George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

A Legendary Dealer’s Eagle Eye

‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ at MoMA

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

‘Ambassador for the New’: A look at a new exhibition at MoMA that highlights the career of the gallery owner and art collector Ileana Sonnabend.

 By HOLLAND COTTER

If you think that all art exhibitions result from the natural meeting of laudable subjects and curatorial passion, consider “Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New,” which opens on Saturday at the Museum of Modern Art. Although the subject is a worthy one — Sonnabend was among the most foresighted art dealers of the late 20th century — the show is a byproduct of legal hassles and diplomatic campaigns surrounding her billion-dollar estate, which may be one reason it feels, as a tribute, cool and impersonal, a portrait-in-art that is only a sketch.

The art is certainly impressive, a constellation of icons, with Sonnabend’s eye and energy the gravitational force. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Romania in 1914, she married a future art dealer, Leo Castelli, born Leo Krausz, in 1932. During World War II, they and their young daughter, Nina, fled Europe for New York, where Castelli opened a gallery.

Artwise, they made a good pair. Although very different in demeanor and temperament — Castelli was debonair and talkative, Sonnabend stolid and shy — they shared an appetite for the untried and the difficult, with Sonnabend, in the long run, having the more adventurous eye. Together, in 1957 they made a famous exploratory trip to Robert Rauschenberg’s studio, where they met Jasper Johns. Sonnabend bought a Johns painting on the spot and became Rauschenberg’s avid and lasting advocate.

After she and Castelli divorced in 1959, Sonnabend remarried, moved to Paris and opened a gallery of her own. She introduced American artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Rauschenberg to Europe, helping, long-distance, to position New York as the new art capital. When she moved back to Manhattan in 1968 and set up business in SoHo, she pulled traffic in the other direction, drawing avant-garde European art from across the Atlantic. She sustained this cosmopolitan mix for five decades, and stayed interested in new art until her death at 92 in 2007. The MoMA show, organized by Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and Claire Lehmann, a curatorial assistant, is a sampler of some 40 objects covering that span, all owned by Sonnabend at one time. Rauschenberg’s monumental 1959 assemblage or “combine” titled “Canyon” has pride of place just inside the gallery entrance, and for good reason. It was Sonnabend’s favorite among the thousands of objects she acquired. It was a much-reported MoMA acquisition in 2012. And it’s still a startler.

Its central element, a taxidermied bald eagle, spread-winged and with a trussed pillow dangling from its claws, conjoins an American emblem with a reference to the Greek myth in which Zeus, in the form of a bird, abducts a boy he lusts after. A collaged photograph of the artist’s young son and the combine’s general air of chaotic dereliction add an intensely subversive spin to the notion of “American” art.

The chaotic look of the piece aroused indignation among some of its initial viewers, which was to Sonnabend always a sign of success. She hit that jackpot repeatedly. Europeans grumbled over Jasper Johns’s work, which was her debut presentation in Paris, and over Andy Warhol’s two years later. A piece by Mr. Johns, “Device,” from that first show, is in the MoMA show. So is one of Warhol’s spectacular “Death and Disaster” pictures, with repeated images of a suicide shuddering across the canvas. (Although shipped, this painting didn’t end up in Warhol’s Paris show because it was too big to fit in the gallery.)

She brought more Pop from New York — James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann — but by the mid- to late-1960s her interests had moved on to American Minimalism, evident here in a majestic Robert Morris sculpture in draped industrial felt. At the same time, she was captivated by a European near-equivalent, Arte Povera, distinguished by a grounding in radical politics and by a poetic use of materials, as in an untitled Giovanni Anselmo sculpture made from carved granite and fresh lettuce.

She exhibited and collected photography at a time when many people didn’t accept the medium as art. And she challenged those who did by promoting hard-to-love work, like the mid-1960s “portraits” of German industrial architecture taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher. She gave fledgling media like video and performance an early berth.

It’s safe to say that Vito Acconci’s notorious 1972 performance, “Seedbed,” for which the artist masturbated, invisibly but audibly, for hours, under a gallery floor, would not have been welcome at many other SoHo spaces, including, one suspects, the Castelli Gallery. When Sonnabend found an artist interesting, she let him (her roster was almost entirely male) do what he wanted, no questions asked.

Her final commitment to something like a movement came in the 1980s when she took on young American artists like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, who cribbed from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism and who, in ways that make even more sense now, were gripped by a love-hate infatuation with the market. Classic pieces by all three are here.

When I say classic, I mean typical pieces, but I also mean widely seen and often reproduced. Given the thousands of objects that passed through Sonnabend’s hands over five decades, and the rich store of them that became her collection, the objects chosen for the MoMA exhibition are surprisingly unsurprising. With few exceptions — a 1962 Jim Dine “tool” painting, a 1972 Jannis Kounellis text piece — they’re familiar, and in the case of “Canyon,” a textbook staple.

“Canyon” plays a major role here. The show revolves around it in a very basic way. Because it incorporates the remains of a bald eagle, an endangered species, the work could not be sold. When Sonnabend died and her collection was appraised for tax purposes, her heirs — her daughter, Nina Sundell, and her adopted son, Antonio Homem — valued the unmarketable “Canyon” at zero; the Internal Revenue Service, however, estimated that it was worth $65 million and was prepared to tax the estate accordingly.

A deal was struck. If the piece was donated to a museum, the estate tax on it would be dropped. Both the Met and MoMA badly wanted it, and Sonnabend’s heirs made conditions for a gift.

The receiving institution would be required to mount an exhibition in Sonnabend’s honor and inscribe her name in the museum’s list of founding donors. In the end, Ms. Sundell and Mr. Homem deemed MoMA, which owns five Rauschenberg combines, the more appropriate setting.

Ms. Sonnabend’s name is now dutifully listed among the founders in the museum’s lobby.

Dutiful is also how the tribute exhibition feels, and cautious. MoMA is clearly concerned about perceptions of impropriety, the taint of commerce. Sonnabend Gallery is still in business; what remains of the collection (portions have already been sold) could go on the block at any time. Apparently to avoid the impression that the MoMA exhibition might serve as a sales show, the curators have surrounded “Canyon” mostly with work already in museum collections, including its own.

Such caution is wise, but in this instance it also prevents a subject from getting its full due. Sonnabend’s is an important story, not only because of the range of art she embraced, but because she lived in an era when few women were doing what she did.

MoMA presents her monumentally as a tastemaker and canon-shaper, but leaves out all the constructive matter, the human complications, a sense of misses along with hits: in short, context of a kind revealed in letters, informal photographs and contemporary documents. Such material is essential to any truly historical — which inevitably means personal — show. Sonnabend, quiet but deep and prescient, deserves that kind of accounting.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Art-Scene Glimpses, Lost Then Found

Vito Acconci, right, on Pier 18 in 1971, part of a trove of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender photos the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is donating to five art institutions.

Shunk-Kender / Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

December 18, 2013

The black-and-white images from the 1960s immediately evoke an era of experimentation and ebullience on the art scene: Andy Warhol clutching a bouquet at a gallery opening; Yayoi Kusama lying on a sculptural love seat at the height of her first American fame; naked women covered in blue paint rolling on paper to create an image for Yves Klein, while musicians play in the background.

These photographs are among the highlights in an enormous trove of more than 200,000 prints, negatives and other photographic material that the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is donating to five top art institutions. The gift, which the foundation will announce on Thursday, documents some of the art world’s most influential — and ephemeral — artistic achievements of the mid-20th century.

The gift of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Photography Collection, estimated to be worth around $25 million, is being split among the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Tate in Britain; and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

The photographs were shot by two eccentric characters, Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, largely from 1958 to 1973, and they capture an indelible era centered on the avant-garde world in New York and Paris. Art was often made communally, and spontaneously, and those the photographers caught in the act of creating it include Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Eva Hesse, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and some 400 other artists.

Slide Show | The Shunk-Kender Archive An art foundation is giving away 200,000 images from one of the great archives of photography documenting 20th-century artists.

The German-born Shunk (1924-2006) and the Hungarian-born Kender (1937-2009) were hired as a team by artists and dealers to record events from routine gallery openings to major conceptual happenings. They shot on the fly and frequently at the same time, never identifying photos as by one or the other.

The collection’s spirit — recording art making that looked a lot like play — is epitomized by Shunk-Kender’s 1961 image of a gun-toting and paint-splattered Niki de Saint Phalle taking aim for one of her “rifle-shot” works, in which fractured bags of paint created the image.

Roxana Marcoci, senior curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called the Shunk-Kender images “an extraordinary, absolutely amazing archive.” MoMA has already received 638 vintage prints; among the most valuable of those is a near-complete set of images from a 1971 performance project on Pier 18. Among the works: the artist Vito Acconci, blindfolded, being led to the edge of the pier, and William Wegman’s contribution, a bowling ball rolling toward pins.

The prints fill an important gap in the Modern’s collection, Ms. Marcoci said, “the history of how photography documented performance art from the 1950s to the 1970s.”

They collaborated with Yves Klein on “Leap Into the Void” (1960), a photomontage of him doing a swan dive.

When the two photographers parted ways, in 1973, Kender gave Shunk control of the material they worked on together, and Shunk continued photographing for another 30 years; some of his solo work is also included in the gift.

For years, the entire archive was moldering in Shunk’s hoarder-style West Village apartment in the Westbeth artists’ housing complex, directly across the street from the Lichtenstein Foundation. Toward the end of Shunk’s life, foundation staff members were aware that he was a neighbor, but they had no idea of the extent of his holdings.

When Shunk died, in 2006, the photographs were carted off by the New York public administrator, and the estate was appraised. Dorothy Lichtenstein, widow of Roy and the foundation’s president, and Jack Cowart, its executive director, discovered its existence from the appraiser, with whom they had worked before. They stepped in and made a bid at the public auction, thinking they would be outbid by a museum.

“We hoped to be Plan B,” Mr. Cowart said, adding that it was important that the archive not be dispersed. Once acquired (the foundation made later, much smaller purchases of Shunk-Kender images from other sources), it became a consuming project to organize and whip the material into shape. The foundation also created a free online archive.

“This mother lode of art-historical data needed to be made available to everyone,” Mr. Cowart said. The Lichtenstein Foundation has divided the collection based on institutional strengths and curator requests, and in an unusual move, the five institutions will allow one another unfettered access to all parts of the gift. Mr. Cowart described the somewhat “subversive” sharing arrangement as “membership in a club.”

Glenn Phillips, acting head of the department of architecture and contemporary art at the Getty Research Institute, said, “This archival sharing is not so common, but the Shunk archive is the perfect candidate to try something like that.” The Getty is receiving the bulk of the gift, some 183,000 items, as well as management of the copyright on all the images, because of its ability to care for huge amounts of archival material.

The National Gallery of Art will receive around 2,300 images documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their epic installation works. They are the most heavily represented artists in the archive. (Klein is the runner-up.)

The Pompidou Center will receive 10,000 prints, and the Tate’s final number has yet to be worked out. The Lichtenstein Foundation intends to have an entire set of the most important images available in Europe split between the two museums, so that scholars and curators there will have easy access. Shunk’s disorganized archive was almost lost to history when the foundation rescued it in 2008, despite the minimal presence of Roy Lichtenstein in the reams of photographs.

The acquisition and donation were the brainchild of Mr. Cowart — and of Ms. Lichtenstein, who personally donated $2 million to acquire the works.

“Our charter purpose is to facilitate public access to the work of Roy Lichtenstein, as well as the art and artists of his time,” Mr. Cowart said “We had been musing how we would implement that last part,” he added. “All of a sudden, this dropped in our lap.”

The foundation devoted years to organizing, cataloging and digitizing the material. Mr. Phillips of the Getty said, “A huge amount of the work we usually need to do on a collection like this has already been done.”

The foundation will hold on to some 25,000 Shunk-Kender works after the distribution and said it is likely to make more gifts.

As Mr. Cowart put it, “We feel very bonded to this project.”

Correction: December 18, 2013

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the surname of the artist featured in the image. He is Vito Acconci, not Annonci.

George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal - "A Complexity That Trumps Similarities" @nytimes By ROBERTA SMITH

A Complexity That Trumps Similarities

Call and response: Martin Creed’s toilet-paper pyramid at Hauser & Wirth, above, parallels a cinder-block one at Gavin Brown.

Genevieve Hanson / Hauser & Wirth New York

By ROBERTA SMITH

December 17, 2013

Sometimes I think the British artist-musician Martin Creed makes art for dummies, not excluding myself. At the same time, his accumulations and arrangements of everyday objects and materials initially seem so rudimentary and forthright that they can also make you feel smart.

The dumb-smart continuum is very much in play in Mr. Creed’s concurrent shows at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the West Village and the uptown gallery of Hauser & Wirth. On this occasion he has made art from such mundane items as bricks, I-beams, colored yarn, rolls of toilet paper and light bulbs, rarely using more than one material or kind of object per work. Together these exhibitions provide an unusually complete picture of his subversive wit and rather restrained, almost classic sense of beauty, not least because he uses the two locations for call-and-response exchanges.

For example, the final work at Hauser & Wirth is a large pyramid of stacked rolls of white toilet paper that is surprisingly eye-popping. (It helps that the cardboard tubes read as black spots.) The first piece at Gavin Brown is its exact opposite, a pyramid made of cinder blocks. The works serve as each other’s punch lines in addition to being the largest possible pyramids that either space could accommodate. They also quietly spoof the big expensive artworks that typically fill New York’s large galleries. A similar sendup — in this case, of installation art as architectural intervention — is a large black balloon shape painted on a wall at Hauser & Wirth that at first looks startlingly like an actual hole.

Mr. Creed, who was born in 1968 and has exhibited in New York since 1997, has devised one of today’s more literal-minded hybrids of Minimalism and Conceptualism. His pieces achieve an unusual balance of materials and ideas, partly because thought is emphasized over traditional skill. Yet the complexity and artistic potential of the physical world is a constant theme.

Martin Creed His light-bulb installation at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, one of two shows in Manhattan devoted to the artist.

Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

At Hauser & Wirth, the six widely available sizes of steel I-beams, each cut to a length equal to its height, are stacked, perpendicular to a wall like a staircase, splitting the difference between sculpture and architecture while taking up almost no space. There are more stacked I-beam pieces at Brown, including one that seems to penetrate a wall, another optical illusion. Next to this work is a wall installation made from every type of white light bulb produced by one company: 49 in all, screwed into electrical sockets set flush with the wall in a grid formation. The distinctly different bulbs disrupt the repetition expected of grids while creating a unified glow.

A similar affirmation of individuality, but far more emotionally charged, unfolds in a new video that shows about a dozen people with atypical gaits crossing the street just outside Mr. Brown’s gallery, one at a time. Some are clearly managing without their usual aids, be it a cane, crutch or wheelchair. But one way or another, they all make it across — moving, it seems, in rhythm to the sounds of a loud, cheerful rock song written and performed by Mr. Creed. In addition to uniqueness, fortitude is succinctly demonstrated in addition to uniqueness.

Human individuality and the challenge of capturing it may be an increasing focus for Mr. Creed, who is pursuing traditional mediums with a new zeal, as evidenced by a series of drawn and painted portraits in which conventional aesthetic decision-making has been deliberately thwarted.

These works invariably look a little odd, haphazardly expressionistic or even childish. Mr. Creed clearly made some of them with his eyes closed, including two pencil drawings that resemble skewed wire portraits by Alexander Calder. Others suggest that he was working from memory, without the model. A particularly messy one placed high on the wall, “Jumping up Portrait of Luciana,” leaves little doubt that each stroke was applied by the artist in midair.

Perhaps to prove that he has the requisite artistic skills after all, Mr. Creed has included a small, dark, relatively descriptive self-portrait. In its way, this drawing may spoof the idea of the artist as expressionist madman, or everything Mr. Creed is not.

Martin Creed’s work is on view through Saturday at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village; 212- 627-5258, gavinbrown.biz/home.html; and at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, Manhattan; 212-794-4970, hauserwirth.com.

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George Lindemann Journal - "Mawkish Memoir, Tedious Staging" @wsj - By Heidi Waleson

 

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic'

Park Avenue Armory

Dec. 17-21

New York

A successful memoir depends on the synergy of compelling raw material and the artistry of the teller, but Robert Wilson's "The Life and Death of Marina Abramović," a traveling production that opened last week at the Park Avenue Armory, brings out the worst aspects of both. The combination of Ms. Abramović, a performance artist known for long duration pieces (in "The Artist Is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, she sat motionless for hours), and Mr. Wilson, a pioneer of cryptic, image-based, slow-motion theater (" Einstein on the Beach" lasts 41/2 hours), is weird and finally tedious. The content is repellent, and the artistry doesn't amaze.

Marina Abramović Lucie Jansch

The first part of the piece plumbs Ms. Abramović's terrible childhood—battling parents, abusive mother—in a tone that is alternately deadpan, gleeful and sentimental. The second part, which has even less bite, is about the joys and (mostly) trials of her main romantic relationship. The actor Willem Dafoe, ensconced among file boxes at the side of the stage, is the storyteller, while Mr. Wilson's actor/dancers create processions and tableaux that are representative or not: Marina gets stuck in the washing machine, Marina's mother throws a crystal ashtray at her head, Marina spends a year in the hospital, Marina's parents fight, Marina plays Russian roulette. Everyone wears white clown makeup. The narration speeds along in short sentences, sometimes repeating or going in reverse: "1973: Burning her hair." "2009: Her heart is broken. Psychoanalysis." For most of the first section, Ms. Abramović plays her mother, an ominous, black-gowned figure with a Joan Crawford grin and a penetrating shriek; later, she plays herself.

The music is so amplified and mixed that although there are four live players in the pit, the instrumentals all feel electronic. Three musical genres overlap. The compositions of William Basinski, which repeat brief melodic figures in endless loops (like Philip Glass, another Wilson collaborator, but without the rhythmic drive), segue into the ululations of Svetlana Spajić and her four-voice ensemble. Their Serbian folk-inflected, straight-tone numbers, no doubt intended to evoke the heritage of Ms. Abramović, who was born in Belgrade, have more grit. Then there is Antony, a transgender singer and composer, who also wears a long black gown and sings croony, moony songs with few notes and little textual or textural variety.

Occasionally, the elements come together with a trancelike intensity. "The Story of the Shoe Polish," for example, in which Marina paints her room with shoe polish, which, because it looks and smells like excrement, keeps her mother out, is told in layers—with Mr. Dafoe minutely describing actions like sitting, drinking and urinating; Antony hissing the ballad "I am seething"; and eight Marina avatars dragging lines of miniature beds, like pull toys, onto the stage. The scene concludes with shrieks from Marina's mother, which make all the Marinas run and hide. Perhaps it is making a point about Ms. Abramović's artistic obsession with the body and minutiae as a psychological way to control her environment under abusive circumstances. Or perhaps not.

But the vignettes and the chatter continue endlessly, for two hours and 40 minutes, and the viewer's sense of detachment from the material grows. Finally, the images stop being curious and are just peculiar. Why, for example, is Antony holding a lobster on a leash? Why is there a man carrying an enormous snake? We've seen these kinds of Wilsonian pictures before. They're not magical, and the alternation of morbid glee and soupy sentiment undermines any connection we might feel with Marina. In the end, it left me stupefied and convinced that these artists were a lot less interesting than they think they are.

***

The Salzburg Marionette Theatre's production of Wagner's "Ring," presented at the Metropolitan Museum last weekend, is clever, but it suffers from the fact that without the music, the cycle is just a goofy story. The two-hour distillation of the four operas hits the major plot points but doesn't tell us why we should care. It does use the music—the renowned Georg Solti Decca recording (1958-1964)—but sparingly, with brief snippets of vocal parts and slightly longer stretches of instrumental material.

Two actor-narrators, Tim Oberliessen and Yoann Moess, tell the story, voice the characters, and even venture onto the stage to play the giants Fafner and Fasolt, as well as Gunther, Gutrune and Hunding. They keep it light, stress the absurdities of the libretto, and even add a little tongue-in-cheek political commentary and feminist criticism. (Of Alberich's encounter with the Rhinemaidens, Ms. Moess remarked: "Small men with big egos have caused a lot of trouble in the world.") The production design gives the nod to contemporary European style, though not at its most extreme. The period is the 1950s, with a Cadillac for the gods, a motorcycle for Siegmund, and a trailer home for Mime. Frei and Brünnhilde are done up like Barbie dolls with big chests and skinny legs, the Rhinemaidens are a synchronized swim team, and the Valkyries are Rockettes.

The deftly operated puppets have a lot of personality, and their interactions with the actors, who loom over them, are a nice touch. The actors become actual giants in this context, and when Mr. Oberliessen, as Siegfried disguised as Gunther, wrestled with Brünnhilde for the Ring, it was strangely lifelike and shocking to see this struggle between a large man and tiny woman. Magic effects, like the green blob of a dragon and the Alberich's transformation into a snake that looked like HVAC tubing, are also much easier to concoct in a marionette theater.

But the breakneck pace of the storytelling left little room for musical expansion. There was none, for example, in Brünnhilde's annunciation of Siegmund's death, one of the most harrowing moments in the cycle. Happily, for the two act finales, we got the musical conclusions of "Die Walküre" and "Götterdammerung," and could leave the theater remembering why we sit through the whole 16 hours.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal - "The End, if It’s Up to You" @nytimes by CHARLES ISHERWOOD

That familiar fantasy of spying on one’s own funeral has come spectacularly true for at least one of us mortals, the performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose work dates back to the 1970s and who has become a slavishly adored fixture on the art-celebrity circuit over the past decade. In “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic,” a new music-theater piece being presented through Saturday in the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, Ms. Abramovic is lying plushly in state on a giant stage draped in black and lit by glowing white neon bars.

 As befits an art-world star, the drama of Ms. Abramovic’s pseudo-sendoff has been entrusted to another aesthetic luminary, the avant-garde theater and opera director Robert Wilson. The inception for the project came when Ms. Abramovic called Mr. Wilson and asked if he’d be interested in staging her funeral — death being a primary preoccupation of this self-punishing artist; he agreed, as long as he got to stage the life, too. Also providing eulogistical and biographical interpretation are well-known figures from other artistic realms: the composer and singer Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), dressed in space-age black velvet and appearing as a sort of avatar of Ms. Abramovic, and the actor Willem Dafoe, looking like a skeleton raised from the dead himself in his white makeup under a flaming pouf of red hair.

If you’ve ever fallen into a daydream of contemplating your own interment and selecting the guest list, you are unlikely to come away from “Life and Death” with any practical tips, unless your digital address book is likewise stuffed to the gills with the names of artistic luminaries. Nor, I’m afraid, will general theater audiences attracted by the savory soup of talent involved find much to satisfy them here. This visually opulent but dramatically opaque consideration of the life and career of Ms. Abramovic will probably give pleasure verging on the orgiastic only to fervent admirers of Ms. Abramovic and Mr. Wilson. Both artists are known for creating work that tests audiences’ (and artists’) powers of endurance, and while “Life and Death” runs under three hours with intermission — a mere snap of the fingers in the timescape of their most monumental pieces — its fragmentary structure and largely static stage pictures often seem to stretch the passing minutes out indefinitely.

The artist is present onstage, to borrow the title from the recent retrospective of Ms. Abramovic’s work at the Museum of Modern Art. (It was the title of her popular stare-a-thon throughout the run of that show, too, as well as an HBO documentary.) Ms. Abramovic appears in “Life and Death” in several guises. The show opens with one of its most striking images: Three almost identical-looking female figures, their faces painted vampire white (a longstanding Wilson motif) are found lying motionless on black coffinlike structures as the audience enters. Black dogs, silhouetted against a brightly glowing backdrop (another classic Wilson touch), romp across the stage, sniffing and chewing at an elegantly arranged pile of bones, each spotlit in red light. One of the figures is Ms. Abramovic, who has written that she does indeed wish, when she’s actually dead, to have three coffins involved in her burial, presumably for purposes of sowing confusion and mystery: No one will truly know what happens to the body that she employed as her primary medium.

Ms. Abramovic makes her first appearance in the disjointed biographical drama that follows portraying her own mother, who looms large as a baleful influence in her life. (At times, the show threatens to devolve into a fabulously highbrow version of “Mommie Dearest.”) Most of the narration is provided by Mr. Dafoe, giving motor-mouth commentary on the action (which is glacially paced, as is Mr. Wilson’s way) from a platform in front of the main stage, surrounded by piles of newspapers.

The macabre Wilson maquillage turns Mr. Dafoe into a ringer for the Joker character from the Batman franchise, and he brings a dark, mordant humor (and several accents) to his delivery of the text, which ranges from random ticker-tape bullet points from Ms. Abramovic’s life (’68 — “discovering Zen Buddhism,” ’73 — “burning her hair, cutting a star on her stomach with a razor blade”) to more elaborately related stories of her traumatic home life growing up in Yugoslavia.

The grimmer passages of her youth were clearly formative influences. At one point, Mr. Dafoe describes a fight Marina got into with her suffocating mother, which ended with her mother saying that since she’d given Marina life, she had a right to take it. With that she flung a heavy ashtray at her head; Marina contemplated letting it hit her but ducked at the last minute.

The art she went on to create would flirt with the self-destructive impulse that was awakened by this and other incidents. In some sense, Ms. Abramovic’s hated mother embodied the idea of death for her, and she appears here as a sinuously menacing figure, stalking across the stage, tapping a finger on her arm indifferently, as tales of Marina’s miserable childhood are depicted.

The impulse to transform her body physically through self-mutilation was born, it is humorously implied, by Marina’s youthful desire to break her own nose (and have it redesigned by a surgeon to resemble Brigitte Bardot’s). One of the songs written and sung by Antony underscores the idea of creating art from abuse: “I will make a necklace from the stones you throw,” he croons in his ethereal sob of a voice. (Other lyrics hew more to vague New Age imagery: “I am a volcano of snow.”) Ms. Abramovic does a little singing herself, in a slightly croaky, accented voice that might charitably be compared to Marlene Dietrich’s.

The stories of Ms. Abramovic’s rough upbringing enliven the proceedings with their bleak humor, but much of the rest of the text is more impenetrable. There isn’t much cogent or sustained reflection about her career or the themes that run through her work. Instead, Mr. Dafoe gives a plodding description of some of the mundane actions Ms. Abramovic performed during her piece “The House With the Ocean View” (2002), in which she spent 12 days living on platforms in the Sean Kelly gallery, her only sustenance water, her every action on view to the public (during gallery hours, at least).

In the second act, Mr. Dafoe and Ms. Abramovic, dressed in military garb — Ms. Abramovic’s parents were celebrated for heroism in the fight against the Germans during World War II — sit on the stage and trade chatter about her difficulties with romance. Mr. Dafoe’s running commentary is often hilariously funny, undercutting Ms. Abramovic’s lugubrious self-seriousness.

That archness also swamps the show during some other passages, as when she provides a series of recipes for “spirit cooking,” or when the cast barks out through megaphones a series of prescriptions for artists to live by. (“An artist must be aware of his own mortality.”) Whether this was intended to be satirical, I couldn’t quite tell, but then much of what takes place in “Life and Death” defies easy exegesis, or even simple comprehension.

The rigorous, elemental aesthetic that has defined Ms. Abramovic’s own works here has been amplified by the manifold contributions of her collaborators, resulting in a show whose lavish effects tend to keep the woman at its center at a distance, atop a glossy pedestal instead of uncomfortably in our faces, as she is in her solo performances. “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic” feels more like the gilding of an icon rather than the illumination of an artist’s experience.

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic       

Conceived, directed and designed by Robert Wilson; co-creator, Marina Abramovic; performed by Ms. Abramovic, Willem Dafoe and Antony; musical director, composer and lyricist, Antony; composer, William Basinski; composer and lyricist, Svetlana Spajic; costumes by Jacques Reynaud; co-director, Ann-Christin Rommen; dramaturge, Wolfgang Wiens; lighting by A. J. Weissbard; sound by Nick Sagar; makeup design by Joey Cheng; video by Tomasz Jeziorski; music supervisor and music mix, Dan Bora. Presented by Park Avenue Armory, Alex Poots, artistic director. At the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall, 643 Park Avenue, at 67th Street; 212-933-5812

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George Lindemann Journal - "Art Collectors Show Their Chinese Prizes" @nytimes By BARBARA POLLACK

Mera and Don Rubell at their museum in Miami. Behind them is “Liberation No. 1,” by Liu Wei, part of a new exhibition, “28 Chinese,” that shows the fruits of their art-buying trips to China.

When the prodigious Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell first visited China, in 2001, they found the artists they met fascinating, but they were frankly unimpressed by the art itself. “It was our most intense trip with the least amount of art,” Mr. Rubell said. “Many of the artists seemed to be making work for export.”

Seven years later, the pair returned to a new landscape: a vibrant art world filled with men and women making work that was relevant to social issues in China today and mostly free of the clichés that had characterized contemporary Chinese art in the past. What they saw inspired the Rubells to spend the next five years seeking out artists and gallerists in Beijing, Shanghai and far-flung Chinese cities. And during this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, the Rubells, who are best known for supporting the works of young American artists, unveiled “28 Chinese,” a new exhibition at their museum in Miami that displays for the first time their acquisitions from six trips to China; it runs through Aug. 1.

Ms. Rubell, 70, equates finding artists like He Xiangyu, who paints with boiled-down Coca-Cola, and Chen Wei, who photographs surrealistic scenes in his studio, to first encountering the Aaron Curry and Thomas Houseago, California artists who are now hot. Mr. Rubell, 73, a retired gynecologist who now devotes most of his time to his boutique hotel business, said that after visiting Mr. He’s and Mr. Chen’s studios and those of dozens of other artists, “we realized we were seeing something different that blew us away.”

The exhibition at the 45,000-square-foot Rubell Family Collection and Contemporary Arts Foundation, in the Wynwood Art District of Miami, features the work of 28 Chinese artists, each given a separate gallery. There is “Ton of Tea,” by Ai Weiwei, a huge cube of expensive Pu’er tea that resembles a Chinese Donald Judd, and “Diary, by Zhang Huan, a canvas based on a Cultural Revolution-era photo of a man in a Mao suit holding a book.

But, for the most part, the work departs from “made in China” iconography, especially the tapestries of the Shanghai artist Xu Zhen, next year’s commissioned artist for the spring Armory Show in New York, or the geometric abstractions of Liu Wei, who had a recent exhibition at his New York gallery, Lehmann Maupin.

“The Rubell collection is not an illustrated history of the avant-garde, on the one hand, nor a speculative portfolio, on the other,” said Richard Vine, the author of the book “New China New Art” (Prestel, 2011). “It seems like a personal response, much more than I expected.” He added: “I suspect the lesser-known people they’ve plucked from obscurity will benefit. But I don’t think they are operating like some other collectors, who bought household names, promoted them and then sold them for a profit.”

The Rubells began collecting in the 1960s, as the story, now famous, goes, on a budget of $25 per week — “25 percent of our income,” Ms. Rubell said during a recent trip to Manhattan for contemporary auction week. Their finds have grown into a collection of more than 5,000 works. Studio visits are the heart of the Rubells’ mode of discovering new talent; they have visited at least 100 artists in China over the last few years. Among the first was Mr. Ai, in 2001, before he was the dissident artist he would become.

“He was a bit insecure about whether he would be accepted in the West, but was totally the ringleader for all the younger artists at that time,” Mr. Rubell recalled.

Rather than buy from the artists, as many collectors did in the 1990s, the Rubells purchased through galleries, particularly Long March Space, Shanghart, Urs Meile and Pearl Lam Gallery, thereby helping China’s fledgling gallery scene develop. They also steered clear of auctions, where prices can be highly inflated, and fakes abound.

“I would say the single most shocking change in the Chinese art world is that the gallery system is now in effect,” said Mr. Rubell, who argues that the new system has helped to legitimize contemporary Chinese art.

The Rubells could be brusque when the art did not appeal to them. “When they didn’t like the work, they would make excuses for running out — but when they liked the artist, they would sit down and have long discussions,” said Ms. Lam, who advised them. One of the artists she steered them to was Zhu Jinshi, the oldest of the show’s artists but still undiscovered when the Rubells met him; his signature style is to ladle paint on calligraphic compositions.

“It was amazing,” Ms. Rubell recalled. “We walked into his studio, and there was 40 years of history in there. We asked if there was more to see, and they took us into three more studios filled with paintings.”

The couple’s son, Jason Rubell, 44, a co-owner of the family business, Rubell Hotels, accompanied his parents on several trips and collaborated on the purchases. “People tend to visualize Chinese art as Warhol-esque, brightly colored figurative stuff, but we found work that is quite conceptual,” he said. “The politics that has been framing the Chinese art scene is there, but in a sophisticated way that is a little more subversive.”

Certain artists in the collection, like Li Songsong, who is represented by Pace, and Zhang Enli, represented by Hauser & Wirth, have sold for more than $700,000 at auction in China. The Rubells, who drive hard bargains with dealers by buying six or eight pieces by an artist at a time, say they rarely spend over six figures for any Chinese work. And while their endorsement is expected to raise prices in this roiling market, they say they are not aiming to sell the work and be beneficiaries of those increases.

“In 50 years of collecting, we’ve put together over 5,000 pieces and we’ve sold less than 20,” Don Rubell said.

Reaching a consensus was sometimes a struggle for the three Rubells. “Abstraction was a little difficult at the beginning,” Ms. Rubell said, yet they finally all agreed that geometric abstraction was an important trend. The “28 Chinese” show at the museum includes eight abstract painters’ work, ranging from the calligraphic brush paintings of Lan Zhenghui to the optical illusions of Wang Guangle. Several young artists whom the Rubells admired were already out of their price range, like Sun Xun, who is featured in the “Ink Art” exhibition, which opens Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“It’s tempting to look at Chinese art as these kids who started out, and now they are living in mansions,” the elder Mr. Rubell said. “But the shocking thing is the way they’ve become sentinels for Chinese culture.”

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George Lindemann Journal - "Pérez Art Museum Miami: Where the Art Will (Hopefully) Come Later" @wsj by Peter Plagens

Miami

Build it, and they will give. Or promise to give. Or lend for the long term. Or something. Those seem to be the operating hopes at the just-opened Pérez Art Museum Miami, ensconced in a building, designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, that gracefully takes advantage of the view and the climate of Biscayne Bay.

The situation is odd, to say the least. PAMM—a museum of modern and contemporary art in the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the country, with five million inhabitants—makes its debut with a paltry collection: only about 1,800 works of art, almost 300 of those just recently bestowed on it from a single private collection. There's scarcely a showstopper in the trove. By comparison, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (only the fifth-largest city in Texas) has about 2,600 objects, with some instructively important works by the likes of Francis Bacon, Vija Celmins and Martin Puryear among them. Or consider the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which has more than 10,000 works, including just about the snappiest gathering of recent sculpture anywhere.

It's not as though there's no art in Miami, especially in early December when Art Basel Miami—a child of the premier European art fair that has become a bigger deal than its parent—is in town. In terms of private collections of contemporary art open to the public (sometimes called "boutique museums"), Miami leads the nation, with four of the very best: the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space; the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse; the Rubell Family Collection / Contemporary Art Foundation; and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, which specializes in Latin American art.

Which is where the problem lies. Several movers and shakers in the Miami art world were against the new museum, or at least against building a $131-million edifice for what originally had been titled simply the Miami Art Museum—which had begun collecting only in the late 1990s—before the institution had enough art to fill its space decently. Some even thought that having the city's publicly viewable modern and contemporary art lodged mostly in the extant private museums and university art galleries made Miami's scene desirably unique.

But supporters of a big new museum prevailed. The city agreed to give the museum a prime plot of land right on the water, not far from the arena in which Miami's championship basketball team plays, and right in between an under-construction science museum and a new waterfront park. In 2004, Miami-Dade County passed a $100 million bond issue to finance the museum, and the deal was done. Sort of.

In late 2011, the project ran short of money. Up stepped Jorge M. Pérez, the CEO of the Related Group, a giant real-estate development firm, with a proffered gift of art and cash that's posted officially on the museum's donors wall as $40 million, with the value of the Latin American art he passionately collects accounting for somewhat more than half of that. In return, Mr. Pérez got his name not just on a few galleries, or a wing, but on the entire museum.

In the blowback over what many saw as an expedient personal naming of a museum financed largely with taxpayer money and sitting on public land, a handful of board members resigned, promised gifts were pulled back and—most important—relations between PAMM and the city's biggest collectors were strained if not actually sundered. The problem, bluntly put, is that those from whom the museum might get desperately needed large donations of museum-quality art—especially those whose collections are already open to the public—are not likely to give to an institution after somebody else's name has been freshly affixed to the facade.

You don't open a museum with the art you wish you had; you open it with the art you do have. And, of course, whatever art you can borrow and exhibitions you can import. In this predicament, PAMM (primarily its director, Thom Collins, and chief curator, Tobias Ostrander) have done a pretty good—and fairly creative—job of stretching the museum's art on hand so that it seems, on first glance, to fill 200,000 square feet of "programmable space" (not all of it galleries).

First, they came up with a bilingually accessible theme for the first two cycles of showing the collection: "Americana." The rolling shows, organized into such College Art Association panel-discussion topics as "Desiring Landscape," "Sources of the Self" and "Formalizing Craft," constitute a kind of art-appreciation course attempting to gainsay the conventional wisdom that modern art is basically a Paris-to-New-York enterprise. The exhibition includes examples, from 1938 on, of trenchant art from Latin America. While the old notion of Northern hegemony has been nominally discredited in international biennials and in the programs of such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (it still holds true, however, at Christie's auctions), and while recent Northern and Southern art is gradually approaching parity, it's difficult to overthrow as a whole. No matter how influential he was in South American modernism, the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) cannot be transformed into a Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian.

Still, the mix-and-match of, for example, the Brazilian Jac Leirner's "Utilidades" (1989), a frieze of consumer logos next to an Andy Warhol "Brillo Box" (1964) is catchy, and quite a few Latin American works, such as Alexander Apóstol's 2005 photographic series on Venezuela's "Skeleton Coast" (under-construction hotels abandoned when a tourism boom went bust) and the Cuban-American artist José Bedia's graphically robust painting of a human torso, "Mama quiere menga, menga de su nkombo" ("Mama Wants Blood, Blood of His Bull," 1988), are right up there with what you'd see at the Whitney in New York or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke's overhead lobby installation of large, colorful model ships, "For Those in Peril on the Sea" (2011), is an exception to the lack of showstoppers. And though not part of "Americana," a small exhibition of the underknown Cuban painter Amelia Peláez (1896-1968), a great colorist, is a jewel.

The second space-filling device is a retrospective—organized with the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo—of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist-activist. And that's the point: He's a headliner and he requires oodles of cubic feet in two enormous galleries. The trouble is that Mr. Ai doesn't visually come across well in quantity. He's an idea guy. His most physically daunting piece, the 12-part bronze sculpture "Zodiac Heads" (2010), has been unfortunately located outside the museum, where its impact is minimized. The result is that the museum's biggest gallery feels more like a dining hall being set up for an official luncheon.

PAMM is a brand-new, out-of-the-box major museum in a major city, and it clearly cannot, and should not, limp along on the gifts of merely passable art that come trickling in and on the curators continually having to shuffle the holdings to make it appear as if the museum's collection is more formidable than it is. One the one hand, it's difficult—not to mention painful—to foresee Miami's most prominent collectors in effect boycotting PAMM and letting it wither on the vine or turn into one of those places that survives on shows of "Star Wars" props (yes, there is such a museum exhibition, and it's still touring). On the other hand, the prospect of the museum unnaming itself (although football stadiums rename themselves as frequently as fugitives from the FBI do) to something more civically neutral in order to mollify the objectors looks to be practically nil. Something has to give among all the powers-that-be. Miami is too young and energetic a city with too vigorous an art scene for the museum not to succeed.

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

George Lindemann Journal

It’s Post Time: At the Big A, Big Art

Street Artists Paint ‘The Aqueduct Murals’ at the Track

Dec. 9, 2013 5:40 p.m. ET

No American museum has ever been pressed to bail out its bankrupt hometown. DIA

Since last spring, when Detroit's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, said that he might have to sell art from the city-owned collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts to help pay off the city's $18 billion in debt, the museum has been operating in a state of unreality. Less than a year after voters in three nearby counties approved a property tax to fund the DIA for 10 years, the museum's survival was again endangered. And last week, on the day that Judge Steven W. Rhodes of U.S. Bankruptcy Court approved the city's Chapter 9 filing and allowed Mr. Orr to proceed with his restructuring plan, creditors balked at the less-than-a-billion-dollar estimate of the value of the art provided by Christie's, even though that figure exceeds Mr. Orr's goal of getting $500 million from the DIA.

The DIA's predicament is unprecedented. No American museum has ever been pressed to bail out its bankrupt hometown. Any sale would violate two cardinal principles of museum ethics: the doctrine that museums hold art in trust for future generations and that, therefore, artworks may be sold only to purchase more art.

Nor has any museum been at the center of the clash between competing definitions of the public good, forced to defend itself from critics who sketch the to-sell-or-not-to-sell quandary in moral terms. These people argue that art cannot be spared while retired police officers and bus drivers are forced to lose part of their pensions—even though the proceeds from art sales would be shared with lawyers, consultants and other creditors and amount to pennies per person.

Little wonder, then, that this complex situation has elicited numerous opinions that are so disconnected from reality that they amount to magical thinking.

Last month, for example, at a panel discussion in New York on the DIA's plight hosted by the International Foundation for Art Research, Richard Feigen, a well-known New York art dealer, suggested that no one would be so unprincipled as to buy art from the museum. The audience applauded, until David Nash, another well-known New York dealer, broke the spell. Plenty of people in Russia, the Middle East and China would be interested in buying the DIA's masterpieces, he rightly said.

At the same event, the DIA's director, Graham W.J. Beal, said he was "optimistic" that the museum would escape unscathed, citing the 22-page opinion issued by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette in June. It declared that "no piece in the collection may be sold, conveyed or transferred to satisfy City debts or obligations" because the art is held in public trust. Yet Mr. Schuette's opinion is far from impregnable: It may not withstand the near-certain court challenge from creditors.

For their part, Detroit's creditors—perhaps eyeing last month's sale of Francis Bacon's 1969 triptych of Lucien Freud for $142.4 million—are unrealistically expecting billions of dollars from the DIA. Yet the DIA owns no contemporary artworks of similar caliber; its most important objects are Impressionist and Old Master works, such as Rembrandt's "Visitation" (1640), markets where demand is lower, buyers fewer and prices generally not as high.

These and other delusions are influencing decision-making, and that is a dangerous game. Before any decisions are reached, these half-truths and untruths must be shown for what they are and discarded:

The DIA's art must be treated like all other city assets. This notion presupposes similar outcomes in each case. But the DIA is the only one of the three main assets in Mr. Orr's sights that would be irrevocably damaged. One other, Belle Isle, which houses the aquarium and yacht club, has been leased by the state and taken off the table. The second, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, might be privatized, then even improved. If art from the DIA is dispersed, the museum would be destroyed—if not immediately, when the museum loses the $23 million provided by the millage tax (two of the three counties have said they will cease payments if the museum's art is sold and an official of the third has said the same privately), then eventually, as it becomes less attractive to visitors and donors alike.

The DIA could easily part with some of its 66,000 artworks. Mr. Orr charged Christie's with evaluating only the 2,871 works purchased with city funds, to avoid violation of donor restrictions. Of those, fewer than 450 have a fair market value of $50,000 or more, and 319 of these works are on view. Some 75% of the total value lies in just 11 works, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Wedding Dance" (c. 1566), Vincent van Gogh's "Self-Portrait" (1887), Henri Matisse's "Window" (1916), Giovanni Bellini's "Madonna and Child" (1509) and a drawing by Michelangelo.

Other U.S. museums will buy the DIA's art, keeping it on public view. Nothing could be further from the truth. American museums, by and large, do not have the acquisition funds they would need for, say, the Bruegel. Even if they did, they wouldn't buy because of ethical reasons. Walter A. Liedtke, curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recently said that his curatorial staff would quit if the Met bid on anything from the DIA, a prospect also probable at other museums.

Foreign museums will buy these masterpieces, keeping them in the public domain. This is unlikely. With the exception of some in the Middle East, most museums are stretched for funds, too, as state funding has shrunk. Rather, the DIA's art would probably go to private collectors overseas and out of public view. Case in point: van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet," which sold in 1990 for a then-record $82.5 million to a Japanese businessman, hasn't been exhibited publicly since.

Philanthropists will come to the DIA's rescue. In this scenario, wealthy Michiganders would buy the DIA's treasures and redonate them. But in the past several years, the DIA raised more than $350 million from this donor pool to modernize its building and increase its endowment. The millage was designed to give the DIA time to raise an added $300 million over 10 years for its endowment. Would these same individuals and foundations be able to donate an additional, say, $500 million to repurchase what the museum already owns to pay Detroit's bills? Doubtful.

The art doesn't have to be sold; it can be monetized. Yes, money can be gleaned from the collection without selling it. But museum ethics block the easiest method of doing so, using it as loan collateral, and ethical standards can't simply be abandoned at the door of bankruptcy court. More important, where would Detroit get the money to repay the loans? This proposal imperils the DIA's collection in a deal over which it has no control of the outcome—and that's a bad deal.

Christie's has advanced some other ideas for monetizing the collection, but each has limited potential. In one, the DIA would tour part of its collection, as the Barnes Foundation did in 1993-95, earning about $17 million. But the two collections are not comparable; a better guide would be "Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: the Treasures of Kenwood House, London," which recently visited four U.S. museums and took in a reported $375,000. The DIA has twice toured portions of its collection recently, raising $700,000.

Another idea would have the DIA find a cash-rich partner museum, an idea fueled by the Louvre's pact with Abu Dhabi for $1.3 billion over several years. Mr. Beal has traveled to the Middle East, but found no takers. More reasonable partner expectations might be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; it provides two exhibitions per year to Nagoya, Japan, for about $2 million a year, less expenses, a meager amount.

A third idea would create a "masterpiece trust" into which the DIA would transfer ownership of city-owned works. Other museums, here or abroad, would then pay membership fees to the city entitling them to borrow works from the trust, like a time-share. But this would remove DIA's treasures from the view of the Michigan public whose tax dollars support the museum.

How, then, can the DIA realistically meet Mr. Orr's decree that it be "part of the solution"?

The Detroit Free Press reported last week that the city's power brokers are "working furiously" to raise $500 million from foundations to barter for the DIA's independence. Though difficult—the total annual giving of 10 of the largest foundations involved barely tops $1 billion and it would be hard for them to divert so much to the DIA and meet their other obligations—this would reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, assuming it passed muster with Mr. Orr.

If that fails, there appears to be only one life-saving solution for the DIA: The state would pay Detroit and transfer ownership to Michigan. So far, Gov. Rick Snyder has declined to give the idea a hearing, and the diversion of money from state coffers to the DIA might face opposition. But Michiganders might remember that in the 1920s and '30s, the cash-hungry Soviet government sold off Russia's art treasures, dispersing them to other countries. Today, that episode is viewed as a national tragedy.

Ms. Dobrzynski writes about culture for many publications and blogs here.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

There was art, of course, at Tuesday’s member preview of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. And outside there were the sounds of construction not quite finished, of gardens still being hung and trees being planted and nearly three years of work drawing to a close.

But mostly, from the museum supporters who stood in line, snapped pictures and gaped, there was pride and a little bit of awe.

“This is overwhelming, isn’t it?” said Florence Jacobson, who spent 16 years as a docent at the building’s predecessor, the Miami Art Museum. “It’s beautiful, it’s people-friendly, it’s aesthetically so pleasing. This is special. This is going to be a centerpiece of Miami’s cultural life.”

Tuesday’s preview for members was expected to draw about 3,000 people and serve as the warm-up act to the official ribbon-cutting and grand opening to the public Wednesday morning. Though some external construction work was still underway — and the neighboring Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science will not open until 2015 — the art museum was essentially finished inside as guests arrived.

Visitors endured long waits for valet parking, battled traffic bound for the Miami Heat game down the street, took public transportation or rode bikes. Once at the museum, they waited in even more lines to enter; the bottleneck was due in part, said PAMM deputy director Leann Standish, to visitors asking employees so many questions as they checked in.

A ceremonial groundbreaking was held in December 2010, as Art Basel Miami Beach crowds filled the city.

The opening was timed to coincide with the same event this year, and many members said Tuesday’s preview was their first stop in a long night of Art Week parties.

Those seeing the Stiltsville-inspired structure for the first time seemed wowed by the wide staircase that doubles as a theater and lecture area. One woman walked up and declared: “It’s like an arena!”

Others exclaimed about the windows spread throughout the building that, unlike those of closed-off, box-like museums, provide views from almost any space inside.

The $131 million building is a public-private partnership, part of a $220 million overall project funded by private donors and $100 million in voter-approved bonds.

“It’s worth it,” said Linda Kubie, a real estate agent who moved from Palm Beach to Miami’s Brickell area three years ago with her husband.

“The city is evolving,” Kubie said. “It’s become a cultural destination.”

Kubie and her husband Jim stood on the Biscayne Bay-facing outside deck before sunset Tuesday, taking in the vista. The couple arrived even earlier than the 4 p.m. opening time, toured the building and checked out the art, which includes works by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and Cuba’s Amelia Peláez.

“It’s really a gem,” Jim Kubie said. “It’ll be a good place to spend the afternoon, read, watch the world go by. . . . This has got to be one of the best views in Miami.”

The couple didn’t seem bothered by the noise of workers behind them, or the construction equipment that still filled the grounds around the building.

“It looks like a work in progress, as things in Miami often are,” said Noelle Galperin of Coral Gables, a consultant to start-up businesses. “It doesn’t bother me that it’s not completely done. That’s the charming part of Miami.”

Davie resident Carolina Almonte, 21, was disappointed everything wasn’t yet finished, but said she, too, was proud that Miami was gaining cultural ground.

“Miami was lacking something like this,” said her boyfriend Justin Romero, 24. “I think it kind of completes Miami in a way.”

Joaquin Livinalli, a resident of Caracas who donated to the museum, took a photo of the “annual giving wall” where his and wife Alys’ names are written.

“Big things are possible,” said Livinalli, a real estate developer and art collector. “It’s worth it to dream.”

Livinalli said that as a fan of the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and especially of art, he was pleased to be involved with the final product.

“I love it,” he said.

Several members said they were excited for Miami to have a cluster of arts attractions downtown, including Museum Park and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts a couple of blocks north.

“I think it’s great for downtown Miami and the cultural corridor,” said Scott Shiller, the Arsht Center’s executive vice president, as he walked up the museums’ staircase. “Once the science museum is open, it’s just going to add to the dynamics and just the vibrancy of the neighborhood.”

Galperin, a charter member of the museum, said she was glad as a Miami-Dade taxpayer that county money had gone to the museum.