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Art, damn it, art! roundup: April 11, 2013.

Thursday, April 11th, 2013

Three things in one blog post:

1. Julie Taymor and the producers of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” have settled their lawsuits. As you might expect, “terms of the settlement were not released”. However, according to the NYT:

Ms. Taymor, who filed the lawsuit in 2011 after being fired by the producers, will receive a “significant” monetary settlement that could amount to millions of dollars if “Spider-Man” goes on to wide popularity, according to one person close to her. The producers, meanwhile, no longer need Ms. Taymor’s approval of future tours and versions of “Spider-Man” — especially any that involve altering the show’s script, which she helped write, or her staging. (The show’s music is by Bono and the Edge of U2.)

The paper of record goes on to suggest that the producers will use their new-found artistic freedom to transform the show into “an arena-style special-effects extravaganza that might fit well in Las Vegas, one of the places that the producers are considering for a future ‘Spider-Man’ run”. In addition, there’s some discussion about “reductions and adjustments in royalties and payments that are factored into the weekly expenses”, which the producers hope will reduce those expenses and allow the show to – eventually – make a profit.

The show costs between $1.1 million and $1.2 million a week to run, the highest expenses on Broadway, because of its aerial stunts and technical complexity, and a problematic amount now that ticket sales are fluctuating between $1 million and $1.5 million during most weeks. With those expenses and box-office grosses, the musical is only inching toward recouping its $75 million capitalization.

2. In 2001, the American Museum of Folk Art opened a new building near the Museum of Modern Art.

“Its heart is in the right time as well as the right place,” Herbert Muschamp wrote in his architecture review in The New York Times, calling the museum’s sculptural bronze facade “already a Midtown icon.”

But things did not quite go as planned.

The folk art museum, which had once envisioned the building as a stimulus for its growth, ended up selling the property, at 45 West 53d Street, to pay off the $32 million it had borrowed to finance an expansion. It now operates at a smaller site on Lincoln Square, at West 66th Street.

MoMA bought the building. Now they plan to demolish it and put up a new building that better fits the MoMA aesthetic. (Also, “The former folk museum is also set back farther than MoMA’s other properties, and the floors would not line up.”)

“It’s very rare that a building that recent comes down, especially a building that was such a major design and that got so much publicity when it opened for its design — mostly very positive,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, the director of Columbia University’s historic preservation program. “The building is so solid looking on the street, and then it becomes a disposable artifact. It’s unusual and it’s tragic because it’s a notable work of 21st century architecture by noteworthy architects who haven’t done that much work in the city, and it’s a beautiful work with the look of a handcrafted facade.”

3. Architect Paolo Soleri has passed away.

A onetime apprentice at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West compound on the edge of Scottsdale, Ariz., Soleri founded his own desert settlement, called Arcosanti, in 1970 at a site roughly 70 miles north of downtown Phoenix.
…In a series of feverishly detailed drawings, Soleri instead proposed denser, vertical settlements that would leave more land untouched at ground level. He called this approach “arcology,” a term combining architecture and ecology.

Arcosanti never got larger than about 100 permanent residents, according to the LAT, which also asserts Soleri’s work has been influential in the “green architecture” movement. Personally, I think this is the best thing to come out of Soleri’s work, but that’s just me.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 28, 2013.

Thursday, March 28th, 2013

Lawrence threw me a nice backlink yesterday, pointing out that Bloomberg’s tobacco proposals will just put money in the pockets of organized crime.

But surely there’s hope for NYC? Surely they’ve learned and will elect someone unlike Bloomberg?

Nope. The NYT profiles Joseph J. Lhota, deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and censorious asshat.

Now, as Mr. Lhota promotes himself as a moderate Republican candidate for mayor of New York with urban sensibilities that the national party lacks, his handling of the episode stands out as a deeply discordant moment, raising questions about how he would operate in a diverse city whose current mayor champions unpleasant speech from every quarter.

Hahahhahaha. Bloomberg, champion of free speech. Unless it is about guns. Or tobacco. Or soda. Or food.

Obit watch: James Herbert, noted British horror novelist.

Posted in Art, Books, Clippings, Law, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 6, 2013.

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

My two favorite tributes to the late Hugo Chavez: here and here.

Both the NYT and the LAT are reporting arrests and confessions in the Bolshoi acid attack. (Previously.)

Investigators said that they believed that the dancer, Pavel Dmitrichenko, hired two men to accost Mr. Filin outside his apartment building late on Jan. 17. As Mr. Filin punched in an entry code, the police said, a masked man called his name and tossed the contents of a jar of sulfuric acid at his eyes.

The NYT says one of the men has confessed: the LAT says both men and Dmitrichenko have confessed.

“I organized the attack, but not to the extent of the damage that happened,” Dmitrichenko said, stone-faced, to Russian news Channel One. The dancer, who has performed such roles as the Evil Genius in Swan Lake and Russia’s brutal ruler Ivan Grozny in a ballet of the same name, planned the assault for “personal resentment related to his work,” police said, according to Russian media reports.

Roy Brown Jr. has died. Mr. Brown was a car designer for Ford. This was one of his designs:

Come all without, come all within. you’ll not see nothing like Mighty Quinn’s.

(Sorry.)

Posted in Art, Beef, Cars, Clippings, Food, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

The things you learn wandering the Internet.

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

A comment over here led me to the official website (are there many unofficial ones?) of Ern Malley, who I had never heard of previously.

Malley was an Australian poet who died at the age of 25 of Graves disease. His sister discovered his poetry in his personal effects, and sent it to Max Harris, the editor of a literary magazine called “Angry Penguins” (really, I am not making that up) for evaluation. Harris loved the poetry, and published it in the magazine, and in a book called “The Darkening Ecliptic”.

And none of what I’ve told you about Malley was true. He was actually the creation of two other poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley:

Stewart and McAuley thought modernist poetry was pretentious nonsense. They likened it to “a free association test”. They agreed with A.D. Hope that it would be a good idea to “get Maxy” and to debunk what they called the “Angry Pungwungs”.

So they created Malley and his poetry (they claimed all the poems were written “in one grand burst on a wet afternoon in their barracks”) and sent it to Harris in an attempt to puncture what they saw as the pretense of modernist poetry. Hilarity ensued…

…until Harris and “Angry Penguins” became the subject of an obscenity trial over the Malley poems. (Harris ended up being fined 5 pounds and had to pick up the garbage.)

Lawrence would probably enjoy this story, as it reminds me a lot of the “Social Text” affair. As for myself, I think “the black swan of trespass on alien waters” is a neat turn of phrase.

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Art, damn it, art! watch (#35 in a series)

Monday, January 28th, 2013

W.C. Fields supposedly said “It is morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep their money.”

I was reminded of that reading this NYT article:

Many in the art world insist there is no need for further scrutiny of a market that prompts few consumer complaints and is vital to the New York economy. But other veterans of the business say there is mounting concern that monitoring has not kept pace with the increasing treatment of art as a commodity.

Some examples of questionable practice:

Posted in Art, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#34 in a series)

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

Once upon a time, a man named Colonel Michael Friedsam, president of the B. Altman retail store chain, died.

The late Col. Friedsam left his extensive art collection to the Brooklyn Museum. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But there’s a catch. Actually, several catches.

Catch one: Col. Friedsam died in 1931. Over the years, the Brooklyn Museum has discovered…well…

… A quarter of the 926 works have turned out to be fakes, misattributions or of poor quality, and the museum potentially faces a hefty bill to store the 229 pieces it no longer wants.

This leads us directly to catch number two: the museum is paying to store stuff it doesn’t particularly want.

The problem of what to do with the unwanted items has arisen as the Brooklyn Museum tries to reclaim gallery space that has long been devoted to storage. When the museum accepted the Friedsam collection in the early 1930s, its sprawling Beaux-Arts building on the edge of Prospect Park had vast spaces to fill. As officials explain in their court filing, the opposite problem now plagues the museum, which at one point had as many as 1.5 million objects, some of them inauthentic, trivial or no longer in keeping with the museum’s mission — like a three battle-axes that came from Mr. Friedsam.

Of course, there are rules and standards on how museums are supposed to store art, so they can’t just shove stuff “willy-nilly into a closet”, as the NYT describes it.

So why don’t they just get rid of the stuff they don’t want? Surely, they can find a buyer, even for the fakes? I’d give them $5 for that Louis XI portrait.

Ah, but that’s catch number three: Col. Friedsam’s will requires that the museum get permission from the executors of his estate before they “deaccession” items. And the last executor died in 1962. The museum is working with the courts on this problem, but:

Noting that the will specified that the art should go to the colonel’s brother-in-law and two friends if the collection were not kept together, Judge Nora Anderson told the museum in December 2011 that it must search for these three men’s descendants before she would rule.

Left unclear in the article: why it took 80 years for the museum to figure out it was stuck with a bunch of crap. Or, alternatively, why there’s a crap crisis now.

Posted in Art, Clippings | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#33 in a series).

Friday, December 14th, 2012

Atlanta has this thing called “Living Walls”, which the NYT describes as “an annual gathering of street artists from around the world who paint on walls and buildings”.

Some of these paintings are in “blighted” areas; the theory seems to be that these paintings will make things look a little nicer.

But it has also prompted an outcry. Some residents have raised concerns that too much of Atlanta has become a canvas, and some find the works disturbing or offensive.

The punchline?

One mural depicting a nude woman was taken down in September after residents called it pornographic. On Tuesday, Georgia Department of Transportation workers painted over another mural — of an alligator-headed man with a serpentine tail — that neighbors said confused them and was possibly demonic.

But this had nothing to do with “artistic value”, according to the DoT: rather, they claim that the artist didn’t have the proper permits for public art. (Other “Living Walls” paintings are on private property; the NYT doesn’t make this clear, but it looks like the alligator mural was painted along the side of a road.)

And:

The mural of the woman was done by an Argentine painter, Hyuro, and the alligator painting was by a French painter, Pierre Roti. Mr. Roti, who traveled to Atlanta on his own budget and spent 11 days on the mural, said he found the reaction confusing. He intended the mural as an allegory about the brutality of capitalism, not a statement on religion or demons.

“an allegory about the brutality of capitalism”. By the way, “Living Walls” sponsors include “a prominent law firm, the Museum of Design Atlanta and the W Hotel”.

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“…with the eyes wide open”

Thursday, December 6th, 2012

Something about the state cemetery that I didn’t realize until I went there; many of the monuments are, for want of a better work, architecturally interesting.

There are quite a few standard flat tombstones (especially in the section for the Confederate dead) but it seems like many people have the attitude of “This is the state cemetery; let’s make it interesting.”

I wish the focus had come out a little better on this one. I think it works, but in retrospect, it would have been better if i had taken another shot with a smaller aperture to get better depth of field.

(And call me a sentimental old fool, but I like the inscription.)

(Tom Lea Institute. The Tom Lea Collection at the University of Texas.)

Posted in Art, Books, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#32 in a series).

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Once upon a time, there was an art gallery in New York City called Knoedler & Company.

Knoedler & Company made more than a fair amount of money selling art. As a matter of fact, they made a lot of money selling art supplied by one dealer, Glafira Rosales.

Between 1996 and 2008, the suit asserts, Knoedler earned approximately $60 million from works that Ms. Rosales provided on consignment or sold outright to the gallery and cleared $40 million in profits. In one year, 2002, for example, the complaint says the gallery’s entire profit — $5.6 million — was derived from the sale of Ms. Rosales’s works.

But there are some problems. Ms. Rosales’s “collection of works attributed to Modernist masters has no documented provenance and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.” One of the works that passed through her hands, a Mark Rothko painting, was sold by Knoedler for $8.3 million dollars, and has now been declared a fake.

At the moment 14 works Ms. Rosales brought to market — 9 of which were handled by Knoedler — have been judged as fake by authenticating bodies.
A company called Orion Analytical also conducted forensic tests on at least five Rosales paintings and reported that materials on the canvasses were not available or were inconsistent with the dates on the works.

Knoedler stopped selling works from Rosales in 2009, and immediately started losing money. They closed in 2011.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Morning random notes: September 4, 2012.

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Would you pay $18 for a 40-minute vinyl record of previously unreleased Charles Manson songs?

Yeah, I wouldn’t, either.

The album’s title, a vulgarity that means wasting time…

I want to come back to this later and elaborate on the idea some, but I’m getting more than a little tired of the mass media being coy in their reporting. (See also: Russian punk bands.)

Vasquez turned to the funding website Kickstarter to raise several thousand dollars to pay to have the album cover printed and 500 copies of the record pressed.

This kind of bothers me, too, but I’m not sure I can articulate why.

Headline in the NYT:

Gotham: A Summer of Easy Guns and Dead Children

First paragraph:

In Harlem, Paula Shaw-Leary talks of her youngest, Matt, who got his college degree in May and was accepted to graduate school…

Matt’s death is tragic, but a 21-year-old man who has been accepted to grad school is not a child.

(Gee, doesn’t NYC have strict gun control laws?)

I don’t think I ever saw anything Michael Clarke Duncan was in, and I wouldn’t say I was a big fan of his work. But 54 is just too young. (NYT. LAT. A/V Club.)

The Frank Lloyd Wright archive is moving to New York City. This sounds like a very good thing:

The models will live at MoMA, which has extensive conservation and exhibition experience. The museum will display them in periodic presentations and special exhibitions. The papers will be housed at Avery, whose librarians will make them available to researchers and educators starting at the end of next year.

(Well, a very good thing for everyone except Mike the Musicologist, who hates NYC.)

Headline from something called “The Root”, linked from the WP site:

Few African Americans at Burning Man

“Word Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit”.

Posted in Art, California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns, Law, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes, September 3, 2012.

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

Workers of the world, unite! Dyslexics of the world, untie!

In 2009, the two-year-old Southern lifestyle magazine [Garden and Gun -DB ] lost financial support from its first publisher. Its employees, many of whom had relocated from New York City to work here, were left with dwindling buyout packages and the promise of freelance pay. Real estate developers could no longer afford to buy advertisements, and some new prospects said they would not give a cent to the magazine until the owners took “gun” out of its title.

Oh, yes. Garden and Gun. I remember them. I was considering subscribing: that is, until they refused ads from the NRA. Now they can die in a fire, as far as I am concerned.

In other news, the NYT wants you to know that you should be careful buying art online.

My big question for the day: now that Reverend Moon is dead, how long will the Washington Times be around? I’ve gotten the distinct impression that it has survived that long purely because he wanted it that way, and his successors are not as wild about the paper as he was.

Mike Nesbitt has resigned as offensive coordinator at the University of Houston. That would be two days after the season opener, which they lost 30-13 to Texas State.

I’ve been kind of tied up the past couple of days and haven’t had a chance to blog the Austin Police Department acting as agent provocateurs to Occupy Austin story. I don’t really know what to make of it, so instead I’ll refer you to the Statesman story above, and the coverage from Grits for Breakfast here. (The other problem I have with this story is that much of the coverage comes from sources I don’t read and don’t trust.)

Speaking of Grits, he also has an interesting followup on the Texas Highway Patrol Association and other similar scam organizations.

Posted in Art, Austin, Clippings, Cops, Guns, Law, Media, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 7, 2012.

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

Noted art critic Robert Hughes.

A/V Club obit for Marvin Hamlisch. I expect fuller obits in the daily papers tomorrow. (I did not know, until I read it in one of the current obits, that Hamlisch was an EGOT recipient, and one of only two people to receive a Pulitzer Prize in addition to the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards. Richard Rodgers was the other one.)

The NYT is also reporting the passing of noted film critic Judith Crist.

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Art, damn it, art! watch (#31 in a series)

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

This story has gotten a fair amount of attention elsewhere, but I want to highlight one aspect of it.

Ileana Sonnabend was a noted NYC art dealer who passed away in 2007. Her children inherited her art collection, which was valued at $1 billion. So far, her heirs have paid $471 million in estate taxes on the collection, selling off a large part of it to do so.

One of the pieces in the collection is a Robert Rauschenberg piece called “Canyon”.

Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero.

The IRS values “Canyon” at $65 million, and wants the family to pay $29.2 million in tax.

“The ruling about the eagle is not something the Art Advisory Panel considered,” [Stephanie] Barron [senior curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art] said, adding that the work’s value is defined by its artistic worth. “It’s a stunning work of art and we all just cringed at the idea of saying that this had zero value. It just didn’t make any sense.”

But doesn’t the fact that the work can’t be sold make it of zero value anyway? Sort of by definition? And is Ms. Barron confusing aesthetic value with market value?

[Ralph E.] Lerner [lawyer for the heirs] said that since the children assert the Rauschenberg has no dollar value for estate purposes, they could not claim a charitable deduction by donating “Canyon” to a museum. If the I.R.S. were to prevail in its $65 million valuation, he said the heirs would still have to pay the $40.9 million in taxes and penalties regardless of a donation.

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Art, damn it, art! watch (#30 in a series).

Monday, July 16th, 2012

Jeremy Larner is the “business manager” for someone named Rob Dyrdek; as I understand it, Mr. Dyrdek is a skateboarder who has a show on MTV.

Point is, Mr. Larner is apparently fairly well-to-do, and describes himself as an “art geek”. Mr. Larner has several works by Shepard Fairey in his collection.

About 15 months ago, Mr. Larner won an auction for the right to sponsor a Fairey mural in the children’s wing at L.A. County-USC Medical Center, paying $30,000 for the privilege.

Mr. Larner is unhappy with the outcome and the way he was treated, and is suing for his money back.

I could snark on Mr. Fairey, or on the wisdom of paying $30,000 for his work, but it actually sounds like Mr. Larner has some legitimate gripes.

In a timeline in his lawsuit, Larner contended that he repeatedly reached out to the charity for updates on the mural but received no firm information for months. He said that after numerous queries to project manager Eli Consilvio, he received a prank phone call in November from a mutual friend and fellow art collector.

Part of Mr. Larner’s sponsorship included watching Mr. Fairey paint the mural. Unfortunately, Mr. Larner was “on vacation and unable to attend” when the mural was painted. It isn’t clear to me if this was a big deal to Mr. Larner. But:

As the months wore on, Larner grew frustrated that no dedication ceremony had occurred. [Project manager Eli] Consilvio said he told Larner that the administrative issues with the hospital were causing the delays and thought Larner understood. Larner filed a fraud and breach-of-contract suit in L.A. County Superior Court on June 25, detailing the delays and the prank call.

Posted in Art, California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, obit! watch: June 19, 2012.

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Barton Lidice Benes died on May 30th, but his obit shows up in today’s NYT.

Mr. Benes was a sculptor “who worked in materials that he called artifacts of everyday life”. For example, he did sculptures using shredded cash. He also did a series of sculptures called “Flood”, using damaged property donated by victims of the 1997 North Dakota floods.

When friends started dying of AIDS, and Mr. Benes himself tested HIV-positive, he began working in everyday materials of the epidemic — pills and capsules, intravenous tubes, HIV-infected blood and cremated human remains.

One of the interesting aspects of this obit is the detail that Mr. Benes, who lived in Greenwich Village, apparently had a close relationship with the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. NDMA exhibited his work in the 1990s, and…

…plans to build a replica of his apartment and furnish it exactly as Mr. Benes left it. Among its objects, many of them macabre, are a blackened human toe; a giant hourglass holding the mingled ashes of two of Mr. Benes’s friends, partners who died of AIDS; a gall stone removed from his friend Larry Hagman, the actor; and a stuffed giraffe’s head.

I’m curious how the relationship between Mr. Benes and NDMA developed. It just seems odd that he’d be that close to an art museum in what New Yorkers consider “flyover country”. It also seems odd that he had so much trouble exhibiting his “transgressive” art in NYC.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

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