NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, it appears, is honing its skill at finding similarities between women with only superficial similarities.  Its current Costume Institute exhibition, "Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations," for example, is a joint retrospective of two fashion luminaries who have little in common aside from the fact that they are both a) female designers and b) Italian. But despite their generational divide, Miuccia Prada's and Elsa Schiaparelli's careers share a certain absurdism, and the show works. We could say the same about Sunday's improbable conversation between 90-year-old textile tycoon Iris Apfel and 16-year-old blogging wunderkind Tavi Gevinson, "Good Taste/Bad Taste: The Evolution of Contemporary Chic."

That's not to say the two share opinions on fashion. Addressing an audience of fashionable women in every manner of strange hats (including one prominently featuring a lobster, an obvious nod to Schiaparelli), Gevinson was blond bangs and dark lipstick, the same angelic/gothic sweetness she showed us during her Fashion Week presentation of "Cadaver," her macabre short film about romance in a morgue. She's a thoughtful analyst who quotes artists like Cindy Sherman and John Waters, gathers her ideas carefully before speaking, and holds the microphone tightly with both hands. The seasoned Apfel, meanwhile, draped in grayish-ish brown Mongolian sheepskin, embellished with turquoise necklace, shoes, and eyeshadow, sharply tells her own stories and freely provides her opinions. The New Yorker's Judith Thurman provided some balance with her simple black top — as well as a few questions. 

The two addressed all sorts of topics: Gevinson's penchant for vintage versus Apfel's early struggles to convince the world that it was okay to wear used clothes; Apfel's view that every designer works with a specific woman in mind versus Gevinson's insistence that clothing is universal. Gevinson equated feminism with freedom, while Apfel said that is was "bunk." And while Apfel wishes she could afford more of the streamlined, sculptural silhouettes of Ralph Rucci, one of Tavi's current favorites is the softly fluttering, California-inspired collections of Rodarte. 

Their divide became more apparent in the different "evolutions" they spoke of. While Gevinson could divide her life into the oppression of middle school and the freedom of high school, Apfel spoke of a world before and after Balenciaga, and the decentralization of fashionable thinking from Paris. When Gevinson, who "became confident once I pretended I was and forced myself into wearing something I was shy about," asked if the same thing happened to Apfel, the nonagenarian replied, "I can’t remember that far back." (Although she does remember being "the first woman to wear blue jeans.") 

Despite their marked (if predictable) differences, they recognized that their manner of dress was meant to attract what Iris called "the same ilk" — and Tavi called "a similar group of weirdos" — both emphasizing that the small tribes of people who get your style are the ones who truly matter, and everyone else's opinion is irrelevant. And together, they hashed a plan for the next Costume Institute show,  one that would be based on the elderly fashion blog, Advanced Style.

"Fear of aging is sad and scary to me," Gevinson said. "I think John Waters said, first there were beatniks and then the hippies and then the punks, and right now I don't really think there's a counterculture like that. So the way to be rebellious now is —"

"To get old?" Thurman interjected.

"To get away from the fetishization of youth," Gevinson finished.

"That's brilliant," Apfel said. "There are so many, many women that go crazy about [aging] in a very bad way for their own being... It would be a very healing show... Let's sign on the dotted line."

Spotlight focuses on the best in culture, hour by hour. Here's today's news and reviews.

• The strangest moments from Dan P. Lee's extremely weird (but must-read) Fiona Apple profile.

• Deborah Ann Woll on filming sex scenes for "True Blood."

• NPRatings: new albums from Beachwood Sparks and Henry Threadgill Zooid.

Pablo Picasso's "Woman in a Red Armchair" has become the latest masterwork to be defaced while hanging on a museum wall. Last Wednesday at around 3 p.m., a man approached the 1929 canvas, which hangs in Houston's de Menil Collection, and stenciled a bull and the word "Conquista" on the surface of the gray and red cubist portrait.

The incident was caught on video by a bystander, who then posted the snippet on YouTube, where it was picked up today by the local news outlet KHOU. The video, shot from behind, captures the suspect with his hands raised in front of the painting. There is a loud cracking sound as he rips the stencil off the surface of the canvas and quickly walks away. Soon after, we hear the civilian filmmaker exclaim, "What the fuck?" 

A police investigation is underway to track down the vandal, de Menil representative Gretchen Sammons told ARTINFO this afternoon. She said the museum also has its own security footage of the incident, which occurred while a guard's back was turned. According to the YouTube posting, the graffiti was the work of Houston-based, Mexican-American artist Uriel Landeros and was done "in dedication to the art beast Pablo Picasso." (Two days ago, after the attack, Landeros was featured in a group exhibition at Summer Street Studios in Houston.) 

"The painting was rushed to the conservation studio before the paint was even dry," Sammons said. "We're hopeful it will be restored." She added that this is the first instance of vandalism at the august institution. The painting was acquired by collectors John and Dominique de Menil in 1956.

In an interview with a local TV station, the bystander seemed oddly supportive of the perpetrator. "I thought it was pretty cool how he walked up to the painting without fear, spray painted it and walked off," he said. After the incident, he followed the vandal out of the museum to ask why he did it; the assailant told him he was simply an up-and-coming artist who wanted to honor the Cubist master in his own way. (And though you might think it would be difficult to pursue a career in art after such a crime, remember that artist Tony Shafrazi spray-painted "Guernica" at MoMA in 1974 and then went on to a successful career in art dealing.)

Such brazen vandalism inside the hallowed halls of museums is rare, though recent attacks on artworks from seemingly unhinged perpetrators have targeted Poussin and Gaugaun. But while those incidents seemed to stem from the vandals's anger at the nudity in the paintings, this particular attack, in keeping with its apparent artistic roots, seems to deal more directly with Picasso's own themes of the bullfight and the conquest.

An inquiry to the lieutenant in charge of the case at the Houston Police Department was not immediately returned.

To see the footage of Pablo Picasso's "Woman in a Red Armchair" being vandalized in the de Menil museum, click on the video below:

Late last month artist Klas Eriksson set Bucharest's towering Intercontinental hotel ablaze in a fiery performance — cheekily titled "Com’on You Reds" — that marked the launch of the fifth Bucharest Biennale. The 2012 edition, curated by Anne Barlow — director of New York non-profit Art in General — boasts the subversive-sounding theme "Tactics for the Here and Now" and an international roster of 17 artists creating projects throughout the Romanian capital.

"Within the context of the shifting nature of economics, politics and culture, I was interested in artistic practices whose agency lies in investigative or indirect approaches that possess their own kind of power," Barlow explained to ARTINFO via email. "While many artists in the Biennale engage with the subjects of territories and histories, risky and unstable positions, or systems of authority, they do so in a way that is characterized by ambiguity, non-linearity and the quasi-fictional, or by tactics of subterfuge and infiltration."

Appropriately, the exhibition has infiltrated an incredible variety of venues, and spans enormous spaces like the Casa Presei Libere and a former textile factory, as well as the University of Bucharest's Institute for Political Research and a quaint downtown restaurant where British artist Ruth Evan has installed a jukebox loaded with politically charged songs.

"While some artists responded to particular sites, such as Klas Eriksson’s flare performances at the Intercontinental hotel and Make A Point," Barlow said, "the majority are situated in spaces that provide meaningful contexts for their presentation — whether this is a physical location or an existing distribution platform such as a cinema, or local publication, as seen in Jill Magid's narratives embedded in the current issues of Vice, Tabu, and Zeppelin magazines."

Bucharest Biennale 2012 continues through July 22.

To see works from the Bucharest Biennale, click on the slide show.

To see a clip of Klas Eriksson's "Com’on You Reds" performance, click on the video below:

Across a soybean field on the southern bank of the Uji River, which underlines the quaint, temple-laden city of Kyoto, sits a small factory. It no longer produces sandwiches, as it did for years, but the place still hums with industry, evidenced by the cluster of bikes outside its entrance.

Since 2009, the factory has been home to the studio of artist Kohei Nawa, known for his texture-obsessed oeuvre of two- and three-dimensional works employing beads, prisms, glue, plaster, and spray foam. His most in-depth series to date, “PixCell,” scavenges motifs and objects from the Internet — everything from shoes to toy tanks to taxidermied animals — and covers them in acrylic and clear glass beads, blurring their contours while magnifying certain details. The day I visit, a half dozen assistants kneel with gloves and glue guns underneath a deer suspended upside down in a large vise. An upright deer behind it is dotted with Styrofoam balls in various sizes, Nawa’s road map for the application of the beads. Another herd of deer — and one baby elephant, just delivered — await their turn in the next room.

Although demand for Nawa’s work has only increased — he took the grand prize at the 2010 Asian Art Biennial in Bangladesh; is represented by one of Tokyo’s top galleries, SCAI The Bathhouse; and last year the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, acquired his “PixCell Deer #24,” 2011 — the artist has taken pains to style the studio as a platform for creation of all kinds. “The word platform suggests a reciprocal equality among the people in any position, generation, or specialized field,” says Nawa. “There is no hierarchy here. All the materials, technologies, and human resources are in free contact with each other, and during the process of mingling with others, incidental creations are born accidentally and unexpectedly.”

Inspired by the studio of Jeppe Hein, in Berlin, and Studio Banana, a loose collective of autonomous creators in Madrid, Nawa, who holds a Ph.D. in sculpture from Kyoto City University of Arts, sought to orchestrate the ideal conditions for creative foment. He found the building in the classifieds, and with the advice and assistance of his architect friends such as Emi Hatanaka, Yuichi Kodai, Yoshitaka Lee, and Yuko Nagayama, renovated the bi-level, open-plan, steel-framed space to include a conference/seminar room, a kitchen, and a 12-bed dormitory for visiting artists. He invited comrades and colleagues in graphic design, production, and architecture — most of them local to the Kyoto/Osaka area, though some work off-site and even overseas — to join.

If Studio Banana is styled as a consortium, Sandwich, as it’s dubbed, has emerged as more of a cooperative, with a growing load of joint projects. And as the studio’s scope has broadened to include product and interior design, the range of needed skills has expanded, too. Its members recently found themselves working on exhibition designs or conceptualizing interiors for restaurants such as Mme Kiki, in Kobe. Sandwich exhibited at the Tokyo Frontline fair in February and is active locally as well, organizing programming for the Hotel Anteroom in Kyoto, a kind of high-end hostel for design buffs.

Sometimes projects come from farther afield. After the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo presented “Synthesis,” a wide-ranging solo show of Nawa’s work, last summer, he was contacted by fashion designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, who asked him to design the headwear for her spring/summer 2012 runway presentation in Paris that October. Given the theme of “White Drama” and knowing only that Kawakubo admired Nawa’s “Scum” sculptures in spray foam, the Sandwich team set about creating caps that resembled deflating clouds or Marie Antoinette wigs sculpted in soft-serve ice cream. “Her requirements completely respected the artist’s inspiration,” Nawa notes.

Although the studio worked blindly, without even a hint as to what the clothes looked like, Kawakubo was so pleased with the result that she commissioned Sandwich to produce “White Pulse,” an installation of 258 white plaster-coated iron pipes, for the newest outpost of her Dover Street Market, which is dedicated to a tightly curated selection of clothing and homewares from the likes of Rick Owens and Martin Margiela. Over the course of three months, the Sandwich architects used the store’s blueprints to create a 3-D model for Nawa and the designers to test out ideas and arrangements, while the production team experimented with plaster-pouring techniques. Prototypes of the sculptures, which looked like a heartbeat monitor line rendered in three dimensions, were wrapped in plastic on the ground floor in December; the store opened in Tokyo’s posh Ginza district in March.

Such opportunities for creation, broadly defined, have made Sandwich a magnet in the Kyoto region. Kousaku Matsumoto, who previously worked for Sou Fujimoto Architects, in Tokyo, and for himself, says, “I was planning to go to a foreign country and had applied to New York firms. But I was still checking the Sandwich home page,” hoping for a chance to join. Fluidity was its appeal. “This studio is very different from other companies and studios,” he continues. “My job is very abstract. Everyone works on everything, and the circumstances are always changing. Each staff member is professional but also flexible.” Matsumoto approaches his role at the studio as a kind of social architect: “I’m interested in how we use this space to connect people.” Miho Harada, a production staffer, mentions the convivial atmosphere, exemplified by simple, family-style meals served at a long table in the kitchen.

That’s exactly what Nawa hopes to achieve. “I feel the possibility exists here for something that would normally be considered impossible to become real,” he says. “The people here are addicted to creating things. We open acceptance to students, interns, and employees, so we are always in a state of chaos.” Indeed, watching the Sandwich members at work, it’s hard to tell where one project stops and another begins. The day of my visit, a drawing penciled on the wall could have been a sketch for one of Nawa’s glue-based skeins but instead is a backdrop left over from a music-video shoot the previous week — one more type of creation absorbed into the Sandwich orbit.

This article first appeared in the June issue of Modern Painters magazine.

It’s all very well for Sylvester Stallone to make six “Rocky” movies and for Mark Wahlberg to talk up “The Fighter II” – which will depict Micky Ward’s legendary fights with Arturo Gatti – but “Raging Bull II” appears to be a movie that nobody wants.

Nobody in the media that is: the announcement by Variety (paywall website) three days ago that the Argentinian-born Martin Guigui had started his Hollywood shoot of the prequel-sequel to Martin Scorsese’s biopic of the 1949-50 World Middleweight Champion Jake LaMotta met with a chorus of disapproval from different websites and outlets

The movie’s publicity claims that it portrays LaMotta “before the rage” and “after the rage.” Starring William Forsythe as the older LaMotta and newcomer Mojean Aria as the novice fighter, it actually began production on June 4. The cast includes Paul Sorvino, Joe Mantegna, Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore, Natasha Henstridge, Ray Wise, Harry Hamlin, Bill Bellamy, and James Russo as Rocky Graziano, whom LaMotta never fought. The two fighters are linked by their crucial defeats to Sugar Ray Robinson (played by Dre’ Michael Chaney).

Alicia Witt, who plays a troubled woman LaMotta became involved with, has spoken of meeting the 90-year-old Bronx Bull on the set of the film and performing “Me or NY.” LaMotta has been married six times. There is no indication that anyone will be stepping into the shoes of Cathy Moriarty, memorable as Vicki LaMotta, the boxer’s domestically abused second wife, in “Raging Bull.”

Beyond what Scorsese showed, there is plenty of drama to be milked from LaMotta’s life, including the 1960 testimony he gave admitting that he threw a 1947 fight to ingratiate himself with the mob, and the deaths in 1998 of his two sons from different causes. However, the lack of enthusiasm for another LaMotta movie is based on the widespread perception that, despite its poor box-office gross ($23 million) and failure to win the 1980 Best Picture Oscar (which went to “Ordinary People”), “Raging Bull” was unimprovable, a bona fide American masterpiece, and the greatest of all boxing pictures.

It was much more than that, of course: a psychologically complex redemption drama about a working-class man – inarticulate, pathologically suspicious and insecure, all id – who attempts to exorcize his demons by expressing his fury and inviting and standing up to intense punishment. Given that it was written by Paul Schrader, it’s difficult not to read a religious, even Christ-like element, into LaMotta’s battering at the hands of Robinson.

Shot in black and white by Michael Chapman and set shortly after World War II, “Raging Bull,” though not an allegory, captured something of the American vortex in the era of Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, and the Korean War. De Niro and Thelma Schoonmaker, the film’s editor, deservedly won Oscars; Scorsese, Schrader, Chapman, and Moriarty should have done. It would be unwise to judge “Raging Bull II” while it’s still in production, but one suspects it will not manage the first film’s reach or impact.

Scorsese, for one, has distanced himself from the project. "[There's] nothing I could say about it except I don't think I could revisit the material, as they say,” he told British GQ, as reported in the UK Huffington Post. “I think we said what we had to say at that time. All of us moved on. Different aspects of the same story basically keep making the rounds....Rise and fall and self-destruction and the suffering and somehow coming through, in some cases. Coming through the suffering so that you change in a way...

"Ultimately, at the end of ‘Raging Bull,’ he's looking in a mirror and he's at comfort with himself, to a certain extent. He's not fighting, he's not beating himself up. That's all….I really don't know what ‘Raging Bull II’ would be."

Below: LaMotta vs. Robinson in "Raging Bull"

This month, Caravaggio’s painting “The Raising of Lazarus” returns from the dead.

Following an intensive five-month restoration that has transformed the classic painting, the work will be featured in a one-work exhibition at the Palazzo Braschi in Rome. Depicting the miracle in which Jesus resurrects Lazarus in the presence of family members who buried him, the baroque work features the dark, emotional style that made Caravaggio a favorite among ecclesiastical patrons looking to stir up emotion among the faithful during the Counter Reformation. While preserving the painting’s brooding overall tone, by clearing away dust and sediment, restoration experts at Rome's Superior Institute of Conservation and Restoration have, in essence, brought new light to Caravaggio’s trademark shadows.

The result is a scene only a little more dramatic than the circumstances under which the painting was made. Between 1608 and 1609, while he was painting “The Raising,” the notoriously roguish Caravaggio was living in Sicily, on the run from a military and religious order known as the Knights of Malta for injuring one of their members. This was after fleeing a charge for murdering an Umbrian nobleman in Rome. Pope Paul V had issued a death warrant against him, and he is said to have suffered several attempts on his life in addition to engaging in the scuffles and street brawls for which he was already famous.

Restoration expert Anna Maria Marcone tells La Reppublica that Caravaggio made the “Raising” in a hurried commission for a Genovese merchant. “There was an urgency to finish up,” she said. “Hence the expedient use of dark-pitched tones, revealing the figures with a few light secure strokes, which now appear as shafts of light.”

Additional analysis by chief restorers Carla Zaccheo and Emanuela Ozino Calligaris has given experts a precise index of the materials that Caravaggio used. “In Sicily, Caravaggio uses what he finds: local materials,” Marcone told La Reppublica. “The work effectively gives you a sense of an artist who has arrived at the climax of his technical and expressive abilities.”

NEW YORK — Last night Fiona Apple played an album release show 18 floors higher than New York's dozens of rock clubs. “Ah, the Boom Boom Room,” Apple said, gripping the microphone with a shocking intensity. “What are you all talking about tonight at the Boom Boom Room? I hear they have the best conversations at the Boom Boom Room. So go ahead. Fuck it. Talk.”

Around her, in that oft-chosen site of fashion after-parties and film premieres, the giant windows peered into the canopy above the Meatpacking District. It was not the obvious choice of venue for Apple on the eve of a release of her new album, “The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do.” Apple isn’t exactly the outgoing socialite. And, for those who have heard the new album, it's as unadorned as anything the singer/songwriter has ever done: a sequence of breakup songs both caustic and cathartic, her piano buffered by little more than the muddled percussion in the background. Meanwhile, the bar atop the Standard Hotel is loud and jam-packed and anything but private.

Yet it soon became clear that this setting, like all settings, was Fiona's to own. With a full band backing her, she pounded the piano in a black tanktop, flayed by a magenta scarf, its ends flying up next to her purple eye shadow and the purple bags beneath her eyes. Then she played “Fast As You Can.” Fast.

“I wanna stop the show,” Apple said after the first song. “I wanna stop the show and get binoculars, and I wanna look out all the windows, look at what's outside.” Quite different from the norm here, where everyone gets suddenly all nearsighted — the views are great, sure, but are there any movie stars around? (A few Standard stalwarts did show up, such as the designers Richard Chai and Philip Lim.)

All eyes, however, were focused on Fiona, her performance getting more physically expressive as she moved to her first hit, “Criminal.” Her arms shot up and swung into wild angles, veins popped out of her neck, and the words came straight from her cheekbones and collarbones. She winded down her set with “Anything We Want,” a highlight from her new album where, at the climax, she asks someone to kiss her “when we find some time alone.”

After the set the crowd milled around, buying drinks and talking, and Fiona Apple was nowhere to be found.

Spotlight focuses on the best in culture, hour by hour. Here's today's news and reviews.

• Nordepolen deliver a Balkan folk-tinged house track with "När Mitt Blod Pumpar i Dej."

• Steve Buscemi's mother hopes that Michael Pitt's character returns to "Boardwalk Empire."

• A second, slightly more illuminating, trailer for P.T. Anderson's "The Master" hits the Internet.

LONDON — Sotheby’s London season evening opener of Impressionist and Modern art yielded a new record for a rare Joan Miro painting. Yet apart from a few other highlights, the event was rather lackluster. Thirty-three of the 48 lots offered sold for a total of £74,934,850 ($117,505,338), compared to pre-sale expectations of £72,970,000-102,630,000 ($114,424,257-$160,934,103).

The relatively high casualty rate by lot of 31 percent reflected the choosy nature of a market largely uninterested in B-class material. Still, some 15 of the 33 lots that sold made over a million pounds and of those, a full 23 made over a million dollars. That compares to the stronger £96,968,000 ($157,543,910) tally from last June, when 32 of the 35 lots offered sold.

The evening got off to a decent start with lot 1, a small Pablo Picasso colored crayon-on-paper “Les Dejeuners” (1961) that sold to dealer David Nahmad for £337,250 ($528,842) (est. £300-500,000), and sizzled briefly with lot 2, Alexej von Jawlensky’s torrid and vividly colored “Still Life With Flowers and Oranges” (ca. 1909) that drew four bidders and sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £2,505,250 ($3,928,483) over an estimate of £800,000-1.2 million. 

Less riveting was the Claude Monet winter scene, “La Seine a Bougival” (1869), which sold to a lone telephone bidder for £2,393,250 ($3,752,855) (est. £2.2-3.2 million). It was one of two lots carrying a so-called third-party guarantee, with a minimum price guaranteed by a party outside the auction house. The much-traded painting last sold at auction at Christie’s New York in May 2006 for $2,928,000 — not much of an appreciation for return-minded investors.

The evening suffered in part from several bouts of buy-in fever, with auctioneer Henry Wyndham valiantly trying to squeeze out a bid for aggressively estimated material from the easily disinterested salesroom. At one point, early on in the sale, four consecutive lots hit the buy-in bin, including a Camille Pissarro, Edvard Munch, Paul Delvaux, and Fernand Leger.

Luckily, a rather great painting came up next and saved Sotheby’s skin, at least from a publicity perspective. The intensely blue cover lot, Joan Miro's “Peinture (Etoile Bleue),” a dreamy abstraction with rich nuggets of color and form from 1927, shot to a record £23,561,25 ($36,946,396), smashing through the upper end of its estimate range of £15-20 million. It hurdled the mark set by Miro’s “Painting-Poem” (1925), which sold at Christie’s London last February for £16.8 million.

The Sotheby’s picture sold to an anonymous telephone bidder who played a cat-and-mouse game with the bidding increments, leap-frogging at one point, for example, from £17 to £19 million and another time from £19.5 million to the winning hammer bid of £21 million. Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s worldwide contemporary head and star auctioneer took the bids while Stephane Connery, Sotheby’s former head of private sales and major rainmaker was the underbidder.

“I was having trouble following it myself,” said Connery afterwards, referring to the crazy bidding pattern. He did, however, express great satisfaction at his first auction as a private dealer.

The star Miro last sold to the Nahmad gallery at Aguttes, the Paris auction house, in December 2007 when it made €11,586,520 (est. €5-7 million), beating out underbidders Giraud Pissarro Segalot. It is believed the painting changed hands since then, before it almost tripled in value. The Miro, which earlier this year was exhibited in the Pace Gallery's “Mythology” show in New York, also carried a third-party guarantee.

Asked about the mixed grill of top-class material and lesser offerings, Connery summed up the state of this market, saying, “It’s difficult to get material and there’s very little discretionary selling in this field. If you’re in the B- minus category, it’s much harder [to sell].”

Helena Newman, Sotheby’s chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art, Europe, praised the Miro, noting, “It very much appealed to the taste of today’s global collectors.” 

Other big hits in the sale included the late and decidedly brawny Picasso musketeer, “Homme Assis” (1972) that was featured in the famed exhibition in Avignon, shortly after the artist’s death in 1973. It sold to a telephone bidder for £6,201,250 ($9,724,180) (est. £6-9 million).  

A pretty and classic Pierre Bonnard, “Nu Debout” of the artist’s muse and wife Marthe, from circa 1931, sold to New York’s Acquavella Galleries for £4,521,250 ($7,089,772) (est. £4.5-5.5 million). “It’s a great picture,” said Nicholas Acquavella as he exited the salesroom, “by a great artist and a great price. It checks all the boxes.”

The market paid close attention to first-rate offerings, including Henry Moore’s poignant bronze, “Mother and Child with Apple” (1956), numbered two from an edition of nine. It sold to the telephone for £3,737,250 ($5,860,382) (est. £1.8-2.8 million). The bronze baby element of the sculpture, cradled by the mother’s left arm, is removable, in case anybody wants to know. The late owner acquired the sculpture from London gallery Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd. in 1957 for £650, according to Sotheby’s Helena Newman.

Another sculpture, Alberto Giacometti’s  petite, 16¼-inch-high bronze lifetime cast, “Femme Debout (Annette)” (ca. 1956) sold to another telephone for an over-estimate total of £2,169,250 ($3,401,601) (est. £800,000-1.2 million).

It’s too soon to tell if the current travails of the Euro and too-big-to-fail status of some Euro Zone countries had anything to do with the evening’s tally. Paintings that appeal to a certain type of taste — call it Russian — had somewhat mixed results, as the ever racy and wildly decorative Kees van Dongen, “Lailla” (1908), featuring a harem-like femme fatale in a veil and little else, sold to a telephone bidder for £3,681,250 ($5,772,568) (est. £3.5-5 million). The work last sold at auction at Christie’s Paris in June 2006 when it made €3,372,000.

“Are we all done?” asked Wyndham to the bank of invisible telephone clients as the bidding slowed. “Is anybody there?”

“There are fewer and fewer highlights,” noted Paris dealer Lionel Pissarro as he exited the salesroom, “and the rest of the market is slow. Still,” cautioned the dealer, “it’s hard to draw conclusions from one sale.”

The evening action resumes on Wednesday at Christie’s Impressionist and Modern sale.

To see highlights of Sotheby's London's Impressionist and Modern sale, click on the slide show.

SALE: Contemporary Evening Sales

LOCATION: Sotheby's and Christie's London

DATE: June 26, 6pm (Sotheby's), and June 27, 7pm (Christie's)

ABOUT: After the Impressionist and modern auctions — the results of which are still to be determined — wrap up in London this week, Christie's and Sotheby's will begin gearing up for next week's contemporary sales. London Contemporary week is one of the last hurrahs of the art market before the summer lull, and in this trophy-hunting sales climate the houses will try to out-do one another with offerings of works by household names like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, Yves Klein, Lucian Freud, Anish Kapoor, and Lucio Fontana.

Look out for a full preview of the upcoming contemporary auctions in London by Judd Tully from the latest edition of Art+Auction later in the week. To see works from the sales, click the slide show.

OTHER INTERNATIONAL SALES:

Sale: Contemporary Day Sale
Location: Sotheby's London
Date: June 27, 10:30am

Sale: Whisky
Location: Bonhams Edinburgh
Date: June 27, 11am

Sale: The Daphne Guinness Collection
Location: Christie's South Kensington (London)
Date: June 27, 7pm

Sale: Post-War and Contemporary Day Sale
Location: Christie's London
Date: June 28, 12pm

WHAT: “Caribbean: Crossroads of the World”

WHEN: El Museo del Barrio, June 12-January 6, 2013; Queens Museum of Art, June 17-January 6, 2013; The Studio Museum in Harlem, June 14-October 21

WHERE: El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street, New York; Queens Museum of Art, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, New York

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: In what is likely the most expansive art event of the summer, El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem co-host a tri-institutional exhibition to conclude over a decade of collaborative research on the Caribbean, its people, nations, and artistic currents.

Spanning two boroughs, “Caribbean: Crossroads of the World” has over 500 works on display including painting, sculpture, artist books, photography, video, and historical artifacts from Caribbean countries, Europe, and the U.S. Accompanying programming at each venue takes place each month, from artist talks to film series, throughout the run of the show. A complimentary publication on the history, art, and culture of the Caribbean has also been released, edited by El Museo del Barrio's Associate Curator, Special Projects Elvis Fuentes and its Director of Curatorial Programs Deborah Cullen. Several other institutions have concurrent shows in conjunction with the exhibition and June’s Caribbean-American Heritage Month, including the Americas Society, Bronx Museum, and Nathan Cummings Foundation.

The museums take a comprehensive look at the region and its Diaspora through the visual creations of its artists, and those inspired by the culture and scenery of the region's islands. The exhibition's time-line spans the period from the Haitian revolution to the present, and incorporates an impressive set of pre-modern, modern, and contemporary artists, including Janine Antoni, John James Audubon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Gauguin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ana Mendieta, and many more.

The work is separated according to six distinct themes, which are divided between the three venues. El Museo del Barrio displays “Counterpoints,” mapping the complex economic and political plantation systems that made the islands prosper, and their major produce industries, such as sugar, fruit, tobacco, and coffee. “Patriot Acts” focuses on the artists and intellectuals who helped shape notions of identity in each nation, through contrasts and comparisons between indigenous practices, African histories, and modern aesthetics.

The Queens Museum of Art shows works in sections dubbed “Fluid Motions” and “Kingdoms of this World.” The first tackles the geographic hurdles and geopolitical positioning of the countries in the region, while the second includes work about the range of cultures, languages, and people that populate them, and the important role of carnival for all of the Caribbean's inhabitants.

The Studio Museum in Harlem covers the last two sections. “Land of the Outlaw” unpacks the two divergent ways the area has been portrayed historically: as a utopia, and as a tropical Wild West where crime and illicit activity run rampant. Meanwhile “Shades of History” looks at the significance of race in the history and culture of Caribbean identity, as well as the milestone of the Haitian Revolution of 1804 — which made Haiti the second independent country in the Americas, following the U.S., and the first black republic.

This citywide exhibition underlines the island nations' history as melting pots for a broad range of cultures. The diverse museums of what is considered to be the largest Caribbean city in the world fittingly reflect that richness and variety in their survey of the region's vibrant art.

– Ai Weiwei Barred From Court as Lawyer Disappears: The Chinese artist and activist has been warned by police — who are stationed outside his studio — not to attend a court hearing about his lawsuit against the tax agency that fined his company $2.36 million. "I've never seen so many police cars outside my studio," he said. "At one point last night a few dozen were there, which was unprecedented." (Opting to stay away from court, Ai tweeted a picture of himself in a police uniform.) Meanwhile, Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer for Ai, has not been seen since he was told to meet with security officers on Tuesday night. [Guardian, CNN]

– Homeland Security Seizes T-Rex From Heritage Auctions: A federal judge has authorized the Department of Homeland Security to seize a 24-foot-long Tyrannosaurus skeleton from an art storage company in Queens. (We'd pay money to see how, exactly, one seizes a 24-foot-long dino skeleton.) Heritage Auctions sold the T-Rex had to a collector for more than $1 million last month; authorities suspect it's been illegally exported from Mongolia. [Post and Courier]

– SFMOMA Plans Three-Year Hiatus: The San Francisco museum will go dark for three years after it breaks ground in June 2013 on its $300-million, Snøhetta-designed expansion. Meanwhile, it's planning a series of collaborations with local institutions to keep its collection on view in its absence, including an exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of some 60 artworks that deal with spirituality. [SFGate] 

– Russians Keep "Communism" Out of Rodchenko Retrospective: A new 316-work exhibition devoted to the Constructivist photographer Alexander Rodchenko at the National Museum in Krakow came at a great cost to the Polish institution, chiefly due to Russian museums' innumerable demands. In addition to disproportionately high loan fees — which the National Museum could only pay off after the show had toured the rest of Europe — the Russian museums provided their own wall and catalogue text (which could not be edited), supervised the installation, and insisted that the word "Communism" not appear anywhere. [WSJ]

– Fear of Lawsuits Silences Art Experts: Art experts are increasingly keeping their mouths shut on matters of authenticity for fear of having to defend themselves in court against disgruntled collectors. Not long after the Andy Warhol Foundation dissolved its authentication committee, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and the Noguchi Museum have followed. "Art scholarship is fighting a losing battle against commerce," said art lawyer Peter Stern. [NYT]

– FBI Returns Stolen Art to Polish Museum: The FBI is returning more than 120 stolen artifacts worth an estimated $5 million to Chicago's Polish Museum of America. The items, which include rare prints and Nazi propaganda from WWII, were stolen from the museum in the 1970s or 1980s and found last year at a home on Chicago's North Side. [AP] 

– Otterness Sculptures Removed from Hilton: A site-specific installation by Tom Otterness featuring playful figures at the entrance to the Hilton Times Square in New York has been permanently removed — but not in protest of the artist's dog-shooting past. As part of a recent renovation, they were cleared to make way for illuminated LED panels that change colors. The sculptures are now in storage. [NYT]

– Chris Ofili Paints Backdrop for Titian Ballet: The Turner Prize winner is one of three artists designing a new Royal Ballet production inspired by three Titian paintings and organized by National Gallery curator Minna Moore Ede. "Metamorphosis: Titian 2012" will premiere on July 14 as part of London's Cultural Olympiad and the July 16 performance will be shown live on a large screen in Trafalgar Square. [Guardian]

– Mathias Poledna to Rep Austria in Venice: The Vienna-born artist, who has lived and worked in L.A. since 2000, will represent his mother country at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Poledna is known for his evocative film installations of subjects ranging from the rainforest to Pop music. [Press Release]

– Small Exeter Museum Deemed U.K.'s Best: The recent £24 million ($37.7 million) redevelopment of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, a regional institution opened in 1868, has paid off, literally: The museum has just received the £100,000 ($157,000) Art Fund prize for the U.K.'s best museum of the year. [Guardian]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

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When I ask Ou Ning how he would answer that perennial dinner party question, "What do you do?,"  he laughs. It’s not easy for one of China’s true polymaths, but he gives it a try. “I’m a cultural worker,” he offers modestly, before teasing out the twists and turns of a career that has taken him from underground poet to concert promoter to star designer to documentary film-maker to curator to biennial director to think-tank animator to literary editor and, finally, to where he finds himself presently, plotting how to revivify his country’s rural life, which has been denuded by 30 years of runaway economic reform.

Ou was born in 1969 in Suixi, a small fishing village on the western tip of Guangdong Province, to a poor family who normally would never have been able to send their son to university. But when he was 10 years old, China’s government made a decision that would transform his family, his village, their home province of Guangdong, and the country as a whole. For the first time in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the door was opened to foreign investment, initially through a series of special economic zones. The first of these, a coastal hamlet called Shenzhen, would play a special role in the Ou family’s fortune.

Situated just over the border from Hong Kong, Shenzhen’s economy exploded once its new status was established, and the government was soon dispatching recruitment trucks deep into the countryside in search of labor for the city’s burgeoning factories. One day a truck rolled into Ou’s village, and his sister decided to take the chance and jump aboard. It would be her factory wages that would ultimately pay for Ou to attend university.

His sister still lives in Shenzhen, but according to Ou, she has never felt at home there. Uncomfortable even in the new apartment he bought for her, she is no urbanite, but there is nothing for her back home. Like thousands of other villages across the country, Suixi has long been hollowed out from years of development. Meanwhile, the cities are submerged under waves of workers seeking a better life. Thirty years ago, 70 percent of China’s population lived on the land; less than 50 percent do so today. Ou believes there is an urgent need to rebalance the country and the city, to find a way to reconstruct the countryside so it can draw people home again.

It’s not an idea one might expect from someone who started his career as the quintessential urbanite. Fresh out of university, Ou worked as a concert promoter, and in 1999 he grabbed public attention with "New Sound of Beijing," his study of underground music in the city. The book was a marriage of gritty reportage and freewheeling design, and a chance for the self-taught designer/writer to play with a riot of visual ideas to express the energy of the capital’s exploding music scene. The chutzpah of "New Sound of Beijing" attracted the attention of the acclaimed artist Fang Lijun, who needed a designer for the first serious book on his own work. Ou got the gig — and through it got to know the curator Hou Hanru.

At the time, Hou was working on a theme for the 2003 Venice Biennale: an exploration of urban spaces as “zones of urgency” created out of “urgent demands rather than planning.” Ou, a Guangdong native who had watched the Pearl River Delta be swallowed by industrial sprawl, knew what this story was about. He teamed up with his then girlfriend, video maker and rising art star Cao Fei, to make "San Yuan Li," an experimental documentary film about a village situated on the fast-advancing frontier of urbanization. As the city engulfs it, the traditional farmland of San Yuan Li village is eaten away until all that’s left are the farmers’ homes. Trapped within the city with no land to sustain them, the villagers find themselves renting out rooms to displaced farmers from other parts of China who are coming to the city to work. Cao and Ou captured this strange world of lost souls on video in stark black and white, revealing a teeming community existing within, but still apart from, its host.

It was around this time that Ou first came across Rem Koolhaas’s 2002 book "The Great Leap Forward." “Koolhaas,” says Ou, “could find the power and energy behind the city. He was not only interested in architecture but in politics and economics, too—his method was totally new to me.” Soon Ou was “reading more about urbanism, about urban geography and how the process of urbanization in Asia was producing conflict.” In 2009 he curated the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. In one section, he explored the contrasting histories of his declining hometown of Suixi and the rising city of Shenzhen; in doing so, he thought more about how problems in the cities were connected to the decline of the countryside, and how the husklike villages might be just as important to consider as the teeming, overcrowded cities.

Looking to rural life for inspiration and spiritual strength has deep cultural roots in China, but over the past hundred years some intellectuals have also felt a duty to serve the countryside in return, finding ways to support and reinvigorate rural culture in the face of industrialization. In this group could be counted the educator Y.C. James Yen (1890–1990) — who promoted mass literacy campaigns in China’s countryside in the 1920s and ’30s and set up the first peasants’ newspaper — and even, in some senses, Mao Zedong.

Ou believes the notion of rural reconstruction has become critical and is helping to coalesce a movement of thinkers and artists who are responding to displacements resulting from the last 30 years of development. “If we can create more job opportunities in the countryside, people who are in a bad situation in the city can come back,” Ou posits. He reflects on the situation of his sister: “She can’t find herself in the city,” he says simply. “I want to do something to help balance the countryside and urban life, to help people whether they live in the country or in the city. That’s why I want to do something for the rural reconstruction movement.”

On a cool early spring day, Ou and I catch a plane from Beijing to Anhui Province. Anhui, situated in China’s rural heartland, is now one of the country’s greatest sources of urban labor. Women flock to the cities to work as maids or factory workers, while the province’s men are the muscle on construction sites all over China. Anhui had become a byword for poverty over the last century, but today it is buoyed by remittances — and tourism.

We are flying into the airport of Huangshan (“Yellow Mountain”), a place fabled for its natural beauty, its jagged granite peaks wreathed in clouds. Monks built temples on its slopes in the 13th century; in the 16th century, the region inspired a school of landscape painting, of mountaintops, pines, and clouds, defining elements of Chinese art.

Poets, too, have eulogized Huangshan, from Li Bai in the Tang Dynasty onward. It has retained its allure: Contemporary poets gather here to party on the peaks, and some have chosen to settle nearby. One of those poets is Han Yu, an old friend of Ou’s.

Her move — and that of another friend, the writer Zuo Jing — to settle in Anhui inspired Ou to take a closer look. The area is also famous for its rural village architecture, which has all but disappeared elsewhere in China. This is the architecture of what were once thriving trade centers that grew in the Tang Dynasty and prospered for more than a thousand years. On the granite-paved streets of towns like Xidi (a World Heritage site), Hongcun, and nearby Bishan, where Han has settled, are houses and public halls with carved stone façades and elaborately ornamented wooden interiors built with techniques that have survived the vicissitudes of the past 60 years. Sensing that places like this could endure not just as tourist sites but as places to make a new start, Ou bought a home in Bishan in 2010.

On the rainy one-hour drive from the airport to his new home, Ou sketches out his vision. A town like Bishan, he tells me, shouldn’t depend on tourism or weekending urbanites. He wants the villagers to thrive by using the skills they have always possessed. He pictures local carpenters busy at home rather than on distant construction sites, and women weaving traditional fabrics in the village rather than being lost to factories in the cities.

Over the last couple of years, Ou has built up a database of all the traditional local skills — food production, fabric making, interior decoration, architecture, and carpentry — and the people who still possess them. His idea is to create an economic base for these villages by helping them make products that urban people will want to buy. That’s where his friends come in. Ou has spent the last 20 years working with artists, writers, designers, and architects; now he has a vision of city-based designers working with rural carpenters to create furniture that fuses urban style with real craftsmanship, and handwoven fabrics that will strike a chord with fashion houses looking for something new.

To get things started, he relied on his immense energy and sure touch as a curator. With a lot of help from friends like Han and Zuo, as well as a slightly bemused local government, last fall Ou threw the first Bishan Harvest Festival, which featured music, dance, a mini documentary festival, academic panels on rural reconstruction with local and Taiwanese intellectual heavyweights in attendance, and, most importantly, the chance for outside designers and artists to interact with local tradespeople and artisans.

In the months leading up to the festival, Chen Feibo, Hu Zhongquan, Shi Dayu, and Zhu Xiaojie worked to create new furniture and decorative-arts designs based on local forms and practices. Meanwhile, Ou asked leading sculptor Liang Shaoji to create a special “harvest totem” for the event. Involving Liang was key. “It is important for us to create a romantic and poetic spirit about the countryside again,” Ou told me. “We need artists for that.” He is currently working to attract other artists to the district and takes heart from the fact that one of China’s most esteemed poets, Wang Xiaoni, and her husband, the critic Xu Jingya, are planning to establish a poetry school in Bishan.

The festival was certainly successful in attracting attention and establishing the first tentative contacts between the city dwellers and villagers, but Ou readily admits his plan to create rural products with an urban twist may encounter a few kinks along the way. Case in point: the Yuting cake, a local delicacy with a 400-year history. Convinced that Yuting cakes could find a wider market, Ou set about commissioning trendily rustic packaging for them in appealing shapes modeled after plants and animals. It was only when he launched them at the festival that he realized the complicated cakes, made of sesame seeds, flour, and sugar, wouldn’t come out of their molds. “As it turns out,” Ou says, grinning, “our design may have looked good, but in fact it wasn’t successful at all!”

But he is undeterred: To him, it simply demonstrates the need for more study, more time, and an annual festival. This fall he plans to mix it up by holding a photography festival with an ambitious slate of international and local participants. One of the reasons we traveled down to Anhui was so he can present his proposal to the village authorities in Bishan.

Sitting through his presentation, it is hard to judge the reaction of the dozen or so officials who sit around the council meeting table, watching Ou’s PowerPoint display and drinking bitter tea from lidded cups. There is no indication that they are moved by the work of artists like Edward Burtynsky, whom Ou is planning to involve. Later there is a long official meal with much toasting, but still no real hint of what is in the wind. Finally, at the end of the night, the local leader tells Ou the government can allocate 1.5 million yuan, a hefty three-quarters of Ou’s target budget. I ask him if he is confident of raising the rest. “Yes,” he says calmly, “because the festival must happen.”

For the Bishan Harvest Festival, Ou produced a hand-drawn book called "How to Create Your Own Utopia." With its tree houses and multicolored shelters mirroring the jagged peaks of Huangshan, the book has a whimsical feel, but its title hints at the intentions behind the Bishan project.

I ask him why it matters so much, why it is so important to establish more harmony between the country and the city. “If everything is urbanized, it will become so bland, so much the same, that there will be no diversity. And right now there is a huge conflict between city and country. Farmers can’t find work at home, but they are despised in the city. We need to understand how important the country is and that both country and city should be in balance, both being places that are good to live in.”

Finally, for all his efforts to enlist his friends in making the countryside appear bucolic, Ou disavows any such impression. “I’m not going to the countryside to live a poetic life,” he tells me when we reconvene in Beijing. “I think there will be more challenge there than in the city. But I will take that because I think it is a good thing to do. It can be helpful, we can do something there — that’s why we have to do it.”

To see works by Ou Ning, click the slide show.

This article appears in the June issue of Modern Painters magazine.