LONDON — When the Tate Modern opened its sleek glass doors in May 2000, its directors and curators expected around two million people in the first year — an ambitious number for a contemporary art museum.

Five million came.

To date, more than 56 million visitors have passed through the massive industrial spaces of the Tate Modern, transformed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron from a disused power station into a cultural center that has altered the nature and expectation of the museum-going experience, making it as much a tourist attraction as an art destination.

On Wednesday, the Tate Modern will open a new set of doors. They lead off the Turbine Hall into three enormous underground concrete cylinders, former oil tanks that once powered the refinery and held a million gallons of the viscous black gold. Known as the Tanks, they will become the first exhibition spaces in a major museum permanently dedicated to exhibiting performance, installation and experimental film.

The Tanks’ opening, heralded by a 15-week festival of performance and installation art that is part of the London 2012 festival, is phase one of a larger extension that should be completed by 2016. Also by Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron, it will include what Mr. Herzog described in a telephone interview as “a pyramidal shaped building” set on top of the tanks, adding further education and gallery spaces.

The Tanks, said Mr. Herzog, are something quite different.

“They have something archaeological about them; it’s like discovering something in nature and you step aside and look at it, recognize its beauty,” he said. “We felt very aware that this aspect of a found space had a real quality for performing arts. We wanted them to look like they had always been like that, not as if they were “architecture,” so our goal was simply to find the least intrusive way to treat them that would preserve their rawness.”

That rawness was important, as an alternative setting for the museum to show and experience art, said Chris Dercon, the director of the Tate Modern.

“We need new, dark spaces for the kind of art that came into being in the 60s,” he said. “Artworks involving projection, performance, participatory events where the spectator is part of the art. Every big museum has a black box theater, but very few have these heterogenous spaces, where anything could happen.”

Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Museums, said the Tate had been aware of the Tanks’ potential from the outset.

“When we first went into them in the mid-90s, we saw the incredible possibilities of those raw spaces, which were closer to the kind of environments that artists were actually working in than the white cube space of the traditional gallery. What developed later was a realization that they should be used for performance.”

That realization speaks of one of the major museum currents over the last decade: the growing acceptance of performance art and experimental film work as valid elements of contemporary art-making rather than fringe activities.

“A few years ago performance art was seen as marginal,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in a 2007 review of Performa 07, a biennial performance festival started two years earlier by RoseLee Goldberg, who wrote a seminal early history of the form in 1979. “Dealers couldn’t sell it,” Mr. Cotter continued, “museums couldn’t show it; critics didn’t know what to say. It was some hippie-dippie remnant of the 1960s and ’70s, when art was ‘experimental,’ which meant you couldn’t prove it was bad or good.”

By 2010, when the Museum of Modern Art presented a four-decade survey, “The Artist is Present,” of Marina Abramovic’s work, there was no longer any doubt that there was a broad public ready to accept the idea of crossover, non-genre specific live art — and even more people were prepared to be fascinated by the charismatic Ms. Abramovic. During the show’s three-month run, the artist sat every day, unmoving, for seven hours, in the atrium of the museum as a thronging public queued to sit opposite her in silence.

“I think there is a reason why we all want to have encounters with people in the flesh at a time when we have an increasingly disembodied relationship with the world through digital media,” said Charlotte Higgins, the chief arts writer of The Guardian newspaper. “And surely artists’ increasing attraction to performance is a backlash against the sheer commodification of art that has happened over the last decade. The idea of contemporary art as part of the luxury goods market is not an appealing idea, especially in light of the financial chaos that we are living with.”

There is also the fact that artists themselves have become increasingly comfortable, over the last decade, with a blurring of disciplinary line. The trend has been clear to anyone involved in dance, which has increasingly found its way into museums over the last few years, and seen choreographers like William Forsythe, Trisha Brown, Jérôme Bel and Boris Charmatz straddle the lines between theatrical performance and installation, conceptual art and participatory experience.

“I think younger audiences are much more open to crossover than was the case 25 years ago,” said Mr. Serota, the museum director. “The growth of digital products, Internet and e-mail, interactivity and blogs have stimulated an appetite for dialogue and discussion, and an engagement with performance. And artists are spending more time in conversation with peers in other areas because they have more access to the work.”

The Tate Modern itself, and its mega-scale Turbine Hall installations, is quite possibly another element in the equation. Whether visitors basked in the virtual warmth of Olafur Eliasson’s fake sun in his “Weather Project,” or laid themselves upon Ai Weiwei’s field of 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds (until the dust stirred up was decreed a health hazard), the collective, interactive experience of these artworks has generated its own momentum and a new set of norms for the museum-going experience.

When performance art first emerged as a major artistic current in the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, its very nature seemed antithetical to incorporation by an institution — partly because the artist’s medium was largely his or her own body, partly because the idea of a time-based experience meant that the act couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be reproduced.

“People have had this idea that performance art is all about physical endurance, pain, nudity,” said Ms. Goldberg in a telephone interview from New York. “And it was that in the 1960s and 70s, when it was about breaking social rules and reflecting social issues. But one of the reasons I created Performa was to commission new pieces and introduce a new idea of what performance art could be. Contrary to what people often think, it’s actually a very accessible form. Bodies have a narrative, everyone has a comment.”

For the duration of the festival, which runs until Oct. 28, two of the tanks (the third is used for offices) will be given over to performance work by more than 20 artists, including a reworking of the choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s 1982 “Fase”; a three-week residency by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera; an examination of ground-breaking figures in experimental film; and, in the space known as the East Tank, a commission from the Korean performance artist Sung Hwan Kim.

In an adjacent space, known as the Transformer Galleries, the museum will show Lis Rhodes’s “Light Music 1975” and a recent acquisition; Suzanne Lacy’s “Crystal Quilt 1987,” a film of 430 women over the age of 60 that the artist describes in an essay for the museum catalogue as “a tableau vivant,” raising questions about the perceptions of older women.

The desire to preserve a history of performance work and incorporate it into an institutional memory isn’t without its opponents.

“There’s never a way that you could repeat the original thing; it just can’t be done,” said Joan Jonas, an important 1960s figure in conceptual and video art, in a 2010 interview.

“No one would say that a ballet performed in the 1920s shouldn’t be revived,” said Mr. Serota, in response to these observations. “Some of the most exciting artistic practice of the last few decades has been in performance and installation work, but it has been available to relatively few. The great thing now is that we have the chance to both recover the past, and the space to create something new.”

 

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and TOM MASHBERG

Published: July 12, 2012

IN the three decades since David Dewey of Minneapolis began collecting Chinese antiquities he has donated dozens to favored museums, enriching the Institute of Arts in his hometown as well as Middlebury College in Vermont, where he studied Mandarin.

But his giving days are largely over, he said, pre-empted by guidelines that most museums now follow on what objects they can accept.

“They just won’t take them — can’t take them,” Mr. Dewey said.

Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, is in a similar bind. An antiquities collector, he is eager to sell an Egyptian sarcophagus he bought from Sotheby’s in the early 1990s. But he is stymied, he said, because auction houses are applying tighter policies to the items they accept for consignment.

“I can’t get proof of when it came out of Egypt,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Across the country measures taken to curb the trade in looted artifacts are making it more difficult for collectors of antiquities to donate, or sell, the cultural treasures that fill their homes, display cases and storage units.

Museums typically no longer want artifacts that do not have a documented history stretching back past 1970, a date set by the Association of Art Museum Directors, whose guidelines most institutions have adopted. Drawn up in 2008, the rules have been applauded by countries seeking to recover their artifacts and by archaeologists looking to study objects in their natural settings.

But the sweeping shift in attitudes has left collectors stuck with items they say they purchased in good faith many years ago from reputable dealers. One study found that as many as 100,000 privately owned ancient Greek, Roman and related Classical objects in the United States would be unable to pass muster with most museums.

“Objects are guilty until proven innocent,” said James J. Lally, a Manhattan dealer in Chinese art and antiquities.

Collectors and their advocates predict that museums, cultural scholarship and the items themselves will suffer as important gifts are disallowed. Kate Fitz Gibbon, a lawyer with the Cultural Policy Research Institute, warned at a March forum that museums, long reliant on the generosity of collectors, may come to regard the guidelines as a “self-administered slow poison.” “This may sound like an exaggeration,” she said. “But if we continue on this path, there may not be a next generation of collectors, donors and patrons of ancient art, not in the United States of America anyway.” There are many on the other side of the question who view Ms. Fitz Gibbon’s perspective as hyperbolic.

“Antiquities collecting destroys far more than it saves,” said Ricardo J. Elia, an archaeology professor at Boston University who specializes in the global art market. “Looting is driven by the art market, by supply and demand.”

For centuries collectors have helped define artistic taste, and their collections, whether assembled for vanity, beauty, profit or some combination thereof, have been the backbone of museums. But the antiquities trade begins, at its source, with an act of appropriation: the removal of artifacts from a native site to one where, in the case of museums, they can be more accessible to scholars and the public.

Whatever air of nobility once attached to that effort has dissipated recently as antiquities collectors are increasingly depicted as the beneficiaries of a villainous trade.

Collectors and their advocates insist the depiction is unfair, particularly when it recasts acquisitions made decades ago, when cultural sensibilities were different, as the illicit booty of indifferent rascals.

“Even objects that entirely lack history are also not necessarily smuggled or looted,” said William G. Pearlstein, a New York lawyer who advises collectors and dealers in the antiquities trade. “Many owners simply failed to keep records of their objects, which they treated like other household possessions.”

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But his giving days are largely over, he said, pre-empted by guidelines that most museums now follow on what objects they can accept.

“They just won’t take them — can’t take them,” Mr. Dewey said.

Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, is in a similar bind. An antiquities collector, he is eager to sell an Egyptian sarcophagus he bought from Sotheby’s in the early 1990s. But he is stymied, he said, because auction houses are applying tighter policies to the items they accept for consignment.

“I can’t get proof of when it came out of Egypt,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Across the country measures taken to curb the trade in looted artifacts are making it more difficult for collectors of antiquities to donate, or sell, the cultural treasures that fill their homes, display cases and storage units.

Museums typically no longer want artifacts that do not have a documented history stretching back past 1970, a date set by the Association of Art Museum Directors, whose guidelines most institutions have adopted. Drawn up in 2008, the rules have been applauded by countries seeking to recover their artifacts and by archaeologists looking to study objects in their natural settings.

But the sweeping shift in attitudes has left collectors stuck with items they say they purchased in good faith many years ago from reputable dealers. One study found that as many as 100,000 privately owned ancient Greek, Roman and related Classical objects in the United States would be unable to pass muster with most museums.

“Objects are guilty until proven innocent,” said James J. Lally, a Manhattan dealer in Chinese art and antiquities.

Collectors and their advocates predict that museums, cultural scholarship and the items themselves will suffer as important gifts are disallowed. Kate Fitz Gibbon, a lawyer with the Cultural Policy Research Institute, warned at a March forum that museums, long reliant on the generosity of collectors, may come to regard the guidelines as a “self-administered slow poison.” “This may sound like an exaggeration,” she said. “But if we continue on this path, there may not be a next generation of collectors, donors and patrons of ancient art, not in the United States of America anyway.” There are many on the other side of the question who view Ms. Fitz Gibbon’s perspective as hyperbolic.

“Antiquities collecting destroys far more than it saves,” said Ricardo J. Elia, an archaeology professor at Boston University who specializes in the global art market. “Looting is driven by the art market, by supply and demand.”

For centuries collectors have helped define artistic taste, and their collections, whether assembled for vanity, beauty, profit or some combination thereof, have been the backbone of museums. But the antiquities trade begins, at its source, with an act of appropriation: the removal of artifacts from a native site to one where, in the case of museums, they can be more accessible to scholars and the public.

Whatever air of nobility once attached to that effort has dissipated recently as antiquities collectors are increasingly depicted as the beneficiaries of a villainous trade.

Collectors and their advocates insist the depiction is unfair, particularly when it recasts acquisitions made decades ago, when cultural sensibilities were different, as the illicit booty of indifferent rascals.

“Even objects that entirely lack history are also not necessarily smuggled or looted,” said William G. Pearlstein, a New York lawyer who advises collectors and dealers in the antiquities trade. “Many owners simply failed to keep records of their objects, which they treated like other household possessions.”

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By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: July 13, 2012

Two weeks after the unexpected departure of the chief curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, battle lines are being drawn over the direction of that influential but long-beleaguered institution.

 
John Baldessari, who’s leaving the museum’s board.

Jason Redmond/Reuters
 

 
Jeffrey Deitch, the museum’s director
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

John Baldessari, a highly respected artist and a dean of the Los Angeles art world, announced on Thursday that he was leaving the museum’s board, partly as a result of the resignation of Paul Schimmel, the museum’s longtime chief curator and an architect of many of its most important shows.

Mr. Schimmel resigned under pressure in late June after months of increasing tension with the museum’s director, Jeffrey Deitch, a former New York gallery owner who took over in 2010 with a more pop-culture-oriented vision of the museum’s mission and a mandate to expand its audience.

Mr. Deitch was chosen as the museum was emerging from financial turmoil. And his selection was seen in the art world as an ideological shift: a demonstration of the increasingly blurry line between the commercial and museum worlds, of a growing desire among some museums to experiment with more populist programming, and of changing views about how younger audiences define art.

The first show that Mr. Deitch conceived after he arrived, a rapidly organized survey of the work of the actor Dennis Hopper, who was dying of cancer at the time, established a critical dynamic that has often been replayed. Christopher Knight, in a review in The Los Angeles Times, called the Hopper show mediocre, filled with the kind of “mostly listless art” that would not help to dig a serious institution out of its troubles.

“Art in the Streets,” a historical survey of graffiti and street art organized by Mr. Deitch, fared better critically and attracted more than 200,000 visitors during its run of almost five months in 2011, helping the museum to double its attendance that year to more than 400,000. And other shows initiated by Mr. Deitch have cut against a straightforward perception of him as showy impresario, including a current well-received exhibition of the Los Angeles artist Amanda Ross-Ho.

But four other board members have preceded Mr. Baldessari in leaving the board this year, and, in a letter to The Los Angeles Times this week, four nonvoting board members wrote that what they called Mr. Deitch’s “celebrity-driven program” was not the right way to make the museum relevant.

In a phone interview Mr. Baldessari said he had decided to step down from the board, which he had been little involved with since Mr. Deitch’s appointment, because he saw it as being pervaded by a “kind of entertainment mentality — this way of putting something up the flagpole to see who salutes.”

As an example of what he called an embrace of pop culture with too little critical distance, he mentioned a large exhibition being planned by Mr. Deitch that will explore the influence of disco culture on the visual arts and performance art.

Mr. Schimmel’s departure was a tipping point, he said, in which “MOCA was going to become something else, whether I liked it or not.” Of the museum’s overall direction, he added: “It also makes me think that I’m a dinosaur, and Jeffrey Deitch and his ideas may be the future. But I don’t like it.”

Mr. Deitch, who declined to comment about Mr. Baldessari’s stepping down, appears to have the continued strong support of the museum’s leadership. Maria Arena Bell and David G. Johnson, who are the board’s chairwoman and chairman, issued a statement on Friday, saying, “There is a paradigm shift happening today, and both art and its audience are changing.”

Mr. Deitch, they wrote, “came here to bring us into this new era, and we are 100 percent behind him and his vision for that.” Ms. Bell and Mr. Johnson added that they saw Mr. Deitch’s overall vision as a “balanced program,” with historical exhibitions, projects with established and emerging contemporary artists and “innovative exhibitions that engage the public in a dynamic way.”

Eli Broad, the collector and philanthropist whose foundation stepped in to save the museum from insolvency in 2008 after its endowment was used to pay operating expenses, continues to exert considerable influence over the museum’s decisions and has consistently supported Mr. Deitch.

But many curators and others in the art world have regarded Mr. Broad’s measure of museum success or failure with a degree of alarm. In an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times after Mr. Schimmel’s departure, Mr. Broad wrote that over the museum’s history it had mounted a number of shows that cost too much and were attended by too few — a problem he described in precise accounting terms, citing exhibitions “exceeding $100 per visitor.”

Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, cautioned in an online forum recently that such a box office view of art patronage threatened to narrow the ambitions of museums.

“We have to change course to a research, education and experiential impact focus and away from obsessing about ‘the gate’ — which represents less than 5 percent of our revenue nationally,” Mr. Anderson wrote. “It’s up to museum professionals to change the topic and measure what we know matters, not what’s easy to measure.”

 

 

Librado Romero/The New York Times
Yayoi Kusama A retrospective of this Japanese artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art includes
paintings from 2009 and 2010.

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: July 12, 2012

“American” is an expandable category at the Whitney Museum of American Art, elastic enough to accommodate a retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, 83, an artist who, apart from a decade-plus stay in the United States many years ago, has spent all of her long life in Japan, where she was born.

It was during that American sojourn, however, when she lived as an immigrant in Manhattan, that she did her best-known work: eyelet-patterned abstract paintings, furniture bristling with soft-sculpture phalluses, and polka-dot designs suitable to any and every surface. So closely has her reputation rested on that New York stay that the last Kusama survey hereabouts, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, never strayed beyond it.

So it’s been left to the Whitney to give a synoptic, transcultural take on her output, one that changes our view of its shape. By including material from the 1940s through the present, the show — which originated at the Tate Modern in London — demonstrates that Ms. Kusama made some of her most complex and personal art before she left Japan in 1957 and after she returned there, in a state of psychological crisis, in 1973, the future of her career uncertain.

As any account of that career will tell you, including those Ms. Kusama gives, crisis mode was the source of her art. She was born in the city of Matsumoto, a few hundred miles northwest of Tokyo, to an affluent family that owned a large plant nursery and seed farm. Her father, by her account, was distant, cool and a serial philanderer; her mother, embittered by marriage, was perversely abusive.

For whatever reason, she had hallucinations from a young age. She claimed that flowers spoke to her; that fabric patterns came to life, multiplied endlessly and threatened to engulf and expunge her. These neurotic fears were compounded by the grueling realities of World War II, when she was in her teens and had begun drawing and painting with ferocious concentration, clinging to art as a lifeline.

Her grip on it was more than firm: it was unrelenting and propulsive. With a boldness unusual in a young woman of her day, she left home, under a cloud of disapproval, for art school in Kyoto. There she customized academic styles to her own subversive ends. In the show’s earliest painting, “Lingering Dream” from 1949, she translates the traditional theme of a floral still life into a nightmare of withered limbs and vaginas dentata set in a blasted landscape.

Two dozen small drawings from the early 1950s that follow in the next gallery are among the exhibition’s highlights. Done in ink, watercolor, pastel and collage, they include references to vegetal, animal and cellular forms. At the same time, each work is abstract, the sum of repeated, labor-intensive details: fields of minute dots, clusters of radiant lines, networks of slug-shaped strokes.

Despite the micromanaged intricacy of the drawings, she turned them out fast and in bulk, establishing a rhythm of productivity she still maintains. She established other habits too, like having herself routinely photographed with new work. And the Whitney installation, overseen by the curator David Kiehl, opens with snapshots taken over several decades.

In New York in the 1960s her preference for documenting her art this way earned her a reputation as a narcissistic self-brander, though it might equally be taken as gesture of self-affirmation on the part of someone who suffered the threat of psychic obliteration. However you see the matter — and some people consider Ms. Kusama’s self-proclaimed psychosis little more than savvy self-mythologizing — the photographic image of her grave, guarded but oddly affectless gaze is integral to her art.

By the end of the 1950s she felt she had done what she could do in her homeland. And she knew that America was the place for an ambitious artist to go. In 1957 she flew to Seattle, where she stayed for a year before moving on to her ultimate goal, New York City. When she arrived, Action Painting and misogyny still dominated the scene. And Ms. Kusama, who had an instinct for undermining authority on its own terms, tackled both head on.

Right off the bat she produced abstract paintings on a king-size scale, but with gestures that, far from swaggeringly expressive, were all the same: tiny, linked curves of thick white paint laid down, one after the other, on a dark-stained ground. Four of these paintings add up to the show’s most compelling installation. From a distance they look like soiled blank walls. Up close they’re like sheets of openwork lace or rippling water or a raked garden.

She called them Infinity Net paintings and they were a hit with smart young artists and critics like Donald Judd, who saw in them something new being forged from something old, high art being conflated with craft, masculinity with femininity, individuality with multiplicity. As for Ms. Kusama, who at this point had little money, scant English and a visa about to expire, she posed for her customary photographs and moved on.

In the early 1960s she turned from paintings that looked like stitchwork to stitching sculptures — small, phallus shaped — from cotton-stuffed cloth. She attached hundreds of these tuber-size objects to ordinary furniture and everyday clothes to create bristling, smothering domestic environments — “Accumulations” was her term — that, among other things, mocked the possession-crammed, father-knows-best home that had become an American postwar ideal.

Yet in the same America, a bit later in the 1960s, she aligned herself and her art with a different set of ideals, those embodied in the call for peace, sexual revolution and tolerance for eccentricity of all kinds issued by the burgeoning hippie counterculture.

The counterculture was bent on shattering ethical givens to create a new order. Ms. Kusama’s work had always been made from individual elements joined together into a whole. As if in response to a dramatically breaking-apart time, she now made one visual element in her repertory, the polka dot, a kind of universal binder that united everything it touched — paintings, collages, films, fashions, political protests, orgiastic public performances — in a personal utopia, a Kusamaworld, with the impresario-artist its center.

In the New York City of the mid-’60s she and her art were everywhere. Newspapers clamored for photographs of her wearing dots, painting dots, mingling with the dot-covered nude dancers in street performances that were part protest, part circus.

The affirming visibility she had always craved was hers; at the same time she was vanishing into her art, becoming one with it. In pictures we see a rare sight: Ms. Kusama smiling.

Then, like the Summer of Love, it was all over. The social climate changed. Peace and love wilted under a blast of national anger and violence. Polka dots, like paper dresses, went out of style. Ms. Kusama, disoriented, went into retreat. Her art experienced the equivalent of a nervous breakdown, and she tried to find her way to a safe place.

The safe place turned out to be Japan. In 1973 she moved back permanently; in 1977 she took up residency in a psychiatric hospital (where she still lives) and built a large studio nearby where she could work daily. During these years she also started making small, enigmatic paintings and collages, with luminous colors blooming against nightshade-colored grounds. In touch and mood they’re very much like what she was doing before she came to America.

The Whitney show has a dozen such pieces. Some of the titles are morbid — “I Who Committed Suicide,” “Graves of the Unknown Soldier” — but the work is imaginative and individually inflected.

It looks restoratively alive.

It would be gratifying to report that she continued to move in this intimate, diaristic direction, but such was not the case. Perhaps she felt that her conservative country needed some shaking up. She probably needed some attention.

She resumed making stuffed-cloth sculpture, larger than before, but also, for some reason, less steroidal, more abstract, more ordinary. She continued to paint, but now in high-colored acrylics on canvas, on an amped-up scale. The show’s final gallery is hung, floor to ceiling, with recent examples, some pretty good, some pretty bad. The abundance seems calculated to make distinctions less obvious.

And she has stayed on the polka-dot path, most recently in designs for a collection of dot-patterned clothes and accessories — skirts, handbags, sunglasses — commissioned by Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton. Her compatriot, Takashi Murakami, received a similar commission in 2008, and his brand of profuse, decorative, acid-edged Pop owes a clear debt to Ms. Kusama. But then, many movements, artists and designers do, and always have, from Andy Warhol and Op Art in America in the 1960s to international Minimalists and Conceptualists of different stripes over time, to Damien Hirst and Rei Kawakubo today.

If aspects of Ms. Kusama’s work now come across as dated and thin, there is no doubt about her heroic, barrier-crashing accomplishment over the long haul. Her Infinity Net paintings and Accumulation sculptures are deservedly classics of global stature; her Japanese work of the 1940s and early 1970s are treasures still underknown. They are things to seek out and dwell on.

“Yayoi Kusama” continues through Sept. 30 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.

 

July 11, 2012

New York is, famously, a city whose seen-it-all citizens are above doing double takes when celebrities walk by. Neither, as it turns out, do some of them raise an eyebrow at a six-passenger, 35-foot-long twin-engine airplane spinning above their heads. How I Roll, which has been somersaulting above Fifth Avenue at 60th Street for a few weeks now, is a monumental kinetic sculpture by the Italian artist Paola Pivi and, jaded New Yorkers notwithstanding, it’s remarkable.

The piece was commissioned by the Public Art Fund, and financed by several generous private donations, including my own. About two years ago, Public Art Fund curator Nicholas Baume and I created a small selection committee to commission a new artwork from a living artist. Joining us on the committee were independent curator Alison Gingeras and Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a former director of Public Art Fund. When Ms. Pivi’s name came up, we all knew we had a winner: she has never had a proper gallery show in New York and is mostly unknown in the U.S. In Europe, she has enjoyed considerable success for a unique style of conceptual art with a twist of absurdity: a leopard walking across a room of cappuccino cups, an alligator in a sea of shaving cream, a zebra standing in snow-covered mountains. Her decision to place a spinning airplane above Doris C. Freedman Plaza wasn’t altogether surprising, given her longstanding interest in large vehicles: she won early recognition in 1997 when she tipped over an 18-wheeler semi-trailer truck, but she has also posed helicopters upside down and leaned fighter jets against walls.

The time-and-money logistics of putting her airplane in place in New York were arduous and lengthy, and there were moments when it looked like the project would never happen. But Ms. Pivi has a magic touch: all the way from Anchorage, Alaska, where she’s lived for several years, she manages to convince people to realize her dreams. After more than two years of planning and engineering and the clearing of much red tape, the piece is finally installed for its two- month run (the piece was finished so late that it arrived four months into its six- month permit). Well, better late than never—I’m convinced it’s the most daring public artwork New York has witnessed in a very long time.

Shortly before she returned to Anchorage, I caught up with Ms. Pivi over lunch at Bergdorf’s. From the seventh-floor café’s windows, we had a bird’s-eye view of her extraordinary piece, and, after remarking that she loves the way a huge twirling plane that looks like it might easily fit in at an amusement park can also function as contemporary art, she recalled how she scraped together financing for her early projects, in the late 1990s. “My first major outdoor piece was a tractor-trailer tipped over on its side,” she said. Her day job as an aerobics instructor wasn’t sufficient to pay her art production bills. “I had to borrow the money from my uncle and my landlord. Fortunately the piece was a success and I managed to pay them back.”

In 2003, she got a show in New York—really, more of a micro-show, in the tiny Chelsea storefront that served as Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick’s Wrong Gallery. The display was short-lived. “I showed only a single piece, one of my bunches of pearls, but it was too heavy for the wall, and the landlord became afraid of the weight because it was hanging on the door to a boiler room, so they took it down after a single week.”

The idea for the spinning airplane came, she said, from “a vision I had.” As for its title, that came from her husband, Karma, a poet and musician who trained as a Tibetan monk. Ms. Pivi insists that “art has no specific meaning” and that she’s “not trying to say more than what you see,” but how, in a city like New York where everyone is always on the go in all manner of vehicle, could I not read into her artwork my own question, “where are we really going?”

“I am not commenting on New York,” she said. “I am commenting on man and machine, time and beauty. The piece is about transcending limits.” 

Isn’t it also about the failure of progress ? “No. … The making of the artwork is huge progress, a big move forward.”

While she wouldn’t divulge to me what inspired the suspended airplane, Ms. Pivi did agree that, as a civilization, we are not exactly moving forward. “Western society overall is indeed going in the wrong direction,” she said. “For example, they don’t stop trashing the ocean. Think about all the trash; where I live in Alaska we pay only $65 a month for garbage removal, but that’s not the real price. The real price would take into account the impact this has on the planet. This garbage will stay for years; no one thinks to calculate the real long-term cost this has to the planet.”

By KELLY CROW

New York financier Leon Black paid Sotheby's nearly $120 million for Edvard Munch's masterpiece, "The Scream," according to several people close to the collector.

 

Reuters
An auctioneer takes bids for the sale of "The Scream" painted by Edvard Munch at Sotheby's in New York in May.

The identity of the buyer—who set a record for a work of art sold at auction—has been one of the art world's most closely guarded secrets since the dramatic, 12-minute sale in May.

 

 

Now that the buyer has been identified, the new parlor game surrounding the iconic artwork will be guessing where it will end up. Mr. Black's long-term intentions for his Munch remain unclear. He sits on the boards of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, setting up a potential tug of war between two of the country's most powerful art institutions. Neither owns a "Scream," aside from lithograph-print versions of it.

 

Few artworks have the world-wide celebrity of "The Scream," and it would immediately become a merchandising bonanza and huge attendance draw for any museum that displayed it.

 

It's easy to understand the work's appeal: Munch created four versions of "The Scream," but Mr. Black's is the only one not in an Oslo museum and the first to come up at auction. The work depicts a bald, skeletal figure in a blue shirt standing at a popular suicide spot on Oslo's horseshoe-shaped bay where people could often hear screams from a nearby insane asylum, according to art historians.

 

A spokesman for Mr. Black, 60 years old, declined to comment.

 

Bernice Steinbaum — sporting giant, playfully baroque Prada eyeglasses and Chinese-inspired couture — is not her usual wisecracking self this afternoon. In a few days, she’ll shut down her two-story gallery, wedged between Wynwood and its chugging art scene and the increasingly tonyDesign District, now with Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Bulgari and Hermés on the way.

“I’m old, baby. I’m 70. I’ve been having lots of second thoughts about closing. But it’s time to recreate myself. And you only live once. And I suspect if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,’’ she says about her decision to retire from full-time art dealing.

The still young gallery scene in Wynwood has had its casualties. For all of the buzz about the neighborhood’s rebirth as an art hub, there is no denying Miami still has a way to go before it catches up with deeper, more established art markets. The 10-year-old Art Basel Miami Beach, the most important contemporary art fair in the country, has done plenty to bolster the city’s cultural evolution. But sustaining year-round enthusiasm for art buying has been a struggle for both serious galleries and the upstarts. And recently, a few local artists, among them rising star Jen Stark, and the internationally-successful Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III of the collaborative FriendsWithYou, decided to bail for the more mature, lucrative art capital of Los Angeles.

But Steinbaum says her gallery has remained prosperous and that her decision to sell the property, which she bought in 1998 for $290,000 according to property records (assessed value in 2011 was nearly $1 million,) had nothing to do with the ups and downs of Miami’s art scene.

Two years ago, she lost her husband Harold, a retired physician. And for Steinbaum, that changed everything.

“Our marriage was 49 years in duration. I’m still reaching out to his pillow,” she says. “I had a wonderful life with him. In my naiveté, I thought this would go on forever. How silly. When someone so close to you dies, you are reminded of your own mortality. I want to spend more time with my grandchildren. I want to go to the mall. I want to watch Days of Our Lives – is that what that soap opera is called?”

In 2000, when Steinbaum opened her gallery on the corner of 36th Street and North Miami Avenue after a successful 23-year run in Manhattan, there wasn’t much but dust flying off a neighboring 56-acre rail yard that no one imagined would one day sprout into the happening Midtown Miami. The Design District was a desolate if historic collection of low-slung buildings, some housing furniture and fixture showrooms, others waiting out the tumbleweeds. Wynwood, now home to more than 60 galleries and private collection spaces plus an ever-expanding compilation of murals by some of the world’s most important graffiti artists, was nothing but a rough patch of the city known for its early 1990s race riots.

But the New York-born Steinbaum, who moved to Miami to live near her three children who had landed careers here, saw only possibility.

“When I bought the building it was crack-infested,’’ she says. “There were no other galleries here yet. And while I understood that a gallery has to be in an area where other galleries exist, you have to be able to do more than sell. You have to have exchanges with artists. And there were already artists who had studios nearby. I was guaranteed they would come. Artists have an insatiable curiosity. ‘’

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