i got not mentioned again

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hey i got not mentioned by JS in NYMag... again.

It's in the new Marlene Dumas review where he says - "I’ve been accused of being part of a "circle jerk" anti-Dumas cabal. A 2008 New York Times Magazine profile included a quote that called disapproving male critics (including me) part of “a sexist conspiracy.”". The circle-jerk mention is me from this post from five(!) years ago.

The other unnamed person he quoted above - from the NYTimes profile - is Nicole Eisenmann, who coincidentally is the person who comments as Corny after the old 'circle-jerk' post. I don't think I'm betraying any confidence saying that.. there was an article mentioning her blog at some point later.

Actually, I was quoted but not named in that NYTimes profile as well. Kind of cool(?), this stealth bibliography? This is like the third time I've been in NYMag but not. My previous unmention by JS in NYMag is here.

I'm glad he finally wrote a review of this artist he has been trashing for seventeen years. Too bad he couldn't do it without portraying himself as a victim. I looked at his Facebook thread on this review and it is beyond ironic that it goes on for 250 comments mostly hostile toward Dumas and then they suddenly switch to honoring JS for his ability to put up with on-line criticism.

Well anyways congrats to both me and JS because I gave him shit about not reviewing the Dumas show at MoMA (which got me 'defriended') and also for getting beat with two dead women by Schjeldahl haha and now he has finally written a Dumas review and has already reviewed two live women this year wow!

Jerry Saltz on Marlene Dumas at MoMA

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"MoMA's dreary Marlene Dumas show establishes that she is a sensationalist with no original ideas about painting, color, or photography; she hasn't developed as an artist; is merely a later day Neo-Expresionist; is more connected to Andreas Serrano than to any painter." - Jerry Saltz on Marlene Dumas, on Facebook, 1/3/09.

WOW! That's it?? A facebook note after fifteen years of random sideswipes? Dude, she has a solo show on your home turf, at the freaking MoMA... this was really put-up or shut-up time.

Some great comments in response to the note -

"Well, Jerry, I have noticed that you've been complaining about her for years, is there a full review underway? If not it's time to let go of this thing with her..." - Joe Fyfe

"It appears you're simply writing "dreary" to avoid dealing with Dark." - Joy Garnett

"I find it fascinating how uniformly critics and New Yorkers (yeah, and me) have hated this show, even Peter Schjeldahl, who I'd have guesed would have found the personality to his liking" - John Haber

John Haber is wrong... Peter Schjeldahl reviewed the show positively. Roberta Smith did not hate the show either.

"I'm gratified that so many people I like to read are so uniform in dumping on this utter garbage and leave it at that" - John Haber... I mean John Hater!! haha.

Charlie Finch dumps, and even uses the word "retarded" to describe the show, apparently trying to glom some of the attention Chris Sharp got for his Joe Bradley review.

Marlene Dumas

Genetiese Heimwee (Genetic Longing), 1984

Marlene Dumas, Measuring Your Own Grave, at Museum of Modern Art. See my flickr set for more photos.

detail of Pregnant Image, 1988-90.

Losing (Her Meaning), 1988

The Binding Factor, 1990, ink and crayon on paper

Girl with Head, 1992

Give the People What They Want, 1992

The Secret, 1994 and The Cover-Up, 1994

detail

detail

Suspect, 1999

Stern, 2004

detail

Jen, 2005

The Blindfolded Man, 2007

detail

REVIEWS:

Charlie Finch on Marlene Dumas at MoMA

Roberta Smith on Marlene Dumas at MoMA

Marlene Dumas

with Marlene Dumas!!

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, at MoMA, 12/14 - 2/16.

RELATED: Marlene Dumas Tally Reaches Fever Pitch!

PLUS: anaba archived in the NYTimes!!! FOREVER!

(oh yeah.. that other guy is Gabriel Bennett)

Marlene Dumas Tally Reaches Fever Pitch

Someone left an anonymous comment yesterday morning (thanks!) noting that anaba is mentioned in this week's NYTimes Magazine... a Deborah Solomon profile of Marlene Dumas -

"An art-world blog, Anaba, has taken to listing the names of Dumas’s supporters and detractors as if they were superdelegates charged with putting an artist into office. Are you pro-Dumas or anti-Dumas? “All of the anti-Dumasers are men,” the blog noted in 2005, in a reference to a group of influential critics that includes Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York magazine, who has described Dumas’s work as 'flat-footed'."

Also noted in my posts, along with the gender split, is that most of those quoted who don't like Dumas are not artists. I'm not sure which posts Deborah Solomon read, but here are the most relevant -

1/5/06 - My ongoing monitoring of the critical response to the work of Marlene Dumas
10/30/05 - The Dumas Report
6/17/05 - Carol Vogel and Sarah Milroy come out for Marlene Dumas
6/1/05 - Jerry Saltz still doesn't like Marlene Dumas
5/12/05 - Marlene Dumas - 1994
5/11/05 - Richard Polsky really hates Marlene Dumas
3/28/05 - Marlene Dumas!

CURRENT TALLY -

PRO-DUMAS: Svetlana Alpers, Chris Ashley, David Cohen, Nicole Davis, Nicole Eisenman (in comments), Joy Garnett, Cynthia King (in comments) Sarah Milroy, George Rodart (in comments), Barry Schwabsky, Adrian Searle, Elisabeth Sussman, Richard Vine, Carol Vogel.

ANTI-DUMAS: Franklin Einspruch (in comments, and on his blog), Charlie Finch, Tyler Green, Jerry Saltz, Richard Polsky, Peter Schjeldahl.

Jerry Saltz has been consistent, but it has always been in throwaway lines, never an actual review, so I'm looking forward to reading his inevitable review of the upcoming MoMA show. I say inevitable because after that much glib dismissal he is going to have to put up or shut up. Hopefully Roberta Smith will also review that show.


Howard Dean and my mother are counting the superdelegate votes as they come in... I'm told a final decision will be reached in about a hundred years.

UPDATE: votes are poring in!
pro - Eva Lake, Amie Oliver

Ladies and Gentlemen

Everytime I post about the weird Artnet side-swipes at Marlene Dumas I get someone who comments on gender bias, so....

Listed as Featured Writers on Artnet's homepage, with female contributors italicized -

Victor M. Cassidy
Ben Davis
Charlie Finch
N. F. Karlins
Mark Kostabi
Donald Kuspit
Joe La Placa
Jerry Saltz
Phyllis Tuchman

Other regular contributors, with female contributors italicized -

Mary Barone
Stephen Maine
Richard Polsky
Walter Robinson

So that makes thirteen contributors, only three of whom are women. I won't even ask what color they are. No, wait, I guess I will. What color(s) are they?

Karlins and Tuchman rarely cover contemporary art and Barone submits the party photos only. There are a few other irregular contributors, but I'm listing here only those that had more than three items published in a year. Ana Finel Honigman was published A LOT in 2004, but she's moved abroad. Let me know if I am missing anyone.

RELATED: I've checked out my own blogroll at right, and have counted twenty-three males and only eleven females, with two anonymous bloggers "sex undetermined". Also, as far as I know there are only two Black bloggers listed here, with no Asians and no Hispanics.

MORE!!: Check out this new blog by a pissed-off woman artist. Did you know that only 29 of 101 artists in the 2006 Whitney Biennial are female???

I think this might be the most fucked-up Whitney Biennial in a good long time. How many are even American, and of those where do they live? How many are even from California? What the hell is the purpose of the Whitney Biennial?

my ongoing monitoring of the critical response to the work of Marlene Dumas

Wow, another dismissive Marlene Dumas slam by Jerry Saltz -

"the below-average overhyped painter Marlene Dumas"

This follows "the second-rate Marlene Dumas" here (Artnet, 5/30/05), and "the flat-footed ways they're painted leave me completely cold" in a very brief mention of her work here (Art in America, 10/1994).

What is with these side-swipes? Has he ever actually reviewed any of her shows?

I saw Jerry Saltz in Miami when I was sitting outside of Scope. He very quickly came down the street (to my left) and went into the Scope hotel, was in there for maybe half an hour, then came back out and walked/ran on his cellphone down toward the beach. He was like the uber-epitome of the adrenaline-addled spectator he talks about here discussing art fairs -

"adrenaline-addled spectacles for a kind of buying and selling where intimacy, conviction, patience, and focused looking, not to mention looking again, are essentially nonexistent"

Maybe that was some kind of family-emergency phone call or something but if I hadn't known it was him I'd have thought he was some rabid collector, certainly not an art critic. I wouldn't call Saltz a "below-average" art critic, only because the bar is sooo fucking low, but except for his glib dislike of Dumas he is wildly inconsistent with his denouncing, celebrating same, denouncing, celebrating same. He is easy to read but tiresome.

Charlie Finch, Tyler Green, Richard Polsky, Jerry Saltz - four guys that aren't artists and don't like the work of Marlene Dumas.

Nicole Davis, Nicole Eisenmann, Joy Garnett, Cynthia King, Sarah Milroy, Adrian Searle, Barry Schwabsky, Richard Vine, Carol Vogel - some people that like Marlene Dumas.

Previous posts with some good Marlene Dumas comments here and here.

The Dumas Report

Two more women writing positively on the work of Marlene Dumas, both for the September 2005 issue of Artforum -

Svetlana Alpers on The Triumph of Painting -

"Marlene Dumas also uses photos. But she is not depressed about painting. In her hands, photos are a mode of access. A way to connect with the world much as earlier painters had used the resource of paintings past. Working her medium is what matters in facing a bleak and brutal world. It is by means of the supple laying on of pale, washlike pigments that Dumas gives value to an extended strip of naked youths (Young Boys, 1993), even as she is mercilessly exposing their vulnerable bodies."

Elisabeth Sussman on the 51st Venice Biennale -

"Installed close by Bacon and Guston, Marlene Dumas’s magnificent group of paintings, many of them depicting figures lying dead or wounded, instantly recalled Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series of 1988; but Dumas’s figures, with their white flesh and mouths and nostrils filled with dried blood, luminescent against dark backgrounds, are bravura passages of loose and spontaneous brushwork all her own."

ANTI-DUMAS:

Charlie Finch, Tyler Green, Richard Polsky, Jerry Saltz

PRO-DUMAS:

Nicole Davis, Nicole Eisenmann (and in the comments to this previous post), Joy Garnett, Cynthia King, Sarah Milroy, Adrian Searle, Richard Vine, Carol Vogel, Elisabeth Sussman, Svetlana Alpers

Carol Vogel and Sarah Milroy Come Out for Marlene Dumas!

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Carol Vogel has come out in support of Marlene Dumas! In her NYTimes Venice Biennial overview she remarks that the Italian pavilion "is showing masters like Francis Bacon, Agnes Martin, Marlene Dumas and Philip Guston alongside younger artists."

And in today's Globe & Mail Biennial coverage Sarah Milroy writes "and the canvases of Marlene Dumas marked her as the best of the living painters on show".

ANTI-DUMAS:

Charlie Finch,Tyler Green, Richard Polsky, Jerry Saltz

PRO-DUMAS:

Nicole Davis, Nicole Eisenmann, Joy Garnett, Cynthia King, Sarah Milroy, Adrian Searle, Richard Vine, Carol Vogel

It is worth noting that of the pro-Dumas people more than half are women; all of the anti-Dumasers are men. Maybe there is something to a previous commenter's accusations of sexism after all. Also notable is that half of the pros are artists and there are no artists among the antis.

The anti-Marlene Dumas dudes are starting to look more and more like an Artnet circle-jerk. At least Saltz has been consistent, his dislike goes all the way back to 1993 and is actually stated in an article on painting, not a throw-away line in an article on the market like the evaluations of the other three.

more thoughts on Dumas, Saltz, the art market, etc.

I’m glad to see that some artists have contributed thoughts on the work of Marlene Dumas. I think that what bothers me most about all of those artnet guy slams is that they have all been so offhand, not in the context of a review or anything but usually in articles about the market and its outrageous auction prices. Just lazy throw-away remarks. The latest diss came in the Jerry Saltz article critical of the auctions; that article mentions eleven artists (Mondrian, Modigliani, Gauguin, Johns, Warhol, Cattelan, Dumas, Barney, Peyton, Currin, Tuymans) but for only one artist is an opinion stated – Marlene Dumas. I guess that was a safe one to glibly diss, five of the other six living artists mentioned are based in NYC.

George made a good observation in the comments section of a recent Modern Kicks post on Saltz’s article - “Saltz complains about speculation at the auctions, but participates in promoting the speculation at the entry level”. YES. Another interesting thing about that post for me was JL’s remark that “the shakeout he (Saltz) longs for sounds like it would cost me my job. Let the eagle soar, I say”. It made me realize again that there are so many people working in the art industry dependent on its continued growth and expansion, maybe not always in the best interests of art? Are artists the only art industry people that don’t have salaries and insurance? Why are we on the bottom of the pile? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had job security to worry about?

Aren't you artists that don't live in NY sick of hearing about this fantastic market in which shows sell out before they open and everyone has a waiting list? They keep saying "the art market" like it is the same all over, but is that what's happening in Chicago, Boston, Philly and wherever else? Seriously, I don't know, so please tell me. It isn't happening in Richmond, that's for sure. Am I the only one that doesn't sell?

I doubt it. Spector Gallery is one of Philadelphia's *hot* galleries and Jim Houser is her hot artist but look at how low most of his prices are! I'm not saying I love his work or anything but I'm surprised that a hot artist in a hot gallery in a big city is so affordable what with all of this stuff we always here about the out-of-control market. I was similarly surprised last year when Sarah McEneaney, a Philadelphia artist whose work I do love and who gets great reviews, showed at Reynolds Gallery. Her prices were lower than I would have expected also.

Jerry Saltz still doesn't like Marlene Dumas

I noticed that in his latest Artnet article Jerry Saltz refers to "the second-rate Marlene Dumas" - so I guess he hasn't changed his mind much since saying about her work in 1994 that "the flat-footed ways they're painted leave me completely cold".

None of the Artnet guys seem to like Dumas. Richard Polsky is always slamming her and in this article Charlie Finch calles her a "mediocre artist". Tyler Green smells blood so you can always count on him to give a little kick once it's safe.

Some critics do have good things to say about Dumas; Adrian Searle writes positively here, Richard Vine called her handling of paint "direct, notational, and extremely deft, as though Dumas were recording her dreams in their raw immediacy", and Nicole Davis writes "Dumas’s painterly quality is so sensuous that it furthers the hunger for her images" (scroll down to read more and see some images).

But really, who cares what the critics are paid to think, I'm interested in other artist's opinions. Commenter George had good things to say, Nicole Eisenmann seems to be a fan, Joy Garnett is interested. I'm definitely a fan.

Saltz going ga-ga over artists like Justin Faunce, Daniel Lefcourt, and Laurel Nakadate and dissing Dumas just doesn't make sense to me. Not that I think the above artists are bad, but their work can't hold a candle to Dumas' stuff. Maybe it's easier to over-praise stuff made by bright young locals who can fawn over you?

I'd like to hear what other artists have to say about Marlene Dumas. Please leave a comment.

UPDATE: Okay, it's 6:55pm Wednesday and 215 unique users have visited the blog so far today but only one has left a comment on Marlene Dumas. Give it up!

Marlene Dumas - 1994

Two opposing and simultaneous views on the work of Marlene Dumas from the same October 1994 issue of Art in America -

Jerry Saltz in his article A Year in the Life:Tropic of Painting: "the flat-footed ways they're painted leave me completely cold".

Richard Vine in the reviews section on her show at Jack Tilton: "in all these pictures the handling of the paint is direct, notational and extremely deft, as though Dumas were recording her dreams in their raw immediacy".

Richard Polsky really hates Marlene Dumas

Excerpts from (relatively) recent Richard Polsky Artnet articles mentioning Marlene Dumas -

5-09-05

"entering the realm of the absurd are two Marlene Dumas paintings, each estimated at $800,000-$1.2 million"

12-23-04

"Marlene Dumas -- This year's auction darling. Her outrageous prices for awkwardly painted (to the point of looking unfinished) figures continues to amaze veteran auction watchers. At over a million dollars for a "good" painting, surely collectors have options. Outlook for 2005: Status quo"

11-08-04

"whoever decides to bid on lot 55, the Marlene Dumas painting, in Sotheby’s evening sale on Nov. 9 should think long and hard. With an estimate of $600,000-$800,000, The Taboo (2000) represents a highly risky purchase. Not only is the canvas sloppily painted, which is unfortunately typical of the artist, but it raises an even greater question -- who is Marlene Dumas and why do her pictures routinely carry (and bring) six-figure prices?"

In this article Polsky calls David Hockney "one of our ten finest living painters". I'm really curious as to who he thinks the other nine are but he won't tell - my guess is that he would include Robert Ryman, Jules Olitski, Wayne Thiebaud, and Jasper Johns on his list.

Marlene Dumas!

Happy to see the article on Marlene Dumas in the NYTimes yesterday - I'm a big fan. I couldn't believe it back in November when Richard Polsky wrote about her - he is not a fan. I ended up making three short Marlene Dumas posts: one, two, three.

Incidentally, Richard Polsky is shunning me! In this later article he calls David Hockney "one of our ten finest living painters" - but when I contacted him asking who the other nine were he wrote back he was too busy to tell me! I e-mailed him again a couple weeks later and haven't heard back. Bummer. I'm dying to know who the others are!

Do you have a list of "ten finest living painters"? Post it in the comments.

UPDATE 1/30/05 :

Franklin Einspruch has written a post responding to the NYTimes Marlene Dumas article. Lots of interesting comments - most of his readers do not like Dumas.

The exception is a commenter named George who writes: "the NYT illustrations made me think of the Goya frescos at the Florida in Spain. In my opinion these are among the greatest paintings ever made. She tried." I think George is the artist George Rodart, he later adds a link to his website with scans from a book of the aforementioned Goya frescos.

Franklin's frequent commenter Oldpro offers "Olitski is my nominee for the best living artist".

Where are my requests for The Finest Living Painters???

Marlene Dumas

Okay! I found some recent Marlene Dumas images and if you are in London you're really in luck because she is showing at Frith Street Gallery from tomorrow through December 23rd! Wow! Someone send Richard Polsky a ticket!

The link also provides her resume which lists only one U.S. solo exhibition - in Chicago - in the past ten years. Yet I'm pretty sure she showed at the New Museum in 2002. Kind of weird. Marlene Dumas is so mysterious!

Marlene Dumas

Still thinking about how wrong Richard Polsky was yesterday in calling his segue from Marlene Dumas to outrageous auction prices "changing the subject from the ridiculous to the sublime", when it's the complete reverse! What Bizarro World is he on?

I think all of these prices are pretty nuts, but fortunately Polsky's pan didn't seem to hurt Dumas. Both of her works available went for over $900,000, this one going for $937,600. Wow! Here's a piece of crap from Damien Hirst that sold for $848,000 and a great painting by Jeff Koons, or someone, which sold for $2,248,000!!!

Jeff Koons is the shit!