Sunday, June 15, 2008

Marlene Dumas Tally Reaches Fever Pitch

Someone left an anonymous comment yesterday morning (thanks!) noting that anaba is mentioned in this week's NYTimes Magazine... a Deborah Solomon profile of Marlene Dumas -

"An art-world blog, Anaba, has taken to listing the names of Dumas’s supporters and detractors as if they were superdelegates charged with putting an artist into office. Are you pro-Dumas or anti-Dumas? “All of the anti-Dumasers are men,” the blog noted in 2005, in a reference to a group of influential critics that includes Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York magazine, who has described Dumas’s work as 'flat-footed'."

Also noted in my posts, along with the gender split, is that most of those quoted who don't like Dumas are not artists. I'm not sure which posts Deborah Solomon read, but here are the most relevant -

1/5/06 - My ongoing monitoring of the critical response to the work of Marlene Dumas
10/30/05 - The Dumas Report
6/17/05 - Carol Vogel and Sarah Milroy come out for Marlene Dumas
6/1/05 - Jerry Saltz still doesn't like Marlene Dumas
5/12/05 - Marlene Dumas - 1994
5/11/05 - Richard Polsky really hates Marlene Dumas
3/28/05 - Marlene Dumas!

CURRENT TALLY -

PRO-DUMAS: Svetlana Alpers, Chris Ashley, David Cohen, Nicole Davis, Nicole Eisenman (in comments), Joy Garnett, Cynthia King (in comments) Sarah Milroy, George Rodart (in comments), Barry Schwabsky, Adrian Searle, Elisabeth Sussman, Richard Vine, Carol Vogel.

ANTI-DUMAS: Franklin Einspruch (in comments, and on his blog), Charlie Finch, Tyler Green, Jerry Saltz, Richard Polsky, Peter Schjeldahl.

Jerry Saltz has been consistent, but it has always been in throwaway lines, never an actual review, so I'm looking forward to reading his inevitable review of the upcoming MoMA show. I say inevitable because after that much glib dismissal he is going to have to put up or shut up. Hopefully Roberta Smith will also review that show.

Howard Dean
Howard Dean and my mother are counting the superdelegate votes as they come in... I'm told a final decision will be reached in about a hundred years.

UPDATE: votes are poring in!
pro - Eva Lake, Amie Oliver

11 comments:

  1. hey chris, thanks... i will add your name to the pro-dumas list.

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  2. Cont'd from my complaints list:

    Not only did D.S. steal the research Martin did without giving him credit by name, I would go so far as to say that the entire idea for the article (the notion that Dumas has a divided audience within the art world) she wrote was coopted from Martin's original blog entries.

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  3. Hi, Martin--

    How about a sitting-on-the-fence category? I'm right there on the pickets.

    And to add my voice to the corollary issue: Solomon's treatment of you and your blog is shameful.

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  4. I am in the"it's ok" category-seems a bit juvenile angsty-and a bit simple.But I love the way she and her husband have dead flowers and gin and don't like the dentist-anon who first posted

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  5. Martin -
    whenever I check in I always ask myself why can't I find time to check in more often? Sigh. Well, I know why but its good to check in and please count ME as Pro-Dumas. Her portraits at the Pompideau in 2006 were beyond the beyond and I wish I had remembered to look at them again when I was in Pompideau last month to see the LB retrospective(!)

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  6. Great YouTube video here;

    Marlene Dumas

    Cynthia "I voted already" King

    I've been so out of it lately I diden't even know there was a controversy.

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  7. cynthia - there isn't really a controversy, we settled it three years ago.

    but the nytimes heard about it.

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