by Jon Lackman | 17 December 2008 | Uncategorized
Noted: Art Historians at Work. “Ideas, tips, and ruminations about the teaching of art history. A blog instigated by the History of Art & Architecture graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh.”
Various art magazines also maintain blogs we’ve never much discussed because they’re mostly concerned with who bought what for how much last night. ArtReview, for example, recently posted an interesting report by John Holden on the democratization of culture. See also Artforum‘s Diary, where we recently got word of Dave Hickey’s recent excellent Vanity Fair piece on art fairs:
… [We get] back to the fair for my so-called keynote address, which turns out to be less than the really big deal for which I flew across the Atlantic. The harmony of the Frieze fair, I discover, is so complex as to require four keynotes. Every afternoon some idiot like myself mounts a rickety platform in a dank tent with folding chairs, faces two blazing spotlights, and, with rain drumming on the canvas, says something. When my turn comes, I embark upon a cascade of really bad decisions. First, blinded by the light, I decide to wing it. Second, since I have known nearly everyone in the tent for decades, I abandon euphemism and simply identify the people I’m talking about. Some of them are in the tent, so it seems pretentious not to. Third, I forget my opening remarks and suggest that integrity may be coming back into fashion. This scares everyone sober …
Back at the hotel, there are tantrums in my e-mail from Nebraska and California damning the off-the-cuff remarks I made two hours ago to a few friends in a soggy tent in Regent’s Park. Unbeknownst to me, my talk had been podcast worldwide by Frieze magazine. Oops! The next morning The Art Newspaper hits the stands with a crude, unauthorized, tragically ungrammatical transcription of my remarks. Double oops. To make matters worse, at one point in my talk, I mentioned that collectors in my hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, own a lot of paintings by Morris Louis. Unfortunately The Art Newspaper has turned “Morris Louis,” the post-painterly abstractionist, into “Maurice Lewis,” an artist almost certainly concocted by Googling up a long history of misspellings in the British press. A week later, tan reprints my talk, still uncorrected and unauthorized, with “Maurice Lewis” still featured prominently. This is why we had a revolution.
