The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Christo Crocker

Tour participants displaying their tan lines at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in Sydney, as they view Robert Owens’s “Sunrise #3.”

By MARK WHITTAKER

Published: May 1, 2012

SYDNEY, Australia — The people gathering for a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia on Friday evening smiled awkwardly in the way of strangers who had to undress in front of one another. Which is what they were about to do.

Christo Crocker

Stuart Ringholt

The artist leading the tour, Stuart Ringholt, wearing scruffy black clothes and a misshapen porkpie hat, stepped forward.

“Who’s from the naturist community?” he asked.

A bunch of older, rounder men put up their hands.

“Who’s nervous?”

A dozen or so others, including this reporter, barely managed to raise their hands to half-mast. The Museum of Contemporary Art has enjoyed a surge in attendance since it reopened on March 29 after being closed for an 18-month, $56 million refurbishment, but these particular visitors would have the place all to themselves. They were here, after hours, for a tour of museum works that was itself billed as an artwork and had this as its title: “Preceded by a tour of the show by artist Stuart Ringholt, 6-8pm (the artist will be naked. Those who wish to join the tour must also be naked. Adults only).”

Mr. Ringholt, 40, is a Conceptual and performance artist who was recently named one of Australia’s 10 “artists who matter” in the Australian newspaper The Age. He has led tours of this kind in three other Australian cities in the last year, and was able to offer some insight about the experience to come.

“It’s very beautiful,” he told his audience. “We are sexualized with our clothes on — with them off, we are not.”

Not everyone, he explained, was going to be naked. “A couple of M.C.A. staff members will come with us for security reasons, but they will be clothed,” he said. But many employees, he added, “if they have to do the tour two days in a row, often take off their clothes on the second day because they feel very uncomfortable being clothed around so much flesh.” He apologized that security cameras would be recording the group, joking that “the footage will be kept for three months, for the enjoyment of the security staff.”

Mr. Ringholt then led the 32 men and 16 women into a brightly lighted conference room, where the clothes just seemed to fall away.

“Everybody seemed to concentrate very much on what they were doing,” Lance Barton, a 57-year-old Sydney office worker making his debut as a nudist, recalled later. (“I have fantasized about it, but never done it,” he added. “Only a bit of midnight streaking by myself in the parklands around where I live.”)

The first stop on the tour was a 2007 work by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, “Earth-Moon-Earth”: a player piano doing a version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, complete with glitches picked up in the course of converting the music to Morse code, bouncing the signals off the Moon, then reconverting them to musical notes. Against this ghostly backdrop, Mr. Ringholt noted that modern museums strip back architecture, floor coverings, windows and adornments for the sake of foregrounding art, and that in the same way contemporary artists have since the 1980s taken to wearing black.

“There’s this process of reduction going on,” he said. “I asked the question of why the contemporary art community stopped at wearing black. Why didn’t they reduce further and strip back the clothing from the visitor?”

The next stop was an untitled Stephen Birch work from 2005, an installation in which Spider-Man faces off with a primitive, phallic figure. Mr. Ringholt spoke about fear, and most of the visitors agreed that their anxiety had subsided. He said that in his 20s, he was profoundly affected by experiences of extreme embarrassment, a subject now at the center of much of his work. One of these involved toilet paper hanging out of his pants as he walked on the field at an Australian football game with hundreds of people looking on.

“I was wrecked — I went home and explained it to my girlfriend, and she was killing herself laughing,” he said. “I was distraught for a whole week.”

Being a dabbler in performance, Mr. Ringholt turned shame into art. He went to Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and stood in front of a marble fountain for 20 minutes with toilet paper trailing from his trousers. He walked around for a day in Basel, Switzerland, wearing a prosthetic nose with a “gob” of fake mucus hanging from it.

“I tried to understand how fear manifests in the body and how it debilitates you,” he said. Knowing these acts of abjection were performances didn’t make them easier, he added: “It was just as bad. You get a panic attack. You get cold sweats. I realized it was the same fear I got when I rang up a woman to ask her on a date.”

Eventually, he said, he learned to conquer his fear by understanding it. He called the woman and got the date, and he took his fear workshops on the road. That led to the nude museum tours.

This tour finished with a glass of sparkling wine on an open terrace overlooking the Sydney Opera House. Asked if he had any plans to take his nude museum tours overseas, to the Metropolitan in New York, perhaps, Mr. Ringholt became animated.

“Imagine walking in there with all that armor” in that museum, he said. He loves the symbolism of masks, and a whole suit of medieval armor offered wonderful new metaphors.

As for the visitors, they seemed to be divided on the question of whether art was enhanced by viewing it naked.

“Not really,” Mr. Barton said.

But another participant, Tracey, who wouldn’t give her last name because she works for “a Christian organization,” said that “there was more focus on the art.”

“You’d think you’d turn up with all these other people without clothes and you’d be checking them out,” she said, “but I wasn’t looking at anyone.”

Afterward, as the visitors walked back to the changing room, glowing from the wine, a crowd on the street outside looked up at the parade of nakedness coming down the glassed-in stairs. But nobody in the group seemed to mind.

Christie's

 

ARTIST Cézanne

TITLE 'A Card Player'

AUCTION HOUSE Christie's

ESTIMATE $15 million to $20 million

For nearly six decades this watercolor, depicting Paulin Paulet, a gardener on Cézanne’s family estate near Aix-en-Provence, France, was familiar to scholars only as a black-and-white photograph. No one knew if the actual work, a study for Cézanne’s celebrated Card Players paintings, still existed and if it did, who owned it.

But it recently resurfaced, and the Dallas collector who had it in his home is selling it on Tuesday. Cézanne’s images of workers on his farm — pipe-smoking men sitting around a table, their expressions dour, absorbed in a game of cards — are among his most recognizable work. Executed from 1890 to 1896, they were the artist’s take on genre paintings made famous by 17th-century Dutch masters. Although not as instantly recognizable as “The Scream,” the watercolor is considered an art historical landmark, but one that will most likely appeal to the connoisseur collector rather than a speculator or a trophy hunter.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: April 26, 2012

ODDS are 3-to-1 that when Edvard Munch’s “Scream” comes up for sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, it will fetch $150 million to $200 million. And there’s a 3-to-2 chance that pastel will become the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, breaking the current record of $106.5 million set two years ago at Christie’s for Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.” As for who will buy “The Scream,” bets are 5-to-2 that it will be a Russian, 3-to-1 an Asian or European and 4-to-1 an American. That’s the thinking, anyway, from Ladbrokes, the British bookmaking chain, which has been analyzing the fate of what Sotheby’s is billing as the most recognizable image in art history after the “Mona Lisa.”

Art isn’t generally Ladbrokes’s métier, but laying odds on just how much this work will get has even captured the attention of gamblers used to putting their money on horse races or boxing. Jessica Bridge, a spokeswoman for the company, said that the bookmakers “apply the same math and algorithms we do for football or hockey.”

While it is certain to be the big draw, “The Scream” is not the only highly recognizable work up for sale at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury over the next two weeks. Other highlights include a classic red abstract Rothko canvas; a Warhol image of Elvis Presley; a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar, the artist who was his lover and muse; and a watercolor of one of Cézanne’s famed Card Players.

What’s bringing these paintings, drawings and sculptures to auction now? One reason is sheer serendipity, as several estates from seasoned collectors have come up for grabs this spring. The second is more opportunistic. Owners are hoping to cash in on the penchant of new, extraordinarily wealthy collectors from Russia, Asia and the Middle East for paying record prices for whatever strikes their fancy. “There are two markets, the regular market for the average collector and the super-market for global icons” that is fueled by the new rich, said Tobias Meyer, who runs Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide. “This last group is smart and gravitates toward the very top.”

Brett Gorvy, Mr. Meyer’s counterpart at Christie’s, says these buyers’ “tastes are conservative but they want quality, technical virtuosity, beauty and color.”

Estimates are high for some of the best works this season, although Sotheby’s figure of $80 million for “The Scream” is conservative by Ladbrokes’s standards. After that are several paintings estimated to fall in the $30 million to $50 million range: a Roy Lichtenstein comic book image and a 1976 painting by Francis Bacon, as well as the red Rothko and the Warhol “Elvis.”

Back on the block are also several works, including “Circles and Angles,” a stainless-steel sculpture by David Smith that failed to sell at Christie’s when the market collapsed during the financial crisis of 2008. Now they have considerably lower estimates. If there are any striking differences between the offerings this month, it is the selection of postwar and contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Christie’s won a group of works collected by David Pincus, a clothing manufacturer from Philadelphia who died in December, and his wife, Geraldine. Their collection includes a large number of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Sotheby’s sale, on the other hand, features more classic Pop art.

Some art historians, who declined to be named for fear of offending Sotheby’s, laughed at the astronomical price predictions for “The Scream,” even the seemingly lowball house estimate, calling the work too ugly to live with, depressing or mere kitsch. Whoever buys it will have a hefty insurance bill, not to mention round-the-clock security, to worry about. But were any new museum to add “The Scream” to its collection, that institution would become an immediate destination.

The image of “The Scream” is so embedded in popular culture that it adorns products like mugs, mouse pads and inflatable dolls, even navel rings. Munch produced four versions of the composition. Three are in Norwegian museums and this one — a pastel on board from 1895 — is the only “Scream” left in private hands. It is being sold by Petter Olsen, a Norwegian businessman whose father, Thomas, was a friend and patron of the artist.

The painting’s fame is almost as much a liability for Sotheby’s as it is an asset. Versions of it have been stolen twice, first in 1994, when two thieves entered the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo and fled with an 1893 “Scream,” and then in 2004, when gunmen stole the 1910 version from the Munch Museum, also in Oslo. (In both cases the paintings were recovered.) This month Londoners had to go through metal detectors before entering the Sotheby’s gallery where it was on view. The crowds were so great that auction house officials have decided not to open the presale viewing in New York to the public, as they usually do. Instead, only Sotheby’s clients will have a chance to see the painting.

Among those who saw “The Scream” in London the betting game has already begun. As for the rest of the art for sale, just where today’s big money goes will be as much of a gamble as the fate of “The Scream.” It is the unknown, after all, that has always been the allure of auctions.

“The mystery is in the moment,” Mr. Meyer said. “Either people are in the mood to bid, or they’re not.”

via nytimes.com

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Sotheby’s

Artist Andy Warhol
Title 'Double Elvis'
Auction House Sotheby's
Estimate $30 million to $50 million

Multimedia

Interactive Feature

Slide Show

The Munch Museum/Munch-Ellingsen Group, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Sotheby’s

Artist Edvard Munch
Title 'The Scream'
Auction House Sotheby's
Estimate $80 million More Photos »

Enlarge This Image

Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Christie's

Artist Mark Rothko
Title 'Orange, Red, Yellow'
Auction House Christie's
Estimate $35 million to $45 millionMore Photos »

By SARA RUFFIN COSTELLO

Jack Shear

Ellsworth Kelly, Beijing Panels, 2003

With the negative press that the U.S. often garners abroad—whether about Wall Street corruption, intractable wars or a divisive presidential campaign—there's one category in which our standing remains untarnished: high art.

Like Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and Christo and Jeanne-Claude's wrapped buildings, contemporary American artists have a reputation for making beautiful, challenging work—and, in doing so, reflecting back who we are as a nation. Since 1986 the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE), a nonprofit now led by collector and philanthropist Jo Carole Lauder, has acted as a kind of global curator for our national psyche, placing preeminent American art in consulates and embassies around the world—and allowing luminaries like Ellsworth Kelly and Louise Bourgeois to serve as our cultural ambassadors abroad.

Photos: Americans Abroad

View Slideshow

Photo by Tony Floyd

Odili Donald Odita, Light and Vision, 2010

 

In the 1960s, the State Department inaugurated a program called Art in Embassies, primarily as a vehicle to provide temporary art for ambassadors' residences during their diplomatic tenure. In 1986, Leonore Annenberg, former chief of protocol for President Reagan and wife of former U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. Walter Annenberg, launched FAPE, along with other diplomats' wives.

By exploiting their formidable connections to the artist and patron community, these women were able to help pay for extensive redecoration projects (including the U.S. Embassy's residence in London), fund much-needed restoration, and both purchase and solicit donations for embassies from preeminent artists to build what would become an enduring, important collection. Although the seeds of the foundation's legacy were growing, the scope was still small.

In 1996 leadership passed to Jo Carole Lauder, the wife of Ronald Lauder; she steered the foundation away from simply supplying loaner art to diplomatic residences and instead toward building a permanent collection at American embassies in more than 140 countries. Lauder quickly transformed what had been an elite, rarefied program into something more accessible and democratic. "Embassies are the visible face of our country," says Yale's fast-talking dean of art, Robert Storr, who moonlights as chairman of the organization's professional fine arts committee and guides its curatorial mission. "The art installed in and around those government buildings allows foreigners to have a glimpse of our cultural production."

“The point is not to just put up feel-good art, but to pay attention to a standard of sophistication. The one thing we don't do is just decorate.”

With certain site-specific installations, the art has been created with its architectural environment in mind. At the Charles Gwathmey–designed United States Mission to the U.N. in New York City (a federal building where dignitaries meet and greet), the State Department brought the foundation into the design process early, so Gwathmey could collaborate with artists as he designed the building.

Portrait by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang

PATRON SAINT | Jo Carole Lauder, right, and Odili Donald Odita in front of ?Light and Vision,? the elevator mural he created for the United States Mission to the United Nations (USUN) building in New York City.

From the Sol LeWitt painting on the dome of the 70-foot-high rotunda to the spectacular Odili Donald Odita elevator mural, the art and architecture flow together seamlessly. Standing under the blue LeWitt dome, visitors are engaged with the art rather than just passively looking at it. "There are a lot of things in the USUN that are not standard issue," Storr explains. "The point is not to just put up feel-good art, but to pay close attention to a standard of sophistication. The one thing we don't do is just decorate."

"So many things in today's world are fleeting," adds Lauder. "Having facilitated the collaboration between our country's best architects and artists, I can see things changing in a way that's wonderfully permanent."

At the American embassy in Beijing, visitors are greeted by two 18-foot-high sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly. Three aluminum panels are mounted on the walls outside—on one side, two red and one yellow, and on the other, red, white and blue.

“Whether people understand it or not, the art's mere presence works subliminally. In that way, the program waves a less obvious cultural flag for America.”

"I am very patriotic; that's why I've done this," says the 88-year-old artist, laughing. "And because of Jo Carole!" Kelly also considered how Chinese citizens would react emotionally as they waited in line for their visas. "When people ask me what my paintings mean," he says, "I say, 'It isn't a question of what it means—ask yourself, how does it make you feel?' "

The foundation's president, Eden Rafshoon, who runs the D.C. office, underscores Kelly's point about the effects of modern art. "Whether people understand it or not, its mere presence works subliminally. If it weren't there, people would feel differently." In that way, the art in our embassies program waves a less obvious cultural flag for America: proof that freedom of expression, opportunity, and unity through diversity are values for which American artists stand.

By KELLY CROW

Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

Gilbert & George's 'Dead' (2001) is at New York's Lehmann Maupin gallery.

The London-based art duo known as Gilbert & George first rose to fame in the late 1960s by donning dapper suits and treating themselves like living sculptures. It turns out that they're also petty thieves.

About seven years ago, the pair began stealing the sandwich-board-style posters that London's newspapers often use to hail their latest headlines, typically tabloid fare like "Man Dies in Human Fireball Horror." On Thursday, the artists opened a new show of their work at New York's Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend galleries featuring headlines from all 3,712 posters they amassed. Unlike the actual newspapers, these black-and-white posters aren't for sale, but "the images and stories they conjure are amazing," said one of the artists, Gilbert Proesch.

The pair said that they would usually wait until dinnertime before canvassing the newsstands in their East London neighborhood. Then one of the artists would try to distract the shopkeeper by buying a candy bar or chewing gum while the other slipped the poster out of its wire casing. A few times they would have to wait until the owner "went to the lavatory," said George Passmore. "Then we'd tuck the poster into our coats and try to walk away, looking normal."

To transform the posters into art, the artists grouped headlines by common terms—say, murder—and arranged them into grids that sit atop eerie photographs of brick walls, tilted windows and alleyways. The artist's faces also pop up throughout the images, Big Brother-style. The portrait of society that emerges from the posters is accordingly grim. "We found very few happy terms," Mr. Proesch said. "That's the invisible part of our lives, the happy part."

"Gilbert & George: London Pictures" will be on view at the galleries through June 23.

An Extended Q&A with Gilbert & George

On Thursday, the London art duo Gilbert & George opened a new show of their work at New York's Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend galleries featuring headlines from 3,712 newspaper posters they collected in London over a six-year period.

Recently, the artists agreed to discuss the project that became "Gilbert & George: London Pictures," up at the galleries through June 23. Here's an edited excerpt.

George: Ten years ago we took our first images of some newspaper posters for a group of pictures called the Bomb pictures, which were based on bomb attacks in Mumbai and London and around the world. Those were shown at the Tate Modern. We didn't think of them as "poster" pictures, but after a while, we realized there were so many subjects we could address—hangings, hate—in a way that could feel very different from simply using a pencil or a brush. With the posters, we could also do that.

Gilbert: All these extraordinary modern subject matters, we don't have to make them up. They were all there, and they began to create in our minds an amazing, modern, Western townscape."

George: In some pockets of the world, there's no free press, and in those areas you won't see sex stories wind up as newspaper headlines. Maybe these posters are actually a celebration of the freedoms of the press in the West.

Gilbert: We worked on it for six years. Every day we had to steal roughly three posters, and finally we had 3,712.

George: We'd steal them on the way to dinner. We always walk through East and North London to go to dinner, and it's very difficult because we didn't want to get caught.

Gilbert: The shopkeepers will stop you if they can.

George: Gil can be pretty devious. He would usually go into the shop to buy some chewing gum or a Mars bar, and then I'd use that time to steal the poster. We became very professional. We were both very good. If it was a difficult shop, we'd wait and wait until the shopkeeper went to the lavatory. Then we'd tuck them into our coats and try to walk away, looking normal. When it was raining, we'd steal the posters wet.

Gilbert: Then after six years, we said, "That's it. We have enough." So we began to divide up the pile into categories based on the words in the headlines, like "murder," "sex" or "money."

George: Those were the three words that popped up most often, and you don't have to go to university to understand why. But we were still really fascinated by our collective fascination with dying and killing. It's extraordinary. We also saw very early on the two levels these posters work on: Obviously they're used to sell newspapers, but they also dwell so heavily on shame and human disaster.

Gilbert:The images and stories these words conjure are amazing: "Man Found Hanging in Graveyard," "Pal Dies in Copycat Hanging." What a story is caught up in that combination of words.

George: They're like haikus.

Gilbert:The relentless mantra of messiness. We wound up making 292 pictures using all the posters.

George: We like that we're celebrating something – the newspaper poster – that might not exist at the end of our lifetimes. People are finding different ways of selling papers now. Online. But when we first moved to London, we had trouble losing our country backgrounds. Reading the local papers was one of the first ways we became citified. The London Evening Standard for many years employed a man who drew the poster headlines on tin every day, and then a new owner came in and they started printing them with a standard typeface. But when we started stealing these posters, we could tell whenever he went on holiday, because those days were the only ones that used a standard typeface instead of his own hand-drawn versions. Just once a year he went away.

Gilbert:Besides the shopkeepers, we might have been the only people to notice that man's holiday. Most people don't notice much. In that way, life always seems invisible—unless you slap people and make them look. That's why art stops time. It makes them stop and look. That's why we want powerful imagery in our art—we want them to remember it.

George: It's a freezing moment.

Gilbert: That's what the posters want to do too, which is why arresting words like "sex" and "death" pop up so often. We found very few happy terms. That's the invisible part of our lives, the happy part. Maybe that part can also feel fake, no?

George: Just look at the countries that only produce happy art—most of those places are totalitarian, like North Korea. The art there feels artificially happy.

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Stealing Headlines for Art's Sake.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Pier Paolo Calzolari, for whom two New York galleries will be as one, in front of "Untitled."

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: April 27, 2012

The big-money contemporary art world has grown so large that it often seems to have achieved nation-state status, while the galleries it comprises operate like feuding medieval principalities, constantly jousting for turf (Chelsea real estate), prestige (A-list artists) and money (from collectors’ pockets).So when Marianne Boesky, who owns a gallery on West 24th Street, approached the Pace Gallery, her much more powerful back-door neighbors on West 25th Street, with a proposal for a kind of concordat, she admits that she didn’t do so with great affection.

Her ambivalence turned out to be justified: not long after, she said, Pace “poached” one of her most prominent artists, Yoshitomo Nara. “There are some very interesting and, I guess, difficult dynamics between us,” Ms. Boesky said.

But beginning on Saturday, the two galleries will breach the walls between them not only metaphorically, but physically as well, cutting a doorway through the abutting bricks to join their warehouselike spaces for the sake of a single artist who has not shown in the United States for more than 20 years.

For a month the two galleries will join forces to show a large selection of work by Pier Paolo Calzolari, a semi-reclusive 69-year-old Italian who is something of a revered mythical figure, even in Europe.

Among the original members of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s — literally translated as “poor art,” partly because the work sometimes employed humble, even ephemeral materials — Mr. Calzolari, who trained as a painter, distinguished himself through his deep suspicion of the avant-garde’s reflexive rejection of the past.

While his work shared many similarities with that of his fellow so-called poveristi, it veered in a much more eccentric direction, bringing in elements of Renaissance painting, of the quasi-animism of St. Francis and of the Romantic movement, in pieces that looked positively florid beside much postmodern art of the era.

He has used materials like salt, running water, open flame, moss, roses, feathers, eggs and tobacco leaves. His calling card, a kind of visual obsession, is frost, which he makes by connecting small, humming refrigeration units to some of his works with a thin copper tube, causing the art to turn bright white as it freezes on the wall.

The fascination is not with ice, he has explained, but with a kind of pure whiteness he saw as a young man in Venice, when sunlight washed over marble walls along the Riva degli Schiavoni, a color he felt it would be wrong to try to replicate in paint.

“Calzolari, it seems to me, is always searching for the absolute, expressed through natural elements, like moss and lead, or natural phenomena, like fire and ice,” said James Rondeau, chairman of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has one of the rare Calzolari works in an American public collection. “His works so often engage in a kind of alchemy, linking him to older, European traditions.”

Mr. Calzolari exhibited actively in Europe and in the United States for more than two decades, but in the late 1980s he retreated to Fossombrone, a small town in the Marche region of central Italy, and he has spent much of the last 25 years working there, mostly out of the public eye, in what he calls a process of “getting to know myself better.”

Ms. Boesky knew of his work only slightly. But a few years ago a young artist she represents, Jay Heikes, who had seen several Calzolari pieces while working as an art handler at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, sang Mr. Calzolari’s praises. And after delving into his career, Ms. Boesky set out to track him down. Instead of sending an e-mail, she wrote him an old-fashioned letter, saying that she was determined to show his work in America again.

“A month or two later,” she recalled, “I got a letter back that said, ‘Why?’ Not ‘Do you want to talk?’ or anything like that, but just ‘Why?’ ”

Eventually, like a coy lover, he invited her to Italy. But when she and an assistant arrived at his rural studio in Fossombrone after a day and half of traveling, a studio employee came to the door to say that Mr. Calzolari was ill and would not be able to keep the appointment after all. They were about to leave when Mr. Calzolari himself, looking grave beneath a thick white beard and a shock of white hair, emerged, grudgingly let them in and spent the next nine hours talking about his work.

• 1
• 2

Next Page »

 

MIAMI — After 20 years of retro-style ballparks since the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, nearly all decked out with brick facades and calculated quirks that came to seem as predictable and interchangeable as the old doughnut-shaped arenas, Major League Baseball has its first unapologetic 21st-century stadium.

 Lumbering and dizzyingly white in the Florida sun, the new Marlins Park is an elliptical concrete, steel and glass boulder looming above the low-rise houses and empty lots of the Little Havana neighborhood. With retail on the outside and a public plaza in front, it’s designed partly to gin up some street life. Economic development is supposed to follow — that was the rationale for the public financing that covered most of the $634 million project ($515 million for the park itself) and contributed to the recall of Miami-Dade County’s mayor. Cities are always building new stadiums with the justification that they’ll catalyze the local economy. They rarely do.

At the same time, the ballpark is unlikely to satisfy aficionados of the latest trends in architecture, but it is nonetheless a modern building, with genuine panache, as opposed to another pastiche. Give the team’s owner, Jeffrey Loria, credit. An art dealer, he cares more than most about aesthetics and took a gamble — part old-school civic improvement plan, part marketing strategy — that Miamians will recognize themselves in the stylishness of the place.

He has festooned concourses and stairwells with art, photographs and sculpture. Most fans will no doubt focus more on the grass field, air-conditioning and retractable roof, which slides over the entry plaza onto slender, palm-shaped pillars, illuminated by pulsing lights. Because of the oppressive heat and rain, the roof isn’t likely to be opened for more than a dozen or so games a year, but even when it is closed, there are sweeping views of the city skyline through 60-foot-tall windows.

The challenge now will be filling the park’s seats. With a capacity of 37,442, this is one of the smallest arenas in the big leagues, but Miamians have notoriously stayed away from Marlins games in droves. Mr. Loria and the city are banking, as so many other owners and cities have, that a new stadium can change a team’s and a neighborhood’s fortunes.

Can it? The Miami Marlins, until this year the Florida Marlins, have labored since their inaugural season in 1993 in a 75,000-seat suburban football arena, where the Dolphins play, which can be as much as an hour’s drive from downtown, with lousy sightlines, crippling summertime humidity and no roof. The Miami Herald’s Marlins beat reporter, Clark Spencer, told me on a recent night that he used to pass the time with colleagues in the press booth counting attendance.

“Once we counted 80-something people,” he said, “and that included some confused foreign tourists.”

Mr. Loria, who took over in 2002, argued that it was pointless to spend money on top players without a domed stadium. Detractors said he was blackmailing the city into paying for a new park, meanwhile pocketing revenue-sharing millions from other teams that were meant to go toward a beefier payroll.

But then in 2007, Miami officials consented to a new stadium on the site of the former Orange Bowl, a couple of miles from downtown. The city provided the land and $13 million. Miami-Dade County paid nearly $350 million for the bulk of construction, with the Marlins kicking in $161.2 million. The pliant architecture firm Populous, formerly HOK Sport, which designed Yankee Stadium and nearly every retro ballpark during the last two decades, was hired to do the architecture.

Orel Hershiser, the pitcher turned ESPN analyst, got in first dibs as critic on opening night when, apropos the swooping “Star Trek” curves on the outside, he said that the stadium looked “like a cruise ship had a baby with a spaceship.”

Almost endearingly, when we met, Mr. Loria countered with a few wishful comparisons to the Getty Center in Los Angeles and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. He said the inspiration for the stadium’s electric color scheme, with its fluorescent-green outfield wall, was the palette of the Spanish painter Joan Miró. Public art and native plantings are meant to lend his building’s exterior what might be called an aspirational gravitas.

Inside Mr. Loria has also installed giant reproductions of paintings by blue-chip modernists like Roy Lichtenstein on or near the main concourse, called the Promenade, amid a souk of food stalls hawking $12 mahi-mahi tacos and $14 Cuban sandwiches. Nobody seemed to take much notice of the art the other night, fans clustering instead four-deep before a bobble-head-doll display. But Mr. Loria professed not to care. The goal is a mix of visual distractions.

These include two narrow saltwater aquariums behind home plate, giving off a bright blue glow. The intended spirit is light-hearted. For the same reason that Florida’s hockey team never installed a panther cage in its rink, it’s now clear why no one had put an aquarium in a backstop before. Animal rights activists were traumatized after the team tested the glass with a pitching machine.

The game aside, the main attraction is clearly the kinetic sculpture by the Pop maestro of kitsch, Red Grooms, in left-center field: marlins spin, flamingos flap and water splashes whenever a Marlin hits a homer. Miamians have been competing to come up with a name for it (the Marlinator and the Marlinstrosity are two, so far). This over-the-top gizmo is to the Mets’ homely home-run apple what the video game Call of Duty is to a jack-in-the-box. Considering how few homers have been hit so far, the fences might need to be brought in before too long to make sure it is exercised.

Mr. Hershiser was close to the mark about the architecture. Stadiums these days emulate cruise ships. They’ve got their first-class cabins and exclusive restaurants and nightclubs. (The one at Marlins Park even has a swimming pool.)

The game is no longer necessarily the point for many people who buy a ticket. Baseball used to be a sport of reverie, with the murmur of the crowd, the chatter of announcers on transistor radios and the crack of bats. Now parks are entertainment palaces, telling us when to cheer and selling us overpriced food and merchandise. The longest line I saw on the Promenade was to get into the team’s souvenir store.

Retro stadiums catered to nostalgia for an era before steroids and artificial turf, but even the past gets old. Fans may someday come to long for the doughnut stadiums. I almost miss Shea. Whether the tropical colors and aquariums at Marlins Park will appeal to local Latino fans, on whom Miami is relying to fill most of the seats, or play to outsiders’ clichés of the city, time will tell.

Sightlines are good. Those at the top and behind the outfield fences feel close to the action, and field-level seats benefit from the narrow foul territory. With the roof closed, Marlins Park is chilled to a dry 75 degrees, a family-friendly environment in which to pass a hot summer day or night. Angled walls and cantilevered ramps on the building’s outside create a few elegant geometries, and multicolored tiles provide decorative pizzazz. It’s more than what you find in the grim concrete corridors of Yankee Stadium.

Yes, baseball isn’t what it used to be — the modern game panders to the corporations and rich patrons who buy luxury boxes and seats behind home plate. But stadiums are about as close as many cities come today to creating large-scale public spaces. They attract untold numbers of fans who might never have gone to a game back when baseball was played before cigar-chomping men in jackets and fedoras.

“A lot of us weren’t expecting something this nice,” said Adam Brownstein, a 38-year-old native Miamian, who spoke for what seemed like every resident I met.

Ten clubs have opened new homes since 2001. The Phillies thrive in Citizens Bank Park, where they keep winning. Pittsburgh flounders in PNC Park — which may be the most beautiful of all the parks to be built in recent years — because the Pirates are perennial losers.

Now that Mr. Loria has gotten his new stadium, he is doling out big money for marquee players, talking about World Series games played with the roof open, under the stars. Through seven home games, according to ESPN, the Marlins have sold an average of more than 29,000 tickets.

If the Marlins are bottom dwellers in late September, that home-run sculpture may come to seem forlorn, the new team uniforms clownish and the cost of the stadium a renewed scandal.

But that’s then. For now, Miami has reason to cheer.

 

 

—Meghan O'Rourke

Portrait by Mark Leong

FAR FROM HERE Artist Kehinde Wiley in his studio in Beijing, with works from his recent Armory Show. He lives part time in China, where he is able to paint free from distractions.

Painter Kehinde Wiley, 35, has enjoyed the kind of meteoric career that led Andy Warhol to quip about 15 minutes of fame. When he was a child, his mother, a linguist, enrolled Wiley and his siblings in art and literary programs as a way to help keep them safe in the rough South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where they lived. Early on Wiley gravitated toward the visual arts; when he was 12, he went to the U.S.S.R. on an arts exchange program, thanks to a foundation grant funded by financier Michael Milken, which ignited his interest in global politics.

After Yale's MFA program, Wiley got a coveted residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he started establishing himself as an art-world luminary. Drawn in by the "peacocking" of Harlem street life, he began making luxurious, Old Master–influenced portraits of young black men in street clothes. Subsequently, in his "The World Stage" series, he broadened his focus to include large-scale portraits of young men from regions around the globe. His work references Titian as easily as it does pop culture, and addresses stereotypes of race and class, power and history.

View Slideshow

COURTESY OF KEHINDE WILEY

Wiley (far right) with his father (lower left), stepmother and half-siblings in Nigeria.

Unlike other artists, Wiley is not interested in art for art's sake. His work shares his lively sense of humor, and he believes it's important for African-American kids to see pictures of people who look like them on museum walls. And he continues to break down boundaries. He collaborated with Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci on his latest project, "An Economy of Grace," which will open at New York City's Sean Kelly Gallery this month. The two chose paintings from the Louvre to serve as inspiration for a series of portraits of African-Americans in couture gowns they designed. Wiley's work, now more than ever, pushes the lines between design and high art, reinventing classical portraiture for a contemporary world.

I think the central narrative of my early childhood had to do with growing up in a family where my mother had to raise six kids alone and do graduate school, while figuring out how to keep us from becoming products of the environment that we were living in. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.

One that was particularly fortuitous for me was called the Center for U.S./U.S.S.R. Initiatives. It was a program set up to create an educational exchange between American and Soviet youths, with the idea that there would be a sort of ping-pong politics style—so that perhaps Soviet children would become envious of our way of life. We had 50 American kids hanging out in the forest outside of St. Petersburg. We had to study Russian for the year, and we did art in the forest.

Most of the kids came from very well-heeled families. But my tuition for the program was covered by the Milken Family Foundation. Milken's contribution to my early development was seminal, in the sense that it opened the whole world up to me—the possibility of seeing other cultures, and envisioning a world beyond the confines of Los Angeles, certainly. It brought up race and different modes of language and expression.

When my mother was working her way through college, we kids helped her run her junk store. It was like "Sanford and Son." We'd go through the streets finding things, and people would donate things knowing that she would take them; we'd be pulling in old furniture and redoing it and selling it to people on the streets. Most of the clientele was Spanish and we learned to speak Spanish on the streets. A lot of the furniture had this really heightened, decorative, late–French Rococo, old-lady sensibility that was really annoying to me at the time. But I remember in later years feeling an affinity with the hyperdecorative because it had a sense of nostalgia, in a way.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture. So, for example, in my last book of photography, the lighting was inspired as much by Tiepolo ceiling frescoes in Venice as it was by Hype Williams's early-'90s hip-hop videos—both having a sense of rapture, both having a sense of this bling. One more sacred, one more profane.

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria. She destroyed all the photos, and I'd never met the guy. So, when I turned 20, being fatherless, and also being profoundly interested in portraiture and wanting to know what he looked like physically, I decided to hop on a plane. Without the experience in Russia, I don't know if I'd have had the guts to do it because it was just so outsize for my life experience. I had a very youthful sense of invincibility. There were warnings all over the Internet from the State Department not to go into Nigeria at that time.

I went looking for one man in the most populated nation in all of Africa. I think there was a sense of curiosity, a psychic necessity. Just who is that other thing? What's my other half? And to stare this other guy in the face and be like, wow, that's weird.

I found him. But it was tough. All I knew was his first and last name and what he'd studied—architecture. I went from architecture department to architecture department looking for this guy. Finally, I took the ethnic route and went to the area where his last name comes from, to the major university there. His name's on the door of the architecture building. He heads the department.

I began a series of portraits of him. Once I get a project in my head, I start getting really obsessive about it. I studied how art-making practices have evolved in Africa, and how they've influenced art-making practices in the States and in Europe, specifically with people like Braque and Picasso, who were experiencing this feeling of the uncanny when looking at African art objects, which has a lot to do with historical European notions of the black body. And, conversely, I started going back to Africans thinking of themselves through the mirror of how someone else thinks of them.

All of those different perspectives and shattered ways of thinking were incredibly helpful to me. Later on when I was studying art theory, first in San Francisco and then at Yale, this sort of postcolonial postmodern condition of shattered identities and fractured selves, I didn't have to look very far. You know? This is not conceptual; this is actual life lived. In terms of how I started putting one foot in front of the other in my own art-making process, I didn't—my job was always to absorb and learn as much as possible and then just be in the world.

I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem and became the artist in residence there, and began this process of street-casting. And so in terms of designing a practice or designing a life, I've always had certain goals in mind: find the father, build the studio in this country, or what have you. But then you just let go and you allow radical contingency to take place, and that's where the magic sort of happens. You think you know what you're going to do when you hit the ground, but then the actualities show themselves.

The work is also about the power of letting go. So much of portraiture has to do with powerful people: powerful white men in powerful poses in big, powerful museums. So what happens when portraiture is about chance? Absolute chance? Someone who just happens to be trying to get to the subway one day now ends up in the painting that goes to one of the large museums throughout the world!

For the new project, Riccardo Tisci and I pulled some connections and got a private audience at the Louvre. The poses of the women, all of whom came from the New York metropolitan area, were taken from specific paintings that we saw in the Louvre, as were the gowns that we designed together. Couture is a symbol of wealth and excess, and that's what art has been. There's a certain guilt associated with it—desire and guilt—it's always more sexy when you feel slightly guilty about it.

I think one of the things that must happen in the work is for it to become class-conscious. You'll never be able to exist within this marketplace without recognizing that paintings are perhaps the most expensive objects in the art world. It's not going to change anyone's life. But what it does function as is a catalyst for a different way of thinking. The very act of walking into the Los Angeles County Museum and seeing Kerry James Marshall as a kid gave me a sense of, Damn, maybe I can do this. And, so, symbols matter. One of my interests is in having the work in as many public collections as possible. When I go to the Brooklyn Museum or the Metropolitan Museum and see my stuff, I'm aware that there are other young kids who don't have access to anything like it.

—Edited from Meghan O'Rourke's interview with Kehinde Wiley