A few weeks ago, I wrote in anticipation of seeing Icons of The Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings From Papunya at the Grey Art Gallery of NYU — here — though I hadn’t been able to see it. Now I have — here’s an update.  

The exhibit didn’t disappoint.
This art was new to me, and it seemed magical, intricate, often powerful. While abstract, to us, the works are somewhat representational to the aborigines who painted them. Many are landscapes, with all those dots creating hills, creeks, caves and bush. At right, for example, is part of Classic Pintupi Water Drawing by Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi. The center is a water hole, and each of the small concentric circles that surround it is a “soakage,” with creeks flowing into it from waterchannels. Beyond them are hills, and Fred Myers, in his essay about the show, says that Shorty, as a forager, would have visited this place regularly.

Myers mentioned a precursor exhibit in 1988 at the Asia Society Galleries, Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. I am sure I did not see it. When I looked it up, I found that Thomas Kenneally, the Australian novelist, wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine, and liked it. Roberta Smith, in the Times, didn’t. In my quick search, those were the only two reviews I found online.

I’ve also since learned that the American University Museum, Katzen Art Center, in Washington, is currently showing Australian Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors, a traveling exhibition of more contemporary works, organized by the National Gallery of Australia –with an example at left.

Interesting that these shows are going only to college art museums…

Photo: By Tony De Camillo, Courtesy the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (top); Maringka Baker (Pitjantjatjara peoples), Anmangunga, 2006. Courtesy of Art Gallery of South Australia. © Maringka Baker (bottom). 
  

There was something new at the Guggenheim Museum when I visited the other evening — and it wasn’t just the Kandinsky exhibition. Which is, btw, quite fine. Beautifully installed. If you go, don’t miss the works on paper in the side gallery. My two morning newspapers — The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times — gave it good reviews (here and here, respectively) on Friday. Not much more for me to say, really.

Except. I noticed one definite improvement at the Guggenheim as I walked up the spiral: there were small, round, elegant seats along the way, usually in groups of three. They fit right in, nestled against the walls separating the gallery bays. One or two hugged the winding rotunda wall, but I couldn’t tell if someone had moved them there or if that was intentional.

Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong was down in the rotunda when I finished seeing the show, so I asked him about the seats. Indeed they are new, styled to go with this exhibition. Armstrong believes, as I do, that people will get much more out of art if they stop and look deeply at the paintings along the way — seating facilitates that. Maybe people will linger more now.

The museum, he told me, already owns furniture designed for Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, but it hasn’t been used. (At least recently.) After the Kandinsky comes down…

If you’re wondering why I bring this up at all, it’s because little amenities matter to visitors. More than one director, in the past, has told me that when they ask people what changes they’d like to see, the first thing on their list is often “more parking.” And then, more seats.

 

Photo: Composition VIII, 1923, Courtesy the Guggenheim Museum

 

Leanne Goebel, writing on Adobe Airstream, asks (and answers) the right question about the Damien Hirst pencil theft incident:

Scotland Yard says the theft was a stunt for publicity. But any more so than Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull was a stunt for publicity and to inflate the value of his art before his “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” direct-to-auction sale at Sotheby’s?

Perhaps the real issue is that Hirst, the most famous, well-known and richest living conceptual artist is being out-concepted by a teenager?

Ah, but you want to read the whole post, really.

Back in August, while I was on vacation, Laurie Fendrich, a painter and fine arts professor who blogs for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm site, raised an interesting point about art magazines. Comparing the table of contents from ARTnews of 1957 with those of today, she wrote:

I’m not one to dwell on the idea that civilization is in decline. It probably is, but I try my best to follow Schiller’s advice that you must embrace your own times, yet not let them consume you. Reading the ideas of previous eras is important for thinking men and women; wallowing in nostalgia for the past is destructive to life lived now.

Sometimes, however, you stumble across something that makes you realize, with a jolt, just how far we’ve fallen from what things were like fifty years ago.

Continuing, she said:

Here, verbatim, is the list of the articles and authors in that summer 1957 issue:

The Creative Act, Marcel Duchamp
The place of painting in contemporary culture, Stuart Davis
The age of the chimpanzee, Randall Jarrell
The liberating quality of avante-garde art, Meyer Shapiro
Fifty-five years of U.S. Museums, Alfred Frankfurter
My friend Picasso, Gaston Palewski
Pure paints a picture, Elaine de Kooning
New York painting only yesterday, Clement Greenberg

And later says:

If it were to go head-to-head with any table of contents, from any issue of any art magazine published during the past decade, there’d be no question as to the winner.

Well, she is entitled to her point and her preference, but I think I disagree — and not just because if artists filled the art magazines and wrote so much about art, what would I do? 

[Read more…] about Art Magazines, 1950s Vs. Art Magazines, Today: Which Do You Prefer?

Simon Cronshaw, the Managing Partner (E-commerce), for CultureLabel, read my last post, about his fledgling website, and wrote in a few answers to points raised.

 

1. Enhancing income: In the UK, only 1-3% of retail turnover for institutions is generated online, with comparable sectors closer to 20-30%. We therefore did a lot of consumer research on why this is the case, and one of the most important aspects is that users are on a ‘visitor’ journey to sites, rather than a ‘purchasing’ journey. When users are on a purchasing journey, the category of ‘cultural shopping’ isn’t yet as well known in consumer minds as it could be (e.g. as in the case of ethical shopping). So, an aggregated site like ours can help tackle this issue.

 

2. US and International presence: We’re currently recruiting many of the major institutions in the US and in other key territories internationally, including Australia, Europe and Africa. These should be appearing onsite (in native currencies) within the next few weeks.

 

3. Individual artists: Curation is really important to us, so we currently sell through galleries and institutions only, rather than direct sales from artists. [Other] sites…profile and sell individual artist works as their core business model, and are better suited to the unique demands. As Rena mentions, however, profiling smaller institutions and galleries is critical to our onsite curation – you may enter via a Tate or British Museum, but then discover the Baltic or Central Illustration Agency. It’s therefore a great way to pool traffic and make it a very unique (and constantly evolving) destination for consumers.