Reading list, 13 July 2019

Art historian Douglas Crimp has died, aged 74

Speaking of which - an opinion piece in the NYT by Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, The Dominance of the White Male Critic

That article tackles critical responses to the Whitney Biennial: see also Xaviera Simmons' Whiteness must undo itself to make way for the truly radical turn in contemporary culture

Ongoing in sponsorship discussions: British Museum director endorses controversial sponsor BP as part of future vision (British institutions are receiving significant pressure on sponsorship from BP; the BM has announced they will continue to take funding and BP will sponsor a 2020 exhibition but it will not be the planned exhibition about the Arctic).

The German Museums Association has released a reworked version of its Guidelines on Dealing with Collections from Colonial Contexts, and called for greater cultural awareness when dealing with colonial restitution.

Reading list, 6 July 2019

SFMOMA announces its first acquisitions made using funds raised by deaccessioning and selling a Rothko

How the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art has been working to repatriate a Benin bronze head

Mark Amery and Megan Dunn are editing the new art review section of The Spinoff

Lots of words, not many dollar-figures, but still interesting in the Washington Post: Women are increasingly getting the top museum jobs. Will more of them finally get equal pay?

Bookmarked for later reading: Change Agents: Kaywin Feldman and Bryan Stevenson on Embracing Empathy and Confronting American Racism in Museums

Ditto: Laura Raicovich's Rethinking the “Bigger Is Better” Museum Model

And for listening: my colleague Dr Amber Aranui on her mahi as a repatriation researcher and self-care in this role

Musing

When I talk on the radio about an exhibition or an art work, I'm mindful that I pick things that I can enthuse about. Partly because that's what I see as my role on National Radio - I'm not going to waste an opportunity to get listeners positively engaged with contemporary art and the art world by behaving like a hatchet-tongued stereotype. But also because I'm aware that going on air and ripping shreds off something that people can't see will simply create a very unenjoyable ten minutes of radio.

So there have plenty of shows in the past year that I've gone to, that I've thought were lame, dull, overcooked, or uninteresting. I've avoided talking about all of them. There have been shows I've gone to that I've found somewhat flawed in a thought-provoking way (the anniversary show at the Dowse, the current show at the Adam Art Gallery) that I have tried to delve into. It's a challenge, trying to explain why you're puzzled or not satisfied by something. When you say a book is not well-written, people know what you are generally aiming at. When you try to explain why you're calling an exhibition badly curated (that is, when you're saying something other that 'the art isn't very good', although god knows there's been a few examples in recent months where that simply is the case), it's far harder to find some common ground to start from.

So I was interested to see Robert Pinsky's three rules of reviewing in Salon this week:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.
2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

I wonder if this can be successfully adapted to exhibitions?

1. The review must tell what the exhibition is about
2. The review must tell what the exhibition's organiser says about the thing the exhibition is about
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the exhibition's organiser says about the thing the exhibition is about

The complicating factor is, of course, that with an exhibition, there's often another layer. What the curator is saying might be very different from what the artist is saying. Sometimes the tension between these two things is interesting - sometimes it's effortful, sometimes it's just daft. Maybe this is point four, and maybe this is where I need to put more thought in.

Reading about writing about reading

Book reviews are one of my favourite kinds of reading matter. I read reviews for books I've read, books I plan to read, books I'll probably never read.

I spent a lovely afternoon on a couch during my holiday on a rainy Hamilton day, browsing reviews from a stack of London Review of Books. I love the LRB, TLS and New Yorker for reviews that don't simply recap the plot and tell you whether the reviewer liked the book. Instead, they use the book/s as a starting place for the reviewer's own piece of work - an essay that stands alone, regardless of whether you ever read the book in question.

The Guardian and the New York Times book sections are two of the places I visit most frequently online. The Times in particular provided me with hours of enjoyment over the break. And the review I enjoyed the most was Dwight Garner's piece on Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud, her account of building a home on a parcel of land in Wyoming.

At first, I wasn't sold on Garner's angel and devil approach:

There are two ways to describe Annie Proulx’s memoir, “Bird Cloud” ...

The angel on my right shoulder suggests something like this: “Bird Cloud” is a mildly animated and knotty book about displacement and loss, about a late-life longing to carve out a place that’s truly one’s own. Ms. Proulx, who is in her mid-70s, finds that longing frustrated at almost every turn. Admirers of her fiction will find much of this memoir to be not uninteresting.

The devil on my left shoulder whispers this: “Bird Cloud” is an especially off-putting book about a wealthy and imperious writer who annoys the local residents (she runs off their cows), overwrites about nature and believes people will sympathize with her about the bummers involved in getting her Japanese soaking tub, tatami-mat exercise area, Mexican talavera sink and Brazilian floor tiles installed just so.

But as I read on, I realised this was quite a special piece. It's easy to ridicule a book you hate or find risible, or gush about a book that impresses you. It's harder to steer a middle course that isn't a middle course - to describe what you admire and what fails to impress you, and why, and then take a stance. Which is what Garner does here.

It turns out I'm not the only person to be impressed. Both Ian Crouch on the New Yorker's book blog and Timothy Noah on Slate wrote their own pieces about Garner's review, both noting how Garner turned the review into an opportunity to show the reader the reviewer's job.

And what is the reviewer's job? Well, that's a vexed question, which the Times' Why Criticism Matters' recruited six critics to answer.

My favourite response came from book critic Sam Anderson:

The membrane between criticism and art has always been permeable. That’s one of the exciting things that books do: they talk to other books.

The critic’s job is to help amplify that conversation. We make the whispered parts of it audible; we translate the coded parts into everyday language. But critics also participate actively in that conversation. We put authors who might never have spoken in touch with each other, thereby redefining both. We add our own idiosyncratic life experiences and opinions and modes of expression — and in doing so, fundamentally change the texts themselves. Balzac’s “Sarrasine” is a new book, or set of books, now that Barthes has written “S/Z.”  “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is radically redefined by Hugh Kenner’s “Dublin’s Joyce.” Updike’s career is a different thing in the wake of Nicholson Baker’s “U and I.” Catullus is a different poet after Anne Carson’s “Nox.” In the grand game of intertextuality — which is, after all, the dominant and defining game of the Internet era — critics are not just referees: they’re equal players.

Reading list

My Christmas reading list is rapidly stacking up - I might post it here next week.

On it already are two books by the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. He has followed up his phenomenally popular The Rest is Noise (a history of 20th century music) with Listen to This, a collection of revised essays from the past 10 years, spanning Mozart to Radiohead.

Despite knowing nothing bout music (or potentially because of knowing nothing about music) I love Ross's reviews. It's a sign of masterful writing when you can take the reader along with you, regardless of their level of knowledge. I make a point of seeking out his irregular pieces in the Guardian, which recently included this article, asking why 'we' embrace avant-garde architecture and art, but not music. Ross suggests:

The music profession [in the 20th century] became focused on the manic polishing of a display of masterpieces. By the time Schoenberg, Stravinsky and company introduced a new vocabulary of chords and rhythms, the game was fixed against them. Even composers who bent over backwards to accommodate a taste for Romantic tonality encountered scepticism; they could not overcome, except by drastic measures, the disadvantage of being alive.

Museums and galleries took a markedly different approach. In America, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other leading institutions propagandised for modern art. Wealthy patrons embraced some of the most radical new work; dealers whipped up publicity; critics romanticised Pollock and company as go-it-alone heroes. The idea took hold that museums could be sites of intellectual adventure. On a recent trip to MoMA, I was struck by a poster at the entrance: "Belong to something brilliant, electrifying, radical, curious, sharp, moving . . . unruly, visionary, dramatic, current, provocative, bold . . ."

It feels a little ironic that a music critic is using the art world as a model of tolerance and curiosity, when here in New Zealand I still regularly hear accusations of charlatanism being hurled against McCahon, and the disgraceful debacle over et al's selection for the 2005 Venice Biennale is (in my opinion, anyway) the biggest art-hits-the-headlines story of the century thus far.

Avoiding the obvious

One of the few reasons I regret not living in Auckland is that Michael Parekowhai doesn't have a Wellington dealer. So a recent trip north has timed to coincide with Parekowhai's new show at Michael Lett Gallery, The Moment of Cubism.

Michael Parekowhai, The Moment of Cubism - installation view, 2009, Michael Lett Gallery

Parekowhai has, since the outset, made incredibly interpretable work.

Michael Parekowhai, Kiss the baby good-bye (The Maquette), c. 1994, Christchurch Art Gallery

As with Shane Cotton, writers and art historians have delighted in unpacking and unravelling all the signifiers in the works, in a kind of cryptic crossword fashion. This has certainly held true with John Hurrell's review of 'The Moment of Cubism' (and subsequent reader comments).

What I admire about Parekowhai - and what keeps me intrigued - is the distance he places between himself and the interpretation of his work. Sometimes it almost seems he's taunting the interpretors with traps baited with art historical quotations and cultural references - although this implies more time and effort being devoted to the cause than I imagine really is.

The themes that to my mind reoccur across Parekowhai's works are:

• immaculate construction
• puzzling yet awesome titles
• experiments with scale
• realism (often subverted)
• art-historical/cultural references (I'm as fallible as everyone else, you know)

When you look at the body of work in this way, objects as disparate as taxidermied sparrows and up-sized Wedgewood bookends hook together in a way that makes you hunger for a survey show.

Thinking about The Moment of Cubism, the first of Parekowhai's works that came to mind was My Sister, My Self (coincidentally, part of the last show Parekowhai had at Michael Lett's, in June 2007 - it's been a while between drinks).

Michael Parekowhai, My Sister, My Self, 2006, Christchurch Art Gallery

The Moment of Cubism shares the blow-it-up-big approach to domestic tchotchkes. But the next set of work I thought of was The Consolation of Philosophy, the photographic series from 2001.

Michael Parekowhai, Boulogne, 2001, Michael Lett Gallery

Part of this is purely aesthetic, of course; the creamy tints of the elephants and the deer sculptures in The Moment of Cubism calling to mind the Crown Lynn vases in The Consolation of Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy is relatively easy to 'read' (flower arrangements named after major engagements in which the Maori Battalion fought in WWII) - but only once you've been given that information. Like the pieces in The Moment of Cubism, the photographs hold themselves aloof.

The Moment of Cubism comprises two new pieces of work - the cast bronze lemon trees and palette and Te Ao Hurihuri, the elephant sculptures - and a piece shown earlier this year at Roslyn Oxley's, Seldom is Herd (punniest MP title yet?). In Sydney, Seldom is Herd was accompanied by The Brothers Grimm - ten little 'Indian' boys.

Michael Parekowhai, Seldom is Herd (installation view), 2009, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Ten little Indians refers back to a counting song for small kids, and it suddenly occurred to me as I was looking through these images that this is a connection back to the Atarangi works, based on Cuisenaire rods, used to teach children about relationships between numbers and more recently employed as a tool for teaching te reo.

Michael Parekowhai, Atarangi II, 2005, Te Tuhi

According to the Roslyn Oxley press release, the little Indians are modelled on Parekowhai's sons. If I recall correctly, these kids have played Indians before - in Steve Carr's 2004 film, Cowboys and Indians. [Or do I have this completely wrong?]

Anyway. Michael Parekowhai is a smart smart guy, and he likes to fool around with us viewers. Relax and enjoy it. If this show doesn't put him into the next Walters Prize, I'll be a donkey's uncle. Go see it (on til 23 January 2010)

Imitation would be welcome

While I wouldn't go as far as to stack him up against the Sistine Chapel (having not seen either) I'm as big a fan of Sol LeWitt as the next art person.*

While I've seen (and enjoyed, and blogged) art galleries who record the creation and erasure of LeWitt's wall drawings, I think Christopher Knight is the first critic to capture the experience he's having on video, so he can share it with his readers. Artists and galleries are going multi-media; why shouldn't critics?


*who doesn't think that "Sol Lewitt was not an artist, and none of his so-called drawings qualify as art---not by any objective definition of the concept..."

Four interesting things I have read today

Jen Graves: 'In Art News' Jen Graves of The Stranger (Seattle) takes apart an article bemoaning the departure of the Seattle Times' art critic Sheila Farr. The original article, by Emily White, is one of the now-becoming-familiar condemnations of the lack of respect amongst newspapers for experienced art reviewers. Graves argues:

To proclaim a national day of mourning for the loss of a notably disengaged critic at a deeply disengaged newspaper—the Times checked out of the cultural conversation of Seattle and the nation long ago, if it was ever part of it in this young city (when is the last time you saw a Times culture writer in the midst of a national dialogue?)—is to miss a far more important problem than whether this city has three full-time critics or two.

Penguin Blog: Fav '08 cover designs Members of the Penguin Art Department discuss their favourite book cover designs of the past year in this beautifully illustrated blog post.




The Book Cover Archive Not just a beautiful site to explore, but obviously a well-kept and well-mannered one; a list of proposed and achieved enhancements is listed at the bottom of all the pages, along with links to similar sites.

Nina Simon's message to museums re:Twitter I've been meaning to talk about this here, but have decided to work blog it instead. Many people say that there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter - heck out the lengthy comments thread for some opposing views. My free piece of advice for museums and galleries: if you're (still) thinking about starting a blog, you should now also be thinking about how that blog interlinks with (or could be replaced by) Twitter.

And one thing I've only scanned, because it's (a) depressing and (b) seemingly the same article that I've being reading everywhere for the last two months - where's a nice big diamond skull meme when you need it?

Rothko from two sides

Two markedly different takes on the installation of the just-opened Rothko show (blogged earlier here) at Tate Modern.

From Adrian Searle in the Guardian

The dim lighting and contained feeling of the Rothko Room at the Tate has always given it, for some spectators, an air of immanence and mystery. I prefer paintings in plain sight, without the heavy breathing, never mind the intimations of tragedy in the shape of Rothko's suicide at the age of 66. His death tends to obscure his achievements even more than the peculiarly low light levels he preferred for the work's display.

From Mark Hudson in the Telegraph

These pictures work best when they are hung in an enclosed space of the right scale, at low light levels - just as they have been shown at Tate Modern since 2006. In general, the lighting of Rothko's paintings is especially important because over time their condition has deteriorated, so that if they are over-lit you see areas of paint slick or sheen on the surface that completely destroys the illusion of immanence - rather in the way a snapshot is ruined by the reflection of the flashbulb in the subject's eyes.

Which is why I absolutely hated the installation of Tate Modern's new exhibition `Rothko's Late Series'. Tate's Seagram Murals are shown next to paintings borrowed from the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Japan and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in an enormous gallery under relatively strong light in a way that utterly destroyed for me any feeling of atmospheric cohesion or unity.

Where Searle sees benefit in being able to see the effects of time and crappy restoration attempts on Rothko's work, Hudson sees an undermining of the paintings' impact. Ditto their discussion of the curators' decision to hang one work so both its front and verso can be seen:

Searle

The show makes a careful study of Rothko's technique, his materials and paint application. One painting, owned by the Tate, is shown alongside close-up photographs of details seen under ultraviolet light, revealing the complex layerings and reworkings the artist subjected his work to. The painting is displayed on a false wall, with an aperture behind that enables us to see the back of the canvas.

Hudson

The organizers are determined to knock the sacred on the head by emphasizing the status of his paintings as objects made of wood, canvas and paint, even going to far as to display one picture in such a way that we can walk behind it to look at the stretcher, lest we get it into our silly heads that there is something magical about what Rothko did. Turn up the houselights! Away with the smoke and mirrors! After all, they're only paintings.

In New Zealand we rarely get two critics' views on the same show (at least, while it's still on) but it's even more unusual to get criticism of the way shows are hung (at more than the most basic "too crammed" / "small but perfectly formed" level). I don't know if writers don't think the general public would be interested in the decisions curators have made, or if they're generally not interested themselves.

Best liners

"I don’t care what Robert Kusmirowski intends by his painstaking reconstruction of the Una-bomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin; it’s dumb."

Peter Schjeldahl: Feeling Blue - Artists get serious, The New Yorker

Frita

Today's challenge: read Tessa DeCarlo's review in The Brooklyn Rail* of the SFMOMA/Walker Art Center Frida Kahlo exhibition, and replace every instance of 'Kahlo' with 'Angus'. I'm almost willing to wager it'll be the most insightful review of the show that you'll see.

From the review:

The knock on Kahlo is that her fame has less to do with art per se than with the “victim chic” of her biography—polio at six, a gruesome, crippling trolleycar accident at 19, marriage, divorce, and remarriage to Rivera, incessant infidelities, miscarriages, and surgeries—and the fact that, as a half-Jewish, half-mestiza, intermittently lesbian, disabled Mexican woman, she’s a veritable political-correctness punch line. It doesn’t help that she’s also wildly popular with people who are more likely to read People than ArtForum.

Indeed, many of Kahlo’s images are so familiar that encountering them in person is like a celebrity sighting: they’re smaller than you expect, yet denser with significance than anything else in the room. But unlike many celebrities, they look better in real life than on glossy paper.

Besides that, I think this is one of the best short reviews I've read in a while. Lively, informed, thoughtfully hooked into contemporary events, tackling the artist and the work, makes me want to write myself.

* By way of Tim Paul's quite splendid Museum Hours blog - thanks for the tip-off J

Review II

More on the reviewing / critic front; Jonathan Jones writes (on his new one-man Guardian blog)

What happens now in professional criticism is that you start where you like, write about the object under study in any order and at any depth you fancy, and perhaps don't even give a single material fact about it. In other words, the idea of the critic today is not more modest but more arrogant - almost messianic - in its freewheeling claim to subjective authority. No wonder people don't like us! We're just loudmouths giving our opinions, at least unless we escape this arid play of free critical expression.

Meanwhile, John Hurrell asks - when reviewing a group show, are you assessing the curator's work or the individual artist's work? To which my short answer is - both, surely?

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT'S DUE

Last night I went to my first Montana Book Awards. One of the things I regret about my directional changes in the last few years is that I don't get to work on books like I used to - and I loved working on books.

It was kind of fascinating, being dropped neck deep in another cultural community and seeing people rumble and seethe (and, occasionally, whoop and holler) over matters I didn't fully understand.

And it was really pleasing to see the finalists in the Illustrative section get due recognition. All friendships and biases aside, the competition between Aberhart, Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning and comma dot dogma [Tom Kreisler] saw three of my favourite designers pitted against each other. Wholehearted congratulations to Aaron Beehre for his multi-award winning design for Jingle Jangle Morning: he's a helluva designer.

The new influencers?

The "bloggers are replacing paid critics" meme is getting another workout in the Observer - is it curtains for critics? asks Jay Rayner, a food critic who had to ask his dining mate (and food blogger) to pull down a review of the restaurant they'd just dined in until his own, dead-tree, review appeared.

The Observer follows up with snippets of comment from print critics, (who, on average, have been reviewing for 39.5 years) musing on the rise of online reviewing.

So, inspired by Cheryl Bernstein's recent findings, this week I'm asking: Where are you reading reviews of art exhibitions these days? What source do you consider to be the best? And who's your favourite reviewer?

Take the survey here - it closes next Monday.

Round the web

Ed Winkleman on overprotective gallerists

Lisa Boyle on closing a dealer gallery

Sarah Eades with pictures of an emptied out Auckland Art Gallery

The Guardian's competition for young critics includes advice from the professionals. From Adrian Searle: "If you don't like looking, don't write about art."

UPDATE What every gallery needs - ducklings

Experimentia

UPDATED You know, I think the sports writers tried harder.

In seventh form, I bunked a history class so I could attend a crucial NPBHS First XV match (yip, I was a kinda different person then).

Come the time of the mock exams, it turned out the history class was actually pretty crucial too. I wound up writing an essay comparing Elizabethan parilamentary standoffs to the team-psych of performing a haka before a match. (Maybe that would have gone down better in post-grad than in bursary.)

Anyway, I was quite excited to see the Guardian's current experiment - sending art critics to report on sporting events (published today), and sports writers to report on art events (coming tomorrow - I'll update the link when it's available).

I guess there's little chance that the experiment could rise above novelty value. The arts writers showed little interest in or knowledge of sport, and seemed largely content to compare the sport they were watching to the art form they normally write about. Watching the crowd afforded more interest than watching the game. But that still makes me curious to see if a rugby correspondent will try to tackle an opera in a similar manner ...

Money and criticism

Adrian Searle asks in the Guardian: Has big money displaced the role of the critic?

Searle says:

At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. ...

... There is indeed something faintly ludicrous in sitting around at an art fair talking about criticism. Never has the art market been stronger. Never has money been so powerful. Never have so many artists got so rich, and never has there been such alarming stuff on sale. Never have critics felt so out of the loop.

Searle also cites Jerry Saltz:

"At no time in the last 50 years has what an art critic writes had less effect on the market than now."

My first reaction was "Huh? You think criticism is there to influence collectors?". I mean, statistically, that's not the case. These statements are a bit of a red herring though - for Searle, criticism seems to boil down to the need to "[meet] art with more than silence". Critics' writing becomes part of the meaning that accrues around an art work over time.

There was a semi-diverting thread on Artbash a wee while ago about art criticism - and a comment that there's a difference between art reviewing and art journalism. The Listener seems to have opted for the latter, with none of last year's art reviewers appearing to have made the move over with new arts editor Guy Somerset.

I might start asking more people why they write criticism - or if that's even what they think they're writing....

Noted

Has anyone else noticed that the art reviews have disappeared from the Listener? Never fear - as announced in this week's edition, proud curmudgeon Hamish Keith is about to commence a fortnightly art column for the magazine.

Also noted

Sarah Jessica Parker's production company (Pretty Matches) has teamed with the creators of Project Runway (Magical Elves) and is shopping an art world version of Project Runaway around the networks. Will SJP take Heidi's role? Who will play Tim Gunn? And what is with the names of those companies?

And just now noted

Gordon McLauchlan's motion(via Beatties' Book Blog), at the monthly meeting of the Auckland branch of Pen (the NZ Society of Authors), to lobby government to relocate some of the national cultural institutions - namely Creative NZ - to Auckland. Seconded by said Hamish Keith.

Will blogging change the artworld? (part 1)

Last week, in a time-strapped post, I pointed to parts 1 and 2 of Tyler Green's interview with Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune.

On Friday, Green posted the final part of the interview, in which he challenged Viveros-Faune over the conflict of interest involved in being an art critic for a major publication and simultaneously the director of two commercial art fairs. Extracted from V-F's reply:

I believe you can wear a lot of hats in the art world, and one needs to because, among other things, critics can't survive on the money that they make from writing. Very few critics can. And, not only that, but I'm interested in curating, and I firmly believe that there is no interest in the art world without a conflict of interest.

Green, to put it briefly, was not impressed. He was also clearly quite unhappy with the way this had all panned out:

On a personal note, this is uncomfortable for me. I've done dozens of Q&As on MAN with all sorts of art world figures, people such as Getty CEO James Wood, critic Jerry Saltz, Gugg curator Nancy Spector, ex-Walker director Kathy Halbreich and artist and New Yorker photographer Robert Polidori. I hope the history of this site indicates that I don't do ambushes and that I don't do gotcha-journalism.

So I want to explain how this all came out: On Monday, impressed with a recent Lawrence Weiner review, I asked Viveros-Faune to come on MAN and he agreed. That night, while researching and preparing for the Q&A I discovered the hiding-in-clear-sight conflicts-of-interest discussed here. When Viveros-Faune and I did our Q&A on Tuesday, my last few questions were about this topic. I expected him to say that he was in the process of separating himself from his commercial interests, or some such thing. He didn't.

Green was by no means the only person to feel this way: here he links out to a number of other bloggers who have commented on the situation. And you can read Ed Winkleman's response here (and don't forget the comments).

And now the Village Voice has announced that Viveros-Faune will no longer be writing for them.

Later this week I'm going to (very belatedly) post about Peter Plagens' roundtable with a group of American art bloggers, published in the November 2007 Art in America (I would have done this sooner, but the article's not available online, which is pretty fitting when you read the print version.) The article probes at what some of the differences and similarities between blogging and print criticism might be.

Some of the things that I think set print criticism and art blogging apart include speed, increased transparency, the ability to assemble lot of information and opinion to create context through hyperlinks, and the ability for readers to feedback. The Viveros-Faune situation, I think, could become a classic case study for the inevitable MA that will soon be written, asking how blogging is changing the artworld.

Critic on critic

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones on whether critics should have regrets

And an interview with the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, the 'dean of a bastard profession' (thanks J)

A new way of being critical?

The Metropolitan is currently showing an enormous (228 works, 14 galleries) exhibition 'The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art'.

Rather than being curated by chronology, theme or schools of painters, the show presents the Met's entire holding of Dutch painting in the order that the collection was assembled:

from the founding purchase of 1871, to the major gifts and bequests of the 1880s through the 1940s, and finally to the strategic accessions of the 1950s onward. Reflecting how the Museum's great collection of Dutch paintings is closely linked with the institution's history, the installation outlines how the collection was formed, following the taste for Dutch art in America and among New York's great collectors.

While it might not work for a casual or targeted visitor (who wants, for example, a greatest hits, or to see all the Metsu's together) I find this approach fascinating. Imagine applying it to the Christchurch Art Gallery's collection of Canterbury painting, and seeing who was being bought when, by whom, and how.

Responding to the potential difficulties of the hang, New York Times critic Holland Cotter has assembled a mighty how-to-visit guide for the exhibition:

The major complication is in the show’s shape. The paintings are arranged by the date they entered the museum’s collection, not by artist or genre or city of origin. So tracking down a particular Rembrandt portrait, or all five Vermeers, or a compare-and-contrast array of floral still lifes, requires some footwork.

You’ll customize your own tour. But if it’s any help, I’ve mapped mine out. My goals were to find something of everything and to balance the familiar with the seldom seen.

Cotter provides descriptions of 13 works. These have also been turned into a multi-media guide, with images, gallery layouts and audio of the written texts (narrated by Cotter), which is well worth checking out. The audio can also be downloaded to provide a audio-tour that you can take when you go to see the show.

This wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary if it was done by the Met. But I'm astounded that a critic has gone to such effort for his readers - it's a really different approach to the role of the critic.

Note: original story via Ed Winkleman. And I'd be interested to know if Cotter worked with the Met to produce this.

Image: Pieter Claesz (1597/98-1660), Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Oil on wood. 24.1 x 35.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image from the Met website.