The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

 

By Barrymore Laurence Scherer
August 27, 2012, 4:37 p.m. ET  

 

Utica, N.Y. - The hills of central New York have been alive with the sounds and sights of Egypt this summer. In Cooperstown, the Glimmerglass Opera Festival featured Verdi’s “Aida” and the Fenimore Art Museum exhibited costumes from Metropolitan Opera “Aida” productions of the past century. And in Utica, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum of Art is presenting the absorbing “Shadow of the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt and Its Influence.”

Comprising roughly 150 objects, paintings, works of art, pieces of jewelry and related items from 30 lenders as well as the museum’s own collections, the show underscores the fascination with a multimillennial legacy that has long made Egyptology a staple of museum culture. Moreover, it places its venerable subject within a fresh and notably accessible historical context: The exhibition isn’t just about ancient Egypt but about its lively effect on fine, decorative and performing art from the Napoleonic era right through Cecil B. DeMille’s brand of Egyptofantasy.

Richard Walker - Detail of a mummy portrait mask from 332 B.C. - A.D. 395.

The first gallery, “The Burial Chamber,” sets the scene with a vivid selection of antiquities concerned with the rites of death, mummification and burial central to ancient Egyptian culture.

Flanking its entrance are two Ptolemaic-period sphinx fragments of carved limestone (332-30 B.C.), their delicately sculpted features softened by the erosion of countless windblown grains of sand. Taking center stage are a wood coffin lid and its base from the Late Dynastic Period (c. 525-343 B.C.) embellished with meticulously carved and painted human and bird motifs. Its splendid condition reminds us how posterity has reaped the preservative benefits of Egypt’s dry climate and the painstaking methods of ancient Egyptian craftsmen and funerary workers.

Many of the objects here would have been buried with the dead to accompany them in the afterlife—brilliantly glazed pottery; diminutive, beautifully wrought amulets and jewelry of cast and beaten gold, carved lapis-lazuli, beads of colored faience. A limestone canopic jar (c. 1070-945 B.C.), to contain the entrails removed from a body as part of mummification, resembles a small coffin with carved face and painted eyes. There’s also an actual mummified head from the Roman period (c. mid-second-century B.C. to mid-first-century A.D.), its face masked in gold leaf and given painted features, to imitate the solid-gold masks of royal mummies. And striking a poignant note is a mummified cat. Whether it once enjoyed life as a sacred creature or a family pet, now its eviscerated, sausagelike body is tightly wrapped in linen, with feline features painted on the swaddled head, its two perky ears distinct.

Virtually all of the chosen artifacts embody the colors, shapes and decorative motifs from which European and, afterward, American craftsmen derived their highly imaginative Egyptian Revivals, initially sparked by 18th-century archaeological discoveries. Representing the awakening interest is a fanciful English “canopic vase” produced about 1770 by the pottery firm of Wedgwood & Bentley. Possibly inspired by elements in the “Egyptian” mantelpiece designs published in 1769 by the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, this striking piece is essentially a bulbous neoclassical urn with a finely modeled Egyptian head pre-empting the usual pine-cone finial.

The shiploads of antiquities sent back to France during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign of 1798 incited the first Egyptian Revival craze during the Directoire and Empire periods and England’s Regency. And the lure of Egypt and its surroundings fostered an enduring “Orientalist” school of painting, as European artists voyaged to Egypt and North Africa, where they produced exotic views of deserts, pyramids and street life that found a ready market back home. The show features lush Orientalist canvases by such exponents through successive decades asCharles Théodore Frère, Rudolf Ernst and Joseph Farquharson, which document their fascination with “primitive” life still extant in 19th-century Egypt. Works like Edwin Long’s “Love’s Labor Lost,” Frederick Arthur Bridgman’s “Cleopatra on the Terraces at Philae” and Gustave Doré’s “Moses Before the Pharaoh” attest to those artists’ mastery of romanticized, dramatic interpretations of ancient and biblical themes.

The construction of the Suez Canal and its completion in 1869 sparked a second Egyptian Revival, represented here with examples of opulent, imaginative furniture, silver, glass, lamps and other decorations in the Egyptian taste whose obelisk, pyramid and sphinx motifs lent distinctive flair to French Second Empire and High Victorian design.

Taking a spin on the stylized Egyptian scarab beetle, a massive porcelain paperweight shaped like a startled but anatomically correct beetle and a porcelain vase embellished with another beetle (replete with six legs and probing antennae) represent experimental extremes by the inventive English designer Christopher Dresser during the 1880s.

More beautiful, and more dazzling, are ancient and European scarab-inspired jewelry in the “Jewels of the Nile” gallery, the exhibition’s visual climax. Among the dazzlers are a scarab brooch of fire opal and enameled gold by Marcus & Co., New York, and a Swiss gold ladies’ watch. Articulated beetles-wings covering the watch face are enameled in royal blue and ablaze with 16 tiny diamonds in star-shaped settings.

The final gallery represents Egypt’s hold on 19th- and 20th-century popular culture, reinvigorated by the English archaeologist Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb. Film posters and other material document successive “Cleopatra” extravaganzas starring Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor; George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” starring Vivian Leigh; “The Mummy” with Boris Karloff and its 1999 remake; “The Ten Commandments,” and of course “Death on the Nile.” There are vaudeville posters, old souvenir postcards, souvenir pencils, toiletries and other commercial relics that once exploited Egyptian fads.

Most endearing is colorful sheet music for such Tin-Pan Alley numbers as “My Cairo Maid” (1917) and “Ilo (A Voice From Mummyland)” (1921), and the wistful tenor air “Star Light, Star Bright” from Victor Herbert’s early operetta hit, “The Wizard of the Nile” (1895). It’s a pity that there isn’t an accompanying selection of historic recordings to let visitors hear the tuneful melodies behind those inviting covers.

For younger viewers as well as adults, videos and board games introduce aspects of Egyptian culture; bins of flash-cards explain hieroglyphics, Egyptian cats, scarabs and other motifs. There are even “scent stations,” whose fragrant boxes of dried seeds and herbs invite visitors to inhale the aromas of “the spicy shores of Araby the blest.” Indeed, virtually no stone has been left unturned, as it were, to make this exhibition delightful and memorable.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.

 

 

Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Pillar Breakfast at the beautiful Bass Museum of Art- July 27, 2012. Pillar members enjoyed a wide array of artwork, a guided museum tour and a speaker panel discussing the highly-anticipated Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach. Speakers: Terry Riley, K/R Architect PC and Jeffrey Lawson, Art Fairs Unlimited. Moderator: Silvia Cubina, Bass Museum of Art Executive Director

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times - Nancy Spector, of the Guggenheim, speaking, and curators listening at a training program in Manhattan.

July 18, 2012
By RANDY KENNEDY

Over the last decade, as the contemporary art world has grown to planetary size — more galleries, more fairs, more art-selling Web sites, bigger museums, new biennials almost by the month — it has sometimes seemed as if a new kind of cultural figure has been born as well: the international curator, constantly in flight to somewhere.

The phenomenon is not wholly new. Roaming European curators like Harald Szeemann and Germano Celant set the terms in the 1960s. But the art world’s transformation has transformed the curatorial field, and this week you needed go no further than a few places in Manhattan to sample its increasingly global sweep. One afternoon in a meeting room near Madison Square Park a young Australian curator who specializes in aboriginal art was sitting next to a Yale-trained painter-art-professor-curator from Tennessee, who sat across a table from fellow curators from London, Beijing, Mexico City, Madrid (by way of Brazil) and Berlin (though working in Albania). In previous months curators from 20 other countries, many of them far from contemporary art’s beaten paths — Sri Lanka, Latvia, Nigeria, Bulgaria — had been in the city for the same reason.

Each of the curators had paid $1,900 — and in some cases more, for airfare and lodging — to come to New York for a 10-day training and networking program recently established by Independent Curators International, which has been known through most of its three decades for helping turn curators’ ideas into traveling exhibitions that are rented by established museums.

But over the last three years this nonprofit organization, based in modest offices overlooking lower Broadway, has reinvented itself, and its profile has begun to rise along with the profile of the profession.

While not exactly lucrative — the most recent snapshot by the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the estimated mean salary of a curator, broadly defined, in the United States at $53,540 — the profession has grown rapidly in cachet. The word itself has seeped into the language, a little too deeply. (“Curate your Facebook profile like you curate your life,” a social media blog counseled recently.) And while the term “independent curator” is misleading — curators are usually attached to institutions or programs, if only temporarily — the example of itinerant curators who have become art-world celebrities in recent years, like Okwui Enwezor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Neville Wakefield, has had an effect.

“This whole phenomenon is really a post-millennium thing,” said Kate Fowle, a longtime British curator who took over as the executive director of Independent Curators in 2009 after working for a year as the curator of a new art center in Beijing. “It’s a profession growing at a very, very fast rate.”

Although precise numbers are hard to come by, Ms. Fowle said that an indication of the field’s size worldwide was that in the two and a half years since her organization started a training program in 2010, 672 applicants from more than 62 countries — “many more than we ever expected,” she said — have vied for what has turned out to be about 150 spots in the program, chosen by a jury. Two sessions are held each year in New York, each with room for only about 14 participants. And the popularity of the program quickly led Independent Curators to begin collaborations with other groups to start parallel training sessions elsewhere: in Philadelphia, Mumbai, Beijing and southeast Brazil, at the privately financed contemporary art complex known as Inhotim.

In New York this week the latest participants, ranging in age from early 20s to early 50s, spent time with some of the most prominent professionals of the city’s museums and nonprofit spaces: Nancy Spector, the chief curator at the Guggenheim; Scott Rothkopf, from the Whitney; Laura Hoptman from the Museum of Modern Art; Matthew Higgs from White Columns. The subjects and discussions — from the aesthetic subtleties of plinths and sandpaper tape to ideas about organizing exhibitions against one’s own taste — were as expansive and amorphous as the job description.

Ms. Spector spoke about the difficulties of “grappling with the authority” of the Guggenheim’s architecture (“I sometimes think that I can’t install in a square room anymore”), but also, more extensively, about the dangers of the “helicopter model of international curating,” which too often leads to superficial understanding of cultures and their art — and to bad shows, she said.

Mr. Rothkopf, who was headed to another curators’ conference in Boston the next day, extolled the virtues — those he joked might seem almost “neocon” in an accelerating art world — of working closely with museum collections and with artists over long periods of time to create exhibitions “that shape an argument.”

“I want to have some voice as a curator,” he said, “not just as a kind of movie producer.”

An unofficial theme of the gathering was a desire among many curators to find ways to to define themselves against the juggernaut of the commercial art world while still being able to pay the bills.

“It’s very hard for people doing this in China to find the right kind of place, that doesn’t feel like just a part of the market,” said Su Wei, an independent critic and curator from Beijing. Meaghan Kent, who worked for Chelsea galleries for many years and recently started a nonprofit program, site95, that organizes shows in temporary urban spaces, said that many curators she knows are as creative about their livelihoods as they are in their work with art and artists.

“There are a lot of people out there who are artist-curator-bartender-whatevers, and they just put it all together to make it work,” she said. “They want to be able to have the freedom to make things up as they go.”

Emilia Galatis, a curator from Perth, Australia, who spent part of last year in the desert meeting aboriginal artists, said that visiting New York and talking to curators from around the world underscored for her how far off the radar of contemporary art aboriginal art remains, and how narrow the focus of the curatorial field can be despite its size.

“It’s really hard even to talk precisely about global curating when the world is still so diverse,” she said.

But Mr. Su said that the more he traveled as a curator, the less diverse the art world was coming to seem. “I was at another curators conference just before I came here, in Guangzhou, and all the things we were discussing there weren’t much different from what we’re discussing here today.”

 

July 11, 2012

New York is, famously, a city whose seen-it-all citizens are above doing double takes when celebrities walk by. Neither, as it turns out, do some of them raise an eyebrow at a six-passenger, 35-foot-long twin-engine airplane spinning above their heads. How I Roll, which has been somersaulting above Fifth Avenue at 60th Street for a few weeks now, is a monumental kinetic sculpture by the Italian artist Paola Pivi and, jaded New Yorkers notwithstanding, it’s remarkable.

The piece was commissioned by the Public Art Fund, and financed by several generous private donations, including my own. About two years ago, Public Art Fund curator Nicholas Baume and I created a small selection committee to commission a new artwork from a living artist. Joining us on the committee were independent curator Alison Gingeras and Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a former director of Public Art Fund. When Ms. Pivi’s name came up, we all knew we had a winner: she has never had a proper gallery show in New York and is mostly unknown in the U.S. In Europe, she has enjoyed considerable success for a unique style of conceptual art with a twist of absurdity: a leopard walking across a room of cappuccino cups, an alligator in a sea of shaving cream, a zebra standing in snow-covered mountains. Her decision to place a spinning airplane above Doris C. Freedman Plaza wasn’t altogether surprising, given her longstanding interest in large vehicles: she won early recognition in 1997 when she tipped over an 18-wheeler semi-trailer truck, but she has also posed helicopters upside down and leaned fighter jets against walls.

The time-and-money logistics of putting her airplane in place in New York were arduous and lengthy, and there were moments when it looked like the project would never happen. But Ms. Pivi has a magic touch: all the way from Anchorage, Alaska, where she’s lived for several years, she manages to convince people to realize her dreams. After more than two years of planning and engineering and the clearing of much red tape, the piece is finally installed for its two- month run (the piece was finished so late that it arrived four months into its six- month permit). Well, better late than never—I’m convinced it’s the most daring public artwork New York has witnessed in a very long time.

Shortly before she returned to Anchorage, I caught up with Ms. Pivi over lunch at Bergdorf’s. From the seventh-floor café’s windows, we had a bird’s-eye view of her extraordinary piece, and, after remarking that she loves the way a huge twirling plane that looks like it might easily fit in at an amusement park can also function as contemporary art, she recalled how she scraped together financing for her early projects, in the late 1990s. “My first major outdoor piece was a tractor-trailer tipped over on its side,” she said. Her day job as an aerobics instructor wasn’t sufficient to pay her art production bills. “I had to borrow the money from my uncle and my landlord. Fortunately the piece was a success and I managed to pay them back.”

In 2003, she got a show in New York—really, more of a micro-show, in the tiny Chelsea storefront that served as Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick’s Wrong Gallery. The display was short-lived. “I showed only a single piece, one of my bunches of pearls, but it was too heavy for the wall, and the landlord became afraid of the weight because it was hanging on the door to a boiler room, so they took it down after a single week.”

The idea for the spinning airplane came, she said, from “a vision I had.” As for its title, that came from her husband, Karma, a poet and musician who trained as a Tibetan monk. Ms. Pivi insists that “art has no specific meaning” and that she’s “not trying to say more than what you see,” but how, in a city like New York where everyone is always on the go in all manner of vehicle, could I not read into her artwork my own question, “where are we really going?”

“I am not commenting on New York,” she said. “I am commenting on man and machine, time and beauty. The piece is about transcending limits.” 

Isn’t it also about the failure of progress ? “No. … The making of the artwork is huge progress, a big move forward.”

While she wouldn’t divulge to me what inspired the suspended airplane, Ms. Pivi did agree that, as a civilization, we are not exactly moving forward. “Western society overall is indeed going in the wrong direction,” she said. “For example, they don’t stop trashing the ocean. Think about all the trash; where I live in Alaska we pay only $65 a month for garbage removal, but that’s not the real price. The real price would take into account the impact this has on the planet. This garbage will stay for years; no one thinks to calculate the real long-term cost this has to the planet.”

Photographs courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, at the Guggenheim Museum, with portraits here from Belgium, Croatia, England, Poland and Ukraine, as well as New York and South Carolina. More Photos »

 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 5, 2012

Rineke Dijkstra has enormous faith in the power of two things: youth and the camera. In her best work this 53-year-old Dutch artist uses photography and sometimes video to coax out the emotional subtleties and raw energy that are special to children, adolescents and young adults, with grave, revelatory and sometimes ecstatic results.

 

At other times her portraits are more opaque, which can yield another kind of magnetism: We see pictures of resistance to photography in which Ms. Dijkstra’s subjects hold on to their secrets, showing us a more armored youthful vulnerability.

Both kinds of images can be found in Ms. Dijkstra’s richly affecting 20-year midcareer survey at the Guggenheim Museum. Organized jointly with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and overseen by the curators Sandra S. Phillips of that museum and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim — it brings together more than 70 color photographs and 5 video works. They create an engrossing meditation on the anxieties, pride and tumult of youth and the emergence of the self, and also on the degree to which the camera can capture these rites of passage.

Ms. Dijkstra studied photography at art school in Amsterdam and spent a few years working commercially, taking corporate portraits and images for annual reports — activity that left her frustrated. She felt that her subjects remained hidden behind social and professional masks and habits of self-presentation, while she sought a greater emotional intensity.

A serious injury gave Ms. Dijkstra needed time to think: five months in bed followed by physical therapy that culminated in swimming. One day in June 1991, toward the end of her recovery, she photographed herself immediately after swimming a grueling 30 laps. She thought that fatigue would lend the photograph an emotional immediacy. It did.

That self-portrait, which shows the artist in a dripping bathing suit, looking winded and slightly bowed but staring defiantly at the camera, is in the show. Drawing from traditional portraiture and postmodern setup photography, it signals the beginning of Ms. Dijkstra’s work as an artist, in particular her tendency to photograph the young, who are less practiced at self-presentation.

Echoing the swimming pool image, she began photographing teenagers in similar moments of physical exposure, in swimsuits on the beach. She then sought out situations of genuine stress or momentous change, as in her large head shots of young Portuguese toreros just after emerging from the bullring, their faces bloodied and garments torn, their eyes glowing with triumph and relief; or her full-length photographs of dazed young mothers standing naked with their newborns in their arms, like no-frills, modern-day Madonnas.

Ms. Dijkstra is member of a prominent generation of European photographers that includes Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, all Germans. But it is often said, and it is true, that her work is less glamorous and more human and frankly expressive than theirs.

Moreover, Ms. Dijkstra uses photography in a way that few of her contemporaries do: as a kind of pivot between portrait painting and reality — that is, between completely hand-formed and therefore fictive pictures of real people and real people themselves. Her photographs adopt some formal aspects of painting, but their subjects are also much more present and unmediated in realistic detail and emotional mood.

The pivoting nature of Ms. Dijkstra’s images is clear in the first gallery of the Guggenheim show, which is distributed somewhat awkwardly through four of the museum’s tower galleries adjoining the rotunda. It begins with an imposing selection of the beach portraits (1992-94) that established Ms. Dijkstra’s reputation: the full-length, nearly life-size color photographs of teenagers and slightly younger children taken at ocean’s edge in the United States, Poland, Britain, Ukraine and Croatia.

The monumental isolation of the figures is enhanced by low-angle shots, along with frontal poses and the austere, slightly abstract background bands of beach, water and sky, all of which echo the full-length portraits of Goya, Hals and Manet. This sense of form and formality contrasts markedly with the pictures’ contemporary casualness — the exposed flesh and intimations of fun and sun — even as it is confirmed by the prevailing seriousness and subtle anticipatory anxiety.

Some subjects, like a Ukrainian youth in a red Speedo-type swimsuit, are rawboned and angular; they have not grown into their bodies. A tall, lanky girl on a Polish beach has full hips but a flat chest; her pale green bathing suit is wet only up to the waist, suggesting the upward progress of puberty. A more mature blond girl in a silky orange two-piece in Hilton Head Island, S.C., has mustered makeup, jewelry and an elaborate hairdo worthy of a local teenage beauty contest.

Speaking about the beach portraits in an interview, Ms. Dijkstra hit the nail on the head when she said, “They showed what we don’t want to show anymore but still feel.” Looking at these pictures, we understand that the emotional vulnerability of youth is not so much outgrown as hidden.

Time, change and the lack of change are among Ms. Dijkstra’s themes, which she often emphasizes by photographing the same person over time. In a series of seven half-length portraits shot over three years, we track the maturation of a teenager named Olivier, starting with two images from July 21, 2000, the day he joins the French Foreign Legion, has his head shaved and dons fatigues. Over the next five images, as he appears in uniforms or sweaty T-shirts, his expression remains amazingly, almost frighteningly, constant and, in a way, young, even as he hardens and fills out, progressing from boy to man.

A fuller transformation is revealed in the same gallery by a series of 11 images taken between 1994 and 2008 that follow a young Bosnian refugee named Almerisa into adolescence and beyond, to motherhood. Always shown seated in a chair, Almerisa becomes tall and gangly, then womanly and, according to some writers, more assimilated.

More transfixing, however, are the subtle and not so subtle changes in her face and, it seems, her attitude. As she tries out different makeup and hair colors, her visage gains a palpable brittleness, becoming slightly common. In the final image she is shown with her infant; corny as it may sound, her face has regained some of the softness apparent in the first images from her childhood.

In Ms. Dijkstra’s videos the passage of time is, as might be expected, even more present, but in remarkably different ways. At one end of the spectrum is the near motionless quiet of “Ruth Drawing Picasso,” a wonderful six-minute portrait that may be as close to still photography as video can get but is much more revealing.

It shows a young schoolgirl seated on the floor of the Tate Liverpool completely absorbed in copying a Picasso painting (that is never shown) into her sketchbook. In her subtle shiftings of gaze, expression and position, Ruth comes across as an immensely likable, self-sufficient child whose existence brightens your view of the future.

In contrast to Ruth’s stillness is the sometimes ecstatic energy found in Ms. Dijkstra’s videos of teenagers in dance clubs: a two-channel projection from 1996-97, “Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL,” and the four-channel installation “The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK,” from 2009.

In both Ms. Dijkstra once more presents her subjects in formally controlled circumstances, against white seamless backgrounds and shot mostly at three-quarter length. In “Buzz Club” the subjects mostly hang out: They smoke, chew gum and drink beer (often simultaneously) while swaying to the music and largely ignoring the camera. But one young woman in a white dress that reveals her midriff is an exception; as the music’s beat becomes irresistible, she locks eyes with the camera and dances her heart out, to riveting effect.

Her generous performance may have inspired the “Krazyhouse” video, for which Ms. Dijkstra invited selected clubgoers to dance before her camera to their favorite music. Again, their performances vary greatly in generosity or, put another way, in the degree to which the music (and the camera) is resisted or surrendered to. But when they cut loose, as do Simon and Dee, it is hard not to be enthralled, and grateful to Ms. Dijkstra for capturing such powerful flashes of human potential.

“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” continues through Oct. 8 at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.

 A version of this review appeared in print on July 6, 2012, on page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Hiding In Plain Sight.

Sotheby’s
David Hockney’s ‘‘Swimming Pool,’’  painted in 1965, went for £2.5  million at Sotheby’s in London, up from  its 2007 price of £1.19 million.

LONDON — The market for contemporary art is holding up remarkably well in the midst of the deepening concerns that are engulfing the global economy.

If Sotheby’s sale on Tuesday evening might have left a different impression, it is because brazen speculation no longer flies as easily as it did until recently. The 69 lots of the 79 that came up nonetheless sold quite well, allowing Sotheby’s to post a £69.3 million, or $108 million, score.

The auction house even achieved a world auction record. Glenn Brown’s monumental canvas “The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dalí (After John Martin)” ascended to £5.19 million, more than two-thirds above expectations. For a picture that has a touch of spoofery about it, this is not bad. As the title indicates, the apocalyptic scenery with fire burning and lava flowing reinterprets John Martin’s “Great Day of His Wrath” done in the late 1840s, and it looks a bit like a movie poster of the 1950s.

Several other works showed that big money continues to pour into contemporary art.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Warrior,” dated 1982, commanded an even higher price, £5.58 million. But that was under the low estimate, and the difference with Mr. Brown’s painting is that it did not trigger competition.

A glance at the prices previously paid for “Warrior,” done in the late artist’s street graffiti style, helps explain its failure to arouse enthusiasm. Five years ago, it sold for £2.82 million, also at Sotheby’s. Buyers apparently felt that allowing the clever consignor to cash in almost double his 2007 outlay was generous enough.

Earlier in the sale, bidders had been more willing to compete over another composition by Basquiat, “Saxaphone,” painted in 1986, two years before his death. Did they like it better because it is covered with inscriptions? Or were they more tolerant of profit-making when spread over a 15-year period? In 1997, the consignor had bought “Saxaphone” at Sotheby’s New York for $244,500. This week, it fetched £2.72 million, about $4.25 million.

After deduction of the sale charge to the buyer, more than 12 percent, which the auction house cashes in, and of another charge payable by the vendor at a privately negotiated rate, this leaves the consignor a profit of $3 million.

Other clever financial coups were made. David Hockney painted “Swimming Pool” in 1965 in a manner that suggests admiration for Magritte’s faux-naif style with a faint avant-garde whiff. In 2007, its owner, Magnus Künow, acquired the Hockney at Sotheby’s for £1.19 million. This week, it realized £2.5 million.

Francis Bacon’s 1980 “Study for Self-Portrait” also proved to have been a judicious bet. Bought in 2001 at Sotheby’s New York for $2.76 million, the Bacon sold this week for £4.52 million, more than $7 million. From a vendor’s perspective, this is brilliant.

Sadly for Sotheby’s, the sale did not look brilliant at all — quite the contrary, if one merely considered the wild estimate, £5 million to £7 million, plus the sale charge. The attendance glumly watched the Bacon being knocked down to a lone bidder who paid £1 million less than the low estimate.

In this dull atmosphere, the auctioneer Tobias Meyer appeared to be extracting bids from a reticent room when these actually resulted in large prices.

Bidders occasionally displayed some zest. Piero Manzoni’s crumpled canvases coated in white kaolin, with not much else to identify them as art, were vigorously chased. “Achrome,” done in 1959-1960, sold for £2.61 million, matching the ambitious middle estimate.

The problem on Tuesday was not that buyers lacked the wherewithal or the will to spend it. They simply declined to be held to ransom by consignors playing around with estimates and assorted reserves designed to ensure huge profits. If Sotheby’s specialists went along with their vendors’ whims, this means that they had no other way to cajole them into consigning their goods.

Christie’s experienced no such trouble. Its Wednesday evening sale, definitely more substantial, put the market back into perspective. With 60 lots adding up to £132.81 million, Christie’s almost doubled the score achieved by Sotheby’s.

The mood in the room was very different. This was partly because the session included several works seen as hugely desirable by those who follow contemporary art. But the fact that estimates had been set more closely to what the market is prepared to accept played a role in turning the Christie’s session into the success story of the week.

The sale, conducted by Jussy Pylkkanen, president of Christie’s Europe, quickly took off.

The third lot consisted of two fluorescent light tubes by Dan Flavin. It was “number two from an edition of three,” Sotheby’s noted. The fluorescent tubes fetched £205,250, well above the high estimate. Next, a bunch of empty mussel shells spread over a panel coated with resin, plus a “plastic bag filled with mussels,” went up to £433,250. It took the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaelers eight years to put the finishing touches to his “work,” completed two years before his death in 1976.

A vast canvas inscribed “Cy Twombly, Roma, 1962” came on its heels. Blobs of paint squished out of tubes are crushed at wide intervals on the off-white ground and a few gray lines are trailed across, with no obvious purpose. But Twombly, who died last year, has been reestablished as a blue chip among the postwar artists. The “Untitled” picture realized a price of £2.16 million.

Moments later, a delirious reaction was triggered by Yves Klein’s monumental “Le Rose du Bleu (RE22).” Sponges and gravel are stuck on board, held by synthetic resin painted pink. The French artist executed this work two years before his death in 1962. In order to enlighten viewers who might fail to grasp the meaning of the pink sponges and gravel, Christie’s quoted the late French art critic Pierre Restany, according to whom “madder rose represents the Holy Spirit before the gold of the Father and the blue of the Son.” Restany even spoke of Klein’s “Cosmological Trilogy of personal transmutation of colors.”

What is clear is that the sponges and gravel transmuted into gold: At £23.56 million, the work set a world auction record for the artist.

As the sale went on, it became evident that the key to success was not the artists’ aesthetic orientation. If non-representational works like the Klein soared sky high, so did figural art in all its trends.

Francis Bacon’s “Study for Self-Portrait,” done in 1964 in an Expressionist vein, soared to an astronomical £21.54 million.

An untitled Basquiat done in 1981 in the late American artist’s distinctive style also pleased bidders. They sent it climbing to £12.92 million, setting a world auction record for Basquiat’s work.

While the ease with which the Bacon and the Basquiat both surpassed expectations could be accounted for by their instant punch, the bland, more naturalistic Lucian Freud was again favorably received. A small “Head of a Greek Man,” portrayed in October 1946, exceeded the estimate by half at £3.4 million. It was followed by “Naked Portrait II,” painted in the mid-1970s in a style that might be seen as looking back to the work of Manet. That work went for £4.29 million.

Pop art indebted to comic books as a source of inspiration also went down well. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Reflections on Jessica Helms,” painted in 1990 in a belated throwback to the American artist’s early work in the 1960s, found a taker at £4.01 million.

Add “Structure (2),” a superb abstract composition done in 1989 by the German artist Gerhard Richter, which sold for £12.69 million, the fourth-highest price on Wednesday, and few would question the eclecticism of bidders. Names seemed to be the determining criteria of desirability, sparing buyers the ordeal of having to make a decision based on the art itself. When these criteria were met, money flowed as easily as ever.

The message this week is clear: The market for contemporary art is full of vitality. But buyers will no longer put up with speculators playing games at their expense.

 

The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, designed by Foster + Partners, at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.

 

Keeping up with the Joneses.

It happens in many settings, from the classroom to the country club, and, perhaps not surprisingly, among cultural organizations, according to a new study that finds that many institutions recently expanded their buildings in part because everyone else had.

Other reasons that organizations will build too much are overambitious trustees, self-interested architects and unrealistic financial projections, according to the study by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago that is to be released Thursday.

The study, “Set in Stone,” examined the cultural building boom between 1994 and 2008, when museums, performing arts centers and theaters in the United States got swept up in new construction or major renovations.

More than $16 billion was spent by cultural organizations on building projects during that period, some inspired by the hope that construction initiatives could do what a Frank Gehry-designed museum building did for Bilbao, Spain: transform a small city into a major cultural destination.

“This issue between confusing a want with a need is enormous in the sector,” said Carroll Joynes, a founder and senior fellow at the policy center. “There are clear ways to avoid this. You can learn from what other people went through.”

A number of the lessons, the study suggests, could be drawn from its case studies of expansions like that of the Art Institute of Chicago over the past decade.

At first glance the project seemed daunting: a $300 million venture that would boost yearly operating costs by an estimated $4 million and would necessitate another $87 million in fund-raising to expand the endowment.

But with the Italian architect Renzo Piano engaged and several key trustees and the museum’s director gung ho, the expansion gained a kind of inexorable momentum.

Attendance did spike initially when the new wing opened in March 2009, but then it dropped back to normal levels. A precipitous decline in endowment income led to pay cuts, furloughs, a salary freeze and two rounds of layoffs.

“Instead of expanding its budget as expected, the Art Institute was forced to contract instead,” the study said.

The study examines not only what arts organizations got wrong but also what they got right and offers guidance for arts executives, civic leaders, donors and government officials about how to avoid pitfalls and how to grow intelligently and responsibly — or maybe not at all.

“It’s lessons from the front lines,” said Adrian Ellis, an arts consultant who helped conceptualize the study. “The stories aren’t told that often.”

The study was based on interviews with people in more than 500 arts organizations and drew data from more than 700 construction projects that ranged in cost from $4 million to $335 million. The New York region led the country in cultural building ($1.6 billion) after Los Angeles ($950 million) and the Chicago area ($870 million).

In many cases the researchers found that organizations failed to realistically assess the demand for their projects and their capacities to complete them: Do we really need this? Can we afford to build it? Can we support a larger operation going forward?

“All of the work fundamentally says, ‘Don’t build what you can’t sustain,’ ” said Duncan M. Webb, an arts management consultant, who was an adviser on the study.

Architects can also run away with a project, the study reports. “They say the building is for you, but the building is for them,” Mr. Joynes said. “It’s for the pictures and for their careers. From their point of view it’s a real success if it gets built.”

The study found that the most successful projects were driven by a clear artistic mission and demonstrable need; had authoritative and consistent leadership throughout the process; controlled expenses during construction; and generated income after completion.

The report’s other case studies were the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Va.; the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.; and the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Tex. — all of which encountered financial hurdles after expansion.

“The Modern Wing was not an impulsive project,” Douglas Druick, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said. “It was 10 years in the making, and it puts the Art Institute on a solid footing for the future. We expect it to be here for decades, just as we still open the doors of our original 1893 building every morning.”

Additional examples outside the study abound, Mr. Joynes said, like the recent travails of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which had to close its new flagship building in Midtown and move to its smaller Upper West Side location after almost going out of business. “The Folk Art Museum should not have happened,” Mr. Joynes said. “It was a wonderful museum and they self-destructed. Our whole purpose in this is to say, ‘There are ways to do this that can protect your organization and help you fulfill your mission that won’t cripple you or take you down.’”

The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Mr. Ellis said, is an example of an organization that failed to build the necessary consensus among public officials and others before embarking on its $265 million complex, which opened in 2001.

“They thought, ‘If we can just get this thing up, everything will fall into place,’ and that simply isn’t the case,” Mr. Ellis said of the Kimmel. “If you haven’t thought about how to operate it, it will come back and bite you.”

Anne C. Ewers, Kimmel’s president and chief executive, acknowledged that she inherited a $30 million building deficit when she came on board in 2007 but said that she retired it the following year and that the institution was in the process of correcting “architectural mistakes” like the acoustics. “The biggest challenge was not having established an endowment dedicated to the maintenance of the facility,” she said.

In part because of these experiences and the economic downturn, the researchers say, the cultural building boom is decidedly over. The trend now is toward adaptive reuse of existing buildings and cultural districts that link various smaller organizations.

“We’re less interested in the idea of palaces of the arts,” Mr. Webb said. “A lot of these communities got in over their heads. I think we’ve learned our lessons.”

Christian Marclay/Paula Cooper Gallery
Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film montage, “The Clock,” is coming to the David Rubenstein Atrium in Lincoln Center.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: June 21, 2012

This summer the city that never sleeps will have another glimpse of an artwork that doesn’t relent much either: “The Clock,” a spellbinding, time-telling 24-hour wonder of film and sound montage by Christian Marclay, the polymath composer, collagist, video artist and pioneer turntablist.

An assemblage of time-related movie moments that had its debut in London in autumn 2010, Mr. Marclay’s “Clock” is already a popular classic. It is also a functioning timepiece; a highly compressed, peripatetic history of film and film styles; an elaborate, rhythmic musical composition; and a relentlessly enthralling meditation on time as an inescapable fact of both cinematic artifice and everyday life. Perhaps the ultimate validation of appropriation art, it thoroughly demonstrates how existing works of art — in this case films — become raw material for new ones.

“The Clock” counts off the minutes of a 24-hour day using tiny segments from thousands of films. Bits of “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Laura,” “On the Waterfront,” “The Godfather” and “A Clockwork Orange” speed past, mixed with early silent films and less familiar foreign ones.

As the action, music, sound effects and dialogue of one film bleed into those of another, each segment specifies a time, sometimes through spoken words, but mostly through shots of wristwatches, clocks, time clocks and the like. All are synced to real time. When it is 11:30 a.m. in “The Clock,” it will be 11:30 a.m. in the world outside. Exactly.

The first New York showing of “The Clock,” at the Paula Cooper Gallery in January 2011, had people lining up around the block in a relatively deserted west Chelsea in the dead of winter. Now, for 20 days starting on July 13, Lincoln Center will present the piece in a specially built theater in the David Rubenstein Atrium on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets. Admission will be first come first served in a setting — lined with movie-palace velvet curtains and outfitted with enormous couches that blur boundaries between living room and screening room — that accommodates only about 90 people at a time.

It may be a challenge to get in, even in the wee hours, which is when I want to go, but I intend to make every effort, and recommend that you do too. The piece will run Tuesday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and then settle in for three 38-hour weekend marathons beginning at 8 a.m. Fridays and running to 10 p.m. Sundays. It will be closed Mondays and ends on Aug. 1.

 

By Farah Nayeri - Jun 19, 2012 7:00 PM ET

Damien Hirst’s $100 million skull could be yours for just $800...

Not the real diamond-studded cranium -- a high-definition rotating image of it, certified by the artist, and available in a limited edition of 2,000 from the new digital-art venture S[edition], started in November by dealer Harry Blain.

seditionart.com via Bloomberg

A still image of the Tracey Emin neon work, "I Promise to Love You." The work is available for purchase from the U.K.-based s[edition] digital art gallery.

A still image of the Tracey Emin neon work, "I Promise to Love You." The work is available for purchase from the U.K.-based s[edition] digital art gallery. Source: seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Harry Blain and Robert Norton - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Harry Blain and Robert Norton, co-founders of s[edition], an online gallery of digital art. Founded in November 2011, the gallery offers for sale digital works by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, among others.

Harry Blain and Robert Norton, co-founders of s[edition], an online gallery of digital art. Founded in November 2011, the gallery offers for sale digital works by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, among others. 

 

 Isaac Julien - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Isaac Julien, a nominee for the U.K.'s 2001 Turner Prize, next to an image of his digital work "The Leopard." The screen-based work is available for $12 from the online art gallery s[edition].

Isaac Julien, a nominee for the U.K.'s 2001 Turner Prize, next to an image of his digital work "The Leopard." The screen-based work is available for $12 from the online art gallery s[edition].

Mat Collishaw artwork - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

A still shot of Mat Collishaw's swaying screen-based artwork "Whispering Weeds." The online work is available for purchase from the s[edition] digital art gallery.

A still shot of Mat Collishaw's swaying screen-based artwork "Whispering Weeds." The online work is available for purchase from the s[edition] digital art gallery. Source: seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Hirst and Tracey Emin are among artists producing the inaugural batch of works: high-quality digital stills or videos priced $8 to $1,600. Emin has contributed images of neon inscriptions. The works are for iPads, smartphones, PC and TV screens, and the artists get a cut of the sales.

So far, more than 100,000 Facebook users have “liked” the S[edition] page. The online gallery doesn’t give out totals for purchases or site subscribers. The most popular buy: a $20 still image of a Hirst dot painting, “Xylosidase,” of which 577 out of an edition of 10,000 have been sold.

“It’s modern, it’s hip, it’s new,” says Charley Uzzell Edwards, a London-based street-art and graffiti-art dealer. “But it doesn’t excite me quite as much as a nice old engraving, where you see the plate marks, and the actual physical character of the piece.”

For S[edition] to have more impact, says Uzzell Edwards, it should represent artists whose original medium is the digital screen. Stills of pre-existing artworks -- albeit low-resolution ones -- can be downloaded for free from the Web. Also, he says, edition sizes should be smaller to boost scarcity value.

Emerging Artists

S[edition] co-founder Robert Norton, former chief executive of Saatchi Online, says both issues are being addressed.

“Short-term, we want to increase our stable of well-known artists,” says Norton. “Longer-term, we want to make this a platform for more emerging artists to offer more work directly.”

The gallery also aims to set up an online secondary market for the works to be resold. Editions will then be smaller to boost their value as an investment, he says.

“The ability to resell the work is an important part, in some collectors’ minds, in the decision to buy,” he says.

Blain -- who co-founded the Haunch of Venison gallery in 2002, sold it to Christie’s International in 2007 and now co- runs BlainSouthern in London and Berlin and BlainDiDonna in New York -- says digital is the next step for the art market.

“There was a fan base out there that weren’t being engaged,” he says. “If you’re only ever talking to an existing marketplace, then you’re talking to a shrinking market.”

Watermark Tracer

Blain dismisses the threat of bootlegging, saying the product is “tracked and traced and watermarked.”

“If you have a first-edition book, it has a value, recognition of it being the original, the authentic, the first published volume,” he says. “There could be 10 billion editions of that book, but it doesn’t erode the value of the first edition.”

Among the moving-image works available on the site, Bill Viola has sequences from two of his videos, priced $200 each. Mat Collishaw’s $48 “Whispering Weeds” shows tall weeds swaying against a gray sky. Michael Craig-Martin’s $80 “Surfacing” has a square frame that moves over the line drawing underneath and colors it.

S[edition] artist Isaac Julien -- a Turner Prize nominee represented in the collections of Tate and The Museum of Modern Art -- sees the gallery as a vehicle for “democratization” of contemporary art. He’d like to see it market art originally made for the screen (as opposed to an image of a pre-existing work).

Julien, who teaches media art at the ZKM Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, also hopes prices will become “a bit more expensive, to give value to that field, which is at the moment locked out of the commercial art world.”

Muse highlights include Richard Vines on London restaurants, Scott Reyburn on the art market, James Pressley on business books and Ryan Sutton on New York restaurants.

To contact the writer on the story: Farah Nayeri in London at Farahn@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

via bloomberg.com

Walter Maibaum/The Degas Sculpture Project
Some of the 74 plasters attributed to Edgar Degas: fearing lawsuits, scholars are afraid to declare them genuine or not.

John Elderfield, former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, remembers the days when scholars spoke freely about whether a particular work was genuine.

They were connoisseurs, this was their field of expertise, and a curator like Kirk Varnedoe, Mr. Elderfield’s predecessor at the Modern, would think nothing of offering his view of a drawing attributed to Rodin, his specialty.

“He was qualified to do it and felt he had a moral obligation to do it,” Mr. Elderfield said.

But when the owner of a painting attributed to Henri Matisse recently asked Mr. Elderfield for his opinion, he demurred. He worried he could be sued if he said the painting was not a real Matisse.

Librado Romero/The New York Times
John Elderfield, a former curator at the Modern.

Mr. Elderfield is hardly alone in feeling that art’s celebrated freedom of expression no longer extends to expert opinions on authenticity. As spectacular sums flow through the art market and an expert verdict can make or destroy a fortune, several high-profile legal cases have pushed scholars to censor themselves for fear of becoming entangled in lawsuits.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and the Noguchi Museum have all stopped authenticating works to avoid litigation. In January the Courtauld Institute of Art in London cited “the possibility of legal action” when it canceled a forum discussing a controversial set of some 600 drawings attributed to Francis Bacon. And the leading experts on Degas have avoided publicly saying whether 74 plasters attributed to him are a stupendous new find or an elaborate hoax.

The anxiety has even touched the supreme arbiter of the genuine and fake: the catalogue raisonné, the definitive, scholarly compendium of an artist’s work. Inclusion has been called the difference between “great wealth and the gutter,” and auction houses sometimes refuse to handle unlisted works. As a result catalogue raisonné authors have been the targets of lawsuits, not to mention bribes and even death threats.

“Legal cage rattling was always part of the process,” said Nancy Mowll Mathews, president of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association. But the staggering rise in art prices has transformed the cost-benefit analysis of suing at the same time that fraud has become more profitable, she said.

While some argue the fear is overblown, others warn the growing reluctance to speak publicly about authenticity could keep forgeries and misattributed works in circulation while permitting newly discovered works to go unrecognized.

The perceived crisis has prompted a pointed ethical debate: Do you speak out if you spot a suspicious work or keep quiet as lawyers recommend?

Art experts have been getting sued over their opinions since at least the days of Joseph Duveen, the flamboyant dealer who found himself in court in the 1920s after declaring “La Belle Ferronnière,” a supposed Leonardo painting for sale, to be a fake. Duveen’s judgment caused the Kansas City Art Institute to withdraw its offer of $250,000, and in the end Duveen settled by agreeing to pay the owner $60,000. (The painting is now considered to be by a follower of Leonardo.)

As prices have risen, so have risks. In 2005, after watching other organizations fend off lawsuits, the Lichtenstein foundation bought $5 million worth of liability insurance and made its authentication process more rigorous and transparent, its executive director, Jack Cowart, said. Then in 2011 the Warhol foundation revealed it had spent $7 million defending itself against a lawsuit involving a silk-screen it had rejected for the catalogue raisonné. Mr. Cowart called his insurance company to find out if the Lichtenstein foundation would be protected if faced with a similar suit. The agent said it was impossible to predict. “That was a very sobering moment,” Mr. Cowart said.

The board had always felt an obligation to guard Lichtenstein’s legacy in this way, he explained. But now, figuring it was only a matter of time before the law of averages would throw a lawsuit their way, board members decided the benefits of authenticating did not outweigh the risks.

“Why should we go stand in front of a speeding car?” Mr. Cowart said. “We decided it’s not the role of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to deal with the art market’s authenticity issues.”

That view disturbs Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, which is publishing Robert Motherwell’s catalogue raisonné and was sued last year for changing its opinion about a painting’s authenticity. “If experts stop speaking up, you’re going to get more fakes surfacing,” he said.

Mr. Cowart counters that the authentication committee’s pronouncements were not driving fakes out of the market. The majority of works inspected during the panel’s six years, he said, were third-rate fakes that would reappear as soon as the owners sold them to other unsuspecting dupes.

So what would the Lichtenstein foundation do if it became aware that a major forgery was being auctioned for millions of dollars?

“We don’t know what we would say if we were asked formally or informally,” Mr. Cowart said. “We don’t deal in hypotheticals.”

Sharon Flescher, president of the International Foundation for Art Research, said she doubts the number of lawsuits challenging expert opinions has gone up. Nonetheless she conceded that the perception is having “a chilling effect.” Even though few plaintiffs win, experts are deterred by the time and legal expense. That’s why the College Art Association recently began offering affordable liability insurance to its members who authenticate art, she noted.

Peter R. Stern, an art lawyer in New York, tells clients never to volunteer an opinion unless formally asked by the owners, and even then to make sure the owners sign a waiver promising not to sue. If they don’t ask, don’t tell. “Art scholarship is fighting a losing battle against commerce,” he said.

Fears of being sued may even lead to changes in the nature of catalogues raisonnés, Ms. Flescher added. She pointed to recent decisions by the Calder and Lichtenstein foundations and the Noguchi Museum to move their cataloging efforts online and label them as “works in progress.”

“What we are presenting is a combination of completed research and research pending,” said Shaina D. Larrivee, project manager of the Isamu Noguchi catalogue raisonné. “We are very clear that ‘research pending’ does not guarantee inclusion in the final catalogue raisonné, and that we have the ability to remove artworks if new information comes to light.”

Alexander Rower, Alexander Calder’s grandson and the chairman of the Calder Foundation, said he decided to forgo a catalogue raisonné in favor of an online guide to Calder’s development and history. “You determine if your work is fake or not with the data we present,” he said.

The Web site, scheduled to begin operation this summer, will feature 4,000 to 6,000 works, roughly one-quarter of Calder’s total output. Although the foundation does not authenticate, Mr. Rower said, it will register and examine a supposed Calder at an owner’s request and release any information it has about the piece. The foundation does, however, keep a watchful eye on the market. Mr. Rower traveled to the Basel art fair in Switzerland last week to photograph every Calder for further research, he said.

And if he were to find a forgery? “You can’t just go out there in the world and say, ‘That’s fake,’ “ Mr. Rower said. “But it is a fair thing for me to say to an art dealer, ‘Have your presented this work to the Calder Foundation?’ And if he says no, I say, ‘You really should.’ “

As for scholars who are dragged into court, they do occasionally come out ahead. The art expert Steve Seltzer was sued after declaring that a watercolor of cowboys was not painted by the revered Western artist Charles M. Russell but by his own grandfather the artist O. C. Seltzer. After the suit was thrown out, Mr. Seltzer turned around and countersued the painting’s owner, Steve Morton, and his lawyers. In 2007 the Montana Supreme Court awarded Mr. Seltzer $11 million in damages. As the judges put it, using a lawsuit to coerce an expert to give a particular opinion is “legal thuggery.”