MARSEILLE, FRANCE:  Since Marina Picasso was a child, living on the edge of poverty and lingering at the gates of a French villa with her father to plead for an allowance from her grandfather, Pablo Picasso, she has struggled with the burden of that artist's towering legacy.

When she was in her 20s and inherited the 19th-century villa, La Californie, as well as a vast trove of Picasso's art treasures, she turned the paintings to face the walls in resentment. Through 15 years of therapy, she dissected bitter family memories of her grandfather's perceived indifference and her brother's suicide. In her 2001 memoir, "Picasso: My Grandfather," she bared her pain and anger at the Picasso clan.

Now 64, Picasso acknowledges that she is expanding her rebellion by preparing to sell off many of his artworks to finance and broaden her philanthropy - aid for a pediatric hospital in Vietnam and projects in France and Switzerland benefiting the elderly and troubled teenagers.

And her unconventional sales approach is reverberating through international art markets, worried dealers and auctioneers accustomed to playing key - and lucrative - roles in the sale of renowned art. In an interview, Picasso said she would sell works privately and would judge "one by one, based on need," how many, and which, of the remaining Picasso works, of about 10,000 that she inherited, she would put up for sale.

Picasso has been regularly selling her grandfather's works for years to support herself and her charities. And since the death of her longtime dealer in 2008, she has tried various strategies in the market - auctioning two major paintings in 2013 and displaying a collection of nude drawings by her grandfather at Sotheby's in Paris last year.

But her decision to sell them on her own suggests a more aggressive effort to purge herself of her legacy. And while other Picasso heirs have occasionally sold works, Marina Picasso is the only one who seems to be "accelerating" the sale of art objects, said Enrique Mallen, an art history professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas who created the Online Picasso Project to track the art.

"It's better for me to sell my works and preserve the money to redistribute to humanitarian causes," Picasso said, speaking publicly about her new strategy for the first time while inspecting a hospital site in Marseille, where she is financing a psychiatric unit for teenagers in crisis. "I have paintings, of course, that I can use to support these projects."

The news of her unusual strategy is spreading in select circles by word of mouth, generating rumors and misinformation - including a recent tabloid report that she planned to sell off her grandfather's villa and seven major works. That is leading to speculation that she could flood the market and depress prices.

"Instead of having a dealer show them, it's been an open secret that there are works for sale and people have been asking other people if they would be interested," said John Richardson, a Picasso historian and biographer in New York. "I've been asked by odd people who tell me, 'We are in on a great deal, and Marina is selling all her stuff.'"

While bypassing dealers and auction houses in the sale of major works is not unusual, sellers going it alone can be at a disadvantage in trying to estimate the value of their own works and to vet the buyers and their source of funds. At the same time, with some auction houses increasing their fees, it can be a smart move in the end for a seller eager to make more money.

Marina Picasso, who inherited about 300 paintings among those 10,000 Picasso artworks - ceramics, drawings, etchings and sculptures are among the others - said she had not decided on the number to be sold and had no plan to put the villa on the market. But she knows which piece she will sell first: "La Famille," a 1935 portrait of a family surrounded by an arid landscape.

"It's symbolic because I was born in a great family, but it was a family that was not a family," Picasso said. By the time of his death in 1973, Pablo Picasso had created some 50,000 artworks and left behind a tangled brood of four children and eight grandchildren, as well as wives and muses, who have had a long-running battle over his estate and his legacy. Marina Picasso is the daughter of Pablo Picasso's son Paulo, and she has long kept her distance from the rest of the family. For years she was guided in her sales by Jan Krugier, a Swiss art dealer who curated and sold off many of the best works in her collection until he died in 2008.

She was disappointed, she said, by other sales routes, like a 2013 Sotheby's auction of two major paintings, including "Femme Assise en Robe Grise." The works drew $6.8 million, according to Sotheby's in Paris, but Picasso said she had expected more because buyers knew the money was going to support her charities.

Her timing is good: Last year, auction sales of Picassos were second only to those of Andy Warhol - $449 million last year in a $16.1 billion international market, according to Artnet, the New York-based art researcher.

While the sales will broaden Picasso's philanthropy, they will also help her move on from the burden of her family history, she said.

Picasso said that she had no photographs of herself with her grandfather and had none of his works until she received her inheritance. She recalled that he would fashion flowers out of paper for her, but she was never allowed to keep the trinkets.

Her father, Paulo, was the son of Picasso and his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballerina. Picasso said she still suffered from the memories of Paulo serving as her grandfather's chauffeur, among other lowly roles, and begging for money.

Her mother, Emiliénne, split from her father after a brief marriage and struggled with alcoholism. She relied on handouts from her ex-husband to raise Marina and her older brother, Pablito.

"I saw my father very little," Picasso said. "I didn't have a grandfather."

Her alienation from her grandfather and his entourage intensified after her brother was barred from Picasso's funeral in 1973 by the artist's second wife, Jacqueline Roque. A few days later her brother committed suicide by drinking bleach. Contributions from friends paid for Pablito's funeral, according to Marina Picasso, who supported herself then by working in a hospice for autistic and mentally ill children.

Pablo Picasso left no will when he died at 91, setting off a bitter struggle among his widow, children and grandchildren. Unexpectedly, Marina Picasso was named an heir and inherited a fifth of the estate, including the villa.

"People say I should appreciate my inheritance and I do," Picasso said, "but it is an inheritance without love."

In the end, she learned from her past.

"It was really difficult to carry this celebrated name and to have a difficult financial life," Picasso said. "I think because of it I developed my sense of humanity and my desire to help others."

Olivier Widmaier Picasso, a grandson descended from the artist's mistress Marie-Therese Walter, who published his own biography of Picasso, holds a more benign view of his grandfather's legacy. As for Marina, with whom he tangled when he tried to brand Citroen cars with Picasso's name, he said he understands her anger, but thinks it is misplaced.

"We need to be honest," he said. "Pablo Picasso was not the cause of all of this. Her mother had exclusive custody. Picasso didn't want to give money to her mother because he worried she wouldn't spend it on the children. So he paid directly for their schooling."

He said he was surprised to learn about Marina Picasso's sales approach.

"All the heirs have always worked with major dealers, like Picasso did in his life," he said. "They know the market and the buyers and work to avoid any bad moves."

In the 1970s, when the estate was split to pay off taxes, "La Famille" was considered one of the most valuable because its realistic style was so unusual, he said.

"The scale is enormous and it is obviously an important work," said James Roundell, a dealer with Simon Dickinson Fine Art in London, who says it is worth "in the millions" of dollars.

Picasso has not publicly disclosed what she hopes to earn.

Picasso, who has five children, three of them adopted from Vietnam, said that selling more of Picasso's art to expand her charities is a fitting use. In just the last year, she has donated 1.5 million euros (roughly $1.7 million) to the Hospital Foundation of Paris and France. Some went to the psychiatric emergency unit for teenagers, and Picasso also financed a project for elderly patients in long-term hospital care.

"I live now in the present," she said. "The past rests in the past. But I will never forget, never. I respect my grandfather and his stature as an artist. I was his grandchild and his heir, but never the grandchild of his heart."

2014 Power 100 - A ranked list of the contemporary artworld's most powerful figures

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"All 43 Works From Bunny Mellon’s Collection Sell at Sotheby’s Auction" @nytimes by  CAROL VOGEL

A 1932 painting by Georgia O’Keeffe sold on Monday for $3.1 million. It had adorned Bunny Mellon’s Virginia dining room. Credit 2014 The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny, spent her lifetime collecting whatever caught her eye, from antique porcelains and shaker baskets to abstract paintings by Rothko and Diebenkorn. Her legendary taste and style, from an era long gone, proved irresistible for scores of collectors who descended on Sotheby’s York Avenue salesroom on Monday night to see 43 “masterworks,” as the auction house called them, bringing prices that were well past anyone’s expectations.

“History, legend, taste — you had everything tonight,” Lionel Pissarro, a great-grandson of the painter Camille Pissarro and a Paris-based art dealer, said after the auction.

Artwork spanning 400 years attracted bidders from 32 countries and four continents. The evening brought $158.7 million, topping a high estimate of $121 million. All 43 works sold. Among the stars: a 1970 abstract canvas by Mark Rothko of intense blues and greens that brought nearly $40 million, twice its high estimate, and several paintings and drawings by Richard Diebenkorn, including “Ocean Park No. 89,” which sold for $9.6 million, below its high estimate of $12 million.

The auction on Monday was the first in a series devoted to the art and objects that Mrs. Mellon, and her husband, Paul Mellon, had lived with and loved.

Mrs. Mellon, who died in March at 103, and her husband, the son of the financier Andrew W. Mellon, were celebrated philanthropists. The couple had either donated or bequeathed world-class artworks to many museums such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received more than 900 works, including Cézanne’s “Boy in a Red Waistcoat.”

But there was still a lot left over, and on Monday night Sotheby’s was selling a personal selection of artwork that decorated the couple’s five homes, including Oak Spring Farms, the 2,000-acre estate in Upperville, Va., where Mrs. Mellon spent the last years of her life. The next Mellon auctions will feature everything from a blue diamond pendant to furniture, porcelains, baskets and even a fire truck.

Throughout her life, Mrs. Mellon was a passionate supporter of Rothko. Besides the canvas of blues and greens the sale also featured one from 1955, “Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange).” Eight bidders competed for the painting, which had been estimated to bring $20 million to $30 million and sold to the Nahmad Gallery for $36.5 million.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent from $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Diebenkorn was another artist Mrs. Mellon championed. Eight examples of his work — paintings as well as works on paper — were up for sale. Among the best of them was “Ocean Park No. 89,” a 1975 painting from the artist’s celebrated series, this one an abstract image of a sunset. Valentino, the fashion designer who was sitting in the front row, snapped up the painting for $9.68 million. It had been estimated to sell for $8 million to $12 million.

Mrs. Mellon was known for her love of blue — in her choice of porcelains, wall coverings and furniture, but also paintings. Lucio Fontana’s “Concetto Spaziale (Blu)” from 1968 was estimated at $300,000 to $400,000 but was bought by a telephone bidder for $965,000. It had hung in the bedroom of Mrs. Mellon’s 70th Street townhouse in Manhattan.

A spare painting of a barn that Georgia O’Keeffe painted during a 1932 visit to Canada that adorned Mrs. Mellon’s Virginia dining room was bought by another telephone bidder for $3.1 million, above its high $2.5 million estimate.

Mrs. Mellon was a well-known horticulturalist who redesigned the White House Rose Garden at the request of her friend Jacqueline Kennedy in the early 1960s. Many works had a botanical theme, like a tiny still life of flowers by the Dutch Golden Age painter Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, which sold for $4.6 million, above its high $4 million estimate.

The auction included several examples of furniture by Diego Giacometti (brother of the famous sculptor Alberto Giacometti), whom Mrs. Mellon met through her friend, the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy. She commissioned him to make bronze furniture and sculptures for her homes. Not fond of his usual bronze patina, she asked him to paint them off-white especially for her. Two coffee tables that featured birds were in hot demand. One, from 1970 that was expected to bring $200,000 to $300,000, sold for $1.7 million; another that was expected to sell for $150,000 to $200,000 was purchased for $1.4 million.

“It’s all in a name,” Rachel Mauro, a Manhattan dealer, said as she was leaving the sale. Many other dealers hope that names like Warhol, Twombly and de Kooning — which fill the mega contemporary art auctions later this week — will have as much allure.

The art market just had the biggest two weeks in its history.

Since Nov. 4, collectors have flocked to the world’s chief auction houses in New York to buy more than $2 billion of art, a historic high in which 23 works sold for more than $20 million apiece. (In 2009, Christie’s International sold only six artworks for that much all year.)

Night after night at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the titans of the world’s far-flung industries squeezed like sardines into packed auction salesrooms to compete for hundreds of artworks created by the world’s best-known Impressionist, modern and contemporary artists.

To win, bidders often had to splurge: Billionaire investor Steve Cohen paid Sotheby’s $101 million for an Alberto Giacometti bronze chariot sculpture; other bidders at Christie’s paid $82 million for an Andy Warhol silk-screen of a gun-toting Elvis Presley and $65 million for Édouard Manet’s portrait of pretty woman with a parasol.

On Wednesday, Christie’s conducted the biggest auction in history when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in a two-hour span.

Len Riggio , chairman of Barnes & Noble, said he intended to bid on a few items in Christie’s sale, but rivals outpaced him. “I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena,” he said. “Everyone wants to put their money somewhere, but what are these guys going to do, buy another house or keep $3 billion in the bank? No, they all want to put a little bit in art.”

When it comes to what collectors want, Sotheby’s chief executive Bill Ruprecht said they want “blue blue blue,” meaning blue-chip masterpieces by name-brand artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol who trade widely and often enough at auction to represent this market’s version of a Dow Jones Industrial Average. Seconds after Christie’s sold Warhol’s “Triple Elvis” for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday, the house sold another Warhol portrait of actor Marlon Brando, “Four Marlons,” for $69.6 million. Both Warhols are wall-power large—“Elvis” stands nearly 7-feet high—and convey the Pop artist’s signature silk-screen style

On Wednesday, Christie’s conducted the biggest auction in history when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in a two-hour span.

Len Riggio , chairman of Barnes & Noble, said he intended to bid on a few items in Christie’s sale, but rivals outpaced him. “I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena,” he said. “Everyone wants to put their money somewhere, but what are these guys going to do, buy another house or keep $3 billion in the bank? No, they all want to put a little bit in art.”

When it comes to what collectors want, Sotheby’s chief executive Bill Ruprecht said they want “blue blue blue,” meaning blue-chip masterpieces by name-brand artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol who trade widely and often enough at auction to represent this market’s version of a Dow Jones Industrial Average. Seconds after Christie’s sold Warhol’s “Triple Elvis” for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday, the house sold another Warhol portrait of actor Marlon Brando, “Four Marlons,” for $69.6 million. Both Warhols are wall-power large—“Elvis” stands nearly 7-feet high—and convey the Pop artist’s signature silk-screen style

Mark Rothko, who painted hundreds of rectangular abstracts, also fared well in these sales, including an untitled indigo version that Sotheby’s sold for $40 million on Monday, twice its high estimate. The following day, the same house sold another Rothko, “No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),” for $45 million. (Estimates, unlike final sale prices, don't include the auction houses’ commissions.)

But collectors also glommed onto rarely seen works that stood out like gems, like a placemat-size Jasper Johns “Flag” from 1983 that Sotheby’s sold for $36 million, over its $20 million high estimate. Manet’s 1881 “Spring” portrait of a woman walking in a park also sold well in part because the work was the last painting Manet ever submitted to Paris’s taste-making Salon. The J. Paul Getty Museum paid $65.1 million for it at Christie’s on Nov. 5.

The art market cycles through good years and bad like the broader financial markets—art values notoriously crashed in 1990 and plummeted briefly in 2009—but in recent seasons, art prices have only gone one direction: Up. Dealers say that is because an influx of newly wealthy international buyers, from Chinese tech entrepreneurs to Brazilian bankers to Middle Eastern oil barons, have entered the art marketplace over the past decade. Most arrive seeking to store their extra cash in any art they can find at auctions and art fairs; others hope to reap the social cachet that comes with owning world-class art. Investors and speculators have also joined in, seeking to profit by buying and selling artworks like stocks.

Once the historic domain of merchant princes and popes, fine art has become attainable for the modern-day millionaire—an asset or currency that merits a place alongside stocks in an investment portfolio.Around 76% of art buyers surveyed earlier this fall by ArtTactic, a London-based auction watchdog, and auditor Deloitte Luxembourg said they are “increasingly acquiring art and collectibles from an investment standpoint,” compared with 53% two years ago.

Unlike Europeans, U.S. collectors have long been comfortable discussing art in investment-grade terms, and Americans now buy more art than anyone else on the planet—particularly the trophy pieces in these major seasonal auctions, according to Dublin-based art economist Clare McAndrew. Last year, art sales in the U.S. totaled more than $22 billion, up 25% from the year before, according to Ms. McAndrew’s latest Art Market Report. Moreover, buyers in the U.S. also took home around half the million-dollar artworks offered at auctions world-wide, she added.

China continues to emerge as the next great purchasing power, though. Xin Li, a former model who now works for Christie’s and often represents collectors from mainland China, won for a client a $17.5 million Willem de Kooning and a $16.9 million Gerhard Richter during Christie’s sale on Wednesday. A Lucian Freud portrait, “Julie and Martin,” also sold for $17 million to a young Asian man at Christie’s dressed in a black, silk-lapel suit.

No wonder collectors wishing to sell their art trophies at auction lined up to consign pieces into these November auctions. Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky said he sold a pair of pieces (he declined to say which) in large part because the mood remained reassuringly chipper—and because the auction houses offered to buy his artworks if no one else did. “I thought my works were overpriced,” he said, “but they did well—and there were other things I wanted that sold for too much.”

Longtime New York dealer and former Sotheby’s auctioneer David Nash said the market feels bloated and “hyperinflated” to him, but he saw few signs of a market bubble about to burst—yet. All but five of the 80 lots offered in Christie’s $853 million sale found buyers. On Monday, Sotheby’s sold 100% of the offerings in its estate sale of Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny. Such “white glove” sales are a rarity in the industry.

“Every season, I say the prices can’t get any higher, and then they do,” Mr. Nash said.

In mid-October, Christie’s art expert Xin Li—a former professional basketball star and model from China’s Manchuria region—was escorting billionaire collectors through the Louvre in Paris. Days later, she popped up in Hong Kong to wine and dine tech millionaires at the auction house’s showroom. Now, Ms. Xin is in New York to field phone bids during the season’s major fall auctions, which started Tuesday and continue through next week.

“I’m never in one place for more than 10 days,” said the 38-year-old deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia. “I can’t be.”

Ms. Xin is a leading player in the art business’s central game right now: a race to match a small number of $10 million-plus masterpieces with a small number of mega-collectors, who are increasingly coming from Asia.

                                 

Next Tuesday, Sotheby’s will offer a top-heavy sale of contemporary art in which nearly half of its estimated $320 million sale total is tied up in eight of its 79 lots. The priciest, a red-and-black Mark Rothko, “No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),” is estimated to sell for at least $50 million. There is also an avocado-green Andy Warhol silk-screen of Elizabeth Taylor sporting a swath of turquoise eye shadow, “Liz #3 (Early Colored Liz),” that is expected to sell for $30 million or more.

Over at Christie’s, the emphasis on blue chips is even more pronounced. Its Wednesday sale, where Ms. Xin said she may be bidding on at least a half-dozen major works, is estimated to bring in at least $600 million, the house’s highest-ever presale expectation. During the recession, these auction houses only offered a handful of $10 million-plus works across a two-week sale series. Next week, a quarter of Christie’s offerings are estimated to cross that bar—including examples by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jeff Koons.

The price increases matter because they are buoying the entire art market, experts say. Nearly $60 billion in art changed hands last year, second only to sales in 2007 and up 8% over 2012, according to art economist Clare McAndrew. “A significant part of the uplift of the market was due to higher-priced works, rather than simply more works sold,” she wrote in a March report.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-art-worlds-high-roller-specialist-1415314210

Bass Museum of Art Receives Donation of $1 Million

Diane and Alan Lieberman

The Bass Museum of Art announced over the weekend that art collectors and patrons Diane and Alan Lieberman—who own the South Beach Hotel Group—have donated $1 million to the museum. The funds will support the museum’s exhibitions of contemporary art and education programs, according to director George Lindemann. A host to year-round exhibitions, the museum's planning an internal expansion in June of next year, working with architects Arata Isozaki and David Gauld. Said Alan Lieberman of the donation, “Miami Beach has been my home for the past twenty-five years. My business is here and I have raised my family here. I want to give back to this community that has given my family so much.”

During the 50th anniversary gala for Miami’s Bass Museum of Art, trustee board president George Lindemann announced that the museum had received a donation of $1 million from Diane and Alan Lieberman, owners of the South Beach Hotel Group. “Miami Beach is a creative and forward thinking city, and we are so fortunate to have such visionaries as the Liebermans as patrons,” Lindemann added. This gift seems particularly well timed given the museum’s forthcoming internal renovation: Beginning in June of 2015, architect David Gauld and design consultant Arata Isozaki will work within the existing structure to expand programmable space by 37 percent.

George Lindemann Journal - "Taking Wing in a Time of Extremis" @nytimes By HOLLAND COTTER

Jim Hodges’s Emotional Palette

CreditStewart Cairns for The New York Times

BOSTON — In the 21st century, we tend to talk about new art in terms of medium and style: Performance is back, painting is back, Pop is back, and so on. But for roughly a decade, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, the emphasis was on ideas and emotions. As racial and gender politics navigated the culture wars, and the toll taken by AIDS grew overwhelming, content often trumped form. In a lesson learned from feminism, personal history and feeling were O.K. Even spirituality, which the New York art world handles with tongs, became an admissible subject.

Jim Hodges’s career as an artist began in that in-extremis time. Mr. Hodges was shaped by it and helped shape the art that came out of it. Gay, raised Roman Catholic, living in the AIDS war zone that was New York City, he favored craft-based forms, ephemeral and found materials, and images — flowers, butterflies — traditionally associated with mortality and transience. You’ll find all of this in “Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take,” a taut career survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art here. You’ll also find work that expands beyond the historical moment to which this artist is usually critically confined.

Mr. Hodges was born in Spokane, Wash., in 1957, studied art in regional schools and graduated with an M.F.A. in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1986. At that point, he lost interest in painting, a shift that seems more or less to have coincided with his coming out. He says in the catalog interview that he was “lost in the hugeness of painting,” was unable to find a singular voice in it. And he needed that voice urgently. He was changing, and so was the subculture he was now fully part of. Both were under serious threat.

Some of the earliest things in the show are experiments in addressing these realities. For the 1989 piece called “Deformed,” he sliced a scuffed-up Bonwit Teller shopping bag along its seams, splayed it out and pinned it to the wall to form a cross. The bag itself carried some gay coding: Andy Warhol had once designed window displays for this women’s department store. The cross has an obvious religious connotation but also suggests a medical emblem, the Red Cross. The bunches of violets printed on the bag (not pansies, as they are identified in a wall label) become both floral tributes and funeral bouquets.

A small 1993 collage, made from store-bought plastic decals, of an eagle descending among butterflies was intended as a homage to a friend, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS three years later. (In 2008 Mr. Hodges turned the collage image into a large stained-glass sculpture, also in the show.) And a 1992 installation called “What’s Left” was conceived with his own possible demise in mind.

It consists of a pile of his clothes — jeans, shoes, briefs, black leather belt — lying on the gallery floor as if dropped in a quick undressing, for sleep, for sex, for a shower. The impression of spontaneity is countered, though, by an additional element: a spider web, woven from fine metal chains, that stretches over the pile, implying that the wearer had long since vanished.

Over the years, Mr. Hodge’s work has been routinely identified, and sometimes dismissed, as a lament over AIDS, but this is not his only subject. Childhood is another. “Good Luck,” from 1987, is nothing more than a black wool ski mask cut open and flattened out. Hung high on a wall, it peers down, scary-funny, like a Halloween spook.

The tall curtain of stitched-together nylon, chiffon and silk headscarves called “Here’s Where We Will Stay” (1995) is an elegant shout-out to his mother and grandmother, who taught him to sew. It also evokes a gay kid’s captivation with the hidden world of delicate fabrics stored away in his mother’s scented bureau drawers. And the mnemonic power of scent itself summons the presence of Mr. Hodge’s own mother in an installation he made after her death in 2006.

Called “The Dark Gate,” it’s a big walk-in, sepulcherlike wooden box encasing a circle of sharp steel spikes. Each spike is meant to suffuse the air with his mother’s favorite perfume and the scent that Mr. Hodges was wearing the day she died. The piece is overdetermined to the point of heaviness (and I picked up no trace of a scent). But as part of a larger idea of recapturing childhood, and the sting of seductions and losses that start early and never really stop, it makes sense.

A decade earlier, the artist had, in a roundabout way, returned to painting, or something like it. In 1997 he glued a mirror to a canvas, smashed it with a hammer and exhibited the cracked results. Thereafter, he created a more controlled fracture effect by piecing together small squares of mirrored glass into mosaic panels. These panels reappear here and there in the galleries, refracting light, disco ball fashion, and creating distorted images of quite different works from other decades.

The curators — Jeffrey Grove of the Dallas Museum of Art, Olga Viso of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Anna Stothart of the Institute of Contemporary Art — have arranged the show by theme rather than date, a good idea. This gives the episodic visual texture of Mr. Hodges’s career a sense of consistency, which, indeed, it has. The natural world, it turns out, is a binding presence through 30 years. It’s there early, and gently, in the flowers and butterflies, and dramatically — operatically, even — in “Untitled (One Day It All Comes True),” finished last year: a mural-size picture of a roiling cloudscape embroidered entirely from thousands of scraps of blue denim.

What, exactly, are we seeing? Nuclear clouds or Constable clouds? End times or a universe coming, Romantically, into being? Much of Mr. Hodges’s art walks an anxious line between fatalism and uplift. He seems to be, by temperament, a mourner, but one with edges and elbows. He has a shrewd sense of humor, a way of mocking himself through materials: all those recycled jeans, and all that crazy hands-on sewing! And if work slips around from one form to another, how refreshing to see someone not turning out product.

In the end, he makes no great claims for his art. His career is less like an orchestrated score than like a diary of doing and being. It’s easy to point out the influence of other artists on him — James Lee Byars, Roni Horn, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek and Richard Tuttle — and Mr. Hodges is the first to name them. Less well documented is the extent to which he has been a role model for a younger generation. If some of the art in his retrospective comes across as wanly familiar in its effects, it’s because so many people have learned from him since the post-plague years of the late 1990s, though you probably wouldn’t see that if you weren’t aware of, or didn’t care about, that history.

George Lindemann Journal - "Miami artist who destroyed Ai Weiwei vase at museum gets probation, must pay $10,000" @miamiherald by David Ovalle

A Miami artist who smashed a valuable piece by celebrated artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum must serve 18 months of probation and pay back $10,000 in restitution.

In a plea deal announced Wednesday, Maximo Caminero must also engage in 100 hours of community service teaching art classes as a result of a self-professed act of protest.

“I was wrong,” Caminero said in a letter of apology released Wednesday. “I think about what I did every day and I find it hard to live with what I did because it still haunts me.”

In a case that stunned the art world, Caminero in February smashed a vase painted by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who represented that the item was hundreds of years old. Police initially estimated the artwork was worth $1 million but the actual cost turned out to be much lower.

Caminero told the arresting officer that he smashed the artwork as a protest on behalf of local artists who he felt were slighted in favor of international artists at the new $131 million complex on Biscayne Bay.

The vase was part of a politically charged exhibition of Chinese culture and art.

The Beijing-born Ai Weiwei, 56, is a sculptor, designer and documentary-maker who has not been permitted to leave China following a 2011 arrest for his political activism. Ai Weiwei condemned the Chinese government for actions he saw as corrupt following a 2008 earthquake in Szechuan.

According to a Miami police report, Caminero ignored a security staffer’s order to put the piece down before smashing it.

He was charged with first-degree criminal mischief, a third-degree felony.

In his apology letter, Caminero stressed that he did not realize that, at the time he destroyed the vase, the museum was also exhibiting the work of five local artists. The museum is also planning a collection of six other local artists.

A lawyer representing the museum, Lilly Ann Sanchez, said “we’re glad this is finally over.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Digitizing Warhol’s Film Trove to Save It" @ntimes by RANDY KENNEDY

“Nico/Antoine” (1966), one of hundreds of Andy Warhol films. Credit Andy Warhol Museum

Andy Warhol wrote lovingly of his ever-present tape recorder. (“My tape recorder and I have been married for 10 years now. When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me.”) But for almost a decade beginning in the 1960s, his real boon companions seemed to be his 16-millimeter film cameras, which he used to record hundreds of reels, many of which are still little known even among scholars because of the fragility of the film and the scarcity of projectors to show them on.

Now the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Modern Art, which holds Warhol’s film archives, are beginning a project to digitize the materials, almost 1,000 rolls, a vast undertaking that curators and historians hope will, for the first time, put Warhol’s film work on a par with his painting, his sculpture and the Delphic public persona that became one of his greatest works. It will be MoMA’s largest effort to digitize the work of a single artist in its collection.

Patrick Moore, the Warhol Museum’s deputy director and a curator of the digitization project, said that the goal was, finally, to integrate Warhol’s film work fully into his career. “I think the art world in particular, and hopefully the culture as a whole, will come to feel the way we do,” Mr. Moore said, “which is that the films are every bit as significant and revolutionary as Warhol’s paintings.”

Warhol began using his first film camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, in 1963. He spent more than two years shooting what became known as the “Screen Tests,” hundreds of short filmed portraits of celebrities, fellow artists, acquaintances and members of his inner circle, like Lou Reed and the socialite Edie Sedgwick, before moving on to longer, more narrative pieces. He made some 600 films of varying lengths, but only about a tenth of those have been available in 16-millimeter prints through the Museum of Modern Art.

While a few of Warhol’s movies are well known — among them, the feature-length “Chelsea Girls” from 1966 and “Empire” from 1964, a single-shot “antifilm” showing the Empire State Building for eight hours — the great majority have not been shown for years or have been available only through bootlegs of varying quality. Several years before Warhol’s death in 1987, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art joined forces to preserve and study the films, which often use the movie screen as a static canvas, a confessional or a window onto the seeming banality of everyday life. But the films’ visibility, even in the art world, increased only up to a point.

“A lot of people feel like they know Warhol’s films but only because they’ve read about them,” said Mr. Moore. “Fewer and fewer people have the ability to show 16 millimeter.”

Frame-by-frame transfer of the films, which is expected to take several years, will begin this month and be conducted by MPC, an Oscar-winning visual-effects company that is donating its time and services to the project.

(In connection with the project, a few pieces of unseen film will make their way into theaters well before the transfers are completed. “Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films,” a project commissioned by the Warhol Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Centers for the Art of Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, will screen digital copies of 15 never-before-shown films in October and November, along with newly conceived, live musical accompaniment by musicians, including Tom Verlaine, Dean Wareham and Eleanor Friedberger.)

Film purists will undoubtedly mourn the migration to digital. In a review of “Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures,” a show of part of Warhol’s film work at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, Ken Johnson complained in The New York Times that seeing Warhol films digitally was “like seeing a movie on television, and that casts in doubt their status as works of art.”

Rajendra Roy, the chief film curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a self-described “unexpected analog guy,” agreed, saying that the right way to see Warhol’s films should always be on film, in part because he helped revolutionize the medium by upending or undermining so many of the conventions of moviemaking.

“I get really grumpy sometimes when things can’t be shown on film, but that said, these will become inaccessible very quickly if we don’t digitize them,” he said. “There are still many discoveries to be made, and that’s the exciting part of this project. Folks are looking at work in boxes of some of Andy’s film that probably hasn’t been seen since he shot it.”

Warhol documented so much of the New York art world of the 1960s that the films could also fill in crucial art-historical gaps about who was doing what, when and where. But curators hope that a more important benefit will be an awareness of how, long before phone cameras brought the quotidian and the personal fully into the realm of media, Warhol was already forging his own kind of YouTube. (He once deadpanned in an interview: “I think any camera that takes a picture, it comes out all right.”)

“He filmed everything around him,” said Geralyn Huxley, a curator of film and video at the Warhol Museum. “He went to people’s houses and filmed the dinners. He was basically a workaholic and the amount of film is unbelievable.”

But she added: “For all of the film out there, there’s very little of Warhol himself in any of it, actually. You get the sense that he didn’t really like to see himself on camera.”

An exhibit opening Aug. 8 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 2012
Galvanized cast copper
Collection of Isabelle Kowal
Though gold has symbolized excess, putting it in an artwork also raises its market value. That paradox is a basic theme in 'Gold.' Many artists in the exhibit fuse the luxury of gold with low-end materials. This insulation board by Rudolf Stingel was marked up by museum visitors, cast in copper, and electroplated with gold, giving it a sense of permanence.

George Lindemann Journal - "  Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art Looks at Gold" @wsj Jenny Che

An exhibit opening Aug. 8 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists. Elmgreen & Dragset/Cortesi Contemporary, Lugano

From an ancient Greek vase depicting the mythical golden fleece to Andy Warhol's painting of Marilyn Monroe against a gilded backdrop, gold and art have been inseparable. Even those artists who have used gold to symbolize excess have raised their art's market value just by incorporating the precious metal.

That paradox plays out in some of the works on view in "Gold," an exhibition that opened Friday at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. The show spotlights gold-related works from two dozen contemporary artists with a number of provocative takes on the metal.

Gold "inspires things like power and passion and greed, and commemorates things like weddings and the Olympic Games," said curator José Diaz. "There's this jubilant aspect of gold, and dark, sinister references to gold."

The Florida exhibition highlights both aspects. Glenn Kaino's "19.83" uses gold to retell Tommie Smith's record-breaking run in the 200-meter at the 1968 Olympics. (The title refers to his time in seconds.) The installation features stills from the race and a gold-plated replica of the platform that Mr. Smith stood on when he received his gold medal and raised his fist in support of civil rights.

Brooklyn-based artist Fernando Mastrangelo addressed the paradox that works criticizing gold's value are worth more if they incorporate the metal. He took a splashy decorative medallion from the early 20th century and cast a new 6-foot version in crystal sugar and gold dragees (confectionary ornaments that are sometimes edible). "As an artist, you're placing your own work within that value structure" of gold, Mr. Mastrangelo said. By using low-end materials, he intends to undercut the value of the original medallion.

Some artists in the show took the opposite route by elevating mundane objects of consumption. Dario Escobar's gold leaf-covered McDonald's cup from 1999 is on view, as is a gold-plated trash can from Sylvie Fleury.

From artist Chris Burden —well known for, among other works, a 1971 performance piece in which an assistant shot him in the arm—come bullets that appear even more menacing wrapped in 22-carat gold. French-born Eric Baudart has sprayed gold paint over stacked street posters, giving them a deceptively solid metal look.

In "Temptation" by the Danish-Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset, whose work has been shown in such venues as London's Victoria & Albert Museum, an arm protruding from the wall clutches a bag of coins. The sculpture, made of resin and 24-carat beaten gold, was inspired by a relief mural, depicting a smiling man as he handed money to officials, outside an old tax collection office at the city hall in Munich.

It is a reminder of how people are expected to contribute to society, said Mr. Dragset in an email, but at the same time, "we all seem to have different opinions on what money represents and what a common good is and who should share in our riches."

For Carlos Betancourt, the beauty of gold underlines its power. His "Amulet for Light I (gold)" is a photograph, tinted gold, of his family's ornate Puerto Rican amulets. Mr. Betancourt's work focuses on memory. "These are personal objects that I have empowered with gold," he said.

Gold "never loses its value no matter how it's cast or used," said Mr. Mastrangelo. "So the artist almost becomes irrelevant in terms of gold. It's such a freaking cool material—if I had more access to it."

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George Lindemann Journal - "Isn't There a Better Way?" @wsj by Lee Rosenbaum

The 145-year-old institution has long suffered from financial difficulties and chronic mismanagement. Associated Press

In last week's courtroom drama over the fate of the endangered Corcoran Gallery of Art and its College of Art + Design, a crucial protagonist was missing from the petitioners' case for dismembering that venerable institution.

No one spoke for the art.

Charles Patrizia, the Corcoran trustees' lawyer, presented testimony by only three witnesses before resting his unconvincing case for divvying up the 145-year-old institution's financial, capital and artistic assets and real estate between George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art. This last-gasp gambit arose from desperate circumstances: The Corcoran has been seriously hobbled by chronic operating deficits and a revolving-door directorship, not to mention deferrals of necessary repairs and upgrades to its architecturally acclaimed Beaux Arts building.

Testifying for the trustees last week, in hearings held by District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Robert Okun, were Lauren Stack, the Corcoran's chief operating officer for the past three years, whose admitted lack of prior professional experience related to either art or museums may have contributed to the Corcoran's problems; Sean O'Connor, a development consultant to the Corcoran; and Steven Knapp, president of George Washington University, which stands to acquire the Corcoran's college and real estate. No Corcoran art professional was heard.

Also notably absent was Earl Powell III, director of the National Gallery. His institution, under the proposed arrangement, would be allowed to acquire whatever it wanted from the Corcoran's 17,000-piece collection of American and European art, which includes such touchstones as Gilbert Stuart's "George Washington," Albert Bierstadt's "Mount Corcoran" (named for the museum's founder), George Bellows's "Forty-Two Kids" and Edgar Degas's "The Dance Class."

The National Gallery has said it would probably keep more than half of the Corcoran's holdings, dispersing whatever it didn't want to other art museums and "appropriate entities," with preference for local institutions. This Washington-first policy helped secure the acquiescence of the D.C. attorney general, who is charged with defending the public interest and the charitable intent of donors. The Corcoran's landmark building would be left a selection of works "that are identified historically with the 17th Street landmark structure," according to the press release that announced the signing of the deal last May. Those works will be showcased in a token "Legacy Gallery"—an ironic appellation given the utter decimation of founder William Wilson Corcoran's legacy. The National Gallery would also get space in the Corcoran building for temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.

When I asked Mr. Patrizia why he didn't call a witness from the National Gallery, he said that this was unnecessary because those who have legal standing to oppose the deal had "raised no issue about the capacity and ability of the National Gallery of Art to undertake and fulfill all of the responsibilities under the . . . agreement." That same reasoning would also have obviated the need to call Mr. Knapp, who spoke at great length.

A more plausible explanation is that no arts professional could have convincingly argued that the dispersal of the Corcoran's collection and the dissolution of its museum adhere to the donor's intent "as nearly as possible," which is the defining requirement for a cy-pres petition, such as the Corcoran's, to be granted. Mr. Corcoran's 1869 deed, from which the trustees of his institution are now seeking to deviate, explicitly mandates "the perpetual establishment and maintenance of a Public Gallery and Museum" to house his holdings. But the redefined Corcoran would cease to be a museum and most of Mr. Corcoran's art would permanently leave the building.

This case bears some resemblance to previous cy-pres proceedings over another collector-founded art gallery and school—the Barnes Foundation. Both court fights involved opponents' charges that the institution's life-threatening financial difficulties were caused, in part, by its own mismanagement.

But there is one crucial difference: The Barnes's court-allowed move to Philadelphia kept that institution's celebrated collection completely intact. The Corcoran's proposal would break up an American art trove that ranks with that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, as described by Darrel Sewell, former longtime American-art curator at the PMA. In written comments to the attorney general, Mr. Sewell asserted that "like the collection of Albert C. Barnes," the Corcoran's trove "is unique and could not be replicated today. As a totality, it has meaning and significance beyond the individual works."

How, then, might the Corcoran and its collection survive and thrive?

Two witnesses called by Andrew Tulumello, the lawyer for the opponents of the George Washington University/National Gallery of Art plan, suggested options: Wallace Loh, president of the University of Maryland, is willing to reopen his failed negotiations with the Corcoran to forge an alliance that he said would maintain the Corcoran's independence and provide financial support. Philanthropist Wayne Reynolds, former chairman of Ford's Theatre in Washington, renewed his previously spurned quest to become the Corcoran's board chairman. This time, he named 23 deep-pocketed potential board members and supporters who he said would help jump-start the Corcoran's financial recovery under his leadership. As reported by the Washington Post, he indicated he might sell works "nobody ever sees" to fund new acquisitions, particularly of contemporary art.

But suggesting that the Corcoran should now entertain the same suitors it previously had reason to reject is probably a nonstarter. Instead of negotiating from weakness, the Corcoran should first focus on how to build on its strengths. Bolstering the board with munificent members is crucial. Notwithstanding his power play, Mr. Reynolds is to be thanked for identifying hot prospects.

As occurred with the endangered American Folk Art Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts, the Corcoran's near-death experience has put potential funders on notice that it's now or never. Mutually beneficial alliances with established institutions (including less sweeping arrangements with George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art, or perhaps with others, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum) should be pursued, but only if they enhance, not eviscerate, the Corcoran.

First and foremost, the Corcoran Gallery needs a dynamic, experienced director who believes in the institution, embraces challenges and has a compelling creative vision. A director's search was under way before the trustees settled on an interim leader, Peggy Loar. The search should resume with renewed urgency.

David Levy, the Corcoran's president and director from 1991 to 2005, whose failed capital campaign for a pricey Frank Gehry addition was a serious blow to donor confidence, suggested a way forward in a 2012 Washington Post opinion piece. The Corcoran, he said, should position itself as "Washington's museum, serving this unique metropolitan region . . . while creatively reaching out to its inner-city neighborhoods." Washington-area artists should be an integral part of this local strategy.

The Corcoran already has cash to keep it afloat while navigating through rough waters, including about $35 million that, if Judge Okun approves the current deal, would be handed over to George Washington University for renovations, and some $8 million to $10 million to be used for donor-restricted purposes. Mr. Knapp testified that about $25 million would suffice to fund the most desperately needed repairs and upgrades.

For now, the courtroom drama continues, with additional witnesses to be called by the deal's opponents. If Judge Okun does the right thing, he'll rule that the Corcoran's proposal doesn't meet the basic requirements of cy-pres. It needs to devise a better plan to fulfill Mr. Corcoran's stated goal of "encouraging American genius."

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Corcoran’s Merger Plan Draws Fire in Court Hearing" @nytimes RANDY KENNEDY

WASHINGTON — Two widely divergent views of the financial troubles of the Corcoran Gallery of Art — which is seeking legal permission to alter its trust and dissolve itself through a merger with the National Gallery of Art — emerged in sometimes contentious testimony in the District of Columbia Superior Court on Wednesday.

The Corcoran, one of the nation’s oldest privately supported museums, has struggled for years to raise money. But the opponents of the merger plan — who include students at its art college and employees who say they could be harmed by the dissolution — during the hearing depicted a board of trustees that in recent years has done little to try to turn around the institution’s fortunes and has squandered money on consultants while not following their advice.

Andrew S. Tulumello, the opposition’s lawyer, cited a 2008 consultant’s study that found, as he described it, “that something was broken with fund-raising at the board level.” In the years after the study, the board never filled all 18 seats that its structure allowed. As Mr. Tulumello depicted the situation during his questioning of the museum’s leadership, the trustees seemed to function more as caretakers for an institution that was already assumed not to have a future.

Harry F. Hopper III, the museum’s chairman, who testified for a second day in support of the plan to dissolve the Corcoran as a stand-alone museum, said that a broken fund-raising mechanism was a symptom, not a cause, of troubles at the gallery. Years of poor finances, which had led to serious structural problems with the museum’s building, a landmark near the White House, became a spiral, scaring off significant donors. The recession, he added, made the climate for giving even more difficult.

“I personally had conversations with a lot of high net-worth individuals that were not presented to the board because they were not willing to step in because of the financial stress of the institution,” said Mr. Hopper, a venture capitalist. Of the gallery’s decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on management consultants, he added, “The only way that we could get our hands on the situation — where we had a bank put us in default and freeze accounts — was to have a SWAT team come in from an outside firm.”

Earlier financial problems were only a “fire drill” for what the gallery encountered over the last several years, he said.

Mr. Hopper defended the board’s work to stabilize the museum. “When it looked like the institution was just having trouble finding the runway to exist, I think we did a pretty good job,” he said.

The plan for the National Gallery to absorb the Corcoran and for George Washington University to take over the Corcoran’s art college has been presented by officials of the three institutions as the only way to keep the heart of the Corcoran’s collection intact and to salvage its legacy.

Thus, the Corcoran is seeking court permission to alter the 1869 deed of its founder, the banker William Corcoran, who gave his collection and money for the “perpetual establishment” of a “public gallery and museum.” Opponents contend that the Corcoran would exist as little more than a name under the merger and that its historic building would no longer function as a museum.

Under the deal, announced in May, the Corcoran would cede its collection of more than 17,000 pieces, rich in American art, to the National Gallery, which would preserve a “Legacy Gallery” within the Corcoran’s building on 17th Street, and organize its own exhibitions of modern and contemporary art there.

Works that the National Gallery could not accommodate would be dispersed to other institutions, with a preference for keeping them in Washington. The Corcoran’s building would become the property of the university, which would use it for classes for students of the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Judge Robert D. Okun will continue to hear testimony in the case Thursday and next week.

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The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Tom Friedman: ‘Paint and Styrofoam" @nytimes by ROBERTA SMITH

“Toxic Green Luscious Green,” a 2014 work by Tom Friedman in his show “Paint and Styrofoam.” Credit Tom Friedman and Luhring Augustine, New York

The artist Tom Friedman tends to blow our minds and then move on, rarely repeating himself. (A starburst made of toothpicks or a realistic fly, having seemingly alighted on the corner of a pedestal, come to mind.) Nearly each artwork is some one-off feat of concept, technique and common materials. So it’s unexpected to see Mr. Friedman staying in one place as he does here and to realize that the effect is even more intense.

This show is suffused with the tension of trying to reconcile what you see with the exhibition’s title: “Paint and Styrofoam.” Whether painting or sculpture, every work in this show uses these two materials. Their names buzz around in your head with almost no place to land, as you try to figure out where one material stops and the other begins, or what you are looking at in the first place. This is especially true of the monochrome, seemingly abstract paintings that line the walls. (Fittingly, one work consists of a tiny eyeball wedged into a corner, easy to overlook.)

Minus the show’s title, other sculptures are determinedly, but also conventionally, trompe l’oeil, especially the wood stool, guitar and disconnected microphone of “Moot” and the purple (Jeff Koons-like) balloon of “Purple Balloon.” But “Pepto Bismol Pink” — an attenuated ganglion of vaguely intestinal shape — deviates. A divot in its white pedestal reveals Styrofoamish blue, probably before you even focus on it.

Each of the paintings has a different subject, effect and surface, and a title alluding to its particular secrets. The cream-colored “Kid” presents a fastidious canvas weave, a strip frame, a big swipe of paint and a tiny ball (a recurring motif), intimating a smiling (or smiley) face. The swirling brushwork of the dark blue “Night” yields part of van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” just as the artist’s visage can be found in the bright yellow of “Self Portrait.”

And so on, from one vision-testing surface to the next. The simplest is “Blue Styrofoam Seascape,” whose central ridge coalesces into a perfectly atmospheric horizon. And Mr. Friedman breaks free of flatness in “Blue” and “Toxic Green Luscious Green,” creating bas-relief pileups of objects, trash and words that include Styrofoam peanuts — previously a favored material — and other references to his singular career.       

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Tracey Emin's controversial artwork My Bed is to return to the Tate after selling for £2.2m earlier this month.

Count Christian Duerckheim, the piece's new owner, has agreed to loan the work "for a period of at least 10 years", said Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.

The 1998 work features an unmade bed and a floor littered with empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts and condoms.

It was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize and bought for £150,000 in 2000 by the art collector Charles Saatchi.

Count Duerckheim, a German industrialist, described the piece as "a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die".

"I am absolutely delighted that Count Duerckheim has agreed to loan such an important work," said Sir Nicholas.

"We look forward to displaying the work [and] creating an opportunity for visitors to see a work that now has iconic status."

Emin made My Bed in her London council flat in 1998

Speaking last month, Emin said she was hopeful that My Bed would end up in a museum after it was sold at auction.

"The best possible result is that an amazing benefactor buys it and then donates it to a museum," she told the BBC News website.

Following the announcement, the artist said she "could not be happier" and that she would "cherish" installing the piece at its new home.

"I have always felt My Bed belongs at Tate. And now it will be," she said.

According to the Tate, My Bed - created by Emin in her council flat near London's Waterloo station - is an "unconventional and uncompromising self-portrait [that] gives a snapshot of the artist's life after a traumatic relationship breakdown".

Details of when and where the piece will go on display will be announced in the autumn.

Born in 1944, Count Duerckheim has been collecting since the 1960s and owns one of the leading collections of international contemporary art.

My Bed was acquired by White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling on the industrialist's behalf, the Tate revealed on Tuesday.

George Lindemann Journal - "A Sculpture King Meets the Sun King" @wsj by Mara Hoberman

'The Entry of Apollo,' a Jean-Michel Othoniel fountain-sculpture, awaits transport to its outdoor Versailles location. Philippe Chancel

A building that once housed the pharmacy of French King Louis XIV has recently brimmed with activity again—this time, involving blown-glass orbs, steel pipes and curious nozzles. Since January, the Paris-based sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel has turned this vaulted chamber on the periphery of Versailles' grounds into his makeshift studio.

When the artist finishes installing the three resulting fountain-sculptures later this summer, they will become the first new permanent artworks in the palace's gardens in more than 300 years.

Since 2008 Versailles, the lavish regal complex about 18 miles west of central Paris, has held temporary art exhibitions inside its 17th-century gilded ballrooms and manicured gardens. These shows have featured contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. Mr. Othoniel's commission—part of the total renovation of a garden originally designed by the famed royal landscaper André Le Nôtre —is meant to stand the test of time.

"As an artist, and a French artist in particular, there is something very special about making a mark on the land that Le Nôtre and Louis XIV designed," Mr. Othoniel said of his fountain-sculptures, made of about 2,000 bowling ball-sized gilded glass spheres.

Photos: The Making of the New Fountains at Versailles

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Paris-based sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel's three fountain sculptures will become the first new permanent artworks in the palace's gardens in more than 300 years. Philippe Chancel

The genesis of the work, titled "Beautiful Dances," dates to 2011, when the artist was invited by landscape architect Louis Benech to collaborate on a proposal for a Versailles-sponsored competition to reimagine the Water Theater Grove. It has been closed to the public since suffering severe storm damage in 1990.

The entry from Messrs. Benech and Othoniel—the only one to include contemporary artwork—won in 2012 over 21 other international submissions.

Some preservationists flinch at the idea of contemporary art becoming a permanent feature of a historic landmark. But Versailles President Catherine Pégard says that "Versailles was always a place for creativity and creation." Louis XIV, she added, "surrounded himself with the greatest artists of his time, and we are continuing that tradition today."

No stranger to monumental art projects, Mr. Othoniel is best known for his bauble-decorated entrance to a Paris subway station near the Louvre Museum. In 2000 he gave a garland of glass ornaments to the fountains of the Alhambra complex in Granada, Spain. Since 2003 six of his giant glass necklaces, like permanent strings of Mardi Gras beads, have adorned an oak tree at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

What the final artwork will look like. Othoniel Studio

At Versailles, Mr. Othoniel says, he felt a responsibility to "enter into a dialogue with the past." He extensively researched Louis XIV's interest in dance. The Sun King, it turns out, got his nickname from his balletic interpretation, at age 14, of Apollo. Mr. Othoniel's studies led him to discover a rare book of notations devised to help the king study Baroque dance steps. Originally published in 1701, these diagrams are the basis for the fountains' arabesque forms, which are meant to evoke the king and queen dancing on water.

"Beautiful Dances" is also linked to the past through its materials and manufacture. Louis XIV brought Venetian artisans to Versailles to fabricate the famous hall of mirrors. Similarly, Mr. Othoniel joined with a traditional glassblowing workshop in Murano—Venice's island of glass artisans—to create four blue orbs that will mark the locations of fountains in Le Nôtre's original garden design.

To match the particular form and intensity of the water jets in Versailles' existing fountains, Mr. Othoniel joined with hydraulic engineers to custom fabricate 17th-century-style nozzles. "I am dialoguing with history," he said, "but also creating a contemporary discourse that will become the next chapter in the history of a legendary location."

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Oliver Payne and Nick Relph: ‘Ash’s Stash’" @nytimes by Karen Rosenburg

An installation view of “Ash’s Stash” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, with shelves of formerly trendy gadgets and accessories. Credit Courtesy the artists and Thomas Müller/Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

“Today everything is always ‘on’ at once, simultaneously forever — we’ve simply run out of past,” the British duo of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph write in a statement for their latest show at Gavin Brown. There, boutique-style shelves hold small, colorful assemblages of formerly trendy gadgets and accessories, among them, Reebok pump sneakers, Sony Walkman cassette players and one forlorn-looking Macintosh Classic computer with a protruding floppy disk.

The whole installation is itself a “reissue”; it dates from a booth at the 2007 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. And the artists have restaged it because they found it oddly predictive of the current trend for sharing carefully chosen photographs of our bookshelves and closets on social media. As they cleverly put it, “Cupboards become catwalks, and possessions pose for the camera, waiting to be liked.”

The cheeky little displays here do look as if they had been made for that exchange, with their high-low, tasteful-kitschy juxtapositions; witness the gilded cat that seems to be “driving” a black-and-gold sneaker, with a Confederate flag pin serving as a hood ornament, or the bottle of Chateau Latour that sports a chunky white digital wristwatch. (The many wine bottles tucked into sneakers may balance out all the expired tech and fashion with suggestions of increasing value.) The assemblages also make an interesting complement to Jeff Koons’s boxed Hoovers at the Whitney — which implies that to “run out of past” is not exactly a new phenomenon of the Instagram age. In fact, it sounds a lot like postmodernism. 

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "‘Displayed’ at the Anton Kern Gallery" @nytimes by Anton Kern   

When you exhibit a work of art, there are two things going on. There’s the object and there’s the presentational apparatus, which might be a frame, a pedestal, a shelf or a vitrine. Also involved are the gallery architecture, the structure of the exhibiting institution and, in the broadest terms, the art world social system. Usually, viewers are supposed to focus on the object and take for granted the apparatus.

In these postmodern times, however, many artists — from Joseph Beuys to Jeff Koons and Carol Bove — have made the displaying part an object in its own right. Organized by the artist and curator Matthew Higgs, this excellent show at Anton Kern Gallery presents works by 18 artists exemplifying a trend he calls “displayism.”

A ramshackle stage set with the artist’s signature — Josh Smith — scrawled in paint on its canvas backdrop implies that the object is the absent artist himself. An installation by Nancy Shaver resembling part of a flea market consists of materials from an antiques store she operates in Hudson, N.Y., called Henry. It includes old things like balustrade knobs and a chain made of bottle caps, with price tags attached, that viewers can purchase mostly for under $20.

Funky sculptural works by B. Wurtz — cobbled from odd pieces of wood, wire and metal cans — display things like white tube socks and plastic bags. A lovely, Walker Evans-like series of photographs of New York sidewalk newsstands from 1994, by Moyra Davey, turns a familiar type of public display into a kind of vernacular art form.

George Lindemann Journal - "Confectionary Overload" @wsj by Peter Plagens

'Play-Doh' (2014) Jeff Koons/Photo by Ron Amstutz

New York

You can give the Whitney Museum's Jeff Koons retrospective due diligence in about 35 minutes. Without pausing for the wall texts and explanatory labels (which read like advertising copy), that amounts to 10 minutes per floor plus a little orientation time in the basement café level to look at posters for Mr. Koons's early exhibitions, where his shtick of trumping Andy Warhol with slickness and production values first caught the public's attention.

The beginning and end of the show contain the good stuff. The vitrined vacuum cleaners, such as "New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue; New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue; Doubledecker" (1987), lighted à la Frankenstein from beneath, exude a harsh morbidity. "Play-Doh," a technical and aesthetic masterpiece of conjoined, painted aluminum parts 10 feet tall and weighing more than five tons, mimics a random pile of the kids' playstuff, and took from 1994 until this year to realize. It's a better Claes Oldenburg than many Oldenburgs.

Otherwise, the exhibition has, as Dave Hickey once said about Las Vegas, lots to see but nothing to look at. It consists of approximately 150 objects, ranging from (early period) framed Nike basketball posters and dime-store inflatable flowers; to (middle period) enlarged porcelain replicas of Bavarian-American kitsch statuary such as Buster Keaton astride a tiny pony; (turning point and nadir) X-rated "Made in Heaven" paintings of the artist having sex with an Italian pornstar, whom he subsequently married; and (comeback and late period) very expensively produced and defiantly shiny sculpture such as a giant candy-box heart and a thyroidal, hideously blue metallic enlargement of a kitsch copy of a Renaissance Venus. You go through the show feeling like you're eating cotton candy on the boardwalk. You leave the show feeling you've eaten entirely too much cotton candy on the boardwalk.

The real subject of the exhibition, however, is not Mr. Koons's bright, empty, perhaps ironic and ultimately numbing art, but his persona. Or rather, the mystery of it. Make no mistake: Mr. Koons is and has always been a very nervy fellow, willing to risk his bank account (considerable now, but empty after the "Made in Heaven" fiasco and an awful custody battle over the son from that marriage) and what one critic calls his "fan base" (a peculiarly appropriate term regarding a serious modern artist) with every deadpan-titled series, from "Celebration" to "Banality" to "Easyfun."

Mr. Koons is nervy and cool enough, in fact, to have in effect played, for 25 years or so, a kind of character common to early television situation comedies. The loud, madcap Lucille Ball played somebody known as "Lucy Ricardo," the loud, madcap wife of a Latino nightclub headliner, "Ricky Ricardo" (played by her real-life husband Desi Arnaz). Closer to Mr. Koons's modus operandi, Bob Cummings played a bon vivant commercial photographer named "Bob Collins," who viewers assumed was pretty close in personality to Mr. Cummings himself. The few times I interviewed Mr. Koons, and every time I've heard him speak in public or in a video—in that voice that seems to emanate from HAL 9000 giving a Chamber of Commerce presentation—I could easily believe that he's really an actor named, say, Jeff Cook, playing in a sitcom about an artist named "Jeff Koons" who truly believes that a saccharine but military-industrial-grade Pop Art redux is the path to a contemporary Renaissance, not to mention the healing of our national psyche.

Mr. Koons is also nervy enough to occasionally subvert his bland Mister-Rogers-goes-to-the-Biennale manner. He nibbles—if not actually bites—the hand that's feeding him this great big exhibition, with an overlay component in a couple of his "Hunk Elvis" series paintings that a label tells us is a "marker drawing of a sailboat." It's also clearly a cartoon of female genitals similar to those of his ex-wife and sex partner in one particular "Made in Heaven" picture. And if the outsize, nauseatingly cute sculpture "Cat on a Clothesline" (2001) isn't a mocking crucifix, then none of those statues in any of the world's Catholic churches are sincere ones. There's no reason for the daisies on either side of the piece other than to extend the horizontal clothesline so that it and the sock in which the kitten resides form a cross. And the clothespins are an obvious metaphor for nails.

While Mr. Koons's "Bob Collins" equivalent isn't afraid to put the museological parallel to a TV network at risk of a little embarrassment, the Whitney does a fair job of embarrassing itself in the show's wall texts. The museum credits Mr. Koons's every stylistic move with the profundity of a Richard Rorty philosophical tome. The text concerning Mr. Koons's mid-'80s small, stainless-steel sculpture series simply called "Statuary" (which includes a big-headed small figure of Bob Hope) says: "By transforming his lowbrow readymades into highbrow art and making his historical sources more contemporary, Koons achieved a kind of democratic leveling of culture. Taken together, the 'Statuary' works evoke a panoply of emotions and styles—melancholy or joy, realism or caricature—and demonstrate Koons's keen manipulation of ingrained ideas about art and taste."

You want to respond that nobody, but nobody, has yet democratically leveled culture, that we'll be the judge of what Mr. Koons's work evokes, thank you very much, and that "manipulating" an audience's allegedly ingrained ideas about taste is patronizing in the extreme.

The big question, of course, regards Mr. Koons's intentions in creating the garishly greeting-card and tourist-shop oeuvre that's been his stock in trade for more than two decades. If he means his art sincerely—no giggling into his shirt collar—then most of the works in this retrospective are, gigantism notwithstanding, as vapid, treacly and dumbed down as any of those Kate Middleton commemorative cups and saucers advertised in the supplements of middle-market American Sunday newspapers. A few art-world people I know think Mr. Koons is sincere. They think that even if he was snideness personified in his 1980s work, after "Made in Heaven" he saw the populist light and simply wants to make art that, as the artist himself has said, "is a support system for people to feel good about themselves."

I disagree. A mature artist does not acquire arrested development in taste unless somebody pours too much Everclear into his vernissage Sancerre, or an international art dealer clubs him over the head with a two-by-four and he wakes up experiencing a blissful epiphany about the sublime beauty of tchotchkes. No; once an artist is a wiseguy doing a love-hate sleight-of-hand with the artifacts of cheap popular culture, and follows that up with pulling the legs of art-world insiders by pretending to really like such artifacts, he's always going to be a wiseguy. The Jeff Koons who speaks in never ending bromides like "Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect" appears to me to be as much a created character—a work of performance art, you might say—as "Bob Collins" was.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

JERSEY CITY — A year after its opening, the Mana Contemporary arts complex, on 35 acres here, remains largely unknown to the artgoing public. So does the man for whom it’s named.

“So Moishe’s the man with a van and a plan?” asked Lisa Dennison, the chairwoman of Sotheby’s North and South America, who was impressed by the ambition of the space on a recent visit.

The Mana is for Moishe Mana. He owns Moishe’s Moving and Storage, a nationwide company, and when he suggested to Eugene Lemay, his trusted right hand of 30 years, that he wanted to get into the art storage business, Mr. Lemay insisted that art couldn’t be handled like furniture. But when he looked into it, he noticed that collectors were keeping millions of dollars’ worth of art in dungeonlike storage spaces. Why not build an entire arts complex where work would be stored so collectors could visit it and show it off?

Mr. Mana has since spent tens of millions of dollars building his conglomeration of profit and nonprofit spaces in a former factory and warehouse area near Journal Square. The complex occupies almost a million square feet — more than five Walmarts — and growing. It includes studios, galleries, a rehearsal space, a Middle Eastern art center and a museum of Richard Meier’s architectural models. Marina Abramovic will lead a performance piece using crowds there in October, and Jeffrey Deitch will organize an exhibition with the choreographer and dancer Karole Armitage in December.

But because Mr. Lemay is the chief executive of Mana Contemporary, he is the one who is photographed and quoted at the organization’s many public events, not Mr. Mana, who is impish with a sunny spirit that may be a little unchecked for the art world.

“But I did study some art history in college in Tel Aviv,” he likes to tell people. “And I’m learning more and more about it every day. I just have to do more listening.”

And so, when Mr. Lemay speaks, Mr. Mana is all ears. Mr. Lemay is an artist. He became one in the early 1990s, about a decade after he started working for Mr. Mana, and his big, brooding canvases now show around the world. Mr. Mana is as proud as he is surprised that his associate is a creative success.

“I remember moving artists in the early days,” he was telling Mr. Lemay as he drove a black Mercedes sedan from Manhattan into the Holland Tunnel toward Jersey City for a recent art opening. “And when they said they couldn’t afford my rate, I told them if they couldn’t make a living from their art, then they should find real jobs and keep art as a hobby.”

Mr. Lemay, a pale man with a serious countenance, winced then laughed.

“Gene, you did exactly what I said,” Mr. Mana continued as he sat in tunnel traffic with the sanguine air of a man who has driven in far more stressful circumstances. “You couldn’t afford being an artist when you came to work for me, but you worked hard and now you can.”

Although Moishe’s Moving doesn’t air its financials, the company, the umbrella for a double octopus of 15 businesses — including real estate development; media; and wine, fashion and document storage — has an estimable net worth. Mana Contemporary has the added draw of both a foundry (it recently manufactured a Richard Serra model) and a high-end silk-screening operation, and Mr. Mana now has a similar venture in Chicago. In Miami, where Mr. Mana invested in a group of buildings covering five blocks, Mana will host an art fair to coincide with Art Basel in December.

“Gene is a person who takes on a lot,” Mr. Mana said. “And he never complains.”

Their company’s rough-and-tumble birth story involves, according to Mr. Mana, incidents like having a gun held to his head by the suspicious neighbor of a client and sleeping in a warehouse with a guard dog to keep it from being burned down by competitors.

“When John Gotti called, I told him to come and shoot me now,” said Mr. Mana, who at 56 still has smooth olive skin and a youthful stride. He arrived from Israel as a law school dropout. “For years,” he said, “it was only about survival.”

In Mr. Lemay, who shared an Israeli background, he found someone akin to a brother to help move furniture and then build a far-reaching empire.

“Our whole life we are one with each other,” Mr. Mana said.

For him, an art mecca is a lure for drawing inhabitants from across state lines to residences that he plans to develop into what he calls “TriBeCa West.” “New Jersey still has a stigma, but that is going to change,” he said.

Their storage clients already include two of Manhattan’s most important art museums, the collection of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, and others. The complex typically shows several exhibitions at once, free to the public. Shows of Judy Chicago and Resnick are among those currently on display.

“If you build it, they will come,” Mr. Mana said as he pulled into his art center.

A chic crowd of 80 had gathered for an exposition of artists organized by Ray Smith, a resident artist, at Mana’s new Glass Gallery, one of the largest exhibition spaces in the country with 50,000 square feet of open space (nearly the size of a football field), with its interior designed by Mr. Meier. Guests for a private dinner at a mirrored banquet table roamed around looking at works for sale by artists including Julian Schnabel, Ai Weiwei and Alex Katz.

Most did not know the man behind the Mana was Moishe.

“That’s just beautiful,” said Yvonne Force Villareal, of the Art Production Fund.

And now, Ms. Dennison of Sotheby’s said, “all he has to do is figure out the Holland Tunnel traffic.” (The Journal Square PATH station is a 10-minute walk.)

Just before a speech by Ms. Abramovic about her fall 72-hour performance with 10,000 participants (moved in and out of six-hour sessions), and an announcement about Mr. Deitch’s exhibition from the archive of the in-residence Armitage Gone! Dance company, Mr. Mana stared at Mr. Lemay’s looming black canvas. It was about Mr. Lemay’s time in the Israeli Army. Under the canvas, a pile of rubble added to the feeling of devastation.

“It’s so dark and sad,” Mr. Mana said.

“I lost a lot of friends when I was in the military,” Mr. Lemay replied.

A silence passed between them. Then a smile lifted Mr. Mana’s face.

“I bet your next work will have flowers growing from all this darkness,” he said.

“Actually, I’m already doing that,” Mr. Lemay said.

Mr. Mana put his arm around Mr. Lemay and sighed

“See? We always think alike,” he said. “We are one.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "A Palace of Wonders" @ nytimes by Frank Rose

VARESE, Italy — The Lombardy region of northern Italy is known for its many “villas of delight” — the “ville di delizia” that aristocratic Milanese families built in the 17th and 18th centuries as summer escapes and settings for lavish entertainments. Varese, in the foothills of the Alps, was a magnet for these estates, several of which are clustered on the parklike hill of Biumo Superiore. At its crest sits the Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza, the most storied, thanks to its longtime owner, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, the Milanese businessman whose adventurous tastes and ardent appetites made him one of the most important art collectors of the last century.

“It’s not bad,” admitted his daughter, Maria Giuseppina Panza di Biumo, a smile escaping her lips as our eyes swept across eight acres of topiary and fountains.

In 1996, more than a decade before his death at 87, Count Panza, as he was widely known in the art world, donated the estate and 167 of the 2,500 artworks he’d amassed to the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, Italy’s national trust, which opened it four years later as a museum. Normally on view are sculptures by Martin Puryear and Meg Webster, monochromatic paintings by such artists as Phil Sims and David Simpson, and site-specific works by Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin and James Turrell that Panza commissioned in the ’70s. But through Nov. 2, the villa is also hosting a small but powerful exhibition of works by Mr. Irwin and Mr. Turrell, pioneers of Southern California’s Light and Space movement, artists whose concern with the limits of perception appealed to Panza both aesthetically and intellectually.

Called “Aisthesis: The Origin of Sensations,” the show takes its cue from the ancient Greek word for “feeling.” Esthesia, the ability to perceive, is the opposite of anesthesia, and this is what the exhibition is about: not admiring inanimate objects, but sensing afresh the world around us. Mr. Irwin and Mr. Turrell create a dialogue between illusion and reality that appealed to Panza — a somewhat stiff and cerebral figure — in ways that he himself may only gradually have appreciated.

Organized by Anna Bernardini, director of the Villa e Collezione Panza, and Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition comprises 19 works created from 1963 to 2013. Among them are two environments the artists returned to the villa to create last year: Mr. Irwin’s “Varese Scrim 2013,” translucent and serene, and Mr. Turrell’s “Sight Unseen,” an unsettlingly immersive installation that provokes a sense of wonder tinged with intimations of danger.

Occupying a former lemon house built in the early 19th century, “Varese Scrim 2013” consists of a mazelike series of white nylon panels that capture sunlight streaming in through tall, south-facing windows. It’s almost the inverse of the “Varese Scrim” he created for the villa 40 years earlier. That work, directly upstairs, transformed a windowless room by dividing it lengthwise with a white nylon panel that is all but indistinguishable from the walls. What appears to be a solid surface is in fact a screen that masks a void, creating a ghost room that exists in parallel with the room you can enter.

This understated questioning of the physical, so characteristic of his work, is present throughout the show. Two other works Mr. Irwin created in 1973, “Varese Window Room” and “Varese Portal Room,” use simple architectural elements to make subtle interventions in empty white rooms, adjusting our perception in a way that makes the real seem hyper-real. A tall acrylic column on the main floor of the villa refracts the sunlight streaming in, scattering rainbows across the room even as the column itself all but disappears.

The Turrells in the show are more assertive, sometimes to the point of aggression. “Shanta (Blue),” a 1967 piece never exhibited outside the artist’s studio, looks to be a glowing, three-dimensional blue box suspended in a corner of a darkened room; in fact, it’s completely immaterial, a projection of blue light. “Skyspace I,” one of the three works Mr. Turrell created for the villa in 1974, is a small room so saturated with natural and fluorescent light as to be blindingly white.

The first of more than 70 “skyspaces” Mr. Turrell has created, it prefigured “Aten Reign,” the otherworldly installation that occupied the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York during last summer’s Turrell retrospective. But where the Guggenheim installation was vast and awe inspiring, “Skyspace I” is intimate and assaultive. It’s also modest compared to Mr. Turrell’s new installation at the villa, “Sight Unseen.” One of his “ganzfeld” (“total field”) pieces, this is an immersive and wildly disorienting environment designed to produce confusion and astonishment in equal measure.

Visitors experience the work in small groups for 10 minutes at a time. After signing a release (lawsuits have been filed over injuries sustained in other ganzfelds) and donning plastic bootees, you are ushered up a set of steps to what looks like an extremely large artwork on the wall. The guide steps through it, inviting you to do the same. Entering a large and seemingly boundless space suffused in white, you feel as if you have floated into a cloud — or you would feel that way if the floor weren’t sloping downward reminding you that gravity has not gone on holiday.

“Stop!” the guide says once you’re 25 or 30 feet in. “No farther.”

There seems to be an edge ahead, barely visible but suggesting a sharp drop. Then the light begins to shift, from an all-encompassing white to intense reds and blues. Now you feel as if you were deep within a Rothko, bathed in nonspecific spirituality. It would be nice to have a wall to lean against, but you can’t make one out. It’s important to remain upright, you tell yourself. You still have five or six minutes to go.

Giuseppe Panza di Biumo was the dutiful son of a Milanese wine merchant and real estate investor who had been granted a title by King Victor Emmanuel III. Young Giuseppe earned a law degree after World War II and went into the family business. But his first love was the villa, which his father had acquired in a run-down state in 1935. He fell in love with America on his initial visit to New York in 1954, and a few years after that, he discovered his greatest passion: art. Here in Varese, at the estate he once described as “a great, green space suspended between heaven and earth,” his three passions converged.

Panza — “He was never a count,” his daughter said, laughing, “but people liked to call him that” — focused his attention on American artists of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. He bought early and in depth, moving on to newer artists once the market caught up with his tastes. He installed many of the best pieces in the villa, to the befuddlement of friends and neighbors.

The white stucco mansion with its decorative plasterwork and 18th-century frescoes was not an obvious home for such work. Panza reveled not only in the juxtaposition but in all the space he had to fill.

“He started collecting because he had this house,” said Ms. Panza, who is a curator there, along with her son and three other family members. “He wanted big things, because he had big spaces.”

Panza first encountered Mr. Irwin’s work in the late ’60s. He was fascinated by Mr. Irwin’s concern with perception and reality: how we think we perceive reality when what we perceive is in fact what we think reality to be. No sooner had he begun to grapple with this conundrum than he discovered Mr. Irwin was not alone in this pursuit. “Irwin told him, ‘You have to go to L.A.,’ ” Ms. Panza said. “There’s a group of artists who are working with light. It’s very important.”

Chief among them was Mr. Turrell. Under the auspices of an early Los Angeles County Museum of Art program, Mr. Irwin and Mr. Turrell had worked with a psychologist on sensory-deprivation environments, a forerunner of Mr. Turrell’s ganzfelds. Before long the two artists found themselves in Varese, transforming rooms above the stable into the site-specific environments you find there today.

As for Panza, he succeeded in transforming the hilltop estate once again into a villa of delight, though one this time conforming to his own definition.

“My father was not very emotional,” Ms. Panza said as we walked back toward the first-floor family quarters, now open to the public as well. “He was more thoughtful.”

But the villa “was a place of recovery for him,” she explained. “It gave him breath and hope.”

Not always, however. In 1999, having concluded a series of deals that sent the bulk of his collection to the Guggenheim and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he was overseeing a full restoration of the villa as both museums were preparing major Panza exhibitions. For an obsessive and a perfectionist, it was all a bit much. Perception may not be reality, but it’s the closest thing we know, and reality had to be just right. The stress led to a heart attack, and as he was recovering, he became overwhelmed with the realization of how much it all meant to him: the purchases, the intellectual discussions with artists, the art itself.

One day, he turned to his daughter, she recalled, and with surprise in his voice said, “I didn’t think emotions could influence so much our heart.”

“And I said, ‘Daddy....’ ”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "In Santa Fe, An Art Space Reinvents the Biennial" @nytimes by Dawn Chan

On view at “Unsettled Landscapes,” the latest edition of SITE Santa Fe’s contemporary art biennial, is Patrick Nagatani’s “Bida Hi’ / Opposite Views; Northeast-Navaho Tract Homes and Uranium Tailings, Southwest Shiprock, New Mexico,” 1990 & 1993.Credit

Beginning tonight, the adobe walls of the art space SITE Santa Fe will house a re-creation of an illegal 19th-century New Mexico gambling den, complete with dealers staging rounds of the Spanish card game known as monte. Inspired by the casinos that cropped up during the 1830s New Mexican gold rush, it’s part of a multipronged piece by the artist Pablo Helguera, one of 45 artists in “Unsettled Landscapes,” the latest edition of SITE Santa Fe’s contemporary art biennial, opening this Sunday.

The biennial has built a cult following since its founding in 1995, thanks to its captivating Southwestern backdrop and brainy programming. (Previous curators included Dave Hickey, who soon after received a MacArthur “genius” grant.) After canceling the biennial two years ago, chief curator Irene Hofmann has rebooted it, with the goal of avoiding the cookie-cutter biennial approach that’s been “duplicated by the hundreds,” as Hofmann puts it. (These days, Dhaka, Singapore and even Bushwick, Brooklyn all have biennials.)

Photo

Liz Cohen’s “Rio Grande,” 2012.Credit Courtesy of Salon 94, New York

In fact, SITE Santa Fe was an early pioneer of what’s become standard biennial practice: “hiring a star curator and bringing in the international art world,” in Hofmann’s words. The team hopes that its new endeavor, SITELines, can rejuvenate exhibition practices. Teams will replace solo curators and artists will get more time to make work. (Helguera spent the past two years developing his piece.)

SITELines will focus on the Americas. While organizing the show, Hofmann traveled everywhere from to Buenos Aires to Cuba. Another curator, Candice Hopkins, visited an artist in the Arctic Circle, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. “She gets the prize for the most remote studio visit,” Hofmann says with a laugh. She explains that her decision to emphasize the Americas is interconnected with her life in Santa Fe. The a-ha moment came while driving on Highway 25, when she realized that a stretch of that route was also the Pan-American Highway — “a road which, in our romantic imaginings,” she says, “connects Alaska to Argentina.”

“Unsettled Landscapes” runs July 20 through Jan. 11, 2015 at SITE Santa Fe, sitesantafe.org.

George Lindemann Journal - "The New Museum Surveys Art From the Arab World" @nytimes by JOHNNY MAGDALENO

A moment from Khaled Jarrar’s 2012 film “Infiltrators,” on view at “Here and Elsewhere,” the New Museum’s new survey of contemporary artists from the Arab world.Credit Courtesy of Khaled Jarrar

The Western media’s obsession with Middle Eastern conflict has made it easy for American audiences to mistake war and crisis as components of Arab identity. But if there’s anything that the New Museum’s newest exhibition, “Here and Elsewhere,” works to dispel, it’s the fallacy that any single portrayal can summarize the many cultural landscapes around and within the Arabian peninsula.

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The exhibition, which opens Wednesday and runs until Sept. 28, documents the work of 45 contemporary artists of Arab origin, marking the first-ever museumwide group show of Arab artists in New York City. The show’s curators were careful to avoid making any blanket statements about art from the Arab world. “We’re looking at a very diverse group of artists who share a fascination with the question of truth through images,” says Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s associate director and the exhibition’s co-curator. “This question is also a question of what constitutes an identity, and how an identity like Arab is constructed through images.”

Gioni began culturing the idea for “Here and Elsewhere” when he noticed that artists from the Arab world were primarily featured by biennials, which are rich in diversity but lack the space to thoroughly showcase specific cultures. In bringing the idea to life, providing multiple Arab artists a museum backdrop was one main goal; coordinating it in the center of the art world’s capital city was another. “This is part of a natural series of exhibitions we like to feature in the New Museum — ones that not only look at art from a specific geographical place, but art that isn’t being made or shown in New York,” says Gioni.

Photo

At left: Ali Jabri’s “Red Sea,” from the “Nasser” series, ca. 1977–83. At right: Hassan Sharif’s “Suspended Objects,” 2011.Credit From left: courtesy Diala al Jabiri; courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai

For some of the featured artists, documenting the trials faced by Arab people in the wake of war or other tragedies is a key method for probing concepts of identity. Bouchra Khalili’s films, for example, circle the lives of Arab immigrants as they leave their lineages in pursuit of new beginnings in Europe and abroad. Fouad Elkoury’s photography captures Lebanese families and country clubs before and after the start of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. And while other artists’ works take even more divisive approaches toward cataloging the Arab experience, like Rokni Haerizadeh’s paintings of animal-human hybrids protesting Islam in the streets of contemporary France, each of the 45 artists are ultimately united by a shared fascination with what it means to be alive and human in the modern era, regardless of ethnic labels. That’s why, says Gioni, American visitors have just as much to gain from the exhibition as do visitors from Arab countries. “If we go to an exhibition to see ourselves reflected in another people, and in another culture, the museum process becomes much more interesting,” he said. “I think that is ultimately what makes art beautiful. To not just function as a picture, but as a portal.”

“Here and Elsewhere” is on view July 16 to Sept. 28 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, newmuseum.org.

George Lindemann Journal - "Fleeting Artworks, Melting Like Sugar" @nytimes by By BLAKE GOPNIK

One of the most substantial works of art to hit New York in years was with us for only two months. This week, the final vestiges of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” were removed from the old sugar shed of the Domino factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which will make way for apartments.

The vast blocks of polystyrene foam at the heart of Ms. Walker’s sphinxlike monument have been cut up and cleaned and taken away for recycling by its supplier, the Insulation Corporation of America. The sphinx’s “skin,” coated in about 30 tons of sugar and not recyclable (or edible, after months of exposure to a leaking roof and the breath of well over 100,000 visitors) is being carried off to the dump by Action Carting. Three of the sphinx’s human-size attendants, cast in candy, had all but melted away by the show’s final weeks; 12 others, cast in plastic and coated in sugar, have been put on sale by Sikkema Jenkins gallery, as part of an edition of 15 sculptures it hopes to place in public institutions, for $100,000 to $200,000 each.

Of the sphinx sculpture itself, the left hand alone is being preserved, as Ms. Walker’s souvenir of the landmark work.

The artist was not present for the weeklong dismantling of her giant Baby and declined to be interviewed. Concerned about the emotions she’d suffer, her staff packed her off to a house in the woods. But rather than mourn the departure of her creation, Ms. Walker ought to take heart from her contribution to the grand tradition of ephemeral art. From Michelangelo to the Buddhist monks who make — and destroy — sand mandalas, artists have always been intrigued by impermanence.

In the 1960s Happenings and performances left the barest trace. By 1970, the great “land artist” Robert Smithson had created Spiral Jetty, a coil of rock and earth. Reaching out from the shores of the Great Salt Lake, it was meant to disappear and reappear at nature’s will. That same year, Smithson poured glue down an embankment near Vancouver. An artist who photographed the event wrote that “its rapid disappearance was an embrace of a state of imperfection.”

Ms. Walker’s most immediate predecessors include Tino Sehgal, who has become an art star by getting people to kiss, and calling it art, or by turning the Guggenheim Museum into a giant audience polling site. He doesn’t allow documentation of his projects; he won’t even issue a receipt to their buyers.

But the great modern artists of the early 20th century were more in love with ephemerality.

In 1917 Duchamp presented his urinal “Fountain” to the Society of Independent Artists in New York, which refused to show it. The sculpture itself — often judged the most influential work of its century — was promptly mislaid, without any mourning from Duchamp. It was meant to exist more as a provocative gesture, lodged in art history.

Four years earlier, Kazimir Malevich, one of the first abstract artists, developed his Suprematist style designing stage sets for the futuristic Russian opera “Victory Over the Sun.” The décor was never meant to endure. Such projects’ short life allowed them to be that much more daring.

Architecture embraced ephemerality with the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. That first world fair’s landmark was a “Crystal Palace” covered in a million square feet of plate glass; it survived only because it was later rebuilt in a nice South Bank suburb (where it burned down in 1936). The exhibition’s heirs in other cities, including New York and Chicago, were mostly dismantled once their exhibits went home.

Food, an art that doesn’t last at all, except in memory, had touched on similar territory around the time of Napoleon. The French chef Marie-Antonin Carême realized that he could take advantage of food’s evanescence with an unlikely marriage to architecture, the most permanent art form. His table-filling classical cityscapes and ruins, built of nougat and sweetmeats, were found awesome and confusing — were they fleeting or enduring? (They drew on the medieval tradition of “subtleties,” dinner table centerpieces made of cast and spun sugar that no lord’s feast could do without; Ms. Walker cites those as a source for her own Domino project.) The most important ephemeral tradition in Western art may be what has come to be called the “triumphal entry.” In 1635 the great Peter Paul Rubens led his Antwerp colleagues in building triumphal arches and other decorations for the grand arrival of Ferdinand, brother of Philip IV of Spain. As the scholar Eric Monin has discovered, such temporary works were accompanied by lavish fireworks, a new art form that got much of its prestige, now lost, from being short-lived. In the late 1960s Judy Chicago revived the idea of fireworks as high art with a series of “Atmospheres” that she revisited last April in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Even Michelangelo played an early part in creating artistic ephemera: One notably snowy day in 1494, a decade before he completed his great marble “David,” Michelangelo’s patron Piero de’ Medici commissioned him to do a kind of dry run for it, in the form of a heroic snowman. Giorgio Vasari, artist, writer and father of art history, wrote that, during the course of its tragically short life, the frozen figure was deemed “very beautiful.”

Ms. Walker may be aware of this tradition’s power. In an interview with Artnet News, she talked about how she was attracted to sugar for “its temporality, that it’s here and then it’s gone”; her sphinx, she said, was conceived to be “very temporary. I’ve been thinking a lot about ruins, things like that.”

Her “Sugar Baby” was an impressive sight, but half its impact came from the certain knowledge that it would not endure. Dare we say that, in the case of this biggest of all sweet confections, absence will make the heart grow fondant?

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "A Warhol With Your Moose Head? Sotheby’s Teams With EBay" @nytimes by By CAROL VOGEL and MIKE ISAAC

An Andy Warhol at Sotheby’s last fall. By teaming up with eBay, it hopes to reach buyers who might never come to a sale room. Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Convinced that consumers are finally ready to shop online for Picassos and choice Persian rugs in addition to car parts and Pez dispensers, Sotheby’s, the blue-chip auction house, and eBay, the Internet shopping giant, plan to announce Monday that they have formed a partnership to stream Sotheby’s sales worldwide.

Starting this fall, most of Sotheby’s New York auctions will be broadcast live on a new section of eBay’s website. Eventually the auction house expects to extend the partnership, adding online-only sales and streamed auctions taking place anywhere from Hong Kong to Paris to London. The pairing would upend the rarefied world of art and antiques, giving eBay’s 145 million customers instant bidding access to a vast array of what Sotheby’s sells, from fine wines to watercolors by Cézanne.

This isn’t the first time the two companies have teamed up; a 2002 collaboration fizzled after only a year. But officials say the market has matured in recent years, making the moment right for a new collaboration.

The announcement comes just months after the activist shareholder Daniel S. Loeb criticized Sotheby’s for its antiquated business practices, likening the company to “an old painting in desperate need of restoration” and calling for directors there to beef up its online sales strategy. It also signals a new phase in Sotheby’s age-old rivalry with Christie’s. After years of running neck and neck, Sotheby’s has recently been losing business to its main competitor — and Christie’s is planning its own bold move to capture more online business, a $50 million investment that will include more Internet-only auctions and a redesigning of its website scheduled for October.

Online auctions are not new to either auction house. Registered bidders can compete in certain sales in real time with the click of a mouse. What is new is the way Sotheby’s is trying to reach beyond its traditional customers to an enormous affluent global audience for whom online buying has become second nature. Luxury shopping websites like Gilt and 1st Dibs, with their broad mix of décor, designer fashion and antiques, have shown that shoppers are willing to spend many thousands of dollars on everything from handbags to sconces without inspecting them in person. And while the auction houses are seeing their online bidding grow — Sotheby’s, for example, says its sales on its website increased 36 percent in 2013 over the previous year — they believe the full potential of online sales has yet to be tapped.

A report in March by the European Fine Art Foundation in Maastricht, the Netherlands, found that online sales of art and antiques in 2013 represented only 5 percent of the $65.9 billion fine art market. The report expects online art and antiques sales to increase by about 25 percent a year for the next few years.

Capturing the online market means reaching out beyond Sotheby’s relatively exclusive pool of customers — which it numbers at more than 100,000 — to 145 million on eBay, most of whom have never seen a gavel fall. It is also a striking reversal from Sotheby’s decision in 2006 to concentrate primarily on the high end of the business. The company’s own research shows that more than 50 percent of all lots sold at auction last year were in the $5,000 to $100,000 range — a chunk of the middle market it hopes eBay will help it reach. “Even if we only reach point 1 percent of eBay users, that’s huge for us,” said Bruno Vinciguerra, Sotheby’s chief operating officer. “The point is to make our sales more accessible to the broadest possible audience around the world, all the while remaining totally committed to our high end.” While those big-ticket artworks get the most attention, officials at Sotheby’s say that sales in the $50,000 to $5 million range make them the most money — though they declined to say just how much.

Recently, both Sotheby’s and Christie’s have glimpsed this hoped-for future. Christie’s sold a Richard Serra drawing in an online-only auction for $905,000 in May; officials there said there were eight serious bidders competing. In April, Sotheby’s sold a “The Birds of America” John James Audubon folio for $3.5 million, a record for an online purchase in a live auction.

What Sotheby’s is hoping to achieve in a partnership, Christie’s is trying to do on its own. The company has hired experts from Gilt and from Mr. Porter, a men’s wear online retailer, to reimagine its online sales approach. “Last year we launched 60 online auctions, and we will continue to double that number,” said Steven P. Murphy, Christie’s chief executive. “Thirty percent of our buyers this year were new to Christie’s, and one-third of that group came to us online.”

For eBay, which reported overall revenues of $16 billion in 2013, and $8.3 billion for its online auction unit, the goal of the partnership is to create a shopping mall with Sotheby’s as its anchor tenant. The company hopes that customers who might go there first to bid with Sotheby’s will then explore the rest of the site.

“We want eBay to be a destination, not just a utility,” said Devin Wenig, president of Global EBay Marketplaces, which has been trying to gussy up its garage sale image by selling $100,000 shiny red Ferraris, designer clothes and yachts. “If you look at what we were selling 10 years ago, it’s really different now,” Mr. Wenig said. “We sell a lot of expensive items, including roughly 13,000 automobiles every week to mobile shoppers. Customer trust in e-commerce has evolved.” When it comes to art, a Sotheby’s deal via eBay will also carry the Sotheby’s imprimatur of authenticity.

In 270-year-old Sotheby’s move to broaden its customer base, some analysts say it risks tarnishing its storied image. In October eBay hired RJ Pittman, a former head of Apple’s e-commerce efforts, to oversee a redesign of its website, which now features a much heavier emphasis on lavish photographs that mimic the look of an upscale magazine. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s has dispatched its own team to make sure the eBay display doesn’t look cheap.

“Both sides know that the look and feel of the site needs to showcase the elegance of the Sotheby’s brand,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail analyst with Forrester Research. “EBay can’t just bring its old product detail page to this feature.”

Details of the arrangement between Sotheby’s and eBay remain confidential. Sotheby’s will pay eBay a commission on each sale that takes place on eBay, according to Ryan Moore, an eBay spokesman. Though eBay also owns PayPal, for now Mr. Vinciguerra of Sotheby’s said shoppers would pay Sotheby’s directly for their purchases, although PayPal could become an alternative payment method in the near future.

The main concern for each company is that the failures of the past not be repeated, especially the one they shared more than a decade ago. In 2002 — well before the smartphone revolution — eBay and Sotheby’s formed their first partnership and started to introduce online live auctions. Sotheby’s hired close to 200 staff members. The project folded after a year.

Before that, Sotheby’s partnered with Amazon.com in 1999 in an effort to sell art and collectibles on that retail site. Back then Sotheby’s was trying to create a marketplace separate from its existing auctions by teaming up with a network of dealers and presenting auctions online. Consumers were leery, and authenticity was often an issue. “It was too early,” Mr. Vinciguerra said. “People weren’t ready for it.” Between 1999 and 2003, the auction house reported losses of nearly $150 million.

For its part, eBay was experimenting with eBay Great Collections, a 1999 attempt to sell more expensive merchandise — from fossilized pine cones to Hepplewhite armchairs — primarily through dealers. That same year, eBay also bought Butterfield & Butterfield, a San Francisco auction house, only to sell the business three years later to Bonhams, the eclectic London-based auction house.

Mr. Vinciguerra is hoping the failures were just a matter of right idea, wrong time. And now Sotheby’s can piggyback on eBay without making another heavy investment in technology.

“Over the years the quality, speed and experience online has changed tremendously,” Mr. Vinciguerra said.

In a sign of caution, the new arrangement will roll out gradually. At first Sotheby’s will present live New York auctions in 18 collecting categories on eBay’s website and through its own website. Sotheby’s big-ticket evening sales — the Bacons, Richters and Renoirs — will not be offered on eBay, nor will certain of its antiquities sales. Josh Baer, an art adviser who was hired by eBay to help shape its own art initiatives, said the new venture was not designed “to take away from selling a Jeff Koons sculpture for $58 million.”

And with its second marriage to eBay, Sotheby’s has a chance to gain a competitive edge. In the past when Sotheby’s competed for estate property, it was primarily hunting for the multimillion-dollar paintings, sculptures or furniture, Mr. Baer said. “Besides being able to sell the Renoirs and Picassos, Sotheby’s will also be able to have a platform to dispose of grandma’s silver and china to a huge audience.”

The advantage works both ways. “For some 25-year-old who is used to shopping online,” he added, “it’s a perfect way to break into the art world.”