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.

Photo by Maya Vidon.

“I told you a long time ago that I would find a way to give them a fist right in the face. That bunch of scoundrels, they caught it.”

—Gustave Courbet, in a letter to a friend.

Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950-1952), at MoMA.
(Photo: The Willem de Koon­ing Foundation/Artists Rights Soci­ety (ARS), New York)

Some­thing must be in the water: now New York mag­a­zine has run an arti­cle by Jerry Saltz on gender in the art world. The num­bers there look even worse than they do for poetry. Saltz counts 400 works of art on dis­play on the fourth and fifth floors of MoMA, where the museum dis­plays art from its per­ma­nent col­lec­tion of paint­ing and sculp­ture. Of these, four­teen are by women, or 3.5%. Count­ing artists rather than art­works, Saltz comes up with 11 out of 137, or 8%. (The dates of those pieces run from 1879 to 1969, an obvi­ously impor­tant factor that Saltz doesn’t take enough account of, though see below for some­one who does.)

Here are more stats from the article’s sidebar: