In 1993 seven Cooper Union undergraduates, all members of the collective Art Club 2000, applied to work at Gap, with no success. So, lacking the benefit of employee access to company wares, they were forced to ingloriously Dumpster dive behind the company’s then-new East Village store (since closed) to collect ephemera for their first exhibition, “Commingle,” at the American Fine Arts, Co. that summer. They found all sorts of things: employee evaluations, interoffice memos, clothing, cash, paper and wrapping supplies, and a William Gibson novel, all of which were incorporated into the show. As a condition for giving the undergraduates their first exhibition, the gallery’s director, Colin de Land, became their unofficial mentor, orchestrator, and sometime collaborator. He required that they meet with him weekly to discuss art and politics in preparation for their debut, which he hoped would be “something that was interesting or visually compelling, something that might confuse or dismay; something not retrograde; something that would examine the condition of its own production; to make visible or obvious that which is latent in culture.”

Initially going by the name the Secret Art Club until officially adopting the Art Club 2000 moniker in 1994, the collective held intense question-and-answer sessions with de Land. This amounted to a high-stakes, real-life extension of their formal education under Hans Haacke and Mark Dion, and spurred a critical, if coolly ambivalent practice, from 1992 to 1999 (when the collective disbanded), that focused on corporate conflations of art, money, and consumerism.

At the time, Gap’s popularity was ascendant. The company’s omnipresent television advertisements featured young models and celebrities dressed in clean, crisp staples like khakis and pocket T-shirts, singing and dancing in front of simple, white backgrounds. Taking advantage of its “back to basics” success, Gap opened more than 4,000 stores across the globe. If the 19th century’s power structures were centered exclusively on nation-states and imperial forces, the 20th century’s belonged to more diffuse agents of capital, corporations key among them. Their advertising and marketing strategies monetized not only commodities but also subjectivities, and in the 1990s this happened in full force. As theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have claimed, corporations “produce needs, social relations, bodies and minds—which is to say, they produce producers.” Gap was, and in some ways still is, a quintessential multinational organization, and for the young collective it came to define the idea that “nothing escapes money,” as Hardt and Negri simply concluded.

For that first exhibition, not only did Art Club 2000 present its eclectic trash finds, but they also installed Gap lighting fixtures, stenciled gallery walls with appropriated corporate jargon, and created a series of blasé, trademark group self-portraits, often featuring collective members in matching Gap outfits. In Untitled (Donut Shop), 1992–93, they’re sitting nonchalantly at a café counter, while for Untitled (Wooster St./Gap Vampires), 1992–93, they’re standing in the middle of a SoHo street at night, imposingly massed together with black tank tops and crossed arms. Perhaps most memorably, though, Untitled (Conran’s 1), 1992–93, pictures the artists lounging like tired, overeager young consumers in a luxury furniture store, stretching out on couches and leaning over chairs. An absurd number of dark blue Gap shopping bags sit conspicuously between the couches, tables, and sofas.

The photographs featuring the collective’s crew in identical uniforms literalize Gap’s all-encompassing and wide-ranging style: Race and gender differences between group members are tempered by the company’s homogenizing fashions. While Gap’s ad campaign at the time, “Individuals of Style,” promoted the brand’s self-expressive, idiosyncratic potential, more often than not it made everyone look the same in “back to basics” polos and jeans, with the ubiquitous square Gap logo. Art Club 2000 replicated this logo for an Artforum advertisement for the “Commingle” show. Featuring de Land disguised by shadows and smoking a cigarette, the spread featured the logo prominently in the bottom right corner—when the group wanted to “do” Gap, it did it well.

I would know. Unlike members of Art Club 2000, I was actually hired to work for the company at a suburban mall in Atlanta during my high school years. So all this cuts very close. I became, as embarrassing as it is to admit, a devoted acolyte of the brand, falling for it hard. I pinned discarded visual displays to my wall and memorized the television ads by heart. When prompted by my manager, I even danced a version of Gap’s Juliette Lewis holiday TV spot for visiting executives, like some sort of corporate, super-gay circus performer.

For its mimickry, Art Club 2000 was threatened with litigation by the company, which member Patterson Beckwith claimed energized the collective; the artists thought it gave their efforts real efficacy, though such suggestions of critical purpose are suspect. Art Club 2000 members shared a post-Pop attitude with other New York City–based artists—namely Bernadette Corporation. Members of that collective also participated in American Fine Arts, Co. exhibitions, holding their subject matter at arm’s length and resisting any polemical judgment calls about the economy around them. Such ambivalence stems in part from Art Club’s self-deprecating spirit, as artist Jackie McAllister has noted, but also from the fact that its members never saw any alternative to the market. After 1968, when anticapitalist strategies failed spectacularly, there was in the art world a growing acceptance of the market’s dominance, even an embrace of it. Andy Warhol led the way, and the appropriation artists of the ’80s and ’90s, such as Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, presented popular culture as is, if not completely glorified. In Sherman’s self-portraits of a woman stuck in plotless cinematic conventions, we can see a contemporary subject, fully formed by movies, the media, and fashion.

After the neoliberal economic policies of the 1990s let capitalism flourish unfettered, Art Club 2000 dove headfirst into that decade’s consumer apogee, making very legible the dictum that if you can’t fight it, you might as well join it—or, as in my case, take a job at Gap and sing the market’s praises.

In an interview at the time with Grand Royal magazine, collective member Daniel McDonald asserted, “I don’t actually object to Gap, but I’m interested and concerned with the omnipresence of Gap and how invisible they are. Even though they’re everywhere and you always see the stores, there’s a kind of invisibility to Gap,” he declared. “You can wear the Gap brand without really noticing you’re wearing it. I’m not really against what they’re doing. I think it’s part of the development of a sort of total, end-all capitalism.”

New York City itself—which at this time was becoming increasingly globalized and corporatized—became the epitome of this “end-all” market influence. With its sheer quantity of advertising and resultant intense corporate influence, Times Square perhaps best embodied the shift from real life to an existence preprogrammed for consumption, becoming the charged setting for Untitled (Times Square/Gap Grunge 1), 1992–93. It features the members of Art Club 2000 in coordinated Gap denim shorts, vests, and bandannas, the lights from nearby 42nd Street billboards glinting in their uniform black sunglasses—porous shields, if ever there were ones. No longer autonomous subjects, the members of the group became totally conditioned to the market even in their antiestablishment grunge posturing.

The use of Times Square was prescient. The area later became synonymous with Rudy Giuliani’s quality-of-life cleansing campaign during his 1994–2001 term as mayor of New York, when he forfeited the intrinsic seediness and crime of the square for a more sanitized commercial landmark. The mayor also instigated heavy-handed crime prevention measures, in which a zero-tolerance policy toward minor infractions—such as jaywalking or subway fare evasion—was part of a larger effort to clamp down on crime and make the city more business friendly. “What is a cop?” became an open-ended inquiry for Art Club 2000 members. The question, often arising in their conversations, instigated one of the group’s last exhibitions in 1998, “Night of the Living Dead Author,” which presented two rows of life-size identical cardboard policemen cutouts that confronted viewers at American Fine Arts, Co. As if marching forward from the wall behind them (which separated the front gallery from the back), the cops overlapped slightly as they progressed, their orange eyes matching the eerie glow emanating from a partially obscured LED display. Each “cop” wore a sash emblazoned with “Punishing Enforcer of a Progressive Regime,” a nod to the business-friendly interests of the city.

Tying big business specifically to art world figures, the gallery’s backroom prominently featured two black leather ottomans, on loan from the Castelli gallery. These Mies van der Rohe–designed pieces were bathed in the light of an orange LED display that closely resembled one of Jenny Holzer’s scrolling text works. It continually looped writing by Art Club 2000 member Craig Wadlin, offering biting commentary on commercially established artists in lines such as this:

“Mariko Mori’s practice of modeling herself on heroines from manga and anime…Vanessa Beecroft’s signature presentation of uniformly stripped young women in the vein of fashion…and Matthew Barney’s Nike romanticism of sports and mythology…without so much as a wee bit of criticism of these forms or industries…. A vast number of artists build careers around a particular facet of an already determined culture…(i.e., fashion, film, advertising, television, music, science, history, politics)….These artists seem to side with the death of authorship by attaching themselves to some meaningful source…but mean only to reclaim the spoils of authorship…by creating an identity inseparable from their work…continuing to supply the system without attempting to change it.”

Like the exhibition’s title, Wadlin makes reference to Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author,” which claims that a text must be freed from the biases of any authority figure, since “text is a tissue of quotations” that can never be owned, determined, or otherwise authored. Since many of the artists cited by Wadlin made inherently appropriative work—grabbing this and that from fashion, advertising, or other consumer conventions—the collective found the subsequent authorship of, and profit from, such appropriations dubious and the lack of criticism of the market offensive. Though to be fair, the collective issued a caveat to its claims, as the rolling screen also decried the “simplistic misunderstanding of theory by Art Club 2000.”

Indeed, this tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation somewhat pulled the rug out from under the complaints—not to mention the fact that the collective was doing things similar to the art stars whom members were railing against. Again, we see them toe the line between complicity and critique with good-humored candor.

Perhaps this is why one of the group’s Gap ads is the featured publicity shot for the New Museum’s current group exhibition centering on that pivotal decade, “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.” Taking its subtitle from a Sonic Youth album, the show strives to triangulate a time when, on the heels of the 1980s art market depression, the value of art skyrocketed, taking the members of the underground with it.

In the end, members of Art Club 2000 reveal themselves as acutely sensitive to the wayward effects of an expanding economy, though they don’t offer any solutions. Moreover, they suggest there aren’t any, a position still relevant to today’s economic climate, and one very much of interest to artists like Liz Magic Laser, Claire Fontaine (who flatly claimed in an interview that “Guy Debord is dead”), and numerous others. Though its members were never commercially successful, perhaps Art Club 2000’s real purchasing power was its self-aware stance. The collective may not have been able to fight the system, but at least its members knew that they were a part of it (as we all are), whether they liked it or not.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

This article appears in the April 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

BRUSSELS — Changes are afoot at Art Brussels following the passing of previous director Karen Renders, an almost 20-year veteran of the fair who put it on the international map.

For this year’s edition, April 18 to 21, a two-director team splits the duties. Anne Lafère is handling the business side and in an innovative step, curator Katerina Gregos has taken the reins of the fair’s artistic direction.

A wholesale architectural reshape should help the fair’s flow. New graphic design by Sara de Bondt will refresh its outward image. And in a juggling act between curatorial imperative and market forces, Greek-born Gregos aims to take the fair beyond a traditional, supermarket approach. She talked to ARTINFO France’s Nicolai Hartvig about balancing art and business, the importance of a curatorial approach and the future of the fair.

You have joined Art Brussels, but you retain your independent credentials and remain an curator, first and foremost. 

It would be impossible for me to do this job for Art Brussels without continuing my work as an independent curator, organizing at the same time different kinds of non-commercial projects. Working independently and closely together with the artists, is the engine which keeps me going, giving me the thoughts, ideas, inspirations and dreams, which also might help to develop my vision on how to inspire an art fair. It is my ambition to help the fair in improving the quality of the experience and making a visit to it more rewarding. To bring collectors and galleries closer together; to create an inspiring atmosphere which no doubt will also improve the fair as a commercial enterprise.

My independent curatorial activity thus gives me the confidence to do Art Brussels. As I do not come from the commercial world, I do not represent any specific commercial interests and I can focus on the artistic quality of the fair. It was Karen Renders’ wish that I take on this role, as she acknowledged the necessity of a more coherent artistic outlook on the fair. As I come from the world of institutions, biennials, nonprofit organizations and foundations, I will focus on what I know best: artistic content and artistic direction. My role is to provide an artistic vision for the fair as well as to oversee all the artistic programming apart from the gallery representation.

Is it your ambition to find a new formula for balancing the artistic and the market-driven ?

It would be a wonderful thing to do, to think about different structures in the future. But I would prefer not to use the word "formula". A formula is a petrified device. There should not be formulas in the art world; they are contradictory to the very notion of artistic freedom. The grid-like structure of art fairs, the heterogeneous way the galleries often install their booths, the copy-paste side programs, it all adds up to the tiring experience that a visit to an art fair has become.

It’s far too early in my experience of Art Brussels to say if it will be possible. I only started in November and part of my program will start being apparent in April — but of course, in less than six months, one cannot engage in drastic, radical change. I need to be able to put one art fair behind me, to digest the experience and to also see how the participating galleries have responded to my request to reflect more on the content and nature of their presentations, to avoid the mix-and-match supermarket style booths that are common in art fairs, to think more curatorially and in terms of scenography; something I think all collectors and professionals would appreciate. We are all suffering from "art fair fatigue," questions of space and presentation are crucial in terms of the way one navigates a fair.

On the other hand, it’s not obvious what to do with a fair to renew it. Fairs are forces to be reckoned with but they are also governed by certain fixed parameters and that no one has managed to change (i.e. the linear succession of stands). Galleries are sometimes resistant to change because they need a specific format to work within, and because as paying customers of a fair, they need to make money. Many galleries are making business only because of art fairs, particularly those that come from smaller countries. It is understandable that they are reluctant to introduce things that might be disruptive or more experimental. One of my primary concerns in the future is how to challenge the spatial format of the fair.

I think the fair can be both artistic and mercantile, if it’s done intelligently and with imagination. I don’t see the one as excluding the other. An art fair is a pretty honest equation. It’s a place where an exchange of artworks takes place. The mise-en-scène of how this scenography takes place and of course the artworks in this mise-en-scène are what make all the difference.

What will be the relationship between yourself and the galleries showing at Art Brussels ?

There is obviously an important dialogue with the galleries who form part of the selection committees. However, I have a vote on these committees, which Karen did not have, and am therefore able to voice concerns about artistic content. I’m also selecting the solo shows. My role is hopefully to help encourage or inspire a certain orientation for the galleries.

A fair is always a very mixed bag, there are different ways of negotiating it as a gallery. There are those who make memorable curatorial and original presentations, and those who unfortunately just take an indexical, mix-and-match, supermarket-like approach. I hope to try and convince the galleries of the importance of avoiding the latter. Better presentations, means a better art fair, means better collectors, better sales.

At last year’s fair, conceptual shows by younger galleries were in a separate hall from the established galleries, who largely brought mix-and-match hangings. Is there a way to bridge this ?

As artistic director, my role can only go so far. I will try to convince the galleries of what is in their best interest, as well as the best interest of the overall quality of the fair. But I cannot force them, of course. In Art Brussels there is a tradition – like in Basel – of presenting the younger and emerging galleries in Hall 3 and the more established ones in Hall 1. I do not think they need to be mixed as this is a clear division that enables collectors to quickly identify their priorities.

What I am more concerned with is the quality of presentation, the number and combination of artists shown within the limited space of the booth and the general presentation. All the participating galleries have now received a letter from me, in which I’ve explained certain criteria. I am inviting them, politely encouraging them, hopefully inspiring them to think about their presentations differently. I basically asked them not to bring too many artists, if possible, because I think the effect of seeing too many artists in one booth — and with the effect of multiplication across the whole fair — is just not conducive to spectatorship. I know that not everyone will respond, but for me, it’s also an experiment to see how galleries will react to this, whether they will take up the challenge.

I have invited them to think about the scenography of their booths. My plea has been to somehow avoid the mixed bag presentation, which I think does no one a service, quite honestly; neither the collectors and curators, nor the public. I have to maybe alert them to the obvious, that any sophisticated collector will be drawn to a better presented and curated stand.

Art Brussels could potentially be open to new ideas. The stakes are not quite as high as at Art Basel or Frieze.

That is also a plus, and in that sense, the fair occupies a niche of its own. You don’t get this kind of mad rush as you do in London. I am always a bit shocked by this — a couple of years ago, for example, I was at Frieze and I was talking to a gallerist whom I know very well. It was one of the few occasions where I was actually contemplating buying something. I remember this collector just pushed me out of the way and said “I’ll take that!” And it was simply a modest photograph, for £2000 or so. At Art Brussels, the pace is more humane, people take more time to look — and I hope it stays that way.

Art Brussels has for many years coincided with Art Cologne.

This is very unfortunate. We’re making sure that this is not something that will happen again. Next year it will be different.

Beyond the booths, you are also putting together the fair’s program of side projects, discussions and performances.

I’ve canceled outside projects such as “Video in the city” and “Sculpture in the city”, which were not so well attended, to really focus on how to improve the content and the look inside the fair itself.

I’ve shortlisted three architects/designers for a general re-design of the "look and feel" of Art Brussels — which I think is one of the most challenging things to do because spatially, art fairs are standardized, generic presentations. How can we make the fair more pleasurable and hospitable, not such a taxing and fatiguing experience for exhibitors and visitors alike, because of the sheer succession and the linear presentation of booths? My brief for the architects has to do with a space that is less corporate, more generous, warm, welcoming, laid back and sexy.

Video, which is a very important but difficult medium for a fair, will be split into two categories. Longer feature films and documentaries will be shown as premieres in collaboration with a Brussels institution. Shorter videos will be screened in a specially designed cinema, again concentrating everything into the fair.

I’m introducing a section dedicated to curator and artist-run spaces. Brussels has a lot of galleries, many international artists, and not that many institutions. But there are lots of small, creative, dedicated and dynamic spaces that are part and parcel of the Brussels’ art scene and an integral part of its artistic ‘muscle’. I’ve invited six of these spaces, giving them each a free stand and carte blanche. For me, it was also quite symbolic to introduce something not-for-profit into a commercial space. We’ve reduced the number of galleries to do projects like these and to think about how a structure like Art Brussels can support smaller initiatives.

The VIP program is, of course, being developed — but it is also important to bring the curators back into the fair. A lot of curators are tired of fairs. They are perhaps very good opportunities for networking, perhaps less good for really looking at, and thinking about, art. I am therefore also developing a Curators’ Programme, in collaboration with BAM The Flemish Institute for Visual, Audio-Visual and Media Art, which will bring curators to the fair but also arrange visits to Brussels cultural institutions. We will also arrange custom-made studio visits. I’m a curator, so for me, everything goes back to the artist.

Previously, discourse at Art Brussels was marginalized, it took place in these drab corporate rooms on the first floor. This year, the architects will be designing what I have called THE STAGE, the discursive heart of the fair in a kind of Greek amphitheater with talks, debates, performances and encounters with artists. I want to introduce a live element to the fair.

There will be artistic projects, but only a few this year. In the long term, I do want to commission more projects, but  also to think critically about how one operates within a fair, as opposed to asking someone to come and make a work as embellishment.

Would you invite guest curators for certain sections ?

I think it’s very interesting to think about how the fair can be curated on specific individual levels. That’s something I will explore on the long term.

Beyond Art Brussels, what are your other projects ?

I’m co-curating the visual arts exhibition for the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz with my colleague Luigi Fassi, who is now curator of visual arts at this oldest and very respected festival for interdisciplinary art in Europe. The exhibition will be about the financial crisis, the lack of transparency of money, the financialization of the economy and the way that the nature of money and capitalism has changed. So I continue on this trajectory of projects that are quite political, which is my field of interest. I’ve also been invited to be on the curatorial team for the nextGothenburg Biennial and will be working on a project that will explore questions of play, politicality, radical imagination and subversive humour.

“Big Eyes,” the movie about the artist Margaret Keane and her glory-seeking husband Walter, will now be directed by Tim Burton. As ARTINFO reported here, the film was originally to be co-directed by its writers, Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, but the Hollywood Reporter confirmed yesterday that the bankable Burton will direct as well as produce it.

Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Reynolds have dropped out of the project because “financing and scheduling never gelled,” says the Reporter. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz are currently in negotiations to play the Keanes.

The couple’s 1965 divorce was followed by a 21-year legal struggle to determine if Margaret or Walter painted the images of the sad, saucer-eyed waifs that were the acme of 1960s living room kitsch. Walter claimed he was responsible for them, but a “paint-off” demanded by Margaret in federal court in 1986 established that she was the artist in the family.

It is logical that Burton, who collects Keane’s work, would choose to direct the film. Although Walter Keane’s evident domination and intellectual and artistic violation of his wife might have interested a woman director, the sinisterness of Margaret’s paintings are right up Burton’s pop-gothic alley. That the children in Margaret’s canvases became more cheerful after the divorce and her move to Hawaii suggests the grade-school depressives in her early pictures were the offspring of the marriage.

Burton’s own early paintings of children radiate melancholy and disturbance. His big-eyed characters Staring Girl and Stainboy strongly suggest Margaret Keane’s influence. Despite being 18, Christina Ricci’s Katrina Van Tassel in Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” is a Keane child come to life, while the Winona Ryder of “Beetlejuice” and the Sally of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” are slightly older versions. Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp) is their older brother. “The Corpse Bride” pair and the “Frankenweenie” gang have Keane-size peepers, too.

With Burton at the helm, “Big Eyes” will extend one of the most consistent strains of authorship in current mainstream American cinema. He has made one great film (“Ed Wood”), good films (“Beetlejuice,” “Sleepy Hollow,” “Alice in Wonderland”), and mistakes (“Mars Attacks!,” “Dark Shadows”), but his adherence to a nightmarish world peopled by troubled child-men and spooked child-women is in itself admirable. (Perhaps only David Cronenberg has plowed a crooked furrow so tenaciously.) The eyes have it.

We’re awkwardly standing in the cramped hallway backstage at the Cort Theatre, the commotion of the production crew rumbling all around us. Chessie is running late. Stuck in traffic, we’re told. As a writer, I’m used to this. I’ve been stood up by actors and musicians plenty of times. But this is the first time I’ve ever had to wait around for a cat.

But Chessie’s no ordinary cat. He’s a star. As a member of the rotating cast of cats that perform every night in the Broadway production of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” he’s expected to hit his mark along with his fellow actors. Vito Vincent, the most popular cat in the cast, is out this week, so Chessie is stepping into the spotlight.

No sign of Monty, the cat who was fired from the lead feline role but, reportedly, remained as an understudy.

While we wait, it’s suggested we pay a visit to Moo, another understudy, who’s lying on the floor of his dimly lit dressing room. (In case you were wondering, the dressing room the cats share is of equal size to those occupied by the other cast members. No favoritism here.) CindyJoseph, Moo’s handler, tells us this is his first stage experience, and that he’s performed in a couple shows already. “Not every animal is a showbiz animal,” his agent, Diane, tells us. Moo is so good, according to Diane, that he even rehearses the other understudies. Right now, he looks desperate to get out of the room.

“The child’s here!” a voice calls from down the hall.  

Chessie has arrived. He’s carried by Babette Corelli, the animal trainer for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Corelli runs Dawn Animal Agency, a family-owned business that represents the cats in the show and has been providing trained animals to the media since 1959. Their website, which features a picture of a macaque riding a horse, boasts that they have “run 16 elephants down Wall Street for Letterman, staged a 60-member dog show at Roseland for ‘Sex and the City,’ and herded 24 cows and 16 horses through Times Square for ‘Good Morning America.’”

We head to the stage to take some photos.

“That’s right, be a cat, embarrass me,” Corelli says as she attempts to get Chessie to walk into frame. He seems more interested in looking at the people chatting in the back of the theater. I start to wonder how he is going to act when there is a full house and actors on stage. Will he freeze up? Will he wander to the wings and sniff the stage curtains?

Corelli scolds him for bad behavior. “Excuse me, you’re a trained cat. Remember that fact.” She claps, bangs the stage floor, and shakes a bag in the air trying to get his attention. No response. “I hate cats sometimes,” she laughs. Chessie finally responds by exiting stage left and hiding under a bed on set.

We decamp to the dressing room to continue the photo shoot. (It’s only later that I realize, as we exited the stage, that we passed Emilia Clarke, star of the show. We paid her no attention. We know who the real star is.)

Upstairs, while Corelli gets Chessie ready for his glamour shots by furiously brushing his hair, actor Cory Michael Smith, who has a dressing room right next to the cats, seems a little peeved that I’m blocking his doorway, taking notes on Chessie’s every move. George Wendt arrives backstage moments later and audibly laughs at us.

The cast is called over the loudspeakers. It’s 30 minutes to showtime, and Chessie needs his rest. Soon enough, he’ll be purring on stage in front of a packed audience, soaking in the bright lights of Broadway.

Click on the slideshow to see behind-the-scenes photos of Chessie and Moo, who play Cat in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”  

– Artist Arrested for Instagram Post: Montreal artist Jennifer Pawluck, 20, was arrested yesterday morning after posting a photo of a piece of anti-police street art on Instagram several days earlier. "I was walking around the neighborhood. My friend told me to look and I took a photo of it," Pawluck said. "I never made any threat or anything, so I don't really regret it. They're the ones who freaked out." But Montreal police doesn't take Instagram uploads lightly: "All I can say is that a person has been arrested for making threats on the internet," said police spokesperson Dany Richer. [La Presse, Hyperallergic]

– Where Are the Tech Collectors?: Though New York's tech and start-up sectors are flush with funds, very few of those well-heeled geeks are spending their money in galleries, a situation that has art dealers increasingly frustrated, particularly in areas like Chelsea and Soho, where the two industries share blocks. "If these are our next Rockefellers, Carnegies, Fricks, whatever you want to say in terms of our wealthy American elite, then why aren’t they supporting culture?" asked art adviser Sima Familant. "If these people are the new wealthy, and they’re not supporting institutions and the arts, then we’re going to have a really big problem at some point." [NYT]

– Corcoran and University of Maryland Team Up: Yesterday the board of trustees of Washington, D.C.'s struggling Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design voted 13 to 0 in favor of signing a document committing to exploring a long-term partnership with the University of Maryland. The deal would not only strengthen the Corcoran College's interdisciplinary programs and expand its enrollment, but also help shoulder some of the costs of the Corcoran Gallery. The deal didn't go over so well with Corcoran students, however, who see the deal as compromising their school's independence. "Students have no voice and no say, and they pay millions to keep the Corcoran going," Tom Pullin, a senior studying photography, said. [Washington Post, Washington City Paper]

– Qatar Censors Nude Olympians: As part of its campaign to host the 2020 Olympic Games, Qatar organized an exhibition on the history of the Olympics from ancient Greece to the present — one judged to be the "most important exhibition ever mounted" on the subject by Christian Wacker, director of the Museum of the Olympics and Sports — but at the opening guests were surprised to find many of the statues loaned from Greek, Italian, French and German museums missing. Local censors found the exhibition's many sculptures portraying male nudity to be indecent, forcing their removal, though a sign at the entrance to the ExxonMobil-sponsored show still warned visitors about the disappeared nudes. [Libération]

– Nationalgalerie Director Slams Ai Weiwei Pick for Venice: The Nationalgalerie, State Museums of Berlin's director, Udo Kittelmann, thinks Susanne Gaensheimer made a mistake in selecting artist and activist Ai Weiwei to represent Germany at this year's Venice Biennale, as the ensuing media attention will overshadow the work of the three other selected artists. "Ai is increasingly used by some art world figures to put forward their own cultural politics in a populist way," said Kittelmann, who is curating the Russian pavilion at this year's Biennale. "The other artists could easily be overshadowed by his presence. It is my belief that one must take great care that the playing field is level." [TAN]

– Spanish Artists Ignore Economic Crisis: Though Spain's economy continues to sputter, the consequent financial hardships have had surprisingly little impact on the work being produced by Spanish artists. "Most artists have stuck to their line and there’s been no new movement really linked to the crisis," said Ivorypress gallery director Antonio Sanz. "Artists have a power of communication, and I believe a duty to use it at a time like this, but I’m amazed by how few other artists are really trying to say something about this crisis," said artist Julio Falagán. [Herald Tribune]

– Hopi Tribe Hopes to Halt Auction: Arizona's tribe of Hopi Indians has solicited the advice of the State Department and the Department of the Interior in its attempts to block a sale of 70 tribal masks at Paris's Néret-Minet auction house on April 12, which is expected to bring in $1 million, but no viable solution has been found thus far. "Right now there just aren’t any prohibitions against this kind of large foreign sale," Jack F. Trope, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, said. "The leverage for international repatriation just isn’t there." [NYT]

– All Hirst's Spots Spotted: Though only an unlucky few jet-setters managed to see all of Damien Hirst's spot paintings peppered across Gagosian's global gallery network last year, soon devotees of the dot canvases can peruse all 1,400 in a 1,000-page catalogue, which will list every spot painting and feature reproductions of most. The book, which is being published by Hirst's former gallery and his publishing company Other Criteria. "People often say the spot paintings are all the same, but they’re not — far from it," said Blain/Southern co-founder Harry Blain. "The catalogue will give an understanding of the many subsets within [the spot works]." [TAN]

– Tate Removes Convicted Pedophile's Prints: Following his conviction on six charges of indecent behavior with a child and one count of indecent abuse on Tuesday, 34 prints by Graham Ovendon were removed from Tate Britain's website and will no longer be available to be viewed by appointment. The works, acquired by Tate from Mayfair's Waddington Galleries in 1975, date from 1970-75 and depict children, some of them partially or fully nude, in Ovendon's trademark style. The Tate said it is "reviewing the online presentation of these editioned prints by him that are held in the national collection." [Guardian]

– All Eyes on Asian Auctions: This week's major sales by Sotheby's, Poly Auction, China Guardian, and Tiancheng International in Hong Kong will be monitored closely as indicators of the Asian market's health after reports of a major slowdown in sales, with the four houses looking to move a combined $300 million worth of art, wine, antiques, and other luxury goods. "Everybody’s looking at these sales — Sotheby’s, mostly — as a test to see if the market is coming back," said Hong Kong gallery owner Catherine Kwai. "I don’t think we’ll ever see it like it was two years ago. You now just don’t see that crazy mainland Chinese buyer who bids up and up." [WSJ]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

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

SHANGHAI — The objects in Chinese artist Zhang Enli’s paintings are usually calm and even mundane. But he says they reveal his understanding of human emotions.

Several new works were leaning against the walls of his Shanghai studio the day of ARTINFO's visit. A constant fixure on his latest canvases is the rubber tube. They take on different colors and sizes. Most are hanging from hooks in ambiguous situations. Zhang Enli says his work explores his fascination with his memory and the objects from it.

“In my work, I use objects from today in place of ones from the past. But the feelings they represent are still from my childhood,” said Zhang Enli.

As one of the Chinese contemporary artists showing extensively around the world, Zhang Enli’s work doesn’t seem that “Chinese”. An old leather sofa, a glass sugar bowl, an opened umbrella are all shown intimately and gently. “I excluded explicit symbols; the ones people usually associate with China.” It might be his way of connecting with a broad and diverse global audience.

In this video, Zhang Enli talks about his idea of the relationship between the city in which he lives and works. 

Although perhaps not universally known, the late Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi was a well-loved and influential force in tropical modernity and a champion of Brazilian artists. Arguably the best-loved of her works is the 1951 Casa de Vidro, or Glass House, of São Paulo. In its transparency and elegance it appears almost weightless; the glass expanse floats on stilts springing from a hillside, and like an inverted greenhouse, it’s shrouded by jungle foliage. The Roman-born architect designed it for herself and husband Pietro Maria Bardi on the edge of the Mata Atlãntica rainforest. Built only five years after she immigrated from Europe, its Corbusier-like pilotis and wrap-around glass seems to echo the remnants of her European sensibilities.

The Glass House was Bo Bardi’s first architectural work, and her death there in 1992 symbolically brought her life full-circle. While she lived, it was where the likes of Gió Ponti, Alexander Calder, John Cage, and Roberto Rossellini would gather, and beyond her death, its legacy as a meeting place for intellectuals continues. The second installment of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s “The Insides Are on the Outside,” the latest of his intimate in-house exhibitions, opens there today.  ​

Harkening back to his curatorial debut (which took place in his kitchen), Obrist has gathered 34 contemporary artists and architects for a group show of site-specific works, or “discrete interventions,” that unfolded in two parts. In September, the exhibition’s so-called “Prelude” featured works by Calder, Gilbert & George, and others: SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima, who paid homage to Bo Bardi’s work during the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, designed a floating set of bookshelves that would better match the lightness of the house than the existing library. Additionally, as a reenactment of the Bardis’ married life, Cildo Meireles installed a machine that periodically disperses a coffee smell and a recording of a voice very similar to that of  Bo Bardi’s husband repeating, “Lina, va fare un caffé.”

“Whenever people went for dinner at the house and the conversation went to politics, [Pietro Bardi] would say ‘Lina go make a coffee,’” Obrist explained. “They would always disagree on politics because he was much more right, and she was much more left.”

Today, additional works by the likes of Koo Jeong-a, Norman Foster, Pablo León de la Barra, and others have been added. Olafur Eliasson, riffing on the title, has installed mirrors within the house to reflect the visible exterior. Nearby at Bardi’s SESC Pompéia, a concrete factory converted to a multi-purpose cultural center, Dan Graham has built a pavilion on the roof, and Adrian Villar Rojas, Pedro Barateiro, José Celso Martinez Corrêa have installed videos featuring footage of the house.

While the artists hail from wildly diverse backgrounds, generations, and aesthetics, what they have in common is an admiration for this house and Bo Bardi’s legacy as an “artist’s architect.” They were either contemporaries of hers who knew her in real life, or had at one point or another mentioned her to Obrist as a source of inspiration. In the way that Obrist’s 2008 “Everstill” exhibition in the Granada house of poet Federico García Lorca sought to connect art to poetry, the Glass House show is meant to connect art to architecture within a domestic space. And while Casa de Vidro serves as the location, it certainly doesn’t serve as the backdrop. We spoke to Obrist about the artists’ intentional interplay with the architecture, the constraints it posed, and Bo Bardi’s multi-disciplinary appeal.  

Many modernist houses stand alone as attractions, and I think we both agree that this house is a work of art in itself. What prevents these “discrete interventions” from being distractions?

You can come and see the exhibition or the house or both. Douglas Gordon made the title. That’s his piece. Some [pieces] are present in the exhibition, but interventions like his or Cildo Meireles’ are on the verge of the immaterial. The goal is not unsettling the house, or making it no longer readable, but bringing it back to life through the smell of coffee. The house is the protagonist when, after the protagonist dies, somehow the house is still there.

When you work in a domestic space like this, what separates the act of curation from decoration?

First of all, when an exhibition happens in a domestic space, the scale is very different and it produces more intimate works. It’s not that the artists bring in works that to decorate the house, but they work really in the context that they believe is necessary. Many of these works are contextual interventions. They add another layer. These houses are conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk; artists play with the different functions and structural elements of such a house. It aims at subtlety. The house becomes a trigger, or production space.

In the past, you’ve called Bo Bardi an “artist’s architect.” Which of her attributes do they most often mention?

She’s not only an artist’s architect, she’s also an architect’s architect. Kazuyo Sejima always considered her to be a hero in terms of this idea of defying gravity. The weightless feeling of her architecture is almost immaterial. This house is hovering above the trees.

[Bo Bardi’s] blurring of the inside and outside is mentioned a lot, and so are her harmonies of light, geometries, the apparent weightlessness. There’s also her thinking of art institutions. At the Museu de Arte de São Paulo alongside the Avenue Paulista, she did all these display experiments with glass features. Her SESC Pompéia is a favorite building of many artists. On the roof, Dan graham [built] his first outdoor pavilion in Brazil. He considers her a key inspiration.

Norman Foster was probably the most surprising artist on the roster. What will he be doing?

Norman Foster has never been to Brazil before this experience. There’s a whole archive of Lina Bo Bardi drawings, so he’s going to connect his daily practice of drawing to her daily practice of drawings. He also visited Oscar Niemeyer. Oscar was so delighted. They had known of each other, about each other for such a long time, but never had met.

Obviously, creating site-specific works like these requires physically fitting them into the space. What kind of problems does that pose for the artists?

The French collective Oulipo made a whole literature out of constraints. Constraints can be interesting for curating. In the Lina Bo Bardi house, it’s very open. At the same time she was a great collector. It was fascinating how she accumulated a lot of objects, a lot of found elements which she brought into the house, of course in addition to her own designs. We start with her accumulation and artists respond to that. They’re responding to her life, actually, with sound pieces, mirror pieces. It’s not just hanging a drawing or painting on the wall; Juan Araújo’s paintings on the dining room wall mirror the number of original works [the Bardis] had when they lived in the house.

Each of these houses has extraordinary possibilities. The oscillation between inside and outside is one of the assets, or one of the great strengths, of this house that becomes a great vehicle for artists to produce work.

Given your emphasis on intimacy, where does a little show like this fit into the big art scene? The trend seems to be towards filling entire atriums with one installation. 

When I started curating in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the art world started to grow, and it started to be in more big venues. It’s important that those exist. It’s about diversity. But in some kind of way, there need to be different experiences or different spaces. The experience that I had at the very beginning in the kitchen should not be lost. It’s always connecting to the first exhibition in some kind of way. We live in a context of globalization, and the danger is maybe the homogenizing effects of globalization are affecting work. If you look at 19th-century museums, you have big panorama-size rooms and then you have tiny little cabinets of work. That’s something you shouldn’t lose. 

“The Insides Are on the Outside,” organized in part by Brazilian retailer Iguatemi, runs through May 30. 

Directed by and starring Robert Redford, “The Company You Keep” is an astute if scarcely tense thriller about the desperate attempt of a former Weather Underground student revolutionary to clear his name of murder. A video surveillance flashback shows the killing was committed during a bank robbery loosely based on the Brink’s armored car robbery by WU and Black Liberation Army members in 1981.

Scripted by Lem Dobbs from Neil Gordon’s novel, the movie is ultimately a guarded lament for the loss of radical idealism (if not the violence) espoused by the Weathermen. Founded in Ann Arbor in 1969, the leftist group adopted and adapted some of the methods and rhetoric of the Black Panthers in their campaigns against the Vietnam War, racism, and the class system. Overthrowing the government was on the agenda.

Toward the end of the film, Redford’s on-the lam Jim Grant (the name he has assumed as an Upstate New York public interest lawyer) takes a potshot at the inertia of the Facebook generation, evincing disgust at the absence of resistance today. The implication, that consumerism and narcissism have softened contemporary kids, is hard to argue with but a mite simplistic. 

Along with Redford, the ageing Weathermen are played by Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, Richard Jenkins, and Julie Christie, who as refugees have reinvented themselves. Of these, Sarandon’s character has turned herself in after 30 years, triggering the FBI’s hunt for Grant. In his cross-country search for Mimi Lurie (Christie), who alone can testify that he wasn’t involved in the murder, Grant has grudging encounters with his former colleagues – it’s hostile in the case of Jenkin’s university lecturer, who regrets his Weathermen past. Time and defeat have worn them down. Only the steely Lurie, Grant’s lover at the height of the Weathermen’s war, is a holdout against compromise, notwithstanding that her latest boyfriend (Sam Elliott) plays the stock market.

“The Company You Keep” is driven by the pursuit of Grant by the young hotshot reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBoeuf), who broke the story. Although it builds toward the showdown between Grant and Lurie, it is the eventual meeting in the wilds between the careworn man of principles and the soulless young egoist that carries the greater moral weight. Redford’s decision to make the scene anticlimactic was smart: it focuses attention on the clash of values far more effectively than a shouting match would have done. Grant’s planting of an ethical question mark in Shepard is delicately done.

Some reviewers are suggesting that Redford’s casting of himself, Sarandon, Nolte, Jenkins, and Christie is problematic. (Was Jane Fonda offered a part?) Save Redford (born 1936), they were all born between 1941 and 1947, which makes their ages roughly commensurate with the ages of such Weathermen as Bernardine Dohn, Bill Ayers, Karen Ashley, and David Gilbert, who were born between 1942 and 1949. Grant’s having an 11-year-old daughter is the biggest eyebrow-raiser.

Of course, the casting of iconic liberals lends a poetic resonance to “The Company You Keep,” as does its opening this Friday (April 5), the same day as Shola Lynch’s documentary about the Civil Rights activist Angela Davis, “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners.” Redford’s film may feel like a last stand for Hollywood radicalism, but it passes muster as a conscience-pricker, if not quite as a fresh call to arms.

David McVicar’s production of George Frederic Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” makes its Metropolitan Opera debut tonight, the first of 10 showings between now and May 10. The opera, which focuses the relationship between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, stars countertenor David Daniels and coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay. The production is led by Harry Bicket and features choreography by Andrew George.

Handel’s opera premiered at the Kings Theatre in London in 1724 and tells the story of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra’s romance, from their first meeting to her crowning as the queen of Egypt, with all the trials and tribulations in between. A hit from the very beginning, the opera has gone on to become one of Handel’s most popular pieces. It first appeared at the Met in 1988 in a production by John Copley, and has been revived twice since, in 1999 and 2007.

McVicar’s production premiered at the Glyndebourne Festival in the UK in 2005. The opera was well-received by critics, including the New York Times’s Paul Griffiths, who wrote: “David McVicar’s brilliant production picks up on this. The springtime of the Roman empire becomes the full summer of the British, in an Egypt of shuttered interiors and servants in fezes; a rattling camp-headquarters typewriter adds to the continuo for one of the recitatives.” In addition to Daniels and Dessay, the rather sizeable production also features Alice Coote (as Sesto), Guido Loconsolo (Achilla), John Moore (Curio), Patricia Bardon (Cornelia), Christophe Dumaux (Tolomeo), and Rachid Ben Abdeslam (Nireno).

If you can’t make it to any of the 10 performances at the Met, the production will also be shown at movie theaters across the United States on April 27 as part of “The Met Live in HD” series.