Currently at the Whitney, the show was previously at MOCA LA (where I caught it) and on its way to the Walker Art Center this fall. It's a good show, and Smith largely thought so as well. What I thought was particularly interesting in her review though, and what I totally missed in my visit to the show, was that Graham wrote "half of the show’s text labels". Of course, out of a combination of laziness and self-preservation I almost never read labels, so it's no real surprise that I missed out, but I'm sorry for that policy now. I was also sorry to find that Smith didn't quote from them in her review, and the museum sites (neither the Whitney nor MOCA) haven't put any of them online. Too bad.

Though it doesn't seem to include the label texts either, you can get the exhibition catalog which contains a couple of essays by, among others, Graham. But whether or not you can get to the show, I can also recommend Graham's 1999 book of essays Two-Way Mirror Power which, like the catalogue, was published by MIT Press. This is is my brief write-up on it from Hol's fall catalog (pdf/scribd):

Following stops in New York and Los Angeles, this comprehensive survey of the work of conceptual artist/writer/sculptor Dan Graham, finished its run in Minneapolis this fall.

Since starting work in the sixties with a group of artists interested in exploring the boundary line between word and art, Graham’s writing has always been integral to his artistic practice. Like those artists, Graham started out using writing as art, but he soon turned to writing on art as his primary form. This practice culminated in the publication of his book, Rock My Religion, in 1993. The book was Graham’s collected cultural criticism on art, film and performance of all kinds. In his 1999 book however, Two-Way Mirror Power, the focus is on Graham’s writing that is either about or for his own work. Though even then, when it came to distinguishing his commentary from his art, Graham and many others would be hard pressed to precisely define a difference.

As artist Jeff Wall bandies in the closing lines of the book’s introduction, “Graham’s writing is not writing about art, or even ‘art-writing’; rather, Graham’s art is an art with writing in it, or, maybe more precisely, an art with the writing it contains glinting in the form of texts.”

In the Whitehouse's official photostream at flickr, there are a few quiet shots of President Obama touring the galleries at the Centre Pompidou. [via]

If this strikes you as unusual, I doubt you're alone. Since the advent of television, presidents have increasingly come to spend most of their time being presidential. And these days it seems, there is nothing particularly presidential about looking at art.

In their rare moments of leisure we expect our leaders to jog or ride their bicycles, spend time with their family or pets, or work at their ranch or ride horses. Regan had his acting career, Carter is endlessly writing books and Clinton played the sax, but I don't believe we much think of our leaders as doing anything very creative, or even spending much time thinking along these lines.

So moments like Obama's brief walk through the Pompidou are rare. And not just in the rarity of the quiet moment the president has reflecting on these pictures, but also of the moment we have reflecting on our own picture of him.

Of course, this rarity was not always the case.

Winston Churchill (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940-45 and 1951-55) was an avid, if also amateur painter. He also wrote a number of essays on the subject, and these, along with some reproductions of his works, were ultimately published in book form as Painting as a Pastime. He writes: "To have reached the age of forty without ever handling a brush or fiddling with a pencil, to have regarded with mature eye the painting of pictures of any kind as a mystery, to have stood agape before the chalk of the pavement artist, and then to suddenly to find oneself plunged in the middle of a new and intense form of interest and action with paints and palettes and canvases, and not to be discouraged by the results, is an astonishing and enriching experience." The book is sadly out of print (and the Churchill estate wasn't ready to grant Hol reprint rights, though we asked) but it's worth tracking down a used or library copy.

Theodore Roosevelt (President of the United States from 1901-1909) wasn't a painter, but was a prolific and respected writer. While most of his books dealt with the military, the environment and the American West, as editor of Outlook magazine, he once wrote an article on the 1913 Armory Show. The show was one of the most controversial in history, and a pivotal moment in the emergence of modern art. It was the American public's first view of then-unknown Eurpoean artists like Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp. Roosevelt's article, "A Layman's Views of an Exhibition", is just that -- an honest and forthright account of what he thought of the "new" art being exhibited. Coming out clearly on the side of a more traditional home-grown art, he was never condescending or close-minded to the new. We've posted the complete text at Scribd for viewing or download, or it's available in Hol's book, For & Against: Views on the Infamous 1913 Armory Show.

Does knowing these things about Churchill and Roosevelt change your view of them? It certainly does mine and ultimately, though I don't know what it means to have a political leader who also paints, or one that writes and visits art exhibitions, I do feel better knowing it's possible.

"strives to honor and encourage writing about art

• that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent, and precise;
• in which a keen engagement with the present is infused with an appreciation of the historical;
• that is neither afraid to take a stand nor content to deliver authoritative pronouncements, but serves rather to pose questions and to generate new possibilities for thinking about, seeing, and making art;
• that is sensitive to both the importance and difficulty of situating aesthetic objects within their broader social and political contexts;
• that does not dilute or sidestep complex ideas but renders accessible their meaning and value;
• that creatively challenges the limits of existing conventions without valorizing novelty as an end in itself."

"In theory at least, wall texts are a powerful method of communication.... spaces where words can enrich the experience of art, and, to this end, could potentially call upon everything language is capable of. Might we imagine a wall text that could make us laugh, or cry, or one so elegant or intellectually surprising that we would recall it, unbidden, months later, in the bath or on the bus?"

In last Sunday's New York Times Book Review

In admiring review of Cusk's approach to and descriptions of art, Begley writes, "she looks with palpable intensity," and, "she observes carefully, teasing out specific meanings," and finally, "she’s at her best when she broods, when she allows her earnestness to condense."

In fact, in the end, it was Cusk's intense looking at art that captured Begley's interest (and ours) and saved the book: "there’s an awkward tension throughout 'The Last Supper' between Cusk’s intellectual ambitions and the humdrum 'what I did last summer' narrative.... I hope that next time she visits Italy she leaves her domestic baggage at home and concentrates on looking at the art."

Given this I'm tempted to buy the book and only read the art bits. And if they were to prove as rich as the review starts to suggest they are, wouldn't it be sort of interesting to offer an edition of the book that was only these descriptions of the art? Perhaps even as a simple ebook or iPhone app that included some travel guide material? Not the thing I'd expect Farrar, Strauss & Giroux or a Whitbread Award-winning author to jump on, but an intriguing opportunity.

A few notable reviews in the latest Rain Taxi online, including:

Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World, Jed Perl
Disorientations: Art On The Margins of the Contemporary, Travis Jeppesen
On Criticism (Thinking in Action), Noël Carroll
Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick eds.

A few notable reviews in the latest Bookforum, including:

Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Suzanne P. Hudson
Picasso and the Allure of Language, Susan Greenberg Fisher ed.
Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, Michael Peppiatt

And though it's not our usual cup of tea, the other Francis Bacon title reviewed, Incunabula, sounds pretty cool too.

One of Camplin's primary concerns, befitting a director from one the world's preeminent illustrated book publishers, is the discrepancy between the cost of producing the traditional art book, and the price consumers are willing to pay. Basically, art books cost a ton and no one wants to pony up.

The fact is though, art lovers are also avid readers, and so should be ready-made customers for eager art book publishers. They’re members of local museums, subscribers to newspapers and magazines, and are extremely active online. They’re also well-educated and of a higher-than-average economic class. This is not a group particularly known for its price sensitivity, and if they aren't paying for art books, I’d propose that it's not because they're too expensive or because they can’t find them in their local store, but rather because they don't see the value in them.

I think the question that really needs to be asked is, What would art lovers value in an art book? Not, How can we recoup an art book’s value from art lovers?

Art lovers (and here I am limiting myself to the broader general public rather than professionals or academics already in the art field) are looking for art books for two reasons: (1) to commemorate the experience of art they have seen in a museum or gallery; or (2) to learn more about art they have seen in a museum or gallery. Only rarely these days—except perhaps in textbooks or for art of a limited mobility, quantity or geographic area—are they buying books on art that they have not seen or are not planning on seeing.

For the commemorators, museum exhibition and collection catalogs, and the single-artist monographs from publishers like Phaidon and Prestel, are going to be the first and best choice. These illustrated books offer a facsimile of the experience of viewing the art on the walls, complete with wall labels in the form of captions and exhibition wall text in the form of an introductory essay. And indeed, if you look at a museum store’s sales figures for its current exhibition catalogue, you might be surprised at the relatively impressive quantity of books that can move from a single venue.

For the learners though, catalogs and monographs are not providing the answer. The learners want to go beyond the experience of looking at the art. By looking for books to learn about art from (rather than taking a class, watching a documentary, or surfing the web) they’re really looking for an engaging, narrative, reading experience. They want art books that do what all books do best: educate and entertain on a textual level. They want books that don't try to act as stand-ins for the experience of viewing art, but rather act as guides to heighten and enliven that experience. Yet the dominant form of the art book is situated to looking and not to reading.

What Camplin dances around, and what all the signs point to, is that it’s time to throw out the old notion that "art book" must equal "illustrated". There is another way. It’s the way of great criticism, narrative non-fiction, biography, artist writings, and even art fiction. Granted, Camplin might brush this aside and point to the current “dearth of good art writers.” But just as he earlier argues that the major bookstore chains are “proving that if you do not display art books, you do not sell them”, I’d argue that the major art book publishers are proving that if you do not publish writing about art, no one’s going to write about art.

If the problems are the high cost of licensing and printing illustrated books, decreasing investment made on those books at the retail level, and the unrecoupability of their costs from consumers, the solution must be to publish art books that are less expensive for publishers to make, for booksellers to stock, and for readers to buy. Isn’t it handy then that this may also mean publishing books that are friendly to approach and rewarding to read.

Camplin says, "the art-book publisher’s first duty… is to encourage people to look at art and help them understand it." With this, I wholeheartedly agree. Let us share our passion for art with our readers. Let us engage them with the material and make them smarter and more confident about it. Then, let us send them merrily on their way to the museum.