This long-awaited ``insider's'' version of the contemporary art world may bring a blush to the cheeks of the ``curators, collectors, academics'' and critics who, Haden-Guest gleeflully demonstrates, ``often spend as much energy sniping at each other as at art's vigorous and well-armed enemies.'' Haden-Guest (Bad Dreams, 1981, etc.), a journalist and art critic, offers an anecdotal portrait of the American art world and, more specifically the frantic, hothouse art world of Manhattan from the 1970s to the present. He draws on the kind of stories one gleans at antic openings, art fairs, cocktail parties, and bibulous lunches rather than from a dimly lit carrel at the library. As a result, it's much more interesting to read than a sober, scholarly study. The book kicks off with an account of the glittery 1973 auction at Sotheby's of 50 works of contemporary art (by Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others) from the noted collection of Ethel and Robert Scull. Raking in over $2 million, the auction set off the frenzied pursuit of contemporary art by dealers, collectors, and museums, and also set the pattern for the edgy, often hostile relations between artists, dealers, and collectors that seemed so much a part of the art scene in the 1970s and '80s. Rumor had it that Rauschenberg (who later tried to pass legislation entitling the artist to a share of resale profits) socked Mr. Scull in the stomach after the auction. Haden- Guest blends accounts of the artists and their hangers-on (including some particularly outrageous stunts by artists desperate to make their mark) with a sly portrait of the evolution of the downtown art scene, nailing down the internal power plays lubricating the machine that SoHo became, emphasizing the temperamental nature of the art world's enthusiasm and the cruelty of the pack (collectors, critics, dealers) when novelty wears away. Sexier than Artforum but brainier than Vanity Fair, this should appeal to insiders and outsiders alike.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-660-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
This ambitious survey of the works of over 200 installation artists lacks a guiding rudder through the sea of pictorial information it presents. British, Northern European, and American artists dominate in creations that range from the strangely ambiguous, as in Wim Delvoye's Untitled (1990), where an oil painting of a bejewelled cat presides over an array of miniature rocking chairs constructed of clothespegs, to the deafeningly obvious, as in Hansjorg Schafer's The Untouchables (1989), meant as a commentary on ``the social hierarchy of contemporary Britain.'' In this work, simple geometrical shapes (such as a pyramid) are formed by champagne glasses, tennis balls, china plates, and clothespegs again. The authors, British artists and art critics, do impose some conceptual order on the dizzying variety of media and intent in installation art, dividing the works into four chapters: ``Site,'' ``Media,'' ``Museum,'' and ``Architecture.'' But the book lacks a convincing analysis of formal themes that reappear in each section, such as the Warholian use of replication. Like Zen masters, many installation artists seem to hope to provide a liberating blow to perception, and many works succeed, albeit somewhat coercively, barraging a viewer with light, color, or noise. German Simon Ungers offers a more restrained effort. In Post and Beam (Umbau 1) (1991), the visitor stepped over tubes of cool white fluorescent light into an all-white gallery whose floor was refitted to duplicate the ceiling. In this calm yet disorienting space, the viewer was made to reformulate something as quotidian as the distinction between up and down. The book's reverse type appears to be making a token gesture towards the same effect. Unfortunately, the thin white letters on glossy black pages strain the eye, and the texts, while supplying a lot of valuable information, hardly provide the sort of incisive new perspectives that many of the artworks themselves at least aspire to. However, the book makes an important and useful reference point and a good start toward understanding an important facet of contemporary art.
Pub Date: May 19, 1994
ISBN: 1-56098-347-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
A sprawling, vivid look at the fate of Europe's artworks during WW II. ``Never,'' states Nicholas in her admirably accomplished first book, ``had works of art been so important to a political movement and never had they been moved about on such a vast scale....'' Charting this unprecedented movement, Nicholas begins with the Nazis' twofold ``purification'' effort to ban ``degenerate'' culture and to scour public and private collections of enemy lands and races for nobly Germanic art. Backed always by astonishing statistics, the author recounts not only the brutal pursuit of both goals in western continental Europe and the even harsher, racially motivated pillage of Russian and Polish art treasures, but also the baffling exceptions to rules: the modernist ``garbage'' (Goebbels) imported into Germany and auctioned for hard foreign currency; the Jewish experts in Nordic art made ``Honorary Aryans''; the hands of Jewish women kissed by Goering in his quest for favorite canvases. As a former researcher at Washington's National Gallery who made a childhood visit through the devastated Germany of 1948, Nicholas is well equipped to elucidate the technicalities and vivify the chaos of wartime Europe's emergency storage sites, their improvised safety and climate controls, the economics and legalities of the art trade and postwar reclamations, and America's interests during and after the war in custodianship, reparation politics, and efforts to protect its own collections. Nonetheless, Nicholas does not, so to speak, lose the big picture, duly prefacing each country-by-country account with background history of the war. One interesting Cold War issue she considers is the politically sensitive return to newly Communist countries of plundered religious relics. The book abounds in poignant and bizarre details, from masterpieces traded for everything from human lives to ``8 kilograms of millet,'' to Chinese bronzes found holding manure in East German pigsties. Nicholas restores harrowing political contexts to ``safe,'' pristinely displayed museum masterpieces. (87 b&w illustrations and 3 maps)
Pub Date: May 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40069-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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