George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Pérez Art Museum seeks sharp boost in county funding" @miamiherald by DOUGLAS HANKS

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Pérez Art Museum seeks sharp boost in county funding" @miamiherald by DOUGLAS HANKS

A view of the the Perez Art Museum Miami’s signature hanging gardens shortly after its December 2013 opening. Massive columns with shrubbery hang like an enchanted forest. The museum, called the PAMM by locals, opened in December and quickly became a popular spot for tourists and locals alike. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) Lynne Sladky / AP

The Pérez Art Museum Miami wants a $2.5 million boost in government support, with taxpayers set to cover a third of the museum’s budget next year.

Housed in a new $130 million waterfront headquarters built largely with government money, PAMM’s celebrated debut late last year also tripled the non-profit’s annual operating expenses, to $14 million from $5 million. Private dollars have not kept pace with the higher costs, leaving a gap that PAMM wants Miami-Dade to help close with a 60 percent increase in the museum’s operating subsidy from hotel taxes, according to interviews and budget documents.

“I consider that to be an asset for the county,” Mayor Carlos Gimenez said of PAMM. “We’ve known for a long time they were going to need to grow their operating subsidies. They’re open, and that’s why they need a little bit more.”

PAMM currently receives $2.5 million from Miami-Dade, but the 2015 county budget Gimenez plans to unveil Tuesday earmarks $4 million for the museum, according to several top Gimenez aides. The museum also wants $1 million in property taxes from Miami’s Omni Community Redevelopment Agency, a special taxing district aimed at improving a neighborhood that stretches from Museum Park north to 23rd Street, the CRA’s director, Pieter Bockweg, confirmed this week.

The push for more public funding by the former Miami Art Museum comes as other non-profits supported by Miami-Dade face a 10 percent cut, and as Gimenez is warning of police layoffs and service reductions. PAMM receives its subsidy from hotel taxes, a funding source Gimenez used this year to narrow the county’s budget gap.

Gimenez’ plan to beef up PAMM’s subsidy is already drawing criticism as county commissioners face another budget process with job cuts on the table. Miami-Dade’s library system is poised to cut 90 full-time positions under Gimenez’s funding scenario, and the overall county budget contemplates a loss of 700 payroll slots without union concessions.

Commissioner Juan C. Zapata said he wants Miami-Dade to consider other uses for the hotel taxes that PAMM is seeking.

“We have a lot of flexibility with these dollars,’’ said Zapata, who represents West Kendall in a district that brushes up against the Everglades. “We’ve gotten on this path where we’re all-in supporting these cultural institutions that are all downtown and are already benefiting from public dollars for construction.”

For PAMM advocates, the extra dollars represent an increased investment in a high-profile cultural institution that’s taken on the added expense of operating in the heart of Miami’s revived waterfront. In 2004, voters endorsed Miami-Dade borrowing $100 million to move the former Miami Art Museum from an under-used county building to a new headquarters that has won raves from critics.

Leann Standish, the museum’s deputy director for external affairs, said the extra county funds would be used for the museum’s subsidized offerings.

“The support from the county really helps us to fund the programs we have found to be in great demand right now. We have free admission for all students. We have two free-admission days,” she said. “It's those free programs that we've found to be very successful.”

PAMM bears the name of Jorge Pérez, the Miami condo developer now enjoying a second high-rise boom across South Florida. In late 2011, he donated $15 million in art and pledged $20 million in cash, payable through 2022.

Budget documents show the museum expects to generate about $8 million next year from private sources, including $4 million from concessions, ticket sales and events, and about $4 million in donations and endowment revenue. That leaves a gap of more than $5 million that would be closed by government dollars.

Museum officials say attendance and membership sales are on track or even ahead of projections after PAMM’s Dec. 4 debut during the annual Art Basel week. Almost all of the museum’s corporate sponsors renewed for 2015, PAMM said.

“The demand has been way more than we projected, across the board,’’ Standish said.

The museum’s endowment hit $14 million for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, a figure well below PAMM’s long-term target of $70 million, according to the 2013 financial statement. The museum’s budget shows the endowment currently generates about $500,000 a year for operations — roughly 3 percent of the year’s $14 million budget.

Including the new building, PAMM listed assets of $167 million in 2013. The museum’s balance sheet listed about $10 million in cash and $14 million in investments, with an additional $31 million in pledges, receivable grants and holdings in trusts slated to provide cash in future years.

PAMM’s financial needs complicated the Miami Dolphins’ pursuit of hotel-tax dollars for a $350 million renovation of Sun Life Stadium. The team won approval June 17 of a new subsidy program that will send the Dolphins a maximum of $5 million in yearly bonus payments for hosting Super Bowls and other large sporting events, provided Miami-Dade can first cover its existing hotel-tax obligations.

Though not binding on commissioners, a county list of about $30 million in hotel-tax obligations written forecasts paying PAMM $4 million annually through the life of the Dolphins’ 20-year deal.

Hotel taxes continue to hit record levels, and are up 8 percent this year. But the revenue source is also under strain, largely thanks to a portfolio of debt tied to the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the Miami Beach Convention Center and Marlins Park.

While state law limits hotel-tax exependitures, during the past two years Gimenez used $50 million in surplus hotel taxes to replace general-fund dollars subsidizing the county’s parks department. The shift, endorsed by county commissioners, freed up general-fund money to be spent on core services, including police, jails and homeless animals.

With the reserves drained, Gimenez said he won’t be using hotel taxes to ease pressure on the general fund for the 2015 budget. If Gimenez could repeat this year’s strategy of shifting $25 million in hotel taxes to parks, it would eliminate more than a third of the $65 million budget gap facing Miami-Dade.

The gap is driving Gimenez’s austerity plan, which forecasts about 200 job cuts in the county’s police department and other spending reductions. Leaders of social-service agencies and other charities funded by Miami-Dade packed a budget hearing last week to protest Gimenez’s plan to cut nearly $2 million out of the county’s $20 million Community Based Organization program. The CBO program funds homeless shelters, pantry programs, battered-women advocates and other groups.

Michael Spring, Gimenez’s cultural chief, said Miami-Dade always intended to give PAMM $4 million this year, but that the current budget strain forced the $2.5 million allotment. He called the $4 million contribution for 2015 reasonable support for a new county asset.

“We don’t make a $100 million investment in a beautiful new building and say we don’t care about your operating budget,” he said.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/06/4218146/perez-art-museum-seeks-60-percent.html#storylink=cpy

George Lindemann Journal - "By the Numbers | The Facts and Figures Behind Jeff Koons’s Massive, Awe-Inspiring Show at the Whitney" @nytimes by KEVIN MCGARRY

George Lindemann Journal - "By the Numbers | The Facts and Figures Behind Jeff Koons’s Massive, Awe-Inspiring Show at the Whitney" @nytimes by KEVIN MCGARRY

Like Jeff Koons himself, “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is larger than life. The biggest show the institution has ever devoted to a single artist, it sprawls across all four floors, occupying 27,000 square feet of exhibition space. Included among the 145 works on display is a pastel Koons created last year specifically for T. The show also serves as the farewell party for the Whitney’s iconic Marcel Breuer building before the museum relocates to its new Renzo Piano-designed space downtown next year. Here, a few more key figures about this one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime survey.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Suit Seeks to Block Corcoran Takeover" @nytimes by RANDY KENNEDY

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann  - "Suit Seeks to Block Corcoran Takeover" @nytimes by RANDY KENNEDY

The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Credit Marge Ely for The Washington Post, via Getty Images

When the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington — one of the nation’s oldest privately supported museums — announced in May that its artwork, landmark building and venerable school would be taken over by the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University, the arrangement was presented as a done deal.

But on Wednesday, a group of museum donors, current and former students, and former faculty and staff members went to court to try to block the dismantling of the Corcoran, saying it would violate the 1869 deed and the charter of the museum’s founder, William W. Corcoran, a banker who gave his art for the “perpetual establishment and maintenance of a public gallery and museum” to promote painting, sculpture and other fine arts. The opponents, members of a group called Save the Corcoran, contend in court papers that museum trustees want to “commit the gravest form of fiduciary breach: to destroy the very institution they are charged with protecting.”

Officials at the Corcoran — which has run operating deficits for more than a decade — filed papers last month asking to override Corcoran’s 1869 deed, saying it was “financially impossible” to carry on the museum and school in their present form and that they believe the plan is the “most closely aligned with the original intent of Mr. Corcoran.”

Under the deal announced in May, which must be approved by a District of Columbia judge, the defunct Corcoran would cede its collection of more than 17,000 pieces, rich in American art, to the National Gallery, its much larger neighbor. The National Gallery would preserve a “Legacy Gallery” within the Corcoran’s building on 17th Street, a block from the White House, and organize its own exhibitions of modern and contemporary art there. The much-admired building would become the property of George Washington University, which would use it for classes for students of the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Opponents contend that the Corcoran would exist as little more than a name under the plan and that the historic building would no longer function as a museum.

They also claim in court papers that in recent years the Corcoran’s board has put scant effort into fund-raising and has mismanaged the institution’s money through “self-dealing, conflicts of interest, hiring unqualified management and profligate spending on consultants whose advice was ultimately ignored.”

As an example of mismanagement claimed in the suit, opponents say that a neighbor of the Corcoran’s board chairman, Harry F. Hopper III, was hired to be the Corcoran’s chief of operations in 2011, though the woman  had a background in “homeland-security contracting, not museum operations or organizations involved in the arts.”

As finances dwindled, the board explored selling the 17th Street building and relocating the museum to Alexandria, Va., or elsewhere; it later explored a partnership with the University of Maryland that failed to materialize.

A spokeswoman for the Corcoran said Wednesday morning that the museum’s lawyers had not had a chance to review the new court papers and would not have a comment until they had done so.

The opponents argue that as bad as the financial situation is, “the charitable purpose of the trust may yet be practicable, if managed properly,” and they ask the judge, Robert Okun, of the District of Columbia Superior Court, to prevent a “midsummer rush to judgment” by closely examining the Corcoran’s financial records. “If one of the oldest and most vaunted art museums in Washington, D.C., is permitted to disappear overnight,” the opponents said in court papers, “the public interest demands that such an undertaking proceed with the utmost consideration and with due regard for all interested voices.”

Jayme McLellan, an artist who has taught at the school for many years and is a leader of the opposition, said in an interview that “the Corcoran hasn’t had a series of checks and balances for decades — it’s been run like a mom and pop shop or a small gallery.”

The museum’s situation echoes in some respects that of the Barnes Foundation, created in a Philadelphia suburb in 1922 by another wealthy collector, Albert C. Barnes, who died in 1951. The foundation, in financial trouble, waged a long court battle beginning in 2002 to override the wishes of Barnes, who stipulated that none of the paintings in the collection could be lent, sold or moved. But the foundation prevailed and relocated the works to a new building in downtown Philadelphia.

In the case of the Corcoran, the most important parts of the collection would go to the National Gallery and would be identified as Corcoran works, though how many of them would be displayed and how often would be determined by the National Gallery. Other works that the National Gallery would not be able to absorb would be dispersed to other museums, with a preference for keeping them in Washington. Earl A. Powell III, the director of the National Gallery, has said that “more art probably will be in the public view in these arrangements than before” and praised the arrangement for creating what he called “one of the great collections — if not the greatest collection — of American art in the country.”

As in the Barnes case, at issue is whether the opponents to the plan have legal standing to block it. In court papers, Corcoran patrons, students and others opposing the move argue that they have “crucial rights, legal obligations and financial and reputational interests at stake.” The attorney general for the District of Columbia, which is charged with oversight of charitable institutions, has been in discussions with the Corcoran’s trustees and has expressed no opposition thus far to the dissolution plan. In interviews, former and current Corcoran staff members describe a steady downward spiral for the institution that began after a hugely ambitious plan to build a $170 million addition to the museum, designed by Frank Gehry, fell apart in 2005 amid fund-raising shortfalls and board disagreements. Patrons with substantial resources left the board; trustees struggled to meet operating expenses and turned toward selling museum-owned land as one stopgap fund-raising measure. But opponents to the planned merger contend that the institution — with its renowned Beaux-Arts building, world-class collection and status as a revered Washington art destination — could have dug itself out of the hole if trustees had worked hard enough, managed properly and sought new benefactors.

“There really needs to be an independent review,” said Carolyn Campbell, the museum’s first public relations chief in the 1970s and 1980s, and who is a party to the opposition lawsuit. “We need to figure out what’s really happened there.”     

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 - "Shapes of an Extroverted Life" @nytimes by Roberta Smith

George Lindemann Journal - "Shapes of an Extroverted Life" @nytimes by Roberta Smith

There are so many strange, disconcerting aspects to Jeff Koons, his art and his career that it is hard to quite know how to approach his first New York retrospective, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s largest survey devoted to a single artist.

First there are the notorious sex pictures from his “Made in Heaven” series of 1989-91, big paintings printed in oil inks on canvas that depict the artist in stagy foreplay, and beyond, with his wife then, the angelic Ilona Staller, known in her porn-star days as La Cicciolina. There is the automaton-like presence of the artist himself, as freakish as Andy Warhol, but far wordier, seemingly more extroverted and given to a slightly nonsensical Koonsspeak that casts him as the truest believer in a cult of his own invention. Like his art, he is completely sincere.

 

 

Then there are all the big, often shiny sculptures, framed posters and glossy paintings, all tending toward an almost brain-freezing hyper-realism that isolates and fastidiously transforms objects from all corners of contemporary life: household appliances, gift store tchotchkes, advertising posters, children’s toys. And, finally, there is the way that these works — which are often exorbitantly expensive to make and frequently break auction records — can unavoidably reek of Gilded Age excess, art star hubris and the ever-widening inequality gap that threatens this country.   

Play Video|2:32

Presenting ‘Play-Doh’

Presenting ‘Play-Doh’

The artist Jeff Koons unveils his new sculpture “Play-Doh” in a retrospective at the Whitney Museum. The piece took 20 years to complete.

Credit By Colin Archdeacon on Publish Date June 27, 2014

Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

So it seems fitting that you may actually recoil when you step off the elevator into the first gallery of “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,” the lucid, challenging, brilliantly installed exhibition organized by Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s associate director of programs. The show is a farewell blowout before the Whitney cedes its Marcel Breuer building to its new tenant, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and heads for new digs downtown.

Its opening salvo is a stunning allée of bizarre Pharaonic splendor: six pieces consisting of gleaming vacuum cleaners encased in plexiglass and suffused with an insistent glow: Every appliance, or pair of them, rests on a raft of fluorescent lights that almost deflect your gaze.

Odes to domesticity, hygiene and American assembly lines that also evoke levitating mummies in see-through sarcophagi, these works date from the early 1980s and are part of a series called “The New.” The name signals Mr. Koons’s obsession with their virginal purity, and his interest in isolating an essential pleasure of consumerism: newness itself. Conflating Minimalism, Pop and Conceptual Art in a gift-wrapped version of Duchamp’s ready-made, they were the first of several shocks — “Is it art?” “Is it any good?” “Do I love it or hate it?” — that Mr. Koons has regularly delivered to his expanding audience over the last four decades.

Impersonal yet deeply familiar, the vacuum cleaner pieces introduce the essential seduction-repulsion dynamic that is basic to most of Mr. Koons’s art. Further along in the show, you may be taken by a vase of outsize flowers, carved in wood by skillful German artisans. It is gorgeously colorful, deliciously magnified and a respite from the sex paintings surrounding it. But look more closely: Many of the flowers’ centers are brown bumpy discs that broadcast a creepy fecundity suggestive of erupting skin, simmering mud or sewage.

 

The erotic and, to some extent, the scatological are never far beneath the surface in Mr. Koons’s art. Exhibit A is “Play-Doh,” a new, almost certain masterpiece whose sculptural enlargement of a rainbow pile of radiant chunks captures exactly the matte textures of the real thing, but also evokes paint, dessert and psychedelic poop.

The most cogent account of Mr. Koons’s career in over two decades, this show benefits from a meeting of like sensibilities. Mr. Koons is a famous perfectionist who takes many years (“Play-Doh” is dated 1994-2014), spends much money and often ends up inventing new techniques to get exactly what he wants in both his sculptures and his paintings, which are made by scores of highly skilled artists whom he closely supervises.

Mr. Rothkopf is equally meticulous, as suggested by the installations of his previous Whitney surveys of the work of Glenn Ligon and Wade Guyton. He’s also been fascinated by Mr. Koons’s work for nearly 20 years, since, as a teenager, coming across an exhibition catalog of his art. The depth of his fascination is apparent in his accomplished, jargon-free catalog essay, an elaborate account of Mr. Koons’s art that underscores the way it entwines with his life, beginning with his father’s home décor store, where “he witnessed firsthand the power of merchandise to tell stories and seduce.”

Mr. Rothkopf also marshals an elaborate if somewhat defensive argument for the way Mr. Koons self-consciously exposes the mechanisms of money and publicity in his art, in essence having his cake and eating it, too.

Mr. Rothkopf has imposed a classical installation on Mr. Koons’s restless exploration of objects. Symmetry and perpendicularity reign, with fewer than five sculptures placed diagonally.

Arranged chronologically, mostly one series to a gallery, the show fills five of the museum’s six floors. It charts Mr. Koons’s progress from visually enhanced ready-mades, like the vacuum cleaners; to existing objects transformed in appearance and value by being cast in bronze or stainless steel; through various kinds of remade objects, like his famous balloon sculptures, flimsy little nothings monumentalized in mirror-polished stainless steel.

Equally clear is his habit of circling back to expand on ideas. For example, in the small gallery devoted to the earliest works, we see that Mr. Koons first glamorized dime store items — mostly inflatable plastic flowers — by displaying them on tilelike mirrors. In other instances, what’s glammed up are piles of colorful kitchen sponges, unmistakable seeds for the giant “Play-Doh.”

Certain themes recur: the abiding interest in flotation, inflation and hollow forms as states of grace; the human desire for things, for other people and for joy; the inherent energy of objects; the human life cycle. There is also a progression from functional objects to nonessentials and knickknacks, then to children’s toys — among our first sources of visual pleasure — and other art. “The New” gives way to the “Equilibrium” series of 1985, starring immaculate incubating basketballs afloat in fish tanks and including framed posters of professional basketball stars swamped in new basketballs, alongside pieces of sea diving equipment cast perversely in bronze — and most sexily in “Lifeboat.” (There’s nothing quite like smooth inflated bronze.)

 

In the ice-cold “Luxury and Degradation” series, function takes a holiday. Here the accouterments of alcohol consumption are cast in stainless steel, which Mr. Koons called “proletarian platinum,” while the walls display framed liquor ads, with their amber fluids, printed on canvas.

If you are drawn to the “Baccarat Crystal Set” and disdain the jokey “Fisherman Golfer” caddy of drink-mixing utensils, shake hands with your own snobbery and class comfort. This conflict steps up as the show proceeds, in the mash-ups of inflatable pool toys and cheap lawn furniture of the “Popeye” series (although stuttering intersections of chairs and seals can bring to mind Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” paintings).

As for the new 10-foot-tall, shiny, yellow stainless version of Bernini’s tumultuous sculpture of the abduction of Proserpina by Pluto — actually based on a small 18th-century porcelain copy — Mr. Koons converts it into a fancy flower box by adding planters with white petunias. This seems déclassé (but there I go again). Maybe Mr. Koons wanted to anchor the work’s rippling surfaces and reflections, which give body to the golden liquids of the “Luxury and Degradation” liquor ads.

Throughout, jolting shifts in color, scale or subject matter encourage the heightened visual awareness that Mr. Koons’s work demands, and rewards. There are surprises around every corner. On the third floor, a row of 10 figures in polychrome wood or porcelain from Mr. Koons’s “Banality” series of 1988 form a single confrontational row in a narrow gallery. Including an amorous Pink Panther; a pig flanked by angels; a London bobby befriending a goofy bear; and, best of all, an ostentatious yet poignant rendition of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey, Bubbles, each of these works is a different collision of art with religion, sex or kitsch.

This series cost Mr. Koons some of his fan base, but laid the foundation for most of his subsequent work. He opened his art directly to art history, waded deep into popular culture and replaced ready-mades with figures based on either objects or images that he combined, tweaked and enlarged as he pleased. A piglet and a penguin in the arms of an imposing porcelain statue of St. John the Baptist are certainly not in the Leonardo da Vinci painting on which it is based. Hereafter, careful manipulations of scale become central to his expression.

Other shifts are quieter but no less edifying. One occurs when you exit the gallery of the fraught and busy sex paintings and find yourself surrounded by the big, serenely blank tinted mirrors of the “Easy Fun” series, each cut in the implicitly friendly shape of a cartoon animal. It is a bit of innocence regained.

Children’s toys and antiquities — forms retrieved from deep in our personal or cultural pasts — inspire many works on the fourth floor. Here you will find “Play Doh,” “Balloon Dog (Yellow)” and “Balloon Venus (Orange),” an extraordinary study in voluptuous geometry inspired by the Venus of Willendorf. There are also less felicitous efforts like “Hulk (Organ),” “Dogpool (Panties)” and the stupefying “Liberty Bell,” an exact copy (dated 2006-14), apparently indistinguishable from the one in Philadelphia that Mr. Koons visited as a child. A fake ready-made?

Despite some ups and downs, this is a gripping show. It chronicles a sculptural career that is singular for its profusion of color, crafts and materials; its opening up of historical avenues closed by Minimalism; and its faith in both accessibility and advanced art, that other New. And it’s a great way for the Whitney to decamp, tossing the Met the keys, knowing that we won’t soon forget that it still owns the place.

“Jeff Koons: A Retrospective” is on view through Oct. 19 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street; 212-570-3633 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 212-570-3633 FREE  end_of_the_skype_highlighting , whitney.org.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "The Ups and Downs of The Spring Auctions" @wsj by Kelly Crow

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "The Ups and Downs of The Spring Auctions" @wsj by Kelly Crow

                                  
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Midway through New York's major spring auctions, collectors of Impressionist and modern art appear to be showing signs of sticker stock, even as contemporary-art buyers prepare to splurge on.

Earlier this week, Sotheby's BID -0.05% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE $40.48 -0.02-0.05% May 14, 2014 9:51 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 39,739 P/E Ratio 18.97 Market Cap $2.79 Billion Dividend Yield 0.99% Rev. per Employee $576,249 41.0040.7540.5040.2510a11a12p1p2p3p 05/07/14 The WSJ's Kelly Crow at the So... 05/07/14 Loeb Wins by Losing at Sotheby... 05/07/14 Court Ruling Bolsters New Type... More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position and Christie's sold a combined $611.2 million worth of Impressionist and modern art, a total that fell within their presale expectations and exceeded a similar series last May that sold for $478 million.

Bidding proved thin for some of Christie's priciest works Tuesday—dealer Paul Gray was the lone bidder on a $22.6 million Pablo Picasso —and around a third of Sotheby's offerings on Wednesday went unsold. Sotheby's failures included a Picasso portrait of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, expected to sell for at least $15 million.

But the same collectors who sniffed at Sotheby's art trophies turned up in force the next day for its sale of lower-priced material. It was a clue that this seasoned subset of collectors is willing to bid—but at price levels below $5 million, unless the art on offer is truly museum-worthy.

New York collector Donald Bryant thought he had hit his limit at Christie's on Tuesday after he offered $6.1 million for Constantin Brâncusi's toaster-size stone sculpture of a kissing couple, "The Kiss." But when he bowed out, he got a nudge from his wife, Bettina, and jumped back in at $7.2 million. "Is it because of her?" auctioneer Andreas Rumbler asked, adding with a grin, "She's the boss." The extra effort didn't pay off, though: The Brancusi sold to another bidder for $8.7 million.

Auction specialists say the art market has seen this divergence in collecting categories before. Decades ago, Old Masters enjoyed top billing until Impressionist and modern art became fashionable among wealthy collectors. Suddenly, its roster of artists such as Claude Monet began fetching the kinds of prices once reserved for Rembrandt and Canaletto. Now the art market appears to be shuffling again: With the majority of Impressionist and modern masterpieces now tucked away in museum collections, new buyers are finding it difficult to amass an enviable collection in a short time.

Many Asian collectors are still trying. At least eight of Sotheby's pricier works on Wednesday went to Asian collectors—including a $19.2 million Henri Matisse view of a woman painting at her easel, "The Afternoon Session."

Dealers say the art market will undergo its greater stress test this week, when both houses, plus boutique house Phillips, hold their sales of contemporary art. In recent seasons, auction prices for contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Christopher Wool have quadrupled—a pace that's encouraged speculators to buy up even younger artists in hopes of profiting later in resales.

Last November, Christie's sold a yellow Francis Bacon triptych for $142.4 million, almost $60 million above its estimate and the most ever paid for a work of art at auction. Next Tuesday, the house will offer up a seafoam-green Bacon triptych, 1984's "Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards," for an estimated $80 million. The seller is computer-chip maker Pierre Chen.

Mr. Chen's Bacon carries a third-party guarantee. This means the auction has promised him it will sell—to an outside investor who has pledged to buy it for an undisclosed sum if no one during the sale offers more. If the guarantor is outbid, he or she will reap a share of Mr. Chen's potential profits and take home a financing fee from Christie's no matter what. (Sotheby's doesn't offer financing fees.)

Unlike Impressionist and modern art, next week's contemporary sales are swimming in guarantees—at least $650 million worth across the three houses. The amount eclipses Sotheby's entire guarantee portfolio for 2008, the last market peak.

Both Christie's and Sotheby's say they feel comfortable with their volume of guarantees.

For the Tuesday sales, third-party guarantors claim a financial interest in 39 of Christie's 72 contemporary artworks, which means that 54% of the estimated $500 million sale will change hands whether anyone even shows up with a paddle. This includes Andy Warhol's "Race Riot," a red-white-and-blue silk-screen that recently belonged to a trust of dealer Bill Acquavella's family and that Christie's estimates will sell for around $45 million.

All this means that contemporary collectors, unlike buyers of Impressionist and modern art, are going to unprecedented lengths to keep fueling their segment's momentum, even if they must bankroll the offerings themselves ahead of time. If the strategy works, it could reshape the way art gets auctioned, with sellers essentially preselling their art privately but angling for a higher, backstop price at auction. If the broader financial markets sour suddenly, bidders could get spooked, and these deal makers may be left owning art at prices that may appear inflated. Stay tuned.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Strolling an Island of Creativity" @nytimes By KEN JOHNSON and MARTHA SCHWENDENER

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Strolling an Island of Creativity" @nytimes By KEN JOHNSON and MARTHA SCHWENDENER

The amazing spectacle that is Frieze New York is up and running on Randalls Island. With more than 190 contemporary art dealers from around the world inhabiting a temporary, quarter-mile-long white tent, it’s a dumbfounding display of human creative industry. Reasoning that in the time allowed, no one reviewer could hope to achieve a comprehensive overview of all there is to see, we both went to look and report. What follows is a sampler of things that caught our attention.

GLADSTONE GALLERY (Booth B6) This museum-worthy show includes more than 200 small drawings from the painter Carroll Dunham’s archives. Dating from 1979 to 2014, they are presented on three walls in grid formation chronologically. Like pages from a personal diary, they track the evolution of Mr. Dunham’s antic imagination. From sketches of blobby, surrealistic forms to pictures of battling, cartoony male and female characters to images of naked, hairy wild women and men in edenic scenes, these irrepressibly lively, cheerfully vulgar drawings suggest a psychoanalytic pilgrim’s progress. (K. J.)

GAVIN BROWN (B38) This booth is filled by Rirkrit Tiravanija’s installation “Freedom can not be simulated.” It consists of about a dozen plywood walls arranged in parallel about a foot and a half apart. On one side of each wall hangs a large black canvas covered with squiggly chalk lines that you can only see fully by squeezing in between the walls. The first canvas in the series has the title drawn on it in big block letters. The installation offers itself as a pointedly coercive metaphor about the eternally necessary tension between freedom and constraint. (K. J.)

ANDREW KREPS (B54) Goshka Macuga’s “Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not 2” is a giant black-and-white tapestry made on looms in Flanders. Over 10 feet high and 36 feet wide, it presents a panoramic scene copied from a photoshopped collage representing an incongruous gathering of art world luminaries and political protesters at Documenta 13, an exhibition in Germany in 2012. Ms. Macuga’s work pictures the moral and political contradictions of contemporary art and its social support system as powerfully as anything at the fair. (K. J.)

MARIANNE BOESKY (A30) This gallery offers “Revolution,” a sculpture by Roxy Paine that expresses a more ambiguous political sentiment. A chain saw with a bullhorn attached, both realistically rendered in wood, it’s a piece of impressive craftsmanship and a surrealistic dream image of political violence. (K. J.)

RATIO 3 (C56) For technical magic, nothing beats Takeshi Murata’s “Melter 3-D.” In a room lit by flickering strobes, a revolving, beachball-size sphere seems made of mercury. A hypnotic wonder, it appears to be constantly melting into flowing ripples. (K. J.)

303 GALLERY (B61)Many works at the fair meditate on art and the artist. Rodney Graham’s big, light-box-mounted phototransparency “The Pipe Cleaner Artist, Amalfi, ’61”, at 303, depicts Mr. Graham in a lovely Mediterranean studio, leisurely making sculptures from white pipe cleaners. With a sweetly comical spirit, it spoofs a kitschy romance of bohemian avant-gardism. (K. J.)

NOGUERASBLANCHARD (A6) A found-object sculpture by Wilfredo Prieto plumbs the sublime. Suspended by cables a few feet off the floor, it’s a metal cage used by divers to observe sharks. Among its many possible implications is the suggestion of the artist’s descent into the monster-infested depths of the unconscious. (K. J.)

 

CROY NIELSEN (C1) In a tall, plexiglass display case here is a simple but philosophically resonant assemblage by Benoît Maire. Titled “Weapon,” it consists of a three-sided ruler attached to a rock by a wrist watch’s metal bracelet. It’s about rationalizing the irrational, an enduring task for art. (K. J.)

GALERIE LELONG (B12) A neon sign by Alfredo Jaar that reads “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness” is a fine prayer for what art might do for our troubled times. (K. J.)

One thing this fair allows you to do is to sample in one location what critics see around the city and the world. This includes emerging artists and historical shows. You’ll find many of them under a special designation, Frieze Focus, indicating galleries founded in or after 2003, and in Frame, a section that features solo presentations by galleries under eight years old.

SIMONE SUBAL (B21) This Bowery gallery is showing a Florian Meisenberg installation that fits in perfectly at an art fair because it takes its cue from another “nonspace”: the airport, with its spectacle of architecture, patterns, moving people and digital screens. It includes a video with excerpts from the film “Lolita” and an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Homer becomes a lauded outsider artist. (M. S.)

LAUREL GITLEN (B28) This gallery offers Allyson Vieira’s “Meander,” a structure made of metal building studs that uses the ancient meander pattern (also found on classic New York coffee cups) as its floor plan and suggests how certain graphic patterns are recycled throughout various empires. (MS)

CARLOS/ISHIKAWA (B34) This London gallery is showing Richard Sides’s collagelike assemblages, made from a personal archive of what he calls “good trash” collected outside his studio. (M. S.)

MISAKO & ROSEN (B20) This Tokyo-based gallery has objects by Kazuyuki Takezaki, who was inspired by the great ukiyo-e printmaker Hiroshige to recreate “landscapes” that sometimes take the form of sculptures, and include materials like a braided rug. (M. S.)

LE GUERN (A2) Dominating the space in this Warsaw gallery’s booth is a solo presentation of the Brooklyn artist C. T. Jasper, a tent made from around 160 sheepskins. (Get it? a tent within the big tent of Frieze). Inside the tent is a remix of the Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s 1966 film “Faraon (Pharaoh)” — but with all the human figures digitally removed from the film. (M. S.)

Gallerists are getting good at organizing historical shows, and several at Frieze are standouts.

JAMES FUENTES (C2) This Delancey Street gallery offers a presentation of the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, best known for performance events like “Make a Salad” (1962). Here you can see objects made by Ms. Knowles from the ’70s to the present. If you hear a loud cascading sound at the south end of the fair, it is someone flipping over her “Red Bean Turner,” which is like an opaque hourglass filled with dried beans. (M. S.)

THE BOX (C14) This Los Angeles gallery has a great roundup of work by NO!Art, a group founded in 1959 that was distinctly (paradoxically, for this setting) anti-commercial. Collages and silk-screens by Boris Lurie, Stanley Fisher and Sam Goodman look incredibly prescient — like Mr. Lurie’s painting “Sold.” (M. S.)

GREGOR PODNAR (A22) In a smaller historical presentation you can see 1970s photographs and Conceptual drawings by two Gorans: Goran Trbuljak and Goran Petercol, Croatian artists who were routinely mistaken for each other in their local Zagreb art scene because of their first names. (M. S.)

PROJECTS Just outside the tent, the Projects section includes the Czech artist Eva Kotatkova‘s “Architecture of Sleep,” an outdoor installation with performers resting on platforms (and who should not be disturbed). Marie Lorenz, who works on New York’s waterways, is offering rides in a rowboat made with salvaged materials. Unfortunately, her “Randalls Island Tide Ferry” doesn’t offer service to or from the fair, but it accomplishes what most art tries to do: It transports you. (M. S.)

Correction: May 10, 2014

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the artist who created “Melter 3-D.” He is Takeshi Murata, not Murato

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Minimalist Retrospective Gets a Master’s Touch" @ wsj by RANDY KENNEDY

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Minimalist Retrospective Gets a Master’s Touch" @ wsj by RANDY KENNEDY

A Minimalist Master Returns

A Minimalist Master Returns

Carl Andre is one of America’s greatest living sculptors. He has been mostly absent from the American art scene for decades, but recently returned to oversee the installation of a new retrospective.

Credit By Oresti Tsonopoulos on Publish Date May 4, 2014

Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Carl Andre, a father of Minimalism and one of the greatest living American sculptors, decided to retire a few years ago, in his mid-70s. And for an exacting artist who usually insisted on arranging and installing most of his pieces himself, on site, retirement had a special ring of finality.

“People ask me what I do now,” Mr. Andre said recently. “And I tell them I do something most Americans find very, very hard to do: I do nothing.”

He was so determined to do nothing, in fact, that when the Dia Art Foundation began more than two years ago to plan a huge, long-overdue retrospective of his work — the show opens on Monday at the foundation’s outpost in Beacon, N.Y. — he told a reporter that he had informed the curators in no uncertain terms: “I can’t stop you from doing it, but don’t expect me to do anything to help.”

But over the last several weeks, to the foundation’s surprise — maybe even to his own — Mr. Andre has been making treks from his Manhattan apartment to Beacon to help oversee the installation, emerging from a kind of self-imposed seclusion that had begun long before his retirement; sightings of him in the art world, for more than two decades, were rare occurrences.

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A Minimalist Retrospective

A Minimalist Retrospective

Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

In part, this absence came about because of what happened early one morning in 1985, when Mr. Andre’s third wife, the promising Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, fell to her death from a bedroom window of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment. She had had an argument with Mr. Andre, who later told the police he was not in the room when she fell.

He was acquitted of second-degree murder. But the death and highly publicized trial created a deep divide in the art world. It caused museums to shy away from him and his work for years and cast a shadow over a career that had been difficult to begin with, composed of work that, as much as any made in the 1960s and ’70s, occasioned the sometimes angry question “Why is that art?” (Asked in a 2011 interview about the effect of Mendieta’s death on him and his career, Mr. Andre said only: “It didn’t change my view of the world or of my work, but it changed me, as all tragedy does. But I have people who love me and believe in me.”)

During an era when many artists were pulling sculpture off the plinth and making it part of the world in a new way, Mr. Andre went further, taking it all the way to the ground, in pieces made up of metal tiles arranged simply in grids, lines or triangles, meant not only to be looked at but also walked on and experienced with the body. And while other artists were finding beauty and new meaning in raw industrial materials, Mr. Andre used such materials barely altered: aluminum ingots piled in pyramids; firebricks in rectangular stacks; timbers in dimensions available from the sawmill, arranged in basic geometric shapes.

“He was interested in the matter of matter, in what was right underfoot,” the sculptor Richard Serra said. “For me, when I first started out, that was enormously important.” He added: “I hope that Carl’s work is given the recognition that it deserves. And I really hope that younger sculptors pay attention to it.”

While Mr. Andre’s work is in many prominent public collections, there has not been an American survey of his career in more than 30 years, and awareness of his pioneering role in an important postwar sculptural movement has diminished along with his public presence. More than most artists of his generation, his presence was also integral to his art: He worked without a studio, traveling the world to galleries or places that commissioned pieces and often finding the materials to make the works in whatever city he was in. The sculptures were decisively human scale; Mr. Andre usually chose components sized so that he could move them all himself.

“It’s always been easier for me to do it myself, rather than to explain to somebody what to do,” Mr. Andre said, sitting one recent morning, looking at a 1979 piece composed of 121 square pieces of Douglas fir. “But I must say, as I have grown older, my physical capacities have been very much reduced. So I used to be able to sling those timbers around like nothing at all. And I don’t want to try nowadays.”

Asked why he decided to become personally involved in the installation of the retrospective, he shrugged. “People keep un-retiring me,” he said, “and eventually I just give in.”

Mr. Andre — who was raised in Quincy, Mass., and once worked as a railroad brakeman to pay his bills — is slightly unsteady on his feet these days. But he is as quick-witted and dryly caustic as he was said to be in his youth, when he was known as a kind of philosopher-scourge of SoHo, a Marxist who chafed at the commercial art world and being “a kept artist of the imperial class.” At 78, he looks like a Melville-ian sea captain, with a thick white beard under his chin and blue bib overalls, a utilitarian uniform he has worn for years, varied only by the occasional addition of a loose blue sweater vest knitted for him by his fourth wife, the artist Melissa Kretschmer, who is usually at his side.

Yasmil Raymond, Dia’s curator, said the prospect of installing more than four decades’ worth of his work without his input would have been daunting. Before his arrival one recent weekday, she and others had arranged a 2005 work of copper plates and graphite blocks, intended to be placed along a floor with a look of randomness.

“He might just laugh when he sees this,” said Ms. Raymond, who organized the show with Philippe Vergne, Dia’s former director, and the curator Manuel Cirauqui. “I’m trying to make it look random, but I’m looking at it and I’m seeing too much order.” (Upon arriving, Mr. Andre didn’t laugh; he suggested some changes and sympathized with the curator: “Even listing random numbers is hard, you know? Patterns start appearing.”)

Surveying the vast space allotted to his work inside Dia:Beacon, a former box-printing factory, Mr. Andre seemed a little daunted himself. “My work isn’t so big,” he said, almost plaintively. “It’s not big enough.” But he allowed that the diffused daylight coming in through angled skylights was ideal for seeing his sculpture as he intended, with a degree of directness that might seem simple but is never easy to achieve. “People want to spotlight things, and I hate that,” he said. “I like even light, shadowless.”

“No melodrama,” he added, waggling his fingers in the air.

Later, as Mr. Andre stood outside the museum supervising the re-creation of a 1968 piece, “Joint,” which consists of nothing more than hay bales he uses to “draw” a straight line on the earth, joining woods to field, it became apparent just how difficult simplicity can be. The line kept stubbornly curving, as workers laid the bales up the incline into the woods. “How many people does it take to make a straight line?” Ms. Raymond whispered to Mr. Andre.

George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann "Sotheby's, Third Point Reach Settlement" @wsj by David Benoit

George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann "Sotheby's, Third Point Reach Settlement" @wsj by David Benoit

Sotheby's expects Picasso's 'Le Sauvetage' will fetch at least $14 million at auction on Wednesday. Sotheby's

Sold!

Activist investor Daniel Loeb and auction house Sotheby's reached a settlement on Monday that concluded his seven-month campaign to shake up the company a day before shareholders were to vote on his board candidates.

The pact gives Mr. Loeb three board seats by expanding the board to 15 people rather than having Mr. Loeb's candidates go up against company nominees. The deal also caps Mr. Loeb's stock ownership at 15%. His hedge fund, Third Point LLC, currently owns about 9.6%, but it had sought the ability to go to 20%, a request the company had blocked, leading Third Point to sue.

On Monday, Sotheby's shares closed up 3.25%, or $1.41, to $44.80, at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange trading.

Settlements, even just hours before a scheduled vote, have become more common for activists and their targets because advisers believe it is better to hammer out a deal than risk a divisive shareholder vote.

Through last week, there have been 20 settlements between companies and activists so far this year, tied for the most to date since 2009, according to FactSet SharkWatch, a data provider.

In a joint statement on Monday, Mr. Loeb said: "As of today we see ourselves not as the Third Point Nominees but as Sotheby's directors, and we expect to work collaboratively with our fellow board members to enhance long-term value on behalf of all shareholders." Sotheby's Chairman and Chief Executive William Ruprecht also said the last-minute agreement "ensures that our focus is on the business."

The agreement came after a Delaware judge blessed Sotheby's so-called poison pill that limited how much stock Third Point could acquire. Beyond that legal issue, a court hearing last week in the suit enabled Third Point to surface internal board emails showing support for Mr. Loeb's point of view; also disclosed were inflammatory comments by Mr. Loeb. The airing of the various remarks added to the drama of a campaign that had captivated Wall Street and the art world.

Mr. Loeb is not a stranger in board rooms where he has spent time publicly attacking. At Yahoo Inc., YHOO +0.51% Yahoo! Inc. U.S.: Nasdaq $37.10 +0.19+0.51% May 6, 2014 1:23 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 8.24M P/E Ratio 30.58 Market Cap $37.15 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $383,012 37.2037.0036.8036.6010a11a12p1p2p3p 05/05/14 Sotheby's, Third Point Reach S... 05/05/14 Box Still Targets Microsoft, G... 05/05/14 CMO Today: Facebook Getting Ag... More quote details and news » YHOO in Your Value Your Change Short position before he joined the board, he waged a several-month war that saw a newly hired CEO fired. Yahoo's shares rose more than 85% during the time he was on the board, which was just over a year.

New York-based Sotheby's had criticized his exit at Yahoo in its presentations to shareholders, just one of the points of contention that will now need to be put aside in the auction house's boardroom.

In one such instance, according to a Friday court ruling, Mr. Loeb had emailed allies that he was waging a "holy jihad," with the plan being to "undermine the credibility" of Mr. Ruprecht. Mr. Loeb said the email was intended as a joke and not meant to offend.

Mr. Ruprecht referred to Mr. Loeb as "scum" to another board member and said the campaign was about "ego," the judge's ruling said.

But other directors worried Mr. Loeb's criticisms were on point and raised concerns about the company's spending and Mr. Ruprecht's compensation, according to court testimony.

Putting such distractions behind the company is "good for shareholders," Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst David Schick wrote on Monday, because it allows the firm to get back to focusing on its auction business.

That will include Sotheby's spring series of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art sales, which are expected to total at least $684 million during the next two weeks. Mr. Loeb has argued that Sotheby's has fallen behind rival Christie's International PLC in selling contemporary art. Christie's contemporary sale on May 13 is expected to bring in at least $500 million.

Mr. Loeb is among an emerging class of hedge-fund executives and art collectors who frequent both the major auction houses, ratcheting up prices for contemporary artists and quickly reselling their purchases for a profit.

The average holding period for contemporary art works has shrunk to about two years from at least a decade previously, according to a former Sotheby's specialist.

—Kelly Crow contributed to this article.

Write to David Benoit at david.benoit@wsj.com and Sara Germano at sara.germano@wsj.com

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Day in the Life of Artist Dan Colen" @wsj by Christopher Ross

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Day in the Life of Artist Dan Colen" @wsj by Christopher Ross

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FARM BOY | Colen at his property in upstate New York, where many of his large-scale pieces are constructed. Photography by Tim Barber for WSJ. Magazine

THE 34-YEAR-OLD ARTIST Dan Colen lives in Manhattan's East Village, but the majority of his work is made either at his new studio in Brooklyn's Red Hook, overlooking a blue expanse of the Upper New York Bay, or at his 40-acre farm in Pine Plains, New York, where roosters crow and the air smells of manure.

These are not his native environments: Raised in Leonia, New Jersey, he came to fame in the mid-aughts as a member of a gritty, decadent clique of artists (including Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley) who helped define the New York downtown arts scene and whose bacchanalian exploits are still legendary. Colen is sober now, and the location of his studios says something about the scale, direction and pace of his work these days. "Walking out of your studio and seeing water instead of the Holland Tunnel, that's going to affect how you create," he says.

This month, the Brant Foundation, in Connecticut, is mounting a comprehensive exhibition spanning his entire career. His trademark pieces blending abstraction with low materials—paintings made from bubble gum or resembling bird poop, papier–mâché boulders covered in graffiti—will be displayed alongside newer works that seem to reflect his change in scenery: small landscape paintings, a heap of scrap metal occupied by canaries. Preparing for the opening, he lopes around the museum with a rangy energy, wearing a tight-fitting jean jacket and Chuck Taylor All-Stars. Sporting a terrifically cowlicked head of hair, he sometimes resembles an overgrown boy. His irreverent former self appears in flashes, like when he mentions, as a cop car passes his Range Rover on the highway, that there is currently a warrant out for his arrest (he missed a court date for carrying a type of knife that's illegal in New York City).

Descending from a line of makers—his father sculpts with wood and clay, and his grandfather was a mechanic and inventor—it's not surprising that Colen now nearly resembles a construction foreman. In the course of a day, he consults with riggers installing an outdoor piece at Brant and discusses with foundry workers how to move boulders. At his farm, one member of his crew is strapping an ash-wood barrel shut while another is tinkering with guitar cases. He counsels his staff of artisans and workers not to focus so much on formal perfection as on an intuitive process of discovery. "I tell them it's not about virtuosity," he says. "It's about commitment."

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court" @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court" @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

Daniel S Loeb is seeking a seat on Sothebys boardSteve Marcus/ReutersDaniel S. Loeb is seeking a seat on Sotheby’s board.

A Delaware state court judge on Friday blocked efforts by the hedge fund mogul Daniel S. Loeb to overturn a crucial corporate defense at Sotheby’s, the auction house.

In a ruling issued Friday evening, Donald F. Parsons, a vice chancellor of Delaware’s Court of Chancery, decided that he would not overturn a so-called poison pill plan that limits Mr. Loeb to no more than 10 percent of Sotheby’s shares while letting passive investors hold as much as 20 percent.

The company’s annual shareholder meeting is Tuesday, when shareholders will cast their votes in what may be a watershed moment in the company’s 270-year history. And it may pave the way for companies to enact tougher defenses against outspoken activist investors pushing for change.

Mr. Loeb and his firm, Third Point, have nominated three director candidates, including himself, pitted against the current board at Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s poison pill, formally known as a shareholder rights plan, had set off debate within the corporate governance community. While companies have used such defenses for decades, the auction house’s version specifically discriminated against activist investors, a move that Third Point had contended was unfair.

But in his ruling, Vice Chancellor Parsons wrote that Mr. Loeb’s primary argument — that the poison pill unfairly impedes his ability to wage his campaign — was flawed. Sotheby’s had presented evidence that the rationale behind its defense could be seen as both rational and proportional to the threat of an activist investor.

And even with his current 10 percent stake, Mr. Loeb has been able to fight the company to a draw. Vice Chancellor Parsons noted that the hedge fund manager had roughly 10 times the number of shares that Sotheby’s board now owns, and that his own expert witness testified that, even now, Third Point has a roughly 50-50 chance of winning the proxy contest.

Mr. Loeb even testified in a deposition that nothing has hurt his ability to reach out to other shareholders.

“There is a substantial possibility,” the vice chancellor wrote, “that Third Point will win the proxy contest, which would make any preliminary intervention by this court unnecessary.”

Mr. Loeb has already won the support of Marcato Capital, another activist hedge fund and Sotheby’s third-largest shareholder. Last week, the influential proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services weighed in with support for Mr. Loeb, advising shareholders to vote for two of his three board nominees.

Mr. Loeb has criticized Sotheby’s for not adapting quickly enough to sweeping changes in the art industry in recent years and has accused it of falling behind its main rival, Christie’s, in crucial parts of the auction business, Impressionist and modern art. He has also railed against the compensation packages of board members, specifically singling out the pay of the chief executive, William F. Ruprecht, who received $6.3 million in 2012.

Sotheby’s adopted its poison pill last October, after Mr. Loeb called for Mr. Ruprecht to step down, arguing that it was in the best interests of all shareholders to ”encourage anyone seeking to acquire the company to negotiate with the board prior to attempting a takeover.”

During the hearing earlier this week in Delaware, Vice Chancellor Parsons was shown emails in which board members discussed the merits of some of Mr. Loeb’s criticisms. In one email, a board member, Steven B. Dodge, wrote that Mr. Ruprecht’s compensation was “red meat for the dogs.”

Mr. Dodge also wrote that the board was “too comfortable, too chummy and not doing its jobs,” in an email to another director, Dennis M. Weibling. “We have handed Loeb a killer set of issues on a platter.”

A rival proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis has supported Sotheby’s slate.

Representatives for Mr. Loeb and Sotheby’s declined to comment.

Gregory P. Taxin, president of the activist hedge fund Clinton Group, said the ruling was disappointing: “In Delaware, stockholders are apparently supposed to be like children in the 1950s: the good ones do not speak unless spoken to.”

A version of this article appears in print on 05/03/2014, on page B7 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Court.

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