George Lindemann Journal - "Boxed In, With Room for Creativity" @nytimes by Ted Loos

For the first show he conceived as director of the Museum of Arts and Design, Glenn Adamson is thinking inside the box.

The box is a large yellow crate made by the Brooklyn packing and art transport company Boxart, built for a bulbous sculpture by Wendell Castle. The crate is part of “NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial,” opening on Tuesday. While Mr. Castle’s sculpture is tucked inside, it is not officially part of the show.

“I like this idea that a fine artist and a crate maker can all be seen on a level playing field,” Mr. Adamson said. “It’s a powerful idea, and a radical idea, for a museum.” Though biennials are not exactly news, Mr. Adamson’s exhibition features a fleet of objects and installations that may be getting through the door of a major cultural institution for the first time: bottles of whiskey, a jar of handmade candy and scratch-and-sniff wallpaper, for starters.

Mr. Adamson is attempting what he calls an ambitious “relaunch” of the museum’s mission, which has been focused on “making sure craft is an equal part of the art world,” he said. “Now we’re looking at what the skilled maker brings to the larger world around us.”

The new biennial format spotlights work by 100 citywide “makers” — the trendy term for creators of any kind — and it includes a cross-disciplinary group of people within New York City. Some are famous, like Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk and Yoko Ono, while others have yet to gain renown, like the wallpaper company Flavor Paper. One of the sweaty-smelling papers in the show is supposed to evoke “the scent of creativity of 100 makers,” said Jake Yuzna, the biennial’s curator.

Lest anyone doubt the of-the-moment feel to the maker concept, President Obama proclaimed June 18 a National Day of Making.

There are objects in the show that would not be out of place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Whitney Museum of American Art, like two crumpled glass sculptures by Jeff Zimmerman. But the show, which Mr. Adamson said he conceived during his first week on the job last fall, is part of his effort to create a more accessible museum. He added: “A good rule for me is that an 8-year-old should be able to get quite a lot out of everything. It’s not that all the content has to be totally introductory, but there should be something for them to hang on to.”

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That approach makes some people in the art world nervous: Could a level playing field devalue the more traditional artworks on view?

“It’s a concern,” said Zesty Meyers, an owner of the design gallery R & Company, which lent the Zimmerman sculptures to the show. “But if it’s done right it could be the best show in the world.”

The biennial organizers are taking pains to create the feel of an open studio where artisans ply their trades in person. Mr. Adamson said it would have the air of a festival. In August, for example, Martinez Hand Rolled Cigars will demonstrate their rolling process; some of their cigars are on view for the duration of the exhibition.

In searching for previously unheralded creativity, the museum — which was founded in 1956 as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and moved to 2 Columbus Circle in 2008 — has tapped in to a populist strain of the current cultural moment. Candidates were nominated by more than 300 New York City cultural leaders including the artist Dan Graham, the choreographer Bill T. Jones and the fashion designer Reed Krakoff. Then a 10-person jury led by the design entrepreneur Murray Moss, including Mr. Adamson and Mr. Yuzna, made the final selections.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made frequent comments about the city’s richness beyond Manhattan, which is well in evidence in the museum’s biennial’s representation from Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and especially the maker-hub of Brooklyn.

“It coincides with what the mayor has been talking about: New York City as a five-borough place,” Mr. Adamson said.

A subtheme of the show is the vital role of the artisan in what Mr. Adamson calls New York’s “creative economy,” and some outside groups have tried to quantify at least part of that impact.

Last month, the nonprofit group Center for an Urban Future released its analysis of figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its report, “New York’s Design Economy,” looked at the topic in the broadest sense, from fashion to landscaping to industrial work.

“We want to highlight parts of the economy that have flown under the radar, and design is a great example of that,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of Center for an Urban Future.

The group reported that, according to the bureau, the number of professional designers in New York was 40,340 in 2013 and had bounced back significantly since the recession but had not reached the levels of 2008, when the number was 44,400.

New York is still the country’s undisputed design hub, and more to the point of the museum’s show, Brooklyn and Queens were found to be leading the growth. The number of design firms in Brooklyn doubled between 2003 and 2012, from 265 to 532.

“A show like this sheds light on the suppliers — specialized people who normally don’t fit into an existing category, but they’re artisans making things,” said Rosemary Scanlon, dean of the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University. Ms. Scanlon produced three extensive reports on the economic impact of the arts: in 1983 and 1993, as an economist for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and in 2007, as a consultant for the Alliance for the Arts.

In organizing the biennial, which will tackle a new city in two years, Mr. Adamson also has an eye on the museum marketplace and positioning the museum as a distinct brand. He mentioned the more famous biennial across town at the Whitney as a point of reference.

“The kind of spiky, theoretical programming is being done so well at other spaces that I think we can become a point of entry for people,” Mr. Adamson said. “Look where we are: the corner of Central Park. I would like people to experience MAD as a fantastic adjunct to a day in the park.”

Some of the makers who are usually behind the scenes are surprised and delighted to find themselves in the spotlight.

“When I got the first call from Jake I thought it was, well, not exactly a scam, but I was a little skeptical,” said Daniel Hanford, the director of Boxart, which works frequently with the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and most of the time no one gets to see our work,” Mr. Hanford said. “It feels great.”

George Lindemann Journal "Enduring the Elements" @wsj by Richard Cork

Exploring mortal drama with religious overtones. St. Paul's Cathedral

London

Nothing can prepare visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral, in the heart of the city, for the impact of Bill Viola's visionary video installation "Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)." After walking through the spectacular elaboration of Christopher Wren's architecture, I find the work positioned at the far end of the long South Quire Aisle. The carbon-steel stand containing four plasma screens is purged and minimal; designed by Norman Foster at his most austere, it contrasts very severely with the profuse ornamentation enlivening the High Altar nearby. The presentation of "Martyrs" is not allowed to interfere with the visceral power of the images themselves, focusing relentlessly on the plight of four figures who undergo extreme torment.

When Mr. Viola first made his reputation, in the 1980s, as a pioneering video artist from New York, his work seemed more secular than sacred. In the poignant "Nantes Triptych" (1992), three screens record the birth of a baby, a man surrounded by water and an old woman's death in a hospital. The baby was Mr. Viola's second child and the dying woman was his mother. So his fascination with extreme mortal drama was already clear, but his exploration of religious images became overt as he grew older. The overseers of St. Paul's were very impressed by his 2003 exhibition at the National Gallery in London, where he disclosed an intense interest in traditional Christian art. Small wonder, then, that "Martyrs" was commissioned for the cathedral, where Mr. Viola's figures immediately look at home in a building dedicated to suffering and redemption.

No seats are provided, so I stand and watch as three men and one woman, one on each screen, endure their unimaginable agony. This time, unlike in the "Nantes Triptych," the figures are all performers. Above them, an enormous Wren window admits daylight to the cathedral. But absolute darkness surrounds the martyrs as they strive to withstand their alarming pain. My encounter with "Martyrs" is profound enough to make me feel that I have never before experienced the strange, heightened intensity provided by Mr. Viola here.

At the beginning, the man on the far left is virtually invisible. Almost covered by a stifling heap of earth, he seems to be buried alive. Only after moving in very close to the screen do I realize that his head is still protruding, although he clamps both hands protectively against his skull. Next to him, a fair-haired woman dangles from thick ropes tied round her wrists. Her clothed body is seen full-length, and ropes entwine her ankles as well. There she hangs, twisting in the wind and contrasting with a seated elderly man on the next screen. He appears to be asleep, yet small flames have already started descending from above and settling ominously on the floor near his bare feet. Meanwhile, on the far-right screen, a bearded young man lies motionless on the ground. Although his naked torso looks healthy and well-built, he might be close to death already. Soon enough, the rope tied round his ankles begins pulling him up into the air.

Mr. Viola wastes no time in putting all the martyrs through hell. The duration of his entire video is only seven minutes, and all the way through I find my gaze darting from one screen to the next in an attempt to discover what exactly is happening to each of these doomed figures. It is a highly dramatic spectacle, especially when the man on the far left is uncovered. The earth rushes upward, like smoke rising from an inferno or even an inverted waterfall ascending to the sky. The man emerges from his hunched humiliation, gradually becoming upright. His stance is very different from the position of the hapless woman, who is now tossed brutally from side to side by furious air.

Yet the most alarming development of all affects the elderly man in the chair. The flames flare upward with terrifying force, threatening to burn him. He wakes up, placing hands on knees while raising his head and staring out directly at us. As for the athletic young man on the right, he dangles upside-down and stretches out his arms at either side. For a moment, I am reminded of the Crucifixion. But Mr. Viola rightly ensures that "Martyrs" cannot be pinned down to a single religion. Water starts pouring down from the top, drenching the young man and making his dark hair hang in long, dripping tresses.

In the final phase of this mesmeric work, turmoil gives way to stillness. Yet there is no loss of intensity. If anything, the figures become even more compelling as they arrive at stasis. The man on the far left stands erect, head up and eyes closed as if lost in prayer. By a miracle, none of the earth that once smothered his body can now be seen on his flesh or clothes. He has been purged, and the woman's gyrations have likewise ceased. She has even managed to free her hands from the thick ropes, but her feet are still bound together and so her fingers cling to the ropes for support. Suspended in space, but not inverted, she throws her head backward as if searching for the light-source above.

Her deathly pallor is echoed by that of the man in the chair. Although the flames have subsided and his entire body is unaccountably intact, he looks blanched enough to be dead. The theme of extinction is pursued at the far right, where the inverted young man is pulled up until he disappears at the top, leaving only a thin, melancholy trickle of water in his place. An overall sense of tragedy dominates the work, but at least the young man might have ascended to another realm. Even the man on the far left, who is still standing, tilts his head back and shuts his eyes, while a strong white light shines down and almost makes his face dissolve in the brightness. At this point, all four screens grow dark and the work terminates.

After a few seconds, though, it starts again and the martyrdom is re-enacted on a continuous loop, replayed over and over. Wandering away from Mr. Viola's elegiac installation, I walk behind the High Altar and, in the Jesus Chapel, discover a large open book with names carefully written inside. The chapel especially commemorates U.S. soldiers who died in World War II, and their names lend a poignant historical dimension to Mr. Viola's work. But his overall intentions cannot be limited to the idea of a military memorial. "Martyrs" may invite us to witness what Mr. Viola describes as "the human capacity to bear pain, hardship, and even death," yet its deepest power resides in his ability to convey the fundamental mystery of sacrifice.

Mr Cork's latest book, "The Healing Presence of Art," was published by Yale in 2012.

George Lindemann Journal "Christie's 'Bumpy' Sale Anchored by $23.8 Million Schwitters" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Christie's in London sold a 1920 jewel-toned painting by German artist Kurt Schwitters created from debris he found scattered around Berlin—including cardboard strips and street-poster fragments—for $23.8 million Tuesday.

One successful sale was a Kurt Schwitters collage for $23.8 million. UPPA/Zuma Press

The price for "Yes—What?—Picture" reset Schwitters's auction record, but it also represented one of the few successes in an otherwise disappointing Christie's $146 million sale in which a third of the house's 60 offerings went unsold.

The sale also fell short of the house's $164 million low bar.

Christie's sale was pockmarked by plenty of artworks that fell flat and went unsold, creating an eerie saleroom atmosphere that has been rare since the recession.

Schwitters's abstract performed well in part because it is so rare: His collage relief paintings, which he made during the turbulent, impoverished years following World War I, helped establish his international reputation—and yet only three works from this period remain in private hands. This version was also three-feet high, large for an artist better known for painting on placemat-size canvases. After a dogged, three-way bidding war, a telephone bidder won it for more than double its high estimate.

A couple other pieces sold well, but with strings attached. Before the auction, Christie's had enlisted outside investors to pledge to bid on a pair of paintings by Henri Matisse and Joan Miró—unless other collectors during the sale offered even more.

Christie's risk-offsetting strategy paid off for the house because these paintings garnered no other bids in the moment and so were claimed by their guarantors for $11.6 million and $7.7 million, respectively.

Matisse's Nice-period "The Artist and His Nude Model" from 1921 was expected to sell for at least $11.9 million, and Miro's "Woman's Voice in the Night, Roissignol" from 1971 was estimated to sell for at least $6.8 million.

Works by Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and Rene Magritte fared reasonably well. A red-and-black Ernst sold to an Asian telephone bidder for $616,975.

A $1.5 million sculpture of black curtains by Magritte sold to London-based art adviser Bart van Son, who said his collector client "has the perfect spot for it at home."

"You don't see much sculpture by Magritte, and it's a marvelous piece," Mr. Van Son added afterward.

Sculptures by Alberto Giacometti largely fell like dead weights at Christie's sale, though. Giacometti has had a mixed performance at auctions lately, and he didn't weather his market test well Tuesday. Of his eight examples up for bid, only four found takers—including a 1956 mustard-colored "Woman of Venice II," that sold for $15.4 million, over its $13.6 million low estimate.

Giacometti's gray portraits and his bronze sculpture of a spindly waving "The Hand" went unsold. The piece was expected to sell for at least $17 million.

Among the other unsold offerings was a Piet Mondrian that was expected to sell for at least $8.5 million—collectors said it had condition problems—and a Chaim Soutine was expected to sell for $2 million or more. The Chaim Soutine stalled at $950,000.

After the sale, Amsterdam collector Matthÿs Erdman said Christie's set estimates that appeared too high, particularly for some material that looked mediocre compared to Sotheby's BID -1.02% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE ^$39.79 -0.41 -1.02% June 26, 2014 12:37 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 432,844 P/E Ratio 18.69 Market Cap $2.77 Billion Dividend Yield 1.00% Rev. per Employee $576,249 40.2540.0039.7539.5010a11a12p1p2p3p 06/24/14 Christie's 'Bumpy' Sale Anchor... 06/23/14 Dueling Bidders Push Up Trophy... 06/20/14 Checker Cabs Come to Brooklyn More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position offerings the night before.

"People go for trophies, and I think Christie's had trouble getting their prices right," Mr. Erdman said. "Even in this market, you can't get away with everything."

Christie's Chief Executive Steven Murphy said the house had a "bumpy night" and that his staff would look harder at their estimates moving forward. But Mr. Murphy said he didn't think the sale portended a downturn in the market overall.

"The masterpieces still flew," he said.

Next week, both houses are slated to conduct sales of contemporary art in London.

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

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "The Collections | The Top 10 Attractions at Design Miami/Basel" @tmagazine

The Collections | The Top 10 Attractions at Design Miami/Basel

Studio Swine’s “Hair Highway.”

The Design Miami/Basel fair — the annual European companion to Design Miami in Basel, Switzerland — has a single objective: facilitating the sale of expensive design objects to wealthy collectors. Yet much like its neighbor, Art Basel, the show can also serve as a resource for enthusiasts and curious window shoppers, who come to see and enjoy the works on view, or survey what’s happening in design now (lots of experimentation with everyday materials, apparently). Without the placards or checklists one would normally find in a gallery or museum, though, it would have been entirely possible for non-experts to meander in and out of the fair’s 50-something booths this year without knowing for sure what’s old and what’s new, or which pieces represent real breakthroughs in materials and process. There were many more novel contemporary works on view than ever before, balancing out the usual glut of 20th-century icons, but it wasn’t necessarily obvious unless you scoured the $30 show catalog.

For example, I nearly walked right past what turned out to be my favorite thing in the entire show, which ended Sunday: a series of furnishings and accessories made from resin-encased human hair by the little-known London designers Studio Swine, who created it during a five-month residency with Pearl Lam Galleries in China. The gallery’s assistant happened to point out the project to me after I grilled her about another new piece by the young duo, a cabinet made from aluminum foam. Similarly, it took some persistence to learn that a group of intricate gold-wire necklaces at Caroline Van Hoek were by a 23-year-old newcomer (Hermien Cassiers), and that almost all the works in Gallery Fumi’s booth were previously unseen experiments by emerging talents — including Studio Markunpoika’s trio of vases made by gluing together blocks of pencils and turning them on a lathe. Listed here are 10 new projects by up-and-coming designers that, based on six or seven hours spent digging around Design Miami/Basel and pestering people, we figured were worth a closer look.

Oliver LangStudio Swine’s curio cabinets.

Studio Swine at Pearl Lam
Building on a process they used to make eyeglasses a few years back, the London newcomers’ “Hair Highway” pieces are made from resin embedded with dip-dyed human hair, sourced from the world’s largest hair marketplace in Shandong Province. The designers created the series during a five-month residency with the gallery in Shanghai. The young Royal College of Art graduates also created these elaborate curio cabinets during their stay, which debuted during the show as well — they’re made from industrial foamed aluminum meant to evoke Chinese scholar’s rocks.

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Oliver LangJeremy Wintrebert at Gallery Fumi

Jeremy Wintrebert at Gallery Fumi
For its inaugural appearance at Design Miami/Basel, Gallery Fumi brought a selection of mostly new works by mostly young designers. I was advised to keep an eye on the Paris-based glass artist Jeremy Wintrebert, creator of these mouth-blown “Cloud” lamps, who will have both a solo show with Fumi and a commissioned installation at the Victoria and Albert museum during the London Design Festival.

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Oliver LangStudy O Portable at Gallery Fumi

Study O Portable at Gallery Fumi 
Another favorite at Fumi was this table by this London duo, who normally make sculptural jewelry and housewares but had scaled their Fuzz process — which involves building up layers of ceramic resin around a geometric void — up to furniture size for the first time.

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Oliver LangKueng Caputo at Salon 94

Salon 94
The New York art gallery was another newcomer to the fair; it cherry-picked a few dozen quasi-functional pieces from its roster of talents, including lights by Andy Coolquitt and a new marbled console and dining table by the hip Swiss design-art duo Kueng Caputo.

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Oliver LangValentin Loellmann at Galerie Gosserez

Valentin Loellmann at Galerie Gosserez
Galerie Gosserez devoted its entire booth to the work of the 31-year-old German designer, who seems to be coming into his own as of late: his gawky, lumpy furnishings have taken a more elegant, less contrived turn, like the new Fall-Winter cabinet, which pairs an organic black frame with sleek, Scandinavian-style oak panels.

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Oliver LangChristopher Schanck at Johnson Trading Gallery

Christopher Schanck at Johnson Trading Gallery
New York’s Johnson Trading Gallery focused on bringing the work of this Detroit talent, who hires local makers to produce his foam shelves and tables skinned in aluminum foil, to an international audience. Particularly novel was a piece that fused his foil process with an earlier experiment in chemically eroded wall mirrors.

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Oliver LangAnton Alvarez at Design at Large

Anton Alvarez at Design at Large
For his graduate thesis in 2012, Alvarez invented a technique to bind chunks of wood together with resin-soaked thread by passing them through a kind of spinning hoop. For Design Miami/Basel’s new Design At Large showcase, curated by Dennis Freedman, Alvarez unveiled the first batch of pieces he’s been making with a supersized version of the machine that he created this spring.

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Oliver LangTomás Alonso at Victor Hunt Gallery

Tomás Alonso at Victor Hunt Gallery
In the London designer’s latest series, tables and tabletop accessories made from various types of marble lock together comfortably thanks to simple grooves cut into their surfaces.

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Oliver LangBrynjar Siguroarson

Brynjar Siguroarson
For a solo show at Galerie Kreo earlier this year, Siguroarson created wooden furniture embellished with a rope-knotting technique he learned from a shark hunter while traveling in the tiny Icelandic town of Vopnafjordur, along with local materials like leather, fur, and fishing lures.

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Oliver LangBenjamin Graindorge at Ymer & Malta

Benjamin Graindorge at Ymer & Malta
The French gallery invited young designers to revisit marquetry for its presentation; Graindorge teamed up with the Parisian master craftsman Yves Josnan to create a table with a veneer comprising 2,000 pieces of 17 different types of wood.

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George Lindemann Journal - "Car Parts, Guitars and Wall Art at Art Basel" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Early hours at the Swiss art fair Clara Tuma for The Wall Street Journal

Tap tap. Bang bang. What does a frothy contemporary art market sound like? A construction site.

Walking through the vast warren of art-filled booths at Art Basel, the Swiss art fair that closes Sunday, shoppers at the VIP preview Wednesday could hear nails regularly being hammered into booth walls—a sign that dealers had sold everything on display and were hanging up fresh pieces for sale.

"Every year, we come into this fair thinking it can't get better than last year, and then it does," said dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who sold out his booth within the fair's opening hours Tuesday—including "Folk Thing Zero," a $2.3 million Georg Baselitz statue of a hulking blue man. "The art keeps getting bigger and selling faster."

After a blistering season of New York auctions, collectors descended on this fair with a feeding-frenzy feeling that they would need to shop quickly—and be willing to splurge—if they wanted to take home any of the roughly 14,000 works on offer. Miami art adviser Lisa Austin said her client, Miami collector David Martin, vied for seven pieces during the VIP preview Tuesday but bought only two because the rest had already sold.

Matthew Armstrong, art adviser to New York billionaire financier Donald Marron, said he typically expects to see a swath of brand-new pieces at Basel. But this time around he noticed more artworks that had been created a few years ago but were already coming back onto the market—a clue that the works' original owners may be seeking quick profits by reselling them through galleries now. As a result, the fair occasionally had a didn't-I-see-that-before vibe. "It's a moderately contemporary fair," he joked.

Whatever their budgets, the 86,000 people expected to attend Art Basel will all be on the lookout for the latest art developments. Here, a few early trends:

VROOM VROOM

Years ago, Richard Prince caused a stir by painting car hoods and hanging them, like canvases, on the wall. This year, Basel purred with pieces created from all sorts of car parts, from batteries to bumpers to windshield wipers that still swished.

Rob Pruitt transformed a miniature refrigerator into a Carmen Miranda-like figure by topping it with a pair of painted tires and tucking plastic fruit in the center hole so that it evoked a towering hat. One of the more elaborate examples is Josephine Meckseper's assembly-line installation that featured several tires balanced atop a silvery conveyor belt sitting beside a pair of TV screens broadcasting a 12-minute montage of car commercials. Ms. Meckseper's gallery, Andrea Rosen, said an art foundation had put a hold on the 2009 work, "Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow it Down." It was priced at $220,000.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

The fair's playful atmosphere was also reinforced by a suite of artworks made from, or about, musical instruments. Performance art duo Prinz Gholam embedded a video of themselves playing a guitar into the soundhole of one of the artist's childhood guitars, which was covered in Disney stickers. It sold to a European collector for around $16,300.

New York's Pace Gallery devoted much of its booth to an orchestra's worth of lumpen soft violins and towering blue sculptures of drums and clarinets by Claes Oldenburg, which the gallery said were selling briskly.

Over at New Delhi's Gallery SKE, artist Navin Thomas salvaged a group of trumpets in Bangalore and used them like speakers to blare his recordings of chirping tree frogs. The gallery said the artist is interested in "electroacoustic ecology," which means he uses urban scrapyard items to remind people about the nature they may be leaving behind. The work, "The Fruit of Some Unknown Tree," was priced around $20,000.

BUY ONE, BUY ALL

In a season where collectors are seeking wall-power art, more galleries were spotted offering multiple, smaller works by artists arranged in huge grids—some of which could be bought individually or in various sets. Singapore conceptual artist Heman Chong at Singapore Tyler Print Institute offered up his $4,000 painted book covers on their own or as a set. Günter Förg's wall of colorful abstracts, which had titles like "Mr. Green" and "Mr. Brown," were priced at $7,300 apiece, or $24,500 for a quartet.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz's nine still-life scenes, which were inspired by a visit to Paul Cézanne's studio, could be bought individually for around $10,000. But Karen Marks of Howard Greenberg Gallery said collectors at the fair preferred to buy them in trios. "Grids are cool," Ms. Marks added. "Collectors can get interactive by choosing how many they want and how to hang them. It gives them a chance to get involved."

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

George Lindemann "Jeff Koons Retrospective To Open at the Whitney" @wsj by ELLEN GAMERMAN

Photos: The Artwork of Jeff Koons

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'Loopy' by Jeff Koons © Jeff Koons/Whitney Museum of American Art

In recent days, Jeff Koons worked on installing a huge topiary at Rockefeller Center, promoted an H&M partnership that features his famed balloon dog on a new handbag and appeared naked in Vanity Fair.

If the most expensive living artist at auction has always embraced publicity, he's got it in a bear hug now as he prepares for next Friday's opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Jeff Koons: A Retrospective." It is the 59-year-old's first major museum exhibit in New York. The show marks some milestones for the Whitney, too: the museum's biggest-ever single-artist exhibition, its last show before opening in a new downtown location next year and its most expensive solo retrospective to date.

The artist's auction performance—led by the 2013 sale of "Balloon Dog (Orange)" for a record $58.4 million at Christie's—has never been stronger, with his annual average lot price this year at $2.4 million, according to Artnet. In 2014, he has sold more than he ever has at auction by value—upwards of $112 million, Artnet said.

From his balloon dogs to oil paintings, Jeff Koons is enjoying unmatched success in the contemporary art world. Ahead of his first-ever New York retrospective at the Whitney Museum, WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Tanya Rivero on Lunch Break to explain why Mr. Koons is today's most expensive living artist. Photo: Getty

What explains such prices? Fans of the artist point to his ability to push the boundaries of the art world—as he has done with his well-known knack for marketing his own work—as well as his mastery of art history and his sixth sense for finding the next big idea in popular culture. It helps that the art is so accessible: Instead of out-there performances or bewildering installations, he creates gem-colored paintings and seductively shiny sculptures inspired by inflatable toys, sex, cartoons and the like.

"If you look at various aspects of Jeff's career, whether it's his relationship to kitsch and popular culture or his use of technology in fabrication or the way that he thinks about a perfect replication—in each of these areas he's moved the stakes out in the field," said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney show's curator. "He's just done so many things to change the parameters that art is happening in, even though his work is somewhat traditional."

Over the decades, a cadre of powerful dealers has helped bankroll expensive works by Mr. Koons, whose career has been bolstered by a handful of influential collectors purchasing his works by the dozen. While detractors have never been shy about calling Mr. Koons a master of hype, his biggest backers have been committed to him since the 1980s.

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Jeff Koons is the most expensive living artist at auction. Getty Images

A former Wall Street commodities broker, Mr. Koons employs nearly 130 people in his New York studio. He asks them to sign non-disclosure agreements to protect intellectual property and trade secrets around the art and has his employees handle the labor while he focuses on bigger concepts, former staffers say.

"People have a concept of how an artist works—they imagine Jackson Pollock pouring paint over a canvas, they definitely don't imagine a man in an office in a suit thinking up ideas," said New York artist and former Koons studio assistant Jaclyn Santos. "To him, it's not about making a work physically, it's about making the idea."

Mr. Koons was unavailable for an interview. A representative from his studio said the artist is involved in every detail of a work's execution.

His raw materials and construction methods are famously expensive. For certain stainless steel sculptures, fabricators in Germany created an alloy with special reflective qualities. He set up a stone milling facility in Pennsylvania for his granite works. He has involved experts like Bavarian wood carvers and a Nobel-laureate physicist, and used technology found everywhere from hospitals to Hollywood.

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'Metallic Venus' by Jeff Koons © Jeff Koons/Whitney Museum of American Art

"There is this whole ecosystem within his organization and outside it, working together to make all of this possible," said Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Bits and Atoms. Mr. Gershenfeld, who has worked with the Koons studio on developing custom hardware and software for 3D models, said some technology he has developed through the collaboration likely will be used commercially.

In her catalog essay for the Whitney show, Artforum editor-in-chief Michelle Kuo wrote that the fabrication of some of Mr. Koons's works has become so technologically complex, production standards for his art in some cases now exceed those found in the aerospace industry or the military.

The artist has been open to unusual business arrangements. Recently, heappeared in a promotional video for the Oceana Bal Harbour, a luxury condo near Miami set to open in 2016. Residents of the roughly 240-unit development will share ownership of two Koons sculptures the developer bought for about $14 million. One of the works, "Pluto and Proserpina," will appear in the Whitney show, with the condo development credited as the owner. Real-estate billionaire Eduardo Costantini, who is spearheading the development, said the works by Mr. Koons were a natural choice given his "very profound identity" as a global artist.

Greek industrialist Dakis Joannou owns close to 40 pieces by Mr. Koons, eight of which he loaned to the exhibit. The art world's devotion to Mr. Koons ultimately comes down to his talent, Mr. Joannou said, adding that he was fascinated by the artist from the start. "I saw in him a man with very ambitious ideas, a man who had huge work," he said. "He has absolutely no limits in achieving his ideas."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal - "At Art Basel, Works With a Museum Presence" @nytimes by Carol Vogel

BASEL, Switzerland — In an old market hall adjacent to the cavernous center where Art Basel, the gold standard of contemporary art fairs, is taking place, there is a happening unlike anything ever staged here. Called “14 Rooms,” it consists of 14 mini-performances created by artists including Marina 

BASEL, Switzerland — In an old market hall adjacent to the cavernous center where Art Basel, the gold standard of contemporary art fairs, is taking place, there is a happening unlike anything ever staged here. Called “14 Rooms,” it consists of 14 mini-performances created by artists including Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst and Yoko Ono, each secreted in a small space behind mirrored doors. Open one door, and there’s a Marina Abramovic look-alike naked and astride a bicycle seat, arms outstretched. In another, identical twins sit in front of identical spot paintings by Mr. Hirst.

“Performance art is usually at the periphery, so why not put it front and center?” said Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1 in New York, who organized the project with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a director of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London. “It’s a temporary museum. Nothing here is for sale.”

But next door at Art Basel, almost everything is. As big and boisterous as ever, with 285 galleries from 34 countries participating, this fair is still a magnet for the contemporary art world. Spotted at Tuesday’s V.I.P. opening were big-money collectors like Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire; Daniel S. Loeb, the activist hedge fund manager and Sotheby’s new board member; Mitchell P. Rales, the Washington industrialist, and his wife, Emily; Jerry I. Speyer, chairman of the Museum of Modern Art; and Daniel Brodsky, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his wife, Estrellita, an independent curator. Few artists ever make an appearance at art fairs but Oscar Murillo, the Colombian-born painter, did.

Last month, $2.2 billion worth of art changed hands at the big auctions in New York. The strength of those sales affected everything about this year’s fair, from the higher prices to the choice of art. So have museum exhibitions. “Collectors are driven by institutional context,” the dealer David Zwirner said. Prominently displayed in his booth is a shiny blue stainless-steel sculpture of a dolphin by Jeff Koons, whose retrospective is opening this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Priced at $5 million, it sold on Tuesday to a collector from China, Mr. Zwirner said. His booth also features paintings by the South African-born Marlene Dumas, who has a traveling show opening at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in September; and canvases by Gerhard Richter, who is the subject of an exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel.

Mr. Zwirner wasn’t the only dealer touting works with a museum presence. Dominique Levy, a New York dealer, had a 1964 black-and-white comic book drawing by Roy Lichtenstein that was in a show at the Morgan Library & Museum four years ago. It sold for an undisclosed price to an American collector.

“Sotheby’s and Christie’s went through a record cycle, and that gives people confidence,” Mr. Zwirner said. “Basel is our biggest weapon, if we want to go mano a mano with the auction houses.”

Brett Gorvy, chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, was here, too. Prices, he said, are “informed by the auctions.” “Collectors have sticker shock, yet they’re pulling the trigger,” he added, using as an example one of Andy Warhol’s “fright wig” self-portraits from 1986 that several people said had belonged to Thea Westreich, the New York collector and dealer. It was bought by another New York collector for around $34 million, according to Per Skarstedt, the dealer who sold it. In addition to examples of Warhol and Bacon — both top sellers at auction last month — Mr. Koons, whose sculptures had adorned the covers of both Sotheby’s and Christie’s contemporary art auction catalogs, was ubiquitous. The Gagosian Gallery is featuring “Hulk (Wheelbarrow),” a giant green painted bronze Hulk carrying a wheelbarrow filled with live flowers; it is priced at $4 million. Almine Rech, another dealer, brought two “Gazing Ball” sculptures made this year, one priced at $2 million and the other at $1.6 million. Both sold to European collectors, she said.

Younger trendy artists are also represented here, with paintings by Jacob Kassay, Joe Bradley and Mark Bradford, many of which were spoken for.

One young artist determined to control his market is Wade Guyton, the American painter who produces canvases on inkjet printers. Last month, protesting an enormous price asked for one of his paintings at auction, he made copies of the 2005 image from the original disk and posted them on Instagram. (Prices for his paintings were stronger than ever anyway, with one bringing nearly $6 million.) Undeterred, for Art Basel he gave each of the five dealers he works with — Frederich Petzel from New York, Gió Marconi in Milan, Galerie Gisela Capitain from Cologne, Galerie Francesca Pia from Zurich and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris — a black painting, all the same size and all made from the same disk. They each had a $350,000 price tag, and all of them sold either on Tuesday or before.

In an email, Mr. Guyton explained that he instructed the dealers to hang his paintings at identical heights, “so each time you walk up to one, you would have a similar physical encounter.” He added: “On the one hand, it is a way to satisfy all my galleries simultaneously and fairly. It’s also a way of talking about the repetitive experience of seeing similar artworks throughout a fair and embracing that aggressively by showing almost identical works.”

For a few years now, people have complained that dealers have been selling or reserving work by sending collectors images of what will be on view in Basel well before the fair opens. That discussion grew louder this week. “Preselling should be forbidden,” said Philippe Ségalot, a private New York dealer whose antics in years past — including hiring a Hollywood makeup artist to disguise him so he could sneak into the fair before everyone and snap up the best works — have become Art Basel legend.

“If I had done that this year,” Mr. Ségalot said, “there would have been nothing to buy.”

George Liindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Pharrell Williams Gets Happy About Art" Inti Landauro

Pharrell Williams —the rapper, record producer, fashion designer and hat-toting singer of pop smash-hit "Happy"—is diving head first into the Paris art scene, curating an exhibition of modern art at one of the city's premier galleries. Photo: Getty Images

Happiness is curating.

Pharrell Williams —the rapper, record producer, fashion designer and hat-toting singer of pop smash-hit "Happy"—is diving head first into the Paris art scene, curating an exhibition of modern art at one of the city's premier galleries.

Called "G I R L," like his most recent album, the show displays art produced by Mr. Williams's friends on the contemporary art scene, such as street artist JR and two artists known for mixing fine arts and Japanese pop culture, Takashi Murakami and a Japanese artist who goes by the name "Mr." Also in the show: Brooklyn-based painter-graphic designer KAWS, Belgian sculptor Johan Creten and French performer-sculptor Prune Nourry. The exhibition opened Tuesday and will close June 25.

                                  

Pharrell Williams at the press conference for the exhibition 'G I R L' at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris. Charlotte Gonzalez for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Williams's latest creative exploit is a cross-pollination of his different artistic worlds. "It says 'curating by Pharrell Williams,' but it should really be 'the education of Pharrell Williams,' because I'm just learning," said the musician.

French gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, whom Mr. Williams met in 2007, introduced him to the world of art. The idea for the "G I R L" art show came after Mr. Williams gave the album of the same title to Mr. Perrotin. Both men played with the idea of accompanying the album's launch with an art show, but the huge success of "Happy" brought the record launch ahead by two months.

Mr. Williams isn't a total novice. The musician, age 41, has already created art pieces himself and collaborated with artists on a couple of projects. His first artwork—a series of chairs with human-shape legs, made with the support of Mr. Perrotin—drew positive reviews. He then met several artists, some of whom he ended up working with on projects, as often happens with other musicians.

Photos: Pharrell Williams's Paris Art Show

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Pharrell Williams in front of Takashi Murakami's 'Portrait of Pharrell and Helen - Dance,' 2014. Charlotte Gonzalez for The Wall Street Journal

With Mr. Perrotin and his Galerie Perrotin team, Mr. Williams selected and commissioned art pieces around three themes, building in just 50 days a collection that spreads over two floors of an old townhouse in the chic Marais neighborhood in Paris.

First come art pieces inspired by the singer and made for the show by other artists. There's a tribute to women by a diverse array of artists with varying artistic and political views. Finally, Mr. Williams has picked works by female artists inspired by their relationship to their own bodies.

Being the subject of artworks feels "weird," said Mr. Williams. He worked on some of those pieces, including a collaboration with American artist Rob Pruitt on a couch covered with drawings related to Mr. Williams's career. The pieces of that section include a cast of the singer made of resin and covered with broken glass, by Daniel Arsham. The work required Mr. Williams to stand motionless for several hours, and breathing through a straw for a long period.

Other artworks focus on the music and videos: A painting by Japanese artist Mr. depicts Mr. Williams as a manga-style character dancing amid girls from a host of countries.

While he doesn't see himself as an activist—"I make no apology for my affinity for women"—Mr. Williams says he is a firm supporter of gender equality and doesn't hesitate to speak in favor of causes he considers worthwhile. On Twitter last week, he spoke out for the Iranian youths jailed for posting a video of themselves dancing to "Happy."

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "His Own Private Mythology" @wsj by Karen Wilkin

'Bye and Bye' (2002) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Houston

Those of us who spend a lot of time looking at art can usually anticipate what we are going to see. We've made the effort to get to the exhibition, in the first place, because we know the artist's work or have a particular interest in the period or culture under review, and we've often already read the press materials. We don't often come upon shows without foreknowledge or expectations, and when we do, that serendipity is no guarantee that we'll be excited by our discovery. Sometimes, though, the unexpected is thrilling, as it was when I was recently in Houston. A curator friend at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston whisked me off to preview an exhibition about to open at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, down the street. The artist, Trenton Doyle Hancock, she said, was meeting us there.

The name was dimly familiar to me from Whitney Biennials some years ago, and, I thought, from something at the Studio Museum in Harlem, but I couldn't conjure up an image. "R. Crumb meets Philip Guston," my friend said, helpfully, as she steered me into "Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing" and introduced me to a sturdy youngish African-American man with chic glasses and a graying beard. Hours later, I was still deeply engrossed in conversation with Mr. Hancock and moving slowly among the many, often obsessively detailed works in the show, beginning to recognize characters, following tangles of sinister vegetation and reading oblique texts. I was not only compelled by the artist's inventive command of mark and tone, but also completely caught up in his uncanny, invented worlds, fascinated by his sometimes raucous, sometimes wrenching, sometimes hilarious private mythology.

Organized in sections devoted to key aspects of Mr. Hancock's evolution, beginning with some astonishingly accomplished boyhood efforts, the installation at CAMH first confronts us with an enormous, mainly black-and-white "drawing," "Bye and Bye" (2002). The dense fabric of delicate lines and patches of hatched tone translate Jackson Pollock's pulsating linear expanses into a completely vernacular idiom. It's rather like the work of the obsessed, supremely gifted 10-year-old boy that Mr. Hancock once was, rather than a 28-year-old art-school graduate, albeit a 10-year-old possessed of a fearless approach to scale and a completely adult degree of sophistication; the more time we spend with the work, the more sophistication dominates. Rowdy images begin to assert themselves: engaging and not so engaging critters of all descriptions, gathered around a sort of skeletal tree with dense, tangled branches, crowned by a confrontational skull. As we explore this enigmatic scene and note the extraordinary variety of marks with which it is made, we discover more wildlife among the dark, hatched tree trunks and start to notice the repeated words "bye and bye" scattered across the image. Suddenly, the whole thing reveals itself as an obscure ritual, changing the way we read the related large works installed nearby. "These are part of the Mound series," Mr. Hancock tells me. "It's been going on for some years."

The Mounds are major players in the artist's invented cosmology, benevolent meat-eating creatures locked in a ferocious, ongoing battle with mean-spirited, nasty Vegans who, among other unpleasant attributes, are unable to see color. Confrontations between the two tribes, often involving elaborate transformations and elaborate machinery, shown at different times in the continuing combat, form another section of the show, while, elsewhere, a Mound-Vegan story, rich in wordplay and written in bold capitals, covers an entire wall. (Hancock is a connoisseur of anagrams and word games as well as visual complexities; just as he likes to conflate the visual languages of comic books and high modernism, he enjoys playing with the verbal, even turning his scores from an online word game into wallpaper.)

Another important figure in Mr. Hancock's mythic world is the stocky, barrel-chested "Torpedo Boy," part alter-ego, part superhero. He appears first in those boyhood sketches, holding a wonderful shaggy bear over his head. Most recently, he is featured in 30 beautiful, unsettling drawings, with cut-out texts below, itemizing racially loaded events in the history of Paris, Texas, where Mr. Hancock was raised. Here, Torpedo Boy meets Guston's Klansmen, with disquieting results, leading to a cliff-hanger finish. The series, Mr. Hancock says, bears witness to the fact that his home town fairgrounds, which he viewed, when young, as a desirable place to visit, were the site of horrendous public lynchings of African-American men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mr. Hancock's exquisite command of line almost obviates his brutal imagery, heightening the tension and unease that his images provoke.

Other sections of the show focus on Mr. Hancock's permutations of the self-portrait, often in relation to his mythologies, and on his experiments with animating line drawings of his characters' heads. And much, much more. There's a lot to look at, since everything shares the complexity and richness of the first works we encounter. Born in 1974, Mr. Hancock is hardly the only artist of his generation today producing work in which sheer effort and time expended are important components, but unlike many of his colleagues, he never makes that effort seem an end in itself. Mr. Hancock's ravishing drawing skills are always in the service of compelling, mysterious, often disturbing narratives that subtly comment on current issues in wholly visual ways. After this unplanned, fortunate encounter, I'll be watching attentively for his future work.

Ms. Wilkin is a critic and independent curator