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Wednesday, June 7, 2006

About Last Night! (Sexier Than the Movie)

Posted by on June 7 at 16:30 PM

There were four panelists at last night’s “What Dictates Taste?” panel at EMP, and each of them could have sustained a whole event. The highlights included the P-I’s husky-voiced Regina Hackett singing a section of Gypsy—yes!—as she talked about being grateful to live in an era of pluralism, where “you can defend whatever you intensely feel.” I’d have liked to hear more discussion about the implications of pluralism as a type of taste, but there wasn’t time.

Dealer Jim Harris sincerely narrated his discovery a few years ago, after opening a gallery in Pioneer Square, that his taste for minimalism and abstraction had no match in a sustainable Seattle client base. He expanded what he shows, but knowing his roots helps explain a quietude at the heart of everything you see at his gallery.

Collector Barney Ebsworth described an apocalyptic situation, where all the great non-contemporary art in the nation has been snapped up by the growing ranks of museums (they’re making “that loud sucking noise” you hear, he says) by the year 2085—except one painting, held in a home in Akron, Ohio, where throngs of people will make pilgrimages to worship at its altar. It’s a great bit of science fiction. In the end, I have a hard time getting worked up over the idea of art becoming part of the public trust instead of being a well-behaved upper-class housepet. Not all museums are saints, but at least they’re accountable.

And in any case, it may not be museums raking in the valuables: increasingly, it’s foreign collectors, Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer said. The Chinese “only buy the best” (ha!) and the more American the work, the better. Russians are drawn to work made before the revolution (denying the whole Soviet era from 1917 to 1991 feels better), and Russian buying power is growing exponentially. “You don’t understand, I want abundance,” Meyer said a Russian woman told him when he suggested that maybe she didn’t need all the impressionist paintings for sale. “I will buy it all, and then I will come back and buy again.” This woman’s taste was driven by what Meyer described with the German word “Nachholbedarf” (another great one from the Deutsches): “making up for lost time.”

Meyer also gave a chilling account of his role as the human embodiment of the blank, amoral market: “I don’t have tastes. If I see something new, I have no opinion. It’s like a yoga posture. I look, and then I try to clear my mind.”

According to Meyer, the living-room wall of a fashionable millionaire once needed a Monet water lily painting, whereas now it must have a de Kooning abstraction. That was perfect, considering that the water lily and the de Kooning upstairs from the lecture room in Paul Allen’s DoubleTake show hang right next to each other, the old nouveau riche and the new nouveau riche. (Note to the gays: You’re in! “An affluent wealthy person today thinks nothing of hanging a (painting of a) drag queen in their living room. It’s very different today than even 5 years ago,” Meyer said.)

In related news: EMP is having Eric Fischl and Nan Goldin over for drinks! Well, not really for drinks, and not on the same night, but each of the artists—both appropriately rock-star-like in their own way—are coming to Sky Church to give talks at 7 pm on Aug 24 and Sept 21, respectively. The events are free, and EMP says it will start taking reservations soon.


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Is the drag queen a guest at the party, or is she just another artwork on display? I'm a little confused.

Duh. Thanks, Fnarf. The verb should be "hanging" rather than "having." (I realize that has its own implications, but ... in context, the quote makes sense.)

Museums and galleries have nothing to do with true art. A roomfull of grandmothers sewing a quilt know more about art than any elite "expert".


"Expert panels" are just another way that the true artists of the world are exploited. True Artists know in their hearts what beauty is.

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