1. Mysteries of Lisbon

Stories grow out of stories and suffering begets suffering in Raúl Ruiz’s labyrinthine, pan-European 19^th century Romantic costume drama about questing orphaned sons, lost mothers, and lovers sundered by fate. Dabbed with Surrealist brushstrokes, this four-and-a-half masterpiece, which was culled from a six-hour Portuguese miniseries based on Camilo Castelo Branco’s three-volume novel and suggests the influence of Balzac, Hugo, and Dickens, is a darkly-lit, sumptuous glory — a fitting valediction for the prolific Chilean filmmaker, who died in August.

2. Melancholia

Damned by its maker Lars von Trier’s self-destructive “OK, I’m a Nazi” quip at Cannes, “Melancholia” failed to win the Palme d’Or and has been pointedly spurned by American awards-givers. A shame, because it’s his most exhilarating and accessible film: deeply personal in its explication of depression and the malign influence of unsympathetic acquaintances and dysfunctional families, and a pyrotechnical marvel in its blend of Surrealism, Dogme-style realism, and “Marienbadish”-ish opulence.  Kirsten Dunst is breathtaking as the anguished Justine who grows in serenity as she almost wills the rogue planet to smash into Earth. Critics who disparaged the film as anti-life missed the point.

3. Meek’s Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt’s haunting “slow cinema” Western, a downscaled depiction of a tragic incident that befell a wagon train on the Oregon Trail in 1845, depicts the travails of seven lost pioneers and their scout who encounter a lone Cayuse Indian as they search the desert for drinkable water and a path to salvation. The scout, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), wants to kill him; standing in his way is the young wife (Michelle Williams), who believes the Cayuse can help them — plus, you know, he’s a human being. “Meek’s Cutoff” is a revisionist historical drama about the belligerently racist masculine creed of Manifest Destiny confronted by the female urge to share, protect, and trust; it’s also an allegory about blinkered American leadership in times of peril. Not the least impressive aspect of this stark, lyrical odyssey is the sound design, which makes the creaks of the canvas and the whines of the wagon wheels resound in the wilderness.

4. A Dangerous Method

Adapted by Christopher Hampton from his play “The Talking Cure” and John Kerr’s eponymous book, David Cronenberg’s tragicomedy explores the rift between Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), the catalyst being Jung’s affair with the Russian medical student Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who in 1904 had come to him in Zurich as his first analysand, her hysteria induced by the sexual excitement she took in being thrashed by her father. With Freud as Jung’s repressive Oedipal father, Spielrein as his Oedipal mother (who flees to Freud for analysis when Jung dumps her), and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) as the movie’s libertine id, “A Dangerous Method” is a shrink’s wet dream. The mood is thoughtful — notwithstanding the spankings Spielrein craves and Jung administers — yet this is one of Cronenberg’s most moving films.

5. Aurora

A leader of the Romanian New Wave, Cristi Puiu is one of few filmmakers who admits to disliking F.W Murnau’s 1927 classic Sunrise, which he has characterized as a fairytale. Partly made as a riposte, Aurora is the second of Puiu’s “Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest,” his follow-up to “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005), and possibly the most dauntingly slow thriller of the century so far. Little happens in its three hours: a somber middle-aged man (played by Puiu) has enigmatic conversations with people to whom he may or may not be related, hangs out in a leaky flat that’s being remodeled, and furtively spies on others in a grim neighborhood. He acquires a shotgun, later wrests his daughter out of school. Eventually, there’s an eruption, though even then little is explained — sometimes “why?” is inadequate. “Aurora” isn’t an emotional rollercoaster like Radu Muntean’s adultery drama “Tuesday, After Christmas” (with Mirela Oprişor outstanding as the betrayed wife) and its focus on the quotidian is guaranteed to try patience, but once seen, it’s never forgotten.

6. Hugo

The tone is relishably bittersweet, the kids (Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz) make intrepid storybook adventurers, the automaton is a magical talisman, and the 1930s Paris train station a splendidly exotic environment for Martin Scorsese’s first venture in 3D. But what makes “Hugo” gleam are the loving re-creations of the studio sets built and peopled by the movie pioneer George Méliès (Ben Kingsley) and the fin-de-siècle fantasies enacted on them. It’s Scorsese’s sweetest hommage.

7. The Princess of Montpensier

Bertrand Tavernier’s 1987 “Beatrice” was a full-blooded evocation of medieval France as the cold and brutal place it undoubtedly was. Virtually a companion piece, “The Princess of Montpensier” is a gripping aristocratic saga centering on a married heroine (Mélanie Thierry) passionately in love with a man she can’t have and unrequitedly adored by her protector; it brings a similar remorselessness to France’s 16^th century-religious wars. Stunningly immediate, it’s a contemporary, psychologically acute swashbuckler comprised of vicious intrigues, duels and ambushes and rendered with fierce tracking shots and explosive cutting. Poetry in dynamic motion.

8. City of Life and Death

Lu Chuan’s widescreen epic, which looks like it was filtered through ash and charcoal, depicts the Japanese Imperial Army’s siege and rape of Nanking in December 1937. It has been shown in films before, in documentaries (including the HBO-backed “Nanking,” inspired by the late Iris Chang’s controversial book), dramas (“Don’t Cry, Nanking”) and exploitation films, but never with such concentrated awe and mournfulness. It is to the Japanese genocide what “Schindler’s List” is to the Holocaust.

9. The Descendants

More quizzical than twinkling, George Clooney excels here as the latest of Alexander Payne’s unresolved middle-aged men — a  shlubby Hawaiian lawyer suddenly confronted with the knowledge that his comatose wife had been having an affair and forced to get to know the daughters, one a rebellious college student, the other a preadolescent puzzle, whom he’d long ignored. He also has to figure out what to do with the swathe of virgin land that his greedy relatives want to sell to resort developers. Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, “The Descendants” was an ideal vehicle for Payne’s calm yet surprising serio-comic storytelling. 

10. Midnight in Paris

The mythical Paris of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, and Salvador Dali (and eventually the Belle Epoque) comes seductively alive for an unfulfilled American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) as he unconsciously seeks escape from his crabby philistine fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her bourgeois parents. Woody Allen’s comedy, his best in years, harks back to “Play It Again, Sam,” “Alice,” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo” as it champions the liberating spirit of art and dreams over materialism, though Wilson’s Woody surrogate has to overcome the poisoned perfume of nostalgia in order to find his way. 

I arrived in Indianapolis on December 13 to participate in a panel on public relations in the cultural sector. That same day, the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) announced at a scheduled press conference that it would bow to community sentiment — expressed over many months in letters, petitions, and forums — and cancel a public art project it had commissioned from Fred Wilson.

The kind person who met me at the airport that day pointed out that Indianapolis is thought to be second only to Washington, D.C., in the number of its civic monuments. I imagine that this statistical source of civic pride was shared with Wilson, too, when he was invited to Indianapolis by CICF to formulate a design for the “Indianapolis Cultural Trail,” a program to create a continuous pedestrian pathway connecting the city’s sprawling neighborhoods. In any case, Wilson did observe that the sole black figure represented on all those many monuments is that of a freed slave — seated at the feet of his liberators and clutching his manacles in a raised right fist — included on the 284-foot-high Soldiers and Sailors Monument in the heart of downtown Indianapolis. Wilson proposed to replicate and “reimagine” the freed slave, replacing the manacles with a multicolored flag representing the African Diaspora, elevating the figure atop a tall angled base that would render the pose more assertive, and siting the new monument at the City-Country Building, the seat of local government. Like the figure, the work’s title — "E Pluribus Unum," Latin for “One out of many” — was appropriated, the motto of the new nation made of former colonies being claimed to describe the unity of a once enslaved and dispersed black people.

The opposition to Wilson’s design — largely but not exclusively voiced by the black community — appears to have been ignited by a September 16, 2010, letter to the editor published in the Indianapolis Recorder, the city’s black-owned daily, submitted by Leroy Robinson, a high school history teacher and, since the November 2011 elections, a city councilman. Robinson objected to the replication of a negative black image and particularly to the figure’s apelike facial features. (Raise your hands if you recall the derisive Obama sock monkey from the 2008 campaign.) He made an analogy between Wilson’s project and erecting a giant black lawn jockey, a remark that went viral and, for a time, fueled the belief that Wilson had proposed erecting just such a derogatory figure. During the ensuing months of protests and hearings, others pointed out that the City-County Building houses not just the powerful but also the powerless: the jail is located there. Given the incarceration rate of young black men across the country, it was argued, the monument’s figure might appear more impotent than defiant. Offers by CICF to re-site the work did not appease the opponents, nor did the fact that an information kiosk would be provided to explain (lengthily, no doubt) Wilson’s intentions and the work’s critical implications.

The decision to cancel the project elicited expressions of sadness and indignation from arts professionals — and a certain amount of grandstanding, too. Tyler Green, in his blog (hosted on ARTINFO), has been flogging Bryan Payne, CIFA’s president and CEO, for mishandling the process and for cowardice in backing away from support of Wilson’s project, as if the cancellation of a public art project — which is to say an outdoor work that is on view 24/7 — were as cut-and-dry an offense as yanking a David Wojnarowicz video from a temporary exhibition which viewers attend of their own volition. Green cites Christopher Knight of the L.A. Times as having issued the following judgment: “Not only is this one of the most provocative ideas he’s [Wilson’s] come up with, it’s one of the most compelling ideas for a public art project that I’ve encountered in a very long time.”

"E Pluribus Unum" may indeed be provocative and compelling for public art, but the strategies that propel the work are well established in critical artistic practice. One is reminded of Michael Asher’s 1979 transfer of a statue of George Washington, a weathered bronze cast of Houdon’s marble original, that stood at the entrance of the Art Institute of Chicago to the museum’s French decorative arts galleries, a transfer intended to highlight the ideological forces at play in the placement and evaluation of objects. More pointedly, the shackles-to-flag transformation of an abject stereotype into a figure of empowerment owes much to Betye Saar’s fundamental "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" (1972), in which the mammy figure has ditched the white baby she typically holds in favor of a shotgun. Wilson’s practice has long centered on the exposure of institutionalized racism in art, a campaign that earned widespread attention in 1992 with his revelatory exhibition “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society. For one of the displays that dealt with the exclusion of blacks from state history as constructed by the museum, Wilson installed three empty pedestals for hypothetical busts of black Marylanders of accomplishment: Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman.

Returning to that incendiary letter to the Indianapolis Recorder, we find Robinson calling for "E Pluribus Unum" to be replaced by a monument that honors the accomplishments of a black resident of Indianapolis. He names some candidates, too, including Tuskegee Airman Walter Plamer and the beauty products entrepreneur and philanthropist Madam C.J. Walker. His point — which was exactly Wilson’s point in 1992 — is well taken, and begs the question: Should Indianapolis welcome a public artwork that embodies a critique of past neglect, or should it commission a public work that actually corrects past neglect?

The next day, CICF’s decision was reported by the city’s mainstream newspaper, the Indianapolis Star (available in my hotel) under the blunt headline “Local groups pleased sculpture won’t be here.” The positive spin was that “Indianapolis is becoming more inclusive when it comes to shaping the city’s self-image.” The Indianapolis Recorder (not available in my hotel), which had published Robinson’s letter 15 months earlier, took a similar tack, but also looked ahead, reporting that “Toby Miller, director of the Race and Cultural Relations Leadership Network, a standing committee of the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee, and others involved in the discussions against Wilson’s project will be spearheading the community process for creating a new art piece.” To translate: A determined opposition has maneuvered from objecting to a specific artwork to cementing a mandate for there to be a specifically black public monument, the first in Indianapolis. CICF’s Payne has announced that, as a white man, he will play only a secondary role. In a brief conversation, Payne stated simply, “Race trumped art” in the final decision.

The cancellation of an honorable art project is never cause for celebration. Indianapolis may be the poorer for not having "E Pluribus Unum," and there is no guarantee that the subsequent project will display commensurate intelligence. Great subjects and great artists rarely coincide today in figural art: Take as Exhibit A Lei Yixin’s lifeless effigy of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the National Mall, a figure so robotic it makes Mount Rushmore’s dead presidents look warm-blooded. But the outcome in Indianapolis shouldn’t be deplored in an unconsidered defense of the absolute prerogative of “provocative” art, nor should local opposition to art that is broadly endorsed by the CCC (critics, curators, collectors) be reflexively rejected as unenlightened, uncomprehending, and conservative. It may be small consolation to Wilson that the insights he has conveyed regarding race and the control of representation have moved, in Indianapolis, from the arena of artistic practice to the world of real community action. On that basis — and with an awareness of the paradox — it’s not too far-fetched to argue that "E Pluribus Unum" has succeeded brilliantly, if unintentionally, as a temporary sculptural intervention that raised the consciousness of a community which had no prior agency in determining its public representation.

Will the original sculpture of the freed slave be seen — or, perhaps more precisely, ignored — as it was before the controversy, or has it been irrevocably transfigured? For the moment, all of the sculptures on the Soldiers and Sailors Monument are obscured by great drapes of Christmas lights. As it turned out, December 13 brought a different kind of press attention to the Indianapolis landmark: it was included on the Huffington Post’s list of Christmas trees worth visiting.

Marcia E. Vetrocq is an art historian and critic, and the senior editor of Art + Auction magazine.

So, the 2012 Whitney Biennial artist list has been released, and there are broad outlines that can be immediately discerned. Here's a snap temperature-reading of the coming exhibition, pulled together by co-curators Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders and opening in March:

1. THIS IS THE FILMMAKER'S BIENNIAL

Looking to see a good movie? Why not go to the to the biennial? The curators have done an impressive bit of star-wrangling this year, getting both Werner Herzog and Frederick Wiseman — two of the greatest documentarian filmmakers alive — to participate, as well as bringing in work by graffiti-artist-turned-actor-turned-director Vincent Gallo. Herzog, of course, is the vatic Teuton best known for art-film spectaculars like "Fitzcarraldo," and well as Hollywood movies with A-list actors like "Rescue Dawn" and "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans" (not your traditional Hollywood flicks, granted). But he's also greatly admired for groundbreaking documentaries like "Grizzly Man" and "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," which plumb near-mystical, deep-running truths in the lives of extraordinary people in extraordinary situations. His work was memorably included in the New Museum's 2008 "After Nature" exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, and at the Whitney his display will focus on the forgotten Dutch artist Hercules Seghers. Wiseman, meanwhile, is the Zen master of documenting how systems of Foucauldian order — from hospitals to "Public Housing" to "Stat Legislature" — actually function (his newest feature, "Crazy Horse," looks at exotic dancers in a strip club). Gallo, of course, is the Kohl-eyed provocateur whose confessional films seem to merge Gus Van Sant with a Herzogian weirdness, and who is best known for "Brown Bunny" (aka "that blowjob movie"). Kelly Reichardt, then, is the director and screenwriter of such critically acclaimed indie films as "Old Joy" and "Meek's Cutoff." Charles Atlas is a filmmaker who has made celebrated documentaries as "The Legend of Leigh Bowery." George Kuchar, who died in September, is the most traditionally-defined "artist" of the group, a crafter of short and often bizarre outsider films (he's famously obsessed with the weather), who was also featured in the last New York Film Festival. 

2. POLITICAL ART IS WOMEN'S WORK

Sussman, the curator, is best known for organizing the intensely controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial, which brought often-uncomfortable political discourse — including what was known in the '90s as "identity politics" — into the museum, with visitors memorably being handed a button by Daniel J. Martinez that read "I Can't Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White." An uproar ensued, with the New York Times's then-chief art critic Michael Kimmelman declaring "I hate this show." This time around, the political bent can be discerned from the list, too — and intriguingly, it's mostly from a female perspective. Of the 20 women included in the show, Andrea Fraser stands out as an icon of feminist institutional critique, revered for her canny send-ups of the male-run museum world (a kind of inoculating self-criticism the Whitney loves indulging in, unless the artist's name is Hans Haacke or Christopher D'Arcangelo). K8 Hardy, then, is another feminist artist, whose W.A.G.E. artists's-rights group is an heir to the Art Workers Coalition. Georgia Sagri, an enfant terrible of the performance art circuit, is an engaged participant in refocusing the Occupy movement against entrenched interests in the art world, most notably in the baffling and off-putting Occupy Artist Space, which somehow found the specter of the 1 percent in the one of New York's most artist-supportive nonprofits. (She's best known, however, for her run-in with transgressive masturbating-and-urinating performance artist Ann Liv Young.)  

3. THE BOUNDARIES ARE BEING NUDGED

The Whitney Biennial always throws a few curve-balls to keep us on our toes, last time around peppering the show with war reportage both dramatized (Omar Fast) and journalistic (Nina Berman). This year, we've got the Red Krayola. Who, you ask? Founded in 1966 by a bunch of art students at Houston's University of St. Thomas and led by artist Mayo Thompson, the group was a psychedelic noise-rock band that brought avant-garde music to the southern college-campus circuit, playing envelope-pushing shows (lots of static and banging and drones) at the height of the '60s and then persisting as a music-nerd touchstone. John Kelsey, meanwhile, is both a cerebral downtown artist/art critic/catalogue-essay maven and the co-founder of Chinatown's indie Reena Spaulings gallery — which creates a nice symmetry with curator Jay Sanders, who was tapped for the biennial after working as a dealer at Greene Naftali gallery. (Expect cries of Jeffrey Deitch-style commercialism over these picks, and the fact that two Greene Naftali artists were included in this list — Richard Hawkins and John Knight — might come back to haunt Sanders.) Then there's Robert Gober, the eminent surrealist sculptor who will be following up his smashing Whitney show of Charles Burchfield's paintings with another curatorial effort backing another American original, this time the late Texas painter Forrest Bess (1911-1977).

4. THERE ARE OLD GUYS AND TRENDY UPSTARTS TOO  

As usual. Say hello again to Mike Kelley, Charles Atlas, Kai Althoff, Lutz Bacher (re-imported into the cannon by her MoMA PS1 show), and Jutta Koether (the closest thing to a Greene Naftali connection, perhaps). Then congratulate Kai Althoff, LaToya Ruby Frazier (of "Younger Than Jesus"), Nicole Eisenman, Nick Mauss, Liz Deschenes, Moyra Davey, Oscar Tuazon (he's big in Europe), and Tom Thayer for continuing their promising runs through the cursus honorum. 

5. IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE LIST

Mike Kelley, zany L.A. sculptor, became a Performa hero in 2009, so don't judge books by their covers. Also, the Red Krayola?

Anyway, here's the list:

Kai Althoff
Thom Andersen
Charles Atlas
Lutz Bacher
Forrest Bess (by Robert Gober)
Michael Clark
Dennis Cooper and Gisèle Vienne
Cameron Crawford
Moyra Davey
Liz Deschenes
Nathaniel Dorsky
Nicole Eisenman
Kevin Jerome Everson
Vincent Fecteau
Andrea Fraser
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Vincent Gallo
K8 Hardy
Richard Hawkins
Werner Herzog
Jerome Hiler
Matt Hoyt
Dawn Kasper
Mike Kelley
John Kelsey
Jutta Koether
John Knight
George Kuchar
Laida Lertxundi
Kate Levant
Sam Lewitt
Joanna Malinowska
Andrew Masullo
Nick Mauss
Richard Maxwell
Sarah Michelson
Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran
Laura Poitras
Matt Porterfield
Luther Price
Lucy Raven
The Red Krayola
Kelly Reichardt
Elaine Reichek
Michael Robinson
Georgia Sagri
Michael E. Smith
Tom Thayer
Wu Tsang
Oscar Tuazon
Frederick Wiseman

The good news came on Monday, as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the highly-anticipated winner of the bid to build the cities’s new applied science campus. Cornell, whose $2 billion designs were dreamt up by architectural giants Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, beat out a host of formidable competition, including Columbia, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, and institutions from around the world.

As a result, Cornell, in partnership with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, receives an 11-acre parcel on Roosevelt Island and $100 million towards infrastructure (truly a drop in the bucket for their pricey proposal), as well as the responsibility of creating an East Coast Silicon Valley, an effort to add technology to the list of New York’s other reigning industries.

Roosevelt Island, while it may be a forthcoming bastion of technical innovation, is an area where few New Yorkers can say they've ventured. While NYU had proposed a campus in Downtown Brooklyn, Cornell will be building on a place that was called Welfare Island for a good 50-year chunk of its existence. Its current population, made up of family households as well as residents of nursing homes and rehabilitation centers, is just under 10,000 souls. A few have expressed concerns about the influx of traffic on and off the island the campus will cause, while others worry it will turn their neighborhood into a college town — it might have to, since the future school's competition in Palo Alto (Stanford), after all, was named the country's most poshest student resort. Currently, the island’s amenities include the ruins of a decaying former smallpox hospital, and more recently, a Starbucks and a Duane Reade.

Although the angular campus of metallic rhomboids looks a bit like a blinding eyesore in current videos and renderings, the winning news came as little surprise. Cornell’s proposals were simply the largest and most ambitious. At 2.1 million square feet of classrooms, labs, auditoriums, housing, and more, the institution will have the capacity to teach 2,500 students. It includes some very progressive environmental features, including solar energy and geothermal wells.  

Cornell’s main competition, longstanding nesting ground of fledgling tech superstars Stanford University, abruptly dropped out of the competition three days before the announcement and abandoned their $2.5 billion plans to reinvent the island's Goldwater Hospital campus with Ennead Architects. Whether Cornell won because Stanford dropped out or if Stanford dropped out because Cornell was going to win remains unclear. Around the same time as Stanford's withdrawl, Atlantic Philanthropies founder and Cornell alum Charles Feeney had donated $350 million (at the time, anonymously) towards his alma matter’s efforts.

“It’s certainly something that boosted Cornell’s fundraising goals, but it wasn’t the determining factor,” a project spokesperson told ARTINFO. “Cornell’s was simply the best proposal, and its plans have been made all the more possible by this large donation.”  

In addition the high hopes that this campus will produce the next Steve Jobs, or at the very least Bill Gates, Bloomberg also claims the campus will produce $23 billion in economic activity over the next 30 years and $1.4 billion in tax revenue. Construction alone is slated to create 20,000 construction jobs, and, after completion, 8,000 permanent jobs — not just for Ph.D’s — to operate it.

NEW YORK— D’Amelio Terras gallery, the pioneering Chelsea art dealership founded in 1996, has announced that it will soon be closing its doors. The move will see co-owners and founders Christopher D’Amelio and Lucien Terras splitting up their partnership — D’Amelio will open a new gallery in the current 525 West 22nd Street location and Terras will move on to separate ventures, working with artists and institutions.   

“It was a very thoughtful and mature decision after 15 years of partnership to have a change and work independently,” D’Amelio told ARTINFO. Despite the recent high-profile closings of New York’s South Asia-focused Bose Pacia gallery and the 160-year-old blue chip Knoedler gallery (following an ongoing law suit over allegedly forged work) in the last two months, the dealer said that it wasn’t poor sales that precipitated the changes. “It was definitely not an economic decision,” he said.

D’Amelio and Terras began discussing the possible split “at the end of 2008 and 2009, when the economy did present a real challenge, whereas things previously had moved quite smoothly and effortlessly forward,” D'Amelio explained. “That became a time of buckling down and surviving, which we did.” The period of austerity did “make us both think about what it is we exactly want to do,” D’Amelio said.

“I expect a lot more from both of us immediately,” the co-owner added. “We’re not checking out, we’re just changing the form.” With his new gallery, D’Amelio will be taking on staff, working with some of the same artists the gallery currently represents and seeking out new additions as well.

D’Amelio Terras currently represents artists including Dario Robleto, Matt Keegan, and Polly Apfelbaum. The space’s current exhibition is Leslie Hewitt’s “Blue Skies, Warm Sunlight,” an exploration of photography and sculpture. The two co-owners both have extensive backgrounds in contemporary art and worked together at Paula Cooper Gallery from 1992 to 1996, after which they founded the joint gallery.

Patti Paige makes turns cityscapes into sweets. In 1976, a young, redheaded art school graduate named Patti Paige rented a studio in a commercial walk-up in southern SoHo, not far from Canal Street. Her paintings made it into journals and shows, and she...

Learn how to upsize or downsize a garment. Take your daughter's sweater you loved her in as a toddler and size it for a tween. Wendy will encourage you to make a pattern your own by adding sleeves or even a hood. She will even show you how to take a...

When I was a little girl my mother made my brothers and me some amazing felt appliqué Christmas stockings from a kit. My brothers' stockings were in a toy soldier theme and mine was in an angel theme.  Sadly, a certain little girl loved her stocking so much that she was known to wear it around a sometimes wet basement.  Needless to say, Mom's handiwork, along with her mood, was ruined pretty quickly...

NEW YORK — A well-preserved 2,000-year-old scroll of the Ten Commandments discovered in a cave is going on display in the city for the first time beginning Friday. The tiny scroll will be shown for 10 days at the Discovery Times Square exhibition space...

One of our favorite pieces in the Israel Museum’s current “Curious Minds” design exhibition is this luminous sculpture by the Netherland’s Studio Drift. First built in collaboration with London-based Pavilion of Art and Design darlings Carpenters Workshop Gallery in 2009, “Fragile Future III” combines nature and technology by embedding actual dandelion seeds into LED lights — forming an impressive array of “dandelights,” if you will. Although delicate in appearance and name, this third installment is crafted into a maze of an open frame structure that isn’t blowing away anytime soon.  

"Curious Minds" is on view at Jerusalem's Israel Museum through April 14. 

Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” which opens Friday, is set during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s. Stressing the mixed ethnicity of the former Yugoslavia and aghast at the notion of people killing and raping their compatriots, it’s about a pair of star-crossed lovers in Sarajevo. Ajla (Zana Marjanović), a Bosnian Muslim artist, meets a Serb cop, Danijel (Goran Kostić), at a Sarajevo nightclub and they’re starting to cozy up to one another when a bomb explodes.

When they next meet, Ajla has been rounded up with other women who are to be raped repeatedly by Serb soldiers as part of the ethnic cleansing program. Danijel intervenes to save her, however, and eventually installs her in a room where she can practice her art and the two can have sex. But Danijel's father, a nationalistic Serb general, is suspicious.

This may sound like a recipe for a Bosnian-Serb “Romeo and Juliet” with more mature lovers, but Danijel’s random killing of Bosnian refugees for sport scotches that theory. “At times Danijel seems a somewhat more benign version of Ralph Fiennes' Nazi in ‘Schindler's List,’ testing the limits of his affection for his personal refugee/plaything while using the refugees scurrying below his window for target practice,” Justin Chang writes in his Variety review.

While Jolie’s Hollywood celebrity as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees opened doors for the actress when it came to getting permission to film in Bosnia (and Budapest), inevitably it’s also factoring into assessments of the movie. Chang, for one, says it “seems to spring less from artistic conviction than from an over-earnest humanitarian impulse.”

One word that has cropped up in several of the early reviews is “vanity” — the deadly sin that Jolie has to exorcise, apparently, before she can be regarded as a bone fide filmmaker. Some, but not all, critics say she has succeeded.    

“It’s clear within the first few minutes of ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey,’ a blunt and brutal look at genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, that this is a serious piece of work and not simply a vanity project for its debuting writer-director,” Todd McCarthy writes in the Hollywood Reporter.

“In making a United Nations extra-credit project about the Bosnian War that pointedly criticizes the U.S. role in a conflict now safely in history's rearview mirror,” says Karina Longworth in the Village Voice, “she has produced a sanctimonious vanity commercial for her own good intentions.”

“The film is not some celebrity vanity project, but an astute, dramatically gripping work set against the horrors of the Bosnian War,” Caryn James notes at indiewire.com.

The "vanity" issue is sexist. Presumably because they aren't actresses in the public spotlight, Michael Winterbottom, John Moore, and Richard Shepard weren't accused  of vanity when they directed their Bosnian War films, "Welcome to Sarajevo" (1997), "Behind Enemy Lines" (2001), and "The Hunting Party" (2007), respectively. Nor was Clint Eastwood when his "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima" were released in 2006. The Chinese director Lu Chuan wasn’t accused of vainglory for depicting the mass rape of Nanking’s women by invading Japanese forces in 1937 in “The City of Life and Death,” which opened here in May. But then he didn’t play Lana Croft and isn’t married to Brad Pitt.

Whether vanity was a consideration for Jolie, she was sufficiently outraged by learning, after the fact, of systemic rape in the Bosnian war to be able to transcend the limitations of being a glamorous A-list star by getting the picture made. Having starred in “Beyond Borders” (2003), a disappointing drama about aid workers set in such global hotspots as Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechyna, and to greater effect as Mariane Pearl in “A Mighty Heart” (2007), Jolie has maintained a level of commitment to films that depict human suffering in times of famine or war. The unflinching approach she has taken “In the Land of Blood and Honey” and the film’s mostly appreciative reviews so far suggest she has evolved in terms of her humanitarian consciousness. Choosing not to act in the film and to include in the cast a number of women and men scarred by the conflict is scarcely narcissistic.

Jolie, 36, clearly expected that she herself — and not just the movie — would be reviewed. “Maybe people will see this film and judge it differently, in a negative way, because I made it,” she told the New York Times’s Larry Rohter. “But at the same time, I don’t think I could have gotten it made unless I had a strong career.”

She believes the movie, which cost a reported $13 million, “might not have been made at all, especially because of this subject matter, which in Hollywood is famously difficult.” Using her celebrity purposefully is important to her, she told Rohter, as opposed simply to being famous for fame’s sake. “I’d like it to be good for something. When you’re young, and somebody sits you down for an interview, you don’t know what to say or why you’re there, because you haven’t formed yourself. I still don’t completely know what to say or do, but I at least have some focus, purpose and direction as to what can be put out in the world that is thoughtful and helpful — as opposed to just what you’re wearing.”

Given that the film has no stars and addresses the rapes of tens of thousands of women during a war scarcely on Americans’ radar since it ended 16 years ago, Jolie’s involvement in it is undoubtedly its strongest selling point. Landing as it does during a season packed with spectacular entertainment movies, it needs her to promote it.

“The people felt as though the world had forgotten them,” Jolie said of the Bosnian war victims in an interview with Janine di Giovanni in Newsweek. “It was a time of great pain, and I wanted to depict how courageous people were — without offending anyone. It was made to remind everyone of the war — but only a small group of people will probably understand.” 

John Chamberlain passed away yesterday at the age of 85. In his memory, ARTINFO is reposting this account of visiting the artist's fabled Long Island studio to see his last works. It was originally published on September 19, 2011.

Walking through John Chamberlain's home and studio on Shelter Island, one is reminded of a basic fact: the man likes cars. Parked in the driveway outside his ranch-style house is a small fleet — a Mercedes-Benz G500 SUV, a black BMW sedan, two other SUVs, another sedan. Other signs of automania abound inside, from the set of artist-themed vanity plates (a melted Salvador Dalí plate, a drip-spattered Pollock one, et cetera) covering an exposed beam to a novelty couch shaped like the tail of a pink 1959 Cadillac. This is natural, considering that the 84-year-old artist entered the pantheon of American art on the horsepower of sculptures that, since the mid 1950s, have been built from the painted metal husks of junked automobiles, contorted into shapes that stand as high points of the Abstract Expressionist impulse.

What is unusual, however, is that the art filling much of his studio, and piling up in the hallways of his home, has nothing to do with cars whatsoever. Instead, these new works are an amalgam of photography and painting, remixed digitally in a way that looks like a product of the Internet generation. As the art dealer Steven Kasher puts it, "If you just saw them at random you'd think they were by some really cool 30-year-old from Williamsburg."

The youthful nature of the works, 11 of which are now on view at Steven Kasher Gallery, belies the poor health that has afflicted Chamberlain in recent years. In fact, while Kasher was giving a tour of the Shelter Island studio to preview the new series, the artist was in a Manhattan hospital undergoing treatment; then, last Thursday, a bout of illness prevented him from attending his show's opening. But somehow, through sheer indomitability, Chamberlain has been remarkably productive of late. Since leaving the Pace Gallery earlier this year to join Gagosian, he debuted a show there of new work — made, controversially, via a team of Belgian fabricators — and he is preparing for a 2012 career retrospective at the Guggenheim that opens in February.

All the while he has been working on his "pictures," as he calls his new photographic canvases, making roughly 26 in all. "Chamberlain is very much racing against time," Kasher says. From the creative tumult in the artist's studio, it shows. Not only are there dozens of artworks in various stages of completion, the house itself has been undergoing an ambitious expansion, with an entire wing added and an enormous indoor pool being dug.

As for the new canvasses, they smack of the devil-may-care experimentation one often encounters in late work. Each is composed of several vertical panels containing photographs that Chamberlain took and then had an assistant distort on Photoshop, blowing them up with fun-house-mirror effects, inverting them, splicing them together, shooting them through with sizzling tropical hues ("his color sensibility is definitely felt in the pictures," notes Kasher), and pixelating them in a way that makes them resemble video-game stills. The earliest ones have a flat, decorative look reminiscent of Bonnard; the most recent are zippy, loud, and baroque. All of them have an unsettling, pastiche quality. "The way Chamberlain sees photography is the way he sees cars," Kaplan explains. "He tears them up he rips them up and he uses what he wants."

Most notably for the work of an artist known for defiantly non-objective sculptures, the pictures are not abstract but representational, presenting distorted images of confederates ranging from the late artist Dennis Oppenheim to New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham to Chamberlain's children to the artist himself — usually wearing reflective sunglasses, and sometimes appearing three times in a single work. (It's also possible to make out the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks from the artist's beloved Paris.)

The canvases range from three to eight bolted-together panels apiece, priced at $50,000 per panel, according to the dealer. "They're a real bargain," he says. "It's actually unbelievably cheap — you can buy my entire show for the price of one of the good-sized pieces in the Gagosian show." (Chamberlain, it might be noted, has never put much stock in having exclusive relationships with art dealers, and has been known to sell sculptures directly to collectors who knock on his studio door.)

While many will see the works as a radical departure for the artist, they are in fact deeply rooted in his oeuvre. Born to a family of tavern keepers in 1927, Chamberlain dabbled in careers as a hairdresser and a poet — arranging "found" words from the everyday landscape into new phrases — before a stay at Black Mountain College committed him to sculpture, which he began making out of used car parts in the late 1950s. (He has always argued that he isn't interested in "car parts per se" or in cars as a theme, but "just the sheet metal" — though there was a period when was known to endow non-auto-part sculptures with the Chamberlain touch by hitting them with his car.)

He also experimented with film, as in the case of "The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez," a 1969 movie that the artist made with Warhol regulars Ultra Violet and Taylor Mead, which lives on today mainly through Internet notoriety. (It "features nudity and gymnastic sexual liaisons in a variety of places, including trees," according to one fan bulletin board. "Most likely this trashy underground film is of no interest to those other than naked-flesh fanatics." The artist Lawrence Weiner is said to own a still from the film.)

In the '60s, Chamberlain was also introduced to the Widelux swing-lens panoramic camera, which he began using to take photos — not in the traditional point-and-shoot manner, but by sweeping the camera through the air and snapping away without looking through the viewfinder. In 1993, he had an exhibition of these photographs at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. Walking through Chamberlain's studio, it's clear that his interest in the medium has only grown. Lining walls of the cluttered space — which is filled with film reels, old art magazines, unusual detritus (a Homer Simpson clock), and tabletop models of new sculptures destined for the Guggenheim show (many resemble twists of foil bent into ankh-like shapes) — are dozens of photos waiting to be Photoshopped by the artist's 23-year-old assistant, Nicholas Alessandro Pissarro Sherman.

"He's taken all the pictures he wants, and now he just wants to do something with them," according to Sherman. One that might yet be used in an work shows Chamberlain looking dazed, his head bloodied. "He was in Florida and someone broke into his home and hit him on the head with a cinder block," says the assistant. "He didn't want to call an ambulance or anything — he just wanted to take a picture."

However intriguing the photographic works are, the overwhelming draw in visiting Chamberlain's studio lies on the other side of the compound, where a massive, clerestoried barn is home to more than 20 metallic sculptures that the artist is either working on or, as with several colorfully painted anemone-like pieces from the '80s, is keeping for himself from his back catalogue. (An earlier triumph that he has also held onto, "Miss Lucy Pink" of 1963, sits in the photo studio.) All around this phantasmagorical forest of art are heaps of raw auto parts, including two vintage Plymouth hoods and other pieces of classic hardtops that the artist acquired two years ago from the estate of an eccentric European car collector. The big blue machine he uses to crush the cars stands to the side.

In the middle of the room, facing three towering pieces he is currently working on — the size of campers or mini-firetrucks, they resemble mangled Transformers standing at attention — is the red rubber chair that Chamberlain occupies as he directs his team of fabricators at work. "Three or four guys who work with John cut the metal with an oxy-acetylene torch while he sits there, and that's how he made all the Gagosian stuff," says Sherman. "He is working ferociously to complete these monumental pieces." Chamberlain has been in the sculpture studio "seven days a week for the past five months," he says.

To leave the studio, one has to walk through the artist's living quarters, where it is both touching and instructive to encounter Chamberlain's cherished memorabilia. Hanging next to the honorable discharge he received from the Navy (after joining at 16), an advertisement for his 1957 debut solo show at Chicago's Wells Street Gallery, and a handmade sign that reads "I ♥ Pops" is a black-and-white photograph of an aged de Kooning, whom Chamberlain idolizes. Further towards the door is a personal hall of fame, with one wall covered in photographs of the artist's artistic peers and heroes, including Rothko, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rauschenberg.

The photographs are not only indicative of Chamberlain's proud position in art history, but also a reminder that the late work of these artists is only now coming under reconsideration — to great profit in the case of MoMA's new de Kooning retrospective. That Chamberlain is still fighting the odds to make new creations, and to take new risks with the photographic pieces, is inspiring indeed, and promises that more surprises will be in store when his Guggenheim show opens next year.

To take a virtual tour of John Chamberlain's studio, click the slide show at left. (Publication of photos showing sculptures in progress was not permitted.)

John Chamberlain, an irascible character known for imposing sculptures of crushed metal, passed away yesterday at the age of 84. He was indisputably a giant of the field, winning a Lifetime Achievement Award from D.C.'s International Sculpture Center in 1993 and the Distinction in Sculpture Honor from the SculptureCenter in New York in 1999.

It is a measure of Chamberlain's singularity, however, that commentators were unable to decide exactly what genre to put him into. He is remembered both as an Abstract Expressionist — because of the dynamic forms of his works — and as a Pop artist, because of his characteristic use of found objects (in particular car parts), his use of candy-colored paints (a no-no for classic abstract sculpture), and the subtle assembly line character of his process. 

For his part, he didn't much care about precise labels. "I've found that Abstract Expression is really the only one you need," Chamberlain said in an interview with his then-dealer, Pace's Arne Glimcher, when asked about his views on art. "Because it's all abstract. It doesn't matter if its realism — it's still abstract, and it's the guy's expression. It doesn't matter who it is. The person is expressing himself. So it's all abstract expression."

Chamberlain was born in 1927 in Rochester, Indiana, and raised in Chicago. After serving in the Navy, he went on to attend the Art Institute of Chicago before finding a place for his enthusiasms at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the mid-'50s. He came to New York in 1956, ensconcing himself as part of the scene at the legendary Cedar Tavern, the hangout of the Abstract Expressionists, coming under the influence of idols like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

He found his most fertile influence, however, in the welded constructions of David Smith. By 1957, Chamberlain was incorporating metal from junked automobiles into his sculptures. His first serious solo show was in 1960 at New York's the Martha Jackson Gallery, and after 1962 he showed often at Leo Castelli Gallery. In 1964, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, and went on to have hundreds of shows — including one early survey at the Guggenheim in 1970 — returning again and again to tortured and abused metal as his signature theme.

Though he created a successful and enduring formula, Chamberlain was not just a one-trick pony. He was also known for smaller sculptures made of belted foam, forming waffled, bouquet-like shapes. He also experimented with independent film, notoriously with the racy "The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez" (1969), featuring Taylor Mead and Ultra Violet ("this trashy underground film is of no interest to those other than naked-flesh fanatics," wrote one of the cult film's harsher critics). Most recently, the octogenarian had taken to creating a new series of collage-like Photoshop montages, seen this year at Steven Kasher gallery, even as he continued his enduring fascination with crushed metal at his Shelter Island studio. 

A large retrospective of his work had already been in the works for February at the Guggenheim, and will now go on without him.

The mothership of airstream conversions sits on the roof top of Cape Town's historic Grandy Daddy Hotel, and it is by far the coolest thing we've seen in a long while. Each of the seven airstreams strategically placed on this Long Street rooftop is in...

For its second commissioned art show in Tokyo, luxury giant Louis Vuitton invited Brooklyn-based artist Alyson Shotz to conceive a work for display at the firm’s swank flagship. The airy glass cube that sits atop the Omotesando store, designed in 2002 by Jun Aoki and dubbed the Espace Vuitton, is an ideal venue for Shotz’s sculptures, whose shiny surfaces are activated by changes in light and atmosphere.

As her exhibition “Geometry of Light” winds down its run on December 25, Shotz recently joined Nat Trotman, associate curator at the Guggenheim in New York, for an artist talk with a handpicked group of Japanese art-world denizens — including collector Yoshiko Morita, the widow of Sony founder Akio Morita, and media artist Mikami Seiko — and Vuitton patrons.

Encompassing ideas of transience and change, matter and antimatter, and transparency and opaqueness, Shotz’s work shares a subtle affinity with Eastern philosophy and Japanese culture. “For me,” she says, “an ideal artwork is one that you can never know.”

Click the accompanying slide show to see Shotz's new work, accompanied by her commentary on the piece.

– Tracey Emin Doesn’t Need the Money: The British artist plans to donate her Royal Academy teaching wage to pay for art materials for her students. The Turner Prize winner was appointed a professor of drawing at the famous British institution last week. "It's a wonderful position because I actually dictate how the drawing classes can be," she said. [BBC] 

– Public Art for D.C.: A new program called 5x5 will put temporary public art installations throughout Washington, a city that has long lagged behind others in the realm of public art. Five curators each received $100,000 to create 25 projects in collaboration with five artists of their choosing. [NYT] 

– White Cube Signs Theaster Gates: The Chicago-born sculptor, installation and performance artist will work with the blue chip gallery in London and continue to be repped by Kavi Gupta in his hometown and Berlin. Perhaps Gates’s upcoming stint as the official artist of the Armory Show will inspire a New York gallery to pick up the rapidly rising star next? [Baer Faxt]

– Occupy D.C. Street Art Spreads: An unnamed street artist has begun posting wheatpasted signs around Washington, D.C. supporting local artist and activist Adrian Parsons, who has been on a hunger strike while in jail with other protestors from Occupy D.C. for the past two weeks. The poster reproduces a photo of Parsons being arrested while handcuffed with the words “Lean and Hungry.” [WaPo]

– London Dealers Fight Droit de Suite: London dealers oppose the new droit de suite law that goes into effect in the EU next year. Critics claim the directive will put London at a competitive disadvantage with top art works going instead to rival markets like New York or Hong Kong, where no such levy applies. “The original idea was to help artists who were young and starving in their garrets to get a little bit more from their art. But the reality is rather different,” said Ivan Macquiten, editor of the Antiques Trade Gazette. [Guardian] 

– Altamira Restoration Lags: Despite nearly 10 years of restoration work, the Altamira cave paintings in northern Spain will remain inaccessible to almost everyone for the foreseeable future. Archaeological director José Antonio Lasheras voiced frustration with the project’s pace, saying that it is “an absolute failure” that such a valuable cultural heritage site should remain closed. [El Mundo]

– Art Project Alerts SVA Administrator to Burglary: A motion-sensitive camera School of Visual Arts administrator Levant Cetiner purchased for an interactive art project ended up alerting him to a burglary in progress inside his home. Pictures of a man entering his apartment from the roof and attempting to make off with several of Cetiner’s used laptops landed in his inbox. He called 911, and the burglar was arrested. [CBS]

– A New Curator for MoMA’s Architecture Department: Pedro Gadanho has been appointed a curator in MoMA’s department of architecture and design. Gadanho, currently an architect and curator based in Lisbon, will oversee the museum’s Young Architects Program and its WAP International Program. [ArchPaper] 

– Assessing the Washington Monument’s Damage: A new report on the damage done to the Washington monument during August’s earthquake details extensive cracking and chipped stones at the top of the 127-year-old structure that make it vulnerable to rain. The report was prepared by an engineering firm whose employees repelled down the monument to inspect damage. [AP] 

– Mr. Brainwash Returns: The street artist who played a starring role in the street art documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” has returned to the City of Angels “with a new mega-show of the sort that only he could mastermind — which is to say that it is a sprawling, jumbled monstrosity pieced together at the last minute,” writes the L.A. Times. Brainwash and his crew rented out a five-story warehouse in the city and are working frantically to fill it with sculptures and paintings before opening night. [LAT] 

– Captain Beefheart’s Album Gets Release Date: More than 36 years after it was recorded, Zappa Records is finally releasing Captain Beefheart’s highly-anticipated album “Bat Chain Puller.” The album, which was reportedly shelved because of a disagreement with producer Frank Zappa and business partner Herb Cohen, will hit shelves January 15. [NYT] 

– Is England in the Midst of a Metal Sculpture Crime Wave?: The theft of a life-size aluminum sculpture of a rhinoceros from a college in North Yorkshire is the second incidence of metal sculpture larceny to make headlines in England this week. Police have traced the recent wave to the rising cost of metals such as brass, aluminum, copper, and lead. [ITA]