Fine Arts News

Banksy NY/YouTube

Banksy, the mysterious British graffiti artist known for his satirical work, has been making mischief around New York City this month.

His latest artwork makes a statement about the meat industry, or lost innocence — or something like that. In any case, it'll certainly make you stop and look.




Banksy's "Sirens of the Lambs" started its tour of New York City in — naturally — the Meatpacking District.

It's called "Sirens of the Lambs" and it features a bunch of cuddly puppet animals peeking out of a truck, squealing (or at least squeaking) with fear. The truck, labeled "Farm Fresh Meats," started its rounds in (what else?) the Meatpacking District, and it's set to tour the city for the next week and a half.

The piece is somehow hilarious and horrifying at the same time, like an episode of The Muppets gone terribly wrong.

One look into those animals' unblinking glass eyes will obliterate any fond childhood memories of playing with Teddy. And judging from the



posted on the artist's website, the installation has already been terrorizing children around the city (one kid is shown screaming as he runs away, and the closing shot is of an inconsolable baby).
But the



that accompanies the piece (accessed via an 800 number printed on the truck) seems to have a good sense of humor. The narrator starts off by saying, "This is a piece of sculpture art, and I know what you're thinking: Isn't it a bit — subtle."

The audio guide also explains that the animals are controlled by four mime artists, who sit inside the truck. Banksy apparently used to work at a butcher shop, which might have inspired the sculpture art.

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• Hasan, West Philly
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  Untitled, West Philly
  
  
  
• Kiss Kiss
  
  
  
• Chaq
  
  
  
  
  Every Day After Work

Social media was abuzz this week with photographer Hannah Price's portraits of men who catcalled her on the street. We first saw the story on The Morning News, where Price was briefly interviewed. We wanted to indulge our curiosity about Price and her work, so we decided to give her a call.

Price's remarks from our interview are below, but first, some background.
Price moved to Philadelphia in 2009 from Colorado and noticed for the first time that she was getting catcalled. The photographer, who's currently working toward an MFA in photography at Yale, decided to turn the camera on the people who approached her on the Philly streets. This resulted in the series "City of Brotherly Love" (Philly's nickname).

Ambiguity might be one of this project's most prevalent themes. It's been mistakenly referred to as "My Harassers" on some blogs, which Price does not like. Her series doesn't take an aggressive stance on catcalling; it's not meant to incite social action, she says. Rather, it's an observation, a way to react behind the camera lens.

Price's portraits leave much to interpretation. Not only do we not know the situations in which she crossed paths with these men, but we also have no idea of their relationship. The photos are framed in a variety of ways; the lighting, composition and even positioning of the subjects themselves vary so much that viewers have plenty of freedom to interpret them.

Price also included a few scenes with no breathing human subjects in the frame, such as a photo of a Marian Anderson image and a beauty salon advertisement. The inclusion of these nonportraits heightens the ambiguity of the project. In a video interview, Price talks about her decision to include this imagery alongside the photos of the men.

"The nonportraits are more of how I would like to be approached. I would like to be approached in a respectable manner, or I would definitely like to fall in love," she says. "The nonportraits are more sort of how I envision a romantic encounter. I don't know if catcalling is necessarily romantic, it's more of like an instant in a situation."

In the video interview, she says she doesn't know how the project will affect the behavior of the men depicted: "I don't think it makes them re-think catcalling. 'Cause I'm just one person and we're all different people and we come from different places. I don't know in their experiences if they've had any luck with their catcalls. They probably have, depending on the person, so I don't think my one instance ... makes them re-think about what they're saying."
Price's process went like this: Someone — a man — would catcall her, and she would either snap their photo at that instant or she would ask to make their portrait.

Price says that taking photographs of the catcallers was a way to address and confront the people who catcalled her. "I'm in the photograph, but I'm not. Just turning the photograph on them kind of gives them a feel of what it's like to be in a vulnerable position — it's just a different dynamic," Price says. "But it's just another way of dealing with the experience, of trying to understand it."

The series also tracks with themes common in Price's work. The photographer, who is Mexican and black, gravitates toward photographing subjects whose ethnic identities overlap with hers.

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Interview Highlights

On why she started making these portraits

It was just a reoccurring thing that I noticed, and that just threw me off guard, I just never really experienced it before. I just started reacting.

On what made her want to start documenting catcallers

I just started doing it. It was another way for me to just deal with it on another level besides avoiding it. Sometimes it's easier to ... just respond and confront people. And then just talking to people, you find out more about them than your initial [impression].
... It was more of like, "Here was a change in my life and it was something really apparent that I noticed."

On how she responded to catcallers before and during this project

Well, I mean the first initial response is avoiding [it], you don't want to. It's just an everyday thing to men and women, and it was just — yeah — one moment, I just started talking to people and I just realized that I could make their portraits and make something of it.
Some of them say "no" and if they say "no," I don't make their photo afterward. But most of them, the majority of them, respond quite well just 'cause I'm responding. Because usually it's expected of me to avoid them so I'm responding. They want a response, so usually they're pretty happy about it — about me talking to them. ...
I explain to them that I'm a photographer and I'm interested in making a portrait.

On how her multiracial identity informs her work

My background is I'm mixed-race. ... I'm Mexican and black, and I grew up in white suburbia and so I've photographed stereotypes of the black race and the majority [of the recent work has been] mostly about men.
It's just, I'm just trying to like ... bring all of these [ideas] of what a stereotype is and what people expect. It may or may not be true, that's the thing of what a stereotype is, is that they're true but they can also not be true. It's kind of like this thing that you base off what it looks like. What you perceive it to be.

In that case, even if women said they had a boyfriend, it's just an expression that they publicly feel comfortable expressing themselves, telling someone how they feel. ...
I do think that women are the most beautiful thing on the planet. Women are beautiful. I get it. Men are men. It's an attraction. ... It can be dangerous, but I don't think it can be something fully avoided and controlled. Just as long as people understand the dynamics of a public expression in that way.
I think, it's good and I think it's ... I've definitely had those feelings and those frustrations before. And I mean it just shows, it's just another example of the power dynamic of how men decide to express their attraction. ... She's just saying, "No, stop. You don't have a right."
There were moments when I decided not to approach someone, like if I felt uncomfortable, I would avoid them. I didn't want to put myself in any danger. So it's not like I respond to every single person. ... It depends on how I was feeling that day. If I felt like photographing or not, or if I felt like talking to this stranger. Sometimes you don't really feel like talking to people and sometimes I would have a really bad day.

On whether she ever felt threatened

There was one moment where I felt threatened but that was because my response was disrespectful.

On whether she finds catcalling disrespectful

I'm not sure. To an extent, it is disrespectful. It depends on the tone, yeah. It really depends on the expression, what they say to you. Sometimes people will say they want to do something to you — I feel like that's really disrespectful. I think it really depends on the phrase.

On whether she's taking a stand against catcalling

I'm not trying to stop catcalling. I think a given thing, especially for an urban community ... it's more just an experience that I had, and a way for me to deal with it. I ended up making a relationship; I ended up taking time to spend time with people who threw me off guard and ended up making something beautiful out of it.
I mean, it's uncomfortable, the act of catcalling. But I'm not trying to do some social thing. I'm just trying to — it's coming from a different place. I'm just trying to understand. ...
I mean, I think it's kind of de-humanizing. I wasn't trying to dehumanize anyone, it was just a response [to] an experience, and just because I'm ... just because I'm a black person or a minority, it's easier for me to talk about this subject or make those photographs. And I understand how other people may respond to it. I'm just trying to point out that ... I was just transitioning from a different place, I was just trying to .... point out that we're all human and all confused.

That's why it's the switch of the camera. I'm in the photograph, but I'm not. Just turning the photograph on them kind of gives them a feel of what it's like to be in a vulnerable position. ... It's a different dynamic — but it's just another way of dealing with the experience, of trying to understand it.


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Pablo Picasso drew L'Homme au Gibus, or Man With Opera Hat, in 1914.

(c) Succession Picasso 2013
Pablo Picasso drew L'Homme au Gibus, or Man With Opera Hat, in 1914.
(c) Succession Picasso 2013

Imagine buying a genuine Pablo Picasso painting valued at $1 million — and paying only $135.
That's the prize if you win the "1 Picasso for 100 Euros" raffle Sotheby's is currently putting on. It's the first time a Picasso has been offered as a raffle prize, and while 100 euros (about $135) isn't cheap for a raffle ticket, at one in about 50,000, your chances of winning are a lot better than the megalotteries a lot of people enter.

Peri Cochin, a journalist and television producer in Paris, explains that the idea for an online raffle came about when she was faced with attending yet another gala charity dinner. She and her mother, who is Lebanese, plan fundraising events for the International Association to Save Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city in Lebanon. Tyre's monuments have suffered from Lebanon's civil wars, and the city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been damaged by urban blight. When Cochin's mother suggested the charity gala, Cochin thought: Not again.

"All those gala dinners," she says. "You go there, you sit and you are really bored very quickly, and you look to your watch and hope that 11 o'clock will arrive quickly and you can go home and be quiet and forget about that dinner."

Cochin wanted to try something new. They came up with the idea for an online raffle that would intrigue people from all over the world, not just the usual suspects at a charity dinner. Cochin knows Olivier Picasso, grandson of Pablo Picasso, who is also a television producer in Paris. Together, they looked for a Picasso drawing, and found Man With Opera Hat. Olivier Picasso, who is writing a biography of his grandfather, says the painting is from 1914, "the peak of the cubism period of my grandfather. It's the second part of the cubism history, when Pablo was more studying how to symbolize things than just to draw them. "

Cochin says many people think the raffle is a joke, but "it's not a joke here," she says. "We're talking serious business."

According to Cochin, they had to work for almost two years to get official authorization. In France, raffles and lotteries are run by the state, so the French Finance Ministry will collect the money and supervise the raffle. The money will go to two projects of the International Association to Save Tyre, both focusing on Lebanese women in need. Cochin emphasizes that this raffle is not just for art aficionados or collectors.

"It's mostly people that are dreaming of something that is not possible to get," she says, "and, all of a sudden, yes, you can maybe have it."

Picasso adds, "You know, there are more chance[s] to win than when you play at the New York Lottery."

The raffle drawing is Dec. 18 at Sotheby's in Paris. If they sell 50,000 tickets, they'll make 5 million euros, or close to $7 million. Even if you take off $1 million for buying that Picasso, it's a pretty good haul for a charity event.


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A necklace of Saint Januarius, in gold, silver and precious stones, is displayed in Rome. The riches are from a treasure trove in Naples that is said to be worth more than the British crown jewels.

Dazzling with diamonds, emeralds and gold, 70 pieces of treasure — said to be some of the most valuable in the world — have been transported from a vault in a Naples cathedral to a museum in Rome. They'll stay there until February, marking the first time they've ever been displayed outside of Naples.

The head of the foundation organizing the Treasure of San Gennaro exhibition tells the BBC the collection is "of incalculable worth, both historically and artistically, greater than that of the British crown jewels or the Russian imperial crown."

The collection officially began in 1526, when the city of Naples called upon its patron saint, fourth century bishop San Gennaro (known in English as Januarius), for help. The BBC reports:

"In the 1520s, when Naples was beset by disease, war and the frequent eruption of the nearby Mount Vesuvius, Neapolitans pledged to build a chapel to San Gennaro and safeguard the donated treasure, in return for the saint's protection.
" 'The city was on its last legs, but the people of Naples knew which saint to turn to,' said the exhibition's curator Paolo Jorio. 'They voted that, if Saint Januarius helped them, they would dedicate a new treasure chapel to him.'"

Since then, it has acquired more than 21,000 pieces. One of the most elaborate acquisitions is a necklace made up of several pieces of jewelry and stones donated over centuries, such as a cross donated by Napoleon.

The exhibition in Rome shows off some of the collection's highlights, including:

• A golden chalice donated by Pope Pius IX in 1849.
• An elaborately bejeweled mitre — the ceremonial headdress of bishops — including more than 3,500 precious stones, created in 1713.
• Diamond earrings donated by a commoner in gratitude for surviving a plague in 1844 (Reuters calls them "relatively humble").

The mitre of San Gennaro is made up of 3,300 diamonds and hundreds of rubies and emeralds.

Tony Gentile/Reuters/Landov



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American artist Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) looks up while seated at his drawing table, circa 1945.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images
American artist Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) looks up while seated at his drawing table, circa 1945.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In February 1959, the great illustrator and magazine artist Norman Rockwell was on Edward R. Murrow's celebrity interview show, Person to Person. For decades, Rockwell had painted scenes that told stories of wholesome, G-rated life in small-town America, and Murrow interviewed Rockwell at his home in just such a small town: Stockbridge, Mass.
Rockwell told Murrow how much he and his family loved living in Stockbridge, but what he didn't say was that Stockbridge was their home because it was also home to the psychiatric institute where his wife, Mary, who was depressive and alcoholic, had found treatment; nor did he say that he had entered therapy several years earlier at the same institute, with a psychoanalyst who went on to great renown.
"Stockbridge is known as a quintessential New England town," biographer Deborah Solomon tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "And in the '50s, it really was a center of psychoanalysis. And Rockwell moved there not for the peaceful countryside, but to be treated."
Solomon's new book, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, takes a close look at Rockwell's relationship with his psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson. Erikson was a German Jewish refugee who went on to write Childhood and Society and Young Man Luther. He gave us the concept of the identity crisis and of life as a multistage process of social development.

A Therapeutic Influence

Rockwell found Erikson late in adulthood, after he'd already experienced a lifetime of depression, anxiety and severe insecurity.




"Erikson was a fabulous listener, and their time together wasn't really psychoanalysis so much as counseling and support," she says. "Erikson was a great supporter of Rockwell, and Rockwell needed that."

Erikson also helped Rockwell connect with liberal politics, and that showed in his art, specifically his 1960s civil rights paintings.

"When he painted the Golden Rule, for instance, in 1959, he tried for what we now call multiculturalism, meaning bringing people from all different ethnicities and religions together," Solomon says. "The central figure is a rabbi who I see as a stand-in for Erik Erikson, who was the closest thing that Rockwell ever had to a spiritual leader."

But Rockwell's relationship with Erikson didn't come cheap. Some of his paintings — like his famous Kellogg's Corn Flakes magazine ads — were meant as bill payers to cover the enormous psychiatric tab he and his family had racked up in Stockbridge.

The Difference Between His Art And His Reality

Rockwell thought of his mother as a chronic hypochondriac, and his father as a drudge. His brother, meanwhile, was athletic and popular, nothing like his skinny, outsider kid brother, Norman.

"I think Rockwell experienced himself as sort of the classic younger brother, picked upon and bullied," Solomon says. "And art for him, of course, became a way to bulk himself up from what he saw as the very competitive world of male adolescence."


Deborah Solomon's other books include Jackson Pollock: A Biography and Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell.

Christian Oth/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Deborah Solomon's other books include Jackson Pollock: A Biography and Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell.
Christian Oth/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Rockwell's own childhood doesn't appear in his work. He painted an idealized America where a boy's anxiety might be the vaccination he's about to receive, and the runaway is a young, comical kid who doesn't even make it out of town before he's stopped by a friendly cop.
"I think he painted a view of America as a caring, concerned place," Solomon says. "He certainly was not painting his own reality, but he was painting, I think, his longing."

Always An Outsider

In the heyday of abstract art, Rockwell was a gifted, commercially successful draftsman and representational artist, which meant he was often dismissed as a lightweight, or "culture polluter," as Solomon puts it. If that hurt him, he didn't let it show.
“ During his lifetime, many people suffered from the illusion that abstract painting was somehow more emotional just because it included drips and splashes and wide strokes.

- Author Deborah Solomon

"He loved illustration for its own sake, and it was very painful for him not to be acknowledged as a gifted artist. But he was committed to illustration," Solomon says. "Now, of course, we understand that realist painting can be as emotional as an abstract painting. But during his lifetime, many people suffered from the illusion that abstract painting was somehow more emotional just because it included drips and splashes and wide strokes."

In fact, Rockwell did once experiment with abstract art. His 1962 painting The Connoisseur shows a balding, middle-aged man from the back as he looks at a Jackson Pollock. To make The Connoisseur, Rockwell had to do his own version of a Pollock painting — and, according to abstract artist Willem de Kooning, it wasn't half bad.
Solomon says, "[De Kooning] saw Rockwell's Connoisseur, and he said to the owner of the gallery, 'That painting is better than anything Jackson could do.' ... But I'm not sure if he intended the comment as a compliment to Rockwell or a takedown of Pollock, his rival."


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Andy Warhol kept much of the ephemera of his daily life in boxes called Time Capsules, now at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. This correspondence addressed to Warhol at his studio, The Factory, comes from Time Capsule 10.

Lauren Ober/NPR
Andy Warhol kept much of the ephemera of his daily life in boxes called Time Capsules, now at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. This correspondence addressed to Warhol at his studio, The Factory, comes from Time Capsule 10.
Lauren Ober/NPR

Marie Elia likes to describe her job this way: She is the secretary to a dead man. As one of two catalogers for Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, it's her job to go through the 610 boxes he left after his death in 1987.

In one box she found a mysterious, small tin. "I opened it and it was full of fingernail clippings, dead bees and those little holes that come from a hole punch," she says. The fingernail clippings weren't Warhol's. They were sent to him by a fan. "I don't know why. Somebody mailed that to him. Somebody thought that he would like it."
Over the past six years, catalogers at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh have indexed more than 300,000 items, from a Tyvek suit covered in Jean-Michel Basquiat's scribblings to a box of Preparation H.


Cataloger Marie Elia explains some of the contents of Time Capsule 10 to a visitor at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Lauren Ober/NPR
Cataloger Marie Elia explains some of the contents of Time Capsule 10 to a visitor at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Lauren Ober/NPR

"We work more with the intimate side of Warhol. His prescriptions, his shampoos, his acne medication, his letters from his family," says Erin Byrne, the Time Capsules' other cataloger. "These are things that blow people away."

Warhol began the project when he was moving the Factory, as his studio was called. But the artist didn't hire a moving company, says Matt Wrbican, the Warhol Museum's chief archivist. Warhol asked his staff to clean up the mess, and one of his assistants found a workaround.
"He suggested to Andy that they start putting everything in these boxes, and they could call them 'time capsules' and he could work on them forever. And he did. He thought that was a great idea," says Wrbican.

Warhol intended for the Time Capsules to eventually be sold as art, but they never went on the market. And it's certainly easy to balk at the idea that the stuff that wound up in the boxes is art. Warhol was a packrat. But that desire to collect helped inform his artistic point of view.


Time Capsule 10 contained receipts, canceled checks, letters and other paper material that Andy Warhol saved from 1967 to 1969.

Lauren Ober/NPR
Time Capsule 10 contained receipts, canceled checks, letters and other paper material that Andy Warhol saved from 1967 to 1969.
Lauren Ober/NPR

"There's an interview Warhol gave pretty early in his days as a pop artist where he said that pop art is liking things," Wrbican says. "I can't think of a better expression of that idea than the Time Capsules. I mean, Warhol loved stuff."

Warhol also loved the spotlight and theatrics, so it is fitting that the museum has turned the Time Capsules into performance art by opening some of them on stage, in front of an audience. On a recent afternoon, catalogers Elia and Byrne prepared to open an unremarkable cardboard box marked simply with dates — 1967 to 1969.

Once open, the box was a bit of a disappointment. No previously unknown artworks, just papers: telegrams, art opening announcements and lots of correspondence. Elia opened one of the envelopes, addressed to Andy Warhol Films, and pulled out a photo of a nearly nude man. It was Paul Richard Shipman, a nude male model who wanted to be cast in Warhol's films. In his letter, he said he'd appeared in several nude magazines — and included all of his "physical details."

Sometimes Byrne feels like Elia finds all the good stuff. "I might be looking over at Marie's box and she's pulling out a Basquiat and Keith Haring underwear and all this great stuff and I'm still knee deep in junk mail," says Byrne. "It's total time capsule envy."

After sifting through 608 Time Capsules, plus a trunk and a filing cabinet that are also part of the work, Byrne and Elia definitely have a different picture of Warhol than the celebrity image he liked to project.

"The flotsam and jetsam that's left of his life is almost a little bit more truthful and faithful to the life he actually lived versus the life he put out there," Byrne says.
In that way, the Time Capsules serve as a kind of Warhol autobiography. Fingernail clippings, dead bees and all.


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Ifnoyes.com sold at an art auction in New York for $3,500. The artist, Rafael Rozendaal, compares owning a website to owning a public sculpture in a park.

Rafael Rozendaal

That Benjamin Palmer dropped $3,500 at Phillips auction house in New York is not surprising. The 217-year-old company, headquartered on Park Avenue, regularly sells artwork for tens — and often hundreds — of thousands of dollars.

What is surprising, however, is that he took nothing home. He has nothing to put up on his wall or put on a pedestal in his living room. Physically, his acquisition lies among a hub of wires, and the likelihood is he will never touch it. But it lives virtually inside every computer, smartphone or tablet in the world.
Palmer's purchase was ifnoyes.com, a Web page with colorful geometric patterns that respond to the movement or click of a mouse.

"Being in such an old-school place and then just buying a website felt like a perfect thing to do," Palmer says. "It was like, this is what I should be doing."

That night, he did the virtual equivalent of hanging a painting up on his wall: He reposted a picture of it on Twitter.

Embracing The Virtual

Art and technology have been close bedfellows throughout history. Artists have employed advances in paint pigmentation, photography, pencils, video cameras, computers — basically anything since the invention of fire, says Steve Dietz, president of the Minnesota-based new media nonprofit Northern Lights.mn.

"Technology is anything that people can use to make something, and artists have always been looking at what are the new tools that are available," he says.

Digital art dates back to the mid-20th century: In 1968, an exhibition in London called Cybernetic Serendipity curated the work of computer-based artists and served as a sort of debutante ball for the field. Web-based art in particular has been growing since the advent of the Web in the mid-'90s.
But the event at Phillips — an art institution known for auctioning off Impressionist paintings and Andy Warhols — signals a widening acceptance of the digital field by the mainstream art world, Dietz says.
Phillips' digital product developer Megan Newcome says the auction in early October, called "Paddles ON," was the first to be dedicated entirely to new media.



These landscape paintings of Yosemite National Part were made by renowned British artist David Hockney using an iPad.

Eric Risberg/AP
These landscape paintings of Yosemite National Part were made by renowned British artist David Hockney using an iPad.

"We continually position ourselves as contemporary, and every 50 years that changes," she says. "We just got this sense that what we were doing was, in a way, unprecedented."
The 20 works of digitally inspired art for sale spanned the spectrum from physical to virtual: a baroque chandelier with surveillance cameras instead of lights, a digital print with embedded touchscreen tablets, an 8-hour performance video by Tumblr sensation Molly Soda, an animated GIF.
Newcome says collectors were initially drawn to the things that "they can wrap their minds around" — the more traditional tangible pieces. But the event, she says, helped some collectors realize that digital works are now part of mainstream contemporary art.

"The fact that this was an exhibition and a panel discussion and a party, this real celebration of digital art ... we were really able to give it some muscle," Newcome says.
And it's not the only art establishment to begin embracing the virtual side. The American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., had an exhibit dedicated to video games last year. In August, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York acquired its first piece of code — an iPad application.
And David Hockney, whom the Associated Press calls "one of Britain's most celebrated living artists," brought mainstream attention to digital art when he began drawing on his iPhone and iPad about five years ago. His digital drawings are now being shown in San Francisco's de Young Museum.
Hockney told the BBC in 2010 that he was drawn to the responsiveness and immediacy of the medium. "Who wouldn't want [an iPad]? Picasso or Van Gogh would have snapped one up," he said.

Creating Market Value

But Picasso and Van Gogh created unique, irreplaceable paintings worth millions of dollars. What's the incentive to invest in art whose very nature is reproducible?
A Verge article about the Phillips auction talked about the challenges of marketing art that lives in a virtual space:



The source code of ifnoyes.com shows the new owners' names and a signature, of sorts, from the artist.

"The question of ownership — and how you get someone to pay notoriously high art-market prices for something as relatively immaterial as Molly's webcam video or a 24-second YouTube clip — is still unsolved, and what the organizers of Paddles ON repeatedly called 'the elephant in the room.' "
The creator of ifnoyes.com, Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal, points out that websites do have intrinsic worth: In the Internet realm, domain names are financially valuable. No one but Palmer and his wife own the URL "ifnoyes.com," even though everyone can access it.

Rozendaal even made Palmer sign a contract to keep the website free and accessible to the public. "My work is public by nature," Rozendaal says. "I want to keep it that way."

It's the virtual equivalent of owning a sculpture in a public park, he says. There's a point of pride of being the one who commissioned or paid for it. And the site still identifies the owner: The title of ifnoyes.com says it's a "Collection of Benjamin Palmer & Elizabeth Valleau."
It seems to be working for Rozendaal: Of the 85 websites he has designed — all of which were coded by an independent programmer — he has sold about a third. He says this one is the first website ever to be sold at an art auction.
For Palmer, the medium is appealing because he can share his acquisition easily. He doesn't have to invite people to his living room to see a painting; they can just take out their phone. "I think it's pretty exciting to kind of have it with you all the time," he says. "I like the idea that it's for everyone."


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Nazi Art Trove Found In German Apartment

Please note: The image quality in this gallery was degraded by the light used to display the work at a news conference in Germany. We're including the photos to impart a general idea of the range of works in question.




A picture of a painting by German artist Franz Marc titled "Horses in Landscape" is projected on a wall during a press conference on the spectacular art find of nearly 1,500 works in Munich, Germany. Officials say they face a long investigation into the hoard of looted Nazi art.

The revelation Monday that nearly 1,500 paintings and prints seized by the Nazis during World War II were found in a Munich apartment has set off excitement in the art world and spurred anger among Jewish groups that German officials didn't publicize the discovery when it was first made.

With a potential value of $1.35 billion, the trove of art contains previously unknown works by Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall; other artists represented include Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

The stash of art was reported by Germany's Focus magazine Monday, under the headline "The Nazi Treasure" (Der Nazi-Schatz). Tax officials discovered the cache when they visited the cluttered Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, a descendant of man who acted as an official in wartime Germany.

Of nearly 1,400 oil paintings, prints, and other works, 1,285 had been stacked in a drawer, unframed. They include work by German Expressionists such as Franz Marc and Max Beckmann, in addition to a previously unknown self-portrait by Otto Dix. The trove also includes Albrecht Dürer and Canaletto, who worked in earlier centuries — a detail that could make the collection's origins even more difficult to explain.

Some of the works were almost certainly looted by the Nazis; others were sold by Jewish collectors who were under extreme duress. And some works were culled from German museums for being "degenerate art" that didn't conform with Nazi ideology.

German officials have asked art historian Meike Hoffmann to examine the works — and perhaps provide clarity for their clouded history.
"All these paintings and prints are in a very good condition," Hoffmann said Tuesday, according to The New York Times. She said it's not possible to put a price on the collection, saying, "Of course it is of a very high value for art historians."
Hoffmann says it could take years to trace the works' origins. She added that there are no signs that any of the art was forged — and that they had a powerful effect when she was confronted with them.

"It was very emotional for me to see all these works and to realize they still exist," Hoffmann said, according to Agence France-Presse.
"This case shows the extent of organized art looting which occurred in museums and private collections," Ruediger Mahlo, the German representative of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, tells Reuters.
"We demand the paintings be returned to their original owners," he said. "It cannot be, as in this case, that what amounts morally to the concealment of stolen goods continues."
Officials say they found the art in early 2012, contradicting the Focus report that the discovery occurred in 2011. But they confirmed that officials in Berlin have known of the find for months.

To a large extent, the works' convoluted history mirrors that of the Gurlitt family, as Reuters reports:

"Cornelius's father Hildebrand Gurlitt was from 1920 a specialist collector of the modern art of the early 20th century that the Nazis branded as un-German or 'degenerate' and removed from show in state museums.
"Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels recruited Gurlitt to sell the 'degenerate art' abroad to try to earn cash for the state. Gurlitt bought some for himself and also independently bought art from desperate Jewish dealers forced to sell.
"After the war he persuaded the Americans that, as he had a Jewish grandmother, he himself had been persecuted. He continued working as a dealer and died in a traffic accident in 1956."

As Der Spiegel reports, the elder Gurlitt also said his collection had been destroyed in the 1945 firebombing of Dresden.
On Tuesday, officials said that Cornelius Gurlitt, 76, first attracted the suspicion of tax investigators in 2010, when a routine check on a train from Zurich to Munich revealed that he was carrying thousands of dollars' worth of cash.
An attorney for the heirs of Jewish art collector Alfred Flechtheim says the family will look into the find for possible ties to his estate, reports Der Spiegel. The magazine says that any art transactions that took place after 1933 are susceptible to review as possible Nazi plunder.
News of the discovery is also coming out as Jewish and historical groups prepare to observe the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a series of coordinated attacks in which tens of thousands of Jews were beaten or arrested between Nov. 9 and 10, 1938.

Thousands of Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues were ransacked or destroyed in that event, widely seen as a turning point in Nazi Germany's attempts to destroy Jews and their culture.


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From The "Creative Dissent" Exhibit




This mural depicts Moammar Gadhafi as a rat fleeing the February 17 revolution in Tripoli, Libya.
Jill Dougherty






In the U.S., graffiti is often condemned as vandalism. But during the Arab Spring, artists say city walls were often the only places where they could talk back to tyrants.
Street art can be found across the Middle East and North Africa, and the Arab Spring protests inspired an artistic revolution. The "Creative Dissent" exhibit at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan is putting that art on display.

Tell Me More guest host Celeste Headlee spoke to guest curator Christiane Gruber, an Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Visual Culture at the University of Michigan, and Nazeer, an Egyptian street artist featured in the show.

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The 69th Regiment Armory on East 25th Street may have seemed like an odd venue, but it was big enough to hold the 1,400-work exhibition. "There were lots of comparisons in 1913 of the Armory Show being a bomb from the blue, so the Armory is not inappropriate," says curator Kimberly Orcutt.

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution



Marcel Duchamp's Cubist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase was famously described by one critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory."

Philadelphia Museum of Ar/2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp

One hundred years ago in New York City, nearly 90,000 people came to see the future of art. The 1913 Armory Show gave America its first look at what avant-garde artists in Europe were doing. Today these artists are in major museums around the world, but in 1913, they were mostly unknown in America.
Boasting 1,400 works — from artists such as George Braque, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and many, many more — it was the biggest art show New York had ever seen. Today, the New York Historical Society is celebrating the Armory centennial with artworks from the original exhibition.
Normally used to store arms and train troops, the 69th Regiment Armory on East 25th Street was an odd venue, but it was big enough to hold it all. "There were lots of comparisons in 1913 of the Armory Show being a bomb from the blue, so the Armory is not inappropriate," says curator Kimberly Orcutt.
The avant-garde show raised hackles. The most controversial work was Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Everyone had an opinion about it, including former President Theodore Roosevelt, who compared it to a Navajo rug he had in his bathroom.

Americans were not used to looking at abstract art. And the Duchamp — painted in ochres and browns a year before the Armory Show, was Cubist — splintering a profile figure so it seems to be in motion. The painting provoked critiques of all sorts, including cartoons and poems.
"It was called a bundle of slats, an explosion in a shingle factory," says curator Marilyn Kushner.
Viewers were puzzled; with all those fragments, where was the nude? But they lined up to see it, and the other avant-garde works. Some 87,000 people came to the Armory show. Rich collectors and dealers had seen such art in Europe, but this was the first time the masses got to see — and react to — the new ideas.
If the Duchamp made visitors puzzled, Orcutt says Matisse's 1907 Blue Nude made people mad. The reclining female nude was a traditional subject, says Orcutt, but it was presented in a "distorted" way: "With blue shadows, with colors that didn't have to do with the representation of nature. And some people considered this sort of a backwards step in cultural progress ... to challenge the very foundations of western civilization. ... She was seen as being very primitive, a threat to the progress they felt that they were making here in the United States."


Henri Matisse angered viewers with his "distorted" Blue Nude, a 1907 oil on canvas.

The Baltimore Museum of Art/2013 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.



Robert Henri's 1913 Figure in Motion was a realistic, but bold response to Matisse and Duchamp's nudes.

Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Ill.

Some American artists were threatened by what they saw at the Armory.
"They were afraid ... that these new styles, Cubism, Fauvism, and so on, would become a fashion, would become a new orthodoxy," Orcutt explains. "A style you had to adopt in order to be modern."
American artists had organized the Armory show — they had chosen the European pictures, and negotiated with dealers and lenders. Almost half the exhibit was made up of American art. So when all the press attention went to Duchamp, Matisse and other controversial foreigners, the Americans were unhappy.
Robert Henri, a leader of the Ashcan school of American artists, had a nude painting in the show called Figure in Motion — and it was a response to the Matisse and Duchamp. The larger-than-life-size woman seems to be stepping toward us. Her image is realistic — not splintered — but still daring, in its way. "She faces the viewer very brashly, with all of her nakedness showing," Kushner says.
American realist John Sloan helped organize the Armory show, and had several works in it. His 1912 McSorley's Bar is a slice-of-New-York-life scene of relaxation and libation.
"The interesting thing also about this is that you only see males in this bar," Kushner says. "But this is the time period in New York when women started venturing out on their own and going into these restaurants — perhaps not bars — but dancehalls and restaurants by themselves."
In 1913, women took to the streets, too — with political and social causes.
"Women are marching in the streets not only for the right to vote, but also for the right of open marriages, contraception, the right to have a child without being married to the father," Kushner says. "... This was 1913, right! I mean we all thought this happened later, didn't we?"


McSorley's Bar by American realist John Sloan is a 1912 slice-of-New-York-life scene of relaxation and libation.

Delaware Art Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As this New York Historical Society salute makes clear, the city was in a bustle 100 ago. On the streets were horse-drawn carriages and automobiles. The Woolworth Building had just been completed, making it the tallest building in town. Electric trains pulled out of Grand Central Station for the first time and new residents arrived in hordes.

"Thousands of immigrants are flooding into the city so you have a cacophony of many, many different languages," Kushner says. "... This was when Europe sort of sat up and said, 'Oh, New York, it's not that backwater. New York is the place of the new and the fresh and the modern.'"
In that exploding city on the Hudson, in addition to the nudes and the cubes, the radical visions and subjects and colors, more than anything else the Armory Show of 1913 was a show about freedom: New ways of thinking and seeing, and expressing yourself. Given the time and the place, Kushner says it was the perfect exhibition:
"The question should not be 'Why did the Armory Show happen?' ... All of this talk about freedom was going on in New York at the time. If the Armory Show hadn't happened, I think the more apt question would have been, 'Why didn't it happen?'"

It's still happening. And if you're in the city before late February 2014 you can see the new and the old at the New York Historical Society's celebration of The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution.


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