Secret Restaurants Part 2 (and Luxury Art in Luxury Hotels)

The Times reports on the continuing proliferation of secret restaurants, doing a better reported, more extensive version of the piece I wrote a few months ago and posted on here recently. To Milk & Honey, La Esquina, and The Back Room, they add the Waverly Inn and - interestingly - the Gramercy Park Hotel's Rose Bar, which contains literally millions of dollars of art, replete with at least one piece by Prince, Twombly, Warhol, Basquiat, Hirst, and Schnabel (who helped design the $200 million renovation). What's most remarkable is that the GPH is not alone in its pricey wall hangings. The Hotel Ganesvoort has also generated quite a bit of buzz over its art collection, anchored by a large Warhol / Basquiat collaboration piece.

Defending Matt Greene

Deitch Projects was recently showing works by Matt Greene in an exhibition entitled Surrender! that I think warrants notice. (It just closed, but you can check out most of the works at the Deitch site.) If you look at the paintings for a few seconds, you're probably not surprised that Roberta Smith is pissed. She says:

"They seem conservative, thin and calculated to appeal to young, straight, male hedge-fund managers with a yen for lap dances and a taste for magazine illustrations from the 1960s."

First of all, all young, straight, males have a "yen" for lap dances. I don't think that should really be held against them. Second, what young hedge fund managers have a "yen" for 1960s magazine illustrations? I mean, I'm sure some do, but is that really a viable cultural stereotype? Those two points aside, these young men are apparently the target audience, according to Ms. Smith.

Smith is most upset that the women depicted in the majority of the paintings appear to be "vamping for the male gaze." Superficially, that may be true. The women bend over and prostrate themselves in various ways for the viewer. But it's over the top and almost comical. In some, the women jump in the air laughing; in others, they hold gigantic swords, caricatured phallic symbols. I don't think that any young male (or young male hedge fund manager, to continue using Smith's words) would feel comfortable purchasing one of these to look at for pornographic purposes, as she seems to suggest, especially given the massive witches in many of them.

With all of that said, they (and we) should feel comfortable purchasing and hanging them for another reason: they're tremendous fun, inhabiting that exciting line between irony and pure pleasure. It's that element of fun that seems to really bother Smith. Everyone's conscious of the concept of the gaze today, and Greene seems to be playing with that in much the same way as Richard Prince in his Nurse paintings (on which the market, at least, has definitely ruled). Matt Greene may or may not end up exploding into popularity - Deitch hasn't made up his mind; he's showing but not representing him at the moment - but these works seem to add some points to the former possibility.

Quick Notes 2

A New Gursky Record: $2.48 million
[EV+/-] (via Modern Art Notes)
Surprising all but the most optimistic commentators, the record price of Gursky prints continues to rise. EV+/- briefly describes some of the digital alterations the artist has made to his most famous pieces. In light of such changes, defining records based on medium seems to be increasingly suspect. Is a digitally altered image really a photograph? Is it fair to put a vintage Man Ray (or, for that matter, a vintage daguerreotype) in the same category as a Gursky?

Jasper Johns Has Some Things to Say
[The Art News Paper] (via Art News Blog)
Johns has a tendency to be a bit quiet, though that holds for most of the artists of his generation. He decided to speak to the Art News Blog recently, though. No real news here, but it's nice to have a quick update on what's up. Things I didn't know: Johns is a major collector of Chris Burden's work, and he considers 1954 his greatest year (too bad the show at the National Gallery is from 1955 to 1965). (The photo is by Rauschenberg.)



CAPC Curators in Trouble with the Law
[Flash Art Online] (via Off Center)
I thought the French were supposed to be open-minded about art (and pornography). Maybe not. The director of Centre d’Arts Plastiques Contemporain (CAPC), Bordeaux's contemporary art museum, and two curators have been hit with pornography charges over, according to the Walker (whose coverage is superb), "Gary Gross painting of a girl taking a bath, an Elke Krystufek video showing a masturbating girl, and photos by Annette Messager of children with their eyes scratched out." (Ironically, the exhibition was entitled Presumed Innocent: Contemporary Art and Childhood.) Thomas Hirschorn has even weighed in, claiming this is the first time any such thing has happened in French history. They face five years in prison and a stiff fine.

Bonvicini at SculptureCenter

Though I hesitate to link to another Times article that will be read by so many, Holland Cotter's review of Monica Bonvicini's show (and a group show called “In Practice Projects”) at SculptureCenter is an exciting reminder that - with Roberta Smith and Michael Kimmelman battling for the chance to review each season's blockbuster shows - there is still room at the paper for brilliant writing about art emerging on the periphery.

Returning to the exhibition, Bonvicini, who works out of Germany, has become something of a darling at various biennials, installing works at the most recent events in Liverpool and Istanbul. While a lot of her work has been about (and built as) architecture, she's also worked in a variety of other media. Indeed, her large-format photographic work These Days only a Few Men Know What Work Really Means (1999), composed of gay pornographic images obscured by vaguely Baldessarian colored circles and text was instrumental in propelling her career forward.

Her piece on view at SculptureCenter, Built for Crime [pictured above], is - like These Days... - relatively conservative in construction. (Other interventions have involved constructing a new set of walls inside a gallery and building a gigantic, steel staircase between two floors.) A series of large glass letters have been cut out spelling the title and brilliantly bright lights have been inserted. Understandably, Cotter looks for the text's referent. What is built for crime? "[It] might describe architecture, or capitalism, or the big, expensive sculpture itself. It’s hard to say." All of the choices seem to offer interesting interpretations.

For Cotter, these are fundamentally socialist questions:

Few people — certainly few in the art industry — are interested in being pestered by such drearily old-hat Marxist questions. Ms. Bonvicini probably knows this, but she gets some fun out of asking them anyway. Her strong suit is being obstructive and annoying.

There's something else at play here, though. I (and I think most people) have tremendous difficulty viewing her architectural installations and especially Built for Crime (a sculpture that in both scale and subject approaches architecture) as "obstructive and annoying." They're fun, even alluring. In that respect she seems quite distant from the polemical Barbara Kruger, to whom she is most often compared, and closer to someone like Jenny Holzer, replete with ambiguity and not a little pleasure.

Kruger, Holzer, and Bonvicini are all clever sloganeers; they're also deeply dissimilar. For, while Holzer and Bonvicini traffic in uncertainty, Kruger tends to write with biting clarity, focusing on the political. Setting Bonvicini beside Kruger, it is difficult to fully endorse the former. Even if Kruger's work has become less subtle, her commitment seems commendable at a time of such national crisis, and her early works remain terrifyingly vital [see left]. In contrast, Built for Crime comes across as a cheap thrill, an irresponsible display of escapism. Indeed, all art begins to look that way. That may be Bonvicini's point.

Quick Art 1

Raymond Pettibon
The Priest
1988
8 1/2 x 11 inches
Ink on paper

Setting aside his early political cartoons for the UCLA school newspaper (he majored in economics), Raymond Pettibon's first major break came from doing concert posters and album covers for his older brother Greg Ginn's band, Black Flag. The Priest comes right from the moment when Pettibon was beginning to make major roads into the high art world with a series of major gallery showings. Within two years his work would provide the cover for Sonic Youth's Goo album, solidifying his ascent.

For his artistic practice, the period was also deeply transformational. While early drawings tend to contain a punch line (however perverse), later drawings become filled with more text and, consequently, ambiguity. Pronouns become linguistic shifters (see Roman Jakobson) in these works, they are (to use Saussure) signifiers with multiple possible signifieds. Here Pettibon accomplishes the a similar feat with only two words: "the priest", and the viewer again becomes responsible for crafting their own interpretation. This is one version.

The scene is a memento mori of the type that flourished in still life in the seventeenth century and remained a common genre of painting into the twentieth century for Cezanne [pictured at left] and Picasso. However, unlike nearly every other example in the field, it sits alone; there are no remnants of worldly life and thus closely mirrors Warhol's skull paintings from the 1970s [pictured below]. This is almost certainly deliberate, as Pettibon repeatedly adopts the motifs of many of the great Pop stars in his own drawings.

The concept of a memento mori comes from the very beginning of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities ... all is vanity." Every living person will die, he reminds the reader, and worldly pursuits will be rendered meaningless. It's tempting to suggest that the text sits as a label for the skull: this was a priest who also died. This is impossible to disprove. It is also possible that the words may refer to the preacher Ecclesiastes himself, bringing him into the drawing for commentary. His words only a few lines down in the Bible fittingly describe Pettibon's process: "there is no new thing under the sun."

There is nothing left to do but recycle old images, paint the same paintings, it first seems to suggest. That's not a particularly optimistic message. (Of course, Warhol's is perhaps even less so, capturing a skull divorced from any human trace: death is the only reality.) The trick, though, is that Pettibon has actually created something new. Grafting together text and a drawing, he disassembles the history of the memento mori painting, arguing that death may not be entirely final: Ecclesiastes was wrong. Art can cheat it.

The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms

The Feelies
Crazy Rhythms
1980

The first thirty seconds of Crazy Rhythms is silence. When The Feelies decide to start playing they come in quietly before slowly building volume over the next four minutes. It's restraint unlike almost any other sound being made in 1980, and they have it throughout the entire record, designing a basic blueprint for the twee movement. It should sound old after twenty-seven years - and its sampling by Calvin Johnson, Luna, and, even Weezer, who copied their cover - but somehow it still manages to be vital.

Alternately spastic and whispered, all while being brilliantly catchy, Crazy Rhythms is almost the perfect record store album: it's simultaneously mysterious and endearing. (I heard it for the first time at Cake Shop.) Unlike a lot of those type of records, however, it holds up even better when you take it home, and there are too many great moments here to delve into any sort of overview, so I"ll just give one.

"Moscow Nights" also opens with silence. Then the twitchy guitar part finally arrives, building up tension through which singer Glenn Mercer tries to break. "All you really wanted / was to be alone for a little while / How was I to know that?" he asks. Still, as in almost every song, he's conflicted: "It seemed like an eternity." Does he win the girl? Does he even want to? No one's quite sure, least of all the listener. The imprecision allows you to squint. You can hear what you want to hear. Like all of the best pop music, it sounds best that way.

Quick Notes 1

City Ordinance Fight Over Kiefer Sculpture [NYT] (from Art Law Blog)
Andrew and Christine Hall, two major art collectors from Fairfield, Connecticut, bought Anselm Kiefer's Narrow Are the Vessels and put it on their lawn. It turns out that it's so big that it qualifies as a 'structure' under Fairfield town ordinances, and they have to apply for a permit to certify its 'appropriateness'. Needless to say, there's a law suit in court. What the article doesn't explain is whether it's a matter of making sure the work is aesthetically appropriate or merely structurally so. (Kind of an important distinction, especially since it's blocked from the street by shrubs.) As is the case in many of these stories, the real problem may be class issues. Says the town attorney, Richard Saxl: "We’re dealing with people who are not used to being told 'no.'" That's a great comment to make to a journalist at the Times, Dick.

When Did Klimt Become the Thing? [ArtNews]
Says Robert Rosenblum, “I myself love Klimt up to a point, but it’s like going to a Viennese bakery.” That's about as weak an endorsement as any endorsement as I have ever heard. I like Klimt a lot - more than Rosenblum, at a minimum - but I'm hard-pressed to disagree with the argument that his prices are enormously inflated at the moment. The ArtNews piece provides a pretty helpful overview of how prices rose so dramatically over the last decade. It should be no surprise that it was spurred, in large part, by the collecting habits of a handful of people. With most of his major works now snatched up, prices will have to fall, but it's not hard to imagine that prices for more minor works have been increases for as least the near to medium term. But still, why Klimt? Rosenblum and others want to chock it up to the work's nostalgia value. Isn't that true of all art, though? Turn of the century Vienna is great, but so are lots of other eras. An additional possibility: the resolution of the ownership of a few major Klimt's dating back to World War II has helped facilitate a temporary market burst. And now most of them are sold - into arrangements that appear to be relatively permanent. Vienna Expressionism is the new French Impressionism.

1970s Police Manual to LA Gangs and Graffiti (from abLA)
Imagine how impossibly cool this could be. Click the link. Be amazed as all of your expectations are surpassed.

Matthew Marks

From New York (May 9, 2005) on Matthew Marks:

"Toward the end of his senior year, he told a member of the art department that he planned to become an art dealer. The instructor, he says, looked him in the eye and told him not to get his hopes up: “He said, ‘They’ll eat you alive.’”

Now, of course, he gets to do things like drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on making Darren Almond's world's largest digital clock. Straight balling. The rest of the article is worth reading, though it makes Marks look ridiculous at points.