Clive Davis

ART AS BLOCKBUSTER

I was hoping to go to the press launch of Tate Modern's re-hang yesterday, but other things got in the way. As I'm allergic to the building - I get depressed just stepping inside - it wasn't a great loss. Raves from most of the critics, although the Indy's Tom Lubbock was a notable exception:

The scenario is new, but the showmanship is undiminished. The result is a gallery that leaves little room for contemplation (just one room, in fact). It has transformed modern art into a short-attention-span spectacle. The wow factor beats us all into submission. It is often beautifully done. In its way, it is an amazing achievement. But, sorry, an art gallery it is not.

NOTEBOOK

It is my belief that art today is largely in the business of supplying frisson, little niblets of existential uncertainty, ways of not-knowing, mysteries, small after-hours pleasures for overworked urban minds... Art galleries are where you go in search of kinky experience. Today's art gallery is a cross between a church and a disco... [Jeff] Koons and Co are actually addressing a significant late 20th century problem...How do you enfranchise the urban worker's after-hours imagination? What do you give that imagination to keep it healthy, wet-nosed and happy now that the worker no longer has access to the fruits of his own labour?

Waldemar Januszczak, quoted by Nicholas Penny, The London Review of Books, 30th March 1989.

"THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS STRETCH FAR AWAY..."

A 19th century photograph of Pompey's Pillar in Alexandria, by the Frenchman Félix Bonfils. More of his pictures here. [Via The Arabist]

Elsewhere, another Middle East blog, Tabsir, ponders a much less inspiring image of modern Egypt - a plainclothes policeman administering instant justice to a pro-reform demonstrator.

MORE: Sandmonkey links to an apparently genuine video clip shot inside a police station. [Via Big Pharaoh]

DOWNBEAT

Critic Waldemar Januszcak heads north to get a glimpse of the future of British art:

Is Nottingham the ugliest city in Britain? It would get my vote, though, to be fair, there are plenty of places I haven’t been to recently. What is certain is that with its messed-up centre and hideous Robin Hood theming, its undrivable one-way systems and casinos doubling as car parks, its lurid purple buses and phoney ye olde taverns, its supremely high gun rate and the gangs of exiled smokers puffing up and down Maid Marian Way, Nottingham must be a contender. Which makes it the perfect venue for the British Art Show.

HE LEICA

Terry Teachout admires the photographs of Carl Van Vechten, best known as the man who introduced the rest of the world to the Harlem Renaissance. An exhibition in Manhattan assembles quite a gallery of VIPs, from Laurence Olivier to Sinclair Lewis:

He was no more (and no less) than a gifted amateur with a good eye and access to a lot of very famous people. Yet there is something, maybe even quite a bit, to be said about the comparative stylistic anonymity of his approach. What you see when you look at his 1940 portrait of Charles Laughton is the man himself, tortured and unsure, with no glossy overlay of self to confuse the issue. What you see when you look at, say, Irving Penn’s wonderful 1947 double portrait of George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken is—well—Irving Penn.

YOU SAY URINAL, I SAY UNORIGINAL...

My pal, writer-blogger Martha Bayles, paid a visit to the major Dada exhibition at Washington's National Gallery of Art. As you can see from her Weekly Standard review, she somehow falls short of the reverent tone generally required of cutting-edge critics:

Take a deep breath. You are now in the presence of Fountain. While contemplating this masterpiece, please be informed that it is an "authorized replica," since Duchamp did not think to hold onto the "original" back in 1917. In 1951 he realized his mistake and "commissioned" a replica, which now hangs (stands?) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1964, he realized the same mistake again, and "personally authenticated" (i.e., signed) another eight replicas. You will note that the meaning of "realize" changes slightly over the course of this paragraph. It is not known what the first replica fetched, but the Scottish art critic Julian Spalding reports that, in 1999, one of the later batch sold at auction for £993,789, and a couple of years later another was sold to the Tate Gallery for about £1 million.

BLUE COLLAR

Somehow, it's the paunch that's the most unsettling... Leafing through some recent photos, I came across this shot I took on my last visit to Stanford. The burly figure is Duane Hanson's, Slab Man, a bizarrely life-like sculpture of a cement worker. I spent a good deal of time peering at him. He gets invited to all the right parties too.

One of these days, I'll have to pay a visit to the Saatchi Gallery so that I can strike up a conversation with the Flea Market Lady.

NOT QUITE A MIRAGE

Englishman in New York heads for Texas and stumbles across a designer sculpture.

IN FLIGHT

Part of a gorgeous series of images by photographer Jan von Holleben.

[Hat-tip: The Walrus.]

HELL IS... OTHER AMERICANS

Lots and lots of reasons not to visit the Whitney Biennial in New York. Although the Telegraph critic, Richard Dorment found it all quite stimulating - "a tightly curated exhibition of works that reflect the social, economic, political and religious polarities of contemporary American society."

If you're curious, here's a sampling....

Post-Katrina Mississippi: "More than any television report the piece speaks of the trauma Katrina represented to Americans, who could see for themselves a country falling apart, a moral centre that wasn't there."

The Bible Belt:  "If anything, the world she documents is more frightening than the scenes from Biloxi, for in photos of a young father parting his seven-year-old son's hair before church, or the artist's grandmother in her coffin prettily dressed in a pink jacket, she reveals a Stepford family insulated from reality by the cotton wool of religious certainty."

And, a roll of drums, please: "America's greatest living artist, Richard Serra, shows only one work - a drawing of a hooded Ku Klux Klan figure, with the words Stop Bush'."

In case you missed the moral of the story... "Hypnotic and sad, this biennial is full of art about the breaking up and polarisation of society. Its message is that there is nothing we can do about it apart from wait for the end of Life As We Know It and console ourselves with sex or consumer products."

Or we could perhaps go and look for a more interesting collection of artists.

James Panero, writing in the New Criterion, is understandably depressed:

Will you ever see a great painter here? A pro-American political artist? Something that may just be overwhelming and, indeed, actually unexpected? Maybe. But it won’t be this year, when all you get is bad Duchamp. In other years it has been bad Mondrian. The derivations change, but what remains consistent is the badness the curators are always able to pull together.