Jeffry Cudlin's 'By Request': Mutual admiration society keeping its own counsel

Has Jeffry Cudlin created the Unreviewable Show? I'm thinking maybe. This because, as a critic, I struggle to evaluate an exhibition so willing to lie on the couch and admit its own deep-seated conflicts.

What happens in Cudlin's Flashpoint exhibition "BY REQUEST?" (All caps, please, says the artist: "The show is that loud.") Tongues are planted firmly in cheeks as Cudlin masterminds an exhibition exposing the social oil that fuels the Washington art scene.

To create "By Request," Cudlin donned his artist cap -- it's one of several art-world jobs he holds. His day job is director of exhibitions at Arlington Arts Center; his part-time gigs find him stewarding his personal art blog and occasionally contributing to Washington City Paper as a critic. In other words, he's conflict of interest embodied.

Fittingly, "By Request" takes as its subject the insularity and often boundary-free interactions of the art world. At its core lies a cynical truth: Making it in the art world happens because of whom you know.

The show unfolds, gamely and predictably, from here. The artist himself didn't make much art. Save for a video, about 13 minutes long, of a cross-dressing dance performance inside a handful of D.C. galleries (about which more in a moment), Cudlin didn't make any art at all. He recruited others to do it for him.

So what did Cudlin do?

Cudlin pinpointed seven folks integral to the Washington art world -- his news release calls them "art world luminaries": a museum curator, a blogger, three collectors, one gallery owner and one museum director. The seven agreed to fill out Cudlin-designed surveys aimed at defining their ideal work of art. Cudlin promised to pair these patrons with seven artists, most from Washington, who would deliver custom-made pieces. Cudlin's one requirement: Every work must have an image or reference to Cudlin.

In concept, Cudlin's show riffs gently on Komar and Melamid's well-known 1990s project, "People's Choice," which produced kooky, nation-specific paintings determined through worldwide polling. Cudlin, too, exposes the impossibility of consumer-driven manufacture, but he roots his work firmly in Washington. "By Request" is something like the sequel to Cudlin and Meg Mitchell's smart, silly 2007 Washington Color School mockumentary "Ian and Jan: The Washington Body School."

But unlike Komar and Melamid's "People's Choice" canvases, the artistic products of "By Request" betray almost no traces of patron influence. A neo-Edward Hopper with hints of Diebenkorn and Ruscha by artist Trevor Young looks almost exactly like any other painting by Trevor Young. A glossy photo with plenty of fake blood by Victoria F. Gaitán looks like a Gaitán. And the big, big nude by photographer Jason Horowitz? No surprise here.

Cudlin contends that the surveys were a bluff anyway. Gussied up Myers-Briggs tests tailored to art situations, they remained largely ignored. Cudlin simply paired artists with patrons he figured shared the same sensibilities.

(One pairing veered intriguingly off track. Brooklyn-based artist Torkwase Dyson constructed a point-by-point response to Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski's survey answers. According to Cudlin, Dyson's project became "a very personal statement about Torkwase's identity as a black woman artist struggling with her relationships to institutions and the people who guide them." Dyson decided that the piece should not go on view and shipped it directly to Kosinski. The missing artwork is perhaps the only significant piece to come out of this otherwise frictionless show.)

Although designed under the guise of empiricism, "By Request" came together as most any art show does: Curator taps art-world friends and associates to put on a show.