The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

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.”

 

April 4, 2012

“Is it the art or is it the hype?” I’ve been asked this question so many times it makes me ill. It always comes from those who don’t look at art and are trying to explain why they don’t buy it. In a skeptical tone they slip me this line on a regular basis. “Yes,” I tell them with a smile, “it’s all a fraud. These contemporary art stars are all phonies and fakes, it’s the fancy galleries promoting this stuff and you’re the smart one who figured it all out.” But what I’m thinking is, “Cretin, you don’t understand a damn thing about art.” But now even most art believers have to admit that parts of today’s art scene have indeed gone too far. Yet when I spelled it out for the world in my satire of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair last December, I was attacked by many insecure pundits, advisers and dealers who felt threatened by the words. But forgetting the whiners, it’s what everyone was and is still talking about. Just last Sunday 60 Minutes ran a Morley Safer-hosted exposé bashing the fair, highlighting the hype in order to suggest that contemporary art is no more than a marketing circus. We can’t really blame old Morley Safer—he’s just another blowhard—but I was shocked to see one respected dealer, Tim Blum of Blum and Poe in Los Angeles, play right into Mr. Safer’s canard. “We’re from Hollywood, this is theater, only theater,” he said when asked about art prices. “It’s the wild west … competition is vicious … when the question of value comes up we drop the subject.” Mr. Blum misspoke—and that’s regrettable because, let’s face it, when the hype booms louder than the art, the art world invites the philistines right to its gates.

 

What bothers art world outsiders is the reality that everything exists within a context, and if they don’t understand the context, they jump to dismiss what they don’t understand. But what’s the matter with some hype? Most of today’s movie stars didn’t make it on their talent alone; they got the right role at the right time, then parlayed the hype. Would Julia Roberts have become a superstar without her breakthrough role in Pretty Woman? What about Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Liz Taylor in National Velvet? So why shouldn’t a visual artist benefit similarly by a breakthrough show, one “produced” by a smart dealer or curator in the right place at the right time? A film can be advertised and promoted; why not an artist and an exhibition? Fine art is often held to an unrealistic standard, a mistaken belief that there is such a thing as “pure” art that exists outside the context in which it’s created and exhibited. Great art is expected to somehow get by without great salesmanship, and great staging.

 

The artist Dan Colen is the perfect example of someone who has plenty of hype. He’s been created by his dealers at the massive Gagosian gallery, right? Might he just be the product of the “fashion of the moment” effect, the W magazine/Interview magazine scene, a leader of the pack of pretty boys who make big prices at auction? This may seem to be the case to some, but the truth is that he was always a good artist. I’ve followed his work for over eight years, long before he joined Gagosian. Even back when he was showing with the smaller gallery Peres Projects, it was clear to me that he was the standout talent of his peer group. His decision to show with Gagosian, the largest gallery in the world, may, in fact, have been a mistake: though he’s had many shows and sold a lot of work in the short term, his market may experience a severe hangover if there is too much work and the market feels saturated. He’s a real talent, though, and so he’ll probably weather the storm of overmarketing and overproduction. The hype that comes from mass marketing an artist is a double-edged sword: it’s a money-making short-term strategy, but it can kill the artist’s career if the work isn’t truly exceptional.

 

The other night I had the pleasure of discussing this topic with one of the top painters in the world, an American artist in his early 70s who has moved far beyond any hype that helped him along the way. I asked him why he has been so loyal to the gallery he’s been with for 20 years. He doesn’t need a gallery—he makes only 12 paintings a year and could sell them all easily even if he hung them in an IKEA for the weekend. By way of answering, he told me, frankly, that most artists are fearful of change. “Do you mean to tell me that at your age you still need to be handled and managed as if you were a child?” I asked. He smiled and said, “I just want to go to my studio and paint, I don’t want to be bothered with the rest of it.” Now, some artists are proactive; they have taken the marketing of their art into their own hands. Damien Hirst shows what he wants, where he wants and, whether you like it or not, he makes his own hype, with Bono and Jagger and sundry movie stars in tow. But most artists don’t play hardball. They stick with their dealers in the old-fashioned way, because they are conservative, or lazy or simply satisfied. I’m sure this will evolve as time goes on. Recently we have seen more artists changing galleries than ever before, though most of them end up joining the rosters of the few mega galleries. That is where they feel safe and secure.

 

Is switching to a mega gallery a sure-fire recipe for market success? Absolutely not. It can be a good career move—the vast majority of successful midcareer artists have stuck with their original galleries, but then again most of them have stagnated, in part because their new work, shown in the same old gallery, gets tiring after a while. But it can also result in overmarketing because the temptation to overproduce, using the generous production budget available, is too strong, so global demand gets oversupplied. The work ends up looking overhyped and oversold­—the hangover effect we see in the careers of so many artists who have bounced around several galleries.

 

Ultimately, the question of whether an artist’s success is the result of great work or great hype reminds me of the time many years ago when I attended a lecture by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the Q&A, trying to sound clever, I asked, “You often speak of the Platonic versus the Aristotelian views of the universe—are these two not contradictory?” Borges answered, “No, no, no, you do not understand—they are not contradictory, they are complementary!” The audience was hushed, a communal gasp was heard as if great words of wisdom had been spoken, but the real message was simple: the two views were necessary to complete the whole.

 

This is true for art and its context—they are complementary, not contradictory. Those who dismiss contemporary art as an overmarketed Ponzi scheme have missed this truth. Warhol and Dali were masters of hype, and that didn’t make their art less meaningful; nor was it the sole reason for their art’s success. Nothing is separable from its context, not even this article, but when the hype overshadows the art, it’s no surprise the skeptics have a field day.