LONDON —  Boutique auction house Phillips de Pury & Company closed out the contemporary evening series of sales on Thursday with a small but successful event that tallied £5,695,550 ($8,998,436 million). Some 23 of the 25 lots offered sold for a tiny buy-in rate of eight percent by lot and 11 percent by value. The end-of-the-night total fell within the modest pre-sale estimate range of £5,165,000-7,670,000.

Three of the lots carried third-party financial guarantees, meaning an anonymous funding source outside of the auction house guaranteed a confidential minimum price for those wares. Only one work sold for over a million pounds and that was Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvas “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” in virginal white from 1960, which sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for a little over £1 million ($1.7 million) (est. £1-1.5 million/$1.6-$2.4 million). The most remarkable thing about the Fontana is that it was once owned by Andy Warhol and sold back at Sotheby’s New York in May 1987, shortly after the artist’s death following gallbladder surgery for a minute $132,000 figure.

Phillips offered a small-scaled Warhol himself as well, “Mao” (1974), which sold to another telephone bidder for £457,250 ($722,694) (est. £300-500,000). An otherwise unidentified Asian woman bidding at the back of the Howick Place salesroom was the underbidder.

But Phillips’s staple, younger, more cutting-edge contemporary art was mostly successful, with Joe Bradley’s Malevich-esque, black and red “Killroy” (2008) in two parts sold to London’s Simon Dickinson Gallery for £49,250 ($77,603) (est. £30-40,000). Kelly Walker’s brick-patterned four-color silkscreen on canvas with an appropriated image from “Hola!” magazine from 2007 sold to Amsterdam dealer Siebe Tettero for £85,250 ($134,328) (est. £50-70,000).

“I thought the sale was a little tepid,” said Tettero later, "but they did well, just as Sotheby’s did last evening with what they had. I think Christie’s won this round.” Asked about the small scale of Phillips de Pury line-up tonight, Tettero added, “I think people are hesitant to give their works out to this house, which is a pity.”

Still, Phillips soldiered on with a steady beat as Christopher Wool’s leaf-patterned alkyd-on-paper “Untitled” (1988) sold to a telephone bidder for £169,250 ($266,687) (est. £120-180,000). Paris dealer John Sayegh-Belchatowski was the underbidder.

Sayegh-Belchatowski also underbid the Jean-Michel Basquiat oil-stick-and-graphite “Untitled (Half-Eaten)” (1983), featuring images of a banana and Basquiat's own head, which sold to the telephone for £181,250 ($286,386) (est. £150-200,000). “It was cheap,” admitted Sayegh-Belchatowski, who watched the action from his seat in the second row, close to auctioneer Simon de Pury, “but after £130,000, it was enough.”

In contrast to the bouts of wild bidding at Christie’s earlier in the week for the likes of Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon, competition at Phillips was decidedly more relaxed. Rudolf Stingel’s densely patterned abstraction, “Untitled” (2004) in oil and enamel on canvas sold to another telephone bidder £505,250 ($798,336)

Of the trio of third-party guaranteed lots, Cindy Sherman’s wildly outfitted cowgirl clown, “Untitled #410” (2003), a color photograph from an edition of six, attracted the most competition, bringing out four telephone bidders who drove the price to £433,250 ($684,565). Another guaranteed entry, George Condo’s classically weird seated figure, “Woman in a Blue Chair” (2007), sold to New York’s Skarstedt Gallery, the artist’s primary market dealer for £205,250 ($324,332) (est. £200-300,000). Marc Quinn’s bad taste “The Golden Column (Microcosmos)” (2008), cast in gold leaf and bronze and featuring a waif-thin Kate Moss in a contorted yoga pose, was also guaranteed, selling to a telephone bidder for £289,250 ($457,071) (est. £300-500,000).

One of the few lots to draw serial bidding was the sensation Walead Beshty’s “Fed Ex Kraft Box" (2005), a laminated glass, silicone, and metal Fed Ex shipping box sculpture that sold to a telephone bidder for £58,850 ($92,992) (est. £15-20,000). “It gets silly,” said London Saville Row dealer Carl Kostyal, referring to the price, who was one of the underbidders. “It comes after a hyped series of auction sales and people are going crazy.”

The only casualties of the quickly paced evening were Andreas Gursky’s “Jumeierah Palm” (2008) and Damien Hirst’s ridiculous confection in painted bronze, “Sensation” (2003). They carried respective estimates of £400-600,000 and £350-450,000.

Moments after the sale, Michael McGinnis, Phillip’s worldwide head of contemporary art described the overall result, saying “It’s exactly what we expected. It was a modest price point sale and we felt confident it would do well across the spectrum of Postwar art.” Asked about the low number of buy-ins, McGinnis added, “we have a much better indication of what the market can absorb, and smaller and more confident is better than a higher risk.”    

 At the age of 8 Stuart Semple came face to face with Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” It was — the British-born artist, curator and gallerist says — as if “a bomb went off in my head.” This early experience sparked an interest that would define his youth and inevitably inspired him to be an artist as an adult. In the years after his Sunflowers moment, adolescent ill health and a naturally reclusive nature would lead him to spend large amounts of time on his own. The sense of isolation and remoteness that this engendered formed Semple’s aesthetic and in his current show, “IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THIS CITY," provides its main narrative too.

Whether he is working on canvas or paper, with foam sculptures or with readymades, Semple draws a picture of a loner shouting back at an unjust world in vivid, hyper-real language. Referencing song lyrics and movie quotes, his angst is palpable. Semple took ARTINFO HK on a guided tour of the exhibition.

Tell me about the title of the show, “IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THIS CITY?”

Well it comes from a Bruce Springsteen song. When he sings it he says "it is hard to be a saint in the city,” but I changed it to "it is hard to be a saint in this city." I am not specifically speaking about Hong Kong, I am more talking about London because that is where I made it. And thinking about sometimes how it is hard to be yourself and maybe your experience of the world is different from how everyone else sees it. There is this idea that someone is trying to do something but the environment that they are in is at odds with it.

Do you think that is a common sentiment in major cities nowadays?

They can be very lonely places, big cities. You can have millions of people and you can feel quite alone. A common theme in my work is isolation and atomization and what I mean by that is, you have mass culture and at the end of the day you are a singular person and rather then bringing us together it often works to isolate, because we have become passive consumers of culture.

But yet your work is very in touch with pop culture and what is happening in the media at this time.

I actually have a further belief that popular culture can be utilized as a language that we can all share. So pop culture, as a language, is something that we can share about how we feel emotionally. So I use that as a visual language to talk about other stuff.

I believe it is an individual thing. I think it is like a cultural DNA. You might be two-thirds Lady Gaga, one-third MGMT with a bit of a David Lynch movie. Everyone has their own mix. It is like your iPod playlist versus my iPod list. They may be very different but there will be commonalities and that is the bit where we find the link and I think that I am lucky because that is the way that people can find a way into the work.

Do you feel like you are sort of a social scientist?

Yeah, there is a definite sociological aspect to the work. My mum is a sociologist. I was brought up with a lot of talk about how societies work and how communities assemble. I have always found the products of societies interesting, i.e. the culture and the bi-products. The things that rise to the surface.

Has that always been your basis for creativity? Is that something you ever see your self moving away from?

For me it would be like trying to learn another language. I grew up watching MTV and pop videos and cover art. That is my language, like the way I speak English. If I were to do something else it would not come naturally. I feel like it would be dishonest.

Is there any section of media that engages you particularly? Is it music or film?

I think the experience of each is unique. But for me music is the most emotive. I think there is something about music that cuts straight to my emotional wires. When I paint I use different music to make me feel different things and you can see it in the gesturing.

How is making a show like this? Is it a work in progess?

If I am honest, I never really like what I make. They are all very personal things. Sort of hanging pages of your diary on the wall. It all grows organically. I have a massive blackboard in my studio and everything that comes up is written there and it becomes the building blocks of something and then slowly images might get attached to them. It all grows from there. It is the first few that are always hard and then you find a rhythm and then it is normally the last few that I am pleased with the best.

How has your perception of what it means to be an artist changed from when you first graduated?

Completely different. Totally different! When I was in college becoming an artist wasn't a job. You would cut your ear off and die drinking meth. It wasn't a respectable thing to tell anyone. Not like it is now. This was before Hirst put a shark in a tank. Now it is really exciting. There are so many things to experience. Being into art is a lifestyle now.

“IT’S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THIS CITY” opens today and runs through March 16 at The Cat Street Gallery at The Space, 210 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

Click on the slideshow to see some of Semple’s works and read his commentary on how they were made.

– Statue of Carla Bruni Incenses the French Left: Sacrebleu! The mayor of Nogent-sur-Marne hopes to erect a two-meter-high bronze statue of a factory worker sporting the face of Carla Bruni, the Italian-born first lady of unpopular conservative prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The artwork, commissioned from artist Elisabeth Cibot, is intended as some sort of strange homage to the Italian workers who came to Nogent at the end of the 19th century, but it has touched a raw nerve with locals. "This is grotesque," said the socialist party's local politician. "To give these Italian workers the face of a super rich person is an insult." [Journal des Arts]

– Greece's Culture Minister Offers Resignation: Greece is decending into chaos amid the European economic crisis, and its storied heritage is suffering. After the second museum robbery in two months, culture minister Pavlos Yeroulanos offered to resign. The Museum of Ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games, was robbed this morning by two armed men, who stole bronze and ceramic artifacts. Previous reports have noted the country's financial woes have led Greece to cut back on museum security. [Bloomberg]

– Pete Doherty's Blood Paintings: The former Libertine (and former paramour of Kate Moss) is at work on his first UK solo show at London's Cob Gallery. He will present of series of paintings made with his own blood — using a technique he morbidly calls "arterial splatter." [Independent]

– If Marina Abramovic Wore Sweatpants...: Here's one outlandish installation to look out for when the Whitney Biennial opens on March 1: Los Angeles artist Dawn Kasper has literally moved into the museum. "Basically everything I own is here," Kasper said. Throughout the show, the artist will make collages and drawings during the day, and "take lots of naps." [NYT] 

– Western Art Bodmbs in India: The first auction of western art in India by online auction house Saffronart fetched $1.2 million, trailing forecasts. An early landscape by Vincent van Gogh sold for $697,000, well below its low estimate of $800,000. [Bloomberg]

– Outsourcing Creativity: More and more entertainment businesses are outsourcing creative work, from film companies going to Eastern Europe to use nonunion orchestras for scores to individual musicians producing music videos in India. [NYT]

– "Mural" Gets a Makeover: Jackson Pollock's breakthrough work "Mural" will undergo a full restoration and then head on tour around Iowa. The repair process will take several years and could cost around $300,000. The painting, worth some $150 million, was a gift from Peggy Guggenheim to the University of Iowa, which has fought hard to keep it from being sold off to benefit the state. [Des Moines Register]

– Nathan Mabry Moves to Sean Kelly: The Los Angeles-based sculptor, who until now has had only a sporadic presence in New York through group shows at Gladstone and Haunch of Vension, will now show with Chelsea's Sean Kelly Gallery, which will present work by the artist at New York's Armory Show in March. [Press Release]

– Azerbaijan Readies for First Art Festival: Baku, Azerbijan's capital city, will host its first public art festival on February 24, featuring 20 local artists whose work is installed throughout the ancient city. Seeing as the nation's government veiled vagina art at last year's Venice Biennale, however, don't expect anything too scandalous. [TAN]

– "I Don't Think Riots Are Art at All": Should violence ever be the subject of public art? In the UK, residents of Surrey are debating this question after a sculpture commemorating a 19th-century bonfire society that organized notorious riots has been proposed for a local roundabout. [BBC]

– Cotter Meets the Ungovernables: In his measured but in the end positive review of the New Museum's triennial, Holland Cotter asks, "How ungovernable can artists be who have all, so to speak, attended the same global art school, studied under the same star teachers, from whom they learned to pitch their art, however obliquely, to one world market?" [NYT]

– London's Iconic Phone Boxes Get the Arty Treatment: Over 40 artists and creative types including Keith Tyson, Giles Deacon, and Zandra Rhodes have been invited to "re-style" London telephone boxes, which will be auctioned to raise money for the charity ChildLine and displayed throughout the capital this summer. [Press Release]

– Leonora Hamill and Eric Pillot Win 2012 HSBC Photography Awards: The winners will sign a book deal with the French publisher Actes Sud and go home with a €5,000 ($6,566) cash prize. Banking giant HSBC will also purchase six of the winning images for the company's collection. [BJP]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Check out this preview of the inaugural Palm Springs Fine Art fair:

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

Phillips de Pury's Petite London Sale Scores $9 Million, Buoyed by Andy Warhol's Fontana

Damien Hirst's Latest (and Greatest?) Scheme: Saving the World Through Eco-Architecture

Discovering a Different Duchamp: A French Show Spotlights Marcel's Older Brother Jacques Villon

Tough Talk With Corey Stoll, That Ernest Hemingway Guy in “Midnight in Paris”

App Art: David Shrigley's "Light Switch" Takes a Swipe at Conceptual Art on the iPhone

YBA Sarah Lucas Gets a Room of Her Own Above Sadie Coles in London

Last month, Pace Gallery parted ways with contemporary-art darling Sterling Ruby. Now, ARTINFO can report that it has picked a new rising star: Bosco Sodi, a 42-year-old Mexico City-born painter known for abstract, almost alchemical, paintings. Pace, one of the world's most powerful galleries, is known for its classy stable of legendary figures like Chuck Close and Richard Tuttle. The decision to pick up Sodi represents director Marc Glimcher's ongoing mission to boost its roster of cutting-edge contemporary art. 

Sodi is not exactly a mega-star yet, but you can bet that you will be hearing more from him. His vast canvasses are both spectacular and have a classical gravity, caking layers of pigment, sawdust, and natural fibers together to create a texture reminiscent of scorched earth. He also deliberately incorporates matter from whatever locality he happens to be at when working, lending his abstraction a site-specific twist.

The Mexican artist was first introduced to American audiences at a solo presentation at the Bronx Museum in 2010, where his massive, 40-foot-across painting "Pangea" caught Glimcher's eye. This led to a solo show at Pace last December. When the artist's monochromatic blue, pink, and inky black canvases sold out, the gallery decided to bring him on board for exclusive New York representation. In at least one sense, Sodi has a sensibility that will be right at home at Pace: Two of his major influences, Jean Dubuffet and the late Antoni Tapies, are also Pace artists. 

A large crowd, early sales, and a well-timed appearance by Judy Chicago propelled the opening preview party at the inaugural Palm Springs Fine Art Fair on Thursday night at the Palm Springs Convention Center. More than 1,500 enthusiasts and collectors came through to see this California desert resort town’s first fair in nearly a decade, exploring 50 exhibiting galleries from around the country. “We’re very pleased to see so many sophisticated, knowledgeable collectors in Palm Springs,” fair director Rick Friedman told ARTINFO. “This is a beautiful place and a beautiful show with museum-quality art in every direction.”

Chicago, omnipresent in Los Angeles on account of several exhibitions and gallery shows in the sprawling Pacific Standard Time, is the subject of a 100-foot-long, in-fair career survey, "Judy Chicago, Material Girl," curated by David Richard Contemporary of Santa Fe, New Mexico. On opening night — a benefit for Palm Springs Art Museum — Chicago accepted the fair’s lifetime achievement award and entertained a standing-room-only crowd in conversation with curator Peter Frank.

Frank also organized an in-fair, Pacific Standard Time-sanctioned exhibition called "The Big Picture: Paintings From Southern California, 1960-1980," celebrating the artists who contributed to the birth and rise of the L.A. art scene.

Meanwhile, collectors wasted no time on the show floor. Several galleries reported sales within the first hour of the fair's opening. Throckmorton Fine Art of New York had an especially strong night, selling a 1970 Slim Aarons “poolside gossip” C-print photographed at the iconic Richard Neutra-designed Kaufmann House in Palm Springs. The gallery also sold two Nickolas Muray photographs of Frida Kahlo and several works of Pre-Columbian, African, and Asian art. Likewise, in the first hour, Richard Levy Gallery of Albuquerque sold a 2012 stripe painting by William Betts.

One of the most popular pieces was the flashy Devorah Sperber piece at Bentley Gallery of Scottsdale, Arizona. Her "After the Mona Lisa 2" (2005) — composed of 5,184 spools of thread hanging on a stainless steel chain, which come together to look like the Mona Lisa when viewed through a curious acrylic sphere — drew clusters of visitors.

Other highlights of the fair include classic Op Art paintings by Julian Stanczak and shaped canvases by Charles Hinman at David Richard Contemporary; Tim Bavington paintings at Scott Richards Contemporary Art of San Francisco; Milton Avery paintings at Yares Art Projects of Santa Fe; two oil paintings on paper by Yigal Ozeri and photograph by Stefanie Schneider at Scott White Contemporary of San Diego; Jim Dine canvases at L.A.’s Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art; new Ricardo Mazal paintings at Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery of San Francisco; three Richard Misrach photographs (and a jaw-dropping array of other black-and-white prints) at Etherton Gallery of Tucson; Lita Albuquerque’s pigment panels at Peter Blake Gallery of Laguna Beach; the cast glass figures by Nicolas Africano at Jenkins Johnson Gallery of San Francisco; a 1967 Ed Ruscha painting at Heather James Fine Art of Palm Desert; a Marc Sijan resin and oil piece at Gerald Peters Gallery of New York and Santa Fe; a 1982 Charles Arnoldi branch painting at Imago Galleries of Palm Desert; Richard Roblin paintings at Madison Gallery of La Jolla, Calif.; and Palm Springs artist Robert Dunahay’s new palm tree paintings at Christian Hohmann Fine Art of Palm Desert and Skidmore Contemporary Art of Santa Monica.

David Floria Gallery of Aspen dedicated its booth to sculptor James Surls, while Robert Green Fine Arts of Mill Valley, California, filled its space with a solo show of Paul Jenkins paintings. L.A.’s Thomas Paul Fine Art exhibited Chicano art from the collection of actor Cheech Marin, tapping into the fair’s other person of the hour, besides Judy Chicago — Marin is Palm Springs Fine Art Fair's "Art Patron of the Year," and will also headline a moderated conversation, which is sure to draw crowds as well.

The Palm Springs Fine Art Fair continues through Feb. 19. 

To see some of the action on the opening night of the fair, click on the slide show.

Is it unethical for a public servant who directs a large government institution to fly first class if he can produce a doctor’s note? That is one of the questions fueling the current scuffle between Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley and Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough. Earlier this week, Grassley demanded a review of Clough’s complete travel documents after an online report revealed the Smithsonian chief had taken 59 trips in the period between when he took office in July 2008 and July 2011, including visits to resort destinations in Colorado and Florida. At a time when wasteful government spending has become a hot topic, even the appearance of excess can destroy a public figure’s reputation. But is G. Wayne Clough really guilty of irresponsible spending, or just the victim of a grand-standing politician?

The Smithsonian has been in hot water for its leader’s traveling habits before. In 2007, former secretary Lawrence M. Small resigned after a Washington Post report revealed he was using federal money to finance cushy travel as well as renovations of his office and home. By contrast, Clough’s $120,000 travel fees were not paid for out of federal funds, according to Junketsleuth, the Web site that first reported on the Smithsonian head’s travel.

Why might Grassley have a problem with Clough’s travel if it wasn’t paid for with government money? For one thing, he says that he isn’t entirely sure that’s true. “There’s uncertainty based on the news reporting so far on who funded the travel and the purpose and accomplishments of the travel,” a Grassley spokeswoman told ARTINFO. “[Senator Grassley] wants to be sure the Smithsonian board of regents is vetting and signing off on the travel.” Furthermore, “the time away from the Smithsonian might be a concern, depending on what’s accomplished during the trips and whether decisions requiring leadership suffered in the absence.”

After the debacle with former secretary Small, the Smithsonian revised its travel guidelines for employees. Special requests (such as bringing along a spouse, which Clough did on at least 10 trips, according to Junketsleuth) must be approved by the general counsel, and all travel by senior Smithsonian executives is audited quarterly by its comptroller and board of regents. But Grassley, who played a central role in bringing down Clough’s predecessor (and who maintains a special section on his Web site for whistleblowers), seeks to confirm the proper reviews are actually being conducted. “It seems like the Smithsonian may not have learned from previous mistakes,” he told the Washington Post.

In order to understand the positions of both Grassley and the Smithsonian, one must understand the unique nature of the institution’s funding. The Smithsonian receives 70 percent of its budget from federal funds; the rest comes from private donations or museum revenue. A representative from the Smithsonian told ARTINFO that neither Clough’s salary nor his travel funds come from the federal portion of its budget.

Fifty-four of Clough’s trips last year, she said, were paid out of the non-federal portion of its budget, while five of the trips were financed by external organizations entirely independent of the Smithsonian. Senator Grassley’s office expressed concern that some of the organizations — George Washington University, Williams College, Midwest Research Institute, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences — might receive federal funding themselves, which means that taxpayers would have, in fact, been financing some portion of Clough's trips that might have involved the use of charter flights and private car services. But a Smithsonian representative told ARTINFO that the federal travel regulation to which the institution conforms “does not require an examination of the financial backgrounds of sponsors to determine if they receive federal funds.”

Drawing a distinction between private and public funds and how they are spent is a tactic to insulate institutions from these kinds of questions, noted Steven Dubin, a professor of arts administration at Columbia University. However, when politics gets involved, such bureaucratic explanations are often futile. He recalled that “Hide and Seek,” the controversial exhibition from which David Wojnarowicz video “A Fire in My Belly” was ultimately censored when it appeared at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in 2010, was also funded by entirely private funds “precisely so that there wouldn’t be the concern that there was federal money paying for it. And we all saw that happened there.”

And indeed, Grassley’s office noted that parsing where funds come from isn’t as important to the senator as how they are being used: "All money that the Smithsonian generates, regardless of its source, is supposed to fulfill the Smithsonian’s mission,” the senator's representative said. 

Some aren't entirely convinced the investigation is worthwhile, however. “It seems to me like these are legitimate expenditures,” responded Dubin. “Frankly, it sounds like nitpicking to me.” 

It’s only getting easier and cheaper to make a music video these days — and all the more important, as artists compete to be heard, largely without the benefit of big pushes from major labels. For those reasons, the music video has undergone something of a mini-renaissance. Every week ARTINFO video editor Tom Chen, photo editor Micah Schmidt, and performing arts editor Nick Catucci will choose five of the most visually engaging music clips from the previous few days, presenting highlights from each in a video supercut, and a slideshow of stills that link back to the full videos.

This week:

St. Vincent breaks free.

The Cool Kids liven up their live-action.

Black Bananas get stoned and watch bad TV.

Noel Gallagher loves a knockout.

The Shins provide the fine print.

Previously: Music Videos From Magnetic Fields, Die Antwoord, the Darkness, Trinity, and Micaela, Augustina and Velodia Leon
Music Videos From Wilcom, Matthew Dear, Nicki Minaj, Kate Bush, and Mastadon

Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Style, and Performing Arts, February 13 - 17, 2012:

ART

— Ben Davis took a look at the raw, pulsing hate inspired by Damien Hirst's "Spot Painting" show at Gagosian, and asked whether it wasn't all a bit over-the-top. 

– The week saw an epic round of ups and downs at the contemporary auctions in London, with reports coming in from Bonhams, Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips de Pury and Company.

– "Retired" artist Maurizio Cattelan opened his new, miniature Family Business space in Chelsea. Kyle Chayka interviewed painter Marilyn Minter, who curated its first show, on the eve of its opening.

– Shane Ferro looked at president's new proposal for an election-year boost for the NEA, and said it was worth supporting — particularly if you were a "Red State Republican."

– Chloe Wyma handicapped 2012's great "show down" between the New Museum Triennial and the upcoming Whitney Biennial.

DESIGN & FASHION

– For Valentine's Day, Janelle Zara rounded up six sex toys that are actually also marvels of design (and in some cases, wanton excess).

– The new Bisazza center for design opened in Italy. We took a look at some of the highlights from its collection.

– For fashion week, artist Rachel Feinstein's crazy set were a towering presence at Marc Jacobs's runway show. Our own Ann Binlot also talked to Feinstein about the creative process behind creating the sculptural backdrop. 

– In the UK, Damien Hirst announced he was making a foray into architecture, planning a sprawling development of eco-friendly-homes.

– Check out the complete record of ARTINFO's coverage of New York Fashion Week on our dedicated "Fashion Week" page.

PERFORMING ART

– Nick Catucci recapped the Foo Fighters's embarrassing win as best rock artist at the Grammy.

– Brooklyn indy outfit Sleigh Bells is getting a lot of hype. Are they worth it?

– Nick Catucci postulated that the "flash mouring" over celebs like Whitney Houston was less about celebs themselves, and more about humans looking for a connection.

– Graham Fuller had a chat with Corey Stoll, aka Ernest Hemmingway from "Midnight in Paris."

– Plans are afoot for remakes of Hitchcock's "Rebecca" and "Suspicion." Is this a terrible idea?

VIDEO

– ARTINFO video editor Tom Chen previewed the New Museum's Triennial, with interviews with curator Eungie Joo and some of the fresh new faces in the show.

BONUS

– For Valentine's Day, Ben Davis reprised his role as love advice columnist, answering questions about online dating etiquitte for artists, and more.

Name: Mary Corse
Occupation: Artist
City/Neighborhood: Los Angeles-Topanga Canyon

What project are you working on now?

Painting. 

Your new show at Lehmann Maupin — your first at this gallery — includes five new paintings. How do your more recent paintings develop or build on your earlier work? 

Each painting leads to the next development, which had always been the case in my work.

You originally studied as a painter at the Chouinard Institute, now called CalArts. Why did you decide to abandon traditional painting for reflective materials like Plexiglas and microspheres?

For me painting has never been about the paint, but what the painting does. I didn’t want to make a picture of light; I wanted to put the actual light in the painting so I searched for materials that would do this. I wanted to make a painting that would depend on the viewer's perception, so I used this medium to create change in relation to the viewer's position. 

You and artists Doug Wheeler, Craig Kauffman, and Larry Bell are often associated with the “Light and Space” movement, which developed in Southern California the 1960s and explored the environment, sensory perception, and time through industrial materials. Were you a tight-knit group? What did you learn from each other?

At the time, I was not part of this group nor was I influenced by their work.

In addition to being an artist, you are also a student of quantum mechanics. How does physics influence your work?

I think the evolution of physics and the evolution of art parallel each other, each coming from opposite sides of the brain.

You’ve spoken before about your interest in Zen Buddhism. In a nutshell, what has the combination of Zen and physics taught you about the universe?

We live in an abstract perceptual multiverse.

How has the recent surge of interest in Californian art spurred by the Getty's postwar art history initiative, Pacific Standard Time, changed the way people see your work?

They see and experience my work today as they have in the past. The Getty’s exhibition has simply brought the work to more people’s attention.

What's the last show that you saw?

“Surface, Support, Process: The 1960s Monochrome” in the Guggenheim Collection, in which I have a "White Light" painting from 1970.

Do you make a living off your art?

Yes. 

What's the most indispensable item in your studio?

The light. 

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

Inside my being and in my own work.

Do you collect anything?

No, I leave that to the collectors.

What's the first artwork you ever sold?

I sold my first painting when I was 15 for $30. 

What's your art-world pet peeve?

Meaningless exhibitions. 

Do you have a gallery/museum-going routine?

I go to see specific exhibitions; no routine.

Know any good jokes?

Yes. 

What's the last great book you read?

“Physics and Philosophy” by Wolfgang Pauli. 

What work of art do you wish you owned?

A Cezanne mountain painting. 

What international art destination do you most want to visit?

Brancusi’s “Endless Column” in Romania. 

WHAT: Yayoi Kusama

WHEN: Through June 5, Sunday - Thursday 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m., Friday - Saturday 10:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m. 

WHERE: Tate Modern, Bankside, London

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: The Tate Modern’s galleries are exploding into an infinite expanse of illuminated dots and psychedelic worlds, thanks to Yayoi Kusama’s currently hanging major retrospective. The Japanese artist, who came to the United States in search of a more liberal environment to make art, found just that and more as she pushed forth into New York’s art scene with ambitious goals in the 1960s. Kusama’s show has been getting a great deal of worthy attention, and rightfully so as she is not only one of the most prolific artists living today, but may just have inspired some trends we’re noticing on the art markets (see Damien Hirst’s ubiquitous “Spot Paintings” for one unworthy successor). The exhibition includes a series of colorfully patterned paintings, like “Eyes of Mine” (2012), in which sets of red eyes stare intently at the viewer from a dizzyingly contrasting blue background. The neon purple environment that is “I’m Here but Nothing” (2000/2012) and the serenely mesmerizing “Infinity Mirrored Room — Filled with the Brilliance of Life” (2011) both allow museumgoers to immerse themselves in the artist's breathtaking visions brought to life. All in all, the show is an affirmation of one of the most enduring artists around, whose work has only gotten more interesting with time.

ARTINFO has compiled a virtual tour of the show for those not able to see it in person. Catch a glimpse of the Kusama’s trippy survey on view at the Tate in our slide show.

– "The Scream" Comes to Sotheby's: One of four versions of Edvard Munch's iconic painting — and the only one still in private hands — will be sold at Sotheby's May sale of Impressionist and modern works. As one of the most iconic images of all time, you can expect the ghoulish work to fetch a pretty penny: The 1895 pastel-and-board composition carries a value of at least $80 million, according to the auction house. [Bloomberg]

– Antonio Banderas IS Pablo Picasso: The Spanish actor has been cast as the Cubist in Carlos Saura's upcoming biopic "33 Dias," which chronicles the painter's emotional struggle while working on his anti-war masterpiece "Guernica." "He is a character that followed me for a long time, but I had always rejected it," said Banderas, who, like Picasso, is from the southern town of Malaga. "I was born four blocks away from here he was born. It has always fascinated me." [Just Jared, El Pais]

– Palin's Hometown Inflamed by Vagina Art: Residents of Sarah Palin's hometown are up in arms over an oblong public sculpture at the local high school that some claim resembles the female genitalia. The work, which was created in conjunction with the state's Percent For Art program, has now been covered with a tarp. [LAT]

– Senator Proposes Selling Art for Tuition: A Washington state senator has proposed selling off the state's art collection to raise funds for low-income students to attend college. The senator, Karen Keiser, has justified herself by claiming that many of the state art commission's 4,000 pieces are never seen by the public, and therefore should be viewed as "an asset to be used." [My Northwest]

– Folk Art Society Defends the "Oskars": Hollywood's Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — best known for giving out the annual Academy Awards — is demanding that Poland's Association of Folk Artists stop giving out its annual awards, called the "People's Oskar," because the name infringes on the Academy's "verbal trademark" of the word Oscar. [Boston Globe]

– Claes Oldenburg Returns to New York: An exhibition of the Pop sculptor's work from the 1960s, currently on view in Vienna, will travel to Cologne, Germany, and Bilbao, before coming back to the States to the Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. According to Oldenburg, his famous food sculptures are autobiographical: "If I ate BLT's, which I did, I would sooner or later want to create them," he said. [WSJ]

– How Do You Lose Art Longer Than a Pickup Truck?: That's the question that the New York Times asks as it chronicles the tale of incompetence that led the University of California, Berkeley to misplace and then mistakenly sell a 22-foot-long carved panel by celebrated African-American sculptor Sargent Johnson to the Huntington Library for $150 plus tax. [NYT]  

– Is There Frank Gehry Backlash?: The architect thinks so. He told the Guardian the disdain is not only directed at him, but also at "everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling." (He pointed to t-shirts that read "Fuck Frank Gehry" as evidence, though he bought some of those himself.) Artists like Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor, Gehry says, are now filling the void left by "bland" architects. [Guardian]  

– Fine Art Ticket to Ride: As part of an effort to bring art to unlikely places, the Aspen Art Museum has released ski-lift tickets that feature original art by painter Mark Grotjahn. The artist, who grew up skiing in California's Squaw Valley, said getting his art on 30,000 lift tickets "could be one of the pinnacles of my career." (No pun intended, we're sure.) [WSJ]  

– A New Generation of African-American Museums: Large museum projects dedicated to African-American history are in the works across the country, from Jackson to Atlanta to Charleston to Washington, D.C. "The folks who actually participated in the civil rights movement are getting to an age where legacy is important," said the director of Smithsonian's African American museum. [NYT]

– "AbFab" Star to Cut Fourth Plinth Ribbon: Elmgreen & Dragset's monumental statue of a boy on a rocking horse for the Fourth Plinth in London's Trafalgar Square will be unveiled Thursday by British actress Joanna Lumley, who played Patsy Stone on the BBC's booze-soaked sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous." She previously lent her voice to one of the joke-art team's sculpture-protagonists in their theater production "Drama Queens." [Artlyst]

– Marcel Duchamp Prize Shortlist Released: Bertrand Lamarche, Franck Scurti, Valérie Favre, and the duo Dewar & Gicquel are in the running for France's most prestigious art prize. The winner will be awarded during FIAC 2012. [Journal des Arts]

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Today, Eurozone authorities agreed on a rescue package to save the debt-wracked Greece from meltdown. Yet it may be too late to stop another sort of disaster touched off by the Mediterranean nation's economic and social crisis: the wave of art thefts targeting its storied cultural sites. On Friday, the second major museum theft to hit Greece in two months came to light, after two masked gunman stole dozens of ancient artifacts from the small Museum of Ancient Olympia, located in southern Greece at the birthplace of the Olympic Games. As a mark of how grave the situation has become, culture minister Pavlos Yeroulanos immediately offered his resignation. 

Such incidents could have a major impact on Greece, since site tourism is one of the major industries. Yesterday, the Culture Ministry and the Citizen Protection Ministry released a joint statement with images of the stolen Olympic artifacts. They include a gold ring that was used as a seal, a vase from Rhodes, 13 ceramic lanters, 11 bronze wheels, and more than 30 animal statuettes.

The latest string of art thefts is a consequence of the severe cutbacks in cultural spending and museum security layoffs, according to many reports. “There are no funds for new guard hirings,” Yiannis Mavrikopoulos, head of the site's guards’ union, told the AP. “Many have been forced to take early retirement ahead of the new program of layoffs. We face terrible shortages.”

Last month, artworks by Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian, as well as a 16th-century sketch, were stolen from Greece’s National Gallery in Athens. The estimated $6.5 million swindle took place on one of the city’s busiest streets and was the first in the museum's 112-year history, according to an in-depth article in the Los Angeles Times on the spike in Greek art crime. Art antiquities lefts are already up 30 percent from last year.

Both recent crimes reportedly occurred when only one security officer was on duty. In the case of the Olympic Museum, thieves tied up the guard, a 48-year-old woman, while they looted the museum. The National Gallery theft, during which thieves tripped the alarm multiple times at different times to confuse security, took place during a three-day guard strike. "I understand the need for cutbacks, but please,” Dimos Kouzilos, the head of a special police unit investigating art and antiquities smuggling, told the Los Angles Times earlier this month after the National Gallery theft. “My house is better padlocked and protected.”

As it stands, approximately 1,900 government workers protect more than 15,000 museums, monuments, and archeological sites in Greece, 1,350 of which are full-time staff members. (That’s about 11 full-time guards per museum.) The rest, according to the LAT, are either contract employees hired during tourist season or government workers placed in the job after being laid off from another government position. The result, some say, is a slew of inexperienced guards with little to no knowledge of antiquities.

After the National Gallery incident, the culture ministry and museum officials launched an administrative investigation to see whether the theft may have been an inside job. Rising unemployment and crime rates suggest that more thefts may be on the horizon, and that they will be organized not by seasoned criminals or double agents, but rather by poverty-stricken amateurs. Last year, for example, two thieves arrested for trying to sell a stolen golden sword linked to the dynasty of Alexander the Great weren’t lifetime crooks — they were bouncers who had been recently fired from a Greek nightclub. 

The following article appears in the February 2012 issue of Art+Auction.

Hailed for her chameleonic self-portraits in various guises, Cindy Sherman is considered an essential artist of her generation. “If you’re a collector focusing on 1980s or 1990s art, you have to have a Cindy Sherman. There’s no question about it,” says Scott Nussbaum, specialist in contemporary art at Sotheby’s New York. Since her debut Sherman has found favor with a broad audience by blending the political, the playful, and, on occasion, the profane. Demand for her work reached a new peak in May 2011, when one of her images became the most expensive photograph to sell at auction. A traveling retrospective opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art this week will further bolster Sherman’s position in the top tier of living artists.

In the past two years, works by Sherman have done exceptionally well at auction, even by the standards of her own market. In November 2010, a print from her “Fairy Tales” series, “Untitled #153,” 1985, in which she lies mud-smeared and seemingly expired in the grass — the only print in an edition of six not held by a major museum — met its ambitious $2 million to $3 million estimate with a winning bid of $2.7 million at Phillips de Pury in the Philippe Ségalot-orchestrated “Carte Blanche” sale. Six months later, “Untitled,” 1981, from the “Centerfolds” series, showing Sherman as a sweatered coed sprawled on the floor (est. $1.5-2 million), soared to $3,890,500 at Christie’s New York, a record for any photograph at auction at the time.

The seeds of Sherman’s success were sown in her early 20s. Born in 1954 in New Jersey and raised on Long Island, Sherman arrived on the downtown New York scene in the late 1970s, armed with a BA in fine arts from Buffalo State College at the State University of New York, where she’d started out in painting before switching to photography. Interested from a young age in the transformative power of wigs, makeup, and clothing, Sherman arrived at her modus operandi with a 1976 series of photographs called “Bus Riders,” for which she assumed various personae, from a sullen black teenage girl to a briefcase-toting businessman, and posed on a chair in her studio as if it were a bus-stop bench. The success of the images, which were printed in editions of 20 only in 2000, hinges on her acute powers of observation and nuanced performance rather than on any transformation of the photographic medium.

The same is true for the breakthrough 1977-80 series “Untitled Film Stills,” in which the artist portrays herself as an array of recognizable feminine types plucked from 1950s pop culture: the icy blonde, the coming-unhinged-housewife, the blasé vamp, the pouting naïf. Sherman’s subject is not her fictitious protagonists, however, but the viewers’ own preconceptions about her assumed identities, reflected back to them. To create the look of cheap publicity shots, Sherman dunked the prints in overheated developer, cracking and marring the emulsion.

The “Film Stills” became instant emblems of the postmodern moment, when artists like Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince were using photography to fracture the boundaries between high and low art. When Sherman’s works were exhibited, first at Artists Space in New York and later in solos at the Kitchen and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, they were acclaimed for their narrative ambiguity, for flipping photography’s promise of veracity on its head and suggesting meaning while deflecting interpretation. And although Sherman disavowed any overt feminist message, her early works were applauded for reintroducing the body at a time when many women artists were traveling along the opposite asymptote toward conceptualism and theory. She told British curator and critic Sandy Nairne in an interview, “I wanted to make something which people could relate to without having read a book about it first.”

In 1980 Sherman showed color photographs at Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring’s newly opened Metro Pictures gallery in New York to positive reviews, but, as Reiring notes, “it was her second show with us, of the ‘Centerfolds’ series from 1981, that seemed to change everything.” Images from this show, for which Sherman played on girlie mags’ clichéd poses to convey anxiety rather than availability, hit a nerve; prints were acquired by MoMA and the Boijmans Museum in Van Beuningen, Netherlands, and Sherman was invited to participate in both Documenta VII and the Venice Biennale the following year. She continues to be exclusively represented by Metro Pictures, though she sometimes has shown work with Sprüth Magers, in Cologne, London, and Berlin, and with Gagosian in Los Angeles and Rome; a show is being planned for his Paris space.

Through the 1980s and 1990s Sherman’s work grew in scale and took on a darker and more experimental tone, perhaps because she thought her early work had been “too quickly embraced,” says Erin O’Toole, assistant curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which will host MoMA’s show this fall. “She felt that it wasn’t quite understood or maybe that it was a little too easy. As a response, she introduced more abject subject matter, daring people to like it.” The “Fairy Tales” of 1985 swap magic and wonder for grotesqueries and horror, and the exploration of violence against the female body continues in “Disasters” (1986-89). Sherman donned fake noses and prosthetics for her “History Portraits” (1988-90), reenacting famous paintings, and moved further into using surrogate body parts for her “Masks” (1994-96) and “Broken Dolls” series (1999). More recently, in a 2008 series the artist wore make-up to suggest the effects of excessive cosmetic surgery among aging society women. The results exemplify the pull between satire and poignancy that characterizes her best work.

Largely spared the early-1990s art-market crash, Sherman’s works started appearing at auction in the middle of that decade. “The quantum leap for the pricing of her work at auction happened with the sale of ‘Untitled Film Still #48’ in May 1999,” says Andrew Massad, international director of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s New York. This 16-by-20-inch black-and-white gelatin silver print of the image popularly known as “the hitchhiker” was estimated to fetch between $60,000 and $80,000; it shot up to an artist-record $200,500. Less than 10 years later, in 2007, another print from the same edition was included in the house’s postwar and contemporary evening sale, tagged $800,000 to $1.2 million; it bested the high estimate with a final price of $1,217,000.

While Sherman’s works are steadily gaining in value, the precipitous rise in prices does not apply across the board. Collectors after the most famous images from each series can expect to pay a steep premium in the multiple millions, but lesser-known examples can be had for $100,000 or less. Among the “Film Stills,” which come in three sizes, Reiring points to number 48, the hitchhiker, along with number 21, the apprehensive career girl and number 13, the busty bookworm, as the most sought after, going for anywhere from $500,000 to $2 million, but others start at $70,000 and top out around $300,000. “The gap between the top price and the next tier can be quite large,” notes Nussbaum, of Sotheby’s. “That can be confusing to new collectors,” admits New York dealer Per Skarstedt, who has sold Sherman’s work on the secondary market for two decades. “What I tell them is that some pieces are icons of our time. And if you have an edition of 10, and 6 or 7 are in museums, the price is going to be higher.”

Starting with the “Fairy Tales,” Sherman began printing her color works in editions of six, with few exceptions. The earlier, rare-to-market “Centerfolds” — only 12 prints in editions of 10 were produced — remain the most expensive, with the “History Portraits” and the mid-2000s “Clowns” earning from the mid-six figures up to $3 million. Beyond these, however, there are several opportunities at lower price points. For example, an early “Bus Rider,” “Untitled #372,” from the 2000 printing, fetched  17,080 ($22,700) at Villa Grisebach in Berlin in November. Series previously dismissed as difficult, such as the “Sex Pictures” of 1992, featuring plastic genitalia and made at the height of the AIDS epidemic, have not fared well in the marketplace and occupy a lower price stratum.

Nussbaum points to high-concept fashion images, which Sherman has returned to periodically over her career, as undervalued. One of these, “Untitled #282,” 1993, featuring the artist as a Gaultier-clad Medusa figure, reached a mid-estimate $818,500 at Sotheby’s New York in November. Massad suggests a 1980 series of rear-screen projection images, printed in editions of five, in which Sherman’s Everywoman poses in front of filmic scenery, as a “vastly underrated” category. “Some examples have a wonderful sense of color and mise-en-scène,” he says, noting that their technique cribs from director Alfred Hitchcock — “a very important influence on the artist.”

Sherman’s most recent works — first shown at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev and the Metro Pictures booth at Art Basel in summer 2010, later at the 2011 Venice Biennale — return to the idea of figures disassociated from their backgrounds. With subtle digital manipulations to her face, she is pictured as various characters on a wallpaper-scale, Toile de Jouy-like surface that is custom-sized to fit the installation site. Several have sold, at prices ranging from $175,000 to $300,000 per wall, depending on the number of figures and size of the wall; they will have their American debut at MoMA.

The nearly unanimous opinion is that Sherman’s market success, far from diluting her vision, has allowed her to pursue it without fear of consequence. As Nussbaum says, “She’s not affected by the market and is unafraid to do things that are difficult or challenging.” Reiring adds, “Her prices have risen gradually over the years, and most important is the quality of work she has continued to do over a long career… she continues to evolve and not repeat herself.” In fact, the key to Sherman’s resilience may be the freedom her success affords her: a rich paradox, just like her images.

Can an artist save the world? Olafur Eliasson is the latest star to bet "yes." The Danish-Icelandic artist is best known for absorptive environmental installations like his "Weather Project" at the Tate Modern, an immense — and immensely popular — indoor sun. Now he's using his tech know-how and his mastery of all things luminous to brighten up the planet. His new company, LittleSun, unveiled earlier this month, aims to bring solar-powered solutions to underdeveloped regions of the world. His first design is a hand-sized, pinwheel-shaped yellow lamp. Not only can it hang anywhere, from the desk to the dinner table, but its wearable construct allows a user to recharge its batteries as he goes about his daily outdoor activities.

Next on the drafting table for LittleSun: a solar-powered battery, radio, phone charger, and a larger light. Through mass production, Eliasson will be able to distribute his arty eco-designs worldwide — making Damien Hirst’s English proposed village of eco-houses look like a drop in the proverbial formaldahyde tank.