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Trendy or What?
John Haberin New York City
Peaks, Crashes, and Diversity: 2018 Art in Review
Did art finally come to it senses in 2018? Of course not, but as markets peaked and crashed, it had to make one anxious for the future.
Can I put my finger on the trends? This year-end wrap-up spots at least five, although they point in wildly different directions, just like the markets. (Is the art scene trendy or what?) You know how much I hate best lists, because this Web site argues for criticism as about cultivating understanding more than judging. Do not be surprised, though, if I stick mostly to highlights. Life is too short for bad art. 
1. The Met cuts back
Whoever thought it would happen—after so many exhibitions, so many new wings, and the Met Breuer? Yet the Met had already cut staff, to the consternation of not just those who lost their jobs. And a reckoning of sorts did come, as the director, Thomas P. Campbell, took the hit on behalf of the board. He is gone, and the museum will give up the Whitney's former home before its eight-year lease is out. Will that leave enough time to exhibit modern and contemporary art while closing its wing dedicated to just that, for major remodeling? Will those plans grow more modest, too?
Maybe not, but a degree of modesty crept into exhibitions as well. The year began with a blockbuster, Michelangelo drawings, and continued with "Like Life," an overblown and overrated show of figurative sculpture at the Met Breuer. Yet two of the year's most comforting shows simply rehang the permanent collections, for all their flaws, of "Epic Abstraction" and the golden age of Dutch painting—the latter in temporary quarters in the Lehman wing. And the Met displayed Thomas Cole not as the archetypical American painter, on the titanic scale of the Hudson River School. Rather, it saw an expatriate grappling with his roots in England. Did an ambitious look at Eugène Delacroix fall way short by cutting back, too, on his major paintings? Sadly, yes, but it, too, explored what defines Romanticism.
Not that everyone has learned the Met's lessons. Its sublease on Madison Avenue will go, of all things, to the Frick Collection, while it undergoes its own expansion. The New Museum and International Center of Photography are feeling the pressure to grow as well, as the first takes over an entire adjacent building and the second plans yet another move, this time to the former Essex Street markets. And the Frick is already putting temporary exhibitions front and center, often two at once. It received ample press at that for an academic sculpture of George Washington, by Antonio Canova, portraits by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and a lesser series by Francisco de Zurbarán. Yet it reached perfection only once, with a single loan paired with a painting from its collection—perhaps by Jan van Eyck with Petrus Christus.
2. MoMA goes for broke
Has the Met put its finances at risk, even as attendance soars (to 7.4 million for the year alone)? Someone ought to tell the Museum of Modern Art. For artists, though, the drive toward bigness sometimes pays off. For the first time ever, MoMA surrendered its sixth floor to just one, Adrian Piper—and then it topped that for Bruce Nauman. He has almost the entirety of MoMA PS1 as well. The shows overcame many a reservation about two notoriously confrontational artists. They also pose an interesting contrast—between Nauman's cowboy posturing and a black woman's fierce intelligence.
The Modern is expanding once again physically as well, for profit, into yet another condo tower. And photographs by Stephen Shore seemed to go on forever—even before he took his latest to Instagram. Still, the demand for more also encourages smaller, quirkier, and more rewarding exhibitions. They include the fantastic architecture of Bodys Isek Kingelez in Africa and the very real Brutalism of "Concrete Utopia" in Yugoslavia under Communism. They include, too, Constantin Brancusi as seen through the permanent collection and, hanging on for a bit from last year, Louise Bourgeois through her prints and response to psychotherapy. Tarsila do Amaral heads for Brazil's heartlands, and a skilled draftsman but conservative artist, Charles White, takes pride in both African Americans and a common humanity.
MoMA PS1 felt hyperactive, too, quite apart from Nauman—even as its publicity seeking director, Klaus Biesenbach, departed for L.A. And who could be more hyperactive than Carolee Schneemann in performance, in feathers and more? Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan in China make their art by literally jumping up and down, while Gauri Gill poses India behind its masks. They make me appreciate all the more Naeem Mohaiemen on video, stuck for days to come in an empty airport in Egypt. He might appreciate the lonely art of Zoe Leonard this year at the Whitney. She may not have lost her luggage, but she has left behind one piece a year as a record of displacements.
3.Others play it safe
Playing it safe might not be such a bad thing. Did the world really need another show of Andy Warhol? David Wojnarowicz and Alberto Giacometti have had retrospectives not all that long ago, too—and the latter has pride of place in the 2019 expanded MoMA. Yet here they were again, and they have never looked more urgent. The Whitney shows Warhol as grappling with sex and death in America, hiding behind camouflage, and never once surrendering to cynicism. 
It also followed Wojnarowicz from youthful optimism to heartbreaking anger and death from AIDS. Giacometti at the Guggenheim took an interest in sexual difference as well.
How about yet another show of Diane Arbus? I could not find anything new to say, but she, too, once again came out from behind the masks, in Chelsea. Her photos of a mental institution just happened to coincide with those of New York streets from Helen Levitt—and both unfold in no small part on Halloween. Other highlights in photography include a return to Henri Cartier-Bresson and "The Decisive Moment," paired with Elliott Erwitt at ICP, and Cartier-Bresson has hardly lacked for attention either. Yet photography, too, can shine by cutting back. In the galleries, Aspen Mays evokes the ravages of a tropical storm and climate change with little more than windows taped shut.
A degree of modesty changed my view of other artists, too. The Jewish Museum shunned a blockbuster for Chaim Soutine, insisting instead on the painter of still life. His carcasses look all the more bloody, raw, and obsessive for that. And the Met Breuer also helped to rescue Jack Whitten from routine abstraction by focusing on just two bodies of work, one less expected than the other. The painter appeared primarily as a sculptor and, in the title of one work, Aphroditie's Lover. Meanwhile his Monoliths present icons of African American culture in dark relief.
4. Galleries struggle
Oh, sure, success does not come easy, but once again the signs point every which way. Ethan Greenbaum indeed embeds street signs in soft plastic, as if all directions were melting away. In practical terms, New York still hold an unprecedented number of galleries, with more opening all the time. Yet others are becoming fossil relics—and more than the perpetual churning of capitalism is at work. It says something that the author of How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery no long runs a commercial art gallery. It says something, too, that he took the opportunity to release a new edition with a new co-author who no longer runs one either.
More and more are adopting a "hybrid model" of pop-ups and private dealing. Can they survive without an exhibition space, apart from a few big players? More to the point, can they still contribute? Will the Lower East Side continue to expand geographically—and will Bushwick survive more than a year without the L train from Manhattan? Still, any day in the galleries brings rewards. I hardly know where a ten-best list might begin or end.
I hardly knew at that where to begin or end a tour of abstract painting in the galleries this fall, even before coming to an ambitious gallery retrospective of Norman Lewis. I kept stopping short, too, for startling images of and by women. Aneta Grzeszykowska looks out from behind her own masks—and as a mannequin in the hands of her daughter. Kyle Staver and Katherine Bradford tell of personal risks and a woman's pleasure. Women like Carrie Moyer dominated a report on abstraction in the galleries earlier in the year as well. In sculpture, Simone Leigh weaves the materials of African huts into a black woman's hair and skirt.
5. Diversity diversifies
You saw this trend coming, too. You will have noticed already how many of the artists cited here are gays, women, people of color, or from the Third World. And you will know that this is not just my bias as a critic or sense of mission. 
You will have guessed that "Epic Abstraction" includes all those groups in its epic as well. You may, like me, have marveled at paintings by Belkis Ayón at El Museo del Barrio—drawing at once on ritual and religion for an atheist's view of Cuba. You will have savored the scathing and genuinely funny feminism of Martha Rosler or "Radical Women" at the Brooklyn Museum, even if you wished that it had displayed insight or order.
The notion of diversity keeps expanding, too, as indigenous peoples and outsider art enter the mainstream. The year's most rewarding views of diversity, though, were not just politically correct. Rather, they shattered joyfully or comically under their own weight. Halfway through, a show on the theme of Black Power in Brooklyn becomes a survey of African American abstraction. With Hilma af Klint, the origins of abstract art span Symbolism, Modernism's rigor, and a woman's visions. And Tarsila never does resolve her hope to belong both to Brazil's interior and to Cubism.
6. Not everyone is trendy
So are things looking up or down? Does diversity mean that art is more welcoming, or are all the wrong people raking it in? When Cordy Ryman has some of his best work yet in a midtown office tower, is he working inside or outside the system? Are the art fairs more open, cutting deals for younger galleries and (by extension) younger artists, or just plain stifling? And which matters more—that they have reached critical mass or that two have already abandoned New York? Can anyone sort out success and failure, diversity and privilege?
If you cannot quite make sense of the trends, take heart: not all art is trendy, because art at its best is meant to last a long time indeed. For me, the year's finest show consists of little more than a single work, and it still stares out after six hundred years. So do two unnamed saints, who look right past a miracle. In The Visitation by Jacopo da Pontormo, at the Morgan Library, they also stare right past the trends. For centuries, Pontormo's Mannerism was out of fashion, as a pale reflection of the High Renaissance, but now it looks directly at you.
Of course, this site has reviewed pretty much all this and more at length. Diane Arbus ran at David Zwirner through December 15. Other dates and locations appear with fuller reviews, with links here. You can now also see year-end reviews for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.