PETER BRANT & STEPHANIE SEYMOUR ART FOUNDATION

Peter Brant, contemporary American art collector, and his wife, the model Stephanie Seymour Brant, have turned a Connecticut fruit barn into a gallery for the display of their paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos. Located in Greenwich, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, which opens in late May, will mount two exhibitions per year drawn mainly from the approximately 600 works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and dozens of other artists that Brant has amassed over the last four decades. Architect Richard Gluckman has converted the interior of the 1902 stone barn into three skylite galleries and a video room in which the Brants, or guest curators, will organize single-artist or thematic shows of around 40 to 60 works. The fields outside will be home to monumental works such as Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, 1994-2000, and his topiary terrier Puppy, 1993, as well as Paul McCarthy’s Santa, 2002, and Richard Serra’s Ali-Frazier, 2001. “We believe it is part of our stewardship to exhibit and share as much of the collection as possible,” says Brant. The inaugural exhibition, which continues until February 2010, will present around 60 works made between 1978 and 2008 by the aforementioned artists as well as Maurizio Cattelan, Larry Clark, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Eric Fischl, Karen Kilimnik, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel and Cindy Sherman, among others. After that there will be a one-man show devoted to the Swiss artist Urs Fischer.

Following is excerpts of Brant's interview with the The Art Newspaper.

The Art Newspaper: You’re a successful businessman. Why collect art and create a foundation?
Peter Brant: My whole philosophy of life revolves around aesthetics and I believe that you should try and sell the gospel. You need to preach and I’ve been doing that my whole life. It’s not something I decided to do four or five years ago…I took one hiatus between 1976 and 1982 when I was involved in horseracing, but besides that I’ve been a very serious collector. We never really acquired art for the purposes of decorating. We always collected because we were very interested in art and art history. We thought this was a good opportunity to give something back to the art world and to our community.

TAN: Do you intend to donate your collection to a museum?
PB: Ultimately, if I could afford to, I would like to have the collection put away in the foundation in perpetuity, to be able to show it and to be guaranteed that it would be shown…There are many possibilities. I’ve given works of art to probably 20 or 25 museums, including the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Whitney—and some stand today as pretty major things. Many times when you give works to museums they’re not put on display. I would very much like the foundation to ensure that the works would be shown to the public, and that could be done through an affiliation in the future with a museum, but it might be tied to some sort of condition or guarantee that the works would be exhibited over a period of time.

TAN: Why has your collecting focused on contemporary American artists?
PB: Stephanie and I love European art, but collecting is about focusing and doing it in depth. Occasionally I’ll branch out, like in the case of Urs Fischer, but I consider artists like that in a sense American because they live and work in America. For me Francesco Clemente is not an Italian artist, he’s an American artist. I concentrate on what I have some knowledge of and where I can obtain the knowledge easily.

TAN: In an interview with the collector Adam Lindemann you said, “As a collector, you really have to be thinking about what people’s tastes are going to be like ten or 15 years from now.” If you buy work you love, what do you care what other people will think in 15 years?
PB: You really have to be looking 15 or 20 years from now because an artist should be that much ahead of his time to forecast something aesthetically, politically or culturally…For instance, one of the earliest pictures that I bought was [Andy Warhol’s] Shot Blue Marilyn. Today that is like looking at the Mona Lisa. Marilyn Monroe has a totally different image than she had in 1964 when she passed away. It’s like Elton John’s song. We’ve looked at her life in retrospect since then and what Andy Warhol projected is something that now is very accurate—but nobody knew it at the time. The art world cognoscenti thought that picture was garish and photographic. It was not considered beautiful and not embraced by the art world…But that’s what Andy did, he was the radical artist at that time. To me it’s about looking at something visually or conceptually that is really going to change your view, something that is going to set a new aesthetic because of what it means culturally. Then it will become socialised and become beautiful. But it has to have some importance, some angst that changes your life in some sense. It has to be troublesome in some way.

TAN: So innovation is an important criterion?
PB: Yes, the beauty is not enough. If I look at a work by Elizabeth Peyton or Karen Kilimnik or John Currin, it’s not because it’s beautifully done. It stands for something that’s culturally important…One common thread in our collection is that a lot of these artists have gotten their ideas from an image—from going through a magazine or seeing something on a billboard or in a comic book—and it becomes iconic as an image that is available to us subconsciously in some way in our society. That’s what’s happened to our society: we’re looking at pictures.

TAN: You have many works by David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl and Francesco Clemente, who were especially prominent in the 1980s. Why did their stars fall?
PB: Their stars have not fallen to me. I think Julian is still an extremely important artist [and] an extremely creative man. He has no fear of branching out and becoming a film-maker and getting involved in music or architecture. I think that confuses people and infuriates them in a jealous way. They felt the same about Andy. He became a film-maker and when he branched out to do Hollywood films, which I was involved in, the art world resented it. But he became more famous in Europe for the films than for the art. You have art dealers who have only been in the business for five years who will comment on the likes of Schnabel, Salle, Fischl and Clemente and talk about them like they’re dinosaurs. Actually they are artists that are in the history books and important in their own right. [We] want to show them with some of the artists who are more, say, au courant than they are. But, again, Warhol is a god today; in the early 1980s he was almost persona non grata. People forget that. Why do you think so much of his late great work was in the estate?

TAN: How important is it for you that the work you acquire retains or generates value?
PB: I never bought art with the idea that the primary push was that the values are going to go up. I know I have a reputation of buying the right stuff but my primary push is that I have a feeling that something is really great. It’s playful, there’s genius in it and it gets my juices going—that’s why I buy works. And the ones that have appreciated the most are some of the ones that most advisors would tell you never to buy. A perfect example would be the [Jeff Koons] Puppy. I mean, what advisor would tell you to buy the Puppy? It’s maybe Jeff’s greatest work. I started to try and buy it in 1993 when he had just shown it in Aarhus and they couldn’t deliver it because it was in wood and structurally not fit. They had to do it in stainless steel and have it manufactured in Australia so it was a long wait. The idea to plant 80,000 flowers every year—nobody is going to tell you to buy something like that. But to me it was like the greatest public sculpture that I’d seen, as important as anything done in the last couple of hundred years, and [I knew that] one day this foundation would display works and this was a pivotal piece to show and have. It’s probably my favorite work of art.

TAN: Do you sometimes sell or trade works to raise funds for other purchases?
PB: Absolutely. I have done that all my life. If I am short and I have extra works of a certain period and don’t have the funding to buy something I need, I sell from time to time. But on balance I am a buyer…The last time was over a year ago when I sold some of Andy’s work that I felt that I had other examples of in order to raise money. In that case we were making a large acquisition for my company and [needed to raise money] because of the capital markets shutting down about a year and a half ago, so I did sell some things.

TAN: How is the downturn of the economy and the art market going to affect your collecting?
PB: In the last two or three months I actually have been buying. I find that the opportunity is there today to buy higher quality and it’s available at lower prices because more people need the liquidity and the money. For collectors it’s an opportunity to buy at a different level. The level that the art was at nine months to a year-and-a-half ago was an unrealistic level and an unhealthy level considering that it made it very difficult for collectors to collect. It’s much better that dealers have to think now about pricing their work more reasonably both in the primary and on the secondary market to entice collectors. It’s about time that happened…I feel that it’s very important that artists realise that the world is what it is today and they have to adjust and not be unreasonable. [That means] scaling back projects that are not realistic in today’s economy and depending more on being creative and having brilliant ideas that don’t have to be executed in gold or platinum or diamonds.

TAN: What about Damien Hirst? Did you buy at the Hirst auction at Sotheby’s?
PB: No. I think Damien is a great artist, but it’s the old saying: You live by the sword, you die by the sword. He kind of maximized the commerciality of his business. I believe that the volume that you turn out and the way in which it’s executed has some meaning in the traditional sense in the art world. That has no bearing on how great an artist you are—Picasso, Monet and Warhol, a lot of the greatest artists have done a huge amount of volume. But you have to be prepared to go through those moments when the supply is going to outdo the demand. I think I have one very early Hirst Apothecary cabinet piece done in 1989 that I bought probably in 1991. I have had other works by him, but I did not buy anything in that sale.

TAN: Does the current climate favor auction houses or dealers?
PB: I think there are better opportunities for dealers only because the transition in the auction houses has been so severe. They were very strong over a period of six years, then as the market turned they naturally got hit because of the guarantees they had out there. Everything that was part of their formula for growth all of a sudden hit in the ninth inning. It’s a temporary hit, but in the meantime the dealers have an opportunity to do private sales and secondary-market transactions. What the auction houses have to do is scale down their evening sales for contemporary art and really concentrate on getting the best quality. How do you do that when the prices come down and you can’t offer anything attractive to the [consignors]? They have to still continue to actively pursue quality things…if they [once] had 60 works in an evening sale they should have perhaps 30 and make them really good. Dealers have sour grapes about the auction houses because they’ve eroded into their business especially on the secondary market for private sales, which is a very stupid place for the auction houses to be. They don’t have the expertise and you’re competing against your customers—the largest portion of customers of the auction houses is the art dealers.
I think the auction houses are making some mistakes now by trying to underestimate where the market is to increase the percentage of their sell-through. That’s very destructive to the art market. Just like they were responsible for increasing the values faster than they should have, they also are now responsible for decreasing the values faster than they should be. That’s because some moron in these auction houses, a financial guy, says they think the market’s gone down 50% so everything’s 50% lower—every appraisal that is given for a bank on collateral, every insurance appraisal. That’s a self-defeating position. I don’t think the market has deteriorated as much as the press believes that it has because I’m talking to dealers that are doing business. They might be doing business at a lower level, but it’s not 50% or 60% below where it was a year or two ago. For quality things it might be 25% lower.

TAN: A recent debate organized by Robert Rosenkranz of Delphi Fund postulated that the art market is less ethical than the stock market. Would you agree?
PB: I think that there’s no comparison. I believe that the country is in the condition that it’s in today largely because of what transpired on Wall Street. I’m not a great fan of such a large population of people that are effectively controlling our resources that don’t really make or produce anything. What got us into trouble was the packaging of these mortgages and the lack of contact with individuals on the street, and this idea to package it and sell it off to someone else—mortgages, credits, derivatives and the whole works. The transparency in the art world is 100 times better and greater than on Wall Street. The very nature of the art market being entrepreneurial and having such a cast of characters involved, it forms like a knitting group of people that are yakking away like old ladies. It might be regulated on Wall Street but nobody understands it. Can you read Citibank’s balance sheet? Who the hell can read that? You can have a masters in business administration or accounting and you can’t read that balance sheet. It’s impossible. I’ve had a lot of dealings with purchasing and selling through these auction companies over the last 40 years, and I think today they’ve regulated themselves a lot more, especially since the anti-trust case that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Sotheby’s and Christie’s. These companies are so large with so many employees that if anything like that went on it would be known, and I don’t believe that they do that. They’re very strict on setting reserves, and people can’t bid up to the reserves.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

WALKER ARTS CENTER
MINNEAPOLIS, MN
APRIL 25 - SEPTEMBER 27, 2009

Surveying art that tries to reach beyond itself and the limits of our knowledge and experience, The Quick and the Dead seeks, in part, to ask what is alive and dead within the legacy of conceptual art. Though the term “conceptual” has been applied to myriad kinds of art, it originally covered works and practices from the 1960s and ‘70s that emphasized the ideas behind or around a work of art, foregrounding language, action, and context rather than visual form. But this basic definition fails to convey the ambitions of many artists who have been variously described as conceptual: as Sol LeWitt asserted in 1969, conceptual artists are “mystics rather than rationalists.” Although some of their work involves unremarkable materials or even borders on the invisible, these artists explore new ways of thinking about time and space, often aspiring to realms and effects that fall far outside of our perceptual limitations. Organized by Walker curator Peter Eleey, this experimental exhibition grapples with art's relationship to many of the big questions and deep mysteries in life as they were defined and examined during the pivotal decade of the 1960s and carried forth to the present day. The Quick and the Dead addresses how preoccupations with mortality, transience, and the unknown during the early history of conceptual art linked directly to evolving understandings of time and space.

Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection

MOMA
April 22, 2009–July 27, 2009

The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, acquired by the Museum in 2005, is an extraordinary collection of over 2,500 contemporary works on paper. Formed by the foundation’s sole trustee Harvey Shipley Miller, in only two years, in consultation with Gary Garrels, who was MoMA's Chief Curator of Drawings and Curator of Painting and Sculpture from 2000 to 2005, Compass in Hand follows in the steps of a number of important exhibitions dedicated to drawing at MoMA, in particular Drawing Now, Bernice Rose's 1976 exhibition, and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, an exhibition held in 2002 organized by Laura Hoptman. The exhibition features works that date from the ’30s to the present with an emphasis on the past two decades. There are big names like Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton and Donald Judd, but the show also includes a fair share of up and comers as well as outsider artists like Henry Darger and James Castle. Through a selection of more than three hundred works, this first comprehensive presentation of the gift surveys the various methods and materials within the styles of gestural and geometric abstraction, representation and figuration, and systems-based and conceptual drawings as well as appropriation and collage. While the collection primarily focuses on the work of artists living and working in what are widely regarded as five major centers of visual art today--New York, Los Angeles, London/Glasgow, Berlin and Cologne/Düsseldorf--it also includes artists from 30 countries throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. Established artists such as Jasper Johns are represented through examples of recent work, while others, such as Joseph Beuys and Philip Guston, are highlighted through core historic groupings, and still others are shown in a comprehensive overview of their careers. Mr. Rattemeyer, a co-curator of the exhibition states "This exhibition speaks first and foremost to the vitality of drawing today, documenting a resurgence of the medium's importance to contemporary art practice over the past two decades. The recent work in the exhibition suggests a new approach to working on paper, or rather with paper as a reconfigured material, with assemblage techniques assuming a major role. To understand this recent activity, certain historical trajectories were established: one through figurative works, and the other through abstract, minimal, and conceptual works." Compass in Hand is laid out along this dual trajectory, with each path following a rough chronology from the 1950s to the present. In its exploration of diverse artistic tendencies at the turn of the twenty-first century, this exhibition proudly celebrates the panoramic state of drawing today.

WHITECHAPEL ART GALERY: LONDON

The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London's East End has been internationally acclaimed for its exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. The renovated and enlarged Whitechapel Gallery is now open after completing an ambitious £13 million expansion, the greatest event in its 100-year history. The Gallery has premiered international artists such as Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Nan Goldin, and provided a showcase for Britain’s most significant artists from Gilbert & George to Lucian Freud, Peter Doig to Mark Wallinger.

To mark the Whitechapel Gallery's reopening, the Guardian asked photographer Juergen Teller to capture some of the artists and curators who helped shape the gallery and make it a world class institution. Here are some of his photographs.



Gilbert & George, photographed in London. The pair's first major British show was held at the Whitechapel in 1970, and their studio is located just around the corner, up Brick Lane.



David Hockney at home in Bridlington - another artist to receive his first solo exhibition at the Whitechapel, just before G&G.



The third major artist associated with the gallery in these years was Richard Hamilton, who has a good claim to have brought pop art to Britain: he made a collaged poster featuring the word POP for the landmark 1956 exhibition This Is ­Tomorrow.



Nicholas Serota, photographed inside his current office. Serota led the gallery from 1976 to 1988, bringing artists such as Frida Kahlo and Cy Twombly to Britain, before taking up the reins at Tate. 'I love the Whitechapel, and I miss it', he says.



Goshka Macuga, who was shortlisted for 2008's Turner prize, is the first artist to be commissioned for the new space. Well-known for working with other artists' materials, she has borrowed the UN's copy of Picasso's Guernica, which was shown at the Whitechapel in 1939.

FACTUALITY #6

X-INITIATIVE
PHASE ONE THROUGH MAY

X IS A NOT FOR PROFIT INITIATIVE OF THE GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY ART COMMUNITY THAT WILL EXIST FOR ONE YEAR AND PRESENT EXHIBITIONS AND PROGRAMMING IN FOUR PHASES

A CINEMA OF SMALL GESTURES:
THE SUPER-8 FILMS OF DEREK JARMAN

APRIL 25, 2009
548 WEST 22ND ST
NEW YORK CITY
5:00 PM

A CONVERSATION MODERATED BY STUART COMER WITH:
ED HALTER
CHRISSIE ILES
GERALD INCANDELA
JAMES MACKAY

Please RSVP
April25@x-initiative.org
917-697-4886

THE PICTURES GENERATION, 1974-1984

JAMES WELLING, MIDDLE VIDEO, 1973, PART 1

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
April 21 - August 2, 2009

This is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on “The Pictures Generation,” a tightly knit group of New York artists working in photography, film, video and performance who created some of the most important and influential works of the late-twentieth century. Born into the media culture of postwar America, their overarching subject was how pictures of all kinds not only depict, but also shape, reality. What these fledgling artists did have fully to themselves was the sea of images into which they were born—the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines. Their relationship to such material was productively schizophrenic: while they were first and foremost consumers, they also learned to adopt a cool, critical attitude toward the very same mechanisms of seduction and desire that played upon them. These artists purposely departed from the prevailing trends of Minimalism or Conceptualism, using recognizable images that reflected postwar consumer culture and opened photography to contemporary art. These artists including Jack Golstein, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Louise Lawler, Matt Mullican, Allan McCollum, James Welling and Laurie Simmons — became known as the Pictures Generation. And now, three decades later, they are figures of inspiration to many younger artists.

AGATHE SNOW and a NEW RENAISSANCE

Photo courtesy of the Jeu de Paume.

Agathe Snow, born in Corsica in 1976 and living in New York, is presented in the context of the satellite program, "Views from the top, dizziness and constellations". This project is part of a discussion devoted to Leonardo da Vinci and developed throughout the years in various exhibition venues. The work of Agathe Snow, whatever the medium - video, performance or installation - holds both the apocalyptic conclusion of a society in decline suggests that the issue, the celebration of survival and hope. Accumulations of found objects allow her to invent a new style narrative reflecting its perception of reality and its attitude towards the world. In the halls of the Jeu de Paume, the artist has created a device that connects the mezzanine and the room, so as to lay the foundations of a new world where it would be possible, "according to her own words, to dream a life more consistent , SEEN FROM ABOVE, a broader perspective. At the center of the space, a sculpture made of bales of rubber blue handballs, magnetized, adhere to metal forms. This mobile between solidity and chaos makes reference to both classicism as a more contemporary aesthetic to remind us of the teenage years the artist spent in the streets and playgrounds of the Lower East Side, with the molecular structure of DNA, as it echoes Constellations, all 49 Photocopying black and white representing Christmas balls in all their facets, meeting in the book published on the occasion of this exhibition. Next, an improvised foam prepared the ground, an American flag and a video replay just the first steps of man on the Moon Live followed in 1969 by millions of viewers. From this event, which marks the climax of the American dream, Agathe Snow takes when the current disenchantment. "Views from the top, dizziness and constellations" becomes a space for ideas and reflection in the hope of developing a new world or a renaissance is possible, "a state of mind free of any accessory superfluous, boredom, of morality and fate, a concept without a name yet to think like a time and in the future. This project refers in part to Leonardo da Vinci, in his impressive creative force that affects all areas and making it a key player in the society of his time and a visionary without limitation: painter, sculptor, founder, engineer, architect, planner, physicist, biologist, philosopher, surveyor, botanist, inventor of board games and kitchen tools, cartographer, author of treaties Optical, garden designer, interior decorator ... ...The spirit of the Renaissance embodied by Leonardo da Vinci and the observation of the degradation of society grow Agathe Snow to propose a new territory, rather than a renaissance based on empirical rationalism and the desire for total knowledge, but on awareness of the limits of our knowledge and appreciation of those things that are beyond human understanding: myths, fables and supernatural. Agathe Snow proposes renewing a new attitude that would "accomplish little by little that the wonder is back in our lives."

María Inés Rodríguez
Curator of the exhibition
Translated from the French

PETER ZUMTHOR WINS PRITZKER

Peter Zumthor's most renowned creation, the thermal spa in Vals, Switzerland. Photograph: Martin Ruetschi/AP

The Swiss architect, Peter Zumthor, who is admired within the profession for his precision and integrity, has won the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prize is widely regarded as the top honor in architecture, having been set up in the 1970s by the Pritzkers, one of America's most wealthy families, who own the Hyatt group of hotels. The award, which is always given to a living architect displaying "talent, vision and commitment", was modelled on the Nobel prize. Peter Zumthor is an architect's architect: he is hugely admired within the profession as a designer of precision and integrity and a master craftsman working in a range of materials from sandblasted glass to cedar shingles. The Pritzker award will earn him $100,000 in prize money. A panel of judges, chaired by the chairman of London's Serpentine Gallery, Lord Palumbo, deliberated in secret. In their citation they described Zumthor as a "master architect" who is "focused, uncompromising and exceptionally determined". The panel praised his detachment from current trends, saying his buildings were "untouched by fad or fashion ... humility resides alongside strength. "While some have called his architecture quiet, his buildings masterfully assert their presence." Zumthor's most renowned creation is the 1996 rebuilding of a thermal spa in Vals, Switzerland. He used giant slabs of Valser gneiss to set the building into the mountainside, with slabs of the roof grassed over and bursting with flowers in spring. The judges also singled out his Field Chapel to St Nikolaus von der Flüe in Mechernich, Germany, which was built using more than 100 tree trunks overlayed with concrete. The panel particularly admired the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, which it said was a "startling contemporary work that is completely at ease with its many layers of history". Amid the global multimillion dollar practices that have been established by some of his predecessors on the roll-call of Pritzker prize winners, Zumthor stands out for the low-key modesty of his way of working. His practice is located in the remote village of Haldenstein in the Swiss mountains, which, as the prize judges pointed out, keeps him removed from the flurry of activity of the international architectural scene. There he employs fewer than 20 staff. Zumthor has said he likes to keep his operation minimalist as it allows him to own the entire process of developing a new building from start to finish. His desire is to be the author of everything. "I'm not a producer of images. I'm this guy who, when I take on a commission, I do it inside out, everything myself, with my team," he told the New York Times. Along with the smallness of scale comes discrimination over the projects that he takes on, which sees him reject far more offers of commissions than he accepts. He has written: "In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings, and speak its own language."

CHRISTOPHER WOOL AT MUSEUM LUDWIG

Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2007
Private Collection

Christopher Wool
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
April 21-July 12, 2009


Christopher Wool is not only an abstract painter, he is also an explorer of abstraction. Wool belongs to the generation of painters who has explored, since the 1980s, in new and unprecedented ways, the fundamental concerns of painting. The relations between the picture plane and the shapes applied to it; color contrasts between black and white; the painterly and the graphic; the unique and the reproduced; the relationship between line and surface. His exhibition at Museum Ludwig traces the migration of abstract imagery through different media of representation, namely free-flowing painting and the silkscreened print. In his paintings he brings together figures and the disfigured, drawing and painting, spontaneous impulses and well thought-out ideas. He draws lines on the canvas with a spray gun and then, directly after, wipes them out again with a rag drenched in solvent – to give a new picture in which clear lines have to stand their own against smeared surfaces. Wool's paintings and silkscreen prints on paper reveal the entire range of his techniques. The main focus of the exhibition is on Wool's abstract paintings and silkscreen prints since 2006.

FACTUALITY #5

THE GENERATIONAL: YOUNGER THAN JESUS
NEW MUSEUM, BOWERY, NEW YORK:  APRIL 8-JULY 5, 2009

The exhibition opened April 8th to a buzz about the New Museum's attempt to grab all the attention from the Whitney Biennial. The show is a new survey of contemporary artists that will happen every three years, called "The Generational".  The first edition, "Younger Than Jesus" has fifty artists from twenty-five countries.  All the participants have to have been born after 1976, making all the artists under the age of 33 years old. With 145 works in "Younger Than Jesus" and filling the entire New Museum, the exhibit will explore many mediums:  painting, drawing, film, photography, animation, installation, dance, performance, Internet-based work, and video games. "The Generational:  Younger Than Jesus" will reflect the New Museum's 30 year mission to present new art and new ideas.  This show will be the first major international museum exhibit of a generation born around 1980 that will explore what is currently shaping the future of global contemporary art.  It has been said that some of the most influential representations in art and history have been made by young people in the early stages of their lives. The show presents the question...can artists from the same age group cut through cultural divides in our world, geographic limitations and nationalities? Only the viewer can answer...
Barbara Fosco

OPM

J. Ezra Merkin was sued Monday by New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo. The complaint accused Mr. Merkin of lying to clients about Mr. Madoff’s dominant role in his hedge fund and improperly collecting more than $470 million in fees — fees that dwarfed his own personal losses in the Madoff fraud — for simply handing his clients’ money to Mr. Madoff. The Madoff Ponzi pal has $150 million worth of Mark Rothko paintings—the world's largest private grouping. Mr. Cuomo’s office went a step further, focusing not just on Mr. Merkin’s dealings with Mr. Madoff but also on his broader track record as an investment manager. Specifically, it accused Mr. Merkin of improperly commingling his personal funds with his hedge fund accounts and using some of the money to buy artwork worth more than $91 million for his apartment. The Rothkos, housed in Merkin’s Park Avenue duplex, include two 9-by-15-foot studies for murals that Rothko executed for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building and Houston’s Rothko Chapel, and a third, smaller study for a Harvard University mural. The Four Seasons mural paintings are in the National Gallery in Washington. The fate of the Rothko paintings has the art world salivating, as cash-rich collectors are desperate to invest devalued currency into artworks by the dead and aged.

First look: SANAA's Serpentine Pavilion

This is the first image of the 2009 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA.

Describing their structure, the architects said: ‘The pavilion is floating aluminium, drifting freely between the trees like smoke. The reflective canopy undulates across the site, expanding the park and sky. Its appearance changes according to the weather, allowing it to melt into the surroundings. It works as a field of activity with no walls, allowing views to extend uninterrupted across the park and encouraging access from all sides. It is a sheltered extension of the park where people can read, relax and enjoy lovely summer days.’ The pavilion opens in July and will remain in place outside the Serpentine Gallery’s until October. The pavilion will be the architects’ first built structure in the UK and the ninth commission in the gallery’s annual series of pavilions. The pair, whose New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York opened last year, will work alongside structural engineering firm SAPS and an Arup team led by David Glover and Ed Clark with Cecil Balmond. The SANAA pavilion, sponsored by NetJets, will be the ninth built as part of the annual programme, which gives international stars the chance to make their UK debut. Previous pavilions have been designed by Frank Gehry (2008), Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Balmond (2005), Oscar Niemeyer (2003), Daniel Libeskind (2001) and Zaha Hadid (2000). Julia Peyton-Jones, director, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director at the Serpentine Gallery, said: ‘Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s design embraces the parkland around the Serpentine Gallery as never before with an extraordinarily innovative design, which reveals the subtle play on light and perception so characteristic of their work. This pavilion will be a wonderful addition to London’s landscape this summer. It is our dream come true.’
The Architects' Journal

JEFF KOONS $25m TRAIN SCULPTURE FOR LACMA

"Train" by Jeff Koons. Credit: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


Jeff Koons is working on the largest and most ambitious project of his career: a towering sculpture consisting of a life-size motorized replica of a locomotive dangling from a crane. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is funding the awesome work that will rise above the entrance plaza like a memorial to the Industrial Age technology that fuelled America’s westward expansion. The life-size train replica may be the most expensive work ever commissioned by a museum. The project, in development for two years, is about to move into the fabrication stage. The price tag? “We’re talking about a $25m work,” said the artist. LACMA's director, Michael Govan, confirmed that was the number going into the project, adding that he will not begin raising the money until fabrication costs are calculated. The projected cost would make Train the most expensive artwork ever commissioned by a museum, surpassing Richard Serra’s $20m sculptural array, The Matter of Time, 2005, in the Guggenheim Bilbao. LACMA has already spent about $1.75m of $2m pledged by trustee Wallis Annenberg for preliminary studies. “It’s chugging along,” Mr Govan quips of the complex and demanding process of realization, which must adhere to Koons’s exacting production standards. The artist envisions hanging a full-scale 70-foot-long steel-and-aluminum replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive from a 160-foot-tall Liebherr LR 1750 lattice-boom crane. The train’s wheels will spin, its funnel belch smoke and the whistle blow at appointed times. “A real train was not meant to hang vertically and would have all sorts of environmental problems,” explains Mr Govan, adding that preliminary design and engineering studies were completed by Los Angeles-based fabricator Carlson & Co. “The next stage is 3D scanning of the parts to get the data necessary to recreate the train,” he says. Scanning began late last month at the New Mexico Steam Locomotive and Railroad Historical Society—the Albuquerque museum that owns the original train serving as the model. “No manufacture can analyze it until we have all the data,” he says, adding that the scanning will be finished in May. “We have to get a crane,” he continues. “They were tough to come by in the old economy—you used to have to get on a waiting list—but it’s getting easier,” he notes. “It’s really architecture, like building a campanile or bell tower,” he says, “and that’s almost exactly how it functions in the urban environment. It’s the architecture around which the museum campus will function, and the campus is a town square for LA.” When will the landmark be completed? A date will not be set until manufacturer begins, but Mr Govan says he and the artist anticipate it will take about four years.

FRANCOIS PINAULT FOUNDATION OPENS JUNE 6 IN VENICE

Sketch by Ando

François Pinault will open his new centre for contemporary art, Punta della Dogana, with the fourth in a series of exhibitions taken from the Collection. Renovated by architect Tadao Ando, Punta della Dogana will provide the permanent base for the collection together with the Palazzo Grassi exhibition space which opened in 2006. The first exhibition, under the joint direction of Alison Gingeras and Francesco Bonami, will be shown simultaneously at the Punta della Dogana and the Palazzo Grassi, in keeping with the François Pinault Foundation’s commitment to the City of Venice and to contemporary culture. Conceived as a single exhibition that will unfold over the two venues, this presentation will be shaped in response to the particular atmosphere of each space: the inward-looking private sphere on one side, and the outward looking, world-at-large on the other. The two halves of the exhibition will constitute a dialogue between artists of different generations, covering a vast range of practices and aesthetic sensibilities. The François Pinault Foundation Collection comprises more than 2,000 artworks by leading contemporary artists.

DETAILS ANNOUNCED FOR VENICE BIENNALE

VENICE—The organizers of the Venice Biennale have released details about participating artists and countries. This will be the 53rd International Art Exhibition for the Biennale. The main exhibition, titled "Making Worlds" and directed by Daniel Birnbaum, rector at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and its Kunsthalle Portikus, will include 90 international artists, a list of whom is available on the biennale's Web site...http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/en/73799.html
A record 77 countries are participating in the national pavilions section, including newcomers Montenegro, the Principality of Monaco, the Republic of Gabon, the Union of Comoros, and the United Arab Emirates.
Golden Lions for lifetime achievement will go to Yoko Ono and John Baldessari.
The Biennale will be open to the public from June 7 to November 22, 2009, at various venues around the city.