Art on the Block

Thursday, May 30, 2013

ILevel Interviews the Author of Art on the Block

I'm sharing here a concise – but happily accurate – piece that ILevel Art Placement and Installation posted yesterday.

A nice promotion, for which I thank them, and I'm happy to promote right back!

David Kassel and his professionals at ILevel have taken care of the installation and regular re-hanging of my own art for years. They are responsive, reliable and – given that most of his team are working artists – always bring a good critical eye to installation decisions.

(I should perhaps add that the antler installation that ILevel are rocking at right of their post belongs to a collector more adventuresome than I!)

212.477.4319
info@ilevel.biz

05-29-2013

Ann Fensterstock Shares Her Top Spots for Art in New York

In the art world, Ann Fensterstock’s opinion is a respected one. Among her credentials: She holds an M.A. in contemporary art from NYU, she spent ten years on the acquisitions committee at the Museum of Modern Art, and she currently serves as as a member of the museum’s Contemporary Arts Council. Most recently, she authored the upcoming book “ART ON THE BLOCK: Tracking the New York Art World from SoHo to the Bowery, Bushwick and Beyond,” the purpose of which is to “take the reader on a journey through the neighborhoods that shape, and are shaped by, New York’s ever-evolving art world” and to “explore the genesis, expansion, maturation and ultimate restless migration of the New York art world from one initially undiscovered neighborhood to the next.”
Ann Fensterstock book

So who better to ask about the top spots for art in New York and beyond? We got a chance to talk to Fensterstock (also an ILevel client) about her favorite galleries, museums, artists and the (enviable) collection she has in her own home. Here’s what she had to say.
Ann fen

You’re an authority on art in New York City.

I don’t really consider myself ‘an authority’ or an ‘expert’ as that tends to suggest that contemporary art is a lofty or impenetrable thing. I just go to a lot of museums and galleries and look hard.

What are your favorite:

Places to discover new artists?

The studios of Bushwick, the newer galleries of the Lower East Side and the not-for-profit spaces who can show riskier, groundbreaking work without worrying about its current commercial viability.

Art museums large and small?

I’m very involved with MoMA so I obviously have to wave that flag. The Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue is a gem as are all of the Dia Foundation sites. Smaller regional galleries like the Norton in West Palm Beach or the Ogden in New Orleans push me to look at things beyond the contemporary work we collect. Looking at venetian glass, art deco furniture or early photography keeps your eye sharp and your mind open.”

Galleries?

Too many to mention but writing my book forced me to make choices about which one’s I consider to be the most important and which dealers the most visionary. You’re going to have to read it!

New York City artists?

Well New York City has tens of thousands of artists – natives and from elsewhere – so that really covers every name you see on gallery schedules throughout the city.

What’s hanging on your walls?

Our library wall is installed with Modern prints from Picasso, Matisse, Dubuffet, Miro, Max Beckman and Emile Nolde but our bedroom is currently all figurative and contemporary portraiture – Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, Elizabeth Peyton, Mickalene Thomes and Lucien Freud. We have been collecting a lot of photography lately. Yossi Milo, Yancey Richardson and Brian Clamp at ClampArt have found us wonderful pieces. We re-hang quite often.

Do you have a favorite piece of art in your personal collection? What is it?

I tend to be a little fickle about loving our latest acquisition. Currently that is an 84 inch wide Michael Waugh drawing of swarming locusts made up of the words from President Obama’s American Jobs Act.

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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Newly Published Books and a Chelsea Exhibition

• Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas by Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl's memoir is now available, I'm a good half way through it and enjoying it for its candor and clarity.

Courageously honest about his difficult childhood and the impact it had on his art, Fischl is also clear-eyed and even-handed about his career ups and downs throughout the over-heated art markets of the 1980s. Other art stars of the era such as Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Ross Bleckner – most of whom Fischl locked horns with at various points across the years – contribute passages.

Fischl was picked up and championed by the kingmaker dealer Mary Boone (featured with Fischl below) in 1984 and his work, along with that of Schnabel, Salle and Bleckner, took on trophy like status. Selling out shows before they opened, vetting and screening collectors before she would grant them access to her stable and replacing the discreet red dot with the emblazoned name of the grateful purchaser, Boone revolutionized art marketing tactics in a way that left the art world aghast.

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Boy-Life-Off-Canvas/dp/0770435572/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369757093&sr=8-1&keywords=eric+fischl+memoir

The Gallerist's writer Andrew Russeth did a nice piece on a conversation with Fischl a few weeks before publication –

http://galleristny.com/2013/05/to-the-bone-in-new-book-eric-fischl-talks-painting-drinking-snorting/2/

– and Phoebe Hoban (author of Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art) also published an interview in the Wall Street Journal –

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324744104578473224204146336.html

• Scene by Jeannette Montgomery Barron

Jeanette Montgomery Barron's book Scene is now available from powerHouse Books.

Capturing the art world scenes that spawned around such venues as Warhol's Factory and TriBeCa's Odeon restaurant, Montgomery Barron shows us the faces of the fabulous and the famous who swarmed around art stars like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, David Salle, Cindy Sherman and Keith Haring.

I'm delighted to report that powerHouse books, a highly-regarded independent book store and publisher in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, will be hosting a book signing of Art on the Block in September.

http://www.jeannettemontgomerybarron.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=38:scene&Itemid=2

• NYC c. 1985 at ClampArt Gallery

In conjunction with the publication of Scene, Brian Clamp at Chelsea's ClampArt Gallery is including this 'right time, right place' photographer's portraits of the 1980s downtown demi-monde in a show called NYC c. 1985. Works by Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus's daughter Amy will also be on view.

http://clampart.com/2013/05/new-york-city-c-1985/

• Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm

Also on my bedside table is this new collections of essays by Janet Malcolm.

In all probability I'll skim this one, picking out the names that interest me but with Artforum's editor Ingrid Sischy, the German photographer Thomas Struth (who generously granted me permission to use one of his stunning black and white studies of 1970s SoHo in Art on the Block) and – yet again – artist David Salle in her table of contents, it should be worth the purchase price.

Art on the Block's chapter "Decade of Decadence" considers the work of all of these artists, the dealers who vied to market their talents and the places they frequented as SoHo became a fusion of art, money, fashion and power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/books/review/forty-one-false-starts-by-janet-malcolm.html

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

A Third Great Show and a Second Great Tour

For readers anxious to experience in the flesh as much of what I write about in Art on the Block before the book launches on September 17, a third exciting exhibition is about to open in New York.

From May 9 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, British-born curator Andrew Bolton's "Punk: Chaos to Couture" will explore the evolution of the Punk movement of the mid- to late-1970s and its effects – not just on music, but on fashion, art and attitude.

I recommend the exhibition less for its promise of showing the output of visual artists of the era (this is a Costume Institute affair) but more for capturing the zeitgeist, or spirit, of those turbulent times. The Punk backdrop is very much a part of the broader sociological context in my sections "The Roots of Restlessness", "East of Eden" and "The East Village Scene". Richard Hell, the Ramones, the New York Dolls, Debbie Harry of Blondie and Anya Phillips (below) are all featured in the book as they made and changed history at downtown clubs like CBGB.

For those of you who missed it, there were two, different takes on the upcoming show in the New York Times over the weekend – one from Jon Caramanica and the other from Melena Ryzik. Both help flesh out the origins of Punk and give it context beyond its British origins and garage band music roots:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/arts/design/punk-chaos-to-couture-at-the-mets-costume-institute.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/arts/design/anarchy-in-the-met.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1367424319-T+td4LhVhrn/7ZbcmsnEZA

Don't forget to add the New Museum's 1993 exhibit and MoMA's Claes Oldenburg's The Store and The Street to your itineraries. Details of those two exhibitions are posted below in earlier blogs.

And from Artview –

Due to overwhelming demand, (Artview likes to keep things big enough for a group dynamic but small enough for discussion), a second date has been opened up for the 'SoHo of the 70's' tour.
Wednesday, May 15 is now fully subscribed but we will repeat the tour the following day.

If you would like to join us from 11am until 1pm on Thursday, May 16 for a return to the cradle of the New York contemporary art scene, please connect with Lacy Doyle at artviewnyc.com or register at the link below:

http://www.artviewnyc.com/events/

Thursday, April 25, 2013

The Judd Foundation Acknowledges the Upside of Money

With what should be a stunning new addition to SoHo's cultural landscape, the Judd Foundation has begun to share images of the lovingly (and painstakingly) restored interior of the great Minimalist sculptor's live/work loft at 101 Spring Street.

Purchased in 1968 as SoHo was first taking hold as a burgeoning art center, and used until Judd's death in 1994, the five story building will open to the public in June as a museum of art, ephemera and creative ambiance. Striving to retain what they describe as the "ineffable meditative quality" of the space, it's interesting to hear Judd's daughter Rainer acknowledge nevertheless the power of modern technology, architectural know-how and the financing that both demand. Running counter to the usual knee-jerk demonization of all things gentrifying, Rainer Judd reconciles the realities saying:

“After ‘84, ‘85 [the neighborhood] changed, and I don’t track the changes so much since then,” she said. “It’s been more people and more money and variations of that, but there’s an upside to people with money coming in that’s also true in spaces of nature: It means it gets taken care of.” "

To read more and see an excellent 22 image slide show go to:

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/895026/donald-judds-children-prepare-his-serene-art-filled-soho?utm_source=BLOUIN+ARTINFO+Newsletters&utm_campaign=9a20a2a703-Daily+Digest+4.25.13&utm_medium=email

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Last Week and Next Month

Last Thursday I was delighted to spend the morning with art world educator, curator and former gallerist Amy Smith-Stewart addressing her students at one of the Sotheby's Institute of Art 'Short Courses.' Titled 'The Gallery Business: A Practical Guide', I helped Amy kick off her three-day program with a very tightly packaged overview of the history of New York's art galleries. Fifty years in 90 minutes is quite the challenge so to anyone interested in attending this annual offering next year, I strongly recommend you read the book!

http://www.sothebysinstitute.com/Programmes/PNewyork/PNPublicProgrammes/Gallery-Business.aspx

On Wednesday May 15th, from 11 am until 1pm, I will be working again with my long-time friend and colleague Lacy Doyle at Artview offering an architectural history and gallery tour of SoHo.
Working from the early chapters of Art on the Block we will go back to the late 1960s cradle of the downtown art world and revisit some of the original haunts where pioneers like Paula Cooper, Ivan Karp, Leo Castelli and Mary Boone first began. We will also be looking in on some of the galleries and not-for-profits that have chosen to stay in SoHo all of these years and a number of newer enterprises that have succumbed to it's lingering charms. Register for the tour below.

http://www.artviewnyc.com/events/

When I'm Asked "Where Next? . . .

Having just written a 50 year history of the ever-migrating art districts of New York City, it's understandable that I am regularly asked where I think the next one will be – and whether it will even be in New York.

Over the course of the 150 some interviews that I did for Art on the Block, the final question I always put to interviewees – to dealers, non-profit directors, artists – was "What do you think? Where else might the art world go?" Responses ranged from the Upper East Side to back to SoHo, Dubai to back to Paris. This week art info.com kicked off a three part series looking at Los Angeles as a well-chewed-over possibility

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/891824/patronage-in-la-part-1-of-3-how-capricious-donors-stymie-a

Their initial discussion is well balanced I think.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

"Marking Spaces: New York City's Landmark HIstoric Districts" at the Queens Museum of Art.

The recently formed NYC Landmarks50 Advisory Committee is wisely giving itself two full years to lead into the celebration of the Landmarks Preservation Commission formed in 1965.

As Art on the Block describes, the Landmarks Commission was formed in the very late stages of Robert F. Wagner's third and final term as mayor. It was up to the incoming Lindsay administration, however, to put the law to work and to move into the next decade avoiding the kind of rash architectural destruction that led to the tear down of the historic McKim Mead and White Pennsylvania Station.

The Queens Museum of Art opens its "Marking Spaces: New York City landmark Historic Districts" on April 14th with a nice dust off of Robert Moses legendary Panorama. Designed in 1964 by Wagner's appropriately tagged "Master Builder,' the Panorama shows every building in the five boroughs constructed before 1992.

The exhibition's timing seems ironic in view of the debate raging around the Museum of Modern Art's decision to demolish the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's Folk Art Museum, hardly a relic at 12 years old.

Read more:

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/889904/iconic-robert-moses-panorama-repurposed-to-honor-nyc-landmarks?utm_source=BLOUIN+ARTINFO+Newsletters&utm_campaign=203fed8dab-Daily+Digest+4.11.13&utm_medium=email