This was a bolt from the blue. I’m pushing 60 and not exactly a svelte Young British Art ingenue–the kind of hot property who seemingly gets offered most of the contemporary museum shows these days. Worse, I’m also an art critic; I pass judgment on other artists’ work. Curators who might otherwise like to show my paintings shy away from it because of conflict-of-interest: it might look like they were doing so in order to get favorable coverage–or just plain coverage–for their other exhibitions. It’s strange: my critic’s job at NEWSWEEK requires me to know a whole lot of curators and what kind of shows their museums are thinking up–just the kind of scoop with which some ambitious, networking artist might leverage a career. But I can’t do that; it’s like having a Formula One racer in the garage and knowing you’ll get a ticket the minute it rolls onto the street. I’m obliged–quite fairly, however–to sit back and wait for someone to call me from out of nowhere. A longshot. Like, say, from Las Vegas.
People sometimes ask, “Does being an artist yourself affect your criticism?” Sometimes they mean, “Are you narrow, rigid, and predisposed toward abstract painting?” I hope not. Any artist, unless he has a messianic “-ism” to promote, is much more catholic in what he likes to see on the walls of galleries and museums than in what he’d like to put there. Many poets like spy novels, even though they don’t write them. People also ask, “Does being a critic affect your art?” My answer is that it echoes the same debility you have when you teach (I used to be an art professor): if you don’t watch out, you tend to make the kind of art you’d give yourself an A for producing if you were one of your own students. That is, if you’ve recently written a review criticizing an artist for, say, pompously oversizing his work, you might start downsizing your own, because you don’t want to be a hypocrite.
On the other hand, there’s always the possibility that my painting itself is responsible for the paucity of museum shows on abstract art. This style of painting is currently caught in the crack: it’s considered somewhat retrograde inside an art world increasingly given over to combinations of installation art and video art, and it’s still thought to be ugly–even fraudulent–by a good portion of the public, which still favors realistic renderings of weathered barns. Moreover, my particular abstract paintings are fairly raucous and clumsy, rather than harmonious and tailored, in composition and color.
It took Jim Mann, a different kind of curator, to offer me a show. Jim has a Ph.D. in literature, not art. He’s a South Carolinian, not a New Yorker. (His father was one of the few congressmen from Dixie to vote to impeach Richard Nixon.) And he speaks in a slow drawl–punctuated with a laugh that cackles like Bill Russell’s–reflecting his Zen-like confidence that a show’s shipping, brochure-printing, hanging, and opening reception will somehow all get themselves done.
Here’s how it happened: the paintings were put on one of the “blanket wrap” art trucks (eliminating expensive crates) that shuttle between the coasts. A couple of days before the Nov. 16 opening, I boarded a hideously early plane filled with sleepy gamblers from New Jersey and landed in Las Vegas, in blinding sunlight, before noon. As soon as I stepped from the jetway, I was confronted by a phalanx of slot machines blinking and bonging like a Swiss Christmas. They were manned (if that’s the word) by cliche-come-to-life copper-haired ladies in rhinestone eyeglasses, armed with enormous plastic cups filled with coins.
The museum is about four or five miles west of Las Vegas’s heart on freeway-wide Sahara Ave. I was told that many Las Vegans thought the museum was doomed when it opened in its new building in 1996 because the edifice was practically out in the desert. But Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in the country, caught up to it in no time. Sahara Ave. is bordered its entire length by malls. (Franchises could become a Nevada unit of measurement: “I live nine McDonald’s west of I-15.” In fact, you could probably drive from I-15 to the museum by means of contiguous parking lots.) LVAM is a huge, plain concrete, futuristic (in a Jetsons sort of way) building, with plenty of parking. The gallery for my show was a nice, big, white-walled box with glass doors through which its contents were wholly visible from the spacious lobby. I liked it–as in “relieved”–on first sight.
“Overjoyed” might be the word for meeting Roy Brownell, the museum’s preparator and exhibition installer, who already had my paintings spotted (leaning against the walls about where they should be hung) when I walked in. Fortysomething, with a ponytail and muscled arms, he’s one of those do-everything guys art museums can’t run without. He admits he’s a nonartist, so he measures everything instead of eyeballing it. “This show’ll be up in two hours,” he said with a smile. He tuned his boombox to an oldies station; I moved a few pictures and eliminated one. (Paintings, I figure, are supposed to speak for themselves; all their installation needs is adequate room, sufficient light, and no visual “noise” around them.)
My outfit for the 6 to 8 p.m. opening was simple: black T-shirt, black jacket, trendy black shoes bought on sale in a Heathrow airport store, and a new pair of blue jeans. (I loathe art-world all-black.) I showed up a little before six, which wasn’t hip, but this was my first opening in a while and I wanted to be there. The place was nearly empty. Uh-oh. Then it started to fill up: more relief. Seeing my own paintings on nice museum walls, I thought about what my NEWSWEEK colleague, the novelist David Gates, says about reviews of his books: he’s interested–in the same way he’s interested in reviews of any author whose work he reads. In the studio, my paintings are always comfortingly provisional; they can be “improved” anytime I want. Here, they almost looked like somebody else did them. But–honestly–I couldn’t write a review of the show if you put a gun to my head.
I did make frantic small talk with whomever wanted it. I’m a word guy for a living, and I can’t credibly get away with thumping my chest and growling, “Me Peter, me painter. You like?” I’m also fairly insecure, and tend to fill any conversational vacuum with the sound of my own raspy voice. Funny thing about your own opening: you think you’ll never get through it and then, bang!, it’s over and you’re back in your hotel room with your ego decompressing, no longer the center of attention. Thirty-six hours later, I was crammed into a middle seat on an absolutely full airplane, amidst more sleepy New Jersey gamblers, trying to ignore the snoring computer programmer next to me and finish my spy novel. I didn’t have an art thought the entire flight home.
