The 2011 gongs season got underway last night with the presentation of the Gotham Independent Film Awards at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan. The climactic event of the evening ended in a stalemate with Mike Mills’s comedy-drama “Beginners” (released by Focus Features) and Terrence Malick’s metaphysical “The Tree of Life” (Fox Searchlight) voted joint winners of the Best Feature Award. As Natalie Portman explained in a specially made video, she and the others jurors — fellow actresses Jodie Foster and Nicole Kidman, producer Anne Carey, and film editor Lee Percy — were loathe to decide between the two films.

This result doesn’t augur particularly well for Alexander Payne’s family drama “The Descendants” (Fox Searchlight), a likely Academy Award contender, for the rest of the awards season. The other unlucky nominees were Kelly Reichardt’s reisionist Western “Meek’s Cutoff” (Oscilloscope) and Jeff Nichols’s apocalyptic drama “Take Shelter” (Sony Pictures Classics).

It was the second time in the Gothams’ 21-year history that the feature award has been shared. In 2001, when the category was known as the Open Palm, John Cameron Mitchell’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” tied with Henry Bean’s “The Believer.”

“Beginners,” about a terminally ill man, played by Christopher Plummer, who tells his son (Ewan McGregor) that he has taken a younger male lover, was also awarded the Gotham for Best Ensemble Performance. The awards will build considerable momentum for Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Plummer, who turns 82 on December 13. He was nominated for the 2010 Supporting Actor Globe and Oscar for his portrayal of Tolstoy in “The Last Station,” having never been previously nominated by either awards body.

There are no individual Gothams for best lead and supporting actors and actresses, but the Independent Film Project, which runs the awards, acknowledges outstanding perfomances in its Breakthrough Actor category. This year’s winner was the 18-year-old English actress Felicity Jones, who in “Like Crazy” (Paramount Vantage) plays a British exchange student who falls in love with an American student but is unable to stay with him because she overstays the limit on her visa. Also nominated were Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Harmony Santana (“Gun Hill Road”), Shailene Woodley (“The Descendants”), and Jacob Wysocki (“Terri”). Olsen and Woodley will continue to compete with Jones for the slot traditionally reserved for ingénues in the Best Supporting Actress Oscar category.

Brooklyn-based Dee Rees won the Breakthrough Director Award for her first feature, “Pariah” (Focus Features), which she adapted from her 2007 short of the same name. It’s a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama about a gay African-American teenager struggling to keep her sexual identity from her parents.

The Audience Award, voted by 15,000 film festivalgoers, went to Justin Lerner’s sensitive drama “Girlfriend” (Elephant Eye), the first American feature to star an actor, Evan Sneider, with Down syndrome. Sneider plays a young man with a crush on a former schoolmate (Shannon Woodward), a down-on-her-luck single mom with a volatile boyfriend.

“Better This World” (PBS/POV) was voted the Best Documentary. Kelly Duane and Kate Galloway’s film tells of two young men from Texas who fell in with a radical activist-cum-FBI informer and were accused of intending to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention; it extends to an analysis of how the war on terror has affected civil liberties post 9/11. Another hard-hitting documentary, Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock’s “Scenes From a Crime,” won the award for unreleased films and will get a theatrical window as a result. A case study for the causes of wrongful confession, it shows footage from a 10-hour police interrogation of a man from Troy, New York, who was psychologically coerced into admitting he murdered his baby. He later recanted and medical evidence undermined the confession.

Honorary Gotham awards were give to actors Charlize Theron and Gary Oldman, director David Cronenberg, and Fox CEO Tom Rothman, who founded Fox Searchlight 17 years ago.

Six men are currently appearing in a southern French court, charged with stealing four paintings valued at €22 million ($29.3 million) from Nice's Musée des Beaux-Arts in 2007. And in a turn of events that has taken on all the trappings of a crime drama, they are accusing a well-known F.B.I. art-crimes expert of inciting them to commit the robbery.

At lunchtime on August 5, 2007, a group of masked men dressed in blue janitorial uniforms entered the museum, ordered the staff and visitors to lie on the floor, and proceeded to take four paintings down from the walls: "Allegory of Water" and "Allegory of Earth" by Jan Brueghel the Elder, "Cliffs Near Dieppe" by Claude Monet, and "Lane of Poplars at Moret" by Alfred Sisley. The Monet and Sisley works were on loan from Paris's Musée d'Orsay, according to AFP. Museum employees say that the men were armed, which they dispute. The leader of the gang was a former small-time thief named Pierre Noël-Dumarais who is now 64 years old. "It was a job by bumbling crooks, which they pulled off because the museum was not at all protected," Noël-Dumarais's attorney, Ludovic Depatureaux, told TF1. The thieves were in and out of the museum in just five minutes.

But the plot thickens due to the involvement of another man, Bernard Ternus, who is originally from France but moved to Miami in 2007. He allegedly helped plan the heist in order to sell the paintings to a wealthy American, Bob Clay. Ternus had met with Clay on a Colombian drug kingpin's yacht, where he saw the unscrupulous American purchase priceless paintings with gold and diamonds while partying with bikini-clad call girls, according to L'Express. In reality, however, "Bob Clay" was Robert K. Wittman, an F.B.I. agent who founded the agency's art crime division, and the scene on the boat was all staged. From his jail cell, Pierre Noël-Dumarais wrote to Nice-Matin that "the Nice theft wouldn't have happened if Wittman hadn't put on the pressure." When Ternus arranged for the sale of the stolen paintings in June 2008, the French art-crime squad swooped in, recovered the Brueghel, Monet, and Sisley paintings, and arrested the thieves. Ternus was tried in the U.S. and is currently serving a sentence of five years and two months in Miami.

In his 2010 memoir, "Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures," Wittman — who now runs an art security consulting business in Philadelphia — recounted his efforts to solve a 1990 theft of artworks including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt seascape from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. On a tip that the paintings could be in the hands of the Corsican mafia, he sought out Ternus, who claimed to have mob connections, and posed as a shady art collector. Noël-Dumarais's attorney accuses Wittman — whom the French media are calling the "American super-cop" — of "having French heritage pillaged." "It's police provocation, which is illegal in France," the attorney told L'Express. Wittman, however, told the Daily Telegraph that he did not incite the men to commit the crime but set up the sting when they offered to sell him the stolen works. "I don't think anything I did 'encouraged' anyone to obtain Chechen hand grenades and semi-automatic pistols in order to commit armed robbery," Wittman said. "It is a fanciful defense at best — at worst it is a defense of desperation used only when criminals are caught."

The cooling Chinese market has finally taken its toll on contemporary art sales in Hong Kong. On the weekend, fine pieces by such major Chinese artists as Liu Ye, Zeng Fanzhi, and Zhang Xiaogang were bought in at Christie’s, and on Monday a boutique sale of international art at Seoul Auctions saw work by marquee names like Jeff Koons and Yayoi Kusama fail to find favor.

As of this season, Christie’s Hong Kong is bundling all contemporary and modern Asian art into one big sector, a strategy that not only gives Asian art a similar status to Western art at the house but also — as it turns out — serves to smooth over the cracks that are opening up in parts of the contemporary Asian market. Impressive results for Southeast Asian contemporary and modern art and for Chinese modern masters on the weekend went some way to cushioning the disappointment of the house’s touted Chinese contemporary art evening sale, called "Faces of New China" — at least for the purposes of the post-weekend press release. This recorded that more than 60 percent of the Asian modern and contemporary art works offered over the past weekend sold above their high estimates, delivering a record average-lot value this season for Christie’s Hong Kong of HK$1.7 million ($218,000).

But no one in the room at the evening sale of Asian modern and contemporary art on Saturday night could help but notice the anaemic level of support for Chinese contemporary art. And given the role of this sector in boosting Hong Kong as a venue for contemporary art sales, this must be cause for concern to the major auction houses and dealers. "Faces of New China," the single-owner sale, was meant to be the high point of the evening auction, but six of the 14 lots were bought in and another four sold below their low estimate. The quality of the works on offer was not in question: among the pieces passed in were strong works by Liu Ye and Zhang Xiaogang, who up until now have been two of the most consistently supported of Chinese contemporary artists both internationally and in China.

The evening sale began with a packed room and a sense of anticipation, but after the single-owner sale the air seemed to go out of the room, and with it much of the audience. Although there were some good moments for contemporary art later in the night — with early works by Fang Lijun and Yoshitomo Nara reaching their high estimates — it was Asian modern art that saved the evening with passionate battles erupting over a number of works by Chinese modern masters Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-Chun, and also over a particularly fine canvas by Belgian-born Bali resident Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Mepres (1880-1958), which sold for HK$7.940 million ($1 million) against a high estimate of HK$3.7 million.

A similar pattern was seen at the day sales on Sunday, where Southeast Asian and Chinese modern art performed well while contemporary Asian artists (other than those from Southeast Asia) largely disappointed.

The winners from all this were the collectors who kept Eric Chang (Christie’s international director of Asian 20^th century and contemporary art) busy well negotiating private sales on lots bought in. By the time we sat down to mull the results on Monday afternoon Chang had already secured a buyer for Zhang Xiaogang’s “Portrait in Yellow” (1993), which was passed in from the "Faces of New China" sale, and had hopes of finding buyers for two works by Tang Zhigang that were similarly friendless in the bidding. Chang did not accept that the estimates for the sale may have been too aggressive in a slowing market, though it can be noted that of the lots which did sell — including three early canvases by Yue Minjun and one by Cai Guo-Qiang — most did so at prices below their low estimate.

As it turned out Christie’s strategy of blending all of Asian modern and contemporary art into one sector had some interesting effects that will be worth watching. It seems to have promoted an encouraging level of “cross-cultural” collecting and bidding. That Asian buyers are beginning to venture outside their own national comfort zone is particularly important for artists whose country’s own markets are moribund, such as those from Japan and South Korea. One notable example was that the successful bidder on Yoshitomo Nara’s superb early work “Looking for Treasure” (1995) was a Chinese collector from Shanghai. Nara now seems poised to see a jump in his market in Asia with plans for a major solo show at Pace Beijing next year.

But it’s already clear that the real heat in the market in Hong Kong this season — as at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong last month, and in Beijing last week — is not in contemporary Asian art but in the heartland sector of traditional Chinese painting, either from the classical or modern period. It is here that the entry of Chinese mainland collectors has had the most galvanizing influence. Even with speculative money driven from the market place by China’s credit crunch, this sector is still booming as Chinese from the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and further afield compete for what they know and love best. Even as Eric Chang and ARTINFO China were talking yesterday, lot after lot at Christie’s fine Chinese classical painting and calligraphy sale were being hammered down at multiples of their high estimates. Results from the fine chinese modern painting auction yet to come this week are expected to be similarly impressive.

This lesson was also on display at the Seoul Auctions sale across town at the Mandarin Oriental Monday. For three years now Seoul has made a reputation for itself in Hong Kong with trailblazing auction sales of Western modern and contemporary art, drawing mostly on the fine collections of Western art to be found in South Korea and Japan. These collections were built up over two or more decades by connoisseurs who suddenly saw the local market for their chosen sector collapse. In South Korea, political scandals around Western art collecting stifled the high end of the market, while the Japanese scene has never really recovered from the collapse of the bubble economy there in the early 1990s.

Since listing in Hong Kong is 2008, Seoul Auctions has carved out a niche bridging the gap between significant collections of Western art in those countries and the emerging Chinese and Southeast Asian markets. So far their achievements have been modest, but even so yesterday’s results must have been particularly disappointing, with only 29 out of 49 lots sold. Yet Seoul Auction’s CEO, Jun Lee, was refreshingly free of spin. The market was “tough” he told ARTINFO China, and seems to be in lock step with the region’s stock markets. Reflecting particularly on the failure of the cover lot — the wonderfully off-message “Smooth Egg with Bow” from Jeff Koon’s "Celebration" series — Lee observed that the South Korean collector who consigned the work was satisfied to have tested the waters in Asia and more than happy to wait for a better market. The Koons was bought in just below the low estimate at a top bid of HK$54 million ($7 million).

But there was one note of excitement at Seoul’s sale. Sitting oddly among Western greats like Hirst, Warhol, Koons, and Degas was a classically-inspired ink on silk painting by China’s penultimate emperor, Guangxu (1871-1908). The work — entitled “Peony” — was a beautiful but modest thing, and its low pre-sale estimate of HK$20,000-30,000 ($2,600-3,850) raised few eyebrows. But the China effect — the passion of mainland collectors for their own history — can set any saleroom on fire, and so it proved yesterday, perhaps because this was a work of particular poignancy. It was the ill-fated Emperor Guangxu who sparked the only attempt at modernisation in the late imperial period in China. Now remembered as the Hundred Days’ Reform, his sweeping 1898 program was cut short by a reactionary coup under the Empress Dowager Cixi, and Guangxu lived out the rest of his reign under house arrest. He died of arsenic poisoning at the age of 37, possibly at the hand of Cixi herself, who in turn died just one day later secure in the knowledge that China was safe at last from her nephew’s ruinous notions of progress.

The painting that hammered yesterday for HK$300,000 ($38,500), ten times its high estimate, had been executed by Guangxu during his years of house arrest and bore the personal seal of his tormenter Cixi, marking it as part of her personal collection. Jeff Koons may have failed to make history in Hong Kong yesterday, but somewhere in China a collector picked up a piece of his own past at a price which would have by no account felt too high.

Attention now shifts to the Chinese traditional modern painting, porcelain, and works of art sales to see whether the China effect will also help deliver Christie’s Hong Kong a strong result in a difficult season.

Those visiting Art Basel Miami Beach with a hankering for design have more than just Design Miami, the city’s industry fair, to look forward to. For a more academic approach, there is “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” currently at Miami’s Wolfsonian Museum through March 26. The exhibition explores the relationship between French culture and design over the past 70 years. Featuring pieces from the Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris, the show comprises 150 objects, from a vintage Hermès Kelly handbag to a 1994 Philippe Starck-designed toilet.

How does one install such a style-conscious show? French design powerhouse M/M Paris, whose projects have included a Björk music video and creative consulting for Vogue, have collaborated with Starck protégé matali crasset and curator Alexandra Midal so that each display component, from pedestal to plaque, conforms to Le Corbusier’s trademark measuring system and is colored red, white, or blue, in honor of the French tricolor. “We didn’t just want to have a collection of images of objects, but a socio-historical concept for the objects,” said M/M's Michael Amzalag.

Some sections of the exhibition focus on game-changing French designers, such as Roger Tallon and Philippe Starck, while others zero in on important elements in France’s design history. A segment entitled “The Barricade,” for example, surveys design after the 1968 uprisings. “We wanted to create a landscape," said Amzalag. "As designers ourselves, we were always inspired by the country in which we live, and all those objects were produced in the country since we were kids."

So what is it that defines French style? “In France, there is no such thing as style,” said Amzalag. “It’s more a collection of several identities or individualities.” A December 1 brunch at the museum gives VIPs the chance to chat with M/M’s founders Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak. Menus will no doubt feature a flawless design.

Below, ARTINFO's very selective list of ABMB Week-related parties and events people will be talking about today in Miami.

THE EVENTS

Dzine's “Nailed” at the Standard
11 a.m.-6 p.m.
The Standard Hotel, 40 Island Avenue, Miami Beach
Come get a tricked-out manicure — Miami Beach-style — at Dzine’s Imperial Nails site-specific installation exploring the history of the practice, alongside an ecclectic list of artists: Kim Hastreiter, Luis Gispert, Yone, Jamel Shabazz, Fab 5 Freddy, and Kai Regan.

Todd Eberle’s Book Signing for “Empire of Space”
5-7 p.m.
The Standard Spa, 40 Island Avenue, Miami Beach
This is your chance to get an autographed copy of “Empire of Space,” photographer Todd Eberle’s anthology of work spanning over 30 years. This book is the definitive collection of the artist’s work.

BallyLove #2 by Olaf Breuning Cocktail Party
6-8:30
W South Beach Hotel, 2201 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
A sure place for some star sightings, this arty fashion event celebrates the exclusive launch of the BallyLove #2 collection with art world satirist Olaf Breuning.

Art Basel Miami Beach VIP Vernissage
6-9 p.m.
Convention Center, 1700 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach
The exclusive preview of ABMB's Art Galleries, Art Nova, Art Positions and Art Kabinett will draw all the week's movers and shakers to the Convention Center. For Invited Guests.

Miguel Paredes Pop-up Gallery
7-11 p.m.
The Gansevoort Hotel, 2305 Collins Ave, Miami Beach
Paredes — the official artist of the 12th Annual Latin Grammys — is putting up a pop-up gallery for the week’s festivities along the 2nd floor mezzanine and grand ballrooms of the Gansevoort, showing off his newest collection of art.

Art Basel Miami Beach’s Post Vernissage Party
7-11 p.m.
Bass Museum of Art, 2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
What’s a good party without a better after-party? The exclusive preview of Art Basel will continue into the night at the Bass Museum of Art. It’s invite only, so make some friends!

Mr. Brainwash Opening
7-11 p.m.
2000 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
The much-mocked but inexplicably still popular French artist best known as the subject of "Exit Through the Gift Shop" will once again take over a 25,000-square-foot luxury condos of Boulan South Beach to create street art mania.

Art Public Opening Night
8-10 p.m.
Collins Park, Miami Beach
A performance-packed night featuring the Black Monks of Mississippi responding in song to the work of Art Public alongside “A Sermon on Art History” by Chicago artist Theaster Gates and “MIXTAPE” by Sanford Biggers. 

The Hole Gallery Presents Salem
10 p.m. - 1 a.m.
The Delano Hotel, 1685 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
New York's Hole Gallery will host a performance by the band Salem in true Miami Beach fashion — pool side.

First night of Paris Paris
11 p.m. to dawn
Shelborne South beach, 1801 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
Le Paris Paris Cabaret kicks off at Miami Beach with performances by Loveboat Radio Piano Bar, Ullman Kararocké, and House of Drama.

THE FAIRS
 

Art Basel Miami Beach
Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach
December 1-4

NADA Art Fair
Deauville Beach Resort
6701 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
December 2-5

Design Miami/
Meridian Avenue & 19th Street
Adjacent to the Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami Beach
November 30-December 4

Art Miami
Art Miami Pavilion
3101 NE 1st Avenue, Miami
November 30-December 4

Pulse Art Fair
The Ice Palace
1400 North Miami Avenue, at Northwest 14th Street, Miami
December 1-4

Scope Art Fair
Scope Pavilion
Northeast 1st Ave at Northeast 30th Street, Miami
November 29-December 4

Art Asia
Art Asia Pavilion
Northeast 1st Ave Northeast 30th Street, Miami
November 30-December 4

ZOOM Elite (invitation only)
W South Beach
2201 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
November 30-December 3

Aqua Art Fair
Aqua Hotel
1530 Collins Ave, Miami Beach
December 1-4

Ink Miami Art Fair
Suites of Dorchester
1850 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
November 30-December 4

Red Dot Miami
3011 Northeast 1st Avenue, at Northeast 31st Street, Miami
November 30-December 4

Seven Miami
2637 North Miami Avenue at Northeasy 27th Street, Miami
November 29-December 4

Fountain Miami
2505 North Miami Ave at the corner of 25th Street, Miami
December 1-4

Verge Art Miami Beach
Greenview Hotel
1671 Washington Avenue at 17th Street, Miami Beach
December 1-4

PooL Art Fair Miami Beach
Carlton Hotel
Sadigo Court
334 20th Street at Park Avenue, Miami Beach
December 2-4

Burst Art Fair
Art Deco Center
1001 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach
November 30-December 5

Art Now
Catalina Hotel
1732 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
December 1-4

Arts For a Better World
Surfcomber Hotel
1717 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach
November 30-December 4

Zones Art Fair
47 Northeast 25th Street, Miami
November 29-December 3

– J.Lo Versus Bronx Graffiti Greats: Well, this isn’t going to help her street cred at all. Jennifer Lopez's ad for Fiat, which depicts the star cruising around the Bronx to find inspiration, has been barraged by criticism for being inauthentic and just plain bad (apparently, she didn’t even venture up to her old hood to film it, but used a body double). Now, Wilfredo "Bio" Feliciano of the legendary Bronx graffiti team TATS Cru says that the ad uses one of his murals as background, and that he expects payment. TATS Cru knows what they deserve — they worked with Lopez on her "I'm Goin' Be Alright" video in 2003. "[I]n all fairness if she is going to represent the Bronx she [should] be more aware of what people around her are doing," Feliciano said. Fiat is “conducting a review” of the matter. [PIX11] 

– Scope Miami Artist Charged for Exotic Animal Smuggling: Miami-based Enrique Gomez de Molina has been charged with illegally smuggling animal carcasses into Florida as raw material for his art. He sewed the animal parts together into hybrid monsters to sell through Miami's Spinello gallery at Scope last year, where two sold for $10,000, apparently to collectors from Canada (who took them home, which counts as illegal export as well). Molina is alleged to have possessed "the parts, skins, and remains of species, including among others, whole cobras, pangolins, hornbills, and the skulls of babirusa and orangutans," as well as specimens of beloved creatures such as the bird of paradise and slow loris. He faces the possibility of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. [New Times] 

– Abu Dhabi Gugg Stymied by Arab Spring?: The UAE government, in a subtle effort to head off unrest in the wake of the Arab Spring, may be diverting funds from museums to infrastructural projects in the poorer emirates, adding to the question marks that surround the future of the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. The change in priorities is said to be due to the increased influence of national security adviser Sheikh Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, “a relative conservative who believes that housing and hospitals come before museums.” [TAN]

– Frank Lloyd Wright's "Little Gem" Goes Under the Hammer: A three-bedroom house in Rockford, Illinois designed by the legendary architect for WWII veteran Kenneth Laurent will be sold on December 15 by Wright Auction House in Chicago. It is expected to fetch between $700,000 and $900,000. The Laurent House Foundation, a recently formed preservation society, is hoping to win the bid and turn the property into a museum. [ArtLyst]

– Martin Creed to Conceive a Restaurant: The Turner Prize winning conceptual artist is to turn London restaurant Sketch into a gesamtkunstwerk next March, to coincide with the venue's 10th anniversary. Kick-starting a series of artist-conceived eateries at Sketch, Creed has worked on all aspects of the design, but the food has been left to the capable hands of Sketch's co-founder, Michelin three star chef Pierre Gagnaire — though the menu was conceived "in unison with the artist's concerns." [Press Release]

–Staedel Museum Gets in Bed With the Banks: Set to open in February 2012, the Frankfurt museum’s €32 million extension ($42 million) will display pieces by the likes of Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, and Cindy Sherman from the corporate collections of Deutsche Bank AG and DZ Bank AG. [Bloomberg]

– Is Julian Schnabel This Year's Big Art Influence?: So says New York Times critic Roberta Smith in a review of Sarah Braman’s exhibition at New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which features bright pastel paintings on plywood. “The paintings made me think, as have many exhibited in galleries this season, that Julian Schnabel is way overdue for his comeback,” Smith writes. [NYT]

– Big Numbers for Contemporary Istanbul: The art fair's sixth edition, which drew to a close on Sunday, attracted a record 62,000 art lovers — despite competition from the new art fair in town, Art Beat Istanbul, which launched last September. Contemporary Istanbul has considerably expanded, presenting 3,000 works by 550 artists, up from 2,000 by 420 artists last year. [Today's Zaman]

– In Paris, A Grave Limit on PDA: We get it. You love Oscar Wilde. Now please back off. Since at least the late 1990s, thousands of visitors have put their lips to the gravestone belonging to the famed Irish author, frequently leaving lipstick and oily residue that is absorbed into the stone and must be washed off with harsh abrasives. To prevent further damage, Wilde’s final resting place at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris will soon be surrounded by a stout glass barrier. [LAT]

– Honey, Have You Seen My Klansmen Robe?: The National Museum of African American History and Culture has accepted as a donation the robe of a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan. The robe was once the property of Stetson Kennedy, a writer who infiltrated the Klan’s security forces and spent his life educating the public about hate groups. Kennedy’s widow, Sandra Parks, said that with the donation, "More Americans will come to understand the significance and the bravery of the people who fought against this powerful and destructive organization.” [WaPo]

– UN to Acknowledges “Intangible” Cultural Practices: A total of 19 cultural practices from around the world have been designated "intangible heritage practices and expressions” by the UNESCO. Included in the list, updated every year, were such practices as Bedouin Al-Sadu weaving and the Eshuva, or sung prayer, of Peru's Huachipaire tribe. Absent from the list was the gesture some people in Manhattan make to sternly indicate that they’re not leaving their parking spot. [News.com.au]

– Alex Katz’s Christmas List is a Little Spare: The preppy painter made a Christmas wish list of gifts from J.Crew as part of a promo for the brand — but he only managed to pick out two items he might want, thereby only minimally fulfilling the definition of “list.” [ITA]

Over a dozen artist studios in Miami’s design district will be demolished at the end of the year to make way for a new retail complex. But the artists, many of whom have worked at their 38th and 39th street studios rent-free for over half a decade due to the generosity of Craig Robins’s real estate development company DACRA, aren’t leaving quietly. Before they splinter off to more affordable parts of the city, artists including Bhakti Baxter, Jim Drain, and Martin Oppel will open their studios for a kind of art block party this Thursday, December 1.

The studios were all part of Robins’s original vision for the design district, a neighborhood the Miami Herald once described as a “sketchy retirement village” that is now becoming a high-end shopping and tourist mecca, thanks in large part to Robins. “We always give space to the cultural community,” Robins told ARTINFO. When an old warehouse building opened up in 2002, Robins offered it as short-term studio space to artists “in a point of transition.” Somehow, their one-year contracts kept getting extended. “They were doing such good work, we just kept renewing it,” said Robins.

Now, he’s decided finally to do away with the program. “It’s important for them to evolve into something that’s more independent and self-sustaining,” Robins said of the studios. They will be torn down as part of a push to bring fashion houses like Louis Vuitton and Hermes, as well as a boutique hotel, to the neighborhood. Robins still plans to keep art as a central focus: he has even toyed with the idea of opening a single institution that can bring together works from the many private collections that have spaces in the area — chief among them the Rubell Family Collection, the de la Cruz Collection, and the Margulies Collection — and his own personal holdings. “If we take ours and add to theirs, it could really add to that infrastructure,” he said, optimistically.

For their part, the artists don’t seem to fault Robins or his development company for kicking them out. “It comes with the territory that you are there to change the place and ultimately that place will push you out,” said Baxter, who has worked at the design district studios for over five years. “Everybody thought they were crazy to buy property there 10 years ago, but now it has become a serious part of the city.” He said he and some of his studiomates will look for inexpensive spaces further north.

Wherever they end up, they’ll certainly go out with a bang. When several of these artists left their Miami studios in Edgerwater in 2003, the final performance involved breaking down the walls with a sledgehammer. While Baxter promises this event will be “less aggressive,” he acknowledges that there is bound to be a certain element of spontaneity and abandon in a display that nobody has to worry about cleaning up.

For the December 1 event, Baxter will team up with artist Jason Hedges to build a functional BBQ sculpture, while the local Nektar De Stagni Shop will host a VIP reception for its exhibition “Hard Poems in Space,” on view through December 24. The exhibition will feature new works by Agathe Snow, Hernan Bas, and Rene Gonzalez, among others. De Stagni and Gallery Diet, which is copresenting the show, also invited designers Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza to install new cement tiles and architect Rene Gonzalez to create a ceiling mural in the space. All this is possible, according to Gallery Diet’s Nina Johnson, because of the impending demolition. “We don’t have to worry about returning the space to its original condition,” she said. 

Celebrating Art + Auction's authoritative Power 100 December issue, a festive crew of revelers sipped cocktails at poolside and listened to the Latin beat of La Jauretsi Tuesday evening at the Shore Club in Miami Beach in a jaunty prelude to the tenth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. 

Among the posse of high-achievers at publisher Louise Blouin's bash were Christiane Fischer, CEO of AXA Art — one of the Power 100 honorees, as a matter of fact — as well as Lisson Gallery's globetrotting Matthew Drutt, Art Moscow art director Christina Steinbrecher, international business advisor Nic Ilgine, and a chatty group of art-world journalists taking advantage of the balmy evening.

To see pictures of Art+Auction's "Power 100" party, click on the slide show.

“The Artist,” French filmmaker Michael Hazanavicius’s hommage to Hollywood’s silent movie era, emerged as the new awards season's top contender following two announcements yesterday. The New York Film Critics Circle voted it Best Feature and Hazanavicius Best Director. In the Film Independent Spirit Awards, it’s been nominated for Feature, Director, Male Lead, (Jean Dujardin), Screenplay (Hazanavicius), and Cinematography (Guillaume Schiffman, who shot it on color stock converted to black and white in post-production).

If “The Artist” were to carry this success to the Adademy Awards and win Best Picture, it would be the first silent film to achieve that honor since William Wellman’s “Wings” won for “Outstanding Picture, Production” at the inaugural Oscars in 1929. F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” won for “Unique and Artistic Production” that year, but “Wings” was retrospectively acknowledged as 1929’s equivalent of Best Picture.

The NYFFC voted acting awards to two of the stars of “The Tree of Life”, but neither won exclusively for their turns in Terrence Malick’s meaning-of-life opus. Brad Pitt’s Lead Actor prize was also for his work in “Moneyball,” which won Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin the screenplay award. Jessica Chastain’s Supporting Actress prize was also for her performances in “The Help” and “Take Shelter,” the latter of which earned her a Spirit nod. Albert Brooks’s portrayal of a film-producer-turned-gangster in “Drive” netted him the Supporting Actor award and a Spirit nomination. “I feel like Herman Cain at a Dallas Cheerleader convention,” Brooks tweeted.

Meryl Streep’s impersonation of Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady” earned her a fifth award from the critics’ group (and her fourth in a lead role). Pitt, in comparison, is an NYFFC newbie. Should they be available, they will add considerable star wattage to the critics’ awards ceremony in January.

Notable for the absence in the NYFFC choices are “The War Horse,” “Hugo,” “Alfred Nobbs,” “Beginners,” “The Descendants,” “Midnight in Paris,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “J. Edgar,” “Melancholia,” and “Shame.” Although the latter pair were among the Spirit nominees for Foreign Film (along with “A Separation,” “The Kid With a Bike,” and “Tyrannosaur”), their Oscar chances may be cooked. Lars von Trier’s “Nazi” comments at Cannes cost “Melancholia” the Palme d’Or and could now be costing it American laurels.

J. Chandor’s financial-crisis thriller “Margin Call” was the critics’ pick for first feature and will be awarded the Robert Altman Spirit award. The critics’ nonfiction choice was Werner Herzog’s 3D hit “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” in which he filmed himself examining the oldest known drawings in the Chauvet Caves in southern France. Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” which won the Golden Bear at Berlin, took the Foreign-Language Film award. The Iranian drama concerns a couple that splits because the wife wants the family to leave the country to have their daughter educated abroad whereas the husband wants to stay to look after his ailing father. Winner of the annual special award was Raúl Ruiz, the Chilean filmmaker who died at 70 in August, the same month in which his four-hour swansong “Mysteries of Lisbon” opened.

In the Spirits, to be presented in Santa Monica on February 25, “The Artist” will compete for the Feature award with “50/50,” “Beginners,” “Drive,” “Take Shelter,” and “The Descendants.” As director, Hazanavicius will be up against Mike Mills (“Beginners”), Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter”), Alexander Payne (“The Descendants”), and Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”). The First Feature nominees are Chandor’s “Margin Call,” “Another Earth” (director Mike Cahill), “In the Family” (Patrick Wang), “Martha Marcy May Marlene” (Sean Durkin), and “Natural Selection” (Robbie Pickering).

Along with Dujardin, the Male Lead nominees are Demián Bechir (“A Better Life”), Ryan Gosling (“Drive”), Woody Harrelson (“Rampart”), and Michael Shannon (“Take Shelter”). The Female Lead choices are Lauren Ambrose (“Think of Me”), Rachael Harris (“Natural Selection”), Adepero Oduye (“Pariah”), Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), and Michelle Williams (“My Week With Marilyn”). Williams and Viola Davis ("The Help") remain Streep’s stiffest competition for the Oscar.

To qualify for a Spirit Award, a film must be made by An American producer for less than $20 million.

Next up are tomorrow’s National Board of Review awards, controversially beaten to the punch this year by the NYFCC, which moved its voting forward so it could claim the kudos of launching the Hollywood awards season.

Artist Nicolas Sassoon, born in Biarritz, France in 1981, publishes the majority of his work on the Internet — but his concerns extend far beyond that. A member of the online art collective Computers Club, whose retro-videogame-style introductory video he created, Sassoon makes GIFs, Flash animations, prints, and projections. His output shares a certain overriding tone — a kind of dreamy, contemplative isolation, like a sailboat drifting alone on a shifting ocean. It is this aesthetic that makes Sassoon's work so piercing, and what forms the backbone of "TIDES," his recent solo show at the online-only gallery space Bubblebyte.org.

As revealed in his elegant personal Web site (its title, You Make Me So Happy, is spelled out in flickering letters and channels of pixelated flowing water), Sassoon tends toward a quiet monumentality. His animations take place in tiny voids, each a singular, looping action sealed in a vacuum, whether it's a floating square cresting loops of waves, a room with a flashing laptop set on a desk, or rotating models of small trees. In every piece, Sassoon finds poetry at the interface between nature and technology, and in using the limited means of the computer to depict the inexhaustible complexity of the natural world — much as he does in the new work, "TIDES."

The series of six video works on display at Bubblebyte were inspired by the artist's recent stay in his hometown on the coast of France. They show different points in the tidal cycle: "RISING" and "MIDHIGH" through "LOW." Close up, the pop-up animations read as intersecting sets of tiny lines moving slowly against each other, like an Agnes Martin canvas set in inexorable motion. Moving farther away from the computer monitor, the lines coalesce into moiré patterns that form smooth sets of waves in a split-second optical illusion. Some of the waves move quickly, flowing toward one corner of the screen or another like the far ocean seen from ashore. Others are placid, evoking a foamy lick of water rising softly up an unpopulated beach.

"TIDES" makes a good companion for Sassoon's wall-size "Fidji" (2011) projection, which was included in "Notes on a New Nature" at Brooklyn alternative space 319Scholes, an exhibition exploring digital art's relationship to the idea of landscape and the natural world. "Fidji" has a physically massive scale, where the "TIDES" pieces only exist (as of yet) in the browser window. Yet both works reduce physical natural phenomena into digital abstractions, using only the most minimal of literal references. "Fidji," with its falling churn of blue stripes, has the dynamism of the waterfall it mimics, while "TIDES" uses the simplest of visual means to create a sense of the relentless, massive movement of the ocean. 

It's easy to level the charge at a large body of Internet art that it's too cheap, too ephemeral, and too driven by inside jokes to mean anything to a wider audience. For better or worse, the work of artists like Ryder Ripps depends on a world of cultural vocabulary that only a rarified group of the mega-Internet-savvy can pick up on. Sassoon bucks the trend: it will still be possible to look at "TIDES" in years and decades to come and still feel the same impact and the same organic resonance. This is digital art built to last.   

Nicolas Sassoon's "TIDES" is on view at Bubblebyte.org from November 5 to December 1, and will not be accessible after that date. 

“A lot of things here are safe, have you noticed that?” said Miami art collector Don Rubell, leaning against a wall and watching the crowds swirl past at Art Basel Miami Beach’s VIP preview. The United States’s premier contemporary art fair kicked off its tenth-anniversary edition on Wednesday with a heady mix of blue-chip works and a throng of collectors that included Eli Broad, Dasha Zhukova, and Anita Zabludowicz along with a sprinkling of celebrities, such as Naomi Campbell, Brett Ratner, and Diddy (who snagged a Tracey Emin wall sculpture from Lehmann Maupin for $45,000). The art on offer may not have been shocking or unexpected — solo shows of emerging talents and blinged-out novelty presentations were few and far between — and the mood may not have been electric, but sales by most accounts hummed along at a remarkably steady pace. (The stock market’s strong finish during the VIP session, with a 400-point gain, probably didn’t hurt.) Works with a strong grounding in art history or with institutional support were snatched up, and many galleries reported six or seven-figure sales by the end of the day.

“It feels serious and the collecting, considered,” said White Cube’s Tom Marlow. Damien Hirst, whose career retrospective at London’s Tate is much anticipated next year and whose “Spot” paintings will soon be the subject of a worldwide exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, sold out briskly at White Cube’s booth. A stainless steel vitrine filled with glistening surgical instruments sold for £1.5 million, while a Hirst spot painting was sold from the gallery’s back-office stash for €500,000.

Hirst isn’t the only artist with strong institutional support to sell well on opening day. A number of works by Nathalie Djurberg flew from New York gallerist Zach Feuer’s booth, including two videos for $35,000 each. One of the Swedish artist’s rarely-seen sculptures, which will be part of her upcoming New Museum solo show in April, were scooped up as well. Meanwhile, a wall full of alphabet paintings by Sister Corita Kent — laboriously assembled by Feuer, who only just managed to track down the "g" — was on sale as a group for $120,000. "Hopefully we'll place it in an institution," the dealer said, noting that four editions of individual letters had sold for $38,000 apiece.

At Los Angeles’s Blum & Poe, a painting of a Tuskegee jumper against a bright blue background by Henry Taylor, who has forthcoming show at MoMA PS1 in January, sold for $35,000 to a New York City collector.  A preview of an upcoming museum-quality show focused on the Japanese Mono Ha movement aslo saw success, with six of the seven being snapped up by American buyers and the seventh — a floor piece by Lee Ufan, recent recipient of a Guggenheim survey — on reserve for $275,000. New York’s Metro Pictures, then, sold a 2010 Cindy Sherman self-portrait as a silver-haired dowager for $350,000. The gallery also represented the artist, whose highly-anticipated MoMA retrospective opens in February, with recently unearthed pre-"Untitled Film Still" work, “Cover Girl (Redbook)” from 1976/2011, comprised of three separate toned gelatin silver prints. Priced at $150,000, the images were discovered in the artist’s archives as a result of research into her catalogue raisonne, and Broad is likely to be the buyer.  “We really like the new Kara Walker work and the early Cindy Sherman but we’re still looking,” he told ARTINFO.

The Walker work in question, the gritty and mural-like “Pastorale” from 2010 in graphite and pastel relating to the drunken, chaos-filled time in American history when African-Americans moved from the countryside to unfamiliar urban areas, sold from Chelsea’s Sikkema Jenkins near the $175,000 asking price. Gallery founder Brent Sikemma said the opening hours felt like "a stampede" just like the old boom days: "Art is fully and fundamentally perceived as the new asset class. A client told me, 'it’s either gold or art and I prefer to invest in art.’”

And just like the old days, banner names continued to draw big prices. Three editions of Paul McCarthy’s “White Snow Dwarf (Bashful)” sold to European collectors for $900,000 from the London-based Hauser & Wirth. At New York’s Luhring Augustine, Christopher Wool’s patterned abstraction, “Untitled” from 1993, in enamel on aluminum, sold in the region of the $3 million asking price. At Lisson Gallery, meanwhile, four Kapoors sold for sky-high prices: £750,000, £575,000, £500,000, and £250,000, respectively. Two Ai Weiwei watermelon sculptures went for €60,000 apiece. "It's been amazing," said gallery director Matthew Drutt. "We're this close from out target for the fair, and our target is double what it was for last year. I doubled our sales target in this fair to inspire us, and by the end of the day we should reach it."

Among the most talked-about booths at the fair was that of L&M Arts, devoted to over 150 drawings by Andy Warhol spanning four decades and ranging in price from $18,000 to $420,000. The stunning display ranged from a simple still life of a Coca Cola battle drawn with black ballpoint pen to an image of a gold shoe adorned with real gold leaf. The gallery had sold fewer than 20 drawings by late Wednesday afternoon, but secured many hard-won fans. “This is the best installation I’ve seen at the fair,” said Broad. “Maybe at any fair ever.” (When asked whether this year’s fair felt any different from that of last year, the Los Angeles collector answered literally: “I love all the carpeting — I’m not sure if it’s new, but it is easier on the feet.”)

While there was less over-the-top flash on the cutting-edge contemporary side, there also seemed to be less mad money lavished on classic works by dead, revered artists — at least during the preview. Munich's Galerie Thomas, for instance, produced an engaging display focused on the artists who passed through La Ruche, the Parisian flophouse that at one point sheltered Chagall, Soutine, Modigliani, Brancusi, Diego Rivera, Leger, and other famed moderns. A $3.95 million Leger hangs on one wall, a wonderfully impastoed work-on-paper by Chagall is priced at $495,000, and a rare Brancusi portrait and Gauguin-esque Rivera add a tang of discovery to the booth. But what sold? Two small Gerhard Richters kept in the back, one 1994 work-on-paper for $95,000 and a tidy 1996 "Fuji" painting for $300,000.

At Helly Nahmad gallery, a $7 million Picasso self-portrait from 1963, an $8 million 1952 Leger of a young couple, and a $3 million Magritte were awaiting suitors. A cluster of blue-chip historical emporiums — Landau Fine Art, Acquavella, and Richard Gray Gallery — were also hoping for sales. Dour-looking with a darkened booth filled with expensive, evidently first-rate artworks by Picasso, Dubuffet, and others, Landau was outshined by Acquavella, its next-door neighbor, which spiked its assortment of modern greats with a fiery Cy Twombly, "Crimes of Passion I" from 1960. A bare canvas scrawled with snaking clouds of smoke, explosions, Roman and Arabic numerals, and what looks like a vagina dabbed with vermillion paint, the piece has an asking price of $12 million, according to Nicholas Acquavella, scion of the namesake proprietor. As for whether it will sell, "it's too early to tell," he said. Also of note in the booth are a gorgeous late Picasso drawing of a bullfighter, ripped from a notepad in 1970, which sold near the asking price of $1.2 million, Giacometti's imposing 1954 tabletop sculpture "Diego au manteau," and a black-and-white Calder from 1952, "Moel for Rosenhof."

Waddington Custot Galleries, meanwhile, was able to sell a Magritte — a fine 1960 gouache on paper, "La recherche de l'absolu," depicting a moon rising behind a tree Surreally shaped like a leaf — most likely because of it's less imposing asking price of $650,000. It sold an hour into the fair to a European collector. "It's top quality he's done other moons he's done other trees but it's the best of its kind," said dealer Leslie Waddington. A gallery worker loudly saying "one point four million pounds" into a telephone could betoken bigger sales to follow.

More recent art history seemed to pay off at Peter Blum gallery, where the sleek totems of California minimalism are on display. "We made a few sales here, and a few prior to the fair," said Blum, including a $200,000 Ken Price sculpture, a $15,000 John Altoon, a $26,000 John McLaughlin, and an $8,000 Peter Alexander drawing. Has the interest generated by the West coast's sweeping "Pacific Standard Time" exhibition helped sales? "Yes it has," replied Blum. "It hasn't increased the value, but it has increased the sales so things that would not move before now sell. I think this stuff is a bargain — in time this will all look remarkably cheap. I have been doing this for 25 years, and I remember when Judds and Flavins were $10,000. Pacific Standard Time is positioning the work historically, and it has had a very direct impact."

At Michael Werner gallery there was a selection of four diverse works by the late Sigmar Polke, ranging from $350,000-900,000, including an exquisite untitled 1986 canvas bathed in a yellow artificial resin and embellished with ancient designs. It had been reserved within the first hour. "No sales yet, but the fair is still young," said gallery director Justine Birble.

- With additional reporting by Judd Tully

Structure: KIRK KAPITAL A/S Headquarters

Clients: KIRK KAPITAL A/S, a securities and investment company dealing in real estate, shipping, and aircraft

Architect: Danish-Icelandic artist and sometimes architect Olafur Eliasson, whose past structures include the 2007 edition of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, along with the glimmering glass facade of Reykjavík’s Harpa concert hall and conference center.

Location: Vejle, Denmark

History: KIRK KAPITAL approached Eliasson to expand their office space because of his skill “with space and the relationship between buildings, cityscape, and users,” according to CEO Bjarne Ammitzbøll. Completion is scheduled for 2016.

Cost: TBA

Purpose: While the investment company’s operations will dominate the upper floors, the building’s ground level will be open to the public, featuring a café and exhibition space, with commercial leases available for the levels in between. The building is part of a completely new development in Vejle’s commercial harbor called Harbor Island, a man-made piece of land that will feature 12 new residential and commercial buildings. Collaborators on the ambitious project include Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter, Vogt Landscape Architects, and the Vejle Municipality.

Features: The new headquarters’ plans show it rising dramatically out of the harbor’s water, giving it a very medieval castle beyond-the-mote effect. It’s going to be all circles, composed of three rook-like structures bearing oscillating brick facades with floor-to-ceiling windows peeking through. Circular atria will be the focal point of the glass and brick interiors, as well as, we’re sure, delightful views of passing sailboats.

Yesterday saw Britain's biggest strike in forty years, with more than 2 million public sector workers taking the streets to protest against the government's proposed pension reform. Despite Prime Minister David Cameron dismissing what he called the "irresponsible and damaging strikes" as "a damp squib," 62 percent of England's state schools were closed, 30,000 routine NHS operations postponed, and public services disrupted throughout the country, including at 10 Downing Street.

Museums and galleries were also affected. Graham Steel, a senior national officer at PCS, the Public and Commercial Services union, which counts around 290,000 members, told ARTINFO UK: "We've had the best support for a strike we've ever had in the cultural sector. [And yet] it's not a part of our union that is in any way militant, or indeed one of our strongest areas. A lot of people who work in the cultural sector are extremely dedicated to what they do, and the last thing they want to see is their museum, or their gallery not delivering the kind of services they normally do."

In London, an estimated 25,000 people were striking. ArtLyst reported a mass gathering of museum workers yesterday morning on Exhibition Road, South Kensington, including staff members of the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and the V&A, as well as representatives from most of the capital's main galleries, including the two Tates and the British Museum.

"They were only able to partially open the National Gallery," said PCS's Steel. "The well-known da Vinci exhibition was open, but the ordinary collection was closed all day. And likewise, we understand that there were only two exhibition rooms open at the British Museum. Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and places like the Imperial War Museum and the British Library — they all had to operate on a skeleton staff. We certainly have the biggest impact we've ever seen in the sector.

When contacted by ARTINFO UK, most major London museums were unable (or unwilling) to state how many of their members struck. Only the NHM stated: "Approximately 70 members of museum staff were on strike yesterday.  The Museum was open as usual, and the experience of visitors discovering the natural world wasn’t affected."

Steel estimates that 80 percent of the PCS members in bigger galleries, and 60 percent in smaller galleries were on strike yesterday. The strike action was also well followed by members of PCS's sister union Prospect. The National Museums Liverpool, Tyne & Wear Archives Museums, the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston and the McLean Museum and Art Gallery in Inverclyde were all closed. Prospect says that museum workers in York, Leeds, Bradford and Scotland were also protesting yesterday.

"What the government is proposing is that our members will pay more for their pensions, that they will have to wait longer to get it, and when they receive the pension, it will actually be worth less — so it's not an attractive proposition," said Steel. "Together with the cuts in the funding for the arts generally in the UK, you can see why people who care about the arts are saying: enough is enough."

"It's not just because people are worried about their pension or their pay as a result of the cuts [that they strike]," he continued, "they are also very worried about what that's going to mean for their galleries and their ability, going forward, to put on the kind of exhibitions they have become very proud off. They are worried about the future of arts funding per se in the UK. That's been a big issue for them."

Unions have predicted further action in the new year if an agreement is not reached.