Regina Hackett

Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette recently asked if it’s fair to give an audience something it hasn’t shown any signs of wanting:

Many of us who love music share a vague idea that audiences should be open to new things, and that they should be convinced to give them a try. But is this true? I’ve observed before that classical music, particularly opera companies and orchestras, are unusual in that they repeatedly try to force things on its audience that its audience doesn’t necessarily want. Someone who comes to the movie theater to see “Avatar” is not necessarily going to be thrilled if I show him “Pan’s Labyrinth” instead, even if I’m convinced that he would really love it if only he would watch it. And yet this is what’s going on in classical music, all the time: audiences are being asked to pay lots of money in order to be taken out of their comfort zone.
(more)

I thought of Midgette while looking at Isabelle
Pauwels‘ exhibit at the Henry Gallery titled, Incredibly, unbelievably/The complete ordered field. There is so little pleasure to be had from its stuttering films, dry photographs and fragmentary collages, the idea must be that viewing them is good for the audience.

I also thought of David Pagel’s review of Diana Thater in the L.A. Times:

Making a movie about movie magic is not the same as
making some of that magic. At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, “Diana
Thater: Between Science and Magic” goes so far out of its way to
extinguish the magic that you can’t help but wonder why movie magic was
brought up in the first place.

The answer is that Thater’s brand of art is opposed to all forms of
entertainment, which it sets itself apart from. (more)

I don’t think the review is one of Pagel’s best. Instead of being specific to Thater’s work, it’s a generalized complaint about art that appears to disdain anything that could be called entertainment. At Pauwels’ show, however, I could see Pagel’s point. Pauwels is Exhibit A in audience neglect. The onus is on the viewer to prove worthy of the artist’s ragtag moments.

Should pleasing an audience be an artist’s responsibility? Artists who worry about how their studio work will strike others don’t get anything done. They repeat their greatest hits, if they have any. They temporize and shilly-shally. They lose their nerve and doubt their understanding of their own visual thread.

On the other hand, Pagel’s problem with Thater and mine with Pauwels is the suspicion that the artist has confused the didactic with the challenging.

And yet, there is something there. I’m going to take a fresh look with none of the above on my mind. After that, review will follow.

From Efrain Almeida‘s world view.

The few get lucky.

The rest keep a record of their tears.

Unring the Bell at Cornish College surveys the early work of Cornish grad (1991) Dan Webb, curated by Jess Van Nostrand. Because the show is about getting started, its catalog (drawn by Kelly Martin) is a comic book, which represents Webb’s reading habits when he happened upon the evidence of art in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1983.

The day I learned about art, I was just another kid skipping class in high school.

Here’s what he saw, flipping through a book on modern art:

Via

His reaction?

HAHA

Webb is a great carver in all materials by anyone’s measure, but there are better. What makes him an essential artist is not the level of his skill, which is high, but his ability to use his skill to be (in Kafka’s phrase), an ax for the frozen sea within us, what Rauschenberg did with a stuffed goat, tire and paint, using odds and ends as a floor.

Hiding out in the library stacks in high school, himself a maker, he realized there were makers who triumphed beyond literal depictions, and that the essence of art is exactly what he craved – freedom. Webb talks about his work tomorrow at noon in the gallery, free admission.

Samples of it include a pair of desks, with gum chewed by the artist. Hanging in threads, it looks suspiciously like paint thrown on the beard of a goat.

Woody Allen’s Interiors opens In a New York apartment that has been designed to death. It could be a window display of a chilly boutique, except a young couple lives in it. The only object that hints at their occupation is the chord of a table lamp, which dangles in plain sight. When the designer enters, the mother of the wife, she sees the chord and frowns. “Who moved this lamp,” she asks, in accusation.

Allen foreshadowed the entire story through that chord. The chord is also the point for Justin R. Lytle, currently showing in the hallway at Cornish College of the Arts, not that the exhibit is anywhere on its Web site.

Lytle, Deviations

Trajectory

Lytle graduated from Cornish in 2009. He’s off to a good start.

From Seattle’s Klara Glosova

On my recent road trip I got inspired by a huge FRESH CHERRIES sign in
eastern Washington. The letters in the photo are just a mock-up, but I
plan to make it real.

This is what happens when you take your house for a walk.

Open House : Nepo (A HUMOROUS APPROACH TO THE SERIOUS ART OF LIVING)

Please come curious and prepared to use you investigative skills. Expect
a homespun, high-end affair: a visual experience perched on the
threshold of spontaneous creative experience and perfected mastery.
Among our auditory attractions will be Live Poetry Juke Box and The
Purple Dots, a five piece band of eight-year-olds (band name is
subject to change). Not Decent Docent will be available for those
needing a little interpretative help.

February 27th 2010, 6:00 pm – 11:00 pm
1723 S Lander Street
Seattle WA 98144

On Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof’s The Art Blog, writer Andrea Kirsch breaks out the hymnal in praise the female sex organ:

Explicit views of women’s pudenda have never been in short supply in
New York City but one found them on 42nd St. (before Disney arrived),
not in established art galleries. Inspired by Eve Ensler‘s Vagina Dialogues, Francis Naumann began collecting work for an exhibition and when it grew too large, enlisted David Nolan to join him; the exhibition, The Visible Vagina,
continues at both galleries through March 20.  The results include the
entire range of responses one might expect from women to their own most
singular parts, and respectful, appreciative study by men of the most
mysterious parts of women.  This is an important exhibition.

What if this were a penis show? Would Kirsch approve only of “respectful, appreciative attention” from women artists? And would she indulge men who are in awe of their “own most singular parts”? The vagina is not the most mysterious part of a woman. That honor goes to the brain, as it does for men.

These exhibits might be swell, but surely not because their artists’ treatment of the content is “respectful.” Art cannot be judged on its manners, good or bad, or its attitudes.

Below, a watercolor on the theme by Seattle’s Amanda Manitach from her blog, My Heroes Died of Syphilis. I like it not because I have a weakness for the genitalia of female syphilitics, but because it makes its own atmospheric world, both ruined and lovely.

Other stories:

An Aesthete’s Lament noticed the floors in The King and I:

My family and I were watching Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in The King and I a few weeks ago and one aspect of the sets caught our mutual attention–the high-gloss floors.
Jet black, pale blue, jade green, and shocking pink, King Rama IV’s residence in Bangkok, the Grand Palace…was all about super reflective, boldly coloured floors and masses of airy chinoiserie. For one mad moment we discussed painting our wood floors similarly, then remember what hell was wrought when we coated them with shining white epoxy paint, and the feeling passed.

Just as I suspected: An exposure to luxury goods can turn you into a shit. (Via AJ) For those who are confused, art is not a luxury good. Think Rolex, not Tim Rollins.

The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others, according to a Harvard Business School study. (more)

Best art blog lead, from Art Fag City:

If the Meet the Biennial Curators press breakfast is any indication — and it never is — this year’s Whitney Biennial will be really great. (more)

Best new online art magazine – This Is Tomorrow. For the images alone, it deserves a prize, but there are also excellent reviews with a global reach.

Cynthia Gutierrez

Brian Jungen – Wasp

Art Chantry

More here.

The great Marsha Burns, no Web site, no longer represented by a gallery.

Kushner:

At least I never voted Republican.

via