Before he was a film director, Anton Corbijn was a rock photographer. One of his most iconic images, shot in contrasty black and white, depicts Joy Division, whose doomed singer Ian Curtis has turned to look back at the camera as he and his three bandmates enter a subway tunnel or underpass. 

That photo, which led to Corbijn’s 2007 Curtis biopic “Closer,” was to Manchester miserabilism in 1980 what Life lensman Dennis Stock’s image of James Dean walking in a wet Times Square was to mid-1950s youth alienation.

It makes perfect sense that Corbijn has signed on to direct “Life,” a movie tracing the road trip Stock and Dean took from Los Angeles to Fairmount, Indiana, the actor’s hometown, to New York in the late winter of 1955.

They had become acquainted at a party hosted by the director Nicholas Ray in 1954. Stock was the Magnum photo agency’s Hollywood representative — his other subjects included John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn — and he dreamed up the collaboration with Dean after seeing him in a preview of Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” in Santa Monica. Dean reportedly waited outside the screening room with his motorcycle. 

“The story, as I explained it [to Jimmy],” Stock wrote in his 2005 book “James Dean: Fifty Years Ago,” “was to reveal the environments that affected and shaped the unique character of James Byron Dean. We felt a trip to his hometown, Fairmount, Indiana, and to New York, the place of his professional beginnings, would best reveal those influences…. I would solicit an assignment guarantee to cover expenses. The obvious magazine to approach was LIFE…. It took only a week for LIFE to approve the assignment.” They left for Fairmount the first week of February.

“I liked him sometimes, but not all the time,” Stock told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2005, five years before his death. “But he was like family after a while. We really bonded in Indiana. Not in New York, where he was distracted a lot. He was an insomniac and didn’t get a lot of sleep and was a pain in the ass to work with.”

Life published a number of Stock’s Dean photos under the headline “Moody New Star” in its issue of March 7, 1955. In the spring, Dean acted in Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause,” and in the summer George Stevens’s “Giant.” He was killed when his Porsche struck another car near Cholame, California, that year on September 30. He was 24.

Corbijn’s problem, of course, will be finding an actor capable of exuding Dean’s unique blend of charisma and vulnerability, arrogance and sensitivity. James Franco made a decent stab of it in a 2001 TV movie directed by Mark Rydell, but there is only one James… Dean.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Life” will be budgeted at $10-15 million and go into production early next year. The script is by Luke Davies. “The King’s Speech” team of Iain Canning and Emile Sherman will produce the picture.

For the Austrian pavilion’s effort at the 55th Venice Biennale, Vienna-born, Los Angeles-based artist Mathias Poledna takes us to the movies — to a very short movie, that is. At just over three minutes long, “Imitation of Life” should feel like a slap in the face to the hulking structure in which it sits (both literally and figuratively). But the single animated scene, which reproduces to exacting detail the process used by film studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is a joy. It’s simple, light (at least on the surface), heartwarming even, and then it ends leaving one wishing for more.

Content-wise, a dog in a sailor costume trots back and forth across the screen singing a tune by Arthur Freed from the ’30s. The hook, “I got a feelin’ you’re foolin’…foolin’ with me,” points at both the absurdity of the Disney-esque display — production on this was run by Tony Bancroft, whose animation credits include “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” and “Beauty and the Beast” among others — and the trompe l’oeil of the medium itself. Around 30 hand-drawn and colored sketches flick past the screen each second on their 35mm spool, which along with the full orchestra commissioned to record the score, made this a massive undertaking in hours of work alone.

Certainly, there are political undertones to be plucked in the piece’s context. The late ’30s and early ’40s saw animation’s rise not only from technological advancement, but also on the shoulders of hundreds of Austrian and German immigrants that fled the Third Reich and came to Hollywood. They defined the classic sounds, look, and feel of cinema to an extent that reverberates today. But however present that history's backdrop in Poledna's work, he more or less shirks its heaviness in favor of a meditation on process. The piece is all the better for it. With the slew of exhibitions across German-speaking Europe this year that reflect on the 80th anniversary of the Nazi rise to power, “Imitation of Life” refreshingly celebrates the future rather than didactically harping on the atrocities of the past.  

– Ex-Cons Visit Deller in Venice: Eight carefully chosen ex-inmates, all previous winners of the annual Koestler Awards for arts in prisons, will travel to the Venice Biennale as part of an initiative sponsored by the British Council and the Koestler Trust, a charity that promotes arts in the British criminal justice system. The timing for such a trip is apt, as Jeremy Deller features so-called "prison art" in his Biennale pavilion that was produced at drawing workshops run by the artists at several prisons in the U.K. "Bringing ex-offenders to Venice, to work with us at the British Pavilion, makes real the theme of social justice that runs through Jeremy Deller’s exhibition," said Andrea Rose, director of visual arts at the British Council. [Press Release]

– Strikes Shutter British Museums: Workers at most of the U.K.'s major museums are planning to walk out Thursday, Friday, and Saturday as part of action coordinated by the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) in protest of cuts to pay and pension. Institutions including the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and the British Museum are expecting to have to limit access to certain galleries as a result, while Tate Liverpool will close completely. Strikers plan to form a human chain around the Museum of Liverpool on Friday. "These strikes highlight the huge gap between the valuable work our members do and the contempt being shown to them by ministers who are imposing cuts and refusing to even talk to us," PCS secretary general Mark Serwotka said. [BBC]

– Velvet Underground and Warhol Settle Banana Split: After the Warhol Foundation attempted to license the banana art on the cover of the now-classic 1967 record "The Velvet Underground & Nico" with Apple for iPhone and iPad accessories, founding band members Lou Reed and John Cale sued. Although Andy Warhol designed the banana, the band claimed trademark rights to the design and called it a "symbol, truly an icon" of the Velvet Underground. Both sides have chosen to settle the dispute outside court rather than facing a trial that would have commenced July 29. "The parties have reached a confidential agreement to settle the case," wrote Warhol Foundation lawyer Joshua Paul in a letter to the judge. [Reuters, Bloomberg]

– Kevin Spacey Portrait Heads to NPG: Kevin Spacey is soon to join Michael Parkinson, Grayson Perry, Sienna Miller, and Rupert Murdoch in a show of paintings by British portrait master Jonathan Yeo at the U.K.'s National Portrait Gallery. "We decided to put him in character as Shakespeare's notorious villain," said Yeo. "Partly as a nod to the tradition of theatrical portraits of the past, and partly as a celebration of what may go down as his most memorable stage role." [Guardian]

– Stolen Masterpieces May Have Been Burned: Investigators are analyzing ashes found in the home of the mother of one of the suspects in the heist of seven artworks form Kunsthal Rotterdam last year for fear that they might be the charred remains of works by Picasso, Monet, Matisse, and Gauguin that the thieves burned after it became apparent that they would be virtually impossible to sell. The ashes were found in the home of Olga Dogaru, whose son Radu Dogaru is one of six Romanian nationals arrested in connection with the heist. [AFP]

– Noland Prevails in Jancou Case: On May 1 a New York state court dismissed dealer Marc Jancou's $6-million lawsuit against artist Cady Noland over the artwork "Cowboys Milking" (1990), which the artist disowned days before the gallerist was due to sell it at Sotheby's in 2011 because it was damaged. Jancou plans to appeal the decision, and is already appealing a November 2012 ruling dismissing his case against Sotheby's for withdrawing the disowned artwork from the sale. [TAN]

– Cleveland Museum Pays for Nazi Loot: The Cleveland Museum of Art has agreed to pay restitution for a 17th-century drawing by German artist Johann Liss to the family of art collector Arthur Feldmann, who died in 1941 after being arrested by the Nazis. Feldmann’s collection of Old Master drawings was allegedly confiscated by the Third Reich, although the museum acquired the drawing from a London art dealer in 1953. Museum director David Franklin claims "there was some vagueness as to whether the drawings were seized by the Nazis or not." But, he went on to say, "we felt it was the honorable thing to meet the family halfway and give them the benefit of the doubt." [The Plain Dealer]

– Death Row Inmate to be Gilded in Gold: Danish artist Martin Martensen-Larsen plans to cover the corpse of Texas death row inmate Travis Runnels in gold after his death in a bizarre monument that mimics the Lincoln Memorial. While Runnels's execution date has not been set, he has already agreed to give his body to the artist. Although the artist is dealing with some problems due to "abuse of human corpses" laws, allegedly two galleries in Texas and D.C. have already agreed to show the work. "I am not celebrating the prisoner, it is American society, or in this case Texas, which places him on a pedestal through the media attention, millions of dollars spent on appeals and through the execution itself which promises redemption," said Martensen-Larsen.  [TAN]

– Wildlife Painter Gets Deep: In a twist on plein air painting, the wildlife artist Jonathan Truss takes to the open waters to create his figurative drawings and paintings of great white sharks — albeit from the relative safety of a diving cage (see below). Truss's daredevil dives in the name of realism build on a long tradition that includes J.M.W. Turner, who famously had himself tied to a ship's mast during a storm so he could witness the weather's full force. "I wished to show what such a scene was like," Turner later wrote, "I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it, I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did." [Guardian]

– L.S. Lowry Doodles Do Good at Auction: A trio of drawings that L.S. Lowry gave to Angelo Salvini, his favorite waiter at the George Hotel in West Yorkshire — including one sketched on the back of a hotel menu — sold for a total of over £64,000 at Bonhams on Wednesday, far surpassing the auction house's £31,000-£43,000 estimate. "Known in the region as somewhat of a 'local celebrity,' Salvini struck up a bond with the artist over the course of his visits and as a sign of his gratitude Lowry drew these works for him on separate occasions," a Bonhams spokesperson said. [Telegraph]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Wildlife painter Jonathan Truss in the shark tank

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Bill Culbert has been an art world secret for too long. The London- and Southern France-based New Zealander, currently representing his native country at the Venice Biennale, belongs to the league of the Dan Flavins and Mario Merzs while, at 78, not yet having enjoyed the recognition he deserves. This is no doubt about to change. Located in the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, an atmospheric former music academy a stone’s throw from San Marco, his pavilion is a must-see of this year’s Biennale.

Light has been Culbert’s primary material for decades, and neon strips feature here in most pieces, contributing to the fetching coherence of the sculptural ensemble. In the entrance’s long corridor, chairs pierced with neon tubes hang from the ceiling (Drop and Bebop, 2013) – a modernist, gently mocking take on the Murano chandeliers gracing so many of Venice’s crumbling palazzi. In contrast to the works of Flavin — all pure, pulsating lumens bouncing off the surrounding pristine white cube – Culbert’s assemblages radiate a down-to-earth energy. They are at once intriguing and familiar, both a commentary on and part of everyday reality.

The exhibition continues with two mirrored wardrobes, each punctured with three neon tubes (Walk Blue and Walk Reflection, 2001-2013), and standing in the courtyard like retro-futurist monuments. In a room directly opening on the canal, a floor of light strips and plastic bottles lie intermingled, as if deposited in the wake of a major tide (Daylight Flotsam Venice, 2013). Level (2013), which is placed on the high beam of a door opening directly onto the canal, features seven jars half-filled with a transparent liquid to form a line echoing the water below.

Talking to the pavilion’s curator Justin Paton, Culbert said “the simplest and cheapest material to me is often the most stable and the most exciting.” His confidence with mundane objects and his savvy use of electric light paved the way for the likes of David Batchelor and rising star Haroon Mirza, awarded the Silver Lion at the last Venice Biennale. As a precursor to these artists, Culbert is understated, but also both exciting and innovative. His place in the history books should be reappraised, and this stunning pavilion could well do just that.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

Every so often a person who neither plays an instrument nor sings, neither composes nor leads a band, makes an impact on the jazz world that captures the music’s essence and enhances its meaning. Jean Bach’s 1994 film, “A Great Day in Harlem,” transformed a classic photograph of jazz heroes into an enduring story. As Douglas Martin reported in the New York Times, Bach died at 94 on Monday at her Manhattan home. In that obituary, Martin wrote that she was “out on the town listening to jazz” until her final months. That shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I’ll never forget Bach, sitting on the living room couch of that quaint Greenwich Village home a decade ago, looking as if superimposed onto Art Kane’s 1958 Esquire magazine photo of jazz musicians in front of a Harlem brownstone. By then, in a way, she was. She’d invited me in for a jazz magazine story, but the experience felt less like an interview than a window into a long-gone world of wit, warmth, and unhurried civility.

The huge photo enlargement on Bach’s living room wall was made for an appearance on “Good Morning, America,” after the release of “A Great Day in Harlem.” That film, centered around Kane’s photo, earned an Academy Award nomination and a popular audience — both of which, Bach said, came as surprises.

“Listen, I didn’t know beans about making a movie,” she said. “But I figured somebody should record these things. In my case it was just a matter of getting something down for posterity. I was mainly thinking it was kind of a scholarly piece about getting these people who were really the crème de la crème of the jazz world and finding out as much about them as I could before they all slipped away.”

Bach, then in her 80s, knew many of jazz’s crème de la crème long before she set a lens on them. She befriended Duke Ellington and many other musicians while in her teens. Her first husband was the big-band trumpeter Shorty Sherock. She was media savvy, too. Her second husband, Bob Bach, was a television producer whose credits included the 1949 CBS series “Adventures in Jazz.” For 24 years, Bach herself was the producer of “The Arlene Francis Show,” a popular radio program whose guests included Ellington, Leopold Stokowksi, and Salvador Dali.

She and her husband threw legendary parties; it wasn’t unusual to find Lena Horne in a corner and Billy Strayhorn sharing the piano bench with Ellington for a version of “Tonk.” In a 1983 New Yorker profile, Whitney Balliett wrote: “She is a Boswell, for, not widely known herself, she spends much of her time cosseting and studying the great and near-great, the famous and almost famous.”

Hers was a documentary based on a document that froze a moment in time, bringing to life perhaps the most famous photograph in jazz — itself an unlikely story.

Around 10:00 one sunny, warm morning in the summer of 1958 — there is general disagreement over the date — 57 jazz musicians gathered on 126th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues, in Harlem. The invitation came from Art Kane, a young freelance art director doing his first professional shoot. The assembled included stars of the day such as Count Basie and Lester Young, then up-and-comers Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins, among others, and  journeymen like Chubby Jackson.

In the early 1980s, Bach thought of doing some interviews with surviving members of the photo’s cast. “It all began to click,” Bach said, “when I heard Milt Hinton talking about that day.” She thought Hinton might have had some photos, as he was known to love photography. But as she recalled, “Milt told me, ‘I can do even better: I brought my movie camera.’”

Over the next four years and with the help of an experienced co-producer, Matthew Seig, and an editor, Susan Pehl, Bach wove a tale around the photo. She intertwined Hinton’s footage with additional photos, snippets from the 1950s television series “Sound of Jazz,” and most importantly, her interviews (nearly all of which were conducted in her living room).

In 1997 Bach used outtakes from “A Great Day in Harlem” to create a second film, “The Spitball Story.” It asked a fascinating if less-than-pressing question: Did Dizzy Gillespie, in 1941, actually shoot spitballs onstage at his boss, the bandleader Cab Calloway, leading to his dismissal from the Calloway band?

No, she determined. In “The Spitball Story,” trumpeter Jonah Jones confessed to having done it. The short won awards at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Newport International Film Festival, and the USA Film Festival.

The 2005 DVD release of “A Great Day in Harlem” presented additional material that places yet another frame around Kane’s celebrated photo. Bach and her collaborators discussed their creative process, including an attitude toward the use of still photos that is a marked departure from the Ken Burns model. Bach recounted her dogged pursuit of the story behind the photo — placing an ad New York’s Amsterdam News with the headline “Remember This Picture?” and following Dizzy Gillespie to a dentist appointment to secure an interview. There’s some hilarious footage of Art Blakey and others recalling details of the photo shoot, and then being called out for getting nearly everything wrong.

Blakey can be forgiven — Bach was after more than just facts. Her sense of humor as much as her sense of history, her winning way as much as her dogged research, made her work singular. Every picture may tell story, but some more than others. Jean Bach knew all that and more. One gets the sense that if you stuck around her, there were more great days than not. 

Cooper Union students have now occupied the school’s president Jamshed Bharucha’s office since May 8, and on Tuesday evening their protest against the school’s decision to begin charging tuition in fall 2014 morphed into an art show and salon on the seventh floor of the school’s historic Foundation Building. As the downstairs floors concurrently exhibit the school’s annual show of student work, the top floor instead features colorful protest banners, and artworks satirizing both Bharucha and the school’s decision. After viewing the architectural models and final art projects below, exhibition-goers continued above, plastic cups of white wine in hand, to find students still taping up protest-related artwork. Nearby, screens played videos of the sit-in as well as a student performance based on the leaked transcript of a September board meeting, in which the trustees raised the possibility of shuttering the school for five years.

Now that classes are over, the numbers of protesters have decreased, but students say they aren’t worried about losing momentum. “There’s no end date” to the occupation of Bharucha’s office, sophomore art student Devonn Francis told ARTINFO. “Some people will go away, but there’s been a consistent group of 15 or 20 people.” Victoria Sobel, a graduating art student, described the board as a “closed loop with no accountability.” She complained that “Jamshed and [board chair] Mark [Epstein] do an inaccurate job representing our intentions. They make us out to be uncivilized or unruly, and they’re trying to make it seem more nebulous when we have concrete demands.”

The students’ demands, which were posted on the wall of the seventh floor, are 1) the resignation of Jamshed Bharucha, 2) more transparency and accountability in the governance of the school, and 3) the reversal of the decision to charge tuition. When asked about the board’s response to these demands, board chair Epstein told ARTINFO via email that “the issues at the Cooper Union go a lot deeper than these demands.” He went on to say that, “although we care very much about all of our students, there are those (a very vocal minority) that confuse the board’s not heeding their demands, with the board’s not hearing their demands.”

In fact, there’s been a lot of resistance to the board’s decision to charge tuition, and not just from a vocal minority. After the students held a vote of no confidence in Bharucha’s office, the full-time arts and humanities faculty unanimously followed suit. The New York Times’ James B. Stewart and Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon have both criticized the board for financial mismanagement that has led to a state of crisis, and trustee Jeffrey Gural, who is unhappy with the decision to charge tuition but at this point sees it as the only option, acknowledged in an email to ARTINFO that “mistakes were made in the past regarding how to deal with the deficit.” Epstein clashed with Salmon at a Democracy Now debate over the issue and maintained to ARTINFO that his criticisms are “factually incorrect.” Yet, as Salmon suggested, it is hard to find anyone who is not on the board of trustees who agrees that the $175-million loan for the new building is not the main cause of Cooper Union’s financial woes.

At one time, other options besides charging tuition were on the table. A year ago, both the Friends of Cooper Union (an organization of concerned alumni) and the Cooper Union Revenue Task Force convened by Bharucha proposed other financial solutions that preserved full-tuition scholarships, and according to the task force’s final report, consulting firm Maguire Associates recommended that to model tuition revenues, scholarships should be reduced by no more than 25 percent. Instead, the board decided to reduce them by 50 percent. Tuition is valued at $38,500, which means that most students will be required to pay $19,250. (The trustees say that students who demonstrate the greatest financial need will receive 100% scholarships.)

At his commencement address at Cooper Union Wednesday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg did not take sides on the tuition issue, but urged students to do as Peter Cooper did and “donate what you can.” Epstein has consistently faulted the alumni for low rates of giving, stating that, traditionally, only 20 percent donate to the institution. In fact, a document provided by an alumnus on the Alumni Pioneer blog indicates that alumni participation stood at 30 percent in 2002, though it has fallen fairly steadily since then, dropping two or three percentage points a year after the recession in 2008 to bottom out at 22 percent in 2011. And in the September board meeting transcript that was leaked to the Village Voice, Derek Wittner, vice president of alumni affairs and development, cites a 24 percent rate of alumni participation for 2012. More importantly, Wittner took the trustees to task for not giving as generously as those of other institutions. “Most campaigns end up with the board contributing 20-30% of campaign total,” Wittner stated at the time. “This board contributed something like 12% last time around. That can’t happen.”

While the students don’t seem ready to let up anytime soon, it’s not at all clear whether the protest will ultimately be effective. Since the occupation, three trustees, including Bharucha (who sits on the board), have met with the students occupying the president’s office. “I think some of the student demands are reasonable and others are not,” trustee Jeffrey Gural, who met with the protesters, told ARTINFO. “I was hoping to convince them to discontinue occupying the president’s office as I thought it was counterproductive; however, they disagreed.” When asked if he planned to meet with the students who are sitting in, Epstein replied that the board had met regularly with student representatives and that “at these meetings the students can ask whatever they want to.”

With American student debt now exceeding one trillion dollars, the exceptionalism and idealism of Cooper Union’s free tuition may make it seem irrelevant beyond Peter Cooper’s 19th-century brownstone walls. But, as ARTINFO’s Ben Davispointed out last week, “the issues at stake here form an almost perfect crystal of the forces buffeting art and education in the woebegotten 21st century.” For Dennis Adams, a Cooper Union art professor, this fight can be called “the Alamo of American education.” “There’s a lot at stake here,” Adams said Tuesday evening in the crowded Cooper Union hallway. “It’s small, but it’s a massive symbolization. And I’m glad to be a part of it.”

Although “Hannah Arendt” (Film Forum, New York, through June 11) is scarcely a dialectic, it demands that the viewer understands the difference between “thinking” and “not thinking” (or “unthinking”).

As relayed by the German Jewish political theorist Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) in Margarethe von Trotte’s transfixing biopic, “thinking” is the agent of the societal superego that safeguards the welfare of all. “Not thinking” leads to the kind of sheepishness that promulgates ultimate evil.

Ranged against Arendt in the film are two non-thinkers. One is the philosopher Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl), the teacher and lover of the starry-eyed scholar (Friederike Becht) Arendt was at the University of Marburg, circa 1924-25. As a 55-year-old émigré in New York she recalls, via brief flashbacks, his sycophantic embrace of Nazism and her subsequent recrimination of him during a woodland meeting.  

The other non-thinker (if that’s what he was, and it’s debatable) is Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer and administrator of Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question.” A faceless night-walker kidnapped by Mossad operatives in Buenos Aires in 1960 at the start of the film, Eichmann appears as himself, spindly and owlish, behind a glass screen in stark footage from his 1961 Jerusalem show trial that Von Trotta intercuts with images of Arendt reporting on it.

The five articles she wrote for The New Yorker and the resulting book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (1963), provoked the crisis on which the movie centers. Arendt’s strident speculations on the role played by Jewish council leaders in inadvertently facilitating the Nazi persecution of the Jews resulted in her being vilified, by and far beyond New York Jewish intellectuals, as “a self-hating Jew.” One French weekly asked the rhetorical question: “Is she a Nazi?”

Arendt’s use of the phrase “the banality of evil,” inspired by Eichmann’s apparent (and therefore doubly frightening) mediocrity, was seized on, as an oxymoron, for offending the memory of the dead. She later regretted its use.

The film is set primarily in Arendt’s academic milieu and offers both the quotidian — Hannah as a party host or in the kitchen — and the romantic: her happy marriage to the steadfast Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), the poet and Marxist philosopher; her jousts with her best friend Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer), the critic and political activist, about the latter’s eventful love life. This civilized atmosphere offsets the accusatory mood that replaces it without diluting the specter of the genocide that haunts every frame.

As the storm clouds gather and erupt over Sukowa’s Arendt, she adheres resolutely to her theories, though Von Trotta includes enough shots of her alone and lost in thought that they cast doubt on her certitude. Has she started to question aspects of her analysis in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” does she feel a certain guilt, or is she contemplating the fathomlessness of the Nazi abyss? This was one of the questions I asked Von Trotta when we met recently in a Film Forum office in the West Village.   

How did the film evolve?

It grew out of the study I made of Jewish history and the Nazi era when I was researching “Rosenstrasse” [2003]. It was all I read for two years, and it was during this time that I read “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” It wasn’t my original idea to make a film about Hannah Arendt. It came from a friend of mine who helped me to do “Rosenstrasse,” and who afterward said, “Now, I’d like you to do a film about Hannah Arendt.” I said, “Oh, no, it’s too complicated. How can you make a film about someone’s who’s just thinking — how do you show that?” It was impossible to imagine.

But when an idea is planted in your mind, it starts to grow, even against your own will. I started to think about it and then I asked Pam Katz, my co-author on “Rosenstrasse” and “The Other Woman” [2004], if she was into it. She was very enthusiastic. I was still hesitant because of the difficulty of creating images and scenes. But then we started to imagine what we could show.

We considered starting with Arendt entering Heidegger’s seminar at Marburg [in 1924] and going up to her death [1975], but we realized it wouldn’t work because to make a film about a philosopher you have to deal with her capacity to think, not simply jump from one event in her life to another — leaving Germany for France in ’33, being put in an internment camp there, fleeing with her husband to Lisbon, and then to America. We would have lost her importance as a writer and thinker.

To show that and keep the story dramatic, we came up with the idea of following her through the four years of Eichmann: from his kidnapping in Argentina, to her asking to report on his trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker, to her seeing that the man in the glass booth is not what she expected and her process of recognizing that he is a kind of “non-person,” going back to New York where her husband becomes ill and she has a serious car accident — which we filmed, but decided to cut because it moved the story too far away from Eichmann. Then she writes the articles and the books, which caused a controversy that lasted another three-four years and which still causes her to be hated by some people.

You’re very sparing with the scenes that show her with Heidegger.

If Pam and I had said, at the beginning, that we were going to make a film about the [notional] love story between Eichmann and Hannah Arendt, we would have got the financing for the film much more quickly than we did! Of course, we didn’t want to make a love story about Hannah and Martin — though it would have been more affecting for many people.

When we examined her relationship with Heidegger and then her relationship with her husband, Heinrich Blücher, and her correspondences with them and with Karl Jespers [psychiatrist, philosopher, and Arendt’s mentor] and Mary McCarthy, we realized that her husband was very, very important for her life and for her writing — more important than Heidegger. She had been immersed in philosophy until she met Heinrich in Paris in 1936, and it was he who pushed her to open her mind to political and historical realities.

I introduced Heidegger only as the master of thinking who taught her thinking. They are adversaries in the film. She is the one who is thinking, he is the one who is not thinking, who falls into the trap of the Nazi Party. It’s not stupidity, but thoughtlessness.

Do you think Arendt felt retrospective guilt about her affair with Heidegger because he had supported Hitler?

I don’t know. She felt rage. In one letter to Jespers, she described Heidegger as a murderer and said she would never see him again. And then after a week or so, she went to Freiburg and met him. So that was her contradiction. I asked her friend Lötte Kohler, “What is that?” And she said, “That’s love — you can’t explain it.”

I also met her niece, Edna Brocke, who asked Hannah at the end of her life why she continued to visit Heidegger in Freiburg, which she did every year, and Hannah said, “There are things that are bigger than a human being.” I put that into the film.

When one sees the footage of Eichmann in the glass booth, it’s hard to disagree with Arendt’s revelation that he comes across as a non-entity. In the book, she speaks of the “dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them…. Everybody [at the trial] could see that he was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” Yet such was his ambition in administering the Final Solution that he epitomized virulent anti-Semitism.

Absolutely. And it’s not that Arendt said he was innocent, a bureaucrat unable to think. She said he was guilty and believed he should be executed, in contrast to her husband, who said he should have lived until he died of old age, as did several Jewish thinkers.

How can Eichmann represent the idea of the “banality of evil” if he accelerated the extermination of Hungarian Jews after Himmler had ordered its cessation? It was an act of will.

Yes, he wanted to complete his task — and his task came from Hitler, not from Himmler. In the trial, [Gideon] Hausner [the chief prosecutor] asked him, “If Hitler would have died, would you have felt liberated from your role?” And he said that immediately he would have felt liberated. That Prussian obedience to authority, whether to Bismarck, the Kaiser, or Hitler, was very consistent with the education of Germans.

Arendt said that the allegation that she accused the Jewish people of being complicit in their destruction was “a malignant lie and propaganda.” She admitted, however, that the tone in The New Yorker articles was “predominantly ironic,” which greatly led to her being misunderstood. Do you think that was a failing on her part?

It seemed that she was not touched herself by the Holocaust and all the bitterness — so many people accused her of being cold, arrogant, and without feeling. I asked Lotte Köhler about it and she said that Hannah had so much feeling that she had to distance herself from it all. She thought it would have been immoral to put her own feelings into it. If you’re an ordinary writer you can do that, but if you’re a philosopher you can’t represent yourself in what you write.

But, yes, perhaps her tone was a mistake and she understood that afterwards.

The shot of her lying on a couch at the end of the film hints at doubt or guilt, though doesn’t it also prefigure your final title, which says that she devoted the remainder of her career to the study of evil?

Yes. She couldn’t get rid of the idea of thinking about it.

As a German filmmaker, do you feel an obligation to confront the Holocaust?

In a way, yes. I was born stateless and only became German with my first marriage. I don’t have to feel responsible, but I was born in Berlin [in 1942] and educated in Germany and that’s my big crime. Our generation was so shocked when we learned what happened before, because no one told us about it in the ’50s. In school, we didn’t learn about it. Out parents didn’t speak about it. When we finally realized, we were very angry and what happened in 1968 was a big part of that.

Many of your films are about strong women who are flawed in some way, never saintly. You said in relation to Hildegard von Bingen, the nun in “Vision” [2009], “The figures that appeal to me are always strong women who also have moments of weakness; therefore, I never try to make heroines out of them. Instead I show how they fought to find their own way, how they put themselves out there, and how much they had to swallow in order to find themselves.” Is Hannah Arendt in that same category?

Loving Heidegger against all reason — her weakness is there in a certain way. I don’t know if she’s strong, or if I’m attracted to her if she is. She’s important in a way that Rosa Luxembourg was as a utopist at the beginning of the century. Where Rosa Luxembourg believed the 20th century would realize all the ideals of the century before, Hannah Arendt looked back with a hope that, as she says in the film, when the chips are down, thinking will protect us from catastrophes. That came from Kant — she came from Königsberg, which was Kant’s city, and read his works from the age of 14.

You’ve been on this long journey — six films — with Barbara Sukowa. Was playing Hannah Arendt emotionally challenging for her?

Oh, yes, she was very afraid, like I was. I knew from working with her on “Rosa Luxembourg” [1986], where she also has so many speeches, that she could convince people she believes what she is saying. We always say we’ll take each other by the hand and go through a tunnel, not knowing if there will be light at the end. Everyday we’d look at each other and she’d say, “Are we doing well? Is that OK?” We didn’t know. We really went through it like two little girls hoping to be redeemed. [laughs]

The brainlessness of the blockbuster film was on full display this past weekend, with both major studio releases exhibiting the type of startlingly insipid and extravagantly unselfconscious filmmaking we’ve come to associate with the summer movie season. Not only did the Memorial Day holiday see the release of the sixth installment in the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, it also saw the opening of the third, and hopefully final, part of the “The Hangover” series. If for some reason you needed more proof that a film doesn’t have to be smart to bring in the millions, this was it.

Let’s start with the significantly better of the two films, “Fast & Furious 6.” This won’t shock anyone, but the film is dumb and fun. It’s a movie about car thieves tasked with stopping a terrorist, for god’s sake. Granted, plot means little to these movies. Instead the film provides a venue for Vin Diesel, Duane “The Rock” Johnson, Paul Walker, and everyone else to crack lame jokes, make serious faces, and talk about the importance of family. Oh yeah, and to drive cars at incredibly high speeds and occasionally crash them into things or launch them off ramps created by the debris of previously mentioned collisions. It’s ridiculous and over the top and so little of it makes sense, but it all happens so fast and is edited so smoothly that you don’t have time to think about anything other than the fact that it’s pretty cool to see someone jump out of a speeding muscle car into an equally fast-moving vehicle.

I clearly wasn’t alone in feeling this way about the film, as the Justin Lin-directed picture made $120 million over the long weekend. (By the way, kudos to Lin, who’s directed four of these now. There are only so many ways to make people driving cars fast look interesting, and he’s really good at it.) During the screening that I caught with a friend on Saturday night, the audience was raucous — guffawing, cheering, oohing and aahing throughout the film’s two-plus hour runtime. We were all having such a good time that no one seemed to care about the woman sitting next to my friend who spent the entire movie checking Instagram, messaging people on Facebook, and, at one point, having a minutes-long phone conversation. There were so many engines revving, gunshots ringing out, and things exploding that she was practically drowned out. And anyway, it’s not like she was going to distract us from any important plot developments.

“The Hangover Part III,” on the other hand, was anything but enjoyable. It was just as inane and plot hole-filled as “Fast 6,” but there was something cynical and sordid about the third part of Todd Phillips’s “Hangover” trilogy. The film reunites the stars of the previous two films — Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis — for another depraved, “wait, how did we get ourselves into this mess” adventure. Except this time around, things aren’t all that debaucherous, or funny – a real issue for the summer’s main comedy release. There are a million reasons to hate a “Hangover” movie — misogyny, homophobia, excessively vulgarity, to name three — but this one was just boring. There’s a forlornness that hangs over everything, and maybe that’s the point. Like the tail end of an actual hangover, everyone involved is ready for it to be over — but that doesn’t make for a particularly entertaining or amusing film.

There were plenty of empty seats at the quiet screening I went to, which was clearly the case across the country — the film has brought in a disappointing $63.8 million since opening last Wednesday. Sixty-plus million dollars isn’t that bad of opening, but remember that this was a holiday weekend and the previous film in the series made $70 million more over the same timeframe in 2011. Hopefully, the movie’s disappointing opening won’t tempt the studio to try to wring more juice from the franchise.

This weekend made me yearn for a fresher blockbuster. So far this summer’s offerings have all been sequels or the adaptation of a classic American novel — well-worn, lucrative paths that studios are reluctant to depart from. But as a viewer, it’s nice to not know exactly what’s going to happen in a film. I’m almost looking forward to next week’s big release, M. Night Shyamalan’s Will and Jaden Smith-starring sci-fi film “After Earth,” because at least it’s somewhat original.

On second thought, that film still looks terrible.

“Fast & Furious 6”

Director: Justin Lin

Writer: Chris Morgan

Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster

Opening Weekend Gross: $122.2 million

“The Hangover Part III”

Director: Todd Phillips

Writers: Todd Phillips and Craig Mazin

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong, John Goodman

Opening Weekend Gross: $63.8 million

A few years ago, as the auctions first went parabolic and Vanity Fair crowed about “The Billion Dollar Art Market,” I wrote an article entitled “A Modest Proposal for the Art World.” In it, I said that these kinds of numbers led to an inevitable conclusion: The U.S. must sell off its art immediately. Sure, people would yell and scream, but think of all the things we could buy with that money! Think of all the good art education we could buy for living kids with all that dead art!

This was meant as satire, to illustrate the freakish conclusions that such mind-numbing numbers must produce; rather than something to be celebrated, I saw (and see) the soaring market for trophies as a representation of how our increasingly bifurcated society is being stretched apart. Yesterday’s absurdity, however, is today’s new normal in austerity America, as last Friday’s announcement that a nearly bankrupt Detroit was toying with the idea of selling off the art at the Detroit Institute of Arts to please its creditors attests.

The idea has provoked widespread outrage, as it should. Met Museum head Thomas Campbell and DIA’s own boss Graham Beal have decried the suggestion — but the appraisers are already moving into position, and the city’s Emergency Manager (EM) says that “people should be prepared” to think the unthinkable. In the event of a Chapter 9 filing, no one quite knows what would keep the sell-off from going through. It is apparently the city’s creditors themselves who first floated the idea. As the EM’s spokesman explained, “These are people savvy enough to know where all the money for the City of Detroit is.”

Will the fire sale go down? Perhaps, though experts argue that such an eventuality currently remains “remote,” partly because of the tremendous outrage it would cause among the city’s middle classes (suburban voters only recently passed a tax to sustain the museum). Affluent and articulate people like art, and are willing to take it up as a cause. And yet, even if liquidation is forestalled, a very important lesson can be gleaned here that should not be lost amid all the high-flown rhetoric about the sacred value of culture.

The focus has been on Detroit’s sheer, historic desperation; the situation is, we are told, the product of “an existential drama of a kind that no city has ever faced.” Yet that is only half of the story. Here’s another unprecedented bit of art news from the last few weeks: Christie’s just did half a billion dollars of business on a single 70-lot sale, a staggering all-time record. When the DIA liquidation story broke last Friday, a cadre of New York art dealers lined up to estimate that the museum’s collection could bring in billions of dollars. It is unlikely that such a potentially disastrous move, which amounts to a clear advertisement of civic decline, would be on the table if such astronomical figures weren’t being tossed around.

I, of course, find revolting the idea that Van Gogh’s salt-of-the-earth “Self-Portrait,” or Bruegel the Elder’s lively ode to the common people, “The Wedding Dance,” might be sold off to sate the moneylenders. But I also understand how, in a city that has been forced to experiment with turning off street lights, righteous rhetoric about DIA's art holdings being a “public good” might ring a wee bit hollow. Hammering away at fine art’s sanctity while the privatization of the city’s water authority is also “on the table” seems bound to make pundits seem out of touch.

DIA may survive, as art lovers rally to its cause. But as long as the rich continue to absorb more and more of society's wealth to themselves, the totals will keep rising at the art auctions. Pressure is going to continue to mount, and defending Detriot's museum is going to sound more and more like the well-off putting their concerns over regular folks. Politicians are already harping on this angle— and if you think they don’t have an audience, look at the feedback from the public to the Detroit Free Press's original report: “Here we go again with outsiders telling the city what’s up for grabs and what is not,” wrote one angry reader. “Make some prints of what we sell, and save the city’s pension fund and city services. Which is more important: saving the city? Or saving some art?” (If he were to propose hiring locals to make the copies as a job program, this would be exactly my “Modest Proposal.”) 

At what price point do you give up on platitudes about the inviolability of art? At a hundred million dollars? Two hundred? One billion? The glue that holds society together is coming apart under the pressure of mounting inequality, and public institutions of art — which promote the mythical notion that the finer things belong, potentially, to us all — are bound to be pulled apart with it. That’s why what is badly needed is for arts advocates to make a case for culture that doesn't frame it in isolation, but that links the fight for art to a broader movement to challenge the economic dogma that we live under, with all its baleful effects.

There is no doubt that Detroit's situation is dire. But it is obscene that we live in a society where some people might pay hundreds of millions of dollars for single works of art while whole communities are mauled to death by the creditor class. The temperament of arts administrators is not such that they are inclined to make fire-breathing speeches about the One Percent. Critics call that “politicizing art.” But unless something happens to change the underlying trajectory of our economy, our culture, and our world, I fear that institutions like DIA will only have one real choice: die fast or die slow.

– Marc Quinn Brings Pregnant Nudes to Venice: The YBA Marc Quinn, known for making popsicle self-portraits from his own blood and for giving the British Museum a golden statue of Kate Moss, has not one but two new works at the Venice Biennale featuring nude, pregnant women. The first is a large painting of the reclining and very preggers model Lara Stone against a shimmering red backdrop; the other is an inflatable sculpture portraying the artist Alison Lapper sans arms, in the style of a classical statue, which is parked outside the church of St. Giorgio Maggiore. [Telegraph, NYT]

– V&A Presses Start on Game Designer Residency: The 160-year-old Victoria and Albert Museum is powering up its new media art program with a new game designer in residence program whose first resident is Sophia George. The 22-year-old designer, who beat out some 100 applicants, will have full access to the museum's design collections spanning the 16th to the 20th century for inspiration for a new game. "I don't want to make it too 'schooley,'" George said. "But it might be a nice idea to develop something that can go inside the museum." [Independent]

– Iraq Hopes Restored Arch Will Encourage Tourism: In hopes of promoting tourism just south of Baghdad, Iraqi authorities have hired a Czech company to begin a restoration on the Arch of Ctesiphon, the crumbling and last remaining structure from the ancient Persian capital Ctesiphon. While this was a once-popular site for visitors, tourism hit a steep decline after the town of Madain was suspected of housing a biological weapons research facility under Saddam Hussein and then later became an Al-Qaeda stronghold. [AFP]

– Finnair Folk Art Grounded: Finnair, Finland's leading airline, has agreed to remove artwork from the fuselage of one of its planes after it was found to have been plagiarized from Maria Primatshenko, the celebrated Ukrainian folk artist. Similarities between the plane paint job and "Metsanvaki" by Primatshenko, who died in 1997, were first spotted by the Finnish news site Helsingin Sanomat. [LATimes]

– Aby Rosen Loves to Party: In his extensive New York Times profile, "party-boy" mega-collector Aby Rosen details his view on life ("I wake up every morning and I think, ‘You know what, I’m a lucky bastard,’"), his feud with Tom Wolfe ("He will go on wearing more white suits. I will go on having a good time"), and features Damien Hirst’s appraisal of the guy: "You have lots of people who buy art because they don’t have a personality, but they want to be able to hang out and be part of a scene and have friends. Aby’s not like that, because he’s already got all that." [NYT]

– Duchamp Scholar Teaches Ai Weiwei To Play Chess: New York art dealer and Marcel Duchamp expert Francis Naumann recently had his dream birthday wish realized: to teach artist Ai Weiwei to play chess. "On April 25 — as luck would have it, on the occasion of my 65th birthday — my long-delayed session with him finally took place in Beijing, on a beautiful sunny spring afternoon in the garden outside of his studio," Naumann said. The game had apparently been long delayed due to Ai's detention, but he was a quick learner. "To facilitate the learning process, I played both sides of the board," Naumann said. "When I then decided to take one side, it was already too late for that side, the position I assumed being too weak to defend. So, although it's not technically correct, you could say that he beat me in our very first game." [AiA]

– Huge Donation for Huntington Museum: Los Angeles's Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Garden has received a $32-million donation from octogenarian businessman Charles Munger, which will go to funding the museum's new visitor center and new education facilities, which are scheduled to open in two years. Munger is the lead donor towards the expansion project, which is already underway, and for which the Huntington hopes to raise $60 million. [LATimes]

– Roberta Smith Was Donald Judd's Secretary: In her feature on the just-renovated former home and studio of Minimalist artist Donald Judd, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith recalls meeting Judd during her semester in the Whitney Museum's independent study program in 1968, befriending his family, and eventually working as his secretary and then on his catalogue raisonné. "Once or twice I went with him to 101 Spring Street — in what was then called the Cast-Iron District — which he had just purchased," Smith recalls. "As the building was being cleared out, he was moving things in. I remember standing in the building’s filthy basement unrolling his paintings from the 1950s, which seemed like ancient history." [NYT]

– T.S. Eliot’s Widow Auctions Art Collection: The art collection of Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s recently deceased widow, is up for sale at a Christie’s London auction this November and on view in New York starting June 1. Royalties from the musical "Cats," based on Eliot’s "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats,” turned out to be more lucrative than his poetry and enabled Eliot’s widow to purchase the collection, valued at $7.6 million. Included are works by J.M.W. Turner, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Thomas Gainsborough, David Hockney, John Constable, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill—all the great Brits! [AP]

– Faberge Museum Stocking Back Up After Divorce: After losing a huge chunk of its collection, nearly 600 items, to a divorce settlement between owner Alexander Ivanov and his now ex-wife, the Faberge Museum is stocking back up with a new acquisitions plan. The museum has already acquired 50 items this year and plans to collect a total of 300 by the end of 2013, according to Ivanov."Every great collection has its ups and downs, and we will continue to grow the collection in quality and quantity," he said. "In addition to Faberge, I actively grow my new collection of ancient gold jewelry." [Artdaily]

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For breaking news throughout the day, check our blog IN THE AIR.

LOS ANGELES — Bjork’s “Biophilia” tour hits Los Angeles next week, playing three nights at the Hollywood Palladium and a night at the Hollywood Bowl. But before that, the Biophilia Education Program will make a one-day stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. on June 2; it will also offer intensive workshops for a week at south L.A.’s Edison Middle School from June 3 through 7.

Bjork’s eighth album, 2012’s “Biophilia,” was accompanied by 10 apps downloadable on iPhones and iPads. For each song, a different app was designed to allow the user to dissect and explore the track, isolating musical elements and manipulating them both visually and audibly.

The apps make up the core of the Biophilia Education Program, suited for children ages 10 to 12. The idea is that each one illuminates how a song works — structure, time signatures, scales, chords, arpeggios — by dismantling it and then reassembling it.

For example, the app for the Webby Award-winning song “Mutual Core” features two hemispheres with rock strata emerging. As the user attempts to fit them together, different chords are created in the process. For “Crystalline,” the user chooses between different tunnels, each representing a section of the song, resulting in the user’s own unique variation. For “Solstice,” students compose harp parts by pulling strings from a central sun and flicking planets into orbit to pluck them.

“I was trying to mix together the most exciting of electronics where you can use cutting edge technology to do more impulsive sort of like right brain sort of stuff for kids but then you could plug it with a sort of most famous acoustic instruments that man has made,” Bjork said in a press release.

The program springs from her own disillusionment with music education when she was young. Her response was to put in the hands of children a device she wishes she had when she was growing up.

“Music schools behaved like a conveyor belt to make performers for those symphony orchestras,” she explained. “For me, music was not about that. It is about freedom and expression and individuality and impulsiveness and spontaneity. It wasn’t so Apollonian, it was more Dionysian. They could totally write amazing music if they just had the right tools.”

In 2012, the Biophilia Education Program was incorporated into the regular curriculum in Reykjavik, Bjork’s hometown. It has also seen trial runs in Manchester, Oslo, Paris, Buenos Aires, New York, and San Francisco. It may be just what cities like Los Angeles need — L.A.’s school district is on the brink of bankruptcy and arts funding for middle school students has declined as much as 75 percent since 2008.

The program has accompanied stops on a dynamic and logistically challenging concert tour that involves a set of unique musical instruments created by a team including an Icelandic organ builder and a graduate of the MIT Media Lab.

Fans will experience music from four 10-foot pendulum-harps (there were going to be 38 of them hanging 30 feet high, but it proved to be a logistical nightmare). Also included is a MIDI-controlled pipe organ celeste refitted with bronze gamelan bars, and twin musical Tesla coils providing bass tones. In addition to such space age instruments will be the more terrestrial sound of a 24-piece Icelandic female choir, with visuals from the Biophilia apps complementing the ensemble.

“After 15 I rebelled and became a punk,” said Bjork, reflecting on her past and how something like the Biophilia program might have come in handy. “It’s important at that age to set up something and then maybe afterwards you can go study your violin for 500 hours a week. But at least in the beginning you know about the options.”

An auction of 1,200 bottles from the wine cellar of France's Elysee presidential palace wraps up Friday with most of the proceeds to be invested in younger, more modest wines.

The sale at the Drouot auction house is expected to fetch at least 250,000 euros ($324,200), and palace aides say any cash raised above that level would go into state coffers. France is struggling to lower its soaring deficit and find 60 billion euros in public savings over five years.

"It's the first time the Elysee Palace has decided to sell a part of its wine cellar," Ghislaine Kapandji of auctioneers Kapandji Morhange said.

The sale is dominated by wine from France's internationally prized Bordeaux and Burgundy regions, vintage 1960 to 1990, and includes famous names such as Chateau Latour, Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Pauillac and Montrachet.

A bottle of 1990 Petrus is estimated at about 2,500 euros, while a more modest Meursault can be had for about 50 euros.

Alsatian wine, some cognacs and champagnes will also be up for sale. Many bottles are ready to be drunk immediately.

Britain's government auctioned off vintage French wine from its cellar in March as part of a national austerity drive.

The four day music festival in the wilds of Tennessee boasts over 10 stages of music, film, and comedy with over 80,000 people expected to attend this year.

On Wednesday the Fondazione Prada’s Grand Canal palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina, opened its new exhibition, a restaging of the seminal 1969 exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” at Bern’s Kunsthalle, with a private preview and dinner, followed by a cocktail party. Titled “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013” and co-curated by architect Rem Koolhaas, artist Thomas Demand, and curator Germano Celant, the show features many of its predecessor’s original artworks, which included major pieces by conceptual and performance artists, members of the Arte Povera movement, and other cutting-edge currents.

In attendance at the lunch and preview were just about every major art world figure imaginable, including the man of the hour, 2013 Venice Biennale curator Massimiliano Gioni, Tate director Nicholas Serrota, Metropolitan Museum director Thomas P. Campbell, MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, L.A. MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, collectors François Pinault and Victor Pinchuk, über-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, dealer Larry Gagosian, artists Cindy Sherman, Anish Kapoor, Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, and Damien Hirst. Artists from the original exhibition who were also on hand included Daniel Buren, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Gilberto Zorio. Land artist Walter De Maria, participating remotely, recreated his 1967 piece “Art by Telephone,” dialing into the exhibition, where Miuccia Prada was the first to answer his call.

To see photos from the Fondazione Prada’s preview for “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013,” click the slideshow.