In 1994, a student in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program created a collage about rape based on the work of feminist photojournalist Donna Ferrato. “It was a radically different use of the image — it was being collaged and literally cut up,” recalled former Whitney director David A. Ross. Nevertheless, the student was served a tall stack of legal papers accusing her of infringing Ferrato’s copyright, and she decided to remove the piece from the show. In his nine years at the Whitney, Ross said this episode was his only experience with copyright infringement trouble.

In the 17 years between Ferrato’s cease-and-desist letter and the historic Prince v. Cariou copyright ruling last March, in which a judge found artist Richard Prince’s “Canal Zone” series to have inappropriately borrowed from Patrick Cariou’s photographs of Jamaican Rastafarians, much has changed. The Internet has transformed the way we see, make, share, and purchase art and other visual media. According to art lawyers, the number of copyright infringement lawsuits (or threatened lawsuits, like that of the Whitney student) has also increased dramatically, in part because copyrighted material is so easily accessible on the Web.

Because the Prince case in particular is so high-profile, his lawyers argue that the district court’s decision will paralyze numerous other artists who work with appropriated imagery. The end result, they claim, will be rampant self-censorship in the art world. “The district court’s holding would force every museum and gallery to undertake an independent legal and factual analysis of every new and existing work within their collection which contained any element of appropriation to decide whether there was any possible copyright infringement,” they write in their appeal of the ruling. “Such a chilling effect could remove all appropriation art from public view.”

Cariou’s lawyers described such claims as “dire warnings” in their response to the appeal. But the fact that this very expensive case is playing out so publicly means that regardless of its legal outcome, Prince v. Cariou has the potential to influence the way other artists, galleries, and museums think about appropriation art. Over the last few months, we spoke with over a dozen lawyers, curators, academics, and artists to see just how the Prince v. Cariou case has shaped their views on the issue of appropriation. While few galleries, museums, or big-name artists were willing to discuss on the record whether the case had a chilling effect on the art they show or make, one thing is clear: we no longer live in an era in which a student in the Whitney’s Independent Study program can borrow imagery without thinking carefully about the law. Since Prince v. Cariou, few artists appropriate without considering the consequences first.

ANXIETY ABOUNDS

“Even before the district court issued its ruling, we were receiving many more questions about fair use,” said art lawyer Virginia Rutledge, a former general counsel for Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that advocates for more open copyright standards, and a co-author of the Andy Warhol Foundation's amicus brief filed in support of Prince. “Blue-chip contemporary artists asking if their work is legal. Major collectors asking if they need artists to sign indemnifications. I know of planned works that have not been made, or existing works not exhibited, because of concern about copyright infringement claims,” she said. “And these people can afford lawyers, even if they shouldn't have to bear the expense. What about the artists still paying off their MFA loans?” 

Nervousness about appropriation has also crept into the art academy. Ross, who now serves as chair of the School for Visual Arts's MFA in Art Practice program, said he plans to assign all his students readings and casework surrounding Prince v. Cariou and other art-related copyright lawsuits. All students are required to take a workshop in intellectual property rights. “I never give anybody legal advice — I don’t give medical advice either,” he said. “But people come to their own conclusions, and that is that this is a litigious time.”

While it is unclear whether the anxiety surrounding Prince v. Cariou is directly suppressing artistic production — very few artists would admit as much on the record — it is certainly making people think more carefully about the work they produce. “After the initial judgment hit the press, I got a flurry of phone calls and e-mails, including from artists who are way more established than I am, asking for advice,” said Joy Garnett, an artist who has lectured and written widely on the subject of fair use. Garnett recalled a particular incident in which a friend who is a conceptual artist worried about a certain logo appearing in a video she had already made. “These artists were afraid of doing the things that they normally do,” she said.

FIGHTING BACK

Some artists who work with appropriated material, however, see the lawsuit as a kind of relic, existing in a realm outside the “borrow and be borrowed” culture of the Internet. Several artists quoted Randy Kennedy's recent New York Times article on the legacy of appropriation art after Prince v. Cariou, saying the entire case felt “almost Victorian.” At a time when the Internet allows visual media to be shared constantly and without limit, some artists, particularly those whose practice is linked to the Web, use appropriated material in willful disregard of the Prince case and others like it.

“I take almost a moral stance of just not caring [about potential copyright infringement],” said Michael Bell-Smith, whose multimedia art incorporates material ranging from gifs to industrial videos to music clips. Bell-Smith said that at one point he intentionally pushed the boundaries of fair use for a project in which he encouraged the public to make remixes out of copyrighted material from the estate of the band Funkadelic. “I say this jokingly, but maybe there’s a little truth to it: as an artist, I feel like those rules don’t apply to me. I don’t think about art in moral terms, but I do think that’s something I’ve come to realize I have a strong opinion about.”

For other artists, it isn’t the development of the Internet, but rather that of art history that makes them feel entitled to appropriate imagery in the face of Prince v. Cariou. Elad Lassry, a conceptual artist who uses anonymous-seeming photographs — mostly original, some found — in his work, is one of many who developed in the shadow of the so-called Pictures Generation. “When I was a student, these are the artists and the works — like Sherrie Levine rephotographing Walker Evans — that changed the way I think,” he said. He sees appropriation as part of a legacy his generation has inherited. “My work is not about appropriation. Appropriation is part of a larger cultural exercise. At this moment it is part of the vocabulary and often the tools of young artists. It is such a foundation of contemporary culture — the idea that there is this duality to the image also as a representation.”

BEYOND PRINCE V. CARIOU

The Prince v. Cariou case is exceptional not only because it is being played out so publicly but also because of how much money is at stake. (As part of the decision, Cariou was granted the right to destroy the 21 “Canal Zone” paintings that had not already sold, each valued at over a million dollars.) Such massive sums can make the lawsuit seem irrelevant to artists working today. “When I read that stuff, it’s like reading People magazine,” said artist Karl Haendel, who became famous for his large-scale graphite drawings of appropriated images like a Chevrolet SUV.

Yet many artists BLOUIN ARTINFO spoke with had their own stories of receiving cease and desist letters or reaching settlements with companies and photographers who alleged copyright infringement. Prince v. Cariou is influential, then, not only as a case that may have a chilling effect on creativity, but also as a precedent for other artists dealing with issues of copyright infringement. While most of these cases are settled behind closed doors, Prince v. Cariou is being hashed out by the courts — which means it has an opportunity to change how appropriation art is treated by law.

Recent developments in the field of copyright law mean a new precedent may be more influential than ever. Since Prince v. Cariou was first filed in 2008, more and more organizations specializing in seeking out copyright infringers have formed. "There now seems to be some trolling in the art world around copyright infringement," said Rutledge. "Often the claims involve photography — not surprising since so many images are photo-based. It may be that these photographic image-makers have more familiarity with licensing practices, but the attempt to import those expectations — or those hopes — into art-making is problematic on a number of levels." (Consider the most well-known of these cases, Shepard Fairey vs. the AP, in which the street artist settled with the photo agency for his use of a photograph of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as the basis for his iconic "Hope" image.)

Certain law firms also specialize in prosecuting copyright infringers. Photographer Jay Maisel employed Harmon & Seidman LLC, a Colorado-based firm, to sue technologist Andy Baio last year over an 8-bit tribute he created to Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” that featured a pixel-art version of Maisel’s iconic photo of Davis on its cover. Those familiar with this area of law say that some such copyright-specific firms work with long-term clients on commission and proactively search for artwork that potentially infringes their copyright. Then they contact the artist and either negotiate a settlement or take him to court. "We try to settle cases before filing, but most infringers are so cavalier about their piracy, they do not appreciate the gravity of their wrongdoing until they are brought into court," Christopher Seidman of Harmon & Seidman said in an e-mail. He denied that his firm actively searches for infringements, noting that "we are litigators, not investigators." 

Canadian artist Jon Rafman was contacted by the Society for Reproduction Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers in Canada (SODRAC) and later, the Artists Rights Society of New York, both claiming that his Web site brandnewpaintjob.com infringed the copyright of almost a dozen artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Web site featured a collection of digital artworks Rafman created by applying bits of famous modernist paintings to various 3D models. (Imagine “Starry Night” used as a cover on your sofa.) 

Rafman agreed to remove the offending images from all his personal Web sites rather than get tangled in a more complicated legal web. But he maintains he was in the right. "My work should be considered fair use and I think it is ironic that the organizations that were established to defend artists rights are the ones going after artists," he said. He quickly replaced the works he removed with new ones in the same style. The originals, meanwhile, weren't entirely lost: "They had been reblogged so much already," he noted.  

Baio, for his part, settled with Meisel for $32,500 rather than take the case to court and risk paying a larger fine and additional attorney’s fees. Though he, like Rafman, still maintains the art was fair use, “it had a chilling effect on all my creative output,” he said. “I was nervous doing anything.”

LOOKING AHEAD

Richard Prince’s legal appeal is currently snaking its way through the courts. After it is decided, what could the future of appropriation art look like? How could a reversal change that future? 

“We have not seen this case before,” said Rutledge. One of the key questions before the court, she noted, is whether a new artwork needs to criticize or comment on a preexisting work to qualify as fair use (though Rutledge maintains the law "accommodates a wide range of expressive uses, not confined to comment on the material borrowed"). "If the District Court’s decision is upheld, it would change appropriation art as we know it. Picasso’s inclusion of sheet-paper music and newspaper clippings in his collages would not be considered fair use under the too-restrictive rule that could be established. But this litigation also has the potential to help clarify that creation of new expression is a primary justification for fair use of existing material, in keeping with both copyright and First Amendment principles. That kind of clarity could open up possibilities for creative work we may not be able to imagine now. It’s certainly not going to stop anyone from making images hoping they could be licensed for other purposes."

The art world isn’t the only group that acknowledges the copyright system is problematic. At the end of October, Congress asked the United States Copyright Office — a subset of the Library of Congress that maintains records of U.S. copyright — to study the problems surrounding small copyright disputes, as well as possible alternatives. One solution under discussion is the establishment of a small claims court. Such a court, set up with simplified procedures and limits, would enable artists to represent themselves without an attorney. It could have major implications for artists who use appropriated material as well as those whose material is appropriated by others: it would potentially make it both easier to defend oneself against copyright infringement claims and easier to sue. 

Prince v. Cariou likely will be resolved long before a copyright small claims court ever sees the light of day. And the outcome could have an effect not only on copyright law, but also on art history itself. "We just can’t know what’s going to be valued by later generations, and possibly inspire future work,” Rutledge said. "After Duchamp's first readymades were made, there was a long period before they were rediscovered by a new generation of artists. Who knows what we lose if work is caught up in a lawsuit or never made in the first place because of self-censorship?”  

– Frank Gehry Goes Pro Bono: The starchitect, who designed L.A.'s signature Walt Disney Concert Hall, will create the new Culver City home for the beloved music venue Jazz Bakery. The theater's artistic director said she didn't know Gehry, or ask for his help, before he swooped in six months ago to volunteer his services, like some kind of dashing architectural crusader. [LAT]   

– Three Museums Jointly Scoop Up "The Clock": The Israel Museum in Jerusalem has plunked down a low six-figure sum to jointly acquire Christian Marclay's 24-hour film collage with Paris's Pompidou Center and London's Tate. Because there are only six editions of the piece, sharing is encouraged: the MFA Boston and National Gallery of Canada purchased a copy jointly, while LACMA and MoMA wanted one all to themselves. Curators, stay alert: only two copies left! [Bloomberg]

– Earliest Copy of "Mona Lisa" Found: Conservators at Madrid's Prado museum recently made an astonishing discovery, hidden beneath black overpaint. What they assumed to be a replica of the "Mona Lisa" made after Leonardo da Vinci's death was actually painted by one of his key pupils working alongside the master himself. [TAN]

– Asia Society Expands: The Asia Society will open two new branches this year, one in Houston and one in Hong Kong (which you can read more about here). The expansion signals a change in mission: once focused on explaining Asia to Americans, the organization now emphasizes strengthening partnerships among Asians themselves. [NYT] 

– Patron Kate at the NPG: Kate Middleton will visit London's National Portrait Gallery for a preview of its Lucien Freud exhibition, which opens to the public February 9. The Duchess, who has a degree in art history, is said to be a fervent admirer of the painter's grim canvasses. It will be her first visit since becoming an official patron of the gallery last December. [Artlyst]

– Robert De Niro Recruits Big Art Names For Film Fest: Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, and street artist JR are among the artists whose works will be given as trophies to winning filmmakers in the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival's jury competitions. [Variety]

– Russian Protest Art Sprouts on the Web: Ahead of antigovernment protests on February 4, Russian Web sites have seen a flowering of visual art espousing opposition to the government. [Radio Free Europe] 

– Anthony Gormley Speaks Up for Squatters: Speaking at the launch of an exhibition to benefit the homeless, the British artist severely critiqued the government's aim to render squatting illegal. "It's a no-brainer that properties that are awaiting renovation or don't have commercial tenants can be used for creative things, and indeed to provide shelter for the homeless," he said. Together with Tracey Emin, Gillian Wearing, and Jonathan Yeo, Gormley has created a new piece to be sold next spring to benefit the charity Crisis. [Guardian]

– Italian Soccer Team Sponsors Old Masters Exhibition: Novara Calcio, a premier Italian soccer team, is backing the show "Treasures of the Prince," which includes 80 Old Master paintings drawn from the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein. "It generates curiousity because there is no link between a football team and the world of arts and culture," said Novara Calcio's managing executive. [TAN] 

– Stolen Aboriginal Art Sold on eBay?: Authorities in South Australia are investigating the whereabouts of a piece of aboriginal rock art that was temporarily advertised on the auction Web site. Officials from eBay are working with police to track down the seller. [ABC]  

– Olympic Art Mimics Post-Impressionists: Artist Neville Gable has recreated Georges Seurat's famous pointillist painting "Bathers at Asnieres" with a photographic tableau of the workers in London's Olympic Park. [BBC]

– Freud's Portrait of Restaurateur Up for Grabs: A never-before-shown portrait of restaurant owner Bernard Walsh by Lucien Freud will be included in the Sotheby's contemporary art evening sale on February 15. It comes with a presale estimate of £1.5 to £2 million ($2.3 to $3.1). [Guardian]

– Lewis Biggs Appointed Folkestone Curator: The former artistic director of the Liverpool Biennial has been appointed curator of the next Folkestone Triennial, to be held in 2014, in Folkestone, Kent. In 2013, he will curate the Aichi Triennial in Nagoya, Japan. [Art Review]

ALSO ON BLOUIN ARTINFO:

New Museum's Massimiliano Gioni Will Curate the 2013 Venice Biennale

Ai Weiwei, China's Most Famous Twitter User, Denounces Its New Censorship Policy

Shady Beijing Developers Demolish the Home of China’s “Father of Modern Architecture”

Vera Farmiga to Play Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie in Dennis Wilson Biopic

ART HK Confirms Place in the Big League With 2012 Lineup

OK Go Must Be Stopped

The first fiction movie directed by Billy Bob Thornton for 11 years has been granted a prestigious slot at the Berlinale, which begins Thursday, February 9. “Jayne Mansfield’s Car” will premiere in the competition section at the Berlinale Palast on Potsdamer Platz the following Monday.

The comically tinged drama, co-written by Thornton and his boyhood friend Tom Epperson, is an ensemble piece that stars Thornton, Robert Duvall, John Patrick Amedori, Kevin Bacon, John Hurt, Ray Stevenson, Frances O’Connor, Katherine LaNasa, Robert Patrick, Irma P. Hall, and 82-year-old Tippi Hedren. Shot in Cedartown, Ga., standing in for fictional Morrison, Ala., in 1969, it apparently has little to do with the 1966 Buick Electra 225 in which the titular blonde bombshell was killed in 1967. (Not that it was Jayne Mansfield’s car.)

At a press conference last fall for “Puss ‘N’ Boots,” in which Thornton voiced Jack (as in Jack and Jill), he commented, “Just so you know, Jayne Mansfield is more of a metaphor for this movie. It’s not about Jayne Mansfield’s death or anything like that. It’s mentioned, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s really about how war affects different generations, and about the examination of life and death and the fear and fascination with both.

“It’s tonally ‘Sling Blade’-like,” he said, referring to his raw-boned 1996 debut as a writer-director. “I think there’s probably more humor in it than ‘Sling Blade,’ but it’s once again very dark humor.”

The best description of the film’s story so far has come from Duvall, speaking to Entertainment Weekly: “It’s another Southern tale — it puts Tennessee Williams in the backseat, it’s that brilliant. It’s about a guy in between WWI and WWII who raises a family after his wife left him for an Englishman and moved to England. [Before] the wife dies, she asks to be brought back to Alabama to be buried, and at that point the character hasn’t seen her in twenty or thirty years. The two families — the original family she abandoned and her English family — meet and then things get really interesting.”

Reportedly costing $12 million, “Jayne Mansfield’s Car” is the first of the six films financed from the $120 million America production fund established by Media Talent Group, the management-production firm run by Geyer Kosinski, and AR Films, the Russian company founded by the mogul and producer-director Alexander Rodnyansky in 2009. Media Talent represents the likes of Thornton, Nicole Kidman, and writer-director D. J. Caruso, whose coming-of-age drama “The Goats” (not to be confused with the recent Sundance entry “Goats”) was the second film to benefit from the fund.

Also in Berlin will be one of Thornton’s ex-wives, Angelina Jolie, another Media Talent client. Her fiction directorial debut “In the Land of Blood and Honey” will be one of the films shown as part of the new Berlinale Special format. Instead of vials of blood (they were actually flower presses), the former Mr and Mrs Thornton can exchange tickets to each other’s screenings. 

Armed with an arsenal of custom light painting tools (various LED and xenon flashlights) he designed himself, Trevor Williams creates mesmerizing effects that must be seen to be believed. The Japan-based photographer and light painting pioneer produces individual light images, as well as group paintings with the collective he founded, Fiz-iks. Paying special attention to location, the group explores Japanese architecture to construct surprising narratives that meld the modern artistic technique with traditional landscapes....

Followers of the art market in recent years are well aquainted with the usual parade of records and unthinkably huge numbers when yearly results are announced. Well, Christie's has just announced its sales totals for 2011, and they do indeed involve a parade of records and some unthinkably huge numbers. Business, it would seem, is booming: With some $5.7 million in total sales reported, this was a very good year for Christie's. 

What to make of all this? What's going on beneath all those numbers? Below, we look at some of the finer grained details of Christie's 2011 performance:   

Total sales for 2011: £3.6 billion ($5.7 million)

According to the auction house, the total is a record in pounds (but not in dollars because of conversion rates) — and it's up a truly massive £300 million (nine percent in pounds, 14 percent in dollars) from last year’s £3.3 billion sum. The company is based in London, so it reports sales in British pounds sterling. Because it’s not a public company it isn’t required to report revenue or profit, the twice-yearly reported sales totals are the some of the only financials to analyze.  

Most expensive lot of the year: Roy Lichtenstein’s “I Can See the Whole Room!… And There’s Nobody in It!” (1961) at $43.2 million

Pop art, as ever, is hot. Our own Judd Tully covered the November contemporary sale in New York and noted that the lot was scooped up by New York-based dealer Guy Bennett, who took it home for a client at a price near the high end of its $35-45 million estimate. It helped Christie’s to a $773 million total for contemporary art, which continues its run as the best-performing category of the year.

Most expensive Impressionist and modern lot of the year: Pablo Picasso’s “Femme Assise, Robe Bleue” (1939) at £18 million ($28 million)

Its Nazi-looted history helped this portrait of Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar sell for several million pounds above its £4-8 million estimate in London last June. However, the Imp-mod category as a whole declined 28 percent to £548.6 million.

Asian art sales: £552.9 million

Meanwhile, the total for the Asian art category is up 13 percent from 2010, and now trumps Impressionist and modern art for sales. Something to think about. 

Growth in Hong Kong: 11 percent

That would seem to be quite respectable — but it’s also a notable leveling off from the epic 114 percent growth it reported in 2010 in Asia.

The Elizabeth Taylor Sale: $157 million with 100 percent of 1,778 lots sold.

The Taylor sale was one was one of the undoubted media events of the year — and the hype paid off for the house, clearly. The $157 million total presumably doesn't even include any revenue from all those people buying tickets and standing around the block to see Liz's baubles when the auction house toured them around the world. As for the sale itself, probably enough has been said.

Private sales totals: £502 million

The house's incursion into the private market continues, and the half-a-billion total for Christie's in this department amounted to a 44 percent increase from 2010. It’s a boon for Christie’s, clearly — but for journalists, the increasing attachment of auction houses to this kind of transaction also means that trying to make sense of the art market becomes more difficult, for those not privy to the back-room deals, that is.

Originally posted on Above the Estimate.

Sotheby’s union art handlers have been picketing outside the auction house’s Upper East Side flagship for months. It wasn't long before people in the neighborhood began to walk by without paying much attention. One day last fall, Merry Tucker, a retired teacher, was heading to Sotheby’s offices to consign two pieces of Georgian 18th-century silver she had inherited from her mother. Rather than walk right by the Teamsters, she took a pamphlet and read up on the cause. After the sale, she decided to give a portion of the $5,000 she made to the workers, who have been locked out of their jobs since August in a protracted contract dispute.

“I thought, I never did anything to earn this money,” Tucker told us. “My mother stipulated that a lot of her estate go to charity, and when I learned about the workers’ situation I felt a lot of sympathy for them.” Tucker, who said she is appreciative of her own union-obtained health care, was particularly motivated to give after learning that the art handlers’ health insurance expired January 1. (Workers earn unemployment benefits plus an additional $200 a month from their union during the lockout. However, as of the New Year, they are no longer entitled to health care without a contract.) "I was afraid to let them [the union] release my name until I got the money from Sotheby's," Tucker said, "but the check just came."

Meanwhile, negotiations between the art handlers and the auction house seem to be making progress. “There's been a slightly better tone in bargaining lately,” said Julian Tysh, a Sotheby's union art handler who is also on the bargaining committee. The next negotiation session is scheduled for February 9 and 10, and Tysh said he’s “hopeful” a settlement will be final in the coming weeks.

Both sides have made concessions on wages and work rules. A representative from Sotheby's said the auctioneer issued a revised, comprehensive proposal that includes wage increases, increased contributions for health insurance, and continued participation in the Sotheby's 401k retirement plan. "To date, the union has not accepted that offer," spokesperson Diana Phillips said in an e-mail. According to Tysh, the major sticking point left to settle is job security. “We need language that will protect the union…We don’t want a contract that allows us to be replaced with temps in the next couple of years.” Without regular paychecks and now, without health coverage, Tysh added the art handlers are under “a tremendous amount of economic pressure.”

The lockout has taken a financial toll on Sotheby’s too, according to recent reports. Costs associated with temporary workers, enhanced security, and expensive legal council contributed to the $2.4 million jump Bloomberg reported in Sotheby's “other compensation” expenses during the first nine months of the fiscal year. “That’s almost as much money as our entire annual contract,” said Tysch.

"We will continue to bargain in good faith and remain hopeful that we can reach an agreement soon so that we can bring our union colleagues back to work once there is a new contract in place," said Phillips. "They are valuable members of the Sotheby’s community."

In recent months, the plight of Sotheby’s art handlers has become something of a rallying cry to labor sympathizers across the country. In addition to garnering the support of arts-related Occupy Wall Street groups, students at universities that have a connection to Sotheby’s have also spoken out in support of the art handlers. Student groups at Columbia University, where Sotheby’s Holdings, Inc. chairman Michael Sovern is a law professor, and at the University of Vermont, where CEO William Ruprecht is on the board of trustees, held demonstrations and teach-ins. “We’re grateful for the support,” said Tysch. “But really, we just want to get back to work.” 

See works from throughout Mike Kelley's storied career in ARTINFO's retrospective slide show

Artist Mike Kelley has passed away at his home in Los Angeles, having apparently taken his own life. The tragic news was confirmed to BLOUIN ARTINFO by Helene Winer, of New York's Metro Pictures gallery, a long-time associate of the artist.

"It is totally shocking that someone would decide to do this, someone who has success and renown and options," said Winer. "It's extremely sad." She added that the artist had been depressed.

Kelley was born in 1954 in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. He became involved in the city's music scene as a teen, and while a student at the University of Michigan, formed the influential proto-punk band Destroy All Monsters with fellow artists Jim Shaw, Niagara, and Cary Loren (a retrospective devoted to Destroy All Monsters was held at L.A.'s Prism gallery last year). Together, the band hatched a style of performance that skirted the edge of performance art.

After graduating college in 1976, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts, studying alongside teachers like John Baldessari and Laurie Anderson. Music continued to be a constant passion: he formed another band, "Poetics," with fellow CalArts students John Miller and Tony Oursler. 

Kelley's career took off in the early 1990s, with solo shows at the Whitney, LACMA, and other international venues. He and Oursler organized a well-recived installation — a kind of monument to punk — at Documenta X in 1997. In the early 2000s, he began exhibiting with Gagosian Gallery after 20 years with Metro Pictures.

For his 2005 exhibition "Day is Done," Kelley filled Gagosian with found yearbook photos, video footage, and automated furniture, prompting New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz to describe the show as an example of "clusterfuck aesthetics." More conventionally, he was associated with the notion of "abject art," highlighting the irrational and the repulsive.

Kelly's work will be included in the upcoming Whitney Biennial. It is the eighth time his work has been included in the biannual exhibition. According to the New York Times, he was also in the process of putting together a show for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Kelley's studio released a statement to the L.A. Times saying, "Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art... We cannot believe he is gone. But we know his legacy will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us."

"Mike Kelley was as kind and generous a collaborator as I could possibly hope for," said curator Dan Nadel, who organized Prism's retrospective for "Destroy All Monsters." "I'm extremely grateful to have worked with him, and will be forever grateful to him for his patience and the education he gave me, perhaps without even realizing it. And, besides his remarkable genius, I'll always remember his rolling, infectious laughter, which was a pleasure to behold." 

See works from throughout Mike Kelley's storied career in ARTINFO's retrospective slide show

Beginning in Singapore in March, Andy Warhol will take Asia, brought to you by the biggest names in Pittsburgh.

After a year of planning, the largest bank in the Pennsylvania city, BNY Mellon, announced Tuesday that it would be sponsoring a huge two-year traveling retrospective of over 300 Warhol works in Asia, curated by one of Pittsburgh's grandest art institutions, the Andy Warhol Museum. The show will appear in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo between March 2012 and 2014 and will have additional sponsorship from three non-bank brands that nonetheless scream "cha-ching": Christie's, Bloomberg, and the Economist. 

The exhibit is called "15 Minutes Eternal" after the artist's claim that "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." Warhol already enjoys popularity in Asia, at least more so than most American artists. But it's unlikely that his hometown has much notoriety in China — and this could be its 15 minutes. "This is a way to send Pittsburgh abroad," said Eric Schiner, the Warhol Museum's director. The canvases headed to Singapore are almost entirely made up of inventory from the Warhol Museum, save for two works on long-term loan to the museum that belong to private collectors from the United States.

Despite the fact that there is an auction house on board, the show is nominally educational rather than commercial. According to Amy Cappellazzo, the head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie's, the auction house was brought on as "value-added in terms of special event planning" (they are good at art-world cocktail parties). But even while promoting an educational mission, Christie's could experience a boost in Hong Kong sales if Warhol proves popular enough.

"I can't think of another [Western] artist that you could bring to Asia who would have the same kind of name recognition and spark the same kind of curiosity as Andy Warhol. We anticipate enormous crowds," said Cappellazzo. Both she and Schiner noted that Warhol visited Asia before it was cool for artists to do so. His first trip to the continent was in 1956, and in 1981 he traveled to China. 

Though Christie's denies that boosting the Western art market in Hong Kong is its primary angle, the auction house released its sales totals for 2011 Tuesday and it showed a significant slowdown in the company's growth in Asia. That's not to say that it isn't still growing (at a rate of 11 percent), but it is a far cry from the 114 percent growth in 2010. That, coupled with the exponential growth of the Beijing-based auction houses are seeing, might be enough for the auction house to invest in developing a penchant for American contemporary art in Asia. Thus far, the Hong Kong branches of Christie's and Sotheby's have stuck to promoting categories that are known to do well: Chinese traditional art, jewelry, and wine. They have stayed away from Western art because collectors in Asia haven't been interested.

Thus far, Seoul Auctions is one of the only players in Hong Kong to experiment with western art, with some success, but they haven't yielded with the eye-popping results that are seen in the contemporary categories in New York and Hong Kong. In 2010, a 1972 Warhol silkscreen of Mao Zedong fetched HK$380,000 ($49,000). A 1964 "Liz" had a low estimate of HK$370,000, but was bought in when bidding failed to reached above HK$320,000.

If this exhibition is successful, however, and Warhol becomes a sought-after brand Asia's wealthiest cities, it is unlikely that his silkscreens will be available for anywhere near $50,000. And it will be all thanks to Pittsburgh's hometown pride.

The trailer for “Game Change,” the forthcoming HBO movie adapted from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s sensational account of the 2008 presidential race, almost plays like a spoof: You can practically hear the needle slide off the record when the montage showing Sarah Palin’s rise, gloriously (if archly) soundtracked by “American Woman,” suddenly tumbles into the campaign’s crash-and-burn. “I’m not sure how much she knows about foreign policy,” a hapless aide murmurs over moody soundtrack synthesizer, the Guess Who echoing impotently in the background.

Next thing you know, Palin, flawlessly played (here, at least) by Julianne Moore, is going rogue — “I so don’t want to go back to Alaska,” she sasses — and John McCain (Ed Harris, gray all over) and adviser Steve Schmidt (unstoned Woody Harrelson) are freaking the fuck out: “What have we done? I can’t control her anymore!” Schmidt whines off camera, presumably clutching his cojones. Cinematically speaking, Palin may as well be Chucky, or a Mogwai given a midnight snack. Although the sheer amount of drama packed into what, on the outside, might seem to be a wonky story puts this in the category of “The Social Network.” The question, then, is this: Will Moore’s potrayal of a Palin, herself a remarkable although flawed construction for most Americans, become realer than real? Years from now, when folks think of Sarah Palin, will they really be thinking of Julianne Moore? The lipstick, in any case, is on the pitbull now.

It's not often that you get the notoriously blasé Hong Kong music crowd crouched on the floor of a nightclub bouncing and gyrating in a collective form of interpretive dance. Bu then it’s not often that Dan Deacon is in town. Well, actually, he’s never been in town before. So it was no surprise that Hong Kong’s newest underground venue XXX Gallery crammed more than 300 music loving locals through their doors to help Deacon kick of his first Asian tour.

It was more of a surprise to see those locals jumping and playing and chasing through various Deacon-inspired imaginative assignments . But then such endeavors are par for the course at a Deacon gig. Half performance art, half total freak-out the Dan Deacon experience requires more then the usual beer-sipping and head-bobbing.

The word "community" comes up a lot when people speak about Deacon’s music, both in the press and from fans. Listening to his first commercially successful album "Spiderman of the Rings" released in 2007 or his more recent 2009 album "Bromst" it is easy to see why. Amidst the blistering layers of impossible sound combinations rises a communal shout. A collective yell of fun-loving mayhem that is as incomprehensible as it is addictive.  Throughout his two hour set there is a distinct sense in the crowd that they are sharing something. Something really fun, that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Deacon has been based in Baltimore since 2004 where he became one of the founding members of the artistic collective "Wham City." The last year saw the classically trained musical maestro sign to Domino records, premier a new piece titled "Ghostbuster Cook: Origin of the Riddler" at the Merkin Concert Hall in New York, and then go on to play the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Getty Center in Los Angeles as well. This year Deacon is set to release a new full length album produced by Chester Gwazda (who also produced “Bromst”).

ARTINFO HK spoke to him about Hong Kong, Baltimore, “Beauty and the Beast” and why houses should always have names

How do you like Hong Kong?

It is crazy! This is my first time in Asia. We just came from Australia and this is a major change. It is just so towering here. I live in Baltimore and the city is pretty vacant. It is crazy to be at our hotel and be looking out at all the lights. I mean it is just crazy.

You played at the Whitney Museum of American Art recently. Why do you think that your music fits that environment?

That was just a regular show. I think it fit because my work is very performative. It uses the space as an element. People went pretty crazy. About 50% of the people there were there because they go to the Whitney and the other people were there because they go to my shows. So it was a fun show. I should have done something specific for the space itself though but I guess you can revise everything in the past. I am looking forward to doing more and more of those shows.

Can you see yourself creating specifically performance pieces?

Yeah totally, I would love to create something that is site specific to a space like the Whitney. We have talked about doing something like that in the future. I think there has always been a little part of a performance artist in me. I normally get the audience to do the actual performing and of course there is the space as well.

How much do you think the visual arts and music go hand in hand?

Oh completely. Without question.

There seems to be a visible change in your energy and demeanour as soon as you start playing to a crowd. Is that something you are conscious of?

Oh every time. I think that happens with anyone that is a performer. There is an energy shift but it is still definitely me up there.

What about when you are making music? What is that process like for you?

It differs from track to track and depends where I am and what I have around me. Nine times out of ten songs are like sketches in a sketch book and every once in a while it is like, “Oh this would be cool to do something for this one.” So I guess it is trial and error. I would say about 80% of what I mess around with never sees the light of day. Making music is my biggest hobby. I like to think of it as sketching or creating a drama.

If creating a song is like making something from a sketch then how do you come up with a complete album like “Bromst”?

When I was making “Bromst” I wanted it to be album based and not like a single-focused album. I wanted it to flow as one piece and you could listen to it in a single sitting. The concept itself was “album”, not too get too meta on things.

How did that change with the new album?

Now I wanted to do something different for the new album. With this one I wanted to make a collection of songs. I wanted to revisit the idea of singles. I wanted to go in a totally different direction.

Things have been happening pretty quickly for you. Have you had a moment along the way where you thought, “Wow, things have changed?”

Yes, I would say there have been many moments like that! Performing at the Whitney was, of course, crazy! Also the first time that we needed to bring the money inside ‘cause we actually had money. That was a moment! This was after our first record came out and we were on tour and we were like, “What are we going to do with this $600.” It was the most money that we could imagine having at one time. That was when I was like, “OK something is going on.”

So tell me a bit about the start of “Wham City” in Baltimore in 2004-5?

Well we didn’t really mean to start a collective. We sort of just got a space, 7 of us, and started having shows and putting on plays while being super poor. Houses with names are very important I think. Once you name a house it is like the house becomes a room-mate almost. If it doesn’t have a name then there is something missing.

What kinds of things were happening there on a weekly or day to day basis?

Well we would dance everyday for about three hours to the same mix and eventually we all became obsessed with “Beauty and the Beast” the Disney version and we would sing along to it all afternoon long. None of us had jobs, we were all living pretty meagerly. Literally eating out of the garbage. Although the house was huge so it was really easy to put on shows.

Was there a “scene” to speak of at the time in Baltimore?

Well there was and we kind of came in at a good time where people started doing similar stuff to us. There was a very vague improvisation scene and a Harsh Noise scene but there wasn’t an art/music scene. There was a rap scene and there was a very avant-garde scene but there was no middle ground. I think we provided that. In a way that still promoted pop music. Bands like Pony Island and Future House and Beach House all started coming out and we kind of merged with that.

What is it like now, what keeps you there?

Well the community is a massive part of that, but I don’t know! Baltimore as a city itself is pretty weird. It is half abandoned and there is horrible crime but because of that it is very affordable and I think you need to have those three elements for there to be a relevant art scene. For people to be able to experiment they need to be able to focus on just their work. If they are working other jobs or worried about media or critics that are in scenes like New York or London and LA then it is not going to happen. Like if the New York of the seventies tried to happen today then it would never happen at all.

Dan Deacon’s Asian tour is now in New Zealand where he will play Auckland, Wellington, Nelson and Christchurch, finishing up in Dunedin on 7 February.  

OPENINGS

THURS 2/2 Jon Kessler's "The Blue Period" at Salon 94, 243 Bowery, 6-8 p.m. 

John Kessler takes surveillance seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he has created a faux panopticon within Salon 94’s Bowery location for viewers to see and be seen within his own version of a hall of mirrors. Guests may feel similar to Charlie in Mr. Wonka's chocolate factory, as they encounter whirling kinetic machinery, cameras, monitors, and life-like cardboard guests. Kessler plays on Guy Debord’s "Society as Spectacle" (1967) by creating an impenetrable fabricated environment. [See listing]

THUS 2/2 Zimoun’s "Volume" at bitforms gallery, 529 West 20th St., 2nd floor, 6-8:30 p.m.

At the technology-oriented bitforms gallery, Zimoun shows a series of pieces that "sculpt with sound." Check out the artist’s composition of cardboard boxes being hit by swinging cotton balls or his tree trunk — complete with 25 woodworms — amplified by a microphone. Can you hear the chewing? [See listing] 

THURS 2/2 Aneta Bartos and Nick Weber’s "Jack & Jill" at AMH Industries, 144 Tenth Ave, 6-9 p.m.

Modern Painters senior editor Scott Indrisek recommends this dual erotic vision from Bartos, a photographer, and Weber, a realist painter. Expect the former's moody, cinematic images to elicit the most titillation (and discomfort); Bartos has solicited local men to masturbate for her camera, and the resulting photos are as unnerving as they are salacious. Bring an open-minded date to the opening. [See listing]

THURS 2/2 Alec Soth’s "Broken Manual" at Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29th St., 6-8 p.m.

"Broken Manual" is an immersive investigation of allusive male figures and their desire to live "off-the-grid." Soth specifically follows Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk from Kentucky, and Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph into their disenfranchised and socially frustrated psyches. [See listing]  

FRI 2/3 Terry Winters’s "Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures & Notebook" at Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd St., 6-8 p.m.

Enigmatic late-modernist painter Terry Winters debuts fourteen kaleidoscopic all-over paintings dictated by mathematical models and knot theory. Simultaneously nerdy and narcotic, these swirling abstractions look like what may have happened if M.C. Escher had forgotten his protractor at Woodstock. Even more striking are Winters’s collages, which juxtapose found photographs with psychedelic spectral colors. [See listing]

ONE NIGHT ONLY

THURS 2/2 Neal Medlyn’s "Wicked Clown Love" at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th St., $15, 8 p.m.

Neal Medlyn’s newest subject is Juggalo culture. The artist, Riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna, Carmine Covelli, and Farris Craddock plan to take the audience on a wild ride. "Fuckin all out buck wild behavior is to be expected," said Medlyn on the Kitchen's Web site. "This will be the freshest presentation of all time. This will be the Wicked Shit. Wicked Clown Love. The most chaotic fucking phenomenon of the year." Indeed. [See listing] 

FRI 2/3 Reading: John Giorno at Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, 3rd floor, 7:30 p.m.

Iconic poet and champion of queer sexuality John Giorno, who founded the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984, will be reading poetry in SoHo Friday. Giorno is fabled for his high-energy live performances, so this is not one to miss. [See listing]

FRI 2/3 Curators’ Tour of "Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine" at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 81st St.,$25, 4 p.m.

As early as Da Vinci and his cohorts sought anatomical perfection with the golden ratio, the quest for truth and beauty has been met by an attendant impulse to adulterate and deform the human body for the purposes of satire, insult, and cheap laughs. Curators Nadine M. Orenstein and Constance C. McPhee walk through the history of caricature from Leonardo’s grotesque heads and Daumier’s acerbic political cartoons to recent caricatures of a beleaguered Barack Obama. [See listing]

FRI 2/3 Bela Taar’s "Werckmeister Harmonies" at Film Society of Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th St., 1 p.m.

A cult sensation, this Hungarian classic gets a matinee showing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this Friday. The film took three years to complete and follows, languidly, a traveling circus and iconic stuffed whale on their journey through a small village. [See listing] 

ON THE RADAR 

"Read My Lips: A Survey of Gran Fury" at NYU 80 Washington Square East Galleries, 80 Washington Square East, through 3/17

"Read My Lips" is the first comprehensive survey of the activist art collective Gran Fury, documenting the group's activities from 1987-1995 during the crucible of the AIDS crises. Gran Fury deployed queer activism, advertising strategies, guerrilla art, and postmodern appropriation strategies à la Barbara Kruger to decry political negligence towards the AIDS pandemic. Some of their most provocative public artworks such as "Kissing Doesn't Kill," "Men Use Condoms" and "Women Don't Get AIDS" will be on view at this important and topical show. [See listing]

Taylor Mead at Churner and Churner, 205 10th Ave., through 2/18

Artist, poet, octogenarian, and "magister ludi of the American underground" Taylor Mead shows no signs of slowing down. The one-time Factory fixture and star of the eponymous "Taylor Mead’s Ass" will be showing drawings from his ongoing "Fairy Tale Poem," an absurdist epic whose cast of characters includes Warhol, Ellen Barkin, and Donald Trump. On view in the back are a resilient group of Mead’s 1980s Neo-expressionist paintings, which — according to the press release — have "survived cockroach infestation, subsequent fumigation, and a collapsed ceiling" in Mead’s derelict Lower East Side apartment. [See listing]

Name: Kimberly Ovitz
Age:  28
City/Neighborhood: Tribeca
Show Happening at ... The Pace Gallery, February 9 at 1 p.m.

Describe the person you're designing for.
The Kimberly Ovitz woman perseveres. She is elegantly edgy and dark , with an intellectual sexual appeal.

How are you preparing for fashion week?
By drinking green juices.

What was the inspiration for your fall/winter 2012 collection?
The concept of the warrior — specifically, the warrior’s attributes of vitality, perseverance, and vigor — inspired the mood of the collection.

What fabrics, shapes, and color palettes are you using?
This dichotomy of design is mirrored by the juxtaposition of fabric textures; lush, soft wool jerseys, velvet, and hammered metal satin is set against dark lux wool suiting.  Faux fur and vivid wolf-fur prints further recall the wild, animalistic characteristics emblematic of the warrior. The color palette embodies the mood with deep tones of onyx, arbor, pine, mud, sangre, and skin.

What are your fashion week vices?
Red wine.

What is the first thing you’re going to do once your show is over?
Sleep.

Click HERE for more fashion week coverage.

– Facebook Graffiti Artist to Become Rich, Rich!: Who says artists aren't smart businesspeople? When graffiti artist David Choe was hired to paint the walls of Facebook's first headquarters, he opted to be paid in stock instead of cash. His shares are now expected to be worth north of $200 million when the social networking Goliath goes public. That may just make him the world's wealthiest street artist. [NYT]

– Law Students Rally Against Christo's River Project: A group of University of Denver law students calling themselves "ROAR" (Rags Over the Arkansas River) have filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming environmental artist Christo's long-planned next project is an environmental threat — in fact, they claim that it is as risky as mineral development. The proposed artwork, "Over the River," involves stretching fabric over several miles of the Arkansas River. Christo, ever the optimist, said it was "gratifying" to see so many people talking about his artwork. [CBS Local] 

– Tino Sehgal Next Up at Turbine Hall: The performance artist who transformed the Guggenheim's ramp into a multigenerational discussion about "progress" will undertake the annual commission in the Tate's massive exhibition hall, starting July 24. One thing's for sure: it'll be easier to clean up than Ai Weiwei's "Sunflower Seeds." [Press Release] 

– Superbowl Spruces Up Public Art: Indianapolis used the arrival of the Super Bowl as an opportunity to launch a mural project aimed at improving some blighted patches of downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. [NYT]

– Beastly Art in London: An exhibition of paintings made by apes and elephants has opened at the Grant Museum of Zoology, University College London. The manager of the museum Jack Ashby has touted them as "almost undistinguishable from abstract art by humans that use similar techniques." We know a cat, a monkey, and a Thai elephant that might concur. [Telegraph]

– U.S. Court Backs Spain Over Sea Treasure: Spain has won a major victory in its long court battle with a Florida-based deep-sea salvage company over the rights to $500 million in silver and gold coins. The treasure was recovered in 2007 from a 19th-century sunken ship off the Spanish coast. Officials expect the nearly 600,000 coins to arrive in Spain soon. (U.S. government machinations to help win back the treasure were the subject of a WikiLeak, incidentally, and one of our biggest stories of all time:  "WikiLeaks Art Expose: U.S. Tried to Trade Nazi Loot for Sunken Gold.") [CNN] 

– Urinal War: A group of women's rights activists is up in arms over the mouth-shaped men's toilets at the Rolling Stones Museum in northern Germany, which echo the band's famous logo. "Why does it have to be a woman's mouth?" asked one. But the museum's founder is fighting back. "That's not a man's mouth or a woman's mouth, that's art," he said. "They were damned expensive and they're staying where they are." [Der Spiegel] 

– Czech Mies van der Rohe House Reopens: The Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, will open its doors next March after a two-year, $9 million renovation. The house was commissioned by wool-factory owners Grete and Fritz Tugendhats, who fled to Czechoslovakia in 1938. Officials hope it will become a popular tourist attraction in the region. [AP]

– Trouble at the Cleveland Museum?: The Ohio institution's longtime board chairman and committed donor, Michael Horvitz, stepped down from his post after being excluded from important decisions, he said. Horvitz's departure is a rare sign of discord at an institution with a reputation for solid management. [Plain Dealer]

– Band of Skulls Singer Moonlights as a Painter: Emma Richardson, the singer and bass guitarist of rock group Band of Skulls, is opening a show of her paintings at Londonnewcastle Project Space today. It includes covers of the band's debut album "Baby Darling Doll Face Honey." [Independent]

– ART HK Appoints First-Ever Projects Curator: Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art and curator of the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, has been selected as the first curator of ART HK 12 Projects. [Press Release]

– RIP Surrealist Painter Dorothea Tanning: Married for 30 years to Surrealist artist Max Ernst, Tanning became well known in her own right for her vivid renderings of dream imagery. Later in life, she gained attention for her writing, producing a novel, autobiography, and poems. She was 101. [NYT]

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

Legendary Artist Mike Kelley Dead at 58, an Apparent Suicide

Is Prince v. Cariou Already Having a Chilling Effect? Contemporary Artists Speak

BNY Mellon, Christie's, and Bloomberg to Bring Epic Warhol Retrospective to Asia

Fashion Week's Funkiest Venues: A Guide to Shows in Galleries and Museums

Sotheby's Lockout Update: Negotiations Make Progress as Art Handlers Lose Health Care and the Auctioneer Loses Money

Breaking Down Christie's Massive $5.7 Billion 2011 Sales Results

NEW YORK — Remember those days when a measuring cup still resembled.. a cup? Well, those unnecessarily boring days are long behind us. The winter edition of the New York International Gift Fair is live and underway at the city’s colossal Javits Center, and as always, with its 2,800 exhibitors, it proves to be a treasure trove of new designs. While there are a large number of high-quality items your mother would enjoy (extravagant throw pillows and placemats, for example), what caught ARTINFO's interest was the surprising number of quirky gadgets and accessories we found that referenced fond memories from childhood —  those aforementioned Kikkerland measuring cups in the shape of a robot, for example. We spotted quite a few traditionally mundane objects playfully infused with toy-like features, while kids’ toys have taken a very adult (read: fancy) turn. 

To see ARTINFO's selection of high-design toys from the New York International Gift Fair you'd actually want to get, click the slide show. 

Legendary artist Mike Kelley passed away on Tuesday. The following is a preview of the cover story in the March issue of Modern Painters about Kelley's groundbreaking work with the group Destroy All Monsters:

Prior to 1994, if you mentioned the name Destroy All Monsters to punk aficionados, it conjured only a minor footnote: a band in Michigan rock music history known for the participation of the former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and the MC5 bassist Michael Davis. But by the time its first single, “Bored,” was released in 1978, three of the band’s four original members had left; two of them, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, had headed west to attend graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles.

During the course of the next two decades, Kelley — who passed away on February 1 — and Shaw rose to the upper echelons of the international art world. Their work prompted considerable interest in the little-heard earlier incarnation of DAM, which also included the filmmaker Cary Loren and the chanteuse Niagara. In 1994, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the music critic Byron Coley issued a lavish three-CD set of archival DAM recordings, which was a revelation to many. It garnered unexpected critical accolades and prompted a series of reunion projects, including performances, recordings, art exhibitions, and publications that brought together various ephemera, such as the collective’s eponymous post-psychedelic, pre-punk zine.

Although the intervening years have seen a steady stream of DAM-related activities and artifacts, 2011 saw a significant increase, culminating in a small retrospective at the Prism Gallery, in West Hollywood, accompanied by a lavish catalogue published by the co- curator Dan Nadel’s imprint, PictureBox. The title of the book (and the exhibition), “Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters 1973–1977,” provides a strong hint that the DAM reclamation was largely part of the co-curator Kelley’s ongoing exploration of the recovering, reconstruction, and archiving of lost personal and cultural histories, and as such, it manages to short-circuit or repurpose most of the problematic absurdities inherent in exercises in DIY subcultural nostalgia.

It’s impossible to calculate the number of small, insular experimental-art communities that existed during the time of DAM’s original activities. But it’s safe to assume that every medium-size urban center sprouted one or more communal freak house, where well-worn copies of Trout Mask Replica and Stimmung inspired drug-fueled reel-to-reel hijinks, and back issues of Zap Comix and the East Village Other provided a template for self-published manifestos and Xeroxed collages. And that’s not even taking into account similar experiments in collective improvisational creativity that came before and after — which, in fact, make up a secret alternative history of modern art dating back at least to the Cabaret Voltaire of the early 20th century.

So the recent surge of DAM documentation — which, in addition to Return of the Repressed, includes Primary Information’s complete reprint of Destroy All Monsters magazine, a reissue of the long out-of-print 1994 three-CD set, a vinyl-only release of a 1975 Double Sextet improvisation, plus a double-CD set of contemporaneous duet jams by Shaw and Kelley, and a staggering eight-CD anthology of Shaw’s vintage solo electric- guitar improvs (all issued on Kelley’s Compound Annex label) — operates on multiple simultaneous levels. At face value, it is a historical account of the early formative milieu of two of Los Angeles’s most celebrated contemporary artists, but it is also a token acknowledgment of the hundreds of similar undocumented communities whose legacies remain below the radar of mainstream culture, and lastly, it is a facet of Kelley’s magnum opus of auto-archaeological fetishism.

The fictionalizing quality inherent in the reconstruction of any historical moment — particularly of a collectively authored improvisational one whose raison d’être hinged on the rejection of any thoughts of posterity — was one of Kelley’s main thematic concerns throughout his career, and it is this ambivalent approach to the notion of authenticity that provides the loophole through which the “Return of the Repressed” exhibit and accompanying book (and the DAM archival project in general) escape the crippling pitfalls of most institutional attempts to capture and display insurgent avant-garde initiatives.

The sheer narrative absurdity of presenting much of this ragtag work in such an upscale, pristine venue as Prism Gallery is underscored by the fact that the most striking of the objets d’art on display is the series of hagiographic banners from the “Strange Früt: Rock Apocrypha” installation of 2000, acknowledging such Michigan cultural icons as Iggy Pop, George Clinton, Sun Ra, John Sinclair, Stanley Mouse, and Lester Bangs — the place of honor in it is saved for Destroy All Monsters.

Those conversant with Kelley’s and Shaw’s archetypal vocabulary will find themselves in familiar territory here: debased Surrealist and Warholian gestures; occult, paranormal, and fundamentalist Christian appropriations; B-movie monsters and pulp-fiction illustrations; curdled depictions of the Middle American Dream; and glamorous ladies in bondage. Niagara’s delicate watercolor-and-pencil-crayon renderings of Art Nouveau femmes fatales capture a sensibility that was routinely beaten out of art-school students back in the day but has gained currency in the intervening years of de-skilling and the discovery and celebration of the work of Henry Darger.

Cary Loren, who went on to participate in the international mail-art network of the 1970s and ’80s, is best represented by the DAM zine, for which he was largely responsible, and which is more appropriately experienced in the anthology reprint than displayed in Plexiglas vitrines. Unsurprisingly, the strongest works are by Kelley and Shaw, both of whom exhibit seeds of their later signature styles — the former with his grotesque, Hairy Who–influenced political cartoons and “Allegorical Drawings,” and the latter with a remarkable mimeographed faux- crackpot flying-saucer religious-cult pamphlet, “The End Is Here,” and a series of doctored “UFO Photos,” both from 1978, two years after he moved to L.A.

Fishy as all this is, there is an elegant symmetry to the rose-tinted recreation of a lost creative Eden that was and is characterized by a vehement anti-utopianism. There is also a familiar frisson from canonical hierarchies disrupted not through ridicule of the established order but through the elevation of seemingly undeserving cultural phenomena to the level of scrutiny and dedication of resources normally reserved for subjects of agreed-upon Historical Importance. Indeed, Kelley’s “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions” series transforms examples from the artist’s extensive collection of carnivalesque high school yearbook photos documenting DIY folk-art performances and installations for homecoming ceremonies, Halloween, and the like into an ambitious Gesamtkunstwerk of professionally executed music-video installations.

Considered as an aspect of Kelley’s work, the reinvention of Destroy All Monsters represents a considerably riskier form of historical revisionism than the appropriation of anonymous snapshots of football team initiations, or even the reconstructions of educational architectures from his own past that make up his “Educational Complex” of 1995. By incorporating the memories and archives of other artists, he simultaneously destabilizes the position of hermetic authority that imbues much of his work and flirts with a history-written-by-the-winners form of manufactured consensus. But perhaps the main outcome of this strategy is to shift attention to the mythologizing efforts of the other members of the DAM collective — the archiving and anthologizing activities of Loren and Niagara to some extent, but most emphatically (albeit almost indirectly) to the parallel solo career of Shaw.

Although the DAM materials prefigure Shaw’s later work, as noted — in their suggestion of a fictional cult as a framework for a larger body of work (manifested during the last decade in Shaw’s ongoing exegesis of the culture of Oism, his fictive 19th-century religion), as well as his juxtaposition of tightly rendered photorealist figuration and generic nth-generation abstract-painting clichés, a motif that recurs throughout his oeuvre — they also spotlight his own subsequent translation of his formative period into a series of fictional histories that are as ambitious in their own way as Kelley’s more celebrated inventions are.

Shaw’s complex narrative of such shared 1960s and ’70s countercultural talking points as religious cults, psychopharmacology, sexual liberation, and the polar oscillation between high and low culture is less well-known than Kelley’s is for at least two reasons. Apart from his slightly later emergence as an art world player, there is also an essentially formal one: Shaw’s feverish and overwhelming appropriations—half homage, half parody—are in some ways more disturbing to denizens of the art world than Kelley’s more assimilated influences are, inviting parallels to John Oswald’s copyright-challenging “plunderphonic” compositions.

It hasn’t helped that Shaw’s three large-scale projects — his encyclopedic accounting of Oism; the exhaustive documentation of his exceedingly detailed and reference-laden dreams; and his breakthrough picto-biographical coming- of-age series, “My Mirage” — have mostly been seen in fragments. Two recent publications, “Dream Object Book” and “Jim Shaw: My Mirage,” go some way toward remedying this. The former is the catalogue of a miniature retrospective of artworks that appeared in Shaw’s dreams and which he subsequently fabricated, all reproduced in miniature à la Duchamp’s “Box in a Valise,” and documented before incorporating them into a meta–dream object as a scrap heap beneath a sculpture of the Whore of Babylon.

Among the Oist artifacts that make up Shaw’s show this month at Metro Pictures, in New York, are some of his more recent engagements with the vernacular of graphic narrative in the form of an Oist comic book, which will hopefully see publication in the next year or so. Even more compelling is the long-awaited publication of the “My Mirage” works in their near entirety, which follows the sexual, psychological, political, cultural, and spiritual transformations of the teenage protagonist, Billy, during the course of five “chapters,” compiled by Fabrice Stroun and Lionel Bovier, and released by JRP Ringier. The original “My Mirage” artworks were created and sold piecemeal between 1986 and 1991. With its reproductions of approximately 170 extant works at half their original 17-by-14-inch size, “Jim Shaw: My Mirage” references an astonishing array of high, medium, and low visual art — from John Baldessari and Frank Stella, to M.C. Escher and Edward Gorey, to Martin Sharp and Jack Chick. Folded into what must now be considered one of the most ambitious and accomplished graphic novels of the last quarter century, it is a landmark in experimental postmodern narrative — alongside the reconstructed history of Destroy All Monsters.

See works from throughout Mike Kelley's storied career in this retrospective slide show

New details — and an outpouring of praise from the art world — have emerged surrounding the death of legendary artist Mike Kelley, who was found in his South Pasadena, California home on Tuesday. The loss has been widely reported to be a suicide.  The Associated Press reported that a worried family friend went to Kelley's home Tuesday and found him, though the police will not confirm the cause of death until an autopsy is completed Thursday. The friend told the AP that Kelley had been depressed after a recent breakup with his girlfriend, but no note was found in his home. The tragedy has sparked a flood of remembrances by Kelley's art world colleagues and friends.

Most notably, a group of artist colleagues and friends — including artists Paul McCarthy and Jim Shaw as well as collector Kourosh Larizadeh — sent out a joint email remembering Kelley. It was published in part by the LA Times's Culture Monster blog:

Our dear friend the artist Mike Kelley (born 1954 in Detroit) has passed away. Unstintingly passionate, habitually outspoken and immeasurably creative in every genre or material with which he took up — and that was most of them, from performance and sculpture to painting, installation and video, from experimental music to writing in a thousand voices — Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art. For Mike history existed only to be reconstructed, memory was selective, faulty and willful and life itself vibrant but often dysfunctional. We can hear him disagreeing with us. We cannot believe he is gone. But we know his legacy will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us.

Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at LACMA, spoke to the Associated Press about Kelley's influence. "He was extremely intense, very serious, phenomenally well read. He would go very deep into his subjects, a real artist scholar but with a real passion for whatever he was investigating," Barron said. "His works often violated notions of so called good taste and blurred the boundaries between art, music and popular culture."

The Los Angeles Times has the most comprehensive roundup of critics and colleagues talking about the artist's work, with colleagues like Tony Oursler and John Waters weighing in. LACMA chief curator Paul Schimmel told the LAT: "L.A. would not have become a great international capital of contemporary art without Mike Kelley. Of all the artists in the 1980s, he was the one who really broke out and established a new and complex identity for his generation."

Take one virtual step inside the VIP Art Fair’s second outing — as we did for today's online vernissage — and it will become immediately apparent that the technology powering the experiment in Internet art commerce has vastly improved over last year’s glitch-ridden debut. VIP 2.0 is the closest thing we have to an online facsimile of the gallery-going experience, with cleanly designed, well curated, and informative displays that highlight high-quality art. The nooks and crannies of VIP have largely been swept clean this time around — though there are a few bugs that remain, and a certain number of Easter Eggs for the inquisitive viewer.

Below, our breakdown of the new VIP's strength and weaknesses.

INTERFACE

The fair is browsable in a variety of ways, but most users will start by selecting the type of gallery that they are interested in the site’s top menu bar. Like Starbucks, VIP has its own lingo when it comes to the different sizes, though here instead of "Grande" and "Tall," one selected among "Premier Large," "Premier Medium," "Premier Small," and "Emerging" galleries, as well as sections for "Focus" solo shows and "Multiples & Editions" being sold by museums and institutions. Clicking on a section will bring visitors to a page of thumbnails displaying a single work from each gallery, each linking to the individual "booth." There is also a searchable, gridded map of the fair that shows, in relative "size," the booths a viewer has visited or favorited works in — the only thing the schematic lacks is hallways full of vendors hawking $25-a-glass Champaign.

Where images of work in VIP 1.0 loaded in erratic, block-by-block grids, VIP 2.0’s loading process is effortlessly smooth and zoomable in extremely high resolution. Work and artist information is clearly displayed in the lower part of the screen. Video pieces like Rashid Johnson’s “The New Black Yoga” at Hauser & Wirth’s booth work particularly well in the VIP 2.0 environment, with pop-up players that are viewable full-screen, though in somewhat pixelated resolution. (Unlike physical galleries, viewers are free to fast-forward through the videos on display — no more waiting for that arduous long shot to end!) 

VIP 2.0’s chat function, a much-touted feature of 1.0 that never worked out, is intuitive and relatively glitch free. In the screen representing each booth, there is a list of gallery staffmembers on call. Booth "attendants" available for chat are marked with a green dot with the languages they speak helpfully listed. Lower East Side gallerist Rachel Uffner of Rachel Uffner Gallery responded promptly to a chat and wrote that “everything’s been fine” with the fair’s technology so far. Representative of Beijing’s Pekin Fine Arts gallery Meg Maggio was running the booth at 11 p.m. China time. When asked if the gallery would be staffing the chat through the night, she wrote back, “Not 24-7. Who would do that job???”

Visitors can also add the names of other fair attendees as "friends," which are listed in their chat box. Through a conversation with a fair-going companion, ARTINFO discovered, much to our joy, that emoticons are enabled as well, with a set of monochromatic smiley faces available to express art-inspired emotions. Among those we have discovered so far: :) , :( , ;) , :P , :D , ;D , 8) , and <3.

But perhaps best of all: Viewers can also select custom avatar-silhouettes that appear next to the works in the “View Scale” option, familiar from VIP 1.0. So get ready to decide whether you identify more as a “Mr. VIP I” type —  a shabbily dressed slouch — or as “Mr. VIP II,” who dons a snazzy suit jacket (for more on the avatars, see our slideshow above).  

GLITCHES

VIP 2.0 still has its flaws. Visitors should be able to bookmark works with the star-marked "Save" function, but the button wasn’t displayed on many works, at least during our time on the site. The zoomed-in artwork view doesn’t include caption information nor are viewers able to page to the next work while zoomed in. Several of the booths were missing the Contact Gallery button, as well, and though chats stay on the page even when browsing to other galleries, it’s not possible to click back to the original booth through the chat window, which is kind of frustrating. When browsing White Cube’s booth, the artwork caption briefly got stuck on Ellen Altfest’s “Rock, Foot, Plant” (2009) while we were viewing other works by Tony Cragg and Zhang Huan, though the problem corrected itself after some more flipping.

All in all, however, VIP 2.0 is lightyears ahead of the original. Our review: :-)

To take a behind-the-scenes look at VIP's avatars and emoticons, click on the slide show