George Lindemann Journal - "Remembering a Tragedy" @nytimes - by CAROL VOGEL

George Lindemann Journal

The Museum of Modern Art’s atrium has been home to any number of weird, wild and wacky goings-on. There was the time the performance artist Marina Abramovic sat there for 700 hours, and another when someone played a baby-grand piano from inside a hole that had been cut into it. There was also an installation of hazelnut pollen, and even a giant garage sale.       

For its next act, the Modern will install nine double-sided screens, measuring up to 23 feet wide and hung at different heights, that will project a work by the British artist Isaac Julien, “Ten Thousand Waves”; it will be on view starting Monday. The installation deals with the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, when 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned off the coast of northwest England. It incorporates archival footage from a police helicopter showing the rescue of one survivor from a sandbank. There are also audio recordings of distress calls and images of contemporary Chinese culture. (Through Feb. 17; moma.org.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/arts/design/remembering-a-tragedy.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Farts%2Fdesign%2Findex.jsonp&_r=0

George Lindemann Journal - "Remembering a Tragedy" @nytimes - by CAROL VOGEL

George Lindemann Journal

The Museum of Modern Art’s atrium has been home to any number of weird, wild and wacky goings-on. There was the time the performance artist Marina Abramovic sat there for 700 hours, and another when someone played a baby-grand piano from inside a hole that had been cut into it. There was also an installation of hazelnut pollen, and even a giant garage sale.

For its next act, the Modern will install nine double-sided screens, measuring up to 23 feet wide and hung at different heights, that will project a work by the British artist Isaac Julien, “Ten Thousand Waves”; it will be on view starting Monday. The installation deals with the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, when 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned off the coast of northwest England. It incorporates archival footage from a police helicopter showing the rescue of one survivor from a sandbank. There are also audio recordings of distress calls and images of contemporary Chinese culture. (Through Feb. 17; moma.org.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/arts/design/remembering-a-tragedy.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Farts%2Fdesign%2Findex.jsonp&_r=0

George Lindemann Journal "Art Public sculptures will remain after Art Basel 2013 is gone" @miamiherald - Siobhan Morrisey

George Lindemann Journal

 Work by Michelle Lopez will be among the sculptures appearing in the 2013 Art Basel Miami Beach Art Public sector

Work by Michelle Lopez will be among the sculptures appearing in the 2013 Art Basel Miami Beach Art Public sector.


Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/29/3763028/art-public-sculptures-will-remain.html#storylink=cpy

Man is by nature a social animal…Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

— Aristotle, Politics

Those of us who fall into the middling range of mere mortals may especially enjoy this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach Art Public sector, with works chosen especially to reflect the exhibition’s theme of “Social Animals.”

Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of New York’s Public Art Fund, selected two dozen works that play on the collective and social nature of a public park. The artists invited to show at Collins Park this year range from emerging to emeritus. There’s even a posthumous display by Charlotte Posenenske, a German artist known for her minimalist works — particularly her steel sculptures resembling ventilation parts. Gallerists Mehdi Chouakri and Peter Freeman are teaming up to recreate six works from her Vierkanthrohre (Square Tubes) Serie D, among the last works she created before abruptly ending her career in the late 1960s. Ironically, during her self-imposed exile from the art world until her death in 1985, Posenenske questioned the worth of public art.

For Silvia Karman Cubiñá, that worth is not questionable at all. As executive director and chief curator of the Bass Museum – which once again joined Art Basel in Miami Beach to produce the outdoor exhibit outside the museum’s front entrance – Cubiñá has seen first-hand how the public interacts with the art previously displayed in Collins Park. Of particular note were six chaise-shaped concrete slabs created by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, Cubiñá says, explaining how different groups of people would gravitate to the works.

“They turned into a meeting point, which became lovely, because there would be different populations that would crowd around it,” she says. “Early in the morning we had a lot of homeless people that were having breakfast. Then a little later, the dog walkers. Then at 3 o’clock the students who came from the high school would gather there, and some of them started coming into the museum. Then again the dog walkers; then again the homeless people. So, there were different populations, and I just saw it as a gathering place that came together around art.”

This year British sculptor Thomas Houseago is expected to provide visitors with a similar experience. In addition to his Striding Figure (Rome 1), Houseago plans to provide two studio seats and a chaise lounge, which will be an open invitation for the public to drape themselves across his sculptures. Danish artist Jeppe Hein also is expected to add a bit of interactive art with his Appearing Rooms, a constantly changing sculpture in which jets of water form a labyrinth of wet walls that can end up soaking those who get too close. Matias Faldbakken presents a full-scale adaptation of a Peterbilt 281 big rig truck.

This year’s exhibit in the park, which fronts the museum and spans the area between 17th and 25th streets, is aimed to satisfy the senses from sight to sound and runs through March 31. According to Cubiñá, a grant from the Knight Foundation enabled the show to grow from its original four days to four months this year. As a result, she says, the museum plans to use the sculpture garden as a backdrop for its 50th anniversary in January, complete with a full orchestra in the park.

On the days when there is no orchestra, visitors to the park may hear the chirping of crickets, as imitated by a clarinet player. That’s courtesy of American artist Mungo Thomson, whose installation goes by the working title of “Cricket Solo for Clarinet.”

Abstract expressionist Mark di Suvero, 80, is the show’s oldest artist. His monumental work, Exemplar, was created in 1979 and consists of two intersecting I-beans. British land artist Richard Long will also be showing an earlier work. His Higher White Tor Circle was created in 1996 and is made up of Dartmoor granite chunks arranged in a mosaic-like circle.

Other featured artists include Huma Bhabha, Carol Bove, Olaf Breuning, Aaron Curry, Sam Falls, Tom Friedman, Alicja Kwade, Michelle Lopez, Matthew Monahan, Scott Reeder, Santiago Roose, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Tony Tasset, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Oscar Tuazon, Maarten Vanden Eynde and Phil Wagner.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/29/3763028/art-public-sculptures-will-remain.html#storylink=cpy

"George Lindemann Journal" -Director sees Miami’s new art museum as ‘town center’ @indulge

George Lindemann Journal

For Thom Collins, director of the striking new Perez Art Museum Miami, the past couple of years have rushed by like the time lapse video of the construction project posted on the museum’s website: cranes moving in; rebar and concrete materializing; walls and columns shooting up; wrap-around terraces stretching out — all at dizzying speed.

Collins spent five years as director of the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., before taking the helm of Miami Art Museum in the summer of 2010, as the museum prepared to build a new home on the water’s edge. With the Herzog & de Meuron-design art house taking shape, he has lost count of how many groups he has taken on dusty tours, his white cowboy-style hardhat tipped against the blazing sun.
 Museum director Thom Collins walks among the works being installed on Tuesday October 29 2013 for the opening in December 2013 of the Perez Art Museum Miami
Museum director Thom Collins walks among the works being installed on Tuesday October 29, 2013 for the opening in December 2013 of the Perez Art Museum Miami.
PATRICK FARRELL

View photos

“When I was growing up in Philadelphia, we went to the art museum every month. I think the PAMM could emerge as that kind of institution for Miami, a culturally oriented town center where people and ideas meet, and where you know you will always find thoughtful, sophisticated programming.’’

Soon after arriving in Miami, Collins, who favors skinny suits and square-framed glasses, moved to a working-class neighborhood bordering art-centric Wynwood, determined to understand from the inside this young city experiencing a modern cultural boom.

“This is a place with such dynamic cultural diversity, and that gives it such potential. This is a city where the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the New World Center, the new science museum and the PAMM are all going up within a period of about 10 years. That’s remarkable. That’s instant cultural infrastructure.”

The PAMM is scheduled to open during Art Basel week, on time and within budget — though not without its share of controversy over its name honoring Miami developer Jorge Perez, who in 2010 donated $40 million in cash and art. Still, Collins is celebrating the fact that the museum has locked in more than 90 percent of its $220 million fundraising goal ($100 million came from public funds).

“There is a lot of aspiration in Miami. And a recognition that we are building a real repository for the city’s shared cultural heritage. You can see this in the support the museum is receiving.”

Collins himself managed to gain broad support from the community almost from the time he arrived — which is no small feat.

“Thom makes it all look easy,” says Michael Spring, director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. “For the whole cultural community to move forward, you have to have top leaders at the flagship institutions who are steady professionals, who can earn the respect of the people around them.

“When you talk to Thom, you get a sense of confidence. This is someone who is a national leader in the visual arts. And he is charming, funny, good in social situations, which is very important when it comes to building relationships with donors and collectors.”

Perez Art Museum Miami opens Dec. 4 in downtown Miami’s Bicentennial Park. 305-375-3000; pamm.org.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/29/3782668/director-sees-miamis-new-art-museum.html#storylink=cpy


George Lindemann Journal - "Immigrant Drama on Nine Screens" by Kelly Crow

George Lindemann Journal

"Immigrant Drama on Nine Screens" by Kelly Crow

In the late 1980s, Isaac Julien became a hit of London's contemporary art scene by projecting his lush films about poets and protesters onto multiple, dangling screens, rather than one. The video artist was among the first to ask viewers to move around his films instead of simply sitting down.

Now the 53-year-old Mr. Julien is making his own big move on Manhattan with two shows—one in the soaring atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, the other splayed across a group of Times Square billboards nearby.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303531204579208322405606680?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_LS_Books

George Lindemann Journal - "Fine art helps sell real estate in South Florida" @miamiherald by Ina Paiva Cordle

The George Lindemann Journal

Fine art helps sell real estate in South Florida

By Ina Paiva Cordle

icordle@MiamiHerald.com

Nine iconic, life-size photographs of celebrities by renowned British photographer Terry O’Neill fill the sales office for The Bond on Brickell, a condominium planned for Miami.

Down the street, shoppers eyeing the Related Group’s Paraiso Bay and SLS Brickell projects are greeted by a huge, Philippe Starck-designed outdoor duck sculpture. And inside the sales center, they are treated to colorful artistic eye candy, including a hand-stitched animal-skin wall rug by Argentine-born artist Agustina Woodgate.

Across town in Doral, huge public art installations are in the works to define Codina Partners’ new multi-use development, whose highlights include the city’s first high-rise condos.

That art — and scores of other paintings, sculptures and installations — aren’t just on temporary display. Once the dust settles on the towering condo projects, they will remain — or reappear, filling lobbies, pool decks and other common areas of pricey properties.

Across South Florida, real estate developers are increasingly attaching extraordinary — and valuable — art to their designs, creating liveable, virtual museums as a way to market high-end condos to wealthy buyers.

Brokers are catching on, too.

Aligning with star architects, choosing uniquely designed furniture, inviting curators in for talks, have all become part of the gentrification — or art-ification — of South Florida, propelled by the success of Art Basel Miami Beach, which returns for its 12th year Dec. 5-8.

“Great cities have great art,” said Carlos Rosso, president of the condo division of the Related Group, which has eight condo projects underway in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, all adorned with art, murals, video installations and sculptures. “We think art gives another dimension to life.”

While developers for years have paired exceptional art with luxury real estate in South Florida, the combination lately has been elevated to a whole new level.

And customers are demanding it.

Ultra-wealthy condo buyers want to be ensconced amid art from the moment they drive up, all the way to their front doors, said Mark Zilbert, president and chief executive of Zilbert International Realty, a Miami Beach-based firm that specializes in high-end properties.

“The idea is that the second you arrive at your building, this is the theme: that art is important,” Zilbert said.

Brazilians, Italians and Russians, in particular — who are buying up South Florida condos briskly — find art especially important, he said.

“Some appreciate art,” Zilbert said, “and, those who are new to wealth, as long as they know it’s expensive — they love it.”

What’s more, for developers, art adds to the value of real estate.

“Every building I can think of that has invested in extraordinary art in their public areas has never had a problem selling and never had a problem reselling.” And, said Zilbert, such buildings “tend to have the highest market value.”

Indeed, the intertwining of art and real estate is furthering the allure of South Florida, which is rising in international appeal among the glitterati, spurred by artsy, modern skyscrapers, and fueled by wealthy foreign buyers’ desire to invest in the United States.

“People of high net worth who collect homes throughout the world also collect art and watches and wine,” said Mayi de la Vega, founder and chief executive of ONE Sotheby’s International Realty, who has collaborated with Sotheby’s auction house to land real estate clients, including attending a dinner held in London at Zaha Hadid’s showroom..

She has found other ways to connect to clients through art, including arranging for a curator to give art tours during Art Basel Miami Beach. De la Vega has even turned her Miami Beach office into a gallery, showcasing emerging and mid-career Latin American artists, with proceeds going to the Cisneros Foundation as well as to the artist.

She has also brought in art advisors Sarah Jane Bruce and Flavia Masetto to educate her 320 agents on the latest trends in art, give talks to clients and write feature stories on art for a new magazine she has launched.

And she includes updates on art fairs in her newsletters for clients.

“You become a source for them, not only for real estate, but they think of you more often because they are receiving something valuable,” said de la Vega, a collector herself, who has traveled to art fairs in Moscow, London and New York to connect with collectors and global clients through art.

“Art really is very much a part of what we do each day,” she said.

Indeed, as the high-end real estate market rebounds, it benefits from sophisticated art collectors’ appreciation for the beautiful things in life.

“Buyers are way more savvy and demanding in this go-around, especially because the deposit structure has changed and they are being asked to shell out 50 percent,” said Diego Ojeda, vice president of the Rilea Group, which is developing The Bond on Brickell. “It’s not your typical flipper. They are more educated, and know what they want.”

At The Bond, a 44-story condo touted to be the first building under construction on Brickell Avenue since the recession, O’Neill’s limited-edition, six-foot tall, black-and-white photographs from the 1960s and ’70s bolster the project’s identity, which is based on the glamour of London’s legendary Bond Street.

“We felt we were missing a little bit of soul for the British theme . . .” said Ojeda, 31, seated at the sales center, which is filled with art books. “Terry O’Neill solved that for us.”

Buyers have responded, with 60 percent of the building sold.

Carlos Paolini, seated in the sales office with his Caracas-based stepfather, Antonio Menafra, found the art appealing.

“The photos were the first thing I saw,” Paolini said. “If this is how the building is going to be, it’s gorgeous.”

Six sculptures by artist Tatiana Blanco will be placed at the entrance, in the lobby, and by the pool deck of The Bond, Ojeda said.

Huge sculptures are also planned for Downtown Doral, a 120-acre multi-use development from Codina Partners, which will include condo towers, apartments, townhouses, offices, retail space, a government center, a school and a park.

The tab for the art alone is $1 million. It includes a massive structure by Michele Oka Doner that will be used as a pavilion in the park and will be “the signature for Doral,” said Armando Codina, chairman and chief executive of Codina Partners.

The developers are also negotiating with another, as-yet-unnamed artist to create two 30-foot-tall, custom-made sculptures that will be placed at the entrance to Downtown Doral’s Main Street.

“This is a city,” Codina said. “How can you not have art in front of city hall? It wouldn’t be the same.”

Beyond art installations, developers are increasingly turning to star architects to give a new project its artsy personality.

“Our building is our art,” said Louis Birdman, who is developing the Hadid-designed, futuristic One Thousand Museum on Biscayne Boulevard. The 62-story tower will have 83 units, starting at $5 million.

One Thousand Museum has expanded on the “starchitect” theme, having Hadid design the sales center. Hadid-designed wallpaper encloses the center, which is topped by an artistic ceiling and sloping furniture, all of Hadid’s design. Even the door handles are hers.

“We see a lot of very sophisticated buyers, cultured buyers — a lot of art collectors,” said Birdman, an architect. “People in the art world know Zaha.”

Art collectors J. Steven Manolis and his wife, Michelle, of Palm Beach, bought a half-floor unit on the 49th floor.

Hadid’s involvement “played a big role in deciding to buy,” Manolis said during a recent soiree celebrating the sales center’s opening.

Jade Signature, a 57-story tower rising in Sunny Isles Beach, is also considered “like a work of art, because the architects Herzog & de Meuron are behind the project,” said Edgardo Defortuna, president and chief executive of Fortune International, the Miami-based development, brokerage, sales and marketing company that is developing the property.

“It is really a lot of detail and architectural features that are related to art,” Defortuna said. Sophisticated buyers and art lovers are drawn to such features, like a sculptural ribbon that wraps around the building, starting at the entrance, then running into the lobby, the restaurant and the pool deck, he said.

Jade Signature is already half sold, mostly to international buyers, said Defortuna, who recently traveled to Buenos Aires to give a presentation to 250 people, and said the next day his reception area was so full that it looked like a busy doctor’s office.

Art is also a vital part of Argentine Alan Faena’s plans for his Faena District in Miami Beach, which will include an art exhibition center, Faena Arts Center, designed by Rem Koolhaas, along with a condo tower, hotel, bazaar and artists-in-residence center, park, marina and gardens.

Years ago, developers first began pairing art with luxury condo projects. Craig Robins, for example, commissioned artist Richard Tuttle to create a large-scale mural on the façade of an eight-story building at his Miami Beach residential project Aqua. And Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca created a sculptural element for the complex’s central plaza.

Related has also been adding art to its projects for many years, and Russo figures the company has invested $50 million in art. Related’s chairman, Jorge Perez, an art collector, also donated $40 million in cash and art for the new Perez Art Museum Miami, or PAMM, which will open to the public Dec. 4.

“The buyer in Miami has become a lot more interested in art and more concerned about what we are doing about art, and more educated about it,” said Defortuna, whose firm also markets some Related properties. “It is getting a different crowd, with Art Basel and the museum. We feel that Miami has gotten a lot more culturally inspired.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/24/v-fullstory/3777085/fine-art-helps-sell-condos.html#storylink=cpy

George Lindemann Journal - "Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1" @nytimes - By TED LOOS and GAIA PIANIGIANI

George Lindemann Journal - www.georgelindemann.com

Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1

Francesco Vezzoli’s Art Show Hits a Snag

Alfonso Di Vincenzo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The church packed for its planned trip to New York.

By TED LOOS and GAIA PIANIGIANI

Published: November 25, 2013

It was a typically elaborate, provocative move by the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli in a career full of them: He had contracted to buy the ruins of an old deconsecrated church in the southern Italian town of Montegiordano and had planned to ship them to New York, brick by brick, for exhibition in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. His videos would be shown inside.

But “The Church of Vezzoli,” as the exhibition was to be called, was canceled Monday in the midst of a legal imbroglio in Italy; some of the ruins now sit in containers at the Port of Gioia Tauro, while others lie stacked in plastic at the chapel site, on an estate in Calabria.

Local prosecutors are evaluating whether Mr. Vezzoli was trying to export items of artistic and cultural value without authorization, a crime carrying a fine or jail time up to four years. No formal charges have been filed against him, but they could come later.

“All of a sudden, it all exploded, and I feel I was hit by a tornado,” said Mr. Vezzoli, 42, from his home Milan. “I’m in a state of shock.”

Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, said he had learned of the troubles from Mr. Vezzoli about six weeks ago and that the museum has been left scrambling. “Part of curating is to come up with new ideas — and I started this morning,” Mr. Biesenbach said on Friday.

Mr. Vezzoli, a native of Brescia, Italy, is used to a high level of celebrity and he has been known for his cheekiness in addressing religion in his art. His 2011 show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, “Sacrilegio,” featured images of weeping Madonnas, each with the superimposed face of a supermodel, including Cindy Crawford’s.

His best-known work, the 2005 film “Trailer for the Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula,” featured Helen Mirren, Courtney Love and a fleet of barely clad actors. In 2006, he made himself the subject of a fake version of an E! channel “True Hollywood Story” show that purported to detail his own scandalous behavior.

Now, a real potential scandal is nipping at his heels.

Mr. Vezzoli said that he identified the Montegiordano ruins, about 300 miles southeast of Rome, a year and a half ago, and went about contracting to buy what he called “a skeleton of a building” for around $100,000 from the owner, who had built a new church in front of the old one. The artist said that he had the blessing of the town’s mayor.

“It was falling down the hill,” he said. “We almost felt we were doing some good.”

The deconstruction process had been going on for six months when, in late October,   a passer-by wrote to complain to the Ministry of Culture, and the superintendent in charge of the Calabria region blocked it.

“I got a phone call that I am under criminal investigation,” Mr. Vezzoli said.

Mr. Vezzoli’s lawyer, Massimo Sterpi, argued that in an examination of the estate in 1988, the regional superintendent had not found the church to have cultural or historical value as a monument. But Francesco Prosperetti, the current art superintendent of Calabria, said on Monday, “Under Italian law, the owners should have asked for an authorization to remove the decorative elements from any historic building,” regardless of cultural value.

Mr. Sterpi, the lawyer, says that the artist is not even the legal owner of the ruins. Mr. Vezzoli’s preliminary contract stipulates that the deal is final only when the church is dismantled, provided that the building had already been deemed free of any restriction on legal, religious or national heritage grounds.

“We never managed to sign the final contract,” Mr. Sterpi said, adding that the export process had not been initiated because the ruins were not entirely dismantled. “I am confident that Mr. Vezzoli will prove his innocence and good faith,” he said. “However, the show is over.”

Mr. Vezzoli said that the decision about the church’s status as a possible artistic treasure would take at least four months.

“Even if we win, it’s a Pyrrhic victory,” he said. “We won’t need it by then.”

The MoMA PS1 show was meant to be the third leg of “The Trinity,” a multicity retrospective of Mr. Vezzoli’s work. “Galleria Vezzoli” just ended this past weekend at the Maxxi museum of contemporary art in Rome. “Cinema Vezzoli” is now scheduled to open in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Mr. Biesenbach said he and Mr. Vezzoli would meet to look for a new way to show his works at the museum later in 2014. But Mr. Vezzoli said he was not ready to consider another building.

“It’s like love — if this church turns you down, you can’t fall in love again right away,” he said. “My Juliet is being kept captive.”

Mr. Biesenbach suggested that the legal troubles, while unfortunate, dovetailed in some strange way with Mr. Vezzoli’s work. He added that the controversy had aspects of “a real-time performance.”

<img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>

A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1.

George Lindemann Journal - www.georgelindemann.com

George Lindemann Journal - "Liam Gillick / Louise Lawler" @nytimes - By KAREN ROSENBERG

George Lindemann Journal

Jean Vong, Courtesy the artists and Casey Kaplan, New York and Metro Pictures, New York

The Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler show at Casey Kaplan.

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: November 21, 2013

525 West 21st Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 21

In their first collaboration, Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler stay within their comfort zones but manage to nudge us out of ours. Their familiar methods of institutional critique (photographic in Ms. Lawler’s case, sculptural for Mr. Gillick) combine to form a dynamic, disorienting installation.

Mr. Gillick’s contribution is a text piece composed of cutout aluminum sentences, which hang from the ceiling in neat rows and lure readers deeper and deeper into the gallery. Gradually, it reveals a vague and halting narrative about workers at a defunct factory (the Volvo plant in Kalmar, Sweden, as the news release tells us).

Ms. Lawler contributes a striking background, a long vinyl wall sticker that links the three rooms of the gallery. The image printed on it is a stretched-out version of some of her earlier photographs of artworks in bland white-box settings; here, pieces by Degas, Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, among others, are distorted beyond recognition.

The collaborative ethos of the show, the references to the socialist history of Volvo production, the relentless conveyor belt of the installation and the content of Ms. Lawler’s photographs (individual artworks by top-selling male artists, blended into a single seamless strip) all signal discomfort with the rah-rah capitalism of the current art market. But no alternatives are proposed, and the installation leaves us with a haunting vision of a factory in limbo. As Mr. Gillick’s text puts it, “No one has secured the building, and no one has wrecked it either.”

<img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>

A version of this review appears in print on November 22, 2013, on page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: Liam Gillick / Louise Lawler.

George Lindemann Journal - "Rosemarie Trockel" By KEN JOHNSON

George Lindemann Journal

Rosemarie Trockel and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Rosemarie Trockel’s sculpture “Copy Me,” in her show at the Gladstone gallery, may look velvety but is cast in steel.

515 West 24th Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 21

This exhibition of new work by the internationally admired German conceptualist Rosemarie Trockel has three parts, one good, two not so good. Best is “Copy Me,” a modern sofa cast in steel, with a velvety looking, rusty surface. Nearly 14 feet long, it resembles seating for an institutional waiting room. It’s divided into two parts, each exactly like the other but in reverse; they’re mirror images. It also has a sheet of transparent plastic draped over it, which brings to mind plastic-wrapped furniture in the living rooms of some obsessively clean homeowners.

As a deflating response to industrial steel sculpture like Richard Serra’s, “Copy Me” scores some feminist points, but it’s deceptive formal complexity and deadpan surrealism saves it from being an ideological one-liner.

Less provocative are works resembling Modernist stripe paintings, which, on close inspection, turn out to be made of lengths of colored yarn. Though visually attractive — except for the ugly, plexiglass boxes containing most of them — they add little to the Postmodernist tradition of critique by parody.

Installed in a separate room are sculptural pieces in which cuts of meat cast in plaster — some painted pale colors, some unpainted — are attached to variously shaped, transparent plexiglass panels. Like the yarn works, they’re didactic, albeit obliquely so. They seem to point to a butcherlike relationship between capitalistic humans and the rest of nature. They are visually wan; they could use some of the visceral horror of Paul Thek’s meat sculptures.

George Lindemann Journal - "A Portrait Painted in Heavy Strokes" @nytimes By DWIGHT GARNER

George Lindemann Journal

Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon were rivals as well as friends. That scratching sound you hear is Freud clawing at his coffin at the news last week that Bacon’s 1969 portrait of him, a triptych titled “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” went for $142.4 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

The painting it displaced (sold for $119.9 million in 2012) is Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Which is perfect, because that’s the face Freud would have made. He’d have preferred it the other way around, that his 1951 portrait of Bacon smash the record. That’s some painting, as well. Robert Hughes compared Bacon’s face in it to “a hand grenade on the point of detonation.”

Too bad it was stolen from a Berlin gallery in 1988 and hasn’t been seen since, except on “Wanted” posters.

I don’t mean to make Freud sound insecure and vile. Geordie Greig does a handy enough job of that in his new book, “Breakfast With Lucian,” a volume of prying and sabotage dressed up to resemble a book of love.

Freud, whose sexually loaded and densely impastoed portraits made him probably the most important British artist of the second half of the 20th century, died in 2011 at 88. He was intensely private. He granted few interviews and fended off at least one potential biographer, Mr. Greig reports, with the help of hired goons.

Until we have a proper biography, we have this book, written by the editor of The Mail on Sunday, whom Freud admitted into his circle in the final years of his life, or at least far enough that they had breakfast together more than a handful of times. Freud was old and feeble; he let his guard down. Bad move, old bean.

“Breakfast With Freud,” Mr. Greig writes in a mystifying author’s note, was composed “mostly by BlackBerry.” (Even if this were true, why would you admit it?) It displays little feeling for Freud’s work. Its history is patchy. Its tone is frequently what you’d get if you set Robin Leach loose at the Tate Modern.

There was “a Hollywood glamour to this brown-eyed temptress,” we read about one of Freud’s early lovers. Freud and Caroline Blackwood, a Guinness heiress, who would become his second wife, were “the most talked-about young lovers in London, with hidebound society agog.” Young Freud and another temptress “canoodled.”

“Breakfast With Freud” is seldom boring, though, which is something. It is so force-fed with gossip and incident — brawling, rutting, gambling, cuckolding, exacting revenge — that Freud comes off as equal parts Cecil Beaton (society dandy) and Charles Bukowski (crusty bum). He was the original werewolf of London.

The lunatic details start early and keep coming. You turn each page the way a rat hits the little lever for another pellet of crack.

Who knew, for example, that Freud had an obsession “with a Johnny Cash song about swapping his brain with a chicken when the chicken was robbing banks”? (This unlistenable novelty is “The Chicken in Black,” but never mind.) Or that he was caught naked dancing to “Sunday Girl,” the Blondie song?

It’s pretty well known that Freud gave Kate Moss a tramp stamp, made up of two tiny swallows. (Freud supplies to Mr. Greig the unlikely detail that this went down in the back of a London cab.) It’s probably less well known that Freud could imitate a whale masturbating.

At 84, Freud “chucked breadsticks at a man who used flash to take a photograph in the Wolseley,” a London restaurant. That fellow got off easy. A boxer when young, Freud loved to thump or head-butt his fellow Britons. One of his daughters recalls, “Dad used to hit taxi drivers and punched people in the street if he didn’t like the look of them.”

My favorite anecdote, melee division — it’s about the art dealer Jay Jopling — goes this way: “A dapper Old Etonian with signature ‘Joe 90’ glasses, Jopling had been having a quiet drink in Green Street, a dining club in Mayfair, when Lucian entered the room and attacked him. ‘He kicked me on the shins, grabbed the girl I was talking to and walked out with her,’ he said.”

Freud leapt on women (and occasionally men) throughout his life as if he were a flying squirrel in paint-flecked work boots. This volume goes long on his “serial sexual opportunism,” his playing of “musical beds on a grand and anarchic scale.” He married twice, and has many acknowledged and unacknowledged children, but always had overlapping lovers. These women had to poke though his work in progress to see whom else he was sleeping with.

In Mr. Greig’s account, he could be a sadist. “He became quite vicious, really hurt breasts and things,” a lover comments. He liked anal sex with women, an acquaintance reports, because it was redolent of utter domination. In restaurants, he grabbed at waitresses’ thighs.

He liked his girls young — as young as 16, 17 or 18. He got them to his home by offering to paint them, often obtrusively naked. A 22-year-old managed to fend him off, and we read about an early painting session: “He started walking up and down and gesturing as he undid his belt.” After a fight with one lover, he mailed her “a postcard with a crude drawing of her defecating.” No dummy, she held onto it.

Freud painted with agonizing slowness and required his models to be present for every brush stroke. Sessions could drag on for more than a year. After sitting for four months for a Freud portrait, of her breast-feeding her son by Mick Jagger, the model Jerry Hall was late for a session or two. Freud got revenge, we read, by erasing her from the painting. He inserted a man in her place. “Lucian liked to have a pet hate or feud,” Mr. Greig observes.

We do witness Freud commit acts of kindness and generosity in this well-illustrated book, but they are few and far between. In the stray details accumulated here, sinisterly speckled onto the page like Ralph Steadman’s ink blots, he is mostly cruel, loutish, self-centered.

Freud probably was all of these things, some or most of the time. But there is never a sense of seeing him whole in “Breakfast With Lucian.” Mr. Greig turns him into a cartoon, a man without texture.

Almost our last image of Freud here, appropriately enough, is of him two years before death, during a photo shoot, impulsively bopping a wild zebra on the nose. The animal bolted, and he clung to it. He was sent to the hospital with a groin strain, though many feared he’d been hurt much worse.

It all worked out, sort of. Kate Moss showed up, we read, and gave the wicked genius “a cuddle in bed.”