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Who Gets To Call It Art?

Rating: 3 stars

By JON GARELICK | February 2, 2006

3.0 Stars

WHO GETS TO CALL IT ART? Henry Geldzahler probably calls this David Hockney portrait of him art.

The subtitle of Peter Rosen’s documentary is “The Legend of Henry Geldzahler 1935-1994,” and it’s through the life of this art gadfly — the first curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum — that we see the emergence of American art, and New York as the art capital of the world, the developments of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop. We hear the stories through Geldzahler’s voiceovers, old documentary clips, and contemporary interviews with the likes of Frank Stella, James Rosenquist, David Hockney, art dealer Ivan Karp, and journalist Calvin Tomkins. Geldzahler was close friends with Hockney, as well as with Andy Warhol, and Stella points out that unlike other curators, Geldzahler “lived with the artists,” taking part in their “Happenings,” sitting for portraits, and furiously discussing art with them in their studios and at openings. As befits Geldzahler’s personality, the film is smart, fast, and funny. When one of the operators at the Met asks why he gets more phone calls than anyone else, he answers, “All my artists are alive.”

Related: Bodies and souls, Greatest hits, Dam cute, More

Bodies and souls
Preserved flayed corpses at the Museum of Science, Americans in Paris at the Museum of Fine Arts, underground art at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, beavers at Mass College of Art — it was that kind of year, capped off by the arrival of the new Institute of Contemporary Art.
Greatest hits
The RISD Museum continues its top to bottom renovation and expansion.
Dam cute
There has been a great wave of Cute in Japanese contemporary art in recent years — colorful nodding mushrooms and balloons from Takashi Murakami, big-headed kiddies and doggies from Yoshitomo Nara, and Dark Cute in the form of movies like Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away .
Something old, something new
For his first major show in the US, Shintaro Miyake would create a pond filled with real water, a dam, beaver lodges, and drawings of beavers and kayakers.
Walk on the mild side
In 1970, William Wegman was making short videos — jumping around in his underwear with purses hanging all over him, that sort of thing.
Portrait of the artist
This is a charming, crowd-pleasing blockbuster show. Sourpuss hipsters may enjoy it anyway.
Return to the edge of the world
Photography and new media loom large on the horizon in 2007, with cameras pointed in every direction.
Just borrowing it
There was a time, in the middle of the last century, when the art industry and its critical minions held the padlock keys to artistic straitjackets, fitting artists’ oeuvres into one-size-too-small versions of pre-formulated art history . . . wasn’t there?
Political Andy?
Was Andy Warhol more politically engaged than he's given credit for?
Hand made
Eight years after Loïs Mailou Jones’s death, School of the Museum of Fine Arts curator Joanna Soltan is proclaiming her to be “among the most significant African-American artists of the 20th century.”
The needle and the damage done
Katherine Porter is known primarily as an abstract painter. But she's always made her work distinctly her own, imbuing it with symbolism and a visionary consciousness
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Topics: Reviews , Painting, Visual Arts, Andy Warhol, More

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