NEWSgrist - where spin is art

"L'Affaire Joannou": Art Critics Get Down!

Sharon Butler reports, while offering a thorough linky roundup of what Artnet has branded "L'Affaire Joannou".

 

via Two Coats of Paint, Tuesday, November 17, 2009:

Critic on critic: Jerry Saltz tells DC blogger to get a grip

In a Vulture post about the New Museum's questionable curatorial practices, Saltz assesses the quality of the vociferous debate and courageously suggests that prickly blogger Tyler Green's criticism has crossed the line. "One of the main things that suggested all this indignation had gone too far was the witch-hunt tone of an editorial in the November issue of  Art Newspaper. The language in the piece — written by art blogger Tyler Green and published at the end of last week — was scolding, scornful, condescending, and smug, tinged with a verbal violence that was a little scary. The editorial begins with the false charge that private collector exhibitions are 'fluff shows.' Green sniffs that he’s 'especially disappointed' in the New Museum, and finishes by beseeching all museums to 'cancel' exhibitions of private collections. He demands that the Association of Art Museum Directors “ban” these shows because they are 'an insult' to the art world. When I hear a word like 'ban,' I reach for my dictionary and review the definition of the word democracy.

"This kind of apparatchik rule-making feels off to me. Green has gotten into the habit of demanding that people be fired, reprimanded, or punished, as if only he knows right from wrong. He played a role in getting Grace Glueck fired from the Times for her 'conflict of interest.' After Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune talked about his dual roles as a critic and an employee of an art fair, Green accused him of indulging 'a textbook case of unethical conflict-of-interest' that struck 'at the very heart of ... integrity' and 'flouted journalistic norms.' Green sneered that he was 'troubled' by this behavior and publicly asked the Voice to 'stop publishing' Viveros-Faune. Guess what? That’s exactly what happened. The Voice and the art world lost a tremendous voice....

"I know it’s dangerous to take on bloggers. They can go after you every day, all day long, and anonymous people can chime in, too. Already this week Green has branded me an 'up-with-art cheerleader,' chortled 'balderdash' at something I wrote, and is now even writing comments on my Facebook page and publishing other of my Facebook comments on his public blog. Still, come what may, I’m tired of the hate fest."

In a conciliatory response, Green writes in the Comments thread (and on Saltz's Facebook wall): "I'm proud of the positions I've taken on a range of issues. It is true that I've taken assertive, principled positions on a range of issues. I'd be happy to engage in a dialogue on any of those positions. ...I don't hate you."

Update: On Jerry's Facebook page, Green says the debate isn't about him, it's about the New Museum. Nice guy Ed Winkleman has called for a public debate between Saltz and Green.

Related Links (via Art Observed):
Controversy over New Museum’s plans to show trustee’s collection [The Art Newspaper]
Turning a museum into a vanity space [Tyler Green for The Art Newspaper]
The New Museum responds [The Art Newspaper]
The NuMu ethics story hits the NYT’s front page [Modern Art Notes]
The Met’s director: We’re closer to NuMu than to MoMA [Modern Art Notes]
Saltz: Money, Insularity, and a Huge Controversy for the New Museum [New York Magazine]
Art Morality [New York Magazine]
Some Object as Museum Shows Its Trustee’s Art [NY Times]
The New Museum’s Web of Connections [NY Times]
Museum Directors on Collectors and Exhibitions [NY Times]
The New Museum’s Position on Its Show From a Trustee’s Collection
The Appendix: New Museum Scandal Edition [Artinfo]
NuMu Boo Boo [Time]
New Museum Brouhaha Goes Supernova [Artnet]
New Museum commits suicide with banality [James Wagner]
The November Brooklyn Rail Cover [William Powhida]
New Museum Controversy Grows with its Announced Plans to Show Trustee’s Art [Art Fag City]
Jeff Koons and The Perils of an Unregulated Art World [Art Fag City]
The New York Museum Director Witch Hunt Begins [Art Fag City]
The Authority of the New Museum [Art Market Monitor]

Upping the Socially Networked Museum: Whitney.org Redesign

"To the museum’s credit, the sensibility of openness that leads to the collection concept works on both sides of the site database – content is added and edited using a distributed, wiki-style content management system (CMS) unique to Linked by Air, the design firm responsible for the new Whitney site. [...That ] part of the goal of the new site [... is to allow] a broad range of museum employees to contribute directly to it assures currency, accuracy – and staff ownership."

Philip Bump offers some insight and analysis.

via MEDIAite:

The Whitney’s Re-Design: Web Done (Nearly) Right

by Philip Bump | 10:27 am, November 12th, 2009

» 1 comment

I don’t envy those who have to redesign the website for a museum – balancing institutional structure and needs with the requirement that it reflect the appropriate aesthetic. Moreover, the process of transitioning a sensibility to the web in itself requires decisions about what the organization represents – a staid, classical collection would justifiably be nervous about embracing an open engagement of the general public.

The Metropolitan Museum, for example, probably won’t be holding a contest on YouTube any time soon. Its website, which looks like it was created by a medium sized corporation in 2002, is staid, muted, and tucked behind a splash screen. The Museum of Modern Art’s website, by contrast, is, well, modern, with a palette and structure that would bore Mies van der Rohe. It’s the Obama of websites – so cool, it’s dull.

Late last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art, known for its modern and contemporary exhibitions and its Biennial, unveiled the latest example from this world. It’s a great improvement over what was there yesterday, though that’s a low hurdle to conquer. Yesterday, the site was a card catalog. Today, it’s a website.

What establishes the Whitney’s new site as a success is not the aesthetic revamping with which, frankly, I’m not impressed. Various elements are laid in a casual grid, anchored by the logo, nice and big, at the top. The navigation is awkward, with elements jumping to the head of the line to show additional options once clicked. The background is either black or white, in order to accommodate a conceptually interesting feature in which it changes when the sun in New York rises or sets. (That would be at 4:41 this afternoon or 6:40 tomorrow morning for those wanting to witness it.) As I said – conceptually interesting. In practice, though, it tends to make the site feel a bit flat, and perusing the collection is negatively impacted by the black background. (White borders would do wonders.)

That’s particularly a shame, because said perusal and its accompanying tools are the real hook to the site. The collection itself is easy to navigate and well indexed. Every page, one notices, has at the bottom a small dot which, when clicked, adds an item to your “custom collection” (assuming you take advantage of the free registration, which you ought to do). This is not unique – the afore-mentioned MoMA site has a similar function – but the Whitney takes it further. When, above, I said every page, I meant every page. In addition to works of art, you can add artists, site elements, upcoming exhibits, even the contact page. Collections are an opportunity to interact with more than the art – you can in essence create your own museum website.

[read full article]

KERPLOW! Powhida on Cover of Brooklyn Rail

via MAN:

Artist William Powhida on the NuMu's "suicide"

New York-based artist William Powhida, who frequently satirizes art world figures and conventions in his art, has taken on the New Museum's "suicide" in his latest work.

Excerpted above, Powhida's drawing details "How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality," and includes James Wagner, Lisa Phillips, Marcia Tucker, Jeff Koons, and plenty of others who are somehow engaged in the NuMu's self-injury. You can see the drawing here at Powhida's website (click on it for a high-res image). New Yorkers will see it on the cover of the next Brooklyn Rail.

Scratch 'n Sniff @ The Met?

Met officials feel that a few smudged or punctured O'Keeffes are a small price to pay for renewed interest in the arts.

via The Onion (thanks Ed!):

Struggling Museum Now Allowing Patrons To Touch Paintings

October 5, 2009 | Issue 45-41

NEW YORK—Hoping to boost attendance and broaden its base of supporters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art launched a new initiative this week that allows patrons, for the first time ever, to prod and scratch at the classic paintings in its revered collection.

"Though it contains more than two million pieces and represents a profound legacy of artistic achievement, most people remain completely indifferent to our museum," Met director Thomas P. Campbell said. "So we decided to try something a little different and give visitors a chance to experience our timeless works of art up close and personal."

Added Campbell, "Please, bring the whole family and smudge up our paintings as much as you want."

According to Campbell, attendance has increased tenfold since the new policy went into effect, with record turnouts causing 45-minute waits for those wishing to clumsily paw at the works of Vincent van Gogh.

"You can't grasp the brilliance of a great painting just by looking at it," said Phil Brehm, 32, who acknowledged that he hadn't set foot inside a museum since a mandatory field trip in high school. "To truly appreciate fine art, you need to be able to run your fingers over its surface and explore its range of textures."

"Or just rub your face all over it, like I do," Brehm added.

Gerard Schmidt, a retired banker who lives near the Met, said he had never much cared for museums until he was given the chance to manhandle one of Monet's Water Lilies.

"At first it just looked like a picture of a bunch of lily pads, but then I started scraping at it with my pocket knife and the whole painting just sort of spoke to me," Schmidt said. "For the first time, I finally understand what Monet was trying to get across in her work."

Art students also took advantage of the Met's relaxed rules, with many photocopying Cézanne canvasses or trying to gain insight into Rembrandt's techniques by tracing over Aristotle With A Bust Of Homer with soft pencils and charcoal.

Karen Cooper, a 41-year-old mother of four, said she enjoyed her first visit to the Met, but admitted it was exhausting to spend an entire afternoon touching paintings.

"This is good to know about, though" said Cooper, before applying another coating of moisturizing lotion to her hands and returning to palm more Vermeers. "Whenever I need some alone time, I can bring the kids here and send them off to go play with the Picassos for a while."

Museum officials confirmed that many new visitors have given donations to the museum to get special member benefits, such as being allowed to remove works of art from the walls and sit down with them while enjoying food or drinks in the café.

The new policy has been so popular that on Monday the Met began extending tactile privileges beyond its paintings. Patrons are now invited to climb inside ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, whether to take a souvenir photo or just carve a message into a 2,500-year-old sacred coffin. Museum-goers are also encouraged to try on the medieval suits of armor and participate in mock battles.

Commenting on the diversity of the museum's permanent collection, Met publicity director Sarita Bhakta said, "Where else can you recline in an original Mies chair, put your feet up on a Rodin, and play "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" on a 300-year-old Stradivarius?"

Some, however, remained unimpressed.

"I touched a crapload of Jasper Johns' paintings," said Mark Bennet, 67. "I just don't get why they're supposed to be so special. They feel like any regular old painting."

[read on...]

Hammered

  

Images Via

via Artnet News, Sept. 2, 2009:

THE LIMITS OF LICENCE AT SAM
Artist-cum-security-guard Amanda Mae has caused a stir in Seattle after she pushed the limits of a participatory Yoko Ono piece at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Ono’s seminalPainting to Hammer a Nail is a small panel with a hammer hanging next to it, and a wall label that encourages visitors to "pound a nail into this painting" (the very artwork that, according to legend, brought Ono and John Lennon together). Hammer a Nail is featured in "Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78," June 25-Sept. 7, 2009, an exhibition that showcases works that "deconstruct painting in order to usher in a new way of thinking" -- though, apparently, this new way of thinking has some strict limits of its own.

At SAM, someone had the idea -- whether it was a museum official or a member of the public is disputed -- of using the license granted by Ono’s work to nail a piece of paper to the museum wall next to it. In short order, the piece was surrounded by a dense ring of announcements, receipts, business cards and other detritus that visitors had posted, all under the museum’s approving gaze. Informed about the paper-hanging, Ono stipulated that it was acceptable as long as the scraps were preserved as part of the work, and returned with it.

On Aug. 20, Mae -- who in addition to working at SAM, also makes performance-based photo art, and is about to start a graduate program in museum studies at the University of Washington, according to Stranger art critic Jen Graves -- decided to take things a step further. She set up in front of the work and began to remove all of the pieces of paper, categorizing them in neat piles for archiving. Mae dubbed her own performance Yoko Ono Excavation Survey, or Y.E.S. After a half hour, SAM curator Michael Darling arrived, and ordered Mae to halt. The next day, she was fired.

Though Mae’s termination is probably to be expected -- she was clearly exceeding her brief as a guard -- whether or not her intervention is acceptable as a part of Painting to Hammer a Nail is a more intriguing question. The museum’s reasoning, that "altering a work of art hanging on the wall of a museum is never really an okay thing to do," seems a little odd given the fact that the piece’s own label calls for "bringing others besides the artist into the creative act."

Mae, for her part, researched the history of Yoko Ono’s work before intervening, and describes her gesture as an attempt to "unearth" its original state, cutting against the "self-congratulatory attitude" that surrounded the museum’s presentation. "I am not shocked at the institution's decision," she is quoted as saying, with respect to her firing. "I am however disappointed at the narrow interpretation Darling has for the artworks he traffics in."

As a footnote, Graves has posted a surprisingly pious letter from Jon Hendricks, curator for Yoko Ono Exhibitions, addressing Mae’s interpretation of Ono’s work. Apparently Mae had written to Darling explaining the rationale for her intervention, and Darling forwarded the letter to Hendricks, who admonishes Mae, "you have to consider art in a much deeper, more profound sense than you do," encouraging her to have "greater respect for the artist" -- all of which sounds strangely academic in the context of a show about artists questioning tradition. Hendricks does concede that because Painting to Hammer a Nail is a participatory work, "one could argue that your participation was just as justifiable as anyone else's participation." 

In the end, Hendricks’ holier-than-thou letter is particularly ironic considering that he is co-founder of the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), which did its own share of unauthorized art interventions back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. GAAG is probably best-known for storming uninvited into the Museum of Modern Art lobby in 1969, covered in blood, and protesting in front of Guernica at MoMA in 1970.

Save the Islip Art Museum!

 

Carriage House, Islip Art Museum (Built in 1910, the Carriage House is one of the few remaining examples of Edwardian shingle architecture at the turn of the century.)

UPDATES

via Artnet News, Aug 14:

ISLIP ART MUSEUM ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK
The Islip Art Museum in Islip, N.Y., long a home for experimental art on Long Island, is facing probable closure as the town looks to grapple with a $10-million budget hole by laying off city workers. After what Newsday called "a rowdy and emotionally charged" meeting on Tuesday, the Islip Town Board voted to let go of 97 city workers -- including, it seems, the entire museum staff.

Islip Museum director Mary Lou Cohalan told Artnet Magazine that the Town of Islip was in negotiation with the nonprofit Islip Arts Council about taking over the museum, but that negotiations would take at least four months, while layoffs will come much sooner. "Closing for any length of time will have a negative impact on our audience, on our schedule (we will have to cancel exhibits) and on our reputation with our grantors," said Cohalan.

via NEWSDAY:

At emotional meeting, Islip approves worker layoffs

August 11, 2009 By JENNIFER MALONEY  jennifer.maloney@newsday.com

At a rowdy and emotionally charged meeting Tuesday, the Islip Town Board adopted a resolution to lay off 97 workers - but also approved an amendment that calls for reducing that number next month if the union offers money-saving concessions.

Town officials said the workforce reduction will help fill a projected $10-million budget hole in 2010 caused by falling mortgage tax and interest revenues. Without it, residents would face a 25 percent increase in their town taxes, they said.

The 4-1 vote was preceded by an hour of public comments in which town employees, union representatives, residents and political candidates pleaded with the board to avoid layoffs.

"I have a family, a house; I'm about to send my daughter to college in two weeks," said Martin Lubliner, 48, a 28-year town security guard. "I hope that in your heart, you can find some compassion for myself and the many fine employees of the town."

The town will now forward a list of 86 full-time and 11 part-time positions slated for elimination to the Suffolk County Civil Service Department for review, town officials said. The amendment calls for the town board to revisit the list at its Sept. 15 meeting and, if union negotiations have produced savings, reduce the number of layoffs.

Speakers criticized the cuts to public safety, the town's animal shelter and the Islip Art Museum, which is slated to lose its entire staff. The town is seeking to transfer stewardship of the museum to a nonprofit arts organization.

Tempers ran hot as Supervisor Phil Nolan, a Democrat, and Councilman Steven Flotteron, the board's only Republican, verbally sparred during the public comment period and in the debate preceding the vote - each accusing the other's party of fiscal mismanagement.

The nearly 200 people who packed Town Hall jeered and whistled in response. Flotteron made a motion to table the layoff resolution. It was not seconded.

Flotteron also attempted to introduce an unscheduled resolution that would cut salaries, revoke take-home cars and require health insurance contributions for elected, appointed and management positions with salaries over certain thresholds.

Nolan declined to entertain the motion because it was not on the agenda and the board members had not had time to consider it.

As the board prepared to vote, Richard Hendershot, vice president of the town workers' union, Teamsters Local 237, stood and shouted: "We have an opportunity here to save jobs. Don't send these people out the door!"

Councilman Christopher Bodkin responded, "All of us in every way feel for you, and understand the tragedy of being laid off. We also see our responsibility to the taxpayers."

+++

Dear readers,

Please consider writing an email or letter today in support of the Islip Art Museum.

For updates and more info see my Facebook thread;

For more details and a really good sample letter see Art Fag City;

Article in Newsday: Islip Town to vote on layoffs to close $10M budget gap. (August 10, 2009).

received Friday Aug 7, via email:

The government of the town of Islip is intending to lay off all the staff of the Islip Art Museum, the letters are going out on Monday [today]. They seem to think they can do what they want as they might not know that there is support for this institution by a wider community.

As you may know the Islip Art Museum has been a beacon of contemporary art showing artists from all over the world. We have received much critical attention over the past 30 years or so. We are the only institution to show such work between New York City and the Hamptons. We are an educational institution bringing contemporary art to an underserved community. Let the councilmen know that this is a loss and that you care about it.

Please contact people you know, not just artists, and ask them to lobby on our behalf. Something simple is good, like:

The Islip Art Museum is one of the most valuable resources for young artists in the tri-state area. I understand that you are considering laying off the entire staff, a move that would effectively close the Museum. I know fiscal problems are everywhere--nonetheless, I urge you not to eliminate this important cultural institution.

Please send a letter and an e-mail to the following officials and ask anyone you know to do the same.

Phil Nolan, Supervisor
Christopher Bodkin, Councilman
Steven Flotteron, Councilman
John Edwards, Councilman
Gene Parrington, Councilman

The address is:
Islip Town Board
Town Hall
655 Main Street
Islip, NY 11751

email to: supervisorsoffice@townofislip-ny.gov

About the Islip Art Museum:

The Islip Art Museum is the leading exhibition space for contemporary art on Long Island. The Museum presents five exhibitions a year in its main galleries. Exhibitions are organized to reflect issues and concerns in the current art world.

Our exhibitions attract a wide range of the New York and international art world to Long Island. In addition to an ambitious exhibition program featuring contemporary art by new and emerging artists, we also present lectures, fine art classes for adults and children, and workshops and tours for all age groups....

Our landmark structure next to the Islip Art Museum, the Carriage House, is Long Island's center for experimental art. We present three exhibitions a year at this site, including one based on an open call for proposals. Artists are invited to submit proposals in a variety of artistic media for presentation in this building.

We maintain a growing Permanent Collection of works by leading contemporary artists, focusing on those with ties to Long Island. Changing exhibitions are presented in the Permanent Collection Gallery.

Recycle LACMA

via Recycle LACMA (thanks Ed!):

On January 14th, 2009 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that it was deaccessioning more than 100 items from its costumes and textiles collection. Once carefully collected, catalogued, and cared for, these items have now been cast back out in to the world. What will happen to them? Like any other useless item, they will need to be recycled or disposed of.

Recycle LACMA is a project of Los Angeles-based artist Robert Fontenot. At three separate auctions he purchased over 50 items deaccessioned by LACMA and is now trying to find new uses for these otherwise unwanted items.

Although each item has not yet been used, each item can have a use.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Cap (possibly a Kufi)

Accession Number: TR8616-2

Label 1: Conley, 12/86

Label 2: Conley, 11/4/86

This is an adult sized, multi-colored, crocheted skull cap. It has a black, donut-shaped, yarn knob on top.

When deconstructed, it was revealed that the spiral of the hat was crocheted around a core of multiple strands of cotton twine which had been glued together to form a thicker cord.

A barbell shaped pattern was developed. Using this, two pieces were cut from the hat and sewn together. Before being sewn shut, the hackysack was partially filled with dried beans. With a diameter of 2.5 inches and a weight of 70 grams, this hackysack conforms to the the Official Rules of Footbag Sports as dictated by the International Footbag Players' Association, Inc. (IFPA).

The accession number has been embroidered on one side of the ball.

Panoramic Foreclosure @ Queens Museum

 

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

An item in “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” at the Queens Museum of Art; The curator Larissa Harris with the Panorama in a foreclosure exhibit at the Queens Museum.

via NYTimes:

July 8, 2009

Mapping a Bird’s-Eye View of Foreclosure Misery

By PATRICIA COHEN

When it came to representing the sprawling nature of the foreclosure crisis in New York City, the artist Damon Rich figured out that the best thing to do was to shrink it down to size.

And so he used the 9,335-square-foot Panorama of the City of New York, the intricate architectural model built for the 1964 World’s Fair, and hundreds of neon-pink triangles to demonstrate just how the city has been marked by economic troubles.

Each plastic triangle represents a block where there have been three or more home foreclosures. Visitors on the balcony walkway that surrounds the Panorama, at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, can see in a single glance precisely where subprime lenders wreaked the most havoc.

Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.

This mapping of the 45-year-old Panorama is part of a larger exhibition about housing, in which politics intersects with art.

“I hope that my work operates on a principle of opening up a set of issues for exploration,” Mr. Rich said.

Titled “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” the show includes photographs, models, drawings and sculptural installations — like a large, three-dimensional wooden graph of interest rates over the past 70 years — that offer an explanation of how the private housing market works, beginning with the federal government’s involvement during the Depression.

Mr. Rich said the exhibition provided a “physical experience” that engages people in a way that a book, a Web site or a television show cannot. “In some way, I hope my exhibitions function as strange educational playgrounds for adults,” he said.

As well as an artist, Mr. Rich is an urban designer and waterfront planner for Newark. He originally created a version of the “Red Lines” exhibition for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an artist in residence in 2007. When one of the center’s curators, Larissa Harris, was hired at the Queens Museum, she asked Mr. Rich to recreate the installation there.

The museum’s director, Tom Finkelpearl, suggested that Mr. Rich use the Panorama. When first built, the Panorama was supposed to simulate the sense of a helicopter ride over New York. Where the walkway now stands, helicopter-shaped cars on elevated tracks gave visitors a nine-minute tour.

“This was built as an urban planning tool,” Ms. Harris said of the Panorama. “I feel so proud of this because we are using it that way.”

The Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project collected the foreclosure information, Ms. Harris said, as she slowly circled the Panorama. The Regional Plan Association, an independent planning group, then crunched the numbers using the Geographic Information System — a mapping program — to create maps of every inch of the city indicating where there had been foreclosures of single- to four-family homes in 2008.

Ms. Harris opened a door off the walkway and descended a few steps to a second door that opened onto the Panorama. She bent down and tilted her head so that her eyes were level with the blue floor that represents the waterways surrounding New York. “When you look at it this way, you can imagine you’re on a boat and coming into Staten Island,” she said.

The first challenge was figuring out how to mark the more than 13,000 foreclosures. “We had a brainstorm,” Ms. Harris said. The small plastic dividers put on the top of a delivered pizza to prevent the cheese from sticking to the top of the box would work perfectly. “We bought 2,000 of them and spray-painted them pink,” a color that would not clash with the Panorama, but would still stand out, Ms. Harris said.

Volunteers from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn of which Mr. Rich is the founder, translated the information from the maps to the Panorama. “We got an amazing crop of kids who just love maps,” Ms. Harris said.

Figuring out how to place the markers without damaging the Panorama proved to be another problem. To get to the East New York section, for instance, volunteers would have had to walk through the rest of Brooklyn, the equivalent of a cadre of building-crushing Godzillas. Ultimately, team members discovered that they could sit on thick squares of foam without damaging the Panorama’s wood and plastic models.

“We took off our shoes, put on little slippers and went out with these maps and pieces of foam,” Ms. Harris said.

The Panorama was last significantly updated in 1992, so the group made “educated guesses” when computer maps differed from the Panorama, Ms. Harris said. The museum, whose only recent addition to the Panorama is Citi Field, the new Mets stadium next door, has begun a new update called Adopt-a-Building. That effort asks people, schools and businesses to sponsor or buy a building for the Panorama. (So far, there have been no foreclosures.)

As for the pink triangles, there are 582 in Brooklyn; 551 in Queens; 140 in Staten Island; and 151 in the Bronx, mostly in the Wakefield section. The areas are predominantly African-American and Latino, Ms. Harris said, the same neighborhoods that used to be starved of credit by discriminatory redlining before it became illegal in the 1970s. The smaller numbers in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, she explained, are due to a combination of income (too rich or too poor) and building type (apartments instead of single- or multifamily homes).

Ms. Harris acknowledged that most of “Red Lines,” which runs through Sept. 27, is political; it emphasizes predatory and racist lending practices. On Wednesday night the museum is hosting a celebration for housing advocates, featuring a lecture by the urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

But she argued that mapping the Panorama was not about taking sides. “I don’t see how it gives a political view, mapping the facts,” she said. “I don’t think you can argue with this. That’s why it’s so powerful.”

An earlier version of this article misstated information about the founding of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. Damon Rich is the founder, not the co-founder.

The High Line Is Ready

via NYTimes Arts Beat:

June 8, 2009, 2:52 pm

First Phase of High Line Is Ready for Strolling

By Robin Pogrebin

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Standing on a newly renovated stretch of an elevated promenade that was once a railway line for delivering cattle — surrounded by the community activists, elected officials and architects who made the transformation happen — Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cut a red ribbon on Monday morning to signify that the first phase of the High Line is finished and ready for strolling. (Panoramic view here and a map here.)

Calling the High Line, which opens to the public on Tuesday, “an extraordinary gift to our city’s future,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “today, we’re about to unwrap that gift.’’ He added, “it really does live up to its highest expectations.”

The first portion of the three-section High Line, which runs along the Hudson River from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street, will be open daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. There are entrances at Gansevoort Street (steps) and at 16th Street (elevator); exits are located every few blocks.

The second phase of the project, which extends to 30th Street, is under construction and expected to be completed by the fall of 2010. The third phase, up to 34th Street, has yet to be approved.

Librado Romero/The New York Times A view along the newly opened High Line public park.

The High Line project is something of a New York fairytale, given that it started with a couple of guys who met at a community board meeting in 1999 — Joshua David, a writer, and Robert Hammond, a painter — and discovered they shared a fervent interest in saving the abandoned railroad trestle, which had been out of commission since 1980 and was slated for demolition. Thus began a decade-long saga that involved rescuing the structure from demolition by the Giuliani administration and enlisting the Bloomberg administration in its preservation and renovation.

Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, called the project “a great West Side story.”

City Council speaker Christine C. Quinn described it as “a miracle of perseverance,” and said “the idea could easily have gone into a file, ‘great ideas that will never happen.’”

With all the bureaucratic hurdles the project had to overcome, it was perhaps no wonder that so many representatives of different arms of local government were there for Monday’s celebratory news conference, including Amanda M. Burden, the city planning commissioner; Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner; and Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York. Also present were two couples who have been the project’s major benefactors Diane von Furstenberg, the fashion designer, and her husband, the media mogul Barry Diller, and Philip Falcone, a hedge fund billionaire, and his wife, Lisa Maria Falcone.

The landscaped walkway, designed by Field Operations and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, includes more than 100 species of plants that were inspired by the wild seeded landscape left after the trains stopped running, the Mayor said. He added that the High Line has helped usher in something of a renaissance in the neighborhood; more than 30 new projects are planned or under construction nearby.

These include a new home for the Whitney Museum of American Art, designed by Renzo Piano, which will anchor the base of the High Line at Gansevoort. The Mayor announced on Monday that the city was finalizing a land sale contract with the museum.

The first two sections of the High Line cost $152 million, the Mayor said, $44 million of which was raised by Friends of the High Line, the group that led the project.

All of the speakers’ comments echoed the triumphal — and perhaps somewhat incredulous — subject line of an email put out by Friends of the High Line right after the festivities had concluded: “We did it.”

Whither Phillip Smith? Historical Erasure at the Pictures Generation

Metropolitan Museum of Art/Licensed by Scala, Art Resource. “Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates,” 1982-84, by Allan McCollum, on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984.”

First:

Framing the Message of a Generation

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: May 29, 2009

HOW does cultural history get written? Who chooses which portraits will hang in the hall of fame, which art will live on in museums, which books will end up on the classics shelf, which music will be standard fare in tomorrow’s concert halls?

We are encouraged to think that such judgments have lives of their own, are decided by a kind of natural selection. The most beautiful art will prevail, the most ambitious, the most morally uplifting, the most universal in emotional appeal. Everything else is by default of a lesser order. We shouldn’t fret if it disappears.

This view is, of course, wishful thinking. Moral and universal are concepts up for grabs; my notion of beautiful may leave you cold. Many of our masterpieces owe their origins to the distinctly immoral ambitions of power politics, their survival to prosaic strokes of luck, their present pre-eminence to institutional marketing, scholarly attention and popular sentiment. Even so, survival can be chancy. Fine things are tossed out and crummy things kept all the time.

In the case of art from the deep past we can usually only guess at how the selection process worked. With contemporary art we can see it in operation. We can see history being written — recorded, edited, enhanced, invented — right before our eyes. It can be a disturbing sight.

I was reminded of this after visiting two big history-writing and history-inventing exhibitions in New York this spring, “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Aug. 2) and “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” at the New Museum (through July 5).
 
[read on...]

See also: via Carefully Aimed Darts, Thought Things, Sharpish:

Historical Erasure at the Pictures Generation

By the power

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current blockbuster, The Pictures Generation 1974-1984 is on the one hand a sprawling historical survey, and yet also a revisionist history. Jerry Saltz describes it as “less a critical survey of a highly influential aesthetic than a feel-good class reunion. Rather than opt for scholarship and tough choices, curator Douglas Eklund cultivated a gang’s-all-here coziness. It’s a huge show, with hundreds of objects, books, posters, films, and videos, and works by 30 artists.”

Philip Smith, All the Answers, 1998

Given the breadth of the show and its apparently inclusive approach, it is particularly surprising that Philip Smith was not included, even though he was one of the five artists that Douglas Crimp selected for the original “Pictures” show at Artists Space in 1977. Crimp’s revised essay, published several years later in October, is arguably responsible for the enduring currency of the “Pictures” moniker, and substitutes Cindy Sherman for Smith. It’s a critical decision that the Met has apparently perpetuated; Eklund has explained to CultureGrrl that “I didn’t respond strongly enough to his work to include it.”

Fair enough.

Remembering that chief photography curator Malcolm Daniel explained the Met curator’s mission as “To collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art that collectively represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement at the highest level of quality, all at the service of the public and in accordance with the highest professional standards,” it is clear that Eklund had the license to exclude Smith on the grounds of quality alone.

What disturbs me more is the way that the Met has entirely erased Smith’s inclusion in the original exhibition. At least one wall label for a work by Tory Brauntuch mentions him as one of the four artists in the Artists’ Space exhibition. The didactic material here needs to be qualified.

Reviewing the show, Martha Schwendener perpetuates the error: “The show at Artists Space featured only four artists. Ironically, neither Cindy Sherman nor Richard Prince, who would become figureheads for Pictures art, were included.”

So what happened to fact-checking? The museum gift shop, at the exit to the exhibition, is discretely selling copies of the catalogue for the Artists Space show (only $30). One need only flip to the title page to see that Crimp’s artists numbered five: Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith. CultureGrrl cornered Crimp at the press preview and asked what he thought of the omission:

Q: What do you make of Philip Smith’s absence from the Met’s show?

A: He was not so much of the group, of the social world, of the people who formulated this. He’s gay and this [the Met's show] is a very straight configuration of artists. I don’t know what’s happened to him, career-wise. It’s a slightly touchy subject: I think Philip is upset, reasonably.

Schwendener rightly points out that the show “was organized by a photography curator intent on showing how the medium was integrated into “mainstream” contemporary art.” Beyond the social circle aspects of the show that Crimp and Saltz emphasize, I wonder if Eklund’s curatorial omission also has to do with the fact that Smith’s work seems to be grounded in drawing.

Whatever Eklund’s his reasons for excluding Smith, the historical record is being distorted. It might not make good copy for wall labels and audio guides, but this decision making process should be more transparent, or at least represented truthfully in the history of Pictures.