Late last month, an opening of a Robert Irwin exhibition at Pace London, very close to Claridges hotel.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: July 15, 2013

LONDON — Mayfair is known for its high-end fashion boutiques: Prada, Burberry, Yves St. Laurent. And for more than a century, this area’s elegant streets have also been the home of the top old-guard British art galleries.

Recently, however, there have been some new neighbors: many high-powered American art galleries — Gagosian, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Michael Werner, David Zwirner — that seem more Manhattan than Mayfair.

A number of them have opened or expanded their spaces in this neighborhood, paying top dollar for commercial rents. And in the me-too world of contemporary art, other galleries, also mostly American, are soon to follow.

“There is art on the street at a level that’s never been seen before,” said David Rosen, a London real estate developer, who says he is busier than ever finding new gallery spaces in the area.

In many ways, the new galleries are a sign of the heated competition at the top of the market. Dealers are competing not only for new collectors from places like Russia, China and the Middle East, who have bought homes here, but also for top artists, who increasingly demand dealers with global reach.

And London may become the city of choice for that kind of extended influence, with Mayfair as its epicenter.

“That’s where it’s all happening,” Mr. Rosen said. “There’s Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Claridges, the Connaught and the Ritz,” he noted, reeling off the names of big auction houses and world-famous hotels in the neighborhood. Foreign governments and hedge funds, as well as scores of other high-profile businesses, also have offices around Mayfair. And Mercury Group, the Russian owner of Phillips, the boutique auction house, recently paid about $160 million for a 52,000-square-foot building at 30 Berkeley Square, where it plans to make the basement and the first and second floors into Phillips’s London headquarters.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, smaller galleries with strong New York connections have also opened, some in upstairs spaces, like Per Skarstedt and Eykyn Maclean.

Mayfair’s latest art-centric turn started with Larry Gagosian, who opened his first London gallery about 13 years ago. He is now opening his third gallery here — a 22,000-square-foot space at 20 Grosvenor Hill — in October.

“I like the adventure of opening galleries in different parts of the world,” Mr. Gagosian said, adding that many European collectors shop in London, but don’t necessarily come to New York.

His other two galleries are on nearby Davies Street, also in Mayfair, and another is farther away, on Britannia Street, a stone’s throw from Kings Cross. But he decided to open a larger space in Mayfair after a collector in London told him, “I love you, Larry, but I just don’t have the time to go all the way to Britannia Street.” The new gallery will be Mr. Gagosian’s 13th worldwide.

Marc Glimcher, president of Pace Gallery, reluctantly admitted that his company opened the London gallery partly for fear of losing artists to Mr. Gagosian.

“Yes, there’s some truth to that,” Mr. Glimcher said when asked. “Gagosian made a brilliant move in 2000 when he opened in London.”

Pace now runs four spaces in New York, one in Beijing and two here in London: a small one in Soho and a large gallery in Mayfair in part of what was once the Museum of Mankind.

“We’re all chasing the same artists,” Mr. Glimcher said. “But the intensity of interest in art in London is long-lasting. You can get 10 reviews in 10 different newspapers. And besides the new collectors and galleries, there is a very vibrant museum community.”

Last fall, David Zwirner, perhaps Mr. Gagosian’s fiercest rival, opened a gallery in an 18th-century town house on Grafton Street, in which Helena Rubenstein started a beauty clinic in 1909; it was more recently a bank. He hired Annabelle Selldorf, the New York architect, to renovate that 10,000-square-foot building, which has five floors of gallery and office space. “I wanted a European presence,” Mr. Zwirner said, “and London is the second-most-important town after New York.”

Dealers say that doing business in London is different from selling in New York. “Nobody just drops in and buys something, like they do in New York,” explained Iwan Wirth, a partner of Hauser & Wirth, which now runs two large spaces in London. “We work on the Swiss model, developing relationships with collectors slowly.”

Although Hauser & Wirth began in Zurich, where it still has a gallery, along with two in New York, Mr. Wirth said it was not till he opened in London that he was considered an international dealer. He now also runs two spaces in London, one on Piccadilly and another nearby, on Savile Row.

Even the cautious have found that it is time to jump in. The Michael Werner Gallery first dipped its toes in the market here, opening temporary “pop-up” spaces on Mansfield Street, in the Marylebone neighborhood, in 2008, and then on Hoxton Square, in the East End, three years ago.

The gallery just added a third floor of space in a period house on Upper Brook Street, in the heart of Mayfair.

“Artists want to show in places where there are other artists,” said Gordon VeneKlasen, Mr. Werner’s partner in the gallery. “In the fall, when we had an exhibition of Peter Doig’s paintings, we had about 200 people a day here for three months,” he said, referring to the Scottish painter. Right now, the setting — large rooms with intricately carved Victorian woodwork, an elaborate fireplace and a glass-ceilinged winter garden — is the backdrop for two monumental paintings and a bronze sculpture by the Danish artist Per Kirkeby.

The cost of running so many galleries, dealers say, is astronomical, and London is exceptionally expensive. Mr. Rosen estimates that spaces in Mayfair usually rent for about £100 (about $160) a square foot per year, and that the average gallery is a minimum of 10,000 square feet. On top of that, he pointed out, there are taxes which he described as “half again as much.” That does not include renovations or salaries. “Yes the cost is huge,” Mr. VeneKlasen said. “But so far it’s more than paid for itself.”

The investment does not seem to be scaring off other dealers. Marian Goodman, who has her well-established galleries in Paris and on 57th Street in New York, is looking for space. “We’re not out to conquer the universe like some of the men,” she said. “We’re really doing this for our artists, because a lot of them don’t show in London.”

Ms. Goodman added, “Now seems to be the right time.”

By Hannah Sampson

hsampson@MiamiHerald.com

WHEN Euripides had the character of Medea kill her children, he sent her offstage. Today the threshold for thrills is higher, and many artists, filmmakers in particular, have the high-def tools to deliver them in detail.

Works by two artists with major exhibitions in New York this summer offer reminders that sometimes art can really leave a mark. James Turrell, who studied perceptual psychology as an undergraduate, is bathing the Guggenheim Museum’s atrium with intense artificial light and color in his piece “Aten Reign.” In her review in The Times, Roberta Smith said the exhibition would be the “bliss-out environmental art hit of the summer.”

James Turrell

A scene from "Aten Reign."

But in a 1980 show at the Whitney Museum, two patrons filed lawsuits after claiming they became disoriented by Mr. Turrell’s work. Bevil R. Conway, a neuroscientist and artist, said Mr. Turrell’s pieces can affect the part of the brain that sees in three dimensions, effectively creating “a kind of functional stroke.”

“He’s impairing your ability to figure out what the scene structure entails,” Mr. Conway said of Mr. Turrell’s body of work, of which he is a fan. “You can’t tell where the floor is. The part of your brain responsible for guiding motor behavior can’t operate, and then you trip.”

At times, content is explicitly intended to cause discomfort. The artist Paul McCarthy has been triggering upset stomachs for decades with work that graphically combines bodily functions, sexual acts and food. For his latest multimedia installation, “WS,” Mr. McCarthy has packed the Park Avenue Armory this summer with scenes of degradation, violence, nudity and sex in his reimagining of the Snow White fairy tale.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

A video at the Paul McCarthy exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory on June 20.

“Even though Paul’s work indicates that things are artificial, there are some people who have the physiological response of feeling repulsed or scared,” said Maggie Nelson, who wrote about Mr. McCarthy’s work in her 2011 book “The Art of Cruelty”: “Where his art has its power is in its ability to produce the same nausea that might be produced were it real.” Given the huge crowds flocking to the Armory show, the public seems to have an appetite for a mass-scale gross-out.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Visitors take in an installation at Paul McCarthy's exhibit on June 20.

Watching a bad movie can be torture. Is it worth sitting through “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the CHUD” just to say you’re a “C.H.U.D.” completist? (No. Trust me.) But what about movies that actually hurt? In 1973 paramedics rushed to theaters to treat people who were felled by William Friedkin’s now-classic horror film “The Exorcist.” The movie’s graphic depictions of vomiting, gore and blasphemy were unheard-of in a Hollywood film at the time. A clip on YouTube of audience reactions to the movie shows a woman collapsing in the lobby. “As soon as they faint I get out the smelling salts,” says an usher.

The 1950s B-movie director William Castle was a master at provoking adverse audience reactions. At screenings of “The Tingler” (1959), buzzers installed under some seats jolted spectators at a moment in the film when the monster is announced to have gotten loose in the real-life theater. Before viewing “Macabre” (1958), audiences signed life insurance policies in case the film scared them to death. He “didn’t expect anyone to actually die,” said Jeffrey Schwarz, who directed a documentary about the filmmaker, “Spine Tingler!” “It was about the expectation that someone might die that got people to buy tickets.”

At screenings of his film “The Tingler” (1959), buzzers installed under some seats jolted spectators at a moment in the film when the titular monster is announced to have gotten loose in the real-life theater.

Castle’s gimmicks were hucksterish, and mostly harmless. But his tactics have staying power, and for some renegade artists these days, a warning means business. At the beginning of David Lynch’s flashing and flickering new video for the Nine Inch Nails song “Come Back Haunted,” a notice warns viewers that the piece could “potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy.”

Below is a sampling of other artworks that have caused audiences to faint, swoon, vomit or otherwise feel queasy.

Music

SUNN O))) This metal band, known for its deep, droning guitar effects, performs so loudly and in such low frequencies that listeners feel vibrations more than they hear pitches. When heard live, such low-end frequencies, or infrasound, can trigger headaches and nausea. “People definitely go to these concerts to experience the vibrations,” said Olivia Lucas, a Harvard graduate student who has written about the band in her research on the sonic extremes of metal. “It’s like a pilgrimage to discover the physicality of sound.”

Film

“THE FLICKER” (1966) Tony Conrad consulted with an epilepsy doctor before he released his 30-minute experimental short of black and white frames that combine to create a strobe effect. At the beginning, it warns: “may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment.” In a 2002 interview, Mr. Conrad said he knew of at least one person who suffered a seizure.

“IRREVERSIBLE” (2002) Twenty people fainted when Gaspar Noé's film, which depicts scenes of rape, brutality and blood-soaked revenge, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, according to news reports. “The scenes in this film are unbearable, even for us professionals,” a fire official told the BBC. An estimated 250 people walked out of the screening.

Theater

“DRACULA” (1927) Four years before Bela Lugosi played Bram Stoker’s vampire on film, he starred on Broadway in a stage version of “Dracula.” Stationed in the lobby of the Fulton Theater was a nurse with smelling salts. According to a 2006 biography of Lugosi, in the first weeks of the show’s run in Los Angeles 110 people fainted, 19 people left the theater “scared after the first act,” and “10 wives per performance summoned husbands to escort them home.”

Universal Pictures, via Associated Press

Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film "Dracula."

“BLASTED” (2008) At least one person fainted during the Soho Rep production of this intensely raw but critically acclaimed play by Sarah Kane, a young British playwright who killed herself in 1999 at 28. The show was mounted in the theater’s 74-seat space, an intimate setting that amplified its graphic depictions of cannibalism, rape and eye-gouging.

Simon Kane/Sam Rudy Media Relations, via Associated Press

Reed Birney and Marin Ireland in a scene from Sarah Kane's "Blasted" in 2008 in New York.

Art

“CARSTEN HöLLER: EXPERIENCE” (2011) This Belgian-born artist, a trained scientist who refers to some of his works as “confusion machines,” had a career survey at the New Museum that deliberately disoriented visitors. A pair of goggles turned the viewer’s surroundings upside down and backward. An installation of flashing lights aimed to induce hallucinations. Museumgoers had to sign legal waivers to participate in the works.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Visitors rode the "Mirror Carousel" at the “Carsten Höller: Experience" at the New Museum in 2005.

“EMILY’S VIDEO” (2012) The artists Eva and Franco Mattes put out an online call for volunteers to watch a video they described as “extremely graphic and extremely violent.” Those who agreed watched it on a laptop computer, and clips of their reactions were turned into a 15-minute compilation shown at a London gallery. In one video, a young woman fights back tears and gags as she watches through her fingers. In another a man hangs his head for the duration of the video.

<img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>

Jay-Z Is Rhyming Picasso and Rothko

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Jay-Z greets art-world guests before a taping of the music video of his song “Picasso Baby” at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea.

“I have no idea why I’m here,” the artist Marilyn Minter said, as she sat in a temporary V.I.P. room at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea on a steamy Wednesday. “I’m just a fame whore.”

Ms. Minter was one of hundreds of fans and art-world types — Kalup Linzy; Lawrence Weiner; Andres Serrano; George Condo; Yvonne Force Villareal; Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum; and Agnes Gund, MoMA’s president emerita — invited to take part in a live filming of Jay-Z’s music video for “Picasso Baby,” the art-centric song off his new album, “Magna Carta ...Holy Grail.”

The rap marathon was inspired by the performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA exhibition, “The Artist Is Present,” said the art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who is Jay-Z’s art adviser and was a host of the event along with the film director Mark Romanek. “Jay has been wanting to do something durational for some time.”

The video shoot added a welcome frisson to Chelsea as the dozy season hit its annual doldrums. And it livened up a corner of the Web, where the topic of art-world fame whores racing to sell out can be counted on to set the thumb-tappers in motion.

Stephanie Theodore, a Bushwick gallery owner, tweeted a wry suggestion that the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei divorce his wife, marry Ms. Abramovic and form a megacult. Why not invite James Franco, the art blog Hyperallergic added, and make it an unholy threesome?

At a mere six hours, the taping was a water-cooler break by the usual standards of Ms. Abramovic, who during the run of “The Artist Is Present,” spent the equivalent of 30 full days sitting immobile in the museum atrium, while spectators took turns sitting opposite her. Still, as Mr. Linzy, a performance artist, said, “It’s epic.”

Dressed for the performance not in the Tom Ford suits he favors, but a pair of black jeans, white sneakers, a white short-sleeve shirt, a heavy gold chain, a gumball-size pinkie ring and a wristwatch from his collection of six-figure timepieces, Jay-Z rapped from a platform facing a bench reminiscent of the set of Ms. Abramovic’s original artwork.

Like Ms. Abramovic, he was a mesmeric presence, shifting spectators around as though they were iron filings drawn by a magnet. With his usual braggadocio, Jay-Z rapped lyrics like: “I want a Picasso, in my casa ... I wanna Rothko, no I wanna brothel,” and “What’s it gonna take for me to go, For y’all to see I’m the modern-day Pablo Picasso baby.”

He reminded his listeners that, like most every self-respecting millionaire mogul these days, he is an avid collector of contemporary art, although he alone turns the pursuit to his singular ends in lyrics that knowingly name-check everyone from Jeff Koons to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In “Picasso Baby,” Jay-Z’s grab bag of references includes Mr. Condo, Art Basel Miami Beach, Francis Bacon, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and Andy Warhol. He cites Basquiat twice, preening his insider knowledge by lyrically incorporating both the artist’s given name and Samo, his original graffiti tag.

To some spectators, it was particularly bracing to watch a hip-hop god colonize a white cube world that must once have seemed as distant as Mars from the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, the projects where Jay-Z grew up (and where he was known by his given name, Shawn Carter). “For a young black man in America to be on his level of success and rapping about art, and not what he’s wearing, is the coolest thing,” the artist Mickalene Thomas said.

“People have to realize he’s referencing artists who have been shape-shifters in themselves,” she added. “They have to know that a young person hearing him saying ‘I am Picasso,’ is going to look up Picasso.”

Ms. Minter, whose lush photorealist paintings comment on glamour and decadence, said, “Jay-Z speaks to the times we live in.”

An Mr. Weiner, an austere conceptualist, added, “Jay-Z speaks with the times he lives in.”

Unquestionably, Jay-Z manipulates our credulous times as deftly as he did a crowd that also included Judd Apatow, the designer Cynthia Rowley, Alan Cumming, Adam Driver and the artist Marcel Dzama, who came to the filming wearing a cow costume he constructed for a recent video.

“It’s great how he has really recreated the whole MoMA feel,” Mr. Dzama said. And it helped that Ms. Abramovic herself was on hand, arriving theatrically an hour into the event and emerging from a stretch S.U.V. with a turbaned chauffeur. Wearing one of the floor-length black dresses that a friend, the Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci, creates for her, Ms. Abramovic stepped from the vehicle and glided into the gallery with the hypnotic gravity of some loopy space priestess from a sci-fi kitsch classic of the ’50s.

Cameras in her wake, she parted the crowd — “Queen of Outer Space” meets the hip-hop monarch — crossing the gallery to mount a low platform, where she and Jay-Z engaged in a pas de deux sure to go down as among the oddest moments in the annals of performance art.

Two minutes later, the dance had already been posted to Vine and gone art-world viral. “OK the video in Infinite Jest that entertains you to death has finally come and it is the Vine of Jay-Z & Marina Abramovic,” wrote @LindsayZoladz. “R.I.P. US ALL.”

Don’t close the coffin lid quite yet.

Like Ms. Abramovic, whose stare-downs at MoMA left so many participants in tears that it inspired the blog “Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry,” the Jay-Z video was too sincere, even in its cynicism, to be all bad.

To a large extent, that was owed to the hip-hop artist’s way with the crowd, both mellow and collaborative. When a generator cut out, taking with it the background music, Jay-Z called out: “Anyone got unusual talents? Anyone can do something awesome?” He then invited a ballet dancer to perform some pirouettes; the performance artist Jacolby Satterwhite to show off his vogueing; and Kiah Victoria, a music student, to blow the roof off the gallery with her a cappella rendition of a torch song.

“I just love the way Jay-Z riffs on what Marina did,” said Roselee Goldberg, the performance art historian and founder of Performa.

That the boo-birds on Twitter failed to share the love will doubtless help Jay-Z’s cause or, anyway, his record sales. The shock and peril that once characterized much performance art had been co-opted by a marketing wizard, turned, as the bloggers carped, into a tool of aesthetic predictability.

Here it seems proper to resuscitate both Andy Warhol’s famous observation that “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” and to paraphrase an aphorism often attributed to the actual Picasso: mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal.

<img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified a music student who attended the event.  She is Kiah Victoria, not Kiah Gregory.

BY DANIEL DUCASSI

dducassi@MiamiHerald.com

One Eye on Art, the Other on Water

Whitney Revamps New Museum After Hurricane Sandy

Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

The interior of a future gallery in the new downtown home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, expected to be completed in 2015.

The George Lindemann Journal

A sun, dominating one of the three gallery rooms that the installation “Fantasy River” is spread over, is made from about 200 Puma shoes. The cornstalks below the sun are shovel handles.

Stepping into “Federico Uribe: Fantasy River,” a sprawling installation at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, visitors encounter fish swimming in schools, a beaver building a dam and crows perching in a cornfield beneath an enormous sun.

Not until they move closer do they discover the defining quality of Mr. Uribe’s work: the unexpected materials he has used to construct his world.

In it, the fish are paintbrush handles, and the beaver and its dam are made from hundreds of colored pencils. The crows are bits of twisted bicycle tires and the cornstalks are shovel handles painted green. Mr. Uribe’s sun, measuring nine feet in diameter, is constructed with approximately 200 yellow Puma sneakers that he disassembled, flattened and mounted on the wall, and countless radiating shoelaces.

The 4,400-square-foot, site-specific installation is the newest iteration of the sculptural landscapes Mr. Uribe has been populating with his composite creations for the last seven years. Bartholomew Bland, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, first saw them in late 2010 in Miami, where Mr. Uribe has lived for the past 13 years. “There’s a sensual pleasure to his work, a beauty that draws you in,” Mr. Bland said. “Not that many serious contemporary artists embrace beauty, but he does.”

“Fantasy River” occupies three galleries. One is for wild animals, where zebras graze and alligators snap at a cheetah. Another is for domesticated species, with bees buzzing around an apiary and chickens roosting in coops. The third, the site of the cornfield and the shining sun, is devoted primarily to natural life in the Hudson Valley. This room includes pieces designed specifically for this exhibition, among them two squirrels that were once a pair of Alexander McQueen shoes.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Uribe, a trim man with short brown hair and an accent reflecting his native Colombia, sat amid the scenarios discussing his work. He wore custom-made clothing that echoed his artwork: pants patterned with flowers and a shirt covered in fish. (“Sí,” he said, “I always wear clothes like this. I buy fabrics wherever I go.”)

He is also always on the lookout for the commonplace items — tennis rackets, computer keys, garden hoses — that he uses to build his installations. He trolls hardware stores and lumberyards; friends give him things they think he might want. “They tell me: ‘My grandfather died and he has 10,000 golf balls. Can you use them?’ ” Mr. Uribe said.

Sometimes his choices are based on the way the objects look: artificial fingernails glued onto pencil erasers resemble bumble bees; old-fashioned coiled phone cord suggests a sheep’s black coat.

Other decisions are more conceptual, like his use of 45,000 bullet casings for the fur of a tiger. Pointing toward the majestic, metallic creature, he said, “That tiger got killed thousands and thousands of times.”

Another metaphoric sculpture is a rowboat made entirely of suitcases, an allusion to the numerous immigrants who, like Mr. Uribe, crossed bodies of water to begin anew in the United States. “They came with nothing but what they were wearing,” he said. “They were their own suitcases.”

Noting the boat’s oars, Mr. Bland said, “I think it’s so beautiful that he used shovels for oars, to represent the labor that is involved in getting here.”

A prevalent theme in “Fantasy River” is reconnecting manufactured products to their sources in nature. In Mr. Uribe’s installation, many animals are constructed from leather shoes. “People kill animals to make shoes,” he said. “I am destroying shoes to make animals.”

Likewise, Mr. Uribe builds his trees from books. Spines align to form bark, rolled pages serve as branches and covers become leaves. “I am letting them be trees again,” he said.

Mr. Uribe uses screws to secure most of the pieces, and says that the repetitive act of turning each screw is an outlet for his anger. “It’s a very aggressive gesture,” he said, “and I’m doing it thousands of times a day.”

Many of the screws remain visible, and like his other materials, they carry a message.

“I like the idea that people can read my effort in them, the time I have spent screwing every screw,” Mr. Uribe said. “They are the testimony of my work.”

Mr. Uribe, 50, was raised on a farm where, he said, “I had a terrible childhood, for many reasons.” He attended art school and began painting — “Painful paintings relating to religion,” he said. “But then my life changed and I couldn’t paint anymore and I started playing with objects.”

That was 18 years ago. Since then, he has continued to play, albeit with a highly disciplined practice.

“I work six days a week, from nine in the morning till eight at night,” he said. “Even when I don’t feel like it, I just do it, no excuses.”

But it is more than discipline that drives Mr. Uribe. “I work with the purpose of creating beauty and bringing uplifting feelings to people,” he said.

He is a man obsessed. “I do this and I can’t stop doing it,” he said. Then, gesturing around the gallery, he added, “I’m making it bigger and bigger and bigger. It will never be done.”

The George Lindemann Journal

The George Lindemann Journal

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

Published: June 11, 2013

Damien Hirst’s spot paintings — some with dots about the size of pinholes, others 60 inches across — have long been celebrated, and disdained, for a certain anonymous, machinelike industrial uniformity.

But since his first spot paintings appeared, in the mid-1980s, something of a mystery has grown: just how many are there?

Mr. Hirst has said he painted the first few dozen. The others he left mainly to a coterie of assistants, who, it seemed, could make them ad infinitum.

For buyers, dealers and auction houses, the prospect of an unlimited supply was a complication. A flooded market might affect the paintings’ future value — not a small worry when they can cost as much as $3.4 million.

“Even art market professionals like myself don’t know the exact count,” said Koji Inoue, a Christie’s specialist who is in charge of its evening sales.

Now Mr. Hirst’s London company Science Ltd. will finally provide a definitive number.

This fall his publisher, Other Criteria, will release a book, a catalogue raisonné, that will show that there are exactly 1,365 spot paintings.

“All paintings are in the book,” Jude Tyrrell, an official at Science Ltd., said in an e-mail.

For Mr. Hirst, the inventory is but another example of how, as an artist and businessman, he has often sailed against the winds. At a time when experts increasingly fear putting out catalogs and authenticating art, lest they be sued by owners whose works don’t make the grade and are left out, Mr. Hirst, 48, is creating a book that could define what is — and what is not — an authentic Hirst spot painting.

The catalog, beyond providing scholarly luster, could well boost prices for the paintings, which in the past 18 months have sold for $53,000 to $1.7 million, by reassuring buyers who suspected there were many more in the series. In April The Art Newspaper reported that the catalog would include around 1,400 spot paintings. It could also dismay any forgers who think the spot works are particularly conducive to fakery. (In March a man was indicted in New York after being accused of trying to sell five fake Hirsts, including three fake spot limited-edition prints. He has pleaded not guilty.)

But a catalog could draw new attention to questions like whether those made by his assistants are of equal value. And while such a catalog is usually a sign that an artist or scholars are drawing a final line under a specific body of work, the spot paintings are still being made, said James Kelly, the director of Science Ltd. “Damien is working on some spot paintings with very small spots, including a painting with one million spots, which will take a number of years to complete,” he said in an e-mail.

Mr. Kelly added that Mr. Hirst would eventually follow this catalog with a complete catalogue raisonné for his entire body of work.  Mr. Hirst did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

For many experts, this catalog — along with a flurry of activity last year that included a commission for the London Olympics, a retrospective at Tate Modern in London and exhibitions of more than 300 spot paintings at 11 galleries in 8 cities — seems like an effort to turn around a career that rose to dizzying heights until 2008, when prices, and the artist’s reputation, took something of a plunge.

“He needs to regain the trust of the marketplace,” said Jeff B. Rabin, a co-founder of Artvest Partners, an art investment advisory firm. “It seems the catalog is one measure he could perhaps take to start to rectify some of the ill feeling out in the marketplace.”

Mr. Hirst has often been a polarizing figure in the art world. As part of a 1990s wave of young British artists, known as the Y.B.A.’s, he produced work — from a dead shark swimming in formaldehyde to a platinum human skull paved with 8,601 diamonds — that often provoked outrage as well as mystified shrugs.

Brought to prominence by the British advertising executive and art collector Charles Saatchi, with whom his relations, by many accounts, later grew strained, Mr. Hirst became as famous for his self-promoting style as for his work. He flouted art world custom in 2008 when he bypassed dealers and staged an auction of 223 pieces of his own work at Sotheby’s in London that September. The auction, which took place even as financial markets were crumbling, was wildly successful and helped make him one of the richest artists in the world, with a fortune said to be more than $300 million.

But Mr. Hirst, like many artists, has been hurt by the financial crisis and recession. Prices of his works at auction are down by about 60 percent since their extraordinary peak in 2007, according to Artnet, the art market information company. And the lingering effect of his blow-out 2008 auction, experts say, is that Mr. Hirst’s prices have been slower to bounce back than those of other artists.

The spot paintings — especially early ones — have tended to retain their value better than his other works, but for an artist whose ideas are often regarded as sly comments on the link between money and art, it may be disappointing that last year the value of all Hirsts sold at auction barely reached $26.5 million. In 2008 the figure was 10 times that amount, according to Artnet, showing perhaps that owners are reluctant to bring his work to market and take a loss.

As if to underline that all may not be well in his commercial relationships, he broke with the super-dealer Larry Gagosian in January.

Science Ltd. said the catalog had been scheduled for last year, with the global exhibition, but took longer than expected. Mr. Hirst’s company would not comment on whether it is concerned about possible objections from owners of works that might be omitted from the list, which is being put together in conjunction with the Gagosian galleries and White Cube, Mr. Hirst’s London gallery. As it stands, all collectors who own what they believe are Hirsts can submit them to be authenticated by the Hirst authentication committee.

“Science Ltd., Damien’s company, have a very comprehensive database of all his works, and if they were prior to our record keeping, we drew upon the extensive records for earlier spots, from White Cube gallery,” Ms. Tyrrell said. She said only 14 paintings would be included without images.

The practice of authenticating art has become fraught, encouraging continual second-guessing, though the risk for Mr. Hirst is greatly diminished by the fact that the book is being produced while he is alive, experts said. Greater trust is put on the artist’s own opinion about what is genuine.

An expert considering a spot painting’s authenticity will look at a number of things. Is it featured in an earlier, credible publication? Are there documents of provenance, like gallery labels? Does it bear a Hirst signature or stamp, or carry, as some works do, a unique identification number from Science Ltd.?

The very concept of inventorying the “genuine” spot paintings rings silly to some critics who have long complained about the mass-produced nature of Mr. Hirst’s work.

“No one was clear how many spot paintings there were — and Hirst himself didn’t know,” Julian Spalding, an author and a former director of museums in Britain and a outspoken critic of Mr. Hirst’s work, said in an e-mail. “But then why should he? They were made purely to an unbelievably simplistic and boring formula by his assistants.”

But Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s senior international contemporary-art specialist, who was the principal auctioneer for Mr. Hirst’s 2008 single-artist sale, said such critics are missing the point. The paintings, he said, are not about mass production, or volume, or about the kind of limits implied by giving them a fixed count.

“He has made no secret,” Mr. Barker said, “of the fact that the spot paintings were an infinite series.”

For many collectors too, the number is beside the point.

Andrew Cogan, chief executive of the Knoll furniture company, owns a thin, horizontal pastel-colored spot painting about six feet long he bought around 2000.

The painting, he said, is in his home in New York and reminds him of the dot candy on paper sheets he used to enjoy as a child.

“I don’t get tired of looking at it,” he said, adding, “I assumed there were literally thousands of them.”

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: June 2, 2013

VENICE — They park their hulking yachts with names like “Lady Nag Nag,” “Wally’s Love” and “Sea Force One” on the choppy waters of the lagoon just outside the main entrance to the Venice Biennale. Every two years, scores of superrich collectors arrive here by sea, joined by museum directors, curators, artists and auction-house experts. They come to see and be seen and to take the temperature of contemporary art today.

But amid the glamorous parties and the people-watching — celebrities like Elton John and Tilda Swinton were here, along with Milla Jovovich, who performed in a glass box atop a Byzantine-style palazzo — there was also serious talk about the contrast between this Biennale and the recent spring auctions in New York, in which Christie’s sold nearly a half-billion-dollars’ worth of art in just one night.

That frenzied moment of spending seemed like another world altogether compared with this year’s Biennale, which opened to the public on Saturday and is about discovery and looking closely, not conspicuous consumption.

“Half the people I’ve seen here seem to be en route from the art fair in Hong Kong to Art Basel,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Yet this Biennale is anything but commercial. Massimiliano has managed to bring together a surprising and interesting group of artists in an exhibition that is both thought-provoking and engaging.”

Mr. Campbell was referring to Massimiliano Gioni, the Biennale’s 39-year-old artistic director, who has chosen “The Encyclopedic Palace” as the theme of this year’s supersize event. It is taken from a symbol of 1950s-era Futurism — an 11-foot-tall architectural model of a 136-story cylindrical skyscraper — that was created by a self-taught Italian-American artist named Marino Auriti and was intended to house all the knowledge of the world. While Auriti’s dream was never realized, his model serves as the centerpiece and symbol of the exhibition.

Mr. Gioni said he chose “The Encyclopedic Palace” because it best reflects the giant scope of this international show and what he called “the impossibility of capturing the sheer enormity of the art world today.”

In addition to Mr. Gioni’s Biennale, which includes 158 artists, nearly double the number in the two previous ones, there are pavilions representing 88 countries. Many occupy spaces in the Giardini, the shaded gardens that have been home to the Biennale for more than a century. Others can be found in the Arsenale, the nearby medieval network of shipyards, or scattered around the city in cloisters, palazzos, medieval warehouses and disused churches. Among the first-timers is the Vatican, whose group show examines the biblical story of creation. There are countless collateral events too, like an exhibition by the artist Rudolf Stingel, who covered the Palazzo Grassi with his own Persian-inspired carpeting on which he hung his abstract and Photo Realist paintings.

By the time the Biennale ends on Nov. 24, officials estimate nearly 500,000 people will have come to see it.

But it is Mr. Gioni’s show that anchors the Biennale. In two parts — a central pavilion in the Giardini and in the Arsenale — it features self-taught and outsider artists alongside superstars like Ryan Trecartin, Robert Gober and Danh Vo.

While there are paintings, drawings and sculptures dating back 100 years, there are also works made just months ago. In a circular darkened room at the entrance to the pavilion in the Giardini are 40 pages of Carl Jung’s “Red Book,” an illuminated manuscript on which he worked from 1914 and 1930. Off this space are galleries displaying an eclectic array of artworks including Shaker drawings, modern miniatures inspired by late-16th-century Mughal drawings by the contemporary Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi; abstract canvases by the Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint and meticulously carved wild and mythical animals dating from 1870 to 1900 by the woodcarver Levi Fisher Ames.

In the central gallery there is also an enigmatic performance piece by the British-born artist Tino Sehgal, the winner of this year’s Golden Lion award for best artist in the Biennale; two or three individuals sit on the floor improvising their own music, humming and chanting while responding to one another in movement and gestures.

As crowds poured into the show for the three-day invitation-only preview last week, museum curators could be seen taking pictures of the wall labels with their smartphones because there were so many artists they had never heard of.

Everyone had theories about what they were seeing and why.

“It’s saying that something in this old art needs to be incorporated into contemporary practices,” said Leah Dickerman, a curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Tobias Meyer, director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s worldwide, called the show a “game changer.”

“It finally addresses the theory of contemporary art that is based on Jung, on the unearthing of the subconscious,” he explained. “The art world right now is all about Pop and global culture and dispersing images via the Internet whereas this is about exploring the deepest sense of oneself and the genesis of art. It is the antidote to Warhol and Koons.”

In past years the scrappy raw spaces of the Arsenale seemed endless and confusing. But this year Mr. Gioni enlisted the New York architect Annabelle Selldorf to reconfigure the space into a coherent museumlike suite of galleries where visitors could see an intriguing selection of paintings, sculptures, videos and objects. There are remnants from a 200-year-old church imported from Vietnam by Mr. Vo and a lounge-like space where new videos by Mr. Trecartin — a surreal mash-up of college kids behaving badly — play continuously. The winner of this year’s Silver Lion award for a promising young artist, the Paris-based artist Camille Henrot, has a video about the history of the universe that is shown at the beginning of the Arsenale exhibition.

The American photographer Cindy Sherman organized a section where visitors are greeted by a giant rag doll, created by Paul McCarthy, whose internal organs are spilling out. Nearby is a nearly eight-foot-tall sculpture of a blond woman in a blue suit by Charles Ray as well as photo albums by Norbert Ghisoland of early-20th-century portraits that were discovered in the family attic by his grandson in 1969. There is also a meticulously fashioned doll’s house made by Mr. Gober, now 58, when he was just 24 and struggling to get by.

Many of the standout pavilions were inspired by Mr. Gioni’s theme of reflecting on the past, as is the case with this year’s winning national pavilion, from Angola. Located in two floors of the Palazzo Cini Gallery at San Vio, a museum that is rarely open to the public, are walls covered with old master paintings of madonnas and saints. Beside them on the floor, for the taking, are neat piles of 24 large-format photographic posters by the artist Edson Chagas depicting the complex contradictions of a post-independent African metropolis.

In the Russian pavilion, the artist Vadim Zakharov created an environment based on the Greek myth of Danae, who was locked in a room by her father, a king, yet impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. Only women are allowed in the first-floor gallery, where they are handed clear plastic umbrellas to protect them from a shower of gold coins raining down from the ceiling, and every woman was allowed to take a coin. “It’s about how money corrupts,” said Udo Kittelmann, a curator from Berlin who helped organize the pavilion, “and the hope for the future of women.”

Crowds stood in rapt attention at the Romanian pavilion, where five dancers acted out artworks from past biennales. Using performance as a vehicle for questioning identity and history, they posed as paintings by masters like Chagall, Matisse, Mondrian and Klimt. They also re-enacted installations by artists including Mona Hatoum and Yinka Shonibare as well as sculptures by figures like Rodin and Vito Acconci.

“We went into the archives and looked at everything from 1895 and have included works that were political but also things we liked,” said the dancer and choreographer Manuel Pelmus, one of the artists who created the work. “It’s our way of writing our own history.”

By WILLARD SPIEGELMAN

Tulsa, Okla.

Black gold, aka oil, turns into real gold, which often makes for artistic wealth and civic pride. Consider the case of this city in the green country of eastern Oklahoma, a landscape that resembles the gently rolling hills of adjacent Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas more than the dustbowl plains of the western part of the state or the Texas panhandle. Until the mid-1950s, Tulsa was the undisputed international capital of the oil industry. Men became rich, almost overnight. Some of them did great things with their gains.

Waite Phillips (1883-1964), whose brothers had already amassed a major company in Bartlesville, developed his own petroleum company here and sold it in 1925 for the then-enormous sum of $25 million. That's when the real fun began. The grand result was his in-town villa, Philbrook, 72 rooms on 23 acres, which he had built in 1927 for himself, his wife and two children, and which he began filling with the art that still hangs on the walls and stuffs the cabinets here. This estate would not seem out of place in Hollywood. But the Phillips family stayed here for less than a dozen years. In 1938 they deeded the house to the city. Then they moved to the penthouse of a downtown skyscraper; and the Philbrook Museum opened in 1939.

The "house museum" is a lovely genre whose members include the more famous Frick Collection in New York and Gardner Museum in Boston. We go to them for the art and also to breathe the air and get a feeling for how the owner-occupants lived and what made them tick. Philbrook mixes Greek, Italian Renaissance, Baroque and Southwestern styles, the building covered by red-tile roofs, in an engaging hodgepodge. Its beautifully landscaped gardens, which include fountains and a classical tempietto, are the go-to spot for Tulsans who want backdrops for wedding photos.

Phillips had a taste for western things—his "man cave" rooms are on the ground floor—while his wife, Genevieve, went in for French style. The museum's collection has 12,000 items and constitutes a modest encyclopedia as well as a fortuitous anthology of Phillips and post-Phillips bequests, the most splendid of which are 40 Italian Renaissance works (34 paintings, six sculptures), a handout from Samuel H. Kress, the five-and-dime-store magnate who disposed of his vast holdings, most generously to Washington's National Gallery, throughout the mid-20th century.

Enlarge Image

Close

Evan Taylor

The main Philbrook campus includes beautifully landscaped gardens.

The Kress works at the Philbrook include some strong and interesting pictures: an "Enthroned Madonna" attributed to Gentile da Fabriano; Tanzio da Varallo's very buff St. John the Baptist (1627); a Madonna from a follower of Andrea Mantegna; a splendid small portrait of a bearded man attributed to Giovanni Bellini; and other impressive pictures by Carpaccio and Piero di Cosimo. For a schoolchild in the middle of the middle of the country, far from Chicago or even Kansas City, these works—no four-star masterpieces—define what we used to call the Renaissance. They are approachable (when I visited the museum in mid-April, it was as silent as a tomb) and all are in perfect condition.

Most of the Phillips furniture has gone, and the original building has been adapted for the display of art. Architectural additions have been made, but the bones of the house survive, as do charming details, like the frescoes by Philadelphia artist George Gibbs on the walls of the music room, which depict four "tempos" (Allegro, Andante, Rondo and Scherzo) in neoclassical tableaux with young girls who look like nothing so much as 1920s flappers with bobbed hair and flowing gowns.

Although the villa's low ceilings and dark rooms are not ideal for the display of art, French pictures by Rosa Bonheur, Eugène Boudin, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny and Edouard Vuillard look pretty good. Even better, in an adjacent gallery added to the original house, is the Herbert and Roseline Gussman Collection (he was a New Yorker who moved to Oklahoma, one of several prominent Jewish oilmen in the state), 450 works that came to the Philbrook. Paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Georges Roualt, Pablo Picasso, Raoul Dufy and André Derain comfortably command the wall space.

The appealing house really cannot display larger, modern and contemporary work. But on June 14 the museum is opening Philbrook Downtown, an industrial space, in the Brady Arts District. Like much of Tulsa, this wonderful old neighborhood of low brick buildings and unused warehouses is redolent of Art Deco style. New restaurants, galleries and lofts are springing up. Think Brooklyn, or even Berlin, on the Arkansas River. Much of this development comes courtesy of the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The new place will free up space in the villa for the display of some of the collection's 600 Asian works, none of which is up now. More American Indian pottery and baskets will come out of storage, and will be joined in the downtown facility by the newly acquired Eugene B. Adkins Collection.

Under the energetic leadership of Randall Suffolk, the museum's director since 2007, the Philbrook has increased attendance by 50% and changed its programming to include more family-friendly events. In a city where horrible race riots occurred 90 years ago, and which still bears traces of the American Indian displacement of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mr. Suffolk proudly notes that 42% of the museum's visitors come from minority populations, versus an average of 9% nationally.

The downtown facility joins a complex of arts buildings (plus a lovely adjacent green space, on which concerts and exercise classes are already taking place) that includes the archives of Woody Guthrie, one of Oklahoma's most famous sons, embraced more warmly after his death than during his life. This socialist songwriting minstrel of the plains has been reborn, courtesy of his state's wealthy philanthropists. It's an appropriate irony. This land is everyone's land.

Mr. Spiegelman, who writes about the arts for the Journal, lives in Dallas.