Introduction

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times  

The Orange County government building in Goshen, N.Y., has a leaky roof, faulty ventilation and mold and, in the eyes of many, is just plain ugly. Officials shut it down last year and would like to demolish and replace it. But it is a prime example of Brutalism, from the noted architect Paul Rudolph, and many want to preserve it. Do even ugly, unpopular buildings deserve to be saved if they are significant? Or should a community, or owner, be allowed to eliminate architectural mistakes?

Read the Discussion »

The organizers are calling it “the biggest festival the U.K. has ever seen.” For eight weeks from June 21 to Sept. 9 — before, during and after the 2012 Olympic Games — Britain is hosting the London 2012 Festival, an outpouring of events across the country including theater, music, visual arts, dance, sculpture, performance art, film and other genres. The plan is to put on a show that rivals the sports spectacle in breadth and excitement, not to mention Olympian flights of excess. London 2012 is part of a broader, multiyear effort called the Cultural Olympiad, showcasing events like the World Shakespeare Festival, running April 23 until November, and a major exhibition of Lucian Freud portraits (through May 27) at the National Portrait Gallery. “Even before we won the bid, we said we wanted culture to be part of it, in the run-up to the games and through the games themselves,” said Moira Sinclair, the executive director of Arts Council England, the London 2012 Festival’s lead organization.

Deborah Shaw, the associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, said the effort brought the modern Olympics back to the ancient idea that the arts were as important as sports.

“It was about celebrating the whole human — both physical prowess and the spiritual, artistic side,” Ms. Shaw said. “If this culture program works, it could mean a whole recalibration for the Olympics.”

This program does not come cheap, which is something of a disconnect at a time of severe government cutbacks in arts financing here. Organizers say they do not yet know the final cost of the Cultural Olympiad, but The Guardian recently estimated the total at more than $154 million: $83 million for commissions for the London 2012 Festival and $71 million for the Cultural Olympiad.

Artists were chosen in a variety of ways: through commissions, applications and organizations taking part in the festival. In one initiative, called Artists Taking the Lead, potential participants were invited to submit projects that would celebrate Britain’s different regions. The winning ideas — a 30-foot seafaring yacht constructed from donated wooden objects, a floating building that generates its own power on the River Tyne — were then selected by a regional panel of artists.

The final lineup of events will be completed this month, when the full catalog is published. But dozens of projects — deadly serious and seriously offbeat, traditional and conceptual, from Britain and abroad — have been confirmed.

One piece, “Work No. 1197: All the Bells in a Country Rung as Loudly as Possible for Three Minutes,” by the Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed, is scheduled to take place from 8 to 8:03 a.m. on July 27, the first day of the Olympics. The idea, according to the festival’s Web site, is to encourage the nation “to ring thousands of bells at the same time, whether school bells, church bells, town hall bells, bicycle bells or doorbells.”

Other events will be less fleeting, like a retrospective of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, who died in 2009, at the Barbican and Sadler’s Wells, which will feature 10 of her works; a Damien Hirst exhibition at the Tate Modern; and “Back2Black” with the Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil, a three-day exploration of the links between Africa and Brazil.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis will have a two-week residency at the Barbican and other spots, culminating in the British premiere of Mr. Marsalis’s “Swing Symphony (Symphony No. 3)”, performed with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Simon Rattle. There will be screenings of Alfred Hitchcock silent movies, restored by the British Film Institute and shown with live musical accompaniment. At the Barbican, Cate Blanchett will star in “Big and Small,” by Botho Strauss.

Offbeat fare is also on the agenda, like “Bee Detective,” a murder mystery in which the audience travels through a beehive.

The verdict on whether the selections in the cultural festival are successful may have to wait until after the Olympiad has ended. But for now cultural critics and members of Britain’s arts world establishment seem open-minded and optimistic. There will probably be little argument over the prominent inclusion of Britain’s most enduring cultural export, Shakespeare. As part of a program called the World Shakespeare Festival, some 70 productions will take place across Britain in 30 locations starting on April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday.

“The theme of the festival is to look at Shakespeare as a world playwright, so we’re not getting just one perspective on his work,” said Ms. Shaw, who is also serving as the director of the World Shakespeare Festival.

The festival, which is costing the Royal Shakespeare Company about $9.5 million, she said, will feature a dozen new productions, some in collaboration with international companies and some performed outside theaters. There will be amateur performances, a chance for people around the world to discuss online what Shakespeare means to them, and an educational conference on how Shakespeare is taught in schools. The Globe Theater in London is hosting an ambitious undertaking called Globe to Globe, in which all of Shakespeare’s plays, and one poem, are to be performed, each in a different language and each from a different international company.

“Four hundred years ago he was using the world to talk about Elizabethan Britain, and it’s very interesting now to look at how the world sees their own societies through the prism of Shakespeare,” said Ms. Shaw, of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

That has raised some controversy, with a number of artists recently calling for the Globe to cancel a planned performance of “The Merchant of Venice” by the Israeli theater company Habima, which has performed in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“By inviting Habima the Globe is associating itself with policies of exclusion practiced by the Israeli state and endorsed by its national theater company,” said a letter in The Guardian that was signed by the director Mike Leigh and the actress Emma Thompson, among others. In response the Globe has said the festival is a “celebration of language,” not “nations and states.” It is also featuring a performance of “Richard II” by the Palestinian company Ashtar Theater.

The festival arrives during a painful economic retrenchment across Europe that has drastically cut into government grants for the arts. In Britain the Arts Council’s government funds have been cut by 20 percent; many smaller groups have lost all their financing. “When we won the Olympics, we weren’t in the same position we’re in now,” Ms. Sinclair, of Arts Council England, said.

But, she added, the program should make it clear how important the arts are to the world’s perception of Britain — and Britain’s perception of itself.

“The range of activity that we’ve got to offer shows that we really are a contemporary-art nation, as well as having this extraordinary heritage we can hook into,” she said.

After the last athlete has gone home, she added, “we want to convey the sense that the Olympics is over, but the arts aren’t.”

 

A man who makes films about people who never stop moving would seem unlikely to set down roots. Yet the artist Doug Aitken has built himself a house in Venice, Calif., that is too much fun to leave — even to go to the nearby studio where he created “Black Mirror,” his film project with Chloë Sevigny as a nomad who spends her days checking into and out of anonymous motels.

The house is the world’s first temple to “Acid Modernism,” the aesthetic the California-born Aitken conceived for himself and Gemma Ponsa, his companion of the last six years. “The goal was to create a warm, organic modernism that’s also perceptual and hallucinatory,” he said of the design. “We thought that would be a wonderful environment to live in.”

Acid Modernism: it’s an apt term to characterize a modest, functional home where the ground-floor walls and curtains have been silk-screened to simulate the hedges growing outside the windows, the sky-lighted staircase is lined with angled mirrors that turn the passage into a dazzling kaleidoscope and the light fixture that illuminates the vintage Western-Holly kitchen stove looks as if it’s wearing a toupee. The toupee is actually a cluster of air plants, tropical ferns that feed off the moisture from Ponsa’s cooking.

“For Doug the house is more like an artwork,” said Ponsa, an obsessive foodie who met Aitken in her native Barcelona. She has claimed one of the two upstairs bedrooms as an office where she is developing a Spanish-language cooking show for television. “For me,” she said, “this is an organism — my dream house, where the materials and the architecture don’t intrude on the nature around it.”

And it’s true: the house does not so much intrude on its surroundings as collaborate with them, in what Aitken calls a “living experiment” based on “concepts and ideas,” a phrase that often recurs in his speech. “There’s really no differentiation between the work I make and the world I live in,” he said.

A sunny 6-foot-1, Aitken is known for staging large-scale public “Happenings” — theatrical entertainments involving farm auctioneers, gospel singers, a drum corps, dancers, a bull-whip-snapping cowboy and food served on “sonic” tables. But mainly his work takes form in sculpture, photographs and books, as well as high-definition silent films like the poignant 2010 short piece “House.” In it an elderly man and woman (Aitken’s parents) sit motionless at a plain wood table that Aitken designed. After a few moments, the walls around them start to crack, the windows shatter, the chimney crumbles, and plaster rains down, but they never avert their eyes from one another, even when the roof falls in.

These were not special effects. The house in the film is the cramped, 100-year-old cottage where Aitken lived for 12 years, until it threatened to collapse. “What you see in the film’s last image is everything leveled, just raw earth,” he said. “At that stage we found ourselves asking how we move forward.”

The creation of the new house, which sits on the same footprint as the old one, proceeded with similar questions: “How does one live the outdoor-indoor life? How does one work with ideas and culture, with the light, the wind, the atmosphere, the foot traffic in this specific place? How do you frame the world around you within the architecture?”

For Aitken, “These things that we take so much for granted — a chair, a table, a light — shape what you make. . . . And you want to make places you can share, where you can collaborate and have people over, and have an experience.”

The new dwelling is taller and more spacious, with bay windows that jut like balconies from the second story and outer walls of mismatched wood partly reclaimed from its predecessor. What was once a detached garage is now a split-level studio and guest room set off by amber and yellow windows that create a warm glow within. A white-walled projection room takes up the lower level. The sleeping loft has a full bath hidden behind a panic-room door disguised as a bookcase that opens by pulling a fake volume of “Ulysses” from one shelf. “It really looks like a book!” Ponsa said, laughing.

On a deck raised above a roof as flat as Buster Keaton’s hat is an edible garden with a view of the Pacific Ocean a block away. Succulents growing in concrete planters at the bottom of the prismatic staircase drink in the sunlight pouring down from above and into the core of the house. And at certain times of day, the living room windows appear to melt away, dissolving the painted walls into the greenery beyond them.

Aitken has created a similar illusion with “Song 1,” a new film projection for the circular exterior walls of the Gordon Bunshaft-designed Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The projection, which had its premiere on March 22 and runs through May 13, appears to dematerialize the U.F.O.-like building into pure light and sound.

The effect is only one example of ideas that turn up in both his house and his art. “I think that living with a lot of plants inspired Doug’s ‘SEX’ work,” Ponsa said, referring to Aitken’s marquee-like sculpture of block letters that spell out the title word and contain a terrarium of local flora and driftwood. In 2009, he erected a wood and curved glass “Sonic Pavilion” at Instituto Inhotim, an immense privately owned art park near Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The pavilion sits over a deep cut in the earth where Aitken and his studio crew buried microphones sensitive to vibrations caused by the rotation of the planet.

Aitken took that concept further in his house, by embedding nine geological microphones in its foundation. They amplify not just the groan of tectonic plate movements but also the roar of the tides and the rumble of street traffic. Guests can listen in on this subterranean world without putting an ear to the ground. Speakers installed throughout the house bring its metronomic clicks and extended drones to them whenever Aitken turns up the volume. “It’s very easy to lose track of the environment around you, to lose touch with the present,” he said. “I wanted the house to help bring me back to the moment that is.”

A half dozen other microphones installed under the staircase make it possible to play the steps like a percussion instrument. Aitken even keeps lightweight mallets on hand for those who want to pick out a rhythm, or they can also use their feet. And when they sit down for one of Ponsa’s meals, they can play the suspended marble surface of the “sonic” dining table. “This is a great house for an insomniac!” he said. (Though in truth he looks every bit the well-rested surfer that he is.)

Still, Aitken insists that “it’s not a radically avant-garde house. It’s not glamorous. But there’s nothing more stimulating than living in an environment that I feel free to experiment with. Come back in a year and there might be new developments.”

 

 

While the majority of garage sale treasures include old family photos, broken VCR's and stained baby clothes, don't give up hope! If you keep scouring you may just find yourself a bona fide sketch by none other than Andy Warhol.

Andy Fields, a businessman from Tiverton, England bought five sketches for a mere $5 at a Las Vegas garage sale. One of them was a depiction of 1930s singer Rudy Vallee, who is famous for the hits "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" and "Lover Come Back To Me". According to the BBC, Fields purchased the sketches from a man who claimed they belonged to his aunt who used to watch over Warhol as a child. Fields didn't think much of it, being surrounded by implausible claims in Las Vegas, but later found Warhol's signature on the back when he reframed the picture.

The early sketch shows Warhol's style, pre-Pop Art, and could have been made when the precocious artist was only 10 or 11 years old. In the IBTIMES video above, Fields says, "I found out it did lead to about 1939 or possibly 1940, when Andy Warhol was in bed with cholera, that I realized to the full extent what we were sitting on." A valuer told Fields the work could fetch just over $2 million, but Fields says he does not want to sell just yet.

This story emerged only days after another lucky shopper found a Picasso print for $14 in a thrift store. So we recommend you keep filtering through all those old workout VHS tapes and fading paperbacks, because you may just find yourself a masterpiece.

Check out the full article with a slideshow of other famous finds below:

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesDamien Hirst’s ‘The Kingdom’, featuring a tiger shark in formaldehyde, on display at Sotheby’s in London in 2008.

LONDON — Don’t know much about art, but you know what you like? Well, what do you think of Damien Hirst, he of the pickled shark and diamond-encrusted skull?

The 46-year-old Briton is reputedly the country’s richest artist after making a fortune of around $300 million since breaking into the international art scene in the early 1990s as the most prominent of the Young British Artists movement.

His erstwhile patron, Charles Saatchi, has called him a genius and placed him up there with the Americans Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd as one of a handful of contemporary artists whose reputations will endure.

But as London’s Tate Modern gallery prepares to launch the artist’s first British retrospective next week to coincide with the city’s hosting of the Olympic Games, one critic has ruffled art world feathers by advising investors in Mr. Hirst’s work to get out while they can.

“His works may draw huge crowds when they go on show in a five-month-long blockbuster retrospective at Tate Modern next week,” Julian Spalding wrote in Britain’s The Independent. “But they have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.”

He said collectors such as Steve Cohen, the Wall Street hedge fund billionaire who was said to have paid $12 million for Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” in 2005, could end up with something no more valuable than a shark in a tank.

“I’ve coined the term Con Art,” said Mr. Spalding, “short for contemporary conceptual art and for art that cons people.” He is so incensed that he’s written a book on the subject — “Con Art — Why you ought to sell your Damien Hirsts while you can” — to be published this weekend.

Hirst’s fans naturally demur. “Hirst’s work asks viewers to question the main dilemmas of human existence: birth, illness, death and religion,” according to the Tate Modern’s blurb, perhaps unwittingly reinforcing the thought that art should be seen and not heard.

And no one would begrudge Mr. Hirst his wealth. In an interview to be broadcast next week by Channel 4 television, Mr. Hirst recalls growing up poor in the northern city of Leeds. “When I was a kid we had so little money I remember looking for money on the street,” he says.

Oliver Basciano, a critic writing for Channel 4 News, castigated Mr. Spalding for conflating art and money. “His first key gripe seems to be that he thinks that Hirst’s work is likely to depreciate in financial value and the Tate needs to offload it quick.

“Now I have no idea whether it will or not — I’m no market monitor — but the idea that a public gallery should be building their collection with an eye to its market worth is beyond troublesome.”

Buyers, in any case, appear undeterred. A doodle of a dead shark that Mr. Hirst rapidly sketched as a tip for a cab driver fetched the equivalent of $7,500 at auction in London this week, 13 times the pre-auction estimate.

Perhaps I should declare a personal interest. Mr. Hirst gave a similar shark doodle to my son, Joe, a struggling painter and Hirst admirer who once met the maestro at a private view. Keep it safe, Joe.

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht is expected to draw around 70,000 visitors and collectors. More Photos »

By GUY TREBAY

Published: March 23, 2012

Maastricht, the Netherlands

 

THE lady in pearls was shimmying under a table. Valentino skirt tucked primly around her knees, she lay on her back beaming a flashlight on a yellowed label, a scrap of paper that lent apparent weight to the proposition that the article on view was as old as its seller claimed.

This was at the European Fine Art Fair, where it is not at all unusual to see well-polished people getting intimate with French-waxed consoles, where old specimens can be seen squinting through loupes at granite busts of even older specimens and where for the past quarter-century the acquisitive rich have descended each spring in hordes. The early social arbiter Emily Post once characterized groups like this as the Worldys, the Oldnames and the Eminents...