The Art Angle

It is not a happy time to be an arts advocate in the United States. The last year has seen the real threat of eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, and the spectacle of the head of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History hauled in front of Congress to be publicly grilled about her programming by Republicans.

For many observers, all this is very alarming, but also gives the sinking feeling of having seen this story play out before. You often hear that we are living through a return of the “culture wars,” the turbulent period of very public, very bruising battles over decency and public funding for the arts from the late 1980s and early 1990s. In many ways, what happened back then set the template for the politics of today.

This is the story told in the recently published book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars. In it, author Isaac Butler revisits the various battles over the National Endowment for the Arts from of the ‘80s and ‘90s. He joins Ben Davis today to go through this history, and to ask what it can tell us about the present.

Images:

Projection of a Robert Mapplethorpe self-portrait during a protest at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Photographed June 30, 1989 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Carol Guzy/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Christians protest outside the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, at the portrayal of Christ in Martin Scorsese's film 'The Last Temptation of Christ', New York City, 13th August 1988. One of the placards reads: 'God Damns Blasphemy'. (Photo by Barbara Alper/Getty Images)

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, (1987). Courtesy Andres Serrano.

If you are in New York this month, I have to insist that you make it over to the 41 Cooper Gallery at Cooper Union in the East Village, where an absolutely thrilling group show is on view through October 31. The exhibition looks at the history and continued resonance of Guild & Greyshkul, a storied gallery that operated from 2003 to 2009 in SoHo. It features work by more than 70 artists, famous and obscure, younger and older, including Mariah Robertson, Dana Schutz, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Ryan Johnson, B. Wurtz, Ryan Muller, and Valerie Hegarty. Some exhibited at the gallery, and others were part of its extended network.

The show was organized by Guild & Greyshkul’s three intrepid artist founders, Anya Kielar, Johannes VanDerBeek, and Sara VanDerBeek, at the invitation of Adriana Farmiga, the dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, and Yuri Masnyj, its associate dean. All five have work in the show.

Sara VanDerBeek recently came by the Artnet News offices to discuss how she and her colleagues built Guild & Greyshkul as young artists in New York. She spoke with Andrew Russeth about how they made ends meet (spoiler alert: it was not always easy), why they decided to pull the plug, and the advice she would offer to someone opening a space today. It’s a conversation about a brief moment in time that I think gets at issues that many artists, curators, and dealers are confronting as New York becomes increasingly expensive and its art scene in some ways becomes more and more averse to risk.

One of the major museum events of the fall is called "Krasner and Pollock, Past Continuous," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It brings together 120 artworks by two of the titans of 20th-century American painting: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. The two famously were a couple, and this show claims to be the first to look at their artworks specifically together as a dialogue.

Jackson Pollock was, and is, known as the indispensable abstract expressionist. His expansive style of drip painting, made by throwing paint across a canvas on the ground, caught the media and the public's imagination in the early 1950s. The sensation around these paintings remade U.S. art. For many years, Krasner's reputation was in his shadow. Pollock died tragically in a car crash in 1956. Krasner lived on until 1984, and the Met show illustrates how she continued to experiment.

These days, museums are featuring Krasner's inventive and varied paintings as much as Pollock's. A rebalancing, this show seems bound to continue. The title of the show even comes from a collage painting by Krasner from the 1970s. Having just returned from the exhibition, Ben Davis was inspired to talk specifically about Lee Krasner, who she was, where she came from, and what makes her art unique and lasting. And so we reached out to the art historian Mary Gabriel, author of the very engaging 2018 bestseller, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art.

What does it mean to make art on the internet? It's not a new question, but it's far from a settled question. From very early on in the history of the World Wide Web, artists leapt in to start experimenting, and very shortly after that, the organization Rhizome was born. Dedicated to digital art, it quickly became one of the most important advocates and keepers of its history.

Last week, Rhizome celebrated its 30th birthday with a gala that brought together the luminaries of online art, both present and historical, and an art show titled "WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!" showing web-based work by Lorna Mills, Rafaël Rozendaal, Maya Man, Kim Asendorf, Luke Shannon, and many other names you either know or should know.

This was the perfect time to talk to Michael Connor, longtime co-director of Rhizome. Ben Davis speaks with him to get the history of art online in all its chaos, and to asks him where he thinks it might be going next.

For many, many reasons, it has been several months since we have done one of our Art Angle chat-casts, where we assemble writers to talk about a few different news stories on the site. But it's September, and we're finally back at it.

Today we'll be talking about three topics:

First, here in New York, the fall art season kicked off with literally hundreds of gallery openings, followed by a bunch of fairs this week. The fall openings are always an event. This year, they're even more closely scrutinized, given how uncertain business has felt behind the scenes. We'll talk about highlights and observations from the galleries.

Second, on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has finally debuted. The brainchild of Star Wars maestro George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, the long-in-the-works, billion-dollar institution has its own quirky vision of art. We'll talk about what that is and whether it works.

And finally, we'll talk about developments in the truly epic divorce of Libbie and David Mugrabi, which touches on hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of art. I don't know if we'll even get to all the details, but the story involves a very important Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, allegations of someone hiring a Russian hitman, and a dog named Botox.