Jed Perl is right!?

Just a quick note about my current thoughts on the differences between editors and curators. I've got a long standing hate for everything on the web being 'curated' when I feel it's been edited. Seems trifling, but I think it's a symptom of the web being 'visual' to people (I'm delivering pictures of shoes I want, therefore I'm a curator) rather than verbal.

Visuality aside, I believe that if you are taking the course of information we all see daily as (metaphorically) a flow of water, then editing is narrowing down a river to a garden hose (again metaphorically). If you are reducing the scary amount of information to a smaller state, reducing the disorder, then (to me) that is an act of editing. Yes, editors select and organize. That is part of their gig. The editor of an academic book filled with her colleague's work is arranging and organizing, but the reason she was invited to build that book is because she can see the wider seascape and can see the importance of the essays that she selected. That winnowing down to a smaller selection, presenting the original essays without lengthy comment, is an act of editing. Writing a new book that quotes those same essays with new original comments for each and charts how these same essays relate to a wider story, is what curating is to me.

It's publicly adding original information to an existing body of work.

So on to Perl

The challenges involved in such curatorial work are the challenges of interpretation. Scholarship and erudition are essential. So is an instinctive feeling for the freestanding value of the work of art. And all of this must be combined with a sense of how works that emerged in a particular time and place can most effectively be presented in another time and place—in a way that is true both to the past and to the present.

Perl's notion is that real curators are there to present the contextualization of objects, ideas, and situations, and this rings true to me. Curating is the activity of knowing a subject and being able to add to it rather than arrange it.

A consequence of this notion is that it would be easy to say I think that editing isn't scholarly but curating is. I think that editing is equally academic, but it doesn't function synthetically. Editing is analytic and curating is synthetic. For an edited book of essays synthesis happens in the readers mind rather than in the creation of the book.

the unexpected links between fifteenth-century Italy, Oscar Wilde’s England, and New York today

That's what a well curated show delivers. Unexpected relevance.

Mark Bradford- convert

Been considering Mark Bradford's Merchant Posters lately. He is subtly moving his practice with these works. Instead of inventing via pictorial abstractions he is now attaching himself to forms of concrete communications and their instability.

He purposely culls the posters that are self-help. Their messages are spiritual and practical at the same time. The practical advice is for those that are close to rock bottom. The disenfranchised turn to people who may not have their best interests in mind. Need to do something illegal or what seems illegal? There's a number for that. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson laid out the list of his subjects in the book about these objects.

My issue is that Jacobson's, and the other essays from the book. relegate Bradford's work to the past. Archaeology, archive, travel document, memory, reclaim, maps, movement, etc. I feel that these works are current. They're not the things of economic bubbles that we've already experienced, they are more present tense than that.

These phrases come from Bradford's voice instead of the invisible con-man.

The stories are about self-motivation and survival on a very basic level. The self-employed, which I consider myself to also be, understand that they have to make their life happen, and that it's up to them to get out there and be heard.

(Huffpo)

He's not making a joke for rich art patrons, or those that hate them (everyone else). He's actually talking to you, not a stand in other.

You.

Do you need help? Call.

He sees the logic in the statements. He see's why they are convincing cons, and wants to use them to get you involved. Dive into these thoughts. Feel them personally. Listen to him. Form a link with him.

His work here is deconstructionist in nature. In this instance, I don't mean that he doesn't want a meaning connected to it but instead there is a disconnect between the thing being shown and the intended meaning. The grammar is indistinct rather than ineffectual. He does not place his faith in the determinacy of context.

Maybe it's more post-structuralist. There is no rigid connection between the sign and the signification. The symbol here has no correct context that unlocks a singular meaning. There is no structural definition to these posters. His usual work invents a format that you have to buy into, here he relies on the unstable meaning of these posters as a form of realism.

Gluing squares to hepcats

Brian O'Doherty's Inside The White Cube has a paragraph that I've always puzzled over:

Happenings were first enacted in indeterminate, non-theatrical spaces -- warehouses, deserted factories, old stores. Happenings mediated a careful stand-off between avant-garde theater and collage. They conceived the spectator as a kind of collage in that he was spread out over the interior -- his attention split by simultaneous events, his senses disorganized and redistributed by firmly transgressed logic.

The formal question of dividing spaces into white cube/black cube/non-cube is simple enough. It fits into the history of high modernism's theatrical explorations as I understand them. Groups like the living theatre "attacked the senses" of the audience and confronted their levels of taste, but they did not do so in accepted venues:

In the 1970's, The Living Theatre began to create The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of plays for non-traditional venues. From the prisons of Brazil to the gates of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and from the slums of Palermo to the schools of New York City, the company offered these plays, which include Six Public Acts, The Money Tower, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, Turning the Earth and the Strike Support Oratorium free of charge to the broadest of all possible audiences.

Factually, I'm with it. Happenings happened in non-theatrical spaces, often the very spaces that the artists lived in. Where I start to strain is where the happening is between theater and collage, specifically that the spectator is a collage.

After spending time with Greenberg's essay Collage though I think I understand where he's coming from. Greenberg's essay is a earnest attempt to define a key moment in two specific painter's journeys to understanding how abstraction works. Greenberg has a special relationship to both Picasso and to art writers of the 70's. Someone like O'Doherty would certainly be knowledgeable about his views on collage. Even if he was writing for Art Forum, and he was their rival, he still would have repressed Greenberg orthodoxies floating in his writing.

If Greenberg said it, than everyone read it. If it's about Picasso, than it's about where the members of Greenberg's Abstract Expressionist brand can find their genealogical basis.

So what is he on about, and what is "firmly transgressed logic?"

Braque and Picasso had obtained a new, self-transcending kind of decoration by reconstructing the picture surface with what had once been the means of its denial. Starting from illusion, they had arrived at a transfigured, almost abstract kind of literalness.

I'm shortening an epic to a haiku, but for Greenberg, the moment of collage is one of exiting the flattened extreme of analytical cubisim and entering into synthetic cubism due to the "independence of the planar unit in collage as a shape." They lost their ability to continue the essence of their brand by being too good at painting things in flattened planes, and had to invent a new way of doing things through collage. It became more real when you glued something on a canvas (at least to the rules of the cubist metaphysic), and for Greenberg especially, they needed for their cubist abstractions to be more real than realism could be.

Happenings often are defined by their inclusion of random people. The chance encounters with art in real life (Marjorie Strider's 1969 Street Works, James Collins' 1970 Introduction Piece #5, Adrian Piper's 1970 Catalysis Series for example). The audience's connection to these events is mere happenstance.

Except when happenings were in the galleries or when people were invited. As I understand it, the audience for this kind of art was tiny at the time. I've seen numerous quotes from artists who talk about feeling obligated to show up to exhibitions from this era as they knew that no one would be in the audience if they didn't. It was a revolving form of credit. If you showed up to Philip Glass's music, than he'd show up to your exhibition.

So back to the audience as collage. If a patently false realism is the highest form of realism, than an audience who were usually insiders and a few chance viewers, then maybe the collage is that the audience is a form of faked random audience?

I feel O'Doherty's intention was that a group of audience members, transfixed by this random event happening in front of them were in a state of collage of random people stuck against the purity of art. By being at a happening, you were effectively glued onto the idealized avant-garde model as a square of conformity in their non-conformist art world. From the spectator's perspective, being unable to look away at a happening is a moment of collage in their lives too. Interrupting the field of daily life is this glued on happening, it fragments their world, complicating the audience member's relationship to real life.

So, the audience is glued to the art. The art is glued to the audience's normal life. The audience is glued in as a false member of the audience, viewing the happening, but accidental and separate from the pure audience. The invited audience is of course not glued to anything as they are uninterrupted in their connection to the happening. They are made of the same stock as the happening. Lots of glue here.

One last part though: the "firmly transgressed logic." Later, O'Doherty defines the principles that make avant-garde art:

Classic avant-garde hostility expresses itself through physical discomfort (radical theater), excessive noise (music), or by removing perceptual constants (the gallery space). Common to all are transgressions of logic, dissociation of the sense, and boredom. In these arenas order (the audience) assays what quotas of disorder it can stand. Such places are, then, metaphors for consciousness and revolution. The spectator is invited into a space where the act of approach is turned back on itself. Perhaps a perfect avant-garde act would be to invite an audience and shoot it.

Now Renato Poggioli enters our conversation. The happening is part of the avant-garde as it assails the audience, attacking their comfort with ill-founded spaces, unproven methods, objectless art, and confrontational inclusion. The work can't be for a new audience, an experiment that is evolving, or even a new format. It has to fit into the avant-garde model by being against your supposedly monotonous level of taste. Art supposedly has to divide us for it to be new. It just seems so old fashioned today.

False Dichotomies

So I'm always doing art shitz. It apparently means that I'm a happier dude than everyone else.

But lately, I've been visiting very diverse art events. Some might call it high or low culture or maybe some of it is stuffy or relaxed. I don't know what it is, but I think that these two types of events just have different audiences. Two photos as examples:




The top is the 4th floor of the Harvard Art museum. Wonderfully filled installation with a solid showing of art from around 1870/1880. Historically important and vital to understanding art history.
The bottom is from the final party/performances at MEME in Cambridge. A bunch of drunken fools playing kazoos and laughing as they improvise music at the behest of the conductor (the blur in the middle).

Are these the poles that people in universities use as high and low? No. They would certainly define a painting from Harvard's collection as high, sure, but they would likely use lady gaga or some advertising spread as the painting's opposite. This low-brow-as-advertising crap has been encouraged deeply by Roland Barthes (pdf). Barthes is an inescapable corner stone of art theory eduction (with Sculpture in the Expanded Field and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as at least two of the other corners).

Low-art is usually described as advertising partially because of Barthes' analysis of static advertising images. It becomes most clear when you consider this: if you asked the supposed commoner who decides such things, is The Hangover from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or is MEME's improv "real art?"

My assumption is that your average person would say that T-L is real art and the improvised music is not real art.

The T-L is easier to read as art, like the advertising spread. From the content to the handling of the paint, this is a great example of how we have been taught that hand-made abstractions are the definition of art. It's also easier to "skim off" the semiotics of what the painting is trying to do. The white wall, the silence, the paying money to get in, the frame, the guards, the space around each work, the wall text announcing the provenance and the official statistics. These are as clear as the pasta advertising's attempt at reading Italian. The culture of high art museums is showing how cultured each work is through the semiotics of the presentation.

This is not evident in MEME's event. Instead the linguistic, coded and non-coded iconic messages are ambiguous. What are we being directed to think in this situation? Is this just a good party? Are nerds like me supposed to remember this event and write about it to anchor it in art history? To use Barthes' ideas for a moment, there is an arbitrariness here that is absent from a museum presentation. The frankness of the image is incomplete at MEME. The "what it is" non-coded message is just a bunch of people having fun. Is that art now?

So Barthes' brand of decoding static images is a bad method to explore what was happening at MEME that night. I think that the "message in the medium" is that performance is something that is not static and functions outside the rules of advertising. I think that low-art, low-brow, whatever you want to call it is best used to look at things like advertising, pop art, graffiti, comic books, or graphic design. Barthes' brand of semiotics is not a universally applicable tool in art.

If people want to continue arguing about the cultured qualities of The Hangover and The Hangover, let them, but if you tell me that a party atmosphere can't be art, then we are going to have to find another reason why besides it's "lowbrow."

I'm sure that someone wants to argue that it's neither: it's avant-garde. Can relaxed performance be ahead of the curve in 2011? Nope. In the 1960's, maybe. Why can't the two just have different audiences that are social equals? Why does everything in art theory have to encourage political divisions?

Where I've been

Minneapolis, Philly, New York, Chicago, Princeton NJ, Southern Maine, and a few other spots along the way. I've been on a crazy travel schedule. It's been great.

I started writing for DailyServing and started a blog for print nerdery (the Wandering Printmaker). It's been crazy, and tomorrow I'm headed back to NY for Print Week.

Some recent ideas in no particular order:
- NEJAR, and Greg Cook can bite my left ankle. The worst public art thing is redic. It's insulting to the artists and myopic.
- Minneapolis Institute of Art is one of the best museums I've ever been to. With a good olde-fashioned dictator and a few hundred more years, it would be Louvre or Prado good.
- Writing about the arts is hard, but I love it.
- Seeing art is awesome, and I love it.
- Sarah Sze is a good artist.
- College art museums are the entrepreneurs of the art world. Some of their ideas are great, some suck-- all are pushing new ideas though. Their work makes big museums look better than they are.
- Independent curators are the risk takers that drive the college museums entrepreneurial spirit. Thank god the AAMC finally allows them to be members.
- I like this.
- I like Pipilotti Rist a lot.
- I need to go drinking with Natalie Jeremijenko and say smart and funny things to impress her.
- AICA/USA is the secret decoder ring I want. They are the art mafia illuminati that I want to be part of.


I'll be in Chelsea and at the E/AB fair tomorrow, the IFPDA fair, the Met, Prints Gone Wild, NYU, and maybe Brooklyn Museum over the next few days. My show at BCA is right around the corner in March/April 2011. I'm still applying to MIT. I'm absolutely ready for a nap.

ubu web is awesomer!

In order to see more of her work and get beyond her staring at you, you should watch this Marina Abramovic, 1975-1976 performance video.

1. Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful.
2. Freeing the voice
3. Freeing the memory
4. Freeing the body.

She's one bad ass cat.
And, no, I didn't watch the whole thing while eating popcorn either. It's long and sometimes intense.

Scheduling two years out.

Apparently pictures of AARP Rock and Rollers isn't populist enough in Brooklyn? Who knew?

Even if No sleep till... used a guitar hook, maybe 50's rock photos should be considered outside the normal populist crap for NY. I know that the white hipsters listen to... whatever the hell that is, but if you had put together an early hip hop photography show, I think it would have done better and fewer competing institutions could say that they got there first.

Essentializing the Brooklyn audience aside, museums are always brooding about what to put up 2 years before we get to make fun of them. Look to the successful shows from this article and you'd probably not want to drop your money and schedule a show about religion in contemporary art or the Indian highway system if you are hemorrhaging viewers. You might alienate someone.

But the thing is, that if the NYT numbers are correct, you are reaching 2.4 times the number of viewers over all and 2.3 times the numbers daily with Leibovitz and Mueck (love to see the numbers separately for each artist, but oh well) than you are with RnR photography exhibit. Also, as Robert Storr says, the audience of the unholy combination of Leivovitz and Mueck is more likely to return to see art, than some rock bros or mid-life crisis boomers are to return to see Kiki Smith or the upcoming Warhol.

You have to keep your museum focused on something but there is space for being open to wide programing. I love old fashioned encyclopedic institutions like the MFA Boston or Philadelphia Museum of Art. The MFA can afford to have a popular show of Egyptian artifacts as it doesn't get in the way of them having a Dürer, Harry Callahan, Toulouse-Lautrec, and a show about the women in Firdawsi's Shahnama simultaneously. Philly had up mediocre Picasso show, but was balanced with a Bruce Nauman installation and Jennifer Levonian, Martha Colburn, Joshua Mosley's work.

You have to keep your popular but questionable shows balanced with your quietly worthy shows.

I'd ask Brooklyn to consider their mission statement:

The mission of the Brooklyn Museum is to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience, committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs, and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation, and presentation, the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.

Can you make it less generic? You might do better then.

May has been friggin busy...

Some good news. As soon as B/R/S #131 is published, you'll see a review I wrote for Carlin Wing at Anthony Greaney. It's effectively what I wanted to say. It took less than a week to write, so it could be better, and will be when I send it Frieze for their young critics contest.

I also expect a review of Dürer at the MFA Boston to be published by the SGC newsletter. I'll put that review up after it's finalized.

September at the Nave is Open Air. The show brings the work of Matthew Best, Nathalie Miebach, Carolyn Muskat, Ted Ollier, and Jason Shoemaker together for the first time. Each are exploring the outdoors in different ways. I'm a fan of each, but together I think they augment each other's work.

Last, and certainly not least, The Mills at Boston Center for the Arts has accepted my proposal for Contact with Density. This show will be scheduled soon, and currently has 12 artists in it. Each of the artists are dealing with part of the urban landscape or just the experience of living in the city.

So I'm tired. Oh, and I'm hoping to get mean angry comments in the comments section of B/R/S... It's just what happens.

Giuseppe Panza

Collector Giuseppe Panza died just over a week ago. I didn't really know anything about him prior to the numerous great articles on him after his death. Particularly good are Christopher Knight's writings on him. I'm half way through reading his 9 hour interview with Panza, and one of the more telling proposals that the Panza puts forth is about Oldenburg and the German Expressionists.

Probably a third of the way down is this...

MR. KNIGHT: In the interview that you did with Bruce Kurts in 1972, you said, almost in passing, that when you met Oldenburg and saw his work, you felt a relation with European experience, especially German expressionists.

DR. PANZA: Yes.

MR. KNIGHT: And that's a very intriguing notion, and I wonder if you could discuss that?

DR. PANZA: Yes, I felt this relationship because of this opposition of so different colors. And also, the German expressionists used the same technique to put very strong colors one aside of the other. They don't use difference of tone of colors, just pure color against another one, but without a transition. And this was a technique used by the German expressionists in order to give more violent force to the expression. And I found the same thing in Oldenburg.

MR. KNIGHT: It's interesting, because Pop is usually thought of as such an American sensibility.

DR. PANZA: Yes.

MR. KNIGHT: But in a case such as this, you seem to connect it with the European tradition.

DR. PANZA: Yes. In some ways, yes. Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps is not real. But I had this feeling, and it was interesting for me to make this confrontation; because it was helpful for understanding the work of Oldenburg.

If you look at Oldenburg's 60's work that Panza collected, I can see this connection. Here are the MoMA Oldenburgs. And, to be exact in which ones we are looking at, the ones Panza actually collected which live at the LA Moca.

It's not an issue of historically attributing the Oldenburgs to the influence of the German Expressionists. This may be true, but like Panza, I'm not willing to state it definitively. The two have similar formal concerns and techniques though. They act the same way. They preform the same formal methods. It's interesting to consider and is a relationship I probably wouldn't have ever considered without this interview. Thank you to both Knight and Panza. RIP dear collector. Your collection lives on.

Extra-Visual art

Robert Morris. He may be the poster child for (capital C) Conceptual Art. His output transitioned the from the 50's Greenberg/Abstract Expressionism era to the John Cage/anti-commodification era of high concept driven art. From Sorting Cows in an art magazine to Bodyspacemotionthings. He seemed for years, to be able to upturn the art world on a single publication or new work. Now it seems that no one wants to see his recent work or ask him to make anything else. Try to find new work online. Good luck.

My interest in him is, like others, his work from 1960 through the mid 70's. There is a promising (haven't seen it in person yet) collection of his writings, but I can't seem to find a single website, catalogue raisonné, or other new media collecting the works (is there a raisonné? I found one for prints by Christophe Cherix, but not anything else). There was a meeting of scholars in France in 08. But that's not nearly the amount of research I assumed I'd find on him.

It's a symptom of conceptual art as a historical subject. We've heard from the people who lived it, but it's about time to start digging in deep and sorting some things out. What is conceptual art and when did it happen was explored by a few books published after about 1999, but those mostly laid the groundwork for our new task, which is to explore the after effects of this era and to explain what is being made now as a reaction to that era. Although through the lens of Morris, maybe we need to do some basic work first.

The late condition of conceptual art. We don't even have a vocabulary for the separation between conceptual and contemporary. People still think that the YBA were conceptualists. They're wrong, but we don't have a developed lexicon to explain why yet. They didn't even have non-objective art. Their intentions were often (mostly I'd say) based on emotive ends rather than concept or infinitesimal thought.

That's a career right there. Being that guy that explains how and why concept gave way to intention. How we will never go back to solid Greenbergian objective art.

Edited to add this from the stuff I should have finished reading before writing this:

Has abstract and conceptual art had its day? Does figurative and representational art have a better future?

What happened in the late Sixties was equivalent to what happened with cubism. It was a new way of describing the world that looked dry and impenetrable to many people for many years, but underpinned a great deal of the art we now admire in the 20th century. The same is true of conceptual art. People describe as "conceptual" almost any work of art that has deep thought embodied in it, rather than simply the representation of an object on a canvas. By those standards, almost all the great art of the last 10 or 15 years has been conceptual because it has dealt with ideas as well as images.

More hybridity

Printresting's take on this video exhibits the printerly laws. It can't be printing, it has to be sculpture. If it were printing, we could control it. If 3-d printing were not printing, we'd be sculptors. Oh no! What to do!

Relax and let it be. Maybe it's an installation. Or a 3-d painting... oh my!
Printers can't be painters!

Student work/reality show

What the christ is this? I'm not sure what the Whitney should do, but I know that this isn't going to endear anyone to the idea that 600K is going to a good cause by putting up ugly disjointed vinyl graphics on things. This I expect from the students who design work for (insert town here) window project. I hope the other three artists will have more success.

Edward Winkleman seems to have a similar problems processing the details behind the proposed new Whitney space as I do. I think the trap he talks about is the same advice given to contestants on the game show, wait, I mean important cultural launching pad that is Project Runway. Make it more, and push yourself. You have to have a unique Identity™ and be able to surprise the judges.

They are bored with you and know everything about you before you have your first line finished. One piece of clothing is a whole season to them. The next week you have to have another "new line" as one piece. The new gallery space needs to served the function of presenting art as much as satisfy the vocal minority of critics who will pan whatever is put up.

To continue my exploration of the ethics, for the museum, the space has to serve two masters. You can't win. Something is compromised. If the space is a white cube, you get panned for falling back on old presentation memes. If you go Bibao with your new space, you will get panned for the failure that is inherent to starchitecture. So a compromise is always staring at you. Choose the red or blue pill and you are sacrificing something. The museum's ethics demand you find a third road and keep the professionals who need to work in this space happy and the critical public happy.

Consider this: the original Breuer building was born of Starchitecture. It created this situation.

Ethics of teh moneys

Yup. Now we will barely look at the deep end. I have no idea what really goes on at such large institutions, but the reality is that if you want to run something larger than local, something where you can present art that is bigger than some cats you've met or the 2 galleries that your grad school friends founded-- you need to have a budget. This budget gets out of hand quickly. One minute you found a tiny gallery with friends the next you have a massive budget that is dependent on private and public funding, run a few non-profit spin offs, and 26 years later are "a contemporary art powerhouse."

In the case of the Whitney... we have some giant budgets, egos, and well, everything. Imagine. When you consider the ethics involved with the decision making process, it would be staggering. Lauder's $131 million ties the hands of the institution and proves the point that money talks in the art world. Yet it also gives the institution the flexibility to use the money to make choices. It seems that they've made choices already though.

They're making payments on a space in case they want it. It's only 600K a year, but still. Imagine the wrestling match behind the scenes.

Obviously, there are disadvantages of starchitecture and few if any of the rewards. But the Whitney finds itself at a cross roads. I hope that the numerous egos involved put the institution first when deciding how they will proceed. I have no opinion about rebuild/move/etc, but it's clear that they do not want to keep things status quo.

Oooh more conservation nerds

Art Power

Been reading Art Power from Groys. His On the New section brings another example of ethics v. morals. The collecting museum needs to protect, present, and keep the object alive for an unnaturally long period of time. From a handbag made of an emu shell to an egg tempera painting, all objects are ethically cared for. This, again, does not mean that the collections manager or the conservation specialist uses holy water or prays for the soul of the object. The conservation of objects, their upkeep has to fit within the objectives and responsibilities of the museum, the conservation staff, and the public. As conservators have worked with contemporary and ancient works longer than the average curator/other art professionals, and should have a deeper understanding into the issues of how an object should be preserved, one should listen to the conservator and trust in their abilities to pursue the correct actions.

As every Pollock is supposedly about to fall off their supports, and keep the conservation staff busy, we can look to them as an example. Each "new" Pollock that enters the world is quickly given a few tests on a physical level. These tests are non-intrusive and are compared to the texts that increase daily. Sometimes it becomes obvious that the former conservation needs to be removed in order for the work to be revealed to the viewer. The earlier conservation is not morally questionable, but rather indicates that the conservators professional ethics and material sciences are growing closer.

This gap is real, and you can see this in most conversations with conservators. They are often using jargon like "pre-established methodology" which means "I like using certain toys in the lab" or asking "Whose responsibility is it to authenticate artwork?" which means "Don't blame the conservator if the curator presents this as a real Pollock, we're pretty sure it's not real". But, again, this is not a question of their moral fortitude. It's a question of their professional methods and goals. Their participation in the museum's ethics is to keep the work on view as much as possible and as close to how the artist intended, however they interpret that goal.

Ethics v. Morals

As this is de rigueur to recent posts and I'm trying to put together a writing sample for grad school soon, I figure that I should try to get some basics down on screen so you could laugh at me and tell me that I'm wrong.

I'm going to be focusing mostly on ethics, but let's describe the difference first between ethics and morals. It's unethical to put your self into an exhibit that you curate. It's not immoral though. Morality is a question of right and wrong. A state of being and if it's right or wrong for your soul-- usually tied to a religion or creed. The religious stuff, don't kill, sleep with your neighbor's wife et cetera has nothing to do with the professional ethics of a curator. Usually there is not much of an overlap, so this question doesn't come up often.

For some it's both immoral and unethical to have sex with a museum professional in order to get your show on the schedule. Christianity says you shouldn't do that for moral reasons and the ethic of your profession says your show should be scheduled because it's a good show, not because you are good in bed.

There is nothing immoral to showing a work from a member of your board. It is usually considered outside the norms of museum ethics though to show a collection from a board member though. Even if the show is outside the norms of museum ethics, we can still view and critique the show as a show.

When the MoMA was founded, they expected to deaccession work regularly. Needless to say that they changed that as soon as they had some work worth a significant amount of money. There is no argument to the morality of collecting work but there is one for the ethic. A collecting museum has a different relationship to work than a non-collecting one but no one asks if they are breaking rules that will keep them from heaven.

What would the MoMA be today if they sold off all of their mid-century work and purchased work produced from 1990- 2010? Imagine if they couldn't own anything from before 1960. This is not a question of right/wrong, but rather questions how a professional would and should engage in their job. Is it ethical to show art work from 1945 in 2010 at a museum that wants to define and explore modernism? The founders thought it was unethical and put it into the rules of the MoMA. Should the public complain about the work that they hold from the 40's? No. But should they consider selling some old stuff that may be looking less modern by the day? Sure.

In the coming months I would like to explore some of the details I just glossed over. From the non/collecting issue, the deaccessioning of works, the sourcing of curators and collecting of collectors, to the gray ethical ares for specific museums. There are unending examples to talk about.

Museums serve the public right?

The Guggenheim has auctioned off stuff practically directly from their gallery.

Powhida talks ethics and morals.

Hashtag class has just finished its run.

We seem to be fighting with what art is and should function in terms of ethic or morals. Sure. But I believe that these three have a subtext about the non-profit and its assumption of non-profitness.

Let's review. The non-profit art space is granted that legal status why? It serves the public by being a location of reference. It becomes a location where we store our physical goods that are deemed to be influential and of note. Like the news paper of yesteryear being the paper-of-record, the museum serves a similar function. We ask that the non-profit museum acts in our interests, or at least pretends to act in our interest.

The question of how the museum is or isn't a public institution is the question at hand. It has to be profitable and raise insane amounts of money yearly. One part of the Museum's job is collecting the work, the collectors, the scholars, the curators, the staff into one place to make the museum function as a public institution. But the museum's morals and ethics are often stretched by this basic job.

Gathering the coffee sales people is not usually a decision fraught with ethics, but an artist acting as curator, who has been collected by a board member who is a major benefactor to the institution is. Selling art from a show should bring up red flags. The questions raised by Brandeis with the Rose is a similar situation. Does the non-profit status of the art museum allow for gathering of property that will be sold off at an opportune time? Not at all by most people's estimation. One cannot start a collection, say it's in the public's interest and then just change your mind that it was actually a liquid collection that will be up for sale to the highest bidder.

So, instead of going all Andrea Fraser and critiquing the museum through our art, we seem to be talking about this in public via words?! Amazing. We might be growing up yet. One thing I hope is that as people like Powhida are smart competent thinkers, I hope that the opportunity to self-publish constantly, and without much editorial challenge won't keep them from working these ideas out completely and writing what would be a fascinating book about this subject. 140 characters, no matter how often, does not allow for full thoughts.

art revolution

Most of this article from Boston.com I agree with.

If the local institutions were to ante up, the artist community would be better off. True. My one critique is that they obviously don't want to.

Which leaves us at:
1. how do we do this without them?
2. how do we convince them it's in their best interest?

Harvard is too conservative and way behind the times to start an art degree. They're still not sure if humanism was a good idea. Good luck convincing them that contemporary art could be a field of studies.

It sounds like a well conceived non-profit with a comfortable budget would fill some of these roles. Something like apex art should be in Boston. No question. We should be the space in the US for curatorial studies. But Bard (of all places) has become that. We have the academics and institutions, but have a blind spot for anything visual.

As for having tons of students, only in undergrad. Add up all the grad students coming out of Boston, and we don't even match up to one gradating year from Art Institute of Chicago. We just don't have that many who are working on an MFA here. AIB, SMFA, MassArt, and BU have fewer than 10 per year each.

And last, good luck convincing them to give moneys to MFA students. This is something I've been arguing should happen for years, but is a bit idealistic. There would have to be a push for professionals to set up funds for endowed chairs and other common academic roles inside the university. Until art departments are able to be good programs from the university's point of view (bringing in status members to staff, revenue positive, etc), we will always be considered a second class program. Bring in money, and guess what! The university will take care the students in the program. You can't expect the sciences/medical/literature dept/etc to let the money they bring into the university to pay for art students, which is what you are asking for.

Mira Schor: The Art of Nonconformist Criticality

Mira Schor: The Art of Nonconformist Criticality

Spend two hours thinking.

From 2006. Wonderful talk about-
the delay between initial thought and implementation
repetition from artists
what makes something feminist art

More than just that. Go on then! Download it and have a drink while you listen.

astro boy.

It seems we need to update the Astro Boy myth every 20 years. Each time we focus on another section of the story and change the presentation significantly. So we must be 10 years or so from the next iteration.

The quick observations: it becomes less silly symphony with each version. The relationship between scientist and son becomes psychoanalytical in the 80's and secondary in the 00's. Why the professor's hair was black in the two early videos I don't know. In the books he has white hair. Last, the message of robots and people living together in equality morphs significantly between the three.