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...thanks for sharing, Tosh and Tam Tam Books

Museum Legs: Fatigue and Hope in the Face of Art by Amy Whitaker My rating: 5 of 5 stars "The ability of museums to be institutions of civic importance rides on their collective capacity for intellectual empathy -- their ability to speak to people in their own idiom and to bring in new audiences -- through tireless effort at customization of messages to different groups.  There are any number of reasons why this doesn't happen...Knowledge benefits from this kind of exuberant free trade -- the more it circulates, the more there is.  Obfuscation is a weird and obscure mercantilism, an isolationism that in an economy walls off a country, and in museums circumscribes a field of knowledge." pp. 88-89 View all my reviews

It is impossible to seek out the face of Sitting Bull, and even more the knowing of Crazy Horse; for one, the photograph is never justice, nor his prime. The other never sat for a white man's camera machine. Rebecca Solnit wrote about the Ghost Dance and technology . I have to look that up. I've just come from Little Bighorn, and you cannot but cry and cry. Such nobility in its last. Ignoble.

In the Montana Triennial at the Missoula Art Museum there was a piece by an artist named Tom Foolery from Dillon, MT. Also some Richard Notkins and plexiglas assemblages by an artist with the last name Autio. Lela Autio. Rudy Autio's wife? Daughter? And eye-catching large soft pastel portrait drawings by a woman named Jennifer Pulchinski.

There was a brilliant installation of drawings and sculpture by an Indian (Lakota) artist named Dwayne Wilcox at the Missoula Art Museum (MAM). They were earnest and ironic; scathing, insightful, childish. Drawn on Ledger Paper, and so at once borrowed and repossessed; the material was also highly personal in feel like you'd discovered a trove of a) drawings of a self-taught skilled observer b) a refined, highly-stylized project by an agent provacateur or c) the working thoughts of a 21st c. Indian artist navigating a new language for his own erudition. I also couldn't not think of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith who means south to me.

Loving the Klosterman

What I'm Reading... I had tasked myself last month or so with reading three books that I then intend to synergize to answer all the questions about why museums are so important, broadly and to me especially. The first is Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct: Beauty Pleasure, and Human Evolution . The second is James Cuno's Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedia Museum . Cuno's was the first of these three that I read, and I was mildly troubled that Cuno appeared to be boxing his way out of a corner. The third book, which I just completed is Putting the Arts in the Picture , from Columbia College Chicago .  Putting the Arts in the Picture is a compelling work about integrative arts education practice in the schools. Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century , our book on arts education, makes a new argument for moving the arts, usually located on the margins of public education, to its center. By examining the role...

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CIMG0334 , originally uploaded by levenj .

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Every important cultural institution in the United States faces almost insurmountable financial challenges every day, every year, decade after decade. The difference between the many that succeed and the few that fail is leadership, steady, enlightened, countercultural leadership that keeps an organization tacking upwind, no matter what happens to the economy. - Philip Kennicott Corcoran’s proposal to leave its historic quarters is laden with questions about leadership http://www.corcoran.edu/institutional-home

CIMG0227 , originally uploaded by levenj . This gem was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts: http://www.artsmia.org/viewer/detail.php?v=12&id=1655

Now imagine the Internet.  And imagine Anton Vidolke.  E-flux and the French theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud – “The contemporary work of art does not position itself as the termination point of the ‘creative process’ (a ‘finished product to be contemplated) but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities.” That’s what we do in museums, right?  We have an obligation to promote this state as culture workers? Modern Painter’s article on Vidokle ( not this article ) goes on to claim, “…the contemporary transformations of influence through social networks -  a truly distributed collective --   and the concept of he commons, in which no single person has control over resources and production but shares them among peers.”  And isn’t this what we are beholden to do with our collections on-line and all the more now on-site? Vidokle says, “It’s kind of a dream that e-flux could evolve into some sort of structure like this, b...

facebook status Can't wait to dig into this !! Thanks for sharing Daniel Schifrin http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=591 Los Angeles Review of Books - Simon Reynolds interviews Greil Marcus lareviewofbooks.org Like · · Share Ryyan LeBllanc likes this. Timothy B Buckwalter it is possibly the longest interview in the history of the internet. Seriously. Yesterday at 2:11pm James G. Leventhal whoa...you know it's going to be long when it begins" "Let's start with your name..." Yesterday at 2:29pm · Like · 1 Timothy B Buckwalter Yep. And then it goes on for miles about his name. Yesterday at 2:47pm · Unlike · 1 James G. Leventhal ‎Gravity Goldberg whoops, it ends up California Dreaming would have been the tie in for Greil Marcus ;) GM: My wife always says I'm a California Jew, meaning I'm not Jewish at all. I didn't know any Yiddish. I have non-Jewish friends in New York who knew far more Yiddish than I do. I was born in San...

The ethics of accessibility are wrapped up in the intersection of two facts – art, at its highest echelons, greatest, happens within a system; and art is popular and meaningful to everyone when given over to its most natural state, mediated to achieve universality. Art within a system. It is esoteric. Or "What I admire most about Paul McCarthy ." Difficult. Scatological. Squeezing ketchup like a child, and tossing about in a tub. He is, in fact, riffing off of extremely popular tools – video, street life, pornography. Somehow McCarthy always strikes me as the ultimate “operator,” the Cal Arts professor, the deliberate charlatan. It’s important for me because the phrase, “Art happens with a system” were notes I took from a Swiss catalog from a brilliant exhibition entitled Lost Paradise. The Angel's Gaze . The Angel’s Gaze (Juri Steiner). The catalog created or well “curated” a brilliant exhibition inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novelus and the related Wa...

I was on a plane out and there was this beautiful documentary about The Doors. A beautiful documentary, man. Mr Mojo Risin': The Story of L.A. Woman . LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT TEXAS RADIO AND THE BIG BEAT. And, boy, it reminded me so hard about why I am in this. Why I am here. Why I keep on keeping on. And there’s art in there. There’s a not-so-secret art. The art of Rimbaud. Back to the art of Baudelaire. Back to the Impressionists -- who spent more time painting brothels than any group of painters before them. Talk about your L.A. Woman. Back to Edgar Allan Poe -- just as dense and heavy, faux philosophical, American, chauvinistic, expressive and dense as Poe.  Popular, enticing and sexy. Was Poe sexy? I mean why did they make all those Vincent Price movies? Let me tell you about Texas Radio and The Big Beat. And The Doors lead to Iggy and the Stooges, right? Echo and The Bunnymen. REM. U2. Ray Manzarek borrows liberally from Chopin, equal as much ...

Spaces of Life: Sonya Rapoport @ Mills , originally uploaded by levenj .

Pacific Standard Time: MLK Weekend , a set on Flickr. What an amazing, long weekend!