If ever there were a middle-of-the-road exhibition, this year’s Whitney Biennial is it. In the spirit of an Obama promise for ‘Change’ and to ostensibly try to please everyone—traditional nattering nabob art critics included—guest curator Francesco Bonami and Whitney senior curatorial assistant Gary Carrion-Murayari transformed, with a few standout exceptions, what is usually a messy and colorful cacophony of coloratura voices all fighting to be heard, into a relatively tame and well-ordered blue-haired lady. This latest effort by the Whitney appears to lack pizzazz, speaking mostly in low, hushed tones and preferring dressed-down matinees to paparazzi-fueled, red carpet openings.Fine Arts MagazineMore
This unusual story may not at first appear to be entirely relevant when considering the dark magic of insurance. Certainly many people need a cup of strong coffee before submitting themselves to an insurance analysis. But, other than that, what relevance is there between insurance and the art of coffee making…possibly, none.
(left): An illustration of Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, 1798, which served as a headquarters for marine underwriters. Fine Art MagazineMore
The original Ocean House, Bluff Ave. view at the turn of the last century
More than half a dozen grand hotels once graced the Watch Hill, peninsula on the western shore of Rhode Island, but a decade ago only one remained, Ocean House, an aging and ailing wooden behemoth whose top floors had been condemned for years. Odds were increasing that this iconic landmark, its era long past, would soon vanish like the rest.
By 2003, bumper stickers around Watch Hill implored “Save Ocean House.” The 1868 renowned, resort, ocean front hotel, where the silent movie “American Aristocracy” starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was filmed, had just closed for good. Its future was manifestly uncertain. If Ocean House was torn down, could a litter of McMansions be far behind? Fine Art MagazineMore
And by obligation, of course, I mean the artist’s motivation to deliver a work of art to the world that represents a highly individualized statement about a relevant theme or subject. In doing so, should the impact, legitimacy and enduring success of that creative effort be measured by the response of the viewer, alone? Is art deemed ‘important’ or ‘timeless’ if it resonates with the consciousness of the public? Or is it ultimately a private exercise in expression by the artist, requiring no moral or didactic justification, wherein capturing the attention and interest of the viewer is merely incidental? Is it true, as French artist and critic, Théophile Gauthier, argued in the 19th century, that the artist’s embrace of, ‘Art for art’s sake’ would protect him from the purely utilitarian and pragmatic demands of public taste and other external influences? And must art remain aloof from the currents of public taste to remain cogent today? This polemic is at the heart and soul of the long-standing debate about the creative forces that have shaped the artistic arena in the modern era.More
The Strip seen from the desert with Robert Venturi’s silhouette, 1966. Photograph by Denise Scott Brown.
There will be no ruins of Las Vegas. Everything of its previous history is absolutely erased by design. Nothing will be left to uncover, as David Macaulay did in his post-apocalyptic comic, Motel of the Mysteries, which imagined a Howard Carter-like excavation of a roadside motor lodge.
What seemed absolutely contemporary in 1968, when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wandered the Strip (since renamed Las Vegas Boulevard) with an assortment of Yale architecture students, has vanished, like the Stardust Hotel into its imploding cloud.
So there is a reluctant dismay – more like a nostalgia begrudged – that accompanies this Yale exhibition, a composite of two separate retrospectives of work by the architects.More
Our minds become numb and our eyes glaze over as the harsh reality of yet another natural tragedy in the world enters the corner of our visual field. Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, has once again been devastated by disaster. Having the misfortune to be built over one the many tectonic faults that thread their way across the Caribbean Ocean floor, Port-au-Prince was, at best, a house of cards before the recent quake. Afterward, the rubble that was once the city may serve as the final resting place for thousands.
This is not so much a matter of the quake’s intensity (a more powerful tremor in San Francisco Bay in 1989 claimed 83 lives). This is a story of poverty and desperation for a people that know no relief from sorrow. Hurricanes, civil unrest and unemployment at 80% leave most of the population living permanently on the precipice of despair. Now with an estimated 200,000 dead, 350,000 injured and three million more desperate people displaced onto the streets, the community of Haiti is on the brink of violence and social collapse.More
E.H. Gombrich’s, The Story of Art, famously begins with the thought that, “There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” Contemporary art has indeed fulfilled Gombrich’s prescience and insight with a somewhat sorrowful consequence, probably unforeseen when first published in 1950. The past half century has birthed an art in which the conceptual presence of the artist has eclipsed his creation – the work of art. As theory and ideas have become both the driving force of the artist’s creation and the measure against which the viewer evaluates it, the ‘work of art’ has been subject to a draining of its language, i.e.- of its ability to articulate its own reason for being. This deficit of language is now manifest in an excessive reliance on a large infrastructure of ancillary exposition to give voice to these concepts. In this way the work of art has become relegated to a mere illustration of the artist’s thought and unable to dialogue independently of its context.More
Interpretation of Monet’s, Nymphia. Classic Impressionism and the retail tie-ins would bring out the crowds to museums in record numbers
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In a 1999 New York Times report on museum attendance for the previous decade, increases of 20% were reported in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Based on a survey by The Art Newspaper, blockbuster exhibits by the likes of Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin and Winslow Homer’s private collection drew thousands of eyes and millions of dollars to some of the most established museums in the world. Shows featuring the ever-popular Impressionists (both French and American) appeared to be a can’t-miss formula for art institutions, both large and small. One spokesperson interviewed for the piece proclaimed that, The museum plays an incredible role in American cities: it’s a focal point, a place for entertainment, for shopping [my italics].”More
It is an indomitable part of the human spirit to find hope in despair; a reason to keep believing when people and causes we once believed in are no longer there- when the footing of our comfortable existence appears to shift with the unsettling suddenness and violence of an earthquake.
The global events of recent months have led to surprise after surprise, as we watch long-standing economic and commercial icons tumble and fall under the weight of decades of poor judgment and bad choices. One is reminded of the poet, Shelly’s words about the fallen statue of a once-powerful king of ancient times, in his 1817 poem, Ozymandias, where he reminds us that, with the ruins of time, “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.” But, within the difficult scenario of tough economic times lies a kernel of hope and the seeds of a revolution for those of us in the design/build community who are willing to pay attention.
A one-hundred-and-four year old woman recently reminded me that her experience of the Great Depression of 1929-35– far more serious and far-reaching than what we are currently undergoing—did not impact on daily life for most people in the same way as today, More
Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, Antoine Pevsner, 1926, cellulite and copper (Yale Univ.)
What might happen to Dorian Gray’s portrait after the story ends? Decayed by age, it has experienced the ultimate restoration, having been returned to a pristine original state by its subject’s effort to destroy it. This is an irony, of course, and one hopes that the murder of the artist and the suicide (if unintended) of the subject are not absolute prerequisites for the kind of resolution being sought by the various curators and conservators whose projects are on view in this necessarily wordy exhibition.
Insert: Russian sculptor and Constructivist, Antoine Pevsner, with one of his sculptures, 1938
But it is impossible not to think of the Oscar Wilde novel when looking at Antoine Pevsner’s assembled portrait of Marcel Duchamp, crumpled in upon itself, with parts of it turned to rust and powder. The composition of cellulose, copper nitrate and iron was a recipe for self-destruction. It’s gone, turned to something not unlike a desiccated corpse on the shelf of a monastic catacomb which, if it were displayed vertically as it was meant to be, would immediately disappear.
The Kahn Wing, Yale University Art Center
But what it has become is extraordinary in its fragile futility. There is nothing to be done. A replica has been fashioned of different materials which current evidence suggest may be more stable than Pevsner’s original choices (the artist was aware of the work’s defects, and made alterations, which only hastened the damage), but is a chill approximation at best. And is there anything but a difference of degree which separates this piece from any other work that is not the “foster-child of Silence and slow Time,” (as Keats’s hidden Grecian urn briefly was) but rather, is held in the abusive care of its actual parent, ruin?
Conservation begins by giving a definition of loss. But to know that there was a loss is not always to know precisely what the loss was. The absence may be in some way diminished, without being accurate. This is the case for a 1st century Roman figure with a right arm from some other sculpture attached to it. The mistake can be removed, but not corrected. No restoration can be absolute.
Conservators sometimes develop ideas of salvation that resemble those of the army officer in Vietnam who reported having destroyed a village in order to save it. A 6th century mosaic removed and embedded in concrete is a hulking fragment, alienated from both past and present. In contrast, repairs made to a Korean tea bowl and Greek drinking cup in their own time were meant simply to preserve them for use, not to guarantee their survival as museum objects. There is also accidental preservation as in the underside of a lid on an Italian wedding chest where the painting of a female figure, nude save for hips bound with a fringe of flowers and pubic leaves, was kept safe for its private audience of forsaken modesty.
Among the mockeries of restoration and restorations as betrayal included here is a restoration as benign fiction. A 16th century painting, Conversion of St. Paul, not a forgery, was later remounted and then had old worm eaten wood applied to its back in order to make it appear consistent with its history.
Thomas Wilfred’s early twentieth century light machines made use of a now obsolete technology which, if operated, would accelerate the complete breakdown of his slapdash electronics. But is the real question here one of reconstructing the effects or the mechanism? What would he have used had it been available, given that there was nothing permanent to what he intended?
Before Restoration (above) and After: The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Saints, from the workshop of Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1305-1310, tempera on panel (restored in 2004) Yale Univ. Art Gallery
A drawing for Edward Hopper’s painting, Sunlight in a Cafeteria, contains what endangers it in its title – its charcoal on acidic paper, already unstable, is slowly erased by light. The painting itself is also on view, with a graph recording the “Fourier transform infrared spectra” of copal varnish used, and now darkening, on its surface. But I came away angry that I had been given this information. There are things that one should refuse to know for the sake of encountering the work itself, damaged as it might be.
The motives for restoration sometimes involve competing strategies, where later choices are a critique of previous ones. A number of early European paintings in Yale’s collection were at one point reduced to only what was verifiably original work. What resulted in some cases resembled an primitive seafarer’s map, with islands and archipelagos of color isolated on a wooden sea. A 14th century Sienese panel of the, Virgin and Child Enthroned, that was subject to this imperious treatment has now been carefully, if only partly, repainted. Before that, according to one curator’s passionate assertion, it had been “too painful” to look at.
But, as I reflected later, perhaps that was the point that actually needed conserving. Losses require our attention, especially when ideal preservation would mean removing every work of art from our sight. This does not require making of the museum some chilled mortuary for dying paintings. Rather, we should stand in front of each and, like Yeats, “for every tatter in its mortal dress,” sing.
“Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation” 
