Feeling Listless: Annual Awards
A Critic's Apathy
By: Charles Giuliano - Jan 05, 2007
There was a time when I loved to come up with that annual best and worst list. It was a no brainer for January, the post holiday slump, when fresh copy is hard to come by. There was the opportunity to go through the scrap book of clippings, or cuttings as they call them in the U.K., and recycle yesterday's newspapers. There was the fun and challenge of seeing how my list matched up with the competition.
But that doesn't particularly turn me on anymore. What if you are a wine critic, for example, and it proves to be a bad year for the grapes? Why bother to vote for the best wine of an off year? Now and then there may be a great vintage and what fun to cull through the best of the best. Like 1969 when without question "Bitches Brew" by Miles Davis was clearly the best jazz album of the year. I was hangin with Miles back then and got to talk to him about it. But what of years when the best album is by Wynton Marsalis? Yawn. Why even bother to vote. Or Halle Berry gets all teary for winning best actress for a forgettable film, Remember when Kevin Kostner won like everything for "Dances with Wolves." What a dumb picture and what has he done since? Waterworld?" "The Postman?" Give me a break.
End of the years lists make me suspicious. Like when big media, Time and Newsweek, the New York Times, call our attention to obscure films there is little or no chance we will ever see, and ignore the obvious crowd pleasers. It's the critical equivalent of stating that "I'm Chevy Chase and you're not." The assumption is that these mainstream reviewers see virtually every film and we don't. Or that they have better taste and we are just the vulgarians. A Boston Globe critic, for example, wrote that "Borat" was the best picture of the year. Please.
In the field of film it is entirely possible that a critic may have seen most of the releases of the prior year. On average they attend several weekly screenings and go round the clock at festivals. By comparison art critics are lazy. As the curator of a serious academic exhibition program, for example, it is a good year if the Boston Globe sees and writes about ten percent of our shows. It would have been appropriate to have coverage of our shows of John L. Moore and Jaune Quick to See Smith. They were important exhibitions. So it annoys me when we don't make the cut for the end of the year awards. Sure, I'm a critic and I don't see all the gallery shows in the city. Not by a long shot. But being an art critic is not my full time job. As is the case for those writing for the Globe, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Saint Louis Post Dispatch, Washington Post, etc. What's their excuse?
To be fair I have colleagues, like the remarkable Bill Arning a curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, who see a phenomenal number of shows. To say nothing of his endless studio visits and trips to New York, London, and the art fairs/ festival circuit. He is a great resource for all of us. But Bill also has a quirky point of view and our opinions rarely match up. And I don't always agree with or particularly care for the shows which result from that intensive field research. But I respect and envy his time and commitment.
On the other hand I have become with age increasingly resentful and reluctant to expose myself to what I see as an increasingly mediocre art world in which quantity has clearly overwhelmed quality. Less is more. The fewer shows I see and write about the more I seem to like them. So I am not really qualified to offer a year end best and worst overview when in fact I have opted to be selfish and selective. But it also annoys me when shows that I concluded were utterly awful or muddled get selected for the lists of my peers and colleagues. And that efforts which I thought were terrific were either never seen or ignored and passed over in favor of knee jerk endorsements of better known artists. In film, for example, was I utterly alone in thinking that "Brokeback Mountain" was a stupid, sentimental, boring, gay, cowboy movie?
As a member of the Boston chapter of AICA, an international society of art critics, I was asked to nominate and vote on its annual list of awards. To be fair I was twice previously honored for solo shows I produced with mid career artists Jo Sandman and Paul Laffoley. I was thrilled on behalf of the artists. They richly deserved recognition. This year I nominated "No Reservations" a remarkable effort by Aldrich Museum curator Richard Klein to combine Native and non Native artists. It was a landmark show on every levcl in a field for which I have considerable interest and passion. But Ridgefield, Connecticut if off the beaten path even though another of their shows was nominated but did not win. It was disappointing, for example, when the Times sent a local stringer to cover "No Reservations" in a thoroughly crappy manner. What a missed opportunity not to have a first string critic wade in on such an historic show the first of its kind in the field.
It was mind boggling to me that the Huang Yong Ping solo show at Mass MoCA was nominated but came up empty while its horrible Carsten Holler show was celebrated. Anyone with eyes and taste would see the difference. Holler put little or no effort into the site specific piece. It just didn't work. How lame. Although Holler's prior ICA show and current Tate Modern shows are terrific. Even the best artists don't get it right all the time. But the Ping show is dead on. Still up catch it if you can. Another MoCA mess and disaster, Nato Thompson's "Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History" won second place in the category of Best Thematic Museum Show. But this blew me away, the award for Best Monographic Museum Show Boston, second place, went to "David Hockney Portraits" at the Museum of Fine Arts. Yahgaddahbekidding. But at least my colleagues got it right awarding first place in that category to the outstanding "America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler 1985-1995" at MIT.
While making lists and checking them twice may be fun it is also serious business. It is great that our local AICA chapter makes that effort to recognize artists, curators and exhibitions. It's a win win both for making our organization more visible as well as putting the spotlight on deserving efforts. But something about the very nature of awards brings out the Groucho in me. Why, for example, are the four finalists for the ICA awards all female? And why were the nominators dominantly female? Am I reading something into this? Is it significant that with one exception the previous winners were female? And that the only annual recognition for Boston artists at the MFA, the Maud Morgan Award, goes to a woman? Hey how about an annual Joe Morgan award? Is this a bad time to be a guy? Some would say, tough luck, after the like previous chauvinistic multi millennia. Yeh but, what doesn't seem right about that? Do awards suck even when occasionally I am embarrassed to win one? Should I, like the late Marlon Brando, have stayed home and sent Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring up to the podium to accept a trophy on my behalf?
Actually some of the best memories of the past year did not always occur in museums. We were thrilled to attend two outstanding dance performances. Our friends Jay Patel and Tanaaz Timblo invited us to join them at Jacob's Pillow for the Tania Perez Salas company from Mexico. Later we enjoyed Ballet Hispanico at Mass MoCA. They were the two most memorable artistic experiences of the season. Next summer we hope to enjoy more of the Jacob's Pillow program. In the theatre "Wings of Desire" at ART and "Mauritius" at the Huntington Theatre still linger and resonate in my memory. Again our ambition is to be more involved with the performing arts. Writing about theatre, dance and film is still relatively new, risky, terrifying and challenging. It is important as a critic to always reach out for new and unfamiliar terrain. The terra incognita of aesthetic experience. It's what keeps you sharp and edgy.
There were also shows and experiences that I never got around to writing about. I saw the Dada show at MoMA during its final weekend so it seemed anticlimactic to write about it. Similarly I had a lot to say about the Picasso and American Art show at the Whitney but never did. I hated the reviews in the Times and Voice. They seemed stupid to me and displayed little in depth knowledge of early modernism in America. Kimmelman and Salz can be pretentious jerks at times. Or is it Times. I tried to read the catalogue for the Whitney show. What I read was terrific but I get bogged down by academic and other responsibilities and gave up. Dada and American modernism are important topics I may get back to when I retire after this semester and have time to read all those thick catalogues at my leisure. And I feel depressed that I never covered Part One of "Sensorium" at MIT which was one of the truly fascinating and challenging exhibitions of the past season. But I promise to wade in on Part Two when it opens in February.
Perhaps the real reason that I don't want to come up with one of those popular and glib year end lists is that it is just too hard for me right now. There was a time when it seemed possible to separate out and keep track of aesthetic impressions. But now I devour media and art on a daily basis. I am a glutton for art. It makes my mind obese. Every night I frantically flick the clicker hoping to find something worth seeing on TV. This week there was a so so piece on Annie Liebovitz. I thought about but opted against writing about her. She really isn't that interesting. And the PBS profile was done by her sister so how objective was that? At first I wasn't going to watch Frank Lloyd Wright in Buffalo also on PBS. But there was nothing else on but reruns so I went back and got riveted by it. Now I am sorry I didn't pop in a tape. When Astrid got home from work around midnight we watched Larry David on HBO. It's great to go to sleep laughing. So I guess overall it was a good day. But how am I supposed to remember that a year from now? Lists suck.