George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “The Ups and Downs of The Spring Auctions” @wsj by Kelly Crow

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “The Ups and Downs of The Spring Auctions” @wsj by Kelly Crow

 

                                  

 

Midway through New York’s major spring auctions, collectors of Impressionist and modern art appear to be showing signs of sticker stock, even as contemporary-art buyers prepare to splurge on.

Earlier this week, Sotheby’s BID -0.05% Sotheby’s U.S.: NYSE ^$40.48 -0.02-0.05% May 14, 2014 9:51 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 39,739 P/E Ratio 18.97 Market Cap $2.79 Billion Dividend Yield 0.99% Rev. per Employee $576,249 41.0040.7540.5040.2510a11a12p1p2p3p 05/07/14 The WSJ’s Kelly Crow at the So… 05/07/14 Loeb Wins by Losing at Sotheby… 05/07/14 Court Ruling Bolsters New Type… More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position and Christie’s sold a combined $611.2 million worth of Impressionist and modern art, a total that fell within their presale expectations and exceeded a similar series last May that sold for $478 million.

Bidding proved thin for some of Christie’s priciest works Tuesday—dealer Paul Gray was the lone bidder on a $22.6 million Pablo Picasso —and around a third of Sotheby’s offerings on Wednesday went unsold. Sotheby’s failures included a Picasso portrait of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, expected to sell for at least $15 million.

But the same collectors who sniffed at Sotheby’s art trophies turned up in force the next day for its sale of lower-priced material. It was a clue that this seasoned subset of collectors is willing to bid—but at price levels below $5 million, unless the art on offer is truly museum-worthy.

New York collector Donald Bryant thought he had hit his limit at Christie’s on Tuesday after he offered $6.1 million for Constantin Brâncusi’s toaster-size stone sculpture of a kissing couple, “The Kiss.” But when he bowed out, he got a nudge from his wife, Bettina, and jumped back in at $7.2 million. “Is it because of her?” auctioneer Andreas Rumbler asked, adding with a grin, “She’s the boss.” The extra effort didn’t pay off, though: The Brancusi sold to another bidder for $8.7 million.

Auction specialists say the art market has seen this divergence in collecting categories before. Decades ago, Old Masters enjoyed top billing until Impressionist and modern art became fashionable among wealthy collectors. Suddenly, its roster of artists such as Claude Monet began fetching the kinds of prices once reserved for Rembrandt and Canaletto. Now the art market appears to be shuffling again: With the majority of Impressionist and modern masterpieces now tucked away in museum collections, new buyers are finding it difficult to amass an enviable collection in a short time.

Many Asian collectors are still trying. At least eight of Sotheby’s pricier works on Wednesday went to Asian collectors—including a $19.2 million Henri Matisse view of a woman painting at her easel, “The Afternoon Session.”

Dealers say the art market will undergo its greater stress test this week, when both houses, plus boutique house Phillips, hold their sales of contemporary art. In recent seasons, auction prices for contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Christopher Wool have quadrupled—a pace that’s encouraged speculators to buy up even younger artists in hopes of profiting later in resales.

Last November, Christie’s sold a yellow Francis Bacon triptych for $142.4 million, almost $60 million above its estimate and the most ever paid for a work of art at auction. Next Tuesday, the house will offer up a seafoam-green Bacon triptych, 1984’s “Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards,” for an estimated $80 million. The seller is computer-chip maker Pierre Chen.

Mr. Chen’s Bacon carries a third-party guarantee. This means the auction has promised him it will sell—to an outside investor who has pledged to buy it for an undisclosed sum if no one during the sale offers more. If the guarantor is outbid, he or she will reap a share of Mr. Chen’s potential profits and take home a financing fee from Christie’s no matter what. (Sotheby’s doesn’t offer financing fees.)

Unlike Impressionist and modern art, next week’s contemporary sales are swimming in guarantees—at least $650 million worth across the three houses. The amount eclipses Sotheby’s entire guarantee portfolio for 2008, the last market peak.

Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s say they feel comfortable with their volume of guarantees.

For the Tuesday sales, third-party guarantors claim a financial interest in 39 of Christie’s 72 contemporary artworks, which means that 54% of the estimated $500 million sale will change hands whether anyone even shows up with a paddle. This includes Andy Warhol’s “Race Riot,” a red-white-and-blue silk-screen that recently belonged to a trust of dealer Bill Acquavella’s family and that Christie’s estimates will sell for around $45 million.

All this means that contemporary collectors, unlike buyers of Impressionist and modern art, are going to unprecedented lengths to keep fueling their segment’s momentum, even if they must bankroll the offerings themselves ahead of time. If the strategy works, it could reshape the way art gets auctioned, with sellers essentially preselling their art privately but angling for a higher, backstop price at auction. If the broader financial markets sour suddenly, bidders could get spooked, and these deal makers may be left owning art at prices that may appear inflated. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann “Strolling an Island of Creativity” @nytimes By KEN JOHNSON and MARTHA SCHWENDENER

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann “Strolling an Island of Creativity” @nytimes By KEN JOHNSON and MARTHA SCHWENDENER

 

The amazing spectacle that is Frieze New York is up and running on Randalls Island. With more than 190 contemporary art dealers from around the world inhabiting a temporary, quarter-mile-long white tent, it’s a dumbfounding display of human creative industry. Reasoning that in the time allowed, no one reviewer could hope to achieve a comprehensive overview of all there is to see, we both went to look and report. What follows is a sampler of things that caught our attention.

GLADSTONE GALLERY (Booth B6) This museum-worthy show includes more than 200 small drawings from the painter Carroll Dunham’s archives. Dating from 1979 to 2014, they are presented on three walls in grid formation chronologically. Like pages from a personal diary, they track the evolution of Mr. Dunham’s antic imagination. From sketches of blobby, surrealistic forms to pictures of battling, cartoony male and female characters to images of naked, hairy wild women and men in edenic scenes, these irrepressibly lively, cheerfully vulgar drawings suggest a psychoanalytic pilgrim’s progress. (K. J.)

GAVIN BROWN (B38) This booth is filled by Rirkrit Tiravanija’s installation “Freedom can not be simulated.” It consists of about a dozen plywood walls arranged in parallel about a foot and a half apart. On one side of each wall hangs a large black canvas covered with squiggly chalk lines that you can only see fully by squeezing in between the walls. The first canvas in the series has the title drawn on it in big block letters. The installation offers itself as a pointedly coercive metaphor about the eternally necessary tension between freedom and constraint. (K. J.)

ANDREW KREPS (B54) Goshka Macuga’s “Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not 2” is a giant black-and-white tapestry made on looms in Flanders. Over 10 feet high and 36 feet wide, it presents a panoramic scene copied from a photoshopped collage representing an incongruous gathering of art world luminaries and political protesters at Documenta 13, an exhibition in Germany in 2012. Ms. Macuga’s work pictures the moral and political contradictions of contemporary art and its social support system as powerfully as anything at the fair. (K. J.)

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MARIANNE BOESKY (A30) This gallery offers “Revolution,” a sculpture by Roxy Paine that expresses a more ambiguous political sentiment. A chain saw with a bullhorn attached, both realistically rendered in wood, it’s a piece of impressive craftsmanship and a surrealistic dream image of political violence. (K. J.)

RATIO 3 (C56) For technical magic, nothing beats Takeshi Murata’s “Melter 3-D.” In a room lit by flickering strobes, a revolving, beachball-size sphere seems made of mercury. A hypnotic wonder, it appears to be constantly melting into flowing ripples. (K. J.)

303 GALLERY (B61)Many works at the fair meditate on art and the artist. Rodney Graham’s big, light-box-mounted phototransparency “The Pipe Cleaner Artist, Amalfi, ’61”, at 303, depicts Mr. Graham in a lovely Mediterranean studio, leisurely making sculptures from white pipe cleaners. With a sweetly comical spirit, it spoofs a kitschy romance of bohemian avant-gardism. (K. J.)

NOGUERASBLANCHARD (A6) A found-object sculpture by Wilfredo Prieto plumbs the sublime. Suspended by cables a few feet off the floor, it’s a metal cage used by divers to observe sharks. Among its many possible implications is the suggestion of the artist’s descent into the monster-infested depths of the unconscious. (K. J.)

 

CROY NIELSEN (C1) In a tall, plexiglass display case here is a simple but philosophically resonant assemblage by Benoît Maire. Titled “Weapon,” it consists of a three-sided ruler attached to a rock by a wrist watch’s metal bracelet. It’s about rationalizing the irrational, an enduring task for art. (K. J.)

GALERIE LELONG (B12) A neon sign by Alfredo Jaar that reads “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness” is a fine prayer for what art might do for our troubled times. (K. J.)

One thing this fair allows you to do is to sample in one location what critics see around the city and the world. This includes emerging artists and historical shows. You’ll find many of them under a special designation, Frieze Focus, indicating galleries founded in or after 2003, and in Frame, a section that features solo presentations by galleries under eight years old.

SIMONE SUBAL (B21) This Bowery gallery is showing a Florian Meisenberg installation that fits in perfectly at an art fair because it takes its cue from another “nonspace”: the airport, with its spectacle of architecture, patterns, moving people and digital screens. It includes a video with excerpts from the film “Lolita” and an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Homer becomes a lauded outsider artist. (M. S.)

LAUREL GITLEN (B28) This gallery offers Allyson Vieira’s “Meander,” a structure made of metal building studs that uses the ancient meander pattern (also found on classic New York coffee cups) as its floor plan and suggests how certain graphic patterns are recycled throughout various empires. (MS)

CARLOS/ISHIKAWA (B34) This London gallery is showing Richard Sides’s collagelike assemblages, made from a personal archive of what he calls “good trash” collected outside his studio. (M. S.)

MISAKO & ROSEN (B20) This Tokyo-based gallery has objects by Kazuyuki Takezaki, who was inspired by the great ukiyo-e printmaker Hiroshige to recreate “landscapes” that sometimes take the form of sculptures, and include materials like a braided rug. (M. S.)

LE GUERN (A2) Dominating the space in this Warsaw gallery’s booth is a solo presentation of the Brooklyn artist C. T. Jasper, a tent made from around 160 sheepskins. (Get it? a tent within the big tent of Frieze). Inside the tent is a remix of the Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s 1966 film “Faraon (Pharaoh)” — but with all the human figures digitally removed from the film. (M. S.)

Gallerists are getting good at organizing historical shows, and several at Frieze are standouts.

JAMES FUENTES (C2) This Delancey Street gallery offers a presentation of the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, best known for performance events like “Make a Salad” (1962). Here you can see objects made by Ms. Knowles from the ’70s to the present. If you hear a loud cascading sound at the south end of the fair, it is someone flipping over her “Red Bean Turner,” which is like an opaque hourglass filled with dried beans. (M. S.)

THE BOX (C14) This Los Angeles gallery has a great roundup of work by NO!Art, a group founded in 1959 that was distinctly (paradoxically, for this setting) anti-commercial. Collages and silk-screens by Boris Lurie, Stanley Fisher and Sam Goodman look incredibly prescient — like Mr. Lurie’s painting “Sold.” (M. S.)

GREGOR PODNAR (A22) In a smaller historical presentation you can see 1970s photographs and Conceptual drawings by two Gorans: Goran Trbuljak and Goran Petercol, Croatian artists who were routinely mistaken for each other in their local Zagreb art scene because of their first names. (M. S.)

PROJECTS Just outside the tent, the Projects section includes the Czech artist Eva Kotatkova‘s “Architecture of Sleep,” an outdoor installation with performers resting on platforms (and who should not be disturbed). Marie Lorenz, who works on New York’s waterways, is offering rides in a rowboat made with salvaged materials. Unfortunately, her “Randalls Island Tide Ferry” doesn’t offer service to or from the fair, but it accomplishes what most art tries to do: It transports you. (M. S.)

Correction: May 10, 2014

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the artist who created “Melter 3-D.” He is Takeshi Murata, not Murato

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann “Sotheby’s, Third Point Reach Settlement” @wsj by David Benoit

George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann “Sotheby’s, Third Point Reach Settlement” @wsj by David Benoit

 

 

 

Sotheby’s expects Picasso’s ‘Le Sauvetage’ will fetch at least $14 million at auction on Wednesday. Sotheby’s

 

Sold!

Activist investor Daniel Loeb and auction house Sotheby’s reached a settlement on Monday that concluded his seven-month campaign to shake up the company a day before shareholders were to vote on his board candidates.

The pact gives Mr. Loeb three board seats by expanding the board to 15 people rather than having Mr. Loeb’s candidates go up against company nominees. The deal also caps Mr. Loeb’s stock ownership at 15%. His hedge fund, Third Point LLC, currently owns about 9.6%, but it had sought the ability to go to 20%, a request the company had blocked, leading Third Point to sue.

On Monday, Sotheby’s shares closed up 3.25%, or $1.41, to $44.80, at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange trading.

Related

• MoneyBeat: Fight Brought Out Worst in Both Sides

 

Settlements, even just hours before a scheduled vote, have become more common for activists and their targets because advisers believe it is better to hammer out a deal than risk a divisive shareholder vote.

Through last week, there have been 20 settlements between companies and activists so far this year, tied for the most to date since 2009, according to FactSet SharkWatch, a data provider.

In a joint statement on Monday, Mr. Loeb said: “As of today we see ourselves not as the Third Point Nominees but as Sotheby’s directors, and we expect to work collaboratively with our fellow board members to enhance long-term value on behalf of all shareholders.” Sotheby’s Chairman and Chief Executive William Ruprecht also said the last-minute agreement “ensures that our focus is on the business.”

The agreement came after a Delaware judge blessed Sotheby’s so-called poison pill that limited how much stock Third Point could acquire. Beyond that legal issue, a court hearing last week in the suit enabled Third Point to surface internal board emails showing support for Mr. Loeb’s point of view; also disclosed were inflammatory comments by Mr. Loeb. The airing of the various remarks added to the drama of a campaign that had captivated Wall Street and the art world.

Mr. Loeb is not a stranger in board rooms where he has spent time publicly attacking. At Yahoo Inc., YHOO +0.51% Yahoo! Inc. U.S.: Nasdaq ^$37.10 +0.19+0.51% May 6, 2014 1:23 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 8.24M P/E Ratio 30.58 Market Cap $37.15 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $383,012 37.2037.0036.8036.6010a11a12p1p2p3p 05/05/14 Sotheby’s, Third Point Reach S… 05/05/14 Box Still Targets Microsoft, G… 05/05/14 CMO Today: Facebook Getting Ag… More quote details and news » YHOO in Your Value Your Change Short position before he joined the board, he waged a several-month war that saw a newly hired CEO fired. Yahoo’s shares rose more than 85% during the time he was on the board, which was just over a year.

New York-based Sotheby’s had criticized his exit at Yahoo in its presentations to shareholders, just one of the points of contention that will now need to be put aside in the auction house’s boardroom.

In one such instance, according to a Friday court ruling, Mr. Loeb had emailed allies that he was waging a “holy jihad,” with the plan being to “undermine the credibility” of Mr. Ruprecht. Mr. Loeb said the email was intended as a joke and not meant to offend.

Mr. Ruprecht referred to Mr. Loeb as “scum” to another board member and said the campaign was about “ego,” the judge’s ruling said.

But other directors worried Mr. Loeb’s criticisms were on point and raised concerns about the company’s spending and Mr. Ruprecht’s compensation, according to court testimony.

Putting such distractions behind the company is “good for shareholders,” Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst David Schick wrote on Monday, because it allows the firm to get back to focusing on its auction business.

That will include Sotheby’s spring series of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art sales, which are expected to total at least $684 million during the next two weeks. Mr. Loeb has argued that Sotheby’s has fallen behind rival Christie’s International PLC in selling contemporary art. Christie’s contemporary sale on May 13 is expected to bring in at least $500 million.

Mr. Loeb is among an emerging class of hedge-fund executives and art collectors who frequent both the major auction houses, ratcheting up prices for contemporary artists and quickly reselling their purchases for a profit.

The average holding period for contemporary art works has shrunk to about two years from at least a decade previously, according to a former Sotheby’s specialist.

—Kelly Crow contributed to this article.

Write to David Benoit at david.benoit@wsj.com and Sara Germano at sara.germano@wsj.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann “Minimalist Retrospective Gets a Master’s Touch” @ wsj by RANDY KENNEDY

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann “Minimalist Retrospective Gets a Master’s Touch” @ wsj by RANDY KENNEDY

A Minimalist Master Returns

 

A Minimalist Master Returns

Carl Andre is one of America’s greatest living sculptors. He has been mostly absent from the American art scene for decades, but recently returned to oversee the installation of a new retrospective.

Credit By Oresti Tsonopoulos on Publish Date May 4, 2014

Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Carl Andre, a father of Minimalism and one of the greatest living American sculptors, decided to retire a few years ago, in his mid-70s. And for an exacting artist who usually insisted on arranging and installing most of his pieces himself, on site, retirement had a special ring of finality.

“People ask me what I do now,” Mr. Andre said recently. “And I tell them I do something most Americans find very, very hard to do: I do nothing.”

He was so determined to do nothing, in fact, that when the Dia Art Foundation began more than two years ago to plan a huge, long-overdue retrospective of his work — the show opens on Monday at the foundation’s outpost in Beacon, N.Y. — he told a reporter that he had informed the curators in no uncertain terms: “I can’t stop you from doing it, but don’t expect me to do anything to help.”

But over the last several weeks, to the foundation’s surprise — maybe even to his own — Mr. Andre has been making treks from his Manhattan apartment to Beacon to help oversee the installation, emerging from a kind of self-imposed seclusion that had begun long before his retirement; sightings of him in the art world, for more than two decades, were rare occurrences.

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A Minimalist Retrospective

A Minimalist Retrospective

Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

In part, this absence came about because of what happened early one morning in 1985, when Mr. Andre’s third wife, the promising Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, fell to her death from a bedroom window of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment. She had had an argument with Mr. Andre, who later told the police he was not in the room when she fell.

He was acquitted of second-degree murder. But the death and highly publicized trial created a deep divide in the art world. It caused museums to shy away from him and his work for years and cast a shadow over a career that had been difficult to begin with, composed of work that, as much as any made in the 1960s and ’70s, occasioned the sometimes angry question “Why is that art?” (Asked in a 2011 interview about the effect of Mendieta’s death on him and his career, Mr. Andre said only: “It didn’t change my view of the world or of my work, but it changed me, as all tragedy does. But I have people who love me and believe in me.”)

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During an era when many artists were pulling sculpture off the plinth and making it part of the world in a new way, Mr. Andre went further, taking it all the way to the ground, in pieces made up of metal tiles arranged simply in grids, lines or triangles, meant not only to be looked at but also walked on and experienced with the body. And while other artists were finding beauty and new meaning in raw industrial materials, Mr. Andre used such materials barely altered: aluminum ingots piled in pyramids; firebricks in rectangular stacks; timbers in dimensions available from the sawmill, arranged in basic geometric shapes.

“He was interested in the matter of matter, in what was right underfoot,” the sculptor Richard Serra said. “For me, when I first started out, that was enormously important.” He added: “I hope that Carl’s work is given the recognition that it deserves. And I really hope that younger sculptors pay attention to it.”

 

While Mr. Andre’s work is in many prominent public collections, there has not been an American survey of his career in more than 30 years, and awareness of his pioneering role in an important postwar sculptural movement has diminished along with his public presence. More than most artists of his generation, his presence was also integral to his art: He worked without a studio, traveling the world to galleries or places that commissioned pieces and often finding the materials to make the works in whatever city he was in. The sculptures were decisively human scale; Mr. Andre usually chose components sized so that he could move them all himself.

“It’s always been easier for me to do it myself, rather than to explain to somebody what to do,” Mr. Andre said, sitting one recent morning, looking at a 1979 piece composed of 121 square pieces of Douglas fir. “But I must say, as I have grown older, my physical capacities have been very much reduced. So I used to be able to sling those timbers around like nothing at all. And I don’t want to try nowadays.”

Asked why he decided to become personally involved in the installation of the retrospective, he shrugged. “People keep un-retiring me,” he said, “and eventually I just give in.”

Mr. Andre — who was raised in Quincy, Mass., and once worked as a railroad brakeman to pay his bills — is slightly unsteady on his feet these days. But he is as quick-witted and dryly caustic as he was said to be in his youth, when he was known as a kind of philosopher-scourge of SoHo, a Marxist who chafed at the commercial art world and being “a kept artist of the imperial class.” At 78, he looks like a Melville-ian sea captain, with a thick white beard under his chin and blue bib overalls, a utilitarian uniform he has worn for years, varied only by the occasional addition of a loose blue sweater vest knitted for him by his fourth wife, the artist Melissa Kretschmer, who is usually at his side.

Yasmil Raymond, Dia’s curator, said the prospect of installing more than four decades’ worth of his work without his input would have been daunting. Before his arrival one recent weekday, she and others had arranged a 2005 work of copper plates and graphite blocks, intended to be placed along a floor with a look of randomness.

“He might just laugh when he sees this,” said Ms. Raymond, who organized the show with Philippe Vergne, Dia’s former director, and the curator Manuel Cirauqui. “I’m trying to make it look random, but I’m looking at it and I’m seeing too much order.” (Upon arriving, Mr. Andre didn’t laugh; he suggested some changes and sympathized with the curator: “Even listing random numbers is hard, you know? Patterns start appearing.”)

Surveying the vast space allotted to his work inside Dia:Beacon, a former box-printing factory, Mr. Andre seemed a little daunted himself. “My work isn’t so big,” he said, almost plaintively. “It’s not big enough.” But he allowed that the diffused daylight coming in through angled skylights was ideal for seeing his sculpture as he intended, with a degree of directness that might seem simple but is never easy to achieve. “People want to spotlight things, and I hate that,” he said. “I like even light, shadowless.”

“No melodrama,” he added, waggling his fingers in the air.

Later, as Mr. Andre stood outside the museum supervising the re-creation of a 1968 piece, “Joint,” which consists of nothing more than hay bales he uses to “draw” a straight line on the earth, joining woods to field, it became apparent just how difficult simplicity can be. The line kept stubbornly curving, as workers laid the bales up the incline into the woods. “How many people does it take to make a straight line?” Ms. Raymond whispered to Mr. Andre.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “A Day in the Life of Artist Dan Colen” @wsj by Christopher Ross

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “A Day in the Life of Artist Dan Colen” @wsj by Christopher Ross

 

FARM BOY | Colen at his property in upstate New York, where many of his large-scale pieces are constructed. Photography by Tim Barber for WSJ. Magazine

 

THE 34-YEAR-OLD ARTIST Dan Colen lives in Manhattan’s East Village, but the majority of his work is made either at his new studio in Brooklyn’s Red Hook, overlooking a blue expanse of the Upper New York Bay, or at his 40-acre farm in Pine Plains, New York, where roosters crow and the air smells of manure.

These are not his native environments: Raised in Leonia, New Jersey, he came to fame in the mid-aughts as a member of a gritty, decadent clique of artists (including Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley) who helped define the New York downtown arts scene and whose bacchanalian exploits are still legendary. Colen is sober now, and the location of his studios says something about the scale, direction and pace of his work these days. “Walking out of your studio and seeing water instead of the Holland Tunnel, that’s going to affect how you create,” he says.

This month, the Brant Foundation, in Connecticut, is mounting a comprehensive exhibition spanning his entire career. His trademark pieces blending abstraction with low materials—paintings made from bubble gum or resembling bird poop, papier–mâché boulders covered in graffiti—will be displayed alongside newer works that seem to reflect his change in scenery: small landscape paintings, a heap of scrap metal occupied by canaries. Preparing for the opening, he lopes around the museum with a rangy energy, wearing a tight-fitting jean jacket and Chuck Taylor All-Stars. Sporting a terrifically cowlicked head of hair, he sometimes resembles an overgrown boy. His irreverent former self appears in flashes, like when he mentions, as a cop car passes his Range Rover on the highway, that there is currently a warrant out for his arrest (he missed a court date for carrying a type of knife that’s illegal in New York City).

Descending from a line of makers—his father sculpts with wood and clay, and his grandfather was a mechanic and inventor—it’s not surprising that Colen now nearly resembles a construction foreman. In the course of a day, he consults with riggers installing an outdoor piece at Brant and discusses with foundry workers how to move boulders. At his farm, one member of his crew is strapping an ash-wood barrel shut while another is tinkering with guitar cases. He counsels his staff of artisans and workers not to focus so much on formal perfection as on an intuitive process of discovery. “I tell them it’s not about virtuosity,” he says. “It’s about commitment.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court” @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court” @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court” @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

Steve Marcus/ReutersDaniel S. Loeb is seeking a seat on Sotheby’s board.

 

 

A Delaware state court judge on Friday blocked efforts by the hedge fund mogul Daniel S. Loeb to overturn a crucial corporate defense at Sotheby’s, the auction house.

In a ruling issued Friday evening, Donald F. Parsons, a vice chancellor of Delaware’s Court of Chancery, decided that he would not overturn a so-called poison pill plan that limits Mr. Loeb to no more than 10 percent of Sotheby’s shares while letting passive investors hold as much as 20 percent.

The company’s annual shareholder meeting is Tuesday, when shareholders will cast their votes in what may be a watershed moment in the company’s 270-year history. And it may pave the way for companies to enact tougher defenses against outspoken activist investors pushing for change.

Mr. Loeb and his firm, Third Point, have nominated three director candidates, including himself, pitted against the current board at Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s poison pill, formally known as a shareholder rights plan, had set off debate within the corporate governance community. While companies have used such defenses for decades, the auction house’s version specifically discriminated against activist investors, a move that Third Point had contended was unfair.

But in his ruling, Vice Chancellor Parsons wrote that Mr. Loeb’s primary argument — that the poison pill unfairly impedes his ability to wage his campaign — was flawed. Sotheby’s had presented evidence that the rationale behind its defense could be seen as both rational and proportional to the threat of an activist investor.

And even with his current 10 percent stake, Mr. Loeb has been able to fight the company to a draw. Vice Chancellor Parsons noted that the hedge fund manager had roughly 10 times the number of shares that Sotheby’s board now owns, and that his own expert witness testified that, even now, Third Point has a roughly 50-50 chance of winning the proxy contest.

Mr. Loeb even testified in a deposition that nothing has hurt his ability to reach out to other shareholders.

“There is a substantial possibility,” the vice chancellor wrote, “that Third Point will win the proxy contest, which would make any preliminary intervention by this court unnecessary.”

Mr. Loeb has already won the support of Marcato Capital, another activist hedge fund and Sotheby’s third-largest shareholder. Last week, the influential proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services weighed in with support for Mr. Loeb, advising shareholders to vote for two of his three board nominees.

Mr. Loeb has criticized Sotheby’s for not adapting quickly enough to sweeping changes in the art industry in recent years and has accused it of falling behind its main rival, Christie’s, in crucial parts of the auction business, Impressionist and modern art. He has also railed against the compensation packages of board members, specifically singling out the pay of the chief executive, William F. Ruprecht, who received $6.3 million in 2012.

Sotheby’s adopted its poison pill last October, after Mr. Loeb called for Mr. Ruprecht to step down, arguing that it was in the best interests of all shareholders to ”encourage anyone seeking to acquire the company to negotiate with the board prior to attempting a takeover.”

During the hearing earlier this week in Delaware, Vice Chancellor Parsons was shown emails in which board members discussed the merits of some of Mr. Loeb’s criticisms. In one email, a board member, Steven B. Dodge, wrote that Mr. Ruprecht’s compensation was “red meat for the dogs.”

Mr. Dodge also wrote that the board was “too comfortable, too chummy and not doing its jobs,” in an email to another director, Dennis M. Weibling. “We have handed Loeb a killer set of issues on a platter.”

A rival proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis has supported Sotheby’s slate.

Representatives for Mr. Loeb and Sotheby’s declined to comment.

Gregory P. Taxin, president of the activist hedge fund Clinton Group, said the ruling was disappointing: “In Delaware, stockholders are apparently supposed to be like children in the 1950s: the good ones do not speak unless spoken to.”

A version of this article appears in print on 05/03/2014, on page B7 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Court.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Sotheby’s Poison Pill Is Upheld by Delaware Court” @nytimes By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED AND ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

 

 

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann “Camille Henrot: An Art World ‘It Girl'” @wsj by Ellen Gamerman

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann “Camille Henrot: An Art World ‘It Girl'” @wsj by Ellen Gamerman

RESTLESS ART Camille Henrot says she’s inspired by eBay, turtles and nail polish, among other sources, for her videos, like ‘Grosse Fatigue,’ above. © Camille Henrot/ADAGP/Silex Films/kamel mennour, Paris

Turtles figure prominently in artist Camille Henrot’s ambitious video chronicling the history of the world in 13 minutes. She sees the creatures as symbols of a prehistoric past and a burdened future. “The turtle, she’s slow because she is carrying this massive round thing—it’s like a figure of Atlas,” she says.

Thinking hard about reptiles—and most everything else—is a hallmark of the 35-year-old French intellectual’s work. On the heels of that video, “Grosse Fatigue,” which won her the Silver Lion award for most promising young artist at the recent Venice Biennale, the artist is unveiling her first comprehensive U.S. museum exhibit. “Camille Henrot: The Restless Earth” opens Wednesday at the New Museum in New York.

The show features her abstract video telling the story of humankind through quick cuts of images like turtles and eyeballs, dead birds and oranges, fizzy water and the cosmos. Other pieces on view include her works on paper and a new installation of literature-inspired Japanese ikebana flower arrangements.

This spring, the New Museum is dedicating separate floors to three young artists rather than doing a group show. “It’s a way to give exposure, to show the artists who are changing how art is being made,” says curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. “Camille was a very easy choice for us in that respect.”

Ms. Henrot created “Grosse Fatigue” during an artist fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington last year. She scoured the collections, filming employees opening drawers of exotic-bird specimens, flipping through files filled with dead bees, and so on. The film advances quickly through time by using overlapping windows on a computer desktop—search results from the Smithsonian’s database. She incorporated her own footage and studio shots of brightly painted fingernails—a nod to her discovery that even the weightiest words in a Google search often seem to match the name of a nail polish.

It wasn’t a solitary effort: Ms. Henrot worked with a cinematographer and film editor, as well as a makeup designer, models and production assistants. A writer created the text, which is performed like a spoken-word poem, and her partner, a musician named Joakim Bouaziz, created the score.

Ms. Henrot finds inspiration from disparate sources including eBay, where her purchases range from firemen’s boots to nude vintage photographs. Sometimes she buys an item just because she likes the picture of its seller. After moving from Paris to New York in late 2012, she says the cargo container with all her stuff was held up by authorities for months—she suspects because its contents were so weird.

As a child, she wanted one day to have a “real job,” eager to distinguish herself from her mother, an artist. Nevertheless, she attended art school in Paris, studying animated film. She took a job in an advertising agency, where she learned tricks like how to shoot a piece of cake to make it look more delicious (blow it with a hair dryer so it seems fluffy). Along the way, she was making films on her own, including an inventive music video for the band Octet in which the musicians were rendered as half-real, half-animated bodies. The film was shown in a 2005 exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, a contemporary art center in Paris, and her career as an artist was launched.

Ms. Henrot didn’t grow up traveling—she says her mother was afraid of flying—but now her experiences in foreign cultures feed directly into her work. The videos featured at the New Museum include “Coupé/Décalé,” an experimental film illustrating a coming-of-age ritual on Pentecost island in the Vanuatu archipelago where young people jump into a void while being held by liana vines around their ankles.

Sometimes her images can be hard to watch. Those turtles in “Grosse Fatigue” are featured with close-ups of their slick tongues and stony eyes. Ms. Henrot, who as a child had a pet turtle named Zoe that escaped through a window of her Paris home, shot the creatures during a vacation in the Seychelles. She filmed a little girl giving a huge turtle a banana and included the footage in her video. “I was interested in the stupidity of man feeding wild animal,” she says.

Ms. Henrot brought home a souvenir from that trip: A scar on her hand from a turtle that bit her when she too tried to feed it.           

 

 

 

 

 

 

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Germany Announces Deal on Art Looted by Nazis” @nytimes by By MELISSA EDDY

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Germany Announces Deal on Art Looted by Nazis” @nytimes by By MELISSA EDDY

 

 

“Seated Woman/Woman Sitting in Armchair,” by Henri Matisse, is one of the paintings whose ownership is disputed. Credit Lost Art Koordinierungsstelle Ma/Getty Images Europe, via Lost Art Koordinierungsstelle Ma

BERLIN — The German government on Monday announced an agreement with Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi-era art dealer, that would pave the way for the possible restitution of art wrongfully taken from Jewish owners and held in his private collection for decades.

Lawyers for Mr. Gurlitt, representatives of the state of Bavaria, and the German federal government agreed that a government-appointed team of international experts had one year in which to investigate the works seized from Mr. Gurlitt’s Munich apartment in 2012.

The deal would take effect when the works, which are being held by Bavarian authorities as part of a criminal investigation, are released. It applies to all art of questionable provenance in Mr. Gurlitt’s collection, which has become known as the Munich Art Trove. Authorities said Mr. Gurlitt can prove legal ownership of some of the works.

Reached after several weeks of negotiations, the agreement bypasses the 30-year statute of limitations that applies to stolen property in Germany, and in doing so, represents a willingness by the German government to resolve outstanding claims related to Nazi-looted art works.

The resolution comes months after the public first learned of the more than 1,280 works — including those by major artists such as Picasso, Chagall and Gauguin — held by Mr. Gurlitt. They were seized by Augsburg prosecutors as part of a tax evasion investigation. When the German news media broke the story of their existence last November, it triggered outrage around the world.

Responding to intense international criticism over how it had handled the art, the German government appointed a task force to investigate their provenance with an aim to return looted works to their rightful owners. But questions lingered over what would happen to the collection once it was released to Mr. Gurlitt, if he is cleared of the tax evasion charges. Legal experts also raised questions over whether the state had been justified in confiscating the collection in the first place.

Mr. Gurlitt, 81, who lived a reclusive life seemingly dedicated to defending the modern art collection amassed by his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, during the Nazis’ reign, had initially insisted that all the art be returned to him. He declared in his only interview, with the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, that he would not give any of them up.

But his failing health led a Munich court late last year to appoint a legal guardian, Christoph Edel, to deal with Mr. Gurlitt’s legal, health and wealth affairs. Since then, Mr. Gurlitt has appeared more willing to negotiate with the authorities, leading up to the agreement.

His spokesman, Stephan Holzinger, said Mr. Gurlitt suffers from a weak heart and remains hospitalized following surgery, adding urgency to the need for resolution.

“We are dealing with a top-class team of experts, and given Mr. Gurlitt’s advanced age and frail health, it can be expected that they should be able to complete their work within this time frame,” Mr. Holzinger said.

Monika Grütters, Germany’s culture minister, has made addressing restitution issues a priority since she came into office at the start of the year. She welcomed the agreement with Mr. Gurlitt, saying it would pave the way for an independent center that is being established to streamline and reinvigorate German efforts to handle restitution claims.

“Our experience gained through dealing with the Munich Art Trove will influence the new Lost Art Center,” Ms. Grütters said. Mr. Gurlitt further agreed that images of the works in question could be posted to the government’s database, which includes 458 pictures.

But the agreement also puts pressure on researchers to determine the history of the works. An additional researcher, appointed by Mr. Gurlitt, will be named to the task force when Mr. Gurlitt’s collection is released to him. Officials said they did not know when that would happen.

Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Jewish Claims Conference, expressed concern that the deadline could lead to the art being returned before the works’ history could be clarified. “Returning artwork to Mr. Gurlitt that has not been fully researched would be reprehensible,” Mr. Schneider said. “Either the government has to commit sufficient resources to complete the work within a year, or the deadline must be extended, if it is not met.”

Among the works is a well-known Matisse painting that the descendants of Paul Rosenberg, a French art dealer, said was taken from their family by the Nazis. The picture, “Seated Woman/Woman Sitting in Armchair,” was among the first to be identified by claimants seeking the return of the picture.

But Mr. Gurlitt’s lawyers said Monday that a rival claim had been filed for the painting, forcing the delay of a previously announced return of the work.

“I am legally required to investigate the new claims,” Mr. Edel said.

The new claimant was not identified, and no details were given on the basis of the claim. Representatives of the Rosenberg family declined to comment.

The latest twist in what appeared to be a relatively clear case reflects the challenges that authorities face with disputed works in the collection; cases that on the surface appear to be morally clear cut may run into snags within Germany’s complex legal system.

Government officials hope the agreement reached Monday will help restore confidence in Germany’s image abroad, which has been tarnished by the handling of Mr. Gurlitt’s collection.

“The meaning of the so-called Munich Art Trove reaches far beyond the criminal proceedings in connection with suspected tax evasion,” said Winfried Bausback, the justice minister for Bavaria. “It opens very basic and overarching questions about how we handle such artworks.”

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Speculating on Trophy Art” @nytimes

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Speculating on Trophy Art” @nytimes

 

 

”Cracked Egg (Magenta)” by Jeff Koons.                                 Credit            Christie’s       

 

LONDON — Works by contemporary artists born after 1945 generated $17.2 billion in worldwide auction sales last year, a 39 percent increase from 2012, according to figures just released by the French database Artprice. Last November, a triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, a record for any work of art at a public sale. And a handy new website, www.sellyoulater.com, now advises speculators on which hot young artists to buy, sell or “liquidate.”

Inevitably there’s talk of a bubble. Art is a notoriously volatile investment that has suffered spectacular collapses, as seen in the great Impressionist boom and bust of 1990-91, and in 2008-9, when contemporary works by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and other fashionable names halved in value after the fall of Lehman Brothers.

“Things are different now,” said Allan Schwartzman, the New York-based art adviser. “There’s a momentum in the market that’s dictated by the top players. It’s trophy-driven. There are often six competitors for the major lots at auctions, which indicates to me there isn’t a bubble. Contemporary art has never been supported like this before.”

Photo    

 

 Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Water-worshipper.”
                                 Credit            Sotheby’s                    

Others feel uneasy about the record prices being paid by billionaires for big-name trophies, as well as the six-figure sums for paintings by hip 20-somethings like Lucien Smith and Oscar Murillo. But how can a market crash when the people now driving its growth are seemingly rich enough to be impervious to the fluctuations of the wider economy? How do their decisions influence smaller buyers? The art market is rife with speculation at the moment, but does that necessarily mean it’s a bubble about to burst? These are the questions on the minds of many in the art world in early 2014.

“In 2007 we were definitely in a bubble,” said Howard Rachofsky, a Dallas-based collector. “Then after the break it got globalized. The market attracted the attention of international players who are interested in art as another asset and they’ve got huge reserves.”

For instance, last week, at the Art14 contemporary fair in London, Citi Private Bank hosted a gathering of private museums from 16 countries.

The super rich have grown in number and wealth. The world had a record 2,170 billionaires with a combined net worth of $6.5 trillion in 2013, according to the inaugural Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census. In the United States, research from the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the wealthiest 1 percent has captured 95 percent of the country’s economic growth since 2009. Those with tens of millions in disposable cash are looking for alternatives to the stock markets, be it luxury apartments in London or Gerhard Richter abstracts.

“Enormous amounts of money have backstopped at the top of the system among a relatively small group of people,” said Todd Levin, the New York-based art adviser.

Still, art is a relatively small sector of the global economy — total dealer and auction sales were estimated at 43 billion euros, or $59 billion, in 2012, according to the European Fine Art Foundation (the 2013 figure will be announced next week). It therefore takes only a tiny minority of the world’s richest 1 percent to spend a small proportion of its wealth to have a disproportionate effect on such a niche market.

“Right now, they’ve decided that art is a good place to put their money,” said Mr. Levin, who, on behalf of a client, was among at least five bidders competing for Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” at over $100 million. Unprecedented auction prices have paid for trophies by blue-chip artists such as Bacon ($142.4 million), Richter ($37.1 million), Jean-Michel Basquiat ($48.8 million) and Andy Warhol ($105.4 million) within the last 12 months. Some are questioning the sustainability of this bull market.

“The global art market is currently held hostage by the very top end of the market (works sold above $10 million) as well as the taste and wealth of a relatively small number of individuals,” said ArtTactic, an art market research company based in London, in an “Outlook” report published earlier this month subtitled “A 10-year-old bubble about to become even bigger.” ArtTactic said the apex of the market was dominated by about 150 individuals with the resources to pay $20 million for a single work of art.

“These prices are being driven by excess cash,” said Anders Petterson, the founder of ArtTactic. “The wealthy get a lot of social prestige out of buying these works. But if prices rise too much, this clique could lose interest and move on to something else, and if they lose interest, a lot of other people would lose interest as well.”

For the moment, high prices are acting as a stimulus program for wealthy sellers at the expense of auction-house profits. Last week, Sotheby’s announced net annual income of $130 million, or 2.1 percent, on record total sales of $6.3 billion in 2013. (Equivalent profit figures are not available from Christie’s and Phillips, which are privately owned.) Thanks to cutthroat competition for consignments, owners of high-value works like Jeff Koons’s “Cracked Egg (Magenta)” sculpture — sold by Damien Hirst for 12.5 million pounds, or $21 million, plus £1.6 million in buyer’s fees at Christie’s in London on Feb. 13 — are not charged sellers’ commissions and are usually given some of the extra paid by buyers.

The auction houses instead have to make money out of lots in the $50,000 to $5 million range, for which they charge double-digit fees to both the seller and the buyer. This in turn squeezes the profitability of middle-range works that don’t enjoy trophy status.

At Sotheby’s on Feb. 12, for example, the 1984 Basquiat painting “Water-worshipper” sold below estimate for a hammer price of £2.15 million; it had been bought by its seller for €2.4 million at an auction in Paris in 2010.

The bargaining power of today’s richest investor-collectors makes it more difficult for the auction houses, and the bulk of their sellers, to turn a profit, thereby putting further pressure on the skin of what may or may not be a bubble. “It used to be said the air was thin at the top of the market,” said Mr. Schwartzman. “Now it’s thin in the middle.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Artists Donate Works for Legal Defense of Man Who Smashed Ai Weiwei Vase” @nytimes by NICK MADIGAN

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Artists Donate Works for Legal Defense of Man Who Smashed Ai Weiwei Vase” @nytimes by NICK MADIGAN

MIAMI — A few dozen artists have promised to donate works for an auction to help cover the legal expenses of a colleague who stunned the art world by smashing a vase by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

The mustering of support for their fellow artist, Maximo Caminero, who has been charged with criminal mischief and could face up to five years in prison if convicted, includes a defense of the intellectual underpinnings of his action. “We do not support the act, but we support the intention,” said Danilo Gonzalez, a painter and sculptor who said he spoke for many of his fellow artists.

While Mr. Caminero’s purpose, as he initially expressed it shortly after breaking the vase on Feb. 16, was to draw attention to a dearth of exhibition space for local artists in Miami’s museums, he has since said that he was driven more by a spontaneous impulse to emulate Mr. Ai’s own destruction of vases, some thousands of years old.

In an interview, Mr. Caminero said he had acted from a sense of solidarity with Mr. Ai, a dissident who has been under pressure from the Beijing authorities for his political activities and is barred from leaving China. Mr. Caminero said he did not realize until later that the vase, painted over in bright green by Mr. Wei, dated from the Han dynasty.

“I was in shock,” Mr. Caminero said. “He could have made replicas.”

Reached at his studio in Beijing, Mr. Ai said he had received an apology from Mr. Caminero but was unimpressed.

“My only advice is that he should make sure next time he knows — or have someone tell him — what he’s going to break,” Mr. Ai said. “He thinks it’s from Home Depot?”

Some artists accuse Mr. Ai of hypocrisy for taking that view. The Chinese artist, they point out, has made a show of not only painting over exquisite ancient vases but of smashing some of them to pieces.

“On the one hand, it is a clear act of vandalism,” the Ukrainian-born artist Alexey Steele, based in Los Angeles, said on Friday of the Pérez Museum incident. “On another, painting on a historic vase is a clear act of vandalism, too.”

While Mr. Ai has defaced works to make new art, one difference is that, unlike Mr. Caminero, he owned the art before he ruined it.

In his emailed apology, Mr. Caminero told Mr. Wei that he shared the Chinese artist’s battles “as though they were my own.”

“Breaking the vase signifies breaking the chains that prevent you from leaving the prison in which you find yourself,” Mr. Caminero wrote. “You were the vase in my hands, and I was the silent voice of the artists of Miami.”

However divided they might be on the advisability of Mr. Caminero’s act, Miami artists clearly see it as an opportunity for a debate about their situation. “Prominent intellectuals” were planning to discuss the cultural impact of the work’s destruction at a news conference late Friday in Miami’s Wynwood arts district, an announcement from organizers said.

Nick MadiganMaximo Caminero

Emilio Martinez, a 32-year-old Miami-based artist from Honduras who is helping to plan the auction, said he had pledges from 35 to 40 artists — including some from Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela — for donations of works and that six more had already turned some in. He said he expected the sale to take place in three or four weeks.

Mr. Martinez called Mr. Caminero’s action “heroic.” Asked what his reaction would have been if Mr. Caminero had destroyed one of Mr. Martinez’s own paintings, he said it would not have bothered him, provided that it was an “unselfish, altruistic act” driven by a “humanitarian” ethos.

Another local artist, Elsa Roberto, said she supported Mr. Caminero’s act “in concept” but not in execution. She added that various ideas were “floating around” to help seize the moment on behalf of Miami artists, including placing vases on the steps of every museum in the area.

The Pérez Museum has pointed out that its schedule already includes exhibitions of local artists’ work, which it describes as “part of the museum’s long legacy of working with the local creative community.”

A show of works by the Miami-based, Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié is planned for March 13 to Aug. 31, and an exhibition devoted to the artist Adler Guerrier, also from Miami, opens on Oct. 30. “Americana,” a series of exhibitions at the Pérez through May 1, 2015, includes work by the local artists José Bedia, Naomi Fisher, Lynne Golob Gelfman and Frances Trombly.

Mr. Ai’s plight, meanwhile, continues to draw attention: At the Armory Show, a fair that opens on Thursday on Piers 92 and 94 in New York, a booth set up by the For-Site Foundation of San Francisco will feature a large bicycle similar to one he keeps chained outside his Beijing studio to remind people that he is not free to leave the country. The foundation is also working with him on a major installation at Alcatraz prison, scheduled for September.

A spokeswoman for Cheryl Haines, the executive director of For-Site, said it does not plan to line up extra security at its booth.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/01/2014, on page C1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Miami Artists Rally Around Colleague Who Smashed a Star’s Vase.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann – “Artists Donate Works for Legal Defense of Man Who Smashed Ai Weiwei Vase” @nytimes by NICK MADIGAN

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