Michelle Grabner gives a tour of the presentation she curated for the 2014 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Credit: Jonathan Fickies

Mary Louise Schumacher Art City An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue. SHARE

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson effectively called artist Michelle Grabner a dull, middle-class soccer mom in a short review published Friday. This spawned cries of sexism and New York provincialism across social media over the weekend.

Mary Lou Zelazny, an adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, called Johnson's use of the term "soccer mom" a "misogynist slur" and "a low in art criticism," echoing others.

"Soccer mom?" asked artist and critic Pedro Velez on his Facebook wall. "Don't they have editors at the (New York Times)?"

"He didn't reach too far into the bag of cheap clichés to pull that one out, did he?" wrote Ryan Farrell.

In his review, Johnson spends much of his ink reflecting on a video by Milwaukee-area artist David Robbins, a short introduction of sorts to Wisconsin native Grabner's show at the James Cohan Gallery. It's a wonderfully droll and camp anti-commercial that's typical of Robbins' work and that invites us to explore ideas about Midwesterness, boredom, intended audiences and serious artistic intention.

Though Grabner explains some of her ideas and influences in the short video, Johnson ignores them and focuses on her gardening, pie making and comfortable home life instead. He then goes on to briefly describe her actual work, calling it "bland," and dismissing it in two sentences flat.

"Nothing in all this is more interesting than the unexamined sociological background of the whole," wrote Johnson. "If the show were a satire of the artist as a comfortably middle-class tenured professor and soccer mom, it would be funny and possibly illuminating, but it's not."

I have not seen the show, but I'm familiar with the bodies of work represented in it. To my mind, this review seems spectacularly lazy. It fails to contend with Grabner's actual work or ideas in any serious way. I am also left wondering, as others are, if his description of her as a "soccer mom" with "bland art" has something to do with her being a woman from the Midwest.

"Authenticity is valid as a mode of belief," wrote Corinna Kirsch in a retort to Johnson at Art Fag City. "Grabner is not alone in this distinction — artists from Allan Kaprow to Sheila Hicks have created art that strives for a core belief in an art life that relates to the rest of life. Frankly, we deserve an art world that makes room for more than Johnson's narrow vision."

It's not the first time Johnson has attracted the ire of the art world. About two years ago, he stirred up controversies with his review of "Now Dig This!," an exhibit related to black Los Angeles from 1960 to 1980, and a preview of "The Female Gaze," for making what many considered broad and dismissive generalizations about artists who were black or female.

In the latter piece, for instance, Johnson questioned why art by women did not have as much market share as that of men, suggesting it might have something to do with "the nature of the art that women tend to make."

"Wow, Johnson is nothing if not consistent!" wrote artist Sabina Ott on Grabner's Facebook wall this weekend, "he seems to always miss the point and indulge his own sexism and racism ... shame on him."

"As a critic, I understand how certain words, slang and terms can have double intentions and I have always taken full responsibility for my reviews," Velez also wrote. "Ken is older and much more experienced than me and this is becoming a pattern for him. I don't buy that he didn't mean to imply what he wrote and how he wrote it."

Grabner took the high road and posted a link to the review without comment on Facebook and, later, an image of a neighborhood soccer game — embracing her "bland" existence with a wink, it would seem. Grabner, a Wisconsin native and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee grad, is most known of late for co-curating the latest Whitney Biennial, the most important survey of contemporary art in the U.S.

This toss off review of Grabner's work in the Times, coupled with almost simultaneous inclusion on a list of the 100 most influential art-world women, speaks to a certain kind of art-world blindness or at the very least a missed opportunity. I will have a few more musings on this tomorrow.