The casualties of Bashar al-Assad's bloody crackdown in restive Syria number in the thousands. Now, the embattled Syrian opposition forces in the Movement for National Change are calling attention to the cultural toll of the brutal onslaught. The group has called upon world heritage organization UNESCO to protect historical sites allegedly being damaged by the Syrian army. The appeal seems to be largely symbolic, since it is unlikely that UNESCO will be able to fully assess the situation, much less to take an active role in heritage protection there, until the political situation is stabilized. 

The Movement for National Change letter to UNESCO declares that "Bashar al-Assad's savage regime... destroys human lives and also human heritage that is over 6,000 years old by bombing mosques, churches, [and] fortified castles...," Le Journal des Arts reports. According to the group, the Omari Mosque in the southern province of Dara'a has been damaged by bombs — last year, the New York Times reported that government forces fired upon demonstrators in the Mosque — as has the Saint Elian Church in Homs. (Homs has seen some of the heaviest fighting in the country; Dara'a was the starting point of the Syrian uprising, and clashes there have escalated in recent days, with both the media and humanitarian organizations being denied access to the city.)

Véronique Dauge, who heads the Arab section of UNESCO's World Heritage department, told Le Journal du Dimanche last week that there has been only limited damage or looting to Syrian heritage sites. "The sites that we have been able to visit have not been purposefully and systematically attacked," Dauge said. But archaeologist Jean-Claude Marin expressed a somewhat different view of the situation in Syria. "The looting is not spectacular, but it is certainly there," he told Le Journal du Dimanche. "It takes place in the form of direct attacks on specific sites or clandestine searches in storehouses holding historic pieces." 

Name: Nari Ward

Age: 48
Occupation: Visual artist
City/Neighborhood: Harlem, N.Y.

What project are you working on now?

“Casings”: Works using the language and form of the NYC Police Department stop-and-frisk report.

While creating work for your latest show at Lehmann Maupin, "Liberty and Orders," you were also working towards becoming a U.S. citizen. How did the naturalization process influence your artwork?

It made me more sensitive to the role of ordinary citizens and more aware of the malleability of our democracy.

The centerpiece of your new show is an installation called “T.P. Reign Bow,” a tactical police tower wrapped in a blue tarp and adorned with used pant zippers and hair. You’ve spoken to Modern Painters about this piece in the context of the Occupy movement. How might the installation reflect our current political climate?

I considered the Tactical Platform as a symbol of authority and control; the archetypal tower of power. I wanted to know if I adopted the form and introduced a more problematic role for its interpretation what other possibilities could it frame for the viewer. The Occupy movement is one possible reference for the work, however it could frame any number of questions, or anxiety regarding control, resistance, and complacency. 

Much of the work in this show reflects your continued interest in the politics of authority and surveillance. “Castings” and “Homeland Sweet Homeland” put a human face on impersonal legalese, particularly the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk procedures and the Miranda Rights. What draws you to these subjects?

Although my work seems very politically charged, it actually starts from a very personal spiritual place. I like to think of the works as a meditation or prayer, which addresses my angst, frustration, or anger. The challenge is how to mold the emotional, political, and material form in a manner, which tells a uniquely poetic story for each viewer to interpret.

You voraciously reclaim found materials, such as neon signs, church pews, TVs, a boat, and Anselm Kiefer’s scrap wood, in your work. Where do you find all this stuff (particularly Kiefer's wood)?  

I actually got the Kiefer wood from MassMoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) which had leftover materials from one of his installations there. I was invited to do a new work and when I saw the abundance of these magnificent hemlock planks I knew I had to find a way to incorporate them into my work. 

Do you have tips for dumpster-divers? 

No, I do not consider myself an expert in anything associated with inspiration; everyone has his or her own path.

What's the last show that you saw?

A solo show of a former student of mine, Yuh-Shioh Wong, at Thomas Erben Gallery.

What's the last show that surprised you? Why?

I enjoyed the "Ungovernables" exhibition at the New Museum. Why? Because there were so many artist I have never hear about and was able to discover these other voices.

What's your favorite place to see art?

The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Brooklyn Museum.

What's the most indispensable item in your office?

A human skeleton that is next to my desk.

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

Books and life.

Do you collect anything?

I am currently collecting hundreds of pants pockets. 

What's the last artwork you purchased?

A paper replica of a 357 magnum, complete with carrying case.

What's the weirdest thing you ever saw happen in a museum or gallery?

I am more likely to be surprised by things I see on the street more than in a gallery or museum.

What's your art-world pet peeve?

I dislike it when galleries place red dots on work or description lists to indicate a sale. I find that tasteless and distracting.

What's your favorite post-gallery watering hole or restaurant?

I don’t have one.

Do you have a gallery/museum-going routine?

No.

Know any good jokes?

One of my frustrations is that I can never remember jokes I like; they just refuse to stick.

What's the last great book you read?

"The Art History of Love," by Robert Farris Thompson.

What work of art do you wish you owned?

Walter De Maria’s "Earth Room."

What would you do to get it?

Trade several works of art.

What international art destination do you most want to visit?

Africa.

To see more works by Nari Ward click on the slide show.

– Gagosian E-mails Reveal Inner Workings of the Biz: New papers filed in the lawsuit between Gagosian Gallery and collector Jan Cowles over the sale of a Lichtenstein painting provide a juicy peek into the dealings of the world's most successful gallery. Attempting to cajole collector Thompson Dean to buy the painting for considerably less than it was originally offered, a gallery staffer wrote in an e-mail, "Seller now in terrible straits and needs cash. Are you interested in making a cruel and offensive offer? Come on, want to try?" In the end, Gagosian made himself a handy $1 million commission on the $2 million sale. [NYT] 

– Cézanne Card Player Study Came to Play: A lost watercolor study by Paul Cézanne for his famous "Card Players" series has resurfaced at the home of a Dallas collector, and is headed to Christie's in New York on May 1. (Another painting from the series was recently reported to be the most expensive artwork ever sold.) The solitary player — who is actually Cézanne's gardener — is expected to sell for between $15 and $20 million. [NYT, ATE]

– Klee's "Swamp Legend" Returns: Three grandchildren of the German art historian Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers have filed a lawsuit against Munich's Lenbachhaus Museum demanding the return of Paul Klee's painting "Sumpflegende" (Swamp Legend), which they charge was stolen from their grandmother by Nazis. The painitng was hung in Munich's famous "Degenerate Art" exhibition, and is now estimated to be worth $2.7 million. [Bloomberg]

– Rediscovered De Lempicka Hits the Block: A portrait by pioneering Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka that had been lost for almost 90 years will be auctioned at Sotheby's in May with a high estimate of nearly $5 million. The consigner, a West Cost construction company owner, had the 1925 painting in his home for a decade and "had no inkling of what it was," said a Sotheby's specialist. [Reuters] 

– SFMOMA Acquires Major Hopper: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired Edward Hopper's "Intermission," among the artist's largest paintings and one of the last significant Hopper works in private hands. In conjunction with the acquisition, the museum has deaccessioned another Hopper work, "Bridle Path," which is awaiting sale at Sotheby's. [Press Release]

– Louvre Abu Dhabi Seeks Contractors: It looks as if the Louvre is making progress on its Saadiyat Island satellite. Having scrapped a major construction contract last October, the state-owned Tourism Development and Investment Company in Abu Dhabi has placed an ad in a local newspaper, seeking bidders for work on the main building. The opening date has been tentatively pushed back to 2015. Let's hope their labor conditions have improved by then — a Human Rights Watch report recently singled out the Louvre as particularly evasive when it came to supporting fair labor practices in Abu Dhabi. [Construction Week Online]

– Kiev Academy Director Locks Up: An exhibition at the Visual Culture Research Center at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy titled "Ukrainian Body," was abruptly shut down by Serhiy Kvit, the president of the academy. Thereafter the exhibition, which features contemporary artworks dealing with corporeality, was only opened to honor requests from the media. "The exhibition is not closed, it is just locked," said Kvit. [NYT]

– Time to Flog Your Hirsts: Art world maverick Julian Spalding is the latest commentator to voice his (negative) opinions on Damien Hirst. "When the penny drops that these are not art, it's all going to collapse," he writes. He's got some skin in the game: Spalding's latest book, "Con Art – Why You Ought To Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can," comes out on April 1. [Independent]

– Northern Ireland's Art Goes Online: Over 1,600 paintings from National Museums Northern Ireland, including canvases by Bacon, Lowry, and Turner, are now available online thanks to an ongoing project organized by the BBC. The initiative, "Your Paintings," seeks to create a complete online catalogue of every oil painting in Northern Ireland's national collection. (See ARTINFO UK's Coline Milliard's report on "Your Paintings," here.) [BBC]

– London's Royal Academy Deluged by Summer Art: Over 12,000 artworks will be brought to the RA today, all vying for a spot in the institution's 244th Summer Exhibition, the world's largest open-submission contemporary show. The final selection of 1,000 to 2,000 pieces will be for sale at prices ranging from £100 to hundreds of thousands of pounds (for works by academicians). Anish Kapoor and Tracey Emin were both included in the show last year. [Guardian]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Watch the making of today's Google Doodle, which celebrates architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe:

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Who would have thought that an interview with David Lynch would be so unsettling?

Lynch, who already has about as much cachet as any living American filmmaker could, seems lately to have expanded his preoccupations decisively beyond film, having branched out into pop music with his recent album "Crazy Clown Time," and even nightclub design with the opening of his Club Silencio in Paris last year. His efforts as a visual artist, however, stretch back decades, running in tandem with his more famous career as an auteur. It was as an art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts that he first discovered the moving image, making the short animated film "Six Men Getting Sick" (1966) to give life to one of his paintings. Not so long ago, he had a full-blown career retrospective of his painting and sculpture at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. His solo exhibition at the Upper East Side's Jack Tilton gallery, however, is his first gallery outing in New York in decades.

The modestly sized show encompasses a series of newish paintings, some on cardboard panels and with bulky gold frames, some with Christmas tree lights poking through the background. The protagonists of these paintings are generally boys, often with bulbous or misshapen body parts, often frozen in the middle of some absurd moment of self-mutilation or savagery. One blows off his own face with a missile. One is just a hideous, screaming head, floating below the scrawled words, "I see my love," a tube poking out of his eye gushing blood. In the large "Boy Lights Fire" (which Lynch discusses below), a screaming boy is at right, his ludicrously elongated arms stretched across the picture and brandishing a huge book of matches. A doughy white naked woman seems to emerge from a small farmhouse in the distance at the bottom of the painting, arms spread wide (the look of glazed horror on her cartooned face recalling the apparition of the nude, beaten Isabella Rossellini that provokes the final crisis in "Blue Velvet"). 

On the second floor of Tilton, a suite of black-and-white photos also dwell on female nudes, the images having a gauzy vintage feel — except that the bodies have been twisted and manipulated to double limbs or orifices, or lop off heads, turning the women into lumpen monsters and nightmare odalisques. The exhibition also includes a single spindly sculpture that looks like some kind of alien antenna, as well as a 42-second film that repeats on a loop, offering, over and over, the pungently irrational image of a gloved hand floating onto a theater stage and giving birth to a numinous, egg-like form through its palm. This last is probably the strongest and strangest work in the show, though relatively clean of the psychosexual obsessions of the rest.

If my interview with Lynch left me slightly unsettled, it was not because of all this unnerving imagery so much as by his unnerving indifference to the typical interviewer's gambits. My game attempts to get Lynch to unpack the meaning of his clearly meaningful work were deflected with what amounted to a clear-cut if cheerful hostility to interpretation. Perhaps this is just the cageyness of someone who has had a thousand film students comb the nuances of his work for meaning. On the other hand, the more I thought about the encounter, the more I was reminded that most Lynch movies center around men (or occasionally women) on a quest to interpret some alluring mystery, only to find fragmentary narratives that resist rational assembly (I'm thinking of Agent Cooper in "Twin Peaks" and Betty in "Mulholland Drive," my two favorite Lynch protagonists).

Lynch has told the tale many times of how his first film was inspired by a vision that came to him unbidden (he told me this tale again). Similarly, he describes his paintings as the products of aesthetic ideas that simply take hold of his brain. While this may sound like invoking the hoary trope of a creative visionary, I think we can take the artist at his word here. The way I see it, the artworks of David Lynch are about trying to capture the sense of being seized by an image so potent that it demands and commands your attention, but that is also too strong and otherwordly to be tamed or properly explained. Whether he actually captures that particular energetic balance of fascination and repulsion varies from work to work. But, it seems to me, it is this underlying theme that explains the basic vocabulary of his work, which circles between the desiderata of desirable females, on the one hand, and monstrous tortured bodies, on the other. The former stands for pre-intellectual attraction; the latter, the turmoil of expulsion and rejection. As Lynch says below of his work, it's very simple: "action and reaction." 

That's my two-cent interpretation, in any case. Here's our conversation:

Tell me about the work. You have perhaps four different types of work here, covering a pretty broad time period.

I have no idea.

I think the works upstairs are from 1999 and these here are the newest ones.

Yes, those are new. Most of these are pretty new. This is “Boy Lights Fire.”

What’s the process of making something like that?

It’s all ideas. Action and reaction. And then there it is.

Does this painting have a particular narrative?

Yes, there’s a little story. Most of them have a story.

Is there an overarching narrative?

No, it's one at a time. In other words, this one has nothing to do with that one.

But there is a general theme overall.

There might be a world that they all live in. And then that world can change if you get new ideas. So, for a period of time, perhaps you could say that there is a certain world that they depict.

And the photos upstairs, the "Distorted Nudes" — what’s going on there?

I like nudes. And I like not necessarily seeing the whole body at once. I like to find things going on in them, and then to isolate those things.

And how do you make those?

It’s all done in Photoshop. The original images are scanned from a book called “1,000 Nudes,” a book a German man put together. Mostly anonymous photos of nudes. I asked him if I could have permission to scan and manipulate them, and he gave me permission over the phone. And then he died. But his son gave me permission, which I thought was really great. So I was able to experiment with their book on the nudes.

And what drew you to those particular images?

They were just beautiful to me. They were old photographs. They have an old quality to them, and I love manipulating them. It was a brand new world, I just loved it.

A lot of this show has an old feeling, kind of Gothic…

No, not Gothic at all — what does Gothic mean? What does it mean?

It depends. A period of art history or a dark sensibility…

No, this [indicates "Boy Lights Fire"] is modern. It’s our world, and all it is is a boy lighting a fire. And here is his neighbor, the neighbor girl whom he likes a lot. It’s a neighborhood picture.

I guess what this would share with the photos on the next floor, which is a very different work, is that there is the same kind of distortion of bodies, a kind of warping.

A little bit of distortion, yes.

You said that they were each in their own world. Is there any kind of message you are trying to communicate, or is it really just inside your own head?

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema. There’s an expression: "The world is as you are." And the thing about a painting is, each person stands in front and looks, and comes back, and there’s a circle. Each person is going to have a different experience even though the work stays exactly the same. It’s kind of magical. It happens. And sometimes people say that is not for me, and they go away. Others, they love it. It’s up to the person.

Have you ever had someone really violently reject one of your paintings?

I don’t really go watch. Same way with cinema — I’m not really in the room.

I know that Francis Bacon is a big influence, and the press for this mentions Magritte, and in photography Diane Arbus. How do you process these sorts of influences?

People get inspiration from other people, and that’s a really good thing. There’s work out there that really speaks to you, and inspires you — but it’s finding your own voice that’s really important. That just takes the doing. Getting ideas and working. And then sometimes things come out that are reminiscent of other works. You can’t do everything. Every film, now that there is over 100 years of cinema — or 110, really — every film is compared to something that’s gone before, and painting the same way, that’s just the way it is.

They talk about how the frames are supposed to look like Bacon’s frames…

Yes, because I saw a show of Bacon’s work at the Marlborough Gallery in 1966, I think it was ’66. I was living in Philedelphia, and a bunch of us came up. They were framed like this. And I said, “This is the way to frame a painting.” And it thrilled my soul. But it was way out of my price range to frame anything like that — and it still is. Now, the price of these things is unreal.

But why is it important? Because it sets the painting back? Because it makes it like a stage?

Yes, it's like a theater stage. Yes, like a jewel box or a theater. The way a thing is presented to me is critical. The frame isolates it beautifully and makes it correct in my mind.

These particular paintings have lights poking through them — what does that represent?

It doesn’t represent anything — they’re lights. I love Christmas tree bulbs and I started putting them in my paintings. You’ve got to plug this painting in, and it's got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if they burn out.

I was glad you mentioned the history of cinema. I find the short film clip upstairs really mysterious. What’s going on there?

What do you think is going on there?

A hand flies in and gives birth to an orb.

You are interpreting it very well yourself. It strikes you a certain way, gives you a certain feeling. And that’s it. If there was meant to be more, there would be a whole text for it. It is what it is. 

I know you started making movies to make your paintings move…

No, it didn't happen exactly that way. I was working that way, and I was looking at it, and from the painting came a wind, and the painting started moving. And I thought, "how would I do a moving painting?" And the next thought was, "maybe with film," and that’s what started it.

My question was, you’ve continued making art alongside films for a really long time. You have a really extensive body of work. Is there something you do in this realm that is different?

Yes, it's totally different! It’s its own medium. That’s what’s so beautiful. You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum. And so, lately, I’ve been working on music and painting primarly.

Why?

That’s where the ideas are.

It’s not a time question?

No.

The final question: Do you think your body of work has evolved over the time you have been making art?

It’s evolved for me. I don’t know what other people would say. But for me, I’m happier and happier with what’s coming out now. So it's thrilling to me personally.

Why?

I love to work in painting, and I like what’s coming out.

Is it different? Has it become a different kind of painting?

Things evolve. They change, let's put it that way. Things change based on the ideas, and so because they change, you could say looking back, even though I really like a lot of stuff from the past, I like the new stuff better.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on some paintings. I’m working on some music. Paintings and music, that's where the ideas are.

To see images from David Lynch's show at Jack Tilton, click on the slide show.

SYDNEY — Seldom have I been as simultaneously impressed and underwhelmed with a museum renovation as I am with the new addition to Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the premier contemporary art museum in Australia and a beacon in this part of the world when it comes to the collection, display, and learning about the work of today’s artists.

Anyone who knows the history of this institution also knows what a miracle the redevelopment is. Less than a decade ago the MCA teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, with insufficient funds to pay its staff. Now it has the facilities that will not only secure its survival but ensure a strong and prosperous future.

The restraint, humility, and functionalism of the redevelopment is surprising and impressive, for it comes at a time when museums have increasingly sought star architects to make statement buildings designed to draw crowds. The dream is to get a world-renowned building like the Guggenheim Bilbao.

One difference, of course, is that the MCA is located smack on Sydney harbor, one of the world’s most lovely settings for a museum and a magnet for tourists, so it didn’t need to become a destination — it already is one. What the museum needed was a renovation that solved endemic circulation and access issues.

For the past 23 years the museum has been located in the old Maritime Services Board building, a 1950s Art Deco revival structure made of local yellow sandstone. It is like a sporting dais crossed with a mausoleum, a dull, forbidding modernist structure that in no way symbolized the kind of art that it was re-purposed to house.

The new design, by Sam Marshall, a Sydney architect, solves many of the structural problems of the old building. It does so in a simple but clever way — removing them from the old building and housing them in the new one, which is more of an access hub, or a service center, rather than a museum building proper.

Some may complain that from the outside the new building is not that much to look at, and they would be right. It is essentially a series of boxes clad in thin, large panels of precast painted concrete and glass. Walk around the building a few times and you can almost forget it is there. Review it from a harbor ferry, as I did, and it is equally humble.

The design’s symbolism, however, is more in keeping with the museum's content. At long last, at least, the place looks like a museum of contemporary art. Hopefully it will better attract crowds.

The new addition adds an additional 4,500 square meters of space, increasing the museum’s footprint by about 50 percent. There is only around 25 percent more exhibition space, surprisingly little given the renovation cost, AUD$53 million ($55.6 million), though entirely understandable given how great the museum’s needs were. In addition to three new galleries the expansion gives the MCA a new lecture theater, a proper entry and ticketing area, a much-needed and impressive education center with a dedicated room for children with disabilities, a rooftop sculpture terrace, a library, and revenue-generating restaurant and shop spaces.

The highlight of the new building is a big two-story box-like space on the entry level, which will be freely accessable to the public at all times. It is currently being devoted to Christian Marclay’s popular 24-hour video installation, "The Clock" (2010). Every Thursday the museum will offer a continuous 24-hour presentation of the work.

Alongside the new building, the refurbishment includes a remodeling of the old one. Marshall’s design is again simple but smart: He removed the staircase that zigzagged up the front right side of the building to create bigger, nicer, self-contained spaces on levels two and three, flowing around the old central utilities shaft.

The level two and three galleries are devoted to a pair of nice shows, one of works from the MCA collection that have hitherto languished in art storage and the other a group show of Australian and international artists. Works by Emily Floyd, Shaun Gladwell, Lindy Lee, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Robert Owen stand out from the crowd.

In the end, the success of institutions is all about the people in charge. Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, the director, has done a terrific job of corralling various local government stakeholders to offer support. Demonstrating both leadership and generosity in a nation where such qualities are often hard to come by, banker and MCA board chair Simon Mordant and his family pledged $15 million. He is an antipodean Herodes.

Apart from the fact that it serves the art and artists, and makes the museum more accessible and fun, what I admire most about the redevelopment is the way in which it reframes the harbor and nearby Sydney Opera House from new angles, on all floors. It lets us rediscover this magical setting anew.

To see images of the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, click on the slide show.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The sixth edition of Art Dubai closed over the weekend after logging record attendance figures and the event’s most extensive international participation to date. Although sales on opening were strong, they slackened during the course of the fair, and some international galleries went home with books full of contacts but with their stock intact.

Despite this, all the international participants ARTINFO spoke to were genuinely happy with their outing at Art Dubai. It was a doorway to a new market that is genuinely interested in what the international art scene has to offer. As New York gallerist Alexander Gray put it, the fair could not be described as “salesy,” but nevertheless had an energy that was “inspiring and promising.” The overall message was that it would take time to develop contacts and business in the Gulf, but that the effort involved would eventually be rewarded.

Some international exhibitors did score big in Dubai. The brisk action at Pilar Corrias’ booth made her a star of the fair. She sold 10 works by Iranian-born U.S.-based artist Tala Madani (some off her iPad) for between $13,000-$55,000, as well as three works by Pakistan-born U.S.-based artist Shahzia Sikander. These sales were made to a range of local collectors (including some from ruling families) and others from locations further afield such as India, Indonesia, and Spain.

Pace Gallery also had reason to be pleased with their trip to the Gulf. Aside from works by Tara Donovan and Keith Tyson, the gallery also sold a major piece by Chinese artist Zhang Huan, an “ash painting” entitled “Tiger.” The price was undisclosed, but Zhang’s ash paintings of similar size often sell for around $250,000.

The experience of Galerie Perrotin, which made its return this year after a two-year hiatus, best represents how the fair played out for most international participants. They made two sales: a work by the French duo Kolkuz for €28,000 ($37,000), and a Peter Zimmerman painting for an undisclosed price. A modest result, but other deals were in the works as Perrotin packed up, and gallery staffer Raphaël Gatel was happy. “A lot of possibilities will emerge from this fair,” he said, “even if it takes a little time to build a relationship with the collectors here.”

Meanwhile, many Middle Eastern galleries capitalized on having hometown advantage. Jeddah’s Athr Gallery sold out on opening night as works by Shadia Alem, Musaed Al-Hulis, Maha Malluh, and others fetched prices between $15,000 to $26,500. Dubai’s The Third Line almost cleared their booth as well thanks to demand for work by Iranian artist Laleh Khorramian (in the $4,000 to $8,000 range) and Iraq-born Hayv Kahraman (in the $14,000 to $20,000 bracket).

Now that the galleries have packed up and shipped out, ARTINFO brings you our take on the "Best and Worst of Art Dubai":

Best: Dubai’s local galleries like Carbon 12, The Third Line and Green Art Gallery, who have grown up with Art Dubai and mounted distinctive booths promoting regional artists.

Worst: Sfeir-Semler gallery who, in a fair otherwise blissfully free of Damien Hirst, decided to show a painting depicting a crowd looking at a Hirst spot painting, to the evident bemusement of fair-goers.

Best: Galleries like London’s Pilar Corrias and New York’s Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, who showed up-and-coming artists with close ties to the region, and were rewarded with strong sales.

Worst: Reports that some galleries, like local outfit Artspace, were asked to remove works which too obviously referenced the Arab Spring.

Best: International galleries that chose to highlight work from their own region rather than scrambling for local cred. Notable in this group: Platform China with its beautifully curated booth of paintings by Qin Qi and Aniwar; and Kolkata’s experimenter, which showed ink paintings and sculptures by Adip Dutta.

Worst: The strange and rather too realistic paintings of horses’ heads that adorned the entrance to the fair.

Best: The Sikka 2012 festival, which ran concurrently with Art Dubai and showcased young Emirati and regional artists, giving fair-goers a reason to visit what is reportedly Dubai’s last patch of indigenous housing (the Al Bastakiya area).

Best: Art Dubai’s aspiration to be more than an art fair. In a country still starved for cultural infrastructure, the seriousness with which the fair pursued parallel programs of talks, forums, and exhibitions was laudable.

Best: Son of the Sheikh. As Rudolph Valentino has proved, there is nothing quite like a Sheikh’s son to add glamor to proceedings. The visit of the ruler of Dubai's son, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, to the fair on opening day had many hardened gallerists’ hearts beating faster. The fact that he took a genuine interest in the works on display was a welcome bonus.

To see images from Art Dubai 2012, click on the slide show.

DENVER — When people hear that “Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective” is on view at the Denver Art Museum, they all ask the same question: Why Denver? The designer’s business and life partner, Pierre Bergé, has given several answers over the last few months: 1. I asked them first; 2. Why not Denver?; 3. J’aime Denver. (I love Denver).

But what will the exhibition — which brought large crowds and lines of up to two hours when it debuted in Paris in 2010 — do for Denver? “We believe we are the new cultural destination in the United States,” said Denver Mayor Michael Hancock when he addressed guests at the exhibition’s opening gala last Friday, adding, “Denver is ready to take our rightful place on this global stage.”


DAM is probably banking that the show, which runs through July 8, will unleash the Alexander McQueen effect in the Rockies. The 2011 blockbuster Met exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” attracted 661,509 visitors in its three-month run, and brought in millions of dollars in revenue (exact numbers were not available). The New York institution sold 23,000 museum memberships thanks to special privileges that allowed members to jump to the front of the line, and 17,000 visitors paid $50 to see the show on Mondays, when the museum is closed to the public.

In the months leading up to the Saint Laurent exhibition, Denver has pulled out all the stops to make sure everyone knows about the retrospective’s first and only engagement in the United States. DAM’s publicists alerted media about the show last fall, leading to mentions in all the major fashion magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. In partnership with the museum, Visit Denver, the city’s travel and tourism visitors’ information bureau, has been targeting regional and national markets with an ambitious direct mail, online, and print ad campaign, which included space in the Wall Street Journal, Women’s Wear Daily, and the New Yorker. Jayne Buck, vice president of Visit Denver, said that their main target audience is women in high-income households.

Exact figures aren’t available on how much was spent to bring the exhibition to Denver. The museum, for its part, is keeping mum. “We’re really hesitant to talk about numbers, but it was one of our more expensive shows in the last 10 years,” DAM director Christoph Heinrich told ARTINFO. Buck said the partner cooperative campaign cost about $200,000 and that it was part of Denver’s general summer marketing campaign, which has a budget of around $2 million.

In addition, the exhibition has partnered up with many local hotels and businesses to create special promotional packages, which consist of various combinations of hotel stays, spa treatments, cocktails, and meals. “There was no better pairing in luxury than to have the Ritz-Carlton Denver create a special package honoring Yves Saint Laurent,” said Allyson Fredeen, senior public relations coordinator for the Ritz-Carlton Denver. “It’s just going to bring travelers from all over the globe since it’s the only city in the entire nation” to host the exhibit, she added.

Denver is certainly buzzing with excitement. “I think if you would have said Yves Saint Laurent or YSL a year ago in this town to any number of people, they would have been like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Britta Erickson, director of the Starz Denver Film Festival, told ARTINFO. “But it’s really brought an awareness to this specific designer as well as how important fashion is and how it relates to the art world.”


Some denizens believe the show will help infuse style into the laid-back city. “I think it will bring a lot of people that we would want in Denver, very fashion-conscious people, because Denver is so casual,” said Alex Jimenez, assistant manager of the luxury consignment boutique Your Best Friend’s Closet. “It will spice it up a little.”



City officials hope that the exhibition will spark international interest and increased tourism. “The Denver Art Museum’s Yves Saint Laurent retrospective is a rare opportunity to draw a national and international audience,” Mayor Hancock told ARTINFO via email.

Buck is also optimistic. “Whenever there is an exhibition of this nature we see regional visitors come in, spend the night, eat out in the restaurants,” she said. “But when they come in they’re spending money to do other things – they may extend their stay and see something else.”

The move to bring the retrospective to Denver follows a cultural gamble the museum lost a few years ago when the then-new Daniel Libeskind-designed wing failed to bring in the projected million visitors a year, causing the institution to operate a loss and lay off several employees in 2007. 


While the fashion spotlight shines on Denver at the moment, whether or not “Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective” will actually attract the masses and put the city on the world map as a cultural destination is yet to be determined — the verdict will come in July.

The Biennale des Antiquaires is France's oldest art fair — but its director is hoping that this year, you won't notice that. In an effort to make Paris's swankiest art event feel fresh again, Christian Deydier has convinced fashion legend Karl Lagerfeld to serve as the fair's official "scenographer." And as if this shake-up weren't enough, now he's also doing something else unprecedented: expanding the venerable biennale to some of the world's fastest-growing art markets. In addition to debuting a new fair in New York this November at the Park Avenue Armory, Deydier is planning to launch mini-fairs in Hong Kong and Istanbul in the fall of 2013.

“We always hear, 'This fair is the most important fair in the world,' but because it is a biennale they forget,” Deydier told ARTINFO. To keep the fair competitive with glamorous annual events like TEFAF, the Syndicat National des Antiquires (SNA), the antiques organization that runs the fair, will organize the two small, four-day art fairs, each one featuring 15 to 25 dealers — mostly galleries that are part of SNA, with a few local names thrown in.

Both of the new mini-biennales will be tailored to their locales: “The fair in Istanbul will have Islamic art, art deco, and Chinese art because there is a big market for that there, as well as painting,” Deydier said, while the fair in Hong Kong will feature Chinese art and design as well as African art. “We chose Hong Kong because it is a central place in Asia — it’s easy for people from Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan to come, and it’s also easy for us to import and export art, unlike in Shanghai, for example.” No specific dates or locations have been set, though Deydier says he is working with the French consulate in Turkey to secure a location there.

Deydier’s international plans were inspired by a tour he is currently taking across the globe to promote this year’s biennale, which runs September 14 to 23. The tour was inspired by the same desire to spice up the event that led to last week's  appointment of Lagerfeld as "scenographer." (Deydier has called his predecessor’s biennale in 2010 “sad and dull.”) The famed designer, who has used the Grand Palais as a venue for his high production Chanel fashion shows, plans to transform the massive space into a bazaar from the turn of the century.

“We never thought he would agree to do a fair,” said Deydier, who served as SNA president from 2002 to 2007 before being reelected following 2010's biennale. But the dealer got his way thanks to a friendly wager. When Lagerfeld visited the last biennale, said Deydier, “He told me, ‘The design is good, but not good enough for the biennial.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you do the biennale next time, if you think it’s not good enough?’ He said, ‘If you are reelected president, I will do the biennale for you.’”

Deydier hopes Lagerfeld’s star power and a larger-than-ever roster of exhibitors (150, according to the most recent count) will help the fair get the attention it deserves. “The biennale format enables us to do all of this, but it’s also our weakness, because every time people are waiting for us to surprise them. When they go to the other fairs, like Maastricht, it’s always the same — the only thing they change is the color of the flowers. But us, we have to change everything.”

Hilton Kramer, an art critic who rose to prominence in the 1950s and remained a passionate advocate of Modernism throughout his career, died this morning in Harpswell, Maine. He was 84. His wife Esta Kramer said he died of heart failure, after developing a rare blood disease, in an assisted living facility near their home in Damariscotta, Maine.

Kramer's career as an art critic took off rapidly after he penned a response to Harold Rosenberg's December 1952 article on action painting in Art News, which was published in Partisan Review the following year. Kramer objected to Rosenberg's assertion that the Abstract Expressionists were creating records of an event, rather than artworks. His response resulted in invitations to be a regular contributor to Arts Digest and Commentary, the latter at the request of the most influential art critic of the time, Clement Greenberg. Kramer would later be a great defender of Greenberg's writing.

As managing editor and then, in 1961, chief editor of Arts Digest, Kramer also wrote criticism for the New Republic and the Nation. In 1965 he became the New York Times's art-news editor, and eight years later succeeded John Canaday as its lead art critic at a time when American art was in a period of extreme transition from the post-war dominance of the Ab Ex artists to a range of practices including Pop, post-modern, and conceptual art.

Despite his talents as a phrasemaker, Kramer will be best remembered as a pugnacious scouce of what he perceived as the liberal decadence of contemporary art. He left the Times to co-found the New Criterion in 1982, a magazine whose conservative editorial stance was a reaction to the perceived nihilism against which he railed in many of his most opinionated critiques of the contemporary art world. He hammered both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities for what he regarded as their excessive political correctness, helping fan the Culture Wars. 

He wrote a media commentary column in the New York Post during the mid-90s, and a column on contemporary art for the New York Observer the following decade. Many of his writings are collected in four volumes of essays published between 1973 and 2006.

Here, ARTINFO selects some of Kramer's sharpest critical lashings.

From "Postmodern: art and culture in the 1980s" (September 1982):

Well, the philistines have certainly had their revenge—even if they have had to leave it to their enemies to secure it for them. Our cities now boast expensive new buildings that remind them—almost—of the good old days. In our museums everything from Salon painting to the inanities of kitsch has been dusted off, freshly labeled, and solemnly placed on exhibition, almost as if the modern movement had never altered our view of them. Scholars can always be found to study these objects, and critics to praise them almost as if they believed them to be worthy of their attention.

From "Criticism endowed: reflections on a debacle" (November 1983):

And if there was no intellectual standard governing the program, was there then a discernible political bias at work in the fellowship awards? Mr. Beardsley spoke of the “recurring desire to support alternative publications,” and went on to point out that “specific ideological biases were more pronounced in 1979 than in other years.” (It was in 1979 that the program awarded more fellowships than in any other year of its existence.) “The 1979 panel,” Mr. Beardsley wrote, “seemed bent upon correcting at one sitting two centuries of male dominated, geographically centered criticism.” One of the panelists for that ill-fated year told the seminar that the 1979 panel had been bluntly instructed at the outset not to give too many fellowships to white males. But it would be unfair to single out 1979 as a special year on political grounds. My own impression, after studying the list of fellowships from 1972 onward, is that a great many of them went as a matter of course to people who were publicly opposed to just about every policy of the United States government except the one that put money in their own pockets or the pockets of their friends and political associates. In this respect, it is worth noting that there seemed to be an annual fellowship reserved—unofficially no doubt—for one or another writer for. 

From "The death of Andy Warhol" (May 1987):

Still, in any such study a special place would have to be reserved for the Warhol phenomenon, which gave to the art world—but not to the art world alone—a model that has proved to be so irresistible that it is now a permanent, and permanently disabling, component of cultural life. It was really that ghastly model, rather than the man or his art, that the media celebrated so copiously in their obituary notices of Andy Warhol—a model that continues to exhibit a potency his art could never achieve.

From "Willem de Kooning at 90" (June 1994):

Yet no matter how weakened and mannered and parodistic the paintings became, the juggernaut of canonization persisted in accelerating its claims, and continued to do so even in the face of the debacle that overtook the man himself from the Seventies onward, when his faculties were clearly failing—first as a result of uncontrollable drinking and the quantities of valium he was taking to cope with it, and finally as he succumbed to the mental occlusions of Alzheimer’s disease. One hardly knows whether to laugh or to cry as we are asked to believe that these impairments imposed no discernible disability upon the artist’s creative faculties—a claim that is, in any case, emphatically belied by the vacuous character of the paintings themselves. At ninety, and despite the immense inventory of failed paintings that now bears his name, Willem de Kooning is still being presented to us as an artist exemplary in his every endeavor. Thus the tragedy of a fallen talent is rewritten to read as a triumph over adversity, and the transformation of a very limited achievement into an art of epochal dimensions continues unabated.

From "Monster Minimalism: Dia Beacon Museum A Vast, Ascetic Folly" (September 16, 2003):

They are unrelievedly boring and they are maddeningly repetitious. Repetition — or Serialism, as it is usually called in the art world — is indeed what Dia:Beacon offers in abundance in lieu of artistic complexity, aesthetic invention or depth of feeling.

From "Deaccession roulette" (December 2005):

Especially to be deplored is the practice of extracting works from public collections in order to auction them to the highest bidder. Institutions that receive the benisons of tax-exemption should not be allowed to exempt themselves from their responsibility to the public. A work that is in effect owned by the public should, if it is no longer relevant to the collection of one institution, pass to another public institution, not into private hands.

There is an enormous amount of chicanery and bad faith surrounding the game of Deaccession Roulette. There certainly are beneficiaries of the wager, but neither the institutions that play the game nor the public that supports it is among their number.

All Kramer's articles for the New Criterion are collected here.

In 1993, Mark Patinkin, a middle-aged columnist for the Providence Journal, listed the following among his “random thoughts”: “Mick Jagger’s 50 years old? Tell me it’s not happening to us.” Almost 10 years later, the Daily News ran a piece of Patinkin’s in which, on the occasion of the Rolling Stones touring near Mick Jagger’s 60th birthday, he said he was against “graceful retirement.” And although we can’t find it online, we’re certain we read a recent Patinkin column (another 10 or so years later) in which he listed the various ages of baby boomer rock stars, comically expressing his disbelief at how old they have become.

What do the ramblings of a newspaper columist who is not Dave Barry have to do with Mariah Carey, who turns 42 today? Not much. Patinkin clearly likes his rock “classic.” But what’s clear is that you can decide a pop star is “old” and keep declaring it for decades. Mariah Carey hardly seems to have aged the way that Jagger had by 1985, and in addition to a young husband who seems great for her and twins under a year old, she has an amazing career — the most number-one hits by a woman, and counting. But if you watch this video, you’ll be reminded of how long she has been at this, and how young she once looked. And there was a moment when her career was seriously in question — about the time that Mick was hitting the big six-zero. The important thing is that we’ve got her for many years to come. And that one of her greatest songs came in 2009. Watch the video below — the message is that it’s never too late to claim what you want. Luckily she can share it with us. 

Admission to the Bronx Museum will be free for all visitors beginning March 29, the museum announced today. That's right: admission to the Bronx Museum will be free, forever. "At a time when other New York City museums are raising their admission fees, we have chosen to focus on increasing access to the museum as a resource for our community," director Holly Block said in a statement. The free admission initiative is part of the museum's 40th birthday celebration, and is funded by a grant from the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York Community Trust.

Admission to the Bronx Museum — the only art museum in the borough, which is New York City's lowest income region — previously cost $5 for adults and $3 for children and students. In addition to free admission, the museum is also launching a "school adoption" program, working with 40 Bronx public schools to organize classroom visits by museum educators, lead museum visits, and produce lesson plans for teachers.

The Bronx Museum's community-centered 40th birthday celebration strikes an interesting contrast with its recent global initiatives. The museum will be the commissioning institution for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and has also launched the smART power program, a collaboration with the Department of State that sends 15 U.S. artists abroad to work with local artists and young people on community-based art projects.

Party rockers in the house tonight! Okay, um. Why did this week’s “Fashion Star” open with LMFAO and the Quest Crew performing the “Party Rock Anthem?” It’s a fun song, and it makes us happy to think about dancing gerbils, but for a fashion competition? It made no sense, even though the performance was a blast. Whatever it takes to lure viewers, right?

Now to the actual point of the show. Orly Shani’s sheath dress was simple and well-designed, and the sherbet tones and pops of bright colors were on trend, but it didn’t excite much. Macy’s and Saks had a different opinion, with the latter scooping it up for $120,000. Her family was in the audience and it must have been a proud moment. Poor Ronnie Escalante. He has an eye. He has talent. But for some reason, he just hasn’t been able to come up with something that excites the buyers. His asymmetrical draped dress had a trapeze silhouette, and not in a good way. The models were drowning in the fabric.

The next group pulled buys all around, but the fashion show itself was too difficult to focus on – the woman on the trapeze ring distracted from the actual clothes. Jumpsuits aren’t the most flattering and it was surprising that Macy’s ordered Nikki Poulos’s poorly executed version. Sarah Parrott must be frustrated that every week she’s only gotten buys from H&M – which purchased her maxi wrap dresses this time around – but hey, it’s better than getting no offers at all. Just like Jessica Simpson, we love Nzmiro Oputa and he definitely has a lot of potential. His men’s color block shorts, which Simpson referred to as a “Hamptons party in the pants,” went to H&M for $50,000.

Ross Bennett and Kara Laricks were the final two designers who sold their creations, Bennett making a splash with his trouser shorts. The floral print on those shorts was our favorite part of the show and it launched Macy’s and H&M into a bidding war, with the former getting the order for $100,000. Bennett’s tuxedo pants were bland, and not really summery. The light fabric and ivory color were suitable for warmer weather, but the choice to create a tuxedo pant was off. Nonetheless, Saks put in an order.

One funny thing we noticed — Saks used the same plaid fabric from the dress Laricks sold them last week for the pants she sold them this week! Is it really that much more expensive to use another one?

And finally, who got spared and who didn’t make the cut? The mentors saved Edmond Newton, and the buyers cut Lizzie Parker. The whole tattooed-suburban-mom-who-likes-heavy-metal aesthetic she went for with her last dress isn’t on trend, nor is it a selling point. It’s admirable that she’s trying to inject her own personality into her clothes, but she needs to think about the consumers and what sells.

As for the items that went on sale following last night’s episode, only the two purchased by H&M are sold out so far. Is the show losing momentum? Until next week.

Video artist Alex Bag landed on the art world’s radar in 1995 with Untitled (Fall ’95), in which she portrayed the evolution of an SVA student. She continued making groundbreaking work over the next decade; in her most recent project, screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009, she cast herself as the demented star of a children’s show. In the mid ’90s, Bag collaborated with Patterson Beckwith on two freewheeling public-access television shows, Cash from Chaos and Unicorns & Rainbows. The episodes—10 hours of which will be screened March 29-April 28 at Team Gallery, in New York—are a mix of performance art set pieces, puppetry, visits to McDonald’s, interviews with pet store employees, and found snippets of truly awful TV. Scott Indrisek spoke with Bag, who resides a bit off the art world map in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

Scott Indrisek: How did you meet Patterson Beckwith? What made you connect both as friends and as artistic collaborators?

Alex Bag: I met Patterson when we were doing our best to advance science and art at the Cooper Union For The Advancement Of Science And Art. He was a freshman when I was a junior, and although I’m not the new age kind of witch, I swear the first time I laid eyes on that boy I saw beams of light radiating off his skull. As collaborators we follow the classic Aries/Taurus trajectory. I start projects with a fervored fever. He makes sure things get finished in a timely, organized manner and cleans up the blood splatter/spatter.

Who first posed the idea of working on a public-access television show, and what were your ambitions?

Since we were mind-melded at the time, I’m not exactly sure whose brainchild that was, but I’m sure Patterson was responsible for filling out the necessary paperwork. I know we were watching an ungodly amount of public access at the time and preferring it to the miasma of network crap. I remember a general mood of giddy excitement at the prospect of reaching this brand-new kind of audience; the 2:30 a.m. Tuesday night crowd.

What were the positives and negatives of the format?

For me especially, the Deadline was and still is an artist in its own right. Having to produce 30 minutes of footage each week forces you to carry your camera everywhere and use it in situations never dreamed of, or to dream of all-new situations. There’s no time to think, to consider, to ponder, to play around with, to use any of an artist’s classic crutches. That makes a good kind of monster.

How was the show discovered? In one episode, perhaps in jest, you say that “public access is a freak magnet” and that you’ve “had some stalkers.”

We weren’t looking to be discovered. Public access is not a stepping stone, it’s a rock to hide under. We didn’t know if anyone heard our tree falling until we got a voice mail number. I don’t know that we had “fans” per se. Mostly we had a drug-addled, sleepless, sometimes angry melting pot of viewers. There is a “community” in the utopian sense of the word, because producers of shows watch other shows and call to tell you to watch their show, and it is possible to make lasting friendships. Also stalkers. The freak magnetism comes about because ultimately, creating a show is a tedious, thankless, masochistic, narcissistic act that attracts like-minded hopeless romantics.

How did you exploit the look of the public TV format—the technological glitches and imperfections?

We were using pretty shoddy equipment at the time, the best we could afford. We were editing from one crappy VHS deck to another, even crappier VHS deck. We were possessed of some strange certainty that this was philosophically and conceptually befitting.

You visit an awful lot of pet shops on the show. Sometimes that translates into a music video moment—like when footage of Jack Russell terrier puppies is set to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges.

We were dog crazy at the time because we were trying to have a puppy together. After visiting with a lot of fertility specialists and incurring some very painful shots, we finally had our Norwich terrier, Boo, join our little family. Animals hold a sacred place in both our vegetarian hearts, and also, remember that the mid ’90s were E years for many—hence all the warm/fuzzy.

During one episode you and Patterson travel to France and spend the bulk of your time inside a McDonald’s, dissecting the differences between the franchise in France and America. Why?

It was Patterson. He is obsessed with McDonald’s. He is also the kind of vegetarian who orders a cheeseburger without the burger.

Music seems very important to the show—for instance, when you pair scenes from child beauty pageants with Hole’s “Teenage Whore,” or footage you taped in that French McDonald’s with the Birthday Party’s “Release the Bats.”

Sound moves images along. Even, and especially, boring images. Our particular soundtrack was just another fishing line dangling out there in the abyss.

If there’s one editing technique that you use with gleeful excess, it’s repetition—rewinding and replaying a small snippet of a clip, like one of a girl squirting milk out of her eyes on a talk show.

There’s an advertising mantra that three times makes it stick. What happens six, sixteen, or sixty times is as yet undetermined.

As with your later, solo videos, wearing costumes and using puppets are pivotal. What makes these things such vibrant tools for an artist?

Being in costume or having an avatar is very freeing. Also, like I said: stalkers… Maybe I should use this opportunity to explain that the transition from Cash from Chaos to Unicorns & Rainbows was a precarious one. Our first show was actually cancelled because we somehow managed to be thrown off an otherwise uncensored network. When we started the second show (under a new producer, with a new show name), we were slightly paranoid that we’d be found out, so for at least one season we didn’t appear as ourselves at all. Masks, wigs, puppets, et al.

The show pulls bits from sources like QVC and the talk show circuit, and as a result you combine clips that really speak to each other in odd ways—like a 19-year-old with a Mohawk talking about how her punk wardrobe is art, followed by Michael Jackson talking about the art of plastic surgery and how he might have eyeballs implanted on his cheeks, followed by Morrissey bemoaning how people don’t treat pop music as art. Were you watching a lot of trash TV at the time? Is a phrase like “trash TV” condescending ?

Pre-YouTube, and after several ill-fated visits to the Museum of Television and Radio, I was anxiety-ridden that everything that happens on TV is not part of a tangible kind of Akashic record somewhere. I began taping everything in a panic. I thought I was doing God’s work. And you call it “trash TV.” Heathen.

For the exhibition, you’ve redecorated the gallery space as a viewing room decked out with furniture entirely bought at IKEA. Can you describe some of your interior decorating choices in a bit of depth?

Nothing in-depth: a 90-day return policy for a show that’s up for 30 days.

When looking back at this project—and culling 60-plus hours into the 10 or so that will screen—did you feel nostalgic, or was the material still somewhat alive for you?

I hadn’t looked at any of that footage for more than a decade, so it was really enlightening to find my own self completely unfamiliar to me. The end of days is a good time to revisit anything you can get your dirty filthy hands on.

What’s been catching your eye and stirring your brain in terms of lowbrow television?

I am a red-flag watchdog for the de-evolution of “reality” TV. Nothing’s beneath me.

You’re one of the few artists I know of whose CV says that they “live and work in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.” What’s an average Jersey day like for Alex Bag?

Feel free to include my home address. At this point, in this town, I would welcome any and all stalkers with open arms and a modest lunch. I know that living with your parents when you’re 40-plus sounds glamorous, but it’s not all rose beds. I birthed a real live spalpeen into this world almost two years ago, so my days are spent mostly in a frustrated effort to make each day exciting, awe-inspiring, and head-trauma free.

How do you think being a mother might affect the work you make in the future, especially considering that some of your videos riff on children’s programming? Could you ever see casting your son in a piece, or does there need to be a strict delineation between family life and art life?

Being a mother means the end to a kind of nihilism that’s been near and dear for so many years. You simply can’t be a sociopath with a stroller. It’s the end of an era or something—but change is good, and I’m trying to look on the bright side, which in and of itself is a new phenomenon. I will absolutely cast my son in whatever I can before he can remember any of it, and probably even after. My family life and art life are a whirling dervish of a blur, and nobody is who they appear to be on TV anyway. Playacting and dress-up are children’s games and coping strategies. I hope he teaches me just as much as I teach him. It is truly frightening and awe-inspiring to watch this child watch TV. He is mesmerized and spellbound, just like Mommy. Right now I have total control over what infects his perception, but I see how we may run into big problems later on.

Click on the slide show to see images from Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith’s Cash from Chaos.

This article appears in the April issue of Modern Painters magazine.