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The Best and Worst of TEFAF 2012

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The Best and Worst of TEFAF 2012
English

The 25th edition of the European Fine Art Fair, better known as TEFAF, opened in Maastricht last week, marking the quarter-century anniversary for world's most exclusive art fair. There was certainly plenty of action on the floor, yet in this time of economic queasiness in Europe, most dealers played it safe, showing mid-priced artworks. Paintings over €10 million were hard to find. Moreover, as a fair with an origin in Old Master sales, it did seem to lack a centerpiece like last year's emblematic Rembrandt, "Portrait of a Man With Arms Akimbo" (1685), which failed to fetch its $47 million asking price at Otto Naumann (New York) but provided an unforgetable image for fairgoers nevertheless.

Nevertheless, there were stand-outs. Here, ARTINFO selects our six favorite items from the fair (and mentions a few sour notes as well):

BEST

1. Schönewald Fine Arts (Düsseldorf), together with Anthony Meier (San Francisco), came to TEFAF with an equally topical and exciting mixture of Gerhard Richter paintings. On the first day, they had already sold 80 percent of the Richter works as well as a Katharina Fritsch sculpture. The key Richter piece, “Kleine Strasse” (1987), sold within the first hours for a seven-digit figure to a private collection.

2. Spirits were high at the shared booth of Bernheimer and Colnaghi in the Old Masters / Paintings section. They sold Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Crucifiction,” “within the first 90 minutes of the opening,” Blanka Bernheimer told ARTINFO. The list price: €3.5 million ($4.6 million).

3. In the TEFAF Paper section Emanuel von Baeyer showed a great selection of works on paper including a sketch by Karl Friedrich Schinkel dated 1825 and rediscovered in 2010, which featured a design for a plinth to support a marble bust by Christian Friedrich Tieck of the crown princess Elisabeth of Prussia. The price was upon request only. The booth also showed off Carl Andre’s “Six Wire Run” (1971), which came with a price tag of €80,000 ($105,256).

4. Sperone Westwater (New York) offered an eclectic mix of modern and contemporary art in the Modern section, including Gilbert & George’s “Photo-Piece” (1971), an arrangement of some 30 black-and-white vintage photographs available for $1.2 million and a brand new large-scale Jan Worst painting titled “Darkness Visible” (2012) for $80,000. 

5. Karsten Greve (Cologne, Paris, and St. Moritz) brought high-quality works to the TEFAF Modern section, including Salvador Dali’s painting “Paysage aux Papillons” (1956), Lucio Fontana’s unusual enameled ceramic “Crocifisso” (1951) and a noteworthy selection of works by Louise Bourgeois presented in a separate section of the booth.

6. Every boy’s dream, a selection of Samurai memorabilia, looked outstanding at the booth of Giuseppe Piva Japanese Art (Milan) in the Showcase section, which this year invited six young dealers to show their wares for a reduced booth price of €5,000 ($6,600). “Ryubu Menpo,” a 17th-century Samurai mask, had a price tag of only €6,000 ($7,924). 

WORST

1. Paris-based Galerie Berès, specialists in 19th-century France, which in the past have exhibited Goya, Manet, Marquet or Toulouse-Lautrec at the gallery, brought a meager selection of modern and contemporary artists to their primely located TEFAF-booth. Showing these small-scale paintings by Georges Mathieu or Simon Hantai means they will surely have to worry about their booth-placement next year.

2. The booth of Jacques de la Béraudière (Geneva) was approached with caution by potential buyers. Formerly named Galerie Cazeau-Béraudière, the gallery had been involved in the Beltracchi-scandal, which uncovered a number of faked paintings, including a work by Max Ernst, “Tremblement de la Terre” (1925), which had been shown on TEFAF in 2004.

3. As one of the very few contemporary specialists, Haunch of Venison (London, New York) disappointed many visitors. After losing artists like Adrian Ghenie to Pace Gallery, it looked like more disappointment at TEFAF. The booth was kept in a somber grey-in-grey tone with rather middle-of-the-road works that included Afro Basaldella (known as Afro), Cy Twombly, and Pierre Soulages. With this list of names it seemed all the more surprising that the gallery’s co-director confirmed that there were no secondary market pieces available on the booth at all.

4. French & Co. (New York) brought the most unsurprising work to the fair: Max Beckmann’s “Perseus' Last Duty” (1949), a painting that has been around the block. The gallery bought the work in 2001 for $3.85 million over an estimate of $700,000-$900,000 at the one-collector-only Stanley Seeger sale in 2001 at Sotheby’s. It attempted to sell it a year later on TEFAF for $7 million. In 2005, it was offered at Sothebys’s again, estimated between $4-6 million. In 2008, it was back on the TEFAF and worth $8.5 million to the gallery. This year, French & Co. are trying to get rid of it for $6.5 million. That’s a saving of $2 million on last year’s price. Grab a bargain while you can!

by David Ulrichs, ARTINFO Germany,Art Fairs,Art Fairs

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cindy Sherman

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cindy Sherman
English

Cindy Sherman
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
February 26–June 11

I was raised in Detroit. It was the early 1960s, and the city was booming. My father worked at Ford’s famous river rouge plant, where he managed an acre of accountants, and some days after school my mother would drive me over to see my dad, and then we’d go to Patsy’s restaurant for a special dinner. But on the day President Kennedy was shot—that’s how I remember the date—my brother and I were packed into the backseat of my mother’s sky-blue Fairlane wagon. She was crying, had been doing so all afternoon, and we went to get my dad. On east Henry Street by Burke, as the light was falling, there was a woman in a man’s black tails, a white shirt, and a pale vest like the one the president wears in the pictures of his inauguration, and she was standing there with a camera on a tripod beneath a streetlight, taking pictures of herself. That was really weird, I thought.

Of course, every picture is an elegy for what it shows. I learned that later. But what was the purpose of this act of picture-taking? To imitate or commemorate or grow close to or grow distant from? To find, in the face and the body, the depth of unfathomable disconnection or the intelligibility of lost speech? Or was it—is it—all the forms of imagining remembrance, of grieving and holding, of running away to really run toward, or was it just to show something, maybe just to play, to not simply be a self like a corner, but like a wide and populated avenue, a cityscape, a universe of selves? This picture-making is what I would call a form of in-personating (one self penetrating another), which is a curious way to realize knowledge through action, but every construction that borrows from the inventory of the real in pursuit of a revealed consciousness serves nothing, finally, but the ethics of the imagination.

There’s a thing that Heinrich von Kleist says in his famous little essay from 1810, “On the Marionette Theater,” in which he tells the story of a beautiful young boy whose grace was tied precisely to his obliviousness to it. Eventually, the boy became aware of his grace. He became obsessed with it, and an “incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures. A year later nothing remained of the lovely grace which had given pleasure to all who looked at him.” At the end of the essay, Kleist imagines a kind of math of redemption, a multiplication of the self, in which each of us has a second chance to look at ourselves and find something else. He calls this “eating of the tree of knowledge to enter the state of innocence,” as if we could slip through the back door of Paradise, and he adds mysteriously that this is “the final chapter in the history of the world.”        

To look into the faces of others and imagine ourselves, we do what Cindy Sherman does in her pictures, and what I see in her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, in the 170 images made over 35 years, quirkily organized by curator Eva Respini into baggily loose themes, with rooms here and there dedicated to specific series, beginning with the great “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977–80, and offering Sherman’s cast of pretty girls, white trash, elites, victims, sex objects, figures from historical paintings, clowns, and occasionally boys. Here we come to a knot of ideas about the self, to the 18th century’s Enlightenment belief that under the weight and corrosion of social artifice, we each hold a natural, unblemished self, which is what Kleist’s tale is about, and against this is the late 20th-century notion that artifice no longer has a self inside it. Sherman is Kleist’s boy, looking again and again in the mirror. Yet instead of the destruction of grace, she offers a sad kind of happiness—the release from the self into parts—while always tendering that sense of lonesomeness in each of us.

I remember another time, sitting in my car with Marley Krieg. We’d been driving around and had stopped at the athletic field of our old junior high. We must have been 16. I recall saying to her with complete, unwavering assurance—the kind only teenagers have—that I understood myself perfectly, that I was so transparent to myself that I was like a book in which every sentence was pure prose, totally clear. But later the burden of self-consciousness accumulates, and the yearnings, questions, and illegibility, so that it’s possible to understand the need for the doubled self in Sherman’s pictures, which aren’t self-portraits by other means, but write out, so to speak, a myriad of possible selves—the more-than-I, the I-as-them, amplified, fragmented, and free. With the more than 500 different selves she’s made, there’s something about Sherman’s approach that’s giddily American: not about slow depth, but about rapid, productive impressions; a way to be in the world that’s somewhere between rectitude and the pleasure of busy hands, of doing as the preferred form of thinking. Room after room, Sherman’s taut images of so many I’s-as-them present their common qualities: specificity, precision, the heft of detail delivered with efficient speed, vessels of great technical, dramatic fluency that argue for the verve of hard work, for endurance through the long haul of the imaginative life.

There’s a very great picture from 2011 in the show, very noble and odd in feeling, and immensely elegant, Untitled #512. In it, She—as I’d like to call Sherman’s chimerical females, who are otherwise as nameless as they are singular—floats artificially on a background, obviously disjointed in the physics of space. She is an early 20th-century type here, fancily cloaked. Her left knee is slightly bent, giving her a formal, fashionable air. She’s grave against this backdrop, which has the austerity of a Courbet landscape. The gray of the sky is about age and barrenness to me, about what we can’t hold on to, which is there in her drawn face, her chin declining somberly, while the scene is exactly opposite in its sense of grandeur: an announcement of social wealth, of culture flashing its satisfaction in the midst of nature. She could have dropped there like a visitor to Mars.

The image has that Shermanesque compression of playfulness, weightlessness, and an oppressive airlessness that stands for constriction of every kind, while somehow the figure edges up into the sky, a deadpan angel of rich impossibility, who captures the slippery strangeness of what transformation is. This is what Sherman does. She transforms herself in endless theatrical ways, repeating the act at the origin of art-making: the magus’s practice to renew matter by releasing a thing inside another thing, overcoming its source. The magic is in showing that source at the moment it shifts shape, affirming that within each thing in the world, there’s something explosive unseen, which is made visible and mastered.

All great art advertises that hand of power as a gift of control, and one of its controls is the breaking of time. The figures of Sherman’s women are intensely static, while their eyes are—what should I say? —time-porous. Time leaks through their eyes, along with pathos, because both are lashed to the elusive glint of narrative inferred as they look out of the frame or into the middle distance. We imagine them moving through an experience, time moving like a music of actions and emotions. Someone else is there, outside the frame, someone who did something with or to her that She now captures in her body, as rigid as a figure in a Grecian frieze. Particularly in the exhibition’s most recent pictures, featuring women shot in front of a green screen and set against a background Photoshopped to exaggerate displacement and weightlessness, time is unhinged as gravity is unhinged, so that time’s power to carry us toward the not yet of the future is held aloft, suspended, and the inevitable march toward death is underscored and lightened. Each She that Sherman makes is a playful jolt of other-life, floating off like a bubble from her factory of selves. But then Sherman is the one who changes; the women are fixed, immemorial, and so as I said, each picture is an elegy for what it shows.

That’s the peculiar bite of Sherman’s images, like salt added to chocolate to give its sweetness an extra depth. The photographs place big philosophical questions amid local details so they seem at once large and intimate, which is the scale of ambiguity. Her women are silly and warm, proud, offensive, and asking for care. Saul Bellow once remarked how much he ached for his character Augie March—“poor bastard,” he called him. Sherman, in her conversation with John Waters in the exhibition catalogue, says something similar about the women in her “headshots” series from 2000 to 2002: “Some of the most pitiful little characters in that series, my heart goes out to them.” The images we eat from are a way to spit out a part of ourselves. We need self-consciousness to understand why we need to escape from it. We need to see these things and make these things. Which is why, thinking about this remarkable artist and her remarkable show, I’ve made my own story up.    

Click on the slide show to see images from the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA.

This article will appear in the May issue of Modern Painters magazine. 

Voina, Russia's Prize-Winning Anarchist Art Collective, Spawns an All-Female Anti-Putin Punk Group

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Voina, Russia's Prize-Winning Anarchist Art Collective, Spawns an All-Female Anti-Putin Punk Group
English

Voina, the infamous Russian art collective known for making art out of vandalism and other pranks, remains best-known for a very male image: a 65-foot drawing of a penis on a St. Petersburg drawbridge (a work for which the group won Russia's Innovation art prize). Now, a handful of Voina members have broken away to form a Riot Grrl-influenced all-female group that is putting a feminist spin on Voina's wild-eyed aesthetic. Wearing purple and yellow dresses and neon-colored ski masks, the splinter group known as Pussy Riot has gathered attention since its formation in winter 2011 for performing unauthorized punk rock concerts in public, letting loose songs with lyrics that decry the alleged ballot-rigging in recent parliamentary elections. And like the group from which it was formed, Pussy Riot has already run afoul of the Russian authorities.

Earlier this month two members were taken in by Russian police after performing the song "Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin, Expel Putin!" next to the altar at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. A third member was arrested on Friday on charges of "hooligan behavior." While some have viewed the arrests as clumsy acts of intimidation (Voina co-founder Natalia Sokol was once arrested and detained with her infant son for one night without being charged), the three women face prison sentences of up to eight years.

Much like the Russian anarchist collective of which its members are alums — whose initiatives have included firebombing a police tank — Pussy Riot has become willfully identified with chaos, illegality, and dissent in their music and public statements. In light of a demonstration for which Voina members snuck guitars and amplifiers into a courtroom during the trial of members Andrei Yerofeev and Yuri Samodurov, the spinoff's punk rock aesthetic should hardly come as a surprise.

Pussy Riot's members are cagey in their relations with the press, simultaneously seeking attention while avoiding direct engagement. They wear masks to preserve their anonymity, and operate under nicknames such as Balaklava, Cat, Seraph, Terminator, Blondie, and Garadzha. After the recent brush with the law, a band member calling herself Shayba was interviewed by the Financial Times via Skype, connecting the group's Riot Grrl feminism with its opposition to prime minister (and president-elect) Vladmir Putin. While Voina's members have described Putin as the personification of corruption and unchecked power in Russian politics, for Pussy Riot, he is also a symbol of a thuggish, grandiose masculinity that oppresses Russian women. Putin, said Shayba, “has repeatedly made sexist statements that the main task of women is child bearing and being in a passive position relative to men."

Snow-Resistant White? Artist Terence Koh and Designer Karim Rashid Reimagine Jackets for Peutery

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Snow-Resistant White? Artist Terence Koh and Designer Karim Rashid Reimagine Jackets for Peutery
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Artist Terence Koh has plastered his white aesthetic on furry sneakers and moon boots for a collaboration with Forex and Opening Ceremony, and on Chuck Taylor high tops for Converse. For his latest design endeavor, Koh stepped out of footwear, reimagining two of Italian outerwear brand Peuterey’s signature waterproof jackets to mark the label’s 10th anniversary. Peuterey also tapped industrial designer Karim Rashid to put his spin on their women’s Sceptre and men’s Guardian styles.

Koh may have added some depth to the opaque white his designs typically come in.  He “opted for an ultra light and transparent high-tech fabric, which he covered with opalescent polyurethane for a milk-like effect,” reports WWD. “Rashid created a painted glassy effect through digital printing and laminating with polyurethane.”

The jackets don’t come cheap. Priced at $1,310 to $1,704, the line will hit Peuterey’s flagship store in Milan this fall.

The collaboration may seem like an odd choice for Koh, but then again, the white coats he wears in cooler months do bear a close resemblance to Peuterey’s sporty luxe style.

 

by Ann Binlot,Fashion,Fashion

Track-by-Track Breakdown: Unsane’s Bludgeoning, Brilliant “Wreck”

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Track-by-Track Breakdown: Unsane’s Bludgeoning, Brilliant “Wreck”
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In a recent interview, Unsane frontman Chris Spencer made a crack at the expense of Blues Traveler, perfectly exposing the very ‘90s sensibility that still rages inside him. To Spencer, who with his band has spent almost 20 years knifing the entrails out from New York City’s underbelly, music’s for exposing and even inflicting wounds, rather than covering over or healing them. And while rock, the city, and many other things may have moved on, Unsane’s mess remains a glorious one. Spencer’s got rusted sewage mains for pipes, and the band rumble like heavy machinery even in their most nimble moments. “Wreck” (Alternative Tentacles), their first album since 2007, out-bludgeons any other disc released so far this year. (It’s out Tuesday.) Our track-by-track breakdown was written in real time, as we submitted ourselves to each song, rating each one out of 10. Stream three of them at the bottom of the page.

“Rat”
Sound: Simultaneously lithe and lurching.
Theme: Dehumanizing urban life.
Key lyric: “This filth is all that you know … So unclean!”
Rating: 8/10

“Decay”
Sound: Chiming, pretty; broken apart, rusted.
Theme: Consequences, possibly as they relate to romantic entanglement.
Key lyric: “Look at this shit we’re in … all hope has gone away.”
Rating: 9/10
Stream below.

“No Chance”
Sound: Swaggering, alarm-like.
Theme: Alienation as it bleeds into revulsion.
Key lyric: “You’re too close, but just out of reach … You live in distress, just like the rest.”
Rating: 8/10
Stream below.

“Pigeon”
Sound: Mopey but propulsive.
Theme: Self-sabotage.
Key lyric: “You know you should have accepted someone … Each night as I lay in my bed, I can’t help but feel you’re better off dead.”
Rating: 7/10

“Metropolis”
Sound: Breakneck, knotted.
Theme: Life’s small opportunities for growth and betterment.
Key lyrics: “I’m lost — at what cost? Take what you get from this, and try not to miss.”
Rating: 7/10

“Ghost”
Sound: Straightforward and churning, with a chilling bridge. (See: key lyric, below.)
Theme: The dangers of conformity.
Key lyric: “Live like you’re a ghost — what you wanted the most.”
Rating: 8/10
Stream below.

“Don’t”
Sound: A slow, greased-up — sleazy — tempo.
Theme: Unclear. Possibly something related to sex or sexual dysfunction.
Key lyric: “Gonna make you sick … Can’t do it twice. No, there won’t be a next time.”
Rating: 7/10

“Stuck”
Sound: Rough and ballad-like, with twangy slide guitar, then ten times as loud, then back again.
Theme: Addiction (to “pills”). And possibly hope.
Key lyric: “I’m waiting here for this to end.”
Rating: 6/10

“Roach”
Sound: An atmosphere of watchful paranoia, over a racing heart.
Theme: The real and imagined dimensions of anxiety and fear.
Key lyrics: “Land of the free. Try and compete.”
Rating: 7/10

“Ha Ha Ha” [Flipper cover]
Sound: Dumb as rocks.
Theme: The freedom and joy of mocking capitalism’s dispiriting limits.
Key lyrics: “We go downtown to do our shopping, and we work in suburbia, but I say: AH HA HA HA HA HA, AH HA HA HA HA HA, EH HEH HEH HEH, AH HA HA HA HA HA …”
Rating: 9/10

Van Gogh's Wrestlers Unearthed by X-Ray, "Video Games" Score for Smithsonian, and More Must-Read Art News

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Van Gogh's Wrestlers Unearthed by X-Ray, "Video Games" Score for Smithsonian, and More Must-Read Art News
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– Fleshy Van Gogh Rediscovered: In one of Vincent van Gogh's famous letters, he describes a work-in-progress depicting two half-nude male wrestlers. No such painting was known to exist — until now. The lost wrestlers have been discovered underneath the paint of a Van Gogh still life acquired in 1974 by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Holland. Thought to have been "uncharacteristically exuberant," the still life had been deattributed to Van Gogh in 2003 and removed from public view completely. The discovery of the hidden wrestlers, made possible by recent advances in x-ray technology, now confirms its authenticity, while offering unique insight into the great Post-Impressionist's working method. [Independent]

– People Like Video Games: Who could have guessed that fans would pack a museum to do exactly what they already do in their own living rooms? Crowds have been turning out for the Smithsonian's "The Art of Video Games" exhibition, which opened on Friday (see our interview with curator Chris Melisinoshere). Over 7,000 visitors attended the museum on Saturday, some waiting up to an hour in line (and a few dressed in costume as their favorite characters), turning it into one of the five busiest days for the museum since it reopened in 2004. [WaPo]

 French Monument Employees Plan Strike: The 1,300 workers employed by France's Centre des Monuments Nationaux (National Monuments Center) — which manages the operations of some 100 historical sites and monuments around the country, like Paris's Arc de Triomphe — are planning a nationwide strike on March 22, citing the "profound demotivation" of its "overburdened" workforce. [Le Monde]

 Forstmann Collection Comes to Sotheby's: The auction house will present the entire collection of the late financier and philanthropist Theodore Frostmann — some 50 items estimated at $75 million — in a series of spring sales. The pieces include a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar valued between $20 and $30 million and a record-setting portrait by Chaïm Soutine (est. $10-15 million). [WSJ]

– The Case of the Missing Monet: A battle over the whereabouts of Monet's "Torrent de la Creuse" has pitted two prominent French families — the embattled Wildenstein art-dealing family and the Heilbronns, who run the Galeries Lafayette department store chain — against one another. The painting was looted from the Heilbronn family by the Gestapo in 1941, but they have reason to suspect the Wildensteins might know more about its fate than they are letting on. [NYT

– Chinese Farmer Jailed for Forbidden City Theft: A 27-year-old man has been sentenced to 13 years in jail for stealing works of art and jewels from the Forbidden City. Shi Baikui broke into the ancient imperial palace last May and bagged nine valuable pieces, a theft he described to the court as a "spur-of-the-moment" act. Six items have been recovered but three pieces, worth an estimated $23,800, are still missing. [AFPAP]

– Censorship in Kuwait: Officers closed down an exhibition of the work of artist Shurooq Amin at Al M Gallery in Kuwait just three hours into the opening after deeming the show "inappropriate," "pornographic," and "anti-Islamic." Most of the 17 pieces, which explore the taboo underworld of the Gulf, were already sold. They are currently tucked away to avoid confiscation. [FT]

– IBM Lends the Louvre a Hand: The American tech giant and the world-famous Parisian museum have begun a multi-year partnership for an undisclosed sum that will see IBM giving the Louvre its "Smarter Buildings" makeover, optimizing every aspect of its operations to make it greener. "If you listen to a building in a holistic manner, there are many opportunities for improvements," said IBM VP David Bartlett. [Technaute]

– 20x200's Business Plan: In a profile of Jen Bekman, the founder of online print seller 20x200, Forbes offers some insight into her business model. The site fronts all costs to produce the artwork it sells, and splits the proceeds with artists 50-50 after deducting production costs. Bekman says she expects to generate revenues of over $7 million in 2012. [Forbes

– More Details Palais de Tokyo Expansion: The Paris contemporary art center, currently celebrating its tenth anniversary, will reopen with amply expanded gallery space on April 12. Following 10 months of construction that will see it nearly tripling its gallery space over four floors, the Palais de Tokyo will host the politically-charged group exhibition the Paris Triennale, just in time for the country's presidential elections. Unfortunately, the exhibition title "The Ungovernables" was already taken. [NYT]

– Britain's Crown Jewels Shine Anew: A fresh display of the crown jewels, with restored footage of the Queen's coronation and improved lighting, will open later this month to celebrate the Queen's diamond jubilee. Held in the Tower of London since 1303, the crown jewels have been publically exhibited since 1994, and attract around 2.5 million visitors a year. [Telegraph]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

The Best and Worst of TEFAF 2012

Unpacking Pac-Man: The Curator of the Smithsonian's Video Game Show on the Medium's Origins and Future

Sharjah Art Foundation Focuses on Film With $200,000 in Awards For Artists, Including the Star of "Pi"

Voina, Russia's Prize-Winning Anarchist Art Collective, Spawns an All-Female Anti-Putin Punk Group

Discovering Elaine Reichek's Sharp Conceptual Embroidery at the Whitney Biennial and Nicole Klagsbrun

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cindy Sherman

Asia Week Watch: Freeman's Scores With $1.5-Million Ming Jar, While the "Rockefeller Raza" Bombs at Sotheby's

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Asia Week Watch: Freeman's Scores With $1.5-Million Ming Jar, While the "Rockefeller Raza" Bombs at Sotheby's
English

In New York, the first of the Asia Week sales began trickling in last night, but the big surprise came from Philadelphia-based Freeman's Auctions. While not officially part of Asia Week, the auction house holds its biannual Asian art sale in conjunction with the Big Apple's week-long event — and in these days of record prices for all things Chinese it is no stranger to bidding wars leading to record prices. Last September, a small jade seal fetched $3.5 million on an estimate of $30,000-50,000. On Saturday there was a similar result for a Ming Dynasty gilt-bronze and cloisonné-covered jar.

Estimated to sell for $10,000-15,000, the jar was scooped up for $1.5 million by a Chinese bidder in the room. At one point, according to the auction house, there were a dozen bidders vying for the enormous jar (which is 21.5 in tall and 16.5 in wide). The full sale brought in $4.5 million for Freeman's, inclusive of buyer's premium.

Meanwhile at Sotheby's, it was a very different story. The top two lots at the Southeast Asian modern and contemporary sale were bought-in as the auction struggled to gain momentum. Far and away the top-estimated lot was the semi-abtstract landscape "Village with Church" (1958) by Indian painter S.H. Raza (pictured in part on the top left). Valued at $1.5-2.5 million by the auction house, the much-touted work was nicknamed the "Rockefeller Raza" because of its longtime place in the collection of John D. Rockefeller III. This clever bit of marketing, however, did not help it to find a buyer. Instead, the top lot was M.F. Husain's 1965 dark and distorted portrait of his biochemist friend Dr. A Rahman "Untitled (Scientist)," which hammered down at $242,500 (estimate $200,000-300,000).

At the East 87th Street headquarters of Doyle's, the Asian art sale offered quite a few surprises. Perhaps the most outlandish was the Chinese white jade boat, which is described as carrying three passengers sitting atop a wood stand carved to resemble breaking waves, and sold together with a group of celadon jade peacock figurines. It sold for well over 100 times its paltry $700-900 estimate, taking a whopping $122,500. In the same type of explosive action, a Chinese acrylic snuff bottle estimated at $200-300 went for $46,875. On the other end of the spectrum, one of the auction's top estimated lots, a Ming-style blue-and-white porcelain bowl went unsold (est. $250,000-350,000).

Finally, the Bonhams Indian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan sale ended late Monday after the cover lot, a portrait of the Indian ruler Rawat Gokal Das celebrating the Hindu spring festival Holi (dated 1808), by early 19th century artist Bagta was sold for $302,500 — ten times the $30,000 low estimate. The auction as a whole brought in $3.2 million.

Asian art auctions in New York continue all day Tuesday at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams. For a full schedule, click here.

This post originally appeared on Shane Ferro's art market blog, Above The Estimate.

 

 

In Five: July Return for “Breaking Bad,” Marc Maron’s TV Move, and More Performing Arts News

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In Five: July Return for “Breaking Bad,” Marc Maron’s TV Move, and More Performing Arts News
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1. The new season of “Breaking Bad” will kick off in July, Aaron Paul said on Twitter: “Make sure u wear diapers because I’m pretty sure u will shit yourself.” [The Clicker/MSNBC]

2. Watch Louis CK’s early short films. [Splitsider]

3. IFC has picked up Marc Maron’s show, which sounds a lot like his “WTF” podcast. [Vulture]

4. Queen Latifah is remaking “Stell Magnolias” for the Lifetime channel. [NYDN]

5. Michael Bay has upset some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans by saying that his live-action reboot of the cartoon will show that the turtles are in fact aliens. [CNN]

Previously: Yunjin Kim, “The Walking Dead,” video games, “Southland,” and Rufus Wainwright

 

Pop Art For the Face: Nars Announces Its Andy Warhol-Inspired Cosmetics Line

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Pop Art For the Face: Nars Announces Its Andy Warhol-Inspired Cosmetics Line
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Not to be outdone by MAC, which revealed plans for a Marilyn Monroe-inspired makeup collection in February, the cosmetics company Nars announced it will launch “Nars Andy Warhol,” a limited edition collection of bright, punchy hues based on the Prince of Pop’s deadpan silk screens of celebrities and mundane consumer items. The company, celebrated in makeup circles for its slick, minimalist packaging and deliberately provocative names for blush (“Deep Throat,” “Orgasm”) has teamed up with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the new line of “innovative packaging, formulas, and shades,” evocative of “the cool, image-rich, character-laden world of Warhol,” reports Women’s Wear Daily.

More than 20 years after his death, the artist who invented the artist-as-celebrity-as-brand paradigm is the 13th-richest famous dead person of all time, and the third-richest visual artist behind Charles Schutz and Theodor (Dr.) Seuss Geisel. This is due to the Andy Warhol Foundation’s indiscriminate product licensing policies. The artist’s persona has been lent to everything from Diane von Furstenberg swimsuits to iPhone cases.

“Nars Andy Warhol” is slated to hit stores in the United States in October and globally in November. No doubt “Campbell’s Soup” lipstick and “Blue Jackie” mascara would fly off the shelves in our color-saturated post-pop beauty moment. One can’t help but notice shades of Warholian artifice in Nicki Minaj’s cotton candy pout, Katy Perry’s smurf-colored hair, and Lady Gaga’s whole persona. No word on whether living Pop artists will follow suit. Somehow, a Claes Oldenburg-inspired bronzer sounds less marketable. 

The Barnes Brief: 5 Developments in the Foundation's Hotly Contested Move to Philly

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The Barnes Brief: 5 Developments in the Foundation's Hotly Contested Move to Philly
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The Barnes Collection is set to reopen in a brand new building on downtown Philadelphia's Ben Franklin Parkway on May 19th, just in time for the institution's 90th anniversary, but controversy continues to follow Albert C. Barnes's storied art collection from its longtime home in suburban Lower Merion to Center City. A recent flurry of developments surrounding the high-profile relocation have made headlines. Here, ARTINFO reviews the latest.

SECRET MOVES

As if to affirm the relocation's portrayal as a heist by its many critics, the process of actually moving the works from the collection to their new home is proceeding with a level of stealth worthy of the Secret Service. With all the art that needs to be moved — including an amazing 181 paintings by Auguste Renoir and more works by Paul Cézanne than are in the collections of every museum in Paris combined — one would think neighbors in Lower Merion would have seen trucks assembling outside the building by now. They haven't. The secrecy was the subject of a feature in the Philadelphia Inquirer, though the best the paper could do was to track down Robert K. Wittman, a former Philadelphia FBI agent who has had an indirect role as a consultant on the relocation. And even his words are accompanied by the disclaimer: "I am only speculating."

ELLSWORTH KELLY WELCOMES THE NEW BARNES

Some of the museum's moves have been very public, though. Earlier this month, the Barnes announced (and the city enthusiastically approved) the installation of a brand new 40-foot-tall public sculpture by color field legend Ellsworth Kelly in front of a reflecting pool outside the collection’s new home. The stainless steel sculpture was commissioned for and donated to the museum by the Neubauer Family FoundationJoseph Neubauer, CEO of food services company Aramark, is vice-chairman of the Barnes.

FRIENDS OF THE BARNES DE-FRIENDED

Cheerfulness about the new sculpture was muffled by concurrent news about a judge’s order that the Friends of the Barnes — the group that has been leading the campaign to stop the museum's move since 2004 — pay a portion of the foundation's legal fees incured while fending off many legal challenges to the move. Though the museum's lawyers originally sought payment of nearly $65,000 from Friends of the Barnes, a judge reduced the sum that the group would have to pay to $25,000.

FURIOUS ABOUT MATISSE

The institution brought further antipathy upon itself when it released videos of “The Dance,” a mural that Barnes commissioned Henri Matisse to create inside his Lower Merion foundation, being pried from its place and prepared for re-installation in the main gallery of the new building downtown (see the video below). Blogger Tyler Green was particularly adamant in arguing that the mural was never meant to be moved. Citing multiple letters and transcripts from interviews, he wrote: 

"...to the best of my knowledge, 'site-specificity' was not a common term in 1930s artistic practice. However, I think that the art historical record makes it clear that Matisse thought he was creating a mural for a specific place, that 'The Dance' was intended to be seen at a particular site and in a particular context, and that the work that would be viewed in this certain way. To return to today’s lexicon, he considered it the Barnes mural to be site-specific."

INOFFENSIVE DESIGN

Writing in the New York TimesFred A. Bernstein doesn't mention the Friends of the Barnes's efforts at all, but instead focuses on the challenges architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien faced to make the interior of the museum look as much like the Lower Merion location as possible, in line with the order of the judge who authorized the transition contingent on "a statement by museum trustees that the existing galleries would be replicated in the new location."

"In designing the new building," Bernstein writes sympathetically, "Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien needed not only to satisfy their own aesthetic judgments but to also honor the ruling (which the state's attorney general is empowered to enforce)." While the Barnes Collection's move to downtown Philadelphia still has some observers riled up, many are curious to see how much of its unique character will be preserved in its new, seemingly more conventional setting — though it seems unlikely that even the best simulation can satisfy the move's bitter critics.

To see the Barnes Foundation's Matisse mural being moved, click on the video below:

by Benjamin Sutton, Reid Singer,Museums,Museums

The Low Line, Illuminated: LES Gallery to Showcase the Technology Behind New York's Future Underground Park

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The Low Line, Illuminated: LES Gallery to Showcase the Technology Behind New York's Future Underground Park
English

Now that you’ve read about the Low Line, the Lower East Side’s underground foil to Chelsea's High Line, Mark Miller Gallery is devoting an exhibition to it. “Let There Be Light” gives eager park-goers a opportunity to actually see the thing.

The month-long exhibition starts on April 1 with an open house hosted by Dan Barasch and John Ramsey, the masterminds behind the concept. The Lower East Side gallery, just steps from the Low Line’s proposed underground site, will feature a 3-D model of the subterranean space that may better explain the fiber-optic solar technology that will make underground sunlight possible. There will also be a life-sized rendering erected onto a wall, with previews of the initial designs. Barasch and Ramsey will be there opening day to gather feedback from the community, so come equipped with comments and suggestions.

“Let There Be Light: A Preview of the ‘Low Line’ Park” is on view from April 1st through the 29th.

 

Slideshow: Selections from "Hollywood Costume" at The Victoria and Albert Museum

From Holly Golightly to Indiana Jones: Expansive V&A Exhibit Looks at Costumes in the Movies

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From Holly Golightly to Indiana Jones: Expansive V&A Exhibit Looks at Costumes in the Movies
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We never forget the clothes worn by the most iconic film characters: Dorothy’s blue-and-white gingham pinafore in “The Wizard of Oz,” Indiana Jones’s fedora and leather jacket, Holly Golightly’s floor-length Givenchy gown with necklace, gloves, and tiara in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The costumes bring their personalities to life. The upcoming fall exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, “Hollywood Costume,” seeks to reunite moviegoers with the costumes of the characters they once connected with onscreen.

For the past five years Deborah Nadoolman Landis, former costume designer, current head of UCLA’s David C. Copley Center for Costume Design, and senior guest curator of the exhibition, has been procuring more than 100 costumes for the show — which opens on October 20 — from collectors, motion picture studios, costume houses, and museums. In addition to the outfits from “The Wizard of Oz,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and the original “Indiana Jones” trilogy, the comprehensive exhibition will include pieces worn by Charlie Chaplin from the era of silent film to a dress worn by Bérénice Bejo in the 2011 hit “The Artist.” Set across three galleries, “Hollywood Costume” will show movie clips along with videos of conversations between the directors and costume designers, like Martin Scorsese and Sandy Powell. Other segments feature Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep explaining the role costumes play in film. 



“Costume design is an intellectual pursuit, it’s more about the conversation than the clothes,” said Nadoolman Landis, who, along with Academy Award-winning costume designer Ann Roth, spoke at a press preview in New York to promote the exhibition. The two discussed the process behind a job, from reading a script to meeting with directors to acquiring and creating pieces in order to help build a character. “The character happens and there’s no controlling it,” said Roth. “Once that happens, you know what to do.”

Click on the slide show to see pieces that will be featured in “Hollywood Costume,” opening at the V&A October 20.

 

More Antiquities Woes for U.S. Museums Loom, As Turkey Demands 18 Artifacts From the Metropolitan Museum

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More Antiquities Woes for U.S. Museums Loom, As Turkey Demands 18 Artifacts From the Metropolitan Museum
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Former Metropolitan director Phillipe de Montebello famously faced one of the greatest challenges of his career over looted Greek antiquities in the museum's collection, ultimately diffusing it with his ingenious “returns-for-loans” strategy. Now, new director Thomas Campbell faces a fresh battle over dodgy antiquities, this time from Turkey. And it's heating up.

At the beginning of the month the Turkish government made aggressive moves to assert its claims on supposedly looted objects, banning its own institutions from loaning antiquities to museums including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Met, until artifacts held in those museums’ collections were returned. While the Art Newspaper reported that 12 unidentified items at the Metropolitan were in dispute, the blog Chasing Aphrodite is now claiming that the number has escalated to 18, and has even offered a specific list of the contested artifacts.

The items in question — all but two of which are listed in a document posted by Chasing Aphrodite — include several pieces that are currently on view in the Met’s Ancient Near East Galleries. Among them are a gold Hittite figurine from the 13th or 14th century BC, early Bronze Age jars, and intricate metalwork vessels in the shape of a bull and a stag. Turkey claims that the artifacts were excavated and transported out of the country illegally, following the passage of a 1906 law that gave the country ownership of all such objects. All the artifacts named in the request come from the Norbert Schimmel Collection. Schimmel, a longtime Met boardmember, donated the collection to the museum in 1989, the year before his death.

Harold Holzer, the Met’s spokesman, offered the following statement to Chasing Aphrodite about the new brouhaha:

This past fall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was contacted by officials from the Turkish Ministry of Culture with regard to 18 works of art in our collection. The Ministry requested provenance information, which we are in the process of providing. Because this matter is currently under discussion with the Turkish government, the Museum will have no further comment at this time — except to acknowledge with appreciation that Turkey has long been a valued lender to significant exhibitions at the Metropolitan, and we look forward to the continuation of that relationship.

This may only be the beginning of a new round of antiquities woes for U.S. museums. Chasing Aphrodite also claims that the Turkish government has made requests to "several other American museums" to return illegal artifacts, though details of those disputes remain vague. Stay tuned.

 

The Juiciest Bits From Frank Langella’s Celebrity-Leveling Memoir “Dropped Names”

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The Juiciest Bits From Frank Langella’s Celebrity-Leveling Memoir “Dropped Names”
English

If some enterprising young psychology student ever wanted to write a thesis on the neuroticism of actors — or the quantifiable psychosis of superstardom — they would find a treasure trove of research in Frank Langella’s juicy new memoir, “Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them.” At one point in the book (which is out next Tuesday), the actor expresses to Stella Adler,  the legendary acting teacher, his admiration for one of her pupils: Marlon Brando. Adler admits her own reverence for him, but warns, “You don’t want to meet him, dear. That way lies madness.” 

While Langella has made movies (he had an Oscar-nominated turn in 2008’s “Frost/Nixon”), he is a true creature of the stage. And in this bitchy, highly entertaining memoir, he throws open the doors of the zoo and reveals the galloping egos, peccadilloes, delusions, insecurities, and self-destructive tantrums of those who labor before and behind the cameras and footlights.

“There will be a fair amount of forks to the eye and knives to the throat,” Langella  notes in the preface. He isn’t kidding. Richard Burton is a “crashing bore”; Lee Strasberg is “a complete charlatan and self-serving martinet”; Anne Bancroft is an “angry baby”; and Laurence Olivier was “a silly old English gent who loved to play camp and gossip.” And while the book includes portraits of icons from film (Montgomery Clift), politics (John F. Kennedy), society (Brooke Astor) and literature (Bill Styron), his profiles of theater folks create a complex and often witty collage of life in that world. 

Langella’s safe as he delivers his broadsides. All of his subjects are deceased, incapable of either defending themselves or questioning the veracity of his claims. But there are also a number of a deeply affectionate tributes to friends whose loss he mourns: Alan Bates, Stella Adler, Jill Clayburgh, Hume Cronyn, and Jessica Tandy. But it  is the searing look at the theater crowd which lingers after the last page is turned. Langella spares no one — least of all himself. 

The  74-year-old actor recalls sharing, as a callow young man,  a summer-stock stage with Billie Burke, best known as the Good Witch in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.” After an instance in which he milked the curtain call at her expense in a production of “The Solid Gold Cadillac,” she turned to him and said, “Mustn’t be greedy, dear. Your time will come.” After it did, Langella recalls that his agent, Eddie Bondie, told him, “Honey, they love your work! They love your looks! But they HATE your personality!”

It’s hardly news that actors tend to be narcissistic. But Langella, as a truly wonderful raconteur, holds up a bright-bulbed, full-length mirror to his subjects. In an anecdote with echoes of “Sunset Boulevard,” he recounts being in a 1956 stock production of “Anastasia” with Dolores del Rio, a film beauty of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Then 51, she was playing the 24-year-old eponymous heroine in the drama. Just fifteen minutes before curtain rise, a Rolls Royce would pull up to the stage door and she would alight, in full first-act costume, attended by a lady-in-waiting and a chauffeur, often bearing an umbrella lest any rays fall upon her tender complexion.  When not in scenes, she would retreat to a spacious private enclosure built for her backstage, never speaking to anyone in the cast or crew.  After taking her curtain call, she would head directly to the waiting Rolls.  Langella  praises her performance and is bemused and charmed by the memory. Later in the book, in a wholly different context, Adler offers the following indulgence: “You can be as phony as you like in life but NEVER on the stage.”

Langella is not quite as forgiving. Anthony Quinn, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, and Laurence Olivier are harshly put down. (The latter, with whom he is filming “Dracula,” blithely tells him that one of his youthful fantasies “was to be standing on a pedestal in a museum and having people pay to worship my naked form.”)  But Langella has the most fun with  Yul Brynner, who refers to himself without irony as the “King of Broadway”  and who comes off as something of a racist. He, too, has his “twenty-foot-long limousine” raised on a special elevator within the theater so he can avoid the public. He doesn’t hide his contempt for regular people. “They were shit,” he tells Langella of one audience attending his umpteenth revival of “The King and I.” “I would not bow. I gave them my ass.”

Anger is a theme, and never more so than in a chapter on Anne Bancroft. After declaring that “all actors are ANGRY babies,”  Langella writes, “And I knew of no baby angrier than little Anna Maria Italiano, known to the world as Anne Bancroft.” Langella doesn’t seek to trace the source of this anger, in Bancroft nor any of his other subjects. Of Lauren Bacall, Maureen Stapleton says, “I stay out of her way until they feed her.” And when Paul Newman and Langella get into a discussion about using rage in performance, the former says enviously, “You can let it out, I can’t.” When Langella asks Newman where his anger comes from, he responds, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

While anger can obviously be a useful tool for actors, Langella cites many examples of their self-destructive behavior. He paints a fascinating picture of George C. Scott, who directed him  in a hit revival of “Design for Living” — a man feared by everyone who, writes Langella, “scared himself most of all.” In the book, there Scott sits during rehearsals, a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, as prone to  expressing utter delight as he is to go off on black-out binges. When Langella tells him that  he has been in and out of therapy for years,  Scott is dismissive. “Well, you’re a coward and a pussy. Why the hell do you need someone else to use as a crutch? Suck it up.”  

Scott is just one of many monsters who inhabit Langella’s theatrical landscape — deadly cobras waiting to strike, as he observes of Olivier. The legendary British actor at one point takes Langella aside and says, “You know, Franky dear, you’re a monster. So am I. It’s what you need to be a star.” In that instance, one becomes aware that the juvenile behavior and narcissism simply cloak a desperate insecurity and fear that it will all too easily fall apart, when, as Bancroft says to Langella,  you can go from being the “toast of the town” to “a pile of  crumbs.”

Perhaps the most poignant chapter involves Jo Van Fleet, a great stage actress, though she’s  best-known for her brief,  Oscar-nominated scene in “Cool Hand Luke.” Her short temper and testiness had exiled her to the ash heap by the time she paid a backstage visit to Langella after a performance of  “After the Fall” at Lincoln Center. In short order, she insults Dianne Wiest, Langella’s co-star, who has come to pay obeisance. Then  Van Fleet proceeds to badmouth Arthur Miller. “The guy’s a chauvinist asshole,” she says.  Langella, who is eager to have his dinner — and not with her — finally asks the actress if there is anything else he might get her. “Yeah,” she says plaintively, “a job.”

Despite such sympathies, Langella is onto his fellow players and himself.  He leaves it to a wry and drunken Maureen Stapleton to put it all into perspective. With dark humor, he describes sharing a limo with the Tony- and Oscar-winning actress. Proceeding to get rip-roaring drunk in the course of a grid-locked ride, she listens as Langella begins a monologue on the career they share, the challenges of acting — the endurance it requires, the commitment it demands.   Langella writes, “Lying with her head back on the seat, the glasses and carafe empty on the floor at her feet, she looked over at me and said, “Who gives a FUCK?” If some enterprising young psychology student ever wanted to write a thesis on the neuroticism of actors — or the quantifiable psychosis of superstardom — they would find a treasure trove of research in Frank Langella’s juicy new memoir, “Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them.” At one point in the book (which is out next Tuesday), the actor expresses to Stella Adler,  the legendary acting teacher, his admiration for one of her pupils: Marlon Brando. Adler admits her own reverence for him, but warns, “You don’t want to meet him, dear. That way lies madness.”

While Langella has made movies (he had an Oscar-nominated turn in 2008’s “Frost/Nixon”), he is a true creature of the stage. And in this bitchy, highly entertaining memoir, he throws open the doors of the zoo and reveals the galloping egos, peccadilloes, delusions, insecurities, and self-destructive tantrums of those who labor before and behind the cameras and footlights.

“There will be a fair amount of forks to the eye and knives to the throat,” Langella  notes in the preface. He isn’t kidding. Richard Burton is a “crashing bore”; Lee Strasberg is “a complete charlatan and self-serving martinet”; Anne Bancroft is an “angry baby”; and Laurence Olivier was “a silly old English gent who loved to play camp and gossip.” And while the book includes portraits of icons from film (Montgomery Clift), politics (John F. Kennedy), society (Brooke Astor) and literature (Bill Styron), his profiles of theater folks create a complex and often witty collage of life in that world. 

Langella’s safe as he delivers his broadsides. All of his subjects are deceased, incapable of either defending themselves or questioning the veracity of his claims. But there are also a number of a deeply affectionate tributes to friends whose loss he mourns: Alan Bates, Stella Adler, Jill Clayburgh, Hume Cronyn, and Jessica Tandy. But it  is the searing look at the theater crowd which lingers after the last page is turned. Langella spares no one — least of all himself. 

The  74-year-old actor recalls sharing, as a callow young man,  a summer-stock stage with Billie Burke, best known as the Good Witch in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.” After an instance in which he milked the curtain call at her expense in a production of “The Solid Gold Cadillac,” she turned to him and said, “Mustn’t be greedy, dear. Your time will come.” After it did, Langella recalls that his agent, Eddie Bondie, told him, “Honey, they love your work! They love your looks! But they HATE your personality!”

It’s hardly news that actors tend to be narcissistic. But Langella, as a truly wonderful raconteur, holds up a bright-bulbed, full-length mirror to his subjects. In an anecdote with echoes of “Sunset Boulevard,” he recounts being in a 1956 stock production of “Anastasia” with Dolores del Rio, a film beauty of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Then 51, she was playing the 24-year-old eponymous heroine in the drama. Just fifteen minutes before curtain rise, a Rolls Royce would pull up to the stage door and she would alight, in full first-act costume, attended by a lady-in-waiting and a chauffeur, often bearing an umbrella lest any rays fall upon her tender complexion.  When not in scenes, she would retreat to a spacious private enclosure built for her backstage, never speaking to anyone in the cast or crew.  After taking her curtain call, she would head directly to the waiting Rolls.  Langella  praises her performance and is bemused and charmed by the memory. Later in the book, in a wholly different context, Adler offers the following indulgence: “You can be as phony as you like in life but NEVER on the stage.”

Langella is not quite as forgiving. Anthony Quinn, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, and Laurence Olivier are harshly put down. (The latter, with whom he is filming “Dracula,” blithely tells him that one of his youthful fantasies “was to be standing on a pedestal in a museum and having people pay to worship my naked form.”)  But Langella has the most fun with  Yul Brynner, who refers to himself without irony as the “King of Broadway”  and who comes off as something of a racist. He, too, has his “twenty-foot-long limousine” raised on a special elevator within the theater so he can avoid the public. He doesn’t hide his contempt for regular people. “They were shit,” he tells Langella of one audience attending his umpteenth revival of “The King and I.” “I would not bow. I gave them my ass.”

Anger is a theme, and never more so than in a chapter on Anne Bancroft. After declaring that “all actors are ANGRY babies,”  Langella writes,“And I knew of no baby angrier than little Anna Maria Italiano, known to the world as Anne Bancroft.” Langella doesn’t seek to trace the source of this anger, in Bancroft nor any of his other subjects. Of Lauren Bacall, Maureen Stapleton says, “I stay out of her way until they feed her.” And when Paul Newman and Langella get into a discussion about using rage in performance, the former says enviously, “You can let it out, I can’t.” When Langella asks Newman where his anger comes from, he responds, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

While anger can obviously be a useful tool for actors, Langella cites many examples of their self-destructive behavior. He paints a fascinating picture of George C. Scott, who directed him  in a hit revival of “Design for Living” — a man feared by everyone who, writes Langella, “scared himself most of all.” In the book, there Scott sits during rehearsals, a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, as prone to  expressing utter delight as he is to go off on black-out binges. When Langella tells him that  he has been in and out of therapy for years,  Scott is dismissive. “Well, you’re a coward and a pussy. Why the hell do you need someone else to use as a crutch? Suck it up.”  

Scott is just one of many monsters who inhabit Langella’s theatrical landscape — deadly cobras waiting to strike, as he observes of Olivier. The legendary British actor at one point takes Langella aside and says, “You know, Franky dear, you’re a monster. So am I. It’s what you need to be a star.” In that instance, one becomes aware that the juvenile behavior and narcissism simply cloak a desperate insecurity and fear that it will all too easily fall apart, when, as Bancroft says to Langella,  you can go from being the “toast of the town” to “a pile of  crumbs.”

Perhaps the most poignant chapter involves Jo Van Fleet, a great stage actress, though she’s  best-known for her brief,  Oscar-nominated scene in “Cool Hand Luke.” Her short temper and testiness had exiled her to the ash heap by the time she paid a backstage visit to Langella after a performance of  “After the Fall” at Lincoln Center. In short order, she insults Dianne Wiest, Langella’s co-star, who has come to pay obeisance. Then  Van Fleet proceeds to badmouth Arthur Miller. “The guy’s a chauvinist asshole,” she says.  Langella, who is eager to have his dinner — and not with her — finally asks the actress if there is anything else he might get her. “Yeah,” she says plaintively, “a job.”

Despite such tender sympathies, Langella is onto his fellow players and himself.  He leaves it to a wry and drunken Maureen Stapleton to put it all into perspective. With dark humor, he describes sharing a limo with the Tony- and Oscar-winning actress. Proceeding to get rip-roaring drunk in the course of a grid-locked ride, she listens as Langella begins a monologue on the career they share, the challenges of acting — the endurance it requires, the commitment it demands.   Langella writes, “Lying with her head back on the seat, the glasses and carafe empty on the floor at her feet, she looked over at me and said, “Who gives a FUCK?” 

Mark Dion, the Rubells, and Other Vinyl Fanatics Got Their Groove On at Miami Art Museum's "Record" Debut

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Mark Dion, the Rubells, and Other Vinyl Fanatics Got Their Groove On at Miami Art Museum's "Record" Debut
English

Miami Art Museum’s freshly opened exhibition “The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl” digs into the relationship between vinyl culture and contemporary art. No surprise, then, that its opening drew an intriguing mix of figures from both the art and music worlds. From the art side there were art-world lights like Miami collectors Mera and Don Rubell, exhibition contributor Xaviera Simmons, and installation artist Mark Dion; from the music side, industry veterans like Arthur Baker (producer of Afrika Bambaataa and New Order), Sweat Records’s Lolo Reskin, and jazz maven Larry Rosen made appearances.

After perusing vinyl-themed works by artists including Moyra Davey, Malick Sidibe, and Christian Marclay, party-goers were treated to a live turntable set in MAM’s plaza from DJ Le Spam. And for those those who missed out on the opening, don’t fret — the museum will play host to a range of DJ performances and battles before the show closes on June 10.

To see photos from MAM’s “The Record” opening, click on the slide show

 

Fool Pesky Facial Recognition Cameras With this Knitwear Face Kit

Stick to Its Knitting, Or Move in a Whole New Direction?

Sale of the Week, March 24-31: Bonhams Hawks Works by Banksy, KAWS, and Other "Urban Art" Stars

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Sale of the Week, March 24-31: Bonhams Hawks Works by Banksy, KAWS, and Other "Urban Art" Stars
English

SALE: Urban Art at Bonhams

DATE: March 29, 6pm

LOCATION: London

ABOUT: While Bonhams's Urban Art sale isn't the kind of contemporary art auction with eight-figure estimates, it is still likely to be a hot category. The sale is estimated to bring in £460,000-680,000 ($730,000-1.1 million), with seventeen works by semi-anonymous British street artist Banksy included. The trendy category, with an evening start time, could draw out celebrity street art fans like Kate Moss — who is the subject of one of the offered works — and Brangelina (that is, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie).

Many of the Banksy works on offer were purchased by the current owner at the artist's first Los Angeles show, "Existencilism," at 33 1/3 Gallery in 2002. They include "Leopard and Barcode" (est. £60,000-80,000, $95,000-127,000) — which features a large cat leaping out of a barcode cage — "Bomb Hugger" (£40,000-60,000) and "Love is in the Air" (£40,000-60,000).

A 2005 eponymous work of Kate Moss in the colorful pop-art style of Andy Warhol's Marilyns could bring in £30,000-50,000. There are also a host of less well-known Bansky works with estimates below £5,000.

Will the market absorb such recent work at auction? Recent history suggests it might. In February, a 2006 Banksy work entitled "Fetish Lady," depicting a prim-and-proper portrait of an aristocrat with her face covered in a black leather mask, fetched £265,250 ($417,000) at Christie's post-war and contemporary evening auction in London — one of the highest prices ever paid for the artist's work at auction, though not a record.

The sale also includes work by Blek Le Rat, Shepard Fairey, and KAWS.

OTHER INTERNATIONAL SALES:

Sale: A Celebration of Burgundy
Location: Hart Davis Hart Chicago (Tru Restaurant)
Date: March 24, 9am

Sale: Period Art and Design
Location: Bonhams San Francisco
Date: March 25 and 26, 10am

Sale: Modern and Contemporary Prints
Location: Bloomsbury London
Date: March 29, 10:30am

Sale: The Classic Cellar from a Great American Collector IX
Location: Sotheby's Hong Kong
Date: March 31, 12pm

Sale: Tribal Art
Location: Lempertz Brussels
Date: March 31, 2pm

To see work from Bonhams "Urban Art" sale, click on the slide show.

 
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