The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Tech entrepreneurs are starting to peer out from their hoodies and explore the art world, and dealers and museum boards couldn't be more thrilled. WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Lunch Break with a look at the new players, and the culture clash it's setting up with Wall Street's elite. Photo: Getty Images.

Next week, San Francisco will unveil a major public art installation using 25,000 energy-efficient lights to illuminate the city's Bay Bridge in countless abstract combinations.

The Bay Lights, set to run every night for the next two years, will also spotlight a new role for the area's tech entrepreneurs: patrons of the arts.

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Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

BETA TESTING Leo Villareal, a tech-world favorite, with his computer-assisted light sculpture that will illuminate San Francisco's Bay Bridge in abstract patterns every night for the next two years.

Created by artist Leo Villareal, the $8 million computer-assisted light sculpture has been financed by some high-profile tech donors including Yahoo YHOO +2.86%CEO Marissa Mayer and Internet power couple Mark and Alison Pincus. Mr. Villareal, who designed the bridge's light patterns using software he created, is also emblematic of a new breed of artist that is especially attractive to wealthy technology executives. A former researcher at Microsoft MSFT +0.61%co-founder Paul Allen's think tank in the early 1990s, Mr. Villareal weaves that tech background into his work.

"This was a whole I.T. job, which you wouldn't associate with a monumental piece of public art," Mr. Villareal said one chilly evening on a San Francisco pier as he tested the work with his laptop. Every time he stabbed at the keyboard through a hole in his glove, the lights rearranged across the bridge.

Around San Francisco, tech entrepreneurs who spent years building businesses and accumulating wealth are starting to peer out from under their hoodies and explore the art world. As the Internet industry matures, the people who helped make it happen are having children, buying houses and taking tentative steps into philanthropy—and now the art world. It's a lucrative emerging market that is gaining the attention of museums, dealers, consultants and other art-world heavyweights.

"Art comes between buying the Ferrari and getting the kids into college," said New York mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who added that he sees "tremendous potential" from tech entrepreneurs as they grow older.

As they have with risky and fast-growing startups, the new tech players are putting a distinctive spin on the art scene—both in the type of work they collect and the low-profile way they acquire it. Many tech collectors exploring the market, for instance, are seduced by works with a digital twist.

"An engineer will look at a photograph or video art in a way a banker couldn't—we think in ones and zeros, we think in terms of screens," said Trevor Traina, a 44-year-old collector of photography who sold his first tech company to Microsoft for more than $100 million.

Unlike on Wall Street, where a trophy canvas can work as a passport to highflying social circles, flaunting isn't part of the tech culture. "If you saw these people, you'd never guess that they have money—it's all about just being cool," said San Francisco dealer Chris Perez, who works with about 20 tech clients.

Two years ago, as a service largely to its growing base of tech clients, Christie's began shipping artworks to San Francisco ahead of the major modern and contemporary art sales, said Ellanor Notides, who runs the Christie's San Francisco office. She said tech clients are chasing pieces by market darlings like Gerhard Richter, whose work sold for more than $34 million at Sotheby's last year.

Lately, some art insiders have been buzzing that the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, Lucinda Southworth, is starting to buy art. (A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn't comment on executives' personal endeavors.) Tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen collects—including works by Robert Rauschenberg—as do tech venture capitalists Matt Cohler, who favors contemporary photography, and Jim Breyer, who owns pieces by emerging artists in China and Brazil.

Mr. Breyer, a board member of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, finds parallels between art and startups. He loves taking a chance on lesser-known talent and often visits galleries while traveling abroad on business. He particularly admires artists like Picasso who show the capacity to reinvent themselves. "It's a personal characteristic not only of the artists I gravitate to but the entrepreneurs," he said. (Mr. Breyer sits on the board of News Corp NWSA +1.04%., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.)

The new collectors' interests sometimes contrast with the more traditional tastes of tech pioneers before them: Oracle ORCL +1.18%CEO Larry Ellison buys centuries-old Japanese art. Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang hunts for leading examples of Chinese calligraphy. Microsoft's Mr. Allen collects masterpieces by blue-chip artists like van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

Now San Francisco museums are stepping up their pursuit of the tech industry, particularly as companies like Twitter, Pinterest and Dropbox settle in new offices in the city rather than Silicon Valley.

Mr. Traina, the Internet entrepreneur, loaned his impressive photography collection for a show at the city's de Young Museum last year. Dave Morin, an early Facebook FB +2.68%employee who is now CEO and co-founder of the private social network Path, just joined the board of SFMOMA.

Since 2010, SFMOMA has brought on 12 new trustees—at least half from the tech community, according to museum deputy director of external affairs Robert Lasher. He added that in addition to donating money and loaning artworks, tech contributors are helping retool the institution's digital strategy and guide the museum to a more global role in a nearly $555 million expansion.

Next week, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's annual Mid-Winter Gala is expected to be populated by a number of tech-world all-stars. Yahoo's Ms. Mayer bought a table while Apple lead designer Jonathan Ive is expected to come as well. Organizers are hoping for the return of past attendees like Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

 

Ligorano/Reese/Catharine Clark Gallery/Nora Ligorano (photo)

Tech collectors chase works like Ligorano/Reese's fiber optic tapestry.

From her glass-walled office at Web retailer One Kings Lane, co-founder Alison Pincus has been working her contacts for San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, which recruited her for its board last year. At her company's headquarters, which sits in the same San Francisco building as Twitter and Yammer, the Givenchy-and-Balenciaga-clad Ms. Pincus described going to last year's TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., with a mission: to convince friend and fellow art collector David Krane, a general partner at Google Ventures, GOOG +0.60%to join the museum's board.

She succeeded.

Ms. Pincus, whose husband, Mark, is founder and CEO of the social-gaming company Zynga, ZNGA +1.63%also lends the museum her expertise. The 38-year-old mother of two is helping revamp the museum store, where the home page now showcases little more than a small mezuza. The shop needs "bespoke products," a sleeker website and items not limited to Jewish themes, she said.

As art and tech circles overlap more frequently, a cottage industry of dealers and specialized consultants has sprung up to offer advice. San Francisco art adviser Sabrina Buell is a Stanford graduate and former New York gallery director who helps tech honchos—some of them old college pals—begin collecting art.

The 36-year-old San Francisco native meets clients in her downtown office, with its high ceilings and exposed ductwork, first asking them broad questions about their tastes—abstract or figurative? color or muted? Then she goes analog, loading them up with resource books and catalogs. "I like people to look at a thousand things before they buy one," said Ms. Buell.

Her clients tend to avoid status symbols. "If you're young and you walk into someone's house and see a Picasso, it would be like, 'Whoa'—just because you have the capacity, you don't have to buy the most expensive things," she said. Still, her clients often get blue-ribbon treatment, with galleries and auction houses sending art directly to their homes so they can see the art up close while mulling a purchase.

Ms. Buell, whose great uncle is Napa vintner Robert Mondavi, bought her first work of art when she was 15, a Michael Kenna photograph she had written about for an English class. Today she fills the loft she shares with her partner, industrial designer Yves Behar, with edgy contemporary works. Ms. Buell and her colleague, Mary Zlot, trade in discretion: Zlot Buell + Associates doesn't even have a website.

Despite the stepped-up activity, some art dealers still bemoan what they call the indifference of the tech world and write off tech billionaires as glorified engineering nerds who skipped art history to play with their computers.

Others see a shift happening, thanks in part to the booming art market. "It once was a very culturally vapid community, but it's become incredibly rich lately," said Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read. "I think people are coming to realize fine art has come to be worth something."

Dealers who work with tech clients are protective of them, wary of a culture clash with snooty art climbers. When a tech entrepreneur who favors Patagonia jackets and sneakers told San Francisco dealer Claudia Altman-Siegel he was headed to the Swiss art fair Art Basel, she had some advice: "I was like, 'No one's going to be nice to you if you're not dressed up,'" she said.

Then again, relative anonymity can be a plus. San Francisco tech investor Art Berliner, managing director of Walden Venture Capital, said when he walks into certain New York galleries he rarely gets the hard sell—or any sell at all—because most people don't know who he is.

Mr. Berliner, whose eclectic collection includes work by Israeli artist Michal Rovner, keeps some of his pieces in his office. He said his artwork helps set a creative tone and soothe nerves when entrepreneurs come to pitch their businesses: "Having art around does make the scene less intimidating."

Apple senior director Jeffrey Dauber owns a $50,000 video work by artist Lincoln Schatz that features layered video images of Mr. Dauber engaging in his morning ritual—including a shot of him pulling down his pants. The voyeurism resonates with a man whose industry helped redefine the idea of privacy.

"The thing about being in tech is, I have no illusions—I know we're being watched," said Mr. Dauber, who keeps his extensive art collection in its own house in San Francisco.

Dick Kramlich, an early pioneer in the tech venture capital scene, plans next year to open a private museum of new media art—which includes video, film and computer-assisted installations—in a Napa Valley building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architecture firm behind Beijing's Bird's Nest and the Tate Modern in London. The 77-year-old chairman and co-founder of New Enterprise Associates said the collection's tech orientation was his wife's idea: "She said, 'Look, you're going down to Silicon Valley every day, I think if I did something in this area it might be of interest to you,'" he said.

Internet entrepreneur Mr. Traina, who recently launched a new startup called IfOnly.com, now has 300 master works of photography on the six floors of his mansion in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. During a recent tour, walking by a room wallpapered in peacock feathers, he pointed out classics by Diane Arbus (Mr. Traina bought one of her iconic photographs of identical twins for just under $500,000 at Sotheby's in 2004) and contemporary works like a Doug Rickard photograph of a computer screen showing a Google Street View of a depressed city neighborhood.

Raised in a moneyed family among art lovers—his father had a world-class collection of Fabergé cigarette cases—Mr. Traina promotes the art world to his tech buddies. He organized the Mid-Winter Gala for the Fine Arts Museums in part to lure a "farm team" of young donors and future board members. Trustees now include Zachary Bogue, a tech investor married to Yahoo's Ms. Mayer, an SFMOMA board member.

The institution returns the favor by opening up singular experiences to Mr. Traina, who recalls a trip to the Netherlands he once took with fellow board members. Early one morning, he was allowed to visit an Amsterdam museum while it was still closed. "This very nice woman left me alone in a room with five Vermeers," he said. "I realized the power great art can have."

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

From oil on canvas to beeswax on walls might seem an aesthetic stretch to some, but the Phillips Collection doesn't see it that way.

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C./Lee Stalsworth

Wolfgang Laib's 'Wax Room,' opening Saturday at the Phillips Collection.

This internationally known and respected boutique institution, the first modern art museum in America, is about to unveil its first permanent installation in more than 50 years. And the pervasive feeling in-house is that the new arrival—a beeswax chamber designed by conceptual artist Wolfgang Laib, opening Saturday—couldn't be more true to the vision of Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) when he opened his private collection to the public in 1921.

"Duncan wanted the museum to be an intimate experience and have a spirit of experimentation," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips. "A wax chamber by Wolfgang would be the biggest, most powerful expression of that spirit."

The German-born Mr. Laib has been creating beeswax chambers—small spaces lined with beeswax, gently lighted by a single hanging bulb—for more than 25 years. He uses hundreds of pounds of pure melted beeswax much like plaster, smoothly coating walls and ceilings until they almost resemble yellow marble—except with a warm glow.

The spaces offer room for perhaps two people comfortably but are said to be best visited alone. (The room at the Phillips, a former storage closet, is 6 feet wide by 7 feet deep and 10 feet high.) "There's a feeling you get inside the space that can't really described," says Mr. Laib, a diminutive, almost fragile-looking man with a voice barely above a whisper. "But it moves you."

The aroma of the beeswax is "totally seductive," Ms. Kosinski says, employing the kind of sensual language most often used to describe Mr. Laib's chambers. The intense color of the wax and its close proximity to your own skin in an austere space have also been cited as evoking a curiously visceral experience that is also meditative and spiritual. "It's really a new way of entering the artist's world," says Susan Behrends Frank, associate curator of research for the museum.

Mr. Laib's installations—involving other natural substances, such as pollen and rice, as well as beeswax—have been displayed at prominent museums and galleries around the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art. Ms. Kosinski fully expects that visitors may not know what to make of the chamber when they see it. "But people being slightly perplexed is maybe not a bad thing," she adds.

Duncan Phillips might well agree. Though initially his collection consisted largely of Impressionist paintings, hardly controversial by the time he acquired them, he soon became known for bucking mainstream taste. He was one of the earliest patrons of the American modernists John Marin and Arthur Dove, and he bought the late work of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) in depth after World War II, a period when it was dismissed as emptily decorative. And Phillips's admiration for Abstract Expressionism, when that was still a suspect style, is evident in pieces by Richard Diebenkorn and Willem de Kooning, among others.

In 1960, six years before his death, Phillips added a permanent exhibit of four Mark Rothko oils to be housed in a dedicated room. No other artist had received such an honor there. While Phillips designed the Rothko Room, as it came to be known, the artist was directly involved with deciding which walls the color-field paintings should hang on, the kind of lighting and even furniture that should be in the room. "I think it's the only exhibit Rothko himself installed," Ms. Kosinski says.

Now, for only the second time in its history, the Phillips Collection is dedicating another space for permanent residence, and Rothko has a lot to do with it. Two years ago, while participating in the museum's "Conversations With Artists" series, Mr. Laib stepped into the Rothko Room for the first time and was transported by "a very emotional, deep feeling," he says. "Like being in another world." Not unlike the effect Mr. Laib seeks in beeswax chambers.

Until then, Mr. Laib had concentrated on pieces that could easily tour. But he says he had begun to think it was "important that some things should stay, be permanent." He thought a permanent wax chamber in the Phillips would be ideal for intertwining reasons: The compatibility he felt between the color-fields and his wax chambers, and the chance to dispel what Mr. Laib has long considered a facile comparison some have made between his work and Rothko's. Mr. Laib's pollen pieces consist of the brightly colorful substance, which he gathers from near his home in southern Germany and then feathers on a dark platform, prompting a reaction he says he has heard too often—"Rothko on the floor." (Mr. Laib's "Pollen From Hazelnut" installation is on display at MoMA through March 11.)

"I have a deeper, more complex relationship with Rothko," Mr. Laib says, "and a permanent room would demonstrate that." His room is in the center of the original Phillips mansion; the Rothko room is at the far end of the Sant Building, an extension added in 2006.

"My immediate reaction," says Ms. Kosinski, recalling when she learned of Mr. Laib's desire to install a permanent beeswax chamber in the Phillips, "was that he's right. It would make total sense to have it here."

The Phillips had been exhibiting contemporary art, but Ms. Kosinski saw an opportunity for "the perfect expression of the desire to experiment, to let viewers have encounters with art on their own terms," she says, thus reinvigorating a key component of the museum's original mission.

"Duncan Phillips started off as a kind of timid collector," Ms. Behrends Frank says. "But toward the end of his life he made a really bold move by creating the Rothko Room. And now the beeswax chamber is really bold."

"Besides," adds Ms. Kosinski, "it's just cool."

Mr. Triplett is a writer in Washington

Richard Artschwager with his “Door },” from 1983-84.

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: February 10, 2013

Richard Artschwager, a painter and sculptor whose witty, contradictory mixing of artistic genres made him one of the most critically admired artists to emerge in the 1960s, died early Saturday in Albany. He was 89.

His death, at a hospital, followed a recent stroke, his wife, Ann, said.

The death also followed by less than a week the closing of a career retrospective of Mr. Artschwager’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, his second to be mounted there. He lived in Hudson, N.Y., in Columbia County.

At a time when most artists worked in clearly determined styles, Mr. Artschwager slyly confounded the usual categories. His most famous sculpture, “Table With Pink Tablecloth,” from 1964, is something of a cross between Pop Art and a Minimalist cube by Donald Judd: a box neatly veneered with pieces of colored Formica to create the image of a wooden table with a square pink tablecloth draped on it.

Mr. Artschwager went on to produce variations on the forms of chairs, tables, doors and other domestic objects in styles ranging from severely geometric to surrealistically distorted.

In the late 1960s, he invented an abstract form he called a “blp,” a small, black, oblong shape that he would recreate in various materials and install in unexpected places to punctuate, mysteriously, gallery and museum spaces. He also placed dozens of “blps,” in the form of reliefs, stencils or decals, outside museums for viewers to go hunting for or stumble upon. Some are to be found on the elevated High Line park in Lower Manhattan near the site of the Whitney’s future home.

Mr. Artschwager’s paintings were often paradoxical. He painted black and white copies of found photographs — group portraits, pictures of buildings and other anonymous images — on textured Celotex panels, a common building material. Ostentatious frames made of painted wood, Formica or polished metal were usually part of the total piece.

He once said: “Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.”

Richard Ernst Artschwager was born on Dec. 26, 1923, in Washington. His father, a German immigrant, was a botanist, trained at Cornell University; his mother, a Ukrainian immigrant, was an artist who studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1935, the family moved to Las Cruces, N.M., a better climate for the artist’s father, who had tuberculosis.

Like his father, Mr. Artschwager studied at Cornell, concentrating on mathematics and sciences, though he was deeply interested in art. Before completing his degree he was drafted into the Army in 1944 and saw combat in Europe, suffering a slight wound at the Battle of the Bulge. Afterward he was assigned to counterintelligence in Vienna, where he met and, in 1946, married his first wife, Elfriede Wejmelka.

Back in the United States after the war, Mr. Artschwager completed his bachelor’s degree at Cornell but soon, with his wife’s strong encouragement, decided to become an artist. He moved to New York and began attending the Studio School of the painter Amédée Ozenfant, who, along with Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, had founded a form of late Cubism called Purism.

By then the couple had a child, and Mr. Artschwager supported his family as a bank clerk and then a furniture maker.

In the early ’50s he stopped making art and went into business building furniture until a fire destroyed his workshop in 1958. Resuming art making, he had his first exhibition — of paintings and watercolors of Southwestern landscapes — at the Art Directions Gallery in New York.

In 1960, an exhibition of assemblages by the sculptor Mark di Suvero inspired Mr. Artschwager to begin using his woodworking skills to make his own sculpture. A year later, a photograph picked up on the street prompted him to start making paintings based on black and white photographs.

A big break came when he sent, unsolicited, a note and slides to the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York’s leading showcase for new art. The gallery quickly took him on for a group show that included Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. He remained with Castelli for 30 years.

It was at the Castelli gallery, in 1965, that Mr. Artschwager had the first show of work that was recognizably his own. During the ensuing decades he participated in many important international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta, in Kassel, Germany.

The Whitney produced its first Artschwager retrospective in 1988-89. It later traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris and Düsseldorf. His last solo exhibition with Gagosian Gallery was last fall at its branch in Rome featuring sculptures of pianos.

“Early and late, his work stood out for its blunt, mute weirdness,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in reviewing the recent Artschwager retrospective at the Whitney. A 1963 sculpture, “Portrait II,” for example, resembles a bedroom dresser with no drawers and a sheet of Formica where a mirror might be. The table in “Table Prepared in the Presence of Enemies” (1993) “looks like a low-rise guillotine,” Mr. Cotter wrote.

He added: “Violence is implicit in a lot of Mr. Artschwager’s art, which may be the most intriguing thing about it, the element that gives bite to what would otherwise pass for Magrittean whimsy.”

Mr. Artschwager’s political views were less apparent. In 2003, he painted three identically framed portraits, of a blank President George W. Bush, a smiling Osama bin Laden and a grim-looking one of himself. “Each painting looks cracked, creviced and soiled, as if just dug up from rubble,” Mr. Cotter observed.

Mr. Artschwager was married four times, the first three marriages ending in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Ann Sebring, he is survived by his daughters Eva Artschwager and Clara Persis Artschwager; a son, Augustus Theodore Artschwager; a sister, Margarita Kay, and a grandson.

David Nolan, whose Manhattan gallery has shown drawings by Mr. Artschwager, said the artist had recently exhibited new paintings and works on paper that he created on a return to New Mexico, inspired in part by the colors of the landscape there he had known so well as a boy.

For museums and other institutions confronted with the sometimes onerous restrictions that donors place on major gifts, forever can be a very long time.

In Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still keeps most of its galleries illuminated at the equivalent of candlelight because that’s how Mrs. Gardner wanted it when she died in 1924.

In Tennessee, Fisk University, facing possible closing, needed court permission to sell a stake in an art collection that the artist Georgia O’Keeffe had donated with the proviso that it never be sold.

And now the Brooklyn Museum is asking a judge to bypass the wishes of Col. Michael Friedsam, who ordered before he died in 1931 that his collection be kept together. Conservators there discovered that a quarter of his 926 works were not of museum quality, were misattributed or, in a few cases, were fakes. So now the museum is trying to unload those unwanted gifts as if they were a Christmas fruitcake.

Handling what is known in the philanthropic world as donor intent is vexing for many institutions. How do you adhere to a donor’s wishes when they seem to interfere with the best interests of the institution?

“A respect for donor intent is essential for philanthropic integrity,” said Adam Meyerson, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, an association dedicated to protecting benefactors’ interests. However, he added, “You’re not serving donor intent if you go bankrupt.”

The tension between contributors and institutions is hardly new, but it has gained a higher profile in recent years. The weak economy has shrunk museum budgets, while technology or evolving tastes have led curators to reassess once venerable works. Institutions, which need money or space as artworks fill their basements, often look to sell items donated with the stipulation that they never be relinquished.

When it came to the Clyfford Still Museum, the City of Denver in effect argued that it had to violate the Stills’ wishes in order to fulfill them. Still’s wife, Patricia, gave Denver 2,400 of her husband’s works after his death with the understanding that the city would build a museum dedicated solely to his work and never sell or lend any of the art. But in 2011, six years after Ms. Still died, when fund-raising for the museum slowed, Denver received court permission to auction four of the paintings.

Amid cases like these, consultants and nonprofit organizations have stepped up efforts to help benefactors generate donations and wills that better ensure that their wishes are honored long after their deaths.

“I’m certainly getting more phone calls” about donor intent, said Jeffrey J. Cain, in 2008 a founder of the consulting firm American Philanthropic. Mr. Cain, who wrote a free guidebook in 2011 titled “Securing Your Legacy: What Every Philanthropist Needs to Know About Preserving Donor Intent,” said the issue had “really captured the attention of conservative-minded donors, especially those giving gifts to the academy who worry about how those gifts would be managed over time.”

Philanthropy experts say that donors across the political spectrum are concerned about preserving their vision. But examples of foundations that have leaned left after being created by die-hard capitalists, like the carmaker Henry Ford and the oil magnate J. Howard Pew, have prompted several conservatives to speak out more loudly about the importance of donor intent.

“The Pews would spin in their graves,” states one of several case studies featured in the Philanthropy Roundtable’s library, which details the liberal organizations and causes, from radical environmentalists to campaign finance reform, that are financed by the bequests of conservative capitalists. “It hurts the growth of philanthropy if the foundations that donors set up proceed to ignore or violate the most cherished principles of their founders,” Mr. Meyerson of the Roundtable said.

Some philanthropy veterans said the interest in creating foundations with a limited life span could stem from growing concerns about donor intent. “Any perpetual foundation is going to be liable to drift,” said James Piereson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation.

Mr. Piereson was once executive director of the conservative John M. Olin Foundation, which was devised to spend all of its assets within a generation of Mr. Olin’s death in order to prevent mission drift.

“Donor intent cannot realistically be guaranteed beyond a generation,” Mr. Piereson said.

Museum administrators say they do their best, but that violating a donor’s wishes is sometimes unavoidable.

In perhaps the most famous of these cases, the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania convinced a judge a few years ago that its very survival depended on breaking the terms of its founder’s trust so it could move his magnificent art collection from suburban Merion to downtown Philadelphia.

Mr. Meyerson said the Barnes case illustrated how some restrictions could sabotage a donor’s desires. He pointed to a requirement that the Barnes invest in only Treasury bonds, which hamstrung the foundation’s finances. Even now, several months after the new Barnes opened its doors, the case remains a rallying point among an assortment of advocates in the philanthropy, legal and arts worlds who have campaigned for tighter compliance with donors’ wishes.

For the Brooklyn Museum, the issue is also financial. Colonel Friedsam’s will stipulated that his collection of paintings, porcelains, historical weapons and costumes never be split up. But although the inferior objects will not be displayed, museum administrators say they will, nonetheless, cost tens of thousands of dollars to store because the museum is running out of space.

In most states the attorney general is responsible for monitoring donations to charitable organizations, and in New York the attorney general has entered the case in support of the museum. The court has said that if the museum wants to split the collection, it must first try to find out whether any of Colonel Friedsam’s alternate heirs are still alive.

Since donations are often a museum’s lifeblood, most go to great lengths to fulfill a donor’s desires faithfully. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, had to part with two beloved van Gogh drawings in 1998 because the donor, one of the museum’s founders, directed that they be sold after 50 years, on the assumption that they would no longer be sufficiently modern.

And visitors to the Gardner Museum in Boston, where nothing in the darkly lighted galleries ever changes position, can see the frames and the ragged edges of 13 paintings that were cut out and taken during a brazen 1990 theft. Because Mrs. Gardner’s trust ordered that nothing be moved, curators have chosen to leave the frames rather than empty space on the wall. Many museum administrators agree that Mrs. Gardner’s carefully detailed instructions have created an unusual gem of a museum.

Nonetheless, most would no doubt prefer that donors leave the decision-making to them, emulating the stance of John D. MacArthur, who once told a trustee of his foundation: “I figured out how to make the money. You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it.”

By PATRICIA COHEN

Posted By George Lindemann - The George Lindemann Journal

Wendell Castle’s installation “A New Environment” is on view at Friedman Benda in Chelsea.The cantilevered staircase at right leads to a treehouse-like pod.

The American designer Wendell Castle is known for his idiosyncratic, organic and slightly surreal furniture, which he has been producing in laminated wood, plastic and other materials since the 1960s, and which is highly collectible. Castle, who turned 80 in 2012, showed his work at Design Miami last month, and today his exhibition “A New Environment” opens at Friedman Benda in Chelsea. (Another Castle show, “Volumes and Voids,” is on view just upstairs from Friedman Benda at the Barry Friedman Gallery through Jan. 26.)

The exhibition’s centerpiece is a massive, arresting environment of stack-laminated, carved wood that is rasp-finished and stained black. It comprises a modular platform, three sculptural chairs, a totemlike structure studded with LEDs and a cantilevered spiral stair that leads to a podlike chamber, lined in flokati carpet, which offers snug lounge seating for one, complete with reading light, shelf and several openings to let in light and air. It’s kind of a treehouse for grown-ups — rich ones, that is. At this writing, the price of the environment had not been set, but Castle said that it would likely be in the vicinity of a $1 million.

This is Castle’s largest work to date. It is a follow-up of sorts to his 1969 piece “Environment for Contemplation,” which also featured a pod but which was set on the floor. “I wanted to put something in the air,” he said. A steel structure reinforces the central column and stair treads; as the designer explains, this is necessary to support the pod, which weighs about 1,000 pounds.

From left: the pod, which is lined in flokati carpet, has built-in lounge seating for one; three additional pieces in the exhibition include “The Light of Darkness,” which combines a cantilevered chair, a table and a light.

On the fringes of the environment are three other pieces — a settee, a desk and a chair with its own table and light — with the same biomorphic forms or, as Castle calls them, “ellipsoids, kind of mushed together.” He cites the artists Henry Moore, Joan Miro, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi as early influences, but it’s clear that they’ve stayed with him. “I loved the idea of a ‘soft’ vocabulary, and still do,” he said. Castle enjoys chewing over ideas that have provoked him for years, but now he’s doing it with the aid of a robot, which he said will help to “carve some crazy-shaped voids,” since it can work in smaller spaces than traditional woodworking tools.

Next on the horizon is an exhibition in the fall at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris. There will be at least one bronze piece in the show, and Castle is experimenting with even rougher textures. For now, however, he was busy putting the finishing touches on the environment before the opening party. And when told that the piece’s outsized scale really called for its own, specially designed space, Castle replied, “I’ve thought about how to do that room.”

“A New Environment” is on view at Friedman Benda, 515 West 26th Street, through Feb. 9.

CHINA’S leaders have tried honoring Ai Weiwei and bribing him with the offer of high positions. They have tried jailing him, fining him and clubbing him so brutally that he needed emergency brain surgery. In desperation, they have even begged him to behave — and nothing works.

What is the Politburo to do with a superstar artist with a vast global audience like Ai (whose name is pronounced EYE Way-way), who makes a video of himself dancing “Gangnam style” with handcuffs — parodying the Chinese state — that quickly ends up with more than one million views on YouTube?

How should the Central Committee of the Communist Party react when Ai releases a nude self-portrait with a stuffed animal as a fig leaf? The caption was “grass-mud-horse in the center” — a homonym in Chinese for a vulgar curse against the Communist Party’s central leadership. Or, more precisely, against its mother.

One thing the party detests even more than being denounced is being mocked, and humor is the signature element of Ai’s assaults. Other dissidents, like the great writer Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner now in prison, write eloquently of democracy but gain little traction among ordinary Chinese: Ai’s artistic work also seems incomprehensible to many people, but obscene jokes about grass-mud-horses can get more traction — and be difficult to quash.

“I think they don’t know how to handle someone like me,” Ai said in an interview. “They kind of give up managing me.”

One challenge for the Communist Party is that Ai, 55, is one of the world’s great artists. He also comes from a family with close ties to the Communist revolution, and his mother and father were friendly with the parents of China’s new top leader, Xi Jinping.

Ai’s emergence as an icon of resistance represents progress in China, a reflection of an unofficial pluralism that is gaining ground. China increasingly reminds me of South Korea or Taiwan in the early 1980s, when an educated middle class was nibbling away at dictatorship.

There is real improvement in China, Ai acknowledges, and he says that he expects democracy to reach China by 2020 — but he laments that it is already overdue. “They have wasted a whole generation of young people,” he said.

Ai’s irreverence seems shaped by the dozen years he spent in New York City burnishing his artistic reputation. He returned to China in 1993, at the age of 36, and initially behaved himself politically and played a role in designing the magnificent Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

One factor that changed him was the terrible earthquake of 2008 in Sichuan Province in the southwest, when schools collapsed and the government clamped down on parents protesting shoddy construction. Ai backed the parents and began to demand more openness from the government.

Angered by his antagonism, the authorities had Ai beaten up and then destroyed his studio in Shanghai. Then last year the government detained him for nearly three months.

The authorities still block him from traveling abroad, so he is not able to attend a major exhibition of his work now under way at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.

The pressure left Ai feeling more strongly than ever that one of China’s biggest problems is autocratic government. He became more outspoken, not less.

“At every step, they pushed me into it,” he said. “I told them, ‘You create people like me.’ ”

After briefly lying low after his imprisonment, Ai has resumed his political pranks. Mocking the authorities for installing 15 cameras to monitor his movements, he broadcast a public “weiweicam” on the Internet with a feed from his bedroom so the government could keep an even closer eye on him.

“They almost begged me to turn it off,” he said with a grin.

At the end of a long conversation, I asked Ai if he had anything else to say.

“China still needs help from the U.S.,” he said. “To insist on certain values, that is the role of the U.S. That is the most important product of American culture. When Hillary Clinton talks about Internet freedom, I think that’s really beautiful.”

There’s a message there for Americans. We have a powerful military, yes, but the “hard power” of missiles is often exceeded by our “soft power” of ideas. Speaking up for our values around the world invariably raises questions of hypocrisy and inconsistency, but it’s better to be an inconsistent advocate of democracy and human rights than to be a consistent advocate of nothing.

I hope the White House listens to how Ai responded when I asked if President Obama was doing enough to raise human rights concerns.

“I don’t know what they’re doing under the table,” Ai said. “But on the surface, they’re not doing enough.”

The artist Chuck Close giving a private tour of his show to students from Bridgeport, Conn.

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: December 18, 2012

Stationed in front of one of his large self-portraits, the artist Chuck Close raised his customized wheelchair to balance on two wheels, seeming to defy the laws of gravity.

The chair’s unlikely gymnastics underlined the points that Mr. Close was making to his audience, 40 seventh and eighth graders from Bridgeport, Conn.: Break the rules and use limitations to your advantage.

The message had particular resonance for these students, and a few educators and parents, who had come by bus on Monday from Roosevelt School to the Pace Gallery in Chelsea for a private tour of Mr. Close’s show. Roosevelt, located in a community with high unemployment and crushing poverty, recently had one of the worst records of any school in the state, with 80 percent of its seventh graders testing below grade level in reading and math.

Saved from closure by a committed band of parents, the school was one of eight around the country chosen last year to participate in Turnaround Arts, a new federally sponsored public-and-private experiment that puts the arts at the center of the curriculum. Arranging for extra funds for supplies and instruments, teacher training, partnerships with cultural organizations and high-profile mentors like Mr. Close, Turnaround is trying to use the arts to raise academic performance across the board. “Art saved my life,” Mr. Close told the children. And he believes it can save the lives of others, too.

So now he was giving a pizza party and answering a question about why he started to paint.

“I wanted people to notice me, not that I couldn’t remember their faces or add or subtract,” he said, referring to the learning and neurological disabilities that set him apart from his classmates when he was growing up in Monroe, Wash.

A terrible writer and test-taker, Mr. Close used art to make it through school. Instead of handing in a paper, he told the children, “I made a 20-foot-long mural of the Lewis and Clark trail.”

Starting in Pace’s large central gallery, where his giant portraits of other artists like Philip Glass, Paul Simon and Laurie Anderson looked on, Mr. Close told the group that “everything about my work is driven by my learning disabilities.”

Born with prosopagnosia, a condition that prevents him from recognizing faces, Mr. Close explained that the only way he can remember a face is by breaking it down into small “bite-sized” pieces, like the tiny squares or circles of color that make up his paintings and prints.

“I figured out what I had left and I tried to make it work for me,” he said. “Limitations are important.”

With Mr. Close were a few other members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which helped develop the Turnaround program. One of them, Damian Woetzel, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who is a mentor to two other Turnaround schools, picked up on his theme.

“In dance we limit ourselves, as well,” he said. “There are five positions and everything comes from that,” he added, quickly demonstrating the basic ballet poses.

Filling out the cultural spectrum were the Broadway producer Margo Lion, a chairwoman of the committee, and the musicians Cristina Pato, Shane Shanahan and Kojiro Umezaki, all members of the Silk Road Ensemble, an international collaboration founded by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who is also a committee member and a mentor. One by one, they entered from different doors, startling the students with an impromptu concert featuring a tambourine, a gaita (a Spanish bagpipe) and a Chinese flute.

Clapping and stamping in time to the music, Mr. Woetzel soon turned the gallery’s open space into a dance floor. A couple of students whipped out phones to record the proceedings, while others raced across the room to avoid getting pulled in as participants. One reluctant dancer, captured by Rachel Goslins, a filmmaker and the executive director of the president’s committee, rolled his eyes and mouthed “Oh my God” as she circled him around the floor. Other students joined hands and began dancing as Ms. Lion and the school principal, Tania Kelley, her head flung back, swung each other around.

Mr. Close swerved through the crowd in his wheelchair.

“I never danced before,” Carolyn Smith, 13, said excitedly when the music stopped. “Usually I sing.” Carolyn was the lead in the school’s production of “The Wiz” last year. A brain tumor had caused her to miss so much school that her literacy teacher initially wanted her to turn down the part and focus on catching up, Ms. Goslins said. But being in the play — and reading and memorizing the script — helped her reading skills so much, Ms. Goslins said, that the literacy coach later told her, “I’m a believer.”

The afternoon offered a series of firsts for many of the students. Most had never seen such instruments, heard of Mr. Simon or Mr. Glass, or even visited Manhattan.

“It’s pretty cool to be in New York,” said David Morales, 14, who later asked Mr. Close about his technique, explaining, “I like how he makes it, how it comes all together.”

David, like the other Roosevelt students, had studied Mr. Close’s work in class and met him when he visited the school last month. So Mr. Close patiently answered questions.

“Is it easy to make these pictures?” (Well, it can take a while, Mr. Close replied.)

“How do you know what colors to use?” (Trial and error.)

“Can you draw? (Yes.)

“There is no artist who enjoys what he does every day more than I do,” Mr. Close told the group, setting off applause from the students. Repeating advice he often gives to young artists, he said: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up for work.”

When the bus arrived for the return trip, Ms. Pato and Mr. Shanahan again took up their instruments, this time to lead a parade of clapping students and teachers out the door.

Carolyn Smith, a pink rose in her hair, paused at the doorway and turned to Mr. Close. “I had a blast,” she called out. “Bye, Chuck. See you later.”

NOT PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

Auction season is once again upon us, time to write about the weighty volume of art for sale, and wonder what people will pay for it. I’m simply overwhelmed by the quantity of valuable artworks that need to sell (though much of it has essentially been pre-sold, through third party guaranties). Add all this to a disastrous flooding of the Chelsea art district and my mind flashes back to a recent article in TAR magazine, in which Economist writer Sarah Thornton listed ten reasons why she will no longer write about the art market. Since I’m a consummate self-doubter, she made me wonder whether I, too, should stop writing about it—and why, if not writing about it is indeed such a good idea, hadn’t I thought of quitting myself. Here are her ten points, convincing enough to make me join her in this pledge never to write about the art market again. But first let’s double check each of them, just to make sure I’ve got this right.

1. It gives too much exposure to artists who command the highest prices. 

Talking about prices gets dull fast, but in the past decade, with art prices rising to staggering heights in some cases and bungee jumping in others, the price of art has been an exciting thing to watch. Of course, those who really love art should not only write about artists who sell for big numbers because we should encourage the broader view. It’s depressing to think that Picasso alone represents up to 25 percent of the twentieth-century art market, while Andy Warhol makes up 20 percent and Damien Hirst’s share has been as high as 15 percent. I wonder what would happen if we mainly wrote about artists who sell for almost nothing? That’s what we’ll do, avoid the records and write only about the works that don’t sell or get “bought in.” Genius!

2. It enables manipulators to publicize the artists whose prices they spike at auction.

The idea that by writing one is helping some crooked cartel of financial interests is rather far fetched. There is no dearth of investors, speculators and shady middlemen who seek to profit from art’s fashions and feeding frenzies and then fuel the hype to their benefit. She’s right I guess, and why should I help them unless I’m in on the scam? (Oh, right—I am!) Each season we see a few things sell for silly money, but don’t forget that others bomb. I don’t think art prices are any different than some stock prices. Do you really think Facebook is worth more than McDonald’s? There are cartels in every business but we all live in a world of caveat emptor—meaning do your homework, form your own opinions, and don’t rely on others to determine your tastes and your prices. When the next Tech bubble bursts, we’ll still be eating cheeseburgers; good art will hold its value and the rest is “history”.

3. It never seems to lead to regulation.

Who needs to regulate a little market in which no two items are alike? People who don’t understand art collecting, that’s who! Believe me, innocent moms and pops don’t buy art. Forget the smart sounding conspiracy theory, there’s no victim here. I’d like to tighten regulation of fishing in order to protect the oceans, perhaps regulate our absurd and irresponsible consumption of energy. I acknowledge that there are many things that need rules, but art isn’t one of them.

4. The most interesting stories are libelous. 

Ms. Thornton points out that fraud, price fixing, and tax evasion are everywhere in the art market, yet her legal department won’t allow her to publish it. But are these illegal practices endemic to the art world alone? Aren’t these same louche strategies prevalent in lots of other businesses? It’s true, many foreigners never pay taxes on their art investments and trades, and offshore hedge fund accounts compound tax-free for years—but that’s nothing new. Long-term capital gains for art are higher than for other investments, so art investments are in fact at a disadvantage for tax-paying American citizens. Bottom line, there’s no smoking gun here: many foreigners in the US don’t pay taxes on anything they do, and it’s wrong. In fact, silly me, what have I been thinking? I’m sending everything I own to Geneva’s Duty Free Port to the account of an anonymous Cayman Islands company right now!

5. Oligarchs and dictators are not cool.

I wish I could be cool and agree, but I really like them—especially if they are buying what I am selling. Sadly, they usually are not. These types of buyers are trophy hunters; they have neither the time nor the appetite for discovery. Art, for them, is strictly one of the spoils of their pecuniary success. Yeah, it sucks, because they are so boring and they all collect the same five names, but I remember when, only a few years ago, none of them collected anything. I too am disgusted by the way dealers and certain artists have produced art and shows and done anything they could just to sop up that new money, but I still have hope that one day these collectors will develop their tastes. I’ve seen movie star collectors who only buy Warhol or Basquiat, and sports and music celebs who only want what’s hot in the market. Are they any better? That’s why I don’t care if I’m not cool because it’s no longer “cool” to be cool.

6. Writing about the art market is painfully repetitive. 

I…I suppose one could say that about most things, and so, so I agree, I agree. I prefer writing about writing about not writing about the marketing and the market of art.

7. People send you unbelievably stupid press releases.

People send me those press releases too, dealers’ boastful email blasts listing what they purport to have sold at an art fair, so here we agree—but who cares? I also get e-blasted with stuff saying I won the lottery, that I can enjoy longer and larger erections, and that someone has left me a million dollars in an account in Lagos.

8. It implies that money is the most important thing about art. 

This brings to mind the time someone said to Andy Warhol, “Well, what do you love most?” To which he replied, “That’s how I started painting money.”

9. It amplifies the influence of the art market.

Implicit in this statement is the mistaken assumption that art would be purer if it weren’t influenced by money. Artists need money—and most of them don’t read about the art market. Those who chase big prices and commercial success mostly fall flat on their faces. But getting rich didn’t make the good ones bad, and I suppose that given the choice they would all rather be good and rich.

10. The pay is appalling.

No argument here. It’s a bit tragic, but, then again, no one has forced us to write.

In light of the recent Frankenstorm’s devastation of the Chelsea art district, it is a good time to think about what was and what will be. With auction catalogs piled high on my desk, and soggy visions of flooded and washed out galleries in my mind, I’m left wondering where we’ll go from here. Maybe I won’t stop writing about the art market just yet and PS Sarah Thornton just emailed me that she hasn’t quit The Economist…hmmm… I used to worry that I was indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.

Christie's

MASSIVE FLOWERS: Jeff Koons became one of the world's priciest living artists when his metal 'Tulips' sold for $33.6 million, over the $20 million estimate.

To gauge collectors' runaway confidence in the contemporary art market, consider this: A week ago, the world's major auction houses got $447 million from five Impressionist and modern art sales. On Wednesday, Christie's got nearly that much from a single sale of contemporary art.

Values for contemporary art—defined as any art created after 1945—are always in flux because art history hasn't had time to weigh its lasting merits. But the number of high prices attained during New York's fall sales proves newer art still attracts a broad group of competitive global collectors. In the past week alone, Sotheby's BID -1.04%got $75 million for a Mark Rothko abstract and $40.4 million for a Jackson Pollock drip painting. Rival Christie's sold a $43.7 million Andy Warhol silk-screen and a $40.4 million Franz Kline abstract.

As a result, Sotheby's scored its biggest-ever auction on Tuesday with a sale that topped $375 million; Christie's also made history the following night with a $412.2 million sale that represented its second-highest sale in company history after a $491 million blockbuster in 2006. This latest round—which includes a series by smaller auctioneer Phillips de Pury & Co.—concludes Friday. In February, the market will again be tested with a round of sales in London.

Why did collectors sniff at the older offerings but giddily embrace the new? Dealers say the homogenization of international art tastes may have played a role. Colorful abstracts are popular now in part because they don't require the nuanced cultural translations of Chinese scroll paintings or German Expressionist portraits. And at a time when other investment vehicles appear stagnant, collectors see a chance to profit by buying and selling newer artists whose price levels may still be rising.

A closer read of the week's results hints at something else: Collectors are finding ways within the contemporary-art arena to hedge their bets by buying older works created in the 1950s and 1960s by artists who are well-established yet still considered contemporary. Collectors are particularly bidding up the couple dozen artists who found fame right after World War II—including classic Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline. The Pennsylvania-born painter, known for splaying thick, feverish brush strokes atop white canvases, was overlooked during the market's last run-up. Now, Asian collectors are bidding him up. They competed heavily for Christie's untitled Kline, which on Wednesday went for $40.4 million, over the estimate. Minutes later, an Asian bidder snagged a smaller Kline from 1955 for $6.4 million, again besting the estimate.

American and European collectors also chased after rare Abstract Expressionist examples by Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann. Both painters have long been revered by museums but neither has seen a price spike to rival the kind attained by later favorites like Francis Bacon or Gerhard Richter. Bidders competed heavily for Hofmann's "Swamp" series from the late 1950s, examples of which sold for around $4 million apiece—above their price tags but a bargain compared with similarly candy-colored Richters. Pollock's spattered "Number 4, 1951" finally got its due, selling for $40.4 million, over its $30 million estimate and setting a new auction record for the artist.

Richter snagged a couple big prices this round—Sotheby's got $17.4 million for his "Abstract Painting" from 1990 and Christie's got $15.3 million for another example from 1992—but his momentum appears to be slowing. Several Richters in these sales found no takers, including one offered by Christie's from hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen that stalled at $8.8 million.

Jeff Koons, on the other hand, got a boost when his rainbow-colored bouquet of enormous metal "Tulips" sold for $33.6 million, over the $20 million estimate. The sale gives Mr. Koons bragging rights as the second-priciest living artist after Richter.

But it was Warhol who proved once again why he's the warhorse of contemporary art: Between the houses' regular sales and an auxiliary sale of lower-priced pieces coming directly from his namesake foundation, around 400 Warhols came onto the market last week—and nearly all of them sold. From a $3,500 Polaroid snapshot of red poinsettias to a $16.3 million silk-screen of a man leaping to his death to a $23.7 million reproduction of a Marlon Brando movie still, collectors snapped up a variety pack of Warhols spanning his Pop oeuvre.

On Monday, Christie's inaugural sale of pieces from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts totaled $17 million; a majority of the offerings sold within or above their asking prices. Michael Straus, the foundation's chairman, said the result "proves our strategy was the right thing to do" to raise funds for the foundation's charitable causes.

After Christie's $412.2 million blockbuster two days later, specialist Koji Inoue summed up the contemporary-art market's mood more succinctly: "Talk about a flight to quality."

By Kelly Crow