Matthew Day Jackson, "Harriet (Last Portrait)," 2006. Woodburned drawing, yarn, aniline dye, mother of pearl, abalone and black panther eyes on wood panel, 243.8 x 182.9 cm.

Carol Vogel of The New York Times wrote last month that, “Optimism has returned to the multibillion-dollar art market.” She was keen on a 1932 Picasso painting, Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust), and mentioned she’d be surprised if it wasn’t a record-breaking sale. Eight days later on Tuesday, May 4, a painting that Picasso made in a single day grabbed $106.5 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. The sale trumped the previous record of $104.3 million paid for Giacometti’s Walking Man I in February of this year, making for back-to-back record sales in the first two quarters of 2010. Even with Sotheby’s posting a narrower-than-expected quarterly loss ($2.2 million compared to last year’s loss of $34.5 million, according to Reuters), these auction sales make a real statement about the comeback of the market.

The real optimism, however, which is arguably more reliable than any wavering value cast by the market, is in Vogel’s portrayal of Matthew Day Jackson as the unsung hero of this year’s blue chip auctions. The artist drew $928,330 for a painting estimated to garner just less than $62,000 at a February auction at Christie’s in London, an incredible feat by any estimation. If any artist were to represent the future possibilities of the market, how deeply appropriate that it be Jackson, an artist whose very work seeks out and explores the potential of mankind.

A 2006 painting by the artist, Harriet (Last Portrait), to be auctioned on Wednesday, May 12, at Sotheby’s in New York, is already estimated at $300,000 to $400,000, and could very well break a million if the current circumstances continue to play out. Vogel’s description includes characterizations of Jackson as an “it” artist, and while I believe that the attention is more than well-deserved, exorbitant overnight rises in the prices of work probably create more questions than they do answers. One independent dealer I spoke with thinks it could create an illusion of value, potentially causing collectors to start flipping works.

“It takes all the reasonable planning and normal thought process, and chucks it out the window,” Bill Arning says of the near-million-dollar figure for Jackson. Arning, who is the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, was the curator of Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance, which debuted at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in May 2009.

“This isn’t bad news for Matt, but it’s not all pluses,” Arning says. “Speculators—and we have to assume there are speculators—might decide this is a really good time to flip work because of the buzz… Matt is just too good an artist to let the whims of the auction market dictate the way his career goes.”

The irony is that Jackson’s painting, which depicts an unwavering Harriet Tubman in a cloak of brightly colored patterns against a backdrop of interconnected stars, can be understood as a portrait of human potential, while Jackson’s future represents a similar promise in a market poised to bounce back swiftly. Is it too early to cast Jackson as the helmsman of the new blue chip? Can we expect to see million dollar auction prices for him moving forward, or is this a temporary spike? What’s certain is that Jackson’s work is compelling enough to present the questions in the first place.

Installation shot of Nathan Mabry exhibition at Cherry and Martin Gallery, 2008. Courtesy the gallery.

A friend of mine dated a composer once. He was a good composer. People found his music “inventive” and “ubiquitous” (in a good way). All of his friends were musicians, artists, or filmmakers and they seemed to be good at what they did too—they cared about craft and they promoted themselves and each other well enough to ensure that a like-minded posse would always be around when they debuted new work. At first, this scenario seemed perfect: having a composer boyfriend with creative friends who made things all the time. But my friend soon noticed that none of these people showed much interest in the meaning of what they were making. She would go to openings at which the art on exhibit looked unambitious, sometimes exploitative or hackneyed, but criticism, even veiled skepticism, was unthinkable. This was a loyal tribe. If you were in, you were in, no matter how brilliant or lifeless your work might be.

Only once did a member of the tribe—an indie rocker from a band-you’ve-definitely-heard-of—get axed. He slept with a girl he shouldn’t have slept with, and, after that, his cohorts weren’t his cohorts anymore. My friend understood why the rocker’s behavior would be reprehensible, but she wondered why his music, a heavy-handed brand of emo that turned human experience into a spurt of blind antagonisms, hadn’t played even a small part in his excommunication. How could a group of artists so effortlessly separate the code they lived by from the art they made?

“You’re not really supposed to discuss moral and ethical matters around contemporary art,” wrote Ben Street, a month into the Must Art Be Ethical? debate. “Express discomfort at Sierra’s synagogue or Fraser’s fornication . . . and your contemporary art membership card is permanently revoked.” This, Street suggested, is a measure of contemporary art’s insecurity with itself. Such insecurity could come from numerous sources, many of which played out during the ethics discussion we’ve had on this site these past few months: modernism,  money, representation (also here),  quantity, institutional policies, power, education, art world politics (and here), artistic process, and the definition of what artists even are.

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Sharon Lockhart, "Maja and Elodie", 2003 Image: Artnet.com

A recent visit to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art provided two exhibits that are worth seeing if you are in town…. or within frequent flier miles for that matter. Rewind: 1970s to 1990s Works from the MCA Collection and Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out both have works worth sharing because they give us rich examples for teaching with contemporary art. Whether you’re examining and re-examining Sharon Lockhart’s Maja and Elodie or moving into and away from Richard Long’s Chicago Mud Circle this is a chance to spend some time with works that meaningfully explore both media and ideas in the same house.

Mike Kelley’s Craft Morphology Flow Chart forces us to remember and simultaneously be repulsed by objects that at one time were perhaps considered precious. Kelley actually gets to “draw” with a history most of us can easily recall, however conflicted these memories may be. Ryan Gander’s A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor is a beautiful play and replay of an instant- exploding quietly throughout the room. And Alfredo Jaar’s Geography=War gets the viewer to carefully consider both what the work is about and why it’s constructed in the way it is.

While both shows offer inspiring works on their own, it’s the interplay of these two exhibits that make them worth seeing. Moving through (and between) both shows allows for some serious contemplation, especially for artist-educators, about how to begin merging the drive to teach about media and big ideas. Too few exhibits can truly say this.

Uta Barth, "Sundial (07.8)," 2007. Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery.

Our new Flash Points topic, Art and Experience, will be launching soon and we’re inviting you to participate!  If this sounds good to you, read on:

We each have our own individualized perspectives which inform how we approach a given situation, and the viewing of art is no exception.  As John Dewey stated, “To perceive a beholder must create his own experience….The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest.”  In this series, we’ll explore the different ways that we as individuals experience art, and how this process is approached by both artists and institutions.

A few of the questions we’ll focus on include:

• How do we experience art?
How do our backgrounds influence the art viewing experience?
• Do art education programs accommodate different modes of learning?
• How are contemporary artists utilizing multi-sensory experiences?
• How do institutions approach the idea of visitor experience?
• Does contemporary art push our boundaries of perception?

We are eager to hear from a range of perspectives, including those of you who work as artists, arts professionals, students, art educators, funders, organizers, and academics. Propose a Flash Points blog post related to the above topic and have a chance to be featured on this site. Email ideas and pitches to blog [at] art21 [dot] org.

Rashaad Newsome, still from "Untitled (New Way)," 2009. Silent single channel HD video; 6:48 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Ramis Barquet, New York.

My partner and I throw a monthly gay dance night in Cambridge with some DJ friends of ours. For 10 months, most dancing has been reserved for the last hour of the party, when the line for the bar has lessened and patrons are at their least inhibited. This month, that hour was marked by a small crew of thin, glamorously hooded men voguing on the dance floor and using the bar’s bathroom hallway as a runway.

The giant smile across my face was due not only to the fact that the entire display was intensely fierce, but because I couldn’t help but wonder if Rashaad Newsome had anything to do with it. If Madonna is the first star to bring voguing to the masses, Newsome is certainly the second. One of two videos featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Untitled (New Way) (2009) features a dancer voguing for the camera in a small gallery space, performing movements taken from footage of several vogue dancers, which Newsome edited to choreograph into a new dance.

In March, the Whitney staged FIVE, a performance organized by Newsome, which included several vogue dancers whose movements were recorded in a live action drawing generated by real time video processing software. Based on the five essential components of voguing (“Hands,” “Cat Walk,” “Floor Work,” “Dip Spins,” and “Duck Walking,” as described by Newsome), the performance was separated into just as many “acts.” Each featured different choreography and musical score, including both an MC and a chamber orchestra, richly conflating ideas of cultural and historical contextualizations. In a statement on his Vimeo site, Newsome says of the performance, “FIVE encapsulates three core approaches I apply to my art practice: exploring the formation, evolution, adoption, and ownership of cultural signifiers; capturing the essence of historic art structures using modern urban symbolism and cultural references, particularly in the form of expression; and leveraging technology to elicit my artistic expression. ”

Paris is Burning, the seminal film about New York voguing balls, drag queens, and transgendered people of color in the mid to late ’80s, keenly documents the emphasis on “realness,” or the extent to which each competitor’s persona — whether butch or femme — appears authentic. Newsome’s work is wholeheartedly real, and his work eloquently brings to light cultural histories long relegated to the dusty shelves of subverted gay culture, doing so with the same confrontational elegance captured by the vogue dancers themselves. Work!

Mark Bradford, "Scorched Earth", 2006. Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, acrylic paint, bleach, and additional mixed media on canvas, 94 1/2 x 118 in. Collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy Wexner Center for the Arts.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about 800 prints in Los Angeles, 100 acres of art in Indianapolis, 12 Polaroids near the Hudson, a 10-year survey in Ohio, two portrait busts in New York, and a one block installation in Toronto:

• The first museum survey devoted to the work of the Season 4 artist Mark Bradford opens May 8 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. The exhibition, titled Mark Bradford, features more than 50 works spanning the last ten years. In addition to providing a comprehensive account of Bradford’s career to date, the show will include new works created under the auspices of a Wexner Center Residency Award in Visual Arts. Among these new works is an environmental installation with sound entitled Pinocchio Is On Fire, which examines key moments in the history of the black community in Los Angeles from the early 1980s to the present (with cultural references that include the rise of HIV and crack cocaine during the 1980s, gangster rap, and mega-churches, along with aspects of the artist’s own biography). Bradford has also created two new works related to Mithra, his ark-like public art project for Prospect.1 New Orleans: a major new sculpture titled Detail, which incorporates elements from Mithra, and a film titled Across Canal that examines the conception, production, and reception of that work. Also commissioned for this show are a suite of new paintings and four new “graphite drawings.” After Mark Bradford closes at the Wexner on August 15, the exhibition will travel to four major U.S. venues: the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

• The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) has announced eight inaugural artists selected to create works for 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. The artists are Andrea Zittel (Season 1), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Kendall Buster, Los Carpinteros, Jeppe Hein, Tea Mäkipää, Type A, and Atelier Van Lieshout. Adjacent to the Museum and located on 100 acres that includes woodlands, wetlands, meadows and a 35-acre lake, 100 Acres will be one of the largest museum art parks in the country, and the only one to feature the ongoing commission of site-specific artworks. The park is scheduled to open June 2010.

• Art Daily reports that the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA’s Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have jointly acquired the complete archive of prints by Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel. The two museums have been collaborating for over two years to realize the acquisition. Since 1988, Jacob Samuel has published 43 portfolios, and his archive comprises more than 800 prints made by a wide range of over 50 international artists, including Art21 artists Andrea Zittel, Barry McGee (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), and John Baldessari (Season 5). This summer the Hammer Museum will host Outside the Box: Edition Jacob Samuel, 1988-2010, a major exhibition highlighting the work in the archive.

• On May 8, Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York will open Twenty Five, a group exhibition commemorating the gallery’s 25-year history. Works from significant exhibitions at the gallery will be shown alongside new ones. Lick and Lather (1993), a series of two self-portrait busts made of chocolate and soap, created by Janine Antoni (Season 2); and an unidentified piece by Paul McCarthy (Season 5), will be included in the show. Twenty Five closes June 19.

• Through May 30, works by William Wegman (Season 1) are on view at Carrie Haddad Photographs in Hudson, New York. Polaroids features 12 of Wegman’s photographs, plus works by Mark Beard, John Dugdale, Jeri Eisenberg, Melinda McDaniel and Tanya Marcuse. The exhibition celebrates the Polaroid photographic process that once gave artists the ability to “push, pull, squish, squeeze and transfer emulsions to different surfaces.” The gallery states, “No other artist has conveyed the color, beauty and elegance of this format quite like Wegman.”

• In a recent interview with the National Post, Season 1 artist Barbara Kruger discussed her new block-long installation for Toronto’s Contact Festival, as well as Twitter transfers, movies, and her love of Canadian comedy. Read Kruger’s conversation with writer Leah Sandals here.

Angela de la Cruz, "Nothing 1," 1998. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

Writing about painting isn’t easy, simply because painting isn’t built to be written about. So writers writing about painting tend to rely on a checklist of clichés: the one about everyone thinking painting was dead, then (like an inverted Weekend at Bernie’s) finding out it wasn’t. Or the one about painting lagging behind other forms of art because it isn’t brainy enough. Or the one about painting being challenged by photography, or besieged by video art, or troubled by conceptualism — all ideas that bespeak a kind of insecurity on the part of art writers who can’t quite believe that a form of creation much older than the novel (that other persistent hanger-on) and almost as old as fire and shelter (also still quite popular) continues to be made by otherwise perfectly nice, intelligent, and right-thinking human beings.

Painters tend to stick in the throat of the contemporary art establishment not because they’re still mucking about in the shallow end of cultural history but because they fail to toe the intellectual party line. They won’t critique institutions, generate participative experiences, hold a mirror up to our (we’re told, but I’ve yet to find anyone who actually believes this) media-bombarded, meta-simulacral society or even (for the love of God!) provide their own commentary on the problematics of making art in the first place. No. Instead, these painters continue to spend hours in messy rooms dirtying up their Birkenstocks making objects to be hung on walls. What a waste!

Some contemporary painters, admittedly, paint with an eye to their work’s transcription into a wall label or press release. A whole slew of post-Tuymans, weak-wristed painters (including, sometimes, the man himself) are guilty of that, from Marlene Dumas on down. That strain in painting – nervous, thinly-applied translations of enigmatic photographic sources – is a boon for the art writer, for whom a lot of such works appears to have been made (a recent show of Eberhard Havekost at White Cube is a good example of this). It’s not a stretch to see that tradition as a kind of insecure commentary on the nature of images in contemporary society. Similarly, a kind of ironic abstraction has tended to dominate painting in recent years, taking its cue perhaps from Tomma Abts, with Blinky Palermo and Peter Halley as its patron saints. That tradition slots in nicely with a dominant strain in other art practices, the tireless and joyless unpicking of modernist utopianism.

Both strains in painting are hard to love, since they postpone or even nullify the principal joy of experiencing painting, which is looking at paint. The good news is that because of those think-first, act-later artists (who, you feel, might be happier not painting), there’s a certain amount of renewed attention given to painting in general. This is particularly good news for the many painters working today whose work fails to readily comply with the established clichés of talking about painting. It’s hard to feel down about contemporary art when painters such as Rose Wylie, Laura Owens, Peter Doig, Michael Borremans, Tal R, Chris Ofili, and Mary Heilmann are working, to name only a few.

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