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Anish in Paris

2011-05-03T05:56:00.001-07:00

Anish Kapoor has always thought big. But with a breakthrough installation set to debut this month at the Grand Palais, London's leading artist is going colossal

For someone who by his own admission is in the midst of completing one of the "greatest challenges" of his career, Anish Kapoor is remarkably calm and collected. He wanders through his labyrinthine South London studio—the same one he has inhabited for 24 years—stopping to inspect assistants and technicians at work on various large-scale installations. There's a team of men in white overalls and masks carving into a block of polystyrene. Elsewhere, Kapoor pauses to discuss the intricacies of building the 380-foot, bloodred spiraling steel tower that will be the centerpiece of next year's British Olympic Games. It's only when he walks into the studio's innermost sanctum, where he works alone, that Kapoor's chatty confidence shows a crack. Standing in front of a model of Paris's Grand Palais and the upcoming site of his most massive construction to date, he says, "I'm not a guy who's afraid of big—I love big—but this is big in so many ways."

The French Ministry of Culture and Communication has asked the Indian-born, British-based artist to create a temporary, site-specific installation inside the nave of the Grand Palais, a glass-domed hall unveiled at the 1900 Universal Exhibition. In this, he is following in the footsteps of Richard Serra and Anselm Kiefer, who transformed the structure in previous years.

There is monumental. And there is "Monumenta," as the series is called. Kapoor intends to erect four giant PVC orbs that, when inflated, will fill the height, length and width of the 145,000-square-foot hall. The piece will be a major departure for the artist, who works almost exclusively with solid, predominantly metal, constructions.

At 57, Kapoor is one of the greatest artists of his generation. Not only is he consistently bankable, with works that earn up to $4 million at auction and a roster of blue-chip collectors, he's also a major draw with museumgoers. His bio includes stops at the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2002, he filled the Tate Modern's colossal Turbine Hall with "Marsyas," a trumpet-shaped installation that attracted a staggering 1.85 million viewers, making it the single most popular exhibition that museum has ever held. And when the Royal Academy staged a retrospective of Kapoor's work in 2009, 275,000 people visited the show. To date, it remains the most successful exhibition by a living artist at the RA. "His work, which is abstract, conceptual and spiritual, can be translated across cultures," explains Barbara Gladstone, his New York gallerist of more than 25 years. It's also playfully engaging, nudging the viewers to step inside a strange, shiny space or sneak under a hulking, floating orb, as with Kapoor's "Cloud Gate," a 110-ton "jellybean" that resides in Chicago's Millennium Park.

Just as his art has a cathartic optimism, Kapoor is so boyishly charming in person that it's almost disarming. Chalk it up to his youthful mop of hair; a tendency to punctuate most sentences with a wide grin or a throaty laugh; his happy home life, which revolves around his art historian wife, Susanne, and their two teenage children, Alba and Ishan; or a balanced perspective on things that comes from daily meditation.

Each morning, after having breakfast with his family at their West London town house, so sleek in its design as to resemble a gallery, he hops into his car and drives to his studio. There, he's aided by a team of 15 assistants, computer technicians and engineers. Yet for all the complex building blocks, Kapoor begins each new project with a simple plywood model. Hovering over his rendering of the Grand Palais, which is about the size of a wine case, he explains his concept for "Monumenta": "In its most basic form, it's a giant balloon. From the inside it's an involuted form that I can only describe as being quite bodily once you are inside. But when you travel outside of it, once you are back in the space of the Grand Palais, I hope then the viewer has another encounter with the form and with the luminosity thrown down by the glass roof."

The six-week-long installation will be a homecoming of sorts for Kapoor. It marks the 31st anniversary of his first exhibit in Paris. That show was held at a studio owned by the artist Patrice Alexandre, and although it was only advertised through word of mouth, Kapoor still recalls with pride how his pigment-powdered abstract sculptures inspired by travels to India nearly sold out. When asked how it feels to return to the City of Light under much different circumstances, Kapoor looks down. "Oh, much the same," he says, smiling modestly. "You see, the thing is, what's success really when it comes to art? A nice table in a restaurant? A better seat on a plane? People being nice to you in front of your face? I've learned a lot of lessons over the years and I admit I've been ambitious, but I have to say the real lesson I have gleaned, the one that matters to me, is this." He gestures around his studio. "You can be as well known as you want; you get the awards, the acclaim. But if it's not happening here, within the studio, with the work, then that's that. Here is where it begins and ends. You have to remember that. Art is only what you create."

- By NATASHA GARNETT, The Wall Street Journal, April 28 2011

Wish Dream’s $1.9 Million Price Tag

2010-12-06T02:21:00.000-08:00

A Mumbai auction house has set the price tag for a painting by New Delhi artist Arpita Singh at 80 million to 100 million rupees (US$1.9 million to US$2.3 million).

The painting, “Wish Dream,” goes on the block at Saffronart’s winter auction Thursday. The auction house has 100 works by 43 modern and contemporary Indian artists for sale, but “Wish Dream” is its front-runner.

More than six meters tall and four meters wide, “Wish Dream” is Ms. Singh’s biggest painting and includes 16 panels. It is inspired by Buddhist monastic traditions and is strewn with flowers, numbers, fragments of text, aircraft and cars.

Her work has been shown at Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Asia Society in New York. Sotheby’s and Christie’s have sold her work since 2006, and in the autumn, her painting “Munna Apa’s Garden” fetched more than $500,000, an auction record for her work.

Born in 1937, Ms. Singh has been producing art for more than 40 years, much of it inspired by the private and public lives of women.

The size of “Wish Dream” has a bearing on the high estimate, said Nishad Avari, an editor at Saffronart.

“The artist is not likely to ever create anything of the same scale and detail again,” he said, “so it is a very significant piece in relation to the rest of her oeuvre.”

- Reenita Malhotra Hora, The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2010

Damascus Evolves Into a Hub of Mideast Art

2010-11-29T03:10:00.000-08:00

Maybe it was the sight of a television crew filming tuxedo-clad waiters as they maneuvered around the gallery with alcoholic drinks. Maybe it was the glimpse of the fashionable young woman in designer jeans and the ostentatious Fendi handbag. Or maybe it was simply the impressive canvases of colorful abstract paintings and the throng of well-dressed international admirers chatting in accented English.

Admiring the action, a 60-something visitor, who identified himself simply as “Sam from San Francisco,” smiled and remarked with disbelief, “This could be London or New York or Paris.” Then he flagged a waiter for a glass of Champagne.

In fact, the scene — an opening at the Ayyam Gallery for the artist Abdullah Murad — was not taking place in a Western capital of the avant-garde but quite the opposite: Damascus, the remote and ancient capital of Syria. And it was a scene that is becoming increasingly common as the city evolves from artistic backwater into a thriving hub of contemporary Middle Eastern painting.

Visitor disbelief is understandable. As the world’s oldest continuously inhabited metropolis, Damascus has long been famous for its ancient appeals rather than contemporary creations: Roman ruins, medieval mosques, Ottoman-period minipalaces, Christian and Islamic lore. The graves of both John the Baptist and the martyr Hussein, grandson of Mohammed, are in the Umayyad Mosque here.

For a long time, the torch of Syrian contemporary art was carried primarily by pioneers like Mustafa Ali, the sculptor whose ramshackle courtyard mansion showcases his moody faces in wood and bronze, and Mona Atassi, the irrepressible director of the Atassi Gallery.

But as the international art world has turned its spotlight on the Middle Eastern market in recent years — Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonham’s have established regional headquarters in Dubai — the art scenes in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan have flourished.

Galleries with international ambitions have sprouted to recruit and exhibit local talents. Artists’ profiles have steadily surged, to say nothing of their prices. The only major restriction is that artists must be careful to avoid political subjects in this police state. “No one dares” critique the government, one gallery employee whispered.

The Ayyam Gallery has led the charge. It was started by Khaled Samawi, who abandoned a successful banking career in Switzerland to open the gallery in 2006. With his wife and partner, Jouhayna, he has signed up top locals like Safwan Dahoul, who does a Middle Eastern take on Art Deco, and has opened branches in Dubai, Beirut and Cairo. Ayyam also takes part in fairs in Miami, New York, Paris and beyond.

“It’s the European concept of a gallery,” Ms. Samawi said. “We take an artist and go all the way with him. We have a lot of potential here in Syria, a lot of good artists. We just need to put them on the map.”

The efforts appear to be paying off. International institutions and collectors have visited for closer looks, she said. “We had some visits from people at the Guggenheim. The Tate came also. Here, to Damascus. Can you imagine?”

A few blocks away, the gallery Tajalliyat has emerged as another top talent incubator since opening last year. On a balmy afternoon the staff was preparing for a show by the Syrian painter Fares Garabet. A dark canvas hung on one wall; it was divided into rectangular panels of gauzy images that recall the Shroud of Turin.

The gallery’s marquee artist is the late Fateh Moudarres, a pioneering 20th-century expressionist and surrealist whom the gallery’s co-owner, Edward el-Shaer, began collecting decades ago.

“When I started my first gallery, in 1985, nobody was interested in art and I couldn’t make any money at it,” said Mr. Shaer, whose family comes from the city of Maaloula. He bought his first Moudarres painting for about $125. Now it’s worth “around $300,000.” Charles Saatchi has one in his collection, Mr. Shaer said, and auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s had been through to have a look. “Now a lot of foreigners are coming to Syria to buy.”

The Damascus art boom can be seen beyond the galleries. Art hotels, once unheard-of here, have begun to sprout. At the year-old Hanania Boutique Hotel, walls are decorated with drippy, brooding portrait paintings by Hala al-Faisal. (The artist attracted notice in 2005 when she was arrested for protesting the U.S. war in Iraq by stripping naked in New York City, where she lives, to reveal body paint that read “Stop the War.”) The Art House Hotel is in a centuries-old castle-like building filled with vaulted stone passageways, studded wooden doors, huge candelabras and other Mideast-Gothic hybrids. You expect to be greeted by Vincent Price. Instead, you are greeted by Ghiath Machnok, the architect and curator.

“Art comes before everything in my life,” he said as he gave a tour of the hotel’s 10 rooms and exhibition area. Nearly every free spot of the building is covered in dark, brooding creations by Syrian artists, especially Sabhan Adam, who creates canvases of monstrous, blood-splattered humanoid creatures. “He’s my favorite,” Mr. Machnok said.

Mr. Adam seems to be everyone’s favorite — or least favorite — Syrian artist, partly through the force of his work and partly through his aggressive marketing. He has taken out magazine ads to trumpet his work and has bought space on billboards along highways that show himself, paunchy, balding and 40-something, posing in a white suit.

Visitors to his very black, very sleek apartment are met with a shower of rose petals and the offer of a drink from a well-stocked bar. Decorative knickknacks like large fake gems, cow skulls and musical instruments adorn the walls, along with many paintings of Mr. Adam’s trademark faces and heads.

“They are the suffering people, the people in pain, the lonely people,” said Mr. Adam through his wife, Ola Taj, who studied English literature and serves as his translator. He said he grew up poor, had no formal art training and used to sell cigarettes on the street to make money. “If I wasn’t an artist, I would be a criminal or a thief,” he said.

Mr. Adam said he found inspiration in the work of Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele. The characters in his paintings, he said, were not supposed to be Syrian or Middle Eastern but universal. “I want all people to understand that this is their reality and their suffering. I want people to see these as their insides.”

The scope of Mr. Adam’s popularity, which is starting to extend beyond the region, offers proof that his message is coming through. “At the beginning, my paintings really troubled people,” he said, sipping a glass of tea as evening descended outside. “Now people love to have them.”

- By SETH SHERWOOD, The New York Times, November 26, 2010

Lebanon’s art scene

2010-10-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

The directions to Lebanese artist Pascal Hachem’s studio include these enigmatic details: “Near Cinema Vendôme (used to exist – now it is an empty plot). There is a stair (a long one).” Hachem, born in Beirut in 1979, lives and works in a small concrete bunker at the bottom of a large house on a steep hill in the hip district of formerly Christian East Beirut, Gemmayzeh. Constantly under threat of demolition, the area is a picturesque mix of Ottoman, French mandate (1920-1943) and modernist architecture, and a warren of fashionable bars, boutiques and restaurants. As the gap where the cinema once was testifies, what civil war and Israeli incursions have failed to demolish, Beirut’s thrusting developers have their eye on. Hachem puts it succinctly: “All the city I knew is disappearing. The sound of the war has given way to the sound of construction. Beirut is a noisy city.”

Hachem’s studio, by contrast, is a haven of quiet order. One wall is hung with a series of mouse traps of differing designs. A row of antique hammers bought in Cairo are lined up on a workbench. We drink freshly crushed apple juice and eat twists of flatbread containing thyme, to counter the heat (there is no air conditioning, here in our mouse hole). On his laptop, Hachem illustrates projects accomplished in Zurich, Bern, Rome, London and here in downtown Beirut. Next week, Hachem will open his first solo show in London, at the gallery of Tunisian gallerist, Selma Feriani.

A designer by training, his work sometimes involves the construction of bizarre working machines; sometimes the work is a performance or a photograph or an intervention in a public place (the sale of miniature crescent shaped buns, boxed up like tourist gifts, with a political message on the base of the boxes, at a festival outside Beirut).

He once installed 50 chicken feet sprayed gold on plinths in the French Cultural Centre in Beirut and called the piece “Nausea”. At Art Dubai this year he constructed a machine that drove three parallel rows of miscellaneous kitchen knives bought in the Dubai market very slowly upwards through a fibreglass table covered in sand to recreate the Dubai skyline. In Rome in July he placed 2,000 forks overlapping in concentric circles, touching a central white plate, inside the first-century BC Pyramid of Gaius Cestius, and then fixed a machine to jiggle the plate at regular intervals, moving the forks as if they were a land mass.

“For me it is like the army, because there are so many. The man who ordered the tomb organised food for the people. Today there are so many more forks that need to be fed.”

He remarks of this variety of approaches and media: “I want to keep my position where I can be very flexible. A gallery has to give me a platform and a moment. I cannot be asked to produce such and such a piece. Always with my shows it is a risk, it is at the last minute.” If the accomplishment is testing, so is the inspiration. To the question “What does Beirut give you?” he answers immediately, “Tension. I love to be here, I love the challenge of the city. To exist in this city is what inspires me.”

The contradiction that Hachem lives out, in common with many other Lebanese artists of his generation, is that of belonging to a highly developed artistic community, within a city and a state midway between collapse and wild rebirth. The daily combat with urban chaos – a city constantly transforming, traffic in permanent deadlock and intensified by continuing political instability – is matched by a longer term fear of renewed outbreaks of violence with Israel on the southern border. For the last 20 years, however, in spite of an almost total lack of state support, without public art galleries or non-profit exhibition spaces, with only the most conservative fine art education available within Lebanon, a vital alternative infrastructure for the making and exhibiting of contemporary art has developed within Beirut.

In defiance of the difficulties confronting them a small number of curators and artists, using funds from private individuals and institutions both within Lebanon and abroad, has consistently nurtured a creative avant garde. Independent organisations such as the renowned Ashkal Alwan group of artists, the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut DC, Irtijal, Né à Beyrouth and others, have built audiences and encouraged critical conversation both within Lebanon and with other independent arts organisations in the wider Middle-Eastern and North African region – in Amman, for instance, Cairo, Alexandria and Istanbul. Individual gallerists have also encouraged ambitious work and brought it into the wider world: Sandra Dagher through her own artistic space, Espace DC, and now as co-director with artist Lamia Joreige of the first non-profit public space in Beirut, the Beirut Art Centre, opened in January 2009; Saleh Barakat of Agial Gallery, co-curator with Dagher in 2007 of the first Lebanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale and commercial gallerist Andrée Sfeir-Semler, who, based in Germany since 1985, opened a large white space in an old industrial district of Beirut in 2004.

As the global art community began to turn its attention to the Middle East a decade ago, they found in Lebanon an art scene already mature and rapidly evolving, with artists ripe for invitation to art fairs, festivals, residencies and group shows abroad. It is the latest generation that Selma Feriani is keen to introduce to Londoners in the autumn, following the show of Hachem with solo exhibitions of Ninar Esber and Ziad Antar. As she puts it: “The emergence of this fascinating art scene in a region with such a rich history is too little known about in the west.”

As the hopeful signs (“Beirut is back on the map”; “Beyrouth revît son age d’or”) pasted on building sites around the city remind us, until 1975 Beirut had been a significant centre for trade, commerce, banking, and tourism, a Mediterranean hot spot, as well as a dynamic hub for Arab cultural and intellectual life. The Lebanon’s many-stranded cultural inheritance – Armenian, Ottoman, French, Arabic, Palestinian, Christian and Muslim of many denominations – and links with a wealthy diaspora worldwide had always made it one of the more accessible countries of the Middle East, with a sophisticated social and cultural life. In spite of a vital contemporary literature and cinematographic scene, however, there was nothing comparable in the fine arts.

It was Lebanon’s bitter and destructive 15-year civil war (roughly 1975-1990) that paradoxically stimulated the development of a distinctively Lebanese visual art tradition. Since then three generations have grown up under siege. For the first “War Generation” of artists, bearing witness to the tragedy of war was their means of creative survival. The second generation, who began exhibiting in the 1990s, but had grown up either within the conflict or in exile from it, found their role in the complex socio-political context of a country recovering from trauma. On the whole rigorously conceptual, nurtured by the fiercely high-minded curator Christine Tohme, one of the founders of Ashkal Alwan, the majority use film, video, photography, installation or public intervention – there is very little that is pure painting or sculpture.

One of the best known figures internationally in this generation is Walid Raad, who is being given a solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in the autumn. A veteran of Dokumenta and biennials the world over, his work, like that of many of his contemporaries, is inspired by the need to research and archive the past from a determinedly political stance in the present. His most famous project is produced under the rubric of The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, which gathers audio, visual and literary artefacts, mostly associated with the war. It plays with two conceits: it honours the ideal of group action in a time of crisis, whilst in fact being the work of one man; and it seems to narrate a coherent contemporary history of Lebanon while in fact eluding any one reading of the fragmentary, partly factual, partly fictional, evidence it musters.

The third generation, Hachem’s generation, born at the end of the 1970s or later, had only really just got started, in a spirit of optimism, when, in July 2006, war with their enduringly hostile neighbour, Israel, erupted with shocking ferocity. Over 34 days, besides the severe human costs, much of Lebanon’s already fragile infrastructure was laid waste and its economy devastated. As artist Zena el Khalil expressed it in her note on her work in a group show in Beirut and Turin in 2008, “I was born in war. Everything around me now is war. I cannot remember a time when there was no war.”

The difficulty for these artists is to escape that war, both as seductive subject and as the defining significance, for outsiders, of all their work. Ninar Esber, a performance and video artist, who was brought up in Paris but returned in January to Beirut, insists that “My work has nothing to do with the war in Lebanon. It has to do with universal feelings of fear, anxiety, loss.” Ziad Antar, an artist using photography and video, also educated partly in Lebanon, partly in Paris, also resists pigeonholing: “The only question I ask myself with every piece is ‘What is it to make a video?’.” At the same time, he acknowledges that the persistent charming humour in his work is there to “give a moment of hope: sadness is easy, humour is a challenge.” The day we arrive in Beirut there is a spat between Lebanese and Israeli forces on the border. Antar reminds us that this was how the war started in 2006: “But forget the stress, live other stresses. We have been at war since 1948.”

By Emma Crichton-Miller, Financial Times, october 8 2010

Is art a hedge against inflation?

2010-10-01T15:20:00.000-07:00

A recent glut of auction records suggest the rich are once again investing in art

A recent swathe of auction records has led, as in 2004, to speculation that the rich may once again be treating art as an investment vehicle. Major records include Giacometti’s L’Homme Qui Marche I, 1960, which sold for £65m at Sotheby’s London in February, Picasso’s Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur, 1932—the world’s most expensive work of art—sold in May, for $106.4m at Christie’s New York, and Rubens’ Portrait of a Commander, around 1612-14, sold for £9m at Christie’s London last July.

This was backed up by a report by Capgemini SA and Merrill Lynch & Co published in June, which found that the number of global millionaires grew 17% last year, and, with financial markets in flux, art had emerged as the most popular category of “passion investment”. Trade sources agree. As New York old master dealer Richard Feigen, told The Art Newspaper earlier in the year: “The art world is inundated with money—there’s so much liquidity out there because people are afraid of currency. They’ve been told that art is a place to park cash.”

Art appeals because it is tangible, can be traded in any currency, and comes with kudos—collectors cannot hang stocks and shares on a wall to show their friends. Art may be particularly attractive now because of the uncertainties of the stock markets, big currency fluctuations and the looming spectre of inflation in some major countries, and deflation in others. Giovanna Segre, lecturer in the economics of culture at Turin University, observed in an article on this subject for our sister paper Il Giornale dell’Arte, the anti-cyclical nature of the art market could be coming into play. The art market “offered annual returns of more than 7% between 2001 and 2004, when the stock-market exchange index was in the doldrums”, she wrote.

“Is art a hedge against inflation? Based on the past two decades, absolutely 100% yes,” said advisor Todd Levin of the Levin Art Group. But, he adds: “For the average collector, it depends on whether one is inside the system or not. If one understands how the system works, then yes, it can be a great hedge. If not, then the answer is—at best—maybe.” Those in the know can do very well indeed: Segre points to Francesco Forte and Michela Mantovani’s publication, Economics and Politics of Cultural Heritage, which calculated that “between 1977 and 1996 the real annual return (ie net of inflation) on four major streams in 20th-century art—expressionism, surrealism, art informel and pop—was 5.98%, 5.9%, 8.9% and 11.75% respectively”. She adds: “The last two figures, however, reflect the low valuations of art informel and pop works at the beginning of the period studied. By 1989 and 1990, such works were fetching very high prices, and anyone who had bought one in either of those years would have been seriously out of pocket by 1996.”

There are plenty of other pitfalls for the potential investor. The art world is relatively illiquid, and prices depend on several factors—lack of supply, changes in taste, new research, when a work was bought, how often it has appeared at market, condition, provenance, and, as Michael Plummer of Artvest Partners, says: “The most unpredictable factor of all—collector behaviour.” Small groups of collectors can easily influence “the market” (which is in reality a series of specialist mini-markets that perform very differently).

Potential investors need to do their homework, and take a sanguine approach to risk, to make serious returns. Or, they could instead stick to traditional methods. As George Gordon, Sotheby’s co-chair of old master paintings, says: “People who have bought the best they could buy, and because they liked it—that usually works.”

- By Charlotte Burns, The Art Newspaper, September 2010

No More 'Cathedrals of Culture'

2010-09-14T01:52:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, directors were proud to say museums were "cathedrals of culture," collecting, displaying and preserving the best art. Today, that's regarded by some as elitism, and it's not enough. Reacting to demographic and social trends, they are bending the art-museum concept to reach new audiences and remain relevant. "We live in a more global, multicultural society that cares about diversity and inclusivity," Ms. Feldman says. "We're thinking about how we increase our service to the community." Doing their part to save energy is an example of that.

There's no shining line separating the generations, of course. Some directors have been preaching the "populist" gospel for years, often translating that into exhibitions about guitars, hip-hop or "Star Wars" paraphernalia and live music nights with cocktails, DJs and dancing.

Current thinking goes much deeper. Many young directors see museums as modern-day "town squares," social places where members of the community may gather, drawn by art, perhaps, for conversation or music or whatever. They believe that future museum-goers won't be satisfied by simply looking at art, but rather prefer to participate in it or interact with it. "The Artist Is Present" show by Marina Abramovic at the Museum of Modern Art—silent, one-on-one encounters between volunteers and the artist, which viewers hung around to watch—is a recent, popular example.

New technology and social media, from blogs to Facebook to YouTube, are helping to drive the trend. "We're on the cusp of a huge change in the way technology will change the visitor experience and how people learn about art," Ms. Feldman says. Adding to the pressure are changes in the art world, which is growing more global and more interdisciplinary, and in education, which skimps on the arts and is forcing museums to provide more context.

- Judith Dobrzinski, The Wall Street Journal, august 24 2010

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Why You Can't Always Trust Art Dealers

2010-09-07T01:05:00.001-07:00

Art buyers have long been wary of the prices dealers charge in a notoriously opaque market. Sellers of art also are increasingly becoming suspicious.

Art sellers have filed a flurry of lawsuits over the past few years after selling pieces for relatively modest amounts, only to see the buyers quickly sell them again for much more.

In 2008, the estate of a Canadian woman, Lorette Jolles Shefner, filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court in New York against Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, two experts on the French painter Chaim Soutine, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The estate claimed the experts had misled Ms. Shefner into selling them a 1923 Soutine painting, titled "Piece of Beef," for $1 million in 2004, and then resold it to the museum a few months later for $2 million. As part of a settlement, the National Gallery sold the painting back to the now-deceased woman's estate, and the two experts paid the estate $210,000 without admitting wrongdoing.

Last year, the auction house Phillips de Pury canceled a sale of a group of prints by the photographer Diane Arbus, which were expected to bring several hundred thousand dollars, after a lawsuit was filed against a Philadelphia art dealer in federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y., by a memorabilia collector who claimed he had been led to sell the photographs for $3,500 in 2003 to the dealer. The suit was settled out of court without an admission of wrongdoing.

Yet another lawsuit, this one filed in New York State Supreme Court in 2008 by the Daughters of Mary Mother of Our Savior, an order of nuns in Round Top, N.Y., alleges collusion between a local art appraiser and a Santa Fe, N.M., dealer in the sale of an 1889 painting by William Adolphe Bouguereau titled "Notre Dame D'Anges" for $450,000.

The painting, a gift from a parishioner, had hung in a chapel, and the buyer promptly resold it to another dealer for $2 million, splitting the profit with the appraiser, the suit alleges. No hearing date has been set yet; the dealer says that "there's no fraud whatsoever here," while the appraiser's lawyer says the charges "are without any basis in fact."

The key element to a claim of fraud is "when one party misinforms the other party deliberately and knowingly," says John Henry Merryman, a professor of art law at Stanford Law School in California.

Ms. Shefner's estate alleged that Mr. Tuchman and Ms. Dunow were aware that her painting was worth considerably more than the $1 million they paid for it. The estate also alleged that the two Soutine experts misled Ms. Shefner by providing her with examples of Soutines that sold at auction for well under $500,000, noting that many paintings by the artist that were up for sale hadn't found buyers at all.

"The defendants did not provide accurate information" to Ms. Shefner, says Karl Geercken, the lawyer for the Shefner family. "They used their expertise to take advantage of her, to put it simply." Mr. Tuchman and Ms. Dunow declined to comment.

The dealer, of course, may not necessarily be in the wrong. A South Korean citizen, Najung Seung, paid Manhattan art dealer Mary Dinaburg $290,000 for a Julian Schnabel painting, after the dealer told her it was worth as much as $500,000—only to find out soon afterward that it was worth closer to $110,000, according the Ms. Seung's lawyer, Michael F. Maschio. Ms. Seung wasn't entitled to get her money back, because the dealer who sold it to her wasn't an expert on the artist's work, according to a New York State Supreme Court ruling filed in 2009.

The court ruled that claims regarding an object's value aren't to be relied upon "if the facts were not peculiarly within [the] other party's knowledge." Ms. Dinaburg didn't possess any "unique or specialized" expertise in the valuation of contemporary art, and Ms. Seung's "blind reliance on Dinaburg's alleged statements of the painting's value is not reasonable as a matter of law." In addition, she "could have, but did not, obtain her own appraisal," which would have made clear the painting's value.

Especially pertinent in this kind of fraud lawsuit is the issue of who sets the price. Carl and Anne Rice of Tucson, Ariz., bought two paintings by Martin Johnson Heade at a local estate sale for $88 in 1996, and later sold the works at Christie's auction house in New York for more than $1 million. They were then sued by the estate in 1998. The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled in the Rices' favor, since the price for the paintings in the estate sale had been set by the sellers or their representatives.

So how do you avoid becoming a sucker? Gaining expertise in a hurry may not be possible, but there are ways to obtain enough information to proceed cautiously. There are, for instance, online auction-results sites that buyers and sellers use regularly—such as ArtNet.com, AskArt.com and Artprice.com—and they may offer a sense of how comparable works of art have done at public sales. (Art dealers and gallery owners tend to keep their own price and sales information confidential.)

A buyer or seller is always free to hire a professional art appraiser, many of whom are members of the Appraisers Association of America, the International Society of Appraisers or the American Society of Appraisers. By the ethical standards of their profession, they charge only for their time, not on the basis of the value of the object they are valuing.

Corrections & Amplifications

Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, experts on the work of French painter Chaim Soutine, said that while they are "experts as to the authentication" of his works, "we do not provide opinions as to valuation." In the purchase and subsequent sale of a Soutine painting in 2004, the two say they "acted as intermediaries" between Lorette Jolles Shefner, who sold the painting to a European buyer, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which later bought the work. "We provided accurate comparables at that time for similar works sold by this artist," they added. This article failed to give the two Soutine experts the opportunity to comment on a lawsuit filed against them and the gallery by Ms. Shefner's estate and incorrectly referred to Ms. Dunow as Mr. Dunow.

- The Wall Street Journal, August 21 2010

The Value Of A Name In Art

2010-08-27T05:48:00.000-07:00

Still, the controversy raises a perplexing question: Why is a set of photos worth millions if they were shot by Ansel Adams, and next to nothing if the photographer depressing the plunger was a nobody? After all, the images remain the same. To the extent that art is about appreciating aesthetic objects for their own sake, is it right to put so much stake in the question of who did the drawing or painting or snapping?

The basic market definition of value is perfectly reasonable: A work is worth what someone will give you for it—an amount usually determined by the intersection of desirability, scarcity and the expectation that there will be someone down the line willing to pay even more. But isn't art supposed to have value that transcends the market—something inherent in the object itself?

There can be very good reasons to judge art by who made it rather than by merely appreciating the thing itself. Take two indistinguishable cubist paintings. "We might think they must have exactly the same aesthetic features and value," and yet we would be wrong, says Matthew Kieran, professor of philosophy and the arts at the University of Leeds, in England. "One work was produced by Picasso and was the first cubist art work, the other was produced by me last year. Only the Picasso is original, brave, daring and revolutionary, whereas mine is at best an academic pastiche."

No doubt. But it's also worth imagining what would happen if Vincent van Gogh had died an utter unknown, without any of his paintings ever having been seen or saved. A hundred years later "The Starry Night" turns up at a yard sale, a grimy orphan. Would it be recognized as a masterpiece?

The answer is, regrettably, probably no. Even so, it isn't unreasonable to put so much stock in the reputations of artists, says Jonathan Gilmore, an art critic who teaches philosophy at Yale: "If we don't have enough time or attention to look at every painting, it's better to invest what time and attention we have in considering the work of recognized masters." To that practical reason he adds an aesthetic one: "Our interest in the work by a great artist reflects a relatively justified approach by which we deal with our uncertainty about what is a great work of art."

Given that uncertainty, we might want to be more open-minded when we encounter art of dubious provenance, allowing ourselves to judge and appreciate works for their quality rather than their attribution. Who knows, maybe Uncle Earl was an artist with something to say.

- By Eric Felten, The Wal Street Journal, August 13, 2010

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Baldessari Retrospective at LACMA

2010-08-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

Mr. Baldessari's own description for his conceptual-art course, "post-studio art," (a class characteristic of his own working methods), was based on the notion that "there is a certain kind of work one could do that didn't require a studio. It's work that is done in one's head. The artists could be the facilitator of the work; executing it was another matter."

Which of course raises the question of conceptual art and conceptual artists in general: Why do they bother? Why do conceptual artists continue to employ finite resources and materials, not to mention occupy valuable space in museums, when, unlike other artists, the conceptual artist has an infinite amount of perfectly adequate space available to make and exhibit art in his or her head? Of course the answer is that Mr. Baldessari's antiart stance, through which he spurns the art establishment, is just that—a pose, a ruse. He craves the recognition of the very institutions he so self- consciously rejects.

Opening "Pure Beauty" is a handful of Mr. Baldessari's surviving paintings from the '60s (the ones, sadly, that got away). Once you have seen these pictures it is easy to understand why the artist decided to burn, rather than keep them. Cremation was the right—if not the ethical—choice. He should have stopped there.

- By Lance Esplund, The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2010

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Why Hadid's MAXXI Works

2010-03-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

The last time a superstar foreign architect designed an art museum in Rome, the reception was less than welcoming. Richard Meier's enclosure for the first-century B.C. Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis), unveiled in 2006, drew fire from critics, politicians and many ordinary citizens. They complained that the elongated modernist structure of glass and white travertine violated the historical and cultural integrity of its setting, close to the heart of the ancient imperial capital and right beside two late-Renaissance churches.

So the new National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, or MAXXI, by the British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, might have been expected to provoke similar controversy. With its deconstructivist mix of irregular angles and flowing curves, seemingly endless variety of perspectives, and lack of any main facade, the building aggressively flouts architectural tradition in this most traditional of cities.

Yet the local response so far has been one of enthusiastic curiosity. The museum's inauguration is not until May 30, but when the still-empty building was opened to the public for a single weekend last fall, an estimated 10,000 people came for the rare chance to view a major work of architecture unencumbered by occupants or furnishings. The MAXXI's authorities say they hoped thereby to prevent Ms. Hadid's design from overshadowing the inaugural exhibitions. Judging from the numbers who continue to peer over the zinc-coated steel fence and beg for a quick look inside, such overshadowing may be inevitable.

Located in a quiet north Rome neighborhood dominated by nondescript apartment blocks, the MAXXI's site is much less of a preservationist's stronghold than what Mr. Meier had to confront. Ms. Hadid has nevertheless treated the surroundings with a tact verging on deference.

The only part of the building that actually sits on the street is a restored portion of an early 20th-century military barracks, which Ms. Hadid integrated into her own design. You have to walk through the gate beside it in order to see her work in all its provocative originality. From some angles, it suggests a snake tentatively raising its head over the edge of its own coiled body.

The building's strangeness is beguiling rather than jarring. In large part that's because Ms. Hadid's structure occupies less than half of its site, much of which is taken up by a plaza dotted with linden trees and Lombardy poplars. This keeps the structure from looming over viewers in a domineering way, while allowing them to step back and take it all in.

Another key to the MAXXI's disarming character lies in the refined use of its main material. Concrete suggests modesty, not only by virtue of its cost, and thus its association with utilitarian or unfinished structures, but in the bland inconspicuousness of its color and texture. We are a long way here from the shimmering titanium skin of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Yet the smooth lines and unblemished surfaces of the MAXXI's curving walls, a discreet display of engineering bravura, dispel any sense of cheapness or crudity.

Whereas Bilbao welcomed Mr. Gehry's spectacle for bringing glamour and prestige to a provincial industrial city, Ms. Hadid faced a very different challenge in Rome, where any building of such size and exalted cultural purpose must justify its presence in the company of world-famous monuments to imperial and papal glory. Her shrewd solution has been a combination of flamboyant experimentation with implicit respect for the past.

A related challenge will face the museum once it reopens with its collection on display. Richter, Warhol and Merz are not exactly names to rival Caravaggio, Raphael and Michelangelo. How to lure visitors from the inexhaustible riches of Western art and archaeology perpetually on show a few minutes away? Ms. Hadid's answer to this problem has been to make the MAXXI bold and intriguing, but also inviting and accessible.

The glass entrance doors are flush with the ground, and visitors will pass directly through them into the three-story-high atrium lobby. Although tickets will be necessary for admission to the exhibition galleries beyond, casual sightseers will be free to linger in the building's largest space and ponder the spindly staircase-ramps that branch and intersect like floating rivers overhead.

Nothing here says "Rome" in any obvious way. There are no classical arches, columns or pediments. Yet the city's distinctive light, ever-shifting in tone and brightness, is a constant presence. It enters through the glass rooftop, and passes through a system of computer-operated louvers that open and close according to the intensity of the sun. So although the level of illumination remains constant, its quality changes continually with the weather, season and hour, linking the internal and external environments in a pervasive yet largely subliminal way.

Awareness of place becomes explicit at the museum's highest point, an entire wall of glass at the end of a cantilevered gallery. The window leans outward from its base (in a way reminiscent of Eero Saarinen's Dulles airport terminal), inducing a mild sense of vertigo, and the spectator suspended in midair feels like he is at once taking off and falling down.

As for the view, the most remarkable thing about it is the absence of landmarks, since the window faces pointedly away from Rome's historic center. Perhaps Ms. Hadid meant this as an act of generosity to the works her building will shelter, by sparing them immediate comparisons to masterpieces of the past.

From the outside, the same trapezoidal window produces one of the building's most characteristic effects. It draws the eye like a church's bell tower, beckoning to the faithful even in silence. Yet those gazing up from the plaza will see not an icon of religion, or even of art, but a group of people like themselves, standing behind a reflection of the buildings nearby.

- Francis X. Rocca, The Wall Street Journal, March 2 2010

Why satellite art fairs are recession-proof

2010-02-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

December’s first weekend in Miami saw just as many satellite fairs (depending on how you count them) as in years past.

(...) Now we hear that when the Armory Show opens in New York in March, it will be accompanied by (at least) two new satellite fairs: one called “Independent” and another called “Critical Design New York”.

(...) The ADAA is a self-governing trade organisation that uses its professional network and reputation to maintain certain collectively held high standards of “curatorial excellence”, whatever that may mean; notably, the proceeds from the gala preview and admission to the show go to benefit the Henry Street Settlement, a not-for-profit social services organisation. In contrast, the Armory Show, owned by Merchandise Mart Properties, is, in essence, a real estate deal. A large property is secured, space is parcelled out, applications are considered by a selection committee (anyone who has bought property in New York City is achingly familiar with how capricious a process like this can be), leases are signed and payments made. By the time the doors open, the fair organisers-cum-event promoters are in the black (hopefully); ticket and concession sales are gravy (and with $5 espressos, it’s rich gravy indeed). In the end, the risk is the galleries own.

Most satellite fairs hew to one or other of these models, or they land somewhere in between. An enterprising promoter with access to a big enough piece of property on the right dates and with the right rolodex can put up a fair in no time at all (i.e. Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook’s “Independent” fair in Dia’s former digs in Chelsea). It doesn’t much matter how one spins the curatorial conceit—“solo shows”, “artist-run”, medium-specific—the mechanics in most cases are pretty much the same.

And we must remember that these, what we could mock-condescendingly call “art fairs for the other half”, are at bottom aspirational. Even the scrappiest, collective-run, artist-centric, market-and-so-self-loathing gallery would very likely jump at a chance for a booth at a big fair, be it the Armory, Frieze or Art Basel. In lieu of such a coveted spot, a slot at Volta or Pulse will do very nicely (one at Pool less so).

(...) Finally, when the economy turns south, so does real estate. Last spring all of the talk was about the impending decimation of New York’s gallery scene. It didn’t happen. And on Manhattan’s lower east side, where commercial rents have dropped around 20%, new galleries have been popping up like mushrooms after the rains. For those aspirational real estate deals we call satellite fairs, there is no reason not to expect the same.

- Jonathan Neil, The Art newspaper, 10 febbraio 2010

The Role of Design in Business

2010-02-08T15:27:00.000-08:00

The Value of Design

There are four basic areas in which design has an important role to play in value creation, say Ravi Sawhney and Deepa Prahalad

The frequent question asked of the design community is of its value to business. The query itself makes little sense. Quite simply, the role of designers has always been to translate and communicate the value of a business idea to consumers. The best designers can do far more—they can help companies connect and establish a dialogue with consumers, thus enabling firms to innovate more efficiently.

The challenge for most corporations today is about how to innovate while mitigating risk. For consumers, choices are made by balancing the need for evolution with the force of habit. Designers are trained to understand how people think and how to make things. For this reason, there are four basic areas in which design has an important role to play in value creation:

Understanding the Consumer

Entrepreneurs and large companies alike invest heavily in understanding their consumers. Consumers themselves often give detailed suggestions about how to improve various offerings. Still, most products that perform as promised are rejected in the marketplace. So designers must not only synthesize functionality and aesthetics, they must understand a consumer's thought process and emotions in order to motivate behavior change.

Risk Mitigation

How many times have companies pronounced that an innovation failed because it was "ahead of its time"? How often does corporate risk aversion result in lackluster offerings that are ultimately taken off the market? Design is a process of synthesizing insights into a tangible offering in a way that addresses the goals of the company and the desires of consumers. Many of the firms that can perform at this level were early in bringing design into their cultures.

Boosting Marketing and Branding

Take a look at any list of the top global brands—including the one published by Bloomberg BusinessWeek. It's no accident that many of the world's top brands are also design leaders. Design is a fundamental part of creating an image and experience of luxury, exclusivity, and tribal belonging. And yet the consumers who purchase these items often select them because they see a little bit of themselves (or who they would like to be) on the shelf. That's great design. The 80% of new products that fail each year show that marketing and promotions can boost the impact of a good concept, but they can rarely compensate for a poor one.

Sustainability

Design will also be a fundamental part of one of the next great challenges to touch every industry. How can the need to consume be balanced with the need to be good stewards of the planet? How can brands retain their image and deliver a superior experience while reducing parts, waste, and carbon footprint. These are business challenges where design has an important role. If the solutions are not aspirational and adopted by large numbers, the potential benefit to the planet is limited.

To say that design is an important part of business success does not mean that all corporate efforts to incorporate design represent money well spent. But that's true of all business functions. The debate about the value of design is healthy and signals a need for more frequent and thoughtful dialogue. In our view, there is far more in common between design and business than may be readily apparent. Great designers, like visionary business leaders, create value by exploring without limitation through the psyche and psychology of consumers. They assemble teams of individuals who see the world through different eyes and explore what should be as opposed to what is. They show discipline in doing more with less. By combining forces, we can create new business opportunities and the pathways to manifest consumer needs, emotions, and aspirations. By so doing, we generate revenue and sustainable growth for business.

Ravi Sawhney and Deepa Prahalad are founder and CEO and lead, global insights, of RKS Design, a design and innovation firm based in Southern California. They are co-authors of the book, Predictable Magic (Wharton School Publishing).

- Ravi Sawhney and Deepa Prahalad, Business week, February 1, 2010

'Pop-up' gallery shows aim to sell condos as well as art

2010-01-19T14:18:00.000-08:00

A Cinderella-like transformation of condos into art galleries -- one night only! three weeks only! -- has been going on in Washington's Shaw neighborhood for the better part of the economic downturn. Artists and developers link arms to throw art shows in unsold, high-design 2BR/2BAs along U Street and up 14th.

These pop-up galleries-in-a-condo are such a phenomenon that a new crop of impresarios has emerged to connect the creatives with the capitalists. Some are DIY veterans who aren't in it for the bucks. They might get a little cash, but the bulk of their rewards are notoriety and the satisfaction that their artist friends can pay the rent. Others hail from art consultancy backgrounds and are tweaking their businesses to serve developers.

Newest among these on-call middlemen is Wool, a roving gallery business that debuted on a chilly Thursday last month. It's a collaboration between Billy Colbert and Ryan Hackett, both artists and veteran DIYers. Hackett was a founding member of erstwhile collective Decatur Blue; Colbert has organized a host of artist-run events in the District and Baltimore.

Hackett likens Wool to Temporary Services or No Longer Empty, organizations in Chicago and New York, respectively, that fill fallow, mostly developer-owned spaces with art. The pair embrace the freedom from gallery overheads.

"We were not interested in money, only in throwing a show," Hackett says.

On the December night of Wool's debut, Colbert and Hackett invited the city's grooviest to the Lacey, a 26-unit condominium at 11th Street and Florida Avenue NW for an event they called "Bauble."

Guests milled near the Fisher & Paykel stainless fridge in Unit 101 (a 2BR/2BA w/den going for $759,000) and chatted over backbeats pumped from a DJ stationed downstairs. One couple -- she in a Moncler puffy jacket, he in skinny jeans -- attempted a makeshift dance floor. Next door in Unit 102, real estate agent Debi Fox held court among Saarinen knock-offs.

Along the wall (and on pedestals), works by some of Washington's more interesting young artists were installed with all the professionalism of a gallery. Among the artists: Cory Oberndorfer, Kathryn Cornelius and former D.C. artist Jose Ruiz. Each work was priced to sell at $250.

Was "Bauble" an art show or a dance party or an open house? Yes, yes and yes.

Yet for art partisans, it was a strange night. Yes, "Bauble" was one of the best exhibitions of this kind. The art looked good, artists made money and a charity benefited. (Wool designated that $100 from each sale go to Project Create, which offers free art programs for at-risk children. Disclosure: I sit on the board.) But the focus that night was condos.

Though the building's developers deny that the event helped sell Unit 102 (currently under contract), the buzz about the Lacey and its art were clearly part of a larger business plan.

Similar art events are the specialty of the Art Registry, a six-year-old consultancy that specializes in the "excitement of the art world transported to unique marquis properties," its Web site says. The registry recently worked with Ernst Development and Willco Residential.

Co-founded by Erin Mackay, a Washington Project for the Arts board member, and photographer Jill Lubar, the Art Registry works like this: Developers donate space; Mackay and Lubar shoulder marketing and installation expenses. Art Registry clients -- young professionals earning enough to afford both art and real estate -- gather for a party and (it is hoped) pull out their checkbooks.

Mackay puts her group's gross from most events at $15,000 to $80,000. An event last April at Providence lofts on 11th Street yielded $28,650 in art sales. Mackay says the artist "always receives 50 percent or more" of the sale price.

For the Providence project, Mackay called on Philippa Hughes, an art impresario who links collectors with artists working in graffiti and street art. Hughes brought in District artist Decoy. Proceeds were split among Hughes, the Art Registry and the artist.

But who really benefits? The developers, that's for sure -- they get branding, foot traffic and buzz. The marketers behind the Providence were shocked by how many people the Art Registry pulled in.

"We had a tremendous turnout, and I think that we sold at least 50 percent of the building because of that event," says Jeremy Aldridge, an agent for Urban Pace, the sales and marketing firm behind Providence. "It was hard to distinguish who was there looking at the units and who was looking at the art, so it created a kind of urgency. That was brilliant marketing."

Brilliant marketing for developers. But bad PR for art? One-offs forge dicey synaptic connections in the public mind: They reinforce the "art as decor" paradigm, divorcing artists from their highest calling -- creating work that challenges social and political norms. On art event nights, artists become another kind of interior decorator.

Then again, this is real life. Artists need to eat and developers need to sell. Not all art is created equal -- and neither are its venues.

The next Wool event is scheduled for March at an as-yet-named space on Ninth Street NW.

The Art Registry is at http://www.theartregistrygroup.com.

- Jessica Dawson; The Washington Post; January 15, 2010

Rome’s newest art museum

2010-01-08T15:04:00.000-08:00

There is a persistent myth that Rome is a city free of modern architecture, that its rich history still weighs too heavily on its designers. The howls of derision aimed at American architect Richard Meier’s controversial 2006 Ara Pacis Museum revealed a seam of resentment and conservatism: one mayor even promised to demolish it. But despite such examples, from the powerful architecture of the fascist era to the city’s fine new galleries, modern Roman architecture is a unique blend of history and archetype.

Once you enter the generous [Maxxi's, ndr] gravel plaza, you are confronted by a museum that is, in its curious way, a museum-piece itself. It took so long to complete (a decade) that its design dates from an earlier phase in Hadid’s career: while her more recent buildings flow and undulate, the Maxxi retains the jagged, geological forms of a former period. Steel columns slant and clash, concrete volumes are cantilevered precariously over ribbons of circulation, the whole appears as a tangle of structural tagliatelle.

The Maxxi was initially conceived to house a collection of Arte Povera (for which you would have to consider the possibility that it may have been a spectacular failure) but is now billed as a “Museum for the Art of the XXI century” (from which its strange acronym derives). Yet although the Maxxi envelops one of the most thrilling and visionary interiors of recent years, it is about as far as it is possible to get from the neutral yet resonant found space which artists and curators like best. Can a brilliant piece of architecture containing questionable gallery space still be a brilliant piece of architecture? If what Rome wanted was a stunning structure which would convince the world this is a city capable of looking, Janus-like, simultaneously backwards and forwards, to both past and future, Hadid has done an impeccable job.

- Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times, 2 january 2010

When Artists Dry Up

2009-12-17T14:55:00.000-08:00

What makes great creators go silent? And is it always a bad thing?

Painters and other visual artists seem to be less prone as a group to the kind of "artist's block" that stymied Copland, Sibelius and Ellison. One reason for this is that unlike serious composers or novelists, who are expected to break new ground each time they create a new work, an artist can frequently return to the same subject. Indeed, the market actively encourages artists to turn out their signature works in series, thus allowing large numbers of collectors to purchase a soup can by Andy Warhol. If Copland had followed up "Appalachian Spring" with "Appalachian Summer," it isn't likely that the sequel would have gone over very well with the public.

This prolonged "fertility," alas, is too often factitious. The history of art is full of major figures who have lost the inspiration that sustained them throughout the earlier phases of their careers. Very often, of course, such artists keep on turning out new work, either out of financial need or mere habit, and fans and critics not infrequently manage to persuade themselves that their late works are equal in quality to the masterpieces that came before them. But who now thinks that Alfred Hitchcock's "Topaz" and "Frenzy" are half as good as "Strangers on a Train" or "North by Northwest," or that Pablo Picasso painted anything in the last couple of decades of his long life that was worthy of the creator of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and "Three Musicians"?

Me, I doff my hat to Sibelius, who knew that it's better to quit while you're ahead than to sully your posthumous reputation by continuing to "create" after you no longer have anything new to say.

- Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Jurnal, 28th november 2009

Survey Shows Pain of Recession for Artists

2009-12-07T03:57:00.000-08:00

A major new survey of American artists and how they are weathering the economic downturn has found that slightly more than half experienced a drop in income from 2008 to 2009, a blow to an already struggling group, two thirds of whose members reported that they earned less than $40,000 last year.
More than 5,300 practitioners in fields like painting, filmmaking and architecture participated in the online survey, a larger response than expected, providing a detailed look at the state of the country’s artists, a group that the Census Bureau numbers at more than two million.
Many of the findings — that working artists tend to work day jobs to support themselves; that more than a third don’t have adequate health insurance; that musicians and architects tend to do better than writers and painters — simply provide statistical support for what artists themselves have long known.
But it also found that the recession has been exceptionally tough for many artists. Eighteen percent of those who responded said their income had dropped 50 percent or more in the last year.
The survey was conducted in July and August and commissioned by a nonprofit artist-support organization called Leveraging Investments in Creativity, which worked with Princeton Survey Research Associates International and the Helicon Collaborative, a consulting firm that advises nonprofits.
The researchers found that in general very few artists’ incomes approach six figures. While the majority of artists have college degrees, only 6 percent said they earned $80,000 or more.
“A lot of the artists who were reporting were telling us, ‘I live in a recession all the time, so this downturn has really not been so different for me,’ ” said Judilee Reed, the executive director of Leveraging Investments in Creativity.
(The groups that conducted the survey, which was paid for in part by the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, publicized the survey through arts organizations and acknowledged that as a result it might not reflect the “experiences of the entire population of practicing artists in the United States.” But they added that the data were weighted to hew as closely as possible to Census Bureau demographics for artists.)
The artists surveyed tended to earn either very little of their overall income from their artwork or almost all of it. Slightly more than 40 percent said that in 2008 they earned 20 percent or less of their total income from their art.
But at the other end of the spectrum 28 percent said creative work accounted for 80 percent or more of their income, and those artists were often those whose incomes were higher, $80,000 or more. Visual artists (who made up half of the respondents) and writers were more likely to earn 20 percent or less of their income from art.
Even artists whose second jobs have carried them through the downturn relatively unscathed said that the climate for creative work was more difficult. Esther Robinson, a Brooklyn filmmaker whose 2007 documentary, “A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory,” was partly paid for with credit cards, money later recouped with an advance from a distributor, said, “This year there are almost no advances available for the same kind of film that is of a certain quality and that is theatrically releasable.”
Ms. Robinson, who also runs a nonprofit arts organization that she founded, said that she was concentrating on short films because “I don’t see a way to finance any of the feature ideas I have for documentaries right now.”
Perhaps because artists tend to have an idealistic bent, the survey found, however, that many also reported upsides to the downturn: that it has given them freedom to experiment and to spend more time on their art when avenues for making money are closed. James Vira, a Manhattan architect who recently lost his job in a round of layoffs at Cooper, Robinson & Partners, is trying to make it on his own by doing consulting work, taking on small projects and designing furniture and other objects.
“It’s allowing me to pursue things that I really want to pursue, and it’s working out so far,” said Mr. Vira, the father of two young children. “I’m very, very hopeful. But I still check the want ads — as a habit, I guess.”

- Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, November 24, 2009

The Museum Bubble

2009-09-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone admits that there was an "art bubble." People admitted it as it was happening.

However, most of us are probably still coming to grips with the fact that there was a "museum bubble" as well.

Almost every week brings fresh news of museum cuts. By now the template is established -- layoffs, hiring freezes and unpaid furloughs or pay cuts for those left. Let it never be said that the art world didn’t contribute to wage deflation.

Many of these announcements have been accompanied by symbolic mandates that those at the top will take more of a hit, salary-wise, than the foot soldiers. James M. Williams, the Getty Trust’s chief investment officer, magnanimously agreed to take a six percent pay cut -- he made a staggering $1.28 million, according to the L.A. Times -- even as his investment decisions led to the loss of 205 jobs.

Meanwhile, everyone knows who is getting hardest hit -- it is the personnel who do the unglamorous day-to-day stuff that makes these places run.

The truth is that it is the people at the top who deserve the most opprobrium. I am not of the camp who hates on art students just because they were sold the idea that art could be a lucrative and glamorous career, or who thinks that art dealers are the spawn of Satan (only some of them are). But the art bureaucrats at the top, those pious guardians of our nonprofit castles of culture -- they deserve our scorn right now.

Reports generally frame museum downsizing as collateral damage of the more general train wreck in the economy. But the truth is that museum boards and higher-ups not only participated in the madness of the "bubble era" -- the period of super-charged, risk-fueled craziness that the world is now trying desperately to recover from -- but actively fed it.

Let’s look at why our museums are falling on their faces so very hard right now. Beneath the Olympian veneer of the nonprofit art world, the causes are surprisingly familiar: short-sighted speculation and irrational competition.

First of all, of course, there are the massive endowment losses. Museums are generally heavily funded by interest from their investments -- they depend far more on endowment income then they do on, say, ticket sales. So who is to blame for these endowment losses?

Over the last few years, the people who run museum endowments have followed the siren song of the "Yale Model," pioneered by guru David Swenson at the Ivy League citadel (which itself recently announced a large loss on its investments). This genius idea held that "safety" was actually a bad thing for large investors, who could use their scale to diversify into riskier, less-liquid, high-yielding asset classes.

Take the Museum of Modern Art, with its gargantuan endowment. A 2002 report in Foundation & Money Management described MoMA’s "alternative assets" portfolio as "dabs and splatters of merger arbitrage funds, distressed debt funds, and long/short equity funds, as well as private equity and real estate" ("Real estate is a great way to get some yield and also is a good inflation hedge," MoMA’s investments director told the publication). At that time, the museum was launching a new "hedge fund strategy," allocating an additional three percent of its assets to a new fund -- and indeed, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy statistics, it seems that between 2004 and 2006, MoMA eliminated all of its cash holdings (11 percent of its endowment value before that), dramatically upping its hedge-fund exposure. "If the Museum's alternatives portfolio were a canvas, the painting certainly would be colorful."

These days there are questions about the Yale Model’s theoretical soundness, given the large-scale losses incurred by Swenson’s protégés. The entry en masse of large institutional investors into high-risk asset classes certainly fed the madness of the bubble years. At the same time, a recent Forbes article, "The Culture Crash," questions whether museum endowments knew what they were getting into at all, noting that "arts boards proved too slow to navigate away from the hazardous investments once the bad times began." As one investment advisor told the mag: "All of the charities, all of the institutions lost money, but they didn't have to lose 25% to 40%. . . putting 85% of your money in equity and illiquid instruments is gambling."

A second reason why museums are suffering is loss of city and county subsidies and support, as desperate municipalities look to trim anything that can credibly be characterized as frivolous. This has left art supporters desperately making the appeal that art actually generates jobs, trotting out any arguments that can make the case that culture is not just a luxury item -- the Americans for the Arts study suggesting that art generates $166 billion in economic activity is popular.

What really burns me about all this, however, is that not so long ago, it was government officials who were actively egging on arts leaders into thinking of themselves as the center of the "new economy." All the chatter about the rise of the "creative economy" was the flip-side of deindustrialization in the U.S., and part of how it was sold -- new "cultural industries" would replace old heavy industry; artists would be "the Johnny Appleseeds of the New Creative Economy," as Myrna M. Breitbart and Cathy Stanton put it in 2007’s Tourism, Culture and Regeneration in an article on New England towns trying to transform their abandoned mills into cultural hubs. There was, they said, "a shift from first seeing investment in culture as amenity alone, to seeing it as a replacement for industry and eventually as an important component of large-scale makeovers" [emphasis mine]. This formula was general.

Thus, the "Bilbao Effect" was sold by and to mayors in Rust Belt towns as a panacea -- old centers of industry could be revitalized by turning themselves into cultural Meccas ("The so-called ‘Bilbao effect’ has come to mean a striking building that almost guarantees that its architecture could or should contribute to the revitalization of a city," the Pritzker Prize’s Martha Thorne explained). Who could have predicted that when the chips were down the same officials who cut the ribbons would cut and run, leaving the art world alone to plead for a paltry few million extra in NEA funding before Congress? Well, in fact, I did write an article lamenting the Bilbao-ification trend with respect to the Toledo Art Museum’s stylish SANAA-designed Glass Pavilion, back in 2006 [see "Glass Houses", Aug. 30, 2006]. I have since regretted dumping on Toledo -- TAM is a terrific institution and the Glass Pavilion is a gem -- but the truth is that the rage for cultural showpieces had become a way of short-circuiting thought about sustainable development.

Which begs a question: If the idea of art-as-revitalization was just a pretext for museum mania, what was its real driver? What caused so many cities to embark almost simultaneously on plans for flashy new museums, from L.A. and Miami to Grand Rapids, Mich., and Roanoke, Va. (the latter’s $66-million Taubman Museum opened in November 2008, and immediately began to lay people off)? We find the answer in a 2007 Art + Auction article on the building craze: "An overabundance of available money." In fact, if you draw a line through the phase of postmodern museum hyper-expansion that passes through the opening of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao in 1997 and ends with the Madoff-fueled evisceration of the Rose Art Museum in 2008, it lays nicely across the recent history of asset super-bubbles -- the internet bubble, and then the real estate bubble. These created huge fortunes in technology, real estate and finance, which swelled the trustee boards of museums and the egos of potential museum donors -- and it was these people who were instrumental in pushing through the unprecedented round of museum expansions of recent years ("a lot of wealthy people are keen to have their names on wings, galleries or walls of a museum designed by a world-famous architect"). Art + Auction described museum directors as being in a sort of "quiet pain" over all the unwise building they were being asked to do. "Most museum directors know better," Nelson-Atkins head Marc Wilson said. "They get pushed into it by the trustees."

The result -- as is often the case with investment driven by an overabundance of cash -- was a lot of bad investment. A famously ill-starred case is that of the Denver Art Museum, which built its Daniel Libeskind museum -- a shiny deconstructionist cruise ship washed up in the Mile High City -- with notoriously over-ambitious projections that it could draw one million visitors a year. The result? DAM ended up operating at a loss, and began laying people off in April 2007, then eliminated its film program and curator in 2008 -- all well before the general meltdown compelled it to slash its budget by an additional 12 percent early in 2009. This, then, is another reason for the fragility of many museums right now -- across the country, cultural institutions have saddled themselves with new, flashy buildings that are expensive to heat and guard. "Subtly, the ratio between fixed costs, which are about the building, and variable costs, which are the programming costs, has changed," Adrian Ellis told Art + Auction. "And that means more building and less art."

...

The cause is simple: The biggest museums have "initial advantages" that they can compound -- they can best afford blockbuster shows (the main driver, aside from population growth, of growing museum attendance), and they are better placed to attract corporate sponsorship and private donations, which in turn have been steadily growing in importance. This competition for big shows and big donations was the reality behind the competition for sprawling new showpiece buildings. "Midsized museums," the study concludes, "will need to think strategically about their basic objectives, the audiences they are trying to reach, and their comparative advantages. They will also need to consider ways to reduce their costs -- for example, by cost sharing, loaning artworks, and joint ticketing." Keep in mind this study came out in 2005, well before museum endowments ran aground on the rocks of a coordinated global economic slump.

Consequently, even as the big museums cut staff, it is the small and midsized arts institutions that are hurting the most, and these are the kinds of places where young and unknown artists get their start, the venues that do some of the most heroic and risky work. For every front-page story about a mismanaged institution like L.A. MoCA, saved by the largesse of real estate mogul and AIG investor Eli Broad, there are ten back-page stories about admirable smaller venues like Memphis’ Power House gallery, forced to close shop as grants and donations dry up.

But it is not, in the end, even such small arts venues that are most battered in the recession, of course. Art, in our society, has an intermediate status -- lavished with praise in the good times, considered dispensable in the bad times.

...

This dynamic is worth meditating on. Given the anatomy of the museum meltdown, the art world should ask itself whose side it is on -- those who are worst hit by this crisis, or those who caused it in the first place?

by Ben Davis, Artnet Magazine

Art and Hypochondria

2009-09-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Marcel Proust, and Andy Warhol - what do they all have in common? They were all hypochondriacs. Brian Dillon examines the relationship between creativity, illness and the imagination.
"A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is itself a sort of treatise on hypochondria and its artistic uses. Proust, it seems, was well aware of the contemporary explanation for hypochondria - it was thought at the turn of the century to be a disorder of the "common sense" or "coenaesthetic" faculty, by which we apprehend the evidence of our senses - and the book is full of instances of physiological as well as aesthetic oversensitivity. The Proustian hypochondriac feels the world press too keenly on him; he mistakes perfectly ordinary sensations for deep afflictions. (In Proust's own case, the touch of a damp towel could send him into hypochondriacal paroxysms.) Proust's genius consists partly in seeing the parallels between sickbed sensitivities and the delicate rigour of aesthetic feeling. What was a vague cliché for the Romantics - the artist's pallor and susceptibility - becomes for Proust a matter of neurology".

"By the middle of the 20th century, "hypochondria" had come to denote little more than the exaggerated fear of illness or the erroneous belief in its actual presence. The condition had meanwhile lost its frequent, and even fashionable, association with the artistic temperament. But that is not to say that hypochondria cannot still teach us something about the relationship between creativity and embodiment, illness and imagination. Consider the case of Glenn Gould, whose numerous eccentricities at the piano and in his daily life - Gould wrapped himself in scarf and gloves in the hottest weather, shrank from physical contact with others and kept voluminous records of his mostly imaginary symptoms - point to a physical retreat from the world that mirrors his retirement from the concert hall in 1964. Just as the recording studio then became Gould's musical prosthesis, so his hypochondria allowed him to engage with the world at a comforting distance".

"The visual artist of the late 20th century who knew most about the dangers and pleasures of physical proximity and aesthetic distance was Andy Warhol, and it is no surprise to discover that throughout his life he was a hypochondriac with a fretful and fertile imagination. The sources of Warhol's bodily unease are well known - his hair loss, his bad skin, the physical and emotional scars from his shooting in 1968 - but his diaries record a much wider variety of fears: cancer, brain tumours, Aids ("the magic disease") and the medical profession itself. (In the end, this last fear hastened his death: had he attended earlier to his inflamed gall bladder, he might have survived the rigours of the hospital; instead, he died of a heart attack in 1987, just hours after surgery)".

"Warhol is also our hypochondriac precursor: his life and art appear to predict precisely the obsessions - weight, complexion, age, aesthetics, the virulence of new diseases and the efficacy of the cures for the old ones - of a society whose medical imagination is better informed than before, but just as susceptible to grisly images of illness and anxious prophylaxis against decay. Though we live at a time when hypochondria is routinely described as merely another anxiety disorder, to be treated with drugs and cognitive-behavioural therapy, we do well to recall the fundamental questions it invites us to ask about disease and well-being, and about the proper attitude to our mortality. Every historical period has felt itself to be an era of heightened hypochondriacal anxieties; the disorder remains current, but its manifestations shift and alter and overlap from one century, or one decade, to another. The history of hypochondria is an X-ray of the more solid and familiar history of medicine; it reveals the underlying structure of our hopes and fears about our bodies".

Brian Dillon
The Guardian
August 22, 2009

Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope: is published by Penguin on 3 September. He will chair a public symposium, 'Culture and Hypochondria', at Tate Britain on 18 September 2009.

Do Critics Matter?

2009-07-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

The fact that the classical music, dance, and art critics are not represented in today's critics' survey in the Washington Post may give those of us in those disciplines extra reason to worry that what we write doesn't actually matter.

But the whole idea that there should be some kind of correlation between reviews in the paper and ticket sales, or popularity, is fundamentally flawed to start with. It reveals a misunderstanding of what it is a critic does. Our role is not to be mere consumer advocates, telling you how to spend your hard-earned dollars. If that were the only point, newspapers might as well issue simple public-relations-style puff pieces and have done with it.

The role of a critic is to cover a field. This doesn't mean simply pandering to popular taste. It means doing one's best to convey a sense of what is going on in a given discipline by writing about every possible side of it. It means trying to convey a perspective that a reader who doesn't spend every night going to concerts/plays/films may not be able to gather himself; or offering a thoughtful take that might stimulate a reader who does go to everything to see something in a different light.

For part of our role is to foster dialogue and debate. That doesn't mean setting forth judgments of taste in order that readers might fall obediently into line behind us. Quite the contrary: it may mean putting out views that one knows may represent the minority. It means being interested in the thoughts of those who disagree. It means being delighted when someone is powerfully moved by something one didn't like oneself. It also means writing well enough that someone might want to read you -- a goal that's hard to reach if all you're doing is trying to push readers to buy tickets.

The disciplines collectively referred to as "the arts," commercial or not-for-profit, highbrow or low, offer a lot more than simply the possibility of passive consumption and a thumbs-up, thumbs-down reaction at the end of the exercise. Their very existence is a tacit reminder that there is a lot more out there than this passive consumption, and critics should be reminding people of this fact. To get diverted into yet another hand-wringing round of us-against-them, critics-are-dying-out, audiences-are-stupid plaints is pointless. Audiences aren't stupid, and if critics are feeling irrelevant, it's up to us to figure out how to become a more vital part of the debate. But if we measure "relevance" by how many tickets we sell or how many people agree with us, we've already abnegated our responsibility.

Anne Midgette - "The Classical Beat" blog, The Washington Post - July 1, 2009

Art criticism is not a democracy

2009-07-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

You might think it's arrogance or snobbery that leads me to criticise a work of art, and maybe it is – but I'm still right

My last comment, on Classified at Tate Britain, appears to read in a highly polarised way. All the early stuff in the show is basically rubbish, I find myself saying, but the later stuff by Tacita Dean, Damien Hirst and the Chapmans is fantastic. It's a brutal expression of opinion that some may find arbitrary. But this is the right way to review new art.

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs. A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says "this is good, this is bad" without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we're innately convinced we're right.

Critics are born, not made. I don't know why I became convinced that I had more to say about art than other people, and an opinion that mattered more than most. But I did decide that – and persuaded others to listen.

The shortlist I have co-selected as a judge of the 2009 Turner prize has been unusually well-received, so say what you like, my taste in new art is apparently pretty good. That is unlikely to make me more modest in my reviews or more tolerant of bad choices and bad art in other people's exhibitions.

Of course, by being so blunt, I run the risk of vilification. I will be seen as a vapid snob, elitist, etc. But I am no more guilty of these traits than anyone else who sets themselves up as a professional critic; I'm just trying to be honest. What do you think all the other critics believe – that their opinion is worth nothing? Unless you think you're right, you shouldn't pass verdict on art that is someone's dream, someone's life.

So, I'm sorry, but this is the deal. I don't believe my views on film or TV or music are worth anything special. But I do believe – actually I know – that my instinct for what is valuable in art is unusually sure. When I say Hirst is a great artist and that Ron Mueck, Marc Quinn and Banksy are cheap, I do think my opinion is true – and that anyone who thinks otherwise is lacking in acuity.

Whatever criticism is, it is not a democracy.

- Jonathan Jones "on art" Blog, Guardian.co.uk, 25 June 2009

The inefficiency of markets

2009-07-04T08:32:00.000-07:00

Slaves to some defunct economist

Jun 11th 2009

THE financial crisis that has engulfed the world in the past two years is not just, or perhaps even mainly, a tale of greed run riot; it is the result of an idea that failed. That idea, which over the past four decades became the dominant belief among those generally regarded as the savviest participants in the financial system, was that the market is rational and efficient. So much for that.

The idea first took hold among a generation of economists repelled by the heavy government oversight of financial markets imposed during the New Deal era and by evidence of widespread irrational behaviour by participants in these markets. At the same time they were excited by the advances in mathematical economics and the computing power that allowed market data to be analysed like never before.

Justin Fox’s description of how the idea evolved and conquered is fascinating and entertainingly told. A statement of investor impotence—an attack on the bold ones (“idiots”, said Larry Summers, a distinguished economist) who think they can beat the market—soon became a near-religious belief. Nobel-laureate preachers, such as Milton Friedman and Merton Miller, proclaimed from the pulpits of the University of Chicago that the market could do no wrong.

Somewhere along the way, what started as a critique of the wrong ways people tried to profit from the market turned into a source of new techniques for making money. The “efficient market hypothesis”, the Nicene Creed of the market rationalists, inspired a wave of innovative financial products, such as derivatives and securitised subprime mortgages, that believers claimed would allow users to exploit the wonders of the market. This gospel was embraced so enthusiastically by the markets that these products soon accounted for trillions of dollars of trades. Then it turned out that the market was not rational after all. Trillions were wiped out and, as one of the cheerleaders for rationality, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, put it, “the whole intellectual edifice collapsed.”

By then, mainstream academic economists had long ago lost faith in market rationality, at least in its purest form. Especially after two of their number, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, both Nobel laureates, lost their shirts when Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund based on their rational-market ideas, blew up in 1998. Indeed, the focus of academic finance has been shifting for at least 20 years towards theories that address the ways in which markets behave irrationally. To use John Maynard Keynes’s phrase, the market participants who in recent years bet trillions on these new efficient-market-inspired financial products were “slaves to some defunct economist”.

The only disappointment about “The Myth of the Rational Market” is that it does not say more about how the ideas that shape financial markets will change in response to this catastrophic intellectual failure. But Mr Fox has written a worthy successor to “Capital Ideas”, the late Peter Bernstein’s 1990s classic on the emergence of the rational-market myth: bang up-to-date; alas, without the happy ending.

Cultural groups tap audiences via social networking

2009-06-29T06:51:00.000-07:00

BY KEVIN JOY

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

June 15, 2009

Two weeks ago, the marketing director for the Columbus Symphony posted a notice on its Facebook page:

Coming this fall: A special guest will be swinging by Columbus on his "way to normal." We'll be "rockin' the suburbs" of C-bus!

The subtle hint, peppered with Ben Folds song titles, seemingly indicated that the popular indie-rock singer and pianist would perform with the revived classical ensemble.

Late last week, the orchestra made the announcement public: The Folds show is scheduled for Oct. 28 at Veterans Memorial, with seats on sale today.

The delay was intentional.

"We're trying to start a conversation, as opposed to just saying tickets are on sale," said Shawne Beck, marketing chief. "We wanted to tease the public."

Other central Ohio arts groups are doing the same.

The use of social media as a marketing tool is fast becoming a key means for cash-strapped organizations not only to spread the word about offerings but also to heighten their "cool" quotients and attract Web-savvy patrons who might otherwise view the groups as stodgy or impersonal.

BalletMet Columbus last year began using the social-networking Facebook and Twitter to post bite-sized updates, ranging from ticket specials and quiz questions (with prizes) to the breed of dog -- a schnauzer mix -- used in the production of The Great Gatsby.

"We're not who you think we are," said Matt Holsinger, marketing manager for BalletMet. "We're not high and mighty, and stuffy."

In the fall, Opera Columbus hosted a Tweet-up gathering for Twitter users in the Ohio Theatre -- including a dress rehearsal of The Pearl Fishers.

About 30 guests kept their thumbs busy, Tweeting their impressions by iPhone or BlackBerry throughout the performance.

Such digital initiatives represent a boon for the company, which last year eliminated a full-time position and canceled The Mikado to avoid a deficit.

"The most rewarding thing was hearing people say (online), " 'I've never been to the opera before; I love it' or 'I'm so surprised,' " said Lisa Minken, director of marketing. "We can look at how many people are talking about us."

"Viral" grass-roots chatter is essentially free -- beyond the time used by staff members to monitor and maintain the content.

(And the practice is increasingly common: A recent study by a California consulting group found that 85 percent of nonprofits are relying on social media for marketing and fundraising.)

"There's absolutely nothing more powerful than a friend's recommendation," said Matt Slaybaugh, artistic director of Available Light Theatre.

After curtain calls at Available Light shows (including God's Ear, through Saturday at Columbus Dance Theatre), cast members ask audiences to mention the troupe via Twitter, Facebook or blog.

Other promotions are on the table, too.

The Columbus Museum of Art has a YouTube channel, with in-house videos containing sneak previews of exhibitions.

The museum is considering discounts or programming just for its 1,137 Facebook fans -- taking a cue from museums in Cleveland and Indianapolis -- and heavier advertising online and, soon, on Internet radio, spokeswoman Nancy Colvin said.

After the recent Columbus Arts Festival, the Greater Columbus Arts Council encouraged visitors to post photos to Flickr, with prizes for the best submissions. The council also tracked Facebook comments.

And the Wexner Center for the Arts recently started presenting live video feeds of panel talks, artist interviews and event announcements.

Its Web site, meanwhile, features "mix-tape" podcasts of bands booked for shows.

Like the museum, the center is using direct advertising on Facebook.

Tiny on-screen ads are targeted -- by age, sex, geography or other personal data -- to appear on selected profiles among the 200 million users worldwide.

In the span of a few months, Wexner Center ads for everything from the Andy Warhol exhibit to a Jenny Lewis concert tallied more than 31 million "impressions" (the number of times that the ads were seen on Facebook pages), according to marketing director Jerry Dannemiller.

And the center soon plans to double its budget for Facebook promotions.

The old-school crowd needn't fret, however: Traditional advertising (from print and radio ads to fliers, brochures and mailed postcards) will still be used, said all 12 organizations surveyed by The Dispatch -- such as the King Arts Complex, Phoenix Theatre for Children and ProMusica Chamber Orchestra.

"There are people who just want to read our print calendar," Dannemiller said. "On the other end, you've got people who need to be updated every five minutes. We have to adapt to that."

Moreover, arts groups acknowledge a difficulty in determining the extent to which digital followers become bodies in seats.

A fan on Facebook doesn't equal a season-ticket holder.

"We don't know how to define success with social media yet," said Bryan Knicely, president of the arts council -- whose 2009 marketing dollars have been cut in half, according to a spokeswoman.

"We feel we (already) market to our target audience very well. This is an (added) means."

Yet the frontier, all agreed, is one that shouldn't be ignored.

Minken, of Opera Columbus, writes a blog under the alias "Mimi," a stuffed cow.

The blog features a way to make donations online -- reflecting an effort to cover a $90,000 deficit -- and a button to "re-Tweet" the fundraiser.

Discounts are offered to online followers, providing another way to gauge Web traction.

Other methods are also distinct.

Beck, of the symphony, sent a Twitter post in April to encourage followers to shout "Tweet, Tweet, Tweet" among the black-tie masses before an Ohio Theatre performance -- in return for a free ticket to a future show.

Several patrons complied.

Don't forget the cultural economy

2009-06-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Razia Iqbal

BBC NEWS

15 June 2009

Could the creative industries provide innovative models which will make this sector not just resilient in the current economic climate, but allow it to flourish?

There are economists who think this is happening already. Recent research from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) suggests that the cultural sector will grow by 4% between 2009 and 2013 - double the estimate for the rest of the economy.

There are parts of this sector which are clearly feeling the effects of the recession, such as architecture and advertising. But others, like the video games industry, are burgeoning. There is a skills shortage, however, which means companies such as RealTime Worlds, in Dundee, run by Dave Jones (he created the original Grand Theft Auto), are having to look abroad for employees. Yet the currently available University courses on video games technology are over-subscribed. Surely, this is an area where the government should be looking to invest?

I've been talking to Lord Puttnam about this and he is a passionate advocate of investing in the creative industries. He thinks they are where young people want to work and argues that the government dismisses their potential at its peril. This goes to the heart of an argument that historically presents the arts community as whingeing luvvies. In fact, the reality is that the creative industries will by 2013 employ 1.3 million people and the wealth generated by these industries could reach £85 billion. It is the economic case for the arts that those in the creative industries need to make.

The National Campaign For The Arts has launched its arts manifesto today which includes a section on the economy: "To maximise the sector's potential, governments should commit to investment over a longer funding cycle of five years, more in line with established business planning". That's one thing, but the creative industries also need to make a case for funding connected with private investment. If the state funding diminishes, so will private sponsorship, so it's in the interests of the state to maintain investment.

The UK is uniquely good at creativity and innovation. Even in difficult times, institutions such as the National Theatre are innovating. Their NT Live project, which will project Racine's Phedre with Helen Mirren, live into 70 cinema screens around the UK, creates a new model to increase audiences.

For many bold enough to say so, the creative industries can be part of the solution to get the economy out of recession.

At times of crisis, fairs should take a more “curated” approach

2009-06-24T14:34:00.000-07:00

A curator's opinion

By Paco Barragán

THE ART NEWSPAPER

Published online 12.6.09

The blurring of the boundaries between the art fair and the biennial or that type of international survey exhibition is almost historical: in 1895 Venetian mayor Ricardo Selvatico saw the first Venice Biennale as an opportunity to promote the city as an international meeting place; in 1955, curator Arnold Bode modelled Documenta in Kassel after the commercial 1913 Armory Show in New York, and hoped its first exhibition, “European Art of the Twentieth Century”, would be integrated into the infrastructure of the German Federation Horticultural Show. Decades later, the Arco art fair in Madrid started the “biennalisation” of the art fair with the creation of an accompanying curatorial programme and an intense international schedule of panels, conversations and discussions with major contemporary art figures such as Okwui Enwezor, Hans Ulrich-Obrist, Octavio Zaya and Barry Schwabsky—a model which since has been copied by the major art fairs. The result is the entangled and complicated dividing lines between the commercial art fair and “non-commercial” biennial.

Both Art Basel and its sister fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, have become known for their extensive roster of special projects, commissions, lectures and discussions. Increasingly other fairs are also turning to the curator—Frankfurt-based critic and curator Amanda Coulson at Volta (the Basel edition runs until 13 June), former Flash Art critic Andrea Bellini who now directs Turin’s art fair, Artissima (scheduled for 6-8 November), or curator Neville Wakefield at London’s Frieze Art Fair (scheduled for 15-18 October)—to inject curatorial values into the commercial fair. Slowly but progressively more curators are finding places in fair selection committees, partly stemming from a desire for “transparency” over the gallery selection process which can sometime draw criticism.

Meanwhile, we are witnessing a new development in the curatorial practice, with curators expanding from museums and academic institutions, towards a more commercial sphere. For curators, art fairs have become not only places of trade, but places for cultural experiences which economists Joseph Pine and James Gilmore have called the “Experience Economy”. This concept, developed in the late 1990s, states that businesses must constantly provide customers with fresh and new “experiences”. And as such, art fair directors increasingly come from an artistic rather than an entrepreneurial background, which in turn is a response to the emergence of increasingly knowledgeable art collectors.

It’s a common complaint that many fairs lack a “focus”. In this process of transformation the curator, together with the artist and the gallery owner, can provide new perspectives on contemporary art practices and trends and redefine the art fair artistically. The fair benefits from the prestige, know-how and contacts of the curator and, in exchange, the curator gets a new curatorial platform.

Whether conceiving special sections for the fair: Black Box at Arco, Art Statements at Art Basel; or curating special shows like Filip Luyckx’s “Ephemeral Fringes” at Art Brussels (April 2008) or Salima Hashmi’s “Desperately Seeking Paradise” at the 2008 edition of Art Dubai 2008; or by organising one-day thematic exhibitions using the art pieces on display at the fair as happens at “In the Spot” at Circa Puerto Rico; the curator can facilitate a certain narrative in a context where conception, selection, production, exhibition, inauguration and social interaction are all compressed into a period of between one and five days.

It is especially true that in times of economic crisis, commercial galleries and artists may be keen to participate in curated project rooms at art fairs providing a solo, more coherent, and arguably more attractive presentation of the artist’s work. Conversely, art fairs are challenging environments in terms of pressure on space and hectic installation schedules requiring a degree of speed and concentration that we curators are not always able to match. But that does not mean that we should not contribute and aspire to make art fairs more intellectually challenging: after all, for many people they offer a more democratic and less intimidating access to contemporary art that the environments in which most of us traditionally work. Isn’t the art fair similar to some degree similar to Malraux’s “Museum Without Walls”? Isn’t an art fair a “cultural house” that takes art from city to city?

Paco Barragán is a freelance curator and author of The Art Fair Age, 2008, CHARTA, Milan

We no longer fully understand the web

2009-06-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

<< Web science is already happening. People are studying the effect of the web within disciplines like social science, economics, psychology and law. Our Web Science Research Initiative aims to bring that research together. There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole - until now. [...]

The web is now a massive system of connected people and technology and we have to study it as one. It connects people as they make and follow hyperlinks to a degree that results in complex properties no one expected. It has something like 1.000.000.000.000 web pages in it and there are a similar number of neurons in the brain. The brain is something very complicated we don't understand - yet we rely on it. The web is very complicated too and, though we built it, we have no real data about the stability of the emergent systems that have cropped up on it. >>

Tim Barners-Lee interviewed by Paul Marks, The New Scientist, 5 June 2009

Survival Strategies for the Arts

2009-06-02T15:06:00.000-07:00

By John Killacky

blue avocado (www.blueavocado.org)

May 30, 2009

John Killacky photoJohn Killacky, artist and arts funder, not only knows that we need the arts now more than ever, but gives us ten survival strategies for arts organizations and one for audience members -- and reminds us that all of us are audience members.

The arts are where hope lives. And right now, as the very tenets of civil society are being re-written, and as health and human service needs rise, there is legitimate concern about whether the arts will survive, how the arts can thrive.

The arts, like every other nonprofit sub-sector, are being challenged by significant contribution losses from government, corporations, foundations, and private donors. Box office and gallery admissions are also eroding as discretionary dollars evaporate. Almost everyone agrees funding problems will become more acute in the upcoming three to five years. Adaptability is replacing growth as a barometer of success.

There's no question to me but that the arts organizations that have dynamic, interactive, authentic relationships with their constituents, audiences, and neighbors are the ones that will come out of this maelstrom stronger. Here are ten ideas for organizations and a potpourri of options for audience members.

1. Do more with less by doing something different. Groups are mounting four plays instead of six, sharing co-production costs, presenting biannual seasons instead of annual, shortening performance runs, mining permanent collections, and altering gallery hours to allow for higher production values, deeper engagement, and higher audience satisfaction. Capitalize to mission delivery, not sustainability. Michael Kaiser from the Kennedy Center is adamant: "We mustn't be scared into thinking smaller. Small thinking begets smaller revenue that begets smaller institutions and reduces excitement and involvement."

2. Place matters. Make sure the neighborhood feels your building is their community center or assembly hall. I loved when Yerba Buena Center for the Arts hosted an election night party last November -- a wonderful cultural celebration.

When I go to the theatre I ask myself: why is this theatre presenting this piece at this time in this community? Through your marketing materials, your programs, your audience involvement, make sure your audience can answer that question. Audiences will respond when they know why you are presenting a particular play/exhibit/dance. Eric Chinski of Farrar, Straus, & Giroux offers a potent reminder of relevance: "The word necessary comes to mind for me. BeMark Rietmeijer photo by Akbar Simonseyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary?"

3. Invite the public in. Expand gallery labels. Dramaturgical notes are needed in every discipline. Pre-concert talks frame and empower audiences. Cultural contextualization translates, bridges, and illuminates artistic expression for both the cognoscenti and the general public. Visual artist provocateur Marcel Duchamp got it: "The closer the ratio is of what the artist sees versus what the audience thinks they see, the greater the artist.

Be transparent and frank about challenges. Ask for help. When the New York Times ran an item on the financial plight of San Francisco's Magic Theatre, an anonymous benefactor from Manhattan (with no previous history of support) stepped up with a major gift.

4. Let audiences co-author meaning: experiment with social media. Link young professionals into your company's social networks. Trendies can then see who is attending opening night, at intermission tweet friends on how fabulous and sexy the new dance is, and do a post-mortem chat on Skype with the artistic director. Find genuine ways for audiences to contribute and find meaning -- before, during, and after events. Try something small and see how it goes; find what's right you're your organization. Arts consultant Holly Sidford reminds us, "Participation is the most important renewable resource."

5. The middle class can save the arts. Consistently, 75% of private donations come from individuals and another 7% from bequests (GivingUSA). Religion garners one-third of this largess; arts, culture, and the humanities only receive 4%. None of us minds tithing to our mosque, temple, synagogue, or church. In the arts, we too offer transformational experiences, so let's operationalize the "church ask." Start with the people you know: audiences, volunteers, donors, and neighbors -- and ask for modest gifts, often. The Obama campaign proved the power of this kind of fundraising.

Does this mean passing the plate in the audience? Well, why not? Keith Hennessy has a free night in every run of his Circo Zero troupe, where the audience is thanked for coming and then asked to pay what they can. He reports contributions on free nights are higher than the usual box office per night.

6. Support the little league players. Sports teams know that the first sport we play is the one we follow -- that's why little leagues are integral to professional sports marketing. Arts researcher Alan Brown found 74% of orchestra subscribers sing or play an instrument. Similar correlations exist in dance, visual art, and theater. His conclusion: "Supporting personal practice is audience development."

Dance and theater companies that have schools guarantee a built in audience, as well as diversified income. Further, The Nutcracker and other holiday staples prove putting kids on stage is good for business. Getting back to the sports analogy, open rehearsals including informal meet and greets with artists are like pre-game warm-ups and autographs: they connect the amateur practitioners with the highest version of the art.

7. The First Global Generation. Pollster John Zogby finds Americans adjusting to the economic realities by "living witBangladeshi painting photo by futureatlas.comh less, embracing diversity, looking inward, and demanding authenticity." These meta-movements are shared equally by Baby Boomers and what he calls the First Global Generation of 18 to 29 year olds.

Both generations are looking for meaningful experiences. They don't want to be told everything is "extraordinary;" but they do want to know what they will encounter and how they might feel. The arts community is perfectly situated to appeal to these roving bands of "secular spiritualists," but needs to speak directly without hyperbole.

8. Risk failing. Nonprofit arts organizations are not supposed to be commercial presenters; they are meant to provide genuine alternatives. As the sector looks to increase earned income, both mission drift and diluted impact are concerns. Commercial entertainment does not do very well chasing after blockbusters. Under-capitalized nonprofits will never be able to compete, so let's not try. Arts organizations need to be counter-intuitive in their offerings, truly providing alternatives in our community. Samuel Beckett's words from Worstward Ho are apt: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

9. Have the Conversation. Small businesses seldom survive decade after decade. Do you still have a unique and necessary role in the cultural ecosystem? Imagine strategic partnerships, joint ventures, and back office collaborations to improve economy of scale, as well as efficacy of program and service delivery. Merger, consolidation, and sunsetting should also be examined. A rigorous analysis of internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats is called for.

10. Become a cultural citizen. Playwright Tony Kushner tells us, "When you don't act, you act; when you don't vote, you vote." Demand all politicians have an arts platform. Support only those that do. Hold house parties for arts friendly politicos. Invite them to openings and receptions and let them be noticed. When over 200 artists showed up in Oakland's City Hall to protest the proposed elimination the arts budget, City Council had no choice other than to reinstate. And better yet, run for school board to ensure arts are in every school, every day for every child. Claim your cultural agency.

P.S. Things audiences can do (and all of us are audience members). Go to Open Studios and buy art. Attend theater. Donate. Take salsa or tango lessons. Enjoy dance performances. Bring a friend. Donate. Sing with a chorus. Listen to live music. Donate. Write a poem, short story, or memoir. Buy a local author's book. Make art with your kids at home and at a museum's family day. Participate. Donate. Debate the merits of an independent film and then upload your own onto YouTube. Have a bake sale to support an artist residency in a nearby school. Host a season announcement, Tupperware-style, for friends. Commission an artist to commemorate a birthday or anniversary. When you love something, tell your friends. Word of mouth remains the best box office motivator.
Miniature horses photo

John R. Killacky is Program Officer for Arts and Culture at The San Francisco Foundation. He was formerly Executive Director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Performing Arts Curator at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He most recently produced and co-directed a national PBS documentary on singer Janis Ian and, with his husband Larry Connolly, uploads videos about Shetland ponies onto YouTube. Click here for their latest (it's fun!).

Why must art magazines be so glamour obsessed?

2009-04-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

I'm sick of the new breed of celebrity-struck art magazines feeding off a glamourous art world that doesn't exist

by Jonathan Jones

guardian.co.uk

Thursday 16 April 2009 13.48 BST

Art magazines operate in a sphere of journalism that knows none of the rules of logic, grammar, coherence or entertainment value that generally prevail in the world of the published. To get published in an art magazine you need to follow criteria that are almost the total opposite of what you need to write for general publications. Anything that might interest or enlighten the general reader - or any reader - is to be ruthlessly avoided.

This is why there is almost no crossover between such magazines and the mainstream press. But, amazingly, there has in recent years been a feeding frenzy in the bizarre media subculture of art magazines. The vogue for art has apparently convinced many publishing titans that there's money to be had in art fairs. What with all the idiots who've been buying art (until recently that is), there must surely be a market for an idiot's art magazine?

ArtReview, for example, having gone through innumerable changes of editor and style, now features big celebrity interviews that treat artists as if they were not so much gods as something much greater than gods - say, reality television stars. There's also one, I believe, called Art World (ugh) while Modern Painters has intensified what was always a fairly celebrity-struck gloss.

Other magazines have adapted to the frenzied popularity of art without entirely losing their souls. Frieze has obviously had a massive boost since its publishers founded an art fair. This is one that I actually wrote for. I've recently been reading it again - and have been amused by its funny pedantry. A piece I was looking at last night cited the old children's television programme Why Don't You? and some intern had actually checked the dates the series ran. Who knew it was on the air until 1995? And who says you learn nothing from art magazines?

I'm relieved that I haven't needed to fork out more than I have on magazines during a period of intense contemporary art research. Google goes a long way. One journal I have enjoyed looking at, however, is Afterall. This magazine is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary and I was pleasantly surprised that it kept me diverted during a train journey yesterday.

Afterall is the very opposite of the slick, ugly new breed of mags that try to feed off art's perceived glamour. It publishes essays rather than interviews, and the essays do try to explore real ideas. I found an article on the return of the "spiritual" in art pertinent and provocative. It pointed out something I hadn't quite noticed, that the vogue for the gothic in art so visible in a show like Mythologies at Haunch of Venison is related to the anti-Darwinian religious resurgence in society. Afterall seems aware that art exists within a larger world. That's much more worthwhile than offering pathetic secondary access to a glamorous "art world" that doesn't exist.

Critics shouldn't befriend artists

2009-04-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

Unless you're a theatre critic possessed of perfect objectivity, making new friends with actors and playwrights – yes, even on Facebook – just leads to trouble

As a woman of reasonable drive and sanity, I try not to spend too much time on Facebook. I'll log on weekly to see which friends have a birthday approaching (felicitations, Peter and Lars) or to post an update. And for a while I really liked that Slayers game, Zombies Must Die! But lately I find myself forced to visit the site for an uncomfortable purpose: declining "friend requests" from actors, directors, playwrights and publicists.

Why not just hit "accept"? Yes, many of these people are unknown to me, but so are several of the erstwhile classmates I cheerfully agreed to "befriend". And many are known to me and very likable – a category that includes, remarkably, several publicists. But I write for publications with strict codes of ethics – chiefly, the New York Times – and they don't look too kindly on pals profiling pals. Yet, to friend or not to friend is really a modern gloss on a much older dilemma: what is the appropriate relationship between the artist and the critic?

My views on this subject have shifted greatly over the past decade. When I first left university and moved to New York, I'd already published a few reviews, but I thought I might find work as an actor. I soon acquired a set of sultry headshots, copies of Backstage, and a musician boyfriend, but few roles. (I may not have been a very good actor.) I believed there was no reason theatremakers and critics shouldn't fraternise. We went to the same parties. We took the same drugs. We even dated one another. And most of my journalist colleagues were also aspiring actors, directors, playwrights or dramaturges; for models, we looked to Shaw or Tynan. We knew the heartache and toil that went into theatrical productions, even bad ones: surely, we were uniquely qualified to critique them.

A few years later, I gave up acting, enrolled in a doctoral program and became a more regular reviewer. I also grew charier about having personal relationships with artists. Increasingly, I found it difficult to write about people I knew. While I certainly wouldn't change a negative review into a positive one (I do have some integrity), I would fret over articles, worrying that acquaintances might be hurt by what I'd written. Perhaps if I were possessed of perfect objectivity I'd still argue for close ties between critics and artists, but I'm not and I can't. Now, I do still show up to the same parties, but I'm much more circumspect about establishing friendships. (It helps that I drink less these days.) I should also say that I do have a few Facebook friends who work in the theatre, typically college chums or mates from my early days in New York. And I no longer write about them.

Alexis Soloski, guardian.co.uk, THEATRE BLOG, 9 April 2009

Getting creative to survive

2009-03-25T13:42:00.000-07:00

People in the arts feel the pinch, too, but they can draw on their talent to stay afloat

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

By Melanie Cox McCluskey

Mar. 4, 2009

In today's economy, Kevin Derrick is lucky to have a job as an interior designer. Not leaving anything to chance, Derrick also moonlights as a studio director, creative consultant, and furniture designer.

Sure, he's feeling the pinch of the economic downturn. The marketing, advertising, and retail worlds that employ creatives like him are suffering.

But artists like Derrick also have built-in mechanisms for survival: their own creativity.

"We are moving into the economy of the free agent," says Richard Florida, the author of Who's Your City and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. "Whether you have a government grant or you work for a company occasionally, you have to take control of your life."
To weather the layoffs and canceled contracts, diverse income sources make sense.

Take Derrick: Juggling his multiple career responsibilities means merging his personal life into the professional. Grabbing coffee in the morning is a meeting to advise an old classmate on career direction. Cooking dinner at an investor's house is securing funds for a new product line.

"My life is: Wake up, then it's a work-live situation until I go to bed at night," says the 32-year-old from Center City.

The environment

Rachel Zimmerman, a partner in the graphic-design firms Studio Z Designs and Studio Z Exhibits and founder of the visual arts nonprofit InLiquid, has seen her creative peers hit hard by cuts in advertising, often first to go from a budget-tightening company.

"There's a lot of rethinking about what's necessary, what works and what doesn't work," says Zimmerman, 41, of Old City. "That automatically trickles down to the creative economy."

Studio Z Designs and Studio Z Exhibits, which Zimmerman runs with her husband, hasn't laid off any of its three full-time employees. Restructuring at InLiquid, however, is imminent, Zimmerman says.

While there was a reprieve during holiday sales time - InLiquid.com boosted its efforts to sell members' artwork - the end of January meant a return to cold, hard reality.

In mid-December, Hilary Jay saw design projects holding steady compared with other employment sectors. Yet six weeks later, the director of the Design Center at Philadelphia University called the layoffs for local creative professionals "epidemic."

"It's this constant pit in my stomach," says Jay, 46, of Center City. "People are looking for ways to justify their existence in a firm. They have to show why they're valuable, and why they're indispensable."

Many arts-oriented jobs that would have opened up for younger artists are still filled - many with baby boomers pushing back retirement plans because of decimated nest eggs.

Getting creative

Being inventive comes in handy in a bad economy, and creative people are finding solutions to sluggish times.

They are taking on every project that comes along. Or they're becoming more discriminating by honing a specialty niche. They're merchandising visual works of art, not easy in a climate where shopping is becoming a lost art.

Maryann Devine, owner of the arts marketing firm smArts & Culture, says that a lack of opportunities will never keep artists from following their passion.

Artists "are used to living on the edge," says Devine, 44, of West Philadelphia. "Maybe they're not going to get the same kind of commissions . . . but they're going to want an audience."

And low-cost outlets, such as Facebook or conversational blogs, still exist for artists to reach that audience, says Devine. She also advises creative leaders to start collaborating more to promote their work.

Jane Golden, executive director of the city's Mural Arts Program, is brainstorming to compensate for the $500,000 budget cut her nonprofit organization faces in the coming fiscal year.

Saturday sessions with her staff resulted in the expansion of the program's walking, bicycle and trolley tours to 500 a year. And by enlisting Temple University graduate students to draft a business plan, Mural Arts is minimizing layoffs of part-time employees.

At Night Kitchen Interactive, an agency that creates marketing for museums and arts and cultural organizations, the staff was once very selective about answering requests for proposals. But president Matthew Fischer says his team now reacts aggressively to what comes in.

Still, Fischer, 39, of Northern Liberties, predicts that his South Street-based firm will remain stable because it grew slowly and built a base of reputable, long-standing clients. This strategy also kept Fischer's 10-year-old agency afloat during the dot-com bust that sank many of his interactive competitors.

"The best thing to do is to have a good diverse client base and work with organizations who are fiscally sound and conservative at this point," Fischer says.

Philadelphia's strengths

Since the dot-com boom and bust, Richard Florida has studied "the creative class" and believes that metropolitan regions with large numbers of high-tech workers, artists, and musicians have a brighter economic future.

Florida points to Philadelphia's strengths: affordability, strong mass-transit system, respected universities, and location between Washington and New York City.

Philadelphia's strength in the pharmaceutical and health-care industries, as well as its conservative marketplace relative to New York and its comparatively secure real estate market, also will help to stabilize the regional economy, says Fischer.

Philadelphia also has the efforts of nonprofit economic development organizations like Innovation Philadelphia, which helps the region's for-profit creative industries by hosting networking events and offering resources like the employment Web site Philly Creative Jobs. Its February panel discussion, "Running on Empty: Making a Little Go a Long Way," featured experienced entrepreneurs' and business owners' strategies for finding success in a recession.

Innovation Philadelphia executive director Kelly Lee says that, like most, her organization has downsized staff and outsourced design and information technology projects. Still, she sees creative industries as one of the region's largest economic generators, counting 56,000 for-profit creative-economy firms in the 11-county area.

Charnelle Hicks was one of the panelists scheduled for the Innovation Philadelphia event. As founder and president of the Center City-based urban and environmental planning firm CHPlanning, she sees the downturn as an opportunity for people to get creative on a personal level. Some of her friends, laid off from large corporations, have reinvented themselves and started smaller, independent entities.

"We have a real advantage to take creativity and skills and apply them not just to an employer, but to finding new avenues to express ourselves and make a living," says Hicks, 42, of Perkiomenville. "It takes a leap of faith, the kind of leap of faith that creative people bring to a project or to a city or to their lives."

A Proposed Job Swap To Save American Capitalism

2009-03-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

By Liz Lerman

COMMUNITY ARTS NETWORK

march 5, 2009

Do Wall Street executives deserve big bonuses during hard times? Does increased arts funding have a place in an economic stimulus package? I’ll leave it to others to debate these controversies. Meanwhile I’d like to make a modest proposal to solve some of our economic problems: Let’s do a job swap. We’ll put the corporate executives to work as artists while the artists run Wall Street.

Since their first task will be getting economic markets back on solid footing, I’m convinced that artists have the perfect resumès for their new jobs. Here’s why:

1. Artists work ridiculous hours for no pay. And most of the artists I know will keep working until they get the job done right.
2. Artists do not need fancy offices. In fact, they usually work in the worst part of town … until that part of town becomes fancy because the artists are there. Then they have to move because they haven’t paid themselves enough to afford the new rent.
3. Artists throw everything they earn back into the store – which is why they haven’t paid themselves enough. (I will admit that there was one time I didn’t do this. When I was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship back in 2002, I decided to open my first retirement account. I put the money in “very safe” stock market investments. I would have been better off putting it into my next dance.)
4. Artists do not need financial incentives. Artists do the work they do because they love it. Or because they believe in it. Or because they think it is a social necessity for our communities. Or because they know when people make poems or pictures or dances, our best human spirits emerge.
5. Artists do not expect to get anything if they do a bad job. Except maybe a bad review.
6. No artist gets a bonus because there is never enough money at the end of a project.
7. Artists keep very tight budgets. They know how to spend the same penny over and over (not by cooking the books, but by pinching, recycling, borrowing, bartering and plowing their economy-airline frequent-flyer miles back into the next project.)
8. Artists have a rightful reputation for fresh ideas combined with a capacity for self-evaluation that borders on recrimination.
9. Artists play well with others, having evolved highly efficient collaborative techniques in the service of their visions. But they are also very independent, delivering great things even when they work alone.

Meanwhile, in their new capacities as painters, poets, cellists and choreographers, our Wall Street executives might be experiencing a combination of culture shock therapy and ethical boot camp. Artistic practice may force them to discover what they really believe in, because the combination of introspection, discipline and craft that fuels an artist’s work (oh, and it is work) puts people in a very demanding state of truth. Doing what artists do every day, some might find themselves in overcrowded classrooms, excited to share their practices to help young people discover that they actually can learn. Others might be sparked to help communities solve problems by bridging differences through the unique power of their art forms. Those who have been lucky enough to get funded for their work will likely be staying up nights, filling out multiple forms to prove the exact use of the money they have been granted. All will find their moral compasses tested as they balance the demanding loyalties of pursuing personal vision and creating value for an audience.

The job swap I propose might have a final payoff: With artists in charge of Wall Street, you might even see people donate to the cause because artists know how to inspire others to participate together, to work for something that matters, to build on the intangibles of the human experience, to make a difference.

Imagine that kind of Wall Street.

Arte Povera

2009-03-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

Why recession isn’t good for art.

By Alexandra Peers

Mar 1, 2009

Not many people would argue that fewer jobs for dancers are a boon to ballet, or shrinking advances are good for literature, or newspapers in bankruptcy are good for journalism. But it’s become commonplace to declare, as the Times did recently, that “a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing.” Newsweek took it further, comparing the art boom to an imaginary world where jazz—once appreciated only by “an audience who really dug what they were hearing” in a “cozy club”—started packing Wembley. The unseemly result, per Newsweek? “A grotesque imitation of heavy metal for the masses.”

Certainly, the excesses of the art world were alienating. But there’s Schadenfreude in the argument that bad times are good for the naughty, naughty art world. It is, and was, a place where you could fly to Miami to see Dita Von Teese strip on a giant pink sequined lipstick and call it “work.” And there’s something both marvelous and ridiculous in that.

The evidence of such profligacy was often on view at the annual art fairs—the massive Armory, plus Volta, Pulse, and Scope—which return this week, considerably constricted by the financial collapse. The art fairs are all still promising breakthrough art, cutting-edge performances, and, now, more “inclusive” or “accessible” events. (Translation: There’s more photography, decorative art, and small works, and the parties will be easier to crash.)

But as for the art, will it be any better? Is the recession good for art?

It’s doubtful. As curator Renée Riccardo, whose group show “The Garden at 4 AM” just opened at Gana Art Gallery, notes, recessions mostly just yank young artists’ work off the walls. “If traditional art isn’t selling, galleries aren’t going to show emerging art.” The recession isn’t breeding creativity so much as demand for familiar, less-threatening work. Ellen Donahue is closing her Chelsea gallery, the Proposition, after seven years and another eighteen running other downtown galleries. “People come in, they look, but they don’t even talk about buying,” she says. “All over Chelsea, artists are being told to pick up their work.” A half-dozen spaces have closed this year, and dealers like Zach Feuer have culled their stables.

The art world’s “brand names” have it easier—they can experiment in a recession, try new media, ride it out—but they aren’t immune. Photographer David LaChapelle says he worries about having to cut back. “I worry about the people who rely on me”—his staff and studio assistants.

The thing the bust fans are missing is that art in good times can capture those good times (even when artists sometimes become overly intoxicated by them). Andy Warhol’s soup cans came out of the postwar era, when cupboards opened to bounties of food. “There’s no correlation” between the economy and the quality of art being produced, says John Good, a director of the Gagosian Gallery. “The great artists transcend.” The art world’s romantic Van Gogh myth holds that starving artists toil anonymously until they’re eventually (or posthumously) discovered. But he was the exception: For centuries, many great artists were patronized in their lifetimes, generously, by popes and kings. (King François I paid for the Mona Lisa.)

Certainly, with things like shows in empty buildings, and a good deal of scrappiness and human suffering, art will adapt, survive. Perhaps it had gotten too easy, too publicized, self-involved. But not any more than anything else during the boom. Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible place to spend some of those now-fanciful-seeming billions. And the level of excitement that a boom brings to art—the sheer number of people paying attention, trying to learn the new names and debating who matters—is itself an engine of creativity. In a boom, it’s cool to love art, see art, buy art. Art is taken seriously. A bust dismisses it as a luxury.

The art market is more moral than the stock market

2009-03-08T11:08:00.000-07:00

By Jerry Saltz

THE ART NEWSPAPER

18.2.09

Introduction by Jason Edward Kaufman: With Wall Street in self-inflicted ruin it might seem ridiculous to argue that the art market is less ethical than the stock market. Yet that was the position taken last month by art dealers Richard Feigen, Michael Hue-Williams and collector Adam Lindemann in a debate sponsored by the Rosenkranz Foundation at Rockefeller University, New York. They faced artist Chuck Close, critic Jerry Saltz, and auctioneer Amy Cappellazzo, who defended the integrity of the salesroom and the art world in general. This pro-art market team was trounced. A before-and-after poll of the audience found that tales of chandelier bidding, bidding rings, the lack of regulation and so on resulted in 55% agreeing that the art market is less ethical than the stock market (only 33% opposed, 12% undecided). Amid the worst economic meltdown in half a century, caused by the unregulated greed of bankers and securities traders, the art market lost the debate. Here is one losing debater’s perspective on the defeat.

In the green room, minutes before going on stage to debate the proposition, a man who helped found the organisation behind the event, frame the debate and assemble the teams told me that he became involved with Intelligence Squared after working in “conservative think-tanks for years”. I said: “I’m just curious, did you vote for Bush twice?” He replied: “As a matter of fact, I did.” I then asked: “Does that mean you also voted for McCain?” He replied: “Yes.” Then I said: “Don’t you think that may mean you have no sense of judgement about these things?” He stared at me and led our team to the debating floor. As we entered the auditorium I noticed that I barely recognised anyone in the packed audience, and that the crowd looked fairly conservative. We were on stage by the time I put two and two together and understood why Karl Rove and Dick Cheney had participated in other debates sponsored by Intelligence Squared. By then, I knew our goose was cooked. I don’t blame losing the debate on the crowd being conservative. Rather, I blame myself and my team for having no idea how to debate, and for existing happily in what I consider a parallel art world.

Intelligence Squared framed the question (which seemed subtly slanted against my team’s position and laced with Schadenfreude), and assembled the teams. Our team—Chuck Close, Amy Cappellazzo, deputy chairman of Christie’s, and I—defended the position that the art world was not “less ethical” than the stock market. Their team was art dealer Richard Feigen, who the day before sold a Turner at auction for more than $12m, Michael Hue-Williams, owner and chief executive of London’s Albion gallery, and super-collector and nice guy, Adam Lindemann (who during the debate said: “I wish I was on your side”).

To me, their side was making a logical-sounding but smug, monstrously cynical argument. Their position essentially broke faith with art, believed in the hype of the past few years, was nihilistic and hollowed out. They said that even with all the abuses on Wall Street, the fall of Enron, insider trading, Bernie Madoff, the collapse of the stock market, widespread job losses, rampant suffering, and the world economy in a shambles, the art market was still less ethical than the stock market! Ironically, all those on the other team were likely involved in most of the unethical behaviour they railed against. To me, this seemed infinitely hypocritical and self-hating. But evidently not to the audience, who seemed to agree with every stone they lobbed at the art world, and sneered at every mention of bad behaviour by the art world.

Our argument was simple and straightforward, even if we utterly failed to make it properly. The art world, we said—like all worlds—has unethical practices.

“Chandelier bidding” happens and is disgusting; art dealers can be sharks; art fairs are like tent-city casinos; the market revved up the bullshit machine. Yet even considering all this, we said the art world is not more corrupt and less ethical than Wall Street. We acknowledged that the system may be damaged, but added that in our studios and in front of works of art when we experience moments of genuine stillness, intensity and meaningfulness, places on the edge of language, the market cannot strip away these things. In this imperfect realm, we sometimes experience the elemental otherness of art. That cannot happen in the stock market, ethics or not.

Mr Hue-Williams talked about how the art world has no regulations and that anyone can get into it. I said that other than basic guidelines already in place (especially in the auction sector), the art world is a “world” and not an industry. I’m lucky that “anyone can be in the art world”. I have no degrees and no qualifications, other than the fact that I want to do it. If there were guidelines about who could be in the art world, most of us wouldn’t be allowed to be here at all. Basically, they were arguing for a form of cultural-ethical cleansing. They claimed that with no regulations the only thing an art dealer needed was “to have two eyes”.

Once our side admitted to “chandelier bidding” and the rest, however, the day was lost. To the audience, the argument turned on the concept, “the art world is unethical”. To us, it turned only on the word “less”. Either way, these are semantic points that we clearly lost. As one blogger later noted: “I found that the ‘against the motion’ side made many errors of strategy and fact.”

Debate strategies and rules aside, I think it’s utterly ridiculous to claim that the art world is “less ethical than the stock market”. The stock market made more people richer, made more people lose money, and brought the US to its knees. By comparison, the art world is relatively benign, and the unethical parts are relatively limited. No one in the art world jumped out of a window because a painting’s price decreased. No one was put out of their home because of the art market. Even at its height, 1% of 1% of 1% of all artists made money. You can rail against the business practices of the art world, but even in flush times reputations are built on credibility, not on money or the market. The public is suspicious of the art world because the art market, and not art, is what they saw first when they saw art. Regardless, just because a dealer makes a lot of money doesn’t mean that they have the respect of the art world. Money doesn’t earn respect. Respect exists outside of the market. If you are in art for the money, you’re not really in art at all. As Brice Marden said: “It’s not the art that’s suffering; it’s the market that’s suffering. They don’t have anything to do with each other.”

An audience member identified himself as a lawyer and said he agreed with the other side because we can never be certain about the true value of art. I agree—the art world, especially now, is not about “certainty”. The art world is a space where uncertainty, doubt and paradox exist, and can transform the world. Art is not a decorative ornament on the edifice of philosophy, religion or economics. Art is not optional. Art is a universal force that helps make things happen, even if some of those things are tainted. The debate made me understand several things: cynicism about the art world runs deep; I have no clue how to debate; the art world exists in a realm that can be described by, but is nevertheless beyond, words. The following day, an old Beatles lyric drifted through my mind: “Although they thought I knew the answer; I knew but I could not say.”

Will This Crisis Produce a 'Gatsby'?

2009-03-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

The 1930s galvanized a generation of authors and filmmakers, recasting the American journey

BY SEAN MCCANN

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

FEBRUARY 21, 2009

In the fall of 1933, Sherwood Anderson left his home in New York City and set out on a series of journeys that would take him across large sections of the American South and Midwest. He was engaged in a project shared by many of his fellow writers -- including James Agee, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Louis Adamic -- all of whom responded to the Great Depression by traveling the nation's back roads and hinterlands hoping to discover how economic disaster had affected the common people. Like many of his peers, Anderson had anticipated anger and radicalism among the poor and unemployed. Instead, he discovered a people stunned by the collapse of their most cherished beliefs. "Puzzled America," the title of the book he composed out of his journeys, said it all.

In particular, Anderson found the people he met to be imprisoned by what he called the "American theory of life" -- a celebration of personal ambition that now seemed cruelly inappropriate. "We Americans have all been taught from childhood," Anderson wrote, "that it is a sort of moral obligation for each of us to rise, to get up in the world." In the crisis of the Depression, however, that belief appeared absurd. The United States now confronted what Anderson called "a crisis of belief."

As Anderson knew, the notion that the United States is a uniquely open society, where the talented and industrious always have the chance to better their lot, is a central element of American self-understanding. The notion has been a prominent feature of American culture since the days of Ben Franklin, and it remains a core feature of the national ethos to this day. Indeed, in recent months the election of Barack Obama has reminded Americans of the promise that in the United States opportunity can be open to all.

The Great Depression, however, subjected even the strongest convictions to stark challenge, revealing cracks in the vision of social mobility that the recent prosperity of the nineteen-twenties had managed to obscure. In truth, the notion that the U.S. was an open and fluid society had always been nearly as much myth as reality -- even when, as was necessarily the case, it was assumed to apply to white men alone. But the myth had come to an especially paradoxical stage in its development in the years leading up to the crash.

Never in American history had the vision of social mobility been more forcefully asserted than in the 1920s. And rarely had the image been so far out of keeping with reality. The Republican Party, which dominated national politics throughout the decade, extolled the twin virtues of economic competition and personal ambition, reminding Americans often that they lived, as Herbert Hoover remarked, in "a fluid classless society...unique in the world." That rhetoric was redoubled by a booming new advertising industry which promised that consumers might vault up the ladder of social status through carefully chosen purchases (often with consumer credit, a recent invention).

And yet, the United States actually became less equal and less fluid in the 1920s, as the era's prosperity increasingly benefited the wealthiest. By the end of the decade, the top 1% of the population received nearly a quarter of the national income, an historic peak that would not be approached again until this past decade. Indeed, the term "social mobility" was coined in 1925 by the sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, who used the phrase to identify a phenomenon in apparent decline. "The wealthy class of the United States is becoming less and less open," Sorokin wrote, "and is tending to be transformed into a caste-like group."

The conflict between the American myth of a classless society and the reality of the nation's deepening caste divisions was the irony at the core of some of the greatest literary works of the 1920s, including Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." But it was not until the Great Depression that the traditional vision of social mobility imploded.

Traveling the country, Anderson and his fellow observers found a populace confused by a collapse they could not understand. Everywhere he turned, Anderson noted, he heard the same refrain, "I failed. I failed. It's my own fault." The documentary books that he and his contemporaries created provided a kind of counter-narrative to the conventional American story of personal freedom and individual ambition. These works featured a journey not upward toward wealth and progress, but back into the hinterlands of a confused and immobilized nation.

That journey was echoed by a whole genre of "road" novels, written by angry young writers like Nelson Algren, who depicted an itinerant population of bottom dogs lurching from one disaster to the next. These novels answered the classic American vision of opportunity by imagining a nation of wanderers rapidly going nowhere.

So, too, did the cycle of gangster films -- "Little Caesar," "Scarface," "Public Enemy" -- which reached the peak of their popularity in the early '30s. Depicting boldly ruthless young men whose quests for wealth and power were doomed to end in self-destruction, the gangster film cast personal ambition as a cruel delusion. Even the era's light-hearted "screwball comedies," such as "It Happened One Night" and "My Man Godfrey," were sometimes fables of downward mobility, where arrogant socialites were brought down a notch by their encounters with ordinary people.

The road novels, documentary books and gangster films of the 1930s depicted the myth of social mobility as a bitter cheat. The era's screwball comedies viewed it merely as delightfully laughable. But all suggested that the Depression had left a core feature of American ideology in disarray, and thus emphasized the extent to which the traditional American language of personal ambition was open to redefinition. That opportunity would be seized on by a cohort of artists and intellectuals who took the crisis of the Depression as a chance to cast the idea of social mobility less as a framework for individual striving and more as an occasion for collective action.

John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" made the Joad family's flight from the dust bowl into an emblem of people coming together to remake their world. A similar image was implicit in the very title of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's documentary book "An American Exodus." Even works of light entertainment like the massively popular "Gone With the Wind" or John Ford's landmark Western "Stagecoach" were in keeping with the prevailing message of the times. All these works told of epic journeys in which a group of people overcame destructive competition in their discovery of a common destiny. Each called for Americans to act collectively to remake a democratic society where opportunity would be open to all.

In effect, such declarations helped lay the cultural groundwork for the New Deal, providing the ideological infrastructure for the new governmental institutions created during the '30s. It is not yet clear whether the current economic disaster will produce anything like the profound transformation that shook the U.S. during the Great Depression. Our own crises of belief are likely just beginning. If we are fortunate, however, we will have a generation of artists and intellectuals like those of the 1930s to help us imagine our way past confusion.

Sean McCann, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, is the author of "A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government."

The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!

2009-02-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

By HOLLAND COTTER

THE NEW YORK TIMES

February 15, 2009

LAST year Artforum magazine, one of the country’s leading contemporary art monthlies, felt as fat as a phone book, with issues running to 500 pages, most of them gallery advertisements. The current issue has just over 200 pages. Many ads have disappeared.

The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing. Careers are leaking air. Chelsea rents are due. The boom that was is no more.

Anyone with memories of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing.

The diminishment has not, God knows, been quantitative. Never has there been so much product. Never has the American art world functioned so efficiently as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model.

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

Many of those specialists are, directly or indirectly, on the industry payroll, which is controlled by another set of personnel: the dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and — crucial in the era of art fairs — event planners who represent the industry’s marketing and sales division. They are the people who scan school rosters, pick off fresh talent, direct careers and, by some inscrutable calculus, determine what will sell for what.

Not that these departments are in any way separated; ethical firewalls are not this industry’s style. Despite the professionalization of the past decade, the art world still likes to think of itself as one big Love Boat. Night after night critics and collectors scarf down meals paid for by dealers promoting artists, or museums promoting shows, with everyone together at the table, schmoozing, stroking, prodding, weighing the vibes.

And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

The ideas don’t vary much. For a while we heard a lot about the radicalism of Beauty; lately about the subversive politics of aestheticized Ambiguity. Whatever, it is all market fodder. The trend reached some kind of nadir on the eve of the presidential election, when the New Museum trotted out, with triumphalist fanfare, an Elizabeth Peyton painting of Michelle Obama and added it to the artist’s retrospective. The promotional plug for the show was obvious. And the big political statement? That the art establishment voted Democratic.

Art in New York has not, of course, always been so anodyne an affair, and will not continue to be if a recession sweeps away such collectibles and clears space for other things. This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case it has been artists who have reshaped the game.

The first real contemporary boom was in the early 1960s, when art decisively stopped being a coterie interest and briefly became an adjunct to the entertainment industry. Cash was abundant. Pop was hot. And the White House was culture conscious enough to create the National Endowment for the Arts so Americans wouldn’t keeping looking, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., like “money-grubbing materialists.”

The boom was short. The Vietnam War and racism were ripping the country apart. The economy tanked. In the early ’70s New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, bleeding money and jobs. With virtually no commercial infrastructure for experimental art in place, artists had to create their own marginal, bootstrap model.

They moved, often illegally, into the derelict industrial area now called SoHo, and made art from what they found there. Trisha Brown choreographed dances for factory rooftops; Gordon Matta-Clark turned architecture into sculpture by slicing out pieces of walls. Everyone treated the city as a found object.

An artist named Jeffrey Lew turned the ground floor of his building at 112 Greene Street into a first-come-first-served studio and exhibition space. People came, working with scrap metal, cast-off wood and cloth, industrial paint, rope, string, dirt, lights, mirrors, video. New genres — installation, performance — were invented. Most of the work was made on site and ephemeral: there one day, gone the next.

White Columns, as 112 Greene Street came to called, became a prototype for a crop of nonprofit alternative spaces that sprang up across the country. Recessions are murder on such spaces, but White Columns is still alive and settled in Chelsea with an exhibition, through the end of the month, documenting, among other things, its 112 Greene Street years.

The ’70s economy, though stagnant, stabilized, and SoHo real estate prices rose. A younger generation of artists couldn’t afford to live there and landed on the Lower East Side and in South Bronx tenements. Again the energy was collective, but the mix was different: young art-school graduates (the country’s first major wave ), street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fab Five Freddy Braithwaite, assorted punk-rebel types like Richard Hell and plain rebels like David Wojnarowicz.

Here too the aesthetic was improvisatory. Everybody did everything — painting, writing, performing, filming, photocopying zines, playing in bands — and new forms arrived, including hip-hop, graffiti, No Wave cinema, appropriation art and the first definable body of “out” queer art. So did unusual ways of exhibiting work: in cars, in bathrooms, in subways.

The best art was subversive, but in very un-’60s, nonideological ways. When, at midnight, you heard Klaus Nomi, with his bee-stung black lips and robot hair, channeling Maria Callas at the Mudd Club, you knew you were in the presence of a genius deviant whose very life was a political act.

But again the moment was brief. The Reagan economy was creating vast supplies of expendable wealth, and the East Village became a brand name. Suddenly galleries were filled with expensive, tasty little paintings and objects similar in variety and finesse to those in Chelsea now. They sold. Limousines lined up outside storefront galleries. Careers soared. But the originating spark was long gone.

After Black Monday in October 1987 the art was gone too, and with the market in disarray and gatekeepers confused, entrenched barriers came down. Black, Latino and Asian-American artists finally took center stage and fundamentally redefined American art. Gay and lesbian artists, bonded by the AIDS crisis and the culture wars, inspired by feminism, commanded visibility with sophisticated updates on protest art.

And thanks to multiculturalism and to the global reach of the digital revolution, the American art world in the ’90s was in touch with developments in Africa, Asia and South America. For the first time contemporary art was acknowledged to be not just a Euro-American but an international phenomenon and, as it soon turned out, a readily marketable one.

Which brings us to the present decade, held aloft on a wealth-at-the-top balloon, threatening to end in a drawn-out collapse. Students who entered art school a few years ago will probably have to emerge with drastically altered expectations. They will have to consider themselves lucky to get career breaks now taken for granted: the out-of-the-gate solo show, the early sales, the possibility of being able to live on the their art.

It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again.

Art schools can change too. The present goal of studio programs (and of ever more specialized art history programs) seems to be to narrow talent to a sharp point that can push its way aggressively into the competitive arena. But with markets uncertain, possibly nonexistent, why not relax this mode, open up education?

Why not make studio training an interdisciplinary experience, crossing over into sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, poetry and theology? Why not build into your graduate program a work-study semester that takes students out of the art world entirely and places them in hospitals, schools and prisons, sometimes in-extremis environments, i.e. real life? My guess is that if you did, American art would look very different than it does today.

Such changes would require new ways of thinking and writing about art, so critics will need to go back to school, miss a few parties and hit the books and the Internet. Debate about a “crisis in criticism” gets batted around the art world periodically, suggesting nostalgia for old-style traffic-cop tastemakers like Clement Greenberg who invented movements and managed careers. But if there is a crisis, it is not a crisis of power; it’s a crisis of knowledge. Simply put, we don’t know enough, about the past or about any cultures other than our own.

A globally minded learning curve that started to grow in the 1980s and ’90s seems to have withered away once multiculturalism fell out of fashion. Some New York critics, with a sigh of relief one sensed, have gone back to following every twitch of the cozy local scene, which also happens to constitute their social life.

The subject is not without interest, but it’s small. In the 21st century New York is just one more art town among many, and no longer a particularly influential one. Contemporary art belongs to the world. And names of artists only half-familiar to us — Uzo Egonu, Bhupen Khakhar, Iba Ndiaye, Montien Boonma, Amrita Sher-Gil, Graciela Carnevale, Madiha Omar, Shakir Hassan Al Said — have as much chance of being important to history as many we know.

But there will be many, many changes for art and artists in the years ahead. Trying to predict them is like trying to forecast the economy. You can only ask questions. The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture. What will artists do with this?

Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?

I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.

Right. Exactly. Crazy.

Gagosian’s $360,000 Photos Linger as Empty N.Y. Galleries Shut

2009-02-05T05:32:00.000-08:00

Katya Kazakina

BLOOMBERG.COM

Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Guild & Greyshkul, one of the most vibrant galleries in downtown Manhattan, is shutting down on Feb. 15, the latest casualty of the collapsing art market. Yet it won’t go quietly.

The Soho gallery’s last hurrah begins Thursday: a four-day extravaganza featuring the work of 120 artists. The show is a fitting end for an exhibition space known for nurturing young talent.

“I wake up at night thinking of what will happen to all the people who do more experimental work, artists who are in the beginning phases of their careers,” Johannes VanDerBeek, 26, one of the owners, said. “We’ll be as flexible as we can be with prices to get our artists a cushion of money.”

Guild & Greyshkul’s financial woes, a result of slowing sales and tanking prices, are growing commonplace in the art world. Since September, four galleries have shut their doors: Roebling Hall and Cohan and Leslie in Chelsea; Rivington Arms in the East Village and 31 Grand on the Lower East Side.

More established galleries are hurting, too. They’re firing staff, dropping out of art fairs and extending their shows for months in an attempt to cut expenses.

“Galleries are just hanging on with their fingernails,” said Matthew Armstrong, who curates the collection of Donald B. Marron’s Lightyear Capital, a New York private equity firm.

On a recent visit to Chelsea, Armstrong stopped by eight galleries.

“I was the only person in at least seven of them,” he said. “I wish the best to these guys, but it’s a little scary.”

Two weeks into its show of veteran German artist Imi Knoebel, Mary Boone’s Chelsea gallery hadn’t sold any of the seven works, priced between $170,000 and $325,000.

Reduced Prices

At the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition, which opened on Nov. 6, 2008, has been extended through March 7. The prices of some of his meditative seascapes have been reduced from $450,000 to $360,000, with plenty still available, the gallery said.

Cindy Sherman’s November exhibition at Metro Pictures did well, said gallery co-owner Helene Winer, but it wasn’t the sellout it would have been a year ago.

“Some of our big collectors said they weren’t buying, and I was shocked,” she said.

Since its founding in 2003, Guild & Greyshkul has attracted an eclectic community of artists, collectors, curators and critics. The partners -- VanDerBeek, his sister Sara VanDerBeek, 32, and their friend Anya Kielar, 30, -- are all artists with successful careers.

“They built a very culturally relevant program of both critically and commercially well-received artists,” said New York collector James Dorment, who has bought works by the gallery’s artists Ernesto Caivano and Trenton Duerksen. “I tried to see most of their shows. To me they were one of the most interesting emerging galleries.”

No Profit

Although Guild & Greyshkul has served a broad collector base and put up new shows every four to five weeks, the gallery never made a profit, VanDerBeek said. All the extra money went right back into producing artists’ work.

“We managed always to keep even,” he said. “And as we were progressing, our exhibitions were getting more ambitious.”

In 2007, Guild & Greyshkul began doing shows that transformed the exhibit space. Artist Lisi Raskin installed a 30- by-20-foot ceiling that hung 7 feet off the floor. Coupled with orange light and a long apocalyptic drawing stretching around the entire space, the installation completely distorted the gallery experience.

The gallery’s overhead has averaged about $25,000 a month in the past three years. Since September, covering those costs has become increasingly difficult, VanDerBeek said.

“Sales when they did occur were at steep discounts on works that were mostly under $20,000,” VanDerBeek said. “People said they loved the pieces, but they were just not buying them.”

(Katya Kazakina is a reporter for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

Art for art's sake; money for God's sake

2009-01-18T06:34:00.000-08:00

Art is its own reward, but it has always helped to have a generous patron
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Ken Russell

The Times

January 6, 2009

In 1880 the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun wrote the first psychology-driven novel, Hunger. In it an unpublished writer gets himself arrested to have a place to sleep for the night. Franz Kafka wrote A Hunger Artist in 1924 about a man who is world-famous for his public performances of fasting. Henri Murger wrote about four starving artists in Scènes de la Vie de Bohème - immortalised in Puccini's opera La Bohème. Poor Mimi - “your tiny hand is frozen”.

In these forthcoming hard times, these could prove examples to us all. Starving artist syndrome is the lot of those obsessives among us for whom the desire and drive to devote ourselves to creative expression outstrips our income.

With the recession and credit crunch licking at our boots and high heels, many more artists will be joining the ranks of the starving or cash-poor, while every penny goes on paint, canvas, paper, pen, music sheets, strings, rosin, film or video. Where they can be found, odd jobs will be taken to supplement the art habit. For art is a powerful and intoxicating addiction to creativity. No artist ever really takes a day off. To create something that wasn't there before, to make a slice of the imaginary real and to get lost in the focused intensity of it may well be the ultimate joy.

As someone who has always been at the service of art whether my habit was easily supportable or not, I feel qualified to comment on the question of whether money makes an artist's art better or whether it is a kind of jeopardy to the purity of one's vision. For as soon as money gets in there, expectations are created and demands on the artist's product become more pressurised. Most artists consider it their duty to resist such pressure.

But there's no question that patronage is a blessing. Nothing is going to be done as long as an artist is without funds entirely. The poet T.S. Eliot was a banker. The poet William Carlos Williams moonlighted as an obstetrician, delivering babies while creating that immortal line about the red wheelbarrow. (“So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.”) It's hard to remember now that Turner, whose last words were “the sun is God”, had many detractors in his day. His first painting to sell was bought for £500 by a wealthy private collector who expressed disappointment in its “indistinctness”. (“Indistinctness,” Turner replied, “"is my fault.”) He did illustrations for travel guides to get by.

It takes a lot of courage to be an artist. The comforts of stability may never belong to the person who is absorbed in an internal struggle to bring forth something ineffable, something beyond words but true nonetheless. Damien Hirst is entitled to be rewarded for having the self-esteem to ask overblown prices for his stuffed sharks or slices of cow. But there comes a point at which the amount of money thrown at this or that flavour of the year, rewarding celebrity image over the power of artistic expression, can seem a little out of balance, as well as encouraging all sorts of childish behaviour. For artists are typically prolonging the magic and selfish delights of childhood. The world is better for it, of course.

Michelangelo was barely tolerated in his own time, considered a wayward eccentric, uncouth and squalid, overpassionate about sculpture. It is said that he was forced by his agent to put dirt on a sculpture to improve its resale value as a supposed antique. It took the Popes to tame him into becoming a fresco painter. His apprentice Condivi verified his indifference to food and drink, saying Michelangelo “slept in his clothes and boots”.

Caravaggio was considered dangerous and unruly, arriving in Rome naked, short of money and transient. Patrons began throwing money at his art, enabling the birth of modern art, but it did his rambunctious personality no good. His taste for confrontation led him into exile and death at 38 from a knife wound.

Picasso, that most inventive of all artists, never took a day off. No one can say he was in it for the money, in spite of having lived enough years to make plenty of it. He was always in touch with his changing creative vision. He is the populist 20th century as far as art is concerned.

Van Gogh is arguably the best artist of all time. During the four years from 1886 until his death in 1890 he created about 1,000 of the world's greatest masterpieces. Yet he never sold a painting in his lifetime. “I have a big fire in my soul,” he said, “but nobody comes to give some warmth.” His brother Theo was the only one who invested in his ability to keep painting. Van Gogh's only financial ambition was to earn enough to buy a crust of bread, a tube of yellow paint and to relieve Theo from having to subsidise him.

Dylan Thomas lived in poverty. He believed that the freedom of an artist to explore evocative expression more than compensated for a lack of plush comfort.

The genius sculptor Henri Gaudier-Breszka, the subject of my film Savage Messiah, was a passionate starving artist living in poverty, as were many of his friends in the Vorticist movement.

The Bloomsbury-ites of 1900 to 1920 were notoriously threadbare, yet the quality of their lives and loves enjoyed a richness, depth, colour and stunning clarity of expression - their love lives were in fact part of their artistic expression. Even so, Virginia Woolf said it was necessary for an artist to have “money and a room of one's own” to write fiction. (She herself had about £100 a year, worth about £3,700 today.) A modest request.

The ballet dancer Isadora Duncan (the subject of my BBC film The Biggest Dancer in the World) said that she was “so poor she hardly knew where the next bottle of champagne was coming from”. Wealth in artistic Bohemian Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was the exception. But being poor and living well (or at least theatrically) could go hand in hand. Nowadays sustained artistic creation under the burden of poverty seems harder to pull off.

Would it hurt so much to give artists a little money for doing what they are absolutely made to do? We must see that they are subsidised or that their part-time jobs are flexible enough to accommodate their main contribution, their art. Art is the very thing that gives our culture a leg-up by creating meaning, beauty and a glimpse of eternal forms. What we need is not more artists, nor fewer, but more saints - such as the Carnegie or MacArthur foundations - willing to sprinkle a little seed money into the path of deserving artists, that their tiny hands may not be frozen.

On the news a few days ago it was announced that in a new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard a symphony orchestra has been reduced to a few singers wandering around the stage playing instruments. Before you know it, they'll be down to whistling. Or maybe they'll get the audience at it.

Time for a cull in the art world

2009-01-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

Waldemar Januszczak

The Sunday Times

January 11, 2009

The art world is plunging, along with the rest of the economy. Hooray

Lucky you. Lucky me. Both of us have ahead of us in 2009 the totally tantalising prospect of watching how the art world responds to the recession. Will the entire house of cards collapse in on itself, leaving the thinnest of messes? Or will some cunning redrawing be embarked on that eventually results in a new version of the tottering edifice? Ask me again in December. What is absolutely certain is that this recession has come in the nick of time, and that we should welcome it with open arms. The art world has spent a decade and a half metamorphosing into something ugly and worthless. That process has been halted. There is hope.

The art world itself will see things differently, of course. It decided long ago that it was a special case, ungoverned by the usual societal rules. I remember, back in the 1980s, interviewing that dramatic German painter Georg Baselitz, the one who specialised in painting figures upside down, and asking him if he felt any guilt about the astronomical prices his pictures were fetching at auction. Baselitz, who lived in a castle at the time, took a big puff on his cigar and actually blew the smoke out in my face, with the words: “What is better than a painting? Nothing.” Conversation over.

This idea that art exists in a different societal realm to anything else is merely laughable when a human cartoon like Baselitz takes to believing it. But when greed begins to be passed off as a redemptive force at the most basic, democratic levels of society — as happens annually at London’s Frieze Art Fair, say, where tens of thousands of us career past zillions of examples of unwatchable art in the mad search for a redemptive bargain we haven’t a hope in hell of seeing properly, because of all the other redemptive bargains jam-packed into the same tent — then all of us are in desperate need of a good shaking.

As recently as the November auctions, you could still find plenty of inhabitants of Sotheby’s-and-Christie’s-land who were insisting that art was recession-proof, that aesthetic values would, like the salamander, survive any fire. A mere month ago, nobody seemed to be batting much of an eyelid at the prospect of the nation having to come up with £50m to “save” the Duke of Sutherland’s fine pair of Titians from resale. The great works, we were told, would fetch £150m on the open market. The nation was getting a bargain.

Now, I admire Titian as much as the next art-lover, and nobody with half an eye would question the quality of these paintings, but look properly around you and you will see Britain is already Titian-rich. Yes, it would have been sad to see the duke’s pair go abroad, but when a nurse in Yorkshire is paid £17,000 per annum to save lives, and a teacher in an inner-city comprehensive makes do with not much more, there is surely something grotesquely warped about a scale of modern values that brands the giving of £50m to a rich duke for an Italian painting as a national bargain.

This, then, is the art world’s chief and most catastrophic problem — as its prices have risen, so its values have collapsed. In 1986, someone asked Andy Warhol about money. By that time, he was much too experienced a rich man and much too canny an interviewee to pass up the chance to promote his utterly appalling world-view. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” quipped the paper-thin Warren Buffett of pop. “I wanted to be an art businessman or a business artist.” Other epochs would have pounced on him immediately and told him to explain himself. How could anyone in their right mind be unable to tell the difference between business and art?

Back in 1986, however, the world was already turning into the one that has been collapsing around our ears in these past few months, and nobody gave a fig. To my eyes, the worst villain in the piece is Tate Modern, which has managed to pull off the Warholesque trick of persuading us that millions of people turning up somewhere for the wrong reasons adds up to a good and gee-whiz thing. The biggest free crèche in town is, amazingly, planning to grow bigger still. Having recently been given £50m by the government towards its projected £215m mega-expansion, the gallery is looking to increase its exhibition space from 9,000 square metres to 15,000! Excuse me, but isn’t it already gigantic enough? Rattling around in the Turbine Hall at twilight when the mothers have taken their kids home is already a profoundly lonely and alienating non-art experience. Does it really need to be doubled?

Instead of pumping more money into this oversized amusement cavern, we should be asking ourselves why it is that at exactly the same time as Tate Modern has been growing, the achievements of British art have been shrinking. The last British movement to have any real impact on the international stage was Brit Art, which emerged a decade and a half ago. That generation, of Hirst, Lucas, Quinn, the Chapmans et al, was a real global player. Since then — nothing. The reason this year’s Turner Prize was so dismal is not only bad selection, but that, frankly, there is nothing out there to choose from. British art has entered one of those crashingly dull theoretical eras when not having anything to say is covered up with oodles of explanation and artspeak. Tate Modern may be giving the public something it wants (the aforementioned free crèche), but British art is getting nothing from it.

Why? Because the whole tottering art-world edifice has grown soft, blubbery, arrogant, self-congratulatory and decadent. I cannot remember the last time I encountered an artist with the kind of fire in their belly that made Damien Hirst so unmissable when he emerged. Or anyone boasting the passions of the early Tracey Emin. British art needs a recession for the same sorts of reasons that those forests in South Africa need the occasional fire: to strengthen their wood, to return to an essence, to get rid of the weeds and to regenerate.

While we are on the subject of bloating, another excellent result of the recession will, hopefully, be a dramatic reduction in the number of art galleries in London. All these Johnny-come-latelys from Zurich or Berlin or New York who have ended up here because this is where the hedge-fund money was are as crucial to the national art scene as another branch of Starbucks. The recession will also see the end, I presume, of the silly sums being spent here by foreign millionaires on third-rate examples of their national art. I don’t mind Chinese billionaires kidding themselves in Shanghai that their trite pop artists are worth squillions, but flaunting appalling nouveau-riche tastes at our auctions is embarrassing.

So, roll on the recession. It’s all good news. A leaner, meaner, angrier art world that has to fight harder for our attention is exactly what we need.

Secrets of the auction room

2009-01-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

By Georgina Adam

Financial Time

January 2 2009

The art market is often described as the last unregulated financial market in the world. It has remained stubbornly resistant to almost all efforts to bring transparency to its operations, which still mainly function on the basis of highly personal relations and often secretive transactions. The problem is that these transactions can today be worth tens of millions, and that art was – at least until the recent global financial crisis – increasingly touted as a “safe” alternative asset class and was even put into investment funds.

The advantage to auctions is that they have a certain democratic, or rather meritocratic, element: for new collectors, buying at auction is easier than braving the haughty froideur of some top art galleries. At auction, if you have the money you can simply bid for a work, thereby avoiding the machinations of dealers who have waiting lists for some artists and select those to whom they will sell. The auction room is also often seen as the only place where “hard” figures can be obtained, with recorded transactions visible and available to all. But even this apparently transparent process is not all that it appears. Much of what is going on is secret, one way or another.

Let’s start with the sales catalogue. The first secret is the reserve for each work, the price below which it cannot be sold. Disclosing this, argue the auction houses, would disadvantage the seller by letting bidders know what is the lowest possible price, and discouraging them from bidding any higher. What is open is the printed estimate, the price range that most newcomers would imagine represents the auction house specialists’ considered valuation of the work. Buy it for less than the low estimate, and you’re getting a bargain; above the high estimate, you’ve overpaid, right?

Actually, no. Estimates can be meaningless. Vendors’ expectations can be too high; the auction house may have agreed to an inflated estimate on one work in order to bag others. Alternatively, the estimate can be unrealistically low, to attract potential buyers. Proving the point, Christie’s buries this disclaimer in its conditions of sale: “Estimates of the selling price should not be relied on as a statement of the price at which the item will sell or its value for any other purpose.”

The salerooms’ conditions of sale also detail the commission they take from buyers and sellers on each sale. The buyer’s premium is on a sliding scale from 25 per cent to 12 per cent, but here again, there is a backstory going on. Until this autumn, competition between the two main auction houses was so intense to get the best property for sale, that in some cases there was virtually an auction before the auction, each firm vying to outbid the other with more generous inducements for sellers. In some cases the whole of the buyer’s premium was given to the seller, as well as the vendor’s premium being waived entirely. This is believed to be the arrangement David Rockefeller made with Sotheby’s when he sold Mark Rothko’s 1950 “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)” for $72.8m (£36.7m) in May last year.

Further secret financial arrangements are flagged up in saleroom catalogues with a series of tiny symbols. Some of these symbols indicate that the work in question may have been guaranteed for an undisclosed sum, meaning that the auction house has promised this to the vendor, even if the work doesn’t sell. A “third-party guarantee” is when the saleroom farms out the risk to an outsider, who agrees to underwrite the risk if the work doesn’t sell – and benefits financially if it does. Another symbol indicates that the firm itself owns or part-owns the work – again, there is no detail as to what percentage it owns.

Much head-scratching has resulted from Sotheby’s newly introduced symbol, the “irrevocable bid”, by which someone agrees to leave a – yes – secret bid on a work. This was first used in November’s New York sales for Kasimir Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition” (1916), which sold for $60m, to whomever had agreed to leave the irrevocable bid. If another person had come in over that sum, then the irrevocable bidder would have taken a cut in the difference between his price and the price actually made. Another newcomer – the “interested party symbol” – indicates that someone who has a financial interest in the lot may bid, and sometimes even “may have knowledge of the reserve”.

All these arrangements were just dandy when the market was rising, but guarantees have come back to haunt the auction rooms in the financial meltdown of the last few months. Sotheby’s has admitted it lost $42m in guarantees in its third-quarter SEC filing; Christie’s as a private company does not have to disclose them, but certainly has taken a hit: a dozen guaranteed works failed to sell in its November 12 sale of contemporary art in New York. Sotheby’s CEO Bill Ruprecht has stated that for the foreseeable future the firm is “sitting on the sidelines” as far as guarantees are concerned.

So let’s actually watch the sale get under way. The auctioneer starts off each lot a few increments under the low estimate (each increment is usually a rise of about 10 per cent). It’s a treat watching him orchestrate the bids, arms waving, nodding to someone here, picking up a bid there ... except that he may have no bids at all. He is doing what is called “taking them off the chandelier”, inventing bids up to the reserve, after which he has to find a real bidder. If he hasn’t got one, then the giveaway is the omission of the word “selling” before the hammer comes down, and a quick “passed” or “unsold” blurred into “next lot!” Chandelier bidding is not illegal; it would only be so if the auctioneer continued to take fictitious bids over the reserve. It adds to the theatre of the event, but it is hardly transparent.

As for the real bidders, they too can be shrouded in secrecy. At the major sales, the most important potential buyers are hidden in windowed “sky boxes” above the room, where they can observe the action and bid by telephone. In the room, auction house staffers pass on bids from the banks of telephones; sometimes, to retain anonymity, a staffer holding an unconnected telephone will be relaying bids from someone who is actually in the room.

This anonymity – which is justifiable in many ways, including for reasons of security – is carefully protected. To this day we don’t know who bought many of the world’s most expensive works at auction, even though they were sold openly.

Until a few years ago, auctioneers generally knew in advance who would be bidding on the most expensive art, and where they would be sitting. So scratching your nose is unlikely to land you with a Picasso. But with the arrival of many new buyers from countries such as Russia or China, the salerooms have had some big surprises. The best known is the 2006 sale of Picasso’s 1941 “Dora Maar au Chat”, for which a buyer buried half way down Sotheby’s saleroom put in an unexpected and winning bid of $95.2m. The painting’s owner is believed to be Russian or Ukrainian, but nobody, even most of the people at Sotheby’s, knows for sure. Which just shows that, in the smoke-and-mirrors world of the saleroom, even the auctioneers themselves don’t always know what’s going on.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

¿Qué depara 2009 a la industria del arte?

2009-01-03T05:59:00.000-08:00

El Mundo

02/01/2009

CONCHA BARRIGÓS (EFE)

MADRID.- En arte, lo caro y prestigioso se seguirá vendiendo igual en 2009, otra cosa serán los "valores mediáticos", a los que la crisis afectará "casi seguro". Es la opinión de galeristas y expertos de la industria del arte, que creen además que la próxima edición de ARCO, que comenzará el 11 de febrero, será un éxito seguro.

En opinión de Guillermo de Osma, dueño de la galería del mismo nombre y presidente de ArteMadrid; Maribel Casillas, directora de Subastas Segre; Daniel Cardani, titular de la galería que lleva su nombre y presidente de la Asociación de Anticuarios de Madrid; y Juan de Muga, vicepresidente del Consorcio de Galerías de Arte y responsable de la galería catalana Joan Prats, el mercado del arte saldrá reforzado de la actual crisis económica.

Las galerías, explica De Osma, son "minipymes" muy vulnerables y artesanales pero que suelen funcionar sin pedirles a los bancos dinero para comprar cuadros, por eso, "en épocas de vacas gordas, guardan y en la de vacas flacas tiran de reservas".

El comprador, aconseja, debe llevarse una obra porque le gusta, "eso es lo fundamental, y luego que valore otros aspectos. Si va a ser o no una magnífica inversión, eso, en principio, nadie lo puede garantizar".

"El arte más contemporáneo será el más vulnerable a la crisis. Por ejemplo, el récord alcanzado en una subasta por Damien Hirst, con obras como un tiburón en formol, fue, cuando menos, dudoso", porque, sospecha, quienes pujaron fueron sus propias galerías.
ARCO cosechará éxitos a pesar de la crisis

En ARCO, apunta, se vende entre el 10 y el 30% de todo lo que se hace en el año y él, al igual que el resto de consultados, cree que en 2009 se repetirá el éxito del año pasado.

Maribel Casillas opina que las casas de subastas "sufrirán unos porcentajes de lotes no vendidos muchísimo más elevados de lo habitual" e incluso puede que reduzcan el número de pujas anuales.

No obstante, precisa, el arte siempre "ha sido, es y será una buena inversión" y, además, ofrece una ventaja añadida muy importante respecto a los otros sectores y es que una vez hecha la inversión ya no genera más gastos y sí aporta, además de los económicos, "beneficios evidentes como el prestigio social y cultural", por eso saldrá "reforzado" de esta crisis.

Casillas piensa que serán los artistas que, por cuestión de modas, han quedado en los últimos cinco años en un segundo o tercer plano los que mejor aguantaran la crisis e incluso sus cotizaciones podrían subir, mientras que otros con los que se ha especulado más, como, por ejemplo, Banksy, acabarán notando la crisis y corrigiendo precios.

Daniel Cardani resalta que el mercado está expectante y que los coleccionistas, galeristas, marchantes, subastadores y artistas, han constatado que en las últimas grandes subastas internacionales se han registrado "mixed results", es decir, se han retirado muchos lotes pero a la vez se han batido récords mundiales.

"Cabe esperar que los coleccionistas e inversores superen el pánico y vuelvan una vez más su mirada e interés al arte, que tradicionalmente se ha considerado un refugio seguro para el dinero, un placentero remedio anti-inflación", desea Cardani, que matiza que esa reacción no será inmediata.

En general, detalla, la crisis, "y sobre todo la incertidumbre en el futuro económico y financiero lo enfría todo", porque desaparece el optimismo, tan necesario cuando se van hacer compras de obras de arte pero que también "se están corrigiendo los excesos cometidos en los años del esplendor económico".

A Juan de Muga le parece que el valor añadido que tienen las obras de arte impedirá que el negocio de las galerías se vea afectado de forma importante. Las crisis, sostiene, la sufrirán, en cualquier caso, los nombres en los que ha habido una mayor especulación, los que tienen precios muy sobrevalorados, "los mediáticos", aunque prefiere no dar nombres.

"Ya no vale todo, se venderá no solo los nombres sino piezas concretas: una obra buena puede seguir subiendo pero ya no cualquier obra de un artista importante tiene una salida fácil si no es muy buena", vaticina.

Small is beautiful in this age of austerity

2009-01-01T07:41:00.000-08:00

The director of the National Gallery tells Arifa Akbar why blockbuster exhibitions are a thing of the past

THE INDEPENDENT

Tuesday, 30 December 2008

For the past decade, the nation's biggest museums have relied on blockbuster exhibitions featuring numerous well-loved masterpieces to attract visitors.

But now a leading director is urging galleries to rethink the way in which major shows are staged by offering up a single work of art rather than the usual rooms crammed full of gilt-framed Monets, Turners and Caravaggios.

Dr Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery in London, who has previously criticised the growth of blockbuster exhibitions that offer up major artists, is advocating recession austerity for 2009 with exhibitions consisting of a single work of art.

Entrance prices should fall to as low as £1, he argues. "I think there are a great many works of art that could benefit from isolation," he said, adding that in some cases numerous images shown together, such as in some exhibitions that focused on religious works, could be off-putting.

"There's something comical about having a line-up of the Virgin and Child. It's not a beauty competition. These religious works of art would gain from being shown in isolation, because it re-emphasises their sacred purpose," he said.

This policy could also be a way to bypass the gloom of recession, he said, which will bring with it a reduced ability for gallery directors to buy new works or take out expensive loans from abroad with which to fund shows.

"We have to find new ways of staging exhibitions, especially in this present economic climate, with rising transport and insurance costs in loaning works of art.

"There is increasing competition for the number of exhibitions and the opportunity to have them. I would like to stage one- or two-picture exhibitions in the future, although that is not want I would want to do exclusively."

Visitors, he added, might better appreciate a work of art if it was hung in this singular way.

One example was the special exhibition currently at the gallery that consisted of two works by Titian.

The pieces have been brought down to London from the National Galleries of Scotland as part of a £50m fundraising campaign.

The show, Dr Nicholas said, had not only attracted extraordinary crowds, but public attendance had lasted longer, with visitors standing in front of the paintings for considerable lengths of time, sketching the works or debating their merits.

"It has been one of the most successful things this year. It was a 'two- picture exhibition', just two works in one room, and it was a major event which drew incredible numbers of people.

"It is about learning to look at one picture and that is what people did, they stood for a long time and looked, puzzled over it, drew it, argued about it. Even if we don't acquire the painting – which we are on the brink of doing – we can say that the exhibition has been the most tremendous success."

Dr Nicholas hopes to stage some 19th-century British painting exhibitions consisting of one or two major pieces of work from that era, which he feels was "greatly under-represented" at the gallery.

Major pieces by painters including David Wilkie and William Mulready would be exhibited in isolation.

"It would focus on an original type of landscape that came out of 19th-century painting," he said.

The solo picture shows would be less expensive than usual exhibitions, costing visitors as little as £1 per visit.
Next year, a single, large-scale installation by Kienholz, Hoerengracht, will go on show alongside an exhibition of religious sculptures from Spain, called The Sacred Made Real, which Dr Nicholas said would be "sparsely displayed", as well as works by Picasso in February.

Dr Sir Nicholas said one of the most successful episodes in the history of the gallery had been its "single-picture" shows during and after the Second World War. "The smaller pictures were coming back from storage to the National and people had been starved of paintings. Only one masterpiece would come back at a time and be shown. This was the most famous episode for the gallery."

Dr Nicholas Penny, and Picasso's Infanta Margarita,
which will form part of a new exhibition in February

Bernie Madoff a ripoff 'victim'

2008-12-30T07:23:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK POST

By JAMES FANELLI and ANGELA MONTEFINISE

Swindler extraordinaire Bernard Madoff got a taste of his own medicine last weekend when a burglar stole a $10,000 statue from his posh, $9.4 million Palm Beach estate, according to a police report.

The theft occurred sometime between 3 p.m. on Dec. 19 and 11:30 a.m. last Sunday, a week after Madoff confessed to ripping off $50 billion from investors in a decades-long Ponzi scheme.

The five-foot, copper artwork overlooked the Madoffs' inground pool, and portrays two young lifeguards sitting on a raised stand.

Madoff is currently under house arrest at his $7 million Park Avenue apartment.

He also owns a $3 million oceanfront estate in Montauk, LI, which has been pummeled by severe beach erosion. The surrounding estates have been largely spared.

The bad luck is hitting Madoff after decades of running a scheme that pulled in money from all over the world, often through hedge funds like Fairfield Greenwich, which lost $7.5 billion.

The fund's owner, Walter Noel, has branches overseas. His niece, Bianca Haegler, a blond-bombshell, well-known Brazilian socialite, and her dad, Alex, reportedly steered Brazilian investors to Fairfield but were unaware of Madoff's alleged scam.

angela.montefinise@nypost.com

The remarkable renaissance in Chinese art

2008-11-22T07:27:00.000-08:00

More than half of the world's best-selling painters and sculptors today are from Asia – a major shift after 500 years of domination by Western art. Andrew Johnson reports

THE INDEPENDENT

Sunday, 16 November 2008

With its £2 trillion surplus, China's economic might dominates the world. Now its painters and sculptors are developing, collectively, into a contemporary arts superpower. Asian artists, and in particular those from China, dominate a new list of the world's best-selling contemporary artists of last year. Among the world's most sought-after artists are the unfamiliar names of Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun and Zeng Fanzhi.

Of the world's 20 top-selling artists, 13 are from Asia, with 11 coming from China. Asian artists make up six of the top 10 biggest sellers at auction, five of which are Chinese. Experts predict that within a decade, the term "Asian art" will be as widely used as "Western art" and will be responsible for most global sales.

The annual survey of the global art market by the auction tracking site Artprice and the Axa insurance company lists the 500 top-selling artists at 2,900 auctions between July 2007 and June 2008. While the top four selling contemporary artists at auction were the Western superstars Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst and Richard Prince, almost all the rest are Asian. Other Chinese artists in the top 10 include Wang Guangyi and Yan Pei-Ming. Japan's Takashi Murakami comes in at number eight, while the Indian-born Anish Kapoor, who lives in England, is number 18. It is a seismic shift in an art market dominated by the Western tradition for almost 500 years.

"The total auction revenue generated by 100 Chinese artists in 2003-4 amounted to £860,000," the report says. "The same 100 generated total revenue of £270m over the last 12 months. Of these 100, three are striking for having each generated more than £26m."

Vinci Chang, head of sales at Christie's Asian contemporary department in Hong Kong, said: "These artists grew up in a post-Mao China and have seen a country under decades of turmoil and political and social change. All this has informed their work."

Such is the interest in Chinese art that Charles Saatchi has opened his new gallery in Chelsea with an exhibition of new Chinese talent. Originally, he said, he found Chinese art as very "kitschy" and "derivative". "But there's enough stuff to put on a good show," he said in 2006. "My rule is: if you can put this in the Whitney Biennial and nobody is going to say, 'Oh, that's very good for a Chinese artist,' then that will be fine."

World’s 20 top selling artists

Wang Guangyi

The Chinese artist is seen as an exponent of 'political pop'. His work, including 2005'2 'Porsche', combines the styles of communist propaganda posters with consumer logos. 'Stylistically merging the government enforced aesthetic of agitprop with the kitsch sensibility of American pop, Guangyi's work adopts the Cold War language of the 1960s to ironically examine the contemporary polemics of globalisation,' according to the Saatchi Gallery.

Takashi Murakami

Murakami is regarded as one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking Japanese artists of the 1990s. His work ranges from cartoon-like paintings and almost minimalist sculptures to giant inflatable balloons. He also puts on performance events and designs factory-produced watches, T-shirts and many other commercial products. Murakami, 46, is credited with creating the 'superflat' style of painting, which features flat planes of colour and graphic images derived from the Japanese traditions of anime and manga. Much of his work is emblazoned with his signature character, Mr DOB.

Zhang Xiaogang

Zhang is known for his surrealist paintings, with Picasso and Dali among his influences. His Bloodline series of paintings, including 'Big Family', right, feature stylised and monochrome portraits of Chinese people in stiff, formal poses, which recall portraits done in the 1950s and 1960s.

Zeng Fanzhi

Zeng is among the most sought-after Chinese contemporary artists. He combines expressionist and realist styles in his work, which often deals with relationships between people. His series of Great Man paintings – featuring Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao among others – appear at first glance to be official portraits, but subvert the traditional representations with use of monochrome and expressive brush strokes.

Yue Minjun

Yue is a member of the Chinese 'cynical realist' movement. He is noted for depicting 'cloned doppelgängers', grotesquely contorted with maniacal grins, such as 2005's 'Backyard Garden'. The forced jollity of his anti-heroes echoes modern anxieties.

World's 20 top selling artists

1 Jeff Koons, born 1955 in Pennsylvania, incorporates kitsch imagery. Sold £69.4m in the past year.

2 Jean-Michel Basquiat, born 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, was a graffiti artist who died in 1988. Sold £54.3m.

3 Damien Hirst, born 1965 in Bristol, a key member of the Young British Artists. Sold £45.7m.

4 Richard Prince, born 1949 in Panama, is an American painter and photographer. Sold £33m.

5 Zhang Xiaogang, born in 1958 in China's Yunnan province. Sold £32.3m.

6 Zeng Fanzhi, born in 1964 in Wuhan, holds the auction record for a contemporary Asian artist. Sold £27.8m.

7 Yue Minjun, born 1962 in Heilongjiang. Sold £27.8m.

8 Takashi Murakami, born 1962, Tokyo, Japan. Possibly the best known Eastern artist on the list. Sold £15.5m.

9 Wang Guangyi, born 1957, in Heilongjiang. Sold £11.7m

10 Liu Xiaodong, born 1963, Liaoning. Painter and photographer documented the controversial Three Gorges Dam project. Sold £10.5m.

11 Cai Guo-Qiang, born 1957. Performance artist who uses gunpowder to produce 'explosive events'. Sold £10.1m.

12 Yan Pei-Ming, born 1960, Shanghai. Best known for epic portraits of Mao Zedong and Bruce Lee. Sold £9.9m.

13 Chen Yifei, born 1946 in Zhejing. Among the first to break into Western art market. Died in 2005. Sold £9.7m.

14 Fang Lijun, born 1963, Hebei. Painter of the 'cynical realism' school. Sold £9.6m

15 Liu Ye, born 1964, veteran of the post-1989 avant-garde movement. Sold £8.8m.

17 Zhou Chunya, born 1955, Sichuan. Renowned for green portraits. Sold £8.3m.

18 Anish Kapoor, born 1954, in Mumbai, India. Turner Prize-winning sculptor who has lived in England since 1972. Sold £6.7m

19 Peter Doig, born 1959. The Scottish artist's paintings are among Europe's most expensive. Sold £6.7m.

20 Rudolf Stingel, born 1956, in Merano, Italy. Sold £6.5m.

Cultura se escribe con 'c' de crisis

2008-11-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

La coyuntura económica ha instalado un ambiente de inquietud en el sector de las artes en España - Cine, música y arquitectura serán las más afectadas

EL PAÍS - Madrid - 16/11/2008

¿Crisis, qué crisis? Crisis de la industria cultural, sin asomo de duda. La temible coyuntura mundial no ha respetado al ámbito de las artes en ningún sitio, tampoco en España. Los estudios de arquitectura (hasta los más prestigiosos) han visto rebajados en un 50% sus visados de obra por culpa de la hecatombe del ladrillo; el sector editorial admite una clara actitud de prudencia en sus estrategias de contratación; el mercado del arte se retrae a velocidad de crucero; los promotores musicales caen ya en un pánico escénico consistente en la reducción de giras y conciertos debido al recorte de los dineros públicos y los productores de cine contemplan con temor un vertiginoso endurecimiento en la concesión de créditos. Sólo el mundo del teatro -paradójico sujeto de un clima de relativa euforia- surge como clara excepción a lo que bien pudiera denominarse "el efecto ventanilla cerrada".

[...]

En 2008 el arte parecía una isla, una inversión refugio de los capitales huidos de los mercados financieros. Pero el mercado ha acabado por sucumbir. Las últimas grandes subastas de arte contemporáneo así lo demuestran. Las subastas de Sotheby's y Christie's de arte contemporáneo de octubre y noviembre se han saldado con porcentajes de obra no vendida que recuerdan a los de la crisis de 1991, el fin del boom de los ochenta; pero es que para el mercado primario, el de las galerías, tampoco las cosas son demasiado boyantes.

España no es una excepción. A principios de octubre, Christie's no consiguió vender el 40% de las obras de arte español que compran fundamentalmente clientes españoles- que sacó a subasta en Madrid. Es más, el frenazo inmobiliario va a hacer que se resienta especialmente la inversión en obras de arte. "Los clientes relacionados con la construcción han dejado de comprar", señala Elisa Hernando, directora de la consultora Arte Global. Aunque apunta una ventaja en tiempos de crisis: "Hay gente que necesita liquidez y está vendiendo obra que adquirieron en los noventa, por ejemplo". Los galeristas hablan de "prudencia" e incluso "miedo" para definir el estado de ánimo del sector. Nerea Fernández cree que aún no ha llegado el gran parón, pero sí que se nota ya que la actividad se está frenando, sobre todo en los niveles medios. "Los clientes fuertes no dejarán de comprar y tampoco los que compran una obra pequeña de forma esporádica", opina.

En este ambiente, las perspectivas para la próxima edición de Arco no son demasiado halagüeñas. "Estamos observando mucha incertidumbre", reconoce su directora, Lourdes Fernández. "La gente no sabe qué va a pasar de aquí a febrero, aunque también hay mucha expectación e interés por participar", añade.

[...]

Con información de M. J. Díaz de Tuesta, R. García, A. Intxausti, I. Lafont, L. Portela, E. Silió, R. Torres y W. Manrique.

After the Building Boom

2008-11-14T13:39:00.000-08:00

WALL STREET JOURNAL

By Alexandra Peers

The economy's swoon and Wall Street's woes are taking a particularly specific and tough toll on art museums. The art boom of the past two decades, and the resulting skyrocketing costs of acquisitions and insurance, led museums to staff their boards with more than a few deep-pocketed executives from real-estate firms, financial institutions and hedge funds -- industries that are now among the hardest hit. Plus, the tough times come at the tail end of a nationwide boom in museum expansions, and many of those glamorous buildings and new wings are not yet paid for. A handful of major institutions financed those expansions with bond issues that face the same climbing adjustable interest rates that are bedeviling homeowners.

For some time now, most museums have been betting that a golden age of giving was soon to end. But even institutions that braced for a downturn say the stock market's decline, the bankruptcy or disappearance of major investment banks, and the liquidity crisis have made this one unique. "We know from history the bell curve of support goes down," says Emily Rafferty, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "But as far as the corporate world is concerned, we've never seen anything like this" current climate, she says. "We need to navigate a very, very difficult time."

At the same time, museum directors say they are actually potentially much more nimble than the cash-strapped orchestra or local theater might be because they have such diverse sources of revenue -- membership income, facilities rental, donations, endowment, admissions and gift-shop sales. The bottom line: Art museums are in more trouble than many other cultural institutions right now, but perhaps more able to manage and maneuver their way out of it. Strategy is key right now, says Ms. Rafferty. Museums, "while controlling expenses as much as possible . . . must think broadly about growing revenues in all other possible ways."

So what are museums doing? Just a year after the opening of its gleaming new Bloch Building, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., has cut hours -- and turned down its thermostat. The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu has laid off 25 employees, nearly half its staff; the Museum of Modern Art in New York has instituted a hiring freeze and won't host any parties at Art Basel Miami Beach this year. Some West Coast institutions seeking increased rental income are expanding their party facilities. Other museums are offering expanded signage to corporate sponsors that pay for exhibitions. Last month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art refinanced $383 million in adjustable-rate bonds to cut its interest rate.

There's all the more tension because museums have become less reliant on corporations than on a relative handful of individual donors in recent years, says Michael Shapiro, director of the High Museum of Atlanta. He notes that while the High has 40,000 members, about 40% of the money donated by members comes from just 200 of them.

How dependent is the museum business on Wall Street and financial-services income? Boards are actually fairly well diversified, but Wall Streeters have been disproportionately generous. The Met's first gallery devoted to contemporary photography, Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall, opened earlier this year; it was endowed chiefly by Robert Menschel, a senior director of Goldman Sachs. Hedge-funder Kenneth Griffin gave $19 million to the Art Institute of Chicago for its new building. Donald Marron, former head of PaineWebber, David Ganek, and buyout kings Henry Kravis and Ron Perelman all have gotten their names on museums walls, rooms, wings or rotundas in recent years. SAC Capital's Steve Cohen gave the Met its first Robert Rauschenberg painting two years ago -- unveiled at an exhibition sponsored by Merrill Lynch.

The ties to financial institution executives are particularly tight at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened its $800 million new building in 2004. It has Mr. Menschel, hedge-fund mogul Leon Black, and Marie-Josée Kravis, the wife of financier Henry Kravis, on its board. Kathy Fuld, wife of disgraced Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, is a museum vice chairman.

Mergers spurred by the credit crisis have made wealthy individuals even more important. Key donors such as Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia and Washington Mutual -- one of the Seattle Museum of Art's biggest corporate supporters -- no longer exist as separate entities.

The museum community as a whole has a bit of a hangover from unbridled expansion. About two dozen institutions added wings or buildings in the past several years, or are still in the midst of doing so. At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, donors have pledged $504 million toward expenses and a new wing due to open in 2010, and so far, 62% of that money has been paid, says Patricia Jacoby, deputy director. She's not too worried, she notes, since on the last fund-raising campaign in 1998 donors defaulted on only $56,000 of the $137 million pledged.

Still, museum directors remember the case of Tyco chairman L. Dennis Kozlowski. Aggressively courted by the Whitney, he pledged over $1 million shortly before being indicted in 2002 for securities fraud.

New York's Museum of Arts and Design just relocated to a new building. "I don't say it's easy and I can't say it's finished," says Holly Hotchner, MAD's director, about raising the last $7 million of a $93 million construction budget. It's become more difficult because of liquidity issues with some art collectors: Banks have cut back sharply on loans against art, she notes.

Many of the building sprees were paid for by both donations and bond issues. A New York City agency, the Trust for Cultural Resources, has, since 2000, issued bonds for six art museums in the city. In most cases, the issues totaled more than $20 million. This is not problematic in and of itself, museum development and financial officers note, since many of the bonds are insured, they're payable over decades, and endowments alone can often easily cover outstanding debt. (The Met alone has an endowment of more than $1 billion.) But the museums with adjustable-rate securities have been hit by rising interest rates.

Last month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had to refinance $383 million of bonds it had issued to pay for a renovation designed by architect Renzo Piano. Interest rates on the variable auction-rate securities had climbed to as high as 11% after the bond's insurer was downgraded to junk status; the new debt is at about 4%, says CFO Ann Rowland. She adds that the museum is considering modest cuts in programming and has started a hiring freeze on all "non-revenue-raising positions." (Earlier this year, MoMA refinanced all its debt to make it fixed-rate.)

Pressure to expand museums comes from shortsighted donors with an "edifice complex," says Scott Black, a trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and chairman of Delphi Capital Management. They want their name on something and "don't want to give money for just operating costs." With most museums' big expansions behind them, that makes fund raising at previous levels unlikely.

For many institutions, it may just be unfortunate timing. While some institutions, like New York's New Museum, have just finished ambitious building projects, the Whitney Museum of American Art launched a capital campaign last year, seeking to raise $680 million for a Piano-designed "Downtown Whitney" on New York's Gansevoort Street. The museum says "nothing has changed. . . . [O]ur building capital campaign is still in the quiet phase."

The economy has slowed some other institutions' big plans. In 2006, the Parrish Museum of Art, in New York's tony Hamptons, unveiled a design by architects Herzog & de Meuron for a building in Watermill, N.Y., that would triple its space. The budget is $80 million. The Parrish's director, Terrie Sultan, says the museum will not break ground until 80% of the target amount is reached through donations. "A decision was made not to take a mortgage" to raise the financing, she says, and now she's glad there isn't one.

Going forward, expect more museum positions to be named after donors, the way endowed chairs are at universities, museum executives say. And expect directors to make pilgrimages to the United Arab Emirates. While the economies of those Persian Gulf states have been dented by oil's decline, they are still among the most free-spending nations in the world. Last year, the Louvre cut a deal to lend some of its art to a new museum in Abu Dhabi that will be built and funded by that state but bear the Louvre's name. The agreement netted the French museum in excess of $500 million. And the heads of MoMA and the Guggenheim have traveled to the United Arab Emirates in the past several months, and a slew of museum officials are expected at the opening of Qatar's huge new Museum of Islamic Art next month.

Meanwhile, the High Museum's Michael Shapiro is thinking far in the future. "We're putting a lot of energy into planned giving, into bequests," he says. In the meantime, the High's annual wine auction is coming in March, and the museum is beefing it up and hoping for record results. People may want to drink more wine in a recession, the director says.

Ms. Peers writes on art and culture for The Wall Street Journal

Frieze After the Freeze

2008-10-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

By Jerry Saltz

NEW YORK MAGAZINE

At London’s big art fair, signs of financial trouble abound. But maybe that’s okay.

Two weeks ago, the Death Star that has hovered over the art world for the last two years finally fired its lasers. It was October 15, the day the stock market fell more than 700 points—again—and a month after Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch collapsed and Damien Hirst pawned off $200 million worth of crapola on clueless rubes at Sotheby’s. Against this backdrop, at 11 a.m., the gates of London’s Frieze Art Fair opened, and in streamed the international traveling circus of bigwigs, collectors, curators, advisers, museum directors, trustees, models, movie stars, and critics like moi.

Talk of financial doom filled the air. Karl Schweizer, UBS’s head of art banking, told one reporter, “We are in a liquidity crisis.” Money manager Randy Slifka added, “There is blood on the streets on Wall Street.” Collectors talked about “sewing up our pockets.” Yet much of the art world was playing on as if nothing had happened. A German dealer told Artforum.com, “This economic mess will all be over by January.” Christie’s Amy Cappellazzo spun her house’s recent sales: “If you bought something, you bought something real.” In truth, most of the speculators are buying something real bad or badly overpriced.

In fact, though, things were different. Those of us who have frequented Frieze could see that something was off. Dealers and assistants who in recent years were always busy with clients now stood or sat quietly. Sales were happening, but slowly, one at a time. The claim of “It’s sold” was replaced by “I have it on several holds.” Although the megagalleries like Gagosian and White Cube teemed with moneyed types and very tall women in very high heels, many younger dealers looked perplexed. A gallerist who entered the field in the go-go aughts and who had sold only two pieces by 5 p.m. that first day asked, “What’s going on?”

As I made my way through the 152 booths, I thought about the moment in Titanic when the designer of the doomed luxury liner warns Kate Winslet to find a lifeboat because “all this will be at the bottom of the Atlantic.” When I tried this idea out on attendees, several said I was “a buzzkill.” I asked, “Isn’t the buzz already beginning to disappear?”

If the art economy is as bad as it looks—if worse comes to worst—40 to 50 New York galleries will close. Around the same number of European galleries will, too. An art magazine will cease publishing. A major fair will call it quits—possibly the Armory Show, because so many dealers hate the conditions on the piers, or maybe Art Basel Miami Beach, because although it’s fun, it’s also ridiculous. Museums will cancel shows because they can’t raise funds. Art advisers will be out of work. Alternative spaces will become more important for shaping the discourse, although they’ll have a hard time making ends meet.

As for artists, too many have been getting away with murder, making questionable or derivative work and selling it for inflated prices. They will either lower their prices or stop selling. Many younger artists who made a killing will be forgotten quickly. Others will be seen mainly as relics of a time when marketability equaled likability. Many of the hot Chinese artists, most of whom are only nth-generation photo-realists, will fall by the wayside, having stuck collectors with a lot of junk.

Much good art got made while money ruled; I like a lot of it, and hardship and poverty aren’t virtues. The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists—especially emerging ones—won’t have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They’ll be able to experiment as much as they want.

But my Schadenfreude side wishes a pox on the auction houses, those shrines to the disconnect between the inner life of art and the outer life of commerce. If they don’t go belly up or return to dealing mainly with dead artists, they need to stop pretending that they have any interest in art beyond the financial. Additionally, I hope many of the speculators who never really cared about art will go away. Either way, money will no longer be the measure of success. It hasn’t made art better. It made some artists—notably Hirst, Murakami, Prince, and maybe Piotr Ukla´nski—shallower.

Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art. The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn. New generations took the stage; new communities spawned energy; things opened up; deadwood washed away. With luck, New Museum curator Laura Hoptman’s wish will come true: “Art will flower and triumph not as a hobby, an investment, or a career, but as what it is and was—a life.”

Art lovers snap up free artwork

2008-10-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

BBC News

Art lovers have snapped up £100,000 worth of free artworks by some of the UK's leading and emerging contemporary artists at a fair in London.

Some people queued and camped out for two nights to get their hands on work by artists like Gavin Turk and Stella Vine at the Free Art Fair.

The 40 pieces available, which were allocated by a ballot system, were all gone within an hour and 20 minutes.

The most valuable piece given away was worth £15,000.

Interest in the Free Art Fair was so great, its website crashed as people clamoured to log on.

Founder Jasper Joffe said the idea was to provide an antidote to the hype that surrounded the Damien Hirst's recent record-breaking sale at Sotheby's, which raised £111m.

'Amazing opportunity'

"It wasn't pushy like the Christmas sales, it was more like a festival. There was a good atmosphere and even the people who didn't get anything were just happy to have taken part."

This was the Free Art Fair's second year and some collectors, like fashion student Selam Yohans, were repeat visitors.

After acquiring a Stuart Cumberland painting last year, she had returned with the hope of getting another.

"I ended up getting a Chantal Joffe collage instead as I fell in love with it and there was another girl who really wanted the Stuart Cumberland," she told the BBC News website.

"I plan on keeping it and putting it in my living room - I have no interest in selling it," she added.

"The idea of the Free Art Fair is great for someone like me who spent two nights sleeping out to get the chance to get their hands on paintings that we would never have be able to get - it's an amazing opportunity."

Joffe said he "might" run the fair again next year, but if he does, will add to the idea in some way.

Link: Free Art Fair

Hirst Sale Marks U.K. Art Market Peak; Prices Fall, Survey Says

2008-10-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

By Scott Reyburn

Bloomberg.com

Oct. 7, 2008

Damien Hirst's 111.5 million-pound ($199 million) record auction in London last month marks the top of the art market in the U.K., for now at least, according to a survey by valuers.

At the time that Hirst was grabbing headlines, the collapse in real-estate sales in the U.K. was taking its toll on prices of lower-value art and antiques, said the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

``The credit crunch and bank collapses are slowing down the markets, as is the falling house market,'' said Simon Jones of Oxfordshire auctioneers Jones & Jacob, who was quoted in the survey. ``It will get worse as the recession continues. That said, best quality lots are finding buyers at good prices.''

Auction houses are watching for signs of how their sales will perform in London and New York in the next two months. Even wealthy art buyers may be deterred by the Sept. 15 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., tumbling stock markets and slowing economic growth, said dealers.

A net balance of 34 percent more auctioneers and valuers reported prices falling for items estimated at 1,000 pounds and below in the quarterly survey completed last month. By contrast, a balance of 39 percent reported that prices rose for more expensive works of 50,000 pounds and higher as wealthy people snapped up trophy art. Contemporary art registered the strongest growth, with 41 percent more surveyors reporting increased prices.

Antique Furniture

Twenty-two percent more of those surveyed by RICS said prices were dropping for items valued up to 5,000 pounds. Prices fell most sharply for antique furniture and traditional paintings, said RICS.

``It seems average buyers are reassessing their spending in the current financial crisis,'' said the survey, based on responses from 63 RICS members. ``With less people moving home, there is a diminished supply and demand for art and antiques.''

In August, the RICS's U.K. housing survey reported that the average number of transactions for each surveyor in the previous three months had dropped to 12.7, the lowest figure since the survey began. During that period, some estate agents in a number of regions reported making less than one sale per week, said RICS.

Silver and jewelry also continued to increase in price at auction, helped by strong commodities and precious metal markets, according to RICS members.

Sotheby's ``Beautiful Inside My Head Forever'' auction of new work by Hirst on Sept. 15 and 16 ended with 98 percent of lots finding buyers.

On Sept. 27, the Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull sold only 27 percent of the lots at a 300,000-pound sale of modern and contemporary art and design in London. Most of the works in the auction were valued at less than 5,000 pounds.

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

The Image Is Familiar; the Pitch Isn’t

2008-07-27T04:16:00.000-07:00

By MIA FINEMAN

NEW YORK TIMES

July 13, 2008

IN February 2007 the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay was installing a solo exhibition of his work in Paris when he received an e-mail message from a friend about a commercial for the Apple iPhone that had been broadcast during the Academy Awards show.

The 30-second spot featured a rapid-fire montage of clips from television shows and Hollywood films of actors and cartoon characters — including Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Dustin Hoffman and Betty Rubble — picking up the telephone and saying “Hello.” It ended with a shot of the soon-to-be-released iPhone.

Mr. Marclay tracked down the ad on YouTube and watched it.

“I was very surprised,” he said recently by phone from London. Like many in the art world he saw an uncanny resemblance between the iPhone commercial and his own 1995 video “Telephones,” which opens with a similar montage of film clips showing actors answering the phone. That seven-and-a-half-minute video, one of Mr. Marclay’s signature works, has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States.

About a year before, Mr. Marclay said, Apple had approached the Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents his work in New York, about using “Telephones” in an advertisement.

“I told them I didn’t want to do it,” he said. His main concern, he said, was that “advertisers on that scale have so much power and visibility” and that “everyone would think of my video as the Apple iPhone ad.”

Mr. Marclay said he spoke with a lawyer after learning of the commercial but decided not to pursue legal action. “When people with that much power and money copy you, there’s not much you can do,” he said.

In any case he did not want a controversy to draw attention to his own appropriations of scenes from other sources — mostly Hollywood movies — without permission from the copyright holders.

“I don’t consider what I do stealing,” Mr. Marclay said. “I’m quoting cultural references that everyone is familiar with. I make art that reflects the culture I live in.” And unlike advertisers, he said, “I’m not trying to sell phones.”

Contacted by telephone and e-mail, neither Apple nor its advertising agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, would comment on the iPhone ad for this article.

Artists have been appropriating images from Madison Avenue for decades. In the 1960s Andy Warhol made silk-screened copies of Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans. In the 1980s Richard Prince rephotographed magazine ads for Marlboro cigarettes, enlarged the pictures and exhibited them as his own. Works like these are comments on consumer culture that also challenge the idea of originality itself.

But what happens when the tables are turned? In recent years a number of advertising campaigns have seemed to draw their inspiration directly from high-profile works of contemporary art. And the artists who believe their images and ideas have been appropriated are not happy about it.

Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer in New York who specializes in art law, is often approached by artists who perceive echoes of their own work in advertisements. “It does seem like advertising people are pushing the envelope on this,” he said. “They’re being more and more brazen in their borrowing. On the one hand they should be mining the art world for inspiration, and you would expect them to be referencing works that people are familiar with. But more and more they seem to be getting into the territory of blatant rip-offs.”

The law governing the unauthorized use of copyrighted images and ideas, he said, is notoriously murky. “Copyright law doesn’t protect ideas, it only protects expression. The question is, where do you draw the line? Is the agency being inspired by the idea? Or did they copy the artist’s expression?”

When artists go after advertisers in such cases, the disputes are most often settled out of court. But there have been a few notable cases in which artists successfully sued advertisers for copyright infringement.

In 1987 a federal court granted summary judgment to the artist Saul Steinberg, who claimed that a poster for the Columbia Pictures film “Moscow on the Hudson” copied his famous New Yorker cover “View of the World From 9th Avenue.” (Like Steinberg’s drawing, the poster had a detailed rendering of four Manhattan city blocks in the foreground and a sketchy view of the rest of the world in the background.)

In May 2007 a French judge ordered the fashion designer John Galliano to pay 200,000 euros, or about $270,000, to the photographer William Klein in a dispute over a series of magazine ads that mimicked Mr. Klein’s technique of painting bright strokes of color on enlarged contact sheets.

Recently Mr. Zaretsky was approached by the artist Spencer Tunick, who is known for his photographs of large installations of naked people in public places around the world. Mr. Tunick was concerned about a television commercial for Vaseline shown in Europe and the United States in 2007.

The 60-second spot, called “Sea of Skin,” features large groups of naked men and women posed in artful configurations in various outdoor settings. They stand and sway in a forest, sit on a concrete rooftop, bounce gently in a glacial lake and wave their arms on a city street.

“There was such a close resemblance to my work that it was uncanny,” Mr. Tunick said in an interview. “When I saw the ad, I thought it was definitely inspired by my photographs and videos of installations.”

Was it? Not according to Kevin Roddy, the executive creative director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York, who developed the commercial for Vaseline’s parent company, Unilever.

“I’m familiar with Spencer’s work,” Mr. Roddy said, “but I can’t say that was an influence at all. Spencer is about masses of people and nudity. We’re about representing the functionality of skin. Sure, it’s hundreds of thousands of bodies, but they’re meant to represent one thing: skin.”

Mr. Tunick said he had not decided whether to pursue legal action.

In some cases artists who see variations on their own images may be victims of their own popular success.

In the late 1990s there were several well-publicized disputes in which young British art stars accused advertisers of pilfering their ideas. The conflicts arose around the time the so-called Young British Artists, or Y.B.A.’s, were featured in “Sensation,” a 1997 London exhibition of contemporary art from the collection of the British advertising mogul Charles Saatchi that later traveled to Berlin and New York.

In 1998 one of those artists, Gillian Wearing, complained that a Volkswagen commercial featuring people holding handwritten signs had copied the style and idea of her series of photographs titled “Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say” (1992-93).

For her series Ms. Wearing photographed people on the street holding paper signs on which they had written brief statements describing their feelings or states of mind. In the best-known image a smirking young man in a business suit holds a sign that reads, “I’m desperate.” Similarly the Volkswagen ad includes a shot of a tough-looking security guard who holds a sign bearing the word “sensitive.” Ms. Wearing did not pursue legal action.

The following year Damien Hirst threatened to sue British Airways over a billboard for its low-cost subsidiary Go that featured a grid of colored dots. Mr. Hirst claimed that the design was based on his paintings of grids of colored dots against white backgrounds. At the time a spokesman for Mr. Hirst told the newspaper The Independent that he had discussed licensing his dot paintings to British Airways, but that the deal had fallen through.

Advertisers have traditionally tapped into the cultural cachet of fine art by commissioning works for hire. From 1950 to 1975 a Chicago company, the Container Corporation of America, commissioned dozens of artists — including Fernand Léger, René Magritte and Willem de Kooning — to create paintings that were reproduced in print ads that ran in upscale magazines like Fortune.

In 1985 Absolut vodka began its famous magazine ad campaign featuring variations on the distinctive shape of its bottle, executed by hundreds of contemporary artists, among them Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Lisa Yuskavage.

But plenty of other artists have staunchly resisted agencies’ requests to license their work.

Mr. Tunick said he had been asked to work on campaigns for Dove, Lipton, Microsoft and Blue Cross Blue Shield, among others. “I think I get two e-mails a week from ad executives or publicists who want to use my work, and I always tell them I’m not an advertising photographer,” he said.

The Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss have turned down numerous requests from ad agencies interested in licensing their award-winning 30-minute short film, “Der Lauf der Dinge” (“The Way Things Go”). Produced in 1987, it follows a Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction in which everyday objects like string, balloons, buckets and tires are propelled by means of fire, pouring liquids and gravity.

Yet in April 2003 Honda ran a two-minute television commercial, “Cog,” in which various parts of a car — tires, seats, windshield wipers — form a dominolike chain reaction that culminates when an Accord rolls down a ramp as a voice-over (read by Garrison Keillor) intones, “Isn’t it great when things just work?”

At the time Mr. Fischli told Creative Review magazine: “We’ve been getting a lot of mail saying, ‘Oh, you’ve sold the idea to Honda.’ We don’t want people to think this. We made ‘Der Lauf der Dinge’ for consumption as art.”

In a strange twist the Honda “Cog” ad, which was developed by Wieden & Kennedy, has inspired several parodies of its own, including commercials for BBC Radio and the British directory assistance service 118. The chain reaction of creative influence, imitation and homage was the focus of a panel discussion at the Tate Modern in London during a retrospective of Mr. Fischli and Mr. Weiss’s work there in 2006.

In an age when sampling and appropriation have become widespread practices in contemporary art and in the culture at large, some find it paradoxical that artists are now guarding their own creations more vigilantly.

Michael Lobel, a professor of 20th-century art at Purchase College who has written about Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Prince, said the easy availability of digital images on the Web had helped foster this defensiveness.

“There’s a broader consciousness among artists about owning their work and keeping tight control over its distribution,” he said. “The more available images have become, the more of a countermovement there is to clamp down on them.”

Mr. Lobel said that while he sympathizes with artists who believe their work has been copied, they also need to recognize their own reliance on existing images. “Culture is about ongoing borrowing,” he said. “It’s about taking images, ideas and motifs and opening them up to new uses.”

The cycle of influence goes round and round: Ad agencies borrow from artists who borrow from advertising. Isn’t it great when things just work?

Death Can Be a Canny Career Move

2008-06-30T15:06:00.000-07:00

By DOROTHY SPEARS

NEW YORK TIMES

June 22, 2008

For years, when the artist Steven Parrino wasn’t jamming power chords on his electric guitar or tinkering with his motorcycle in his garagelike studio in Brooklyn, he was recycling his unsold paintings: twisting them into eccentric new shapes, smashing their stretcher bars or stabbing them repeatedly with scissors.

His destructive approach to art making earned him the admiration of some fellow artists, but it also concealed a painful reality: There was no market for his work. In eight years and five solo New York shows, his former dealer José Freire said, he sold only two of Mr. Parrino’s paintings, one for $9,000 and the other for $10,000.

Then, on New Year’s Day 2005, Mr. Parrino died from injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. Demand for his art has since increased, and in September a Parrino retrospective that had toured European museums surfaced at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue. With Gagosian’s high-profile endorsement and a limited number of works for sale — only two paintings and a dozen drawings out of 56 exhibited works — the top price for a Parrino in that show reached nearly $1 million.

Mr. Parrino’s posthumous ascent was not an anomaly.

While Gagosian was busy folding unsold Parrinos into its seasonal repertory, Zwirner & Wirth was plotting a comparable resuscitation of the career of Al Taylor, who died in 1999 of lung cancer. And Jay Gorney and his colleagues at Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery were busy tapping collectors and auction houses for paintings by Jack Goldstein, who committed suicide in 2003.

Call it the Dawn of the Dead Artist. The message from the market is as clear as it is macabre. In a quest for fresh material, blue-chip contemporary-art dealers are finding a healthy source of revenue buried six feet under.

With the soaring prices of contemporary art, dealers admit that they have a strategic incentive to seek dead artists and give them recognition. “It’s supply and demand,” said David Zwirner, the Chelsea dealer and co-owner in Zwirner & Wirth, which represents Mr. Taylor’s estate. He said the limited inventory imposed by an artist’s death can end up increasing prices.

“Although overall market conditions are not our only motivation, we are a for-profit gallery,” he added. “There is a commercial angle, or we’d be going out of business.”

All dead artists are not created equal, however. Several other important factors are at work in the surge of interest in Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein. First, all three were active in the 1980s, a period now considered hot.

“It’s very infrequent to find an artist of this period that you’d never even heard of,” said Zwirner & Wirth’s director, Kristine Bell, referring to Mr. Taylor.

Second, each artist’s work fits into the context of each gallery’s artists. Mr. Parrino, for example, is right at home in the somewhat macho male club at Gagosian, which shows the likes of Richard Prince and Richard Serra. And Mr. Taylor’s playful use of materials and droll one-liners aligns with Zwirner & Wirth artists like Richard Tuttle and Fred Sandback, for whom the gallery already has an established and devoted client base.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash, where Mr. Gorney described programming as “intergenerational, and gravitating toward artists who challenge media genres,” seems a cozy niche for Mr. Goldstein’s provocative disregard for traditional image making.

And even if they did not strike gold during their lifetimes, Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein had earned the respect of their peers, as van Gogh had before he died, adding to the credibility of their newfound status.

Despite the market parallels, the work of the three artists could hardly be more different. In his embrace of the American road, for example, Mr. Parrino, born in 1958, mined multiple sources, from zombie movies to underground literature to punk rock and extreme metal. (He often gave reverb and feedback performances in conjunction with his exhibitions.) Convinced that painting was dead, he then tried to jump-start it.

A onetime assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, Mr. Taylor shunned heroic impulses. Combining discarded objects like broomstick handles with absurdist gestures and lighthearted wordplay, Mr. Taylor even based a series of work on dog-urine stains, a joking reference to the so-called accidents and heroic mark making of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis.

Spectacle was a primary focus for Mr. Goldstein, who had himself buried alive in 1972 while a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. With a stethoscope attached to his chest, he breathed air from plastic tubes while a red light above ground flashed to the rhythm of his beating heart. Like his performances Mr. Goldstein’s short films, his recordings of sound effects — like barking dogs and fog horns — and eventually his paintings combined a West Coast embrace of landscape with an almost scientific interest in technical strategies for image making.

With the significance of contemporary artists typically measured by their success on the market, Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein saw others — often their friends — faring much better than they were. Still, they refused to cater to dealers and collectors. In 1998, for example, Mr. Parrino responded to a Swiss dealer’s complaint that he couldn’t sell Mr. Parrino’s work by sending a fax to Marc-Olivier Wahler, then a curator at the Centre d’Art Neuchatel Switzerland. The fax instructed Mr. Wahler to remove all of his works from the dealer’s Geneva commercial gallery.

“Do not worry about damaging anything (damage is good),” it read. “Nothing will be for sale. All will be thrown out after the show.” Seeing his unsold works strewn across the floor of the gallery, Mr. Parrino coolly proceeded to cover their surfaces with black enamel and carve them up with an electric saw.

“Steven was extremely anarchic, especially in relation to gallerists,” said Jutta Koether, a German-born artist who was a friend and frequent collaborator of Mr. Parrino. “He’d been put through the ringer so much. He was like, ‘I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to.’ ”

Far less aggressive in his tactics, Mr. Taylor quietly gave up painting in 1984, when he found it hard to pay for paint and canvases. The following year he began incorporating found objects into three-dimensional works. He stubbornly referred to them as “drawings in space” and refused to promote them to dealers.

“Al was not an art businessman at all,” said his widow, Debbie, in an interview. “He would have never gone around to David Zwirner and said, ‘Would you come to my studio?’ And he wouldn’t have let me do that while he was living. He wasn’t into the audition.”

Instead he relied on word-of-mouth support from his friends, among them the painter Cy Twombly, Mrs. Taylor said.

Mr. Goldstein, for his part, abandoned hard-to-sell films and sound recordings for the more lucrative medium of painting in 1979, only to be criticized for his flagrant use of assistants. “Now it’s totally commonplace to have technicians doing the nitty-gritty,” said the photographer James Welling, a friend of Mr. Goldstein. “But when Jack was doing this, it was considered extreme. People said he didn’t make his own paintings.”

Although Mr. Goldstein’s sales gained momentum in the late 1980s, his gnawingly competitive spirit and addiction to heroin alienated his friends and supporters.

“Jack had a very short temper and made a point of burning bridges,” Mr. Welling said.

Mr. Goldstein dropped out of sight and spent several years living in a trailer in East Los Angeles with no running water or electricity. His career was being resuscitated somewhat in 2003 when he was found hanging from a tree on his parents’ property in San Bernardino, Calif.

After Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein died, admirers of their work assumed responsibility for what the artists had been unwilling — or unable — to do for themselves.

In late 2006 a retrospective of Mr. Parrino’s work organized by the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva was en route to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris when Blair Thurman, a friend and an adviser to his estate, called Andisheh Avini at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Mr. Avini was developing programming for a newly opened series of low-ceilinged, fluorescently lighted rooms at Gagosian’s headquarters on Madison Avenue.

“Blair thought that space kind of screamed for Steven’s work,” Mr. Avini recalled, adding that he proposed a Parrino show to Larry Gagosian, who embraced the idea.

Likewise, after several false starts, Mrs. Taylor approached Zwirner & Wirth, sending them a small selection of her husband’s catalogs. The package sat for several months among a stack of similar parcels until the summer of 2006, when a gallery assistant showed it to Ms. Bell.

Ms. Bell scheduled a visit to the artist’s TriBeCa studio. There, she said, Mrs. Taylor pulled out portfolio after portfolio of drawings arranged by year, beginning with 1974-75 and ending with Mr. Taylor’s death in 1999. Ms. Bell arranged for a visit with Mr. Zwirner, who said he was “blown away” by the work.

After devoting a room in its booth at Art Basel Miami in December to Mr. Taylor, Zwirner & Wirth presented a tightly focused show of drawings and three-dimensional pieces made from 1985 to 1990, just after the artist gave up painting, at its Upper East Side gallery.

At the Art Chicago fair in April and most recently at Art Basel in Switzerland, Ms. Bell said, the work sold well. Mr. Taylor’s drawings now fetch up to $20,000, and three-dimensional works range from $40,000 to $200,000. “It was a classic rediscovery,” Mr. Zwirner said. As for Mr. Goldstein, his paintings now top out at around $250,000.

With Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s support and a planned retrospective of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Mr. Goldstein’s place in the contemporary art pantheon is all but secured.

Still, the market’s embrace of Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein within a decade of their respective deaths elicits some skepticism. “On the one hand, it’s incredibly romantic,” the artist Robert Longo said in an interview. “These artists are finally getting their due. On the other hand, it’s about a commodity. There’s a limited supply.”

Comparisons to van Gogh are inevitable. The art dealer Theo van Gogh was not successful at selling his brother Vincent’s work, said Joachim Pissarro, director of the Hunter College Art Galleries and a co-curator of “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” opening in September at the Museum of Modern Art. Then six months after Vincent’s suicide, Theo also died, leaving the unsold trove of van Gogh’s artwork to his wife, Johanna.

“Johanna was a very shrewd businesswoman,” Mr. Pissarro said. “She knew how to sell a legend. But Vincent was also very, very respected among artists.

“Had van Gogh lived a few years longer, he would have been a millionaire.”

Inflated phrases

2008-06-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

by Christian Demand

signandsight.com

28/05/2008

Most texts which accompany contemporary art production are so twisted and woolly that they could easily pass for self-parody. Christian Demand takes up a three hundred year old lament.

In anticipation of any objections that might follow: I am not an art critic. I am not now and I never was, and I don't intend to become one. When I talk about the crisis of criticism, I am not speaking with the authority of someone who has proved he can do things better.

I am driven by nothing more than the frustrations of a reader who is interested in art and who simply cannot believe the mass of linguistic strutting, moral imposture and lazy thinking that is inflicted upon him by this genre. Take the official exhibition text for the Anish Kapoor show in Munich's Haus der Kunst (2007/08): "In Kapoor's work, material plays a central role, although always in connection with an idea of presence and spirituality that transcends the superficial 'actuality' of the object. In Kapoor's words: 'In a certain way matter always leads to something immaterial.' He sees this as the fundamentally paradoxical yet complementary proviso of the material world. (...) Terms like lightness, slowness and growth seem to be the inspiration and driving force for Kapoor's new kinetic objects and spacial objects shown in this exhibition. At the root of them all is Kapoor's expression of anxiety through unabashed emblems and formal reference to sexuality and violence: the unspeakable is given voice."

Most texts which accompany contemporary art production are so alarmingly twisted and woolly that they could easily pass for self-parody. Clucking hysterically they describe works "which hover on the border between the visible and the invisible", which - in the most wonderful way - "function as a link between geology and biology", which - how could it be anything else - "tackle aesthetic-political questions on cultural difference and the migration of form", which - it goes without saying - "reference the key artistic avant-guards of the 20th and 21st centuries", while naturally "incorporating the key questions of architecture, design, philosophy and science" and representing, in their spirituality, "a realisation of the present".

All these confused, inflated phrases stem from one and the same text which ,as far as I'm concerned, speaks for the genre as a whole. After centuries of unbroken lamentation about the intellectual hopelessness and the unkempt state of the genre I feel no need to produce further evidence of the fundamental rottenness in art criticism. As far back as the early 18th century, the great court artist Antoine Coypel, president of the Paris Academy and Premier Peintre du Roi, an expert on art in other words, complained about the "vapid and bizarre jargon" of "falsely applied artistic terms" applied by the art critics of his day, and he left no doubt that he thought the great majority of them incompetent and dimwitted.

If the foreword of a contemporary guide for budding cultural journalists expresses the hope that the publication will help ensure that "art critics once again do their work with a clear conscience" then it would appear that this general suspicion has had little currency since. My suspicion about this suspicion is that if a complaint this fundamental stills holds true after three hundred years, it cannot be down to coincidence. We are not dealing with the teething problems of a discipline, with exceptional journalistic condition or with an unusually obdurate cluster of incompetent or malicious authors. The error must be in the system.

This suspicion is the real reason for my prolonged preoccupation with the subject. What bothers me is not so much the individual critical judgement but much more the activity of judging per se. So I don't really care whether or not I can agree with other people about the importance of Jeff Koons or Tracey Emin, whether I can convince them about my opinions on the latest Turner Prize winner, or whether we can reach an agreement about how the London art scene could be more lively than the one in New York or Shanghai.

As far as I'm concerned – and please excuse this old fashioned expression – it's all just a matter of taste and as such, can only be substantiated to a limited extent. I am also reluctant to deduce consequences for other people based on my personal likes and dislikes. After all I would never dream of trying to convince someone else that football is a better sport than ice dancing, just because I happen to prefer watching football.

But I am extremely interested in public discussion about matters of taste. I find it fascinating to follow the ways and means with which people deal with differences in opinion, how they argue for their personal preferences and attempt to establish universal authority for their own passions, making opposing views seem misplaced. The strategies of reasoning and argumentation, the rhetorical twists which are summoned in public talking and writing about art are particularly worthwhile object of study.

In many cases these are degenerate forms of argumentative speech. Texts on art rarely explain what they profess to explain; they simply simulate the explainability of their theories. From this point of view, I should add that the differences between review, catalogue text, laudatio and artist profile are nominal. However varied the forms of writing which circulate in the art world, they are unified in their claim to truth, in their allegation of stringency and factuality. Even a Kunstverein press release doesn't want to be read as some dubious rhapsody, but as a reliable source of information and coherent aid to understanding, in other words, as criticism in the best sense of the word.

If I am right in my theory about a general system error, then one would expect to encounter it not only in texts by critics, but also in the places were critics themselves are critiqued. Were this not the case, the countless suggestions for improvement and guidance on good criticism, which since Coypel's time have come to form their own art-critical sub-genre, would have guided things in the right direction and the problem would have been solved long ago. But the opposite has happened. As evidence of this conjecture, I would like to quote from the aforementioned vademecum for critics: "Artworks are undoubtedly social objects. They are produced and absorbed by people, they have an effect on the life of the individual as well as on culture as a whole, and at the same time they take on their meaning from the socio-historical environment in which they exist."

I would have little to object to here, were not the paragraph to continue as follows: "But works of art are more than this, they possess their own qualities which raise them above the status of social things. They might be human products, artefacts, but unlike others which exhaust themselves in their utility value, they are marked out by a surplus, a quantum of non-utility. Art works 'are an end in themselves', art theory tells us. The refusal of the art work to be a means to an end stands it apart from us. Proud and exclusive it stands and faces us. whereas all other media offer themselves to us wholeheartedly so to speak: the newspaper to impart information; an essay, instruction; a football match, excitement; a cabaret, relaxation; and good wine, a lifting of the spirits. The art work claims the right not to have to fulfill needs, not to want to join the ranks of useful things. Instead of giving, it demands the exertion of the (perceiving) senses and the (understanding) intellect."

It is pure coincidence that in my search for material to bolster my theory about the dire situation of criticism, I should stumble on this particular text. Yet it doesn't strike me as coincidental in any way that this text, which reflects on the aims and reasons for art criticism, should contain this bizarre anthropomorphic theory. What this reflects is less the result of an individual mental effort and more the traces of an intellectual mass movement.

The idea that art has to possess certain characteristics which 'raise' it above the rest of the social world, thereby freeing it from all obligations to justify itself, has become so deeply entrenched over the course of 300 years by the pens of entire armies of writers about art, that it will take considerable effort to take another road across this terrain. But why should you? It is certainly in the interest of the critic to follow in these footsteps. They offer, for example, a plausible means for explaining the phenomenon of the chronic variance in the evaluation of art, and in practical terms, one which guarantees that in his work the critic is automatically on the right side.

It is a clear-cut hierarchical model which relies on the basic assumption of an absolute moral-intellectual divide: there is such a thing as art in the singular, an amount of artefacts whose particular characteristics make them art, no matter whether we personally think they merit the definition or not. The leading authorities generally entrusted with awarding this distinction tend to be art history and the museum – these also tend to exist in the singular, interestingly enough. Secondly, there are, unbridgeable topographical differences between art (and its friends) on the one hand, and the audience, another strangely singular being, on the other. The audience lives in the profane world of aims and needs; art on the other hand forms a special kingdom beyond the profane. At its borders end the rights of the audience to make demands or more precisely: the rights are transferred directly to art, which itself makes demands on the audience.

Since the audience is not used to having to meet expectations, it is simply no longer prepared or able to do this. It has been so thoroughly pervaded by the everyday indolence that comes from dealing with the profane, that it comes as no surprise that it should have the most peculiar ideas about what art should look like. Since the critic, by contrast, is on a par with art, he always stands on the right side of the expertise gap. His task is essentially to educate the people: from the lofty heights of expertise he informs the audience about what art is and how to behave towards it. Shocking amounts of writing about art follow this view to a greater or lesser extent. Against this current, there is something I want to cling to: "Art" is – and always was – a value judgement, in other words a term whose application reflects the likes and dislikes of the person using it. Art is therefore anything we call art, because for whatever reasons we find it interesting, exciting, enriching or delightful. Since however experience tells us that people find very different things interesting, exciting, enriching or delightful, it follows that the popular pedagogic declaration "That is art!" is trivial (in that it simply denotes that the object in question is, let's say, being exhibited in a museum) or presumptuous (in that it assumes that something which I find interesting, automatically has to be interesting to others).

There is no real way to prove the validity of likes and dislikes, they have very little to do with understanding and knowledge, and really only reflect our convictions about what makes a successful life. This is an ethical question and in ethical questions no one has an expert edge. Every voice carries equal weight.

This is not to say that there is no possibility for a sensible discussion about aesthetic judgement. Because even if our likes and dislikes have no universal authority, they are anything but unmotivated. Indeed our passions are our most compelling motivations, nothing interests us more, there is nothing we can talk about more. Why don't we do just that? And why do we try to do it with such inflated intolerance, instead of just promoting them honestly. We have to do this in our daily lives. And even outside the world of art it rarely happens that other people share the same interests, feel the same affinities, foster the same sympathies as we do.

Generally we don't react to these differences with dogmatic arrogance. We are much more likely to make an effort to present our likes and dislikes as cogently as possible to the person we are addressing. We try to infect them with our enthusiasm, to paint as enticing a picture as possible of the increased happiness to be had from dealing with edifying fields of activity, we try to bring their attention to factors they may have overlooked in their assessment, and much more besides. Admittedly, there is no guarantee that this will work. But is there ever?

*

Christian Demand is a professor of art history at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg. He is also writes regularly for Merkur magazine and Bayrischen Rundfunk on art and aesthetic theory. His book "Die Beschämung der Philister. Wie die Kunst sich der Kritik entledigte" (Shaming the philistines. How art did away with the critics) was published by Klampen Verlag in 2003.

This article was originally published in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung Folio May 2008 edition.

Translation: lp

Business Advice for Artists from Artists

2008-04-20T03:38:00.000-07:00

by Stacy Perman

BUSINESS WEEK

April 11, 2008

While most fine artists will not see Picasso-size deals in their lifetime, they have ways to promote themselves and boost their sales

Nearly 10 years ago a Japanese real estate developer paid $51.3 million at auction for Pablo Picasso's "Pierrette's Wedding." The buyer, Tomonori Tsurumaki bid by telephone from Tokyo with the Paris auction house Drouet. Tsurumaki said he planned to hang the painting at an auto racing resort he was building on the Japanese island of Kyushu.

At the time, Tsurumaki's purchase was the second-highest amount paid for a work of art. Two years earlier, Vincent van Gogh's "Irises" was sold at an auction at Sotheby's in New York for $53.9 million.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2006 when cosmetics mogul Ronald S. Lauder (co-founder of the Neue Galerie in New York) bought Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer," a work of oil, silver, and gold on canvas. Lauder paid an astounding $135 million for the painting, eclipsing all other deals.

The jaw-dropping purchases of Picasso, van Gogh, and Klimt are the kind of art sales that make headlines (BusinessWeek.com, 4/8/08). But realistically speaking, few artists get those kind of prices for their work. "More people are making art than buying it," says Laura Miner, a former art buyer for Citibank (C). Citing a familiar art world statistic, she adds: "Ninety-seven percent of the people making art have other jobs."

- The Business of Art

While most artists would not consider themselves entrepreneurs, art is still a business. And while most painters, photographers, or sculptors will not see Picasso-size deals in their lifetime, they can still find ways to boost sales of their work.

A main problem is that most artists learn art, not how to make a career out of it. "When I was a young artist I had no idea about the business of art," says Judith Page, a visual artist who went on to teach other artists about the commercial side of their profession. "At [art] school, none of the students were encouraged to ask questions about how to sell art. It wasn't even discussed." Miner concedes that most artists aren't wired for accounting but says: "I think that artists should take some business classes."

Visibility has always been crucial for artists to get their work out to buyers. Today, with the Internet, resourceful artists can get their work noticed by creating Web sites or establishing a presence in online communities. These serve as a virtual portfolio. "Web sites are essential," says Page, who for five years directed a program about the business of art at the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, N.J. "You might not make sales directly through your Web site, but people research art online."

- Know the Galleries

Offline matters, too. Keep abreast of the galleries and stores that might carry your work and try to forge a relationship with those gatekeepers. At the same time, experts suggest, do your homework. "Many dealers tell me that artists walk in and say: 'Will you show my art?'" says Miner. "And the dealer only deals in abstraction while the artist is a realist painter."

Callie Danae Hirsch, a painter who was recently awarded a Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit commission to design the tiles at a New York City subway stop, says it's essential to be professional and prepared at all times. "Always have your résumé, artist statement, and bio updated and ready. Make postcards for your shows, keep your work in [prospective buyers' or exhibitors'] minds, in their view. Have business cards, a Web site, and anticipate what works and what does not."

Although it may seem obvious, artists should be able to explain their work. "Writing about your art is very important," says Page. It lets people know what you do, who you are, and why you do it. A good impression will go a long way.

- Barter, Barter, Barter

"If you cannot write a good artist statement, barter with a writer who can," suggests Hirsch. In fact, all artists need to be just as good barterers as they are painters or sculptors, she says. "I once traded a painting for six therapy sessions. This works for Web design, graphic work, and anything else you may need that others can provide. When I started out, I used to barter for Web work. I went through three designers this way in 10 years. They received paintings, and I got more exposure."

Artists should also know those they are dealing with and keep rigorous records of any transactions. "It's like the Cold War," says Miner. "Trust, but verify. Never leave your work on consignment without getting something in writing. So many artists can be charmed by a gallery owner and give them 10 paintings and never hear back from them. Next thing they know, a friend tells them they saw one of their paintings sold for $10,000 and they never got a penny because they left the work on a handshake."

Finally, be persistent. "If you love what you are doing and keep at it, then you are bound to always be improving," says Hirsch. "You never know when or where you will get your next break. Just be ready for it"

Perman is a staff writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.

France plans to bolster its sagging art market

2008-04-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

By Angela Doland

Associated Press

Apr. 3, 2008

PARIS - After watching the fashion industry go more global and seeing fierce competition from New World wines, France is determined to resuscitate another stagnant national treasure: its art market.

Calling the decline "undeniable," Culture Minister Christine Albanel unveiled a plan yesterday that includes zero-interest loans for art buyers, more tax breaks for corporate art buyers, and measures to free up strict regulations on the auction business.

While France's museums pull in millions of art viewers, French auctioneers and gallery owners have long struggled to attract art buyers. A study this week from market watcher Artprice crystallized their fears, with China taking France's traditional No. 3 spot in worldwide art sales.

The United States had 41.7 percent of sales in 2007, Britain 29.7 percent, China 7.3 percent and France was flat at 6.4 percent, the study said. A year earlier, China had 4.9 percent of the market, while France also had 6.4 percent.

Contemporary art in France is in especially bad shape: France had a mere 2.8 percent share of worldwide sales in contemporary and modern art last year, Artprice said. On top of that, the culture minister said art was being "relentlessly drained" from the country.

"For every work that is imported [to France], two works are exported," she said.

The government's proposals must still be approved by parliament. Albanel's recommendations were based on a report from art insiders led by Martin Bethenod, who runs FIAC, an international contemporary art fair in France. Auctioneers and gallery owners said it was a big step forward.

"This is coming really late, but at least it's here now," said Herve Chayette, president of the Symev union of French auction houses.

One sign of how slowly change has come: Only in 2001 did France allow foreign companies like Sotheby's and Christie's to run auctions in the country.

The art market sector employs at least 50,000 people in France, Albanel said. Auctions bring in about $2 billion a year, and private sales are probably five times that, she said.

One goal of Albanel's plan is to encourage the middle class to buy original artwork. While people often think of art as out of their reach, Albanel said the median price of a sale in France is about $11,000.

The highlight of the plan is based on a program called Own Art. Launched by Arts Council England, that plan provides for zero-interest loans for people who buy contemporary artworks from any of more than 250 venues in the program.

Albanel said French banks could promote the program to clients, "which would help reach an audience that is often not familiar with galleries, auction houses and antiques dealers." In exchange, banks would get tax breaks for corporate art patronage. Exact details, such as the maximum loan, are still being worked out.

Critical condition

2008-04-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

Has big money replaced the pundit as the true authority in the art world?

By Adrian Searle

The Guardian

Tuesday March 18 2008

You can whack them with a shovel. You can shoot them, poison, stab or throttle them. You can threaten their families and you can hound them in the press; you can put them down any way you like, but some artists refuse to stay down. What does this tell us? That artists are the undead? Or, worse, that criticism is in crisis?
At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. Wherever critics are paid to gather (you wouldn't catch us in the same room otherwise), they go on about the crisis. These debates have become an occupational hazard - but they also pay well. If I had known there was money in it, I would have invented a crisis myself.
At Art Basel in Miami Beach last December, just as we were about to go out and perform on the imminent death of criticism and to answer such questions as "What is art criticism today and why is it relevant?" and "Is money the new art criticism?", the Las Vegas-based critic Dave Hickey said he felt like Donald Duck at the Last Supper. Being Donald Duck is at least livelier than being a dinosaur, drowning in a dismal swamp. There is indeed something faintly ludicrous in sitting around at an art fair talking about criticism. Never has the art market been stronger. Never has money been so powerful. Never have so many artists got so rich, and never has there been such alarming stuff on sale. Never have critics felt so out of the loop.
People blame all the money sluicing round the art world. They blame the internet and the rise of the blogger. They blame the dumbing-down of newspapers and the replacement of criticism with the sparkling, if vapid, preview featurette, and the artist-as-celebrity photo opportunity profile. Who cares about the art or the concepts? They're just the MacGuffin. Tell us about the parties, the openings, the drugs and the dresses. Artists are creative, and creative is sexy and good. Critics are a comedown. Some have hair sprouting from their ears. They're always complaining; they're untrustworthy; they're full of hate and spite and they make everything all so complicated, when all we're really trying to do is sell a lifestyle. Fuck 'em.
Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine, has complained: "At no time in the last 50 years has what an art critic writes had less effect on the market than now." Whatever he writes, Saltz believes, has no effect. Might as well shrug and walk away. I just wonder why a critic even cares that their writing has such a negligible influence on the market. Although there has been a certain pleasure, on one or two occasions, in making Charles Saatchi stupendously angry, I couldn't care less if collectors pay any attention to me or not.
Some critics think that the fact that there's so much bad art around means that it is a great time to be writing about art, which is like saying that because of the plague, what a great time the 14th century was to be an undertaker. Critics aren't doctors. We can't fix things. We are not here to tell artists what to do. They wouldn't listen anyway. Maybe the word criticism has become part of the problem. Or the problem is that we are asking the wrong thing of the critic: critics are not the painting police nor the sculpture Swat team, not market regulators nor upholders of eternal values (there aren't any). Those who think they have a role to play in this regard are as jumped up as they are unreadable. Criticism might blow the whistle on overhyped art, flabby curating, moribund institutions or the odd fly-blown administrator, but that is because you cannot divorce art from its context.
Being iconoclastic, slagging off artists and institutions, gets a critic noticed. Anger, undeniably, is also a good motive for writing in the first place. Controversy, the smell of blood, the whiff of scandal - this makes careers. It also sells newspapers and magazines. Of course it is the duty of the critic to be iconoclastic, and to be reckless; but critical terrorism is no good as a long-term strategy. It becomes predictable, and the adrenaline buzz soon wears off. It is also disingenuous, and ultimately a false position. There is such a thing as bad faith, and lousy opinions.
Getting things wholly wrong is also a critical prerogative. But, again, it is no good just turning up with a lot of fixed opinions and then complaining that the art doesn't measure up to your impossible requirements and unassailable prejudices. Some critics make you wish you didn't like art at all.
A former Guardian art critic, who now delivers Olympian judgments for one of the Sunday newspapers, recently moaned to me that no one took him seriously any more. The "any more" bit was a trifle deluded, in my view, as I have never taken him seriously in any way. We have lost our authority, he wailed. "What authority?" I was tempted to ask, but didn't. One can only mistrust critics who whimper about the waning of their authority. They are, I think, more interested in power than in writing. The only sensible way to deal with one's power, such as it is, is to not think about it.
Which is not to say that what one writes doesn't matter. The opposite is true. The only authority a critic or an artist can claim lies in the work they do. Everything else is just wind.
I don't know what I think, often, till I write. The act of writing shows me what I think. I never know where things are going till I get there. There is an element of fiction and invention even in criticism. Being a critic has its performative side. For the writer, the problem, as much as it might be one of interpretation, is felt first of all in the difficulty of describing what one is looking at. Description, however plain it appears to be, is never neutral, however technical it gets, whatever its claims to objectivity. And while we're at it, criticism is never objective, never impartial, never disinterested. It is subjective and partisan. What else would you expect?
Writing about art only matters because art deserves to be met with more than silence (although ignoring art - not speaking about it, not writing about it - is itself a form of criticism, and probably the most damning and effective one). An artist's intentions are one thing, but works themselves accrue meanings and readings through the ways they are interpreted and discussed and compared with one another, long after the artist has finished with them. This, in part, is where all our criticisms come in. We contribute to the work, remaking it whenever we go back to it - which doesn't prevent some artworks not being worth a first, never mind a second look, and some opinions not being worth listening to at all.
In the end, we are all critics. Listen to the babble of conversation as you leave the cinema or the theatre, or to the chat in the gallery. People argue about what they have experienced and about what the critics have said. This is good. But some voices might be worth attending to more than others, just as some artists, some playwrights, moviemakers, composers, choreographers are better than others. The fact that we can't all agree on what is valuable (and why) keeps things interesting. It also keeps criticism alive.
Some things are not easy to grasp. We have to work at them. This, in part, is what criticism tries to do. It is also where a lively engagement with the art we encounter begins. And it is where we all begin to be critics.

Why museums should dump the ‘Disposal Toolkit’

2008-03-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

Tiffany Jenkins

SPIKED!

Wednesday 27 February 2008

Contrary to the advice of the Museums Association, preserving collections is not a ‘burden’ — it’s the whole purpose of museums.

The historic protection of art and artefacts in museums and galleries received a blow this week from the very organisation that should be caring for collections. The UK’s Museums Association, the professional body for the museum sector, has issued a ‘Disposal Toolkit’, encouraging professionals to get rid of stuff from their store rooms.

‘Museums urged to dispose of “burden” collections’, screamed the association’s press release announcing the publication of the Disposal Toolkit. The document states that ‘if an item is no longer relevant, not in use or there is no reasonable expectation of it being used, it may be appropriate to dispose of it’.

Until recently, the disposal of museum collections was anathema to the sector. Indeed, the power of UK national museums and galleries to get rid of stuff is limited by various Acts of Parliament. On the whole, national museums are only permitted to dispose of an object by sale or exchange of gift when it is a duplicate of another in their collections. Even this process is tempered with a check that the decision is not detrimental to the interests of students and the public.

There are good reasons for such checks and limits. The role of national museums is to record, preserve, research and display artefacts and art. They are not shops or businesses, and it is not their job to sell off or dump items that should be held in care for future generations. Museums hold items in storage for the benefit of researchers, in case new questions arise, or for use in future exhibitions when, due to innovation and a bit of imagination, the items are deemed exciting and interesting again.

It is no great surprise that at the same time as museums are suffering a crisis of purpose, they start to see collections as a ‘burden’ and begin to devise strategies for getting rid of them. Most museums were established during the Enlightenment, and contemporary society’s hostility to this period has rendered the role of museums uncertain. Since the 1960s, their role has been challenged by a number of intellectual influences, many developed by museologists and other professionals within the museum sector.

The collective effect of cultural relativism, postmodernism and postcolonial theory has been to question museums’ remit as scholarly organisations that contribute to the pursuit of truth. In the 1980s, their work was further undermined in the UK by the then Tory government, which demanded that museums turn over a profit. Under the New Labour government, museums have been instructed to solve everything from social exclusion to bad race relations and youth crime. Being turned into the frontline for governmental policies, museums professionals are variably treated as businessmen, agents for regeneration, social workers and entertainers.

Now, museum directors and curators seem so uncertain about their own role that they don’t know what to do with the items they’re supposed to take care of. One of the main arguments put forward for removal is that if an artefact is not ‘in use’, it serves little purpose. This displays a very narrow, unimaginative and utilitarian view of display and public involvement. It is true that many artefacts are covered in dust, unseen for decades, but those who complain about this fail to appreciate that artefacts serve multiple purposes in different times.

The fact that an item is not considered particularly relevant, popular or fashionable in the here and now is no reason to discard it. Who is to say that it won’t be regarded as interesting or useful in the future? For instance, the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery’s Collecting Policy 2003–8 characterised the museum’s 1950s sale of South Asian and Far Eastern metalwork as ‘an act of irrevocable rashness’.

Different copies of the same engraving by the same artist need not grace the walls of a museum for all members of the public to see. Yet under the professional scrutiny of researchers, the engravings can reveal important information about the development of the image and the ideas of the artist. Visitors to the British Museum may not want to examine all the 700,000 coins in its collection. Nevertheless, coins are a primary source of information about many aspects of ancient and medieval study.

The Imperial War Museum in London owns 120million feet of film and six million photographs, and the Victoria and Albert Museum holds one million prints and drawings and 80,000 textiles. The Museum of London stores findings from over 5,000 archaeological excavations, including 140,000 boxes of bulk finds from London and over 250,000 individually registered finds.

Much of this may be of poor quality. Some has been ignored for decades and may be ignored for many more. But a long-forgotten film clip, drawing or piece of fabric may, at some point, shed light on the past, possibly revealing details about old printing procedures, the development of pattern and texture, or hidden intimacies about people’s lives.

Institutions can always do more with their stores and there are some good examples of museums putting their large collections to practical and creative use. The King’s Library at the British Museum, for instance, was created with 4,500 objects, most of which were taken from boxes in the basement. The Darwin collection at London’s Natural History Museum provides behind-the-scenes access for visitors. Both show the potential for using material that has been put away, out of sight of the general public.

At a time when funds for caring for and expanding collections are hard to come by, it is foolhardy for the Museums Association to advise selling or dumping them. Much of what is on the walls and shelves of our museums comes from private collections - individuals donate to a specific museum, perhaps to fill gaps in the current collection, or just because they value the place and want to leave a mark on it for posterity. They donate on the understanding that the museum will care for the collection. The John Rylands University Library in Manchester learnt a harsh lesson when it sold off books in 1998 and soon after lost an important loan. The library has found it hard to attract donations ever since.

Many museum collections are too large to be exhibited in their entirety and doing so would be an evasion of curatorship. But display is not the only purpose of a collection; they are also priceless sources of knowledge, treasuries of ideas and material from the past. Many successful shows and education initiatives make use of the work hidden behind-the-scenes, in those storerooms that the Museums Association is now so keen to free up and clear out.

The Disposal Toolkit is a threat to museum collections and is influenced by a profound confusion about the rationale of such institutions. If museums professionals really are so unsure of their own purpose, it would perhaps be safest to keep them away from the objects and artefacts that they were charged to care for on behalf of past, present and future generations.

Tiffany Jenkins is researching the crisis of cultural authority in museum institutions, at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

The problem with privately funded museums

2008-03-07T03:50:00.000-08:00

by Adrian Ellis

The Art Newspaper | 21.2.08 | Issue 188

Art and wealth are rarely strangers—one person’s history of art is another’s sociology of conspicuous consumption. So it is not surprising that today’s tipping of the world—the convulsive and regressive changes in the distribution of wealth both within the West and between the West and the rest—is transforming the art world. The effervescent art market, its fairs and auctions; the global museum building boom; and the increasingly complex and conflicted relationship between active private collectors and public museums are all manifestations of large-scale change in the institutional ecology of art. Eli Broad’s funding of a “museum within a museum” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the uncertainty around the eventual destination of his collection is the latest example of these criss-crossed lines between private collectors and public institutions.

But perhaps the most significant phenomenon attributable to changes in wealth distribution is the increase, globally, in new museums and galleries that are conceived, funded and run privately, usually but not invariably through the vehicle of a philanthropic trust or foundation, in which tax breaks are traded for ceding formal legal ownership, but not necessarily control. The US experienced a similar phenomenon in its last Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century, when many of its leading cultural institutions were founded on the private collections of the industrial and banking titans of the day.

There was a steady trickle of new privately funded museums throughout the second half of the 20th century. But for the most part the destination of choice for most collectors with a philanthropic bent, uninterested heirs, or an aversion to inheritance taxes was a public or a publicly funded museum that would give the collection the imprimatur and care the collector believed it deserved. The courting of collectors has always been a more significant source of acquisitions for public museums than buying or commissioning. Today, inequalities of wealth have created a second Gilded Age, with a similar burgeoning of institutions.

Many significant collections will never find their way into public institutions but form the nucleus of new private museums. New York’s Neue Galerie and Rubin Museum, to cite two obvious examples, are not vanity museums. They are permanent, vital additions to the cultural fabric of the city, with a full range of curatorial, conservational, public and scholarly programmes. Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi, the Pulitzer Foundation in St Louis, Shanghai’s Zendai Museum, La Colección Jumex in Mexico City or Viktor Vekselberg’s recently announced plans for Moscow and St Petersburg are all fuelled by the immense wealth and entrepreneurial drive of collectors who, with some justification, do not believe that donation to a public institution would afford them the degree of control, the opportunities for display, or even the conservational standards that they will get by going it alone.

The trend is viewed with consternation by many in the museum community. These new institutions are often erratic in their governance, especially in their early years when their often restless founders are still around; the lines between the private and public interest are frequently blurred. Above all, like their 19th- and early 20th-century forbears—the Gardeners, the Morgans, the Barnes and the Fricks—the collections represent the acquisitive interests of a single individual and, often, the small coterie of advisers he or she has chosen to surround themselves with. The collections represent a passionate and single minded interest—the antithesis of the universalist impulses of the encyclopaedic museum.

There are good reasons to believe the trend will continue. Inequalities in wealth are widening not narrowing, and the international super-class of collectors is growing—there are, according to Forbes magazine, just under 1,000 dollar billionaires in the world today—twice the number there were four years ago. Much of the art market today has been annexed by the global luxury goods and services market that has grown up around the newly super-rich and is relocating to where they live and play. And the larger, older public institutions, with the inbuilt inflexibilities inherent in their organisational design and their operating models, find it increasingly challenging to be able to offer this cadre of collectors propositions for stewardship or display of their collections that are more attractive than a museum of one’s own. A world recession may slow the rate of increase, but the tiny cohort is largely protected from the vagaries of recession.

As the scale and number of private art museums increases, their influence on museum practice will too, and codes of practice and policies around such issues as de-accessioning, conflict of interest policy and reciprocity in loans will come under pressure as these new institutions explore and test received wisdom and standard practices. Some of this disruption will be healthy, forcing museums to revisit long unexamined practices. But there is also a very real danger that the appropriate conservatism of the museum sector will be challenged aggressively by a new generation of proprietorial museum board members who feel that, as in their own professional lives, “rules are for other people” and that, whatever the formal legal status, these institutions are an extension of their own private property and can be run as such.

The writer is a director of AEA Consulting and a regular contributor to The Art Newspaper

“Everyone is wondering if the downturn will be like 9/11”

2008-02-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

New York dealers fear the worst

By Brook S. Mason

The Art Newspaper | 13.2.08 | Issue 188

NEW YORK. US dealers are admitting to sluggish sales, hesitant clients and cancelled deals amid continuing financial market woes, which last month saw America’s largest bank, Citigroup, post a $9.8bn fourth-quarter loss.

“Nobody wants to say the sky is falling but perception affects every market and clearly, we are entering a new period in the economy,” said Martha Fleischman, president of Kennedy Galleries. “The people who see art as part of their portfolio and like to flip will get an education very quickly this year,” she added.

“There are more dealers hanging on by their fingernails but no-one will go on the record,” said a prominent art world public relations expert who did not want to be named. “Everyone is wondering if the downturn will be just like 9/11,” she added.

One of the art market’s noted analysts, William Goetzmann, of Yale School of Management, said the picture is mixed: “What we are seeing are the natural effects of economic concerns among the middle class and a shift away from non-essential, luxury goods, even as the demand at the high end of the wealth spectrum for art appears strong for now.” He sees sales of emerging artists’ work as having a speculative component, which “is sustained by the appearance that there is a market for them”. “However, if galleries close and the market for emerging artists retrenches, it is harder for buyers to believe in a future market for what they have bought,” he added.

Dr Goetzmann argued this new market shift may spill over and affect more established artists. “Even for works that are not purchased for speculative reasons, we should see a drop in price based on lower income levels among the customers for these works,” he said.

So far the only shift dealers are reporting is in the middle market. “In the past six months, clients are no longer willing to take a chance on younger artists priced at $15,000 to $20,000,” said David Maupin of the Lehmann Maupin gallery with both Chelsea and Lower East Side premises. He reported a 50% drop in sales in that category over the past six months with buyers focusing instead on higher priced works by established artists like Tracey Emin who have had museum exhibitions. “I have far more people I can call for a $75,000 to $100,000 work than the lower-priced artists,” said Mr Maupin.

“Six months ago, everyone talked of expanding but now merging is the topic,” said Michel Allen, 36, who opened Allen Gallery in Chelsea in December 2006. Her clients include Russian corporations, major financial firms such as Gruss & Company and trendy designers such as Celerie Kemble. “Lately, other dealers have approached me about merging,” she said. She has seen her sales decrease 10% in the second half of last year with photography particularly affected.

But although her rent doubled this summer, she has turned down offers of partnerships to share costs. “I’m still up compared to last January’s sales,” she explained, but said this has required considerable efforts. “I’m working 24/7, I’ve accepted more speaking engagements than before and have been giving more collector walks in Chelsea while going out to many events.”

The antiques market also appears particularly hard hit. “The middle market is virtually at a standstill,’ said English and continental antiques dealer Clinton Howell. “The interesting thing is that a certain segment of the market that used to be able to buy things has been left behind and thinks that top end dealers are too expensive.”

Even so, some say the market at the top remains healthy. “So far the Citigroup losses and the mortgage crisis, which began in the summer, have had no impact on my own collectors,” said Linda Hyman, American paintings dealer. “But the younger collector, especially those taking on contemporary art, is more tuned into the daily vibrations of the market.”

Ann Freedman, Knoedler & Company president, said its Olitski exhibition this winter was sold out. “Many of the paintings could have been sold many times, illustrating the depth of the market for serious work,” she said.

T-Rays Reveal Hidden Art Harmlessly

2008-02-23T15:45:00.000-08:00

By Eric Bland

Discovery News

Feb. 7, 2008 -- Forget X-rays. Scientists from the University of Michigan are using T-rays, a benign form of electromagnetic radiation, to see artwork hidden for centuries by paint or plaster.

"It would be an overstatement to say it's the best way to look through materials," said John Whitaker, professor of electrical engineering and computer science the University of Michigan and one of the authors of the study appearing in the current issue of Optics Communications. "But we can see underlying material that other scans miss."

T-rays have been around for decades and used for everything from space shuttle foam analysis to poison detection. But this is one of the first times they have been used in the art world. The researchers plan to apply the technology next month to find murals hidden beneath layers of plaster in centuries-old churches in France.

Unlike energetic and potentially harmful X-rays, T-rays, or terahertz rays, are completely benign to living things. Since many paint dyes are organic, and thus susceptible to X-rays, T-rays are better for imaging artwork because there is no risk of damaging the piece. The new technique should be able to detect particular dyes in old artwork, such as sanguine, a reddish-brown color that Flemish painters often used.

To generate T-rays, the scientists shoot a special laser beam into an electromagnetic field. When the laser hits the field it's like "turning on a light switch," explained Whitaker, and the T-rays shoot out in pulses toward the target.

Different wavelengths of T-rays are absorbed or reflected by different materials. By looking at when and which wavelengths are reflected or absorbed, researchers see what a piece of artwork is hiding.

"The timing of the T-rays is critical," said Whitaker. "Without it you can't distinguish the depth. It's something like a pulsed radar."

There are currently two T-ray machines the researchers use to examine art. The first is a stationary machine at the University of Michigan. The other is a portable one the size of a breadbox from Picometrix, a company founded by a former University of Michigan faculty member.

Right now the T-ray images appear only in black and white. The next step is generating full color images of buried artwork.

"The potential of this technique is very exciting," said Daniel Mittleman, a professor of Eletrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University who does T-ray research but was not involved in the Michigan study.

T-rays won't eliminate the need for other imaging techniques, he said, but will instead "be a complimentary technique that will reveal new information."

Honey Space: The Least Chelsea Gallery in Chelsea

2008-02-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

By Jacquelyn Lewis

ARTINFO.COM

Published: February 19, 2008

NEW YORK—Honey Space might be the latest art gallery to crop up in Chelsea, but there’s nothing Chelsea about it. The raw, ground-floor space at 11th Avenue and 21st Street, just around the corner from the Chelsea Art Museum, is tiny—less than 1,000 square feet. It doesn’t have heat, it doesn’t broker sales, and it doesn’t have gallerists. In fact, it doesn’t have a staff at all. Designed to house site-specific installations and transform with each exhibition, the space is open to the public and unsupervised during the day, with security gates that open and close in the morning and evening.

“The first thing most people ask me about is security,” said Honey Space founder Thomas Beale, 29. But he says he is less concerned with the lack thereof than with how visitors will react to it.

“This is kind of a radical idea for New York City, where we have such a security-conscious culture,” said Beale, a sculptor who, ironically, debuted an exhibition of his own works in a much more corporate location—the display windows of the Lord & Taylor department store on Fifth Avenue—the day before Honey Space opened. “To do something where you put complete trust in people, and to see whether people end up respecting it or not, is a powerful idea.”

Honey Space’s inaugural installation is “Still Reaping,” a tower of nature-inspired acrylic paintings by Adam Stanforth that will remain in the gallery through March 15. Beale said he can’t reveal who will exhibit in the space after Stanforth, but the Japanese artist Midori Harima will mount an installation in May or June, and his inbox is clogged with email messages from other artists who want to participate.

“Still Reaping” is not the first work to be shown in the space. Beale also has his studio, which he cut in half to create the gallery, in the old warehouse that is home to Honey Space. He mounted two exhibitions of his own works there last year, before it became an official gallery. He said he opened Honey Space because he planned on “laying low” for several months without exhibiting his sculpture in the space, but wanted to give other artists the rare opportunity to exhibit in the middle of well-trafficked Chelsea. He spent $6,000 of his own money bringing the electricity up to code, and he did the grunt work himself— recruiting about half a dozen friends to help—with no intention of making even a cent of profit.

“I’m not interested in being a gallerist,” Beale said. “This was about how I could use the space and create opportunities but at the same time not burden my own studio practice.”

You might think all this couldn’t get any further from market-driven Chelsea, but there’s one more detail that makes the arrangement even more unusual. In an area where battles over square footage are the norm and rents tend to be sky-high, Beale’s monthly bill for the space comes to $0. Mega-developer and broker Alf Naman owns the property and has allowed Beale and other artists to build out and maintain studios there for free for the past year and a half (Beale says there are about a dozen studios in the building). Part of the agreement is that Beale will give artworks to Naman. Although no art has changed hands to date, Beale said he’s working on a major piece for Naman’s collection. The artist said he has developed such rapport with Naman that the latter’s only request concerning Honey Space was that Beale take care of the electricity.

“I was excited,” Beale said. “But the biggest moment was when I was first offered the studio space for free. I was really shocked—I hadn’t heard of any other situation like it.”

He said Naman offered the studio space for between one and two years (Naman will develop the property after that, according to Beale). “Anything beyond that, I feel is an added gift.”

Honey Space had its official opening, which drew about 150 people, on Valentine’s Day. When ARTINFO arrived, we found a tiny door with a patchwork of Stanforth’s paintings around it, but no sign indicating whether the gallery was open, or if we were even at the right entrance. We ducked through the diminutive opening, wandered hesitantly down a hallway lined with dried vines, lifted a gauze curtain, and emerged to find a small group gathered ‘round cups of apple cider, a pot of cheese fondue, and a space heater, with Stanforth’s paintings rising into a column in the center of a shabby room, some dangling from the ceiling. It seemed a thousand miles away from the sleek showrooms of Chelsea.

“Are you open?” we asked, confused.

“Yes,” Beale said with a smile that said our reaction was exactly the one he was looking for. “You’re actually the first guest.”

Is modern art a left-wing conspiracy?

2007-12-29T04:10:00.000-08:00

by Munira Mirza

SPIKED

Munira Mirza picks apart the idea that all of Britain's arts bodies are stacked with pinkos generating propaganda for liberal causes.

Ask a right winger who is in charge of the arts in Britain and they are likely to tell you that the arts are run by a liberal-left conspiracy - that the BBC, National Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Arts Council are all staffed by pinkos who generate propaganda in service of leftie causes.

But is all modern art left-wing, as they suggest? To answer this, you’d have to work out what is meant by left-wing (or right-wing for that matter) which is an increasingly difficult thing to do these days. Calling someone left- or right-wing used to be a pretty good indication of where they stood on the big political issues of the day. For the 200 years between the French Revolution of 1789 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, left and right were shorthand labels for showing ‘whose side you were on’ – whether it was at the barricades or the picket line.
But today, do these terms have the same instructive value? US President George W Bush is sometimes described as the leader of a radical right-wing government, but in what sense is this true? In 2002, he controversially introduced protection tariffs on steel imports to save the skins of domestic producers – so he is not exactly a rabid proponent of the free market. Maybe, then, he is a hawk when it comes to international affairs because he believed in America’s role in effecting regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. But then, if this is right-wing, where does that leave Bill Clinton, his predecessor, who used similar arguments to justify the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia (only he used the term ‘humanitarian intervention’)?
One could go on. Is free speech a left- or right-wing principle? For all their talk of freedom and challenging orthodoxy, we know there are plenty of academics on the left who have campaigned for ‘no platform’ policies in universities. Are they more or less left-wing than Mary Whitehouse, the Christian campaigner who demanded that certain things on television were too offensive for the British public to handle and required government censorship?
And what about green politics? Even trendy left-wing supporters of organic food, who are vitriolic in their hatred for Tesco, can be embarrassed to find themselves in bed with aristocrats who believe in the purity of the land and subordination of man to nature. Sustainability - the red-green slogan of choice - is about slow, manageable change. It’s hardly the credo for revolution.
So, the first point to make is that we should recognise that when we use the terms left and right, we’re not really referring to political categories, so much as badges of honour that we parade around. Or else, they are terms of abuse, to dismiss someone’s arguments and avoid examining their ideas properly. Many people cling to them for emotional comfort at a time when the sea of ideology is confusing and uncertain.
Accusing all modern art of being left-wing probably doesn’t get us very far. What might be more useful is to ask whether there is a dominant consensus when it comes to political attitudes in modern art today. Is art good at presenting alternative perspectives and shaking our worldviews, or does much of it congratulate us on our prejudices? If we’re honest, most of us would probably have to say ‘yes’, in as much as wider contemporary society can be dominated by bland consensus and conformity. Of course, there is still challenging and provocative art, but perhaps not as much as we’d like. Even Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre complained about wanting a really good ‘mischievous right-wing play’ to shake things up a bit. If we take him at his word - that he’s not censoring them when they land on his desk - then why are these spiky, thought-provoking works not being written?
There are some rather obvious gaps. For instance, there’s plenty of anti-war art out there (think of Mark Wallinger’s State Britain, which is the recreation of Brian Haw’s eccentric protest on Parliament Square, or the spate of anti-war plays produced, like David Hare’s Stuff Happens, or the verbatim plays at the Tricycle Theatre), but where’s the pro-war art? It’s a minority view, but it’s intriguing that for all its spirit of experimentation and shock, no one in the arts is prepared to explore this argument further. And with all this concern for community art, there are a few communities that never seem to get much airtime. In the 1980s there were lots of agitprop plays about the impact of mine closures on working-class communities, so where are the plays about the end of foxhunting in the countryside? Most obviously, where is the satire about radical Islam or the ultimate attack on political correctness? When an issue so dominates in the media (and has, potentially, so much comedy value), why hasn’t anyone really touched it?
Although the political compass is changing, so-called radical artists usually stick to what’s comfortable. It’s very easy to be anti-Bush these days, but try being anti-recycling. You’ll be branded a heretic and lose your friends in high places very quickly. Indeed, there is hardly any artistic critique or satire about environmentalism, even though the majority of people in surveys feel deeply ambivalent about being hectored about flying, carbon footprints and so on. Never mind Jerry Springer: The Opera, or even ‘Mohammed the Opera’ (if any artist would dare to do such a thing), Al Gore is practically crying out for his own musical! The artist Mark McGowan is one of the few artists who has managed to spoof environmentalism. He once tried to ‘raise awareness’ about pollution in Britain’s rivers by publicising the fact that he was going to dump a tonne of waste in the Thames. On another occasion, he announced he would leave a tap running in his London gallery to raise awareness of wasted water. On cue, green protesters arrived to try to turn it off. Why isn’t there more of this in our age of supposed irreverence and playful postmodernism?
More crucially, however, what passes for ‘radical’ these days is actually quite conservative and reactionary in character. In 2001, the artist Michael Landy publicly destroyed all 7,277 of his possessions in a former C&A shop on Oxford Street. ‘Breakdown’ was supposed to be a statement about consumerism, the pressure of material wealth, money doesn’t make you happy, etc - practically Church of England stuff. Much of contemporary modern art displays our own pieties. As the editor of spiked Brendan O’Neill has argued, Marc Quinn’s preachy statue, ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’, displayed more elitism about individual identity being shaped by nature than even the imperial Victorian statues she shared Trafalgar Square with (see Statue of limitations, by Brendan O’Neill).
As many critics would accept, it’s a tough challenge to bring politics into art without losing some subtlety. It is a very rare thing for artists to hit the right political note without their work looking like a simplistic didactic message. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (1937) is a rare example of a painting that succeeds as propaganda and art – telling the world about the Luftwaffe bombing of the Spanish town, while also screaming out the existential misery of twentieth-century warfare. But, as the art historian Simon Schama notes in his book The Power of Art, much of Picasso’s work and politics afterwards was too closely aligned to Stalinism to achieve the same effect again. The radicalism of an artist in his art does not necessarily correlate to his politics. Salvador Dali, possibly the most subversive artist of the twentieth century, supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Which is why it is hard not to feel a sense of relief when fine artists today avoid bringing politics into their work, especially when you know how bad their politics can be. Thank god for a bit of apolitical postmodernism, one might say. But then, with state subsidy the way it is, there is also an enormous pressure to be socially useful, in terms of measurable targets and transforming society. Artists are supposedly responsible for tackling the ‘poverty of aspiration’, as Tessa Jowell put it - the ex-culture secretary now minister for that even more Orwellian project, ‘The Olympics’.
The troubled artistic search for truth is dismissed as ‘a bit dodgy’ and state-funded artists are happily recruited to produce propaganda for the latest war against social exclusion. This marks a shift in post-Cold War politics, certainly. During the 1950s, the free world’s strategy was to associate liberal democracy with artistic autonomy from the state and politics. The CIA – through various agencies – clandestinely funded abstract expressionist artists in Europe and America. Its purpose was to undermine the appeal of socialist realism which was seen as overtly political, but also to make the point (without irony) that free market governments don’t tell their artists what to paint, unlike in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to conclude that this principle still has the same support in contemporary state subsidy.
It could be argued, as some have tried, that the contemporary art world is very right-wing, because it is commercialised, greedy and ‘entrepreneurial’. Post-Thatcher, we have a yuppified, over-inflated market where everything is a ‘brand’. Damien Hirst’s diamond skull retailing at a whopping £50million is hardly a left-wing statement. But is it a right-wing statement either? There is always a temptation to reduce right-wing politics to greedy, ‘loads-a-money’ individualism. But this would be to neglect the fact that a large aspect of right-wing thought understood the importance of tradition, knowledge, community and social institutions (family, monarchy, religion) to any society. All these elements are seen to be quaint but irrelevant in contemporary art.
To see what I mean, just compare Tracey Emin’s bed to Constable’s romantic, untroubled landscapes or Betjeman’s nostalgic, homely poetry. Rather than characterising the Young British Artist sensation and commercial art world as right-wing, it might be better to see it as postmodern. It sneers at the idea of meaning, truth, beauty and all that. In that sense, modern art is neither left-wing nor right-wing, because so much of it rejects the notion of truth and meaning, which must inevitably characterise any politics.

Munira Mirza is a writer and researcher based in London and a founding member of the Manifesto Club. This article is adapted from a speech she gave at the Southbank Centre in the debate ‘All Modern Art is Left-Wing’.

Research puts myth of a cultural elite to rest

2007-12-22T08:15:00.000-08:00

THE NEW ZELAND HERALD

by Indipendent

Friday December 21, 2007

The "cultural elite" brought up on opera and the higher arts, which supposedly turns up its nose at anything as vulgar as a pop song or mainstream television, does not exist, according to research published by Oxford University academics.
Researchers have used data from Britain and six other countries to test a theory that people born to posh families absorb only "high culture" while "popular" or "mass" culture is strictly for those from ordinary to humble beginnings.
They found that in truth Billy Elliott - the fictional working-class boy from a northern mining village with a passion for ballet - is not the social freak he might seem to be. Equally, someone with an impressive ancestry and blue blood in his veins is not necessarily any more cultured than the rest of us.
"We find little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite who would consume 'high' culture while shunning more 'popular' cultural forms," the two Oxford academics said, when their results were published this week. "There are certain individuals who fit this description, but they are too few in number to figure in any survey-based analysis."
Tak Wing Chan, from Oxford's sociology department, and John Goldthorpe, of Nuffield College, Oxford, have spent years trying to analyse whether "social status" still exists in Britain, and how it operates.
For this exercise, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, they divided people into four groups - univores, who only like popular culture; omnivores, who like everything from opera to soap opera; paucivores, who absorb very little culture; and inactives, who absorb practically none.
People's education, income and social class were all taken into account but this study, unlike others of its kind, differentiated between "class" and "status". An out-of-work aristocrat has class, without status, while there are bright people from poor backgrounds who have "status" but not "class".
In previous studies, they have concluded that status is now determined more by the work someone does than by their birth or their wealth. Office workers consider that they have a higher status than manual workers; professionals think themselves a cut above works managers, and so on.
The newspaper a person chooses, and the forms of entertainment that person enjoys are all tied up with ideas about social status. That does not mean that professionals in elite jobs restrict themselves to "elite" arts, but it does mean that the opera houses and specialist art galleries are likely to be filled with people who have "status".
Class, as opposed to status, does not seem to have much effect on cultural tastes. "A substantial minority of members of the most advantaged social groups are univores or inactives," the researchers found.
Dr Chan said: "Our work shows it's education and social status, not social class that predict cultural consumption in the UK, and broadly comparable results were obtained from other countries too."
Data from Britain, Chile, France, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands and the US were analysed in the study.

More than just a pop sensation

2007-12-02T17:11:00.000-08:00

THE AUSTRALIAN

Rex Butler

November 30, 2007

SOME time after the death of pop artist Andy Warhol, undoubtedly the most important and influential artist of his generation, a fact emerged with the force of revelation: throughout his life he had been religious. Warhol not only had a family background steeped in a particular Slovakian Catholic worship of icons but he had regularly attended church throughout his adult life.

Only his closest friends knew of this side to Warhol, and he was surely aware that it did not sit well with the public image of him as the cynical parodist of consumerism, the ringmaster of the kinky goings-on at his Factory, the speed-fuelled hipster in leather jacket, dark glasses and white wig.

In a way, knowing this about Warhol changes everything. His images of iconic figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley seem no longer to point to the emptiness of fame but instead aspire to something of their original presence. His obsession with celebrity suggests that movie stars and rock singers are our contemporary saints and gossip magazines their holy relics. We can see Warhol as an artist not of the disenchantment of the image, the inheritor of Charles Baudelaire's dire prediction of the "decrepitude of art", but of its re-enchantment, the attempt to restore something of its original magical power.

It is not surprising that at the time of his death in 1987 he had been working for about two years on a large series devoted to Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, which depicts that moment in the biblical narrative when Christ reveals that one of the disciples gathered there will betray him, and gesturing towards the wine and bread laid out on the table prefigures the Eucharist, in which the faithful incorporate the holy spirit by symbolically consuming his flesh and blood.

It is something like this miracle of incarnation that occurs every time we take an image as real, when we see it not as the representation of something that is absent but as the presentation of an object that is now before us.

Throughout his career, Warhol explored three registers of the image that still have this phantasmic power over us and, sacrilegiously perhaps, sought to link their commonality. They are religious images, pornographic images and advertising images. In each, the image attempts to make us believe, to see or desire something that is not there, and ultimately to make us act in some way.

Looking at Warhol's oeuvre, it is remarkable how often the power of the image to produce the effect of reality, or the possibility of the image to be real, is played on. Throughout all of his silkscreens, photographs, films and even the paintings he made by urinating on sensitised canvas, he aimed at an image that miraculously brought itself about without human, or at least artistic, intervention. Theologians call this special type of image acheiropoietos - literally, not made by hand - and the great example of it was the religious relic Veronica's veil, on which the image of Christ's face was miraculously imprinted after it was used to wipe away his sweat while he was carrying the cross towards Calvary.

In his films, too, Warhol sought to capture actions that could not be faked, that actually took place: eating, crying, sleeping, shooting up drugs, all the way to the notorious film Blow Job, in which we stare up-close at the face of a man while he is being fellated, and whose tics and grimaces are meant to be as authentic as the orgasm that pornography shows as proof of its reality.

For a long time Warhol was seen as the ultimate postmodern artist, systematically undermining the conditions for art: talent, inspiration, taste, originality, the artist's signature, the difference between artistic and other kinds of objects.

In fact, we can see him leading us not towards the end of art but back towards its beginning: that moment when art was not yet aestheticised, historicised, put into a museum. It was when art as we know it did not yet exist and the artist was pledged to religious rather than aesthetic values.

The huge retrospective of Warhol's work due to open at the new Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane next week takes place in the middle of this dramatic re-evaluation of Warhol's work.

The exhibition, typical of the gigantism of contemporary blockbusters, will include about 300 of Warhol's works, sourced from across the country and from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It will include his well-known Campbell's Soup cans, his Marilyns, his film and rock stars, his electric chairs and car crashes, his cow wallpaper, his Chairman Maos, his Silver Clouds, one of his Last Suppers and an almost complete selection of his films.

The new GoMA, with its populism, its kids' activities and its wide open views on to the outside world, is the ideal place to undertake this rethinking of Warhol and the consequences of his work for 21st-century art.

Warhol's work has nothing to do with our usual understanding of art, and GoMA is so far the only gallery in Australia to grapple with the problem of what to do when the most interesting objects it shows are no longer art and no longer belong to a history of art.

Two great artists of the 21st century have understood very well this strange retrospective revolution Warhol brings about for art: American pop artist Jeff Koons and Britain's Damien Hirst. In Koons's Made in Heaven series, which features hard-core tableaus in which the artist and his wife have sex, we have gestures towards the pornographic as one of the few realms where the image still retains its credibility, and an association, in the same way as Warhol, of pornography with art's original religious vocation.

In Hirst's famous shark in a vitrine or his more recent diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, we have again the attempt to produce objects that are there before us. They seek, either through their physical presence or economic worth, to do away with any effort to intellectualise them or allow us any distance from them.

In all of this, Warhol can be seen as the forerunner not of postmodernism but of the present moment in art that has come after postmodernism, the contemporary. It is a moment when theorising fades away before the sheer visual power of the work being made, when art no longer comes out of other art but is itself a thing in the world.

The paradox is that although the best art today is becoming more populist and aligned to the forms of mass culture - Koons and Hirst again, or the Japanese super-flat artist Takashi Murakami - the questions it poses are becoming more complicated and more connected to long-running themes of Western civilisation.

We can only hope that the Gallery of Modern Art in this show manages to balance the two priorities: this is the true task confronting museums today. It must realise that the art it exhibits is increasingly doing away with the need for museums, while making the case that museums are the best place for this to be thought through.

Viewers going to the GoMA to see the Warhol retrospective should realise that they constitute a kind of test case for the continued viability of art.

The strange thing is that people will flock to see originals of works they have seen a thousand times before and that in most cases were copies of images taken from elsewhere.

But this familiarity doesn't stop worshippers gazing every Sunday at the icons of Christ in their church: the images have a magical ability to make them feel that they are looking at something that was actually there in their space.

Warhol is perhaps best known for his quip that in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. The brilliant irony is that it's precisely by facing the obsolescence of art and fame, brought about by their constructions as products, that he achieved for himself a kind of immortality.

And he did so in the only form it has been possible: as an image.

Warhol and his Superstars is at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, December 8 to March 30.

Pulse of the Art Market

2007-11-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

THE NEW YORK SUN

The Big Picture at Sotheby's

Auctions

By Marion Maneker

November 12, 2007

Last week, on the basis of one disappointing auction, Sotheby's stock lost a third of its value — even as the company reported the best three consecutive financial quarters in its long history. In an analyst call for the company's third quarter earnings, CEO William Ruprecht pointed out that Sotheby's had already taken the $14.6 million loss on guarantees for the Wednesday evening sale. Despite those losses, he underscored that the sale was otherwise profitable.
Nonetheless, $1.3 billion of the company's value has disappeared. That's because Sotheby's is the only publicly traded auction house. Its stock is a proxy for the entire art market. Despite evidence that the art market is larger, deeper, and more independent from other financial markets than ever before, if the art market sneezes, Sotheby's stock catches the flu. Oddly, in this case, there is no evidence yet of a significant slowdown in the art market. Even in a disappointing sale, 35% of the lots that sold at Sotheby's went for prices above the high estimate.
Last week was not the first time that BID — Sotheby's cute ticker symbol — suffered. It spiked first in 1989, at the peak of the last art boom, before tumbling down a cliff in the art crash of 1990. It spiked again in 1999 before a long, slow decline exacerbated by the price-fixing scandal. Early in 2006, the stock started to show some life. Eight years into a booming art market, the company was growing with the art world. For the first time since 2001, the stock moved above $20. It opened this year in the low $30 range — where it is now — and climbed through a successful year of sales to the low $50 range. Then the credit crisis hit in August, whacking the stock back to $39. Just as quickly, the stock recovered, as credit fears receded and the stock rose to its highest level just before the London auctions were held to coincide with the Frieze art fair in mid-October.
Those sales were successful, but the vertiginous ascent of art prices seemed to have leveled off. The art market's greatest problem is keeping up with expectations, which couldn't be higher: The art market has been on an extraordinary run. According to Artnet, since 1998 the number of lots sold at auction around the world has increased by more than 50%. At the same time, the value of that art sold has more than tripled.
In the last two years the pace has increased. For the 12 months ending in June 2006, $5.9 billion worth of art was auctioned off in 144,000 lots. But those spectacular figures pale next to the numbers for the 12 months ending in June 2007. During that period, $9 billion worth of art sold at auction in 165,000 lots. That's a 52% increase in value with only a 14% rise in volume. Perhaps there was no way for Sotheby's stock price — and the art market — to keep up with that pace. But the question is: Are we in for a crash — and how much of the art market is dependent on confidence in other financial markets?
The art market is bigger than Sotheby's, of course; it's much bigger than both of the auction houses. Auctions account for between 20% and 25% of the total art market, Artnet estimates. That makes for a conservative value of the art market in the range of $36 billion. That dwarfs the online advertising market, which is the engine of stock market darling Google and its competitor Yahoo. Together, both companies generated sales this year of only $25 billion.

Gerhard's Window

2007-11-18T09:44:00.000-08:00

Coincidence and illumination

Gerhard Richter's stained glass window opens a new chapter in the long career of the Cologne Cathedral. By Petra Kipphoff

The South Transept window of the Cologne Cathedral was inaugurated at the end of August and met with an enthusiatic reception from the feuilleton press. But the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Meisner, found Richter's abstract design better suited to a mosque or a prayer house than a cathedral. He told the local Kölner Express: "If we are to have a new window, then it should clearly reflect our beliefs, not just any old beliefs." Saints and martyrs would have been more to his liking.

All grand churches, whether St. Peter's in Rome or the Frauenkirche in Dresden, have a history; Cologne Cathedral has a career. Begun in the Middle Ages, the building stayed unfinished for centuries. Its facade remained without any real relationship to the chancel, and even after the bells were installed in 1437 the South Tower was still just a stump that - augmented by a crooked building crane - formed an eccentric urban landmark right through into the nineteenth century. Not until the Romantic rediscovery of Gothic and the Middle Ages did this torso become a magnet for patriotic yearnings and religious raptures. These - and Kaiser Wilhelm I too - we have to thank for the completion of the Gothic cathedral in its historic style, which was finally brought to an end in 1880. In this simulated perfection the cathedral became the symbol of German unification, and this is where the building's career began. Cologne Cathedral - picture-postcard-perfect World Cultural Heritage - stands beside the Rhine, the German river, and as such it has come, especially for foreigners, to be the object that is identified most with German art and culture, comparable only with Schloss Neuschwanstein.

The sharp breaks and changing expectations of the cathedral's history need to be mentioned, because it has now been enriched by a new and unexpected chapter that promises a career of a different kind: Gerhard Richter's new window for the South Transept. The credit for persuading Richter - an artist of great standing and prices to match, but also a loner who only works on his own account - to take on this work must go to the energetic cathedral architect Barbara Schock-Werner. As well as possessing the patience to gain the agreement of both artist and chapter, she also managed to coolly face down the disapproval of Cardinal Meisner, who (praise the Lord) demonstratively stayed away from the inaugural mass.

Gerhard Richter is neither a Roman Catholic nor born in Cologne. Contemporary German history brought him in 1961 from the Dresden of his birth to the Rhineland. At the Düsseldorf Academy he was first a student, from 1971 a teacher too; since 1983 he has lived in Cologne but kept a low public profile. Now he is in the thick of it in his own way, allowing neither Catholic Church nor Cologne carnival to call him their own. True to his principles he took no commission, making the windows without a fee.

The cathedral architect's initial request came with the wish for a figurative motif. Not necessarily Joseph or the Virgin Mary, but maybe a modern martyr like Father Kolbe or Edith Stein. After a brief attempt Richter gave up the holy venture. In fact he would have returned the commission had he not accidentally, playfully, placed a template of the window's frame on a reproduction of one of his earlier colour field paintings. "I got a real shock," says Richter, "because it looked good, it was the only honest possibility."

There was more to it than meaning-resistant abstraction. The interplay of light and colour in the stained glass window also attracted Richter for its possibilities of new experience on old terrain. "The main problem of my painting is the light," he wrote back in 1964/65, by which he meant not the light of Impressionist plein-air painting but the instantaneous light of the photography that so often forms the basis for his paintings. From the early photos of family and friends to the sea and landscapes and the Baader-Meinhof cycle, light-generated photographs - preferably blurred and in the shades between grey and white - have provided the inspiration for Gerhard Richter's paintings. Only in the series of monochrome panels and the abstract works does light play no active role (here it is a matter of illumination rather than exposure). A stained-glass window, where the glass changes its coloration with the quality of the daylight, offers a new facet of this old theme that is the central issue.

This discovery, this challenge, came by accident. And Richter responded to the coincidence with an aleatoric computer program. From the colour spectrum of traditional glass-painting he selected hand-blown glass in 72 colours. With a format of 9.7 x 9.7 centimetres this resulted in a total of 11,263 glass squares for the 19-metre-high, 106-square-metre window. For three of the six lancet windows the arrangement was determined by computer; the other three are mirrored versions of these, as is easily seen by comparing the first lancet window with the third, the second with the fifth, and the fourth with the sixth. For Richter, this planning was certainly not hocus-pocus, as is demonstrated by the accompanying exhibition at the Museum Ludwig, where Stephan Diederich has collected the "studies on proportion, on the method of random arrangement, on mirroring, and on colour matching", the early painting "4096 Colours" and the big colour field work "4900 Colours" created in connection with the planning for the cathedral window. The exhibition is important because it underlines Richter's radical refusal of any message, in the kind of neutral atmosphere that is easily lost in the cathedral - not only by virtue of the way the South Transept window itself sparkles in a kaleidoscopic cascade of colours, but also through its medieval stained glass neighbours, the sovereign royal window high up in the chancel and the wonderfully vivacious Biblical windows in St. Stephen's Chapel and the Chapel of the Three Kings.

Of course the Cologne Cathedral window occupies a special place in Richter's artistic biography. As a parallel, he himself mentions - to emphasize the difference from his other, quasi-private work - his rendering of the German black, red and gold flag for the Reichstag in Berlin. He felt that art would be out of place there, and was pleased to have created "a clever design". These windows have been immediately sacralized by representatives of the Church, but the cautious Richter prefers to neutralize here too: "I wanted to achieve what is possible using the craft and resources available and the experience in the space."

With statements like this Richter - exactly like at the beginning of his career and parallel to his "unsharp pictures" - blurs the essence and the contours of his works. But in the case of the stained-glass windows there is a new unknown for him. Even when his paintings no longer belong to him he retains sovereignty over them, at least to the extent that their condition is not a final one. But the cathedral windows are not only taken out of his power for ever materially; through the changing light they are also in a state of permanent change over which he has no influence. That is the other, the meteorological coincidence.

So it is the very place itself, and its changing light, that makes this window into a paradigmatic work of art of the late twentieth century. Unlike the earlier pictorial narratives, figurative representations or decorative patterns, which each fitted into its respective frame, Richter's illuminated abstraction is not determined by lancet and rosette. So, just as he turns his back on narrative, with this design he also transgresses the prescribed frame, where necessary at the edges simply cutting the glass squares. Richter gaily ignores the constrictions of his stained-glass windows. And breaks the bounds once again, by outshining them: "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3).

*

signandsight.com

This article originally appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on September 13, 2007.

Petra Kipphoff is a freelance art critic.

Translation: Meredith Dale

Fashionable Art

2007-11-04T12:02:00.000-08:00

Art on the cutting edge?

Brigitte Werneburg asks what contemporariness means in the artworld today

Is the Winter Collection 2007 that Marc Jacobs designed for Louis Vuitton an homage to a) Jan Vermeer, b) Adrian Brouwer, or c) Jan Steen? These are the kinds of questions with which today's readers of fashion magazines are confronted. The answer is pretty easy, since the Marc Jacobs Collection is named "Girl with a Monogrammed Bag," clearly referring to Peter Webber's recent film, "Girl with a Pearl Earring." That film has helped bring renewed popularity to Jan Vermeer's 1665 painting, "The Girl with a Pearl Earring." What you should also know: Scarlett Johansson, who plays the lead female role in the film, made a guest appearance at the presentation of the Marc Jacobs collection.

The question is drawn from the "big Elle test" in the magazine's special edition on "Art," which presents stars like Samuel Keller, who just took leave from his role as head of Art Basel and Art Basel/Miami Beach, or gives tips for "art shopping." There's nothing about Art Summer 2007. Though put together with little knowledge, these 20 pages make it very clear: Art is the theme of the hour. You can't get around it. Even if they simply miss the looming, critical mass of great contemporary art events in early June, like the Biennale in Venice, documenta 12, the sculpture projects of Muenster and Art Basel. Oh well, these events will attract millions of visitors anyway. Because it seems nothing better justifies claims to hipness than interest in contemporary art.

Clearly, this is not only true for unmitigated consumerism and lifestyle, but also for societal or political engagement. Even demonstrators at the G-8 summit don't - or don't wish to - avoid art. "Art goes Heiligendamm" (feature) or "BALANCE!" is the name of the project in which politics becomes aesthetic, and aesthetics becomes political. The greater good therein may not be really clear. But this only underscores the true role of art. Art is needed because - according to popular consensus - only those who bring art into play are truly up-to-date.

Where art is, you'll find the weltgeist, or world spirit. Or at any rate the world market, if you prefer the Marxist reading of Hegel. Art's protagonists show up by the hundreds in their private jets at international art fairs. They bid at the biggest auctions in New York and London and generate ever new, ever more abstruse price records for contemporary art. And then the world market is also enamoured of world history. At least in the form of art history and the "Girl with a Monogrammed Bag." Is it this linkage of market and art that lends art its current cache? The certainty of its meaning as the medium for expressing contemporary questions, themes or attitudes per se? The certainty of being able to count on attention to and interest in art, at all times, from all people and in all places? And if not, to confidently demand that attention? Whether it's about daily small talk, about the World Economic Forum in Davos, about the consumers of tabloid journalism and celebrity TV or about the so-called big politics, which - oh, come on now! - know by now that art just has to be included in the planning of a G-8 summit.

Actually, the circles are growing of those who not only merely tolerate the preoccupation with art, but actually kiss up to it. The way they express their new-found interest may be somewhat disenchanting. But in fact, most of them pursue quite different interests and goals, and only relate to art in order to profit from it. But what else would it mean to be a standard-bearer of contemporary attitudes toward life? If not to defy the "embrace of success," as Kaspar König, director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and co-curator of the "sculpture projects muenster 07," put it? The progression of exhibitions, fairs and satellite fairs, gallery weekends and biennials, projects in increasingly extravagant locations, best of all on the security fence at Heiligendamm, cannot get their act together these days even with help of the most elaborate personal organizer.

Right after the Venice Biennial opens on 10 June, one big event follows the next. Both documenta 12, with its 480 artworks by some 100 artists, and the "sculpture projects muenster," with only 37 objects scattered throughout the city, open a week later, on June 16. Conveniently, Art Basel takes place between the two, from June 13-17. But perhaps the heavyweight international collectors whom Europe wants to entice will already have blown their wad in Venice? That's not an issue, at least not officially, at the Biennale, which still hasn't become a sales exhibition. But it is an issue at the very first "Corniche Art Fair." This parallel event is the brainchild of Jean Jacques Aillagon, director of Venice's Palazzo Grassi (which belongs to Francois Pinault, mega-collector and owner of the Christie's auction house), and of Daniella Louxembourg, art consultant to, among others, Ronald S. Lauder, and co-owner of a gallery in Zurich together with Simon de Pury, head of the Phillips auction house.

But not only the market is lining up: museums are, too. On May 31, Anselm Kiefer's one-man show opened in the Grand Palais in Paris; on June 3, the MoMA in New York opened its solo exhibition of works by Richard Serra. The "Made in Germany" show in Hanover, a collaboration of the Sprengel Museum, the Kestnergesellschaft Gallery and the Art Association of Hanover, has opened as well. The MoMA in Berlin exhibit now has been replaced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit of 19th century French masterpieces from its collection. In the words of Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, which promoted the show far and wide: "France's greatest beauties come from New York." Art is immigrating or emigrating to and from all corners of the world. Especially to finance capitals like Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore.

It's just not easy to say whether this trafficking in art inflicts collateral damage along the lines of the "migration of form" that Roger M. Buergel, director of documenta 12, and his wife and co-curator Ruth Noack track down in Kassel, or whether it behaves in just the opposite way. To unlock that question, the oldest exhibit of documenta 12 presents a key in art history: a 19th century Persian drawing in which, oddly, a river flows in Chinese manner - because the unknown artist had studied the art of China and assimilated the style. At any rate, today's emblematic work, which opens the door wide open for migration of form and lifestyle to all corners of the world and all levels of education and wealth, is called "Girl with a Monogrammed Bag."

No, you still don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. But maybe a little more Marxist theory is needed to really see the world spirit reflected in the world market. Because disbelief remains. It prompts scepticism when you see how those who feel their rightful place is on the spearhead, nevertheless chronically feel they are in the wake of events. The turnover rate with which art is purchased and rejected nowadays sends a clear message: Did the person who bought yesterday and already doubts his purchase today ever believe in being on the qui vive? It's also questionable as to whether there is any sensation at all. Exhibits, fairs or record-breaking auctions are planned and agreed upon as if in a war room; in other words, manipulated and staged. It is not the art event that prevails, but rather marketing strategies and insider dealing.

Despite all the legitimation power and dominance of the attention economy, art lacks drive – as they used to say in the 60s and 70s, when contemporariness still defined a moment of imperative. Anyone who took art's side knew: It will change your life (or at least your drug consumption). On the other hand, the current claim of art to be the cultural trend-setting medium leaves one without alternatives. The preoccupation with art is evidence of economic and societal success – not a counterproposal. One regularly is confronted by conformist behaviour. Defiance and deviance must be fully assimilated – if you wish to be successful. Gallerists, artists, curators, art dealers or critics – they're all smart, flexible and obliging; and in this setting they are assertive and extremely disciplined. It doesn't hurt to be a child prodigy, as long as one is as nice and polite as Jonathan Meese. And one almost needs enigmatic arrogance as a trademark in the exceptional case of art, if you live a life as inconspicuous and as virtuous as that of Roger M. Buergel.

At the same time, art – which is no longer alternative – basks in a diversity of possibilities. Almost everything has its justification: figuration, abstraction, New German Painting and (John) Bock performances, video art, and kitsch just as much as the sociological evaluation of the world; every genre, every style, every aesthetic approach and every societal or political influence and point of reference, every network and every niche counts. Probably the feeling of being chronically in the wake of events also arises from this diversification of art production and distribution, which inevitably supports private idiosyncrasies about what can be considered the state of the art. The prevailing taste in the art business is actually the taste of those who prevail, and the fact that they for the most part share their preferences does not mean that they know what "cutting edge" means; much more, they try to find or invent it through alternating exchange. But which art is also interesting and important? There's no agreement. Because the other participants in cultural life react just like Pinault, Flick and co.; they, too, construct and communicate their own standards, each in their own network.

Always, and in all ways trendy, for art the question of whose rules have greater convincing power and perhaps even greater validity in the long run can no longer be answered. No one knows of a public dispute about an artist or an artistic position. The dispute revolves around personal data or tenure, as was recently the case regarding Peter Klaus Schuster in Berlin, general director of the State Museums, or in the case of the restitution of a Kirchner painting.

"What is to be done?" asks documenta 12. And of all things, it brings up Lenin's famous-infamous text of 1902 , in which he argued that the revolution should be managed professionally, instead of as Marx did, betting on its inevitability, its inescapable drive. Buergel and Noack don't question the status quo. At the head of documenta 12, they fight on the side of the institution and the management. So those who – thanks to a huge staff - define, invent and promote in a quite calculated manner, can still think of themselves as being on the spearhead. Only more such big events can help assuage doubts about the purpose of such home-grown productions, and about the forced productivity of the machine. They are always keeping up the suspense so nicely, and are actually always up to date.

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signandsight.com

The article originally appeared in German in die tageszeitung on May 30, 2007.

Brigitte Werneburg is cultural editor at die tageszeitung, and publisher of "Inside Lemke. Ein Klaus Lemke Lesebuch."

Translation: Toby Axelrod