George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

There was art, of course, at Tuesday’s member preview of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. And outside there were the sounds of construction not quite finished, of gardens still being hung and trees being planted and nearly three years of work drawing to a close.

But mostly, from the museum supporters who stood in line, snapped pictures and gaped, there was pride and a little bit of awe.

“This is overwhelming, isn’t it?” said Florence Jacobson, who spent 16 years as a docent at the building’s predecessor, the Miami Art Museum. “It’s beautiful, it’s people-friendly, it’s aesthetically so pleasing. This is special. This is going to be a centerpiece of Miami’s cultural life.”

Tuesday’s preview for members was expected to draw about 3,000 people and serve as the warm-up act to the official ribbon-cutting and grand opening to the public Wednesday morning. Though some external construction work was still underway — and the neighboring Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science will not open until 2015 — the art museum was essentially finished inside as guests arrived.

Visitors endured long waits for valet parking, battled traffic bound for the Miami Heat game down the street, took public transportation or rode bikes. Once at the museum, they waited in even more lines to enter; the bottleneck was due in part, said PAMM deputy director Leann Standish, to visitors asking employees so many questions as they checked in.

A ceremonial groundbreaking was held in December 2010, as Art Basel Miami Beach crowds filled the city.

The opening was timed to coincide with the same event this year, and many members said Tuesday’s preview was their first stop in a long night of Art Week parties.

Those seeing the Stiltsville-inspired structure for the first time seemed wowed by the wide staircase that doubles as a theater and lecture area. One woman walked up and declared: “It’s like an arena!”

Others exclaimed about the windows spread throughout the building that, unlike those of closed-off, box-like museums, provide views from almost any space inside.

The $131 million building is a public-private partnership, part of a $220 million overall project funded by private donors and $100 million in voter-approved bonds.

“It’s worth it,” said Linda Kubie, a real estate agent who moved from Palm Beach to Miami’s Brickell area three years ago with her husband.

“The city is evolving,” Kubie said. “It’s become a cultural destination.”

Kubie and her husband Jim stood on the Biscayne Bay-facing outside deck before sunset Tuesday, taking in the vista. The couple arrived even earlier than the 4 p.m. opening time, toured the building and checked out the art, which includes works by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and Cuba’s Amelia Peláez.

“It’s really a gem,” Jim Kubie said. “It’ll be a good place to spend the afternoon, read, watch the world go by. . . . This has got to be one of the best views in Miami.”

The couple didn’t seem bothered by the noise of workers behind them, or the construction equipment that still filled the grounds around the building.

“It looks like a work in progress, as things in Miami often are,” said Noelle Galperin of Coral Gables, a consultant to start-up businesses. “It doesn’t bother me that it’s not completely done. That’s the charming part of Miami.”

Davie resident Carolina Almonte, 21, was disappointed everything wasn’t yet finished, but said she, too, was proud that Miami was gaining cultural ground.

“Miami was lacking something like this,” said her boyfriend Justin Romero, 24. “I think it kind of completes Miami in a way.”

Joaquin Livinalli, a resident of Caracas who donated to the museum, took a photo of the “annual giving wall” where his and wife Alys’ names are written.

“Big things are possible,” said Livinalli, a real estate developer and art collector. “It’s worth it to dream.”

Livinalli said that as a fan of the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and especially of art, he was pleased to be involved with the final product.

“I love it,” he said.

Several members said they were excited for Miami to have a cluster of arts attractions downtown, including Museum Park and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts a couple of blocks north.

“I think it’s great for downtown Miami and the cultural corridor,” said Scott Shiller, the Arsht Center’s executive vice president, as he walked up the museums’ staircase. “Once the science museum is open, it’s just going to add to the dynamics and just the vibrancy of the neighborhood.”

Galperin, a charter member of the museum, said she was glad as a Miami-Dade taxpayer that county money had gone to the museum.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Go ahead. Grab a rough-hewn Adirondack chair, settle down on the expansively shaded deck under the pendulous greenery and bask in what may be the best public views — inside and out — anywhere along the water in downtown Miami.

This is, after all, your new museum of art — a $131 million haute-design showcase for modern and contemporary work that also manages to extend an open, dare we say homespun, welcome.

When it opens to the public at the edge of Biscayne Bay on Wednesday, on time and on budget, the strikingly original and meticulously thought-out Perez Art Museum Miami will put art front and center on the city’s landscape for the first time. In doing so, supporters and civic leaders fervently hope it will redefine Miami as a cultural destination.

With wrap-around verandas cooled by lush gardens and a monumental overhanging roof, 360-degree views of bay and city from within and without, and an adjacent new plaza, park and baywalk, the unusually porous museum could also become something else, backers say: a spectacular new front porch for the people of Miami.

“It’s going to be a Miami icon without trying to be anything other than a great museum,’’ said Terry Riley, the architect and former museum director who oversaw the launch of the building effort, in a recent public talk. “I think it’s going to be considered one of the most important contemporary museums anywhere.’’

Bold words, for sure, especially for a young institution that until relatively recently had but a small, uneven collection and a nearly invisible profile, thanks to its location behind fortress-like walls on an elevated plaza on Flagler Street.

During the new museum building’s long gestation, the use of scarce city park land and a public subsidy of $100 million (approved by voters in 2004 as part of a larger, $2.9 billion Miami-Dade County bond package) became a persistent target for critics, including some prominent local art collectors. So did the subsequent renaming of the onetime Miami Art Museum after developer Jorge Perez, whose $40 million gift of art and cash boosted its collection and bottom line but provoked raised eyebrows in the art world and a rift among the institution’s own supporters.

Against this backdrop, museum leaders say they were acutely aware of the need to avoid the cost overruns and construction issues that plagued the nearby Arsht Center even as they built a home and collection defined by high aspirations. PAMM officials say they’ve also nearly met a private fundraising goal of $120 million to supplement the public investment and create an endowment to support the expanded operation.

To design the building, Riley and board leaders picked the powerhouse Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, famed for the conversion of a massive London power plant into what is now the world’s most popular museum of contemporary art, the Tate Modern. More recently, the firm designed San Francisco’s de Young Museum, which is covered in punctured, oxidized copper and has a tower shaped like an inverted pyramid rising from Golden Gate Park. The firm, though known for its raw look and rigorous execution, has no signature style, which meant its approach would not be cookie-cutter, Riley said.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Talk of the Turner Prize, Where, for One Thing, Talk Is Art

Johnny Green

Tino Sehgal, foreground, is one of four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize. His work “This is exchange” involves a simple chat.

By ROSLYN SULCAS

Published: November 29, 2013

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — On a recent morning, a group of teenagers stood in a room, now an art gallery in a former military barracks here, and stared at the bare white walls. They were searching for the work of Tino Sehgal, one of the four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.

What they didn’t yet know was that they were the work: Mr. Sehgal’s art exists only as personal encounters between members of the public and a guide paid to engage them in conversation. It was a moment worthy of the oft-contentious reputation of the Turner, an annual award of £25,000 (around $41,000) under the aegis of the Tate Museum that is given to a British artist under 50. The winner will be announced on Monday.

Mr. Sehgal’s performance art piece — here in a three-month exhibition, along with works by his fellow nominees, David Shrigley, Laure Prouvost and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye — is one sign that the 29-year-old Turner Prize can still be counted on to provide at least a few challenges to traditional expectations.

The finalists are nominated by a four-person international jury of curators and gallery and museum directors, led by Penelope Curtis, the director of Tate Britain, who plays no part in the final decision. The prize is well known in Britain, and it makes for a moment when people entirely uninterested in contemporary art discuss contemporary art. The award ceremony on Monday will be shown live on national television, as it is each year, and bookmakers are eagerly taking bets on the winner. (A few days before the announcement, Mr. Sehgal was the favorite at Ladbrokes, with 7 to 4 odds.)

But winning isn’t required. Even a nomination for the Turner can be a turning point in an artist’s career, said Chris Hammond, whose gallery, MOT International, represents Ms. Prouvost. “What the Turner Prize does is to instantaneously bring the artist to a new, broad audience,” he said.

Tracey Emin, nominated for the prize in 1999, was blunter. Writing in 2006, she said: “If I were speaking to the artists who are in it this year, I’d say something like: ‘Don’t worry too much. The price of your work is going to double.’ ”

Critics have often been scathing about the quality and shock value of some art that has been nominated for the Turner. The prize “is perhaps most famous for trying — sometimes desperately — to elicit a reaction from its visitors,” Zoe Pilger wrote in The Independent last month.

The prize is also popular partly because of that shock value, much enjoyed by the British tabloids, which have followed some of the exhibits with delirious glee: Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, or Ms. Emin’s unmade bed with detritus from her stay there during a siege of depression, including condoms and cigarettes.

This year, the prize apparatus is also breaking a barrier with its setting: For the first time, the Turner Prize exhibition and award ceremony are being held outside of England, here in Londonderry (called Derry-Londonderry in all Turner publicity), designated as Britain’s first City of Culture.

The city is deeply associated with the Troubles, the violent sectarian conflict that raged on the Irish island for decades. Londonderry bears testament to sensitivities that prevail, despite the 1998 Good Friday agreement. (Some see the London prefix, added to Derry in 1613, as a British imposition, thus the double name that is popular with many.) The placing of the exhibition in the Ebrington Barracks, where the British Army was garrisoned and which remained barred and inaccessible until relatively recently, is meant to symbolize a transformation from devastation to regeneration.

“We recognized there would be challenges, but there was always a desire on our part to make it work,” said Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate Museums, in a telephone interview. “I hope that by putting it in Ebrington, we lay down another layer of history.”

The exhibition is part of the extensive calendar of events planned by Culture City, an organization working in concert with the city’s designation. The art is in building 80/81, transformed by a $3.9 million renovation from dilapidation to a gleaming series of galleries facing the curving Peace Bridge, built in 2011.

What will happen to Ebrington when the Turner exhibition closes is uncertain. “The real value of having the Turner here has been showing the potential of those buildings as a cultural center,” said Willie Doherty, a Londonderry-born photographer who has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize. “I think we will have missed a huge opportunity if we don’t develop and build upon the success of this year.”

The galleries provide an unobtrusive, custom-made space for the artists. Mr. Shrigley’s “Life Model 2012” is an ill-proportioned animatronic naked man, three meters (about 10 feet) tall, surrounded by chairs and, usually, groups of people earnestly drawing it.

Mr. Shrigley, 45, has been producing books of illustrations — and photography, cartoons, sculpture, animation and painting — since the early 1990s, and he has been commercially and artistically successful; last year the Hayward Gallery in London presented a 20-year retrospective of his work, the source of his nomination. His pieces are funny and accessible; therefore, he said cheerfully in a telephone interview, “I don’t have any expectation of winning the prize.” A giant man urinating in a bucket, he said, is not a winner.

A video and sculpture installation from the French-born Ms. Prouvost, 35, who moved to London at 18 to study experimental film and video, is in the next gallery. Her whimsical film installation “Wantee,” for which she was nominated, is animated by her voice telling the story of her (fictional) conceptual artist grandfather, whose creations, displayed around a space resembling a tearoom, are used as domestic objects by her grandmother.

“The idea of a dialogue with the audience is important to me,” Ms. Prouvost said in a Skype interview. “I am coming from the experimental scene and questioning the idea of telling the story and making moving images.”

Ms. Yiadom-Boakye, 36, a Londoner of Ghanaian descent, is perhaps the wild card in the pack because she is a straightforward portrait painter. But her portraits are of imaginary people that she describes as “composites” of memory, images and imagination. At Ebrington, the dark-hued figures emerge from the dark, textured oil-painted canvases and low lighting with almost palpable intensity.

And then there is Mr. Sehgal’s 2003 “This is exchange,” which centers on a discussion of the market economy. (There is an incentive for visitors to participate: a small sum of cash.) Mr. Sehgal, 37, who studied dance and economics before turning to the world of visual art, is enjoying a moment in the sun; he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale this year.

No matter how many bets are taken, the Turner Prize outcome is never predictable. “It’s not a vote but a discussion, which makes it unpredictable because passions come into play,” said Judith Nesbitt, the head of National and International Initiatives at Tate. “It’s opinionated. It’s not objective. It can’t be.”

From a local point of view, said Graeme Farrow, the programming director of Culture City, it hardly matters. “The real winner,” he said, “is Derry.”

George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann

The art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn at her townhouse on the Upper East Side.

By GUY TREBAY

Published: November 29, 2013

As the art mob descends on South Florida this week for the 12th edition of the cross-platform marketing frenzy that is Art Basel Miami Beach — private jets disgorging art sharks and their adviser remoras — one slight and fashionable figure will stand out.

A thin and dark-haired woman with a knife-slash smile, Rooney Mara bangs and a collection of jersey weeds from Saint Laurent and Rick Owens, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn is, at 46, no one’s idea of a late bloomer

For well over a decade, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn has been a stealth force in the art world, the “art brat” daughter of a respected dealer who, after her college studies, went on to become an independent curator; a private dealer and adviser; a judge in the Bravo reality series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”; a widely photographed socialite with a prominent banker husband; a prodigious Democratic fund-raiser; and a proprietor of three increasingly influential galleries with clients from both inside the circles of usual art-world suspects as well as powerful and unexpected outliers like the hip-hop mogul Jay Z.

It is at her Salon 94, Salon 94 Freemans and Salon 94 Bowery that Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn came into her own, showcasing a signature knack for discovering young and emerging artists, for kick-starting the reputation of those in midcareer, and for engineering unlikely aesthetic mash-ups combining the disparate worlds of fashion, sports, entertainment and art.

Consider that when, during the 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees opened his North Bay Road mansion to a select group of Art Basel attendees, the witty batting-cage installation by the New York-based sculptor and painter Nate Lowman was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s inspiration, generated out of a visit the ballplayer made to her gallery.

“I first came to Jeanne’s uptown space to view several monochrome Richard Prince ‘Joke’ paintings,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote in an email. “Our real conversation happened upstairs looking at a Nate Lowman ‘Smile’ painting.”

Having introduced the Yankee to the artist, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn suggested they collaborate. Thus, Mr. Lowman “tricked out my batting cage” with an array of his obsessive smiley-face paintings, Mr. Rodriguez said.

“The Smiles became a stadium audience around the room,” he added. “We joked about me hitting a baseball through one of his bullet-hole paintings hung high on the net.”

When Jay Z appeared at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea last summer to film a video for the single “Picasso Baby” with a cast of celebrated art-world conscripts, it was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn who subtly and with little fanfare acted as a guiding force.

There she was, on a muggy July afternoon, discreetly stage-managing as the rapper mesmerized a crowd including the artists Lawrence Weiner, Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas, and the philanthropist Agnes Gund. Gliding through the white cube gallery in a one-shouldered Lanvin jumpsuit and with her signature cluster of stone talismans strung from her neck, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn supervised the proceedings, darting from improvised green room to curb, where she greeted the performance artist Marina Abramovic as she descended from a chauffeured S.U.V., a nutty lunar priestess in a self-induced trance.

“The interesting thing about Jeanne is how involved she is in the ‘becoming’ of an artist’s creations,” the artist Terry Adkins recently said.

Recruited by Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn and added to her roster after a 10-year absence from the art scene, Mr. Adkins found himself emerging from semi-obscurity as a newly minted breakaway star. For the October Frieze Art Fair in London, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn installed a cut-down version of Mr. Adkins’s totemic “Muffled Drums,” a stacked drum sculpture paying symbolic homage to the black writer and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois.

The piece, quickly snapped up by the Tate Modern, represented an element of political engagement that is Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s signature. “I was really attracted to her in the first place because she had black artists and women, and never made a big deal out of it,” said Marilyn Minter, one of the gallery’s marquee names. In fact, her list of artists was never preferential of race or sex, yet the range of her interests and connections goes well beyond the confines of an often insular gallery scene.

“How many dealers,” Mr. Adkins asked, “would even think to collaborate with Jay Z on a video?” How many, for that matter, could hope to elicit his consent?

On a recent chill evening, the crowd for an opening of a jewelry exhibition by the sculptor Alexander Calder at Salon 94 was indicative of the atmosphere Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn specializes in creating, one bearing little resemblance to the typical art-world assembly.

Teetering about the room in the townhouse that serves as both gallery and residence for Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s family, Michele Lamy — wife and muse of Mr. Owens, the designer — wore vertiginous heelless platform shoes and a gold grille on her teeth. Gareth Pugh, the British designer, mugged for a camera in a Calder tiara, closely watched by a security guard in white cotton gloves.

Bearded and wearing a thigh-high miniskirt, the gender-torquing party promoter Andre J. took snapshots as Fran Lebowitz, in a studied Robert Benchley pose, held up a wall. Wandering through it all was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s daughter Coco, one of her three children with Nicolas Rohatyn, a financier whose father is the eminent banker Felix Rohatyn, best known perhaps for his brinksman role in staving off New York City’s bankruptcy in the 1970s.

“You go into Jeanne’s house, and you see this phenomenal taste and incredible mix,” said Lisa Perry, the fashion designer and art collector, noting how offhandedly the valuable Calder jewelry was displayed — in a 1952 Lattes bookcase by the Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (whose estate Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn represents); atop a Hella Jongerius Frog table; and on a charred-looking bronze sculpture by the artist Huma Bhabha. “It’s all kind of seamless,” she said.

Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn (her first name is pronounced “genie”) moved quietly about the space dressed in black leather trousers and with her hair slicked back. “This is all normal,” she said. Yet normal people seldom inhabit double-wide townhouses chock-full of costly contemporary art, including a Calder stabile and David Hammons’s backboard chandelier Untitled, a version of which sold at the recent auctions for $8 million. “The idea is to elevate the way you live your domestic life,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn coolly remarked.

Not all of her projects have been high-minded; a stint on a cable reality show struck some in the industry as a curious career move for a woman who struggled to shake off an early reputation as a Vogue “It” girl, a fashion favorite often spotted in designers’ front rows. “I’m glad I took the risk and did something unknown to me,” she said of “Work of Art,” in which she appeared alongside China Chow, the gallery owner Bill Powers and Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine. “You can’t be too predictable,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn explained in a text message. “It shook up my image.” It also “made me fix my posture,” she said.

“What is fascinating about Jeanne is the sheer force of her personality,” a New York museum official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid the appearance of favoritism. “She loves art, she loves artists and she loves objects. You look across the roster of emerging to midcareer to well-known artists she shows, and you can see there’s something there that requires a passionate, individual approach.”

For Roselee Goldberg, an art historian and the founder of Performa, the performance art foundation whose board Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn leads, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn “has an ease” in navigating the art world because it is her native terrain. A daughter of a prominent art dealer, Ronald Greenberg, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn — who studied art history at Vassar and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and was raised in a vast Gothic Revival pile in suburban St. Louis — comes by her easy conversancy with art-world machinations and folkways naturally.

“She is comfortable across the entire spectrum, from established artists to the youngest and most emerging,” Ms. Goldberg added of the dealer’s catholicity of taste. Ms. Goldberg pointed out that at Salon 94, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn has exhibited artists, sculptors and designers as varied as Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson, Mr. Lowman and also Mr. Owens, whose massive, neo-brutalist furniture she once showed in tandem with sprightly organic vessels by Betty Woodman, a beloved octogenarian ceramist.

“The thing with Jeanne is she’s not coming from a place of cold calculation,” Ms. Goldberg added, and surely few other dealers would be as willing to risk reviving the reputation of an artist like Jimmy DeSana, a gifted and all-but-forgotten photographic explorer of dark sexual impulses and an early AIDS fatality.

It was most likely her passionate and unorthodox approach that made her attractive to an equally passionate group of novice collectors, said Lyor Cohen, a music industry executive who brokered Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s introduction to Jay Z.

“Her aesthetic and taste is impeccable,” Mr. Cohen said by telephone. “She is on the front end of a lot of things.”

Unlike many who travel the art fair circuit with billionaire clients and a shopping list of fashionable requisites in hand, he suggested, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn builds collections with an intuitive eye. “If you wanted that art adviser playbook, she wouldn’t have contorted her body for that playbook,” he said.

Although requests for comment made through representatives for Jay Z went unanswered, those familiar with his collection note that, in a surprisingly short time, he has amassed a grouping notable for breadth and discernment, one that includes works by, among many others, Ms. Minter, Gary Simmons, Mr. Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“Jeanne’s as courageous as he is, and that’s what he wants,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to Jay Z. “He wants the best of her.”

Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn, for her part, invokes omertà when discussion turns to her clients. “But, yes,” she said curtly, “art does sometimes need a lot of help.”

For Ms. Minter, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s editorial eye and her ability to reconfigure careers was in some ways life-changing. “I’d been somebody who was always slightly marginalized,” the artist told a recent visitor to her Garment Center studio. “When Jeanne first came to me, after I was in the Whitney Biennial, she said, ‘You’ve had such an out-of-the-box kind of career, I want to represent you.’ ”

Ms. Minter had no gallery at the time and sold few pictures; these days, there is a waiting list for her paintings, whose prices range from $45,000 to $500,000. “Now Jerry Seinfeld owns photos of my mother, if you can believe that,” Ms. Minter said. “That’s Jeanne!”

At Art Basel Miami Beach, 258 galleries from 31 countries will set up shop, and 50,000 visitors are expected to flood the halls of the city’s convention center. For her own white-walled space, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn is taking a chance by displaying only Ms. Minter’s new paintings and a motorcycle by the designer Sebastian Errazuriz customized and with a topiary bird affixed to the handlebars. “Objects have their own integrity and energy, which is something people who live among objects understand,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said. “They speak to each other, creating a dialogue, which is what personally gets my heart beating.”

One afternoon last week, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn wandered about Ms. Minter’s studio checking the progress of her Miami pictures, as several of the artist’s nine assistants applied final touches to paintings that were not yet dry.

Musing about whether to bring along examples of the painter’s older work, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn asked, “Do you have the singer in the studio?”

Ms. Minter, who was wearing motorcycle boots, black tights and a Kelly green T-shirt with the legend “Draw Me,” called out to an assistant, “Do we have that painting here, or is it in storage?”

“The singer,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said.

As Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn and Ms. Minter hunched over a desktop computer, scanning images from an online inventory, a visitor suddenly recalled an observation Ms. Perry, the designer, had made about Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn. “I think her connection to Jay Z and to me and to the people she advises works because she opens our eyes to stuff we would not have even known about before,” Ms. Perry said. “We love Jeanne for that reason: She’s going to open our eyes.”

Just then, a blurred image popped onto the screen depicting a woman whose mouth was widened as if in song. The image, Ms. Minter noted, came from an early series titled “Hard Core Porn.” On close inspection, it became clear the woman was no singer and the object she gripped so tightly in her hand was no microphone.

“Oh,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said, grinning wryly. “Let’s not take that.”

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Squeezing Art Out of the Picture

From left, Remo Ruffino, the creative director of Moncler; Uma Thurman; and Jean Pigozzi at the Moncler anniversary party last year during Art Basel Miami Beach. Such stargazing events are overshadowing art-related events.

By NATE FREEMAN

Published: November 29, 2013

Let’s play a game: Are the following parties taking place during New York Fashion Week or Art Basel Miami Beach?

A brunch to toast a T-shirt designed by Visionaire and Gap. A cocktail party to celebrate a new fashion fair. A dinner hosted by Louis Vuitton for a modernist beachfront house. A Dom Pérignon party hosted by the playboys Alex Dellal, Stavros Niarchos and Vito Schnabel?

O.K., O.K., they are all parties from Art Basel, the annual South Florida pilgrimage this week by seemingly every social person in New York. But while fashion parties in the art world are nothing new, the sheer volume of events (dinners, cocktails and blowout parties) not related to art this year is deafening. Sure, the art fairs still display paintings at gobsmacking prices during the day, but the serious art folk are getting sick of the nighttime excess.

“You basically have to treat Art Basel Miami Beach like Vegas,” said Bill Powers, a gallerist and constant fixture at cocktail functions and openings. “You get in, then you get out. Nobody I know is staying the whole weekend.”

Mr. Powers is just dipping his toe in the Miami Beach melee: he’s staying for two days. He forwarded an email with an invitation to a screening of “Her,” the latest film by Spike Jonze. Highly anticipated, sure, but not exactly art-related (even with Jeffrey Deitch moderating a Q-and-A with Mr. Jonze). And it’s slated for Thursday. “I’ll be home already,” Mr. Powers said.

Would he be missing much by skipping out early? Perhaps not.

“So much of the Basel fatigue is that a lot of the events are not that fun,” said Manish Vora, who, along with Kyle DeWoody, is a founder of Grey Area, the art collective and online retailer. “Every conversation is about what parties you’re going to. It’s not about the actual party. No one goes and says, like, ‘Oh, I had the craziest time.’ ”

Granted, last year’s spate of parties had its highlights, and it just so happened that most had little to nothing to do with art. The most-discussed moment wasn’t a bidding war or a Damien Hirst brawl. It was the Chanel dinner where Demi Moore spent the evening petting a stray cat, even during an auction for a Dash Snow charity. Or the Moncler 60th anniversary party, held at the parking lot at 1111 Lincoln Road, which was reimagined as a tropical ski chalet for celebrities like Uma Thurman and Pharrell Williams.

This year’s edition of Art Basel, which officially starts Thursday, is shaping up to be no different. Sure, there are the week’s usual marquee art parties: White Cube’s poolside party at the Soho Beach House, Aby Rosen’s A-list dinner at the Dutch and the opening and V.I.P. dinner for the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami’s winter exhibition (this time, for Tracy Emin). There are notable newcomers, too. The Pérez Art Museum Miami, a contemporary art museum, is opening this week with a series of private brunches, V.I.P. previews and dinners.

But they pale in comparison this year to the flood of parties not related to art but with tie-ins to luxury brands, alcohol sponsors, fashion labels and boutiques. One public relations firm has compiled a party calendar that runs 14 pages and includes 27 events on Tuesday alone, including a fashion show, a brunch for a pop-up store and a dinner for a new furniture line.

And partygoers are already talking about Wednesday night, with word circulating online that Kanye West is to participate with the artist Vanessa Beecroft in a performance art piece at Mana Wynwood, a sprawling production village in the Miami Art District.

The art fairs themselves are not immune to the hubbub. NADA Miami Beach, a satellite fair that showcases emerging contemporary artists, has partnered this year with American Apparel on a line of artist-designed T-shirts. And SCOPE Miami Beach, another satellite fair, is showcasing an art project curated by Red Bull.

No wonder that with each passing year, more and more attendees don’t even seem to bother with the art. “I don’t have a relationship with the art world in any profound capacity, so for me it’s just a way for me to unwind,” said Leandra Medine, the fashion blogger known as Man Repeller.

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George Lindemann Journal

You Loved Me Like a Distant Star (2012)
Ms. Emin's neons are all hand-blown by London-based sign-maker Kerry Ryan, who then fills the glass with a mixture of neon, argon and mercury using a century-old technique. Lehmann Maupin

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The Scream (2002)
Many of the show's works, including "The Scream" from 2002, reflect Ms. Emin's struggle with feelings of depression. Ms. Emin believes her soul was "tangled up" in that of her twin brother, Paul. Tracey Emin/White Cube

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The Tracey Emin Museum (1995)
Kerry Ryan made Ms. Emin's first neon, shown here, for her studio in 1995. The two are now close friends, but upon meeting the "boisterous" artist, Mr. Ryan says he initially thought she was "a bit off her rocker." Tracey Emin/White Cube

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I Can Feel your Smile (2005)
The seemingly random capitalized letters in Tracey Emin's signs are cosmetic touches. Some letters such as "i" or "s" look better capitalized than others, she explains. Lehmann Maupin

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Meet Me in Heaven I Will Wait for You (2004)
Ms. Emin became famous for brassy, sexually explicit work, which are themes in some of her neons in the show. But the vast majority of her works deal with topics like love, God and depression. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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Only God Knows I'm Good (2009)
The green used in this sign is similar to that used in the neon signs of apothecaries in Europe, because it also glows during the day, says Ms. Emin. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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You Forgot to Kiss My Soul (2001)
Ms. Emin has never held a show of neons before, partly because the process of putting it together is so expensive that most museums would require that the show then travel to recoup costs, says Ms. Emin, who refuses to do traveling shows. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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Sorry Flowers Die (1999)
MOCA Miami was the first American museum to purchase one of Ms. Emin's works, a film called "Why I Never Became a Dancer," whichi will be screened at the exhibition. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

George Lindemann Journal

The Museum of Modern Art’s atrium has been home to any number of weird, wild and wacky goings-on. There was the time the performance artist Marina Abramovic sat there for 700 hours, and another when someone played a baby-grand piano from inside a hole that had been cut into it. There was also an installation of hazelnut pollen, and even a giant garage sale.

For its next act, the Modern will install nine double-sided screens, measuring up to 23 feet wide and hung at different heights, that will project a work by the British artist Isaac Julien, “Ten Thousand Waves”; it will be on view starting Monday. The installation deals with the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, when 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned off the coast of northwest England. It incorporates archival footage from a police helicopter showing the rescue of one survivor from a sandbank. There are also audio recordings of distress calls and images of contemporary Chinese culture. (Through Feb. 17; moma.org.)

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George Lindemann Journal

Work by Michelle Lopez will be among the sculptures appearing in the 2013 Art Basel Miami Beach Art Public sector.

Man is by nature a social animal…Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

— Aristotle, Politics

Those of us who fall into the middling range of mere mortals may especially enjoy this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach Art Public sector, with works chosen especially to reflect the exhibition’s theme of “Social Animals.”

Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of New York’s Public Art Fund, selected two dozen works that play on the collective and social nature of a public park. The artists invited to show at Collins Park this year range from emerging to emeritus. There’s even a posthumous display by Charlotte Posenenske, a German artist known for her minimalist works — particularly her steel sculptures resembling ventilation parts. Gallerists Mehdi Chouakri and Peter Freeman are teaming up to recreate six works from her Vierkanthrohre (Square Tubes) Serie D, among the last works she created before abruptly ending her career in the late 1960s. Ironically, during her self-imposed exile from the art world until her death in 1985, Posenenske questioned the worth of public art.

For Silvia Karman Cubiñá, that worth is not questionable at all. As executive director and chief curator of the Bass Museum – which once again joined Art Basel in Miami Beach to produce the outdoor exhibit outside the museum’s front entrance – Cubiñá has seen first-hand how the public interacts with the art previously displayed in Collins Park. Of particular note were six chaise-shaped concrete slabs created by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, Cubiñá says, explaining how different groups of people would gravitate to the works.

“They turned into a meeting point, which became lovely, because there would be different populations that would crowd around it,” she says. “Early in the morning we had a lot of homeless people that were having breakfast. Then a little later, the dog walkers. Then at 3 o’clock the students who came from the high school would gather there, and some of them started coming into the museum. Then again the dog walkers; then again the homeless people. So, there were different populations, and I just saw it as a gathering place that came together around art.”

This year British sculptor Thomas Houseago is expected to provide visitors with a similar experience. In addition to his Striding Figure (Rome 1), Houseago plans to provide two studio seats and a chaise lounge, which will be an open invitation for the public to drape themselves across his sculptures. Danish artist Jeppe Hein also is expected to add a bit of interactive art with his Appearing Rooms, a constantly changing sculpture in which jets of water form a labyrinth of wet walls that can end up soaking those who get too close. Matias Faldbakken presents a full-scale adaptation of a Peterbilt 281 big rig truck.

This year’s exhibit in the park, which fronts the museum and spans the area between 17th and 25th streets, is aimed to satisfy the senses from sight to sound and runs through March 31. According to Cubiñá, a grant from the Knight Foundation enabled the show to grow from its original four days to four months this year. As a result, she says, the museum plans to use the sculpture garden as a backdrop for its 50th anniversary in January, complete with a full orchestra in the park.

On the days when there is no orchestra, visitors to the park may hear the chirping of crickets, as imitated by a clarinet player. That’s courtesy of American artist Mungo Thomson, whose installation goes by the working title of “Cricket Solo for Clarinet.”

Abstract expressionist Mark di Suvero, 80, is the show’s oldest artist. His monumental work, Exemplar, was created in 1979 and consists of two intersecting I-beans. British land artist Richard Long will also be showing an earlier work. His Higher White Tor Circle was created in 1996 and is made up of Dartmoor granite chunks arranged in a mosaic-like circle.

George Lindemann Journal

For Thom Collins, director of the striking new Perez Art Museum Miami, the past couple of years have rushed by like the time lapse video of the construction project posted on the museum’s website: cranes moving in; rebar and concrete materializing; walls and columns shooting up; wrap-around terraces stretching out — all at dizzying speed.

Museum director Thom Collins walks among the works being installed on Tuesday October 29, 2013 for the opening in December 2013 of the Perez Art Museum Miami.

PATRICK FARRELL

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“When I was growing up in Philadelphia, we went to the art museum every month. I think the PAMM could emerge as that kind of institution for Miami, a culturally oriented town center where people and ideas meet, and where you know you will always find thoughtful, sophisticated programming.’’

Soon after arriving in Miami, Collins, who favors skinny suits and square-framed glasses, moved to a working-class neighborhood bordering art-centric Wynwood, determined to understand from the inside this young city experiencing a modern cultural boom.

“This is a place with such dynamic cultural diversity, and that gives it such potential. This is a city where the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the New World Center, the new science museum and the PAMM are all going up within a period of about 10 years. That’s remarkable. That’s instant cultural infrastructure.”

The PAMM is scheduled to open during Art Basel week, on time and within budget — though not without its share of controversy over its name honoring Miami developer Jorge Perez, who in 2010 donated $40 million in cash and art. Still, Collins is celebrating the fact that the museum has locked in more than 90 percent of its $220 million fundraising goal ($100 million came from public funds).

“There is a lot of aspiration in Miami. And a recognition that we are building a real repository for the city’s shared cultural heritage. You can see this in the support the museum is receiving.”

Collins himself managed to gain broad support from the community almost from the time he arrived — which is no small feat.

“Thom makes it all look easy,” says Michael Spring, director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. “For the whole cultural community to move forward, you have to have top leaders at the flagship institutions who are steady professionals, who can earn the respect of the people around them.

“When you talk to Thom, you get a sense of confidence. This is someone who is a national leader in the visual arts. And he is charming, funny, good in social situations, which is very important when it comes to building relationships with donors and collectors.”

George Lindemann Journal

"Immigrant Drama on Nine Screens" by Kelly Crow

In the late 1980s, Isaac Julien became a hit of London's contemporary art scene by projecting his lush films about poets and protesters onto multiple, dangling screens, rather than one. The video artist was among the first to ask viewers to move around his films instead of simply sitting down.