BARBARA BALKIN INC.

FRIEZE ART PROJECTS

2012-01-27T08:57:00.000-07:00

Frieze Projects at
Frieze New York 2012
4–7 May 2012

The eight artists that will participate in the inaugural Frieze Projects program for Frieze New York are: John Ahearn, Uri Aran, Latifa Echakhch, Joel Kyack, Rick Moody, Virginia Overton, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. and Ulla von Brandenburg. The Frieze Projects program is realized annually at Frieze New York and is curated by Cecilia Alemani.

Frieze New York will be located in the unique setting of Randall’s Island Park, overlooking the East River. The majority of the commissioned projects are situated outdoors and are located throughout Randall’s Island.

2012 WHITNEY BIENNIAL ARTISTS

2012-01-03T14:43:00.000-07:00

The Whitney Museum of American Art has announced the list of artists participating in the upcoming 2012 Whitney Biennial, which takes place at the Whitney from March 1 through May 27, 2012. The Whitney Biennial is an exhibition held every two years in which the Museum gauges the current state of contemporary art in America. The 2012 Biennial is being curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator.

2012 Biennial Artists

Kai Althoff
Thom Andersen
Charles Atlas
Lutz Bacher
Forrest Bess
    (by Robert Gober)
Michael Clark
Dennis Cooper and
    Gisèle Vienne
Cameron Crawford
Moyra Davey
Liz Deschenes
Nathaniel Dorsky
Nicole Eisenman
Kevin Jerome
    Everson
Vincent Fecteau
Andrea Fraser
LaToya Ruby
    Frazier
Vincent Gallo
K8 Hardy
Richard Hawkins
Werner Herzog
Jerome Hiler
Matt Hoyt
Dawn Kasper
Mike Kelley
John Kelsey
John Knight
Jutta Koether
George Kuchar
Laida Lertxundi
Kate Levant
Sam Lewitt
Joanna Malinowska
Andrew Masullo
Nick Mauss
Richard Maxwell
Sarah Michelson
Alicia Hall Moran and
Jason Moran
Laura Poitras
Matt Porterfield
Luther Price
Lucy Raven
The Red Krayola
Kelly Reichardt
Elaine Reichek
Michael Robinson
Georgia Sagri
Michael E. Smith
Tom Thayer
Wu Tsang
Oscar Tuazon
Frederick Wiseman

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

2011-12-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

TO OUR CLIENTS, COLLEAGUES AND DEAR FRIENDS HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM BARBARA BALKIN INC. !!

ICONOCLASTS LOST

2011-12-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

COMBINING FEARLESS AND MASTERFUL LITERARY BRILLIANCE WITH CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND VACLAV HAVEL: MAY THEY REST IN PEACE

DOUGLAS GORDON AT MMK

2011-12-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

Douglas Gordon. Photo: Martin Hunter

With the major solo exhibition "Douglas Gordon" (19 November 2011–25 March 2012), the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst will present an artist who is one of the most important and most influential of his generation. While he gained renown above all for his films and large video installations, his oeuvre also comprises photographs, texts, sculptures and sound installations. Douglas Gordon (b. 1966 in Glasgow) has been a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt since 2010. The MMK has in its possession one of Gordon's magnum opera—the video installation Play Dead; Real Time (2003)—as well as a number of other photo and video works. These holdings now form the point of departure for the first major survey in Europe since Gordon's presentation at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2007. Apart from installations rich in imagery, for example Straight to Hell and No Way Back (both of 2011) and recent additions to the Self-Portrait of You + Me series, the exhibition will also present three further large-scale video installations. The artist's latest work, Henry Rebel, carried out jointly with director James Franco and the young actor Henry Hopper, was premiered by the show. Henry Rebel is a major video installation executed this year as part of the Rebel project initiated by James Franco. All of the artists participating in the project realized works revolving around different aspects of Nicholas Ray's film Rebel Without a Cause of 1955. In the video installation to be featured by the MMK exhibition, Gordon interprets two scenes, which were part of the original screenplay but were never shot. For these scenes, they were fortunate in being able to cast Henry Hopper, the son of the late actor Dennis Hopper, who played in the original movie by Nicholas Ray. This is a circumstance which brings the inner logic of this highly complex masterpiece—in which Gordon records the young actor's performance on film—full circle. With his analyses of the images of our collective memory and everyday culture, Gordon exposes fundamental patterns of perception. His works frequently revolve around phenomena of doubling and mirroring: the couple, the double, light and dark, guilt and justice. Douglas Gordon won the Turner prize in 1996.

CONGRATULATIONS ROB PRUITT

2011-12-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

ROB PRUITT AT DALLAS CONTEMPORARY

17 December 2011 - 18 March 2012
Opening celebration – Saturday 17 December 21.00 – 24.00 (9.00 - midnight).

Dallas Contemporary announces an exhibition featuring New York artist ROB PRUITT. The exhibition made specifically for Dallas Contemporary will be Pruitt’s first major institutional exhibition in the United States and his largest exhibition to date. Pruitt’s interests lie in creating environments where participants feel free to improvise and experiment outside of their comfort zones. In his signature style, Pruitt’s installation of glitter panda paintings has never before been shown and is the largest number of panda paintings to be shown together.

HARMONY KORINE

2011-12-10T18:34:00.000-07:00

Dazed And Confused just turned 20 years old and for a new series of covers for their magazine they invited Harmony Korine to pose for a cover. A video interview featuring Korine and Dan Colen can be viewed from the magazine’s YouTube page.

MARTIN BOYCE WINS TURNER PRIZE 2011

2011-12-07T16:23:00.000-07:00

Scottish artist Martin Boyce, 44, whose work harks back to the innovators of 20th century Modernism has won this year’s Turner Prize — Britain’s best-known and most provocative art award. Boyce was nominated for his solo exhibition in Zurich, which included a stark installation compared to an indoor park complete with paper leaves. The jury praised Boyce for his contribution to contemporary artists’ interest in historic modernism, and said he developed and found new directions using his knowledge of the field.

ANN KOCH AT ART BASEL MIAMI

2011-12-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

Anne Koch performs in her film ‘eat (lobster)’ 2011 at Art Basel Miami Beach

ART TORONTO

2011-10-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

MATIAS FALDBAKKEN AT THE POWER STATION/DALLAS

2011-10-08T11:03:00.000-07:00

FRIEZE ART FAIR

2011-09-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

The ninth edition of the leading international contemporary art fair takes place in London's Regent's Park from 13–16 October 2011. 173 of the world's leading galleries representing 33 countries will present new work by over 1,000 of the world's most innovative artists.

LUCIAN FREUD BLOCKBUSTER OPENS EARLY 2012

2011-09-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

Photograph: David Dawson/Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery on Tuesday revealed details of what will be a blockbuster, with more than 100 works filling most of the ground floor gallery space. The exhibition, the first major show to focus on Freud's portrait work, had been planned in close partnership with the artist, who died aged 88 in July. Lucian Freud's final work will be shown in a National Portrait Gallery exhibition opening February 9, 2011. The painting is an enormous and unfinished nude portrait of his assistant and close friend, David Dawson, with Dawson's whippet, Eli. The work will be shown for the first time and will feature prominently in the major 2012 exhibition covering seven decades of the artist's probing, distinctive portraiture. His final work was, said curator Sarah Howgate, "a commanding and affectionate" portrait of a man who had been the artist's assistant for 20 years.

AI WEIWEI AT KUNSTHAUS GRAZ

2011-09-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

AI WEIWEI
INTERLACING
September 17, 2011–January 15, 2012

INTERLACING is the first large-scale exhibition of Ai Weiwei's photographic and video works. In his New York period (1983–1993), Ai Weiwei took photographs, but especially since his return to Beijing, he has tirelessly documented everyday realities of the urban environment and society in China, and discussed them in blogs and twitters. The photographs of the radical changes to the urban built fabric, the search for earthquake victims, and the destruction of his Shanghai studio are presented along with art-photographic projects, the documenta Fairytale project, the countless blog and mobile-phone photographs. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive book of material and archives published by Steidl and from Feb. 21 to April 29, 2102, it will show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

GONE SWIMMIN', BACK IN THE FALL!

2011-07-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

Ryan McGinley

CY TWOMBLY DIES AT 83

2011-07-05T14:40:00.002-07:00

VENICE BIENNALE 2011

2011-06-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

MARK LECKEY AT SERPENTINE GALLERY, LONDON

2011-06-03T07:09:00.000-07:00

TRAILER: "SEE WE ASSEMBLE", MARK LECKEY AT SERPENTINE GALLERY

ALLORA + CALZADILLA REPRESENTS USA AT VENICE BIENNALE

2011-05-31T16:14:00.000-07:00

Body in Flight (American)

Image: Lucy Hogg

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla representing the United States are a young Puerto Rican duo. At this morning’s pre-preview of the Biennale (it opens to the public on Saturday) Allora and Calzadilla launched our nation’s contribution by getting two American gymnasts, one male and one female, to do routines in two of the pavilion’s Palladian spaces. Another piece of theirs prepared just for Venice is called “Algorithm,” and consists of a huge, custom-built pipe organ that reaches up into the cathedral ceiling of one of the building’s spaces. It sets up our national pavilion as a national art-church. But there’s more: Set into the far side of the organ, where you might expect to find its keyboard, is a standard automatic teller, ready to deliver money to anyone with a card. Withdraw cash, and the organ lets loose Hunchback-of-Notre-Dame chords, as though J.S. Bach or E. Power Biggs disapproved of your password and credit report. (The artists say that the Palladian pavilion, built in 1930, reminds them of a wealthy regional bank. Sports; art; industry; commerce; church: almost all the lynchpins of American culture are there, inside our single American pavilion – except the military, which instead gets pride of place in front of it. Allora and Calzadilla have taken a huge, real tank, painted Desert-Storm tan, and installed it upside-down in the pavilion’s forecourt, like a helpless beetle flipped on its back. Mounted high up on the tank’s left tread is a standard gym treadmill, its motions electronically linked to the tread on the tank. An athlete climbs up and starts walking, and the tank tread rumbles to life. As the athlete starts to hoof it, the tread moves faster and faster. The curator of the American Pavilion is Lisa Freiman, the curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

2011-05-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

NEWSLETTER n°19 maggio 2011

ARTE / ART

54. / 54th International Art Exhibition

The 54th International Art Exhibition opens on Saturday 4th June. For President Paolo Baratta, “the Biennale is like a wind machine. Every two years, it shakes the forest, unveils hidden truths, gives new strength and light to new sprouts, showing older trunks and persisting branches from a different perspective (this year trunks are really old considering the intention expressed by the curator to open with Tintoretto).” Read more >>

ARTE / ART

ILLUMInazioni / ILLUMInations

Ld'
Art historian and critic Bice Curiger is the director of the 54th International Art Exhibition, that she titled ILLUMInations. “The Venice Biennale” -says Curiger- “is one of the world’s most important forums for the dissemination and illumination of current developments in international art. The title, ILLUMInations, literally draws attention to the importance of such endeavours in a globalized world.” Read more >>

ARTE / ART

Informazioni pratiche /

The 54th International Art Exhibition, ILLUMInations, opens from 4th June to 27th November. Venues: Giardini and Arsenale. Opening hours: 10 am to 6 pm (closed on Mondays, excepting 6th June, 15th Aug, 31st Oct. and 21st Nov.). Ticket points: Giardini and Arsenale (Campo della Tana and Ponte dei Pensieri). Ticket prices: € 20 full price, € 16 concession, € 12 students & Under26, and further prices. Info, telephone advance sales and ticket points: Tel. +39 0445 230313 (from abroad).

LINDSAY LOHAN: A RICHARD PHILLIPS FILM

2011-05-26T19:32:00.000-07:00

Richard Phillips’ Lindsay Lohan will be included in "Commercial Break," presented by the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Venice, Italy, June 1 - 5, 2011, concurrent with the 54th international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
Gagosian Gallery

WHITNEY: CORY ARCANGEL: PRO TOOLS: OPENS TODAY

2011-05-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools
May 26–September 11, 2011

The show is called Pro Tools, and is new work... bronzes, metal sculptures, drawings, photos, self playing bowling games, cell phone signal amps, kinetic sculpture, etc, etc. All of the works featured in the exhibition—ranging from video games, single channel video, kinetic sculpture, and prints, to pen plotter drawings—have been created by means of technological tools with an emphasis on the mixing and matching of both professional and amateur technologies, as well as the vernaculars these technologies encourage within culture at large. Cory Arcangel’s work crosses a range of media, including computer-generated projects, performance, video, installation, music composition, sculpture, and print media.

SAATCHI:THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME: NEW SCULPTURE

2011-05-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

27th May - 16th October 2011 LONDON
New exhibition at the Saatchi showcasing the works of 20 of the most acclaimed sculpture artists to emerge during the last few years. What are the parameters of contemporary sculpture? This exhibition surveys international trends over the last 10 years – a return to figuration, exploration of scale, the dissolution of the very boundaries of traditional sculpture.

WARHOL, WARHOL

2011-05-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

CHRISTIE'S POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY AUCTION MAY 11, 2011

ANDY WARHOL SELF-PORTRAIT, 1963-64 $38,442,500

ANDY WARHOL SELF-PORTRAIT, 1986 $27,522,500

DOUGLAS GORDON'S EXHIBITION "PHANTOM"

2011-04-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

Douglas Gordon is one of the most highly regarded British video-artists and the first to win the Turner prize. Using film and video as a means to experiment with identity and the mechanics of memory, his work abstracts film images to provide an alternative experience of human observation. In the artist’s sixth exhibition at the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris, Phantom features three autobiographical installations. A half destroyed neon work titled Unfinished, featuring the words “I am the centre of the world”, and a series of four hundred framed works - an open diary of Douglas’ personal belongings – delves into the dark depths of the artists vulnerability through the objectification in their exposure. Phantom – the main body of this collective, is a collaborative work with singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. Surrounded by mirrors and a grand piano, a video of Wainwright’s eye plays in darkness, inviting observers to question the fragmented and torturous nature of self.

Phantom, Yvon Lambert, 108 rue Vieille-du-Temple, 75003, Paris, until June 3

NEW MUSEUM GALA

2011-04-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

Gilbert and George
Photographer: Amanda Gordon/Bloomberg

Amanda Gordon of Bloomberg reports: There were many happy pairs at the New Museum Spring Gala in Manhattan’s financial district last night. The couples garnering the most attention were the event’s honorees: collectors Gael Neeson and Stefan Edlis and the artists Gilbert & George, who have been working, dressing and talking in sync since the 1960s. The duos accepted their awards at a Lucite lectern. “We are so happy that we are smiling at both ends,” Gilbert & George said in unison. The party, on the 45th floor of 7 World Trade Center, brought in $1.3 million. Sotheby’s, auctioned off a photographic portrait-sitting with Chuck Close for $250,000. The 33 collages that Josh Smith made for the gala, some of which were exhibited next to a red carpet as guests arrived, sold out.

LE JARDIN MAJORELLE, MARRAKECH

2011-04-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

Amidst the bustling, eclectic ambience of the souks & kasbahs of Marrakech stands one of North Africa’s most diverse, abundant gardens – the JARDIN MAJORELLE – a tranquil haven conceived by the artist Jacques Majorelle in 1924. Opened to the public in 1947 and acquired by the fashion designer YVES SAINT LAURENT and his partner PIERRE BERGÉ in 1980, the garden remains a public attraction today – offering a rare glimpse into this rich and intriguing fusion of traditional and European design of the early 20th century. The 1931 villa nestled within the grounds is rendered in a rich cerulean blue (a customary local color that was henceforth labelled ‘bleu majorelle’ after the artist’s liberal use of the tone attracted international attention). Originally drawn up by architect Paul Sinoir as ‘the blue workshop’, the building currently houses the Islamic Art Museum.

Ai Weiwei is investigated by Chinese police for 'economic crimes'

2011-04-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

Authorities acknowledge police action against artist but still no word about his friend, Wen Tao.
An ominous editorial in the Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper stated, “Ai Weiwei . . . has been close to the red line of Chinese law. As long as Ai Weiwei continuously marches forward, he will inevitably touch the red line one day.” “Ai Weiwei will be judged by history, but he will pay a price for his special choice,” it added. The newspaper also hinted that Ai had infringed the law by attempting to fly from Hong Kong to Taiwan without completing his “departure procedures.” Chinese citizens require a special permit to visit the island. Ai's friends said Ai had steeled himself for such an outcome after years of criticizing the government. Hao Guang, a fellow artist in Beijing, said Ai “has known for a long time this day was coming.”

AI WEIWEI'S NEW YORK PROJECT TO GO ON

2011-04-05T16:39:00.000-07:00

A large-scale public art project by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, to occupy the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel starting early next month, will go forward even if Ai, who was detained by the Chinese authorities on Sunday, is unable to be present, reports Robin Pogrebin for the New York Times. Ai’s twelve-piece sculpture, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, is scheduled to be displayed from May 2 and through July 15 at Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. It is the first major outdoor exhibition to be presented on the site of the fountain, according to the organizers. The installation was inspired by the fabled fountain-clock of the Yuanming Yuan, an eighteeth-century imperial retreat just outside Beijing. Designed by two European Jesuit missionaries at the behest of the Manchu Emperor Qianlong, the clock featured each animal of the Chinese zodiac spouting water at two-hour intervals. In 1860 French and British troops ransacked the Yuanming Yuan, pillaging the heads. Seven of them—the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, horse, monkey and boar—have since been located. In a series of interviews for a book about the project, Ai said New York was particularly suited to his sculpture. “It’s not one kind of people,” he said, adding that its residents came from all over the world and included many minorities. “It’s a zodiac city.”
"But because Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is animal heads, I think it’s something that everyone can have some understanding of, including children and people who are not in the art world. I think it’s more important to show your work to the public. That’s what I really care about. When Andy Warhol painted Mao in the 1960s and 1970s, I don’t think many people understood Mao, either—it was just this image that people knew, like Marilyn Monroe or somebody. So they might see these zodiac animals like that—like Mickey Mouse. They’re just animals. Eleven real animals and one mystic animal." Ai Weiwei

AI WEIWEI STILL MISSING

2011-04-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

Ai Weiwei, detained by the Chinese authorities and unreachable since 3 April, has joined a select band of artists who have risked everything for their ideals. Ai Weiwei joins a select band of artists who have risked everything for ideals. Michelangelo was arguably the first dissident artist when he created fortifications for the revolutionary republic of Florence in 1529: in fact, he and Ai Weiwei have something in common as artists who work on a grand public scale. You could call the floor of the Tate Turbine Hall a modern equivalent of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, in both fame and impact. In the 19th century, the tough realist painter Gustave Courbet joined the Paris commune and died in exile for his ideals: again, like Ai Weiwei and Michelangelo, he was a charismatic personality who seemed too big to be brought down. But he was cruelly punished. Will Ai Weiwei be a Courbet or a Michelangelo? While the Communard painter was ruined by his political enemies, Michelangelo was spared and allowed to carry on working and enjoying his success after the defeat of the Florentine rebellion – he really was too big to hurt. We have to hope that the state will release Ai Weiwei and his fame will continue to protect him. Whatever happens, he is that rare thing: the artist as moral and political hero. Britain, the United States and the European Union, as well as leading figures in the art world, have joined the growing international outcry over his detention and Beijing's wider crackdown on dissidents and activists. Ai's wife, Lu Qing, told Reuters: "This time it's extremely serious. They searched his studio and took discs and hard drives and all kinds of stuff, but the police haven't told us where he is or what they're after."
Excerpt: The Guardian

ROB PRUITT UNVEILS THE ANDY MONUMENT TONIGHT

2011-03-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

Public Art Fund
presents ...

Rob Pruitt
The Andy Monument
March 30 - October 2, 2011
Union Square
(17th Street and Broadway)

Unveiling:
March 30, 2011
6:00pm

' You know the song "New York, New York," and how for year after year people have come to New York to "make it." One of the most important examples of that is Andy Warhol, who spawned a generation of people who think they can make it here in this city. Andy Warhol embodies the spirit of the city that still draws people. Every day a thousand more kids come to New York propelled by his legacy. And even if the decades pass and Warhol becomes a vaguer and vaguer character, there will still be something here that's directly linked to him - this pilgrimage, or calling, coming here from the Midwest, Eastern Europe or South- East Asia, to make it big, to be an artist. I think there should be a destination in New York to mark all those journeys. There are hundreds of monuments to politicians in the New York City, but I can’t think of any monuments to artists, and other figures who actually represent the lived experience of most of the people who live here. When I was a teenager, I visited Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde are buried. I was struck by the throngs of people that came to visit the tombs of their idols. When Andy Warhol died, his family had his remains sent back to Pittsburgh, where he was born, and so no such marker for him exists in New York. So a public statue of Warhol has a sense of righting a wrong. Andy, like so many other artists and performers and people who don’t fit in, moved to New York to be himself, fulfill his dreams and make it big. That’s why I moved here, and that’s what my Andy Monument is about. Of course it could be argued that someone could just go to the Modern and look at his Soup Cans, but I think there is something to being truly out in streets of New York, to have something you can visit at 4:20 in the morning with your friends.

I will be unveiling the Andy Monument at the North-West corner of Union Square on Wednesday, March 30 at 6:00PM. I hope you will be able to join me to celebrate one of our own. '

Rob Pruitt
New York
March 2011

Congratulations Urs and Christel Raussmuller

2011-03-25T06:58:00.003-07:00

Robert Ryman and Urs Raussmüller: A Public Conversation

The founders of the Hallen für Neue Kunst, Urs and Christel Raussmüller, are receiving an award for their extraordinary cultural achievements by the Swiss Foundation for the Doron Prize. The Hallen für Neue Kunst will be awarded the Doron Prize 2011 for its unique concept in content and architecture; it serves as a model world-wide. The privately run Hallen für Neue Kunst has been making high calibre works of European and American “New” Art accessible to the public for over 25 years. The special thing about the “Hallen” is its holistic concept that brings art and space together in a convincing way. In the Hallen für Neue Kunst’s inspiring atmosphere, major works from the ground-breaking period around 1965 can realize the entire potential of their creative radiance in an exemplary, long-term presentation context. Artists such as Robert Ryman, Bruce Nauman, Mario Merz, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt or Carl Andre, among others, can be permanently experienced in representative work groups. As the “Schaffhausen model” and the first uncompromising transformation of an industrial building into an art institution, the Hallen für Neue Kunst is seen as a museum that reflects artists’ needs. The Hallen für Neue Kunst is highly recognized far beyond Swiss borders; it has inspired numerous projects, among them the Tate Modern in London or the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

The award ceremony will take place in Zug on March 30th on invitation by the Swiss Foundation for the Doron Prize.

Raussmüller Collection
Hallen für Neue Kunst

Baumgartenstrasse 23
CH-8200 Schaffhausen
T. +41 (0)52 625 25 15
F. +41 (0)52 625 84 74
www.modern-art.ch
www.raussmueller-collection.ch

JEFF KOONS BMW M3 GT2 ART CAR ZOOMS AT TEFAF MAASTRICHT!!

2011-03-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

MARTIN CREED AT NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER

2011-03-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Martin Creed, will create a site-specific installation , on view from March 26 through June 19, 2011 at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. Creed will transform the space by filling it with colored balloons to a height of about 8 feet. Related to earlier installations such as Work No. 628: Half the air in a given space from 2007, the balloons enclose and make visible portions of the volume of air in the room, as well as drastically alter one's physical experience of the space.

Patrick Cariou wins copyright case against Richard Prince and Gagosian

2011-03-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

Cariou v Prince: Left, a photo of a Rastafarian from Patrick Cariou's "Yes, Rasta" and, right, a painting from Prince's Canal Zone series

New York. A US District judge has ruled in favour of photographer Patrick Cariou in his copyright lawsuit against artist Richard Prince.
Cariou originally filed suit for copyright infringement against Prince, Larry Gagosian, Gagosian Gallery, and Rizzoli books in December 2008 after a number of his photographs were reappropriated without consent in Prince’s “Canal Zone” series. The photographs first appeared in Cariou’s 2000 publication, Yes, Rasta, a photographic book produced after spending six years documenting Jamaican Rastafarians. Prince “admits to using at least 41 photos from Yes, Rasta”, according to the judge’s decision, but had claimed “fair-use” for transforming the original works, as opposed to creating derivative images. US District Judge Deborah Batts has granted Cariou’s motion for summary judgement on the issue of copyright infringement and ordered the defendants to “deliver up for impounding, destruction, or other disposition, as Plaintiff determines, all infringing copies of the photographs, including the paintings and unsold copies of the Canal Zone exhibition book, in their possession, custody, or control and all transparencies, plates, masters, tapes, films, negatives, discs and other articles for making infringing copies.”
The defendants must also notify in writing any current or future owners of the paintings to inform them that the works infringe Cariou’s copyright, and “were not lawfully made under the Copyright Act of 1976, and that the paintings cannot be lawfully displayed”. At its heart, the case focuses on Prince and Gagosian’s “fair use” defense. This legal doctrine is intended to mediate between the First Amendment and the Copyright Clause, which are “intuitively in conflict”, according to the judge’s decision. Four factors determine fair use. Firstly, “the purpose and character of the use,” ie the extent to which the new work is transformative. However, rather than adding value solely through transforming elements of the original, the new work must comment on the original in some way, and create something “plainly different from the original purposes for which it was created”, according to the judge’s decision, which refers to the landmark copyright case of Rogers versus Koons: “If the infringement of copyrightable expression could be justified as fair use solely on the basis of the infringer’s claim to a higher or different artistic use...there would be no practicable boundary to the fair use defense.” In the earlier case, Koons failed to prove that his “parody” of an image of a couple surrounded by puppies, by commercial photographer Art Rogers, constituted fair use. After noting Prince’s testimony that “he didn’t really have a message” and did not attempt to comment on any aspects of the original, the judge ruled that “there is vanishingly little, if any, transformative element.” The less transformative a work, the more important its commerciality becomes. The papers quote Gagosian’s sales figures to determine that the “defendants use and exploitation of the photos...was substantially commercial...[which] weighs against fair use”. Gagosian had sold eight of the Canal Zone paintings for a total $10.48m, 60% of which went to Prince, with the remainder to the gallery. Seven other paintings were exchanged for art “with an estimated value between $6m and $8m,” according to court papers. Gagosian gallery also sold $6,784 worth of exhibition catalogues. “Bad faith” is also taken into consideration. Despite instructing an assistant to contact Cariou’s publisher to buy extra copies of Yes, Rasta, Prince never asked “about licensing or otherwise sought permission to use” the images. “Prince’s bad faith is evident,” ruled Judge Deborah Batts.
The second element is the “nature of the copyrighted work”. The defendants had questioned Cariou’s copyright of the images, asserting that his “photos are mere compilations of facts...arranged with minimum creativity.” The judge ruled against this: “Unfortunately for defendants, it has been a matter of settled law for well over 100 years that creative photographs are worthy of copyright protection,” found the judge.
The third issue taken into consideration in the fair use defense is the “amount and substantiality of the portion of the copyrighted work used”. The judge found that, by appropriating the central figures in Cariou’s publication, Prince had gone “to the very heart of his work. Accordingly, the amount of Prince’s taking was substantially greater than necessary, given the slight transformative value of his secondary use...[which] weighs heavily against...fair use.”
The final deciding factor is the extent to which Cariou’s real and potential markets had been harmed by Prince’s appropriation. The defendants’ claims that “Cariou has not marketed his photos more aggressively (or, indeed, as aggressively as Prince has marketed his paintings) are unavailing,” found Judge Batts, who said that Cariou’s potential market had been “usurped”. Cariou’s real market was also effected after Manhattan gallerist Christiane Celle cancelled a scheduled exhibition of prints from Yes, Rasta because she did “not want to be seen to be capitalizing on Prince’s success and notoriety...and did not want to exhibit works which had been ‘done already’ at another gallery”, according to the papers.
The “Gagosian defendants” were also found “directly liable for copyright infringement” by distributing images of and selling paintings from Canal Zone. In addition, all Gagosian defendants were found as “vicarious and contributory infringers” after the judge ruled the they had “at the very least the right and ability (and perhaps even responsibility) to ensure Prince obtained licenses”. She added: “The financial benefit of the infringing use to the Gagosian defendants is self-evident.”
Cariou had also claimed for conspiracy under the Copyright Act, which was dismissed.
In an emailed statement, a Gagosian spokeswoman said: “Gagosian Gallery declines to comment on the Court’s decision at this juncture. Gagosian remains committed to the promotion of the arts through its continued support of artistic freedom in the studio for appropriation artists, such as Richard Prince, the creator of the Canal Zone series.” It is not known whether the gallery or Prince will appeal the decision.
All parties are due to appear in court on 6 May for a status conference to settle damages and fees.

The Art Newspaper
By Charlotte Burns | Web only
Published online 21 Mar 11 (News)

ARI MARCOPOULOS: DIRECTORY

2011-03-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

April 5, 2011 Rizzoli to release Ari Marcopoulos: Directory: Text by Neville Wakefield, Photographed by Ari Marcopoulos

Influential to both art and fashion, Ari Marcopoulos’s unique style of raw immediacy has made him one of the most important contemporary photographers. For thirty years, photographer Ari Marcopoulos has been pioneering contemporary photography by documenting subcultures such as skateboarders and graffiti artists, as well as landscapes and his own family and friends. Since his days printing photographs for Andy Warhol, he has amassed a huge body of work marked by its arresting and unsentimental intimacy that has been influential to the worlds of art, fashion, and photography.Bound to mimic a phone book, Ari Marcopoulos: Directory presents a collection of approximately 1,200 photographs, with curator and critic Neville Wakefield providing insightful commentary on some of Marcopoulos’s singular images. Copublished with Nieves, each book in this limited-edition series includes a print signed by the artist. Ari Marcopoulos is a photographer whose work has been exhibited around the world. His photographs have been acquired by such institutions as SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art and have been featured in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Interview, Snowboarder, and Blind Spot. His books include Out & About and Transitions & Exits. Born in Amsterdam, he currently resides in California and New York. Neville Wakefield is an art curator and a writer on contemporary culture, art, and photography. The author of Postmodernism: The Twilight of the Real, he has contributed to such publications as Artforum,Art in America, i-D, Interview, and Italian Vogue. He lives in New York.

Rizzoli
US $65.00
ISBN: 978-0-8478-3532-4

69-76, Photographs of Patti Smith by Judy Linn

2011-03-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

Rirkrit Tiravanija at GBE

2011-03-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

Photograph by Mark Handforth

ELIZABETH PEYTON OPENS TONIGHT AT GALLERY MET

2011-02-24T13:46:00.000-07:00

Wotan Taking Away Brünnhilde's Godlike Powers will be featured in Elizabeth Petyon's Gallery Met exhibition.
Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise.

“It’s a challenge to embrace Wagner as a human being, not as hard to embrace him as an artist,” says Elizabeth Peyton, whose new solo exhibition of works inspired by the composer’s Ring cycle opens in Gallery Met on February 24. “He was awful in so many ways but had such epic creativity. To make a narrative so transcendent is a gigantic feat, and the music is mind-blowing.” Peyton’s exhibition, simply titled Wagner, is the second in a series of four Ring-inspired shows planned for Gallery Met this season and next. The exhibitions coincide with Robert Lepage’s new Ring production, which began with Das Rheingold and continues on April 22 with Die Walküre. “I chose Elizabeth for this project because she’s not only one of the strongest artists of her generation, but she has an uncanny ability to say something new about historical figures through her portraits,” says Gallery Met director Dodie Kazanjian. “It seemed like the Ring might open another door to her imaginative thinking.” Known for her small but vibrant portraits of such figures as Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Prince William, and Michelle Obama, among others, Peyton was a newcomer to opera when she was approached to create work for the Met. But an immersion in Wagner recordings helped her realize the new pieces. “I listened to the Ring a lot while I was making the pictures for the show, along with Tristan und Isolde and Tannhäuser —I was listening to the new Kanye West record a bit too,” says the artist, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. “There is a sound of human emotions that Wagner captures that is so heartbreaking. I was thinking about that a lot, about the power of being able to express those kinds of feelings in art.” —Matt Dobkin

Wagner is on display in Gallery Met,
in the Met’s south lobby, through the end of
the season.

This article was first published online in January 2011 and in the Met's Playbill in February 2011.

LACMA and the Getty Acquire Robert Mapplethorpe Art and Archive

2011-02-08T17:42:00.000-07:00

Monday's announcement that LACMA and the Getty Museum together acquired over 2,000 photographs by the artist, with a robust archive going to the Getty Research Institute, came as a surprise to art experts for many reasons. It was the first joint acquisition by LACMA and the Getty, arranged at a time when the latter is searching for a new president and museum director. And while both museums have strong photography programs, neither had particularly deep holdings in Mapplethorpe. Before this deal, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had seven photographs, says department head Britt Salvesen. The Getty Museum had "a few Polaroids and a platinum print," says acting director David Bomford. The Guggenheim had previously ranked as the recipient of the biggest donation from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. But perhaps most striking of all was the fact that the foundation, which since the artist's death in 1989 has actively sold his prized black-and-white images through top galleries at top prices (benefitting AIDS research and museum photography departments), had this much material left to give. This was not a collection of leftovers but "a print of virtually every editioned photograph" done in his lush black-and-white silver gelatin process, including an entire XYZ Portfolio with his most controversial S&M imagery. (Think self-portrait with bullwhip planted in anus.) Michael Stout, president of the Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York and the artist's friend and lawyer, explained, "Many of the works going to Getty and LACMA are things we almost secretly reserved for this day." "Our goal was for the museums to have everything they wanted to tell the full story of Robert Mapplethorpe's life and creative life," he said. The foundation will continue to sell images from editions not already sold out, he says, but has relinquished its archival "responsibility and burden." Salvesen at LACMA added that Mapplethorpe's silver gelatin prints were not in any event printed by the artist himself: they were done either under his supervision or posthumously, per his permission, by the foundation. "We're not getting brand new prints of anything made just for us," she adds.
Los Angeles Times

STEVEN HOLL: QUEENS WEST LIBRARY

2011-01-31T09:52:00.000-07:00

Steven Holl, at 63, is widely considered one of the most original talents of his era. His work has influenced a generation of architects and students. And over the last decade or so he has become a star in faraway places like Scandinavia and China, where he is celebrated as someone able to imbue even the most colossal urban projects with lyricism. Yet his career at home has been negligible. He has had only a handful of notable commissions in the United States, and his output in New York is embarrassingly modest. So when the Queens Library Board of Trustees approved the design of the new Hunters Point community library this month, it was a well-deserved and long overdue breakthrough. The project will stand on a prominent waterfront site just across the East River from the United Nations. The building’s beguiling appearance — with giant free-form windows carved out of an 80-foot-tall rectangular facade of rough aluminum — should make it an instantly recognizable landmark. Seen from Manhattan, it will have a haunting presence on the waterfront and at dusk the library’s odd-shaped windows will emit an eerie glow. Only at the site itself, however, will the optimism driving Mr. Holl’s design come into focus. The library will stand at the western edge of Queens West and Mr. Holl’s design is not about escaping this world but transforming it into something more poetic. Approaching from the towers across the street, visitors will enter a tranquil reading garden. As visitors move closer to the library, they will be able to see through the lobby windows and out over a reflecting pool and the riverfront park. Other odd-shaped windows will allow diagonal glimpses up through the building and out to the sky. This facade brings to mind Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 “Day’s End,” in which Matta-Clark used a power saw to carve big circular openings into the exterior of an abandoned industrial building on the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan. In both works the over scaled cut-out openings are powerfully metaphorical. They suggest the desire to expose private, interior worlds to public scrutiny, and — by seeming to undermine the buildings’ structural stability — they evoke an unstable, ever-changing world. But Mr. Holl’s design is also a statement about the individual’s place in a larger communal framework. The lobby is a towering space framed on both sides by several big, balcony like reading rooms. To get to them visitors climb a staircase that runs up the lobby’s back wall and past one of the huge free-form windows that afford views of the East River and Manhattan. But it is the constant reminders of the larger world provided by the giant cuts through the building’s surface that give the design so much resonance. Mr. Holl is not interested in creating a monastic sanctuary; he wants to build a monument to civic engagement. The views aren’t just pretty; they remind us that the intellectual exchange of a library is part of a bigger collective enterprise. It’s a lovely idea, and touching in its old-fashioned optimism.
Excerpted from:
NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
New York Times

HAMMER MUSEUM: All of This And Nothing

2011-01-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

January 30 - April 24, 2011

All of this and nothing is the sixth in the Hammer Museum’s biennial invitational exhibition series, which highlights work of Los Angeles-based artists, both established and emerging, alongside a number of international artists. All of this and nothing features more than 60 works, much of it created for the exhibition, by fourteen artists: Karla Black, Charles Gaines, Evan Holloway, Sergej Jensen, Ian Kiaer, Jorge Macchi, Dianna Molzan, Fernando Ortega, Eileen Quinlan, Gedi Sibony, Paul Sietsema, Frances Stark, Mateo Tannatt and Kerry Tribe. The first major exhibition at the Hammer to be curated jointly by the museum’s chief curator, Douglas Fogle and senior curator Anne Ellegood, this exhibition presents a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, performance, and the moving image. The artists explore fundamental questions about our experiences of existing in the world and in the potential for art to reveal the mysterious and the magical. Reaching beyond exclusively visual references, many works incorporate aspects of music, literature, science, mathematics, sound, or time into their subject matter or structure. This group of intergenerational artists closely considers the process of art-making in their work by playing with scale, the ephemeral quality of their materials, the nature of time and language, and the relationships between the objects that they create. Their work explores ideas of disappearance and reemergence, of shifting visibilities, as well as the beauty found in the everyday. These artists resist notions of autonomy and completeness in favor of openness to multiple interpretations over time. For them the value of the work resides more in the process of its making than in the resulting objects.

MACRO MUSEUM IN ROME

2011-01-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

Plus Ultra
Works from The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection
Until 20 March 2011

Piotr UKLANSKI, "Untitled (Monster)," 2009.
Juta, linen, plant fiber, aluminium.

MACRO and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo are proud to present PLUS ULTRA, a selection of major works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, curated by Francesco Bonami, at MACRO Testaccio, Rome until 20 March 2011. This is the first time a group exhibition featuring works from Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo's contemporary art collection, first started in the early nineties, has been shown in Rome, presenting an important selection of highly acclaimed Italian and International contemporary artists. PLUS ULTRA, which takes its name from a work featured in the exhibition by Polish artist Goshka Macuka (previewed at the 2009 edition of the Venice Biennale) presents the work of thirty-eight artists utilizing painting, sculpture, video, photography and installation, offering an in depth insight into today's art. Among the artists featured in the show are: John Bock, Damien Hirst, Pawel Althamer, Carsten Höller, Sarah Lucas, Tobias Rehberger, Piotr Uklanski, Cerith Wyn Evans, Maurizio Cattelan, Giuseppe Gabellone, Diego Perrone, Paola Pivi and Patrick Tuttofuoco.

THE WOODSMANS: Provocative Portrait of Photographer Francesca Woodman and Her Artist Family

2011-01-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

Documentary Had U.S. Theatrical Premiere Wednesday, January 19 at Film Forum

Francesca Woodman's haunting B&W images, many of them nude self-portraits, now reside in the pantheon of great photography from the late 20th century. The daughter of artists Betty and Charles Woodman (she a ceramicist and he a painter/ photographer), Francesca was a precocious RISD graduate, who came to New York with the intention of setting the art world on fire. But in 1981, as a despondent 22-year-old, she committed suicide.

THE WOODMANS beautifully interweaves the young artist's work (including experimental videos and diary passages) with interviews with the parents who have nurtured her professional reputation these past 30 years, while continuing to make art of their own in the face of tragedy. The film grapples with such issues as parent-child competition and the toxic level of ambition that fuels the New York art scene. It also has much to say about the healing powers of creativity. Winner of the Best New York Documentary award at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. —Karen Cooper, Film Forum

It's one of the fundamental questions of art. Who is a work of art ultimately about, the artist or the audience? In film we have the auteur theory, which argues that a movie is the creation of a single author, and that to understand that author is to better understand that movie. Our interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock's filmography and its recurring theme of wrongful imprisonment is enhanced by our knowledge of a story from Hitchcock's childhood; his father had him locked up in a local jail for a couple hours to teach him a lesson. Hitchcock was scarred for life, but that scar produced some wonderful movies. So that brings in a second fundamental question: are the best artists the ones who are the most emotionally damaged? Both of these questions are at the core the new documentary "The Woodmans," a thought-provoking look at one troubled family of artists and their need to express themselves. Francesca Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22 after producing some of the most fascinating photographs of the 20th century. Was her work a cry for help or simply a darkly beautiful point of view of the world? Did her need to compete with her parents, both artists themselves, compel her need to create? "The Woodmans" by director C. Scott Willis offers no simple answers to these questions. It isn't interested in absolving or indicting this family, but rather uses them as a case study to try to understand what makes an artist an artist. Husband and wife George and Betty Woodman have been married for 54 years. George is an abstract painter, Betty a potter. They had two children: Charles, who grew up to become an experimental electronic artist, and Francesca, a photographer. Francesca, arguably the most talented member of the family and inarguably the most emotionally troubled, killed herself in 1981. "The Woodmans" is filled with Francesca's photographs, which are moody and surreal images of nude women, many of whom were portrayed by Francesca herself. Betty believes her daughter's work was not autobiographical, but "The Woodmans" uses Francesca's photographs as the visual accompaniment to the story of her life up to and including George's recounting of his daughter final, tortured months, and they do not seem out of place in that context. But perhaps that's my interpretation, and not Francesca's intent. When Charles and Francesca were young, the Woodmans consumed art the way most families consume food: creating and studying it was absolutely essential to their existence. We imagine children's lives enriched by early exposure to culture. But maybe this particular family's zeal for art pushed past love into something closer to obsession. When the Woodmans would go to a museum, George says, Charles and Francesca would be given a notebook and a time and place to meet so he and Betty could enjoy the art "without the children around our necks." Director C. Scott Willis cuts between George and Betty's interviews and footage of the pair working on their art, juxtaposing their babies with their "babies." We see how incompatible an artist's life can be with a parent's life: the artist must be devoted entirely to one's self and one's impulses, which can leave little time or room for loved ones. Am I suggesting George and Betty neglected their daughter and are therefore responsible for her death? Absolutely not. But George and Betty have clearly wrestled with guilt over Francesca's suicide; in their darker hours, they may still wrestle with it ("Maybe I've been an absolutely horrible mother. I can't go back and rewrite it," Betty says at one point). Throughout the process Francesca herself remains something of a mystery, but that's appropriate given the fact that "The Woodmans" is about her family and friends reflecting back on her life and her work and trying to make sense of her decisions. Francesca's words, taken from her journals, leave nearly as large -- and nearly as ambiguous -- an impression as her photographs ("I am so vain and I am so masochistic. How can they coexist?"). Perhaps the most moving part of "The Woodmans" is George and Betty's creative reaction to Francesca's death. Both changed dramatically as artists -- maybe even improved as artists -- in the wake of the tragedy: George took up photography after years of abstract paintwork while Betty abandoned functional pottery for more whimsical creations. Now she has an enormous mixed media piece hanging in the new American embassy in China. Betty says the most common reaction she gets to her work these days is joy; when people talk about her art with her they say it makes them feel "better." The Woodmans may not believe in autobiographical impulses in artists' work. But that doesn't mean I can't see them in theirs.
Matt Singer IFC

Elmgreen & Dragset Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, London 2012

2011-01-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset are the winners of the Fourth Plinth, one of the most significant public art commission in Britain. Their work Powerless Structure, Fig. 101 will be exhibited in Trafalgar Square in London in 2012.

RICHARD HAWKINS "THIRD MIND" OPENS AT HAMMER FEBRUARY 12, 2011

2011-01-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Hawkins
Untitled (Slash/Twombly)
1992

Altered book; twofold leaves of plates. 12 x 8 1/2 in. (30.5 x 21.6 cm). Collection of Joel Wachs.

Martin Creed Ballet Work 1020.wmv

2011-01-09T16:05:00.001-07:00

AI WEIWEI:NEVER SORRY TEASER

2011-01-09T14:57:00.000-07:00

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry TEASER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

The first feature length doc on the iconic Chinese contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei. Coming 2011.

Producer/Director:
Alison Klayman

MASS MOCA: AN EXCHANGE WITH SOL LEWITT

2011-01-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

Daniel Joglar
Instruction, 2010
documented action

OPENS JANUARY 23-MARCH 31, 2011

The story of Sol LeWitt's exchanges with other artists is widely known. Though most artists engage in this process at one point or another, LeWitt seemed fully committed to it as an artistic code of conduct, a way of life. Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold, Hanna Darboven, and Robert Ryman are just a few of LeWitt's celebrated contemporaries with whom the artist exchanged works. Such exchanges were not limited to well-known artists -- LeWitt consistently traded works with admirers whom he did not know but who had nevertheless sent their work to him, as well as amateur artists with whom he interacted in his daily life. LeWitt's exchanges —- he responded to every work he received by sending back one of his own -— fostered an ongoing form of artistic communion and, in some cases, a source of support and patronage. The Sol LeWitt Private Collection retains all of the works he received, as well as a record of what he offered in return. For LeWitt, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual practice. In addition to encouraging the circulation of artworks through a gift economy that challenged the art world's dominant economic model, LeWitt's exchanges with strangers have the same qualities of generosity, and risk, that characterized his work in general. This kind of exchange was designed to stage an encounter between two minds, outside the familiar confines of friendship. If we consider the process of exchange as another of Sol LeWitt's instructional pieces, then the rational (or irrational) thing to do is to continue to exchange work and ideas, if only symbolically, with him. This exhibition, curated by Cabinet's Regine Basha, springs from a call to those who share an affinity with Sol LeWitt's legacy as a conceptual artist, to those who knew him and those who did not—to anyone who has ever wondered, "What would Sol LeWitt like?" Cabinet and MASS MoCA issued an open call for gifts to Sol LeWitt in any form of an image, an object, a piece of music, or a film, books, ephemera, and other non-perishable items (e.g. wine) for a two-part exhibition taking place at MASS MoCA and at the offices of Cabinet (300 Nevins Street in Brooklyn) from January 20- February 19, 2011. A publication documenting the contributions will accompany the shows and will be presented at the conclusion of the project to all participants.

"THE BROAD"

2011-01-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and his wife on Thursday unveiled long-awaited plans for a new museum in downtown Los Angeles that will house their collection of contemporary art. The museum, called "The Broad," features a honeycombed shaped facade, glass-enclosed lobby and three floors to display various works in their 2,000-piece collection. "The Broad" was designed by New York-based architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, and will be situated near the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. The cost is estimated at around $130 million, and it is planned to open in 2013 with works by luminaries of contemporary and modern art including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Calling the concept the "veil and the vault," DS+R's design consists of a cast-concrete "veil" that wraps the building with a distinctive pattern and floods the interiors with that must-have for any museum: natural light. The second-story core of the building is the "vault" for the Broad Art Foundation, including Broad's massive collection -- over 2,000 works by 200 artists -- with windows that allow visitors to peek at the holdings as well as at the day-to-day operations of the foundation itself. The top floor features a completely sky-lit gallery that offers 24-foot ceilings and almost an acre of unobstructed gallery space.

Steven Holl: First Annual Raimund Abraham Memorial Lecture

2011-01-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

First Annual Raimund Abraham Memorial Lecture - Lecture

HAPPY NEW YEAR: BRING IT ON!

2010-12-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

TO OUR CLIENTS, COLLEAGUES AND DEAR FRIENDS HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM BARBARA BALKIN INC.

Rock 'N' Roll High School: The Ramones - Do You Wanna Dance?

THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES

2010-12-07T15:09:00.000-07:00

In this twittering world, Andy Warhol’s chronicle of his glimmering final decade seems pretty well scheduled for its republication. A star-studded (and stud-studded), gorgeously gossipy account of the Pop Art demi-God’s unyielding activity from 1976 until just days before his death in 1987, The Andy Warhol Diaries offer the sort of reading pleasure you’d get from poring over acres of salacious 1980s magazine print, only with the most famous artist of the period making gloriously catty asides about everybody over your shoulder the whole time. The most incredible thing about this catalogue of VIPs, VI-Parties and VI-Money Matters is how weirdly compelling it is, in spite of the flagrant laziness of the writing. Warhol never even so much as actually wrote any of the diary, as editor Pat Hackett explains in her introduction: the entire, breezeblock-thick thing is based on the rigorous regime of weekday morning phone calls that Warhol made to Hackett, faithfully recording his movements, anxieties and – in bogglingly minute detail – financial expenses. Edited from 20,000 pages down to the 1,123 published here, what Warhol’s testimonial lacks in art-theoretical analysis and probing psychological insight it more than makes up for in glamorous name-dropping, irreverent opinion and oddly fascinating glimpses into the life of this totemic enigma. Marvel at the crap Andy liked watching on telly, gasp at who was on which drugs at which party, cringe at the weird way that the wind at the World Trade Centre blew Jerry Hall’s underarm B.O. right up our diarist’s nose. The ‘Diaries now comes with a gratifyingly comprehensive index at the back, so you can speedily dip in and go straight to the entries on all your favourite celebs. They’re all in here: everyone who was anyone crops up somewhere in this massive and continually-pleasing labyrinth of the best possible tittle-tattle. The Andy Warhol Diaries isn’t just another good book, it’s an exhaustive, exhausting, dependably diverting friend for life.

PATTI SMITH WINS NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

2010-11-18T16:40:00.000-07:00

Tina Fineberg/Associated Press

The rock musician Patti Smith won the National Book Award for nonfiction on Wednesday night for “Just Kids,” a sweetly evocative memoir of her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe and life in the bohemian New York of the 1960s and ’70s. Accepting the award to applause and cheers, Ms. Smith — clearly the favorite of the night — choked up as she recalled her days as a clerk in the Scribner’s bookstore in Manhattan. “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.” “Just Kids” was published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.

2010-11-16T19:17:00.001-07:00

Glenn O'Brien and Rob Pruitt

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is pleased to announce the nominees for Rob Pruitt's 2010 Art Awards, the second annual celebration honoring the notable individuals, exhibitions, and projects that have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art during the past year. Awards in 14 categories will be presented at a fundraising event to benefit the Guggenheim Foundation and visual arts non-profit White Columns on Wednesday, December 8, 2010, at the nightclub and music venue Webster Hall. Artist Rob Pruitt, whose conceptual practice is rooted in a pop sensibility and a playful critique of art world structures, conceived the event as a performance-based artwork which follows the format of a Hollywood awards ceremony. Designed by Pruitt with a flourish of showbiz glamour, the Art Awards harnesses the energy and accomplishments of the international arts community while simultaneously supporting two of its institutions.
Pruitt has invited writer, editor, and downtown fixture Glenn O'Brien to preside over the event as the Master of Ceremonies. Pruitt and O'Brien, along with writers David Colman and Linda Yablonsky, are penning the event script. A distinguished cast of presenters will participate in distributing award statuettes designed by Pruitt, including Bill Powers, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, and Jerry Saltz of the television series Work of Art, who will announce "New Artist of the Year"; Mary Heilmann, the 2009 "Artist of the Year," who will announce the winner in that category; artist Marina Abramovic with Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1; artists John Currin and Rachel Feinstein; Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum; and Matthew Higgs, Director, White Columns, among others. The evening will also feature performances by artists Martin Creed and Kalup Linzy, and surprise guest appearances. An after-party following the presentation will feature music by Rub-N-Tug. Lifetime Achievement Awards, determined by Rob Pruitt along with organizing partners the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and White Columns, will be awarded to Jonas Mekas and Martha Rosler. The Artist-Educator Achievement Award, a new distinction added for this year's celebration, will be presented to Marilyn Minter. A group of more than 1,000 artists and arts professionals were invited to form an anonymous Art Awards Council to nominate and then vote upon four nominees in categories that focus primarily on exhibitions and projects that took place over the past year (July 2009 to July 2010), in the United States, as well as one category recognizing an international exhibition. The Rob Pruitt Award is being decided solely by the artist. The winners in each of the twelve categories-in addition to the three Achievement Awards-will be announced at the live awards ceremony on December 8 at Webster Hall. The nominees for each category are:
Alternative Space of the Year
179 Canal, New York
Artists Space, New York
Cleopatra's, Brooklyn, New York
Light Industry, Brooklyn, New York
Alternative Project of the Year
Apartment Show, various locations, New York
edia Int'l Group, Foundation Barbin, New York
INDEPENDENT, New York
Jennifer Rubell, Creation, Performa 09, New York
Artist of the Year
Marina Abramovic
John Baldessari
Louise Bourgeois
Trisha Donnelly
Blogger or Critic of the Year
Howard Halle
Paddy Johnson
Jerry Saltz
Linda Yablonsky
Curator of the Year
Massimiliano Gioni
Laura Hoptman
Chrissie Iles
Neville Wakefield
Exhibition outside the United States
John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, Tate Modern, London
Rosemarie Trockel: Deliquescence of the Mother, Kunsthalle Zürich
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels
Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail, Schaulager, Basel
Group Show of the Year, Gallery
Lush Life, various locations, New York
Picture Industry (Goodbye to All That), Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970, David Zwirner, New York
Your History Is Not Our History: New York in the 1980s, Haunch of Venison, New York
Group Show of the Year, Museum
At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York
In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976, Museum of Modern Art, New York
2010 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

New Artist of the Year
Michele Abeles
Tauba Auerbach
Liz Magic Laser
Ryan McNamara
The Rob Pruitt Award
To be announced the evening of December 8, 2010
Solo Show of the Year, Gallery
Claude Monet: Late Work, Gagosian Gallery, New York
Gelitin: Blind Sculpture, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
Jonathan Horowitz: Go Vegan! Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
Trisha Donnelly, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York
Solo Show of the Year, Museum
Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Otto Dix, Neue Galerie, New York
Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Proceeds from the 2010 Art Awards will benefit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and White Columns.

WOMEN THEN 1954 - 1969

2010-10-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

Women Then 1954 - 1969
a new book by Jerry Schatzberg

The New York Photographer’s Ode to the Sirens of the 60s

Jerry Schatzberg began his career in fashion in the family business, manufacturing fur coats. Uninspired by his job he would take two-hour lunches to walk around the city and stare, intrigued, at cameras. After breaking free and assisting Bill Helburn, Schatzberg took to his own studio befriending, dating and capturing countless famous faces before segueing into feature films. In giving Al Pacino one of his first roles in the gritty Panic in Needle Park, documenting Faye Dunaway as a down-on-her-luck model in Puzzle of a Downfall Child, and hiring Gene Hackman in the Palm d'Or-winning Scarecrow, Schatzberg's movies were as successful as his photographs. Below he recounts shooting Warhol Superstar Edie Sedgwick in 1960. "It’s difficult to have a favorite image because I consider them all my friends. The Edie photograph, for example, was interesting because Albert Grossman––who was Bob Dylan’s manager at the time––wanted to represent her because she was quite a personality, but he didn’t know what for, so asked me to photograph her. Later I ran into Andy [Warhol] with the documentarian Barbara Rubin and I told him I was going to photograph Edie. By the time I got back to the studio, Barbara called and said Andy was wondering if I would shoot five minutes of footage for his film on Edie, and I said yes. Five minutes later she called again and said Andy’s wondering if he can shoot five minutes of you shooting five minutes, and I said yes. And then Barbara called once more and asked if she could film the shoot herself and bring a few people. I said yes. Before I knew it 40 people showed up at my studio, including most of the Velvet Underground! I always remember shooting my five minutes with Edie in the dressing room whilst Andy was shooting us. His assistant Gerard Malanga said, 'But Andy, there’s no film in the camera!' and Andy said, 'Oh, it doesn’t matter.' Then I politely threw them all out and did these photographs of Edie."

Reported by Nowness

Printed Matter, Inc. presents The NY Art Book Fair

2010-10-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

Thursday, November 4, 6-9 p.m.
Printed Matter, Inc. and The NY Art Book Fair will take over all three floors of MoMA PS1, November 5–7, to present 275 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, museums, galleries, and artists from twenty-four countries, exhibiting the very best of contemporary art publishing. The Fair will open with a preview on Thursday, November 4 from 6-9 p.m. Admission to the preview and to the Fair is free.

www.nyartbookfair.com

ArtAtWork | Painting Extravaganza

2010-09-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

ART AT WORK
Via Mazzini, 40
10123 Torino
T.+39.011.19715285
F.+39.011.19715876
mail@artatwork.it
www.artatwork.it

ROY LICHTENSTEIN IN THREE NY EXHIBITIONS

2010-09-25T07:37:00.000-07:00

"Woman in Bath" (1963)

Credit: Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, Collection of H. Gael Neeson

Works by the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein are on view in three separate exhibitions around Manhattan.
Roberta Smith writes: "Lichtenstein’s art forms an ode to the Americana of comic books and commercial art, but it has about it a brisk cosmopolitanism that is also New York at its most New York, which is in the fall. Perfect working order is what Lichtenstein was all about. And the loose-jointed survey of his economics afforded by these shows is all the more pleasant for being interrupted by large swaths of the city, which works pretty darned well in spite of everything. You can alternate views of Lichtenstein’s genius with healthy intakes of urban life and draw your own conclusions from the shows’ overlaps and discrepancies, whether with one another or reality." The most substantial effort is the Morgan Library & Museum’s brilliant “Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968,” which concentrates exclusively on the large finished drawings that heralded the arrival of his bold mature style. A broader view is taken by “Roy Lichtenstein: Mostly Men” at the Leo Castelli Gallery on the Upper East Side. Its 25 works concentrate on depictions of men, skimming across a career more identified with anxious young women. And in Chelsea, Mitchell-Innes & Nash rounds out the bill with “Roy Lichtenstein Reflected,” which features 10 paintings, mostly from the late 1980s and early ’90s, that one way or another depict mirrors. While more routine it gets to the heart of Lichtenstein’s concerns. As each show has its own catalog, a kind of Lichtenstein Festschrift also accrues.
Reported in NY Times

PETER AND STEPHANIE HAPPY AT LAST

2010-09-21T08:45:00.000-07:00

All couples go through some rough patches, but when the husband is a billionaire publishing tycoon/polo player/art collector and the wife is a glamorous Victoria's Secret model/artist’s muse, people tend to gossip. And when private squabbles turn into a vicious public divorce, complete with allegations of drug use and domineering personalities, there’s no stopping wagging tongues. Well, all the schadenfreuders out there eagerly awaiting the outcome of yesterdays divorce trial between Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour (What was going to happen to all the art?!) were shocked into silence when the pair walked into court hand-in-hand and told the judge, actually, they’ll be staying married, nevermind. The newly reunited couple, who have been married for 15 years and have three children, received some parting advice from Superior Court Judge Lynda Munro, who reportedly said, “After the first hearing with you, I said I thought you were going to reconcile and I'd forgotten about it… I'm a true believer in marriage. It's hard work growing old together, but it's actually sort of fun." It’s always nice to see a family—and an art collection—stay together.

TATE MODERN: The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei

2010-09-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

Ai Weiwei
Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo 1994
Courtesy the artist © Ai Weiwei
Han Dynasty urn, paint
25.4x27.9x27.9cm

The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei
12 October 2010 – 2 May 2011

The Chinese artist has become one of the most important cultural commentators of his generation. Ai Weiwei who designed Beijing's 'Bird's Nest' Olympics stadium is no gentle character. A notable artist, commentator, activist, blogger and a powerful voice on Twitter, his art and social commentary have shocked the world.

INSTALLATION VIEW AZZEDINE ALAIA

2010-09-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

ROB PRUITT PATTERN AND DEGRADATION

2010-09-09T14:17:00.001-07:00

ROB PRUITT PATTERN AND DEGRADATION
SEPTEMBER 11 – OCTOBER 23, 2010
Opening Reception: September 11, 6-8 PM
Gavin Brown’s enterprise
620 Greenwich Street New York, NY 10014
Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street New York, NY 10014

Rob Pruitt is the artist for our time, creating and living at a moment when the American experience is both preeminent and stagnant. Rather than feel defeated by the diminished cultural legacy left to us, Pruitt has embraced it. He loves the cynicism, bathes in the stupid, lies down with the empty, turns the other cheek, and asks for an autograph. He has no answers, so he offers a joyful moment of flat, ridiculous glitter. His love of life and seeming flippancy are forms of modern wisdom - a radical, smiling response to an intolerable situation and a giddy challenge to those who have given in.

MISSING IN ART

2010-06-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Returning in the Fall!!

Photo: Ryan McGinley

THE NEW DECOR : HAYWARD GALLERY, LONDON

2010-06-16T09:16:00.001-07:00

The New Décor: Artists & Interiors
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/decor
June 19th- September 5, 2010

An international survey of over 30 contemporary artists, including some of the leading sculptors of our time, who explore interior design as a means of engaging with changes in contemporary culture. By reconfiguring and reinventing the familiar objects of our domestic life, these artists look beyond design and function to create provocative sculptures and installations. The exhibition features work by 30 artists including: Martin Boyce (Britain), Los Carpinteros (Cuba), Jimmie Durham (USA), Elmgreen & Dragset (Scandinavia), Gelitin (Austria), Mona Hatoum (Lebanon), Jim Lambie (Britain), Sarah Lucas (Britain), Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Ugo Rondinone (Switzerland), Doris Salcedo (Colombia), Rosemary Trockel (Germany), Tatiana Trouve (Italian), Franz West (Austrian). Curated by Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, the exhibition draws on artists from around the world, but what unites them is their ability to transform objects we associate with the everyday – a bed, a shelf, a lamp – into something uncanny and compelling.

FRIEZE PROJECTS 2010 ANNOUNCED

2010-06-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

Frieze Projects is a program of newly commissioned artworks by international artists realized annually at the Frieze Art Fair every October in Regent's Park, London. It is curated by Sarah McCrory and, this year, includes nine specially commissioned projects as well as the Cartier Award. The artists commissioned to create these site-specific works for Frieze Art Fair are Ei Arakawa and Karl Holmqvist, Spartacus Chetwynd, Matthew Darbyshire, Shannon Ebner and Dexter Sinister, Gabriel Kuri, Shahryar Nashat, Nick Relph, Annika Ström and Jeffrey Vallance. This year’s program of commissioned projects includes elements of performativity – either directly, with performances taking place in and around the fair, or more obliquely, commanding a level of involvement from visitors. Ranging from the spectacular to the intimate, the emphasis is on a direct engagement that will rest upon a series of personal encounters. The Cartier Award 2010 recipient is Simon Fujiwara. Fujiwara will present Frozen; an installation based on the fictive premise that an ancient lost city has been discovered beneath the site of the fair. Throughout the fair, visitors will encounter archaeological digs, displays of found artefacts and graphic panels describing a historic civilization that was once a hub of art and commerce.

SIGMAR POLKE DIES AT 69

2010-06-12T16:49:00.001-07:00

European Pressphoto Agency / April 7, 2005

Sigmar Polke, one of Germany’s best-known artists, died Thursday night from cancer at the age of 69. Polke, a painter, graphic artist and photographer, was “one of the most important and most successful representatives of German contemporary art and had an important international reputation. The record price for Polke’s work at auction was 2.7 million pounds (then $5.3 million) for a 1966 canvas titled “Strand” (Beach) that sold at Christie’s in London in 2007. Stephanie Barron, curator of modern art at LACMA who included Polke in the 2009 show "Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures," called him "one the most important painters of the postwar generation and a leader among German artists." Born in 1941 in eastern Germany, Polke emigrated to the west in 1953. He settled in Dusseldorf, where he studied at the Art Academy. In 1963, he founded the “Capitalist Realism” painting movement with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg. The three artists mocked both the realist style that was the official art of the Soviet Union and the consumer-driven pop art of the west. Polke moved to Cologne in 1978. He experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them. Polke was "incredibly adept at blending together images taken from many different sources," Barron said. "In his paintings he would bring together images from advertising, newspapers, film stills, and more in an incredibly eloquent and layered way." Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate Modern art gallery, said Polke's "sublimely beautiful paintings" often carried a "tough message about society and its values" and were enormously influential on younger generations of artists.

Marina Abramovic Answers $64,000 ? "HOW DID I PEE?"

2010-06-07T16:31:00.000-07:00

Marina Abramovic, the performance artist whose retrospective closed at the Museum of Modern Art on Memorial Day, last night answered what she said was the number one question about her performance in the exhibit, in which she sat in the museum's atrium facing museum visitors all day every day during the exhibit's run: "How did I pee?" In her MoMA performance, called, as was the retrospective, Abramovic sat in an armless chair, on a pillow, facing an individual visitor--the famous like Sharon Stone, Lou Reed, James Franco, Isabella Rossellini, Marisa Tomei and Bjork, but, more often, the not-so-famous--who sat in the same kind of chair; initially they were separated by a table, which was later removed. Speaking at MoMA, surrounded by 36 performance artists who, during the retrospective, recreated her pieces on the museum's sixth floor, Abramovic said her chair had a "little hole." After three days of sitting on it, she said it became "so clear to me I will never use it. I never have the urge to pee, I sat on a pillow." To prepare for her marathon performance--her longest to date, 716.5 hours long, with Abramovic facing 1,545 visitors--the artist said she became a vegetarian (something she normally is not) six months before the exhibit, eating light food based on grains. And she said she trained herself to wake up every 45 minutes at night to drink water and remain hydrated. Abramovic also explained her fashion choices during the marathon. She said the blue dress she wore during the first month "calmed" her mind; "my brain was moving 360,000 miles per hour." The red dress the second month symbolized the "enormous amount of physical pain" she was experiencing, particularly from her armless chair--which she said she would change if she were to perform the piece again--and her legs swelling. The white dress, worn during the final month, represented "clarity, the immaterial." Abramovic also said her eyes created "incredible problems," but that she walked out on a doctor whom she consulted when he asked, "Why are you doing this to your eyes?" Klaus Biesenbach, curator of the Abramovic exhibit, said the artist called him on April 30 to ask if she could remove the table separating her from museum visitors, "to be directly with the audience." Although he said he had some misgivings about this, "Marina took it away." Asked if she could reperform "The Artist is Present," Abramovic said, "Of course we could reperform it. It's really a kind of piece about awareness, stillness. It opened the door to me to aspects of performance."
Jane Levere: Huffington Post

Jeff Koons Unveils Art Car That Will Race At Le Mans

2010-06-03T16:36:00.000-07:00

Artist Jeff Koons unveiled the BMW Art Car that will carry his colorful paint job in this month’s 24-hour race at Le Mans, France. The race car, a BMW M3 GT2, competes in a popular category that includes Ferraris, Porsches and other production-based sports vehicles that most drivers would recognize. The Art Car will be part of a two-car team competing at Le Mans, where many other Art Cars have raced. The Koons racer is certain to be noticed on the track. Its bright, streaked paint job suggests motion, as if paint was thrown at the car as it passed. Up close, though, the color scheme is full of intricate detail. The M3 GT2 is the 17th Art Car BMW has produced since commissioning Alexander Calder to paint the first one in 1975. Many artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol have designed Art Cars for BMW. Typically the artist created the design through sketches and models, and BMW does the actual painting. Andy Warhol is the only one who painted the car himself.
By Jonathan Welsh: WSJ

ROLE MODELS BY JOHN WATERS

2010-06-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Frank Klein

Leave it to John Waters to write what is perhaps the first loving, learned homage to outsider pornographers. In one chapter of his new memoir, Role Models (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Waters introduces Bobby Garcia, "the Almodóvar of Anuses, the Buñuel of Blow Jobs, the Jodorowsky of Jerking Off." Garcia--who has somehow convinced thousands of straight Marines to star in gay porn--lives in a run-down shack overflowing with pigs, roosters, and hundreds of rats. But to Waters he is a genius. Role Models is a paean to the people Waters claims as influences, but not all are so predictably perverse. In it, he reminisces about artist Cy Twombly and Clarabell the Clown from The Howdy Doody Show, Tennessee Williams and Patty McCormack, the actress who portrayed the murderous little girl in 1956's The Bad Seed. And aside from one serious, soul-searching chapter--about Manson girl and convicted murderer Leslie Van Houten--the book is surprisingly charming and riotously funny. It's an especially good read for those familiar with Waters' hometown, a city "filled with nutcases who think they are totally levelheaded." Baltimore's own aficionado of filth names many Charm City natives as inspirations. There's Lady Zorro the lesbian stripper, who would come out on stage naked and snarl, "What the fuck are you looking at?" There's Esther Martin, the foul-mouthed founder of the Club Charles, who inspired her daughters with such inspirational adages as "A cunt hair will pull a twenty-mule team." And Waters devotes a good deal of his chapter on Baltimore heroes to his favorite scary bars, most of which--Hard Times, Morgan's, Boots--are no more.
But beneath Waters' exuberant, bawdy prose lies a challenge. "Filth is just the beginning battle in the war on taste," he writes. Parts of Role Models are, of course, shocking, some in the same sense as a certain famous scene in his classic movie Pink Flamingos. (In the book, the author wonders if it is as draining for Johnny Mathis to sing "When Sunny Gets Blue" over and over again as it is for Waters to have fans ask him repeatedly whether Divine really ate dog shit.) But the affectionate, respectful tone Waters takes with each profile--whether of a famous fashion designer or an unknown coprophiliac--is a deeper transgression. After reading the book, you feel that his fascination with those on society's periphery is accompanied by real empathy, a generosity of spirit that most of us cannot fathom.
Leslie Van Houten is perhaps the most notorious recipient of that compassion. At the age of 19, in the thrall of Charles Manson, she participated in the bloody murder of the LaBianca family. She is still in prison, and Waters devotes a long chapter in his book to her story and the story of their friendship. She is repentant and fully rehabilitated, he writes, and deserves to be given parole. The chapter is neither scandalous nor simplistic. It discusses the limits of redemption, the nature of accountability, and the purpose of imprisonment. And it reveals another side of John Waters, the repentant one. He writes that he is "[g]uilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims' families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case." Role Models covers a great deal of strange, seemingly unrelated ground. It leaps directly from Van Houten to a section on Waters' wardrobe, a style he calls "disaster at the dry cleaners." After perusing "John Waters's Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life if Something Is Basically the Matter With You," you're whisked to a drab hotel room inhabited by Little Richard. You'd think this eccentric narrative wouldn't hold together. But the book is, somehow, a brilliant self-portrait. It's a little like one of those photo mosaics so popular of late: Up close, it's a jumble of tiny colorful portraits. Step back, and there's the Pope of Trash himself.
Baltimore CityPaper

Dennis Hopper: NPR Interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross

2010-06-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

Anarchic Actor, Artist Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010 : NPR

ART WORLD'S GRAND DAME LOUISE BOURGEOIS DIES AT 98

2010-05-31T14:08:00.000-07:00

French-born sculptor and artist Louise Bourgeois died Monday at age 98 of a heart attack.

POP ICON DENNIS HOPPER DIES AT 74

2010-05-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

Dennis Hopper 1971
Andy Warhol

Dennis Hopper, actor, filmmaker, photographer, and art collector, died today at 74 of complications due to prostate cancer.

WHITNEY PLANS MOVE DOWNTOWN

2010-05-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

After 25 years of false starts, the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art has taken a step that will redefine the 80-year-old institution. It voted on Tuesday afternoon to begin construction on a building in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, to be completed by 2015, that will vastly increase the size and scope of the museum.

The site near the High Line in the meatpacking district where the Whitney Museum of American Art plans to break ground next year. The downtown Whitney will be a six-story building.

The New York Times

The board also agreed to sell a group of brownstones adjacent to the museum’s signature Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue and East 75th Street, and the museum’s annex building around the corner on 74th Street. The sale will effectively end any chance of the Whitney expanding in its current space, where it has been since 1966 and which it has been trying to enlarge since the architect Michael Graves unveiled the first of many expansion plans in 1985.Without room to grow uptown, and without the income necessary to run two museums, the Whitney now faces the question of what to do with the Breuer building — which may end up being shared, at least temporarily, by another institution, perhaps the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Certainly such an alliance would lighten the Whitney’s financial burden. So far the board has raised about $372 million toward the downtown project, which it estimates will cost $680 million, a figure that includes construction and endowment. The sale of the brownstones and the annex building is expected to raise about $100 million more. The vote to break ground downtown — and the choice of holding it so close to the planned site — were the latest in a series of moves that have been carefully choreographed by board members who saw the new building as the Whitney’s last chance to grow after so many failed efforts at expansion. The Whitney has been struggling with space issues for decades. When it moved to the Breuer building, there were 2,000 works in its collection — a number that has since grown to about 18,000 — but there is only enough room to show about 150 works from its permanent holdings at one time. Many larger works in the collection have never been displayed because of the lack of space. The downtown Whitney, designed by Renzo Piano, will be a six-story, 195,000-square-foot metal-clad building, with a dramatic cantilevered entrance. It will include more than 50,000 square feet of indoor galleries and 13,000 square feet of rooftop exhibition space, as well as classrooms, a research library, art conservation labs and a multi-use indoor/outdoor space for film, video and performance art. It will also include a restaurant, cafe and bookstore. Most important, in Whitney's director Weinberg’s view, “it will have one of the largest column-free spaces to show art in New York.”

SITTING WITH MARINA

2010-05-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Photographs by Marco Anelli

Performance art, as currently practiced, emerged as an avant garde movement in the 1960s and ’70s, and some of its features made it difficult to visualize how it might make the transition from galleries and public spaces to the more institutional environment of the museum. For one thing, the medium of the artist is his or her own body, sometimes nude or engaged in highly dangerous circumstances. Pictures of nude bodies doing dangerous things raise no such obstacles in a museum space, but performance art itself is real in all dimensions. Before it can be translated and presented in a museum, a number of problems, both practical and philosophical, must be worked out. One method would be to allow the pieces to be re-performed, which purists naturally disallow. For them, a performance is a one-time event, unlike a play, which is made to be re-performed; in theater, the distinction between character and actor is widely accepted. In the purist’s conception of performance art, there can be no such distinction; the artist and the performer are one, and must use his or her own body in the work. No one else, they argue, can do this, for reasons both moral and metaphysical. Marina Abramovic is one of the early performance artists whose works have the deep originality that justifies their inclusion in great museums. In recent years, she has not adhered to the purist approach; she has re-performed the work of other artists, when they have granted her permission, and of course has re-performed her own. She did both at the Guggenheim Museum in November 2005, in a one week show called “Seven Easy Pieces.” But knowing that she will not always be around, she has also trained other artists to re-perform some of her work. Five of these re-performances are included in “The Artist Is Present,” the retrospective of Marina’s work currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, now in its final week. One of those pieces, “Imponderabilia” — originally performed in 1977 by Marina and her former partner, Ulay — consists of two nude performers facing one another in a doorway. Visitors to the show may pass through to the next room by working their way through this living gate. (A few steps away, there is an alternate way into the next room; in the original performance, visitors to the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna were required to pass through Marina and Ulay to enter.) At the MoMA show, visitors must be aware that in this case “don’t touch the art” is underwritten by considerations of privacy that go with works consisting of living, breathing bodies. And as MoMA and other museums seek to go beyond exhibiting and actually acquire such performances, they will also have to deal with a number of imponderable issues that do not normally arise with works of art like paintings and sculptures. The live performers share the MoMA exhibition space with other more conventional works of art — photographs, videos and various props. All these are conceptually as well as aesthetically exciting, but in no respect have they aroused the sort of universal interest generated by Marina’s new performance piece, enacted daily by the artist since the show opened on March 14. It has captured the imagination of everyone interested in contemporary art. Because of my role as critic and philosopher, and as a New Yorker associated with the arts, I am often asked for my opinion of what this new work, designed for this occasion, means. It consists of Marina seated in a chair on the floor of the atrium, one flight up from the museum’s entrance, across from an empty chair, in which anyone can sit for any length of time. (A table that had been placed between Marina and the sitter was removed a few weeks ago, as it was felt to be an unnecessary barrier.) The performance has brought MoMA itself to the cutting edge of contemporary artistic experiment, and has in every way proven to be a succès fou. I was a sort of witness to the creative history of the work, since I had accepted the invitation to write the main essay for the show’s catalog. Part of my task was to establish the historical setting of Marina’s work, which was part archival and part interpretative. But it was another matter to describe the new piece; Marina was still uncertain what the atrium performance would be and on this point my essay was necessarily vague. Originally, she imagined a scaffold of seven platforms on one of the atrium walls, connected by ladders, which would have related to an earlier work, “The House With an Ocean View,” performed at the Sean Kelly Gallery in 2002. There she fasted through the 12 days the performance lasted, and did certain things acceptable in a gallery space that would be at least questionable in a public museum space: she urinated, for example, and sometimes stood nude, weeping on the scaffold. For the MoMA show, which would be nearly three months long, fasting was out of the question, and nudity would have to be negotiated. Then, in a moment of high inspiration, she changed the program radically. On May 23, 2009, she wrote her curator, Klaus Biesenbach, as follows:

I decided that I want to have a work that connects me more with the public, that concentrates … on the interaction between me and the audience.
I want to have a simple table, installed in the center of the atrium, with two chairs on the sides. I will sit on one chair and a square of light from the ceiling will separate me from the public.
Anyone will be free to sit on the other side of the table, on the second chair, staying as long as he/she wants, being fully and uniquely part of the Performance.
I think this work [will] draw a line of continuity in my career.

Fortunately, the catalog had not gone to press, and I was able to revise my essay to take account of this decision. It was consistent with certain past performances, where, for example, she and Ulay would sit in silence at opposite ends of a table for a set period of time. What was new was the empty chair. No one, except perhaps Marina herself, knew what the effect of the empty chair would be. What is clear is that the possibility of sitting with Marina has ignited in the public imagination the idea that one can do more than passively experience works of art, that one can be part of a work of art for as long as one is willing or able. I have been told that museum visitors in general stand in front of art works for an average of 30 seconds. At MoMA, some have chosen to sit across from Marina for hours; one young woman sat for the entire length of a day’s performance, frustrating many others waiting their turn in line. Others have returned to sit multiple times. By rough estimate, visitors sit for an average of 20 minutes. I had the opportunity to sit with Marina on April 15. My wife and I were permitted to arrive before the museum opened and were first in line. We watched Marina sweep into the atrium surrounded by some others, and then take her seat. There were only two chairs in the atrium. Everyone else was waiting or working. Marina was sitting in a sort of space within the space of the atrium. The space was defined by tape laid in a square on the floor and lit from above. Just outside the square was a film crew; visitors waiting to sit with Marina stood in line in a sort of L. It reminded me of a portrait by Giacometti, in which the subject is placed within a space suggested by a few lines. Giacometti was after all a sculptor; he used the lines to suggest a space, thus giving the subject a presence. I noticed a similar effect in the atrium. The inner space was the artist’s own. It was charged with palpable feeling. Since I now use a wheelchair to get around, someone wheeled me opposite Marina and the chair was removed. My session as part of the work had begun. Marina looked beautiful in an intense red garment whose hem formed a circle on the floor, and her black hair was braided to one side. I was unclear as to what I was to do in the charmed space across from her other than to maintain a silence. She is in fact a wonderful talker, full of wit and a kind of Balkan humor. But this performance is very much a dialogue de sourds — a dialog of the deaf. Communication is on another plane. I ventured to signal “hi” with a wave, which aroused in Marina a weak smile. At this point, something striking took place. Marina leaned her head back at a slight angle, and to one side. She fixed her eyes on me without — so it seemed — any longer seeing me. It was as if she had entered another state. I was outside her gaze. Her face took on the translucence of fine porcelain. She was luminous without being incandescent. She had gone into what she had often spoken of as a “performance mode.” For me at least, it was a shamanic trance — her ability to enter such a state is one of her gifts as a performer. It is what enables her to go through the physical ordeals of some of her famous performances. I felt indeed as if this was the essence of performance in her case, often with the added element of physical danger. The question was how long to sit. On the one hand, I thought I could sit there interminably. For a wild moment I thought my physical ailments would fade away, as if I were at Lourdes. I don’t really believe in miracles, but I do believe in courtesy. After 10 minutes I decided that it would have been inconsiderate to take much more time away from the other visitors, who had waited their turns so patiently. I held out my arm as a signal, and someone wheeled me away. I stayed long enough in the area to be interviewed by the film crew. In the interview I speculated on the Marina phenomenon. I wondered if others had experienced the translucence. Was it, I wondered, part of the experience for them as well? I searched the Web later that day to see what others who sat with Marina had written. Of course their experiences were different from mine. I had put three months into the catalog essay for the MoMA show, reading about her performances and about her life. I had spent some time in Yugoslavia the 1970s teaching philosophical seminars as a Fulbright professor at the Inter-University Center of Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik. It was around then that Marina was doing her first performances in Belgrade. I recalled that, years before she was born, I had, as a young soldier in Italy, sailed one dark night to the Dalmatian coast with some partisans I had fallen in with, to bring some of their wounded comrades back to Bari for treatment. One’s experience of art draws on one’s total experience in life. One of my art world pals, Domenica, who works in a gallery in California, wrote how lucky I was to have sat with Marina. I thought that the many people now longing to sit with Marina would also say I was lucky to have had that chance. What I know now is that she and MoMA have brought some magic back into art — the sort of magic that all of our courses in art history and appreciation had encouraged us to hope for. James Turrell, the light artist, once told me that after seeing the slides of paintings in the courses he had taken, he was disappointed by the actual paintings. What he had really loved was the light, and in a sense then vowed to make sure his art, consisting of light, would never lose its magic. Those who do get lucky enough to sit with Marina will not be disappointed, because the light I noticed will be there, even if they are not ready to see it.
By ARTHUR C. DANTO for the New York Times

Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, and was the art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009. He is the author of several books on analytical philosophy and the philosophy of art; and winner of the the National Book Critics Prize for Criticism in 1990, as well as Le Prix Philosophie for “The Madonna of the Future.”

PAUL McCARTHY'S PIG ISLAND AT TRUSSARDI FOUNDATION

2010-05-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

Paul McCarthy
Pig Island, 2003–2010 (Detail)
Mixed media, 11 x 10 x 6 m
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

From May 20 to July 4, 2010, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents Pig Island, the first major solo show in an Italian institution by Paul McCarthy.

Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has invited the legendary American artist Paul McCarthy to conceive a project for Palazzo Citterio—one of the most extraordinary places in the city of Milan, located right in the city’s historical center on Via Brera, yet unknown to the public, as it has been closed for over 25 years. This exhibition will premiere the monumental masterpiece on which McCarthy has been working for over seven years: Pig Island. Paul McCarthy is a true contemporary master who has achieved a key role in art history over his decades-long career. Combining minimalism and performance, Walt Disney and George W. Bush, McCarthy has used the human body, with all its desires and taboos, to create a unique, irreverent, and satirical language that combines Pop Art with fairy tales, the nightmares of the daily news with universal archetypes. McCarthy’s videos, performances, installations and sculptures transport visitors to a universe that combines Hollywood glamour with the dark side of the American dream. Pirates, clowns, Santa Claus puppets, home-made avatars, and mutant monsters populate McCarthy’s theater. Ketchup bottles, cans of food, mechanized pigs and cast body parts pop up in his exhibitions like the remnants of some bad dream. McCarthy’s shows are conceived as giant theme parks that stage raving bacchanals. Like a circus ringmaster, McCarthy constructs exhibitions in which celebrities impersonators interpret deranged parodies of movies, or in which Mickey Mouse and Snow White are caught in bestial acts of regression. For the exhibition with Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Paul McCarthy presents one of his most complex and ambitious works, Pig Island, a giant sculpture that grew in the artist’s studio to fill over 100 square meters with a surreal anthology of the themes that have cropped up throughout his career. The installation Pig Island is a carnivalesque amusement park in which human beings behave like pigs. A treasure island in reverse, Pig Island is a sculptural shipwreck in which pirates and their heroines throw themselves with abandon into wild revels. The installation is a contemporary Raft of the Medusa: its characters can finally cast off their inhibitions and reveal their all-too-human nature. The piece—accompanied by a selection of McCarthy’s work from 1970 to 2010—is installed in one of the grandest examples of contemporary architecture in Milan: still completely hidden to the public, and left in a state of disrepair, this building will be unveiled for the first time on this occasion. With Pig Island, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi introduces the public to a new landmark space hidden away in the heart of the city; after the major solo shows by Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Darren Almond, Maurizio Cattelan, John Bock, Urs Fischer, Anri Sala, Paola Pivi, Martin Creed, Pawel Althamer, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Tino Sehgal and Tacita Dean, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is proud to present one of the most ambitious projects it has undertaken since its foundation in 2003, when it set out to explore historic sites in Milan and infuse them with new life through the visions of contemporary art. To help people discover all of its projects, the foundation has published the book What Good Is the Moon?, which presents brand-new articles, behind-the-scenes information, and texts by Beatrice Trussardi, Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, Stefano Boeri, Tiziano Scarpa, Catherine Wood and Hans Urlich Obrist, among others, along with artist interviews and in-depth historical investigations, in 368 pages with over 450 illustrations. What Good Is the Moon? is a fundamental tool for discovering contemporary art through the projects of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi.
Curated by: Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi

JUDGE DENIES ROBINS' INJUCTION AGAINST ZWIRNER

2010-05-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

In a decision filed 20 May, a federal judge has found that Craig Robins's claims against David Zwirner to prevent the sale of works by Dumas are "unwarranted."

A federal judge has denied Miami collector Craig Robins' claims against New York art dealer David Zwirner, alleging a breach of confidentially. In an order filed 20 May, Judge William H. Pauley III said that Robins’ application for a preliminary injunction to prevent the sale of three works by Dumas was unwarranted. In his decision, Judge Pauley also took the opportunity to deliver a harsh verdict on the art world: “This lawsuit offers an unflattering portrait of the art world—a realm of self-proclaimed royalty full of ‘blacklists’, ‘graylists’ and astonishing chicanery.”

Robins was suing Zwirner for $8m, after Zwirner told Dumas, whom he now represents, that he had sold her 1994 painting Reinhardt’s Daughter on Robins’ behalf. Robins filed suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on 29 March. As well the alleged breach of confidentiality, Robins alleged that the disclosure landed him on a “blacklist” by Dumas, precluding him from buying her works on the primary market. He also says that, to avoid a lawsuit in 2005 when he first found out about the blacklist, Zwirner promised him “first choice, after museums, to purchase one or more [primary market] Marlene Dumas works”. Last month, fellow dealer Jack Tilton testified in support of Robins’ claims that Zwirner had agreed to keep quiet about the sale, and his claims of the existence of a blacklist of collectors barred from having access to Dumas’ new work. According to court documents, Robins has been a major collector of the South African artist, owning 29 works, and was eager to acquire three paintings from her new exhibition at David Zwirner. Although the judge found that Robins has shown that he would suffer “irreparable harm” if Zwirner sold the three paintings elsewhere instead of offering them to Robins, he said that without written proof of either of the alleged oral agreements, enforcement is barred by the Statute of Frauds. According to the decision, “Original works of art are within the small category of intrinsically unique goods for which a specific performance remedy is appropriate… The three Dumas paintings are unique works of art. Thus, if a breach of contract has occurred, a damages remedy would be inadequate to make Robins whole. Dumas rarely makes her work available in the Primary Market. Moreover, the exhibition paintings related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Dumas, scenes of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem are thematically exceptional and in a subject area she is unlikely to soon revisit. If one of these paintings is sold, Robins will have no recourse to obtain a substitute.” But according to the judge, the alleged confidentially agreement is void under the Statute of Frauds because it “was intended to last for ‘an unlimited duration’. Since the agreement was premised on Dumas never learning that Robins had sold Reinhardt’s Daughter, the confidentially agreement could not be fully performed within one year”, the time limit for an oral contract. “Indeed, the only way the [agreement] could terminate…was if Zwirner breached the agreement,” the judge wrote, showing how the oral contract could create a double bind.

The gallery agreement giving Robins right of first refusal is similarly barred under the Statute of Frauds. “The three Dumas paintings are each priced over $1 million, and Plaintiff has not come forward with any writing signed by Zwirner promising to sell the paintings to Robins. Absent a writing signed by Zwirner, enforcement of the oral gallery agreement is barred.” The judge went on to explain that “as an alternative ground for recovery”, Robins attempted to stop Zwirner from “reneging on his promise to sell the three Dumas paintings” under a legal doctrine known as “promissory estoppel”. In order to succeed, Robins needed to show: “(1) a clear and unambiguous promise, (2) reasonable and foreseeable reliance by the party to whom the promise was made and (3) an injury to the party whom the promise was made by reason of the reliance. When promissory estoppel is interjected to overcome a valid Statute of Frauds defense, it ‘has been strictly construed to apply only in those rare cases where “the circumstances [are] such as to render it unconscionable to deny the oral promise upon which the promisee has relied”’.” “Because Robins alleges no injuries sufficiently severe to be ‘unconscionable’, he is unlikely to succeed on estoppel grounds,” wrote the judge. “Here, any injuries Robins suffers are within the realm one would reasonably expect from the non-performance of a sales contract—Robins does not own the artworks promised to him. Moreover, when Robins sold Reinhardt’s Daughter, he was aware Dumas might learn of the transaction and ban him from purchasing in the Primary Market. Indeed, it was for that reason that he sought the confidentiality agreement.” Judge Pauley went on to say that “the standard of ‘unconscionability’ cannot be judged solely based on Plaintiff’s personal tastes. Because Robins has not shown an unexpected and serious injury flowing from the breach of Zwirner’s promises, has been able to purchase Dumas art, and has been offered another painting form the exhibition by Zwirner, he is unlikely to show an unconscionable injury. Accordingly, a preliminary injunction … is not warranted.” The judge also addressed Robins fraud claims against Zwirner, which he says “amount to nothing more than a reiteration of his contract claims with words like ‘purposefully’ and ‘induced’ sprinkled in.” According to his decision: “While Robins alleges ‘wanton dishonestly’ on Zwirner’s part…[he] does not allege any special duty owed by Zwirner, and … he suffered no special damages from Zwirner’s misdeed. Further, given that Zwirner did not even represent Dumas in 2005, and was himself on the Dumas blacklist, it is difficult to conceive how Zwirner intended to violate his agreements with Robins.” In the end, Judge Pauley offered Robins and all collectors the ancient advice of “buyer beware” and “get it in writing”. And he reserved his most severe judgement on the murky dealings of the art world in general. “As the facts of this case make clear, some in the art world desire a market that is neither open nor honest. Thus, collectors in this seemingly refined bazaar should heed the admonition ‘caveat emptor’ and be mindful of the Statute of Frauds.”

Neither Robins nor Zwirner were available to comment when approached immediately following the decision.

By Helen Stoilas and Marisa Mazria Katz

The Art Newspaper

COLLECTOR PETER BRANT'S NEW URS FISCHER SHOW

2010-05-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

Urs Fischer "Abstract Slavery"

Peter Brant has given Swiss artist Urs Fischer the run of his bucolic Greenwich, Connecticut-based Brant Foundation Art Study Center, resulting in an irreverent, cunning portrait of the collector. Using wallpaper and wax, Fischer raises poignant questions about mortality, reproduction and the very nature of art accumulation. Brant’s reputation as a longtime collector is well known, but there is still something startling about seeing a two dimensional likeness of his home, filled with so many expensive artworks, reduced to flat copies. The wallpaper piece, which reproduces Brant’s Warhols and Lichtensteins, alongside shelves arrayed with art books, family photos and silver polo trophies, is pointedly titled “Abstract Slavery.” To further the point, Brant’s waxy likeness, a life-size human candle, melts amid the material trophies. There has been no credible explanation from anyone involved about the show’s ironic Oscar the Grouch title. Oscar is the squat green Muppet best known for his compulsive hoarding of trash!

FACTUALITY #9

2010-05-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

At the end of this weeks contemporary art sales in New York Christie’s pulled in an impressive $231.9 million and Sotheby’s $189.9 million, each house selling 94 percent of their lots—by all appearances two controlled, confident sales. Christie’s total was more than triple their fall auctions; Sotheby’s more than quadrupled its results from last May. Sales especially “paid off” for living artists, with Cattelan, Brice Marden, Richard Tuttle, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly achieving new records at Sotheby’s; Johns, Mark Tansey, Lee Bontecou, and Christopher Wool setting records at Christie’s. “While the Euro may be falling, America is clearly in recovery,” Christie’s Amy Cappellazzo said after Tuesday’s sale.

CNET FOUNDER SELL'S $21.1M of ART TO PAY CREDITIORS

2010-05-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

A painting of a blue-eyed nurse by Richard Prince and an aluminum couch by Marc Newson were among the artworks sold by Halsey Minor that helped the CNET Networks Inc. founder raise $21.1 million to pay his creditors. His collection accounted for just 22 of the 74 lots offered at a contemporary art-and-design auction last night held by Phillips de Pury & Co. in New York, yet they took in more than half of the $37.9 million total, and were the highlight of the evening. Prince’s 69-inch-tall “Nurse in Hollywood #4,” the 2004 canvas depicting a Grace Kelly look-alike, fetched $6.5 million, against a presale high estimate of $7 million. Another highlight from Minor’s collection was the prototype 1988 “Lockheed Lounge” by Newson which fetched $2.1 million, up from the high estimate of $1.5 million. In 2006, the curvy, white-footed recliner sold for $968,000 at Sotheby’s New York. Minor’s paintings by Ed Ruscha also did well. The artist’s depiction of a red-and-yellow feathered bird, “Angry Because It’s Plaster, Not Milk” (1965) fetched $3.2 million, up from high estimate of $3 million.
The auction houses charges buyers 25 percent of the hammer price up to $50,000, plus 20 percent from $50,000 to $1 million, plus 12 percent above $1 million. Estimates don’t include fees.
The two weeks of impressionist, modern postwar-art and contemporary-art sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s tallied $1.1 billion, up from $415.4 million in the same period last year.

ART WORLD GOES GREEN

2010-05-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

At Sotheby’s tonight all eyes were on a 1986 painting by Andy Warhol, “Self Portrait,” which sold for $32.6 million, more than twice its $15 million high estimate. The seller was Tom Ford, the fashion designer, movie director and collector; the buyer, one of six bidders by telephone.

One of Mark Rothko’s untitled abstract red canvases, this one from 1961, also went for a high price: $31.4 million, also to a telephone bidder. The painting was estimated to bring $18 million to $25 million. David Martinez, a Mexican financier, was the seller. Marguerite Hoffman, a prominent Dallas art collector, filed suit this week against Mexican financier David Martinez for failing to keep her 2007 sale of a star Mark Rothko painting a secret.

JOHN'S FLAG SETS RECORD

2010-05-11T19:14:00.000-07:00

A Jasper Johns painting of an American flag from the estate of writer Michael Crichton sold for a record $28.6 million tonight at Christie’s International in New York. The work titled “Flag,” created between 1960 and 1966 with wax encaustic and newspaper, was expected to sell for as much as $15 million.

Christopher Wool's brash painting FOOL painted in 1990 realized $5,010,500! Both prices include the buyers premium. Art world insiders expected the prices to go ballistic tonight, and they did!!

Everything's gonna be alright mother

2010-05-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

Daniel Josefsohn
The Jewing Gun – IDF Soldiers in Israel, 2009

Daniel Josefsohn
Everything's gonna be alright mother
Kunstverein Hamburg
1 May – 30 May 2010

Blurring the borders between art, design and fashion photography, Daniel Josefsohn's works capture the spirit of a generation that playfully mixes media and styles creating a very individual language for its environment and way of life. Whether the subject is right-wing extremism in Germany or the Middle East conflict, Josefsohn invariably finds unusual motifs and unsettling scenes. His series "Jewing Gun" portrays young Israeli soldiers. The photographs are characterized by the contrasts between military uniforms and small accessories like sunglasses, which make the whole series resemble a fashion spread for a magazine. In fact, what the accessories actually do is show the hue of personality the soldiers have tried to bring to their regulation clothing. Josefsohn does not capture his subjects like an impartial bystander, but as a highly conscious observer who eschews the repetitive stereotypes we so often see in the media. Daniel Josefsohn was born in 1961 and currently lives in Berlin. Since 1995 he has been working as a freelance photographer for numerous magazines. He first came to public attention with a series of black-and-white portraits of youngsters, which he took for an MTV campaign. The first institutional solo exhibition at Kunstverein Hamburg presents a wide range of his works.

Picasso Nude Fetches Record $106.5 Million at Christie's N.Y.

2010-05-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

Pablo Picasso’s 1932 lilac-hued oil painting of his young mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, sold for a record $106.5 million in New York last night, hours after the U.S. stock market had its biggest drop since February. “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” featuring the artist’s profile hovering over a reclining Walter and against a blue backdrop with philodendron leaves, is the most paid for an artwork at auction. It went to an unidentified phone buyer who beat seven rivals after a nine-minute bidding war. The price exceeds host Christie’s International’s own presale estimate of between $70 million to $90 million for the painting. “Masterpieces are recession proof,” said New York dealer Guy Bennett, in an interview. Picasso’s paintings of Walter are some of his most-coveted because of their size and expressiveness, among other qualities. The record price for this painting is a positive start to the city’s spring art auctions over the next two weeks that may fetch a combined $1.2 billion. The five-foot tall painting exceeded the previous record for artwork at auction: $104.2 million set at Sotheby’s in New York in 2004, for a 1905 Picasso painting, “Garcon a la Pipe.” And it beat the 65 million pounds, or $103.4 million, for Giacometti’s “Walking Man I” set in February in London. “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” came from the estate of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Brody, who died last year at the age of 93. She bought it in 1950 for $17,000 at New York’s Paul Rosenberg and Co., according to Conor Jordan, head of Christie’s Impressionist and modern art department in New York. Christie’s auction yesterday tallied $335.5 million, the company’s biggest sale since November 2007. The 69 lots on offer had been estimated to fetch $262.8 million to $368.3 million. All 27 lots from the Brody estate found buyers, totaling $224.2 million. A portion of the proceeds go to the non-profit Huntington of San Marino, California, which has a library, art collection and botanical gardens.

BASQUIAT AT FONDATION BEYELER

2010-05-01T07:03:00.000-07:00

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Untitled (1982)
Private collection, courtesy Tony Shafrazi Gallery
© 2009 Jean-Michel Basquiat / ProLitteris, Zurich

May 9 to September 5, 2010

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 –1988) was one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities in the art world. After starting on the New York underground scene as a graffiti sprayer, musician and actor, he began to devote himself to painting at nineteen. His highly expressive, energetic work soon found wide admiration. Supported by Andy Warhol, he advanced to become an internationally acclaimed star. He was the youngest Documenta participant ever, and exhibited at Art Basel, the Venice Biennale, and various famous galleries. The son of immigrants from the Caribbean, Basquiat became the first black artist to make a highlevel breakthrough. He collaborated with Keith Haring, Francisco Clemente, Debbie Harry, and many other stars. In the space of only eight years, he created an extensive oeuvre of about 1000 paintings and 2000 drawings before his tragic death at the age of only twenty-seven. To mark his fiftieth birthday, the Fondation Beyeler is devoting a large retrospective to Jean-Michel Basquiat, comprising more than 100 paintings, works on paper, and objects from renowned museums and private collections around the world. His works, populated by comic-like figures, skeletal silhouettes, curious everyday objects, and poetic slogans, are highly colorful and powerful. They blend pop culture and cultural history into critical and ironic commentaries on consumer society and social injustice. The exhibition brings together many of Basquiat’s major works and illustrates the development of this legendary art scene star. The exhibition catalogue, published in a German and English edition by Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart contains essays by Dieter Buchhart (exhibition curator with Samuel Keller), Glenn O’Brien, and Robert Storr, and an interview with Basquiat by Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis, previously published only as a video film (1985), 244 pages, 334 illustrations, CHF 68.

ART'S IMMORTAL ROCK STAR

2010-04-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

The Intimate Documentary "Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child"

Forever remembered as one of the art world’s brightest—and fastest burning—stars, Jean-Michel Basquiat began his meteoric rise to fame in the late 70s, when he ran away from home to live on the streets of New York. Branding himself as a graffiti artist under the mysterious moniker “SAMO©” (a portmanteau of “Same Old”), he soon attracted the city’s counter-cultural royalty, collecting friends such as Debbie Harry, Keith Haring, Glenn O’Brien and Andy Warhol, before turning to painting and storming galleries in New York and Los Angeles with his brightly hued, neo-expressionist works. Basquiat produced thousands of artworks in his short life, dashing off his poetry-infused canvases at a hair-raising pace, but footage of the artist himself has been hard to come by since his death in 1988. Director Tamra Davis, who met and befriended Basquiat when he visited LA to exhibit at the Gagosian gallery in 1983, was one of few to document the artist during his lifetime. Profoundly affected by his death, Davis hid her reels for two decades. But in 2005, prompted by a friend working on MOCA’s Basquiat retrospective of that year, Davis returned to her 80s footage to create a short, 20-minute tribute to the artist. “Everybody at the museum flipped out because the footage I had was incredibly rare,” she says. “They said, ‘This is so important! You can’t just keep it in your closet––you have to show this film.” So Davis developed the short into a feature-length documentary with Arthouse Films, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, seeking out Basquiat’s contemporaries, friends and admirers, from his longtime girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk to artist Julian Schnabel and early hip-hop maestro Fab Five Freddy. The film documents Basquiat's transformation from slouching street kid into international art world darling, accompanied by graphic animations by artist Shepard Fairey and a soundtrack from Beastie Boys Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond and Manhattan-based composer J. Ralph. Today’s clip is an exclusive preview of the film, which in association with NOWNESS, had its New York premiere at MoMA during the Tribeca Film Festival.

SAVE THE DATE: MAY 23, 2010

2010-04-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

"Greater New York 2010" at P.S.1

May 23, 2010 - October 18, 2010

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY

Greater New York, the third iteration of the quintennial exhibition organized by MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art, showcasing some 68 artists and collectives living and working in the metropolitan New York area, will open at MoMA PS1 on May 23 and run through October 18, 2010. The 2010 exhibition will not only present recent work made within the past five years, but also will foster a productive workshop where artists will be invited to experiment with new ideas within MoMA PS1's building for the duration of the exhibition. Greater New York is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art; Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art; and Neville Wakefield, MoMA PS1 Senior Curatorial Advisor. Covering a full range of practices and mediums, the artists in Greater New Yorkare inspired by living in one of the most diverse and provocative centers of cultural activity in the world. The exhibition centers largely on the process of creation and the generative nature of the artist's studio and practice. A number of artists are being commissioned to work in residence in MoMA PS1's gallery space to shoot photographs and video, rehearse and realize performances, and stretch the notions of sculpture, painting, photography, film, and video-making. The Greater New York 2010 curators selected artists through studio visits, review of recommendations, mailed submissions, and through Studio Visit, a new initiative on www.MoMAPS1.org that invites artists to present their artwork and studios online. Over 750 Studio Visit submissions were reviewed by the curatorial team.

For more information and a list of artists please visit http://www.barbarabalkin.com and select "SEE"

ANOTHER VICTIM

2010-04-28T16:15:00.000-07:00

Art fabricator Carlson & Co., which gained fame by producing Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel “Balloon Dog,” is closing. Company founder Peter Carlson said it will be filing something “akin” to bankruptcy.
“The economic climate contributed very much to the condition we find ourselves in,” Carlson said in a phone interview. The company, based in San Fernando, California, was founded in 1971. It became one of the best-known resources for artists seeking to produce complicated, large-scale and frequently costly artworks. The firm fabricated some of the most technically challenging artworks created during the six-year rise of contemporary art prices which began in 2002. Besides Koons, Carlson was the producer of choice for dozens of top contemporary artists, including Doug Aiken, John McCracken and Charles Ray. The company probably won’t finish a number of projects. “Our ability to complete projects is limited,” Carlson said. The use of high-end fabricators like Carlson became increasingly popular in the past decade as billionaire art collectors hunted for pricey large-scale artworks to fill private museums and foundations. Carlson’s reputation rose along with the contemporary art market. The company was featured in a profile in the New York Times in 2007, the same year Artforum magazine devoted an issue to “The Art of Production.” At the time, the company was engrossed in solving Koons’s latest puzzle: the construction of a 70-foot-long replica of a 1943 steam locomotive, designed to dangle from a crane, outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The work was estimated to cost $25 million, according to the Times article. Peter Carlson is quoted comparing the Koons train to the scale of “major industrial pieces, like the Eiffel Tower.” The project is “still in the feasibility study phase,” said LACMA spokeswoman, Barbara Pflaumer.

"EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP"

2010-04-17T07:20:00.000-07:00

A still from "Exit Through the Gift Shop."

No, it's not a hoax -- but the British street artist's hilarious documentary is a head-spinning, wild ride. Sincerity always poses problems for the news media. Maybe the press has professionally inoculated itself with a vigorous blend of skepticism and cynicism, and maybe it's just grown ever more fearful of being punked by pranksters, celebrities and presidents. One can only wish the New York Times had viewed the Bush administration's call to war with half the caution with which it has approached "Exit Through the Gift Shop," the new documentary made (or presided over, or something) by the mysterious British street artist Banksy. Commentators for the Times, National Public Radio and elsewhere have become hypnotized by the question of whether this fascinating and often exciting film about the global rise of guerrilla art, Banksy's own career as a provocateur and the genesis of a sub-Banksy pop artist called Mr. Brainwash might itself be some kind of meta-fictional Banksy prank. I felt some of the same anxiety after first seeing "Exit Through the Gift Shop" a few months ago at Sundance, but I now think that reaction dramatically misses the point of the film. Banksy offers a heady and hilarious voyage through the underworld of contemporary art that poses all kinds of puzzlers about the role, meaning and context of allegedly subversive art in a consumer society. "Exit Through the Gift Shop" is of a piece with Banksy's murals and installations -- bending a London phone booth in half, hanging his own "Old Master" painting in the Tate Gallery, planting a dummy wearing an orange Gitmo jumpsuit within a Disneyland ride -- in many ways. It's both a work of art and a process, in which the subject and object of creation seem to trade places. It's meant to shift your perspective, both subtly and dramatically, no matter where you stand on the value of guerrilla art like Banksy's. Moreover, it's both a documentary that captures Banksy practicing his daring craft and an elaborate joke at his own expense that depicts him in an unexpected light. Narrated by Rhys Ifans in plummy, mock-BBC tones, "Exit Through the Gift Shop" begins as a story about would-be filmmaker Thierry Guetta, a strange little French émigré who ran a vintage clothing store in Los Angeles and whose cousin was the Paris graffiti artist known as Space Invader. (You can guess what his stencils look like.) Guetta began compulsively documenting his cousin's work with a video camera, and then moved on to other prominent street artists, including Shepard Fairey -- now famous for his iconic Obama images -- and finally, after a great deal of patience and detective work, the notoriously elusive Banksy. (According to his Wikipedia entry, Banksy is originally from Bristol, in southern England, and is about 35. His stencil work began to appear on the streets of Bristol and London around 2000.) But after Banksy and Guetta start hanging out, a peculiar exchange follows: The artist becomes the director, and the filmmaker becomes his subject. Banksy, who is seen in the film delivering wry expositions -- severely backlit, in a hoodie, with his voice masked -- came to realize that Guetta was unable or unwilling to make a coherent film out of all his footage, and took over the project himself. Encouraged by Banksy to put down the camera and create his own art, Guetta transformed himself into Mr. Brainwash -- at best, a miscellaneous repurposer of pop-culture images already adopted by other artists -- and succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. This film has many levels, but in no sense is it insincere, or an attempt to trick you. If anything, it's a rueful, comic exploration of what happens when artists like Banksy and Fairey, who have set themselves up as subversive opponents of the pretentious, big-money art establishment, see their own weapons used against them. Despite their rebel status, Banksy and Fairey are forthright about clinging to relatively old-fashioned ideas about artistic craft, training and vision. Somebody like Guetta, who lacks any art education or knowledge of art history, and whose aesthetic is mainlined from every prominent pop or street artist since Andy Warhol, threatens to undermine their entire raison d'être. To put it more directly: They're good and he isn't, but a whole lot of people apparently can't tell the difference. Banksy himself seems relaxed and even jovial about this. He has said he doesn't want to extend his own artistic career beyond its point of social or political usefulness, and the ultimate lesson of "Exit Through the Gift Shop" is exactly what its title implies -- that all the best ideas of all the most brilliant artists are ultimately rendered into more crap for sale. As Banksy's London dealer muses late in the film, on the subject of Mr. Brainwash: "Good for Thierry if he can pull it off. At the same time, the joke's on ... well, I'm not sure who the joke's on. I'm not even sure there is a joke."
Andrew O'Hehir
Salon.com

"Exit Through the Gift Shop" is now playing in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It opens April 23 in Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle; April 30 in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, San Diego and Washington; May 7 in Indianapolis and Toronto; and May 21 in Austin, Texas, with other cities to be announced.

"RED" BY JOHN LOGAN

2010-04-15T18:58:00.000-07:00

Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne in “Red.” Photograph by Steve Pyke.

Mark Rothko’s life was a series of abdications: from Russia, when he was ten; from his father, who died six months after arriving in Portland, Oregon; from Yale, after two years; and from life itself, when he committed suicide, on February 25, 1970. A fractious, hard-drinking, unhealthy, and unhappy soul, Rothko was a gourmand of his griefs. By contrast, his large, luminous abstract canvases—spectacles of subtraction of all subject matter, including the self—turned abdication into an art form. Rothko was the first to paint “empty” pictures. His blocks of floating iridescence were the public answer to Action painting; privately, they were also a kind of vanishing act. At a party where Expressionism was being discussed, Rothko leaned over to the art critic Harold Rosenberg and whispered, “I don’t express myself in my paintings; I express my not-self.” In John Logan’s “Red” (elegantly directed by Michael Grandage, at the Golden), Rothko (Alfred Molina) is onstage twenty minutes before the play begins. He’s in his studio, a vast cave of consciousness that, subtly designed by Christopher Oram, also suggests a sanctuary. Rothko sits in a blue wooden chair with his back to us, surrounded by unfinished canvases that are propped against the high, dingy walls; he is studying one of five huge murals that he’s been commissioned to do for the new Seagram Building. His first gesture, once the play begins, is to walk up to the painting and feel the canvas with the flat of his hand. Rothko is already well inside the painting; the success of Logan’s smart, eloquent entertainment is to bring us in there with him. For a month in 1949, Rothko went to the Museum of Modern Art to stand in front of Matisse’s “The Red Studio,” which the museum had newly acquired. Looking at it, he said, “you became that color, you became totally saturated with it.” Rothko turned his transcendental experience into an artistic strategy; his work demanded surrender to the physical sensation of color. “Compressing his feelings into a few zones of color,” Rosenberg wrote, “he was at once dramatist, actor, and audience of his self-negation.” Rothko escaped from the hell of personal chaos into the paradise of color. “To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience,” he said. “However, you paint the large picture, you are in it.” Logan’s theatrical conceit is to introduce an assistant into Rothko’s solitude, an aspiring painter named Ken (the excellent Eddie Redmayne). Over two years, between 1958 and 1960, he becomes Rothko’s student, gofer, whipping boy, and sounding board. In teaching Ken how to look at his art, Rothko indirectly teaches us. It’s an exciting education. Logan’s dialogue is a sleight of hand; behind its wallop is a lot of learning. “Nature doesn’t work for me,” Rothko says at one point. “The light’s no good.” The play then demonstrates the point. Ken switches on the overhead white fluorescent lights, which flatten the canvas and break the painting’s spell. “You see how it is with them? How vulnerable they are?” Rothko says after he’s returned the room to its crepuscular glow. “People think I’m controlling: controlling the light; controlling the height of the pictures; controlling the shape of the gallery. . . . It’s not controlling—it’s protecting.” Pontifical, obsessive, opinionated, vain, arrogant, and brilliant, Rothko had a sour wit. “How’s business?” he used to say to artist friends. Logan sometimes appropriates Rothko’s epigrams (“Silence is so accurate”), but his own idiom is well wrought and delightful. He doesn’t just tell; he also shows, at one point having Rothko collaborate with Ken in mixing paint and priming canvases. As classical music blasts from the record player, they slather the paint over the canvas, a balletic, two-minute explosion of activity that deftly conjures what most plays about artists don’t: the exhilaration of the act. As Rothko, the strapping Molina burns up the stage. Head shaved, striding across the studio with his barrel chest thrust forward, he is all feistiness and creative ferocity. Even in silence, he exudes a remarkable gravity. He also makes a gorgeous fuss. “I am here to stop your heart, you understand that?” he bellows at Ken, in one of their arguments about painting. “I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!” Is there any contemporary actor who can roar like Molina? His big torso is a boom box that turns his lacerating words into a force field. For instance, in a moment of inspiration, just as Rothko is about to wield his five-inch housepainter’s brush, Ken misguidedly answers a rhetorical question about what the painting needs: red, Ken suggests. “By what right do you speak? . . . Who the fuck are you? What have you done?” Rothko shouts, throwing packets of red paint at him in his fury. “You mean scarlet? You mean crimson? You mean plum-mulberry-magenta-burgundy-salmon-carmine-carnelian-coral? Anything but ‘red’! What is ‘red’?!” It’s a terrific moment, shrewdly conceived and terrifying to watch. Molina is withering and dangerous; his achievement is to suggest in Rothko’s obsession both the madness and the grandeur of a great artist playing for keeps. “Red” is built around a canard—that Rothko painted the murals for the Four Seasons restaurant, in the Seagram Building, which was still under construction when he accepted the rich commission. He didn’t. Rothko, who had strong feelings about the public display of his work—eight hundred of his paintings were unsold when he died—was under the impression that the murals would be displayed in the lobby of the prestigious new building. He “refused to deliver them when he learned that they would be placed not in the lobby but in an adjoining restaurant,” Rosenberg wrote. Nonetheless, it’s a good story and a good hook on which Logan hangs his scintillating discourse about Rothko and modern art. Rothko frequently refers to his paintings as tragic. In the shifting movement of red and black in the murals, Logan suggests Rothko’s encroaching darkness. “There’s only one thing I fear in life, my friend,” he says. “One day the black will swallow the red.” While the play hints at dark things to come, it doesn’t linger on them; Logan prefers to emphasize the manic bits of the painter’s depressed personality.
John Lahr
The New Yorker

Rothko’s Art Reflects Baltic Landscapes, Scars of Russian Youth

2010-04-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

On April 23, the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture will open the first exhibition of work by the abstract painter Mark Rothko held in Moscow. The event at the exhibition space run by Dasha Zhukova, Roman Abramovich’s partner, raises a question: How much was Rothko affected by the decade he spent in Russia? Of course, Rothko (1903-1970) was a U.S. citizen, and a leading member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters. He left Russian territory, never to return, in 1913 when he was 10. Yet there are reasons for thinking that Rothko’s art and imagination were deeply influenced by those early years. He was born Marcus Rothkowitz in the city of Dvinsk, which was then part of the czarist empire. It’s now the Latvian city of Daugavpils. His family was Jewish, but spoke Russian not Yiddish at home, a sign of their educated status. The culture at home was literary and liberal. Rothko recalled the family sitting shiva -- the Jewish mourning ritual -- when Tolstoy died in 1910. His older sister Sonia remembered that “we were very interested in literature, all of us.” They left behind a library of 300 books when they emigrated to the U.S. According to his friend Herbert Ferber, quoted in James Breslin’s biography, Rothko was “very strongly interested” in his “Russian background.” The stories he told about those early years were often dark. Rothko had a scar on his nose that he said was caused by the slash of a Cossack whip while he was being carried as an infant. Several times Rothko described hearing relatives talking about a massacre -- where and when he wasn’t sure -- in which Cossacks forced Jewish villagers to dig a mass grave for themselves in the woods. Rothko said that he’d been haunted by the image of that grave and was sure it had found its way into his paintings. His friends suspected this memory to be a fantasy, and no such incident seems to be recorded. True or not, Rothko, “a high-strung, noticeably sensitive child,” according to his brother Moise, grew up in an atmosphere of menace. There were no pogroms in Dvinsk, but there were Cossacks, anti-Semitic prejudice and mounting political violence. That’s a possible source for the darkness in much of Rothko’s work. It’s the landscape, not the persecutions, of Dvinsk/Daugavpils that may have influenced his euphoric, light- filled abstractions of the late 1940s and early 1950s. It’s a place of forests and wide horizons on the Daugava River. The winters are long, dark and hard -- Rothko remembered skating to school -- and in midsummer the sun only sets for three hours a night. In a poem, he associated heaven with a light shining through mist. To a fellow painter, Robert Motherwell, Rothko extolled the “glorious” Russian sunsets of his childhood. On a personal note, a few years ago I sailed off the Baltic coast of Latvia in July. Each night there was a spectacular display of reds, pinks, gold and purples in the sky, for hour after hour. It recalled one painter above all: Mark Rothko. As is always the case with great art, the sources of Rothko’s painting are numerous, complex and ultimately mysterious. One point that’s often forgotten, though, is that he grew up in a Northern land, close to the latitudes of the midnight sun.
“Mark Rothko: Into an Unknown World” opens April 23 and runs through Aug. 14 at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow.
Martin Gayford
Bloomberg News

ALTERNATE REALITY

2010-04-13T19:03:00.000-07:00

Left: Work of Art host China Chow. Right: Work of Art mentor Simon de Pury with Work of Art judge Bill Powers.

WITH VERY FEW EXCEPTIONS—PBS’s Art:21 and the occasional British import—contemporary art is conspicuous by its absence from mainstream American TV. To some this might seem a rank injustice, but given the obvious pitfalls, it may equally represent a lucky escape. Arriving at the Paley Center for Media for a Wednesday evening preview of Bravo’s new reality series Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, I felt more trepidation than would have accompanied any insider event. How would the art world fare at the hands of producers who aimed to do for it, in the words of the cable channel’s Frances Berwick, “what we’ve done for fashion and food”? Would the featured artists (who are, of course, pitted against one another in the bankable manner of Project Runway, Top Chef, and RuPaul’s Drag Race) survive the presumed emphasis on pizzazz? And would the judges shed all credibility by association with this demotic form? Taking a seat (the crowd was split between journos and those who I took, by their relatively well-heeled appearance, to be industry types), I settled in for a screening of the hour-long first episode. Intimacy with the subject of such a program tends to make the viewer hypersensitive to the details of its construction, and such was the case here. Editing was staccato and manipulative, competitors seemed to have been chosen entirely for their looks (though the judges later denied this), and “reality” seemed very far away indeed as the familiar struggles of most artists were displaced by a hothouse fantasy of prestocked studios and Project Runway–style accommodations designed to spark rivalry from the get-go. The artists, competing for the mixed blessing of a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum (Artnet’s Walter Robinson later wondered how the show’s producers, Magical Elves, secured the venue—apparently they just asked), ran the gamut of stereotypes from untrained and overawed to world-weary and imperious, though most had their quirks. And while the majority were young and telegenic, there were one or two exceptions. The host was immaculate ’90s It Girl China Chow (additionally qualified for the role by having been “born into a family of collectors”); the “mentor” was auctioneer Simon de Pury (presumably Tobias Meyer had other commitments); and the judges were Jerry Saltz, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, and Bill Powers, fashion-forward proprietor of Half Gallery. Contributing a bit of real star power, executive producer Sarah Jessica Parker also made a brief appearance. As the competition’s first challenge—the artists were paired off and asked to make portraits of each other—rattled toward its conclusion (the usual dramatic “voting-off” shenanigans), I found myself paying less and less attention to the (overwhelmingly dire) work and more to compiling a list of sententious quotes: “Wall power, that’s what you want” (de Pury); “To you, it’s a portrait, but to no one else will it ever be a portrait” (Saltz); “I’m getting falling leaves, is what I’m getting off this” (Powers), and the definitive “There’s no excuse for a bad painting” (Saltz again). Also good for a laugh were token tough guy Erik Johnson asking de Pury—to bemused reaction—if he fancied hitting a strip club after the show; senior feminist Judith Braun clashing with junior sexpot Jaclyn Santos; and Chow’s chilling dismissal of the show’s first loser: “It’s been said that good art isn’t what it looks like but what it makes us feel. Your art didn’t make us feel anything.” Ouch. The Q&A that followed—host and judges, along with SJP and co-producer Dan Cutforth, were all present—was good-natured, perhaps because most questions came from TV folk astonished that a show about art could be anything other than “stuffy” (initially misheard by Saltz as “scuzzy”). Accessibility was stressed again and again, but while it would be po-faced indeed to ignore the show’s more amusing interactions, it was hard to avoid feeling that some valuable middle ground between fusty and trashy was being overlooked. And when the panelists were asked whether they had managed to find “the next great artist,” I think we can take that long, awkward pause—Saltz’s shit-stirring claim “I saw artists here that were better than artists in the Whitney Biennial” notwithstanding—as a probably not. Oh well. The tribe has spoken.

Michael Wilson
Artforum

ROBINS V. ZWIRNER LAWSUIT

2010-04-12T19:12:00.000-07:00

Dealer David Zwirner has fired back in the lawsuit against him by one of America’s better-known art collectors. In papers filed last Monday in the Southern District Court of New York, he charged that he never made or violated a “first dibs” promise or one of confidentiality in a prominent art sale. His response further raises the question of whether the collector was essentially speculating on art, flipping it for profit and as a tax-break strategy. The lawsuit, Robins v. Zwirner et al., goes to the heart of the intricate workings of the art world in recent years. Whichever side wins, it throws a spotlight on the growth of a stratified collector caste system, the rise in the practice of flipping art for profit, the development of sophisticated tax strategies to aid in art trading—and the widespread inability of any art-worlder to keep their mouth shut for long. Lawsuits are rare in the art world, or at least they used to be. In recent months, however, there have been a spate of them. Lawyers, collectors and dealers say a couple of factors have come together to make it more tempting to sue: The boom in art prices has made art worth going to court over, and commonly sent emails create a paper trail that can make litigation easier. But most of all, the rising tide of lawsuits is about the recession. In boom times, “you figure it will all even out on the next deal,” said one art attorney. “But when times get tight, you go to court.” it’s a mark of the times. Craig Robins, the well-known Miami real estate developer, is charging in his lawsuit that he sold a painting by noted South African artist Marlene Dumas in 2004, with Mr. Zwirner brokering the deal. Mr. Zwirner paid him in both cash and other artworks, in what’s called a like-kind transaction in the Internal Revenue Code. Mr. Zwirner agreed to keep the sale confidential, according to the suit, because the sale would be something of an affront to the artist and might prevent Mr. Robins from gaining access to her other works. Then, Mr. Robins charges, Mr. Zwirner gossiped, and gossiped with a motive. He told Ms. Dumas of the sale. Not long after, Mr. Zwirner became Ms. Dumas’s primary representative, a coup for the art dealer, as she had a 2008 retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art, among other achievements. Meanwhile, Ms. Dumas, Mr Robins said, does not want to sell him any more paintings, even though, with six to eight of her paintings in his collection, and many more drawings, he is one of her primary collectors. Further, Mr. Zwirner had agreed to put him at the top of the waiting list for her works, and did not honor that promise, he said. Mr. Zwirner declined to comment; a spokesman for the gallery said “there is no evidence to support” Mr. Robins’ claim—and there doesn’t seem to be much of a paper trail either to confirm that a legal contract existed, which Mr. Robins said he has a witness to, or to support the implication that Mr. Robins is collecting for profit. Indeed, Mr. Zwirner’s response to the suit, filed last Monday, raises the issue of “art speculation” and notes “Ms. Dumas does not want collectors to speculate in her works or flip them for profits’ sake.” He also essentially argues, somewhat surprisingly, that while confidentially is assumed during an art-world transaction, it does not extend beyond it. Mr. Robins counters that he is not a speculator. “In nearly 30 years of collecting over 1,000 works of art, I have sold perhaps 50 of them—and I have never been in a legal dispute with a gallery or over a work of art, until now.”

MALCOLM MCLAREN DIES: 1946-2010

2010-04-08T17:16:00.000-07:00

“Stealing things is a glorious occupation, particularly in the art world.”
Malcolm McLaren

Malcolm McLaren, who has died from cancer at age 64, came to public attention in 1976 as the manager of the Sex Pistols, the punk band which he steered to fame and notoriety before their implosion barely two years later. McLaren is considered the godfather of punk and first made his name in 1971 when he opened a fashion boutique on the Kings Road in Chelsea with his partner, the designer Vivienne Westwood. With his unerring eye for publicity, he renamed the shop Sex. In 1975, he spotted a young punk called John Lydon who regularly hung around outside the shop. McLaren signed him up as the frontman of the fledging punk band he managed and the Sex Pistols were born.
When the band released God Save The Queen during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, they became one of the most notorious acts in British music history. He once said: “I am a product of the Sixties. All I have ever felt is disruptive — I don’t know any other way.” McLaren always said punk was an attitude. "It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that. It turns out that the bankers may have been the biggest punks of all; they were making punk investments. I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules. It was one of my tutors at Saint Martins, when I was an art student, that really brought it home to me." He said that only by being willing to fail can you become fearless. He compared the role of an artist to that of being an alchemist or magician. And he thought the real magic was found in flamboyant, provocative failure rather than benign success. "There are two rules I've always tried to live by: turn left, if you're supposed to turn right; go through any door that you're not supposed to enter. It's the only way to fight your way through to any kind of authentic feeling in a world beset by fakery. I believe in ideas, not products. Any survivor of a Sixties art school will tell you that the idea of making a product was anathema. That meant commodification."

ARE YOU FEELING LUCKY PUNK?

CHINA CONTEMPORARY ART SOARS

2010-04-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

A painting by Liu Ye sold for HK$19.1 million ($2.5 million) at a Hong Kong auction, the most for a Chinese contemporary artist in two years, in a sign prices are returning to pre-credit-crisis levels.

Liu’s acrylic-and-oil “Bright Road,” showing a smiling couple with a flaming jet in the background, fetched an artist record. It was one of seven Chinese contemporary works that made $1 million or more at Sotheby’s sale, fueled by mainland and Indonesian money. During last year’s crisis, bidders passed on similar works offered at a third of yesterday’s prices. “Demand for the best Chinese contemporary artworks is back,” Eric Huang, a Taipei-based buyer and dealer, said in an interview at the auction. “Don’t be surprised to see prices match or even beat pre-crisis levels very soon.” Prices of top Chinese contemporary art fell 70 percent during the financial rout from the peak in May 2008 when Zeng Fanzhi’s painting of Red Guards fetched HK$75.4 million in Hong Kong.
Bloomberg News

JASPER JOHNS PAINTING "FLAG"

2010-04-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

A red, white and blue 1960-1966 Jasper Johns painting “Flag,” which once hung in Michael Crichton’s bedroom in Los Angeles, is estimated to fetch up to $15 million at Christie’s in New York on May 11. The 98 lots from the estate of the bestselling author and filmmaker are estimated to sell for as much as $75 million. Crichton, who wrote such jumbo thrillers as “Jurassic Park” died in 2008 at 66. Along with works by Picasso, David Hockney and Jeff Koons, the sale features Richard Prince, Andreas Gursky and Karen Kilimnik.

Bloomberg News

MIKE NELSON TO REPRESENT BRITAIN AT THE 2011 VENICE BIENNALE

2010-03-31T14:06:00.000-07:00

CY TWOMBLY "THE CEILING" AT MUSEE DU LOUVRE, PARIS

2010-03-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

A monumental ceiling by Cy Twombly for the Louvre opened March 25th in Paris. He is is the third contemporary artist invited to install a permanent work at the Louvre: a painted ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes. The permanent installation of 21st century works at the Louvre, the introduction of new elements in the décor and architecture of the palace, is the cornerstone of the museum's policy relating to contemporary art. This type of ambitious endeavor is in keeping with the history of the palace, which has served since its creation as an ideal architectural canvas for commissions of painted and sculpted decoration projects. Prior to Cy Twombly, the Louvre's commitment to living artists has resulted in invitations extended to Anselm Kiefer in 2007 and to François Morellet for an installation unveiled earlier in 2010, but these three artists also follow in the footsteps of a long line of predecessors including Le Brun, Delacroix, Ingres and, in the twentieth century, Georges Braque. Twombly's painting will be showcased on the ceiling of one of the Louvre's largest galleries, in one of the oldest sections of the museum. It is a work of monumental proportions, covering more than 400 square meters, its colossal size ably served by the painter's breathtaking and unprecedented vision. Twombly's two best-known trademarks are perhaps the incorporation of passionately scrawled words into his paintings and the energetic use of splashes or drips of vivid colors. In this work, Twombly leaves behind such romantic expressiveness. Here instead, the visitor discovers an immense blue sky, enlivened by the movements of spheres and punctuated by white insets inscribed with the names of the leading Greek sculptors active in the 4th century: Cephisodotus, Lysippus, Myron, Phidias, Polyclitus, Praxiteles and Scopas. Twombly's aim was to create a work perfectly in harmony with the architecture and purpose of the space, this huge rectangular gallery housing the Louvre's collection of Classical bronzes. Thus the round shapes can be interpreted as shields, planets, or coins, while the blue background evokes either the sky or the sea. Although certainly an American artist—Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928—he is thoroughly Mediterranean in spirit and has lived in Italy since 1959, making frequent trips to Greece over the years. All of Twombly's work finds inspiration in mythology, in the poetry and heroic figures of Antiquity. The Ceiling is the artist's second commission in France, following the curtain conceived for the Paris National Opera's new flagship theater at the Bastille in 1989. In 2001, Twombly received the prestigious "Golden Lion" award at the Venice Biennale. Commemorating the artist's 80th birthday in 2008, the Tate Modern presented a major retrospective of his work, an exhibition that would travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome later that same year and in 2009.

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present

2010-03-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

MOMA
March 14–May 31, 2010
Watch Marina Abramovic live on MoMA's webcam:
http://tinyurl.com/yztjeek

Marina Abramović. Portrait with Flowers. 2009. Black-and-white gelatin silver print; photo: Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović.

This performance retrospective traces the prolific career of Marina Abramović (Yugoslav, b. 1946) with approximately fifty works spanning over four decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). In an endeavor to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience, the exhibition includes the first live re-performances of Abramović’s works by other people ever to be undertaken in a museum setting. In addition, a new, original work performed by Abramović will mark the longest duration of time that she has performed a single solo piece. All performances, one of which involves viewer participation, will take place throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, starting before the Museum opens each day and continuing until after it closes, to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works. A chronological installation of Abramović’s work will be included in The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery on the sixth floor of the Museum, revealing different modes of representing, documenting, and exhibiting her ephemeral, time-based, and media-based works. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that includes an audio recording of the artist’s voice guiding the reader through the publication.

ONE MAN'S OPINION

2010-03-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

Peter Brant, Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Koons, Dakis Joannou at the New Museum opening.
Photo: Patrick McMullan

Last week, the New Museum opened its new show, "Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection," curated by mega-art-star Jeff Koons. This show has prompted a huge amount of controversy and suspicion, from The New York Times to The Village Voice, and all the blogs in between. Some journalists feel safe sounding prudish, cautious and wary of shows that are fraught with art market implications. Like it or not, there is no arguing the fact that some of the best contemporary collections have always been in private hands, and in my view, it's high time the public gets to see them. It is interesting to look at all the bad press and the barrage of criticism the New Museum has received and to use these views to expose some of the prejudices, mistaken assumptions and hypocrisy prevalent in much of the art world today. Most museums in this country are sponsored by private donations, and most shows include some component of private giving. Curators who need funding for a show will naturally go to the lenders, and they are expected to contribute to the expenses. After all, their paintings are hanging on the wall and getting prime exposure; shouldn't they help foot the bill? In the Contemporary Art world, this situation is both magnified and multiplied. We have witnessed an art market that has radically changed and accelerated in the past 10 years. Most museums do not allocate a sufficient budget, nor are their curatorial committees equipped to keep up with new artists and new prices. Curators and acquisition committees tend to act slowly and with prudence. This means that they are by nature bureaucratic: They choose late and pay slow. Neither of these attributes endears them to dealers who need to get paid and install the next show, or to artists who want money and need to move on in their career. That's why much of the best contemporary art ends up in private hands. A great collection requires an entrepreneurial mind-set, a risk-taker with vision and enough money to act quickly and seize opportunities. Additional thunder has been drained from the museums, with the galleries increasingly doing many of the best shows in town. There have been a number of claims that the New Museum has abused certain cozy relationships between its curators, certain dealers and certain artists. The litmus test is whether the shows were good-not who is friends with whom. The contemporary art world is a small place, and it is inevitable that curators are closer to some dealer programs than others. Collectors also tend to favor some galleries over others, but why this should prohibit a trustee from exhibiting his collection to the public makes little sense. It goes back to an idealistic and unrealistic assumption that rich people should sit on museum boards simply to provide money. The truth is, in America, once you accept someone's money, you accept the strings attached, you accept that curators need to keep the board happy, and keep the money flowing for everyone's best interest. The New Museum has reportedly said that Dakis is not underwriting the show. This position is a type of public-relations apology to assuage the anticipated criticism of insider dealing and self-promotion. But why feel guilty here? If Saatchi had paid for the "Sensation" show back in 1997, would that have made it better or worse? And today, who cares? There is nothing the matter with Dakis' financial support; it is helping a museum that needs it. The New Museum's policy specifically prohibits trustees lending a work of art if they are planning to sell it. Most museums do not like to hang things that are obviously for sale, but realistically, there is no way of knowing whether a lender will sell in the future. How is the public harmed in any way? The core assumption is that an individual is personally benefiting from a sale made in an institution that serves the public good. But if you put jealousies and sour grapes aside, who is harmed here? As long as the public gets a great show, there is no foul. Everyone in the contemporary art world has an opinion, which is why we are energized and enlightened by the art of our time. Can New York generously welcome this exciting collection and Jeff Koons' idiosyncratic viewpoints? So far, despite the bad press, the show has been packed. The New Museum had the courage to accept today's art world as it is, and to put on the show we've wanted to see for years. We should congratulate and encourage them to do it again and hope that other museums will follow their lead. As an audience, we want to see the best works, the best collections and the best shows, and we're not concerned with archaic rules of propriety or the paralyzing implications of critics' forensic art appraisals.
Adam Lindemann
excerpted from The New York Observer