The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Warrior” had a rapid turnover at auctions. Credit Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In one striking example, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Warrior” sold three times at auction between 2005 and 2012, the painting’s price soaring during those seven years by 450 percent, to nearly $9 million.

In another, at Christie’s this May, an Alex Israel sky painting drew over $1 million, more than 10 times what paintings from this series fetched when they were created less than two years ago.

Such soaring prices and quick resales, especially of work by emerging artists, have fueled a perception that a new breed of collectors, fond of flipping art as they would a stock, have overtaken the market. In this view, widely held in the art world, work once valued for its lofty, aesthetic appeal has become a mere commodity, just another asset class for hedge-fund millionaires and others to cash in.

But separate statistical analyses conducted for The New York Times by two companies that specialize in evaluating art market data indicate that the hand wringing may be premature.

Yes, for the past few years, postwar and contemporary art has been reselling at auction faster than, say, a decade ago, the data show. But the pace last year was only slightly faster than it was in the mid-1990s, signaling that the reselling may be just the latest iteration of a historical cycle, not a lasting change.

A Quick Turnover? Nothing New

Art has turned over more quickly in recent years, according to an analysis by Tutela Capital, a firm that tracks auction sales. But the trend is not unprecedented — contemporary and postwar artwork that was resold in 2013 was owned for an average of 3.1 years, compared with 3.6 years in 1995.

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Average number of years a contemporary or postwar artwork was owned before being resold at auction

6 YEARS

4

2

0

’96

’98

’00

’02

’04

’06

’08

’10

’12

YEAR OF AUCTION

After a few years, during which the pace of reselling accelerated, the data show that owners of postwar and contemporary works are holding onto their artwork longer again. “After all I had read about flipping, when looking at the market itself, it’s really business as usual,” said Fabian Bocart, a founder of Tutela Capital S.A., a consultancy in Brussels that prepared one of the analyses for The Times.

“Reselling art at auction is not a new phenomenon,” he wrote in the report, “or at least, not very different from what has existed since 1995.”

At the request of The Times, Tutela Capital and Beautiful Asset Advisors, a New York company best known for its Mei Moses family of indexes, reviewed art market data from 1995 through 2013 to see if there had been a noticeable shortening in the time owners held onto art. The discussion of the issue has largely focused on the postwar and contemporary markets, where there is the perception that a commodities trading approach has become prevalent. This view has been fueled by a drumbeat of headlines about flipping; the emergence of companies like ArtRank, which give “buy” and “sell” ratings for works; and the high profile of collectors who buy pieces by new artists in bulk and sell them for a handsome profit.

“Many buyers today seem eager to buy the ‘new kid on the block’ — the hot, young, talked-about artist — for a low price and, in a short time, put the work up for sale, anticipating to receive a multiple of what they paid,” said Angela Westwater of the Sperone Westwater gallery.

At Israel Lund’s New York solo debut in June 2013, for example, an untitled yellow-and-gray painting sold for $7,500; this May it sold for $125,000 at Christie’s. Similar examples abound for recently created works by artists like Lucien Smith and Oscar Murillo.

But the data indicate that contemporary works appearing at auction within three years of their creation are not coming to auction faster than in the past, and that such flipping remains very much the exception, not the rule. Though more works come up for sale each year, the percentage of these works was essentially the same last year, less than 2 percent, as in 2007, Tutela Capital found.

Beautiful Asset did another review of the art market, using a different measure, and reached a similar conclusion: While, historically, the percentage of works resold within five years is higher now than it was, say, two decades ago, that percentage has been decreasing since 2008.

“It reached a high right before and after the financial crisis,” said Michael Moses, a founder of Beautiful Asset, “and it has been declining since.”

Beautiful Asset tracks sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which by themselves account for about three-quarters of the value of the auction market worldwide but a smaller amount of the volume. Tutela Capital collects data from more than 2,500 auction houses. Both use the provenances supplied at the time of auction to track prior sales of a work, including those, in the case of Beautiful Asset, that occur at houses where data are not routinely collected.

The analysts’ methodologies were reviewed by two experts, Stephen T. Ziliak, professor of economics at Roosevelt University, and Alan F. Karr, director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Both experts found the methods sound.

“Ultimately, I think the market is reassuringly stable,” said Thomas Galbraith, the managing director of auctions at Paddle8, an online auction house. He said the scourge of the speculative investor has long haunted the art market.

“If it’s not the hedge funds or venture capitalists, then in the ’80s it was the Japanese,” he said. “And if it wasn’t them, then, at the turn of the century, it was American industrialists. It’s a cycle, it’s repeating, and in a way it’s very reassuring. I don’t think it’s something that we necessarily need to be frightened of, because we’ve seen this story before.”

Some of the fuss over flipping is related to its reputation as a vulgar way to collect art. Old World moneyed families were often embarrassed to be seen selling things, veteran dealers said, and galleries have long frowned on flipping. Wanting to control the market for their artists, dealers prefer to sell to collectors who will hold onto their purchases, worried that, while frequent resales may boost prices initially, they can hurt an artist’s staying power and ultimately devalue artwork.

Artists said that frequent resales of their works can generate creativity-stifling pressure to produce more of the same to feed the market. And the pace can be unsettling, even if prices rise in the short term.

From 2006 to 2007, Peter Doig’s painting “White Canoe” sold twice, drawing about $10 million at auction the second time around, the most paid for one of his works at the time.

“I was very nervous” after the sale, Mr. Doig said in an interview from his home in Trinidad. “I felt that things would change for me, that people would talk about that rather than the work.”

“It made it more difficult to paint for me,” he added. “I became more cynical. I just wondered why I was doing it: ‘Am I doing it to make rich people richer?’ ”

“White Canoe” had initially been sold at auction in 2006 by the prominent art collector Charles Saatchi — one of seven Doig paintings he sold through Sotheby’s that year. Mr. Doig said he was among the artists who had stopped selling to Mr. Saatchi because of his reputation for pumping and then dumping artwork.

“Everybody knows that’s what he does,” Mr. Doig said.

But if Mr. Saatchi is a flipper, he certainly does not embrace the title. In an article he wrote for The Guardian in 2011, he excoriated newcomers who he said had changed the culture of collecting.

“Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar,” he wrote. “It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.”

The data analyses, however, indicate that, although such collectors may be conspicuous, they are not yet commonplace.

Beautiful Asset found that contemporary and postwar artworks resold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s last year had been held by their owners an average of 11.2 years, the highest level in six years and a reflection of behavior similar to that exhibited in the late 1990s.

Major auction houses said they had not performed calculations to test the flipping thesis but said they believed the prevalence of that buying behavior had been overstated. “The speculative art buyer, or ‘flipper,’ motivated purely by short-term investment potential, is the anomaly in our experience,” Christie’s said in a statement.

One factor that slows collectors who might be interested in flipping art is the size of the fees they pay auction houses to purchase a work. Someone, for example, who has bid $1 million for a painting is typically charged another $205,000 in fees, known as the buyer’s premium. So the art has to be held long enough to appreciate and cover those costs, a situation not unlike that faced by homeowners when calculating whether it makes sense to refinance, given the closing costs.

Mr. Bocart of Tutela Capital said that people alarmed by changes in the art market might be reading too much into the idea that a new breed of collectors is transforming the culture.

“They see bankers and hedge-fund managers coming into the market, and they have a preconceived idea of what they will do,” he said. “But they’re not the rogues or vultures they imagine.”       

George Lindemann Journal - "Taking Wing in a Time of Extremis" @nytimes By HOLLAND COTTER

Jim Hodges’s Emotional Palette

CreditStewart Cairns for The New York Times

BOSTON — In the 21st century, we tend to talk about new art in terms of medium and style: Performance is back, painting is back, Pop is back, and so on. But for roughly a decade, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, the emphasis was on ideas and emotions. As racial and gender politics navigated the culture wars, and the toll taken by AIDS grew overwhelming, content often trumped form. In a lesson learned from feminism, personal history and feeling were O.K. Even spirituality, which the New York art world handles with tongs, became an admissible subject.

Jim Hodges’s career as an artist began in that in-extremis time. Mr. Hodges was shaped by it and helped shape the art that came out of it. Gay, raised Roman Catholic, living in the AIDS war zone that was New York City, he favored craft-based forms, ephemeral and found materials, and images — flowers, butterflies — traditionally associated with mortality and transience. You’ll find all of this in “Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take,” a taut career survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art here. You’ll also find work that expands beyond the historical moment to which this artist is usually critically confined.

Mr. Hodges was born in Spokane, Wash., in 1957, studied art in regional schools and graduated with an M.F.A. in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1986. At that point, he lost interest in painting, a shift that seems more or less to have coincided with his coming out. He says in the catalog interview that he was “lost in the hugeness of painting,” was unable to find a singular voice in it. And he needed that voice urgently. He was changing, and so was the subculture he was now fully part of. Both were under serious threat.

Some of the earliest things in the show are experiments in addressing these realities. For the 1989 piece called “Deformed,” he sliced a scuffed-up Bonwit Teller shopping bag along its seams, splayed it out and pinned it to the wall to form a cross. The bag itself carried some gay coding: Andy Warhol had once designed window displays for this women’s department store. The cross has an obvious religious connotation but also suggests a medical emblem, the Red Cross. The bunches of violets printed on the bag (not pansies, as they are identified in a wall label) become both floral tributes and funeral bouquets.

A small 1993 collage, made from store-bought plastic decals, of an eagle descending among butterflies was intended as a homage to a friend, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS three years later. (In 2008 Mr. Hodges turned the collage image into a large stained-glass sculpture, also in the show.) And a 1992 installation called “What’s Left” was conceived with his own possible demise in mind.

It consists of a pile of his clothes — jeans, shoes, briefs, black leather belt — lying on the gallery floor as if dropped in a quick undressing, for sleep, for sex, for a shower. The impression of spontaneity is countered, though, by an additional element: a spider web, woven from fine metal chains, that stretches over the pile, implying that the wearer had long since vanished.

Over the years, Mr. Hodge’s work has been routinely identified, and sometimes dismissed, as a lament over AIDS, but this is not his only subject. Childhood is another. “Good Luck,” from 1987, is nothing more than a black wool ski mask cut open and flattened out. Hung high on a wall, it peers down, scary-funny, like a Halloween spook.

The tall curtain of stitched-together nylon, chiffon and silk headscarves called “Here’s Where We Will Stay” (1995) is an elegant shout-out to his mother and grandmother, who taught him to sew. It also evokes a gay kid’s captivation with the hidden world of delicate fabrics stored away in his mother’s scented bureau drawers. And the mnemonic power of scent itself summons the presence of Mr. Hodge’s own mother in an installation he made after her death in 2006.

Called “The Dark Gate,” it’s a big walk-in, sepulcherlike wooden box encasing a circle of sharp steel spikes. Each spike is meant to suffuse the air with his mother’s favorite perfume and the scent that Mr. Hodges was wearing the day she died. The piece is overdetermined to the point of heaviness (and I picked up no trace of a scent). But as part of a larger idea of recapturing childhood, and the sting of seductions and losses that start early and never really stop, it makes sense.

A decade earlier, the artist had, in a roundabout way, returned to painting, or something like it. In 1997 he glued a mirror to a canvas, smashed it with a hammer and exhibited the cracked results. Thereafter, he created a more controlled fracture effect by piecing together small squares of mirrored glass into mosaic panels. These panels reappear here and there in the galleries, refracting light, disco ball fashion, and creating distorted images of quite different works from other decades.

The curators — Jeffrey Grove of the Dallas Museum of Art, Olga Viso of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Anna Stothart of the Institute of Contemporary Art — have arranged the show by theme rather than date, a good idea. This gives the episodic visual texture of Mr. Hodges’s career a sense of consistency, which, indeed, it has. The natural world, it turns out, is a binding presence through 30 years. It’s there early, and gently, in the flowers and butterflies, and dramatically — operatically, even — in “Untitled (One Day It All Comes True),” finished last year: a mural-size picture of a roiling cloudscape embroidered entirely from thousands of scraps of blue denim.

What, exactly, are we seeing? Nuclear clouds or Constable clouds? End times or a universe coming, Romantically, into being? Much of Mr. Hodges’s art walks an anxious line between fatalism and uplift. He seems to be, by temperament, a mourner, but one with edges and elbows. He has a shrewd sense of humor, a way of mocking himself through materials: all those recycled jeans, and all that crazy hands-on sewing! And if work slips around from one form to another, how refreshing to see someone not turning out product.

In the end, he makes no great claims for his art. His career is less like an orchestrated score than like a diary of doing and being. It’s easy to point out the influence of other artists on him — James Lee Byars, Roni Horn, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek and Richard Tuttle — and Mr. Hodges is the first to name them. Less well documented is the extent to which he has been a role model for a younger generation. If some of the art in his retrospective comes across as wanly familiar in its effects, it’s because so many people have learned from him since the post-plague years of the late 1990s, though you probably wouldn’t see that if you weren’t aware of, or didn’t care about, that history.

George Lindemann Journal - "Miami artist who destroyed Ai Weiwei vase at museum gets probation, must pay $10,000" @miamiherald by David Ovalle

A Miami artist who smashed a valuable piece by celebrated artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum must serve 18 months of probation and pay back $10,000 in restitution.

In a plea deal announced Wednesday, Maximo Caminero must also engage in 100 hours of community service teaching art classes as a result of a self-professed act of protest.

“I was wrong,” Caminero said in a letter of apology released Wednesday. “I think about what I did every day and I find it hard to live with what I did because it still haunts me.”

In a case that stunned the art world, Caminero in February smashed a vase painted by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who represented that the item was hundreds of years old. Police initially estimated the artwork was worth $1 million but the actual cost turned out to be much lower.

Caminero told the arresting officer that he smashed the artwork as a protest on behalf of local artists who he felt were slighted in favor of international artists at the new $131 million complex on Biscayne Bay.

The vase was part of a politically charged exhibition of Chinese culture and art.

The Beijing-born Ai Weiwei, 56, is a sculptor, designer and documentary-maker who has not been permitted to leave China following a 2011 arrest for his political activism. Ai Weiwei condemned the Chinese government for actions he saw as corrupt following a 2008 earthquake in Szechuan.

According to a Miami police report, Caminero ignored a security staffer’s order to put the piece down before smashing it.

He was charged with first-degree criminal mischief, a third-degree felony.

In his apology letter, Caminero stressed that he did not realize that, at the time he destroyed the vase, the museum was also exhibiting the work of five local artists. The museum is also planning a collection of six other local artists.

A lawyer representing the museum, Lilly Ann Sanchez, said “we’re glad this is finally over.”

George Lindemann Journal - "  Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art Looks at Gold" @wsj Jenny Che

An exhibit opening Aug. 8 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists. Elmgreen & Dragset/Cortesi Contemporary, Lugano

From an ancient Greek vase depicting the mythical golden fleece to Andy Warhol's painting of Marilyn Monroe against a gilded backdrop, gold and art have been inseparable. Even those artists who have used gold to symbolize excess have raised their art's market value just by incorporating the precious metal.

That paradox plays out in some of the works on view in "Gold," an exhibition that opened Friday at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. The show spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists with a number of provocative takes on the metal.

Gold "inspires things like power and passion and greed, and commemorates things like weddings and the Olympic Games," said curator                                               José Diaz. "There's this jubilant aspect of gold, and dark, sinister references to gold."

The Florida exhibition highlights both aspects. Glenn Kaino's "19.83" uses gold to retell Tommie Smith's record-breaking run in the 200-meter at the 1968 Olympics. (The title refers to his time in seconds.) The installation features stills from the race and a gold-plated replica of the platform that Mr. Smith stood on when he received his gold medal and raised his fist in support of civil rights.

Brooklyn-based artist Fernando Mastrangelo addressed the paradox that works criticizing gold's value are worth more if they incorporate the metal. He took a splashy decorative medallion from the early 20th century and cast a new 6-foot version in crystal sugar and gold dragees (confectionary ornaments that are sometimes edible). "As an artist, you're placing your own work within that value structure" of gold, Mr. Mastrangelo said. By using low-end materials, he intends to undercut the value of the original medallion.

Some artists in the show took the opposite route by elevating mundane objects of consumption. Dario Escobar's gold leaf-covered McDonald's cup from 1999 is on view, as is a gold-plated trash can from Sylvie Fleury.

From artist Chris Burden —well known for, among other works, a 1971 performance piece in which an assistant shot him in the arm—come bullets that appear even more menacing wrapped in 22-carat gold. French-born Eric Baudart has sprayed gold paint over stacked street posters, giving them a deceptively solid metal look.

In "Temptation" by the Danish-Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset, whose work has been shown in such venues as London's Victoria & Albert Museum, an arm protruding from the wall clutches a bag of coins. The sculpture, made of resin and 24-carat beaten gold, was inspired by a relief mural, depicting a smiling man as he handed money to officials, outside an old tax collection office at the city hall in Munich.

It is a reminder of how people are expected to contribute to society, said Mr. Dragset in an email, but at the same time, "we all seem to have different opinions on what money represents and what a common good is and who should share in our riches."

For Carlos Betancourt, the beauty of gold underlines its power. His "Amulet for Light I (gold)" is a photograph, tinted gold, of his family's ornate Puerto Rican amulets. Mr. Betancourt's work focuses on memory. "These are personal objects that I have empowered with gold," he said.

Gold "never loses its value no matter how it's cast or used," said Mr. Mastrangelo. "So the artist almost becomes irrelevant in terms of gold. It's such a freaking cool material—if I had more access to it."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lindemann, christopherfountain www.forbes.com/profile/george-lindemann, https://twitter.com/BassMuseumPres, http://www.nova.edu/alumni/profiles/george_lindemann.html, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/investors/george-lindemann-net-worth, george-lindemann-jr.com, George Lindemann & family, george lindemann journal, shark tales, aclu, savedade, http://www.bassmuseum.org/blog/george-lindemann-wins-inaugural-better-beach-awards, horse, art, art education, forbes, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/lindemann.html

George Lindemann Journal - "Isn't There a Better Way?" @wsj by Lee Rosenbaum

The 145-year-old institution has long suffered from financial difficulties and chronic mismanagement. Associated Press

In last week's courtroom drama over the fate of the endangered Corcoran Gallery of Art and its College of Art + Design, a crucial protagonist was missing from the petitioners' case for dismembering that venerable institution.

No one spoke for the art.

Charles Patrizia, the Corcoran trustees' lawyer, presented testimony by only three witnesses before resting his unconvincing case for divvying up the 145-year-old institution's financial, capital and artistic assets and real estate between George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art. This last-gasp gambit arose from desperate circumstances: The Corcoran has been seriously hobbled by chronic operating deficits and a revolving-door directorship, not to mention deferrals of necessary repairs and upgrades to its architecturally acclaimed Beaux Arts building.

Testifying for the trustees last week, in hearings held by District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Robert Okun, were Lauren Stack, the Corcoran's chief operating officer for the past three years, whose admitted lack of prior professional experience related to either art or museums may have contributed to the Corcoran's problems; Sean O'Connor, a development consultant to the Corcoran; and Steven Knapp, president of George Washington University, which stands to acquire the Corcoran's college and real estate. No Corcoran art professional was heard.

Also notably absent was Earl Powell III, director of the National Gallery. His institution, under the proposed arrangement, would be allowed to acquire whatever it wanted from the Corcoran's 17,000-piece collection of American and European art, which includes such touchstones as Gilbert Stuart's "George Washington," Albert Bierstadt's "Mount Corcoran" (named for the museum's founder), George Bellows's "Forty-Two Kids" and Edgar Degas's "The Dance Class."

The National Gallery has said it would probably keep more than half of the Corcoran's holdings, dispersing whatever it didn't want to other art museums and "appropriate entities," with preference for local institutions. This Washington-first policy helped secure the acquiescence of the D.C. attorney general, who is charged with defending the public interest and the charitable intent of donors. The Corcoran's landmark building would be left a selection of works "that are identified historically with the 17th Street landmark structure," according to the press release that announced the signing of the deal last May. Those works will be showcased in a token "Legacy Gallery"—an ironic appellation given the utter decimation of founder William Wilson Corcoran's legacy. The National Gallery would also get space in the Corcoran building for temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.

When I asked Mr. Patrizia why he didn't call a witness from the National Gallery, he said that this was unnecessary because those who have legal standing to oppose the deal had "raised no issue about the capacity and ability of the National Gallery of Art to undertake and fulfill all of the responsibilities under the . . . agreement." That same reasoning would also have obviated the need to call Mr. Knapp, who spoke at great length.

A more plausible explanation is that no arts professional could have convincingly argued that the dispersal of the Corcoran's collection and the dissolution of its museum adhere to the donor's intent "as nearly as possible," which is the defining requirement for a cy-pres petition, such as the Corcoran's, to be granted. Mr. Corcoran's 1869 deed, from which the trustees of his institution are now seeking to deviate, explicitly mandates "the perpetual establishment and maintenance of a Public Gallery and Museum" to house his holdings. But the redefined Corcoran would cease to be a museum and most of Mr. Corcoran's art would permanently leave the building.

This case bears some resemblance to previous cy-pres proceedings over another collector-founded art gallery and school—the Barnes Foundation. Both court fights involved opponents' charges that the institution's life-threatening financial difficulties were caused, in part, by its own mismanagement.

But there is one crucial difference: The Barnes's court-allowed move to Philadelphia kept that institution's celebrated collection completely intact. The Corcoran's proposal would break up an American art trove that ranks with that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, as described by Darrel Sewell, former longtime American-art curator at the PMA. In written comments to the attorney general, Mr. Sewell asserted that "like the collection of Albert C. Barnes," the Corcoran's trove "is unique and could not be replicated today. As a totality, it has meaning and significance beyond the individual works."

How, then, might the Corcoran and its collection survive and thrive?

Two witnesses called by Andrew Tulumello, the lawyer for the opponents of the George Washington University/National Gallery of Art plan, suggested options: Wallace Loh, president of the University of Maryland, is willing to reopen his failed negotiations with the Corcoran to forge an alliance that he said would maintain the Corcoran's independence and provide financial support. Philanthropist Wayne Reynolds, former chairman of Ford's Theatre in Washington, renewed his previously spurned quest to become the Corcoran's board chairman. This time, he named 23 deep-pocketed potential board members and supporters who he said would help jump-start the Corcoran's financial recovery under his leadership. As reported by the Washington Post, he indicated he might sell works "nobody ever sees" to fund new acquisitions, particularly of contemporary art.

But suggesting that the Corcoran should now entertain the same suitors it previously had reason to reject is probably a nonstarter. Instead of negotiating from weakness, the Corcoran should first focus on how to build on its strengths. Bolstering the board with munificent members is crucial. Notwithstanding his power play, Mr. Reynolds is to be thanked for identifying hot prospects.

As occurred with the endangered American Folk Art Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts, the Corcoran's near-death experience has put potential funders on notice that it's now or never. Mutually beneficial alliances with established institutions (including less sweeping arrangements with George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art, or perhaps with others, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum) should be pursued, but only if they enhance, not eviscerate, the Corcoran.

First and foremost, the Corcoran Gallery needs a dynamic, experienced director who believes in the institution, embraces challenges and has a compelling creative vision. A director's search was under way before the trustees settled on an interim leader, Peggy Loar. The search should resume with renewed urgency.

David Levy, the Corcoran's president and director from 1991 to 2005, whose failed capital campaign for a pricey Frank Gehry addition was a serious blow to donor confidence, suggested a way forward in a 2012 Washington Post opinion piece. The Corcoran, he said, should position itself as "Washington's museum, serving this unique metropolitan region . . . while creatively reaching out to its inner-city neighborhoods." Washington-area artists should be an integral part of this local strategy.

The Corcoran already has cash to keep it afloat while navigating through rough waters, including about $35 million that, if Judge Okun approves the current deal, would be handed over to George Washington University for renovations, and some $8 million to $10 million to be used for donor-restricted purposes. Mr. Knapp testified that about $25 million would suffice to fund the most desperately needed repairs and upgrades.

For now, the courtroom drama continues, with additional witnesses to be called by the deal's opponents. If Judge Okun does the right thing, he'll rule that the Corcoran's proposal doesn't meet the basic requirements of cy-pres. It needs to devise a better plan to fulfill Mr. Corcoran's stated goal of "encouraging American genius."

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Corcoran’s Merger Plan Draws Fire in Court Hearing" @nytimes RANDY KENNEDY

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, above, is the topic of a contentious court battle in Washington. Credit Kevin Wolf/Associated Press        

WASHINGTON — Two widely divergent views of the financial troubles of the Corcoran Gallery of Art — which is seeking legal permission to alter its trust and dissolve itself through a merger with the National Gallery of Art — emerged in sometimes contentious testimony in the District of Columbia Superior Court on Wednesday.

The Corcoran, one of the nation’s oldest privately supported museums, has struggled for years to raise money. But the opponents of the merger plan — who include students at its art college and employees who say they could be harmed by the dissolution — during the hearing depicted a board of trustees that in recent years has done little to try to turn around the institution’s fortunes and has squandered money on consultants while not following their advice.

Andrew S. Tulumello, the opposition’s lawyer, cited a 2008 consultant’s study that found, as he described it, “that something was broken with fund-raising at the board level.” In the years after the study, the board never filled all 18 seats that its structure allowed. As Mr. Tulumello depicted the situation during his questioning of the museum’s leadership, the trustees seemed to function more as caretakers for an institution that was already assumed not to have a future.

Harry F. Hopper III, the museum’s chairman, who testified for a second day in support of the plan to dissolve the Corcoran as a stand-alone museum, said that a broken fund-raising mechanism was a symptom, not a cause, of troubles at the gallery. Years of poor finances, which had led to serious structural problems with the museum’s building, a landmark near the White House, became a spiral, scaring off significant donors. The recession, he added, made the climate for giving even more difficult.

“I personally had conversations with a lot of high net-worth individuals that were not presented to the board because they were not willing to step in because of the financial stress of the institution,” said Mr. Hopper, a venture capitalist. Of the gallery’s decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on management consultants, he added, “The only way that we could get our hands on the situation — where we had a bank put us in default and freeze accounts — was to have a SWAT team come in from an outside firm.”

Earlier financial problems were only a “fire drill” for what the gallery encountered over the last several years, he said.

Mr. Hopper defended the board’s work to stabilize the museum. “When it looked like the institution was just having trouble finding the runway to exist, I think we did a pretty good job,” he said.

The plan for the National Gallery to absorb the Corcoran and for George Washington University to take over the Corcoran’s art college has been presented by officials of the three institutions as the only way to keep the heart of the Corcoran’s collection intact and to salvage its legacy.

Thus, the Corcoran is seeking court permission to alter the 1869 deed of its founder, the banker William Corcoran, who gave his collection and money for the “perpetual establishment” of a “public gallery and museum.” Opponents contend that the Corcoran would exist as little more than a name under the merger and that its historic building would no longer function as a museum.

Under the deal, announced in May, the Corcoran would cede its collection of more than 17,000 pieces, rich in American art, to the National Gallery, which would preserve a “Legacy Gallery” within the Corcoran’s building on 17th Street, and organize its own exhibitions of modern and contemporary art there.

Works that the National Gallery could not accommodate would be dispersed to other institutions, with a preference for keeping them in Washington. The Corcoran’s building would become the property of the university, which would use it for classes for students of the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Judge Robert D. Okun will continue to hear testimony in the case Thursday and next week.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lindemann, christopherfountain www.forbes.com/profile/george-lindemann, https://twitter.com/BassMuseumPres, http://www.nova.edu/alumni/profiles/george_lindemann.html, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/investors/george-lindemann-net-worth, george-lindemann-jr.com, George Lindemann & family, george lindemann journal, shark tales, aclu, savedade, http://www.bassmuseum.org/blog/george-lindemann-wins-inaugural-better-beach-awards, horse, art, art education, forbes, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/lindemann.html

The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Tom Friedman: ‘Paint and Styrofoam" @nytimes by ROBERTA SMITH

“Toxic Green Luscious Green,” a 2014 work by Tom Friedman in his show “Paint and Styrofoam.” Credit Tom Friedman and Luhring Augustine, New York

The artist Tom Friedman tends to blow our minds and then move on, rarely repeating himself. (A starburst made of toothpicks or a realistic fly, having seemingly alighted on the corner of a pedestal, come to mind.) Nearly each artwork is some one-off feat of concept, technique and common materials. So it’s unexpected to see Mr. Friedman staying in one place as he does here and to realize that the effect is even more intense.

This show is suffused with the tension of trying to reconcile what you see with the exhibition’s title: “Paint and Styrofoam.” Whether painting or sculpture, every work in this show uses these two materials. Their names buzz around in your head with almost no place to land, as you try to figure out where one material stops and the other begins, or what you are looking at in the first place. This is especially true of the monochrome, seemingly abstract paintings that line the walls. (Fittingly, one work consists of a tiny eyeball wedged into a corner, easy to overlook.)

Minus the show’s title, other sculptures are determinedly, but also conventionally, trompe l’oeil, especially the wood stool, guitar and disconnected microphone of “Moot” and the purple (Jeff Koons-like) balloon of “Purple Balloon.” But “Pepto Bismol Pink” — an attenuated ganglion of vaguely intestinal shape — deviates. A divot in its white pedestal reveals Styrofoamish blue, probably before you even focus on it.

Each of the paintings has a different subject, effect and surface, and a title alluding to its particular secrets. The cream-colored “Kid” presents a fastidious canvas weave, a strip frame, a big swipe of paint and a tiny ball (a recurring motif), intimating a smiling (or smiley) face. The swirling brushwork of the dark blue “Night” yields part of van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” just as the artist’s visage can be found in the bright yellow of “Self Portrait.”

And so on, from one vision-testing surface to the next. The simplest is “Blue Styrofoam Seascape,” whose central ridge coalesces into a perfectly atmospheric horizon. And Mr. Friedman breaks free of flatness in “Blue” and “Toxic Green Luscious Green,” creating bas-relief pileups of objects, trash and words that include Styrofoam peanuts — previously a favored material — and other references to his singular career.       

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lindemann, christopherfountain www.forbes.com/profile/george-lindemann, https://twitter.com/BassMuseumPres, http://www.nova.edu/alumni/profiles/george_lindemann.html, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/investors/george-lindemann-net-worth, george-lindemann-jr.com, George Lindemann & family, george lindemann journal, shark tales, aclu, savedade, http://www.bassmuseum.org/blog/george-lindemann-wins-inaugural-better-beach-awards, horse, art, art education, forbes, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/lindemann.html

A proposed expansion of the Frick Collection would eliminate a garden on East 70th Street. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission would do well to turn down the Frick Collection’s proposed expansion, which imagines replacing a prized garden on East 70th Street in Manhattan with a clumsy addition. The city should avoid another self-inflicted wound, and there are other options.

The plan, announced last month, ran into early headwinds. New Yorkers have seen the consequences of trustee restlessness and real estate magical thinking, which destroy or threaten to undo favorite buildings. Not so long ago, the Morgan Library & Museum, another Gilded Age landmark, built an addition that flopped. The New York Public Library wanted to disembowel its historic building at 42nd Street before thinking better of it.

The Museum of Modern Art’s demolition of the American Folk Art Museum building, a once-cherished institution but today the object of widespread derision, is probably what finally tipped some invisible scale of public tolerance against the culture of market capitalism and arrogant growth. The city’s truest anti-MoMA, the Frick becomes the latest front in a larger battle to prevent nonprofit outposts of civilization from falling prey to the bigger-is-better paradigm.

It’s not too late. The plan calls for opening to the public part of the museum’s second floor, long used as offices, and turning the circular music room, a distinctive and eccentric space dedicated to lectures and concerts, into a rectangular gallery for temporary shows. Of the 40,000 square feet the Frick wants to add, only 3,600 of it would be for showing art — the size of an oligarch’s wine cellar, in that neighborhood. That’s actually plenty. The Frick doesn’t need more room for art.

Otherwise the proposal calls for a new auditorium and for rationalizing back-of-the-house practical stuff like office space, classrooms, the conservation lab and wheelchair access, although while at it, the expansion includes a new boardroom, cafe and gift shop.

To accomplish all this, the current plan entails constructing a new tower on 70th Street in lieu of a gated garden that’s a civic gem to the east of the Frick mansion. The idea is essentially to extend the six-story Frick library building, with its Palladian entrance on 71st Street, all the way to 70th Street, linking it to the mansion via a stepped addition.

The garden, from 1977, is the only work in the city completed by the great British landscape architect Russell Page. It was conceived not to be entered but as a tableau to be viewed from the street and the museum’s reception hall. It occupies a narrow plot where the Frick acquired and tore down a townhouse with the intention of someday expanding on the site. Page took time to get the layout right: a rectangular pool, with floating lotus and white lilies in summer, surrounded by pea gravel paths and boxwood.

Very Zen, the garden has become one of those little New York treasures, flowering nearly year-round. Trees include late-blooming crab apple and Kentucky yellowwood. Page chose clematis and hydrangea to ornament the trellis, wisteria to climb the wall. It’s all a model of precision and proportion, a revelation and breather on the street: “a master class in restrained minimalism,” as Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, put it recently. It sets apart the mansion, reveals its layered additions, dapples the Frick in shade. At human scale, the garden exemplifies the sort of minor miracles New York manages to shoehorn into small spaces.

Naturally, it frustrates Frick officials no end that what was devised as a temporary amenity should now be an obstacle to its growth. But plenty of temporary works (the Eiffel Tower comes to mind) become permanent because they’re admired. Page did his job too well. Landscape preservationists, architects and others are rallying around the garden for good reason. They’ve been pleading for years that buildings shouldn’t trump spaces around them: Great public places and works of landscape architecture deserve to be treated like great buildings. They’re right.

Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director, argued the other day that the Frick already has another garden, and that Central Park is nearby. The expansion, he said, would replace Page’s garden with a smaller, new one.

The museum has three Vermeers, too. That’s not an argument for trading one in. And in this case, the trade just isn’t persuasive. The proposal looks banal and inelegant, extruding the library and the 70th street facade. The Frick has chosen to continue in Beaux-Arts style as if that might make the imbalanced bulk of its plan seem less obtrusive. In the right architects’ hands, maybe it could. In this case, it doesn’t.

The Frick has hired Davis Brody Bond, a fine New York firm but a curious choice to riff on the historic mansion designed for Henry Clay Frick a century ago by Carrère and Hastings. To that mansion, John Russell Pope devised ingenious and exquisite additions that turned the house into a museum during the 1930s. (He designed the great covered garden court, among other things.)

The reception hall, by the firm John Barrington Bayley, Harry van Dyke and G. Frederick Poehler, was added in the ’70s, a fussy, awkward Beaux-Arts pastiche that should serve as a cautionary tale to Frick officials hoping to follow in the footsteps of Hastings and Pope. Like Page’s garden, the annex would be demolished in the current plan.

The fact is that the Frick is perfectly well loved as is. People revere it precisely because it isn’t (yet) like all the museums that have been busily remaking themselves for big crowds and blockbuster shows. For a few months last year, an exhibition of Dutch pictures on loan from the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands turned the museum into something akin to an outlet mall on Black Friday. That’s not what the Frick does best.

It puts on small, smart shows; collects some art, albeit nothing like what it used to; and wants more people to use its storied art reference library. The expansion is also meant to give the library more room, notwithstanding that the neighborhood has other libraries specializing in art, and more and more of what used to make the Frick library a first-stop for art scholars and dealers is online or slowly heading there. At this point, the library averages 23 visitors a day.

Those other options? Leave well enough alone. In a climate of rampant expansionism, that’s unlikely, however.

The Frick might not get everything it wants. (Who does in New York?) But, alternately, it could open those second- floor rooms, swap the music room for a bread-and-butter exhibition gallery and build a new, larger auditorium under the Page garden, which could then be put back as it is.

That’s already a pretty radical step. The museum could also redo the mediocre 1970s ticket pavilion and explore adding a modest floor or two atop that new exhibition gallery, an idea Frick officials contemplated half a dozen years ago but abandoned because they thought it would get knocked down by the landmarks commission. The current proposal seems far less circumspect.

While it’s at it, the Frick would be remiss not to pursue the Berry-Hill Galleries space, up for sale in the townhouse next to the garden. I was told the asking price is around $20 million, astronomical for art, offices or seminar rooms, but the location can’t be beat, and in the long run, the Frick might be very sorry not to have bought it.

The really big move would be to redo from scratch the interior of the library building on 71st Street, leaving Pope’s landmark facade. I can hear the booing. But a smartly repurposed space (Modernist, even) might better serve the library in the 21st century and also the museum.

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Stephen Bury, the chief librarian, told me the other day that his priorities include keeping the Frick’s archives at hand along with rare and oversize books (the Frick already uses offsite storage) and gaining more and flexible spaces for visitors and scholars in residence. The Frick stacks, inflexible and purpose-built, aren’t historically significant like the ones in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. The library’s reading room is a charmer, but not a national treasure like the Rose Main Reading Room atop the Public Library stacks.

Putting the library building on the table seems at least worth debating if the trustees are hellbent on expansion. The building could be modestly extended into a space now used for air-conditioning and other mechanicals.

Mr. Bury raised the point that, in essence, gutting the library would sacrifice the reading room to save the garden. True. But if that’s the choice, here’s one vote to spare the garden.      

Tracey Emin's controversial artwork My Bed is to return to the Tate after selling for £2.2m earlier this month.

Count Christian Duerckheim, the piece's new owner, has agreed to loan the work "for a period of at least 10 years", said Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.

The 1998 work features an unmade bed and a floor littered with empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts and condoms.

It was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize and bought for £150,000 in 2000 by the art collector Charles Saatchi.

Count Duerckheim, a German industrialist, described the piece as "a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die".

"I am absolutely delighted that Count Duerckheim has agreed to loan such an important work," said Sir Nicholas.

"We look forward to displaying the work [and] creating an opportunity for visitors to see a work that now has iconic status."

Emin made My Bed in her London council flat in 1998

Speaking last month, Emin said she was hopeful that My Bed would end up in a museum after it was sold at auction.

"The best possible result is that an amazing benefactor buys it and then donates it to a museum," she told the BBC News website.

Following the announcement, the artist said she "could not be happier" and that she would "cherish" installing the piece at its new home.

"I have always felt My Bed belongs at Tate. And now it will be," she said.

According to the Tate, My Bed - created by Emin in her council flat near London's Waterloo station - is an "unconventional and uncompromising self-portrait [that] gives a snapshot of the artist's life after a traumatic relationship breakdown".

Details of when and where the piece will go on display will be announced in the autumn.

Born in 1944, Count Duerckheim has been collecting since the 1960s and owns one of the leading collections of international contemporary art.

My Bed was acquired by White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling on the industrialist's behalf, the Tate revealed on Tuesday.