Vote paves way for Bass Museum to expand

By Christina Cepero Umpierre

The Bass Museum of Art on Miami Beach will close Sunday until fall 2016 to increase programming space by 47.5% on its existing footprint with a $7.5 million city grant.

The Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board voted 6-0 Tuesday to approve the partial demolition, renovation and expansion of the two-story structure at 2100 Collins Ave.

The interior reconfiguration involves replacing a ramp with a staircase and enclosing the courtyard and terrace to boost programmable space from 17,772 square feet to 26,212.

The Bass will add two galleries for a total of five and two classrooms for a total of three.

The museum attracted a record 65,000 visitors during its 50th anniversary year in 2014, doubling attendance in five years.

“We need our building to catch up with us,” said Silvia Karman Cubiñá, the museum’s executive director and chief curator since 2008.

An average of 300 people a week participate in the museum’s educational programs.

The redesign will include a reception area with a shop and added classroom space to offer more classes to more children and add an after-school program.

“We’re going to change the character of the visitor experience,” said Mrs. Cubiñá. “When we designed the building it was in a time when visitors came to museums in a very contemplative mode. They came to see art and they left.

“Now museums are asked to be places of entertainment, to have coffee, educational programs, be much more interactive.”

During construction, the museum will display contemporary art in the first floor lobby of the Miami Beach Regional Library across the street as well as outdoors in Collins Park outside its entrance.

“We’re going to be sharing resources,” said Jennifer Shipley, library branch manager. “I think it’s a positive situation.”

Miami-Dade County issued the Friends of the Bass Museum a temporary permit from September 2015 to September 2016 for bassX to display nine exhibits in the library’s first floor lobby and offer weekly programs in its upstairs classroom, including Bass Babies and portfolio classes.

The museum office will remain on site and summer camp will also be held at the Bass while the building is prepared for construction, which will start in mid-August.

Museum leaders are interviewing contractors this week.

The 2,000-piece collection is to be transported to a secured warehouse.

Designed in 1930 by Russell Pancoast, grandson of Miami Beach pioneer John A. Collins, the Art Deco building at 2100 Collins Ave. housed the Miami Beach Public Library and Art Center before the Bass opened there in 1964.

In 1978, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2002 the museum added 16,000 square feet designed by Japanese architect ArataIsozaki in collaboration with his New York partner David Gauld.

The Bass is again working with Mr. Isozaki and Mr. Gauld for its interior expansion.

“I’ve been to Tokyo three times to meet with him,” Mr. Gauld said. “He very much supports everything we’re doing.”

Miami Beach city planning staff recommended approval. Tracy Slavens, attorney for the Friends of the Bass Museum, said the museum agreed to city staff’s request to keep intact an original staircase, develop a lighting plan and ensure the coral stone west wall is protected.

“You’ve really brought the museum into its own,” said city historic preservation board member Jane Gross. “People who visit here now actually go to the museum.”

Gary Farmer, the city’s cultural affairs program manager, commended museum leadership for coming up with the plan to expand without building an addition, which would have cost $15 million.

The city commission approved the $7.5 million grant for the work from its capital budget in 2013.

The museum’s annual budget is $3 million, Mrs. Cubiñá said, adding that two-thirds comes from fundraising and the rest from municipal funds.

The City of Miami Beach owns the building and collection while a 26-member board runs the museum, which has 21 full-time employees and 1,200 members.

“They have really made a name for themselves in the national art world,” Mr. Farmer said.

Exhibits initiated at the Bass have gone to museums in Purchase, NY; Dallas, and Cincinnati.

Of Museums and Racial Relics

Recently, Rush Limbaugh lambasted the first lady, Michelle Obama, for bringing up the idea of diversity among museum visitors at the opening of the new Whitney Museum in New York.

According to Limbaugh, the first lady said: “Museums and concert halls just don’t welcome nonwhite visitors — especially children — the way they welcome white people.”

What the first lady actually said was:

Museums: Get the Picture, Sell the Duds

Art purists all over the world are up in arms at museums that are selling off parts of their collections to pay the electricity bill or finance remodeling. Museums of all sizes in the U.K, France, Germany and Wilmington, Del., have been unloading treasures, or thinking about doing so, to help keep the lights on. The practice of robbing Tintoretto to pay the taxman is known as “deaccessioning.” In the art world, it is a nasty word indeed.

No one denies that some museums and other institutional art owners are in trouble. In Portugal, the government is thinking about selling off a trove of works by Joan Miró to cover the bills run up by the bank that owned them. Last year, after the Delaware Art Museum sold a Pre-Raphaelite canvas by William Holman Hunt, the Association of Art Museum Directors advised its members to stop lending works to the Delaware museum or collaborating with it on exhibitions. For the museum, it’s like being cast out in the darkness. Or blacklisted.

“The arts bring in big bucks” @miamiherald by Ricardo Mor

If you visited Miami Beach recently, you might have noticed the message “Culture = Capital” on top of the rotunda in Collins Park in front of the Bass Museum. It’s a work by artist Alfredo Jaar and was installed as part of Art Basel’s yearly public program.

The work likely was staged during Art Basel as a comment on the flagrant commercialization of art that takes place during the week of the art fair. But the work also got me thinking about how art has become an integral part of the South Florida economy and how it has helped drive local industry.

Earlier this year, much ado was made when the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released its first study ever attempting to measure the value of artistic production in the country. The study determined that 4.2 percent of the country’s GDP, nearly $700 billion, was from creative industries, greater than other industries including construction, agriculture or tourism.

When O, Miami founder P. Scott Cunningham shared the results of the study on social media, he said what many local creatives wished they could tell local business leaders: “You’re welcome.”

The arts are sometimes denigrated and seen, by some, as unessential. But the arts are especially vital in Miami, and many fail to realize just how big of an impact they have on its economy.

In terms of dollars, nonprofit arts and culture organizations and their audiences produced more than $1 billion in direct spending according to the Arts & Economic Prosperity study by Americans for the Arts. This study also found that nonprofit arts and culture organizations in Miami-Dade County employ almost 30,000 workers.

According to the Beacon Council, the nonprofit arts economy employs nearly as many jobs as the top three private employers in Miami-Dade County combined, which include Baptist Health South Florida, University of Miami and American Airlines. It also amounts to about as many employees on the Miami-Dade County government’s payroll.

While our arts scene is much newer than others around the country, we’ve already become among the most prosperous arts communities in the United States. According to the aforementioned Arts & Economic Prosperity study, we have more economic output from nonprofit arts and culture organizations and audiences than Hawaii, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Delaware, and Wisconsin combined.

To put that into perspective, we have more economic output in the nonprofit arts community than the population of the 17 million in those states despite being home to only 2.5 million in Miami-Dade County.

While the direct impact of these arts nonprofits is significant, there is also the for-profit arts and culture industry, which includes commercial art galleries, live music and cultural events. While statistics on the for-profit arts and culture industry are difficult to find, Miami-Dade County Cultural Affairs director Michael Spring estimated that the direct economic impact behind both the commercial and nonprofit arts and culture industry is $2 billion.

While the measurable economic effects are significant, the arts have also driven up our cultural capital in a way that studies can’t capture. This community has helped reshape the image of Miami into a city that is perceived as cosmopolitan.

That has attracted new audiences to Miami, many of whom drop big bucks while visiting or even decide to move or make investments here.

If even just a small percentage of those visiting, moving to or investing in Miami are doing so primarily because of the arts community, the indirect economic impact would likely measure in billions of dollars on top of the more easily calculated direct impact. Greater Miami has done a remarkable job at fostering this artist community and now its reaping its rewards.

We must double down on this community to allow it to thrive. While many arts institutions in Miami are on the rise, they need to support of government, corporate sponsors and individual donors to continue their work and expand their horizons.

In addition, we must foster and patronize arts for-profits like art galleries and music venues that showcase local and national talents.

More important, we need to continue to foster the community culture that has allowed the arts to thrive and ensure that everyone who wishes to contribute the arts in Miami have the opportunity for success.

Because what’s good for the arts is good for our economy.

“Obama proposes $240 million in 2016 for Everglades restoration” @miamiherald by Jenny Staletovich

The Obama administration signaled it’s serious about fixing the Everglades Monday by unveiling a budget that proposes spending $240 million on restoration work.

Of that, at least $124 million would go directly toward U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction projects, nearly double the current budget and more than four times what was spent the year before, said Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg.

The money builds on $1.6 billion the administration says it has so far spent to complete chronically-delayed repairs to one of the nation’s largest ecosystems. Restoring the wetlands drained for development in the 1940s was first authorized under a landmark act signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000. But in recent years, the large public works bill intended to pay for projects failed to pass a divided Congress.

“We’ve been very vocal that if we’re going to avoid Everglades fatigue not only in Florida but around the country, we’ve got to move to finish these projects,” Eikenberg said. “So the White House coming out with $124 million just for the Corps is a very positive development.”

Eickenberg said he now hopes Congress follows the lead and “at least starts at that baseline.”

While the administration did not name specific projects to be funded, Julie Hill-Gabriel, director of Everglades policy for Audubon Florida, said top contenders include two older canal projects in South Miami-Dade County authorized nearly two decades ago, along with four projects inserted into a major 2014 water works bill. Among the projects are a water preserve in western Broward County and two reservoirs needed near Lake Okeechobee to keep polluted water from fouling the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers. In 2013, water from the lake triggered toxic algae blooms.

George Lindemann Journal – “Climate fix for rising seas could foul Miami’s Biscayne Bay” @miamiheald

George Lindemann Journal – “Climate fix for rising seas could foul Miami’s Biscayne Bay” @miamiheald

Last fall as Miami Beach triumphantly drained its streets, beating back seasonal King Tide flooding that has come to symbolize the perils of climate change, scientists got a different view of what the future may hold: one of the world’s most celebrated beaches surrounded by water too foul for swimming.

New pumps installed to keep the city dry flooded Biscayne Bay with a soup of phosphorus, nitrogen and other pollutants that can feed toxic algae blooms, according to a study overseen by Florida International University geologist Henry O. Briceno. In parts of the bay, the mass flushing caused nutrients to increase six-fold. If pumping were to become a regular practice, nutrients that are “like caviar for algae” could fuel nasty-smelling blooms that kill marine life and turn water a bright pea green, he said.

“You have a dry city. A very safe city,” with increased pumping, Briceno said. “But you won’t have any beaches to bring tourists.”

Over the next three to five years, the city plans to install 20 times as many pumps — between 60 and 70 altogether — capable of pumping up to 20,000 gallons a minute as part of a $300 million-plus fix to keep the island high and drive.

Briceno, who used the annual flooding event to conduct a rare island-wide experiment in real time, relayed his findings to Miami Beach officials. Officials said the work indicates more monitoring is needed, but is not conclusive.

“It gives you a good idea of the potential, but it doesn’t really prove anything other than this is something we need to look at,” said Miami Beach City Engineer Bruce Mowry.

Spikes in pollutants could have been caused by the city’s new, more powerful pumps flushing a century-old system, Mowry said. The city is also equipping pumps with devices meant to filter out pollution and plans to increase street sweeping and gutter cleaning to keep contaminants from reaching the bay. Mowry also pointed out that the new pumps passed muster with environmental regulators.

“I guess the question to be asked is: Is this enough?” he said.

Miami Beach, a natural mangrove barrier island sliced and diced by Miami’s early real estate moguls, sits on porous limestone rock, like a calcified sponge. When seas rise during annual fall and spring high tides, water washing over seawalls poses less of a threat than fresh groundwater, which floats on seawater, pushing up through holes in the ground. Mowry calls it vertical flooding. In the past, as seas crept higher, vertical flooding caused the city’s old gravity stormwater system to act like artesian wells, with water bubbling up through pipes, he said.

Last fall, the city focused its efforts on its most flood-prone — and most trafficked — locations near West Avenue and Sunset Harbor, installing three new pumps and rehabbing three old ones to keep water from washing back into streets as the tide drove water levels higher.

But Briceno worried the city was “only looking at one face of the coin,” and not at how water, pushed through ground polluted with old septic tanks, animal feces and other contaminants, affected the bay. So a month before the tides, he created a grid for sampling. Researchers collected water near sewer outfall pipes in the bay, midway into the bay and on the eastern edges of Star, Flagler Memorial and Rivo Alto islands. At the height of the tide in October, they returned for a second round of sampling.

Briceno said his experiment was really meant to provide a snapshot of what to expect.

“The city is being kept dry, which is excellent. That’s a success, protecting people’s health and property and tourism,” he said.

But what about the health of the bay?

“I imagine to live in Miami Beach in the future is going to cost you a lot of taxes,” he said.

Briceno predicts Miami Beach and other communities that want to drain increasing amounts of water will need to treat it to eliminate hazardous elements, or use deep injection wells where they can store it until limestone filters out pollutants. Mowry believes the solution could be a combination of keeping streets and pipes clean and more efficient pumping.

“This is not one thing,” he said. “It’s a big thing and the world is going to have to address it.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article8830133.html#storylink=cpy

George Lindemann Journal – “A Daring Duo Portrays a Divided Britain” @wsj by Mary M. Lane

George Lindemann Journal – “A Daring Duo Portrays a Divided Britain” @wsj by Mary M. Lane

‘Astro Star,’ by Gilbert & George, is at the White Cube gallery in London. © Gilbert & George/White Cube

Strolling through East London three years ago, Gilbert & George stumbled on empty nitrous-oxide gas containers that young partygoers had used for a euphoric high. To the artistic duo, the cans looked like miniature bombs. At the same time, they were noticing on the same streets a growing group of English-born Muslim women clad in all-covering black shrouds.

Gilbert & George decided to explore this contrast between rebellion and conservatism, and the result is “Scapegoating,” 123 photographic collages featuring gas canisters, posters promoting strict Islamic law and veiled Muslim women.

“Scapegoating” is “about capturing a schizophrenic London,” said Gilbert Proesch, 70, who became romantically and professionally linked with George Passmore, 72, after they met at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1967. They have put up half of the collages at London’s White Cube gallery until Sept. 28, while a second installment opens on Sunday at Paris’s Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

Gilbert & George are now almost household names in Europe. Their local pub bears a large mural honoring them. They have won the prestigious Turner Prize, represented the U.K. in the 2005 Venice Biennale, and their major 2007 Tate Museum retrospective ended at the Brooklyn Museum.

As an example of the duo’s view of a divided Britain, Mr. Proesch pointed to “Astro Star,” an 8-by-14-foot symmetrical work showing two veiled women circumventing a headless figure in skin-tight jeans. The artists’ ghostlike faces and a local café menu, advertising such British fares as steak pie, surround them.

The artists have divided each picture into panels—a look Westerners might associate with stained glass windows, they say. The duo used only five colors: onyx, white, tan, yellow and red.

In “Puttees,” a shrouded woman carries two shopping bags down a blood-red street. Beside her, Gilbert & George, distorted to resemble skeletons, raise their palms in supplicating pleas.

Artists Gilbert and George outside their studio in East London last month Jason Alden for The Wall Street Journal

Both artists say the series expands on earlier work that cast a critical look at ideologies like white supremacy and Christian fundamentalism. “What’s wrong with a godless religion built around having impeccable manners?” said Mr. Proesch, straightening his tie portraying frogs leaping atop green silk.

For 45 years, Gilbert & George have worn self-designed tweed suits. What began as a marketing aid is now part of an ethos that sees maintaining fastidious standards as a way to show spiritual respect for fellow humans, they say.

Gilbert & George express sympathy for the 2010 French ban on the burqa, the all-body shroud worn by certain Muslim women—a decision that caused much debate in Britain. “Is [the burqa] a wonderful expression of the tolerant society we live in, or are there dangers to it?” asked Mr. Passmore.

“We haven’t shown something as political as these works before,” says Thaddaeus Ropac, 54, who opened his gallery in Paris in 1990. “The French will embrace it. I just wonder how the members of these [Islam-practicing] ethnic groups will feel.” So far he has heard of no protests.

Gilbert & George’s White Cube and Ropac works are priced between $91,000 and $829,000.

The artists have always courted criticism with once-controversial themes such as homoeroticism or bodily fluids. The two touched on other topics as they gained fame, but English critics still referred to them as “fruits in suits” when they addressed nonsexual topics, they say. “It didn’t matter what the subject was, it was ‘gay art’ and that wasn’t acceptable,” said Mr. Proesch.

In time the sexualized themes that brought them publicity have become accepted and even copied. That, the artists say, galvanized them to explore new subject matter: fundamentalism and what Mr. Passmore calls youthful “hooliganism.”

The artists remain a tough sell in the U.S., say curators and dealers. They enjoy a cult following among some private American collectors—nearly all of whom own several works and have adequate space for their large-scale pictures, says their New York dealer, Rachel Lehmann. She recently closed a show in Manhattan of historical Gilbert & George videos. They weren’t for sale; the exhibition was part of her long-term plan to glean more academic attention for the duo.

Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman, known among curators for his niche artistic predilections, organized the only U.S. touring show of Gilbert & George’s work in 1984 and 1985, as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. “All that male frontal nudity… We had to do a lot of convincing to get museums to take the show” and secure the necessary corporate sponsors, he said.

For Gilbert & George’s American devotees, salvation may lie in the South. Curator Bonnie Clearwater is planning a late-2015 Fort Lauderdale, Fla., exhibition to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, a mecca for collectors coveting controversy. Ms. Clearwater employed the same strategy last year to promote British artist Tracey Emin. The show was a hit, and Ms. Emin’s prices have been climbing since.

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal – “Taking Wing in a Time of Extremis” @nytimes By HOLLAND COTTER

George Lindemann Journal – “Taking Wing in a Time of Extremis” @nytimes By HOLLAND COTTER

Slide Show|9 Photos

Jim Hodges’s Emotional Palette

Jim Hodges’s Emotional Palette

CreditStewart Cairns for The New York Times

BOSTON — In the 21st century, we tend to talk about new art in terms of medium and style: Performance is back, painting is back, Pop is back, and so on. But for roughly a decade, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, the emphasis was on ideas and emotions. As racial and gender politics navigated the culture wars, and the toll taken by AIDS grew overwhelming, content often trumped form. In a lesson learned from feminism, personal history and feeling were O.K. Even spirituality, which the New York art world handles with tongs, became an admissible subject.

Jim Hodges’s career as an artist began in that in-extremis time. Mr. Hodges was shaped by it and helped shape the art that came out of it. Gay, raised Roman Catholic, living in the AIDS war zone that was New York City, he favored craft-based forms, ephemeral and found materials, and images — flowers, butterflies — traditionally associated with mortality and transience. You’ll find all of this in “Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take,” a taut career survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art here. You’ll also find work that expands beyond the historical moment to which this artist is usually critically confined.

Mr. Hodges was born in Spokane, Wash., in 1957, studied art in regional schools and graduated with an M.F.A. in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1986. At that point, he lost interest in painting, a shift that seems more or less to have coincided with his coming out. He says in the catalog interview that he was “lost in the hugeness of painting,” was unable to find a singular voice in it. And he needed that voice urgently. He was changing, and so was the subculture he was now fully part of. Both were under serious threat.

Some of the earliest things in the show are experiments in addressing these realities. For the 1989 piece called “Deformed,” he sliced a scuffed-up Bonwit Teller shopping bag along its seams, splayed it out and pinned it to the wall to form a cross. The bag itself carried some gay coding: Andy Warhol had once designed window displays for this women’s department store. The cross has an obvious religious connotation but also suggests a medical emblem, the Red Cross. The bunches of violets printed on the bag (not pansies, as they are identified in a wall label) become both floral tributes and funeral bouquets.

A small 1993 collage, made from store-bought plastic decals, of an eagle descending among butterflies was intended as a homage to a friend, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS three years later. (In 2008 Mr. Hodges turned the collage image into a large stained-glass sculpture, also in the show.) And a 1992 installation called “What’s Left” was conceived with his own possible demise in mind.

It consists of a pile of his clothes — jeans, shoes, briefs, black leather belt — lying on the gallery floor as if dropped in a quick undressing, for sleep, for sex, for a shower. The impression of spontaneity is countered, though, by an additional element: a spider web, woven from fine metal chains, that stretches over the pile, implying that the wearer had long since vanished.

Over the years, Mr. Hodge’s work has been routinely identified, and sometimes dismissed, as a lament over AIDS, but this is not his only subject. Childhood is another. “Good Luck,” from 1987, is nothing more than a black wool ski mask cut open and flattened out. Hung high on a wall, it peers down, scary-funny, like a Halloween spook.

The tall curtain of stitched-together nylon, chiffon and silk headscarves called “Here’s Where We Will Stay” (1995) is an elegant shout-out to his mother and grandmother, who taught him to sew. It also evokes a gay kid’s captivation with the hidden world of delicate fabrics stored away in his mother’s scented bureau drawers. And the mnemonic power of scent itself summons the presence of Mr. Hodge’s own mother in an installation he made after her death in 2006.

Called “The Dark Gate,” it’s a big walk-in, sepulcherlike wooden box encasing a circle of sharp steel spikes. Each spike is meant to suffuse the air with his mother’s favorite perfume and the scent that Mr. Hodges was wearing the day she died. The piece is overdetermined to the point of heaviness (and I picked up no trace of a scent). But as part of a larger idea of recapturing childhood, and the sting of seductions and losses that start early and never really stop, it makes sense.

A decade earlier, the artist had, in a roundabout way, returned to painting, or something like it. In 1997 he glued a mirror to a canvas, smashed it with a hammer and exhibited the cracked results. Thereafter, he created a more controlled fracture effect by piecing together small squares of mirrored glass into mosaic panels. These panels reappear here and there in the galleries, refracting light, disco ball fashion, and creating distorted images of quite different works from other decades.

The curators — Jeffrey Grove of the Dallas Museum of Art, Olga Viso of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Anna Stothart of the Institute of Contemporary Art — have arranged the show by theme rather than date, a good idea. This gives the episodic visual texture of Mr. Hodges’s career a sense of consistency, which, indeed, it has. The natural world, it turns out, is a binding presence through 30 years. It’s there early, and gently, in the flowers and butterflies, and dramatically — operatically, even — in “Untitled (One Day It All Comes True),” finished last year: a mural-size picture of a roiling cloudscape embroidered entirely from thousands of scraps of blue denim.

What, exactly, are we seeing? Nuclear clouds or Constable clouds? End times or a universe coming, Romantically, into being? Much of Mr. Hodges’s art walks an anxious line between fatalism and uplift. He seems to be, by temperament, a mourner, but one with edges and elbows. He has a shrewd sense of humor, a way of mocking himself through materials: all those recycled jeans, and all that crazy hands-on sewing! And if work slips around from one form to another, how refreshing to see someone not turning out product.

In the end, he makes no great claims for his art. His career is less like an orchestrated score than like a diary of doing and being. It’s easy to point out the influence of other artists on him — James Lee Byars, Roni Horn, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Paul Thek and Richard Tuttle — and Mr. Hodges is the first to name them. Less well documented is the extent to which he has been a role model for a younger generation. If some of the art in his retrospective comes across as wanly familiar in its effects, it’s because so many people have learned from him since the post-plague years of the late 1990s, though you probably wouldn’t see that if you weren’t aware of, or didn’t care about, that history.

George Lindemann Journal – “Miami artist who destroyed Ai Weiwei vase at museum gets probation, must pay $10,000” @miamiherald by David Ovalle

George Lindemann Journal – “Miami artist who destroyed Ai Weiwei vase at museum gets probation, must pay $10,000” @miamiherald by David Ovalle

A Miami artist who smashed a valuable piece by celebrated artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum must serve 18 months of probation and pay back $10,000 in restitution.

In a plea deal announced Wednesday, Maximo Caminero must also engage in 100 hours of community service teaching art classes as a result of a self-professed act of protest.

“I was wrong,” Caminero said in a letter of apology released Wednesday. “I think about what I did every day and I find it hard to live with what I did because it still haunts me.”

In a case that stunned the art world, Caminero in February smashed a vase painted by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who represented that the item was hundreds of years old. Police initially estimated the artwork was worth $1 million but the actual cost turned out to be much lower.

Caminero told the arresting officer that he smashed the artwork as a protest on behalf of local artists who he felt were slighted in favor of international artists at the new $131 million complex on Biscayne Bay.

The vase was part of a politically charged exhibition of Chinese culture and art.

The Beijing-born Ai Weiwei, 56, is a sculptor, designer and documentary-maker who has not been permitted to leave China following a 2011 arrest for his political activism. Ai Weiwei condemned the Chinese government for actions he saw as corrupt following a 2008 earthquake in Szechuan.

According to a Miami police report, Caminero ignored a security staffer’s order to put the piece down before smashing it.

He was charged with first-degree criminal mischief, a third-degree felony.

In his apology letter, Caminero stressed that he did not realize that, at the time he destroyed the vase, the museum was also exhibiting the work of five local artists. The museum is also planning a collection of six other local artists.

A lawyer representing the museum, Lilly Ann Sanchez, said “we’re glad this is finally over.”

“He has acknowledged that this kind of deviant destruction of someone else’s property is completely inappropriate,” Sanchez said.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/08/13/4287417/miami-artist-who-destroyed-ai.html#storylink=cpy

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Digitizing Warhol’s Film Trove to Save It” @ntimes by RANDY KENNEDY

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Digitizing Warhol’s Film Trove to Save It” @ntimes by RANDY KENNEDY

“Nico/Antoine” (1966), one of hundreds of Andy Warhol films. Credit Andy Warhol Museum

Andy Warhol wrote lovingly of his ever-present tape recorder. (“My tape recorder and I have been married for 10 years now. When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me.”) But for almost a decade beginning in the 1960s, his real boon companions seemed to be his 16-millimeter film cameras, which he used to record hundreds of reels, many of which are still little known even among scholars because of the fragility of the film and the scarcity of projectors to show them on.

Now the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Modern Art, which holds Warhol’s film archives, are beginning a project to digitize the materials, almost 1,000 rolls, a vast undertaking that curators and historians hope will, for the first time, put Warhol’s film work on a par with his painting, his sculpture and the Delphic public persona that became one of his greatest works. It will be MoMA’s largest effort to digitize the work of a single artist in its collection.

Patrick Moore, the Warhol Museum’s deputy director and a curator of the digitization project, said that the goal was, finally, to integrate Warhol’s film work fully into his career. “I think the art world in particular, and hopefully the culture as a whole, will come to feel the way we do,” Mr. Moore said, “which is that the films are every bit as significant and revolutionary as Warhol’s paintings.”

Warhol began using his first film camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, in 1963. He spent more than two years shooting what became known as the “Screen Tests,” hundreds of short filmed portraits of celebrities, fellow artists, acquaintances and members of his inner circle, like Lou Reed and the socialite Edie Sedgwick, before moving on to longer, more narrative pieces. He made some 600 films of varying lengths, but only about a tenth of those have been available in 16-millimeter prints through the Museum of Modern Art.

While a few of Warhol’s movies are well known — among them, the feature-length “Chelsea Girls” from 1966 and “Empire” from 1964, a single-shot “antifilm” showing the Empire State Building for eight hours — the great majority have not been shown for years or have been available only through bootlegs of varying quality. Several years before Warhol’s death in 1987, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art joined forces to preserve and study the films, which often use the movie screen as a static canvas, a confessional or a window onto the seeming banality of everyday life. But the films’ visibility, even in the art world, increased only up to a point.

“A lot of people feel like they know Warhol’s films but only because they’ve read about them,” said Mr. Moore. “Fewer and fewer people have the ability to show 16 millimeter.”

Frame-by-frame transfer of the films, which is expected to take several years, will begin this month and be conducted by MPC, an Oscar-winning visual-effects company that is donating its time and services to the project.

Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

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(In connection with the project, a few pieces of unseen film will make their way into theaters well before the transfers are completed. “Exposed: Songs for Unseen Warhol Films,” a project commissioned by the Warhol Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Centers for the Art of Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, will screen digital copies of 15 never-before-shown films in October and November, along with newly conceived, live musical accompaniment by musicians, including Tom Verlaine, Dean Wareham and Eleanor Friedberger.)

Film purists will undoubtedly mourn the migration to digital. In a review of “Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures,” a show of part of Warhol’s film work at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, Ken Johnson complained in The New York Times that seeing Warhol films digitally was “like seeing a movie on television, and that casts in doubt their status as works of art.”

Rajendra Roy, the chief film curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a self-described “unexpected analog guy,” agreed, saying that the right way to see Warhol’s films should always be on film, in part because he helped revolutionize the medium by upending or undermining so many of the conventions of moviemaking.

“I get really grumpy sometimes when things can’t be shown on film, but that said, these will become inaccessible very quickly if we don’t digitize them,” he said. “There are still many discoveries to be made, and that’s the exciting part of this project. Folks are looking at work in boxes of some of Andy’s film that probably hasn’t been seen since he shot it.”

Warhol documented so much of the New York art world of the 1960s that the films could also fill in crucial art-historical gaps about who was doing what, when and where. But curators hope that a more important benefit will be an awareness of how, long before phone cameras brought the quotidian and the personal fully into the realm of media, Warhol was already forging his own kind of YouTube. (He once deadpanned in an interview: “I think any camera that takes a picture, it comes out all right.”)

“He filmed everything around him,” said Geralyn Huxley, a curator of film and video at the Warhol Museum. “He went to people’s houses and filmed the dinners. He was basically a workaholic and the amount of film is unbelievable.”

But she added: “For all of the film out there, there’s very little of Warhol himself in any of it, actually. You get the sense that he didn’t really like to see himself on camera.”