ARTISTS
The Summer Ramp Down
It was so hot last week that my phone sent me a message that it was overheating. I had no idea it was capable of either overheating or alerting me
Shane Mcadams / The Brooklyn Rail
01 Sep, 2010
It was so hot last week that my phone sent me a message that it was overheating. I had no idea it was capable of either overheating or alerting me of its feelings, but, whatever its degree of sentience, it was only confirming what most of New York had already arrived at: that it was too hot to do anything that couldn鈥檛 be done just as effectively while lying on one鈥檚 back. Though I didn鈥檛 do it lying down, I did flee the oppressive heat of New York for that of the Philadelphia suburbs to see the Barnes Collection in its original location before it moves downtown next year. The planned relocation comes after a rancorous battle between the executors of the estate and the institutional interests bent on stealing or liberating (depending on who you ask) Dr. Barnes鈥� collection. This prolonged struggle was detailed recently in a controversial documentary called The Art of the Steal, which provides a dramatic backstory for the impending move. Despite a stacked roster of modern treasures including C茅zanne鈥檚 鈥淐ard Players鈥� and Matisse鈥檚 鈥淛oy of Life鈥� the overall experience is a bit more humble and eccentric than one might expect. Gems by often-overlooked artists like Maurice Prendergast and Chaim Soutine climb the walls next to Navajo pottery, African metalwork, and medieval manuscripts. The place feels more a curio shop than a museum, where every other curiosity happens to be a Picasso or a Seurat. It would be pointless to review a collection that verges on transcendence, but suffice it to say that if you haven鈥檛 been, you should go in the next year.
From the lofty heights of suburban Philadelphia, summer ramped down, leveling off at the Lower East Side and Lush Life, a multi-venue group show inspired by Richard Price鈥檚 novel of the same name. Give curators Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud credit for locating a relatively plausible and compelling alibi for a summer group show鈥攁 beast that doesn鈥檛 usually bother to offer excuses for shoehorning mismatched artwork into a single conceptual premise. Lush Life, the novel, explores the effects of an ever-evolving Lower East Side cultural landscape against a gripping crime story. Price鈥檚 novel would seem a perfect conceit for a sprawling summer show, but in the end, Lush Life, the art show, reacted to the novel too obliquely. With over 60 artists working across nine venues, great moments emerged鈥攁 life size bar at Sue Scott Gallery by David Kramer and paintings by Joanne Greenbaum and Dana Frankfort, to name a few. Ultimately though, its most significant contribution to Price鈥檚 theme was its proof of, rather than commentary on, the neighborhood鈥檚 ongoing gentrification.
When summer finally forced me indoors, I began a regrettable Wednesday evening habit of watching Bravo鈥檚 reality show, 鈥淲ork of Art: The Next Great Artist.鈥� I suspect anyone who had the opportunity couldn鈥檛 avert their gaze any more than they could avoid watching a large wild animal running loose in rush hour traffic. But even if watching is excusable, broaching the subject is a little like tending to an Ebola outbreak, wanting to mitigate the effects but not at the expense of spreading the contamination.
As a television program, 鈥淲ork of Art鈥� is formulaic but innocuous. As a means of evaluating artwork, it is preposterous. As everyone knows by now, the show is based on a tired template of turning creative industries into challenge-based talent shows. The postproduction embellishment in 鈥淲ork of Art鈥� weighs on the show as it does most programs of this type. The camera trains on the eventual finalists from the outset, and presumably in-depth interviews with contestants are parsed into titillating sound bites to dial up the drama. But still, editing room manipulation shouldn鈥檛 alarm us as much as the more subtle deceptions of the judges themselves.聽
The experts on 鈥淲ork of Art鈥濃�擟hina Chow, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Bill Powers, and Jerry Saltz鈥攕uccumb to the dynamics of group thought and pass off conformity as a consensus of informed opinion, much like the prison guards in Philip Zimbardo鈥檚 experiment at Stanford University. If the judges were aware of this tendency, their decision-making process wouldn鈥檛 be any more treacherous than the overt trickery of the producers. But it looked more like self-deception to me, which is often more dangerous than conscious duplicity. For instance, faced with the impossibly vague task of evaluating art meant to capture the visual essence of riding in an Audi 5000, the judges offered opinions with Greenbergian authority. The projects created in response to the Audi challenge were so abstract they rendered a reasonable critique all but impossible. Of course I can鈥檛 know for sure if anyone was faking it, but I suspect none of them would have been as enthusiastic or resolute in a magazine article or a studio visit. I can say with more certainty that a final critique shouldn鈥檛 yield the same ratio of superior, mediocre, and inferior work as another. But based on what we saw on 鈥淲ork of Art,鈥� if you started with nine Matisses, the bottom three would be deemed terrible; take nine piles of excrement, and the top three would be astounding. Where鈥檚 Stanley Milgram when you need him?聽
So it turns out the winner was the affable young representational painter, Abdi Farah. His show opened this week at the Brooklyn Museum in a small gallery on the fifth floor. Kind of anti-climactic for all the bluster about the Brooklyn Museum that we heard repeatedly throughout the show. Farah鈥檚 show was competent enough; however, with a body of work fixated on faithfully representing his own image, he would benefit from looking inside himself rather than to the computer or the mirror for a way out of his literal world.聽
It鈥檚 funny, but about six years ago, in a Village Voice review, Jerry Saltz called for a moratorium on photo-based painting. He declared it the 鈥淩ichter Resolution.鈥� Though he called for it to end after 48 months, he seemed to come around faster than I would have thought for an avowed dissenter of this kind of work. Ironically, downstairs from Abdi Farah鈥檚 show, an Andy Warhol quote graced the wall:
Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there鈥擨 always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
Ending my summer I鈥檓 faced with the existential dilemma about whether the art world is moving implacably toward a deadpan Warholian cynicism, where in the absence of a concrete reality, fiction merges into life to become one, or whether the earnestness and optimism of those early modernists who fill the Barnes Collection will endure. In light of these circumstances, I move that the next edition of 鈥淲ork of Art鈥� be held in the Barnes Collection to determine if five judges can convince themselves, for the sake of high drama, that all those Mont Sainte-Victoires just don鈥檛 work for them.
From the lofty heights of suburban Philadelphia, summer ramped down, leveling off at the Lower East Side and Lush Life, a multi-venue group show inspired by Richard Price鈥檚 novel of the same name. Give curators Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud credit for locating a relatively plausible and compelling alibi for a summer group show鈥攁 beast that doesn鈥檛 usually bother to offer excuses for shoehorning mismatched artwork into a single conceptual premise. Lush Life, the novel, explores the effects of an ever-evolving Lower East Side cultural landscape against a gripping crime story. Price鈥檚 novel would seem a perfect conceit for a sprawling summer show, but in the end, Lush Life, the art show, reacted to the novel too obliquely. With over 60 artists working across nine venues, great moments emerged鈥攁 life size bar at Sue Scott Gallery by David Kramer and paintings by Joanne Greenbaum and Dana Frankfort, to name a few. Ultimately though, its most significant contribution to Price鈥檚 theme was its proof of, rather than commentary on, the neighborhood鈥檚 ongoing gentrification.
When summer finally forced me indoors, I began a regrettable Wednesday evening habit of watching Bravo鈥檚 reality show, 鈥淲ork of Art: The Next Great Artist.鈥� I suspect anyone who had the opportunity couldn鈥檛 avert their gaze any more than they could avoid watching a large wild animal running loose in rush hour traffic. But even if watching is excusable, broaching the subject is a little like tending to an Ebola outbreak, wanting to mitigate the effects but not at the expense of spreading the contamination.
As a television program, 鈥淲ork of Art鈥� is formulaic but innocuous. As a means of evaluating artwork, it is preposterous. As everyone knows by now, the show is based on a tired template of turning creative industries into challenge-based talent shows. The postproduction embellishment in 鈥淲ork of Art鈥� weighs on the show as it does most programs of this type. The camera trains on the eventual finalists from the outset, and presumably in-depth interviews with contestants are parsed into titillating sound bites to dial up the drama. But still, editing room manipulation shouldn鈥檛 alarm us as much as the more subtle deceptions of the judges themselves.聽
The experts on 鈥淲ork of Art鈥濃�擟hina Chow, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Bill Powers, and Jerry Saltz鈥攕uccumb to the dynamics of group thought and pass off conformity as a consensus of informed opinion, much like the prison guards in Philip Zimbardo鈥檚 experiment at Stanford University. If the judges were aware of this tendency, their decision-making process wouldn鈥檛 be any more treacherous than the overt trickery of the producers. But it looked more like self-deception to me, which is often more dangerous than conscious duplicity. For instance, faced with the impossibly vague task of evaluating art meant to capture the visual essence of riding in an Audi 5000, the judges offered opinions with Greenbergian authority. The projects created in response to the Audi challenge were so abstract they rendered a reasonable critique all but impossible. Of course I can鈥檛 know for sure if anyone was faking it, but I suspect none of them would have been as enthusiastic or resolute in a magazine article or a studio visit. I can say with more certainty that a final critique shouldn鈥檛 yield the same ratio of superior, mediocre, and inferior work as another. But based on what we saw on 鈥淲ork of Art,鈥� if you started with nine Matisses, the bottom three would be deemed terrible; take nine piles of excrement, and the top three would be astounding. Where鈥檚 Stanley Milgram when you need him?聽
So it turns out the winner was the affable young representational painter, Abdi Farah. His show opened this week at the Brooklyn Museum in a small gallery on the fifth floor. Kind of anti-climactic for all the bluster about the Brooklyn Museum that we heard repeatedly throughout the show. Farah鈥檚 show was competent enough; however, with a body of work fixated on faithfully representing his own image, he would benefit from looking inside himself rather than to the computer or the mirror for a way out of his literal world.聽
It鈥檚 funny, but about six years ago, in a Village Voice review, Jerry Saltz called for a moratorium on photo-based painting. He declared it the 鈥淩ichter Resolution.鈥� Though he called for it to end after 48 months, he seemed to come around faster than I would have thought for an avowed dissenter of this kind of work. Ironically, downstairs from Abdi Farah鈥檚 show, an Andy Warhol quote graced the wall:
Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there鈥擨 always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
Ending my summer I鈥檓 faced with the existential dilemma about whether the art world is moving implacably toward a deadpan Warholian cynicism, where in the absence of a concrete reality, fiction merges into life to become one, or whether the earnestness and optimism of those early modernists who fill the Barnes Collection will endure. In light of these circumstances, I move that the next edition of 鈥淲ork of Art鈥� be held in the Barnes Collection to determine if five judges can convince themselves, for the sake of high drama, that all those Mont Sainte-Victoires just don鈥檛 work for them.
