State of Architecture: California

This year may well be the one that California museums wish to forget. Institutions are reeling from drastically reduced endowments: The Getty Trust in December told The Art Newspaper that its endowment has lost 25 percent since last June. Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles was just delivered perhaps the most public blow of all: donor default. Exacerbated economic woes resulted in a massive drop in donations, forcing the museum to dip into its emergency savings. Financial strain has shuttered its Geffen Contemporary space for six months, and forced the resignation of Jeremy Strick, the museum’s director since 2001. After considering a proposed merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which is partially reliant on government funds), the museum accepted a no-strings infusion of cash from arts super-patron Eli Broad, who promised to match endowment funds up to $15 million. The museum also added a CEO position, naming Charles Young, former UCLA chancellor.

The uncertainty of MOCA’s future has left many pondering the fate of architecture and design departments at museums throughout the state. But a closer look finds them faring far better than anticipated. MOCA’s architecture and design curator Brooke Hodge said she is continuing work on three planned exhibitions, as well as several major projects that are in development. The only significant change so far is to the next architecture exhibition, a survey of local firm Morphosis, which was rescheduled from its March opening to an August date. “It’s too early to predict whether there will be any further impact,” she said.

The museum also recently announced a renewed agreement with the Pacific Design Center, where MOCA has had a satellite location since 2000. The space will offer expanded programming with a greater focus on architecture and design, said Hodge. “My aim is to develop an innovative and inspiring program of exhibitions that touches on important issues and developments in the design disciplines both at home and abroad,” she added. Planned for 2009 are two exhibitions exploring the intersection of craft and computation: A site-specific installation by Ball-Nogues Studio, and Boolean Valley, an installation by architect Nader Tehrani of Office dA and ceramist Adam Silverman.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA) architecture and design department is in the midst of an acquisitions spree since Henry Urbach took over as curator of the department in 2006. An exhibition that closed January 4 showcased over 246 objects acquired by Urbach, as well as the decision-making process that went into each acquisition. It’s too early to know if that pace will change. If art prices go down, that might make acquisitions easier. For spring, Urbach has scheduled the first solo exhibition of the Berlin–based architecture firm J. MAYER H.

Another bright spot for architecture and design is at the Getty Research Institute in LA, which recently announced the formation of a design and architecture department. Headed by Wim de Wit and associate curator Christopher James Alexander, the department will curate the Getty’s already impressive holdings. These include Julius Shulman’s archives and the papers of architects John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, Ray Kappe, Daniel Libeskind, and Philip Johnson, as well as those of critics like Reyner Banham and unique acquisitions like the Bauhaus Papers and archives of the International Design Conference at Aspen. The first exhibition planned under de Wit’s tenure will unite many of these: a survey of California architecture from 1940-1990, tentatively planned for 2013 or 2014.

De Wit will also launch a consortium for architects to share best practices, including practical information about the economy. “These will be to meet and learn more about each other’s works and see how we can help each other,” he said, adding that he is looking forward to more collaborations like the symposium organized in conjunction with the Hammer Museum’s John Lautner show last fall.

While museums are busy saving themselves, chances are there will be less outreach to rescue endangered mid-century modern houses. A few years ago Michael Govan, then newly named director of LACMA, bandied about an interest in acquiring some mid-century architecture to help preserve it, a groundbreaking move. While LACMA has yet to deliver on such a promise, hope may lie in the strength and agility of smaller institutions: The LA-based MAK Center just added a third house to its roster, the Fitzpatrick-Leland House, designed by R.M. Schindler.

Alissa Walker
The Architect’s Newspaper

Anywhere, Anytime

Monica Serra showed at Mina, a boutique, after her gallery closed.

Anne Pedret eyed a standard-issue sawhorse improbably dressed up in fleece. “I’d love to have that in my bedroom to put clothes over,” she said, apparently prepared to part with $750 to turn that conceptual artwork into a high-ticket coat hanger. Ms. Pedret, an associate professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, could have been forgiven.

The sawhorse, one of several by Cheryl Pope, a local artist, was on view, after all, not in a gallery, but at a fashion boutique on North Damen Avenue, a mercantile thoroughfare that is home to the likes of Marc Jacobs and Club Monaco. That it vied for attention with satin cocktail dresses and oversize cardigans was fine with Robin Richman, the owner of the shop that bears her name. She is mounting the works of emerging artists to fill space once reserved for fashion labels she can no longer afford to sell, and to pique the interest of her worldly clientele.

“In this economy,” Ms. Richman observed, “we have to be really inventive.”

Those words would surely resonate with merchants across the country who have transformed their boutiques into one-stop emporiums offering gladiator sandals alongside rare lithographs and vivid oils on canvas. And these days they have as compelling a ring for scores of artists forced by a rocky commercial climate to seek new settings for their work. As the galleries that once embraced them succumb to soaring overheads and declining sales, some have taken to exhibiting in restaurants and hotel and condo lobbies. Even more are seeking refuge in the fashion world.

Exhibition in a dress shop? “You can’t say no,” said Monica Serra, who agreed to show her moody portraits, priced at about $10,000 each, at Mina, a boutique in downtown Manhattan, after the Miami outpost of her German gallery shuttered last month. “If the economy was different, I might have thought twice. I might have been worried that the art world wouldn’t take me seriously. But what are you going to do — stockpile your paintings because the venue is not right?”

Quite a few of her peers have adopted a similarly flexible attitude. In exhibiting alongside camisoles and candles, they have stood convention on its head: If their presence once lent cachet to the clothes, today it is the artist who seeks to borrow fashion’s luster.

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Ruth La Ferla
New York Times

More on the Closing of the Rose Museum

Donors and longtime supporters of the Rose Art Museum are exploring whether they can block Brandeis University’s stunning decision to close the museum and sell an art collection that had been valued at $350 million.

Jonathan Lee, chairman of the museum’s board of overseers, said yesterday that he intends to meet with officials in the state attorney general’s Public Charity Division to see if there is anything he can do to stop the university from shutting down the 48-year-old museum at the end of the summer.

Brandeis’s announcement that it would sell the collection to help shore up the university’s finances raises a thicket of legal questions about what the university can do with money and art donated to the Rose, especially pieces given with the restriction that they be displayed publicly.

“We can be angry, but the question is, can we save it?” said Jonathan Novak, a museum overseer and a Los Angeles art dealer who graduated from Brandeis in 1975 and has given art works and money over the years. “Had I had any idea when I donated work that there was a chance they would be sold to benefit the university, I never would have donated them.”

Among those joining the chorus of outrage yesterday was Lois Foster, the widow of a former Brandeis trustee, for whom a new museum wing is named.

In an interview, Foster said university trustees raised the idea of closing the Rose a decade ago, recognizing the potential millions that could be raised by selling off a collection that includes works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, and de Kooning.

Her late husband, Henry, “talked for hours to get them to change their minds, and they did,” Lois Foster recalled yesterday.

Eventually, the Fosters gave more than $5 million to the school for the museum’s Lois Foster Wing, which opened in 2001.

“It’s like somebody kicked me in the stomach, and I’m just sick,” Foster said. “I just don’t want to sit back and let them do the wrong thing.”

Officials in the museum world continued to criticize the Brandeis administration yesterday. In a statement made on the eve of its midwinter conference, the Association of Art Museum Directors said it was shocked and dismayed to learn of the university’s “regrettable” plans.

Meanwhile, a pair of petitions to save the Rose were posted online, and Brandeis students were planning a sit-in protest tomorrow.

Brandeis spokesman Dennis Nealon said yesterday that many alumni and donors had called to support the university’s decision. While dismayed about the closing, Nealon said, the alumni recognized that Brandeis was making hard choices to undergird its core educational mission. And, he said, they recognized as well that the building will be used as a campuswide fine arts center.

Emily LaGrassa, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said that Brandeis notified the agency Monday afternoon of its plans, after the trustees voted unanimously to shut down the museum. While Nealon said at the time that the attorney general’s office “has not balked at this at all,” a university attorney amended that statement yesterday morning. And LaGrassa confirmed that the office has not offered an opinion on any aspect of the proposed sale.

“We’re talking about 6,000 pieces of art,” she said. “It’s going to take some time. But we will review the Brandeis plan as it evolves.”

In fact, the museum’s collection includes 7,180 works, 84 percent of which were gifts, said Rose registrar Valerie M. Wright.

While Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandeis, said that financial challenges facing the university forced the museum closing, Rose supporters said they were cut out of the process. Director Michael Rush learned of the move late Monday afternoon, when he was informed by provost Marty Krauss.

Lee, the Rose overseer, said that the university had other choices: borrow $100 million against the value of the collection or decide to sell just a work or two. Lee, whose mother, Mildred, gave dozens of works over the years and served as the first president of the Rose board in the 1960s, said he remains baffled by the logic of the university.

“The trustees and the president should call Barack Obama and say we can solve the financial crisis,” he said. “Why don’t we sell all the collections in the Smithsonian?”

It remains unclear how complicated any art sale will be. Much will depend on what arrangements donors made when giving the museum art. In some cases, Brandeis would need to file papers with the Supreme Judicial Court and seek approval.

Opened in 1961, the Rose was long one of the only places for art lovers in the Boston area to see contemporary works. This was before the Institute of Contemporary Art had a permanent home and prior to the opening of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center.

Novak was an economics major in the 1970s when he took a course with Carl Belz, then museum director. “But for the Rose Art Museum, I would not be an art dealer today,” he said.

Lois Foster began to visit the Rose in the 1970s through her husband, head of the university’s board of trustees from 1979 to 1985. She helped organize a supporters’ group by taking friends on tours of the museum and asking them for a small check.

Years later, when her husband wanted to give the Rose more than $5 million to name a wing after his wife, she resisted.

“This was his gift to me,” said Foster. “I fought it when he wanted to do it, because he wanted to give the gift in my name. But he always said, ‘This is the best gift I’ve ever given.’ “

Of the Rose closing, Foster said: “It’s like a death.”

Geoff Edgers
The Boston Globe

End of the Rose Art Museum

Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik.

The move shocked local arts leaders and drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries. Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush declined comment this evening, saying he had just learned of the decision.

Brandeis is also discussing a range of sweeping proposals to bridge a budget deficit that could be as high as $10 million, such as reducing the size of the faculty by 10 percent, increasing undergraduate enrollment by 12 percent to boost tuition revenue, and overhauling the undergraduate curriculum by eliminating individual academic programs in favor of larger, interdisciplinary divisions.

Other plans under consideration include requiring students to take one summer semester, allowing the university to expand its student body without overcrowding, and adding a business program. The changes would take place, at the earliest, in 2010.

“This is not a happy day in the history of Brandeis,” President Jehuda Reinharz said tonight. “The Rose is a jewel. But for the most part it’s a hidden jewel. It does not have great foot traffic and most of the great works we have, we are just not able to exhibit. We felt that, at this point given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice.”

Brandeis said the museum would be closed late this summer. It was founded in 1961; a new wing designed by celebrated architect Graham Gund was added in 2001.

Announcement of the closing came as Rush was searching for a chief curator. A leading expert on video art, he had arrived in 2005 with plans to expand the museum. He also launched a full scale analysis of the museum’s value by Christie’s auction house. Dennis Nealon, the university’s director of public relations, would not say how much the collection is worth.

Experts on university art collections said the move was unusual, but not unexpected.

“Clearly, what’s happening with Brandeis now is that they decided the easiest way is to look around the campus and find things that can be capitalized,” said David Robertson, a Northwestern University professor who is president of the Association of College and Univertsity Museums and Galleries. “It’s always art that goes first.”

But there is no precedent for selling an art collection of the Rose’s stature. Internationally recognized, the collection is strong in American art of the 1960s and 1970s and includes works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler.

“I’m in shock,” said Mark Bessire, the recently named director of the Portland Museum Of Art. “And this is definitely not the time to be selling paintings, anyway. The market is dropping. I’m just kind of sitting here sweating because I can’t imagine Brandeis would take that step.”

Geoff Edgers and Peter Schworm
Boston Globe

Hadid in Eastern Europe: A Pickle for Everyone

The 100,000sqm Dorobanti Tower will house a 34,000sqm 5-star hotel, casino, convention centre, shops and 35,000sqm of luxury apartments.

The project for Smartown Investment at the junction of Calea Dorobanti and St Mihail Eminescu features concrete-filled steel ‘profiles’ is due to complete in 2013.

It is not all good news for Hadid in Eastern Europe: earlier this week a 250m-tall tower designed for Warsaw, Poland, was put on hold due to the global financial crisis.

Richard Waite
Architects’ Journal

Say It Isn’t So

In early June, when Michael Conforti became president of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), no one could have anticipated the challenges that he and his colleagues would face just a few months into his two-year term.

As luck would have it, this country’s leading professional organization for art museums now finds itself in the hands of one of its most seasoned and respected members — director for 14 years of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., and, before that, curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (a position he assumed more than 30 years ago). Mr. Conforti, 63, has long been widely esteemed as one of the field’s leading thinkers and advocates.

Now hardly a day goes by without announcements by museums from Los Angeles to Detroit to New York of substantial reductions in programs, exhibitions, capital projects and staffing — collateral damage from a global financial drubbing that walloped museum donors, retail sales and, most critically, endowments.

Even the enormously wealthy J. Paul Getty Museum last month announced a job freeze and other cost-cutting measures. Mr. Conforti’s own well-off institution is slowing down its expansion. More dire was the situation at two poorly endowed museums — the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the National Academy Museum in New York — which revealed they were on the verge of going bust. Both gained last-minute reprieves. But the academy’s sacrifice of two paintings to raise cash was condemned last month by AAMD’s board as a serious violation of museum ethics. The sales broke a cardinal rule — that proceeds from selling art may be used only for buying other art.

So why does Mr. Conforti seem so upbeat?

Fresh from meeting with the architects for the Clark’s expansion, he argued during a long conversation at New York’s Harvard Club that this financially perilous period is “a great time for art museums.” They are, he said, “bellwethers for people at moments like this. We saw this happen after 9/11. If we are doing our jobs well, we’re the places that people can turn to in times of instability. The reality is that the Metropolitan Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Phoenix Art Museum are not going away.”

But the National Academy and MOCA did come perilously close to “going away,” due to financial circumstances specific to them that predated the general economic collapse.

The academy clawed its way back from the edge by selling two Hudson River School paintings — its most important Frederic Church and its only Sanford Gifford — to raise about $13.5 million for operations. By the time its desperation-driven plan to sell came to light on Dec. 5 through a report on my CultureGrrl blog, the paintings were already gone — withdrawn from the public domain by an unidentified private foundation.

In making this risky move, the museum forfeited not only AAMD membership but also art loans from and collaborations with institutions that obey the strong recommendation of the association’s board. “These objects are there for the collective cultural patrimony of the people who live in this country. They are not fungible assets,” Mr. Conforti declared to me.

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Lee Rosenbaum
Wall Street Journal

Return to Seeing

There is a hilarious – if horrifying – video running on Sotheby’s website right now in which some chastened auctioneers are brought before the cameras. Each struggles to maintain a certain silk-suited dignity while attempting to solicit new clients, while also mollifying the old, in the wake of the latest disastrous auction results.

After much persiflage about the “enormous amounts of money” supposedly flooding around, and some barefaced fictions about market stability – six months after Roman Abramovich paid $86m for a Bacon in May, Sotheby’s couldn’t sell another for less than half that price – the worldwide head of contemporary art makes a staggering announcement. “Don’t worry,” he counsels potential sellers, “there is a return to seeing the real object and what kind of presence it has, what’s great and what is not so good. And what’s great will nowadays sell.”

A return to seeing? What a triumphant new dawn this is when art will once again be viewed! And not only that, but these men and women may even be able to sell the good works and not just the bad and the ugly. For in the past decade, there has been no art too sorry to be sold at auction, no art too brainless, slapdash, repetitive, obnoxious or devoid of originality. Whatever you had, some dealer or auctioneer could probably sell it; the ravening maws were always eager to be stuffed.

More millionaires bought and sold art than at any other time in history. More art was constantly required. It hardly mattered whether the work had any meaning, let alone quality. Practically the only rule was that it must be advanced art – progressive, serious, high-minded, what used to be called avant-garde; all this meant was that if second-rate, then knowingly so, and if kitsch, then in an ironic rather than innocent fashion.

The significance of the work became its market price, its wealth-making potential. By that token, buyers needed a Richard Prince nurse, a Damien Hirst tank, a Jeff Koons sculpture and a photograph by Andreas Gursky. That was the starter pack, and the safest collateral, for the droves of plutocrats and hedge-fund managers now trying to offload their art.

Anything beyond that, anything less well tested, and the buyer was taking a risk, though the risk was for quite a time unimaginably small. For the ever-increasing index of collectible artists was securely determined by dealers in tandem with tiny groups of super-rich collectors. If the dealer could persuade the collector to buy the work of a particular artist, then the work was de facto collectible and all the other buyers would roll over. You could call it a futures market, just like any other, except that it was so much less of a gamble.

There has never been anything complex about this system, and anyone who believes that most artists are too principled to play to it ought to try looking about. Even the cats and gondolas of the Royal Academy summer show are made for an audience that knows what it likes and likes what it knows; easy supply and demand.

What this overheated market has now produced is an immoderately vast amount of art: more art than can possibly be bought, more art than anyone could ever need and more art than anyone, apart from Charles Saatchi, could ever look at.

But one thing about this art was that it very successfully adapted itself to suit the cash-rich but time-poor. The speed of consumption, by which I mean viewing as well as buying, could now be measured in minutes and even seconds. This effect is apparent everywhere.

Take the dreg-ends of art recently shown in GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy. Here you could see neoclassical figurines personally smashed to pieces by Georgina Starr, which took about a second and was easily imagined by anyone who has ever broken crockery. You could see chrome-plated statues of fighting cherubs – so anarchic, so expensive, what a neat combination! You could see an outsize replica of a peeled onion.

Obviously the impromptu GSK canteen was a work of art; what else could it possibly be if Carsten Höller’s prodigiously expensive Africa-meets-Europe Double Club on the other side of town, no more than a standard night club with Congolese beer, was successfully promoted as art? Höller brought you the slides at Tate Modern. For a few more weeks, you can consume his latest project for yourself in Islington. Cote de boeuf with chips – £42.

The question is not whether an art work is art, but whether it is good, and even allowing for the wasteland that is January, there is almost nothing worthwhile; hundreds of new shows at London’s commercial galleries, but scarcely anything to detain mind or eye. White Cube has Rosson Crow, a Texan painter born in 1982. She does deserted scenes from history – Lincoln’s funeral, a banquet at the White House – but with the canvas bleeding great gouts of pigment, or melting like a candle, combining extreme decadence with glib Ab-Ex parody.

Crow was discovered as a student while the market was at its most voracious, has had more shows in her short life than far better painters and looks not unlike Britney Spears. Brash, cocky and hideous to behold, her work is more skilful than the blood-spattered skeletons by Andreas Golder upstairs. Still, if Jay Jopling is showing such work, there must be one last collector out there who doesn’t trouble him or herself with actual viewing.

The London-born Alice Anderson at Artprojx looked more promising with her tiny dolls tumbled to the bottom of towers studded with nails and her stark variations on Rapunzel. Anderson uses dolls the way Louise Bourgeois uses stuffed figures and has similar family issues.

Appearing as the protagonist in the short film The Dolls’ Day, abandoned by her mother, molested by her father, she bashes effigies of both to smithereens. But despite the Kleinian overtones (and the lavish French funding) nobody can save Anderson from bathos. “Are you OK?” mumbles her dad.

Still, she is a genius compared with her badly over-promoted contemporary Dan Colen, once acclaimed for his realistic paintings of bird shit. Colen has filled a whole show at Gagosian with one picture of a park bench, supposedly where Cinderella met her fairy godmother, supposedly reflecting upon the ideas of the distinguished art theorist Michael Fried. If I were Fried, I would issue a disclaimer.

You might think that the market doesn’t matter, that collectors can make fools of themselves without affecting our lives, but the truth is that public galleries are profoundly influenced by the market, their purchases very generally following those of the rich. Every time you enter a commercial gallery, what you see is only there because it fetches enormous sums, and if you notice trends, it is because the market has decreed that art should look like this and so the art does. Then it enters our museums.

But now that the market is crumbling – Sotheby’s contemporary art sales in New York in November 2007 and 2008 made $418m and $160m respectively – what will fill the galleries, both private and public? 2009 is already looking rather different. Hoxton is collapsing, galleries closing by the week. The London Art Fair was deserted by the end of the first afternoon last week. Prestigious galleries are planning to show what pass for contemporary old masters such as Cy Twombly and Robert Mangold. These are exhibitions one wouldn’t want to miss.

It is obvious to anyone with eyes that art has become more vulgar and rebarbative during our lifetime, as well as slicker and quicker. Whether we will ever progress to anything better – more subtle, refined, intelligent, inventive, perhaps even original – is anyone’s guess, but these hard times have got to be propitious.

Less money means less genuflection to collectors, less subservience to donors and less demand-based product. It may even mean less dross of the sort that surely dismays (be honest) every visitor to Frieze. And if less money can elicit a promise from the industry to look at the art object for what it really is, then this is truly the start of a new era.

Laura Cumming
The Guardian

Infrastructure in the New World Order

In a narrow swath along Manhattan’s Hudson River, stone walls and beautiful arched bridges set off with trees disguise a buried railroad and entwine a six-lane highway.

This is Riverside Park, and it’s an infrastructure masterpiece.

Congress and President Obama shouldn’t commit themselves to spending billions for “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects before examining every inch of the park, which was built during the Depression.

Regrettably, we can’t create its contemporary equivalent today. Great ossified bureaucracies make it all but impossible to unite highways, rails, transit and appealing walkways.

I fear that “shovel ready” means boondoggles like the E- 470 beltway, a six-lane, 46-mile arc through empty high-desert grasslands dotted with new subdivisions east of Denver. Cars cruise the wide-open toll road at 80 miles per hour.

Touted as essential to the metro area’s growth, this land developers’ delight hasn’t lightened loads on more centrally located highways. It’s just rearranged growth patterns, scattering splotches of development over an unimaginably large landscape. New residents depend on long beltway commutes by car.

We can’t do better now, the lobbying legions say, we need to start the bulldozers fast. Translation: No bridge to nowhere will be left behind.

What’s wrong with America’s way of building transportation has long been known. We segregate roads, mass transit, railways and air. Each has its own pot of money. It’s no one’s job to assemble a transportation system that offers the right travel mode for the task at hand.

Aside from the odious earmarks, most transportation funding decisions are made by Metropolitan Planning Organizations. Never heard of MPOs? They’re supposed to set priorities based on real needs, though instead they operate in obscurity and allow the political horse-trading to go on unimpeded by real oversight.

So much is made of the nation’s neglect of infrastructure, yet the U.S. actually is spending record sums on it.

We don’t make progress because the nation fails to lay out new communities so they can be efficiently served by means other than the auto. A start would be to group people-intensive colleges and commercial centers as hubs along corridors served by transit and walkable streets.

While the bureaucracies (state and federal) get overhauled, officials can easily cross off much on the wish lists, like all those beltways that are really land-development schemes posing as congestion relief. (Charlotte, North Carolina, killed an outer- beltway plan some years ago and has done fine, thank you.)

Next, knock out the fourth, fifth and sixth expressway lanes. When roads get that big, there’s enough demand to support high-quality transit. The six rail tracks that tunnel into New York’s Penn Station haul as many people as 45 freeway lanes.

What should Obama support? Lots of innovation has been trickling up from municipalities. Beltway suburbs like Bellevue, Washington, turned their parking-lot acres into high-value suburban downtowns. Focused on transit, they’re appealing as places to walk, shop, work and live.

Some metro areas are aligning roads and rails (both freight and passenger) in corridors to support these emerging urban hubs. The San Francisco Bay Area could use some cash to finally finish a rapid-transit extension linking Oakland and the East Bay to San Jose and Silicon Valley. Without additional aid, underfunded and overburdened big cities will soon have to stop long-planned, often-deferred projects like New York’s Second Avenue Subway.

Express bus lanes and bikeways sharing “green streets” with cars can reduce auto dependency. In the best cases, each mode is physically separated from the others by planted buffers. These little Riverside Parks aren’t just pretty. They make pedestrian crossings safer and sop up storm water — essential in an increasingly flood-prone era.

Dollars spent that get Americans out of cars will ease traffic, save money, reduce pollution, slow global warming and make us less vulnerable to volatile oil oligarchs.

Road projects do little more than rearrange the traffic jams. Look for freeway spectaculars among the proposals, like the 23-lane extravaganza touted for Atlanta’s suburbs. Mark them “D” — for delusional.

James Russell
Bloomberg

Art Warranties?

Art is long and life is short, according to the old Roman saying, but sometimes art doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain. The canvas warps, the metal bends, the paper turns brown: New artworks may look like old works in a short period of time, leaving their buyers perhaps feeling as though they have been had. One such collector brought back to New York gallery owner Martina Hamilton a painting she had purchased there by the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum that now looked as though the “painting was falling off the canvas,” Ms. Hamilton said.

Art is sold “as is” by galleries or directly from artists. (Can you imagine Consumer Reports reviewing art?) Still, dealers hope to maintain the goodwill of their customers, and artists don’t want to develop a reputation for shoddy work. But it’s not fully clear what responsibility artists bear to their completed work, especially after it has been sold. That’s particularly the case for artists who purposefully use ephemeral materials in their art (bee pollen, banana peels, lard, elephant dung, leaves, mud, moss and newspaper clippings, to name just a few examples) — isn’t it the buyers’ responsibility to know what they are getting?

Mr. Nerdrum, who is known for formulating his own paints (and constructing his own frames), was contacted by Ms. Hamilton about the deteriorating painting, and he directed the dealer to offer the buyer her choice of other works by him at the gallery in the same price range. The collector, however, didn’t want any other Nerdrum painting in the gallery, so the artist rehired the same model he had used originally and painted the image anew. The matter took a year to resolve.

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Daniel Grant
Wall Street Journal

Nouvel in Copenhagen

It’s usually considered an insult to say that an architect designs pretty packages, let alone that he borrows ideas from a dead genius.

But Jean Nouvel should be forgiven for resurrecting old ghosts. His Copenhagen Concert Hall, which opened here on Saturday evening, is a loving tribute to Hans Scharoun’s 1963 Berlin Philharmonie, whose cascading balconies made it one of the most beloved concert halls of the postwar era. And Mr. Nouvel has encased his homage in one of the most gorgeous buildings I have recently seen: a towering bright blue cube enveloped in seductive images.

It’s a powerful example of how to mine historical memory without stifling the creative imagination. And it offers proof, if any more were needed, that we are in the midst of a glorious period in concert hall design. Like Frank Gehry’s 2003 Disney Hall in Los Angeles and Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie, now under construction in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Nouvel’s new hall demonstrates that an intimate musical experience and boldly imaginative architecture need not be in conflict — they can actually reinforce each other.

The Copenhagen Concert Hall has the ugliest setting of the three. In a new residential and commercial district on the outskirts of the old inner city, it is flanked by boring glass residential and office blocks. Elevated train tracks running to the old city swing right by the building; swaths of undeveloped land with tufts of grass and mounds of dirt extend to the south.

Approached along the main road from the historic city, the hall’s cobalt blue exterior has a temporal, ghostly quality. Its translucent fabric skin is stretched over a structural frame of steel beams and tension cables that resembles scaffolding. During the day you can see figures moving about inside, as well as the vague outline of the performance space, its curved form embedded in a matrix of foyers and offices.

It is in darkness that the building comes fully to life. A montage of video images is projected across the cube’s fabric surface at night, transforming it into an enormous light box. Drifting across the cube’s surfaces, the images range from concert performers and their instruments to fragments of form and color.

This is the intoxicating medium of late-capitalist culture. You can easily imagine boxes of detergent or adult chat-line numbers finding their way into the mix.

Yet what makes this more than an advertising gimmick is the contrast between the disorienting ethereality of the images and the Platonic purity of the cube. For decades architects have strived to create ever more fluid spaces, designing ramped floors and curved walls to meld the inner life of a building with the street life around it. The ideal is a world where boundaries between inside and out vanish. Yet Mr. Nouvel’s box is more self-contained and arguably less naïve: its solid form, bathed in tantalizing images, is in stark opposition to the sterile desolation around it.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times