George Lindemann Journal - "Boxed In, With Room for Creativity" @nytimes by Ted Loos

For the first show he conceived as director of the Museum of Arts and Design, Glenn Adamson is thinking inside the box.

The box is a large yellow crate made by the Brooklyn packing and art transport company Boxart, built for a bulbous sculpture by Wendell Castle. The crate is part of “NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial,” opening on Tuesday. While Mr. Castle’s sculpture is tucked inside, it is not officially part of the show.

“I like this idea that a fine artist and a crate maker can all be seen on a level playing field,” Mr. Adamson said. “It’s a powerful idea, and a radical idea, for a museum.” Though biennials are not exactly news, Mr. Adamson’s exhibition features a fleet of objects and installations that may be getting through the door of a major cultural institution for the first time: bottles of whiskey, a jar of handmade candy and scratch-and-sniff wallpaper, for starters.

Mr. Adamson is attempting what he calls an ambitious “relaunch” of the museum’s mission, which has been focused on “making sure craft is an equal part of the art world,” he said. “Now we’re looking at what the skilled maker brings to the larger world around us.”

The new biennial format spotlights work by 100 citywide “makers” — the trendy term for creators of any kind — and it includes a cross-disciplinary group of people within New York City. Some are famous, like Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk and Yoko Ono, while others have yet to gain renown, like the wallpaper company Flavor Paper. One of the sweaty-smelling papers in the show is supposed to evoke “the scent of creativity of 100 makers,” said Jake Yuzna, the biennial’s curator.

Lest anyone doubt the of-the-moment feel to the maker concept, President Obama proclaimed June 18 a National Day of Making.

There are objects in the show that would not be out of place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Whitney Museum of American Art, like two crumpled glass sculptures by Jeff Zimmerman. But the show, which Mr. Adamson said he conceived during his first week on the job last fall, is part of his effort to create a more accessible museum. He added: “A good rule for me is that an 8-year-old should be able to get quite a lot out of everything. It’s not that all the content has to be totally introductory, but there should be something for them to hang on to.”

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That approach makes some people in the art world nervous: Could a level playing field devalue the more traditional artworks on view?

“It’s a concern,” said Zesty Meyers, an owner of the design gallery R & Company, which lent the Zimmerman sculptures to the show. “But if it’s done right it could be the best show in the world.”

The biennial organizers are taking pains to create the feel of an open studio where artisans ply their trades in person. Mr. Adamson said it would have the air of a festival. In August, for example, Martinez Hand Rolled Cigars will demonstrate their rolling process; some of their cigars are on view for the duration of the exhibition.

In searching for previously unheralded creativity, the museum — which was founded in 1956 as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and moved to 2 Columbus Circle in 2008 — has tapped in to a populist strain of the current cultural moment. Candidates were nominated by more than 300 New York City cultural leaders including the artist Dan Graham, the choreographer Bill T. Jones and the fashion designer Reed Krakoff. Then a 10-person jury led by the design entrepreneur Murray Moss, including Mr. Adamson and Mr. Yuzna, made the final selections.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made frequent comments about the city’s richness beyond Manhattan, which is well in evidence in the museum’s biennial’s representation from Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and especially the maker-hub of Brooklyn.

“It coincides with what the mayor has been talking about: New York City as a five-borough place,” Mr. Adamson said.

A subtheme of the show is the vital role of the artisan in what Mr. Adamson calls New York’s “creative economy,” and some outside groups have tried to quantify at least part of that impact.

Last month, the nonprofit group Center for an Urban Future released its analysis of figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its report, “New York’s Design Economy,” looked at the topic in the broadest sense, from fashion to landscaping to industrial work.

“We want to highlight parts of the economy that have flown under the radar, and design is a great example of that,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of Center for an Urban Future.

The group reported that, according to the bureau, the number of professional designers in New York was 40,340 in 2013 and had bounced back significantly since the recession but had not reached the levels of 2008, when the number was 44,400.

New York is still the country’s undisputed design hub, and more to the point of the museum’s show, Brooklyn and Queens were found to be leading the growth. The number of design firms in Brooklyn doubled between 2003 and 2012, from 265 to 532.

“A show like this sheds light on the suppliers — specialized people who normally don’t fit into an existing category, but they’re artisans making things,” said Rosemary Scanlon, dean of the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University. Ms. Scanlon produced three extensive reports on the economic impact of the arts: in 1983 and 1993, as an economist for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and in 2007, as a consultant for the Alliance for the Arts.

In organizing the biennial, which will tackle a new city in two years, Mr. Adamson also has an eye on the museum marketplace and positioning the museum as a distinct brand. He mentioned the more famous biennial across town at the Whitney as a point of reference.

“The kind of spiky, theoretical programming is being done so well at other spaces that I think we can become a point of entry for people,” Mr. Adamson said. “Look where we are: the corner of Central Park. I would like people to experience MAD as a fantastic adjunct to a day in the park.”

Some of the makers who are usually behind the scenes are surprised and delighted to find themselves in the spotlight.

“When I got the first call from Jake I thought it was, well, not exactly a scam, but I was a little skeptical,” said Daniel Hanford, the director of Boxart, which works frequently with the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and most of the time no one gets to see our work,” Mr. Hanford said. “It feels great.”

George Lindemann Journal "Enduring the Elements" @wsj by Richard Cork

Exploring mortal drama with religious overtones. St. Paul's Cathedral

London

Nothing can prepare visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral, in the heart of the city, for the impact of Bill Viola's visionary video installation "Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)." After walking through the spectacular elaboration of Christopher Wren's architecture, I find the work positioned at the far end of the long South Quire Aisle. The carbon-steel stand containing four plasma screens is purged and minimal; designed by Norman Foster at his most austere, it contrasts very severely with the profuse ornamentation enlivening the High Altar nearby. The presentation of "Martyrs" is not allowed to interfere with the visceral power of the images themselves, focusing relentlessly on the plight of four figures who undergo extreme torment.

When Mr. Viola first made his reputation, in the 1980s, as a pioneering video artist from New York, his work seemed more secular than sacred. In the poignant "Nantes Triptych" (1992), three screens record the birth of a baby, a man surrounded by water and an old woman's death in a hospital. The baby was Mr. Viola's second child and the dying woman was his mother. So his fascination with extreme mortal drama was already clear, but his exploration of religious images became overt as he grew older. The overseers of St. Paul's were very impressed by his 2003 exhibition at the National Gallery in London, where he disclosed an intense interest in traditional Christian art. Small wonder, then, that "Martyrs" was commissioned for the cathedral, where Mr. Viola's figures immediately look at home in a building dedicated to suffering and redemption.

No seats are provided, so I stand and watch as three men and one woman, one on each screen, endure their unimaginable agony. This time, unlike in the "Nantes Triptych," the figures are all performers. Above them, an enormous Wren window admits daylight to the cathedral. But absolute darkness surrounds the martyrs as they strive to withstand their alarming pain. My encounter with "Martyrs" is profound enough to make me feel that I have never before experienced the strange, heightened intensity provided by Mr. Viola here.

At the beginning, the man on the far left is virtually invisible. Almost covered by a stifling heap of earth, he seems to be buried alive. Only after moving in very close to the screen do I realize that his head is still protruding, although he clamps both hands protectively against his skull. Next to him, a fair-haired woman dangles from thick ropes tied round her wrists. Her clothed body is seen full-length, and ropes entwine her ankles as well. There she hangs, twisting in the wind and contrasting with a seated elderly man on the next screen. He appears to be asleep, yet small flames have already started descending from above and settling ominously on the floor near his bare feet. Meanwhile, on the far-right screen, a bearded young man lies motionless on the ground. Although his naked torso looks healthy and well-built, he might be close to death already. Soon enough, the rope tied round his ankles begins pulling him up into the air.

Mr. Viola wastes no time in putting all the martyrs through hell. The duration of his entire video is only seven minutes, and all the way through I find my gaze darting from one screen to the next in an attempt to discover what exactly is happening to each of these doomed figures. It is a highly dramatic spectacle, especially when the man on the far left is uncovered. The earth rushes upward, like smoke rising from an inferno or even an inverted waterfall ascending to the sky. The man emerges from his hunched humiliation, gradually becoming upright. His stance is very different from the position of the hapless woman, who is now tossed brutally from side to side by furious air.

Yet the most alarming development of all affects the elderly man in the chair. The flames flare upward with terrifying force, threatening to burn him. He wakes up, placing hands on knees while raising his head and staring out directly at us. As for the athletic young man on the right, he dangles upside-down and stretches out his arms at either side. For a moment, I am reminded of the Crucifixion. But Mr. Viola rightly ensures that "Martyrs" cannot be pinned down to a single religion. Water starts pouring down from the top, drenching the young man and making his dark hair hang in long, dripping tresses.

In the final phase of this mesmeric work, turmoil gives way to stillness. Yet there is no loss of intensity. If anything, the figures become even more compelling as they arrive at stasis. The man on the far left stands erect, head up and eyes closed as if lost in prayer. By a miracle, none of the earth that once smothered his body can now be seen on his flesh or clothes. He has been purged, and the woman's gyrations have likewise ceased. She has even managed to free her hands from the thick ropes, but her feet are still bound together and so her fingers cling to the ropes for support. Suspended in space, but not inverted, she throws her head backward as if searching for the light-source above.

Her deathly pallor is echoed by that of the man in the chair. Although the flames have subsided and his entire body is unaccountably intact, he looks blanched enough to be dead. The theme of extinction is pursued at the far right, where the inverted young man is pulled up until he disappears at the top, leaving only a thin, melancholy trickle of water in his place. An overall sense of tragedy dominates the work, but at least the young man might have ascended to another realm. Even the man on the far left, who is still standing, tilts his head back and shuts his eyes, while a strong white light shines down and almost makes his face dissolve in the brightness. At this point, all four screens grow dark and the work terminates.

After a few seconds, though, it starts again and the martyrdom is re-enacted on a continuous loop, replayed over and over. Wandering away from Mr. Viola's elegiac installation, I walk behind the High Altar and, in the Jesus Chapel, discover a large open book with names carefully written inside. The chapel especially commemorates U.S. soldiers who died in World War II, and their names lend a poignant historical dimension to Mr. Viola's work. But his overall intentions cannot be limited to the idea of a military memorial. "Martyrs" may invite us to witness what Mr. Viola describes as "the human capacity to bear pain, hardship, and even death," yet its deepest power resides in his ability to convey the fundamental mystery of sacrifice.

Mr Cork's latest book, "The Healing Presence of Art," was published by Yale in 2012.

George Lindemann Journal "Christie's 'Bumpy' Sale Anchored by $23.8 Million Schwitters" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Christie's in London sold a 1920 jewel-toned painting by German artist Kurt Schwitters created from debris he found scattered around Berlin—including cardboard strips and street-poster fragments—for $23.8 million Tuesday.

One successful sale was a Kurt Schwitters collage for $23.8 million. UPPA/Zuma Press

The price for "Yes—What?—Picture" reset Schwitters's auction record, but it also represented one of the few successes in an otherwise disappointing Christie's $146 million sale in which a third of the house's 60 offerings went unsold.

The sale also fell short of the house's $164 million low bar.

Christie's sale was pockmarked by plenty of artworks that fell flat and went unsold, creating an eerie saleroom atmosphere that has been rare since the recession.

Schwitters's abstract performed well in part because it is so rare: His collage relief paintings, which he made during the turbulent, impoverished years following World War I, helped establish his international reputation—and yet only three works from this period remain in private hands. This version was also three-feet high, large for an artist better known for painting on placemat-size canvases. After a dogged, three-way bidding war, a telephone bidder won it for more than double its high estimate.

A couple other pieces sold well, but with strings attached. Before the auction, Christie's had enlisted outside investors to pledge to bid on a pair of paintings by Henri Matisse and Joan Miró—unless other collectors during the sale offered even more.

Christie's risk-offsetting strategy paid off for the house because these paintings garnered no other bids in the moment and so were claimed by their guarantors for $11.6 million and $7.7 million, respectively.

Matisse's Nice-period "The Artist and His Nude Model" from 1921 was expected to sell for at least $11.9 million, and Miro's "Woman's Voice in the Night, Roissignol" from 1971 was estimated to sell for at least $6.8 million.

Works by Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and Rene Magritte fared reasonably well. A red-and-black Ernst sold to an Asian telephone bidder for $616,975.

A $1.5 million sculpture of black curtains by Magritte sold to London-based art adviser Bart van Son, who said his collector client "has the perfect spot for it at home."

"You don't see much sculpture by Magritte, and it's a marvelous piece," Mr. Van Son added afterward.

Sculptures by Alberto Giacometti largely fell like dead weights at Christie's sale, though. Giacometti has had a mixed performance at auctions lately, and he didn't weather his market test well Tuesday. Of his eight examples up for bid, only four found takers—including a 1956 mustard-colored "Woman of Venice II," that sold for $15.4 million, over its $13.6 million low estimate.

Giacometti's gray portraits and his bronze sculpture of a spindly waving "The Hand" went unsold. The piece was expected to sell for at least $17 million.

Among the other unsold offerings was a Piet Mondrian that was expected to sell for at least $8.5 million—collectors said it had condition problems—and a Chaim Soutine was expected to sell for $2 million or more. The Chaim Soutine stalled at $950,000.

After the sale, Amsterdam collector Matthÿs Erdman said Christie's set estimates that appeared too high, particularly for some material that looked mediocre compared to Sotheby's BID -1.02% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE ^$39.79 -0.41 -1.02% June 26, 2014 12:37 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 432,844 P/E Ratio 18.69 Market Cap $2.77 Billion Dividend Yield 1.00% Rev. per Employee $576,249 40.2540.0039.7539.5010a11a12p1p2p3p 06/24/14 Christie's 'Bumpy' Sale Anchor... 06/23/14 Dueling Bidders Push Up Trophy... 06/20/14 Checker Cabs Come to Brooklyn More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position offerings the night before.

"People go for trophies, and I think Christie's had trouble getting their prices right," Mr. Erdman said. "Even in this market, you can't get away with everything."

Christie's Chief Executive Steven Murphy said the house had a "bumpy night" and that his staff would look harder at their estimates moving forward. But Mr. Murphy said he didn't think the sale portended a downturn in the market overall.

"The masterpieces still flew," he said.

Next week, both houses are slated to conduct sales of contemporary art in London.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "The Collections | The Top 10 Attractions at Design Miami/Basel" @tmagazine

The Collections | The Top 10 Attractions at Design Miami/Basel

Studio Swine’s “Hair Highway.”

The Design Miami/Basel fair — the annual European companion to Design Miami in Basel, Switzerland — has a single objective: facilitating the sale of expensive design objects to wealthy collectors. Yet much like its neighbor, Art Basel, the show can also serve as a resource for enthusiasts and curious window shoppers, who come to see and enjoy the works on view, or survey what’s happening in design now (lots of experimentation with everyday materials, apparently). Without the placards or checklists one would normally find in a gallery or museum, though, it would have been entirely possible for non-experts to meander in and out of the fair’s 50-something booths this year without knowing for sure what’s old and what’s new, or which pieces represent real breakthroughs in materials and process. There were many more novel contemporary works on view than ever before, balancing out the usual glut of 20th-century icons, but it wasn’t necessarily obvious unless you scoured the $30 show catalog.

For example, I nearly walked right past what turned out to be my favorite thing in the entire show, which ended Sunday: a series of furnishings and accessories made from resin-encased human hair by the little-known London designers Studio Swine, who created it during a five-month residency with Pearl Lam Galleries in China. The gallery’s assistant happened to point out the project to me after I grilled her about another new piece by the young duo, a cabinet made from aluminum foam. Similarly, it took some persistence to learn that a group of intricate gold-wire necklaces at Caroline Van Hoek were by a 23-year-old newcomer (Hermien Cassiers), and that almost all the works in Gallery Fumi’s booth were previously unseen experiments by emerging talents — including Studio Markunpoika’s trio of vases made by gluing together blocks of pencils and turning them on a lathe. Listed here are 10 new projects by up-and-coming designers that, based on six or seven hours spent digging around Design Miami/Basel and pestering people, we figured were worth a closer look.

Oliver LangStudio Swine’s curio cabinets.

Studio Swine at Pearl Lam
Building on a process they used to make eyeglasses a few years back, the London newcomers’ “Hair Highway” pieces are made from resin embedded with dip-dyed human hair, sourced from the world’s largest hair marketplace in Shandong Province. The designers created the series during a five-month residency with the gallery in Shanghai. The young Royal College of Art graduates also created these elaborate curio cabinets during their stay, which debuted during the show as well — they’re made from industrial foamed aluminum meant to evoke Chinese scholar’s rocks.

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Oliver LangJeremy Wintrebert at Gallery Fumi

Jeremy Wintrebert at Gallery Fumi
For its inaugural appearance at Design Miami/Basel, Gallery Fumi brought a selection of mostly new works by mostly young designers. I was advised to keep an eye on the Paris-based glass artist Jeremy Wintrebert, creator of these mouth-blown “Cloud” lamps, who will have both a solo show with Fumi and a commissioned installation at the Victoria and Albert museum during the London Design Festival.

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Oliver LangStudy O Portable at Gallery Fumi

Study O Portable at Gallery Fumi 
Another favorite at Fumi was this table by this London duo, who normally make sculptural jewelry and housewares but had scaled their Fuzz process — which involves building up layers of ceramic resin around a geometric void — up to furniture size for the first time.

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Oliver LangKueng Caputo at Salon 94

Salon 94
The New York art gallery was another newcomer to the fair; it cherry-picked a few dozen quasi-functional pieces from its roster of talents, including lights by Andy Coolquitt and a new marbled console and dining table by the hip Swiss design-art duo Kueng Caputo.

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Oliver LangValentin Loellmann at Galerie Gosserez

Valentin Loellmann at Galerie Gosserez
Galerie Gosserez devoted its entire booth to the work of the 31-year-old German designer, who seems to be coming into his own as of late: his gawky, lumpy furnishings have taken a more elegant, less contrived turn, like the new Fall-Winter cabinet, which pairs an organic black frame with sleek, Scandinavian-style oak panels.

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Oliver LangChristopher Schanck at Johnson Trading Gallery

Christopher Schanck at Johnson Trading Gallery
New York’s Johnson Trading Gallery focused on bringing the work of this Detroit talent, who hires local makers to produce his foam shelves and tables skinned in aluminum foil, to an international audience. Particularly novel was a piece that fused his foil process with an earlier experiment in chemically eroded wall mirrors.

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Oliver LangAnton Alvarez at Design at Large

Anton Alvarez at Design at Large
For his graduate thesis in 2012, Alvarez invented a technique to bind chunks of wood together with resin-soaked thread by passing them through a kind of spinning hoop. For Design Miami/Basel’s new Design At Large showcase, curated by Dennis Freedman, Alvarez unveiled the first batch of pieces he’s been making with a supersized version of the machine that he created this spring.

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Oliver LangTomás Alonso at Victor Hunt Gallery

Tomás Alonso at Victor Hunt Gallery
In the London designer’s latest series, tables and tabletop accessories made from various types of marble lock together comfortably thanks to simple grooves cut into their surfaces.

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Oliver LangBrynjar Siguroarson

Brynjar Siguroarson
For a solo show at Galerie Kreo earlier this year, Siguroarson created wooden furniture embellished with a rope-knotting technique he learned from a shark hunter while traveling in the tiny Icelandic town of Vopnafjordur, along with local materials like leather, fur, and fishing lures.

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Oliver LangBenjamin Graindorge at Ymer & Malta

Benjamin Graindorge at Ymer & Malta
The French gallery invited young designers to revisit marquetry for its presentation; Graindorge teamed up with the Parisian master craftsman Yves Josnan to create a table with a veneer comprising 2,000 pieces of 17 different types of wood.

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George Lindemann Journal - "A Shadow Market at Art Basel" @nytimes By SCOTT REYBURN

Buyers gathering last week at the opening of Art Basel. Credit Niels Ackermann for The New York Times

BASEL, Switzerland — Art Basel, the world’s pre-eminent fair devoted to modern and contemporary works, opened its doors to V.I.P.s on Tuesday. But by then plenty of business had already been done by many of the 285 exhibiting dealers. Hundreds of thousands of digital images had been emailed to collectors, advisers and curators, giving them the opportunity to reserve or even buy works before the official opening of the event in Switzerland.

“Jpeg bombing,” as we might call it, has subtly changed the dynamic of Art Basel and other contemporary fairs. Back in the mid-2000s, during the last contemporary art boom, Armani-clad collectors would actually run into V.I.P. openings, desperate to have first dibs on the latest available works from the studios of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and other fashionable artists.

No one was running into the preview of the 45th edition of Art Basel. To be sure, there was a big enough crowd of perma-tanned “First Choicers” gathered in front of the fair’s two-story exhibition hall in Messeplatz, but when the doors opened at 11 a.m., these V.I.P.s weren’t breaking into much more than a purposeful stroll. What’s the point of running when so many of the most desirable works have been reserved or presold?

“It is irritating,” said the New York-based art adviser Judith Selkowitz. “You fly for eight hours, schlep round the fair, see something beautiful, and then are told, ‘No, it’s sold.”’

A straw poll of some of Ms. Selkowitz’s fellow New York advisers, who buy for private collectors and museums, said that pre-selling on the basis of jpegs has become routine in the run-up to Art Basel, and confirmed works they bought this year.

Amy Cappellazzo, formerly the co-head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department and the co-founder of the recently formed Art Agency Partners, said she had pre-bought two works, including one for more than $1 million; Lisa Schiff, founder of Outset art advisers, had bought 10 pieces priced in the $20,000 to $50,000 range; Todd Levin, a former adviser to the hedge fund manager Adam Sender, had bought six, ranging from $150,000 to more than $2 million, with others put on reserve; Jonathan Binstock, an art adviser at Citi Private Bank, had bought one work for between $300,000 and $500,000.

Art Basel has the reputation for being the fair for which dealers keep their best works. It’s also one of the most expensive, with some exhibitors paying more than $150,000 for their booths, transport, client entertaining and other costs. Many dealers try to defray the costs of this weeklong fair by finding buyers in advance for their most desirable pieces. These are either sold beforehand, or, more typically, put on reserve for a client who then confirms the sale, subject to viewing, within a set time-period at the fair itself. Mr. Levin, for example, turned nine reserves into sales at the preview, including a 1971 Frank Stella “Polish Village” wall piece, priced at $500,000 to $600,000.

“‘First Choice’ V.I.P. access is no longer the priority as most of the major pieces at fairs are bought in advance,” said the London-based collector Kamiar Maleki, who buys works by younger artists, and who arrived at Art Basel on Thursday. “Before you would go to Art Basel and find interesting young artists the moment you arrived and had the ability to purchase them then and there,” he said. “But still, nothing beats coming to the fair.”

Dealers have always notified clients about the works they’re taking to fairs. But now, in the age of the high resolution jpeg, buyers of the latest contemporary works, if not of six-figure Stellas or seven-figure Picassos, have the confidence to make financial decisions based on photographs. The challenge for exhibitors at Art Basel is to make the most of digital marketing, while at the same time encouraging collectors and advisers to visit them at their booth.

The New York dealer Marianne Boesky typified the new dynamic in operation at Art Basel. She brought six new paintings by Donald Moffett, one of her gallery’s most sought-after artists, priced at $40,000 to $50,000 each. Two were bought by an American collector just before the fair; two were reserved and became confirmed sales when the clients visited the booth; the remainder were still available at the time of writing.

“We like to get reserves,” said Ms. Boesky. “So much happens in the lead up to the fair, and yet we also want people to have surprises, to have an experience. There’s no art emergency.”

Paintings dominated the advance and in-person sales at this year’s Art Basel, as they have done at the most recent contemporary art auctions. Collectors were impressed by the fair’s envelope-pushing “14 Rooms” exhibition devoted to performance art, but what they actually wanted to buy were big rectangles of paint that could be instantly recognized. And they were buying plenty of them.

The 1986 Andy Warhol pink “fright wig” self-portrait, priced in the mid $30-millions and sold to an American collector by the New York dealer Per Skarstedt, ranked as one of the most valuable sales at an art fair in recent years. A red and white 1997 abstract by Gerhard Richter found a buyer at the booth of Dominique Levy, another New York dealer, priced at about $6 million.

The American artist Wade Guyton is one of the hottest names in the auction market at the moment. No fewer than five different Art Basel exhibitors offered and sold versions of one of his large black 2013 Epson-printed abstracts, priced at $350,000 each.

The success of Mr. Guyton, Christopher Wool and the younger “Instagram” generation of abstract painters seems to be encouraging other artists in different media to start painting.

The Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy has an international reputation based on his provocative figure sculptures. Now he’s turned from three to two dimensions. “WS, Dior,” a swirly colorful 2014 abstract with elements of fashion-magazine collage, was an early confirmed sale at the booth of Hauser & Wirth, priced at $950,000. The same London, New York and Zurich dealer also sold three paintings of mask-like heads by the American sculptor Thomas Houseago, tagged at $220,000 each.

The Swiss neo-Dada sculptor Urs Fischer was represented by 2014 “TBD” abstracts, painted over photographs, at the booth of the London dealer Sadie Coles. They were sold at $600,000 each, according to www.artmarketmonitor.com.

What is it about painting? Wealthy people today are willing to pay hundreds of thousands for works in a medium that a medieval artist like Giotto would have recognized. Do they find an art form with historical roots a more reassuring investment? Or is it just that big colorful paintings really look great in a jpeg?

George Lindemann Journal - "Using Artists to Sell Condos in Miami and New York" @ nytimes by JULIE SATOW

With cities like New York and Miami in the midst of another luxury condominium boom, developers seem to be tripping over one another in the scramble to announce their latest projects, and to stand out from the pack, they are locked in an escalating game of one-upmanship.

In a market where amenities like golf simulators and children’s playrooms barely raise a well-manicured eyebrow, the stakes are high. Add to this the fact that developers are asking buyers to shell out upward of $10 million for apartments that are, in many cases, still just a dirt pile on the ground, and they have no choice but to bring the razzle-dazzle.

Increasingly, the trick they are most often pulling out of their collective hat is art, with a capital A.

In Miami, for example, the developer of a beachfront condominium on Collins Avenue has commissioned a sculptor, whose pieces have sold for more than $500,000, to create original works for every buyer in the building. Another Miami developer has hired the painter and Academy Award-nominated director Julian Schnabel to design a sales center for its condominium, with rose-colored stucco and sawtooth lamps. In MidtownManhattan, a developer is making a pointed effort to stand out by placing a permanent 40-story LED light installation on the building’s facade, while others have taken to hiring art consultants just as they would architects and construction companies.

“There is a very strong art market right now, with a much more diverse and large collector base than at any other time I can remember,” said Yvonne Force Villareal, a founder of the nonprofit Art Production Fund. She and a business partner, Doreen Remen, recently started Culture Corps, a for-profit art consulting business that advises real estate developers. The expanded art collector base has resulted in more buyers of high-end condos wanting artwork to be part of the experience of shopping for a new home.

“Those who invest in high-end luxury homes also tend to have a strong knowledge of art,” said Helidon Xhixha, an Albanian-born artist who has shown his work at Art Basel Miami Beach, and who recently sold a piece titled “The Wall” to a private art collector for more than $540,000. The developers Property Markets Group and S2 Development hired Mr. Xhixha to create sculptures tailored to each buyer at Muse, a 68-unit condominium in the Sunny Isles neighborhood of Miami.

While some may consider it selling out for artists to create pieces as part of a condominium marketing effort, Mr. Xhixha said, “I do not see this as over-commercializing my art. On the contrary, I see a collaboration between buyer and artist.” Mr. Xhixha added that an apartment tower filled with his pieces “will be like having my very own private museum.”

For the Chetrit Group and Clipper Equity, the developers converting the former Flatotel at 135 West 52nd Street into 109 condo units, “we wanted to create something that gave the building an identity, that gave us some notoriety,” said Raphael De Niro, a broker at Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, who is representing the building. “People like to be able to talk about their building and have others know it, for people to feel they live somewhere unique.” The developers hired Thierry Dreyfus, the lighting designer who lit up the Grand Palais in Paris and the Château de Versailles, to create the 423-foot installation that will be placed inside a casing attached to the front of the building.

The commingling of art and real estate has a long, established history, beginning with the cathedrals of Europe, which commissioned religious art. The Medici family in Italy hired artists to create works for their many estates, while in modern times, art has played a role in places like the Seagram Building, with its famed tapestry by Pablo Picasso. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that in this era, which some have termed the new Gilded Age, the worlds of art and real estate have once again begun to merge.

Mr. Schnabel, who created the interiors of the Gramercy Park Hotel and built Palazzo Chupi, a pink condominium in the West Village, is no stranger to this connection. “The idea of living with art is a good thing, not necessarily a scam,” he told me recently. “Obviously, when something is popular they can turn that into something trendy, but it has a historical precedent.”

Mr. Schnabel is designing the sales center — “a terrible term, can’t we say building?” — for the Brickell Flatiron, a 710-foot triangular-shaped skyscraper underway in Miami. The center — the developers prefer the word “gallery” — will have Mr. Schnabel’s paintings and furniture, as well as a fireplace. It will “look like a living room,” Mr. Schnabel said. “It will be very different than other sales offices, where they look like you are walking into a bank, with cold marble, a lot of glass, very corporate.”  

There are clear benefits to collaborating with artists, but the artists can also be unpredictable. Mr. Schnabel, for instance, repeatedly declined to be interviewed about the project, despite cajoling from the developers who are paying his wages. And when he and I did finally connect, he was far less interested in talking about the condominium than about his new exhibit opening in October at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, “Café Dolly: Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen.”

While art is playing a critical role in the marketing of ultraluxury real estate, it is by no means the only strategy developers are employing. At One Riverside Park, the developer, the Extell Development Company, has partnered with the company Musion, which created the hologram of Tupac Shakur that appeared onstage at the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Musion created a hologramof One Riverside Park, with images of the floor plans and the surrounding neighborhood.

But some developers, like Francis Greenburger, the chairman of Time Equities, is skeptical of marketing gimmicks. “Like those mood movies — why would you make a movie that has nothing to do with the building?” he said, referring to the $1 million film commissioned by the developer Harry Macklowe to market his skyscraper 432 Park Avenue. “Maybe it has worked, but for me, it is a distraction. It isn’t what selling an apartment is all about.”

Still, Mr. Greenburger has plenty of marketing strategies of his own. At the sales office for 50 West Street, his new condominium in the financial district, a curved projection wall features 180-degree images, taken by drones, of different elevations from the building, allowing buyers to see their potential views. And there is a piece of a curved glass curtain wall that will wrap around the building.

While the efforts may be gimmicky, they may also work. At 135 West 52nd Street, the building will not only be draped in an enormous light installation, but will also have a sales office featuring purple mohair walls and a V.I.P. room for prospective buyers of the penthouses. “Once you step into the V.I.P. room, you are entering a different strata,” said Mr. De Niro, the son of the actor Robert De Niro and himself no stranger to V.I.P. treatment.

George Lindemann Journal - "Car Parts, Guitars and Wall Art at Art Basel" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Early hours at the Swiss art fair Clara Tuma for The Wall Street Journal

Tap tap. Bang bang. What does a frothy contemporary art market sound like? A construction site.

Walking through the vast warren of art-filled booths at Art Basel, the Swiss art fair that closes Sunday, shoppers at the VIP preview Wednesday could hear nails regularly being hammered into booth walls—a sign that dealers had sold everything on display and were hanging up fresh pieces for sale.

"Every year, we come into this fair thinking it can't get better than last year, and then it does," said dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who sold out his booth within the fair's opening hours Tuesday—including "Folk Thing Zero," a $2.3 million Georg Baselitz statue of a hulking blue man. "The art keeps getting bigger and selling faster."

After a blistering season of New York auctions, collectors descended on this fair with a feeding-frenzy feeling that they would need to shop quickly—and be willing to splurge—if they wanted to take home any of the roughly 14,000 works on offer. Miami art adviser Lisa Austin said her client, Miami collector David Martin, vied for seven pieces during the VIP preview Tuesday but bought only two because the rest had already sold.

Matthew Armstrong, art adviser to New York billionaire financier Donald Marron, said he typically expects to see a swath of brand-new pieces at Basel. But this time around he noticed more artworks that had been created a few years ago but were already coming back onto the market—a clue that the works' original owners may be seeking quick profits by reselling them through galleries now. As a result, the fair occasionally had a didn't-I-see-that-before vibe. "It's a moderately contemporary fair," he joked.

Whatever their budgets, the 86,000 people expected to attend Art Basel will all be on the lookout for the latest art developments. Here, a few early trends:

VROOM VROOM

Years ago, Richard Prince caused a stir by painting car hoods and hanging them, like canvases, on the wall. This year, Basel purred with pieces created from all sorts of car parts, from batteries to bumpers to windshield wipers that still swished.

Rob Pruitt transformed a miniature refrigerator into a Carmen Miranda-like figure by topping it with a pair of painted tires and tucking plastic fruit in the center hole so that it evoked a towering hat. One of the more elaborate examples is Josephine Meckseper's assembly-line installation that featured several tires balanced atop a silvery conveyor belt sitting beside a pair of TV screens broadcasting a 12-minute montage of car commercials. Ms. Meckseper's gallery, Andrea Rosen, said an art foundation had put a hold on the 2009 work, "Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow it Down." It was priced at $220,000.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

The fair's playful atmosphere was also reinforced by a suite of artworks made from, or about, musical instruments. Performance art duo Prinz Gholam embedded a video of themselves playing a guitar into the soundhole of one of the artist's childhood guitars, which was covered in Disney stickers. It sold to a European collector for around $16,300.

New York's Pace Gallery devoted much of its booth to an orchestra's worth of lumpen soft violins and towering blue sculptures of drums and clarinets by Claes Oldenburg, which the gallery said were selling briskly.

Over at New Delhi's Gallery SKE, artist Navin Thomas salvaged a group of trumpets in Bangalore and used them like speakers to blare his recordings of chirping tree frogs. The gallery said the artist is interested in "electroacoustic ecology," which means he uses urban scrapyard items to remind people about the nature they may be leaving behind. The work, "The Fruit of Some Unknown Tree," was priced around $20,000.

BUY ONE, BUY ALL

In a season where collectors are seeking wall-power art, more galleries were spotted offering multiple, smaller works by artists arranged in huge grids—some of which could be bought individually or in various sets. Singapore conceptual artist Heman Chong at Singapore Tyler Print Institute offered up his $4,000 painted book covers on their own or as a set. Günter Förg's wall of colorful abstracts, which had titles like "Mr. Green" and "Mr. Brown," were priced at $7,300 apiece, or $24,500 for a quartet.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz's nine still-life scenes, which were inspired by a visit to Paul Cézanne's studio, could be bought individually for around $10,000. But Karen Marks of Howard Greenberg Gallery said collectors at the fair preferred to buy them in trios. "Grids are cool," Ms. Marks added. "Collectors can get interactive by choosing how many they want and how to hang them. It gives them a chance to get involved."

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

George Lindemann "Jeff Koons Retrospective To Open at the Whitney" @wsj by ELLEN GAMERMAN

Photos: The Artwork of Jeff Koons

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'Loopy' by Jeff Koons © Jeff Koons/Whitney Museum of American Art

In recent days, Jeff Koons worked on installing a huge topiary at Rockefeller Center, promoted an H&M partnership that features his famed balloon dog on a new handbag and appeared naked in Vanity Fair.

If the most expensive living artist at auction has always embraced publicity, he's got it in a bear hug now as he prepares for next Friday's opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Jeff Koons: A Retrospective." It is the 59-year-old's first major museum exhibit in New York. The show marks some milestones for the Whitney, too: the museum's biggest-ever single-artist exhibition, its last show before opening in a new downtown location next year and its most expensive solo retrospective to date.

The artist's auction performance—led by the 2013 sale of "Balloon Dog (Orange)" for a record $58.4 million at Christie's—has never been stronger, with his annual average lot price this year at $2.4 million, according to Artnet. In 2014, he has sold more than he ever has at auction by value—upwards of $112 million, Artnet said.

From his balloon dogs to oil paintings, Jeff Koons is enjoying unmatched success in the contemporary art world. Ahead of his first-ever New York retrospective at the Whitney Museum, WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Tanya Rivero on Lunch Break to explain why Mr. Koons is today's most expensive living artist. Photo: Getty

What explains such prices? Fans of the artist point to his ability to push the boundaries of the art world—as he has done with his well-known knack for marketing his own work—as well as his mastery of art history and his sixth sense for finding the next big idea in popular culture. It helps that the art is so accessible: Instead of out-there performances or bewildering installations, he creates gem-colored paintings and seductively shiny sculptures inspired by inflatable toys, sex, cartoons and the like.

"If you look at various aspects of Jeff's career, whether it's his relationship to kitsch and popular culture or his use of technology in fabrication or the way that he thinks about a perfect replication—in each of these areas he's moved the stakes out in the field," said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney show's curator. "He's just done so many things to change the parameters that art is happening in, even though his work is somewhat traditional."

Over the decades, a cadre of powerful dealers has helped bankroll expensive works by Mr. Koons, whose career has been bolstered by a handful of influential collectors purchasing his works by the dozen. While detractors have never been shy about calling Mr. Koons a master of hype, his biggest backers have been committed to him since the 1980s.

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Jeff Koons is the most expensive living artist at auction. Getty Images

A former Wall Street commodities broker, Mr. Koons employs nearly 130 people in his New York studio. He asks them to sign non-disclosure agreements to protect intellectual property and trade secrets around the art and has his employees handle the labor while he focuses on bigger concepts, former staffers say.

"People have a concept of how an artist works—they imagine Jackson Pollock pouring paint over a canvas, they definitely don't imagine a man in an office in a suit thinking up ideas," said New York artist and former Koons studio assistant Jaclyn Santos. "To him, it's not about making a work physically, it's about making the idea."

Mr. Koons was unavailable for an interview. A representative from his studio said the artist is involved in every detail of a work's execution.

His raw materials and construction methods are famously expensive. For certain stainless steel sculptures, fabricators in Germany created an alloy with special reflective qualities. He set up a stone milling facility in Pennsylvania for his granite works. He has involved experts like Bavarian wood carvers and a Nobel-laureate physicist, and used technology found everywhere from hospitals to Hollywood.

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'Metallic Venus' by Jeff Koons © Jeff Koons/Whitney Museum of American Art

"There is this whole ecosystem within his organization and outside it, working together to make all of this possible," said Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Bits and Atoms. Mr. Gershenfeld, who has worked with the Koons studio on developing custom hardware and software for 3D models, said some technology he has developed through the collaboration likely will be used commercially.

In her catalog essay for the Whitney show, Artforum editor-in-chief Michelle Kuo wrote that the fabrication of some of Mr. Koons's works has become so technologically complex, production standards for his art in some cases now exceed those found in the aerospace industry or the military.

The artist has been open to unusual business arrangements. Recently, heappeared in a promotional video for the Oceana Bal Harbour, a luxury condo near Miami set to open in 2016. Residents of the roughly 240-unit development will share ownership of two Koons sculptures the developer bought for about $14 million. One of the works, "Pluto and Proserpina," will appear in the Whitney show, with the condo development credited as the owner. Real-estate billionaire Eduardo Costantini, who is spearheading the development, said the works by Mr. Koons were a natural choice given his "very profound identity" as a global artist.

Greek industrialist Dakis Joannou owns close to 40 pieces by Mr. Koons, eight of which he loaned to the exhibit. The art world's devotion to Mr. Koons ultimately comes down to his talent, Mr. Joannou said, adding that he was fascinated by the artist from the start. "I saw in him a man with very ambitious ideas, a man who had huge work," he said. "He has absolutely no limits in achieving his ideas."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal - "At Art Basel, Works With a Museum Presence" @nytimes by Carol Vogel

BASEL, Switzerland — In an old market hall adjacent to the cavernous center where Art Basel, the gold standard of contemporary art fairs, is taking place, there is a happening unlike anything ever staged here. Called “14 Rooms,” it consists of 14 mini-performances created by artists including Marina 

BASEL, Switzerland — In an old market hall adjacent to the cavernous center where Art Basel, the gold standard of contemporary art fairs, is taking place, there is a happening unlike anything ever staged here. Called “14 Rooms,” it consists of 14 mini-performances created by artists including Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst and Yoko Ono, each secreted in a small space behind mirrored doors. Open one door, and there’s a Marina Abramovic look-alike naked and astride a bicycle seat, arms outstretched. In another, identical twins sit in front of identical spot paintings by Mr. Hirst.

“Performance art is usually at the periphery, so why not put it front and center?” said Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1 in New York, who organized the project with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a director of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London. “It’s a temporary museum. Nothing here is for sale.”

But next door at Art Basel, almost everything is. As big and boisterous as ever, with 285 galleries from 34 countries participating, this fair is still a magnet for the contemporary art world. Spotted at Tuesday’s V.I.P. opening were big-money collectors like Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire; Daniel S. Loeb, the activist hedge fund manager and Sotheby’s new board member; Mitchell P. Rales, the Washington industrialist, and his wife, Emily; Jerry I. Speyer, chairman of the Museum of Modern Art; and Daniel Brodsky, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his wife, Estrellita, an independent curator. Few artists ever make an appearance at art fairs but Oscar Murillo, the Colombian-born painter, did.

Last month, $2.2 billion worth of art changed hands at the big auctions in New York. The strength of those sales affected everything about this year’s fair, from the higher prices to the choice of art. So have museum exhibitions. “Collectors are driven by institutional context,” the dealer David Zwirner said. Prominently displayed in his booth is a shiny blue stainless-steel sculpture of a dolphin by Jeff Koons, whose retrospective is opening this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Priced at $5 million, it sold on Tuesday to a collector from China, Mr. Zwirner said. His booth also features paintings by the South African-born Marlene Dumas, who has a traveling show opening at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in September; and canvases by Gerhard Richter, who is the subject of an exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel.

Mr. Zwirner wasn’t the only dealer touting works with a museum presence. Dominique Levy, a New York dealer, had a 1964 black-and-white comic book drawing by Roy Lichtenstein that was in a show at the Morgan Library & Museum four years ago. It sold for an undisclosed price to an American collector.

“Sotheby’s and Christie’s went through a record cycle, and that gives people confidence,” Mr. Zwirner said. “Basel is our biggest weapon, if we want to go mano a mano with the auction houses.”

Brett Gorvy, chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, was here, too. Prices, he said, are “informed by the auctions.” “Collectors have sticker shock, yet they’re pulling the trigger,” he added, using as an example one of Andy Warhol’s “fright wig” self-portraits from 1986 that several people said had belonged to Thea Westreich, the New York collector and dealer. It was bought by another New York collector for around $34 million, according to Per Skarstedt, the dealer who sold it. In addition to examples of Warhol and Bacon — both top sellers at auction last month — Mr. Koons, whose sculptures had adorned the covers of both Sotheby’s and Christie’s contemporary art auction catalogs, was ubiquitous. The Gagosian Gallery is featuring “Hulk (Wheelbarrow),” a giant green painted bronze Hulk carrying a wheelbarrow filled with live flowers; it is priced at $4 million. Almine Rech, another dealer, brought two “Gazing Ball” sculptures made this year, one priced at $2 million and the other at $1.6 million. Both sold to European collectors, she said.

Younger trendy artists are also represented here, with paintings by Jacob Kassay, Joe Bradley and Mark Bradford, many of which were spoken for.

One young artist determined to control his market is Wade Guyton, the American painter who produces canvases on inkjet printers. Last month, protesting an enormous price asked for one of his paintings at auction, he made copies of the 2005 image from the original disk and posted them on Instagram. (Prices for his paintings were stronger than ever anyway, with one bringing nearly $6 million.) Undeterred, for Art Basel he gave each of the five dealers he works with — Frederich Petzel from New York, Gió Marconi in Milan, Galerie Gisela Capitain from Cologne, Galerie Francesca Pia from Zurich and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris — a black painting, all the same size and all made from the same disk. They each had a $350,000 price tag, and all of them sold either on Tuesday or before.

In an email, Mr. Guyton explained that he instructed the dealers to hang his paintings at identical heights, “so each time you walk up to one, you would have a similar physical encounter.” He added: “On the one hand, it is a way to satisfy all my galleries simultaneously and fairly. It’s also a way of talking about the repetitive experience of seeing similar artworks throughout a fair and embracing that aggressively by showing almost identical works.”

For a few years now, people have complained that dealers have been selling or reserving work by sending collectors images of what will be on view in Basel well before the fair opens. That discussion grew louder this week. “Preselling should be forbidden,” said Philippe Ségalot, a private New York dealer whose antics in years past — including hiring 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.

“If I had done that this year,” Mr. Ségalot said, “there would have been nothing to buy.”

Isabelle Collin Dufresne – known to the world as Andy Warhol's "superstar" Ultra Violet, died of cancer in New York City. She was 78.

Nearly four years ago, I interviewed Ultra Violet when she was in Miami Beach during Art Basel for the opening of a gallery featuring the works of photographer William John Kennedy, who frequently photographed Warhol.

Here is my 2010 interview with Ultra Violet:

srothaus@MiamiHerald.com

Ultra Violet, the Andy Warhol "superstar'' internationally known in the 1960s, demands more than her 15 minutes of fame.

"Today with the explosion of the media, the Internet, everybody has 15 minutes of fame. I'm trying to get 16 minutes, and it's very hard," she says. "Everybody has a camera, everybody has Facebook, everybody has a computer. If you can tell me how to get one more minute, let me know."

Ultra Violet -- born Isabelle Collin Dufresne 75 years ago in France -- is here from New York for Art Basel, showing off her own works and helping launch a KIWI Gallery retrospective of photographer William John Kennedy, who long ago captured images of UV, Warhol and Robert Indiana, whose iconic LOVE poster became a symbol of the '60s Pop Art movement.

In 1963, artist Salvador Dalí -- Ultra Violet's one-time mentor -- introduced her to ``this little woman, I thought."

"Her hair was weird: black rattail in the back, white on the top. It was a synthetic nylon wig. And that person, which I thought was a woman had a very strange voice," Ultra Violet recalls. "Anyway, Dalí introduced me, and he said, `This is Andy Warhol.'

"He was totally unknown then. Warhol said to me, `You are so beautiful, let's do a movie together.' I said when? He said tomorrow. Tomorrow, the next day, I went to The Factory [Warhol's New York studio], and this was the beginning of a very interesting era."

Among the photos on display at the KIWI Gallery off Lincoln Road: a series of Ultra Violet nudes shot by Kennedy almost a half-century ago.

"I have no regrets," she now says. "But this was the '60s and in the '60s everybody got undressed. In 2010, you do not get undressed. Not the right people. We were the right people."

UV says that during the sexual revolution, "the clothes would just fall off."

"But you know I'm a born-again Christian now and I don't take my clothes off," she adds.

Actually, UV wasn't totally nude in Kennedy's portraits. "I didn't want to be completely naked," she confides. "I needed something, so I [wore] one of his ties."

Kennedy, 80, now of Miami Beach, says this is the first major exhibition of his work.

His photographs are displayed full frame.