Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
— D. H. Lawrence

They were asking me questions like: "Is it art?" And I was saying, "Well, if it isn't art... what the hell is it doing in an art gallery and why are people coming to look at it?"
— Tracey Emin

Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives; I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
— Henry David Thoreau

The Deaccession Rollercoaster of Love 

“Ok, so the party’s over. Western visual culture—the part made up of fabulous ancient artifacts, Old Master paintings and that flirtation with immortality called “modern art”—is winding down with the century. So what’s to do? Have a last drink from a patinnaed cup? Reminisce about dead geniuses? Clean up 50 or so centuries of loose ends?”
— Richard Huntington, The Buffalo News, 02/16/96

Kudos to everyone voicing their opinion on this issue, be that opinion shrill, passionate, hysterical, well-reasoned, half-baked or all of the above. I’ve always maintained that contention is far more interesting than consensus. What we don’t agree upon tells us a lot and the Albright deaccession issue reveals to us (as if we didn’t already know) the deep passion for art and culture reverberating throughout our community. So far as I know, there have been no fisticuffs, wedgies, back alley brawls, or Molotov cocktails.

First, I can’t help but refer to this gem from part of a letter written by restaurateur Donald Worfe to Artvoice (Nov 30-Dec6/06 issue): “After hearing thousands of complaints about the art during the “highly” praised Extreme Abstraction, I was ready to move my business to any museum or gallery that specialized in pre-modernism.” If museums start making decisions based on how upset the restaurant manager is, please shoot me. I am pretty skeptical that Don heard “thousands of complaints” but since he’s no longer running the restaurant at the Albright, it looks like he got half his wish. I haven’t yet heard about his relocation to a pre-modern museum.

Less hostile to the notion of contemporary art, Kathi Roussel’s letter in the same issue of Artvoice nonetheless had its own gem tucked within it: “Looking and learning from the endeavors of the past, the feat of mastering materials and expression, aren’t remotely provincial, but actually quite monumental. Not everything has to be 20 feet tall and made from chewing gum that was regurgitated by lab rats and sewn together with dried sinew and rubber bands, while a projection of a video loop of a shadow passing [sic] over an expressionless face...Some things are just cool because they already are.” Hahaha, that is just beyond brilliant!!! I don’t know what specific work Kathi is referring to here, but if some artist can get lab rats to regurgitate gum and then use that material to build a 20 foot sculpture held together with sinew and rubber bands, SOMEBODY CALL ME IMMEDIATELY! I want to see that puppy!

This week’s AV (Dec7-13/06) includes this comment from a letter by Dave Derner: “Now I’m told that the ‘core mission’ is, and always was, to display contemporary art. I should believe, as do the board of directors, that the next 30 years would produce a body of artwork to match the last 3,000. I find that reasoning highly misguided if not brazenly arrogant.” Wha?! Dave does not explain how he concocted this equation. On any scale of comparative value, I’m not certain how you rationalize forcing 30 years of art history (an arbitrary number, so far as I can see) to duke it out with 3,000 years. To quote Dave, “I find that reasoning highly misguided if not brazenly arrogant.”

It was nice to encounter the sane, sensible voice of Donn Esmonde articulating the issue recently in The Buffalo News, beginning his column by astutely confessing that he didn’t know “change” was a four letter word. Zing! Among Donn’s sane and sensible observations: “One of our historic problems is so-called leaders who let our institutions grow mold. Donna Fernandes was a bolt of lightning at the Buffalo Zoo because the place was stuck in neutral for decades. It was hardly alone on the treadmill. The Albright largely kept pace—but resting on laurels in the shape-shifting art world is like digging a grave.” Donn Esmonde

And if that doesn’t do it for you, how about Charles Wickser Banta, President of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Board of Directors, in his recent op-ed piece for the News, which ends on an interesting note: “By the way, among the works being deaccessioned is an important sculpture from India gifted by my grandfather, Philip J. Wickser. My family endorses its inclusion in the deaccession process.” Charles Banta




You can lead a person to culture, but you can't make them think.
— Thomas Wolfe

You can love yer brain
Even if it slips
Down the drain...
— The Flaming Lips

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genius only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
— Aldous Huxley

Choose the dessert which augments life,
seek that wine which Is full-bodied;
The rest is all scent and image and colour;
the rest is all war and shame and opprobrium;
Be silent, and sit down, for you are drunk,
and this is the edge of the roof...
— Rumi

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
— Jack London


Soon, Artemis will be sleeping with the fishes... 

Much has been written and said about the Albright’s announcement to deaccession some of their collection in order to replenish their purchasing endowment for contemporary work. You won’t find any sentimentality about it here. My last words to Artemis and the Stag would be, “Don’t let the vault door hit you on the way out!” And it’s not because I hate antiquities or that I think tradition is disposable. Or that it plays no part in our understanding works of the present. But we who work with contemporary forms of art have to perpetually work ourselves up a steep incline of hostility that’s often directed toward the forms of expression we love. It’s well-worth stating the patently-obvious: it’s actually the 21st century and, for the most part, the contemporary (modern,post-modern) forms of visual expression that surround us are nothing new. Most belong to a lineage that stretches back easily 100 years.

So, it wasn’t surprising to read Mary Jane Panek of Cheetowaga in her Nov 28 letter to the Buffalo News: “Mary Kunz Goldman’s Nov. 20 column certainly hit the nail on the head. Why in the world would gallery directors even consider selling our beloved “Artemis” or any of the lovely sculptures and paintings I remember seeing with my art-loving father back in the 1930s and 1940s? I have often searched the gallery for these beloved works of art, only to see them replaced by “modern art.” Who can help stop this madness of deaccessioning? True art lovers, speak up!”

I agree, Mary Jane, let’s stop the madness, though I perceive a different madness. How come those of us who believe in contemporary forms of visual expression are never considered the “true art lovers” that you urge to speak up? We actually DO love these things that YOU deride and our love IS true. Why does it perpetually have to be the love that dare not speak its name? Why do those most beholden to tradition hold everything else in such contempt? I’ve NEVER EVER met or worked with a contemporary artist who didn’t hold some portion of art history in a deep, deep reverence. But you hardly have to gallery-hop 10 feet without tripping over a “traditionalist” who has no use and, much more importantly, ZERO TOLERANCE for contemporary art. Can’t we all just get along?

Also, not to downplay the significance of Mary Jane’s visits to the Albright with her “art-loving father” over 60 years ago...but why is there an underlying presumption here that today’s art-loving father must replicate that experience with the same works? Why is it implausible that today’s art-loving dad might enjoy certain works of contemporary art with his child? Why do we always revert to old paradigms to create meaning?

Kudos to local collector Steve Biltikoff for his letter on the same page, sanely and sensibly speaking on behalf of the excitement he understands as inherent in contemporary art. “As a longtime member of the Art committee of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, I take great pride in our acquisitions of contemporary art over the years. It has been gratifying to see the excitement of many audiences discovering these new works as part of the permanent collection and in exhibitions such as last year’s Extreme Abstraction.”

It was a little disappointing to see Artvoice’s cover last week. Not the story so much as the cover image, sexing up the negative froth around the Albright’s recent deaccession announcement with a Louis Grachos As Tony Soprano mugshot. It may be that AV sees its job as, in part, stirring the pot a bit and their proactive headline (You’ve Got To Keep Moving...”) set against the stern, unsmiling, squinting-into-the-sun close-up of Grachos certainly plays the double-edged sentiment. Geoff Kelly does an admirable job with his feature article, illuminating both sides of the debate but it did feel by the end that deaccession critic Freudenheim got a little more play. But maybe that’s just AV keeping the pot well-stirred...
Artvoice

More incredible was the published AV letter from a Patrick Klinck of Aurora on pages 4-6 of the same issue. The letter runs an astonishing 53 column inches! (Number of art review column inches in the same issue of AV? Zero.) In it, Klinck states the intention of the Albright to “sell off a frighteningly large chunk of the museum’s patrimony so he can fund his insatiable appetite for new acquisitions.” Proposing to deaccession 200 works from a collection of over 6500 is neither frightening, large, nor a chunk. Maybe a chunkette. After quoting a fairly straightforward remark by Grachos about the Albright’s plan to develop their modern and contemporary collection through the move, the writer shrewdly observes, “You can practically see him rubbing his hands together as he describes the deal.” Klinck goes on to refine his complaint by noting that Grachos has only promised to purchase works by the greatest artists of “our time,” rather than the greatest artists of “all time.” Well, pass the Magic Eightball. A lot of the current “all-timers” in the Albright collection were hardly that when purchased. Many were only the greatest of their time. The letter goes on for quite a while until we reach the sore spot at the center of the screed: “The value of the objects the Albright plans to peddle far exceeds any monetary value or exchange value their sale would bring to the gallery in terms of new acquisitions. Generations of Buffalonians past and future have had and will have their first encounter with art culture at the Albright, and there will be many who never travel to New York or LA or Rome or Cairo to experience these kinds of objects firsthand. It is a cruel and short-sighted decision to deny them an opportunity that, quite literally, changed my life, and changed it forever for the better and enriched me beyond measure, in a way money and contemporary photography will never do.”

There you have it. The “contemporary” will just never do it for P. Klinck. And I have no remedy for that. Quel domage.

As a curator, I’ve been working with artists for 14 years, hundreds of them, all working in more or less “contemporary” or “non-traditional” forms. Making use of modernist and post-modernist visual languages to express nothing more or less than the conditions of living and being and becoming in the world. Many of them have dealt with acutely contemporary issues of identity, anxiety, and individual freedom. Many have been compelling precisely because of their unexpected and unfamiliar aspects. Many have questioned authority: authority within society, authority within history, even the authority of art history. Many recognize their own fallible selves and traffic in self-deprecating gestures, even to the point of self-mockery.

And through it all, time and time and time again, I have experienced the deeply sublime in many of these contemporary works. They have fully inhabited the present moment. They have cracked the universe wide open. They have left me gasping for breath.

Or, to quote Patrick Klinck of Aurora, they have “quite literally, changed my life, and changed it forever for the better and enriched me beyond measure.”

I make no apology for contemporary art.
I like it. I like progress. I like the progress of ideas.
Bring it on and serve it up.
And then bring me seconds.
AND dessert. And coffee.
And then pack me a doggy bag to take home.
And save the leftovers for supper tomorrow.
And then take the leftover leftovers and make me a stock
So I can whip up some contemporary art soup to serve
To unsuspecting traditionalists and then when they’re done
And stuffed and satisfied, I can point and laugh and say,
“Hahaha. Made you eat contemporary art!”
I like the Old Masters too.
But not the Old Master Paradigm,
in which anything that isn’t of Old Master lineage is framed as somehow...unworthy.
And demonized for it.
And those who argue on its behalf are demonized by association.
Or slow roasted on the spit of public opinion.
Recognize the undeniable pulse beating within the genres of contemporary art.
These are the distillations of our present.
These are the antiquities of the future.

Anyway, I’m fine with the deaccession, so long as they never sell this: 



Rene Magritte, The Voice of Space, 1928
Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
— Will Rogers