Gap founder gives up plan for a big museum in S.F.’s Presidio.
Steals and Deals: Bernie Madoff associate Ezra Merkin forced to sell art collection.
In sort of related news: Dutch arts official vanishes after the discovery that he had embezzled €15.5 million from an arts organization’s accounts. (Arts Journal.)
If only guilt-free zones weren’t so small: Good Luck, by Squeak Carnwath at the Oakland Museum of Art. (Photos by Gay Swan.)
Squeak Carnwath’s paintings are too big to be shoplifted. Otherwise, I would happily “own” one or two of the idiosyncratic, icon-addled, blackboard-sized canvasses from her first solo museum show at the Oakland Museum of California — at the tender age of 62. As one of the leading California artists no one’s ever heard of (unlike her cohorts Viola Frey and Jay DeFeo), Carnwath fuses the personal symbology of a genius Waldorf preschooler with the flawed humanity of the psychotherapy couch. The result is pure Californication.
I couldn’t not love her recurring guilt-free zones (Everything(2)), or her collection of good luck symbols (Good Luck ), bunnies (Long Happy Life ) and record albums (Side One ) — the latter representing about the side-oneness of life. There’s a shameless appropriation of periodic table grids (Four Months), confession (Promise) and assorted visual elements that once led people to associate her work with outsider art. Each painting reads like a short story asking universal questions. Then on the video at the end of the show, there’s Squeak with all the answers. And you walk out feeling like you just had a great talk with your therapist.
Dismemberment of Jeanne D’Arc by Anish Kapoor, at this past last May’s Brighton Festival. You know you want to see it large. See a photo essay of the construction of the piece here. (Photo by Luna Park.)
All the artspeak you’ve never wanted: Art Baloney, a new blog devoted to chronicling the tortured, the contorted and the convoluted in art writing. Send nominations to artbaloney [at] yahoo [dot] com
OH YES! Bravo issues casting call for new art reality show. (Dear Bravo, Who do I gotta blow to be a judge? I can be the Bruno of art reality TV: short, funny, ethnic, handy with malaprops. Please let me know where I can submit my reel.) Interestingly, ABC’s Wife Swap is also doing some casting, and they’re looking for a family that’s “passionate about graffiti as an art form.”
A two-fer: Picking out art for the White House + Philip Smith’s letter to Art in America about being excluded from the Pictures Generation show at the Met.
The art industrial average is limp: Bidding thin at Christie’s auction in London.
Museum musical chairs: Ann Goldstein leaves L.A.’s MOCA for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. More here. And: Timothy Rub departs Cleveland to take over the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In Newark:Hector Canonge, Germinal, at City Without Walls, through Aug. 5.
In Washington: Daniel Arsham, Jonah Bokaer and Judith Sanchez Ruiz, Replica, a collaborative performance, at Sidney Harman Hall, tomorrow at 12 p.m. (This event is free.)
In London:Futurism, at the Tate Modern, through Sept. 20.
In the Netherlands: UN Studio, Retreat Exhibition, an architectural installation at the KunstFort Asperen, near Leerdam, through Sept. 20.
In Vienna:Cy Twombly, Sensations of the Moment, a retrospective, at the Museum Moderner Kunst, through Oct. 11.
Now what the heck does it say up there? (Surreptitious photos by Sebastian Puig all taken with special Get Smart® shoe phone.)
Q: What’s better than SUPERTITLES at the opera?
A: REALLY BIG WALL TEXT REALLY HIGH UP at an art museum!
We loved seeing the exhaustive (and exhausting) Kandinsky retrospective at the Beaubourg, a.k.a. Centre Georges Pompidou: the bold splotches of color, the whimsical shapes, all that kinetic motion from the peripatetic 20th-century master whose career took him from the Blue Rider through the Bauhaus. The only thing that left us puzzled was the wall text, which was writ LARGE and placed WAAAY up the wall. I suppose it’s so that even if visitors are stacked five-deep and can’t see the art, they can at least read the name of the painting over the tousled heads of fellow art-gawkers. Maybe some U.S. museums will catch on to this user-friendly trick. The Guggenheim will get its opportunity in September, when the show travels to New York.
Calder at the Pompidou is up through July 20; Kandinsky, through Aug. 10.
‘Cuz Miami needs another private collection space: Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz to open a 30,000 square foot exhibit space for their collection in December.
