Blogcritics Author: Lenny Campello

Art Review/Auction: San Francisco's Southern Exposure

Lenny Campello — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:59:52 EDT

An auction for an influential SF art venue yields some terrific art finds.
As I like to do once in a while, I have invited a guest writer to pen a piece discussing the visual arts, and this time SF's Jennie Rose comes in with a terrific discussion on one of the Bay area's most influential art venues.Jennie Rose on Southern Exposure at SFIn the late 1980s and early 1990s, San Francisco galleries and non-profit arts...

Exhibit Review: Frida Kahlo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Lenny Campello — Thu, 3 Apr 2008 07:29:58 EDT

A major retrospective of iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reviewed by a self-described Kahlophile.
Sometimes an art review needs a little context from the perspective of the reviewer's own historical involvement with the work being reviewed. In 1975, I visited Mexico City and discovered the works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Almost immediately, I developed an artistic obsession with Kahlo's image. Over the years I have created...

The Rise of Tim Tate: Subjective Advice on Buying Artwork

Lenny Campello — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:17:57 EST

Washington, DC artist Tim Tate has gone from a virtual unknown to the nation's capital's best-known artist.
A Lesson on an Artist's GrowthFor years and years now I have been advising art collectors to buy Tim Tate. How does one know when to acquire work by an emerging artist, anyway? The obvious first clear part of that puzzle is: Do you like the work? If the answer is yes, then read on.This advice to buy work from this then-emerging artist came from a...

Did the President of the American Association of Museums Put His Foot in His Mouth?

Lenny Campello — Fri, 9 Nov 2007 11:47:32 EST

Did the new president of the American Association of Museums just say that Hispanics are not "experienced" with museums?
Ford W. Bell, a former Minnesota Democratic candidate for the US Senate, is the brand new president of the American Association of Museums, replacing Edward H. Able, who retired last years after 20 years at the association.Bell may have already put his foot in his boca mouth.Bell was interviewed by Nicole Lewis for the Chronicle of Philanthropy...

Why Aren't There More Black Artists in the White House Art Collection?

Lenny Campello — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 16:21:13 EDT

Three of the 375 works of art in the White House art collection are by African American artists - a suggestion for some more names to acquire!
If I told you that 66% of all the artwork by black American artists currently in the White House art collection has been acquired by the Bushes, depending on what side of the political aisle you stand, this fact may either raise an eyebrow from right wing nuts or some sort of conspiracy theory from left wing nuts.But if I told you that there are...

When Is An Artist A Great Artist And Not Just A Great African-American Artist?

Lenny Campello — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:07:43 EDT

Campello barks at artistic segregation.
I do not like artistic segregation.A few days ago I came across a Washington Post article that once again, perhaps as a result of journalistic formation, or perhaps as a result of America's love of racial/ethnic labeling, or perhaps (and most probably) unintentionally, really hit an artistic pet peeve of mine by segregating a great American...

Botero's Abu Ghraib Paintings Should Hang in the Pentagon Art Collection

Lenny Campello — Mon, 3 Sep 2007 09:58:00 EDT

A call for the Botero Abu Ghraib paintings to be donated to the Pentagon Art Collection and a new idea for Botero.
The series of paintings done by Colombian artist Fernando Botero based on the Abu Ghraib photographs may become part of the permanent collection of the University of California, Berkeley, according to news sources. UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau has said that the university and the artist "have a gentleman's agreement"...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Cuban-American Drama Cane to Debut on CBS: Andy Garcia, Where Are You?

Lenny Campello — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:45:32 EDT

I guess that because I am an American of Cuban ancestry someone sent me an advance (I guess) preview copy of the new CBS show Cane. This new TV series is about a Cuban-American family running a sugar empire from Florida.Think The Sopranos without all the cussing and with better haircuts.Thank you. I am honored.And now some very pedantic and jingoist issues. The lead character in the new series is played by Jimmy Smits, who is a great actor, but not what your typical Cuban sugar magnate would have looked liked in the racist Cuban society of the late 1950s and the Cuban-American refugee wave of the early 1960s.The elite upper crust of Cuban society was lily white throughout much of that unfortunate island's history, and Cuban society was essentially segregated. It would probably amaze most people to realize that the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who came from a mixed race background, but took control of the Cuban government in a coup masterminded while he was a communications sargeant in the Cuban army, was not allowed to join the elite Havana Yatch Club, even as he was President, because he was not white. And when the Dodgers took Jackie Robinson through a Latin American tour, before he made his debut in the US Major Leagues, the team stayed in one of Havana's elite hotels, but Robinson had to stay in a separate hotel for black Cubans. That was the Cuba of the 1950s.But back to Cane. CBS picked Smits, a brilliant actor, I suspect based on their perception of what a Cuban should look like. But Smits is not of Cuban ancestry; his father, Cornelis Smits, was a Surinamese immigrant from Dutch Guiana, and his mother, Emilina, is Puerto Rican.And yet, this is what the person that Smits' character is loosely based upon really looks like: That is him and his Cuban wife to the left; but because, like a lot of Cubans, he looks too "white" and not enough of what Hollywood (and CBS) apparently thinks that Latinos should look like, they instead hired a terrific Emmy-winning Surinamese-American actor who fits the sterotypical image of what Hollywood thinks Cubans should look like, to play the lead part.HBO hired (for the most part), excellent Italian-American actors to play Italian-Americans for The Sopranos; it worked (awright, awright, so Jamie-Lynn DiScala, who played Meadow Soprano was actually a Cuban-American actress -- ironic, huh?).And Smits is a great actor, so I should probably swallow my pedantic issues with Cane. But CBS has not only hired Smits to play the lead role, but also Puerto Rican actors Hector Elizondo, Eddie Matos, and Rita Moreno, as well as Miss Colombia 1991 Paola Turbay, to play other assorted Cubans.What's the matter, CBS? Can't find any good Cuban-American actors around?And now for CBS: My list of actor candidates who are actually of Cuban ancestry and thus a shoo-in for the part and who actually speak Spanish with a Cuban accent:Andy Garcia - Duh! Perfect for the part -- but probably too classy and too expensive for TV.Nestor Carbonell Okay, okay, he plays the nasty brother.Mel Ferrer Ah! I think he's dead.Desi Arnaz Fine, fine -- he's definitely dead; but how about Desi Jr.?Jorge PerrugorriaCesar Romero Fine! I know that The Joker is definitely dead.George AlvarezOkay, I'm off my pedantic box; it looks like a decent show - it's no Sopranos, but let's give it a chance.

F. Lennox Campello is a widely published Washington, DC and Philadelphia based art critic, as well as an award winning artist and curator. He is also often heard on NPR and the Voice of America discussing visual art issues. Campello also reports on Mid Atlantic area art news for the TV show ArtsMedia News.

Wal-Marting a Museum for Arkansas

Lenny Campello — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:29:39 EDT

Lately, with a rare exception here and there, it has become very fashionable among art writers, bloggers and critics to demonize the efforts of Alice Walton's no nonsense, robber-baroness approach to give the people of Bentonville, Arkansas a world class collection of art.Regardless of how one feels about Ms. Walton's wealth (she's the 20th richest person on the planet) and approach to buying art, Bentonville (population: 29,538) is not a place in which many people live, much less visit, and practically no one in the art world cares about it.But needless to say, flyover states deserve a look at America's art historical tradition, too. Other than an infectious and personal dislike by these writers for Ms. Walton's approach, the barely hidden implication in their written words is that metropolitan areas like Seattle, Washington, Forth Worth, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri -- places that people will visit -- are more natural and deserving destinations for high art for our public American masses outside of New York.This is elitist nonsense on a major scale. There are very few places left in this nation where the reach of internationalism doesn't touch. Early last year I was gallivanting all around the nation, and one of the places that I visited (for the first time in my case) was Arkansas. It's rural OK, but it's not what urbanites visualize.Bentonville's next door neighbor, Fayetteville (population around 67,000) is the home to the 420-acre campus of the University of Arkansas (the only comprehensive, doctoral degree-granting institution in the state). Their enrollment has more than 14,600 students (more than 12,000 in undergraduate programs) and a diverse student population with 650 international students representing 86 countries. And this place is rated by Money magazine as one of the top ten most desirable places in the nation in which to live or work.There are several other towns in the area. Springdale is one where the impact of Wal-Mart is amazing to see -- luxury retailers and gargantuan homes; a real population and cultural explosion is happening there.It doesn't take a futurist to predict that this area will see a major urban growth in the next few decades, and when it does, it will be grateful to the vision of Alice Walton, which is perhaps a throwback to that of the moneyed folks who a century earlier built the collections that she now shops from.And so I think that I will step aside from the rest of the art lemmings and applaud Ms. Walton's Soviet-style approach to art politics in her effort to give the folks of Arkansas a world class collection of art.Not only because she has billions of dollars to do so, but also because I think that she sees the location of this museum as something positive for an America that although politicians (and both left-wing and right-wing nuts) are often quoting as underserved Americans, they all perceive as a backwater populated by people who don't care about art. And yet, I hope that no one will disagree in that this coming exposure of the fine arts to this hard-working, modest segment of our population, who haven't generally had the opportunity to have it so close at hand, will be a good thing.This is something to be applauded.You go Alice Walton!

Glass Artist Dale Chihuly Causes a War of Words in Seattle

Lenny Campello — Sat, 12 May 2007 07:10:37 EDT

Seattle is the center of the fine arts glass universe. It is appropriate that an intellectual battle of words involving the world's most famous glass artist has been going on around the blogs and newspapers of that beautiful city, so dear and near to my heart. “Circular Ccriticism,” or as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's eloquent art critic Regina Hackett calls it, "Prizes in Hypocrisy" is a very good story on two newspapers first trashing an artist on a particular point and then later taking the other viewpoint.First she recalls (through the writing of Trevor Fairbrother's 1996 essay about the collaborative paintings of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat) the New York Times critical drubbing of the Basquiat and Warhol art collaborations. “Writing there in 1984, Vivian Raynor observed that Basquiat might turn into a substantial artist if he doesn't become an ‘art-world mascot.’ A year later, reviewing the Basquiat-Warhol collaboration, she repeated the mascot charge and added that the jointly produced paintings were Warhol manipulations with Basquiat as the ‘all too willing accessory.’) Wounded, Basquiat distanced himself from Warhol, who had functioned as an anchor for the younger artist. After Basquiat's death at age 27 in 1988, the same New York Times called him a "genius" who unfortunately had cooled his relationship with his mentor "partly out of fear that he was being viewed as Mr. Warhol's mascot."Then Hackett brings to national attention the fact that the Seattle Times , in 2006, wrote a three part series focused on Dale Chihuly by Sheila Farr (the Times art critic) and Susan Kelleher (in which Chihuly's work process is compared to Thomas Kinkade's). “If we measure an artist's importance by the number of museum exhibitions, books, articles and television appearances he has, Seattle glass guru Dale Chihuly is right up there with the greats. His work is in the collection of most every U.S. art museum you can think of, as well as many abroad. Museum exhibitions of his work circulate continually and stacks of hefty coffee-table books praise his talents. And who hasn't seen one of those often-aired documentaries about him on PBS?But what many don't know is that Chihuly — a Northwest icon who has built a multimillion-dollar business — generates the bulk of that exposure himself. Most of those hugely popular exhibitions weren't organized and distributed by art museums, but by Chihuly Inc. And those books and television shows? Most of them were produced by Chihuly's publishing company, Portland Press. All that publicity has inflated the public notion of Chihuly's status in the art world.”Kinda tips your hand as to where these articles are heading, eh?Yet, the more you think and see the articles as a purely investigative series, the less they appear to be "bloated and inconsequential," as Hackett describes them. Generally Farr and Kelleher do a pretty good job of describing and somewhat exposing an amazing business and propaganda machine, which -- other than the fact that the business empire happens to be that of an artist -- is much like any other article that investigative reporters write. Like many of those, we know from the beginning words what the conclusions will be, or in this case, what flavor they want to leave the readers with once they are finished reading the series.If we began to read an investigative article in the Washington Times about the finances of Move.org, or in the Washington Post about the finances of the Republican National Committee, we'd all know from the beginning what the conclusions or findings will be, right? Although Farr and Kelleher tip their hand early on, and generally leave a somewhat negative taste at the end of the series, nearly all of what they write appears to be fact, I think. It is fact reporting from a negative and perhaps somewhat unfair viewpoint, but facts nonetheless, and their negativity is probably because the art world is not used to famous artists who are also astounding business wizards. When the big, famous artist who is the most famous artist in your city sues lesser-known artists, then we have victims and victimizers. Artists are supposed to be always the victims, not also the victimizers.The articles are also a little naive in the sense that the writers approach Chihuly's success from that sort of ivory tower view of the art world that so many art critics have that leads them to assume and believe that mixing business and publicity with artmaking is a bad thing. If you're as good as the Chihulian Empire is at all those three, then you're Darth Dale as far as some art writers are concerned.Hackett rightly points out that the Seattle Times seems to be contradicting some of their own nuances in the Chihuly series by noting later on that this artist's work is indeed quite similar to Chihuly's. This is sort of what happens when a WaPo movie critic trashes a film on Friday, and then a second WaPo film critic loves it on Saturday. Hackett has written her own excellent piece on Chihuly, not necessarily "defending" him, but presenting him from a more positive viewpoint. Hackett is the counterpoint to the articles by Farr and Kelleher. She does a pretty good job of presenting Chihuly in a good light, even delivering a very convincing argument why it is okay for us all to accept the fact that Chihuly actually doesn't make any of his artwork himself. In her blog, Hackett goes a little more out on a limb: “After six months of digging, the Seattle Times produced a bloated and inconsequential three-part Chihuly series, suggesting grave wrongs were being uncovered at Chihuly Inc., maybe just over the hill of the next paragraph. As written by Seattle Times investigative reporter Susan Kelleher and Seattle Times art critic Sheila Farr, there was nothing but smoke over that hill. My favorite headline in the tell-all wannabe series was ‘Chihuly Benefits from his own Philanthropy.’ Who doesn't?”Mmm, I think this is perhaps an easy pass by Hackett, for the million dollar profit reported by the Times article. Hackett apparently went on a war of words with the Stranger's (a Seattle alternative newspaper) art critic Jen Graves over an interview. It all led in turn to Graves’ response.It would be fair to conclude then that the art critics from Seattle's three main newspapers are now somewhat arctic to each other over the issues, allegations, facts, opinions, and printed words brought forth by that walking publicity machine that is Dale Chihuly, who -- along with the savvy art aficionados of the Seattle area who are lucky enough to have art critics and newspapers who care about stuff like this -- is the only winner from this glass skirmish.