Is Latin American art one of the few remaining categories left for the truly passionate collector?

Earlier this week, at the Artvest art finance conference in New York, Latin American art was often brought up as an example of a market that produces modest returns, but also boasts low volatility. Despite steady growth, Latin American art is, it seems, one of the few categories that has remained isolated from the frenzy that motivates hedge fund managers and Russian oligarchs to bid eight and nine figures for trophies by blue-chip modern masters. As such, the speculators and "art investors" are kept out, and great pieces of art from Latin American artists continue to be an attractive buy for collectors.

According to Virgilio Garza, the head of the Latin American art department at Christie's New York, "the nature of our market is very non-speculative. People are really passionate about this field — they don't sell things that easily or that often, so we see steady but upwards growth." As an example he pointed to one of the highest-estimated works in the upcoming sale, an abstract painting from 1944 by the Chilean artist Matta. It was executed during one of the artist's most important periods and has never before been sent to auction — two very good reasons for collectors to salivate over it. "La révolte des contraires" has been traded privately, but has only seen two or three owners, meaning each kept it for upwards of 30 years. Despite the fact  that Garza refers to the work as "one of the best [Mattas] that has ever been offered," it is estimated to fetch $1.8-2.5 million — the price of a third-tier Picasso, or 1/60th of "The Scream."

Fernando Botero is perhaps an even better example. In the May issue of Art+Auction, Julia Halperin referred to him as "Latin America's wealthiest and most recognizable artist." There are more than 30 Botero lots coming up for auction next week, and last November, many of the works sold by him nicked the high end of, or surpassed, pre-sale estimates. Yet, the best examples of his work sell for $1-2 million, nowhere near his contemporaries from Europe or the United States, and not far above where his prices were 20 years ago.

In November, the best result for a work by the artist was the gigantic sculpture "Dancers" (2007), which Christie's placed outside its Rockefeller Center headquarters for the few days before the sale. It hammered down for $1.76 million (est. $1.5-2 million), a record for the artist's sculpture. Compare this to stars in the contemporary market, artists who are around the same age: the record for a Lucian Freud work at auction is $33.6 million. For Gerhard Richter it's $21.8 million, set at last week's contemporary evening sale at Christie's. Botero's work — at least the paintings of his signature corpulent figures — have been fetching more than a million dollars at auction since the early 1990s. Back then, Richter's work was still in the mid-six figures.

But is the Latin American art market set for an explosion? It's possible that in the near future it will catch fire just as other 20th century art categories have. "You still have undervalued artists, you have opportunities, but it is not the same as 10 to20 years ago," noted Alejandro Zaia, the chairman of the Latin American art fair PINTA, which is held annually in New York and London. Slowly but steadily, prices are heading up. A rare Diego Rivera work is estimated to sell for $4-6 million next week at Sotheby's. Even better, Axel Stein, a Latin American art specialist and vice president of business development at the auction house, told ARTINFO that work by Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist who was once known only for being Rivera's wife, has sold privately at Sotheby's in the last year for above $10 million.

But as Latin American art's star rises, its distinction also fades. Zaia explained that many artists born and raised in Latin America are choosing to move to art-centric metropolises in the United States and Europe such as New York, London, and Berlin. As such, they are becoming part of the "mainstream flow," and collectors in U.S. and Europe are more exposed to their work. At the same time, they maintain connections with their primary galleries in their home countries, and are thus collected both locally and internationally.

"When you hear the name of Vik Muniz or Fernando Botero, it is very hard to call them Latin American artists, except for the fact that they were born there," said Stein. "The world has adapted a global art language."

What does make art Latin American, versus contemporary or modern, these days? Take the work of Muniz. The artist was born in Brazil, but lives and works in New York. Three of his works are being offered next week in the Latin American sales, two at Phillips and one at Christie's. But almost a dozen works were sold last week in the contemporary sale. (To make it more complicated there are two Muniz lots slated for the Phillips photography sale in London this week.)

The answer turns out to be fairly subjective. "There is the incorrect idea that an artist upgrades by moving to other categories," said Garza. Choosing a category for a particular artist is an organic process, not a given. "'Jackson Pollock' by Vik Muniz [referring to Muniz's "Convergence: Number 10, After Jackson Pollock (From Pictures Of Pigment)," 2008] just looks better in contemporary."

In “Space Program: Mars,” Tom Sachs fills the Park Avenue Armory with a kind of childhood fantasy gesamptkunstwerk — a collection of space travel modules impeccably replicated in everyday materials. The artist takes a clear joy in the work. In his role as mission commander, he orders an army of assistants to make repairs, give demonstrations, and answer any and all space travel-related questions. During the exhibition’s preview, ARTINFO caught Sachs in a rare lull and pulled him into the heart of his Lunar Lander to talk about the functional details of his models, the scope of the installation, and his obsession with space.

Click on the video below for ARTINFO's interview with Tom Sachs

– On the Catwalk: On Sunday, the Whitney Museum will host a full-blown fashion show conceived of by former stylist, queer art dynamo, and current Biennial star K8 Hardy, whose lumpy creations featuring found and recycled items are also included in the museum's biennial. Professional models will strut their stuff on a catwalk designed by fellow Biennial star Oscar Tuazon, and though the production will have all the trappings of a bona-fide fashion show, Hardy promises there will be no front row. [NYT, Whitney]

– Credit Card Fraudsters Fleece Auction Houses: A criminal network using fake credit cards at UK auction houses purloined an untold amount of art from big-name businesses. The theft ring, first uncovered last year, was originally thought to have targeted some 30 regional auction houses — but is now suspected of having stolen works from both Bonhams and Christie's, in what is surely a major PR black eye. “As a result of this incident [Christie’s] had to take a long, hard look at itself and what was being done to regulate payments,” says a former employe. "There was no real policy in place to deal with suspicious transactions." [TAN]

– Gehry Submits Stands by Eisenhower Child: After months of heavy criticism, Frank Gehry submitted revisions for the forthcoming Washington D.C. Eisenhower Memorial. He agreed to incorporate nine-foot-tall statues depicting the former president in wartime, but refused to give up the life-size sculpture of Eisenhower as a boy, which remains at the center of the memorial despite the family's contention that it was too "Horatio Alger." [Object Lessons]

– More Repatriation Requests from Turkey: The Turkish government's latest target in its widening repatriation initiative? Harvard University. Turkey asked the Dumbarton Oaks Museum to return 40 Byzantine relics were allegedly looted and smuggled out of the country in 1963. [Chasing Aphrodite] 

– Thomas Houseago Comes to the High Line: The beloved elevated park recently mounted an exhibition of tiny sculptures, but now, it seems, it's time to go big. Thomas Houseago's 15 foot-long headless sculpture "Lying Figure" will be installed this Friday on the High Line, underneath the Standard Hotel. [Press Release]

– Tate Raises Millions for Refurb: Thanks to donations from members, charities, and the British lottery, Tate Britain has reached its fundraising target of £45 million ($71 million) for a major refurbishment of its galleries. Improvements, which will be completed a year from now, include reinforced floors to facilitate the display large-scale sculpture, and a rehang that will includes works by William Blake and David Hockney. [Telegraph]

– Quay Brothers Bringing Underworld to Leeds: As part of the UK's 2012 Cultural Olympiad, the American filmmaking duo Stephen and Timothy Quay are creating a large-scale, free, three day-long public art installation in central Leeds. "OverWorlds & UnderWorlds" features a circuit through the center city along which spectators will encounter performances by the Northern Ballet, Opera North, and other local arts groups, as well as darkly surreal installations by the brothers themselves. [Guardian]

– Making Murals Last: Outdoor murals present some inherent conservation challenges, but a growing number of organizations around the U.S. have sprung up around the country to meet them. In Los Angeles, Heritage Preservation received funds from the Getty and NEA to restore a six-story 1932 mural by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, while Philadelphia Mural Arts has restored a Meg Saligman mural and secured it by applying an ultraviolet ray prohibitor to its surface. [WSJ]

– Surrealist Music Covers: Here's your interesting art-historical factoid for the day: René Magritte was designing album covers before albums even existed. The famed Belgian surrealist created cover art for some 40 books of sheet music during the 1920s. Hints of his later aesthetic can be discerned from the vintage-style covers, several of which were offered at auction this month at New York's Swann Auction Galleries. [Brain Pickings]

– El Anatsui Gets Denver Retrospective This Fall: The Denver Art Museum is mounting a major retrospective of the Ghana-born, Nigeria-based sculptor this fall, which will feature some 65 works spanning four decades. "El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa" opens September 9 and continues through December 30. [Press Release] 

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PHILADELPHIA — "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead," Benjamin Franklin is said to have advised, "either write something worth reading or do things worth writing." The late Dr. Albert C. Barnes, whose namesake Foundation opens its new home on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Center City on Saturday, did many things that have been written about and penned at least one document — the Barnes Foundation's by-laws — that has been read and re-read countless times since 2002, when plans to displace his world-class collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings from suburban Lower Marion were first announced. "It was always about the collection," said Aileen Roberts, Foundation board member and chair of its building committee, during Wednesday's preview. "And Dr. Barnes — the phantom client."

Barnes's presence is much more than spectral, though; his wishes are honored throughout the museum's permanent collection galleries, and in many of its new features, which Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects have carefully kept (mostly) separate. "Our campus has been expertly conceived and developed to meet the needs of the 21st century," Barnes executive director and president Derek Gillman said Wednesday. Purists will bemoan the addition of requisite modern museum features like audio guides, a restaurant and coffee bar, and a gift shop, but the new Barnes's deep sensitivity to its founder's wishes makes it very difficult to remain focused on the past decade's legal turmoil.

The fight over Albert Barnes's will may have been lost, but both sides have emerged victorious. Our trophy is a museum that Roberts rightly described as "a jewel box." Visitors enter through a stepped garden — by landscape architects OLIN — passing the towering new Ellsworth Kelly sculpture "Barnes Totem" and a row of Japanese maples bordering a reflecting pool, before moving indoors through a giant doorway in the façade of hand-grooved limestone. Inside, passing the admissions desk, you emerge into the cathedral-like Annenberg Court, a kind of enclosed courtyard linking the half of the building housing offices, services, and a large gallery for temporary exhibitions with the wing designed to replicate the experience of Paul Philippe Cret's 1925 Merion building. The impressive — but never oppressive — verticality of the spaces and structures leading to the core of the Foundation only makes entering the smaller permanent collection galleries more surreal and transporting.

Leaving behind the familiar monumental scale of contemporary museum architecture, visitors enter a reverent recreation of the original Barnes in which the densely hung collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, tapestries, furniture, and assorted metal knick-knacks literally shines. The high-tech lighting control system highlights the revolutionary palettes of Fauvist, Pointillist, and Expressionist paintings that many complained were dulled by the lackluster lights in Lower Marion.

The extremely faithful salon-style installations and cozy architectural proportions in these galleries resemble streamlined period rooms. And, as countless visitors and officials reiterated during the preview, the artworks have never looked better than they do in these sparkling surroundings. The first room, a double-height gallery crowned with Henri Matisse's Barnes-commissioned mural "The Dance" (1932-33), features enough famous canvases to sustain a small museum unto itself: a handful of works by Paul Cézanne includes "The Card Players" (1890-92); dozens of nudes and pastoral scenes by Pierre-Auguste Renoir; huge canvases by Georges Seurat and Pablo Picasso; and even a small Tintoretto ("Two Apostles," late-16th century).

All 23 rooms include a similar blend of the usual European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist suspects — what the inaugural temporary exhibition, "Ensemble: Alfred C. Barnes and the Experiment in Education," calls "The Four Core Artists," Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Renoir — along with unexpected treasures. The latter range from proto-Cubist African statues to colorful pottery that seems to have fallen right out of an adjacent still life, to surprising finds like Frans Hals's dark "Portrait of a Man Holding a Watch" (1643) — looking all the more gloomy flanked by luminescent Renoirs; a similarly intense Goya portrait; a bleak Bible scene painted by El Greco alongside Cézanne's "Still Life With Skull" (1896-98); or Horace Pippin's striking "Christ and the Woman of Samaria" (1940), with its glowing sky of hot pink.

The new Barnes Foundation sets the stage for such compelling contrasts, providential discoveries, and close observation marvelously, all the while sheathing the experience in a more conventional — and very successful on its own terms — contemporary art museum. "It had to work on a great civic scale," said Laurie Olin of OLIN. "But by the time you entered you had to be transported to a completely different — I'd say more domestic — space." Now that Dr. Barnes's priceless collection has been relocated in order to be more accessible, it's the visitors, sure to be more numerous than ever before, who will be transported by design to Merion.

Click the slide show to take a tour of the new Barnes Foundation.

1. Nicki Minaj’s new “Right By My Side” video shows her in a love triangle with Nas and Chris Brown. Watch below. [The Juice/Billboard]

2. Jesse Plemons, Landry from “Friday Night Lights,” will join the cast of “Breaking Bad.” [TV Guide]

3. “Cock” opens Off Broadway, at the Duke, tonight. [Playbill]
Related: “Cock” and the New York Times: Paper of Record Tries to Keep It Clean

4. Jack White claims the White Stripes were shut out of the Guinness Book of World Records, calling the organization “elitist.” [Vulture]

5. Watch a child push Artie Lange on a swing on the set of “Louie.” [Vulture]

Previously: Rock the Bells, Howard Stern, Adult Swim, Ne-Yo, and Mary J. Blige

Last February, a group of fashion and art insiders met at the Core Club, in midtown Manhattan, stocked up on champagne and truffle oil popcorn, and packed into a theater for the premiere of a short film called “Here.” It was a perfectly pretty flick, even if it was largely an ad for the Luxury Collection brand of hotels, but the big draw was its star, Agyness Deyn. In the piece, the British model pursues the person behind a series of mysterious wax-sealed letters that she has been receiving. She runs through empty villas and remote cabins until she reaches her destination. It comes not at all as a surprise that she looks really fabulous while doing this.

Apart from a small part in the big-budget action film “Clash of the Titans,” the model has had precious little time on screen. That is about to change. After securing a part in Francois Archibald’s “The Leisure Society,” a play onstage earlier this year in London’s West End, and the role of the stripper in the 2012 remake of the drug thriller “Pusher,” Deyn will be making her first star turn. It was announced yesterday that she’ll be playing a farmer during World War I in “Sunset Song,” director Terence Davies’s adaptation of the 1932 Scottish novel.

“When I read the script I fell completely in love with the character and the story,” Deyn told British Vogue. “I’m so honored and excited to be working with Terence, he’s such an incredible director.”

Will she be as successful on set as she has been on the runway? It’s hard to tell from what we’ve seen, as “Home” didn’t really force her to dig into an emotional well. She’s following in the footsteps of Australian model Gemma Ward, who nabbed a part in “The Great Gatsby” after small parts in “The Strangers” and a “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel. And there’s Lily Cole, a muse to Jean Paul Gaultier who’s in the movie “Snow White and the Huntsman,” set for release this summer.

Another interview with British Vogue, which ran in April just a few weeks after “The Leisure Society” ended its run, may give some hints as to what we can expect from Deyn in the future, or at least her hopes for it. She wants to play an “archetypal strong woman” like Jane Eyre, or Joan of Arc.

Perhaps her burgeoning career in film will force her to come back to the States. After spending years as a fixture on American red carpets, she broke up with Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr. and moved to London. New York might best be avoided, though: that rock star ex-boyfriend has apparently taken up with Deyn’s countrywoman, Alexa Chung. What would Jane Eyre do?

New York City devotes a week out of the year to art to coincide with the annual behemoth Armory Show — and this year a second for Frieze New York — and two more to clothing for the stylish set to crowd the catwalks during Fashion Week. It’s only fair to devote some time to the latest in furniture and lighting accessories, which brings us to New York Design Week. Scheduled to coincide with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, NYDW is only four days long, but packs plenty of sights and sounds to keep furniture lovers satisfied. ARTINFO rounds up highlights from the main event, as well as the smaller satellite programs around town to entertain normal people and design wonks alike.

International Contemporary Furniture Fair

The main event is the ICFF at the Javits Center, a presentation of all that is new and huge in design. More than 500 exhibitors come out to present the latest products in living, dining, kitchen, and bath, including Bernhardt Design, which will unveil industrial icon Charles Pollock's first chair in 30 years. The venerated trade show opens to the public on its last day, Tuesday, the 22nd, but the ICFF invites you to kick off the festivities at the Opening Night Party at the Park Avenue Armory amid Tom Sachs's interstellar "Space Program: Mars" installation. For best results, get your tickets now.
Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, Eleventh Avenue at 38th Street; May 19-22; http://www.icff.com/

NoHo Design District

Online design and lifestyle magazine Sight Unseen is once again taking over the vaguely delineated (does Astor Place count?) NoHo neighborhood for a weekend packed with exhibitions, product launches, and plenty of parties. The new Standard East Village serves as a central hub for all the goings-on: see groundbreaking work from the West Coast during "Hotel California," or the intersection of architecture and design at "SCALE," a showcase of irreverent works by Snarkitecture, Studio Dror, and more. The building at 22 Bond Street is also going to be chock-full of exhibitions, including experimental Brooklyn designers Chen Chen and Kai Williams's "$99 Store."  

Storefronts across the neighborhood are also in on the act. On Great Jones Street, the Future Perfect is unveiling new pieces from the likes of hand-blown lighting maven Lindsey Adelman and Dutch expert woodworker Piet Hein Eek. British manufacturer Tom Dixon is taking over the basement of the Bleecker Street Theater with "London Underground," a collaboration between Surface magazine and Fab.com featuring Dixon’s Luminosity lighting collection, a '60s-inspired broadcasting station, and a pop-up shop from the online design destination.
Various locations; May 18-21; http://www.sightunseen.com/

Wanted Design

Seeking a communal space where fair-goers could escape the formality and fluorescent lighting of the Javits Center, founders Odile Hainaut & Claire Pijoulat founded Wanted Design in 2011 as a casual, interactive lounge for the design-minded. Their second annual event is even bigger and broader than the past, showcasing more global designs like the Brazilian jewelry, graphics, and furniture featured in "Fresh From Brasil." Experts will be on hand to host panel discussions on architectural glass and international design collaborations. Fashion designer Jason Wu is showing off his collection of bathroom fittings for Brizo in a special installation by architect and designer Tommy Zung, while Manhattan Neon hosts a workshop on what to do with those brightly colored lights. Oh, and everyone gets free coffee. 
The Tunnel, 269 Eleventh Avenue; May 18-21; http://2012.wanteddesignnyc.com/

Moss Bureau

The venerated tastemakers Franklin Getchell and Murray Moss, freshly relocated from their former SoHo showroom, invite you to check out their new Midtown digs. To properly ring in the occasion, they've invited multimedia artist Cathy McClure to install "Midway," a kinetic, zoetropic installation of ferris wheel proportions, embellished with music, flashing strobe lights, and silver and bronze "bots." Nearby, animals taxidermied in the traditional Victorian method by Kelly McCallum will also be inhabiting the space. Getchell and Moss promise it will be madcap. 
Moss Bureau, 256 W 36th Street; May 18-20; http://bloss.mossonline.com/

Model Citizens

This launchpad for emerging designers features a diverse set from all over the globe. While there will be plenty of prototypes to ponder and products to buy in the pop-up shop, we're intrigued by the presentations, which bear titles like "Cosmic Quilt," and "Design for the End of the World." 
52 Mercer, 4th floor; May 19-21; http://www.modelcitizensnyc.com/

Love it or Leave It

Gallery R'Pure presents the work of 10 New York-based designers, including industrial hot shots David Weeks, Sebastian Erraturiz, Josee Lepage, and Paul Loebach, whose works examine classic features of American life from different perspectives, be it celebratory or cynical. 
Gallery R'Pure, 3 E 19th Street; May 19-June 1; http://loveitorleaveitnyc.com/

To see more objects from New York Design Week, click the slide show.

At the end of this trailer for Jonathan Demme’s latest Neil Young concert film, Young explains why “you don’t have to worry if you lose friends”: “‘Cause they’re still in your head. They’re still in your heart.” Young is still very much with us, praise be to whatever god they worship in Canada, and before he can live on in his biggest fan Demme’s heart and mind, he’s hanging out in the guy’s films — “Neil Young Journeys” makes three of them. They’re nice places to be, with good music, not too much going on — a drive through small-town Ontario in an antique car, say — and hardly even a hint of mothball mustiness. Groove on.

I got up this morning – which is always preferable to the alternative – and realized that this was going to be one of those days where most of what’s in the news is a rehash of what’s been in the news for some time. I mean, you know, Greece, JP Morgan...

For many galleries, moving into a ground-floor space is a rite of passage. For a museum whose primary function is to serve the public, such a move is all the more significant. Late this summer, the staff of MOCA Cleveland will leave its retrofitted location on the second floor of a former department store and set up shop inside a brand-new, stand-alone building in the heart of the city’s emerging arts district. The $35-million Farshid Moussavi-designed, hexagonal space will be the anchor of one end of the Uptown neighborhood, near Case Western Reserve University. (The other is occupied by the Cleveland Institute of Art.) The building will be Moussavi’s first in the United States, as well as her first museum. 

“It’s a museum space that is truly an expression of our program,” MOCA Cleveland director Jill Snyder told ARTINFO. The new space is specially designed for a kunsthalle. As one of the few non-collecting contemporary art museums in the country, MOCA Cleveland didn’t need permanent collection galleries or much storage space. What it did need a whole lot of flexibility.

“I’m not a fan of galleries with irregular configurations because I think contemporary art is irregular enough,” Snyder explained. “The space doesn’t have to provide yet another element of unconventionality.” That’s why the faceted building shifts from a hexagonal shape on the ground floor — allowing visitors six different access points — to a four-sided shape on the fourth floor, which houses the main, 6,000-square-foot gallery space.

In addition to being flexible, Snyder wanted the space to feel accessible. Though the majority of the building’s exterior is covered with steel paneling, a large, triangular window cutting across one side of the building offers a peek at all four floors. “We wanted viewers to be able to see what’s going on inside from the street,” says Snyder. 

Beginning in October, passerby looking into the triangular window will see a massive painting by Katharina Grosse commissioned especially for the atrium, covering three stories of MOCA’s elevator shaft and spilling out into the stairwell. (Grosse’s project will be the first in a series of commissions for the space.) The painting is part of the museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Inside Out and From the Ground Up,” a group show exploring space and architecture, for which celebrated French-Canadian artist David Altmejd will create his largest vitrine to date, encasing golden insects, cast body parts, and colorful strings inside a 30-foot glass case — a fittingly splashy showpiece for Cleveland's new power museum.

NBC’s “Fashion Star” set a new bar for reality fashion design competitions, with bass-thumping runway shows, an entertaining and inspiring cast of designers, and the opportunity for viewers to buy the winning designs from H&M, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Macy’s, just moments after each episode aired. The season one finale was broadcast on Tuesday – so what’s next for the reality fashion design competition? ARTINFO caught up with one “Fashion Star” mentor, designer John Varvatos, at the Donor of the Day Celebration, and chatted with him about the show’s future, winner Kara Laricks, and how to thrive in the fashion industry.

So “Fashion Star” just wrapped up Tuesday night. How does it feel?

We shot it last summer, but it’s exciting because we just got picked up for another season and we just had a call today talking about how to make it even better, more interesting, more focused — all the things that you learn in life with anything you do. It’s amazing how many fans we have from the show already. It’s really shocking to me in a way, but people get addicted to those kinds of things.

You’ve called Nzimiro Oputa your “brother from another mother.” Any chance you hired him to work with you?

No, but I love Nzimiro, he’s a good guy. There’s some other talented people that were in the competition as well, and I definitely will be talking to Nzimiro. We’ve talked a bit. We wanted to wait until the show was over, but he’s trying to figure out what he’s going to do next, and he’s got some opportunities. He had a lot of fans.

Especially to come from an engineering background and go into fashion design. I thought that was really amazing.

There were some good stories in there too, right?

Yeah, Kara, the winner, she was great too. You were a big fan of hers.

She’s a true talent. I saw it from the first time I was with her.

And after her flub during the first show, when she just designed an accessory instead of a whole look, and she came back to win it.

That was ballsy to show a collar and a tie.

I just think she didn’t know any better.

She didn’t, and that’s what’s so exciting about her and even about the show. There’s people who are very plugged into the industry, and there’s people who are just passionate and talented, and they’re not business people. They don’t know.

Are you coming back next season?

I’m planning on it. I’ve been asked to come back and we had a call today about it and I’m definitely trying to figure my schedule out, but I’d like to do another season.

Will the next season still have all the bells and whistles — the backup dancers, fireworks, and motorcycles — of season one?

We’re going to have some. It’s going to be much more tuned in to the designers, the mentors, creating. It can’t be stagnant. It really is, in the end, about the clothes. People want to know about the designers. So all that’s important. Those bells and whistles are important, I don’t know about the trapezes and everything else. Those weren’t my thing.

I think of you as the true expert on the show because you really paid your dues and you know what the fashion industry is like.

Well, thank you. It was fun working with Jessica and Nicole, and I think that in the second season there will definitely be more dynamics between the designers. Even though we had a lot of it filmed, we have 14 designers; it’s a lot to get on the show. And dancers and everything else. So I think there will be a lot more dynamic between the designers and the mentors.

How do you think “Fashion Star” changed the whole reality design competition game?

There’s two things — number one, it was instant gratification. You could be in love with Kara’s designs and you could go online or in the stores tomorrow and buy it. And you kind of vote with your buy, too. It’s really unique like that. And then the other thing is that it gives these unknown designers who are an engineer or a teacher the opportunity to really start a business. Kara got a deal at the end for $6 million between H&M, Macy’s, and Saks Fifth Avenue, three of the biggest stores in the world. I really truly believe it’s a whole new landscape. The way the world’s changed — the Internet and everything else, the world moves so quickly. I believe this is another entity in all that as well.

How long did it take you to get a $6 million deal?

You know — a long time in life! And the real reality is, even when you get one, you have to protect it and you have to grow it because there’s a lot of people who come and go in any industry, but in the fashion industry, overnight people come and go. You can be the flavor of the month one week, and gone the next month.

Any advice for aspiring fashion designers?

Be a sponge, suck up every bit of knowledge, and take every opportunity no matter how small or how big the opportunity is. Some kids get a little arrogant, “Oh, it’s not a big enough deal, it’s too small a job.” Take every opportunity, be a sponge, take every bit of information and knowledge. I’m still learning today, being in the business for 25 years. I’m still learning every single day and you just have to have that approach that you want to grab as much information as you can and as much knowledge as you can and it will set you up to be more successful.

Related:

"Fashion Star" Finale Report: And We Have a Winner!

"Fashion Star" Episode 9 Report: Three Contestants Get the Ax and the Stella McCartney Copycat

"Fashion Star" Episode 8 Report: Advertisement Campaigns and the "Out of Africa" Failure

"Fashion Star" Episode 7 Report: Karma Strikes and John Varvatos Fights for a Suit

"Fashion Star" Episode 6 Report: A Childhood Tale of Tenacity and the End of the "Two-Fer"
 

"Fashion Star" Episode 5 Report: Window Display Flop and Free Advice From H&M

“Fashion Star” Episode 4 Report: The Case of the Cocky Texan’s Tacky Petticoat and Snarky Celebrity References

"Fashion Star" Episode 3 Report: Party Rockers, a Trapeze Act, and the Return of the Plaid Fabric

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Great cities are works in progress. Their forms are nurtured over time, left over by generations like layers of geological strata. But in the past few years, the demand for cities has spiked exponentially, with little time allotted for their painstaking maturation. Seven billion people are predicted to live in cities by 2050 — twice the current urban population — and, as if a global biological clock had gone off, government leaders and developers are now attempting to leapfrog centuries of gradual development and erect entirely new capitals from the ground up in Honduras, South Korea, China, and beyond. Yet, as entire metropolises are being built from scratch, the role of the architect remains curiously uncertain. Two theories have emerged at this dawn of rapid urbanization: one that threatens to wholly dismiss architecture and another that places immeasurable faith in its faculties.

The Lure of "Charter Cities"

In a 2009 TED talk, economist Paul Romer unveiled a "radical idea" for the future of cities. A good city, according to Romer, is built not on street layouts, transit designs, and housing projects, but on good rules. Rules are what predicate Romer's contentious "charter city" concept, which instructs countries to graft new cities onto unused land and govern them with imported "charters." Host countries would thereby relinquish their jurisdiction over areas of their unpopulated terrain, and third-party countries would draft charters to govern fledgling cities, thereby attracting citizens to populate and invest in their respective geographies. The charter city par excellence is Hong Kong, a city that can boast a developmental success story that eclipses the stigma of its colonial past.

Though boiled down to simple diagrams and syllogisms, Romer’s 2009 TED talk caught the attention of the Honduran government, and shortly thereafter in 2011, the government voted to start their very own charter city. Legislators passed a constitutional amendment last year that would make quasi-independent "special development regions" possible, a big step for the future of charter cities. Romer attributed his first success in Honduras to his argument that "Cities are worth so much more than it costs to build them." In a second TED lecture on the subject, he flashed an image of Songdo, South Korea's newest city. The slide was a snapshot of an archetypal Asian business district, stocked with towering high-rises and sculptural low-rises. Tinted in a soothing palette of aquamarines, grays, and whites, South Korea's clean-slate metropolis is portrayed as a collection of shiny, immaculate buildings, all constructed within a mere four years. It represents, for Romer, the potential of building from scratch.

To Romer, this comfortingly utopian image is built on a foundational concept far greater than the architecture itself. Architecture is merely the period after the sentence. It is an afterthought. Cities are worth more than it costs to build them, exactly because cities are so much more than their buildings. "It's important that buildings don’t catch fire or fall down when there’s an earthquake," Romer told urban issues writer Greg Lindsay in Forefront, while discussing his charter city model. "Otherwise, I don't think it matters all that much."

The IBA Model

Can architecture really be so trivial in the discussion of urbanization? Could it really not matter all that much? Not surprisingly, another approach to city-building — one driven by architects — suggests otherwise. Earlier this year, New York-based architect Meta Brunzema and a team of eight architecture graduate students at Pratt Institute pitched an idea to revive the swath of post-industrial towns hugging the Hudson River in upstate New York. Unlike Romer’s charter city concept, Brunzema’s proposal implies that thoughtful architecture can be an important catalyst for effective urbanization.

Brunzema’s project, tentatively called "Building Exhibition Hudson Valley/Erie Canal, 2014-2024," suggests retooling the Hudson River Valley with urban design prototypes that will attract a young, creative demographic and subsequently revive and repopulate the area. For their speculative proposal, Brunzema and her students envision a vibrant new Hudson River Valley, one studded with eclectic mixed-use facilities and new sustainable industries ready to lift 46 riverfront burgs out of depression.

The project’s name and its flashy early prototypes beg comparison with the 1987 International Building Exhibition in Berlin or IBA Berlin (the abbreviation coming from its German name, Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin). Architecture writer Jeff Byles links the two accordingly in the Architects' Newspaper: "Brunzema has borrowed a page from Germany's famed International Building Exhibition…which over the last century has leveraged design intelligence to tackle urgent social and urban challenges. These farsighted efforts include monumental housing built by Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer…and the 'critical reconstruction' of Berlin's historic core…which pioneered sensitive alternatives to slash-and-burn urban renewal."

An even more appropriate precursor (as Byles mentions later in the same article) might be a more recent building exhibition in Germany: The 1999 IBA Emscher Park, a regional urban renewal effort targeting a former coal-mining district in Germany's Ruhr Valley. Over the span of 10 years between 1989 and 1999, the program added landscaped parks, infrastructure, housing, and business and cultural institutions to over 80 cities. Not only did this new IBA result in 5,500 new and renovated housing units, develop 26 garden cities, convert industrial ruins into cultural destinations, and add hundreds of miles of bicycle paths and walking trails, but imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Newtown Creek Digester Eggs — four impressive steel additions to the Brooklyn landscape — are actually among many duplicates of a wastewater treatment plant built in Emscher Park in 1996!

The Emscher Park scheme is little-known, but in some ways that is a mark of its success: how this massive urban initiative managed to dodge public disapproval is arguably a testament to its thorough integration into the Ruhr Valley community, both socially and architecturally. Though inspired by the star-studded 1987 IBA Berlin, the 1999 IBA was a very different building exhibition, one built upon the efforts of civic organizations, private enterprises and the local communities of the Northern Ruhr Valley, not on the design philosophies of architecture icons.

Which Path to Take?

The IBA building exhibition model stands adverse to Paul Romer's abstract vision for charter cities. They present two unfolding strategies for urbanization, and their bipolarity brings into question the capacity of architecture to enact substantial change within a municipal frame. Though Romer is an economist, not an architect or a planner, his disregard for design stems from a valid premise: that great architecture can only be as strong as its framing social substructure, a lesson learned when the public turned on modernism for its failure to build us into utopia.

Any plan to inject a landscape with architectural prototypes could potentially overlook an honest shortcoming of the field. Yet at the same time, architecture is much more than an afterthought to rules and hierarchies. There is a reason we might cringe when we see clones of Hong Kong and Singapore popping up on manmade islands and other unpeopled territories. Architecture connects us to our geographies; it roots us in place and time and provides us a "foothold on the future," as architecture critic Douglas Murphy writes. It is careless to reduce architecture to a mere means of shelter and safety.

A difference that skews the comparison between the IBA and charter city models is the fact that the IBA model attempts sweeping renewals of existing cities while the charter city model spawns entirely new ones. The former has the potential to respond to traces of the past and present, while the latter is untethered, free to drift into the abstract. But both approaches risk designing cities without context. To do so is to take a major leap of faith, which every act of building requires. The question is how big of a leap we should take, and whether or not we have the choice to act otherwise.

To see the images proposed for "Building Exhibition Hudson Valley/Erie Canal, 2014-2024," click on the slide show.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed the design of the Newtown Creek Digester Eggs to Ennead Architects. This has been corrected.

— KAWS Keeps Rising: Brooklyn-based street artist-turned-gallery star Brian Donnelly, aka KAWS, will join Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami in the exclusive hundred-feet-high club for artists whose work has floated in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In November his figure "Companion" — a grayscale giant with cartoonish gloved hands covering its face — will become the latest (and perhaps the saddest) artist-designed balloon to float in the popular parade. "I kept imagining myself in front of that many people," KAWS said. "He’s shy, a bit out of place, not proudly posing like a Superman character." [NYT]

— Hayward Gallery Shines a Light on Invisible Art: On June 12, London's Hayward Gallery will open an unusually sparse group exhibition, "Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957-2012," including Andy Warhol's "Invisible Sculpture" (1985), documents and paintings by Yves Klein, Yoko Ono's instructions for a performance, and an empty space that a which is said to have been cursed by Tom Friedman. "This exhibition highlights that art isn't about material objects, it's about setting our imaginations alight, and that's what the artists in this show do in many varied ways," says Hayward director Ralph Rugoff. (James Franco's recent forays into the genre, sadly, are not included.) [Press Association]

— Sexy Science Show Excites Canadian Minister: James Moore, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, is not turned on by a new show at Ottawa's Canada Science and Technology Museum called "Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition," which opened yesterday and aims above all to educate adolescents about sex and sexuality. "The Canada Science and Technology Museum's mandate is to promote scientific and technological culture in Canada," said Moore spokesperson Sébastien Gariépy. "It's clear that this exhibition does not conform with this mandate; its contents is indefensible, and insulting to taxpayers." [La Presse]

— Art N.E.R.D.: The rapper and producer Pharrell Williams has been known to dabble in furniture design, but he has discerning taste in art too — sort of. Pressed to name his top five contemporary artists, he admits that his favorites are fairly conventional, praising Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, JR, and KAWS. "I don’t have the most eclectic in taste buds for art. I like what I like," he said. "With KAWS, I felt like he had this very interesting take on pop culture." [WSJ]

— Brooklyn Museum Crowdsources Another Exhibition: The Brooklyn Museum continues to explore populist exhibition approaches — from 2002 "Star Wars" exhibition and 2008's Takashi Murakami retrospective, to 2009's online voting-curated photography exhibition "Click!" and its solo shows by "Work of Art" winners — but its latest more firmly ties Internet polling to the local art scene. In "GO: a community-curated open studio project," December 1-February 24, 2013, museum curators will visit the studios of artists nominated on the exhibition's Web site to select works for exhibition. [Press Release]

— D.C. Museum Offers Tours for Alzheimer's Sufferers: The Kreeger Museum has begun offering tours of its Philip Johnson-designed house-turned-gallery for visitors afflicted with Alzheimer's. The program, the first of its kind, pairs seniors with the neurological disease and students from two local middle schools — plus the seniors' caregivers — who discuss works from the collection like Claude Monet's "Sunset at Pourville," a melancholy seascape painting in which two figures walk along the beach together. [NPR]

— China's Booming Market Inwardly Focused: China may have overtaken Europe and the United States to take the largest segment of the global market, but Chinese collectors' international dominance is largely the result of a fervor for domestic artworks. Chinese collectors have focused mostly on the country's ancient artifacts and, increasigly, the paintings of its proven contemporary art stars like Yue Minjun and Zeng Fanzhi. According to Kate Bryan of London’s Fine Art Society, formerly of Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong: "Western art galleries are deluded in thinking how much they can persuade Chinese buyers to take an interest in Western art right now." [TAN]

— President's Portrait Censored in South Africa: A painting of South African president Jacob Zuma by the artist Brett Murray was removed from his exhibition at Johannesburg's Goodman Gallery (and the gallery's website) following pressure from the country's ruling ANC party. The portrait, titled "The Spear" and priced at 120,000 rand ($14,000), depicts the president wearing a suit and what looks like a codpiece. ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said the black, yellow, and red acrylic painting was an "abuse of freedom of artistic expression." [Guardian]

— Lisa Hostetler Leaves Milwaukee for D.C.: The Milwaukee Art Museum will lose its curator of photographs Lisa Hostetler in July, when she relocates to Washington, D.C. to become the Smithsonian American Art Museum's photography curator. Hostetler, who arrived at the Wisconsin institution seven years ago after a stint at the Metropolitan Museum, most recently organized the MAM's Taryn Simon retrospective. [Journal Sentinel]

— Baltimore Museum Gets Major Morris Louis Gift: The widow of the Baltimore-born artist Morris Louis (who died in 1962), Marcella Louis Brenner, has given the Baltimore Museum of Art more than 20 works by the early adopter of Color Field painting. The gift includes 19 drawings and the major paintings "Silver III" (1953) and "Untitled 5-76" (1956), one of which will make its BMA debut when the museum reopens its renovated Contemporary Wing. [Press Release]

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