When Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel Doctor Zhivago, the Soviet press exploded with outrage. The year was 1958, and although Stalin was dead, he had instilled a lingering fear, and despite the liberalizations of his successor, Khruschev, critical portrayals of life in the ussr were still commonly demonized as enemy propaganda. The leading Russian cultural newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta featured an entire spread headed “Anger and Infuriation” with a selection of searing, over-the-top letters savaging the novel and its author. One of the most fervent accusers was Anatoly Safronov, the erstwhile secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers and a laureate of the Stalin Prize. In a rambling, semi-literate statement, the bureaucrat-writer denounced Pasternak, proudly declaring that although he had not read the offending novel, he roundly condemned it. An adaptation of his words, “I did not read it, but I rebuke it,” became a late-Soviet underground byword for the absurdity of uninformed criticism.
I was reminded of Safronov’s inadvertent bon mot twice last week: first, as I read the Brooklyn Museum’s announcement of their latest exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” and then again as I perused moma’s “pride-month”-themed Instagram posts.1 The Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby co-curated the Brooklyn Museum show, billed as “part of a global presentation . . . marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death,” together with Sackler Senior Curator Catherine Morris and Senior Curator Lisa Small. In the opening quote of the exhibition description, Gadsby channeled Safronov’s pigheaded message of proud ignorance: “Picasso said, ‘You can have all the perspectives at once!’ What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s [sic]? Well, then I’m not interested.” To make up for the lack of a “woman’s” perspective in Picasso’s art, Gadsby et al. proceed to hitch the “woman artist” wagon to Picasso’s power engine. Nevermind that Picasso’s pronouns would have been “he/him,” so that a “woman’s” perspective would not have been his thing in the first place. Logic is just another patriarchal atavism.
Posted
on May 19, 2023, 10:15 PM,
by jfriedman,
under Crypto art.
Non-fungible tokens are so passé. The initial furor prompted in March 2021 by Christie’s sale of Beeple’s opus for the princely sum of $69,346,250 has long since subsided. Damien Hirst has had enough time to wrap up his year-long Currency project—an experiment which pitted unique physical paintings against their blockchain inscriptions. Donald J. Trump is a conspicuous latecomer to this party, a fact that he was oddly eager to emphasize when he announced his initial drop of NFT trading cards in December, 2022. Trump admitted that NFTs were no longer a “hot category. … Everyone said ‘what’s he doing it for—that’s so cold.’” Normally, Trump presents himself as a leader not a follower, so what could have led him to jump into this game so late, and even to boast about his tardiness? More perplexing still, why would he issue a second series of NFTs in mid-April of this year, thereby causing the value of the initial collection to promptly collapse?
In the aftermath of the original drop, Trump claimed that his motives were purely aesthetic, a point he reiterated in a Truth Social post on April 19th: “My New Trump Digital Trading Cards Series 2 is the Number One Collection in the World. It must be that people love the art.” From its purported triumph, Trump deduced that this “really incredible artwork” must be “very beautiful and interesting.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but the cards are certainly interesting. The first collection of 45,000 NFTs comprised extravagantly camp and heroic portraits of Trump as a musclebound cowboy, a rockstar, and even an astronaut—quintessentially American images. In sharp contrast, a number of images in Series 2 have a distinctly monarchical flavor.
To read the entire article click on the image below.
Posted
on April 28, 2023, 10:54 AM,
by jfriedman,
under art history.
A lifetime ago, Gore Vidal published two searing essays about sexual morality in the respective contexts of law and politics. Vidal lobbed his critical grenades from publications whose very existence was a testament to the efficacy of the First Amendment. In 1965, “Sex and the Law” appeared in the Partisan Review, a journal started by the Communist Party USA-affiliated John Reed Club.
The hedonistic Playboy magazine, which printed “Sex is Politics” in 1979, aimed to undo mainstream mores. In these two essays, Vidal argued that sex, including pornography, was the “hottest of buttons” in politics, and that the prudery of “dead-letter laws,” then still on the books, was rooted in outdated religious prejudice. “When the Cromwells fell,” he wrote, “the disgruntled Puritans left England for Holland (not because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs but because they were forbidden to persecute others for theirbeliefs).” Once in North America, the Puritans fulfilled their goal of creating a “quasi-theocratic society,” the morality of which had distinctly Old Testament origins.
We are nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st century, but despite most people’s tolerant self-image, moral censorship of the visual arts remains a problem. Neither the conservative Right nor the progressive Left are ready to embrace Playboy’s proposition that morality is a matter for the individual conscience. Across the political spectrum, accusations of indecency provoked by the alleged overexposure of human flesh can still lead to furious controversy and even suppression of the offending material. In a 1996 Vanity Fair essay about The People vs. Larry Flynt, Christopher Hitchens correctly observed that “the ‘righteous and violent’ American culture war is for real.” But two recent instances of moral uproar (from the Right on one occasion, and from the Left on another) confirm that the opposing sides can at least concur on the topic of risqué art. Both want it hidden from view to avoid traumatizing the audience and wider society.
Xavier Hufkens gallery (Brussels) recently published a clip of an interview I conducted with Los Angeles-based artist Evan Holloway. The interview was conducted on the occasion of his upcoming exhibition Scry if you want to which runs February 10 through April 1, 2023. We discussed work which ranges from abstract relief paintings Enochian Tablets based in on the writings of 16th century occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley, to large-scale Automatic Drawings, to assemblage sculpture. There is a musical element to the show that will take shape as an LP Holloway is currently recording with the gallery.
Posted
on February 2, 2023, 12:28 PM,
by jfriedman,
under Public art.
Good sculptures make the ideas they represent self-evident. “The Embrace” by Hank Willis Thomas is a muddled mess, and my latest article in Quillette aims to explain how what was meant as a celebration of the civil rights icon turned into an obscene meme.
Our third article on Damien Hirst’s ongoing NFT project The Currency (co-authored with David Hawkes) is out in Whitehot Magazine one year after it published ‘The Currency’ referendum in November 2021, and four months following the second article that addressed the aftermath of July vote that pitted physical artworks against their digital avatars. Part three focuses on the role of the community, and the shift away from the outmoded omnipotent artist paradigm. We argue that The Currency turns the consumers of the artwork into full-fledged participants of the project, breaking down the wall between the creator and their audience. On the face of it, The Currency fits the definition of “community art.” It also fits the paradigm of what anthropologist David Graeber called “human economies,” which operate through collective social practices, rather than through the mind of an individual genius.
Quillette just published my article about Ben Sakoguchi’s spectacular smackdown of literalist curators.
Sakoguchi was invited to participate in the revived California Biennial, to be held at the Orange County Museum of Art, which was reopening with great fanfare in a brand new $94 million Morphosis-designed building. The curators had selected a his 16-panel polyptych titled Comparative Religions 101, but But with all the paperwork completed and the artwork ready to ship, Sakoguchi was informed that OCMA’s Education Department had “raised questions about the content of his submission.” The painting contained images of swastikas. Sakoguchi was handed a list of 17 questions the museum wanted him to answer. Three days after submitting his written responses, Sakoguchi was informed that Comparative Religions 101 would not be included in the show “because the museum will not show any work that depicts a swastika.” Having accused an 85-year-old survivor of a Japanese internment camp of hate speech, the curators’ ensuing scramble to save face was tragicomic.
Matt Stromberg’s comprehensive account of the exchanges between the Biennial curators, museum staff, the artist’s studio and his dealers reconstructs the drama that played out between the September 12th rejection and the opening of the Biennial two weeks later. Stromberg recounts the predictable shifting of blame between museum administrators and exhibition curators, the bid to secure a different work by Sakoguchi (declined), the attempts to go behind his back to obtain work from his dealers (unsuccessful), and finally a groveling email imploring the artist to re-enter the offending painting into the exhibition (denied). The California Biennial debacle was a face-off between pedants and poets, and this time the poet won.
Site Santa Fe: in conversation with Dave Hickey 04.15.16.
The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. (more)
Northwestern University Press
7 x 10, 300 pgs, Trade Cloth
ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 / $69.95
Skira Editore Milano just published a monograph on British-Iranian artist Reza Aramesh. In addition to several texts, and an interview with the artist, ACTION: BY NUMBER contains a catalogue raisonné of his work from 2002 onwards, including Aramesh’s recent marble sculpture. I discuss the art-historical genesis and cultural meaning of these spectacular and frightening works in my essay “The Meta of Marble.” (pp.124–129).
SKIRA Editore Milano
Hardcover. 248 pages, 153 ill., size 24x28cm
ISBN 978-88-572-5285-8
Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of "dunces" and "pricks." Paperback, 586 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 1517287103
Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from a vast digital discourse that took place in Dave Hickey’s social media space between June 2014 and March 2015. During that time Hickey posted almost 3,000 comments, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes and skeptics. Wasted Words, the resulting volume, is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Paperback, 124 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 152327266X
Over the past seven years Wayne Thiebaud has made dozens of paintings, drawings, and etchings of clowns. Like much of his work, this latest series is in a sense autobiographical. During his boyhood in Long Beach he looked forward to the visits of a traveling Ringling Brothers circus and sometimes helped out behind the scenes in exchange for tickets. The costumes, faces, and antics of the clowns were the beginning of a lifelong fascination for him. The clown series is its culmination, in which the now 100-year-old artist revisits those early memories.
In December 2019 Wayne Thiebaud unveiled a selection from his clown series at the San Francisco gallery founded by his son, Paul Thiebaud. The Laguna Art Museum exhibition will be a version of the Paul Thiebaud Gallery exhibition, featuring more than forty works.
Fully illustrated with 56 artwork reproductions. Essay by Dr. Julia Friedman. Interview with the artist by Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Hardcover: 100 pages; ISBN-10: 0578798573ISBN-13: 978-0578798578
Celebrating the 100th birthday of one of America's most respected and beloved artists, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings honors a lifetime of extraordinary achievements across many genres. Best known for his tantalizing paintings of desserts, Thiebaud has long been affiliated with Pop Art, though his body of work is far more expansive, continuing to grow as the artist approaches his milestone birthday. Across the decades, Thiebaud has explored various details of American life through his art from urban views and rural landscapes to clowns and household items all the time continuing to explore the food subjects that made him famous.
Wayne Thiebaud 100 accompanies an exhibition of the same name, organized by the Crocker Art Museum. In addition to the 100 paintings, prints, and drawings featured in the exhibition, this publication includes numerous other contextual paintings by Thiebaud, art by the masters who inspired him, and photographs of the artist with family and friends, taken over the course of his extraordinary career.
Hardcover : 212 pages
ISBN-10 : 1087501172
Dimensions : 9.8 x 0.9 x 11.3 inches
ISBN-13 : 978-1087501178
Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev
Adele Marie Barker (Editor), Eliot Borenstein (Contributor), Julia Friedman (Contributor), Adam Weiner (Contributor), Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky (Contributor), Robert Edelman (Contributor)
With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors... (more)
Paperback: 488 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 10, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822323133
ISBN-13: 978-0822323136
“A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance as Life-Writing” by Julia Friedman
In Symbolism, its Origins and Consequences. Edited by Rosina Neginsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010
Hardcover: 665 pages
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
New edition edition (October 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1443823929
ISBN-13: 978-1443823920
“The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov,” by Julia Friedman
"Elective affinities" - a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry - here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal...
In In Elective Affinities: Word & Image Interactions 6, 2008
Edited by Catriona McLeod, Véronique Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass.
Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi
Paperback: 422 pages
Publisher: Rodopi (June 20, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9042026189
ISBN-13: 978-9042026186
“Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act,” by Julia Friedman. Edited by Maurice Geracht and Frédéric Ogée.
In Interfaces: Image Text Language, vol. 29, 2010
Skira Editore Milano just published a monograph on British-Iranian artist Reza Aramesh. In addition to several texts, and an interview with the artist, ACTION: BY NUMBER contains a catalogue raisonné of his work from 2002 onwards, including Aramesh’s recent marble sculpture. I discuss the art-historical genesis and cultural meaning of these spectacular and frightening works […]
This article published in Quillette is a cautionary tale about what happens when while looking at a painting one only sees their own reflection. As the historian Christopher Lasch pointed out four decades ago, disproportionate concern with “identity” is directly linked to the difficulties of establishing the boundaries of selfhood. And without the certainty of […]
The April issue of the New Criterion has my article about the Santa Barbara Museum of Art debacle—the eleventh-hour cancellation of the “Three American Painters: Then and Now” exhibition, and the firing of its curator Dr. Eik Kahng. Read and weep.
While the Whitney Museum of American Art’s webpage still defines the Whitney Biennial as “the longest-running survey of American art” (emphasis added), this year’s eighty-first installment will expand its reach well beyond the United States. The show includes artists from Chile, Britain, Korea, Indonesia, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, Switzerland, Lebanon, Singapore, Mongolia, Finland, Sweden, Croatia, […]
