“Starf@#king”?: Björk at the MoMA

It’s hard to remember a major show at a major American museum generating so much angst as Björk at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Some arts sites quickly began aggregating art critics’ aggravation over almost every detail of the show. What began as art criticism evolved into a media lynching of the MoMA, American museums, and pandering-to-the-public curators (in this case, Klaus Biesenbach). New York art world critics, and husband-and-wife team, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith hated the show in different ways, but both connected to their love of Björk and her music.  ArtNews’ M.H. Miller wins the poison pen prize, however, for coining the new critical term “starf@#king” to describe the MoMA’s treatment of Björk as much as its treatment of the viewing public. The question of whether Björk is good or not might really be a question of what Björk is really about. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "“Starf@#king”?: Björk at the MoMA."

What Makes Art Critics Change Their Minds?

Nothing hurts like a blown call. Baseball’s bittersweet beauty owes much to moments such as Umpire Jim Joyce’s missing a call to rob Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Armando Galarraga of a perfect game, that rarest of baseball feats, in 2010. In baseball, calls are irreversible. In the world of art criticism, however, a blown call can be reversed, sometimes years and years later. In the February 2013 issue of Art News, Ann Landi chronicles cases of art critics changing their minds. Split Decisions: When Critics Change Their Minds gently, but firmly pulls away the curtain of infallibility from the world of art critics, whether they like it or not. But more important than documenting these moments of minds changed is raising the question of what makes art critics change their minds. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "What Makes Art Critics Change Their Minds?"

[Image: Cy Twombly. Fifty Days at Iliam. Shield of Achilles, 1978. Oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas.]

Why You Shouldn’t Believe the “Earlier Mona Lisa” Hype

A second Mona Lisa? One made even earlier than the one hanging in the Louvre? It sounds almost too good to be true, and probably is. A Swiss-based organization calling itself The Mona Lisa Foundation launched a full-scale international media assault asserting that the painting formerly known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa is actually also by Leonardo da Vinci and is the long-presumed-lost “Earlier Mona Lisa” (detail shown above) alluded to in texts by Leonardo’s contemporaries. The idea that the most famous painting in the world suddenly has an older “sister” understandably sent a shockwave through not just the art world, but the world at large. But after the dust settles, the “Earlier Mona Lisa” is most likely neither earlier nor a Leonardo Lisa. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why You Shouldn’t Believe the “Earlier Mona Lisa” Hype."

Power Surge: The Art Review 100

Scrolling through the 2010 Power 100 of Art Review, I almost immediately had two reactions. First, I’m not on it! (Bloggers get little to no respect.) Second, so many of the artists (and only 18 of the 100 are artists) are either unfamiliar to me or, maybe worse, too familiar. Any list is suspect purely by nature. The makers of this list claim that it’s “[f]irst and foremost,… a guide to the general trends, networks and forces that shape the artworld.” What such lists really provide is something for people like me to talk about. What I find myself talking about is the way the list reflects the true source of power—in the hands of gallerists, curators, and art fair directors and, disturbingly so, not in the hands of artists or critics. What does that power surge to those who aren’t creating or critiquing mean for art today? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Power Surge."

Watch What You Say

I’ve been meaning for a while to respond to a post written by TIME Magazine art critic Richard Lacayo on the sorry state of writing on art, spawned specifically by several doozies cooked up by the curators of this year’s Whitney Biennal. “Why is so much curatorial writing so dreadful? Why is it so clogged with the decrepit formulations of academic artspeak? Why does so much of it sound like it was written by an anxious schoolkid delivering a labored term paper?” Lacayo asks before going on to blame Deconstruction, Cultural Studies, and the other critical philosophies prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s, when said curators were learning their craft. Lacayo modestly proposes a moratorium on his top five “artspeak” catch phrases: Interrogates, Problematizes, References (as a verb), Transgressive, and Inverts.

Reading Lacayo’s lament brought back memories of my own days in graduate school in the 1990s, surrounded by the ghosts of French philosophy’s past: Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and, perhaps most menacingly, Michel Foucault (shown above, pontificating). If you tried to do “straight” criticism—just you and the text, with some historical context—you found yourself left behind. The closest you could get to that was some flavor of New Historicism, usually a pale imitation of Stephen Greenblatt, who himself usually channeled Foucault. I’ll admit that I played along and actually found Foucault to be useful when delving into texts that were sexually charged or dealt with issues of control and submission. Herman Melville’s Pierre, to give one memorable example, really resonated with me when I finally decoded Foucault’s ideas for myself to the point that I could apply them to other texts. Although some critics argue that ALL texts involve control and submission, I found that Foucault couldn’t be applied to everything, but that never stopped some of my colleagues from stretching the Frenchman and his philosophy like so much deconstructionist Silly Putty until their arguments grew so thin as to fall apart. That gamesmanship and its willful impracticality turned me off from pursuing a doctorate and teaching. I was old school in wanting to find some meaning in the texts rather than juggle them like playthings for higher academic standing and eventual tenure.

As I write this blog, I try to avoid the heavy philosophy except when I think it’s relevant and enlightening. Sometimes Foucault can breathe life into a text or a painting. The key is to accept Foucault and any other philosophy as tools and nothing else. The people who have only one philosophical tool in their toolbox are one-dimensional. If all you have is a hammer, the whole world starts to look like a nail. If all you know is Foucault, everything starts to look like a bondage narrative.

I had a good chuckle at Lacayo’s list of his top five catchwords. On one hand, I understand the need to use certain terms as shorthand, or else you’d always be defining your terms over and over. I try to link to definitions of such terms in my own blog as much as possible. However, some people never define their terms, hiding their own intellectual laziness behind the catchwords they’ve picked up along the way, building up a façade of fancy lingo to cover over the emptiness of their thought. That’s where Lacayo’s “anxious schoolkid delivering a labored term paper” appears in the hallowed halls of museums and universities disguised as curators and academics. That laboring comes from having nothing to say when it’s your job to have something to say. The next time you find yourself laboring over some opaque text, rather than automatically assuming that you’re missing something, stand back and ask if there’s truly anything worth reading there. You’ll be surprised at the results. I’ve always promised myself that if I started writing something and found myself laboring at it, I’d step back and ask myself the same question. If it wasn’t saying anything, it wasn’t worth writing (or reading). That’s called “editing,” which is the true essence of writing. If there were a little more editing in the art history world (and all of academia and, for that matter, the entire endless stream of communication in the world today), there’d be a lot more worth reading and a lot less sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Sad Times

Art critic Roberta Smith of The New York Times takes notice of the PMA’s Antonio Mancini exhibition in today’s edition. On one hand, it’s nice to see this sleeper of an exhibition get greater press, especially someplace as visible as the Times. However, the one thing that I loved the most about the catalogue to the exhibition (which I reviewed here) was that it totally resisted making the "Van Gogh angle" of the "crazy painter" the main focus. Smith makes some interesting comments, drawing parallels between Mancini and Balthus, Frank Stella, and Cy Twombly, but falls right into the same, tired storyline of the mad painter. “Yes, I am a little bit nuts,” she imagines one of his paintings saying. Perhaps Smith takes that tack to pander to popular taste, which thinks that all artists are a bit daft, but you’d hope for something a little better from the alleged paper of record. Yes, Mancini had severe emotional and mental problems. Yes, he lived a strange, tragic existence. But to insinuate, as the mad painter storyline always does, that the art is a pure, unconscious manifestation of that madness rather than a talent developed by effort expressing a particular inner life does injustice to the artist and perpetuates prejudice against the mentally ill. (Smith also veers off into a critique of some of Mancini's paintings of children, likening them to Calvin Klein ads and thus skirting the periphery of a pedophilia accusation, maybe as another component of his "madness." Personally, I believe that Mancini's depictions of children are his most striking works in their honesty and intensity. They are truly cases of an "inner child" being let out, in this case on canvas.) When Annie, Alex, and I toured the Mancini exhibition after visiting the Renoir Landscapes recently, I was simply blown away, even after being somewhat prepared by seeing the works in reproduction first. Annie couldn’t believe how someone that good could remain unknown. The PMA’s exhibition hopes to create an atmosphere in which Mancini the artist can be rediscovered by a modern audience. Roberta Smith’s piece on Mancini the madman simply covers him up again.

The Birth of the Cool

Number 18, 1951, by Mark Rothko. Oil on canvas; 81-1/2 x 69-7/8 in. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, NY (53.216) ©2006 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the American Federation of Arts.

“The history of art is messier and more haphazard than most theories allow,” writes Karen Wilkin in the catalogue to the exhibition Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975 currently at the Denver Art Museum. Beginning with Heinrich Wolfflin’s concept of the history of art as a pendulum swing between linear (i.e., precise and clean) and painterly (i.e., full of individual gesture) and then moving on to Clement Greenberg’s modern appropriation of that dichotomy in his appreciation of the Abstract Expressionists, Wilkin sets the stage for the generation after Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko–the Color Field painters. “Their art can be read as departing from the possibilities suggested by Rothko’s poised rectangles,” Wilkin writes, such as Rothko’s Number 18 (above). Yet, as Wilkin quickly shows, the relationship between the Color Field painters and their Abstract Expressionist “ancestors” as well as between themselves made for a “messier” story than their calm, cool paintings reveal.



Yellow Hymn, 1954, by Hans Hofmann. Oil on canvas; 50 x 40 in. The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust; courtesy Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, New York. © 2006 Estate of Hans Hofmann / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the American Federation of Arts.

Wilkin sees two factors defining what Color Field painting is. One is the idea of “cool,” “in Marshall McLuhan’s sense of the word,” Wilkin adds. McLuhan defined “hot” media as those works that “reach out” and grab you, whereas “cool” media require the individual to take the first step. The frenzy of the Abstract Expressionists heated up the art world in a way that the Color Field painters wanted to cool down. When the Color Field painters looked for inspiration among the Abstract Expressionists, Rothko obviously provided a model, but the lesser-known Hans Hofmann offered a different take on how an economy of means could be full of possibilities. Hofmann’s Yellow Hymn (above), with its organization and “push and pull” of warm and cool colors projecting from and receding into the surface, opened up possibilities that some of the better-known Abstract Expressionists couldn’t. “You could become a de Kooning disciple or satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock,” Helen Frankenthaler said in a similar vein, rejecting the claustrophobically overpowering gestures of de Kooning for the freer, all-over effect of Pollock’s drip paintings. Matisse stands as another teacher for the Color Field artists, demonstrating how to build pictures with powerful, unmodulated blocks of color, adding to Hofmann’s lessons.

The second factor linking the Color Field school is the person of Clement Greenberg, who co-curated the Post Painterly Abstraction exhibition that first gathered these diverse artists together, allowing him almost single-handedly to define the terms of the movement and who and who wasn’t included. The power of Greenberg, the earliest critical champion of Pollock, seems almost impossible today, but was all too true in the 1950s and 1960s art world.

Flood, 1967, by Helen Frankenthaler. Synthetic polymer on canvas; 124 x 140 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art (68.12). Photograph Geoffrey Clements. © 2007 Helen Frankenthaler. Courtesy of the American Federation of Arts.

Helen Frankenthaler emerges as one of the central figures of the Color Field movement. “Frankenthaler’s multivalent images seem to distill the large phenomena of the natural world—sea and sky, night and day, and changing weather—into subtle, richly modulated relationships of hue,” Wilkin writes. Works such as Frankenthaler’s Flood (above) mimic nature’s power yet remain true to the tenets of abstraction. Sadly, as Carl Belz recalls in his short essay in the catalogue, Frankenthaler’s approach to Color Field painting soon received the criticism of being “too soft” by critics such as Harold Rosenberg, Greenberg fierce rival. “Too soft,” of course, served as code for “woman painter,” a standard putdown for female artists. Flipping through the biographies of the Color Field painters by Hrag Vartanian at the end of the catalogue and looking at the artists’ photographs, you quickly realize that Frankenthaler was the lone intruder in the all-men’s club. To think that she found her point of departure in the art of the macho Pollock, you realize just how innovative and individual Frankenthaler’s art truly is.

Floral V, 1959-60, by Morris Louis. Acrylic and magna on canvas; 98-3/8 x 137-13/16 in. Private collection, Denver. 1993 Marcella Louis Brenner. Courtesy of the American Federation of Arts.

Wilkin compares the effect of innovations in acrylic paint on the Color Field school to the effect of the advent of prepared oil paint on the Impressionists. Tubes of paint freed the Impressionists to venture forth into nature and paint in the open. Quick drying, brilliantly colored acrylic paint similarly freed the Color Field painters to try new effects, such as Morris Louis did in his Floral V (above) and other multilayered works. “It is impossible to determine which came first: the painters’ desire to cover large surfaces with thin, saturated, even handed color or the existence of paint that made this possible,” Wilkin writes. This chicken-egg conundrum lies at the heart of the Color Field movement, providing an early example of modern artists exploiting new materials and technology in pursuit of new effects.

Moultonville II, 1966, by Frank Stella. Fluorescent alkyd and epoxy paint on canvas; 124 x 86 in. Collection Mr. and Mrs. David Mirvish, Toronto. Photograph Sean Weaver. © 2006 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the American Federation of Arts.


Color Field painting today suffers from a inferiority complex, something that this exhibition should rectify. As Wilkin points out, although Color Field art shares much with their contemporary movements of Minimalism and Pop Art in terms of striving towards economy and anonymity of touch, Color Field art gets labeled as “decorative” or, even worse, “corporate” for lacking any overt political content even during such turbulent times as the 1960s in America. Belz captures some of the flavor of this pecking order and its injustice in comparing Frank Stella’s shift from Minimalism to Color Field in works such as Moultonville II (above) to Bob Dylan’s infamous choice to go electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966. “As each radicalized his art and deepened it by taking inspiration from his art’s past and extending it into the present,” Belz writes, “each revealed the past in a fresh light. In doing so, each took me along to places that were at once familiar and new.” Using the example of Stella’s transition, Belz finds the essence of Color Field’s attraction, namely its ability to be both conservative by taking the best of the past and radical in extending that forward, thus providing a “model for lived experience” itself.

Chi Ama, Crede, 1962, by Robert Motherwell. Oil on canvas; 82 x 141 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; purchased by The Phillips Collection through funds donated by The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Phillips, The Chisholm Foundation, The Whitehead Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Laughlin Phillips, Mr. and Mrs. Marc E. Leland, and the Honorable Ann Winkelman Brown and Donald Brown, 1998. Photograph Steven Sloman. Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of the American Federation of Arts.

Perhaps more than any other modern art movement, Color Field art is a creation of art critics, for good and ill. Michael Fried’s “combination of intellectual rigor and passion for every aspect of works of art,” Wilkin writes, “quickly set a standard for illuminating formalist criticism” as he promoted works such as Robert Motherwell’s Chi Ama, Crede (above). Unfortunately, the bald pate of Clement Greenberg continues to rule over the Color Field world, for better or worse. “Even today,” Wilkin laments, “a decade after his death, the personal animosities aroused by this difficult, thorny man can seem to get in the way of objective judgment of his achievement, and by extension, to obscure the excellences of the art with which he was most closely associated.” Fortunately, Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975 exorcises the ghost of Greenberg, lifting the label of pure decoration to reveal the creative thinking and even radicalism of the artists and their works. In curating and writing Color as Field, Karen Wilkin allows the Color Field school to step out of the long shadow of Clement Greenberg and show their true colors.

[Many thanks to the Denver Art Museum for providing me with a copy of the exhibition catalogue to Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975 and for the images from the exhibition.]