Cool Drawbridge

By Thomas Hetherwickhttp://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/20e60062-abdf-11e1-a8a0-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1xJB9iKsV

Culture and Repression in Syria

Fifteen months ago, write the Financial Times' cultural critic Peter Aspden, he was invited to Syria by Asma al-Assad, wife of the president, Bashar al-Assad, to discuss a major new cultural initiative.


Events, of course, interfered, but the whole thing gave him a great line.
"Just what is it about the wives of dictators, monarchs and absolutists that make them in a neat reversal of the chilling Nazi dictum, reach for culture whenever the hear the sound of a gun?"

Doerr & Martinez -- Artists in Gotham

Delayed Dispact from the Architectural Digest Show which took place at the end of March

Shortly after Michael Doerr, the fine furniture maker in Sturgeon Bay, had decided to show his work at the Architectural Digest Home Design Show in New York, he was on the phone with Troy Hanson, the show’s director. They discussed finding someone to show their work on the walls behind his chairs and tables.  A short time later his wife, Bobbi, said Sandra Martinez had called and asked if she and Wence could show their rugs and wall-hangings with Doerr. Sandra Martinez said once she had sent images of Wence’s work to Hanson, he immediately accepted them into the show, described the rugs as “trophy work,” and said the MADE exhibition has nothing else like it.

On Saturday afternoon, three days into the four-day show, they were feeling a little tired but also exhilarated by all the positive attention from people who had paid $25 for the show ticket -- 40,000 were expected including hundreds of interior designers and architects who got in free. 

Michael Doerr with interested visitors

Doerr and Martinez were exhibiting in a section called MADE where 160 artisans and artists were showing a juried selection of limited edition and one-of-a-kind fine art objects, furniture, and lighting. Most of the show floor was large commercial displays of high end products for the home including  home furnishings,  kitchen and bath products, flooring, fabric, lighting, and outdoor products. For the fourth year the show also included Dining By Design -- an areas devoted to incredibly elaborate table settings and lighting.

Wence and Sandra Martinez adjusted well to the pace

Home Design, located on an enclosed pier on the Hudson River, was a change from the low-key, low--stress world of Door County, but both teams were enjoying themselves and finding New Yorkers pleasant to talk with. Doerr does one one or two fine furniture shows a year, although this was his first time in the Home Design Show. Sandra said that in the 18 years of operating their gallery just south of Jacksonport on Hwy. 57, this is the first time they have done any show. 



We’ve had some people come by who really know weaving,” said Sandra. And they were very impressed by the intricate patterns which she designs and Wence executes. They also appreciated the range of hand-spun wool colors and the organic dyes Wence used in much of the work. 

“You are honoring your tradition but you are furthering it and keeping it alive,” one visitor told them.

Doerr, who works in northern hardwood such as oak, maple, cherry and Kentucky coffee nut, makes chairs with a flowing design and a solid feel he attributes in part to his use of the Sam Maloof joint. 

Doerr explains the properties of his woords

After working for several years building large wooden sailing boats for the Olympus Boat company in central Wisconsin, where he worked with Master shipwright Ferdinand Nimphius, he decided to apply his woodworking skills to furniture. His chairs sell for $2,300 while benches and tables vary in price by size and complexity. The wood is treated with a hand-rubbed oil finish.

He too was pleased to find people who understood the value of his work.

This is fun -- can we go home soon?

“I like it and I’m already thinking of next year,” he said. “I’ve talked to educated people who understand this is not your mother’s chair, but one with high end design and sculptural aspects.”

By Satuday afternoon the Door County artisans had heard many expressions of interest. Several interior decoratos asked for detailed information about their work, including how long it took to produce a piece and what sizes they could work in. 

No, not the rugs -- I did the chairs you're sitting on

Doerr said nothing is certain until a check arrives, but he recalled a show he did several years ago. A man showed interest in the work and then somewhat over a year ago ordered a table that occupied Doerr for nearly nine months. 

Fake Steve Jobs on Hillary, Hollywood, Oracle, Bill Gates, and Bono

I must admit I haven't gone back to this book since Steve Jobs died, but I probably will. It does poke fun at Jobs, and it uses his persona to comment on the world around him. My comments from a few years ago:

What is it about this book, despite the hilarious egoism of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, that makes it such a fun and provocative read? 

Mostly it’s the keen insight Fake Steve Jobs, aka Forbes Senior Editor Daniel Lyons, has into the American political economy. 

See the book’s account of Hillary Clinton’s reception at Silicon Valley VC’s John Doerr’s home for a fundraiser. 

After she stuns Jobs by making fund of his John Lennon-style glasses, Jobs goes ballistic, but sensibly so. 

“You see the guys in this room? We’re guys who build things. All right, with the exception of the VCs, who are parasites. But I’m talking about the rest of us. We’re the guys who built the friggin Internet, with our bare hands…. “ 

And it makes you think of the gap between Silicon Valley firms and Wall Street and Washington. Where is wealth created? Where is it consumed – by politicians, plaintiff’s lawyers with their ludicrous lawsuits, and federal prosecutors, like those who brought the options cases against high-tech firms. 

The mixture of fact and fantasy is great – after Jobs attacks Hillary for having a fat ass, T.J. Rodgers (Cypress Semiconductor’s legendary CEO who has driven Dartmouth’s liberal board members crazy with his demands for open discussion) “stands up and starts doing a slow clap. Some others join in. Soon the whole room is clapping and shouting, Steve, Steve, Steve…” 

Robert Hughes, Art Critic, Looks Back

Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s art critic for 30 years, says he wrote this memoir to explore his life and its meaning. The results are decidedly mixed, and I ended up skimming sections—like his Catholic education. He arrived in New York in the late Sixties, after Abstract Expressionism had peaked and is interesting on Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, two prominent champions, who, he says, showed no interest or understanding in older art, or merely saw is as a precursor to the art of their time. 

In her biography of Greenberg, Alice Goldfarb Marquis suggests he and Rosenberg were like a couple of Talmudic scholars arguing at great length, and in her account they did seem to generate more heat than light, leaving me to wonder what made them so important. But getting back to Hughes, he does lead the reader through his own education and growing self-confidence as a critic, two days of looking at Pierre Bonnard’s work, intriguing comments on Paul Klee, deciding that narrative has a valuable place in art, and noting that Tiny Tim believed in himself in the way that only the very worst artists, such as Julian Schnabel and Madonna, can do. 

He does have a way with words. Now I want to re-read The Shock of the New and, after his descriptions of his time in Spain, I also want to read his book “Barcelona”. And maybe go back to Australia to see work by some of his favorite painters there. 

Bondage And Fishing Shanties -- Gripping Photography By Catherine Obie

I saw the big show of work by Catherine Opie, American Photographer at the Guggenheim, but I must say the book is just as good as the show. And you can find her work online too. 

Welcome to her own special approach to photography. And enjoy it. She doesn’t stay at home copying work by other photographers or hanging goldfish from the ceiling.

She is engaged, and she is open to comments from her friends, which I found refreshing. Early reviews of the show have focused, maybe obsessed, on her involvement with an S&M scene in California, and indeed her pictures do have impact, including a self-portrait with 46 eight-gauge needles in her arms. Oh, did I mention she is wearing a leather hood and has “pervert” across her bare chest, written in the somewhat healed results of pinpricks.  A lesbian, she writes about the way mainstream gays were pushing the fringe gays out of sight in their effort to attain respectability. 

In a later portrait she is nursing her son. 

Wear your preconceptions lightly. 

The daughter of a southern California real estate agent who wanted her to get a license, she has a great awareness of her surroundings. What I admire most about Obie is her range. Many photographers stick with one type of subject and one type of camera – 35 mm or large format, color or black and white, landscapes or street photography. 

Obie is all over the place and does it all extremely well. Portraits, large format Polaroids, panoramic color pictures of mini-malls on the edge of Korean neighborhoods, and some excellent work around the time she was a student of master plan communities in Valencia, CA, showing exteriors, construction and essays on two families. See what results from growing up in a real estate family? 

She takes the new suburbs straight on with no one of the condescension that some photographers have shown in years past. Maybe, by now, artists, writers and photographers have realized that suburbs are not dangerous alien life forms. 

She also toured the country shooting lesbian couples in images of intense normalcy; one suspects their homes and yards are little different from others in their neighborhood. 

During a fellowship at the Walker in Minneapolis she went out and photographed the ice fishing houses that northern sportsmen haul out onto frozen lakes across Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota to fish, swap stories, drink beer and get out of the house.  She also has photographed Lake Michigan at different times of the year, large format pictures where the view has to look carefully to find a horizon, and more panoramics, black and white, of the underside of Chicago bridges and elevated roadways at night. And there are California freeways devoid of vehicles and looking lovely and sculptural, and after friends said she was just shooting queers she did a series on surfers. 

Her work is a wonderful counter to the worries at the Met that there is nothing left to shoot but self-referential photographs about photography. She started with a close circle and images of herself, but she didn’t stop there. The result is an enjoyable, provocative, and highly appealing body of work. 

Puzzled Photography at The Met -- Is Anything Worth Shooting Any More?

Years ago when I was taking a course in photography and aesthetic with Gary Metz at the International Center of Photographer in New York, he used to cite Henry James on the questions a critic should ask about a work:

What was the artist trying to do? 

How well did he or she do it? 

Was it worth doing? 

So when I read Richard Woodward’s WSJ review of the show of “Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I feared the worst. 

“The theme of the show is self-consciousness, interpreted here to mean any work that comments on photography’s unnerving mutability.” 

Or, as Associate Curator Douglas Eklund, presumably, wrote in a wall label: 

“Recent years have seen much hand-wringing about the future of the medium [photography] as 150 years of analogue photography are rapidly giving way to its digital successor.” 

The exhibition in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography wasn’t nearly as bad as I had anticipated from Woodward’s writeup. 

At least, once I got past Sherrie Levine whose work consisted of copies of Walker Evans’ Depression Era photographs. 

But back to the video tape. Ok, the wall label. “Levine’s work from this series tells the story of our perpetually dashed hoped to create meaning, the inability to recapture the past and our own lost illusions.” 

Or maybe it is just another girl photographer who can’t get outside her own walls to photograph the world. Ever noticed how many self-portraits, created scenes, and pictures of tableware are done by women photographers? (See below for my comments on Catherine Opie whose very much world-engaged work is just up Fifth Avenue at the Guggenheim.) Anybody remember Jan Groover? 

Uh oh. From citing Gary Metz I might have to transition to Tom Wolfe. No doubt they would be both be offended…but concept shows like this present a great opportunity for curators with art history degrees to strut their stuff. 

It’s up to the viewer to make sense of it all, and weigh the words against the pictures to see if they make sense. 

“I read the descriptions of these pictures and I have no idea what they’re talking about, and I’m not a dumb person,” said a man walking past me in the gallery, talking to his wife. 

The widely collected Richard Prince is represented by images taken from publications – perhaps news or ads, and blown up so they are grainy and the tonal scales abnormal. They are sort of interesting. 

James Welling has a very large print of a plumbago blossom with shifts in color, looking beautiful (oops, pre-postmodernist concept) at 24x30 inches or so. (I forgot to bring a tape measure and the wall labels didn’t give dimensions. I also forgot a small level, but I could swear that a lot of the labels and some of the pictures, were crooked. In the way they were mounted on the wall, that is. Same at MOMA last week. Really, what do a couple of small plumbers’ levels cost? Can art historians learn where to put the bubble?) 

Roe Etheridge ‘s somewhat faded looking of a marina, tightly cropped to show several somewhat faded boats, “is considered a post-appropriation.” Ok, but I might consider it a picture of a marina with the print made to match the condition of the boats, kind of worn…nothing terrible pristine here in either the boats or the image, but a glimpse of the toys of life past their prime. 

Moyra Davey’s images of her home, with open photography books, Maker Mark’s bottles, images of images on her walls – all displayed in 13 photographs attached to the walls with nails holding glass in place over the images, was unpretentious and gave off a warm feel for the photographer. Among the books on display were Robert Franks’ The Americans, a book about or perhaps by Andy Warhol, flowers – if she walked into the gallery to talk I would know a bit about her, and like it. Some of the prints had masking tape on them from the last time they had been exhibited. 

If you have time, see this show, try to understand the wall labels, decide if you really want a degree in art history so you can be equally obtuse

Georgia O'Keeffe -- Creating a Myth Through Photography and Art

Georgia O’Keeffe’s persisting fame as one of America’s best known artists is due, in no small part, to her success at creating an image for herself by working with some of America’s best know photographers. Starting with her mentor—dealer and eventually husband Alfred Stieglitz—she learned about projecting an image of herself. It was knowledge that she went on to use with Life photographer John Loengard and a host of other famous photographers including Irving Penn, Ansel Adams, Arnold Newman, Karsh, Philippe Halsman, Eliot Porter and, improbably enough, Andy Warhol. 

An exhibition and accompanying catalog, “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Camera – the Art of Identity,” 

explored this topic in 2008 in a fascinating, albeit occasionally frustrating, account. Susan Danly, curator of graphics, photography and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine organized the show and wrote the catalog which is interesting even long after the show. 

Perhaps the many books about O’Keeffe and Stieglitz cover their complex relationship in so much detail that Danly felt it unnecessary to probe more deeply, but this account sleights the importance of O’Keeffe’s age, experience and success in dealing with Stieglitz. It suggests that Stieglitz took advantage of her youth and inexperience which may shortchange the power of her own personality. 

At the core of this is the unexamined issue of O’Keeffe’s posing nude for Stieglitz.  Was she a naïve young woman, or someone relaxed about posing for the famous photographer and gallery owner?  The text seems to be uncomfortable with the real world in its disinclination to grapple with issues of age, experience, sophistication, and the passage of time.  In 1917, at the time Stieglitz arranged her first solo show in New York, she was 30. Danly says she had studied art in New York during the 1910s before moving to Texas and teaching at West Texas State Normal College. It was at this time that Stieglitz began his series of pictures of her, including the nudes. 

Intriguingly, although the nudes form a key part of the story, none is included in the exhibition or the book.  O’Keefe’s friend Rebecca Strand, wife of the photographer Paul Strand, also posed nude for Stieglitz – something that Danly doesn’t mention but which suggests that nudes were less of a problem for artists and photographers then than they apparently are for curators now. (This reminds me of the scandalized tone in wall labels at the Thomas Eakins exhibition at the Met a couple of years ago when they described his practices in teaching life drawing in Philadelphia.) 

O’Keefe was 30 at the time of her first show and the beginning of her series of Stieglitz photographs, she lived in New York as an art student for at least a few years, she was a Texas teacher when she received a one-woman show at a leading gallery in New York – is there a problem? Okay, perhaps I need to go to the biographies for answers. 

Stieglitz didn’t show the nudes after 1921, but apparently the photos and his commentary on sexual suggestion in her flower paintings incited critics to Freudian commentary, often a favored recourse of the partially educated.  In any event, O’Keeffe apparently disliked the commentary and was spurred to take control of her professional image; in her campaign she enlisted her knowledge of photography to create her own myth in the high desert of New Mexico. 

Her first trip to New Mexico in 1929 was with Rebecca Strand at the invitation of the famed salon hostess, Mabel Dodge, who provided a studio for three months at her home in Taos.  Danly notes that Stieglitz’s photograph of O’Keeffe in 1929 was captioned “After Return from New Mexico” and show O’Keeffe as a commanding, perhaps condescending, presence posed against an automobile, presumably the one she bought in New Mexico. 

This “differs significantly from his earlier images of O’Keeffe posed with her work. Gone are the allusions to sensuality, either personal or aesthetic, and instead we see the artist as a saintly desert ascetic.” 

Of course, this image was 12 years later than the 1917 photos, so she had gone from 30 to 42 and Stieglitz from 53 to 62. Is a change in their relationship and the way she and he present her image so remarkable? 

The exhibition and book present a remarkable story of an artist attuned to the growing American interest in art and celebrity, stoked by magazines like Life and Vogue. 

The photographic styles are interesting – Ansel Adams, who became a close friend of O’Keeffe’s in New Mexico and New York, has the friendliest photos of her – painting in the back of her car, and glancing coyly at a cowboy.  She, in turn, drew from his architectural photographs a deeper interest in local buildings as a subject for her own work. 

Each photographer brought his own style for depicting her – from Life’s John Loengard’s journalism – so popular it has been turned into a book and was reissued in several languages in 2006, to Irving Penn’s New York studio portrait, Arnold Newman’s signature style of her in front of an easel with skull and horns and Philippe Halsman’s stark profile. Throughout the articles, portrait sessions and extended visits by photographers who shot her home, studio and brushes, she was apparently an avid collaborator in the creation of her own image. 

One benefit of this carefully managed celebrity was that through knowing her life and her face people who might normally ignore abstract art or even western landscapes were attracted to her work. Sanford Schwartz, the author of several books about art, objected to some of the stagy photographs in an essay in the New Yorker, but added:  “O’Keeffe was a figure with a national renown that cut through art circles and reached the widest public – a public that often had little or no interest in the art world. O’Keeffe’s fame was special in that it was based equally on what people knew of her work and of her life.” 

Barbara Rose, another expert in art history, said that O’Keeffe’s success in making her own myth was one of her greatest creations. “Her painting and her personal together provide a lasting drama of artistic and human interest.” 

As Danly concludes, “O’Keeffe’s astute understanding of the power of the photographic image became a critical tool in fashioning her popular identity and a key to her abiding fame.” 

Clarity in Contemporary Art – From a Canadian Economist, of all People

Confused about modern art? Intimidated by the beautiful young women sitting at the front desks of the all-white contemporary art galleries from New York to London? (See Peter Mayes’ mystery “Chasing Cezanne” for a hilarious account of the art world). 

Don Thompson, who teaches marketing and economics in Toronto, London and Boston offers reassurance based on a year of research into the art market which he has turned into a book, "The $12 million stuffed Shark," a reference to a Damien Hirst shark resold by London adman Charles Saatchi to Greenwich (CT) hedgie Steve Cohen.  This is an excellent combination of smart reporting with questions informed by a background in business and economics. Tired of trying to reach through long-winded tomes on the aesthetics of contemporary art? Here’s a welcome and information respite. 

You can’t understand, or plain can’t stand, most of what you see? He finds that experts in the field of contemporary art think 85 percent of it is crap – they just argue over which 85 percent.

Whew. I was wondering if I was alone in skipping gallery after gallery in the big art warehouses in New York’s Chelsea. After a quick glance through the doors of most, I move on without ever entering.  What’s changed in the last decade is the location – I used to do this in Soho with a pretty visually sophisticated friend. I mean, she got weekly manicures and everything. We kept wondering what was wrong.

That intimidating receptionist? Apt to be an art grad whose father is a collector and got her the job. And the gallery? Four out of five contemporary art galleries close within five years, and 10 percent of more established galleries also go out of business. Only one artist out of 200 will ever get their work into the auctions at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. Thompson says London and New York each have 40,000 artists. Of those, 25 are superstars and about 300 are making a decent living. Whew…how do art schools ever persuade student to spend a couple of years and pay tuition to do it?

That puts a lot of the art world in perspective. 

Still, the market is active. More than 100 museums have opened in the last 25 years, and each will want to acquire at least 2,000 works of art. Then again, with 40,000 artists in just two art capitals (And where is Paris in this equation? Good question. No mention of the Chinese villages which churn out copies or the growing leagues of accomplished Chinese painters – maybe in the sequel.)

Thompson shows how the art world overlaps with finance, although any reader of artinfo.com will know at least some of this.  Steve Cohen, of hedge fund fame, not only buys a lot of art, he provides auction house with insurance – a hedge – against the guarantees they offer major sellers. (see p. 137) Thompson wonders if traders like Cohen will try to time the art market – an intriguing point.

Despite some occasional attempts to regulate the market (auction houses do now have to say when a piece doesn’t sell) the auctions and dealerships pretty much run their own world as regulators fear that stiffer laws will send the business abroad. (For example, the Maastricht fair is a major event, but most of the deals are actually concluded afterwards, in countries that impose lighter tax burdens than the Netherlands.)

“The auction market, as one commentator described it, is a place where consenting adults can indulge in irrational private acts.”

Contemporary art is, or was, a fast-growing market.  In one auction, Thompson notes, a Francis Bacon painting at £5.5 million would have paid for two Monets, one Pissarro and a Cezanne auctioned the night before. Meanwhile, in an effort to beat the two top houses, Phillips de Pury has focused on contemporary art and sold more 21st century art that the other two houses combined.

Think these financiers who buy art are so smart? Thompson says that a Jeff Koons piece which brought $4 million at Sotheby’s in November 2006 could have been picked up from a dealer a few blocks away for $2.25 million.

The art market is in furious flux, with art fairs one of the weapons that dealers use against the auction houses. “In 2008 there were 2005 relatively major art fairs scheduled around the world, compared to 55 in 2001.” He has a great description of the way fairs work, with best buyers allowed in early. On opening night half the important work will sell in the first 30 minutes, and half of that in the first 15. Art Basel Miami Beach has become one of the biggest fairs in the world in just a few years, and it is sponsored by UBS. Thompson notes that 5,000 of the wealthiest people in America winter in Florida – which might account for some of its success. (See www.artinfo.com for coverage – I wrote about the photography and design satellite shows on artinfo two years ago and had a great time at the fair.) One result of the busy schedule is that artists don’t have time to be original – they have to churn out new work for their galleries and it can be repetitive.

He wonders whether auction houses will replace the dealers, since they can offer higher prices and lower commissions,

Does art make sense as an investment? No. “Eighty percent of the art bought from local dealers and local art fairs will never resell for as much as the original purchase price.” 

“In the overwhelming majors of cases, art is neither a good investment nor an efficient investment vehicle.” 

Fewer than half the modern and contemporary artists in a Christie’s or Sotheby’s auction catalogue 25 years ago are still offered at any major auction, says Thompson.

The book runs out of steam near the end. Thompson places Thomas Hoving at MOMA – he was at the Met, and he doesn’t probe the economics of museums in much depth. Still, he has interesting anecdotes. The Neue Gallerie in New York went from 800 visitors a day to 6,000 after Ron Lauder paid a reported $135 million for a Klimt painting. (Lauder was the subject of a recent Lunch with the FT.)

While I can’t claim comprehensive knowledge of art books published in the last year, I would hazard a guess that this is one of the clearer explanations of what goes on in the world of studios, galleries and museums.

Art an Anodyne For Rootlessness -- Toffler

Back in 1965, Alvin Toffler, best know for "Future Shock," wrote a book called "The Culture Consumers: Art and Affluence in America," which noted that the booming American economy was capable of satisfying most consumers' needs and had produced what he called the Comfort Class. People across the country were turning to visual arts and performance arts, as producers, consumers and sponsors. He noted that colleges and universities across the country were both bringing in top performers and putting on some of the world's most challenging plays and musical productions with student groups, sometimes including highly respected professionals from outside the area as part of the production.

Unlike some critics of American culture, or its reputed lack of culture, Toffler traveled the country, visited university campuses, talked to professional and amateur performers and to impresarios competing with local university booking offices for both talent and audiences.

He also looked at what psychologists have to say about art, its role through the ages (lightly touched upon, but a useful reminder that art has only rarely been the sole province of the professional.) In other words, his reporting isn't politically correct, New York City parochial or infused with psych babble. This is quality journalism at its best -- inquisitive, imaginative in its effort and fact-based in its delivery.

"Art, not merely because it sometimes transmits the value of a past age, but because it has been a part of human society since the beginning, is an anodyne for rootlessness."

Monet Too Tired to Paint the Thames At Night

Count Harry Kessler drops by Monet’s studio in Giverny and asks the Master if he has ever considered painting the Thames by night. “Yes, but one is too tired when one has painted all day,” Monet tells him. “And then it would be difficult without imitating Whistler.”

From Diary of an Aesthete in The New Yorker