Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2016 i ARTnews

With a gun in her holster and her mind in art history, FBI Special Agent Meridith Savona has been investigating art crimes for the FBI’s New York office major-crimes unit since 2010. She has seen her fair share of fraudsters and thieves, ranging from would-be dealers trying to pawn off fake Jackson Pollocks to rapacious collectors willing to pay top price for stolen artifacts. With all that she has discovered, her view of the art world, characterized by its secretive nature, is considerably less than favorable—simply put, a breeding ground for crime. But, Savona thinks it’s changing for the better, due in no small part, she believes, to the FBI’s efforts. Savona is one of two agents based in New York specially trained in the investigation of art crimes, a…

Robert Rauschenberg kept only one major example of his earliest, most influential body of work, the Combine paintings he made between 1954 and 1961. Short Circuit (1955) is similar to other works from the period; it incorporates sculptural elements with both painting and drawing and combines abstraction with images and objects plucked from the young artist’s world. But it was not included in his breakout exhibition, in 1958 at Leo Castelli Gallery. And though it was published in a couple of catalogues, Rauschenberg didn’t loan it to his 1976 or his 1998 retrospective, and he declined its inclusion in curator Paul Schimmel’s exhaustive Combines exhibition of 2005. Its appearance at Gagosian Gallery in 2010, two years after the artist’s death, was the first time the work had been seen in…

Domenico and Eleanore De Sole live most of the year in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Domenico is originally from Calabria, and he grew up in a military family, moving all around Italy. He got a law degree from Harvard in 1972, but he’s no longer a member of the bar. He made his fortune in the fashion industry, first as the CEO of the Gucci Group, and then as a cofounder of Tom Ford International with the label’s namesake. Eleanore describes herself as “Domenico’s unpaid secretary.” They are collectors and major patrons of the arts. Domenico currently serves as the chairman of the board of directors at Sotheby’s, but when it comes to their art purchases, Eleanore makes all the decisions. Still, they would not describe themselves as art experts…

Artists have long gotten away with murder, sometimes literally. After Benvenuto Cellini killed his rival, the goldsmith Pompeo de Capitaneis, in 1534, Pope Paul III—a Cellini fan—reportedly pardoned the Florentine artist, declaring that men like him “ought not to be bound by law.” In 1660 the Dutch painter Jacob van Loo stabbed a wine merchant to death during a brawl in Amsterdam, and then fled to Paris. But, as the art historians Rudolf and Margot Wittkower have noted in their vigorously researched 1963 treatise on the behavior of artists, Born Under Saturn, van Loo had no problem being elected to the Royal Academy there just two years later. His reputation as an artist was what mattered. Artists have not only indulged in criminal behavior and then been forgiven for it,…

In 1974 Korean-American artist Nam June Paik predicted, “Video-telephones, fax machines, interactive two-way television… and many other variations of this kind of technology are going to turn the television set into an [expanded-media] telephone system with thousands of novel uses, not only to serve our daily needs, but to enrich the quality of life itself.” The optimism that Paik and his peers felt about new technology in the late ’60s and early ’70s seems quaint today. Artists in the 21st century are much more ambivalent about the dizzying tech developments of recent years, which have connected individuals and communities around the globe but also ushered in a new age of surveillance. This dichotomy was reflected in the landmark exhibition “Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966)” at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The ambitious show charted…

From a show of mixed-media collages by Carol Rama, who died last year at age 97, to an installation involving furniture, video, and fruit by 26-year-old Bunny Rogers, exhibitions of art by women were a silent majority in Berlin’s galleries this spring. While conversations across continents focused on American politicians seeking to harness essentialist concepts of gender and pitting generations of feminists against one other, there was a remarkable lack of fanfare in Berlin about this diverse intergenerational array of female artists. Berlin, a city where women earn more than men, according to a recent government compensation survey, is also an environment where their power is presented confidently and as a matter of fact. Loose-limbed figuration was one of the few commonalities among these shows. The slinkiest works were the…

Without museum guards, museums couldn’t exist—it’s as simple as that. For our Crime issue, we turned the spotlight on the people who not only act as key players in the implementation of an institution’s security system, protecting works from theft and damage, but also perform a critical role in the museum-going experience. Museum security, above all, abides by Murphy’s Law. “If you think it’s not going to happen, it’s going to happen. You have to expect the unexpected,” said Pat Natale, director of security at the New Museum in New York. The 2013 show “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” included an artwork made up of multiple gold bars, so the museum had beefed up security—there were armed guards, panic alarms, motion detectors, audible alarms, and even fake walls. “In the end,…

The 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa seems to be a magnet for myths. The most popular range from claiming the heist as the source of the painting’s frame to saying the robbery was part of a larger ruse orchestrated by mastermind Eduardo de Valfierno, who intended to have the painting copied by French forger Yves Chaudron (a hypothesis that first appeared in a 1932 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, but is now largely rejected). The real story is far less cinematic, but perhaps more lyrical, than lore suggests. An Italian nationalist and former employee at the Louvre, Vincenzo Peruggia, lifted the painting for so-called patriotic reasons on a quiet Monday, when the museum was closed. Peruggia (dressed in his old Louvre uniform) entered the museum through the backdoor,…

On Saint Patrick’s Day in 1985, a party of young boys hiking in upstate New York encountered the partially burned body of Eigil Dag Vesti, a Fashion Institute of Technology student from Norway. The boys had wandered onto the property of Bernard LeGeros, an employee of New York art dealer Andrew Crispo and Crispo’s unofficial henchman of sorts. Vesti’s head, the only part of his body still intact, was encased in a black leather bondage hood. Thus began the strange, high-profile case of Andrew Crispo, the sadomasochistic art dealer who allegedly ordered Vesti’s execution inside the basement “dungeon” of LeGeros’s summer home. In a 1988 Vanity Fair article, David France, who would go on to author an entire book about the case entitled Bag of Toys: Sex, Scandal, and the…

Usually it’s the legal case, not the courtroom artist, making headlines. But that wasn’t Jane Rosenberg’s experience when she depicted New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady during Deflategate last August. Like all courtroom illustrators plying their craft, Rosenberg was racing the clock, trying to nail the scene. The resulting sketch showed NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and an unhappylooking Brady, each flanked by his attorneys, at the hearing in federal court in lower Manhattan. There was just one wrinkle: Brady’s handsome face resembled a portrait of Dorian Gray, and it instantly went viral. Within minutes of its transmission, multiple memes of the memorable image were flooding the Internet, and Rosenberg was fielding calls from all the major news networks and talk shows, including Good Morning America and The Tonight Show. Within…

The high-school bathroom is an essential site of drama in the canon of teen film and television, from My So-Called Life to Mean Girls. So too is it in Jennifer Reeder’s surreal short movie Blood below the Skin (2015), which made its L.A. premiere at the CalArts REDCAT arts center on February 22. In the film, one high-school student (an angelic-looking blond with a boyfriend and a plan to wear a pink princess gown to the upcoming school dance) encounters another (this one less confident, less girlish, and prone to locking herself in her bedroom) by the bathroom stalls between class periods. One girl introduces herself as Joni, the other as Joan; in a scene of palpable sexual and nervous energy, they banter about their namesakes, from Joan Didion to…

The 1990s in Mexico City saw not only an economic bubble and subsequent collapse of the peso, increasing narco violence, intractable government corruption, and rising income inequality, but also the emergence of a vibrant alternative art scene. In neo-conceptualist work that often alluded to the turbulent political, social, and economic landscape of Mexico City during that decade, artists such as Luis Felipe Ortega, Eduardo Abaroa, Damián Ortega, and Minerva Cuevas subverted existing nationalistic and institutional art practices, often with daring and humor. Operating outside the margins of an art world into which even canonical works and texts of the modern era had still not filtered, this “post earthquake” generation of artists opened artistrun spaces and organized exhibitions in homes, markets, and abandoned buildings, where they could show, and show each…

A woman yanks a man’s head back by his hair and lets blood spurt out from a gash in his throat. This is not an image from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, but rather the subject matter for Caravaggio’s painting Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598–99), which, in more ways than one, typifies the Italian Baroque painter’s career. It highlights Caravaggio’s love of dramatic, sleazy subject matter; it also shows just how attached to violence he was. In 1606, nearly seven years after Caravaggio finished that painting, the Papal State put out a bando capitale, or a death warrant of sorts, for the artist after he killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, a Roman pimp. The way it went down sounds like something out of a Baroque painting: Caravaggio stabbed Tomassoni in the femoral artery after…

On July 6, just two months after street artist Shepard Fairey erected a legal 184-foot-tall mural in downtown Detroit (commissioned by the real-estate billionaire Dan Gilbert), Fairey was arrested and hit with a felony charge stemming from the alleged vandalism of 14 different buildings and walls throughout that very same city. Fairey was passing through customs at Los Angeles International Airport when he was detained by police after TSA officers detected an outstanding warrant. Prosecutors from Michigan’s Wayne County accused Fairey of malicious destruction of property over $1,000 and less than $20,000, a possible ten-year jail sentence, as well as two counts of malicious destruction of a railroad bridge, both potential four-year sentences. Fairey posted a $75,000, 10 percent bond, and was released later the same day. As is Fairey’s…

The art that had New York talking this past spring was barely there— shows comprised of empty, or nearly empty, spaces charged with anxious energies: the cacophony of a prison, the voices of art dealers, the movement of balloons, the smell of bacon. Andrea Fraser led the way. For a little over two weeks, Fraser took over the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum as part of “Open Plan,” a series of solo shows in the largest column-free museum exhibition space in New York. Light streamed through floor-to-ceiling windows at each end of the airy gallery as audio that the artist recorded inside Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York, played from speakers mounted on the ceiling; men talked, shouted, and screamed, metal clanged, and birds chirped. Titled Down the…

A busy black-and-white painting hanging at the end of a lightfilled corridor in one of the most serene museum exhibition spaces in the world depicts a man in a tweed suit and bowler hat. The man has evidently been playing piano; now he spins on his stool to reach for the curvaceous nude woman lying on a nearby bed. The man and woman’s faceless, cartoonlike figures are boldly limned in with broken black lines. An eye-popping variety of patterning— stripes for the wallpaper, speckles for the bed’s counterpane, flowers for the carpet, staccato dashes for wood grain, tweed, and ribbon—fills the canvas from edge to edge. Walls, floors, furniture, and couple undulate as if they, or we, were a little bit drunk. Titled My Father Plays Piano in a House…

From its beginnings in 1897, when it had but one modest site in London housing a small collection of British artworks, to the present, Tate Gallery has grown to boast four venues—London’s Tate Britain and Tate Modern, as well as Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives—and some 70,000 works, dating from 1500 to the present. It’s been on an often controversial roll, culminating in the June 17 debut of its Herzog & de Meuron–designed extension to the architects’ 2000 rendition of the Bankside Power Station, home of Tate Modern and its famous Turbine Hall. Earlier this year, Frances Morris, a longtime curator at Tate, was appointed the new director of Tate Modern. Over the past century ARTnews has tracked the Tate’s evolution. Below are observations from our pages. –THE EDITORS…