LONDON — Phillips de Pury & Company closed out the endless summer art market season with a buoyant £23,376,400 ($36,233,420) sale compared to pre-sale expectations of £15.1-21.1 million ($23.4-$32.7 million). Estimates do not reflect fees, also known as the buyer’s premium, charged by the auction house on all lots that sold. Twenty four of the twenty eight lots offered sold for a stellar buy-in rate by lot of 14 percent and two percent by value. Three lots sold for over a million pounds, seven sold for over a million dollars and two hurdled the $10 million mark. The tally more than doubled the amount set a year ago when 27 lots sold brought £11,243,350 ($17.4 million).

No individual artist records were set but the Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol collaboration, “Olympics” from 1984, perfectly timed for the upcoming games here next month, fetched a record for the short-lived duo at £6,761,250 ($10,470,938), more than tripling its high estimate of £2-3 million ($3.1-4.6 million). At least five anonymous telephone bidders vied for the work as well as one gentleman bidding in the sparsely attended yet newly refurbished salesroom at Howick Place in Victoria. A telephone bidder clinched the mural-scaled prize at a hammer price of £6 million ($9.3 million). It topped the mark for “Third Eye,” set at Phillips de Pury New York in May 2011, when it made $7,026,500.

Even with the skimpy audience and intense competition from the simultaneously scheduled Euro 2012 semi-final soccer match in Warsaw between Italy and Germany, the mood was casually upbeat as auctioneer Simon de Pury graciously offered German and Italian brand beer and a large-screen TV in the lobby during or after the auction. His announcement brought hearty applause.

While Phillips scored well with the handful of high-priced lots, most of them retrofitted with third party guarantees, younger artists fared extremely well, as Tauba Auerbach’s “Binary Uppercase,” in acrylic on wood panel from 2006, a kind of nouveau-Bridget Riley, sold via telephone for £97,250/$150,718, almost double its high estimate of £50,000 ($77,490). London dealer Ivor Braka was one of the underbidders.

Four bidders drove Wade Guyton’s mirrored stainless steel “U Sculpture (v.5)” from 2007, part of an edition of three, to £193,250 ($299 498) — more than double its high estimate of £90,000 ($139,000), and Brazilian artist Adriana Varejao’s beautiful oil on plaster on canvas, “Agnus Dei” from 1990 sold to another telephone bidder for £145,250 ($225,108), nearly matching its high estimate of £150,000 ($232,000).

Like its much bigger competitors, Phillips also offered a handful of third party guarantees and some barely drew notice as evidenced by Sherrie Levine’s cleverly titled “Dada” sculpture in cast bronze from 2008, from an edition of twelve, which sold to that anonymous guarantor on the telephone for £313,250 ($485 474, well within its £250,000-350,000 estimate.

The action picked up again with Warhol’s guaranteed “Gun” silkscreen painting from 1981-82, measuring just 16 by 20 inches and selling for a bullet-proof £892,850 ($1,383,738), well over its £800,000 ($1.2 million) high estimate. At one point in the bidding, Montreal collector François Odermatt, the scion of a famed French art dealer, shouted out a bid of £540,000 but was outgunned by two telephone bidders.

Warhol was much in evidence, as the aristocratic beauty of “Princess Diana” from 1982, sourced from an official palace photograph depicting the young princess in a purple gown and appropriately bejeweled, sold on what appeared to be a single bid at £993,250 ($1,539,538), just within its £900,000-1.2 million estimate. The picture famously sold for a pittance during the Frederick Hughes sale of Warhols at Sotheby’s New York in May 1993 for $57,500 and then again at Sotheby’s London in October 2007 for a heftier £692,500 ($1,410,674). You can’t say it has been a good investment.

Though telephone bidding dominated the proceedings as per usual, and the number of Phillips personnel handling that in the salesroom appeared equal to the number of spectators in the room, there was some floor action.

Paris dealer Thaddaeus Ropac dueled for Anselm Kiefer’s “Die Woge (The Wave)” from 1995, comprised of canvas cloth, paint, ashes, tin, and cotton wool on board, but lost out to Omer Tiroche, the son of seasoned dealer Micky Tiroche, at £397,250 ($615 658), right in the middle of its £350,000-450,000 estimate.

That was also the case with Gilbert & George’s fifteen-part, hand-dyed gelatin silver prints and gold leaf in artists’ metal frame composition from 1983, which sold to London Old Master dealer Fabrizio Moretti for £115,250 ($178,614), well within the £100,000-150,000 estimate.

“I’m one of the few old master dealers,” said Moretti after the sale in the packed downstairs lobby where refreshments were being served for the big game, “who really likes contemporary art because I believe art is an anti-depressant. You want to put together stuff no matter what the century,” added Moretti, further explaining that he bought the Gilbert & George “for both my private collection and investment.”

But Phillips’s most triumphant moment was the exceptional result for the prime 1981 Basquiat acrylic and oilstick on wood, “Irony of Negro Policeman,” which sold to a telephone bidder for the top lot mark of £8,161,250 ($12,649,938), just over its £8 million ($12.4 million) high estimate. New York dealer Helly Nahmad was the underbidder and left the room the moment after losing the battle for the 72 by 48 inch guaranteed prize to an anonymous competitor.

Even though it trailed Christie’s record-setting Basquiat on Wednesday that made £12.9 ($20.1 million), Phillips's ability to sell another top 1981 picture cannot be understated. Besides, even though its total for the evening was roughly the same as the single work of the record-setting Yves Klein sponge relief that sold at Christie’s, Phillips was the only house this week to exceed its high estimate.

“It’s remarkable to see such strong results,” said Michael McGinnis, worldwide head of Phillips’s contemporary art, “at the end of such a long season. We didn’t see any auction fatigue.”

Click the slide show to see works from the contemporary sale at Phillips de Pury & Company London.

Philippe Jousse, whose contemporary art gallery in Paris represents artists such as Superflex, Ariane Michel, and Richard Kern, got his start in the 1980s dealing ’50s furniture at a flea market on the outskirts of Paris. In the decades that followed, he built a successful business unearthing iconic pieces by the likes of Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Mathieu Matégot, and Serge Mouille. He established Jousse Entreprise in 2001 in the prominent arts district on rue Louise Weiss; the gallery was split into two neighboring halves covering art and design. In 2005, Jousse moved the design outpost to the well-heeled rue de Seine in Saint-Germain, and the contemporary art gallery followed suit, relocating to the Marais in 2009.

Today, Jousse’s design gallery is busy staging vintage and contemporary exhibitions, including outings by Rick Owens and Joep van Lieshout, whom Jousse met in the early ’90s at L’Hôpital éphémère, a famed artist-populated squat. Jousse’s own space is filled with unique pieces: A neon-blue set of chairs, tangerine bookshelves, an emerald green sink, and a mouse-gray desk, all by Van Lieshout, fill the front room of the gallery. The dealer can usually be found there, cigarette in hand, surrounded by his team, including his wife, Patricia, and son, Mathias, who heads the 1970s furniture department. “I understand the desire for a designer to connect to art, but at the same time, design in the greater sense does not benefit from becoming a work of art,” says Jousse of the fine line he treads with his dual gallery spaces. “To me, design pieces are more akin to functional sculptures.”

Jousse says he has the most personal affinity for the work of Prouvé and for Matégot, a “couturier of metal” who, interestingly, did not share his contemporaries’ ambition for industrial production. Matégot’s output from the ’50s and ’60s consists of functional furniture made with perforated metal but resembling featherweight tulle. The rue de Seine gallery will host a solo show by Matégot this month, showcasing his signature Satellite ceiling lamps as well as works that have never been seen in Paris, including a rare bar and counter from a private hotel commission.

To see works from Philippe Jousse's gallery, click the slide show.

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

As always, it couldn’t have been more pleasant, even luxurious, to stroll down Auguststrasse, past the cafés and galleries, then into the sunlit courtyard of KW, with its own café scene for artgoers, here for the seventh edition of the Berlin Biennale, where  the Polish artist and curator Artur Zmijewski undertook to stamp his feet in this gilded cage. “Forget Fear,” co-curated with Joanna Warsza and the Russian art-activist group Voina, is his mammoth, laudably intentioned, almost heroic demonstration of collective resistance to the forces of global political hegemony and capitalism’s lubricating power to reduce art to frictionless pleasure. More than 90 participants in six venues were armed for a battle meant to stand against the old-school “magic” of art objects, as Zmijewski called it, and the toxic fetish of capital’s fairy dust. In his words, their biennial presents “art that actually works, makes its mark on reality, and opens a space where politics can be performed.” So much is revealed in that last word: The performance of politics is a telling indication of what “actually works” might really mean.

A spectacular confusion about artistic and political efficacy, even a kind of sleight of hand, troubles this biennial, spilling a cornucopia of unexamined and contradictory ideas and actions. The first and most obvious of these, of course, is that Zmijewski uses his position of power while claiming to hold the hierarchical power intrinsic to institutions in contempt. His demands for political and material equality are voiced within the confines of an art palace whose audience is hardly a cross-section of exploited classes. (Other venues around town simply bring the same audience from one station of this political Via Dolorosa to the next.) Further, more than 2.5 million euros of funding provided by the government and corporate sponsors underwrites his complaints against capitalism’s vitiating force. If these ironies are intended, they do absolutely nothing to advance Zmijewski’s cause.

At the start of “Forget Fear,” the viewer enters through a long corridor with the welcoming word “Revolution!” scrawled in orange letters overhead and quotes like “To create is to resist” on the walls. At the end of the hall is the downstairs gallery where a sign announces, “This Is Not Our Museum. This Is Our Action Space.” The space is given over to stands for various political and Occupy movements, relegating the distinction of political organizations and artistic practice to an enthusiastic blur. The Occupy movements’ power and proven social effectiveness is what Zmijewski wants for art. But his co-optation of them directly contradicts their protest against the established capitalist order that the art gallery and its regime of representation exemplify. He has done nothing more than deploy this regime of representation to “perform” the political, transforming the actualization of politics embodied by the real actors of the Occupy movements into playacting, into—in the well-worn phrase—the aestheticization of politics.

Zmijewski flatly denies this in the biennial’s catalogue, writing: “Art needs to be reinvented, but not as some crafty option to aestheticize human problems in a novel way by turning them into a formal spectacle. What we need is more an art that offers its tools, time, and resources to solve the economic problems of the impoverished majority.” But this last demand for art can lay no actual claim of evidence in the real world, while what precedes it is undermined by the same standard regime of representation everywhere present in the biennial he has curated, with its performances, conventional sculptures, dark rooms of videos, and vitrines of objects—all the trappings of the un-reinvented art world and its glittering things.

At least in the downstairs gallery the encounter with political activists is an engagement, a two-way exchange. Upstairs, in a large, darkened space devoted to documentary videos of political oppression and various Occupy movements, collectively titled “Breaking the News,” there is no news in terms of this biennial’s overarching goal: Nothing is reinvented for us as political workers (or mere consumers) to do, just sit in the dark, mute, and watch. Yet he claims that to merely bare witness is insufficient. Meanwhile, this art that “actually works” as a new form of social expression to change governments and institutions is nowhere to be seen. Take the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar’s wonderful project for the biennial in which he fabricated a national Palestinian stamp and managed to slip it into the postal system through mailings. It is not political reality reordered but an act within a symbolic order, a trickster’s bending of reality without fundamentally breaking it. It is a cool piece of subversion, subtly disruptive, yet it hardly fulfills the mandate of a reckoning with transformative structural change. Nor does Łukasz Surowiec’s Berlin-Birkenau project, for which the artist brought 320 birch saplings from the area surrounding the Auschwitz death camp and planted them across Berlin as a “living archive.” Here, too, the poetic gesture is barely visible; in terms of the realpolitik demanded, the work leaves only a fine sense of despair floating in the air. Nor does the biennial’s re-enactment of the Battle of Berlin offer anything more, finally, than underscore its rendering of history as theater. This is not revolution. Considering the voluminous social discourse that has fueled vast numbers of works populating art spaces over the last decade, what Zmijewski serves us is the opposite of radical provocation. It is entirely in step with radical chic, its popularity among curators (whom he also derides as tools of the market) giving it the prestige of the institutional art world to which he claims superiority while strutting its stage, since the world of social institutions, actual political workers, governments, NGOs, and even the incursive movements of Occupy and terrorist organizations have little real use for art and artists.

On the one hand, Zmijewski and his co-curators are agitating to reconvene art within the space of political action, but what they actually give us is the political represented and bracketed by artistic gesture. They limit the political just as they limit the play and multiplicity of art. They say the artist must give answers, while the most provocative conjugations of art are the interrogatory and the conditional. Use and efficacy are at the base of their argument, yet they never account for the productive labor of the magical function of art—they simply dismiss it. The essentially dystopian vision of the artist whose emergent self-realization must assume the shape of a single form of agent provocateur as political worker represents a giving up, a threadbare faithlessness in the richness of the imagination, and only the most depleted interpretation of Beuys’s social sculpture. They reject all other forms of art as weak and bourgeois, while they never escape the terms of the bourgeois. They never offer a fundamental alternative or even a rethinking of the political.

Far more interesting than Zmijewski’s injunction that the artist awake and rise on the barricades is the ongoing rehabilitation of the Nazi political thinker par excellence, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s coldly rationalized justifications of the Reich’s actions are captured in a passage that Zmijewski might well want to consider in his call for the univocal politicization of artists. In his masterwork, "The Concept of the Political," Schmitt proposes: “Let us now make thoroughly clear what the affirmation of the political in disregard of the moral, the primacy of the political over the moral, would signify. Being political means being oriented to the ‘dire emergency.’ Therefore the affirmation of the political as such is the affirmation of fighting as such, wholly irrespective of what is being fought for.” Schmitt claimed Hitler’s murder of his political opponents was “the highest form of administrative justice.”

Despite his legions of detractors based on his irrepressible zeal for dictatorship, book burnings, and murder, it is the reason of Schmitt’s insight into the weaknesses of liberal individualism that remains fascinating. His offering of brutality as the true form of agency of the political worker has a shattering clarity, however despicable, while Zmijewski’s call for the political retooling of art and artist never presents a deep examination of his most crucial term or, in fact, any originality. It is not that a countervailing political thinking hasn’t been profoundly conceived elsewhere. It is the final lack of any radical rethinking of the political on Zmijewski’s part that leaves his demands vague and irretrievable. More than a hundred years ago, William Morris reimagined a world in which, as he wrote in "News from Nowhere," his novel about a socialist future, “many of the things which used to be produced—slave-wares for the poor and mere wealth-wasting wares for the rich—ceased to be made. That remedy was, in short, the production of what used to be called art, but which has no name amongst us now, because it has become a necessary part of the labor of every man who produces.” Where is Zmijewski’s true rethinking of the world that legitimates his rhetoric?

I am writing this during a stay in Tel Aviv, where I sat the other day with Yael Bartana, one of the artists participating in the Berlin Biennale. She said to me that any art made in Israel is, by the nature of reality here, political. Every work is freighted with the burden of the mentality of lockdown, of repression in all forms of social and legal existence. The reading of every work as a commentary on occupation, in which the exceptionalism of the artist as a seer outside the status quo is pitted against the exceptionalism of the government that declares itself unaccountable to international law, offers an immensely more nuanced version of the artist as political agent without demanding Zmijewski’s tyranny of a single role and efficacy for art. In the catalogue, Voina writes: “Armed with a weapon. That is real art.” I’m waiting to see one contemporary artist or group of artists whose work can be rigorously defined as art and whose societal impact is equal to the Occupy movements or the revolutions of the Arab Spring. For all his claims and work, Zmijewski does nothing in Berlin but shoot blanks.

To see works from the Berlin Biennale's "Forget Fear" exhibition, click the slide show.

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

Despite the impressive list of accomplishments Álvaro Siza has collected during his six-decade-spanning career — taking the Pritzker Prize in 1992, designing the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in 2005, and now waiting to receive his Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Architecture Biennale in August, to name a few — the Portuguese architect's name isn't immediately recognizable outside of architectural circles. And it's unlikely that he would ever "enjoy the fame of say, a Rem Koolhaas or a Frank Gehry," the New York Times decided in 2007, suggesting that his obscurity is due to the limited geographical distribution of his work, which remains confined mostly to Europe. (He has an aversion to long flights, he says, because of his smoking habit and bad back.)

Unhindered by his relatively unknown status, his career has quietly earned the admiration of his peers, including this year's biennale curator David Chipperfield, the one who proposed that Siza take this year's honor.

"Siza has maintained a unique position in the architectural galaxy," said Chipperfield in a statement. "This position is full of paradox. Siza has upheld a consistent production of works at the highest level, yet without the slightest hint of the overt professionalism and promotion that has become part of the contemporary architect’s machinery. Apparently running in the opposite direction to the rest of the profession he always seems to be out in front." 

The announcement was made this week, two days after Siza's 79th birthday, more than 50 years into his career. His buildings have become known for being both spare and precise, demonstrating a poetic kind of modernism. One of his masterpieces is the Iberê Camargo Foundation (2002-2008) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a rare venture out of Europe that serves as a home to the austere and haunting works of the eponymous Brazilian artist. The building, which was awarded a Golden Lion in 2003, features a gently undulating surface behind a row of angular ramps, a juxtaposition of two geometric extremes. The unfinished, unpainted white concrete surfaces, uninterrupted by bricks or sealing elements, create a stark contrast with the lush green surroundings, giving the foundation a pristine, almost ethereal lightness so unlike the artwork inside.

Most of Siza's buildings don't fall far from his birthplace, Porto, Portugal. In the earlier days of his career, he worked in more diverse materials, like the red African Afizelia wood, terracotta, and copper of the beachside Boa Nova Tea House (1963). In 1966, he designed a public pool complex in the resort town Leça da Palmeira, just north of Porto, by cutting directly into the rocky landscape. But it's the stark whiteness and simple geometries of Porto's Faculty of Architecture (1987-93) and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (1997) that make for two modernist marvels. Although his failure to stray far from home has largely kept him off the radar of the world at large, it certainly hasn't hindered his career, according to Chipperfield: "Secured by his isolated location," he said, "[Siza] exudes worldly wisdom."

Siza will be officially honored during a ceremony on August 29, 2012. To see highlights from Álvaro Siza's career, click the slide show. 

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Anyone who has read “Anna Karenina” knows that Leo Tolstoy likes to take his time unfurling a narrative. A small detail can become a menagerie containing infinite pieces and a single moment in time can linger for pages.

So when Anna upstages everyone at Kitty’s society debut, the writer does not skimp on the details.

“Anna was not in lilac, as Kitty had absolutely wanted, but in a low-cut black velvet dress, which revealed her full shoulders and bosom, as if shaped from old ivory, and her rounded arms with their very small, slender hands,” Tolstoy writes in the first chapter of the novel. “The dress was all trimmed with Venetian guipure lace. On her head, in her black hair, her own without admixture, was a small garland of pansies, and there was another on her black ribbon sash among the white lace.” 

This goes on for some time.

The glut of material has been a boon for the costume designers of “Anna Karenina” film adaptations — all 17 of them. The most recent is the upcoming version starring Keira Knightly that hits theaters this September.

Tolstoy’s prose will also inspire a new line from Banana Republic, a partnership between the retailer and the forthcoming film’s production company, Focus Features. Costume Designer Jacqueline Durrann told WWD that to create the look for the adaptation, she combined the Russian Imperialism austerity of the book with the more modern style of Dior’s New Look. She transferred this approach to the store’s capsule collection as well.

“I was given the chance to apply my passion for period styles to a collection that translates to fashion today,” Durrann said.

Tolstoy’s classic isn’t the first book to make the leap from the page to the runway. Prabal Gurung channeled Miss Havisham, from Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” dressing show opener Karlie Kloss in a long ruffling red dress with a black sash and black lace gloves. Ralph Lauren has on occasion mined the dreamy satins and flapper dresses of the Roaring Twenties since he designed the clothes for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 take on “The Great Gatsby” (directed by Jack Clayton), and his spring 2012 collection featured what seemed to be one Daisy Buchanan after another (Brooks Brothers designed the suits and menswear in the new Baz Luhrmann adaptation of the film).  

Then, last December, H&M released a line full of slashed-up black leather jackets and grimy jeans that were inspired by “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and its sequels, designed by Trish Sommerville, the costume designer on David Fincher’s adaptation from 2011. And in February, Helmut Lang put on a show in New York that clearly referenced “Game of Thrones,” the wildly popular fantasy novels from George R. R. Martin. The boots and leather were battle-ready.

What book could be the next to inspire a leading designer? Our money is on a certain sexually explicit trilogy that’s already launched a lingerie line. Indeed, “Fifty Shades of Grey” would be a whip-smart choice to adapt on the runway. 

The Swiss artist Caro Niederer paints colorful canvases that explore the intersection of artistic creation and everyday life, often basing the compositions on postcards she collects during trips around the world, or daily snapshots of her surroundings taken with her camera — or, lately, with an iPhone. Her work encompass a variety of media, from painting and sculpture to video and tapestry, but Niederer's first New York solo show — at Hauser & Wirth through July 27 — focuses on her paintings from the early 1990s to the present.

The earlier works on view are a series of small canvases presenting images from the Kama Sutra as well as postcards from a trip to Kyoto. The most recent works take on a much larger format, while focusing on more everyday subjects, like a kitchen table with a vase of flowers, a street in front of her home, or the basketball court where her kids play. Standing out against the vibrant color palette prevalent in most of her paintings are two sepia-toned “Brown Paintings.” Like blown-up old time photographs, the paintings exude a warm and gentle light that guides us through what the artist calls “common subjects.” On the occasion of her new show, Niederer spoke to ARTINFO about the series, and their disparate source materials.

“Caro Niederer — Paintings” is currently on view at Hauser & Wirth New York. It runs through July 27.

Liberal humanism isn’t usually associated with comic books, but it’s a defining quality of writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières' supercool Valérian and Laureline series, a publishing phenom in France and Belgium. Having announced that he will bring the time-traveling, space-hopping duo to the screen in a live-action, English-language movie, the producer-director Luc Besson has now tasked himself with preserving their sensitive egalitarian agenda while visualizing its intricately conceived “spatio-temporal” world to please devotees.

As reported in Variety (paywall website) this morning, the project was announced in Paris by Besson’s business partner Christophe Lambert (not the actor), with whom he runs the French film empire EuropaCorp. Before Besson adapts Valérian and Laureline, he will direct the Mob comedy thriller “Malavita,” starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tommy Lee Jones, which begins production in August. Also on his roster is an unnamed action thriller to star Angelina Jolie.

Besson’s enthusiasm for Valérian and Laureline is long-standing. “Circles of Power,” volume 15 in the series, greatly influenced his campy pop-sci-fi semi-classic “The Fifth Element,” for which Mézières was the conceptual designer; the flying taxicab driven by Bruce Willis’s Dallas through the congested air space of Manhattan was derived from the comic.

Published by Dargaud, Christin and Mézières' voluminous series, which first appeared in Pilote magazine in 1967 and completed its run in 2010, runs to 21 volumes; there is also a short-story collection and an encyclopedic guide.

Black-haired earthling Valérian, who was created as an antidote to Tintin and American comic-book heroes, is a 28^th-century agent of Galaxis, capital of the Terran Galactic Empire, who carries out the orders of the Spatio-Temporal Service whether he agrees with them or not. By no means an omnipotent or supremely intelligent hero, he has sometimes compromised his missions through his incompetence, Clark Kent-like obtuseness, and occasional defeatism.

The red-headed Laureline is a dead-ringer for Florence and the Machine’s Florence Welch, should Welch fancy auditioning. Originally a medieval peasant, she is much smarter than Valérian and prone to rebel against Galaxis’s orders. Using her sex appeal to her own ends without being exploited, she is (despite having been drawn for French Playboy by Mézières) an exemplary feminist heroine and the real star of the series.

As the series evolved, Christin steered it away from simplistic action-adventure conflicts between good and evil toward a grappling with ethical, ideological, and environmental issues (which suggests an influence on James Cameron’s “Avatar”). Fanboys alert – when Valérian and Laureline’s first big-screen exploit arrives, it may not be for you.

Read more culture coverage on Spotlight

London's summer auctions have provided a lot of noise and thunder in the last two weeks, but meanwhile, there is also plenty to see in the ground at the city's many outstanding galleries. Here are our picks for a few of the best.

To see this piece in illustrated slide show format, click here.

“Invisible: Art About the Unseen 1957-2012” at the Hayward Gallery, through August 5

A deeply clever, historically thought-provoking exhibition organized by curator Ralph Rugoff explores ideas relating to the invisible and the hidden in visual art. Yves Klein’s “Void Room” from 1961 and his spacey concept regarding “the architecture of air” joust with Maurizio Cattelan’s absurd and officially stamped Italian police report about a stolen invisible painting and Claes Oldenburg’s spooky and unrealized “Buried Monument to John F. Kennedy” — a proposal to create a gigantic hollow form in the shape of the assassinated president underground — are a few of the remarkable highlights.

“Nouveau Realisme” at Luxembourg & Dayan at 2 Saville Row, through August 11

A superb pastiche of museum-quality works ranging from Yves Klein’s "IKB 170" (1960) to Martial Raysse’s stunning collage “Pamela Beach” (1963), including a jaunty hat and earring, as well as lesser known works by Gerard Deschamps and Raymond Hains, delivers a short course on the European side of Pop Art.

“Bridget Riley — Works 1960-66” at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street and Karsten Schubert, 5-8 Lower John Street, Golden Square, through July 13

Let the art market weep to see these classic, optically challenging pictures, beautifully arranged in a two-part exhibition that features some of Riley’s best work, including “Horizontal Vibration” (1961) and  “Climax” (1963). An excellent catalogue, highlighted by a combative 1967 interview with the artist by the late and great David Sylvester, broadens the experience.

“Irving Penn — Cigarettes” at Hamiltons, 13 Carlos Place, through August 17

Exhibited for the first time in its entirety, the 26 platinum palladium prints of found cigarette butts sourced from the streets of New York in 1972, carefully set-up and then photographed in extreme close-up, convey Penn’s Minimalist genius. A selection of the works debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975 in an exhibition organized by John Szarkowski, MoMA’s storied photography guru, but the decidedly postmodern display was largely panned at the time.

“Diane Arbus: Affinities” at Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place through August 17

The mere presence of American photography titans Arbus and Penn, literally doors away from one another, makes this a stunning treat, with 32 Arbus gelatin silver prints from from 1956 to 1971, including  “A husband and wife in the woods at a nudist camp, N.J” (1963) and “A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C.” (1968). Arbus visited London in 1969 for a magazine story she proposed of  “People Who Think They Look Like Other People,” and some of these humor-streaked images are included in the exhibition, such as “Winston Churchill look-alike, London, England.”

“Calder in India” at Ordovas, 25 Saville Row, through August 3

A first-time-in-the-West view of eight of the nine sculptures Calder created during a three-month sojourn in India in 1954 make this precise and historical exhibition one of the more exotic samplings in Mayfair. Fantastic mobiles and stabiles, including “Franji Pani” in painted aluminium sheet and steel wire from January 1955 and “Guava” from the same year, top the entries that originally came about by the patronage of the artist’s Indian hosts, Kamalini, Gautam, and Gira Sarabhai.

Doris Salcedo at White Cube Mason’s Yard, through June 30

The Columbian sculptor’s powerful memorials relating to some 1,500 young men murdered in remote areas of her native country come back to life in two haunting installation pieces, “A Flor de Piel,” a shroud-like floor piece composed of sutured rose petals resembling flayed skin, and “Plegaria Muda,” a 45-unit work comprised of coffin-sized tables of aged wood and thick slabs of earth.

Rudolf Stingel at Sadie Coles HQ at 9 Grosvenor Place through July 4

Situated in a listed Georgian townhouse crowned with a chandeliered ballroom, “Untitled,” the single, large-scale self-portrait painting is based on a formal photograph of the artist by Roland Bolego. It appears at one end of the grand room as a kind of altar piece, albeit one that has visible wine glass stains on the distressed surface. As in past site-specific installations, Stingel designed a vast, Oriental-style, mechanically stitched carpet that looks more like a pixilated echo of the real thing and feels notably artificial to walking on. Anyway, it’s worth the trip.

The Comme des Garçons creative director swayed away from her usual avant-garde silhouette, going for a more traditional preppy approach for her eponymous Junya Watanabe Man collection. The light blue blazer, pink button-up shirt, and loose white pants are a go-to ensemble for polo watching, summer weddings, or a Hamptons cocktail party. Straight-leg jeans, a plaid shirt, and a khaki jacket are clam-bake ready, while the three-piece short suit look combines a double-breasted grey blazer and French striped-shirt with shorts, so you can stay cool. Now go call your Ivy League buddies and set up a date so you can show them how crisp you look.

Welcome to Varying Hues, a column in which Wine Steward Maxwell Leer explores unsung, colorful wines from around the world. The notion of clean-tasting and clear-looking white wine is a new one. In the history of wine, you will see more of the hazy...

In 1976, photographer Brad Elterman walked into the backstage green room of the Roxy, the famed club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, to find Bob Dylan standing around with nothing to do. So he took his picture. But there were a few others at the infamous Hollywood bar that night, including the folk singer Ronee Blakeley and a young actor who wanted to meet Dylan. His name was Robert DeNiro and he had a new movie out called “Taxi Driver.” So they all got together, Elterman took the photograph, and it ended up in People magazine.

Since then, Elterman’s pictures have appeared in every major rock magazine, galleries across the world, and a coffee table book called “Like It Was Yesterday.” He’s taken many iconic photographs, like the shot of Brooke Shields sticking her tongue out with Gene Simmons in KISS makeup, or a young Michael Jackson in his cherished sequined vest, or Joan Jett flipping the bird with both hands while grinning wildly at the camera.

And now he’s sharing his pictures once again. Last night at Kanga Manglapus Projects in Los Angeles’s Venice Beach, Elterman unveiled an exhibition of never-before-seen photos of LA during the excess of the 1970s. “Factory 77” features a bevy of perfect pictures, many of which portray megastars not posing, just being natural. There’s Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta engulfed by the crush of newfound fame at the premiere of “Grease.” In another, a gaunt David Bowie is walking into his studio at 6:00 a.m., smoking in a pageboy cap, red hair spilling out from underneath. There’s Duran Duran lounging in a white convertible at the Riot House. And, perhaps most memorably, there’s Ringo Starr, using a secret key to get into the Roxy for a Bob Marley show as John Lennon and Yoko Ono look on.

For Elterman, it’s a tribute to a lost era and a reflection of the fact that his particular expertise and talent may never be of use again.

“They thought the camera was a novelty,” he told WWD. “Today, everyone is armed with an iPhone and can beam a picture around the world, but this was an age before p.r. and management controlled the imagery.” 

And, sadly, not only is the age of physical film dead and gone, so are many of the icons captured in these photograph — John Lennon and Michael Jackson, to name two. So, relive the Roxy and all its long lost rock stars at “Factory 77.” The exhibition runs until September 10.

Click on the slide show to see images from Brad Elterman’s “Factory 77.”

Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Fashion, and Performing Arts, June 25-29, 2012:

ART

— We chronicled the art world’s most influential young figures in our list of 30 power players 30 and under, among them Sheikha Al-Mayassa, Hannah Barry, and Carter Cleveland.

— Judd Tully reported that pieces by Basquiat, Bacon, and Klein led Christie’s staggering $207 million postwar and contemporary sale in London.

— Famed street artist and inveterate doodler Barry McGee told Alanna Martinez about the difficulties of installing his improvisational new San Francisco exhibition.

— Sotheby’s London contemporary sale had solid sales but lacked major highlights, netting a grand total of $108 million.

— Modern Painters magazine visited the quirky Chelsea studio of pooch portraiteur William Wegman and discovered a few reminders of the artist’s family and art-world friends.

DESIGN & FASHION

— Janelle Zara discovered the debut of a collection of male sex toys emblazoned with designs courtesy Keith Haring. If you need more details, see the diagram on our Object Lessons blog.

— Kelly Chan analyzed the innovative Via Verde housing complex in the Bronx, praising its community-minded spirit.

— Heiress Daphne Guinness has one of the more couture-packed closets in the world, and she decided to put some of it up for auction through Christie’s, breaking records with clothing from Alexander McQueen, Mario Testino, and others.

— Louis Vuitton is opening no less than seven custom-designed pop-up shops to showcase its capsule collection collaboration with mistress of spots, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

— Nate Freeman brought to our attention the latest in literary-fashion crossovers, Banana Republic’s new “Anna Karenina” collection. But would Tolstoy approve?

PERFORMING ARTS

— Writer and director Nora Ephron passed away, but her play “Lucky Guy” will still be produced on Broadway. Could it be a posthumous hit?

— J. Hoberman enjoyed Sundance hit “Beasts of the Southern Wild’s” “gumbo magic realism,” but also worried that the fantastical film might have been oversold. 

— Handsome leading man Viggo Mortensen, after being offered the role of Henry Clemens in the nautical vampire flick “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” moved the project up to high-profile status.  

— A collaboration between music stars Lana Del Ray and A$AP Rocky dropped this week, and the hazed out, Instagram-y music video recalls the age of J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe.

— The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died in 1953, was revealed to be one of the main characters in the upcoming British film noir “A Visit to America,” based on a screenplay by another Welsh poet, Owen Sheers.

VIDEO

— Tom Chen spoke to Swiss painter Caro Niederer on the occasion of her New York solo debut at Hauser & Wirth:

Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim may be installed in the museum’s annex galleries rather than the main spiral ramp, but the exhibition remains hypnotizing. Dijkstra’s large-scale vertical portraits stand like sentinels around the four floors of galleries, silently daring viewers to look closer. Even for visitors familiar with the photographer’s famous “Bathers” series of adolescents posed on beaches, the show includes a number of surprises. Dijkstra’s recent video works of London club dancers show a less dour yet similarly sensitive side to the artist.

Dijkstra herself, in attendance at the Guggenheim press preview, seems to have more in common with the dance club ravers than her stiff Israeli soldier and French legionnaire subjects. ARTINFO sat down with the artist for a short conversation about the accident that made her an art photographer, being vulnerable in front of the camera, and her history as a clubber.

On display at the Guggenheim is a self-portrait that you took at a pool. Can you explain the story behind that photo and how you moved from editorial to art photography?

I was working for magazines and newspapers, and at a certain point I felt that I was an artist... I felt more like an art photographer. I thought maybe I should take a couple months off to think about a project for myself. The last day of the two months that I gave myself to think about everything, I broke my hip in a bike accident. So then I had a lot of time to think [laughs].

And I think that that moment I realized how vulnerable you could be, that something can just happen. My whole perspective changed. I had to recover, and I was really afraid... The doctor said, “well, maybe your hip is going to die, and you’ll need a hip replacement.” I didn’t want that to happen. And they told me the only thing I can do is swim every day. Exercise, exercise, exercise! So that’s why I started to swim every day. And then one day I came out of the swimming pool and looked in the mirror and I took my goggles off, and it looked like I was crying. I thought, maybe I should make a self-portrait. I wanted to capture a moment you don’t normally think about.

Was there anything that frustrated you about editorial photography?

The thing that I found so difficult about editorial work was that everyone was always so self-conscious. Everybody starts to pose, gets on their photo face. I didn’t know how to deal with that. I wanted to get people to drop that mask.

Is that how your “Bathers” series of portraits of teenagers on beaches started?

I grew up in a place near the beach, and I started to photograph people on the beach. I first started to photograph friends, but I had the same problem, everyone was so self-conscious. So I started to photograph strangers. The first beach portrait was a black-and-white photograph of a girl who was about 13, and I realized that I like that age group very much. She was very open, and there was a lack of inhibition, very natural. I felt like that age group was... There was an acceptance. So I started to photograph children and teenagers.

Is that desire to photograph teenagers also what kicked you off on your clubber portraits and videos, like the Buzz Club installation?

First of all, there was the club itself. I was a clubber myself when I was much younger. So I went to clubs when I was 14, and I always liked that. I was in Liverpool and I was photographing school children and my assistant was also a clubber, so after shooting we went to the club. We ended up in the Buzz Club, which we really liked, and I thought, wow, I should make pictures here.

How did you move from still photography into the video format?

I liked the club pictures, but they were missing something — the atmosphere of the club and the people moving and dancing and talking. So that brought me to video. I wanted to capture the atmosphere of the club, and that was missing in the photos.

“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” runs at the Guggenheim through October 8. 

HOBART, Australia — It might not seem like a radical concept or a major revolution in the field of museology, but the results of the experimental "Theatre of the World" exhibition at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) certainly feel like a significant departure from the traditional museum exhibition format.

When was the last time you entered a museum exhibition to find that there were no wall plaques to identify and explain each item? When was the last time you explored a museum exhibition that placed a Giacometti sculpture alongside an Egyptian mummy? When was the last time a display case containing a severed head followed you around the exhibition space? Curated by the internationally renowned and visionary French curator Jean-Hubert Martin, "Theatre of the World" asks the viewer to reject the traditional concept of the museum space and experience an eclectic range of objects in an entirely new and refreshing manner. 

Convinced that it is “no longer enough to see art in an art historical context,” Martin makes it his mission to present a unique and radical panorama of the world using seemingly unrelated items in an environment devoid of many of the hallmarks of a conventional museum space. Spanning 4,000 years of fine and decorative arts, the exhibition includes 180 works from the private collection of MONA owner David Walsh, and 300 items selected from the collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), ranging from historical furniture to contemporary art. 

The aim of the exhibition, first conceived four years ago, is to challenge traditions of museum display and interrogate the definition of institutional space. By rejecting the age-old conventions of museum practice, Martin seeks to create an experience that is purely about “seeing.” He cleverly divides the exhibition into themed rooms, each of which features objects which have one or more elements in common. One room is devoted to the eye; a room titled “Majesty” is filled with an amazing display of traditional Melanesian and Polynesian barkcloths; and another room analyzes the relationship between man and beast.

As its title implies, the exhibition incorporates a range of elements reminiscent of stage design that not only challenges the historical conventions of curatorial practice, but also invite viewers to develop entirely new and exciting relations between historic and contemporary objects, fine and decorative arts, natural and artificial materials, and domestic and public spaces. Theatrical lighting, rope curtains partially hiding some of the objects on display, and the lack of restrictive museum cases add further dimensions of interactivity and connectivity. According to Martin, “looking carefully at an artwork is a richer experience than reading many books.” By enacting a curatorial practice that favours “visual efficiency” and inviting the viewer to approach the exhibition as a puzzle, he successfully conjures that experience.

Whether or not you agree that "Theatre of the World" exhibition is as radical as it seems, or its format represents the future of museum practice, there's no denying that the show provokes thought, discussion, and analysis. There is no doubt that the exhibition is also highly indulgent, but in an extremely good way. In fact it's thanks to the indulgent character of the show that its experience is so enchanting and unique. Seeing a Picasso painting juxtaposed with a traditional tribal shield, a Max Ernst sculpture sitting atop an antique Peruvian mortar, and a piece of geometric pyrite alongside a Chinese teapot, are incredibly exhilarating and eye-opening experiences, and they can only be had by experiencing this elaborately staged show. 

All things are one thing and that one thing is, in turn, obvious and exotic and beautiful and plain and elegant and prosaic and deep and shallow and rich with a richness that makes all things grand. - David Walsh, 2012

Theatre of the World is at MONA, Hobart, until April 8 2013.

This article also appears on ARTINFO Australia.

– Mysterious Moves at Jim Carrey's NYC Art Cave: Big news for those who closely follow the art career of rubber-faced funnyman Jim Carrey (no this is not a joke: He had a show of his paintings at Palm Springs's Heather James Fine Art earlier this year). The comedian-painter has been renting out a single-story, 2,000-square-foot Perry Street space in the West Village (aka his "art cave," in tabloid-speak). Carrey even tagged the exterior last year with the phrase "Church of FFC," which stands for "Freedom From Concern," to symbolize the location's status as his aesthetic refuge. Now, it seems, the landlord has the space listed as for rent, leading some to speculate that Carrey may be hanging up his brushes — though a "source" told the Post that he plans to renew the lease at the end of the year. [Page Six]   

– Baroness's Constable at Christie's Branded a "Moral Shame": Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza's decision to sell John Constable's "The Lock" — which had been housed in Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum — at Christie's in London this week has been met with protests and the resignation of one of the museum's trustees. The former Miss Spain's decision to sell the Constable "represents a moral shame on the part of all those concerned, most especially on the part of Tita," wrote former Royal Academy director Sir Norman Rosenthal in his letter of resignation. [Telegraph]

– Stolen Dali Mailed Back: The small, $150,000 Salvador Dali drawing "Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio" (1949) that was stolen from writer and colorful collector Adam Lindemann's new Upper East Side gallery Venus Over Manhattan was intercepted at JFK Airport last week as it was being mailed back from Europe. The culprit included a fake return address and illegible name on the package, and even emailed the gallery a tracking number along with the message "Cartel on its way back to you already." [NYT, ITA]

– An Inaccessible Art History Made Available Online: A cadre of researchers has spent years inside the homes of important figures in the Chinese art scene, counting, scanning, and annotating their archival materials. The fruits of this labor — some 300,000 digital items in various forms — are now online and accessible to the public via the Asia Art Archive's Collection Online. The founders hope to encourage art historians outside of Asia to study the region's contemporary art history. [NYT]

– Feds Sell Off Seized Art: Collectors looking for a bargain would do well to check out today's online auction held by the U.S. Marshals Service, which is offering 245 artworks, including pieces by Chagall, Matisse, and Picasso, at a steep bargain. All the works for sale were used to facilitate or obtained with proceeds from crimes like money laundering and tax fraud. The top bid for a work by Rembrandt is currently $68,000. [CNN]

– Dorothy's the Force Behind Lichtenstein's Retrospective: The massive Roy Lichtenstein retrospective currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago bears the distinct mark of the artist's wife, Dorothy. Three paintings she salvaged from a group her husband sought to destroy are included in the exhibition, as well as dozens of pieces from her own collection. To encourage collector Agnes Gund to lend a large painting, Dorothy loaned her one of similar size and shape so she wouldn't have a blank wall during the run of the exhibition. [NYT]

– Europe Considers Juicing Culture Spending Amid Crisis: As part of its "Creative Europe" plan, the European Commission is pondering a proposal to increase its cultural funding by 37 percent for seven years beginning in 2014. The boosted budget — totaling €1.8 billion ($2.27 billion) — would cover loans to local, small-scale cultural enterprises and restoration projects, among others, and is considered to be an indirect investment in tourism, 40 percent of which is driven by cultural events in Europe. [TAN]

– Klimt Life Turned Into a (Spectacularly Weird) Rock Opera: As part of the 150th anniversary celebrations of Gustav Klimt in his hometown, a new stage musical based on the beloved painter's will premiere at Vienna's Künstlerhaus on September 2. "Gustav Klimt — Das Musical" turns the Austrian artist's dramatic life into a rock opera with an appropriately colorful multimedia backdrop. (For a taste, see below.) [TAN]

– Hirst to Birth Pregnant Woman Statue: YBA bad boy Damien Hirst is proposing one of his most ambitious public art projects yet for the historic seaside town of Ilfracombe in Devonshire, where he would like to install a 66-foot-tall sculpture of a pregnant allegorical figure of Justice brandishing a sword in one hand and scales in the other while standing atop a stack of bronze legal books. If the proposal is approved by the town — where Hirst also owns a restaurant — the sculpture "Verity" would be loaned to the North Devon council for 20 years. [Telegraph]

– Three Artists to Rep Scotland in Venice: Artists Duncan Campbell, Corin Sworn, and Hayley Tompkins will represent Ireland at the 2013 Venice Biennale. The pavilion — which marks Scotlands 10th anniversary participating in the international event — will be curated by the organization the Common Guild. [ArtReview]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Trailer for "Gustav Klimt — Das Musical" at Vienna's Künstlerhaus

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

Rineke Dijkstra on Her Guggenheim Retrospective, Vulnerability, and Photographing London Club Kids

Let Them Have Architecture! Dame Zaha Hadid Calls for Better Buildings During Periods of Austerity

One-Line Reviews: Our Staff's Pithy Takes on the Mono-ha Retrospective, Summer's First Group Shows, and More

8 Outstanding Summer Shows in London, From Dazzling Bridget Rileys to a Survey of Invisible Art

VIDEO: Swiss Painter Caro Niederer on Her Bold New York Solo Debut at Hauser & Wirth

Spirit of ’77: Brad Elterman Shows His Candid Photographs of Rock Stars in L.A.

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

The inspirations for Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s sound installation "The Murder of Crows" were eclectic, to say the least: dreams of disembodied legs wearing socks and tennis shoes; bombastic Russian choirs; the quiet hum in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall; the sci-fi side of Kathmandu. The piece was originally created for the 2008 Sydney Biennale, and in August it comes 
to the capacious Park Avenue Armory in New York. Though one edition of the installation takes up nearly a football field’s length in the home of a Brazilian collector, and occasionally brings software to a halt with 
its 1,000 tracks, Bures Miller insists it’s really just a big stereo. Alexander Forbes spoke to the artists in Berlin, where they work when not at their second home base in Grindrod, British Columbia.

Alexander Forbes: In the four years since you first presented "The Murder of Crows," has your relationship to it changed?

Janet Cardiff: It changes every time we get to experience it. I think when you’re making a piece you’re so in tune with it right at the moment, you’re so involved in it, that you can’t really see it. You only get to hear a piece like this every couple of years because it can only be shown in a huge space — so then you have a lot more time to get away from it, and when you mount it again you can see it in a fresh way.

George Bures Miller: I think the Armory will be a great location, because you have complete control over the lighting. And it’s such a beautiful space — it has a bit of that science-fiction quality. It’s got a nostalgic feel as well, and it really suits the piece.

JC: Yeah, space really has an influence too on how people interpret it. If it’s not a great space, then the sound really suffers, and therefore the piece really suffers. I guess it’s the same with all art; I mean, if you present an installation in a crappy space, it’s not going to look as good, but with sound you also have to deal with the acoustics. If you just have a white box space, the sound is horrible. You need high ceilings, lots of texture, wood floors like they have in the Armory.

AF: Do you recall a distinct starting point for the piece?

GBM: We were in the Tate Turbine Hall, and some of the turbines were still operational off to the side, and you could hear the humming. So we thought that you could take that hum, if you put 3,000 speakers in the Turbine Hall and you have people actually doing that hum, each speaker could be a voice and the hum would start moving through the space. It was 2005 when we had that conversation, and the technology really just wasn’t there for us to do high-def audio with 3,000 speakers. But this idea led to "The Murder of Crows." The piece completely changed, and it was still a lot of speakers in the end: 98. In the final iteration, in Australia, we were still having trouble getting 98 speakers to actually play back.

AF: So how did you land on 98?

GBM: It’s funny because we use a device that has 24 outputs, so it’s easy for us to work in divisions of 24, so that gives us 96. But then when we were in Australia, Janet wasn’t there, and Titus Maderlechner —
 who does the mixing and a lot of our recording — and I were there and were like, “We need two more speakers!” I don’t know what we were thinking, but we had to have two more speakers! So we went out to buy some little device to have two more outputs. It just seems ludicrous now. Why did we need it? But it just seemed like the most important thing to have those two speakers at the last moment.

AF: "The Murder of Crows" is essentially sound art, but has a sculptural physicality with 
both the arrangement of the speakers and 
the movement of the sound itself. Do you see the media intertwining or interacting?

GBM: We’re always just experimenting, really. For this piece it was about the sounds moving around the viewer such that the space almost becomes a movable sphere of sound. It’s like a movie in your head that’s moving all around you, all the time.

JC: What we wanted to do was create a sculpture that has a virtual presence, but also a kind of physical presence.

GBM: There are all kinds of things that happen in different spatial areas, but the focus definitely is on the horn that sits on the main table where Janet’s voice comes out. It’s nice to be in a spot where you can hear that clearly. The structure of the piece is three horrific dreams that Janet had in Kathmandu, where we spent six months. That city is an interesting place because it’s quite like science fiction. It’s almost like living in "Blade Runner" except without the crime: There’s very little crime, but it feels like there should be.

JC: I would wake up in the middle of the night. I had my tape recorder there and I must have recorded about 30 different dreams. You know, when you wake up, and you go, “Oh man, was that ever bizarre!” That wasn’t part of the concept originally 
for "Murder of Crows," but we felt that it 
needed structure, so that’s when the dreams came in. It was also a reference to the Goya etching "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," where he’s lying on the table 
with the nightmares around him, and he can’t wake up.

AF: So there’s a distinct sense of trauma?

GBM: The piece developed in the middle of what I call the Bush decade. It wasn’t a decade but it was a dark time, and we were living in Berlin mostly at that time, and 
we read a lot more newspapers, which were very depressing. It was such a contrast. 9/11 is such a splitting point for the world. Pre-9/11, there was lots of bad stuff happening, but people weren’t paying attention to it. 
The news media was more interested in Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. This piece was in a way a requiem for the old world, 
the old optimistic world that we lost. We wanted it to feel oppressive and depressive and moving as well. We wanted it to be something that would hit you with a punch 
in the solar plexus. A sound punch.

AF: On one hand you have something that’s completely ephemeral: You’re making 
sound and you’re throwing it right away. 
It’s a very postmodern gesture in a strange sense, but it seems like it’s almost an elegy 
for a time before postmodernism, sometime that was more hopeful.

GBM: An elegy is a better word than requiem, yeah. That’s interesting. We do use sound because it bypasses your intellect. Sound can hit you such that you can’t stop 
it from coming in. It somehow gets around all of our filters. As soon as you have a 
cello playing right here behind you and on the chair—just that bass note, the way 
the vibration hits you in the back and goes into your body, you can’t stop the emotional reaction. You can’t cover your ears. We 
don’t have earlids; we have eyelids.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's "The Murder of the Crows" will run at the Park Avenue Armory August 3-September 9.

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