The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal - "The Redesign of a Design Museum" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

Andrew Carnegie used the third floor of his Fifth Avenue mansion as a gymnasium where he practiced his putting. The current owner, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, plans to put a small mini-golf green there on Tuesday when the news media gets a preview of the mansion’s nearly completed $91 million renovation.

The gesture is partly a playful way to honor a piece of the building’s history. But it also represents a larger message that the museum is trying to send as it reopens later this year after three years of being closed: This institution, which highlights the importance of design in everything from architecture to umbrellas, can be fun for all kinds of visitors — not just specialists.

The reconditioned building, at East 91st Street, seeks to present an interactive experience — not just artifacts in glass cases — to draw more people in the door and keep them coming back.

“We’re really taking the dust off the place and making it an exciting destination for people,” said Caroline Baumann, the museum’s director, in a recent walk through the building. “We want to open our arms and say welcome to Cooper-Hewitt, and to build audience.”

Marketing the Cooper-Hewitt as “an exciting destination” can be a challenge, given the museum’s home, the Carnegie Mansion: a turn-of-the-century gem, but not a natural setting for cutting-edge contemporary design. But with its renovation — the largest in the museum’s history — the Cooper-Hewitt is trying to counter a fusty image. It’s also rebranding itself, with a new font and a new name: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

The third floor — which had housed the research library and was not open to the public — has been transformed into a signature 6,000-square-foot gallery for temporary exhibitions. The newly landscaped garden, with seating for 180, will be free to the public — with a new canopied entrance on 90th Street — and Ms. Bauman said she hoped to open it in the early morning before museum hours as a place to enjoy coffee and pastries.

The new second floor features “the immersion room,” where visitors can pick from 500 examples of the Cooper-Hewitt’s 10,000-piece wallcoverings collection — or design their own — and the pattern will be projected on two walls. “We expect a long line outside this gallery,” Ms. Baumann said.

And then there is the pen. The museum plans to encourage each visitor to use a special electronic pen that can collect information from works on view by tapping wall labels. The information can later be downloaded for additional study, and the system will remember patrons the next time they visit.

“It’s an entire record of what you did at Cooper-Hewitt that day,” Ms. Baumann said. “Our ambition is to make people repeat users: You’re creating and collecting throughout your experience at Cooper-Hewitt.”

Introducing the pen, the immersion room and croissants in the garden in an institution that has positioned itself as the national authority on design may raise questions about whether the museum is resorting to gimmicks. But design experts said the museum needed to take steps to cultivate repeat visitors and international tourists, among whom the museum is not always a popular destination — particularly because it is at the north end of Museum Mile.

“People tend to go there once a year,” said Karim Rashid, the industrial designer. “They need to have revolving, frequent, high-profile shows that bring people there every couple of months.”

Museum officials said that they viewed the pen, in particular, as a useful tool to gauge — and respond to — the viewing habits of visitors. “What are you looking at; what are you not looking at?” Ms. Baumann said. “It helps us better tweak the visitor experience.”

“It’s a global first,” she added. “We don’t know if it’s going to work.”

Through such efforts, the museum hopes to raise its annual number of visitors to as many as 500,000, compared with 225,000 in the 12 months before it closed in 2011 (which in itself was unusually high because of the Van Cleef & Arpels show that spring). By comparison, the Frick Collection, also in a Beaux-Arts mansion, had 420,000 visitors last year, and the Guggenheim, just down the block from the Cooper-Hewitt, had 1.2 million.

The Cooper-Hewitt also wants to increase its revenue. Being closed has cost the museum income and momentum. With the renovation, the institution’s annual budget has grown to $18 million from $16 million, and the Smithsonian, its parent, covers only 30 percent; the Cooper-Hewitt has to raise and earn the rest.

And the museum wants to double its endowment, to $20 million ($8.4 million of the additional $10 million has been raised so far).

When the renovated museum opens, by the end of the year, it will have 60 percent more gallery space for temporary exhibitions and shows of the permanent collection, which contains 212,000 objects. There will be new sunlit stairwells, with oversize numbers clearly designating each floor, and a new delivery entrance for art coming into the museum. (When the museum exhibited a Tata Nano automobile in 2010, it had to roll the podlike car up a ramp through the front door).

The project’s budget rose to $91 million from $64 million in 2008, partly because of additional work in the garden. The Cooper-Hewitt received about $14 million for the project from the city.

The museum enlisted several design firms in the effort, including Gluckman Mayner Architects, for the mansion’s overall interior renovation, in collaboration with Beyer Blinder Belle; Hood Design, for the landscaping; Diller Scofidio & Renfro, for the new retail space, entrance and some exhibitions; Local Projects, for the interactive media; and Pentagram, for a new graphic identity.

Every millimeter of the mansion has been restored, from the Caldwell & Company light fixtures to the oak walls, and almost the entire building has been turned over to galleries. (Offices that were there have been moved to the Cooper-Hewitt’s two adjacent townhouses on East 90th Street, which have also been renovated).

“You build audience by improving the quality and the number of exhibitions, and they can do that now,” said Richard Gluckman, one of the lead architects on the project. “It’s become a more flexible building.”

George Lindemann Journal - "An Artist Fills Galleries With Emptiness" by ROSLYN SULCAS

It was Day 2 of “512 Hours,” Ms. Abramovic’s first new work since her 2010 retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, transformed her from a pioneering performance artist to a celebrity. There, she sat motionless, six days a week, seven hours a day, looking straight at whoever sat down opposite her. This time there is no chair. “There is just me,” she said. “And the public. It is insane what I try to do.”

The idea of “512 Hours,” named for the length of time Ms. Abramovic will spend in the gallery over the duration of the exhibition (running through Aug. 25), is both simple and radical. There is nothing in the Serpentine galleries except lockers, where visitors can put their bags and electronic devices. Ms. Abramovic, as well as an assistant, Lynsey Peisinger, and several museum guards are there. What will happen in the space no one quite knows. “I honestly don’t know; I don’t have a plan,” she said in an interview at the house she is sharing with her assistants during the London show. “That is the point. The idea is that the public are my material, and I am theirs. I will open the gallery myself in the morning and close it at 6 p.m. with my key. I want to understand how I can be in the present moment, be with the public.” On Wednesday, hundreds of people lined up outside to enter the gallery, although on Thursday there was no wait.

Ms. Abramovic, who has long black hair and almost spookily unlined creamy skin at 67, was born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, to parents who had been partisan heroes during World War II. She started her performance career in Belgrade, but has lived most of her adult life elsewhere and speaks a throaty, lightly accented English. Even before the MoMA show made her a star, she was widely known in the art world as a pioneer in her field who had not just created performances of physical intensity — carving a star into her stomach with a razor, lying on a block of ice for hours, screaming until her voice gave out — but had also re-enacted the grueling performance pieces of other artists.

She said that she had been invited to the Serpentine, the small museum in the middle of Kensington Gardens that is mostly dedicated to experimental work, almost 17 years ago. (“Everything takes forever in my life,” she declared dramatically.)

When she and the gallery’s co-curators, Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, finally fixed a date, she thought she might show little-known early works, or sound pieces. “Then one night, in the middle of the night,” she said, “I woke up thinking: ‘This is wrong. I must do something really radical, there is no time to lose.’ I had this vision of an empty gallery — nothing there.

But there has been much ado about the word “nothing.” Two weeks ago, TheGuardian newspaper reported that a number of American art historians and curators had written to Mr. Obrist, accusing Ms. Abramovic and the gallery of failing to acknowledge the work of Mary Ellen Carroll, a New York-based conceptual artist. Ms. Carroll said in an email that she had been working on a project called “Nothing” since 1984, describing it as “an engagement with the public” without documentation. Ms. Carroll did not respond directly to the question of how Ms. Abramovic’s piece is imitative of her own. But she wrote: “There is a historical tradition/protocol for artists, curators and historians to acknowledge historical precedents. When they are similar, one would say it is necessary.”

Mr. Obrist, in a telephone interview, said that Ms. Carroll was one of numerous artists before Ms. Abramovic who had explored the relationship between art and nothingness.

“There are many people — John Cage, Yves Klein, Gustav Metzger, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys — who have worked with this idea, including Mary Ellen Carroll. Of course we take that seriously.” (Mr. Obrist did not mention Jerry Seinfeld.)

“From my point of view, it’s difficult for anyone to claim nothing,” Ms. Abramovic said dryly. “I think it’s a misunderstanding anyway. It’s not that I’m doing nothing — quite the opposite. It’s just that there is nothing except people in the space. But now we are getting letters every day from people who did nothing first. It seems to have become something.”

After “The Artist Is Present,” which drew more than a half-million visitors, Ms. Abramovic said she found it difficult to move on to another performance work. “I set up such a high bar I think everyone was thinking that was it and now I’d do my institute,” she said, referring to the Marina Abramovic Institute, a center for long-durational work in Hudson, N.Y., that she hopes will bring together figures from the worlds of art, science and spirituality. “And it is true that it was so incredibly complete I had to figure out how to get out of that. The solution was simple: To take away even the few things I had there — the chair, the structure of sitting and looking.”

The controversy generated by “512 Hours,” the first performance work that Ms. Abramovic has presented in a British gallery, is nothing new for this artist, who has been criticized for appearing to relish the fame that has accompanied her success: Lady Gaga has come to her for instruction and Time magazine put her on this year’s list of its 100 most influential people.

“I have moved from an art structure to a larger one,” Ms. Abramovic said. “‘This is not a public who usually go to museums; they are super young, and I become for them some kind of example of things they want to know. I think there is an enormous need to be in contact with the artist. It is a huge responsibility, there are huge expectations. It does not make my ego bigger, it gives me more to do.”

In the gallery she gave a small mirror to a visitor and told her to walk backward, using the mirror as a guide. “Reality is behind you,” she whispered.

"Think Big. Build Big. Sell Big." @nytimes  CAROL VOGEL

On a spring afternoon with his first major retrospective in New York looming, the artist Jeff Koons, nattily dressed in navy blue from head to toe, calmly boarded a helicopter heading for a foundry in upstate New York. His mission was to check up on his “Play-Doh,” a monumental sculpture depicting the squidgy material ubiquitous in American playrooms.

Back in 1994, Mr. Koons set out to replicate a colorful mound of Play-Doh configured by his son, Ludwig. It was to have been fashioned from polyethylene, and after seeing the model, a Los Angeles collector named Bill Bell agreed to buy “Play-Doh” on the spot.

“But as I started putting more and more detail in the piece, I realized I needed to make it out of aluminum to get a more hyper-realistic surface,” Mr. Koons said, as if to justify the sculpture’s long gestation.

Twenty years later, “Play-Doh” is still in 27 pieces, and Mr. Bell has never seen it finished. Neither has the Whitney Museum of American Art, where the 10-foot-tall work is to be a centerpiece of its coming Koons survey, one that will consume more space than the museum has ever devoted to a single artist, including Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper or Georgia O’Keeffe.

John von Schmid, sculpture manager of the Jeff Koons studio, demonstrates how a part of the sculpture “Play-Doh” (1994–2014) will get through the front door of the Whitney for its Koons retrospective.

“It’s never easy with Jeff,” said Mr. Bell, who owns 10 of his sculptures and is keenly familiar with the artist’s tardy ways.

The Whitney has had its share of challenging installations. Crews have had to handle toxic molten lead and contend with hanging thousands of pounds of mattresses from the ceiling and smearing them with Entenmann’s cinnamon cake.

But nothing comes close to the test the museum will face with the opening of “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,” on June 27.

How, for instance, are the art handlers planning to move his 15,000-pound granite “Gorilla” into an elevator only equipped to safely handle 14,000 pounds? (Specialists from the Otis Elevator Company will have to raise the elevator with the sculpture inside it, using chain hoists.)

To get both “Gorilla” and “Play-Doh” inside the museum, the building’s front doors and transom must be removed — a first for the Whitney.

And then there are the supersize balloon dog of polished steel; the golden ceramic Michael Jackson with his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles; the black granite Popeye; basketballs floating in tanks of water; vacuum cleaners encased in vitrines, and the giant canvases painted by scores of assistants depicting figures from antiquity and pop culture.

“It’s the perfect storm of difficulties,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s associate director of programs, who has spent four years organizing the exhibition and accompanied Mr. Koons last month on his helicopter journey. “There are the sheer physical demands of the objects themselves, their high values and the fragile materials, to say nothing of the cliffhanger of waiting for works that have been in production for years.”

Mr. Rothkopf, 37, who has written extensively about Mr. Koons since he was a student at Harvard, has a lot riding on this show. Not only will it fill nearly the entire museum, including the lobby and sculpture court, with some 120 objects, it is also the Whitney’s grand finale before moving to its new home in the meatpacking district in Manhattan next year.

While it would have been far easier to wait and hold the exhibition in the Whitney’s new Renzo Piano-designed building, which will be equipped with commodious loading docks, elevators able to handle unusually heavy artworks and column-free galleries, Mr. Koons explained that he likes seeing his work set against “the patina of the Breuer building,” adding, “There is a brute force reality about the Whitney spaces.”

At 59, Mr. Koons may be one of the most famous living artists around — and the most expensive at auction, a distinction he earned last year when “Balloon Dog (Orange)” sold for $58.4 million. But this will be the first time American audiences will see the sweep of his more than three-decade career in one gulp, 1978 to the present.

“These works resonate on so many levels, for the younger artists he has influenced and for the general public,” said Jeffrey Deitch, Mr. Koons’s former dealer and his friend, who was counting on holding the retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles when he was the director. (Mr. Deitch left the museum last year, and the show will not be traveling to Los Angeles.) “Despite their sophistication, they are accessible. Everybody can relate to a child’s toy or a vacuum cleaner. You don’t need to know art history to be knocked out by them.”

Mr. Koons, who has been making art out of kitsch since the 1980s, has been slammed by some critics as glibly calculating, even as others have praised him. In 1991, Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times, “Just when it looked as if the ’80s were over, Jeff Koons has provided one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the decade.”

The occasion was a show at the Sonnabend Gallery of paintings depicting Mr. Koons and his first wife, Ilona Staller, the Italian porn star and politician called Cicciolina, engaged in sex acts. (He is now married to Justine Wheeler, an artist who worked in his studio, and they have six children.)

More recently, his work has received considerable praise here and in Europe, where he has had several shows. And one, at the Château de Versailles in France, got considerable attention good and bad for placing a plexiglass-enclosed display of vacuum cleaners and floor polishers in front of the official portrait of Marie Antoinette and installing a bare-breasted blonde holding a pink panther in the same room with a 1729 painting of Louis XV conferring peace upon Europe.

Part of Mr. Koons’s magic is the perfection and seemingly effortless appearance of his objects, but museum experts say they are among the most technically challenging produced today.

“Many of the sculptures are as delicate as Fabergé eggs,” said Mr. Rothkopf, describing their shiny, painted surfaces as one example of why this show is costing “millions of dollars,” for insurance and shipping and refabricating, for example, aging basketballs. (Mr. Rothkopf refused to give exact figures but said the show is the Whitney’s most expensive.)

A list of its lenders reads like a Who’s Who of today’s powerful collectors, including the British artist Damien Hirst, the Los Angeles financier Eli Broad, the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, the luxury goods magnate François Pinault and the real estate developers Harry Macklowe and his wife, Linda.

By all accounts an artist with this much celebrity should have had at least one major show in a New York museum by now. Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, who also emerged in the 1980s with Mr. Koons, have each had two.

It’s not for lack of trying. Starting in 1996 the Guggenheim Museum had a Koons exhibition on its schedule. But skyrocketing costs coupled with difficulties in making the works to Mr. Koons’s exacting standards killed it. (Not all has been lost for the Guggenheim. After the Whitney’s show closes, it will travel first to the Pompidou Center in Paris and then the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.)

Asked why they finally abandoned the idea, Lisa Dennison, a former Guggenheim director who is currently a chairwoman of Sotheby’s, said that besides the rising costs, “finding the technology to match Jeff’s vision became impossible.”

It is still his biggest problem. In addition to “Play-Doh,” crews are racing to finish several significant sculptures from his “Celebration” series, a group of childlike objects, including party hats, Easter eggs, kittens and the now famous “Balloon Dog.” (And Mr. Bell has yet to see two other purchases: a black granite “Popeye,” which is slated for the retrospective, and a 10-foot tall “Party Hat,” which is not.)

And so, on that spring day, greeting his helicopter pilot like an old friend, Mr. Koons rose above the rush-hour jam on his flight to the Polich Tallix foundry in Rock Tavern, N.Y.

In its cavernous space dozens of workers stood by, anxiously watching Mr. Koons’s reaction to the progress of “Play-Doh.” The artist gently caressed a rippled portion of the aluminum surface and said, in his signature monotone that almost seems scripted in its sincerity: “Look how sensual these forms are. When you rip Play-Doh apart and stretch it, you get these lines. It’s like a Rodin sculpture.”

Later in the day, back at the artist’s Chelsea studio — where more than 100 assistants were performing any number of tasks, including painting canvases and choosing which of some dozen store-bought inflatable monkeys might be replicated as sculpture — it was easy to see why everything Mr. Koons does takes so much time.

Realizing “Play-Doh” was “almost Pharaonic,” Mr. Rothkopf said. There was also a re-creation of the Liberty Bell under way, made of bronze. An assistant was painting its wooden stand, choosing from a palette of 129 shades of brown, each matched precisely by computer to the original.

“It’s a moral exercise to make something as realistic as possible,” Mr. Koons said, explaining that he liked his Bell not only for its “sense of history” but also for its sensuous shape, a “feminine form.”

His choice of colors for “Play-Doh” was equally exacting. Mr. Koons ran off, coming back with a tray with small containers of vintage, dried-up Play-Doh, dating to 1994. “Over the years, the company has changed its colors,” Mr. Koons explained, asked why he had saved the samples and original containers. “They are easy to refresh with a little water.” Tiny mounds of bright yellow, blue, purple, red and green will be matched and spray-painted on the cast-aluminum parts at a company in Connecticut that specializes in decorative painting of hot rods and vintage cars. Then they will be assembled into a gigantic mound.

Finishing “Play-Doh” in time for the retrospective is one hurdle. Installing it on the museum’s fourth floor is another.

A few days later, Mr. Rothkopf and Graham Miles, an art handler at the Whitney, were hunkered down in the museum’s subbasement, planning maneuvers. “It has been like a military operation,” Mr. Rothkopf said. The installation of the show will take three weeks, with crews working seven days a week in 11-hour shifts.

Not leaving anything to chance, Mr. Miles’s team, working with assistants from Mr. Koons’s studio, made a video of a small-scale model of “Play-Doh” to chart exactly how it will move through the museum lobby, into the elevator and up, where it will join other works from the “Celebration” series.

“Every 16th of an inch is critical,” Mr. Miles said. “There’s no room for error. It’s like getting a ship in the bottle 30 times over.”

Mr. Rothkopf said he and others from the Whitney felt it was crucial that the museum’s last show, which is expected to generate record crowds, be like no other.

“We didn’t want to leave uptown feeling nostalgic, we wanted to go out with a bang,” he said. “Let’s just hope we don’t bring the building down with us.”

George Lindemann Journal - "Are Museums Selling Out?" By ELLEN GAMERMAN

A Bulgari snake bracelet-watch on display in Houston. Julie Soefer for The Wall Street Journal

A display of Bulgari jewels in Houston features cases of spot-lit gems, photos of Angelina Jolie and Keira Knightley laden with signature baubles and testimonials about the company's "shimmering, iconic jewelry."

Pretty typical for a jewelry presentation except for one thing: It isn't in a store, but a museum.

The exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, "Bulgari: 130 Years of Masterpieces," includes slick video and screen displays, hologram-like installations and glowing descriptions of the pieces—all created by Bulgari, which supplied most of the jewels, footed half the bill, and provided the catalog essay.

The timing of the exhibit is also notable. The same week the museum show opened in May, Bulgari unveiled a gleaming makeover of its boutique in a Houston luxury mall. The company brought in experts from Rome to help rebuild the shop, which is partly inspired by the Via Condotti flagship store and features some of the same images of gem-covered movie stars on its walls as the museum exhibit, along with leaflets and window banners advertising the show.

Exhibits featuring luxury fashion and jewelry brands are increasingly jamming museum calendars. For cultural institutions, the shows offer the potential for a blockbuster that attracts a broader range of visitors, brings in big first-time donors and tours the world. To date, more than one million people have seen a traveling global exhibit about designer Jean Paul Gaultier, what museum experts call a record number for any fashion exhibit.

For luxury companies, museum exhibits are becoming an important new tool in their marketing arsenals. Fashion and jewelry executives have long cultivated museum shows to provide a stamp of legitimacy and a chance to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Now, big brands have gone further, hiring curators to shop shows to museums, spending millions to build their archives for exhibit loans, wooing arts venues in strategic markets and enlisting stores and VIP clients to help secure and promote these shows.

Individual luxury items that boast a museum pedigree can soar in value. A Van Cleef & Arpels art-deco diamond brooch sold for more than $662,000 at Christie's in New York in 2011—more than eight times its high estimate. The sale followed the piece's appearance in "Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels," a 2011 exhibit at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum that drew record-breaking crowds in New York.

"These exhibitions are very, very important for us," says Nicholas Bos, CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels. "When clients see some pieces exhibited in the museum that are pretty similar to ones they've bought, it confirms to them that it's a valid choice, and it's a good incentive to add to their collection."

The explosion of recent exhibitions featuring fashion, jewelry and other luxury accessories includes shows created with input and money from the featured brands. Chanel curated and paid for the creation of its brand-related exhibits, known as "Culture Chanel," which museums and arts institutions went on to stage in Moscow, Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, China. A Chanel spokeswoman says the company sometimes helps cover installation costs at the venues, too. This year, a collector of David Webb jewelry and a major dealer sponsored an independently curated show about the society jeweler at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla. An exhibit on Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry that closed earlier this year at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., was curated by a Van Cleef employee with production costs paid partly by the jeweler.

Even for shows whose curators or sponsors have little connection to the luxury business, a brand's cooperation is often pivotal. A coming September exhibit curated by the Brooklyn Museum, "Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe," will feature lent pieces from a wide range of established and emerging designers including Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin. (A museum spokeswoman says the show has no confirmed sponsors yet.) Cartier didn't sponsor the Denver Art Museum's new fall exhibit, "Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century," but it opened its gem vault and various archives to the museum's curator more than a dozen times. The Gaultier retrospective, making its ninth stop this fall in Melbourne, Australia, was originally conceived by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts without funding by the brand. But its curator, former model Thierry-Maxime Loriot, worked closely with Mr. Gaultier and sought his approval. "It's his baby, it's my baby," says Mr. Loriot.

Putting the Shine on Display

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A look at luxury brand shows at museums across the world. Leonardo Finotti

The sheer number of luxury shows today—and the differing levels of corporate involvement for each—have some critics increasingly concerned. While some museums assert complete curatorial control and refuse brand sponsorships, others install exhibits with major corporate involvement, and varying degrees of disclosure about that relationship.

"Nobody ever said museums are pure, but at least there's an element of public trust that when you go to a museum, what you're seeing is museum worthy," says Bruce Altshuler, director of New York University's Program in Museum Studies. "The widespread exhibiting of luxury-brand goods erodes that trust."

Other museum professionals argue that some of these exhibits cede too much control over content.

"When the company is the curator, it's the appearance of a conflict that we stay away from," says Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where officials recently rejected a proposed exhibit about a movie remake because it seemed too promotional. "The notion that we may be in bed with a commercial venture in a less than appropriate fashion—it's not worth it."

Many museum curators say luxury exhibits featuring work by living designers are no different from art exhibits featuring living artists. Why is it a conflict to work with a wildly creative couture or jewelry house, they ask, when the economic benefits from museum shows could be even greater for fine artists? In the end, they say, the only thing that matters is quality.

"The hunt for conflict of interest is irrelevant to the museum visitor—the exhibition stands or falls on the strength of the artistry of the material displayed," says Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. As the former head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's modern art department in New York, Mr. Tinterow was an early supporter of a widely debated show about a jeweler known as JAR. "I've worked with lots of living artists, I've worked with dead artists—there are always interests at stake."

A Cartier necklace will be displayed at the Denver Art Museum. Cartier

With stepped-up competition from rivals, fashion and jewelry labels are investing heavily in museum outreach. In 2011, Chanel hired a former curator at the Louvre in Paris, Emmanuel Coquery, to head its "patrimony department," which is responsible for compiling heritage pieces that can be shown in museums. The company, which opened a sprawling new space for its archives outside Paris last year, uses its Culture Chanel shows to demonstrate the art world's influence on the brand, a spokeswoman says. The shows display paintings, photographs, archival materials and other objects next to Chanel pieces such as the little black dress, jewelry or perfume. The company's biggest Culture Chanel show opens in Seoul this summer.

Christian Dior CDI.FR +0.34% has been busy, too. "The last five years have been very rich ones for the house of Dior when it comes to exhibitions," Sidney Toledano, president and CEO of Christian Dior Couture, said in an email.

Dior works closely with museums to place its fashions alongside art in a series of themed exhibits with names like "Inspiration Dior" and "Esprit Dior." The company, which collaborates with external curators for the shows, declined to discuss the funding arrangements for these exhibits.

In 2011, a Dior show at Moscow's Pushkin Museum paired haute couture pieces with paintings by masters like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; a show at Shanghai's Museum of Contemporary Art last year presented an Alberto Giacometti sculpture next to dresses from Raf Simons's first haute-couture collection for Dior. Attempts to reach the two museums were unsuccessful.

The venues in growing luxury markets like Russia and China aren't accidental. Bain & Co. says Chinese consumers make up nearly 30% of the global luxury market. Russia ranks third in the number of the world's billionaires, according to Forbes. "The country and city are chosen firstly for strategic reasons, based on the markets in which we want to focus our communication," said Mr. Toledano, adding that sometimes museums approach Dior to initiate a show.

The Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., chose to have its 2013-2014 Van Cleef & Arpels show curated by the company's "heritage director" Catherine Cariou, who joined Van Cleef in 2000 after working in French auction houses. Museum President Peter Keller said it made sense to have Ms. Cariou curate because of her access and expertise. "She's in charge of the foundation archives—she knows the collection better than anyone," he said. The museum's budget is too small to cover in-house curators so all shows are guest curated.

MUSEUM BLING A Bulgari sautoir necklace once owned by Elizabeth Taylor is featured in a current exhibit in Houston. Museum shows can burnish a brand's image and increase gem values. Bulgari

The show opening at the Bowers coincided with the expansion of a Van Cleef boutique in nearby Costa Mesa, Calif. Although the Bowers noted the store unveiling in its media materials, Mr. Keller says he planned the show well in advance of the store renovation. He calls the museum's efforts on behalf of the boutique too minor to qualify as marketing: "Just because it's in a press release? How many people read a press release?"

A Bulgari exhibit that opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in late 2010 was a private event staged by the company rather than a project organized by independent curators, a distinction that might have been lost on the general public at the time, says Grand Palais chief curator and exhibitions director Laurent Salomé. The Grand Palais is considering changes to make it clearer to audiences when private interests are at work, he adds: "Bulgari was maybe the big problematic exception."

The line between retail promotion and museum exhibits has become increasingly blurred. For this year's exhibit on the society jeweler David Webb, the Norton Museum of Art employed the same architect and designer who worked on the brand's Manhattan flagship location to design the galleries for the Florida museum show, too.

"We wanted people who were accustomed to creating luxe interiors," says Norton deputy director James Hall. Designer Katie Ridder says she used the same color scheme for the interiors and velvet for the display cases as she did for the Madison Avenue boutique: "I think it definitely has a similar feeling as the store."

The exhibit was first proposed by the husband of a board member who collects David Webb's jewelry and was partly funded by that couple, Mr. Hall says. A major local dealer of David Webb jewelry also paid for the show. The exhibit, assembled by a freelance curator, was chosen because of the strength of the pieces and the jeweler's connections to Palm Beach, says Mr. Hall, adding that he doubted the show increased the market value of the jewelry.

The American Alliance of Museums guidelines on exhibition ethics don't specifically address brand-themed shows, and, regardless, all of its suggestions are voluntary. Most museums write their own institutional codes of ethics and are subject to local, state and federal laws and international conventions governing nonprofits.

At the Bulgari exhibit at Houston's Museum of Natural Science one recent afternoon, images of bejeweled stars such as Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Alba flashed on screens. A former cast member from "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," Camille Grammer, perused the vitrines with her Louis Vuitton purse slung over her Chanel jacket. Cocktail music tinkled in the background.

Two people familiar with the exhibition planning say a staffer from Houston's Bulgari boutique made the initial overture to the museum in 2012. Joel Bartsch, the museum's president, and Alberto Festa, president of Bulgari North America, say they can't quite remember who initiated negotiations over the show.

Cartier in Paris Pierre-Olivier Deschamps/Agence VU/Cartier

Bulgari officials eventually made a presentation to Mr. Bartsch, suggesting ways a recent Bulgari exhibit at the de Young museum in San Francisco could be retooled for Houston. He was impressed.

"They had done their homework," he says, adding that the Bulgari team was familiar with the museum's gem collection and its commitment to jewelry exhibits.

Houston socialites soon were helping with loans to the show. Joanne King Herring, a political activist and widow of a natural-gas tycoon, volunteered her Bulgari sautoir necklace with scores of diamonds, a piece she spotted in a window of New York's Pierre hotel in the 1970s. "My husband said, 'Well, do you want that or the state of Rhode Island?'" she recalls.

People with knowledge of the Bulgari negotiations say the museum exhibit was the main impetus for the Houston store's makeover. Workers toiled all weekend to get the boutique ready for the show's debut, one person said. Mr. Festa says the timing was coincidental and largely due to the expiration of the shop's 10-year lease and its outdated design.

For the exhibit openings in Houston and San Francisco, Bulgari boutiques in those cities were supplied with stacks of tickets so employees could offer VIP customers and foreign visitors tours of the galleries, according to people familiar with the exhibits. In some cases, the shop set up appointments ahead of time so that visitors could go straight from the museum to the store, one person said.

Mr. Bartsch, a gems expert, says the exhibit's aim is educational: "This is about the design and quality of the stones, with a connection to natural history and the technology that goes into making the pieces," he says. "One of the major points is that these pieces are not for sale and are not going to be for sale. This is a historical retrospective exhibition."

Bulgari, an Italian jewelry company purchased in 2011 by Paris-based luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, MC.FR -0.24% started its push for exhibitions five years ago with a 600-piece show at a cultural center in Rome. The next year, Bulgari rented the Grand Palais in Paris for an exhibit. Bulgari shows followed in Beijing and Shanghai, and Mr. Festa says China is interested in more.

"Clearly now there are going to be more exhibitions world-wide, which is an initiative of LVMH," says Amanda Triossi, an independent curator who created Bulgari's heritage collection and helped develop many Bulgari museum exhibits.

In recent months, Bulgari executives have approached the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Perez Art Museum Miami as well as institutions in Dallas and Chicago to lobby for shows featuring its jewelry archive, says Mr. Festa, adding: "I approached other institutions in the country mainly where we have stores."

For more than a decade, Bulgari has been buying back its collection of archival jewelry—the pieces often displayed in museum shows—including nabbing more than $20 million worth of Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry at a Christie's sale in 2011.

People familiar with Bulgari's business practices say that while archival pieces aren't for sale, customers can ask the company to create a custom-made piece that draws inspiration from the original as long as it is valued at $50,000 or sometimes more.

For Ms. Grammer, who paused in the Houston show to stare at a 1967 necklace with emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds, the exhibit renewed her love for the brand. She owns two Bulgari pieces, gifts from her ex-husband, the actor Kelsey Grammer. "People have questioned me, 'Why would you wear anything your husband gave you after the divorce?'" she says. "Why wouldn't you? They're works of art."

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

George Lindemann Journal - "El Anatsui’s Miami Beach exhibition at Bass merges colonial past with contemporary art" @miamiherald by George Fishman

Gravity and Grace is an apt title for this retrospective of internationally celebrated artist El Anatsui. But look for playful notes as well. The Bass Museum, Miami-Dade County’s oldest municipal exhibition space, is celebrating its 50th year, and this dazzling show provides a fitting complement to current and planned presentations.

Anatsui’s voluptuous, fluid, metal wall sculptures dominate the show. These breakthrough works have catapulted the artist into global acclaim during the past decade. Combining the homey appeal of vibrant patchwork quilts with the sophisticated color blending of tessellated mosaics and digital pixelation, his category-crossing works dramatically swoop and drape from wall to floor and convey the majesty of natural phenomena.

In Africa, where resources are often scarce, milk cartons, soft drink cans and other found objects are used to make toys and household goods. Anatsui uses them not out of necessity, but as a reference to the history of colonialism, which the artist, born in Ghana, knows well.

Bass curator of exhibitions José Carlos Diaz provided a comprehensive tour that began on the ground level with an array of floor-mounted sculptures called Peak, which resemble miniature mountain ranges . He explained that these were fabricated from the lids of shiny/rusty milk cans.

“Peak” also is a brand of canned milk that is ubiquitous in Ghana and in Nigeria, where Anatsui has lived since 1975. The lids are a residue of the historically lopsided trade between Europe and Africa. As it says on the Dutch company’s website, “For millions of Nigerians, Peak is milk and milk is Peak.”

Since the late ’90s, the artist has taken thousands of such tin can lids and liquor bottle caps, directing a crew of studio assistants to cut, pierce, fold and wire them into distinctive forms and compositions.

On a nearby wall, Ink Splash, the smallest work in the show, spills onto the floor, representing the intersection of painting and sculpture. “It looks a lot like a mosaic, but then you start noticing the ruffles and folds. The piece is very much in movement,” Diaz says. “It’s not static and it wants to either touch the ground or creep elsewhere.”

SLAVE TRADE

The liquor bottle caps bear a grim association with the slave trade route connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas. Anatsui’s work is not overtly political, but the back story remains potent.

Ellen Rudolph, the former senior curator of the Akron Art Museum, first conceived and organized the show there. Bass Director Silvia Karman Cubiña recognized an inspired fit for South Florida’s multifarious audiences. It will complete its five-stop tour in San Diego.

The tour continues along the ramp that connects the Bass’ first and second floors, providing unique viewing positions. Peak, when seen from above, flows caterpillar-like. Mask of Humankind transforms from pixelated patchiness into a blended color field “painting” when viewed from near and far.

Diaz says, “As you approach them you can see that each bottle cap has a combination of colors — whether it’s from the graphic logos, whether it’s because they’re paired together with similar other bottle caps, whether the bottle cap is in reverse, so you’re seeing the metal and not the actual color of the logo or the graphic.”

The eight segments of Drifting Continents evoke the varied character of topographies — and of people. They nudge one another along the wall flanking the ramp.

“Just the way they are unique in their presentation, they are unique in their construction. They’re asymmetrical, and there are no 90-degree angles.”

As we approach the top of the ramp, Diaz points out that Ozone Layer’s “fabric” has been opened up, and individual squares gently flap in the breezes provided by an array of semi-hidden fans.

The next gallery is devoted to Wall. This five-part installation explores how mankind creates barriers. But by using only the bottle cap rings, Anatsui created a lacy translucency through which visitors are revealed and obscured.

“Although we’re physically prevented from traveling through them, we can visually experience the whole room without the barriers blocking our vision,” Diaz remarks as we pass among the diaphanous veils.

Fabrication and installation are both labor-intensive. “In his studio in Nigeria, individuals pound and weave together small sheets of these bottle caps. They’re placed on the floor, and El Anatsui, in an abstract way, pieces together colors and textures to find a final resolution … and with the studio assistants he is able to play with texture and color and when he’s satisfied, able to combine them,” Diaz says.

Even the seemingly monochromatic Red Block and Black Block — both as elegant as evening gowns — reveal nuances of pointillist color blending when closely examined in their second-floor gallery.

INSTALLATION

Like enormous rugs, the crated metal works arrive stacked or rolled. Although the artist gives considerable latitude to each venue for installation, the Akron Art Museum sends their experienced preparator for guidance. The jagged and malleable pieces are beautiful to look at but hazardous to manipulate.

“We’ve used two scissors lifts,” Diaz says. “We have to take the whole work rolled up, and essentially drop it down. As it cascades down we’ll start to place hooks, lift portions of the work so it can start taking some of the weight and essentially creating all these grooves and curves and folds.”

“There is an excitement to see what one hook, one screw can do to transform the whole piece.” Then, during final days, the artist made a variety of “tweaks.”

The tour next takes a look back. “The orange room we are entering is the very middle of the exhibition,” says Diaz. “It features the wooden works that El Anatsui has made since the mid-’80s. What’s interesting to note is that the room also includes preliminary sketches for these.”

Anatsui doesn’t sketch his metal pieces, but the wooden sculptures and drawings prefigure these later works in several ways.

“You’ll see the appearance of colors. You’ll see the appearance of motifs that look like gathered circles — cut circles, which would become bottle caps,” Diaz explains. “The works also have early elements of the use of copper wire. You’ll see copper wire that’s coiled around the wooden posts.”

There are anthropomorphic and totem-like qualities in these pieces, which reveal the artist’s deep grounding in African visual and social history. Also, lively patterning. Comparison to African kente cloth and to European tapestry is inevitable but limiting. Although surrounded by weavers during his childhood, the artist had no affinity for fabrics during his student years. And he has expressed regret that some viewers look no deeper than this facile association with textiles when assessing his work.

FINAL GALLERY

The Drainpipes series is both playful and sinister. According to Diaz, “They appear to be coming from the wall and appear snakelike, crawling toward you. They have that element of danger with the sharpness, the rust, which essentially would prevent you from touching the work or wanting to approach it.”

The Waste Paper Bag sculptures suggest the bane of insufficient recycling programs, as well as the transience of all things. Using discarded newspaper printing plates to fabricate them, Anatsui has enlarged these mundane forms to monumental scale.

“[Y]ou can actually make out actual Nigerian newspaper — whether it’s sports, advertising politics or crime. So, there is the sense of history being gathered in the way that you would with a history book or a scrapbook or an album.”

In this same enormous room, Garden Wall flows smoothly down from its wall moorings and unevenly across the floor. “The artist actually moved into the piece and started creating piles. He wanted to give the reference that the work was still growing from the ground up,” Diaz says.

“Colors meet and merge, referencing nature both through texture and color. Color combinations resemble details of a Turner painting.”

Diaz’s tour concludes with Gravity and Grace, the namesake of the exhibition, which merits its title. “The artist wanted the piece to have a sense of being grounded and a sense of elevating. It’s very special because the work is able to take on one of the largest walls in the museum and have such a presence in the room.”

During the day, natural clerestory light enlivens its richly modulating colors and textures.

Art historian and educator Adrienne von Lates was among the first visitors. She spoke about Anatsui’s transformation of materials. “He turns these things into magnificent constructions that sometimes look like they’re going to come alive.”

“He is trained in Western art and the abstract tradition, but he also takes some of the African tradition of using recycled objects and does it so brilliantly — so [he] combines African and modernist ideas to create something that gives you that sense of the sublime that we’re always talking about when we’re looking at big abstract art.”

"Delaware Art Museum's Planned Sale of Homer Work Draws Ire" @wsj by Scott Calvert

'Milking Time' by Winslow Homer, which the Delaware Art Museum is planning to sell to help pay off debt. Bridgeman Images

For a small institution, the Delaware Art Museum is wrestling with a big conundrum.

The museum is moving ahead with plans to sell at least two paintings to pay off a debt, including a popular piece by American master Winslow Homer. The rare move has roiled the art world, where a collection is considered a public trust.

The museum says selling as many as four works is the only way it can retire a $19.8 million debt and replenish its endowment. It says the alternative would be closing the century-old Wilmington institution and its 12,500-object collection.

Disposing of art for a reason except to buy more art violates the ethics policy of the Association of Art Museum Directors. The group warns it may sanction the museum, which could block it from sharing works with most other U.S. museums.

"It's a tragedy when works that belong to the community get sold," said Ford Bell, president of the American Alliance of Museums, which also decried the planned sale.

Delaware museum officials say their decision was made with the community in mind. "I am sad about this, but as a trustee of the museum—not any one piece of art the museum holds—I am in support of doing what is necessary to keep the museum open," said Paula Malone, one of 19 trustees.

Other institutions have faced similar struggles. In March, the museum directors association, which represents 240 directors in North America, sanctioned Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., and its Maier Museum of Art after the school sold the George Bellows painting "Men of the Docks" to the National Gallery in London for $25.5 million. In Detroit, some creditors are pushing to sell off at least some city-owned works at the Detroit Institute of Arts to restructure roughly $18 billion in long-term obligations as part of the nation's largest municipal bankruptcy case.

The college's president, Brad Bateman, said the museum was being unfairly punished for the college's decision. Such decisions don't necessarily mean art will vanish from public view: The Maier gets about 7,000 visitors a year, a fraction of the foot traffic at the London museum.

Michael Miller, chief executive of the Delaware Art Museum, declined to comment on specifics except to confirm the museum's previously announced intention to shed "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" by William Holman Hunt. The piece is scheduled to be auctioned this month in London, where Christie's expects the 1867 pre-Raphaelite work to fetch as much as to $13.4 million.

Homer's "Milking Time" could be next. The 1875 painting depicts a pastoral scene, with a woman standing beside a boy who gazes at cows while perched on a wood fence. It is undergoing conservation at Sotheby's ahead of being shopped on the private market, a person familiar with the matter said. Only eight Homer paintings have gone to auction in the past five years.

Sotheby's declined to comment on the Homer painting.

The Delaware museum's former executive director, Danielle Rice, called the two pieces among her favorites in the galleries. A poster of "Milking Time" goes for $15 in the gift shop, and it was used in a 2012 advertising campaign for the museum.

"I'm actually aching inside at the thought of losing those objects for the public," she said.

Ms. Rice said that when the American Folk Art Museum in New York faced financial woes in 2011, it sold its midtown Manhattan site instead of dipping into its collection.

Mr. Miller said selling the Delaware museum's building wouldn't raise nearly enough. The museum says it has cut staff and exhibition funding and tried to refinance the debt. The goal is to raise $30 million, mostly to pay off debt from a 2005 expansion and renovation.

—Matthew Dolan contributed to this article.

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

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

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

Happiness is curating.

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

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

                                  

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

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

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

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

Photos: Pharrell Williams's Paris Art Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Meet Design Miami's Rodman Primack" @wsj by Jen Renzi

CREATURE COMFORT | Primack, the new executive director of Design Miami, in his home in Miami. The hippo is by Renate Müller, the artwork on the wall by Florian Baudrexel. Photography by Adam Friedberg for WSJ. Magazine

FOR RODMAN PRIMACK, the collecting bug came early. His youthful obsession, at the age of 12: "Day of the Dead–themed folk art from Oaxaca, Mexico," explains the new executive director of Design Miami, the biannual fair devoted to collectible furnishings that's a sister show to blue-chip stalwart Art Basel.

Primack has since graduated to other passions and now lives among an eclectic array of 18th-century embroidered textiles, Latin American art, midcentury furniture, 1980s Memphis design and works by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé. "My interests are very broad," Primack says with a laugh. "I am not nearly as focused a collector as I recommend that others be."

Even so, Primack's far-reaching enthusiasms are an asset to his new gig—as is his diverse background. His former titles include chairman of auction house Phillips de Pury's office in London (now Phillips), director of Gagosian Gallery's Los Angeles outpost (where he sold everything from Calder mobiles to Gerhard Richter landscapes), founder of online auction site Blacklots and Latin American art specialist at Christie's. For the past decade, Primack also helmed his own Manhattan-based interior- and textile-design firm, RP Miller, helping clients curate—and create surroundings for—their art collections.

Strengthening the bond between art, design and interiors is a mission he shares with the fair (this year's Swiss edition of the event opens June 17; the Miami version falls in early December). "The idea that people can collect really seriously in one area, like art, but not also collect design and commission a great environment for that art, is so strange to me," he says. "I mean, I even collect my socks!" Among his colleagues, the 39-year-old Primack is known as a connective tissue between disciplines. "Rodman bridges what gaps still remain between art and design collectors with his deep knowledge, experience and connections in both worlds," explains Evan Snyderman, cofounder of New York design gallery R & Company. That's why he was hired in the first place: "His time at Phillips honed his understanding of how to engage collectors and grow the market," adds fair founder Craig Robins. "And working with Larry Gagosian is a fantastic complement of art-market awareness. He's a perfect choice for the next phase of Design Miami's growth."

Primack cites his six-year chairmanship of Phillips as most analogous to his current job. "My time there was distinguished by a lot of flux, since our new building wasn't ready and we had to do these pop-ups and guerrilla maneuvers," he explains. "I love that scrappy energy, which is something Design Miami shares." In terms of connoisseurship, however, Primack's most formative experience was a stint at the studio of Peter Marino, go-to architect for Chanel and Louis Vuitton. "That's where I began looking at design and furniture in a different way, not as simply tables and chairs to sit at, but also as important and collectible," says Primack.

He has since spent his career observing the emergent design market, which he is now positioned to help mature. "The pricing and structure for contemporary design is different from that of contemporary art," explains Primack. "There are areas that have coalesced into clearly demarcated markets—Prouvé, Perriand, Maria Pergay, midcentury French design, Art Deco furniture—but otherwise it's still a landscape in discovery, which leaves room for experimentation."

That's also how he sees Design Miami. In comparison to more staid, trade-focused events, the 10-year-old fair has always had a rakish vibe. Early installments were mounted in unexpected venues (a church, an old market). One of Primack's ambitions is to preserve the show's edgy, upstart spirit as it becomes more established. He's also keen to bolster its Hispanic constituency. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, Primack lives part-time in Guatemala, where his TV-executive husband, Rudy Weissenberg, is based. "Having traveled all over South America, my perspective is obviously Latincentric. That's a collector base that we would like to see more of, in both Miami and Basel," he says.

When Primack came on board in February, the lineup for the Swiss fair was all but finalized by his predecessor, Marianne Goebl. And yet he has already begun lending his imprimatur. The Basel show will debut a program called Design at Large, high-concept installations—both historic and contemporary—curated by Barneys creative director Dennis Freedman. Primack is also attending to more mundane matters. "I started thinking about basic ways to make the fair experience more pleasant, from better Wi-Fi to having more—and more generous—table space for people to spread out and meet with clients," he says. "And as someone who's unfortunately ruled by my stomach, it's important to have food you want to eat."

Primack has an appetite for a wide swath of culture, waxing poetic about Paul Gauguin and the "Pina Bausch–like choreography" of Audi's assembly line in the same breath. "Rodman has depth of knowledge of the design field, from his art history education to his practical experience at all ends of the spectrum: designing, marketing and selling to the public," says Primack's former boss, Marino. "I particularly like his non-narrow vision of what constitutes interesting and valuable design."

Although his role vis-à-vis the fair is to help expand the market for rare and limited-edition collectibles—pieces that often walk the line between functional object and fine artwork—he's unmoved by high-design navel gazing. "I'm interested in connecting what we exhibit at the fair to the bigger canvas of design and science, technology and materials development," he says. "The process of bringing better design to a bigger number of people—that improves life."

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

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

Houston

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ms. Wilkin is a critic and independent curator

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Norman Rockwell’s Art, Once Sniffed At, Is Becoming Prized" @nytimes by JAMES B. STEWART

Photo

“Rockwell’s greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché.”

In that Washington Post criticism of a 2010 exhibition of Norman Rockwell paintings at the Smithsonian, Blake Gopnik joined a long line of prominent critics attacking Rockwell, the American artist and illustrator who depicted life in mid-20th-century America and died in 1978.

“Norman Rockwell was demonized by a generation of critics who not only saw him as an enemy of modern art, but of all art,” said Deborah Solomon, whose biography of Rockwell, “American Mirror,” was published last year. “He was seen as a lowly calendar artist whose work was unrelated to the lofty ambitions of art,” she said, or, as she put it in her book, “a cornball and a square.” The critical dismissal “was obviously a source of great pain throughout his life,” Ms. Solomon, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, added.

But Rockwell is now undergoing a major critical and financial reappraisal. This week, the major auction houses built their spring sales of American art around two Rockwell paintings: “After the Prom,” at Sotheby’s, and “The Rookie,” at Christie’s. “After the Prom” sold for $9.1 million on Wednesday; “The Rookie” for $22.5 million on Thursday.

In December, “Saying Grace” set an auction record for Rockwell, selling at Sotheby’s for $46 million.

Rockwell isn’t yet at the level of Francis Bacon (top price at auction: $142.4 million), Picasso ($104.5 million) or Andy Warhol ($105.4 million) — all of whom critics eventually embraced — but he’s poised to join a select handful of artists whose work is instantly recognizable not just for its artistic quality but, for better or worse, the many millions it took to acquire one.

Apart from any critical reappraisal, Rockwell’s paintings show that in art, as well as in the stock market, it can pay to be a contrarian. Rockwell’s paintings have turned out to be a singularly good investment. “After the Prom” last sold at Sotheby’s in 1995 for $880,000. This week’s sale price represents a compounded annual rate of return of 13.1 percent, compared with 7.9 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the same period.

Michael Moses, a retired professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a co-founder of the Mei Moses Art Index, said his database contained 39 works by Rockwell that had sold more than once at auction. Taken together, their sales prices represent a 9.7 percent annual rate of return over the period from 1960 to 2008. (The latest round of sales isn’t included.) “That’s extremely good for an American painter,” Mr. Moses said.

Mr. Moses said that his research suggests that the adage — “buy the best,” or the most acclaimed by critics — doesn’t hold true, at least when it comes to investment returns. “Rockwell was so out of favor, there was ample room for appreciation,” Mr. Moses said. Paintings already acknowledged by critics as masterpieces “tend to underperform the market,” he said. “It turns out you don’t have to be an art expert to earn good investment returns.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/business/norman-rockwell-captures-the-art-markets-eye.html