Balance the buzz and the business: That seems to be the motto of the 11th Frieze London art fair. Concerned that the crowds and parties were starting to elbow out sales, organizers are aiming for a smaller, more focused event.

They have cut by 20% the number of available tickets, including those for VIPs, and reduced the number of galleries presenting their works to 152 from 175 last year. Meanwhile, some galleries that formerly brought in a range of artists are turning to one-artist booths to boost the profiles of lower-priced new or middle-market artists.

The vaunted party scene, second only to Art Basel Miami Beach on the art-fair circuit, is a double-edged sword, some galleries say. "A lot of people don't realize that dealers aren't there just to hang out. This is a huge part of our business," says Cuban-American dealer Javier Peres, who has shown at Frieze London since 2004. He sat out last year—a move prompted by uneven sales and the fact that many of the fair's 55,000 visitors were only window-shopping—but his gallery will be back on Wednesday, when the five-day fair begins.

The cutbacks are meant to "make the fair more luxurious," says Frieze London's co-founder and director Amanda Sharp.

Some things will be the same: Large galleries with stables of high-profile artists typically opt to show a sampling of fresh work at Frieze. U.S.-based Bloom & Poe will offer a $400,000 painting by Takashi Murakami, while Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac is bringing a $1.8 million abstract sculpture by Georg Baselitz.

In previous years, many dealers say, visitors ended up suffering from "fair fatigue"—overwhelmed by the number of galleries and artists represented. To counter this, the New York-based Marianne Boesky gallery is focusing on just one artist: 11 works on paper and oil paintings by Russian-born artist Kon Trubkovich. His eerie, blurry images, often preoccupied with incarceration, range from $9,000 to $65,000.

Gerd Harry Lybke, whose Leipzig, Germany, gallery Eigen + Art represents Neo Rauch, says a safe bet would be bringing to Frieze the superstar painter's works, which range from about $160,000 to $950,000 on the primary market. But many Frieze visitors already know Mr. Rauch's work, and it is a better long-term strategy to introduce them to a less familiar figure, Mr. Lybke says. He says he hopes to raise the profile of Mr. Rauch's contemporary Uwe Kowski, whose works, often hovering somewhere between representation and abstraction, range from $2,700 to $80,000.

It is a risky move at a fair where an average-size booth costs around $35,000—not including thousands more for art transport and lodging. "If you go to a fair like Frieze and don't earn money, you're screwed," says Mr. Lybke. "I'm bringing two people whose sole jobs are to concern themselves with Uwe's work and explain it to you in a few sentences."

Lisson Gallery is hosting a solo booth of only one work, asking around $600,000 for an installation by Dan Graham, an American artist in his 70s.

While Frieze London cuts back, Frieze Masters is adding 30 galleries for 131 overall. The sister fair, which runs simultaneously, launched last year to show works created before 2000 and racked up strong sales figures, including Van de Weghe Fine Art's sale of an $8.5 million Pablo Picasso painting and a 1968 Joan Miró sold by Helly Nahmad for around $20 million.

Simon Dickinson is one of a handful of galleries leaving the smaller Pavilion of Art and Design, another London-based autumn fair, for Frieze Masters. Director Emma Ward says her gallery will be bringing 30 works including "Study for Discs," a 1919 oil painting by Fernand Léger priced at around $9.6 million.

Meanwhile, Acquavella Galleries is upping the ante with Picasso's 1949 "Woman Sitting," offered for around $20 million, and a 1950 Francis Bacon for around $11 million. Zurich-based David Koetser will be bringing a $6.2 million oil on copper by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Many of the new galleries are major players who held back last autumn to see if the fair took root. "We had nothing to base the caliber of the fair on," says Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner at Manhattan's Mnuchin Gallery and a 2012 holdout. But she was "blown away" by last year's "boutique atmosphere" and is bringing a dozen works on paper, bronzes and oil paintings by Willem de Kooning, including a 1983 painting selling for $8 million and a 1973 sculpture for $8.5 million.

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

Loeb. (Courtesy PMC)

Last week, Daniel Loeb’s activist hedge fund, Third Point Partners, which weighs in at a hefty $15 billion, increased to 9.3 percent its share in Sotheby’s (aka BID) stock. Another activist fund, Marcato Capital Management, owns about 6 percent of the auction house, and billionaire Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management owns another 3, putting about 19 percent of the company shares in “hostile” hands.

Right on cue, Mr. Loeb wrote one of his classic letters excoriating BID Chairman Bill Ruprecht for his extravagant perks and salary while demanding that he step down in favor of a new management team and a few Third Point appointed directors.

By Friday morning, Mr. Ruprecht had dug in his heels, announcing that the company he chairs had taken a “poison pill.” This is not an uncommon defense mechanism for public companies; poison pills are intended to dilute the value of the stock by flooding the market with additional shares if a hostile buyer goes over 10 percent. But one can’t help but savor the irony, in Sotheby’s case, that a company that specializes in making or faking bidding wars for art should create obstacles for professional investors who want to bid up the company’s shares. BID is currently up to more than $50 per share, a nearly 47 percent increase over its share price at the beginning of this year, so even if this is all smoke and mirrors, the sizzle is working on the street.

If Mr. Loeb’s track record outside the art world is any indication, we may well see BID achieve $60 or even $70 per share, a market capitalization of $4.5 billion to $5 billion. Third Point has delivered outstanding results for its investors since Mr. Loeb founded the firm in 1995. Mr. Loeb has made a habit of tilting at large companies, most recently his 7 percent position in Sony and his subsequent demand that it split the entertainment business from the rest of the company: The split did not occur, but the stock did go up handsomely. In the case of Third Point’s investment in Yahoo, Mr. Loeb was successful in bringing in a new CEO and literally doubling the stock price, a big win for both shareholders and investors in his fund.

But is BID really worth it? Is the company as old-fashioned and stodgy as Mr. Loeb and his co-investors believe—in his own words, an “Old Master painting” badly in need of restoration? As Mr. Loeb pointed out in his scathing letter, BID has lagged behind its archrival, Christie’s, in both market share and the hunt for top lots to feature in major biannual evening sales. Christie’s has set more records recently for blue-chip artists like Calder, Yves Klein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s achieved lackluster results for a large Barnett Newman painting featured last season. Consigners have responded to Christie’s momentum by bringing valuable artworks to the block, like Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, estimated to sell for $35 million to $55 million in a Christie’s sale next month. Sotheby’s has parried with a major Warhol disaster diptych in its corresponding November sale, but silver paintings from the ’60s don’t have the same spark.

Would that Newman painting have done better at Christie’s? There is one macro difference between the two companies, from which many other differences stem. Sotheby’s is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Christie’s is a private company controlled by the French art collecting luxury goods tycoon Francois Pinault. In 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, Christie’s continued offering consignors juicy guarantees for major evening sale lots, even if it then tried to lay them off on third parties, locking in profits for the house. Mr. Ruprecht, wanting to sound more prudent, told the stock market that Sotheby’s would no longer offer guarantees, because the company had been so badly burned in evening sales of November 2008.

Mr. Ruprecht’s approach might have sounded good to myopic Wall Street types who see the art market as fraught with risk and view the art business as narrowly as any other business, but the strategy was wrong.

Art is a fashion-driven business prone to either feast or famine, and star lots and market share are critical in maintaining the appearance of success, even when fierce competition leads to side deals where house premiums sometimes get cut to the bone. Though art collecting has grown globally, and prices have risen overall, every artwork, and each artist’s individual market, tells a different story; the line between a world record sale and a flop is all too often razor-thin. In order to remain at the top of their game, the auction houses must charge after those few lots in a season that have the potential to make headlines. Having no one to report to but Mr. Pinault, Christie’s was able to be more nimble, despite an uncertain world economy.

Since the epic disaster of the painfully absurd “price fixing” scandal back in 2000, Sotheby’s and Christie’s have developed very different styles of doing business. Sotheby’s acts like a European academic institution where department heads are virtually tenured and there is limited incentive or leeway for underlings to go hunting for deals. This feeling is palpable as one walks into the building; behind the information desk are tight-suited staffers who insist on asking where you are going before they let you up the elevator. There is a British, clubby feeling of privilege and stuffy pedigree; it’s a place where you, the nouveau riche, have come to ogle the dusty treasures of the refined Old World while the natty experts stand aloof as if you have interrupted their rereading of Proust.

Christie’s is considerably warmer. Until recently, a genial, mustachioed doorman, Gil Perez, welcomed you. (Sadly he retired last year.) You walk into a labyrinth of art for sale. Sometimes, large pieces are plopped awkwardly in front of the building. One is never really sure which of the experts is the department head, but they are always in a rush, as if you are talking to them in an airport and they have just a few minutes between flights.

Fine art has traditionally been marketed in the buttoned-up, European manner, and Christie’s lack of hierarchy and more democratic approach has made some new buyers feel less like they are trying to get into a club where they know they are not welcome. I happen to favor the snottier style—as Groucho said, I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member—but times have changed, and the social dynamic of collecting is more powerful than ever. Sales are not just about the quality of the works or an elegant, sophisticated presentation. Aggressive marketing, over-the-top parties and elaborate catalogs have raised the stakes of this expensive battle.

Still, Sotheby’s is the premier name in art. It has been around since 1744. I would guess that the name alone is worth at least $1 billion, or about $14 per share. For the value of Sotheby’s to be maximized—and for it to exist on a level playing field with Christie’s—it would likely have to go private or be merged into a larger entity. Look at eBay, which has a market cap of $72 billion; sources tell me it is looking to expand its presence in art. It could easily swallow up Sotheby’s and instantly change the value and global reach of the company. Far-fetched? I don’t think so. EBay certainly knows how to build efficient online selling platforms. Then there’s the more natural and obvious fit with Bernard Arnault’s LVMH luxury conglomerate, which sports a market cap of $72.66 billion. Here’s a company that knows how to maximize brands globally and is not afraid to take on fixer-uppers with great brand strength and identity. Mr. Arnault gave auction house ownership a go when LVMH financed Phillips from 1999 to 2002—maybe he has learned from that lesson and is ready for another round. And perhaps Mr. Arnault would enjoy challenging Christie’s and the Pinault family, his archrivals in luxury retail.

Every system benefits from being challenged, and I believe the present firefight will benefit Sotheby’s and in fact already has. But don’t expect it to last long: The art world is a lot smaller than outsiders believe. Don’t be surprised if New Canaan’s own Mr. Ruprecht and the Upper West Side’s influential Mr. Loeb kiss and make up. Yesterday’s archenemies can be tomorrow’s BFFs when there is money to be made.

Art, From Conception to Birth in Qatar

Damien Hirst’s Anatomical Sculptures Have Their Debut

By Natalia V. Osipova

Damien Hirst Sculptures Unveiled: On Monday, the British artist Damien Hirst unveiled 14 monumental bronze sculptures in Doha, Qatar. The installation is considered a particularly bold move by the Qatar Museums Authority.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: October 7, 2013

DOHA, Qatar — For weeks, 14 giant balloons had been mysteriously parked in front of the Sidra Medical and Research Center, a hulking steel, glass and white ceramic building devoted to women’s and children’s health that is to open on the outskirts of this city in 2015.

At 7 on Monday evening, to the amplified sound of a beating heart, members of Qatar’s royal family, government officials and local artists watched as each balloon, bathed in purple light, opened like a giant flower to reveal an unusually provocative public artwork. Called “The Miraculous Journey,” it consists of 14 monumental bronze sculptures, by the British artist Damien Hirst, chronicling the gestation of a fetus inside a uterus, from conception to birth, ending with a statue of a 46-foot-tall anatomically correct baby boy.

Even for a Persian Gulf country that is aggressively buying its way into modernity, this installation takes official acceptance of Western art to a new level. Local women still adhere to centuries-old Islamic traditions, wearing the abaya, a long cloak, and niqab, or face covering; images of women are routinely censored in books and magazines. Even the representation of the human form is unusual.

To commission such an audacious work of art is considered a particularly bold move for Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, 30, chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority and a sister to the new emir of this oil- and gas-rich state. The sculptures are reported to have cost $20 million.

“To have something like this is less daring than having a lot of nudity,” said the sheikha, interviewed on Monday morning in her office at the Museum of Islamic Art, a modern, sun-filled space with sweeping views of the gulf. “There is a verse in the Koran about the miracle of birth,” she said. “It is not against our culture or our religion.”

Rather, she sees the sculptures as an extension of her mission to create a platform for contemporary artists from around the world, transforming this city of gleaming skyscrapers and sandy beaches into a center for arts and culture. Whether the public likes it or not, she believes, “it’s important to have an ongoing conversation.”

The museums authority has also organized a giant retrospective of Mr. Hirst’s work, “Relics,” which opens on Thursday.

Known as one of the most powerful forces in the international art world today, with exceptional buying power and forward thinking, Sheikha al Mayassa is a vocal advocate of contemporary art and arts education. She has been criticized by some as brazen or for embracing only celebrated artists, yet is praised by others for her commitment to the art of the new.

“She’s brave to introduce new visuals and new thoughts, especially in Doha, which is more conservative than other Middle Eastern cities,” said Nada Shabout, a professor of art history at the University of North Texas who works with the Arab Museum of Modern Art here. “Most of the Arab world has not seen public nudity. Sex is not taboo here, it’s just a very private affair. I have no idea how the public will react to these sculptures.”

Generally, the public does not take to the streets to voice disapproval and is considered unlikely to deface any public artwork. Instead, residents seize on social media platforms, like Twitter or blogs. After a 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture depicting one soccer player head-butting another was installed last week on the Corniche, a popular waterfront promenade here, some residents called online for its removal on the grounds that the sculpture, by the Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed, offended religious sensibilities. The sheikha shrugs off the criticism, saying that contemporary art is vital to the city’s landscape.

Purposely provocative, Mr. Hirst, 48, was long controversial in his own country, known for startling works that have included rotting cows positioned to simulate copulation; sharks and sheep preserved in formaldehyde; maggots attacking a cow’s head; and medicine cabinets full of hundreds of different kinds of drugs. Yet, in recent years, exposure to his work has been oversaturated in the United States and Europe.

He is fascinating to many, nonetheless, in a city like Doha. Sheikha al Mayassa recalled visiting Mr. Hirst’s studio in Gloucestershire, England, around 2009 and asking him to consider creating an outdoor sculpture.

Mr. Hirst showed her some drawings of prenatal and natal development he had made in 2005, from sperm to fetus to newborn. “I had always envisioned them to be monumental sculptures, and the sheikha had the idea of putting them in front of a woman’s hospital,” he said. (The installation’s full title is “The Miraculous Journey (2005 to 2013).”

It was a commission fraught with secrecy. “The first meeting I had with the architects, I was not allowed to tell them what the sculptures were because they wanted it to be a surprise,” he recalled. Most of the work, which took three years, was carried out in his studio in England.

There is nothing secret about them now: he positioned the sculptures so they can be seen both from the motorway and the desert. Together they weigh a total of 216 tons.

Wearing scruffy blue jeans and a white T-shirt, Mr. Hirst was watching workers put the finishing touches on his retrospective at Al Riwaq, a nondescript building — now covered in his signature dots — that is next to the Museum of Islamic Art, which was designed by I. M. Pei and opened in 2008.

Mr. Hirst said he became fascinated with childbirth after having children of his own. “Everyone talks about our life’s journey, but we have a whole journey before you’re born,” he explained.

Both Ms. Shabout and Zainab Bahrani, a professor of Near Eastern art and archaeology at Columbia University, pointed out that depictions of naked women bathing have been common throughout the history of Islamic art — for example, in ancient illuminated manuscripts. Such images are not, however, readily available to the population here.

“People are not aware here that it has a long tradition,” Ms. Shabout said.

Ms. Bahrani said: “I am sympathetic to the fact that art makes us feel uncomfortable, can challenge. On the other hand, you don’t want to shock. So it’s a fine line.”

But to Sheikha al Mayassa, it is one more step in the process of introducing art to Doha. Already she is planning two more museums here: the National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, and the Orientalist Museum, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron.

Although the sheikha declined to confirm or deny the reported cost of Mr. Hirst’s sculptures, she said the outlay was “not a crazy number.”

“For us, it’s about the bigger picture,” she said. With an impish grin, she added: “Although he denies it, I think the baby is really Damien. It looks like him.”

When winds kicked up the other day, the balloon shrouding the baby boy accidentally blew off. Mr. Hirst, who was in London at the time, received an e-mail from Sheikha al Mayassa that read:

“Your baby appears to want to come early.”

By Hannah Sampson

hsampson@MiamiHerald.com

Janet Cardiff’’s sound installation “The Forty Part Motet,’’ 40 loudspeakers in an oval in the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan.

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 19, 2013

Wobbling, blissed out, a few in tears, people emerged every 12 minutes or so from the remnant of a 12th-century Spanish chapel tucked into the Cloisters museum.

Something had happened there, up on a hill at the northern end of Manhattan.

“It’s too soon to talk,” Margaret Cardenas said as she left the chapel.

“Too raw,” said another young woman, Alyssa.

Inside the ancient chapel was the first presentation of contemporary art ever at the Cloisters: “The Forty Part Motet,” an 11-minute immersion in a tapestry of voice, each thread as vivid as the whole fabric. A sacred composition of Renaissance England is rendered by the multimedia artist Janet Cardiff through 40 speakers — one for each voice in the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, which performed the piece in 2000. What started as one microphone per singer is now a choir of black high-fidelity speakers arrayed in an oval, eight groupings of soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass.

In the intimate space of the museum’s Fuentidueña Chapel, the sound, from invisible people, as if from ghosts, feels like charged, living sculpture. Through Dec. 8, it plays in a loop all day.

Ms. Cardenas, 24, had stayed in the chapel through four full cycles, walking along the ranks of speakers, then sitting on a bench in the center.

“I’m kind of out of it — I can’t articulate it,” she said. “Each speaker is a different person. It’s not something you think about: you feel it.”

In a moment, she found the word.

“Transcendent,” she said.

Ms. Cardenas was visiting the East Coast from Oregon for a wedding, and came to New York this week specifically to see a monumental installation by James Turrell in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. Then she heard about the Forty Part Motet and trekked uptown. “This is cooler, honestly, than Turrell,” Ms. Cardenas said. “I was super fortunate to get to see both.”

Others stumbled onto the “Forty Part Motet” while doing a lap around the city museum circuit. No one who sets foot inside the Cloisters can miss the sounds; although they are at their most powerful within the jeweled acoustic space of the chapel, they soar through the building.

“We had no idea it was here, and then we heard it all along as we went around the exhibits,” said Bengt Ehlim, who was visiting the city from Sweden with his wife, Susanne. She seemed to be stepping out of a trance.

“I am so really moved,” Ms. Ehlim said.

The core of Ms. Cardiff’s installation is a motet, “Spem in Alium,” a Latin fragment of the phrase “In No Other Is My Hope,” composed by Thomas Tallis sometime in the 16th century. Its transformation into the “Forty Part Motet” has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the museum’s space in Long Island City, Queens.

“I’d seen it at MoMA, and the gallery was very neutral,” Jeff Gray, 33, a computer programmer and musician, said outside the chapel. “But there’s nothing like this kind of space, the resonance of brick with wood roof. The kind of ghost qualities are a lot more apparent here. Everything bounces a lot more: you hear a voice over here, and you kind of feel it float around you.”

He was accompanied by Etta Yuki, who works in independent film. The sensations, she guessed, were what the director of an orchestra would feel. “And seeing it in a place like this puts it in a spiritual context,” Ms. Yuki, 36, said.

Sampled from the familiar, the sum of the ancient sound and space arrives in modern ears and eyes like nothing else: not like hearing a church choir, not like listening to music on a superb sound system.

“I’ve sung in English church choirs, and I know what it’s like to be in a space with 40 people and singing something like this,” Norman Yamada, 50, a composer and high baritone, said. This was a different, slightly unsettling experience, he said; acoustically “dry” sound was reconstituted. “By close-mikeing each singer, you’ve got it very dry,” he said. “Then you put it back in this space, and it takes the coloring of the space.”

The space, of course, takes its coloring from history. The Fuentidueña Chapel was part of a castle-fortress complex in Segovia during the hundreds of years of war between Muslims and Christians in Spain. Ms. Ehlim, the Swedish visitor, had made the journey from her accommodations in the hectic East Village to the Cloisters looking for the opposite of war. “My sister told me this is a lovely place to go if you want to have some peace in New York,” Ms. Ehlim said.

A new color.

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Escaping the Heat in Art’s Fortress

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Chanel Baldwin, exploring the Brooklyn Museum after learning that admission fees were “suggested.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: August 22, 2013

CHANEL BALDWIN’S eyes sipped on that painting and only that painting, because it was what was available to her on this side of the money line.

On steaming afternoons for much of the season, Ms. Baldwin, who turned 16 on Thursday, parked herself after summer school at the Brooklyn Museum, a refugee seeking the asylum of air-conditioning.

Because she could not afford the $8 suggested student admission — one that she, like so many others, understood to be required — she never got further than the lobby. She helped herself to the bathroom and water fountain, though, and spent a lot of time gazing at the painting called “Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps,” by Kehinde Wiley. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when the museum was closed, she sometimes stood outside the glass doors that whispered puffs of cool air through their divide.

In a perfectly air-conditioned world, Ms. Baldwin’s art consumption might never have been. It was a boiling city that drove her into the frosty museum, and she’s not alone. In a city where culture is supposed to be king, New Yorkers in the summertime sometimes pop into a museum mostly to escape the heat. They come for the air but can grow to love the art, too.

Ms. Baldwin’s confinement to the lobby has made her something of an expert on that Napoleon painting — one of the few works hanging before the place where you pay. First she saw the obvious: A black man with Timberland boots had supplanted Napoleon in a riff on the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David. Then Ms. Baldwin saw the Starter brand wristband. Then she noticed the sperm cells swimming over the canvas. It made her wonder what the artist was trying to say about men of her race.

Ms. Baldwin could have remained at the school for chill air, but who wants to stay there a minute longer than you must? She could have gone home to her mother’s, not far away in Flatbush, but the miserly bedroom air-conditioners breathe too little into the living quarters. Here in the museum the air was different, almost lush. “It’s like when you’re getting into a pool, and they make you shower,” she said.

In the season now passing, museums in New York actively pursued people like Ms. Baldwin — potential visitors for whom liquid-cool air might have been a gateway drug to the art. On Twitter, where so many institutions speak more authentically than elsewhere, there were lures like “Beat the summer heat!” from @MuseumMileNYC, representing several institutions on Fifth Avenue. “Looking to beat the #NYC heat?” the Park Avenue Armory asked. “Beat the heat with our Store’s new Marilyn Minter water bottle & Jasper Johns beach towel,” the Guggenheim offered.

At the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, the chill seekers were easily detected: the ones with the soaking shirt backs, and those who sprinted in and asked the receptionist some variation of, “So what kind of museum you got here exactly?” During the heat wave, searing temperatures had driven most people from the surrounding streets, save for a crew of fluorescent-vested construction workers, belt deep in the chopped-up road, singing.

Over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the next day, Nauman Shah, 25, was leaving French salon paintings on his way to Cypriot sculpture. For this Pakistani-born engineer, who works below earth on the Second Avenue subway project, the air-conditioning was especially important. He was observing Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for Muslims. He woke before dawn and gobbled breakfast, chased by four or five glasses of water — and then the fast. He had to conserve his hydration until 8:23 p.m. Ordinarily, he would have returned to bed, waking only for dinner. But a friend had persuaded him to go out, and they agreed on the Met over other activities, he said, in part because its cool air was almost as effective as sleep at forestalling thirst. It was aiding his monthlong quest, he said, to achieve “control over your soul and desires.”

Around this time, but in another wing, a bird, perhaps also fleeing the heat, fluttered overhead through Rooms 229 and 230. It jolted a teenage boy with a Germanic accent. He asked aloud, “Was that really a bird?”

Back at the Brooklyn Museum, Ms. Baldwin was hanging with Akeem Reuben, 16, her second cousin and another summer-school air-conditioning refugee. Ms. Baldwin was on her usual bench, where she perched because of her belief that it cost money to roam further. But the fee was only “suggested,” I told them. The cousins said no one had explained that before.

Next thing, the three of us were in line. When our turn came, I uttered the museum equivalent of “open sesame”: “No donation today, thank you.”

The gates parted. We received green tags to prove our bona fides. Ms. Baldwin and Mr. Reuben looked stunned: such a formidable barrier, so easily breached. Ms. Baldwin realized they had given her an extra admission tag. She made sure to return it.

Now what did the cousins want to see? “Statues,” Ms. Baldwin replied.

But she never made it there, because the first room set her alight and held her rapt until she had to leave. There was no label too tedious to read, no piece undeserving of her scrutiny. She couldn’t help touching some of the works.

“Look at the detail on it,” she said of a Fred Wilson mirror, gasping. Then over to a grid of shelves with dozens of jugs from around the world. Each column of jugs had a Rolodex-like set of descriptions. She and Mr. Reuben stood there and went through every last jug — reading the card, then looking up at the corresponding piece, then the next and the next. They had time.

A piece called “Avarice,” by Fernando Mastrangelo, gripped Ms. Baldwin. It appeared from afar like a classic Aztec sun stone. But she got up close. Traced her fingers over it. Went to one side, looked at it; went to the other side, considered it that way. She noticed that the piece was made of corn, and then detected a toothpaste tube, soda bottles and cowboy hats lurking on the surface, all crackling with meaning.

Watching her, I realized how the inadvertent exclusion from these rooms must have trained her eyes. Instead of cruising across many floors, she had stared at the Napoleon painting and a nearby sculpture until they had little to give. Having only them to consider had taught her how to see. Now her sight could be marshaled against anything.

But she was irritated with the museum. New York is run on the kinds of understandings that kept the cousins in the lobby, with so many places formally open to anyone but protected in their exclusivity by invisible psychic gates.

Ms. Baldwin suggested a more honest approach, since people tend to think you have to pay: “They should just put a sign out telling us that it’s somewhat free.” Either way, she pledged to inform all her friends.

As the cousins left the museum for the oven of the outdoors, two schoolmates crossed their path, heading inside. “What’s going on here?” one asked. It was the cousins’ first occasion to share their discovery.

Art Basel in Miami is one of many international art fairs. Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Shared Planet” at a booth there in 2012.

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

The Threads That Tie a Show Together

Rudolf Stingel’s Carpeting Makeover in Venice

Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

In Venice, the exhibition “Rudolf Stingel” unfolds over the atrium and both upper floors of the Palazzo Grassi; in the larger salons, the carpeting reinforces the architecture of the building.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: August 20, 2013

VENICE — François Pinault, the French megacollector and mogul, was smart to give the painter Rudolf Stingel the run of his regal Venetian exhibition space, the Palazzo Grassi, along with an elastic budget. Still, it was a risk. Quantities of money and space can bring out the worst in artists, including Mr. Stingel. But this time, the resources were well used.

The visually explosive, historically charged transformation of the palazzo’s interior is one of the signal achievements of Mr. Stingel’s fascinating career and just about the best contemporary art in Venice outside of “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the exceptional centerpiece of this year’s Biennale.

At a moment when art is swamped with big-ticket, high-tech spectacles that overwhelm, Mr. Stingel’s effort is the exception that proves the rule. It engulfs but also backs off, giving the viewer plenty to look at and think about, and plenty of room for doing so, often with a weird, unexpected one-to-one intimacy.

Mr. Stingel has achieved this rarity by lining most of the palazzo’s public spaces — the vast atrium and the two floors of enfiladed galleries overlooking it — with synthetic carpet printed with an enlarged, repeating digital facsimile of a predominantly red Ottoman carpet. He then countered the blazing color with noncolor: grisaille oil paintings hung sparingly throughout the palazzo, usually one, and occasionally two, canvases in each gallery. Abstract paintings dot the second floor; the third has loosely Photo Realist paintings of carved-wood medieval saints and madonnas, some quite small, copied from old art history books.

The result of this makeover is a three-dimensional interplay of two-dimensional mediums (painting, textiles and photography) that carefully layers abstraction and representation; original and reproduction; East and West; art and craft; and personal, local and world history, all into an encompassing environment of exhilarating complexity.

Mr. Stingel is among the great anti-painting painters of our age, a descendant of Warhol but much more involved with painting’s conventions and processes, which he alternately spurns, embraces, parodies or exaggerates. His art asks what are paintings, who makes them, and how?

Among much else, he has made paintings by walking on thick slabs of white plastic foam in shoes dipped in corrosive acid, creating the one-liner effect of footsteps in snow. He has made painting kits (canvas, paint, spray paint, instructions and a bit of ballet tulle to use as a stencil), whose purchasers can attempt their own Stingel abstractions, simpler versions of those on view here.

He has also installed silver foil-covered insulation foam that the public is allowed to mar and write on; he subsequently divides these “ready-made” surfaces into paintings. And in the past decade, Mr. Stingel has revisited his early training in representation with Photo Realist works: morose self-portraits, and portraits of people important to him, like his longtime dealer, Paula Cooper. These works signal the autobiographical subtext to his seemingly distanced approach.

Throughout his career, Mr. Stingel’s installation pieces have expanded painting’s physical borders in starkly efficient ways, including the unfurling of great expanses of carpet on either wall or floor and the claiming of them, often convincingly, as paintings.

The Grassi carpet painting is his biggest ever, the first to cover both walls and floors at once, and unusually freighted with history. It is from the early 18th century (the palazzo is mid-18th-century) and just the kind of exotic luxury item that regularly passed through Venice when it was a major gateway to the Middle East.

Such carpets sometimes ended up depicted in Renaissance paintings, with the result that certain patterns are forever linked to the artists who used them and are, for example, referred to as Lotto, Memling, Holbein or Crivelli.

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a Lotto carpet from 16th-century Turkey on view in Gallery 459 that is thought to be the carpet depicted in Lotto’s 1542 “Alms of Saint Anthony,” an oil-on-wood painting hanging in the Basilica of Santia Giovanni e Paolo, not far from the Palazzo Grassi.)

At first sight, Mr. Stingel’s pictorial wonderland is mesmerizing; you seem to float like a fish in an aquarium or fall, like Alice, into some unusually lavish rabbit hole. The white cube is obliterated, absorbed completely into an encompassing, unending visual fact. Appropriately, the Persian word for “carpet” means to spread.

The mind is pulled in, too, figuring it all out: the carpet has a large central medallion on a tight field surrounded by an ornate border; its pattern is greatly enlarged (roughly eight times the original); it is the same throughout the building. Above all, it just keeps going: up the walls and the stairs, into the elevator. Always it softens sound (and comforts the feet). This built-in sense of “hushed awe” enhances the privacy of the experience.

Upstairs, space folds and unfolds, as patterned walls and floors seem to meld into continuous planes. You become aware of the care taken with piecing the carpet to fit the rooms. In the smallest, it seems magnified. In the larger salons, the giant motifs seem closer to human scale, chiefly because the carpet borders sometimes reiterate the architecture, implying wide molding around doors or wainscoting along walls. This makes sense: such carpets often had architectural inspiration in Islamic buildings, monuments and gardens.

As for the “normal” paintings: On the second floor, their loose, abstract gestures contrast with the considered craft of the rug. Some paintings with hints of brocade and signs of the stenciled tulle echo carpet’s foliate motifs and evoke the tiny grid of carpet weaving.

In a stately second-floor salon, overlooking the Grand Canal, a large portrait of the Austrian artist Franz West — a close friend of Mr. Stingel’s, who died a year ago — startles. West’s youthful image is flecked with paint and coffee cup stains, as if it had sat around his (or Mr. Stingel’s) studio for years. (One of Mr. Stingel’s darker self-portraits, based on a similarly damaged photograph, hangs in a corner of the ground floor, as if intended as a signature.)

The paintings of carved saints on the third floor set up an especially lively dialogue, contrasting Christian imagery with Islamic semiabstraction, European with Middle Eastern, opulence and love of nature with colorless deprivation and martyrdom. Moving in to examine the small paintings of St. Elizabeth, St. Barbara or John the Baptist brings you up against the Op-Art blurriness of the printed carpet, and also contrasts modern pixilation with one of its ancient precursors: hand-tied carpets.

In a sense, Mr. Stingel has merged two forms of local architecture, turning a formerly residential palazzo into a setting for religious art after purifying it with the high, sometimes religious, art of another culture. It is by far the best exhibition seen at the Palazzo Grassi since Mr. Pinault bought it from the city of Venice in 2004 as a showplace for his often tone-deaf, inordinately blue-chip collection. Maybe its run should be extended.

In a city full of centuries-old churches, whose in situ artworks never move, why not leave an aggressively contemporary site-specific one in place? Maybe the Dia Foundation could take it over; it has just as much startling displacement as Walter De Maria’s famed “New York Earth Room,” yet it is also profoundly at home.

“Untitled” by Jackson Pollock was one of the forged works. How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery.

By PATRICIA COHEN and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: August 15, 2013

For 15 years, some of the art world’s most established dealers and experts rhapsodized about dozens of newly discovered masterworks by titans of Modernism. Elite buyers paid up to $17 million to own just one of these canvases, said to have been created by the hands of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

But federal prosecutors say that most, if not all, of the 63 ballyhooed works — which fetched more than $80 million in sales — were painted in a home and garage in Queens by one unusually talented but unknown artist who was paid only a few thousand dollars apiece for his handiworks.

Authorities did not name or charge the painter and provided few identifying details except to say he had trained at a Manhattan art school in a variety of disciplines including painting, drawing and lithography. He was selling his work on the streets of New York in the early 1990s, they said, when he was spotted by a Chelsea art dealer who helped convert his work into one of the most audacious art frauds in recent memory.

The new details about the man said to have created the fakes were contained in a superseding indictment, handed up Wednesday against one of the co-conspirators, Glafira Rosales, an obscure dealer from Long Island who was arrested after a lengthy Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry. She has been charged with wire fraud and money laundering in connection to what authorities have called a scam, but her boyfriend, alleged to be the other co-conspirator who discovered the painter, has not been charged.

Investigators say Ms. Rosales sold 40 of the counterfeit works through Knoedler & Company, a venerable Upper East Side gallery that took in about $63 million from their sale. The gallery, which abruptly closed in November 2011, kept $43 million of that sum, and paid Ms. Rosales $20 million. Fakes sold through a second Manhattan dealer, Julian Weissman, brought in another $17 million, according to the indictment.

Meanwhile, the painter earned $5,400 for a painting in December 2005 and $7,000 for another in February 2008, the indictment said.

Ms. Rosales has pleaded not guilty and was released on bail earlier this week. Knoedler, its former president Ann Freedman, and Mr. Weissman have repeatedly said they believed the works they sold had been authentic.

How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery.

“It’s impressive,” said Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, the nonprofit organization that authenticates Motherwell’s work. “Whoever did these paintings was very well-informed of the practices of the artists.”

One of the first experts to publicly identify some of these paintings as forgeries, Mr. Flam noted that not only the works themselves, but also the backs of the paintings and the way the canvases were treated and the frames constructed aped the styles of the artists.

But he said “the way we look at reality is highly influenced by the context it’s presented to us.” The fact that they were sold by Knoedler, a respected gallery, influenced people’s opinions, he said.

Ms. Rosales’s boyfriend and business partner, who was not named in the indictment but has previously been identified in court papers as Jose Carlos Bergantiños-Diaz, processed the freshly painted fakes, “heating them, cooling them, and exposing them to the elements outdoors, in an attempt to make the fake works seem older than, in fact, they were,” the indictment said.

Ms. Rosales concocted various stories about the sudden appearance of so many never-seen-before works, telling Knoedler and Mr. Weissman that a majority came from a family friend who had inherited them from his father and insisted on remaining anonymous. The works, she said, were acquired in the 1950s and kept stashed in a sealed container.

Eight lawsuits have been brought by customers who say they were duped into buying forgeries. Many of the works were subjected to forensic testing that concluded they were forgeries.

Two of those suits were settled, including one involving a Pollock bought by a London hedge fund director for $17 million.

Ms. Freedman’s lawyer, Nicholas Gravante Jr., said: “Rosales’s confession confirms that Ann Freedman was the central victim of this criminal scheme.” Knoedler’s lawyer, Charles D. Schmerler, said in a statement: “If proven true, the new allegations against Rosales are a sad development for the entire art world.” But he said claims that Knoedler knowingly sold inauthentic paintings were baseless.

A lawyer for Ms. Rosales, Steven R. Kartagener, declined to comment on the new charges.

John Howard, a Wall Street executive who has sued Knoedler, Ms. Freedman and Ms. Rosales after paying $4 million for a painting attributed to Willem de Kooning, said that after he purchased the work in 2007, he asked Ms. Freedman to be on the lookout for a rare item — a small Motherwell from the artist’s acclaimed “Spanish Elegy” series.

“I doubt you’ll ever see one,” he remembered her saying.

Then six months later, he said, he got a call from the gallery saying one had surprisingly turned up. He decided not to buy it, he said. He noted that the work remained in an inventory of works unsold when the gallery shut its doors.                       

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