'Pictures Generation' wins odd new art award

A photograph by Cindy Sherman from her "Untitled Film Stills" series. Part of "The Pictures Generation,

" a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"The Pictures Generation," a show that closed earlier this year at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been dubbed the best group show of the year in something called "Rob Pruitt Presents: The First Annual Art Awards." This new collection of awards -- part genuine contest, part performance art piece, part fundraiser -- was jointly sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum and Calvin Klein.

It's an unconventional award, to be sure. Pruitt, an artist whose work often deals with the machinations of the art world, organized the Oct. 29 awards ceremony to resemble a Hollywood affair. An account of the evening from the Guggenheim's Web site:

After a dinner of locally sourced cuisine culled from Brooklyn-based restaurants and chefs, presenters including Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum Richard Armstrong, Cecily Brown, Jeffrey Deitch, James Franco, Knight Landesman, Julianne Moore, and Guggenheim Chief Curator Nancy Spector announced the winners. On receiving her award, a statuette created by Pruitt resembling a celebratory bucket of champagne that also serves as a fully functional lamp, Heilmann acknowledged the significance of being recognized while also declaring, “The Guggenheim belongs to all of us."

"The Pictures Generation," treated warmly by critics, focused on that group of artists whose appropriation of images and material from other artists and from popular culture at large sat at the center of their art. Those artists, of course, included Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer and others who launched their careers in Buffalo and went on to become enormously influential to future artists. Which, in essence, was the point of the well researched and engrossing exhibition.

Holland Cotter, from the New York Times, praised the show thusly:

The show is a winner. It tackles a subject — an innovative and influential body of art produced between two major American economic booms — that has been begging for museum attention. It does so at a time when the work in question has particular pertinence to what’s being made today. And it gives the subject something like classic old master treatment (decent space, big catalog) at probably a fraction of old master cost.

As for the art itself — painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, installation, prints and books by 30 artists, most of them still active and caught young here — it looks terrific. Some of it has become famous. But a lot of it hasn’t been seen since it was made in the post-Vietnam 1970s.

--Colin Dabkowski