NEW YORK — Capping a billion-dollar auction week of postwar and contemporary art, boutique firm Phillips de Pury & Company sold a modest $79,904,500 at its Park Avenue headquarters. Modest, at least, compared to the auction giants Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which delivered back-to-back evening sales tallying $887.5 million.

At Phillips de Pury, only 35 lots were offered, with 13 carrying third-party financial guarantees that pretty much pre-sold the big lots in the sale and insured a positive result. Twenty-nine of those 35 sold for a buy-in rate by lot of 17 percent and two percent by value.

The overall total fell in the middle of the pre-sale expectations, which were $73,620,000-110,730,000. That was slightly better than last November’s $71,292,500 sale, which was 16 sixteen percent unsold by lot. Four artist records were set, four lots sold for over ten million dollars, and 15 hurdled the million-dollar mark.

Offering younger, cutting-edge artists is the house’s specialty, and that was apparent early on with Tauba Auerbach’s “Untitled (Fold)” trompe-l’oeil composition from 2010, which sold for a record $290,500 (est. $200-300,000) to New York dealer Alberto Mugrabi.

Next up, Rashid Johnson’s darkly decorative, 98¼-inch-high “Fly” (2011), comprised of branded red oak flooring, black soap, wax, and gold paint went for a record $182,500 to an anonymous telephone bidder (est. $100-150,000). Los Angeles dealer Patricia Marshall was the underbidder on the Johnson, which was also chased by Milan dealer Nicolo Cardi.

In similar fashion, Sterling Ruby’s mural-scaled, 90-by-134-inch “SP 17, 2008,” executed in acrylic on canvas, sold for a record $626,500 (est. $400-600,000) to Los Angeles art advisor Julie Miyoshi of Miyoshi Art Projects LLC.

“Phillips’ estimates are particularly on the high side,” commented Miyoshi as she departed the salesroom, “but I’m happy with my purchase.” The dealer said the work was purchased for an American collector. Milan dealer Cardi of Cardi Black Box was the underbidder.

Dan Colen’s bubble gum-on-canvas “S&M” (2010), complete with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist, sold for a record $578,500 (est. $200-300,000) to New York art advisor Wendy Cromwell. Greenwich Connecticut collector Peter Brant was the underbidder.

Strong bidding greeting Mark Grotjahn’s colored pencil-on-paper “Untitled (Cream Butterfly Thin Black Lines #673)” (2007), which sold to another telephone bidder for $734,500 (est. $400-600,000). At one point in the bidding, one specialist manning a telephone attempted to split the bid in half on behalf of her client to a $5,000 increment. Auctioneer and Phillips chairman Simon de Pury couldn’t help telling the crowded salesroom, “It’s a measly little increment,” and declined the offer. The anonymous cheapskate on the line buckled and took the $10,000 increment. It last sold at Phillips de Pury London in April 2008 for GBP 90,500/$179,813.

The rather paltry levels of bidding may have been a question of auction fatigue, coming at the end of a long week of evening and day sales. In fact, Christie’s “day” sale was still going strong as Phillips started its evening auction 15 minutes late.

Luckily for Phillips — a closely owned company controlled by the Russian based Mercury Group— had enough third-party guarantees to carry the sale, as clearly evidenced by Gerhard Richter’s huge abstract, “Kegel (Cone)” (1985), which sold on what appeared to be a single bid for a hammer price of $11 million, or $12,402,500 with fees (est. $12-18 million).

The same reception greeted Jean-Michel Basquiat’s early and goofy two-figure composition, “Humidity” (1982), which sold on what appeared to be a single telephone bid for $12,402,500 (est. $12-18 million).

Another Basquiat, a work on paper “Self-Portrait” (1982), elicited spirited bidding even though the fierce and richly colored composition’s authenticity was reportedly challenged earlier in the day, despite the fact that it was accompanied by a certificate of authenticity by the recently disbanded Basquiat Authentication Committee. It sold for $4,058,500 (est. $2.5-3.5 million).

“Luckily we had the wherewithal to prove its authenticity,” said Michael McGinnis, the newly elevated CEO of Phillips de Pury and the firm’s worldwide head of contemporary art.

Another big lot backed by a third-party financial guarantee also drew scant attention as Andy Warhol’s lipstick-enhanced “Mao” (1973), measuring 50 by 42 inches, sold, according  to auctioneer de Pury, to  “a gentleman in the room” for the top lot price of $13,522,500 (est. $12-18 million).

De Pury didn’t announce the winner — as is custom and also required by the New York City Consumer Affairs Agency that supposedly monitors the auction business here — leading to speculation that it might have sold to Helly Nahmad, who was mostly invisible in a sky box above the salesroom. (Uber-clients such as the Nahmad family and the Mugrabis never raise paddles — like British royalty, they are unfamiliar with carrying cash in hand.)

Another Warhol, the spiffy, serial Disaster “Nine Jackies,” another guaranteed lot, from 1964, all of them stamped “Estate of Andy Warhol” and not bearing the artist’s coveted signature, sold to a telephone bidder for $12,402,500 (est. $10-15 million). It last sold at auction at Sotheby’s New York in November 1995 for $398,500 to Los Angeles collector and art patron Eli Broad. Alberto Mugrabi was the underbidder at that long-ago sale, according to this reporter’s catalogue notes at the time.

Other blue-chip works also found new homes, as Alexander Calder’s “The Whiffletree,” a jaunty and early standing mobile from circa 1936, sold to the telephone for $4,002,500 (est. $3.5-5.5 million). It last sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2007 for $1,609,000.

John Chamberlain’s chunky steel, “Ivory Joe” sculpture from 1974-77 sold for $542,500 (est. $600-800,000) to Los Angeles dealer Patricia Marshall who bought it on behalf of Eugenio Lopez of Mexico’s Jumex Collection. It last sold at Sotheby's New York in May 1999 for just $40,250.

“The sale was very strong for the obvious things,” said Marshall as she departed the salesroom. “It’s a bit easier buying here.”

It wasn’t so easy, however, for Milan dealer Nicolo Cardi, who struck out in his efforts to buy works tonight. “It was a bad night for me,” said Cardi, moments after the sale ended, “I was the underbidder on four works [the Sterling Ruby, Elaine Sturtevant, the Rashid Johnson and the Richard Prince]. The market is very strong for quality works.”

Michael McGinnis weighed in on the results, noting, “There was a lot of art sold this week and I think we tipped over the billion-dollar market with this sale tonight. We’re happy with the results.” McGinnis acknowledged that the third-party guarantees came “from multiple parties” — a formula that has proved successful for this current era of risk-averse sellers.

Prices here include the buyer's premium tacked onto the hammer price: 25 percent up to and including $50,000; 20 percent up to and including $1 million; and 12 percent above $1 million.

Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York, charged with reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here).

* Willem Andersson, “Is the house still on fire,” Nancy Margolis, 523 West 25th Street, through November 24

The sharp detail and crisp colors in the oil-on-wood scenes of solemn destruction and portraits of mysteriously faceless generals by Swedish artist Willem Andersson make his first American solo show a strangely approachable shade of surreal. —Allison Meier

* Bernadette Corporation, “2000 Wasted Years,” Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, through December 16

A collection of Bernadette Corporation ephemera, books, videos, and designs is interspersed with giant placards (one for each year the collective has existed) in a sort of three-dimensional powerpoint presentation tracing the group's varied endeavors, from early-‘90s anti-fashion fashion shows through their book, “Reena Spaulings,” and their more recent endorsement of Occupy Wall Street, thereby offering loads of information and sensory stimulation but few definitive descriptions, encouraging visitors to reach their own understanding of this art group’s significance. —Sara Roffino

* Rackstraw Downes, Betty Cunningham, 541 West 25th Street, through November 24

Impending creepiness stirs beneath the surface of Downes’s realist landscapes — painted from below bridges, in deserts, and on roadside medians — taking wide-angle vistas and turning them into tiny pockets of secrecy. —Rachel Corbett

* Trenton Doyle Hancock, “...And Then It All Came Back to Me,” James Cohan, 533 West 26th Street, through December 22

Though the Houston-based Hancock abandons here the self-created mythological narrative that has served as the content of his work to date (good “Mounds” vs. evil “Vegans”) in favor of a new series of paintings that purport to be autobiographical, the feeling is less raw and confessional than a kind of free-standing version of the fertile mental and bodily discomfort that his more famous work ciphers through its twisted comic book universe. —Ben Davis

* Huang Yong Ping, “Circus” at Barbara Gladstone, 530 West 21st Street, through January 19, 2013

Huang Yong Ping's “Circus,” is not for the easily disturbed, for the headless taxidermied animals in a cage, apparently under the spell of a monkey puppeteer who controls a giant hand looming over them, elicits an eerie feeling of uncertainty about our relationship to an almighty authority, and makes the ambiguity of who or what guides us very apparent. —Terri Ciccone

* Leon Levinstein, Steven Kasher, 521 West 23rd Street, through December 22

For better or worse, this series of candid 1940s and 1950s New York street photography seems to ride on the coattails of last winter’s Weegee exhibition at the gallery, relying on no more than five types of beautiful normal people. —Reid Singer

* Ali Kazma, “In It,” C24, 514 West 24th Street, through December 22

The selection of two-channel video works for this Turkish artist’s first NYC solo show has been curated around the concept of “energy,” and aligned side-by-side, an older work which captures the pace of industrial machines adds an eerie, metronomic element to a newer work centering on a stamp-wielding desk clerk. —Lori Fredrickson

* Lin Tianmiao, "Badges," Galerie Lelong, 528 26th Street, through December 8

While the front gallery's meticulously wrapped thread wall pieces resist a singular reading — for this Westerner, they echo Odysseus's Penelope slyly stitching and unstitching her way through a tapestry — the back room installation, which features elegant hanging hoops embroidered with American and Chinese slang terms for women, is slightly less memorable for being so didactic.  —Julia Halperin

* Christina Mazzalupo, “Prognosis: Doom,” Mixed Greens, 531 West 26th Street, through January 5, 2013

With the now-disproved Mayan apocalypse of December 21, 2012, fast approaching, artist Christina Mazzalupo has grabbed her (possibly last) opportunity to explore every angle of doomsday phenomena, from meticulous portraits of cult extremists painted on scientific tags to a text-based video that literally spells out the Biblical plagues. —Alanna Martinez

* Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, “Twenty One Twelve," Postmasters, 459 West 19th Street, through December 15

Though ostensibly set a century in the future, the McCoys' ominous and dystopic miniature landscapes, embedded with glitchy video art and real-time camera loops, come seem at all preachy, and are maybe best framed as eerily prescient Hurricane Sandy art. —Benjamin Sutton

* Mickalene Thomas, “How to Organize a Room Around a Striking Piece of Art,” Lehman Maupin, 540 West 26th Street, through Jan 5 

Few gallery shows wear their hearts on their sleeve so bravely as Thomas's emotional tribute to her late mother and muse, which features an unflinchingly personal documentary, the artist's signature glamour portraits, and a reconstruction of her groovy studio environments, complete with animals prints and dueling paisleys.  —Chloe Wyma

President Obama’s reelection last week has put a blazing spotlight on the “emerging majority” thesis, thrusting it into the center of political discussion. Some pundits, including prominent Republicans, even question the party's future if they don't change their race-baiting ways and embrace the reality of a multicultural America. As the Economist put it, “The GOP must become younger and browner to remain a serious contender.” Would it surprise you to know that, on this score at least, the liberal-leaning art world has more in common with Republicans than Democrats?

For make no mistake about it, the “emerging majority” thesis has great significance for art and its institutions. Cosmopolitan New York is a majority minority city, and has been for as long as anyone can remember. But walk from the subway towards any gallery opening or museum party, and watch the color drain away. In fact, for some time now, the people who crunch the data on cultural participation have been warning that the art world's inability to address this issue threatens its very future.

Back in 2010, the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) issued a report with a title at once anodyne and urgent: “Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums.” It is well worth reviewing in depth for what it says about the scandalous state of diversity in the visual arts, but its moral is really all summed up in the following line: “This analysis paints a troubling picture of the ‘probable future’ — a future in which, if trends continue in their current grooves, museum audiences are radically less diverse than the American public, and museums serve an ever-shrinking fragment of society.”

The data tells the story. As of 2008, non-Hispanic whites made up close to 80 percent of visitors to museums, even though they were only about 70 percent of the population. Another study, by Reach Advisors, polled 40,000 museum-going households. Among those who frequented art museums, a stunning 92 percent identified as white, and only 16 percent identified as a minority (in this survey, respondents were allowed dual identification). Compare: 87 percent of registered Republicans are white. 

It is amazing how insulated from this issue the art world has been. When New York magazine recently wrote its “New Art World Rule Book” and included one (shamefacedly un-bylined) piece advising artists that the secret to success was, “Be Young, Post-Black, and From Chicago” (citing just two figures, Theaster Gates and Rashid Johnson), it rang out as thoroughly clueless. But the high-minded mandarins of contemporary theory don’t score so much better. Infamously, when Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss wrote their textbook, “Art Since 1900,” they penned every chapter themselves — except for the two on communities outside the normal October School narrative, Mexican muralism and the Harlem Renaissance, which were outsourced to a writer credited only by his/her initials. You think this might be a signal about whose history counts?

The cringe-worthy statistics are not just some bad hangover from a more ignorant past. In fact, they are getting worse. Between 1992 and 2008, according to the CFM study, the percentage of Hispanic adults who visited museums or art galleries dropped three percentage points, from 17.5 to 14.5 percent. In the same period, the white audience shrank too, but it did so by less than two percentage points, from 28.6 percent participation to 26 percent. African-American participation dropped most dramatically of all, from 19.3 percent to just 12 percent — a full seven percent loss. These are staggering disparities.

You may not be aware that museums face a looming attendance crisis. Aren’t the lines for the MoMA always around the block? Isn’t the Met always packed? But these “superstar” museums, which can count on insatiable tourist audiences, distort the overall trends. Look at the Brooklyn Museum, which at one time drew more than one million visitors. In 2010, it drew just 340,000, an embarrassingly large percentage of that to its now-cancelled dance parties (though these did, indeed, draw a diverse audience). Nationwide, art museum attendance shrank about 9 percent between 2003 and 2010, from about 33 million to about 30 million.

The causes for this downward trend are debated, but art’s diminishing hold on the country’s increasingly diverse population is surely one of them. The only good news anyone can find is this: At least we’re not ballet. Attendance at all of what the NEA calls “benchmark art events,” including dance, orchestra, and jazz, have registered steep, double-digit declines in recent years (only Broadway bucks the trend). Museum attendance has merely gently eroded. Perhaps visual art’s more protean character will allow it to reinvent itself to find new audiences. But you need only to flip through the gallery of portraits of people who sat with Marina Abramovic for MoMA’s blockbuster “The Artist Is Present” performance to see that at its most pseudo-democratic and inclusive, today’s art world looks more like Boise than NYC.

Some 80 percent of museum studies graduates are white. That’s a problem if — as the experts suggest — the diversity of key museum staff is taken as a signal about how welcoming the institution is to minorities. Ethnically and culturally diverse arts institutions are the fastest growing category of cultural organization, presumably because there are communities hungry for culture who don’t feel like they are being served. Anecdotal evidence suggests that initiatives like the Birmingham Museum of Art’s Sankofa Society, which reinvented itself to focus on celebrating African-American art, do help generate more enthusiasm among diverse audiences.

It would represent a huge failure of vision, however, if art were to remain confined to just the cultural group that originated it, and could never transcend this context. Some kind of readjustment of taste will probably be in order given a changing society. But certainly plenty of artists of color have been influenced by European art and artists, and vice versa. Culture at its best should be about the dialogue by which diverse strands of thought become relevant to diverse people, and that is a matter of actively connecting art to the realities of people’s diverse lives. Right now our cultural sector seems to be failing at that mission, to its own detriment.

And yet, finally, you also have to stress that the problem isn’t just the lack of good will or general cluelessness. As “Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums” rightly notes, “it’s impossible to examine the disparities of museum use without noticing the stark effects of income and education — which often correlate with (even when they are not caused by) immigrant status, race and ethnicity.” It follows that you can't just solve the problem through better programming.

Museum-goers, the CFM says, are much more similar across race and ethnicity than different. Art-goers are likely to be relatively affluent, and education level is the greatest predictor of whether you become a museum fan. Perhaps, then, the huge and persistant disparities between white and Black economic resources and educational outcomes — due to discrimination, urban disarray, and, increasingly, a push back against affirmative action policies designed to help cut against these factors — has something to do with the astounding decline in Black arts attendance. The Black middle class is being hammered by a foreclosure crisis that disproportionately affects it, and cuts to public sector, where it is disproportionately represented. Despite a Black president, it’s been a terrible few decades for Black America.

These are political matters, not things that good arts policy can turn around. The art world could, however, at least have something to say about them. Otherwise, it cannot help but become more and more removed from the living experience of the population in our increasingly diverse and still troubled nation.

Interventions is a column by ARTINFO executive editor Ben Davis. He can be reached at bdavis[at]artinfo.com.

LONDON — Yesterday, 250 people gathered atAnish Kapoor’s vast studio in South London to shoot a "Gangnam Style" tribute video in support of Ai Weiwei and political dissidents across the globe.

The piece, of course, is a response to a parody clip of Psy’s K-pop hit circulated by the Chinese artist and activist three weeks ago for which he transformed the original horse riding-themed choreography into an evocation of handcuffed hands. The video went viral, but Ai Weiwei’s tongue-in-cheek comment on the lack of freedom in China didn’t go down well with the authorities, which blocked it shortly after its release.

At the studio doors last night, assistants were handing out leaflets with a message from Kapoor. It read: In this time of economic difficulty it would appear that governments all over the world are afraid to criticize authoritarian regimes and as a result human rights and freedom of expression suffer for many million of people. IT IS OUR DUTY NOW AS INDIVIDUALS TO ACT.”

Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger, Bob & Roberta Smith, and English National Ballet artistic director and principal dancer at the Tamara Rojo joined art worlders, human rights activists from Index on Censorship and Amnesty International, Goldsmiths art students, and members of National Youth Orchestra. Star choreographer Akram Khan directed the enthusiastic gathering. “Show your fist, this is a protest,” he said to the crowd during the first group scene.

Kapoor appeared perfectly at ease in his role, dancing away with handcuffs and sunglasses, or holding a banner spelling “End Repression Allow Expression” as Rojo twirled around him. In another shot, Rojo danced ballerina-style in front of a line of masked participants, their middle fingers raised.

“Our video aims to make a serious point about freedom of speech and freedom of expression,” said Kapoor. “It is our hope that this gesture of support for Ai Weiwei will be wide-ranging and will help to emphasize how important these freedoms are to us all.” 

Index on Censorship and Amnesty International had covered the set with placards bearing the names of numerous victims of censorship, and provided masks bearing the faces of imprisoned activists and human rights campaigners in China. “It’s not unusual, when you’ve got an extremely high profile, to want to use it to shine light unto a much broader issue,” Index on Censorship Head of Arts Julia Farrington told ARTINFO UK. “That’s absolutely part of the way Ai Weiwei is in the world — to say: ‘it’s happening everywhere, we can’t let this stuff let slip as if it doesn’t matter.’”

Participants were handed black tape to wear on their mouths and comic sunglasses, and the studio floor was strewn with plastic crabs. In Chinese, the word “crab” is very similar to the word “harmony,” often bandied about by the government. As his Shanghai studio was to be destroyed in 2010, the ever-ironic Ai Weiwei organized a river crab feast. On that occaision, the artist himself was prevented from attending, but some 800 other people did, and the crustacean has become a symbol for state censorship. During the shoot many people took to wearing the plastic toys on their lapels.

“Anish found his political voice through taking his work out from a British Council exhibition in China last year, in protest of what’s happening to Ai Weiwei,” explained Farrington. “He said in the speech at the Lisson Gallery that he found it really empowering. This event is absolutely a continuity of that experience.”

Other organizations and artists have also come on board. The Tate, the Guggenheim, MoMA, and the New Museum in New York are said to be preparing their own take on the song, and artists Cornelia Parker and Jane and Louise Wilson, among others, are also said to be working on a contribution. All of these will be put together and edited in a video to be released on YouTube early next week.

Earlier this week Barneys New York unveiled its holiday windows, a Disney collaboration called Electric Holiday, with a celebratory to-do that closed down the block of Madison Avenue in front of the luxury department store. It was a friendly clash of icons as a litany of America’s sweethearts, from Sarah Jessica Parker to Barbara Walters, took turns posing with Minnie Mouse, or rather, a person dressed up as the adored anthropomorphic rodent. The Barneys building was lit up in a cool blue while everyone basked in the glow of celebrity greatness and cartoon fame.

The centerpiece of Electric Holiday is a five-minute animated video. In it, Minnie Mouse aspires to become a model and, in a fantasy sequence, finds herself whisked away by Air France to walk in a Paris fashion show. Before the show begins, she’s seen waving to Linda Evangelista, getting her make up done by Pat McGrath, and being dressed by Alber Elbaz. She then takes the runway in her Lanvin dress, walks through fairy dust and — poof! — magically becomes rail-thin, giraffe-tall, and vacant-eyed. Her pals Goofy, Snow White, and Daisy Duck also take turns on the catwalk, while front-row denizens look on expressionless: Franca Sozzani, Cathy Horyn, Daphne Guinness, and a notes-taking Suzy Menkes. Poor Minnie is then returned to her comparatively frumpy self, longingly staring at the same red Lanvin dress in a store window — but then Mickey buys it for her, so we’re good?

Now, we don’t mean to bash a well-intentioned project, and chances are pretty good that we’ll always love Lanvin, but… what? And… why? Throwing together a bunch of beloved things does not a collaboration make. And then there is the inconvenient truth that these two behemoths, Barneys and Disney, are aimed at entirely different groups of people: adults and children. Where is the connection? If the video does anything, it’s to highlight society’s ills. First, that this country is suffering from a brain drain, where girls are encouraged to throw scientific or political aspirations to the wind and become models (and boys Wall Street bankers). And second, the very obvious problem with making Minnie Mouse look adolescent and anorexic so she can fit into a tiny and short dress. When the announcement of the project was made in August, it wasn’t long before the petition site Change.org  took Electric Holiday, and the duo behind it, to task.

Then there is the sad portrayal of industry veterans. Steven Meisel appears to be a stalker who’s somehow gained entry into Minnie’s Paris manse and Juergen Teller juggles cameras outside of the fashion show like a paparazzo jacked up on meth. Clearly we aren’t expected to think about realism, only to plunk down plastic for other fruits of the collaboration: figurines designed by Paul Smith and Diane von Furstenberg, Mickey Mouse ears by Rag & Bone and L’Wren Scott, and ornaments, candies, and children’s toys.

In more optimistic news, 25% of all items in the Electric Holiday collection will be donated to American Red Cross disaster relief. Disney and Barneys have also worked with the City of New York to donate the generators used at the unveiling to the hurricane recovery process in the Rockaways.

But not even altruism is enough to save this collaboration. Has anyone else noticed that Anna Wintour and her American Vogue crew have, apparently, had the good sense to duck out?

Lee Carter is editor-in-chief of Hint Fashion Magazine.

Visit Artinfo.com/fashion for more fashion and style news. 

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– MoMA Acquires Cage's Silence: The score that launched a thousand art history jokes, John Cage's silent 4'33'', is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. New York financier Henry R. Kravis purchased the earliest extant version of the legendary work in honor of his wife, Marie-Josée, MoMA’s president. Kravis bought it from the artist Irwin Kremen, to whom Cage had given the score as a birthday present in 1953. "It’s between music and art, a score but also a drawing as well," said Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s chief curator of prints and illustrated books. The score will go on view at the museum next summer. [NYT]

– Duomo Asks Cathedral Enthusiasts to Adopt a Gargoyle: Milan's Duomo cathedral — the fourth-largest in the world — has put its 135 gargoyles up for adoption in a quest to raise £20 million ($32 million) for essential renovations. Donors who contribute £80,000 (about $127,000) to the gothic building will have their names engraved underneath a gargoyle. The fundraising campaign was introduced to make good a shortfall caused by cuts to the Italian culture budget. Still, the scheme begs the question: If you love gargoyles enough to adopt one for £80,000, do you really want to alter it forever by adding your name? [BBC]

– Queens Foundry Owner Accused of Johns Forgery: Brian Ramnarine, the owner of a foundry in Long Island City that does a great deal of fabrication work for artists, has been accused of attempting to sell for $11 million a forged bronze sculpture he made using a mold Jasper Johns trusted him to store. Ten years after being convicted of making and selling forged sculptures, Ramnarine is again suspected of selling an unauthorized work — and even forging provenance documents for the metal flag sculpture and claiming Johns gifted it to him in 1989. [NYT]

– Met Taps Tate Curator Nicholas Cullinan: The current curator of international modern art at London's Tate Modern, Nicholas Cullinan— whose previous jobs have included stints at the Guggenheim and MoMA— will return to New York in the spring to begin his tenure as a curator in the Metropolitan Museum's department of modern and contemporary art. "He is a formidable scholar who has established himself with distinction in the field of modern and contemporary art over the past decade," Met director Thomas Campbell said, "particularly through his work on Cy Twombly, Arte Povera, and a range of contemporary artists internationally." [Press Release]

– Bond Villains Commandeer D.C. Museum: Washington, D.C.'s International Spy Museum is marking the 50th anniversary of the James Bond franchise in a deliciously evil way. Its exhibition "Exquisitely Evil: 50 Years of Bond Villains" brings together 007's arch-nemeses — from Dr. No and Octopussy to Jaws — in a bacchanal of Bond baddies. "That’s what give the movies a lot of their power,” said guest curator Alexis Albion. "They are drawing from real-life fears... They are anchored in a sense of real threat." [Washington Post]

– World-Class Photo Collection Sale to Benefit Homeless: Just two decades after he bought his first photograph — Alfred Stieglitz's 1920 close-up of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands — 82-year-old philanthropist Henry Buhl is sending his 1,100-piece collection to auction next month at Sotheby's. Most of the proceeds will go to the Association of Community Employment Programs for the Homeless. The Buhl collection, which was the focus of an exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2004 and includes works by Man Ray, Irving Penn, and Gilbert & George, is expected to bring in some $12 million. [Telegraph]

– D.C.'s National Galley Acquires Glenn Ligon Work: The National Gallery of Art has purchased a 1988 text painting by Glenn Ligon, a favorite artist of the President and First Lady. The work, "Untitled (I Am a Man)," is a reinterpretation of the signs carried by many of the 1,300 African-American sanitation workers striking in Memphis in 1968. It also comes with a Washington connection: Ligon was inspired to create the painting after seeing one of the actual signs in Representative Charles B. Rangel's office years ago. The piece was previously part of the artist's personal collection. [NYT]

– Renoir Found in Flea Market Reopens Old Wounds: Susan Helen Adler, the great-great-niece of Saidie Adler May— who donated Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1879 painting "Paysage Bords de Seine" to the Baltimore Museum of Art, from where it was stolen in 1951 before turning up in a flea market earlier this year — says her great-great-aunt's donations are not sufficiently well highlighted in the institution's permanent collection galleries. "Saidie spent her life dedicated to art and educating the public, but other people have made the decision about her legacy," Adler said. "The museum has hundreds of her items in storage. I don’t even know what they have." [Washington Post]

– Belgium Taps Berlinde De Bruyckere for 2013 Biennale: The sculptor and installation artist has been selected by the Flemish Minister for Environment, Nature and Culture to represent Belgium at the 2013 Venice Biennale. De Bruyckere, who specializes in haunting images of mangled bodies, received the Flemish Culture Prize for Visual Arts in 2009. An exhibition putting her work in dialogue with deceased artist Philippe Vandenbergh is currently on view at the Museum De Pont in the Netherlands. [Press Release, Gallerist]

– Court Documents in Knoedler Motion Questioned: The twisted tale of the now-defunct Knoedler Gallery and its cache of allegedly forged modernist masterpieces keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. In a recent motion to dismiss a lawsuit over an ostensibly forged Mark Rothko painting, the gallery and its former director Ann Freedman submitted a letter that claims the piece was viewed and approved by ten experts on the artist. But one of the men on the list, Dedalus Foundation president Jack Flam, was astonished to find his name listed. "I'm not a Rothko expert, and I don't remember seeing the painting," he said. "If I did see it, it was probably behind someone's desk." [TAN]

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Anish Kapoor’s Gangnam Style Video: The Making-of

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NEW YORK — Pinta, the modern and contemporary Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese art fair, is currently in its sixth New York iteration, with over 60 galleries from 17 countries representing hundreds of Latin American and Iberian artists, as well as a few artists who, though not from Latin America, have some sort of connection to it. Much of the work in the fair comes from the expected well-traversed art terrains, like Spain, Brazil, and Argentina, but Bolivian, Uruguayan, and Cuban artists make some meaningful contributions as well.

Cuban artist Arles del Rio was a hit the opening night. Most of his pieces were part of a series of studies for his installation in the Havana Biennial last May — a giant fence along the malecon with a cut-out of an airplane, a visually impressive work that touched on ideas of permanence, escape, and closeness.

The Art Projects section — curated by Italian born-Brazilian resident, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti— offers a space in which seven galleries showcase the work of a single artist, allowing for a more in-depth experience of the work, and a more curated art experience for the viewer. The work in Art Projects ranges from Puerto Rican, Brooklyn-based artist Ramón Miranda Beltrán’s “Village Youth,” a subtly powerful and highly political photo-transfer on concrete, to small, formal geometric studies by Brazilian Concrete master Willys de Castro. Also in Art Projects, the sole Portuguese gallery in the fair Filomena Soares highlights the work of Dias & Riedweg with “Little Stories of Modesty and Doubt,” a short video of overlapping cuts of a Brazilian park taken from different angles at the same time.

In curating the section, Visconti was interested in the themes that connected the diverse group of artists. “We have the whole spectrum, from very engaged artists who were interested in making a change or making a political statement," he says, "to artworks that could look just formal, but were created to make a change.”

The rest of the fair was heavy on photography of all sorts. Argentinia-based Espacio Makarius has four incredible works by Henri Cartier-Bresson shot and printed in Cuba for $25,000 each. The Makarius family is a strong presence in the gallery, with photographs by the prolific Argentine artist Sameer Makarius (starting at $6,500) hung alongside paintings by his son, the abstract painter Karim Makarius.

São Paulo-based Paralelo Gallery is dominated by four images of Hélio Oiticica, taken by filmmaker Ivan Cardoso during Oiticica’s final Parangolé installation in 1978. In the stills — cut from film — Oiticica is a lone figure against a blue sky, moving with and within the colored fabric of his moving sculpture, the parango. Each image in the series of four is $9,000.

Based in La Paz, Bolivia, Salar Galeria de Arte is perhaps the gem of the fair. The gallery has fewer pieces than most other galleries; all by strong South American artists little-known in North America. The simply curated space carries a strong Andean aesthetic with visually rich and politically relevant works like the two large Gastón Ugalde photographs set in the desert; one with colored threads woven atop white sand and the other with bright beach balls and clear bubbles contrasted against the blue sky. They are both part of an edition of three, priced at $5,000, and related to his video, “Marcha por la vida,” also part of an edition of three, which costs $12,000. Ugalde’s work is strongly influenced by indigenous Andean textiles: In “Marcha por la vida” he sews together almost 500 feet of bright, hand-woven blankets, which he installs differently depending on the setting. Also at Salar Galeria is a video by Sara Modiano, who has been described as the Colombian Cindy Sherman; and a 12,000-pound, wooden, color-blocked sculpture by Sonia Falcone.

The Miami-based Sammer Gallery has a phenomenal selection of abstract work by Uruguayan artists — particularly the works by Raul Pavlotzky and Carmelo Arden Quin. Sammer also has a series of small, delicate abstract works in tempera and pencil by Ana Sacerdote, ranging in price from $2,800 to $4,500.

For the most part, Pinta 2012 is a success. There’s an incredible selection of artists, thoughtful curation, and much to discover. Yet, the fair fails in one egregious way: only about a quarter of the work shown at Pinta is by women. Hopefully, when Pinta returns to New York next year, it will include more of a selection of female artists, and the work will remain as high-quality as it is this year.

Our most-talked-about stories in Visual Art, Design & Architecture, Fashion & Style, and Performing Arts, November 12 - 16, 2012:

Now in its thirteenth year (and its second year at the Grand Palais), Paris Photo is being unanimously acclaimed as the second most important photography fair in the world after New York’s AIPAD. The fair has “gone up a notch,” fair director Julien Frydman told ARTINFO France, having attracted an informed and attentive group of visitors who arrive more for the work than for face-recognition. Since opening on Wednesday night, the fair has led with a spirit of discovery and thoughtful questioning, and a calmer, less-frenetic energy than most contemporary art fairs. Collectors have arrived from around the world, including from the U.S., with only a lesser turnout of Belgian collectors (as a result of the current Thalys train strike affecting the Brussels-Paris line).

The big-name photography galleries are all here, including Camera Work (Berlin), Edwynn Houk (New York and Zurich), Hamiltons (London), Bruce Silverstein (New York), Johannes Faber (Vienna), Thomas Zander (Cologne). Also present are photography agencies such as VU, and Magnum, which has been one of the most heavily trafficked booths. And certain contemporary art galleries at the fair, like David Zwirner, are appearing for the first time. Zwirner’s unequalled selection includes photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gordon Matta-Clark, Thomas Ruff, and James Welling. The storied Fraenkel Gallery, which specializes in photography but is a first-timer at Paris Photo, has brought works by Nan Goldin and Christian Marclay. And the ever-present Gagosian has a selection that includes the blurry nudes of Thomas Ruff.

Other impressive works from the talent on display include pieces by Gabriele Basilico, Franco Fontana, Luigi Ghirri, Jürgen Klauke, and Nils-Udo at Photo & Contemporary’s booth; the diverse choice of artists, including Pilar Albarracin, Didier Faustino, Tracey Moffatt, and Shirin Neshat, at the smaller booth of Portuguese gallery Filomena Soares; and photography by Brandon Lattu, Arnold Odermatt, and Gerhard Richter at Leo Koenig’s booth.

The level of sales has had mixed reports. While enthusiastic about the fair, the director of the emerging East Wing gallery of Doha, Qatar expressed concern that he had only five sales, along with a few works reserved, on the first day. Collectors may be nervous about testing the waters with artists from countries that are newcomers to the Western art market; although Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery reported strong sales, aided by the fact that the gallery has brought politically-charged works by artists “who are already very well-known in Europe,” according to gallerist Lara Koseff.

A new feature of the fair this year, titled “Paris Photo Vu Par…” (“Paris Photo Seen By…”), is a selection of favorite photos from the fair chosen by a prominent cultural figure. This year, that figure is David Lynch, and everyone has been talking about the approximately hundred photos he’s chosen from the works. It’s an unsurprisingly eclectic array, featuring a mixture of nudes, monuments, stone and flesh, and images of the female form. Another side-event, Paris Photo Platform, organized by MoMA’s photography curator Roxana Marcoci, features conferences and discussions by artists and thinkers including Lynch, Jean-François Chevrier, Beatriz Colomina, Taryn Simon, and Hilla Becher.

Everywhere I went in Istanbul last May, during the aptly named “Istancool” culture festival, it seemed that Tate Modern’s curator of international art, Jessica Morgan, had just been there, making the rounds and sniffing about the galleries, as their proprietors were eager to tell me. The situation was once unthinkable, according to the veteran dealer Haldun Dostoglu, a cofounder of one of the city’s oldest modern-and-contemporary galleries, Galeri Nev: “Fifteen years ago, it was almost impossible for me to imagine selling an artwork to the British.”

In a remarkable about-face, the market for Turkish art has soared, both within and without the country. The inaugural sale of Turkish modern and contemporary art at Sotheby’s London in March 2009 was a bright spot in an otherwise tanking global market, with 50 of the 71 lots selling, nearly all within or above estimate. The total climbed from £1,307,400 ($1.8 million) to £2,436,850 ($3.8 mil- lion) in 2010. By the following spring, Phillips de Pury & Company was in on the action with a selling exhibition of contemporary Turkish art at the Saatchi Gallery in London. New York galleries like Paul Kasmin and Lehmann Maupin were testing the waters of the Istanbul market. Judging by the number of special fair sections and exhibitions devoted to the country’s artists this year and next, interest in Turkey appears to have reached a fever pitch.

Yet the result at the Sotheby’s sale this past spring was a sharply diminished £1,531,175 ($2.5 million), nearly half of which came courtesy of Nejad Melih Devrim’s Abstract Composition, 1952. According to the sale’s director, Elif Bayoglu, the prime-period painting was chased by at least four bidders and more than doubled the high estimate by earning £735,650 ($1.2 million), an artist record and the house’s highest price achieved in the category. But works by bankable modernists with crossover appeal, such as Erol Akyavas, Burhan Dogançay, Mübin Orhon, and Fahrelnissa Zeid, flopped on the block, and the reception accorded formerly hot younger artists like Taner Ceylan was palpably cooler. Most of the 36 works that sold just met their estimate at the hammer.

Sotheby's was not alone in feeling the pinch; Bonhams, which had unveiled a competing sale in 2011, elected not to hold one in 2012. (Christie's folds its Modern and Contemporary Turkish offerings into its biannual sale of Art, Iranian and Turkish art in Dubai.) Some blamed consigning galleries for putting up works by artists whose markets were not yet mature. Others even speculated about collusion among elite buyers to keep prices down. As Kristina Sanne, of the London-based art consultancy Sanne Grunberg, observes, "The excitement has created opportunism that in itself causes uncertainty and lack of confidence." Whatever the causes, the takeaway for many observers was that the party was over.

While the Turkish market has been subject to breathless descriptions like “boom” and “bubble” in the international press, the reality is much more nuanced and complex. The Istanbul-based art adviser and curator Isabella Icoz, who works with local and international clients (Lehmann Maupin among them), points out, “These were unfortunate labels to begin with, because they set up all of these unrealistic expectations.” Within the country, tales of short-term profiteering are outweighed by long-term trends of broad — and deepening — development in the auction, collector, gallery, and fair sectors.

Although Sotheby’s maintains an office in Istanbul, and Phillips de Pury has been making quiet inroads since 2000, the auction territory is fully staked out by 35 houses operating domestically. The most important for modern and contemporary art are Antik A.S., founded in 1981 by Turgay Artam, and Aziz Karadeniz’s Beyaz Müzayede, founded in 2006, which hold up to four annual sales of a couple of hundred works each. Antik organized its first modern sale in 1989, yet prior to 2008 the sector accounted for just 15 percent of the house’s revenue. Last year Antik reported a total turnover of about $35 million, 60 percent of which was for modern and contemporary art. This past March, a huge canvas by Akyavas, En-el Hak, 1987, notched a new high for a Turkish contemporary work when it sold for TL 2,777,700 ($1.54 million) in an auction that took in more than $5 million total.

Olgaç Artam, Antik’s polished CEO and head auctioneer, is upbeat about the market’s prospects. “Since 2009 there has been a huge amount of demand and a limited number of quality works,” he explains, “which makes us think values will continue to rise as the number of buyers goes up.” Serious Turkish collectors, he adds, “are after the best of the best” and are willing to fight for masterpieces like the Akyavas. But, he cautions, paintings of that quality are rare. And with only five percent of his clients coming from outside the country, Turkish art should still be considered an “emerging local market.”

Not everyone is pleased with the influence exerted by domestic auctions. “For contemporary art, the auction houses are not the secondary market, they are players in the primary market, ” explains Moiz Zilberman, owner and director of Galeri Cda projects gallery, and the new art space Kat I. “Artists are producing directly for the auction houses and galleries are consigning [new work] to auction houses.” As Sanne points out, in a speculative market, a less than stellar debut on the block can have a detrimental effect on an artist’s developing career. “The galleries take the time to promote good quality artists, who are then sadly zapped by the auctions,” she says. In Icoz’s view, the international houses are no better. Acknowledging the problem, Zilberman says, “As a gallerist, I try to sell only to collectors, not to people who will put the works right back into auction.” But, he admits, “It’s not easy.”

Art is experiencing an unprecedented vogue in Turkey even given the long history of patronage from powerful families.
One of them, the Eczacıbası clan, was responsible for the founding of the Istanbul Biennial in 1987, which has enjoyed increasing international prominence. The 2011 edition, curated by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, received 110,000 visitors, more than double the number seen in 2005. A wave of private museums opened in the city during the past decade: the Sakip Sabanci Museum, in 2002; Istanbul Modern, in 2004; and the Suna and Inan Kiraç Foundation’s Pera Museum, in 2005. (Notwithstanding
his government’s antipathy toward many aspects of liberal culture, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cut the ribbon on Istanbul Modern, a private museum founded by Oya Eczacıbası.) And absent real governmental support, private-sector patronage dominates, with major banks like Garanti, Akbank, and Yapi Kredi as well as corporations sponsoring their own white-box platforms.

More to the point, Turkey has money to burn, having seen an explosion in entrepreneurship since 1980, when a military
coup led to the dismantling of state-run industries. Rebuffed when they tried to join the Euro zone, it turns out the Turks are better
off without that albatross. Today there are nearly as many billionaires in Turkey as there are in France and Japan combined, and in this context, as Kerimcan Güleryüz, son of the painter Mehmet Güleryüz and founder of the Empire Project gallery, quips, “Art is the new Ukrainian top model on the arm of the fat man.”

Those on the scene agree that there are about 20 to 25 collectors who can be characterized as “serious,” spending more than $200,000 on art annually, but many more — Dostoglu thinks perhaps as many as 500 — who are buying on a smaller scale. There is perhaps no better emblem of the speed and ferocity of the new collector class than Çengiz Çetindogan, head of the Demsa Group, the agent within Turkey for international luxury brands such as Harvey Nichols, Dolce & Gabbana, and Longchamp. In the last decade, he and his wife, Demet Sabanci, have amassed a comprehensive collection of works, with a particular strength in paintings, from the Ottoman era to the present day, and have engaged Zaha Hadid to design an exhibition venue — the country’s first purpose-built art museum — along the Golden Horn, the strait that bisects the European side of the city. Thomas Krens’s firm, Global Cultural Asset Management, will manage the collection.

Several Western dealers say they particularly enjoy working with their Turkish clients. “They are younger than the average collector
in the United States, and definitely younger than the average collector in Europe,” observes Rachel Lehmann. Emerging markets tend to spend time catching up on their own artists before turning toward international art, but “in Turkey this is happening in tandem,” she says. Regis Krampf, who has longstanding ties to clients in the region, agrees: “I find them to be very daring, willing to take a risk.” This fall he shuttered his New York gallery to go all-in in Istanbul, leasing a four-floor space in Tophane, once a rough quarter akin to New York’s Lower East Side that is now bristling with galleries and cafés. “I’m looking forward to bringing a lot of Western artists, like Marc Quinn and Yinka Shonibare, who have never shown in Turkey,” he says.

Aside from the incursions by galleries from the U.S. and Europe promoting international art, a major shift in the past three years is the diversification of the local market, with younger collectors entering and buying more broadly, from emerging Turkish artists as well
as international names. The sons and daughters of the privileged classes, educated abroad, have brought a cognizance of Western art back to Istanbul. Icoz believes the expansion toward international contemporary art will have a stabilizing effect on the market overall, as prices for Turkish art are put in perspective
 and onerous import taxes on art — up to 30 percent — make speculative buying a less attractive proposition.

Over the past decade, the number of commercial galleries in Istanbul has mushroomed from a dozen to more than 200, by some estimates. A handful stand out for the seriousness of their programs. Two that receive curatorial accolades are Pi Artworks, founded in 1998 by Yesim Turanli, who represents established midcareer Turks like Gulay Semercioglu and Irfan Onürmen alongside international talents, such as the Egyptian-German artist Susan Hefuna; and Rodeo, founded by Sylvia Kouvali in 2008, who shows Turkey’s 2009 Venice representative Banu Cennetoglu, Emre Hüner, and the Cairo- and New York–based conceptualist Iman Issa.

One Art Nouveau building on the bustling pedestrian thoroughfare Istiklal Caddesi houses a private collector’s showroom and eight galleries, including Galeri Nev, founded by Dostoglu and Ali Artun in Ankara in 1984 and home to the Turkish blue chips, including Canan Tolon, Hale Tenger, and the video artist Ali Kazma, who will represent Turkey in next year’s Venice Biennale. Every day scores of visitors tramp up and down the marble staircase of the Misir Apartment, almost all of them foreigners who have come for the galleries. “They know where to go,” Dostoglu says mockingly. “They have a list of names.” The veteran dealer looks askance at the meteoric rise of the market for Turkish art, though he has certainly profited. “As a gallerist I have a mission. I invest all my life in the same mission: to make my artists be seen first by the local audience, and then the international audience,” he says. Despite his professed ambivalence toward the new found art enthusiasm, Dostoglu says he is encouraged by the movement in the lower rungs, the new galleries, many run by women: “This world used to be very masculine; now that’s changing.”

Galeri Manâ, owned by the London-based collector Mehves Ariburnu, is a newcomer with international ambitions, having opened in a 19th-century wheat mill in 2011.The director since January, young Arzu Komili can take credit for snagging Kutlug Ataman, who had bypassed representation in his native Turkey for years. Komili grew up in Istanbul, part of a family whose name is plastered on bottles of olive oil in grocery stores; she studied art history and visual arts at Princeton and worked for Sotheby’s and Paul Kasmin in New York. She also headed Kasmin’s ultimately ill-fated launch into the Turkish market — Kasmin chose not to pursue the venture after a show of David LaChapelle photographs last winter — and brings a measured perspective. “I think when you look from the outside it seems like a bit more is happening than really is,” she says. At the same time, she’s been astonished by how quickly things are changing in Tophane.

When I paid a call this past spring, Manâ was showing the photographer Taryn Simon, who is represented by Gagosian Gallery and was exhibiting concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Within the first week, Komili had sold “more than five” works. Coming from the New York context, “I have a problem with the prices in the Turkish art market for artists who have not yet established themselves internationally,” she admits. She hoped the Simon show would “demonstrate to collectors how affordable well-known artists can be.” Her program alternates between Turkish artists like Murat Akagündüz and international stars like Douglas Gordon. The current group show includes Simon Starling and Olafur Eliasson.

Distinctive even among the new breed of galleries is two-year-old Rampa — founded by husband-and-wife architects Murat Arif Suyabatmaz and Leyla Tara Suyabatmaz — a slick, cavernous space near the W Hotel in the trendy Akaretler neighborhood. The roster includes almost exclusively Turkish names, but most came with reputations established abroad: the German-Turkish artist Nevin Aladag, Erinç Seymen, and Cengiz Çekil, regarded as the country’s father of conceptual art. Rampa has shrewdly chosen the long view, mounting museum-worthy presentations of their 14 artists and issuing monographs. “Some of the artists did not show in Istanbul for a long time before working with us,” the gallery’s PR manager, Ustüngel Inanç, explains. “We think it’s important to show the art scene a survey of what the artists have been doing.” Rampa also markets intensively outside the country, courting international curators and loading up the calendar with fairs. “People think that [Turkish art] is something different than the practice happening in London or wherever, but it’s not,” explains sales director Mehtap Öztürk. The gallery reported brisk sales at Frieze New York, as well as strong interest from Asian buyers in Nilbar Güres’s whimsically feminist depictions of domestic scenes at ArtHK. The extraordinary growth of the international art-fair circuit has been crucial to the visibility and dissemination of Turkish art. Istanbul itself has four art fairs, the most significant of which, Contemporary Istanbul, welcomed 90 exhibitors and 62,000 visitors last year, almost as many as Frieze London’s 68,000 in 2011. To the disappointment of some, nearly 80 percent of the artists on display were of Turkish origin. “Some collectors were hoping for slightly more prestigious international galleries,”
says Icoz. “They were drawing parallels to Art Dubai and finding that the fair fell short of their expectations.”

Next year Contemporary Istanbul will have another competitor: Art International Istanbul launches in September 2013 under
the leadership of Sandy Angus, a cofounder of ArtHK. Turkey’s combination of “cultural substance” and “demographic advantages,” Angus explains, “led us to believe that Istanbul will be
the venue for one of the major global art fairs in the medium term.” The selection committee includes representatives from Rampa
as well as Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai; Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; and Leila Heller Gallery, New York.

Contemporary Istanbul, like all major art events in Turkey, is largely sponsored by a corporate entity, in this case, Akbank Private Banking. But private patronage is evolving in encouraging ways. In 2011 the collector Ahu Büyükkusoglu Serter added an artist residency program to her Casa Dell’Arte luxury art hotel in Bodrum, on the Aegean coast. Twice a year she hosts a curator and five artists from the region for six weeks, furnishing a production budget, lodging, and meals in exchange for two artworks for the collection. Last year
a group of nine collectors founded SAHA, a nonprofit association that aims to promote contemporary Turkish art abroad by establishing long-term partnerships with groups such as New York-based Independent Curators International and institutions like the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, in Rotterdam. SAHA has already funded projects by Turkish artists for Performa, Documenta, and Manifesta. According to the general secretary, Merve Çaglar, “There is only one criterion for membership: The applicant can’t have any connections to a profit-making art body.”

Many with financial and emotional investments in the Turkish scene fear that even after years of growth, all could be undone
 by political unrest. The rift between the Istanbul intelligentsia and the conservative Muslim majority is growing. In 2010 an angry mob descended on a trio of galleries during an opening, incensed by the art’s satirical political content and the crowd’s plastic cups of wine. Last year the prime minister was involved in orders to demolish Monument to Humanity, a giant sculpture-in-progress by Mehmet Aksoy on the border between Turkey and Armenia, and the interior minister likened artists to terrorists in a speech. Chosen to curate the Turkish pavilion for next year’s Venice Biennale, Emre Baykal, of the Vehbi Koç Foundation’s contemporary showcase, Arter, confirms that “there are signs that the state wishes to define and get involved in the production of art. But,” he adds, “I think people will push back.”

Turkey’s democracy is entering a critical period, and the outcome will affect the country’s ability to sustain a healthy art ecosystem. More than a few of the art-scene protagonists with whom I spoke expressed their hope for the eventual establishment of a public museum for modern and contemporary Turkish art. A public museum would effectively enshrine aesthetic freedom as an aspect of civic life while exerting a stabilizing influence on the market as an impartial arbiter with no stake in selling. But for that dream to be realized,
 a governmental policy of benign neglect will not suffice.

This article was published in the November 2012 issue of Art+Auction.

It is not often that a visit to an artist’s studio requires you to go on a pilgrimage, but this spring I set out for Tiantai Mountain, a place sacred to both Buddhists and Taoists, in pursuit of the artist Liang Shaoji.

Liang went to live near Tiantai Mountain at the turn of the millennium, but it was 11 years earlier, in 1989, that he began the journey that would lead him there. That year he was included in the pathbreaking “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. His installation for the show provided him with the twin ideas that have animated his work ever since: The theme of his art would be life, and his medium would be a humble living creature, the silkworm.

At 44, Liang was already much older than most of the artists who were then beginning to put Chinese contemporary art on the map. He had graduated from the middle school attached to the Zhejiang Fine Art School in Hangzhou in 1965, on the cusp of the catastrophic Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In those years intellectuals were reviled and the universities were closed, and Liang found himself working in a textile factory where he was involved in the manufacture of carpets, fabrics, lampshades, handicrafts, and tapestry, while in his spare time he painted and made prints and sculptures. Later he became the director of the Institute of Arts and Crafts in Taizhou.

In the early 1980s he found himself on a Chinese trade delegation visit to Europe and the United States, during which he explored the contemporary artworks in museums such as the Centre Pompidou, in Paris. Finally, at age 40, he decided to go back to school. The Bulgarian artist Maryn Varbanov had recently set up an atelier at the Zhejiang Fine Art School, and in 1986 Liang was accepted as a student. Varbanov, who had arrived in the country as a student in the 1950s and became a pioneer of the use of textiles in installation art and sculpture, was a profoundly influential figure on the Chinese art scene. He made his name as one of the first artists to take weaving off the wall and present it in open space. Liang was inspired by Varbanov’s radical approach to materials and the way in which he merged Western and Eastern techniques and philosophies in his art.

In 1988, for the “China/Avant-Garde” show, Liang created an installation called Yi Series–Magic Cube, incorporating silk fabric, dry silkworm cocoons, metal, and rice paper — just the sort of experiment with space and materials that Varbanov would have relished. Later, when Liang was installing the piece for a show in Hangzhou, a chance breeze set the dead cocoons swaying in the light. Looking at them, Liang found himself wondering for the first time, What would it be like to work with living silkworms?

The first thing I notice when I walk into Liang’s studio is the stones. Dozens of them cover the floor, and they seem to be dusted with snow. But when I touch one, I find that it isn’t cold but soft. Silken, sparkling-white thread covers each stone. In a corner are stacked dozens of large white disks. These also turn out to be covered in silk. Liang explains that when a silkworm isn’t in a confined space, it won’t form a normal cocoon but instead will just spin thread and cover whatever surface it finds itself on.

He likes to quote a line from a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin: “Only at death does the silkworm’s thread reach an end.” To Liang, this line embodies the silkworm’s devotion to creation, its generosity, and its tenacity in life. He says that in working with them he aims to capture something of this spirit and to allow a meditation on the passing of life and time.

The first major work in his “Nature Series,” which he commenced in 1989 and still continues today, was called Bed/Nature Series No. 10, 1993. Liang raised silkworms to live within tiny bedsteads that he had fashioned from copper wire salvaged from old generators. From these fragments of the waste and ugliness of the man-made world, Liang had created comfortable refuges that the silkworms made their own, forming cocoons, metamorphosing into moths, laying eggs, and continuing their life cycle over and over again. The work, which took seven years to complete, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Later Liang created a piece in which silkworms covered suspended heavy metal chains with silken threads. He called it Chains: The Unbearable Lightness of Being/Nature Series No. 79, 2003.

In an essay on the “Nature Series” that he wrote last year, Liang says: “Every life is in search for its own space for existence amid absurd and implacable contradictions. The strong silk threads, symbol of life, as if to break but resistant, show a strong will to life, an unremitting life pursuit, a force to beat the strong with softness, and life associations with endless extension.”

By the time Bed/Nature Series No. 10 was complete, Liang had decided to move near Tiantai Mountain. It is home to the Tiantai sect of Buddhism, which Liang describes as the “most indigenous and most pristine” of all the Buddhist sects in China, and a place where over the centuries many “crazy monks” have gone to seek enlightenment.

On Tiantai Mountain there is a platform where the founder of the sect, Zhiyi, is believed to have meditated. In 2007 Liang went there to make the film Cloud Mirror/Nature Series No. 101. Since moving to Tiantai he has become committed to the concept of the interconnectedness of living beings. Liang thinks this is embodied in the connection between silkworms and humankind, and between both of them and the rest of the natural world. In Cloud Mirror he illustrated this connection by holding up a mirror to the sky.

On the mirrors Liang laid out on Tiantai Mountain, silkworms had already spun their silk in patterns that evoked the shapes of clouds. As real clouds passed overhead, they and the sky itself were reflected in Liang’s mirrors. In the video of the event, spun silk and clouds merge in the reflected sky until it is impossible toLiang Shaoji Weaves the Complex Work of Nature into Spellbinding Silkworm Art see where one ends and the other begins. The video is a poetic evocation of the passage of time, life, and the natural world.

Liang likes to point out that in Chinese the words for poetry and for silk are homonyms, perhaps suggesting some deep cultural connection. He tells me that sericulture has existed in his country as long as the Chinese have claimed to have had a civilization, around 5,000 years. Taking the word associations further, he points out that the word for silkworm and the word for Zen also sound alike, and in a work called Listening to the Silkworms, 2006, which he is restaging at London’s Hayward Gallery this fall, he aims to induce a Zen-like state by inviting his audience to do exactly what the title suggests.

The sound of silkworms eating mulberry leaves is remarkably like the bubbling of a running stream. In Listening to the Silkworms Liang asks visitors to sit in a darkened room and attend to the sounds of the silkworms’ life. What you hear is not a recording but silkworms living in an adjacent room in real time. And as you listen, you do begin to feel something of what Liang himself feels deeply, the profound connections that exist between everything in the natural world.

In a catalogue essay for his exhibition “An Infinitely Fine Line” at Shanghai’s Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Liang wrote that “the entire ‘Nature Series’ is a sculpture of time, life, and nature, a recording of the fourth dimension.” Looking at the works, especially amid the ancient surroundings of Tiantai Mountain, you see what he is getting at. By working with silkworms he has consciously slowed his artistic practice to the pace of his tiny co-creators and connected his art to natural forces beyond his control.

Liang calculates that he has raised around 90,000 silkworms in the 23 years he has worked on the “Nature Series,” and estimates that the silk thread they have produced would wind around the world 10 times. One imagines he might try that someday.

This article was published in the November 2012 issue of Modern Painters.

NEW YORK — Eat. Drink. Bid. That was what arts organization Independent Curators International encouraged guests to do by posting those three words in the program and on the walls at its 2012 fall benefit and auction at New York’s Prince George Ballroom. And that they did, eating mini burgers and dumplings, drinking libations poured peculiarly from a small keg strapped on to a server’s back, and bidding on works by such artists as Olaf Breuning, Ellsworth Kelly, and Laurel Nakadate.

Model Karlie Kloss, artists Rashid Johnson and Marina Abramovic, and curator Neville Wakefield were among the personalities on hand to honor Nav Haq, curator of MuHKA, Antwerp; and Jay Sanders, curator and curator of the performing arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with the Independent Vision Curatorial Award. Philanthropist and entrepreneur Dasha Zhukova received the 2012 Leo Award for her innovative work founding Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow.

“Spreading art to the Russian public has not been met without resistance — but through education programs, exhibitions, and our kids workshops we’ve been able to engage an audience from 8 to 80, and I think that the success of these initiatives is deeply rooted in the ability of our staff to tap into the global curatorial dialogue,” said Zhukova in her acceptance speech.

Curator and Serpentine Gallery director Hans Ulrich Obrist, who presented Haq and Sanders with their awards, spoke to ARTINFO about the two honorees. “What they both have in common — Jay and Nav — is that they work very closely with artists and I think that’s the most important thing about curating,” he said.

Obrist mentioned that he had visited the hurricane-ravaged Rockaways with PS1 MoMA director and MoMA curator at large Klaus Biesenbach earlier that day. “It’s really devastating,” said Obrist. “It’s much more extreme than what we see in the newspapers.”

Sanders discussed the importance of ICI with ARTINFO. “I grew up in Oregon, in Portland in the early ’90s, and I see these world-class, sophisticated exhibitions of new art and new ideas, and I wouldn’t have had the perspective to know this — but they were ICI shows that were touring,” he said. “It’s a way for really interesting art, and ideas, and critical discourse to permeate and disseminate — and it’s invaluable.”

Click on the slideshow to see images from the ICI fall benefit and auction.

— Richard Phillips and His Lohan Painting Get "Gossip Girl" Cameo: On last night's episode of "Gossip Girl," Kelly Rutherford's character Lily Bass hosted an auction to benefit the Art Production Fund, with Richard Phillips making a cameo alongside APF co-founder Doreen Remen and one of his portrait paintings of Lindsay Lohan— the episode also featured artworks by Marilyn Minter, Dustin Yellin, Kehinde Wiley, Josephine Meckseper, and Fab 5 Freddy. The prized piece of Lily's personal collection, Phillips's "Spectrum," becomes the subject of a bidding war between the characters Chuck (Ed Westwick) and Ivy (Kaylee DeFer). [FanBolt]

— Israeli Museums Safeguard Art Against Rockets: Curators at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Ashdod Art Museum have opted to remove treasured works from their gallery walls and store them in secure facilities in response to fears of rocket attacks in the ongoing violence, bloodshed, and attacks being exchanged between Hamas and the Israeli military. "It’s chutzpah to take a chance on them," Ashdod Art Museum curator Yuval Biton said after taking 15 works by contemporary artist Tsibi Geva to the museum's vault, the first time the institution has taken such a measure since it opened in 2003. [AP]

— Turkey Demands Louvre Return Prized Mosaics: Tomorrow Ertugrul Günay, Turkey's minister of culture, will ask that Paris's Louvre return three 16th-century mosaics that occupy a prominent place in the museum's new Islamic art wing, one of which the institution acquired from art historian Germain Bapst in 1889, and the rest of which comes from the collection of art restorer Alexis Sorlin-Dorigny. However, the Turkish government claims the works were stolen from Istanbul's Piyale Pacha mosque in the late 19th century. [Figaro]

— James Franco Joins London Gallery's Christmas Pop-up: This Christmas, art person and relentless polymath James Franco will lend a hand at House of Voltaire, a pop-up shop in the Mayfair gallery district to benefit south London's Studio Voltaire art space, hawking works by the likes of Mark Titchner, Pablo Bronstein, and others who've designed pieces especially for the store. No word on whether Franco's bout of holiday volunteerism is performance art or the real deal. [Guardian]

— Ono and DMC Team Up for Fundraiser: Fluxus artist Yoko Ono and rap legend Darryl "DMC" McDaniels (of Run-DMC) were on hand yesterday at Times Square's Hard Rock Café for the launch of an annual fundraising campaign for the anti-poverty charity WhyHunger, which is expected to generate roughly $1 million between now and New Year's Eve. "This is the way we can prevent hunger from impacting other generations," McDaniels said. [NYT]

— Abramovic Opera Will Have North American Debut: The Robert Wilson-directed, -conceived, and -staged opera "The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic," which stars the performance art legend alongside Willem Dafoe and Antony and the Johnsons frontman Antony Hegarty, will have its North American debut next spring at Toronto's Luminato festival, running June 14-17. Abramovic hopes the show "could continue to tour after Toronto," she said, "and that there could be somebody else playing me because it is life and death and, it would be great to have someone else playing me while I’m still alive." [Globe and Mail]

— How Brazil's Hazy Tax Laws Hamper its Art Market: Though South America's biggest country has long been one of the art world's fastest-rising economies, local and international dealers and fair organizers are concerned that the country's unclear tax laws on art imports will slow growth and scare away buyers. "It’s very hard to do business when you can’t tell people what the work will cost them," said one dealer who participated in the recent ArtRio fair. "An approximation isn’t good enough." [TAN]

— Trevor Paglen Pictures Headed Into Orbit: Today at 1:31 p.m. the communications satellite EchoStar XVI will lift off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome, taking with it Trevor Paglen's "The Last Pictures," an etched disk containing 100 photographs that will remain in orbit for five billion years. The launch of the Creative Time project is slated for 1:15 p.m., with liftoff scheduled about 15 minutes later; the entire event can be viewed live online. [Press Release]

— Korean Painter's Political Satire Draws Party's Ire: In response to artist Hong Sung-dam's painting of South Korea's ruling Saenuri party's presidential candidate, Park Geun-hye, giving birth to her father — former president Park Chung-hee— party officials are demanding that the painter apologize for what they see as a defamatory artwork, particularly ahead of December's elections. "If a painting like this should be punished by law, then all political cartoons in newspapers should be punished nearly every single day," Hong said. "Park's supporters tend to blindly worship her as if she is a goddess ... but that's not the way voters in a democratic society should support a politician." [BBC]

— Chapman Brother Goes Solo: Dinos Chapman, of the artist duo Jake and Dinos Chapman, is set to release what a press release describes as a 13-track "electronic ‘Schlampige Musik’" album next year titled "Luftbobler," and accompanied by a multimedia installation making its debut at London's Vinyl Factory on February 27. The record, for which Chapman designed the zombie-like cover art, includes tracks titled "Cool operator" and "Pizza man," and is likened to a sonic melding of Stockhausen and Squarepusher. [TAN]

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