Gallery vs. Critic
I am writing in response to the recent "review" of New York Peep Show ("Trash & Treasure," by Megan Voeller, 1/24-30). For the record, I am Michael P. Murphy, the owner of Michael Murphy Gallery M (this is the correct name of the gallery — please use the correct name in the future). I have been in the art business in Tampa since 1974 and started the gallery in 1986. I had humble beginnings, have worked extremely hard, taken many risks in order to make the gallery what it is today. Neither the artists nor I have an issue with a bad review — when done in an educated, creditable and professional manner. This review was none of those things.
I contemplated if it was even worth my time to respond to the inaccuracies in her "review" and her personal attacks. I decided to respond in order to provide facts and educated opinions. It is my hope that Ms. Voeller will take this as constructive criticism and an opportunity to grow and understand the damage that has been done by a young, clearly unprofessional and unsophisticated writer. People who read her article will assume that (because of her position) she has the erudition and authority to render judgment. Readers will assume that Ms. Voeller's statements are true. I feel obligated to at the very least respond and correct a few of the gross inaccuracies in Ms. Voeller's article.
I would also like to note that Ms. Voeller was provided a complete press package, which among other things, included artist statements/biographies along with complete access to the artists. She chose not to use this information or she did not read the information. She did not contact the artists and she never interviewed the artists as she does in many of her other "reviews." Instead, she latched onto facts about their background and decided that since they had a tangential relationship to wealth and/or fame, they (or their work) did not deserve to be treated with respect or fairness. I have not seen any other article by this writer that even comes close to this attacking and slanderous. Therefore, I must assume that something — whether that is wealth, connections, an association with minor celebrity, my gallery, or I — have somehow offended her.
Great artists throughout history have an association with wealth and/or a tangential relationship to celebrity; a couple of artists that fit this are the neo-classical painter Jacques-Louis David, Paul Cézanne and Mathew Barney, a well-respected contemporary artist — to name a few. Someone's wealth, background or association with minor celebrity is one interesting aspect of their biography, not justification to dismiss them.
Now, I will address a couple of basic and grossly inaccurate statements made by Ms. Voeller.
First, Ms. Voeller makes it appear that all of Damon Johnson's work, she previewed, was hand-painted pixelization. In fact, only three of the six that she saw contained hand-painted pixelization. In addition, the "gallery helper" informed her that the piece in question was once titled "Crackhead"; she did not describe it as a picture of a "crackhead." Perhaps Ms. Voeller was too blinded by whatever personal vendetta she had against the show to concentrate on the basic facts or the artwork. Also, I would like to note that Mr. Johnson was selected for the Forbes 2006 Collectors Edition and included on the cover.
Second, labeling Olan's work "Warhol rip-offs" was a ridiculous and unsophisticated artistic criticism. I could write a letter on this alone.
If your knowledge of Warhol is limited to a poster of Warhol's Marilyns hanging in your friend's high school bedroom, then I could see how one might find them to be similar. They are both bright-colored and, yes, some of Olan's are people who have been on TV and in movies.
Why did Warhol do portraits of celebrities like Marilyn? One of the things Warhol was interested in was consumer culture. This portrait was a critique on how Marilyn was seen as a product and not a person. Her image was extremely commercial. The woman could not leave her home without being hounded. Warhol also produced these portraits using means of mass production in order to mirror the production of consumer goods. He often played a little role in their final production, which usually involved silk-screening (a commercial image-making tool) and borrowed images.
Warhol (a former social acquaintance of Olan's) may inspire Olan's color palette; however, the comparison ends there. All of the "celebrities" Olan paints are people he personally meets and gets to know (definitely something very un-Warhol). These people are also very unlike the celebrities Warhol portrays. Further, Olan is the photographer for his paintings as well as the painter (these are hand-painted, not screen-printed), again a very un-Warhol thing to do. Olan's artistic intentions and statements are also very different from Warhol. He wants to illuminate the individual and uses his portraits to explore these people as people, not as "Pop Icons." Olan wants people to see the faces you pass on the street in busy cities and really look at them, whether they are celebrities or regular folks. He wants a person to look at other people rather than writing them off with thoughtless judgments (which does add an air of irony to Ms. Voeller's harsh and ignorant judgment since this is exactly what she did). It is also important to mention that out of Olan's 10 major works in our show only four are of "famous" people. This is not even half of his works. So as you can see, Ms. Voeller's labeling of Olan as a "Warhol rip-off" is not only completely ridiculous, it also shows her lack of art knowledge, even when it comes to an artist as well-known as Andy Warhol.
The last and most damaging aspect of this "review" is that Ms. Voeller's article does a number of grave disservices to the people, businesses and the Tampa Bay community.
The first disservice is to the writer. Anyone with even basic art knowledge will recognize that this writer does not have the knowledge of her subject and is unwilling to research it properly. How could anyone in the future be able to give her creditability for anything she writes?
The second disservice is to Creative Loafing. To allow someone like Ms. Voeller to represent the paper as an "art critic" shows a complete lack of any journalistic integrity. This really takes the paper to a level of a local ranting blog.
The third disservice is to the artists. To attack an artist as viciously as Ms. Voeller did is wrong and mean-spirited. These artists are successful in their own right and certainly do not need Tampa. They agreed to this show as a favor to a friend of mine to help me bring more diverse artwork to the Tampa gallery scene.
The fourth disservice is to my gallery. The next time I am trying to convince an artist they should come to Tampa to do a show, they will Google the gallery, and Ms. Voeller's article will show up. It makes Tampa look backward and unsophisticated when our "alternative" paper is so vicious and unsupportive of the art scene. A show of this caliber is expensive to produce and barely breaks even, but I look at it largely as an investment in our community.
The last disservice is to the City of Tampa. In a city struggling to make a cultural scene happen, this "review" reflects poorly on Tampa. Tampa is not a city that requires a nasty pseudo-art critic. Tampa needs to have an art supporter/ reporter, not a journalist who actively tears down the arts in Tampa in order to boost her own ego. I understand the argument that having art criticism can be beneficial even to a burgeoning art community. However, I feel that the criticism should be something which is educated, respectful and constructive rather than catty.
I am publicly withdrawing all Megan Voeller's invitations to my gallery now and in the future until Ms. Voeller can convince me she has made an effort to become more professional and has matured. I will not let artists represented by us be abused so one writer can take sophomoric joy in playing (what she believes to be) the role of "real big city art critic." Ms. Voeller, please save the tabloid writing style for other purposes and write art reviews that contain some level of substance rather than just cheap shots and zingers. Viciously attacking people is not art criticism, Ms. Voeller. In an art review, one is supposed to discuss art in depth with a level of expertise, rather than clogging the article with attempts at wit. I have no problem with Ms. Voeller not liking the show and stating professionally why she did not think the art worked. I do have a problem with her voicing her opinion in a disrespectful, unprofessional and uninformed manner in a forum where she has an assumed authority.
Michael P. Murphy, Michael Murphy Gallery M
Megan Voeller responds:
Where I went to school (Williams, B.A. studio art with honors, The New School, NY, M.A. in media studies), art students were often prohibited from explaining their work during critiques. We weren't to judge the work based on what artists meant — the "intentional fallacy" — but on what we saw. In reality, an artist's work can be read within the context of art history, as well as a broader visual culture or even, say, psychoanalysis, without knowledge of what he or she meant it to mean.
I mention this because Murphy seems to take issue with the fact that I did not speak to his artists. For various reasons, including their unavailability, I routinely do not speak directly to artists. Even more frequently, I speak to them but disregard what they've told me about their intentions if I don't see those intentions reflected in the work. Take the artists whose work I describe in the paragraphs about Florida Craftsmen gallery directly below the Peep Show piece. I did not need to speak to those artists to understand their work — their skill with materials and sophisticated engagement with the subject matter is as clear as day. After seeing the Peep Show work, which I found to be thoroughly mediocre, I did not feel the need to speak to the artists about their intentions. The work speaks for itself.
The Olan pieces, most literally the faux-Marilyn Monroe, take as their jumping-off point a visual quotation of Warhol's celebrity portraits. The subjects who aren't already famous are given the pop icon treatment. That "Olan wants people to see the faces you pass on the street in busy cities and really look at them whether they are celebrities or regular folks" escapes me. Every artist hopes his work will stop the viewer in a moment of reflection; whether it does is another matter entirely.
There is a perverse kind of aesthetic pleasure to be had from Olan's work. This is why I invoked John Waters, famed celebrator of all things tacky and vulgar, at the beginning of the article. A la Waters, I salute Olan's portraits as a spirited refusal to obey the laws of good taste.
Murphy is correct in pointing out that not all of Damon Johnson's paintings include pixilation. My sense was that it was a frequent device used in his work, which I described as "the tiresome gimmick of rendering everything as a pixilated photograph." In retrospect, I wish I had described it as frequent without using the word "everything." As for the "crackhead" painting, I was told by the gallery helper that it was a painting of a crackhead.
The Forbes piece about Damon Johnson is not art criticism. (Nor is Forbes a credible source for art criticism.) It is a business story about Johnson selling his work directly to clients and bypassing the gallery system.
The artists' shared connection to, or interest in, wealth and celebrity is not something that I would ordinarily be inclined to mention, except that it was used to market this exhibit. I have never in my life seen on a promotional show card (until the one for Peep Show) mention that an artist is related to a prominent person or family (Johnson or Charriol) or "spent his early years in New York hanging out with Warhol" (Olan). In my experience, people who have connections like these tend to be reluctant to exploit them in this manner. My feeling was that the work in this exhibit was of poor quality and what was really being pushed by the gallery was the thrill of rubbing elbows with these ostensibly important or glamorous artists. The gallery's emphasis made it fodder for critique.
Championing the Bay area's emerging arts scene is pretty much what I (try to) do every week. This is the only exhibit I've seen in a year that provoked the thought, "You have got to be kidding me." For the sake of my own credibility as well as an interest in seeing Tampa grow into a sophisticated arts community, I wrote a negative review. If there's a market for work from Peep Show in Tampa and not a market to support, say, Flight 19, Bleu Acier, Covivant and countless other small arts groups who are operating hand-to-mouth, I think we're in a sorry state.
I assume it goes without saying that I have nothing against Michael Murphy or the artists in this show on a personal level. If the gallery opened a show full of good work, it would absolutely be my pleasure to write a glowing review. (Indeed, I've seen better work than this in Murphy's gallery on another occasion.) New York Peep Show, however, is not a group of works worthy of either the hype or the prices that Murphy's gallery has imposed upon them.
Tiff Over TIFF
I take great exception to some of the assertions made by Robert Tregenza in the recent article in Creative Loafing about the fate of the Tampa International Film Festival in specific and about the University of Tampa in general ("Fear of a Subtitled Planet," by Lance Goldenberg, 1/31-2/6). Accordingly I would like to make the following comments to set the record straight:
Every year, the director of TIFF, Robert Tregenza, sought and received seed money from various sources across the university community: the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of Business, the Communication Department and the Baccalaureate Office were among the traditional benefactors. However, this past fall Tregenza decided that the festival needed a greater commitment from the university and requested direct operational funds and additional personnel that in effect more than doubled the potential financial outlay. Unfortunately, his request came three months into the fiscal year when it is difficult if not impossible to find such substantial unbudgeted "extra money." After much discussion it was Tregenza's decision, and his decision alone, to pull the plug on this year's festival. I personally didn't disagree with this decision as he convinced me and others that it was best not to pursue a scaled-down version of the festival. Tregenza then worked up a budget proposal that was placed, along with all the other proposals, into the budgetary process for next fiscal year. As of today we've not heard the final word on the budget and, as such, I can only say that the film festival is on hiatus, not gone.
However, what distresses me more beyond Tregenza's spin on events is the way he impugns the entire university community (I believe the idea of a "university" is the sum total of all its parts — the students, faculty and staff, the curriculum and programs, the extracurriculars and even the facilities). He suggests that there is a lack of depth to our commitment to diversity, ethnicity and the international community. But anyone with more than a passing knowledge of UT will be able to recognize such a commitment across the very fabric of our campus. Each and every freshman is required to take a Global Issues class; every student who graduates must have, at minimum, two courses of international focus with one specifically centering on "non-western" concerns; each semester there is a global village simulation on campus with a total number of participants for the year at 1,000 students and staff; the study abroad program has grown in popularity every year and, indeed, the university recently adopted "international competency" as the focus of its Quality Enhancement Plan. Even the most popular upper-level course in Tregenza's own department (as measured by the number of sections and students who take it every year) is a course called Intercultural Communication that pulls students in from across the university.
But we do so much more beyond our curriculum.
The University of Tampa's The Writers at the University program has shown its commitment to diversity with such international voices as Edwidge Danticat, Samrat Upadhyay, and Mathew Shenoda, African American writers Reginald Shephard and John Holman and many women writers such as Pam Houston and Jane Ellen Glasser. All of these events are open to the public. Moreover, the university's own literary journal, The Tampa Review has become known as one of the leading journals for translations of international poetry and fiction.
Other examples abound. The current Electronics Alive exhibition in the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery has an international component; our Dance program has sponsored presentations and workshops by groups such as the Kuumba Dancers and Drummers, flamenco duo Esther Suarez and Jose Maria Moreno, Malaysian bharata natyam dancer Mohan Kulsaingam and Tibetan monks; our own Music Department has on its full-time faculty the internationally known artists Grigorios Zamparas and Libor Ondros, and this is just in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I could go on, but just a glance at a UT calendar of events for any given year will show a clear emphasis on diversity across the colleges.
And, again, all special programs are open to the public.
So will TIFF return next year? I think the question now is more "Will the university administration decide to hand over thousands of dollars to a festival headed by someone who so publicly repudiates the university?" I'm not sure of the answer but I DO know one thing: The university community that Tregenza so totally misrepresents in his comments will continue in its commitment to diversity with or without him and with or without TIFF.
Dr. Gregg Bachman, Professor and Chair
Department of Communication, The University of Tampa
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2007.