philip guston short documentary

MET MUSEUM SUED!?

November 15, 2012, 2:20 pm

Met Museum Is Being Sued Over Admission Fees

By RANDY KENNEDY

Karsten Moran for The New York Times The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Two members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art have sued the museum, contending that it misleads the public into thinking that its admission fees – $25 for adults, and less for seniors and students – are mandatory and not simply suggested. (The museum’s original lease with the city specified that it had to be accessible free of charge several days of the week, but the museum says that changes in city policy in the 1970s allowed it to institute a voluntary admission fee.)
The museum members, Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson, who filed suit in state court in Manhattan, argue in court papers that the museum makes it difficult to understand the fee policy, a practice intended to “deceive and defraud” the public. The suit, reported by The New York Post, cites a survey commissioned by Mr. Grunewald and Ms. Nicholson in which more than 360 visitors to the museum were asked if they knew the fee was optional; 85 percent of visitors responded that they believed they were required to pay. Their suit asks the court to prevent the museum from charging any fees.
Signs above the museum’s admissions desks include the word “Recommended” in small type below the word “Admission,” and on the museum’s Web site, an additional phrase is included: “To help cover the costs of exhibitions, we ask that you please pay the full recommended amount.” (There is no extra charge for entry to special exhibitions; 250,000 New York City schoolchildren visit for free each year as part of the museum’s programs.) When the recommended fee was first instituted in the 1970s, signs over the cashiers’ desks included the phrase: “Pay what you wish, but you must pay something.”
Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the museum, called the suit “entirely frivolous.”

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends. ca. 1868.
Oil on canvas.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Birmingham, UK.

Tokyo Ga - Snippet - Wax Food Models

After Floods, Galleries Face Uncertainty

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: November 7, 2012

At most of the art galleries in Chelsea the water that poured in from the Hudson River during Hurricane Sandy has been pumped out, and the business of sorting out artworks — separating those that survived intact from those that didn’t, figuring out which of the damaged works are reparable — is well under way. Gallery owners no longer sound as despondent as they did last week, when they returned to their businesses in the strip between 10th and 11th Avenues, from 18th to 29th Streets, and found flooded basements, high water marks five feet up their walls, and a loss of art, documentation, catalogs and reference books, to say nothing of physical spaces that will need to be rebuilt.

Angel Franco/The New York Times

Wet prints and paintings being laid out to dry at Gallery Henoch.

Angel Franco/The New York Times

Paintings and sculptures at Gallery Henoch, on West 25th Street, which sustained serious damage in its basement.

But many dealers are looking at a long recovery process that will involve huge expenses and, in many cases, uncertainty about whether or to what extent insurance will cover damage to galleries and artworks as well as lost business days. And the timing could not be worse. Although some galleries are back in business or will soon be, several dealers estimated that the district as a whole will not be fully back to work until mid-December, near the end of the gallery world’s prime selling season, when dealers’ and artists’ fortunes typically revive after the slow summer months.

“In some ways things are not as bad as we first thought,” said Andrew Liss, the assistant director at Gallery Henoch, on West 25th Street, which has showing space at both basement and street levels and sustained serious damage in its basement. “That said, we’re a week into it, and the area still isn’t fully up and running. We have electricity, but no phones or Internet. And everybody is concerned about the long-term effects on business.”

Dealers declined to say what percentage of their annual sales are made in the fall. “If I had a dry computer, I could tell you,” a gallery owner said. But Linda Blumberg, the executive director of the Art Dealers Association of America, described the season as critical. “There’s a pattern of expectation, among buyers as well as dealers,” she said, “that this is the time when people are engaged in making buying decisions.”

Instead, gallery owners expect to spend the next several weeks juggling meetings with restoration specialists, contractors and insurance adjusters. And new problems are cropping up. One dealer said that the contractor rebuilding his space was unable to get to the site early this week because of the gas shortage.

Christiane Fischer, president and chief executive of AXA Art Insurance, which insures many of the galleries, said that her agents had been working the neighborhood since last Wednesday, but that it’s “too early to put numbers on the loss.”

“We’ve sent people out, street by street, to visit clients and make assessments, and brought in teams of conservators and contracted truckers and handlers to bring the art to warehouses,” Ms. Fischer said.

Insurance is a complicated issue for galleries, which require several distinct kinds of policies. Most crucially there is art insurance, which brokers say most galleries carry. According to New York State law art insurance includes flood coverage.

“With galleries there is a lot involved,” said Brian Frasca, the director of fine arts at the Rampart Group, a brokerage that specializes in insuring galleries, museums and private collections. “Does the gallery own the art? Is it on consignment from a collector?” He said costs vary based on the size of the gallery and how much art it has, and he noted that galleries do not necessarily insure for the full value of their holdings, on the theory that even in a disaster a percentage of their inventories may survive.

But art insurance does not cover the galleries themselves — the physical space and its contents beyond the art — or the potential sales lost when the galleries are closed. For that dealers need business and property insurance that specifically includes disaster coverage, which many dealers lack.

“We’ve tried to push our galleries to get that for years,” Mr. Frasca said. (Business insurance carries a heavy deductible. Scott Schachter, a broker at Marsh, a company that insures businesses, said a $1 million policy can have a deductible of up to $500,000 for physical damage, as well as a time deductible of up to 96 business hours — or 12 days — before the lost revenue coverage kicks in.)

Galleries without flood insurance are finding ways to cope.

“With our commercial general liability policy,” said Zach Feuer, the owner of a gallery on West 24th Street, “we’re trying to interpret whether the surge counts as a flood.” If it does, Mr. Feuer will be on his own in replacing the various furnishings and equipment (including computers) of his gallery. But his landlord has agreed to pay for the rebuilding of the space.

Inadequately insured galleries have other options too. On Tuesday, the Art Dealers Association of America announced a program in which galleries in the Zone A, low-lying neighborhoods that could demonstrate that they have been unable to conduct business since the storm, could apply for grants and loans. They need not be members of the association.

Conservators and restoration specialists have jumped into the fray as well, and they have an eager audience: dealers, artists and insurance companies have a shared interest, if for different reasons, in determining what can be saved. When the Museum of Modern Art and representatives from the American Institute for Conservation Collections Emergency Response Team presented a free lecture on the basics of post-disaster conservation on Sunday, MoMA’s auditorium was packed for two sessions.

“Just because something is wet muddy or torn,” said Eric Pourchot, the conservation group’s institutional advancement director, “doesn’t mean it’s not recoverable. That’s one of the messages we want to get out. And instead of walking down 21st Street, ringing a bell and saying, ‘Bring out your wet,’ we decided to get everyone together and see what they need.”

Still, conservators’ services don’t come cheap. Restoration specialists’ fees can be as much as $400 an hour. For artists insurance payments may be welcome, but the loss of work is dispiriting. Sofia Bachvarova, an artist whose solo show at the PVS Gallery in Hoboken was about to end as the hurricane arrived, has spent the past week fretting about what she describes as four year’s worth of work — paintings on canvas as well as sculpture. Neither she nor the gallery’s owner has been able to visit the site, and she worries that even if the work was not directly damaged by the flood, moisture in the walls may affect it.

Other artists have been able to reach a philosophical view.

“So far as I know I’ve lost only one piece,” said David Kassan, who had some paintings at Gallery Henoch, “a painting that’s worth about $24,000, and a couple more were damaged. But I’ve been volunteering in Staten Island, where people lost their homes, and where there’s been loss of life. And in the larger scope of things, what I lost was only a painting.”

NY Galleries Soaked by Sandy

Critic's Notebook

Chelsea Art Galleries Struggle to Restore and Reopen

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

The Casey Kaplan Gallery is recovering from damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: November 2, 2012

There are many pleasures to being an art critic in New York. One, in my view, is definitely the late Saturday afternoon crunch in Chelsea, that day’s-end rush through a last few galleries, seeing shows and squirreling away experiences and ideas just before they all close for the weekend.

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Casey Kaplan Gallery

The gallery was showing a survey of the paintings of Giorgio Griffa before the storm. Mr. Kaplan said he was determined to reopen and to continue the Griffa show.

Enlarge This Image

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Drywall pulled from flooded galleries filling trash bins in Chelsea. The neighborhood’s art dealers, some in tears, are salvaging what they can in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

I had a great final 60 minutes in Chelsea last Saturday and, consequently, one of the last looks at what would suddenly become, on Tuesday, the old, pre-Sandy Chelsea gallery scene. That day, as I started hearing reports of flooding in the neighborhood, some of the art I had seen on Saturday became increasingly vivid in my mind, as did the weird thought that I might be one of the last people who would ever see it.

I had enjoyed Eberhard Havekost’s show at Anton Kern on West 20th Street, a don’t-pin-me-down stylistic array that gave this German painter a sharper, slyer edge than he had ever had for me. There were hard-edge abstractions, diaphanous images of sunsets and one quirky, crusty Expressionist exercise that seemed laden with enough paint to make the rest of the show.

On West 21st Street, a small new gallery named Guided by Invoices (talk about sly) had been showing small abstractions on Masonite, enlivened by spurts of spray paint and rugged lines that appeared to be more sawed than incised. They were by a virtual unknown: Rafael Vega, a 2012 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, making his New York debut.

Farther down the block, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery had been offering an unusually gimmick-free show by Olafur Eliasson, with photographs of Iceland’s hot springs and volcanoes and a wall-to-wall floor piece made of large chunks of dark obsidian, or volcanic glass. It was a welcome alternative to the immersive, perception-distorting environments that have become an Eliasson specialty.

One of the most beautiful and surprising shows had been next door at Casey Kaplan: a four-decade survey of the paintings of Giorgio Griffa, a little-known Italian artist born in 1936 who had not shown in New York since the early 1970s. His sparse, plain-spoken works constitute a kind of visual counting: simple brush marks, lines or bands of radiant color applied one after another to expanses of raw, unstretched canvas. They expanded history on several fronts for me, adding to my understanding of European abstraction of the late 1960s, speaking to the efforts of American painters as disparate as Alan Shields and Agnes Martin, and presaging the low-tech painting of younger artists like Sergej Jensen.

I had left Chelsea, as I often do, feeling a little high at the sight of different kinds of art made at different points in artists’ lives: starting out, continuing, approaching the end. Whatever you think of the actual art on any given day in Chelsea, regulars to the neighborhood are privy to a lot of human endeavor on the part of artists and art dealers. It is a gift.

That point was brought home with special intensity when I returned on Wednesday and then again on Thursday, witnessing devastation everywhere, and also the purposeful reaction to it. On Wednesday, to the thunderous clatter of water pumps and generators, ashen-faced, sometimes teary-eyed art dealers, along with their staff members and often their artists, were pulling sodden furniture, computers and irreplaceable archival documentation and artworks from their dark, water-blasted galleries.

There were huge piles of wet, crumpled cardboard on the street. “You know, most people look at this and think it’s just cardboard,” said Michael Jenkins, a partner in Sikkema Jenkins & Company, on West 22nd Street. “They don’t realize that all of it was wrapped around works of art.”

At Bonakdar, there was no sign of the Eliasson photographs, just the long, Donald-Judd-style wooden table and bench that have become friendly landmarks on the ground floor, severely warped by water. At Kaplan, the front desk had already been removed, and the Griffa paintings were, I was told, at the restorer.

Everywhere there were signs of water’s relentlessness, but also odd exceptions. At Guided by Invoices, which sits as far west as you can go on 21st Street, on the corner of the West Side Highway, the Vega show was still hanging, and the gallery was almost completely dry. Something — perhaps unusually watertight gates — had saved it.

Anton Kern was locked when I went by, but through the window there were no Havekost paintings to be seen, only what would become the increasingly familiar sight of works on paper spread out on tables and the floor for drying.

I ventured north to find that the floods had not touched the galleries on West 29th Street, and then back down to 27th Street, between 11th Avenue and the West Side Highway, where the string of small galleries nestled in the south side of the old Terminal Warehouse building — Derek Eller, Wallspace, Winkleman, Foxy Production and Jeff Bailey — had lost huge amounts of art when the building’s common basement flooded.

At every turn there was evidence of salvage and conservation, as well as rebuilding. Even on Wednesday workers were cutting away ruined drywall in galleries so it could be replaced; on Thursday trucks from lumber yards were delivering drywall and plywood. At CRG at 548 West 22nd Street, a floor that had been slick with water on Wednesday was a day later arrayed with tables for drying works on paper. Upstairs, where the Artist’s Book Fair was to have been held this weekend but had been canceled, the space had been converted into a kind of art hospital for drying out.

For all these efforts, it was easy to wonder, on first encounter, if Chelsea would ever come back as an art district. And when I talked to dealers about what they thought, reactions were mixed. Asya Geisberg, whose 23rd Street gallery was flooded, said: “I worry about the longevity of Chelsea for smaller galleries. We don’t have the staff or resources to deal with this.”

“My artists are helping me out,” she added. “Other people are helping me out, but it’s not enough.”

On 22nd Street Andrew Kreps confirmed that he had lost most of his inventory in his flooded basement, and my next, perhaps undiplomatic, question to him was “Will you close?”

But his immediate reaction was “No.” James Yohe, another 22nd Street gallerist, put it more romantically, “We’re here because we’re true believers.”

Mr. Kaplan said he was determined to reopen and to continue his Griffa show when he did. “I have to do this for him,” he said, referring to Mr. Griffa. “He’s been kind of written out of art history.”

“We won’t come back in the same way — we might be on one leg financially,” he added. “But we will.”

His commitment was echoed on 19th Street, where David Zwirner was overseeing an immense conservation effort spread, in his case, through three large spaces. He said his faith in Chelsea was unshaken. Referring to both the density of Chelsea’s galleries and their lack of entrance fees, he said, “It’s the craziest freebie in the world.” He sounded as if he didn’t want to miss a minute of it.