November 2007

NOTES & COMMENTS
The Aristos Awards
The awards this month are to Joan Altabe, an art critic; Heather Mac Donald, a cultural critic and public policy scholar; Lynne Cheney, a public policy scholar and former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Rupert Christiansen, a music critic for the London Telegraph; and Julian Spalding, a former museum director in Scotland. As indicated by the just-revised introduction to the Awards, they "pertain only to the individual's views on art as specified in the award citation--independent of any other beliefs held, whether in respect to art, philosophy, politics, or culture."

November 2007. New award winners (marked ) have been added for the following years: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2003, 1995.

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2007
Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry / Bradenton [Fla.] Herald)
Rupert Christiansen (Music Critic, London Telegraph)
Heather Mac Donald (Contributing Editor, City Journal; Fellow, the Manhattan Institute)
2006
Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry / Bradenton [Fla.] Herald)
2005
Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry / Bradenton [Fla.] Herald)
Victoria Dailey (Beverly Hills, Calif.)
Jennie Farrell (Wantagh, N. Y.)
Kaley Holmboe (sixteen-year-old student, London)
Joshua Kosman (Music Critic, San Francisco Chronicle)
National Review
New York Daily News
Henry J. Stern (Director, New York Civic; former Commissioner of Parks, New York City

Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry) [bio] [posted 11/07]
For "Conceptual Art Is a Crock!" [pdf version] ("Open Letter to Artists [From an Art Critic]--Part 26"), March 27.
Joan Altabe does not mince words. "Conceptual art isn't art," she boldly states. "It's [just] an idea, often without image or object." One early conceptualist, Altabe reports, simply "conducted a poll on museum goers' opinion of the Vietnam War." "No art" there, in her view. "You may as well write out the idea, which is actually what many conceptual artists do." Regarding the infamous "readymades" of Duchamp, Altabe also gets right what most critics get wrong, that "the way Duchamp saw his readymades, they were statements about the state of art, not art itself."
(Altabe has also won Aristos Awards for 2006 and 2005.)
2006
Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Fine Arts Registry) [bio] [posted 11/07]
For "Shock Art" ("Open Letter to Artists [From an Art Critic]--Part 16"), October 23.
Notwithstanding her view of "shock art as art," her vague definition of art as "a mix of beauty and truth," and her questionable interpretation of Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Joan Altabe merits high praise for taking her fellow critics Michael Kimmelman (New York Times) and Kim Levin (Village Voice) to task for helping "the shock art crowd . . . take art's name in vain"--a phrase which to us implies that what that crowd makes is not art.
Here she quotes from Kimmelman's approving review of what she calls "the SoHo exhibit of cow carcasses hacked up by artist Damien Hirst":

The show left me somehow, unexpectedly, smiling. . . . It's a sense of something vivifying beyond, or besides, his infatuation with death and dead animals, that makes [Hirst's] work likable, and makes his art different from the merely slick and chilling. ['Cows, Pigs, Cigarettes: All Dead,' New York Times, May 10, 1996].

Altabe faults Levin for her vacuous remarks about the work of Julian Schnabel--who is known, Altabe notes, for "giant canvases [more] where globs of paint are applied to broken pieces of crockery glued to the surface." In Levin's view, such works "regurgitate residues of feelings that no longer exist. They manage to be decadent and barbaric at the same time." Altabe continues: "Then, as if she knew she wasn't making any sense, Levin added, 'Why should everything mean something? What's wrong with a taste of true meaninglessness?'" To which Altabe replies: "Nothing, if that's your taste. Just don't call it art."
(Altabe has also won Aristos Awards for 2007 and 2005. She is also the winner of an Excellence in Journalism Award for Criticism in 2006 from the Florida Press Club.)


Joan Altabe (Art Critic, Bradenton (Fla.) Herald) [bio] [posted 11/07]
For "Hanson Works Should Not Be Deemed 'Art,'"August 14.
"Now that the . . . Hanson show [more] at the Ringling Museum of Art has ended, I'll share my thoughts about it without worrying that I'll be spoiling your exhibit experience. As you can guess, I'm not a Hanson fan. If you are, you may not want to read further. Still here? OK, you've been warned. Hanson's life-like, life-size 'sculpture' of working-class people isn't sculpture. It isn't art."
(Altabe has also won Aristos Awards for 2007 and 2006. She is also the winner of an Excellence in Journalism Award for Criticism in 2006 from the Florida Press Club.)