George Lindemann Journal - "Using Artists to Sell Condos in Miami and New York" @ nytimes by JULIE SATOW

With cities like New York and Miami in the midst of another luxury condominium boom, developers seem to be tripping over one another in the scramble to announce their latest projects, and to stand out from the pack, they are locked in an escalating game of one-upmanship.

In a market where amenities like golf simulators and children’s playrooms barely raise a well-manicured eyebrow, the stakes are high. Add to this the fact that developers are asking buyers to shell out upward of $10 million for apartments that are, in many cases, still just a dirt pile on the ground, and they have no choice but to bring the razzle-dazzle.

Increasingly, the trick they are most often pulling out of their collective hat is art, with a capital A.

In Miami, for example, the developer of a beachfront condominium on Collins Avenue has commissioned a sculptor, whose pieces have sold for more than $500,000, to create original works for every buyer in the building. Another Miami developer has hired the painter and Academy Award-nominated director Julian Schnabel to design a sales center for its condominium, with rose-colored stucco and sawtooth lamps. In MidtownManhattan, a developer is making a pointed effort to stand out by placing a permanent 40-story LED light installation on the building’s facade, while others have taken to hiring art consultants just as they would architects and construction companies.

“There is a very strong art market right now, with a much more diverse and large collector base than at any other time I can remember,” said Yvonne Force Villareal, a founder of the nonprofit Art Production Fund. She and a business partner, Doreen Remen, recently started Culture Corps, a for-profit art consulting business that advises real estate developers. The expanded art collector base has resulted in more buyers of high-end condos wanting artwork to be part of the experience of shopping for a new home.

“Those who invest in high-end luxury homes also tend to have a strong knowledge of art,” said Helidon Xhixha, an Albanian-born artist who has shown his work at Art Basel Miami Beach, and who recently sold a piece titled “The Wall” to a private art collector for more than $540,000. The developers Property Markets Group and S2 Development hired Mr. Xhixha to create sculptures tailored to each buyer at Muse, a 68-unit condominium in the Sunny Isles neighborhood of Miami.

While some may consider it selling out for artists to create pieces as part of a condominium marketing effort, Mr. Xhixha said, “I do not see this as over-commercializing my art. On the contrary, I see a collaboration between buyer and artist.” Mr. Xhixha added that an apartment tower filled with his pieces “will be like having my very own private museum.”

For the Chetrit Group and Clipper Equity, the developers converting the former Flatotel at 135 West 52nd Street into 109 condo units, “we wanted to create something that gave the building an identity, that gave us some notoriety,” said Raphael De Niro, a broker at Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, who is representing the building. “People like to be able to talk about their building and have others know it, for people to feel they live somewhere unique.” The developers hired Thierry Dreyfus, the lighting designer who lit up the Grand Palais in Paris and the Château de Versailles, to create the 423-foot installation that will be placed inside a casing attached to the front of the building.

The commingling of art and real estate has a long, established history, beginning with the cathedrals of Europe, which commissioned religious art. The Medici family in Italy hired artists to create works for their many estates, while in modern times, art has played a role in places like the Seagram Building, with its famed tapestry by Pablo Picasso. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that in this era, which some have termed the new Gilded Age, the worlds of art and real estate have once again begun to merge.

Mr. Schnabel, who created the interiors of the Gramercy Park Hotel and built Palazzo Chupi, a pink condominium in the West Village, is no stranger to this connection. “The idea of living with art is a good thing, not necessarily a scam,” he told me recently. “Obviously, when something is popular they can turn that into something trendy, but it has a historical precedent.”

Mr. Schnabel is designing the sales center — “a terrible term, can’t we say building?” — for the Brickell Flatiron, a 710-foot triangular-shaped skyscraper underway in Miami. The center — the developers prefer the word “gallery” — will have Mr. Schnabel’s paintings and furniture, as well as a fireplace. It will “look like a living room,” Mr. Schnabel said. “It will be very different than other sales offices, where they look like you are walking into a bank, with cold marble, a lot of glass, very corporate.”  

There are clear benefits to collaborating with artists, but the artists can also be unpredictable. Mr. Schnabel, for instance, repeatedly declined to be interviewed about the project, despite cajoling from the developers who are paying his wages. And when he and I did finally connect, he was far less interested in talking about the condominium than about his new exhibit opening in October at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, “Café Dolly: Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen.”

While art is playing a critical role in the marketing of ultraluxury real estate, it is by no means the only strategy developers are employing. At One Riverside Park, the developer, the Extell Development Company, has partnered with the company Musion, which created the hologram of Tupac Shakur that appeared onstage at the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Musion created a hologramof One Riverside Park, with images of the floor plans and the surrounding neighborhood.

But some developers, like Francis Greenburger, the chairman of Time Equities, is skeptical of marketing gimmicks. “Like those mood movies — why would you make a movie that has nothing to do with the building?” he said, referring to the $1 million film commissioned by the developer Harry Macklowe to market his skyscraper 432 Park Avenue. “Maybe it has worked, but for me, it is a distraction. It isn’t what selling an apartment is all about.”

Still, Mr. Greenburger has plenty of marketing strategies of his own. At the sales office for 50 West Street, his new condominium in the financial district, a curved projection wall features 180-degree images, taken by drones, of different elevations from the building, allowing buyers to see their potential views. And there is a piece of a curved glass curtain wall that will wrap around the building.

While the efforts may be gimmicky, they may also work. At 135 West 52nd Street, the building will not only be draped in an enormous light installation, but will also have a sales office featuring purple mohair walls and a V.I.P. room for prospective buyers of the penthouses. “Once you step into the V.I.P. room, you are entering a different strata,” said Mr. De Niro, the son of the actor Robert De Niro and himself no stranger to V.I.P. treatment.

Bass Museum in Miami Beach celebrating 50th anniversary

From Egypt to Renaissance Europe to contemporary works, the county’s oldest municipal museum showcases its past as it forges a cutting-edge future.

Like the city’s skyline, Miami’s cultural landscape 50 years ago would be almost unrecognizable today.

In 1964, virtually none of the art institutions we are now familiar with existed, until the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach opened that year, becoming the first city exhibition space in the county. (The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami was the first art museum in South Florida, opened in the 1950s, but it is not a municipal institution.)

Now in its golden jubilee year, the Bass has come a long way since its birth — and like the metropolis itself, sometimes with fits and starts.

During the 1960s and ’70s, the museum showed mainly the 500-piece collection donated to the city of Miami Beach by John and Johanna Bass, which focused on Renaissance and Baroque works, in the old library building off Collins Avenue.

Fast forward to 2014, when the Bass opened its year with a symphony in a newly refurbished park that now holds significant outdoor public sculptures, outside a building remodeled by Arata Isozaki. Inside, the work of internationally acclaimed Polish multimedia artist Piotr Uklanski took over the second floor; on the first floor a Romanian performance troupe had recently reenacted some pieces from museum’s initial Renaissance painting collection, giving the centuries-old masterpieces a contemporary twist. Clearly, the Bass had come of age and stature.

There have been growing pains, with the museum sometimes closing and renovations taking longer than expected, but today it is one of Miami’s major cultural landmarks.

And the changes may continue in unexpected directions.

The talk of the art town has been the potential merger of the Bass and North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which would bring MOCA’s more-mature contemporary art collection to the Beach, making the Bass a heftier institution.

But the merger has become mired in technical and legal difficulties since MOCA announced its intentions and has faced stiff resistance from North Miami, which has housed the public, nonprofit museum since its inception. For now, the merger is on hold.

When John Bass ran the nascent museum from 1964 to 1978, it was a small, regional space, attracting a local crowd who came to see the mainly Renaissance and Baroque painting and tapestry. After Bass died in 1978, the authenticity of some of the works was called into question, and the city closed the museum. When a slightly refurbished building reopened, the Friends of the Bass membership group was incorporated, and a professional director, art historian Diane Camber, was hired in 1980.

During Camber’s tenure, the museum started to focus on traveling exhibits and expanded its artistic repertoire.

“From the beginning, I was determined to professionalize the institution,” the Miami Beach native recalls, by getting the museum accredited and developing the collection to include design and architectural aspects. Her first big splash came from the “Precious Legacy” exhibit of European Judaica collected by the Nazis from a museum in Prague. “It illustrated that we could be an important cultural destination, and highlighted the need for an expanded facility,” she says.

The collection grew to about 3,000 pieces, the Isozaki-redesigned building opened in 2001, and the museum was now capable of mounting large shows. But structural problems plagued the facility, and it had to close several times. The struggle for funding was unending. “There are battle scars, but it was all worth it,” says Camber, who retired in 2007 and was named director emerita.

When Silvia Karman Cubiña took the reins in 2008, the Bass was ready for its next big leap. The recession was well under way, but Cubiña expanded the museum’s scope, bringing in important contemporary exhibits, furthering the emphasis on design and fashion to reflect the nature of Miami Beach itself, and literally “busting it outdoors,” she says.

For years the park that extends from the museum’s front door to Collins Avenue had sat derelict, while visitors entered at the rear. Art Public opened up four years ago during Art Basel, with sculptures from international artists populating the newly renovated park during the December extravaganza. The popular sculptural exhibit now runs for four months each year.

From an anemic number of members on its board of directors, the Bass now has 23 under president George Lindemann, who has been instrumental in expanding the educational programming. Support from the Knight Foundation has brought funding for the museum to the next level; and last year the city approved a $7.5 million grant for further expansion, which will begin in 2015. Out will go the huge ramp that leads from the first floor to the second and has been considered a waste of space, and in will come more room for art and additional educational programs.

The museum will have to close again while the work is done, but Cubiña says it will be worth it because the museum will gain almost half again as much programmable space as it now has. “That’s the biggest 50th anniversary present of all,” she says.

Surrounded by the phenomenal works of Ghana-born artist El Anatsui, whose metal bottle-cap tapestries make up the current exhibit at the Bass, Cubiña says part of her mission is to push the Bass to be “part of the international dialogue” on the art stage. “I want to make sure we have a finger on the pulse of what is going on globally.”

To that end, she has brought in some groundbreaking exhibits, including two stunning video installations: Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, and another video thriller, Eve Sussman’s Rape of the Sabine Women, both presented during Art Basel Miami.

Other exhibits with acclaimed contemporary international artists have tied the Bass to its history by playing off the Masters’ works in the collection, such as the six projects interpreting classical themes, combined in The Endless Renaissance. Or the solo outing by an early member of the Young British Art movement, Matt Collishaw, whose still-lifes looked like tweaked Baroque reincarnations, and who incorporated a classic altar from the Bass collection into his show.

In 2010, the museum created a room to permanently show the works of Egyptian art that had been in the Bass collection but not prominently displayed before. Featuring a sarcophagus and ancient mummy, 13 objects of antiquity are now on view daily in the dimly lit downstairs enclave.

The museum also instituted the temporary contemporary program, which in conjunction with Miami Beach exhibits temporary outdoor installations, many by local artists. Outside the museum right now are the whimsical and hefty sculpture Self Portrait as the Barefoot Mailman by local artist Christy Gast, whose mailman’s head is buried in the ground; and the pinewood “decks” by Emmett Moore that visitors to the Bass park are encouraged to lounge on.

And Cubiña is surrounded by more art professionals than during her early days with the Bass. One is the new curator of exhibitions, Jose Carlos Diaz, who has put together the official 50th anniversary exhibit, set to open Aug. 8, titled Gold, appropriately. This will not only include artists who work with gold but those who work with the ages-old associations of the metal, power and wealth, in contemporary forms such as video, installation and photography as well as painting and sculpture.

The Bass will continue to explore the relationship between visual arts and fashion, such as last year’s extensive From Picasso to Koons, which included 135 artists’ sculptural jewelry; and this year’s Vanitas, avant-garde, ready-to-wear and couture curated by the director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

In other words, says Cubiña, in the museum’s 50th year she wants to continue to “open up the Bass” to a variety of art forms, locations (indoors and outdoors), international trends and curatorial visions, to be “a conduit to what’s happening in the world.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/15/4119773/bass-museum-in-miami-beach-celebrating.html#storylink=cpy

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal - "Art Collectors Show Their Chinese Prizes" @nytimes By BARBARA POLLACK

Mera and Don Rubell at their museum in Miami. Behind them is “Liberation No. 1,” by Liu Wei, part of a new exhibition, “28 Chinese,” that shows the fruits of their art-buying trips to China.

When the prodigious Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell first visited China, in 2001, they found the artists they met fascinating, but they were frankly unimpressed by the art itself. “It was our most intense trip with the least amount of art,” Mr. Rubell said. “Many of the artists seemed to be making work for export.”

Seven years later, the pair returned to a new landscape: a vibrant art world filled with men and women making work that was relevant to social issues in China today and mostly free of the clichés that had characterized contemporary Chinese art in the past. What they saw inspired the Rubells to spend the next five years seeking out artists and gallerists in Beijing, Shanghai and far-flung Chinese cities. And during this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, the Rubells, who are best known for supporting the works of young American artists, unveiled “28 Chinese,” a new exhibition at their museum in Miami that displays for the first time their acquisitions from six trips to China; it runs through Aug. 1.

Ms. Rubell, 70, equates finding artists like He Xiangyu, who paints with boiled-down Coca-Cola, and Chen Wei, who photographs surrealistic scenes in his studio, to first encountering the Aaron Curry and Thomas Houseago, California artists who are now hot. Mr. Rubell, 73, a retired gynecologist who now devotes most of his time to his boutique hotel business, said that after visiting Mr. He’s and Mr. Chen’s studios and those of dozens of other artists, “we realized we were seeing something different that blew us away.”

The exhibition at the 45,000-square-foot Rubell Family Collection and Contemporary Arts Foundation, in the Wynwood Art District of Miami, features the work of 28 Chinese artists, each given a separate gallery. There is “Ton of Tea,” by Ai Weiwei, a huge cube of expensive Pu’er tea that resembles a Chinese Donald Judd, and “Diary, by Zhang Huan, a canvas based on a Cultural Revolution-era photo of a man in a Mao suit holding a book.

But, for the most part, the work departs from “made in China” iconography, especially the tapestries of the Shanghai artist Xu Zhen, next year’s commissioned artist for the spring Armory Show in New York, or the geometric abstractions of Liu Wei, who had a recent exhibition at his New York gallery, Lehmann Maupin.

“The Rubell collection is not an illustrated history of the avant-garde, on the one hand, nor a speculative portfolio, on the other,” said Richard Vine, the author of the book “New China New Art” (Prestel, 2011). “It seems like a personal response, much more than I expected.” He added: “I suspect the lesser-known people they’ve plucked from obscurity will benefit. But I don’t think they are operating like some other collectors, who bought household names, promoted them and then sold them for a profit.”

The Rubells began collecting in the 1960s, as the story, now famous, goes, on a budget of $25 per week — “25 percent of our income,” Ms. Rubell said during a recent trip to Manhattan for contemporary auction week. Their finds have grown into a collection of more than 5,000 works. Studio visits are the heart of the Rubells’ mode of discovering new talent; they have visited at least 100 artists in China over the last few years. Among the first was Mr. Ai, in 2001, before he was the dissident artist he would become.

“He was a bit insecure about whether he would be accepted in the West, but was totally the ringleader for all the younger artists at that time,” Mr. Rubell recalled.

Rather than buy from the artists, as many collectors did in the 1990s, the Rubells purchased through galleries, particularly Long March Space, Shanghart, Urs Meile and Pearl Lam Gallery, thereby helping China’s fledgling gallery scene develop. They also steered clear of auctions, where prices can be highly inflated, and fakes abound.

“I would say the single most shocking change in the Chinese art world is that the gallery system is now in effect,” said Mr. Rubell, who argues that the new system has helped to legitimize contemporary Chinese art.

The Rubells could be brusque when the art did not appeal to them. “When they didn’t like the work, they would make excuses for running out — but when they liked the artist, they would sit down and have long discussions,” said Ms. Lam, who advised them. One of the artists she steered them to was Zhu Jinshi, the oldest of the show’s artists but still undiscovered when the Rubells met him; his signature style is to ladle paint on calligraphic compositions.

“It was amazing,” Ms. Rubell recalled. “We walked into his studio, and there was 40 years of history in there. We asked if there was more to see, and they took us into three more studios filled with paintings.”

The couple’s son, Jason Rubell, 44, a co-owner of the family business, Rubell Hotels, accompanied his parents on several trips and collaborated on the purchases. “People tend to visualize Chinese art as Warhol-esque, brightly colored figurative stuff, but we found work that is quite conceptual,” he said. “The politics that has been framing the Chinese art scene is there, but in a sophisticated way that is a little more subversive.”

Certain artists in the collection, like Li Songsong, who is represented by Pace, and Zhang Enli, represented by Hauser & Wirth, have sold for more than $700,000 at auction in China. The Rubells, who drive hard bargains with dealers by buying six or eight pieces by an artist at a time, say they rarely spend over six figures for any Chinese work. And while their endorsement is expected to raise prices in this roiling market, they say they are not aiming to sell the work and be beneficiaries of those increases.

“In 50 years of collecting, we’ve put together over 5,000 pieces and we’ve sold less than 20,” Don Rubell said.

Reaching a consensus was sometimes a struggle for the three Rubells. “Abstraction was a little difficult at the beginning,” Ms. Rubell said, yet they finally all agreed that geometric abstraction was an important trend. The “28 Chinese” show at the museum includes eight abstract painters’ work, ranging from the calligraphic brush paintings of Lan Zhenghui to the optical illusions of Wang Guangle. Several young artists whom the Rubells admired were already out of their price range, like Sun Xun, who is featured in the “Ink Art” exhibition, which opens Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“It’s tempting to look at Chinese art as these kids who started out, and now they are living in mansions,” the elder Mr. Rubell said. “But the shocking thing is the way they’ve become sentinels for Chinese culture.”

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George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal - "Pérez Art Museum Miami: Where the Art Will (Hopefully) Come Later" @wsj by Peter Plagens

Miami

Build it, and they will give. Or promise to give. Or lend for the long term. Or something. Those seem to be the operating hopes at the just-opened Pérez Art Museum Miami, ensconced in a building, designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, that gracefully takes advantage of the view and the climate of Biscayne Bay.

The situation is odd, to say the least. PAMM—a museum of modern and contemporary art in the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the country, with five million inhabitants—makes its debut with a paltry collection: only about 1,800 works of art, almost 300 of those just recently bestowed on it from a single private collection. There's scarcely a showstopper in the trove. By comparison, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (only the fifth-largest city in Texas) has about 2,600 objects, with some instructively important works by the likes of Francis Bacon, Vija Celmins and Martin Puryear among them. Or consider the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which has more than 10,000 works, including just about the snappiest gathering of recent sculpture anywhere.

It's not as though there's no art in Miami, especially in early December when Art Basel Miami—a child of the premier European art fair that has become a bigger deal than its parent—is in town. In terms of private collections of contemporary art open to the public (sometimes called "boutique museums"), Miami leads the nation, with four of the very best: the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space; the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse; the Rubell Family Collection / Contemporary Art Foundation; and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, which specializes in Latin American art.

Which is where the problem lies. Several movers and shakers in the Miami art world were against the new museum, or at least against building a $131-million edifice for what originally had been titled simply the Miami Art Museum—which had begun collecting only in the late 1990s—before the institution had enough art to fill its space decently. Some even thought that having the city's publicly viewable modern and contemporary art lodged mostly in the extant private museums and university art galleries made Miami's scene desirably unique.

But supporters of a big new museum prevailed. The city agreed to give the museum a prime plot of land right on the water, not far from the arena in which Miami's championship basketball team plays, and right in between an under-construction science museum and a new waterfront park. In 2004, Miami-Dade County passed a $100 million bond issue to finance the museum, and the deal was done. Sort of.

In late 2011, the project ran short of money. Up stepped Jorge M. Pérez, the CEO of the Related Group, a giant real-estate development firm, with a proffered gift of art and cash that's posted officially on the museum's donors wall as $40 million, with the value of the Latin American art he passionately collects accounting for somewhat more than half of that. In return, Mr. Pérez got his name not just on a few galleries, or a wing, but on the entire museum.

In the blowback over what many saw as an expedient personal naming of a museum financed largely with taxpayer money and sitting on public land, a handful of board members resigned, promised gifts were pulled back and—most important—relations between PAMM and the city's biggest collectors were strained if not actually sundered. The problem, bluntly put, is that those from whom the museum might get desperately needed large donations of museum-quality art—especially those whose collections are already open to the public—are not likely to give to an institution after somebody else's name has been freshly affixed to the facade.

You don't open a museum with the art you wish you had; you open it with the art you do have. And, of course, whatever art you can borrow and exhibitions you can import. In this predicament, PAMM (primarily its director, Thom Collins, and chief curator, Tobias Ostrander) have done a pretty good—and fairly creative—job of stretching the museum's art on hand so that it seems, on first glance, to fill 200,000 square feet of "programmable space" (not all of it galleries).

First, they came up with a bilingually accessible theme for the first two cycles of showing the collection: "Americana." The rolling shows, organized into such College Art Association panel-discussion topics as "Desiring Landscape," "Sources of the Self" and "Formalizing Craft," constitute a kind of art-appreciation course attempting to gainsay the conventional wisdom that modern art is basically a Paris-to-New-York enterprise. The exhibition includes examples, from 1938 on, of trenchant art from Latin America. While the old notion of Northern hegemony has been nominally discredited in international biennials and in the programs of such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (it still holds true, however, at Christie's auctions), and while recent Northern and Southern art is gradually approaching parity, it's difficult to overthrow as a whole. No matter how influential he was in South American modernism, the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) cannot be transformed into a Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian.

Still, the mix-and-match of, for example, the Brazilian Jac Leirner's "Utilidades" (1989), a frieze of consumer logos next to an Andy Warhol "Brillo Box" (1964) is catchy, and quite a few Latin American works, such as Alexander Apóstol's 2005 photographic series on Venezuela's "Skeleton Coast" (under-construction hotels abandoned when a tourism boom went bust) and the Cuban-American artist José Bedia's graphically robust painting of a human torso, "Mama quiere menga, menga de su nkombo" ("Mama Wants Blood, Blood of His Bull," 1988), are right up there with what you'd see at the Whitney in New York or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke's overhead lobby installation of large, colorful model ships, "For Those in Peril on the Sea" (2011), is an exception to the lack of showstoppers. And though not part of "Americana," a small exhibition of the underknown Cuban painter Amelia Peláez (1896-1968), a great colorist, is a jewel.

The second space-filling device is a retrospective—organized with the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo—of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist-activist. And that's the point: He's a headliner and he requires oodles of cubic feet in two enormous galleries. The trouble is that Mr. Ai doesn't visually come across well in quantity. He's an idea guy. His most physically daunting piece, the 12-part bronze sculpture "Zodiac Heads" (2010), has been unfortunately located outside the museum, where its impact is minimized. The result is that the museum's biggest gallery feels more like a dining hall being set up for an official luncheon.

PAMM is a brand-new, out-of-the-box major museum in a major city, and it clearly cannot, and should not, limp along on the gifts of merely passable art that come trickling in and on the curators continually having to shuffle the holdings to make it appear as if the museum's collection is more formidable than it is. One the one hand, it's difficult—not to mention painful—to foresee Miami's most prominent collectors in effect boycotting PAMM and letting it wither on the vine or turn into one of those places that survives on shows of "Star Wars" props (yes, there is such a museum exhibition, and it's still touring). On the other hand, the prospect of the museum unnaming itself (although football stadiums rename themselves as frequently as fugitives from the FBI do) to something more civically neutral in order to mollify the objectors looks to be practically nil. Something has to give among all the powers-that-be. Miami is too young and energetic a city with too vigorous an art scene for the museum not to succeed.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

George Lindemann Journal

It’s Post Time: At the Big A, Big Art

Street Artists Paint ‘The Aqueduct Murals’ at the Track

Dec. 9, 2013 5:40 p.m. ET

No American museum has ever been pressed to bail out its bankrupt hometown. DIA

Since last spring, when Detroit's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, said that he might have to sell art from the city-owned collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts to help pay off the city's $18 billion in debt, the museum has been operating in a state of unreality. Less than a year after voters in three nearby counties approved a property tax to fund the DIA for 10 years, the museum's survival was again endangered. And last week, on the day that Judge Steven W. Rhodes of U.S. Bankruptcy Court approved the city's Chapter 9 filing and allowed Mr. Orr to proceed with his restructuring plan, creditors balked at the less-than-a-billion-dollar estimate of the value of the art provided by Christie's, even though that figure exceeds Mr. Orr's goal of getting $500 million from the DIA.

The DIA's predicament is unprecedented. No American museum has ever been pressed to bail out its bankrupt hometown. Any sale would violate two cardinal principles of museum ethics: the doctrine that museums hold art in trust for future generations and that, therefore, artworks may be sold only to purchase more art.

Nor has any museum been at the center of the clash between competing definitions of the public good, forced to defend itself from critics who sketch the to-sell-or-not-to-sell quandary in moral terms. These people argue that art cannot be spared while retired police officers and bus drivers are forced to lose part of their pensions—even though the proceeds from art sales would be shared with lawyers, consultants and other creditors and amount to pennies per person.

Little wonder, then, that this complex situation has elicited numerous opinions that are so disconnected from reality that they amount to magical thinking.

Last month, for example, at a panel discussion in New York on the DIA's plight hosted by the International Foundation for Art Research, Richard Feigen, a well-known New York art dealer, suggested that no one would be so unprincipled as to buy art from the museum. The audience applauded, until David Nash, another well-known New York dealer, broke the spell. Plenty of people in Russia, the Middle East and China would be interested in buying the DIA's masterpieces, he rightly said.

At the same event, the DIA's director, Graham W.J. Beal, said he was "optimistic" that the museum would escape unscathed, citing the 22-page opinion issued by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette in June. It declared that "no piece in the collection may be sold, conveyed or transferred to satisfy City debts or obligations" because the art is held in public trust. Yet Mr. Schuette's opinion is far from impregnable: It may not withstand the near-certain court challenge from creditors.

For their part, Detroit's creditors—perhaps eyeing last month's sale of Francis Bacon's 1969 triptych of Lucien Freud for $142.4 million—are unrealistically expecting billions of dollars from the DIA. Yet the DIA owns no contemporary artworks of similar caliber; its most important objects are Impressionist and Old Master works, such as Rembrandt's "Visitation" (1640), markets where demand is lower, buyers fewer and prices generally not as high.

These and other delusions are influencing decision-making, and that is a dangerous game. Before any decisions are reached, these half-truths and untruths must be shown for what they are and discarded:

The DIA's art must be treated like all other city assets. This notion presupposes similar outcomes in each case. But the DIA is the only one of the three main assets in Mr. Orr's sights that would be irrevocably damaged. One other, Belle Isle, which houses the aquarium and yacht club, has been leased by the state and taken off the table. The second, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, might be privatized, then even improved. If art from the DIA is dispersed, the museum would be destroyed—if not immediately, when the museum loses the $23 million provided by the millage tax (two of the three counties have said they will cease payments if the museum's art is sold and an official of the third has said the same privately), then eventually, as it becomes less attractive to visitors and donors alike.

The DIA could easily part with some of its 66,000 artworks. Mr. Orr charged Christie's with evaluating only the 2,871 works purchased with city funds, to avoid violation of donor restrictions. Of those, fewer than 450 have a fair market value of $50,000 or more, and 319 of these works are on view. Some 75% of the total value lies in just 11 works, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Wedding Dance" (c. 1566), Vincent van Gogh's "Self-Portrait" (1887), Henri Matisse's "Window" (1916), Giovanni Bellini's "Madonna and Child" (1509) and a drawing by Michelangelo.

Other U.S. museums will buy the DIA's art, keeping it on public view. Nothing could be further from the truth. American museums, by and large, do not have the acquisition funds they would need for, say, the Bruegel. Even if they did, they wouldn't buy because of ethical reasons. Walter A. Liedtke, curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recently said that his curatorial staff would quit if the Met bid on anything from the DIA, a prospect also probable at other museums.

Foreign museums will buy these masterpieces, keeping them in the public domain. This is unlikely. With the exception of some in the Middle East, most museums are stretched for funds, too, as state funding has shrunk. Rather, the DIA's art would probably go to private collectors overseas and out of public view. Case in point: van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet," which sold in 1990 for a then-record $82.5 million to a Japanese businessman, hasn't been exhibited publicly since.

Philanthropists will come to the DIA's rescue. In this scenario, wealthy Michiganders would buy the DIA's treasures and redonate them. But in the past several years, the DIA raised more than $350 million from this donor pool to modernize its building and increase its endowment. The millage was designed to give the DIA time to raise an added $300 million over 10 years for its endowment. Would these same individuals and foundations be able to donate an additional, say, $500 million to repurchase what the museum already owns to pay Detroit's bills? Doubtful.

The art doesn't have to be sold; it can be monetized. Yes, money can be gleaned from the collection without selling it. But museum ethics block the easiest method of doing so, using it as loan collateral, and ethical standards can't simply be abandoned at the door of bankruptcy court. More important, where would Detroit get the money to repay the loans? This proposal imperils the DIA's collection in a deal over which it has no control of the outcome—and that's a bad deal.

Christie's has advanced some other ideas for monetizing the collection, but each has limited potential. In one, the DIA would tour part of its collection, as the Barnes Foundation did in 1993-95, earning about $17 million. But the two collections are not comparable; a better guide would be "Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: the Treasures of Kenwood House, London," which recently visited four U.S. museums and took in a reported $375,000. The DIA has twice toured portions of its collection recently, raising $700,000.

Another idea would have the DIA find a cash-rich partner museum, an idea fueled by the Louvre's pact with Abu Dhabi for $1.3 billion over several years. Mr. Beal has traveled to the Middle East, but found no takers. More reasonable partner expectations might be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; it provides two exhibitions per year to Nagoya, Japan, for about $2 million a year, less expenses, a meager amount.

A third idea would create a "masterpiece trust" into which the DIA would transfer ownership of city-owned works. Other museums, here or abroad, would then pay membership fees to the city entitling them to borrow works from the trust, like a time-share. But this would remove DIA's treasures from the view of the Michigan public whose tax dollars support the museum.

How, then, can the DIA realistically meet Mr. Orr's decree that it be "part of the solution"?

The Detroit Free Press reported last week that the city's power brokers are "working furiously" to raise $500 million from foundations to barter for the DIA's independence. Though difficult—the total annual giving of 10 of the largest foundations involved barely tops $1 billion and it would be hard for them to divert so much to the DIA and meet their other obligations—this would reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, assuming it passed muster with Mr. Orr.

If that fails, there appears to be only one life-saving solution for the DIA: The state would pay Detroit and transfer ownership to Michigan. So far, Gov. Rick Snyder has declined to give the idea a hearing, and the diversion of money from state coffers to the DIA might face opposition. But Michiganders might remember that in the 1920s and '30s, the cash-hungry Soviet government sold off Russia's art treasures, dispersing them to other countries. Today, that episode is viewed as a national tragedy.

Ms. Dobrzynski writes about culture for many publications and blogs here.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Maestro of the new museum

By Lydia Martin

Special to the Miami Herald

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.”