Dürer review

Grab the PDF of my review of the MFA's Dürer show that's up right now.

That Nuevo York place.

Ran down there this week. Had to see the Bespoke show as I know all but one of the bike builders in the show. It's complicated and interesting. I'll be writing up a review and as long as it makes sense on paper/screen/smarty-pants-phone it'll be published in the following weeks.

I also saw the Dead/Alive show. Has numerous good works and icky ones too. I like icky works. The birds turned into synthetic diamonds were awesome, but I wouldn't spend 30 hours trying to explain how the show functions-- as it's pretty straightforward. Ick, death, and odd smells.

The baskets from the Sara and David Lieberman collection is a perfect example of how design often works in museums. It sometimes reduces what probably should be considered a sculpture to design.

I hit up that Frick collection I keep hearing about. Dude had deep pockets. 3 Vermeers is not natural. Having two essential Rembrandts also on the scale of hedonistic. The perfect early power portrait and probably the best self-portrait. And the Holbeins! good lord. I believe fortune smiled down on Mr. Frick in order to have those two portraits facing each other in such a well funded public collection. Everything else he did and collected (including the Franz Hals portraits) were just padding around those two Holbeins.

Around the corner at the Asia Society is Mariko Mori. I won't belabor this either, as Kumano is from 1998, but it's the work from Mori that is who she is to me. If you have the time, go, but read up on the signs and signifiers of Japaneseness. That work is jammed full with how the Japanese understand themselves. From the calligraphic style to the moon, to the temple, to the fox spirit. It's her best work to me as it's solid packed with complicated images.

Throw in a drunken evening in Brooklyn, and it ended up being a good distraction.

Speaking of distractions, I hope people know that the work of art thing on the TV shouldn't be taken seriously or talked anywhere near as much as it has. It's a tv show kids. Like Futurama, the return of which I'm more excited about. It's worse than tv, it's reality tv. Like the housewives, but with corporate art whoring instead of die job ladies selling their bodies and souls for fame.

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.

Curator's bibliography

No joke, there has been a lot of books published on the subject of curators in the last decade. I've been reading a fair number of them and for a while, have been making a list of ones I need to get. Today I'm going to share them with you.

I don't doubt curators as much as others do. If it weren't for curators, there would only be two type of shows: solo shows in galleries and museum based historical retrospectives of dead artists. I do think that the word is being used way too much and we need to expand our vocab. Personally, I wrestle with how and what I do when I plan a show-- is it merely an illustration of an idea or is there something bigger going on, does the work or theme of the show lead, am I telling artists what to do, is it understandable to a wide audience, could I have found better artists or written about them differently, etc.

And yes, I don't shy away from books about museums.

Here we go:
Brief History of Curating
On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators
A Brief History of Curating New Media Art: Interviews with Curators
Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance
Rethinking Curating
What Makes a Great Exhibition
Cautionary Tales
Thinking About Exhibitions
Inside the White Cube
One Place After Another
Collecting the New
Salon to Biennial
Studio and Cube
Exhibiting Cultures
Art and Its Publics
Exhibiting Contradiction
Academies, Museums, and Cannons of Art
The Arts of Democracy
Contemporary Art and the Museum
Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects
Good and Plenty
Curating Consciousness
International Dialogues about Visual Culture, Education and Art
The Modern Eye
Money for Art
Museum Basics
Museums and their Communities
Museum Exhibition
Museum Legs
Museum Prejudice
New Media in the White Cube
The Place of Artists' Cinema
Spaces of Experience
Sponsorship
Museum Frictions
This is the Flow
Harald Szeemann: Exhibition Maker
Harald Szeemann--with by through because towards despite
Under Construction
Whose Muse?
Women Gallerists
Curating Now(PDF Yup, it's a free book! Goes for over 100 on amazon.)
Curating Subjects



If you know of a book that isn't on this list, let me know!