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 "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.

RELATED

A Closer Look at “Here and Elsewhere”

T’s Senior Photography & Video Editor Jamie Bradley Sims shares the photographs of Hashem el Madani, an artist featured in this group exhibition. More…

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?

The developer Aby Rosen reached a deal to keep a 33-foot-tall Damien Hirst sculpture on his property in Old Westbury, N.Y. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times

The naked lady stays.

The planning board of the Village of Old Westbury, N.Y., agreed on Monday to allow the art collector Aby Rosen to keep “The Virgin Mother,” a 33-foot-tall painted bronze sculpture of a pregnant woman with an exposed fetus, by Damien Hirst, on his property. Neighbors had objected to the graphic sculpture, which could be glimpsed from a private road leading to Mr. Rosen’s estate. The outdoor art even prompted the board to consider enacting a law to prohibit any structures — including sculptures — from rising more than 25 feet.

But a new landscaping plan has soothed critics, Mayor Fred J. Carillo said. The statue — with its partly ripped-away skin that reveals the woman’s skeleton as well as the fetus — will be installed in the pocket of a hill so that it rises only 25 feet above level ground. The statue will be turned so that the detailed anatomy will face the house instead of the road, and it will not have any artificial lighting.

Finally, Mr. Rosen has agreed to maintain all-season landscaping that will shield the statue from view. Thus, the statue’s proverbial fig leaves will remain even in the fall and winter, when most other trees lose theirs.

“They were very cooperative,” Mr. Carillo said of Mr. Rosen’s team.

A real estate developer and avid art collector, Mr. Rosen also serves as chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts.

The Old Westbury planning board also approved the siting of two other statues on Mr. Rosen’s property: “Wind-Up Hello Kitty,” a sculpture by Tom Sachs, and “Untitled: Figure Balancing on Dog,” by Keith Haring, Newsday reported.

“The village approvals have all been obtained,” Peter MacKinnon, Mr. Rosen’s lawyer, said. “Everybody’s happy.”      

George Lindemann Journal - "Detroit’s Art May Be Worth Billions, Report Says" @nytimes By RANDY KENNEDY

A new expert appraisal of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection, which some creditors are demanding be sold to help pay municipal debts in the city’s bankruptcy case, has found that the works could be worth $2.7 billion to $4.6 billion.

The appraisal, commissioned by the city and the museum in advance of a federal bankruptcy trial in August, also added that such a price tag would never be attained at sale, for reasons including donor lawsuits that would delay or prevent the sale of many valuable works, weakness in the market for some kinds of paintings, and lower sale prices because of the sheer bulk that would flood into the market at once. The appraiser, Artvest Partners, an art investment firm based in New York, said that because of these factors and the notoriety of such a forced sale from a venerable public institution, the bulk of the museum’s collection might raise as little as $850 million.

“A significant segment of D.I.A.’s collection is in areas that have fallen out of favor with collectors, and that are underperforming their market peaks in 2007,” a report by the firm said, noting in particular old master and 19th-century European paintings and pre-1950s American art.

The numbers and the report’s conclusions will undoubtedly be fought over fiercely at trial. Over the last several months, creditors have accused city officials of underestimating the value of the collection in order to protect it. The collection comprises more than 60,000 pieces, which are owned by the city and considered a municipal asset. Late last year, at the behest of Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn D. Orr, Christie’s appraised a small but significant portion of the collection, including some of the museum’s greatest masterpieces, and estimated that those works — by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh and several others — would bring $454 million to $867 million if sold.

That estimate, which looked only at works bought by the city that would not be subject to litigation by donors, took on great significance as private foundations and state lawmakers put together the so-called grand bargain, pledges of more than $800 million in private and state money to protect the art collection in exchange for helping the city to shore up pension funds.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lindemann, www.forbes.com/profile/george-lindemann, https://twitter.com/BassMuseumPres, http://www.nova.edu/alumni/profiles/george_lindemann.html, http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/investors/george-lindemann-net-worth, george-lindemann-jr.com, http://www.bassmuseum.org/blog/george-lindemann-wins-inaugural-better-beach-awards, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/lindemann.html

George Lindemann Journal "London Auctions Cap a Go-Go Season" @nytimes by By SCOTT REYBURN

Francis Bacon’s ‘‘Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground)’’ from 1964 sold for £26.7 million. Credit Sotheby’s

LONDON — The momentum seems unstoppable. Last week in London, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips raised an aggregate 200 million pounds, or about $340 million, from their evening sales of postwar and contemporary art, a 26 percent increase on the equivalent series of sales last summer.

London’s sales came on the heels of an Art Basel fair in Switzerland last month, where an Andy Warhol self-portrait sold for about $30 million, and a blockbuster series of contemporary evening and day auctions in New York in May that totaled $1.6 billion.

“The sleepy days of collecting are over,” said Amy Cappellazzo, the co-founder of the New York-based Art Agency, Partners, who was in London bidding on works by Lucio Fontana and Roy Lichtenstein on behalf of clients she advises. “The wealthiest of the wealthy now view art as an alternative currency. It’s become a very big business.”

London was the latest stop in what has become a year-round traveling circus of auctions, fairs and gallery events. Contemporary art has become a global monoculture. If you’re seriously rich, and want to enhance your status and your wealth, why not buy top-tier contemporary art, as well as super-prime real estate in London and New York? This seemed to be the message Sotheby’s and Christie’s were trying to convey in the slickly presented views of their June 30 and July 1 auctions of art produced during the last 60 years.

But was the rise in overall sales a result of new clients entering the market, or was it simply that existing buyers were spending more money? There weren’t many new faces to be seen at these London sales, as there hadn’t been at Basel. Paradoxically, if that is the case, and new buyers aren’t flooding into the upper reaches of the art market in the way they did in 2007 and 2008, then it is less likely that the current expansion represents, as many people suspect, a speculative bubble.

What is certain is that the wealthiest art buyers are concentrating their investment on a narrow range of low-risk “blue chip” names.

Anders Petterson, the founder and managing director for the London-based analysts ArtTactic, said in an email that the 10 most expensive artists accounted for 73 percent of the £192.6 million aggregate total achieved at Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales.

Francis Bacon is currently the contemporary market’s most valuable artist after the $142.4 million achieved for a large-scale triptych in New York in November. The Irish-born painter also topped the price lists at these latest Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales. Sotheby’s offered a small-scale that had been in a private collection in Milan since 1970. Christie’s had a 1967 head of Lucian Freud from the estate of the children’s author Roald Dahl. Four telephone bidders pushed the price on the triptych to £26.7 million, significantly above the upper estimate of £20 million. An unidentified private collector standing at the back of Christie’s sale room bought the head of Freud for £11.5 million, just below the unpublished upper estimate of £12 million. The seller of the latter work had been guaranteed an undisclosed minimum price, according to Christie’s catalog.

Further research by Arts Economics, based in Dublin, has shown that of the 36,000 artists recorded in the worldwide auction market for postwar and contemporary art, fewer than 50 have sold for more than €10 million.

The Scottish-born painter Peter Doig, who is usually sold in London, is one of only two living British artists (the other being Damien Hirst) who can reach that kind of price level. Sotheby’s guaranteed Mr. Doig’s critically acclaimed 1999 canvas, “Country-rock (wing-mirror),” showing an underpass in Toronto. Its estimate of £9 million proved too ambitious and it was bought by a telephone bidder for £8.5 million with fees. Christie’s, by contrast, placed a more modest valuation of £3 million to £5 million on the more decorative and mysterious 2002-4 landscape with a self-portrait of Mr. Doig in theatrical dress, “Gasthof,” and was rewarded with a price of £9.9 million from the dealer Larry Gagosian in the room.

Elsewhere there was the usual procession of seven- and six-figure prices being paid for Andy Warhol silk screens, Lucio Fontana slashed canvases, Yves Klein rectangles of ultramarine and other signature works by postwar and contemporary’s investment-grade brands.

The monotony of what at times felt like factory auctioneering was momentarily broken at Christie’s when Tracey Emin’s most famous and infamous work, “My Bed,” dating from 1998, sold from the Charles Saatchi collection for £2.5 million. The mellowing Ms. Emin, who was a leading figure in the Young British Artists (YBAs) group, installed the bed at Christie’s preview and was in the auction room to see it knocked down to her London dealer Jay Jopling.

Less established artists remain an area of unpredictability. Phillips’s more modest £9.9 million evening sale on July 2, their last before moving to a plush new building in Berkeley Square, tested demand for some of the younger minimalist painters who have recently been generating speculative heat. In February at Sotheby’s, a large 2012 Lucien Smith “Rain” painting, one of an estimated 200 to 300 made by the artist with a fire extinguisher, sold for £224,500. At Phillips, another 2012 example of similar size sold for £116,500. Bidders seemed to have a more positive sense of the long-term values of the Cologne-based abstract painter David Ostrowski, whose ghostly 2012 canvas, “F (Gee Vaucher),” attracted at last five bidders before selling for £170,500, more than three times the estimate based on what galleries charge for his paintings when first released.

At Christie’s post-auction press conference, Francis Outred, the company’s European head of contemporary art, said that although the evening’s buying had been dominated by established collectors, 190 clients from 28 countries had bid at the sale. That’s still just a tiny fraction of the world’s 199,235 individuals who each were estimated byUBS and the consultancy Wealth-X to have more than $30 million cash to spend in 2013. In other words, despite all the media reports devoted to the relentless growth of the art market, that night at Christie’s it remained the preserve of the 0.1 percent of the 0.1 percent.

“It’s a relatively small pool of buyers,” Mr. Petterson said. “They’re financial people in a world of their own. But as long as this group finds monetary value and cultural status in these objects, that pool will remain stocked.”

George Lindemann Journal - "Basel ‘mothership’ fair is bigger than ever" @miamiherald by Siobhan Morrissey

BASEL, Switzerland -- Go big or go home. That may well have been the watchword for the 45th presentation of Art Basel in this medieval city on the Rhine, where museum-scale installations dominated both the design and art exhibitions.

Much like Art Basel Miami Beach, the Swiss fair opens with Design Miami a day before collectors and curators descend upon the main art fair, which began in Basel in 1970. For a city with an area of less than 10 square miles and fewer than 200,000 inhabitants, Basel holds bragging rights for hosting the biggest contemporary and modern art fair in the world.

“Basel, Switzerland, is the mothership,” says gallerist Yancey Richardson. “It sets the bar.”

Richardson runs a New York gallery that focuses on photography. She usually exhibits at Pulse, a satellite fair to Art Basel Miami Beach, and was in Basel simply to enjoy the show and learn about up-and-coming artists.

Held the second week in June, the Basel fair was big in all manners of speaking. A record crowd of 92,000 people visited it. That’s 6,000 more than last year, and almost 20,000 more than the number who attended the sister fair in Miami Beach last December.

“We expect that in Miami Beach we will see, as we have seen in Basel this week, the now truly global nature of Art Basel’s audience with new and many more collectors from faraway places,” Art Basel director Marc Spiegler told the Miami Herald by email at the conclusion of the fair.

A new sector at the fair in which galleries present a curated focus on a single artist or one monumental work by a given artist is a harbinger of things to come at the Miami Beach fair this December, Spiegler said.

That new sector was designed to draw an enthusiastic group of collectors, and that was just the kind of crowd that appealed to Steven Sacks, whose New York-based bitforms gallery exhibited a museum-quality video installation by Beryl Korot.

“This fair is by far the highest-quality, densest group of collectors, curators and institutions in the world,” said Sacks, who was looking to place Korot’s iconic work, Dachau 1974, with a European museum.

“I would never bring that to any other fair in the world but this fair because I would never, ever find a client for it,” he said. “It is a tough piece. It’s beyond that. I want it to be in a museum. It’s hard because, one, there’s a limited audience for that work in general, and also I’m limiting the audience by not wanting to sell to a private collector. So, I made it a little more complicated, but this fair allows that to happen.”

The bitforms booth actually felt like a museum setting, with Korot’s eerily riveting four-channel video installation the sole work for sale. The Basel offering, for $175,000, coincided with an exhibition of the work at the Tate Modern in London.

The 24-minute, black-and-white footage depicts how the former concentration camp looked 40 years ago. The ambient sound of church bells and the babbling of a nearby brook, as well as the trudging feet of tourists, all could have been sounds heard during the war years. It was the last of three works available, and at the conclusion of the fair Sacks was in negotiations with an unnamed European museum to sell the video.

While Basel proved to be the perfect arena to exhibit the Korot video, Miami Beach is a better place to show up-and-coming artists, Sacks said.

“The buyers there are looking for things outside of the blue-chip, and they want to find and discover,” he said of the Miami Beach fairgoers. “A lot of times that corresponds to lower prices. I think the work there is a bit edgier. Also, I think the Latin American vs. European tastes are different. The European is more of a traditional. There’s a history there that is very deep in terms of art collecting and art history.”

As a result, Sacks said, he tends to exhibit more works from emerging artists in Miami Beach and keeps the prices below $100,000.

In Basel, prices often soar into the millions. The Skarstedt Gallery, with spaces in New York and London, sold its Andy Warhol Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) from 1986, which had a price tag of roughly $35 million. David Zwirner, also of New York and London, sold a Jeff Koons dolphin balloon sculpture for $5 million, a Bruce Nauman sculpture of wax heads for $3.2 million and a Gerhard Richter painting for $2 million.

Annely Juda Fine Art of London sold David Hockney’s Vista near Fridaythorpe, Aug, Sept 2006, an oil painting on four canvases, for more than $4 million. White Cube of London, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo sold one of Damien Hirst’s glass-enclosed pharmacy cabinets filled with boxes and bottles of pills and palliatives, Nothing is a Problem for Me (1992), for just under $6 million.

“Last year we had our best fair ever in Miami, and this time we’re having our best fair ever in Basel,” said White Cube’s Graham Steele. “The quality of the fairs are of the highest, but they just have a very different cultural feeling. There’s something wonderful about being in Switzerland. You’re in a small town. You’re in a town that’s steeped in culture that goes back a thousand years. You have these institutions that have these phenomenal collections that add perspective.

“What’s wonderful about Miami is, it’s New World. You have a phenomenal energy. There’s a different crowd. It’s a Miami energy. It’s a Miami heat. Here you bring the absolute best; there you might bring something newer and sexier and bigger.”

Galerie Lelong of New York and Paris also had a phenomenal fair, according to gallery vice president Mary Sabbatino. By day three of the six-day fair, the gallery had sold one of Jaume Plensa’s bronze sculptures featuring the elongated and serene face of an Asian woman with her hair pulled back in a bun, as well as works by David Nash, Sean Scully and Ana Mendieta for an undisclosed amount.

Lelong is an institution at the Basel and Miami Beach fairs, exhibiting in Switzerland for more than four decades and in Florida since the fair’s inception in 2002.

As the global art market is exploding, both fairs are improving apace, Sabbatino said.

“The quality here is one of the best I’ve seen, and Basel is always traditionally an art fair where the quality is high,” she said. “Miami also is high in a different way. But in Basel, this particular Basel, it really seems like everyone put on their finest clothes and really are showing wonderful works in all the booths.”

Come December, Miami Beach is also expected to excel, Sabbatino said, explaining that every gallery reapplied to exhibit at the fair — something that had never happened before. Sabbatino serves on the selection committee that oversees who gets to exhibit in Miami Beach, and she said the competition is fierce in both locations. More than 1,000 galleries applied for space at Basel this year, but only 285 made the cut.

The Basel fair differs from Miami Beach’s in that it is slightly larger, with exhibition space on two floors, and a separate hall for showing large-scale works in a program titled Unlimited.

The bigger and bolder works dominated that sector of the fair. Among the highlights were:

• Giuseppe Penone’s Matrice di Linfa (Matrix of Sap), a 2008 work in which a giant fir tree is sawed in half lengthwise and presented like an open book that reveals its age when 80 years old. The tree spans more than 150 feet, with both halves positioned end-to-end. At Tucci Russo Studio, Torino, Italy.

• Julio Le Parc’s Continuel Mobile Sphere Rouge (2013) includes some 3,000 red translucent Plexiglas squares suspended by wire and assembled into an orb measuring 15 feet in diameter. Whenever someone walks by, the air shifts, causing the sphere to move and cast cascading shards of red light onto the surrounding walls and floor. At Bugada & Cargnel, Paris.

• Haegue Yang’s Accommodating the Epic Dispersion — On Non-cathartic Volume of Dispersion (2012) features a colorful array of everyday window blinds arranged in various stages of extension and aperture that immediately captured attention as visitors entered the hall. At Kukje Gallery of Seoul, South Korea, and the Tina Kim Gallery of New York.

• Carl André’s Steel Peneplain (1982), a floor sculpture that goes almost unnoticed by visitors until they are actually walking on it, as the 300 steel plates that comprise the walkway blend into the exhibition hall’s gray floor. At Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf, Germany.

In a nearby exhibition hall, Design Miami had its share of monumental works, including:

• Jamie Zigelbaum’s Triangular Series, which set the tone for the show in the anteroom where visitors ascended on escalators to Design Miami. Made of translucent white acrylic and steel, this assemblage of nearly five dozen sculptures hung from the ceiling like a forest of stalactites, pulsating with light and interacting with people below and each adjacent sculpture. Set against a sensory-depriving black background, the inverted and elongated pyramids of light evoked the feeling of ice floes in dark water.