Best in visual art:
Lori Waxman on the art moments that mattered in 2019.
Anyone who wants to know which Chicago area shows struck me as most trenchant, magnificent and affecting can read the articles I have written over the course of the year, keeping in mind that no one critic can cover everything of importance. What did I miss? Meleko Mokgosi’s larger-than-life-size suite of power paintings at the Smart Museum, Alberto Aguilar’s buoyant retrospective at Gallery 400, Alexandra Bachzetsis’s rigorously choreographed slapstick-erotics at the Art Institute, and no doubt plenty more.
But as 2019 draws to a close, it is other art-related subjects that consume my mind, which don’t neatly fit in between the lines of exhibition reviews. The list starts off dark, but I promise it gets lighter at the end.
The Topic of the Year, generating protests, open letters, resignations and refusals, has undoubtedly been toxic philanthropy. The award for Deadliest Philanthropists goes to the Sackler family, for their generous support of cultural institutions and universities, money derived from their company Purdue Pharma, maker of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, the drug at the center of the opioid crisis. Demonstrations by the photographer Nan Goldin and her group P.A.I.N. have convinced the Met, the Guggenheim and the Tate to announce that they will no longer accept Sackler money. Forging ahead, the Louvre and just last week the Smithsonian have removed the family name from their respective galleries of Asian art. With 130 people dying every day in the U.S. from opioid-related drug overdoses, it is surely worth the hassle.
Second place goes to Warren B. Kanders, who in July left his position as vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art after months of protests by Decolonize This Place and the withdrawal by artists from the museum’s biennial. Kanders was targeted for his ownership of Safariland, a multibillion-dollar manufacturer of law enforcement and military supplies, including tear-gas grenades used against asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border.
The Kanders debacle has led to calls for a more general ethical rethink of museum board members and their fortunes, including at the Museum of Modern Art, whose October reopening after a large expansion was greeted with exhortations for museum board member Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, to divest from private prisons and weapons making.
On view since early November at MoMA’s PS1 annex is “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011,” a sprawling and timely group show examining the impacts of these conflicts through hundreds of works by 82 artists, including 36 Iraqis and Kuwaitis. It is also the Most Ironic Proof That the Art World Is Complicit. Though the Queens venue does not have the same trustees as MoMA, they do share a name, a website, and an institutional identity, as well as a man named Leon Black, who as chairman of MoMA’s board also serves on PS1’s. Black owns Constellis Holdings, formerly Blackwater, infamous for its role in the Nisour Square Massacre. That artists whose work — and in some cases, whose lives — testify to the horrors of these wars are being put in the situation of art-washing a man whose company participated directly in these traumas ought to be the stuff of dystopian fiction, not reality.
Meanwhile, the man at the top of Chicago’s own philanthropic heap, billionaire Ken Griffin, has used $125 million of his sizable fortune to spur the Brashest Act of Rebranding by purchasing the naming rights to the Museum of Science and Industry, soon to be known as the Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. Griffin, for whom the fourth-floor galleries of the MCA and the main hall of the AIC’s Modern Wing are also named, is the founder of the hedge fund Citadel, a majority shareholder in CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, which runs prisons and detention centers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), among others.
Working from what might be considered the opposite premise, the Oriental Institute has on the occasion of its centennial given itself a coy new moniker: The OI. No doubt the museum, which houses the country’s largest collection of ancient artifacts from the Middle East, is all too well aware of the political incorrectness of the term “oriental” when applied to just about anything. Formerly one of the more obscure institutions in Chicago, the OI has also been in the news for its return this September of some 1,800 ancient tablets to Iran, unearthed in the 1930s by OI scholars and kept in Hyde Park ever since. This marks the Most Notable Local Entry in the Worldwide Trend Toward Restitution, officially on the table since the Savoy-Sarr report was released by the French government proposing the unconditional return of any object gained through looting or forced consent.
Progressive ideas concerning cultural property, about who has the right to own and display it, were in full force at the Art Institute in April, when the museum announced the Most Principled Cancellation of the Year .Inan unprecedented move, its main temporary exhibition galleries were left empty of the ancient pottery of the Mimbres people, who lived in the southwest between 1000 and 1130 A.D., because the show had been curated without indigenous input and was to be comprised of funerary objects robbed from burial grounds.
As proved this year both at the Whitney and the Art Institute, the threat of vacant galleries is now real. It can’t help but be, in an art world where so much has been stolen, censored and compromised. Early this month, however, the four individuals nominated for the U.K.’s annual Turner Prize offered up another option. In the Most Uplifting Move by Artists, the group requested that the award be shared between them. The judges acceded their appeal, which came in the form of a letter, in which the artists explained: “At this time of political crisis in Britain and much of the world, when there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity — in art as in society.”
Thank you Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Tai Shani and Oscar Murillo for a wish to help guide us all into 2020.