19 June - A Bentonville Bilbao?

Is Bentonville the new Bilbao? On 11-11-11, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will open its doors in the unlikely city of Bentonville, Arkansas. The museum will be 201,000 square feet, over twice the size of the Whitney Museum of American Art and will chronicle the entire story of American art from the Colonial era of the late 1600s to contemporary works including Chuck Close, Kara Walker, Mark di Suvero, Walton Ford, James Turrell, and Roxy Paine. This project is the brainchild of Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune.

In addition to Ms. Walton’s lavish spending to build the collection (over 400 works will be displayed upon the opening of the museum) and initiate the project, her family has pledged to give $800 million to the new art museum, the largest cash donation ever made to a U.S. art museum. Kelly Crow of the Wall Street Journal explains that “the gift from the Walton Family Foundation trumps the $660 million in oil stocks that J. Paul Getty bequeathed to his namesake Los Angeles museum more than three decades ago.” According to Don Bacigalupi, the museum's executive director, "$325 million from the family's gift this week was earmarked to buy additional artworks. Another $350 million will go to cover the museum's operating expenses (around $16 million a year), and the rest, around $125 million, will be set aside for future upkeep of the complex."

The museum's “encyclopedic sweep (is) reminiscent of the ambitions of the robber-baron museum builders in the Gilded Age, but rarely attempted by new museums today. Billionaire Eli Broad, for example, has pledged nearly $340 million to build and endow a new museum for his collection in Los Angeles, but his vast holdings only cover the past few decades of U.S. and international art.” (Crow)

This is a massive undertaking in any city, but this is located in Bentonville, Arkansas. Why? Because Ms. Walton seeks to bring high art to this middle-American town of 35,000, best known as the headquarters of Wal-Mart. The Crystal Bridges website describes their mission, in addition to expanding access to art, cultural and learning resources, "will also spur the continued economic development of Northwest Arkansas.”

This brings to mind the Guggenheim Bilbao, now the landmark of the city. Built by starchitect Frank Gehry, Bilbao was transformed virtually overnight from a backwater to be avoided to a must see destination. As the city’s website describes “Bilbao was changed forever. Then came the obvious knock on effects of hotels opening, the airport expanding, upgrading of all facilities, extra employment etc etc. Today the advances continue as Bilbao continues to strive to make itself a tourist friendly destination.”

Ms. Walton described that “for years I’ve been thinking about what we could do as a family that could really make a difference in this part of the world. I thought this is something we desperately need, and what a difference it would have made were it here when I was growing up.” Carol Vogel of the New York Times reported that the museum is “planning for about 250,000 visitors in their first year and expect an annual operating budget of $16 million to $20 million. In addition to the 120 full-time jobs the institution is creating, they said, it will pump millions of tourist dollars into northwest Arkansas.”

An interesting story to follow – certainly a worthwhile collection to visit. Let's hope the Field of Dreams concept works for Bentonville as it did Bilbao, "if you build it, they will come."

images: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Bilbao

3 Dec - Jerry Saltz on Witch-Hunting

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Dear Jerry, we officially extend an invitation to Wojnarowicz to show his video in Santa Fe...

By Jerry Saltz

posted on facebook

"THE LYING CYNICAL RIGHT-WING REPUBLICANS ARE WITCH-HUNTING AGAIN. This time cry-baby House Speaker, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and mindless Republican Eric Cantor have demanded that the Smithsonian close or cancel a show because it contains 11 seconds (!) of "offensive" videotape by David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly. The Smithsonian removed the tape! The reporter who started this also wants Creationism presented in the museum! The Catholic League stirs the bad-brew saying the work "insults and inflicts injury and assaults the sensibilities of Christians." Washington Post critic Blake Gopnick rightly reminds us, "If every piece of art that offended some person or group was removed from a museum, our museums would be empty."

Not surprisingly given these swarm of liars this isn't about Wojnarowicz' image of ants crawling on a crucifix for 11 seconds. It is about gay-baiting/gay-bashing - stoking the bigotry that fires the base of the Tea Party/Republicans. The Wojnarowicz was part of a show at the National Portrait Gallery titled "Hide/Seek" about "gay love."

Repulsive, deficient parasites searching for a host body (Art) to inhabit, secretly in love with hate, relentless, breeding sickness and nullity; zombies pathologically entranced by order, anesthetized to life and the damage they do; sadistic, jubilant, manipulative; marooned eternally inside themselves - we cry havoc. Whitney Museum; New Museum; Guggenheim; MoMA; Please screen the Wojnarowicz video. Anywhere. In a dark staircase. That alone will be enough"

28 September - Untitled the Movie

LAUNCHPROJECTS - Ben and I just watched Untitled (the movie) again. The film is a brutal satire of the contemporary art world and the first time I watched it, as the former curator of the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) and as a current curator of LAUNCHPROJECTS, it hit me to the core of my contemporary art conundrums. It was almost too painful to watch, and I seriously contemplated hating this film. To add to my pain, previous to watching it I had accepted the dubious honor of introducing it for audiences at the CCA. I nearly called CCA's Film Director to back out of the deal. But then I thought about it. And this is the introduction that I gave (omitting the welcoming preamble).

This movie is too true, to painful to ignore. The protagonist of this film creates brooding new music that brings to mind “art bands” such as internationally celebrated artist Mike Kelley’s band “Destroy All Monsters,” and John Cage’s 1952 composition 4 minutes 33 seconds of which three minutes are performed without a single note being played. Installations in Untitled’s fictitious gallery include Maurizio Cattelan style taxidermy sculptures (pictured above, right) and contemporary ready-mades a la Marcel Duchamp such as post-it notes, blank walls, and push pins. A light bulb installation immediately calls to mind Martin Creed, the artist who won London’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2001 for an installation of an empty gallery with a pair of flashing lights.

These are all real art objects, real art starts. The pressing question became HOW do these artist become famous, important, and valued? Matthew Barney covers the walls of the Guggenheim in vasoline and scales the museum, Tracey Emin presents her slept-in (and horrifically dirty) bed, Felix Gonzalez Torres places a pile of candy and a string of lightbulbs in an exhibition space, Marcel Duchamp obtains a urinal, signs and titles it Fountain. All of the above are celebrated as paradigm-shifting moments in art. How did this happen?

It is admittedly hard to accept challenging art. I remember a few years back, standing in front of a Richard Tuttle installation at the Museum of Modern Art asking myself, HONESTLY, as a curator, if Tuttle had submitted a proposal to me as an unknown artist, would I have given him a show?

The contemporary art curator often translates into exhibitions objects that have yet to be defined, much less understood. As Betty Parsons, the first dealer to promote abstract expressionism, described “You can’t put something that’s just been done into history; you’ve got to talk about its creative impact for the moment. A new work by a new artist is not history. It is the present”.

In this movie we see Madeline, the sexy adventuresome art dealer, convincing collectors to purchase seemingly farcical and ridiculous objects of art. While laughing at the absurdity, however, my mind strayed to Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings—drawings he never himself executed. The collector buys instructions, sometimes detailed, sometimes not, and the drawings are carried out by other artists or art students. Talk about a tough sale, but LeWitt is one of the most prestigious and sought-after artists in the world.

The fact is, as an art collector, museum curator, or dealer, it is tough to distinguish innovators from charlatans. Innovators challenge what we believe art to be in such a way they can easily look like pretenders. Charlatans with the right backing and publicity can make it to fast notoriety—smashing and popular success.

Marcia Tucker (pictured above) was the first female curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art and was fired for her innovative approach to the arts and for her solo exhibition of Richard Tuttle. Audiences complained bitterly that it was not art. Tucker went on to found the New Museum, one of the most important contemporary art museums in the world. She forged a career of challenging audiences, and receiving excruciatingly bad press all the while.

Tucker once made an observation that I will leave with you as we turn to the film. “If cutting edge works of art were truly devoid of significance, why should the world of artists, critics, writers, argue, swear, and fight over them? The question answers itself; the trouble is the works do possess significance. They are significant of the spirit of change that within and about us, the spirit of unrest, the spirit of striving". This film, I would argue, is a silly yet shrewd continuum of that debate.

21 June - en route to New York

LAUNCHPROJECTS - en route to New York, I was calmly reading the Leo and His Circle, the recently released English translation of Leo Castelli's biography. About twenty minutes into the flight, our pilot announces that we are doing an emergency landing in Charlotte, North Carolina due to engine failure. After twenty minutes of sheer terror we touched down in Charlotte surrounded by fire trucks and emergency vehicles.

We arrived in New York at midnight and checked into the Surrey Hotel, our new favorite in New York. Greeted at check-in by large-scale Jenny Holzer photographs, Chuck Close tapestries, and an entire hotel filled with art from the Whitney Museum across the street; it was a great ending to an extraordinarily stressful travel day.