The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal - "  Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art Looks at Gold" @wsj Jenny Che

An exhibit opening Aug. 8 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists. Elmgreen & Dragset/Cortesi Contemporary, Lugano

From an ancient Greek vase depicting the mythical golden fleece to Andy Warhol's painting of Marilyn Monroe against a gilded backdrop, gold and art have been inseparable. Even those artists who have used gold to symbolize excess have raised their art's market value just by incorporating the precious metal.

That paradox plays out in some of the works on view in "Gold," an exhibition that opened Friday at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. The show spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists with a number of provocative takes on the metal.

Gold "inspires things like power and passion and greed, and commemorates things like weddings and the Olympic Games," said curator                                               José Diaz. "There's this jubilant aspect of gold, and dark, sinister references to gold."

The Florida exhibition highlights both aspects. Glenn Kaino's "19.83" uses gold to retell Tommie Smith's record-breaking run in the 200-meter at the 1968 Olympics. (The title refers to his time in seconds.) The installation features stills from the race and a gold-plated replica of the platform that Mr. Smith stood on when he received his gold medal and raised his fist in support of civil rights.

Brooklyn-based artist Fernando Mastrangelo addressed the paradox that works criticizing gold's value are worth more if they incorporate the metal. He took a splashy decorative medallion from the early 20th century and cast a new 6-foot version in crystal sugar and gold dragees (confectionary ornaments that are sometimes edible). "As an artist, you're placing your own work within that value structure" of gold, Mr. Mastrangelo said. By using low-end materials, he intends to undercut the value of the original medallion.

Some artists in the show took the opposite route by elevating mundane objects of consumption. Dario Escobar's gold leaf-covered McDonald's cup from 1999 is on view, as is a gold-plated trash can from Sylvie Fleury.

From artist Chris Burden —well known for, among other works, a 1971 performance piece in which an assistant shot him in the arm—come bullets that appear even more menacing wrapped in 22-carat gold. French-born Eric Baudart has sprayed gold paint over stacked street posters, giving them a deceptively solid metal look.

In "Temptation" by the Danish-Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset, whose work has been shown in such venues as London's Victoria & Albert Museum, an arm protruding from the wall clutches a bag of coins. The sculpture, made of resin and 24-carat beaten gold, was inspired by a relief mural, depicting a smiling man as he handed money to officials, outside an old tax collection office at the city hall in Munich.

It is a reminder of how people are expected to contribute to society, said Mr. Dragset in an email, but at the same time, "we all seem to have different opinions on what money represents and what a common good is and who should share in our riches."

For Carlos Betancourt, the beauty of gold underlines its power. His "Amulet for Light I (gold)" is a photograph, tinted gold, of his family's ornate Puerto Rican amulets. Mr. Betancourt's work focuses on memory. "These are personal objects that I have empowered with gold," he said.

Gold "never loses its value no matter how it's cast or used," said Mr. Mastrangelo. "So the artist almost becomes irrelevant in terms of gold. It's such a freaking cool material—if I had more access to it."

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George Lindemann Journal - "Isn't There a Better Way?" @wsj by Lee Rosenbaum

The 145-year-old institution has long suffered from financial difficulties and chronic mismanagement. Associated Press

In last week's courtroom drama over the fate of the endangered Corcoran Gallery of Art and its College of Art + Design, a crucial protagonist was missing from the petitioners' case for dismembering that venerable institution.

No one spoke for the art.

Charles Patrizia, the Corcoran trustees' lawyer, presented testimony by only three witnesses before resting his unconvincing case for divvying up the 145-year-old institution's financial, capital and artistic assets and real estate between George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art. This last-gasp gambit arose from desperate circumstances: The Corcoran has been seriously hobbled by chronic operating deficits and a revolving-door directorship, not to mention deferrals of necessary repairs and upgrades to its architecturally acclaimed Beaux Arts building.

Testifying for the trustees last week, in hearings held by District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Robert Okun, were Lauren Stack, the Corcoran's chief operating officer for the past three years, whose admitted lack of prior professional experience related to either art or museums may have contributed to the Corcoran's problems; Sean O'Connor, a development consultant to the Corcoran; and Steven Knapp, president of George Washington University, which stands to acquire the Corcoran's college and real estate. No Corcoran art professional was heard.

Also notably absent was Earl Powell III, director of the National Gallery. His institution, under the proposed arrangement, would be allowed to acquire whatever it wanted from the Corcoran's 17,000-piece collection of American and European art, which includes such touchstones as Gilbert Stuart's "George Washington," Albert Bierstadt's "Mount Corcoran" (named for the museum's founder), George Bellows's "Forty-Two Kids" and Edgar Degas's "The Dance Class."

The National Gallery has said it would probably keep more than half of the Corcoran's holdings, dispersing whatever it didn't want to other art museums and "appropriate entities," with preference for local institutions. This Washington-first policy helped secure the acquiescence of the D.C. attorney general, who is charged with defending the public interest and the charitable intent of donors. The Corcoran's landmark building would be left a selection of works "that are identified historically with the 17th Street landmark structure," according to the press release that announced the signing of the deal last May. Those works will be showcased in a token "Legacy Gallery"—an ironic appellation given the utter decimation of founder William Wilson Corcoran's legacy. The National Gallery would also get space in the Corcoran building for temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.

When I asked Mr. Patrizia why he didn't call a witness from the National Gallery, he said that this was unnecessary because those who have legal standing to oppose the deal had "raised no issue about the capacity and ability of the National Gallery of Art to undertake and fulfill all of the responsibilities under the . . . agreement." That same reasoning would also have obviated the need to call Mr. Knapp, who spoke at great length.

A more plausible explanation is that no arts professional could have convincingly argued that the dispersal of the Corcoran's collection and the dissolution of its museum adhere to the donor's intent "as nearly as possible," which is the defining requirement for a cy-pres petition, such as the Corcoran's, to be granted. Mr. Corcoran's 1869 deed, from which the trustees of his institution are now seeking to deviate, explicitly mandates "the perpetual establishment and maintenance of a Public Gallery and Museum" to house his holdings. But the redefined Corcoran would cease to be a museum and most of Mr. Corcoran's art would permanently leave the building.

This case bears some resemblance to previous cy-pres proceedings over another collector-founded art gallery and school—the Barnes Foundation. Both court fights involved opponents' charges that the institution's life-threatening financial difficulties were caused, in part, by its own mismanagement.

But there is one crucial difference: The Barnes's court-allowed move to Philadelphia kept that institution's celebrated collection completely intact. The Corcoran's proposal would break up an American art trove that ranks with that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, as described by Darrel Sewell, former longtime American-art curator at the PMA. In written comments to the attorney general, Mr. Sewell asserted that "like the collection of Albert C. Barnes," the Corcoran's trove "is unique and could not be replicated today. As a totality, it has meaning and significance beyond the individual works."

How, then, might the Corcoran and its collection survive and thrive?

Two witnesses called by Andrew Tulumello, the lawyer for the opponents of the George Washington University/National Gallery of Art plan, suggested options: Wallace Loh, president of the University of Maryland, is willing to reopen his failed negotiations with the Corcoran to forge an alliance that he said would maintain the Corcoran's independence and provide financial support. Philanthropist Wayne Reynolds, former chairman of Ford's Theatre in Washington, renewed his previously spurned quest to become the Corcoran's board chairman. This time, he named 23 deep-pocketed potential board members and supporters who he said would help jump-start the Corcoran's financial recovery under his leadership. As reported by the Washington Post, he indicated he might sell works "nobody ever sees" to fund new acquisitions, particularly of contemporary art.

But suggesting that the Corcoran should now entertain the same suitors it previously had reason to reject is probably a nonstarter. Instead of negotiating from weakness, the Corcoran should first focus on how to build on its strengths. Bolstering the board with munificent members is crucial. Notwithstanding his power play, Mr. Reynolds is to be thanked for identifying hot prospects.

As occurred with the endangered American Folk Art Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts, the Corcoran's near-death experience has put potential funders on notice that it's now or never. Mutually beneficial alliances with established institutions (including less sweeping arrangements with George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art, or perhaps with others, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum) should be pursued, but only if they enhance, not eviscerate, the Corcoran.

First and foremost, the Corcoran Gallery needs a dynamic, experienced director who believes in the institution, embraces challenges and has a compelling creative vision. A director's search was under way before the trustees settled on an interim leader, Peggy Loar. The search should resume with renewed urgency.

David Levy, the Corcoran's president and director from 1991 to 2005, whose failed capital campaign for a pricey Frank Gehry addition was a serious blow to donor confidence, suggested a way forward in a 2012 Washington Post opinion piece. The Corcoran, he said, should position itself as "Washington's museum, serving this unique metropolitan region . . . while creatively reaching out to its inner-city neighborhoods." Washington-area artists should be an integral part of this local strategy.

The Corcoran already has cash to keep it afloat while navigating through rough waters, including about $35 million that, if Judge Okun approves the current deal, would be handed over to George Washington University for renovations, and some $8 million to $10 million to be used for donor-restricted purposes. Mr. Knapp testified that about $25 million would suffice to fund the most desperately needed repairs and upgrades.

For now, the courtroom drama continues, with additional witnesses to be called by the deal's opponents. If Judge Okun does the right thing, he'll rule that the Corcoran's proposal doesn't meet the basic requirements of cy-pres. It needs to devise a better plan to fulfill Mr. Corcoran's stated goal of "encouraging American genius."

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Corcoran’s Merger Plan Draws Fire in Court Hearing" @nytimes RANDY KENNEDY

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, above, is the topic of a contentious court battle in Washington. Credit Kevin Wolf/Associated Press        

WASHINGTON — Two widely divergent views of the financial troubles of the Corcoran Gallery of Art — which is seeking legal permission to alter its trust and dissolve itself through a merger with the National Gallery of Art — emerged in sometimes contentious testimony in the District of Columbia Superior Court on Wednesday.

The Corcoran, one of the nation’s oldest privately supported museums, has struggled for years to raise money. But the opponents of the merger plan — who include students at its art college and employees who say they could be harmed by the dissolution — during the hearing depicted a board of trustees that in recent years has done little to try to turn around the institution’s fortunes and has squandered money on consultants while not following their advice.

Andrew S. Tulumello, the opposition’s lawyer, cited a 2008 consultant’s study that found, as he described it, “that something was broken with fund-raising at the board level.” In the years after the study, the board never filled all 18 seats that its structure allowed. As Mr. Tulumello depicted the situation during his questioning of the museum’s leadership, the trustees seemed to function more as caretakers for an institution that was already assumed not to have a future.

Harry F. Hopper III, the museum’s chairman, who testified for a second day in support of the plan to dissolve the Corcoran as a stand-alone museum, said that a broken fund-raising mechanism was a symptom, not a cause, of troubles at the gallery. Years of poor finances, which had led to serious structural problems with the museum’s building, a landmark near the White House, became a spiral, scaring off significant donors. The recession, he added, made the climate for giving even more difficult.

“I personally had conversations with a lot of high net-worth individuals that were not presented to the board because they were not willing to step in because of the financial stress of the institution,” said Mr. Hopper, a venture capitalist. Of the gallery’s decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on management consultants, he added, “The only way that we could get our hands on the situation — where we had a bank put us in default and freeze accounts — was to have a SWAT team come in from an outside firm.”

Earlier financial problems were only a “fire drill” for what the gallery encountered over the last several years, he said.

Mr. Hopper defended the board’s work to stabilize the museum. “When it looked like the institution was just having trouble finding the runway to exist, I think we did a pretty good job,” he said.

The plan for the National Gallery to absorb the Corcoran and for George Washington University to take over the Corcoran’s art college has been presented by officials of the three institutions as the only way to keep the heart of the Corcoran’s collection intact and to salvage its legacy.

Thus, the Corcoran is seeking court permission to alter the 1869 deed of its founder, the banker William Corcoran, who gave his collection and money for the “perpetual establishment” of a “public gallery and museum.” Opponents contend that the Corcoran would exist as little more than a name under the merger and that its historic building would no longer function as a museum.

Under the deal, announced in May, the Corcoran would cede its collection of more than 17,000 pieces, rich in American art, to the National Gallery, which would preserve a “Legacy Gallery” within the Corcoran’s building on 17th Street, and organize its own exhibitions of modern and contemporary art there.

Works that the National Gallery could not accommodate would be dispersed to other institutions, with a preference for keeping them in Washington. The Corcoran’s building would become the property of the university, which would use it for classes for students of the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Judge Robert D. Okun will continue to hear testimony in the case Thursday and next week.

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The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Tom Friedman: ‘Paint and Styrofoam" @nytimes by ROBERTA SMITH

“Toxic Green Luscious Green,” a 2014 work by Tom Friedman in his show “Paint and Styrofoam.” Credit Tom Friedman and Luhring Augustine, New York

The artist Tom Friedman tends to blow our minds and then move on, rarely repeating himself. (A starburst made of toothpicks or a realistic fly, having seemingly alighted on the corner of a pedestal, come to mind.) Nearly each artwork is some one-off feat of concept, technique and common materials. So it’s unexpected to see Mr. Friedman staying in one place as he does here and to realize that the effect is even more intense.

This show is suffused with the tension of trying to reconcile what you see with the exhibition’s title: “Paint and Styrofoam.” Whether painting or sculpture, every work in this show uses these two materials. Their names buzz around in your head with almost no place to land, as you try to figure out where one material stops and the other begins, or what you are looking at in the first place. This is especially true of the monochrome, seemingly abstract paintings that line the walls. (Fittingly, one work consists of a tiny eyeball wedged into a corner, easy to overlook.)

Minus the show’s title, other sculptures are determinedly, but also conventionally, trompe l’oeil, especially the wood stool, guitar and disconnected microphone of “Moot” and the purple (Jeff Koons-like) balloon of “Purple Balloon.” But “Pepto Bismol Pink” — an attenuated ganglion of vaguely intestinal shape — deviates. A divot in its white pedestal reveals Styrofoamish blue, probably before you even focus on it.

Each of the paintings has a different subject, effect and surface, and a title alluding to its particular secrets. The cream-colored “Kid” presents a fastidious canvas weave, a strip frame, a big swipe of paint and a tiny ball (a recurring motif), intimating a smiling (or smiley) face. The swirling brushwork of the dark blue “Night” yields part of van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” just as the artist’s visage can be found in the bright yellow of “Self Portrait.”

And so on, from one vision-testing surface to the next. The simplest is “Blue Styrofoam Seascape,” whose central ridge coalesces into a perfectly atmospheric horizon. And Mr. Friedman breaks free of flatness in “Blue” and “Toxic Green Luscious Green,” creating bas-relief pileups of objects, trash and words that include Styrofoam peanuts — previously a favored material — and other references to his singular career.       

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A proposed expansion of the Frick Collection would eliminate a garden on East 70th Street. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission would do well to turn down the Frick Collection’s proposed expansion, which imagines replacing a prized garden on East 70th Street in Manhattan with a clumsy addition. The city should avoid another self-inflicted wound, and there are other options.

The plan, announced last month, ran into early headwinds. New Yorkers have seen the consequences of trustee restlessness and real estate magical thinking, which destroy or threaten to undo favorite buildings. Not so long ago, the Morgan Library & Museum, another Gilded Age landmark, built an addition that flopped. The New York Public Library wanted to disembowel its historic building at 42nd Street before thinking better of it.

The Museum of Modern Art’s demolition of the American Folk Art Museum building, a once-cherished institution but today the object of widespread derision, is probably what finally tipped some invisible scale of public tolerance against the culture of market capitalism and arrogant growth. The city’s truest anti-MoMA, the Frick becomes the latest front in a larger battle to prevent nonprofit outposts of civilization from falling prey to the bigger-is-better paradigm.

It’s not too late. The plan calls for opening to the public part of the museum’s second floor, long used as offices, and turning the circular music room, a distinctive and eccentric space dedicated to lectures and concerts, into a rectangular gallery for temporary shows. Of the 40,000 square feet the Frick wants to add, only 3,600 of it would be for showing art — the size of an oligarch’s wine cellar, in that neighborhood. That’s actually plenty. The Frick doesn’t need more room for art.

Otherwise the proposal calls for a new auditorium and for rationalizing back-of-the-house practical stuff like office space, classrooms, the conservation lab and wheelchair access, although while at it, the expansion includes a new boardroom, cafe and gift shop.

To accomplish all this, the current plan entails constructing a new tower on 70th Street in lieu of a gated garden that’s a civic gem to the east of the Frick mansion. The idea is essentially to extend the six-story Frick library building, with its Palladian entrance on 71st Street, all the way to 70th Street, linking it to the mansion via a stepped addition.

The garden, from 1977, is the only work in the city completed by the great British landscape architect Russell Page. It was conceived not to be entered but as a tableau to be viewed from the street and the museum’s reception hall. It occupies a narrow plot where the Frick acquired and tore down a townhouse with the intention of someday expanding on the site. Page took time to get the layout right: a rectangular pool, with floating lotus and white lilies in summer, surrounded by pea gravel paths and boxwood.

Very Zen, the garden has become one of those little New York treasures, flowering nearly year-round. Trees include late-blooming crab apple and Kentucky yellowwood. Page chose clematis and hydrangea to ornament the trellis, wisteria to climb the wall. It’s all a model of precision and proportion, a revelation and breather on the street: “a master class in restrained minimalism,” as Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, put it recently. It sets apart the mansion, reveals its layered additions, dapples the Frick in shade. At human scale, the garden exemplifies the sort of minor miracles New York manages to shoehorn into small spaces.

Naturally, it frustrates Frick officials no end that what was devised as a temporary amenity should now be an obstacle to its growth. But plenty of temporary works (the Eiffel Tower comes to mind) become permanent because they’re admired. Page did his job too well. Landscape preservationists, architects and others are rallying around the garden for good reason. They’ve been pleading for years that buildings shouldn’t trump spaces around them: Great public places and works of landscape architecture deserve to be treated like great buildings. They’re right.

Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director, argued the other day that the Frick already has another garden, and that Central Park is nearby. The expansion, he said, would replace Page’s garden with a smaller, new one.

The museum has three Vermeers, too. That’s not an argument for trading one in. And in this case, the trade just isn’t persuasive. The proposal looks banal and inelegant, extruding the library and the 70th street facade. The Frick has chosen to continue in Beaux-Arts style as if that might make the imbalanced bulk of its plan seem less obtrusive. In the right architects’ hands, maybe it could. In this case, it doesn’t.

The Frick has hired Davis Brody Bond, a fine New York firm but a curious choice to riff on the historic mansion designed for Henry Clay Frick a century ago by Carrère and Hastings. To that mansion, John Russell Pope devised ingenious and exquisite additions that turned the house into a museum during the 1930s. (He designed the great covered garden court, among other things.)

The reception hall, by the firm John Barrington Bayley, Harry van Dyke and G. Frederick Poehler, was added in the ’70s, a fussy, awkward Beaux-Arts pastiche that should serve as a cautionary tale to Frick officials hoping to follow in the footsteps of Hastings and Pope. Like Page’s garden, the annex would be demolished in the current plan.

The fact is that the Frick is perfectly well loved as is. People revere it precisely because it isn’t (yet) like all the museums that have been busily remaking themselves for big crowds and blockbuster shows. For a few months last year, an exhibition of Dutch pictures on loan from the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands turned the museum into something akin to an outlet mall on Black Friday. That’s not what the Frick does best.

It puts on small, smart shows; collects some art, albeit nothing like what it used to; and wants more people to use its storied art reference library. The expansion is also meant to give the library more room, notwithstanding that the neighborhood has other libraries specializing in art, and more and more of what used to make the Frick library a first-stop for art scholars and dealers is online or slowly heading there. At this point, the library averages 23 visitors a day.

Those other options? Leave well enough alone. In a climate of rampant expansionism, that’s unlikely, however.

The Frick might not get everything it wants. (Who does in New York?) But, alternately, it could open those second- floor rooms, swap the music room for a bread-and-butter exhibition gallery and build a new, larger auditorium under the Page garden, which could then be put back as it is.

That’s already a pretty radical step. The museum could also redo the mediocre 1970s ticket pavilion and explore adding a modest floor or two atop that new exhibition gallery, an idea Frick officials contemplated half a dozen years ago but abandoned because they thought it would get knocked down by the landmarks commission. The current proposal seems far less circumspect.

While it’s at it, the Frick would be remiss not to pursue the Berry-Hill Galleries space, up for sale in the townhouse next to the garden. I was told the asking price is around $20 million, astronomical for art, offices or seminar rooms, but the location can’t be beat, and in the long run, the Frick might be very sorry not to have bought it.

The really big move would be to redo from scratch the interior of the library building on 71st Street, leaving Pope’s landmark facade. I can hear the booing. But a smartly repurposed space (Modernist, even) might better serve the library in the 21st century and also the museum.

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Stephen Bury, the chief librarian, told me the other day that his priorities include keeping the Frick’s archives at hand along with rare and oversize books (the Frick already uses offsite storage) and gaining more and flexible spaces for visitors and scholars in residence. The Frick stacks, inflexible and purpose-built, aren’t historically significant like the ones in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. The library’s reading room is a charmer, but not a national treasure like the Rose Main Reading Room atop the Public Library stacks.

Putting the library building on the table seems at least worth debating if the trustees are hellbent on expansion. The building could be modestly extended into a space now used for air-conditioning and other mechanicals.

Mr. Bury raised the point that, in essence, gutting the library would sacrifice the reading room to save the garden. True. But if that’s the choice, here’s one vote to spare the garden.      

Tracey Emin's controversial artwork My Bed is to return to the Tate after selling for £2.2m earlier this month.

Count Christian Duerckheim, the piece's new owner, has agreed to loan the work "for a period of at least 10 years", said Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.

The 1998 work features an unmade bed and a floor littered with empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts and condoms.

It was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize and bought for £150,000 in 2000 by the art collector Charles Saatchi.

Count Duerckheim, a German industrialist, described the piece as "a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die".

"I am absolutely delighted that Count Duerckheim has agreed to loan such an important work," said Sir Nicholas.

"We look forward to displaying the work [and] creating an opportunity for visitors to see a work that now has iconic status."

Emin made My Bed in her London council flat in 1998

Speaking last month, Emin said she was hopeful that My Bed would end up in a museum after it was sold at auction.

"The best possible result is that an amazing benefactor buys it and then donates it to a museum," she told the BBC News website.

Following the announcement, the artist said she "could not be happier" and that she would "cherish" installing the piece at its new home.

"I have always felt My Bed belongs at Tate. And now it will be," she said.

According to the Tate, My Bed - created by Emin in her council flat near London's Waterloo station - is an "unconventional and uncompromising self-portrait [that] gives a snapshot of the artist's life after a traumatic relationship breakdown".

Details of when and where the piece will go on display will be announced in the autumn.

Born in 1944, Count Duerckheim has been collecting since the 1960s and owns one of the leading collections of international contemporary art.

My Bed was acquired by White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling on the industrialist's behalf, the Tate revealed on Tuesday.

George Lindemann Journal - "A Sculpture King Meets the Sun King" @wsj by Mara Hoberman

'The Entry of Apollo,' a Jean-Michel Othoniel fountain-sculpture, awaits transport to its outdoor Versailles location. Philippe Chancel

A building that once housed the pharmacy of French King Louis XIV has recently brimmed with activity again—this time, involving blown-glass orbs, steel pipes and curious nozzles. Since January, the Paris-based sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel has turned this vaulted chamber on the periphery of Versailles' grounds into his makeshift studio.

When the artist finishes installing the three resulting fountain-sculptures later this summer, they will become the first new permanent artworks in the palace's gardens in more than 300 years.

Since 2008 Versailles, the lavish regal complex about 18 miles west of central Paris, has held temporary art exhibitions inside its 17th-century gilded ballrooms and manicured gardens. These shows have featured contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. Mr. Othoniel's commission—part of the total renovation of a garden originally designed by the famed royal landscaper André Le Nôtre —is meant to stand the test of time.

"As an artist, and a French artist in particular, there is something very special about making a mark on the land that Le Nôtre and Louis XIV designed," Mr. Othoniel said of his fountain-sculptures, made of about 2,000 bowling ball-sized gilded glass spheres.

Photos: The Making of the New Fountains at Versailles

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Paris-based sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel's three fountain sculptures will become the first new permanent artworks in the palace's gardens in more than 300 years. Philippe Chancel

The genesis of the work, titled "Beautiful Dances," dates to 2011, when the artist was invited by landscape architect Louis Benech to collaborate on a proposal for a Versailles-sponsored competition to reimagine the Water Theater Grove. It has been closed to the public since suffering severe storm damage in 1990.

The entry from Messrs. Benech and Othoniel—the only one to include contemporary artwork—won in 2012 over 21 other international submissions.

Some preservationists flinch at the idea of contemporary art becoming a permanent feature of a historic landmark. But Versailles President Catherine Pégard says that "Versailles was always a place for creativity and creation." Louis XIV, she added, "surrounded himself with the greatest artists of his time, and we are continuing that tradition today."

No stranger to monumental art projects, Mr. Othoniel is best known for his bauble-decorated entrance to a Paris subway station near the Louvre Museum. In 2000 he gave a garland of glass ornaments to the fountains of the Alhambra complex in Granada, Spain. Since 2003 six of his giant glass necklaces, like permanent strings of Mardi Gras beads, have adorned an oak tree at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

What the final artwork will look like. Othoniel Studio

At Versailles, Mr. Othoniel says, he felt a responsibility to "enter into a dialogue with the past." He extensively researched Louis XIV's interest in dance. The Sun King, it turns out, got his nickname from his balletic interpretation, at age 14, of Apollo. Mr. Othoniel's studies led him to discover a rare book of notations devised to help the king study Baroque dance steps. Originally published in 1701, these diagrams are the basis for the fountains' arabesque forms, which are meant to evoke the king and queen dancing on water.

"Beautiful Dances" is also linked to the past through its materials and manufacture. Louis XIV brought Venetian artisans to Versailles to fabricate the famous hall of mirrors. Similarly, Mr. Othoniel joined with a traditional glassblowing workshop in Murano—Venice's island of glass artisans—to create four blue orbs that will mark the locations of fountains in Le Nôtre's original garden design.

To match the particular form and intensity of the water jets in Versailles' existing fountains, Mr. Othoniel joined with hydraulic engineers to custom fabricate 17th-century-style nozzles. "I am dialoguing with history," he said, "but also creating a contemporary discourse that will become the next chapter in the history of a legendary location."

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Oliver Payne and Nick Relph: ‘Ash’s Stash’" @nytimes by Karen Rosenburg

An installation view of “Ash’s Stash” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, with shelves of formerly trendy gadgets and accessories. Credit Courtesy the artists and Thomas Müller/Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

“Today everything is always ‘on’ at once, simultaneously forever — we’ve simply run out of past,” the British duo of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph write in a statement for their latest show at Gavin Brown. There, boutique-style shelves hold small, colorful assemblages of formerly trendy gadgets and accessories, among them, Reebok pump sneakers, Sony Walkman cassette players and one forlorn-looking Macintosh Classic computer with a protruding floppy disk.

The whole installation is itself a “reissue”; it dates from a booth at the 2007 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. And the artists have restaged it because they found it oddly predictive of the current trend for sharing carefully chosen photographs of our bookshelves and closets on social media. As they cleverly put it, “Cupboards become catwalks, and possessions pose for the camera, waiting to be liked.”

The cheeky little displays here do look as if they had been made for that exchange, with their high-low, tasteful-kitschy juxtapositions; witness the gilded cat that seems to be “driving” a black-and-gold sneaker, with a Confederate flag pin serving as a hood ornament, or the bottle of Chateau Latour that sports a chunky white digital wristwatch. (The many wine bottles tucked into sneakers may balance out all the expired tech and fashion with suggestions of increasing value.) The assemblages also make an interesting complement to Jeff Koons’s boxed Hoovers at the Whitney — which implies that to “run out of past” is not exactly a new phenomenon of the Instagram age. In fact, it sounds a lot like postmodernism. 

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "‘Displayed’ at the Anton Kern Gallery" @nytimes by Anton Kern   

When you exhibit a work of art, there are two things going on. There’s the object and there’s the presentational apparatus, which might be a frame, a pedestal, a shelf or a vitrine. Also involved are the gallery architecture, the structure of the exhibiting institution and, in the broadest terms, the art world social system. Usually, viewers are supposed to focus on the object and take for granted the apparatus.

In these postmodern times, however, many artists — from Joseph Beuys to Jeff Koons and Carol Bove — have made the displaying part an object in its own right. Organized by the artist and curator Matthew Higgs, this excellent show at Anton Kern Gallery presents works by 18 artists exemplifying a trend he calls “displayism.”

A ramshackle stage set with the artist’s signature — Josh Smith — scrawled in paint on its canvas backdrop implies that the object is the absent artist himself. An installation by Nancy Shaver resembling part of a flea market consists of materials from an antiques store she operates in Hudson, N.Y., called Henry. It includes old things like balustrade knobs and a chain made of bottle caps, with price tags attached, that viewers can purchase mostly for under $20.

Funky sculptural works by B. Wurtz — cobbled from odd pieces of wood, wire and metal cans — display things like white tube socks and plastic bags. A lovely, Walker Evans-like series of photographs of New York sidewalk newsstands from 1994, by Moyra Davey, turns a familiar type of public display into a kind of vernacular art form.

George Lindemann Journal - "Confectionary Overload" @wsj by Peter Plagens

'Play-Doh' (2014) Jeff Koons/Photo by Ron Amstutz

New York

You can give the Whitney Museum's Jeff Koons retrospective due diligence in about 35 minutes. Without pausing for the wall texts and explanatory labels (which read like advertising copy), that amounts to 10 minutes per floor plus a little orientation time in the basement café level to look at posters for Mr. Koons's early exhibitions, where his shtick of trumping Andy Warhol with slickness and production values first caught the public's attention.

The beginning and end of the show contain the good stuff. The vitrined vacuum cleaners, such as "New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue; New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue; Doubledecker" (1987), lighted à la Frankenstein from beneath, exude a harsh morbidity. "Play-Doh," a technical and aesthetic masterpiece of conjoined, painted aluminum parts 10 feet tall and weighing more than five tons, mimics a random pile of the kids' playstuff, and took from 1994 until this year to realize. It's a better Claes Oldenburg than many Oldenburgs.

Otherwise, the exhibition has, as Dave Hickey once said about Las Vegas, lots to see but nothing to look at. It consists of approximately 150 objects, ranging from (early period) framed Nike basketball posters and dime-store inflatable flowers; to (middle period) enlarged porcelain replicas of Bavarian-American kitsch statuary such as Buster Keaton astride a tiny pony; (turning point and nadir) X-rated "Made in Heaven" paintings of the artist having sex with an Italian pornstar, whom he subsequently married; and (comeback and late period) very expensively produced and defiantly shiny sculpture such as a giant candy-box heart and a thyroidal, hideously blue metallic enlargement of a kitsch copy of a Renaissance Venus. You go through the show feeling like you're eating cotton candy on the boardwalk. You leave the show feeling you've eaten entirely too much cotton candy on the boardwalk.

The real subject of the exhibition, however, is not Mr. Koons's bright, empty, perhaps ironic and ultimately numbing art, but his persona. Or rather, the mystery of it. Make no mistake: Mr. Koons is and has always been a very nervy fellow, willing to risk his bank account (considerable now, but empty after the "Made in Heaven" fiasco and an awful custody battle over the son from that marriage) and what one critic calls his "fan base" (a peculiarly appropriate term regarding a serious modern artist) with every deadpan-titled series, from "Celebration" to "Banality" to "Easyfun."

Mr. Koons is nervy and cool enough, in fact, to have in effect played, for 25 years or so, a kind of character common to early television situation comedies. The loud, madcap Lucille Ball played somebody known as "Lucy Ricardo," the loud, madcap wife of a Latino nightclub headliner, "Ricky Ricardo" (played by her real-life husband Desi Arnaz). Closer to Mr. Koons's modus operandi, Bob Cummings played a bon vivant commercial photographer named "Bob Collins," who viewers assumed was pretty close in personality to Mr. Cummings himself. The few times I interviewed Mr. Koons, and every time I've heard him speak in public or in a video—in that voice that seems to emanate from HAL 9000 giving a Chamber of Commerce presentation—I could easily believe that he's really an actor named, say, Jeff Cook, playing in a sitcom about an artist named "Jeff Koons" who truly believes that a saccharine but military-industrial-grade Pop Art redux is the path to a contemporary Renaissance, not to mention the healing of our national psyche.

Mr. Koons is also nervy enough to occasionally subvert his bland Mister-Rogers-goes-to-the-Biennale manner. He nibbles—if not actually bites—the hand that's feeding him this great big exhibition, with an overlay component in a couple of his "Hunk Elvis" series paintings that a label tells us is a "marker drawing of a sailboat." It's also clearly a cartoon of female genitals similar to those of his ex-wife and sex partner in one particular "Made in Heaven" picture. And if the outsize, nauseatingly cute sculpture "Cat on a Clothesline" (2001) isn't a mocking crucifix, then none of those statues in any of the world's Catholic churches are sincere ones. There's no reason for the daisies on either side of the piece other than to extend the horizontal clothesline so that it and the sock in which the kitten resides form a cross. And the clothespins are an obvious metaphor for nails.

While Mr. Koons's "Bob Collins" equivalent isn't afraid to put the museological parallel to a TV network at risk of a little embarrassment, the Whitney does a fair job of embarrassing itself in the show's wall texts. The museum credits Mr. Koons's every stylistic move with the profundity of a Richard Rorty philosophical tome. The text concerning Mr. Koons's mid-'80s small, stainless-steel sculpture series simply called "Statuary" (which includes a big-headed small figure of Bob Hope) says: "By transforming his lowbrow readymades into highbrow art and making his historical sources more contemporary, Koons achieved a kind of democratic leveling of culture. Taken together, the 'Statuary' works evoke a panoply of emotions and styles—melancholy or joy, realism or caricature—and demonstrate Koons's keen manipulation of ingrained ideas about art and taste."

You want to respond that nobody, but nobody, has yet democratically leveled culture, that we'll be the judge of what Mr. Koons's work evokes, thank you very much, and that "manipulating" an audience's allegedly ingrained ideas about taste is patronizing in the extreme.

The big question, of course, regards Mr. Koons's intentions in creating the garishly greeting-card and tourist-shop oeuvre that's been his stock in trade for more than two decades. If he means his art sincerely—no giggling into his shirt collar—then most of the works in this retrospective are, gigantism notwithstanding, as vapid, treacly and dumbed down as any of those Kate Middleton commemorative cups and saucers advertised in the supplements of middle-market American Sunday newspapers. A few art-world people I know think Mr. Koons is sincere. They think that even if he was snideness personified in his 1980s work, after "Made in Heaven" he saw the populist light and simply wants to make art that, as the artist himself has said, "is a support system for people to feel good about themselves."

I disagree. A mature artist does not acquire arrested development in taste unless somebody pours too much Everclear into his vernissage Sancerre, or an international art dealer clubs him over the head with a two-by-four and he wakes up experiencing a blissful epiphany about the sublime beauty of tchotchkes. No; once an artist is a wiseguy doing a love-hate sleight-of-hand with the artifacts of cheap popular culture, and follows that up with pulling the legs of art-world insiders by pretending to really like such artifacts, he's always going to be a wiseguy. The Jeff Koons who speaks in never ending bromides like "Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect" appears to me to be as much a created character—a work of performance art, you might say—as "Bob Collins" was.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.