Art Fag City

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2009-11-11T21:50:25Z

The Dia Comes Home to New York - Looking Around - TIME.com

Background on the Dia and it’s announced return to New York.

Fresh Links!

2009-11-11T21:50:25Z

New GBTV @ Invisible Exports | GalleryBeat

Paul H-O accidentally calls Cathy Lebowitz “Cindy”, the name of his previous lover, while pointing at an erotic rubbing. He then asks her to explicitly describe other body parts and actions in the pornographic works.

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2009-11-11T19:15:20Z

The New Museum’s Web of Connections - ArtsBeat Blog - NYTimes.com

Deborah Sontag outlines the five hundred personal and professional connections between artists, curators, dealers, and collectors, intertwined at the New Museum.

New Museum Controversy Grows with its Announced Plans to Show Trustee’s Art

2009-11-11T18:15:23Z

POST BY PADDY JOHNSON
New Museum front entrance, Image via: Improv Everywhere

This week in growing New Museum controversy, The New York Times’ Deborah Sontag and Robin Pogrebin report on the museum’s plans to exhibit three floors worth of board member Dakis Joannou’s collection. The report is well worth the read and cites a number of experts offering up telling statements. Joannou, for instance, speaks in defense of the show, but says virtually nothing: “Sure I’m a trustee. Would it be different if I weren’t?” He tells The Times, “For me it’s a non-issue. I know who I am and what I’m doing.” That’s great of course, but it would be nice if he let the rest of us in on what it is he thinks he’s doing. To paraphrase his statement thus far, all he’s basically said is “So what? I’m a trustee.” We knew that already.

Further down page, the piece outlines guidelines established by international programs and ethics at the American Association of Museums.

The guidelines stress the potential for conflicts if board members become lenders, Mr. Ledbetter said. He offered these “cautionary flags”: a show devoted to one collector; a show in which the collector is a board member, donor or underwriter; a show in which the museum gives away or pools curatorial judgment with the collector.

“Any one of those things can be managed,” he said, “but when you layer them on top of each other, it’s more complicated.”

The New Museum show raises all the association’s cautionary flags except one: Mr. Joannou is not underwriting the exhibition. [Jeff Koons has been asked to curate the show.]

Ouch. The piece goes on to describe Museum Director Lisa Phillips as exasperated by the controversy before offering up her following quote: “We’re not the first to do an exhibition of a private collection, and we won’t be the last.”

But this statement propagates the assumption that precedent alone justifies a course of action, which isn’t necessarily an argument for anything. By that rationale, one might similarly argue that it’s okay for museums to purchase stolen national treasures, because it’s an institutional practice that exists elsewhere. As this example makes clear, the implication that a pre-existing practice suggests an ethically sound action, simply does not make sense in a lot of cases.

Taking a different line of attack over at The Art Newspaper, Tyler Green explains why museums exhibiting private collections are not only unethical, but possibly violate the letter of museum tax exemptions. According to Green, the US Internal Revenue Code mandates that tax-exempt organizations must not operate for the benefit of private interests. Certainly, the value of Dakis Joannou’s collection will increase due to its exhibition at the New Museum. How is this legal?

Given the ethical problems this show presents, I don’t see any reasonable cause for the museum to continue with its plans to launch the show this March. The last thing we need is more museum directors citing bad precedents as justification of ethically challenged shows.

Fresh Links!

2009-11-11T18:22:44Z

GalleryBeat

Does James Kalm have a little more competition?

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2009-11-11T18:09:55Z

New York Art - Urs Fischer, Bowery Bad Boy - page 1

Martha Schwendener takes Fischer to task for derivative work.

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2009-11-10T16:51:44Z

Famous Paintings Reproduced In Coffee - Coffee art by karen eland - Gizmodo

Meta-textual product placement or one more reason for you to dislike coffee? Via: Marina Galperina

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2009-11-10T16:25:05Z

Chelsea Falls – Paper Monument

Best Chelsea round-up ever. A sample: Anselm Reyle & Takashi Murakami show at Gagosian
We were thinking: if Gagosian is going to have big-budget, blockbuster shows with uniformed guards pacing around, the least they could do is make it official and offer us a restroom, maybe even a cafe. But then we remembered: museums charge you 20 bucks to enjoy their facilities. The hotel lobby emerged as a new ideal: corporate art, public bathrooms, no admission price.

Fresh Links!

2009-11-10T16:04:04Z

Morbid Anatomy: Fritz Kahn “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” (Man as Industrial Palace) Animation and Installation

An amazing video.

The Magic Painter Backstory

2009-11-10T16:50:02Z

POST BY PADDY JOHNSON

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSE3m0VrYKM

Back in the New Year, artist Javier Morales highlighted a few of his favorite youtube videos, The Magic Painter (pictured above) amongst them. At the time, I enjoyed Morales’ pick for it’s strange aesthetic; the entire video looks like it was made courtesy of White Rose, a now defunct craft and nursery store in Canada. In revisiting the video over Twitter however, blogger Tom Moody points out a creepy backstory YouTube commenter Shawnantone brings to light. He sources the video to the Christian based religious cult “The Family” (aka The Children of God), the organization focusing on sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ around the world. This wouldn’t be particularly weird were it not for founder David Brandt Berg, who not only came to be known within the organization as “Dad,” but had numerous allegations of pedophilia and sexual abuse lodged against him. He was also a well known anti-Semite. Notably, David Brandt Berg himself stars in the above video, strangely choosing to sport a fake beard over his real one. It is especially disturbing to see children in this clip, given Brandt Berg’s background. In 2005, his adopted child Ricky Rodriguez took his own life after murdering one of his adult caretakers.