The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Architecture generally involves creating monuments to permanence from substantial materials like steel and concrete. Yet this year, the discipline’s top award is going to a man who is best known for making temporary housing out of transient materials like paper tubes and plastic beer crates.

On Monday, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban was named the winner of this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, largely because of his work designing shelters after natural disasters in places like Rwanda, Turkey, India, China, Haiti and Japan.

“His buildings provide shelter, community centers and spiritual places for those who have suffered tremendous loss and destruction,” the jury said in its citation. “When tragedy strikes, he is often there from the beginning.”

In a telephone interview from Paris, Mr. Ban, 56, said he was honored to have won, not because the Pritzker would raise his profile but because it affirms the humanitarian emphasis of his work. “I’m trying to understand the meaning of this encouragement,” he said of the prize. “It’s not the award for achievement. I have not made a great achievement.”

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The Work of Shigeru Ban

The Work of Shigeru Ban

Credit Roland Halbe/Centre Georges Pompidou-Metz, via EPA

The prize, established in 1979 and viewed as the Nobel of architecture awards, suggests otherwise.

Mr. Ban is credited with challenging traditional notions of domestic space and what it means to have a roof over your head. His Naked House in Saitama, Japan, features four rooms on casters within a house clad in clear corrugated plastic and surrounded by rice fields. He stepped in after the 19th-century Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand was ravaged by a 2011 earthquake, designing a transitional sanctuary fashioned mainly from cardboard tubes.

Asked to create something related to the Pont du Gard, a Roman aqueduct on the Gardon River in the south of France, he came up with a footbridge, using his signature cardboard tubes and recycled paper as a counterpoint to the ancient structure’s heavy stone. And his Curtain Wall House in Tokyo links interior and exterior with white curtains that can be opened and closed.

“His works are airy, curvaceous, balletic,” Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times in 2007. “An heir to Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemeyer, to Japanese traditional architecture and to Alvar Aalto, he is an old-school Modernist with a poet’s touch and an engineer’s inventiveness.”

Mr. Ban is also known for somewhat more conventional projects, like the Pompidou Center’s satellite museum in Metz, France (with a roof inspired by a woven bamboo hat) and his entry for the competition to redesign the World Trade Center as part of a team that included Rafael Viñoly, Frederic Schwartz and Ken Smith. Mr. Ban’s Aspen Art Museum, a 33,000-square-foot structure in Colorado with a woven exterior wood screen, is to open in August.

Yet, in a way, Mr. Ban also represents a kind of anti-architecture, a rejection of the aura of celebrity status pursued by many in the profession. In public remarks this month, for example, Mr. Ban took architects to task for not putting their expertise to work for a greater social good.

“I’m not saying I’m against building monuments, but I’m thinking we can work more for the public,” he said in London at Ecobuild, an annual conference on sustainable design. “Architects are not building temporary housing because we are too busy building for privileged people.

Each year the Pritzker goes to a living architect whose work has contributed to humanity and the built environment. Mr. Ban will receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion to be awarded on June 13 in a ceremony at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Previous winners of the prize have included Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster. 

Mr. Ban was originally drawn to disaster relief by the squalid condition of Rwanda’s refugee camps in 1994. “I thought we could improve them,” he said. He traveled to Geneva to work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on designing prototype tents with paper poles.

He then turned his attention to the aftermath of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, designing emergency housing with beer-crate foundations and paper-tube walls. He has since become a familiar presence on the scene of major international disasters, arriving with architecture students to teach them about developing solutions at such sites.

Many of Mr. Ban’s temporary structures have become semi-permanent. In Kobe, for example, shelters meant to be used for three years were used for 10. “Whether they keep it is up to them,” he said. Born in Tokyo in 1957, Mr. Ban studied at the Southern California Institute of Architecture before transferring to the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1984. A year later, Mr. Ban established a private practice in Tokyo; he now also has offices in Paris and New York.

Many New Yorkers became acquainted with his work with the arrival of his Nomadic Museum, mobile shipping containers parked on a Hudson River pier to showcase “Ashes and Snow,” a 2005 exhibition of Gregory Colbert’s animal photography that made its debut in Venice.

With Dean Maltz, the architect who runs the American branch of his practice, Mr. Ban has also designed a set of glass duplex penthouses atop the Cast Iron House, a 132-year-old landmark on lower Broadway, and Metal Shutter Houses, a condominium on 19th Street in Chelsea. And Mr. Ban designed Camper’s flagship shoe store on Prince Street, with red-and-white interiors and a vertical garden.

Although such commissions are highly lucrative, Mr. Ban said he is not motivated by the compensation. “I’m not really interested in making money,” he said. “I’m not interested in the design fee.”

“As long as I can make people happy to use my building,” he added, “I’m happy.”

Agonized sincerity does not sit well in today's art world, where irony—albeit sometimes diluted to the homeopathic strength of just a little too much knowingness—is a standard ingredient. This is especially true in sculpture, as opposed to painting, where assemblage—the cobbling together of disparate parts of varied origin—is the predominant manufacturing method. So what will this city's art cognoscenti make of "Germaine Richier," the Dominique Lévy / Galerie Perrotin show of about 40 cast-bronze sculptures—in an old-fashioned crowded installation—of alternately spiky and bulbous, existentially distorted and distressed human figures, some of them veritable animal or insect hybrids?

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'La Tauromachie' (1953). Germaine Richier / 2014 ARS/ ADAGP

At the least, we should reopen our aesthetic to the possibility that what might appear, to superficially sophisticated eyes, as mere mawkish modernism is actually profoundly tragic art. And we should recognize that Germaine Richier (who was born in 1902 in Grans, in the south of France, and who died in 1959 in Montpellier) was—with some ups and downs—a great sculptor whose depth, passion and skill we could use more than a bit of today.

After studying at the art academy in Montpellier, Richier moved to Paris in her mid-20s and entered the studio of Antoine Bourdelle, a sculptor of bombastic, classico-modernist public works who also taught Alberto Giacometti and Henri Matisse. From Bourdelle, Richier learned everything there was to know about modeling in clay and casting in bronze. (Traditional craft is visibly operative in even her most contorted pieces.)

She was married twice, the first time—and for more than two decades—to Otto Bänninger, a good but not great Swiss sculptor, and then, for the last few years of her life, to the surrealist poet René de Solier.

Although she had to teach in order to afford to work in bronze, Richier was quite successful, especially after World War II. (She and her first husband were able to sit out the war in Switzerland, returning to Paris in 1946.) From 1948 on, she participated in five Venice Biennales in a row, and her postwar exhibition record includes solos at such prestigious galleries as Maeght and Berggruen, and a 1958 retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. All of which is to say that Richier was anything but neglected in her day. But her last solo gallery exhibition in New York, at Martha Jackson—where the likes of Christo, John Chamberlain and Sam Francis made their New York debuts—took place 57 years ago. That was just about the time the art world was starting to veer from Abstract Expressionism toward Pop, and heartfelt figuration was increasingly perceived in the quarters that counted as—to be blunt—corny.

Stateside Americans hadn't been as close to the blitzes, bombardments and mass killings of World War II as had Europeans, and our artists didn't feel nearly as strongly as did Richier about the psychological as well as aesthetic problem of reviving, let alone maintaining, the credible presence of the human figure in sculpture. Perhaps she'd already formed the basis for her sculptural vision from a visit to the ruins of Pompeii in 1935, but it was the war that prompted in her an idea of human devolution—from the most advanced mammal back down to bats and birds and, finally, insects. The crouching, frightening "La Mante, moyenne" (1946)—the exhibition titles are in French—is a wonderfully pessimistic example.

Not that Richier didn't have hope. In 1950, she completed a commission for a crucifix for a church in Plateau d'Assy; the sculpture (not in the exhibition) was a stark, almost stick-figure Christ, whose tortured surface came from a verse in Isaiah about "a man of sorrows" having grown up "as a root out of dry ground," without "form or comeliness." The work was denounced politely as "liturgically insufficient" and not so politely as "an insult to the majesty of God," and removed in 1951. It most likely didn't help that the artist was a woman. In 1962, however, the Vatican II reforms decided what was called "the quarrel over sacred art" in favor of the kind of cry-from-the-heart modernism that Richier represented.

The artist's best pieces in this mode, in this show—among at least a couple of dozen very good ones—are "Le Couple peint" (1959), a tall, poignantly thin (from the pressures of the world, not lack of food) man and woman; "La Tauromachie" (1953), a walking, hollow-stomached figure accompanied by a bull's skull; and the startlingly inventive "l'Echiquier" (1959). That last work, which tackles the cliché of the chessboard in modern art, features the king, queen, knight, rook and bishop; each piece displays a different semiabstracted human gesture and—this is Richier's magic—is somehow moving. At Dominique Lévy, the large version consists of a row of figures deftly installed on a low platform; on another floor sits the smaller work, with the figures positioned on a partial chessboard.

In spite of the fact that Richier's art deeply influenced not only such contemporaries as the "geometry of fear" English sculptors Reg Butler and Lynn Chadwick but is a clear inspiration for Louise Bourgeois's giant spiders, she's not had the obviously obligatory major retrospective in Paris. The reason is Giacometti, of whom some unfairly judge Richier to be a variant, if not imitator. While there are similarities, the two artists are as different as, say, Joan Miró and Paul Klee.

Richier is, in bronze, quite an original artist and, in words, one of the better thinkers about sculpture. "What characterizes sculpture, in my opinion," she says in a gallery wall text, "is the way in which it renounces the full, solid form. Holes and perforations conduct like flashes of lighting into the material, which becomes organic and open, encircled on all sides, lit up in and through the hollows. A form lives to the extent to which it does not withdraw from expression."

When London's Tate Modern opened in 2000, in the famous former power plant on the Thames, it installed in a prominent place a painted plaster—and quite joyful—iteration of Richier's "l'Echiquier." London, at least, had it right.

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

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Speculating on Trophy Art" @nytimes

''Cracked Egg (Magenta)'' by Jeff Koons. Credit Christie's

LONDON — Works by contemporary artists born after 1945 generated $17.2 billion in worldwide auction sales last year, a 39 percent increase from 2012, according to figures just released by the French database Artprice. Last November, a triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, a record for any work of art at a public sale. And a handy new website, www.sellyoulater.com, now advises speculators on which hot young artists to buy, sell or “liquidate.”

Inevitably there’s talk of a bubble. Art is a notoriously volatile investment that has suffered spectacular collapses, as seen in the great Impressionist boom and bust of 1990-91, and in 2008-9, when contemporary works by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and other fashionable names halved in value after the fall of Lehman Brothers.

“Things are different now,” said Allan Schwartzman, the New York-based art adviser. “There’s a momentum in the market that’s dictated by the top players. It’s trophy-driven. There are often six competitors for the major lots at auctions, which indicates to me there isn’t a bubble. Contemporary art has never been supported like this before.”

Others feel uneasy about the record prices being paid by billionaires for big-name trophies, as well as the six-figure sums for paintings by hip 20-somethings like Lucien Smith and Oscar Murillo. But how can a market crash when the people now driving its growth are seemingly rich enough to be impervious to the fluctuations of the wider economy? How do their decisions influence smaller buyers? The art market is rife with speculation at the moment, but does that necessarily mean it’s a bubble about to burst? These are the questions on the minds of many in the art world in early 2014.

“In 2007 we were definitely in a bubble,” said Howard Rachofsky, a Dallas-based collector. “Then after the break it got globalized. The market attracted the attention of international players who are interested in art as another asset and they’ve got huge reserves.”

For instance, last week, at the Art14 contemporary fair in London, Citi Private Bank hosted a gathering of private museums from 16 countries.

The super rich have grown in number and wealth. The world had a record 2,170 billionaires with a combined net worth of $6.5 trillion in 2013, according to the inaugural Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census. In the United States, research from the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the wealthiest 1 percent has captured 95 percent of the country’s economic growth since 2009. Those with tens of millions in disposable cash are looking for alternatives to the stock markets, be it luxury apartments in London or Gerhard Richter abstracts.

“Enormous amounts of money have backstopped at the top of the system among a relatively small group of people,” said Todd Levin, the New York-based art adviser.

Still, art is a relatively small sector of the global economy — total dealer and auction sales were estimated at 43 billion euros, or $59 billion, in 2012, according to the European Fine Art Foundation (the 2013 figure will be announced next week). It therefore takes only a tiny minority of the world’s richest 1 percent to spend a small proportion of its wealth to have a disproportionate effect on such a niche market.

“Right now, they’ve decided that art is a good place to put their money,” said Mr. Levin, who, on behalf of a client, was among at least five bidders competing for Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” at over $100 million. Unprecedented auction prices have paid for trophies by blue-chip artists such as Bacon ($142.4 million), Richter ($37.1 million), Jean-Michel Basquiat ($48.8 million) and Andy Warhol ($105.4 million) within the last 12 months. Some are questioning the sustainability of this bull market.

“The global art market is currently held hostage by the very top end of the market (works sold above $10 million) as well as the taste and wealth of a relatively small number of individuals,” said ArtTactic, an art market research company based in London, in an “Outlook” report published earlier this month subtitled “A 10-year-old bubble about to become even bigger.” ArtTactic said the apex of the market was dominated by about 150 individuals with the resources to pay $20 million for a single work of art.

“These prices are being driven by excess cash,” said Anders Petterson, the founder of ArtTactic. “The wealthy get a lot of social prestige out of buying these works. But if prices rise too much, this clique could lose interest and move on to something else, and if they lose interest, a lot of other people would lose interest as well.”

For the moment, high prices are acting as a stimulus program for wealthy sellers at the expense of auction-house profits. Last week, Sotheby’s announced net annual income of $130 million, or 2.1 percent, on record total sales of $6.3 billion in 2013. (Equivalent profit figures are not available from Christie’s and Phillips, which are privately owned.) Thanks to cutthroat competition for consignments, owners of high-value works like Jeff Koons’s “Cracked Egg (Magenta)” sculpture — sold by Damien Hirst for 12.5 million pounds, or $21 million, plus £1.6 million in buyer’s fees at Christie’s in London on Feb. 13 — are not charged sellers’ commissions and are usually given some of the extra paid by buyers.

The auction houses instead have to make money out of lots in the $50,000 to $5 million range, for which they charge double-digit fees to both the seller and the buyer. This in turn squeezes the profitability of middle-range works that don’t enjoy trophy status.

At Sotheby’s on Feb. 12, for example, the 1984 Basquiat painting “Water-worshipper” sold below estimate for a hammer price of £2.15 million; it had been bought by its seller for €2.4 million at an auction in Paris in 2010.

The bargaining power of today’s richest investor-collectors makes it more difficult for the auction houses, and the bulk of their sellers, to turn a profit, thereby putting further pressure on the skin of what may or may not be a bubble. “It used to be said the air was thin at the top of the market,” said Mr. Schwartzman. “Now it’s thin in the middle.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Artists Donate Works for Legal Defense of Man Who Smashed Ai Weiwei Vase" @nytimes by NICK MADIGAN

MIAMI — A few dozen artists have promised to donate works for an auction to help cover the legal expenses of a colleague who stunned the art world by smashing a vase by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

The mustering of support for their fellow artist, Maximo Caminero, who has been charged with criminal mischief and could face up to five years in prison if convicted, includes a defense of the intellectual underpinnings of his action. “We do not support the act, but we support the intention,” said Danilo Gonzalez, a painter and sculptor who said he spoke for many of his fellow artists.

While Mr. Caminero’s purpose, as he initially expressed it shortly after breaking the vase on Feb. 16, was to draw attention to a dearth of exhibition space for local artists in Miami’s museums, he has since said that he was driven more by a spontaneous impulse to emulate Mr. Ai’s own destruction of vases, some thousands of years old.

In an interview, Mr. Caminero said he had acted from a sense of solidarity with Mr. Ai, a dissident who has been under pressure from the Beijing authorities for his political activities and is barred from leaving China. Mr. Caminero said he did not realize until later that the vase, painted over in bright green by Mr. Wei, dated from the Han dynasty.

“I was in shock,” Mr. Caminero said. “He could have made replicas.”

Reached at his studio in Beijing, Mr. Ai said he had received an apology from Mr. Caminero but was unimpressed.

“My only advice is that he should make sure next time he knows — or have someone tell him — what he’s going to break,” Mr. Ai said. “He thinks it’s from Home Depot?”

Some artists accuse Mr. Ai of hypocrisy for taking that view. The Chinese artist, they point out, has made a show of not only painting over exquisite ancient vases but of smashing some of them to pieces.

“On the one hand, it is a clear act of vandalism,” the Ukrainian-born artist Alexey Steele, based in Los Angeles, said on Friday of the Pérez Museum incident. “On another, painting on a historic vase is a clear act of vandalism, too.”

While Mr. Ai has defaced works to make new art, one difference is that, unlike Mr. Caminero, he owned the art before he ruined it.

In his emailed apology, Mr. Caminero told Mr. Wei that he shared the Chinese artist’s battles “as though they were my own.”

“Breaking the vase signifies breaking the chains that prevent you from leaving the prison in which you find yourself,” Mr. Caminero wrote. “You were the vase in my hands, and I was the silent voice of the artists of Miami.”

However divided they might be on the advisability of Mr. Caminero’s act, Miami artists clearly see it as an opportunity for a debate about their situation. “Prominent intellectuals” were planning to discuss the cultural impact of the work’s destruction at a news conference late Friday in Miami’s Wynwood arts district, an announcement from organizers said.

Nick MadiganMaximo Caminero

Emilio Martinez, a 32-year-old Miami-based artist from Honduras who is helping to plan the auction, said he had pledges from 35 to 40 artists — including some from Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela — for donations of works and that six more had already turned some in. He said he expected the sale to take place in three or four weeks.

Mr. Martinez called Mr. Caminero’s action “heroic.” Asked what his reaction would have been if Mr. Caminero had destroyed one of Mr. Martinez’s own paintings, he said it would not have bothered him, provided that it was an “unselfish, altruistic act” driven by a “humanitarian” ethos.

Another local artist, Elsa Roberto, said she supported Mr. Caminero’s act “in concept” but not in execution. She added that various ideas were “floating around” to help seize the moment on behalf of Miami artists, including placing vases on the steps of every museum in the area.

The Pérez Museum has pointed out that its schedule already includes exhibitions of local artists’ work, which it describes as “part of the museum’s long legacy of working with the local creative community.”

A show of works by the Miami-based, Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié is planned for March 13 to Aug. 31, and an exhibition devoted to the artist Adler Guerrier, also from Miami, opens on Oct. 30. “Americana,” a series of exhibitions at the Pérez through May 1, 2015, includes work by the local artists José Bedia, Naomi Fisher, Lynne Golob Gelfman and Frances Trombly.

Mr. Ai’s plight, meanwhile, continues to draw attention: At the Armory Show, a fair that opens on Thursday on Piers 92 and 94 in New York, a booth set up by the For-Site Foundation of San Francisco will feature a large bicycle similar to one he keeps chained outside his Beijing studio to remind people that he is not free to leave the country. The foundation is also working with him on a major installation at Alcatraz prison, scheduled for September.

A spokeswoman for Cheryl Haines, the executive director of For-Site, said it does not plan to line up extra security at its booth.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/01/2014, on page C1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Miami Artists Rally Around Colleague Who Smashed a Star’s Vase.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Artists Donate Works for Legal Defense of Man Who Smashed Ai Weiwei Vase" @nytimes by NICK MADIGAN

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 “Untitled,” 2013, by Laura Owens, one of the women revitalizing abstract painting. Credit Private collection; courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York.                

This year’s edition, its 77th, which opens next Friday, is the last in the Whitney Museum’s Madison Avenue home before it decamps to its new building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district in 2015. It is also perhaps the most highly anticipated contemporary art event in a week jam-packed with gallery openings and art fairs.

For the Biennial’s finale in the Marcel Breuer building, the Whitney invited three outside curators to organize the show: Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art; Anthony Elms, associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; and Michelle Grabner, an artist and a professor in the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In a break from years past, the three have each taken a floor and will present distinct visions, rather than one buildingwide narrative. Although they have coordinated in some of the public spaces, the second, third and fourth floors can be seen as independent shows and visited either in bite-size pieces — one floor at a time — or swallowed in one gulp.

“It’s as if you’re on your laptop and have three windows open,” Mr. Comer explained. “It’s not a collaboration but a conversation, a dialogue.” To drive home the point that this is “a show with three chapters,” as he calls it, the catalog gives each curator a distinct section, printed on differently textured papers.

This year’s biennial is especially dense, featuring the works of 103 participants (a word carefully chosen to include both individual artists and artist collectives), more than twice the number in 2012. Art is everywhere — in the stairwells, the sculpture court, the elevators, the lobby (where the composer and artist Sergei Tcherepnin has created a sound installation emanating from the ceiling).

Performances will be sprinkled throughout the museum, changing during the run of the show, which ends on May 25. (The schedule will be posted on the museum’s website.)

It’s not the first time the Biennial will spill out of its home, this time into Hudson River Park, at 17th Street, with a monumental multimedia work by Tony Tasset, composed of colored acrylic panels etched with the names of 400,000 artists, from Picasso and Warhol to little-known emerging artists.

For visual omnivores, the week also offers a panoply of commercial art fairs. There are the Art Dealers Association of America Art Show, at the Park Avenue Armory (at 67th Street), which opens on Wednesday, and the sprawling Armory Show, at Piers 92 and 94 (12th Avenue and 55th Street in Clinton) and the Independent Art Fair, (548 West 22nd Street in Chelsea), which both open on Thursday.

But it is the Biennial that aims to capture what’s happening in American art. Themes inevitably emerge, delivered in different ways, in different mediums, by different curators. Here are a few to look out for during your visit.

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Words and More Words

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PAPER is a star of this Biennial, with dozens of books and printed material. “Now that we have access to more archival material, we are all preoccupied with how we can reanimate it and create living histories,” Mr. Comer said. The independent publisher Semiotext(e) is presenting a series of books; an artist duo, Valerie Snobeck and Catherine Sullivan, have created an installation whose imagery and objects are based on a lifetime of airline menus collected by a Chicago anthropologist.

In addition to printed matter, look for literary accouterments, such as a writing table created for Nancy Mitford, the British novelist, by the Canadian-born artist Paul P.

Arts and Crafts

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The first Arts and Crafts movement, in England, challenged the taste of the Victorian era. Now the handmade aesthetic is flourishing again, Ms. Grabner said. “As so much moves to the digital world, there is a movement of slowing art and life down.”

Sheila Hicks, an artist whose career has involved melding art, design, craft and architecture, has created a monumental fiber sculpture from ceiling to floor in a spectrum of colors. Lisa Anne Auerbach, based on the West Coast, has knitted sweaters with political messages in the trim.

There is also ceramic art by Shio Kusaka, John Mason and Sterling Ruby, as well as a delicately tooled leather wall piece created by Carol Jackson. The Los Angeles artist Joel Otterson created a 14-foot-tall curtain wall of colored beads that seems straight from a hippie apartment.

Looks That Deceive

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Things are not always as they appear. Genders are switched. Artists known for working in one discipline are presenting work in another. There are writers who paint; painters who write poetry; filmmakers who create sculptures; photographers who draw.

What appear to be abstract canvases by Ken Okiishi are actually oil paintings on flat-screen televisions, with a mash-up of footage from old VHS tapes and new digital images in subjects ranging from newscasts to commercials in an installation that is neither a painting nor a video.

An especially provocative photographic diary compiled by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst in Mr. Comer’s installation chronicles the couple’s five-and-a-half-year relationship, in which one transitioned from female to male, and the other from male to female. Until now, this had been a private journal.

Toward the end of March, look for a 22-minute video by the duo called “She Gone Rogue,” described as an odyssey through a world of transgender-themed magical realism when it was shown at the Hammer Museum’s biennial in 2012.

Female Painters

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Women are revitalizing abstract painting, and they are well represented here, with works by artists like Louise Fishman, Jacqueline Humphries, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Dona Nelson, Laura Owens and Amy Sillman.

“I am focusing on a handful of women artists who take on the authority of abstract painting — its history, its ambition and its relationship to power and gender,” Ms. Grabner said. “I wanted to put them together to underscore how different the language of abstract painting can be.”

She isn’t alone; Mr. Elms has included two large-scale abstract paintings by Rebecca Morris on the second floor. Long a fan of Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist architecture, Mr. Elms said the works fit perfectly with the space.

Nostalgia

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In trying to grapple with the future, artists of different generations are looking to the past for inspiration. The Surrealist environment on the fourth floor, created by Shana Lutker, a Los Angeles-based Conceptual artist, is loosely based on a fistfight between André Breton — a founder of Surrealism — and two artists, Joan Miró and Max Ernst, over their sets and costumes for a ballet based on “Romeo and Juliet” in 1926. (Breton considered the production lowbrow, Ms. Grabner explained). Ms. Lutker’s stage, an abstract re-creation of the sets and costumes, from Miró's drawing, includes hanging stainless-steel figures of dancers, two cast ballerina feet and hundreds of red fliers on a ballet bar, to symbolize those thrown onto the stage in a protest.

On the third floor, a 19th-century-style salon, the work of Keith Mayerson, is hung with images from his own modern family: he and his husband; Elvis Presley; Kermit the Frog; and Marvin Gaye, among them.

“It falls somewhere between comic books, a story board and an old-fashioned painting gallery,” Mr. Comer said. He also enlisted Triple Canopy, a nonprofit group that publishes books and an online magazine, to create an installation that explores the cultural meaning of artworks as they are collected, sold, replicated, photographed and exhibited. It focuses on the Garbisch family (Col. Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch) and its vast trove of American primitive paintings and furniture, given to many museums. (The Whitney sold its gift in 1999 to focus on the 20th century.) Objects include a wash basin on loan from the Met and carefully made reproductions.

Architecture

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Perhaps because the Whitney is saying goodbye to the Breuer building — or because more artists today are preoccupied with architecture, both as a form and a discipline — watch for constructed objects and architectural images, and ideas about what a museum should be, to be addressed in myriad ways.

Zoe Leonard has transformed a fourth-floor space into a giant camera obscura. Most of the Breuer’s trapezoidal window is blacked out, with only a small hole left that projects an inverted image of the unfolding streetscape — people rushing, and taxis and buses barreling by — onto the walls, ceiling and floor of the gallery.

Morgan Fisher, a Los Angeles artist, has created a curious portrait of the Whitney’s new Renzo Piano building. His sculpture, on the third floor, is an intentionally scrappy construction fashioned from drywall, in which he has reconfigured spaces in the museum, from the lobby to a boardroom coat closet. “It’s about how we rethink the history of museums and the hierarchy of space,” Mr. Comer said.

Mining Marcel Breuer’s archives, Mr. Elms brought together 24 artists and groups to answer a question by Breuer in his earliest notes on the building, when the architect wrote: “What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?”

Look for the artists’ responses to that question in Mr. Elms’s second-floor installation.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Clueless at the Corcoran" @wsj by Eric Gibson

If the proposed "collaboration" goes through, it will mean the end of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Corbis

The past four or five decades have witnessed much upheaval in the art world. Museums have been founded, others enlarged, still others have spun off satellites. Some have relocated, others have merged. Yet no museum has consciously willed itself into oblivion, as Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art has done with its announcement Wednesday of a proposed "collaboration" with two other Washington institutions.

"The Corcoran" is actually two entities under one roof: an art school and museum. Under the terms of the proposed agreement—details of which have yet to be finalized—the Corcoran College of Art + Design will become part of George Washington University, which will also assume ownership and responsibility for the Corcoran's 1897 Beaux Arts building, no small undertaking since the perpetually cash-strapped museum needs some $100 million for deferred maintenance and upgrades on it.

The building's museum functions will be taken over by the National Gallery of Art, thereby realizing that museum's long-held dream of a dedicated space for its own shows of modern and contemporary art. It will be renamed "Corcoran Contemporary, National Gallery of Art." Some corner of the Corcoran building itself will be set aside as a Legacy Gallery for a rotating display of the museum's "signature works." Anything the National Gallery doesn't want will enter a "distribution plan" to place the works in other U.S. museums. In all, this is a sorry end for a once-proud U.S. arts institution.

This announcement is the latest in a string of policy lurches going back a decade or more as the Corcoran strove to find answers to problems of money, mission, visitorship and the physical plant. It wanted a satellite space in Southwest Washington, then it didn't. It wanted a Frank Gehry addition to the 17th Street Beaux Arts building, then it didn't. It wanted to sell that building and move to the suburbs, then it didn't. It had a partnership with the University of Maryland; now, evidently, it no longer does. This is mismanagement on a near-epic scale. If you added up the costs associated with developing, implementing, then abandoning each of these initiatives, you'd probably make a serious contribution to the renovation tab.

But of all the board's decisions, this one is by far the worst. Because if this agreement goes through—and there is no reason to doubt that it will—it will be the end of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The trustees will be washing their hands of their own institution, in effect saying: "Enough, already! Let someone else deal with it. We're done." This is a shocking dereliction of duty by Washington's supposedly enlightened elites—the lawyers, financiers and other well-educated, well-heeled professionals who make up its board.

Yet sadly, the Corcoran is not alone in its misguided ways. Indeed the untold story of our time is the emerging crisis in nonprofit governance, where boards embark on policies that go against—and even imperil—the mission of the institution they are charged to oversee and protect.

Exhibit A in this regard is, of course, New York City Opera, which in 2007 hired Gerard Mortier as an "edgy" choice for general director, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the closure of the company last year. The New York Public Library wants to gut its magnificent Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue and change it from a research institution to, as Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in this newspaper, "a state-of-the-art, socially interactive, computer-centered" circulating library, with fewer books, a good number of them moved off-site. Four years ago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles hired an art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, as director, an unheard-of blurring of the line between commerce and art in a museum. Mr. Deitch soon fired Paul Schimmel, the longtime chief curator and one of the most respected professionals in his field, precipitating a hemorrhage of support. And had the Barnes Foundation not endured two decades of mismanagement—unnecessary lawsuits against the neighbors, for example—it might still be in Merion, Pa., instead of downtown Philadelphia.

The answer to why this is happening can be found in "The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made," the 1999 memoir by Flora Miller Biddle, granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The book traces Biddle's involvement with the museum from 1958, when she was in her late 20s, to 1990—years in which she witnessed a dramatic change in the boardroom. In the 1960s, she writes, trustees were "idealistic and committed to public service" and possessed "a genuine love of art and faith in the museum." By the late 1970s and into the 1980s a new breed had emerged, one that "wanted to use the museum and their contacts there for social and business purposes."

Not everyone on a board today is an opportunist, of course; many are serious, dedicated supporters and benefactors. But it's impossible to ignore the shift away from boards populated by individuals who understand the values of the institution and the discipline. One now-retired museum director once told me that one of the hardest parts of his job was teaching new trustees from Wall Street that a museum is not a business in the sense that they understand the term.

Until the pendulum starts to swing back toward the kind of board member Ms. Biddle encountered early in her career, we're going to see a lot more tragedies like the one now engulfing the Corcoran.

Corrections & Amplifications
The National Gallery will integrate some of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's collection into its displays and holdings but will not sell any of the Corcoran's works. An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the nature of the National Gallery's custodianship of the Corcoran's collection.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts Editor.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Corcoran Gallery of Art May Cede Control of Its Collection" @nytimes by CAROL VOGELFEB

Facing mounting debts, a shrinking endowment and tens of millions of dollars in renovations, the long-struggling Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington is exploring a plan to give up its independence as the oldest privately supported art museum in the nation to form a partnership with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University.

The resulting three-way arrangement, which must be approved by the boards of the three institutions, would ensure that the Corcoran’s art collection would remain in public institutions and maintain its Beaux-Arts building as an art destination. At the same time, the Corcoran’s education arm, its 124-year-old Corcoran College of Art + Design, one of Washington’s only professional colleges of art, would continue to operate, but under the auspices of George Washington University.

Under the proposed agreement, the 145-year-old Corcoran would cede control of its renowned collection to the National Gallery — some 17,000 works, including a world-class group of American paintings by masters like Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church and John Singer Sargent, as well as its celebrated holdings of photographs. George Washington University would operate the Corcoran College, and the university would assume ownership, including responsibility for all of the expenses, of the landmark Corcoran building near the White House, which is in need of about $100 million worth of renovation and repairs.

The federally funded National Gallery would organize and present exhibitions of modern and contemporary art at the Corcoran under the name Corcoran Contemporary, National Gallery of Art — a gesture to preserve the Corcoran’s heritage. The National Gallery would also oversee what it is calling a Corcoran Legacy Gallery in the Corcoran building and show a selection of the museum’s greatest attractions. What works the National Gallery and curators from the Corcoran decide are not compatible with the National Gallery’s collection would be distributed to other American museums, giving Washington-area ones first priority. Artworks that would enter the National Gallery would be identified as from the Corcoran Collection.

“This arrangement turns two great collections into one extraordinary collection,” said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery. “The Corcoran will still have its own identity: a great facility with a distinguished building. It’s a way of keeping the Corcoran memory alive.”

If the plan is approved by the boards in April, it will put an end to years of money trouble for the Corcoran, which had some 103,000 visitors last year. The Corcoran currently runs a $2,071,129 deficit, has $2,787,690 of bank debt and an endowment that has shrunk over the last decade to only $18 million. It also has a $44 million acquisitions fund. Unlike the National Gallery, which does not charge for admissions, the Corcoran is one of the few museums in Washington that does ($10 for adults), a practice that has hampered its ability to attract a strong visitorship. If the plan is implemented, all exhibitions in its original home will be free to the public.

Over the years, the Corcoran has pursued a number of efforts to shore up its finances, including the sale of real estate. In 2010, it sold the Randall School, a former public school in Southwest Washington, where it once planned to relocate the college, for $6.5 million to the Miami collectors Donald and Mera Rubell and the developer Telesis. It also tried to sell the college’s current building in Georgetown, but the deal fell through. Last year, it announced the possibility of relocating from its historic building on 17th Street, but after a hailstorm of criticism its board changed its mind, saying the museum would stay put and look for other options. In June, the museum auctioned a group of Oriental carpets at Sotheby’s, which gave the Corcoran about $39 million, which went into its acquisitions fund.

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Last year, the Corcoran’s board appointed a new interim director, Peggy Loar, a former director at the National Museum of Qatar and the Wolfsonian Museum and Research Center in Miami to take over for Fred Bollerer, who retired as president and director after only three years in the job. In April 2013, it announced the possibility of a partnership with the University of Maryland, but talks fell apart several months ago, when the board of the Corcoran and the university were not able to come to an agreement about the future of the college, the museum and the sustainability of the art collection, according to officials at the Corcoran.

“We’ve been looking for a good, secure solution for the collection and for the future of the school,” said Ms. Loar in a telephone interview. “Our curators have worked with curators at the National Gallery. We feel like these are colleagues, and we can partner with them. It solves the problem with the building, which is in need of major repairs.”

If the partnership is approved, Ms. Loar added, the faculty of the college would be absorbed by George Washington University for at least one year. Ms. Loar said the future of the Corcoran’s staff, including its curators and registrars, was still being discussed. “We will look for future roles either within the new partnership or elsewhere,” she said.

The plan also gives the National Gallery an additional site to present its own exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Although its East Building is currently being renovated to add more than 12,000 square feet of gallery space, Mr. Powell, the director, said that overseeing the Corcoran’s majestic galleries, which he described as “arguably the most beautiful galleries of any museum in the United States,” would solve a bigger problem for his institution in a few years. “It does answer an unspoken need for us,” Mr. Powell said. “We would have been looking for more space.”

If the plan is approved, the Corcoran’s board will comprise representatives of all three entities in an advisory role to “keep innovation programmatically alive at the Corcoran,” Ms. Loar said.

As for George Washington University, Steven Knapp, its president, said on Wednesday that taking over the college “would be a very exciting opportunity and helps establish our university as a hub for the arts.”

“I’ve been talking to the Corcoran for a number of years about partnerships that would be beneficial,” Mr. Knapp said. “They are a close neighbor.” But this particular plan, including the hefty expenses required to renovate the Corcoran’s building, Mr. Knapp said, “would secure the nation’s capital as a center for arts and culture.”

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed by Protester at Miami Museum" @nytimes By NICK MADIGAN

“Colored Vases” by the artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in Florida in November 2013. The police on Sunday arrested a man who is accused of smashing one of the vases. Daniel Azoulay/Perez Art Museum Miami, via European Pressphoto Agency

MIAMI — Officials at the recently inaugurated Pérez Art Museum Miami confirmed on Monday that a valuable vase by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been deliberately destroyed by a visitor in what appeared to be an act of protest.

A spokeswoman for the museum said the incident occurred on Sunday afternoon when a local artist walked into the waterfront museum and picked up one of the vases in an installation of Mr. Ai’s work titled “Colored Vases.” A guard asked the man to put it down, but instead he threw it to the ground, smashing it, the spokeswoman said.

The police were summoned and arrested Maximo Caminero, 51. Mr. Caminero was charged with criminal mischief and later released after posting bail. He told reporters that he planned to hold a news conference on Tuesday afternoon to explain his actions, but later canceled it.

Pérez Art Museum Miami, which opened with much fanfare during the Art Basel festival here in December, published a statement on its website saying that after the vase had been broken in the museum’s retrospective exhibit of Mr. Ai’s work, a security team “immediately secured the galleries and the person was apprehended.” Without mentioning Mr. Caminero’s name, the statement said that the museum was “working with the authorities in their investigation.”

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“Although the museum can’t speak directly to intentions, evidence suggests that this was a premeditated act,” the museum’s statement went on. “As an art museum dedicated to celebrating modern and contemporary artists from within our community and around the world, we have the highest respect for freedom of expression, but this destructive act is vandalism and disrespectful to another artist and his work, to Pérez Art Museum Miami, and to our community.”

Mr. Caminero, a native of the Dominican Republic who has long lived in Miami, told the Miami New Times, a weekly newspaper, after his arrest that he had broken the vase to protest what he said was the museum’s exclusion of local artists in its exhibits.

Mr. Ai has become China’s best-known artist and has been under intense pressure from the authorities there to curtail his advocacy efforts, which included a lengthy investigation he undertook into shoddy construction that contributed to the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in their classrooms during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Mr. Ai, 56, was detained for 81 days in 2011 on tax evasion charges, and remains subject to travel restrictions.

Reached by telephone in China, Mr. Ai said he had initially understood the vase to have been broken accidentally. But then he read a news report that the vase in Miami had been deliberately smashed, and he questioned Mr. Caminero’s expressed reason for doing so.

“The argument does not support the act,” Mr. Ai said. “It doesn’t sound right. His argument doesn’t make much sense. If he really had a point, he should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble to destroy property that does not belong to him.”

Mr. Ai said he had no idea whether the vase could be fixed or whether its loss would be covered by insurance. But he said he was not overly distressed by the breakage. “I’m O.K. with it, if a work is destroyed,” Mr. Ai said. “A work is a work. It’s a physical thing. What can you do? It’s already over.”

News reports here said the vase was worth $1 million, a figure the museum said was provided by the police as an estimate based on previous appraisals of similar works by Mr. Ai. An official appraisal of the vase’s value is underway, said Alina Sumajin, a spokeswoman for the museum.

A similar work, called a Group of 9 Coloured Vases, consisting of Neolithic vases painted by Mr. Ai in 2007, sold at Sotheby’s in London in 2012 for $156,325, a price that included buyer’s premium.

Paradoxically, Mr. Caminero claims to be an admirer of his Chinese colleague. He told the Miami New Times that he destroyed the vase “for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here.” Miami’s museums and galleries, he said, “have spent so many millions now on international artists,” without, in his view, giving any attention to local talent.

“It’s the same political situation over and over again,” he told the newspaper. “I’ve been here for 30 years and it’s always the same.”

Mr. Caminero suggested that he had been inspired by one of Mr. Ai’s most famous works, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” a series of three photographs, on exhibit here, in which he dispassionately shatters a priceless ancient Chinese vase to make a point about valuation of art and everyday objects as well as the fragility of cultural objects.

The Pérez museum’s description of the photographs says that the artist dropped a 206 BCE-220 CE urn to the floor “to express the notion that new ideas and values can be produced through iconoclasm.”

“I saw it as a provocation by Weiwei to join him in an act of performance protest,” Mr. Caminero told the New Times.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Choose the Artists, Ignore the Critics" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

Anthony Elms, one of the curators of this year’s Whitney Biennial. Abe Frajndlich for The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — Anthony Elms says that the first artwork he fell in love with, as a boy growing up in southern Michigan, was John Singleton Copley’s painting of a swimmer pulled from the clutches of sharks, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Mr. Elms may soon be casting his mind back to that picture as he starts to feel like chum.

He is in the last stages of being a co-curator for the latest biennial survey of this country’s art, which opens on March 7 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Now 82 years old, the show — which ran annually from 1932 until 1973 — is as famous for the vitriol it provokes as for its works: “When it comes to being boring, the Whitney staff is inexhaustibly inventive,” read one slam from 1977. “It’s glum, preachy, sophomoric and aesthetically aimless,” another critic wrote in 1993.

Encountered on his home turf at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art here, where he has been an associate curator since 2011, Mr. Elms doesn’t come across as girded for battle. He’s wearing pink jeans, a dress shirt and a tweed jacket — a sedate style he says he’s favored since high school. “I used to be the kid where they’d go, ‘Who’s the narc?’ ” Slight, almost pretty, Mr. Elms looks at least a decade younger than his 43 years.

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He’s the wild card in the curatorial mix, somewhat junior beside Stuart Comer, the chief curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art, and Michelle Grabner, a longtime professor of painting now teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Yale. (The Whitney is giving one floor to each curator.) Before his current job, Mr. Elms helped run a minor university gallery in Chicago, after a decade spent as an exhibition preparator and a freelance writer and curator, and also making art. The invitation to do the Biennial came pretty much out of the blue, he said, after he was asked to submit a one-page proposal.

Mr. Elms said he’s read the stack of previous Biennial pans, “and I actually found that kind of liberating,” he said. “I know someone’s not going to like the show, so I might as well just go forward and try to do it the way that seems right. Maybe this is about the part of me that comes from scrappy Michigan.” He added, “Anything I can do to put more artists in more people’s faces is something I’ll say yes to.”

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Mr. Elms’s Biennial spread will include works by 24 artists and collectives — the unknowns and the unheralded, as well as a few famous figures. Elijah Burgher is a 35-year-old painter who remembers getting the email from Mr. Elms saying he would be in the Biennial. “It sounds really silly, but I felt like I was going to faint,” Mr. Burgher said, speaking by Skype from his Chicago studio. Wearing an old red hoodie, he was bleary-eyed from finishing his Whitney work at 4 a.m.to meet the shipping deadline. Behind him on a wall hung a canvas like those he was sending to New York. The painting invokes the occult and carries a self-designed “magic” symbol, a bit like a Wiccan pentacle, that Mr. Burgher called a sigil. It seems to cross the stick figures of Keith Haring with rigorous geometric abstraction. The last-minute Biennial piece is a detailed drawing, in colored pencil, of three nude males posed in front of a crude mural of naked swordsmen.

Making esoteric work in Chicago about spells and sex can leave a young artist feeling invisible, Mr. Burgher said. A Whitney invitation promises critical validation and a market boost: “I want both — who doesn’t?”

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Marc Fischer is another of the eight Chicagoans whom Mr. Elms will feature on his Whitney floor. Mr. Fischer rarely makes salable objects — he lives mostly off part-time teaching and fees from museum projects — and the Biennial doesn’t offer financial rewards. “It’s a bit bizarre how special it’s treated — maybe a few more people will ask me to give a lecture,” he said in a phone interview. Although he normally works as part of a collective — this year’s Biennial will have a full eight of those — his Whitney work comes under the aegis of Public Collectors, a kind of community project that he runs solo to bring attention to the weird stuff people amass.

For the Biennial, Mr. Fischer has delved into the estate of Malachi Ritscher, who was well known in Chicago as a peace activist and for the thousands of recordings he made of the city’s music scene. He came to national attention in 2006, when he immolated himself in protest against the American war in Iraq. Mr. Fischer’s installation will include recordings by Ritscher and listening stations for them, but also a skateboard that Ritscher designed and documentation of his life, ideals and death. “I want to see the museum lend its authority to something which is not normally accorded it,” Mr. Fischer said.

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If Mr. Elms’s tastes run from magic paintings to cassette tapes and skateboards, documentary photos and day-in-the-life videos, his eclecticism may be a reflection of a shifting moment in art, said the 36-year-old artist Paul P., whom Mr. Elms recently met. “I think that at this moment to be a curator could be a more modest act,” said the artist from his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That is, instead of making choices based on some idea of setting the art agenda, a curator could aim instead to sample the vast range of interests that artists now have.

Paul P. found success with luscious, Whistlerian paintings of young men culled from the pages of gay pornography. He said he was grateful to Mr. Elms for letting him go in a new direction: He’ll be showing his fountain-pen drawings of old master sculptures, as well as a wooden desk and stool that he designed in the refined Victorian style known as Anglo-Japanese; it was built by a Toronto craftsman.

“To have what was on the forefront of my interest be what Anthony was interested in is great,” Paul P. said.

Mr. Elms has called for a Biennial with “a multiplicity of voices and a sense of poetry,” but the role of poet these days risks being less about complex ideas rendered with maximum concision than about portentous, high-seeming confusion.

Worse yet, his party-mix approach could make his floor at the Whitney read as an avatar of the art fair, geared to collectors’ lust for variety.

The market implications of the Biennial — a recent article in Forbes discussed it as a guide to art investing — left one rigorous conceptualist, Angie Keefer, hesitant about accepting Mr. Elms’s invitation to exhibit, although she counts herself a fan of his work as a curator. After much back and forth, the piece she agreed to make will be installed near where visitors pay to enter, and will address “economic versus artistic definitions of what value is,” she said from her home in Hudson, N.Y. A projection of a lovely waterfall will be manipulated to give visitors a visceral sense — literally — of the rise and fall of commodities futures. Whether the public likes what it gets is not very much on her mind, she said — or Mr. Elms’s.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Marianne Boesky: In Search of Art Stars" @wsj by Alexandra Wolfe

When gallerist Marianne Boesky first showed the works of Takashi Murakami —the Japanese artist renowned for work that combines traditional Japanese style with contemporary Pop, whose career she launched in 1997—the art world thought she was crazy. "I couldn't even give his work away," she says. "I could even go so far as to say I was mocked for showing it." One of his pieces recently sold for over $15 million at auction. And Ms. Boesky has had her own success, introducing art stars such as Lisa Yuskavage, Yoshitomo Nara and Barnaby Furnas.

In a few weeks, Ms. Boesky, 46, is taking another risk. At this year's Armory Show, a New York art fair that runs from March 6 to 9, she will showcase the work of emerging South African-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka. While Ms. Boesky has never devoted her entire booth to one artist at the Armory, she is reserving all her space for him—not bad for an artist who's never been seen in the U.S.

With the contemporary art market booming, fairs such as the Armory Show—in which booths often cost galleries at least $100,000—have become increasingly influential. They're a one-stop shop for global collectors looking to buy more efficiently than ever before. Some collectors forgo in-person shopping altogether. These days, Ms. Boesky never even meets some of her clients, who often buy the works of recognized artists based just on seeing photos of them. "An email comes in, and you Google the person, and it's the 14th-richest person in Japan or something," she says.

But while she thinks collecting is now "a lot less personal" than it used to be, one motivation for buying remains the same. "Art is a status symbol and always has been," she says. "People arrive at a certain level of wealth, and they've bought their umpteenth car, and art is that great equalizer of having arrived."

On this day, Ms. Boesky is sitting in her white minimalist office in her spacious Chelsea gallery in Manhattan. She has a second gallery in a rental space on the Upper East Side, opened in 2010. Now she is planning to announce the creation of another gallery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she will showcase the emerging artists she has increasingly represented in recent years.

Ms. Boesky has come a long way from the first space she opened 18 years ago in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. She grew up around the art owned by her father, Ivan Boesky, the investment banker convicted of insider trading in 1986. Even then she had dreams of opening a gallery one day, she says.

Ms. Boesky spent her childhood in and around New York City, and her father often took her to galleries and auctions, where he let her raise the paddle. Her mother liked "pretty" art while her father "tended toward dark and tough art, and that's really what I related to, too." Together her parents built a collection of blue-chip artwork, including works by Auguste Rodin and Édouard Vuillard. "It was great art for somebody who grew up with nothing," she says, referring to her father.

But he tended to buy work by more established artists. Mr. Boesky met Andy Warhol and was offered works by Willem de Kooning, but she says he had no interest. "If he was going to be a successful, rich man, he was going to have a Renoir and a Monet, but he also liked the really tough stuff." Ms. Boesky was especially interested in her father's sculptures by Alberto Giacometti. "To me, their raw, ugly, roughness was relatable and sad and beautiful," she says. "But that's all gone and in the past."

When Mr. Boesky was convicted, she says, "everything sort of imploded." She was then in college—first at Duke University, then at Middlebury College. After graduating, Ms. Boesky supported herself working for a few private dealers and interning at Sotheby's before she realized that she needed to make more money if she wanted to amass her own collection. During a brief stint in law, while working for the American Civil Liberties Union, she met her first artist, Lisa Yuskavage, through an art dealer.

She got a loan to rent a space on Greene Street and continued to add artists, eventually selling her apartment to open her current gallery in Chelsea. "I borrowed money to get started, and I've continued borrowing money to grow, and I just keep borrowing money," she says, laughing. "I am a risk taker, but I have never defaulted on a single loan." Her parents didn't help finance the gallery. "It was not something that my parents were going to be in a position or have an interest in supporting and bankrolling," she says.

Now, Ms. Boesky lives with her husband and daughter above the Chelsea gallery in an art-filled apartment. "My hope was just to be able to feed myself and keep the doors open," she says. "It never occurred to me I'd be able to buy a house and a boat and all these things…but it's a nice incidental benefit, no doubt about it." She's also glad to have been able to help artists have the same opportunities. "I like that artists don't need to be burned-out hippies anymore."

With recent artwork drawing high prices—such as the record sale of a 1969 Francis Bacon triptych for $142.4 million last fall—some are asking whether there could be an art bubble. Ms. Boesky says she doesn't believe so because prices aren't high across the board. "People are chasing young, hyped, hip, and they're chasing the rarefied blue-chip, hard-to-get art and paying whatever it takes to get it, but the middle remains to be seen," she says.

Since the contemporary art market weathered the economic downturn better than assets like homes, Ms. Boesky thinks art is now considered a less volatile asset than it once was. "Late 2009 and 2010 wasn't easy for anyone, but it's kind of incredible," she says. "The richest people…even in the worst of times are still rich, and they need to put their money somewhere." Unlike stock in a tech company, art is a physical asset. "Things go up and down, but they don't go to zero…and at least I have a storage facility in Delaware I could visit," she quips.

In the past few years, the art market has come under fire for its lack of oversight. Art-fair transactions are not public, and auction houses rarely disclose buyers or sellers of works they bring to market. Most galleries don't post the prices of their artwork, in defiance of a decades-old law that mandates they do so.

And groups of speculators can buy a large amount of work by a particular artist, put the pieces up for sale at auction and then enlist their friends to bid up the prices. If the works sell well, the speculators can reap tidy profits. "You can call that collusion, but it's not illegal, and I don't even know if it's unethical," she says. She admits there is a fine line. "You could compare it to insider trading in that…all the little people who don't get access get hurt by losing opportunity," she says, "but it's all very gray."

Ms. Boesky does think the art world, traditionally a handshake business, would be better served by embracing written contracts, which would avoid many of the legal spats over payments that have plagued countless deals. In the end, though, she says most people buy art because they love it. "We're talking about art," she says. "Nobody gets hurt."

Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com

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