"Ineffable Emptiness, From Dawn to Dusk" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Ineffable Emptiness, From Dawn to Dusk

Robert Irwin’s Light-and-Space Work Returns to the Whitney

Robert Irwin Photograph, Warren Silverman, 1977

Scrim Veil — Black Rectangle — Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York has returned to the Whitney’s fourth floor.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 25, 2013

New York has seen its share of art spectacles this summer. The Museum of Modern Art has its Rain Room, where the computerized stop-and-go downpours have attracted mobs. The Park Avenue Armory is filled with Paul McCarthy’s sensurround onslaught of sexual and psychological chaos. At the Guggenheim, lines of people wait to see the immense digital light show that James Turrell has inserted into the soaring rotunda.

And then there’s Robert Irwin’s installation at the Whitney Museum. This eye-filling yet barely-there low-tech mirage makes all the others seem overwrought.

“Scrim Veil — Black Rectangle — Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York” is an installation piece that has not been exhibited since its debut in 1977 and probably will not be seen again for years. A levitating concoction composed of a white semitransparent polyester scrim, a black attenuated aluminum beam and a black line painted on the wall, it has the scale of a spectacle; it takes up the museum’s entire fourth floor. But it is devoid of the sensational ostentation, heavy-duty physicality or technical complexity typical of the genre. It involves very little in the way of materials, and what’s here is decidedly analog.

The means with which Mr. Irwin has transformed the Whitney’s fourth floor are so simple — and the illusion so easily deconstructed — that you might even call his effort the anti-Turrell. (Mr. Irwin can certainly do complicated, but he saves it for unusual situations, like the intricate, constantly evolving Central Garden he designed for the Getty Center in Los Angeles.) Like Mr. Turrell, Mr. Irwin was part of the Light and Space movement that sprang up in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. These artists’ lack of interest in making visual objects led them to start creating situations that gave the viewer a new awareness of visual perception itself. They created, as was often said, the experience of “seeing yourself see.”

None of these artists did more with less than Mr. Irwin. Where most Light and Space artists made a practice of adding walls or cutting holes in them and using special artificial lighting, Mr. Irwin has rarely relied on anything more than a bit of scrim, tape, wire or paint combined with natural light, although he sometimes used the artificial lighting already in place. Still, most of his classic pieces from the 1970s and the 1980s qualify as Light and Space unplugged.

The Whitney piece, as is usual with Mr. Irwin’s scrim works, is extrapolated from a careful consideration of the details of the architecture. Here the main detail is Marcel Breuer’s enormous, emblematic Cyclops window, a trapezoidal bay affair that pivots slightly out from the building’s boxy and otherwise featureless facade.

The scrim abuts the left edge of the window and runs the length of the 117-foot gallery, descending from the ceiling to a height 5 feet 6 inches above the floor. There it is anchored and stretched into a smooth white plane by the aluminum beam, a three-inch-thick, seemingly seamless element (it actually breaks down into 11 pieces) that spans the length of the gallery. Then there’s the black line — also three inches wide and, like the beam, at a height of 5 feet 6 inches above the floor — painted completely around the gallery.

The piece is in some ways a work of measurement both accurate and inaccurate. The scrim-beam makes the space feel bigger than it actually is. The drama of its emptiness is the first thing you experience stepping off the elevator. The effect is of an indoor abstracted landscape, with the scrim functioning as sky and the beam and line providing shifting horizons.

At the same time, the scrim measures the light exactly. Its whiteness meticulously registers its fading and dimming from the window to the back wall. These measurements change every second of every day, corresponding to the time and weather.

Experiencing the work is a process of continuous mulling, of separating visual fact from fiction. You repeatedly take Mr. Irwin’s installation apart and put it back together again, parsing the individual elements — including the window — and then seeing the different ways they combine and affect one another as you move around the space. One thing that quickly becomes obvious is that the dark metal frame around the window seems to be an essential inspiration for the beam and black line. The trapezoidal angles of this aperture also play against the right angles of everything else, just as its transparency contrasts with the fluctuating milkiness of the scrim.

As you leave the elevator, the beam is dominant, but you don’t necessarily know exactly where it is. At first it reads as a deep, dark slot cut into the opposite wall, shadowed by the seemingly thinner, paler painted line. As you move toward it, the beam’s suspension in space near the central axis of the gallery emerges. Then you start sorting out the scrim: the way it diffuses light, making it a granular, tangible atmosphere while also constantly changing from transparent to opaque as you cross under it, walk along it, or view it from a distance. At times it might as well be a plaster wall.

At the juncture of scrim, beam and window, the painted line takes off like a relay racer, zipping around the walls, interrupted only by the elevator foyer and the door to a gallery in the opposite corner. It asserts the horizontal plane of the gallery against the almost guillotinelike vertical of the scrim. It also functions as a kind of ship’s railing by which you can right yourself if things get too disorienting, yet its distant-horizon effect adds to the illusionistic expansion of space.

Mr. Irwin made his first public scrim piece in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art at the invitation of a prescient curator, Jennifer Licht. (I was her secretary at the time.) In a tiny skylighted gallery usually reserved for the Modern’s Brancusis, he stretched a horizontal scrim across half the skylight and added a thin strand of wire running parallel to its edge, again contrasting precision and diffusion. Seven years later at the Whitney, Mr. Irwin accomplished what is surely one of the masterpieces of Light and Space, or Minimalism in general, and he gave it to the museum on the condition that it could only be exhibited in the space that inspired it. And now the Whitney has brought it out of storage for the first time: a last look before handing its Marcel Breuer building over to its new tenant, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and reopening downtown in new quarters in 2015. It will probably not be seen again until the Met’s lease is up and the Whitney has the wherewithal to take back its historic building.

"In Los Angeles Art Museum Arrival, a Foreshadowing of a Departure" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, has had to deal with a variety of challenges, including financial ones.

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: July 25, 2013

When Jeffrey Deitch was named in 2010 to lead the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, many in the city’s art world expressed guarded optimism that he could turn around a museum that had come close to foundering only two years earlier.

But others urged Mr. Deitch, a veteran New York art dealer, to run from the job, which they saw as next to impossible, a tangle of long-festering internal problems compounded by the museum’s unenviable basics: two locations blocks apart, one of them with no onsite parking in a downtown neighborhood that remains a tough sell for tourists and residents alike.

In retrospect, Mr. Deitch may wish he had listened to the second group. On Wednesday, the museum announced his resignation three years into a five-year contract, after a tenure that included a few well-attended, critically praised exhibitions but that was marked by staff defections, budget problems and accusations that Mr. Deitch had neither the ability nor the desire to run a large public institution.

Mr. Deitch has not publicly spoken about stepping down and declined to comment when reached by phone Thursday.

Since the decision, few people have been willing to speak on the record about what happened at the museum, which has one of the finest collections of postwar art in the country. Privately, his supporters say that he took the job with several disadvantages, among them the inability — partly because of the museum’s financial situation — to bring in people he knew to help him. And relations between Mr. Deitch and Paul Schimmel, the museum’s chief curator, were tense from the beginning. (Mr. Schimmel left under pressure last year.)

In 2008, the museum was saved from going under or merging with another institution by the billionaire collector Eli Broad, who is building a museum to house his own collection opposite the Museum of Contemporary Art’s location on Grand Street. Charles Young, the chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Los Angeles, was brought in by Mr. Broad as chief executive of the contemporary museum and quickly stabilized it.

But Mr. Broad also engineered the selection of Mr. Deitch, and some trustees and financial supporters of the museum felt that the choice had been forced on them, leading to a downturn in giving, according to a former museum official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues involved.

The former official added, however, that Mr. Deitch bore much of the responsibility for financial problems — and for staff problems — that worsened under his leadership.

“He was going to do whatever he wanted,” the former official said. “He would add things, cancel things, change exhibition schedules, would hold parties that would end up being only break-even. He had no concept or need for those kind of events to help the museum financially.”

Of a large public institution in which consensus and communication are important, the former official added: “He had no ability or interest in functioning in that kind of environment. At the end of the day, I think Jeffrey was incredibly unhappy at MOCA.”

Mr. Deitch’s supporters counter that he recruited several wealthy new members to the board, including Ari Emanuel, the high-powered talent agent; Maurice Marciano, a founder of the Guess clothing company; and Laurence Graff, a London-born billionaire and diamond merchant. In all, 16 new trustees joined during Mr. Deitch’s years.

“I found him to be an inspiring person to work with,” said Rebecca Bronfein Raphael, an associate director of development at the museum in 2010 and 2011 who had previously worked for Mr. Deitch at his New York gallery. “He instills a lot of trust and confidence in the people that he works with.”

Ms. Raphael, who now works for the online art site Artsy, added, “Artists are his No. 1 passion.” In the realm of fund-raising, she said, “I think it took some time to find a groove, but I think that was just a general symptom of being a new person, working in a new city.”

Mr. Deitch’s curatorial staff is now reduced to two full-time members, and there is great uncertainty about the exhibition schedule over the next year. “He has absolutely no interest in any other exhibitions” than those he originated or organized himself, said one current museum staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The staff is completely in the dark and has been since Jeffrey arrived.”

The Los Angeles artist John Baldessari, who resigned from the board last year and criticized Mr. Deitch as trying to move the museum too much in a pop culture direction, said: “Jeffrey wasn’t disingenuous. He did what he does, and that’s what the museum wanted.”

“But I think the real problem is the museum board,” Mr. Baldessari added. “It’s a really nonfunctional board. They need to have a clear vision for this museum as an important place and a place where people feel the need to go, and I think right now it’s a troubled and a flawed vision.”

"Ross Bleckner Wipes the Canvas Clean" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Robyn Lea/GMAimages

Ross Bleckner's home in Sagaponack, N.Y., was once owned by Truman Capote. Mr. Bleckner expanded the once-modest footprint of the home twice and added a pool to the five-acre property. More Photos »

 By STEVEN KURUTZ

Published: July 24, 2013

All was quiet at Ross Bleckner’s house last week, if you didn’t count the four yappy dachshunds gnashing their teeth in a downstairs window. Strange, because the renowned artist had an appointment to show a reporter around the place.

An hour passed. The sun intensified. Still no sign of the homeowner.

Then a tall man was spotted in the distance, trimming trees. He explained that Mr. Bleckner was in his studio, at the far, wild end of the property, accessible by a path cut into waist-high grass.

Indeed, Mr. Bleckner was inside, working feverishly on a large-scale painting in the morning heat.

“Oh, you’re here,” he said in a high, scratchy voice. “I forgot all about our meeting.”

He worked a brush quickly back and forth on the canvas. “What is this article about, again?”

Your home.

“Oh. Well, what do you want to know?”

In the early ’90s, Mr. Bleckner paid $800,000 for Truman Capote’s old beach house, which sits on five cloistered acres here on the East End of Long Island, a short walk from the ocean. Over 20 years and two major renovations, he has taken a little two-story, box-shaped dwelling and added wings, a pool and the art studio. He expanded the guesthouse, too, and repaired and winterized the whole place.

“I had to,” Mr. Bleckner said. “It was falling apart.”

He was happy to show the home, he said, but he needed to use this fresh paint before it dried. He works on several groups of paintings at the same time, he said. The one in front of him, a dark canvas layered with ghostly white and red dots, was part of his brain-scan series: “They go from very calm to schizophrenia. This is not calm. This is plaque.”

Mr. Bleckner is friendly, quick-witted, curious and well read. He is not, however, prone to lengthy digressions about decorating or his domestic life. Nor does he exhibit much interest in the lore surrounding the previous owner.

Did Mr. Capote do a lot of entertaining here?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Bleckner said.

Do you?

“No.”

Mr. Bleckner said he uses the home as a summer retreat, and relishes the quiet. Noise was one of the main reasons he sold his longtime home in the city, a loft building in TriBeCa whose ground floor once held the Mudd Club.

“Every time you turned around someone was tearing down a building,” he said. “If you want quiet, you need to be in a place that is deeply established architecturally.” (He moved to the West Village, where he still lives most of the time.)

Eventually, the morning’s work was completed, and Mr. Bleckner walked through the football-field-size yard and up to the main house.

In Mr. Capote’s day, the home was filled with books and tchotchkes, and decorated with yellow stuffed chairs, pillows and animal skins. Mr. Bleckner, it quickly became apparent, is not Mr. Capote. Though he shares the home with Eric Freeman, an artist who lives here year-round and designed the space, the rooms looked barely lived in.

The living area had very little furniture or art. The kitchen was showroom-neat. Upstairs, in the master suite that Mr. Bleckner added (Mr. Capote used a tiny sleeping loft), a Zen-like sparseness prevailed. A wooden shelf held a simple framed photo of Mr. Bleckner’s mother, who died in 2008. The main attraction was not inside but out the windows, where a beach and white-capped water were tantalizingly visible in the distance.

Still, Mr. Bleckner was anxious about the potential for personal revelation. “You see a lot when you come into someone’s room,” he said. “Even when you don’t see a lot, you see a lot.”

He picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books on a low table. “You can see what I read,” he said, mock scandalized.

Back downstairs, Mr. Bleckner said he would probably pick up a sandwich for lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon in his studio, followed by a late swim in the ocean.

Asked if he was happy here, he smiled and replied, simply, “Yes.”

"The Death of a Museum" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Fresno Met’s Closing Could Hold a Lesson for Detroit

By ROBIN POGREBIN

How does a museum decide to dissolve?

That question could ultimately face two cultural institutions: the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose artwork may be sold off because the city has declared bankruptcy, and the South Street Seaport Museum, which is desperately trying to stay afloat.

Museums don’t often go out of business. They cut back, they pare down, but they tend to persevere as cultural anchors of their communities. And neither of these institutions has announced plans to close; both are hoping to weather their current storms.

But both are arguably in jeopardy — the Detroit Institute because a sale would denude its prestigious collection of its most valuable artworks and compromise its integrity, since nonprofit museums, founded in the public trust, are ethically obligated not to sell pieces except to acquire others; the Seaport because it has struggled for years to pay its bills and recently lost its white knight when the Museum of the City of New York said it could no longer afford to run the museum, which was damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Should these institutions find themselves forced to close, they could look to the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science, which shut down in 2010, as an object lesson in the complex, painful process of dissolution.

Although vastly different in scale and reputation from the august Detroit Institute and the endearing Seaport Museum, the Fresno Met had certain key things in common with those institutions. It was a nonprofit whose building was in the end owned by the city. (The City of Detroit owns the Institute and much of its collection, and the Seaport Museum leases its building from the city’s Economic Development Corporation.) Also like the Detroit Institute and the Seaport Museum, the Fresno Met was a flagship attraction and a local point of pride.

“It was extremely difficult,” said Dana Thorpe, the Fresno Met’s last executive director. “For many people in the community, this was their Disneyland.”

The Fresno Met was one of nearly 30 museums that decided to close in 2009, the last year statistics were compiled, according to the American Alliance of Museums, a national association. The alliance no longer tries to calculate the number of closings, said a spokesman, Dewey Blanton, because many go unreported.

The Fresno Met didn’t have a lot of history behind it. It was created in 1984 in the former home of The Fresno Bee newspaper, a 1922 Renaissance Revival building on the National Register that the Bee’s owner donated. Among the largest arts institutions in California’s Central Valley, the museum had a few gems in its collection like American Indian baskets and a cache of Ansel Adams photographs.

For a while, the Fresno Met thrived as a center for programs in art and science. But by the time Ms. Thorpe became director in June 2008, the museum was foundering. A $28 million renovation project was $15 million over budget and three years behind schedule, closing the museum during construction.

Although the Met finally managed to reopen in November 2008, and attendance reached a record 110,000 over the ensuing year, contributions diminished as the recession hit donors’ stock portfolios. In 2009, carrying more than $4 million in debt, the museum cut its operating budget by 45 percent, went through two rounds of layoffs and closed its Chagall exhibition early.

“It was a Taj Mahal and a beautiful museum, but the demographics were not there to support it,” said Stewart Randall, the former board president.

The museum sought help from the City of Fresno, which agreed to guarantee a $15 million loan. But the economic downturn left the museum unable to raise money to refinance the loan, so the city took over the building. And the writing was on the wall.

“We were spending $300,000 a month and had income of $200,000 a month,” Mr. Randall said. “That’s when it became evident to me that there was no way this was going to survive.”

Staff members were let go. The collection had to be sold. Debts had to be paid. “We were now talking about closing the museum with dignity and grace,” Ms. Thorpe said.

To deal with all this, the museum hired Riley C. Walter, a Fresno bankruptcy lawyer.

The museum considered filing for Chapter 11 protection. But, after calculating the potential costs and delays, it instead pursued an insolvency proceeding to benefit creditors that is governed by state law rather than federal bankruptcy law.

The procedure turns the museum’s assets over to an assignee — in this case, O. James Woodward III, a prominent local lawyer and art collector — who then oversees their disposal.

“It was far less expensive and far faster than a Chapter 11,” Mr. Walter said. “In Chapter 11, you would have to go through elaborate notice procedures and give a lot more opportunity for people to object.”

The museum notified creditors of its liquidation, so that they could file claims, then auctioned off non-art items like pedestals and display cases. Sotheby’s handled the sale of the most valuable art works, which brought about $2 million; other auction houses sold the rest.

The unsecured creditors received 80 cents on the dollar.

At the beginning of the process, a group of local patrons lent the museum $675,000 and took a lien against its assets. That money was used in the liquidation for payroll while the museum was obtaining valuations from auction houses. This loan was paid off through the Fresno Met’s first sale of assets.

The liquidation prompted only one lawsuit: The family of Ansel Adams said the photographs were meant to stay in a museum. So the family traded other pieces it had for those in the collection, based on a fair market value price determined by an auction house.

Note to institutions contemplating a similar move: The aftermath wasn’t all grim. A science and math exhibition for children was bought by a children’s museum in north-central California; a large collection of original boxed puzzles went to a toy museum. The museum’s building is now rented out by the city as commercial space. And some of the staff members and trustees landed at the Fresno Art Museum, an older institution that focuses on contemporary American art.

Still, “it was really unfortunate,” Mr. Walter said. “And it’s led to there being one fewer cultural amenity in the whole region.”

Ms. Thorpe said she had received calls for advice from other museum directors whose institutions were in similar straits on how to avoid the same fate.

“I share the story of the Fresno Met,” she said. “I never want to see another museum close, even though I know it continues to happen.”

"By Design | Josef Albers’s ‘Interaction of Color’ Goes Interactive" @nytimes

By Design | Josef Albers’s ‘Interaction of Color’ Goes Interactive

Design
By PILAR VILADAS
July 23, 2013, 4:28 pm 1 Comment

A color plate from Josef Alberss Interaction of ColorrdquoCopyright Yale UniversityA color plate from Josef Albers’s “Interaction of Color.”

“Interaction of Color,” the landmark 1963 book by Josef Albers — the German-born artist and educator who taught at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale University over the course of his storied career — isn’t just for aspiring artists. Its mesmerizing illustrations are a revelation for anyone interested in color theory and human perception. On Thursday, to mark the book’s 50th anniversary, Yale University Press, the publisher of the original edition, will offer a fresh way to engage with Albers’s lessons by releasing the “Interaction of Color” App for the iPad. The $9.99 app bundles the book’s full text and more than 125 of its original color studies with more than 60 new interactive plates that allow users to perform their own experiments with color, along with a new color palette tool and video commentary that explains Albers’s principles. There are also interviews with the graphic designer Peter Mendelsund; the artists Brice Marden and Anoka Faruquee; the architect Annabelle Selldorf; the textile designers Denyse Schmidt and Christopher Farr; and the director of sourcing and product development of Fab.com, Brian Mullan, all of whom talk about the use of color in their professional practices; as well as Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of the Albers Foundation. In addition to the app, a 50th anniversary edition of the book is available in paperback for $18.

In the video below, the designers involved in the project talk about the importance of color and the influence of Albers.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 24, 2013

A previous version of this post incorrectly described Brian Mullan, one of the people interviewed on the "Interaction of Color" app. He is the director of sourcing and product development for Fab.com, not the design director.

"Announcement of Jeffrey Deitch's departure from MOCA is expected" @latimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Eli Broad and Jeffrey Deitch

Eli Broad and Jeffrey Deitch at the announcement of his appointment as MOCA director in January 2010. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times / July 23, 2013)                                        

By Mike Boehm

July 23, 2013, 11:05 a.m.

Jeffrey Deitch is expected to resign as director of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art imminently, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

One person, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Deitch was "choosing to step down." Another person who has spoken to Deitch said that MOCA is expected to announce Deitch's exit along with the news that the museum is nearing completion of a fundraising campaign it announced in March to boost its endowment from about $20 million to $100 million.

The person who spoke with Deitch, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the fundraising success would enable Deitch to exit with a parting accomplishment. Deitch had a five-year contract to lead MOCA and has served slightly more than three years.

TIMELINE: MOCA in flux

A MOCA staff member who was not authorized to speak publicly said that “major news” is anticipated from a museum board meeting scheduled for Wednesday.

Neither Deitch nor a MOCA spokesperson immediately returned calls for comment.

Citing unnamed sources, Tom Christie of the arts blog B.L.A.T.C. posted an item Monday saying MOCA has formed a search committee to replace Deitch, who, Christie said, was hunting for an apartment and a new gallery space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

Deitch rose to prominence in the contemporary art world as an art dealer and head of Deitch Projects, a Manhattan gallery in which he focused not only on established artists who commanded big prices but emerging figures who explored intersections between visual art and popular culture.

Deitch earned $917,377 in 2011, his second year at MOCA and the most recent one publicly reported in the museum’s tax filings. That included a delayed $300,000 signing and relocation bonus that boosted his second-year earnings past the salary in the $600,000s he had earned his first year.

In an interview with The Times last year, Deitch acknowledged that his tenure at MOCA had been rocky amid disputes with curators and a struggle to raise money. But he defended MOCA’s exhibitions program: “What we’re doing here now, it’s on the most serious level. It’s as good as any museum in the country.” 

"Qatari Riches Are Buying Art World Influence" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Qatari Riches Are Buying Art World Influence

By ROBIN POGREBIN 

The prices have been record breaking, and startling.

More than $70 million for Rothko’s “White Center” in 2007, a high-water mark for that artist.

More than $20 million later that year for a Damien Hirst pill cabinet, then a record for a living artist.

And $250 million for Cézanne’s “Card Players” in 2011, the highest known price ever paid for a painting.

Given the secrecy of the art market, few knew at the time who had laid out such unprecedented sums.

But it has become increasingly clear that those masterpieces and many more have been purchased by Qatar, a tiny Persian Gulf country with enormous wealth and cultural ambitions to match: it is buying art at a level never seen before.

“They’re the most important buyers of art in the market today,” said Patricia G. Hambrecht, the chief business development officer for Phillips auction house. “The amount of money being spent is mind-boggling.”

The purchasing is directed through intermediaries by Sheika al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority and a sister to Qatar’s new emir. At age 30 she has become one of the most influential players in the art world.

No one knows exactly how much Sheika al Mayassa has spent on behalf of her family or the museum authority since she was named chairwoman by her father, the former emir, in 2006. But experts estimate the acquisition budget reaches $1 billion a year and say the Qataris have used it to secure a host of undisputed modern and contemporary masterpieces by Francis Bacon, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.

Where all this art will eventually end up remains something of a mystery. But it seems clear that, just as Qatar has used its oil riches to boost its influence in the Middle East with ventures like arming Syrian rebels, its wealth is also being deployed to help the country become a force in the world of culture.

This effort to create a first-class contemporary art collection, essentially from scratch, has buoyed the international art market, experts say, and contributed to some of the escalation in prices.

Until Qatar’s 2007 purchase, for example, the most expensive Rothko ever sold at auction (“Homage to Matisse”) had drawn $22 million in 2005, less than one-third of the price Qatar paid. In 2011 the $250 million spent for “Card Players” was four times the highest public price ever paid for a work by that artist.

“When they finish their buying program and withdraw from the market,” said David Nash, a New York dealer who spent 35 years as a top executive with Sotheby’s, “they will leave a big hole which I don’t see anyone else ready to fill at their level.”

In recent years the Qatar Museums Authority has created three high-profile museums in the capital, Doha, by the architects Jean Nouvel, I. M. Pei and Jean-François Bodin. But each of these projects — a new home for the National Museum of Qatar now under construction; the Museum of Islamic Art; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art — is focused on regional art and artists. So experts expect that a good portion of the Western collection being amassed will become part of a new contemporary art institution in the country, though officials have yet to announce that.

The annual acquisition budgets of major museums typically amount to just a small fraction of what Qatar is spending. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, spent $32 million to acquire art for the fiscal year that ended in June 2012; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, $39 million.

While other gulf states like Abu Dhabi and Dubai are also trying to become cultural capitals, those two members of the United Arab Emirates have teamed up with existing institutions — namely the Louvre and the Guggenheim — to establish themselves. Qatar, meanwhile, is going it alone.

“They see themselves as an international center for many cultures,” said Allen L. Keiswetter, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “It establishes them as another reason to be a destination for travel, for business. If you want to attract people, you need to have a reason to go there.”

Sheika al Mayassa declined to be interviewed for this article, but she has made limited remarks about the role art will play in Qatar’s future.

“We are revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development,” she said in a 2010 TED Talk. “Art becomes a very important part of our national identity.”

In an interview that year with The New York Times, the sheika suggested that establishing art institutions might challenge Western preconceptions about Muslim societies.

“My father often says, in order to have peace, we need to first respect each other’s cultures,” she said. “And people in the West don’t understand the Middle East. They come with Bin Laden in their heads.”

Sheika al Mayassa appears to combine Western and Muslim influences. Sometimes she dresses like a stylish business executive; sometimes she wears a traditional black abaya, which covers everything but her round face. She speaks French and English as well as Arabic.

The sheika does not have a formal background in art history, having studied political science and literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Both she and her husband, Sheik Jassim bin Abdulaziz al-Thani, also did postgraduate work at Columbia University before returning to Qatar.

“The sheika has a very grand vision and is a very educated woman,” said Leila Heller, a New York dealer with many Middle Eastern artists. “She wants to make Doha a hub for art in the region, where people don’t necessarily have to fly to New York and to Paris and to L.A. to see great shows. Doha has an ambitious plan of opening close to 20 museums of different kinds.”

As to the guiding principle behind the buying, art experts say the sheika is simply trying to amass the best of the best, whatever the price. The pace of her purchasing during the past three or four years has vaulted her, many say, to a place among the art world’s most powerful figures. She has been written about by publications like Forbes and Vanity Fair; The Economist recently pronounced her “the art world’s most powerful woman.”

And yet her profile within the places where art is bought and sold is all but nonexistent. The sheika does not visit art galleries. She won’t be found in the auction room on sale nights among the other major collectors for whom the business is something of a high-society fraternity.

Auction houses and galleries will often wine and dine these collectors before a big sale. Significant works will be flown to their homes. The Qataris don’t take part in this. They delegate their purchasing to a handful of experienced art advisers who do it for them — initially the dealers Philippe Ségalot and Franck Giraud and now Guy Bennett.

Mr. Bennett, a former co-head of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern art department worldwide, is known as a master dealmaker. He is just one of a number of Christie’s alumni who have taken on roles with Qatar. In June 2011 Edward Dolman, the auction house’s former chairman, was named executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority. Jean-Paul Engelen, the director of public art programs for the authority, is also a Christie’s veteran.

The Qatar team typically buys from dealers, though some of its most major purchases have been at auction. Experts said that another intermediary may act on Mr. Bennett’s behalf so that the sales cannot be traced to the Qataris, who want to keep their buying private to prevent driving up the market and fueling speculation about their plans.

“They are very secretive about their purchases and activities in the art market and I am not quite sure why,” Mr. Nash said.

American art institutions could be expected to be frustrated to see so many important pieces leaving the United States. But some museum executives say that’s just how it goes.

“Sure, there are lots of works of art that we have absolutely wanted,” said Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art. “But if Rothko and de Kooning and Kline, among others, end up circulating in Moscow, Qatar and Shanghai, that’s not so bad — it’s a projection of American culture and importance that is meaningful.”

"Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr will cook for Pèrez Art Museum Miami" @miamiherald - The George Lindemann Journal

Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr will cook for Pèrez Art Museum Miami

By Evan S. Benn The Miami Herald

                 

An artist's rendering of an outdoor terrace facing Biscayne Bay at the new Perez Art Museum Miami, opening in December. Perez Art Museum Miami

A view from Watson Island of the under-construction Perez Art Museum Miami. The 200,000-square-foot space is set to open in December. Daniel Azoulay / Perez Art Museum Miami

An artist's rendering shows the bar area of the restaurant at the new Perez Art Museum Miami. Philadelphia-based restaurateur and caterer Stephen Starr will run the museum's food services. Perez Art Museum Miami

An artist's rendering shows the outside dining area of the restaurant at the new Perez Art Museum Miami. Perez Art Museum Miami

An artist's rendering shows the indoor dining space at the restaurant at the Perez Art Museum Miami, which will be run by Philadelphia-based restaurateur and caterer Stephen Starr. Perez Art Museum Miami

Restaurateur Stephen Starr Starr Restaurants

 

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STEPHEN STARR

•  Oversees 31 restaurants in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Florida and Washington, D.C.

•  Flagship restaurants include Buddakan (Philadelphia, New York, Atlantic City) and Morimoto (Philadelphia, New York); also owns Steak 954 in Fort Lauderdale and Makoto in Bal Harbour.

•  Has eight catering contracts at cultural institutions, including Pérez Art Museum Miami, New York Botanical Gardens and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

•  His new restaurant at Pérez Art Museum Miami, name to be announced, will be open Tuesday through Sunday.

By Evan S. Benn

ebenn@MiamiHerald.com

With a small army of workers painting gallery walls and installing lighting fixtures this month, the new Pérez Art Museum Miami is getting ready to welcome thousands of visitors into its 200,000 square feet of bayfront space when it opens in December, in time for Art Basel.

And now, the museum has tapped a chef to feed all those hungry art aficionados:

Stephen Starr, the Philadelphia-based restaurateur whose empire includes 31 dining destinations and exclusive catering contracts at seven cultural institutions, will lead the still-unnamed restaurant at Pérez Art Museum. The catering arm of Starr’s organization also will handle food and drinks for all of the museum’s banquets and private events. Starr's contract with the museum runs for seven years.

“Stephen really appealed to us because of his experience at other institutions as well as with his restaurants,” said Hollie Altman, the museum’s director of special events and sales. “We met with a lot of groups who were either very good at catering or had successful restaurants. But Stephen really has this young, dynamic team that’s able to come to Miami and bring its culinary experiences from both aspects.”

Starr’s restaurant in the new Herzon & de Meuron-designed museum will be open during museum hours, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, in addition to extended evening hours, until 10 p.m., on Thursday. It will seat about 70 people inside, under a slanted ceiling, and about 30 outside; both dining areas feature views of Biscayne Bay.

The restaurant’s aim is to “lengthen the stay of museum guests, but also of course to raise their overall satisfaction,” said Simon Powles, president of Starr Restaurants Catering Group.

“We hope to provide everything visitors could want during regular museum hours, which primarily will focus on a lot of great lunch dishes and snack items,” Powles said. “We’ll also be open one night a week, and we’d love to take advantage of that by offering beer dinners, wine dinners, cooking demos. And I really hope we can make Sunday brunch a destination opportunity: Come have brunch down by the waterfront; spend the morning with us.”

The restaurant’s menu, like its name, is still a work in progress – Powles said his team has a team trip planned to Miami in early August to hammer out those details – but expect at least some influence from Starr’s flagship restaurants, Buddakan and Morimoto.

“We’ll definitely incorporate some signature Starr dishes, like dim sum from Buddakan and sushi from the Morimoto and Makoto menus,” Powles said, adding that the fare and price points will be family friendly.

In addition to serving the restaurant, Starr’s kitchen will have the capability to handle on-site banquets of up to 400 people at the museum.

“We pride ourselves on delivering restaurant-level cuisine at all of our private functions,” Powles said. “The best feedback we get from clients is when they tell us their food didn’t taste like a mass-produced, catered dinner.”

Museum leaders also have talked with Starr about rotating in seasonal dishes based on the background of exhibiting artists. Starr and his Asian-leaning cuisine should have no problem finding food to fit with the works of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who will be featured at the museum from December through March. But what about when the spring-summer “Caribbean: Crossworlds of the World” installation comes to town? Does he have recipes in his repertoire to complement Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes’ fall exhibit?

Leann Standish, the museum’s deputy director of external affairs, smiled.

“Something we love about Stephen was how creative he is,” Standish said. “He’s very flexible and able to respond to what Miami wants.”

The three-level Pérez Art Museum is located in downtown Miami’s Museum Park, the new name for Bicentennial Park. The space is about three times larger than the Miami Art Museum’s former Flagler Street home and will face the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, set to open in 2015.

The $220 million museum project is being paid for with about $100 million in public money, which Miami-Dade voters approved with a 2004 general obligation bond, and about $120 million in private donations (including $40 million in cash and art from developer Jorge Pérez, the naming donor, and $1 million from Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross).

Starr’s restaurant at Pérez Art Museum will be his third in South Florida; he opened Steak 954 at the W Hotel in Fort Lauderdale in 2009 and Makoto at the Bal Harbour Shops in 2011. Having been named Bon Appétit magazine’s 2005 Restaurateur of the Year, Starr’s reach includes 20 restaurants in Philadelphia as well as others in New York, Atlantic City and Washington, D.C. His permanent catering gigs include New York Botanical Gardens, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Pérez Art Museum restaurant will be Starr’s first partnership with a Florida cultural institution – bringing his number of exclusive contracts nationwide to eight – and will mark his foray into the region’s catering and special-events market.

Powles said the catering group is looking at two or three potential spaces for a commissary kitchen in Miami to prepare food for non-museum jobs. Starr will have a staff of seven managers at the museum, plus another team for off-site catering.

“We’re very excited about taking our catering brand into the Miami market,” said Powles, who formerly led Wolfgang Puck’s catering business. “We’ve had great success with Steak 954 and Makoto, and obviously we think the Pérez Art Museum is going to be a spectacular venue. Stephen is very committed to South Florida and building our name there.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/22/v-fullstory/3514733/philadelphia-restaurateur-stephen.html#storylink=cpy

"London’s Neighborhood to Show and Be Shown" @nytimes - The George Lindemann Journal

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Late last month, an opening of a Robert Irwin exhibition at Pace London, very close to Claridges hotel.

By CAROL VOGEL
Published: July 15, 2013

LONDON — Mayfair is known for its high-end fashion boutiques: Prada, Burberry, Yves St. Laurent. And for more than a century, this area’s elegant streets have also been the home of the top old-guard British art galleries.

Recently, however, there have been some new neighbors: many high-powered American art galleries — Gagosian, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Michael Werner, David Zwirner — that seem more Manhattan than Mayfair.

A number of them have opened or expanded their spaces in this neighborhood, paying top dollar for commercial rents. And in the me-too world of contemporary art, other galleries, also mostly American, are soon to follow.

“There is art on the street at a level that’s never been seen before,” said David Rosen, a London real estate developer, who says he is busier than ever finding new gallery spaces in the area.

In many ways, the new galleries are a sign of the heated competition at the top of the market. Dealers are competing not only for new collectors from places like Russia, China and the Middle East, who have bought homes here, but also for top artists, who increasingly demand dealers with global reach.

And London may become the city of choice for that kind of extended influence, with Mayfair as its epicenter.

“That’s where it’s all happening,” Mr. Rosen said. “There’s Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Claridges, the Connaught and the Ritz,” he noted, reeling off the names of big auction houses and world-famous hotels in the neighborhood. Foreign governments and hedge funds, as well as scores of other high-profile businesses, also have offices around Mayfair. And Mercury Group, the Russian owner of Phillips, the boutique auction house, recently paid about $160 million for a 52,000-square-foot building at 30 Berkeley Square, where it plans to make the basement and the first and second floors into Phillips’s London headquarters.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, smaller galleries with strong New York connections have also opened, some in upstairs spaces, like Per Skarstedt and Eykyn Maclean.

Mayfair’s latest art-centric turn started with Larry Gagosian, who opened his first London gallery about 13 years ago. He is now opening his third gallery here — a 22,000-square-foot space at 20 Grosvenor Hill — in October.

“I like the adventure of opening galleries in different parts of the world,” Mr. Gagosian said, adding that many European collectors shop in London, but don’t necessarily come to New York.

His other two galleries are on nearby Davies Street, also in Mayfair, and another is farther away, on Britannia Street, a stone’s throw from Kings Cross. But he decided to open a larger space in Mayfair after a collector in London told him, “I love you, Larry, but I just don’t have the time to go all the way to Britannia Street.” The new gallery will be Mr. Gagosian’s 13th worldwide.

Marc Glimcher, president of Pace Gallery, reluctantly admitted that his company opened the London gallery partly for fear of losing artists to Mr. Gagosian.

“Yes, there’s some truth to that,” Mr. Glimcher said when asked. “Gagosian made a brilliant move in 2000 when he opened in London.”

Pace now runs four spaces in New York, one in Beijing and two here in London: a small one in Soho and a large gallery in Mayfair in part of what was once the Museum of Mankind.

“We’re all chasing the same artists,” Mr. Glimcher said. “But the intensity of interest in art in London is long-lasting. You can get 10 reviews in 10 different newspapers. And besides the new collectors and galleries, there is a very vibrant museum community.”

Last fall, David Zwirner, perhaps Mr. Gagosian’s fiercest rival, opened a gallery in an 18th-century town house on Grafton Street, in which Helena Rubenstein started a beauty clinic in 1909; it was more recently a bank. He hired Annabelle Selldorf, the New York architect, to renovate that 10,000-square-foot building, which has five floors of gallery and office space. “I wanted a European presence,” Mr. Zwirner said, “and London is the second-most-important town after New York.”

Dealers say that doing business in London is different from selling in New York. “Nobody just drops in and buys something, like they do in New York,” explained Iwan Wirth, a partner of Hauser & Wirth, which now runs two large spaces in London. “We work on the Swiss model, developing relationships with collectors slowly.”

Although Hauser & Wirth began in Zurich, where it still has a gallery, along with two in New York, Mr. Wirth said it was not till he opened in London that he was considered an international dealer. He now also runs two spaces in London, one on Piccadilly and another nearby, on Savile Row.

Even the cautious have found that it is time to jump in. The Michael Werner Gallery first dipped its toes in the market here, opening temporary “pop-up” spaces on Mansfield Street, in the Marylebone neighborhood, in 2008, and then on Hoxton Square, in the East End, three years ago.

The gallery just added a third floor of space in a period house on Upper Brook Street, in the heart of Mayfair.

“Artists want to show in places where there are other artists,” said Gordon VeneKlasen, Mr. Werner’s partner in the gallery. “In the fall, when we had an exhibition of Peter Doig’s paintings, we had about 200 people a day here for three months,” he said, referring to the Scottish painter. Right now, the setting — large rooms with intricately carved Victorian woodwork, an elaborate fireplace and a glass-ceilinged winter garden — is the backdrop for two monumental paintings and a bronze sculpture by the Danish artist Per Kirkeby.

The cost of running so many galleries, dealers say, is astronomical, and London is exceptionally expensive. Mr. Rosen estimates that spaces in Mayfair usually rent for about £100 (about $160) a square foot per year, and that the average gallery is a minimum of 10,000 square feet. On top of that, he pointed out, there are taxes which he described as “half again as much.” That does not include renovations or salaries. “Yes the cost is huge,” Mr. VeneKlasen said. “But so far it’s more than paid for itself.”

The investment does not seem to be scaring off other dealers. Marian Goodman, who has her well-established galleries in Paris and on 57th Street in New York, is looking for space. “We’re not out to conquer the universe like some of the men,” she said. “We’re really doing this for our artists, because a lot of them don’t show in London.”

Ms. Goodman added, “Now seems to be the right time.”

"MOCA chief Bonnie Clearwater leaving for Fort Lauderdale museum" @miamiherald - The George Lindemann Journal

By Hannah Sampson

hsampson@MiamiHerald.com

Bonnie Clearwater, the art world powerhouse credited with raising the profile of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, announced Wednesday that she is leaving the institution to head the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale.

The 75,000-square-foot facility at 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., which is owned by the private Nova Southeastern University, has been searching for a new executive director since Irvin Lippman retired last year.

Though Clearwater said the Fort Lauderdale museum had approached her repeatedly over the years, she wasn’t ready to make the move until now.

“The bones are there, the support is there and what they really need is exactly what I can bring them,” she said, describing her role as “defining its purpose, its vision and taking it to beyond not even the next level but he next level beyond that.”

Clearwater said leaving MOCA, where she has worked since 1993, was a “very, very” difficult decision. But she said she is leaving the museum in good hands, with an enthusiastic board, able staff and well-regarded young new curator in place, Alex Gartenfeld.

“I feel very confident in the museum’s future,” she said. “It’s really [because of] the fact that there is such a strong and educated board and a creative, smart, resourceful staff that I feel confident that this is a good time for me to take this opportunity.”

She will start in her new position as director and chief curator on Sept. 3, but said she would still curate the Tracey Emin: Angel Without You exhibition at MOCA in December.

George L. Hanbury II, president and CEO of Nova Southeastern University in Davie, said the university has not been able to fully integrate the museum since acquiring it in 2008. He said Clearwater will be tasked with making the museum an academic asset for students at the university and at the K-12 University School.

Clearwater stood out, he said, because of her knowledge of South Florida and connections with art supporters in the region.

“We have been an underappreciated museum, I believe, for many years,” said David Horvitz, chair of the Fort Lauderdale museum’s board of governors and a friend of Clearwater. He cited the museum’s large size, its three permanent collections and its architecture as assets that often go unnoticed.

“Couple that with now being a part of Nova and their real desire to build an academic portion of this museum to integrate everything the museum does to the student life and the academic experiences of Nova,” he said.

“How do you get the right person to do this when, one, we’re underappreciated and under-known and, two, have these high expectations?” said Horvitz, whose wife, the artist Francie Bishop Good, served on MOCA’s board for many years. “It was an international search, it was a big search. And Bonnie has all these attributes that we’re looking for.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/17/3504804/moca-chief-bonnie-clearwater-leaving.html#storylink=cpy