The Unknown Korea

Moon Jar, Early 18 century. Porcelain, Height 16 1/8 inches (41 cm). National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Treasure No. 1437. 

HUMANITIES
Spring 2014

The Unknown Korea
by James Panero

Little known treasures from the Joeson dynasty come to the United States

“Sacrifice,” writes Lee Myung-Bak, the former president of South Korea and CEO of Hyundai, in his autobiography The Uncharted Path. “That's what makes our mosaic so beautiful and rich.” Over the last sixty years, such sacrifice has turned a war-torn country into an economic powerhouse and brought what is known as the “Miracle on the Han River” to the United States. We Americans drive Korean cars, eat Korean cuisine, watch K-Pop on Korean electronics, and read Korean-American literature by celebrated writers such as Chang-Rae Lee.

The confident reach of South Korean culture follows that country’s emergence from a century of terrible upheaval, in which it was caught up in the territorial ambitions of China, Japan, and Russia as well as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over a million people perished in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. And today, even as South Korea has emerged from darkness, North Korea remains captive to an aggressive tyrannical regime.

Sun, Moon, and Five Peaks, Artist/maker unknown, Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), 19th century, Eight-fold screen; colors on paper, 82 11/16 × 217 7/16 inches (210 × 552.3 cm), Private Collection 

For Hyunsoo Woo, curator of Korean art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the moment was right to look beyond her country’s recent past to the era that informed it: the 518-year reign of the Joseon Dynasty (pronounced “Choe-sun”), from 1392–1910, which gave Korea its culture of duty. What has resulted is an ambitious survey of one hundred and fifty works called “Treasures from Korea,” now on view at the Philadelphia Museum, an exhibition that will travel on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The show is a “dream come true,” Woo tells me over lunch at the museum. “Everyone thought I was crazy.”

Crazy, in part, because of the difficulty in securing work for such a show. There is relatively little Korean art in American museum collections. “The number of Korean pieces in the United States is drastically smaller than for other Asian art. There is much less of it than Chinese or Japanese,” says Woo.

Portrait of Yi Jae (1680-1746), Artist/maker unknown, Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), Late 18th century, Hanging scroll; ink and colors on silk, 38 1/2 × 22 3/16 inches (97.8 × 56.3 cm), National Museum of Korea, Seoul. 

Known as the “Hermit Kingdom,” Korea under the Joseon was late to open its doors to the West. Korea only began normalized relations after establishing a trade treaty with the United States in 1882. “Korea didn’t know about the rest of the world,” says Woo. By 1890, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston already had a curator for Japanese art, and American collections of Japanese and Chinese artifacts were extensive. Even today, according to Woo, there are only four curators for Korean art at U.S. museums, and until recently only UCLA offered a Ph.D. program in Korean art history. As a result, Americans know sadly little about Korean art.

Joseon art and artifacts are rare in Korea, too, and are seldom lent overseas. “We went through a rough modern era: the annexation by Japan and the Korean War between north and south. The whole country was completely ruined,” says Woo. The upheaval led to the “loss of many treasures and cultural properties,” and some that did survive remain locked away in North Korea. What survives in the south can also be fragile: paper, hemp, silk. Woo’s only choice for a multicity exhibition was to find different objects to borrow from Korea for each location: “We are only allowed to show one painting at any venue, for conservation reasons. So it was extremely complicated. Books and paintings will all be rotated. Screens are on paper and silk.”

Ever since the war, in which 40,000 U.S. service personnel lost their lives or went missing in action, America has had a deep bond with South Korea. So “Treasures from Korea” grew from the spirit of cultural exchange between the two countries—and became far more expansive than even Woo first envisioned. In exchange for the loans from Korean institutions, many of them protected as national treasures, the three stateside venues, plus the Terra Foundation for American Art, first lent a historic three-century survey of their holdings for an exhibition called “Art Across America,” which showed in 2013 in Korea at Seoul’s National Museum, a key organizer of the current exhibition.

Jar with Design of Bamboo and Plum Trees, 16th to 17th century. Porcelain with underglaze iron decoration, 15 3/4 x 14 15/16 inches (40 x 37.9 cm). National Museum of Korea, Seoul. National Treasure No. 166. 

Just as Koreans might be familiar with Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, but new to the Hudson River School, the art and culture of the Joseon will be an eye-opener for American audiences. The word “treasures” brings to mind rich materials, but the Joseon, the longest reigning neo-Confucian dynasty in history, enforced an austere aesthetic. “Reserve, discipline, formality, simplicity, serenity,” says Woo of the Joseon. “It was a great culture of recording.” Its respect for tradition and self-sacrifice helps explain its singular longevity. Imported from China, neo-Confucian scholarship also gave Korea’s intellectual class a way to keep its monarchs in check. 

The art of the Joseon was far more spare than what you see from earlier Korean dynasties, such as the Buddhist Silla. Pronounced “Shilla,” works from this period were recently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Highlights of the Joseon include minimalist porcelain pottery, often left white and unadorned, and the detailed scrolls used to record and dictate royal ceremonies. “Japanese and Chinese art, if you look at it, you think, amazing, gorgeous, look at the level of technology and achievement,” says Woo. “But with Korean art, you don’t really have it. It takes some time to appreciate. That’s where the challenge is. There is no immediate response to it.”

Instead, Joseon art rewards close looking, with small imperfections, a fingerprint left here and there, revealing the soul behind the austerity. “There is a huge jar. A moon jar,” Woo explains of one large example from the early eighteenth century. “And it is really a difficult technique to perfect . . . because the diameter is so wide.” The same goes for the dynasty’s detailed, illustrated self-documentation, one that in a way mirrors our own “selfie” culture. 

Military Costume (Dongdari), 19th century. Silk, length: 45 11/16 inches (116 cm). Dangook University Seok Juseon Memorial Museum, Yongin. 

“We wanted this to be a great introduction to Korean art,” Woo says of her exhibition’s thematic approach, which ranges from sections on the royal family to dioramas of simple Joseon rooms, clothing, and everyday artifacts. “So we wanted to do the exhibition that way, to come up with some themes, to come up with some story based on the viewer’s own knowledge.”

The screen paintings, Woo’s academic specialty, take little to appreciate: Often symmetrical landscapes in gorgeous geometric patterns, filled with naturalistic symbolism, they were used as royal backdrops and objects of prestige. The exhibition’s innovative digital displays do an impressive job at unpacking and explaining the messages in these paintings. “We really wanted to integrate that technology to broaden the knowledge,” says Woo. “Because we knew that Korean art and Korea in general are new.”

Śākyamuni Assembly, 1653. Hanging scroll; colors on hemp, 39 3/16 × 25 7/16 feet (12 x 7.8 m). Hwaeomsa, Gurye. National Treasure No. 301. 

The biggest surprise, now at the Philadelphia Museum, is certainly the Śākyamuni Assembly, a thirty-nine-foot-tall hanging scroll of the Buddha, painted on hemp and used for outdoor services, from 1653. The fact that this towering object even made it to Philadelphia is astonishing—it is far too large to travel to the other venues. Woo had the vision of it hanging in the museum’s Great Stair Hall, where the statue Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens is otherwise displayed. “When I first told people that I really wanted to bring that painting here, everyone thought it was impossible. And I thought my chances were extremely slim because of its size, and it is designated a national treasure of Korea. There are about eighty paintings of that type that survived in Korea at different temples, and, among those, this is the best example in terms of size, quality, condition, and date of production. This is one of the earliest.”

Yet, Woo says, “along the way, people became convinced it was important to show because it was never introduced outside of Korea.” The transportation of the scroll by cargo plane from Korea to Philadelphia was a feat in itself, and the complex image, now in line with the axis of the museum’s grand east entrance and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, is breathtaking.

The lavish scroll hints at another side of Joseon culture. Beneath the asceticism of the dynasty’s official neo-Confucian mandates, a more fanciful Buddhist influence from earlier dynasties never went away. The same might be said of the two-part nature of Korean society today, with a fanciful pop culture that overlays a deeper, older mandate. “The spirit, the Confucian ideals,” says Woo, “you have to pay ultimate loyalty to your king and the state. Even in the current day, we see that. You put your family, your organization before you.”

In the north, we see a regime’s repressive interpretation of the old Hermit Kingdom. In the south, a Confucian work ethic drives the country’s exuberant contemporary culture. It has also brought a divided nation back from the brink. “When I was growing up, I rarely saw my father,” says Woo, “because he was working so hard, building the country.” During the war, she explains, he fled from the north at fourteen, leaving family behind. “He thought he would only be away for a few months. Now it has been sixty years.” Woo’s “Treasures from Korea” honors all those who have made the sacrifice to ensure the survival of this treasured culture.

Ten Longevity Symbols, 18th century. Ten-fold screen; colors on paper, 98 7/16 × 231 1/8 inches (250 × 587 cm). Private Collection. 

The traveling exhibition “Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty: 1392–1910,” originally on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from June 29 till September 28 and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from November 2 till January 11, 2015.

An Italian Conductor Looks to US Models

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 6, 2014

An Italian Conductor Looks to US Models
By James Panero

The conductor Gianandrea Noseda knows what it's like to have the roof cave in. As the curtain falls on Act II of "Prince Igor," the acclaimed new production of Alexander Borodin's opera at the Metropolitan Opera, the roof in Igor's court of Putivl collapses in grand fashion: Sparks fly, beams and ceiling lights come crashing to the ground. "I hope the roof of the theater will not collapse," jokes the maestro, who will lead the Met's final performance of "Prince Igor" on Saturday.

Italy's continuing financial crisis could have spelled a similar fate for the Teatro Regio Torino, the Turin opera house where Mr. Noseda has been the music director since 2007. The country's austerity measures, which hit hard over the past five years, have slashed state funding for cultural institutions. And in the birthplace of opera, where the government has traditionally provided lavish support for culture and the arts, many opera houses have had no choice but to curtail productions, limit artistic recruitment and training, and, in some cases, go dark.

From Florence and Rome on down to Naples, most of Italy's opera houses are now operating in the red. But not the Teatro Regio, where performances increased to 110 in 2012 from 85 in 2005, even with a reduction in staff. Its orchestra and chorus have also just announced an ambitious North American tour, including an appearance at Carnegie Hall on Dec. 7, featuring concert performances of Rossini's opera "William Tell."

Teatro Regio's good fortunes can be attributed in large part to Mr. Noseda, the energetic 49-year-old native of Milan who has turned his country's financial crisis into an occasion to introduce an American idea to Turin: a culture of private philanthropy that will sustain the arts even when the government cannot.

"We need to involve the Italian people to support the arts," he explained during a lunch meeting. "To take from your pocket and give money for something culturally oriented—that philanthropic element is missing in Italy. Because, since we were kids, we have been used to the state doing that. So developing a culture of philanthropy is something that will take a generation. It will take 20 years to build that culture in Italy. But we are starting."

The issue is about developing not just donors but also willing fund-raisers. When it comes to donor development, European concert-house managers have traditionally been prima donnas more than rainmakers. The same year Mr. Noseda took the podium in Turin, for example, the Belgian-born Gérard Mortier was tapped to become director of the (now defunct) New York City Opera. Just as the financial conditions of that company worsened in 2008, Mr. Mortier—rather than pursuing new sources of revenue—bolted for a post in Spain when it became clear he wouldn't have the easy resources to enact his artistic vision.

"Of course it requires a lot of my time, but you have to survive. You have to continue your activity," says Mr. Noseda, who worries about the cascade of failures he now sees at other Italian institutions: "Less money; fewer productions. Less money; fewer singers. Less money; less opera." Instead, he says, "it is my aim to convince people to come along, to be supportive, to be part of the project, to really use the energy you have to get to a common aim." As he explained in a recent interview for La Stampa, Turin's daily newspaper, if he only did what his government could pay for, his opera house would disappear. But with bold plans, focusing on the global market, he is able to attract the funding to implement his broader artistic aims.

Five years ago, 95% of Teatro Regio's funding came from the state. Today, that percentage is closer to 75%. Ideally, he says, he would like to see private philanthropy make up 35% of his funding. "What I try to do is not to lose the majority of support coming from the state, but to integrate private sponsorship," he explains.

Such a mixed-funding model is now being pursued by other innovative Italian institutions as well. In 2006, the city and province of Florence joined forces with its chamber of commerce and private donors to revive the Palazzo Strozzi as an exhibition hall. With an autonomous board built in the style of U.S. nonprofits, the Palazzo Strozzi now boasts a business model that is "exceptional for its mix of public and private funding streams" and "its high percentage of earned revenue," according to its latest annual report.

At the Teatro Regio, Mr. Noseda's donor outreach has been met with support from Eataly, Lavazza and Fiat—all Turin-based companies—as well as from individual donors. The greatest interest, he says, has come from a younger generation of Italians such as Michele Denegri, the 44-year-old new owner of Del Cambio, Turin's most historic restaurant.

Mr. Noseda has found private support for his Teatro Regio despite the fact that Italian tax law does not grant deductions, along American lines, for charitable giving. Sometimes, Italian companies with U.S. operations are able to contribute through a U.S. charitable arm, but Mr. Noseda hopes that Italy will modernize its own tax laws to allow similar deductions for in-country contributions. "We will not copy, but we take some inspiration," he says of his new funding model. "So we have to find an Italian way to use these ideas that we can collect around the world." While Matteo Renzi, Italy's new 39-year-old prime minister, has recently promised sweeping tax reform, it remains to be seen if the charitable deduction will be included.

One irony of Mr. Noseda's enthusiasm for American-style cultural philanthropy is how such support has recently come under attack here at home. "Philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious," wrote the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer in his 2009 book "The Life You Can Save." By contributing to a museum rather than to cataract operations in the developing world, Mr. Singer claims, donors are in effect blinding children. Studies by the Conference Board and by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University show that such antiart attitudes have been absorbed by many American philanthropists. Last fall, in a widely publicized interview, Bill Gates reiterated Mr. Singer's utilitarian condemnation of cultural philanthropy.

Yet the future of Italian culture has little time for armchair philosophy. At the end of the Met's production of "Igor," updated by Mr. Noseda and the director Dmitri Tcherniakov, the prince, defeated in battle, humbly begins picking through the rubble of Putivl. As the curtain closes, a seeming cast of thousands comes together in repairing the city brick by brick. "Why do I have to delay until the next generation?" Mr. Noseda asks. "This duty is on my shoulders. There are so many ways to motivate people to support an opera house, to support culture."

Gallery Chronicle (March)

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. All images by James Panero

THE NEW CRITERION
March 2013

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

A survey of the Philadelphia art scene: On “Sarah Sze” at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, “In Daylight: Small Paintings” at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, “Mia Rosenthal: A Little Bit Every Day” at Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, and “Yeesookyung: The Meaning of Time” at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

 Artists are a swarming species. There’s a reason why, a century ago in Montparnasse, the main studio building was called La Ruche, or “The Beehive.” While great art can, of course, emerge in isolation, more often it comes out of hives of activity—dense, furious places, usually frightening to outsiders, that must be surrounded by just the right kind of environment. And for several generations, it is safe to say, the largest swarm has settled in New York. Certainly, from time to time, the actual location of its hive has moved—from Tenth Street, to Spring Street, to the East Village, to Williamsburg and Bushwick. But since the 1950s, the living arts have fed off the same citywide ecosystem.

Which goes to show you how unpredictable artistic swarms can be. New York has always been a city of both nectar and insecticide. No other place may be so sweet to artists while at the same time striving to kill them off—its environment rich in resources but unsentimental towards artists’ habits and needs. Of course, particularly harsh circumstances may account for the tenacity of art in New York. The arts have thrived despite, not because of, what New York offers.

This is not to suggest the swarm is ever stable; great art is a fragile product. The buzz on the ground only tells us so much about the health of the hive, and swarms move in unpredictable ways. A few distant bees may just be out for a long day, or they may end up relocating the whole hive—La Ruche, au revoir.

In New York, the talk has always been, Where to? How much longer? What’s next? The city’s imminent artistic collapse is a perennial topic of conversation. So far, the artists have largely stayed within city lines, even as they have moved to its outer limits. But a handful of busy bees have been going even farther afield—up to the country where they nest in the eaves of barn studios, or off to municipalities with exotic names like Hoboken.

To put the city of Philadelphia in this final category may be as New York–centric as it comes. Philly was an art town before New York had a canvas to paint on. Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts remains America’s oldest art academy and museum. Its singular headquarters, designed by Frank Furness in the 1870s, continues to be a hive of activity. Its best-known student and teacher, Thomas Eakins, may be the single greatest painter in American history.

With grand boulevards cutting broad sightlines through tight city streets, Philly has had the cultural ambitions of imperial France. Philadelphia’s City Hall is a cacophony of Second Empire striving and is said to be the tallest masonry building in the world—a reason that, through gross tonnage, it has escaped the wrecking ball. The city has also long placed the arts and sciences, for better or worse, at the heart of its civic identity (and municipal meddling). The Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of the greatest encyclopedic museums to come out of the nineteenth century, now looks down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at the city’s latest (and, to some, most infamous) artistic acquisition: the relocated Barnes Foundation.

Philadelphia’s centralized cultural outreach, now called Visit Philadelphia, is today the envy of all museum towns—and a convincing one at that. So this past month, I took this column to Philadelphia (meaning I must pass over the latest New York appearances by Loren Munk at Freight + Volume, Austin Thomas at Hansel & Gretel, and Deborah Brown at Lesley Heller—not that you should.)

I never intended the “Gallery Chronicle” to be soley about New York, after all, but it goes where I go, and most months I travel no farther than a New York City subway ride. As the vibrancy of art in New York has been pushed to the margins, with an alternative scene now flourishing in the outer boroughs, Philly is sometimes talked about as the “sixth borough” for its ability to offer artist-friendly space, at artist-friendly prices, in a city that trumpets its artistic infrastructure. I’m sure Philadelphians don’t think of themselves that way, but it helps us New Yorkers to see the world as an extension of our streets rather than as unique places. There’s even a website, called extendny.com, that will lay the Manhattan grid over the entire globe and calculate every avenue and cross-street.

I should say here that my weekend survey of Philadelphia’s gallery scene was anything but scientific. With only a general sense of where to go, I found myself sounding the social-media siren the morning of my arrival. Fortunately, in what I gather is called “crowdsourcing,” the recommendations came pouring back in. The Brooklyn-based painter and curator Paul Behnke, who lived for several years in Philadelphia, was particularly insightful. I also found online resources such as theartblog.org to offer an excellent guide to the city’s contemporary highlights. Unfortunately, from the moment of my arrival, which was the first weekend in February, I came to understand that I had come at somewhat the wrong time. Philly’s gallery scene is coordinated to such an extent that almost all its shows open on the same “first Friday” of the month—and I was there on the last Saturday.

Sarah Sze at Fabric Workshop

That means I never made it to some highly touted spots, such as The Icebox Project Space in the Crane Arts building. My regrets also go out to Fjord, another space in Fishtown. I did see the Fabric Workshop, thanks to a suggestion by the fabric artist Brece Honeycutt, and I’m glad I did. The current installation by Sarah Sze, who was an artist in residence, might have little to do with fabric but seemed to employ just about every other material—newspapers, stones, ceramic particles—to build up and break off systems of significance.1

Here an entire floor is filled with boulders that are really (for the most part) hollow sculptures covered in digital mylar printouts of rocky moss-covered textures. What did it mean? I didn’t really care, because the technique alone was so intriguing and the sense of it so unnerving, with massive forms that weighed almost nothing.

Grizzly Grizzly

Another curious space I passed through was a grimy gallery building at 319A North 11th Street, which I dub “Little Bushwick,” home to such artfully named startups and cooperative spaces as Vox Populi, Marginal Utility, Grizzly Grizzly, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. I’m sorry TSA wasn’t open, since its exhibition of molded sculptures by Benjamin White looked promising. What I saw at Vox Populi left me underwhelmed, while Grizzly Grizzly’s white cave of oddities by Trevor Amery, sculptural work of mirrors and plaster (I think) “that questions our relationship to discreet art objects and challenges our role as passive art viewers,” as a press release said, left me scratching my thick bear head. I did respect the fact that the gallerist in attendance had no chair and had to sit with a laptop on the floor.

Installation view at Larry Becker

My visit to Larry Becker Contemporary Art in Philadelphia’s Old City was a knockout—in the sense that once I walked in, and got wrapped in conversation with its co-founders Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling, it was several hours before I regained my senses to move on. The gallery, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in February, reflects the city’s do-it-yourself art scene at its best. Becker and Nivling met as students at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art and decided to return after graduate studies, buying a small factory building with a ground-floor exhibition space. Here their program has focused on serious, reductive painting, the kind of labor-intensive studio practice that seems right at home in the painted, scraped back, and painted-over environment of Old City.

Detail of Steve Baris work at Pentimenti

On view through March 15, Becker has brought together nine such painters for an exhibition called “In Daylight.”2 With work by Eve Aschheim, Karen Baumeister, Anna Bogatin, Dove Bradshaw, Max Cole, Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Martha Groome, Kazimira Rachfal, Merrill Wagner—some new, many returning—the exhibition offers an excellent overview of what this gallery is about. With mostly small, meditative work, the exhibition draws extra attention to the subtleties of light on paint, showing at least one work by each artist in the front window. (Behind the desk at the nearby Pentimenti gallery, I stumbled upon an interesting painting by Steve Baris—accompanied by the artist himself—that worked with many of these same ideas.)

Portrait of Eadweard Muybridge at Gallery Joe

I found something similar at Gallery Joe, another Old City space that came recommended and which opened the doors of its current exhibition early for me. Gallery Joe’s focus is works on paper, and Mia Rosenthal, now on view, offers the kind of paper-working I find extra enjoyable.3

Part draftsmanship, part note-taking, in “A Little Bit Every Day” Rosenthal reprocesses the furtive images of online landscapes back into items of craft. She draws “portraits” of people’s laptops and smart-phone screens. She layers pictogram over pictogram of the world’s evolving, spiraling species, including tiny handwritten labels, in extremely dense drawings such as Life on Earth (2013). She also makes composite sketches of online image searches. Her Google Portrait of Eadweard Muybridge (2013) here works best, as Muybridge’s famous stop-frame photography gets repeated over and over in search results, which Rosenthal freezes in pencil and ink.

Detail of Yeesookyung sculpture at Locks

No tour of Philadelphia’s gallery scene would be complete without a visit to Locks, founded in 1968, and by far the city’s largest (only?) blue-chip international gallery. The building itself is stunning—a historic, neoclassical facade overlooking Philly’s Washington Square Park, leading onto multiple floors of spare, loft-like space. Again, my timing here could have been better. An exhibition of paintings by Nancy Graves was just coming down, while all that was left of an installation by Rob Wynne were hundreds of nails in the wall. At the same time, the current Robert Rauschenberg exhibition, focusing on a worldwide tour he made in the 1980s called the “Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange,” was still in the shipping containers.

I did, however, get a glimpse of its other current show, by the Korean artist Yeesookyung.4 There’s undoubtedly a style of international art that takes some local craft, often an expensive one, and recasts it through a contemporary pop aesthetic. Yeesookyung’s sculptures made from shards of oriental pottery, held together with gold, would seem to fit in this category. But Yee’s sculptures, crafted from imperfect, cast-off fragments of contemporary Joseon Dynasty–style porcelain and Goryeo Dynasty–style celadon, transcend this obvious framework with hauntingly ephemeral, dynamic, bubbling forms. To borrow a phrase once reserved for Duchamp’sNude Descending a Staircase (now another Philly resident), Yee’s sculptures resemble an explosion in a teacup factory.

If I were to single out one factor that seemed to be missing from most of these Philadelphia exhibitions, it would be the pressure of the market that one feels in New York. Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling, after all, call themselves gallerists, not dealers: Their focus is on showing art, not selling from a back room. The dominant style of art in Philadelphia, Nivling says, is no style. With less of an imperative to follow the trends, Philadelphia’s artists and dealers have a greater freedom to show what they like. Taken together with its great museums and peerless orchestra, the arts of Philadelphia certainly reverse those old W. C. Fields jokes that have been made at the city’s expense. From here on out, second prize is a week in Philadelphia, and first prize is two.

1 “Sarah Sze” opened at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, on December 13, 2013, and remains on view through April 6, 2014.

2 “In Daylight: Small Paintings” opened at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, on December 28, 2013 and remains on view through March 15, 2014.

3 “Mia Rosenthal: A Little Bit Every Day” opened at Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, on February 7 and remains on view through March 22, 2014.

4 “Yeesookyung: The Meaning of Time” opened at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, on February 7 and remains on view through March 15, 2014.