ABOVE: Vertical food at the newly renovated Walker Art Center’s Wolfgang Puck-run restaurant: Tuna Sashimi and Tartare with Yuzu Citrus-Soy Ponzu and Sticky Rice topped with Daikon-Carrot Salad.

This is totally off-topic and pretty much pointless, but how could we turn down a food review of the newly blinged-out Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Star-Tribune is today running its review of 20.21, the all-digit-and-punctuation restaurant that was shoehorned into the Walker’s $130 million renovation. 20.21 is run—from a safe distance—by fusion-food-fuhrer Wolfgang Puck, who we believe is kept frozen in a meat locker most of the year, defrosting only around Oscar® time to harangue us all (via the medium of “Entertainment Tonight”) about whatever ludicrous chimerical cuisine he’s serving to the celebrities this time around.

But we digress. Rick Nelson of the Star-Trib notes that the restaurant is actually mostly art-free, save for a Warhol Marilyn keeping watch over the reservations list. The atmosphere, he says, is “starkly chic,” and suggests avoiding the Sunday brunch. The restaurant offers “multiculti dishes boasting bright flavors and looks as striking as any Joan Mitchell canvas hanging in the galleries below.” There’s that art metaphor we were looking for.

But remember what Peter DeVries said: “The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.” You’ve been warned.

LINK: Minneapolis Star-Tribune > 20.21’s cuisine imitates art

ABOVE: detail from Richard Serra’s Wake (2002-2003), which will be the centrepiece of the new Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. The SAM broke ground on the new outdoor exhibition space last week.

The Seattle Art Museum put their shovels in the ground last week to start construction of their new Olympic Sculpture Park, a big new outdoor public exhibit space on a former brownfields site. The planned park is a triple threat, do-gooder wise: it’ll put important works by important artists out in a free-to-the-public venue, supposedly revitalize the neighbourhood, and detoxify a polluted vacant lot.

The Olympic Sculpture Park (not named after the bloated and corrupt international quadrennial sporting monstrosity, it turns out, but after the Olympic Mountains, which can be seen from the site) will include works by Richard Serra (see above), Alexander Calder, Teresita Fernandez, and Tony Smith. The SAM is also planning two other expansions right now—an expansion for the main musuem in 2007 and renovations to the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 2008—and raising money for all three projects. You can gape at their plans and hand over your credit cards at their cutely-named campaign website.

LINK: Seattle Art Museum Breaks Ground on the 8.5 Acre Olympic Sculpture Park [via ArtDaily]

Ok, so someone was tipping cows at the server farm last night. Different, exotic technical difficulties persist today. We throw up our hands, and promise to post twice—twice!—tomorrow.

ABOVE: detail from Al Brandtner’s Patriot Act (see ADD, April 13). New York Governor Al Pataki told the papers this week that artworks slated to be included in the increasingly inaccurately named Freedom Center at Ground Zero will include no such expressions of “America-bashing.”

We know, we know, it’s the New York Daily News, and nothing the Murdoch Mouthpiece says can be taken with the slightest bit of seriousness by right-thinking people such as ADD’s discerning readers. But it’s simply too hilarious, and we’re still recovering from that week off inoculating orphans in Tanzania. We must pick the low-hanging fruit where it hangs.

We find ourselves perversely concurring with the Daily Snooze on their labelling of 9/11 art as “kooky.” Though we’re coming up on four years since that fateful morning, the events of September 11th, 2001 have yet to be addressed seriously and satsifactorily by any artwork that we have come across. What we see is trite in its politics, uninspired in its execution, and limp in its emotional resonance.

But that’s beside the point. The 9/11 angst of today is what kind of groups are going to be allowed to contribute art to the “Freedom Center,” the museum-monument planned for Ground Zero. Apparently some of the involved groups “hate America” and are therefore not free to contribute any more. Apparently Gov. Pataki, who is a leading voice for the shocked and appalled, feels no cognitive dissonance whatsoever vis-a-vis dictating what may and may not be said at the Freedom Center. In a world where “Orwellian” is misused and abused so often in overheated rhetoric, we wish to point out that this is in fact a textbook definition of the term. Discuss.

LINK: New York Daily News > Nutty 9/11 Art Nixed

ABOVE: detail from Liu Xiaodong’s Prostitute 2 (2001). Liu’s work is gaining in popularity both inside and outside China. Observers have watched the Chinese art market heat up in the last few years, but skepticism abounds.

The Art Newspaper noted yesterday that there are 45 Chinese artists represented at Art Basel this year, a significant jump. Always keen to follow the money, TAN noted that while the market for Chinese art used to be exclusively the decadent west, there is a domestic boom going on, with Nouveau-Riche Reds snapping up contemporary Chinese art at never-before seen rates. The Party has also apparently jumped on the bandwagon and is boosting contemporary artists, apparently even discussing construction of a permanent pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where Chinese officials attened the official opening last weekend.

The Art Newspaper says that this new trend is not driven by money, per se—although prices for art by the hottest Chinese artists are spiralling up into the ludicrous amounts that are now standard everywhere else in the world—but because it’s another area in which they are expanding their diplomatic and cultural legitimacy. Look for a good anecdote in the middle of the story about Jiang Zemin being humiliated on a trip to France when Jacques Chirac tried to talk to him about paintings and Jiang didn’t have anything to say; the official Chinese stance on painting changed soon after he got back from that trip. The French save the world from barbarity once again.

LINK: The Art Newspaper > Banking on China

ABOVE: details of a photobooth self-portrait of Andy Warhol, part of the contents of “Time Capsule 21,” one of Warhol’s more than 600 such boxes containing ephemera of his life and work. Four such boxes will be opened for the first time as part of Dia:Beacon’s Warhol retrospective, “Dia’s Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage,” which opened yesterday.

To celebrate its second anniversary, Dia:Beacon (aka Escape from New York: The Gallery) opened yesterday its Andy Warhol retrospective, “Dia’s Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage.” Dia amassed a formidable Warhol collection throughout the 70s and later donated most of it to the Warhol Foundation to start the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 1994. Now a lot of that stuff has come back to roost for the show, which sounds a little chaotic: the Brillo boxes will be all over the place, there are silkscreens, wallpapers, films, sculptures, and several of Warhol’s Time Capsules, essentially banker’s boxes full of the artist’s detritus, like letters, photos, magazines, comic books, scraps of paper with little notes on them—it’s quite the trove.

Many of the Time Capsules have never been opened, and four will be opened and displayed for the first time as part of this show. Dia has got all kinds of balls up in the air on this exhibit, with several lectures and screenings planned, a catalogue in the style of Warhol’s Interview magazine, and a companion show called “In and Out of Place: Louise Lawler and Andy Warhol,” on photographer Lawler who has shot 25 years worth of photos incorporating Warhol’s work. It all sounds quite exhausting, so perhaps you should instead look at the Warhol Museum’s online gallery of the contents of Time Capsule 21 and have a little lie-down.

LINK: Dia:Beacon > Exhibition of works by Andy Warhol on view at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries

ABOVE: detail from Kerry Skarbakka’s Interstate (2003), part of the artist’s “The Struggle to Right Oneself” series. Skarbakka was jumping from the roof of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday for a photo shoot.

In what he has termed an instance of “performance photography,” Kerry Skarbakka was leaping from the roof of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday and invited the public to come and watch him do it. Skarbakka, who has been working on a series of photographs called “The Struggle to Right Oneself” since shortly after September 11, 2001, says the project is a response to images of office workers at the World Trade Center leaping from windows as the buildings fell. “I was so distraught, I needed some way to find an artistic response,” Skarbakka told the Chicago Sun-Times in a story today. The photos depict Skarbakka falling or leaping from train bridges, windows, overpasses, beds, flights of stairs, and other precipices (precipi?); usually his fall is controlled with harnesses and cables. Assistants take the photos, but Skarbakka later touches them up digitally, photoshopping out the safety gear.

The most interesting thing about the Sun-Times article on the performance is the responses of the people on the street, many of whom just happened to be ambling past. Their responses to the work run a surprisingly wide range, from the guy with the dog who thinks the true artwork would be Skarbakka’s bloodied corpse on the sidewalk, to Joan W. Herring, a “retired housewife” on vacation from Marietta, Georgia, who seemed truly fascinated with what Skarbakka was doing: “For artists today, everything two-dimensional has been done,'’ she told the Sun-Times with an authority (we’re sorry to say) we don’t often expect from retired housewives from Henrietta, GA. “The contemporary artist has to find a new way to express himself.'’ Amen, sister.

LINK: Chicago Sun-Times > Photographer falls for his art

ABOVE: left, detail of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks; right, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. The Chronicle of Higher Education says art students are now trained to be “half-baked social scientists,” rather than serious artistes. Zing!

The world is going to hell in a handcart. Art students these days would rather slather themselves with paté and shave weasels inside a plexiglass box suspended in the Tate Modern foyer than sit quietly with a bit of charcoal and sketch the wonder of nature. Art schools have abandoned craft for flash, trashed their still-life seminars, embraced theory and concept instead of good, wholesome drawing and painting. It’s true: we read it in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Apparently you can buy water in bottles now, too, instead of digging your own well. And those horseless carriages are awfully popular these days. It’s a crazy old world, dontcha know!

The Chronicle, which might as well rename itself Harrumph Weekly, for the number of these ridiculous kids-these-days essays it runs, says that art schools are getting weaker on craft and skill and emphasizing superficial individual expression and theoretical wankery. OK, point taken, there are art school students graduating right now who couldn’t sketch a bowl of pears if you put a gun to their heads, but let’s have a little perspective. That which is new is not automatically inferior to that which is old. The world already contains an awful lot of oil paintings depicting bowls of pears, and perhaps it’s OK to take a breather for a bit. We’ve worked on charcoal sketches of voluptuous nudes for, oh, about a billion years, so perhaps we can have the conviction and the patience to experiment with this video art thing for another decade or so and see if it pans out. They’re really into tradition over at the Chronicle, but they seem to believe it’s awfully fragile.

Also, that Joyce reference in the headline: totally original thinking, guys. Bravo.

LINK: The Chronicle of Higher Education > A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess [via ArtsJournal]

ABOVE: Some of the iconic work of Barbara Kruger, who was honored with a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Commentators are noting the strong showing of female artists at Venice this year.

The Venice Biennale opened officially yesterday, curated for the first time in its 110-year history by two women. Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez of Spain are the historic duo, and have made some historic choices, exhibiting the work of the semi-anonymous New York collective Guerrilla Girls, whose work is strongly reminiscent of the words-and-pictures style of Barbara Kruger, who was herself in Venice to receive a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. Four of five Golden Lions went to women this year, another first.

The Australian did a story on the strong showing of female artists this year which was almost comic in its “Lady cops? Now I’ve seen everything!” tone: “The Biennale as a whole is refreshingly diverse and not overwhelmingly political,” it reads, “But a feminist agenda was already apparent before the official prizes were announced on Friday night.” Yep, those chicks and their agendas. ABC (the A is for Australia) also noted the presence of scary tampon-based art. Us, we see a future in which all art is made of tampons. And the museums it appears in are all made of tampons. And the computer you’re reading this on right now? Oh yeah. Tampons.

LINK: The Australian > Lion’s Share for Women

ABOVE: Detail of Richard Serra’s new installation, A Matter of Time which opened earlier this week at the Guggenheim Bilbao. The New York Times calls it “one of the great works of the past half-century.”

The funniest thing about this New York Times review of Richard Serra’s new installation/renovation at the Guggenheim Bilbao has to be the correction which was added to the online version yesterday:

“Because of an editing error, a review in The Arts on Tuesday about Richard Serra’s sculptural installation at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, misstated the whereabouts of “Tilted Arc,” a Serra sculpture that was removed in 1989 from Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. It was initially carted to a yard, not a dump….”

The original story, which remains intact on the Times’ website, does indeed say that Serra’s Tilted Arc was carted to a dump because the public hated it so much. But Michael Kimmelman also makes the much-needed point that Serra’s sculptures have grown on the public with a little time and patience, and he’s now gone from being perceived as “an angry man devising menacing sculptures” to a sculptor-colossus bestriding the world and blithely rearranging Frank Gehry’s lopsided gallery spaces with his huge steel ribbons. The review glows with praise, (”it’s a benchmark for the young century”) and the accompanying photos certainly help the case.

The Times‘ correction adds that Tilted Arc is now in government storage. It’s probably in that locked filing cabinet that no one has the key to.

LINK: The New York Times > Abstract Art’s New World, Forged for All

ABOVE: detail of The Tree of Life, built out of decommissioned guns after the Mozambican civil war by Cristovao Canhavato (usually known as Kester), Hilario Nhatugueja, Fiel dos Santos and Adelino Serafim Maté. It is part of the British Museum’s current “Views from Africa” show.

Today The Guardian is running a sort of meta-review of the British Museum’s “Views from Africa” show, written by the museum’s director, Neil MacGregor. He doesn’t spend much time talking about the art itself, but instead waxes on the curious, tortured relationship of England and Africa, the current devastation of parts of the continent, and the role of religion in rebuilding—in some cases building, period—African civil society.

Forming a sort of centrepiece of the show is The Tree of Life, a sculpture made out of thousands of guns left over from the civil war that ravaged Mozambique from 1976 to 1992. It’s a bit of a tired metaphor—swords into plowshares, yadda-yadda—but no less impressive and effective for it. Close up, it’s quite a piece of craftsmanship, as you can see in the museum’s online gallery. The different chunks of the exhibit are on view through most of the summer, and admission is free.

LINK: Guardian Unlimited > Art of Africa

ABOVE: Alexander Calder’s Untitled (1976), which has just been re-hung at the National Gallery in Washington after a refurbishing.

Alexander Calder’s last major work, a mobile for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was re-unveiled yesterday after getting a year’s worth of maintenance. The Calder-designed, Paul Matisse-built aluminum structure was removed last August for the Tremclad treatment—a new coat of Calder Foundation-approved paint, repair to some worn-down contact points, and a thorough scrubbing.

Untitled, the press release helpfully tells us, was commissioned in 1972 when the East Building was under construction. Calder had originally designed it in steel, but that would have been too heavy. Matisse rejigged it out of aluminum, and it was installed in 1977, a year after Calder’s death. The last time it was disassembled for cleaning was 1988; that’s one hell of a dust bunny.

LINK: National Gallery of Art’s Calder Mobile Back on View Following Conservation Treatment

ABOVE: Left to right: Oprah, Dr. Phil, Rembrandt. They have more in common that just using one name, notes the New York Times, reviewing Roger Housden’s self-help book How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self: Life Lessons From the Master

What The Da Vinci Code did for airport thrillers, Roger Housden appears poised to do for self-help books, with his atrociously titled How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self: Life Lessons From the Master— i.e., plunder the works of a great artist for the purposes of selling an aircraft carrier-load of insipid and aesthetically bankrupt books. Apparently, since Rembrandt pulled a couple of boners in the 17th-century stock market and juggled a few emotionally crooked and financially devastating romantic entanglements, he’s fodder for a book aimed at needy, impotent Nebraskan day traders because he, you know, took a real hard look in the mirror from time to time, and couldn’t we all benefit from that?

Carol Kino surveys the psychological wreckage in Sunday’s New York Times, and if the article is to be believed, it’s not as bad as all that. But we are not convinced. As Kino points out early on, the book is filled with the typical brand of East-meets-West imitation Buddhism that is the stock in trade of the contemporary self-help oeuvre, “like ‘Open Your Eyes,’ ‘Troubles Will Come,’ and ‘Keep the Faith.’” Apparently museum gift shoppes across the land are stocking up on the book and Housden is now lecturing and signing books in L.A. as part of the Getty’s current Rembrandt show (which, by the way, opens today). Why get some dusty old tweed-wearing art history prof in to talk about Rembrandt when you can get a bestselling author, and not just any author: The author of Ten Poems to Change Your Life and its dynamite sequel, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart!

Sickening, top to bottom.

LINK: New York Times > Portrait of the Artist as a 17th-Century Oprah

ABOVE: detail from Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov’s Fanta 1996. Paul Abelsky writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that Russian contemporary art has become just as strange and chaotic as Russia itself.

So, as the Guggenheim in New York prepares to look back over eight centuries of Russian art with its gooey, crowd-pleasing show RUSSIA!, Paul Abelsky, a writer for Russia Profile magazine in Moscow, peers into the murky present in an article yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle. Russian art, he writes, is in a “predicament,” suffering from “derivative art discourse” borrowed from the west, and strangely disconnected from the realities of contemporary Russian life. The essay is a little strange, wandering off on odd tangents sometimes, but is useful reading for decadent ignorant westerners like us to whom Russia is a vast tundra of onion-dome Tetris backgrounds and cirrhotic 14 year-olds.

Current events in Russia, such as Vladimir Putin’s hardening military stance, interference with the press, and the trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are pushing artists into new territory, Abelsky writes, and they are increasingly targeting the Orthodox church, state imagery, and political leaders. It sounds like it’s producing some profoundly bad art in many cases, but given the strange history of the Russian state and the artists it employs/imprisons, it’s definitely worth paying attention.

LINK: San Francisco Chronicle > Russian art mirrors discord

ABOVE: two works by artists competing for the 2005 Turner Prize: left, detail from Gillian Carnegie’s Fleurs de Huile; right, detail from Darren Almond’s Meantime. Carnegie is already favoured to win.

The 2005 Turner Prize nominees were announced yesterday, and the BBC noted that English bookmakers William Hill have already announced that painter Gillian Carnegie is the artist to beat, with odds of 1 to 1. The Turner, arguably the most important contemporary art prize in the world, has developed a reputation for what we will politely call eccentricity, and is often criticized for emphasizing conceptual over aesthetic concerns. Well, experts—the gamblers, at any rate—reckon that this is the year the committee will break that streak and award the prize to painter Carnegie, who does still life. In oil paint. On canvas. Try to contain yourself.

In case Will Hill is barking up the wrong installation, the other artists nominated for the £25,000 prize are: Installation artist Darren Almond; conceptual sculptor Jim Lambie; and scavenger-sculptor Simon Starling. Exhibits of the artists’ works will open at the Tate Britain on October 18, and the prize will be announced during a live broadcast on Channel 4 on December 5. Eat that, American Idol.

LINK: Tate Britain > Turner Prize 2005 Shortlist Announced