The cover of Judith Goldman's 1985 monograph

As I write, my husband and daughter are threatening to cremate my books and preserve them in an urn for me for eternity. This is not going to happen (and they know this). A surefire way to irritate me beyond reasonable measure is to not understand my (perhaps unreasonable) attachment to books. I love their weight and feel and their sense of occupancy, their reason for being–to attempt to communicate something beyond time and distance. I particularly love my art books. James Rosenquist by Judith Goldman is one of my favorites. The cover alone is irresistible (reminds me rather unsurprisingly of a great album cover) but her text is equally swoon worthy:

December 1983: “I’ve got an idea for a real zinger–women, flowers, and dead fish.” James Rosenquist has just returned from a meeting at New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant, where he discussed the mural they had recently commissioned from him. He is excited, physically animated. “Maybe the fish won’t be dead,” he continues, “but they’re going to have real slippery eyes. Slippery fish and beautiful women.”

“Did they understand it?” What I had meant to ask was if they liked it.

Rosenquist finds the question beside the point and not wanting to be impolite, steers the conversation in another direction. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was down in Florida visiting Bob Rauschenberg? We’d had dinner and a lot to drink. We were pretty swacked, and after dinner Bob showed me his new work. I looked for a while and told him I liked it, but I wasn’t sure I understood it. Bob started to laugh and laugh and was still laughing when he said, “Do you think I understand it?”

Another favorite is Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966–73, a catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery in 1995. I love this one primarily because I believe it changed my life. Really. I was 25 when I was introduced to Mel Bochner. I was working as a features reporter for a daily newspaper in Connecticut and by default had been assigned to provide arts coverage for the Sunday paper. I would drive around the state in a dying Mazda (it seemed to require oil replenishment every sixty miles) and write about artists, gallerists, and writers in the area (Cleve Gray, Robert Natkin, Rosamond Bernier, Jacques Kaplan) as well as regional exhibitions. Here is some of what I wrote about the Bochner exhibition:

Black-and-white, pen and ink, Bochner’s art includes everything from rough diagrams and preliminary sketches to typed letters and stamped envelopes. He defines art as measuring tape on a wall, floored newspaper painted blue, even stones placed on pieces of white paper. Rarely are Bochner’s works straight-forward. They require translation. They rely on finding a common language which is, of course, the trickiest art of all.

“Language is what keeps people apart and ideas from being understood,” says Bochner, a tall, slender man of model proportion with a sweep of thick, silver hair, and a tendency to wink frequently and smile occasionally. He is gentle and patient in the fluid, graceful way he moves his hands–more like a dancer, less like a salesman–when he speaks. “I’ve always been interested in the hidden conventions that govern life and art.”

I studied that catalogue like mad, trying to pin down his mental teasers. It was invigorating. His art made everything and anything possible–all forms of communication and miscommunication. It suddenly wasn’t something that I was failing to understand (and by it I mean those “hidden conventions” that had flummoxed me since at least adolescence); it was something that no one (not to be presumptuous or idealistic) completely understood  even if they thought they did. Ultimately, the exercise of translation (and not just a single translation but repeated and often increasingly contorted translations) that Bochner’s art required opened an entire world of learning for me. I was no longer intimidated by not knowing; I was completely enthralled by it. Everything became about translation–from art and physics to mathematics and relationships. The world of knowing became one glorious invention of systems and practices that veiled the amazing and thrilling comfort of not knowing and perhaps, maybe and fleetingly, understanding just a little. Seriously and simply beautiful.

Bochner wins me over with lines like the "dead ends and vicious circles of language."

Manipulating a representation of some estimated value until it delivers insane dividends to a group of privileged investors appears to be a skill shared by Wall Street and Warhol, whose 200 One Dollar Bills sold for $43.8 million at Sotheby’s last week.

My understanding of moral hazard is slippery (is it possessing information that is used to the detriment of others or is it engaging in risky behavior based on a presumption of protection?)–more intuitive than precise–but the phrase makes me think that sales like these must stick in the craw of Joe Simons and others who have been prevented from partaking in Warholian currency while folks like Larry Gagosian, Peter Brant, and Jose Mugrabi swim in it.

To read more about the superfreakonomic, morally hazardous accusations that underscore Simons’s lawsuit against the Warhol Foundation, read Richard Dorment’s “What is an Andy Warhol? in last month’s New York Review of Books and “Authenticating Andy Warhol,” an article I wrote for ARTnews in 2004.

Strikingly, on the day that 200 One Dollar Bills went on the block, a front-page article in the New York Times questioned the ethics of the New Museum of Contemporary Art for its decision to turn the museum into a private showcase for mega-collector and New Museum Trustee Dakis Joannou and his favorite art star/investment/yacht painter Jeff Koons, who has been engaged to curate the exhibition of Joannou’s holdings.

“Sure, I am a trustee. Would it be different if I weren’t? Some people may think some things,” Joannou told the Times. “For me, it’s a nonissue. I know who I am and what I am doing.”

In the NYT ArtsBeat blog, Deborah Sontag, an author of the Times article, took a stab at revealing the “dizzyingly insular circle of art world insiders” and their connections to programming at the New Museum. I propose an addition to Sontag’s list – Pauline Karpidas, the seller of 200 One Dollar Bills (she paid $385,000 for it at Sotheby’s in 1986–lucky girl), a major benefactor of the New Museum, and a neighbor of Joannou’s in Hydra, Greece, whose most recent Hydra Workshop was devoted to Joannou-collectible Nate Lowman (with Mary-Kate Olsen in tow). In 2005, the featured artist of Karpidas’s Hydra Workshop was Urs Fischer, another Joannou collectible and the subject of the New Museum’s current exhibition. As Jerry Saltz points out, Fischer is represented by Gavin Brown who has secured exhibitions at the New Museum for four of his artists in the last two years.

But at least someone out there (who are the Erasers? perhaps these guys?) has a sense of humor: www.dakisjoannou.com. So, apparently, does society scribe Christopher Mason (eh hem): The Bowery’s New Museum Song.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

“Damien’s not recognized like I am everywhere I go,” she said [clad in a swimsuit poolside at her New York hotel]. “In London I’m in the papers every time I blow my nose, essentially. I’ll be followed by paparazzi. I’m taught in the school curriculum in Britain. It’s actually kind of nice when I come to New York and I don’t have that recognized thing.” via The New York Times

Forget the largely dour results of the pulverized sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s major auctions this week and last (they will eventually rebound perhaps more quickly than we suspect), the contemporary art auction season has been dealt a more mortal blow. Gone is the promise of watching a stallion-like Stephanie Seymour stride up the center aisle of Christie’s saleroom in some seductive getup to find her seat beside hubby Peter Brant, publisher of Art in America and Interview, polo and interview extraordinaire, and infamous Gagosian comrade. Just as the opening of the Brant Foundation Art Study Center is providing a peek at some of the 1,000 artworks that Brant has collected over the years, the 14-year marriage between Seymour and Brant (whose duo involvement with Interview as of late has been a bit disconcerting) is dissolving into Page Six reports detailing their bitter divorce and putting a final nail in the coffin of a decadent art collecting era. There are lots of questions here beyond whether Seymour is drugging and boozing and whether Brant’s ownership of a Maurizio Cattelan sculpture of Seymour (see above) that looks like it belongs in a hunting lodge qualifies as exhibiting “hostile, threatening and intimidating behavior.” The implications for contemporary art (at least some 1,000 works) is just beginning.

and bad Donald Judd and Carl Andre and sherbert

Falling hard for the music and visuals in this; all labors should be so provocatively and oddly uplifting (happy long weekend):

Garth H. Drabinsky, who served as the chief executive of the defunct Broadway production firm Livent, was sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday for defrauding the shareholders of more than 500 million Canadian dollars. His former business partner, Myron I. Gottlieb, received a six-year sentence. Image: Chris Young/Canadian Press

Read today’s NYT article about the Broadway convictions involving Larry Salander-like exploits with Michael Ovitz in the role of Robert De Niro:

“The exponential growth of the company was analogous to an athlete taking a performance-enhancing drug,” Justice Mary Lou Benotto of the Ontario Superior Court said at Garth Drabinsky’s and Myron Gottlieb’s sentencing hearing in Toronto today. “The result may be spectacular, but the means involve cheating.”