Colin Gleadell is enjoying the irony of Matthew Collings, an art market critic, cashing in:

Collings has been critical about the current art world “ruled by money”. “It’s not a good time to be an artist,” he says. With values dictated by money, “art is generally bad at the moment”.

How pleasant to report, therefore, that Collings, who paints in partnership with his wife, Emma Biggs, has just had a sell-out exhibition.

The paintings, geometrical abstractions that resonate with the qualities of ancient Byzantine mosaics, were on show at the Vigo gallery in Old Bond Street, and modestly priced between £8,000 and £18,000 each.

The Art Market: Banksy Market Back on Track? (Telegraph)

Sebastian Smee was the first on the scene to re-discover Murdock Pemberton, the New Yorker’s first art critic and a man who was never meant to be a member of the cultural vanguard.  Smee was approached by Sally Pemberton, Murdock’s granddaughter, who discovered his “archives” in her mother’s attic and set about creating a lavishly illustrated “scrap book.”

The massive tome, Portrait of Murdock Pemberton is now available but perhaps some background is necessary. Here’s Smee on the unlikely conversion of Pemberton to cultural crusader:

Pemberton was a master of breeziness, and he wrote for the magazine’s general – and generally affluent – readership with a good deal of drollery and cultivated ingenuousness. But somewhere along the line, Pemberton had caught the modern art bug. And over the years he became a passionate crusader for modern art, both European and American.

This must have taken a good deal more courage than his casually offhand columns suggest. It’s easy to see, in retrospect, that the country was on the cusp of a great change in its attitudes toward modern art. But for a courageous pioneer of modern art like Alfred Stieglitz, for dealers like Valentine Dudensing and Erhard Weyhe, for critics like Henry McBride and Pemberton, and above all for America’s first wave of modern artists, all this was a question of faith.

Pemberton was also a great puncturer of pretension, goading the Metropolitan Museum and harassing Lord Duveen, Andrew Mellon and the plans for Washington’s National Gallery of Art. We’ll have more on Pemberton and the National Gallery’s other great benefactor, Chester Dale, in later posts.

Through the Eyes of Murdock Pemberton (Boston Globe)

Bloomberg announced this morning that it has hired Lance Esplund:

Lance Esplund has joined Bloomberg as the U.S. art critic, covering the museum and gallery scene for the company’s arts and leisure team, Muse.

An art critic and columnist for The Wall Street Journal for the last three years, Esplund was chief art critic for The New York Sun from 2004 to 2008.

He has contributed to Art in America, Harper’s, Modern Painters, The New Criterion, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review.

Deborah Solomon points out in the New York Times that New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins will be honor by the Whitney this week. In turn, she thought she would honor him:

“He’s not trying to impress with his use of language,” said John Baldessari, the Conceptual artist. “I love him because he would rather say house than edifice.”

His detractors accuse him of helium lightness and superficiality, of writing about art stars in a consistently adulatory tone. Both he and his editors counter that he has no interest in pricking bubbles or deflating oversize reputations. [...]

Descended from a line of blue bloods who settled along the banks of the Hudson River and quarried limestone, Mr. Tomkins grew up in suburban Llewellyn Park, N.J., an enclave of West Orange. His father owned a plaster company that manufactured wallboard and was eventually sold to Allied Chemical. The house was hung with serious paintings — a Charles Burchfield, a Utrillo, a Dufy, a small Alfred Marquet and “a very large painting of a family of wolves” that was believed, with unearned optimism, to be a Courbet. [...]

Mr. Tomkins, who is currently at work on a profile of Carl Andre, occupies a privileged position that grants him seemingly instant access to every artist. Asked whether any had ever declined to be profiled by him, he could think of only one: Cy Twombly, the magisterial abstract painter, who died in July. Jasper Johns, he added, whose heraldic images of flags and targets imbue the bright contours of Pop art with gray doubt, was his single “most difficult” subject and required the longest chase. Mr. Tomkins pursued him over four decades before the artist agreed to be interviewed for a piece that appeared in 2006.

Asked in an e-mail why he chose to relent, Mr. Johns replied, tersely, “As well as I can remember, Calvin told me that he would like to talk with me and to write something that would not really be a profile.“

Artists Painted with a Palette of Words (New York Times)

There’s no love lost between Sarah Thornton and art historians in her ArtForum Diary entry for this Valentine’s Day. She was at the US convention of academic art historians, the CAA, moderating a panel on Damien Hirst when one hoary professor complained about Contemporary art’s beguiling appeal:

“Maybe we should drop the word ‘history’ from ‘art history,’ ” declared Patricia Mainardi, a professor from CUNY’s Graduate Center. She was regaling a standing-room-only crowd last Thursday during her opening remarks for “The Crisis in Art History,” a panel she had convened for the annual College Art Association conference, which took place over four days at the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan. Mainardi, an art historian recognized for her work on nineteenth-century Europe, deplores the fact that eight out of ten art history grad students are now studying contemporary. Why do they? The global economy, explained Mainardi, is like a “sun whose magnetic attraction pulls other bodies out of alignment.” [...] Yet, for those of us who stick to writing, researching, or teaching contemporary art, the global economy is less a motivator than an object of study. And the fast pace of change means that, like it or not, 2008 is history.

Search Party (Scene&Herd/ArtForum)

And you thought it was easy being Jerry Saltz:

My No. 1 rule for dealers is: Never use your sales pitch on a critic. Ever.

I can’t tell you how much I hate it, and it happens constantly. I’m looking at art in a gallery, and after two or three minutes the dealer strides out to say hello. He (or she) then starts explaining. He tells me what the artist says the work is about. He repeats some pithy thing the artist said, or recites a text the artist thinks viewers need to know to understand the work. Curator X was just here, I learn, while the art was being packed for Biennial Y. “Artists especially” like this work — Chuck Close, or Chris Ofili, or Maurizio or Klaus or Brice. (I always want to say “Maurizio likes everything,” but I don’t.) Some dealers talk about who’s buying the work, which museum-purchase committees are considering it, how much it sells for. [Read more...]