Bracketology

Sure, we admit it. We've been filling out our brackets over the past few days. But now Tyler Green has to come along and make us feel like a bunch of mouth-breathing jocks with his own bracketed tournament to decide the Greatest Living American Abstract Painter. It's even seeded and, as you might guess, Cy Twombly (above) is one of the #1 seeds. Check out the post and start voting/lobbying.

Contemplating the Void

Taylor Green has been musing on the Guggenheim's exhibition "Contemplating the Void," in which the curators asked 200 contemporary artists to propose something to go in that big space in the middle of the museum. First he focused on environmentally themed responses, then on responses that had to do with torture, and there's more yet to come this week. The exhibition has its own Web site, too, so you can poke through interpretations of the space on your own, although they're a bit scattered. Make sure you have some time, in other words, and aren't easily frustrated by the weird, Flash-based navigation system or by artists' tendency to believe their work already clearly explained by a quick drawing. We find ourselves drawn to the more colorful options, like Ball Nogues Studio's proposal that appears to have something to do with a giant candy-making machine (above) or Fritz Haeg's idea to paint the ramps as a rainbow, but Green's analysis has been bringing out some interesting themes.

Oh snap!

We always enjoy Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes blog, which is zippy and smart in its commentary on all manner of museum and art issues, but his latest achievement, provoking the directors of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and New Orleans Museum of Art into a Superbowl bet comparable to the ones in which mayors often participate, especially deserves some notice. No mere polite exchange this. E. John Bullard and Max Anderson have been trash talking with glee. For what it's worth, New Orleans is a slight underdog in the game.

Reasonable Middle Ground

We don't know if you've been following all the weighing in over the past week or so with regard to the New Museum's upcoming exhibition drawn from Dakis Joannou's collection, sparked by Tyler Green (who has all of the relevant links, including to the recent front-page New York Times story on the subject), but Richard Lacayo, in Time, has a very measured response to all of it (Green even points out that he agrees with Lacayo), including the following important point:

I've written about these single collector shows before and as I said then I don't see the point of an absolutist position against them. Especially for smaller museums and museums outside the biggest cites, collector shows are a way to offer visitors a look at work the museum could never otherwise offer them. Obviously, the same could be said for a show in a larger museum. But those institutions, which are more likely to be on the circuit for big traveling shows, have other options for bringing in works from outside.