The Year in Pan

There is one more day in the year, so I thought I'd look back at how this blog did in 2010. Over the course of 2010, I got a little more than 46,000 page views. Considering that there are blogs that get that many page views every day (and more), it's not too exciting. That works out to about 126 page views per day.

As you might expect, however, this hasn't been constant. From January to August, I got about 2570 page views a month. Then I discovered Reddit. I started posting my posts in appropriate Reddit forums, and my page views show up. After September, my average page views per month were about 6360 per month. Now this may be as good as it gets. After, my two main subjects, contemporary art in Houston and art comics, are not hugely popular. There's a reason Gawker covers celebrity gossip instead of contemporary art.

Reddit surprised me in another way--the posts people liked the most weren't necessarily what I would have guessed (although in retrospect, their popularity makes sense). Here are the ten most popular posts from 2010, based on page views.



Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976
Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976

1.The Woodmans: This post was about a film about the late photographer Francesca Woodman and her family. When I posted it up on Reddit, the number of people visiting Pan exploded.


Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960

2. Where Does a Work of Art Get Its Value? This post was from September 2009, but when I posted a link to Reddit, it took off. That said, it is a post that readers often manage to find--the issues surrounding what makes a given piece of artwork valuable are always interesting.


Tara Donovan, Bluff detail, buttons and glue, 2007

3. Lady Art at McClain. This is another one from last year (December 24, 2009). It's about an ill-conceived group show at the McClain Gallery, which is about the bluest of blue-chip galleries in Houston. Why is it popular? I don't know--I can't credit Reddit for this one. I will say one thing about it, though. I was really snarky--it's one of the few bad reviews I've written. And given the way people liked it, maybe I should write some more!


Norman Lindsay, Visitors from the Moon, watercolor

4. Two Books by Norman Lindsay. This post was a review of a novel and a memoir by the eccentric Australian erotic artist, Norman Lindsay, with whom I became somewhat fascinated by over the course of 2010. Why is this post so popular? Well, I suppose it's that sex sells!

5. Every Painting in the Museum of Modern Art. I wish I could say that it is my writerly brilliance that brings readers to Pan, but this popular post demonstrates otherwise. It is essentially a repost of a video from New York Magazine.


Michael Crowder, Du musée Sauvignons detail, glass, 2009

6. L'heure bleue d'Michael Crowder. This is another post from 2009 that somehow has remained popular throughout 2010. The gallery linked back to the review, which I presume drove some of the views. But really, I don't understand why this post--a review of a nice show by a Houston-area artist--should have been so much more popular than many other similar posts.


E.C. Segar, Popeye daily strips

7. "I Yam What I Yam" On the other hand, I know exactly why this post is so popular. It's a post about how frequently E.C. Segar, the creator of Popeye, put Popeye in drag--and how comfortable Popeye seemed to be cross-dressing. It was a response to a post by Jeet Heer on his excellent blog Sans Everything. He mentioned my post on his blog, which sent some readers over. Apparently, someone at the popular liberal blog Alas! A Blog saw Heer's post and posted a link. Which was very nice. That said, I don't think that posting about cross-dressing comic strip characters would, in general, increase my readership. (This post appeared exactly one year ago today.)


Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage cover, 1974

8. The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James. This one was from November, 2009. It, like many others, was given a new lease on life when I uploaded a link to Reddit. On the face of it, it seems strange that an avant garde graphic novel published in a small print run in 1975 should be of any interest to readers today. But it has a kind of mystique attached to it, and many contemporary readers and creators of art comics are extremely curious about it. It's an amazing work, and one that should be reprinted.


Laurel Nakadate, Stay The Same Never Change film still

9. What I Saw When I Saw Stay the Same Never Change. I saw this Laurel Nakadate film during FotoFest. I hated it. I wrote a highly negative review and quoted some hilarious things Nakadate said about the film. Perhaps this is a signal that I should continue to write negative reviews. Or perhaps it just means that Nakadate remains a popular search engine subject (maybe for artsy people who like to see naked ladies--which would help explain the popularity of the Francesca Woodman post as well).


still from Boogie Woogie

10. I Saw Boogie Woogie So You Don't Have To. This post is sort of a review of this movie set in the art world. And it is pretty negative, which strongly suggests a trend. BUT! It also has nudity--boobs to be precise--so that's another trend. That's what you people like--snarky negative reviews with naked boobs.

So that's it--the most viewed pages of the past year. Expect to see more crossdressing cartoon characters, more boobs, more bad reviews, more movie reviews, and more reposting of popular posts from other blogs. Happy New Year!

Lady Art at McClain

by Robert Boyd

There is something really weird about McClain Gallery's show "A Room of Her Own." OK, the title. We get it. Virginia Woolf. So a show of women artists. But as far as I can tell, the only curatorial idea present in this show is that all these artists are women. I will willingly acknowledge that the art world still has sexism, but it has obviously improved a lot over the past few decades--especially contemporary art. Look at the artists I've written about this year. Look at the composition of the artists going into the Whitney Biennial. And frankly, look at the artists in this show--Kiki Smith, Louise Nevelson, Jenny Holzer, Cecily Brown, Tracey Emin, etc. They are all hugely successful artists, artists scarcely in need of affirmative action. I could see the grouping if there were some feminist idea animating the work, but there really isn't--at least, not that I can see. (Indeed, Inez van Lamsweerde's enormous photographic print, "Kate in Veil", is notable for two reasons: "Kate" is a total hottie, and she is wearing a veil and nothing else. That's one piece designed to appeal to the fellas! Perfect for hanging in your "man cave.")

So maybe a better way to think of the show is that it is a chance for McClain to put on a group show of blue-chip art. That's how I related to the show. And that's perfectly fine. My favorite piece in the show is this one:


Tara Donovan, Bluff, buttons and glue, 2007


Tara Donovan, Bluff detail, buttons and glue, 2007

Tara Donovan's sculpture is really cool, and this one was amazing.The buttons are semi-transparent, so the effect (which you can't really see in the photos) is weirdly hazy and out of focus. Because on the edges of the sculpture, it is transparent, but the deeper you go in, the more the layered buttons block light. The effect is remarkable--it's as if these stalagmite-like stuctures are out of focus. It is literally hard to see the edges unless you get really close. It's disconcerting. Making a huge sculpture out of buttons or plastic straws or paper plates seems like kind of a stunt when you hear about it, but the proof is in the pudding. "Bluff" has a truly remarkable presence.

I was astonished and really pleased to see a piece by one of my teachers from Rice, Karin Broker. When she was teaching us, her main thing was doing huge drawings and etchings of flowers. But that was in the mid 80s and this is apparently what she is doing now.


Karin Broker, Self-Portrait 1, metal, 2009

In the back of the gallery is a separate show of small pieces with another Broker piece. (Sorry for the crappy focus.)


Karin Broker, In the Country, farm box, construction and found objects, 2009

Here's a detail of the Farm Box.


Karin Broker, In the Country, farm box detail, construction and found objects, 2009

It's hard for me to square these pieces with the Karin Broker art I used to see, but I like them a lot. It is as if she decided to take all her strengths (incredible draftsmanship, beautiful sense of light and dark, hard-won skills as a printmaker) and chuck them all out. And that can be a useful strategy if you want to goose yourself to a new or different place, artistically. I think it works here.

One last piece I want to mention, also in the show of small pices in the back. It's by Rachel Whiteread, whose work I have always loved. But she's famous for taking rooms and indeed whole buildings and making full-size sculptures of the negative space within them, right? So what kind of "small" work can we expect from her?


Rachel Whiteread, Secondhand, Stereolithograph of laser sintered white nylon (edition of 400), 2004

It's basically a miniature version of a fairly typical sculpture (positive instead of negative, though). And the means of producing it sounds really high-tech--I'd love to see one being made. I know these techniques are used by industrial engineers and designers when they are producing models of new machines. (I had a summer job at Cameron and was shown some of these 3-D "printed" objects of reciprocating gas compressors that were on the drawing boards.) What is cool about this tiny sculpture is how much it looks like her enormous concrete versions. (And it's fairly inexpensive, given Whiteread's stature. Almost in my price range...)

"A Room of Her Own" is up through December 31, and the "Small Works and Artists Books" show in the back is up through January 2.