The auction houses probably have a little swagger in their step today, as both Christie's and Sotheby's are coming down from record-setting jewelry sales over the past two days.

Yesterday, Sotheby's brought in a record $43.2 million — nearly a third above the $31.1 million high estimate. The sale was 88 percent sold by lot and 95 percent sold by value, and was the highest total that Sotheby's has ever achieved during a spring jewelry auction — nearly $4 million more than last year's $39.4 million sale. In total, seven pieces fetched more than $1 million. The top lot was a marquise-shaped fancy blue diamond ring, which sold for eight times its $300,000 low estimate, bringing in $2.4 million for the auction house. The 3.54-carat ring was designed by Tiffany & Co. circa 1900.

The day before in Rockefeller Center, the Christie's sale brought in $70.7 million and was 95 percent sold by lot and 97 percent by value. At that sale, the "Clark Pink" diamond — a 9-carat , cushion-cut pink diamond ring designed by Dreicer & Co., once owned by copper heiress Huguette M. Clark, and locked in a safety deposit box for decades — soared over its $6-8 million estimate to hammer down at $15.8 million, a record for a pink diamond sold in the U.S. In total, the Clark collection brought in $20.8 million, more than twice the $9 million estimate.

At both sales, the top lot went to Brett Stettner of Stettner Investment Diamonds, who is a private dealer and runs a diamond investment fund. Other buyers include a mix of trade professionals (U.S., Asian, and "International"), some private Asian collectors, and a handful of bidders listed anonymously.

The New York jewelry extravaganza continues today at Phillips de Pury, where the gem sale begins at 4pm.

To see jewelry from the Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips de Pury sales, click the slide show.

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College has a major expansion and renovation in the works, helmed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the same husband-and-wife operation behind the former American Folk Art Museum building and the forthcoming Asia Society Hong Kong.  While details of the designs have yet to be released, the current plans will dramatically increase the square footage of the institution and update the technology in its classrooms.

The aim of the renovation of the adjacent Wilson Hall and addition to the existing 27-year-old museum is to better house Dartmouth’s 70,000-piece collection. Dating back to 1772, the Hood's holdings include African, Aboriginal, Native American, and contemporary art, most of which is currently hidden away due to a shortage of exhibition space. The renovated and expanded building will also better facilitate the museum's public and private programming.

The expansion project is part of a broader mission to develop Dartmouth’s new Arts District, which includes the neighboring Hopkins Center for the Arts and the forthcoming Black Family Visual Arts Center — designed by architects Machado and Silvetti Associates and scheduled to open in September. The Hopkins Center is slated for a renovation and expansion of its own, although the architects for that project have yet to be selected. 

From video and collage to photography and writing, from feminism to social activism: Martha Rosler has influenced as many areas of endeavor as any artist alive. Today, a show of never-before-seen photographs she took in Cuba some 30 years ago will open at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, in New York, and on Wednesday the Brooklyn Museum of Art honored Rosler as part of its annual gala and the fifth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Daniel Kunitz spoke with Rosler from Berlin, where she is spending part of the year in a residency.

DANIEL KUNITZ: What brought you to Cuba in 1981?

MARTHA ROSLER: One of the only ways you could go to Cuba at that time was for cultural or academic reasons because under Reagan, other sorts of trips were banned. Or you had to go through Mexico or Canada and risk censure. Somehow, Ana Mendieta helped put together a culturally based trip with the help of the Cuban government, and I was invited. I had recently moved back to New York, though some of my L.A. friends were on the trip, including Suzanne Lacy and Jerri Allyn, and I was friends with some of the other participants, including Lucy Lippard. It was hard to turn down a chance to visit Cuba, which I never thought I’d be able to visit.

DK: In deciding what to photograph, did you have an agenda?

MR: I did not.

DK: You just shot whatever struck you?

MR: Yes. The pictures I took are quite continuous with the photos I’ve taken before and since. They evidence the same eye for how daily life is carried out, in public in particular—one of my most precious subjects, one I keep returning to. Anyhow, I was carrying two cameras, one for black-and-white and one for color. I was in the process of deciding whether I was going concentrate on color or black-and-white in general. My compatriots in San Diego had insisted on working in black-and-white, but I was also fond of color photography. I was the only one of the group that had trained as a painter. You couldn’t develop color slides yourself, and I didn’t much care for color print film. I was ambivalent about which way I was going to go.

DK: How did you select the photographs for this show?

MR: I tend to look at spaces of transit and movement and the way people organize their lives. I photographed on long-distance buses in California when I lived there in the 1970s. Since then I’ve done a lot of work about airports and subways and roads, and looking at the black-and-whites, there are pictures of airports and cars and shop windows. A lot of my work in color subsequently centered on airports, roads, shop windows, and streets—it’s almost a counterpoint to the housing work that I’ve done. I mean, housing is about the organization and habitation of apparently private spaces, and the other work that I’m describing is about places where people appear in public. The Cuba images follow the same lines.

DK: It strikes me that while there are people in your photos, there are really no individuals.

MR: Well, some are portraits, but mostly I don’t do portraiture. I just did a photographic series on Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I live, commissioned by the Wattis Institute, in San Francisco, for its show “More American Photographs.” But I was unwilling to produce a series of traditional portraits of people whom I knew, or whom I met in the course of walking around my neighborhood or while dealing with them behind a store counter. Instead I doubled the portraits: There were two of each, and sometimes more than one person in a photo. I included some text; I usually included a storefront image as well. I put three of those clusters on one photograph, so that the working system is a series of composite shots.

The multiplication is a tiny reminder that time is absent from still photos. I’m suspicious of the iconic portrait—the physiognomic fallacy suggests we can learn something significant about a person from looking at a facial representation. Really, how much can you read from a person’s photograph? Mostly we tend to fetishize what we’re looking at. Since the people in these photos are not public figures, it didn’t seem right for me to just show pictures of them taken at a relatively random moment. Perhaps if this were not representing a network of my own social relations, I would feel differently.

There are portraits among the photos I took in Cuba, pictures of people whom I met, however briefly, or who agreed to be photographed. Some of those are doubled too, others not. But I waited more than 30 years to show these, in any case. Photos, and representations in general, have gone past singularity; we expect series or multiples.

DK: Can you talk about the relationship between your photos and your collage work?

MR: They both construct a picture, a complex meaning, by the method that we consider optically realistic, the one we invest with the burden of realism. I’m interested in getting at the question of truth value in different ways, but one, straight photography, offers relatively transparent means—although we’re all smart, so we know that photos aren’t transparent—and the other, the constructed image, offers palpably nontransparent means. Many of the photomontages marry idealized images of private homes, or of our bodies. Two kinds of representation are facing you and reminding you that photographic representations stem from and help us construct a world picture in which different entitlements accrue to those in different geopolitical situations, in different linguistic and conceptual frames. Aesthetically I think my standards are the same. I’m fairly conservative, in fact.

DK: What makes you conservative?

MR: I don’t like messy picture fields, though other people may think I do. And in the antiwar photomontages I much prefer a feeling of stasis to a suggestion of real-world movement. I want people to have a space of contemplation or thought. I don’t always feel the need for that in straight photography, though I do have formal demands within the frame of the print. This is all less true of some of the works in the “Body Beautiful” series [1966–72], which function a bit more like sketches. But I think this all stems from my training as a drawer and painter.

DK: You’re being honored this month by the Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

MR: It’s always gratifying to receive honors, even from institutions that may purchase a work or two but don’t put on shows of my work.

DK: They wouldn’t show you because your work is …

MR: Offensive!

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

Milliner Stephen Jones is ready to dress up the Bowes Museum’s collection in Teesdale, England. On April 26, the renowned British hat maker will begin to stage an intervention by selecting objects at the institution to combine with his sumptuous hats for his upcoming exhibition, “From Georgiana to Boy George,” which runs at the museum from May 19 to September 2.

Fashion designer Giles Deacon, who attended the Barnard Castle School next door to the museum, will contribute an ensemble from his spring/summer 2012 collection, which was influenced by the Bowes Museum’s prized “Silver Swan,” an 18th-century life-sized mechanical musical automaton swan that the Bowes purchased in 1872. Jones designed the fantastical swan-like feathered headpieces that season.

“Deacon said, ‘I’ve got to do a show with you because I used to have my history lessons in the Bowes Museum,’” Joanna Hashagen, the museum’s curator of fashion and textiles, told ARTINFO.

Along with the “Silver Swan”-inspired headpiece, Jones will exhibit approximately 11 pieces from his 31-year career. The sculptural creations were inspired by everything from the Georgian era to the New Romantics of 1980s London.  

Jones’s client list includes the late Princess Diana, French first lady Carla Bruni, and pop stars Madonna and Kylie Minogue. He entered the Paris fashion scene in 1984 when he made hats for a collection by couturier Jean Paul Gaultier and has regularly collaborated with designers since then, including Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, and Marc Jacobs.

When asked how the museum selected Jones, Hashagen said, “He obviously loves working in museums in historic collections, so we asked him.”

The exhibition follows a 2009 show at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, “Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones,” where the designer curated a selection of hats he found inspiring from the V&A’s collection.

Click on the slide show to see highlights of “From Georgiana to Boy George,” on view at the Bowes Museum from May 19 to September 2.

Unless you are a numismatic enthusiast, you may not know that an extremely rare 1792 penny, the first coin struck inside the Philadelphia mint, sold for $1.2 million yesterday at a coin auction in Illinois run by Heritage Auctions. It is one of only 14 coins of its type still known to be in existence. For Heritage, this was just another day as king of the Internet coin auction business.

Record-setting collectibles sales have become the norm for the Dallas-based auction house, which begin in 1976 as a small company selling rare U.S. coins (still one of its most lucrative categories). It was founded and is still led by Jim Halperin, who dropped out of Harvard to pursue a career as a numismatist, along with fellow coin-enthusiast and businessman Steve Ivy. Over the years, it has grown into a giant business, with $800 million in annual sales, making it the third largest auction house in the United States, topped only by Sotheby's and Christie's.

And Heritage is growing. While fine art has traditionally not been its bread and butter, it has been looking to expand in that field and according to Halperin may even be opening soon in the fine art world's newest mecca: Hong Kong. That is, if they can find a good Asian art specialist (applications are still being accepted.)

For now, however, that remains in the future. So how, exactly, did Heritage go from being a small rare coin house to the massive market-maker that it is now? The answer is: By being different than everyone else. 

AMERICA'S AUCTION HOUSE

Heritage has positioned itself over the last 40 years as the All-American auction alternative: While Sotheby's and Christie's are bigger, Heritage's employees emphatically refer to it as the largest auction house established in the United States (the former two were both founded in Britain). According to figures posted prominently on its heavily-trafficked Web site, last year it sold $830 million worth of items in such as memorabilia, art, wine, jewelry, and coins. It is the market leader in niche memorabilia categories like arms and armor, comic books, sports memorabilia, movie posters, militaria, natural history, and space exploration. Yes, Heritage has succeeded by becoming the go-to place where the world goes to buy and sell old space suits over the Internet.

WEB DOMINANCE

Heritage has offices around the world, including in Dallas, New York, San Francisco, Beverly Hills, and Paris, but the auction house is also constantly conducting sales online. According to Halperin, Heritage does about half of its business by dollar value over the Internet, but Web sales make up 80 to 85 percent by lot (worth noting, the $1.2 million coin that just sold attracted 22 Internet or phone bids). It is one of the Web 1.0 success stories that took the novelty of being able to buy random stuff on the Internet and turned it into a big business.

According to the third-party Web analytics company Compete.com, Heritage gets three times as many unique visitors to its Web site at Christie's does, and almost 13 times as many uniques as Sotheby's (the latter of which is currently pouring money into upgrading its online presence). Heritage's 725,000 visitors per month pushes the company into the top 3,000 — or the 99.8th percentile — of American Web sites.

It may not have the sleek features of Sotheby's image-heavy, design-oriented site or Phillips de Pury's (frustrating) minimalism, but Heritage's Web site gets the job done, and it brings in business in a way that other auction house sites don't. Heritage conducts its sales with less smoke and mirrors than its competitors. "Our goal is to bring collecting mainstream. We stress transparency because we feel that's the way to make bidders more comfortable," Halperin told ARTINFO.

OBSCURE CASH COWS

Bidders seemed very comfortable indeed during last month's vintage comic auction — another category in which Heritage excels. Held in New York's Fletcher-Sinclair House (which houses the Ukrainian Institute of America), Heritage sold the Billy Wright Collection of comics, just recently discovered in pristine condition in a basement closet of the late collector's family. The 345 items — mostly published between 1936 and 1941 — went for more than $3.5 million, nearly twice the $2 million low estimate. Over three days of comic sales Heritage brought in a record  $8.8 million.

In other words, whatever its future may hold, as long as there are obscure troves of classic comics to find under the bed, Heritage should do just fine.

Most Fridays ARTINFO video editor Tom Chen, photo editor Micah Schmidt, and performing arts editor Nick Catucci choose five of the most visually engaging music videos from the previous week. Here are descriptions and a slideshow of stills linking to the full clips, plus highlights from each in video supercut. Today ...

In "Get Free," Major Lazer and Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors recreate the experience of reading comics on hallucinogens.

R. Kelly slips on black leather gloves and smears the lens with Vaseline for "Share My Love."

Keane mash up movie tropes in "Disconnected."

Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards takes the opportunity in "My Country" to show kids acting just as weird as her. 

Meanwhile, in "Girl, You're So Weird," the Flaming Lips combine the smoky with the "not safe for work."

Previously: Ceremony, Keaton Henson, Rye Rye, Chief Keef, Lil B

Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Fashion, and Performing Arts, April 16-20, 2012:

ART

— Alanna Martinez and Chloe Wyma gathered a list of the 20 best artist grants and fellowships that artists might apply for.

— Antonio Manfredi, curator of Naples's Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, made good on a promise to start burning works from the museum's collection in protest of austerity measures that have hit Italy's cultural institutions hard.

— Shane Ferro reported that Sotheby's has come under fire from an investment group for cronyism on its board.

— Julia Halperin revealed that the doorway to Sean Kelly Gallery's booth at Art Basel this year will be guarded by two nude performers re-enacting Marina Abramovic's classic piece, "Imponderabilia."

— ART+AUCTION's Judd Tully spoke to super-collector Jean Pigozzi, who explained his preference for African and Japanese art over the works of Western artists most collectors go after.

DESIGN & FASHION

— This week Janelle Zara covered the constant stream of design news coming out of Milan's Salone Internazionale del Mobile, from Marni's new line of chairs made by Colombian ex-cons, to a mini Alexander McQueen retrospective and Mercedes-Benz's new line of luxury furniture. (ARTINFO UK also reported on the Milan launch of a new design think tank backed by a Russian oligarch.)

— Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo opened an exhibition of the label's spring/summer 2012 line at Les Docks in Paris.

— British starchitect David Adjaye released plans for a massive mixed-use development in Frankfurt, the 1.8-million-square-foot "Forum Kulturcampus."

— Ann Binlot e-visited the Museum of the City of New York's new online exhibition chronicling the works of 19th-century couturier Charles Frederick Worth and 20th-century designer Main Rousseau Bocher, aka Mainbocher.

— Revolutionary British hat-maker Stephen Jones — whose hats have graced the heads of Princess Diana, Carla Bruni, Madonna, and more — will adorn manequins at the Bowes Museum in Teesdale, England, with his signature designs.

PERFORMING ARTS

— Nick Catucci pondered the tenuous basis in historical fact of art house auteur Abel Ferrara's new web series for Vice, "Pizza Connection," which purports to be about a Sicilian heroine bust in '70s New York, but so far has mostly concerned a pizzaiolo's peculiar customers. 

— Ben Sutton reviewed Performance Lab 115's outrageous, Spandex-clad staging of Robert Wagner's Ring Cycle as a pro-wrestling melodrama.

— Graham Fuller parsed an incredibly complex synopsis of Quentina Tarantino's next film, "Django Unchained," which the filmmaker released to appease eager bloggers.

— Kyle Chayka spoke to RISD film student Julian Marshall, who's working on a fictionalized film about the early career of one of the school's most famous alums, street art star Shepard Fairey. (You have got to see the trailer.)

— Graham Fuller attended a screening of the 1989 BBC classic "The Firm" starring Gary Oldman, which was introduced by the British author Martin Amis.

VIDEO

— Kyle Chayka and Tom Chen visited the Brooklyn studio of Chinese art legend Xu Bing, who discussed the political hardships faced by artists in China, and his current exhibition at the Aldrich Museum.

India and Pakistan continue to produce artists who have absorbed their artistic heritage and developed it into original conflicts and unique techniques. A number of these artists are emerging from their regional confines and stepping onto the international stage. The world is familiar with names like Rashid Rana and Anish Kapoor, but who are the new faces of South Asian art?    

Aicon Gallery associate director Harry Hutchison, who has worked extensively with Indian and Pakistani artists, sheds some light on these new players by selecting 10 Indian and Pakistani artists to watch out for. “These artists that are coming out of the woodwork today are amongst the best I have seen,” he said in an email to ARTINFO India. “They have so much to say, it’s when you have nothing to say that art is weak. They are a small group of creative geniuses.”

Click on the slide show to see images of work by emerging Indian and Pakistani artists.

What better way to compliment Palm Springs’s desert terrain than with boldly hued overnight accommodations? That’s what New York-based Stamberg Aferiat Architecture did when conceptualizing the rainbow color scheme of the newly opened Saguaro Palm Springs, a 245-guest room boutique hotel located in the Coachella Valley.

Originally constructed in 1977, the three-story structure captures the area’s distinct modernist architecture, fusing it with colorful eye-popping exteriors and interiors. Conveniently located at the corner of Sunrise and East Palm Canyon Drive, the hotel provides a relaxing oasis in the middle of the desert. An Olympic-sized pool serves as the hotel’s courtyard centerpiece, an ideal spot for sunbathing or lounging. Afterwards, go to Tinto for chef Jose Garces’s Basque-influenced cuisine or El Jefe for Mexico City-inspired small plates.

When searching for a retreat that’s both relaxing and pleasing to the eye, the Saguaro Palm Springs nails it with its hip vibe, just at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains.

SAGUARO PALM SPRINGS
1800 EAST PALM CANYON DRIVE
PALM SPRINGS
760-323-1711

Green design has never been more in vogue, now that LEED certification is a badge to wear with pride, along with the amount of recycled materials a designer can incorporate (see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation campus or the Whitney's shipping container studio). Phaidon's new tome "Vitamin Green" from author Joshua Bolchover offers 350 pages devoted to groundbreaking sustainable design from around the world, from horizontal skyscrapers outfitted with green roofs to solar-powered handbags — and the cover is made from recycled egg cartons to boot. While it won't be available in time for Earth Day this weekend, ARTINFO has picked out some highlights from the tome's futuristic, eco-friendly inventions, including models of energy and material efficiency by the likes of Steven Holl, Coca-Cola, Puma, and Yves Béhar.

Vitamin Green will be available in May. 

To see a selection of the most cutting-edge projects from Joshua Bolchover's "Vitamin Green," click on the slide show.

– Smithsonian Honors Golden Girl: Everyone, it seems, loves Betty White. Now, she'll be officially honored as an American treasure. On May 17, the Smithsonian will fete the suddenly ubiquitous nonagenarian with a gala event at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. "I have been a Smithsonian fan forever," the "Hot in Cleveland" star told the Washington Post. "Just the thought of being invited knocked me out.”  White plans to focus her remarks during the very special evening on her passion for animal rights. "Oh my career," she said, "everybody has had it up to here with that." [WaPo]

– Is Dubai's Auction Market Shrinking?: At least in terms of the number of auction houses there, it is. After a disappointing series of Middle Eastern and Arab art sales last year, Bonhams pulled out of the free-wheeling emirate. Meanwhile, Christie's most recent sale pulled in $6.4 million, above the high estimate of $6.1 million — but down from last year's $8 million total. "Tucked into this [sale] were a number of works offered 'without reserve' and quite a few decorated with the tiny triangle denoting works that actually belonged to Christie’s, generally because they had been guaranteed and failed to sell in previous sales." [FT]

– Heizer's Lives at LACMA Now: For over a month, the Nevada-based land artist Michael Heizer has been living with his wife and dog in an Airstream trailer on the LACMA campus while his monumental work "Levitated Mass" settles into its permanent new home outside the museum. L.A. county supervisor Zev Yaroslavky offers a behind-the-scenes look at the publicity-averse artist as he oversees the boulder being lowered into its permanent resting place. [L.A. County News]

– Cooper-Hewitt Opens Education Annex on the Park: The Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is opening a new storefront classroom space on the northern edge of Central Park on May 12. The museum's building, the historical Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue, is undergoing a $54 million, two-year renovation and will reopen in 2014 with 60 percent more exhibition space. [WSJ]

– Tate Breaks Ground on Mostly-Funded New Wing: Construction has finally begun on the Tate's new wing, imaginatively dubbed "Tate 2." The long-in-the-works project was delayed due to fundraising difficulties, but the museum reports it now has about 75 percent of the £215 million ($346 million) needed. The new galleries, which will be housed in giant former oil tanks, will be opened temporarily from July to October for a festival that will coincide with the Olympics. Tate 2's tentative opening date is 2016, though director Nicholas Serota says, "My guess is, it’ll be sooner than that." [Businessweek]

– Street Artists Beastial Mural Has Little Italy Seeing Satan: A mural by street artist Tristan Eaton, recently installed on Mulberry Street across from a 124-year-old church in New York's Little Italy, is ruffling some local feathers. "I see the tiger's teeth in the crotch — that's dangerous," said one resident of the design, which features a human figure with a peacock head and tiger's head over the groin. "It looks like Armageddon. This is the devil." [NYP] 

– Swedish Culture Minister to Stay Put: Sweden's culture minister, Lena Adelsohn, said she has no intention of resigning over the bizarre and controversial photographs of her cutting into a cake shaped like a stereotypical African tribeswoman on World Art Day. The episode was intended to draw attention to genital mutilation, according to the artist behind the cake. [NYT]  

–What a Nice Surprise: While visiting the Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane, Australia, a British Museum egyptologist discovered something the museum staff had overlooked: papyrus fragments from the ancient Egyptian funerary text known as "Book of the Dead." "We are incredibly surprised that we had such a significant object in our collection," said the museum's CEO, who probably shouldn't have admitted that. [CBC]

– Montevideo's Contemporary Art Museum Reopens: After a six-month-long renovation project, Montevideo's Bohemian Gallery and Museum of Contemporary Art reopened in the Uruguayan capital last month. The art center is run by the international collector and gallerist Virginia Robinson, who also owns Kansas's Bohemian Gallery. Upcoming shows at the museum include Julian Schnabel and Marc Chagall. [TAN]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

One-time Beastie Boy Mike D tours his first curated MOCA show:

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

Can Artists Help Us Reboot Humanism in an Over-Connected Age?

How Heritage Auctions Built an $800-Million Empire Selling Old Coins, Dinosauria, and Space Rocks

For Earth Day, 10 State-of-the-Art Eco-Inventions From Phaidon's Design Tome "Vitamin Green"

Kehinde Wiley Collaborates With Designer Riccardo Tisci to Create His First-Ever Paintings of Women

See Highlights From Art Brussels, Belgium's Pleasingly Schizophrenic Art Fair

Rising Stars: 10 Emerging Indian and Pakistani Artists

Bentley is celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's diamond Jubilee with 60 exclusive Mulsanne models, one for each year of her Majesty's reign. The special editions have been designed by Bentley's Mulliner division, the team responsible for the State Limousine...