The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Ai Weiwei's Spring: Three Shows on Two Continents" @wsj by Mary M. Lane

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Ai Weiwei is seeing his work mounted in museums in Berlin and New York and at a gallery in London. Ai Weiwei Studio/Brooklyn Museum

When "Evidence," Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's biggest exhibition to date opened in Berlin last week, one person was notably missing from the guest list: the artist himself.

Barred from traveling abroad since his release from detention in 2011, Mr. Ai couldn't be in Germany—or in New York. There, his first museum show in the city opens at the Brooklyn Museum April 18 and runs through Aug. 10.

But Mr. Ai says that in some ways Germany in particular surrounds his home in Beijing every day. "When you walk in Beijing now you almost think you're in a German industrial city, because you see all these Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs everywhere," Mr. Ai, who owns a Volkswagen VOW3.XE -1.05% Volkswagen AG Non-Vtg Pfd. Germany: Xetra ^€192.40 -2.05 -1.05% April 14, 2014 5:35 pm Volume : 976,645 P/E Ratio 10.31 Market Cap€89.21 Billion Dividend Yield 2.11% Rev. per Employee €343,937 19619419219010a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 04/14/14 Peugeot Sets Out Recovery Plan... 04/13/14 Can New Hyundai Sonata Match P... 04/13/14 GM's Opel Could Break Even Ahe... More quote details and news » VOW3.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position and frequents a bar popular with German engineers, said in a Skype interview from Beijing last week.

Chinese hunger for German products triggered one piece in Berlin: eight vases from the Han Dynasty (202 B.C.—220 A.D.) dipped into the most popular Mercedes-Benz DAI.XE +0.11% Daimler AG Germany: Xetra ^€66.22 +0.07 +0.11% April 14, 2014 5:35 pm Volume : 3.74M P/E Ratio 10.35 Market Cap€70.77 Billion Dividend Yield 3.40% Rev. per Employee €428,427 6766656410a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 04/13/14 GM's Opel Could Break Even Ahe... 04/11/14 China Car Demand Slows as Euro... 04/10/14 Ai Weiwei's Spring: Three Show... More quote details and news » DAI.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position and BMW car paints in China. The altered antiques speak of consumerism, but also of the economic freedoms Chinese citizens enjoy today, Mr. Ai said.

The artist and his studio designed the new exhibitions, and a May show with art for sale at London's Lisson Gallery, to raise Mr. Ai's profile even higher than it is—while China still refuses to issue him a passport. It's a clear push for large exposure, simultaneously in three cities on two continents, at a prime season for art sales and tourism.

Mr. Ai says he is addressing two audiences: one foreign, one domestic. The artist hopes that Chinese tourists, whose presence has sharply risen in the West, will be exposed to his art and issues. "Because my work is banned from being shown inside China, the only way they can become aware of it is from the outside," he said.

The Brooklyn show "According to What?" originated in 2009 at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, with later stops in Washington, Toronto and Miami, but Brooklyn's version includes several major new pieces. Social injustice and sexual discrimination are key themes in the artworks. Among five videos screening in Mandarin with subtitles, the new "Stay Home" documents the anguish of a woman who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. Many Chinese still think of those with HIV/AIDS as promiscuous pariahs, to which Mr. Ai is trying to draw attention, says Sharon Matt Atkins, curator of the Brooklyn show.

Another added artwork in the roughly 13,000-square-foot Brooklyn show involves sex worker-activist Ye Haiyan, a close friend of Mr. Ai's. Ms. Ye has for seven years pushed to widen health-care access for Chinese prostitutes and petition the government to legalize prostitution and destigmatize rape and AIDS. Ms. Atkins said that last summer Ms. Ye fled to a hotel after being kicked out of her apartment in the wake of the publicity over her sex activism.

At the Brooklyn show, Mr. Ai created wallpaper that covers a room and portrays Ms. Ye's belongings including a phone, a teapot and a Guy Fawkes mask. Jumbled in front of the wallpaper are many of Ms. Ye's actual possessions—including her fridge, rolling suitcases and her Tiffany-blue moped.

Several subjects show up both in Brooklyn and the much larger German show, at the Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition hall. In a debut, Berlin features a replica of the detention room where Chinese authorities held Mr. Ai in 2011 for 81 days. Visitors can sit on his bed, at the desk or touch the toilet. "I was in jail, I was beaten, I was forbidden to go on the Internet—all because of thoughts that were inside my mind," said Mr. Ai in the video interview.

In the same vein, Brooklyn is showing "S.A.C.R.E.D.," a sextet of less-than-life-size dioramas featuring scenes from Mr. Ai's life in detention. "S.A.C.R.E.D." has only been seen during last year's Venice Biennale.

The artist added that he has consistently received "strong support" from Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel lobbied for his release from detention and he keeps a life-size cardboard cutout of her in his studio. Though some Americans have openly supported him, he says he still believes, as he stated in 2009, that America's approach to human rights abroad is becoming insular: "If it is not necessary, most people don't try to share the pain and struggle of others. That is just how society is."

Politics doesn't occupy all the space at the new shows. The artist's love of Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art whose work Mr. Ai discovered while living in Brooklyn in the 1980s, is present in the New York exhibition through a wire bent in the shape of Duchamp's face.

The artist's work often revolves around Mandarin puns that can get lost on Westerners. One such work displayed in both shows (and part of the U.S. tour from the start) is "He Xie," a pile of 3,200 hand-painted porcelain crabs. The Mandarin word means both "river crabs" and "harmonious society," but also designates the "Gang of Four," disgraced leaders who were tried in 1981 for treason.

In 2011, authorities bulldozed a studio that they had invited him to build in Shanghai in 2008. Mr. Ai first tried protesting. When that failed, he planned a feast of river crabs at the site and went on to create the porcelain crustaceans.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Breaking From Donor Dependence" @nytimes by ROBIN POGREBIN

ONE doesn’t typically think of drawing visitors to a cultural institution with a sheepshearing festival. But that is part of the strategy of Gore Place, a historic house in Waltham, Mass., that also has a working farm.

The farm has always been a part of Gore Place, the 1806 house and estate of Gov. Christopher Gore that is considered among the most significant Federal Period mansions in New England. Recently the institution has stepped up its for-profit events to include snowshoeing (rentals available at $8 for adults and $5 for children), farm dinners ($80 a person) and an evening “Tick-Tock a Tour” of the mansion’s clock collection ($15).

Such efforts are part of a growing consciousness among cultural institutions that they can no longer depend on donations and must develop revenue-generating activities beyond the cafe and bookstore.

“Museums are thinking of new ways to achieve their mission that earn money,” said Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, an initiative of the American Alliance of Museums.

“How do you break this cycle of charitable poverty?” Ms. Merritt continued. “How do you make a program self-sustainable, where you’re drawing a connection between people who value it and those willing to pay for it?”

Such projects come with some growing pains, museum experts say, particularly given the historical bias against mixing a cultural mission with business considerations. But at a time when contributions from foundations, corporations and individuals are shrinking — along with government support — such adjustments increasingly seem like a matter of economic survival.

“It requires a mind shift,” Ms. Merritt said. “To stop thinking automatically in terms of underwriting and stop thinking of earning money as somehow being a bad thing and start with the premise that if you’re delivering a program that’s mission-related maybe there’s a way of finding a capitalist way of supporting it.”

There are already such entrepreneurial ventures. This summer, the New Museum plans to open NEW INC, an incubator for art, technology and design in its adjacent building at 231 Bowery in Manhattan. Members selected through a competitive application process (deadline April 1) are to form an interdisciplinary community intended to foster collaboration and innovation. Those chosen will pay a monthly membership fee in exchange for work space, professional development, support services and a series of programs. The fee will go toward the incubator’s operations.

The Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., recently established “The Edge at The Dalí,” a creativity and innovation services program for businesses and nonprofit organizations. The museum developed its curriculum based on Dalí’s art and the psychology and neurology of innovative thinking.

Over the last decade, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has developed a commercial licensing business by marketing its digital image archive to the home furnishing, fashion and hospitality industries. Designers are drawing from the museum’s textile collection for products like tableware, drapes and pillows. “The purpose is to get the artwork and the imagery out there and to see it used in multiple functions,” said Debra LaKind, the museum’s director of business development and strategic partnerships. “It’s also a way of generating revenue.” The Bronx Museum of the Arts now hosts dinners featuring prominent chefs ($250 to $300 a person), runs a wine club that generates as much as $15,000 a year and recently started selling prints of works by some of its featured artists.

The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington charges a licensing fee to collaborators in its SparkLab National Network. SparkLab offers activities at the museum that are focused on invention, such as Science Stations, which explore concepts like radioactivity, and an Under 5 Zone where children can build with blocks or solve puzzles. The proceeds go into the program.

In exchange, the partners receive use of the Smithsonian, SparkLab and Lemelson Center names and logos; a set of start-up activities; two years’ worth of materials, and assistance and consultation services. The program ultimately aims to help its collaborators in the network — like the Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum in Reno, Nev. — create activities and programs that are specific to their institutions and geographic areas.

“The idea is to expand it out of the museum internationally to places that seem interested,” said Arthur Molella, director of the Lemelson Center. “They can take our basic material and add a lot of their own content relevant to the idea.”

Organizations like Gore Place feel as if they have no choice but to diversify. “Historic houses have to find ways to make themselves unique in order to survive,” said Susan Robertson, the executive director. “They have to be cultural resources, they have to be community resources, they have to be able to pay their bills, they have to attract visitors — they have to get a buzz going.”

“It’s an exciting challenge,” she added. “Whether we’ll succeed remains to be seen.”

Indeed, it is still unclear whether these experiments ultimately will make nonprofit institutions more independent of donor largess. Gore Place, for example, is in the second year of a three-year plan to pursue new sources of revenue — including farm stands.

“Like any new venture, there are all of the unknowns,” Ms. Robertson said. “You don’t know if the geese are going to come in and strip your pea fields in half an hour or you don’t know that you’re going to have an influx of rabbits and they’re going to eat up all your squash.”   

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "In Boston, Altering the Artist-in-Residence Concept" @nytimes by By HILARIE M. SHEETS

“I’ve never done a thing where I sort of seep into the fabric of the museum itself and the neighborhood around it, almost like an energy consultant coming in,” said Mr. Ritchie, 50. “But instead of talking about heat, it’s ideas.” The artist is known for his densely layered, expansive paintings and installations that diagram systems of religion, science, history and cosmologies, sometimes all at the same time.

“Matthew heard from us that we’re interested in activating more spaces in the museum and activating the museum in more spaces in the city,” said Jill Medvedow, director of the 78-year-old institute, who oversaw its relocation to the edge of Boston harbor in 2006 in a luminous glass building designed by the architectural firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro. “He took that and completely embraced it and has incorporated those goals of ours into these new works of his, which are all one big body of work.”

Leading the project is Jenelle Porter, senior curator at the contemporary art institute. She had seen Mr. Ritchie’s multimedia music production “The Long Count,” conceived with Bryce Dessner of the National, the indie rock band, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009. Having worked with him before, she knew Mr. Ritchie’s penchant for collaborating across disciplines with musicians, scientists, architects and judges. “I thought it would be great to bring someone in who has the skill set to work with a lot of different people in the museum,” Ms. Porter said, “but whose work also requires and desires that kind of collaboration.”

She initially proposed that Mr. Ritchie stage a version of “The Long Count” in the museum’s theater; paint a mural on the lobby’s Art Wall, and produce a project with the Teen Arts Council. “Visual arts, performing arts and education are the most important programming elements for the I.C.A.,” said Ms. Porter.

From there, Mr. Ritchie’s residency evolved to include an additional mural in Dewey Square, a park near the institute, and an additional performance with Mr. Dessner, all unfolding through the year. “I’m imagining moving people through time and having all these disparate moments understood as orbiting planets in a solar system,” said Mr. Ritchie, who has also donated a painting, “The Salt Pit,” on view now in the museum’s collection galleries.

Mr. Ritchie has just completed the lobby mural; it covers a 50-foot wall and extends across an adjacent stretch of windows. While the piece is abstract, it builds on visual themes in the Dewey Square mural, completed in September.

“On one level, this is the story of the beginning of time,” says Mr. Ritchie. A large atom form, or big bang, is exploding on the top right, with smaller atoms falling into a kind of primordial seascape. From the center arises a vessel-like form with dense scaffolding, suggesting the building of a complex society, which then begins to break down and return to a state of nature on the left.

Within this epic history, the artist suggests ideas of Boston and the institute as well. The shape of the vessel alludes to the ship where John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, quoted the Sermon on the Mount to migrants from England in 1630 as he envisioned the future “city upon a hill.”

“The I.C.A. is also the model of the shining city on a hill,” said Mr. Ritchie, “clearly designed as a lantern that glows at night and was embedded with ideas of the future at that moment it was built.” Mr. Ritchie said he thought of museums as ocean liners moving through history and preserving things. He is interested in how the opening of the art institute’s building spurred rapid redevelopment of the once-dilapidated waterfront, with hotels, office buildings and condominiums going up all around it (the mural on the institute windows, in fact, obscures a construction site directly outside).

On March 29, the next episode of Mr. Ritchie’s complex vision comes to life in a performance that will begin in the museum lobby and conclude at a Roman Catholic chapel nearby, Our Lady of Good Voyage. Musicians on clarinet and guitar, including Mr. Dessner, will improvise a composition in front of the mural. When they proceed to the chapel, originally for seamen, the performance will develop into a choral work, with the vocalist singing Mr. Dessner’s composition “To the Sea,” accompanied by organ choir and imagery by Mr. Ritchie projected behind the altar.

It is meant to connect the innovative technological present, embodied by the museum and the contemporary art within it, to Boston’s maritime and religious roots, as well as the shift in art to a largely aesthetic experience from its more spiritual role in the past. The artist noted that the chapel itself would soon be relocated from its prime location in the middle of the redevelopment district.

Since the beginning of the residency last fall, Mr. Ritchie has met regularly with members of the Teen Arts Council at the museum and prompted them to think like him. “He’s directed us to take photographs of things in our day-to-day lives that might normally go unnoticed and connect them in this big photo map or web of overlapping concepts,” said Cecelia Halle, a high school sophomore on the council, which recently received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program award from Michelle Obama. “Ultimately, we’re going to put these things into a video that documents the changing structure of Boston through the eyes of us teens.” The collaborative project, which will make use of the museum’s high-tech digital lab, will go on view this summer.

The artist has other surprises in store. He plans to embed an unannounced artwork somewhere in the museum later this year and is working with the bookstore about a way to provide an unexpected — and undefined — ghost text along with intended purchases. He’s also created a series of short films, which set his vocabulary of abstracted imagery in motion and can be seen and heard via smartphone at the site of each artwork and performance. The residency will conclude with a reprise of “The Long Count” in the museum’s theater in December.

“There are all these things swirling around each other and each person is going to be encouraged to solve it in a way,” said Mr. Ritchie. “It’s not about having a secret language but more to encourage exploration. Can you remember the mural you saw 15 minutes ago in Dewey Square when you walk into the lobby? Can you remember the performance you were at six months ago when you’re at another one that echoes it? Can these things have an algorithmic choral quality and build on each other not just in space but in time? It’s the sense of a haunting.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "The Met’s Director Looks Ahead" @nytimes by By ROBIN POGREBIN

IN the five years since Thomas P. Campbell became director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the museum world has had to grapple with declining philanthropic dollars, mushrooming entertainment options and a rapidly developing digital world. But in an interview, Mr. Campbell said he was optimistic about the public’s appetite for museums in general and the Met’s prospects in particular. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q. What is the biggest issue facing museums today?

A. Impacting all of us is technology. We’ve made a huge investment in transitioning from being an analog museum to a digital museum and there are great opportunities in that to see the collections on the whole, to deliver the information to our audiences in new ways. Still, at the end of the day, the core values remain the same: It’s about bringing people face to face with works of art and stimulating their curiosity.

Q. Can museums really hope to compete with computers for people’s attention and leisure time?

A. We’re all bombarded. Museums are like the quiet car of the world. It’s a place you can come to escape, where there’s authenticity, there’s uniqueness, there’s calm, there’s physicality. I feel it’s so refreshing. But at the same time, the exciting thing is that because of technology we’re reaching out to new audiences. Our attendance has increased from 4.5 million to 6 million over five years. But online last year we had 44 to 45 million visitors to the website.

Q. What in particular are you looking forward to at the Met right now?

A. Over the last five years, we’ve completed a number of major capital projects — the American Wing, the Islamic galleries and the re-presentation of the European paintings collection. Next up is the reopening of the Costume Institute in May. This has been a project that has long been planned but has been undertaken in the last two years. We’ve expanded the exhibition space and we’ve put in place state-of-the-art storage and conservation facilities. The opening exhibition is on the great but little-known American couturier Charles James, an amazing designer of both everyday wear and couture to whom many contemporary designers look back as the inspiring genius for their own work. And then in the fall we’ll have the reopening of the plaza, which of course has been under construction outside the museum.

Q. What are you looking to accomplish with that?

A. The plaza is the entry point for the museum. For many it’s the gateway to a great institution that many visitors feel very comfortable with. But for others, our great Beaux Arts facade is intimidating. And it certainly wasn’t helped by the deplorable state of disrepair that the fountains had fallen into. We started with a plan first to replace the fountains, and then one thing led to another, and we’ve totally reconceived the plaza so it will be a much more friendly, attractive, welcoming area for people visiting the museum or who, after a visit, want to sit outside and enjoy being in one of the great New York spaces. It’s a beautification project that will make the plaza worthy of our great facade, but it’s also an external manifestation of the emphasis on accessibility that we’ve really been making over the last five years. The Met is a museum for everybody.

Q. Given the goals you set when you became director, how are you doing so far?

Q. Talk a little about the Met’s technological advances.

A. We’ve wired the whole museum — there is wireless access everywhere in the museum for free. The catalog collection is now online and we’ve also put a lot of investment into creating cross-museum applications. The scholarly backbone is the Timeline of Art History set up about 12 years ago, which we continue to invest in very heavily. And we have a number of publications like “Connections” and “82nd and Fifth” that are aimed at being entry points for audiences who want — not such in-depth scholarly information — but to get an understanding of why certain works of art are important.

Q. What is the place of contemporary art at the Met and how are you planning to use the Breuer building when the Whitney moves downtown?

A. It’s clear from all of our surveys that our audience is very interested in seeing modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan. That was an explicit part of the job description when I was hired as director — to make sure the museum was engaging in a meaningful way with modern and contemporary art. The challenge we have is that our modern and contemporary galleries are not very well laid out and they’re also quite constrictive. So to operate the Breuer building is a great opportunity. It’s space that’s going to be especially well suited to the display of modern and contemporary art. We can provide an element of context that will differentiate our programs from those of MoMA and the Guggenheim and the Whitney. In a way, the Breuer building — because it’s not constrained — is a new space for us. We can perhaps be more experimental there, we can break away from the departmental restraints that often characterize the programs we run here at the main museum and we can really respond to the way contemporary artists are using multiple media. We can look very closely, not just at the European and American schools, but also think more internationally.

Q. Given these innovations, has there been any pushback from the old guard, saying, “This is too much change for us”?

A. By and large this is evolution, not revolution. The financial crisis of 2008 to 2009 was a sobering moment but the silver lining is, it forced all of us to think very hard about what our core priorities were about scholarship, education and accessibility, and out of that moment came a huge wave of creativity. The greatest asset along with the building and the collections is this extraordinary staff of curators and conservators at the core. I want to sustain the culture in which those scholars have flourished, so I’m not out to force any of those faster than they want to go. Most of my colleagues are as sensitive to the changes that are going on in the world as I am.

Q. How much of a hurdle do you think price is for a museum like the Met?

A. We’ve had a lot of negative press over the year about our admissions policy that really ticks me off. Five years ago, we had people telling us we should go to a compulsory charge. I felt, and the board felt, that making admission a voluntary donation was central to the integrity of an institution that was trying to make itself as accessible as possible. We’ve sustained that process in the face of financial pressure and I’m really proud of that. The average visitor costs us about $45 and we ask for a donation of $25. Of course, the reality is many visitors give much less, but that’s great. I don’t want to start charging for exhibitions. Here we have this amazing cornucopia of exhibitions and whatever you’ve donated — it’s all accessible.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Boldly Go" @nytimes by Roberta Smith

Rob Fischer’s “Good Weather (Glass House)” is at the Derek Eller Gallery in Chelsea. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times        

ACCORDING to the thermometer as well as the calendar, it’s finally spring, a great time for that urban sport known as gallery-hopping. The options in New York City have never been richer — in some neighborhoods, taking in the galleries requires Olympic stamina.

New York is often described as the former center of the art world, the torch having been passed to Berlin, London, Los Angeles or even New Delhi. Globalism notwithstanding, New York remains the center of the gallery world, and galleries are the bedrock of any truly thriving art scene.

No other city can match its sheer numbers, and such quantity creates its own strange, implicitly democratic form of quality. New York is still the place where the greatest range of art is selected for public view by the greatest number of people — namely art dealers, who operate independent of institutions. Month after month, they mount shows of artists or artworks they believe in for our consideration, and we don’t have to buy anything or pay admission (though occasionally we have to climb on something, after removing our shoes).

A few years ago, it seemed that Chelsea was the Cookie Monster devouring other gallery neighborhoods. But as our five selective reports demonstrate, New York has thriving scenes on the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side. The SoHo scene, once inundated by retail, is showing signs of bouncing back, and putting out new shoots in eastern TriBeCa. Bushwick is blooming in Brooklyn, and in the newly named Donut District an art scene is taking root virtually beneath the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

Our intrepid art critics went and looked. Now it’s your turn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/arts/design/a-gallery-guide-by-the-art-critics-of-the-new-york-times.html?ref=arts&_r=0

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George Lindemann Journalby George Lindemann - "An Artist Demands Civility on the Street With Grit and Buckets of Paste" @nytimes By FELICIA R. LEE

ATLANTA — With a lick of wheat paste, a roller and a stepladder, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, a painter and illustrator from Brooklyn, introduced herself to the South, in an unusual way.

She plastered a poster with her own face floating above the words, “Stop Telling Women to Smile” on a vacant storefront here, across from a federal courthouse.

Then Ms. Fazlalizadeh and her helpers brushed on two dozen more posters she had created. Images of young faces stared back with wary, defiant and no-nonsense gazes above statements such as “My Outfit Is Not an Invitation,” or “Women Do Not Owe You Their Time or Conversation.”

The words came from Ms. Fazlalizadeh’s interviews with women about “catcalling,” a form of public harassment by men who feel free to comment on their bodies and demeanor. Women around the country have begun to speak out publicly, in blogs, public writing projects and on the websites of anti-harassment groups like Stop Street Harassment and Hollaback!, which document and research the problem. Many women have said they feel objectified and demoralized by sexual comments made on the street, and Ms. Fazlalizadeh has transformed their feelings and images — she photographs the women and then creates pencil drawings — into a major public art project.

Photo

Local artists and Georgia State University students and professors helped plaster posters around Atlanta. Credit Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

Local artists, as well as the students and professors from Georgia State University who had invited Ms. Fazlalizadeh here, passed paste, steadied the ladders and even tried their hand at plastering the row of storefronts on Forsyth Street.

Jessica Caldas, a visual artist, watched the posters take form. “Something a lot of people take for granted as normal and acceptable is being shown for the impact it has,” she said.

Street harassment, though, is hard to define precisely and then to challenge legally, experts say. A growing body of research shows that it is a problem affecting where women live, how they get to work, when they go out and how they dress, said Laura S. Logan, an assistant professor of sociology at Hastings College in Nebraska, who has studied catcalling for years.

Continue reading the main story

“The challenge has been there are so many behaviors that can go into street harassment on a continuum, from ‘hey baby’ to contact,” she said. “It also presents a first amendment challenge: Offensive speech is not illegal.” Still, she said, “the negative consequences are pretty well documented: fear, anger, distrust, depression, stress, sleep disorders, shame and anxiety about being in public.” Beth Livingston, an assistant professor of human resource studies at Cornell University, said verbal harassment is “more pervasive than workplace harassment, but there are less policies and laws to deal with it.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she said, “very, very recently has started to ask questions about this, to see if this could be a pervasive public health issue or problem.”

Laurie A. Combo, a New York City councilwoman from Brooklyn who is the chairwoman of the Committee on Women’s Issues, said Tuesday that she is calling on the Council to revisit the issue. In 2010 the Council held a hearing on the matter.

“We have evolved as a society, and there is no place for catcalls, lewd gestures, inappropriate language and unwarranted comments about the physical characteristics of a woman’s body,” Ms. Combo said in a comment her office sent by email.

Ms. Fazlalizadeh did not wait for any official notice to start her art project, called “Stop Telling Women to Smile.” It took off about 18 months ago when she began making nighttime forays in her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood with a brush, roller and her own self-portraits. (Though wheat pasting is illegal in some places, she has never been cited, she said.) She has since moved to Bushwick and interviewed and created portraits of about 15 women. Spread largely by social media, her poster campaign has appeared in Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Atlanta. A Kickstarter campaign last fall raised $34,000, allowing her to travel the country to meet women, and create and hang new work. In March, Betti Ono Gallery in Oakland, Calif., began an exhibition of her series, featuring the original graphite-on-paper drawings, oil paintings and photographs.

“This is all about how women’s bodies are consumed and are considered public property for display, comment and consumption,” said Ms. Fazlalizadeh, a soft-spoken, direct and contained 28-year-old from Oklahoma. “Women need to start talking about their daily moments because it’s the smaller stuff that affects the larger things, like rape, domestic violence, harassment in the workplace.”

She has heard all manner of stories, ranging from come-on call outs of “hey baby” to a woman in Los Angeles whose friend was shot for not giving a man her phone number. She has found some broad regional differences: Female drivers in car-centered cities like Los Angeles are often approached by men also in their cars. Women in New York tend to face street harassment.

“New York City is the most aggressive I’ve experienced in the country,” said Zahira Kelly, a 31-year-old visual artist and writer who lives in Savannah, Ga. “I cannot walk down the block without multiple men yelling at me or trying to grab me.” The caption on the poster with her picture reads, “I Am Not Here for You.”                               

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh pasted her self-portrait Friday at the Krog Street Tunnel in Atlanta, known for street art. By Sunday night, the poster had been defaced. Credit Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Germany Announces Deal on Art Looted by Nazis" @nytimes by By MELISSA EDDY

“Seated Woman/Woman Sitting in Armchair,” by Henri Matisse, is one of the paintings whose ownership is disputed. Credit Lost Art Koordinierungsstelle Ma/Getty Images Europe, via Lost Art Koordinierungsstelle Ma

BERLIN — The German government on Monday announced an agreement with Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi-era art dealer, that would pave the way for the possible restitution of art wrongfully taken from Jewish owners and held in his private collection for decades.

Lawyers for Mr. Gurlitt, representatives of the state of Bavaria, and the German federal government agreed that a government-appointed team of international experts had one year in which to investigate the works seized from Mr. Gurlitt’s Munich apartment in 2012.

The deal would take effect when the works, which are being held by Bavarian authorities as part of a criminal investigation, are released. It applies to all art of questionable provenance in Mr. Gurlitt’s collection, which has become known as the Munich Art Trove. Authorities said Mr. Gurlitt can prove legal ownership of some of the works.

Reached after several weeks of negotiations, the agreement bypasses the 30-year statute of limitations that applies to stolen property in Germany, and in doing so, represents a willingness by the German government to resolve outstanding claims related to Nazi-looted art works.

The resolution comes months after the public first learned of the more than 1,280 works — including those by major artists such as Picasso, Chagall and Gauguin — held by Mr. Gurlitt. They were seized by Augsburg prosecutors as part of a tax evasion investigation. When the German news media broke the story of their existence last November, it triggered outrage around the world.

Responding to intense international criticism over how it had handled the art, the German government appointed a task force to investigate their provenance with an aim to return looted works to their rightful owners. But questions lingered over what would happen to the collection once it was released to Mr. Gurlitt, if he is cleared of the tax evasion charges. Legal experts also raised questions over whether the state had been justified in confiscating the collection in the first place.

Mr. Gurlitt, 81, who lived a reclusive life seemingly dedicated to defending the modern art collection amassed by his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, during the Nazis’ reign, had initially insisted that all the art be returned to him. He declared in his only interview, with the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, that he would not give any of them up.

But his failing health led a Munich court late last year to appoint a legal guardian, Christoph Edel, to deal with Mr. Gurlitt’s legal, health and wealth affairs. Since then, Mr. Gurlitt has appeared more willing to negotiate with the authorities, leading up to the agreement.

His spokesman, Stephan Holzinger, said Mr. Gurlitt suffers from a weak heart and remains hospitalized following surgery, adding urgency to the need for resolution.

“We are dealing with a top-class team of experts, and given Mr. Gurlitt’s advanced age and frail health, it can be expected that they should be able to complete their work within this time frame,” Mr. Holzinger said.

Monika Grütters, Germany’s culture minister, has made addressing restitution issues a priority since she came into office at the start of the year. She welcomed the agreement with Mr. Gurlitt, saying it would pave the way for an independent center that is being established to streamline and reinvigorate German efforts to handle restitution claims.

“Our experience gained through dealing with the Munich Art Trove will influence the new Lost Art Center,” Ms. Grütters said. Mr. Gurlitt further agreed that images of the works in question could be posted to the government’s database, which includes 458 pictures.

But the agreement also puts pressure on researchers to determine the history of the works. An additional researcher, appointed by Mr. Gurlitt, will be named to the task force when Mr. Gurlitt’s collection is released to him. Officials said they did not know when that would happen.

Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Jewish Claims Conference, expressed concern that the deadline could lead to the art being returned before the works’ history could be clarified. “Returning artwork to Mr. Gurlitt that has not been fully researched would be reprehensible,” Mr. Schneider said. “Either the government has to commit sufficient resources to complete the work within a year, or the deadline must be extended, if it is not met.”

Among the works is a well-known Matisse painting that the descendants of Paul Rosenberg, a French art dealer, said was taken from their family by the Nazis. The picture, “Seated Woman/Woman Sitting in Armchair,” was among the first to be identified by claimants seeking the return of the picture.

But Mr. Gurlitt’s lawyers said Monday that a rival claim had been filed for the painting, forcing the delay of a previously announced return of the work.

“I am legally required to investigate the new claims,” Mr. Edel said.

The new claimant was not identified, and no details were given on the basis of the claim. Representatives of the Rosenberg family declined to comment.

The latest twist in what appeared to be a relatively clear case reflects the challenges that authorities face with disputed works in the collection; cases that on the surface appear to be morally clear cut may run into snags within Germany’s complex legal system.

Government officials hope the agreement reached Monday will help restore confidence in Germany’s image abroad, which has been tarnished by the handling of Mr. Gurlitt’s collection.

“The meaning of the so-called Munich Art Trove reaches far beyond the criminal proceedings in connection with suspected tax evasion,” said Winfried Bausback, the justice minister for Bavaria. “It opens very basic and overarching questions about how we handle such artworks.”

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George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann - "Look Up! All Signs Point to Art" by CAROL VOGEL

Can the likes of Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper and Cindy Sherman help jump-start the struggling billboard business?

This summer, images by dozens of famous American artists will be plastered on 50,000 displays from electronic billboards to bus shelters, an initiative by leading museums and the billboard industry to create one of the largest outdoor art exhibitions seen in the country.

Museum directors hope the project, called Art Everywhere, will draw more visitors to their galleries, while the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, devoting about $500,000 to the effort, is betting that great artworks will make looking up fashionable again. With the web pulling dollars away from billboard advertising, some in the advertising industry see it as a move to get millions of Americans to “take your head out of your phone,” explained Rob Schwartz, the global creative president of TBWA, the worldwide advertising agency.

Five museums collaborated — the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — with each submitting 20 works from their collections, from gritty urban scenes to ’60s Pop Art to challenging images reflecting race and gender politics. They include Mr. Johns’s “Three Flags,” Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, Grant Wood’s seminal “American Gothic” and Glenn Ligon’s self-portrait of his shaved head.

Beginning on Monday and running through May 7, the public can view the 100 selections at ArtEverywhereUS.org and vote for favorites. The 50 images that receive the most votes will be announced on June 20 and be reproduced on outdoor displays coast to coast in August.

From the Long Island Expressway to the Los Angeles freeways, many billboards that once publicized sneakers or airlines or cars have gone blank. Companies cut marketing budgets during the recession, and lawmakers, as well as homeowners’ associations, have tried to restrict the spread of digital billboards and new sites with size and content limitations. Revenue for the outdoor advertising industry fell at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent over the five years preceding 2013, according to a report last fall and although revenue is beginning to improve, industry analysts are skeptical that the campaign will create a billboard renaissance.

“The outdoor industry is under threat,” said Mr. Schwartz, who added that perhaps an initiative like Art Everywhere is a way to “channel desperation into inspiration.”

Starting on Aug. 4, for one month, it may be hard not to notice the ads, especially in hubs like Times Square, where the artworks will saturate the landscape on about a dozen billboards in rotation.

Art Everywhere is a copycat version of an initiative in Britain last summer. It received so much positive attention there that the outdoor advertising trade group asked Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Dallas Museum of Art, to help bring it to the United States.

“There’s great art in England, but nothing like American art,” said Stephen J. Freitas, the chief marketing officer for the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. He said revenue in outdoor advertising has grown significantly in the past year, making it the second fastest growing media segment after online formats. “The billboards that are dark are that way because of zoning issues or actions taken by the City of New York, not because of low demand,” he said.

Mr. Anderson, who saw the initiative as a way to celebrate American art, contacted four other museum directors, geographically selected, and asked if they would be interested in participating. “Everyone wrote back to me within a day,” he recalled. “There were obvious duplications,” he said. Settling on particular artworks “took a bit of fiddling,” he added.

Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum, said it submitted a range of works from different periods, including Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning” and Georgia O’Keeffe’s haunting “Summer Days,” as well as a posterlike Los Angeles canvas by Ed Ruscha called “Large Trademark With Eight Spotlights.”

“We knew the images had to have graphic possibilities,” Mr. Weinberg said.

The Whitney also included works by younger artists, like Mr. Ligon’s powerful “Self Portrait #7.”

Douglas Druick, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said the museum chose “American Gothic,” that 1930 painting of a stern farmer and his dour daughter, along with Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” the evocative 1942 scene in an all-night diner with three strangers seated at the counter. “In the end, it doesn’t matter who the artist is, people are going to vote on the images that strike them,” Mr. Druick said.

Social media will extend the message, letting people share their impressions of the art through numerous interactive platforms.

Some seasoned advertising executives are skeptical about the mission of Art Everywhere. “People are going to perceive the art as advertising,” said Peter Arnell, the branding impresario who created the much-praised Donna Karan DKNY campaign in the late 1980s, when he had the logo — with a photograph he took himself of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline — hand-painted on a building in SoHo.

“They are going to think the images are an ad for an exhibition,” he added, saying he thought Art Everywhere was little more than “a pop-up stunt” that in the end would be “demeaning to the art.”

Still, Mr. Druick of the Art Institute of Chicago said museum directors are “hoping that familiarity breeds desire, that people will see an artwork, be struck by it and want to see it in the flesh.”

Formerly SellYouLater.com.

SellYouLater.com is the best art website to come along in some time. Since starting in early February, it has been rebranded as ArtRank.com, but the old name seems more appropriate. They rank artists as “buy” or “sell” based on a secret mathematical formula (don’t you love that!). They claim to use algorithms to identify “prime emerging artists based on qualitatively weighted metrics, including Web presence (verified social media accounts, inbound links), studio capacity and output, market maker contracts and acquisitions, major collector and museum support, gallery representation, and auction results.”

Come on. This is great stuff. You never did that at home! These guys have used “math” to break every art market taboo and in the process have captured the art world zeitgeist. Sure, people make believe they are looking at the work, they make believe they are interested in art and what it says about the world, but let’s face it, real art-talk sounds archaic in the world of the now, where most conversations quickly circle back to last week’s auction prices. There have never been as many speculators, flippers, scalpers and small-time punters in the market. The hooligans of today far outnumber the old-school collectors.

SellYouLater.com is the epitome of where we are at. It has so many amazing things going for it that I don’t know where to begin. The stock market is full of tip sheets that provide insider advice for long investors, short sellers, yield hogs and junk-bond floggers. It’s about time someone did one for art, especially now that all people really care about are prices.

When SellYouLater.com first came out in early February I thought it was a joke, the best joke I had seen in a long while. The idea of listing artists in columns titled “buy now,” “sell now” and “liquidate” was genius—it was totally inappropriate and broke every rule in “proper” art collecting. To list artists strictly by their market value and the direction in which their prices appeared to be going reduces art to a pure investment. Yes, I know that the markets for Mark Flood, Alex Israel, Sam Falls and Joe Bradley are on the rise, but I never thought of them as “Buy Now <100k.” (P.S. Most of them are already over a hundred on the secondary market.) The real fun of the website is in the “sell now (peaking)” category. Here I found artists that I thought were still going up, and yet SellYouLater.com algorithms were telling me to dump them. These included young but established artists like KAWS and up-and-comers like Walead Beshty.

There were moments when I disagreed. The algorithm for Lucien Smith says his prices have gone too high, and perhaps they have, but might they keep going higher, instead of taking a turn? I dispute the conclusion that Dan Colen and Tauba Auerbach have peaked—I feel their best is yet to come—and I have good reasons to feel that way. Even in the case of Lucien Smith, I suspect his market success will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember the stock trader’s classic rule: The trend is your friend.

No matter, SellYouLater.com is a must-read. Where else can you find a column of artists listed as “liquidate (down)” that includes the poor victims of the 2008 crash, like Anselm Reyle, or read a “diss” about the street artist Banksy? I was surprised to see Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Sterling Ruby and Oscar Murillo on the liquidate list. Wasn’t it only months ago that these guys were solid buys? SellYouLater.com’s algorithm says holders (I no longer call them collectors) need to about-face and dump these artists as fast as they can. Which brings me to the only real problem I see with SellYouLater.com: By the time I’m supposed to sell, it’s already too late! Never forget, you can only sell art when others are buying it. The market for a given artist goes cold in a flash: As soon as there are no bids, everyone jumps out as quickly as they jumped in, and the art becomes unsellable. It becomes totally illiquid—a scary feeling and, yes, I’ve been there.

We’re in a pretty scary moment in the cycle. The number of people flipping works of art has never been higher, and they will keep on pumping up prices until the music stops. When it will stop is anyone’s guess, but certainly websites like this one are a telltale sign that we have entered a whole new phase. One can semi-plausibly argue that a Bacon, a great Picasso or a Warhol is a rare and precious thing and that in the 21st century we will always see more buyers (many of them from outside the U.S.) than there are works available. The young stuff is another matter altogether. Artists go on making it every day, and the higher it goes, the more they produce. The market now is rife with speculation and getting hotter by the day. Today, everybody’s a wise guy looking for an angle.

A guy gets offered a picture for a buck and thinks: Why just tell the seller “yes” or “no”? Why not be a player and re-offer it to 10 other guys you know for two bucks? Maybe you can buy it yourself for 85 cents and sell it for $1.50, or better  yet, just flip it without buying it. This is, after all, trading tulips; no one really wants to smell them roses. Collecting is now an anachronism. Some people are still doing it, but they have become the minority. The new generation is in it to win it, and it’s very bold and not risk averse. It will dive into anything that has buzz and hype and feels like it’s going to the moon. What’s ironic and sad is that some artists’ careers now seem to end only months after they began. This means we won’t get to “sell them later,” because there won’t be any “later.”

What if all these “SellYouLater.com” flippers suddenly panicked and tried to SellYouNow? Scary thought. Ah, forget it, I’ll worry about that later.

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

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

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

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

View slide show|16 Photos

The Work of Shigeru Ban

The Work of Shigeru Ban

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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