J. Paul Getty III, grandson of oil tycoon and art collector J. Paul Getty has been the subject of a recent movie and now a television docudrama based on his 1970's kidnapping and ransom. The story is an eye-opening look inside both the art world and… — J. Paul Getty III, grandson of oil tycoon and art collector J. Paul Getty has been the subject of a recent movie and now a television docudrama based on his 1970's kidnapping and ransom. The story is an eye-opening look inside both the art world and the world of the ultra wealthy. Photographer unknown, c. 1970.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

April 08, 2018

We are finally back from our whirlwind travels through China and Japan, a trip that exceeded all expectations! In the coming weeks, I will be dedicating some posts on some specific art and architecture related topics related to my visit, but I wanted to bookend this week's round-up with a look at Art Basel Hong Kong, an event that I sadly missed by only a few days but shaped much of the art world conversation at precisely the moment I was on this trip. In fact, it is notable if you look at the Instagram feeds of many of the art world types I recommended in a recent post how many of them are touring major Asian cities since late March to survey the evolving art scene. I highlight @thingsizzyloves account in particular, as she has been posting spectacular art images this past week from Japan-- a place that I also sought to feature on my own feed as much as possible.

The other benefit of the long journey to Asia was that I was finally able to catch up on many movies and television shows that I had held in reserve for the air travel. At the top of my list was Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird, two beautiful films I had missed at VIFF, and All The Money in the World, a movie I have been wanting to see for some time since it follows the story of art collector J. Paul Getty and the kidnapping of his grandson in the 1970s. This is a story I had only heard about in passing, and being a huge fan of the Getty Institute and collection in LA, the story ended up blowing me away for lifting the veil on the corruption and ugly reality of the senior Getty. Without spoiling the movie and new television series Trust (debuting tonight on FX) and also based on the Getty story, suffice it to say that anyone interested in Getty's museums, art collections, and overall legacy will learn a great deal about the real story behind the man and the family. Eye-opening on every level, and an important part of the larger conversation regarding the intersection of art and the ultra wealthy. Enjoy this week's links and I will be back soon with some posts related to my Asia trip!

"Spotlight on… Art Central in Hong Kong"

theartnewspaper.com

"How Corporations Harness — and Hijack — the Idea of the Museum"

hyperallergic.com

"What’s Your Favorite Color? With Art Palette, Google Hopes to Repeat the Success of Its Viral Face-Matching App"

artnet.com

"What About the Breakfast Club? Revisiting the Movies Of My Youth In the Age Of #MeToo"

newyorker.com

"Unknown or Unreal? The Shadow on Some Russian Avant-Garde Art"

nytimes.com

"Judge Throws Out Closely Watched Lawsuit Against the Agnes Martin Authentication Committee"

artnet.com

"Why the Artist Who Created Erica Haskard’s Artwork Loves The Americans’ Fictional Painter"

slate.com

"Impressions of Art Basel in Hong Kong (VIDEO)"

ArtBasel

"Forgotten Feminisms: An Appeal Against ‘Domestic Despotism’"

nybooks.com

"Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 | MoMA LIVE (VIDEO)"

moma

Detail from Banksy's new mural that appeared in New York this past week depicting the imprisonment of Turkish journalist Zehra Doğan.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

March 18, 2018

As I post my weekly round-up, we are boarding a plane to embark on a whirlwind Asia trip with stops in Hong Kong, Xiamen, Shanghai, Beijing, Hakata, Kyoto, Shimizu and Tokyo-- a trip that has been in the works for almost a year, and one that I have been looking forward to and eagerly anticipating from the moment it was finalized. As it will be our first visit to China and Japan, I have been diligently researching the urban scene in each of our stops and enjoying the opportunity to learn more about the contemporary art scene we hope to glimpse while on the ground. Japan, in particular, has been at the very top of my travel bucket list for years and was the catalyst for this trip. Japan is a place that I have long wanted to visit for a million reasons related to the modern design, visual and urban culture, architecture, fashion, and the strong emphasis on everyday aesthetics the Japanese are famous for. I have also spent time studying the influence of Japanese art on developments in European modernism, so I am particularly excited for this leg of our journey.

China was a later addition to this trip, and it is a place that I am admittedly fascinated by but also deeply ambivalent about. As a teenager in 1989, watching the Tiananmen Square protests and aftermath on TV in the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall was both a life altering and critical turning point in my life. Looking back, I can mark this time as especially pivotal in how I eventually came to understand my own activism, research interests in the avant-garde, and the strong beliefs I formed in upholding liberalism, human rights, freedom of speech, and the role of artists, activists, and journalists in civil society. Over the years, I have been fortunate to have many students from China in my classroom, all urging me to see the country for myself, and to separate out the current politics from the long-standing culture and history that shapes the nation. At the same time, I have had students and friends from Hong Kong openly sharing how the city has been impacted since the handover to China in 1997 and describing how distinct and special the people of Hong Kong are. I have much to see and I am beyond excited to start this journey with an open mind and an open heart, and look forward to sharing what I see in the weeks to come. Enjoy the links, and happy Spring Break!

"Why Fewer Galleries Are Opening Today Than 10 Years Ago"

artsy.net

"Can Inclusion Riders Change Hollywood?"

theatlantic.com

"Activists Pressure Louvre to Drop Oil Company Sponsorship with Die-in"

hyperallergic.com

"Zaha Hadid’s Desert Think Tank: Environmental Beauty and Efficiency"

nytimes.com

"Banksy protests Turkish artist's incarceration in new mural"

cnn.com

"No. 72: The Delectable, Daring World of Cake Art (PODCAST)"

artsy.com

"Hustle & Ho, Sex Workers Festival of Resistance "

artforum.com

"The mirage of riches in museums’ vaults"

theartnewspaper.com

"Firing of MOCA's chief curator triggers worry over the future of an artist-centric museum"

latimes.com

"Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts / Retrospective at Schaulager Basel (VIDEO)"

vernissage

Jasper Johns Target paintings (1961) on exhibition at an artist retrospective of Johns' career at The Broad in Los Angeles (image: D Barenscott Instagram) — Jasper Johns *Target* paintings (1961) on exhibition at an artist retrospective of Johns' career at The Broad in Los Angeles (image: D Barenscott Instagram)

Jasper Johns and Some Thoughts on Artist Retrospectives

March 14, 2018

Last month when I visited the Takashi Murakami exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I mentioned how retrospective exhibitions were among my favourite type of art show. Perhaps it is the historian in me, or the interest I have had since I was a young kid in reading biographies of famous people, but I find something deeply resonant in seeing the lifework of an artist curated in a dedicated space. Not to be mistaken, retrospectives are admittedly among the most romanticized and least critical of all art exhibition types. They are seductive in their visual storytelling, positioning the artist as hero-genius in the isolated white cube, and shamelessly appealing to that part of us that wants the short-cut version of an artist’s career.

Retrospectives follow a long tradition in the history of art that sought to distinguish and elevate particular individuals into the canon of art history. Originally exclusive affairs with limited audience, retrospectives were made more commercial and mainstream in the late nineteenth century as part of the rise of World’s Exhibitions. Importantly, the move grew out of an interest by the state in nationalizing and even laying claim to particular artist movements and traditions, yet by the early twentieth century, sprawling retrospective exhibitions also existed to attract larger audiences, and potential buyers, to the new “modern art” of the era. Important retrospectives (what we would call “blockbuster” shows) held across Europe at this time, of artists such as Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Matisse, helped to inspire new generations of artists and educate the public through a survey of carefully selected works meant to represent the individual artist’s oeuvre.

As art historian Robert Jensen argues in his study Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton University Press, 1996): “after 1900 the retrospective was widely and self-consciously employed as a weapon to redress the exclusions of the past, to rewrite history, to construct a canonical history of modernist artists as a sequence of great individuals in the evolution of modern art.” Ironically, the era of retrospectives, which began as a way to recognize artists on the margins of the art world, and in post-WWII would act as important cultural exports in the name of liberal democracy linking modern art with open societies, continues today with many problematic dimensions, exclusions, and the aura of privilege. For these reasons, it is always important to approach the retrospective with both healthy scepticism and an understanding of the larger contexts at play.

Case in point-- while in Los Angeles, I visited the Jasper Johns exhibition “Something Resembling Truth” at The Broad (click on selected image gallery below to view individual works and titles). This was a retrospective that was co-organized with the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts in London, where it was first on display through the fall of last year. Jasper Johns, an American painter, sculptor, and artist (associated with the Neo-Dada and pop art movements of the 1960’s), who is today 87 years old and regarded by many as among the most important living artists in North America, was chosen for a retrospective by a curator and art historian duo in London who had been working on publishing and releasing a five-volume academic catalogue on Johns. The Los Angeles contingent organizing the show was headed by The Broad’s founding director, and the Jasper Johns show would be part of the private museum’s programming, helping to raise the profile of the brand new art institution in the eyes of the art world. In short, the Jasper Johns retrospective does one kind of job in England, and an entirely different kind of job in the U.S.

In London, the venue for the retrospective, in one of the cities oldest and most venerated art spaces, was presumably staged to showcase the research of the curator and art historian organizers. Still, the show was met with much less enthusiasm as one might expect. Seeing all of John’s famous American flag works was likely unsettling to a British public coming to terms with the Trump era, and was once again a reminder of the art historical narrative and mythology surrounding what Jason Farago in the New York Review of Books termed “the primacy of American art as the postwar successor to European modernism.” In sharp contrast, as I noted when I was in L.A. after seeing the tremendous marketing machine promoting the Johns show all over the city, there was a very different way that the Johns show was being used to attract a new kind of crowd to the local art scene. In L.A., Johns was positioned as both retro and sexy—a recycled version of an American art legend in a city that venerates heroes and everything shiny and “new.” As Catherine Wagley aptly described in an artnet review:

“The exhibition may indeed be particularly illuminating for younger Angelenos, who, even if they visit museums regularly would rarely see Johns paintings (LACMA and MOCA mostly own prints). It’s seductively installed, lit to make colors pop. The aspiring painter can, and should, geek out over Johns’s surface texture, trompe l’oeil, and material competence. But the Broad, with its ahistorical hanging, does to Johns what it usually does to art: privileges objects over context. Hopefully viewers will be beguiled enough to learn on their own how deftly Johns’s work spoke and responded to his political and aesthetic milieu.”

In the case of the artist himself, Jasper Johns had very little to no input in the staging of the retrospective. Reading a longer New York Times article on Johns by Deborah Solomon ahead of my trip, it was interesting to learn how little the interpretation of his legacy mattered to the artist: “Mr. Johns himself is loath to offer biographical interpretations of his work — or any interpretations, for that matter. He is famously elusive and his humor tends toward the sardonic. He once joked that, of the dozens of books that have been written about his art, his favorite one was written in Japanese. What he liked is that he could not understand it.” In fact, the important lesson in understanding the wider context of this and many other retrospectives, is how little the artist’s actual lived experience or interpretations figure into what one sees. Retrospectives, like many other kinds of storytelling devices, say more about the culture that produces them than the subject under examination.

Ruth Asawa, Spring (1965). Artist, activist, and art education advocate Ruth Asawa learned to draw and paint as a child in the Japanese internment camps during WWII. — Ruth Asawa, *Spring* (1965). Artist, activist, and art education advocate Ruth Asawa learned to draw and paint as a child in the Japanese internment camps during WWII.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

March 11, 2018

As spring is just around the corner, the art world's attention has shifted this week to New York where Armory Arts Week opened to kick off the 2018 art season. With over 200 exhibitors representing international galleries, artist collectives, and public art programs, the Armory show often sets the tone for what can be expected in terms of themes, issues, and yes, fashion and taste, for the year to come. This year, mirroring my own experience at the College Arts Association conference in LA last month, the event has been overshadowed in many important, but also cynical (and some would argue potentially destructive) ways, by the spectre of the Trump administration and the abject fear of how shifting US government policies may impact art activism and the role art can play in speaking truth to power.

At a time when the art market is once again breaking records (as it did this same week at the Sotheby's auction in London), there is the everpresent disconnect between art valuations and the value of subversive thought that underpins many of the works at auction. Still, one of the ironies of the overheated art market is renewed focus and attention that is being paid to artists who have often fallen just off the radar of conventional art histories. Case in point is my artist in focus this week, Ruth Asawa.

Artist, activist, and art education advocate Ruth Asawa learned to draw and paint as a child in the Japanese internment camps during WWII. She would go on to challenge visual arts boundaries and make her unique mark in the American art scene. I highly recommend a recent New Yorker article that touches on her important legacy and body of work within the context of a recent commercial art exhibition promoting her works for sale:

"The addition of Asawa to art’s overwhelmingly white-male hit parade comes at a critical time in our country, as the policies of the current Administration challenge the undeniable fact that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Asawa’s parents were farmers, who emigrated to rural California from Japan. (“Sculpture is like farming,” the artist once said. “If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.”)"

Enjoy this week's links, and get out into that spring sunshine!

"Someone Yarn-Bombed a Guggenheim Museum Toilet with Gold Crochet"

hyperallergic.com

"Ai Weiwei Will Make the Refugee Crisis Personal in His Upcoming Qatar Show"

artnet.com

"Jean-Luc Godard’s Models for a Scuttled Exhibition Are Artworks in Their Own Right"

hyperallergic.com

"How the 1913 Armory Show Dispelled the Belief that Good Art Had to Be Beautiful"

artsy.net

"A Flag Is a Flag Is a Flag"

nybooks.com

"New Adventures in Old Masters: How Art Historical Detective Work Gives Dealers at TEFAF an Edge"

artnet.com

"What Is the Perfect Color Worth?"

nytimes.com

"The Handmaid's Tale costume designer Ane Crabtree on the feminist power of fashion (PODCAST)"

cbc.ca

"Identifying art through machine learning with the MoMA #GoogleArts (VIDEO)"

googlearts

"The Spring Break Art Show: A Good Time Show Disrupted by the Specter of Trump (PODCAST)"

explainme

Sarah Morris, Creative Artists Agency (Los Angeles) (2005). Power relationships rendered in abstraction-- the perfect representation of Hollywood and the film industry honouring its best in tonight's 90th Annual Academy Awards. — Sarah Morris, *Creative Artists Agency (Los Angeles)* (2005). Power relationships rendered in abstraction-- the perfect representation of Hollywood and the film industry honouring its best in tonight's 90th Annual Academy Awards.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

March 04, 2018

Tonight will be the 90th edition of the Academy Awards-- an event that was originally created by the Hollywood film moguls to honour each other and create legitimacy for a medium and an industry that was still very new and even suspect at the turn on the twentieth century. Indeed, one of the important themes that I explore with students in my film courses is the critical role that public relations and the vertical integration of the film industry played in reinforcing the perception of film as a kind of modern religion, complete with its screen Gods, ritualized ceremonies like the Oscars, and unquestioned practices related to film production, exhibition, and distribution.

My chosen artist this week, Sarah Morris, is a NY-based artist and filmmaker, and has made it part of her practice to examine the interrelated connections between the world of painting and the world of cinema. Her large scale abstract paintings reflect the networks of power in large-scale bureaucratic institutions, mirroring related structures in both the art world and the film industry. Her work Creative Artists Agency (Los Angeles) (2005) is described by MoMA in the following terms:

"Glossy, bright, and geometric, this painting is part of a series by Morris that is inspired by the city of Los Angeles. Its title refers to the powerful Creative Artists Agency, a talent agency that is a key player in the invisible Hollywood network of actors, directors, and producers who are also the subjects of the artist's video Los Angeles (2004). The hexagonal structures are a visually complex interpretation of the web-like, convoluted power relationships that dominate the entertainment industry. Morris charts these connections to create a flashy, hard surface that reflects a culture of superficiality."

In recent years, pressures have grown once again within Hollywood, as in many other powerful institutions (including the art world), to examine and openly question the most damaging and exclusionary practices of the film industry. This process, which in earlier episodes of Hollywood history brought about the dismantling of the big studio monopolies, the freeing up of actors from stringent contracts, and the recognition and promotion of women and minorities to the upper ranks of the industry, is mirrored in the choices played out at the Oscars-- wins, losses, and yes, snubs. It is a fascinating event and one that I watch almost exclusively for the unstated tensions, and I know I will be rooting for many important and path-breaking films, actors, and creatives to be honoured tonight. Enjoy the links, and enjoy the Oscars if you will be tuning in.