Hollywood, May 24, 1988, p. 110

Getting financing for an independent feature film can make getting a show at Castelli seem like child's play - as artist Robert Longo surely knows. He's spent much of the decade trying to finance his film Steel Angel. In the interim, Longo's been honing his directing skills on music videos and finally working with real actors on Arena Brains, a 34-minute film that premiered at last year's New York Film Festival and was released by Elektra Home Entertainment this week.

Arena Brains is ATV (art TV) starring downtown and Hollywood types Eric Bogosian, Ray Liotta (No Way Out), and Richard Price (who wrote The Color of Money). It may also be the first film to feature an exchange between a jaded artist and a critic that actually ends with the critic screaming: "If it wasn't for my reviews you'd be a total joke...You're nothing but a parody of yourself." Stranger still, the artist seems to agree with him. As with much of Longo's work, it's difficult to get a precise fix on his attitude toward the material.

Elektra's brochure gushes that Arena Brains is "...Underground. It's commercial. It's an ambitious, ambiguous meditation on power, sex, violence, art, and the media's manipulation of them all. And it's about a guy who gets tired of sitting at home and goes out to get a sandwich." At least it credits Longo, the "self-proclaimed 'punk' artist" with "a flair for printmaking, drawing and sculpture." Do you think they sit around the commissary at Universal Studios and snicker at Artforum prose? (Speaking of Artforum, even insiders are making no predictions about what will happen to the art mag and newish editor Ida Panicelli in the wake of the recent "departure" of reviews editor Christian Leigh and others. Chaos was the adjective on many insider lips.)

Whitney Biennial Watching, June 27, 1989

As banal as the Biennial is, the minimal television coverage of it has been even worse. Channel 13's Eleventh Hour of May 3 demonstrated the uninformed depths to which public television's coverage of contemporary art regularly sinks. The broadcast opened with 1985 Biennial veteran Kenny Scharf painting a canvas and host Robert Lipsyte inquiring how much it will sell for. Scharf's response was the last piece of solid information heard during the show.

Lipsyte must have picked up his intellectual modus operandi from People magazine. Interviews paired Whitney curator Richard Armstrong with dealer/notorious kvetch Ivan Karp; and artist Scharf with artist Greg Sholette. "The curators who are chosen to make this exhibition are never given a visual perception test," Karp motor-mouthed. "They qualify because they have good art history credentials." (Better-informed observers invariably note the group's collective lack of advanced art history degrees.)

The show's second interview was equally one-sided. Truly nice guy Scharf was selected to appear not for his analytical bent, but because other artists refused to use Channel 13's set as their studio. Why wasn't an articulate art-world commentator like Barbara Kruger invited to participate? Or any woman or person of color, for that matter? Sholette's intelligent observation that "Art is an industry...the Biennial is a trade show" made Lipsyte beam. "That's a helpful way of framing it - to look at in commercial terms." Oddly enough, it's the only way Lipsyte had been looking at it. Give me Dallas anytime.

And then there was the commentary of former trendoids Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, who appear intermittently on public access cable's Tomorrow's Television Tonight. Their "Neutral Trends" segment of the show usually consists of them flashing out-of-focus exhibition announcements at the camera while incoherently hyping the same artists they promote in their role as independent curators.

On June 5 they took a different tack. They interviewed Biennial artist Donald Baechler. They observed that the Biennial was, well, a little dull this year. Then - and I paraphrase - Baechler said that about 30 per cent of the Biennial artists are women...and that's why the show is so dull! Even the haltingly garrulous C & M were taken aback. Where are the Guerrilla Girls when you need 'em?

Guerrilla Girls, April 13, 1993

The Guerilla Girls and Joan Mitchell are the subjects of two tasty documentaries opening April 14 at Film Forum. This extraordinarily odd coupling is also unexpectedly complementary. Marion Cajori's film about the recently deceased, expatriate action painter foregrounds Mitchell's psyche and paintings; Amy Harrison's riff on the self-described "conscience of the art world" evokes the smarmy '80s art world that brought the GG into being. When art dealer Mary Boone smugly opines that the girls have had "a very negative impact upon women" or when collector-consultant, mistress-of-the-universe Estelle Schwartz says of artists like Ashley Bickerton and Peter Halley that "they were waiting to be bought and we bought them," Guerillas in Our Midst becomes biting social satire. The most telling moment in Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter comes when Mitchell fends off an interviewer's question about a longtime lover she doesn't initially want to name, revealing the vulnerability and matter-of-factness that inform her radiant paintings: "He was my 24-year live-in; then he took off with the dog-sitter. That's the way it was."

Letter from New York, Contemporanea, February 1990, p. 36

If the first half of the fall season seemed pluralist with a vengeance--"directionless" was the term on many art-world lips--the second half was characterized by New York's perennial fascination with the media. The standout show in this regard was the Whitney's Image World: Art and Media Culture. Although it floated ideas no more resonant than the notion that artists of the last twenty-five years have indeed been influenced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, there was terrific work to be seen here.

The first work that viewers encountered was Nam June Paik's Fin de Siècle II, a video-wall of psychedelic sound and visuals that incorporated some 300 TV sets and video works by Joseph Beuys and David Bowie, surely the oddest coupling of the year. The second was Nancy Burson and David Kramlich's fascinating interactive Composite Machine in which you sit at the controls, have your face recorded on the screen by a video camera, and then choose from among the dozen or so faces of public figures that appear on the screen along with yours (including Mikhail Gorbachev, Barbara Bush, and Oprah Winfrey): the machine meshes your face and theirs into a single hybrid image. Burson and Kramlich's imaging system (now routinely used by the FBI to update portraits of long-missing kidnapped children) will soon make its network television debut in the form of an as yet unnamed game show! How about Face to Face to Face to Face?

There's rarely a shortage of media-age public art visible in the Big Apple. Image World contributed a few more, with billboards by Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Lorna Simpson, and Gran Fury (the activist AIDS-art collective) sited throughout the city. Richard Prince didn't get a billboard nod, although his work in the exhibition and a pair of simultaneous shows at Barbara Gladstone and Jay Gorney Modern Art looked remarkably fresh. During December, subway riders were treated to advertising format pieces by Barbara Kruger and General Idea: Kruger's three Whitney-sponsored works pleaded for healing, housing, and environmental awareness, and General Idea's Public Art Fund-sponsored prints presented their AIDS image based on Robert Indiana's still-ubiquitous LOVE logo...

Art Today, a video publication that premiered at the end of last year, offers the ultimate in mediated art. Published by Horace Solomon, the ten-issue-per-year "magazine" documents from ten to fifteen contemporary exhibitions each month, with commentary by critics, curators and dealers (including Holly Solomon, of course). Strangely enough, about twenty percent of the $495-per-year subscribers are New York couch potatoes.

Sting, the rocker and former front-man for the group Police, made his Broadway debut in the Brecht-Weill masterpiece Threepenny Opera, and the critics yawned. Vanessa Redgrave got critics and audiences on their feet for her virtuosic performance in the Tennessee Williams chestnut Orpheus Descending. She also received widespread attention for the contractual demands she placed on publications interested in an interview with her. The terms? No questions about politics. Redgrave's attempts to give new meaning to the term "self-censorship" resulted in a virtual blackout of the incandescent actress's long-term stay in New York.

At the edge of the theater district, the Public Art Fund presented artist Louis Hock on the Times Square Spectacolor lightboard during November. His message about the commodification of contemporary art included the characters denoting the Japanese yen, the German mark, etc., buzzwords such as "investment" and "brokerage," and the phone number "800-BUY With ART." Callers got an art quiz and a tongue-in-cheek earful designed to help distinguish good and bad art.

More difficult to evaluate was the magazine ad that New York curator and bon vivant Henry Geldzahler did for Dewar's Scotch, in which he is paired in a profile-pas de deux with the young Scottish artist Scott Kilgour (don't ask-I don't know who Kilgour is either). The text of the ad tells us that Henry's pastime is "helping to promote the work of unknown artists," and that Scott drinks "what Henry's having." Henry lays a finger on Scott's brow. There's not an artwork in sight. Is this career-counseling for art-school grads?

Promotion, October 26, 1993

The New York Times Magazine's October 3 profile of Arne ("Arnie" in Hollywood) Glimcher and Pace Galleries contains precisely the sorts of market-oriented minutiae that inspire loathing of the art world-like Morley Safer's recent 60 Minutes piece. Glimcher's accomplishment? As author Allan Schwartzman pointed out, Glimcher neither discovers nor nurtures young talent: he sells art to Hollywood moguls who are letting L.A.'s myriad struggling galleries (and artists) wither on the vine. Schwartzman also noted that Glimcher was part of a committee that met with the Times last spring to complain about the lack of "positive attention" to commercial galleries. How about an artists' committee?

Promotional Copy, artist Robin Kahn's latest brainchild, is 400 very yellow pages of self-promotion. There are pages devoted to groups (WAC, queer artists in Hoboken), to services faux (spelunking) and real (The Thing electronic bulletin board), and, not surprisingly, too many artists' exhibition announcements and twee drawings (yawn). The book's literal and figurative heights are the amusing top-of-the-page alphabetical listings: see PHALLUS CONTROL, LENIN, WOMB LOST & FOUND. P.C. is on sale ($25) from November 2 at the Guggenheim Soho.

Television, July 23, 1991

When executive producer-director Juliet Cuming made her Creative Time-funded, prochoice public service announcement, she was gratified at the number of musicians who chose to appear on the video: Corina, Kim Gordon (of Sonic Youth), Lady Miss Kier (Deee-Lite), MC Lyte, Kate Pierson (B-52s), Crystal Waters, and Tina Weymouth (Tom Tom Club). Now Cuming is debating which of two tag lines to use for the PSA: "Women have a right to choose" or "Keep abortion legal." She fears that the term "abortion" may be too much for what she calls television's "censorship boards." If it passes them, watch for Cuming's 30-second spot later in the summer.

Boston's seven-year-old Contemporary Art Television (CAT) Fund - the most successful ongoing synthesis of American art and TV yet - officially went belly-up last month. Catalyzed by the now financially straitened Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the CAT Fund coupled the talents of the Institute of Contemporary Art and the New Television Workshop and PBS stations WGBH. Twenty-eight artists - Laurie Anderson, Dara Birnbaum, Chip Lord, Joan Logue, Branda Miller, and Michael Smith among them - have produced tapes and installations since '84...On the home front: The Public Art Fund will be commissioning artists to work on Sony's JumboTron, the 24-by-32 foot video projection screen that's replaced Times Square's Spectacolor Board. Watch for a September start-up date.

WNET kicked off its sixth season of American Masters biopics on July 1. The summer's infrequent art offerings consist of "Frederic Remington: The Truth of Other Days" (to be aired on August 5) and "Robert Motherwell and the New York School: Storming the Citadel" (August 26). Drawlin' Gregory Peck narrates the first, a slow-as-molasses meditation about the artist who so shamelessly promoted frontier machismo that the Marlboro Man is unimaginable without him. The Motherwell offering, by contrast, is an absorbing visual essay. The apprehension that viewers would fail to see the psychically charged subject matter of Abstract Expressionism is one of Motherwell's many lucid comments about an often misunderstood cultural moment.

Watched & Listened, [the final Scene & Heard column] November 15, 1994, p. 90

Right-wing art bashers have long been aided by an anti-intellectual popular culture that found an easy target in '80s New York's large population of well-off artists. (Morley Safer's 60 Minutes tirade was the culmination of this tradition, not its kickoff.) "A spate of recent films have undermined the popular image of bohemian integrity," I wrote in January 1989. "In movies of the last two years, art is variously regarded as a joke (After Hours), an accessory for the status conscious (Wall Street and The Moderns), a commodity subject to unscrupulous manipulation (Legal Eagles), and an aphrodisiac (9 1/2 Weeks)." Four months later, "Hollywood's informal antiartist campaign continues with a ceaseless flow if images of artist-as-narcissist" such as Martin Scorsese's "Life Lessons" segment of New York Stories, Merchant/Ivory's Slaves of New York, and the TNT biopic Margaret Bourke-White.

Deal of the Art, February 15, 1994

First Murphy Brown took on (and bested) Dan Quayle; now it's Brown versus Morley Safer in Soho. The show's amusing January 17 "The Deal of the Art" segment closely paralleled the Safer tempest in a teapot: it opened with an exposé of artist "darling of the moment" Sean Van Olin, a former blackjack dealer who catapulted to fame and astronomical auction prices with his "Frigidaire still life," an open refrigerator stocked with food cutouts. It then featured an out-of-her-depth Murphy squaring off on public TV with a hilariously pretentious panel of art worldlings that might have been cast by Mel Brooks. Finally, Murphy hung her infant son Avery's finger painting in a show and got the two talk-show critics to rate it on camera. Naturally, they disagreed, and the joke was on everybody - especially Morley Safer, who would seem too close to self-parody to satirize...If you missed Safer's own paintings on a recent segment of Art TV's Gallery Beat, they are interiors that oddly couple the painterliness of Edward Hopper with the pathos of Maggie Keane.

ArtForum, April 14, 1992, p. 106

It's the worst of times for art magazines. The ubiquitous loss of advertising revenue has revived rumors that ARTS is going out of business. ("Untrue," chuckled editor Barry Schwabsky.) No one at Artforum is laughing, however, where the downturn's led to an editorial consolidation and shake-up: editor Ida Panicelli resigned and will be replaced at the end of April by associate editor in charge of reviews Jack Bankowsky; senior editor Deborah Drier was let go (and won't be replaced, according to publisher Anthony Korner); managing editor Charles Miller will become a part-time senior editor, and his successor will assume the newly joined position of managing/production editor. Rates for writers, already considered low by magazine standards, will be lowered after this season.

But two Artforum staffers tell me that there's more to the personnel changes than meets the eye on the bottom line. They assert that Korner's publishing colleagues, executive publisher/advertising director Knight Landesman and associate publisher Charles Guarino, have been pushing Korner and Panicelli to make the magazine more commercial: that is, shifting its emphasis from theoretical concerns to advertisers' needs; or, to put it another way, attempting to dumb down the often difficult-to-read publication. The staffers also contend that Panicelli's resignation reflects her weariness with such urgings, although Panicelli observed that "those kinds of pressures are always around, but it's not why I'm leaving."

When I put these assertions of blurred editorial-advertising imperatives to Korner, he flatly denied them. "He [Bankowsky] will be making his own decisions." Bankowsky assured me that he has "no intention of getting rid of serious academic writing...although there will be an emphasis on more stylish writing." But Korner's reasons for promoting Bankowsky - a move supported by Landesman and Guarino, he said - seem to contradict his denial. "We interviewed widely and the others were all too parochial," he explained to me. "Jack has been going to art fairs and calling on galleries. He knows his way around the art world." We'll be checking the correlation between advertising and editorial in months to come.

Art Critics Confer, October 29, 1991, p. 96

A meeting of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA in French) two weeks ago took me to Southern California. Why did I go? I'd never been to an art critics conference and this was a historic occasion--the first time in its 43-year history that the Paris-based group has held its annual confab in this country. (Despite my attendance at just a single meeting seven years ago, I am ethically bound to inform you of my membership in AICA USA.)

Approximately 160 representatives of many of AICA's 55 national sections gathered in Santa Monica. The geographical spread was global: from Senegal and Syria to Bulgaria and Brazil. Thanks to a $15,000 grant from the Getty Foundation, the numerical weight was with the hard-currency-shy Soviets and Eastern Europeans. So, too, was the emotional emphasis of this congress titled "Beyond Walls and Wars: Art, Politics and Multiculturalism."

What looked to some of us to be a lavish promotion of the Los Angeles art scene--five days of bus tours to museums and galleries, cocktails at collectors' homes, post-conference trips to San Diego or San Francisco--was apparently pretty spartan compared to previous, better funded (read government-funded) congresses. Canadian Gerald Needham, an organizer of last year's meeting, informed me that AICA gatherings usually last 10 days. Visitors to Montreal were feted at consulates and taken to the Maritime Provinces for whale watching. The conference sessions, he assured me, were a similarly mixed bag.

What to say about 40, mostly short, papers? Two things struck me: the scant attention paid to the critic's role and working conditions, and the surprising congruity of cultural conditions in the Eastern bloc and the United States. "Post-Utopian" is the appropriate descriptor for these coincidental circumstances. The covert false consciousness of media/advertising reality seems a shocking and poignant concomitant to the overt false consciousness of communist social realism. (The congress was held against the media backdrop of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill imbroglio and Christo's Umbrellas.) But at least their evil empire is in retreat.

My earlier ethical disclosure is not irrelevant to my ambivalent response to this laid-back conference. AICA's American section may be based in New York, but I've never quite figured out what it does. It's not a union, although a sample contract for writers--largely ignored by publishers--was formulated a few years ago. It's not an advocacy group, although a press release or two about NEA assaults on freedom of expression have been released. And it's not a membership organization providing medical insurance or other services for its largely underpaid members. (AICA USA did recently sponsor a weirdly misconceived competition to determine the 10 best museum and gallery shows of 1990-91: The former included "Titian" and "David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble," the latter "Mondrian Flowers" and "David Wojnarowicz.")

Does the international organization--funded by dues from all the national sections--operate differently? AICA president Jacques Leenhardt told me that the group frequently defends critics persecuted for their political beliefs; most recently an unnamed Spanish writer whose visa would otherwise have been revoked for the publication of unpopular views about the French presence in Morocco. The twin emblems of this first post-Cold War congress may have been the State Department's decisions not to issue Cuban critic Adelaida de Juan's visa in time for her to present her scheduled paper, as well as the remarks of Bulgarian critic Philip Zidarov: "Thank you AICA USA and the Getty Trust for bringing me here to see the Pacific Ocean and touch my first palm tree." I'm writing this from the Critic's Corner Café, near the conference site. It's part of the Santa Monica AMC movie complex.

Whit-less, May 12, 1992

What gives with local papers' recent coverage of David Ross? The Whitney's relatively new director has been attracting the sort of attention to minutiae the media usually reserves for "Elvis" Clinton. The New York Observer initiated the feeding frenzy with its March 2 article, ostensibly about the museum's expansion plans, but actually about unattributed bitching by board members and others regarding Ross's exhibition program and his charge accounts at restaurants such as Coco Pazzo. (Can you imagine criticizing the Met's Philippe de Montebello--unlike Ross, the head of a public institution--for power-lunching at uptown eateries?) Then New York Newsday published a piece in mid-April about "The American Century" exhibitions the Whitney is starting to plan for the mid to late '90s (!) that was so sketchy it could only have been designed to scoop the Times's April 19 article, which was widely known to be in the works.

That Sunday "think piece" turned out to be a model of equivocation and muddled thinking. Senior art critic Michael Kimmelman seems to believe that Ross is damned if he does theme or solo shows--and damned if he doesn't do them. Likewise for contemporary and historical exhibitions. Evoking memories of his predecessor, Hilton Kramer, Kimmelman even challenges the museum director to prove that that the "social history and theory" that he sees embodied in the almost totally unformulated "American Century" series can be the basis of compelling exhibitions (!!). The Times's critic seems also to yearn for fewer contemporary--and more historical--one-person shows.