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In the recent weeks I have tried to grapple with my opinions of the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition on view at the New York’s Guggenheim Museum that has garnered a great amount of press and conversation.  I couldn’t do it.  The show was just unmemorable and distracted.  An exhibition of an artist so rooted in performance work should highlight it.  But they didn’t.  Instead we saw a lot of preparatory works and a few pedantic sculptures with videos of the performances wedged in where the projectors would fit.  An hour after I left, I had forgotten I had even gone.  So instead, I will say quickly, go to the Metropolitan Museum and see their exhibitions of Jasper Johns and, the newly opened, Gustave Courbet.  In tandem these shows illustrate the trajectory of modernism; from its birth in confident paintings and even cockier attitudes up to anti-emotional, detached encaustic wall-hangings.  Apart, these exhibitions display the consistency and refrain of each artist.  However, together they parlay a disjointed history which is the basis for much of our current art-historical moment.  Make a day of it.  After the shows wander though the halls of our collective culture and reap the benefits. It will be more fulfilling.   

Dan Cameron has announced the star-studded roster for the inaugural run of his ‘Prospect.1 New Orleans.”  This biennial is supposedly aimed at rejuvenating the city which is still reeling from the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina some years ago.  By bringing such names as Cai Guo-Qiang and Fred Tomaselli into the Louisiana bayou, the idea is that something lost in the storm will be reclaimed, that the lives of residents will get better and that the city will actually heal in some capacity.  I am still unsure over the original conception of this event, because all of it sounds like complete make-believe.   Like many others, I do believe in the communicative powers of art.  I also hold that successful works can also parlay some amount of spirituality or emotion or the like.  But I have little faith in contemporary arts ability to bring any level of stability back to a place like New Orleans.  Not only is city still lacking a stable infrastructure, but it is also missing residents and strong political leaders.  That Cameron, a veteran curator and long-time New Orleans fan, thinks a biennial can fix any of those things is myopic at best. I do not believe that this fair is destined for failure, or that it will not bring about some sort of short-term change in the scarred city.  The risk here is more long-term.  On a volunteer trip to the city a year after the storm, it was apparent to me that certain parts, particularly those that catered to privilege, had been rebuilt.  They had running water, police patrols and pedestrian traffic.  Within walking distance from these places, however, some down-trodden neighborhoods were boasting the highest crime rate in the continental United States.  Homes that had been ravaged by the storm were still untouched and the residents were incapable of returning.  Even now, years later, stories of lives interrupted still come out and thousands of New Orleans’s old residents are still dispersed around the country.  In this chapter of New Orleans history, it confuses me what exactly Cameron imagines will be the aftermath of attracting a wealthy art-public to the city.  It may cause some hotels to be built, but with companies drawing contracts with Latin American countries for workers, it will not stimulate the local job market, or bring the old residents back.  It may bring money into the French Quarter and Garden District, but neither were truly incapacitated by the storm.  It may also bring a renewed interest to the city, but without those thousands of residents who are still forced to stay away, NOLA will be only a reminiscent shadow of its former self.  Unfortunately there is little to do but wait and watch as the show goes on view at the end of this year.  One can hope that Cameron will be right and NOLA will be flooded with artsy upstarts aimed at making the city better.  Now it is just a matter of who is defining better.  Sadly, I think those who saw NOLA as a rich center for Jazz and Black American history may not like what develops.  As someone who wants to see the city stabilize itself, I hope that I will be surprised by the outcome of Prospect.1 New Orleans.   

When I eagerly arrived at the Whitney Museum of American Art I would have never thought that I had forgotten a pen.  Oh well, the first is always a cursory look anyway.  So I continued onward.   As more of a review will follow, I being without any true/hard facts about the exhibition, and will reflect only briefly.  ¶Collectively, it was a more cohesive exhibition than the previous two.  With less silly stylistic nuances, the works presented a sobering view of the contemporary art scene.   It seemed to be about life much more than art.  Specificially, it was Javier Téllez’s ‘Letter On The Blind For The Use Of Those Who See’ (2007) that stood out.  The work was simply refreshing.  A marker of sensory perception.  The video showcases six blind people who take turns feeling an elephant in the middle of a drained swimming pool.  It seems surreal, and it is.  However, in concept and execution, the work demands the viewer both appreciate their reality as seeing people while acknowledging something entirely different.   This idea may not be particularly innovative, but Téllez’s photography and mise-en-scéne add human depth.  So whenever you wander through, take a few minutes to watch this one.  You’ll be better for it.  

A few simple facts pervade the contemporary art scene: there is far too much art to process fully, much of it is poorly thought out or aesthetically clumsy and everyone wants to mention the price of an artwork first.  ¶There is an overwhelming amount of art works to see.  There is too much art for any one person to see, let alone process.  Like any aspect of our contemporary culture whether music or film, the playing field is so vast that one can only hope to keep up with the pace of change and not the lose themselves in the details.  Its less about seeing every object - although you must attempt to see as many as you can.  But more, what art should be asking people to do, is contemplate what they are actually seeing and not wonder what they might be missing.  ¶Cynicism can take hold when someone looks at too much art.  Much of what is created under that banner of art is bad.  Some critics prefer to stop the conversation there; only to continue in the face of a ‘masterpiece.’  The problem with that is missing out on the underlying nuance of cultural change.  Just because a work of art may be visually or conceptually sub-par, does not make it an illegitimate creation of our time.   In turn, even a poorly executed artwork can offer insights into the collective understanding of our historic situation.  My intent is not to be broadly accepting of all artworks in an inclusive way.  There does exist such things as ‘good art,’ although this judgement has more to do with historical perspective than inherent qualities.  Simply, consider it all without being simplistically dismissive.  ¶Money is quantitative and as such is something that is easy for people to discuss.   Some art critics as well as a lot of the viewing public are seemingly preoccupied with the weight of gold above anything else.  Innumerable articles ‘examine’ the present art market and offer ‘insider’s advice.’  As one who was educated at an auction house, let me offer this: the works themselves should never be solely discussed as objects of monetary equivalence.  Not only can this debase the nature of the works, but it undermines any aspect of honest criticism.  It matters not what something is worth in gold if it only seen as an abstraction of the stuff.  Paintings, sculpture and all the rest of it are much more valuable, although the return can be worse.  But if your interest in art is reliant on a currency symbol, take the safer bet and trade futures.  ¶In many ways this is my circuitous effort to define ‘art.’ But more simply, take the art world with a grain of salt.  Its less austere than it can make you believe.

¶Dutch artist Michel Francois is preoccupied with the way that we precieve the things of our lives.  His current show is up at Bortolami Gallery on 25th street in Chelsea.  Its good.  He has filled a room with a variety of industrial byproducts, most useless, that have been dipped repeatedly in plaster or encased in minute styrofoam balls.  They play with weight and space and perspective like sculpture is supposed to.  But what makes these things so noteworthy is that they make you think about how we have come to constantly manipulate the artifacts of current history.   ¶Without being didactic or authoritative, Francois’s work looks at how we have collectively altered the products of our industry.  These things are quiet and offer little patronizing instruction. They are not meant to make us reconsider our habit of making such alterations.  Francois merely wants us to be aware of such manipulations.  Like sterilized museum objects, they reflect what our society has put into them.  To further soften this lesson-plan, the artist has garnished them with elements of beauty.  Some have glitter and shimmer under the gallery lighting.  Others demand close inspection of the affected surfaces.  Either way they are entrancing, captivating, fetish-like objects.  ¶These objects alone can only offer a precursor to the true thesis of the show.  A small video piece explains further.  Like the objects, it is simple and austere.  In it wine glasses are juggled by figures disguised in black costumes.   The lighting is minimal which leaves almost nothing to the reel.  But what exists are slight reflections, only momentary.  This fluttering imagery is overlaid with the sound of shattering glasses.  It is apparent that something is going wrong, but the repetition operates as a sedative.  There is no need to panic, things break and we recreate them.  There is an endless supply of glasses to juggle, break and repeat.  Like the fetish ornaments in the other rooms, this video is about our ephemeral appreciation for our own artifacts.  Francois is intent on investigating our relationship with these now mundane things.  Gone are the days of widespread industrial anxiety or novelty.  Where before artists examined the austere beauty in a perfectly created steel box or plastic form, now its about how we are embellishing them with traces of our existence.  These objects are not about how our bodies relate, but how we as a collective of people have broken them down and transformed them into precisely what we want.  They are as  much as an exercise in making beautified objects as they are about reasserting human dominance on the artifacts of our history.