This Friday I took most of the day off from IBM and my other SEO work and spent it at two museums, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum.  I spent a couple of hours looking at the Whitney Biennial’s Day for Night.

I like the Whitney as a building and feel comfortable in it - even as I’ve often had mixed feelings about the art.  I grew up as an artist in the 1970’s and that was the time the new Whitney Museum came to be (at least, that’s how I recall it) and many of the artists I studied with at the School of Visual Arts and who I interfaced with later at the Vermont Studio Center, where I spent a summer in 1987, came to exhibit at the Whitney Museum.   In a way, the Vermont experience colored my life and I am fond of my memories in Vermont and my time there. 

I responded to to Vermont’s unique beauty and I still have many studies from the period.  But getting back to the Whitney show…..

One of things I’ve noticed while in musuems is how I look at people who are in the museum.  In modern museums like the Whitney and the Modern, I look more at the people in the museum and less at the art.  It seems to me that woman look more sexual, more human, against a white, empty wall.  We all look and feel like the human creatures we are and that’s what much of modern art evokes for me.   And as I’ve gotten older i have taken it less seriously and appreciated it for what it can offer.  Here’s what I liked:

Anne Collier’s photos were very powerful, particularly the one of the the spliced casette tape (it’s a personal metaphor.as feelings can be visualized as threads or ribbons and tape is a ribbon).  While the Whitney’s Biennial website is created in Flash, and very clumbersome to navigate (and copy pictures from - because they’re flash movies) it does offer mini-podcasts of each artist’s work which is really cool idea.  Personally, I’d wish for some similar functionality on many of The House Designers’s house plans (ie: I would wish Alan Mascord would annotate his plans - and explain why he designed it as he did).  I would find that kind of use of rich media very compelling - but no one does it yet; maybe THD will be the first, who knows?  It would make sense as, in this case, The House Designers are selling themselves, as architects, along with the plans and in order to sell the plans, you sell the architect’s firm who created them.

I did not understand Rodney Graham’s movies of chandlier’s but found them visually arresting.  Adam Mcewn’s newspaper tabloid obituaries of famous living people were annoying enough to stick out.  The first one I saw I actually fell for (Rod Stewart) and I started reading it and than I said to myself …but I know Rod Stewart is still alive…fooled again.  After that I saw a couple more, Bill Clinton, Jeff Koons (why bother with him?) and Nicole Kidman.  I stopped reading them once I knew what they were - modern art can be annoying and honestly, I don’t see the point of this kind of thing, unless the point is to get me to think about how my own life might read if it appeared on a newspaper headline, first page.  If that were the case, there’d not be much to say, I think.

Angela Strassheim’s photo of Father and Son seemed almost too real and when I listened to the Podcast I understood why, it’s actually profound. 

Billy Sullivan’s photos on naked woman drew me in (they’d draw anyone’s eyes) and allow you to project into the photos (he had photos of other people, not just naked woman) but what I got out of it - and also listening ot the Podcast, is that he hanged out at all the important NY art establishments in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and his photos are about the people he met. Because I lived in NYC at that time, I find that kind of thing meaningful even if I did not go to those places and hang with those people.

Francesco’s Vezzoli’s parody on Gore Vidal’s Caligula was actually quite funny, if overdone and well described in the NYTimes Review of the trailer (Caligula’ Gives a Toga Party (but No One’s Really Invited) .  The movie trailer tried to be a parody of the original movie that was also a parody of history.  I know all about Caligula as I read Roman History, read Suetonius’s Lives of the 12 Casears and Robert Graves "I Claudius", and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,  and Gore Vidal’s Caligula was nothing like the real story of Caligula.   Sex sells and Gore Vidal played that up in the original movie and Vezzoli has Gore Vidal play a part in the Parody which is shown as movie trailer at the Whitney Biennial.  

Also that pretty model and actress who played in the Fifth Element, Mila J….played Caligula’s sister  ( he slept with all three of his sisters according to Suetonius). It shows me that modern art is also tied up with modern cinema and for an artist such as Francesco Vezzoli to go to the length he did, and parody Gore Videl, was truly ambitious.  He had me fooled for a couple of minutes.  I suppose that’s art.  I used to think it wasen’t but modern art does tend to focus on the perverse, the sexual and the morbid - and yet it’s a layer of reality, not the only layer, but it does exist, so I don’t reject it, I just look at it for what it is, a parody of film that was pretty funny.

As i listened to the Podcast of Francesco Vezzoli discussing - i remembered that much of the theme of the Biennal was the corruption of our goverment and if you look at much of the work in that light, it’s much easier to take and even to be sympathic.  It past Whitney shows, the work I saw did not touch me and I judged it, but in this case, I don’t.  I just accept it as a statement of how some people feel and view the world today.

As far as painting, I did not see that much I liked (that’s to be expected); I did not want to spend the time to try to understand Troy Brauntuch’s dim works while I was in the musueum; I suppose there’s something in there, but do I want to take the time to understand what that is?  I don’t think so, but that’s just me.  Yet, when I listened to the the Podcast for this artist the works did make sense, esp the 3 for World Trade Center - a nightmare I lived through.

Monica Majoli’s paintings do deplict sexual fetishism and they reminded me of much of the art I saw in trendy New York galleries when I often went to them in the 1970’s, again, listening to the Podcast gave me a lot more information, these paintings are really like meditations of the state of the victim and coming to terms with it.  Personally, I would not chose this kind of subject matter - as there’s always the chance people will take it as another way to get attension.  But in this case, I accept it and I look at the quality of the brushstroke, of the texture - if there work has enough quality in then the work justifies itself, regardless of what it deplicts.

JP Murro had some of the strongest paintings, as paintings, in the Whitney Biennial; I suppose if he likes Delacroix he can’t be all bad.  When I listened to the Podcast, it made a lot more sense - he tried to understand old art, old masters, and coulden’t because the cultures of the past are too different than how we live today - (at least, JP Murro feels that way) yet he’s still impressed by the artist as creator, as manipulator, and so he picks imagery today that evokes the same strangeness he feels when he looks at old art.

First of all, I don’t feel the same strangeness when I look at work at the Metropolitian or the Lourve, but it’s not about what I feel, it’s about how authentic the artist feels, and how they convey it, and I think he succeeded on a painting level to convey those feelings.

Ed Pakche’s work was also good in it’s own way - not something I’d want to live with but I can relate to it.  Again, the Podcast really helps to understand what the artist is doing - what he wants to accomplish.   And as well known an artist as Richard Serra with his Stop Bush painting brings the show home and finishes my commentary on the Whitney show and I was happy he spoke out. 

The best thing I can say about the show is the website, for once, complimented the Biennial. Here is an example of using rich media the way my architect clients need to do - they need to sell themselves as a brand just as each artist at the Whitney show, is a brand.   

In fact, if we want to underline what Modern Art is, it would be "The Artist as his or her own Brand". Modern Art is it’s own justification and the Artist is, at the end of the day, a Brand. 

Art has not been about anything else since the days of Van Gogh.   For better or worse, the only true validity for art today, is, in my opinion, how true an artist is to their own brand and how well they can sell the art establishment on it (whom ever they are at any moment in time).