Announcement
USA art 23 articles, created at 2016-10-01 06:00
1 Kim, Kourtney Kardashian Turn out to Buro 24/7’s Cocktail in Paris Cohosts included Miroslava Duma, Carine Roitfeld, Irina Shayk and Natasha Poly. 2016-09-30 21:07 912Bytes wwd.com
2 Shirley Jaffe, Geometric Artist of Joyful Forms, Dies at 93 An American w ho settled in Paris, Ms. Jaffe moved from Abstract Expressionism to a style rich in color and energy, finding a new audience in the 1990s. 2016-09-30 21:05 6KB www.nytimes.com
3 Trial Offers Rare View of Wildenstein Family and Fortune The art dealer Guy Wildenstein and his financial advisers are facing charges of tax fraud and money-laundering in a French court. 2016-09-30 20:51 6KB www.nytimes.com
4 jiří příhoda's 'generator' is a sanctuary inside CCC art museum jiří příhoda continues his investigations into the nature of space and solitude in a new collaboration w ith the czech china contemporary art museum, beijing 2016-09-30 20:30 4KB www.designboom.com
5 Film: Pornography of Power In her last film project, the late artist Ellen Cantor mixed documentary and soap opera genres to expose the perversity of US support for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. 2016-09-30 19:00 12KB www.artinamericamagazine.com
6 Up Close: Narrative Painting The representational paintings and draw ings of New Orleans artist Willie Birch echo traditional African fractal patterns, reinforcing his solidarity w ith local “bottom up” social organizations. 2016-09-30 19:00 13KB www.artinamericamagazine.com
7 The Digitized Museum Introducing A.i. A.’s special issue on museums and digital technology, its organizers reflect on how new electronic devices, new institutional policies and programs, and a new emphasis on access, interactivity, and feedback are altering long-established ideas about w hat an art museum is and w hat it should do. 2016-09-30 19:00 12KB www.artinamericamagazine.com
8 The Public as Producer At the Cooper Hew itt, a multipurpose handheld device called the Pen enables visitors to share in “design thinking” through instantaneous searches of the collection and experiments in high-tech drafting. 2016-09-30 19:00 20KB www.artinamericamagazine.com
9 Silicon Values The New Museum has adopted the start-up incubator model for its New Inc residency program. Has it also taken on the goals and thinking of today's venture capitalists? 2016-09-30 19:00 20KB www.artinamericamagazine.com 10 Unknown Makers Casts and copies once played a key role in education of artists and their public. Will the ever-proliferating, ever-improving images and 3D reproductions made possible by new technology soon become fully legal and critically legitimate? 2016-09-30 19:00 40KB www.artinamericamagazine.com
11 Met Picasso Belonged to Family That Fled Nazis, Suit Says Law yers for the estate of Paul Leffmann say persecution by the Nazis led him to sell a painting. 2016-09-30 18:42 3KB www.nytimes.com
12 Fall Exhibitions Preview (2): 8 Exciting London Exhibitions in October and November Part 2 of our guide to the season's best show s, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Rodin, and the Guerrilla Girls. 2016-09-30 18:28 4KB www.blouinartinfo.com
13 Sam Moyer Joins Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, Leaving Rachel Uffner Gallery [Updated] Installation view of "Sam Moyer: More Weight" at Rachel Uffner Gallery in 2014. COURTESY RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY Sam Moyer, a longtime member of the artist 2016-09-30 18:01 2KB www.artnews.com
14 The Duchess of Cambridge Inadvertently Bolsters Sales for Canadian Company Sentaler The Duchess of Cambridge has chosen an assortment of designer labels w hile in Canada including CH Carolina Herrera — a first for the royal. 2016-09-30 17:59 2KB wwd.com
15 Russia Urged to Liberalize Trade Policy at WTO Russia is the w orld’s 10th largest apparel import market w ith shipments valued at more than $5.6 billion last year. 2016-09-30 17:43 2KB wwd.com
16 Scott Kay Sets FIT Jewelry Design Student Competition Student designs are eligible to be produced and show n at the JCK Las Vegas trade show . 2016-09-30 17:42 1KB wwd.com
17 Datebook: Ellwood Risk at Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica 'A History of Violence' by Los Angeles-based artist Ellw ood Risk is on view at Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica through October 8, 2016. 2016-09-30 17:41 1KB www.blouinartinfo.com
18 Nike’s Bike-Sharing Program With Portland Offers Limited-Edition Bikes Nike signed a $10 million five-year deal w ith the city of Portland, Ore., to provide 1,000 bikes for a bike-sharing program. 2016-09-30 17:34 2KB wwd.com 19 Post-Merger, Auctionata | Paddle8 Will Be Known as Paddle8 When Auctionata acquired Paddle8 in May, the company took on an unw ieldy tw o-part moniker; the film w ill now streamline its name. 2016-09-30 17:34 5KB news.artnet.com
20 New York International Fringe Festival Will Skip 2017 Organizers of the summer festival, w hich has been produced for 20 years, say the hiatus w ill be used to reconsider the festival’s mission. 2016-09-30 17:27 3KB www.nytimes.com
21 Datebook: Sol LeWitt and Zhang Xiaogang at Pace Beijing A group exhibition show casing the new paintings of acclaimed Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang and sculptures and w all draw ings of American artist Sol LeWitt is on view at Pace Beijing. The event w ill run through November 19, 2016. 2016-09-30 17:25 1KB www.blouinartinfo.com
22 Datebook: ‘A Perhaps Hand’ at IT Park, Taiwan An exhibition titled 'A Perhaps Hand' presenting the w orks of acclaimed artist Mia Wen-Hsuan Liu w ill be on view at IT Park, Taiw an, from October 1-29, 2016. 2016-09-30 17:19 1KB www.blouinartinfo.com
23 These Artists Sampled Fukushima's Textures and You Can, Too The 'Fukushima Texture Pack' is almost like being there. Just, minus the radiation. 2016-09-30 17:10 3KB thecreatorsproject.vice.com Articles
USA art 23 articles, created at 2016-10-01 06:00
1 /23 Kim, Kourtney Kardashian Turn out to Buro 24/7’s Cocktail in Paris SOFT POWER: Russian designers moves into the spotlight on Friday at the cocktail reception of Miroslava Duma’s Buro 24/7’s Fashion Forward Initiative supporting emerging designers at the Ritz when Paris Fashion Week was in full swing. Kim and Kourtney Kardashian made a showing, furthing upping the glamor of the event whose cohosts including Carine Roitfeld , Irina Shayk and Natasha Poly.
2016-09-30 21:07 Laure Guilbault wwd.com
2 /23 Shirley Jaffe, Geometric Artist of Joyful Forms, Dies at 93 Shirley Jaffe, an American painter working in Paris whose brilliantly colored, dancing geometric forms found an appreciative new audience when she began exhibiting in New York in the 1990s, died on Thursday in Louveciennes, France, near Versailles. She was 93.
Her death was confirmed by her brother, Jerry Sternstein.
Ms. Jaffe moved to Paris in 1949 and, somewhat to her own surprise, settled in and stayed. She was surrounded in the early days by a coterie of American artists, including Sam Francis , Joan Mitchell and Al Held , and the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle.
Her Abstract Expressionist work found a home in the Jean Fournier Gallery. She became a fixture on the scene. But she experienced a crisis in the early 1960s during a year in Berlin.
“I felt that my paintings were being read as landscapes,” she told Bomb magazine in 2004. “I became aware that gesture as gesture wasn’t sufficient for me. Something wasn’t working.”
Breaking with Abstract Expressionism, she embraced a highly individual, extremely refined geometric style that arranged single-color swirls, arabesques and hard-edged shapes in a tense, tingling formal arrangement, often against a white ground, that reminded critics of Matisse in his cutout phase, or Miró, or the American painter Stuart Davis. The color sense, and the joie de vivre, seemed profoundly French, the reckless energy American. She once described her canvases as “a general congestion of events.”
For the next half-century, working in a small apartment-studio on the Left Bank, Ms. Jaffe refined and extended her inquiries into the drama of form and color — always at a distance, literally and figuratively, from the currents of American art.
“After reinventing herself as a painter in the late 1960s she gradually, over the next 20 to 30 years, brought to her work an incredible vitality of form and complexity, not through gesture but through the very deliberate, patient shaping of form,” Raphael Rubinstein, the author of the 2014 monograph “Shirley Jaffe: Les Formes de la Dislocation” (“Shirley Jaffe: Forms of Dislocation”), said in an interview. “She arrived at this style through an internal developmental process. She was not part of a movement, so she was, in a sense, stylistically ahistorical. There was no other painter like Shirley.”
She was born Shirley Sternstein on Oct. 2, 1923, in Elizabeth, N. J. Her father, Benjamin, ran a shirt factory. After his death, when she was 10, the factory failed and her mother, the former Anna Levine, took her three children to the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn.
After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School, she earned a bachelor’s degree in art from the Cooper Union in 1945. She then worked in the print department of the New York Public Library and for a time drew fashion sketches in the advertising department at Macy’s.
After marrying Irving Jaffe, she moved to Washington, where Mr. Jaffe was the White House correspondent for Agence France-Presse. She attended the Phillips Art School there before moving with her husband to Paris, where he continued working for the news agency and studied sociology at the Sorbonne on the G. I. Bill.
“I went to every contemporary gallery and looked at everybody’s work and gave myself a visual education,” Ms. Jaffe told Bomb. By the time she and her husband divorced in 1962, she had been given her first solo show in Berne, in southern France, and found a place for herself in Paris’s small art community.
In the middle of the decade she began showing regularly at the Fournier Gallery, although Mr. Fournier was less than enthusiastic about the new direction her work had taken late in the decade.
“In the very first paintings it wasn’t geometry, more like ‘lite’ geometry,” she told the arts journal The Brooklyn Rail in 2010. “The lines weren’t always straight. I kept elements of a kind of gesture in a certain section of the painting. And then I began to develop on that.”
Reviewing her paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 2015 for The New York Times, Holland Cotter called her “an expressive geometrician” who “makes painting look like fastidiously worked joy.”
Ms. Jaffe’s fellow Abstract Expressionists regarded her break with gestural abstraction as heresy, and it was not until she was in her 60s that she was given her first solo show in New York, at the Holly Solomon Gallery. Tibor de Nagy Gallery has represented her in the United States since 2002. In France she is represented by the Galerie Nathalie Obadia.
“She hasn’t played the crafty New York game of positioning oneself in other people’s opinions,” the critic Kay Larson wrote in New York magazine in 1990. “The paintings she has created are full of lonely nuance and exaltation, bracketed by a deep silence of mind and spirit.”
In 1999 the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret, near the Spanish border, mounted a survey of her paintings of the previous two decades, and the 14th-century chapel of St. John the Evangelist in Perpignan, further north, installed nine stained glass windows that she had been commissioned to design.
She leaves no immediate survivors aside from her brother.
Ms. Jaffe worked steadily and methodically into her 90s, producing paintings and works on paper that showed no sign of flagging invention or vigor. The evidence was on display as recently as March, when Tibor de Nagy exhibited her mixed-media works on paper.
To the end, she retained the power to surprise. “I don’t believe that one thing follows from another, and I don’t want a logical reading in my painting,” she told Bomb. “I want the possibility of unpredictable change.”
2016-09-30 21:05 By www.nytimes.com
3 /23 Trial Offers Rare View of Wildenstein Family and Fortune PARIS — Guy Wildenstein, the billionaire international art dealer, is most accustomed to his company’s regal limestone headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But for the last few days, he has stood at a wooden dock in an ornate courtroom here, fending off questions about inheritance taxes and a maze of financial trusts that a French judge described as part of the family’s DNA.
After months of legal delays, Mr. Wildenstein, 70, and seven others — including his entourage of Swiss and French financial advisers — are on trial at the Palais de Justice on charges of tax fraud and money-laundering in a process that is to continue through Oct. 20.
Mr. Wildenstein, president of Wildenstein & Co. in New York, is accused of underestimating inheritance taxes after his father, Daniel, died in 2001 in France at 84. Prosecutors contend that Mr. Wildenstein and his brother, Alec, schemed to hide art and assets in complex trusts and abruptly moved millions of dollars in artworks from New York to Switzerland days after their father died.
For this secretive family — with a presence in the art world dating back four generations — the trial has offered a glimpse of tense financial disagreements and quarrels over estates in testimony delivered in French, English, Russian, German and financial jargon. It also has provided a rare accounting of the size and worth of the family’s old master and Impressionist works now stored in Switzerland, Singapore and the United States.
A tribunal of judges is probing the opaque system by which the international art market uses foreign trusts, shell companies, and freeport warehouses to shelter art works and obtain loans against the security of the assets for other investments.
Tax fraud carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years and possibly other fines. The French government has calculated that the estate could owe, with fines and interest, at least 550 million euros, or roughly $600 million.
Mr. Wildenstein’s defense is that he was advised by his lawyers that he did not have to disclose the trusts to French authorities since those entities, and not the family, technically owned the paintings. But during the opening days of the trial, Olivier Géron, the presiding judge on the tribunal, repeatedly elicited information from the financial advisers indicating that the family had made critical decisions about art sales and demands for distribution of money.
Under the French system, the judge is free to call witnesses back to the stand immediately to ask them questions when their testimonies conflicted.
He also demanded an explanation from Mr. Wildenstein regarding the sudden movement of artworks after his father’s death and why his father had created four offshore trusts registered in the Bahamas and Guernsey, a Channel island that is part of Britain.
“Did he explain his motivation?” the judge asked, pressing Mr. Wildenstein, who faced the judge with more than 20 lawyers in black robes arrayed behind him, representing him and the other defendants.
“The protection of the heritage,” Mr. Wildenstein replied in a low voice, noting that his father had feared the dispersion of the collection and had not explained his decisions. “He was a man of few words.”
The Wildenstein family has long maintained a mystique about its holdings. No one knew what rested in their vaults in New York and Tokyo and in a research institute in the heart of Paris on the Rue la Boétie. During the trial, the tally emerged. In 1998, Daniel Wildenstein created an offshore Delta Trust in the Bahamas to hold almost 2,500 works that he valued at about $1.1 billion before his death. The Royal Bank of Canada managed it to provide funds for the family, selling artworks or making loans against their value.
About 675 works have been sold, raising about $238 million for family members, according to a bank representative, Brian Taylor, who valued the collection today at about $875 million. The remaining works are now divided among the United States, Switzerland and Singapore, he said.
Two other Wildenstein family members are also on trial in the case, including Guy Wildenstein’s nephew, Alec Jr., and Liouba Stoupakova, the widow of Mr. Wildenstein’s brother, Alec. She is estranged from the family and engaged in a continuing legal battle over her share of the proceeds from trusts created by her husband, who died in 2008.
The Wildensteins have long confronted legal challenges from generations of women in the family who have complained of having been excluded from the business or cheated out of inheritances. Sylvia Wildenstein, Daniel’s widow, sued her stepsons over her late husband’s estate, contending that assets had been hidden from her in the trusts.
Ms. Stoupakova’s frosty relationship with Guy Wildenstein was apparent when she testified in Russian and was pressured by his attorney to supply information about her Swiss bank account. She refused to respond, snapping, “I’m at war with this family.”
While she testified, Mr. Wildenstein rolled his eyes and shook his head.
During questioning on Thursday, Judge Géron pointedly raised the issue of whether women in the Wildenstein family are treated differently than men.
“I have the feeling,” he said, “that the men and women are not necessarily considered in the same way in the customs of the family.”
“I believe that you are mistaken,” Mr. Wildenstein replied, noting that for the youngest generation, “there are no differences between the male grandchildren and female grandchildren.”
2016-09-30 20:51 By www.nytimes.com
4 /23 jiří příhoda's 'generator' is a sanctuary inside CCC art museum fusing art, sculpture and architectural forms, jiří příhoda continues his investigations into the nature of space and solitude in a new collaboration with the czech china contemporary art museum, beijing. příhoda’s creations — usually taking the form of simple, temporary rooms or dwellings — become autonomous extensions of the sites on which they are built. his previous constructions, which have included a glow-in-the-dark curved pavilion in prague and a diverse series of sculptures within a baroque palace, both integrate with and interrupt the world around them, creating secluded spaces for spiritual sanctuary. the ‘generator’ is located within the czech china contemporary art museum, beijing jiří příhoda was originally invited by gallery owner zdenek sklenar to create the space in 2014. located within the studio zdenek sklenar gallery at CCC art museum, sklenar’s commission called for an interior addition capable of facilitating both conventional tasks like studying and sleeping, that would also serve as a sanctuary for mental seclusion and creative inspiration. the resultant chamber would eventually be used as a base for a two month residency within the museum, providing artists with a new space for creating work. příhoda’s final design is a ‘house within a house’, a sky-lab which hovers three meters above the studio floor. making use of dead space, příhoda nestled the lab into the corner between the studio’s ceiling and the indent in the wall created by the roof of an adjoining toilet. made from stainless steel, plywood, styrofoam, drywall and anti-corrosive corrugated metal sheets, the dwelling is divided into the almost completely cylindrical sleeping section and the half cylinder entry/living space, and is accessed through a wooden stair that descends into the gallery below. příhoda’s use of in-vaccum glued composite panels (produced by variel) allows him to create non-standard structures, capable of being sculpted into a variety of adaptable shapes. the container is accessed through stairs that lead down into the gallery space entitled ‘generator’, the cylindrical appearance of the interior suggests a gradually increasing velocity, an effect which doesn’t detract from the dwelling’s inherent sense of peace. the chamber is imagined both as workspace to foster creative ideas, and as a creative generator in and of itself. each artist that resides in the ‘generator’ is invited to redesign or arrange its interior to suit their own aesthetic needs. the project also suggests a possible solution to the lack of dedicated studio space for artists in cities and art institutions worldwide. rising rent and concentrated urban developments has made functional, affordable studio space a rarity, with many companies seeking solutions through modular, easily assembled workshops (see previously). the ‘generator’ suggests an adaptable, unobtrusive structure capable of inhabiting disused or unconventional spaces that would otherwise go unfilled. the generator is intended to be used for a series of three-month artist residencies a circular design suggests motion, but is neither claustrophobic nor overbearing the metal, which is shaped to accommodate its unconventional location, creates surprising architectural forms the commission called for a creative space, that could also be used for rest or study the project suggests a possible solution to the lack of dedicated studio space for artists in cities worldwide each artist that resides in the generator is invited to redesign or arrange its interior to suit their own aesthetic needs the studio inhabits what would otherwise be dead space within the gallery the generator is located in the studio zdenek sklenar gallery at the CCC art museum, beijing
2016-09-30 20:30 Peter Corboy www.designboom.com
5 /23 Film: Pornography of Power Ellen Cantor: Pinochet Porn , 2008–16, Super 8 transfered to video, 2 hours, 3 minutes. All images this article courtesy Estate of Ellen Cantor.
Advertisement
ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1970, PepsiCo president Donald Kendall made two urgent phone calls to the company’s former lawyer, President Richard Nixon. Kendall was alarmed about the results of the recent presidential elections in Chile, where Salvador Allende had become the first unabashed Marxist to be democratically elected in a Latin American country. Much was at stake for American corporations, which since the Kennedy administration had maintained a presence and fostered influence in Chile by investing in about 85 percent of the country’s industries. A few days later, with Kendall’s help, national security adviser Henry Kissinger met with Agustín Edwards, the owner of PepsiCo’s Chilean bottling operation and publisher of Chile’s leading newspaper, El Mercurio , which did everything it could to undermine the new president. 1
Media manipulation was part of the CIA’s plan to instigate a coup. While the junta led by General Augusto Pinochet decided on its own to rebel, it did so with the tacit approval of the United States. 2 The missiles used to bomb La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, on September 11, 1973, were allegedly secured by the US Defense Intelligence Agency. 3 Using a rifle given to him by Fidel Castro, Allende committed suicide that day in La Moneda, right after delivering a final radio address. Dramatic footage of the palace’s stone facade crumbling amid smoke and flame appears early in Ellen Cantor’s film Pinochet Porn , providing the sociopolitical backdrop for the work. Filmed in Super 8mm, Pinochet Porn is undoubtedly the defining achievement of Cantor’s career. A fixture on the Lower East Side scene, Cantor (1961–2013) is just now receiving wider attention for her diaristic drawings and videos that appropriate cinematic sources—from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Carrie to The Sound of Music and Disney cartoons. By splicing, montaging, and superimposing this found footage in her videos, she combined genres in ways both intensely personal and more broadly critical of the topology of “types” put forward by popular culture: the nuclear family, hysterical females, and other personifications of gender and class conventions.
All of this came to a head with Pinochet Porn, a labor of love Cantor worked on consistently for eight years until her death from lung cancer in 2013, at the age of fifty-one. While Cantor had already edited most of the film—along with her coeditors, artists John Brattin and Jay Kinney— the process had to be completed posthumously according to her directives. Finally finished over the summer, Pinochet Porn premieres at the Museum of Modern Art on October 31, the culmination of an extensive multi-venue retrospective of Cantor’s work that opened at 80WSE Gallery, Foxy Productions, and Participant Inc last month.
Pinochet Porn originated as a series of eighty-two drawings called Circus Lives from Hell (2004), which use thin pencil lines and collage to portray the fantastical, intertwined lives of five children growing up under the Pinochet regime or indirectly affected by it: Manuelo, Paloma, Jaimi, Guillermo, and Cantor herself. Their stories are loosely based on the biographies of real friends and acquaintances of the artist. The drawings were first shown, in 2008, at New York nonprofit Participant Inc, where Cantor and Participant director Lia Gangitano decided to project animated versions of some of them onto the gallery wall.
One of these drawings opens each of the five chapters of Pinochet Porn. The chapters are loosely connected over the film’s two-hour run time, and portray the characters falling in and out of love, doing drugs, partying, traveling, getting married, and otherwise living their lives. Fiction and history are liberally conflated by means of found footage interspersed throughout. The film was shot in fits and starts around New York City (with one sequence filmed in Cantor’s London flat), with the help of a close-knit group of collaborators, including Gangitano—who plays Pinochet’s (fictional) twin daughters, Paloma and Pipa—and a rotating cast of artists and art workers from the Lower East Side.
Cantor called the film a “soap opera,” though that hardly does it justice. It doesn’t just detail the characters’ lives and preoccupations. It offers a psychoanalytic reading of sexuality and desire that gets to the heart of how interpersonal power is leveraged institutionally—by sovereign nations, the market, the media. If anything, Pinochet Porn foregrounds the everyday fascism of our relationships to others, and the fact that love—that aspirational, cinematic ideal—is such a tempestuous, hard-to-pin-down thing.
The beginning of the film is devoted to Manuelo. After being abandoned by his mother and father (as Cantor notes in the voiceover), Manuelo starts wearing a clown costume and eating nothing but M&Ms. The film jumps ahead in time to show Manuelo, played by actor and filmmaker Patrick Blumer, as a young man now enlightened by Osho, the Indian “sex guru” (played, in the buff, by artist Cerith Wyn Evans). In a long, lively simulated orgy set in a rollicking ashram, a coterie of emancipated types dote on the good-looking Manuelo, now largely unclothed. They dance and loll around, feeding each other grapes and doing other ridiculously stereotypical “free love” things. Shot dazzlingly by Chris Hughes, Derek Jarman’s director of photography, the scene offers rich coloring, vibrant textures, tasteful nudity, and frequent improvisation among gender-bending subjects, and resembles a cross between Jarman’s Super 8 works and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963).
The one scene with actual sex in it is about Pinochet subjugating his maid. While it explores the dark, violent, and disruptive potential of sexual desire, its kitschy, tongue-in-cheek staging offers some hilarious comical reprieve. The scene begins in black-and-white, dubbed with the speech that Pinochet delivered on the day of the coup. Jim Fletcher, a professional actor who works mostly in experimental downtown theater, plays Pinochet in an official-looking military getup with shiny star-shaped medals. Cantor rented the costume, customizing it to resemble certain South American military uniforms (modeled in turn after those of Nazi officers). The role of the maid is played by Cantor in a kinky servant’s outfit, complete with a sheer thong that she lets slip to her knees.
The pairing of Cantor and Fletcher was something of an accident. Most of the artists involved were squeamish about having sex on camera. Cantor found Fletcher at the last minute. He was willing to do things “real or fake.” Cantor asked him to recruit a woman to play opposite him as the maid, but he couldn’t, so she did it herself.
In the scene, Pinochet fingers the maid, then inserts a wooden spoon into her vagina, tasting her as if she were a bowl of soup. He calls her a slut, and intones breathily: “I will teach you how to be subordinate.” Servicing him, either bent over or on her knees, the maid continues to dust as if her life depended on it, though calling her actions dusting is generous. The feather duster barely moves, shoved in the corner of the counter while she’s slumped over getting spanked, her arm outstretched awkwardly. Continuing to “clean” against all odds, she steals the scene. The comical exaggeration of stereotypical gender roles—the woman who cleans, the man who fucks her for his own pleasure while not at war—tidily illustrates the unequal power dynamics between men and women, governments and citizens, capital and consumer. By folding it all into one scene, Cantor foregrounds the intrinsic interconnections among these relationships. She reminds us that pornography is about power—the fantasy of having power and using it to subjugate.
DURING PINOCHET'S seventeen-year dictatorship, at least 2,279 leftists and other dissidents were killed, and about 28,000 were tortured. 4 This occurred with the blessing and funding of corporations—an acute grievance for Cantor. Pepsi figures prominently in Pinochet Porn , most notably in another powerful scene, in which a first-person voiceover recounts the experiences of Luz de las Nieves Ayress, who worked underground to resist Pinochet while a graduate student in Santiago. She was arrested and tortured repeatedly over the course of four years, first at the National Soccer Stadium, which had been turned into a holding pen with torture chambers, then later at detention camps, where she was the guinea pig for experiments in gauging just how far torture could go shy of murder. 5 The nauseating testimony is read aloud in full, and Cantor juxtaposes it with a montage of Pepsi lifestyle ads. Young, attractive white couples enjoy leisurely sports: jet skiing over azure waters, biking in the desert, swimming in a pool. A young man’s athletic frame is silhouetted as he swings from a rope over a lake in slow motion. All these scenes are intercut with refreshing pauses for Pepsi, its logo cradled in ice. There’s something redolent of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) in these commercials’ blatant fetishism of athletic bodies and sport. We might be conditioned to think this propaganda isn’t fascist, but Cantor persuades us that it is. While appropriation artists have critiqued corporate culture and advertising incisively since the 1980s, it’s hard to think of an indictment more pointed and damning than Cantor’s.
Pinochet Porn finds fascism in all areas of personal life. Cantor was raised in Detroit, and the city makes a long, bittersweet cameo in the second chapter of the film. In a voiceover, Cantor talks about playing with childhood friends and encountering anti-Semitism (Cantor was Jewish and her family’s rabbi was murdered in his own synagogue). 6 The city’s notorious institutionalized racism is portrayed through news footage of armored tanks rolling through the city’s streets on July 24, 1967, during one of the worst race riots in American history. Fifteen hundred National Guardsman were called in to control widespread looting and fires that destroyed nearly seven hundred buildings citywide and accelerated white flight to the suburbs. 7 These tensions were simmering while Cantor was growing up; the blissful obliviousness of a small-town-style parade seen in this sequence feels ominous. So does the absurd footage of the Pontiac Unicycle Club, its men riding down a street on exaggeratedly heightened seatposts. Cantor herself joined a unicycle club, and the inclusion of the latter clip is a bit of goofy autobiographical recollection.
Heartfelt and vulnerable, Pinochet Porn is as much about Cantor as it is about the institutionalized inequities that involve and affect everyone. In the film’s last chapter, Cantor cries in her apartment at the news of a former flame’s engagement, then kisses and makes love to Guillermo, “a magic boy [who] came from a land far away. He had the power to transform the world around him,” as she notes in voiceover. A musician, he was able to play rock-and-roll music in Chile despite Pinochet’s ban on the genre (interestingly, only pop songs and disco were sanctioned by the dictator). As we see blurry shots of sexual trysts with close-ups of flowers encircled by pollinating bees, Cantor repeats the matter-of-fact admission that “we made love for fourteen days and fourteen nights, it was amazing,” as if it were a mantra. Maybe it was, and maybe it should be, as a small means to resist untold horrors—the Pinochet regime, race riots, the September 11 attacks on New York (which makes a brief appearance in the film), and so on—that seem to appear and recur with the inevitability of clockwork. Where else would one want to escape to but the throes of love?
“Ellen Cantor: Are You Ready for Love?,” at 80WSE Gallery, New York, through Nov. 12, 2016; “Ellen Cantor,” at Foxy Production, New York, through Oct. 23, 2016; “Ellen Cantor, Lovely Girl’s Emotions,” at Participant Inc, New York, through Oct. 30, 2016.
David Everitt Howe is a New York–based critic and curator and an editor at BOMB magazine.
2016-09-30 19:00 by David www.artinamericamagazine.com
6 /23 Up Close: Narrative Painting Willie Birch: Large Hose on Wall , 2013, charcoal and acrylic on paper, 60 by 48 inches.
All images this article courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans.
Advertisement
THERE'S A CHAIR in artist Willie Birch’s studio in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward. I can’t remember if he ever told me it was “his” chair but, in my many visits to his studio, I’ve never sat in it. I met Birch when I first moved to New Orleans six years ago, and over time he has served as mentor, friend, and, on occasion, burr. At age seventy-three, Birch is an energetic pedagogue, quick to jump up and grab a book from his shelves when making a point. It is in those moments, when the chair has been suddenly emptied of his presence, that it has looked to me its most strange. Once covered in rich, inky upholstery, the chair is now threadbare, with exposed stuffing and gaping holes such that you can see right through to the door. Even in the context of the unpretentious shotgun house turned artist studio—cluttered with boxes, papers, works in progress, and xeroxed source images tacked to the walls—the chair is extreme, especially considering Birch is most likely to be seen on the streets of his native city sharply dressed in linen pants or sporting a crisp straw hat.
Last year, I stood in Arthur Roger Gallery, the prominent commercial venue on New Orleans’s Julia Street where Birch has exhibited since 1993, observing his drawings of the Seventh Ward, acrylic-and-charcoal works on paper in velvety grisaille. I recognized familiar anti-monuments— a watering hose coiled against peeling clapboard, a forlorn pair of tennis shoes flung over an electric wire—from the artist’s historically black, working-class neighborhood, located only five miles from the gallery, but seemingly a world away. Though the chair wasn’t literally depicted in the gallery, I finally understood it. I appreciated its frankness and vulnerability, the way its material makeup is exposed to every visitor to Birch’s studio, but I also had the alien sensation of “seeing through” a thing that should be solid. If the initial takeaway from Birch’s recent works is his privileging of everyday objects—a toilet bowl, a door hinge, a bag of Camellia-brand black-eyed peas—as subjects, it is the “seeing through” that lends the works their visual and metaphoric depth. When Birch pictures five abandoned baby cribs behind a chain-link fence that encompasses the whole frame, the fence assumes a tactile realism, separating the viewer from the sad and perplexing scene on the other side. Similarly, when a barred window is left ajar, as in Morning Light on Urquhart Street (2015), the eye strains to make out what’s within the dark interior.
The sense that there is more to see, that these snippets of banality are important details in an unfolding drama, was enhanced by Birch’s conscious grouping of works in this solo exhibition, “Seen and Unseen: Coupling.” Pairs of drawings were hung atop one another or side by side; others were arranged in clusters. The toilet bowl, complete with an upright plunger, found its mate in a neat roll of toilet paper. In an especially suggestive gathering of eight drawings of various sizes, two images of a single abandoned shoe (with a pronounced hole in its sole) met two dapper fedoras, two bags of black-eyed peas, and two darkly feathered chickens roaming the grass. (Feral chickens are not an uncommon sight in downtown New Orleans neighborhoods post-Katrina.)
HAVING WORKED in series for decades, Birch knows that these couplings and groupings have the power to broaden the meaning of his individual images. I frequently return to John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing when I think of how images affect one another by proximity, but in the slim brochure that accompanied Birch’s exhibition, the artist likened his associative mode of image creation to New Orleans’s greatest cultural innovation: jazz. Birch explains, “an individual melody exists by itself, but within the orchestra its meaning expands.” He continues, “The potential is infinite, but the core remains the same.” And while this melodic potentiality is not unique to jazz, it’s a telling referent, rooted both in local black life and collective work. Though it is not plainly stated in this brochure, I’ve learned through our conversations that Birch also relates this visual language—defined by attention to spacing, repetition, and scaling, among other qualities—to mathematician and author Ron Eglash’s observations of fractal patterns in African design.
Eglash’s African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design is one of the many books Birch has jumped up to show me in our hours in his studio. Eglash examines how “patterns [of fractal geometry] are surprisingly common in traditional African designs, and some of its basic concepts are fundamental to African knowledge systems.” 1 He writes:
Fractals are characterized by the repetition of similar patterns at ever-diminishing scales. Traditional African settlements typically show this “self-similar” characteristic: circles of circles of circular dwellings, rectangular walls enclosing ever-smaller rectangles, and streets in which broad avenues branch down to tiny footpaths with striking geometric repetition. 2
While Eglash is clear to disavow theories of naturalism or primitivism that disregard the diversity and complexities of distinct African cultures, his argument roots fractals within a political and social commonality across the continent. “Pre-colonial African cultures,” he remarks, “included many state societies, as well as an enormous number of smaller, decentralized social groups, with little political hierarchy—that is, societies that are organized ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down.’” 3
Decentralized organization does not always result in fractal patterns, but Eglash’s description and the potential for complex structures to develop from the bottom up resonate with Birch’s work and many aspects of New Orleans’s black social life, especially the city’s Social Aid and Pleasure clubs. These mutual-assistance groups can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when they emerged to pool limited financial resources, providing burials and other forms of aid to their members. Over the years, the clubs developed into integral service networks and entertainment hubs with dinners, picnics, and, of course, the famous second-line parades, marked by brass bands and dancing in the streets, that have become synonymous with the city’s visual performance culture.
While Birch is not a member of any club, he is no stranger to second lines and neighborhood gatherings. “I can be outside but be accepted as an insider because folks know my history and they know where I come from.” 4 For Birch this position is central to his vision of the artist as observer and storyteller, one who gains and offers new perspectives by moving between worlds. Birch frequently references the fraternal and musical culture of Social Aid and Pleasure clubs indigenous to his Seventh Ward, among other neighborhoods. In Tuba (Setting Up) , 2014, the gleaming titular instrument lies disassembled against gray asphalt—a moment of rest before coming to life. In the exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery, the tuba’s rounded body and protruding bell were echoed in nearby drawings of fedoras, part of the aforementioned grouping of shoes, peas, and chickens.
The chicken, pictured twice in this grouping, presents a wide range of associations for Birch and within many African diaspora contexts. The Adinkra symbol akoko nan (leg of the hen) , from the Akan of West Africa, comes to mind, bearing with it the values of nurturing and discipline. You can see Adinkra symbols throughout the ironwork of New Orleans. The sankofa symbol, referenced in the title of one of Birch’s chicken drawings here, Remembering a Bird Called Sankofa (2015), is likewise connected with the Akan, as well as New Orleans’s historical Free People of Color (those of African descent who were not enslaved in colonial and antebellum America). Appearing as a bird turning its head backward to take an egg off its back, or alternatively and more rudimentarily as a heartlike shape, the symbol suggests a need to reflect on the past when planning for the future.
Linked with the proverb “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten,” the sankofa symbol feels undeniably relevant today, as many natives and long-term residents struggle to make sense of and redefine their place within the rapidly changing city. And it is frequently invoked cross-generationally in post-Katrina New Orleans by activists and community leaders to signal black autonomy and resistance through collective action. For example, artist and advocate Rashida Ferdinand gave the name Sankofa Community Development Corporation to the initiative she started in the flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward in 2008. Part of a rebuilding effort focused on health, SCDC now includes a farmers’ market, a community garden, and youth programs. The symbol is also invoked through the character Madame Sankofa in Ecohybridity: Love Song for NOLA , a roving visual opera and movement-building project spearheaded by artist Kai Lumumba Barrow. Created for the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August of last year, Ecohybridity unites intergenerational black queer feminists through verse, dance, song, and installation work designed to challenge narratives about the inevitability of black dislocation.
IN THINKING about these activist practices in present-day New Orleans and Birch’s visual language, it is interesting to consider another aspect of Eglash’s research: the lusona sand drawings of the Chokwe people of Angola. As Eglash explains, “The Chokwe made use of these figures to create group identity. The reports [from missionaries] indicate that the lusona were used in an age-grade initiation system; rituals that allowed each member to achieve the status of reaching the next, more senior level of identity.” 5 Many works in Birch’s “Seen and Unseen” exhibition have patterns of interconnected circular objects (fields of gravel, bags of black-eyed peas, chandelier beads, and wildflower stamens) that resemble the lusona’s arrays of dots surrounded by curving lines. Although the similarity is incidental—Birch did not intend to create the Chokwe’s forms, which require the uninterrupted motion of the drawing utensil around the dots—it is noteworthy. The fact that the Chokwe also used the sand drawings “to deflate the ego of overconfident European visitors, who found themselves unable to replicate the lusona of many children,” 6 as Eglash remarks, suggests an apropos emblem of pride and connection in post-Katrina New Orleans, where so many black residents have been displaced by largely white newcomers. Through this lens, Birch’s tuba, black-eyed peas, and even fedoras take on the meaning embedded in the sankofa chicken, suggesting that the traditions of New Orleans must be preserved as both a mode of celebration and an avenue of resistance. Even when modest and ordinary, these traditions are important for the way they resist the homogenizing impulse in dominant American culture, and represent the rich history of black Americans in the city.
Often the desire to build upon traditions and share knowledge between generations and across peer networks seems to propel black political, social, and aesthetic movements in post- Katrina New Orleans. The place-based project “Exhibit BE” turned an abandoned housing project in the West Bank (a suburb of New Orleans across the Mississippi River) into a five- story graffiti environment and community celebration through the collective action of forty artists. Its most salient feature was a tree-house-like structure painted with revolutionary figures from black history by local graffiti artist, muralist, and co-organizer Brandan Odums. The loosely defined artist-and-activist group Blights Out uses performance, education, and advocacy to address issues of displacement and affordable housing. Its members hope to purchase an abandoned home and convert it into a community resource center to empower potential homebuyers.
The self-organizing impulses of a new generation of black artists in New Orleans—who draw on Social Aid and Pleasure clubs, the DIY spirit engendered by Hurricane Katrina, and movements like Occupy Wall Street—connect to Birch’s work and its formal and conceptual roots in diaspora experience. In a city where many black residents report themselves worse off than eleven years ago despite biased narratives of post-Katrina “progress,” the “bottom up” approach remains the most viable option for moving forward.
This article is part of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Art in America Arts Writing Fellowships, a joint project designed to foster art and culture writing in cities throughout the U. S.
Cameron Shaw is the executive director and founding editor of Pelican Bomb .
2016-09-30 19:00 by Lynn www.artinamericamagazine.com
7 /23 The Digitized Museum Aram Bartholl’s sculpture Map , 2013, 23 feet tall; in “Hello World!,” 2013, at Kasseler Kunstverein. Photo Nils Klinger.
Advertisement
AMONG THE SUBTLER indications that technology is driving profound changes in cultural institutions are the new words and symbols that have cropped up in museums’ communications to their visitors. A curator’s introduction, printed in vinyl on the wall, might have appended to it an official hashtag to be used in posts about the show to Twitter or Instagram. A label might have the lopsided grid of a QR code, to be scanned for further information about the work nearby. When the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a Jeff Koons retrospective as the final show at its Madison Avenue location in 2014, slips of paper inserted in pamphlets for teens advised: KOONS IS GREAT FOR SELFIES !
These forms of address normalize and affirm behavior that has become habitual as more and more people carry networked computers in their pockets. Museumgoers text their friends or compose work emails. They consult Google for more information about an artist. They pose for photos to commemorate the visit on Facebook. So it should come as no surprise that museums have met them halfway, attempting to claim institutional authority in the field—and feeds—of online communication. One example is #museumselfie day, an annual, internet event launched in 2014, shortly after the Whitney hosted a symposium on museums and social media where discussion focused largely on photography policies. Accepting the inevitability of smartphone use in and around their galleries, museums try to harness it to heighten their own appeal. But the internet, unlike the white cube, is messy. Serious debates about access and pedagogy on #artsed compete with more frivolous ones on #emojiarthistory. The question isn’t if museums will participate in these exchanges, but how they will. Are curators allowed to send glib tweets on #askacurator day? Will a museum invite the public to catch Pokémon in front of a Parmigianino?
Most changes to the attitudes and actions that define the museum experience have been catalyzed by visitors’ personal mobile devices, rather than by high-tech gallery infrastructure. While some art institutions have introduced digital information kiosks and touchscreen displays, most have avoided installing costly hardware that has to be upgraded or replaced every few years. The most ambitious digital interventions in galleries have been temporary. In summer 2015, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art launched The Return , an interactive installation by Reid Farrington commissioned to celebrate the successful twelve-year restoration of Tullio Lombardo’s Adam (ca. 1490–95), a marble sculpture that had been shattered in a 2002 accident. The Return featured a life-size digital rendering of Adam displayed on a screen adjacent to the restored sculpture. The 3D avatar was synced to the movements of a live performer out of view, and seemed to interact with docents and visitors. The digital Adam was a fleeting spectacle designed to generate attention for the virtuoso, but often unsung, work of conservators and to attract visitors to a key portion of the Met’s historically diverse collection, much like the earlier illumination of the Temple of Dendur with colored laser light.
DIGITAL MEDIA have also brought more durable changes that can’t be seen by the average museum visitor. Some of the biggest structural shifts are happening in the staff offices. New positions have been created to steward the integration of strategies and methods for using digital media across long-standing disciplinary divisions. In the last four years, nearly a third of major US art museums have appointed “digital directors.” 1 People employed in these positions come from a variety of backgrounds—from scholarship to communications to IT— and the exact titles vary (“manager of museum digital strategy,” “deputy director for digital experience,” “director of digital adaptation”). What matters is that these new officials don’t report to directors of communications and marketing, as digital managers do at the many institutions that haven’t established high-level positions. Rather, they report directly to senior museum leadership.
While not a digital director, Paola Antonelli, curator of design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate digital technologies into curatorial departments. She coded websites for her exhibitions in the 1990s. Some of the most innovative digital projects today attempt to transform the museum’s homepage into something more than an ad or a directory. The website for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis features artists’ op- eds, art historical research, and a selection of cultural news from other resources. Likewise, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space blog goes beyond highlighting what’s happening at the museum, hosting critical discussion for local and national arts scenes. It also serves as a platform for multimedia artwork. Many institutions have undertaken major initiatives to publish collection data and reproductions of artworks online, along with museum archives.
Extending the purview of digital innovation beyond marketing can provide new avenues for creative work, scholarship, and institutional openness. But more often than not it tends to infect those fields with practices from the business side, exacerbating the increasing influence of marketing and fund-raising departments in museums over the last several decades. Curators are now confronted with analytics about who is visiting their shows and how those visitors are interacting with the displays—analytics that prompt everything from implicit managerial pressure to direct recommendations for increasing attendance. In order to get the money they need to launch ambitious projects, museums often have to define their mission in terms that make sense to nonprofit foundations funded solely by number-crunching technology companies.
One organization at the forefront of efforts to digitize museums is the Google Cultural Institute, a nonprofit offshoot of the Silicon Valley behemoth Alphabet. The GCI uses Google Street View technology to create 360-degree representations of museum galleries. Anyone with internet access can simulate the experience of wandering through the Hermitage’s grand halls, the Met’s Northern Renaissance collection, or the galleries of the Archaelogical Museum in Harappa, Pakistan. In some of the bigger institutions that participate in the Google Art Project— the branch of GCI that works with museums—paintings and sculptures under copyright protection are blurred, like the faces of people captured by the cameras on the Google vans that photograph streets, underscoring the limits of the access Google provides.
And yet the GCI offers a viewing experience that, in other ways, far surpasses that of a real gallery. So-called gigapixel captures—ultra high-resolution images of paintings—enable viewers to “go deep,” as lead Google engineer Amit Sood explained in a 2011 TED Talk. Visitors can zoom into the backgrounds of old master landscapes, presented at some ten billion pixels, and study details that are difficult to discern with the naked eye. Given its depth and complexity, Pieter Bruegel’s work has often been used by Google to demonstrate the amazing possibilities of this and other imaging technologies. 2 Working with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, GCI recently produced animated virtual reality representations of some of the Flemish artist’s masterpieces. A smartphone video player combined with Cardboard, Google’s VR viewer, transformed The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) into a dynamic, immersive environment in which a cast of demonic antagonists appears to wrestle and fight.
Where is the line between enriching the experience of viewing a work and fundamentally transforming it? It’s exciting to see a 450-year-old painting or a 500-year-old statue (like the Met’s Adam ) set in motion. But when the museum and its corporate partners bring these works “to life” with cutting-edge tech, are they also implicitly declaring the death of the static art objects that fill physical galleries? In 1999, museum historian Karsten Schubert predicted: “As more and more aspects of our lives become virtual, our fetishist fixation on the museal object may grow in accordance.” 3 But the increasing prevalence of spectacular animations of “dead” works makes Schubert’s assertion ever harder to accept. The value of the static object seems to decrease as museums satisfy cravings for mobile, flexible media.
MUSEUMS AIMING to enrich and enliven encounters with their collections through digital means face significant challenges. Chief among them is the expense of building and maintaining the necessary infrastructure. Though a robust social media presence can be a comparative bargain, gigapixels don’t come cheap. At a time when most museums are slashing staff and struggling to raise funds, it may seem irrational to pursue digital spectacles that could be dismissed as luxuries, or broaden virtual access when brick-and-mortar institutions require upkeep. Yet novel technologies can attract new audiences and excite potential donors, creating a feedback loop of engagement and financial support. Or at least that’s the hope.
The tech buildup parallels the contemporary boom in museum construction in this sense. “Institutions that already had to beg for funding were drawn into building more expensive facilities,” critic Ben Davis argued in a recent New York Times Op-Ed. “It is evidently still easier to raise money for fancy new things than to maintain what is already here. . .. So, have museums been growing? Yes. But on a sustainable basis? No.” 4 Apps, VR displays, and touch-screen kiosks might be considered examples of “fancy new things,” along with shiny new wings by famous architects. Well-funded organizations like Bloomberg Philanthropies have enthusiastically supported such digital initiatives, partnering with cultural institutions of various sizes around the world in the name of easier access to art through technology.
But there are reasons to be wary when private-sector entities rush to bridge the gap between public museums’ digital aspirations and their brick-and-mortar realities. Google may currently share its high-res images with the world, but the valuable data ultimately lives on its servers. The British Museum had been working on independent technology to represent its galleries online, but then in 2015 it abandoned the project, citing expense, and handed over the data to Google. What does it mean for paintings held in the public trust by institutions that receive taxpayer subsidies to be converted into partly privatized pixels? Copyright laws in this area are murky, and there’s no way to know what return on investment the private tech companies partnering with museums will expect in the future.
While the effects brought about by digital media aren’t as readily visible as construction, they are arguably even more important. Museums aren’t just sharing data they already have. They are producing new kinds of data. Mobile apps, such as the one launched by the Dallas Museum of Art, offer access to virtual representations of the museum’s collection and extended texts about exhibitions, but they also track users’ movements in the galleries and log information about their preferences. The museum’s role as custodian of objects is doubled by a new role as custodian of data. And if the purpose of preserving art objects is to serve the public—those future artists, students, and seekers who might find inspiration or solace in them —the purpose of maintaining a data stockpile is less romantic. The digitization of the museum prompts a renewed examination of whom the institution serves, and to what ends.
2016-09-30 19:00 by Alexander www.artinamericamagazine.com
8 /23 The Public as Producer The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s Pen, with nine of twenty-eight objects in the collection found by searching for navy in the museum’s color- coded database. Left to right: binder bin, 1994; mouse trap, date unknown; Dutch covered dish, ca. 1920s; button, date unknown; match safe, date unknown; card index, 1994; lamp, 1962; Iranian vase, 17th–18th century; flashlight, ca. 1980s.
Advertisement
Beyond exhibiting design objects, the Cooper Hewitt seeks to transform museumgoers into designers, a tech- driven approach that is creating a new role for cultural institutions.
FROM BEHIND the sleek thermoformed desk that curves through the wood-paneled lobby of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, an attendant waved at me, hoping to grab my attention as I walked toward the galleries on a recent visit. She had already handed me a ticket, but I was missing something of equal importance: the Pen. This black tube about the thickness of a whiteboard marker with a stylus on one end and a fragmented plus sign on the other is the key to the Cooper Hewitt’s visitor experience and the focal point of one of the most ambitious efforts by any museum to integrate digital technology into its galleries.
The Pen, which allows users to create digital collections and activate displays in the galleries, has been a hit. Visitors have lauded it on Yelp, and museum professionals have analyzed it at conferences. The professional designers’ association AIGA celebrated the device, calling it a “design solution that successfully demonstrates the value of design.” 1 At press time, 185,649 people had used the Pen to interact with the Cooper Hewitt’s exhibitions since the device debuted in early 2015, shortly after the museum reopened following a three-year, $91-million renovation of its Upper East Side home, the former residence of industrialist Andrew Carnegie. A total of thirteen architecture and design firms were enlisted for the overhaul, including New York’s Local Projects, which conceived the Pen. The museum expanded its galleries and refurbished its landmarked building. More important, perhaps, the Cooper Hewitt took the opportunity to rethink its identity, its collecting policies, and even its mission. The Pen is a tangible outcome of these broad efforts. The device embodies a contemporary, process- oriented definition of design, one that the museum champions, business leaders praise, and many cultural institutions are increasingly adopting.
The first thing I noticed on my recent visit was that everyone had a Pen in their hands, and most people were using it. One woman, head cocked to the side, studied a Nigerian textile in shades of yellow, green, and blue. After some contemplation, she gingerly stepped forward, matching the plus sign on her Pen to the one on the wall label. Three circles on the barrel lit up in quick succession, indicating she had stowed the object in her “collection.” Using the large touch- screen tables scattered throughout the building, visitors can download the digital contents from their Pen on the screen and subsequently explore other objects by the same creator, from the same time period, or simply in the same color. Hunched over the tabletop, a man sorted through hundreds of collection images that appeared to float and collide. A young girl across from him used the stylus on her device to quickly sketch a chair.
Unlike most technologies found in museum galleries, which are often viewed as supplementary to the visitor experience, the Pen is intended to be a central part of the Cooper Hewitt. As director Caroline Baumann told me in a recent interview, the goal is a 100 percent pick-up rate. 2 The museum’s galleries have been conceived as sites of interactive engagement rather than passive observation. With the Pen, design becomes a verb, something you do in the museum, and not just something you look at. The Pen not only facilitates the act of design but encourages viewers to assume the mind-set of a designer, a specific approach to thinking and problem-solving. The Cooper Hewitt has become a model for other museums and cultural institutions because it makes this creative mind-set—known as design thinking— accessible to its broad and diverse audiences.
At the 2016 Museums and the Web conference in Los Angeles—arguably the country’s largest professional museum-technology confab—numerous speakers advocated design thinking. The conference offered workshops on “Design Sprints for Awesome Teams,” and words of wisdom on “Design Thinking for Museums,” and “Co-Designing the Future of Museum Digital Literacy.” Institutions around the county are enacting programs informed by these perspectives. In 2014, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, opened their Maker Lounge, a space that’s meant to introduce museum visitors to the design process and that periodically hosts designers for short residencies.
Museums of all kinds are eager to embrace the language of design for many of the same reasons that top business schools offer courses in design thinking, and corporate consultants teach the method to their clients. Framing cultural production in terms of design underscores the former’s links to technology and emphasizes its economic value. In this sense, while we tend to think of museums as stewards of the past, they are also mirrors of the trends and politics of their time.
THE CONTEMPORARY NOTION of design promoted by the Cooper Hewitt developed over the course of the institution’s history. The museum was built on the legacy of Peter Cooper (1791– 1883), an industrialist who created the first steam locomotive in the United States. Cooper was an ardent supporter of public education, and in 1859 he opened the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a New York college that remained tuition-free until recent years. His dream of founding a decorative arts museum was realized posthumously by his three granddaughters: Sarah, Eleanor, and Amy Hewitt. The Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration opened in 1897 on the fourth floor of the college. Donations from New York’s industrial and financial leaders made up most of the collection. Early acquisitions included drawings of Italian architecture and decorative motifs and eighteenth-century French furniture. John Pierpont Morgan, a banker, gave an assortment of European textiles. Such exemplary objects, reflecting elite taste, contributed to what has been called a visual library, meant to inspire professionals and students in the fields of art and engineering. In keeping with Cooper’s concern for public education, the Hewitts emphasized access, offering free entry. (Baumann characterized the sisters’ visual library concept as prescient, calling it a “user-centered” approach to cultivating design thinking.)
The institution was forced to reinvent itself in the 1960s. In response to a budget crisis, the trustees transferred control of the museum to the Smithsonian in 1967. The following year, the Carnegie Corporation offered a new home for the institution, a mansion built by Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the twentieth century. The structure was exceptional in its time; Carnegie eschewed the excessive ornamentation popular with his peers and instead loaded his building with the latest gadgetry, including climate control, electric lighting, and an Otis passenger elevator.
This new setting underscored a more fundamental change in the museum’s approach. Its previous focus on ornament and unique craftsmanship, maintained through the 1950s, was giving way to a broader understanding of design as distinct from the decorative arts. The rival design department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art had, throughout the 1950s and ’60s, advocated “good design” in industrial manufacturing, celebrating functional and efficient products for everyday use. When the renamed Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design, opened its doors in 1976, its inaugural exhibition suggested an even more radical interpretation of this democratizing impulse. Organized by architect Hans Hollein, “MAN transFORMS” was indicative of a shift in rhetoric, signaling an all- encompassing definition of design. As Hollein wrote in the exhibition catalogue:
Everything man touches he alters to suit his esthetic as well as his physical needs. The altering of things and places is the process of design. . . whether it is dough for bread, cloth for a ball gown, wood for a chair, metal for a tool, or the contours of the earth for a city. 3
If the decorative arts were linked to elite tastes, the version of design heralded by the Cooper- Hewitt appeared to be by and for everyone.
Still, the downside to claiming such an expansive purview is that it waters down the meaning of design. How could one discipline cover everything from bread dough to the contours of the earth? Postmodern theorists in the early 1970s were already sounding the alarm about the homogenizing effects of an ever-expanding category of design. Jean Baudrillard argued that the overbroad understanding of design emerging in the ’70s risked subsuming and neutralizing creative production of all kinds: “Objects, forms, and materials that until then spoke their own group dialect, which only emerged from a dialectical practice or an original style, now begin to be thought of and written out in the same tongue, the rational esperanto of design.” 4 Art historian Hal Foster extended this critique, noting that the umbrella term “design” allows capitalist logic to infiltrate all aspects of material culture. 5
Design, it seems, could no longer be defined with purely aesthetic qualities (beautiful ornaments), or even specific categories of objects (furniture, textiles). Other thinkers in the ’70s began emphasizing the thought process of the designer. In 1972, designer and writer Victor Papanek proclaimed: “All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity.” 6 He went on to list pursuits as wide-ranging as mural painting, poetry, and dentistry as falling within this purview. Yet Papanek’s purpose in defining the field in such broad terms was different from Baudrillard’s. For Papanek, a concern for human needs was fundamental to design, and his approach—what we’d now call “human- centered” or “user-centered” design—emphasized a process of testing and evaluating, with the goal of creating humane, useful objects for every setting. Papanek advocated a design process that would balance technical mastery and experimental rigor with empathy and creativity.
The Pen reflects the continued relevance of this ideal. At the 2015 Museums and the Web conference in Chicago, Sebastian Chan, then director of digital and emerging media at the Cooper Hewitt, spoke to a hushed audience about the Pen. As an organization focused on design, he began, the Cooper Hewitt had a unique luxury: “We get to focus on process over objects.” 7
Chan emphasized how a version of Papanek’s process-oriented, human-centered approach is at the heart of the Cooper Hewitt’s visitor experience. It’s evident in the Process Lab, a hands- on space where visitors can craft a lampshade of cellophane and chicken wire and watch how the materials shape the light, or sketch cartoon characters that embody emotions. In the Immersion Room visitors can draw their own wallpaper patterns and project digital versions onto the room’s surfaces. Visitors also engage with the museum’s collection in dynamic ways. Exhibitions can be eclectic, with digital creations displayed alongside traditional ornamentation. Baumann explained that the Cooper Hewitt collapses and remixes the history of decorative arts and design. “We happily present both, together and separately, on a global scale and along a historic continuum.”
Armed with the Pen, visitors can examine hundreds of collection items that appear on the tabletop screens. The effect of seamlessly moving through a vast collection is made possible by a sophisticated application programming interface, or API, that is as fundamental to the museum’s revamp as any architectural intervention. The API allows data to flow from various sources, whether a collections database, a ticketing system, or a customer relationship management tool, into websites and applications. Visitors can interact with these programs on- site via the Pen, but the Cooper Hewitt has also opened its system to the public.
Independent developers can tap into the Cooper Hewitt API for their own creations: the technologist Kyle Greenberg created a virtual aquarium populated by fish-related objects from the collection, and data visualization designer Rubén Abad printed a poster with all of the colors in the collection sorted by decade. This unfettered access to cultural data elicits anxiety in many museum professionals who are wary of releasing any inaccurate information. Such fears can stall museum projects for years. It’s impressive that the Cooper Hewitt, part of the government- run Smithsonian Institution, has been able to expedite wide access. As director of digital media Micah Walter explained to me, he perceives a strong obligation to the public trust, viewing “metadata as public domain.” 8
Of course, the museum’s data system isn’t a one-way flow of information from the collection to the world; the Cooper Hewitt’s API also captures data. The Pen can track visitors’ interactions with the exhibitions. The museum knows how long the average person spends on the Cooper Hewitt campus (110.63 minutes), how many visitors saved designs they created (122,655 in the first year), what percentage of people didn’t use the Pen to “collect” (23.8 percent), and which works are the most collected. As Walter remarked, “The big question now is, what do we do with all of the data.”
The Cooper Hewitt is not the first museum to engage in data collection practices. The Dallas Museum of art’s DMA Friends program, for example, is a loyalty program that asks visitors to check in to exhibitions and activities with their mobile devices in exchange for membership rewards such as free parking and special exhibition tickets. The trade-off can seem reasonable: visitors partake in an enriched museum experience, while the museum gets a more precise understanding of visitor behavior which can then be applied to developing future exhibitions. This feedback loop allows museum administrators to apply a human-centered design philosophy on an institutional level.
There is, of course, a dark side to data mining. Today’s technologies—from the GPS tracker on your phone to Facebook’s mapping of social ties—have brought upon a rise in and normalization of mass surveillance. This cultural climate makes it essential for museums engaging in visitor data collection to ask themselves how they might be complicit in such systems. As institutions devoted to serving the public, the responsibility in building ethical data- based experiences becomes all the more important for museums.
FOR MANY IN the design field, melding a humanistic approach to design with quantifiable metrics holds enormous potential to achieve social and economic progress. One figure key to defining the Cooper Hewitt’s current mission was Bill Moggridge, who became director in 2010. Born in the UK, Moggridge was a founder of the design consultancy IDEO and is best known for his role in building the first laptop computer, in 1979. Despite his short tenure at the Cooper Hewitt, which ended tragically when he succumbed to cancer in September 2012, Moggridge left a mark. “Bill infiltrated the Cooper Hewitt with asking questions all the time,” Baumann explained, “looking at everything and saying, ‘How might we do it differently?’” Those three words—“how might we?”—suggest the inquisitiveness at the heart of IDEO’s particular strain of design thinking, a rigorous methodology the company provides to clients including Fortune 500 companies and major cultural institutions. More important than any physical product, the company offers on-demand creativity, a mind-set that can be taught and reproduced. According to IDEO’s mission statement, its brand of design thinking “brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.” Importantly, this thought process can be made accessible to all (or at least those who can afford the consulting fee), allowing “people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.”
For Baumann, the design thinking modeled at the Cooper Hewitt is fundamentally about finding solutions on different scales. The museum, in her view, encourages visitors to apply the creative skills they’ve honed in the galleries to real-world scenarios. Design thinking, she told me, is “about solving problems—whether its K–12 students resolving a challenge posed to them in our Design in the Classroom program or inspiring people to solve a universal problem, like poverty, on a global scale.” This fall, the Cooper Hewitt opened a new exhibition whose title seems to echo this optimism: “By the People: Designing a Better America,” organized by the museum’s curator of socially responsible design, Cynthia E. Smith. We seem to have come a long way from the Hewitt sisters’ vision of the museum as a place to study “beautiful specimens of art applied to industry.” The aesthetic imperative of decorative arts has been replaced with a moral and economic one.
The progressive gloss that’s been put on contemporary design has also been widely adopted in the for-profit sector. Uber advertises product designer roles as “the rare opportunity to change the world.” User interface startup InVision gives away T-shirts that proclaim, design makes everything possible. And, indeed, designers who work for these companies, backed by billions in investment, have changed the world to a significant extent (even if the beneficiaries from that change are not always clear).
But when social issues are reduced to a design problem, we ignore the very real political and economic landscapes surrounding them. That’s what writer Megan Erickson argued in a Jacobin article last March when she examined design and technology initiatives that purport to solve the crisis in education worldwide. As Erickson argued, designing new educational software won’t change the fact that many children from working-class backgrounds still come to school without having had breakfast. “‘Innovation’ is almost always invoked by elites to ignore class conflict,” she wrote. 9 In a talk at a Creative Mornings convention in San Francisco in November 2015, New York Times editor and designer Jennifer Daniel similarly derided designers for using the shield of design-for-good to assuage their guilt about serving corporate interests. 10 By touting design as saving the world, Daniel claimed, designers are really just selling more design. And there’s nothing wrong with selling design, she says; let’s just not pretend it’s anything else.
There’s nothing wrong with the Pen either. The device enriches the museum experience, making it more informative and engaging. But the real achievements and commendable aspirations that the Pen embodies shouldn’t be confused with the inflated rhetoric sometimes used to extol the potential of design to solve social problems. Design thinking, though highly desirable in certain circumstances, may offer a limited tool kit for addressing needs that don’t have clear-cut solutions reachable through testing and research. A democratic culture, for instance, can’t be designed. While the Pen and its associated interactive experiences garner much attention, it may be the developments behind the scenes that are most revolutionary in this regard, pushing toward such a culture. The Cooper Hewitt’s open data systems (and the organizational workflows required to administer them) are a major advance, helping to assure broad access to the historical objects that comprise what Papanek called a “human ecology.”
“By the People: Designing a Better America,” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, through Feb. 26, 2017.
Desi Gonzalez is manager of digital engagement at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
2016-09-30 19:00 by Alexander www.artinamericamagazine.com
9 /23 Silicon Values Addie Wagenknecht in Deep Lab’s performance Permission to Fail , 2015, pigment, drones, smoke bombs, and canvas; at the New Museum, New York. Photo Peter Kaiser.
Advertisement
Hosting an incubator for creative start-ups, the New Museum has embraced the age of the entrepreneur.
In a 1953 profile of Alfred H. Barr Jr., Dwight Macdonald used an economic metaphor to explain the position of the young Museum of Modern Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA’s older and more established uptown rival, boasted an endowment of $62 million and was funded in part by the city of New York. MoMA, on the other hand, had barely any endowment to speak of, and covered its own operating expenses. “The former is thus in the position of a rentier, living on income from capital,” Macdonald wrote, “while the latter is an entrepreneur, dependent on its own exertions.” MoMA’s economic situation impelled it to pursue a program of a “dramatic, enterprising, and multifarious” character, one quite unlike that of any other museum of its time. 1
The word entrepreneur has come a long way since 1953. Now it extends beyond the industrious spirit that characterized MoMA’s early leadership. In 2016, the image of the entrepreneur has been redefined by Silicon Valley’s culture of disruptive innovation. An appetite for risk and a thirst for independence just won’t cut it anymore. Today’s entrepreneur uses new technology not just to beat the competition but to destroy it, and justifies that destruction with a utopian faith in technocratic progress. Historian and critic Jill Lepore compares the situation to asymmetrical warfare, with twentieth-century corporations as nation-states and start-ups as stateless insurgents. “Disruptive innovation,” she writes, “is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.” 2
The zeal for disruption grips nonprofit boardrooms as well as corporate ones. Some arts institutions have taken this to its logical conclusion. Anxious about their place in the world, museums that once relied on existing reserves of cultural capital have succumbed, proposing the new mythic entrepreneur as a response to the precarity of the institution. Suddenly, the entrepreneur seems to promise more than the artist.
Enter New Inc, the first-ever museum-led incubator for creative entrepreneurs. New York’s New Museum launched New Inc in the summer of 2014, touting it in a press release as an experimental center for “new modes of cultural production.” In the same release, New Museum director Lisa Phillips and deputy director Karen Wong described New Inc as a place for creative start-ups and a “lab-like environment” for “the pursuit of innovation” in art, design, and technology.
As the founders note in the FAQ section of New Inc’s website, the center is “positioned somewhere between a business incubator and an artist residency program” for projects that “don’t neatly fit either model.” Wong further explained in a recent magazine article, “museums in the twenty-first century have to understand how to be more relevant.” 3 Julia Kaganskiy, the director of New Inc, finds the solution to this problem in addressing the plight of the cultural entrepreneur. The call for applications makes the appeal: “the professional landscape in which they work is still undefined, and few resources and systems exist to support these enterprises.”
The New Museum hosts New Inc on the second floor of 231 Bowery, an adjacent building that the museum acquired in 2008 that will house expanded exhibition and office space upon completion of an $80-million development project announced in May. The Brooklyn-based architecture firm SO-IL transformed the eleven-thousand-square-foot space into a sleek open office lined with whiteboards, evocative of the interior of a tech start-up. About a hundred members, selected through an application process, rent desk space here for a monthly fee of $600 ($350 for part-timers) over a twelve-month period. In addition to sixty desks, New Inc provides a prototyping lab where engineers can test product designs, a community workbench to facilitate collaborative projects and skill sharing, a high-speed internet connection, and several 3D printers.
Even in the incubator’s first year of operation, these amenities drew an impressive roster of members. Paul Soulellis is an artist and designer whose serial almanac, Printed Web , archives online art projects in book form. The feminist research collective Deep Lab produces talks, publications, and performances that engage critically with contemporary digital culture. Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch artist known for his single-serving websites with colorful interactive animations that garner millions of hits and are sold as public art. Slava Balasanov and Analisa Teachworth founded 4Real, a creative agency and interactive design studio. Its popular web-app CloneZone, which lets anyone customize and publish their own parodic version of a webpage, has earned its fair share of cease and desist orders.
New Inc’s member list reads much like the programming schedule from its host institution—an experimental non-collecting museum whose website declares a commitment to “new art, new ideas.” Yet New Inc recasts the New Museum’s mission in the Silicon Valley jargon of “innovation.” While they foster entrepreneurs, New Inc and the New Museum are nonprofits, and they do not make direct investments in New Inc members. That means the day-to-day administration is more like that of a co-working space than that of a profit-seeking incubator. This left many in the art-and-technology community perplexed. Why did the New Museum choose such a charged term?
SIMPLY DEFINED, an incubator is a means of supporting start-ups, or early-stage companies with high growth potential that tend to deal in software, which has a low cost of entry and can rapidly reach a global market. But office space is still as costly as ever, and savvy investors saw an opportunity. Incubators pool together brick-and-mortar resources and rent them out in exchange for a portion of the tenant company’s equity. Since 2005, Y Combinator, an especially prominent incubator, has put small sums (typically less than $150,000) into companies such as AirBnB, Stripe, and Dropbox. Those injections have appreciated by leaps and bounds. Today the combined valuation of Y Combinator’s well-timed investments stands at around $65 billion.
But sexy stories of the big winners drown out the fates of the many losers. The hype surrounding the start-up economy conveniently ignores the fact that nine out of ten start-ups fail, consigning millions of dollars and countless hours of work to the dustbin of history. Even as the overwhelming majority of their resident start-ups fail, incubators have made a small group of investors very, very rich. Such is the impact of a model where rapid exploitation is meted out in an asymmetrical all-or-nothing game.
Investors love the speed at which the incubator can launch new ideas. Their temporary arrangements are an ideal fit for the already precarious labor behind high-risk, high-growth ventures. Federal and local governments, public colleges and universities, and even the New Republic, the once august magazine of politics and culture, have created incubators or venture capital funds for themselves as an alternative means of generating new tools and revenue.
The New Republic Fund, established shortly after Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes purchased the magazine in 2012, was meant to address the increasingly gloomy revenue projections for independent, long-form journalism. The initiative wasn’t just about deal-making. It was an exchange of cultural capital. The tech mogul’s aspirations to save an old institution with a new economic strategy helped advance the prevailing wisdom that digital disruption can solve society’s most intractable problems. Hughes failed, 4 but not before his high-tech salvation narrative helped create an environment in which the announcement of New Inc was cheered. Celebratory coverage in the Wall Street Journal , Entrepreneur , and Forbes parroted the feel-good tropes of Silicon Valley, speculating that scrappy innovators might shake the museum from its aloof, Luddite obsolescence. “How the New Museum’s Lisa Phillips Is Making Entrepreneurship into an Art Form,” exclaimed a headline on the blog Fast Company . 5 But these articles glossed over the crucial fact that the New Museum’s “incubator” had no more in common with entrepreneurship than a co-working space. There were only a few skeptical assassments of New Inc’s uncritical use of the language of venture capital. 6 In any case, New Inc is less an experimentation in institutional practice than a tweaking of institutional identity, one that brings the museum squarely in line with the new age of the entrepreneur.
For all the perceived novelty of New Inc, its promotional materials invoke the rich history of institutional programs fostering collaboration among artists and engineers. In October 1966 Billy Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Waldhauer, and Robert Whitman held “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” a series of presentations that featured thirty engineers and ten artists performing together in various combinations at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory. A month later the group would form Experiments in Art and Technology (E. A. T.). Most of the engineers involved, including Klüver, came from Bell Labs, which had established itself as a corporate center for creativity.
From 1967 to 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ran an Art and Technology program that paired artists with technology companies in Southern California. LACMA’s lab was the pet project of curator Maurice Tuchman, who set out “to bring together the incredible resources and advanced technology of industry with the equally incredible imagination and talent of the best artists at work today.” 7
The E. A. T. and LACMA projects were brief episodes, and certainly not the only initiatives of their kind. But their particular mold has been resurrected and referenced by arts institutions grappling with the implications of networked art and a newly ascendant Silicon Valley culture. In 2013, LACMA announced it would revive the program with support from Google, Accenture, NVIDIA, and other companies. Now called the Art + Technology Lab, it offers artists grants, residencies, and opportunities to consult advisers from tech companies.
In 2010 Rhizome, the nonprofit art-and-technology organization that has been a New Museum affiliate since 2003 and is now an anchor tenant at New Inc, launched the Seven on Seven conference, a two-day event at the New Museum staging collaborations between artists and engineers. If early art-and-technology projects had a utopian, future-oriented quality, Seven on Seven draws its ethos from the recent phenomenon of the hackathon, an all-night, caffeine- fueled sprint in which software developers put together a minimum viable product. 8 Some of the results resemble performances. Others are bold conceptual gestures. But few ever evolve into something that lives beyond the conference. A rare exception to the rule was Monegraph, conceived at Seven on Seven in 2014 by artist Kevin McCoy and entrepreneur Anil Dash. It’s an application that uses a public ledger known as blockchain to register authorship for digital works of art. When the idea took off, McCoy turned it into a full-service consumer product available on desktop and mobile devices. What began as little more than a jam session between an artist and an entrepreneur grew into a venture- backed enterprise. Today, the eleven employees of Monegraph work full-time at New Inc to develop the product.
The discourse around art and technology wasn’t always so cozy with products. A product is different from a technical breakthrough, because it requires greater concern with market performance and usability than with the borders of scientific knowledge. E. A. T. was designed to expose artists to the potentially illuminating creative potential of a nascent class of technologists who too often toiled in the obscurity of industry silos, and vice versa. The transition from radical tinkerer to corporate boardroom occurred as technological breakthroughs became eclipsed by a focus on the end user. Likewise, the early utopian promise of digital technology was foreclosed by app interfaces and formats that standardize the user experience. Today, Silicon Valley doesn’t push the limits of technological innovation so much as it launches successful services that rely on extant information technology. The 1960s lab provided a metaphorical model for the art-and-technology programs that grew out of it. But the lab is not quite the same thing as the start-up incubator, which is less concerned with engineering than it is with creating value for investors.
IN JULY 2015, New Inc threw a Demo Day at Red Bull Studios in New York to showcase member projects. Part trade show, part immersive installation, the event was a Gesamtkunstwerk of creative entrepreneurship. One crowd-pleaser was LUMA , an interactive light sculpture by Lisa Park and Kevin Siwoff. A number of fluffy orbs formed from bundles of fiber-optic strands hung from the ceiling, the level of light changing in response to sound picked up by a central microphone. The artists compared the responsive rippling effect of the light to touching water inhabited by bioluminescent plankton. The Principals and Studio Studio, two experiential design groups that make art installations and immersive brand experiences, collaborated on Snowblind , another visitor favorite. The work filled an enclosed space with vapor clouds shot through with colored lights. Sensors tracked visitors’ movements, triggering playful manipulations of the color gradient of the clouds. The result was a foggy bliss combining the organic formlessness of steam and exacting adjustments of light and color levels.
The event at Red Bull Studios came with an art museum’s imprimatur, but the work sought sponsors, not reflection. An ideal outcome would be a company like Nike contracting the team behind LUMA for an installation at a corporate event. The Demo Day was a fitting display of the world envisioned by New Inc, where creativity is manifested not in artworks produced for the museum’s public but in start-ups, apps, or hardware installations designed to serve a clamoring market of investors and consumers. 9 It was a peek into a possible future: the museum as a studio for branded content.
Separating art, creativity, and patronage is no doubt a historically tricky undertaking, but recent interventions by Silicon Valley thought leaders have helped redefine the boundaries of all three components. One of the clearest distinctions was made by none other than John Maeda, a member of New Inc’s advisory council and partner of the venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. In Wired , Maeda (who had a brief, embattled tenure as president of the Rhode Island School of Design) argued poignantly for art’s special status. Artists, he said, don’t propose solutions but ask questions. They are after truth. “The questions that artists make are often enigmatic, answering a why with another why.” 10
At first, Maeda’s defense of art for art’s sake seems curiously at odds with Silicon Valley’s fusion of art, technology, and corporate brands. But Maeda builds his idea into a significant position regarding the changing virtues of cultural institutions. Maeda is an advocate of STEAM, which proudly adds “Art” to “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), shorthand for the sort of utilitarian education that Silicon Valley applauds. One of the goals of Maeda’s STEAM movement, announced on the website stemtosteam.org, is to encourage “employers to hire artists and designers to drive innovation.” “Successful Start-ups Cofounded by Designers Are Not Uncommon,” proclaims a headline from Maeda’s influential “Design in Tech” report. 11 Such is the peril of New Inc’s foundational principle. When New Inc says in its mission statement that it supports creative entrepreneurs, it’s speaking to a Silicon Valley mind-set that regards art and creativity as means for making better products.
New Inc’s choice to cater to the model of the “creative entrepreneur” does more than perpetuate a myth; it’s a cynical twist on the state of arts institutions. “We’re seeing a trend of artists taking on for-profit practices because the nonprofit world is really not sustainable,” Julia Kaganskiy told the Wall Street Journal . 12 But consider what happens when institutional retrenchment gives rise to an incubator format built specifically for cultural production that comes with a balance sheet.
An incubator is a provisional arrangement. While it offers a layer of insulation for a short time, it still facilitates—and intentionally accelerates—a harsh natural selection. It bakes you in market fear. You’re kept warm only because you’re expected to hatch. The incubator rewards the kind of ingenuity and intelligence that yields demos, prototypes, and flashy pitch decks. Its pace is a sprint. It generates populism with hype, it defines discourse with marketing slogans. Most crucially, the audience is not the public, but investors.
Rather than directly funding initiatives that value cultural production on its own terms, the museum incubator privileges a private-sector model formed around the logic that the best solutions are motivated by financial incentives. If cultural institutions are losing a competition against technological advancements from the private sector (already a questionable premise), the museum-led incubator only further advances this one-sided game by appropriating vocabulary from Silicon Valley’s peculiar brand of libertarianism.
The alliance among Silicon Valley thought leaders and arts institutions could generate a productive new space without impinging on the mission of its host institution. And New Inc, even with its TED Talk rhetoric, might be interpreted as an attempt to reclaim the incubator format from the world of investors and repurpose it for a cultural institution’s own specific needs. But such a reclamation cannot proceed without implicitly shifting the delicate balance in the social function of the museum, an institutional value system that asks for a humanist leap of faith that Silicon Valley seems unwilling or unable to make. Alfred Barr’s MoMA was innovative, even entrepreneurial, as Dwight Macdonald characterized it. But his maneuvers renewed the museum’s form by foregrounding exhibitions and stagecraft. He didn’t pivot away from the defining mission of a cultural institution. The artist remained central.
The art institution cannot help but communicate the nature of its cultural moment. Our much- celebrated regime of digital innovation has also brought about tremendous disintegration. As opportunity abounds, so does competition. An increasingly large number of people are self- employed, which is to say desperate and scrambling. They are liberated from institutions, but protected by none. Precarity is repackaged as a lifestyle choice for scrappy and energetic youths, romantic images of whom are ripped straight from the Horatio Alger tales of our new Silicon Valley titans. But there’s not much choice at all. Artists, writers, curators, performers, and everyone else under the new umbrella of “creatives” have never been so forced to rely on their own exertions.
When it comes to shaping social expectations of art, the words we use to explain what a museum does are often more powerful than the work on display. When the New Museum launches an “incubator” at a moment when technology platforms aim for nothing less than the colonization of everyday life it should give us pause. Even a seemingly innocuous rhetorical move may influence an institution’s capacity for criticality and its status as a place for contemplation and memory. Museums innovate at their own risk. Mike Pepi is a writer based in New York.
2016-09-30 19:00 by Alexander www.artinamericamagazine.com
10 /23 Unknown Makers The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall, 1925, showing plaster casts of marble sculptures.
Advertisement
As digital technologies enable increasingly accurate reproductions of artworks, museums are grappling with the complex aesthetic, legal, and political implications of copying.
Museum Without Walls
I may enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sketchbook and pencil in hand, and walk through the stately hallways until I arrive in gallery 811, where Gustave Courbet’s The Source (1862) hangs. I may take a seat on the glossy wood bench, place the sketchbook on my lap, train my eyes on the nude woman whose arms thrust into a cascade of spring water, and attempt the most perfect copy. I may not use ballpoint pens, ink, markers, fountain pens, or watercolors, but I may use crayon, pastel, or charcoal if I’m on a supervised tour that grants permission. I may not photograph the painting, even as I witness visitors momentarily pause between me and The Source , elevate iPhones, and blithely jab thumbs into screens. I may have to fight the urge to hiss at the offenders, such is my concern for this institution being turned into a classy Instagram backdrop.
If I’m enrolled in the Met’s copyist program, which was established in 1872, I may request to copy one work in the permanent collection with oil on canvas or oil-based clay. I may imagine myself as the young painter in inventor Samuel F. B. Morse’s monumental painting Gallery at the Louvre (1831-33), reproducing the greatest hits of Western art history, making myself more refined with each minute and each brushstroke. After getting clearance from curatorial and security, I may set up my easel and drop cloth four feet from The Source , so long as my copy does not exceed thirty-by-thirty inches and differs from the dimensions of the original work by at least 10 percent; or I may sit on the floor and mold my own version of Marble head of Herakles, a Roman reproduction of a Greek statue attributed to Lysippos, so long as the size doesn’t exceed one cubic foot.
In the late 1800s, the Met was very much devoted to procuring and exhibiting copies. “We can never expect to obtain any large collection of original works, but we can obtain casts, which, for students of art and archaeology, and indeed for the general public, are almost their equivalent,” reported the Met in 1891. 1 Though originals may have been far-flung, replicas could be configured so as to provide a full impression of the culture of any era or the relationships between styles separated by oceans and centuries. At the time, European institutions were not only accumulating casts but churning out copies of their own artworks to sell to other museums and collectors. The Met’s report singled out the Royal Museum in Berlin, which set an example by striving to acquire copies “of all the masterpieces in the different collections of the world, and bring them together under such an arrangement as would best exemplify the progress of the plastic arts at all epochs. " 2
The Met, which lagged behind its compatriots in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D. C., determined to do the same, and estimated that $100,000 would be required to “follow examples of European nations in developing an artistic perception common to their people, but slightly manifested by Americans.” Curator Edward Robinson dispatched agents to Europe to procure and commission replicas of classical statuary. “Doubtless there are many who join us in the wish that every city might have its gallery of reproductions as well as its public library,” wrote Robinson in The Nation in 1889. He envisioned “a gallery in which children could grow up familiar with the noblest productions of Greece and Italy, in which the laborer could pass some of his holiday hours, and in which the mechanic could find the stimulus to make his own work beautiful as well as good.” 3
By 1902, the Met had amassed 2,607 casts, some of which were displayed to great fanfare in what is now the central hall. Aspiring artists assembled to draft their own impressions of the Parthenon frieze, the Uffizi Wrestlers, Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise (1425–52), and Luca della Robbia’s Visitation (ca. 1445). As Alan Wallach points out in Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (1998), the exaltation of replicas is essential not only to American museums but to the cultivation of popular values and tastes in general. The prominence of casts speaks to the importance of all kinds of copying in a country that for so long had very few original works of art and literature. The colonial publishing landscape was crowded with magazines devoted to reprinting, without permission, articles and book excerpts imported from Europe; rampant piracy was understood as the foundation for the fledgling nation’s creativity and eventual autonomy. 4
Now, the gallery of reproductions is everywhere, much to the benefit of children and laborers and mechanics, so long as they aren’t sued by the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America or textbook publishers or copyright trolls. Yet museums like the Met, which by the 1940s had warehoused its casts and focused on originals, may still be perceived by most visitors as custodians of unique objects, even as the notion that any object is really unique, or at least formally inimitable, has come to seem dubious. In fact, museums have been turning into manufacturers and managers of images and various other coded representations of artworks, which they circulate to engage and edify audiences as well as to fill coffers. They’ve resurrected nineteenth-century ideals and wielded twenty-first-century innovations—all while retaining twentieth-century legal teams.
At the gift shop (which in 2015 accounted for 16 percent of the museum’s annual revenue), the Met may sell postcards of The Source that mark the image as copyrighted, even though the painting is in the public domain. But the Met also makes available online a high-res image of The Source , which juxtaposes two age-old symbols of poetic inspiration—the muse and the spring—and refers to Ingres’s 1856 nude of the same name. Viewing this image, I can zoom in so close that I can discern the splotches of paint that compose each fleck of water and crease of flesh, and also plaster the image onto pillows and coffee mugs via Zazzle—or perhaps not the same image, but a version in which my signature overlays Courbet’s. The online shop of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (“If you ever wanted a Vermeer above your bed, look no further”) enables customers to order exquisite reproductions on paper or canvas, complete with the museum’s logo on the border, to mark the copy as genuine. The Van Gogh Museum, also in Amsterdam, reproduces paintings like Sunflowers (1889) with a 3D-printing process called reliefography and offers the resulting Relievos, which record the contours of both sides of canvases and every indentation and protuberance caused by brushstrokes and the passage of time, for $34,000.
“Anything unique is at risk of vanishing: we make a twin—a notarized copy, a plaster cast, paste diamonds, Thayer’s working replicas,” writes Hillel Schwartz in his compendious The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (1996). “An object uncopied is under perpetual siege, valued less for itself than for the struggle to prevent its being copied. The more adept the West has become at the making of copies, the more we have exalted uniqueness. It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of originality.” 5 Museums —in their contradictory treatments of artworks, in their various investments in restricting and freeing information, in their enthusiasm for exploiting intellectual property and ennobling the public—are excellent avatars of our vexed relationship to copying of all kinds. The ways in which we now understand, or fail to understand, the function of museums and art objects (all objects, really) reflect more general confusion about the rights we possess and violations we routinely commit, the kinds of copies that are “good” or “bad,” and how reproduction might fortify or degrade the commons.
We revel in the dematerialization of objects and images, and even testify to the erosion of those categories. We herald the everything-on-demand future, to be driven by global migration to the cloud and 3D-printer-powered manufacturing hubs. Yet we remain ensnared by the notion of art and literature as original works that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. We cling to notions of creativity and property that date to the Industrial Revolution—and even then hardly satisfied anyone—as we handle books, algorithms, databases, YouTube videos, varieties of flora and fauna, geographical indications, trade secrets, and gene sequences.
After Polykleitos
Photographs taken in the early 1900s show gleaming casts of torqued warriors, serene goddesses, and assured statesmen crowded together in museum halls like thoroughbreds assembled for inspection before the race. Only in the following years—as scribes, pantographs, and pointing machines gave way to Electro Copyists, photostats, mimeographs, Speedographs, Ditto machines, Neo-Cyclostyles, and Rotos—did museums in Europe and the United States cement the dichotomy between original and copy. Connoisseurship was professionalized and oligarchs like J. P. Morgan steered the boards of major museums, which began to esteem originals: rare commodities, products of individual genius, artifacts of bygone civilizations, testaments to the collector’s discernment and status. Numerous cast collections were secreted into warehouses or destroyed. The Met’s casts ended up in a rundown depot in Upper Manhattan, under the West Side Highway. Heads were severed, faces were cracked, limbs were lost, torsos were blackened.
Sensibilities changed as the figures moldered. By the 1980s, casts had come to seem important to the history of art of the nineteenth century. They were useful for the study or conservation of artworks that had been destroyed or degraded by war. They were valuable to teachers who wanted to transport the museum to the classroom. And they jelled with the zeitgeist: Genius and originality were under assault, and there was a vogue for simulacra, pastiche, unending repetition. To copy was to deprive the king of his crown, and also to assert that images were for the taking and recycling, and always had been. Narratives of authorship and authenticity, equally prevalent in art history and copyright law, were undermined (occasionally in both realms at once). 6 As Warhol was deified, the mantle of the avant-garde was claimed by artists like Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler. Digital technologies were heralded for their potential to grant unfettered access to—i.e., distribute infinite copies of—all the world’s information, even all the world’s artworks. So after decades in which any art professional who proposed lavishing funds on fragile derivatives of Western classicism might as well have submitted a résumé to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Met salvaged its collection, embarked on a restoration campaign, and loaned casts to Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the New York Academy of Art, among dozens of others.
Today, New York’s Institute of Classical Architecture and Art (ICAA), where ancient techniques never go out of style, employs 120 casts donated by the Met as teaching aids. A pristine cast of the Diadoumenos, a young athlete fastening a triumphal band to his head, bears the marks of the lost ancient Greek masterpiece, a bronze by Polykleitos, from which it derives. (The cast may also, or may primarily, bear the marks of one of the manifold Roman copies, and, of course, many of those copies were altered and/or made from older replicas.) Posed in an unassuming room with windows overlooking midtown office buildings, the cast is surrounded by plaster busts and friezes placed on boxy plinths, hung from peach walls, rested on the polished wood floor. The Diadoumenos cast strikes me as oddly inert, more like a product of texture mapping and digital extrusion than muses and manual chiseling. It might as well be compressed data inscribed on an imperfect storage medium, one of thousands of copies of copies of mythical originals; each has its own character, a combination of the artist’s hand, the mold-making process, and the passage of time.
I’m reminded of the box in my basement packed with booklets of CD-RWs that store albums and movies copied from friends. To me, they now represent the world in which they were burned, however many microprocessor-generations ago, as much as the MP3s and MPEGs imprinted on their surfaces. They might soon be joined by hard drives full of digital models of classical statuary, such as those fabricated by artist Oliver Laric, who has recently devoted himself to making 3D scans of objects from institutional collections and offering them for free online. The resulting caches of STL files—presented with the artist’s names, object numbers, materials, and locations, but destined to roam far from the controlled gallery environment— prompt us to ask how and why we encounter originals and reproductions in (and on the websites of) museums, and what is afforded by these various situations and media. For Lincoln 3D Scans (2013), commissioned by the Usher Gallery and The Collection in Lincoln, England, Laric scanned scores of sculptures, friezes, chairs, and vessels, which were then published online along with an archive of works by other artists and tinkerers who employ the models. In these scans and subsequent versions of objects, we can see the absorptive quality of chiseled stone being supplanted by manipulable data; the artwork is liberated but also comically compressed as it migrates from marble to the surface of an image.
If plaster casts were expelled from museums because they contradicted elite opinions about authorship and originality, only to be recuperated in an era when museums and collectors competed to acquire artworks that hinged on transgressive copying, they now seem like typical —and typically anachronistic—features of the media landscape. I know, when I look at the ICAA Diadoumenos, that the cast is not the real thing. At the same time, I’m unsure what, if anything, “original” and “copy” mean, given that everything so frequently and promiscuously manifests as objects, images, texts, series of zeros and ones.
Laric, nurtured by this sense of infinite mutability, revives musty bronzes and democratizes collection data, but he evokes the specters as well as the promises of digitization. He joins in the reconfiguration of museums into digital publishers, and the conversion of the objects to which they assign meaning and value into equivalent pieces of content, all in the name of access and engagement. To me, the Lincoln 3D Scans files seem strangely elegiac, as they’re marked by deficits of information that are bound to grow as the source becomes more distant, and that speak to a great mass of remaindered data—the ghostly balance of technological progress.
Owning Data
The confusion, enthusiasm, and inventiveness fostered by today’s tools for converting between objects, images, and data recall, among other historical episodes, the popularization in the mid-1800s of the electromagnetic telegraph. The telegraph made “one neighborhood of the whole country,” according to Morse (who by middle age had given up on painting), and heralded a revolution in communications, but also undercut principles of originality and authorship—as well as the business models based on them. 7 Similarly, the recent dissolution of distance and sudden mobility of media has spooked the acolytes of Sonny Bono and supplicants of Mickey Mouse. From Hollywood film studios, Silicon Valley rec rooms, and Capitol Hill steakhouses, they lust after rights management and insist that copyright continues to stimulate creativity (as gauged by economic output), even as protections are extended for so long that the primary beneficiaries are likely to cash checks on another planet, even as the inextricability of copying and creation gives rise to our best bromides, e.g., remix culture.
Judges are increasingly likely to be asked whether the law might accommodate the prosaic violations of copyright facilitated by digital technologies. Often, rulings issued in disputes between major corporations have reverberating effects. In the 2008 case of Meshwerks v. Toyota , Meshwerks, a design studio, was hired by Toyota to produce 3D depictions of cars to be used in a single commercial. Meshwerks sued when Toyota continued to use the wireframes in additional commercials. To make the wireframes, Meshwerks had painstakingly scanned the car from numerous angles, which produced an extremely rough image—a digital maquette, basically. According to Meshwerks, 90 percent of the work was in what followed: the laborious manual “sculpting” of visual data, which took its designers nearly one hundred hours. Toyota asserted that, while a photograph inherently has the mark of originality, simply as a result of a human being’s pointing and clicking, a scan is purely mimetic and not eligible for copyright. Siding with Toyota, the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit concluded that any originality in Meshwerks’s digital files was an attribute of the cars they depicted.
Charged with making sense of 3D imaging, the court conflated various notions of originality. The Toyota was understood to have the kind of originality associated with artworks (despite the car being a “useful article”), and the wireframe was understood to be a replica (despite being a digital representation, and one that hardly looks like the car). As a precedent, the court cited an earlier case in which Bridgeman Art Library, an English firm that contracted with museums to license photographs of their artworks, sued the American software company Corel, which had produced a CD-ROM that ostensibly duplicated Bridgeman’s images of European masterworks. The judge in Bridgeman v. Corel found that reproductions cannot be copyrighted when they “do nothing more than accurately convey the underlying image,” when they are “slavish copies.” The decision discounted the creativity and skill of photographers who precisely record existing objects; they might as well be making Xeroxes. 8
Taken to its logical extreme, this line of legal thinking implies that realism—in photography, drawing, or painting—is akin to making a copy of whatever is depicted. “Put simply, realism is not contrary to originality,” writes law professor Edward Lee in “Digital Originality” (2012), which excoriates the Meshwerks ruling. “Raw facts are not copyrightable, whereas depictions of the world are.” 9 Lee argues that Meshwerks is a sign of the legal system’s struggle to maintain a coherent definition of authorship as computers take on much of the work associated with creativity. To help courts distinguish between the labor of machine and human, the role of operator and artist, he proposes a “doctrine of digital originality,” which requires a consideration of whether or not “the creative powers of the mind” are involved when someone clicks on an iPhone camera or a 3D scanner. But even if such a doctrine were implemented, for how long might we hold on to any notion of where the work of the mind ends and the work of the machine (or algorithm) begins?
According to Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying (2010), our ongoing “cultural crisis” points to the basic “inability of the law to resolve, both intellectually and practically, questions about the identities of objects,” which is made conspicuous by the “apparent indifference of the general public to whether the things that they buy are ‘real’ or ‘fake,’ ‘original’ or a ‘copy.’” 10 The crisis is only exacerbated by the efforts of markets, galleries, governments, record companies, and fashion brands to regulate the forms and values of goods. Boon suggests we turn away from the legacy of the Platonic distrust of mimesis, which is thought to distort the connection between outward appearance and inner essence, and toward non-dualistic and Buddhist philosophy. He proposes that we understand the similarity of original and copied objects as pointing to a common emptiness, a fundamental lack of essence shared by all objects, regardless of which came first and which came second.
Of course, the legal system is not about to adopt Mahayana Buddhism, turn away from the illusory realm of appearances, and embrace flux. In the meantime, Boon cheerily suggests we make do with the internet, which offers “the opportunity to render visible. . . the instability of all the terms and structures which hold together existing intellectual-property regimes, and to point to the madness of modern, capitalist framings of property.” If we produce and circulate enough copies, with the aid of BitTorrent and data breaches and 3D scanners and printers, we might drive the courts to admit that certain laws governing intellectual property are not only antiquated but so unenforceable as to seem like fantasy. Then what?
Copyleft adherents, digital utopians, additive-manufacturing entrepreneurs, and trendcasters at magazines from Wired to Harvard Business Review envision a world in which anyone with a laptop can function as a factory: Grab designs online and print your own home, then decorate it with extruded ancient Greek busts, Alexander Calder mobiles, and Joseph Cornell boxes; maintain your farm by fabricating shovels, chicken feeders, meat grinders, replacement blades, irrigation spigots, and hydroponics systems; mock up one-of-a-kind Lego fortresses with the kids. Artificial scarcity wanes, imports come to seem extraneous, and artisanal producers displace mega-retailers like Walmart. Consumers turn into creative coders and establish decentralized networks that allow them to exchange knowledge and “physibles” and enable them to sate their own appetites for commodities. In the view of Adrian Bowyer, founder of RepRap, an open-source rapid prototyping system that can replicate itself by manufacturing its own parts, 3D printing augurs “Darwinian Marxism”: The proletariat takes control of the means of production but “without all that messy and dangerous revolution stuff, and even without all that messy and dangerous industrial stuff.” 11
Cultural Memory
I may be aware of the laws governing intellectual property, but I hardly notice all the violations I engage in (or benefit from) each day: I wake up and grasp for the alarm on my knockoff nightstand, amble into the office, listlessly gaze at the unauthorized reproduction of a recent artwork that occupies my desktop, play an illegally downloaded song, load a pirated version of Adobe Acrobat in order to search a book nabbed from Aaaaarg—and that’s all before I’ve had coffee. In these moments of impulsive breach, I occasionally realize what a chasm exists between the regulation of intellectual property and my daily routine, even my natural instincts. 12 I’ve barely changed my behavior, though, except to mask my internet traffic by paying for a virtual private network. Perhaps the arm of the law is not really so long, or perhaps hardly anyone heeds the occasional examples made by prosecutors and trolls. (It’s impossible to say for sure, because so many defendants can’t afford decent representation, so they cease and desist rather than make their mark on the legal system.) Nevertheless, to parrot “Areopagitica,” John Milton’s foundational polemic against licensing, censorship, and the regulation of thought: “I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us.” 13
Yet I don’t believe we’ll reach Shangri-La 2.0 by leveling the distinctions between original and copy, marble statue and CAD model, and insisting on the essential equivalence of all manifestations of all things. To do so is to disavow the meaning that imbues objects as they become vessels for our personal memories and collective histories, as they are marked by our rituals and caresses—which may be trivial when it comes to torrents of Hollywood films and knockoff Louis Vuitton clutches, but paramount when it comes to ancient artifacts and cultural relics (which is how we’ll eventually describe torrents and knockoffs). The museum’s traditional role as custodian of objects cannot be divorced from the task of registering and manufacturing the value of those objects through research, publication, education, conservation, and exhibition. A sculpture on a pedestal in a museum is always a signifier of meaning to be found elsewhere.
So what, precisely, is copied when one scans and creates 3D-printed versions of an artwork from a museum’s collection? The answer depends on the artwork, the museum, and the relationship between the artwork and the museum. Whereas Laric’s scans range from Victorian busts of British authors to Bronze Age urns to nineteenth-century Nigerian figurines, German artists Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles recently captured the iconic bust of Queen Nefertiti that resides at Berlin’s Neues Museum. Last October, they walked into the museum— Al-Badri with a customized Microsoft Kinect motion sensor strapped to her chest, concealed by a black leather jacket and vogueish azure scarf—and headed to Room 2.10, which is devoted to the pacific likeness of the Sun Queen. The museum’s website indicates that the bust was made with limestone and stucco around 1340 b.c. by court sculptor Thutmose and used as a model by contemporary portraitists (which is to say the original was designed to be copied). As for provenance, the museum is oddly terse: “She was found in 1912 during the excavations of the German-Orient-Association in the city of Achet-Aton, today known as Amarna.” 14 James Simon, a Jewish patron and philanthropist, “funded the excavations in Amarna and acquired ownership of the bust when the finds were divided and bequeathed it to the National Museums in Berlin.”
Al-Badri circled the towering vitrine and, whenever the guards seemed distracted, pushed the scarf aside and made a scan. 15 She and Nelles gave the data to designers to assemble a digital model, which was made available for download two months later—as The Other Nefertiti —and widely praised for its accuracy, given the circumstances. They then created a 3D-printed version out of polymer resin, which was put on display at the American University at Cairo: an avatar of the bust and a polemic against its appropriation by Germany. Al-Badri and Nelles lament the Neues Museum’s failure to even acknowledge that ownership of the bust is highly contested: The Egyptian government claims that fraudulent documents were used to shuttle the statue out of the country, and officials have requested numerous times that it be repatriated; Germany was on the verge of doing so in 1935, but Hitler interceded. (“Nefertiti continually delights me,” he wrote, outlining his plan for the bust to be the centerpiece of a new museum devoted to Egyptian antiquities. “I will never relinquish the head of the queen.”)
Does the Neues Museum, which has made an extremely precise “museum quality” scan of the bust for the purposes of research and conservation, have the right to stash that data, to treat it as intellectual property rather than a public good? Does the museum have the right to determine who gets to access artworks and cultural heritage? The museum might like to argue that, for those who can afford to visit Berlin, the most enriching and secure environment in which to encounter the bust of Nefertiti is Room 2.10. But why must this preclude schoolchildren and scholars in Cairo and Toronto from scrutinizing Nefertiti’s flat-topped headdress and L’Oréal lips? What is lost when high-quality scans begin to circulate alongside thousands of shoddy and illicit iPhone pics? Why should the museum limit digital or physical reproductions so long as they have no effect on the original, especially since the bust of Nefertiti is ostensibly held in the public trust? If the scholarship on markets for designer clothing and knockoffs is any guide, the museum need not be concerned that the half-million people who file through Room 2.10 each year will instead opt to stay at home—or go to Cairo—and satisfy themselves with 3D-printed versions. Perhaps the answer has to do with the potential devaluation of the museum’s own copies: 3D-printed and hand-painted replicas, made last year in an edition of one hundred, retail for $10,000.
Museums around the world may have shut down their plaster cast workshops, but they are increasingly capable of turning digital models into extremely convincing—and therefore marketable—replicas, which will soon only nominally differ from the original artworks. And while Nefertiti may always be on view, the bulk of the Neues Museum’s artifacts are warehoused, as tends to be the case with European museums, whose collections keep paying dividends on colonialism. So why not revive the model of the museum devoted to plaster casts, on the basis of reparations for plunder, and repatriate Nefertiti and her ilk?
This proposal heralds the arrival of perfect copies even as it upholds the value of the original— not as an artwork so much as a symbol of the genesis over millennia of Egyptian culture, and its persistence despite the regularity of conquest and desecration by megalomaniacal foreigners. For the symbol to function properly, the object must be possessed. But even if Egypt were to get the bust of Nefertiti returned, the actual sculpture would remain notional to the vast majority of people, whose vacation allowances are nil. And the narrative of the Egyptian nation might just as well be expressed by the proliferation of digital representations of the sculpture as by the gypsum lacquer that has been mottled by the passage of centuries but still enlivens the queen’s face.
Since the invasion of Iraq, new urgency has been granted to the question of how physical artifacts and their binary manifestations act as stores of cultural memory, especially in light of campaigns to rid territories of the histories of ethnic and religious minorities. Organizations like CyARK, the Million Image Database, Palmyra Photogrammetry, and Learning Sites have been working to create 3D models and virtual reconstructions of damaged and destroyed monuments. (The Institute for Digital Archaeology’s 3D-printed marble version of Palmyra’s arch, which was assaulted by ISIS last year, was installed in April at London’s Trafalgar Square.) Artist Morehshin Allahyari recently reconstituted a statue of King Uthal, ruler of the Roman-era city of Hatra, that was shattered by Islamic State militants at the Mosul Museum last February. 16
Allahyari made the 3D model of the sculpture available as STL and OBJ files, along with her cache of research, images, maps, and videos; she also stored this data on a flash drive and memory card nestled within a plastic replica. This miniaturized, crystalline figure of a bearded royal seems spectral in contrast to the stone masses being pulverized by smug militants in an ISIS propaganda video—as much an elegy as an act of recovery. Allahyari’s 700-megabyte version might be an appropriate container for cultural memory: People can circulate, manipulate, and annotate the files; they can assign their own significance to the work and put it to their own uses; they can claim ownership of the data and limit access, or they can allow the data to degrade and disappear. Which is to say that this transformation also augurs an age of promiscuity for artworks, as they might no longer be bounded by museum walls or tethered to institutions that assume responsibility for taking care of them and shaping their meaning. The alternative is apparent when I gaze through the extruded plastic that makes up King Uthal: I glimpse the outline of data storage devices and nothing of the world in which he ruled.
The Future of Originals
Perhaps the original is most valuable to most people as a source for continual reproduction: Imagine Thutmose’s satisfaction at the multiplication of his masterpiece, which might reside, along with all the world’s cultural treasures, in a punctiliously regulated, apocalypse-proof underground facility—the art equivalent of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Every museum (and every museumgoer) would have access to the same digital store of objects, with copies being instantly materialized and guiltlessly trashed. Blockbuster traveling exhibitions—which cost fortunes, burn through tons of oil, and harm artworks—would be supplanted by shows with low- cost facsimiles and VR versions of legendary performances. Conservation would become as focused on software rot as the decomposition of paints and papers; artworks would become defined as much by parameters for fabricating reproducible objects as certificates and signatures.
We can glimpse something like this future in the farrago of copies made, facilitated, and proscribed by museums like the Met as they uphold their traditional roles while permitting the dematerialization of artworks and diffusion of collections. But the bleeding edge is elsewhere. Consider the Otsuka Museum of Art in Naruto, Japan, founded in 1998 by an industrialist, Masahito Otsuka, who had no art collection but wanted the Japanese people to have access to Western masterpieces, and for his unremarkable hometown to partake of the Bilbao Effect and transform into a cultural hub. Otsuka decided to stock his museum with one thousand reproductions of Western artworks created between the Renaissance and the 1960s, from the Sistine Chapel to Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962). Whether out of politeness or confusion, Otsuka’s son-in-law traveled the world to secure permission to copy works from museums and private collections that, in most cases, hold copyrights only to their own documentary photographs. The museum then created the reproductions with a technique, developed by one of Otsuka’s companies, for implanting photographic images in ceramic sheets. The copies preserve the surface textures of the originals and will outlast them by millennia. “Mind blowing museum,” reads the TripAdvisor review by MaurTee from Melbourne. “Amazing to have all of the worlds best art work shown in one place. The reproductions are very impressive especially the cave drawings and art work on the walls of chapels located in very remote places in real life.”
The Spanish company Factum Arte, which specializes in “the production of works that redefine the relationship between two and three dimensions,” replicates not only artifacts but entire archaeological sites in order to prevent their degradation. Factum Arte recently worked with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities to create a facsimile of Tutankhamun’s tomb by measuring every millimeter of every surface, converting the textures and colors into data with laser scanners, and reconstructing the space via machine-operated blades. The result is “identical to the original at normal viewing distances” and impervious to tourists—those camera-toting, sweat-secreting, humanoid humidifiers. Pilgrims to the prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France, are familiar with this strategy, as the original site was closed in 1963 and visitors were soon directed to a nearby reproduction, Lascaux II. Thanks to stereophotogrammetry, slide projections, 3D photographs, and a unique mortar, a painter named Monique Peytral was able to mimic the hues and textures of the ancient artworks, the effect of seventeen thousand years on earthen pigments.
What might be lost as the greatest hits of human civilization are safely transferred to hard drives? The passage of centuries registered in the fissuring of the supple flesh and glinting pool of Courbet’s The Source ; our sense of ourselves as stewards of objects that testify to our histories and capabilities, given that everything can so simply be stored and retrieved.
Museums offer a concentrated dose of the vexation caused by our stubborn reverence for originality and intensifying devotion to copying, our sensual investment in hallmarks of human achievement and satisfaction with databases of lifeless versions that can be browsed from bed. But they also prompt us to ask how our creations might meaningfully be governed by laws, quotidian behaviors, and collective desires, and how the status of artworks might change as a result. They even use fashionable devices to enable us to see and understand artworks in ways that might previously have been impossible.
Generally, credit is due not to the schemes of digital strategists but to the intervention of artists like Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Cree artist who lives in Ontario and often describes the mutation of cultural artifacts as they are wrested from their sources and housed in museums. Last year, for an exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Linklater scoured the American Indian collection and made 3D-printed versions of headdresses, clay pots, masks, a totem pole, and a kachina, which were shown alongside prints on linen that reproduce Navajo textiles. The names of the artists of the original works, which were collected between 1875 and 1978 and exhibited in an adjacent gallery, are all unknown to the museum. Linklater’s sculptures, made of uncolored plastic resin, are like low-resolution copies, with the detail and workmanship of the originals supplanted by peculiar blurs and abscesses. His prints, derived from photographs of a screen displaying images of the textiles, trade the vivid colors and precise angles of the original patterns for digital effects and distortions.
Linklater’s works allegorize the loss of information and, more important, the depletion of cultural significance that occurs when headdresses and masks are given over to pedestals and vitrines, and complex forms of authorship—which may balance individual artistry and collective ownership—are reduced to the conventions of wall labels. Linklater’s sculptures suggest that perfect fidelity is always out of reach. But rather than simply register degradation, they testify to the role of the museum, whose unique ability and staggering responsibility is to present objects at once as elements of sacred rites, pedagogical tools, colonialist booty, exquisite artworks, documents of contested histories, and fragments of a highly particular collection. Focused on the relationship between specific objects and specific contexts, Linklater challenges the museum to provide additional explanation rather than circulation, and fix rather than continuously redirect our attention.
While Linklater may be unmoved by the possibility of digital files endlessly trafficking between platforms and users, museums are now all too eager to address us as makers as well as viewers, and indulge our desire for their paralytic—and paralyzing—grip on artworks to be eased. The British Museum organizes “scanathons,” which coax visitors to brandish smartphones and make haphazard captures of artworks to be delivered to a crowd-sourced digital archive. The Met’s MediaLab invites museumgoers to scan artworks from the collection as part of the occasional “hackathon” or while wandering through the galleries, and posts many of these images and models on platforms for sharing 3D files, such as Sketchfab and Thingiverse. These exercises seem not to be intended to scrutinize the role of the museum in the twenty-first century, much less reform outmoded laws and correct misguided views concerning intellectual property. “We encourage everyone to use our content, which represents the world’s cultural heritage, to create their own creative works,” reads the Met’s Thingiverse profile, a tangle of buzzwords from museum education departments and Silicon Valley. “These are scans for fun, for sharing, and to inspire creativity.” In other words, the Met will continue to hoard its “museum-quality models,” which would actually be useful to researchers or those wishing to experience an artwork, not a cartoonish distortion, from afar. But at the gift shop you can buy an impeccable marble reproduction of Marble head of a youth, an Ancient Roman copy of a bronze by Polykleitos, for $425 (member price: $382.50).
Alexander Provan is the editor of Triple Canopy .
2016-09-30 19:00 by Mike www.artinamericamagazine.com
11 /23 Met Picasso Belonged to Family That Fled Nazis, Suit Says The estate of a German Jewish businessman sued the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday in an effort to claim one of its most valuable Picassos, “The Actor,” asserting in court papers that the museum does not hold good title to the painting because the businessman was forced to sell it at a low price after fleeing the Nazis.
According to the filing in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the former owner, Paul Leffmann, had to sell his home and businesses in Cologne, Germany, before he fled with his wife, Alice, to Italy in 1937, as conditions in Europe worsened.
Before they left Italy for Switzerland, and finally fled to Brazil, he sold the painting in 1938, the lawsuit says. The sale was made under duress to the Paris art dealers Hugo Perls, a collector of Picasso’s work, and Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s dealer, for $13,200, the suit says.
In 1941, Thelma Chrysler Foy bought the painting through New York’s Knoedler Gallery for $22,500, a price the estate says is evidence that the 1938 sale had been at a discount. She donated it to the Met in 1952, where it has been continuously displayed since.
The 1904-5 oil on canvas shows an attenuated male figure gesturing with his hands. The Met curators describe it as a “simple yet haunting” work that marked the beginning of Picasso’s interest in “the theatrical world of acrobats and saltimbanques.”
The lawyers for the estate — who estimate a value of more than $100 million for the painting — said in the court filing that the museum “did not disclose or should have known that the painting had been owned by a Jewish refugee, Paul Leffmann, who had disposed of the work only because of Nazi and Fascist persecution.”
The lawyers said they had negotiated with the Met for several years, while the Met investigated the claim, but they had never been able to reach a settlement.
“The Leffmanns would not have disposed of this seminal work at that time, but for the Nazi and Fascist persecution to which they had been, and without doubt would continue to be, subjected,” Lawrence M. Kaye of the law firm Herrick, Feinstein said in court papers.
In a statement, the Met strenuously denied there were grounds for the claim, asserting that the 1938 sale had been for fair market value and had not been made under duress. The amount the Leffmanns received was, the museum said, “a higher price than any other early Picasso sold by a collector to a dealer during the 1930s.” The Met said its ownership had never been questioned until Laurel Zuckerman, administrator of the Leffmann estate and great-grandniece of Paul and Alice Leffmann, approached the museum more than 10 years ago.
The museum also said the Leffmanns had made no claim on the painting after the war, when they did try to reclaim property they had been forced to sell.
Lawyers for the Leffmann estate criticized the Met, saying that for many years it had given an erroneous provenance for the painting, indicating that subsequent to Mr. Leffmann it had been owned by an unnamed German private collector until 1938, and that the Met corrected this only in 2011.
The Met said the provenance was not erroneous but was based on the recollection of the buyer Hugo Perls. It reflected the fact that the painting was owned by a German in Switzerland and was updated when more information became available, it said.
2016-09-30 18:42 By www.nytimes.com
12 /23 Fall Exhibitions Preview (2): 8 Exciting London Exhibitions in October and November Top Lists
25 Most Collectible Conceptual Artists
Fall Exhibitions Preview: 10 Upcoming Paris Exhibitions
See All »
Related
Venues
Tate Britain
British Museum
Tate Modern
National Portrait Gallery
Alison Jacques Gallery
Artists
Man Ray
London’s fall arts calendar is so full that one exhibition guide is not enough; instead, we have split ours into two, spotlighting 16 exhibitions in total that offer the best art of the season. The first part of our guide featured must-see exhibitions in September through mid-October, and below you will find more recommendations for the latter half of October, as well as November. These include shows dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe, the Guerrilla Girls, and Rodin; shows ranging from Modernist photography to modern photography, from the art of South Africa to the concept of “the vulgar” in fashion.
Click on our slideshow to view highlights from every show mentioned in our two London autumn exhibition previews.
October
Delivering a one-two punch along with The Photographers’ Gallery’s summary exhibition of the ‘70s feminist avant-garde, Whitechapel is hosting an archive show of the activism of the Guerrilla Girls. It includes a new commission that returns to the themes of representation in the arts, which, sadly, is not an issue we can archive yet.
With “Ab Fab” finally coming to cinemas this summer, vulgar fashion is back. What better way of celebrating than with this Barbican show, which will look at the loaded issue of taste and the deliberate disregarding thereof in dresses from the Renaissance to today. The exhibition will feature stunning couture from viscounts of vulgarity such as Philip Treacy, Christian Lacroix (“Lacroix, darling”) and, of course, Vivienne Westwood.
Some say that there are two segments to Rodin’s work: images of dancers dancing, and images of sex workers…working. The former is explored in depth at the Courtauld, with a remarkable show that highlights an often unseen experimental side to the artist. It features works in plaster and terracotta, as well as drawings exploring the possibilities of the body in movement, which unites both sides of the Rodin canon.
Tate Britain is donning a cloak and a pointed hat for an exhibition comprising Paul Nash’s British landscapes, inspired by mainstays of English mysticism such as the phases of the moon and the equinox. There are also paintings of the machinery of the Second World War that the artist is perhaps best known for.
The British Museum’s contribution to the fall calendar is a characteristically modest affair, only trying to explore ten millennia of the art of South Africa. The first exhibition of its kind in the UK, it will show 200 chronologically-arranged objects that take visitors on a journey from caves to Contemporary art, stopping by magnificent items like the gold treasures of Mapungubwe.
November
In addition to being one of Britain’s most beloved musicians, Elton John also has a major collection of photography — a flaming beacon of great taste that makes other collections look like (you’ve guessed it) candles in the wind. Puns aside (though we stand by that last one), the collection is a must-see, featuring famed and rare works by Man Ray , Imogen Cunningham, André Kertész, and Alfred Stieglitz among many others.
A staple of the fall arts calendar in London, the Taylor Wessing Prize is your chance to see all the year’s finest photography in one place. It is sure to be the usual combination of candid and celebrity, triumph and tragedy.
Celebrating the 70th anniversary of Robert Mapplethorpe’s birth, Alison Jacques Gallery has asked equally renowned photographer Juergen Teller to curate an exhibition from the entire archive of the Mapplethorpe Foundation. How the contemporary photographer known for the seeming casualness of his shots will approach the master of form is a question that makes this exhibition essential visiting. 2016-09-30 18:28 Samuel Spencer www.blouinartinfo.com
13 /23 Sam Moyer Joins Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, Leaving Rachel Uffner Gallery [Updated] Installation view of “Sam Moyer: More Weight” at Rachel Uffner Gallery in 2014.
COURTESY RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY
Sam Moyer, a longtime member of the artist roster at Rachel Uffner Gallery on Lower East Side in Manhattan, is joining Chelsea’s Sean Kelly Gallery, Uffner confirmed to ARTnews during a phone call this evening. The departure was announced in an email that Uffner sent to her friends and clients today.
“This is happening, and I’m proud of the work we did together, and I wish her luck moving forward,” Uffner said over the phone. “I’m sad about it—she’s been a big part of the gallery for six and a half years.”
Moyer’s last solo exhibition at the gallery was in 2014, and her work has appeared in two group shows at the space this year. Her first show at the gallery was in 2010.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, and as much as you think that you’re supporting an artist, it’s out of your control,” Uffner said. “The move—you know, I never wanted it to happen, but it didn’t come out of thin air.”
Moyer did not respond to an email.
Uffner’s email also announced that the gallery has hired a new director, Alexandra Giniger, previously a managing director at Greene Naftali Gallery in Chelsea. She starts October 19.
Update, September 30, 6:12 p.m.: On Friday evening, I was able to reach Sean Kelly on the phone. “We’re extremely excited about Sam joining the gallery, as she’s one of the most talented artists of her generation,” he said. “She’s a terrifically smart and talented artist.”
“She was extremely respectful of her relationship to Rachel and continues to be so,” Kelly added. “It was a difficult decision for her, because she’s a loyal person. We’re very grateful for Rachel for all the work that she’s put behind Sam. We’re excited for the next phase of Sam’s career, and we’re absolutely thrilled that she’s joining the gallery.”
Plans for her first solo exhibition at the gallery are underway, he said, but a date has not been set.
2016-09-30 18:01 Nate Freeman www.artnews.com
14 /23 The Duchess of Cambridge Inadvertently Bolsters Sales for Canadian Company Sentaler Her eight-day trip with the Duke has featured a carousel of designer looks — Jenny Packham, Dolce & Gabbana, Chloé, CH Carolina Herrera and Preen by Thornton Bregazzi among them. By choosing a red CH Carolina Herrera coat for one of this week’s official appearances, the Duchess was photographed in a Carolina Herrera design for the first time.
The former Kate Middleton arrived in Victoria wearing a cobalt blue Jenny Packham dress and a coordinating hat, carrying her 16- month-old daughter down the jetway. For the official welcoming ceremony with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia at Victoria International Airport, the Duchess kept L. K. Bennett’s Nina clutch neatly on her knee. The compact $325 bag appeared again later in the week, when the Duchess wore a Dolce & Gabbana green dress and L. K. Bennett nude-colored $345 Fern pumps.
One of this week’s big winners in terms of free worldwide publicity has been the Canadian outerwear label Sentaler. During the Yukon stretch of the royal tour, the Duchess wore a belted ribbed sleeve coat in gull gray. The Toronto company is a favorite label with Grégoire Trudeau. Fans of the Duchess have been ordering the $920 Sentaler jacket via the company’s e- commerce site. The little-known brand gained homeland recognition after Grégoire Trudeau wore a white Sentaler coat to her husband’s swearing-in ceremony last fall.
In advance of the royal visit, a stylist requested a few coats from Bojana Sentaler’s company, though staffers were not certain they were for the Duchess. Sentaler has sold out of the gray ribbed coat within hours of the Duchess having been photographed wearing one. (The company posted an image of her wearing it via its social media outlets but not on its web site.) Demand continued along to the degree that the item was first backordered until November, then December and eventually February due to shoppers’ interest, a Sentaler spokeswoman said. “Now all the ribbed styles are back ordered until the spring,” she said.
2016-09-30 17:59 Rosemary Feitelberg wwd.com
15 /23 Russia Urged to Liberalize Trade Policy at WTO Since Russia joined the WTO in 2012 it has become “a well-established and collaborative member,” said Michael Punke, U. S. ambassador to the WTO, who also was critical of recent changes in Russian trade policies.
“We have been been disappointed to see Russia turning away from the core tenets of of the WTO — liberal trade, transparency, predictability — in favor of inward-looking import substitution economic policies.”
During a two-day review session of Russia’s trade policies, the first since it joined the global body, that ended Friday, Punke questioned Russia’s enforcement and protection of intellectual property rights. “Russia continues to inadequately enforce its own laws, ” he said.
Similarly, the European Union delegation to the WTO said it regrets Russia “has so far not made the best use of the opportunities afforded by its membership, including transforming its economy and advancing on its objectives of modernization and innovation.”
Maxim Medvedkov, Russia’s deputy trade minister, said external shocks, such as the threefold drop in hydrocarbon prices and sanctions imposed by the U. S. and EU over the annexation of Crimea in 2014, had adversely impacted the economy.
The International Monetary Fund has said the Russian economy is on a “stabilization course” and forecast the economy will contract by 1.8 percent in 2016 and expand by 0.8 percent next year, notes a report compiled by the WTO secretariat for the review session.
However, Medvedkov said the growth rate is expected to reach “0.8 percent in 2017, 1.8 percent in 2018 and 2.2 percent in 2019.”
Import substitution policies ushered in have focused on agricultural products and strategic industrial sectors such as civil aircraft and pharmaceuticals.
Asked if apparel imports have been hit by tit-for-tat counter sanctions by Russia, Medvedkov said the sector has not been affected.
However, he said the sharp drop in the national currency, the ruble, “absolutely” had affected apparel import shipments.
Russia is the world’s 10th largest apparel import market with shipments valued at over $5.6 billion last year and accounted for a 3.1 percent share of total goods imports.
2016-09-30 17:43 John Zarocostas wwd.com
16 /23 Scott Kay Sets FIT Jewelry Design Student Competition Scott Kay , the New York-based fine jewelry firm, has asked second-year FIT jewelry design students to create bridal jewelry suites in the brand’s aesthetic vein. FIT’s jewelry program is a two-year, associate degree curriculum.
The winner will win a $3,000 cash prize and a trip to the Las Vegas JCK jewelry trade show, where their design will be displayed. Scott Kay will meet with the winning student to negotiate a potential production agreement, and the suite will also be shown to retailers for consideration. Texas-based Bailey, Banks & Biddle has signed on a potential stockist for the collection.
The contest will extend through the spring 2017 semester. Its five finalists will attend a dinner event, where they will present their work to a panel of judges, which has yet to be decided.
“The design contest will allow FIT students to experience the realities of the jewelry industry, providing them a firsthand look into the total design process from first sketch to final conception. We hope students will be inspired by the artistry of Scott Kay and that the contest will encourage them to continue exploring their studies in jewelry design,” said Kelly Kahn, Scott Kay’s director of brand management.
The competitions second and third runners-up will win a $1,000 cash prize, with the fourth and fifth runner-ups slated to take home $500.
2016-09-30 17:42 Misty White wwd.com
17 /23 Datebook: Ellwood Risk at Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica Related
Venues
Robert Berman Gallery
Artists
Ellwood T. Risk
'A History of Violence' by Los Angeles-based artist Ellwood Risk is on view at Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica through October 8, 2016. The exhibition features many of the (LA and New York Times) front pages from shooting tragedies in years past and the present.
The show comes in wake of the rising gun violence incidences in the US and how it has become a day to day reality. The Orlando mass shooting also forms a backdrop to the exhibition. This is Ellwood Risk's comment regarding the topic of gun violence in America. This is her first attempt at directly addressing the issue.
2016-09-30 17:41 BLOUIN ARTINFO www.blouinartinfo.com
18 /23 Nike’s Bike-Sharing Program With Portland Offers Limited- Edition Bikes With 350 miles of bikeways covering 8.5 square miles, Oregon’s capital — and Nike’s home state — has one of the largest and oldest biking circuits in the country, dating back to the Seventies. The city of 600,000 also has one of the highest percentages of commuters who cycle their way to work — 7.2 percent for nearly 20 years, according to Portland Bureau of Transportation’s chief information officer Dylan Rivera. “It’s been a phenomenal success. We said we’d give it six to 12 months before we’d consider expanding adjacent locations or expanding the square footage.”
Before Nike was chosen from a field of dozens of other national and local contenders, Portland planned to launch its bike program with 600 bikes using solely a $2 million federal grant. Nike’s $10 million deal also included branding rights, and Nike being Nike, there are limited- edition bike wrap designs inspired by select footwear. Portland cyclists now have the option of cruising through the city on an Air Max version. Adhesive wraps are used to reflect the color schemes and designs inspired by Air Max footwear.
And Nike is even knocking off its own idea at the company’s Beaverton, Ore., campus. Last month, the company rolled out 400 bikes for employees to use on campus.
Unlike Citibike’s bike-sharing program in New York, Portland’s Biketown uses “smart bikes with dumb stations instead of dumb bikes with smart stations.” Rivera said. Designed by Social Bicycles, a Brooklyn company, the Nike-supported bikes have eight gears, reflective features, solar panels, a GPS unit, security locks for riders’ convenience and individual baskets. Instead of relying on expensive docks and kiosks, Social Bicycles uses wireless technology and a locking system on the bike.
The company has 27 bike share programs including ones in Beverly Hills, the University of Virginia and Kraków, Poland. Biketown is operated by Motivate, the largest company managing bike share systems in the U. S. A local Portland company, Holy Spokes, operates the Biketown WHQ program.
2016-09-30 17:34 Rosemary Feitelberg wwd.com
19 /23 Post-Merger, Auctionata | Paddle8 Will Be Known as Paddle8 Two players in the online auction realm merged in May, and will now modify their name to reflect their unified identity. Auctionata acquired Paddle8 and briefly operated under the unwieldy name Auctionata | Paddle8. The company will soon rebrand as Paddle8, CEO Thomas Hesse told artnet News in a phone conversation today.
“It just doesn’t make sense long-term to operate under two names,” he said.
In addition to simplifying, the name change also deemphasizes the Auctionata brand, which was tainted in April when international accounting firm KPMG accused the company of engaging in improper trade practices, including company executives bidding up the company’s own lots.
Related: Auctionata Accused of Serious Trade Violations
The choice of brands came as a surprise to some insiders, talking to artnet News off the record, who indicated that Paddle8 had been missing its revenue targets consistently in recent months and that the company faced possible liquidation after the acquisition. (Hesse denies this.) Some key staffers had left by the time the acquisition was announced, and a round of layoffs followed it became public. Paddle8 launched in 2011, founded by the trio of Phillips veteran Alexander Gilkes, startup veteran Aditya Julka, and merger and acquisition specialist Osman Khan. In three rounds of fundraising, Paddle8 raised $44 million from 13 investors, including heavyweights like British artist Damien Hirst , London dealer Jay Jopling, Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos, and New York/London dealer David Zwirner.
After initially focusing on emerging artists in a bid to serve buyers and sellers of relatively low- priced items, the company had several rounds of fundraising that it used to try to break into other luxury markets, without much success.
Paddle8’s acquisition by Auctionata came shortly after the demise of another online auctioneer, ArtList, which folded in July after two years, reflecting the struggles of many online auction startups. (artnet has operated its own online auction business since 2008.)
Related: ArtList, Startup for the Art World, Closes Shop Just as It Was Gearing Up
Auctionata launched a year after Paddle8. Founded by Alexander Zacke and Georg Untersalmberger, the auctioneer boasts investors including French fashion magnate Bernard Arnault. The firm had raised some $88 million by May; the online database Crunchbase reflects that the merged company has raised some $95.56 million in four rounds from 13 investors. Hesse declined to disclose staffing numbers; insiders speaking to artnet off the record estimate about 200.
Hesse says the company is banking on the combination of Auctionata’s livestreamed auctions with concurrent bidding from various buyers and Paddle8’s shiny brand, developed through partnerships with nonprofits and institutions like the Guggenheim Museum, as well as celebrity curators for some of its sales, from Elton John to Ellen DeGeneres.
We spoke to Hesse by phone and posed some questions.
Q: Even companies like Uber and Lyft are encountering skeptical investors. Are you facing some of the same headwinds?
“It’s true that the whole climate of investment in startups has cooled off a little bit, but the positioning we have in the market is unique, and we have a strong shareholder base of very prestigious investors and partners like Hearst and MCI. They have been extremely supportive.”
Q: Isn’t the art market, with which Paddle8 is closely associated, softening? Does that present a challenge?
“Even if the art market overall may not be growing, our share of that market is growing significantly, and Auctionata | Paddle8 is very much present in the luxury category—watches, classic car activity, wine, jewelry—these are all businesses that have been doing well overall. The market is coming our way, and it is growing.”
Q: Paddle8 wasn’t entirely successful in branching out from art into other sectors of the market. Is it the best face for the merged company?
“When it came to making a brand decision, we felt it was Paddle8 that was the most suitable brand to continue on a successful path, though Auctionata will be a key engine driving things from the inside.
“You have to remember that while we have decided that Paddle8 will be the brand, the change is not happening tomorrow. We will for the time being have two websites, and there are two customer databases that we’re gradually bringing together. We will conduct more video selling, which will broaden Paddle8’s capabilities and its reach, and we will in a subtle but meaningful way add other categories. We will align the look and feel of the two places. It will be a very natural convergence.”
2016-09-30 17:34 Senior Writer news.artnet.com
20 /23 New York International Fringe Festival Will Skip 2017 Over the past 20 summers, the New York International Fringe Festival has shepherded 3,680 productions onto downtown stages, 193 of them this August alone. But performance spaces in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side may be seeking new tenants next year. In a move that officials hastened to say was not a precursor to its demise, the festival — popularly known as FringeNYC — is taking 2017 off.
“This is not the end,” said Shelley Burch, president of the board of the Present Company, which produces the festival.
Elena K. Holy, FringeNYC’s producing artistic director and one of its founders, said that the hiatus isn’t prompted by a financial crisis or executive burnout at an organization so lean that she is one of just two full-time employees.
Rather, she said in an interview Thursday afternoon in the funky garden behind her East Village office, it’s about something more elusive and fundamental: carving out the time to ponder — to completely reconsider what the festival needs to be instead of racing headlong, as usual, into preparations for the next year.
“It’s too short a window to make any significant changes,” said Ms. Holy, 48. “We need to disrupt it.”
Looking contemplative, she said she didn’t know yet what or how major those changes might be, but that FringeNYC needed to figure out how to best serve its artists, audiences and alumni — in part by taking the time to analyze its trove of data on them.
FringeNYC has a number of notable alumni, including Mindy Kaling, Diane Paulus and the Broadway musical “Urinetown,” but it hasn’t been as much of a launching pad for emerging artists as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Though FringeNYC selection is juried, some critics have grumbled about a surfeit of substandard shows.
Every element of the festival, which presents not only theater but also dance, opera, comedy and other live performance, is open to evaluation. That includes whether FringeNYC should occur annually or on some other schedule, whether it should continue to rent theaters on behalf of its shows (Edinburgh does not) and whether its current curation process is the best way to go.
“It really is a blank canvas,” Ms. Holy said. “Should it be bigger? Should it be smaller? Should it be find-your-own-venue? Should it be a particular genre? Everything is game.”
Its tax return for 2014, the most recent year publicly available, shows revenue of just over $1 million and expenses of $918,000 for the Present Company, whose sole program is FringeNYC. With a budget of about $900,000 for 2016, the Present Company has by now built up a nest egg of about $140,000, Ms. Holy said. That’s enough to keep her and the festival’s general manager, Christian De Gré, on the payroll during the hiatus year — but, for a group that operates on about 90 percent earned income, not enough to go on longer than that.
Ms. Holy began considering a festival hiatus when she caught herself, in the past few years, reading the emails headhunters would send, trying to recruit her for other jobs. She said she isn’t ready to leave FringeNYC, but also that having such a tiny full-time staff may not be tenable. “I really have been working every day, and that’s not great,” she said, “because it doesn’t allow time to think.”
2016-09-30 17:27 By www.nytimes.com
21 /23 Datebook: Sol LeWitt and Zhang Xiaogang at Pace Beijing Related
Venues
PACE Beijing
Artists
Zhang Xiaogang
A group exhibition showcasing the new paintings of acclaimed Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang and sculptures and wall drawings of American artist Sol LeWitt is on view at Pace Beijing. The event will run through November 19, 2016.
The exhibition features sculptures and wall drawings composed by Sol LeWitt placed in a spiritual discourse with a selection of more than 20 paintings created by Zhang Xiaogang. LeWitt’s artwork is known to extricate and cleanse the tangible into conceptual whereas Zhang’s paintings bring forward a psychosomatic inner world, which is more allegorical in comparison. The works of both the artists have been segregated by a translucent wall which assists in blurring the edge between the artworks, creating a visual collision while simultaneously depicting a harmonious and conceptual co-existence.
Click on the Slideshow for the sneak peek at the exhibition.
2016-09-30 17:25 BLOUIN ARTINFO www.blouinartinfo.com
22 /23 Datebook: ‘A Perhaps Hand’ at IT Park, Taiwan An exhibition titled 'A Perhaps Hand' presenting the works of acclaimed artist Mia Wen-Hsuan Liu will be on view at IT Park, Taiwan, from October 1-29, 2016. The works are the artist’s recent composition, which is a progression of studies concerning diverse possibilities related to or extending from painting.
Propelled by inquisitiveness, it presents a mixed visual effect of paper sculpture and painting subsequent to the blade streaking across the paintings consecutively, and further being installed and tracked in the space. Through this demonstration, the artist tends to explore beyond the limits of painting into the real prevailing space and takes a shot at entwining imagination with representation into compositions concerning painting and its fantasy.
2016-09-30 17:19 BLOUIN ARTINFO www.blouinartinfo.com
23 /23 These Artists Sampled Fukushima's Textures and You Can, Too
Textures from the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. Images courtesy the artists
Can you define the aesthetic of a disaster zone? Artists Eva and Franco Mattes are trying to do just that with The Fukushima Texture Pack , a photo collection of the surfaces left in the irradiated Fukushima Exclusion Zone after an earthquake, tsunami, and reactor breach ravaged the Fukishima Prefecture on March 11, 2011.
In August 2015, an exhibition called Don’t Follow the Wind opened at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, making it perhaps the least accessible exhibition in the world. Organized by the Japanese art collective Chim↑Pom, Don't Follow the Wind includes works by 12 artists and groups, and will run until the area is safe again for the general population. Unfortunately, this means that the site-specific artworks from Ai Weiwei, Trevor Paglen, and more will remain in the ghostly dystopian confines of the unreachable radiation dome, possibly for decades. The Creators Project documented the installation of Don't Follow the Wind , which you can watch below:
The NYC-based Mattes duo, who also contributed to Don’t Follow the Wind , have created The Fukushima Texture Pack as a stop-gap, in order to return a temporary kind of access to this forbidden territory. Thus, the photos in the series document various elegant, gritty, decaying, but surprisingly intact surfaces inside of the Exclusion Zone. These include both indoor and outdoor surfaces like tatami, walls, grass, pavements, floors, and desks. The Mattes will preserve the surfaces by covering them by transparent plexiglass, creating a publicly- accessible impression of the forbidden areas.
Additionally, the artist duo encourages creatives to use the pictures in the Fukushima Texture Pack as elements of their own artworks. They envision the disparate elements reconfigured in 3D models, films, sculptures, and more, with the goal to collect the multifarious projects their photographs transform into. They will soon publish the textures online and are currently looking for any and all collaborators. Potentially, they will distribute the Texture Pack via a Pantone-style catalogue, making the textures accessible to artists both online and off.
See more of Eva and Franco Mattes' work on their website .
Related:
Big Brother Is Alive and Well in the World of Content Moderators
The Radioactive Art Exhibit You Can't See | Don't Follow The Wind Eva and Franco Mattes Explore The Values Of A Virtual World
2016-09-30 17:10 Masha thecreatorsproject.vice.com
Total 23 articles.
Created at 2016-10-01 06:00