Published: June 20, 2012

 

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

LeRoy Neiman in his Manhattan studio in 1996.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.

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

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

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

seditionart.com via Bloomberg

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

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

Harry Blain and Robert Norton - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

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

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

 

 Isaac Julien - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

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

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

Mat Collishaw artwork - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emerging Artists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watermark Tracer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

via bloomberg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The park and the Bass Museum.

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

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

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

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

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

Link: A well-deserved nod to the Bass

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

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

By Yuval Ofir (Yo Miami)

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: June 14, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

June 13, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Geri Allen, seated, and Carrie Mae Weems working on their show “Slow Fade to Black.”

By FELICIA R. LEE

Published: June 14, 2012

POINTING her camera, the artist Carrie Mae Weems lobbed directions. “A little more smoke!” and “Women, raise your mirrors!” she instructed the performers gathered recently in a black-box theater on the Lower East Side. Geri Allen, the jazz pianist and composer, sat nearby, scribbling notes.

 Ms. Weems, known for photography and film projects that plumb issues of race and gender, was filming the Persuasions, four men tricked out in purple suits, in a flirtatious encounter with three female singers in regal black turbans.

“Trust me, love me, feel me,” the men crooned.

“Can I trust you?” the women cooed back.

“What happened to ‘No, no, no’?” Ms. Weems asked.

“It sounds great,” Ms. Allen shouted from the sidelines. “Just do more!”

Ms. Allen and Ms. Weems were creating images for a multimedia show called “Slow Fade to Black,” set to have its premiere on Friday at Celebrate Brooklyn!, the Prospect Park summer festival of performing arts and film. Marrying Ms. Weems’s images (on three giant screens) to original music by Ms. Allen, the show is among the festival’s 32 mostly free events, which began last week with the reggae star Jimmy Cliff and will end in August with the country singer Lyle Lovett.

“Slow Fade” is an unusual first-time festival collaboration for two African-American artists who tend to inhabit separate citadels of culture: museums and galleries for Ms. Weems, and concert halls and clubs for Ms. Allen. For this project the two will be joined by the Grammy-winning members of Ms. Allen’s trio, Esperanza Spalding, a bassist and singer, and the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington.

Also part of the show are, among others, the tap dancer Maurice Chestnut; the singers Lizz Wright and Patrice Rushen; and Afro Blue, Howard University’s vocal jazz ensemble.

If the title “Slow Fade to Black” sounds familiar, it’s because it is the culmination of a project that began in 2010 and continued in 2011: a series of blurred, soft-focus photographs of famous black female performers like Eartha Kitt, Nina Simone and Marian Anderson. The title works in two ways, Ms. Weems said. The blurry photographs are a comment on the women’s receding from cultural prominence and the idea of a fade “to black” suggests a new generation of emerging black female artists. Many of the “Slow Fade” photographs will be projected while Ms. Wright sings on Friday. Ms. Allen composed a song to accompany the images.

“I first and foremost view this as an evening of music, centered on this idea of a woman’s journey, the span of a life,” Ms. Weems said recently as she and Ms. Allen dined in an Italian restaurant in the West Village.

“The journey is from your first feeling of emotion and love, the birth of your children, growing old,” she said. She and Ms. Allen are both in their 50s. They have known each other more than a decade and have worked together before.

Ms. Weems, tall and ebullient with a dash of curly hair, is perhaps best known for her 1990 project “Kitchen Table Series.” It deployed text and images to show a woman (Ms. Weems herself) sitting at the same kitchen table at various points in her emotional life.

More recently, her 2009 video project “Afro-chic” explored 1960s pop culture, concentrating on younger women. Ms. Weems’s 1995-96 project “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, is a layered work consisting of about 30 representations of African-Americans in the history of American photography. They are accompanied by text that explores the history from Ms. Weems’s perspective, creating a counternarrative to the way the images were often intended.

In the Celebrate Brooklyn! project, “the images will inform the performance,” said Ms. Allen, a soulful, post-bop pianist whom Ben Ratliff of The New York Times recently called “one of the more important jazz musicians of the last 25 years” and whose album “Flying Toward the Sound” made several “best of” lists for 2010. She is shorter and quieter than Ms. Weems, her face framed by locks.

While the overall structure of the show has been mostly sketched out, there will be plenty of improvisation as things get cooking, the women said. Sometimes the three screens will form a triptych or linger on Ms. Allen’s hands on the keyboard. Look for Ms. Allen and Ms. Rushen to perform a version of “Que Sera Sera” and for Ms. Allen’s contemporary arrangement of the spiritual “Oh, Freedom,” to be sung by Afro Blue. Images on the three screens will shift between video projections and the live action onstage.

The staged images of men and women that Ms. Weems created at the Lower East Side theater will be there too. They are intended as explorations of the nature of love, desire and female identity, examining women’s relationships to men, children and, most important, to themselves, she said. For example, the images show women looking at themselves and one another in mirrors or approaching a man who looks away.

“Will everyone in the audience pick up every nuance of the music or the images?” Ms. Weems asked. “Maybe not, but enough will, and we are excited about presenting this to an audience in Prospect Park.

“Geri is more introspective; I’m more visual and animated,” she continued. “I think those qualities are what we bring to the evening — the deep introspection on one hand, and this level of visual noise and visual sensuousness on the other.”

Ms. Weems, who is married and has an adult daughter, lives in Syracuse and Brooklyn. A single mother, Ms. Allen lives in New Jersey, with a hectic schedule that includes touring, caring for two teenagers (a third child is grown) and teaching music at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The women mostly worked apart after an initial residency at Mass MoCA last year to jump-start the project.

It helped that the two had collaborated before. In 2009 Ms. Weems created an art film called “Refractions: Flying Toward the Sound,” which explored Ms. Allen’s life as part of a larger look at women’s lives. The film uses Ms. Allen’s composition “Flying Toward the Sound,” a concert-length piano suite with pieces inspired by Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. Ms. Allen wrote the piece while on a Guggenheim fellowship. In turn, Ms. Weems’s film projections accompanied Ms. Allen’s concert performances of “Flying.”

“Slow Fade” was commissioned by Bric Arts Media Brooklyn, the festival producers, as part of a mission that includes bringing artists not usually associated with free festivals to Prospect Park, said Rachel Chanoff, the artistic director of Celebrate Brooklyn!

Ms. Allen and Ms. Weems have been established artists for years but they continue to come into their own. The first major museum retrospective of Ms. Weems’s work — some 225 photographs, videos and installations — begins on Sept. 21 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. It will travel to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

“In Weems’s video work the scores are an integral part, and this festival is a way for the viewer to have an immediate, all-sensory experience in an unexpected way,” said Kathryn Delmez, the curator of the Frist retrospective.

Ms. Allen, known for her collaborations, has worked with a glossy roster of musicians that includes Betty Carter, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden and Ravi Coltrane. Her new trio with Ms. Carrington, who is in her 40s, and Ms. Spalding, who is 27, showcases her with a younger generation. Ms. Carrington’s album “Mosaic” (with various artists, including Ms. Allen) was awarded the 2011 Grammy for best jazz vocal album of the year. Mr. Chestnut can be heard on the album “Geri Allen and Timeline Live, ” along with the bassist Kenny Davis and the drummer Kassa Overall, who will both perform on Friday.

Although “Slow Fade” begins through “the lenses of a black cultural experience, ultimately, it’s about the experiences of all women,” Ms. Weems said.

Mr. Chestnut, 28, speaking the other day, said, “I see it as just a celebration of this history — African-American jazz, tapping, as well as a tribute to women.”

At a recent rehearsal, at Ms. Allen’s suggestion, Ms. Weems read some Harriet Tubman quotations as part of the evening.

“I had no one to welcome me to this world of freedom,” Ms. Weems read in her husky, melodious voice.

Ms. Weems then told a story about how Tubman left her husband behind in one of her Underground Railroad excursions. Returning to find him with another woman, Ms. Weems said, Tubman simply asked the other woman to join her in escaping bondage.

Ms. Allen and Ms. Weems exchanged a knowing high five.

“Slow Fade to Black” is Friday night at 8 at the Prospect Park Bandshell, Prospect Park West and Ninth Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn; $3 suggested donation; (718) 683-5600, bricartsmedia.org.

Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times

Documenta 13 This sprawling exhibition in Kassel, Germany, includes “Doing Nothing Garden,” a composted landscape by the Chinese artist Song Dong. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: June 14, 2012

KASSEL, Germany — The longtime curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has a lot on her mind, and she has managed to wedge a remarkable amount of it into Documenta 13.

 

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Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times

A small painting by Etel Adnan. More Photos »

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Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times

One of the so-called Bactrian Princesses from Central Asia (2500-1500 B.C.). More Photos »

As artistic director of the latest version of this always overbearing international exhibition of mostly contemporary art, which is staged every four or five years in this drab industrial city in central Germany, Ms. Christov-Bakargiev has assembled an immense, unruly organism of a show. It is alternately inspiring — almost visionary — and insufferable, innovative and predictable, meticulous and sentimentally precious. I would not have missed this seething, shape-shifting extravaganza for the world, and I’d rather not see its like again, at least not on this dwarfing, imperious, self-canceling scale.

By now, it is almost tradition for Documenta to present more art than is possible to track down, much less absorb. The current effort spreads the work of some 200 artists and artists’ collectives from some 50 countries all over Kassel, starting at the Fridericianum, the regal Neo-Classical museum that has been the show’s heart since its inception in 1955. Ardently feminist, global and multimedia in approach and including works by dead artists and selected bits of ancient art, it provides visitors with paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos and, most of all, quite a number of impressive installation and performance pieces. Works involving sound or music of some kind are often especially outstanding.

Many efforts push, sometimes to a sophomoric degree, against the boundaries separating art and life while straining the limits of the exhibition format. Also on display are scientific projects by a quantum physicist and a geneticist, and an anger-management workshop, courtesy of an Australian artist, that you can sign up for. It is not clear how many more times we need to be reminded that anything can be considered art, but there you are. The larger point seems to be that Ms. Christov-Bakargiev is more interested in creativity in general than in art in particular.

This year the impossibility of seeing everything has been made official: The show has a distant outpost, with works by roughly 30 of its artists, in Kabul, Afghanistan. The country where much of the West has been at war for a decade is a recurring leitmotif in Kassel, as are the two world wars, the Vietnam War and other 20th-century conflicts.

The emphasis on the trauma of war is consistent with Ms. Christov-Bakargiev’s view of Documenta as a show born of trauma, expressed in an essay in one of the show’s three catalogs. It grew, after all, out of the ruins of World War II — Kassel was heavily bombed by the Allies — and was an attempt to bring Germany up to speed with modern art, both banishing and repressing the cultural darkness of Nazism.

Ms. Christov-Bakargiev seems more determined than even some of her predecessors to counter any notion of this show as a mere art update; she wants to reveal how art reflects and interacts with the world. Her effort is haunted by the violence of history mitigated by the solace of art and its creative processes and by the solidarity and sometimes bravery of artists.

She signals her intention to make a different kind of Documenta in the ground-floor galleries at the Fridericianum, which usually feature some sort of opening-act visual spectacle. This time they have been left nearly empty, devoted to “I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull),” an installation piece by the British artist Ryan Gander. Nothing more than an overhead ventilation system that blows a stiff, cooling breeze through the galleries, the piece is a very nervy, even arrogant opener, but the refreshing air and elegant spaces are hard to resist.

Soon enough, though, emptiness is superseded — in the rotunda space that is portentously called “The Brain” — by a dense array of art, artifacts, photographs and ephemera that highlight some of the themes and artworks to come, and is among the show’s best moments. Dachau, Hitler’s bathtub, the 1968 Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia, the crowds of the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square are alluded to.

Against these, Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings are glimpsed, along with examples of the objects depicted in them. We see a lone puppet, one of scores used by the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky in his “Crusades Cabaret,” a brilliant two-video marionette-musical consideration of early contact between the Arab and European cultures. (It is on view in the Neue Galerie, a short walk from the Fridericianum.)

In the rotunda, as throughout the exhibition, attention to the fine print is de rigueur. If you are wondering, for example, about a pleasantly derivative van Gogh-ish landscape from 2011, the label will tell you that it was made by Mohammad Yusuf Asefi, an Afghan artist who saved some 80 paintings in the National Museum in Kabul that were threatened by the Taliban prohibition of art depicting animals or humans. (He painted over these motifs with water-soluble paint.)

There are also actual examples of work that evaded destruction. One of the show’s most magnificent inclusions is a group of eight small, rare composite figurines, the so-called Bactrian Princesses from the Central Asian region around northern Afghanistan (2500-1500 B.C.). Roughly contemporary with Cycladic and Egyptian art, they are distinguished by delicate limestone faces and bulky, polychrome stone bodies cloaked with incised patterns that conjure rivers, plant life and intricately woven silks. They attest to art’s implacable ability to survive on sheer visual power (though portability helps too).

From here, the exhibition unspools through the Fridericianum, revising and resurrecting as it goes. Directly upstairs you’ll find the relatively unknown figurative tapestries from the late 1930s by Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970), a self-taught Swedish weaver, that vigorously protest, with color and verve, the rise of Fascism. Nearby, two walls are covered with small, winsome postcard-size paintings of apples or pears, one or two at a time, made between 1912 and the ’60s by Korbinian Aigner (1885-1966), a Bavarian village priest and botanist who, the label informs us, was sent to Dachau for speaking out against the Nazis.

Elsewhere in the building, the pulsating abstractions of Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, an Aboriginal artist in Australia born in 1959, are riveting, as are the packed expressionist drawings of the Egyptian artist Anna Boghiguian and the obsessively worked postapocalyptic paintings of the American artist Llyn Foulkes, who also exhibits — and over the next week or so sometimes plays — “The Machine,” a homemade drum kit festooned with old automobile horns.

Also not to be missed is Kader Attia’s “Repair From Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures,” a daunting installation that reflects on art, colonialism and body scarification in Africa but draws its main force from a set of large carved-wood busts depicting the horrific face wounds suffered by European soldiers in World War I. Gripping yet also illustrational, the piece exemplifies several archivelike works here. It also reflects the continuing hegemony of late-late Conceptualism — now extravagantly materialized and labor-intensive — over the international exhibition circuit.

Beyond the polemical intensity of the Fridericianum, the show loses coherence and often subsides into dross. There are terrible low points, like “Limited Art Project,” by the Chinese artist Yan Lei, a bit of endgame cynicism involving 360 fuzzily dead-in-the-water Photo Realist canvases that will be gradually converted to monochromes: Each day a few are spray-painted at a car factory near Kassel. They fill a looming space in the Documenta Halle, where their dreariness is somewhat ameliorated by a nearby gallery devoted to the small, stubbornly radiant abstractions that the Lebanese-American poet and writer Etel Adnan has made since the late 1950s.  

There are efforts that muster relatively stark presentations of facts, for which you are grateful, like the timeline explaining the plight of Western Saharan refugees in Algeria that the New York artist Robin Kahn has assembled with help from the heroic National Union of Women From Western Sahara, and is presenting along with a Bedouin-style tent in Karlsaue Park, which is dotted with installations and works displayed in small cottages.

Similarly, at the nearby Neue Galerie, the South African artist Zanele Muholi presents “Difficult Love,” a documentary video (made with Peter Goldsmid) that harrowingly illuminates the prejudice and frequent sexual violence endured by lesbians in her country. The life force evoked in these works becomes transcendent art in a dance-performance piece by the French choreographer Jérôme Bel, enacted by learning-disabled adults in a theater on the slightly seedy Königsplatz.

Several usual suspects do what they usually do in shows of this kind, only better. “Study for Strings,” a sound piece by the Scottish artist Susan Philipsz, unleashes a plaintive call-and-response of cellos at Kassel’s intercity railroad station, where William Kentridge, collaborating with Peter L. Galison, revives a style that had gone stale with “The Refusal of Time,” an engulfing fusion of video animation, sculpture and music.

Several less usual suspects, too, rise to the occasion. Also at the railroad station, the Indian artist Tejal Shah presents “Between the Waves,” a pair of mock-serious pseudo-mythological videos involving two women wearing unicorn horns and not much else. Among the show’s several Afghan artists, whose work is somewhat ghettoized in a former hospital behind the Fridericianum, a standout is Jeanno Gaussi, who was born in Kabul in 1973, left in 1978 and is based in Berlin; she presents an installation piece that centers on old family snapshots that she commissioned Ustad Sharif Amin, a Kabul artist, to render as vivid, folkish paintings.

On the manicured lawn at the mouth of the Karlsaue, “Doing Nothing Garden,” an undulant compost-heap hillock fuzzy with new weeds, by the Chinese artist Song Dong, erupts like a comic mirage. And the American artist Theaster Gates has converted a large old house near the Fridericianum into a resonant walk-in collage of recycled building materials punctuated with videos and occasional performances — the first of his efforts truly to justify the considerable buzz around his work.

Adjacent to Mr. Gates’s work, the British-born artist Tino Sehgal has orchestrated what is really the show’s beating heart, an immersive environmental-performance piece that places viewers in a nearly dark gallery among some 20 performers who sing, dance, clap, hum and talk, creating an electrifying aural-spatial experience of pure, unencumbered imagination in action.

Not unlike this piece, Documenta 13 is perhaps most effective as a disembodied state of mind. Ms. Christov-Bakargiev seems to have intended it to be the first of its kind in terms of its sheer porosity, the way it blends with the world. But its incomprehensible, viewer-defying vastness perpetuates an old model, the curator as all-seeing-god, on a disheartening scale. In this way, it seems as much a dying breed as a new start.

 

Documenta 13 is on view in Kassel, Germany, through Sept. 16; d13.documenta.de.