Art Athenaeum

Hong Kong Prison to Be Rehabilitated as Lavish $231 Million Art Complex, With a Hand From Herzog & de Meuron

2011-06-07T11:37:00.004-04:00

The Central Police Station, Central Magistracy and Victoria Prison compound will be transformed into an art museum.

HONG KONG— In bustling Hong Kong, a nexus of wealth and power is making waves, with a much expanded Hong Kong Art Fair that drew 63,000 visitors last month, dramatic auction results tallying $962 million during Christie's and Sotheby's spring season, and Western gallery incursions from Gagosian and Ben Brown. The city, however, still lacks a world-class contemporary art center. But that will change in dramatic fashion as ambitious plans for the British colonial era Central Police Station, Central Magistracy and Victoria Prison compound, located on Hollywood Road in the heart of the city and in disuse since 2006, will be transformed into a multi-venue contemporary art museum, performing arts center, and cinema.
Instead of demolition to make room for another batch of glass-skinned high-rises, this site will be largely preserved and interfaced with a brand new Kunsthalle, a Herzog & de Meuron-styled contemporary museum that will be about the size of London's Hayward Gallery. In almost fairytale fashion, the richly conservative Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust is initially bankrolling the Central Police Station Project (CPS) with a HK$1.8 billion ($231 million) commitment, along with the official blessings of the local government to launch the not-for-profit enterprise. According to the sponsors, CPS Project will establish "a centre for heritage, arts and leisure at this prime Central location [and] compliments the overall development of arts and culture in the city and adds an attraction with distinct Hong Kong character."

"Our planned mixture of commercial and cultural usage," said Hong Kong Jockey Club chairman John Chan, "will ensure the vibrancy of the entire area."

The buildings were declared monuments by the government in 1995 due to their historical significance and remain as the sole surviving architectural remnants from that bygone time of Colonial rule. The complex's 16 mixed-use structures come from the mid-19th to early 20th century, with some of them sporting wooden louvers and balconies. The site is just steps away from the bustling, eastern end of Hollywood Road, where Asian antique shops proliferate with a more recent sampling of contemporary art galleries moving in, some local and some not (including Chelsea's Sundaram Tagore, which is currently exhibiting Sebastiao Salgado's gritty photographs of poverty and labor).

The CPS initiative is a key part of the local government's "Conserving Central" initiative, "Central" being the name of the neighborhood where CPS, long cloistered from public view, is located. On a sunny and hot morning in late May, the official importance of the new initiative was underscored by a tour of the razor-wire festooned and ultra-secure derelict site led by David Elliott, the storied museum director and itinerant curator, who is serving the Trust in an advisory capacity. Elliott, who was the artistic director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, expects the first phase of the project, the opening of the museum with "high-value exhibitions," by the summer of 2014.

"It's early days," said Elliott, casually clad in a cowboy shirt and blue jeans, standing in the middle of the parade ground of the police station, a kind of surreal oasis surrounded by gleaming high-rises, "but these historic buildings are all being restored."

Elliott estimates that 27 percent or so of the mixed-use site will be devoted to commerce, mostly art galleries and already existing non-profits working in Hong Kong. Those rent-paying ventures will help make the non-profit CPS independent. "We'll have to raise a lot of money to make that happen," predicted Elliott, who was the founding director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and also served stints at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

The plans also include an archaeological investigation of the Central Police Station and will be carried out before some of the less important structures are razed to make room for Herzog & de Meuron's cube-styled museum. It was evident during the tour that many of the original furnishings of the jail complex had already been removed, though the bare bunks were still standing in gloomy formation in the cell block, complete with peeling yellow paint and cautionary signs still warning inmates to roll up their bedding before exercising in the delightfully tree-shaded prison yard. In one of the stripped rooms, a lone painting of sail-masted junk boats skimming along Victoria Harbor at sunset hung in eerie isolation, as if part of a secret Mike Nelson installation.

Elliott has great expectations of the emerging art complex, noting, "good art doesn't all have to come out of London and New York."

The CPS Project is scheduled to go live before the much bigger M+ Museum, sited on 95 acres of reclaimed land for the West Kowloon Cultural District on the riverfront. Lars Nittve, the founding director of London's Tate Modern (and, like Elliott, a former director of the Moderna Museet), has been recruited as executive director of this major new enterprise. During a boat tour of the famous harbor, Nittve told the assembled mix of art critics and dealers who flooded the city last month for the fourth edition of the ART HK, "the money [for the M+ Museum] is already in the bank to build the project and realize it. We don't have to fund-raise." Indeed, the local government has infused the project with an outright grant of HK$22 billion ($2.8 billion). The first phase, a 43,000-square-foot museum building on the scale of the current Tate Modern, is expected to open in 2016-17.

The two visual art ventures have the potential of transforming Hong Kong into something more than the 21st century mecca for the consumption and acquisition of luxury goods that it is now. What better way to start that than rehabilitating a cell block?

Adventures with Warhol, 1986 self-portrait edition

2011-05-10T11:48:00.001-04:00

If you want a great example of how the entire business of the art world is built on opacity and information asymmetry, the Christie’s auction of a big Andy Warhol self-portrait next week is a good place to start.

But first let’s go back to this time last year, when Sotheby’s was auctioning off a similar self-portrait: same size, different color, different wig. This information is high up on the official Sotheby’s page for the painting:

According to our research, there are only four other self-portraits from this series in this size. They are located in the following collections:

Self Portrait (Green), Fort Worth Art Museum
Self Portrait (Yellow), Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Self Portrait (Blue), Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Self Portrait (Red), Private Collection

Scroll all the way down to the bottom, however, and you find a loophole: “It is believed that only five of the 108 in. square format self-portraits depicting this exact image exist”.

My emphasis added — and it’s important, because the Christie’s red self-portrait is not the red self-portrait listed by Sotheby’s. Instead, it’s one of two slightly different self-portraits in the same size; the other, a green one, is in the Guggenheim.

Now see how Christie’s explains where the other paintings are. The release quotes Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s co-head of post-war and contemporary art, as saying that “with all other examples in museums, it will be the last chance that buyers will have to bid on a work that shifted art history”. It then goes on to explain:

Warhol painted only seven large scale self-portraits in 1986. All the other versions are in museums or in foundations open to the public. A purple Self-Portrait was acquired in 2010 for $32.5 million for a private museum; other examples belong to Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Fort Worth Art Museum and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

It’s very easy to simply assume, when Cappellazzo says that all the other paintings are in museums, that she means just that. But really it isn’t true. Of the seven big paintings, only four are in museums: one in the Guggenheim, one in Fort Worth, and two in Pittsburgh. There’s also the one that Christie’s is selling — and then there are two more: the purple one which Sotheby’s sold last year, and the red one which Sotheby’s said was in a private collection.

(And when Cappellazzo says that Warhol painted only seven large scale self-portraits in 1986, that’s not really true either: the Tate, for instance, has a huge 1986 self-portrait on show right now, which looks almost identical to the Christie’s one. It’s just not quite as huge: it’s 80 inches square, rather than 106 inches.)

So what does Christie’s mean when it says all the other paintings are in museums (or, later on, “in museums or in foundations open to the public”)? If they’re public, it should be easy enough to find out where they are, right?

Wrong. Ask Christie’s and they’ll suddenly go very quiet when you ask them for the location of the purple self-portrait and the other red one. (Although they will say that the other red one isn’t really red, it’s “coral”.) They obviously know where those paintings are, or think they know, but they’re not telling.

And so we enter the murky world of art-world rumor, which has it that the red one is owned by Peter Brant and the purple one by Bernard Arnault. Brant does have a foundation which is kindasorta open to the public — it’s by appointment only and you make appointments by email. I tried emailing them to ask if they have the red Warhol; they never replied. But I’m pretty sure that the foundation has never shown the Warhol and there’s certainly no public indication that the foundation even owns it.

As for Arnault, his Gehry-designed museum doesn’t even exist yet, and again, there’s zero public acknowledgment that he was the buyer of the purple Warhol last year.

When I asked art collector Adam Lindemann about all this, he replied succinctly that “they always say it’s the last one until someone else needs or wants to sell”. The fact is that auction houses are essentially art dealers and art dealers make their money by putting the best possible spin on the art that they’re selling and by knowing the secrets of who owns what. In this case, while Sotheby’s just said that the red self-portrait was in a “private collection”, Christie’s has upgraded it to being in a museum, or something tantamount to a museum. Which if you ask me is a bit of a stretch.

One of the weird things about conspicuous consumption in the art world is that for all that it’s conspicuous it isn’t public — outside the big public museums everybody tends to be very secretive indeed about what they own and what they don’t. That allows collectors to sell art quietly without admitting that they did so. And it also allows dealers and auction houses to make claims about where paintings are which are very difficult indeed to fact-check. Even when those claims are about “foundations open to the public”.
- Felix Salmon May 2011

Christie’s Blurs The Line Between Public and Private Collections

2011-05-10T11:44:00.003-04:00

Felix Salmon has a good post about the Warhol auction racket, if you can parse the Warhols. According to Salmon, seven same-sized large self-portraits exist, each painted in 1986. Christie’s claims ”[a]ll the other versions are in museums or in foundations open to the public”, but only four are easily traced to such institutions: one in the Guggenheim, one in Fort Worth, and two in Pittsburgh. Remaining is the one Christie’s will auction May 11, and one sold at Sotheby’s last year, and another, which was described by Sotheby’s last year as part of a private collection.

So where are the two Warhols in question? Christie’s doesn’t want to say, but according to art world gossip recounted by Salmon, collector Peter Brant has the red one, and Bernard Arnault the purple. Both have semi-public foundations — or at least, in the case of Arnault, plans to create one — and that’s good enough for Christie’s.

Now, obviously using the words “public collection” to describe private collections with sharing intentions isn’t particularly accurate, and it’s good that Salmon called it out because ultimately it means the piece isn’t as rare as Christie’s claims. Collector Charles Saatchi does better than either Brandt and Arnault in respect to making his collection public — The Saatchi Gallery maintains regular hours — but that’s still no guarantee that he won’t sell the work. In fact, he has a bad reputation for unloading recently acquired art.

All this goes to say that even when private collections are made public, that doesn’t mean that a collector will love those works enough to never sell them. This makes a difference, because for a buyer, there’s a pretty big distinction between purchasing a work that will likely be the only one of its kind on the market, and owning a work of which two others are floating around. Surely this is exactly the kind of distortion that could inflate the painting’s sale price.

by Paddy Johnson on May 6, 2011

Thiebaud Gets His Slice, Chamberlain Sets Record Sotheby’s Stone Sale

2011-05-10T11:37:00.003-04:00

A raw, twisted steel 1958 John Chamberlain sculpture, Nutcracker, sold for $4.8 million last night at Sotheby's in New York. The price achieved an auction record for the artist, selling to a Gagosian Gallery representative who paid more than double the presale $1.8 million high estimate. Gagosian recently signed on the 84-year-old artist, following a two-decade partnership with Pace Gallery.

Nutcracker was the most coveted artwork on offer in a single-owner sale from the estate of Upper East Side dealer Allan Stone, who died in 2006 at the age of 74. The sale included 42 lots totaling $54.8 million, topping the $46.8 million high estimate. The lure of estate material and low estimates resulted in a healthy 93 percent of lots finding buyers.

While results were steady, the mixed quality of works on offer was more suited to a day sale than an evening sale. Nevertheless, Sotheby's gave the Stone estate the royal auction treatment, having snatched the business away from Christie's, where a first round of works were sold in 2007.

Stone was a compulsive buyer who filled his suburban home with whatever caught his eye. His daughter, Olympia Stone, directed and produced a 2006 documentary about her father, The Collector: Allan Stone's Life in Art. Two skyboxes filled with Stone family members and friends watched the proceedings, snapping photos and sipping champagne.

This sale launched a weeklong series of contemporary art auctions at Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips de Pury, stocked with big-money paintings by Warhol and Rothko.

Last night's sale included a group of 18 works by painter Wayne Thiebaud. Sotheby's strategy, offering a large pool of work by a single artist, can risk flooding the market. In this case the gambit paid off. Seventeen sold, totaling $27.5 million, above the $18.3 million high estimate.

"The work that was really great sold very well," San Francisco dealer Gretchen Berggruen told A.i.A. "[Thiebaud has] a much broader following than people think because he's always been labeled a California artist." Berggruen purchased Various Cakes for $3 million, above the $1.8 million high estimate.

Stone originally met Thiebaud in 1961, a year after he founded his gallery. They continued to work together until Stone's death. Thiebaud's 1961 still-life painting of rows of symmetrical Pies, thickly painted on a cream background and in step with a then-emerging Pop style, sold for $4 million, above the $3.5 million high estimate.

International phone bidding from Europe, Israel and Asia helped propel Thiebaud's prices. An 11-inch-tall 1962 work, Four Pinball Machines (Study), soared over a $900,000 high estimate, selling for $3.4 million.

The sale also featured Abstract Expressionist artists, including nine pieces by Willem de Kooning, who is the subject of a major survey at MoMA this autumn. "The quality of the De Koonings weren't very good, and they didn't generate much enthusiasm," noted dealer David Nash, of Mitchell Innes & Nash, after the sale. The most significant de Kooning, a 1947 greenish-yellow and raspberry painting on board titled Event in Barn, missed a $5 million to $7 million estimate, selling for $4.8 million.

The most hotly pursued de Kooning was the pink and flesh-toned painting on newsprint, Woman in a Landscape (1965–66). Estimated to sell for $700,000 to $900,000, more than four bidders pushed the price up to $1.1 million. It eventually sold to an unnamed phone bidder.

"The sale was a good warm-up for the week, but many of the key players didn't show up," observed dealer Edward Tyler Nahem. "Tuesday night will be packed."

TOP: Wayne Thiebaud, Pies, 1961. Oil on Canvas, Est. $2,500,000–$3,500,000. Sold: $4,000,000
ABOVE: Willem de Kooning, Event in a Barn, 1947. Oil, enamel and paper collage on board. $5,000,000–$7,000,000. Sold: $4,800,000.

by Lindsay Pollock 05/10/11

20x200

2011-03-24T14:16:00.002-04:00

Maclean’s charts the growth of online art selling in Canada giving credit for the emerging trend to Jen Bekman and her success with 20×200.com:

Vancouver artist Indigo quit her secretarial job last year, and has been able to support herself thanks in part to income generated on Cargoh.com, a Canadian-based website for buying and selling art. Robyn McCallum’s work was spotted onEyebuyart.com, prompting her inclusion in an exhibition at Toronto’s Drake Hotel. And Montreal photographer Robert Cadloff makes more than 200 sales a month on Etsy.com, earning “just a little less” than he did in engineering. “Ten years ago, this kind of career change and all the sales wouldn’t have been possible,” says Cadloff. “You needed to schlep your portfolio around to galleries and beg people to exhibit your work. I wasn’t born with that pushy gene.”

Luckily for Cadloff, and a growing number of artists—both emerging and well-known photographers and painters looking to further raise their profile and tap a new market of less-affluent collectors—selling art online is gaining momentum. New Yorker Jen Bekman is credited with starting the trend in 2007 when she launched 20×200.com—her site features limited-edition prints and photographs starting at $20. Others have instituted a similar curatorial policy. Claire Sykes, co-founder of Toronto-based Circuitgallery.com, says she “keeps the quality high” by featuring prints of established Canadian contemporary artists, including Robert Bean and Andrew Wright. “Earlier sites were more like clearing houses,” she says, “and artists were worried, quite rightly, about damaging their reputations by being associated with uncurated spaces and cheaply produced prints.”

March 24, 2011 By Marion Maneker - Art Market Monitor

The Armory Arts Week

2011-03-06T13:37:00.002-05:00

The Armory Show
Piers 92 and 96, Twelfth Ave., at 55th St.;  3/2–3/6; Th–S (noon–8 p.m.), Su (noon–7 p.m.); $30, $10 students
This behemoth loves it when you call it big poppa, with its hundreds of exhibitors divided into two sections: Modern (Pier 92) and Contemporary (Pier 94). Besides that there are forums and a film schedule, making it possible to never see daylight.

Fountain New York
Pier 66 and the Frying Pan, Twelfth Ave., at 26th St.; 3/4–3/6; noon–7 p.m.; $10
Named after Duchamp's famous piece, the avant-garde fest features twenty exhibitors, a collaborative mural, and live-action performance art in an offshore setting (so probably best to skip if you get seasick). Funk-infused popster Gordon Voidwell kicks off the festivities at the public reception Friday night.

Volta NY
7W–7 West 34th St., nr. Sixth Ave., 11th fl., 3/3–3/6; Th (3 p.m.–7 p.m.), F–Su (11 a.m.–7 p.m.); $10–$15, $40 Volta and Armory Pass
Midtown gets a creative infusion: This fair's 80 galleries each chose only one artist to represent, which cuts down on the clutter. For an insider's point of view, InContext tours is offering an opportunity to mingle with the artists and discuss works with art critic and fair director Amanda Coulson.

Pulse Art Fair
Metropolitan Pavilion; 125 W. 18th St., nr. Sixth Ave.; 3/3–3/6; Th (1 p.m.–8 p.m.), F–Su (noon–5 p.m.); $20, $15 students and seniors
A contemporary art fair with signature large-scale sculpture, held annually in both New York and Miami. Check out Ben Wolf's site-specific Clamber, an eighteen-foot-long ship's hull salvaged from an abandoned vessel in Newark; or Molly Dilworth's "Field Test," site-specific paintings that use X-ray and electron microscopy images of rare earth elements as visual references.

Verge Art Brooklyn
Antidote, 81 Front St., ground fl., Dumbo; 3/3–3/6; Th–S (noon–10 p.m.), Su (noon–6 p.m.); Free
Art in Brooklyn! This fair turns Dumbo into an art city, with over 70 exhibitors sprawling over nine locations. They do it up right with a dance party opening night at Galapagos running from 9:30 p.m. to 3 a.m., with acts including Sister Anne and Violens.

Moving Image
Waterfront New York Tunnel, 269 Eleventh Ave., nr. 27th St.; 3/3–3/6; Th–S (11 a.m.–8 p.m.), Su (11 a.m.–3 p.m); Free
Single-channel videos and video sculptures selected from international commercial galleries and nonprofit institutions, including artists like Leslie Thornton and David Wojnarowicz. A panel exploring the state of moving-image-based work is scheduled for Saturday, and private tours are available for groups.

Scope Art Show
355 West 36th St., third fl., nr. Ninth Ave., 3/2–3/6; W (VIP and first view, 3 p.m.–8 p.m.), Th–S (noon–8 p.m.), Su (noon–7 p.m.); $10–$15, $20, $10 students, $100 First view
Contemporary art will be shown in all its forms, as one of the larger fairs (taking over a 60,000-square-foot hall with a price tag to match) shows over 50 exhibitors, and this year features "Us vs. Us," five days of performance in the fenced mezzanine.

Independent Art Fair
548 West 22nd St., nr. Tenth Ave.; 3/3–3/6; Th (4 p.m.–9p.m.), F (11 a.m.–8 p.m.), S (11 a.m.–8 p.m.), Su (noon–4 p.m.); Free
It's the second year this impressive gallerist collaboration takes over three floors in the former Dia building in Chelsea, exhibiting over 40 international galleries in an open-layout plan, making it less of a fair and more of a conversation.

Who Bought What at Sotheby’s London I/M Sale

2011-02-09T14:46:00.002-05:00

Picasso's "Le Peintre et Son Modele dans un Paysage" sold for $3,227,816 at Sotheby's London

The Master, Judd Tully, has the bid spotting from Sotheby’s “no surprises” sale:

■James Roundell bought Picasso’s wartime 1943 still life “Compotier et Verres” for $1.3 million (£802,850) on a £600-800,000 estimate.

■The Nahmad art trading clan, seated at the front of the salesroom, dropped out rather early, and finally Sotheby’s Mark Poltimore, a former president of Sotheby’s Russia and a well-known cultivator of Russian-based clientele, nabbed the picture at the hammer price of £22.5 million, before the buyer’s premium was added.

■Guy Jennings and Simon Theobald of Theobald Jennings Ltd. were also active, nailing Paul Klee‘s peppy late abstraction of 1931 “P Vierzehn (P Fourteen)” for $1.3 million (£25,250) on a £700,000-1 million estimate

■Acquavella Galleries, meanwhile, beat out the Nahmads for Picasso’s late and autobiographical “Le Peintre et Son Modele dans un Paysage” from 1963 for $3.2 million (£2 million) against a £600-800,000 estimate. The painting last sold at auction at Christie’s New York back in May 1981 for $115,000

Scott Reyburn gathers a few tight-lipped comments on the sale:

■“The auction did all right, not great,’’ the London-based dealer Alan Hobart of the Pyms Gallery said in an interview. “The auction houses are struggling to find the goods. Rich collectors are hanging on to their art. Once prices are driven up, the market becomes more discriminating.”

■Giacometti’s 1957 bronze portrait of his younger brother, “Grand buste de Diego avec bras,” estimated at 3.5 million pounds to 5 million pounds, failed to sell because of its pale color, according to dealers.

February 9, 2011 By Marion Maneker

Caring for Photography

2011-02-09T14:40:00.001-05:00

In her celebrated essay on photography, writer Susan Sontag observed that, "to collect photographs is to collect the world". This sentiment is no doubt held by the growing number of collectors focusing on photography. Along with choosing photographs for one's collection comes the need to know more about caring for them. Below is some helpful advice:

When Transporting Artworks:
-Make sure that the vehicle is large enough to accommodate the artwork and its packaging.
-Make sure the works are professionally and correctly packaged for shipping.
-Ask the gallery or insurance carrier for advice on shipping to avoid using inexperienced art handlers.

When Framing, Hanging and Storing:
-Make sure your artwork is protected with archival framing.
-Glass vs. Plexiglas? Glass is easier to clean and care for but when it breaks, it can destroy artworks. If the photograph is of high value choose the added safety and protection of Plexiglas.
-Always protect art from heat and direct sunlight. Never hang expensive art over a fireplace.
-Use appropriate picture hangers for artwork, which are available at professional framing stores.
-Avoid storing works in basements. If you must, be sure to keep the artwork at least 3 inches above the floor.

When Dealing with Insurance:
-Keep your insurance company updated with the current values of your artwork. This should be done yearly or when there are significant changes in values.
-Confirm coverage for the work includes shipping and transportation coverage.

When in doubt, seek the advice of an expert. Museums, galleries, and historical societies are your best resources for the proper care and storage of photographs. If you own a photograph that has sustained damage, they can refer you to a paper conservator qualified to treat your photograph.

Article contributed by Colin Quinn, Director of Claims Management and Loss Control Services, AXA Art Insurance Corporation

KiptonART Art Talk with Art Enthusiast Ann Lydecker

2011-02-08T10:47:00.002-05:00

Ann Lydecker is an active and established member of New York’s vibrant Art Industry. Prior to joining Cirkers and Hayes Fine Art Storage & Logistics as Director of Worldwide Sales, she founded Metropolitan Art Advisors.

As Founder of Metropolitan Art Advisors, Ann Lydecker shares her passion, insight and comprehensive understanding of the art world with clients by providing introductions, connections and direct access to major artists' studios, leading galleries, museums, art fairs, auction houses and private collections globally.

Who are your favorite KiptonART artists? Why?

I am a friend of Stephan Fowlkes, and really believe in his future as an artist. I’ve also discovered several other painters and photographers on KiptonART whose work I’m curious to see in person because it looks good online, such as Joseph Conrad-ferm and Jane Frances Lloyd.
Most importantly, I’m excited to see the upcoming exhibition of 2011 KiptonART Rising Winners which will be featured at Cirkers Fine Art Storage for a brunch during Armory Arts Week March 5th from 9:30am-12noon.

What was the last exhibition you attended?

The MoMA Abstract Expressionism show which I really enjoyed. I also like the recent shows at Sundaram Tagore Gallery on West 27th and my friend Michael Lyons Weirs new gallery on West 24th Street.

How would you describe the décor in your home?

Hollywood Glam… meets contemporary art. It was designed by New York based interior designer Martin Hughes for MStudiolo in 2009. He was an absolute pleasure to work with and wildly creative & resourceful! He custom designed almost everything throughout the apartment. I selected Martin after seeing his magnificent apartment on West 10th Street. He is a rare and exceptional talent.

What was the first work of art you purchased?

A Wayne Thiebaud of eight lipsticks from the Campbell Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco. I cherish this work.
Since then I have purchased several Eric Zener paintings, Matisse drawings, Picasso prints, vintage photography of famous Americans, Bert Stern's last sitting photos of Marilyn Monroe, paintings from emerging NY & California based artists. I own some contemporary Chinese Art from a 2006 MoMA trip to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong such as Yue Minjun. And Latin American painters such as Bradley Narduzzi Rex from an international art tour I organized & lead for Microsoft executives in Mexico City. Recently, I’m inspired by Middle Eastern female artists, but I haven’t purchased any yet, as I need a larger apartment. LTMH Gallery on the upper east side is a great resource for some of these artists. I also like some of what Jen Beckman at 20x200 has too!

What artists most inspire or influence you?
The list is so long. I am crazy about artists spanning from Spanish and Dutch Masters to Hudson River Painters to Mark Rothko to Damian Hirst. The work of Kenneth Noland, Caio Fonseca, Banksy, Takashi Murakami, Marilyn Minter, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Vik Muniz, Helen Frankenthaler and Andy Goldsworthy inspire me.
This week we have a magnificent Impressionist painting hanging at Hayes Fine Art Storage and celebrity clients are coming in to view it. It’s more beautiful than many you’d see in museum collections.

Interview with Todd Levin Art Advisory

2010-03-08T10:47:00.002-05:00

Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York
Alighiero e Boetti's "Far Quadrare Tutto," 1979

NEW YORK— It goes without saying that art advisors are intensely busy people during art fairs — especially when, like Todd Levin, they occasionally don a curatorial hat too. We talked to the Levin Art Group dealmaker (and curator of the acclaimed 2009 show "Your Gold Teeth II" at Marianne Boesky Gallery) to find out why he considered the Dakis Joannou show a miss, what was hot at the ADAA, why the art trumps the nightlife, and why Independent is the must-see of all the satellite fairs. Here is what he had to say.

• With so much going on this week, the three most significant things for me are the ADAA opening, the Armory opening, and Independent's opening. Everything else is negligible. Independent is singularly interesting, specifically for the person who conceptualized it, Darren Flook, along with his wife, Christabel Stewart. The invited participants will represent an interesting and lively cross-section of what's happening in the young and mid-level galleries now.

• The two most interesting and elegant booths at the ADAA were Sperone Westwater's all-Boetti booth and Marianne Boesky's featuring a very interesting selection of Arte Povera. The opening felt lively.

• I purposely avoided the Dakis show on Tuesday night for a number of reasons. First, I strongly disagree with the entire concept of the exhibition based on the obvious conflicts of interest. Second, I didn't think I'd be able to see the work, given the crowd. I really abhor celebrity cluster$@%#s.

• As for my strategy at the Armory Show this year, rather than going for specific objects at specific booths, I'm really going to take the overall temperature of what the gallerists are doing in terms of their programs. I'll go over the weekend to really have the opportunity to speak with the gallerists one-to-one and gain a better understanding of what they're doing in their spaces. This time around, it's more about research and development, and less about purchase and acquisition.

• I don't do the whole nightlife thing. It doesn't add anything for me, neither in terms of my social connections nor in terms of access to information. My nightlife thing consists of private dinners and private drinks with gallerists where we can speak in a detailed, prolonged way about work and do business in a more humane fashion.
By Sarah Douglas
Published: March 5, 2010

Michael Anderson at Marlborough Gallery

2010-03-08T10:29:00.005-05:00

Marlborough Gallery's Collage Artist Michael Anderson greets associate Ann Lydecker, Metropolitan Art Advisors at The MoMA/Armory Week Party.

1968 Michael Anderson was born in New York, New York
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1996 - 2004 Member Artist, GAle GAtes et al., Brooklyn, New York
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1997 - 2004 Open Studio, DUMBO Arts Festival, GAle GAtes et al., Brooklyn, New York
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1999 Independent studio, Kreutzberg, Berlin, Germany
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1999 Independent Studio, Mexico City, Mexico
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2000 Artistic Residency, La Panaderia, Mexico City, Mexico
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2004 Guest artist, Kangol flagship store, New York, New York in cooperation with The Apartment, New York, New York
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2005 Art Editor, Animal Magazine, Instincts Issue, No. 6
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2005 Panel discussion, featured artist, in conjunction with East Village USA, The New Museum, New York, New York
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2005 - 2008 Studio Residency Grant, Chashama, New York, New York
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2006 Art editor, Animal Magazine, Wildlife Issue, No. 7
*
2007 Curator, Sex, Drugs and Violence, Canal Chapter, New York, New York

Solo Exhibitions
*
2009 Collage Geomancy, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, New York, United States.
*
2008 Harlem Collage Shop, Galeria Marlborough, Madrid, Spain.
*
2007 - 2008 Media Violence, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, New York, USA.
2006 Fracture/Frattura, Changing Role-Move Over Gallery, Rome, Italy.
*
2004 Mad Collectors, Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery, New York, New York,USA.
*
2002 Post No Bills, Paul Rodgers/ 9W Gallery, New York, New York, USA.

1997 Recycled Amsterdam, Vi Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
*
1996 The Ark, Gale Gates et al., New York, New York, United States.

http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/galleries/new-york/artists/michael-anderson

http://www.artcritical.com/zinsser/JohnZinsserMoMAParty.html

POOL Art Fair at Gershwin Hotel

2010-03-07T01:05:00.005-05:00

85 Broads & Metropolitan Art Advisors at Armory Preview 3/3

2010-03-07T01:01:00.004-05:00

Armory Arts Week Update

2010-03-07T00:41:00.009-05:00

It is not too late for you to be inspired by the volumes of modern and contemporary art being exhibited throughout NYC this week. After attending almost every show, I can summarize what's hot & what's not for you.

The Armory Show www.the armoryshow.com at 54th St and West Side Hwy, Pier 92 exquisite world class modern art, Pier 94 edgier, riskier contemporary art. 94 is milder than last year. Both excellent. Paul Morris and his team have produced a world class event. Your most chic, sexy designer outfit and Loboutin shoes for this one. And your feet will ache when you're finished walking the Piers, but you'll look great and that's much more important. Besides...champagne bars throughout to ease the pain of looking so good.

ADAA The Art Show www.artdealers.org at the Park Avenue Armory - American Art Dealers only (must have US Passport to qualify) and among the more high end works of art. Very good. You can do it in under an hour. Upper East Side attire for this one.

The Scope Art Fair www.scope-art.com held at Lincoln Center half a block from Rosa Mexicana, on 62nd x Ninth Ave. Slightly more affordable art than the Art Show & Armory Shows and has a more "fun" vibe, allocate at least 45 minutes for this one. Attire-casual chic. Food & wine in the lounge and beautiful, affordable Prints for sale from the Lincoln Center archive in the VIP Room in the back.

Pool Art Fair - Emerging & unrepresented artists at the Gershwin Hotel. Located next to the Museum of Sex on Madison x 27th St. Here you can find works in the $500 range. There are some "eye opening" "interesting" collaborative works and video art... A very funny and worthwhile aspect of POOL are the audience participatory rooms! Such as one where guests are encouraged to draw a picture of their family (crayons, markers, paper & clipboards provided) you will find yourself laughing aloud looking at these daily creations.
There seems to be wine offered in every room, so even if you attempt to race through this fair be prepared, you may find yourself seating down, drinking wine & getting into philosophical conversations here with an artist. Very casual and memorable. Food and drink on the first floor lobby bar.

Pulse Art Fair www.pulse-art.com located on 330 West St x West Houston. Casual Chic attire and allocate 45-60 minutes. Good galleries, some great galeries. Interesting works, prices from $500-$15K ish. Some of these galleries carry amazing works which aren't being shown here, a handful of "solo shows" and my favorites were the Cuban artists, wow: surprising and thoughtful creations. And hang out with the tall curly blonde Director of Bitforms Gallery. Have him explain some of his works, esp the Pantone colors digital artwork on the flatscreen.

Red Dot Art Fair - George Billis Gallery produces this one and George always does a good job. It was the only fair I attended with free, delicious food. Smaller than the other fairs, and located across the street from Exit Art on 36th at 10th Avenue. Worth a stop in, and don't miss the 5th and 6th floor galleries. Upstairs, I noticed one artist who paints swimmers which sell for $5Kish and look very, very similar to a San Francisco based artist whose works start at $50K. And another young artist who "Andy Warholized" a series of famous American Gangsters. Very funny. We all know someone who should have one or two of the gangsters. Lots of colors. Generally less "apocalyptic" art than some of the other fairs.

Others I hear are good are: Fountain Art Fair, Volta Art Fair (7 West 34th) and the New Museum exhibition (BoweryxPrince) and the Whitney Biennial.

Pop Up Exhibition on View at the Empire State Building

2009-12-22T13:19:00.001-05:00

Klari Reis, "Temazepam", 2008. Mixed media and epoxy polymer on floating aluminum panel.
NEW YORK, NY.- The Cynthia Corbett Gallery presents "Art at the Top in association with Ronnette Riley Architect at The Empire State Building". The exhibition features PHOTOGRAPHY by Tom Leighton, Lluis Barba, Boyarde Messenger & PAINTING by Klari Reis, David Gista, Cecile Chong and Geoff Stein.

Featuring in the exhibition will be new series of work by Geoff Stein entitled "Irrational Exuberance" a series of portraits about the credit crunch. These works are acrylic and collage and feature newspaper cutting detailing the events surrounding key events over the last year. The work Madoff, includes reports from the SEC and Dept. of Justice complaints made against Bernard Madoff.

The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, an international contemporary art gallery, represents emerging and newly established contemporary artists. The Cynthia Corbett Gallery is a regular exhibitor at major international contemporary art fairs. The Cynthia Corbett Gallery has an annual program of off-site exhibitions which take place in Cork Street, Mayfair and London’s East End throughout the year. The gallery also works with a number of mid-career American, British and European artists whose works have been published and acquired by International museums and institutions. corbettPROJECTS, launched in 2004, focuses on presenting curated projects which address contemporary critical practice and works with emerging curators and artists for site specific installations. These solo and group exhibitions, which are selected by a curatorial panel lead by Director Cynthia Corbett, present an innovative programme of events in a variety of media including photography, painting, sculpture, performance art with particular emphasis placed upon emerging video art. The Cynthia Corbett Gallery also provides an art consultancy service, and works with international Advisors and Curators and well as private Collectors.

At 94, She’s the Hot New Thing in Painting

2009-12-21T10:41:00.003-05:00

Under a skylight in her tin-ceilinged loft near Union Square in Manhattan, the abstract painter Carmen Herrera, 94, nursed a flute of Champagne last week, sitting regally in the wheelchair she resents.

After six decades of very private painting, Ms. Herrera sold her first artwork five years ago, at 89. Now, at a small ceremony in her honor, she was basking in the realization that her career had finally, undeniably, taken off. As cameras flashed, she extended long, Giacomettiesque fingers to accept an art foundation’s lifetime achievement award from the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Her good friend, the painter Tony Bechara, raised a glass. “We have a saying in Puerto Rico,” he said. “The bus — la guagua — always comes for those who wait.”

And the Cuban-born Ms. Herrera, laughing gustily, responded, “Well, Tony, I’ve been at the bus stop for 94 years!”

Since that first sale in 2004, collectors have avidly pursued Ms. Herrera, and her radiantly ascetic paintings have entered the permanent collections of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Tate Modern. Last year, MoMA included her in a pantheon of Latin American artists on exhibition. And this summer, during a retrospective show in England, The Observer of London called Ms. Herrera the discovery of the decade, asking, “How can we have missed these beautiful compositions?”

In a word, Ms. Herrera, a nonagenarian homebound painter with arthritis, is hot. In an era when the art world idolizes, and often richly rewards, the young and the new, she embodies a different, much rarer kind of success, that of the artist long overlooked by the market, and by history, who persevered because she had no choice.

“I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she said of painting. “I never in my life had any idea of money and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition, to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.”

Julián Zugazagoitia, the director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, called Ms. Herrera “a quiet warrior of her art.”

“To bloom into full glory at 94 — whatever Carmen Herrera’s slow rise might say about the difficulties of being a woman artist, an immigrant artist or an artist ahead of her time, it is clearly a story of personal strength,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said.

A minimalist whose canvases are geometric distillations of form and color, Ms. Herrera has slowly come to the attention of a subset of art historians over the last decade. . Now she is increasingly considered an important figure by those who study her “remarkably monumental, iconic paintings,” said Edward J. Sullivan, a professor of art history at New York University.

“Those of us with a passion for either geometric art or Latin American Modernist painting now realize what a pivotal role” Ms. Herrera has played in “the development of geometric abstraction in the Americas,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Painting in relative solitude since the late 1930s, with only the occasional exhibition, Ms. Herrera was sustained, she said, by the unflinching support of her husband of 61 years, Jesse Loewenthal. An English teacher at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Mr. Loewenthal was portrayed by the memoirist Frank McCourt, a colleague, as an old-world scholar in an “elegant, three-piece suit, the gold watch chain looping across his waistcoat front.”

Recognition for Ms. Herrera came a few years after her husband’s death, at 98, in 2000. “Everybody says Jesse must have orchestrated this from above,” Ms. Herrera said, shaking her head. “Yeah, right, Jesse on a cloud.” She added: “I worked really hard. Maybe it was me.”

In a series of interviews in her sparsely but artfully furnished apartment, Ms. Herrera always offered an afternoon cocktail — “Oh, don’t be abstemious!” — and an outpouring of stories about prerevolutionary Cuba, postwar Paris and the many artists she has known, from Wifredo Lam to Yves Klein to Barnett Newman.

“Ah, Wifredo,” she said, referring to Lam, the Cuban-born French painter. “All the girls were crazy about him. When we were in Havana, my phone would begin ringing: ‘Is Wifredo in town?’ I mean, come on, I wasn’t his social secretary.”

But Ms. Herrera is less expansive about her own art, discussing it with a minimalism redolent of the work. “Paintings speak for themselves,” she said. Geometry and color have been the head and the heart of her work, she added, describing a lifelong quest to pare down her paintings to their essence, like visual haiku.

Asked how she would describe to a student a painting like “Blanco y Verde” (1966) — a canvas of white interrupted by an inverted green triangle — she said, “I wouldn’t have a student.” To a sweet, inquiring child, then? “I’d give him some candy so he’d rot his teeth.”

When pressed about what looks to some like a sensual female shape in the painting, she said: “Look, to me it was white, beautiful white, and then the white was shrieking for the green, and the little triangle created a force field. People see very sexy things — dirty minds! — but to me sex is sex, and triangles are triangles.”

Born in 1915 in Havana, where her father was the founding editor of the daily newspaper El Mundo, and her mother a reporter, Ms. Herrera took art lessons as a child, attended finishing school in Paris and embarked on a Cuban university degree in architecture. In 1939, midway through her studies, she married Mr. Loewenthal and moved to New York. (They had no children.)

Although she studied at the Art Students League of New York, Ms. Herrera did not discover her artistic identity until she and her husband settled in Paris for a few years after World War II. There she joined a group of abstract artists, based at the influential Salon of New Realities, which exhibited her work along with that of Josef Albers, Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay and others.

“I was looking for a pictorial vocabulary and I found it there,” she said. “But when we moved back to New York, this type of art” — her less-is-more formalism — “was not acceptable. Abstract Expressionism was in fashion. I couldn’t get a gallery.”

Ms. Herrera said that she also accepted, “as a handicap,” the barriers she faced as a Hispanic female artist. Beyond that, though, “her art was not easily digestible at the time,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said. “She was not doing Cuban landscapes or flowers of the tropics, the art you might have expected from a Cuban émigré who spent time in Paris. She was ahead of her time.”

Over the decades, Ms. Herrera had a solo show here and there, including a couple at museums (the Alternative Museum in 1984, El Museo del Barrio in 1998). But she never sold anything, and never needed, or aggressively sought, the affirmation of the market. “It would have been nice, but maybe corrupting,” she said.

Mr. Bechara, who befriended her in the early 1970s and is now chairman of El Museo del Barrio, said that he regularly tried to push her into the public eye, even though she “found a kind of solace in being alone.”

One day in 2004, Mr. Bechara attended a dinner with Frederico Sève, the owner of the Latin Collector Gallery in Manhattan, who was dealing with the withdrawal of an artist from a much-publicized show of female geometric painters. “Tony said to me: ‘Geometry and ladies? You need Carmen Herrera,’ ” Mr. Sève recounted. “And I said, ‘Who the hell is Carmen Herrera?’ ”

The next morning, Mr. Sève arrived at his gallery to find several paintings, just delivered, that he took to be the work of the well-known Brazilian artist Lygia Clark but were in fact by Ms. Herrera. Turning over the canvases, he saw that they predated by a decade paintings in a similar style by Ms. Clark. “Wow, wow, wow,” he recalled saying. “We got a pioneer here.”

Mr. Sève quickly called Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, a collector who has an art foundation in Miami. She bought five of Ms. Herrera’s paintings. Estrellita Brodsky, another prominent collector, bought another five. Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, also bought several, and with Mr. Bechara, donated one of Ms. Herrera’s black-and-white paintings to MoMA.

The recent exhibition in England, which is now heading to Germany, came about by happenstance after a curator stumbled across Ms. Herrera’s paintings on the Internet. Last week The Observer named that retrospective one of the year’s 10 best exhibitions, alongside a Picasso show and one devoted to the American Pop artist Ed Ruscha.

Ms. Herrera’s late-in-life success has stunned her in many ways. Her larger works now sell for $30,000, and one painting commanded $44,000 — sums unimaginable when she was, say, in her 80s. “I have more money now than I ever had in my life,” she said.

Not that she is succumbing to a life of leisure. At a long table where she peers out over East 19th Street “like a French concierge,” Ms. Herrera, because she must, continues to draw and paint. “Only my love of the straight line keeps me going,” she said. By DEBORAH SONTAG

The Collector: Benedicto Cabrera

2009-12-18T14:10:00.002-05:00

Visitors strolling the grounds of Benedicto Cabrera's home will get a quick view of some of the Filipino painter's passions: Plants, sculpture and other remnants of the culture of the northern Luzon region pepper his four-hectare spread in Baguio.
Some recent additions to the landscape, such as the bonsai in the garden and carp in the pond, are gifts from admirers hoping to move up the long waiting list of buyers for the work of BenCab, as the famous painter is also known.
The artist's new compound, completed earlier this year, includes three contemporary-style concrete and glass structures. There's a hangar-like painting studio -- neat, yet filled with books and small random objects. Across from it is the cottage Mr. Cabrera, 67 years old, shares with his partner, Annie Sarthou. And a few steps away, his extensive collection of contemporary Filipino artworks and tribal art sits displayed in a personal museum that is open to the public. An inveterate collector, Mr. Cabrera says he no longer knows how many pieces he owns.

"With collecting you learn," says the perpetually curious artist.

Named a National Artist by the Philippine government in 2006 -- the highest recognition given to Filipinos who have made significant contributions to the development of Philippine arts -- Mr. Cabrera owns hundreds of archive-worthy antique materials on the Philippines, including maps and books and old photographs. Some have inspired his paintings, which are prized for their draftsmanship and reflections on Filipino identity. He also owns one of the largest collections of Northern Philippine tribal objects as well as hundreds of Filipino works of contemporary photography, painting and sculpture.

"I love looking at them," says Mr. Cabrera. "I find inspiration in them."

One of his most-treasured items is a small wooden model made by Arturo Luz (born in 1926) as a prototype for an outdoor sculpture that now stands in Manila. Mr. Cabrera first spied the miniature -- a modern interpretation of a tribal god called an anito -- in the early 1970s, when he visited the London home of Jaime Z[oacute]bel de Ayala, then the Philippine ambassador to the United Kingdom. Mr. Z[oacute]bel, whose family company commissioned the work, noticed Mr. Cabrera's interest in the Luz maquette and gave it to him.

Born in Manila, Mr. Cabrera trained at the fine arts department of the University of the Philippines. He moved to London in the 1970s, after meeting and marrying an Englishwoman; they had three children, now grown. He returned to his homeland in 1986, after a divorce, and settled in Baguio, a mountain retreat about a six-hour drive north of Manila.

His children, who live in Europe and the U.S., visit him once a year. They share his love for his collections and art. "The middle one, Mayumi, shifted to art now," he says. "She used to model and was taking psychology. But she has been drawing and now taking fine arts in Los Angeles."

Mr. Cabrera's own art keeps him busy. He recently had an exhibition at the Andrew Shire Gallery in Los Angeles. Some of his work is part of the Singapore Art Museum's exhibition "Thrice Upon a Time: A Century of Story in the Art of the Philippines," which runs until Jan. 31. Mr. Cabrera also is preparing for a one-man show of his drawings at his museum next year. And in June, he'll begin his second artist-in-residency at Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Why do you have a museum as part of your home?

I want to put some of my things in a proper setting. I was inspired by some artists in Bandung [Indonesia]. But I want to display other things aside from my own work for people to admire, so I have tribal art and contemporary art.

When did you begin collecting?

I started collecting comics when I was young. When I got into the arts, I could not afford to buy books so when I used to come across articles on the arts in a magazine, I would cut it and then have it all book bound. It was a good reference. When I started to make money, in the 1960s, I was introduced to santos [statues of saints that date from the country's time as a Spanish colony, 1565-1898]....Maybe it was my affinity to sculpture that made me collect santos.

When I got married we traveled. We went to India, Kathmandu and I started collecting Oriental things like thangkas [Buddhist painted or embroidered artworks] and Buddhas. In the 1970s, when I was living in London, we started dealing in these things....We rented a stall in a flea market. This is where I met other collectors and I started concentrating on Filipiniana. Then you could get maps of the Philippines for cheap. My first map I got in Rome for a dollar. Now it is worth about 35,000 pesos ($755). It dates from 1575.

What happened to the santos?

I sold them [in the 1960s and 1970s before moving to England].

Do you miss them?

I do. I wanted to focus on maps, books and prints. I have travel books from as early as the 1630s. When I came back to live in the Philippines, I sold some of my maps to start life again....I was forced to sell because I didn't have much money. I have been attracted to Japanese ukiyo-e, woodblock prints. I started collecting and stopped....The price of the maps went up. You learn, and then you have to part with it sometimes.

How did you build a collection about the Cordilleras (the northern Philippine mountain region with tribal cultures from precolonial times)?

The postcards, photos and maps I came across in London. There were whole albums. These objects I started collecting when I was making money from my paintings, so this was in the late 1980s to early 1990s. But even before that I was already interested. I used to come across nice pieces but I could not afford them in the early days.

What attracts you to Cordillera art?

The sculptural quality and the culture that goes with it. They use [these objects] for rituals. I am also attracted to the patina. You can feel if it is old. In London I met a lot of dealers in tribal art. I was attracted to pieces from Benin and Nigeria. I said, "Filipinos also have tribal art."

Is tribal art-collecting popular in the Philippines?

Yes. There was a good collection that Imee Marcos [Ferdinand and Imelda's eldest daughter] bought. There are a number of collectors. But not everyone likes them. Some, because they are Christian, have to sell because it is considered "idolatry." But for me it is art.

What are your favorites in your collection of works by Filipino masters?

I like the Luz. And the Jos[eacute] Joya. The Cesar Legaspi. Early Lee Aguinaldo. Because of the stories behind them and because they were our first abstract paintings. They were done in the 1960s, at the height of abstract expressionism. This was when painters were painting not for buyers. At that time it was hard to sell works. Now many of our artists are [sold] at international auctions.

How did you become interested in the work of younger artists?

The pieces in my collection have some affinity to my work and what I'm interested in. Most of them are figurative. I go to exhibitions, particularly when it's their first, the works are still reasonably priced.

What attracts you aesthetically?

Skill: That is what is missing now. A lot modern art now is mostly conceptual. It is sloppy. I'm old school. I look for good composition...and I like artists who are innovative.

Name some young Filipino painters you like.

Roland Ventura is very skillful. He just draws so well. Some thought he made digital prints because his work is so fine. Elmer Borlongan paints from memory. He doesn't base it on photographs, which a lot of artists do now. Even I do it sometimes. I also like Mark Justiniani.

And photography?

I love photography. When I worked as a layout artist for [Manila's] Sunday Times magazine in the early 1960s, I got my first camera. Romy Vitug is in his 70s now. He's a cinematographer but he is very good at photography. I learned techniques from him, he learned composition from me. I like Emmanuel Santos and his narrative approach to photography. He uses a traditional film camera. I also have a collection of 60 pictures by [the late Filipino photographer] Eduardo Masferr[eacute]. He was selling them as postcards. I used to buy them for 2.50 pesos (about 13 cents) and they are original photos. Now reproduction prints are $300. He made images of the [indigenous Filipino] tribes in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Why are you purchasing some of your old paintings?

There was a time when I could not afford to keep my own work. I don't have any early work of my own. It was a struggle before, so I was able to buy a few back recently.

One you bought back was an early painting of a "Sabel," a female figure draped in rags. What does Sabel represent?

Sabel started as a symbol of the oppressed and conditions of the country where we have a lot of poor people. In the beginning, she was social commentary. I've used it to make a very Japanese style or almost abstract. It became my icon.

Why do you like plants?

In London I had very little space. With bonsai you can have many trees in one small space. You can bring it in and admire it. I train it and all that. I make the time. But now I have a forest so I don't add bonsai anymore....One collector realized I like bonsai. So he said: "I'll give you bonsai from China." He gave me 14. Wow. It's the Filipino utang na luob, where you have to return the favor. He got two paintings last year.
—Alexandra A. Seno is a writer based in Hong Kong.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Miami Mania 2009

2009-12-07T11:23:00.001-05:00

The long days are those that start the night before. So let’s begin in the dark, at a just-assembled picnic table on the back patio of the new "pop-up" Max Fish bar in a creepy Wynwood neighborhood rife with crackheads and whores and only a half-block away from the Ice Palace, abandoned this year by the NADA Art Fair and soon to be taken up by Helen Allen’s Pulse art fair.

Max Fish proprietor Ulli Rimkus had been lured to Miami by Al Moran, who publishes artist’s books (the latest by Don Attoe) and runs an art gallery named O.H.W.O.W. (and who himself plans to invade NYC with a bookstore at Waverly Place and East 7th Street in the Village in February 2010).

A Brooklyn artist named Krink was using old-fashioned fire extinguishers to spray long loopy swaths of yellow and blue paint on the tall whitewashed walls of the Fish building, the spray arcing over the roof (toward the cop car parked out front?) and running down the back façade like a living thing. "He’s famous for making fat writers," Ulli said, in reference to graffiti markers that draw a thick line (I think).

Inside the Fish, the bar surface was decorated with a giant print of a snow-covered tree by Seton Smith, which had been coated with a thick layer of epoxy and looked rather like marble, and the walls decorated with geometric wallpaper and a large assortment of artworks, including a striking dual portrait of Dash and Agathe Snow.

Sitting and gossiping at one of the picnic tables, Rimkus and I drew the attention of some 20-somethings, who pronounced us a "perfect couple" and took some pictures. I always wanted to grow up to be a curiosity for the party set.

The next morning’s schedule started at 10 am, and included an unveiling by Shepard Fairey of a street-long mural project on NW 2nd Avenue in Wynwood (missed it), a press conference in the "collector’s lounge" at Art Basel Miami Beach (missed it), and the preview for Ink Miami 2009 at the Suites of the Dorcester Hotel, which I made my destination.

On the way I ran into Robert Lynch, Nora Halpern and Katherine Gibney of Americans for the Arts, down in Miami to lobby the assembled art lovers -- they still want artists to get tax deductions for donating their own works to nonprofits -- and to huddle with Miami cultural affairs chief, Michael Spring, who is a boardmember.

The night before they had attended the Art Miami opening gala, which featured a Los Angeles band named OK Go performing on guitars decorated by Fendi with neon and feathers. Very Vegas.

On the way I stopped at the Catalina Hotel, home to the Verge art fair --but all was quiet, as the event debuted the next day.

For its part, Ink was up and running with its brunch, giving away iced cans of Illy Cappuccino along with the pastries. Energy drinks, often in small "booster" sizes, turned out to be a leitmotif of Miami art week events and gift bags. A jittery art dealer is a good art dealer.

Ink’s dozen or so print dealers include Glenn Dranoff from New York, who frankly noted that "of 50 things I have only six are prints." This included a suite of four Jasper Johns color etchings from his 1987 "Seasons" portfolio, priced at $150,000. "It’s ready to go into a collection," he said.

Next door was Jim Kempner Fine Art, where his gallery director Dru Arstark was touting delicate stipple-pen portraits, done with a Bic, of everyday African-Americans by Craig Norton -- "I bought one myself!" (they’re $3,500). Norton is doing an 88-figure installation of Civil Rights images for a benefit at the Museum of Television and Broadcasting, now known as the Paley Media Center, in February 2010.

Arstark was also enthusiastic about a new suite of color photos by Steve Giovinco, her husband, depicting the two of them as an alienated couple. A fiction, one suspects. "I put the camera on a ten-second delay," Giovinco said, "so I never know what’s going to happen." They’re $2,500, in editions of five.

Next door I met Margaret Miller of GraphicStudio at the University of South Florida in Tampa, the largest school-based print program in the country. It was GraphicStudio that produced those unique cyanotypes by Christian Marclay, bluish x-ray-looking grids of stacked cassette tapes or tangles of loose recording tape. Collectors love ‘em, and they’re selling like hotcakes at $14,000 and $30,000 -- buyers include the Boston MFA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan and the Whitney.

Marclay is holding back a suite of 14 new images for his 2010 show at the Aldrich Museum of Art, and is also working with GraphicStudio on a 50-foot-long scroll-score, based on the "zap and pow" sound effects of Japanese comics, for a show at the Whitney next spring. It will be performed by a voice choir.

Also on hand was David Norr, curator of the USF’s museum, which is officially named the Institute for Research in Art, for public-private-partnership-type reasons that escape me, even though Miller explained it all in detail. Norr’s current show, "New Weather" -- it’s about "the atmosphere in the studio," he said -- includes Diana Al-Hadid, who has showed in New York with Perry Rubenstein Gallery and who is doing a project with GraphicStudio as well.

After idling away the morning at the print fair, I directed my feet toward the Convention Center for Art Basel Miami Beach, which was having a day-long preview. The show seems larger than ever, and presents, as everyone knows, an all-but-endless spectacle of art and money. Funny, there’s so much art that it seems almost random, while the money is invisible, though it’s why everyone is there. We all construct our own narratives as we go, like picking out messages in alphabet soup.

I had just decided to plumb the mysterious appeal of painterly painting via large works by Emilia and Ilya Kabakov and Georg Baselitz at the booth of Galerie Thaddeaus Ropac when I came upon Curt Marcus, who I first met 30 years ago when he worked at Grace Borgenicht Gallery. Marcus was genuinely psyched, not least because he had just returned from a trip to Marrakesh and the hip nightclubs of London with his 19-year-old musician son.

One definite change for the better at ABMB: the fair has given up on the shipping-container village at the beach, and instead placed the young dealers in booths around the square center of the convention-floor proper. Here was much interesting young work, including a working (electronic) piano made from barn wood by Brent Green, an artist from Central Pennsylvania, though when I started to play chopsticks he stopped me, saying that dealer Andrew Edlin promised to make any such two-fingered virtuoso buy the thing (it’s $35,000).

I spotted an unfriendly art-blogger dogging my steps, and hastened away, stopping further along at a booth filled with large raucously colored bobblehead constructions -- a giant fried egg with a pair of oversized Jockey shorts, a papiér-mâche King Kong climbing the Empire State Building while surrounded by mouse balloons -- works by Agathe Snow, presented by Lower East Side dealer James Fuentes. They’re $12,000-$17,000, and financier Asher Edelman has already spoken for the sculpture with Homer Simpson’s head.

I jumped in my rented Dodge Charger -- the smallest vehicle available, honest -- and headed across the causeway to Miami proper, in search of Scope and Art Asia. Ever thorough, when several byways beckon, I’ll be sure to take all the wrong ones first, and instead I found the sprawling building in Wynwood rented, for the fourth year now, by Pierogi from Brooklyn and Hales Gallery from London.

Four young art dealers were sitting in a row of chairs in front of the door -- funny, but not an artwork -- and I had the large exhibition all to myself. Very impressive, including the works by the 52-year-old Hew Locke, a London-based artist who grew up in Ghana, where he became fascinated with the trappings of empire. Thus, a vast portrait of a "puppetmaster" made of beads and gold braid on black wool, adorned with images of samurai swords, the Scottish lion and a griffin ($50,000), and smaller, densely tinsel-and-plastic-jewel-encrusted portraits of the Queen ($16,000).

After driving around several blocks several times, I found Scope and Art Asia, which share space in another sprawling, many-roomed facility. At the entrance was veteran journalist Anthony Haden-Guest, who promised performances of his inflammatory verse at the Standard Hotel every night at 8 pm. "Just don’t call it poetry," he said.

Right inside the front door was the booth of Jonathan LaVine, whose artists -- he specializes in exceptionally accomplished illustrators like AJ Fosik, Jeff Soto and award-winning comic-book cover artist James Jean, whose images were adapted by Prada for its fashion line -- have an enviable surfeit of skills. The thing about illustrators, they can draw anything (while Mark Rothko could just make those big squares of color).

Nearby, Jacob Karpio, the madcap dealer from Costa Rica, was highlighting a video of "surfing in Cuba" -- cars driving down flooded streets with kids hanging onto their bumpers -- and the serene poured-paint abstractions of L.A. surfer artist Andy Moses. "I’ve sold two," said Karpio, referring to the surfing video, which goes for $8,000. As for Moses, his painting is $22,000 -- and has been featured in Surfer’s Journal magazine.

Scope has enlisted the efforts of several curators this year, and before I got much further, Scope director Jeffrey Lawson called one of them on his cell and arranged an impromptu tour of "Truly Truthful," a show of pan-Asian art -- 30 artist from 15 countries -- assembled by the estimable Leeza Ahmady, an Afghanistan-born curator who lives in New York and works for Asia Society.

"Truly Truthful" suggests a quest for a deeper honesty, and listening to Ahmady’s impassioned remarks made me realize that not only are curators charged with finding new art, but they also must buttress their discoveries with words. One of Ahmady’s choices, a black-and-white video of a Western bicycle that its Afghan owner had set on fire, she described as emblematic of resistance to civilization via colonization.

I couldn’t help but waste her time, but eventually her waiting companions came and dragged her away to go to the ABMB vernissage. Me, I was hearing the siren call of a whole list of publicist-abetted events at swanky hotels along Collins Avenue, including something involving Bruce High Quality Foundation promoted by Vito Schnabel, but I couldn’t find a parking place.

Better luck was had at the Delano Hotel, where you couldn’t even go inside unless you were on a guest list. Something called AnOther Magazine was throwing a party on the roof, with a buffet, alcoholic punches and a DJ. I beat it out of there in short order, but not without collecting copies of the mag, which is quite thick and published in male and female versions. Wonder which one to open first?

WALTER ROBINSON is editor of Artnet Magazine.

U.S. Marshals seize art from Swiss art dealer

2009-12-07T10:42:00.001-05:00

Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- A dozen U.S. Marshals and police officers were among the first visitors to the Art Basel Miami Beach fair yesterday as they seized paintings by Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, Edgar Degas and Yves Klein following an insurance dispute between two dealers.

Late this afternoon the feuding dealers said that they had tentatively resolved their dispute and that the seized paintings would be back tomorrow. They would not discuss the terms of the proposed settlement.

The paintings were confiscated from the fair at the convention center in Miami Beach, Florida, about 90 minutes before the V.I.P. opening at noon yesterday for thousands of invited guests including casino mogul Steve Wynn, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross and designer Calvin Klein. The fair opened to the general public today and ends on Sunday.

The works had hung in the booth of Zurich-based Galerie Gmurzynska among paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Robert Indiana and actor Sylvester Stallone.

Artworks have never been seized by authorities in Art Basel Miami Beach’s 8-year history, said Sara Fitzmaurice, a fair spokeswoman.

“We were there to execute a private federal court order,” said Barry Golden, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshal Service, Southern District of Florida. “Artworks were seized.”

Art Basel Miami Beach hosts over 250 galleries from 33 countries. About 10 satellite fairs coincide with the bigger show, which is the largest and most prestigious modern and contemporary art fair in the U.S. in terms of exhibitors.

The seizure was connected to a lawsuit filed in New York Federal Court on July 13 by Edelman Arts Inc. as assignee of XL Specialty Insurance Corp. Edelman Arts is a New York gallery run by former Wall Street investor Asher B. Edelman.

Edelman, in conjunction with XL Specialty Insurance, which assigned its claim to Edelman in exchange for moneys owed, sued Galerie Gmurzynska over a damaged Robert Ryman painting. Ryman is known for his white minimalist surfaces.

The lawsuit alleged that in 2007 Edelman consigned Ryman’s 1985 “Courier I” to Gmurzynska for sale at Art Basel Miami Beach and was insured for $750,000. The work was returned with a “deep indentation,” or “gouge” according to the lawsuit, and the defendant refused to pay the insured value.

‘Reprehensible Motives’

The suit claims an additional $250,000 for “willful conduct of defendant” and “reprehensible motives and such wanton dishonesty as to imply a criminal indifference to civil obligations.” The suit resulted in a default judgment for the plaintiff for about $765,000.

“We had a judgment against Gmurzynska for damages done to a work of art and executed the judgment on behalf of the insurance company,” Edelman said in a telephone interview from his booth at the Art Miami fair across town.

Edelman accompanied the marshals. The Ryman work was not on display at Gmurzynska. The seized artworks, which are not owned by Edelman, reflect about 10 times the value of the judgment, the standard amount confiscated for auction, he said.

Assisting Marshals

“I was assisting the marshals by valuing the paintings,” said Edelman, who also made time at the convention center to buy an Agathe Snow sculpture featuring cartoon character Homer Simpson from Lower East Side dealer James Fuentes.

Gmurzynska’s lawyer, Peter R. Stern of McLaughlin & Stern LLP, declined to discuss ownership of the seized artworks, and it is unknown whether they are gallery inventory or works on consignment.

“The gallery was totally surprised by the events that occurred,” said Stern. “Edelman Arts, unbeknownst to the gallery, obtained a default judgment against my client without warning. The marshals appeared. The gallery is attempting to clarify the matter.”

Edelman said the artworks would be auctioned by the U.S. Marshals to pay XL, Edelman Arts and lawyers’ fees, with any surplus going to Galerie Gmurzynska.

The four paintings are valued at more than $6 million, according to sources familiar with the works. Comparable works by Degas alone have recently sold at auction for about $7 million. The confiscated Degas painting depicts jockeys on horseback.

Resolved Dispute

“The parties have in principle resolved the dispute,” said Stern this afternoon. “The paintings are expected to be back on the walls of the gallery space tomorrow.”

“In principle they have offered to pay what they owe and at that time I will release the paintings,” said Edelman. The seized artworks are being held in a Miami storage facility, according to Edelman. “My intent is simply to get paid what is owed to my insurance company.”

Edelman said he expects payment on Friday.

Gmurzynska’s booth attracted even more attention as the fair opened. Gallery consultant Princess Michael of Kent, clad in a lavender suit, chatted with clients and visitors at the booth.

Stallone held court in the back half of the stand, where his colorful expressionistic paintings hung on a wall. It is the actor’s first gallery show.

As photographers’ flashbulbs exploded around the stand, the Los Angeles-based Stallone discussed his work, admitting he was intimidated to exhibit in close proximity to his artist heroes like Colombian artist Fernando Botero.

“I wouldn’t exactly say I have a following,” Stallone said in an interview. He said he usually gives his paintings as gifts to relatives, but two paintings had sold by the afternoon, each priced between $40,000 and $50,000.

The Party Returns to Art Basel Miami Beach

2009-12-07T10:25:00.002-05:00

In the early throes of the recession last year, Art Basel dialed down the partying—but this year the bacchanalia appears to be coming back.

Art collectors, dealers, celebrities and hangers-on have a dizzying number of social events to choose from, with everyone from art dealer Larry Gagosian to cyclist Lance Armstrong throwing dinner gatherings and parties. (Sleep is apparently optional, with many starting as late as 11 p.m. and a few winding down as the sun is coming up.) A year ago, with galleries and artists stressed about a sales downturn, the mood was more subdued, veterans say.

Guests watch Santigold perform at an event hosted by Jeffery Deitch at the Raleigh Hotel in Miami Beach.

Late Wednesday night, singer Santigold, in a sparkly top and silver pants, performed underneath al fresco chandeliers at the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach at a bash thrown by New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch. Throngs of partiers sat at VIP tables or stood in the sand underneath palm trees, holding their stiletto heels and sweating in the late-night humidity while sipping pink Campari cocktails. "There's no compromise," said Mr. Deitch of his annual Art Basel fetes, which always feature an up-and-coming musical act. "We go all the way with parties."

Earlier that evening, guests like Scott Stapp, lead singer of rock band Creed, and hip-hop/fashion mogul Russell Simmons posed for photos at a party on a balcony at the Mondrian South Beach Hotel.The host, Mr. Simmons, who collects works by artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Barbara Krueger, was raising money for his charity, Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. He said he'd been inundated with calls from friends wanting to know where the cool events were this year. "I get a lot of young-party-people emails," he said.

Also there was Morgans Hotel Group CEO Fred Kleisner, who said that unlike in 2008, his hotels, including the starkly designed Mondrian, are fully booked for Art Basel, with more dinners and parties scheduled.

Wandering through Convention Center on Wednesday afternoon, magazine publisher Jason Binn scrolled through his BlackBerry calendar ticking off the half dozen parties he'd RSVP'd for that evening, including one hosted by rapper Dr. Dre and another by Sylvester Stallone. "I can't even eat dinner while I'm here, there's too many parties," he said. This year feels different than last year, he said, with more exclusive and VIP-studded parties.

One of his magazines, "Ocean Drive," hosted a guest-listed affair at the Sunset Island home of fashion photography collector Gert Elfering. On Wednesday morning, at least a dozen workers hung artwork and rearranged furniture in the collector's minimalist home, once owned by the late Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees. As they hung artwork—including a wall-sized face relief sculpture of Buddha made of a cow's hide—Colombian artist Efren Isaza put the final dabs of paint on his digitally altered photographs, which depict models with elongated features. His images, along with several live models dressed in origami sculpture outfits that he designed, would be the centerpiece of the party, with one standing on a platform in the middle of the home's ocean-view infinity pool. "Everybody has a Damien Hirst," said Mr. Elfering. "I want to do something no one's ever seen before."

Thursday night's options included an event hosted by Lance Armstrong to celebrate the opening of "Stages," an art exhibit to raise money for his cancer foundation, which was expected to draw guests such as Nike CEO Mark Parker. There was also a Tequila Casa Dragones brand launch party to take place aboard a sailboat. For the first time this year, the Box, a Manhattan burlesque club and celebrity hot spot, moved its operation down to Miami's Nikki Beach nightclub for the week, bringing body painters, aerialist acrobats and "a divine chanteuse." (Basel VIPs received jewelry-box invitations that cooed seductively when opened.)

Basel regulars said that smaller, more intimate dinners and cocktail parties were more prevalent this year. Heiress and designer Nadja Swarovski hosted a dinner and after-party at the W South Beach. Collectors Aby Rosen and Peter Brant also hosted a dinner there, with an after-party thrown by 23-year-old art dealer Vito Schnabel, son of artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. Friday night at the W: the Sex Pistols.

The most conservative hosts this year may be Art Basel's corporate sponsors, which include UBS, NetJets and Cartier. For the past couple of fairs, Cartier constructed a freestanding geodesic dome for VIPs across from the Convention Center. This year, the luxury jeweler hosted a dinner and a cocktail party, but built their lounge inside the Convention Center, with a large gold and bejeweled column designed by architect Alessandro Mendini. UBS also has a lounge for VIPs at the fair but says it's cut back on parties this year. NetJets isn't having a big bash, either.

Write to Candace Jackson at candace.jackson@wsj.com
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

2009-10-16T12:14:00.001-04:00

Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?

2009-10-16T12:08:00.002-04:00

ART’s link with money is not new, though it does continue to generate surprises. On Friday night, Christie’s in London plans to auction another of Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets: literally a small, sliding-glass medicine cabinet containing a few dozen bottles or tubes of standard pharmaceuticals: nasal spray, penicillin tablets, vitamins and so forth. This work is not as grand as a Hirst shark, floating eerily in a giant vat of formaldehyde, one of which sold for more than $12 million a few years ago. Still, the estimate of up to $239,000 for the medicine cabinet is impressive — rather more impressive than the work itself.

No disputing tastes, of course, if yours lean toward the aesthetic contemplation of an orderly medicine cabinet. Buy it, and you acquire a work of art by the world’s richest and — by that criterion — most successful living artist. Still, neither this piece nor Mr. Hirst’s dissected calves and embalmed horses are quite “by” the artist in a conventional sense. Mr. Hirst’s name rightfully goes on them because they were his conceptions. However, he did not reproduce any of the medicine bottles or boxes in his cabinet (in the way that Warhol actually recreated Brillo boxes), nor did he catch a shark or do the taxidermy.

In this respect, the pricey medicine cabinet belongs to a tradition of conceptual art: works we admire not for skillful hands-on execution by the artist, but for the artist’s creative concept. Mr. Hirst has a talent for coming up with concepts that capture the attention of the art market, putting him in the company of other big names who have now and again moved away from making art with their own hands: Jeff Koons, for example, who has put vacuum cleaners into Plexiglas cases and commissioned an Italian porcelain manufacturer to make a cheesy gold and white sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet chimp. Mr. Koons need not touch the art his contractors produce; the ideas are his, and that’s enough.

Sophisticated gallery owners or curators normally respond with withering condescension to worries about the lack of craftsmanship in contemporary art. Art has moved on, I’ve heard it argued, since Victorian times, when “she’d painted every hair” was ordinary aesthetic praise. What is important today is not technical skill, but skill in playing inventively with ideas.

Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.

Does this mean that conceptual art is here to stay? That is not at all certain, and it is not just auction results that are relevant to the issue. To see why works of conceptual art have an inherent investment risk, we must look back at the whole history of art, including art’s most ancient prehistory.

It is widely assumed that the earliest human art works are the stupendously skillful cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, the latter perhaps 32,000 years old, along with a few small realistic sculptures of women and of animals from the same period. But artistic and decorative behavior emerged in a far more distant past. Shell necklaces that look like something you would see at a tourist resort, as well as evidence of ochre body paint, have been found from more than 100,000 years ago. But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are much older even than that. I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes.

The earliest stone tools are choppers and blades found in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, from 2.5 million years ago. These unadorned tools remained unchanged for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and other human ancestral groups started doing something new and remarkable. They began shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what to our eyes are arresting symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop forms. Acheulian hand axes (after St.-Acheul in France, a site of 19th-century finds) have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, wherever Homo erectus roamed.

The sheer numbers of hand axes indicate a rate of manufacture beyond needs for butchering animals. Even more curious, unlike other prehistoric stone tools, hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges, and some are in any case too big for practical use. They are occasionally hewn from colorful stone materials (even with decoratively embedded fossils). Their symmetry, materials and above all meticulous workmanship makes them quite simply beautiful to our eyes. What were these ancient yet somehow familiar artifacts for?

The best available explanation is that they are literally the earliest known works of art — practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and virtuoso craftsmanship. Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human prehistory, tools attractively fashioned to function as what Darwinians call “fitness signals” — displays like the glorious peacock’s tail, which functions to show peahens the strength and vitality of the males who display it.

Hand axes, however, were not grown, but consciously, cleverly made. They were therefore able to indicate desirable personal qualities: intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability and conscientiousness. Such skills gained for those who displayed them status and a reproductive advantage over the less capable. Across many thousands of generations this translated into both an increase in intelligence and an evolved sense that the symmetry and craftsmanship of hand axes is “beautiful.”

Aesthetically pleasing hand axes constitute an unbroken Stone-Age tradition that stretches over a million years, ending 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, about the time that their makers’ African descendants, now called Homo sapiens, started to become articulate speakers of language. These humans were probably finding new ways to amuse and amaze one another with — who knows? — jokes, dramatic storytelling, dancing or hairstyling. Alas, geological layers do not record these other, more perishable aspects of prehistoric life. For us moderns, the arts have come to depict imaginary worlds and express intense emotions with music, painting, dance and fiction.

However, one trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall — where now and again the Homo erectus hairs stand up on the backs of our necks — human beings have a permanent, innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts.

We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it — even before they could put their love into words.

Denis Dutton is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.”

Michael Anderson at Marlborough Gallery

2009-10-08T12:09:00.003-04:00

Enrique Chagoya

2009-10-07T10:09:00.001-04:00

Enrique Chagoya also seeks to describe alternative cultural histories: “I integrate diverse elements: from pre-Columbian mythology, Western religious iconography, ethnic stereotypes, ideological propaganda from various times and places, American popular culture, etc. Often, the result is a non-linear narrative with many possible interpretations.” Working on amate bark paper, in the tradition of ancient codices (pictorial histories from pre-Colonial Central America) Chagoya creates current historiographies, depicting contemporary political happenings and figureheads engaging in symbolic battles. His multimedia works serve as humorous and incisive critiques of the cultural and political power-struggles taking place on the American continents, while referencing both ancient and contemporary aesthetic traditions. In Pyramid Scheme , Chagoya re-imagines Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans as a delectable collection of “Cannibulls” flavors like “Freddie Mac n’ Cheese” and “Mergers, Acquisitions and Lentils,” while in a codex titled Illegal Alien’s Guide to Political Theory political power brokers portrayed as self-absorbed superheroes frolic alongside traditional depictions of indigenous peoples.

Take Home a Nude

2009-10-05T22:15:00.001-04:00

The 18th Annual Take Home a Nude ® Art Auction & Party

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

at Sotheby's

An evening honoring John Currin

6 - 9 pm silent & live auction

9 pm dinner

Mike Perry

2009-10-05T22:04:00.001-04:00

Women Gain Power in New York Arts, Report Says

2009-09-22T11:54:00.001-04:00

NEW YORK—Between leading boards, helming multimillion-dollar fundraising campaigns, chairing galas, and handing over six- and seven-figure checks themselves, women are stepping up and taking a greater role in running New York City's cultural institutions, according to Crain's New York Business.

“Whether boards are accepting women in more powerful positions or whether women have control over more money than they used to, they are definitely becoming more prominent, particularly in the arts,” fundraising consultant Toni Goodale told Crain's.

The report looks at women who sit on the boards of prestigious New York institutions and/or have ponied up huge gifts to them, such as Museum of Modern Art President Marie-Josée Kravis; Agnes Varis, managing director of the Metropolitan Opera and vice chairman of the Jazz Foundation of America; New York Public Library Chair Catherine Marron; and Laurie Tisch, who sits on the executive committee of Lincoln Center.

"I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life."- Frank Stella

2009-09-22T11:09:00.003-04:00

Frank Stella,(American, b.1936) American printmaker and painter Frank Stella was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. Stella attended Princeton University, graduated in 1958 and moved to New York City.
Influenced by Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and frequent visits to the New York art galleries, Stella began to paint. He developed the firm belief that a painting was a "flat surface with paint on it - nothing more" and created a technique of planes of color and lines in collage-like compositions which quickly gained him recognition in the art world at the early age of 25. Stella married art critic Barbara Rose in 1961. They would remain together for eight years before separating in 1969.
By the mid-1960's Stella began working with print making as a medium, utilizing screen printing, etching and lithography. By 1970 he received a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the youngest artist to ever receive such an honor. Many of his prints incorporated several different techniques to create one unique effect. In 1973 he had a print shop installed in his home in New York. Stella is still an active artist living in New York.

Annie Leibovitz Woes Shed Light On Art Loans

2009-09-11T15:23:00.001-04:00

By Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK — Photographer Annie Leibovitz has won an extension on a $24 million loan in a financial dispute that threatened her rights to her famous images.
Leibovitz and Art Capital Group announced Friday that the 59-year-old photographer had been given more time to repay the loan. The two sides didn't say how long the extension would last.

The loan's deadline passed on Tuesday. Leibovitz would have had to repay it or lose the rights to photographs that she had put up as collateral.

Art Capital had sued for repayment in July but said Friday that it had withdrawn the lawsuit and that Leibovitz could retain the copyright to her work.

Last year, Leibovitz put up as collateral three Manhattan townhouses, an upstate New York property and the copyright to every picture she has ever taken — or will take — to secure the loan.

Leibovitz portraits have graced the covers of Vanity Fair, Vogue and Rolling Stone.

Art Capital is a Manhattan-based company that issues short-term loans against fine and decorative arts and real estate.

Art Capital consolidated all Leibovitz's loans in September 2008. The company said Leibovitz needed the money to deal with a "dire financial condition arising from her mortgage obligations, tax liens and unpaid bills to service providers and other creditors."

Its lawsuit charged she had breached a December sales agreement with the company, granting Art Capital the right to sell the collateral before the loan came due. The lawsuit claimed the photographer refused to allow real estate experts into her homes to appraise their value and blocked the company from selling her photographs.

Art Capital has estimated the value of the Leibovitz portfolio at $40 million, and real estate brokers say her New York properties are worth about $40 million.

Pace Law School Professor and intellectual property lawyer Horace Anderson said the "messiness" of the Leibovitz case may make other lenders think twice before making loans in similar situations.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Austrian Family Seeks Return of Vermeer Sold to Hitler

2009-09-09T10:31:00.003-04:00

The heirs of a prominent Austrian family want the government to return a famous seventeenth-century painting that they say was sold by force to Adolf Hitler in 1940, reports Agence France-Presse via Der Standard. Count Jaromir Czernin had sold Flemish painter Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece to the Nazi dictator “to protect the life of his family,” states his descendants’ attorney, Andreas Theiss.

Czernin’s wife was of Jewish origin and he was also the son-in-law of Austrian leader Kurt von Schuschnigg, who was toppled by the Nazis. Hitler acquired the painting for 1.65 million reichsmarks, Der Standard said. But the family’s attorney said a new expert appraisal found that the painting was sold for no more than one million reichsmarks, or “a fraction of its value.” The Art of Painting, which Vermeer created in 1665, has been on the walls of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum since 1946. It is the Flemish master’s largest painting.

“We are convinced that the Austrain republic will treat this case in an open and honest manner,” Theiss said, adding that he had filed the request on August 31. The culture ministry confirmed Saturday that it had received Theiss’s request and would transmit it to a committee tasked with issuing opinions on restitutions. The painting has been owned by the Czernin family since the nineteenth century. The family had already asked for the painting to be returned in the 1960s, but their requests were rejected on the basis that it had been sold voluntarily and at an appropriate price. Jaromir Czernin had tried to sell the painting in 1938 for one million dollars to an American collector, but his plan was thwarted by the German invasion of Austria and Hitler’s opposition, Theiss said. Hitler had expressed interest in acquiring the painting as early as 1935 to put it in the Führer Museum which he planned to build in the Austrian city of Linz.

Hidden Treasures

2009-08-23T08:18:00.005-04:00

Tucked away in a cellar in Bahrain is one of the largest collections of Islamic art in the world. It is the life’s work of Abdul Latif Jassim Kanoo – and now, for the first time, the public will be able to see it, when a new exhibition hall opens at the Beit Al Qur’an museum. Hamida Ghafour had a sneak preview.

In a darkened room of Abdul Latif Jassim Kanoo’s museum in Bahrain, a single spotlight picks out the brilliant blue tones of an exquisite vase painted with gentle scenes of rural Chinese life. It is an unusual piece, Kanoo explains, because it was made by Iranian pottery makers mimicking Chinese porcelain.

It is a rare and valuable item, but for Kanoo there is another more personal story attached to it.

He bought the pot in London but was not allowed to board the aeroplane because it was too big.

“The only way was to buy it a seat,” he says. “So it was me in one seat, Mrs Kanoo on the other side and the pot in between. We told people it was our child.”

The Iranian pot is among the hundreds of treasures that are part of an upcoming exhibition to open during Ramadan at the new Dr Abdul Latif Kanoo Hall at the Beit Al Qur’an museum in Manama, which he founded.

It is no ordinary exhibition, however. Kanoo has spent 50 years travelling around the globe and amassing one of the largest private collections of Islamic art in the world, much of it rarely or never seen in public.

One afternoon shortly before the hall opened I got a sneak preview of his incredible collection of Islamic treasures.

In his office he reaches into his safe and takes out four opaque plastic containers. He opens one and places in the palm of my hand an exquisite cup heavy for its small size.

“Are these emeralds and rubies?” I ask, touching the inlaid jewels. Yes, he says. It is a 16th century Mogul cup carved from a piece of rock crystal.

We try on a couple of Mogul archer rings, which were worn by Indian warriors in battle to protect their fingers when the bow was pulled. They are made of pale green jade studded with rubies, and I wonder if the archers were worried about losing a ruby when they fired arrows.

“I must catalogue these,” he mutters.

Kanoo rummages around the boxes for his collection of Islamic coins. He has one from every year of the Islamic calendar, except for the first year in which the young Muslim empire began minting coins, Hijri 77 (696AD).

“There are only eight in the world. I couldn’t afford it, the last one I saw was selling for US$200,000 to US$300,000 (Dh1.2 million to Dh1.8 million),” he says.

The basement of the Beit Al Qur’an Museum houses the Kanoo’s private collection of Islamic art.

When he steps out of his office to chat with his secretary he jokingly adds, “Don’t steal anything.”

Kanoo is in his 70s – he does not have a precise age because he was born in Bahrain at a time when the Bedouin did not keep such records – and is a scion of the Kanoo dynasty, one of the great merchant families in the Gulf who made a fortune in shipping, travel and oil, among other things, a century ago. Arabian Business last year estimated the family’s wealth at US$6.1 billion (Dh37 billion) and ranked them number nine in the top 10 richest families in the Middle East.

Kanoo, however, has never been involved very much or interested in the family business. He has divided his life between his family, his work as an engineer and his private passion as an art lover.

He is an avuncular, jovial figure who loves talking about his five grandchildren, teasing his secretary and calling the room in which he keeps his treasures “the dungeon”.

“Should we go to the dungeon?” he asks when he finishes speaking to his secretary. The dungeon is the basement of the Beit Al Qur’an museum where he stores the bulk of his personal art collection.

There is a special lift to take him to the basement but no one can find the key so he walks downstairs instead. A nondescript door leads to a large semicircular room with a massive pillar in the middle that is part of the supporting foundation of the building. A gorgeous wall of framed miniature paintings, Indian, Turkish and Iranian, dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, greets us.

“This one is very rare,” he says, pointing to a domestic Indian scene set against a subdued backdrop of gold and silver.

Kanoo feels that the new Abdul Latif Kanoo Hall and its contents – stored in the basement – will be an opportunity to show his gratitude for a life well lived.

It is hard to know where to look first. There are pieces of pottery laid out on the floor; glass, jewellery and metal objects behind cabinets, sculptures; embroidered textiles and clothing laid out on tables and on the floors. Paintings, four or five deep, are leaning against the walls.

There are many paintings by Bahraini artists, some of which he admits he bought out of duty rather than admiration for the work. “I like to support the arts scene here,” he explains. It is an Aladdin’s cave of priceless and exquisite treasures spanning several hundred years of Islamic arts.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London would be envious, I say. It has 400 objects in its Islamic gallery; Kanoo’s is much bigger.

He won’t give an exact figure – “I don’t know, really. I don’t have and don’t give numbers” – but in 2007, a selection of 5,000 items was on display in Abu Dhabi.

“There are few in the world with a collection like this. David Khalili has one,” he says, referring to the British-Iranian billionaire and art dealer whose collection was valued at US$900 million (Dh5.5 billion) by Forbes magazine.

Kanoo specialises in works from the 8th to 13th centuries and most of the collection has been purchased from auction houses in London and New York. But he also likes to trawl through Spanish markets in search of pieces from Muslim-ruled Andalusia.

“Every item I can tell you where and how I got it and whether they ripped me off or I ripped them off,” he says, laughing. He is too discreet to reveal what his collection is worth or what his favourite piece is. “All these things are my babies, my sons and daughters, how can I choose a favourite?”

Kanoo’s love of collecting began as a child when he picked up coins and shells on the beaches of Bahrain. But his interest took a more serious turn when he travelled to England to study. He earned a degree in engineering from Imperial College London and when he wasn’t learning, he was travelling to Europe’s capitals with his family, visiting its great museums including the British Museum, the Natural History museum and the Louvre in Paris. These visits left a deep impression on the young man from an island which had just started its modernising phase after the discovery of oil in 1932.

“The West has the nicest museums but all the content came from the Middle East, from Egypt in particular, from Muslim countries. So I was determined when I went back I’d make a museum if not equal but better that will display many things.”

He put his engineering degree to good use after graduation and worked for a short time in Saudi Arabia and then Kuwait where he built bridges and schools. Upon returning to Bahrain he got a job at the ministry of housing and was instrumental in planning and building many of the kingdom’s neighbourhoods.

One of his greatest accomplishments, he says, is the Beit Al Qur’an museum which he founded in 1990 and which is built entirely with donations from the public. The nucleus is his own spectacular collection of Qurans written on a range of materials from the skin of a gazelle to a grain of rice. The collection is unrivalled: there is the first translation into Latin, completed in 1535, and the first ever printed Quran produced in Germany in 1694.

“When you expose yourself to those beautiful collections in the West I thought, ‘How can they look after them in the West but not us in the Middle East?’ I’m grateful to European institutions, they did us a favour. Now, thanks to them, people have an understanding of the development of items and materials like textiles, carpets.”

The Kanoo family business started in 1890 when Haji Yusuf bin Ahmed Kanoo, a general merchant, began importing goods from Asia and Europe. It expanded to Saudi Arabia and later the UAE, and is now owned by the sixth generation of the family.

Like the Italian merchant dynasties, such as the Medicis who patronised the Renaissance in 15th century Italy, the Kanoos are playing a role in fostering and developing the arts in the young nations of the Gulf.

Kanoo’s daughter-in-law, Hoda Kanoo, founded the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation and has brought classical music and opera to the capital, while her husband, Mohammed, is an artist and co-owner of Ghaf, the first contemporary art gallery in Abu Dhabi.

When Kanoo began collecting Islamic art 50 years ago, it was not considered very important and only a few people were interested in buying. In the past 20 years perceptions have changed dramatically. The market has taken off – and so have the prices. A watershed moment came in 1997 when a Qatari sheikh paid £3.6 million (Dh21.9 million) for a 10th-century bronze fountainhead from Italy or Spain, the highest ever paid for a piece of Islamic art.

Kanoo says acquiring pieces is becoming difficult and expensive.

“I used to get miniature paintings for £500-£2,000 (Dh3,000-Dh12,000) but now they talk about £50,000 (Dh300,000).”

Most of the world’s major museums have had a usually small Islamic art collection, kept in a dusty, little-visited corner, but that is also changing. The Victoria and Albert in London has 400 permanent objects in its new Jameel Gallery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is refurbishing the Islamic art galleries, which are scheduled to re-open in 2011 for its permanent collection of 12,000 objects. The Louvre will display its 2,000-item collection in a new gallery in the renovated Cour Visconti, which is expected to open next year.

Does he believe in returning artwork to its country of origins?

“It’s not about how it is or where it is,” he says. “Human civilisation shouldn’t be anchored in one unit but set in places where people can appreciate them. It is about preserving human history.”

His eyes notice a brilliant vase with a floral pattern from the Iranian Safavid period sitting on a plinth.

“Why is this here? It can fall. Here hold it,” he gives it to me as he moves the plinth to a corner and sets the vase on the carpeted floor where it won’t be knocked over.

You get a sense that Kanoo doesn’t take all this too seriously.

“These are my grandchildren’s, I made them sit down and paint,” he points to some framed crayon drawings. They are hung next to a 14th-century Turkish blue-glazed ceramic that was once part of a chandelier in a mosque.

He has tried to pass on his love of collecting fine things to his five grandchildren and indeed there is an entire antechamber in the basement devoted to the little things he has bought them when they were small children. There are spiders set in amber, rock crystals or just shells picked up in London’s markets.

“When we go to Portobello in London I’d give them money and they’d go and buy something. They’d say, ‘I’d like this rock,’ and I’d say, ‘It’s too expensive,’ and they’d say, ‘Please?’ Well, how can I refuse the beautiful Noor?” he says, referring to his granddaughter.

We wander back upstairs. He admits he has spent all his money on art. “That’s what my wife complains about,” he says with a laugh.

One year Prince Charles visited Beit Al Qur’an and Kanoo displayed a collection of Bahraini pearls. He cheekily borrowed a necklace belonging to his wife – without asking her permission.

“We had dinner with Prince Charles later that week and before leaving he said to my wife, ‘Your husband has been very naughty,’ and told her what I did.’ She just said, ‘What can I do with him?’”

The museum is closed for the summer, so specialists can carry out conservation work on the manuscripts.

In the new Abdul Latif Kanoo Hall, the public will now be able to see some of the fruits of a lifetime’s collecting.

“What can I do with it all? Lock it in a room? I want the public to appreciate it. I want people to know we have some of the most beautiful collection of Islamic art in the world. The tip of the iceberg will go on display. The idea is to have exhibitions which will not be permanent. It will be for three, six months to a year perhaps. We will specialise only in rings, or perhaps textiles or glass. It will rotate so people can appreciate the contents. I personally choose what will be on display but of course I have people who help me.”

One of the rarest items is an unglazed clay jug made in Iran in the 9th or 10th century. It is in perfect condition and the workmanship gives a hint to the style of Islamic art that would develop later on.

A favourite is an extremely rare silk carpet which covered the floor of a Moghul ruler’s private quarters. “It is so small so we know it was used in his home. Otherwise they would have used a very big carpet.”

The museum and its contents will be an opportunity for Kanoo to show his gratitude for a life well lived, he says.

“I am a man who is simple, straightforward, loves everything around me. I don’t carry ill feeling, always I look at the positive side, not the negative side. I have achieved everything I want to achieve.”

He looks content.
by Matt Kwong DUbai, UAE

Corporations rent their collections to Museums

2009-08-23T07:51:00.002-04:00

By ROBIN POGREBIN. PEOPLE admiring Thomas Moran’s tranquil “View of Fairmont Waterworks, Philadelphia” (from about 1860) or Childe Hassam’s bucolic “Old House and Garden, East Hampton” (1917) in the show on American Impressionism at the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta this summer might be surprised to learn the identity of the curator: Bank of America.

Since the 1960s, when Chase Manhattan Bank assembled one of the first major corporate art collections under the guidance of its president, David Rockefeller, banks and other large companies have been acquiring fine art as a way to give their offices a cultured, dignified aura. Over time many companies have expanded these collections — with in-house curators to oversee them — and lent works to museums and other exhibition spaces, mostly for marketing reasons.

But a few corporations, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and UBS, have occasionally gone a step further, lending out complete shows. And Bank of America has lately gone further still, creating a roster of ready-made shows that it provides to museums at a nominal cost to them— essentially turnkey exhibitions.

Traditionally museums have been loath to allow the sponsors of an exhibition a significant role in curatorial decision making — particularly when the sponsor is a corporation, given the potential taint of commercialization and artistic compromise. And most major museums still draw the line there.

“What is crucial is curatorial independence,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, “the ability of a curator to make his or her own decisions about what would constitute an exhibition.”

Mr. Lowry said his museum would show a corporate collection only if the majority of what was on show was donated, as was the case with the museum’s UBS show in 2005. “That’s our safeguard,” he said. “We’ve had real input because it’s a gift to the museum. What’s going to be displayed is not going back on the market.”

Rodney M. Cook Jr., president of the National Monuments Foundation, which owns the Millennium Gate, said he was unconcerned about the potential commercial implications of mounting a Bank of America show. “Is there a problem with enhancing the value of a great collection?” he said. “The quality of this collection I would say enhances the museum more than the museum enhances the collection. It’s some of the greatest pictures in America history. If our new museum can improve on the value of the bank’s collection, God bless America.”

Given the economic downturn, which has forced the cancellation, postponement or prolonging of exhibitions across the country, more small and midsize art institutions may be increasingly open to ready-made shows.

“It relieves the pressure of having to always initiate shows,” said Holly Block, executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which recently mounted “Collected Visions: Modern and Contemporary Works from the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection,” featuring about 70 works by some 60 artists, to commemorate the bank’s 50 years of collecting. “It’s very costly, and there’s not a lot of money out there right now for exhibitions. Last year was very, very hard for us to raise money. So anywhere we can create partnerships and consortiums, it’s a win-win situation.”

Ms. Block said the show also allowed the Bronx Museum to fill two galleries that otherwise would have been closed during the show’s two-month duration because of budget constraints, and to exhibit work it would not have otherwise been able to obtain. “This was an incredible opportunity,” she said. “It’s the first time we had Andy Warhol at the Bronx Museum.”

In conjunction with the show JPMorgan Chase also donated Martin Wong’s 1981 acrylic on canvas, “Brainwashing Cult Cons Top TV Star.”

Started two years ago, the Bank of America program placed 12 shows in 2008 and has placed 10 so far in 2009, with 10 more scheduled for 2010 and 6 for 2011. And there is a waiting list.

“At first we were calling museums,” said Rena DeSisto, the bank’s global arts marketing and philanthropy executive. “Now the calls are coming in to us.”

Ms. DeSisto said the bank had initially hoped to place its shows in big museums, to build credibility, but has come to realize that its collection could instead play an important role in serving institutions with fewer resources.

“Smaller community museums with more need began to ask for our program,” she said. “They just don’t have the deep pockets, and they don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We don’t do corporate collections,’ nor do they frankly have the snobbery about it.”

At the Millennium Gate, which opened a year ago, Bank of America’s Impressionism show, which runs through Dec. 6, was hugely important to efforts to build an audience. “It’s been a great way to introduce ourselves to the city,” Mr. Cook said. “Our curators would have had to start from the beginning to catalog everything and pack and ship it, whereas the bank has all of this already done.”

From March 8 to July 19 the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey mounted “The Wyeths: Three Generations,” an exhibition of work by N. C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth that was put together by Bank of America. At the museum — a 95-year-old institution with a collection of some 12,000 works — the endowment is down 20 percent since last year, and there have been two rounds of layoffs.

Lora S. Urbanelli, the museum’s director, said the show allowed the museum to present work it otherwise could not afford. “For us to put together a show on Wyeth would have been very expensive,” she explained, given the high cost of shipping, insurance and education materials, practically all of which Bank of America covered. The show was one of the museum’s most successful, Ms. Urbanelli said, attracting more than 80,000 visitors.

“The fact that we were able to do this exhibition so easily, especially when we’re under financial pressure, has been great,” she said.

The Association of Art Museum Directors has no policy governing shows organized by corporations and “would not be against it,” said Michael Conforti, the association’s president, “as long as the people involved felt comfortable themselves that a show complied with their curatorial standards.”

What museums need to be conscious of, art experts say, is creating the impression that these exhibitions enhance the value of corporate collections that might one day come to market. “A museum has to think very seriously about taking those shows,” said John Ravenal, president of the Association of Art Museum Curators and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “The museum, by virtue of its stature and its public role, gives legitimacy or confers a certain kind of validity to these collections when it exhibits them.

“If the collection isn’t a promised gift to the museum, then there is the potential for the museum to be used to unwittingly increase the value of a collection, whether its individual or corporate.”

If a corporation is contributing funds to a museum that shows its collection, “then it looks as if the museum’s exhibition program is for sale,” Mr. Ravenal said. “They don’t want to look like they’re selling their reputation.”

As for concerns that a bank would impose its curatorial tastes on the museum, Ms. Urbanelli of the Montclair Art Museum said Bank of America selected the works in the Wyeth show, but the museum had some say in their installation. “We were able to filter it through our own curatorial staff,” she said. “I don’t feel like we made any kind of compromises at all. If anything, they provided us with a wonderful opportunity — helped us to do something we would not have been able to do ourselves.”

Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, said he would be unlikely to accept a show put together by a corporation in part because it supplants the role of the museum’s curators. “The reason the museum exists is to make exhibitions on its own,” he said. “You have people on staff who consider themselves to be historians with highly nuanced receptors, and it’s not healthy to duplicate that by hiring out to somebody else.”

To be sure, importing a corporate-organized show might be expected to create tension between the curators at the company and those at the host museum. But Sergio Bessa, the director of curatorial and education programs at the Bronx Museum, said that his institution’s collaboration with JPMorgan “was very collegial,” and that the show gave the museum access to blue-chip artists.

“We saw an opportunity instead of a takeover,” he said. “I actually have quite a lot of respect for their vision. I was amazed: How did Chase get paintings by this painter and that painter?”

The curators at corporations and museums may be equally qualified in terms of expertise, art experts say, but their responsibilities differ. “The point of a corporate collection is to burnish the reputation of a corporation,” Mr. Ravenal said, and corporate curators are therefore “involved in that agenda.”

Given the current state of the economy and the considerable expense of maintaining and storing art, corporations might be expected to want to sell all or part of their collections, and many smaller companies are doing some divesting. Bank of America considered selling off its entire collection of about 60,000 pieces — all gathered through acquisitions of other banks with art collections — even before the downturn. But the bank determined that there were other marketing benefits to be gained from the collection.

“We have determined that a sale would result in an overall loss or a break-even, and that it is better used as a community support and marketing tool,” the bank’s Ms. DeSisto said: associating the bank with arts patronage and charitable giving, providing access to prospective clients in museum trustees and donors, offering opportunities for client entertainment.

Bank of America said its cost per exhibition can range from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on how far the artwork needs to be transported, and Ms. DeSisto said the expenditure — which she declined to quantify — has paid off.

“The income we have generated through increased business is superior to any income we could generate from selling the collection,” she said. “Attracting even one individual client can cover the entire cost of lending a turnkey exhibition.”

“Art has a very emotional pull,” she added. “If you are an art lover who supports your local museum, you are going to become positively inclined to the company that helps your museum thrive.”

Other banks too have recognized the potential for such intangible dividends. “It’s not about collecting as an investment strategy,” said Gary Hattem, president of the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation in New York, which administers the bank’s philanthropic activities in the United States, Latin America and Canada. “It’s really about being fully engaged in the communities in which we do business.”

Deutsche Bank, with a collection of about 56,000 pieces, has made art “a major part of our identity as a bank,” said Liz Christensen, the company’s curator for the Americas. Work from the collection, including pieces by prominent artists like Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, is displayed in the public areas of the bank’s headquarters and in branches in 41 countries. And the reach of that identity is extended by its shows, like the coming “Beuys and Beyond,” featuring about 50 works on paper by Joseph Beuys and his students from the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which will travel over the next two years to museums in five countries, possibly including the United States.

Bank of America, which has four to five exhibits lent out at any one time, has a show of 30 watercolors of the American West painted by Alfred Jacob Miller in the early 1840s headed for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., next year. It is then bound for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, followed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Peter C. Marzio, director of the Houston museum, said he was comfortable with the collaboration. “There are people in the art field who think that somehow businessmen are evil, and you shouldn’t deal with them, but they have no trouble taking their money,” he said. “I’ve always thought that was the ultimate hypocrisy. You almost can’t do a contemporary art show without borrowing from some gallery, and those paintings are for sale. So it’s the ultimate in commercialism, if you want to look at it that way.

“I’m a big proponent of it,” Mr. Marzio added. “I prefer to see the art out there.”

Documenting your Art Collection

2009-08-15T08:57:00.002-04:00

Excerpts from Alan Bamberger

Another aspect of good collecting is documenting your art.
You can see best how documentation really pays off in the markets for older art. Suppose, for instance, that two 19th century landscape paintings by John Doe come up for auction at the same time. They're virtually identical in size, quality, condition, date painted, and other details. The first is catalogued as "Rural Landscape"-- really exciting. The second is catalogued as "Looking North from Smith's Point, Maine, September 23d, 1876. Exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1877. Originally purchased for $100 by Robert Bob from ABC Gallery, New York City, 1877. Sold to Mary Miller in 1922 for $500, descended in the Miller family." Assuming you find both paintings equally appealing, which would you rather own? Which do you suppose will sell for more money? The second one, of course. It's like choosing between a mutt and a dog with a pedigree.

By the way, when art dealers and auction houses take on art with poor documentation, they at least do their best to come up with exciting titles. They know that even when additional information is scant or nonexistent, good titles sell art faster than boring ones or no titles at all.
The point is that good documentation positively impacts not only dollar value, but also the ability to personally appreciate and understand a work of art. If you know nothing about painting, for instance, you can only guess why it was created, what it means, where it's been. If you know its entire history, you can relate to it on a multitude of levels in addition to the purely visual.
If you think you remember everything significant about your art and don't need to physically sit down and record that information, think again. At some point, your collection will become so large that there's simply too much to remember. Either that or time will take its toll. You certainly won't be able to remember every single detail about works of art you acquired years or even decades ago.
The good news is that you can begin documenting at any time and even from a standing stop. If you own undocumented art, write down everything you can either from memory or by contacting the sellers.

Include information like the following:
* Any stories the sellers tell you.
* Any memorable moments about making the purchases.
* What the art means.
* What the subject matters are.
* How long they took to create.
* Who the artists are and what they've accomplished.
* Why the artists made them.
* When they date from.
* Whether they've ever been exhibited in public.

Don't think you have to hide anything. Far too often, collectors throw away their original gallery receipts or refuse to tell what they paid for their art, where they bought it, or what it's previous ownership history was. Reasons usually sound like these-- "If people know what I paid, my art will be worth less" or "If they find out where it comes from, they'll try to buy some themselves." These things rarely happen. If you feel protective, don't tell everything to anyone who asks, but at least save and record the information for release at some later date. Don't lose it forever. Your descendents will thank you for it.
Not only does good documentation tend to increase the value of art, but the documentation itself often has value and that value can increase. Imagine if you had an original receipt from the sale of a Van Gogh painting that changed hands in the early part of this century. Or perhaps your grandfather bought a Picasso and got an inscribed photo of Picasso handing him the painting. I'm in this end of the business and can tell you that either of these items would be worth well into the thousands of dollars today. So here's what you do:

* Save all receipts and certificates of authenticity.
* Whenever possible, get descriptive written statements from artists or dealers or both when you buy art. If they won't write something for you, have them tell you about the art and either write it down yourself or record it.
* Save all books, exhibit catalogues, gallery brochures, reviews, and the like.
* Whenever possible, photograph the artists who you collect, have them sign or inscribe catalogues or gallery invitations for you.

This information is easy to get, fun to get, it brings you closer to your art, and it only takes a few moments at the point of purchase. Over time, however, those few moments pay big dividends.
Another distinguishing feature of a superior collection is that it's organized. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This goes back to posing the problem and then using the collection to map out the solution. Take the previous example of the "history of still life painting in Indiana." This collection can be organized in many ways including by date, by artist, by style, or by region. Or you can get even more specific. Within a topic as narrow as this there are numerous subtopics:

* Still life painting in Indianapolis organized by date.
* Still life painting in Southern Indiana showing native trees, plants and vegetables.
* Nineteenth century still life painting in Indiana by immigrant artists.
* Modernist still life painting in Indiana organized by degree of abstraction.
* Small format still life painting in Indiana organized by size.

Or you can narrow it further yet. How about a collection of still lifes painted by your favorite Indiana artist between 1980 and 1990 organized by date? The possibilities for formulating and presenting a collection are limited only by your own imagination.
The easiest way to get the hang of organizing is to go to museums. Here you see the work of professional organizers-- also known as curators. Museum shows always have starting points; they always have ending points. What happens in between the two is that viewers learn something about art. Depending on the museum or the show, you have printed, oral, or recorded guided tours that explain the way the show is organized.
Now you don't have to go so far as to physically re-arrange your house and print up a catalogue. Everything can still be displayed right where it looks its best. But organize it in your mind. Be able to walk someone through and tell them the story of how and why you've come to own all this wonderful art and how it works so well together.
This increases not only their enjoyment, but it also reinforces your chosen direction and your future buying. Additional benefits to organizing your collection are that you can see where you've been, where you're going, where you have duplication, where you're weak, what you're missing, what no longer makes the grade, and what you have to do to resolve any problems. It's not much different from your son putting together all the baseball cards of his favorite team to complete his collection.
The final step in good collecting is not the most delightful to talk about, but it is among the most necessary, and that is to plan for future owners-- whether they be museums, institutions, family members, friends, or complete and total strangers. You'd be surprised how many collectors never say a word and just think that everyone automatically knows everything they've been doing all these years. This is never the case! Think about all the people you've met who own family heirlooms that they know little or nothing about because no one ever told them. "That's the painting that hung over the sofa while I was growing up and it belonged to my grandmother. That's all I know."

The worst possible outcome for a collection occurs when the owner passes away leaving no information about the art, how much it's worth, how to care for it, or how to sell or donate it, if that's what the inheritors want. Countless collections have been resold for pennies on the dollar, given away, or even thrown in the trash because the collectors kept little or no records and left no instructions on what to do with their art.

I remember receiving a call one day from a hauler who said he had some art in a storage space and wanted me to come down and have a look. He mentioned the name of the artist who I immediately recognized as a well known Bay Area painter. It turned out that the hauler had been asked to cart away 5 major paintings by this artist which, at that time, were worth between 30 and 50 thousand dollars. The owners had simply thrown them out. And these were only a few of the treasures that this hauler had accumulated over the years absolutely free of charge, directly out of people's trash. In fact, he'd been paid to take them away!
The lesson in all this is that collectors, no matter how large or small their collections, should provide a complete list of options and instructions for those who'll inherit their art. These include names, addresses, phone numbers, procedures, dollar values, and all other particulars for selling or donating as well as for dispersal within the family.
By the way, simple appraisals with no further instructions are never enough. In fact, they often create more trouble than good. These appraisals are usually for insurance or replacement purposes which means that they're at or beyond retail. The inheritors get stuck with these values, have no idea what they mean, and often assume that that's what the art should sell for. They spend months or years beating their heads against the wall, getting nowhere, and concluding that all buyers are out to take advantage.

Cover all bases by providing insurance or replacement appraisals should your descendants decide to keep or donate the art. Also include realistic wholesale values should they decide to sell it. And don't forget those instructions-- who to call, where to go, what to do. You don't want them at the mercy of whatever dealer they happen to pull out of the Yellow Pages.
If you expect to have any influence over the long term future of your collection, lay the groundwork beginning right now. Educate your family about what you own. Instill a love and respect for what you've accomplished and accumulated all these years. Make sure that those close to you are aware of your art's value and significance. Make sure that they understand how important it is to you. You can't control the final outcome, but at least you can have your say and know that you've done your best to collect like a pro.

How to Collect Art Like a Pro - Building a Collection

2009-08-15T08:52:00.002-04:00

Excerpts from Alan Bamberger

...Regardless of how you view your collecting, whether serious or recreational, there are techniques that you can use to maximize not only the quality and value of your art, but also your own personal enjoyment, appreciation, and understanding of that art.
Step one is being true to your tastes.
This means acknowledging that you like certain types of art regardless of what you think you're supposed to like or what seems to be the current rage. All great collectors share this trait-- that's one thing makes their collections stand out. When personal preference is ignored in favor of the status quo, one collection begins to look just like the next. A few people dictate, the masses follow, everyone walks in lock-step, and the art you see from collection to collection becomes boring and repetitive.
Collectors who aren't afraid to express themselves yield exactly the opposite results. Take, for example, the artist who, several years ago, put together a collection of paintings bought exclusively at second hand stores and garage sales, often for little more than a few dollars each. His collection ultimately toured the country and was published as a book. Many of us were not only entertained by it, but it also helped to broaden our definition of what could reasonably be considered art. He taught us that interesting looking art can be found just about anywhere, not only at the major museums or in the best galleries. Now he would never, most likely, have put this collection together if he had chosen to mimic the tastes of others rather than be true to his own.
You may or may not be well along in your collecting, but if you have any nagging doubts about what you've been buying, what you've deliberately avoided, whether you're totally satisfied or you just want to take a moment to see what's new, suspend your buying for a bit and take a look around. Don't confine yourself to the same museums or galleries or wherever else you've been looking at art. Get out there and see what else is going on.
Explore the less conventional if that's what you're curious about. Look at art that you think might attract you, but that you've always steered clear of. Don't be afraid to experiment. You may end up right back where you started, reinforcing your chosen path, but then again, something new and truly unique may thrill you at some point along the way. Periodic reappraisals of your tastes are always a good idea. What excites you today could easily bore you tomorrow. A quality collection is always evolving and never static.
The next step is educating yourself. Once again, you probably know a good deal about what you collect already, but the educational process is a continuing one. Be an informed buyer. Learn from the pros. Take every opportunity to discuss the fine points of what you're looking at with as many different experts as possible. Not only does this improve your abilities to separate out the great from the good from the not so good, but you also learn how to protect yourself against being taken advantage of in the marketplace-- which brings us to this next point.
Hand in hand with knowing the art goes knowing the marketplace-- and here's were many collectors fall short. The great collectors know just about everyone who sells what they collect; they're on top of the market and the market knows them. They're tuned in to the late breaking news and when something exciting is about to happen, they're usually among the first to find out about it. The top collectors go to great lengths to scoop the competition when the best art comes up for sale-- because it doesn't come up all that often. They also know how to compare and contrast what dealers offer them in order to assure that something is as good as they're led to believe it is.
What amazes me about art collecting in general is the lack of comparison shopping and market savvy that collectors often show. Far too many establish relationships with only one or two galleries and rarely if ever stray. The danger in doing this is that your overview of the market suffers. You can inadvertently subjugate yourself to the tastes of one or two dealers and, over time, your collection becomes less of what you originally intended it to be and more of what the galleries tell you it should be.
Knowing the marketplace also prevents you from overpaying. Simply put, Gallery X may offer you a painting for $10,000; Gallery Y may have a comparable piece priced at $7500. If you only shop Gallery X and you don't know that Gallery Y exists, you waste $2500. Or Gallery X may borrow that $7500 painting from Gallery Y and offer it to you for $10,000. Same outcome.
Regarding the art that does make it into your collection, most novice collectors will tell you that they buy what they like. That's the best way to buy, but as you gain experience, the reasons why you buy what you like should become increasingly more conscious, complex, and purposeful. "Not only do I love this sculpture, but it's also a prime example of the artist's best subject matter dating from his most productive time period and it fills a major gap in my collection."

Experienced collectors show this sense of sureness and direction in their overall plans. And here's where we get into the essence of collecting, of what distinguishes a superior collection from an inferior one. In a superior collection, every piece belongs; nothing is random or arbitrary. A less experienced collector, on the other hand, may know plenty about each individual piece of art, but lack an overall understanding how they work together or even if they work together. "What's all this art doing in my house at the same time? I really don't know. I'm not quite sure."
In a sense, what the experienced collector does is pose a problem and then illustrate the solution to that problem by piecing together a collection. That way, everything fits, it all makes sense according to the master plan. Take this problem, for instance:
What is the history of still life painting in Indiana? The solution is an art collection consisting of still life paintings by Indiana artists that date from pioneer days right up to the present.
Pose your problem as soon as you can. Take the randomness out of your buying. See what's going on in your collection; find out what all those individual pieces you like so much have in common and proceed from there. Ask questions like:
* Why does my art make me feel good?
* What about it satisfies me?
* Do I like the subject matters, the colors, the historical aspects, the lives of the artists?
* Does it take me to a special place?
* Does it make me feel a certain way?
* Do I respect the way it's put together?
* Does it make me see life differently?
* Is it that it's old, new, local, foreign, big, small, round, square, whatever?
Once you identify the common traits, you can refine your buying to zero in on additional pieces that share those traits. The collector with a mission is always more effective at acquiring than one who rarely questions why they buy what they do. By the way, if the answers to your questions sound like these-- "I buy what my friends buy; I buy for investment; I buy only the big names"-- consider returning to square one, determining what kinds of art you really, really like, and starting all over again.

Top 10 Most Searched Artists online-July

2009-08-03T02:39:00.010-04:00

Andy Warhol
Liu Bolin
Banksy
Nan Goldin
Sally Mann
Jock Sturges
Marilyn Minter
Nobuyoshi Araki
Damien Hirst
Pablo Picasso
This Top 10 list says a lot about the moment in economic history and our collective unconscious. It also indicates which artists works are being researched most, a good market value/sales indicator.

Bryan Hunt, sculptor

2009-08-03T02:09:00.003-04:00

It was a great show of sketches of his new sculptural works on Saturday August 1st at the Drawing Room in Easthampton, NY.

Books for "next generation" art collectors

2009-08-03T01:32:00.006-04:00

Kathryn Markel, Owner of Markel Fine Arts a gallery in New York since the 1970's says: This bit of advice from my wise friend Jeanne Frank whose new book, Discovering Art : A User's Guide to the World of Collecting is a wonderful source for beginning art aficionados. You'll notice the works of art that appeal to you all have something in common. It may be softness, boldness of color, or a color itself. Perhaps you are attracted to blues, grays, or a compositional element such as the consistent use of deep space. Maybe there is a subject matter that unites all the work to which you are attracted such as landscapes, realism, abstraction, still lives, or florals.

What to avoid when buying art

2009-08-03T00:40:00.008-04:00

"Buy from reputable art dealers" ...That's easy to say, but how can you - the uninitiated - discern between a reputable dealer and a less reputable one?

When you are purchasing art, for more than $700 for an original work on paper or $2000 for a painting, it is a good idea to work with a reputable dealer. Do your research on artnet.com or artinfo.com.

Avoid any dealer with who sells Salvador Dali, Peter Max or Norman Rockwell. Other artists to avoid are Tarkay, Erte, Earle, Jiang, Chagall (late), LeRoy Neiman, and Agam etc. They are all overpriced.

Avoid buying art from the framer in your local shopping mall. Typically, they know little about the realities of the broader art market.

Avoid galleries located in tourist areas, hotels, airports, shopping malls. The average person only thinks about buying art on vacation, some galleries take advantage of that.

Avoid the "Limited Edition Print" and dealers who sells them. They are often nothing more than overpriced, signed posters.

Avoid the dealer who talks investment and offers a "Certificate of Authenticity". Certificates of authenticity are usually phony. They lead you to believe that you have an original piece of work when in reality you may not.

Avoid buying art at auction on cruise ships. See the numerous lawsuits over counterfeit Dali prints on www.fineartregistry.com

Basic Rules of Buying Art

2009-08-02T22:28:00.015-04:00

Rule #1- BUY WHAT YOU LOVE. Never Buy only for the sake of making an Investment.
You must love your art and allow it to give you pleasure every day.
If dollar signs are all you think about when you look at it, it's not good for your soul or for the art.
In the very unlikely case your art happens in increase in value, consider yourself lucky that you did not have to pay more for the same pleasure. 99% of all artwork never goes up in value: Like a car, many pictures decline 50% in value the minute you walk out of the gallery.

The art market fluctuates the same as every other market: For example, big collectors who paid top dollar for art in the late 80's were left with unwanted inventory in the early 90's when the Japanese stopped buying art and Wall Street declined.
Art is not liquid. Typically, a dealer who sold you something, will not not take it back five years later. They have new work to sell by the artist, and does not want to deal with older works. Unless, the artist has substantially appreciated in value.

Rule #2 - DO YOUR RESEARCH

Learning about art takes time and effort just like learning about anything else. Look at art constantly and develop your eye, so that you learn what you like and why. The more you look, the more you'll come to understand the difference between what is good and what is not. This might not change the kind of art you like, but will help you distinguish between the good (of what you like) from the bad. Note the "Isn't it amazing" picture (Thomas Kincaid for example) and how many there are....
For the uninitiated, a realistic oil that looks like a photo can be an amazing - How did the artist do that? Well, it's actually quite simple. Anyone can learn if they have time and patience.

Rule #3 - TRUST YOUR TASTE

At the end of the day, after looking and looking, you must trust your own taste. Good art comes with many different syles and subjects. The style and subject matter that really speak to you depends on how well your personality converges with that of the artist. You might have an eclectic sensibility and appreciate many kinds of good art, you might like the romantic landscape, colorful expressionistic painting, or Zen-like minimalism. No matter what kind of art really grabs you, do not be afraid to mix different things in one space. In the end your general taste will connect them all.

Rule #4 - LOOK FOR VALUE.

Although you are NOT thinking "investment potential" (you're not, are you?), you should be thinking VALUE.

You do not want to be taken advantage of, and in the art world, it's easy to spend lots of money on junk. You must go through the learning process. If you're spending under $700 for an original work on paper or under $2000 for a good - sized painting, don't worry. Use these numbers as general guidelines for buying artwork, and remember buy anything that pleases you and is affordable.

Remember, artists have to make money too. A typical artist who makes one watercolor a week and sells it directly for $500 each, makes $24,000 a year. Furthermore, she probably has an expensive Masters of Fine Arts degree, plus the costs of postcards, stamps, supplies, paper, rent, and framing. Most likely, she has a day job and is caught in the classic artist-bind: the artist has to make enough to live, and at the same time, find time to paint. It's a hard life, so give her a break and don't complain about her trying to sell an original work of art for more than $300. Pay her gladly.

Rule #5 - BUY FROM reputable art DEALERS

Scared to Buy Original Art?

2009-08-02T22:24:00.013-04:00

Are you are an intelligent, affluent, sophisticated consumer who knows nothing about contemporary art or how to buy it?
You are not alone, and it is not your fault. The art market is intimidating, confusing, and rife with over-priced works.....

You are justified in being confused and cautious. Most of my neighbors think nothing of spending thousands on window treatments, but are terrified of buying a $500 piece of art. Unlike other cultural experiences, such as the theatre or dance, buying art is not a transient event. If you make a mistake, it hangs there on your wall proclaiming to the world your lack of taste. This fact scares the hell out of most people which is why they stick with their posters from college or pictures they pick up on vacation. Thus, you often see exquisitely decorated houses without good art. Interior Designers are sometimes just as intimidated and unsophisticated as you.

There's only one step - LOOK, LOOK, and LOOK some more.

Learn About Art, Learn About What You Like, Learn About Yourself.

"I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like"... To a certain extent, it is true, but remember the corollary - "The more art you see, the more you know what you like."
Everyone has a different reaction to the images they see, depending on their personal psychological makeup.
Look at all different styles of art with an open mind. As you do, write down the names of the artists you like the best.

Surf the web for images and take note of your favorites. There are wonderful web resources to find good art: artnet.com, artinfo.com, artforum.com, artnews.com, artnewspaper.tv.

VISIT FINE ART MUSEUMS and libraries. Every town has a local museum associated with the city or a local university. Local libraries have art books and magazines to browse.

TAKE COURSES at local universities, attend lectures sponsored by local art organizations and museums.

VISIT THE LOCAL GALLERIES- Find galleries through listings in the local papers and local arts organizations. While these galleries might have the best of your local artists try to avoid the tacky galleries. (Click here to learn how to spot a tacky gallery)javascript:void(0)

ASK QUESTIONS when visiting galleries - questions such as "Can you tell me about the artist? Do you have other things by her that I may look at"? Ask whatever questions you can think of, and don't let youself be intimidated even if you're dressed in sweats and sneakers.

SIGN GALLERY GUESTBOOKS - You'll receive notices of art openings. Most art openings are casual affairs and it's easy to meet collectors, the artist, and find out more about the local art world. Openings are a great opportunity to ask more questions. People in the art world love to talk and give out information.

SUBSCRIBE TO MAJOR ART MAGAZINES
www.markelfinearts.com

Affordable Art online

2009-08-02T22:15:00.008-04:00

You love art, and you know what you like, but you don’t have a financier’s funds. So is it still possible to be a collector? The answer is an overwhelming YES. And if you have any spare cash, an economic downturn is an excellent time to buy. With fewer buyers in the market, there is actually a wider variety of interesting, affordable pieces available.

Here, some great places to start building your collection:

Invisible Exports’ Artist of the Month Club
www.artistofthemonthclub.com
The Artist of the Month Club "is a wonderful way to start a collection — or to add to a growing one — with the help of a dozen of the country's most plugged-in curators, a kind of dream team of art advisers. It's a perfect way to acquaint yourself with the work of great living artists, many just on the verge of real breakouts and others who have already received wide acclaim,” Needleman says. She adds that new collectors don’t have to wait until January to sign up; late subscribers can still join and receive the full 2009 collection.

TINLARK 6671 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. www.tinlark.com “Carefully curated, affordable art — that’s what I do,” gallery director Cris McCall told us, and she has the prices — starting at $25! — and selection to prove it. If you can’t make it to Hollywood, look for Tinlark online or at smaller art fairs. McCall recommends works by Drew Beckmeyer, Kirsten Tradowsky, Wesley Younie, Nathaniel Klein, and Nancy Baker Cahill, whose pieces sell in the $200 to $300 range. “Their pieces are compositionally exciting, well executed, conceptually smart, and funny,” she says. Also keep your eyes open for Brooks Salzwedel’s haunting graphite, tape, and resin landscapes, which start around $275.

CHARMINGWALL
This little gallery, standing alone amid the tattoo and novelty shops in New York’s West Village, offers a curated selection of quirky, open-edition prints that never go above $80 — and that includes framing and matting. How does Charmingwall maintain such affordable prices? The owners are in the boutique printing business, so production costs are minimal, and the gallery maintains personal relationships with all of its artists, who approve each print, according to gallery director Katie McClenahan. The prints are available online too, and the gallery has small monthly exhibitions of original art priced anywhere from $50 to a few thousand per work. “We’re trying to get up-and-coming artists out there and provide affordable art for the masses,” McClenahan says. Less than two years old, Charmingwall has already attracted media attention from the likes of New York magazine and DailyCandy.

ETSY, Rob Kalin dropped out of art school and founded Etsy in 2005. The result is an addictive online marketplace where you can buy anything from original artworks to handmade jewelry and clothing. According to Kalin, art is the third most popular category on the site and accounts for 10 percent of Etsy’s overall sales. “This is about the idea that art is a craft,” Kalin says. Etsy’s selection isn’t curated, so quality is hit or miss, and it can be time-consuming to page through its thousands of offerings. Still, the site features some great finds.

TINYSHOWCASE
True to its name, the four-year-old Web site Tiny Showcase showcases prints that are, well, tiny. You can sign up for its newsletter and snatch up a limited-edition piece each Tuesday for minimal dough — from around $20 to $100. But you have to be nimble — the works usually go within hours. Imagine covering an entire wall with these exquisite little pieces, all printed on archival paper in ink. And the best part is that a percentage from each work sold goes to a charity of the artist’s choice.
By Jacquelyn Lewis, Marisa Rindone
Published: July 29, 2009

Picasso at Home

2009-07-31T15:03:00.002-04:00

Bert Stern - Color Photos of Marilyn Monroe

2009-07-31T14:54:00.002-04:00

Charts of Art Market Performance of Bert Stern Photographs:

Bert Stern - Marilyn Monroe B&W Photography

2009-07-31T14:52:00.003-04:00

Bert Stern photography including works from "The last sitting" are available for sale through www.lydeckerfineart.com in New York, NY. (917)940-3353

Marilyn Minter -Green Pink Caviar video

2009-07-31T13:45:00.006-04:00

Click on (title) link to view video
Autographed video is for sale at Whitney Museum, NY, NY

Marilyn Minter Paintings

2009-07-31T13:43:00.004-04:00

Michael Parekowhai - Artist

2009-07-31T09:08:00.002-04:00

Lehman Mounts Art Bargain Auction With Lichtenstein, Bourgeois

2009-07-30T10:59:00.002-04:00

(Bloomberg) -- Roy Lichtenstein’s 1982 print of the Statue of Liberty, once wall candy at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., is expected to contribute about $30,000 to the bankrupt company’s coffers when it’s offered for auction in November.

Lehman will begin selling its multimillion-dollar corporate art collection in a series of three sales at Freeman’s Auctioneers in Philadelphia this winter.

Lehman is shedding 650 lots, projected to fetch a total of $1 million. They include modern and contemporary paintings, prints and drawings, along with a smaller group of American and European paintings and prints from Lehman’s New York, Boston and Delaware offices. Sales are scheduled for Nov. 1, Dec. 6 and Feb. 12, 2010.

“We tried to price things consistent with what they will bring in the current market,’’ said Anne Henry, Freeman’s vice president of modern and contemporary works of art. “There’s a lot of really attractive work at affordable levels.’’

Lehman filed the biggest U.S. bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008. Proceeds from art sales will benefit creditors. Lehman Chief Executive Officer Bryan Marsal has said the firm owes as much as $250 billion. (In the beginning of July, Lehman began selling on EBay Inc. items originally produced as freebies for clients and employees.)

Items in the November sale range from an abstract 2007 black-and-blue collage by Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera, estimated to sell for as much as $15,000, to a surreal 1997 Louise Bourgeois print of an undulating bed with lips for as much as $1,500.

The firm’s art collection consists mostly of European and American art from the 1970s onwards. Willie Cole and French sculptor Bernar Venet are among those offered in this first round of selling.

Rocky Time for Art

The auctions come at a rocky time for the art market. Christie’s International recently reported that its worldwide sales plummeted 35 percent in the first six months of 2009 from the year-earlier period.

“At the moment, it doesn’t look like a good time for sellers,’’ said New York private dealer Meredith Palmer. “I don’t anticipate they are going to get good prices for a lot of these things.’’

On the plus side, buyers may find deals.

“People may see this sale as an opportunity,’’ said Palmer, who said the Lehman name wouldn’t have a big impact. “The provenance isn’t a negative thing,’’ she said. “But I don’t think it has much to add.’’

Lehman hired New Hampshire-based art consultant Kelly Wright in January to inspect artworks at several Lehman offices and storage facilities and recommend a selling strategy.

Competition for Sale

Freeman’s, a 200-year-old regional auction house in Philadelphia, holds more than 30 sales a year. It competed for the consignment against other auction houses, according to Lehman spokeswoman Kimberly Macleod.

Lehman owns more than 3,000 artworks, and some of those aren’t being sold, such as art that hung in Lehman’s New York headquarters. The building is now occupied by Barclays Plc, which acquired Lehman along with a one-year option to buy the art. That option expires in September.

Lehman’s best-known art holdings are 900 works owned by money manager Neuberger Berman, a firm Lehman acquired in 2003. The collection focuses on painting and photography and is the legacy of the company’s art-collecting founder, Roy Neuberger.

Artists represented in Neuberger’s collection include Marlene Dumas, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami.

The fate of these holdings is undecided. In December, Neuberger management acquired a majority stake in the company in a deal that closed May 4. Management has a one-year option, expiring May 4, 2010, to buy the art.

To contact the reporter on the story: Lindsay Pollock in New York at lindsaypollock@yahoo.com;

What is art?

2009-07-29T13:11:00.002-04:00

When considering the work of an established artist – work sold at a major action house such as Christie’s or Sotheby’s, say, Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, or graffiti artist Basquiat, for example, armed with any knowledge of Post War and Contemporary art you immediately understand that you’re seeing something of value. And therefore, the painting that you’re gazing upon must be art. And indeed it is art, valuable art. That said; take a moment to look around you. Inspiration for creating great works is right there on the street where you're standing.
With an eye for composition and color in other words the eye of an artist study the façades of old buildings, street signs and sidewalks. Narrow your vision and imagine a frame as though you were looking through the lens of a camera. Snap. Now imagine this image painted on canvas. From the intangible vision comes a tangible picture. Regardless of any existing market value, dear reader, this too is art.
Consider Fountain, a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp, a piece he called readymades (also known as found art) because he made use of an already existing object—in this case a urinal which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". He purchased the standard urinal from the J.L. Mott Iron Works, brought it to his studio at 33 West 67th Street, placed in a ninety-degrees position, deviating from its normal position of use, and wrote on it, "R. Mutt 1917".

Whether Mr. Mutt made Fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view, thus creating a new thought for that object. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

Art is visceral. At the very least it should make you think. The history of the world is in paint, metal, and recycled and found objects. Love, war, death, longing documented on canvases, erected in metals, assembled and installed as works of art in museums and galleries all over the world, reminding us of our past, speaking to us of man and the environment, capturing that emotion we feel when watching a sunrise or the moon hovering over a mountain top..

Conversely, if nothing stirs within, no thoughts come to mind, when contemplating an artist’s work can we still call it art? Individual perceptions taken into consideration, that which resonates within us varies from person to person contingent upon personal experiences, education, and emotional capacity. Therefore, whether or not Duchamp’s commissioned work, Fountain, is thought provoking the fact that it provides fodder for discussion about the importance of ordinary objects seen out of context has allowed it to take its place in the world of art.

Great art doesn’t shout. You have to move in close and listen. Though the phrase art is in the eye of the beholder may be true, taking the time to understand an artist’s statement will often open new doors in the mind, allowing you the viewer to move beyond your own borders of comprehension.

The objective of a good art reviewer is not only to self-interpret, but to understand an artist’s inspiration when creating the work. Understanding the artist’s statement can expand our knowledge of the world and its inhabitants and connect us to the message that is relevant to the exhibition.

Now, go out there readers and take a new look at art and the world around you.
July 28, 1:25 PM · Rachael Lorenz - Portland Contemporary Art Examiner

The art of a recession: Gallery owners struggling

2009-07-26T08:59:00.002-04:00

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Art gallery owners across the country are finding they have a tough sell these days.
With houses going up for auction, unemployment continuing to rise and the threat of layoffs seemingly ever-present, many gallery owners in art communities such as Scottsdale, Ariz., Santa Fe, N.M., Portland, Ore., and New York City are closing shop, going broke to stay open or drastically changing the way they do business.
"Art is a very discretionary sort of object, and we are in the worst recession arguably in the postwar era," said Jay Bryson, a global economist with Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, N.C. "Obviously somebody who has lost their job in a factory in Indiana probably is not buying art."
ALYSSA PHEOBUS
Even people with plenty of discretionary money aren't spending much on it.

"You're a billionaire and you took a 40 percent hit on your portfolio, now you only have $600 million left," Bryson said. "That's still pretty deep pockets, but 40 percent is 40 percent."
In the gallery district of downtown Scottsdale, at least a half dozen galleries have closed in the past year or are in the midst of closing. Others still are wondering how much longer they can make it.
One recent day, Leslie Levy sat quietly amid the contemporary art she sells in her gallery, which was just as deserted as the streets outside, where the temperature was in the triple digits.

The summers here are always slow because of the heat, but this one is much worse than usual. That's partly why Levy is closing her doors at the end of August after 32 years in business and becoming a private art dealer online.
"I'll tell you what — if I was younger, I'd just keep at it knowing we've not seen times quite as bad as this before," Levy said.
Longtime customer Marylyn Gregory of Bernardsville, N.J., came in the gallery that day to see it one last time and check out what pieces Levy had left of her and her husband's favorite artist. Gregory told Levy she was surprised and upset when she heard the gallery was closing but added, "You're probably doing the right thing."

Gregory didn't end up buying anything that day, saying she needed to check with her husband. Before, she might have been more spontaneous. "Sometimes you'd go to an opening and have a glass of wine, and you're like, OK," she said. "It's certainly the method to get everyone to open their checkbooks."
But like many other art lovers, the Gregorys are more conservative with their money these days.
Levy understands. "People are watching what they spend — cutting back and spending on the necessities of life. That makes sense to people."
ALYSSA PHEOBUS, represented by Becky Smith who knows that all too well. She owned the Bellwether Gallery in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood for a decade, but closed at the end of June after watching her revenue plummet to $80,000 gross in the first quarter of 2009. She had $40,000 net, and $10,000 of it went to rent each month.
The $80,000 figure was down from about $350,000 the same quarter in 2008 and about $600,000 during that period the year before.
"I was really startled," Smith said. "It was the spring of '08 where I saw three shows that should have been blockbusters underperform, and I was in shock.
"Things were booming so intensely a couple years ago and the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction, it was impossible to know where I stood," she said. "And I didn't want to be paying for a storefront while I was figuring it out."
In the past two years, at least 24 galleries have closed in Manhattan, mostly in Chelsea, according to New York City-based Artnet magazine, which covers the fine art world. "That's really dramatic," said Artnet editor Walter Robinson.
In Santa Fe, N.M., between 10 and 15 galleries have closed this year, said Christy Walker, managing director of the Santa Fe Gallery Association.
"A lot of people have this idea that running a gallery, the owners make a lot of money, when it's just a lot of effort to make a living off of it," she said. "It's a hard business to be in, and when things are good, things are good, and when times are tough, it's a really tough business to maintain."
Kraig Foote of art one gallery in Scottsdale has done everything he can think of to avoid shutting down.
His house is about to go up for auction because he hasn't made a payment in seven months, he has laid off his two employees and he has resorted to selling his own beloved art collection for a fraction of what it's worth.
"I have given up everything," he said recently in the very empty gallery, which sells work by local high school- and college-age artists.
And still, the threat of closure looms.
"I'm trying to make it to December," Foote said. "I think people will start spending again once they get to the next holiday. They'll say, 'We've saved, let's get something.'"
He paused. "I don't know."
By AMANDA LEE MYERS, Associated Press Writer

Nancy Rutter, Painter

2009-07-25T10:00:00.004-04:00

Born New York City 1948
Studies: High School of Music and Art
New York University
Arts Students League, Ford Foundation Grant
Atelier 17, Paris, France
Experience:
National Society of Arts and Letters Young Printmaker Award
Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, color etching
Lecturer Limerick College of Art, Ireland
Lived and worked in Ireland and France.
Exhibits: Rose Gallery
Gallery One
Richard Sena Gallery
Tom Caldwell gallery, Ireland
Dalkey Gallery, Ireland
Chateau Pontigard, France
Art Students League of New York
NABA Editions
Lever House
Long Island University
Haddad Lascano Gallery
Collections: Goldleaf and Torello,
Walsh Printers,
Southern New England Bank
Self Brand LLC

Guild Hall in Easthampton Announces 63rd Annual 'Clothesline' Art Sale

2009-07-25T09:47:00.001-04:00

East Hampton - On Saturday, Aug. 1 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (rain or shine) at Guild Hall will again host its annual Clothesline Art Sale featuring original oil, acrylic, and watercolor paintings as well as prints, collages, photography, and small sculptures. Hundreds of art lovers throughout Long Island descend upon this show with the hope of buying fine art - cheap. Both established and first-time collectors can take home art by emerging and critically acclaimed artists. No need to get hung up on costs, as prices start at only $50 and go no higher than $2,000, with all proceeds split 50/50 between the artist and Guild Hall. Admission is free.

Last year, over 150 artists lined upside waiting to register their works. Some arrived as early as 7 a.m. On average 350 artists participate and their work attracts over 1,000 visitors. Each year 500 to 800 pieces are sold thanks in part to 225 volunteers (and dozens and dozens of donuts and hundreds of peanut and jelly sandwiches). This year's event promises to be stellar with more than 500 works of art for sale.

Artists interested in participating should call 631-324-0806 for registration information. Delivery of artwork is Thursday, July 30 and Friday, July 31. Guild Hall is located at 158 Main Street in East Hampton.

Founded over 75 years ago, Guild Hall is the year-round arts center wholly dedicated to serving the residents, members, families, and artists of the East End and offering them, as well as visitors and tourists, enriching experiences by presenting relevant and meaningful programs in the visual and performing arts, working in collaboration with artists, and providing a meeting place for the community. For more information and to become a member, visit www.guildhall.org

The Savvy Art Buyer In Uncertain Times

2009-07-25T09:39:00.004-04:00

Some of us are passionate collectors of art but not always for love. Some collect art passionately for profit and status.

Southampton - Is it genetic wiring or some law of attraction that makes us want to take home whatever object catches our eye? Anything and everything, from anywhere in the world, is fair game as “Collectible." It's personal and dictated only by desire. For some, it's stamps. For others, it's antique doorstops. Some of us are passionate collectors of art but not always for love. Some collect art passionately for profit and status; art as a “brand" so to speak.

According to renowned dealer and collector Eugene V. Thaw, there is no real art market as much as there is hype and spin. “The prospective art buyer should be clear whether they are starting a collection for love of art, or for profit and status. There are just trophies and what they can be hyped up to." Which is how a Rothko owned by David Rockefeller, originally appraised for $10 million about nine months before it sold at Sotheby's, went for $72.8 million at the time of sale. There was a tremendous amount of promotion for months prior to the auction causing the sale dollars to be spun into the heavens."

Well, those were the days. Buying art at a time when a reassessment of the “essentials" is foremost on the minds of many may seem anything but essential. That is, except for those of you who are avid art collectors. For you, if there is a will, there is a way.

Art market prices have certainly not enjoyed immunity from the recent financial upheaval. The Mei Moses website on the 2008 art index report states, “The 2008 decrease in the return of the all art index of almost 4.5 percent is the first time our all art index has declined after five years of positive annual growth averaging almost 20 percent."

Furthermore, their recent findings for the first quarter of this year indicate that their “all art index" declined by 35 percent. According to the Financial Times Limited, the “decline accelerated as people who lost money in the financial crisis put up works for sale, often at a loss." Even corporations and museums are downsizing their collections. The data from the Mei Moses Index indicates contemporary and postwar art prices suffered the most, though the Old Masters were only marginally affected.

Clearly it's a buyers market and a great time to buy original artwork if you are the average collector or someone interested in starting a collection. One side benefit of a slower market is that if you are a novice collector, the gallery dealers and experts will have more time to talk to you.

Is art a good investment these days? Vicky Nash Shaw, ISA AM, an accredited personal property appraiser (www.TheAuthenticAppraisal.com) reports, “Like the stock market, unless you have a crystal ball, it is difficult to tell. There are periods in recent history where art prices certainly outperformed the stock market, as measured by comparing the Mei Moses Index to the S&P; Index. Many art experts believe that art will outperform the stock index over the long run..."

Still it's always been risky to trade in fine art for profit. You can't always get instant liquidity by dumping a painting on the market as you would with a stock, without taking a loss. The wiser perspective might be to buy art for love first, but also regard it as an investment for profit over time.

Rick Friedman, developer of ArtHamptons and the Hamptons Home and Garden Show, is himself, an avid collector of mid 20th century art, has this to say about investing in art. “When you buy blue chip art, you will never over-pay, although you may be buying a little early...."

He goes on to say, “As it stands, dealers are eager to move their wares and are willing to negotiate. The current prices haven't been this low in four or five years. However this window of opportunity may only be temporary. Because a lot of high quality art was sold on the market at a loss earlier this year, there may be some “bounce back" at some point in the near future."

Given these circumstances, you have a great opportunity this coming weekend to dip your toe back into the art market.

Art fairs in particular are the most efficient way (though sometimes exhausting) way to see a lot of art all in one place.
by Cindy Lee Bergersen - Hamptons.com

Top Billionaire Art Collectors

2009-07-24T15:47:00.006-04:00

Suffering from one of its worst years in recent memory, the art world got a boost in June when French billionaire François Pinault opened his new modern art museum, the Punta della Dogana, in Venice's former customs house at the entrance of the Grand Canal. In what some called the "Dogana effect," the opening was also seen as having helped boost attendance at Art Basel, the respected contemporary art fair in Switzerland later that month. While sales for the toned-down fair are hard to come by, a record crowd of 61,000, including billionaires Mitchell Rales, Eli Broad and Roman Abramovich showed up at the event.

Wealthy patrons and collectors have been the lifeblood of the art world for centuries, from Italy's Medici family to American industrialists Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon. That is still true today even as art valuations drop. Indeed, in a downturn like this one, billionaires are some of the only people who can still afford to buy expensive art or help prop up museums.

Broad, for instance, spent $30 million in December bailing out the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to prevent the museum from having to sell off artwork and leave its current headquarters. Several months earlier, Estée Lauder Chairman Leonard Lauder gifted $131 million to New York City's Whitney Museum, of which he is chairman emeritus, in part to help it keep its Upper East Side location.
Art is a passion for these billionaires, but it is also a valuable asset. So how did their personal collections hold up in the past year, and who among the rarefied rich owns the most valuable works?

Forbes recently scoured the art world to find out, spending weeks consulting with collectors, art appraisers, insurers, auction houses and gallery owners around the globe. We decided not to include members of the art trade, like dealer Larry Gagosian, or corporate collections, such as Bill Gates', which belongs to Microsoft. Also not considered were ones belonging to royal kingdoms.

Since the art world trades on closely held information, most experts who spoke with us requested anonymity in discussing private art collections. While some disagreed on exact figures, almost all agreed on the top billionaire collectors. The final list includes 14 individuals who hold private collections worth $700 million or more. The estimates are purposefully conservative and should be considered "at least" numbers.

Topping the ranks is Philip Niarchos, son of the late shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos and father of Stavros III, who was linked in the past to American heiress Paris Hilton. He is said to have the most valuable collection, worth at least $2 billion. Philip's father began collecting art in 1949 and over his lifetime acquired many well-known masterpieces including Vincent van Gogh's "Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear" and Pablo Picasso's self-portrait "Yo, Picasso." Since his father left him the collection, Philip has quietly added such contemporary works as Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Self-Portrait" and Andy Warhol's "Shot Red Marilyn."

During our quest to pin down these extraordinary collections, we discovered a new fortune belonging to Esther Grether, a little-known Swiss cosmetics heiress whose 7.5% stake in Swatch and art collection of more than 600 pieces, including ones by Paul Cezanne, Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon, make her not only a billionaire but also the only woman in our list of top art collectors. She keeps the works in a printing factory that she converted, and where she also lives.

Valuing art is an obvious challenge, and even more so today with the art market affected by the same liquidity crisis as any other product or service. "The confusion [in valuations] has to do with the lower number of sales," said Dr. Beverly Schreiber Jacoby, a fine art adviser and former head of Old Master Drawings at Christies in New York. "Theoretically, there are fewer points of reference since last fall." With fewer buyers in the market and a healthy supply of new art, the contemporary art market took a precipitous fall in the last year, with some pieces depreciating in value by up to 90%.

Entertainment mogul David Geffen, for instance, made the list although the value of his collection was a matter of heated debate. Some argued his collection, comprised of seminal works by Jasper Johns, Willem De Kooning and Jackson Pollock, could be worth up to $2 billion. One person said the entire collection is worth only $400 million, due to the plunge in contemporary art prices. We pin the value at a $1 billion.

Regardless, most agreed that Geffen proved to have impeccable timing in selling some of his collection three years ago. In a period of months in 2006, he apparently sold four paintings for $420 million including Jasper Johns' "False Start" to Citadel's Kenneth Griffin for $80 million and de Kooning's "Police Gazette" and "Woman III" to SAC Capital's Steve Cohen for $63.5 million and $137 million, respectively.

Cohen also makes the cut with a collection valued at $750 million, even though he likely couldn't sell his de Koonings for anything close to what he paid for them. Still, he has earned a reputation as a prolific, adventurous collector. He is the buyer, for instance, of British artist Damien Hirst's piece, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living"--a 13-foot tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. The creature reportedly rotted and was replaced. It also was the inspiration for a book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, by economist Don Thompson, who used it as a symbol of greed in the contemporary art world.

Cohen's passion for art may even surpass his love of business: SAC Capital bought a stake in Sotheby's auction house earlier this year, even as the auction house reported losses of $34.5 million for the first quarter of 2009.
Keren Blankfeld, Cristina von Zeppelin and Susan Adams 07.24.09

2009 National Design Award Winners

2009-07-24T14:15:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON, D.C.—“Design is intriguing to the public,” says Jennifer Northrop, director of communications and marketing at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, “because design isn’t art.”
That’s an unexpected statement for an arts professional to make. But Northrop has the reasoning to back it up: “Design is the most accessible form of visual culture — we touch it. We use it everyday. It’s based on solving a particular problem.”

And the museum has plans to make the art of design (or just plain “design,” as the case may be) even more available. On July 24, in conjunction with a White House luncheon thrown by the first lady and an awards ceremony to honor the winners of this year’s National Design Awards (announced in April), the New York–based Cooper-Hewitt will host a number of public programs aimed at educating the public about the field. A series of panel discussions sprinkled throughout Washington, D.C., the events are part 10-year anniversary celebration for the awards, part obvious measure to encourage the general public’s growing interest in design.

Chanel Mobile Art in NY

2009-07-22T08:37:00.002-04:00

Chanel Mobile Art, the project Karl Lagerfeld created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Coco Chanel’s iconic 2.55 quilted leather handbag, is now in the midst of a whistle-stop tour. It has already landed in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and after it touches down in New York, from October 20 to November 9, it will round out the tour in Moscow, London and Paris. A few weeks before the installation of the Zaha Hadid–designed portable pavilion was to begin on Central Park’s Rumsey Playfield, Sarah Douglas sat down in Chanel’s New York offices with Fabrice Bousteau, the editor in chief of Beaux Arts magazine and the curator charged with choosing artists for the project; the company’s head of fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky, who worked with Lagerfeld to organize it; and Chanel president John Galantic.

Sarah Douglas: Fabrice, how did you go about selecting the artists?

Bousteau: I looked for artists who would take advantage of the full freedom they are given to play with the characteristics of Chanel. I wanted them to ask themselves, “What is Chanel? Is it Coco Chanel? What are the brand’s main values?” After all, a fashion company has a particular idea of life. I asked each artist to visit the studio of Chanel, to visit the place where the handbags are made, to meet the people who make the handbags and to visit the apartment of Coco Chanel.

Lisa Kiss, Photographer

2009-07-19T12:57:00.003-04:00

Lisa Kiss lives and works on the east end of Long Island.
Her work is focused on using nature to express the universal conditions of mankind.
www.lisakiss.net

Lisa Kiss received her BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. Then travelled to Italy and studied with Tony Vevers in Cortona through the Unviversity of Georgia. On her return from Europe, she moved to Oregon and exhibited Monoprints there as well as in Cortona Italy. Later she studied with Lenore Davis at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina where she began designing textiles.She moved to NY City, started her own business of hand painted scarves and fabrics called 'Lisa L.' in which she sold her fabrics nationally and internationally for over 16 years. Until the fateful day of 9/11 when Lisa L.'s studio and offices were destroyed in the disaster, as it was directly across the street from the World Trade Center Towers. All of her equipment and samples were lost.

Her home was also unable to be lived in, so she moved with her family to the East End of Long Island the very next day. Not long after settling in did she begin a whole new body of work in photography, producing some of the best work of her life in this new location. The beauty of the landscapes surrounding her along with the impact of such a devastating event preceding her exodus from Manhattan must have been the impetus and inspiration for all the work that followed. Now, in any of her travels, Lisa is taking thousands of digital images wherever she goes, to create a new type of documentation of place. Interestingly enough, the images are taking on a patterning effect. The use of digital photography has opened up many possibilities in portraying this aspect in her work. After seeing the recent show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY on the Islamic influence on the Venetian painters, LIsa stated, "I became more keenly aware of how ingrained pattern is in all our lives, through history to the present. Right down to objects in nature through the magnifying glass, one will find the perfection of patterning even there." So it is through found objects in her surroundings that she weaves and quilts and paints with her photographs. There are a few different bodies of work evolving at the same time, all with similar intent. Playing with the sense of place as real or fantasy. In some of the works Lisa will take an image of a wrapped tree to create a human figure placed inside a somewhat foreboding place. In other works she may create a landscape that appears to be natural in it's repetition and flow, yet still one cannot place the reality of it, because it is not quite real, but more 'dream like'.

In a series called, "Mapping Places" Lisa is working with a play on the traditional idea of the "frame" around a "central image". The interest is more in the details and patterning that occur in the frame rather than at the center where we are usually drawn to look. The work on a whole is rich with color and complexity. There is a mission here of not only working in one linear stream with just one idea to pursue. With a wonderful eye for composition, scale and color, as well as a mastery of her medium, Lisa brings a complexity of thought to the work. There is much to look forward to in following this artist in her growth. Lisa Kiss has shown this new work solely on the East End of Long Island in the past two years; at Guild Hall and Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton and Crazy Monkey Gallery, Southampton Cultural Center and DeCordova Gallery, along with other alternative gallery spaces in the Hamptons.

Why dont more Americans buy art? A Midwest perspective

2009-07-19T12:42:00.006-04:00

Recently one of my clients balked at purchasing a painting buy a famous living American artist whose work is in many museums for $30K, yet spent over $1M for box seats at the new Yankee Stadium.

This is the beginning of commentary about How to Buy Art, What questions to ask, How NOT to buy art and Why dont more people in the USA buy art... Excerpts from : http://theurbanophile.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-dont-people-buy-art.html
"On the Cusp, the premier contemporary art blog in Indianapolis, conducted an art survey to collect some facts about the local arts community and market. They recently covered the announcement of the results. The big topic of debate was around people buying art.

Two questions sparked the most discussion. The amount of money people had spent buying art and the top figure most would consider for an art purchase hit a ceiling of about $500. Scott pointed out that there are many who easily spend $300 for a few hours of entertainment at a Colts game, but where is the mindset that an investment in original artwork lasts a lifetime? Well, for one thing, the vast majority of US cities do not have a culture of art buying. Tyler Green brought this up during a lecture once when someone asked him why New York and Los Angeles are arts hubs. One reason is that people there buy art. In New York, collecting art is something one does as you acquire the means to do so, since art & artists are everywhere in NY. That's not true in most other places.

Americans Fear that since they don't know enough about art, they fear that are could be a sucker, overpaying for something, and will look like an idiot one day because of it. Fear that they are being ripped off or taking advantage of by people much more knowledgeable than themselves. Fear that they can never get any resale value out of the work. Think about walking into a gallery like walking into a car dealership times twenty and you get the picture. Lots of angst.

The average person is not an art expert, doesn't know what art "should" cost, has no confidence in their own taste, and therefore is very uncertain. The fact that buying art is positioned as an act of monumental significance, and that you are being entrusted with some object that needs to be preserved for the ages, only heightens the angst. Note the quote above, "lasts a lifetime". Who wants to sign up for that kind of responsibility?
The cultural of art buying will take care of itself if you can get the pump primed. One way to do that is to create a mental analogy, reinforced through the marketing of art, to a type of purchase people can already envision themselves making (see below).

The other points are:
How do you establish transparency in the market?
Perhaps a local registry of prices paid, maintained by an independent party with solid documentation, and a ban on non-arms length or related party transactions would help. Put this on the web openly for anyone to consult.
This could potentially also handle the secondary market to show the value over time (most art is likely to depreciate in my opinion - which is ok, if we know about it in advance). It might also help with tracking provenance.
How do you establish a viable secondary market that doesn't totally destroy value?
Perhaps some type of a "certified pre-owned" program, run through the same registry would help. Lots of thinking needs to be done here.
Art needs to be repositioned as a temporary purchase.
People shouldn't feel like they are buying a Patek Philippe when they buy a piece of art ("You never actually own it, you just take care of it for the next generation"). Instead, let's make art buying more like any other consumer purchase where the item in question has a limited life span in your possession.
I suggested fashion, but Jeffrey Cufaude had an even better idea in looking at it like home furnishings or decor. People are willing to pay a lot for a sofa. They know it will be there for a while, but they will eventually replace it. Similarly, it should be psychologically Ok to get rid of art you bought, even by throwing it out if necessary.
That might seem anathema, but if your goal is to sell art, then people shouldn't be made to feel like they are participating in some momentous civilizational event and that they are saddled with something they might change their mind about later for the rest of their lives.
Could this program be embraced? Who knows. The art world establishment in major markets seems to view transparency with horror.
They like inefficiency. But do we need to pattern local art purchases in most cities after the same business practices used for high end art? I'm not so sure. Perhaps we could use a more clean disconnect between the two. Thoughts?"- Aaron M. Renn is The Urbanophile, a leading independent urban affairs thinker and strategist based in the Midwest.

Signs of Hope for Contemporary Art Market

2009-07-13T13:10:00.001-04:00

Gerhard Richter, "Abstract Painting, Courbet" (1986)
LONDON— Art investors seem to think the worst of the financial crisis has passed for the contemporary art market, although the recessionary storm is not quite played out.

The London-based research firm ArtTactic recently released its semiannual U.S. & European Art Market Confidence Survey, which showed negative sentiment lifting and hope for a recovery strengthening. The Confidence Index more than doubled, to 28 from 11 six months ago, although it remains well below the 50 level that would indicate confidence.

The highest hopes were at the low end of the market, with positive sentiment for works valued below $50,000 at 55 percent, up from 47, and negative views shrinking to 22 percent from 35. The outlook for higher-priced art was less clear: In the $1 million-plus category, positive sentiment grew to 28 percent from 19, but negative sentiment also grew, to 55 percent from 36. Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of those surveyed expect the market to begin to recover within two years, more than twice the level six months earlier.The survey listed the top five artists, in terms of investor confidence, as Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Robert Gober, and Andreas Gursky.

VIP Art Preview at ArtHamptons for 85Broads

2009-07-13T11:33:00.004-04:00

Ann Lydecker, Founder of Metropolitan Art Advisors, lead a group of "next generation" art collectors at Art Hamptons on Sunday July 12, 2009 in Bridgehampton from the VIP/Patrons Lounge. The collectors met with Bruce Morris from Louise Blouin Media/Artinfo.com, the editor of Art Collector Magazine, the producers of ArtHamptons, Helen who manages Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner home, Beth the VIP lounge designer.

They were then guided over to Hall D where they met with Barry Singer, Kathryn Markel, Throckmorton Fine Art and were able to meet the 81 yr old photographer, Elliott Erwitt.

Art Hamptons 2009

2009-07-13T11:20:00.003-04:00

BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y.—It’s been a hell of a year or so for the art market, but Rick Friedman, founder and executive director of ArtHamptons, now in its second year, is bullish: “There is no better time to invest in art,” he writes in his introduction to the catalogue of this year’s edition, which opens to the public today and runs through Sunday. “From buying the masters to discovering fresh and upcoming stars, you can acquire items that should not only accrue in value, but also bring everyday beauty into your home. And you may consider these art purchases as another element in your investment portfolio.” Friedman clearly understands the instincts of ArtHamptons patrons, and last night’s opening gala and collector’s preview provided a fascinating insight into what they find appealing. It also offered an opportunity to gauge the mood of the dealers who attempt to satisfy them.

Decoration, it seems, is much in demand. New York’s DC Moore has a group of paintings by 85-year-old Jane Wilson, who is one the fair’s 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award honorees (along with photographers Elliott Erwitt and Lillian Bassman). Wilson makes easy-on-the-eye landscapes that look to Rothko’s abstraction and Turner’s brushiness, though her color palettes are less trying than those artists'. Her Blue Dawn (2009) is available for $45,000. Gallery president Bridget Moore was in a positive mood when she spoke to ARTINFO. “It’s been a very active summer,” she said, “and very good for classic works.”

Elsewhere the Cooley Gallery has a little section of its booth turned over to palette-knifed skyscapes by Judy Friday, who is apparently something of a celebrity in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where both she and the gallery are based. Her remarkably consistent paintings are priced between $650 for a picture six inches square and $3,800 for Gray and Peach Sky, which measures two feet across. Gallery director Joseph Newman described himself as “certainly optimistic,” adding, somewhat surprisingly, that “the first quarter of 2009 was the best quarter we’ve ever had.”

Trompe l’oeil is also much in evidence at the fair. Connecticut gallery Eckert Fine Art has Eric Forstmann’s oil-on-shaped-panel Made Off with the Bail Out Package (2008–09), a depiction of an unwrapped pigeonhole with a crumpled dollar and two pennies inside, which the artist explained is a Madoff-inspired joke, priced at $13,500. Discovery Galleries from Bethesda, Maryland, has walls full of J. Scott Nicol book-spine paintings and prints. Only one painting (at $7,200) remained unsold last night, but the prints were still available for anywhere from $600 to $1,600.

Gallery Henoch has long specialized in this kind of work and at ArtHamptons offers a full range: landscapes by Max Ferguson, figures by Eric Zener and Daniel Greene, still lifes by Olga Antonova and Janet Rickus, and interiors by SungHee Jang. On the other hand, the Eisenhauer Gallery (an Art Hamptons debutant from Martha’s Vineyard) is more focused: Featured artist Michel Brosseau specializes, appropriately enough, in boat sails and other nautical paraphernalia. Prices range from $6,000 to $21,000, with Overlooking New Harbor, for example, priced at $7,000. Gallery director Elizabeth Eisenhauer has come to the fair with an open mind. Asked about her expectations for the weekend, she described herself as simply “curious.”

Art magazine dishes on NYC's biggest collectors

2009-07-08T10:50:00.002-04:00

Aerial view of the Estate of Mitchell Rales

Despite the recession and the collapse of the art market, New York this year has retained—and even added to—its status as the art capital of the world.

More of the world's 200 most active art collectors make their primary residence in New York than in any other city, according to ARTnews magazine.

In its annual list of the top collectors, 37 listed New York as their primary residence, up from 34 last year. More than half, 106, live in the United States.

The list, which is compiled from interviews with collectors, dealers, auctioneers, and museum directors in 22 countries, had 17 new names on it this year. The New York-based newcomers include Alliance Bernstein Chairman Peter Kraus and his wife Jill, and Investor Hubert Neumann.

Out of the Top 10 collectors, five are from the New York metropolitan area. They are Debra and Leon Black; Steven Cohen; Marie-Josee and Henry Kravis; Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder; and Mitchell Rales.

Even though the contemporary art market has taken a hit with the global recession, that segment of the art world continues to be the most popular. Out of the group, 81% collect contemporary art, 34% collect modern art, 9% collect Impressionist art, and 9% collect Old Masters.

The list will appear on newsstands in ARTnews' July 17 summer issue.

Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor

2009-06-25T09:49:00.001-04:00

TITLE: Elizabeth Taylor
ARTIST: Burt Glinn
CATEGORY: Photographs
REGION: American
STYLE: Contemporary (ca. 1945-present)
http://tullaboothgallery.com

Ragellah Rourke - Painter

2009-06-25T09:43:00.000-04:00

Art Review: Locksley Shea Collection in Florida

2009-06-23T18:01:00.003-04:00

With You I Want to Live (2007), by Tracey Emin.

By Emma Trelles
FORT LAUDERDALE -- With You I Want To Live, a pink neon sculpture by British artist Tracey Emin, is a bit of a triple-threat. In its own right, the work reflects Emin’s millennial-tinged obsessions with ardor - its pleasures, its unavoidable pratfalls. She is, after all, also the author of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a pup tent stitched with the 102 names of people she shagged or with whom she simply slumbered.

The piece is also the title of a show, now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale and culled from the private holdings of four South Florida collectors. Scrolled like a quick jot on a notepad, the sculpture suggests this maxim: Why buy something if you’re not smitten with its presence?

Pointing to art as a vehicle for quick and certain profit seems sort of reckless at the moment (not to mention unimaginative), and it’s just not enough to explain our appetite for love affairs, whether they are with man, woman, or the 41 artworks on display and on loan from the collection of art dealers Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea. (A second gathering from The Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Collection is also on exhibit).

Installed in the museum’s second-floor galleries, the Locksley and Shea collection mirrors a 40-year involvement with groundbreaking artists and with a calling that both men find as essential as oxygen.

“I think that the collecting gene begins with necessities. It begins with needing a bowl from which to eat,” says Locksley in a Q&A printed in the exhibition’s catalogue. “The need to have the basic tools to prepare food and to live, which man, by nature, decorates. That evolves into collecting.

“Some people want to possess beauty...,” the 78-year old adds. We want to own it; we need to own it.”

British Phone Booth (2006), by Banksy.

The show is indeed a grand one, housing some of the most important and varied makers of 20th and 21st century art. Whether you love their offerings (Mark Bradford’s collage-and-acrylic homage to the Los Angeles skyline; the spare elegance of Robert Morris’ plywood installation,), or they elicit a response along the lines of “meh” (Damien Hirst’s acid-inspired dot painting; Takashi Murakami’s super-flat ode to Louis Vuitton), most of it holds a place in any thoughtful dialogue about contemporary art.

The show opens with an absorbing study by two young Berlin-based painters, Maike Abetz and Oliver Drescher. Tausend Plateaus is a large-scale acrylic canvas as ambitious as it is delicately rendered.

The picture is stuffed with the iconography of art across the ages and includes the Greek wood-god Pan, the Muses,and medieval gargoyles alongside a riff on da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and a fiery Sacred Heart. With a pair of young lovers at its center and a smattering of Fender guitars, the painting reminded me of the art-pastiche-rock of Sonic Youth, particularly its 1988 release, Daydream Nation, which is similarly frenzied and lush in its attack.

Tausend Plateaus introduces the wide span of aesthetics found within the show’s interiors and illustrates how Locksley and Shea cultivate relationships equally with contemporary masters and up-and-comers. The collectors bought works by Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly, for instance, before anyone took either artist seriously.

Alixa and Naima, by Swoon.

Locksley’s intensely personal relationship with his acquisitions is also evidenced in the rarely seen graphite drawings of Andy Warhol’s flowers, made exclusively for Locksley by the Pop artist in 1975. The collector describes his relationship with Warhol as bizarre in that he would visit the artist at night at his studio on New York’s East 47th Street. There they would chat, alone, with the lights off and Factory denizen Billy Name hiding in a nearby closet.

Some of what’s on deck has never been viewed: a stunning Native American rain wall, comprised of 11 polychrome panels and once owned by Donald Judd, and a hulking mixed-media piece by NewYork street-and-graffiti artist Swoon, which was commissioned exclusively for the exhibit.

Of note are random meditations on the overlooked locales and people of American cities, such as John Sonsini’s vibrant oil portrait of four Mexican day laborers. Despite hints of urban concerns throughout the exhibit, there’s not much of a direct address to thematic unity. The passion for collecting, the show’s chief premise, for example, is never deeply explored through its artworks, and what does appear just seems like a sample of Locksley’s and Shea’s greatest hits.

Grouping works by movement or era - as with the minimalist canvases made by Robert Mangold and Brice Marden in the early 1970s - functions adequately, but a meatier approach would have perhaps assembled motifs such as beauty, and our enthrallment with its presence and its absence.

Also, it must be said, too many lengthy placards explaining the providence of artwork slows things down. Do we really need to read about how the Luo brothers blend old and new Chinese culture when their wood panels clearly mash together tigers, lotus blossoms, Coke cans and Sly Stallone? My guess is no.

Yet these are small gripes, really, because the summer months typically fill South Florida’s galleries with art geared toward schoolchildren or with dull-to-horrid juried exhibitions. It’s a delight to have a show of this caliber to visit, and not just through our heat-crazed season but straight into next spring.

Emma Trelles is an arts and culture writer based in South Florida.

With You I Want to Live: the Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea Collection is on display through March 22, 2010, at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale/Nova Southeastern University. Information: Call 954-525-5500 or visit www.moaflnsu.org.

Time is Money

2009-06-16T13:06:00.003-04:00

THE MOST ENTERTAINING ACTIVITY of the past two weeks, as one raced from Venice to Basel, was comparing the vastly differing points of view over the same subjects. Thanks to globalization, which has multiplied the number of countries and artists represented at the fairs and exhibitions, the most diligent marathon runners (artists, dealers, critics, collectors) ended up a bit confused. They seemed most flustered when it came time for one of their favorite activities: judging. There were no clear standards, and what was “brilliant” to one person proved “disappointing” to another. “Splendid” or “vulgar,” “in” or “out”—comments varied as unpredictably as the weather, which itself oscillated between blinding sunshine and severe downpours.

Last Wednesday evening, when I went to the Basel premiere of “Il Tempo del Postino,” an event held to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the city’s eponymous art fair, someone asked me if I had an extra ticket for “Il Tempo del Cappuccino.” We all could have used some coffee, perhaps, but anyway there was only Moët champagne. “Il Tempo del Postino,” a “group exhibition” that “occupies time rather than space” (a bit like a spectacular variety show) was curated and directed by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno with the help of artists Anri Sala and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and just about everyone and their dealer was in attendance. Those (myself included) who had seen the show’s original premiere at the Manchester International Festival in 2007 were ahead of the others, and I had fun making my neighbors, curator Raimundas Malašauskas and artist Mario García Torres, guess which artist made which work. Some were delighted that Matthew Barney didn’t reproduce the fist-fucking scene that caused such a controversy for the British, while others thought the work had been better with it. (This time, at the end of Barney’s contribution there was only a concert in the lobby performed with a score by Jonathan Bepler.) To keep things exciting, two new works were added to this version of “Il Tempo”: one by Thomas Demand—a projection of a film imitating rain that was “not at all interesting” for some, “absolutely fantastic” for others—and another by Fischli & Weiss featuring their well-known characters, Rat and Bear. For the latter, the pair were represented in child form, and Bear Cub and Baby Rat fiddled with a remote control and closed the stage curtain by accident.

Since the audience consisted exclusively of art enthusiasts, success was guaranteed. The public, moved to ecstasy, shouted for an encore—perhaps the first harmonious opinion this whole trip. All the contemporary art lovers were deliriously happy with Sala’s four geishas, who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly (“Now that’s an opera”), as well as with Doug Aitken’s piece, in which cattle auctioneers dispersed throughout the audience wildly rattled off numbers, their voices coming together in a crescendo of faster and faster bids, while a large onstage screen went from pitch black to bright. Most everyone agreed, too, that the show was very appropriate for a fair and much more inspiring than tiresome talk of a market “return” or “collapse.” After the performance, the artists left for the Schiesser’s, where a dinner had been organized by Fondation Beyeler director (and former Art Basel director) Samuel Keller and press rep Isabela Mora. For those who didn’t attend, the only thing open was a restaurant around the corner serving kebabs, because the three-hour show didn’t end until just before midnight.

Artist Matthew Barney. Right: François-Henry Pinault with Salma Hayek. (Photo: Nicolas Trembley)
It wouldn’t be Basel without a proliferation of parallel fairs, and like musical chairs, Design Miami/Basel found itself plopped in Hall 5 of the city’s Messeplatz convention center. Voltashow, which had once been in Voltaplatz, was moved to the Markthalle, where the Design show used to be; Bâlelatina became the Hot Art fair; Scope moved to the Sportplatz, etc. Along with artist Christian Holstad, I opted to visit the former Wartek beer factory hosting Liste, which has served as the gateway drug to the official fair for the past twelve years. If, at Art Basel, you could find miniature versions of the now-famous installations at the Venice Biennale or the Pinault Foundation (Tomas Saraceno at Tanya Bonakdar, Mike Kelley at Jablonka, Guyton\Walker at Air de Paris, among many others), that’s not quite the case at Liste. This year, as always, some found Liste to be very good, while others complained that the complexity and punk had disappeared. Those who opted to hold solo shows seemed the most satisfied. David Kordansky sold all of Elad Lassry’s photographs as soon as the fair opened, and Overduin and Kite were more than pleased with reactions to Scott Olson’s paintings.

But the art public wasn’t just there for the fairs. The Schaulager, which always organizes a brunch to lure in the famished tourists, this year presented part of the collection of the Kunstmuseum. Most of the works came from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation (to which the Schaulager belongs), and the show got plenty of attention. Public opinion was much less mitigated about these chefs d’oeuvre, and everyone was amazed to discover that all the works, from Hans Holbein to Wolfgang Tillmans, had been purchased as soon as they had been produced. (Holbein was a longtime Basel resident, and the Kunstmuseum has the largest collection of his works in the world.) Danh Vo’s show at the Kunsthalle was a hit, and alternative spaces, such as the one hosted by New Jerseyy, a collective of artists and curators (Daniel Baumann, Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti, and Dan Solbach), also proved very popular. The evening that Ida Ekblad painted a storefront window and Nils Bech sang a cappella on a ladder was a must-attend, as was the launch of Provence, a new magazine about art hobbies produced by a group of young dandies from Frankfurt’s Städelschule.

On Saturday, after all the madness, I made my way to Dinard, in Brittany, where François Pinault was showing yet another part of his collection. (How much remains?) The show, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, couldn’t be more different from the one at the Dogana and Palazzo Grassi. First of all, the Palais des Arts, where it was held, is a much smaller space (eighty-six hundred square feet), and it is designed for a local public that is less accustomed to contemporary art, which can sometimes be rather provocative. One local newspaper ran the headline “A Shocking Exhibition.” Much more intimate, this show, cheekily titled “Who’s Afraid of Artists?,” features seven sections, ranging from “Around Minimalism,” with classics by Flavin, Manzoni, and Agnes Martin, to “Afraid of Death,” with Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture of Pope John Paul II being hit by a meteorite and a series of works by Damien Hirst offering evidence of one of the collector’s obsessions: skulls. Pinault, who has always spoken with pride about his simple Breton origins, was welcomed like a prodigal son by a large crowd of badauds that also came to greet ex-president Jacques Chirac and the actress Salma Hayek, who was beaming and holding the arm of Pinault’s son. Very few gallery owners or artists attended this very personal exhibition, and there was little idle chatter at the opening. It seemed as though the great collector had decided to return to his roots modestly, a (relatively) simple, uncomplicated end to June’s festivities.

— Nicolas Trembley, artforum.com

NEA reports decline in arts audiences for 2008

2009-06-16T13:01:00.002-04:00

Audiences for the arts in the U.S. continue to decline and age at significant rates, according to a report released Monday by the National Endowment for the Arts. But the Internet holds out hope, as more people are going online to experience culture.

Nearly 35% of U.S. adults – or about 78 million people – attended an art museum or an arts performance in 2008, said the report. That's down from about 40% in 1982, 1992 and 2002. In particular, audiences for classical and jazz concerts have declined by double digits since 1982, the most of all the art forms.

Surprisingly, the largest drop in arts consumption comes from people ages 45 to 54, which has traditionally been the most dependable group of arts participants.

The NEA report said that college-educated Americans – including those with graduate degrees – are cutting back on their arts consumption across all forms. Ballet attendance by this demographic has dropped by 43% since 1982.

One optimistic note in Monday's report is the "substantial number" of people going online to experience the arts. Of the adults who went online for any purpose in 2008, approximately 40% used the Internet to view, listen to, download or post artworks or performances. About 30% of adults who use the Internet do so to consume music, theater or dance performances at least once a week. More than 20% go online to view paintings, sculpture, or photography at least once a week.

The NEA's report, which is titled "Arts Participation 2008: Highlights From a National Survey," was conducted in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey has been conducted five times since its inception in 1982 and targets U.S. adults 18 and older on their patterns of arts participation over a 12-month period.

Among the NEA's other findings was a decline in the number of adults creating and performing art. The decline was reported across all art forms, with the exception of the number of adults doing photography, which has increased from 12% in 1992 to 15% in 2008.

A more detailed version of the survey is expected in the fall. More findings from the report include:

-- The U.S. rate of attendance for art museums fell from a high of 26% in 1992-2002 to 23% in 2008, comparable to the 1982 level.

-- Audiences for jazz and classical music are substantially older than before. In 1982, jazz concerts drew the youngest adult audience -- with a median age of 29. In the 2008 survey, the median age of jazz concert-goers was 46, representing a 17-year increase. Since 1982, young adult (18-24) attendance rates for jazz and classical music have declined the most, compared with other art forms.

-- Between 1982 and 2008, attendance at performing arts such as classical music, jazz, opera, ballet, musical theater and dramatic plays has seen double-digit rates of decline.

-- Less-educated adults – those without college degrees – have significantly reduced their already low levels of arts attendance.

Entrance to UAE section at Venice

2009-06-11T10:40:00.003-04:00

VENICE—While the critical orthodoxy holds that the Venice Biennale’s system of national pavilions is a 20th-century relic due for overhaul, the United Arab Emirates pavilion, together with Abu Dhabi’s “platform for visual arts” — both making their debuts in Venice this year — illuminate the continuing relevance and fertile risk of engaging art and culture as tools of nation building. The UAE and its capital, Abu Dhabi, both put on shows that are part old-fashioned World’s Fair–style expos and part art exhibitions — a curatorially incorrect (and therefore exciting) mixture of political boosterism and artistic self-interrogation.

The Abu Dhabi exhibition, mounted by the city’s Authority for Culture and Heritage, is in a warehouse a 10-second boat ride away from the back of the Arsenale. Before you get to the art, you walk through an entry hall emblazoned with intimidatingly huge banners like the ones found everywhere alongside highways in the UAE. They’re both absurd and thrilling in their bombast, advertising the general brilliance of the city and its utopian property developments, undaunted by the economic crisis. One of the banners advertises an apparently solid-gold building as the centerpiece of an unnamed waterfront development in Abu Dhabi, with go-go real-estate sales copy underneath: “Relaxed property laws mean that investors (local and international) keen for a slice of the action are snapping up property in the emirate’s thriving real estate market.”

This is weird to see in what you thought was going to be an art exhibition. A mirror at the end of the space has stuck to it a prophetic text titled “The Future of Culture” (how many nations would dare proclaim such a thing?), with the oxymoronic climax: “New forms have to be invented for our cultural institutions. The more things change, the more they remain the same, only the pace is different.”How are the region’s artists responding to these top-down political, economic, and cultural ambitions? You might expect (and perhaps secretly hope) for them to sign up for the cause in a Socialist Realist or Constructivist manner and launch an exhilarating new political-artistic aesthetic for the 21st century. But unsurprisingly they don’t. The first piece you see is a low-key video by filmmaker Waël Noureddine: He simply points his camera at quotidian street life and presents it more or less unedited. It’s boring, but Noureddine’s insistence on banality might be a minor act of heroism in the heady climate of ubiquitous optimism.

There are also rough and refreshingly un-maudlin portraits of construction workers by Sami Al Turki, and Romantic, desolate photos by Mohammed Kazem of a lone figure with his back to us, gazing at vistas of empty desert dotted with construction work, flags planted next to him in the ground as if he could possibly stake a claim to this rapidly changing territory. Upstairs there’s a room crammed with objects — toys, pots and pans, notebooks — accumulated by Hassan Sharif, another small-scale hero for his insistence on the vernacular rather than the splendid. Sharif is the founder of Dubai’s grass-roots arts hub the Flying House, where his mad collections are archived in full.

While the work is strong, the show’s curator, Catherine David (formerly of Witte de With in Rotterdam and director of Documenta in 1997), has refused any integration or confrontation with the both awkward and stimulating expo context. And so, as good as these artists are, they end up looking like appendages to the exhibition’s main agenda of nation building rather than agents of it. Frankly, the massive posters in the lobby are more aesthetically powerful than any of the art on display.

On the other hand, the UAE pavilion, which is really just a large room in the Arsenale, is confessional and funny about the pressures of national representation. Curator Tirdad Zolghadr immediately confronts us with a corporate-style SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the situation he finds himself in, showcasing both the UAE and its art to the world. His conclusion: “a reasonable measure of self reflexivity” but “no apologetics.”

A quarter of the space is taken up with architectural models of Abu Dhabi’s planned new cultural district, Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness), which are bitterly disappointing responses to the exhibition’s call for “new forms” to be invented for the UAE’s cultural institutions. Instead, we get an elaboration on existing Western models: Frank Gehry gets to build a Guggenheim even wilder than Bilbao, Jean Nouvel has designed an exquisite Middle East outpost for the Louvre, and Zaha Hadid plans a gargantuan performing-arts center that looks like a sleek digital amphibian slithering out of the sea. Not to be outdone, Dubai, too, is planning a “Culture Village,” and UNStudio has designed a Museum of Middle Eastern Modern Art that is so similar to Hadid’s building that you think it must be a deliberate attempt to demystify her virtuosity through repetition.

In contrast to the grandiosity of the Abu Dhabi “platform,” with its big-gun foreign curator, huge space, and aesthetic purity, the emphasis in the UAE pavilion, titled “It's Not You, It's Me,” is on the bottom-up pooling of knowledge and the cultivation of arts infrastructure: Computer stations let you surf the nascent online UAE Art Archive, which showcases the work of national artists, and there’s a video kiosk featuring conversations between cultural policymakers in the UAE.

But the main component of the pavilion is a selection of photographs by the 26-year-old Lamya Gargash. There are maybe a maximum of three types of living situations that we can easily imagine in Dubai through standard media coverage (Simon Jenkins and Germaine Greer in particular are guilty of shockingly lazy stereotypes): the decadent five- (or seven-) star hotel, the ex-pat gated community/compound on an artificial island, and the Dickensian laborers’ camp. Gargash undermines this list with a type of accommodation that doesn’t come so easily to mind: the humble one-star hotel.

Gargash photographs people-less hotel rooms (though she occasionally inserts framed photos of family members), lobbies, and corridors head-on and unemotionally with a medium-format camera, creating a systematic analysis of what usually gets summarily repressed in the official narrative of Dubai, city of wonders: the generic and the banal. We see beds with gaudy purple comforters and white sheets folded crisp and tight and awaiting your arrival, clean tiled floors, tissue dispensers and cushions just so, elaborately folded towels, air-conditioning units, flowers — nothing fancy, but everything pristine.

Her transient hotel rooms might be an update on Bedouin tents as a mode of living. They also reveal the aesthetics of the UAE’s small and hidden lower/middle class, from which an embedded civic society — rather than a get-rich-quick expat commercial zone — will grow. Gargash is a worthy “representative” of her natijavascript:void(0)on, pointing out an optimistic, necessary, and largely ignored “future of culture” in the UAE.

New Culture City being built in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

2009-06-11T10:40:00.001-04:00

Metropolitan Art Advisors art tour at Pace in Chelsea

2009-06-10T14:35:00.004-04:00

Ann Lydecker welcomes the members of 85 Broads and introduces Jay Grimm, Associate Director at Pace Wildenstien Gallery on West 25th St in NYC. This is the first Chuck Close painting and tapestry exhibition in the USA in over four years.

Jack Balas at CTS in Brooklyn

2009-06-10T12:00:00.005-04:00

Jack Balas, Home Run, 2008, oil on canvas, , 32x40in (81x102cm)

Jack Balas is interested in recontextualizing images of men in a variety of emotional, political and stylistic scenarios -- contexts in which they function as everyman, but are more vulnerable than their surface perfection might suggest.

Born in Chicago in 1955, Jack Balas received his BFA and MFA from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship in Painting in 1995. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tucson Museum of Art, among others. A portfolio of his paintings, "Today I Drove Along the Rio Grande," was published in The Paris Review (New York). His most recent museum solo was his 2008 project "We'll Be Seeing You" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.

2009-06-10T11:43:00.001-04:00

Ian Davenport

2009-06-10T11:20:00.002-04:00

Alan Christea Gallery booth: Ian Davenport’s "Etched Lines, Thirty Five" (2009)

John Niero designer of ELLE Chair

2009-06-08T16:59:00.002-04:00

www.justnotnormal.us John and Ann - fast friends - leopard + cougar?

Eric and Julie Zener at Gallery Henoch

2009-06-08T16:53:00.003-04:00

Margaret Lydecker, Founder of Greendrinks.org, Eric Zener www.ericzener.com, Julie Zener and art advisor Ann Lydecker.

Art + Politics mixing

2009-06-08T16:49:00.002-04:00

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom with Ann Lydecker, Founder of Metropolitan Art Advisors at a private party in San Francisco, California.

Sandra Bermudez - "YES" to marriage proposal

2009-06-08T16:25:00.002-04:00

From her blue cloud series she also has similar works "Always" and "Forever"
www.sandrabermudez.com in Miami, Florida

Design Art by Eleanor Lydecker

2009-06-08T15:41:00.001-04:00

Eleanors newest creation - the magnificent shell dresser.
She also designs beautiful shell framed mirrors. For ordering information: www.theysellseashells.com

Bill Rabinovitch

2009-06-08T15:39:00.001-04:00

Metropolitan Art Advisors at Melissa Meyers Studio

2009-06-08T15:05:00.003-04:00

San Francisco Art Galleries bite the dust

2009-06-08T11:28:00.001-04:00

For a while, the economic realities facing the world have been blamed for the decline of the contemporary art market. A surprising outcome of the decline is newfound collaborations among galleries and a fresh willingness from galleries for price transparency. In some cases, the downturn brought misfortune to San Francisco with multiple losses of one fine art gallery after another. Some say this is a natural expectation, and an opportunity for the best to rise resulting from attrition, but the list is surprising. It includes prominent art dealers who have the diminished and seriously downsized their exhibition spaces, or have closed their doors and are lost to the gallery world ether. In alpha, not chron order, some of them are:

ArtWorksSF – Contemporary fine art, mixed media, photograph and performance space moved out of 49 Geary digs to 2861 California Street from which they manage a roster of local café exhibitions as well a portraiture business.

Bucheon – Always edgy and avant garde, the two ladies who ran the scene from the obscure upper Hayes Street in late 1990s, to hip lower Hayes in early 2000s, and final posh space on Grove Street last, are gone. It’s quiet where they were, as their last exhibition announced narrative works by artists Eckhard Etzold, Michael Frerris Jr., Mars-1, Sarah Ratchye, Gordon Henderson, Lordan Bunch, Laurel Connell, Olive Ayhens, Danny Keith, Alex Luke, Megan Wolfe, David Choong Lee, Lucho Pozo, Dan Nicoletta and Christina Empedocles, in a large show for such a small space. The show was extended, and some gallery alumnae have been redistributed, and welcomed with alacrity, by Mark Wolfe Contemporary, for example.

Cain SchulteCain Schulte Gallery – With a consistently critical schedule of exhibitions, the gallery that morphed in 2006 out of Michael Martin’s space on Townsend and 3d Street by it’s two partners, Marina Cain and Kit Schulte, has moved to 714 Guerrero Street. Continuing to support its artists and clients with a full schedule of privately run home-based exhibitions and events, Cain Schulte representing contemporary artists from the United States and Europe with a focus in painting, the gallery promises to consistently participate in national and international art fairs. The word is that Kit’s established a gallery in Berlin, as Marina continues the business privately while seeking better digs. Go, Cain Schulte! You give galleries a good name.

Don SokerDon Soker Contemporary Art bode farewell to the 49 Geary community with a small reception hosted by Claire Carlevaro of Art Exchange Gallery this March. A beloved gentleman gallerist, the word is that he’s gone to private consulting while his website states an upcoming inaugural exhibition at an immense new space somewhere in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. A standout presenter with a good eye for solid relevant artworks, this will be something to look forward to.

Oakland’s Esteban Sabar closed his gallery last August, another casualty. Just two years after its opening, and one year after its initial foray into Art Miami|Basel scene, the gallery is gone. The initial controversy generaged by the new rush of 20 something hipsters that 'invaded' and discovered Oakland’s downtown overnight wasn’t enough to support an established ‘art scene.’ Its owner, Esteban Sabar, earned respect with disarming charm and the sort of unabashed honesty one rarely encounters regularly in the art world, whatever corner of it you find yourself in. Flamboyant, garrulous, friendly, and possessed with unique talents, Sabar is silent these days. I hope it won’t be for long as his program was so far out it was fun and refreshing.

Gallery 415’s focus on Latin American artists moved out of its 49 Geary home to the heart of the Mission District. While this seems apropos given the large Hispanic community that considers the Mission its home, the rest of us are probably envious of the unique opportunity to present from the growing importance of the newest group of artists: the San Francisco Mission School. While the gallery’s owner, Claudine intends to focus on private art consulting at her new location, it’s probable that she will continue to champion artwork by emerging and mid career Latin American artists, in step with the recent focus on Latin America, as well as the growth of affluence and desire to invest by the American-born Hispanic community. Luckily, growth in Latin American art, artists and collectors, is not just a blip on the radar anymore, as Art Basel at Miami has certainly made things much more accessible! New address: 622 - 27th Street, San Francisco.

Hacket-Freedman, another Hayes Valley alum, closed its doors as of May 1. Founded in 1986, by Michael Hackett and Tracy Freedman, the gallery offered a select inventory of 20th-century and contemporary painting and sculpture, with a particular focus on postwar American and Californian art; the established partnership specialized in represented contemporary realism, including the estate of David Park. One partner if off to the wilds of private consulting, while the other will manage the rest of the collection, I’ve heard.

Hang Art introduced a novel approach to buying art in the late 1990s with its clear and published business structure. Using a happy formula for emerging artists with non-wavering price formulas that are client-friendly too (their website states they show artwork under $200!). The gallery showcases works by emerging artists and features a list of ‘staff picks’ and actively promotes affordable artworks to a broad collector base. On May 1, Hang Art downsized to one exhibition space at 567 Sutter Street. Smart move.

Octavia’s Haze – Sometime in 2008, painter James Michalopoulos began to show his work exclusively at the space developed by Michael Melampy. The cleverly-named gallery showed glass objects and vessels on the corner of, ahem, Octavia and Hayes Streets from about 1999 to 2008. Now co-mingled on lower Hayes Street with another shop, and while the name doesn’t seem as apt or clever as it was at its old space, they seem to be continue a brisk trade in hand blown glass vessels with their new partners.

Reaves Gallery – Sharon Reaves, artist mentor turned art dealer, took her emerging artist business from the Castro to a beautiful space on Gough Street. A year later (actually just a week or so ago) and according to its website, the gallery is gone for rebranding, and its website now features the Reaves Collection. Sharon tells me she’s gone for the opportunity of a lifetime in NYC. Lifetime opportunities are good. Loud applause.

871 Fine Arts – Fine art book, posters, artists books and other ephemera moved out of 49 Geary next to Crown Point Press on Hawthorne Lane. Quiet move, not much fanfare, in fact hardly any, as former clients still come by looking for it.

Weinstein Gallery – This powerhouse gallery showing modern works by Chagall, Miro, and Picasso, as well as uber-pricey glass sculptures by Christopher Reis, closed its Grant Street space to consolidate with its posh mega space on the corner of Powell and Geary Streets last week.

Wow. That’s quite a list. Oh, I forgot, there’s another casualty - what about the quiet-made-quite-public-furor over the tenured staff slash and burn at SF’s venerable San Francisco Art Institute... in the name of the economy, etc. Oh well, so much for San Francisco’s fame as an art vanguard.Micaela Gallery

We San Franciscans are fortunate to still have a couple of galleries left, and hope to benefit from a couple of surprising moves. Altman|Siegel’s directors came west as they grew out of gallery experiences in NYC and moved in to 49 Geary, Jack Fischer moved out of his exciting mini gallery into Don Soker’s window-lit space and is rockin’ San Francisco. Micaela moved her glass sculpture and media arts out of Hayes Valley (and hopes the move was not jinxed by the Hayes Valley kiss of death) and into ArtWorkSF’s space, also at 49 Geary, and painter-turned-gallerist George Lawson opened up Room for Painting Room for Paper next door to Micaela.
For those that are gone, we hope it’s farewell but not goodbye. For those that reduced their efforts and await the economy to rebound, and for the rest of us, long live contemporary fine art in San Francisco!

Ed Adler - urban cowboy painter

2009-06-08T10:54:00.005-04:00

Molly Barnes brown bag lunches at Roger Smith Hotel

2009-06-08T10:45:00.002-04:00

The Show Might Not Go On

2009-06-08T10:35:00.001-04:00

The global financial meltdown is taking a toll on art exhibitions, with at least 20 big shows having been canceled or postponed this year and next.

The situation seems grimmer in North America than in Europe, since U.S. museums typically are more reliant on private sector funding than their Continental counterparts. With shareholders suffering, companies are under intense pressure to cut costs for such things as sponsorships, while foundations have seen the values of their portfolios crumble, limiting their ability to finance projects.

One of the hardest-hit institutions has been the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has lost at least three major shows. But even though American museums are bearing the brunt of recessionary pressures, the effect is being felt abroad since many traveling exhibitions rely on making stops in the United States to recoup their costs.

Read more at the Art Newspaper.

The first museum survey of one of the most influential street artists of our time

2009-06-04T10:35:00.002-04:00

Metropolitan Art Advisors rate this artist a BUY!
ICA Boston nailed it. Worth the trip to Boston from out of state.
A 2009 version of Warhol meets Banksy meets Russian and Chinese communistic aesthetics?

From humble beginnings as a defiant, skateboard-obsessed art student pasting homemade stickers, Shepard Fairey has developed into one of the most influential street artists of our time. Despite breaking many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture, his work is now seen in museums and galleries, as well as the worlds of graphic design and signature apparel. His multi-faceted, open-ended and generous artistic practice actively resists categorization. Building off of precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Fairey shifts easily between the realms of fine, commercial, and even political art.

Fairey's multi-layered renderings of counter-cultural revolutionaries and rap, punk and rock stars, as well as updated and re-imagined propaganda-style posters, carry his signature graphic style, marked by his frequent use of black, white, and red. Recently, his portrait of Barack Obama, a ubiquitous sight on the campaign trail, drew a new level of attention to the artist's work and was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, for its collection.

Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand traces the development of the artist's career, from the earliest Obey imagery through his latest efforts, and includes screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal, and canvas. The artist is also creating a new mural for the ICA and public art works at sites around Boston.

Unica Zurn at Drawing Center

2009-06-01T10:34:00.002-04:00

The black-and-white photographs of Unica Zürn’s body—bound by string, coiled, and reduced to a sack of bulbous flesh—are some of Hans Bellmer’s most admired works and, until recently, her mere cameo in art history’s canon. As a remedial course, perhaps, this elegant show offers a bounty of Zürn’s automatic drawings, a few shimmering paintings, and some brilliant pieces of her writing (for which she is most regarded). Although it reprises themes set forth in Ubu Gallery’s similar 2005 show, the Drawing Center exhibition thoughtfully and tenderly examines her short career and mental illness without didactically trying to “rediscover” her and without mythologizing her suicide at age fifty-four or her interest in sadomasochism. The tranquil sea-blue walls and the thick black frames here temper the hotness of these issues, and so do the sweet, nearly oceanic and biomorphic forms in her finely detailed renderings. These creatures hover at the center of her pages, bearing multiple countenances, breasts, limbs, and orifices, though, unlike a Bellmer "Poupeé," rarely do Zürn’s striations recall actual bodies. Instead, forty-nine mostly untitled works here offer roving, repetitive deviations: delicate lines, smudged ink, and twisting spirals appear as faces, then just shapes, and finally as faces, again, through an echolike effect. Intense and otherworldly, they offer a window into a mind that contemporary artists––particularly those invested in psychedelic motifs––should investigate. For some, her work might feel like the sun against their eyes; for others, a beacon in the distance.— Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Sophie Calle at Paula Cooper Gallery 534 W 21st St NY

2009-06-01T10:18:00.006-04:00

Widely popular at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself––on view in the United States for the first time––recontextualizes an agonizingly ambiguous letter the artist received from a lover concluding their relationship. Although the misery ensuing from breakups has been explored in cultural venues low and high, Take Care of Yourself combines this common theme with pointed and intelligent thematic allusions to issues ranging from gender to seriality. Concluding a winding explanation of the relationship’s dissolution, Calle’s former lover, whom she renames X, implores her to “take care of yourself.” To better understand these words, the artist distributed the letter to 107 women differing extensively in age and profession, asking each to offer some interpretation or advice.

Semantically deconstructing a statement that most would gloss over with emotion, Take Care of Yourself draws heavily on Calle’s noted documentary and conceptual practice. The walls in the main gallery are covered, from floor to ceiling, with each woman’s name, profession, and photograph while reading the letter, as well as the work produced. Each result highlights a different facet of the text, inviting reconsideration of both words and the experiences they signify. In one example, a translator considers X’s odd choice of the formal French vous (you) over the more familiarized tu, suggesting the underlying meaning of a seemingly minor decision. In another especially poignant piece, Calle sits in a chair next to the letter and addresses a family mediator’s inquiries. The mediator’s thorough questioning forces the artist to assume both passive and active roles, ultimately resulting in a cathartic meditation on the boundaries of personal experience. — Britany Salsbury

Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African-American Art

2009-06-01T10:14:00.004-04:00

William Henry Johnson (1901–1970), Ice Cream Stand, ca. 1939–42, Courtesy of Landau Traveling Exhibitions

The works of more than 50 African-American artists from the late 1800s to the present will be on view at the Amon Carter Museum from June 6 through August 23, 2009, in the special exhibition The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African-American Art: Works on Paper. The Kelley collection is one of the most esteemed private collections of African-American art, and the special exhibition features more than 90 works on paper by artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, William H. Johnson, Alison Saar and Charles White.

Two significant eras are the focus of the exhibition: the 1930s and 1940s, a period which saw the birth of African-American regionalism, and the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the rise of politically motivated and African-inspired themes; subjects range from racism and its related hardships to family, music and religion.

“An array of fascinating, vivid imagery makes this exhibition particularly compelling,” says Jane Myers, senior curator of prints and drawings. “Virtually every work clearly emanates from the artists’ own powerful, personal narrative.”

The Kelleys have been collecting art since the mid-1980s, when they saw the exhibition Hidden Heritage: Afro-American Art, 1800–1950 at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Realizing they did not recognize any of the artists’ names, they vowed to educate themselves about this aspect of their heritage and built a collection to advance the legacy of African-American art.

“We are delighted the Amon Carter Museum has chosen to host this exhibition,” Harmon Kelley says. “Placing our drawings and prints in the context of the museum’s rich holdings of American art is a wonderful and unique opportunity.”

Concurrent to this exhibition, the one-gallery exhibition African-American Art: Selections from the Amon Carter Museum’s Collection is on view. This exhibition showcases some of the museum’s landmark prints and drawings from the same era as those in the Kelley show. Artists featured include Charles Alton, Grafton Tyler Brown, Elizabeth Catlett, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, William E. Smith, Dox Thrash, Charles White and John Wilson.

Glen Baldridge at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Brooklyn

2009-05-25T09:55:00.004-04:00

Get out your Prozac -