Sotheby’s
David Hockney’s ‘‘Swimming Pool,’’  painted in 1965, went for £2.5  million at Sotheby’s in London, up from  its 2007 price of £1.19 million.

LONDON — The market for contemporary art is holding up remarkably well in the midst of the deepening concerns that are engulfing the global economy.

If Sotheby’s sale on Tuesday evening might have left a different impression, it is because brazen speculation no longer flies as easily as it did until recently. The 69 lots of the 79 that came up nonetheless sold quite well, allowing Sotheby’s to post a £69.3 million, or $108 million, score.

The auction house even achieved a world auction record. Glenn Brown’s monumental canvas “The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dalí (After John Martin)” ascended to £5.19 million, more than two-thirds above expectations. For a picture that has a touch of spoofery about it, this is not bad. As the title indicates, the apocalyptic scenery with fire burning and lava flowing reinterprets John Martin’s “Great Day of His Wrath” done in the late 1840s, and it looks a bit like a movie poster of the 1950s.

Several other works showed that big money continues to pour into contemporary art.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Warrior,” dated 1982, commanded an even higher price, £5.58 million. But that was under the low estimate, and the difference with Mr. Brown’s painting is that it did not trigger competition.

A glance at the prices previously paid for “Warrior,” done in the late artist’s street graffiti style, helps explain its failure to arouse enthusiasm. Five years ago, it sold for £2.82 million, also at Sotheby’s. Buyers apparently felt that allowing the clever consignor to cash in almost double his 2007 outlay was generous enough.

Earlier in the sale, bidders had been more willing to compete over another composition by Basquiat, “Saxaphone,” painted in 1986, two years before his death. Did they like it better because it is covered with inscriptions? Or were they more tolerant of profit-making when spread over a 15-year period? In 1997, the consignor had bought “Saxaphone” at Sotheby’s New York for $244,500. This week, it fetched £2.72 million, about $4.25 million.

After deduction of the sale charge to the buyer, more than 12 percent, which the auction house cashes in, and of another charge payable by the vendor at a privately negotiated rate, this leaves the consignor a profit of $3 million.

Other clever financial coups were made. David Hockney painted “Swimming Pool” in 1965 in a manner that suggests admiration for Magritte’s faux-naif style with a faint avant-garde whiff. In 2007, its owner, Magnus Künow, acquired the Hockney at Sotheby’s for £1.19 million. This week, it realized £2.5 million.

Francis Bacon’s 1980 “Study for Self-Portrait” also proved to have been a judicious bet. Bought in 2001 at Sotheby’s New York for $2.76 million, the Bacon sold this week for £4.52 million, more than $7 million. From a vendor’s perspective, this is brilliant.

Sadly for Sotheby’s, the sale did not look brilliant at all — quite the contrary, if one merely considered the wild estimate, £5 million to £7 million, plus the sale charge. The attendance glumly watched the Bacon being knocked down to a lone bidder who paid £1 million less than the low estimate.

In this dull atmosphere, the auctioneer Tobias Meyer appeared to be extracting bids from a reticent room when these actually resulted in large prices.

Bidders occasionally displayed some zest. Piero Manzoni’s crumpled canvases coated in white kaolin, with not much else to identify them as art, were vigorously chased. “Achrome,” done in 1959-1960, sold for £2.61 million, matching the ambitious middle estimate.

The problem on Tuesday was not that buyers lacked the wherewithal or the will to spend it. They simply declined to be held to ransom by consignors playing around with estimates and assorted reserves designed to ensure huge profits. If Sotheby’s specialists went along with their vendors’ whims, this means that they had no other way to cajole them into consigning their goods.

Christie’s experienced no such trouble. Its Wednesday evening sale, definitely more substantial, put the market back into perspective. With 60 lots adding up to £132.81 million, Christie’s almost doubled the score achieved by Sotheby’s.

The mood in the room was very different. This was partly because the session included several works seen as hugely desirable by those who follow contemporary art. But the fact that estimates had been set more closely to what the market is prepared to accept played a role in turning the Christie’s session into the success story of the week.

The sale, conducted by Jussy Pylkkanen, president of Christie’s Europe, quickly took off.

The third lot consisted of two fluorescent light tubes by Dan Flavin. It was “number two from an edition of three,” Sotheby’s noted. The fluorescent tubes fetched £205,250, well above the high estimate. Next, a bunch of empty mussel shells spread over a panel coated with resin, plus a “plastic bag filled with mussels,” went up to £433,250. It took the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaelers eight years to put the finishing touches to his “work,” completed two years before his death in 1976.

A vast canvas inscribed “Cy Twombly, Roma, 1962” came on its heels. Blobs of paint squished out of tubes are crushed at wide intervals on the off-white ground and a few gray lines are trailed across, with no obvious purpose. But Twombly, who died last year, has been reestablished as a blue chip among the postwar artists. The “Untitled” picture realized a price of £2.16 million.

Moments later, a delirious reaction was triggered by Yves Klein’s monumental “Le Rose du Bleu (RE22).” Sponges and gravel are stuck on board, held by synthetic resin painted pink. The French artist executed this work two years before his death in 1962. In order to enlighten viewers who might fail to grasp the meaning of the pink sponges and gravel, Christie’s quoted the late French art critic Pierre Restany, according to whom “madder rose represents the Holy Spirit before the gold of the Father and the blue of the Son.” Restany even spoke of Klein’s “Cosmological Trilogy of personal transmutation of colors.”

What is clear is that the sponges and gravel transmuted into gold: At £23.56 million, the work set a world auction record for the artist.

As the sale went on, it became evident that the key to success was not the artists’ aesthetic orientation. If non-representational works like the Klein soared sky high, so did figural art in all its trends.

Francis Bacon’s “Study for Self-Portrait,” done in 1964 in an Expressionist vein, soared to an astronomical £21.54 million.

An untitled Basquiat done in 1981 in the late American artist’s distinctive style also pleased bidders. They sent it climbing to £12.92 million, setting a world auction record for Basquiat’s work.

While the ease with which the Bacon and the Basquiat both surpassed expectations could be accounted for by their instant punch, the bland, more naturalistic Lucian Freud was again favorably received. A small “Head of a Greek Man,” portrayed in October 1946, exceeded the estimate by half at £3.4 million. It was followed by “Naked Portrait II,” painted in the mid-1970s in a style that might be seen as looking back to the work of Manet. That work went for £4.29 million.

Pop art indebted to comic books as a source of inspiration also went down well. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Reflections on Jessica Helms,” painted in 1990 in a belated throwback to the American artist’s early work in the 1960s, found a taker at £4.01 million.

Add “Structure (2),” a superb abstract composition done in 1989 by the German artist Gerhard Richter, which sold for £12.69 million, the fourth-highest price on Wednesday, and few would question the eclecticism of bidders. Names seemed to be the determining criteria of desirability, sparing buyers the ordeal of having to make a decision based on the art itself. When these criteria were met, money flowed as easily as ever.

The message this week is clear: The market for contemporary art is full of vitality. But buyers will no longer put up with speculators playing games at their expense.

 

The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, designed by Foster + Partners, at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.

 

Keeping up with the Joneses.

It happens in many settings, from the classroom to the country club, and, perhaps not surprisingly, among cultural organizations, according to a new study that finds that many institutions recently expanded their buildings in part because everyone else had.

Other reasons that organizations will build too much are overambitious trustees, self-interested architects and unrealistic financial projections, according to the study by the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago that is to be released Thursday.

The study, “Set in Stone,” examined the cultural building boom between 1994 and 2008, when museums, performing arts centers and theaters in the United States got swept up in new construction or major renovations.

More than $16 billion was spent by cultural organizations on building projects during that period, some inspired by the hope that construction initiatives could do what a Frank Gehry-designed museum building did for Bilbao, Spain: transform a small city into a major cultural destination.

“This issue between confusing a want with a need is enormous in the sector,” said Carroll Joynes, a founder and senior fellow at the policy center. “There are clear ways to avoid this. You can learn from what other people went through.”

A number of the lessons, the study suggests, could be drawn from its case studies of expansions like that of the Art Institute of Chicago over the past decade.

At first glance the project seemed daunting: a $300 million venture that would boost yearly operating costs by an estimated $4 million and would necessitate another $87 million in fund-raising to expand the endowment.

But with the Italian architect Renzo Piano engaged and several key trustees and the museum’s director gung ho, the expansion gained a kind of inexorable momentum.

Attendance did spike initially when the new wing opened in March 2009, but then it dropped back to normal levels. A precipitous decline in endowment income led to pay cuts, furloughs, a salary freeze and two rounds of layoffs.

“Instead of expanding its budget as expected, the Art Institute was forced to contract instead,” the study said.

The study examines not only what arts organizations got wrong but also what they got right and offers guidance for arts executives, civic leaders, donors and government officials about how to avoid pitfalls and how to grow intelligently and responsibly — or maybe not at all.

“It’s lessons from the front lines,” said Adrian Ellis, an arts consultant who helped conceptualize the study. “The stories aren’t told that often.”

The study was based on interviews with people in more than 500 arts organizations and drew data from more than 700 construction projects that ranged in cost from $4 million to $335 million. The New York region led the country in cultural building ($1.6 billion) after Los Angeles ($950 million) and the Chicago area ($870 million).

In many cases the researchers found that organizations failed to realistically assess the demand for their projects and their capacities to complete them: Do we really need this? Can we afford to build it? Can we support a larger operation going forward?

“All of the work fundamentally says, ‘Don’t build what you can’t sustain,’ ” said Duncan M. Webb, an arts management consultant, who was an adviser on the study.

Architects can also run away with a project, the study reports. “They say the building is for you, but the building is for them,” Mr. Joynes said. “It’s for the pictures and for their careers. From their point of view it’s a real success if it gets built.”

The study found that the most successful projects were driven by a clear artistic mission and demonstrable need; had authoritative and consistent leadership throughout the process; controlled expenses during construction; and generated income after completion.

The report’s other case studies were the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Va.; the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas.; and the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Tex. — all of which encountered financial hurdles after expansion.

“The Modern Wing was not an impulsive project,” Douglas Druick, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said. “It was 10 years in the making, and it puts the Art Institute on a solid footing for the future. We expect it to be here for decades, just as we still open the doors of our original 1893 building every morning.”

Additional examples outside the study abound, Mr. Joynes said, like the recent travails of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which had to close its new flagship building in Midtown and move to its smaller Upper West Side location after almost going out of business. “The Folk Art Museum should not have happened,” Mr. Joynes said. “It was a wonderful museum and they self-destructed. Our whole purpose in this is to say, ‘There are ways to do this that can protect your organization and help you fulfill your mission that won’t cripple you or take you down.’”

The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Mr. Ellis said, is an example of an organization that failed to build the necessary consensus among public officials and others before embarking on its $265 million complex, which opened in 2001.

“They thought, ‘If we can just get this thing up, everything will fall into place,’ and that simply isn’t the case,” Mr. Ellis said of the Kimmel. “If you haven’t thought about how to operate it, it will come back and bite you.”

Anne C. Ewers, Kimmel’s president and chief executive, acknowledged that she inherited a $30 million building deficit when she came on board in 2007 but said that she retired it the following year and that the institution was in the process of correcting “architectural mistakes” like the acoustics. “The biggest challenge was not having established an endowment dedicated to the maintenance of the facility,” she said.

In part because of these experiences and the economic downturn, the researchers say, the cultural building boom is decidedly over. The trend now is toward adaptive reuse of existing buildings and cultural districts that link various smaller organizations.

“We’re less interested in the idea of palaces of the arts,” Mr. Webb said. “A lot of these communities got in over their heads. I think we’ve learned our lessons.”

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: June 22, 2012

When I was in graduate school in the mid-’70s, trying to learn how to paint, a useful, shorthand criticism for a certain kind of creation was, “It looks like a LeRoy Neiman.” A reasonably sophisticated art student knew what that meant, and it was not a compliment. It referred to the splashy, garish, instantly recognizable style of illustration, a formulaic mix of impressionism, expressionism and realism, that Mr. Neiman used to make himself one of the most famous artists in America. To compare a student’s work to Mr. Neiman’s meant, “You are trying to distract the viewer from noticing your wooden draftsmanship and your ineptitude with matters of form and structure by larding your canvas with loud color and patchy accretions of paint.” Or, “What you are making is all frosting, no cake.”

 
LeRoy Neiman Inc.
A portrait of Joe Namath by LeRoy Neiman, whose bread and butter was sports subjects.

Mr. Neiman, who died this week at 91, was not an artist whom anyone in what I will here call the serious art world ever cared about. The world that I identified with, and aspired to be a part of, was the one whose orbit included New York Times critics, Artforum and Art in America magazines, institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art and galleries like those lining the streets of Chelsea.

From that exclusive vantage point, Mr. Neiman was the archetypal hack, his immense popularity explicable only by his ambitiously opportunistic personality and his position as Hugh Hefner’s court artist, which gave him monthly visibility to millions in the pages of Playboy. With his ever-present cigar and enormous mustache, he was a cliché of the bon vivant and a bad artist in every way.

I suppose that what Mr. Neiman’s fans found in his painting was a sense of engagement with the kind of subjects regularly proffered by network television: professional sports and its heroes, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath. He was, after all, a modern artist, as concerned as any with synergies of form and content. He made infectiously frothy paintings about exciting subjects. But there was nothing in his work to upset the couch potato’s televisual worldview.

It is one of the big lies of the serious art world that anything goes. That may be the case in regard to form, material and techniques, but when it comes to cultural politics, my art world leans decidedly leftward. In Chelsea galleries you are not going to find art made in the service of family values, patriotism or orthodox religion. Republican presidents may be satirically skewered, those who are Democrats hardly ever. You are unlikely ever to see anything condemning abortion or advocating looser gun control laws in a Whitney Biennial.

The serious art world expects, ostensibly at least, that Modern and contemporary art should be in some way critical of mainstream culture, as the avant-garde, from Manet to Pollock, is supposed to have been. Pop Art of the 1960s seemed to view the circus of American mass entertainment and consumerism with a mordantly amused eye. Warhol cranked out portraits of celebrities, but in a way that left you uncertain what he really thought of them. Mr. Neiman’s shamelessly fawning portraiture and uncritical view of big-time athletics left no room for doubt.

But his enthusiastic embrace of the wide world of sports points up by comparison a troubling insularity and crabbed vision in the serious art world. Unlike, say, movies and books that expansively meditate on topics of urgent interest to lots of people and at the same time  earn the respect of smart critics — the novels of Richard Ford and the films of Wes Anderson, for example — the contemporary art scene tends to favor either navel-gazing or promotion of certain agendas. The movement known as Institutional Critique, which obsessively parses the system by which art is circulated and consumed and has been, paradoxically, much favored by museum curators, is only the most conspicuous instance of this blinkered view of real, multidimensional life in the world at large.

Mr. Neiman started out in the late 1950s and early ’60s near the cutting edge of cultural change in his association with the swinging yet literate, unapologetically hedonistic lifestyle promoted by Playboy. His single, most memorable creation was the Playboy Femlin, his deft cartoon figure of a curvy sprite in thigh-high stockings and big hair. She was an extraordinarily economical condensation of mid-20th-century heterosexual male desire and a muse for the sexual revolution in the new era of the Pill.

But Mr. Neiman did not evolve in ensuing decades, and his public profile faded, like that of the magazine he worked for. I suspect that few artists now under 30 have any idea who he was or what he represented.

Mr. Neiman  is not the only celebrated artist to be marginalized by the cognoscenti. Walt Disney, Salvador Dalí, Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth all incurred suspicion for the taint of kitsch attached to their work. But it is hard to deny the aesthetic and moral interest of what they did, so they have their high-minded apologists.

Is the serious art world wrong to exclude and disdain Mr. Neiman and his art? I don’t think so. But the artist who could galvanize both popular imagination and mandarin intellect and in so doing expand the serious art world’s spiritual horizons and tell us something true about real life in the real world — that is something to wish for.

 

Walter Maibaum/The Degas Sculpture Project
Some of the 74 plasters attributed to Edgar Degas: fearing lawsuits, scholars are afraid to declare them genuine or not.

John Elderfield, former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, remembers the days when scholars spoke freely about whether a particular work was genuine.

They were connoisseurs, this was their field of expertise, and a curator like Kirk Varnedoe, Mr. Elderfield’s predecessor at the Modern, would think nothing of offering his view of a drawing attributed to Rodin, his specialty.

“He was qualified to do it and felt he had a moral obligation to do it,” Mr. Elderfield said.

But when the owner of a painting attributed to Henri Matisse recently asked Mr. Elderfield for his opinion, he demurred. He worried he could be sued if he said the painting was not a real Matisse.

Librado Romero/The New York Times
John Elderfield, a former curator at the Modern.

Mr. Elderfield is hardly alone in feeling that art’s celebrated freedom of expression no longer extends to expert opinions on authenticity. As spectacular sums flow through the art market and an expert verdict can make or destroy a fortune, several high-profile legal cases have pushed scholars to censor themselves for fear of becoming entangled in lawsuits.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and the Noguchi Museum have all stopped authenticating works to avoid litigation. In January the Courtauld Institute of Art in London cited “the possibility of legal action” when it canceled a forum discussing a controversial set of some 600 drawings attributed to Francis Bacon. And the leading experts on Degas have avoided publicly saying whether 74 plasters attributed to him are a stupendous new find or an elaborate hoax.

The anxiety has even touched the supreme arbiter of the genuine and fake: the catalogue raisonné, the definitive, scholarly compendium of an artist’s work. Inclusion has been called the difference between “great wealth and the gutter,” and auction houses sometimes refuse to handle unlisted works. As a result catalogue raisonné authors have been the targets of lawsuits, not to mention bribes and even death threats.

“Legal cage rattling was always part of the process,” said Nancy Mowll Mathews, president of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association. But the staggering rise in art prices has transformed the cost-benefit analysis of suing at the same time that fraud has become more profitable, she said.

While some argue the fear is overblown, others warn the growing reluctance to speak publicly about authenticity could keep forgeries and misattributed works in circulation while permitting newly discovered works to go unrecognized.

The perceived crisis has prompted a pointed ethical debate: Do you speak out if you spot a suspicious work or keep quiet as lawyers recommend?

Art experts have been getting sued over their opinions since at least the days of Joseph Duveen, the flamboyant dealer who found himself in court in the 1920s after declaring “La Belle Ferronnière,” a supposed Leonardo painting for sale, to be a fake. Duveen’s judgment caused the Kansas City Art Institute to withdraw its offer of $250,000, and in the end Duveen settled by agreeing to pay the owner $60,000. (The painting is now considered to be by a follower of Leonardo.)

As prices have risen, so have risks. In 2005, after watching other organizations fend off lawsuits, the Lichtenstein foundation bought $5 million worth of liability insurance and made its authentication process more rigorous and transparent, its executive director, Jack Cowart, said. Then in 2011 the Warhol foundation revealed it had spent $7 million defending itself against a lawsuit involving a silk-screen it had rejected for the catalogue raisonné. Mr. Cowart called his insurance company to find out if the Lichtenstein foundation would be protected if faced with a similar suit. The agent said it was impossible to predict. “That was a very sobering moment,” Mr. Cowart said.

The board had always felt an obligation to guard Lichtenstein’s legacy in this way, he explained. But now, figuring it was only a matter of time before the law of averages would throw a lawsuit their way, board members decided the benefits of authenticating did not outweigh the risks.

“Why should we go stand in front of a speeding car?” Mr. Cowart said. “We decided it’s not the role of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to deal with the art market’s authenticity issues.”

That view disturbs Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, which is publishing Robert Motherwell’s catalogue raisonné and was sued last year for changing its opinion about a painting’s authenticity. “If experts stop speaking up, you’re going to get more fakes surfacing,” he said.

Mr. Cowart counters that the authentication committee’s pronouncements were not driving fakes out of the market. The majority of works inspected during the panel’s six years, he said, were third-rate fakes that would reappear as soon as the owners sold them to other unsuspecting dupes.

So what would the Lichtenstein foundation do if it became aware that a major forgery was being auctioned for millions of dollars?

“We don’t know what we would say if we were asked formally or informally,” Mr. Cowart said. “We don’t deal in hypotheticals.”

Sharon Flescher, president of the International Foundation for Art Research, said she doubts the number of lawsuits challenging expert opinions has gone up. Nonetheless she conceded that the perception is having “a chilling effect.” Even though few plaintiffs win, experts are deterred by the time and legal expense. That’s why the College Art Association recently began offering affordable liability insurance to its members who authenticate art, she noted.

Peter R. Stern, an art lawyer in New York, tells clients never to volunteer an opinion unless formally asked by the owners, and even then to make sure the owners sign a waiver promising not to sue. If they don’t ask, don’t tell. “Art scholarship is fighting a losing battle against commerce,” he said.

Fears of being sued may even lead to changes in the nature of catalogues raisonnés, Ms. Flescher added. She pointed to recent decisions by the Calder and Lichtenstein foundations and the Noguchi Museum to move their cataloging efforts online and label them as “works in progress.”

“What we are presenting is a combination of completed research and research pending,” said Shaina D. Larrivee, project manager of the Isamu Noguchi catalogue raisonné. “We are very clear that ‘research pending’ does not guarantee inclusion in the final catalogue raisonné, and that we have the ability to remove artworks if new information comes to light.”

Alexander Rower, Alexander Calder’s grandson and the chairman of the Calder Foundation, said he decided to forgo a catalogue raisonné in favor of an online guide to Calder’s development and history. “You determine if your work is fake or not with the data we present,” he said.

The Web site, scheduled to begin operation this summer, will feature 4,000 to 6,000 works, roughly one-quarter of Calder’s total output. Although the foundation does not authenticate, Mr. Rower said, it will register and examine a supposed Calder at an owner’s request and release any information it has about the piece. The foundation does, however, keep a watchful eye on the market. Mr. Rower traveled to the Basel art fair in Switzerland last week to photograph every Calder for further research, he said.

And if he were to find a forgery? “You can’t just go out there in the world and say, ‘That’s fake,’ “ Mr. Rower said. “But it is a fair thing for me to say to an art dealer, ‘Have your presented this work to the Calder Foundation?’ And if he says no, I say, ‘You really should.’ “

As for scholars who are dragged into court, they do occasionally come out ahead. The art expert Steve Seltzer was sued after declaring that a watercolor of cowboys was not painted by the revered Western artist Charles M. Russell but by his own grandfather the artist O. C. Seltzer. After the suit was thrown out, Mr. Seltzer turned around and countersued the painting’s owner, Steve Morton, and his lawyers. In 2007 the Montana Supreme Court awarded Mr. Seltzer $11 million in damages. As the judges put it, using a lawsuit to coerce an expert to give a particular opinion is “legal thuggery.”

 

The park and the Bass Museum.

Wynwood gets most of the attention these days as the art hub of Miami. And rightly so, as the amount of galleries and studio spaces far exceeds any other place not only here, but in the Southeast and likely any place south of New York. The newly formed ArtPlace, a national collaboration of foundations, banks and government agencies that has begun giving significant grants to help develop art districts, has just awarded the Wynwood Arts District a business development grant of $140,000 to upgrade the neighborhood, and awarded a whopping $385,000 to the The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse, the Miami Light Project’s new home in Wynwood.

But a little overlooked in this all is the art neighborhood surrounding the Bass Museum, a Knight Arts grantee, on Miami Beach. It too just got an ArtPlace grant in the not-small sum of $225,000. While Wynwood is the hip and gritty placeholder for contemporary art, the area around the Bass is in all honestly a better place to develop a pedestrian and art friendly community.

With the completion of the park that rolls out from the front doors of the museum and runs over to the actual sand beach, this is simply a nice, comfortable place to walk and take in art. The temporary sculpture park in this area that took place during last December’s Art Basel was a taste of things to come. With this recent grant, the Bass will instigate the ”TC: Temporary Contemporary” public art projects program, which will bring well-known contemporary artists to the Beach to create site-specific installations in the 40-block area being called “City Center/Arts District.” These will include sculpture, sound installations, video and other interactive works that will try to engage the passersby.

And unlike Wynwood at present, it’s likely that many people will indeed experience the art, as there is a constant stream of pedestrians, local and visiting, who actually walk around this area, a beach-front district that is unique in the country.

Even before the outdoor art takes its place, you can get a good feel for the potential that ArtPlace has recognized. Walk to the museum from the Miami City Ballet’s home, or from the fabulous Frank Gehry-designed New World Symphony building, or even from the Art Center/South Florida on Lincoln Road — really, you’ll enjoy it. And then make sure you visit the wonderful Charles Ledray exhibit currently on display at the Bass, which runs through August 12. His works  — ceramics, knitted objects and the like  — are often described as “exquisite” and especially, “exquisitely crafted.” In his case, it’s not an exaggeration.

Link: A well-deserved nod to the Bass

The incident is the latest in a series of vandalizations of Britto work around Miami.

As expected by many, someone graffiti "bombed" controversial Miami-based artist Romero Britto's new Wynwood space over the weekend.

By Yuval Ofir (Yo Miami)

Public art by Romero Britto, the artist most identified with Miami around the world, is a frequent and easy target for graffiti bombers. His "Beach Ball" in Miami Shores, a sculpture sporting Britto's trademark bright colors and pop-art patterns, got the treatment last June when some blunt vandal scrawled the words "Not Art" across it with red spray paint. Then, in July of 2011, someone -- maybe the same someone -- tagged the same sculpture with the words "Meaningless Bliss" and "error".

The latest: This past Saturday, the day of Second Saturdays Art Walk, someone who apparently goes by the name "C Dog" tagged Britto's new Wynwood space, at 146 N.W. 25th Street, in huge white letters.

Update: Britto has responded by painting over C Dog's scrawl with a burst of color, sunny imagery, and a bit of advice: "Make Art Not War".