By RACHEL WOLFF

From the masterworks by Louis Sullivan, known as the "father of skyscrapers," to the ultrathin Spire project by Spain's Santiago Calatrava that never rose above its foundation, Chicago has remained synonymous with tall buildings.

So it's the perfect place to focus not only on the buildings themselves but on how contemporary artists have looked at such feats of engineering.

Enoc Perez/MCA Chicago

Enoc Perez's vision of Chicago's 'Marina Towers,' part of a residential-commercial complex created in the 1960s.

"Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity" opens next weekend at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. The 70 or so artworks featured span the past 58 years and nearly all media. The interpretations are funny, sublime—and sometimes possess a dark and haunting edge.

"One thing that became pretty evident was how many artists really anthropomorphize the skyscraper," says Michael Darling, co-curator of the exhibition and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Some of the renderings, he adds, are plainly meant to be critical, "things that have to do with the inhumanity of the skyscraper, putting people in boxes and stacking them up and all the pathos that comes with that."

It's unsurprising that the skyscraper holds such a fascination for contemporary artists, says David Van Zanten, a professor of architecture and urbanism at Northwestern University in Chicago's Evanston suburb. Many artists trained as architects. He adds that skyscrapers are worlds unto themselves. "There are all sorts of different people inside them. And they're all too obvious a symbol of social hierarchy—the up and down makes that very clear."

Each of the exhibition's five sections tackles a theme. "Urban Critique" includes Michael Wolf's "Transparent City #6," from 2007-08, a cropped photo of Chicago's own Marina Towers that looks almost abstract—a tapestry of sorts woven from apartment windows in a style typical of this Hong Kong-based photographer. In a 2011 piece, New York artist Enoc Perez, known for a brushless technique that positions his work somewhere between paintings and prints, depicts the same towers as a pair of striking red monoliths.

A section titled "Improvisation" is anchored by a room-size piece by the French artist Kader Attia. His "Untitled (Skyline)," from 2007, includes 80 refrigerators of various sizes, blanketed with thousands of tiny mirrors.

“Skyscrapers are worlds unto themselves. And many artists trained as architects.”

Another section, titled "Personification of Architecture," includes Madelon Vriesendorp's 1975 "Flagrant Délit," which roughly translates to "Caught in the Act" and cheekily shows a skyscraper catching two fellow towers together in bed. The image graced the cover of "Delirious New York," a well-known 1978 manifesto written by her husband, the architect Rem Koolhaas.

The proverbial elephant in the gallery is the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, tackled in the exhibition section "Vulnerability of Icons."

For "Exploded City," a cluster-like installation from 2009, Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt crafted scale models of all of the buildings that were attacked by terrorists in the years leading up to and following 9/11, including the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the Oberoi-Trident Hotel in Mumbai.

Eerier yet is Robert Moskowitz's "Skyscraper," from 1998, which presciently depicts the matching behemoths as two solid-black fields of color—dark shadows set against a bleakly gray sky.

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: June 22, 2012

When I was in graduate school in the mid-’70s, trying to learn how to paint, a useful, shorthand criticism for a certain kind of creation was, “It looks like a LeRoy Neiman.” A reasonably sophisticated art student knew what that meant, and it was not a compliment. It referred to the splashy, garish, instantly recognizable style of illustration, a formulaic mix of impressionism, expressionism and realism, that Mr. Neiman used to make himself one of the most famous artists in America. To compare a student’s work to Mr. Neiman’s meant, “You are trying to distract the viewer from noticing your wooden draftsmanship and your ineptitude with matters of form and structure by larding your canvas with loud color and patchy accretions of paint.” Or, “What you are making is all frosting, no cake.”

 
LeRoy Neiman Inc.
A portrait of Joe Namath by LeRoy Neiman, whose bread and butter was sports subjects.

Mr. Neiman, who died this week at 91, was not an artist whom anyone in what I will here call the serious art world ever cared about. The world that I identified with, and aspired to be a part of, was the one whose orbit included New York Times critics, Artforum and Art in America magazines, institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art and galleries like those lining the streets of Chelsea.

From that exclusive vantage point, Mr. Neiman was the archetypal hack, his immense popularity explicable only by his ambitiously opportunistic personality and his position as Hugh Hefner’s court artist, which gave him monthly visibility to millions in the pages of Playboy. With his ever-present cigar and enormous mustache, he was a cliché of the bon vivant and a bad artist in every way.

I suppose that what Mr. Neiman’s fans found in his painting was a sense of engagement with the kind of subjects regularly proffered by network television: professional sports and its heroes, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath. He was, after all, a modern artist, as concerned as any with synergies of form and content. He made infectiously frothy paintings about exciting subjects. But there was nothing in his work to upset the couch potato’s televisual worldview.

It is one of the big lies of the serious art world that anything goes. That may be the case in regard to form, material and techniques, but when it comes to cultural politics, my art world leans decidedly leftward. In Chelsea galleries you are not going to find art made in the service of family values, patriotism or orthodox religion. Republican presidents may be satirically skewered, those who are Democrats hardly ever. You are unlikely ever to see anything condemning abortion or advocating looser gun control laws in a Whitney Biennial.

The serious art world expects, ostensibly at least, that Modern and contemporary art should be in some way critical of mainstream culture, as the avant-garde, from Manet to Pollock, is supposed to have been. Pop Art of the 1960s seemed to view the circus of American mass entertainment and consumerism with a mordantly amused eye. Warhol cranked out portraits of celebrities, but in a way that left you uncertain what he really thought of them. Mr. Neiman’s shamelessly fawning portraiture and uncritical view of big-time athletics left no room for doubt.

But his enthusiastic embrace of the wide world of sports points up by comparison a troubling insularity and crabbed vision in the serious art world. Unlike, say, movies and books that expansively meditate on topics of urgent interest to lots of people and at the same time  earn the respect of smart critics — the novels of Richard Ford and the films of Wes Anderson, for example — the contemporary art scene tends to favor either navel-gazing or promotion of certain agendas. The movement known as Institutional Critique, which obsessively parses the system by which art is circulated and consumed and has been, paradoxically, much favored by museum curators, is only the most conspicuous instance of this blinkered view of real, multidimensional life in the world at large.

Mr. Neiman started out in the late 1950s and early ’60s near the cutting edge of cultural change in his association with the swinging yet literate, unapologetically hedonistic lifestyle promoted by Playboy. His single, most memorable creation was the Playboy Femlin, his deft cartoon figure of a curvy sprite in thigh-high stockings and big hair. She was an extraordinarily economical condensation of mid-20th-century heterosexual male desire and a muse for the sexual revolution in the new era of the Pill.

But Mr. Neiman did not evolve in ensuing decades, and his public profile faded, like that of the magazine he worked for. I suspect that few artists now under 30 have any idea who he was or what he represented.

Mr. Neiman  is not the only celebrated artist to be marginalized by the cognoscenti. Walt Disney, Salvador Dalí, Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth all incurred suspicion for the taint of kitsch attached to their work. But it is hard to deny the aesthetic and moral interest of what they did, so they have their high-minded apologists.

Is the serious art world wrong to exclude and disdain Mr. Neiman and his art? I don’t think so. But the artist who could galvanize both popular imagination and mandarin intellect and in so doing expand the serious art world’s spiritual horizons and tell us something true about real life in the real world — that is something to wish for.

 

Christian Marclay/Paula Cooper Gallery
Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film montage, “The Clock,” is coming to the David Rubenstein Atrium in Lincoln Center.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: June 21, 2012

This summer the city that never sleeps will have another glimpse of an artwork that doesn’t relent much either: “The Clock,” a spellbinding, time-telling 24-hour wonder of film and sound montage by Christian Marclay, the polymath composer, collagist, video artist and pioneer turntablist.

An assemblage of time-related movie moments that had its debut in London in autumn 2010, Mr. Marclay’s “Clock” is already a popular classic. It is also a functioning timepiece; a highly compressed, peripatetic history of film and film styles; an elaborate, rhythmic musical composition; and a relentlessly enthralling meditation on time as an inescapable fact of both cinematic artifice and everyday life. Perhaps the ultimate validation of appropriation art, it thoroughly demonstrates how existing works of art — in this case films — become raw material for new ones.

“The Clock” counts off the minutes of a 24-hour day using tiny segments from thousands of films. Bits of “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Laura,” “On the Waterfront,” “The Godfather” and “A Clockwork Orange” speed past, mixed with early silent films and less familiar foreign ones.

As the action, music, sound effects and dialogue of one film bleed into those of another, each segment specifies a time, sometimes through spoken words, but mostly through shots of wristwatches, clocks, time clocks and the like. All are synced to real time. When it is 11:30 a.m. in “The Clock,” it will be 11:30 a.m. in the world outside. Exactly.

The first New York showing of “The Clock,” at the Paula Cooper Gallery in January 2011, had people lining up around the block in a relatively deserted west Chelsea in the dead of winter. Now, for 20 days starting on July 13, Lincoln Center will present the piece in a specially built theater in the David Rubenstein Atrium on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets. Admission will be first come first served in a setting — lined with movie-palace velvet curtains and outfitted with enormous couches that blur boundaries between living room and screening room — that accommodates only about 90 people at a time.

It may be a challenge to get in, even in the wee hours, which is when I want to go, but I intend to make every effort, and recommend that you do too. The piece will run Tuesday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and then settle in for three 38-hour weekend marathons beginning at 8 a.m. Fridays and running to 10 p.m. Sundays. It will be closed Mondays and ends on Aug. 1.

 

 

Published: June 20, 2012

 

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

LeRoy Neiman in his Manhattan studio in 1996.

LeRoy Neiman, whose brilliantly colored, impressionistic sketches of sporting events and the international high life made him one of the most popular artists in the United States, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 91.

Mr. Neiman’s kinetic, quickly executed paintings and drawings, many of them published in Playboy, offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches, Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas like the horse races at Deauville, France, and the Cannes Film Festival.

Quite consciously, he cast himself in the mold of French Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas, chroniclers of public life who found rich social material at racetracks, dance halls and cafes.

Mr. Neiman often painted or sketched on live television. With the camera recording his progress at the sketchpad or easel, he interpreted the drama of Olympic Games and Super Bowls for an audience of millions.

When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky faced off in Reykjavik, Iceland, to decide the world chess championship, Mr. Neiman was there, sketching. He was on hand to capture Federico Fellini directing “8 ½” and the Kirov Ballet performing in the Soviet Union.

In popularity, Mr. Neiman rivaled American favorites like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth. A prolific one-man industry, he generated hundreds of paintings, drawings, watercolors, limited-edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books yearly, earning gross annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.

Although he exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics either ignored him completely or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial — magazine illustration with pretensions. Mr. Neiman professed not to care.

“Maybe the critics are right,” he told American Artist magazine in 1995. “But what am I supposed to do about it — stop painting, change my work completely? I go back into the studio, and there I am at the easel again. I enjoy what I’m doing and feel good working. Other thoughts are just crowded out.”

His image suggested an artist well beyond the reach of criticism. A dandy and bon vivant, he cut an arresting figure with his luxuriant ear-to-ear mustache, white suits, flashy hats and Cuban cigars. “He quite intentionally invented himself as a flamboyant artist not unlike Salvador Dalí, in much the same way that I became Mr. Playboy in the late ’50s,” Hugh Hefner told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1995.

 LeRoy Runquist was born on June 8, 1921, in St. Paul. His father, a railroad worker, deserted the family when LeRoy was quite young, and the boy took the surname of his stepfather.

He showed a flair for art at an early age. While attending a local Roman Catholic school, he impressed schoolmates by drawing ink tattoos on their arms during recess.

As a teenager, he earned money doing illustrations for local grocery stores. “I’d sketch a turkey, a cow, a fish, with the prices,” he told Cigar Aficionado. “And then I had the good sense to draw the guy who owned the store. This gave me tremendous power as a kid.”

After being drafted into the Army in 1942, he served as a cook in the European theater but in his spare time painted risqué murals on the walls of kitchens and mess halls. The Army’s Special Services Division, recognizing his talent, put him to work painting stage sets for Red Cross shows when he was stationed in Germany after the war.

On leaving the military, he studied briefly at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art) before enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where, after four years of study, he taught figure drawing and fashion illustration throughout the 1950s.

When the janitor of the apartment building next door to his threw out half-empty cans of enamel house paint, Mr. Neiman found his métier. Experimenting with the new medium, he embraced a rapid style of applying paint to canvas imposed by the free-flowing quality of the house paint.

• 1
• 2

Next Page »

Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.

By Farah Nayeri - Jun 19, 2012 7:00 PM ET

Damien Hirst’s $100 million skull could be yours for just $800...

Not the real diamond-studded cranium -- a high-definition rotating image of it, certified by the artist, and available in a limited edition of 2,000 from the new digital-art venture S[edition], started in November by dealer Harry Blain.

seditionart.com via Bloomberg

A still image of the Tracey Emin neon work, "I Promise to Love You." The work is available for purchase from the U.K.-based s[edition] digital art gallery.

A still image of the Tracey Emin neon work, "I Promise to Love You." The work is available for purchase from the U.K.-based s[edition] digital art gallery. Source: seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Harry Blain and Robert Norton - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Harry Blain and Robert Norton, co-founders of s[edition], an online gallery of digital art. Founded in November 2011, the gallery offers for sale digital works by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, among others.

Harry Blain and Robert Norton, co-founders of s[edition], an online gallery of digital art. Founded in November 2011, the gallery offers for sale digital works by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, among others. 

 

 Isaac Julien - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Isaac Julien, a nominee for the U.K.'s 2001 Turner Prize, next to an image of his digital work "The Leopard." The screen-based work is available for $12 from the online art gallery s[edition].

Isaac Julien, a nominee for the U.K.'s 2001 Turner Prize, next to an image of his digital work "The Leopard." The screen-based work is available for $12 from the online art gallery s[edition].

Mat Collishaw artwork - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

A still shot of Mat Collishaw's swaying screen-based artwork "Whispering Weeds." The online work is available for purchase from the s[edition] digital art gallery.

A still shot of Mat Collishaw's swaying screen-based artwork "Whispering Weeds." The online work is available for purchase from the s[edition] digital art gallery. Source: seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Hirst and Tracey Emin are among artists producing the inaugural batch of works: high-quality digital stills or videos priced $8 to $1,600. Emin has contributed images of neon inscriptions. The works are for iPads, smartphones, PC and TV screens, and the artists get a cut of the sales.

So far, more than 100,000 Facebook users have “liked” the S[edition] page. The online gallery doesn’t give out totals for purchases or site subscribers. The most popular buy: a $20 still image of a Hirst dot painting, “Xylosidase,” of which 577 out of an edition of 10,000 have been sold.

“It’s modern, it’s hip, it’s new,” says Charley Uzzell Edwards, a London-based street-art and graffiti-art dealer. “But it doesn’t excite me quite as much as a nice old engraving, where you see the plate marks, and the actual physical character of the piece.”

For S[edition] to have more impact, says Uzzell Edwards, it should represent artists whose original medium is the digital screen. Stills of pre-existing artworks -- albeit low-resolution ones -- can be downloaded for free from the Web. Also, he says, edition sizes should be smaller to boost scarcity value.

Emerging Artists

S[edition] co-founder Robert Norton, former chief executive of Saatchi Online, says both issues are being addressed.

“Short-term, we want to increase our stable of well-known artists,” says Norton. “Longer-term, we want to make this a platform for more emerging artists to offer more work directly.”

The gallery also aims to set up an online secondary market for the works to be resold. Editions will then be smaller to boost their value as an investment, he says.

“The ability to resell the work is an important part, in some collectors’ minds, in the decision to buy,” he says.

Blain -- who co-founded the Haunch of Venison gallery in 2002, sold it to Christie’s International in 2007 and now co- runs BlainSouthern in London and Berlin and BlainDiDonna in New York -- says digital is the next step for the art market.

“There was a fan base out there that weren’t being engaged,” he says. “If you’re only ever talking to an existing marketplace, then you’re talking to a shrinking market.”

Watermark Tracer

Blain dismisses the threat of bootlegging, saying the product is “tracked and traced and watermarked.”

“If you have a first-edition book, it has a value, recognition of it being the original, the authentic, the first published volume,” he says. “There could be 10 billion editions of that book, but it doesn’t erode the value of the first edition.”

Among the moving-image works available on the site, Bill Viola has sequences from two of his videos, priced $200 each. Mat Collishaw’s $48 “Whispering Weeds” shows tall weeds swaying against a gray sky. Michael Craig-Martin’s $80 “Surfacing” has a square frame that moves over the line drawing underneath and colors it.

S[edition] artist Isaac Julien -- a Turner Prize nominee represented in the collections of Tate and The Museum of Modern Art -- sees the gallery as a vehicle for “democratization” of contemporary art. He’d like to see it market art originally made for the screen (as opposed to an image of a pre-existing work).

Julien, who teaches media art at the ZKM Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, also hopes prices will become “a bit more expensive, to give value to that field, which is at the moment locked out of the commercial art world.”

Muse highlights include Richard Vines on London restaurants, Scott Reyburn on the art market, James Pressley on business books and Ryan Sutton on New York restaurants.

To contact the writer on the story: Farah Nayeri in London at Farahn@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

via bloomberg.com

Walter Maibaum/The Degas Sculpture Project
Some of the 74 plasters attributed to Edgar Degas: fearing lawsuits, scholars are afraid to declare them genuine or not.

John Elderfield, former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, remembers the days when scholars spoke freely about whether a particular work was genuine.

They were connoisseurs, this was their field of expertise, and a curator like Kirk Varnedoe, Mr. Elderfield’s predecessor at the Modern, would think nothing of offering his view of a drawing attributed to Rodin, his specialty.

“He was qualified to do it and felt he had a moral obligation to do it,” Mr. Elderfield said.

But when the owner of a painting attributed to Henri Matisse recently asked Mr. Elderfield for his opinion, he demurred. He worried he could be sued if he said the painting was not a real Matisse.

Librado Romero/The New York Times
John Elderfield, a former curator at the Modern.

Mr. Elderfield is hardly alone in feeling that art’s celebrated freedom of expression no longer extends to expert opinions on authenticity. As spectacular sums flow through the art market and an expert verdict can make or destroy a fortune, several high-profile legal cases have pushed scholars to censor themselves for fear of becoming entangled in lawsuits.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and the Noguchi Museum have all stopped authenticating works to avoid litigation. In January the Courtauld Institute of Art in London cited “the possibility of legal action” when it canceled a forum discussing a controversial set of some 600 drawings attributed to Francis Bacon. And the leading experts on Degas have avoided publicly saying whether 74 plasters attributed to him are a stupendous new find or an elaborate hoax.

The anxiety has even touched the supreme arbiter of the genuine and fake: the catalogue raisonné, the definitive, scholarly compendium of an artist’s work. Inclusion has been called the difference between “great wealth and the gutter,” and auction houses sometimes refuse to handle unlisted works. As a result catalogue raisonné authors have been the targets of lawsuits, not to mention bribes and even death threats.

“Legal cage rattling was always part of the process,” said Nancy Mowll Mathews, president of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association. But the staggering rise in art prices has transformed the cost-benefit analysis of suing at the same time that fraud has become more profitable, she said.

While some argue the fear is overblown, others warn the growing reluctance to speak publicly about authenticity could keep forgeries and misattributed works in circulation while permitting newly discovered works to go unrecognized.

The perceived crisis has prompted a pointed ethical debate: Do you speak out if you spot a suspicious work or keep quiet as lawyers recommend?

Art experts have been getting sued over their opinions since at least the days of Joseph Duveen, the flamboyant dealer who found himself in court in the 1920s after declaring “La Belle Ferronnière,” a supposed Leonardo painting for sale, to be a fake. Duveen’s judgment caused the Kansas City Art Institute to withdraw its offer of $250,000, and in the end Duveen settled by agreeing to pay the owner $60,000. (The painting is now considered to be by a follower of Leonardo.)

As prices have risen, so have risks. In 2005, after watching other organizations fend off lawsuits, the Lichtenstein foundation bought $5 million worth of liability insurance and made its authentication process more rigorous and transparent, its executive director, Jack Cowart, said. Then in 2011 the Warhol foundation revealed it had spent $7 million defending itself against a lawsuit involving a silk-screen it had rejected for the catalogue raisonné. Mr. Cowart called his insurance company to find out if the Lichtenstein foundation would be protected if faced with a similar suit. The agent said it was impossible to predict. “That was a very sobering moment,” Mr. Cowart said.

The board had always felt an obligation to guard Lichtenstein’s legacy in this way, he explained. But now, figuring it was only a matter of time before the law of averages would throw a lawsuit their way, board members decided the benefits of authenticating did not outweigh the risks.

“Why should we go stand in front of a speeding car?” Mr. Cowart said. “We decided it’s not the role of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to deal with the art market’s authenticity issues.”

That view disturbs Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, which is publishing Robert Motherwell’s catalogue raisonné and was sued last year for changing its opinion about a painting’s authenticity. “If experts stop speaking up, you’re going to get more fakes surfacing,” he said.

Mr. Cowart counters that the authentication committee’s pronouncements were not driving fakes out of the market. The majority of works inspected during the panel’s six years, he said, were third-rate fakes that would reappear as soon as the owners sold them to other unsuspecting dupes.

So what would the Lichtenstein foundation do if it became aware that a major forgery was being auctioned for millions of dollars?

“We don’t know what we would say if we were asked formally or informally,” Mr. Cowart said. “We don’t deal in hypotheticals.”

Sharon Flescher, president of the International Foundation for Art Research, said she doubts the number of lawsuits challenging expert opinions has gone up. Nonetheless she conceded that the perception is having “a chilling effect.” Even though few plaintiffs win, experts are deterred by the time and legal expense. That’s why the College Art Association recently began offering affordable liability insurance to its members who authenticate art, she noted.

Peter R. Stern, an art lawyer in New York, tells clients never to volunteer an opinion unless formally asked by the owners, and even then to make sure the owners sign a waiver promising not to sue. If they don’t ask, don’t tell. “Art scholarship is fighting a losing battle against commerce,” he said.

Fears of being sued may even lead to changes in the nature of catalogues raisonnés, Ms. Flescher added. She pointed to recent decisions by the Calder and Lichtenstein foundations and the Noguchi Museum to move their cataloging efforts online and label them as “works in progress.”

“What we are presenting is a combination of completed research and research pending,” said Shaina D. Larrivee, project manager of the Isamu Noguchi catalogue raisonné. “We are very clear that ‘research pending’ does not guarantee inclusion in the final catalogue raisonné, and that we have the ability to remove artworks if new information comes to light.”

Alexander Rower, Alexander Calder’s grandson and the chairman of the Calder Foundation, said he decided to forgo a catalogue raisonné in favor of an online guide to Calder’s development and history. “You determine if your work is fake or not with the data we present,” he said.

The Web site, scheduled to begin operation this summer, will feature 4,000 to 6,000 works, roughly one-quarter of Calder’s total output. Although the foundation does not authenticate, Mr. Rower said, it will register and examine a supposed Calder at an owner’s request and release any information it has about the piece. The foundation does, however, keep a watchful eye on the market. Mr. Rower traveled to the Basel art fair in Switzerland last week to photograph every Calder for further research, he said.

And if he were to find a forgery? “You can’t just go out there in the world and say, ‘That’s fake,’ “ Mr. Rower said. “But it is a fair thing for me to say to an art dealer, ‘Have your presented this work to the Calder Foundation?’ And if he says no, I say, ‘You really should.’ “

As for scholars who are dragged into court, they do occasionally come out ahead. The art expert Steve Seltzer was sued after declaring that a watercolor of cowboys was not painted by the revered Western artist Charles M. Russell but by his own grandfather the artist O. C. Seltzer. After the suit was thrown out, Mr. Seltzer turned around and countersued the painting’s owner, Steve Morton, and his lawyers. In 2007 the Montana Supreme Court awarded Mr. Seltzer $11 million in damages. As the judges put it, using a lawsuit to coerce an expert to give a particular opinion is “legal thuggery.”

 

The park and the Bass Museum.

Wynwood gets most of the attention these days as the art hub of Miami. And rightly so, as the amount of galleries and studio spaces far exceeds any other place not only here, but in the Southeast and likely any place south of New York. The newly formed ArtPlace, a national collaboration of foundations, banks and government agencies that has begun giving significant grants to help develop art districts, has just awarded the Wynwood Arts District a business development grant of $140,000 to upgrade the neighborhood, and awarded a whopping $385,000 to the The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse, the Miami Light Project’s new home in Wynwood.

But a little overlooked in this all is the art neighborhood surrounding the Bass Museum, a Knight Arts grantee, on Miami Beach. It too just got an ArtPlace grant in the not-small sum of $225,000. While Wynwood is the hip and gritty placeholder for contemporary art, the area around the Bass is in all honestly a better place to develop a pedestrian and art friendly community.

With the completion of the park that rolls out from the front doors of the museum and runs over to the actual sand beach, this is simply a nice, comfortable place to walk and take in art. The temporary sculpture park in this area that took place during last December’s Art Basel was a taste of things to come. With this recent grant, the Bass will instigate the ”TC: Temporary Contemporary” public art projects program, which will bring well-known contemporary artists to the Beach to create site-specific installations in the 40-block area being called “City Center/Arts District.” These will include sculpture, sound installations, video and other interactive works that will try to engage the passersby.

And unlike Wynwood at present, it’s likely that many people will indeed experience the art, as there is a constant stream of pedestrians, local and visiting, who actually walk around this area, a beach-front district that is unique in the country.

Even before the outdoor art takes its place, you can get a good feel for the potential that ArtPlace has recognized. Walk to the museum from the Miami City Ballet’s home, or from the fabulous Frank Gehry-designed New World Symphony building, or even from the Art Center/South Florida on Lincoln Road — really, you’ll enjoy it. And then make sure you visit the wonderful Charles Ledray exhibit currently on display at the Bass, which runs through August 12. His works  — ceramics, knitted objects and the like  — are often described as “exquisite” and especially, “exquisitely crafted.” In his case, it’s not an exaggeration.

Link: A well-deserved nod to the Bass

The incident is the latest in a series of vandalizations of Britto work around Miami.

As expected by many, someone graffiti "bombed" controversial Miami-based artist Romero Britto's new Wynwood space over the weekend.

By Yuval Ofir (Yo Miami)

Public art by Romero Britto, the artist most identified with Miami around the world, is a frequent and easy target for graffiti bombers. His "Beach Ball" in Miami Shores, a sculpture sporting Britto's trademark bright colors and pop-art patterns, got the treatment last June when some blunt vandal scrawled the words "Not Art" across it with red spray paint. Then, in July of 2011, someone -- maybe the same someone -- tagged the same sculpture with the words "Meaningless Bliss" and "error".

The latest: This past Saturday, the day of Second Saturdays Art Walk, someone who apparently goes by the name "C Dog" tagged Britto's new Wynwood space, at 146 N.W. 25th Street, in huge white letters.

Update: Britto has responded by painting over C Dog's scrawl with a burst of color, sunny imagery, and a bit of advice: "Make Art Not War".

 

 

Stefan Altenburger, Rudolf Stingel/Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

“Untitled (Paula)” a photo-realist painting from 2012 by Rudolf Stingel. The 11-by-15-foot work is being shown at Art Basel.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: June 14, 2012

BASEL, Switzerland — The day before the invitation-only opening of Art Basel, scores of collectors and dealers gathered in the cavernous building that houses Art Unlimited, the annual show of super-size artworks. Word had spread quickly about an extraordinary photo-realist painting by the Italian-born artist Rudolf Stingel. Based on a 1980s photograph of the New York dealer Paula Cooper looking glamorous with sultry eyes and a cigarette in one hand, the large canvas (it measures 11 by 15 feet) was hung dramatically in a space by itself. Its price was around $3 million, and it was bought by François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and owner of Christie’s, before the fair even opened.“Stingel created the painting just for Art Unlimited,” said Steven P. Henry, director of the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea. “He’s been working on it for months.”

The economic crisis may have left the average American family with a shrinking bank account — and most Europeans in an even more precarious financial position — but in the tiny Never-Never Land that is the international art world, there is a conspicuous display of disposable income.

Art Basel, which opened on Wednesday and runs through Sunday, is as grand as ever, with 300 galleries from 36 countries exhibiting. And it still attracts the stars of contemporary art, including the collectors Eli Broad, the Los Angeles financier; Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire; Jerry I. Speyer, the real estate developer and chairman of the Museum of Modern Art; and Laurence Graff, the London jeweler. Museum directors are here too, including Nicholas Serota, from the Tate in London; Richard Armstrong, who runs the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum in New York; and Alain Seban, president of the Pompidou Center in Paris.

There are several noticeable changes at this year’s fair. Rather than one opening day for art world V.I.P.’s, there were two. The reason, the organizers said, was to make the fair less crowded and more pleasant for serious buyers. But many dealers, who declined to be named for fear of being thrown out of the fair next year, said that with more time to buy, the exciting, now-or-never rush of having to make a quick decision had evaporated. Some dealers were also unhappy about having to give their client lists to the fair organizers to issue the V.I.P. invitations, rather than having the galleries themselves do it.

The art on view at Art Unlimited is also different. Rather than a hodgepodge of oversize objects, it is a more carefully conceived exhibition, put together for the first time by Gianni Jetzer, director of the Swiss Institute/Contemporary Art in New York. In addition to Ms. Cooper’s portrait, another crowd pleaser was “Untitled (Scatter Piece),” from 1968-69, by the American artist Robert Morris. The installation consists of 200 pieces of industrial materials seemingly randomly placed in a space, first shown when it was made, at the Castelli Gallery in New York. (This version comes from Barbara Castelli, the widow of the dealer Leo Castelli, who is showing it in collaboration with Sprüth Magers, a gallery with spaces in Berlin and London.) Like most everything here, it is for sale; the price is $1.45 million.

“Untitled (Scatter Piece)” was among many works of older art. Conservative, classic modern paintings and sculptures were everywhere.

“Dealers are aware that collectors want to put their money in things that will endure,” said Tobias Meyer, chairman of contemporary art at Sotheby’s worldwide. “And the prices of these traditional works are now at levels that were once reserved only for masters like Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi.”

At the main fair, in a chapel-like installation, watched over by a security guard, at Marlborough Fine Art, was Rothko’s “Untitled, 1954,” a yellow-and-pink abstract canvas. The painting was auctioned at Christie’s in New York in 2007. A Swiss collector bought it for $26.9 million and is now hoping to get $78 million. The markup — and its presence here — was inspired by the nearly $87 million record that someone (some say it was the businessman Leonard Blavatnik) paid at Christie’s last month for “Orange, Red, Yellow,” a dreamy 1961 Rothko.

“That auction was the incentive,” said Andrew Renton, director of Marlborough Contemporary in London. “Rothko is finally being recognized as one of the great masters of the 20th century, and this is the moment.”

Throughout the fair there are many works by artists who brought top prices at last month’s big New York auctions. Gerhard Richter is one. At the Pace Gallery, Mr. Richter’s “A. B. Courbet,” an abstract canvas from 1986, sold to an unidentified American collector on Wednesday, gallery officials reported. The asking price was $25 million.

The fair is also filled with works by artists who have recently had a big retrospective — John Chamberlain and Cindy Sherman — or are about to, like Wade Guyton, whose show at the Whitney Museum of American Art opens in October.

There have been a few less predictable touches. Almine Rech, a Paris dealer, asked Nicolas Trembley, a curator and art critic, to organize her booth as though it were a small museum or gallery exhibition, around the notion of the artist’s process and appropriation. Called “Telephone Paintings,” the installation was inspired by László Moholy-Nagy’s “Konstruction in Emaille,” in which he challenged the notion of man-made art by asking an enamel plaque factory to commission three pieces composed of abstract lines in primary colors.

“The space feels like a salon for selling art,” Ms. Rech said. White wallpaper decorated with small gold Aladdin’s lamps designed by the Swiss artist John M. Armleder covers her booth, and the selection of art on view is unusual and varied. There is a “Joke” painting by Richard Prince, 1963 race riot prints by Andy Warhol and a collage by Kurt Schwitters, along with examples by younger artists like Mr. Guyton, Erik Lindman, Tom Burr, Alex Israel and Jonathan Binet. By the end of Tuesday, Ms. Rech said, she had sold a number of the smaller works by artists like Mr. Israel and Mr. Lindman.

Some seasoned collectors and art advisers were grumbling that many works had gone before they even walked through the fair doors. “With dealers sending clients JPEGs ahead of time the game has changed,” said Philippe Ségalot, a New York dealer whose antics in years past, like hiring of a Hollywood makeup artist to disguise him so he could sneak into the fair before everyone and snap up the best works, have become Art Basel legend.

So why do so many important collectors still bother to come all the way to Basel? “They’re afraid of missing something,” Mr. Ségalot replied.

 

 

June 13, 2012

On the eve of this summer’s annual Art Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland, I’ve noted that some art writers have eagerly predicted the demise of the so-called “art bubble”; a few of them are persuasive enough to instill real fear and a loss of confidence. It almost makes you wonder if their doomsday predictions could actually come true. Well, fear not, they won’t.

 There are two main reasons for the popularity and persistence of the art bubble apocalypse myth. First, it makes good copy: gloomy predictions always draw an audience. Second, the thought that collectors, speculators, dealers and advisors are reaping the financial gains from these “insane“ prices seems awfully unfair to many of those in the art world who don’t. But it’s not the prices that are wrong, it’s the logic that is flawed: art and the art market are two altogether different things. The goal of the art market is to sell artworks and achieve the highest possible price; there’s no morality in it. Sometimes these prices may sound extreme, vulgar, indulgent or decadent, but many things are this way, and you don’t, for instance, read many articles lamenting the obscene sizes and prices of today’s mega-yachts—or cruise ships, for that matter.

Let’s put the art market in perspective. Think about the value of Google, which boasts a $189 billion market cap, or Facebook, with a market cap of $58 billion, down from an IPO price of about $100 billion only a few weeks ago. The average trading volume of Google in a single day is $2.4 billion dollars. The approximate total sales in the entire global contemporary art market in a year is around $6 billion, or what would likely be only two or three days’ worth of trading in Google stock. If these companies’ young billionaire founders, Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg, bought up all the contemporary art sold in an entire year, they wouldn’t even feel the pinch.

Two weeks ago, in an article in The New York Times Magazine that asked if we are in an art bubble, business writer Adam Davidson admitted to understanding nothing about the art market, but still managed to come to a sound conclusion: the art market “is a proxy for the fate of the superrich themselves.” His view is that as long as the rich get richer, art prices will hold steady or increase. My bet is that he’s right. But he ends his article by confusing art and the art market: “It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall.” But one has nothing to do with the other; why should the “art world overall” bear any relation whatsoever to the $120 million paid at Sotheby’s last month for Edvard Munch’s The Scream?

Mr. Davidson is hardly the first journalist to brood on a bubble in recent years. U.K.-based writer Ben Lewis’s documentary The Great Contemporary Art Bubble, which predicted an art market crash, came out in 2009—good timing. But, though the market did dip, sadly for Mr. Lewis it then rebounded and has now risen, in some cases, to new heights. The esteemed Souren Melikian also recently intimated he felt the bubble when he said: “Right now, the art market situation offers uncomfortable similarities with the state of affairs in the spring of 1990,” so bubble predictions today aren’t the exception, they are the norm.The latest entry in the department of doom and gloom comes from Artnet.com’s endearing Charlie Finch, who last week fearlessly gave us his take on this precarious situation in a piece titled “Will the Art Market Crash?” He posited that the perfect storm of bad worldwide economic news means that the market cannot “continue its contrarian record sales indefinitely.” He then convincingly played the economist, speculating that deflation will make the rich horde cash and stop spending on art, and then midrange collectors “will panic … as collectors argue that the $100 million Munch might just as well be worth $10 million in an environment of falling prices.” Mr. Finch took the full cold plunge when he spouted, “I predict that, in six months, art prices will be down, across the board, by 50 percent, falling faster with no takers.”

Extreme views make for exciting reading. Their conclusions may differ, but Messrs. Davidson, Lewis, Melikian and Finch all share the same premise: art values are in a precarious “bubble.” Having been a zealous contemporary art collector for some 20 years, and having recently opened my own gallery, I do not share their view. No one can predict the future, but let me fill in some of the blanks for my soothsaying, doomsday-predicting friends.

All is not well in the art market and hasn’t been since late 2008. While a few trophy pieces make record prices at auction each season, like colorful Basquiats (if they are from 1982), and colorful Richter abstractions, underneath this spectacle things move with difficulty and sometimes grind to a halt. Today’s collectors are fickle, they find comfort in following the prevailing trends, and so what’s hot now can very easily be cold tomorrow. All that glitters is not gold.

Despite the highflying golden outliers, there is no bubble and there hasn’t been one since the one that burst in the 1990s. My prediction is that there will never be one again. I don’t see art market history repeating itself, and I don’t fear a tulip-style crash. Fine art was undervalued for a long time, and for a number of reasons. Before the Internet, the glitzy retail auctions and the now-ubiquitous art fairs, collecting tastes were often quite regional. Aside from a few global names, Europeans were primarily interested in collecting European artists, and Americans bought Americans. Even inside the U.S., the Los Angeles art market was separate from the one in New York. West Coast museums know it too; they recently staged the massive “Pacific Standard Time” series of exhibitions to showcase the generation of excellent artists that never quite made it out of L.A. Well, it still didn’t really work.

Today the picture is very different: L.A. dealers who operate from Berlin sell hot artists to collectors in New York, while new and hungry Filipino or Chinese collectors regularly appear at art fairs in Basel or Paris. I’m not suggesting that there are all that many of them; I am well aware that there are very few people with the money and the conviction to purchase a historic Munch for $120 million or a Cézanne for $250 million, but there are a few, and it’s likely that with time there will be more. Consider that this phenomenon is not restricted to art alone; just this week a 1962 Ferrari GTO, one of only 39 ever built, sold privately for $35 million, a world record for a car. The collectable car market also crashed in the ’90s but today, for the top trophy cars like GTOs, Testarossas or Spyder Californias, it is going up higher and higher and looks like it will never turn back. However, if you are thinking that a ’50s Porsche Spyder or a ’60s Aston Martin DB4GT will ever make these numbers, you are likely to be very disappointed. The big prices exist only for the rarest of Ferraris, though a prewar Bugatti or Alfa-Romeo may perhaps squeeze into these megabuck garages once in a while.

Art isn’t the only asset class to have often been repriced. The value of some vintage French Bordeaux wines has tripled over the past few years (though beware this is not the rule with all wine). When the Chinese coveted Château Lafite, it jumped by a factor of two or three times the value of a comparable Château Latour. The Chinese were the big buyers (as recently as last year), so Lafite ruled the wine market, though many experts might argue it tastes no better than a fine Latour or Mouton Rothschild. Now the Chinese buyers have backed off, so Lafite prices are easing off: Château Lafite may have been in a bubble, but the wine market overall was not and is not.

There is, theoretically, a limited supply of “trophy”-grade historic art, though the definition of what is or is not “historic” is a moving target and subject to constant change and review. Those outstanding record blockbuster sales notwithstanding, a global, informed and well-travelled audience has repriced fine art as an asset class. Collectors as a rule are willing to pay more for emerging, young, midcareer as well as blue-chip art, and this phenomenon will not reverse itself—though it might slow down, and I believe it already has.

Nothing is forever, of this we can be sure, but that doesn’t mean we will ever go back to the way it used to be. Those who are enthusiastically waiting to hear a big “pop!” in the market bubble will yet again be disappointed. From now on all we are likely to hear is a tight snap or a faint crackle.