Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Kraftwerk fans at MoMA on Tuesday night. The band's performances include 3-D imagery. More Photos »

By MELENA RYZIK

Published: April 11, 2012

Sell-out rock shows usually mean a lot of shouting, some sweating, maybe a few drunken pass-outs. Kraftwerk inspired none of that on Tuesday night. The first of its eight consecutive sold-out performances at the Museum of Modern Art had reverence and stylistic weight; even for a New York museum crowd there was a lot of black. Artfully swept hair, uncomfortable-looking shoes, architectural glasses: check, check and check. The high-design audience was rewarded with an equally aesthetically tuned concert, with the band, a foursome in graphic black-and-white unitards, playing neon-lighted synths. Behind them a video screen offered a parade of simple 3-D images, like stick figure robots and spinning numbers, a retro future in an MS-DOS font.

 

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Slide Show

Kraftwerk at MoMA

The show, part of a retrospective for this pioneering German electronica group, was a coveted event, with fewer than 450 tickets available to the public for each night of the run. All eight sold out within an hour when they went on sale in February. (With a face value of $25, they were going for hundreds online afterward.)

On Tuesday several diehard Kraftwerk fans waited outside the museum in the vain hope of scoring an extra ticket. “I grew up listening to this in high school,” said Andy Horowitz, 49, a banker turned teacher from Long Island. “It’s got a real good sound. It’s melodic, pulsating, makes you want to move. It’s timeless.” Mr. Horowitz, who had also turned up at the museum a few days earlier to inquire about more spots, said he might return nightly but was holding out for Friday, when the band is scheduled to perform its seminal 1978 album, “The Man-Machine.” “The personal computer, space, technology — they hit it right on the head,” Mr. Horowitz said. Kraftwerk was expected to play a full album a night, with some bonus and new material mixed in.

 

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Kraftwerk, the German group whose members were early adapters to the world of the computer, at the Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday. More Photos »

By JON PARELES

Published: April 11, 2012

The Robots” — the first song Kraftwerk played on Tuesday to start its eight-night series of retrospective concerts at the Museum of Modern Art — is adroitly misleading. “We’re programmed to do/anything you want us to,” Ralf Hutter sang.

 

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The album in focus on the opening night of the Kraftwerk retrospective at the Modern was “Autobahn,” from 1974, performed live with prominent graphics and along with additional material. More Photos »

In fact Kraftwerk has been far more predictive than obedient. It can rightfully claim to have done some cultural reprogramming of its own. Back in the 1970s Kraftwerk conceptualized itself as the Man-Machine and started writing songs about what technology might do to — and with — the modern mind. It can now claim a direct influence on all sorts of electronic and computer-driven music, while its lyrics clearly envisioned our computer-mediated daily lives.

Tuesday’s concert was the beginning of Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, with Kraftwerk performing eight consecutive albums on eight nights for just 450 people per show. Only Mr. Hutter remains from Kraftwerk’s original lineup; the other current members are Henning Schmitz, Fritz Hilpert and Stefan Pfaffe. Onstage the quartet stood at keyboards — playing some of the music’s components live — in front of a very active video screen with images that sometimes sandwiched the musicians between the planes of eye-popping three-dimensional geometry and typography. (Concertgoers were handed 3D glasses on the way to the museum’s atrium.)...

 

Introduction

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times  

The Orange County government building in Goshen, N.Y., has a leaky roof, faulty ventilation and mold and, in the eyes of many, is just plain ugly. Officials shut it down last year and would like to demolish and replace it. But it is a prime example of Brutalism, from the noted architect Paul Rudolph, and many want to preserve it. Do even ugly, unpopular buildings deserve to be saved if they are significant? Or should a community, or owner, be allowed to eliminate architectural mistakes?

Read the Discussion »

April 4, 2012

“Is it the art or is it the hype?” I’ve been asked this question so many times it makes me ill. It always comes from those who don’t look at art and are trying to explain why they don’t buy it. In a skeptical tone they slip me this line on a regular basis. “Yes,” I tell them with a smile, “it’s all a fraud. These contemporary art stars are all phonies and fakes, it’s the fancy galleries promoting this stuff and you’re the smart one who figured it all out.” But what I’m thinking is, “Cretin, you don’t understand a damn thing about art.” But now even most art believers have to admit that parts of today’s art scene have indeed gone too far. Yet when I spelled it out for the world in my satire of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair last December, I was attacked by many insecure pundits, advisers and dealers who felt threatened by the words. But forgetting the whiners, it’s what everyone was and is still talking about. Just last Sunday 60 Minutes ran a Morley Safer-hosted exposé bashing the fair, highlighting the hype in order to suggest that contemporary art is no more than a marketing circus. We can’t really blame old Morley Safer—he’s just another blowhard—but I was shocked to see one respected dealer, Tim Blum of Blum and Poe in Los Angeles, play right into Mr. Safer’s canard. “We’re from Hollywood, this is theater, only theater,” he said when asked about art prices. “It’s the wild west … competition is vicious … when the question of value comes up we drop the subject.” Mr. Blum misspoke—and that’s regrettable because, let’s face it, when the hype booms louder than the art, the art world invites the philistines right to its gates.

 

What bothers art world outsiders is the reality that everything exists within a context, and if they don’t understand the context, they jump to dismiss what they don’t understand. But what’s the matter with some hype? Most of today’s movie stars didn’t make it on their talent alone; they got the right role at the right time, then parlayed the hype. Would Julia Roberts have become a superstar without her breakthrough role in Pretty Woman? What about Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Liz Taylor in National Velvet? So why shouldn’t a visual artist benefit similarly by a breakthrough show, one “produced” by a smart dealer or curator in the right place at the right time? A film can be advertised and promoted; why not an artist and an exhibition? Fine art is often held to an unrealistic standard, a mistaken belief that there is such a thing as “pure” art that exists outside the context in which it’s created and exhibited. Great art is expected to somehow get by without great salesmanship, and great staging.

 

The artist Dan Colen is the perfect example of someone who has plenty of hype. He’s been created by his dealers at the massive Gagosian gallery, right? Might he just be the product of the “fashion of the moment” effect, the W magazine/Interview magazine scene, a leader of the pack of pretty boys who make big prices at auction? This may seem to be the case to some, but the truth is that he was always a good artist. I’ve followed his work for over eight years, long before he joined Gagosian. Even back when he was showing with the smaller gallery Peres Projects, it was clear to me that he was the standout talent of his peer group. His decision to show with Gagosian, the largest gallery in the world, may, in fact, have been a mistake: though he’s had many shows and sold a lot of work in the short term, his market may experience a severe hangover if there is too much work and the market feels saturated. He’s a real talent, though, and so he’ll probably weather the storm of overmarketing and overproduction. The hype that comes from mass marketing an artist is a double-edged sword: it’s a money-making short-term strategy, but it can kill the artist’s career if the work isn’t truly exceptional.

 

The other night I had the pleasure of discussing this topic with one of the top painters in the world, an American artist in his early 70s who has moved far beyond any hype that helped him along the way. I asked him why he has been so loyal to the gallery he’s been with for 20 years. He doesn’t need a gallery—he makes only 12 paintings a year and could sell them all easily even if he hung them in an IKEA for the weekend. By way of answering, he told me, frankly, that most artists are fearful of change. “Do you mean to tell me that at your age you still need to be handled and managed as if you were a child?” I asked. He smiled and said, “I just want to go to my studio and paint, I don’t want to be bothered with the rest of it.” Now, some artists are proactive; they have taken the marketing of their art into their own hands. Damien Hirst shows what he wants, where he wants and, whether you like it or not, he makes his own hype, with Bono and Jagger and sundry movie stars in tow. But most artists don’t play hardball. They stick with their dealers in the old-fashioned way, because they are conservative, or lazy or simply satisfied. I’m sure this will evolve as time goes on. Recently we have seen more artists changing galleries than ever before, though most of them end up joining the rosters of the few mega galleries. That is where they feel safe and secure.

 

Is switching to a mega gallery a sure-fire recipe for market success? Absolutely not. It can be a good career move—the vast majority of successful midcareer artists have stuck with their original galleries, but then again most of them have stagnated, in part because their new work, shown in the same old gallery, gets tiring after a while. But it can also result in overmarketing because the temptation to overproduce, using the generous production budget available, is too strong, so global demand gets oversupplied. The work ends up looking overhyped and oversold­—the hangover effect we see in the careers of so many artists who have bounced around several galleries.

 

Ultimately, the question of whether an artist’s success is the result of great work or great hype reminds me of the time many years ago when I attended a lecture by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the Q&A, trying to sound clever, I asked, “You often speak of the Platonic versus the Aristotelian views of the universe—are these two not contradictory?” Borges answered, “No, no, no, you do not understand—they are not contradictory, they are complementary!” The audience was hushed, a communal gasp was heard as if great words of wisdom had been spoken, but the real message was simple: the two views were necessary to complete the whole.

 

This is true for art and its context—they are complementary, not contradictory. Those who dismiss contemporary art as an overmarketed Ponzi scheme have missed this truth. Warhol and Dali were masters of hype, and that didn’t make their art less meaningful; nor was it the sole reason for their art’s success. Nothing is separable from its context, not even this article, but when the hype overshadows the art, it’s no surprise the skeptics have a field day.

(CBS News) Two decades after Morley Safer took a critical look at contemporary art in his 60 Minutes story "Yes...But is it Art?" he has found the definitive answer to his snide question: Does it matter what it is if it appreciates in value by a thousand-fold? Safer learns this at Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami's premier contemporary art fair, where he reports on the boom in contemporary art, a market that's defying the world economic slump and outperformed stocks. Safer's story will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, April 1 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

 

Jeffrey Deitch, a former dealer and now the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, has a long memory and can't resist ribbing Safer. "In the art world, we remember very well that famous program that you did 20 years ago...it was almost a send-up of the contemporary art market," he tells Safer. One of the objects of Safer's critical eye back then was a Jeff Koons installation called "Equilibrium," consisting of three basketballs suspended in an aquarium. Koons' works have greatly appreciated. "I think [at] the time we were talking Jeff Koons was very well sold for $250,000," says Deitch. "As you know now, Jeff Koons' works have gone for $25 million or more."

 

Last year, sales of contemporary art reached $5.5 billion, just for auctioned works. Billions more probably changed hands at regularly held shows like Art Basel Miami Beach. The contemporary art market has outperformed the Standard & Poor's list of 500 common stocks since 2003.

 

60 Minutes cameras capture the rich buyers and the art works on sale at Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the most important art fairs held in what is now considered an art capital of the world. Some of the works might pose a quandary for the uninitiated. Among the paintings and sculptures are works incorporating bathroom fixtures and extension cords, works that make noises, works incorporating video. The pieces have no price tags; their worth is negotiable.

 

Foreign money is one factor driving the market. Gallery owner Larry Gagosian says, "I think the wealth in Russia, the Middle East, Asia has changed [the market]...dramatically." Art fairs are now the place to be for people like Gagosian. "The art fair has become a huge part of our business," he tells Safer.

 

Anything can happen in a market comprised of original, one-of-a kind merchandise and billionaires willing to bet monumental sums of money on them. Gallery owner Tim Blum says, "It's the Wild West. This is not a normal retail business. It's an unregulated, utterly bizarre place to conduct business." What sustains it against the odds? "It's inexplicable...almost unexplainable...When we bring it up...begin to talk about it, we sort of drop the subject," says Blum. "Because it almost feels like you should just let it... keep rolling."