"Too much is really just fine.” Peter Beard, Wildlife Photographer on the Wild Side, Dies at 82

"If you crave something new, something original, particularly when they keep saying, 'Less is more,' remember that I say: Too much is really just fine."

Peter Beard, Wildlife Photographer on the Wild Side, Dies at 82

Called "the last of the adventurers," Mr. Beard photographed African fauna at great personal risk, and well into old age could party till dawn. He had been missing for 19 days.

By Margalit Fox

Updated April 20, 2020, 1:38 a.m. ET

Peter Beard in 1982. He was known for his photographs of African wildlife and for his exploits as a man about town. Gerard Malanga

Peter Beard, a New York photographer, artist and naturalist to whom the word "wild" was roundly applied, both for his death-defying photographs of African wildlife and for his own much-publicized days — decades, really — as an amorous, bibulous, pharmaceutically inclined man about town, was found dead in the woods on Sunday, almost three weeks after he disappeared from his home in Montauk on the East End of Long Island. He was 82.

His family confirmed that a body found in Camp Hero State Park in Montauk was that of Mr. Beard.

He had dementia and had experienced at least one stroke. He was last seen on March 31, and the authorities had conducted an extensive search for him.

"We are all heartbroken by the confirmation of our beloved Peter's death," the family said in a statement, adding, "He died where he lived: in nature."

Mr. Beard's best-known work was the book "The End of the Game," first published in 1965. Comprising his text and photographs, it documented not only the vanishing romance of Africa — a place long prized by Western colonialists for its open savannas and abundant big game — but also the tragedy of the continent's imperiled wildlife, in particular the elephant.

Peter Beard Studio

The muse of displacement: Edmund de Waal’s ‘library of exile’

Nice project on Exile from Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, now showing a the British Museum in London. 

The predicament of the Exile is "as if a thread has been unspooled from the homeland to the land of exile, continually tugging the expatriated person out of time and place."

The muse of displacement: Edmund de Waal's 'library of exile'

A migratory installation explores how the loss of homeland has inspired and encumbered writers

yesterday

Edmund de Waal's installation 'library of exile' at the British Museum in London © Greg Funnell

"Books brought from Odessa and Vienna, sent from dealers in London and Zurich, his lifetime of reading, are taken off the library's shelves and sorted and packed into wooden crates." Thus Edmund de Waal's elegiac account of the "confiscation" of his Jewish great-grandfather Viktor's library. Its theft by the Nazis in 1938 foreshadowed a new era of displacement, including that of Viktor himself, who fled Vienna for England with his family.

De Waal describes himself as "an artist who writes", though when we meet at the British Museum a week before the opening of his new installation, library of exile, he tells me he finds it increasingly difficult to separate the two activities. Today he is equally well known for his books, especially the bestselling 2010 memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, which includes the account of the fate of his great-grandfather's library, and his work in porcelain. Library of exile, which he has described as the most significant sculpture of his career, consolidates the themes of diaspora, memory and memorial he has returned to throughout his art and writing; but it also serves to reconcile those twin practices.

A roofless pavilion about the size of a shipping container, it is lined with shelves holding some 2,000 books by exiled writers. On the walls are also four of de Waal's vitrine works filled with porcelain pots. The library represents a kind of communal autobiography of the displaced person through history, from Cicero and Dante to the European émigrés of the 20th century and present-day author-exiles such as Elif Shafak and Aleksandar Hemon.

The installation is itself migratory, having arrived in London following sojourns in Venice and Dresden. From here it will travel to Mosul, Iraq, where it will remain. Readers are invited to write their own name inside volumes that are meaningful to them (each book has an ex libris plate for this purpose). The most-read volume is the children's book The Tiger Who Came to Tea, whose author, Judith Kerr, arrived in Britain from Germany in 1933. Visitors are also encouraged to suggest further books, which de Waal will add to the collection. "We're here for six months, so God knows how big the library will be at the end."

The scope of "exile" is certainly wide. The World Health Organisation estimates that 1bn people — almost one in eight of the global population — are living as migrants, of whom 68m have been forcibly displaced. From Syria and South Sudan to Russia and Colombia, exile is a defining condition of our time; but it is also as old as humankind itself. De Waal picks out a leather-bound edition of Ovid's Tristia, written in around AD8. In the opening pages of this archetypal exile text, the poet describes a stroll in the warmth of his beloved native Rome: "Now the public squares, now the temples, and now the marble theatres — ". Suddenly the tone darkens, the skies turn ashen; he acknowledges that what he has written is only a memory, for he is writing from Tomis on the Black Sea, 900 miles away from Rome, where he has been banished for an unnamed crime. The violence of that transition, from the comforts of the metropolis to windswept barbarian misery, is one committed by Ovid's own memory.

It's a predicament that the late Edward Said understood: "The exile exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting, nor fully disencumbered of the old." It's as if a thread has been unspooled from the homeland to the land of exile, continually tugging the expatriated person out of time and place.

See the whole article here: https://www.ft.com/content/cf1daa42-6219-11ea-abcc-910c5b38d9ed#myft:my-news:page 

Incredible #Miami Artist @JMargulis

#JMargulis https://www.instagram.com/j.margulis

Incredible art from Miami artist, the Venezuelan @JMargulis in @VoyageMIAmag 

http://voyagemia.com/interview/meet-j-margulis-j-margulis-visual-artist-wynwood-area/

Meet J. Margulis of J.Margulis Visual Artist

Voyagemia StaffFebruary 15, 2018

Today we'd like to introduce you to J. Margulis.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don't you give us some details about you and your story.
I began my career as an artist through photography while studying Management in my native Venezuela. I was working at the time in a family-run business exploring digital printing and later in life, I decided to apply my professional skills to art making, as I progressively became interested in sculpture. Today, my artwork is the result of an intrinsic connection between two and three -dimensional planes, working with sculpture in parallel with photography.

I began producing acrylic 3D sculptures and compositions made from different types of colorful plastic sheets, affixing them onto surfaces, other times as free-standing structures or traditional fixtures on a wall. As a direct consequence of these productions, I began photographing my pieces as a way of documenting them, thereby generating a significant volume of autonomous photographic work which created an intimate connection between the photograph and its related piece, developing a visual yet independent dialogue through language, photography, and sculpture.

At the same time I was supporting myself through custom work I did in my acrylic shop, furniture, displays and any job I could make using my skills and equipment. One day a friend of mine from childhood was in town, he used to be the director of an Art Museum in California and even though I had a long time without talking to him I send him a message and ask him to come over and take a look at my work. I was not even showing my work at that time, I just had this small collection of pieces created by me which I felt where good enough for me to dream of having an Artist career. (something I dream about all my life and honestly felt it was not going to happen in this lifetime of mine).

I needed an opinion from someone I respect and trust given the subjective nature of art critique. I already had a family with two children at that time and could not afford to play the artist, I had a big responsibility but the urge to create, the ability to express myself with a clear voice was so overwhelming that I only need one encouraging word that would unlock my vision to give me license to dream of truly becoming a professional artist. And so it happens that one afternoon my friend swing by and took one look at my small collection of pieces and he could not believe these were the first pieces I ever made…

He took me under his wing and prepare my first show which obviously took many people by surprise, a lot of people did not believe in me and look at me as if I was a bit crazy but the show was a great success and so my artist career began and I never look back. On the contrary, I just spring forward working like a madman, evolving, growing and developing this new sense of myself. It's been several years from that time and I still have this feeling of gratitude, this sense of purpose and obligation to become the very best version of myself. Very few people get to do what the love the most in life, the possibility of realization is not a given and when you are lucky enough to find it specially when you thought it was too late for it then you know you must honor it every day for the rest of your life.

Has it been a smooth road?
As a struggling artist many times you must take another paying job we all have hear this before but the truth is that not being able to work on your Art is one of the most miserable feeling you can have, it just feels like a great waste of time. When you are an artist you know that transcendence, redemption and the ability to deeply communicate with other human beings only can be realize through art.

To sell an art piece more than the money you get to spend is a promise that you can keep making art and maybe if you sell enough you will be able to do it all day and everyday of your life…. that is a dream worth taking risks, exposing yourself and revealing without fear your most intimate essence.

It's a road full of uncertainty and many discouraging moments, disappointments and self doubt. But when you know this is your mission in life, when you know there is anything else that can take you to developing your full potential then you become a survivor and find the way to push forward and have faith in yourself.

So let's switch gears a bit and go into the J.Margulis Visual artist story. Tell us more about the business.
I believe that courage, empathy, and kindness are all ingredients in a powerful and elusive formula, which arms us with a clean and ever-sharpening lens that catches fleeting glimpses of our true nature. Small fractions of divine understanding that reverberate in our essence with the power to shape our deepest beliefs and completely change our perspectives, and so, the way we act in the unfolding of our own existence.

My work is about the physical representation of this belief. I digitally design 3-D objects and compositions, and cut them in slices from different types of plastic sheet materials. These slices are then fixed to a rigid canvas, a pedestal or held together in space. Most of my work is done using acrylic sheets with different levels of translucency in a range of colors, graphic patterns, textures and photographic images directly printed on the sheets' surfaces. The bright and fully saturated color palettes to which I instinctively gravitate to, is heavily influenced by the traditional Mexican arts and crafts which made a great impact on me during the time that I lived there.

I treat my three-dimensional pieces as light traps or secret blueprints, in which by controlling the placement of its components, I'm able to create intriguing 3-D containers. Their designs are then fully revealed by applying or "pouring" light into them. In a sense, light becomes the ink that reveals the design by following a 3-D template. The light source may vary from natural to one or more fixtures, placed on precise locations in relationship to the subject, with specific power, color temperature, angle and proximity.

These exposed patterns and designs are not absolutes or unique because as the viewer changes his point of view, the work expresses a different narrative that is completely new in its own essence. It intrigues and fascinates me how the object mutates in front of me, with no other resource but a simple change of perspective. Going back and forth naturally, I try to synthesize and integrate different perceptions that coexist as different facets of an object.

Every time, I find myself trying to lock that seemingly unreal angle in which we are able to contemplate the amazing connections among complex layers of facts, prejudices, and beliefs; that "sometimes surreal" frame in which we discover how easily we could be absolutely wrong and misjudge everything that surrounds us, while tragicomically posing ourselves as proud holders of truth and owners of higher grounds.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I think that the future is already here. Social media and online gallery platforms has created this scenario where there is a personal and direct relationship between the artist and the audience.

Right now anyone can truly get to know an artist by following his or her development on a continuous basis through social media images and the artist expressed ideas and thoughts. There is this virtual conversation in which art gets infused into people's daily life. You can talk to the artist, you can tell them what you like, what you don't like, celebrate the success or critique the shortcomings there is this amazing relationship potential not only with the art but with the artist itself.

Contact Info:

• Address: 710 NW 55 Street, Miami FL 33127
• Website: www.jmargulis.com
• Phone: 3055885155
• Email: jm@jmargulis.com
• Instagram: @j.margulis artist

Getting in touch: VoyageMIA is built on recommendations from the community; it's how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

@MasterLiving

Bit.ly/MasterLiving

#Israel's Nazi art hunters are fighting to return art looted by Jews after World War

	Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy)
01/01/16 20:47 Israel's Nazi art hunters are fighting to return art looted by Jews after World War II. atfp.co/1VuXFZk pic.twitter.com/pqoVDM5Ge2

Rethinking ‘Islamic Art’ @WSJ

The new Aga Khan museum in Toronto. 

Rethinking ‘Islamic Art’

                           
Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum; building designed by Fumihiko Maki. Photo: Janet Kimber

ByLee Lawrence

Jan. 13, 2015 6:19 p.m. ET

Toronto

For seven years, exhibitions in Asia and Europe have showcased treasures owned by the Aga Khan, the spiritual head of an estimated 10 million to 15 million Shia Ismaili Muslims world-wide. The collection of some 1,000 objects has now alighted in its permanent home, the recently opened Aga Khan Museum, the first institution in North America devoted primarily to what it terms the “artistic, intellectual, and scientific heritage of Islamic civilizations.” The 300 or so items on display date from the eighth through the 19th centuries and come from as far west as Morocco and Spain and as far east as India, Indonesia and China, with Egypt, Turkey, Iran and other lands in between.

The museum’s setting in northeast Toronto is an urban idyll. It sits in a 17-acre park designed by landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic with reflecting pools and plantings that carry forward the spirit of Persian gardens. Facing the museum’s entrance is the Ismaili Center (by Charles Correa) with a glassed-in prayer hall that rises like a crystalline pyramid. For its part, the museum is a Fumihiko Maki building that uses light and shadow as much as it does granite and sandstone to create an environment at once spacious and human-scale. It is to this new home that one of the most prized private art collections of its kind has come to roost—and work.

Its stated mission is to impress upon visitors the variety and high quality of what is often referred to as “Islamic art.” And it does. It groups works by place and time of origin with only the occasional thematic display. We are thus treated to, among other things, different styles of lusterware and tile work, intricate metalwork and wood carvings; an array of miniature paintings; calligraphy in wildly different styles, some so embellished it is a matter of scholarly debate whether they are actually letters at all; and Iznik ceramics from 16th- and 17th-century Turkey, as vibrant in color as they are in design. In addition, two upstairs galleries host temporary shows—some drawing from the museum’s holdings, others coming in on loan.

Although the Aga Khan has purchased pieces specifically for the museum, the majority are works he and his family have inherited or collected. Primary among them is the highly regarded trove of paintings, manuscripts and ceramics amassed by Aga Khan’s uncle, the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan. We get a taste of how he and his wife lived with their collection thanks to a small gallery that emulates a salon of Château de Bellerive, their home on Lake Geneva. A plush circular couch fills the center of the room while, in cabinets that evoke the style of the Alhambra, bowls, plates and vessels beckon us to come close and marvel.

Here, as in the main exhibition, the works reflect a connoisseur’s taste and desire for quality without an art historian’s hunger for completeness. The museum does not offer the kind of encyclopedic presentations associated with, say, Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art or the Islamic art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. Instead, as senior collections adviser Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani writes in the catalog, the museum’s works constitute “an anthology, not a comprehensive survey.” There are therefore gaps—most noticeably the absence of lamps or vessels in enameled blown glass.

But the collection makes up for this in rarities—whether pages with exquisite miniatures from a copy of the “Shahnameh” commissioned in 1540 by Iran’s Shah Tahmasp, a 14th-century astrolabe from Spain with Latin, Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions, or an 17th- or 18th-century palm-sized shell from India in which incised verses from the Quran form a mesmerizing concentric design. There is also an unusual oliphant, an elephant tusk hollowed out to serve as a ceremonial hunting horn. Found in southern Italy, it is covered with carvings of animals and the occasional human all hunting one another. But rather than employing the more usual scheme of medallions or horizontal bands that appear on similar oliphants from the same period, this artist depicted real and mythical animals chasing each other up the length of the tusk with, in places, more humor than menace. One beast, for example, does no more than nip the toe of a soldier who stands, sword raised, while, elsewhere, what looks like a dog turns away from potential prey to attack its own tail.

In form, this oliphant is a product of medieval Europe, but its carving is stylistically in tune with the arts of the Fatimids, the Muslim dynasty that ruled parts of northern Africa, Egypt and Syria from 909 to 1171. Whether it was made in southern Italy or in Cairo for export (scholars disagree on this), the hunting horn attests to a lively cultural conversation among Christian and Muslim civilizations. In this respect it embodies the kind of mutual curiosity and appreciation the museum hopes to foster among people of different faiths and cultures. It is also one of many objects that raise the question of what “Islamic art” means and whether such a thing even exists.

The museum’s position is clear. The ingenious map that fills the back wall, for example, bucks the convention of shading all the areas under Muslim rule. Instead, areas delineating different empires and kingdoms take turns lighting up, thereby subtly underlining their political and cultural separateness. Much in the catalog and presentation, too, strongly suggests the museum hopes visitors will join those who question the very existence of an “Islamic art,” which implies a connection between religious belief and art.

Cases displaying copies of the Quran act as touchstones, reminding us that the cultures represented share a belief in these scriptures. Yet the juxtapositions simultaneously drive home how varied these cultures are. An 1804 book from Indonesia bears no resemblance to an 1847 Quran scroll from Iran, just as the illuminations in 14th-century copies from Egypt and India are strikingly different in style. Only if you stand so far back that you cannot pick out differences in calligraphy styles or register variations in illumination and design do many Qurans look similar—which is pretty much what early art historians in the Christian West were doing when they looked east and south and saw “Islamic art.” Everything in the museum seems committed to dislodging all legacy of this perspective, using beauty to lure us in close enough to appreciate the distinctiveness among Muslim civilizations.

Ms. Lawrence writes about Asian and Islamic art for the Journal.

Rethinking ‘Islamic Art’ - WSJ

Banksy's in NY: Better Out Than In #BanksyNY

See all of Banksy's artworks here:

Better Out Than In

Jorge #Selaron found dead on the staircase he decorated in #Brazil

The painter who turned the 215 steps into a kaleidoscope of brightly hued tiles from all over the world, into a rambunctious “tribute to the Brazilian people,” was found dead on the very staircase.

Jorge Selaron found dead on the staircase he decorated in Brazil | World | News | National Post

Associated Press | Jan 10, 2013 5:55 PM ET
More from Associated Press

The candy-colored steps of a staircase in Rio’s bohemian neighborhood of Lapa were the life work of Chilean artist Jorge Selaron, and a symbol of his adopted city. On this gray, rainy Thursday, they became his memorial.
The painter who turned the 215 steps into a kaleidoscope of brightly hued tiles from all over the world, transforming a dingy, urine-scented alley and stairs into a rambunctious “tribute to the Brazilian people,” was found dead on the very staircase.
Rio de Janeiro police found his body front of his house, one of the humble colonials that face the staircase as it ascends into the St. Teresa Convent above. Visitors dropped flowers and tried to light candles in the blustery weather on his doorstep.
Investigators would not disclose the cause of death but are not discarding murder. Calls for additional comment from police were not promptly returned.

Meanwhile, neighbors, friends and strangers are in shock over the death of a man who may have been born abroad, but whose open, carefree manner and riotous use of colour came to represent the best of Rio. In 2005, the staircase became a city landmark and the artist was declared an honorary Carioca, or Rio resident.
“We can speak of Lapa before and after Selaron. He changed the face of Rio. His death is something brutish, that makes no sense,” said Jocimar Batista de Jesus, aka Mestre Duda Pirata, a capoeira master who also lives along the steps and shared many a beer with the artist over decades.
The staircase project began in 1990, when Selaron began tiling the steps and collecting old porcelain bathtubs to use as planters along the sides.

As it grew, people began to contribute, to send him tiles, to bring them to Rio when they came to visit

“He had no resources, no support from the city,” said Jesus. “The neighbors helped as they could. I brought him tiles from my trips, from Spain, Holland, as I traveled. As it grew, people began to contribute, to send him tiles, to bring them to Rio when they came to visit.”
Crowded in a corner are tiles showing a woman in traditional dress from Minho, Portugal, next to a Buddha in seated lotus position, next to a depiction of St. Jorge slaying a dragon. A few steps ahead, Indian deities fan out around a tile representing the principal sites of Berlin. Further up are tiles showing Bob Marley, antique French tiles, and others with flowing Arabic calligraphy, all flanked by the flaming red and eye-popping yellow Selaron chose as the dominant colors.
The artist himself, unmistakable with his bushy mutton chop mustache, was always around, said tour guide Alejandro Martin Barreira.

Often attired in the quintessential carioca outfit of flip-flops and board shorts, and outgoing to the point of offering to take pictures with tourists even before they asked, Selaron was a local character as picturesque and well-loved as his work.
He’d make a little money selling other paintings to people visiting the steps.
“Here in Lapa everyone knew him; he was the face of this bohemian, artistic neighborhood,” said Barreira. “He was simple man, who loved this life, sitting here, watching the kids play, chatting people up.”
A mysterious image that pops up in all of Selaron’s work — a hugely pregnant black woman, often shown holding a fish — makes appearances throughout, some of them discreet, some monumental. In one painting that takes over several tiles, Selaron gives himself, mutton chops and all, the same pregnant belly and prominent breasts, along with a sign that says, “Brazil, I love you.”
The artist introduces the character to visitors in his own words, painted, of course, on tile: “On the 7th of December of 1999, I was moved to tears,” he wrote. “All that was needed was for me to paint the pregnant woman who is in all my paintings.”
He never reveals who she was, writing only it is a personal matter. With that last touch, he ran out of room. So he started substituting the tiles, he explained, turning the staircase into a fluid, evolving piece, perennially changing to reflect the interests, origins or obsessions of contributors, with Selaron first among them.
The staircase that was born of this “great folly,” as he writes in a tile, is full of stories, notes, poignant mementos of those who pass by and leave something of themselves.
In one, Selaron thanks a friend for helping out with the tiling. Elsewhere, proud mother Jandira announces the birth of her son Bruno. In one tile, Selaron apologizes to his landlady, Dona Elena, for having neglected to pay rent during the years he spent working on the staircase.
“I hope you understand,” he pleads in a piece decorated with the omnipresent pregnant woman.
Selaron meant the work to last a lifetime.
“I will only end this mad and singular dream on the last day of my life,” he wrote on the wall.
Several steps above, an anonymous contributor answered, in simple handwriting on a plain tile painted in the green and yellow of the Brazilian flag: “Obrigado, Selaron.”
“Thank you, Selaron.”

Jorge Selaron found dead on the staircase he decorated in Brazil | World | News | National Post

Chronicle of a Masterpiece Foretold - National Geographic #Art

Chronicle of a Masterpiece Foretold

Photograph by Dave Yoder

This article was originally published in the February 2012 issue of National Geographic Italy magazine and has been translated from Italian.

A dream ... an obsession lasting more than thirty years, for a mystery worthy of a detective novel, of a mural painting, a masterpiece lost centuries ago. And of another fresco painted on top of the first, complete with a clue: a small flag with the inscription "Cerca Trova" ("Seek and you shall find"). It was in the mid-1970s that Carlo Pedretti, one of the world's leading experts on Leonardo da Vinci, first communicated to Maurizio Seracini, a Florentine engineer, the idea of using scientific methods to look for traces of the mural painted in 1503 by the genius da Vinci: the Battaglia di Anghiari. It all started with a book, Leonardo inedito (The Unpublished Leonardo), that Pedretti published in 1968, in which he theorized "the necessity of research on the lost Battaglia di Anghiari," which could be found, according to Seracini, behind the right panel of the east wall in the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, on top of which Giorgio Vasari painted the Battaglia di Marciano.

The frescoed wall and the older one behind it, on which one might find Leonardo's work, prove to be separated by a gap of 10-15 millimeters, the existence of which was confirmed by ground-penetrating radar investigations from last August and recently, by the use of an endoscopic probe.

In the book, Pedretti referred to other cases in which Vasari could have "hidden" works of art in order to not destroy them: the Trinity of Masaccio, "[was] discovered in the mid-1800s in Santa Maria Novella after tearing down the planks of a large altar built by Vasari, which did not touch the fresco. The same occurred in Santa Croce with Giotto, in the Cappella Peruzzi." Not to mention that in the former Courtroom of the Arte dei Pellicciai e Vaiai, today part of the monumental complex of the Uffizi, the late-fourteenth century Annunciation, which was visible but not yet allocated, was only discovered in 1885, found by chance behind a wall put up in subsequent eras, probably by the hand of Vasari himself. According to Pedretti, the architect from Arezzo "would intervene but would not destroy." So why would he have ever needed to eliminate that great fragment of the Battle of Anghiari? He even praised it privately to a Venetian traveler when he said: "Stop and take a look at Leonardo's horses."

And so it is then, that Pedretti's book and the recent start of the final phase of the investigation in the Palazzo Vecchio conducted by Seracini, financed in part by the National Geographic Society and supported vehemently by the mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, represent the two extremes of the research, between which there are more than 35 years of document studies, acquired data, discoveries, advances and obstacles, misunderstandings and interests, all leading up to the fact that, for Seracini, the Battle of Anghiari is more than just research, it is an obsession.

$375.1 Million Contemporary #Art Sale Is #Sotheby’s Record - NYTimes.com

a 1954 Mark Rothko oil brought $75.1 million

   
Sotheby's, Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The highlight of Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art on Tuesday, “No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue),” a 1954 Mark Rothko oil, brought $75.1 million.

$375.1 Million Art Sale Is Sotheby’s Record


“I have all the time in the world,” Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s principal auctioneer, said on Tuesday night as he leaned over the lectern and flashed a smile at Lisa Dennison, the auction house’s chairwoman. She was on the telephone, trying to draw a higher bid from a client. Two tenacious collectors were competing to take home “No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue),” a classic Mark Rothko painting from 1954 that is also a conspicuous example of what dealers like to call “wall power,” and the bidding was already at $61 million.


The painting ended up selling to another mystery telephone bidder for $67 million, or $75.1 million including Sotheby’s fees.

The Rothko was the high point in a contemporary art sale of exceptionally strong prices and spirited bidding that ultimately made $375.1 million, the highest total for any sale in Sotheby’s history, beating the previous record of $362 million set in May 2008.

After last week’s disappointing auctions of Impressionist and modern art, it was also a night of great relief for the international group of collectors and dealers who packed Sotheby’s salesroom.

“There were huge prices,” Allan Schwartzman, a Manhattan art adviser, said toward the end of the sale. “It was all about fast money looking for places to park.”

Shortly before the Rothko sold, Jackson Pollock’s drip painting “Number 4, 1951” — a layered patchwork of red, blue, yellow, green and ocher oil paints, metallic aluminum and flecks of shiny black enamel — which was expected to bring $25 million to $35 million, sold to Ms. Dennison, bidding on behalf of her telephone client, for $36 million, or $40.4 million with fees, a record for the artist at auction. (Final prices include the buyer’s commission to Sotheby’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Of the 69 works on offer, only 11 failed to sell.

Four bidders went for Bacon’s “Untitled (Pope)” from 1954, which had been expected to sell for $18 million to $25 million, but sold to a telephone bidder for $26.5 million, or $29.7 million including Sotheby’s fees.

Not everything topped expectations. Gerhard Richter, the 80-year-old German artist, currently holds the title of the most expensive living artist at auction, after a painting belonging to Eric Clapton sold at Sotheby’s in London last month for $34.2 million. Richter’s prices have been rising ever since a recent traveling retrospective that went to the National Gallery in Berlin, the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris. On Tuesday, Sotheby’s had a 1990 Richter that was estimated to bring $15 million to $18 million.

Perhaps there are just too many examples of the artist’s work — Christie’s has several on offer at its sale on Wednesday night — and this painting had only one bidder, who was willing to pay $15 million, or $17.4 million including fees.

The sale also included several Warhol paintings from the 1960s. “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice),” a 1963 work based on a photograph of a brutal car crash, went for $15.2 million. The buyer was Peter Brant, the newsprint magnate, who is a large Warhol collector. Great works on paper by Warhol are rare, and on Tuesday night three of them, also from the 1960s, brought strong prices. Top among them, “Suicide,” a gruesome image of a man jumping to his death that was expected to bring $6 million to $8 million, went to Philippe Ségalot, a Manhattan dealer, for $16.3 million — a record for a work on paper by the artist. (Sotheby’s previously sold it in 1992 for $132,000.) As the dealers and collectors were milling outside of Sotheby’s toward the end of the evening, many said they were amazed at how strong the results were, given the shaky economic picture around the world. “It was surprising,” Mr. Ségalot said. “But Sotheby’s had works that were fresh to the market and they put them in the beginning of the sale. That set the tone for the rest of the evening.”

See the article online here: $375.1 Million Contemporary Art Sale Is Sotheby’s Record - NYTimes.com

Why Is Art So Damned Expensive? - The Daily Beast

Why Is Art So Damned Expensive?

A pile of stools for $575,000. A cabinet full of surgical instruments for a cool $2.5 million. The global economy’s in a tailspin, but among the world’s elite collectors, works are selling for record prices.

by Blake Gopnik | December 5, 2011 12:00 AM EST

Walking around Miami Beach last weekend, taking in the 10th edition of its extravagant Art Basel art fair, you sensed something strange in the air. Patou’s “Joy” drifting off the pashmina? Polished walnut wafting out of the Bentleys? More basic than either: the ineffable aroma of money itself, rising from the art out for sale. By the end of the first day, a customer at Mary Boone’s booth had spent $575,000 for a pile of battered stools turned into a nest—by Ai Weiwei. A blue lozenge on a white rectangle—by Ellsworth Kelly, on view at Matthew Marks—had gone for $1.5 million. A glass cabinet full of surgical instruments, by Damien Hirst, had sold for nearly $2.5 million at White Cube’s stand. Despite the big names attached to these objects—and whatever their artistic worth—any normal observer would immediately wonder: Stools, for half a million dollars? Three times that for some plain paint on canvas? Why is art so damned expensive?

There is a pile of simple, and basically unsatisfying, explanations. There’s scamming: The veteran New York dealer Arne Glimcher speaks of the “scuzzy” people who keep the Warhol market hot by manipulating his auctions. Simon de Pury, chairman of Phillips de Pury auction house, has counted a dozen other price boosters. He says a bigger picture is always worth more than a small one. He notes that you pay a premium for a piece once owned by someone famous. And he points out that something that has been shown in a museum is worth extra. But such explanations only tell us why one object might sell for more than another. They don’t tell us why so many buyers in Miami spend more on a picture than the rest of us spend on a house.

Despite the flatlined economy, the art market has been roaring. In the first half of this year, total worldwide art sales hit a record of €4.3 billion ($5.8 billion), up 34 percent from 2010, according to the French Web site Artprice.com. The same site reports that 663 works jumped past the million-euro mark during that period, 200 more than in the first six months of 2008, which once held the record.

The top art prices may have little to do with classic economics. Noah Horowitz, whose Art of the Deal is a crucial text on the subject, says in the long run your investment in art may only do about as well as your holdings in bonds—and comes with greater risk. (But, as one major New York collector put it, that’s not so bad, if you have nowhere else to store your income. And anyway, “bonds aren’t that good to look at.”) At this moment, when the 1 percent has the cash to burn, buying art is less about finance than about the cultural value of money, and of art. “A dollar is not a dollar is not a dollar,” says Viviana Zelizer, the great Princeton sociologist who wrote The Social Meaning of Money. The dollars spent in Miami are “cultural dollars,” Zelizer says, and that makes them obey their own rules. Below, five reasons why art defies economics:

THE PRESTIGE FACTOR

“If I can’t sell something, I just double the price.” That’s what Ernst Beyeler, the great Swiss dealer who helped found Art Basel, reportedly said. Some people actually prefer to pay more than makes sense. Zelizer explains that, in all walks of life, we treat the biggest sums -differently, with special respect or even awe, than more-everyday money. “I think very often the price paid for a work is the trophy itself,” says Glimcher, the dealer.

In 2006, the crowds lining up to see a portrait by Gustav Klimt in the private Neue Galerie in New York weren’t there out of any fondness for the artist. They were there because they’d heard that the museum’s founder, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, had paid a record $135 million for it.

The sociologist Mitch Abolafia, who has made a study of Wall Street financiers, says that sometimes money speaks for itself. “A trader said to me one day, with glee in his eyes, ‘You can’t see it, but money is everywhere in this room. Money is flying around—millions and millions of dollars.’ It was a generalized excitement about money. Even I felt it.” That’s the excitement we all get from expensive art. One collector, who believes deeply that art should be bought for art’s sake, acknowledges basking in the “robust glow of prosperity” that his purchases give off once their value has soared.

The people who are spending record amounts on art buy more than just that glow. (And much more than the pleasure of contemplating pictures, which they could get for $20 at any museum.) They’ve purchased boasting rights. “It’s, ‘You bought the $100 million Picasso?!,’” says Glimcher. Abolafia explains that his financiers were “shameless” in declaring the price of their toys, because in their world, what you buy is less about the object than the cash you threw at it. The uselessness of art makes any spending on it especially potent: buying a yacht is a tiny bit like buying a rowboat, and so retains a taint of practicality, but buying a great Picasso is like no other spending. Olav Velthuis, a Dutch sociologist who wrote Talking Prices, the best study of what art spending means, compares the top of the art market to the potlatches performed by the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, where the goal was to ostentatiously give away, even destroy, as much of your wealth as possible—to show that you could. In the art-market equivalent, he says, prices keep mounting as collectors compete for this “super-status effect.”

DOLLARS ARE EASIER TO MEASURE THAN BEAUTY

I asked the great New York collector Agnes Gund how she would feel about her artworks if their value suddenly halved. “I wouldn’t feel they would have changed,” she said, explaining that most of her pictures are promised to museums. Then I asked how she’d feel if their value doubled instead, and her story changed. “Obviously, it’s wonderful to see the price rise,” she said, since that’s confirmation of the object’s cultural worth.

Book Review - When The World Spoke French - By Marc Fumaroli - NYTimes.com

When French Was the Language of Enlightenment

By CAROLINE WEBER

WHEN THE WORLD SPOKE FRENCH

By Marc Fumaroli

Translated by Richard Howard

519 pp. New York Review Books. Paper, $18.95.

A few months ago, WikiLeaks’ publication of confidential cables from American embassies around the world inspired a mock news item headlined “Sarkozy Admits French Language a Hoax.”According to this report, France’s diplomatic missives were revealed to have been written in English, leading the French president to confess that “the French really speak English, except in the presence of the British.” He went on to explain that the French language “was in fact complete gibberish,” invented by William the Conqueror’s troops during their invasion of England in order to “seem a bit more exotic” to the locals.

Whatever its humor value, this absurdist scenario underscores the degree to which English has eclipsed French as the international idiom of choice. With his magisterial study, “When the World Spoke French,” Marc Fumaroli harks back to a time when the situation was exactly the reverse. In the 18th century, he shows, “the international community of the learned” tended “to speak, write and publish mostly in French.” Whether they hailed from Russia or Prussia, Sweden or Spain, Austria or America, the Enlightenment’s best minds gravitated to French out of their shared reverence for both the matchless sophistication of the French art de vivre and the spirited intellectual exchanges of the Parisian salon.

To Fumaroli, an eminent scholar of French classical rhetoric and a member of the Académie Française, the adoption of the French language necessarily entailed the absorption of a whole system of cultural values. Like the Ciceronian Latin favored by the intellectuals of the Renaissance, 18th-century French “was a language in itself inconvenient, difficult, aristocratic and literary,” inseparable from “a bon ton in manners, from a certain bearing in society, and from a quality of wit, nourished on literature, in conversation.” Notwithstanding the radical role it would eventually play in the French and American Revolutions, the language of Enlightenment liberalism and universalism paradoxically evinced the finest qualities of the French nobility: cleverness, leisure, cultivation and charm.

Book Review - When The World Spoke French - By Marc Fumaroli - NYTimes.com

The art market: Hands up for Hirst | The Economist

Damien Hirst's coup

The art market - Hands up for Hirst

How the bad boy of Brit-Art grew rich at the expense of his investors

Sep 9th 2010

IN 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. The collapse in the Hirst market can partly be ascribed to the recession. But more important are the lingering effects of a two-day auction of new work by Mr Hirst that Sotheby’s launched in London on September 15th 2008.

The sale was memorable for many reasons, not least its name, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”. The first session took place the very evening that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. No one on Wall Street or in the City of London knew who might be next. Yet within the New Bond Street saleroom, collectors went on bidding, oblivious to the bloodletting without.

The sale was an innovative, daredevil affair. The art market is divided into “primary”, new work sold through galleries, and “secondary”, literally second-hand art, which is often put up for auction. This sale was full of primary material straight out of Mr Hirst’s studio, some of it not yet dry. (Usually the only new art sold at auction is donated by artists to raise money for charity.) According to Frank Dunphy, Mr Hirst’s business manager at the time, the galleries that represent him were very unhappy. Soon after breaking the news to Larry Gagosian, the world’s leading dealer, Mr Dunphy recalled their conversation: “Larry said, ‘It sounds like bad business to me. It’ll be confusing to collectors. Why do you need to do this? We could continue in the old way’.” Mr Dunphy went on: “We’ve had our shouting matches over the years. But there was no shouting that day.”

Sotheby’s was keen to build its own brand around a celebrity artist rather than the usual assortment of inanimate objects. The sale was marketed on YouTube and through the media around the world, part of a conscious effort to broaden international demand for the work. Sotheby’s filled its exhibition rooms with Hirsts. Never had so much of his art been seen in one place. Many art-world insiders saw the sale as an artistic event. Cheyenne Westphal (pictured above, right), European chairman of Sotheby’s contemporary art, says: “Damien’s auctions will become part of his oeuvre. He has done three sales: ‘Pharmacy’ (2004), the ‘RED’ charity auction (2008), and ‘Beautiful’. Fast forwarding, they will be very good provenance.”

Few people were convinced, though, that the market could absorb 223 lots from one artist in 24 hours. Yet an astonishing 97% of the works sold. “Beautiful” brought in £111m ($198m) and expanded the art market: 39% of the buyers had never bought contemporary art before and 24% of them were new to Sotheby’s. Europeans (including Russians) bought 74% of the lots, while 17.7% went to the Americas and 8.3% flew to Asia and the Middle East.

But who exactly bought what? Even Mr Hirst admits, “I’m still finding out.” Dealers acquired some works, but 81% of the buyers were private collectors purchasing directly. Miuccia Prada, an Italian designer and longstanding Hirst collector, for example, spent £6.3m acquiring a trio of Mr Hirst’s trademark animals in formaldehyde: “The Black Sheep with the Golden Horn”, “False Idol” (a calf), and “The Dream” (a foal made to look like a unicorn). “I think it was an incredible conceptual gesture, not a sale,” she says.

Several billionaires from the former Soviet Union also took part. Alexander Machkevitch, a Kazakh mining magnate with a taste for metallurgical themes, bought six lots in the evening sale: a large stainless steel cabinet filled with manufactured diamonds, a pair of gold-plated cabinets containing more lab gems, three butterfly canvasses and a spot painting with a gleaming gold background for a total of £11.7m. Other buyers from the region included Maria Baibakova, Vladislav Doronin, Victor Pinchuk and Gary Tatintsian.

Speculation abounds about who spent £10.3m (including commission) on “The Golden Calf”, a bull in formaldehyde with 18-carat gold hooves and horns. Many thought the garish top lot carried an ambitious estimate, £8m-12m, and would be hard to sell. In the event it proved a nervous moment—there were only two bidders—and whoever acquired it has not been showing it off. The persistent rumour is that the “Calf” has gone to the royal family of Qatar. (Just over a year earlier the emir’s daughter, Sheikha al-Mayassa al-Thani, bought Mr Hirst’s “Lullaby Spring”, a pill cabinet, for £9.65m, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist.) When asked about the Qataris, Mr Hirst replies, “I’m sure they did buy things. But it’s all hearsay. I got a call from somebody who said [the Qataris] bought ‘The Golden Calf’ but I think they’re denying it.”

Could any other artist pull off this kind of spectacular trade? Mr Hirst is often likened to Jeff Koons, an American pop artist who overtook Mr Hirst as the most expensive living artist when his “Hanging Heart” sold for $23.6m in November 2007 (see chart 1). Although Mr Koons has a larger-than-life persona and his work enjoys international appeal, he is a conservative market player who issues works in controlled editions of five and concentrates exclusively on the very high end. Nothing could be further from Mr Hirst’s risk-loving manner and his desire to offer work at a range of different prices. “Beautiful” was a success in part because it offered something for everyone.

Mr Hirst, already rich and famous, became richer and more famous. But what of his investors? Two years after the auction, the second-hand trade in Hirsts has slowed to a trickle. Even Sotheby’s, which has had a Hirst in every major contemporary sale in London since “Pharmacy” in 2004, offered none of his art in this year’s evening sale in June. The auction house admits it is avoiding Mr Hirst’s work because it can’t meet its consignors’ price expectations.

The average auction price for a Hirst work in 2008 was $831,000. So far in 2010 it is down to $136,000, a sum that does not even take into account the many lots that failed to find buyers. With prices down to 2002 levels, the artist’s work is outperforming the S&P 500, but is lagging well behind Artnet’s C50 contemporary art index, an industrial average of the 50 most traded post-war artists (see chart 2). The only Hirst pieces that are showing signs of recovery are butterfly paintings, particularly the wing-only works that evoke kaleidoscopes and stained-glass windows. Nine of the ten top trades since the “Beautiful” sale have been butterflies of some sort.

A seller’s disappointment, however, is a buyer’s opportunity. Alberto Mugrabi, a dealer and devoted supporter of most things Hirst, observed the “Beautiful” sale carefully, but bought little. By contrast, he admits to buying 40% of the Hirst paintings that have come up for sale at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the past year. “I believe in the artist,” he says. The Mugrabi family owns some 110 Hirsts, including an installation that features 30 sheep, two doves, a shark and a splayed cow in formaldehyde. The Mugrabis offered $35m for the artist’s diamond skull, “For the Love of God”, but failed to secure the work that was marketed at $100m and has never sold. “The Mugrabis rarely buy directly from me,” says Mr Hirst. “We can never work out a deal because they want such fierce prices.”

The Mugrabis liken the tumble in Mr Hirst’s secondary prices to Andy Warhol’s in the early 1990s. “In the long term, the market will be more than fine. I couldn’t be more optimistic,” says Mr Mugrabi. Yet they have not invested in Mr Hirst’s latest line of Francis Bacon-inspired skull paintings, saying that they are “not visually continuous with the old work, which we find more beautiful and relevant.” Unlike most of the work, which is made by teams of other people, the artist actually paints these himself. Most of the reviews have been ruthless: “The Worst of Hirst” and “Hirst, Renaissance man, obviously not”.

Americans who did not make purchases at the “Beautiful” sale have recently shown more confidence, buying from Gagosian Gallery’s “End of an Era” show in New York earlier this year. The Broad Art Foundation acquired “Judgement Day”, a giant gold-plated cabinet containing lab diamonds. Millicent Wilner, a Gagosian director, affirms that all 15 new works in the exhibition sold for a total of over $30m.

At the Hong Kong art fair in May a special Hirst stand by his British dealer, White Cube Gallery, was swarming with young people having their photo taken in front of the works. Daniela Gareh, White Cube’s sales director, confirms that it sold to first-time Hirst buyers from Korea, Taiwan and mainland China. “The Chinese respond to branding and Damien is a master brander,” she says. Other Criteria, Mr Hirst’s print business, also did a solid trade at the fair. Photos of Mr Hirst’s most expensive unsold work went like hot cakes. The most popular item was a foot-high image of the artist’s diamond skull, an edition of 1,000, priced at £950.

In 2008 and 2009, Mr Hirst repeatedly made statements like “The first time you sell something is when it should cost the most” and “I’ve definitely had the goal to make the primary market more expensive.” The artist was frustrated by the speculators who were buying from his galleries then quickly reselling his work at auction. Moreover, the acquisition of a package of 12 of his own works from Charles Saatchi for £6m in 2003, far more than what Mr Saatchi had originally paid, may have led to an Oedipal determination to overthrow all the high-rolling dealers and collectors who thought they might lord it over the little artist.

The goal of making the primary works more expensive may benefit Mr Hirst’s personal income in the short-term, but it makes no sense from the perspective of his market. Part of the reason that art costs more than wallpaper is the expectation that it might appreciate in value. Flooding the market with new work is like debasing the coinage, a strategy used from Nero to the Weimar Republic with disastrous consequences. If Mr Hirst were managing a quoted company, he would be unable to enrich himself at the expense of his investors in quite the same way. But Mr Hirst is an artist and, in Western countries, artists are valued as rule-breaking rogues.

Two developments could help Mr Hirst’s secondary market. He has started compiling his catalogue raisonné, a complete list of all the works he has made, which will comfort those who suspect he has made hundreds more spot and spin paintings than he admits to. According to Francis Outred, Christie’s European head of contemporary art, “As with Warhol, this could bring reassuring clarity to the question of volume within each series.” Mr Hirst is also discussing with the Tate a retrospective show to coincide with the Olympic games in London in 2012.

Hirst sceptics point out that the only museum to hold a career survey of Mr Hirst's work was in Naples, Italy, in 2004. From October 28th a private New York gallery, L&M Arts, will show 18 of his earliest medicine cabinets. The changing shape and contents of these pieces are the most intriguing evolutionary thread in Mr Hirst’s work. Indeed, they foreshadow the artist’s drive to assemble objects into auction spectaculars.

Where will the Hirst market go from here? The ball is still in Mr Hirst’s court. “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” may have been an historic moment in artist empowerment, but such performances risk destroying the delicate ecology of living artists’ markets. Mr Hirst should repair his relationship with his collectors and concentrate on his retrospective. Another “Beautiful” sale could be ugly.

Books and Arts

The art market: Hands up for Hirst | The Economist

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