The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Christie's saw new record high sales, helped by selling over 50 artworks at more than $10 million a piece, totaling in over $4.5 billion sales for the first half of the year. WSJ's art reporter Kelly Crow joins Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Getty

The art market is still crackling. Christie's International PLC said Tuesday it sold $4.5 billion of fine and decorative art during the first half of the year, up 22% from the same period a year ago—and representing a record high for the privately held company based in London. Christie's total included $3.6 billion in auction sales and $828 million in privately brokered art sales. Its private sales were up 16% compared with the first half of 2013.

Rival Sotheby's said it auctioned $3.3 billion in art during the first half, up 29.4% from the year before. The New York-based auctioneer will release consolidated totals next month.

In a realm that thrives on hawking masterpieces, Christie's offered up 52 artworks that sold for more than $10 million apiece—a bumper crop that included an $84.2 million Barnett Newman striped abstract, "Black Fire I," and an $80.8 million Francis Bacon triple portrait of the artist's bartender friend, "Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards."

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Jeff Koons's work, 'Jim Beam - J.B. Turner Train,' 1986, sold for $33.8 million. CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2014

Christie's Chief Executive Steven Murphy said the company owed much of the spring season's success to an influx of new, curious buyers: 24% of Christie's bidders during the first half were first-timers, he said. Many of these newcomers were wealthy, younger collectors from Asia looking to expand their collections of everything from wine to watches to Andy Warhol. As a result, the auction house plans to launch additional sales at its new salesroom in Shanghai near the Bund after it opens in October. Christie's will also offer another sale in its latest salesroom in Mumbai in 2016.

In terms of categories, Christie's sold $1.3 billion in postwar and contemporary art, up 30% from the first half of 2013, and $939 million in Impressionist and modern art, up 49%. Sales of jewelry, watches and wine also totaled $455.5 million, up 20% from the first six months of last year.

In a twist, Christie's sales of Asian art dropped 15% to $369.6 million for the period, a sign that collectors of Asian art might be growing wary of rocketing price levels for scroll paintings and jade figurines. Dealers said buyers might also be saving money to splurge on other, Western collecting categories like contemporary art.

Collectors from the U.S. outspent all rivals this spring, taking home $1.8 billion worth of art from Christie's, up 31% from the first half of 2013. The company said it plans to capitalize on the U.S. momentum by reconfiguring some space in Rockefeller Plaza in New York to add additional private viewing rooms for discreet shoppers. European collectors bought $1.5 billion in art, up 22% from a year ago. But Christie's said it is still betting big on Asia's purchasing power, noting that buyers from China accounted for 24% of the house's total sales for the first half, a 46% uptick in spending from last spring.

When it comes to contemporary art, the playing field is evening out in compelling ways, Mr. Murphy added. During the first half, buyers from the art market's biggest regions—the U.S., Europe and Asia—each took home roughly a third of the contemporary works on offer at Christie's major sales. That broad sweep of interest and competition is the main driver pushing up record prices for newer art, he added.

"We have to send out the invitations and hold the dinner," he said, "but the good thing is that people everywhere are hungry for art."

The art market tends to quiet down in late July and August but will get tested anew at sales throughout the fall in London, Hong Kong and New York.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

On Kawara, a Conceptual artist who devoted his career to recording the passage of time as factually and self-effacingly as art would allow, died in late June in New York City, where he had worked for 50 years. He was 81.

The David Zwirner Gallery, his representative, announced the death on its website. Mr. Kawara’s family declined to provide the date of death or the names of survivors, in keeping with his lifelong penchant for privacy.

Working in painting, drawing and performance, Mr. Kawara kept himself in the background and almost never gave interviews. The rare published photographs of him showed him from the back. Toward the end of his life, he stopped attending his own openings.

He belonged to a broadly international generation of Conceptual artists that began to emerge in the mid-1960s, stripping art of personal emotion, reducing it to nearly pure information or idea and greatly playing down the art object. Along with Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Hanne Darboven and others, Mr. Kawara gave special prominence to language.

He was best known for his “Today,” or date painting, series: monochromatic canvases, often small, whose only images are the dates on which they were made, rendered in meticulous white letters that look almost printed against fields of red, blue, black or gray. The series began in New York on Jan. 4, 1966 — before the term Conceptual Art existed — when Mr. Kawara painted that date on an 8-by-10-inch blue surface. It continued throughout his life.

The “Today” series, part of the Duchampian tradition of making art directly from dumb reality, treated each date as a ready-made. The works seemed straightforward — even obvious — and maddeningly repetitive, suggesting the Zen passivity of John Cage’s acceptance of noise as music. But they were also diaristic and meditative and could resonate with existential, psychological and scientific implications about the time-space continuum.

The date painting canvases were on thick stretchers that gave them a tombstone-like solidity. They usually memorialized days that had passed routinely for most people, and it was always a little jarring to see them plucked from oblivion. You realized that any date was special for someone, somewhere; you experienced space as full of time, and in the painting’s silence, you sensed the noisy tumult of history.

The date paintings were always site-specific, using the language and grammar of the country in which Mr. Kawara painted them (more than 130 locales). He used eight different sizes, up to around five by seven feet, but otherwise the method of production rarely varied.

The dates were painted in liquitex on four layers of acrylic paint rubbed smooth. Any painting not finished by midnight was destroyed. If finished, it would eventually be placed in a custom-made cardboard box that was often lined with parts of that day’s local newspaper. Sometimes exhibited with their paintings, the clippings measured time’s more specific tumult.

Sometimes the dates were significant, like the three large gray ones made in July 1969, during the Apollo 11 space mission, the first to land on the moon.

On Kawara was born in Japan in December 1932 and raised in an intellectual atmosphere infused with Shinto, Buddhist and Christian teachings. He was a promising student, he said, until the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 left him traumatized and full of doubt about “everything.”

After finishing high school in 1951, he moved to Tokyo and embarked on a course of self-education, reading omnivorously in European philosophy and in political and psychoanalytic theory. He also began making and exhibiting art and, with remarkable quickness, became a rising art star in Tokyo, an experience he disliked. He was known for figurative work of a decidedly dour postwar cast that culminated in a series of drawings of truncated bodies and body parts floating in tilted, tile-lined bathrooms.

In 1959 Mr. Kawara traveled to Mexico City, where his father was the director of an engineering company. He stayed three years, painting, attending art school and exploring the country — the beginning a life of incessant traveling. In 1962 he went to New York, where he spent eight months absorbing new art, especially Pop, and then went on to Paris, later visiting Spain.

He returned to New York in 1964, by which time his work was abstract and included drawings involving grids and random words. Dubious of art’s ability to communicate, he made paintings that reduced specific phrases to indecipherable geometric shapes of color interrupted by intermittent spacing and punctuation. He destroyed these works, but they convinced him that he could not do without legible words, ones that were both literal and resonant. A 1965 triptych titled “Titled,” with the words “1965,” “One thing” and “Viet-Nam” painted in white on red, inspired the date paintings.

More lighthearted, personal works recorded time as a process of moving through space, and life. Between the late 1960s and 1979, Mr. Kawara sent telegrams as regularly as possible to a rotating selection of friends and colleagues that announced, “I am still alive.”

During the same period, his “I Got Up” series consisted of mailed postcards rubber-stamped with the time he had risen and the address where he was staying on a given day. For “I Met,” he typed lists of all the people he encountered in the course of a day. In the mid-1990s he typed lists of one million years — one reaching back in time, the other forward — that were read aloud in performances in New York, Paris, London and elsewhere. This work was published in a limited-edition two-volume set that ran to 2,012 tissue-thin pages per book.

Mr. Kawara had his first solo show of time-related works at the Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris in 1971 and his first New York show at the Sperone Westwater Fischer Gallery (now Sperone Westwater) in SoHo in 1976. A large retrospective titled “On Kawara: Silence” will open at the Guggenheim in 2015.

Keeping the viewer focused on time’s incremental, day-by-day omnipresence was one reason for Mr. Kawara’s deliberately low profile and his habit of listing his age in exhibition catalogs in terms of the number of days he had been alive as of the show’s opening date. In the catalog to a show at the David Zwirner Gallery, an otherwise blank page titled “Biography of On Kawara” put the count at 26,192 days on Sept. 9, 2004. Last week the gallery calculated he had reached 29,771.

George Lindemann Journal - "The New Museum Surveys Art From the Arab World" @nytimes by JOHNNY MAGDALENO

A moment from Khaled Jarrar’s 2012 film “Infiltrators,” on view at “Here and Elsewhere,” the New Museum’s new survey of contemporary artists from the Arab world.Credit Courtesy of Khaled Jarrar

The Western media’s obsession with Middle Eastern conflict has made it easy for American audiences to mistake war and crisis as components of Arab identity. But if there’s anything that the New Museum’s newest exhibition, “Here and Elsewhere,” works to dispel, it’s the fallacy that any single portrayal can summarize the many cultural landscapes around and within the Arabian peninsula.

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The exhibition, which opens Wednesday and runs until Sept. 28, documents the work of 45 contemporary artists of Arab origin, marking the first-ever museumwide group show of Arab artists in New York City. The show’s curators were careful to avoid making any blanket statements about art from the Arab world. “We’re looking at a very diverse group of artists who share a fascination with the question of truth through images,” says Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s associate director and the exhibition’s co-curator. “This question is also a question of what constitutes an identity, and how an identity like Arab is constructed through images.”

Gioni began culturing the idea for “Here and Elsewhere” when he noticed that artists from the Arab world were primarily featured by biennials, which are rich in diversity but lack the space to thoroughly showcase specific cultures. In bringing the idea to life, providing multiple Arab artists a museum backdrop was one main goal; coordinating it in the center of the art world’s capital city was another. “This is part of a natural series of exhibitions we like to feature in the New Museum — ones that not only look at art from a specific geographical place, but art that isn’t being made or shown in New York,” says Gioni.

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At left: Ali Jabri’s “Red Sea,” from the “Nasser” series, ca. 1977–83. At right: Hassan Sharif’s “Suspended Objects,” 2011.Credit From left: courtesy Diala al Jabiri; courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai

For some of the featured artists, documenting the trials faced by Arab people in the wake of war or other tragedies is a key method for probing concepts of identity. Bouchra Khalili’s films, for example, circle the lives of Arab immigrants as they leave their lineages in pursuit of new beginnings in Europe and abroad. Fouad Elkoury’s photography captures Lebanese families and country clubs before and after the start of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. And while other artists’ works take even more divisive approaches toward cataloging the Arab experience, like Rokni Haerizadeh’s paintings of animal-human hybrids protesting Islam in the streets of contemporary France, each of the 45 artists are ultimately united by a shared fascination with what it means to be alive and human in the modern era, regardless of ethnic labels. That’s why, says Gioni, American visitors have just as much to gain from the exhibition as do visitors from Arab countries. “If we go to an exhibition to see ourselves reflected in another people, and in another culture, the museum process becomes much more interesting,” he said. “I think that is ultimately what makes art beautiful. To not just function as a picture, but as a portal.”

“Here and Elsewhere” is on view July 16 to Sept. 28 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, newmuseum.org.

George Lindemann Journal - "Fleeting Artworks, Melting Like Sugar" @nytimes by By BLAKE GOPNIK

One of the most substantial works of art to hit New York in years was with us for only two months. This week, the final vestiges of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” were removed from the old sugar shed of the Domino factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which will make way for apartments.

The vast blocks of polystyrene foam at the heart of Ms. Walker’s sphinxlike monument have been cut up and cleaned and taken away for recycling by its supplier, the Insulation Corporation of America. The sphinx’s “skin,” coated in about 30 tons of sugar and not recyclable (or edible, after months of exposure to a leaking roof and the breath of well over 100,000 visitors) is being carried off to the dump by Action Carting. Three of the sphinx’s human-size attendants, cast in candy, had all but melted away by the show’s final weeks; 12 others, cast in plastic and coated in sugar, have been put on sale by Sikkema Jenkins gallery, as part of an edition of 15 sculptures it hopes to place in public institutions, for $100,000 to $200,000 each.

Of the sphinx sculpture itself, the left hand alone is being preserved, as Ms. Walker’s souvenir of the landmark work.

The artist was not present for the weeklong dismantling of her giant Baby and declined to be interviewed. Concerned about the emotions she’d suffer, her staff packed her off to a house in the woods. But rather than mourn the departure of her creation, Ms. Walker ought to take heart from her contribution to the grand tradition of ephemeral art. From Michelangelo to the Buddhist monks who make — and destroy — sand mandalas, artists have always been intrigued by impermanence.

In the 1960s Happenings and performances left the barest trace. By 1970, the great “land artist” Robert Smithson had created Spiral Jetty, a coil of rock and earth. Reaching out from the shores of the Great Salt Lake, it was meant to disappear and reappear at nature’s will. That same year, Smithson poured glue down an embankment near Vancouver. An artist who photographed the event wrote that “its rapid disappearance was an embrace of a state of imperfection.”

Ms. Walker’s most immediate predecessors include Tino Sehgal, who has become an art star by getting people to kiss, and calling it art, or by turning the Guggenheim Museum into a giant audience polling site. He doesn’t allow documentation of his projects; he won’t even issue a receipt to their buyers.

But the great modern artists of the early 20th century were more in love with ephemerality.

In 1917 Duchamp presented his urinal “Fountain” to the Society of Independent Artists in New York, which refused to show it. The sculpture itself — often judged the most influential work of its century — was promptly mislaid, without any mourning from Duchamp. It was meant to exist more as a provocative gesture, lodged in art history.

Four years earlier, Kazimir Malevich, one of the first abstract artists, developed his Suprematist style designing stage sets for the futuristic Russian opera “Victory Over the Sun.” The décor was never meant to endure. Such projects’ short life allowed them to be that much more daring.

Architecture embraced ephemerality with the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. That first world fair’s landmark was a “Crystal Palace” covered in a million square feet of plate glass; it survived only because it was later rebuilt in a nice South Bank suburb (where it burned down in 1936). The exhibition’s heirs in other cities, including New York and Chicago, were mostly dismantled once their exhibits went home.

Food, an art that doesn’t last at all, except in memory, had touched on similar territory around the time of Napoleon. The French chef Marie-Antonin Carême realized that he could take advantage of food’s evanescence with an unlikely marriage to architecture, the most permanent art form. His table-filling classical cityscapes and ruins, built of nougat and sweetmeats, were found awesome and confusing — were they fleeting or enduring? (They drew on the medieval tradition of “subtleties,” dinner table centerpieces made of cast and spun sugar that no lord’s feast could do without; Ms. Walker cites those as a source for her own Domino project.) The most important ephemeral tradition in Western art may be what has come to be called the “triumphal entry.” In 1635 the great Peter Paul Rubens led his Antwerp colleagues in building triumphal arches and other decorations for the grand arrival of Ferdinand, brother of Philip IV of Spain. As the scholar Eric Monin has discovered, such temporary works were accompanied by lavish fireworks, a new art form that got much of its prestige, now lost, from being short-lived. In the late 1960s Judy Chicago revived the idea of fireworks as high art with a series of “Atmospheres” that she revisited last April in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Even Michelangelo played an early part in creating artistic ephemera: One notably snowy day in 1494, a decade before he completed his great marble “David,” Michelangelo’s patron Piero de’ Medici commissioned him to do a kind of dry run for it, in the form of a heroic snowman. Giorgio Vasari, artist, writer and father of art history, wrote that, during the course of its tragically short life, the frozen figure was deemed “very beautiful.”

Ms. Walker may be aware of this tradition’s power. In an interview with Artnet News, she talked about how she was attracted to sugar for “its temporality, that it’s here and then it’s gone”; her sphinx, she said, was conceived to be “very temporary. I’ve been thinking a lot about ruins, things like that.”

Her “Sugar Baby” was an impressive sight, but half its impact came from the certain knowledge that it would not endure. Dare we say that, in the case of this biggest of all sweet confections, absence will make the heart grow fondant?

The developer Aby Rosen reached a deal to keep a 33-foot-tall Damien Hirst sculpture on his property in Old Westbury, N.Y. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times

The naked lady stays.

The planning board of the Village of Old Westbury, N.Y., agreed on Monday to allow the art collector Aby Rosen to keep “The Virgin Mother,” a 33-foot-tall painted bronze sculpture of a pregnant woman with an exposed fetus, by Damien Hirst, on his property. Neighbors had objected to the graphic sculpture, which could be glimpsed from a private road leading to Mr. Rosen’s estate. The outdoor art even prompted the board to consider enacting a law to prohibit any structures — including sculptures — from rising more than 25 feet.

But a new landscaping plan has soothed critics, Mayor Fred J. Carillo said. The statue — with its partly ripped-away skin that reveals the woman’s skeleton as well as the fetus — will be installed in the pocket of a hill so that it rises only 25 feet above level ground. The statue will be turned so that the detailed anatomy will face the house instead of the road, and it will not have any artificial lighting.

Finally, Mr. Rosen has agreed to maintain all-season landscaping that will shield the statue from view. Thus, the statue’s proverbial fig leaves will remain even in the fall and winter, when most other trees lose theirs.

“They were very cooperative,” Mr. Carillo said of Mr. Rosen’s team.

A real estate developer and avid art collector, Mr. Rosen also serves as chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts.

The Old Westbury planning board also approved the siting of two other statues on Mr. Rosen’s property: “Wind-Up Hello Kitty,” a sculpture by Tom Sachs, and “Untitled: Figure Balancing on Dog,” by Keith Haring, Newsday reported.

“The village approvals have all been obtained,” Peter MacKinnon, Mr. Rosen’s lawyer, said. “Everybody’s happy.”    

George Lindemann Journal - "Detroit’s Art May Be Worth Billions, Report Says" @nytimes By RANDY KENNEDY

A new expert appraisal of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection, which some creditors are demanding be sold to help pay municipal debts in the city’s bankruptcy case, has found that the works could be worth $2.7 billion to $4.6 billion.

The appraisal, commissioned by the city and the museum in advance of a federal bankruptcy trial in August, also added that such a price tag would never be attained at sale, for reasons including donor lawsuits that would delay or prevent the sale of many valuable works, weakness in the market for some kinds of paintings, and lower sale prices because of the sheer bulk that would flood into the market at once. The appraiser, Artvest Partners, an art investment firm based in New York, said that because of these factors and the notoriety of such a forced sale from a venerable public institution, the bulk of the museum’s collection might raise as little as $850 million.

“A significant segment of D.I.A.’s collection is in areas that have fallen out of favor with collectors, and that are underperforming their market peaks in 2007,” a report by the firm said, noting in particular old master and 19th-century European paintings and pre-1950s American art.

The numbers and the report’s conclusions will undoubtedly be fought over fiercely at trial. Over the last several months, creditors have accused city officials of underestimating the value of the collection in order to protect it. The collection comprises more than 60,000 pieces, which are owned by the city and considered a municipal asset. Late last year, at the behest of Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn D. Orr, Christie’s appraised a small but significant portion of the collection, including some of the museum’s greatest masterpieces, and estimated that those works — by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh and several others — would bring $454 million to $867 million if sold.

That estimate, which looked only at works bought by the city that would not be subject to litigation by donors, took on great significance as private foundations and state lawmakers put together the so-called grand bargain, pledges of more than $800 million in private and state money to protect the art collection in exchange for helping the city to shore up pension funds.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lindemann, www.forbes.com/profile/george-lindemann, https://twitter.com/BassMuseumPres, http://www.nova.edu/alumni/profiles/george_lindemann.html, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/investors/george-lindemann-net-worth, george-lindemann-jr.com, http://www.bassmuseum.org/blog/george-lindemann-wins-inaugural-better-beach-awards, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/lindemann.html

George Lindemann Journal "London Auctions Cap a Go-Go Season" @nytimes by By SCOTT REYBURN

Francis Bacon’s ‘‘Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground)’’ from 1964 sold for £26.7 million. Credit Sotheby’s

LONDON — The momentum seems unstoppable. Last week in London, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips raised an aggregate 200 million pounds, or about $340 million, from their evening sales of postwar and contemporary art, a 26 percent increase on the equivalent series of sales last summer.

London’s sales came on the heels of an Art Basel fair in Switzerland last month, where an Andy Warhol self-portrait sold for about $30 million, and a blockbuster series of contemporary evening and day auctions in New York in May that totaled $1.6 billion.

“The sleepy days of collecting are over,” said Amy Cappellazzo, the co-founder of the New York-based Art Agency, Partners, who was in London bidding on works by Lucio Fontana and Roy Lichtenstein on behalf of clients she advises. “The wealthiest of the wealthy now view art as an alternative currency. It’s become a very big business.”

London was the latest stop in what has become a year-round traveling circus of auctions, fairs and gallery events. Contemporary art has become a global monoculture. If you’re seriously rich, and want to enhance your status and your wealth, why not buy top-tier contemporary art, as well as super-prime real estate in London and New York? This seemed to be the message Sotheby’s and Christie’s were trying to convey in the slickly presented views of their June 30 and July 1 auctions of art produced during the last 60 years.

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‘‘Country-rock (wing-mirror)’’ by Peter Doig brought a price of £8.5 million. Credit Sotheby’s

But was the rise in overall sales a result of new clients entering the market, or was it simply that existing buyers were spending more money? There weren’t many new faces to be seen at these London sales, as there hadn’t been at Basel. Paradoxically, if that is the case, and new buyers aren’t flooding into the upper reaches of the art market in the way they did in 2007 and 2008, then it is less likely that the current expansion represents, as many people suspect, a speculative bubble.

What is certain is that the wealthiest art buyers are concentrating their investment on a narrow range of low-risk “blue chip” names.

Anders Petterson, the founder and managing director for the London-based analysts ArtTactic, said in an email that the 10 most expensive artists accounted for 73 percent of the £192.6 million aggregate total achieved at Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales.

Francis Bacon is currently the contemporary market’s most valuable artist after the $142.4 million achieved for a large-scale triptych in New York in November. The Irish-born painter also topped the price lists at these latest Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales. Sotheby’s offered a small-scale that had been in a private collection in Milan since 1970. Christie’s had a 1967 head of Lucian Freud from the estate of the children’s author Roald Dahl. Four telephone bidders pushed the price on the triptych to £26.7 million, significantly above the upper estimate of £20 million. An unidentified private collector standing at the back of Christie’s sale room bought the head of Freud for £11.5 million, just below the unpublished upper estimate of £12 million. The seller of the latter work had been guaranteed an undisclosed minimum price, according to Christie’s catalog.

Further research by Arts Economics, based in Dublin, has shown that of the 36,000 artists recorded in the worldwide auction market for postwar and contemporary art, fewer than 50 have sold for more than €10 million.

The Scottish-born painter Peter Doig, who is usually sold in London, is one of only two living British artists (the other being Damien Hirst) who can reach that kind of price level. Sotheby’s guaranteed Mr. Doig’s critically acclaimed 1999 canvas, “Country-rock (wing-mirror),” showing an underpass in Toronto. Its estimate of £9 million proved too ambitious and it was bought by a telephone bidder for £8.5 million with fees. Christie’s, by contrast, placed a more modest valuation of £3 million to £5 million on the more decorative and mysterious 2002-4 landscape with a self-portrait of Mr. Doig in theatrical dress, “Gasthof,” and was rewarded with a price of £9.9 million from the dealer Larry Gagosian in the room.

Elsewhere there was the usual procession of seven- and six-figure prices being paid for Andy Warhol silk screens, Lucio Fontana slashed canvases, Yves Klein rectangles of ultramarine and other signature works by postwar and contemporary’s investment-grade brands.

The monotony of what at times felt like factory auctioneering was momentarily broken at Christie’s when Tracey Emin’s most famous and infamous work, “My Bed,” dating from 1998, sold from the Charles Saatchi collection for £2.5 million. The mellowing Ms. Emin, who was a leading figure in the Young British Artists (YBAs) group, installed the bed at Christie’s preview and was in the auction room to see it knocked down to her London dealer Jay Jopling.

Less established artists remain an area of unpredictability. Phillips’s more modest £9.9 million evening sale on July 2, their last before moving to a plush new building in Berkeley Square, tested demand for some of the younger minimalist painters who have recently been generating speculative heat. In February at Sotheby’s, a large 2012 Lucien Smith “Rain” painting, one of an estimated 200 to 300 made by the artist with a fire extinguisher, sold for £224,500. At Phillips, another 2012 example of similar size sold for £116,500. Bidders seemed to have a more positive sense of the long-term values of the Cologne-based abstract painter David Ostrowski, whose ghostly 2012 canvas, “F (Gee Vaucher),” attracted at last five bidders before selling for £170,500, more than three times the estimate based on what galleries charge for his paintings when first released.

At Christie’s post-auction press conference, Francis Outred, the company’s European head of contemporary art, said that although the evening’s buying had been dominated by established collectors, 190 clients from 28 countries had bid at the sale. That’s still just a tiny fraction of the world’s 199,235 individuals who each were estimated byUBS and the consultancy Wealth-X to have more than $30 million cash to spend in 2013. In other words, despite all the media reports devoted to the relentless growth of the art market, that night at Christie’s it remained the preserve of the 0.1 percent of the 0.1 percent.

“It’s a relatively small pool of buyers,” Mr. Petterson said. “They’re financial people in a world of their own. But as long as this group finds monetary value and cultural status in these objects, that pool will remain stocked.”

George Lindemann Journal - "Basel ‘mothership’ fair is bigger than ever" @miamiherald by Siobhan Morrissey

BASEL, Switzerland -- Go big or go home. That may well have been the watchword for the 45th presentation of Art Basel in this medieval city on the Rhine, where museum-scale installations dominated both the design and art exhibitions.

Much like Art Basel Miami Beach, the Swiss fair opens with Design Miami a day before collectors and curators descend upon the main art fair, which began in Basel in 1970. For a city with an area of less than 10 square miles and fewer than 200,000 inhabitants, Basel holds bragging rights for hosting the biggest contemporary and modern art fair in the world.

“Basel, Switzerland, is the mothership,” says gallerist Yancey Richardson. “It sets the bar.”

Richardson runs a New York gallery that focuses on photography. She usually exhibits at Pulse, a satellite fair to Art Basel Miami Beach, and was in Basel simply to enjoy the show and learn about up-and-coming artists.

Held the second week in June, the Basel fair was big in all manners of speaking. A record crowd of 92,000 people visited it. That’s 6,000 more than last year, and almost 20,000 more than the number who attended the sister fair in Miami Beach last December.

“We expect that in Miami Beach we will see, as we have seen in Basel this week, the now truly global nature of Art Basel’s audience with new and many more collectors from faraway places,” Art Basel director Marc Spiegler told the Miami Herald by email at the conclusion of the fair.

A new sector at the fair in which galleries present a curated focus on a single artist or one monumental work by a given artist is a harbinger of things to come at the Miami Beach fair this December, Spiegler said.

That new sector was designed to draw an enthusiastic group of collectors, and that was just the kind of crowd that appealed to Steven Sacks, whose New York-based bitforms gallery exhibited a museum-quality video installation by Beryl Korot.

“This fair is by far the highest-quality, densest group of collectors, curators and institutions in the world,” said Sacks, who was looking to place Korot’s iconic work, Dachau 1974, with a European museum.

“I would never bring that to any other fair in the world but this fair because I would never, ever find a client for it,” he said. “It is a tough piece. It’s beyond that. I want it to be in a museum. It’s hard because, one, there’s a limited audience for that work in general, and also I’m limiting the audience by not wanting to sell to a private collector. So, I made it a little more complicated, but this fair allows that to happen.”

The bitforms booth actually felt like a museum setting, with Korot’s eerily riveting four-channel video installation the sole work for sale. The Basel offering, for $175,000, coincided with an exhibition of the work at the Tate Modern in London.

The 24-minute, black-and-white footage depicts how the former concentration camp looked 40 years ago. The ambient sound of church bells and the babbling of a nearby brook, as well as the trudging feet of tourists, all could have been sounds heard during the war years. It was the last of three works available, and at the conclusion of the fair Sacks was in negotiations with an unnamed European museum to sell the video.

While Basel proved to be the perfect arena to exhibit the Korot video, Miami Beach is a better place to show up-and-coming artists, Sacks said.

“The buyers there are looking for things outside of the blue-chip, and they want to find and discover,” he said of the Miami Beach fairgoers. “A lot of times that corresponds to lower prices. I think the work there is a bit edgier. Also, I think the Latin American vs. European tastes are different. The European is more of a traditional. There’s a history there that is very deep in terms of art collecting and art history.”

As a result, Sacks said, he tends to exhibit more works from emerging artists in Miami Beach and keeps the prices below $100,000.

In Basel, prices often soar into the millions. The Skarstedt Gallery, with spaces in New York and London, sold its Andy Warhol Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) from 1986, which had a price tag of roughly $35 million. David Zwirner, also of New York and London, sold a Jeff Koons dolphin balloon sculpture for $5 million, a Bruce Nauman sculpture of wax heads for $3.2 million and a Gerhard Richter painting for $2 million.

Annely Juda Fine Art of London sold David Hockney’s Vista near Fridaythorpe, Aug, Sept 2006, an oil painting on four canvases, for more than $4 million. White Cube of London, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo sold one of Damien Hirst’s glass-enclosed pharmacy cabinets filled with boxes and bottles of pills and palliatives, Nothing is a Problem for Me (1992), for just under $6 million.

“Last year we had our best fair ever in Miami, and this time we’re having our best fair ever in Basel,” said White Cube’s Graham Steele. “The quality of the fairs are of the highest, but they just have a very different cultural feeling. There’s something wonderful about being in Switzerland. You’re in a small town. You’re in a town that’s steeped in culture that goes back a thousand years. You have these institutions that have these phenomenal collections that add perspective.

“What’s wonderful about Miami is, it’s New World. You have a phenomenal energy. There’s a different crowd. It’s a Miami energy. It’s a Miami heat. Here you bring the absolute best; there you might bring something newer and sexier and bigger.”

Galerie Lelong of New York and Paris also had a phenomenal fair, according to gallery vice president Mary Sabbatino. By day three of the six-day fair, the gallery had sold one of Jaume Plensa’s bronze sculptures featuring the elongated and serene face of an Asian woman with her hair pulled back in a bun, as well as works by David Nash, Sean Scully and Ana Mendieta for an undisclosed amount.

Lelong is an institution at the Basel and Miami Beach fairs, exhibiting in Switzerland for more than four decades and in Florida since the fair’s inception in 2002.

As the global art market is exploding, both fairs are improving apace, Sabbatino said.

“The quality here is one of the best I’ve seen, and Basel is always traditionally an art fair where the quality is high,” she said. “Miami also is high in a different way. But in Basel, this particular Basel, it really seems like everyone put on their finest clothes and really are showing wonderful works in all the booths.”

Come December, Miami Beach is also expected to excel, Sabbatino said, explaining that every gallery reapplied to exhibit at the fair — something that had never happened before. Sabbatino serves on the selection committee that oversees who gets to exhibit in Miami Beach, and she said the competition is fierce in both locations. More than 1,000 galleries applied for space at Basel this year, but only 285 made the cut.

The Basel fair differs from Miami Beach’s in that it is slightly larger, with exhibition space on two floors, and a separate hall for showing large-scale works in a program titled Unlimited.

The bigger and bolder works dominated that sector of the fair. Among the highlights were:

• Giuseppe Penone’s Matrice di Linfa (Matrix of Sap), a 2008 work in which a giant fir tree is sawed in half lengthwise and presented like an open book that reveals its age when 80 years old. The tree spans more than 150 feet, with both halves positioned end-to-end. At Tucci Russo Studio, Torino, Italy.

• Julio Le Parc’s Continuel Mobile Sphere Rouge (2013) includes some 3,000 red translucent Plexiglas squares suspended by wire and assembled into an orb measuring 15 feet in diameter. Whenever someone walks by, the air shifts, causing the sphere to move and cast cascading shards of red light onto the surrounding walls and floor. At Bugada & Cargnel, Paris.

• Haegue Yang’s Accommodating the Epic Dispersion — On Non-cathartic Volume of Dispersion (2012) features a colorful array of everyday window blinds arranged in various stages of extension and aperture that immediately captured attention as visitors entered the hall. At Kukje Gallery of Seoul, South Korea, and the Tina Kim Gallery of New York.

• Carl André’s Steel Peneplain (1982), a floor sculpture that goes almost unnoticed by visitors until they are actually walking on it, as the 300 steel plates that comprise the walkway blend into the exhibition hall’s gray floor. At Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf, Germany.

In a nearby exhibition hall, Design Miami had its share of monumental works, including:

• Jamie Zigelbaum’s Triangular Series, which set the tone for the show in the anteroom where visitors ascended on escalators to Design Miami. Made of translucent white acrylic and steel, this assemblage of nearly five dozen sculptures hung from the ceiling like a forest of stalactites, pulsating with light and interacting with people below and each adjacent sculpture. Set against a sensory-depriving black background, the inverted and elongated pyramids of light evoked the feeling of ice floes in dark water.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Pérez Art Museum seeks sharp boost in county funding" @miamiherald by DOUGLAS HANKS

Housed in a new $130 million waterfront headquarters built largely with government money, PAMM’s celebrated debut late last year also tripled the non-profit’s annual operating expenses, to $14 million from $5 million. Private dollars have not kept pace with the higher costs, leaving a gap that PAMM wants Miami-Dade to help close with a 60 percent increase in the museum’s operating subsidy from hotel taxes, according to interviews and budget documents.

“I consider that to be an asset for the county,” Mayor Carlos Gimenez said of PAMM. “We’ve known for a long time they were going to need to grow their operating subsidies. They’re open, and that’s why they need a little bit more.”

PAMM currently receives $2.5 million from Miami-Dade, but the 2015 county budget Gimenez plans to unveil Tuesday earmarks $4 million for the museum, according to several top Gimenez aides. The museum also wants $1 million in property taxes from Miami’s Omni Community Redevelopment Agency, a special taxing district aimed at improving a neighborhood that stretches from Museum Park north to 23rd Street, the CRA’s director, Pieter Bockweg, confirmed this week.

The push for more public funding by the former Miami Art Museum comes as other non-profits supported by Miami-Dade face a 10 percent cut, and as Gimenez is warning of police layoffs and service reductions. PAMM receives its subsidy from hotel taxes, a funding source Gimenez used this year to narrow the county’s budget gap.

Gimenez’ plan to beef up PAMM’s subsidy is already drawing criticism as county commissioners face another budget process with job cuts on the table. Miami-Dade’s library system is poised to cut 90 full-time positions under Gimenez’s funding scenario, and the overall county budget contemplates a loss of 700 payroll slots without union concessions.

Commissioner Juan C. Zapata said he wants Miami-Dade to consider other uses for the hotel taxes that PAMM is seeking.

“We have a lot of flexibility with these dollars,’’ said Zapata, who represents West Kendall in a district that brushes up against the Everglades. “We’ve gotten on this path where we’re all-in supporting these cultural institutions that are all downtown and are already benefiting from public dollars for construction.”

For PAMM advocates, the extra dollars represent an increased investment in a high-profile cultural institution that’s taken on the added expense of operating in the heart of Miami’s revived waterfront. In 2004, voters endorsed Miami-Dade borrowing $100 million to move the former Miami Art Museum from an under-used county building to a new headquarters that has won raves from critics.

Leann Standish, the museum’s deputy director for external affairs, said the extra county funds would be used for the museum’s subsidized offerings.

“The support from the county really helps us to fund the programs we have found to be in great demand right now. We have free admission for all students. We have two free-admission days,” she said. “It's those free programs that we've found to be very successful.”

PAMM bears the name of Jorge Pérez, the Miami condo developer now enjoying a second high-rise boom across South Florida. In late 2011, he donated $15 million in art and pledged $20 million in cash, payable through 2022.

Budget documents show the museum expects to generate about $8 million next year from private sources, including $4 million from concessions, ticket sales and events, and about $4 million in donations and endowment revenue. That leaves a gap of more than $5 million that would be closed by government dollars.

Museum officials say attendance and membership sales are on track or even ahead of projections after PAMM’s Dec. 4 debut during the annual Art Basel week. Almost all of the museum’s corporate sponsors renewed for 2015, PAMM said.

“The demand has been way more than we projected, across the board,’’ Standish said.

The museum’s endowment hit $14 million for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, a figure well below PAMM’s long-term target of $70 million, according to the 2013 financial statement. The museum’s budget shows the endowment currently generates about $500,000 a year for operations — roughly 3 percent of the year’s $14 million budget.

Including the new building, PAMM listed assets of $167 million in 2013. The museum’s balance sheet listed about $10 million in cash and $14 million in investments, with an additional $31 million in pledges, receivable grants and holdings in trusts slated to provide cash in future years.

PAMM’s financial needs complicated the Miami Dolphins’ pursuit of hotel-tax dollars for a $350 million renovation of Sun Life Stadium. The team won approval June 17 of a new subsidy program that will send the Dolphins a maximum of $5 million in yearly bonus payments for hosting Super Bowls and other large sporting events, provided Miami-Dade can first cover its existing hotel-tax obligations.

Though not binding on commissioners, a county list of about $30 million in hotel-tax obligations written forecasts paying PAMM $4 million annually through the life of the Dolphins’ 20-year deal.

Hotel taxes continue to hit record levels, and are up 8 percent this year. But the revenue source is also under strain, largely thanks to a portfolio of debt tied to the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the Miami Beach Convention Center and Marlins Park.

While state law limits hotel-tax exependitures, during the past two years Gimenez used $50 million in surplus hotel taxes to replace general-fund dollars subsidizing the county’s parks department. The shift, endorsed by county commissioners, freed up general-fund money to be spent on core services, including police, jails and homeless animals.

With the reserves drained, Gimenez said he won’t be using hotel taxes to ease pressure on the general fund for the 2015 budget. If Gimenez could repeat this year’s strategy of shifting $25 million in hotel taxes to parks, it would eliminate more than a third of the $65 million budget gap facing Miami-Dade.

The gap is driving Gimenez’s austerity plan, which forecasts about 200 job cuts in the county’s police department and other spending reductions. Leaders of social-service agencies and other charities funded by Miami-Dade packed a budget hearing last week to protest Gimenez’s plan to cut nearly $2 million out of the county’s $20 million Community Based Organization program. The CBO program funds homeless shelters, pantry programs, battered-women advocates and other groups.

Michael Spring, Gimenez’s cultural chief, said Miami-Dade always intended to give PAMM $4 million this year, but that the current budget strain forced the $2.5 million allotment. He called the $4 million contribution for 2015 reasonable support for a new county asset.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann  - "Suit Seeks to Block Corcoran Takeover" @nytimes by RANDY KENNEDY

The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Credit Marge Ely for The Washington Post, via Getty Images

When the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington — one of the nation’s oldest privately supported museums — announced in May that its artwork, landmark building and venerable school would be taken over by the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University, the arrangement was presented as a done deal.

But on Wednesday, a group of museum donors, current and former students, and former faculty and staff members went to court to try to block the dismantling of the Corcoran, saying it would violate the 1869 deed and the charter of the museum’s founder, William W. Corcoran, a banker who gave his art for the “perpetual establishment and maintenance of a public gallery and museum” to promote painting, sculpture and other fine arts. The opponents, members of a group called Save the Corcoran, contend in court papers that museum trustees want to “commit the gravest form of fiduciary breach: to destroy the very institution they are charged with protecting.”

Officials at the Corcoran — which has run operating deficits for more than a decade — filed papers last month asking to override Corcoran’s 1869 deed, saying it was “financially impossible” to carry on the museum and school in their present form and that they believe the plan is the “most closely aligned with the original intent of Mr. Corcoran.”

Under the deal announced in May, which must be approved by a District of Columbia judge, the defunct Corcoran would cede its collection of more than 17,000 pieces, rich in American art, to the National Gallery, its much larger neighbor. The National Gallery would preserve a “Legacy Gallery” within the Corcoran’s building on 17th Street, a block from the White House, and organize its own exhibitions of modern and contemporary art there. The much-admired building would become the property of George Washington University, which would use it for classes for students of the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Opponents contend that the Corcoran would exist as little more than a name under the plan and that the historic building would no longer function as a museum.

They also claim in court papers that in recent years the Corcoran’s board has put scant effort into fund-raising and has mismanaged the institution’s money through “self-dealing, conflicts of interest, hiring unqualified management and profligate spending on consultants whose advice was ultimately ignored.”

As an example of mismanagement claimed in the suit, opponents say that a neighbor of the Corcoran’s board chairman, Harry F. Hopper III, was hired to be the Corcoran’s chief of operations in 2011, though the woman  had a background in “homeland-security contracting, not museum operations or organizations involved in the arts.”

As finances dwindled, the board explored selling the 17th Street building and relocating the museum to Alexandria, Va., or elsewhere; it later explored a partnership with the University of Maryland that failed to materialize.

A spokeswoman for the Corcoran said Wednesday morning that the museum’s lawyers had not had a chance to review the new court papers and would not have a comment until they had done so.

The opponents argue that as bad as the financial situation is, “the charitable purpose of the trust may yet be practicable, if managed properly,” and they ask the judge, Robert Okun, of the District of Columbia Superior Court, to prevent a “midsummer rush to judgment” by closely examining the Corcoran’s financial records. “If one of the oldest and most vaunted art museums in Washington, D.C., is permitted to disappear overnight,” the opponents said in court papers, “the public interest demands that such an undertaking proceed with the utmost consideration and with due regard for all interested voices.”

Jayme McLellan, an artist who has taught at the school for many years and is a leader of the opposition, said in an interview that “the Corcoran hasn’t had a series of checks and balances for decades — it’s been run like a mom and pop shop or a small gallery.”

The museum’s situation echoes in some respects that of the Barnes Foundation, created in a Philadelphia suburb in 1922 by another wealthy collector, Albert C. Barnes, who died in 1951. The foundation, in financial trouble, waged a long court battle beginning in 2002 to override the wishes of Barnes, who stipulated that none of the paintings in the collection could be lent, sold or moved. But the foundation prevailed and relocated the works to a new building in downtown Philadelphia.

In the case of the Corcoran, the most important parts of the collection would go to the National Gallery and would be identified as Corcoran works, though how many of them would be displayed and how often would be determined by the National Gallery. Other works that the National Gallery would not be able to absorb would be dispersed to other museums, with a preference for keeping them in Washington. Earl A. Powell III, the director of the National Gallery, has said that “more art probably will be in the public view in these arrangements than before” and praised the arrangement for creating what he called “one of the great collections — if not the greatest collection — of American art in the country.”

As in the Barnes case, at issue is whether the opponents to the plan have legal standing to block it. In court papers, Corcoran patrons, students and others opposing the move argue that they have “crucial rights, legal obligations and financial and reputational interests at stake.” The attorney general for the District of Columbia, which is charged with oversight of charitable institutions, has been in discussions with the Corcoran’s trustees and has expressed no opposition thus far to the dissolution plan. In interviews, former and current Corcoran staff members describe a steady downward spiral for the institution that began after a hugely ambitious plan to build a $170 million addition to the museum, designed by Frank Gehry, fell apart in 2005 amid fund-raising shortfalls and board disagreements. Patrons with substantial resources left the board; trustees struggled to meet operating expenses and turned toward selling museum-owned land as one stopgap fund-raising measure. But opponents to the planned merger contend that the institution — with its renowned Beaux-Arts building, world-class collection and status as a revered Washington art destination — could have dug itself out of the hole if trustees had worked hard enough, managed properly and sought new benefactors.

“There really needs to be an independent review,” said Carolyn Campbell, the museum’s first public relations chief in the 1970s and 1980s, and who is a party to the opposition lawsuit. “We need to figure out what’s really happened there.”     

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lindemann, www.forbes.com/profile/george-lindemann, https://twitter.com/BassMuseumPres, http://www.nova.edu/alumni/profiles/george_lindemann.html, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/investors/george-lindemann-net-worth, george-lindemann-jr.com, http://www.bassmuseum.org/blog/george-lindemann-wins-inaugural-better-beach-awards, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/lindemann.html