It's looking like another year of big firsts for rising New York-based painter Angel Otero. His gallery, Lehmann Maupin — whose Lower East Side location hosted his solo debut last year — is consciously cultivating a global profile for the Puerto Rico-born artist, placing him in a series of major shows all over the world throughout 2012. He's preparing a pair of museum exhibitions, a show in India, and last week, through a partnership between Lehmann Maupin and the arts organization ISTANBUL'74, Otero opened his first exhibition in Turkey, featuring a new series of his distinctive paintings. "There are six works in the show," he told ARTINFO via email, "and for this body of work I used Poussin as a reference to historical painting, using him as a starting point for a dialogue between the traditional and the unconventional."

Otero's painting process is anything but conventional, but also has broad appeal. He begins by applying layers of oil paints on glass in reverse order; once the paint is half-dry he scrapes it off the glass and applies the richly textured oil skin surface to a canvas. The resulting compositions reveal surprising bursts of color and produce unexpected wrinkles in Otero's imagery. "I can control about 50 percent of the end result," he says. "But those limitations and the uncertainty are what spark the dialogue that I aim for."

Asked how his works — which are so engaged with the history of Western painting — might translate in a Turkish context, Otero isn't worried. "Turkey is very rich in history and culture," he writes. "I think that viewers here will receive the work in a more historical sense, rather than thinking about process, which is what many Westerners focus on."

For now, Otero's focus is on a full schedule of upcoming exhibitions that will keep him busy in his Queens studio until the end of the year. "I am finishing up works for my first show in India, which was arranged through Lehmann Maupin," he explains. "The show will be at a new gallery called Galeri Isa in Mumbai. After that I will focus on preparing for two museum shows, one in June and the other in October." He wouldn't say where those exhibitions will be held, but if the momentum his young career has gathered is any indication, we'll all know soon enough.

In his much-acclaimed first film "Maria Full of Grace," director Joshua Marston told the story of a young pregnant Colombian woman who becomes a drug mule to help her impoverished family. Now, with "The Forgiveness of Blood," he shows how a blood feud threatens to tear apart an Albanian family. As the young males are forced to stay at home in fear of retribution after their father participates in a killing, the teenaged son rebels at his confinement, while his sister takes on new bread-winning responsibilities. The film opened in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, and will also be available on IFC Films's video-on-demand channel. ARTINFO France spoke with Marston about the tragic reality of blood feuds, working with young, non-professional actors, and what's wrong with the Academy's definition of what makes a foreign language film.

I know that you did research in Albania for the film. How much of the story was already developed before your trip?

I knew the skeletal outline of what the story would be. I knew the premise, and I knew that I wanted the main characters to be teenagers. I did not know the details of what would instigate the murder that would start the feud — I did not know, for example, what the family business would be — and I didn't know all the details of how things would work out over the course of the movie. But I knew that it was about this teenaged boy who was stuck inside the house and that he had a girlfriend that he was trying to sneak out to go see.

The blood feud that the film focuses on is something that feels very foreign and antiquated — the kind of thing you'd expect to read about in Norse sagas or ancient Greek literature, but not see coexisting with Facebook and cell phones. What is the attitude of people in Albania toward this phenomenon?

It is sort of a tragic reality of life; it doesn't influence everyone in Albania but everyone knows of feuds or maybe knows some friend or some family member who was in some way affected by it. And I think it's something that most people are hoping that the country is moving beyond at this point, but it's hard to be sure that Albania is putting it in its past. Partly because it's something that has existed for hundreds of years, and also more recently, for the last 45 years under Communism, the dictatorship declared firmly that they had abolished feuds and gotten beyond them and then after Communism fell, they sprang back up again. So it's fairly deeply ingrained — if not the feuds themselves, the importance of honor in Albanian culture and society is fairly deeply ingrained. But the feuds themselves are viewed as unfortunate and tragic. And yet if you tell someone that someone just killed your mother or your brother, there might be an impulse to at least have a sense that something is owed to you. Whether someone would take a gun and actually take revenge, fewer and fewer people are likely to resort to that. As the political structures get firmer in post-Communist Albanian society, people are increasingly confident in the police to investigate murders and in the state to appropriately prosecute them.

The two main characters in the film, the teenaged brother and sister, were played by non-professional actors. What were you searching for in working with ordinary people instead of trained actors?

A realism to their performances. An authenticity and a naturalness that I think sometimes comes more fluidly with people who haven't necessarily been trained in a style of acting that might be huge or theatrical or melodramatic. There was also the simple reality that there simply aren't professional teenaged actors in Albania, they don't exist, and so we didn't have much of a choice.

The brother and sister are forced to grow up a lot and take charge, and this causes a lot of tension in the family. Despite the foreign customs, there seems to also be something universal in this film, in the sense that it's a coming of age story.

Absolutely. With all my filmmaking, what I'm doing — in films like this or "Maria Full of Grace," when we're going to some foreign place and discovering a new world — is telling a story that is, on the one hand, specific and fascinating for all of how different it is from our own world, but at the same time embed in that story some deeper thematic that is more universal so that audiences in the United States or anywhere in the world can relate to the story. In this case, it's a coming of age story – it's also a story about retribution and justice, and it's also a story about a family that's trying to hold together.

I understand that the film was selected to represent Albania in the foreign language category at the Oscars, but due to Academy Awards regulations about the number of Albanian nationals working on it, it was disqualified. This seems strange since the movie is filmed entirely in Albanian.

Well, it would be too long of a name to say "the foreign language and foreign cast and crew and foreign location" Academy Award, so it's called the foreign language Academy Award, but the language that the film is shot in is not the only rule that submissions must adhere to. So the Academy wants to make sure that the film is indigenous to the country from where it's being submitted. And they do that by looking at the nationality of passports of certain key crew as well as the key cast and also the director and the producer and the writer.

And are there hard and fast rules about this?

There are rules — they're not hard and fast. And I think that's part of the difficulty. The rule is that there are three categories and in each of the categories you have to have a majority of nationals from the country. The first category is the cast, the second category is the top six crew members, and the third category is writer, director, and producer. But there are two problems. One is that that rule isn't necessarily applied equally. So for example there was Kaurismäki's film that was submitted from Finland, but it has a French cast, and I don't know about the crew, but I think it probably has a number of French crew as well.

But the other problem that I think is the real problem is the existence of the rules at all. Because it's just impossible and wishful thinking that there could ever be one set of rules that the Academy could impose that would fit all the different countries who are submitting films. Specifically, the rule that the majority of the six key crew members need to be from the country of origin will never fit Albania — at least not currently, not for the foreseeable future. None of the submissions up until now since the end of Communism would have been eligible and the submission that replaced mine wouldn't have been eligible because there are simply not cinematographers and production designers and so on and so forth in Albania. All Albanian movies, whether they're Albanian directors or American directors, rely on crew members from outside of Albania. So it's the fact that the Academy imposes this definition and this rule that they think works across the board that I think is the problem. 

An Abstract Expressionist artist most remembered for his questionable dealings with the Mark Rothko estate is now, ironically, at the center of a bitter dispute surrounding his own legacy. A good friend of Rothko, Theodoros Stamos was one of three people named as executors of the painter’s estate when he committed suicide in 1970. He and his cohorts were found guilty of negligence and conflict of interest after selling a number of paintings to Marlborough Gallery at an unusually high discount. Forty years later, his own estate is in locked in a trans-Atlantic legal back-and-forth. 

Stamos's sister and several of his former dealers and friends are tangled up in litigation in both Greek and the U.S. courts, duking it out with collector Zacharias Georgiou Portalakis over ownership of the late artist’s copyrights and the authenticity of a number of his artworks. The complicated dispute, which has lasted over three years in Greece and recently expanded to the United States, illustrates just how messy it is to sort out an artist’s legacy when no rules or executors are set in stone before his death.

“When an artist dies, there is a dealer or there is an estate which has X amount of paintings. They do shows and establish museums like the one for Clyfford Still. When Stamos died, there was nothing,” said Louis Meisel, an art dealer in New York who temporarily represented Stamos and owns a number of his paintings. The legal messiness began way back in 1995, when an ill Stamos wrote a letter granting Portalakis, his friend and collector, the right to all his copyrights. The letter also identified him as the sole authenticator of his paintings, people familiar with the case said. "Many people in the art world believe an artist can appoint somoene as his legal authenticator. Not so," said lawyer Alan Sugarman, who is representing the plaintiffs. Stamos contradicted the letter in a will finalized before his death in 1997, granting authority over his estate to his sister Georgianna Savas and a cousin in Greece, though he said nothing of authentication.

Since then, Portalakis has obtained an order of seizure from a Greek court for two Stamos works estimated at approximately $30,000 each that were to be sold at a Greek auction house because he said they were fake, and used the letter to illustrate his authority. “Here in New York, the case would have been tossed out of court in 60 days,” said Sugarman. Back in the United States, Savas, Stamos’s sister, recently filed a $15 million claim against Portalakis in federal court to compel him to return a number of Stamos canvases, according to Courthouse News. People familiar with the case said Portalakis acquired a number of Stamos works from the family after promising to build a museum for them, but the museum was never built. 

The jury of the Pritzker Prize, the architecture world’s equivalent to the Nobel, has just announced the winner of the 2012 honor: Chinese architect Wang Shu, age 48 (a mere youngster by industry standards).

Following I.M. Pei’s 1983 award, Wang is the second Chinese architect to join the ranks of Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, and Rem Koolhaas in receiving architecture’s highest prize, which comes with $100,000 and a bronze medal. Wang is, however, the first winner to have worked his entire career in China. Born in 1963 in the western city of Urumqi, he earned his architecture degrees at the Nanjing Institute of Technology and co-founded the Hangzhou-based Amateur Architecture Studio with wife Lu Wenyu in 1997.

Wang’s work, which frequently makes nods to China’s history through the unusual use of salvaged materials, includes the 2008 Ningbo History Museum, a behemoth composed of more than one million pieces of salvaged stone, brick, and tile. He also covered the roofs of the China Academy of Art’s Xingshan Campus with more than two million tiles from demolished traditional houses.

Wang will receive his award at the official Pritzker ceremony in Beijing on May 25, marking the event's first occasion in China. "The fact that an architect from China has been selected by the jury represents a significant step in acknowledging the role that China will play in the development of architectural ideals," Thomas Pritzker said in a statement. "In addition, over the coming decades, China's success at urbanization will be important to China and to the world."

To view highlights of Wang Shu's career, click the slide show.

The much-loved Brucennial is returning for 2012, this time downtown at 159 Bleecker Street. A sort-of-every-two-years showing of not-quite-eminent works of art, this downtown alternative exhibition is set once again to coincide with the Whitney Biennial, throwing open its doors at 6pm on February 29. Coordinated by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the well-known art collective which focuses on a genial form of institutional critique, the Brucennial has managed to attract quite an audience for its lovably DIY spirit.

In 2010, when the Bruces were featured as part of the Whitney Biennial itself, their concurrent Brucennial attracted hordes of scenesters, with crowds packing the facility at 350 West Broadway (provided to the artists courtesy of art collector Aby Rosen) to capacity and lining up in the snow to get in. That edition featured a crazy quilt of artists, from a swath of near-unknowns who happened to be friends with the organizers to the likes of David Salle, George Condo, and Julian Schnabel.

We see something similar in the provisional list of the 2012 participants glimpsed by ARTINFO. Between the names of a variety of under-employed artists and gallery interns, there are figures like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and even Jean-Michel Basquiat. There’s even supposed participation by one Damien Hirst — though the curators haven’t denied that this might be a wisecrack about the British artist’s hyper-exposure (see below). 

In addition, the Bruces are advertising a musical to accompany this year’s show, titled “Animal Farm,” which appears to be a kind of satirical reflection on their own experimental free art school: "In 2012, The Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU) is in crisis. Faced with overwhelming debts, the Chicken Trustees of the school may be forced to compromise its 150 year legacy and do the unthinkable: charge tuition. Luckily, the graduating Piggy Artists of the class of 2012 have something else in mind." 

It's essentially an elaborate word of mouth process. When we first started putting the show on, we asked our friends. And then they asked their friends. And now six years later, we have a lot of friends.

We started planning it a couple of months ago. The installation itself happens in just a couple days thanks to the effort of the army of artists in the show.

Is there anything different about this edition than the last time around? Does the fact that this time the Bruces aren't in the concurrent Biennial change anything?

We started doing this show before we were in the Biennial, so we saw no reason to stop now. There isn't anything significantly different about the format this time around. Except there is more. More artists. More work. And it seems like participants have really stepped up their efforts thanks to the attention the 2010 edition received.

And then there's "Animal Farm." Right in the middle of the space we're putting on a musical. It's a fable about arts education, about BHQFU, the free art school we're re-opening this fall, and Cooper Union, the free art school that is currently considering charging tuition.

As an alternative biennial yourself, do you have any take on the Occupy Wall Street agitation around the Biennial this time?

Oh wow, that was fake? That's brilliant.

What's the logic behind the mixture of famous names and all the rest in the show?

Artists are artists. The young ones, the old ones, live ones and dead ones. And we're invested in forging a community among all of them.

Damien Hirst? Really?

Sure enough. If anyone is attempting the round the world trip to see all the spot shows, there's another location to add to the list.

Dora Maar. Kiki de Montparnasse. Edie Sedgwick. These women were muses to some of history's most brilliant minds. They're so great, in fact, they’ve been immortalized as kitsch kitchenware by Jonathan Adler. The houseware purveyor who brought us the “happy chic” aesthetic has captured their likeness (sometimes their faces, sometimes their nether regions) as bas reliefs on his Muse collection of delightful ceramics. For the spring/summer line, the latest additions to the collection feature that familiar Dalí mustache and Gala’s luscious lips. It’s a little biomorphic, high gloss, white porcelain tea set family complete with pot, creamer, and mug that invites you to “sip the surreal.” 

The Whitney Biennial always draws fire from critics, but this year we're witnessing what seems like an unprecedented amount of actual anti-biennial action. Yesterday alone saw two broadsides against the event, including a fake press release satirizing the event's corporate sponsorship and a demand from the Arts and Labor group to make the 2012 Biennial the last. Today, ARTINFO's Julia Halperin broke news that Sotheby's locked-out art handlers will be using the occasion to try the auction house in the court of public opinion, protesting because of Sotheby's sponsorship of the biennial.

Still, this is hardly the first time that artists have protested the Biennial — in fact, it is one of the most frequently protested exhibitions in modern art history, second only perhaps to the salons of late-19th century Paris for its capacity to stir up anger towards art-world power structures. And of course, this makes sense: Since it claims to sum up the American art scene, what happens at the biennial really matters. Here, then, is a brief and partial history of anti-Biennial activism:

— Guerrilla Girls, 1987: Perhaps the most serious example of using the biennial to put art-world inequity on trial involved the anonymous, gorilla-masked feminist artist-protesters known as the Guerrilla Girls, who gained national media attention with their exhibition "Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney," held at the Clocktower in the spring of 1987. As part of the exhibition they released their "Banana Report," which documented the glaring under-representation of female and minority artists in Biennials between 1973 and 1987.

— Miltos Manetas, 2002: Just in time for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Greek-born Web artist Miltos Manetas took over the official-sounding URL WhitneyBiennial.com and created an incomprehensible Flash animation page, what he called a "parasite" exhibition dedicated to Internet works. He advertised it in advance by saying he was going to disrupt the actual opening by having two-dozen U-Haul trucks circle the block projecting Flash animation pieces by 200 excluded digital artists — an emoty boast that proved to be little more than a publicity stunt for the satirical Web site, which still exists. (In a strange case of life-imitating-art, Manetas's online exhibition format seems to have informed the design of the Whitney's recently rebooted net art venture Artport.)

— Anti-Smoking Prank, 2006: At the time of the 2006 Biennial — the Chrissie Isles and Philippe Vergne-curated "Day For Night" (one of the few such events to have a title) — crafty pranksters took over the Web site WhitneyBiennial.org, erecting something that looked fairly credible — until you clicked on it. Then you got a message that said "Please learn about the Whitney Biennial's lead sponsor..." A further click took you to the logo of Altria, the tobacco company (once known as Phillip Morris) that was then the Whitney's chief corporate partner. A further click took you to a page by something called Altria Means Tobacco, an anti-smoking outfit. (The original fake site is no longer up, but can still be glimpsed via the Internet archive the Wayback Machine.)

— Brucennial 2006-2010: The art collective known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation was invited to the big dance in 2010. But that didn't stop them from going ahead with their alternative version of the event, the so-called Brucennial. In truth, much like their alternative free art school, their anti-Biennial was less an attack on the art world as it was an attempt to clone it and add some more fun and slightly egalitarian modifications. Alongside the many, many little-known and younger artists included in the 2010 Brucennial — selected by word of mouth — were vetted art stars like David Salle, George Condo, and Julian Schnabel, adding clout and also drawing crowds. 

Without the influence of Pablo Picasso, there would be no Francis Bacon, no Henry Moore, no David Hockney. The great Spanish modernist's influence can be felt in the work of all those who made the avant garde in Britain — and yet the country was relatively late in making sense of Picasso's radicalism. The exciting "Picasso and Modern British Art" show currently at Tate Britain gives the quintissential modernist his due in grand style, assaying his protean influence.  

Before the First World War, only a small group of aficionados in the famous Bloomsbury Group collected Picasso's early experiments. Critic Roger Fry's two post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 did a little to help, and so did Picasso's stay with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russe in the summer of 1919. Between the 1920s and 1950s, "Señor Picasso" was shown regularly in galleries and museums — his "Guernica" toured the UK — but he failed to impress the British public. But it was only in 1960, and a major Tate retrospective, that the Spaniard got his due.

Assistant curator Helen Little took a moment to talk with ARTINFO UK about five key works in "Picasso and Modern British Art." 

For images from the exhibition accompanied by quotes from Tate's Helen Little, click on the slide show.

A version of this article originally appeared on ARTINFO UK.

In the 1960s, fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, his model and muse Peggy Moffitt, and her husband, photographer William Claxton worked as a symbiotic trio — Gernreich dressing Moffitt in his then-futuristic ensembles and Claxton photographing Moffitt in the looks. The threesome fluttered about the Los Angeles art scene, defining the look of the period. Gernreich “invented the modern way of dressing for the latter half of the 20th century just as Chanel had done for the earlier part of the century,” writes Moffitt, according to a press release.  

A new exhibition at Los Angeles’s MOCA Pacific Design Center, “The Total Look: The Creative Collaboration Between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt, and William Claxton,” on view through May 20, traces the relationship between the three figures and their work together. The show includes Gernreich pieces from Moffitt’s collection, along with photographs and films by Claxton.

The Los Angeles-based fashion designer pushed boundaries again and again during the 1960s, first with the monokini, a breast-baring swimsuit, and then with his unisex designs. “Gernreich was the first fashion designer since Christian Dior to become a household name,” writes Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in her 2011 book “Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene in the 1960s” (Henry Holt).   

Gernreich graced the cover of Time magazine’s December 1, 1967 issue, the headline proclaiming: “The miniskirt is here to stay (till spring, anyway).” But his influence was not limited to the fashion industry. A strong figure in the booming Los Angeles 1960s art world, he stood among some 45 seminal cultural figures like Ed Ruscha, Frank Gehry, Judy Chicago, and Claes Oldenburg in a 1968 portrait to promote an exhibition of Los Angeles artworks in Sacramento’s capitol building. 


Gernreich slowly faded out of America’s cultural zeitgeist after his death in 1985. Perhaps his vision was too futuristic for the United States, as other American designers like Diane von Furstenberg entered the spotlight, producing more commercial clothing.

According to MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who considers Gernreich a pioneer, the exhibit is about more than just the clothes. “It’s not to show a fashion exhibition,” he told ARTINFO in October. “It’s to show how art has expanded into fashion and fashion expands into art, and to also show some of the history with that with Gernreich.”

Click on the photo gallery to see images from “The Total Look: The Creative Collaboration Between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt, and William Claxton,” on view at MOCA Pacific Design Center through May 20, 2012.

NEW YORK — James Ramsey, a former NASA engineer and current principal of New York-based Ramsey Architecture and Design, came up with an interesting concept three years ago when the economic downturn's crunch on the architectural community afforded him a surplus of free time: to take an underground trolley station on the Lower East Side that’s remained derelict since 1948 and transform it into something unheard of — an underground park full of real live plants, pathways, and most surprisingly of all, sunlight, brought below grade using fiber-optic technology.

While it’s a far cry from Ramsey's bread and butter, high-end residential spaces, it falls into the same vein as his approach to his practice: a reverence for history that still incorporates futuristic elements (high tech gadgets made of raw materials, like a walnut soundsystem, for example). After presenting the idea in September in conjunction with Dan Barasch of innovative social network PopTech and money manager R. Boykin Curry IV, the media caught wind, and deemed the project, originally called the Delancey Underground, the Low Line, in reference to the elevated High Line park on the west side. Five days after the group launched its Kickstarter site, it's already more than halfway towards its $100,000 goal, indicating the level of excitement surrounding the project. That money will enable Ramsey and company to put together an official proposal for the park.

Between relocating offices from the corner of Chrystie and Delancey streets (on the East Side) to a new office in the West Village, Ramsey talked to ARTINFO about those frequent, unfavorable comparisons of East to West, High Line to Low Line; the potential transformative properties a park underneath the ground could possibly have; and what else is hiding beneath our feet. 

East and West have been historic rivals, especially in New York City — East River Park’s major renovations over the past couple of years had people saying it's trying to attain the glory of its Hudson counterpart. How do you feel about people calling this project the Low Line, which is such an obvious comparison to the High Line? Does it bother you?

Not really. I think that the Lower East Side in particular has been historically and systematically ignored by the powers that be, and because of that it has very little nice public space. The High Line comparison is inevitable. A private partnership took a piece of remnant infrastructure and turned it into a public space, so it’s a spiritual predecessor to what we’re proposing. 

Are there a lot of these abandoned pockets under the city? It sounds like the stuff of urban legends.

Tons, from what an old MTA engineer told me. There a whole bunch of them that haven’t even been catalogued yet. To my knowledge, there are 13 acres of underground infrastructure space just in Manhattan. It highlights something really cool about New York City, which is that as forward-looking as we are, New York City is a city on top of a city on top of a city.  That’s an amazing thing, the fact that these unused spaces are really kind of peppering the New York City landscape. 

Can you describe for us lay folks the technology that goes into bringing sunlight into a subterranean park?

It’s three compononents: first of all, you gather sunlight with a system of optics, and you concentrate that light through pipes, or fiber optics, and then you deliver them at the final location. What we’re proposing is that the method of delivery is the inverse of how we gathered it, like a reflection, and so it’s a simulation of the sky. 

How does a website like Kickstarter help launch a project like this? 

I think there are a couple things going on here. At 4 days in yesterday, we were almost halfway done funding the entire thing, which is kind of crazy to me and kind of encouraging. It shows how much people are loving this idea. The money-raising aspect is only half of it. The other half is people having a sense of ownership and engagement. Kickstarter is allowing us to start a grassroots movement. This is a drop in the bucket, of course. This is all our primary work that lets us get to the point where we can actually start raising money for the actual construction of this thing. What we’re trying to do is a couple things. We want to build a scale version of this technology and concept of the park itself, almost like an art installation. That's going go happen in September at Essex Street Market. We need to do all the homework, like legal analysis, and structural engineering, and real estate analysis, et cetera, and use those to, firstly, put together a price tag on the overall thing, secondly, specify a business model, and finally, do so in such a way that’s convincing to the MTA itself because they own it.

The whole obsession with the High Line that everyone continues to harp on was its transformative effect on Manhattan's west side. Do you think the same thing is expected for this project, and even possible for a park that's going to sit below the ground?

I think there are a couple things to look at. This is the central nerve of the neighboord that’s been historically overlooked, one that doesn’t have much, if any, public space. This seems to me just a next generation way of filling that void and making an amenity the local community can actually use. Second of all, change is already certainly coming to that neighborhood. There's SPURA, a million-and-a-half-square-foot development, about to start immediately adjacent to the site. If one thing is for sure it’s that things always change. I think that’s some sort of Buddhist saying, right? Or maybe the 12 step program, I don’t remember. Change is coming, and the question to me seems more like, can we seize on the opportunity and control what the change is going to be? That it's suited to the community there rather than not playing a role in it? What we’re proposing is a landmark for one of the richest but most neglected cultural neighborhoods in America. 

Tell us a little bit about how you envision the space, and what exactly you plan on putting down there. 

The space itself was built in 1903, and it's so compelling just from an archaeological or historical standpoint. It would make me very happy to preserve as many inherent qualities of the space as possible and really make those shine. At the same time, the intervention we’re proposing is this liquid metal ceiling and greenery snaking through the space. It's very much my intention for there to be paths and trees down there as a year-round park. And I know it’s a little perverse. The repercusions and ramifications aren't clear because no one's ever done this before. I hope its not just cool as a phenomenon, but also to someone who lives nearby and can sit under a tree on a cold day in November. What actually is going to go into the space is very much in the air. That’s going to be deteremind by a bunch of factors, including the barebones economics of making this thing sustainable. We'd like it to be driven by the input fo the community itself, just sort of figuring out what the adjacent communities would really like.

After years of various art-world jobs, including gallery work and, more recently, art advising (there was also a short stint as a lawyer in there somewhere), Joe Sheftel would rather challenge collectors than please them. After a month-long group show that served as a "soft opening," Sheftel is officially inagurating his own eponymous Lower East Side space this weekend, on March 4. 

"As an advisor, I understand how clients want to be interacted with," the newly-minted Orchard Street gallery owner told me. But, he says, "trying to please collectors is the wrong way to do it. I think people looking at art are often very intellectual and enjoy being challenged."

Struggle is not a theme that's new to the Lower East Side, in historical or contemporary terms. Gallery owners have to cope with tiny spaces, rotting floors, and rusty pipes. But the challenging nature of the neighborhood also creates a community distinctly different from the more high-profile Chelsea area, Sheftel says, which is what makes it attractive. He is on friendly terms with his neighbors, and he claims there is little competition.

Rather, the Orchard Street gallerists — including Rachel Uffner, Lisa Cooley, Candice Madey (of On Stellar Rays), Joel Mesler, and Carol Cohen (both of untitled) — are in it together, for better or worse. "I think they understand that the better the galleries in the neighborhood are, the more people will come here."

He has a point. I dare you to go to the area and visit just one gallery. In that way, community atmosphere serves a commercial purpose.

In the new show, a solo exhibition of Philadelphia-based artist Alex da Corte's work, Sheftel takes advantage of the intimacy of the new space. Many of the works on display are da Corte's small, square shampoo paintings, which are just as they sound — oozing pastels made of dried hair product that gently wash over the glass they are painted on. 

Like many of the dealers on the Lower East Side, Sheftel describes his space in terms of the ways it differs from the typical white cube gallery in Chelsea. "These storefront, smaller-scale spaces dictate a different type of art," he told me over espresso in his second-floor office, where the rugged walls are without whitewash, showing a century of wear and tear. "That's why collectors like it down here."

And just who does the former art advisor expect to be coming through his doors to buy? Lower East Side collectors, according to Sheftel, are a subset of the same collectors that buy in Chelsea — the most curious ones. "The people I see down there are people who are more involved and a little more adventurous. They are the people who are willing to go somewhere to see something worthwhile."

Two artists and one period dominated Milan Fashion Week fall 2012: the Baroque era, 18th-century English portraitist Thomas Gainsborough, and fashion photographer Helmut Newton, making several runways — Bottega Veneta, Dolce & Gabbana, Emporio Armani — laden with historical references. ARTINFO picks a selection of the art-inspired designs of Milan Fashion Week.

Click on the slide show to see the art-inspired designs of Milan Fashion Week fall/winter 2012.

In the thick foliage of popular and scientific literature on Leonardo da Vinci, Oxford University professor Martin Kemp stands out for several reasons. He is a trained scientist who came to art history later in life, and therefore has a passion for, and understanding of, Leonardo as a scientist that is distinct from the many art historians without that sort of training who approach his work. Kemp also finely balances rigorous scholarship with elegant, approachable writing. His books make the reader feel smart, and that is a great gift. Malcolm Gladwell is perhaps the most popular example of an author whose goal is to introduce complicated ideas to a broad readership in a way that makes those ideas accessible to all, and in doing so empowers the reader intellectually. In the world of Leonardo, readers can pick up a book by Kemp and be 100 percent assured of his scholarship, while also being 100 percent assured that he will help them “get it,” that all will be clearly written and explained. That is a powerful promise that few expert scholars offer, and fewer still fulfill.

Dr. Kemp has been covered extensively in this column: A pair of interviews, a review of his latest book Christ to Coke, and more. Today’s column takes a quick look at a re-issued, updated version of Kemp’s acclaimed biography of Leonardo da Vinci, published by Oxford University Press. It was originally released in 2004, but the newer edition benefits from several additions. There have been two new Leonardos discovered since 2004: "Salvator Mundi" and "La Bella Principessa," the former authenticated fairly universally, the latter a matter of debate, but Kemp has made a very convincing case that it is Leonardo’s work. He has located a book that the work on vellum seems to have come from, a portrait of the subject (Bianca Sforza, who died after one year of marriage — the book was a gift to her bereaved husband), and a document in which Leonardo seeks advice of the technique used in "La Bella Principessa" from a fellow artist. It is rare for that much evidence to rise from the archival silt for any Old Master work, and it is most persuasive.

Kemp also looks back on a career of working on Leonardo in a beautifully-written introduction, penned while staying at the beautiful hotel in Chianti, Villa Vignamaggio, which was once owned by the family who commissioned "Mona Lisa," the Gherardini (I’ve visited it myself and it is heavenly — it can also be seen as the setting for Kenneth Branagh’s wonderful film, Much Ado About Nothing). Dr. Kemp is working on a memoir of his life studying Leonardo and in this book we get a small preview of what promises to be a fascinating work. 

Kemp writes evenly and convincingly because he has nothing to prove — a decorated Oxford professor who writes regularly for major art historical publications as well as the be-all and end-all of scientific publications, Nature, and whose books have been widely praised by critics. He does not get stroppy with the endless conspiracy theories about Leonardo, from The Da Vinci Code to bizarre ideas about hidden codes carved into Mona Lisa’s eyes. He does not need to be reactionary the way many academics are when confronted with something they find either silly and misleading or contrary to their own theories. This makes Leonardo easier to read for non-specialists, and it is specifically meant as an introduction for thoughtful lay readers. Its length, too, is welcoming. It is a thin volume with large font and double-spacing — it looks to be about 40,000 words long, and could be read comfortably in about two days.

Leonardo sets out a biography of its subject without relying on the more boring chronological method (of which this author is occasionally guilty), but rather weaves the artist’s life around themes. We are granted a picture of Leonardo stripped of over-hype and conspiracy. What is left is a truly distinctive, brilliant man who was in constant demand and therefore finished few projects, not someone whose own hyper-active mind drew him away from completing what he began. He was obsessed with vision, what he called the most powerful and honest sense (though contemporary police would disagree, calling “eyewitness” accounts the least reliable and most open to subjective interpretation). Painting was a chance to create something wonderful that could be seen immediately, and therefore was more powerful and accurate than text, which had to be read and could only obliquely describe what a painting could show in an instant. We are reminded that Leonardo was probably also a sculptor, and a possible autographed work by him in terracotta is indeed extant. He was in demand as a hydraulic and military engineer (the latter termed “master of water,” which is a lovely title), and was so valued as a consultant and mind that his eccentricities were tolerated.

We are also presented with a warm and inviting personal portrait of Leonardo, something very rare in texts on him, which are usually focused on his product or on scandalous, unsubstantiated theories. We see Leonardo as a rare Renaissance man among many “Renaissance men” who excelled at a wide variety of arts and sciences — this was not so unusual during his era, but his level and breadth of genius were. Only Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Bernini might compete for the breadth of activities and the full-step-forward that their ingenuity presented for art. Dürer is another point of comparison, but was involved only in painting and print-making. Michelangelo was employed as an architect, but not as an engineer. Raphael died too soon to have had the impact of his renowned contemporary High Renaissance greats. One is left hoping that Kemp or someone of a similar stature might embark on some comparative biographies: of Brunelleschi and Leonardo, of Michelangelo and Leonardo, of Dürer and Leonardo.

In short, this slim volume offers a quick, scholarly, and yet thorough biography of Leonardo and discussion of his works, including the newly-discovered pieces that have been so much in the news of late. As The New Yorker wrote of the 2004 edition, this book presents “Leonardo seen from the inside out.” If only more art history books were as intimate, calm, well-written, and thorough while remaining accessible to non-specialists.

Noah Charney is a best-selling author and professor of art history. His regular column for ArtInfo is The Secret History of Art. His latest book is The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting.

WHAT: Os Gemeos’s “Miss You”

WHEN: February 25-March 24, Tuesday-Saturday, 11:00 a.m-6:00 p.m.



WHERE: Prism Gallery, 8746 West Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, California



WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: A gargantuan, grinning, yellow face has appeared atop the roof of Prism Gallery on West Sunset Boulevard, as if the giant is watching over the street. The Brazilian twins who are Os Gemeos (Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo) return after four years with a major exhibition at the L.A. street punk-friendly gallery. The space is just coming off a major success with its retrospective of the arty band of Ann Arbor miscreants Destroy All Monsters, featuring the work of the late Mike Kelley. Os Gemeos fills the void with new dream-like paintings, glowing sculptures growing like dewdrop shaped stalagmites from the painted floor, and a fully immersive installation that allows viewers to try on one of their yellow-beings' heads for size.

Their work is part of a larger mission to build alternate worlds ­– tinged in yellow and populated by equally aurulent people – on the sides of abandoned buildings. The 2005 exhibition at the now defunct but not forgotten Deitch Projects won them praise and caught the attention of the international art community. They were also participants in the recent blockbuster show for L.A.’s MOCA, “The Art in the Street.” The duo works exclusively as a unit – verifying the notion that a special bond exists between twins – and their inspiration comes from shared dreams. Reflecting appropriately the vibrant colors of Brazil’s favelas, their surreal plays on perspective and cultural influences – from indigenous styles to graffiti hues – will travel from Prism to the ICA Boston this summer.

“Miss You” embodies their “interest in life’s natural magic, its dreams, sentiments, surrealism, realizations, relationships, love, hate and ultimately underlines their intrinsic curiosity to question everything around them,” says Prism in the release for the show. That’s a lot to cover – no matter how big the walls, floors, or roof!

– Angelina's Leg Inspires Flood of Fan Art: Not since the "pepper-spraying cop" has a gesture so captured the imagination of the Internet's million amateur cultural pranksters. Angelina Jolie's leg, first thrust into the spotlight at the Oscars on Sunday night, now has its own Twitter account (@angiesrightleg), but also has inspired its very own viral art meme. In a practice that has fast become known as "legbombing," people have begun to photoshop Jolie's leg onto a number of famous artworks, from the Vitruvian Man to Whistler's Mother. [HuffPo, BuzzFeed, Pinterest]

– Sotheby's Caught in Cambodian Investigation: Cambodia has asked the Department of Homeland Security to help it recover a thousand-year-old statue of a mythic warrior that currently sits in limbo at Sotheby's in New York. Some experts believe the sandstone masterpiece, which had a catalogue estimate of $2 to $3 million before being pulled from auction, was looted during the Vietnam War. [NYT]

– Artist Chickens Out of Chicken Art Project: Kansas-based artist Amber Hansen's project to raise awareness of cruel practices in that state's chicken slaughterhouses with her public project "The Story of Chickens: A Revolution" — funded in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation — has been canceled after it was deemed too cruel. Had Hansen defied a city ordinance and proceeded with a plan to publicly raise, slaughter, and serve the chickens she could have faced a $1,000 fine and six months in jail. [AP]

– Glenn Kaino to Represent the U.S. in Cairo: The Los Angeles-based artist has been chosen to represent his home country at the 13th International Cairo Biennale. Cesar Garcia, currently the senior curator at LA><ART, has been appointed U.S. Commissioner. Garcia says he hopes to directly engage with the social and political transitions currently underway in the Middle East. [Press Release]

– Protesters Converge on the Whitney: Last night, Sotheby's locked-out art handlers and members of Occupy Wall Street gathered to protest the Whitney Biennial at its VIP opening. The demonstrators spoke with partygoers as they entered the museum, and chanted, "Shame on Sotheby's, No Justice, No Peace." [Hyperallergic]

– Will Artists Space Make Up With Georgia Sagri?: In the first of a two-part interview, Artists Space director Stefan Kalmar discusses his work with the biennial and revisits that trying 24-hour period during which his organization was "occupied" by a group of rogue artists and activists in October, in a bizarre footnote to Occupy Wall Street. Kalmar says he would be "open" to "revisit[ing] that moment" with Georgia Sagri, the artist who led the occupation and is currently showing at the Whitney Biennial. [A1]

– Exhibition's Name is Bond, James Bond: London's Barbican Centre is set to present the first major exhibition devoted to the UK's foremost cultural diplomat, secret agent James Bond. Artifacts to be included in "Designing 007 — Fifty Years of Bond Style," July 6-September 5, include Daniel Craig's blue swimsuit from "Casino Royale" and Ursula Andress's bikini from "Dr. No." [HuffPo] 

– A Row Over Seine-Side Cultural Center: Paris's mayor Bertrand Delanoë has criticized the design for a Russian spiritual and cultural center to be built on a plot by the Seine owned by the Russian state. Alluding to the planned 25-meter-high golden domes, the mayor said that the showiness of the "pastiche architecture" was inappropriate for this world heritage site. [Journal des Arts]

– Historical Diamond "Beau Sancy" Goes Under the Hammer: Sotheby's is handling the sale of the 34.98 carat rock on behalf of Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia. The stone's impeccable pedigree includes four royal families. King of France Henri IV gave it to his wife Marie de Medicis, who wore it in her crown at her coronation in 1610. [Above the Estimate]

– Meet Putin's Secret Weapon: Sergei Kapov, the new head of Moscow's culture department, has been making waves since he revived the dilapidated Gorky Park last March and arranged for Dasha Zhukova to bring a branch of her Garage Center for Contemporary Art to the area. But Kapov's allegiance to Vladimir Putin makes him a target: a day after the controversial December elections, 700 pairs of ice skates were stolen from the park, allegedly as a political protest. [TAN]

– Lab Coats Lead to Creativity: According to a new study by researchers at Northwestern University observing the effects of so-called "enclothed cognition," donning scientists' and doctors' trademark garb heightens creative and critical thinking skills. Watch out, artists: in one test, participants wearing what were described as doctor's coats out-performed participants wearing identical coats described as artists' smocks. [Miller-McCune] 

– Sculpture to Steal Armory Show Spotlight: According to at least one observer, Gotham Magazine's Judith H. Dobrzynski, sculpture will be the dominant medium at this year's Armory Show. Citing shows like John Chamberlain's Guggenheim retrospective and the ubiquity of sculpture in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, she concludes: "It’s the most exciting area of the art world right now for collectors and viewers alike." [Gotham]

– Cai Guo-Qiang to Set Off Explosions at MOCA: The New York-based, Chinese-born artist known for his gunpowder drawings, installations, and explosion events will create a public outdoor explosion at MOCA as part of his solo exhibition, "Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder," opening April 8. [Press Release]

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