The Soho20 Gallery in Chelsea is a non-profit gallery that helps promote female artists. Works by three women are now on display. Costa Rican born Nefertiti Ingalls' photography show "Identity is the Way I Look" looks at the style of urban youth. Monica Block returns to ceramics in "Without Irreverence"  about the mother-daughter relationship. And North Korean Gongsan Kim expresses her country's political warfare in "Trampled Ember." The show runs through June 15.

The Verona Opera Festival takes places in the city's 2000-year old Roman amphitheatre with a program of open air operas on the world's largest opera stage. This year's festival presents 58 performances and is dedicated to Guiseppe Verdi.

“What surprises and shocks me most of all is the tremendous amount of hatred and hostility lying around and waiting only for the chance to break out,” Hannah Arendt confided to her friend, the writer Mary McCarthy, in the fall of 1963. At the time, she was caught in the middle of a backlash against her ideas concerning the “banality of evil,” a term Arendt coined in relation to Adolf Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the Nazi Party and a main organizational force in the logistics of Hitler’s Final Solution. Arendt’s confrontations with the personal and political past would last throughout the rest of her life, crisscrossing the career of Margarethe von Trotta, a pioneer of the German New Wave film movement, whose members were preoccupied with dealing with post-war confusion, and delusion, in their home country. So it makes sense that Von Trotta, whose films have been dominated by strong female lead roles, would tackle the divisive legacy of Arendt.

In February 1963, The New Yorker published the first part of “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt’s report from Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann was captured by the U.S. Army following World War II but managed to escape custody under an alias and, after more than a decade on the run, was found in Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. He was captured by Mossad agents as he came off a bus and was quickly smuggled out of the country. A year later, Eichmann would appear before the Jerusalem District Court, indicted on 15 criminal charges including crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people. The chilling image of Eichmann in a glass cage was broadcast for viewers all over the world. In December 1961, Eichmann was convicted on all counts and in May of 1962, was hanged shortly before midnight, refusing a final meal.

Arendt, a German Jew, was already intellectually revered for “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” her book-length study tracing the deep-seeded roots of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Although not a trained reporter and, as a member of the social circle surrounding The Partisan Review, skeptical of The New Yorker, which many thought of as light and frivolous, Arendt suggested to editor William Shawn that he send her to Jerusalem to cover the trial. From most reports, he was more than happy to have a thinker of her renown writing for the magazine, and was even excited about the exchange of ideas that would spread in response.

Arendt’s report from the trial, published in five parts, immediately caused a firestorm across the intellectual community. Her widely misunderstood thoughts on the banality of evil, and her condemnation of Jewish councils that collaborated with Nazis, struck many as a denial of innocence of the Jewish people. Arendt steadfastly claimed she was simply presenting facts and couldn’t understand the uproar, despite factual errors that have been documented since. Reporting on a public forum concerning Arendt, presented by Dissent Magazine, the poet Robert Lowell described the intense atmosphere in the New York Review of Books. “The meeting was like a trial, the stoning of an outcast member of the family,” Lowell wrote. “Any sneering overemphasis on Hannah, who had been invited but was away teaching in Chicago, was greeted with divisive clapping or savage sighs of amazement.” The intellectual community that once praised her now looked at her as a pariah.

Although Von Trotta sets “Hannah Arendt” during this period of strife, she is less interested in the specifics of the controversy surrounding Arendt’s work than how it manifests itself. Much of the focus in the film is on the relationship between Arendt and McCarthy, who, though this is only hinted at in the film, was going through an equally painful controversy surrounding her novel, “The Group.” In the film, the friends are surrounded by domineering men who circle around them like vultures: spouses, mentors, and intellectual counterparts who only treat them as contemporaries when necessary. Arendt refused to conform to the ideas of the men around her, unwilling to be a spokesperson for any group or trapped by a set way of looking at the world. The intense scorn, Von Trotta seems to say, has more to do with Arendt being female than her ideas.

The film becomes muddled when it draws connections between the Eichmann trial and Arendt’s affair with her former professor, Martin Heidegger, who she (temporarily) broke contact with after he embraced the Nazi Party. Presented in flashbacks, the brief interactions with Heidegger are supposed to convey the troubled nature of the trial, the war, and the complex questions Arendt was trying to answer, but these scenes ultimately feel like they exist in a different film. The full story of Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger, equally as interesting as the story told in Von Trotta’s film, is worthy of its own space.

“Hannah Arendt,” currently screening at New York’s Film Forum, is more than an interesting historical document or gossipy intellectual footnote, though it works very well as both. In her refusal to back down from exploring forms of evil, and our culpability within those forms, Arendt was a prescient and inspiring thinker who deserves to be reexamined and used as a model for how we investigate the past and question the present.

Related: Margarethe von Trotta on Filming Hannah Arendt’s Public Ordeal.

For the first time ever, France and Germany have traded pavilions at the Venice Biennale. The works of Anri Sala, chosen to represent France, are on display in the German pavilion, curated by Christine Macel, while Germany has selected four artists, Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar, Santu Mofokeng, and Dayanita Singh, to show their work in the French pavilion, curated by Susanne Gaensheimer. The idea of the pavilion exchange was actually suggested ten years ago as a sign of Franco-German harmony but is only happening now, with the agreement of the artists and with each pavilion organized independently. 

Visitors to both pavilions may be surprised by what very different choices they have made: For France, the work of a single artist related to the world of music, and, for Germany, four installations on the theme of identity. Nothing connects the art shown by the two countries. So it seems that the trade has been fundamentally respectful of the wishes of each artist and committed to showing the diversity of the European art scene — or even the international art scene in the case of Germany, whose artists are from four different nations.

The German Pavilion

The German pavilion presents four striking installations on the theme of identity, and a close viewing reveals each one to be worthy of attention. However, there’s a bit of a sense of déjà vu when seeing Ai Weiwei’s installation — wooden stools linked together and piled up to the ceiling — which is reminiscent of things seen before (as in Tadashi Kawamata’s work, for example). Set up in the main room of the French pavilion, Ai’s installation serves as an almost decorative introduction to the other artists’ work. While it can be considered in terms of Chinese culture, the installation seems just to skim the surface of the theme of identity.

Santu Mofokeng lays out his artistic approach in a poetic text that treats the duality of his identity in a South African context. On the one hand there are spirits and the apparitions of the ancestors, and, on the other, the artist’s distance from these “fables.” Torn between two worlds and torn apart by the history of apartheid in South Africa, Mofokeng revisits the world of the ancestors in photographs that combine religion and popular beliefs in the Mpumalanga province in the northeast of the country, where factories were built on the exact sites that were once visited as places of worship and cemeteries but are now off-limits to the indigenous people. In this way, Mofokeng, who began his artistic career documenting apartheid in Soweto in the 1970s, has created a reflection on divided identities and the stealing of popular memory in South Africa.

In Dayanita Singh’s work, identity becomes the place for a complex process of questioning connected to sexuality. With her wonderful film of a Hindu eunuch and its accompanying series of photographs documenting various archives of Hindu birth certificates and identity papers, Singh examines the deprivation of sexual identity or the accepted androgyny of the eunuchs, asking the very contemporary question: isn’t identity above all sexual?

Finally, Romuald Karmakar’s work is less poetic and addresses politics directly in two videos. One is a video of a neo-Nazi protest in Berlin on May 8, 2005, during the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The other shows a well-known German actor, Manfred Zapatka, reciting the “Hamburg lectures,” which the Salafist Mohammed Fizazi, an associate of the September 11th terrorists, was in the habit of reciting in the city’s mosque. Karmakar thus puts these two films about two kinds of extremism on the same level in recent German history. A third video, “Anticipation,” depicts trees gently waving in the wind. It was filmed in Massachusetts in October 2012, just before Hurricane Sandy struck. This film seems to serve as a metaphor for the natural restrictions affecting human lives. We seem to be at the mercy of natural disasters in the same way that we’re at the mercy of extremist attacks.

Through the work of Mofokeng, Singh, and Karmakar, the German pavilion presents a concept of minority identity that is broken up, fragmented. It is thus impossible to establish a single image of the pavilion. These works of art can be connected only through real-life similarities between minority identities that are destroyed by nationalism in the work of Mofokeng and Singh, while Karmakar crystallizes extremist tensions. The works function completely independently and unfortunately lack any sense of connection.

The French Pavilion: Anri Sala

“Making the historic setting into a sound box” is how Christine Macel has described her curatorial approach, and this seems to be a perfect formula for introducing Anri Sala’s “Ravel Ravel Unravel” at the Biennale. The German pavilion, which was built by the Nazis in the Giardini in 1937, has been split up into three parts. Visitors enter through the small door on the left side of the building and leave by the right side. While Sala often creates temporal and narrative wholes, here the story of Maurice Ravel’s concerto in D major for the left hand seems at first glance to dissolve in this presentation, which consists of two videos of two pianists, Louis Lortie and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, playing the concerto at different tempos, along with videos of DJ Chloé trying to synchronize the playing of the pianists on two records. The films of the pianists are shown in an anechoic chamber and the camera follows the movements of their left hands on the piano keys.

There’s nothing documentary here concerning Ravel’s concerto. The documentary aspect applies more to the DJ’s performance, as, especially in the last room of the installation, she operates the turntables in an almost surgical manner. Unlike the pianists, the DJ doesn’t interpret Ravel’s concerto. It’s almost as if via this performance she reproduces the playing of a left and a right hand. In this way, Sala’s vision brings together musical interpretation and composition, as in contemporary music. And in this double movement, the artist problematizes the concerto itself as a musical creation that now approaches jazz or repetitive music.

This seems almost like a betrayal of Ravel, who was so adamant that pianist Paul Wittgenstein play the concerto according to the composer’s intentions. Anechoic chambers were originally used for military testing, to measure and control the noise of detonations of weapons, and, in Sala’s installation, this chamber thus recalls the military context of the German pavilion. Now dedicated entirely to music and peace, the pavilion takes on an aspect of utopian architecture. Sala’s installation also evokes the violent history behind this concerto: Wittgenstein asked Ravel, who was a pacifist, to write a concerto for the left hand because his right arm had been amputated during World War I, a tragic loss that he treated with music to the extent that he could. 

To see images from the French and German pavilions, click on the slideshow.

– The Venice Biennale kicked off this week, with Sarah Sze’s subtle American pavilion, New Zealander Bill Cubert’s under-valued light art, and Mathias Poledna’s heartwarming animated film for the Austrian showing. Art+Auction previewed Jesper Just's film for the biennale and Coline Milliard reviewed Massimiliano Gioni’s “The Encyclopedic Palace,” calling it “the most successful Venice Biennale exhibition in recent years.”

– Benjamin Sutton went to the Brooklyn Museum to take an in-depth look at Valerie Hegarty’s wild interventions in the museum’s period rooms.

– Julia Halperin focused in on Warhol Foundation head and former politician Joel Wachs.

– Ben Davis skewered the art market in this timely analysis of what the Detroit Institute of Art’s plights says about the fate of art.

– Cooper Union’s annual art show opened as students still stage a round-the-clock protest upstairs in president Jamshed Bharucha’s office.

– Rapidly growing Dallas-based auction house, Heritage Auctions, gained 5,000 square feet of space on New York’s Park Avenue.

– Janelle Zara interviewed the co-founders of Shanghai-based architecture firm Neri & Hu Design Research Office on the ways that a Chinese identity influences their design practice.

– Our weekly “Planet Art” roundup featured great shows from Austria to Mexico that are on view this month.

– Rob Sharp reported from London that the 10th year of Frieze will debut a leaner fair, more geared at professionals.

– BLOUIN ARTINFO held our first-ever art fair essay contest, and winner Leo Curbelo’s entry on Frieze New Yorkis just what we were hoping for.

VIDEOS OF THE WEEK:

In September 2011, at the Shanghai International Commodity Auction Company, a bottle of 1858 Cuvée Léonie Cognac direct from the cellars of Pierre Croizet was hammered down at RMB1 million ($161,000), the highest price ever paid for a bottle of cognac at auction. While record lots are often anomalies, the sale exemplified several key traits of the collectible spirits market, including the availability of fine drinking brandies more than a century old, the importance of provenance in achieving high prices, and the increasing influence of the Asian market. Cognac, however, is not the only spirit gaining collector interest. “Historically, single malt whiskey has performed better,” says Bonhams whiskey expert Martin Green. According to Paris Artcurial wine and spirits expert Laurie Matheson, both of them offer the same advantage for collectors: “They’re not as fragile as wine and therefore easier to store under normal conditions.” Still, those looking to start a collection should consider a few tips from experts before stocking bottles of either potent potable.

COGNAC

HISTORY AND CLASSIFICATION 

While cognac is today considered one of France’s luxuries, its history is both international and working-class. Production of brandy began in the 16th century to satisfy demand from Dutch sailors for an alcohol that would survive the long voyage to the East Indies. By happy coincidence, the vineyard surrounding the harbor of La Rochelle in southwest France produced a white wine that was difficult to store but well suited for distillation. Soon the nearby town of Cognac became the center of production. As British trade in the elixir emerged and grew, English merchants created the distinction between cognac’s two most renowned terroirs: Grande Champagne and Petite Champagne (which have nothing to do with the region that produces the effervescent wine). The British also created the cognac age scale, indicating the time spent in barrels: very special (VS) for at least two years, very superior old pale (VSOP) or reserve for at least four years, and XO (extra old) or Napoleon for a minimum of six years.

PRODUCTION

Cognac, like all brandies, is distilled wine. Current production involves a complex network of thousands of vine growers, winemakers, independent distillers, and corporate brands. Although it must be distilled twice and aged for at least two years in barrels, the intricacies involved allow for great variety in methods of production. But all cognacs are the end product of blending. Wines are mixed prior to distillation, and brandies that have been aged one to three years are put up together in casks. Most bottlings contain a combination of young and old spirits. “Only five percent of our production comes from our own vineyard,” says Benoît Fil, cellar master at Martell. For Rémy Martin Louis XIII, some 1,200 different spirits may be used.

COLLECTING

“There are three reasons why people build a collection,” says Michael Ganne, head of Continental wine and spirits at Christie’s: “because you want to drink it; as an investment; or to see thousands of beautiful bottles in your home.” Of course, these motivations are not mutually exclusive, and it would make little sense to put the effort into collecting if you have not developed a taste for the elixir. With age, the palate goes from light fruit (mostly citrus) and flowers to dark notes of prune, chocolate, toffee (sometimes due to the legal addition of caramel), even tobacco. Other factors to be considered when buying for a collection are vintage, brand name, and the style of the bottle. A collector may choose according to various criteria. “You can have every vintage from 1800 to 1900 to resell as a vertical,” Ganne says. “Or you can buy all the bottles of one great vintage, to control its market.”

VINTAGE

Many very old vintages are available, and there are fewer risks in purchasing them compared with old bottles of wine. “Cognac from the 1850s will be perfect, and the alcohol will be less aggressive,” says Ganne. Furthermore, these old bottles are quite affordable. A typical 1830 cognac can be had for around $1,700, and bottles of 1811 can be bought for $2,000. By comparison, a bottle of Château d’Yquem 1811 was sold for £75,000 ($112,000) by the Antique Wine Company in London two years ago. “You don’t have to buy 19th-century cognacs; it’s quite easy to find some early 20th-century bottles for really good prices,” Ganne says. “A 1914 bottle can be bought for €500 to €600” ($600 to $750). For more recent vintages, “Only buy the top market product, with an announced number of bottles produced,” says Matheson, of Artcurial. “You have to have a brand with a quality reputation, not neces­sarily the best known.”

TOP MAKES

Because cognacs are blends, brands producing larger batches tend to show greater variation with age. Collectors favor less-well-known brands that bottle their spirits in limited editions, thereby guaranteeing a more constant level of quality. “A.E. Dor, Hine, Ragnaud Sabourin, Delamain, Croizet, Lheraud, Monnier, and Gourmel are often featured at our auctions,” says Matheson. Of these, each is distinctive both in taste and in marketing approach. Hine is quite rare with a more elegant, complex, and strict style than that from a familiar trade brand such as Courvoisier. A.E. Dor still produces spirits under its label but also owns very old vintages. Similarly, Croizet still has old bottles, although they decline to say just how many. The maker will sell directly only to those it designates true connoisseurs. The record-setting Cuvée Léonie is said to be available for $157,000. The 1883 and 1889 vintages can be had for $14,000 and $12,000, respectively. These prices are aided by the impeccable provenance of bottles that never left the producer’s cellars.

AND THE OBSCURE

Because brandy holds up over time, bottles have outlived the companies that produced them. “Some companies that have disappeared are still famous,” says Ganne. “If you buy Eschenauer, Pierre Chabanneau, Fromy, Bignon, it’s likely the cognac will be very good.” Saulnier Frères, which stopped producing cognac in the 18th century, is somewhat obscure, yet a Réserve de Saint Amand de Graves 1789 sold for SF27,600 ($29,000) at Christie’s Geneva in November 2012. Provenance can help achieve good prices for some bottles that don’t even have a label. “Last year in London we sold cognac and other spirits from La Tour d’Argent,” Ganne notes. “The bottles were purchased and cellar-stored by the restaurant a very long time ago.” Two 2.5-litre bottles of 1805 grand champagne cognac went for £25,300 ($38,000) each. A vintage alone can be enough to give value to an anonymous bottle. Look for those dating to the time of Napoleon—vintages from 1800 to 1815—with some bottled for the emperor himself carrying markings on the neck to indicate a royal purchase.

DECANTERS

Among a subset of collectors, the beautiful decanters, made by such notable firms as Lalique, Baccarat, Daum, and Sèvres, create value.  Retail decanters released in larger editions are considered collectible only after 20 to 30 years of proper storage. Rare examples include those donated by the manufacturers to be purchased at the Part des Anges charity auction, held each September in Cherves-Richemont, near Cognac. Of course, the prices cannot be considered market, but “the quality of the cognacs in the auction is serious,” says Matheson. Among well-known examples is a run produced for Courvoisier of 12,000 bottles serigraphed with seven different images by Erté. The last sets of this 30-year-old edition were released in the U.S. in 2008 for $10,000. Auction prices for the lots vary between $3,000 and $18,000, with a complete series sold by Bonhams in San Francisco on March 9 for $7,735. Rémy Martin created its Louis XIII decanter in 1874, based on the design of a 16th-century metal flask. Erratic auction prices commonly range from $800 to $4,000, depending on the bottling, the oldest being the most expensive. In 2007 the house released a century-old liquor in a special version of the bottle called the Louis XIII Black Pearl. One example from a limited edition fetched $HK190,400 ($25,000) after a bidding war at Bonhams Hong Kong in November 2012, but similar bottles are often purchased at auction for around $7,000.

WHISKEY

HISTORY AND CLASSIFICATION

Scotch whiskey dates back to the 15th century, as evidenced by records of malt being sent to a monk in 1494 for the distillation of “aquavitae.” The first distillery license was granted to the Scotch whiskey industries, including the Macallan and Glenlivet brands, in 1824. “Prior to that date, people were distilling without a license,” says Green, of Bonhams. Despite its world renown, it is a contracting industry. In the 1920s, when numerous distilleries were taken over by Scotland’s United Distillers Company, “around 80 distilleries were closed,” says French retailer Thierry Richard, who seeks the best remaining barrels from these vanished companies and bottles them in very limited editions. Once home to 30 distilleries, Campbeltown, on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland, now has only three. Scottish production is divided into three main regions, each known for its own style. Speyside, east of Inverness, is the birthplace of Scotch and home to still-famous brands like Glenfiddich and Glenlivet. Scotch from this region is notable for its balanced style, with both peat and fruit and notes of bourbon and sherry. The Lowland, south of Glasgow, offers spirits with a light, round style, while the Highland to the north is associated with more robust whiskeys.

PRODUCTION

The original principle still remains: Grain, most often barley, is fermented in water and the malt is distilled to extract the alcohol, which is then put up in casks to mellow. Although Scotland’s regions are known for just a few general styles, there is great diversity of flavors due to the different qualities of barley; whether or not peat is used and in what proportion to the malt; the purity of the water; and the stills employed. However, the most dramatic differences come from the types of casks, which are often recycled. Barrels imported from Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, that have been used to age sherry can add dark fruit flavors, while American bourbon barrels give vanilla and toffee notes. To preserve the extraordinary complexity derived from these barrels, single-cask bottlings are a common practice for whiskey. Properly stored, whiskey ages only while it’s in the barrel. Unlike wine, the maturation process doesn’t continue after it’s bottled. Thus, a 50-year-old whiskey has spent half a century in a cask.

COLLECTING

Collecting whiskey can be “a bit more complicated than collecting cognac,” Ganne says. “If you really want to understand whiskey, you have to be passionate.” The difficulty stems from the sheer amount of information one needs to gauge the true value of the bottles available for consumption or trade. The distillation date, cask number, aging time, bottle quantity, bottle date, and sometimes the rank number in the bottling determine the final price. David Clelland, who founded 1494ad.com, a consultancy for interested buyers, advises beginners to “start with a single distillery, do your research, attend tastings and events from the distillery wherever you are in the world, and look to buy that distillery’s releases at auction.” After building a solid base, “you can add other distilleries as you discover them and learn more,” he says.

INVESTMENT

“In the 1980s whiskey became a very popular thing to collect, a way of investing money. Whiskey auctions have been very dynamic since,” says Green. Unlike cognac, it’s difficult to find really old whiskeys, and the gap between known retail brands and auction stars is small, according to Ganne. Thus, the collecting strategy is quite clear: Collect well-known brands that are more likely to appreciate and expect returns only over the long term. Product by independent companies is trickier to assess, but time often creates value. An interesting speculation is in “the direction of the distillery-bottled malts, particularly the limited editions,” Green says.

THE MACALLAN

The undisputed top distillery is The Macallan, located in the Highland but understood stylistically to be a Speyside distillery. It is sweet, fruity, and spicy with a high level of alcohol, up to 66 percent. The Macallan team studies the company’s older malts to determine what gives each whiskey its unique flavor. The company taste-tests current and vintage casks and buys old vintages at auction. At the Christie’s Geneva spirits auction in November 2012, a collection of 98 Macallan bottles of malts ranging in age from 29 to 56 years old of the vintages 1937 to 1974, realized $450,000 on a high estimate of $358,000. During a 2007 Christie’s New York sale, a 1926 bottle of Macallan estimated at $20,000 to $30,000 reached $54,000, a price rarely seen except at charity auctions.

AND OTHER TOP BRANDS

Dalmore, in the Highland region, has a rich mouthfeel. An Oculus decanter by Lalique filled with a unique Dalmore blend, was sold for £27,600 ($46,000) at Bonhams Edinburgh in 2009. Glenfarclas of Speyside provides aromas of ripe fruits and spices. One of its auction highlights is a 50-year-old whiskey from1955 that sold for $HK71,400 ($9,000) at Bonhams Hong Kong in late 2012. Another Speyside, Glenfiddich, offers a generally unctuous mouthfeel with fruity and slightly smoked flavors. A Glenfiddich Janet Sheeds Roberts Reserve achieved £46,860 ($70,000) at Bonhams Edinburgh in 2011. Glenlivet, the third of the well-known Speyside distilleries, produces whiskey with the aromas of flowers, citrus fruits, and spices. A bottle of the 1883 vintage, 48 years old, reached £18,750 ($28,000) at Bonhams Edinburgh in 2007. Springbank, one of the last remaining distilleries from the tiny Campbeltown region, creates a powerful whiskey that is both peated and smoked. A 50-year-old bottle fetched £6,875 ($8,951) at a recent Edinburgh sale.

Sharon Stone is the talk of the lunch table when I join the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos and her staff for a family-style meal a few days after the March opening of her exhibition at Lisbon’s Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, which attracted 4,600 weekend visitors, Stone among them. The show is the artist’s largest to date in Portugal and a reprise of her Versailles commission last summer, this time set in a 19th-century royal palace. It is anticipated to be one of the season’s major cultural events in the city, a fact underscored by the commercial for it that appears on the flat-screen television as we tuck into chicken with spinach and rice.

Vasconcelos’s star has risen quickly since her breakout at the 52nd Biennale de Venezia in 2005, when curator Rosa Martínez chose A noiva (“the Bride”), 2001–05, a chandelier sculpture made of some 25,000 tampons, for a front-and-center position in the Arsenale. Inverting connotations of purity and privacy, the piece deploys ready mades, domestic in origin, in a bravado public gesture that is a Vasconcelos hallmark. Subsequent works, in media ranging from yarn to tile to marble to iron, shown at the Palazzo Grassi in 2011 and at her galleries—Galerie Nathalie Obadiain Paris and Brussels, Galeria Horrach Moya in Majorca, Casa Triângulo in São Paulo, and, until recently, Haunch of Venison in London and New York— delight and seduce with saturated colors, touch-me textures, and Pop slickness. “She is constantly reinventing herself in her work,” says Obadia. Many trumpet their handmade-ness with craft techniques or labor-intensive repetition. Often there is a kinetic or musical component: Coraçao independente vermelho (“red independent heart”), 2005, a 12 1/2-foot-tall organ modeled in thousands of plastic forks, spoons, and knives, spins to the voice of fado legend Amália Rodrigues. The works almost always feature some element that links them directly to Portugal, which is surely one reason the cash-strapped country (which effectively dissolved its culture ministry in 2011) tapped Vasconcelos for its national pavilion in this year’s Biennale.

These pieces nevertheless found an apt setting last year at Versailles, when Vasconcelos became the fifth and youngest artist, and the first woman, to receive the nod for the palace’s summer exhibition, which attracted record attendance. At first blush her work might seem to share a lineage with past honorees Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, but her show was both bigger and subtler, responding to and appropriating each exhibition site individually. The Hall of Mirrors, for example, played host to Marilyn, 2011, a monumental pair of women’s pumps rendered in stainless-steel cooking pots and lids. In the Gallery of Battles, where neoclassical murals document France’s military history, she hung three bulbous pieces from her “Valkyrie” series—stuffed sculptures in a patchwork of sumptuous fabrics dripping with tassels, beads, and trim. They are sexually suggestive and jester-like and bring to mind thoughts of a spreading contagion.

Contamination is an important word at Atelier Vasconcelos. It describes the process by which crocheted medallions are joined to sheath porcelain faience animals, which form a good part of the artist’s Palácio da Ajuda show. It is also how she thinks of her general strategy. Her deceptively approachable pieces aren’t exactly conceptual Trojan horses, designed to smuggle a foreign idea and disrupt native thought, but instead effect a slower-acting subversion of apparent binaries. “What I try is to pick some points and put them in perspective,” explains Vasconcelos. “That means that every person can look at them and, through their own experience and personal history, can reason with them. I don’t try to give them solutions.”

The artist—who despite her boosterish national focus was born in Paris to parents from colonial Mozambique— likens her approach to Portugal’s polyglot former empire, whose conquering was less violent than Spain’s, wider ranging, and more integrated. “That’s what I mean with ‘contamination’: making your culture part of another and leaving space for you to be contaminated by it in return.”

In that sense, the word could also be used to describe how ideas are passed down the chain of command from Vasconcelos to her 30-odd employees. Situated in a vast former grain-storage building on the Tagus River just west of Lisbon’s center, her studio is a large concrete space regularly enlivened by riotous color. At one end of the main room, a flannel-clad young man is carefully shaping red plastic forks with a heat gun; at the other, three women sit at sewing tables, wrestling sections of blue fabric through their machines. Spread on the floor in front of them is a bag of foam peanuts and a vast quilt of the same blue fabric, “all for Venice,” explains Vasconcelos’s press liaison. The long drafting table pinned with sheet after sheet of blue watercolors of Lisbon is all for Venice too. She leads me through a smaller room devoted to knitting and crochet, with meticulously labeled bins containing a trim shop’s worth of ribbons, threads, and gewgaws, and into another large room devoted to the more heavy-duty aspects, such as engineering and hardware.

A hallway hung with photographs of openings and studio holiday parties leads to the architects’ office, where technical plans for works and exhibitions are drawn up. The walls are covered with cross-sections of boats and flooring samples— also, I’m told, for Venice. Upstairs there are financial and communications offices, a massage chair, and, at the heart of the hive, the artist’s office, with a purple crib for her daughter, Alice, born to Vasconcelos and her husband, Duarte Ramirez, in the thick of Versailles preparations in 2011.

As we talk, Vasconcelos doodles in her sketchbook. She rejects the romantic notion of the artist slaving away in solitude in a garret. Instead, she has orchestrated a studio that relies on specialized contributions from all corners. Trained in jewelry design and drawing at Lisbon’s Center of Art and Visual Communication before earning a master’s degree in contemporary art, she says, “With drawing I learned how to look, to compose colors and volumes. In jewelry I learned how to plan.” Sourcing of materials is key. The porcelain animals, for example, come from the Caldas da Rainha factory, founded in 1884 by ceramic artist Rafael Bordalo de Pinheiro. In 2008 it was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, but Vasconcelos— who played on the figurines’ kitsch value in works like Passerelle, 2005, a motorized conveyor that suspends porcelain dogs in loose collars that slip once the machinery is turned on stepped in with a large order. After she organized a grassroots campaign to preserve this patrimony, the factory was rescued by the Visabeira Group, an international conglomerate
 based in Portugal. Like everything else in her studio, these porcelains are organized neatly by type on shelves. Howling wolves, frogs, spiders, even the occasional Duchamp-style urinal await turns in the crochet and knitting room, where half a dozen women sit, fingers flying around hooks and yarn. Vasconcelos selects the colors for each animal and works with the knitters to devise a unique pattern that leaves selected features exposed. It takes about a week to completely encase a medium-size piece. It’s not for nothing titles often invoke the memory of a tragic heroine: In the old days, Vasconcelos notes, “women were illiterate, they couldn’t write or count, but crochet was a way of expression.”

This raises an interesting, and intentional, quandary when it comes to the themes of domestic labor present in her art, but Vasconcelos dismisses the suggestion that using these workers, or the women in Portalegre whom she commissions to make traditional felt appliqués and tapestries, is exploitation. “First of all, I pay,” she says. “I use their craftsmanship but transform it. Anyone can buy a Bordalo in the store; anyone can buy a crocheted napkin. What I do with the mixture is my own. I’m using the materials to put forward a concept. Of course,” she adds, “I work on the pieces myself all the time, but I don’t spend eight hours knitting.” Before, it used to take a long time to produce a large piece—the first heart took four months. Now, she says, a large staff is simply “what we need to be professional.” She did 25 shows in 2011 but turned down many more. “I need to have time to control all steps of the way. If people have to wait, OK, they’ll wait. This is not a factory.”

That said, organization is privileged, and Vasconcelos makes sure little is left to chance. Someone from the studio travels for each exhibition to make sure the work is unpacked and installed correctly. The shipping crates are painted bright red for easy identification. Ideas that emerge from the artist’s sketchbook are immediately translated into technical drawings by the architects, who pass them along to the fabrication team, led by Vasconcelos’s production director
 of 14 years, Fernando Monteiro, a veteran of special effects
in the film industry. Solutions to problems are proposed by 
the various departments. “Everybody starts adding their 
own professional look to the project,” says Vasconcelos. “Then we start working on the budget, permits, legal stuff, financials...and then I start public relations. I go and see if I can raise the money.” That is another key element that cannot be outsourced: the hustle.

For her Venice project, curated by Miguel Amado, the artist is receiving only €175,000 from the government; the rest will come from global corporate and private donors. Trafaria Praia is a prime example of her precise planning and versatility across platforms. Instead of using the 2011 Biennale venue, the Fondaco Marcello, Vasconcelos staged the Portuguese pavilion on a Lisbon ferryboat, which will make daily tours of the Canale di San Marco. “It has no glamour whatsoever,” she says. “In Venice, too, people take the vaporetto every day. It’s what connects these two cities today.” There is also a historical link, as Venice’s power as the distributor of Asian goods in the 15th century declined once Portugal found sea routes to the East. “In a way, we’re responsible for Venice being the way it is today,” Vasconcelos says. “And where once the two cites were known for economic reasons, now they are known for touristic reasons.”

The boat’s midlevel exterior will be covered in antique-style azueljo tiles—a common material in her work—painted with a panorama of the contemporary Lisbon skyline. The inside will be lined in textiles and a kind of magic forest of soft sculpture that twinkles with Christmas lights. “The outside is Lisbon, but then you get inside and you discover a new identity, a new reality,” says Vasconcelos. “It’s not a house, it’s not a boat; what is it? That’s where the poetry starts. People will fill in and interpret it with their own references.

“We Portuguese look at things in a very poetic way,” the artist muses. “The sea has always been an escape, a solution; if nothing works, you can always leave. So my boat is just a place you can go and have a poetic solution for yourself.”

This article appears in the June 2013 issue of Art+Auction.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

Art made with light is having a moment, with pioneers of California Light and Space getting their due and cutting-edge technology putting new effects at the disposal of today's artists. In this five-part series, we look at the connections between past and present, as well as investigating the challenges of creating and trading in works from this challenging genre of work.  

Light continues to be an inspiring medium for emerging artists looking, as their forebears did, to tap into its mystical and scientific properties. But these artists are less interested in the formal aspects of light than they are in what this medium enables them to convey. Some use it to explore scientific properties (Conrad Shawcross) or to create poetic dispatches to, or from, the universe (Katie Paterson). Rising stars continue to use illumination to engage viewers, whether in playful interactive works (Camille Utterback) or in immersive settings by joining light with sound for an atmosphere redolent of a 90s night club (Haroon Mirza). Others aim to transform everyday items like chairs and doorframes into dangerous and confounding objects (Ivan Navarro). While the newer generation of artists is opting for digital technology, LED tape, or the more prosaic halogen over the neon and fluorescents of their predecessors, their work explores light’s experiential possibilities while suggesting a more expansive narrative of communication and interconnectedness.

Katie Paterson

Scottish artist Katie Paterson won viewers over when she offered them a lifetime supply of moonlight. Her 2008 work,“Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight,” consisted of a bare blue halogen bulb hanging in a darkened gallery enshrouded in a mysterious glow. The bulb, which was specially produced to replicate the qualities of moonlight, comes with a lifetime's supply (289 bulbs, each one lasting 2,000 hours) of these blue bulbs. That was just after Paterson graduated from the Slade School of Art. Soon after, the artist showed her work in Canada, Sweden, and France, and took part in Altermodern: Tate Trienniale 2009, in London, and New York’s Performa 09. She’s been picked up by James Cohan Gallery in New York where she had a solo exhibition in 2011, and Ingleby Gallery in Scotland where she’ll have her first solo show in 2014.

Though Paterson’s work is multi-disciplinary, it often involves the sun, moon, or stars as well as a team of scientists. For one of her first major works, “Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon (2007),” Paterson transformed Beethoven’s famed sonata into Morse code, bounced those signals off the moon, retrieved the signals, and translated them back into musical notes and had them programmed into a player piano. In 2010, for “Streetlight Storm,” Paterson caused lights along Deal Pier, in Kent, UK, to flicker in time with live lightning storms happening around the world. And while this artist is known for her use of light, her “lifelong project,” ironically, is called the “History of Darkness,” for which Paterson has been collecting photographic images of some of the darkest points across the universe.

Ivan Navarro

Ivan Navarro is maybe best known for recreating Marcel Breuer’s modernist Wassily Chair from fluorescent light tubes. He’s since created luminescent chairs, doors, and ladders that similarly build on modernist design but with a more edgy end — “You Sit, You Die” (2002) is a chaise longue that suggests you would be electrocuted if you tried to use it. Born in Santiago, Chile, Navarro grew up within the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet with a constant fear of being abducted. Later, as an artist, he turned to light as a hopeful medium, one he used to help him comprehend his country’s history.

“There is a certain amount of fear in my pieces,” he once said. If you look into one of his light-filled boxes, or doorframes, what you’ll encounter is a series of bulbs of a uniform color that appear, thanks to mirrors, to reproduce infinitely, carrying your gaze into a seemingly endless abyss. A 2007 doorframe work, “Dead End,” sold at Phillips in New York in 2008 for $97,000. The artist, who is represented by Paul Kasmin in New York and is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. among other private and public collections, represented Chile in the 53rd Venice Biennale.

Conrad Shawcross

Conrad Shawcross got his first big career bump when collector Charles Saatchi snapped up one of his works (a functioning loom that was a metaphorical take on the nervous system) and included it in the show “New Blood” in 2004, one year after Shawcross graduated from Slade School of Art in London. That same year, the London-based artist created “Light Perpetual I,” one of his earliest lightworks. Situated in a mesh cage and constructed from a light bulb affixed to an articulated arm that rotates at the speed of 200rpm, the oak, steel, and light contraption creates through its fluctuations a lighted illusory shape that floats in space. In this model of String Theory, Shawcross attempts to show that matter is composed of continuous loops of energy, as opposed to individual particles.

Shawcross’s poetic feats of luminescent engineering have since been shown at the Pace Gallery in New York, the National Gallery in London, and Palais de Tokyo in Paris among many other galleries and museums worldwide. While his contraptions are often noted for their intricate Rube Goldberg-type functionality, they also often instill the spirit and feel of space exploration as well as hark back to the kinetic works of Jean Tinguely. In 2008, Shawcross was named by UK publication the Observer as among the 80 young artists who would define the countries culture, politics, and economics for the 21st century.

Camille Utterback

Camille Utterback is best known for her interactive sculptural installations, which employ light, architecture, and digital software to engage participants in kinetic play. For one of her first interactive works, “Text Rain” (1999), which she created with Israeli artist Romy Achituv, participants stand in front of a large lighted screen onto which they see a projection of themselves along with colorful animated falling letters. Moving their bodies, people can engage with the tumbling alphabet on the screen, by collecting the letters, spelling words, or simply letting them fall onto their arms and fingers. Trained as a painter, but earning her masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Utterback’s fusion of traditional artistic mediums with digital media have made her a favorite choice for public art projects.

“Aurora Organ,” was a 2009 public project at the Showplace Theaters in St. Louis where six columns of light were strung up over the main stairway entrance, and the hand railings were outfitted with glass sensors that responded to peoples’ touch, causing painterly bursts of color in the hanging rods and transforming the small gestures of theater-goers into architectural patterns of light. She had her first major museum exhibition earlier this year at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennesee. Utterback's work has also been shown at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, American Museum of the Moving Image, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. In 2002, Utterback picked up a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship as well as a Whitney Museum commission for the CODeDOC project on their ArtPort website. Solidifying her status as an artist to keep an eye on, in 2009, Utterback was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

Haroon Mirza

LED lights — in particular, the kind you’d see in a shop window — have become something of a regular feature of Haroon Mirza’s installation environments, which otherwise include sound and the things that produce them like old TVs, speakers, and record players. Stumbling upon one of his works is something like walking into a rave deconstructed into its component parts: sound, light, beats. Mirza, who is also a DJ, first garnered attention for his sound works, in particular “Anthemoessa” — an installation that included vintage record players, radios, projected film clips, and a Victorian painting — for which he won the 2011 Northern Art Prize in the UK. Later that year, at the 54th Venice Biennale, Mirza’s piece “The National Apavilion of Then and Now” — a sound-proof chamber in which an analog drone increased in volume as a glowing ring of light intensified until both suddenly shut off enveloping the viewers in silent darkness — was awarded the Silver Lion, the Biennale’s recognition for a promising young artist. He currently has a show at Lisson Gallery in London, and will be included in upcoming exhibitions at the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art.

To be fair, a multimedia work like Mirza's Venice project goes somewhat beyond the classification of “light art” — but that itself shows how far the kind of immersive, perception-bending installations pioneered in the '60s and '70s have expanded the frontiers of what we call art, and become part of the contemporary vocabulary. For today's artists, illumination has become just one element to use among others, one color of paint in their palette.

To see images connected to the works mentioned in this article, click on the slideshow.

The first exhibition in Spain of the so-called "Father of Impressionism," Camille Pissarro, opens on at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

The retrospective, which will run through to September 15, includes 79 of the artist's works from private collections and museums across the globe.

The Danish-French artist, who lived from 1830 to 1903, was a mentor to Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin, and an inspiration for painters worldwide. Cezanne dubbed him "the humble and colossal Pissarro". 

He mostly painted scenes of rural and urban French life, showing empathy for workers in the fields and streets. He sold few of his paintings in his lifetime but his works have fetched millions at auctions in recent decades.

– Aussies Seize Obscene Justin Bieber Collage: Austrialian police recently seized works by 25-year-old artist Paul Yore depicting children with sexual objects from an exhibition titled "Like Mike" at St. Kilda's Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts in Melbourne. Among the works confiscated was a collage of Justin Bieber’s head on a child’s body with a dildo. Although the works were eventually returned, Yore may be charged with the production and possession of child pornography. Arts officials in the country have spoken out against the situation. "What you can find in the internet within a couple of clicks is so much more sexually explicit than what was within this artwork," said National Association for the Visual Arts executive director Tamara Winikoff. [The Australian]

– Michigan Senate Protects DIA: A committee in the Michigan State Senate  has taken a major step to protect the art in the Detroit Institute of Arts’s collection with the passing of a bill this past Tuesday. The bill, which protects collections at all Michigan museums from being liquidated in the event of  municipal bankruptcy, passed on a vote of 5-0. "I introduced the bill to protect the art institutes in Michigan," said Senate majority leader Randy Richardville when introducing the bill. "A piece of art might have a certain value in terms of dollars, but like a family heirloom, the value goes beyond dollars." [Detroit Free Press]

– Warhol Foundation Sued Over Gretzky Polaroids: Vancouver-based dealer Frans Wynans is suing the Andy Warhol Foundation for auctioning off a group of Polaroid photographs that Andy Warhol took of Wayne Gretzky in 1983 when Warhol was commissioned to make six paintings of the hockey great. Wynans's company paid Gretzky $50,000 and royalties to license the resulting works, plus $175,000 to Warhol for producing them, under the agreement that although the artist retained copyright, he needed permission from Gretzky to "reproduce, restrike, utilize or otherwise exploit the Art," while Wynans was given exclusive rights to selling the works. The dealer's complaint continues: "Being fully occupied with the marketing and selling the Paintings and Prints, Mr. Wynans gave no thought to the Photos, of whose continued existence after the Art was produced, he was unaware." [Courthouse News]

– Christie's Pulls Brazilian Art Over Forgery Fears: In May Christie's made a last-minute decision to pull 10 works of Brazilian art from its Latin American sales — including pieces by Ivan Serpa, Mira Schendel, Ubi Bava, and more — all of which had come from the collection of Rio de Janeiro-based collector Ralph Santos Oliveira. One week later Phillips also took a work by artist Alfredo Volpi out of its Latina American auction. "They seemed very suspicious, clearly strange," said Gustavo Rebello, a dealer based in Rio who collects Serpa's work. "They also seemed too flat and plain to be Serpa paintings, especially the smaller ones." [TAN]

– London Galleries' Lopsided Gender Audit: The East London Fawcett Group has announced the results of a study that zeroes in on gender inequality in the London art world, and, unsurprisingly, those results aren't great. Of 100 commerical galleries in London, only 5 percent represent an equivalent number of female and male artists, not one woman was included in the top 100 auction lots of 2012, and in data from 134 commerical galleries, only 31 percent of represented artists were women. "By raising awareness of the challenges specific to female artists, we hope that the campaign will widen the dialogue around this issue and that as a result the gender balance will continue to improve," said Gemma Rolls-Bentley, arts director at ELF. "The art audit's message is one of optimism." [Guardian]

– UK Museum of Year Announced: After undergoing a major renovation last year, North London’s William Morris Gallery has won the UK’s annual Museum of the Year award, which comes with a £100,000 Art Fund prize. The gallery, named for Victorian designer William Morris, is devoted to showing Morris's work. The judges of the competition stated that the museum "set the highest standards of curatorship, and reached out impressively to its local community, and offers a memorable way of experiencing art of the highest quality in the context of a great historic personality." [Telegraph]

– Minneapolis Museum Gets $25M of Japanese Art: Libby and Bill Clark, California-based collectors who made their money in cattle breeding, have donated nearly 17,000 artifacts valued at $25 million to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. "I’m a fifth-generation central Californian and I wanted it to be on the West Coast if possible," Bill Clark said. "But when I considered the options, to be honest, they weren’t there… Minneapolis is one of the great cities in our country… I think it’s the perfect home for our collection because they’re going to continue our programs." An exhibition featuring more than 100 of the donated artworks will open at the MIA in October. [Start Tribune]

– Retiring Gallery Photographer Gives Away His Work: For the last four decades D. James Dee (who goes by "The Soho Photographer") has been taking photos of artworks and installation shots of exhibitions at New York City galleries, but now that he's retiring he's looking for a home for the roughly 250,000 slides and transparencies — mostly unlabeled — that he has produced during his career. He's hoping to place the collection with a non-profit so he can receive a tax deduction. "It has value to someone," Dee said. "Not to me… I’ve decided it is time to do the next thing in my life, while I still have the energy." [NYT]

– Ron Burgundy Gets Museum Show: In November, one month before the release of "Anchorman: The Legend Continues," the long-anticipated sequel to LACMA collector committee member Will Ferrell's 2004 comedy "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," Washington, D.C.'s Newseum will open "Anchorman: The Exhibit." Artifacts on view will include Burgundy's jazz flute, and an interactive KVWN-TV news anchor desk at which visitors can perform the legendary fictitious newsman's "You stay classy" farewell. [Washington Post]

– Robbed Collector Goes Rogue: After police could not solve the case of the 800-piece art collection that was stolen from Anthony Shaia’s Oregon home in late 2011, the art collector decided to take matters (and a .38 handgun) into his own hands to find the thieves. Back in April, at a local pizza parlor, Shaia threatened to shoot a 24-year-old man he suspected of being involved with the theft, if he did not talk to the police about the crime. Shaia has since pleaded guilty of coercion and unlawful use of a weapon. "I was just at my wits’ end," Shaia said. "I was trying do something to keep him there until police arrived, but then I ended up being arrested." [Register Guard]

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Despite his outlandish persona, hardly anybody remembers Morton Downey Jr. anymore. Say the name today, and you’ll get the conversational equivalent of a tumbleweed (or the assumption you’re talking about Iron Man). Has he really been completely forgotten? Or is it possible that his particular brand of egregious grandstanding has become so ubiquitous that it has not vanished but seeped deeply into the fabric of American popular culture? We may have left the man behind, but we’re stuck with his antics forever.

“Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie” traces the startling connect-the-dots between Mort, as he fans called him, and conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, the glut of fame-hungry reality television stars, and an obsession with what may be our most distinctive national character, the loud-mouthed quack.

With a face straight out of a Chuck Jones cartoon, Mort was born to be on television. Modeled after Joe Pyne, the 1950s and ’60s conservative talk show host with a wooden leg who would berate his guests, especially if they were hippies, the “Morton Downey Jr. Show” premiered on October 19, 1987. “Certain things really burn my buns,” the host muttered angrily to open the show, exhaling from one of the cigarettes he would chain smoke throughout each episode. The audience — predominantly white, male suburban meatheads — screamed in the background and mugged for the camera. Tom Shales, then television critic for the Washington Post, famously referred to Mort’s fans as a “hockey audience,” but the scene, with its public-access production qualities and reckless endangerment, resembles something more akin to a professional wrestling match, or small-scale Roman Coliseum housed in somebody’s dimly lit basement in Secaucus, New Jersey, where the show was filmed. Chairs were frequently broken and punches were thrown regularly. Mort would often physically remove guests who he didn’t agree with from the stage.

Was Mort a genius, presenting political commentary as a circus? Or was he truly out of his mind, a lunatic breaking down in front of a live audience? “Evocateur” thankfully doesn’t force an agenda on its viewers, but it gives us plenty of material to form our own opinions. While Pat Buchanan, interviewed in the film, may see Mort as an essential predecessor to the Fox News monolith of talking heads, there is plenty of evidence that the talk show host was a hollow fame-hungry shell who would have done anything for attention. If his quick ascension, and even quicker downfall — which included an embrace of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, complete with an unfortunate album — was calculated, as some believe, at some point Mort lost control of the dividing line between performance and reality.

There’s no denying that it’s fun to watch Mort scream, spit, and throw tantrums. But “Evocateur,” ultimately, is a sad and familiar tale, the Icarus myth for the modern television age. The last decade of Mort’s life, when the persona starts to cave in, is hard to watch, worse because you can see it coming from a mile away. The rise and fall is a story we all know, but that doesn’t mean we should not pay attention. Morton Downey Jr. may have been a lot of things, many of them horrible, but based on what has come in his wake, it’s hard to say he didn’t tap into acidic political discourse that was bubbling under the surface. Roger Ailes, after all, has since built an empire around the vitriolic celebrity TV host.

No matter if you’re disgusted by his buffoonish character or turned on by his provocative nature, Mort was a pioneer who ushered a wave of political commentary as theater. His life was lived like a long, slow motion car crash that’s impossible to stop. As another raspy-voiced man once said, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

“Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie” is in theaters now. 

It’s a bad sign when you feel the need to check the time during the middle of a movie. It’s a clear indication that you haven’t disappeared into the world of the film, and that, more often than not, you’re hoping the end credits are near. So to give you an idea of how much I disliked “After Earth,” just know this: I checked my phone well over 10 times. The film’s only 100 minutes long.

“After Earth” may be the worst film that I have ever paid money to see. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Will Smith (who also conceived the story) and his son Jaden, the film tells the tale of Cypher Raige (yes, that’s really his name) and his son Kitai, who, 1,000 years in the future, are the only survivors aboard a ship that crash lands on the no-longer-inhabited-by-humans Earth. To make matters worse, Cypher, general of Nova Prime’s Ranger Corps, is gravely injured, leaving it up to Kitai — who has not inherited his father’s courage or battle field acumen — to initiate the homing beacon in the tail of the ravaged ship. Two problems, though: 1) the tail of the ship is 100km away from the rest of the crash site, and 2) since humans abandoned Earth for Nova Prime, every single one of the planet’s inhabitants have evolved into a blood-thirsty-people-killing creatures. If all that sounds like the makings of bad sci-fi film, that’s because that’s exactly what “After Earth” is.

It’d be one thing if the weak story was the movie’s main issue, but it’s just one of many. The acting is atrocious, consisting mainly of characters grimacing into the camera. Plus, everyone speaks with this utterly strange and laughable Kennedy-esque accent. And, you’d think that having cost a reported $130 million to make, the film would at least look slick, but it doesn’t. The design of everything, from the costumes to the ships to Earth itself, looks unimaginative and chintzy, and the CGI, with the exception of the main monster, looks half a decade old. Worst of all is that the film bombards us with trite platitudes every few minutes (the movie’s tagline: “Danger is real. Fear is a choice”). It’s cute, I guess, but it felt like a tribute to certain controversial belief system that’s very popular among some celebrities.

If there’s one good thing to be said about “After Earth,” it’s that it proves that the American people don’t have completely bad taste. The film, a definite passion project for Will Smith, opened to a disappointing $27 million domestically and was third at the box office — it wasn’t even the week’s strongest debut (“Now You See Me,” a magic and crime drama, brought in $28.1 million, trailing only “Fast and Furious 6” over the weekend). Ever since 1996’s “Independence Day,” Smith has been practically a sure bet at the summer box office, but “After Earth” is easily his worst summer movie debut, besting (worsting?) the atrocious “Wild Wild West” (which, after an adjustment for inflation, brought in $38.7 million back in 1999) significantly. Come on, even one of last year’s big disasters, “John Carter,” had a better opening.

Friday sees the release of “The Internship,” a lowbrow comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson that attempts to recapture the (non-existent) magic of the duo’s past collaborations. That film and “Grown Ups 2” (due out July 12) are the only reasons I’m not ready to crown “After Earth” the summer’s worst movie just yet.

“After Earth”

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Writers: Gary Whitta and M. Night Shyamalan (Story by Will Smith)

Starring: Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Zoë Kravitz, Sophie Okonedo

Opening Weekend Gross: $27 million

Kristen Stewart has replaced Mia Wasikowska in Olivier Assayas’s next film, the English-language “Sils Maria,” which will be filmed in Switzerland and Germany this summer.

When Deadline reported yesterday on Stewart being cast in the movie as well as writer-director Peter Sattler’s Guantánamo Bay drama “Camp X-Ray,” its headline said Stewart has landed “leads” in both movies. By all accounts, however, Hollywood’s highest paid actress won’t be the star of “Sils Maria.”

The film is a portrait of a middle-aged actress, played by Juliette Binoche, for whom Assayas wrote it, reflecting on her past choices and where they have led her.

She becomes obsessed by a young actress (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is appearing in a controversial role that made the Binoche character famous 20 years before. Stewart will play Binoche’s assistant.

If it sounds a little like a continental “All About Eve,” Assayas possibly has something more existential in mind. Friedrich Nietzsche, regarded as one of the first existentialist philosophers, stayed in Sils-Maria, a section of Sils im Engadin/Segl, in the Maloja District of southeast Switzerland, in the summers of 1881 and 1883-88.

The Nietzsche-Haus is open to the public if the former Bella Swan fancies brushing up on the author of “Twilight of the Idols,” which he wrote in Sils-Maria between August 26 and September 3, 1888. Its title insists she must.

If Stewart’s character proves more pivotal than central in Assayas’s film, it should be creatively nourishing for an actress whose predominantly introspective style sometimes ill-suited her action sequences in the “Twilight” saga. Nor did she look comfortable in the awkward physical sequences of “On the Road.” Interiority, reticence, and reactivity have proved her strengths so far.

Assayas is a master at directing ensembles, as he showed in “Summer Hours” (which featured Binoche) and this year’s “Something in the Air.” Bringing together Binoche, Stewart, and Moretz in a film that seeks to analyze female ageing and careerism can scarcely fail to deliver psychological combustibility. “Sils Maria” should be ready for Cannes next year.

In “Canp X-Ray,” set for a late-summer start, Stewart will play a soldier from a small town who is posted to Guantánamo instead of being sent for a tour in Iraq. The Deadline article says she is abused by the Muslim detainees, “but forges an odd friendship with a young man” who’s been imprisoned there for eight years.  

For an abstract artist who primarily uses digital artistic tools like Photoshop, Travess Smalley comes off as peculiarly traditional. “I'm a painter,” Smalley told ARTINFO over G-chat, “who doesn't paint.” His compositions blend computer graphics with physical collage-making for a final product that looks like a cross between a canvas and a screen saver. Though the artist — who is currently in London for a group show — cites influences as varied as the cut-up compositions of Henri Matisse and the aesthetics of Trapper Keeper binders (popular with kids in the '80s and '90s when the 27-year Smalley was a tot), his biggest inspiration at the moment is Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner whose canvases he calls “dynamic” and “confident.” “There is an investment in the image and creating images,” he said, “that I am greatly drawn to in her work.”

One can see what he means. Smalley’s first solo exhibition in New York, “Capture Physical Presence,” which is currently on view through June 8 at Higher Pictures gallery, presents a selection of works that, from a distance, appear to be similar in look and feel to abstract paintings. Smalley’s “Capture Physical Presence #51” (a photomontage of black-and-white lozenge-like shapes) could be an update to Krasner’s “Night Creatures” (1995) — a picture of swirling two-toned ovals. But get closer to Smalley’s work and rather than seeing gobs of encrusted oil paint you’ll see a flat surface with hints of digital language — with smooth color gradients, perfectly cut shapes, and layered textures. The works are both prosaic and new-feeling, which is all part of Smalley’s plan. 

Though he’s young, and relatively little known, demand for work by this West-Virginia-born artist is already strong. All six works on view have been sold to private collections, some in presales. But that shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The artist has had little difficulty stirring interest in his work thus far — his hybrid abstractions were included in group shows worldwide even before he finished school. In 2011, he was included in the show “BYOB Venezia” at the Venice Biennale where he showed one of his “abstract visualizer videos” — a digital composition that looked like one of his paintings except that it appears to be rippling, like a windblown pond. This year, he was in the group show “Decenter: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show,” at the Abrons Arts Center, which featured 27 artists (including Sara VanDerBeek, Cory Arcangel, Andrew Kuo, and Liz Magic Laser) who “explore changes in perception brought on by the digital age” and whose work reflects the fragmentation and nonlinearity of the Cubist lexicon.

Fragmentation and nonlinearity are Smalley’s calling card. He starts out by creating digital paintings in Photoshop. After printing them out on a color laser printer, he cuts them up, and makes them into a collage using other source material like construction paper, drawings, and color gradient backdrops from magazines. After he’s done with his work (generally laid out in the standard dimensions of a sheet of paper), he’ll scan it back into the computer and further manipulate the collage in Photoshop in a process he likens to “a feedback loop.” Then he’ll blow up the final product to a much larger size and print it out. Each, though theoretically reproducible, is kept unique.

Smalley studied painting and digital printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University (2006) and went on to receive his BFA from Cooper Union in 2010. Though he had been making paintings, collages, and drawings, it was in 2010 at his Bushwick studio — a converted school — that Smalley first started scanning his images and combining his “very physical studio practice” with digital painting and image making. “When I made it digital, it opened up a whole other plane of options: opening the image in Photoshop, selectively changing colors, cutting out areas, rearranging areas. Very quickly I began to notice the similarities of the digital and physical side of my art making practice.”

Currently, Smalley is working on “Compositions in Clay,” a series of clay-based creations, for which he packs colorful clay onto a scanner bed to create high resolution scans he will then use as source material that he’ll digitally manipulate. That series will also be shown at Higher Pictures in late 2013 or early 2014, for the second of the two solo shows he’s on board for. He also hopes to do more “video vizualizers” (moving digital abstractions) when he finds the right programmer. “2-D static images are hard enough to show,” he said. “Showing animated work through time has so many other variables.”

To see images by Travess Smalley, click on the slideshow.

“International Art English” is back. The essay of the same name, penned by David Levine and Alix Rule and published in the online journal Triple Canopy one year ago, touched off a minor furor with its attempt to prove scientifically that the art world was a hive of pompous windbags — that is, that the official language of art was a linguistically meaningless jumble of buzzwords written in a tortured style imported from French theory, a claim the authors said they could verify through running 13 years of press releases through a computer. The concept of International Art English (IAE) got plenty of press pick-up, and has sustained various debates and forums in the months since. Now, the listserv/online theory journal e-flux — source of the original press releases analyzed by Levine and Rule — has issued two scathing replies attacking the essay for being smug and methodologically sloppy, courtesy Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl. I hear Levine and Rule are planning a fresh reply of their own tomorrow.

Is anything actually at stake in this tempest-in-a-teapot debate? Like Rosler, when it comes to the original article, I found the tremendous excitement it caused to be more significant than the argument itself. The central assertion of the “International Art English” essay, that today’s artspeak amounts to an entirely new language (it “has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English”), seemed both overstated and trivial — but most of all strangely tone deaf about the art world about which it claimed to speak so authoritatively.

At the outset, we should say that Levine and Rule’s decision to use e-flux’s press release archive as source material was obviously made for convenience, with their po-faced justification that press releases stand as the “purest articulation” of art language being an ex post facto justification. Yet it’s not the target of press releases per se that seems off to me but the assertion that these particular press releases stand for trends within the entire art world. As the authors mention themselves, the vast majority of what e-flux sends out hail from non-profits and biennials, institutions with quite specific reasons for maintaining a veneer of academic seriousness in a way that, say, an art fair does not. 

When a pseudo-academic essay diagnoses the entire world as being plagued by pseudo-academic obsessions, you might guess that, possibly, there is some observer bias at work. Promoting their article in the Guardian, Levine and Rule attributed the dominance of IAE to the art market boom. But the jargon pilloried in the Triple Canopy piece is all but irrelevant to the discourse around the unholy trinity of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami, the most visible faces of the market. Alice Gregory has given an account of writing catalogue copy for Sotheby’s: “I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (‘fey,’ ‘gestural,’ ‘restrained’) amid a small repertory of active verbs (‘explore,’ ‘trace,’ ‘question’),” she explains. “I inserted the phrases ‘negative space,’ ‘balanced composition,’ and ‘challenges the viewer’ every so often.” A vapid instrumentalization of aesthetic vocabulary, to be sure — but as far as I can tell, one pursued at a distance from the knotty conventions of IAE.

Even within the high-minded museum world, anthropologist Matti Bunzl’s recent book, “In the House of Balloon Dog” — a first-hand account of the debates inside the MCA Chicago leading up to its Koons retrospective — describes in some detail the “rearguard battle” being fought by curators championing conceptual difficulty against commercial populism. You don’t need references to “hybridity” or “biopolitics” to advertise the Met’s Alexander McQueen show or the MoMA’s “Rain Room” experience. You just don’t. So I would need more information about why the authors think this, exactly, is the central burning issue of the day, and where they see it fitting in with the world beyond e-flux. 

I wouldn't deny that the art world is still awash in a lot of sophomoric intellectual bullshit. It clearly is. Yet the obviousness of this point is the problem; the essay is just a clever way of telling people what they think they already know, without doing justice to the complexity of the actual environment it is generalizing about. To their credit, I think Levine and Rule mean their essay to have a political thrust, unmasking art’s false investment in a superficially radical vocabulary. They also gesture towards the idea that artspeak is off-putting and elitist. Unfortunately, its argument sounds a lot like conservative philosopher Denis Dutton’s “Bad Writing Contest,” for which he held up passages from leftist cultural thinkers like Fredric Jameson or Judith Butler to scorn. Less remarkably, the idea of IAE lends itself to old-fashioned anti-intellectualism; it finds its final destiny in bland career development advice for artists and as the punchline for Huffington Post's recurring “Really?! You Call This Art?” feature. “What, you don't speak International Art English?,” HuffPo's caption writer asks, mocking a sculpture she finds so contemptible that she doesn't even bother to figure out who made it.

By consensus, the most useful application of the concept was Mostafa Heddaya’s admirable article, “When Artspeak Masks Oppression.” Attending a panel at the Guggenheim on art in the United Arab Emirates, Heddaya noted how the ongoing controversies over labor conditions for workers building the Gugg’s new Abu Dhabi museum were given short shrift, and he reflected on how art jargon seemed to serve as a tool to deflect the question. But here’s the thing: Though he references IAE, as far as I can tell, what Heddaya witnessed was not a particularly robust example of IAE at work, at least not as Levine and Rule explain it. In the quote he singles out from curator Reem Fadda, she does drop the term “ethical positionality” in questioning whether criticism should be imposed on the UAE by outsiders. Maybe this sounded different in the auditorium, but I think her statement would have been clear to the audience. As a whole, her statements seem politically evasive, but linguistically unremarkable.

Heddaya goes on to connect it to another example that he says follows the same pattern, this time a Chinese Communist Party paper denouncing Western governments for their support of Ai Weiwei. But the connection to IAE is hazy. The cited text doesn’t contain any of the labored Gallic-isms at issue in Triple Canopy's blockbuster; it is, as he himself says, rather prosaic (“The West’s behavior aims at disrupting the attention of Chinese society and attempts to modify the value system of the Chinese people”), merely an example of how a warped version of anti-colonialism has been used to justify authoritarian policy. This is also true of the other example cited, a statement by an artist about Arab Spring-themed work which displays the art world's characteristic politics of ambiguity, but actually does so in a fairly straight-forward way. As far as I can tell, the gimmicky concept of International Art English doesn’t really add anything to the clarity of the discussion, and probably takes a little away, framing a political question as a rhetorical one.

IAE, as Levine and Rule tell it, is a language that became detached from its original theoretical meaning, and is used mainly as a way to drum up superficial interest. Which is why it is amusing — and probably telling — that the term “International Art English” almost instantly became detached from its original meaning, and used by various people as a buzzword to drum up superficial interest. In a way, that fact tells you all you need to know about the debate at hand.

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