Manhattan’s Meat Pack­ing Dis­trict still exists, and as eco­nomic con­di­tions worsen it’s likely that the slaugh­ter will increase as the cloth­ing bou­tiques and home design shops shut down.  That is, more cow and lamb blood will stream down the curb, while less invest­ment banker mar­tini vomit will flush down the night club toi­lets.   The Bru­tal­ist Police have come to town, and The Stan­dard Hotel is slated to open “soonish” accord­ing to a nylon sign strapped to the building’s south­west glass panel.  

I was drink­ing beer with my brother last night when he alerted me to an arti­cle on Bru­tal­ism that appeared in the back of the front sec­tion of the day’s New York Times (Page A40, New York edi­tion, and online here).  He knows to do this, as I’m an incon­sis­tent and super­fi­cial scholar of that school of archi­tec­ture, and also the author of an unpub­lished series of poems called “Architecture Series Part II: Brutalisms.”  I’ve been inter­ested in Bru­tal­ism for some time; it prob­a­bly started during col­lege with the Regen­stein, the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago’s main library, which is one of the U.S.A.’s Bru­tal­ist land­marks.  In the few years since I grad­u­ated from col­lege, I’ve remained vaguely on the look­out for more Brutalism— at home in New York I try to visit Water­side Plaza as much as I can, though I’ve only man­aged to cross over the FDR to that realm once.  When my girl­friend and I vis­ited London last year, we spent an after­noon roam­ing the grounds of the Bar­bi­can Centre and it was heaven.  As Daniel Soar writes in the Short Cuts sec­tion of the 6 Novem­ber issue of the London Review of Books: “With its forty acres of 1960s Bru­tal­ist con­crete and noto­ri­ous labyrinth of tower blocks and over­head walk­ways, the Bar­bi­can is one the most under­vis­ited places in London.  I love it as I love hos­pi­tals and air­ports, for the way they allow you to occupy public space with­out being seen, with­out being public.”  Yes, Bru­tal­ism has its cult of fol­low­ers.  But what exactly char­ac­ter­izes it?

From “Mao Crazy,” Jed Perl’s review of Cai-​Guo Quiang’s “I Want To Believe” show at the Gugghenheim:

There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thun­der­ous pop­u­lar­ity of a number of con­tem­po­rary Chi­nese artists com­pels a polit­i­cal analy­sis. Much of the work is pow­ered by a star­tling and com­pletely delu­sion­ary infat­u­a­tion with Mao Zedong and the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion. This is more sin­is­ter than any­thing we have seen in the already fairly aston­ish­ing annals of rad­i­cal chic. We are wit­ness­ing a glob­al­ized polit­i­cal white­wash job, with artists and assorted col­lec­tors, deal­ers, and syco­phants pour­ing a thick layer of avant-​garde double-​talk over the infer­nal decade of suf­fer­ing, destruc­tion, and death that Mao unleashed on his coun­try in 1966. And as we are also deal­ing with the house of mir­rors that is the art world, I have no doubt that some­body is ready to explain that I am con­fus­ing appro­pri­a­tion with appro­ba­tion or that fas­cism is just another way of spelling free­dom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s bur­geon­ing love affair with Mao and the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion makes a very neat fit with the cur­rent Chi­nese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the author­i­tar­ian power that every­body can learn to love.

“Postcards from Nowhere,” which appears in this week’s New Repub­lic, is Jed Perl’s latest poison-​tipped volley against the ruling elite of con­tem­po­rary art. Some sample copy:

For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, and now Cai Guo-​Qiang, having a ret­ro­spec­tive at the Guggen­heim is like being a Visig­oth who has been given the keys to Rome. At the Guggen­heim, the staff no longer curates exhi­bi­tions. They simply invite an artist to come in and rape the place.

And, dis­cussing the Broad Con­tem­po­rary Art Museum and the New Museum:

Dis­cussing such muse­ums in archi­tec­tural terms is like dis­cussing a sculp­ture by Jeff Koons in com­po­si­tional terms. You would be kid­ding your­self. These muse­ums are only brands designed to con­tain brands.

I’ve been struck favor­ably by some of the art that Perl hates. Whichever of Damien Hirst’s mir­rored med­i­cine cab­i­nets was hang­ing in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice back in 2006 was impres­sive enough to steal my breath for more than a few seconds.

But far and away the best things at the Grassi were the very uncon­tem­po­rary Rothkos hang­ing in a second-​story alcove. And so, having found myself almost com­pletely bored by the Whit­ney Bien­nial a few weeks back–only Leslie Hewitt’s lean­ing paint­ings held my atten­tion for more than a few min­utes there–I have to count myself gen­er­ally sym­pa­thetic to Perl’s spite.

That said, I thought it inter­est­ing to see how dif­fi­cult Perl found it to explain what exactly it was that gets under his skin about the Matthew Bar­neys and Richard Princes of the world.