NEW YORK — Today, three universities announced that they are joining forces to launch a new — and, as they see it, unprecedented — program in international arts management. A partnership between Southern Methodist University in Dallas, HEC Montreal, and SDA Bocconi in Milan, the one-year master’s program seeks to capitalize on the international growth of art institutions, promising to train a new generation of administrators to navigate an increasingly globalized world where money is tight (except in China and the Middle East) and cultural differences still hamper collaboration. 

Here's the pitch: The 25 to 30 students accepted to the program will begin their year at SMU in Dallas, where they will spend four months taking courses on subjects including fundraising for the arts, international arts law, and comparative international arts policy. Then, they will move to Montreal to refine their marketing skills, taking courses with titles like “International Event Product Management” and “Anthropology and Marketing of Consumer Culture.” During the program’s final leg, in Milan, students will work to complete a final project in their area of interest.

“What we hope to offer is unique because of the international context it provides,” said Zannie Voss, chair of the arts management at the SMU Meadows School of the Arts. The program, which kicks off in September 2013, costs a hefty $40,000 (a fee that includes travel, but not lodging, though a handful of merit-based scholarships are available). “Our dream would be to have a cohort of 30 different students from 30 different countries,” Voss said, adding that ideally, these students return to their home countries after the program, bringing their new skills and international web of contacts along with them.

Some details have yet to be ironed out — and indeed there was a hint of skepticism at a roundtable held at the Museum of Modern Art this morning to mark the program's launch, which featured about a dozen arts administrators. Issues under discussion ranged from how to address the rapidly growing cultural industries in China and the Middle East (“It can’t just be us telling them how to do it,” said the Theater Development Fund's Victoria Bailey) to the proper age and experience of prospective students (“Why does it have to be people in their 20s?” asked Holly Hotchner, director of the Museum of Art and Design. “I’d do it.”). Furthermore, some on the panel wondered, who's to say there will be jobs available to these students after they graduate? “Over 10 years, you’d have 250 people,” said Hotchner. “Are there really jobs for them all to do international work?”

"The notion of arts management in three places, three sessions, and three countries — I don't know what that means," said Signature Theater Company’s artistic director James Houghton.

Still, there was a sense that the program might fill an actual gap. “We know arts organizations have difficulty all over the world, but I think a lack of good managers causes most of the problems,” said New York Philharmonic CEO Zarin Mahta. 

Toward the end of the discussion, it was Houghton who proposed perhaps the most unorthodox idea of the day for the new global initiative: Why not start the program small, asking other arts administration programs to nominate one student with great potential, and enroll 10 to 15 people in the program for free, at least for the first three years? “Making it invitation-only and fully funded,” he said, “would immediately set it apart.”

The organizers bristled. As arts administrators know all too well, money is tight. 

The town of Colmar in eastern France has selected Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron to renovate and expand its medieval Unterlinden Museum and the neighboring Place Unterlinden. By adding a new wing and an underground gallery, the extension — which will cost €30 million ($37.6 million) — will double the museum's size, bringing it to over 86,000 square feet.

The Unterlinden Museum, which will remain open during construction, has a wide-ranging collection that includes archaeological objects from the Neolithic period to the Iron Age, medieval and Renaissance works, decorative art, popular traditional art, and 17th- to 20th-century painting. One reason for the renovation is that the museum's modern and contemporary collection has grown over the years. "Since its opening in 1853, the museum has always presented contemporary art, but an active policy of acquisitions in modern and contemporary art began in the 1970s," museum director Pantxika De Paepe told ARTINFO France. "The collection exists, but we don't have the space to show it." Several bequests and donations have also enhanced the museum's collection with works by artists including Jean-Michel Atlan, César, Henri Michaux, Joe Downing, and Constantin Brancusi.

The Dominican chapel in the museum's 13th-century medieval cloister holds the highlight of the collection, the Issenheim altarpiece, which marks its 500th anniversary this year. The new wing of the museum will take shape alongside the chapel in perfect symmetry, and its façade of brick and copper will echo the medieval structure. The extension will connect to the Art Nouveau-style Colmar Baths, which date from the early 20th century, via an underground gallery. The baths building — which ceased to function in 2003 when the town got a new public swimming pool — will display large-scale sculptures and host cultural events. 

Three million tourists per year visit Colmar, and the Unterlinden Museum currently receives 200,000 annual visitors. The museum's goal is to increase that number to 320,000 when the renovation is complete in 2014. Currently, the French state is providing almost €5 million ($6.3 million) in funding through the Regional Office of Cultural Affairs, the region of Alsace has contributed €4.2 million ($5.3 million), and the departmental government is chipping in €3.3 million ($4.1 million) for the project. Of the €3.5 million ($4.4 million) left for the museum to raise, €2.6 million ($3.3 million) has already been donated by supporters including two American foundations — the Timken Company Charitable Trust and the Scheide Foundation — and the French bank Crédit Mutuel.

Few artists have tested the limits of sculpture as relentlessly as Erwin Wurm. His fattened-up sports cars and suburban pavilions melting like vanilla ice cream are riotously humorous comments on social aspirations and normality, as well as inspiring formal experiments. He consumes the everyday and spits it back transformed, in a grotesque and unsettling version of itself. Wurm's "One Minute Sculptures" series stretches the concept of sculpture to its breaking point: the artist instructs performers or members of the public to pose with mundane objects — pieces of fruits, plastic buckets, china tea cups, stationary — creating temporary sculptural situations which are then photographed. Many of these funny-but-uncomfortable images have become legendary. The Red Hot Chili Peppers even paid homage to them in their music video "Can't Stop" in 2002.

Next month, Liverpool's Open Eye Gallery goes back to a seminal moment in the artist's practice, presenting 18 early "One Minute Sculptures." These pieces are "a near-perfect convergence of performance, sculpture, and photography," said Open Eye Gallery director Patrick Henry. "They present a moment of escape from the grown-up world — a momentary revolution, an inversion of the established order."

Speaking from his studio in Vienna, Wurm discussed the origin of the series with ARTINFO UK, talking ephemerality, authenticity, and the philosophy of failure.

You've said that the fundamental concept behind the "One Minute Sculptures" was to "abandon the idea of durability and infinity." How did you reach this conclusion?

I think it was a development over several years. First I wanted to become a painter. I went to art school and they didn't put me in the painting class, but in the sculpture class. This was the first strange experience, but on the other hand, it was good because it set a task for me. I started to research the notion of sculpture: what does it mean, what is it, and so on. During this period, time was also a concern. I had questions like: if I'm doing something, is it an action? Can it become a sculpture? When does an action become a sculpture?

I made different works about these ideas and finally I realized that all my pieces from that time had a beginning and an end. Before that, everybody, starting with Michelangelo, believed that the work would stay for eternity. So I thought that was interesting. But I'm not saying that I was the first to do it — in the 1960s everything was happening already. I made the "sweater pieces," for which I was hanging sweaters on the wall with specific instructions to fold the sweaters, to transform them from sweaters into other objects. Some lasted a month, others lasted two weeks and so on. I realized the pieces were becoming shorter and shorter. Then I made this video, "59 Positions," in which I was wearing normal clothes in unusual, strange, stupid, ridiculous, and embarrassing situations and positions — filmed for twenty seconds each. In this piece, the work only existed for twenty seconds. I tried to create a sort of "brand name." I thought "One Minute Sculpture" was a good idea, and then I made this new work with all the different objects. But "one minute" can mean ten seconds, or five minutes, it doesn't matter.

Since you photograph your "One Minute Sculptures," they continue to exist. Could you envisage, like Tino Sehgal, not having any documentation at all? Doing "One Minute Sculptures" that would really last — and could only be seen — during that one minute?

At the beginning these sculptures were really ephemeral, but very quickly I thought that I didn't want them to become too ephemeral. This is not the way I want my work to be seen. I was more interested in giving the public a part to play. I made these platforms with instruction drawings. People were invited to step on the platform, follow the instructions, and realize the piece. They could have a Polaroid of themselves doing the piece taken, send it to me with $100 or €100 and I would send it back signed. It was an interesting and weird game about originality, copy, and authenticity.

You seemed to have a clear desire to democratize art and art practice.

This is true, but on the other hand, it was not very democratic because I was the one who decided which piece is a "One Minute Sculpture" by Erwin Wurm, and which isn't. On the platform, the audience could do anything but only if they followed my instructions would I call it "One Minute Sculpture" and sign the piece. I was the director and the people were the material.

The exhibition at Open Eye Gallery is concentrating on a series of "One Minute Sculptures" made in 1997. How do you remember making these pieces?

I made these "One Minute Sculptures" under very specific conditions: I got an invitation to do a solo show at Bremen Künstlerhaus. I said OK, great, but I would like to come ten days in advance and create something new. The director, Horst Griese, accepted. I had the possibility of using all the materials found in their offices, and the people who were working there. I tried all the positions and situations myself making the video "One Minute Sculptures," and there's also a lot of failing in it. After this, I asked the people to take the positions and I photographed them. The director of the Künstlerhaus is the old, bald guy with the grey hair and all the pens in his nose, mouth, and ears, and the other people are the people from the office.

It was also about reflecting the situation of an artist travelling from place to place, making a work in different institutions, making it site-specific or not. At the beginning, I was not sure about these works at all. I was very suspicious — I'm always very critical with my work. Then other people saw it and all of a sudden people from the Kunstverein Cologne came and said we would like to make a little catalogue with this work. It was sold out in one month. It was unbelievable; I'd never had this before. All of sudden something changed.

Do you ever tire of the everyday, or for you is it an endless source of inspiration?

Frankly, at the beginning the idea came from very specific conditions. Because I had no money at all I decided to use any cheap material that I could have access to. I first made sculptures with wood because there was a furniture factory close to my studio and they threw away pieces of wood I could use. Then I changed studios and there was this other material, and then I changed again and there was this thrift store with all these clothes, and I would also use my own clothes. This was the first thing: I wanted to use material that was absolutely cheap and cost nothing. The other thing was that I wanted to relate these pieces to my time, to the questions of our time, and with the notion of culture.

When you are making a sculpture in clay, you add volume or you take volume away. You do the same thing when you gain weight or when you lose weight. That puts different levels together: the social level, the personal level, the sickness of our time where everybody has to be slim. Nowadays fat people are so-called underdogs, because the rich are the slim ones, and all these weird aspects of society are in this little idea of working with volume: adding volumes or taking volumes away.

You've compared the artist to the philosopher, arguing that both tackle reality but are doomed to failure and obsolescence when the next generation comes around.

It seems to be one of the destinies of an artist's life: that at the end you fail, because the next generation comes and says, "come on old guy, move over and take your bullshit out of the way." You start as this young, informed, aggressive guy and then you are the victim of another young guy — that's the game. And it's the same with the philosophers: great ideas will end one day, they'll be corrected, and become part of history.

"Erwin Wurm: One Minute Sculptures," June 22 – September 2, 2012, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.

For images from the exhibition, click on the slide show.

Is fighting counterfeit knock-offs the new fashion cause célèbre?

Earlier this month, a Manhattan district judge ordered Guess to pay Gucci $4.7 million in damages over a claim that the designs were direct copies. Though the amount awarded was significantly less than what Gucci had asked for (a cool $221 million), it was still a victory on the copycat front. If there’s a big settlement in the trademark infringement suit that Christian Louboutin filed against Yves Saint Laurent last February, we could see many more.

France is doing its part to stop the sale of fakery. WWD reports that luxury group Comite Colbert has teamed up with French Customs and the French National Anti-Counterfeiting Committee to launch a massive ad campaign that will warn buyers about the perils of purchasing the cheap instead of the real. The effort — a total of 10,000 posters — will target thoroughfares in French airports.

Several major brands have collaborated with the campaign, including Cartier, Chanel, Christian Dior, Lacoste, Longchamp, Louis Vuitton, and Van Cleef. Here’s a sample tagline: “Buy a fake Cartier, get a genuine criminal record.”

Elisabeth Ponsolle des Portes, the president of Comite Colbert, alludes to the stringent anti-smuggling policies in America, and perhaps also makes a reference to the fashion world trademark cases that that have made headlines this year.

“We think it is strange that what has been done in the United States has not been done in France,” she told WWD.

It’s not the first time that the French have released a controversial campaign to fight counterfeiting or piracy. Last April, the Union of Professional Photographers attempted to fight widespread online photo theft with a racy ad: a man bending forward towards a camera on a tripod has been approached by another man from behind — the second man is pressed against the photographer in a way that leaves little to the imagination.

Yet, despite the new surge in the war on fake bags and shoes, there’s one pretty big holdout. Prada wasn’t on the list of collaborators, and in an interview with Bloomberg, Patrizio Bertelli — Prada’s CEO and Miuccia Prada’s husband — “shrugged off” the entire frenzy.

“Fake goods aren’t totally bad, at least it created jobs at some counterfeit factories,” said Bertelli. “We don’t want to be a brand that nobody wants to copy.”

Bertelli better hope that once the other fakes go away, his customers still prefer the $3,000 bag from the store and not the $30 bag from the street. 

– Diving for Ancient Chinese Treasure: A marine-archeology company is planning a mission to retrieve a cargo of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain that has been submerged at the bottom of the ocean off Indonesia for more than 400 years. Recovering the 700,000 pieces — Ming Dynasty fine bowls, dishes, and cups — will cost an estimated $6.3 million, in part because divers will have to construct a wooden platform in the ocean to prevent frequent trips back to land. But that's nothing compared to the staggering value of the loot, estimated at $43 million. [Bloomberg]

– Parents Protest Topless Sculpture Gift From the Chinese Government: A bronze sculpture by artist Yu Chang titled "Accept or Reject" that was donated to the Overland Park Arboretum in Kansas by the artist and the Chinese government has been rejected by the American Families Association, members of which find the work's deconstructed and bare-breasted female figure too risqué for their kids. Jo Anne Hughes, who has started a petition asking for the work's relocation, was not appeased by new cautionary signage alongside the temporary installation: "I'm fighting to keep this a G-rated venue." [Fox]

– John Lennon's Sexy Drawings Make a Comeback: A group of risque lithographs by John Lennon depicting nude women masturbating have returned to the neighborhood from which they were once banned. A scandalized judge ordered them to be removed from a Chicago exhibition and burned in 1970. Now, copies have returned to the Oak Brook neighborhood for a revival exhibition. [Chicago Sun-Times]

– Eli Broad Teaches Art Grads His Signature "Be Unreasonable" Method: Billionaire art collector Eli Broad delivered a commencement speech at Otis College of Art and Design that sounds suspiciously like the first chapter of his new autobiography/self-help book. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world," he told the graduates, quoting George Bernard Shaw, as well as his own book's introduction. "The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." [Press Release]

– How the Market Thrives on Inequality: "Fine art...is not really part of the overall global economy," writes Adam Davidson in an essay exploring the latest sky-high prices paid at art auctions. "Instead, it’s part of the economy of a small subset of the super-superrich, whom some economists call Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, or U.H.N.W.I.’s. And their economy, unlike ours, is booming." [NYT, ATE] 

– Renzo Piano Would Like to Thank the Academy: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has selected Renzo Piano and L.A. architect Zoltan Pali to design its forthcoming movie museum on the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The new space should fit right in: both architects previously designed portions of LACMA. [LAT]

– Sotheby's Bets on Blue Miró: The auction house is selling Joan Miró's 1927 canvas "Peinture (Étoile Bleue)" in London on June 19, where its early estimate of £15-20 million ($24-32 million) makes it a potential new record for the artist. His previous top sale, "Painting-Poem," happened at Christie's three months ago for £16.8 million ($26.9 million). Sotheby's exec Helena Newman says "Peinture" is "one of Miró’s most important paintings, effortlessly bridging the transition between figurative and abstract art," while others see the pre-sale hype as pure boosterism. [FT]

– U.S. Government Nearly Halts Havana Biennial Performance: A project by Russian artist duo Ilya and Emilia Kabakov for the Havana Biennial was almost cancelled after the U.S. Department of the Treasury denied them a license to bring five American schoolchildren to Cuba to participate in a performance titled "Ship of Tolerance." A government official said authorities feared the Cuban authorities might use the kids for political propaganda, but eventually granted the license after losing an appeal brought by the artists. [TAN]

– Only American Celebrities Can Save Pussy Riot: A lawyer for three members of the anti-Vladimir Putin feminist punk band Pussy Riot — an all-female spin-off of the anarchist Voina artists collective — says the only way to save his clients from incurring additional criminal charges is for Western celebrities to intervene. "I think the only option now is pressure from the outside," said Nikolai Polozov. "I don’t understand why Western pop and rock stars don’t want to support their Russian colleagues. There are many stars who speak out for various liberal values." [TAN]

– Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei's Serpentine Pavilion Sold Before Opening: The 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Hyde Park, designed by the Chinese-Swiss trio behind Beijing's "Bird Nest" stadium, will open to the public tomorrow. But the subterranean space has already been purchased by billionaire collector Lakshmi Mittal, whose ArcelorMittal steel company sponsored Anish Kapoor's nearby Olympic monument. [Bloomberg]

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After Protests, Vandalism, and Legal Theater, South Africa's Nude Presidential Portrait Saga Finds Closure

New Tri-National Masters Program Could Make You a Member of the Globe-Trotting Arts Administration Elite

"Hong Kong Is a Place With Much More Freedom": Curator Pi Li on Why He Left Mainland China for the New M+ Museum

"We Had to Start Something New": Art Fairs and Museums Unite for September's Inaugural Berlin Art Week

Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto Captures Moving Colors for a New Line of Hermès Scarves

For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

Last weekend, a pack of New York’s artists, fashion editors, designers, and style personalities packed their bags and jetted off to Istanbul for the International Arts & Culture Festival. That’s not a short hike — farther than travelling to Paris or London for those cities’ respective fashion weeks. Yet, when they arrived in the ancient city thousands of miles away, the guests were expected to attend a party at the Boom Boom Room, that sky-high hot spot atop the Standard Hotel that usually resides in their native city’s Meatpacking District.

It wasn’t the real thing, but it was mighty close. The Standard creative team had opened a pop-up version of the party space, complete with a reproduction of the original’s soaring circular bar. And they constructed it — in just six days — within the Esma Sultana mansion, a palace overlooking the Bosporus strait and, beyond the water, Asia.

Instead of finding a local spot that would sate the needs of this very specific set, perhaps it’s better to plant a version of what’s already worked before — a pop-up club, bar, or boutique, open for just one week. It’s just the latest example of what’s become a de rigueur element of every elite cultural happening in a far-flung locale, something present at every stop on the fashionista’s global pilgrimage.

A few weeks ago, party boy Andre Saraiva let the Cannes Film Festival have a taste of his world-conquering Le Baron empire, setting up shop in a defunct Croisette nightclub called Jimmy’z. This is business as usual for Saraiva, whose entire mission seems predicated upon the spread of the Le Baron brand. In addition to the Paris flagship, he’s got brick-and-mortar outposts in New York, London, and Tokyo. With these pop-ups, pretty people the world over know that where they go, Le Baron goes.

Not a day’s yachting distance from Cannes, the little town of Saint-Tropez attracts the same type of patron as the film festival’s more posh bashes. But what to during the day, when you’re not sunning? Well, you can go shopping. Realizing this opportunity, Karl Lagerfeld opened a Chanel pop-up at 25 rue François Sibilli, in 2010.

Miami might have its fair share of bars and clubs, but when Art Basel Miami Beach comes along and half of New York’s art industry decamps for the sunshine state, the nightlife has to come with them. Saraiva is there with his Le Baron crew (until he fries the soundboard, that is), but the more intriguing addition to the scene came in 2009, when the guys behind the burlesque club the Box brought their special Lower East Side version of naughty entertainment to Club Nikki. We’ve sampled the wares at their Chrystie Street location, and according to Urban Daddy, things at the pop-up weren’t too much different. “Expect gender-bending aerialists swinging from the rafters, avant-garde vocalists and an act so anatomically innovative we’re not even sure we can tell you its name (or if it’s legal).”

That same year, the guys behind art collective OHWOW decided to base a pop-up on a place just a few blocks away from the Box: the legendary art punk bar Max Fish. Usually located on Ludlow Street, Max Fish has always catered to artists — based on the walls, you’d think they had a paintings-for-tabs deal, like a Cedar Tavern for the age of Dash Snow. So it made sense for a Max Fish pop-up to appear at Art Basel Miami Beach.

There are countless others, and with Art Basel coming up in Switzerland later this month, expect to see more. And why not? To remake one of your hometown’s cherished places in a foreign locale is a creative project, one in line with the cultural happenings where these pop-ups appear. But the best example of a pop-up may be a shop that never actually opens. That would be the Prada boutique in Marfa, Texas, installed by the artists Elmgreen and Dragset in 2005. It’s a fully stocked store off a tiny road in the middle of the desert that just sits there, serving no one. And unlike another bar or store in the luxury mecca that is New York, Saint-Tropez, or Miami, it might be distinctly useful — there isn’t a real Prada boutique in the entire state of Texas. 

Until late last year, the market ascension that has made Gerhard Richter the world’s top selling living artist could have been characterized as a slow burn. True, the 80-year-old painter had enjoyed decades of renown, with top-notch gallery affiliation, countless museum exhibitions, and even the early honor of representing the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1972 Venice Biennale. Richter’s market prices, however — particularly for his critically heralded, richly colored, multilayered abstract works — had been rising at a tortoise’s pace.

That slow but steady advance turned supersonic at Sotheby’s New York last November, when a group of eight Richter abstract canvases of various dimensions and dates from a private collection fetched $74,280,000 against combined pre sale estimates of $27 million to $36.7 million. The psychedelic, purple-haze-colored, and squeegeed "Abstraktes Bild" (“Abstract Painting”) of 1997, measuring a mural-scale 8 feet 61∕8 inches by 11 feet 17∕8 inches, fetched a record $20,802,500 (est. $9-12 million). It flattened the previous mark set by "Kerze" (“Candle”), 1982, at Christie’s London just one month earlier, when the 323∕4-by- 241∕2-inch photo painting (as Richter’s photograph-based works are called) made £10,457,250 ($16.4million). At Sotheby’s, the buyer of the new first-ranked Richter was the billionaire Lily Safra, who donated the painting to the Israel Museum in memory of her late husband, the Lebanese-born banker Edmond Safra. The unnamed consignors, later revealed to be the London collectors Marc and Victoria Sursock, had acquired the work on the primary market at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, in London, in 1998, a time when auction prices for Richter’s large-scale abstractions stood under $500,000.

Marian Goodman, Richter’s longtime dealer, looks farther back, to 1985, when Richter had his first solo exhibition with her in New York (it coincided with one at Sperone Westwater Gallery). Recalls Goodman, “You could buy a 10-foot abstraction for $25,000 or one of the candle paintings starting at around $5,000. It’s kind of shocking, but it’s a fact.”

A confluence of circumstances has contributed to Richter’s global elevation as the most sought-after living artist, among them the recent deaths of titans Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly. For the new global superrich, the large-scale and vibrantly hued Richter abstractions can be easy to live with — a decorator’s dream, really, with a large array of color combinations and sizes yet they possess considerable wall power. And then there is the market's ineluctable need to anoint a new leader.

“The art world always needs a clear top end,” says Thaddaeus Ropac, the Paris and Salzburg dealer, “and for years the top end was taken by a few English artists, namely [Francis] Bacon and Freud. The fact is they are gone, and someone had to take over the reign. Jasper Johns would be the natural contender but he doesn’t appeal enough to the world audience. You haven’t heard much exciting news about Johns recently, and the same goes for Brice Marden. The art market instinctively decided Richter should be the one.”

Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s and the force behind the Richter market surge of last November, looks beyond the mysteries of instinct, observing, “Every market needs an artist that combines high quality and beauty. Now, when contemporary art has to be beautiful, Richter is the artist.” Meyer equates Richter’s market power with that of Bacon and Mark Rothko, noting that when the eight Richters were displayed together at Sotheby’s during the New York preview last fall, “I told people, ‘You are standing in a room full of Rothko’s in 1982, because that’s what they are.’”

As it turns out, Richter holds Rothko in low esteem — he greatly admires Barnett Newman and Robert Ryman — and might well flinch at hearing Meyer’s comparison, however complimentary the intention behind it. “Richter has a keen interest in Newman but not in Rothko. He is not drawn to anyone on the romantic side of Abstract Expressionism,” says Robert Storr, currently the dean of the Yale School of Art, who curated the landmark 2002 retrospective “Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which featured 188 works. “He may think about Rothko,” adds Storr, “but not in positive terms.”

Among the paintings that did exceedingly well at Sotheby’s last November was "Gudrun," 1987, a gestural abstraction with a blaze of fragmented and veiled primary colors and aggressive black streaks, which sold to a telephone bidder for $18,002,500 (est. $5.5-7.5 million). The Sursocks had acquired "Gudrun" at Sotheby’s London in June 2001 for £501,276 ($709,350). Richter named the painting for Gudrun Ensslin, a founding member of the radical left-wing German youth protest group the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the title grants the nonobjective work a politically charged dimension, particularly in hindsight. The year after painting "Gudrun," Richter created the 15-painting cycle “October 18, 1977,” commemorating the rather grisly prison deaths of some of the key members of Baader-Meinhof. The series was purchased by MOMA in 1995.

Another large-scale abstraction, "Abstraktes Bild," 1992, a sweep of brilliant colors and dense layers crafted in a closely choreographed process that Richter has described as “applying, destroying, and layering,” sold at the November 2011 Sotheby’s event to a telephone bidder for $14,082,500 (est. $5.5-7.5 million). It had last changed hands at Sotheby’s New York in May 2005 for $1,248,000.

There will be no shortage of material for the market — Richter is astonishingly prolific. His abstract work began in the 1960s, shortly after he moved from Dresden, in Soviet-controlled East Germany, where he had worked successfully as a mural painter in the Social Realist style, to Düsseldorf in the West. He studied for three years at the prestigious Düseldorf Art Academy, where he befriended and exhibited with Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke, and Konrad Lueg (better known later as the dealer Konrad Fischer). Polke and Richter cofounded the short-lived Capitalist Realist movement, a German-flavored exploration of pop consumerism that debuted officially in a 1963 exhibition in Düseldorf featuring the founders with Lueg and Wolf Vostell. Richter is credited with coining the movement’s name as a riposte to Soviet-style Social Realism. He and Polke remained close until the latter’s death in 2010.

During the 1960s, Richter produced some 28 abstract paintings, according to the online archive meticulously compiled by the Swiss collector Joe Hage. The census of abstract pictures jumps to 151 for the 1970s and grows much larger in the 1980s, when Richter produced 201 abstract works in various sizes in the first half of the decade and 344 works in the second half. Discussing Richter’s numerically modest beginning and subsequent sharp uptick as a painter of abstractions, Storr explains, “Reaching the point where he could paint what he calls ‘abstract pictures’ was a significant problem for him — he didn’t want to be caught in the slipstream of previous abstraction, whether metaphysical, transcendental, or social — and it wasn’t until the end of the 1970s that he found a way to really move forward on his own terms.”

Richter maintains a disciplined production schedule in Cologne, where he has lived since 1983. Although he has several assistants mixing paint and preparing canvases and a manager to oversee the enterprise, he works alone in his studio, aided by lightweight aluminum ladders and armed with a formidable variety of brushes and custom-made squeegee tools with which he achieves his trademark spectacular surfaces. The abundance of Richter’s abstractions may make the works appear numbingly similar to some observers, the result of a marathon-like effort to create material for an insatiable art market. Meyer acknowledges the copious output but doesn’t see that as a hindrance to evaluating the work in terms of quality and rarity. “Like great Rothkos,” he explains, “there may be 40 or 50 great Richter paintings, so you sort that out and know exactly where you are.”

Still, one can’t help but ask why the abstractions have zoomed so high in value, especially since they have generally played second fiddle in the market to the photorealist paintings, such as "Mustang Squadron," 1964, and "Ema (Nude on a Staircase)," 1966, which first brought Richter fame. That disparity seemed especially acute last November at Christie’s, the same week the abstracts racked up record prices at Sotheby’s, when Richter’s "Frau Niepenberg," 1965, a blurry painting based on a found photograph, offered by the Astrup Fearnley Collection in Oslo, was bought in against an estimate of $7 million to $10 million, despite the work’s inclusion in the important 2009 exhibition “Gerhard Richter Portraits,” at London’s National Portrait Gallery.

Intriguingly, Richter’s representational and abstract works, while typically distinguished in the market, are not absolutely separate in his creative process. As Storr explains, “Underneath many abstract paintings are figurative paintings, and certainly after the mid-1980s Richter regularly used abstraction to cancel out photo based images with which he was dissatisfied or used photo images as the sacrificial lamb of abstraction. If you X-ray these works you may find something else underneath.” Storr cites as examples “canceled” paintings from the “October 18, 1977” cycle that lurk beneath the surfaces of some of Richter’s abstract works. He also mentions "Clouds," a bravura two-panel abstract work from 1982, also owned by MOMA. “First you have a cloud painting,” he observes, “and then a kind of Al Heldish or hard-edged and geometric abstract painting that [Richter] then built over and dragged” with a squeegee. “You have three different genres within the same painting.”

The recent leap in Richter’s market has been assisted by the magisterial touring retrospective “Gerhard Richter: Panorama,” which debuted at Tate Modern, in London, in early October, then moved to Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie in February, and will open at the Centre Pompidou in Paris this month. There is precedent for this. Just as Richter’s MOMA retrospective was winding down in May 2002, a photo painting, "Drei Kerzen" (“Three Candles”), 1982, sold for a record $5,395,750 at Sotheby’s New York, and "180 Farben" (“180 Colors”), 1971, from the “Color Chart” series, made $3,969,500 at the same house. A 98-inch-square "Abstraktes Bild" from 1987 sold for $1,329,500 at Christie’s New York that same month.

“If you look through Richter’s career and correlate it to the marketplace,” says Francis Outred, European head of postwar and contemporary at Christie’s,“every time he has a retrospective, there’s a jump in the market. When people see independent works on their own in isolation, they like them but don’t really get the full artistic vision. It’s only when you see all the work together that you understand how special the vision is and what a pioneer he is,” Outred continues. “The abstract paintings have become the paintings of choice for this generation in the same way the 1960s photo paintings were for the generation of the 1990s.”

Beyond the retrospective, Richtermania is being stirred by the publication this year of the first volume of a long-awaited updated catalogue raisonné, a projected five-volume undertaking edited by Dietmar Elger, the director of the Gerhard Richter Archive, in Dresden. It will supersede the existing three-volume catalogue raisonné, which covers 1962-93. Meanwhile, audiences have been watching the 2011 documentary "Gerhard Richter Painting" by the German filmmaker Corinna Belz, which lifts the veil on the artist's method and intensity. In short, the run-up to the highly touted sale of six important Richter paintings on May 8th at Christie’s New York enjoyed quite a tail wind.

Not everyone is persuaded by this recent spate of astonishing prices, especially those reached at Sotheby’s last November. “I haven’t a clue,” says the seasoned dealer Roland Augustine, cofounder of Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, about what he regards as less-than-stellar abstractions. The gallery has sold several major Richter paintings, including the black-and-white photo painting "Woman Descending the Staircase," 1965, now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1996 organized an exhibition of 24 photo paintings and abstractions that Augustine characterizes as the first show in New York devoted to Richter on the secondary market. “As much as Lawrence [Luhring] and I both have been involved in the Richter market,” continues Augustine, “I don’t believe we could sell one of those abstractions for $12 million to $15 million right now if we had one in the gallery. It wouldn’t feel conscionable. He’s produced hundreds and hundreds of paintings, and his output is formidable. I just can’t imagine where these price levels come from.” About the group that recently sold at Sotheby’s, Augustine says frankly, “I mean, they were hardly A-quality paintings. It looked like a group of paintings put together by a speculator who bought them from here and there and elsewhere.”

A speculative motive was certainly evident in the midseason sale at Sotheby’s London in February, when Richter’s "Abstraktes Bild," 1995, measuring a scant 22 by 20 inches, sold for £959,650 ($1.5million). The seller, Paris dealer John Sayegh-Belchatowski, literally doubled his investment, having bought the painting just two months earlier at Paul Kasmin’s stand at Art Basel Miami for $750,000. The dealer bought a second, similarly scaled Richter from Seoul’s Kukje Gallery in Miami for a similar price and resold it in a private transaction in March at a comparable profit. Asked why he sold the paintings so quickly, Sayegh-Belchatowski, a familiar figure on the international auction and art fair circuit, states the obvious: “As you know, the Richter market is strong right now, and there are a lot of collectors who want to have one or some paintings by this major artist in their collection.”

Richter’s market advance shows no sign of abating. At this year’s February evening sale at Christie’s London, at least four telephone bidders chased Richter’s large "Abstraktes Bild," 1994, a mélange of flickering blues and greens reminiscent of Monet’s water lilies. Estimated at £5 million to £7 million ($7.6-11 million), it sold to an American telephone bidder for £9,897,250 ($15.5 million). Outred attributes the competition to “pure collector passion” and a belief that “Richter’s market is still undervalued. I think we’re very early in the cycle for his market.”

Against the back drop of this fierce trading in paintings by Richter, Marian Goodman says her gallery sets a price standard different from that of the auction houses, adding that she has to be increasingly vigilant about whom she sells work to. “Gerhard and I do the pricing together, and we’re certainly not trying to match auction prices. One of the things we have to be careful of is somebody who intends to buy a work, knowing our prices are so very much less than auction prices, as an investment or for speculation. Gerhard himself has said that the auction prices are crazy.” Still, Goodman acknowledges, "his auction market is an honest market, and there aren’t people joining others to keep it at a certain price range."

Richter’s position in the pantheon of postwar art is unassailable in the view of historians and curators, and the desire of collectors appears unquenchable. But Goodman sees an ethical current that runs through the work, an aspect that is being eclipsed by the market furor. She notes with a certain sadness, “Everybody wants to know prices, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the art.” Richter’s oeuvre, Goodman says, is “so dedicated to the art of painting itself, so ambitious in terms of breadth and depth, that really, painting for him is a moral act.”

This article appears in the June issue of Art+Auction.

Here in New York, Film Forum’s three-week Spaghetti Western season starts today with a three-course al dente hogfeast fit for the wealthiest grandee or the lowliest peon. Bring on the Sergios: The opening salvos are Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), Sergio Corbucci’s “Django” (1966) – the genre’s two most influential works – and the US premiere of the complete Italian version of Sergio Sollima’s “The Big Gundown” (1966). Read the full article on Spotlight.

Lot #319 - Merryvale Vineyards Merryvale Magnum Vertical Profile is Merryvale's flagship red Bordeaux blend showcasing the very best fruit from each vintage. This lot features 4 bottles of Napa Valley wine, and a VIP tour, and wine & cheese seminar for 8...

– Getty Unveils "Google Books for Art": The good folks at the Getty have launched a Web site, dubbed the Getty Research Portal, which is being described as "an art-specific version of Google Books." The cool new initiative aims to upload art historical texts online and make them searchable to anyone with an Internet connection. To date, the Getty has collaborated eight institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Columbia University, to cull about 20,000 art-related titles. [LAT, Getty Research Portal]  

– Art World Heavies to Battle in Arles Amphitheatre: The age of the live art smackdown is upon us! For four days this summer, a Roman amphitheatre typically used for bullfighting in the center of Arles, France will host "To the Moon Via the Beach," an organized by the LUMA Foundation, helmed by a gaggle of curatorial stars — Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno, and Beatrix Ruf — and featuring works by 20 giants of contemporary art, including Daniel Buren, Douglas Gordon, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Lawrence Weiner. From July 5-8, the artists will create new works, live, in the open-air, sand-filled arena-cum-studio. [Press Release]

– Frieze London Gets Artist-Designed Hologram Guide: Berlin-based artist Cecile B. Evans has won Frieze's annual Emdash award, which allows an emerging artist living outside the UK to realize a major project at Frieze London. Evans will create an arty audio guide to the art fair featuring the voices of non-art people commenting on the spectacle, which will be accompanied by a ghost-like holographic "host" that will pop up around the fair. [Press Release, ARTINFO UK]

– So This is What Retirement Looks Like: "Retired" art star Maurizio Cattelan unveiled an attitude-filled billboard next to the High Line last night, created in collaboration with photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. The giant image of a woman's 10 manicured and jeweled fingers will be on view through June 30. Though Cattelan held casting sessions for hand models, he found his subject — an older woman — while taking a break at the bar next door. [NYT]

– MoMA Acquires Darger Trove: The Museum of Modern Art has acquired 13 double-sided drawings by the artist Henry Darger, the museum's largest acquisition of work by an outsider artist. MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, an expert in Darger's work, is said to have been instrumental in arranging the gift, which came from the artist's estate. [NYT]

– Nazi Victim's Family Told to Return Artifact: In a reversal of the traditional scenario, the family of a Holocaust survivor was ordered to return an ancient gold tablet to the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin after a court concluded it had been looted not from the survivor, but from the museum at the close of WWII. [NYT]

– Montreal Museum Rained Out: The Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art's underground storage facility flooded earlier this week amidst heavy rains, causing damage to hundreds of artworks and marking the fourth time the institution has been affected by serious flooding. "We have one to three feet of water in our basements," said the museum's director, Paulette Gagnon. "It’s not a dozen works, it’s hundreds. But we still don’t know the exact number." [Globe and Mail]

– Degas Scholars Boycott Symposium Over Authenticity Fears: Leading Edgar Degas experts refused to attend a conference at the State Hermitage Museum last weekend in order to avoid discussing bronzes made with a set of recently discovered plaster casts. Their boycott was motivated not only by questions regarding the authenticity of the plaster casts, but also by the legal risks run by scholars who publicly question the provenance of such artworks. [TAN]

– Bush Presidential Portrait Unveiled: Former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura Bush were back at the White House yesterday for the formal unveiling of the latest presidential portrait. The painting, along with one of Mrs. Bush, were made by fellow Texan John Howard Sanden. "I am pleased my portrait brings an interesting symmetry to the White House collection," Bush said. "It now starts and ends with a George W." [LAT]

– Gay Art Museum Gets Major Donation: The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in SoHo — which only recently received formal museum accreditation — has received donations totaling upwards of $10 million, the largest donation ever to a gay and lesbian arts organization. Of that sum, $8.8 million was given by museum co-founder Charles W. Leslie in honor of his late partner Fredric D. Lohman. The remainder includes a $1.5 million donation from the estate of painter Marion Pinto. [Art Daily]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Cecile B. Evans, who has just won the Emdash prize and will create an audio guide for Frieze 2012, explains her previous project, "Art by Telephone":

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check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

NEW YORK — After a 10-month-long lockout, Sotheby’s union art handlers reached an agreement with the Upper East Side auction house yesterday. The 42 art handlers from Teamsters Local 814 will begin trickling back to work over the next three weeks following the longest lockout in company history. The lockout, which began a month before Occupy Wall Street, became a symbol of the movement within the arts community, provoking protests outside board members’ homes and offices, at affiliated museums, inside auction rooms, and even at Sotheby's London branch. It also inspired a petition to end the dispute, which was signed by 2,740 people, including artists like Fred Tomaselli and Artur Zmijewski. The news of the resolution was first reported by Crain’s New York. 

Following months of bitter negotiations during which both sides complained that the other refused to budge, meetings began to take on a slightly better tone in February, according to sources familiar with the negotiations, when both sides began making concessions. But the final push toward compromise began after Sotheby’s replaced its legal representation last month, Teamsters Local 814 president Jason Ide told Crain's. Bob Batterman of Proskauer, who represented the NFL in its lockout of players last year, took over for counsel from Jackson Lewis, a firm with a reputation for union avoidance.

The deal will last three years, raise workers’ salaries one percent a year, lift starting salaries to $18.50, and maintain workers’ benefits. It also protects all the existing union positions, some of which Sotheby’s had reportedly hoped to replace with temporary, non-union hires. (Back in February, Julian Tysh, a Sotheby’s union art handler who is also on the bargaining committee, said that the final sticking point left to settle was job security. “We don’t want a contract that allows us to be replaced with temps in the next couple of years,” he told ARTINFO.) Because the final agreement only protects the 42 art handlers currently employed by Sotheby's, a source close to the union says it is still negotiating how many Teamsters the company will employ in the long-term.

Union sources say the one percent raise — which unintentionally takes on additional significance in the context of the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street — was "almost beside the point," considering the costs of the lockout on both sides and the fact that the Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, has risen 2.3 percent in the last year. Despite these difficulties, the Teamsters report enthusiasm with the agreement. "I am proud of this settlement, which means pay raises and solid benefits for these 42 workers," Ide said in a statement. "This was a collective victory for the 99 percent." 

Sotheby’s, for its part, won more flexiblity and overtime provisions. The company will now pay lower rates for overtime, and the opportunity to work overtime now will be more evenly distributed amongst the art handlers. “Sotheby’s is pleased that it has reached a new collective bargaining agreement with Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters,” Sotheby’s spokesperson Diana Phillips told ARTINFO in an e-mail. (It remains to be seen whether recently re-elected board member Diana Taylor will resign from her post at Sotheby's after having threatened to do so last December if any of the art handlers' demands were met.) 

Both sides come out of these protracted negotiations with a few war wounds. Costs associated with temporary workers, enhanced security, and expensive legal council contributed to the $2.4 million jump Bloomberg reported in Sotheby's “other compensation” expenses during the first nine months of the fiscal year (though Sotheby’s Michael Sovern recently told board members the costs were less burdensome in the long term than acceding to the contract demands of the union). 

In addition to being out of work, the Teamsters lost their health insurance on January 1, a development some say added an extra level of urgency to the negotiations. As recently as the penultimate negotiation session, points ranging from work rules, pay, benefits, and even when the art handlers would return to work were all still under discussion.

City Council speaker Christine Quinn also played a role in the negotiations. She spoke to Sotheby's on a number of occasions, according to union sources, as well as to several museums. "I am proud the Council was able to play a helpful role in fostering positive conversations between labor and management," Quinn said in a statement. 

"This was a tough fight," George Miranda, president of Teamsters Joint Council 16, told Crain’s. "Now, we begin the job of rebuilding the relationship with Sotheby's, which had always been a good place to work."

It can be a lonely world out there for art museums, from confronting budget troubles to organizing endless shows, dealing with an apathetic public, and informing visitors that they can’t actually touch the art. Fortunately, the Nationwide Museum Mascot Project is here to help bring a little bit more pizazz to the stern façades of our country’s august art institutions. A DIY band of museum cheerleaders, the Mascot Project is embarking on a 2012 Summer Tour, alighting outside museums to engage visitors and staff alike with a combination of silly costumes, pro-museum picketing, corn dog giveaways, and public workshops.

The crew, helmed by Brian Dick and Christen Sperry-Garcia, has appeared at the Orange County Museum of Art, NADA Hudson, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others, in costumes slapped together from garbage bags, paper plates, and deconstructed piñatas. The mascot project started as a way to promote an event at a San Diego performance art space through an impromptu parade, but the pair quickly graduated to bigger venues.

For the SDMA’s “Inside the Wave” exhibition, which examined artists acting in social spaces, Dick proposed “mascotting” a museum for the first time. The institution agreed, but they were “kind of fuddy-duddy,” the artist recalled. “Initially there’s suspicion, but if you’re there long enough there’s acceptance,” he told ARTINFO. “We’re kind of integrating with the museum."

That integration isn’t always asked for or encouraged. Though they pitched to LACMA about making an official appearance, the museum was uncomfortable with the Mascot Project disrupting their carefully managed branding. Dick and Sperry-Garcia showed up anyway, taking up residence in a far corner of the museum’s campus, much to the delight of a group of Japanese tourists (though not, perhaps, director Michael Govan). Their appearances are about “50-50 invited and not,” said Sperry-Garcia.

The audience’s reaction is mixed. “Kids will be immediately engaged,” Sperry-Garcia noted, but art students and younger artists “tend to be confused and skeptical” about their antics. This combination suits the performance, which “has an element of prank, but it’s also ambiguous,” Dick explained. “We know the museums don’t really want or need mascot promotion,” he continued — “They don’t think they need it,” interjected Christen — “but we’re committed to the idea of promoting them.” The duo's enthusiasm is in earnest. “We’re never going to make fun of anyone," Dick added.

With the proceeds from their listing on the Kickstarter-style funding site USA Projects, Mascot Project hopes to hit museums across the United States on their grand 2012 Summer Tour, their first time taking the costumes on the road. “I’m not sure if we’re a rock band or what,” Dick laughed. 

An obscure 1997 documentary about Texans trying to win a pick-up truck in an endurance contest hardly seems the basis for a Broadway hit, especially with a softcore porn-style title. But after solid reviews recently rolled in for the world premiere of “Hands on a Hardbody" at the La Jolla Playhouse,  the producers announced this week that the musical will be coming to Broadway next season. This will mark the theater debut of Trey Anastasio of Phish, who co-wrote the songs with Broadway veteran Amanda Green (“High Fidelity”). Douglas Wright (“I Am My Own Wife”) adapted the hardscrabble story of ten of his fellow Texans arduously competing to keep one gloved hand on a truck. Read the full post on Spotlight.

Two of the 100 Antony Gormley sculptures of male figures standing on Crosby beach, Merseyside, are sporting colourful crocheted jumpsuits, courtesy of the New York guerrilla knitwear artist Agata Oleksiak, also known as Olek.

The sculptures, which usually stand stark naked looking at the sea, have been radically transformed by the yarn and needle intervention — going from quietly meditative to borderline psychedelic. One is wearing pink, purple and green, while the other has been granted a slightly more demure colour scheme of white, grey, and black.

The idea, explained Olek, was to "transform old into new." "The pieces have been there for a while and people stop paying attention to them," she told the BBC. "By covering them and giving them a new skin, I made them more alive... besides, it is a public work and needs an interaction with a viewer."

Olek has made a name for herself by giving similar knitting treatments to bicycles, cars, grand pianos, and even to the iconic Wall Street Bull. She had planned to cover more — possibly all — of the Antony Gormley standing sculptures, but ran out of time.

Gormley, for his part, appears to have taken it in good spirits. "I feel that barnacles provide the best cover-up," he told the BBC, "but this is a very impressive substitute!"

Olek is one of the main players in guerrilla knitting, or yarn-bombing — a cosy alternative to graffiti art that has been cropping up across the globe in the last few years.

Last March, a mysterious knitter installed a 50ft-long "yarn-bomb" representing a myriad of Olympic sports on the pier of Saltburn by the Sea. Many more interventions of this kind are to be expected in the coming weeks, as June 9 is International Yarn Bombing Day. Their slogan: "Join us in World Yarn Domination. Knit or Be Knitted." You've been warned.

This article appears on ARTINFO UK.

In January 2009, Naomi Watts posed as the “Seven Year Itch” Marilyn Monroe on the cover of the French Madame Figaro magazine. Ali Mahdavi’s photograph of Watts with her lids half closed and her scarlet lips wide open made for a facsimile of Monroe that was no worse or better than others, though truth be told the Australian actress resembles the Hollywood legend no more than Michelle Williams, who played her affectingly in “My Week With Marilyn.” Read the full post on Spotlight.

Andrew Garfield, recently nominated for a Tony for his role in "Death of a Salesman," plays Peter Parker and his superheroic alter ego in "The Amazing Spider-Man," Marvel Comics' reboot of the popular superhero film franchise, in theaters July 3.

ISTANBUL — The lovably goofy Istancool is no more. In its third year, the swanky Turkish arts-and-culture get-together returned last weekend with the more neutered name Istanbul International Arts & Culture Festival (“IST. Fest” seems to be the prefered abbreviation), with “Istancool” demoted to subtitle. “It was like a bad song that got stuck in your head,” festival founder Alphan Eseli acknowledged in an interview. “And it was misleading because it’s not all about being cool.”

In some ways, this waffling between the lovable but laughable and the more buttoned-down but boring is symbolic. It reflects how the whole enterprise has grown almost faster than it has been thought out, and is shooting for an ideal that has not quite been fully formulated. Still, the basic idea is not too hard to explain: The event aspires to be a kind of summit for figures from art, fashion, and film. It is overseen by husband-and-wife cultural entrepreneurs Alphan Eseli and Demet Muftuoglu Eseli — he’s a filmmaker, while she’s an art director for Vakko, a multi-headed Turkish fashion and media conglomerate that sponsored the event, and hosted the first day of talks in its boxy postmodern corporate headquarters (designed by REX Architects).

This year, the free-to-the-public two-day program of speakers featured, among others, the wry, jaded-seeming film director Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”), dashing American artist Aaron Young (vanguard representative of the motorsports-as-art trend), and chilled-out-to-the-point-of-being-comatose fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti. These globe-trotting Hollywood and fashion types mixed with figures of more regional renown, like bestselling Turkish novelist Ayse Kulin, urbane Italy-based moviemaker Ferzan Ozpetek (subject of a MoMA film retrospective a few years back), and Turkish architect Emre Arolat, whose talk seemed to draw sparks from the crowd — gentrification, it seems, is a hot topic in this fast-developing metropolis.

What to say about this event, and its place in the world? Turkish cultural policy has been in the news frequently of late, with the government going on an aggressive campaign to demand the return of antiquities from foreign institutions. In its way, IST. Fest grows out of the same cultural conjuncture. Both initiatives are unthinkable without the surging sense of dynamism brought on by Turkey’s entry into the club of fast-growing “emerging” nations, which brings with it a new sense of assertiveness.

Yet at the same time, the confab offers a positive alternative to this type of jingo. In a welcome letter, Demet and Alphan expressed a hope that their endeavor might offer young people in their country “the opportunity to come together with those people that have inspired them, to open their minds and reshape their own worlds,” billing the talks as a “multi-national and multi-disciplinary cultural exchange program.” It's clear that they are invested in an ideal of a frictionless cosmopolitanism.

However, like economic globalization, cultural globalization is not a smooth process. It tends to come on the scene as a jagged series of collisions — some of them fruitful, some less so — between local interests and international forces. In its own benign manner, this affair reflected this unevenness in the way that the Turkish cultural figures and the foreign ones seemed to have very little to say to one another onstage. I have no idea what filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes and Turkish actress Meltem Cumbul were meant to do together for their joint presentation. Neither did they. It was strange.

In the end, it was one of the handful of visual artists on the bill who served as the example of what the future of the festival might most productively represent. South Africa-born, Germany-based Robin Rhode was, in addition to being a speaker, the subject of a show at Istanbul ’74, a nonprofit art space run by the organizers (in recent years, it has been collaborating with New York’s Lehmann Maupin on programming). Rhode spoke well about how the playful video- and street-art experiments on view there grew out of the effort to find a mode of creativity with some kind of social resonance beyond the smart set. This ambition — even if it is mainly just an ambition — gives his body of work all its daft energy, and an emotional tone that makes it more than just a pleasing spectacle.

I’m told that in the future, the art component of this festival may be more integrated with the programming at Istanbul ’74, perhaps serving each year as a summation of the art space’s activities. This scheme promises to give the visual art aspect more local resonance, and, if done right, to give the proceedings more texture and depth as well. In any case, I don’t expect Istancool / IST. Fest to hold still. Above all, it has the most powerful of forces driving its evolution — Istanbul itself, a city increasingly cast in the global spotlight. That energy makes it an endeavor that is worth keeping an eye on. Indeed, my guess is that it's probably going to be hard to look away.