Thank you again, Los Angeles Times Culture Monsters:

Thomas P.F. Hoving, the controversial former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art who died this month, is widely attributed (for good or ill) as the “Father of the Modern Blockbuster Exhibition,” thanks to undertakings like the first King Tut show in 1976. Big extravaganzas with jaw-dropping loans can be a revelation, and at least one from the past year made it onto my list. But so did small, quirky or unexpected presentations, proving once again that it isn't always the manufactured crowd-pleasers that end up pleasing the most. Click on the photo gallery for the 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions I saw this year.

– Christopher Knight

Also:

Architecture 2009: Christopher Hawthorne's Top 10

Music 2009: Mark Swed's Top 10

Theater 2009: Charles McNulty's Top 10

Follow this link:
Art 2009: Christopher Knight’s Top 10

Note from the LA Times Culture Monsters:

Just over a year ago, New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum completed a three-year restoration project for its great landmark building by Frank Lloyd Wright. Among much else, the beautifully done project put a grayish white skin on the original corkscrew building, visually separating it from the undistinguished annex added in the rear in 1992.

The renovation was done in time for the Guggenheim's 50th anniversary celebration — and, happily, in time for the celebratory Vasily Kandinsky retrospective, on view now. Kandinsky (1866-1944) was among the small handful of authentic revolutionaries in Modern art. The big retrospective draws heavily on the incomparable Kandinsky collections at museums in Munich, Paris and New York, but the relationships between his achievements and Wright's remarkable building are one of the unique pleasures of seeing the show at the Guggenheim.

I'll have a full review of the Kandinsky retrospective in Sunday's paper.

– Christopher Knight

Photo: Vasily Kandinsky, “Impression III (Concert)” 1911. Credit: Guggenheim Museum

Originally posted here:
Art review: ‘Kandinsky’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Spot on analysis of right wing flame game on Sheppard Fairey saga by Christopher Knight of LA Times. (hint to extremists: Joe Biden pointed out last fall that “FACTS MATTER”!!)

You have to hand it to the right-wingers. For them, any excuse to trash President Obama is a good excuse, even when the inherent self-contradiction and plain falsehood of the claim make them look as dumb as a box of rocks. Shamelessness is apparently its own reward.

The latest example is Charlotte Allen, a contributing editor for a website of the far-right Manhattan Institute. Writing on the Op-Ed page of today's Times, Allen scolds Obama for having said as a candidate that he was “privileged” and “proud” to have been the subject of graphic artist Shepard Fairey's now-famous “Hope” poster. Fairey, embroiled in a fair-use lawsuit with the Associated Press over the Obama photograph he employed for the work, confessed last week to having lied to the court about the image he used and destroying evidence.

Allen claims that he got away with the deception “because Fairey was 'one of us' in the eyes of the fiercely liberal cultural and intellectual elite.” Her examples? She cites exactly one: “The New Yorker's art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, wrote reverently of the works, calling them 'epic poetry in an everyday tongue'….”

Reverently? The quoted review of Fairey's big retrospective at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art in fact laments that Schjeldahl wished Fairey “were a better artist.” The New Yorker's critic goes on to bemoan Fairey's acts of vandalism in his street art and his “energetic but unoriginal enterprise involving a repertoire of well-worn provocations.”

And what's up with Allen fabricating a plural? The reverence Schjeldahl does not actually display in the review is extended by her to some or all of Fairey's “works, calling them” epic poetry. No. As you can read for yourself here, the Obama poster is the single work to receive that “epic” praise — rightly, to my mind. “A 'Hope' poster hangs alongside about two hundred and fifty slick and, for the most part, far more resistible works” in the show, Schjeldahl wrote in February.

So who does Allen cite as a sterling example of someone who appropriately took Fairey to task for his shenanigans way back when? Again, there's just one: Los Angeles artist Mark Vallen — described without irony as one of “Fairey's fellow leftists in the arts community.”

Huh? Didn't Allen just claim that the fiercely liberal and intellectual elite was responsible for being Fairey's evil enabler? And didn't any right-wingers take him to task back then?

It doesn't stop there. The incoherent screed goes on to insist, without any additional stabs at evidence, that artists and intellectuals “seem to agree that there should be one moral standard for artists and another for everyone else.” Perhaps that's what the shrinks call projection.

Like I say, you've got to hand it to her: Allen gives the concept of “fair use” a whole new, deeply pathetic meaning.

– Christopher Knight

Illustration credit: Wes Bausmith / Los Angeles Times; referenced from a photograph by Peter Foley / EPA

Related:

AP accuses Shepard Fairey of more lying

Shepard Fairey's lawyers say they have not yet withdrawn from AP case

Shepard Fairey admits to wrongdoing in AP lawsuit

Art review: Shepard Fairey at ICA Boston

Read the original:
Using Shepard Fairey to trash President Obama

More thoughtful arts commentary from the LA Times bloggers:

When I was writing the other day about Peter Shelton’s sculptural ensemble for the new Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, I decided to stop by Parker Center, the old police HQ that sparked a huge firestorm over public art when it opened in 1955. (You can read about the earlier ruckus here.) The minute I got there I thought, “Distance lends enchantment to the view.”

Bernard “Tony” Rosenthal’s abstract bronze wall relief just to the right of the entrance doors is a minor sculpture by a minor artist, produced at a time when painting is where most of postwar Modern art’s adventurous action was in America. And at any rate, as I noted in my Shelton review, it wasn’t the relative quality of the art that caused the uproar back then — a dozen years would pass before another abstract sculpture would be commissioned for a downtown public space — an uproar that seems quaint when faced with Rosenthal’s sculpture today.

– Christopher Knight

Photos: Parker Center. Credit: Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times

Related:

Public art review: Peter Shelton’s ‘’sixbeaststwomonkeys’

Sculptures at LAPD’s new home likened to ‘cow splat”

Peter Shelton’s whimsy, all in a row, for the L.A. police HQ

Visit link:
LAPD’s public art has weathered storms

When he was director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Henry T. Hopkins gave the green light to the first major retrospective of Ed Ruscha's paintings. The show, which traveled the U.S. and Canada in 1982 and 1983, was instrumental in securing Ruscha's reputation as a critically important artist — both for Los Angeles, where he began to attract attention as a promising newcomer around 1959, and for a 1980s art world that was just on the cusp of going global.

Hopkins, who died over the weekend at 81, was instrumental in developing L.A.'s art scene. As an educator and a museum director, he was around in the 1960s as the cultural scene began to take off and again after 1986, when he returned from museum jobs in Texas and the Bay Area and L.A. became a powerhouse.

Among my favorite Hopkins stories is a rather harrowing one that concerns Ruscha. Hopkins bought one of the artist's first word-paintings not long after it was made, a transitional 1959 canvas called “Sweetwater.” He paid $200, arranging a $10-a-month payment plan with the young, then-little-known painter…..

– Christopher Knight

Related content:

Henry T. Hopkins dies at 81; painter and museum director had formative role in L.A. art scene

Photo: Henry T. Hopkins with two Ed Ruscha paintings in the background. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Read the entire artice here:
Henry Hopkins and the ‘lost’ Ed Ruscha

Christopher Knight for the LA Times writes:

I do not envy the directors of major art museums the amount of business-related travel their jobs require. No, it's not exactly combat duty. But frequent, far-flung travel is necessary to cultivate relationships, seal deals, keep up with the field and such. Regular travel comes with the job.

Still, I was taken aback by the report by my colleagues Alan Zarembo and Mike Boehm in today's paper, which lays out details of the hefty compensation package provided to Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art since early 2006. In the course of reporting that Govan is on track to collect $6 million over the duration of his 5-year contract, putting his pay near the top among American art museum directors, Zarembo and Boehm take note of an unusual, travel-related perk.

Govan was paid “$1,000 a night to stay in his own New York condominium, while there on museum business.” The deal, according to the written agreement and details subsequently provided by LACMA, “paid Govan $103,000 over three years.”

Being paid to live in your own house is certainly an eyebrow-raiser…..

Related coverage:

Behind Michael Govan's almost $1-million LACMA salary

Discuss: Do you think $1 million is a fair salary for a museum director?

Read the complete article here:
L.A. museum director lived 10% of the time in N.Y.

Read the entire article at
Camilo Ontiveros