Gallery Chronicle (June 2017)

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2017

Gallery Chronicle

On the 2017 Met Gala, “Frieze New York” & “TEFAF New York Spring.”

When it comes to the life of art, there may be nothing less gala than the Met Gala, or at least what this annual boondoggle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has become. The scandal of this year’s iteration should serve as a sobering wake-up call for the increasingly besotted priorities of too many American museums, including our greatest institutions.

If you have not heard of the Met Gala, do not worry. You were not invited. Since 1995, on the first Monday of every May, the Metropolitan has handed its keys over to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine and the artistic director of Condé Nast. Here her purported aim has been to raise funds for the museum’s Costume Institute—I’m sorry, make that the “Anna Wintour Costume Center.” Her lording over the gala’s invite list has become notorious and the subject of a documentary called The First Monday in May.

Of course, the potential conflicts of interest that exist between Wintour’s commercial concerns and her museum trusteeship are blatant. The specter that she has conjured up with her gala has followed priorities far beyond fundraising and certainly beyond the realm of art. Along the way these extra-artistic interests have risen up from the Institute’s basement galleries to infect not only the museum’s spaces but also its institutional tenor, and by extension the tenor of American museums at large.

Tweet of an image from the 2017 Met Gala

Like much else in the world of art, the Met Gala and the Costume Institute itself have become unrecognizable deformations from the Institute’s founding and the event’s inception in 1946. Consider that for nearly twenty years, from 1979 to 1995, the gala was helmed by the singular society doyenne Patricia Buckley. During this time the Institute mounted exhibitions such as “Fashions of the Hapsburg Era” (1979–1980), “Victorian Dress 1837–1877” (1988–1989), and “The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire” (1989–1990). The historical programming more than fit, so to speak, the seriousness of the institution that presented it.

The Wintour era has wrought, by contrast, “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” and “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” Even beyond its superficial, contemporary turn, Wintour’s Costume Institute has exposed the museum to the predations of celebrity culture. Worse still, the museum as a whole, a once-protected precinct of our cultural inheritance, has learned to revel in Hollywood’s demotic attention. “The Met is a place that you consider very very correct, very formal,” the fashion editor André Leon Talley explains in the Wintour documentary. “Anna has taken that out of the mix.”

Tweet from the 2017 Met Gala by Marc Jacobs

The 2017 Met Gala became the apotheosis of this transformation. With the pop singer Katy Perry serving as the year’s honorary hostess, the hordes of bold-faced names, amply stocked with Jenners and Kardashians, marched up the museum’s Fifth Avenue steps and made a public mockery of the institution. “The celebrities were like animals . . . acting like they were at the Playboy Mansion!” one informant explained to Radar magazine. “Some didn’t even know it was a museum. They thought it was an event space with old stuff brought in to make it look like Egypt!” Many of the attendees, clearly uncertain of their surroundings, came to loiter in the museum restrooms. Here they sprawled out across the floors, spilled drinks, smoked cigarettes, and took “selfie” shots in the mirrors, which they disseminated through social media.

Some may perceive such spectacle as a tolerable distraction—even a welcome frivolity for an overly stuffy and off-putting institution. I fear the pantomime is far more anti-civilizational. It is a takeover—a commercial-grade, mass-culture affront to an institution held in disdain. Guarded by a phalanx of bodyguards, these latter-day vandals take barbarous license amidst the greatest artifacts of history. They smoke. They fornicate. They sprawl across the floors in mockery of the art around them, merely to focus on themselves. And all the while they record their debauchery on social media for millions of fanatics to emulate their cultural annihilation.

There have been many cringe-worthy moments during the reign of Thomas Campbell, the disgraced director of the Metropolitan Museum who departs this month. Perhaps the curator once dubbed “Tapestry Tom” thought he could take a major carpet ride to new money and popular adulation. Instead he opened the floodgates and drowned his institution in ridicule and debt while forsaking his scholars and curators. There should have been only one response for any proper museum steward to this year’s Met Gala: to sweep the trash out of the galleries, and to keep Wintour’s damage deposit with the suggestion never to return. Short of that, Anna Wintour’s Met Gala should be interred alongside Tom Campbell’s ignominious career.

Frieze New York. Photo: Mark Blower / Frieze

The sixth annual art fair known as Frieze New York opened on the same week as the Met’s inanities, but seemed a world apart.1 My first thought upon entering Frieze’s elevating, light-filled tent was how the value of seeing, as opposed to seducing, has been abdicated by many museums to be taken up by commercial galleries, which in turn increasingly coalesce around these quasi-institutional art fairs.

Six years ago I was bullish over the first stateside Frieze, a remarkable art encampment on New York’s Randall’s Island at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers by the Hell Gate to Long Island Sound. The setting alone is a stunning retreat. Of course, many of us already know this island to be that which exists beneath the roadbed of the Triborough Bridge. There was a time I played after-school sports beneath its dingy overpasses, and I attended a grungy rock festival there in 1994. But one of the surprises of Frieze is how Randall’s Island has been recently transformed into a bucolic sanctuary in the heart of the city with flowering paths and woodpeckers tapping on trees. The first year I took a ferry there. More recently I walked across a footbridge from Manhattan.

Admittedly over the past few years I grew somewhat weary of Frieze’s formula of trendy, transposed eateries and art as lifestyle retreat, mixed with some showboating and the dumbing down of the art on view. Access to Frieze has become increasingly daunting, with inscrutable online directions, unreliable transportation, and the feeling during storms that the whole operation may become a runaway bouncy castle. But this year seemed different, at least once the clouds parted, and far less frivolous—a place set apart, and well engineered, for the contemplation of art in exile.

In 2012 the architecture firm SO-IL designed the Frieze tent from pre-fabricated rental components to snake along the edge of the Harlem River overlooking Manhattan for more than a quarter mile. Made of white translucent material, supplemented by minimal artificial illumination, its 225,000 square feet are awash in natural light. The visual effects can be uncanny, cooling colors and bathing both painting and sculpture in an indirect, northern-like light.

This year many of the two-hundred-plus galleries, brought together from thirty-one countries by Frieze’s London-based curatorial team, took best advantage of these light-filled surroundings not just to give us something to look at, but also something to see, with minimal labels and misdirection. Alexander Gray Associates, with a prominent booth by the southern entrance, singled out a late geometric abstraction by the painter Jack Tworkov called Triptych (Q3-75 #1) (1975), a contemplative fugue of gridded form and spontaneous brushwork. (This Chelsea gallery, it should be noted, is currently showing a survey of the artist Betty Parsons, a central figure of twentieth-century art better known for her singular dealership of the Abstract Expressionists.)

Sculpture by Carol Bove. Photo: Mark Blower / Frieze

Both David Zwirner and Sculpture Center exhibited pas-de-deux sculptures by Carol Bove of scrap metals punctuated by urethane dots. The paintings of Henry Taylor were released from the circus of the Whitney Biennial to show to best effect at Blum & Poe. The Symbolist abstractions of Gabriel Lima were new to me at the Portuguese gallery Múrias Centeno. I liked the worn paint textures of Marina Rheingantz at the Brazilian gallery Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, while the bold lines of James Nares’s abstractions at New York’s Paul Kasmin directed us to the American road. London’s October gallery testified to the modernist innovations of contemporary African art, especially Romuald Hazoumè’s Benin-style masks crafted from gasoline canisters.

There was some regrettable selfie bait, in particular Karl Holmqvist’s sign paintings at Gavin Brown’s “Enterprise” instructing fair-goers to “Hug a Hooker!” Yet these were anomalies in a fair that dedicated much of its real estate to its selection of “Spotlight” galleries exhibiting solo shows of work created exclusively in the last century, which included many of the best booths in the fair: Judith Linhares’s dreamscapes at San Francisco’s Anglim Gilbert, Paul Feeley’s color-forms at New York’s Garth Greenan, and, in particular, Alfred Leslie’s stark portraiture at New York’s Bruce Silverman.

TEFAF New York Spring at the Park Avenue Armory. Photo: TEFAF

A depression in interest for European antiquities may say as much about the state of the European past as it does of the European economy. Founded nearly thirty years ago in Holland, TEFAF Maastricht has long been a preeminent art fair featuring an advertised “7,000 years of art history,” but one particularly known for its selection of Old Masters and antiquities. Looking to expand from Maastricht while educating an American collecting public that may know little beyond the latest Jeff Koons, TEFAF came stateside last fall with a fair that transformed the Park Avenue Armory into an ethereal treasury of art history.

I wish I could stay so enthusiastic for tefaf’s spring edition, which returned to the Armory over “Frieze Week” to exhibit ninety-three galleries showing modern and contemporary art and design.2

Booth at TEFAF New York Spring. Photo: TEFAF

There were some highlights: the New York gallery Hans P. Kraus Jr., dealing in the “old masters of photography,” as always showed a remarkable selection of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century prints. Bernard Goldberg featured scenes by Thomas Hart Benton from his “American Historical Epic” of 1924 through 1927. David Zwirner smartly positioned Josef Albers next to the equal (if not superior) work of his wife, Anni Albers. London’s James Butterwick offered a selection of Russian and Ukrainian modernists, and Lisson featured the Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera, while Bergamin & Gomide focused on South American modernism.

But overall TEFAF New York Spring was a letdown, a largely directionless retread of other modern fairs underscored by an often garish arrangement of work. Once again TEFAF included jewelers and other such retailers in the mix, which gave its fair an aura of the international departures terminal “duty free.” The selection also leaned awkwardly towards postwar European painting, and I can only gather that a memo went out suggesting exhibitors display every sliced-up Lucio Fontana canvas in inventory, rendering the fair both a whodunit slasher and a vagina monologue. Perhaps there’s a future for TEFAF New York Spring. For now I will simply look forward to the opening of TEFAF’s next revelatory fall production of Old Masters.

Finding Common Ground

Joseph Hogan of the Hauenstein Center  interviews me over two days for his fascinating and ecumenical podcast, Common Ground. 

In today's episode, we hear from James Panero, executive editor of The New Criterion, about contemporary museum culture and art in the age of Trump.

This is the second installment of our two-part interview with James Panero, executive editor of the New Criterion. In this episode, we hear a bit more about the history of the journal, how it fit into the culture wars of the 80s and 90s, and what critics and editors like Victor Navasky of the Nation and Jed Perl of the New Republic have thought about it.

Gallery Chronicle (January 2017)

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2017

Gallery Chronicle

On art in the age of Trump.

America’s cultural fault lines should have become apparent even before the seismic shock of the latest presidential election. Now we might ask what role art could play in bridging that divide. Our stratification has become increasingly unstable. Regardless of one’s political views, the solution should not be greater segregation but new efforts at cultural integration.

The country’s cultural division was the subject, of course, of Charles Murray’s penetrating 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010. Here Murray observed how a “high-IQ, highly educated new upper class has formed over the last half century. It has a culture of its own that is largely disconnected from the culture of mainstream America.” To prove the point to his readership, which he assumed would largely be of this new class, Murray posed a series of questions called “How Thick is Your Bubble?” The quiz has now been widely distributed through an online version published by pbs’s NewsHour. It asks questions such as whether you have ever walked a factory floor, known low academic achievers, or regularly eat at chain restaurants—experiences that might show shared experiences with working- and middle-class Americans.The quiz should be compulsory testing for any latter-day Pauline Kael who cannot understand a political outcome so out of step with elite expectation—which was the true shock of this election.

It was Kael’s fate for her life’s work as a film critic to become overshadowed by a single political quip: that she couldn’t understand how Nixon won, because no one she knows voted for him. That aphorism, it should be noted, turns out to be somewhat off from what Kael actually said. At a 1972 talk before the Modern Language Association, Kael remarked that “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” So Kael was acknowledging her own provincialism while also, perhaps, demonstrating relief at the segregation that created it—even as she could occasionally “feel” the presence of a Nixon voter in the demotic assembly hall of the American movie house.

The takeaway of Murray’s study might be that we are all Pauline Kaels now, increasingly divided not by a wall but by the cultural fortifications that surround the city-states from flyover country. I say this as a critic, not unlike Kael, writing from inside the battlements. When I took Murray’s latest quiz, in which lower numbers indicate greater degrees of insularity, I scored a mere eight out of a hundred—a number so impenetrably low that it falls below even the average median of 12.5 for my boyhood neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which Murray reveals to be the “bubbliest zip code” in the United States. And I must say even as I have moved on and up (two zip codes north), most people I know still live in this “rather special world” of separatist identity that run deeper than presidential preference. It is a cultural deficiency I acknowledge, and one that I have tried to confront in this column by looking to the tributaries and backwaters of the artistic mainstream.

After all, such separation does not make good culture. It is certainly not a healthy culture, but rather one made of equal parts disdain and resentment. It is also not a rich culture, with the dynamics of America at full throttle. Just what could be done about these divisions is a question that should now be posed by our cultural institutions, our artists—and by government itself. What follows are a few possible answers.

In the museum world, one of the most successful recent examples of bridging our cultural divide has been the creation of the (appropriately named) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2011. Tucked deep in Ozark hill country, with a complex designed by Moshe Safdie that spans a bubbling body of water called the Crystal Spring, the museum is a literal bridge of American art in a culturally underserved area of the country. If you haven’t been there, I encourage a visit, with fifty flights a day landing in nearby Fayetteville and a boutique “museum hotel” that connects by sylvan bike paths to the institution, which should increase the comfort level of even the bluest of blue-staters.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Founded by Alice Walton, the heiress of the Wal-Mart fortune, and constructed with funds north of one billion dollars by the Walton Family Foundation, Crystal Bridges bucks all conventional wisdom on who, where, when, why, and what a major museum should be. “Swim upstream,” wrote Sam Walton, Alice’s father, in his 1992 autobiography, published the year he died. “Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.” By choosing to locate a new world-class museum far beyond our wealthy urban centers, Alice Walton has been an iconoclast in culture just as her father was in business, all while giving back to the hometown that still maintains the original “Walton’s 5&10” (which is now also the company’s museum).

Crystal Bridges’s truly counter-cultural formation has also been reflected in its maverick programming—so unlike many other inland museums that operate more like colonial outposts of coastal elitism camouflaged in pandering condescension. Two years ago I visited Crystal Bridges for a survey of contemporary art called “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now,” an exhibition I covered in these pages in October 2014. In search of artists whose “engagement, virtuosity, and appeal” have gone underappreciated, the museum’s director and curator hit the road on a 100,000-mile coast-to-coast visit of 1,000 artist studios. They logged 218 flights and 2,396 hours in rental cars, recording 1,247 hours of audio conversation and extensive video as they narrowed their selection down to the 102 artists to include in their 19,000-square-foot exhibition. “The vision on which Crystal Bridges was founded, and its mission today, is to share the story and the history of America through its outstanding works of art,” Alice Walton told me at the time. “That’s exactly what ‘State of the Art’ is about—sharing works that are being created in artist studios all across the country, in our own time.” “The mainstream is very narrow,” added Don Bacigalupi, the museum president who spearheaded the initiative with Walton. “Our exhibition is outside the mainstream structure of the art world.” Granted, such a wide net will necessarily bring in a haul of various quality, but at least this diverse selection of contemporary American art, created in just about every corner of the country, was a refreshing departure from our art fairs and biennials. It was also an indication that we all need to hit the road.

A decade ago an artist named Scott LoBaido did just that—he went on the road to paint the American flag across fifty rooftops in fifty states. He crossed back and forth over the country nearly two times. In the process, he went broke. He was attacked by wild animals. He dodged twisters. He took a container ship to Hawaii. He slept outside on a twenty-two-hour ferry ride to Alaska. He relied on strangers for food and shelter. And as curators look to the state of political art post-election, they might consider giving equal time to the conceptual and painted work of this self-styled “creative patriot.”

Scott LoBaido

A self-taught artist living just a ferry ride from the heart of the art world, LoBaido hails from that other New York City—the middle class, flag-waving, Republican-voting borough of Staten Island. I first met LoBaido in September 2004, at a show of his paintings at a gallery in lower Manhattan, off Broadway, timed to the Republican National Convention (“Gallery Chronicle,” October 2004).

A year after I met him, I got word that he was in Mississippi working in the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina. He had driven a truck of supplies down from Staten Island, offering his skills in wood and paint. It was in Mississippi that LoBaido made a connection between Katrina and the other great tragedy of his life: the terror attacks of 9/11. In Mississippi, he saw a spirit of hope, renewal, and patriotism that he believed could unite people from very different worlds. He was then inspired to paint an American flag on one of the Gulfport rooftops. He donated his truck to the relief effort, and on his twenty hour bus-ride home, the idea for “Flags Across America” was born: a visible display from the ground and from the air. He said he wanted to send an artistic message to the troops flying home from war. Back home at bar on Staten Island called The Cargo Café, where he was artist-in-residence, LoBaido loaded up a 1989 Chevrolet Suburban named Betsy, a replacement gift from a friend painted in the colors of the American flag: this was the beginning of “Flags Across America.”

LoBaido’s efforts earned him a profile as “Man of the Week” on abcNews. Yet when I told his story at a conference of the College Art Association and made the case for him as a legitimate political artist, the audience, needless to say, wanted none of it. Most recently, LoBaido has made a name for himself again: this time for painting a red-white-and-blue “T”-shaped billboard in Staten Island. This sign, and his flag murals, have been the repeated targets of vandalism and arson. LoBaido’s dissent from cultural orthodoxy is not mere novelty; it is heretical, which should say much about the diversity promises of the cultural establishment. Until this changes, much of America will never see themselves reflected in those mandarin surveys of contemporary American art such as the Whitney Biennial, despite their overtures to inclusion.

Even beyond the National Endowments, there are now dozens of presidential appointments and thousands of Federal employees dedicated to American arts and culture. The new administration could do worse than seek out the cultural analogues of those “forgotten men and women” who have become estranged from the political establishment. Moreover, the power of celebrity can bring comfort, rather than just disdain, to the culturally forsaken, such as Gary Sinise’s outreach with soldiers and veterans through his Lt. Dan Band or Dolly Parton’s efforts for childhood literacy. I have also been moved by efforts such as the Joe Bonham Project connecting illustrators with Wounded Warriors as they undergo rehabilitation, shining a light on the hidden faces of war.

Concept for Wheels of Humanity, a sculpture by Sabin Howard to be displayed
at the National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C

A final mention should go not only to our culture’s geographic outliers, but also to those who have been aesthetically pushed aside. What I mean are to those many artists, undoubtedly a majority of the country’s artists, whose creative urge has driven them beyond the pale of narrow, establishment style. You might have your pick of this category, but it would include every artist who does not fit within the Happy Meal of Contemporary Art now served up the same way across the country (Gerhard Richter burger; Kehinde Wiley fries; Jeff Koons toy). So consider the religious artists, the plein-air painters, the formalists, the classical realists, and the many, many others now on the outside looking in.

All this will be a bitter pill for the art world to swallow. “Trump lost the art vote by a wide margin,” writes Ben Davis. A critic on the Left, Davis it should be said contributed the most comprehensive coverage of artists across the political spectrum this election season, including the activism of Scott LoBaido. “The entire cultural establishment . . . threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton (or at least against Donald Trump) in the final stretch of this campaign.” Still, Davis concedes, “mainstream culture failed to be the decisive factor where it was needed. It is even likely that this anti-Trump unanimity may have helped give a false sense of his weakness.”

Davis is right when he suggests that the “dynamic of this election should raise some critical questions on the limits of cultural activism.” It is a conclusion with which the world of culture must reckon as it considers art in the age of Trump and the best application of its creative and institutional energies in a divided landscape.