Here’s a little grass-roots art effort that deserves some publicity and support: Slow Art Day. It’s kind of like the Slow Food movement, which attempts to get people to cook, eat slowly, and savor food. The art thesis is, if you look at art, really look slowly, you will see.

And we all know that people breeze through a museum too quickly.

Even if you work in a museum, though, you may not have noticed that Slow Art Day took place in mid-April — sometimes in your very museum. A guy named Phil Terry, chairman of the Reading Odyssey, started Slow Art Day in 2009, continued it this year and is seeking hosts for 2011 on the website. Terry wants to attract people who are not regular museum-goers (and don’t we all?).

So what is it?

Run by volunteer hosts around the world, Slow Art Day helps people slow down and see art in a new way. It’s very simple. Attendees visit a local museum and view on their own 5 to 10 works of art pre-selected by the volunteer host. They then gather for lunch to talk about the experience.

The result? Participants say they get “inspired not tired” and plan to return to that museum again and again.

This year, more than 50 museums and galleries on every continent except Antarctica (list here on FB) were the target of Slow Art groups.  

Slow Art Day has a Facebook page where some participants posted comments, like

• Slow Art Day in St. Louis MO was a mind and heart shifting experience that we can’t wait to repeat! A piece I thought I would not like gave the most discussion due to its complexity.
• Slow Art Ashland was a 5-star event for sure. It was great to take the opportunity to s-l-o-w down for art, and conversation. We had a lively conversation and learned so much from each other’s perspectives.
• A simple but powerful antidote to the common syndrome of “i-really-like-art-but-museums-often-leave-me-a-bit-blah.

My impression — the experience varies from place to place, and it depends on who organizes and who shows up. You can read more reports here.

And it you get inspired, here’s a link to the “How To” on FB for prospective hosts.

 

Ready for “a Pop social history, which is at its best when capturing the tempo of the movement’s march through the institutions — really a breakneck gallop that seems to have occurred in a matter of months”?

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an excellent review — “Attack of the Hipsters” by Michael J. Lewis of Alice Goldfarb Marquis’s new book “The Pop Revolution.” (And a short excerpt from the book as well.)

That’s his description above. Lewis remarks on what he calls a strange attribute of the book, namely that it will please both “the friends of Pop and its foes:”

Pop’s friends will read it as an account of an aesthetic revolution that displaced the humorless and posturing European-derived formalism of the postwar years–one thinks of Barnett Newman’s portentous “Zip” paintings, where a quavering pillar of light suggested a portal opening onto another universe–and substituted a content-rich art that was deeply engaged with American life and subject matter. Among the iconic works that signaled Pop’s triumph were Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip- inspired “Whaam!” (1963), depicting a fighter-plane dogfight; and Andy Warhol’s multiple images of Marilyn Monroe in “Marilyn Diptych” (1962).

Pop’s foes, by contrast, will read “The Pop Revolution” as the saga of a crass commercial enterprise in which a mindless populist fad cut short the career of Abstract Expressionism, America’s only meaningful contribution to the world art.

That’s a great talent for an author who wants her book to sell. As Lewis says, preceding my first quote from the book above, “Ms. Marquis’s principal contribution is that she tells the story of Pop not by profiling the artists themselves, as is usually done, but by tracing the interlocking network of galleries and collectors that sustained them.”

Leo Castelli is chief among them, of course. Castelli is about to more scrutiny: In a few weeks, Annie Cohen-Solal’s biography Leo And His Circle will be published.

Judging by the advanced billing, Cohen-Solal’s book will have a different tone. From Publisher’s Weekly:

Cohen-Solal writes with energy, wit, and aplomb, and though she was a friend of Castelli’s, she maintains a balanced critical distance, pointing to his initial misjudgment of Andy Warhol’s genius, his perpetually complicated love life (with numerous mistresses and multiple marriages), his often frustratingly high standards and constant need for reassurance. Yet Castelli emerges as a rare individual: a magnanimous lover of art.

Could be an interesting contrast.

 

I spent a couple of hours at the Whitney Biennial one recent Sunday afternoon, looking at the art, reading the labels, and watching the crowds. And it was crowded.

I was struck, though, by something that I didn’t see in the reviews I read: how much this show focuses on the process of art, rather than the substance. Or maybe the process is the substance. Yes, process has grown in “importance” in contemporary art over the years, but at the Biennial, that’s most of what’s on view — or at least remarked upon. Consider what was written (online, but this parallels the wall labels) about a work by Curtis Mann (above):

Curtis Mann’s photographs contain fragments of scenes that are partially erased and obscured. Mann’s process draws attention to the artifice of the photographic medium by demonstrating the malleability of images. He begins by culling images of strife and conflict in various international locations from photosharing websites such as Flickr and then has prints made. Once he has the prints in hand he covers portions of the photographs with a protective varnish and pours bleach over each one, stripping away areas not coated with varnish.

In After the Dust, Second View (Beirut), Mann has arranged a grid of snapshots of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah….

With Pae White, it’s about how she “began creating tapestries with photographic images of crumpled aluminum foil and plumes of smoke.”

With James Casebare: “Casebere’s process involves constructing tabletop models out of modest materi¬als, such as Styrofoam, plaster, and cardboard. He then dramatically lights these constructions and care¬fully positions his camera to manipulate the com¬position and the mood of the resulting photograph. Devoid of human figures, the constructions invite viewers to project into and inhabit the space.”

With Lesley Vance: “Lesley Vance carefully arranges and lights objects such as fruits or shells. The artist then photographs these arrangements, and the resulting images serve as the basis for her abstract paintings [above, left]. Vance creates these paintings by manipulating wet paint with a palette knife, erasing and editing her strokes until she feels that the final form has revealed itself.”

When the curators didn’t know what to say about the art, did they revert to talking about process/technique? Looks that way, and while process is interesting, it shouldn’t be everything.

I also noticed that the works that seemed (granted, this was one afternoon) to be attracting the most attention, the longest stays, from Whitney visitors: Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs of Afghani women who had set themselves on fire to escape abuse; Nina Berman’s photographs of a severely disfigured Marine; and the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s “portable museum,” whose installation comments on American culture using video and audio and a hearse/ambulance. Not  much about process there.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Artists and The Whitney Museum

 

Oh, the irony of it. Las Vegas, a metropolis with more than 1.8 million people that allowed its art museum to close in February, 2009, is about to get two new museums — about the Mob.

One, the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, is a city effort, being installed in a disused downtown courthouse (at left) and set to open next March.

It’s already been nicknamed The Mob Museum, which is its website address.

The other, the Las Vegas Mob Experience, is a private effort by something called Eagle Group Holdings, in conjunction with Antoinette McConnell, 74, the daughter of notorious Sam “Momo” Giancana, head of the Chicago mob from 1957-66 (AKA “Sam the Cigar,” “Sam Gold,” “Sam Flood,” and “Mooney”). It is set to open by year-end in a space in, according to a Page One article in Sunday’s New York Times, the Tropicana casino on the Las Vegas Strip. It sounds like a theme park that could well end up glorifying mob exploits.

The city effort, on the other hand, has engaged Dennie Barrie, who headed the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center during the obscenity flap over Robert Maplethorpe’s exhibition there, then led the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and later helped create the International Spy Museum in Washington. That means something: Barrie has substance. The restored courthouse will contain 700 objects arranged in interactive exhibits that tell stories about the law’s efforts against the Mob in Vegas. They include, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

an exhibit called “Mob Mayhem,” featuring weapons used by hit men and explanations of secret messages hidden within murders. The centerpiece…will be the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre wall from a Chicago warehouse where Al Capone’s men slaughtered members of a rival gang in 1929.

“The Skim” concerns Las Vegas’ casinos and the revenue they provided to crime families across the country. The walls will be papered with cash, Barrie said, and displays will show how casino profits were diverted….

Another exhibit will be “Bringing Down the Mob” and will focus on wiretaps and surveillance. Visitors will be able to listen to Mob conversations, view surveillance footage and learn about establishing new lives in witness protection.

Federal, state and local money, to the tune of $42 million, is paying for the museum, and Vegas officials tried but failed to get federal stimulus funds, too. They call it part of the downtown revitalization efforts, and expect 250,000 to 600,000 visitors a year (such a big spread that it sounds like a guess).

Contrast that with the LV Art Museum, which had 1,000 members at its closing. Las Vegas is a tough town for visual arts — the Guggenheim gave up after a trial run with the Hermitage, and so did Pace Wildenstein.

But where are the city’s arts patrons? Art may not be for everyone, and shouldn’t try to be. But it’s sad to think that so many people now lack access to a real art museum in their community.

LVAM remains as a website, with links to commercial galleries.

Photo Credit: Courtesy The New York Times

 

Over the weekend, the North Carolina Museum of Art re-opened in an expanded incarnation. The centerpiece is a 127,000 sq. ft. “light-filled building” designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners. A sculpture hall is the spine from which 40 galleries branch out, according to press materials.

I have not yet visited, but it seems to have done several things well.

For a start, as Chuck Twardy reported in the Raleigh News & Observer, it used the occasion to rethink the collection. He writes:

What’s surprising, though, is the degree to which the new building has influenced decisions about the collection. The scrims filtering daylight through its revolutionary roof can be changed to adapt to new configurations, giving curators flexibility to move art around and to rotate pieces in and out of view. The building allows them to show 18.5 percent of the collection at any time, and they are making the most of it.

 

“It was really an opportunity to show the permanent collection in a new way,” said Linda Dougherty, the museum’s chief curator and curator of contemporary art. “We didn’t want to just re-create the way we had installed it in our existing building. We really wanted to think about different juxtapositions, different relationships, between objects and between different areas of the collection.”

Later she says: 

 

It’s a really different building from our existing building, so it makes you think about the collection in a different way and I think people who are very familiar with the museum’s collection are going to feel like they are seeing new work, because it looks so dramatically different in this space.”

All true, no doubt. But I also like that John W. Coffey, deputy director and curator of American art acknowledged the museum had “weak spots” in its collection that resisted a strictly chronological approach. No sense beating around the bush, imho (though he also said that chronology was “boring,” and it isn’t necessarily if you have the goods).

 

Here’s a link to Twardy’s article and an interactive feature that lets you zoom into the galleries for close-ups is here. You’ll also find a tour with the director on the website, but it loaded so slowly on my computer that I gave up.

 

The museum, meanwhile, posted hundreds of photos of the building on Flickr, accessed through its website. Good idea, too.

 

And the museum has recently made some 200 aquisitions, including works by Ellsworth Kelly, Jennifer Steincamp, Roxy Paine, and Ursula van Rydingsvard.

 

Third, on Friday, according to the North Carolina News Network, the museum announced a campaign to raise funds for its endowment, programming and grounds. The goal is $50 million by the end of 2013, and so far the total committed is $26 million.

 

Many museums finish a capital campaign and take a rest, figuring they’ll get to the endowment later. Actually, capital and endowment campaigns ought to go hand-in-hand; but when they don’t, the one better closely follow the other.

 

The North Carolina museum did receive public funds — $73 million from the state, county and city, according to the NCNN. That makes an endowment campaign easier. Still, “more than 60 percent of the NCMA’s operational and programmatic budget is provided by private sources (individuals, corporations and foundations),” NCNN says. Here’s that link.

 

NCMA’s old building will reopen later this year.

 

Photo Credit: Courtesy North Carolina Museum of Art