Weekend arts.

Background. This summer, ARTnews ran its list of the 200 most powerful collectors and Ovitz is on that list. "To date," writes Nikki Finke in the LA Weekly, "no one has gone behind his collection to describe what he did to amass it early on." So Finke sets out to tell "a tale of ambition, greed and ego not only on his part but also on the part of those who did business with him. In the process, Ovitz helped change the art world for the worse by bringing the same ruthless tactics to SoHo and 57th Street that he'd used to rule Hollywood."

Sensationalist? Naturally. Moldy, as Greg asserts? Perhaps Finke's quotes and anecdotes are set in the 90s because that's when Ovitz was doing that amassing "early on." To be fair, it's difficult to imagine that there are 20 out of the 200 collectors on that list with higher ethical standards. It's a vicious trade.

Meanwhile, Carly Berwick revives a question Linda Nochlin asked in ARTnews back in 1971 - "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" - and applies it, with a twist, to comics. Turns out there were a lot of reasons women went missing on the comics scene until only just the last decade or so. Though there are no women in the Masters of American Comics exhibition, as David D'Arcy notes in the intro to his interview with Art Spiegelman, there are, in fact, "so many women now in the field that the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) in New York will mount an all-female exhibition called She Draws Comics, running from May through September 2006."

Back to the Masters exhibition, which has just opened at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. For the LAW, Doug Harvey presents "10 Comics That Shook the World," briefly surveys the exhibition and declares that "Jim Shaw has managed to produce one of the most visually exciting, complexly conceptual and disturbingly entertaining pop-culture-based bodies of work to emerge from the world of fine art."

Also: Bill Smith meets comic artist Tony Millionaire.

Online look-closer tip. A poster for Scarface, handwritten from the entire 300-page script. Via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2005 4:10 PM