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Slideshow: Duro Olowu's "Material" pop-up shop at Salon 94 Freemans


What's Holding Back the Indian Art Boom?

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What's Holding Back the Indian Art Boom?
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In the last decade, the Indian art market has started to take off. Prices are rising and the international art community has been taking notice. But will growing interest turn into a long-term, stable new market where big galleries open new branches and auction houses start hiring local experts? Many sharp art-focused entrepreneurs are making headway in India, but it may still be too soon to declare the country as the "next big thing" — the country faces an uphill battle in substantially growing its art market, as taxes and bureaucratic red tape threaten to muzzle the fledgling industry.

This year, after the founder and director of the India Art Fair (née India Art Summit) sold a 49 percent stake in the company to Sandy Argus and Will Ramsay, the duo behind the wildly successful Hong Kong fair Art HK, several big-name western galleries showed up in New Delhi for the event, including Hauser & Wirth, White Cube, and Lisson Gallery, bringing more international recognition than ever before.

Of course, visitor numbers were down (possibly because a new location was more out-of-the-way or the heavy arms outside the vernissage, as ARTINFO's Madeleine O'Dea reported) and sales were slow. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that it was a failure. Sree Goswami of Mumbai gallery Project 88 told the Financial Times that she was not dismayed by a lack of major sales: "Sales at fairs are no longer made immediately, as was the case a few years ago." We probably won't know the success of the fair until a year or two from now. Will the New York and London galleries keep coming back? Will more American and European collectors make the trek to India? Time will tell.

In the meantime, Indian marketwatchers can turn their eyes to online auction house Saffronart (based in Mumbai), which will venture into Western art sales next week. The auction house is moving into uncharted waters with its inaugural sale of Impressionist and modern art, featuring several Picassos and Vincent van Gogh's 1885 landscape "L’Allée aux Deux Promeneurs," which could fetch $800,000-1 million. Prices that high are nothing new for the auction house, which made a splash as the first Internet auctioneer to make a sale over the $1 million mark, and last July became the first auction house to receive a mobile bid of that amount. Still, the market for Western art is untested by Saffron, and the auction could go either way.

Interestingly, though the headquarters for the auction house are in India, most of the art for its Imp-Mod sale is being stored in the U.S., will be shipped from New York, and must be paid for in U.S. dollars. Why? Saffronart did not respond to ARTINFO's request for an interview in time, but if we had to hazard a guess, we would say it probably has something to do with the tax and tariff problems that have also plagued the IAF. According to the Saffronart's own Web site, the taxes on art in India can be as much as 20-25 percent.

The biggest obstacle to India's art market growth is its own government. Art commerce is hampered by the notorious red tape of India's sprawling state. Art is a heavily taxed luxury in the country. Take the case of India Art Fair, again: While it was granted "museum status" for the first time this year, allowing it a reprieve from some of the duties levied in the past, Indian collectors were still hit hard if they purchased a work within the country. As a result, many galleries reported that they were trying to finalize transactions outside of the borders of India. That's fine if you are a collector who flew in from London, but more of a problem when it comes to interfacing with the local market. The administrative difficulties of the IAF drew the most criticism from international galleries this year, according to an article in the India Times.

While India's overall economic growth is often compared to (if not quite as robust as) China's, there is no way that the art market can flourish like it has for its northeastern neighbor unless its government takes a similar approach to promoting it, combining state backing with some modicum of laissez fair attitude. While there are some notiorious problems with the Chinese model, it does have some strengths. On the one hand, China's government is highly restrictive of the art that can leave the country, and has all but banned Western collectors from the government-subsidized auction houses in Beijing, but it more than makes up for that by promoting art collecting among its own citizens (Poly and Guardian are doing just fine without Western money). However, even if they weren't, access to the Western art market is just a short flight away in Hong Kong, where there are few taxes or regulations and the bastions of art capitalism flourish: Christie's and Sotheby's do a brisk business, as do major gallery chains like Gagosian.

India doesn't have a Hong Kong-like tax haven, nor does it have a regime steering its citizens toward historical treasures. If it wants a future in the global art market the goverment either has to get involved or get out — it can't just keep skimming cream off the top. 

by Shane Ferro,Market News, Columnists

Online Art Wars Heat Up, as Paddle8 Secures $4 Million From Tech and Luxury Investors

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Online Art Wars Heat Up, as Paddle8 Secures $4 Million From Tech and Luxury Investors
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Digital art startups, call your deep-pocketed friends: the gauntlet has been thrown. Online art venue Paddle8 has secured $4 million from technology and luxury investors in its first significant round of venture fundraising. The investment is led by Mousse Partners, a private investment firm controlled by Chanel, Inc., and Founder Collective, a well-respected venture capital fund that has fueled startups like Makerbot and Milo.

Since it launched in May 2011, Paddle8’s traffic has increased to up to 100,000 views per day, and according to the company over 2,000 carefully screened individuals join its "private member" community every month. "With our combined expertise we were able to attract investors in luxury and technology," co-founder Alexander Gilkes told ARTINFO. "Over the next couple of months we'll roll out an ambitious pipeline of new developments, including a new app and increased editorial content." 

The seed money will keep Paddle8 competitive in a growing field of art e-commerce initiatives. It will launch a new user interface focused on connecting collectors with one another and improve its navigation, allowing collectors to browse more artwork from different eras and mediums. These moves may be a preemptive effort to ward off competition from Art.sy, the Dasha Zhukova and Larry Gagosian-backed art site that is positioning itself as a Pandora for the art world. (Art.sy has already launched in Beta and secured some impressive investors for itself, but it won’t launch fully until later this year.)

Other plans to simplify the transaction process for galleries, museums, and art fairs that sell wares through Paddle8 will keep it competitive with Artspace, a Web site that sells prints, photographs and sculpture, and is expanding to have an editorial component as well (to be helmed by ARTINFO's own former executive editor Andrew M. Goldstein). That start-up recently raised $2.5 million in investments. Paddle8's development of private viewing rooms, where galleries can show specific works to select clients, is also reminiscent of a similar program at the online-only VIP Art Fair, which ended its second edition today. 

Founded by former Phillips de Pury specialist Gilkes and McKinsey veteran Aditya Julka, Paddle8 has been among the most creative of this new crop of online art sales sites. Its core strategy is to produce guest-curated exhibitions online with works for sale at major galleries. To date, it claims that it works with over 200 galleries all over the world. Previous guest curators include artist Marina Abramovic, writer Glenn O’Brien, and actor Robin Williams (and his gallerist son Zak). Recently, it has also expanded to the world of art fairs, collaborating with events like NADA Miami and the Art Los Angeles Contemporary Fair to allow collectors to preview artwork leading up to the fair and purchase it online in the weeks that follow. 

Slideshow: Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale Results

“A Separation” Inspires Wacky Conspiracy Theories

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“A Separation” Inspires Wacky Conspiracy Theories
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Like many Americans, we soiled ourselves just a little when we read that U.S. intelligence was officially concerned about Iran attacking us on our own soil. Then again, we weren’t totally surprised. What we didn’t see coming was the possibility that “A Separation” — the classy Iranian family drama that won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Film and is now up for a couple of Oscars — might be some sort of allegory in support of Iran’s regime. And really, it pretty obviously is not. But the Daily Beast’s Omid Memarian found someone putting this novel hypothesis forward:

Houshang Asadi, who was editor in chief of the popular Gozaresh-e Film (The Film Report) magazine in Tehran, considers A Separation a political film; one that supports Iran's religious regime.

"Asghar Farhadi's film opposes the Iranian middle class; the character representing the middle-class symbolism confronts the character representing the lower-class symbolism and is overpowered by the latter's values,” Asadi told The Daily Beast. 
“The middle class is the Green Movement, Iran's platform for freedom, individuality, and civil society. The regime mobilized the lower classes against the middle class and brought them to the field.”

“Asghar Farhadi's latest film sees the moral victory of lower classes over the Iranian middle class, continuing his positioning against the middle class, and this is why I consider Farhadi's cinema ideological and in the service of the Iranian government.”

(When, in an earlier post, we quoted Iran’s Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance as saying, “Wise judgment has put this movie on the podium of the chosen ones,” we just figured he was looking for the most awesomely grandiose way to say that “A Separation” probably deserves a little recognition.)

Meanwhile, Memarian finds another wacky Iranian — Masoud Dehnamaki, a filmmaker who actually likes the regime, and whose “Ekhrajiha” was overshadowed by “A Separation” — to say that the U.S. government probably influences Oscar picks: “Especially in the foreign films category, yes, it does have a role.”

Which one of these incredibly stupid competing theories is correct? (Memarian, by the way, doesn’t indulge the theories — just cites them in his round up of reactions to the movie’s reception.) Well, we noted before that in his Globe acceptance speech, the director of “A Separation,” Asghar Farhadi, was careful not to criticize Iran’s regime. Interesting. And that Obamoscars idea? It seems obvious that only the American government could get behind a nonsense, 9/11-exploiting fantasy like “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (up for Best Picture). (We haven’t actually seen “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” — nor have we read the book — but that’s because they’re both so obviously terrible.)

Assuming Farhadi is in fact pro-regime, and that the U.S. has conspired to make sure his film would reach the Academy Awards, there’s only one conclusion to be reached: That our intelligence services have Farhadi pegged, and intend to draw him into accepting an Oscar so they can have Kanye West humiliate him on stage. World politics: So complicated.

Star Lots Go Lonely at Sotheby’s London's Anemic $125 Million Impressionist and Modern Sale

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Star Lots Go Lonely at Sotheby’s London's Anemic $125 Million Impressionist and Modern Sale
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LONDON — In stark contrast to Tuesday evening’s stellar Impressionist and Modern sale at Christie’s, arch-rival Sotheby’s had a tougher go tonight with less exceptional material, realizing £78,837,650 ($125,424,934). The tally nicked the low-end of the £77.3-111.2 pre-sale estimate.

At the end of the night, 41 of the 53 lots offered sold, accounting for a buy-in rate of 23 percent (by both lot and by value). Twenty-five of the 41 that sold made over a million pounds and 34 exceeded one million dollars (for comparison, the Christie's sale the night before had 28 lots that brought in more than a million pounds). The result was not significantly better than the same sale last year, which hauled in a total of £68.8 million ($111 million), and had a buy-in rate of 24 percent.

Devastatingly, the much-anticipated cover lot, Gustav Klimt’s quietly Symbolist styled landscape, “Seeufer mit birken/Lakeshore with Birches” (1901), owned by the same family since 1902 and estimated at £6-8 million, failed to sell at an imaginary £3.8 million bid (that is, the action ended with a so-called 'chandelier bid,' where the auctioneer pretends there's an offer in the room).

As members of the family sat shell-shocked near the front of the salesroom, facing the unhappy prospect of owning a burned picture, the picture was rescued via three offers from different bidders who had sat on their hands earlier. The family finally accepted the higher bid of £5 million (£5,641,250, or  $8,974,100, when the buyer’s premium was added — still well below the low estimate).

Auctioneer Henry Wyndham made the announcement about the Klimt's fate late in the sale to a room already made nervous from a number of other high-end casualties. The message seemed to improve the mood. “We took the highest offer of the three that came in quickly,” said Sotheby’s senior specialist Philip Hook, “because it is better to strike when the iron is hot.” Officially, however, the Klimt was kept out of the statistics for sold lots and wasn’t included in the official tally.

The unusual sequence of messages rushing back and forth while the auction was in progress likely made for heart-pounding behind-the-scenes drama. Of course, this wasn’t apparent in a quiet salesroom that never appeared to be getting overly enthusiastic for what most seasoned observers believed to be relatively unexciting kit. Still, overall, for what Sotheby’s had on offer, the market nibbled contentedly enough to show its mettle. On a few occasions, bidders even showed outright hunger for the best things.

That was evident for lot five, Claude Monet’s snowy, shadowy composition, “L’entrée de Giverny en hiver” (1885), which became the top lot of the evening at £8.2 million ($13 million), over an estimate of £4.5-6.5 million. Not far behind was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s large-scaled, ambitious streetscape, “Das Boskett: Albertplatz in Dresden” (1911), which sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £7.3 million ($11.6 million) (est. £5-7 million). A young woman in a green sweater standing at one side of the salesroom was the underbidder. When asked, she declined to give her name, though she reluctantly divulged with a nod of the head that she was a dealer.

Shyness or secrecy seemed to be a theme tonight, as demonstrated by a Tel Aviv-based art advisor who snapped up four pictures for two different clients. Though he declined to advertise his name, the dark-haired advisor, outfitted in a crisply pleated dress shirt and jeans, ticked off a mini-buying spree. First off was Max Ernst’s Surrealist-styled “La Comedie de la Soif” (1941), which sold for £1,6 million ($2.6 million). The same painting last sold at Sotheby’s London in June 2007, basically at the height of the last market boom, for £748,000.

Next was Paul Delvaux’s 48-by-72-inch night scene, “Les Adieux” (1964), which the advisor bought for £1.5 million ($2.3 million) (est. £700-900,000). It had been last sold at the old Sotheby’s Parke Bernet in New York in 1982, for $242,000 at the hammer. The advisor (bearing paddle number 211) also nabbed Rene Magritte’s mysterious, star-lit “Fortune Faite” (1957), a work which has been in the same private collection since the late 1960s, for £825,250 ($1.3 million) (est. £700,000- 1 million). His final purchase of the salea was Joan Miro’s mid-sized, late gestural abstraction, “Personnage” (1973), which went for £1.1 million ($1.8 million) (est. £700,000-1 million).

One could say that such purchases indicate that the current market is best stimulated by Surrealist work and dynamic abstraction. That said, there were no takers for the main draw, the larger and earlier Joan Miro, “Peinture” (1933). It simply expired after a few half-hearted  bids at £6.4 million (est.£7-10 million), causing an audible chorus of gasps in the salesroom.

“It should have been bought,” said Sotheby’s specialist Andrew Strauss after the auction. “It just didn’t have its night and I can’t explain it. I suppose [the composition] was a bit static but it had all the language you wanted from a Miro.” According to Strauss, the current market is one “driven by the rarity factor, as well as image and estimate."

The fresh-to-market Monet snowscape made a brilliant price as did a small handful of other works, including the Fauve-period, color-charged Georges Braque, “L’Oliveraie” (1907), which soared to over £5 million ($8 million) (est.£2-3 million), and a fantastic Otto Dix collage, “Die Elektrische (The Electric Tram)” (1919), which  made close to £3 million ($4.7 million) (est. £700,000-1 million). (London dealer Richard Nagy was the underbidder for the Dix.)

“It was never going to have the same fireworks as Christie’s, but in the end, they did very well," said New York-based art dealer, commenting on the evening. "There are moments of sheer unpredictability in the the market and we saw it tonight, as we saw it at Christie’s.”

“If you offer something good for a normal price, it will sell for much more,” said storied Paris dealer Daniel Malingue, who bought lot 17, Salvador Dali’s work on paper “Bureaucrate et Machine a Coude” (1933) for £713,250 ($1.1 million) (est. £400-600,000).

The evening action switches to contemporary art next Monday at Bonhams in London.

To see a selection of the most important lots in Sotheby's London's Impressionist and Modern evening sale, click on the slide show.

 

by Judd Tully,Auctions

Slideshow: Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery

Experimental Helsinki Cafe Tries Out Web-Controlled Furniture — Wackiness Ensues

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Experimental Helsinki Cafe Tries Out Web-Controlled Furniture — Wackiness Ensues
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At the Helsinki café Kauko, the coffee is free, but the experience is unpredictable. A Web site with live video lets Internet users raise or lower the seats and tables, dim the lights, or change the music. This can all be done remotely, or, with free wifi, customers can even play tricks on others on the spot.

The installation, which will remain in the Forum shopping mall through mid-February to celebrate Helsinki's designation in 2012 as a World Design Capital, is intended to question what makes good and bad design. Is interactivity essential, desirable, or even smart? The café's best moments — immortalized in video — are those evidencing the best sense of humor and timing. The rising table that takes a young boy's toy out of reach. The table that moves and interrupts a kissing couple. The poor guy who tries to climb onto a stool and, once he gets on it, feels it start to descend.

Time spent in the café becomes a little comedy of daily life, like a film by Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati. And the experiment also becomes part of the recent artistic tendency to flatter — and simultaneously to question — the user/visitor's god complex. A controversial example of this impulse was the Chilean-Danish artist Marco Evaristti's project of placing goldfish in blenders for his installation "Helena" at Denmark's Trapholt Art Museum in 2000. Visitors were free to turn on the blenders if they so wished — and seven fish perished. In 2003, a court ruled that this did not constitute animal cruelty.

Thankfully, the Kauko Café doesn't have any human-sized blenders, and so it will result in more benign encounters.

To see footage of the hijinks at Helsinki's Kauko café, click on the videos below:

 
by Nicolai Hartvig, ARTINFO France,Design

Slideshow: Steven Alan Fall/Winter 2012 Collection

Cy Twombly's Assets Targeted by Italian Authorities in Multimillion-Dollar Tax Evasion Case

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Cy Twombly's Assets Targeted by Italian Authorities in Multimillion-Dollar Tax Evasion Case
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Alessandro Twombly, the artist son of American painter Cy Twombly and the Italian Tatiana Franchetti, is embroiled in a series of turbid legal battles to determine the fate of the late artist's billion-dollar-plus estate. Reports in the Italian-language media paint a picture of charges as tangled as the lines in one of Twombly's famous canvases. 

The Milan-based paper Corriere della Sera says that Italian authorities claim that the legendary painter, who died last year, evaded taxes on a cache of 40-odd paintings sold between 2005 and 2009 for some €80 million ($106 million). Last week, officials therefore ordered the seizure of "no less than" €29.2 million ($38.8 million) that was held in Cy Twombly's name in the Banca Popolare di Bergamo, charging his American advisors Ralph Ernest Lerner and Thomas Habib Saliba with aiding in the "fraudulent evasion" of taxes. Alessandro Twombly had, authorities say, attempted to transfer €3.8 million ($5 million) from the account to a trust controlled by the two men.

Alessandro has said that he believes that the taxes for the paintings had already been paid in America, and that he will fulfill any obligations to the Italian Ministry of Revenue as soon as he is in full possession of his inheritance. The artist's will, written under U.S. law, reportedly allocated the bulk of the elder Twombly's art and cash to the Cy Twombly Foundation of New York (the Web site FindTheBest.com lists Ralph Lerner as the Foundation's officer), leaving $150 million in cash to Alessandro. However, the Corriere della Sera article adds that Lerner and Saliba can only make the funds available to Alessandro once all taxes (U.S. and Italian) have been paid. 

Finally, in another dispute, the Italian press says that Alessandro is levying a separate claim on a group of paintings that he claims do not figure in the bequest as they were in the family's collection. What the exact truth of these various charges is not yet clear, but given the towering legacy — both artistic and financial — of Cy Twombly's art, the results are sure to make waves.

 
by Reid Singer,Market News

Slideshow: See "Wendy", the winning design of Young Architect’s Program 2012

Diego Rivera Pret-a-Porter? See Designer Steven Alan's Collection Inspired by the Mexican Muralist's MoMA Show

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Diego Rivera Pret-a-Porter? See Designer Steven Alan's Collection Inspired by the Mexican Muralist's MoMA Show
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Designer Steven Alan went to MoMA to find inspiration for his fall/winter 2012 collection. More specifically to the fifth floor, where the exhibition “Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art” is located. The arbiter of preppy New York cool traveled back to the time of Rivera’s politically driven Depression-era frescoes, drawing on the dismal mood of the period with a dark color palette filled with muted tones of black, grey, brown, and olive green. Panama Hats and indigenous weaves reminiscent of the stripes on traditional Mexican serape shawls represented south-of-the-border touches. Overall, the button-up shirts, tailored blazers and suits, knee-length skirts, parkas, and prim dresses that are typical of the designer found added depth and freshness through the melancholic ‘30s touches in this extremely wearable collection.

Click on the slide show to see Steven Alan's fall/winter 2012 collection.

Click here for more ARTINFO New York Fashion Week coverage.


 

 

 

Could Prince v. Cariou Bring Down Google Search?

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Could Prince v. Cariou Bring Down Google Search?
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Prince vs. Cariou

After Patrick Cariou's legal team filed its appellate brief recently in the epic battle the photographer is fighting against appropriation artist Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery, the Web was awash in analysis of the case's meaning for the art world and discussion of the amicus briefs filed by various interested parties on behalf of one side or the other. But the one thing that few have discussed is the rather strong argument made by Internet giant Google's legal team that the decision poses a major threat to not only to a few key Google properties that depend on fair use like Blogger and YouTube, but its entire raison d'être: Internet search.

Before going further it should be noted that amicus briefs, or "friends of the court," have little to do with the case itself and are unlikely to affect the outcome. They are just notes to the judges deciding the case, written by interested but uninvolved parties, letting the court know how its decision could affect future cases. Those that filed in favor of Prince — the Warhol Foundation, as well as the Association of American Museum Directors and its museum co-signors (including the Met and MoMA) — want to prevent similar lawsuits against appropriation art in the future. Getty Images and Corbis, both of which filed a joint brief in favor of Cariou, want to make sure their right to sue for copyright infringement is protected.

Meanwhile, Google filed a neutral brief (it was not in favor of Prince, as has been previously reported) objecting to the specific language used by the district court judge finding in favor of Cariou. The document written by the Google legal team says that the opinion "diverges in dangerous ways from the mainstream of fair use analysis." Specifically, it refers to two passages from the original Prince v. Cariou opinion, which notes that "all of the precedent that this Court can identify imposes a requirement that the new work in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works," and goes on to say that "Prince's Paintings are transformative only to the extent that they comment on [Cariou's] photos."

This particular argument, Google says, is "simply not the law." The opinion as it stands imposes a very narrow definition of fair use, which requires that a new work that uses content from a copyrighted work be "transformative." Specifically, it has to transform the old work by commenting on or criticizing the original work. If this were the law, Google would have a big problem. The company uses a lot of copyrighted work (notably, a huge chunk of the Internet) without transforming it at all. In order to show webpages that appear on its search page, it basically trolls the Web, copying all the pages it finds in order to index the web's content. When it does that, it copies without comment or criticism — if it did, the search function wouldn't be helpful. Thus far, the courts have ruled in favor of Google and similar defendants, saying that the way search functions index the web qualifies as fair use because "large-scale copying of works in digital form was required to achieve a socially useful goal."

However, the distric court in the Cariou case defined a much, much narrower scope for fair use that, if it stands up on appeal, might hand every every indexed Web site cause for a copyright infringement lawsuit. Even though the search function is largely a useful digital tool that brings traffic to Web sites and its unlikely that anything short of a Supreme Court ruling could actually bring it down, the language of this decision does leave Google vulnerable to lawsuits from any old Joe with a copyrighted Web page and an opportunistic attitude. The probability that Google would actually be faced with millions of lawsuits is fairly slim — after all, Google's search index is helpful to most sites and brings in a fair amount of traffic. However, it's not negligible, and the requirement that a work must be transformative in order to be fair use puts Google — and most of the Internet — in a very precarious position indeed.

 

 
by Shane Ferro,Market News

Slideshow: "Impact: 50 Years of the CFDA"

6 Questions For HWKN, The Architects Behind the Nanoparticle Party Pavilion for MoMA PS1's Warm Up

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6 Questions For HWKN, The Architects Behind the Nanoparticle Party Pavilion for MoMA PS1's Warm Up
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Those raucous MoMA PS1's summer Warm Up sessions are always a mess in the best way, but this year’s edition is on a mission to do more than entertain. This morning MoMA announced the winning design in its Young Architects Program, destined to stand temporarily in the PS1 courtyard and provide museum-goers with shade, seating, and sweet hydration during those sweltering parties. It's a doozy, a mass of fabric spikes christened "Wendy" and designed to do more than provide a backdrop for dancing — it also cleans the air. Over the course of the summer (starting it June), the pop-up work of green engineering will have made the same impact as having taken 260 cars off the road.

Designed by New York architects HWKN, Wendy is a 70-foot-tall mass of environmentally-friendly fabric stretched by a framework of scaffolding that will spill over the different sections of the outdoor space. More so than any of the other 12 temporary structures PS1 has erected in the past, it serves as a kind of architectural Swiss Army Knife: it’s part pool, part hydrant, part soundsystem, part sculpture, and — yes — part air purifier. This morning, ARTINFO asked the architects behind HWKN, Matthias Hollwich and Mark Kushner, exactly how it's all supposed to work. 

So, tell me exactly what we’re looking at with this design.

MK: Wendy is basically a sculpture made of fabric made of nanoparticles that clean the air. It made us realize a very simple equation: the more surface area we create, the more air we can clean.

And how does the process work?

MH: The fabric will be coated with Titania nanoparticles, or TiO2. In short, when TiO2 is hit by sun, it triggers a catalytic and chemical reaction that neutralizes nitrodgen dioxide. Inside of Wendy you will have a micro climate that is triggered by the sun exposure from outside. The heat generated creates an internal convection that enhances the flow of air inside out and outside in, further intensifying the air-cleaning effect.

MK: The budget is not disclosed, but it’s not big. It’s tight. What that meant for us is that we needed to find the most efficient way to get the most fabric on the site as possible. What we did was start with the scaffolding, which is a quintessential New York construction technique, and with the scaffolding we made the biggest outline we possible could and operated within that structure, and that’s sort of how the playground for Wendy became established. We started pulling at this fabric form to increase surface area. The payoff is that the arm, the pipes that come out, are able to shoot air and water and music on partygoers at PS1. That’s the evolution of the thinking of the form. The overriding idea of the form is that it does all this ecological work. We wanted to give people an icon to associate with the potential of this architecture get people excited about it, get people to talk about it, something memorable that hits you in the face about the potential of our profession.

It looks like you’ve achieved that, since MoMA design and architecture curator Pedro Gadanho described it as “iconic, but with a twist.” Did you want to reference New York?

MK: I think that we’re New Yorkers. In a way, it’s in our blood. What we love about using the scaffolding is that it’s everywhere. New Yorkers pass under it, they see it, it blocks their views, it covers their buildings. The opportunity here is to say that even scaffolding, with some thought, can actually become supercharged. It can be proactive about facing environmental and social issues that face the city as a whole.

MoMA Chief Curator of Architecture and Design curator Barry Bergdoll described this design competition as a “zany quest for a space that is simply good fun.” How do you expect it’s going to be received by museum-goers? How are people who go to Warm-Up going to interact with it?

MK: In a few different ways. They’re going to get blasted with air from Wendy. They’ll get doused with water dripping out of her arms. They’re going to wade into her pools. We’re really excited. I actually think that the full potential is using social media and kind of showing off. We know that when people go to PS1, they’re psyched to be somewhere packed with people. They’re excited to tell people where they’re at. That icon that Pedro described is going to incite curiosity at a grassroots level at what Wendy is and what she does ecologically.

I noticed you’re referring to Wendy as a lady. Where did the name Wendy come from?

MK: We think of Wendy as a storm. All powerful storms have names. In a video that we’ll release shortly, we use that song by the Association called “Everyone Knows It’s Wendy.” The storm kind of started to have a personality about it. We’re trying to change the game of architecture and be more proactive about speaking to people who use architecture but aren’t architects. Trying to change the game of architecture and being more proactive really speaks to people who use architecture who aren’t architects. We didn’t want to revert to traditional architectural naming devices, which tend to be an insider game, so we went the total opposite direction, to choosing one that anyone could say and start to fall in love with.

And what can we look forward to from you in the future?

MH: We’re working on a hotel in New Jersey, where construction starts in the next two months. We’re working on the Pines Pavilion in Fire Island, designing a temporary pavilion for this year and a permanent one for next year. And there’s our retirement community for Palm Springs. We’re continuing work on that in our office, and we’re going to do the groundbreaking in two years. It’s one of our projects we’ve been working on for quite a while. And then there are a couple of other things, but we can’t talk about those yet. 

To see the other, many sides of Wendy, click on the slide show


Slideshow: See Hits and Misses From 6 Museum Valentine's Day Gift Guides

See the Greatest Hits of American Fashion From FIT's Sweeping "Impact" Exhibition

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See the Greatest Hits of American Fashion From FIT's Sweeping "Impact" Exhibition
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"Impact" Museum at FIT

NEW YORK — Eleanor Lambert organized the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1962 with the belief that the creative minds behind American fashion should be recognized and promoted. With 50 of the country’s top designers — including Rudi Gernreich, Bill Blass, and Adele Simpson — joining her, the publicist founded what would become the voice of the fashion industry, ballooning over the next five decades into a group of approximately 400 members.

There’s also an art connection; Lambert was the Whitney’s first press director. She went on to represent American artists like Thomas Benton, Walt Kuhn, Jackson Pollack, John Curry, Jacob Epstein, and Isamu Noguchi. Additionally, she played a part in the formation of the American Art Dealers Association.

But back to fashion. In what perhaps is the most fitting way to celebrate the CFDA’s 50-year history, the group joined forces with the Museum at FIT for “Impact: Fifty Years of the CFDA,” an exhibition showcasing the group’s work, on view through April 17. “The word ‘impact’ sounds like an American car in the late ‘50s, one of those great convertible cars that really meant and illustrated the American dream, and therefore the word ‘impact’ illustrates what American fashion is about,” explained CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg at a press conference for the retrospective. “It’s about driving design and pragmatism. It’s about where the words ‘fashion’ and ‘commercial’ blend in into the highway of success.”

The show is as diverse as the members of the CFDA — with a selection of evening gowns, cocktail dresses, sportswear, suits, and more. Each CFDA member asked to participate in the exhibition contributed a piece that they felt best represented them. Patricia Mears, the museum’s deputy director, and Fred Dennis, the senior curator, picked items for deceased members. Narciso Rodriguez selected the red and black embroidered silk dress Michelle Obama wore on election night in 2008. Marc Jacobs chose a dress from his seminal 1993 Perry Ellis grunge collection. Von Furstenberg opted for her signature wrap dress in a leopard print. The pieces range from being relatively tame (a Traina-Norell evening set) to ridiculously flamboyant (a Thom Browne pheasant feather and wool suit). Geoffrey Beene, Thakoon, Ralph Lauren, Oleg Cassini, Stan Herman, Tory Burch, Oscar de la Renta, Norma Kamali, Donna Karan, Betsey Johnson, and Reed Krakoff were among the other designers who had pieces in the show.

With the limited space, the museum couldn’t hold items by every designer, so the remaining 300 or so who aren’t represented by a garment or accessory are featured in an interactive directory presented through 10 iPads throughout the space and a rotating projection of each designer located the north and south sides of the gallery.

While the scope of the show is broad, the CFDA is the one common thread. “It’s our being unified that makes us more powerful,” said von Furstenberg.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from “Impact: Fifty Years of the CFDA,” on view at the Museum at FIT until April 17.

Click here for more New York Fashion Week coverage.

 

Finding Love in the Gift Shop: The Best (and Worst) Valentine's Day Suggestions From 6 Museums

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Finding Love in the Gift Shop: The Best (and Worst) Valentine's Day Suggestions From 6 Museums
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The big day is coming! Yes, that would be Valentine’s Day, the institutionally sanctioned celebration of horribly ill-conceived romantic gifts. It doesn't have to be that way for you, however, because ARTINFO has your back. In addition to providing our own V-Day gift guide, we've turned a discerning eye to the gift shops of the major museums, the MetLACMA, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the V&A, all of which are offering selections of Valentine's-appropriate gifts on their Web sites. While some of their suggestions are great, many will land you in the dog house indefinitely. Here, then, is our guide to navigating them, highlighting our favorite hits and misses of these museum-approved tokens of affection. 

To read about the hits and misses of museum Valentine's Day gifts, click on the slide show.

 

 

by Janelle Zara,Architecture & Design, Design

Tom Friedman, Master of Lo-fi Art, Talks About His New Work and Technology's "God-Like" Future

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Tom Friedman, Master of Lo-fi Art, Talks About His New Work and Technology's "God-Like" Future
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Tom Friedman's "Untitled (sun)," 2012

At artist Tom Friedman’s upcoming Luhring Augustine show "New York," opening this Saturday, February 11 (the artist’s first outing with the gallery), a video camera will be keeping a watchful eye on visitors. This unmanned camera looks real, but it’s actually a trompe l’oeil ploy by Friedman, laboriously handmade out of wood. The work is at once funny and subtly critical: the artist watching those who watch his work. It is notably more edgy than some of the artist's other famous work, which has generally involved ingeniously processing ordinary materials like tinfoil or cereal boxes into sculptures that are at once ordinary and delightful. In a recent phone interview, Friedman gave ARTINFO a peek into the thought process behind his diverse collection of new sculptures.

Can you talk a little bit about what you’re planning for your upcoming show at Luhring Augustine?

Let’s see, there are 12 or 13 pieces. They’re new works. It’s my first show with Luhring Augustine. I was working with Gagosian, then left Gagosian and started working with Stephen Friedman from London, who I’d been working with before. Then I was looking for a New York gallery, and I really liked Luhring Augustine’s program.

Did they help develop the show at all, or was it more just work that you had already been developing?

We had agreed on a date for the show, and the show took maybe a little over a year to produce. But it’s pretty much open. Usually the galleries don’t tell me what kind of things to do. They’ll come and do studio visits, and we’ll talk about the artwork a bit — that’s helpful for me. The pieces in the show are all very disparate, as is usual with my work. I tend to enjoy the relationships between things through their differences.

You have a few different formats in the show, from sculptures to drawings on paper.

Right. I’ve been working more with Styrofoam and paint. I love the material. It’s very easy to use in so many different ways. You can carve with it, you can cut it down paper thin, and it takes paint very well. And it’s light.

I also have a wood piece that I made. I’ve never really worked in wood. I made a video camera that’s made entirely out of wood and then painted it a stealth gray. Before I made a camera on a tripod — the video camera’s on a tripod as well — that was all painted black. It just sort of sat around, but I liked the idea that maybe the photographer had left the room and is getting ready to document the work. It kind of becomes invisible in a way, and the video camera has a different presence. I want it to be something that might be a little more invisible. A camera has a different quality — there needs to be someone to take the picture — but the video camera could be turned on, surveying. So it has more of a presence of possible documentation and voyeurism. I’m hoping, before they realize it’s not real, that it might heighten a visitor's sense of awareness. I want the camera to be kind of in the distance, so it takes you awhile to get there. It would be placed in a way that it’s inconspicuous, so it seems like it was meant to be there.

You talk about voyeurism and recording devices. What’s your personal relationship with that kind of technology?

With technology, it’s more of an idea in terms of the future, and going from the present to the future. I think about it more in theory. I’ve always been interested in the future of technology and have done some writings that have to do with mapping out how we go from here to a completely obscure, kind of God-like state through technology. I think about technology as narrowing that gap between desire and fulfillment of that desire; they get closer and closer together through technology. The final thing is where desire and fulfillment of the desire just merge together. What is that?

People talk about the "singularity," the moment where humanity merges with machines, and there’s the instant fulfillment of any desire through technology.

Right. I’m also interested in taking the digital and trying to figure it out and making it analogue. Like some of the collage pieces I’ve done, or the enlarged boxes — I take a digital process and make it analogue.

There’s another piece, “Pixelated Static.” I dealt with static before with another piece, where I made a faux television set, and inside was a television screen and computer that projected an animated sequence of images of colored candy sprinkles that, when played, looked like color static. The recorded sound that played was made by shaking the sprinkles in a cake tin. In this piece, I chose this form of an old TV monitor that I carved out of Styrofoam. I had to carve it and sureform it and sand it down, so it has the shape, but it’s not a flat surface. It’s curved, or concave.

I wanted to create this illusion of static, so I took a photograph of television static and pixelated it. Then I went through a long, arduous process of gridding out the form, printing it out, then cutting out paint into squares matching the colors on the photograph and then gluing them onto the surface. It got really complex because of the curvature — it’s not a flat surface — so I had to figure out a way to create the grid so that it wrapped around. When you get to the edges, it’s not squares anymore; they start to become diamond-shaped. It was a lot of labor.

What makes you want to do all this very hands-on labor? What attracts you to that process?

It has to do with the momentum of my work. Having done it in the past, there’s just an enjoyment that I have of creating an experience, and I learn a lot through that. I see my work as being more about the experience of it — how you experience it piece to piece, and the body of work, the grouping — than the meaning of it. I think about how one would enter a gallery space — what’s the first thing they see, the next thing they see, how they accumulate the information, the assumptions that they bring to the experience, how that all comes together — and then how they digest it, and the memory that it leaves. I’m curious about that phenomenon. There’s a certain logic to thinking that way. Computer science deals with that kind of approach. It’s not methodical, though.

A lot of your work also has a really great sense of humor to it. Is that something you look for in the finished piece?

I think it’s more of a byproduct. I don’t really think about it so much. I’m really into absurdity; I’m not a sentimental person at all. For me, sentimentality reinforces the illusion, and good absurdity, for me, strips the layers, the filters, the assumptions that we have away. I think that, in a way, approaches good comedy: taking an overview and looking at the absurdity of things.

And the absurdity lets you understand it at a deeper level that you couldn’t before.

It’s like stepping back and seeing a bigger picture.

Tom Friedman's "New Work" will open at Luhring Augustine (531 West 24th Street) on February 11, and runs through March 17

Slideshow: The Art of Song Byeok

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