George Lindemann Jounral

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

 

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic'

Park Avenue Armory

Dec. 17-21

New York

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

Marina Abramović Lucie Jansch

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic       

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

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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George Lindemann Journal

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

Miami

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Lindemann Journal

It’s Post Time: At the Big A, Big Art

Street Artists Paint ‘The Aqueduct Murals’ at the Track

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I love it,” he said.

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

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

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

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Go ahead. Grab a rough-hewn Adirondack chair, settle down on the expansively shaded deck under the pendulous greenery and bask in what may be the best public views — inside and out — anywhere along the water in downtown Miami.

This is, after all, your new museum of art — a $131 million haute-design showcase for modern and contemporary work that also manages to extend an open, dare we say homespun, welcome.

When it opens to the public at the edge of Biscayne Bay on Wednesday, on time and on budget, the strikingly original and meticulously thought-out Perez Art Museum Miami will put art front and center on the city’s landscape for the first time. In doing so, supporters and civic leaders fervently hope it will redefine Miami as a cultural destination.

With wrap-around verandas cooled by lush gardens and a monumental overhanging roof, 360-degree views of bay and city from within and without, and an adjacent new plaza, park and baywalk, the unusually porous museum could also become something else, backers say: a spectacular new front porch for the people of Miami.

“It’s going to be a Miami icon without trying to be anything other than a great museum,’’ said Terry Riley, the architect and former museum director who oversaw the launch of the building effort, in a recent public talk. “I think it’s going to be considered one of the most important contemporary museums anywhere.’’

Bold words, for sure, especially for a young institution that until relatively recently had but a small, uneven collection and a nearly invisible profile, thanks to its location behind fortress-like walls on an elevated plaza on Flagler Street.

During the new museum building’s long gestation, the use of scarce city park land and a public subsidy of $100 million (approved by voters in 2004 as part of a larger, $2.9 billion Miami-Dade County bond package) became a persistent target for critics, including some prominent local art collectors. So did the subsequent renaming of the onetime Miami Art Museum after developer Jorge Perez, whose $40 million gift of art and cash boosted its collection and bottom line but provoked raised eyebrows in the art world and a rift among the institution’s own supporters.

Against this backdrop, museum leaders say they were acutely aware of the need to avoid the cost overruns and construction issues that plagued the nearby Arsht Center even as they built a home and collection defined by high aspirations. PAMM officials say they’ve also nearly met a private fundraising goal of $120 million to supplement the public investment and create an endowment to support the expanded operation.

To design the building, Riley and board leaders picked the powerhouse Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, famed for the conversion of a massive London power plant into what is now the world’s most popular museum of contemporary art, the Tate Modern. More recently, the firm designed San Francisco’s de Young Museum, which is covered in punctured, oxidized copper and has a tower shaped like an inverted pyramid rising from Golden Gate Park. The firm, though known for its raw look and rigorous execution, has no signature style, which meant its approach would not be cookie-cutter, Riley said.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Talk of the Turner Prize, Where, for One Thing, Talk Is Art

Johnny Green

Tino Sehgal, foreground, is one of four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize. His work “This is exchange” involves a simple chat.

By ROSLYN SULCAS

Published: November 29, 2013

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — On a recent morning, a group of teenagers stood in a room, now an art gallery in a former military barracks here, and stared at the bare white walls. They were searching for the work of Tino Sehgal, one of the four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.

What they didn’t yet know was that they were the work: Mr. Sehgal’s art exists only as personal encounters between members of the public and a guide paid to engage them in conversation. It was a moment worthy of the oft-contentious reputation of the Turner, an annual award of £25,000 (around $41,000) under the aegis of the Tate Museum that is given to a British artist under 50. The winner will be announced on Monday.

Mr. Sehgal’s performance art piece — here in a three-month exhibition, along with works by his fellow nominees, David Shrigley, Laure Prouvost and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye — is one sign that the 29-year-old Turner Prize can still be counted on to provide at least a few challenges to traditional expectations.

The finalists are nominated by a four-person international jury of curators and gallery and museum directors, led by Penelope Curtis, the director of Tate Britain, who plays no part in the final decision. The prize is well known in Britain, and it makes for a moment when people entirely uninterested in contemporary art discuss contemporary art. The award ceremony on Monday will be shown live on national television, as it is each year, and bookmakers are eagerly taking bets on the winner. (A few days before the announcement, Mr. Sehgal was the favorite at Ladbrokes, with 7 to 4 odds.)

But winning isn’t required. Even a nomination for the Turner can be a turning point in an artist’s career, said Chris Hammond, whose gallery, MOT International, represents Ms. Prouvost. “What the Turner Prize does is to instantaneously bring the artist to a new, broad audience,” he said.

Tracey Emin, nominated for the prize in 1999, was blunter. Writing in 2006, she said: “If I were speaking to the artists who are in it this year, I’d say something like: ‘Don’t worry too much. The price of your work is going to double.’ ”

Critics have often been scathing about the quality and shock value of some art that has been nominated for the Turner. The prize “is perhaps most famous for trying — sometimes desperately — to elicit a reaction from its visitors,” Zoe Pilger wrote in The Independent last month.

The prize is also popular partly because of that shock value, much enjoyed by the British tabloids, which have followed some of the exhibits with delirious glee: Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, or Ms. Emin’s unmade bed with detritus from her stay there during a siege of depression, including condoms and cigarettes.

This year, the prize apparatus is also breaking a barrier with its setting: For the first time, the Turner Prize exhibition and award ceremony are being held outside of England, here in Londonderry (called Derry-Londonderry in all Turner publicity), designated as Britain’s first City of Culture.

The city is deeply associated with the Troubles, the violent sectarian conflict that raged on the Irish island for decades. Londonderry bears testament to sensitivities that prevail, despite the 1998 Good Friday agreement. (Some see the London prefix, added to Derry in 1613, as a British imposition, thus the double name that is popular with many.) The placing of the exhibition in the Ebrington Barracks, where the British Army was garrisoned and which remained barred and inaccessible until relatively recently, is meant to symbolize a transformation from devastation to regeneration.

“We recognized there would be challenges, but there was always a desire on our part to make it work,” said Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate Museums, in a telephone interview. “I hope that by putting it in Ebrington, we lay down another layer of history.”

The exhibition is part of the extensive calendar of events planned by Culture City, an organization working in concert with the city’s designation. The art is in building 80/81, transformed by a $3.9 million renovation from dilapidation to a gleaming series of galleries facing the curving Peace Bridge, built in 2011.

What will happen to Ebrington when the Turner exhibition closes is uncertain. “The real value of having the Turner here has been showing the potential of those buildings as a cultural center,” said Willie Doherty, a Londonderry-born photographer who has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize. “I think we will have missed a huge opportunity if we don’t develop and build upon the success of this year.”

The galleries provide an unobtrusive, custom-made space for the artists. Mr. Shrigley’s “Life Model 2012” is an ill-proportioned animatronic naked man, three meters (about 10 feet) tall, surrounded by chairs and, usually, groups of people earnestly drawing it.

Mr. Shrigley, 45, has been producing books of illustrations — and photography, cartoons, sculpture, animation and painting — since the early 1990s, and he has been commercially and artistically successful; last year the Hayward Gallery in London presented a 20-year retrospective of his work, the source of his nomination. His pieces are funny and accessible; therefore, he said cheerfully in a telephone interview, “I don’t have any expectation of winning the prize.” A giant man urinating in a bucket, he said, is not a winner.

A video and sculpture installation from the French-born Ms. Prouvost, 35, who moved to London at 18 to study experimental film and video, is in the next gallery. Her whimsical film installation “Wantee,” for which she was nominated, is animated by her voice telling the story of her (fictional) conceptual artist grandfather, whose creations, displayed around a space resembling a tearoom, are used as domestic objects by her grandmother.

“The idea of a dialogue with the audience is important to me,” Ms. Prouvost said in a Skype interview. “I am coming from the experimental scene and questioning the idea of telling the story and making moving images.”

Ms. Yiadom-Boakye, 36, a Londoner of Ghanaian descent, is perhaps the wild card in the pack because she is a straightforward portrait painter. But her portraits are of imaginary people that she describes as “composites” of memory, images and imagination. At Ebrington, the dark-hued figures emerge from the dark, textured oil-painted canvases and low lighting with almost palpable intensity.

And then there is Mr. Sehgal’s 2003 “This is exchange,” which centers on a discussion of the market economy. (There is an incentive for visitors to participate: a small sum of cash.) Mr. Sehgal, 37, who studied dance and economics before turning to the world of visual art, is enjoying a moment in the sun; he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale this year.

No matter how many bets are taken, the Turner Prize outcome is never predictable. “It’s not a vote but a discussion, which makes it unpredictable because passions come into play,” said Judith Nesbitt, the head of National and International Initiatives at Tate. “It’s opinionated. It’s not objective. It can’t be.”

From a local point of view, said Graeme Farrow, the programming director of Culture City, it hardly matters. “The real winner,” he said, “is Derry.”

George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann

The art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn at her townhouse on the Upper East Side.

By GUY TREBAY

Published: November 29, 2013

As the art mob descends on South Florida this week for the 12th edition of the cross-platform marketing frenzy that is Art Basel Miami Beach — private jets disgorging art sharks and their adviser remoras — one slight and fashionable figure will stand out.

A thin and dark-haired woman with a knife-slash smile, Rooney Mara bangs and a collection of jersey weeds from Saint Laurent and Rick Owens, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn is, at 46, no one’s idea of a late bloomer

For well over a decade, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn has been a stealth force in the art world, the “art brat” daughter of a respected dealer who, after her college studies, went on to become an independent curator; a private dealer and adviser; a judge in the Bravo reality series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”; a widely photographed socialite with a prominent banker husband; a prodigious Democratic fund-raiser; and a proprietor of three increasingly influential galleries with clients from both inside the circles of usual art-world suspects as well as powerful and unexpected outliers like the hip-hop mogul Jay Z.

It is at her Salon 94, Salon 94 Freemans and Salon 94 Bowery that Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn came into her own, showcasing a signature knack for discovering young and emerging artists, for kick-starting the reputation of those in midcareer, and for engineering unlikely aesthetic mash-ups combining the disparate worlds of fashion, sports, entertainment and art.

Consider that when, during the 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees opened his North Bay Road mansion to a select group of Art Basel attendees, the witty batting-cage installation by the New York-based sculptor and painter Nate Lowman was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s inspiration, generated out of a visit the ballplayer made to her gallery.

“I first came to Jeanne’s uptown space to view several monochrome Richard Prince ‘Joke’ paintings,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote in an email. “Our real conversation happened upstairs looking at a Nate Lowman ‘Smile’ painting.”

Having introduced the Yankee to the artist, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn suggested they collaborate. Thus, Mr. Lowman “tricked out my batting cage” with an array of his obsessive smiley-face paintings, Mr. Rodriguez said.

“The Smiles became a stadium audience around the room,” he added. “We joked about me hitting a baseball through one of his bullet-hole paintings hung high on the net.”

When Jay Z appeared at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea last summer to film a video for the single “Picasso Baby” with a cast of celebrated art-world conscripts, it was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn who subtly and with little fanfare acted as a guiding force.

There she was, on a muggy July afternoon, discreetly stage-managing as the rapper mesmerized a crowd including the artists Lawrence Weiner, Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas, and the philanthropist Agnes Gund. Gliding through the white cube gallery in a one-shouldered Lanvin jumpsuit and with her signature cluster of stone talismans strung from her neck, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn supervised the proceedings, darting from improvised green room to curb, where she greeted the performance artist Marina Abramovic as she descended from a chauffeured S.U.V., a nutty lunar priestess in a self-induced trance.

“The interesting thing about Jeanne is how involved she is in the ‘becoming’ of an artist’s creations,” the artist Terry Adkins recently said.

Recruited by Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn and added to her roster after a 10-year absence from the art scene, Mr. Adkins found himself emerging from semi-obscurity as a newly minted breakaway star. For the October Frieze Art Fair in London, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn installed a cut-down version of Mr. Adkins’s totemic “Muffled Drums,” a stacked drum sculpture paying symbolic homage to the black writer and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois.

The piece, quickly snapped up by the Tate Modern, represented an element of political engagement that is Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s signature. “I was really attracted to her in the first place because she had black artists and women, and never made a big deal out of it,” said Marilyn Minter, one of the gallery’s marquee names. In fact, her list of artists was never preferential of race or sex, yet the range of her interests and connections goes well beyond the confines of an often insular gallery scene.

“How many dealers,” Mr. Adkins asked, “would even think to collaborate with Jay Z on a video?” How many, for that matter, could hope to elicit his consent?

On a recent chill evening, the crowd for an opening of a jewelry exhibition by the sculptor Alexander Calder at Salon 94 was indicative of the atmosphere Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn specializes in creating, one bearing little resemblance to the typical art-world assembly.

Teetering about the room in the townhouse that serves as both gallery and residence for Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s family, Michele Lamy — wife and muse of Mr. Owens, the designer — wore vertiginous heelless platform shoes and a gold grille on her teeth. Gareth Pugh, the British designer, mugged for a camera in a Calder tiara, closely watched by a security guard in white cotton gloves.

Bearded and wearing a thigh-high miniskirt, the gender-torquing party promoter Andre J. took snapshots as Fran Lebowitz, in a studied Robert Benchley pose, held up a wall. Wandering through it all was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s daughter Coco, one of her three children with Nicolas Rohatyn, a financier whose father is the eminent banker Felix Rohatyn, best known perhaps for his brinksman role in staving off New York City’s bankruptcy in the 1970s.

“You go into Jeanne’s house, and you see this phenomenal taste and incredible mix,” said Lisa Perry, the fashion designer and art collector, noting how offhandedly the valuable Calder jewelry was displayed — in a 1952 Lattes bookcase by the Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (whose estate Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn represents); atop a Hella Jongerius Frog table; and on a charred-looking bronze sculpture by the artist Huma Bhabha. “It’s all kind of seamless,” she said.

Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn (her first name is pronounced “genie”) moved quietly about the space dressed in black leather trousers and with her hair slicked back. “This is all normal,” she said. Yet normal people seldom inhabit double-wide townhouses chock-full of costly contemporary art, including a Calder stabile and David Hammons’s backboard chandelier Untitled, a version of which sold at the recent auctions for $8 million. “The idea is to elevate the way you live your domestic life,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn coolly remarked.

Not all of her projects have been high-minded; a stint on a cable reality show struck some in the industry as a curious career move for a woman who struggled to shake off an early reputation as a Vogue “It” girl, a fashion favorite often spotted in designers’ front rows. “I’m glad I took the risk and did something unknown to me,” she said of “Work of Art,” in which she appeared alongside China Chow, the gallery owner Bill Powers and Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine. “You can’t be too predictable,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn explained in a text message. “It shook up my image.” It also “made me fix my posture,” she said.

“What is fascinating about Jeanne is the sheer force of her personality,” a New York museum official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid the appearance of favoritism. “She loves art, she loves artists and she loves objects. You look across the roster of emerging to midcareer to well-known artists she shows, and you can see there’s something there that requires a passionate, individual approach.”

For Roselee Goldberg, an art historian and the founder of Performa, the performance art foundation whose board Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn leads, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn “has an ease” in navigating the art world because it is her native terrain. A daughter of a prominent art dealer, Ronald Greenberg, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn — who studied art history at Vassar and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and was raised in a vast Gothic Revival pile in suburban St. Louis — comes by her easy conversancy with art-world machinations and folkways naturally.

“She is comfortable across the entire spectrum, from established artists to the youngest and most emerging,” Ms. Goldberg added of the dealer’s catholicity of taste. Ms. Goldberg pointed out that at Salon 94, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn has exhibited artists, sculptors and designers as varied as Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson, Mr. Lowman and also Mr. Owens, whose massive, neo-brutalist furniture she once showed in tandem with sprightly organic vessels by Betty Woodman, a beloved octogenarian ceramist.

“The thing with Jeanne is she’s not coming from a place of cold calculation,” Ms. Goldberg added, and surely few other dealers would be as willing to risk reviving the reputation of an artist like Jimmy DeSana, a gifted and all-but-forgotten photographic explorer of dark sexual impulses and an early AIDS fatality.

It was most likely her passionate and unorthodox approach that made her attractive to an equally passionate group of novice collectors, said Lyor Cohen, a music industry executive who brokered Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s introduction to Jay Z.

“Her aesthetic and taste is impeccable,” Mr. Cohen said by telephone. “She is on the front end of a lot of things.”

Unlike many who travel the art fair circuit with billionaire clients and a shopping list of fashionable requisites in hand, he suggested, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn builds collections with an intuitive eye. “If you wanted that art adviser playbook, she wouldn’t have contorted her body for that playbook,” he said.

Although requests for comment made through representatives for Jay Z went unanswered, those familiar with his collection note that, in a surprisingly short time, he has amassed a grouping notable for breadth and discernment, one that includes works by, among many others, Ms. Minter, Gary Simmons, Mr. Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“Jeanne’s as courageous as he is, and that’s what he wants,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to Jay Z. “He wants the best of her.”

Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn, for her part, invokes omertà when discussion turns to her clients. “But, yes,” she said curtly, “art does sometimes need a lot of help.”

For Ms. Minter, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s editorial eye and her ability to reconfigure careers was in some ways life-changing. “I’d been somebody who was always slightly marginalized,” the artist told a recent visitor to her Garment Center studio. “When Jeanne first came to me, after I was in the Whitney Biennial, she said, ‘You’ve had such an out-of-the-box kind of career, I want to represent you.’ ”

Ms. Minter had no gallery at the time and sold few pictures; these days, there is a waiting list for her paintings, whose prices range from $45,000 to $500,000. “Now Jerry Seinfeld owns photos of my mother, if you can believe that,” Ms. Minter said. “That’s Jeanne!”

At Art Basel Miami Beach, 258 galleries from 31 countries will set up shop, and 50,000 visitors are expected to flood the halls of the city’s convention center. For her own white-walled space, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn is taking a chance by displaying only Ms. Minter’s new paintings and a motorcycle by the designer Sebastian Errazuriz customized and with a topiary bird affixed to the handlebars. “Objects have their own integrity and energy, which is something people who live among objects understand,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said. “They speak to each other, creating a dialogue, which is what personally gets my heart beating.”

One afternoon last week, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn wandered about Ms. Minter’s studio checking the progress of her Miami pictures, as several of the artist’s nine assistants applied final touches to paintings that were not yet dry.

Musing about whether to bring along examples of the painter’s older work, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn asked, “Do you have the singer in the studio?”

Ms. Minter, who was wearing motorcycle boots, black tights and a Kelly green T-shirt with the legend “Draw Me,” called out to an assistant, “Do we have that painting here, or is it in storage?”

“The singer,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said.

As Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn and Ms. Minter hunched over a desktop computer, scanning images from an online inventory, a visitor suddenly recalled an observation Ms. Perry, the designer, had made about Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn. “I think her connection to Jay Z and to me and to the people she advises works because she opens our eyes to stuff we would not have even known about before,” Ms. Perry said. “We love Jeanne for that reason: She’s going to open our eyes.”

Just then, a blurred image popped onto the screen depicting a woman whose mouth was widened as if in song. The image, Ms. Minter noted, came from an early series titled “Hard Core Porn.” On close inspection, it became clear the woman was no singer and the object she gripped so tightly in her hand was no microphone.

“Oh,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said, grinning wryly. “Let’s not take that.”

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