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Insights from “Artoholic” in chief Charles Saatchi, on art collectors:
However suspect their motivation, however social-climbing their agenda, however vacuous their interest in decorating their walls, I am beguiled by the fact that rich folk everywhere now choose to collect contemporary art rather than racehorses, vintage cars, jewellery or yachts. Without them, the art world would be run by the state, in a utopian world of apparatchik-approved, culture ministry-sanctioned art. So if I had to choose between Mr and Mrs Goldfarb’s choice of art or some bureaucrat who would otherwise be producing Vat forms, I’ll take the Goldfarbs. Anyway, some collectors I’ve met are just plain delightful, bounding with enough energy and enthusiasm to brighten your day.
The Fabric Workshop and Museum was founded in 1977 as a way to combine world-class artistic collaborations with community outreach and education. (Photo: Steve Legato for The New York Times)
When it rains, geysers of water have been known to erupt from the floor drains of the art collective here known as Fluxspace, which makes its home in a mammoth former textile mill in the northern part of the city. The building has no air-conditioning, and on the harshest winter days its heating system borders on notional. It’s also a bear to find: one morning this week a taxi driver on his way to it ended up taking several unintended detours down trash-filled alleys, cursing the calm voice issuing from his dashboard G.P.S.
But the three-year-old collective is becoming known in the Philadelphia art world for its monthly exhibitions of work by its members and other artists. And “we actually get awesome turnout for our shows, considering the location and everything,” said Danielle Ruttenberg, one of 25 young artists who either pay for raw studio space in the building or take on chores in exchange for it. (The current exhibition, of bird-centric prints and drawings by a local artist named Tory Franklin, continues through Sept. 13.)
I had sought out Fluxspace at the beginning of Day 2 of a thoroughly idiosyncratic personal art tour (with some good eating woven in) of a city that has emerged, especially over the last decade, as a lively and unpredictable place to see new art.
There is a particularly Philadelphian brand of hardy, low-budget, do-it-yourself, do-it-for-love creativeness evident in art and art spaces across the city. It is a climate that, as new as it sometimes feels, has been embodied and nurtured for decades by organizations like two I included on my itinerary: the Fabric Workshop and Museum, founded in 1977 as a way to combine world-class artistic collaborations with community outreach and education, and the Mural Arts Program, which grew out of the city’s anti-graffiti efforts and has worked with neighborhood residents and artists for 25 years to create more than 2,800 towering murals on walls throughout the city.
Randy Kennedy
New York Times
Among Kickstarter’s projects was a temporary wedding chapel in Manhattan. (Photo: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)
Earl Scioneaux III is not a famous music producer like Quincy Jones. He is a simple audio engineer in New Orleans who mixes live albums of local jazz musicians by day and creates electronic music by night. He had long wanted to pursue his dream of making his own album that married jazz and electronica, but he had no easy way to raise the $4,000 he needed for production.
Then he heard about Kickstarter, a start-up based in Brooklyn that uses the Web to match aspiring da Vincis and Spielbergs with mini-Medicis who are willing to chip in a few dollars toward their projects. Unlike similar sites that simply solicit donations, patrons on Kickstarter get an insider’s access to the projects they finance, and in most cases, some tangible memento of their contribution. The artists and inventors, meanwhile, are able to gauge in real time the commercial appeal of their ideas before they invest a lot of effort — and cash.
“It’s not an investment, lending or a charity,” said Perry Chen, a co-founder of Kickstarter and a friend of Mr. Scioneaux. “It’s something else in the middle: a sustainable marketplace where people exchange goods for services or some other benefit and receive some value.”
Janet Wortham
New York Times
LEFT: Abu Dhabi performing arts centre now, and RIGHT: in 2013 Photo: Zaha Hadid Architects
Just off the coast of Abu Dhabi is a small, sandy atoll. Surrounded by clear turquoise water, turtles and porpoises, this flat, barren little island was once home to nothing more than weekend campers, boat parties and water-skiers. But Saadiyat – which means “island of happiness” – is adjacent to the world’s richest city, and is being given a $27billion makeover in a bid to recast Abu Dhabi as a cultural mecca.
By 2013, the capital of the United Arab Emirates will boast an offshoot of the Louvre, a new Guggenheim museum, a National Museum inspired by the British Museum, a performing arts centre designed by the British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, several art schools, and various pavilions and other cultural franchises that will be able to host temporary exhibitions from around the world. A 10-lane bridge will bring millions of visitors to this meticulously planned development. More than 40 million people travel through the UAE each year; there is a market to be seized.
Jo Tatchell
Telegraph
Charles Gwathmey (Photo: Diane Bondareff/The New York Times)
The death of Charles Gwathmey early this month has provoked a lot of nostalgic reminiscence in the New York architecture world: not just about Mr. Gwathmey himself, but also about the New York Five, a group of influential architects of which he was part.
This nostalgia has much to do with what’s been lost in the years since the group’s prominence in the 1970s. The early years of that decade was a time when this city was beginning to close itself off to innovative architecture. But it was also a time when New York could still claim to be the country’s center of architectural thought, and Mr. Gwathmey and his colleagues had a great deal to do with maintaining that pre-eminence in the public imagination. The New York Five came to represent the idea that architecture could still express and advance our values as a culture. To some, the group embodies the last heroic period in New York architecture.
That the five came together at all seems almost an accident of fate. They had no real manifesto, no common aesthetic. Several young, promising New York architects were invited by Arthur Drexler, the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s legendary architecture department, to meet informally in the museum board room one day in the late ’60s to talk about their work. More meetings followed, a few attendees dropped out, others joined in. When the book “Five Architects,” which inspired the group’s name, was published in 1972, its success was a shock to everyone.
What the five architects did share, however, was a desire to reassert the importance of architecture as art form during a crisis in the profession. By the mid-1960s much of the Modernist dream was in ruins, and one of its central tenets — that architecture could act as an agent of positive social change — lay buried beneath decades of failed urban housing projects, soulless government buildings and sterile concrete plazas.
Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
Walter Gropius
Grahm Balkany’s mood lurches from admiration to anguish as he strolls among a group of small, flat-roofed hospital buildings on Chicago’s South Side.
“Look how progressive that is,” he exclaims, pointing to where slatted awnings filter sunlight that falls on patients’ rooms. A moment later, he gazes mournfully on scattered trash, uncut grass, and other signs of neglect. “I can’t tell you how beautiful this was at one point,” he says.
Recently, while studying engineering and architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Mr. Balkany discovered that one of the great minds of modern architecture, Walter Gropius, lay behind many of these buildings, built in the 1950s and early ’60s in a great gust of urban renewal on the South Side. But what began as a triumph for scholarship and Chicago’s architectural history has quickly soured. The city intends to tear down at least 28 buildings on the Michael Reese Hospital campus, including those linked to Gropius, to make room for the 2016 Olympics. Architectural preservationists have so far protested in vain.
“There’s no question that Walter Gropius was instrumental in the overall master planning of the campus and in designing many of the buildings,” says Jonathan Fine, executive director of Preservation Chicago, a group that tries to bring attention to important buildings that are imperiled. “On that basis alone, at least the buildings he designed should be preserved.”
Richard Mertens
Christian Science Monitor
Evoking the religious and the sublime … The Weather Project, an installation by Olafur Eliasson in Tate Modern, 2003.
It is not especially original, but it’s hard not to notice the striking similarities between theatre and organised religion: the communal experience, the gathering together in one place to bear witness; finding a space within a crowd to reflect in silence on one’s thoughts; the civic, social and, to an extent, pastoral needs which both can fulfil.
For the ancient Greeks, theatre clearly played an important part in the intellectual and moral life of the city; it’s probably reasonable to speculate that the day-long performances of tragedies must have accrued some of the heady atmosphere of the religious trance.
But in Shakespeare’s deeply sectarian Christian world, while frowned on by protestantism, theatres seemed to distance themselves from overt expressions of religious faith. And so, the raucous, secular, circular space of the Globe offers an almost precise opposite of the hushed, reverent cruciform of a cathedral.
From the 17th century onwards, an essential secularity seems to have been established in theatre, both in terms of content and architecture. There are superficial similarities between the narrower proscenium arch theatres and more ornate churches, but such similarities tend not to resonate. If the wings of the stage are the choir, then the altar has been excised; in theatre, at least, the cross has been decapitated.
Andrew Haydon
Guardian
A set of delicate, rib-like columns was recently roofed over in the World Trade Center pit in downtown Manhattan. They are the first visible elements of the new transportation hub, the celebrated $3.2 billion work of architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava. You won’t see the dramatic winged entrance hall until at least 2012…
There have been cuts to the project. The iconic wings above the station entrance have been clipped and they will not majestically flap up and down. Skylights over the train platforms have been eliminated. Still, one question is inevitable: How can the project possibly cost $3.2 billion?
“The station itself is a fraction of this cost,” said Calatrava…“I have designed stations in Zurich, Lisbon, and Lyons,” Calatrava said. “And this is the most complex I have done…”
Calatrava explained that the most expensive work at Ground Zero is underground and largely invisible: “It was a challenge to make a building that is secure yet very generous.”
James S. Russell
Bloomberg
Herb and Dorothy Vogel at the National Gallery. They amassed a valuable collection of contemporary art over the years on a modest income. (Fine Line Media)
After-hours at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. A small group of significant donors seated around a conference table slip on print-handling gloves and then— with Christmas-morning-like anticipation—turn their attention to the large shipping crate that a curator is carefully unpacking. It’s a scene that has already taken or soon will be taking place at 49 other museums, one in each state: the opening of a gift of 50 works of art sent by Herb and Dorothy Vogel.
The backstory to the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection…New York-born Herb, a high-school dropout and aspiring artist who worked a day job as a postal clerk, married Dorothy Hoffman of Elmira, N.Y., a Brooklyn librarian who also became an aspiring painter. The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection is what resulted from their decision shortly thereafter, in the mid-1960s, to collect rather than make art. They earmarked Herb’s modest salary for that purpose, and for much of the next four decades the pair were Zelig-like presences on the New York art scene, easily attending as many as 25 shows a week. In 1990, it would take five full-size moving vans to empty their one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment of the 2,400 works—covering every inch of wall space, stacked in crates and under beds—that they’d so voraciously collected.
Ann S. Lewis
Wall Street Journal
Mayra Cimet reattaching a piece of tarp to a dome aboard the Waterpod, a barge docked on the waterfront at Joralemon Street in Brooklyn this week. Michael Nagle for The New York Times
For the last two months artists have been floating around New York City on the Waterpod, a 3,000-square-foot experiment in community living and artistry. Founded by Mary Mattingly, whose medium is mainly photography, it was envisioned as a self-sustaining living space, an eco- and art-friendly sphere that could be recreated in the future, when land resources might be scarce. Preparing for the project, Ms. Mattingly thought about hardship and utopia. And so the Waterpod — at least that part of it that is not a commercial shipping barge, whose rental was backed by dozens of public and private groups — was built from donations and recyclables. Its systems run on solar power; its crew grows its own greens, collects its own rainwater. These things cared for each day, the notion was that the crew could work on more creative pursuits.
Melena Ryzik
New York Times
