The Art Set
Charlie Scheips

The Lobbyist

The cover of this past week’s New York Times Magazine — New York issue — was a wry (though un-credited) take-off on artist’s Roni Horn’s work of a decade ago.

The magazine’s voice of authority is significantly weakened with limp pieces like photographer Tina Barney’s attempt to define the next thoroughly modern Medicis in her Patron Sweethearts spread. The question begs: does anyone there even know who the Medicis were?

I don’t know everyone in the art world, but none of the seven young ladies that the piece claims as future leaders in the upper echelons of the world of arts patronage are familiar to me. And certainly none has done enough yet to be called a Medici. Major players? I don’t think so. Maybe someday.

Art and players aside, the magazine basically just used Barney’s art world credentials to hawk the products (clothes and accessories) of some of their big luxury advertisers. No doubt Barney’s well-intentioned subjects were duped into this ill-conceived editorial idea run amiss (or is it a Ms.?).

As the grande dame of all Sunday newspaper magazines, the magazine could have had Tina Barney shoot some of our top young women artists who are prominently shaping the cultural landscape today. That would have commanded a higher plane than consumer hype. If higher planes are what the Times really wants to fly with.

Because he lived the life of his times, his photographs reflected the epoch’s edginess and anxiety. While his portraits suggest an aura of spontaneity it was only accomplished through his subtle manipulation of his sitter’s characteristic essence. His photos are raw and imbued with gravitas. Jean Cocteau dubbed Avedon that terrible, wonderful mirror. And that seems as close as one can get to the enigma of Avedon. Was he cruel or kind? Or sometimes both.

	Jean Cocteau by Germaine Krull, 1925

I’m pretty certain that he was the most famous photographer in the world. It was said that Avedon worried at times that his fashion work obscured in some way the serious artistic work he did in ensuing years. Perhaps he softened up a bit in the end bringing out his Made In France book of unpublished fashion shots from the Bazaar era a couple years ago. He needn’t have worried so much — his fashion work didn’t diminish his far more formidable body of portraiture. Instead of a blemish it was a beauty mark that enriched and informed his imitable vision.

One of Avedon’s earliest and at times controversial supporters was the Whitney Museum. They gave him not one but two full-scale retrospectives as did the Metropolitan Museum — most recently in 2002. He was shown in the greatest galleries and museums of the world. The photography market in the art world exploded during the last couple decades and Avedon’s method of exhibiting large-scale prints, often unframed, has been widely imitated. He broke through boundaries separating art and photography by carefully controlling the dissemination of his work particularly in the many books he scrupulously edited.

Like many of his subjects he was a star — a recognized personality on the world stage of culture. Now that he’s gone, his work is the primary evidence of his extraordinary life and artistic contribution to the visual world.

The Whitney’s is one of this town’s key places to find the art of today. On Monday, they celebrated in a big way with Now Art Now: A Celebration of Artists — black-tie dinner and after-party.

I got there around 7:15 just as the cocktail reception in the lobby and downstairs had just got going. A highlight of the evening was seven art installations, up only for that night, selected by Whitney curator Shamim M. Momin and made by artists featured in recent Whitney Biennials. Black Leotard Front’s enormous inflated Limousine sculpture was laid atop the entire expanse of the museum’s bookstore counter running the length of the lobby. I also caught a good glimpse Cory Archangel, Virgil Marti and E.V. Day’s pieces before the guests jammed into the room.

One of my disappointments of the evening was that despite the lovely weather, the Museum had tented over the outside area that usually is the bastion for us smokers. So I ran upstairs and out onto the street where I ended up smoking with Jean Claude Christo, with her husband, as well as a cigar smoking Frank Stella, as we chatted with Sharon Hoge.

Back inside, I ran into Anne Pasternak of Creative Time and her husband, artist Mike Starn. Mike, with his twin brother and artistic partner Doug, is hard at work putting the finishing touches on a big show of their work at Stockholm’s Fäbriken Kunsthalle later in the year.

	Adam Weinberg addresses the guests at the Whitney

I also caught a glimpse of beautiful Whitney trustee Joanne Casullo with Dr. Brian Saltzman. By the time we were called to dinner on the fourth floor I managed to spot: Larry Gagosian, Barbara Gladstone, PaceWildenstein's contingent included Arnold and Millie Glimcher, son Marc Glimcher with his glowing nine-months’ pregnant wife Andrea, Susan Dunne and Douglas Baxter; Cheim & Read’s Howard Read; Richard Marshall with architect Bill Georgis; Alberto Mugrabi; Edward Tyler Nahem; Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman; Angela Westwater with David Meitus; Elizabeth Dee with her artist Virgil Marti; and Peter Brant. The artist contingent was huge including: Joel Shapiro, Brice Marden, Ellen Phelan, Pat Steir, Alex Katz, Elizabeth Murray, Cecily Brown, Jim Hodges, Kiki Smith, Fred Wilson and William Wegman. Cory Arcangel, Eli Subrack, Black Leotard Front, Slater Bradley, E. V. Day, Glenn Kaino, and Richard Tuttle. In all, over 500 of the museum’s nearest and dearest were present.

Vanessa Hoermann and Henry Cornell, Heather and Steven Mnuchin, and Brooke and Daniel Neidich chaired the museum’s most successful gala to date raising over 2 million dollars. Board chairman Leonard Lauder, who with wife Evelyn is the museum’s most indefatigable champion, welcomed us and pointed out that the site of the dinner happens to be one of the city’s largest unobstructed interior spaces. All the temporary walls were removed for the evening allowing a rare chance to see Marcel Breuer’s brutalist space in all it glory. It was also the site of an enormous and breath-taking floor to ceiling mural by Eli Subrack aka assume vivid astro focus. The artists’ room in the most recent Biennial was a lot of fun but this mural is really amazing. And, while one can see influences ranging from James Rosenquist and recent Jeff Koons, the work shines on its own artistic merits.

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