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Over at Modern Art Notes, Tyler’s on a roll, posting frequently and furiously about the current court proceedings to decide the fate of The Barnes Collection, the greatest assemblage of modern art in the country. Tyler does his gadfly best, providing some very useful context (and a bit of foaming at the mouth) for this big, somewhat under-/mis-reported story.

Barnes was a new moneyed crank with a voracious appetite for once-unpopular art (Cezanne, Matisse, Renoir, Soutine, etc.), which he frequently bought in bulk, out of the artists’ studios. He had an unparalleled–but not unbiased–eye; by cornering the market on cheesy Renoir nudes, for example, he forced generations of Third World dictators to decorate their palaces with much less desirable, generic soft porn. His collection, foundation, and vision were all mercilessly mocked by Philadelphia society the art establishment of his day, and he took great glee in their eventual comeuppance; he knew the world would have to come groveling back to his art someday.
Now, though, after a couple of generations of pathetic mismanagement (“hundreds of items,” including a Matisse and a Renoir gone missing. Did you check the bathroom for the Renoir, your honor?); a feckless board; the inept defensiveness of Lincoln University (the historically black institution Barnes’s will put in charge of his legacy), and an utterly clueless-sounding judge, it looks like that same Philadelphia Establishment’s shameless attempt to take control of the collection may succeed. It’s all pretty ghetto.
I haven’t thought it all the way through yet, but Barnes comes to mind when I see the sometimes clumsy, always entertaining, mega-collecting arms race in Miami right now. I doubt that Marty Margulies or his competitors are the Albert Barnes of the 22nd century, but I know that there are enough snotty art worlders who try to proclaim their own insiderness by mocking them behind their backs.

The S is for Self, as in Self-Important. And I wasn’t alone. Far from it. The most unnecessary question of the day was the endearing, “Do you know who I am?” It wasn’t unnecessary because the Swiss minions running the art fair were so gracious, but because people were always telling you how fabulous they and their taste are anyway. My VIP card didn’t score me an early private screening of the only piece I wanted to see in the video program; fortunately, though, the snow conspired to keep me in town one more night. I saw Amar Kanwar‘s 2002 A Night of Prophecy, which he produced for last year’s Documenta XI.

I left the tawdry spectacle of NY art dealers singing karaoke for what turned out to be basically a series of subcontinental music videos. Kanwar filmed people singing calls for caste revolution and protests of various ethnic conflicts. It was alternately moving and didactic, always poetic, but hopelessly at odds with the shiny-as-a-C-print materialist, money-soaked, elitistriving artfest that hosted it. The thirty people at the start of the screening dwindled to less than half that, with only about 8-10 of us pinko Gandhi-ists watching the entire thing. Why some people wouldn’t want to spend their Friday night in South Beach being called (in melodic Hindi) an exploitative thief living off the sweat of the poor is beyond me.
(Of course, I’m writing this from the Delta Crown Room at the airport…the sweaty sunburned masses are already too much for me to deal with apparently…)

You should feel horrible for missing Gabriel Orozco’s latest show at Marian Goodman. His elegant, biomorphic sculptural shapes are recognizable at first as found objects: bones, husks, driftwood. In the rear gallery, though, less finished “sketches” of polyurethane foam extruding through fine wire mesh point to Orozco’s material process. Gradually, it dawns on you that the artist didn’t find the previous shapes; he created them by manipulating quick-drying foam on sheets of latex with a hard-to-fathom series of gestures and pauses. What looked so familiar becomes perplexing and unknown. At least it did until Saturday.
Start making it up by going to Sargent’s Women at Adelson Galleries. It’s a museum-quality exhibition of portraits, scenes, and studies by an artist whose paintings I like for their photographic influences, which I discovered at the giant National Gallery show in 1999 (which rocked). [via About Last Night]
Then, if you go to Feigen for the Joseph Cornell show, and then buy Robert Lehrman’s unprecedented, awesome-looking catalog/DVD-ROM tour of the boxes, you’ll be just fine.

If not their effectiveness. One more picture of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project at the Tate in London.