Summer Shows Are Bad (One Especially)
Hi.
Summer shows at galleries go back a long ways. The research I did isn’t dissertation worthy—this is a free publication after all—but Castelli, to cite one example, has a thorough exhibition history on their site. From 1958, the year after it opened, it varied its mostly solo-show slate with a group show in May called Pioneers 1910–1950, which featured Delaunay, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Picabia, etc. They started staying open into June in 1960, with a show called Summary 1959–1960, which featured gallery artists like Bontecou, Johns, Rauschenberg, Stella, Twombly, Jack Tworkov. And so on. For its first summer in New York, that of 1964, Pace Gallery put up a show literally called Group Exhibition of Gallery Artists.
The summer show has thus historically been a no-fuss attempt at inventory clearing and an excuse to have a few cocktails before everyone heads off to Provincetown (later the Hamptons, later Sun Valley or Aspen), along with an opportunity to test out the markets for young artists whom one might be picking up in the future. Summer shows get less foot traffic; collectors and their advisors (who tend to do their business at fairs anyway) are even less likely to see them; likewise curators. The art world obeys the quaint rules of a more civilized era, whereby the wealthy flee the noxious vapors of city for their summer estates.
I’m describing these shows in purely commercial terms because summer shows are not conceptually lofty affairs. They have lots of artists in them: Don’t like this one, how about that one? Group Exhibition of Gallery Artists is pretty much as sophisticated as it gets. Summer gallery shows are not meant to be taken seriously. No doubt there are exceptions to this rule, but I can’t think of any. Matthew Marks and Pat Hearn, then Marks and Greene Naftali, have made a thing of doing joint shows of painting once a decade since 1998—Painting Now and Forever. They’re up to three now. Have they been groundbreaking? More than an excuse for a big party to kick off the summer? Good snapshots of the moment, perhaps better than many biennials.
This year, a couple of summer shows seem to have gotten more attention than the form usually warrants or achieves—except one actually does deserve credit. The Painter’s New Tools at Nahmad Contemporary is not that one.
The comically unimaginative cheek-by-jowl display of painters who propose to use things like—brace yourself—computers, monitors, LEDs, and cameras. Darren Bader is so bold as to use a QR code (which sends you to an image of a pooping dog, which I confess I found pretty funny). There are 31 artists, some of whom are quite good and clearly contributed whatever they had lying around, given the request from a collector of clout. Some of the artists, on the other hand, are bad to begin with. People who come out well are Ei Arakawa, Julien Nguyen, the Dutch guy (at least visually), Anicka Yi. The show might have been OK had there been half as many works and a little space to consider them—but, remember, this is a sales opportunity: you have to get as much merch onto the showroom floor as possible. The viscous notions of beauty so frequently espoused by the the curatorial tandem’s microcelebrity half in his writings are jetsam in the face of a wave of cash on the horizon. The show’s other seeming purpose, to be contemporary, like most such attempts succeeds in making it feel immediately out of date.
None of this would matter if the show had been treated like most summer shows, especially those at a culturally irrelevant gallery like Nahmad, whose “specialties” as the website calls them include Basquiat, Richard Prince, Rudy Stingel, Picasso, Rothko, etc. Unfortunately because of the curators’ clout The Emperor’s New Tools has seized a certain amount of attention. The summer is a slow news season. Maybe it’s the same every year? Nevertheless I was appalled to see a full page devoted to the show in the New York Times, and the frequent mentions of it in conversation and online testify to the combo of blandness on the city’s walls and thirst in the art audience at the moment.
Note: Who that audience is is a big question. In a way the curators are blameless: the show is not for me, it’s for people who don’t know much about art. The fact that it’s being taken semi-seriously by the insular, professionalized art world I know and love is, however, depressing. And truly one can do better by the broader public than this. In any case, this question of the art audience and its evolution is one I think about a lot; I’m sure I’ll return to it.
Since Nahmad has so little going on, you can see the Tools until Sept 24.
Next time, a postmortem on The Patriot at O’Flaherty’s on Avenue C.
Wine
[A recurring section wherein I drink something, look at a topographic map, and improvise.]
Castello Monaci Kreos Negroamaro 2021. Salento is the heel of the Italian boot—rocks, sea spray. Thus: salty and gravelly (it’s limestone, the bottle tells me). Rosés are usually too pointlessly puckery but this one is closer to white wine, light-medium body. Dry but with enough fruit of some kind to keep from raking your throat raw.
Street Find
[A recurring section wherein I document items washed up on the silky sands of NYC’s sidewalks.]
Weather
By Armand N. Spitz
1967
Finally, A Song
And its adorably archaic video. Featuring snippets of cinema’s most famous brainwashing.