The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Photo via Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan.com

According to the Daily Mail, Damien Hirst, the most famous of the original YBAs, has snapped up one of London’s “grandest” homes for a reported £34 million ($57 million). The five story property, designed by architect John Nash, is described as “a stunning example of Regency architecture.” It was put on the market last year though it is believed that Hirst may have paid well above the listed price of £34 million, the report states.

The former enfant terrible is planning an extensive renovation of the property. The latest acquisition confirms his position as the “world’s most financially successful artist.” Hirst, who has a fortune of $369 million according to the story, already has an extensive real estate portfolio, including his main residence in North Devon, set on 24 acres. He also owns Toddington Manor, a 19th-century estate that has 300 rooms. Hirst’s tastes in property match his standing in the art market; he tops the artnet News list of the ten most expensive living British artists. In 2007 his cabinet Lullaby Spring sold for $19.2 million at Sotheby’s London.

Perhaps Hirst took a cue from top-selling American artist Jeff Koons, who is currently building his own mega-mansion on the Upper East Side. Hirst’s new digs have an “imposing” set of Greek pillars and a a frieze on the main structure. It was previously owned by Anne Van Lanschot, heir to a Dutch banking family. Princess Diana was reportedly a guest on at least one occasion.

The Daily Mail story calls Hirst’s acquisition his “new masterpiece” and points out “Shark tank not included,” a reference to his most famous work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), which Hirst created and sold to mega-collector Charles Saatchi for a reported £50,000. It was later sold to hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen for a price said to be around $8 million and loaned to the Metropolitan Museum—though only after Hirst swapped out the rotting original shark for a fresher specimen.

Hundreds of miles of rope transform park into work of art.

OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA.- It was Oklahoma’s wide open spaces and famous red dirt that inspired New York artist Orly Genger to envision her latest rope sculpture “Terra.” Now the artist is building her massive art in Oklahoma City on October 20 to be the first installation on the future home of the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center.

Made of 1.4 million feet of recycled lobster-fishing rope, and painted with 350 gallons of terra cotta colored paint, “Terra” will weave its way through the center section of Campbell Park, located at NW 11th and Broadway. The installation opens Monday, October 20, 2014, and runs through October, 2015.

“When visiting Oklahoma I was taken by the vastness of the open landscape and envisioned a line that would travel in a continual motion winding through the patch of land on which the work sits,” said Genger. The artist said the term “red dirt” inspired her color choice, “which relates both to the clay-like nature of the earth, and to the bricks with which we build walls.”

Dubbed the “rope wrangler”, Genger hand knits and shapes hundreds of miles of discarded lobster rope into massive sculptures that traverse the space and incorporates the piece into the landscape. Her art encourages visitors to explore the terrain in a new way and interact with the larger-than-life pieces.

Since 2005, Genger has completed several large-scale installations featuring colorful masses of hand-knotted rope. These include “Red, Yellow and Blue” in Madison Square Park, New York City and deCordova Sculpture Park in Boston and most recently, “Current” in Austin, Texas.

The artist’s transformation of discarded rope and its homage to Oklahoma is a fitting way to mark Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center’s move to downtown Oklahoma City. The center is moving from its longtime location on the state fairgrounds and building a new arts campus on a previously vacant lot at NW 11th and Broadway.

“I'm honored to be the first artist to exhibit near the future site of Oklahoma Contemporary,” said Genger. “This is an exciting time for the organization and for Oklahoma City; it's energizing to be a part of it.”                  

Despite setbacks that threatened its existence, part of his dream has now been realized. Last year, Mass MoCA attracted a record 162,000 visitors. It adds more than $20 million a year to the regional economy, including the businesses that rent its surplus space, according to the Center for Creative Community Development at Williams College. And it has become a model for hundreds of other localities hoping to use culture as an economic driver.

“Mass MoCA has become a really important asset in North Adams,” said Jamie Bennett, executive director of ArtPlace America, which awards grants to encourage such “creative placemaking” pursuits around the country.

Ripe for growth, Mass MoCA will now spread into nearly all corners of its 26-building campus. It will double its exhibition space to 260,000 square feet — more than DIA:Beacon’s 240,000 square feet in Beacon, N.Y., and just shy of the total gallery space at the sprawling Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

But the expansion will again test Mass MoCA, which has teetered several times before and since its opening in 1999. Most notably, the museum brushed with financial disaster in 2006, thanks to the exploding costs of a vast, unfinished installation by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. It blew past its $165,000 limit to about $385,000, driving the budget “to the brink,” Mr. Thompson said, when Mass MoCA had no endowment and no cash reserve. An ensuing dispute — Mr. Büchel charged that Mass MoCA had mismanaged the project and had allowed some people to see the work before completion, while the museum called his demands unreasonable and said he had abandoned the project — landed in court, and though the parties eventually settled, both sullied their reputations in the process.

Since then, in some eyes, Mass MoCA has lost some of its appetite for risk. The expansion conceived by Mr. Thompson, aside from putting new pressure on the museum’s small staff, $7 million annual budget and minuscule $3 million endowment (plus $12 million in reserves), may further challenge the museum’s stated identity as “an experimental platform for art making.” His plans call for Mass MoCA to devote half its exhibition space to art that already exists.

By the time it opened, Mass MoCA had already evolved from its initial conception as a visual arts museum. After listening to donors and neighboring institutions like the Jacob’s Pillow dance center, Mr. Thompson added performing arts to the mix. The museum devotes “a full 50 percent of our curatorial and financial and emotional bandwidth to the performing arts,” he said, from the Bang on a Can contemporary music festival to performances by Don Edwards, the cowboy poet. They appeal, in particular, to local audiences.

More recently, alongside new works by artists like Teresita Fernández and Darren Waterston, both now on view, Mr. Thompson has added galleries for works by contemporary masters. It started with a 25-year renewable venture with the Yale University Art Gallery that brought 105 of Sol LeWitt’s large-scale wall drawings to Mass MoCA, uniting them in one spot for the first time on nearly an acre of wall space.

When the installation opened in 2008, Holland Cotter of The New York Times called the setting “close to perfect.” For Mass MoCA, it was also close to a permanent collection, which it lacks. “Before that, everything we did changed every year, and when you change shows, the cupboard may be bare,” Mr. Thompson said.

One day last month, he showed off a second semi-permanent installation, which opened last September: three massive works by Anselm Kiefer borrowed from the Hall Art Foundation and installed in a renovated water tank building. The foundation paid for the revamping of the building, landscaping and most of the increased operating costs.

“We would never have done it ourselves,” Mr. Thompson said. “We focus on emerging and midcareer artists who want to make something large, and we like to fabricate the art with them. Kiefer has his own studio and doesn’t need our help. But he found the spaces here to be very compelling.”

Together, the LeWitt and Kiefer exhibitions have muddied Mass MoCA’s profile as a presenter of experimental art. Much of the public comes to see them. It was the Kiefer opening and the display of Xu Bing’s “Phoenix,” two gigantic birds made of detritus, that pushed 2013’s attendance far above the more typical 120,000 visitors.

Critical reaction has been split. “Christoph Büchel dragged Mass MoCA’s name through the mud, but it still has a significant reputation,” said Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. “They are as interested in exploring the fringe and what’s new as most significant contemporary art museums are in this country.”

But some curators at those museums, while declining to speak on the record for collegial reasons, disagree. Among the words they used to describe Mass MoCA’s curatorial program are “less ambitious than it once was,” “more middlebrow” and “gun shy.”

Michael Darling, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, noted, though, that since the recession, many museums have focused more on artists with name recognition. “There’s more wariness about taking on something too new or too experimental among us, including Mass MoCA,” he said.

Still, the artists Mass MoCA have selected credit it for allowing experimentation. Mr. Waterston, a painter, was invited to use a large wall as his canvas. Instead, he proposed “a much more ambitious project, on a very different scale, requiring more resources and more space,” he said. “I was responding to the nature of Mass MoCA,” he added, “and the kind of projects it is known for, projects that otherwise would never be realized.”

The work he created, “Filthy Lucre,” is a reimagining of James McNeill Whistler’s masterpiece of lavish decoration, “Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room,” which was the subject of a major row in 1876 between Whistler and a Liverpool patron over style, content and money. Mr. Waterston concocted it as a dramatic ruin: warped bookcases, overturned ceramics, a melting mural. The favorable review in The Boston Globe said that the work “ghoulishly satirizes the extreme wealth exemplified by Gilded Age industrialists, and draws a clear line to today’s 1 percent, buyers who snap up wildly expensive art on a whim and drive an overheated market.” “Filthy Lucre” will travel next year to the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, which owns Whistler’s “Peacock Room.”

Mr. Waterston praised the “incredible range of skills” of the artisans that Mass MoCA employs, who were key in its fabrication. “Even a huge institution like the Smithsonian could never have done it,” he said. “And it completely set me on a whole other trajectory. I’m not just a painter anymore.”

Performers like David Byrne have also used Mass MoCA as a petri dish. Citing Mr. Byrne’s “Here Lies Love,” his musical about Imelda Marcos, as an example, Mr. Thompson said, “David called and asked to work out aspects of it here,” which led to a five-night run there in June 2012.

Will the expansion swamp that identity? It calls for little change in space and budget for performing and homegrown visual arts programs (music, dance and theater festivals, as well as six or seven special exhibitions a year). Instead, the 120,000 square feet of new gallery space will be filled with installations like Mr. Kiefer’s.

Mr. Thompson is talking with four potential partners — artists, foundations and collectors — and he insists that these deals, with most expenses paid by the partner, are a strength, not a weakness. “There are enough institutions that program their own voice,” he said. “Multiple voices, sometimes contrary voices, strike me as more interesting.”

Undoubtedly, state officials were encouraged to ante up for the expansion by this low-risk formula and North Adams’s striking unemployment rate. Before Mass MoCA opened, it was seven times the state average, and at 8.1. percent this June, it was still higher than the 5.5 percent state rate. A bigger Mass MoCA, according to its own projections, is likely to draw 185,000 visitors a year, with many expected to linger in the area, spending money in hotels, restaurants and stores.

Imitators might find that Mass MoCA’s experience is not easily replicated, however. It started out with two undeniable assets: excess space, about 90 percent of which is now leased, and its location in the Berkshires, a summer tourist destination full of cultural assets, like the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art, both nearby in Williamstown. The three museums have benefited from “extraordinary synergy,” says Michael Conforti, director of the Clark, enhanced at times by joint ticketing. On July 4, the Clark opened expanded galleries, and once Mass MoCA grows, officials hope that day-trippers will become overnighters.

To complete Mr. Thompson’s plan, Mass MoCA must raise $30 million from private donors, about half for the museum’s endowment. “The expansion is unquestionably good for the region and the community; the challenge is to pull it off,” said Stephen C. Sheppard, director of Williams’s Center for Creative Community Development. “They will need to connect with people who share their vision and who’ll support it.”

State money will allow the expansion to begin, with the opening of new spaces, if all goes quickly, in 2016 — 30 years after Mass MoCA was proposed.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Warrior” had a rapid turnover at auctions. Credit Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In one striking example, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Warrior” sold three times at auction between 2005 and 2012, the painting’s price soaring during those seven years by 450 percent, to nearly $9 million.

In another, at Christie’s this May, an Alex Israel sky painting drew over $1 million, more than 10 times what paintings from this series fetched when they were created less than two years ago.

Such soaring prices and quick resales, especially of work by emerging artists, have fueled a perception that a new breed of collectors, fond of flipping art as they would a stock, have overtaken the market. In this view, widely held in the art world, work once valued for its lofty, aesthetic appeal has become a mere commodity, just another asset class for hedge-fund millionaires and others to cash in.

But separate statistical analyses conducted for The New York Times by two companies that specialize in evaluating art market data indicate that the hand wringing may be premature.

Yes, for the past few years, postwar and contemporary art has been reselling at auction faster than, say, a decade ago, the data show. But the pace last year was only slightly faster than it was in the mid-1990s, signaling that the reselling may be just the latest iteration of a historical cycle, not a lasting change.

A Quick Turnover? Nothing New

Art has turned over more quickly in recent years, according to an analysis by Tutela Capital, a firm that tracks auction sales. But the trend is not unprecedented — contemporary and postwar artwork that was resold in 2013 was owned for an average of 3.1 years, compared with 3.6 years in 1995.

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Average number of years a contemporary or postwar artwork was owned before being resold at auction

6 YEARS

4

2

0

’96

’98

’00

’02

’04

’06

’08

’10

’12

YEAR OF AUCTION

After a few years, during which the pace of reselling accelerated, the data show that owners of postwar and contemporary works are holding onto their artwork longer again. “After all I had read about flipping, when looking at the market itself, it’s really business as usual,” said Fabian Bocart, a founder of Tutela Capital S.A., a consultancy in Brussels that prepared one of the analyses for The Times.

“Reselling art at auction is not a new phenomenon,” he wrote in the report, “or at least, not very different from what has existed since 1995.”

At the request of The Times, Tutela Capital and Beautiful Asset Advisors, a New York company best known for its Mei Moses family of indexes, reviewed art market data from 1995 through 2013 to see if there had been a noticeable shortening in the time owners held onto art. The discussion of the issue has largely focused on the postwar and contemporary markets, where there is the perception that a commodities trading approach has become prevalent. This view has been fueled by a drumbeat of headlines about flipping; the emergence of companies like ArtRank, which give “buy” and “sell” ratings for works; and the high profile of collectors who buy pieces by new artists in bulk and sell them for a handsome profit.

“Many buyers today seem eager to buy the ‘new kid on the block’ — the hot, young, talked-about artist — for a low price and, in a short time, put the work up for sale, anticipating to receive a multiple of what they paid,” said Angela Westwater of the Sperone Westwater gallery.

At Israel Lund’s New York solo debut in June 2013, for example, an untitled yellow-and-gray painting sold for $7,500; this May it sold for $125,000 at Christie’s. Similar examples abound for recently created works by artists like Lucien Smith and Oscar Murillo.

But the data indicate that contemporary works appearing at auction within three years of their creation are not coming to auction faster than in the past, and that such flipping remains very much the exception, not the rule. Though more works come up for sale each year, the percentage of these works was essentially the same last year, less than 2 percent, as in 2007, Tutela Capital found.

Beautiful Asset did another review of the art market, using a different measure, and reached a similar conclusion: While, historically, the percentage of works resold within five years is higher now than it was, say, two decades ago, that percentage has been decreasing since 2008.

“It reached a high right before and after the financial crisis,” said Michael Moses, a founder of Beautiful Asset, “and it has been declining since.”

Beautiful Asset tracks sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which by themselves account for about three-quarters of the value of the auction market worldwide but a smaller amount of the volume. Tutela Capital collects data from more than 2,500 auction houses. Both use the provenances supplied at the time of auction to track prior sales of a work, including those, in the case of Beautiful Asset, that occur at houses where data are not routinely collected.

The analysts’ methodologies were reviewed by two experts, Stephen T. Ziliak, professor of economics at Roosevelt University, and Alan F. Karr, director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Both experts found the methods sound.

“Ultimately, I think the market is reassuringly stable,” said Thomas Galbraith, the managing director of auctions at Paddle8, an online auction house. He said the scourge of the speculative investor has long haunted the art market.

“If it’s not the hedge funds or venture capitalists, then in the ’80s it was the Japanese,” he said. “And if it wasn’t them, then, at the turn of the century, it was American industrialists. It’s a cycle, it’s repeating, and in a way it’s very reassuring. I don’t think it’s something that we necessarily need to be frightened of, because we’ve seen this story before.”

Some of the fuss over flipping is related to its reputation as a vulgar way to collect art. Old World moneyed families were often embarrassed to be seen selling things, veteran dealers said, and galleries have long frowned on flipping. Wanting to control the market for their artists, dealers prefer to sell to collectors who will hold onto their purchases, worried that, while frequent resales may boost prices initially, they can hurt an artist’s staying power and ultimately devalue artwork.

Artists said that frequent resales of their works can generate creativity-stifling pressure to produce more of the same to feed the market. And the pace can be unsettling, even if prices rise in the short term.

From 2006 to 2007, Peter Doig’s painting “White Canoe” sold twice, drawing about $10 million at auction the second time around, the most paid for one of his works at the time.

“I was very nervous” after the sale, Mr. Doig said in an interview from his home in Trinidad. “I felt that things would change for me, that people would talk about that rather than the work.”

“It made it more difficult to paint for me,” he added. “I became more cynical. I just wondered why I was doing it: ‘Am I doing it to make rich people richer?’ ”

“White Canoe” had initially been sold at auction in 2006 by the prominent art collector Charles Saatchi — one of seven Doig paintings he sold through Sotheby’s that year. Mr. Doig said he was among the artists who had stopped selling to Mr. Saatchi because of his reputation for pumping and then dumping artwork.

“Everybody knows that’s what he does,” Mr. Doig said.

But if Mr. Saatchi is a flipper, he certainly does not embrace the title. In an article he wrote for The Guardian in 2011, he excoriated newcomers who he said had changed the culture of collecting.

“Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar,” he wrote. “It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.”

The data analyses, however, indicate that, although such collectors may be conspicuous, they are not yet commonplace.

Beautiful Asset found that contemporary and postwar artworks resold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s last year had been held by their owners an average of 11.2 years, the highest level in six years and a reflection of behavior similar to that exhibited in the late 1990s.

Major auction houses said they had not performed calculations to test the flipping thesis but said they believed the prevalence of that buying behavior had been overstated. “The speculative art buyer, or ‘flipper,’ motivated purely by short-term investment potential, is the anomaly in our experience,” Christie’s said in a statement.

One factor that slows collectors who might be interested in flipping art is the size of the fees they pay auction houses to purchase a work. Someone, for example, who has bid $1 million for a painting is typically charged another $205,000 in fees, known as the buyer’s premium. So the art has to be held long enough to appreciate and cover those costs, a situation not unlike that faced by homeowners when calculating whether it makes sense to refinance, given the closing costs.

Mr. Bocart of Tutela Capital said that people alarmed by changes in the art market might be reading too much into the idea that a new breed of collectors is transforming the culture.

“They see bankers and hedge-fund managers coming into the market, and they have a preconceived idea of what they will do,” he said. “But they’re not the rogues or vultures they imagine.”       

George Lindemann Journal - "Taking Wing in a Time of Extremis" @nytimes By HOLLAND COTTER

Jim Hodges’s Emotional Palette

CreditStewart Cairns for The New York Times

BOSTON — In the 21st century, we tend to talk about new art in terms of medium and style: Performance is back, painting is back, Pop is back, and so on. But for roughly a decade, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, the emphasis was on ideas and emotions. As racial and gender politics navigated the culture wars, and the toll taken by AIDS grew overwhelming, content often trumped form. In a lesson learned from feminism, personal history and feeling were O.K. Even spirituality, which the New York art world handles with tongs, became an admissible subject.

Jim Hodges’s career as an artist began in that in-extremis time. Mr. Hodges was shaped by it and helped shape the art that came out of it. Gay, raised Roman Catholic, living in the AIDS war zone that was New York City, he favored craft-based forms, ephemeral and found materials, and images — flowers, butterflies — traditionally associated with mortality and transience. You’ll find all of this in “Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take,” a taut career survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art here. You’ll also find work that expands beyond the historical moment to which this artist is usually critically confined.

Mr. Hodges was born in Spokane, Wash., in 1957, studied art in regional schools and graduated with an M.F.A. in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1986. At that point, he lost interest in painting, a shift that seems more or less to have coincided with his coming out. He says in the catalog interview that he was “lost in the hugeness of painting,” was unable to find a singular voice in it. And he needed that voice urgently. He was changing, and so was the subculture he was now fully part of. Both were under serious threat.

Some of the earliest things in the show are experiments in addressing these realities. For the 1989 piece called “Deformed,” he sliced a scuffed-up Bonwit Teller shopping bag along its seams, splayed it out and pinned it to the wall to form a cross. The bag itself carried some gay coding: Andy Warhol had once designed window displays for this women’s department store. The cross has an obvious religious connotation but also suggests a medical emblem, the Red Cross. The bunches of violets printed on the bag (not pansies, as they are identified in a wall label) become both floral tributes and funeral bouquets.

A small 1993 collage, made from store-bought plastic decals, of an eagle descending among butterflies was intended as a homage to a friend, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS three years later. (In 2008 Mr. Hodges turned the collage image into a large stained-glass sculpture, also in the show.) And a 1992 installation called “What’s Left” was conceived with his own possible demise in mind.

It consists of a pile of his clothes — jeans, shoes, briefs, black leather belt — lying on the gallery floor as if dropped in a quick undressing, for sleep, for sex, for a shower. The impression of spontaneity is countered, though, by an additional element: a spider web, woven from fine metal chains, that stretches over the pile, implying that the wearer had long since vanished.

Over the years, Mr. Hodge’s work has been routinely identified, and sometimes dismissed, as a lament over AIDS, but this is not his only subject. Childhood is another. “Good Luck,” from 1987, is nothing more than a black wool ski mask cut open and flattened out. Hung high on a wall, it peers down, scary-funny, like a Halloween spook.

The tall curtain of stitched-together nylon, chiffon and silk headscarves called “Here’s Where We Will Stay” (1995) is an elegant shout-out to his mother and grandmother, who taught him to sew. It also evokes a gay kid’s captivation with the hidden world of delicate fabrics stored away in his mother’s scented bureau drawers. And the mnemonic power of scent itself summons the presence of Mr. Hodge’s own mother in an installation he made after her death in 2006.

Called “The Dark Gate,” it’s a big walk-in, sepulcherlike wooden box encasing a circle of sharp steel spikes. Each spike is meant to suffuse the air with his mother’s favorite perfume and the scent that Mr. Hodges was wearing the day she died. The piece is overdetermined to the point of heaviness (and I picked up no trace of a scent). But as part of a larger idea of recapturing childhood, and the sting of seductions and losses that start early and never really stop, it makes sense.

A decade earlier, the artist had, in a roundabout way, returned to painting, or something like it. In 1997 he glued a mirror to a canvas, smashed it with a hammer and exhibited the cracked results. Thereafter, he created a more controlled fracture effect by piecing together small squares of mirrored glass into mosaic panels. These panels reappear here and there in the galleries, refracting light, disco ball fashion, and creating distorted images of quite different works from other decades.

The curators — Jeffrey Grove of the Dallas Museum of Art, Olga Viso of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Anna Stothart of the Institute of Contemporary Art — have arranged the show by theme rather than date, a good idea. This gives the episodic visual texture of Mr. Hodges’s career a sense of consistency, which, indeed, it has. The natural world, it turns out, is a binding presence through 30 years. It’s there early, and gently, in the flowers and butterflies, and dramatically — operatically, even — in “Untitled (One Day It All Comes True),” finished last year: a mural-size picture of a roiling cloudscape embroidered entirely from thousands of scraps of blue denim.

What, exactly, are we seeing? Nuclear clouds or Constable clouds? End times or a universe coming, Romantically, into being? Much of Mr. Hodges’s art walks an anxious line between fatalism and uplift. He seems to be, by temperament, a mourner, but one with edges and elbows. He has a shrewd sense of humor, a way of mocking himself through materials: all those recycled jeans, and all that crazy hands-on sewing! And if work slips around from one form to another, how refreshing to see someone not turning out product.

In the end, he makes no great claims for his art. His career is less like an orchestrated score than like a diary of doing and being. It’s easy to point out the influence of other artists on him — James Lee Byars, Roni Horn, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek and Richard Tuttle — and Mr. Hodges is the first to name them. Less well documented is the extent to which he has been a role model for a younger generation. If some of the art in his retrospective comes across as wanly familiar in its effects, it’s because so many people have learned from him since the post-plague years of the late 1990s, though you probably wouldn’t see that if you weren’t aware of, or didn’t care about, that history.

George Lindemann Journal - "Miami artist who destroyed Ai Weiwei vase at museum gets probation, must pay $10,000" @miamiherald by David Ovalle

A Miami artist who smashed a valuable piece by celebrated artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum must serve 18 months of probation and pay back $10,000 in restitution.

In a plea deal announced Wednesday, Maximo Caminero must also engage in 100 hours of community service teaching art classes as a result of a self-professed act of protest.

“I was wrong,” Caminero said in a letter of apology released Wednesday. “I think about what I did every day and I find it hard to live with what I did because it still haunts me.”

In a case that stunned the art world, Caminero in February smashed a vase painted by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who represented that the item was hundreds of years old. Police initially estimated the artwork was worth $1 million but the actual cost turned out to be much lower.

Caminero told the arresting officer that he smashed the artwork as a protest on behalf of local artists who he felt were slighted in favor of international artists at the new $131 million complex on Biscayne Bay.

The vase was part of a politically charged exhibition of Chinese culture and art.

The Beijing-born Ai Weiwei, 56, is a sculptor, designer and documentary-maker who has not been permitted to leave China following a 2011 arrest for his political activism. Ai Weiwei condemned the Chinese government for actions he saw as corrupt following a 2008 earthquake in Szechuan.

According to a Miami police report, Caminero ignored a security staffer’s order to put the piece down before smashing it.

He was charged with first-degree criminal mischief, a third-degree felony.

In his apology letter, Caminero stressed that he did not realize that, at the time he destroyed the vase, the museum was also exhibiting the work of five local artists. The museum is also planning a collection of six other local artists.

A lawyer representing the museum, Lilly Ann Sanchez, said “we’re glad this is finally over.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Digitizing Warhol’s Film Trove to Save It" @ntimes by RANDY KENNEDY

“Nico/Antoine” (1966), one of hundreds of Andy Warhol films. Credit Andy Warhol Museum

Andy Warhol wrote lovingly of his ever-present tape recorder. (“My tape recorder and I have been married for 10 years now. When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me.”) But for almost a decade beginning in the 1960s, his real boon companions seemed to be his 16-millimeter film cameras, which he used to record hundreds of reels, many of which are still little known even among scholars because of the fragility of the film and the scarcity of projectors to show them on.

Now the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Modern Art, which holds Warhol’s film archives, are beginning a project to digitize the materials, almost 1,000 rolls, a vast undertaking that curators and historians hope will, for the first time, put Warhol’s film work on a par with his painting, his sculpture and the Delphic public persona that became one of his greatest works. It will be MoMA’s largest effort to digitize the work of a single artist in its collection.

Patrick Moore, the Warhol Museum’s deputy director and a curator of the digitization project, said that the goal was, finally, to integrate Warhol’s film work fully into his career. “I think the art world in particular, and hopefully the culture as a whole, will come to feel the way we do,” Mr. Moore said, “which is that the films are every bit as significant and revolutionary as Warhol’s paintings.”

Warhol began using his first film camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, in 1963. He spent more than two years shooting what became known as the “Screen Tests,” hundreds of short filmed portraits of celebrities, fellow artists, acquaintances and members of his inner circle, like Lou Reed and the socialite Edie Sedgwick, before moving on to longer, more narrative pieces. He made some 600 films of varying lengths, but only about a tenth of those have been available in 16-millimeter prints through the Museum of Modern Art.

While a few of Warhol’s movies are well known — among them, the feature-length “Chelsea Girls” from 1966 and “Empire” from 1964, a single-shot “antifilm” showing the Empire State Building for eight hours — the great majority have not been shown for years or have been available only through bootlegs of varying quality. Several years before Warhol’s death in 1987, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art joined forces to preserve and study the films, which often use the movie screen as a static canvas, a confessional or a window onto the seeming banality of everyday life. But the films’ visibility, even in the art world, increased only up to a point.

“A lot of people feel like they know Warhol’s films but only because they’ve read about them,” said Mr. Moore. “Fewer and fewer people have the ability to show 16 millimeter.”

Frame-by-frame transfer of the films, which is expected to take several years, will begin this month and be conducted by MPC, an Oscar-winning visual-effects company that is donating its time and services to the project.

(In connection with the project, a few pieces of unseen film will make their way into theaters well before the transfers are completed. “Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films,” a project commissioned by the Warhol Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Centers for the Art of Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, will screen digital copies of 15 never-before-shown films in October and November, along with newly conceived, live musical accompaniment by musicians, including Tom Verlaine, Dean Wareham and Eleanor Friedberger.)

Film purists will undoubtedly mourn the migration to digital. In a review of “Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures,” a show of part of Warhol’s film work at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, Ken Johnson complained in The New York Times that seeing Warhol films digitally was “like seeing a movie on television, and that casts in doubt their status as works of art.”

Rajendra Roy, the chief film curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a self-described “unexpected analog guy,” agreed, saying that the right way to see Warhol’s films should always be on film, in part because he helped revolutionize the medium by upending or undermining so many of the conventions of moviemaking.

“I get really grumpy sometimes when things can’t be shown on film, but that said, these will become inaccessible very quickly if we don’t digitize them,” he said. “There are still many discoveries to be made, and that’s the exciting part of this project. Folks are looking at work in boxes of some of Andy’s film that probably hasn’t been seen since he shot it.”

Warhol documented so much of the New York art world of the 1960s that the films could also fill in crucial art-historical gaps about who was doing what, when and where. But curators hope that a more important benefit will be an awareness of how, long before phone cameras brought the quotidian and the personal fully into the realm of media, Warhol was already forging his own kind of YouTube. (He once deadpanned in an interview: “I think any camera that takes a picture, it comes out all right.”)

“He filmed everything around him,” said Geralyn Huxley, a curator of film and video at the Warhol Museum. “He went to people’s houses and filmed the dinners. He was basically a workaholic and the amount of film is unbelievable.”

But she added: “For all of the film out there, there’s very little of Warhol himself in any of it, actually. You get the sense that he didn’t really like to see himself on camera.”

An exhibit opening Aug. 8 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 2012
Galvanized cast copper
Collection of Isabelle Kowal
Though gold has symbolized excess, putting it in an artwork also raises its market value. That paradox is a basic theme in 'Gold.' Many artists in the exhibit fuse the luxury of gold with low-end materials. This insulation board by Rudolf Stingel was marked up by museum visitors, cast in copper, and electroplated with gold, giving it a sense of permanence.