We've been through this thing before, and it doesn't go down easier the second time: Another Greek tycoon has rented (at no charge) the museum of whi

We've been through this thing before, and it doesn't go down easier the second time: Another Greek tycoon has rented (at no charge) the museum of which he is a trustee, in order to showcase his expensive art hoard.

Fifteen months ago I was the first to complain about the New Museum's judgment and ethics when it announced that it would be hosting "Skin Fruit", a show of work owned by Dakis Joannou.

I don't think I'm the first to complain this time*, since the news was reported by New York Times' Carol Vogel (once again the messenger, as she was for NuMU's plans) a week ago. That article reports the basic facts, that in the coming spring the Guggenheim Bilbao will be hosting "The Luminous Interval", a show of work owned by Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Unlike the article she wrote in 2009, this one asks questions, or rather it appears that the museum itself anticipated questions, defending its decision and arranging for their friendly big-deal collector to be available for a statement.

I'm not satisfied with the answers. While there may be no law against it, the ethical problems are obvious: installing a private collection exhibition in a public museum is just wrong, unless ownership of the work has already been transferred to the museum.

Museum directors should know this.

I know I may sound like a scold, but when it comes to the art world I really don't normally go out of my way to look for things to criticize. My experience of the last year or so has saddened me however, as I watch our museums making some very bad decisions. I'd rather be looking at art, or listening to or watching a performance, but it seems to me that museums are "acting up" (and not in the good way) a lot these days.

Maybe it's because of the ubiquity and curiousity of the internet that so many ethical missteps are being exposed within institutions we really cherish. Perhaps we're just more impatient with custom or superciliousness then we once were. It's even possible we've given up believing we can influence government behavior and so look to our own neighborhoods, our own family. Whatever it is, it's not easy to ignore these institutional failings, or the cant which tries to disguise them.

We have the right to expect better of the people who guard our heritage and our sacred spaces. Philip Kennicott, in his excellent Washington Post commentary on "Hide/Seek", published yesterday, describes the extraordinary importance of the museum to people who do not worship in a church, temple, mosque, or forest:

"The museum has become a quasi-sacred space, with rules as complicated and inviolate as any church liturgy. People who don't find the meaning of their existence in churches are often passionate about museums, where a set of fundamental values - openness, fearlessness, truthfulness - are celebrated with all the historical trappings.

ADDENDUM: Whoa! ARTINFO had the story two months ago. I'm sorry I missed both their scoop, and their complaint about how the Guggenheim stonewalled them:

When preparing the original scoop, "IN THE AIR" [an ARTINFO blog] contacted the Guggenheim for comment, which the museum declined to provide - relegating the news to "rumor" status despite multiple well-placed sources confirming the story, and the now-evident accuracy of its substance.

(http://jameswagner.com/2010/12/guggenheim_bilbao.html)

THE TEA PARTY ART MOVEMENT...interesting article on the Tea Party Gang ...

THE TEA PARTY ART MOVEMENT?
The wild-eyed protestors of the Tea Party movement have certainly taken a space at the center of American political consciousness, as commonplace as its forces might seem (the base of the movement is "Republican, white, male, married and older than 45," according to the New York Times). But to date, the Tea Party’s brushes with the art world have been rare and infelicitous. Most famously, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight had some fun with mad man of the airwaves Glenn Beck, pointing out that the logo for his right-wing, Tea Party-infused "9/12 Movement" was inspired by socialist and anarchist designs.

Still, the Tea Party gang is nothing if not entrepreneurial, and several of its more artistic members have made news with their schemes to flog their own artworks to this particular niche market. A press release from the Princeton, N.J.-based Meg Michael is a case in point.

Michael is pitching 16 x 20 in. prints of her still-life painting, featuring a teapot, cup and saucer placed on an orange tablecloth, to members of the Tea Party movement. "Professional quality copies of a recent still-life painting titled Tea Party are being offered to members of the new political movement for a variety of purposes," her release announces, helpfully listing what such purposes might be: "They may be used to encourage membership and party unity or simply hung in the office or home."

Michael’s press release notes that the work is "painted in a most conservative and traditional style," thereby being perfect for a conservative movement. Prints of Tea Party are available "at a special introductory discount" of $290 -- supposedly a bargain price, considering that the work "may well become a valuable investment in due time as a collector’s item," and has already garnered some media attention. Interested parties may mail a check to "Tea Party Art, Six Smalley Lane, Skillman, NJ 08558." (More of Michael’s work can be seen on the website of the Arts Council of Princeton.)

More typical in terms of the spirit behind the Tea Party movement -- unreasoning fury -- is the art promoted by Amy Marsh, who runs the website FreeSignArtwork.com, apparently as a side project to her corporate printing business, Marsh Enterprises, located in Olathe, Kansas (she is also on Twitter at twitter.com/freeteapartyart). The website features free downloadable images to use at rallies.

Here you get the kinds of references that have become the Tea Party’s bread and butter: symbols suggestive of the American Revolution, like a coiled snake with the slogan "Don’t Tread on Me," as well as marginally more clever ideas, like an image of a pitcher of Kool-Aid and a tea bag, with the caption asking, "Which One Are You Drinking?" FreeSignArtwork’s gallery of protest photos features an image of bellicose Fox News pundit Sean Hannity -- a famous Tea Party supporter, who even had to apologize after faking evidence about the size of a Tea Party rally -- holding up an image of a Marsh graphic which declares, "Keep Your Hands Out of My Piggy Bank."

Easily the most unintentionally awesome icon of "Tea Party Art," however, has to be Sarah Para Bellum 2012, by the artist known as Dale, a Virginia-based cartoonist whose Norman Rockwell-meets-Mad Magazine work appears often at a website called All Right Magazine. Somewhere in between caricaturing the evils of "Diversity" and imagining Nancy Pelosi being brought to orgasm over a "Health Care Reform Bill: Pathway to Total Power," Dale found time to create a poster of a brawny Sarah Palin-as-Rosie the Riveter, with a shotgun across her lap and the words "Death Panel" on a BlackBerry clutched in her hand (a reference to her inability to function without written talking points, perhaps?).

You’d think that Sarah Para Bellum 2012 (available online for $13.95!) was some sort of satire, but it is the real deal. A detailed analysis of its iconography appeared last year on the liberal website Daily Kos, which even inspired a counterattack from Shotgun Life magazine -- that’s right, Shotgun Life magazine -- which sternly took the Daily Kos writer’s art criticism to task for misidentifying the weapon held in her lap ("not an over/under but a pump gun"). As to the meaning of the work: "Sarah Palin is trying to uphold the traditions of traditional America, which I think is something worth saving," Dale told Shotgun Life.

At the end of the day, however, the Tea Party movement doesn’t run on such odd hero worship alone (in fact, according to that Times poll, a plurality of Tea Party supporters don’t think Palin is qualified to be president). It runs on rage and fear. And the best art image to capture this is still one of the first: the "Obama as Joker" graphic created by a still-anonymous individual or political consulting firm, which soared into the spotlight last year.

The image has had a long afterlife. Georgia artist Andy Davis is best known for making realistic portrait sculpture of the likes of Hugh Hefner, Ray Charles and Truett Cathy, founder of the Chik-fil-A fast-food empire. However, he caught some headlines earlier this year for his sculptural renditions of the Obama Joker image. According to local news in Atlanta, Davis -- who describes himself as a "mainstream realist" and "a red-blooded American who loves my freedom" -- began as an Obama supporter, creating some 50 bronze busts of the president to sell for between $500 to $1,000. But then he became disillusioned by the president’s handling of the financial crisis and "felt his personal freedoms were threatened," and began to paint the Joker image over some miscast busts of Obama -- drawing a whole new audience.

A Davis Obama-Joker has have been used as part of a fundraiser for the Tea Party, bringing in "quite a bit of money," according to the artist. And its meaning? Davis strenuously rejects any racial overtones, saying instead that it symbolizes that "the state of politics in America has become somewhat of a joke." On that, you’ve got to agree with him.