"The Paintbrush in the Digital Era" @nytimes by Roberta Smith

  • “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” has been a long time coming. The Museum of Modern Art has steadily been acquiring new painting, as a visit to its website will confirm. But for years it has disdained actually saying anything about the state of the medium in exhibition form, and all the while painting has developed actively on numerous fronts.

    “The Forever Now,” which opens Sunday and is organized by Laura Hoptman, curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, considers some of those changes, and it does so with a normal combination of successes and shortcomings, including a lack of daring. Its thesis hinges on the word atemporal, inspired by “atemporality,” which was coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in 2003. The idea is that, especially in the digital era, culture exists in a state of simultaneity, where all of history is equally available for use.

    It could be argued that simultaneity is nothing new: It was once the definition of postmodernism; it also describes the ways artists selectively consider past art alive and useful, and can be a cover for simple derivativeness — a condition not entirely absent from the exhibition.

    The terrain the show stakes out is diverse and fairly recent, but also very familiar: The 17 artists represented here are all known, mostly market-approved entities familiar to anyone who follows contemporary art even casually. Nearly all the participants possess résumés dotted with solo shows in smaller museums and at blue-chip galleries, here and abroad; 12 of the artists are already represented in MoMA’s collection.

    In short, this exhibition looks far too tidy and well behaved, much as you might fear a show of recent painting at the Modern would look: validating the already validated and ready for popular consumption. For the majority of the museum’s visitors who rarely set foot in commercial galleries, the show may hold surprises and even mild frissons of shock.

    And this exhibition may also exceed the expectations even of gallery-scene regulars. Against the odds, it is surprisingly engaging. It gives you plenty to look at, which has become something of a rarity with shows of recent art at the Modern. (It’s when you consider what else could be here that the problems begin.)

    The show is actually less predictable than the list of names would imply. It helps that there are new works by several artists. Some, like Julie Mehretu, have pushed into new territory (in her case, from drawing closer to painting, of a decidedly Twombly-esque sort).

    If you focus intently, you can get an expanded appreciation of some of the artists. The much ballyhooed young painter Oscar Murillo, for example, shows several reasonably promising new paintings, albeit all lent by one of his galleries, which should have been avoided.

    Although it occupies galleries that are too small for close to 100 pieces, the show has been smartly installed. The sequence of works and the conversation about current painting that it presents in real space is one of its primary strengths. It is arranged in largely contrapuntal exchanges between extremes: spare and labor-intensive; little or no color and lots of it; improvisation and deliberation; and riffs on Minimalism and reconsiderations of Expressionism, both abstract and figurative. And in plotting this conversation, Ms. Hoptman makes highly effective use of the narrow, dead-end space at her disposal, dividing it crosswise with walls, including four free-standing ones.

    Consequently, artists drop in and out of sight, and different ones are prominent, when you retrace your steps, as you must. The work of Josh Smith, possibly the most rough-edged artist here, is (perhaps deliberately) invisible until you reach the show’s final space and turn around. Mr. Smith’s nine canvases insouciantly sum up the show’s no-holds-barred attitude, tripping the light fantastic with works variously monochrome, gestural and figurative, as well as a kitschy sunset and the artist’s signature, writ goofily large.

    The contrasts among artists are sometimes so glaring they seem sure to set even a novice’s mind in motion. At the entrance, the large elaborately textured and tinted, latently Symbolist paintings on paper by Kerstin Brätsch — which suggest masses of rustling silks or feathers — flank a wall of works from which they could not be more different: Joe Bradley’s emblems simply outlined in grease pencil on raw canvas, redolent of children’s drawings. But the rich detail of Ms. Brätsch’s works attunes you to the unexpected subtleties of Mr. Bradley’s bare-bones approach. The rudimentary perpendicular forms of his “On the Cross,” for example, are enhanced by repeated diagonal creases in the canvas, intimating the wrapping of a bandage, a shroud or swaddling.

    Rashid Johnson’s voluptuous black paintings, whose thick graffitilike marks are scrawled into a mix of wax and black soap with a broom handle, confront the more delicate and colorful improvisations of Michaela Eichwald, which look impressive but more decorous than usual.

    After that comes a conversation about carefully but thickly applied paint that is one of the show’s best face-offs. To one side: Mark Grotjahn’s palette knife loops of color, which define a deep space but are also scattered with oblique features, and Nicole Eisenman’s forthright, masklike faces, laid on in thick, textured slabs of color. They recall the early modernist visages of Alexej von Jawlensky, but on a contemporary scale and with references to our political present: a raised (white) fist here, collages of African sculpture elsewhere.

    Sometimes the show makes such clear points, you can get the impression that artists or works were chosen to fill slots, to demarcate positions as much as for themselves. You almost imagine Ms. Hoptman going down a punch list.

    Interactive? Check: Mr. Murillo has an additional eight unstretched canvases on the floor that visitors can unfold and look at, like rugs at a bazaar.

    Minimalism? Check: Matt Connors is represented by an immense three-panel work in sharp, non-primary hues of red, yellow and blue. Purposefully made so tall it can only lean against the wall, it evokes everything from Barnett Newman’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” painting to Richard Serra’s steel plates.

    Painting as deconstruction? Check: Dianna Molzan’s piquant explorations of canvas, stretcher and paint improve upon the French Surface/Support group of the 1960s.

    Abject-art deprivation and the trendy “de-skilling”? Check. Richard Aldrich’s elegantly offhand works, one of which has strips of painted wood and canvas at right angles to the canvas.

    His spare works face the excessive but smooth-surfaced paintings of Michael Williams, whose crazed, partly printed tapestries of color, cartoons and airbrushed lines make the digital and the handmade all but indecipherable. Mr. Williams ends the show on a very promising note.

    There’s one way that “The Forever Now” is something of a landmark: Nine of its 17 artists are women. A large-group show that is over 50 percent female is beyond rare and sets a standard for other museums (and commercial galleries) to match.

    Less cheering is this demographic detail: With one exception, all the older artists are women, all the younger are men. And only three are not white.

    And yet it’s not just about numbers. This show also reminds us that a more open art world allows male and female artists alike to have inflated reputations, which I think is the case with Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl and Ms. Mehretu. They’re perfectly good painters, but no better than, say, Joanne Greenbaum, Dona Nelson, Sadie Benning and Katherine Bernhardt, any of whom might have disrupted the conversation here a bit more.

    Another possibility would have been the irrepressible Mickalene Thomas. It’s great to think of her extravagant depictions of proud black women in this well-done but too-safe show.

    It makes you wonder what’s so scary about surveys of current painting.

    "Miami’s Karmic Buzz Around Peter Marino" @wsj by Marshall Heyman

    Miami’s Karmic Buzz Around Peter Marino

    Show at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum of Art; Receives Design Visionary Award

    Peter Marino                                          
    Peter Marino Manolo Yllera
    By
    Marshall Heyman
                 

    If Art Basel Miami Beach had a prom king, this year’s would be the New York-based architect Peter Marino.

    Mr. Marino, who often dresses in black leather and has designed flagship stores for fashion brands like Chanel, Fendi, Louis Vuitton and Dior, is the subject of a show, opening this week, at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum of Art.

    “One Way: Peter Marino” features a third of his massive art collection, 136 pieces by the likes of Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Richard Serra. In addition, it includes studies of his more recent architecture projects; his initial series of cast-bronze boxes; as well as new work he commissioned from artist friends like Gregor Hildebrandt and Guy Limone.

    There is an ode to the performance of the opera “Orfeo ed Euridice” Mr. Marino staged in his own New York City home last year, as well as a life-size wax sculpture of himself.

    Even the catalog has the Marino touch. It is bolted with real leather straps that Mr. Marino fabricated in-house and paid for out of his own pocket.

    Black Rosaries 2014 by Jean-Michel Othoniel is part of the One Way Peter Marino exhibit at Miami Beachs Bass Museum of Art ENLARGE
    ‘Black Rosaries’ (2014) by Jean-Michel Othoniel is part of the ‘One Way: Peter Marino’ exhibit at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum of Art. Jean-Michel Othoniel/Philippe Chancel

    Meanwhile, Design Miami, an offshoot of Art Basel, will also recognize Mr. Marino with its Design Visionary award. For that honor, he was asked to design a pavilion, which features furniture pieces from Mr. Marino’s collection as well as a newer series of his cast-bronze boxes.

    “There must have been some karmic buzz on me in Miami a year ago,” said Mr. Marino during an interview. Creating eight galleries worth of material for the Bass and designing a 25-by-25 foot pavilion has been “a huge amount of work,” Mr. Marino explained: “It feels like I got an Academy Award.”

    How did the show at the Bass Museum come about?

    Anyone who’s been to my office knows that I’ve created a special environment where art and architecture are intermingled. Next to a Cy Twombly, I have a model of a hotel. And 18 months ago, the museum asked if I would have a show of my work and my collection. They’re looking for out-of-the-box kind of shows that will have a big appeal for the community. To be frank, I’ve been very busy and I have a successful company, and I didn’t spend as much time recording my legacy as other firms. Though this is not a retrospective, I thought that maybe this was a good idea for my legacy.

    How did you start collecting artwork?

    In the ’70s when I started working for Andy Warhol, he paid me in art. But I always went to flea markets; you can find a gold nugget amid some crummy stuff. And as my career grew, I was able to balance my flea market adventures with art fairs. My collection has become massive as I became more successful. I owe about 11 art dealers a fortune, but it’s not my intention to die with money in the bank. A lot of this is art that you’ll see was in my office. I’m the original rat-packer. Things are coming out of the closets and going back on the walls there, and people have already asked me, “What are you going to do when the 136 pieces of art come back?”

    When you pulled the show together, did you notice any throughlines in your collection?

    I love paintings that are all white or all black because that’s how I think. I love pop art. I love photography. I have tons of Mapplethorpe. I love German painting. I think there’s great truth in that German angst. I collect from 5000 B.C. to yesterday.

    What made you start making bronze boxes?

    There is something in every architect yearning for eternity and, of my work, nothing was lasting. Barneys, which I built, got sold and redone and is all messed up. But I remembered seeing a bronze show, and I realized those pieces had lasted 3,000 years. Some of what I’d done hadn’t even lasted three years. So, five years ago, I started making these boxes. That’s my way of expressing myself. Some boat will go down with one of these boxes and they’ll discover it in 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea, signed and numbered.

    I can’t even picture how you staged an opera in your home.

    Well, close your eyes and imagine a very big house. Opera started in people’s homes. Music was an intimate experience. We wanted to give to our 120 closest friends a very special thing. We had a full corps de ballet. I was asked very nicely, “Can we take this production and bring it elsewhere?” And I just don’t have the time. Last year, I did the opera, this year I did the Bass. I’ve only got two hands. We have 81 active projects.

    Tell me about this wax figure of yourself.

    I always loved Madame Tussaud’s and wanted to be in a wax museum. A friend introduced me to this artist named Yuji Yushimoto [of studio UG]. I spent eight hours in Brooklyn getting my whole body molded. He measured my head and my hairs and my arms. And then he brings the body parts to you and puts them on a table, and you see your arms and your legs. And then he paints them.

    What’s going to happen to the wax figure when the museum show closes in May?

    That’s what my staff wants to know. I’ve threatened to motorize it and roll it up and down the aisles of the drafting room.

    Write to Marshall Heyman at marshall.heyman@wsj.com

    "Peter Marino's One Way at Bass: Luxury and Leather Done Right" by Liz Tracy

    peter_marino_bass_2JPG

    The name "Peter Marino" was on the well-moisturized lips of every privileged attendee at the New York Times-hosted International Luxury Conference at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami this week.

    And why wouldn't it be? Of all the people on display during the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, the architect, art collector, and Warhol protege Marino seems to know about living most luxuriously.

    By "on display," we mean quite literally, too. Marino's personal collection was curated thoughtfully by Palais de Tokyo's Jérôme Sans, at the Bass Museum of Art's One Way. But front and center sitting pretty is a wax sculpture of the often leather-clad Marino, hand tipping his hat at every passerby.

    Every news outlet around the world seems to be frothing at the mouth for a tiny taste of Marino and his extravagant lifestyle. It's a bit odd that while most people can't afford rent, the art world still laps up the extravagant like its starving.

    See also: From Wynwood to South Beach, Galleries Bring the Heat to Basel

    peter_marino_bass1JPG
    In the Louis Vuitton room.
    Rooms at the exhibition are sponsored by Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Dior. Those fortunate to get in (and it was packed) excitedly tiptoed, chattering and iPhones snapping away, through the gallery at both the VIP preview opening on Tuesday and last night's proper vernissage. Moreno attended both, but stayed much longer on Tuesday.

    To be fair, who wouldn't want to live like this guy? His taste is clearly honed, his talent undeniable, and his BDSM gear very leathery.

    But what's more impressive is how interactive the show is, and finely presented. It's about the design of it all, among other things, so it feels almost like a very fancy living space.

    peter_marino_bassjpg
    Walking up the ramp, the walls are covered with what looks like VHS tape and black, white, and red-only work by Gregor Hildebrandt, Loris Gréaud, Dan Colen, Rudolf Stingel, and others. It's festive but dark and modern. Though the elements are there, there isn't a Gothic or industrial feel, the energy is still warm in a way, with a hint of humor.

    As you round the bend to the first space, you first encounter a display case filled with medical equipment. This sets the sort of metallic vibe, repeated in the futuristic Stingel alien-like busts and Marino's own cast-bronze boxes. But, obviously, everyone is busy vying for a selfie with the wax figure which stands alongside a wall of tasteful photographs of the man himself.

    Farhad_MoshiriJPG
    Farhad Moshiri
    Other rooms have different themes. On the wall in the Vuitton sponsored room, the explanation is that these works are "borrowings" of other greats or use repurposed materials. There's a Richard Prince wall, and Farhad Moshiri creations -- you could call them sculptures -- bright images made from tiny beads.

    "Art Basel Miami Beach’s Not-to-Be-Missed Parties and Events" @nytimes by KEVIN McGARRY

    "Art Basel Miami Beach’s Not-to-Be-Missed Parties and Events" @nytimes by KEVIN McGARRY

    Jeff Koons at the North American premiere of his BMW Art Car last year. Credit Donald Bowers/Getty Images for BMW

    No matter what it looks like on social media, Art Basel is all about the art. Well, at least the original one in Basel, Switzerland is. As for the Miami Beach edition, which takes place in the coming week (officially Thursday through Sunday, though festivities begin as early as Monday), it is still a horde of ancillary art shows and performances, with the parodic parade of parties swirling around them. Here are 10 buzzworthy happenings where culture, taste and excess all combine to electric effect.

    1. FREE ART

    Some of the best art at Art Basel isn’t for sale. With so much of the art world in town, it is the moment for Miami’s galleries to shine. A modernist house designed by Jean Prouvé is being unveiled in the orchard behind the Delano hotel (1685 Collins Avenue), exhibiting sculptures by the Brooklyn artist Zak Kitnick and the French art duo Kolkoz. Meanwhile, across the bay, the artist Daniel Arsham excavates a giant hole at Locust Projects, a gallery in the Design District (3852 N. Miami Avenue), and fills it with ghostly casts of obsolete gadgets. And at the cheekily named Guccivuitton gallery just south of El Portal (8375 NE Second Avenue), an exhibition called “Luxury Face” ponders how art has become a blue-chip commodity.

    2. MID-BEACH SCENE

    Photo
    The Edition hotel.

    Ian Schrager returns to Miami with the 1960s-style Miami Beach Edition hotel (2901 Collins Avenue) and a slew of parties. On Wednesday, the design firm Yabu Pushelberg (responsible for the hotel’s white-and-cream interiors) hosts the debauched gay party from London Horse Meat Disco. The rest of the week, there will be parties for Visionaire and W magazine, and pool bungalows turned into pop-up galleries and bookshops. Also new in Mid-Beach is the Thompson Miami Beach (4041 Collins Avenue), which will host parties for Jeremy Scott and others.

    3. NEW MUSEUM

    Last year, rumors were spiraling about the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, and a rancorous split between its board and the city. Would MoCA’s board decamp? Yes. Would it move to the beach? No. Instead, the newly formed Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (I.C.A.) has set up shop in the Design District (Moore Building, 4040 NE Second Avenue; icamiami.org). Inaugural exhibitions by Pedro Reyes and Andra Ursuta open on Tuesday, with an intimate dinner that night hosted by Lisson Gallery.

    4. SHOPPING DISTRICT

    Photo
    Credit Francesco Clemente, via Mary Boone Gallery

    Speaking of the Design District, the luxury strip mall continues to heat up. On the retail front, newcomers include Chrome Hearts, a Los Angeles-based jewelry brand that opens a concept store (4025 NE Second Avenue; chromehearts.com), and a pop-up marketplace called The World of Mr. Somebody and Mr. Nobody featuring the outré European designers Walter Van Beirendonck and Bernhard Wilhelm (91 NE 40th Street). The scene continues after dark with a V.I.P. dinner on Wednesday for Peter Marino, who has an exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art.

    5. POP ART

    Photo
    Miley Cyrus. Credit Raphael Dias/Getty Images

    Musicians are artists, too. And these days, the caliber of D.J.s and performers at Art Basel rivals that of the Winter Music Conference. Tongues are wagging about what may be Jeffrey Deitch’s grandest Miami stunt yet: a private Miley Cyrus concert at the Raleigh (1775 Collins Avenue) on Wednesday. YoungArts Miami features a triple play from Britain: the inscrutable chanteuse FKA twigs (Thursday), James Blake (Friday) and the dance alchemist SBTRKT (Saturday) (2100 Biscayne Boulevard, youngarts.org/artbasel; tickets from $37). The Pérez Art Museum Miami (1103 Biscayne Boulevard) celebrates its first year on Thursday with Kelela, Total Freedom and the D.J. collective Future Brown. And Solange Knowles D.J.s at various parties.

    6. SO MANY FAIRS

    Photo
    The Freehand. Credit Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times

    To say that Art Basel is saturated with satellite fairs is putting it lightly. But not all are worth your time. For those seeking emerging talent, the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is still a draw for young galleries like Misako & Rosen of Tokyo, François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles and Foxy Production in New York (Deauville Beach Resort, 6701 Collins Avenue, newartdealers.org). Newcomers include the NEWD Art Show, an “anti-fair” from Bushwick, Brooklyn, that is testing the waters with a Wednesday cocktail party at the Freehand (2727 Indian Creek Drive), and Concept, a secondary-market fair held on a yacht docked downtown in Miami.

    7. NO WALLS

    While Tumblr and GIFs were all the rage a couple of years ago, the more ontological dimensions of the web are taking center stage this year. On Tuesday, Ryan McNamara will reprise his “ME3M 4 Miami: Story Ballet About the Internet” from the Performa biennial at the Miami Grand Theater at the Castle Beach Resort (5445 Collins Avenue). On Thursday, the art-world bigwigs Klaus Biesenbach, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon de Pury join the Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, the artist Amalia Ulman and Bettina Korek (moderator) to discuss “Instagram as an Artistic Medium” — no selfies were harmed in the making of this panel (Miami Beach Convention Center, Auditorium Hall C; Thursday at 5 p.m., open to Art Basel attendees).

    8. ARTY PARTIES

    Photo
    The Soho Beach House. Credit Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Soho Beach House

    As Art Basel veterans know: The real action takes place at the private dinners and parties that give the week its hedonistic reputation. Tentpole events include White Cube’s welcome-to-town jubilee on Tuesday at the Soho Beach House (4385 Collins Avenue); Artsy’s Wednesday party with Carter Cleveland, Wendi Murdoch and Dasha Zhukova, which this year moves to the Design District; and Aby Rosen and Samantha Boardman’s who’s-who dinner on Thursday at the W hotel. Needless to say, strictly invitation only.

    9. HOUSEWARMINGS

    Even more exclusive, perhaps, are the parties held at private estates,. This year, the Russian collector Maria Baibakova and her family, who upgraded from a Setai penthouse to an island home, are hosting a housewarming on Wednesday, with VanDutch boats whisking partygoers across Biscayne Bay. On Tuesday, Dee and Tommy Hilfiger, the new owner of the Raleigh hotel (which he plans to convert into a private club) will host a dinner at his Golden Beach home to celebrate a Dee Ocleppo handbag benefiting Autism Speaks.

    10. BEFORE SUNRISE

    Photo
    The Le Baron pop up in Miami last year. Credit Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

    With only so many hours before the sun comes up, the battle of the after-parties rages on. Rather than the roving parties of years past, Le Baron hunkers down at its previous home, FDR at Delano (1685 Collins Avenue). On Tuesday, Silencio slides into the Edition hotel for a party with the New Museum. Tolga’s Fair Pop-up, will hold a week-ending blowout on Sunday at a club to be announced, while Surf Lodge and Paul’s Baby Grand will hold pop-up parties at the Deauville Beach Resort.

    Correction: December 7, 2014

    An article last Sunday about events related to Art Basel Miami Beach omitted part of the name for a performance last Tuesday. It was the “ME3M 4 Miami: Story Ballet About the Internet,” not just “Story Ballet About the Internet.” The article also misidentified the venue for that performance. It is the Castle Beach Resort, not the Thompson hotel. In addition, the article misstated the purpose of a dinner for Peter Marino on Wednesday. It was to honor him personally, not his current exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. And, finally, the article misstated part of the address of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. It is 4040 NE Second Avenue, not 3841.

       

     

    "With Art, Investing in Genius" @nytimes by JAMES B. STEWART

    "With Art, Investing in Genius" @nytimes by JAMES B. STEWART

    Andy Warhol’s “Triple Elvis (Ferus Type)” sold for nearly $82 million this month. It is from the ’60s, his most sought-after period. Credit Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency

    If there were any remaining doubts that “making money is art,” as Andy Warhol famously pronounced in his 1975 book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” they were surely vanquished on Nov. 12. His silk-screen print “Triple Elvis (Ferus Type),” an image taken from a Hollywood studio publicity shot showing Elvis Presley with a gun, sold for nearly $82 million at a Christie’s auction packed with bankers, hedge fund managers and art dealers.

    In just two weeks this month in New York, the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s sold over $2 billion in art, a record for major New York fall auctions. The billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen paid over $100 million for a Giacometti sculpture. A Manet sold for $65 million, two by Mark Rothko for $45 million and nearly $40 million, a Georgia O’Keeffe for $44 million and a small Jasper Johns American flag for $36 million.

    The lofty sums stunned even longtime art market watchers. “It’s phenomenal,” said Michael Moses, a founder of the Mei Moses Fine Art Index, a widely followed measure of art prices, and a retired professor at the New York University Stern School of Business. “At the Christie’s postmodern and contemporary sale, the average compound return was 20 percent annualized. That’s amazing.”

    Photo
    Kazuo Shiraga’s “BB56.” The artist is obscure, but his work is innovative and influential. Credit Christie's

    For better or worse, fine art is now firmly planted alongside equities, bonds, commodities and real estate as an asset class. Financial terms like “compounded rates of return” have elbowed their way into the traditional vocabulary of connoisseurship even as art’s old guard has trouble with the word “sell.” (“Deacquisition” is preferred.)

    This month’s record sales left some dealers and collectors talking about irrational exuberance and a potential bubble, especially in the soaring contemporary-art market. But Evan Beard, who leads Deloitte’s art and finance practice in the United States, said he didn’t agree. “If you were seeing second-rate works selling for huge values, then you’d say there’s dumb money out there,” he said. “But the works selling for these high multiples are important works that art historians have deemed innovative and have had influence. People want to own original works of genius.”

    Mr. Moses said that it was hard to describe the art market as exuberant, when overall returns — about 3.5 percent annually — have barely outpaced inflation and have trailed equities and, in recent years, even fixed income. He noted that it was contemporary and postwar works that had shown the biggest gains. “The single most surprising change in the art market is the relative increase in the value of recent art,” said David Galenson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who has done groundbreaking research into valuations in the art market.

    While some art historians, curators and dealers bemoan the emergence of fine art as just another economic asset class, “art and money have always been joined by an umbilical cord of gold,” Professor Galenson said. “The Renaissance ideal has gone the way of the dodo bird. I say, Get over it. Steven Cohen doesn’t make any pretense of being an art history major. Maybe he’s the Andy Warhol of collectors.”

    In a recent survey of art professionals by Deloitte, 76 percent said collectors viewed art, at least in part, as an investment — up from 53 percent two years ago. And 72 percent said their clients’ primary reason for buying art was related to the “social and networking scene” and the status associated with buying art, compared with 59 percent in 2012.

    Given the money involved, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that bankers are treating art like any other asset class, which, in turn, is helping drive up prices and create a more liquid market. More banks are lending against art as collateral. Some are even starting to create collateralized debt obligations with art as the underlying asset — much as bankers packaged subprime mortgages before the financial crisis.

    John Arena, senior credit executive for fine art at U.S. Trust, said the bank had a long track record in art lending and had billions outstanding in loans guaranteed by art. “Contemporary and postwar art is the driving force,” he said. “The trajectory has gotten steeper, and the loan requests have gotten much higher. In contemporary art, you’re dealing with a younger generation of collectors, who are comfortable with the economic aspects of their art. They’re leveraging it and using it to take advantage of other investment opportunities, while still being able to enjoy it and keep it on their walls.”

    He said U.S. Trust would lend up to 50 percent of a work’s appraised value but that it wasn’t packaging the loans into C.D.O.s. “I’ve heard people are doing that,” he said. “But it scares me. That’s not our game.”

    The soaring prices are being driven by market forces rather than any aesthetic or artistic awakening, Professor Galenson said. “Aesthetics have nothing to do with it.”

    What does matter, Professor Galenson’s research suggests, is innovation by the artist. “It’s really incredibly simple,” he said. “Valuable paintings are innovative. Valuable artists are innovators. Cézanne did his most influential work at the very end of his career, Picasso at the very beginning, when he invented Cubism. Nineteen sixty-two is when Warhol started using mechanical reproductions and photography and reinvented modern art. His works from the 1960s are the very most expensive. Those from the 1980s are much less.”

    Mr. Beard, of Deloitte, said he found Professor Galenson’s research persuasive. “That you saw the ‘Triple Elvis’ sell for so much has nothing to do with its aesthetic value or coolness or hipness and everything to do with the fact that historians agree that Warhol with this work influenced art history,” he said.

    In this respect, the auction catalog may be more important to a work’s value than the art itself. Monet’s portrait of Alice Hoschedé may be very beautiful, but its sales price of $33.8 million represents a compounded rate of return of just 5.4 percent since its last sale, according to Mr. Moses. And for Impressionist and modern works as a whole, the average was only 3.9 percent.

    By comparison, consider the work of the Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga, who died in 2008 after becoming a Buddhist monk. Mr. Shiraga is hardly a household name, and he didn’t figure in the headlines from this month’s sales. But his “BB56” sold for $4.9 million, which represents the single best compounded rate of return — 53 percent — of any work sold this month, according to Mr. Moses’ calculations. (The work last sold at auction in 2008 for a little over $300,000.)

    The description of the work from Christie’s catalog hits all of Professor Galenson’s benchmarks.

    It’s innovative: “Painted directly with the artist’s feet as he suspended himself above the canvas from a rope hanging from the ceiling, the painting represents a unity of the central tenets of postwar abstraction with performance art.”

    And it’s from the most influential period of the artist’s work: “Painted in 1961, ‘BB56’ dates from a highly significant time for the artist,” the catalog description says, adding that 1962 “was the year in which Shiraga was given his first solo show outside Japan, at the Galerie Stadler in Paris, where this painting was exhibited.”

    That it may look, to some, like a child’s finger painting is irrelevant. “A lot of contemporary art is aggressively ugly,” Professor Galenson said. “That doesn’t matter in terms of its value.”

    One Way: Peter Marino Art Basel review – a spectacle of decadence @TheGuardian by Jason Farago

    Bass Museum of Art, Miami
    This show of the leather-clad architect’s private collection suggests that art’s recession into fashion and luxury is not just inevitable but to be celebrated

    Curator Jrme Sans posing next to wax Peter Marino
    Curator Jérôme Sans posing next to wax Peter Marino. Photograph: Jason Farago/The Guardian


    The Bass Museum of Art, a medium-sized institution not far from the sands of South Beach, is opening its winter exhibition on Wednesday: a showcase of both the work and the collection of Peter Marino, the New York architect known as much for his designs of global luxury emporia as for his perennial uniform of black leather, even in the Floridian heat. I had a preview of the show, and it’s – well, it’s perfect for Miami, I can say that.

    The exhibition starts on a long ramp ascending from the ground floor to the main galleries upstairs, whose usually white walls have been covered in black unspooled videotape: an intervention by the artist Gregor Hildebrandt, whose dark luminescence sets the tone of high-end punk. Against this backdrop, in recessed spaces, are paintings from Marino’s collection: universally black and white, and utterly unconcerned with art history or for that matter quality. Ideas are out, looks are in. An important painting by Rudolf Stingel, one of the most trenchant interrogators of the possibilities of abstraction, hangs next to a vapid Dan Colen; a fine Christopher Wool is displayed next to, no joke, a projection of a Chanel runway show. (The show has been organized by Jérôme Sans, a peripatetic French curator.)

    Paintings by Loris Graud Dan Colen and Rudolf Stingel hung side by side Paintings by Loris Gréaud, Dan Colen, and Rudolf Stingel hung side-by-side. Photograph: Jason Farago/The Guardian

    But even the luxe leather bar does not prepare you for the subsequent galleries: first, a dozen images (hung cheek-by-jowl, like at an auction preview or a storage facility) of Marino himself, biceps bulging out of his leather vest, as well as a Madame Tussaud’s-style wax sculpture perfect for selfie snappers. Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, that earlier leather lover, against walls covered in shiny black cowhide. Dozens of flatscreen televisions projecting Marino’s luxury boutique designs: Armani, Bulgari, Chanel, Dior, all the way from LA to the Gulf, as well as a model of one of his Louis Vuitton stores. And, in the last room, of all things, an opera: a multi-screen video recording of Glück’s Orfeo ed Euridice, performed last year in Marino’s own house and reconstituted here with custom furniture, a shimmering silver backdrop, and all the trimmings.

    Mapplethorpes against leather wall Mapplethorpes against leather wall. Photograph: Jason Farago/The Guardian

    It is, in a word, obscene. And yet there is something almost perversely admirable about the overtness of its obscenity – the show’s unconcerned commingling of art and commerce, its total indifference to history and scholarship, its assurance that art’s recession into fashion and luxury is not just inevitable but something to be celebrated. Philanthropy is marketing, alas, but this show takes it to new heights. Too many luxury brands to count have stumped up to support the show, and here’s something I’ve never seen before: individual galleries bear the names of luxury sponsors. “This gallery is sponsored by Chanel.” “This gallery is sponsored by Louis Vuitton.”

    An Anselm Kiefer and a Georg Baselitz An Anselm Kiefer and a Georg Baselitz. Photograph: Jason Farago/The Guardian

    The funny thing is that he actually owns some truly major works of art. Along with numerous Stingels, you’ll see some important photographs by Thomas Struth, a totemic Baselitz sculpture I liked more than I thought I would, and there’s even a Robert Ryman white monochrome if you can find it shunted near the emergency exit. (Female artists are not his thing; I counted just three – Paola Pivi, Claude Lalanne, and Michal Rovner – alongside more than 40 men, though Marino’s wife Jane Trapnell collaborated on the opera.) If a private collector wants to hang such important works in such decadent circumstances, that’s no concern of mine. Whether a nonprofit museum should be the forum for this, though, is a thornier matter.

    One Way: Peter Marino Art Basel review – a spectacle of decadence @TheGuardian by Jason Farago

    Bass Museum of Art, Miami
    This show of the leather-clad architect’s private collection suggests that art’s recession into fashion and luxury is not just inevitable but to be celebrated

    Curator Jrme Sans posing next to wax Peter Marino
    Curator Jérôme Sans posing next to wax Peter Marino. Photograph: Jason Farago/The Guardian


    The Bass Museum of Art, a medium-sized institution not far from the sands of South Beach, is opening its winter exhibition on Wednesday: a showcase of both the work and the collection of Peter Marino, the New York architect known as much for his designs of global luxury emporia as for his perennial uniform of black leather, even in the Floridian heat. I had a preview of the show, and it’s – well, it’s perfect for Miami, I can say that.

    The exhibition starts on a long ramp ascending from the ground floor to the main galleries upstairs, whose usually white walls have been covered in black unspooled videotape: an intervention by the artist Gregor Hildebrandt, whose dark luminescence sets the tone of high-end punk. Against this backdrop, in recessed spaces, are paintings from Marino’s collection: universally black and white, and utterly unconcerned with art history or for that matter quality. Ideas are out, looks are in. An important painting by Rudolf Stingel, one of the most trenchant interrogators of the possibilities of abstraction, hangs next to a vapid Dan Colen; a fine Christopher Wool is displayed next to, no joke, a projection of a Chanel runway show. (The show has been organized by Jérôme Sans, a peripatetic French curator.)

    Paintings by Loris Graud Dan Colen and Rudolf Stingel hung side by side Paintings by Loris Gréaud, Dan Colen, and Rudolf Stingel hung side-by-side. Photograph: Jason Farago/The Guardian

    But even the luxe leather bar does not prepare you for the subsequent galleries: first, a dozen images (hung cheek-by-jowl, like at an auction preview or a storage facility) of Marino himself, biceps bulging out of his leather vest, as well as a Madame Tussaud’s-style wax sculpture perfect for selfie snappers. Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, that earlier leather lover, against walls covered in shiny black cowhide. Dozens of flatscreen televisions projecting Marino’s luxury boutique designs: Armani, Bulgari, Chanel, Dior, all the way from LA to the Gulf, as well as a model of one of his Louis Vuitton stores. And, in the last room, of all things, an opera: a multi-screen video recording of Glück’s Orfeo ed Euridice, performed last year in Marino’s own house and reconstituted here with custom furniture, a shimmering silver backdrop, and all the trimmings.

    Mapplethorpes against leather wall Mapplethorpes against leather wall. Photograph: Jason Farago/The Guardian

    It is, in a word, obscene. And yet there is something almost perversely admirable about the overtness of its obscenity – the show’s unconcerned commingling of art and commerce, its total indifference to history and scholarship, its assurance that art’s recession into fashion and luxury is not just inevitable but something to be celebrated. Philanthropy is marketing, alas, but this show takes it to new heights. Too many luxury brands to count have stumped up to support the show, and here’s something I’ve never seen before: individual galleries bear the names of luxury sponsors. “This gallery is sponsored by Chanel.” “This gallery is sponsored by Louis Vuitton.”

    An Anselm Kiefer and a Georg Baselitz An Anselm Kiefer and a Georg Baselitz. Photograph: Jason Farago/The Guardian

    The funny thing is that he actually owns some truly major works of art. Along with numerous Stingels, you’ll see some important photographs by Thomas Struth, a totemic Baselitz sculpture I liked more than I thought I would, and there’s even a Robert Ryman white monochrome if you can find it shunted near the emergency exit. (Female artists are not his thing; I counted just three – Paola Pivi, Claude Lalanne, and Michal Rovner – alongside more than 40 men, though Marino’s wife Jane Trapnell collaborated on the opera.) If a private collector wants to hang such important works in such decadent circumstances, that’s no concern of mine. Whether a nonprofit museum should be the forum for this, though, is a thornier matter.

    George Lindemann Journal "Performance, new opening time mark Art Basel’s 2014 edition" @miamiherald Andres Viglucci

    George Lindemann Journal "Performance, new opening time mark Art Basel’s 2014 edition" @miamiherald Andres Viglucci

    Buckminster Fuller dome is displayed at the entrance to the Perez Art Museum Miami which is exhibiting fresh work for Art Basel         

    Buckminster Fuller dome is displayed at the entrance to the Perez Art Museum Miami, which is exhibiting fresh work for Art Basel. CARL JUSTE MIAMI HERALD STAFF

    Here it comes, ready or not: Year 13 of Miami Beach’s blockbuster Art Basel fair, which will as always fill the vast Miami Beach Convention Center floor and overflow into nearby public spaces with a mind-boggling gamut of contemporary art, plus a few fresh wrinkles — including a free screening of a new Tim Burton film.

    In the biggest change, fair-goers will see a new opening schedule on Wednesday and Thursday that’s designed to give serious art collectors more “quality time’’ at the gallery booths before the doors open to the general public. Ticket buyers will get three hours less inside the hall on Thursday’s public opening day.

    The fair also boasts a pair of program additions this year, one inside and the other outside the convention center. Inside, the new Survey sector will focus on overlooked 20th century artists deserving of fresh consideration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how the art world has long been a men’s club, the Survey artist roster is dominated by women, said fair director Marc Spiegler.

    Then, at the unlikely venue of the onetime Playboy Theater at the Castle Beach Resort, artist Ryan McNamara will stage MEEM 4 Miami: A Story Ballet About the Internet. The “immersive’’ choreographic performance, a tweaked version of a work that debuted last fall in New York, features 20 dancers dancing in a range of styles, from classical to club dancing and contemporary, to a parallel mix of music.

    Related

    In its most unconventional aspect, audience members will be bodily lifted on gurneys while still in their seats and wheeled to different areas of the performance space, mimicking the jumping-around experience of the web.

    “It’s a mind-blowing experience,’’ Spiegler said, adding that he considers the performance to be one of the must-sees at this year’s fair.

    Coming back this year is the popular Film program, which features videos inside the hall but also free outdoor showings on the projection wall of the New World Symphony’s building across Seventeenth Street. On Friday, director Burton’s new film, Big Eyes, about a notorious, real-life art fraud, will screen at the Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road Mall. Seating is free but obviously limited.

    Also returning is the free Public program, which this year will bring 26 sculptures and installations, guided tours and live performances to Collins Park.

    Then, from the sublime to the practical, the fair’s restaurants inside the convention center will be moved this year from the center of the floor to the two entrances, and — hosannah! — seating will be doubled, Spiegler said. Hunting for a table in past editions of the fair has been a frustrating experience for some fair-goers.

    This year’s edition will be the next-to-last before the Beach embarks on a total renovation and updating of the aging convention center, work that has already forced a planned relocation of the international boat show.

    But Spiegler, sounding optimistic, said the city has pledged there would be no real disruption for the art fair during the two years of construction because work will be done in phases around it. Only one edition of the fair will happen while renovations are in progress, he said.

    The upshot of the makeover will be significant improvements for the fair, in particular to the convention center’s inadequate Internet service, an important element because of the image-heavy web traffic the event generates, Spiegler said. The addition of multilevel parking to the center, he said, will also be helpful in reducing some of the parking crunch that has plagued the neighborhood during the fair, which draws about 75,000 people.

    “The city has been extremely collaborative in understanding what we need to have to continue to be a world-class show,’’ Spiegler said. “This is a show that needs to run smoothly all of the time.’’

    The departure this year from the established opening schedule might lead to some initial confusion, Spiegler conceded. But he said the shift is necessary to better serve the fair’s two main constituents — the galleries and the collectors who come to the fair to buy.

    The previous schedule — with a semi-public Vernissage Wednesday evening and admission to the general public starting on noon Thursday — did not allow enough time for gallerists to meet and chat with new customers, a main goal of their attendance at the fair, Spiegler said.

    “We wanted to extend that time,’’ he said. “We think it will have a great effect on our galleries.’’

    Now, Wednesday will be for VIPs only, with the Vernissage moving to 11 a.m. Thursday and extended by one hour, running until 3 p.m., when the general public will be admitted.

    Beyond the Art Basel fair, another two dozen satellite fairs will take over hotels and set up in tents in Miami Beach, Wynwood and Midtown. Those include long-established fairs like Art Miami and SCOPE, and relatively newer shows including Untitled, MiamiProject and the first-timer PINTA. And for those who have become accustomed to finding fairs in specific places, it’s a year to consult the map: Pulse, for instance, will move from the Ice Factory near downtown to Miami Beach.

    Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/visual-arts/art-basel/article4193639.html#storylink=cpy


    George Lindemann Journal - "Waxing Surreal" @wsj by Lance Esplund

    George Lindemann Journal - "Waxing Surreal" @wsj by Lance Esplund

    From a dismembered leg to a human-sized cigar, Robert Gober’s work is certainly indebted to Surrealists—but is it worth a trip to MoMA?

    Untitled Leg 1989-90 by Robert Gober now on view at the Museum of Modern Art                                          
    ‘Untitled Leg’ (1989-90) by Robert Gober, now on view at the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art/Robert Gober
    Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor

    Museum of Modern Art

    Through Jan. 18, 2015

    New York

    Few contemporary artists can rankle and befuddle viewers as sympathetically as the American sculptor Robert Gober (b. 1954), who hasn’t shied away from tackling serious subjects—including AIDS, slavery, terrorism and gay rights—or from playing the entertainer, the buffoon. In the opening gallery of his 40-year retrospective, “The Heart Is Not a Metaphor,” at the Museum of Modern Art, we encounter his neo-Dadaist classic “Untitled Leg” (1989-90). Like much of this exhibition, in which Madame Tussaud’s effigy meets the Duchampian Readymade, “Untitled Leg” transforms the commonplace into the surreal—and back again.

    Mr. Gober turns the Readymade—the found object-become-sculpture—on its head. He and his studio assistants meticulously craft mundane domestic objects such as fake fruit, playpens, bottles of liquor, girl’s ice skates, newspapers, disposable diapers and white porcelain sinks entirely from scratch, until they are nearly indistinguishable from the mass-produced goods they mimic.

    Fusing realism and Readymade, “Untitled Leg” is the first of what would become Mr. Gober’s signature handmade life-size beeswax sculptures of truncated human legs and bodies with actual human hair. Unfussy, drab and unnerving, “Untitled Leg” is oddly lifelike or corpselike. It comprises a man’s leg dressed in dark trousers, gray sock and old brown shoe, cut off at the shin and jutting, toes-up, straight out from the base of the gallery wall. The foot is turned out slightly, conveying relaxation and surrender; and its short, cuffed pant exposes hairy white flesh, which verges on the obscene.

    “Untitled Leg” is initially amusing, but its strange, associative aftertastes linger. These include the dismembered victims of serial killers and Théodore Géricault’s morgue-based preparatory studies of severed limbs. “Leg” also dogs Duane Hanson’s hyperrealistic figurative sculptures, Hans Bellmer’s surreally twisted pubescent female dolls, van Gogh’s “Shoes” and René Magritte’s “Time Transfixed”—the steaming locomotive exiting the fireplace. And then there is the obvious: This man, like the Wicked Witch of the East, has perhaps been crushed by the museum.

    Sly jokes tinged with melancholy abound in Mr. Gober’s work, which is one reason he’s so likable—even forgivable. As sculpture, “Untitled Leg” is lifeless. It just lies there. But in relationship to its entire spare gallery, in which we’re also confronted by a shallow, doorless, empty closet, the sculpture resonates—serving up humor, pathos and dread in equal measure. With “Untitled Leg,” Mr. Gober is at his most understated, barren and discomfitingly satisfying. He lets things fall with an ambiguous thud.

    Unfortunately, “Untitled Leg” is the high point of Mr. Gober’s oeuvre and of MoMA’s survey, which was organized by Ann Temkin and Paulina Pobocha, working in close collaboration with the artist. A close second may be “Long Haired Cheese” (1992-93). Inspired perhaps by Méret Oppenheim’s Surrealist “Fur Teacup,” it is a beeswax wedge of Swiss cheese, sporting a thin, black flowing mane of real human hair.

    Mr. Gober is at his rawest and most convincing—most surreal—when he keeps things simple; when he resists being too preachy and melodramatic. At MoMA, he twists a child’s playpen, like a Klein bottle, into two triangular jails; he rams culverts through a playpen and a stuffed chair, respectively; and he cuts barred prison windows—through which you can see daylight and painted blue sky—high into gallery walls. One eerily vacant room contains little more than five of the artist’s fixtureless, wall-mounted white sinks made of plaster, wire lath, wood and enamel paint. In various sizes and all from 1984, their blank faucet holes stare out like beady eyes.

    But Mr. Gober can overwork his themes. Sinks here also have been oddly joined like Siamese twins and transformed seemingly into useless urinals. On a scaffold outside MoMA’s second-floor windows, two sinks have been partially buried in a patch of grass, announcing themselves like goofy tombstones. And in three subsequent sculptures of truncated, prone men’s bodies, Mr. Gober adds, respectively, white candles, embedded sink drains and a musical score written across hairy bare buttocks. In the center of the room is a human-scale cigar. Made out of tobacco sheaves, it looks like an overturned canoe. Elsewhere, a woman’s nude torso—evoking Gustave Courbet’s erotically charged “Origin of the World”—gives birth, shoe-first, to a man’s leg. Freud would have had a field day.

    MoMA has spared no expense for Mr. Gober—literally pushing the boundaries of what is possible in a museum. Besides the outdoor scaffolding, they have installed running water and plumbing in numerous galleries and have jackhammered large holes in the museum’s granite floors. But are Mr. Gober’s theatrics worth all the fuss?

    Typical here are kitschy, symbolically ham-fisted, sociopolitical installations. In one, from 1989-96, a wedding gown (representing “purity” and “equality denied to gay Americans,” according to the wall text) is surrounded by wallpaper (representing “excrement”). The wallpaper juxtaposes images of a lynched black male next to a white male, who sleeps soundly in his bed. Bags of kitty litter (the cleansing “metaphorical fulcrum” linking the violent imagery and dress) line the walls. This work should have never left the idea stage.

    Another cornball installation, evoking the interior of a church, is Mr. Gober’s memorial to Sept. 11, 2001, where, according to MoMA, the artist (who grew up Roman Catholic) sought “to create a space of refuge and reflection.” Here, altered photolithographed pages from the Sept. 12, 2001, edition of the New York Times are positioned like stained-glass windows. We also encounter makeshift pews, chapels, bags of disposable diapers and bathtubs filled with running water. Hanging above the altar is a headless, crucified Christ—minus the cross—whose nipples shoot streams of “regenerative ‘living water’” into a big hole cut into MoMA’s floor. Far from being contemplative, this installation is a circus. It emphasizes not the loss suffered on 9/11 but, rather, the power of Mr. Gober to make his mark.

    Despite Mr. Gober’s hyperbolic missteps, this show has flashes of redemption. His “Untitled Leg”—25 years later—still trips me up. And one intricate under-floor piece, “Untitled” (1997), which I had not seen before, is otherworldly. A large, open suitcase—another nod to Duchamp—sits on the floor. Inside, it reveals a sewer grate, through which you can see a brick shaft, which leads to a shallow, glowing pool filled with sea life and which offers glimpses of a man and infant. Mr. Gober had hoped with this work to “make a believable sculpture of a living tidal pool.” Surprisingly magical, it is the one instance in this exhibition where MoMA feels truly—not just physically—transformed.

    George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "After Detroit’s Close Call" @wsj by Lee Rosenbaum

    A bronze cast of The Thinker sits in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts ENLARGE

    A bronze cast of ‘The Thinker’ sits in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Reuters
    By
    Lee Rosenbaum
    Nov. 19, 2014 6:05 p.m. ET

    “What happened in Detroit must never happen again,” declared U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes in his landmark Nov. 7 ruling that approved the city’s plan to exit from bankruptcy. Museum officials might add a corollary: “What happened to the Detroit Institute of Arts must never happen again to another cultural institution.”

    During the bankruptcy proceedings, city creditors sought permission to get some of the money Detroit owed them through the liquidation of masterpieces from the DIA’s city-owned collection. Instead, under the “Grand Bargain” approved by the court, the city is to receive $816 million over 20 years from nonprofit foundations, the state of Michigan and DIA donors, to be used to reduce the cuts to city workers’ pensions and to allow for the transfer of ownership of the museum’s collection and building from the city to the museum’s own nonprofit corporation. The DIA, at this writing, has raised some $87 million of its $100 million commitment to the Grand Bargain.

    The DIA’s supporters and museum officials around the country sighed with relief at Judge Rhodes’s ruling, which extolled the DIA as “an invaluable beacon of culture” and ringingly declared that “to sell the DIA art would be to forfeit Detroit’s future.”

    But there are other museums around the country whose objects are owned, in whole or in part, by government entities, and the DIA’s excruciating experience in defending its collection against the predations of the city’s creditors should be a wake-up call to them. They should do proactively what it took the DIA millions of dollars and more than 16 months of legal wrangling to accomplish—put their collections beyond the reach of municipal creditors. The experience of Detroit—once prosperous, now fallen on hard times—proves that what seems inconceivable today may become inescapable tomorrow.

    Surprisingly, however, officials at several museums with potentially vulnerable collections feel no urgency about protecting them, citing the financial soundness of their localities and the strong support they receive from government officials and the public. But as recent events have shown, when a city declares bankruptcy (Detroit’s being the 13th since 2008), a community’s love of culture and its government’s previous history of solvency are no insurance against an onslaught by creditors, who may love a museum for the wrong reasons—as a treasure trove of monetizable assets.

    Patricia McDonnell, director of the Wichita Art Museum, in Kansas, believes that its city-owned collection is protected from being sold during a municipal financial crisis because “the city is required to balance its budget every year.” But what if the city one day felt compelled to “balance its budget” on the back of the museum? “Anything is possible,” Ms. McDonnell acknowledged, “but I find it highly improbable.”

    Similarly, Gail Andrews, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, in Alabama, said: “We have no plans to change” the ownership by the city of part of the museum’s collection. “The city has been a steadfast and important partner of the museum, both of us deeply valuing the collection and its importance to the community,” she noted.

    Even the director of a major encyclopedic museum, Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, feels no pressing need to shield the estimated 10% of LACMA’s collection that is county-owned: “Los Angeles’s good financial condition and its commitment to culture . . . meant that we didn’t really feel we were at risk,” Mr. Govan stated. Nevertheless, in light of the DIA’s experience, LACMA officials have begun exploring the possible future transfer of the objects that are county-owned to museum ownership.

    At the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, whose 23,000-object founding collection is city-owned, executive director Julia Marciari-Alexander said that the takeaway from the Detroit ruling is this: “It is important for us to talk with the city and with our trustees and to have these conversations [about ownership], which, frankly, no one wanted to have before.” Initial talks have already begun and “the situation and ruling in Detroit provides an incredibly useful framework for these discussions, going forward,” she said.

    Richard Levin, the DIA’s lead bankruptcy attorney, suggests a pre-emptive defense for those museums with city-owned collections that are not yet in the cross hairs of creditors. On the same day as Judge Rhodes’s ruling, Mr. Levin told attendees at a symposium on art law held in New York that museums and city governments should “see what assets you have that you think might be vulnerable and find a way, properly under state law, to put [those assets] in a charitable trust,” to protect them for the city’s residents.

    Some museums with government-owned objects have already done this. They include the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, that city’s Asian Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Their city-owned works—the entire collections of the first two; the John G. Johnson Collection at the PMA—are held for the benefit of the public under the terms of charitable trusts that protect them from liquidation to satisfy their cities’ debts. Similar protection was provided by the 1972 transfer of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s collection from city ownership to the museum’s own state government subdistrict, according to SLAM’s attorney, David Linenbroker.

    For the museum world, what is perhaps most significant about the resolution of Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings is that a federal court ruling has explicitly upheld the Association of Art Museum Directors’ professional standards for deaccessioning: “Nationally accepted standards for museums,” Judge Rhodes declared, “prohibit the de-acquisition of art to pay debt.”

    That said, the knowing violation of these standards by several financially desperate cultural institutions (most recently, the Delaware Art Museum) has created an environment that gives a cloak of legitimacy to the notion of monetizing a museum’s art to defray debt. According to Mr. Levin, Detroit’s creditors “argued that the [AAMD] guidelines were just advisory and not binding,” since several art museums had previously disregarded them.

    Having passed its grueling test in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, the DIA is now poised to embrace its future, with its collection intact and confidence restored.

    “I’m hopeful this will give us a boost in fundraising,” said Annmarie Erickson, the museum’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, noting that the DIA had “kept aside” from the Grand Bargain campaign “a category of donors who we knew loved the museum and . . . would be willing to support endowment. We have a short list to begin with and we’re looking to grow that.” She added, “I know there are people who were waiting in the wings to see how the bankruptcy played out” before deciding to donate.

    She and the DIA’s director, Graham W.J. Beal, want to beef up the museum’s inadequate endowment over the next eight years to at least $400 million from some $120 million. “We’re certainly going to cull Judge Rhodes’s opinion for some great language,” she said, “when we go out to make those fundraising appeals!”

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