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"The New High-Tech Patrons" @wsj - George Lindemann

Tech entrepreneurs are starting to peer out from their hoodies and explore the art world, and dealers and museum boards couldn't be more thrilled. WSJ's Ellen Gamerman joins Lunch Break with a look at the new players, and the culture clash it's setting up with Wall Street's elite. Photo: Getty Images.

Next week, San Francisco will unveil a major public art installation using 25,000 energy-efficient lights to illuminate the city's Bay Bridge in countless abstract combinations.

The Bay Lights, set to run every night for the next two years, will also spotlight a new role for the area's tech entrepreneurs: patrons of the arts.

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Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

BETA TESTING Leo Villareal, a tech-world favorite, with his computer-assisted light sculpture that will illuminate San Francisco's Bay Bridge in abstract patterns every night for the next two years.

Created by artist Leo Villareal, the $8 million computer-assisted light sculpture has been financed by some high-profile tech donors including Yahoo YHOO +2.86%CEO Marissa Mayer and Internet power couple Mark and Alison Pincus. Mr. Villareal, who designed the bridge's light patterns using software he created, is also emblematic of a new breed of artist that is especially attractive to wealthy technology executives. A former researcher at Microsoft MSFT +0.61%co-founder Paul Allen's think tank in the early 1990s, Mr. Villareal weaves that tech background into his work.

"This was a whole I.T. job, which you wouldn't associate with a monumental piece of public art," Mr. Villareal said one chilly evening on a San Francisco pier as he tested the work with his laptop. Every time he stabbed at the keyboard through a hole in his glove, the lights rearranged across the bridge.

Around San Francisco, tech entrepreneurs who spent years building businesses and accumulating wealth are starting to peer out from under their hoodies and explore the art world. As the Internet industry matures, the people who helped make it happen are having children, buying houses and taking tentative steps into philanthropy—and now the art world. It's a lucrative emerging market that is gaining the attention of museums, dealers, consultants and other art-world heavyweights.

"Art comes between buying the Ferrari and getting the kids into college," said New York mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who added that he sees "tremendous potential" from tech entrepreneurs as they grow older.

As they have with risky and fast-growing startups, the new tech players are putting a distinctive spin on the art scene—both in the type of work they collect and the low-profile way they acquire it. Many tech collectors exploring the market, for instance, are seduced by works with a digital twist.

"An engineer will look at a photograph or video art in a way a banker couldn't—we think in ones and zeros, we think in terms of screens," said Trevor Traina, a 44-year-old collector of photography who sold his first tech company to Microsoft for more than $100 million.

Unlike on Wall Street, where a trophy canvas can work as a passport to highflying social circles, flaunting isn't part of the tech culture. "If you saw these people, you'd never guess that they have money—it's all about just being cool," said San Francisco dealer Chris Perez, who works with about 20 tech clients.

Simon Upton/The Interior Archive

Trevor Traina, who sold his first company to Microsoft for more than $100 million, is amassing a major photo collection.

Two years ago, as a service largely to its growing base of tech clients, Christie's began shipping artworks to San Francisco ahead of the major modern and contemporary art sales, said Ellanor Notides, who runs the Christie's San Francisco office. She said tech clients are chasing pieces by market darlings like Gerhard Richter, whose work sold for more than $34 million at Sotheby's last year.

Lately, some art insiders have been buzzing that the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, Lucinda Southworth, is starting to buy art. (A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn't comment on executives' personal endeavors.) Tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen collects—including works by Robert Rauschenberg—as do tech venture capitalists Matt Cohler, who favors contemporary photography, and Jim Breyer, who owns pieces by emerging artists in China and Brazil.

Mr. Breyer, a board member of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, finds parallels between art and startups. He loves taking a chance on lesser-known talent and often visits galleries while traveling abroad on business. He particularly admires artists like Picasso who show the capacity to reinvent themselves. "It's a personal characteristic not only of the artists I gravitate to but the entrepreneurs," he said. (Mr. Breyer sits on the board of News Corp NWSA +1.04%., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.)

The new collectors' interests sometimes contrast with the more traditional tastes of tech pioneers before them: Oracle ORCL +1.18%CEO Larry Ellison buys centuries-old Japanese art. Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang hunts for leading examples of Chinese calligraphy. Microsoft's Mr. Allen collects masterpieces by blue-chip artists like van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

Now San Francisco museums are stepping up their pursuit of the tech industry, particularly as companies like Twitter, Pinterest and Dropbox settle in new offices in the city rather than Silicon Valley.

Mr. Traina, the Internet entrepreneur, loaned his impressive photography collection for a show at the city's de Young Museum last year. Dave Morin, an early Facebook FB +2.68%employee who is now CEO and co-founder of the private social network Path, just joined the board of SFMOMA.

Since 2010, SFMOMA has brought on 12 new trustees—at least half from the tech community, according to museum deputy director of external affairs Robert Lasher. He added that in addition to donating money and loaning artworks, tech contributors are helping retool the institution's digital strategy and guide the museum to a more global role in a nearly $555 million expansion.

Next week, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's annual Mid-Winter Gala is expected to be populated by a number of tech-world all-stars. Yahoo's Ms. Mayer bought a table while Apple lead designer Jonathan Ive is expected to come as well. Organizers are hoping for the return of past attendees like Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

Ligorano/Reese/Catharine Clark Gallery/Nora Ligorano (photo)

Tech collectors chase works like Ligorano/Reese's fiber optic tapestry.

From her glass-walled office at Web retailer One Kings Lane, co-founder Alison Pincus has been working her contacts for San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, which recruited her for its board last year. At her company's headquarters, which sits in the same San Francisco building as Twitter and Yammer, the Givenchy-and-Balenciaga-clad Ms. Pincus described going to last year's TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., with a mission: to convince friend and fellow art collector David Krane, a general partner at Google Ventures, GOOG +0.60%to join the museum's board.

She succeeded.

Ms. Pincus, whose husband, Mark, is founder and CEO of the social-gaming company Zynga, ZNGA +1.63%also lends the museum her expertise. The 38-year-old mother of two is helping revamp the museum store, where the home page now showcases little more than a small mezuza. The shop needs "bespoke products," a sleeker website and items not limited to Jewish themes, she said.

As art and tech circles overlap more frequently, a cottage industry of dealers and specialized consultants has sprung up to offer advice. San Francisco art adviser Sabrina Buell is a Stanford graduate and former New York gallery director who helps tech honchos—some of them old college pals—begin collecting art.

The 36-year-old San Francisco native meets clients in her downtown office, with its high ceilings and exposed ductwork, first asking them broad questions about their tastes—abstract or figurative? color or muted? Then she goes analog, loading them up with resource books and catalogs. "I like people to look at a thousand things before they buy one," said Ms. Buell.

Her clients tend to avoid status symbols. "If you're young and you walk into someone's house and see a Picasso, it would be like, 'Whoa'—just because you have the capacity, you don't have to buy the most expensive things," she said. Still, her clients often get blue-ribbon treatment, with galleries and auction houses sending art directly to their homes so they can see the art up close while mulling a purchase.

Ms. Buell, whose great uncle is Napa vintner Robert Mondavi, bought her first work of art when she was 15, a Michael Kenna photograph she had written about for an English class. Today she fills the loft she shares with her partner, industrial designer Yves Behar, with edgy contemporary works. Ms. Buell and her colleague, Mary Zlot, trade in discretion: Zlot Buell + Associates doesn't even have a website.

Despite the stepped-up activity, some art dealers still bemoan what they call the indifference of the tech world and write off tech billionaires as glorified engineering nerds who skipped art history to play with their computers.

Others see a shift happening, thanks in part to the booming art market. "It once was a very culturally vapid community, but it's become incredibly rich lately," said Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read. "I think people are coming to realize fine art has come to be worth something."

Dealers who work with tech clients are protective of them, wary of a culture clash with snooty art climbers. When a tech entrepreneur who favors Patagonia jackets and sneakers told San Francisco dealer Claudia Altman-Siegel he was headed to the Swiss art fair Art Basel, she had some advice: "I was like, 'No one's going to be nice to you if you're not dressed up,'" she said.

Then again, relative anonymity can be a plus. San Francisco tech investor Art Berliner, managing director of Walden Venture Capital, said when he walks into certain New York galleries he rarely gets the hard sell—or any sell at all—because most people don't know who he is.

Mr. Berliner, whose eclectic collection includes work by Israeli artist Michal Rovner, keeps some of his pieces in his office. He said his artwork helps set a creative tone and soothe nerves when entrepreneurs come to pitch their businesses: "Having art around does make the scene less intimidating."

Apple senior director Jeffrey Dauber owns a $50,000 video work by artist Lincoln Schatz that features layered video images of Mr. Dauber engaging in his morning ritual—including a shot of him pulling down his pants. The voyeurism resonates with a man whose industry helped redefine the idea of privacy.

"The thing about being in tech is, I have no illusions—I know we're being watched," said Mr. Dauber, who keeps his extensive art collection in its own house in San Francisco.

Dick Kramlich, an early pioneer in the tech venture capital scene, plans next year to open a private museum of new media art—which includes video, film and computer-assisted installations—in a Napa Valley building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architecture firm behind Beijing's Bird's Nest and the Tate Modern in London. The 77-year-old chairman and co-founder of New Enterprise Associates said the collection's tech orientation was his wife's idea: "She said, 'Look, you're going down to Silicon Valley every day, I think if I did something in this area it might be of interest to you,'" he said.

Internet entrepreneur Mr. Traina, who recently launched a new startup called IfOnly.com, now has 300 master works of photography on the six floors of his mansion in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. During a recent tour, walking by a room wallpapered in peacock feathers, he pointed out classics by Diane Arbus (Mr. Traina bought one of her iconic photographs of identical twins for just under $500,000 at Sotheby's in 2004) and contemporary works like a Doug Rickard photograph of a computer screen showing a Google Street View of a depressed city neighborhood.

Raised in a moneyed family among art lovers—his father had a world-class collection of Fabergé cigarette cases—Mr. Traina promotes the art world to his tech buddies. He organized the Mid-Winter Gala for the Fine Arts Museums in part to lure a "farm team" of young donors and future board members. Trustees now include Zachary Bogue, a tech investor married to Yahoo's Ms. Mayer, an SFMOMA board member.

The institution returns the favor by opening up singular experiences to Mr. Traina, who recalls a trip to the Netherlands he once took with fellow board members. Early one morning, he was allowed to visit an Amsterdam museum while it was still closed. "This very nice woman left me alone in a room with five Vermeers," he said. "I realized the power great art can have."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at [email protected]

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"A Collaboration of Bees and Man" - @wsj - George Lindemann

From oil on canvas to beeswax on walls might seem an aesthetic stretch to some, but the Phillips Collection doesn't see it that way.

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C./Lee Stalsworth

Wolfgang Laib's 'Wax Room,' opening Saturday at the Phillips Collection.

This internationally known and respected boutique institution, the first modern art museum in America, is about to unveil its first permanent installation in more than 50 years. And the pervasive feeling in-house is that the new arrival—a beeswax chamber designed by conceptual artist Wolfgang Laib, opening Saturday—couldn't be more true to the vision of Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) when he opened his private collection to the public in 1921.

"Duncan wanted the museum to be an intimate experience and have a spirit of experimentation," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips. "A wax chamber by Wolfgang would be the biggest, most powerful expression of that spirit."

The German-born Mr. Laib has been creating beeswax chambers—small spaces lined with beeswax, gently lighted by a single hanging bulb—for more than 25 years. He uses hundreds of pounds of pure melted beeswax much like plaster, smoothly coating walls and ceilings until they almost resemble yellow marble—except with a warm glow.

The spaces offer room for perhaps two people comfortably but are said to be best visited alone. (The room at the Phillips, a former storage closet, is 6 feet wide by 7 feet deep and 10 feet high.) "There's a feeling you get inside the space that can't really described," says Mr. Laib, a diminutive, almost fragile-looking man with a voice barely above a whisper. "But it moves you."

The aroma of the beeswax is "totally seductive," Ms. Kosinski says, employing the kind of sensual language most often used to describe Mr. Laib's chambers. The intense color of the wax and its close proximity to your own skin in an austere space have also been cited as evoking a curiously visceral experience that is also meditative and spiritual. "It's really a new way of entering the artist's world," says Susan Behrends Frank, associate curator of research for the museum.

Mr. Laib's installations—involving other natural substances, such as pollen and rice, as well as beeswax—have been displayed at prominent museums and galleries around the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art. Ms. Kosinski fully expects that visitors may not know what to make of the chamber when they see it. "But people being slightly perplexed is maybe not a bad thing," she adds.

Duncan Phillips might well agree. Though initially his collection consisted largely of Impressionist paintings, hardly controversial by the time he acquired them, he soon became known for bucking mainstream taste. He was one of the earliest patrons of the American modernists John Marin and Arthur Dove, and he bought the late work of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) in depth after World War II, a period when it was dismissed as emptily decorative. And Phillips's admiration for Abstract Expressionism, when that was still a suspect style, is evident in pieces by Richard Diebenkorn and Willem de Kooning, among others.

In 1960, six years before his death, Phillips added a permanent exhibit of four Mark Rothko oils to be housed in a dedicated room. No other artist had received such an honor there. While Phillips designed the Rothko Room, as it came to be known, the artist was directly involved with deciding which walls the color-field paintings should hang on, the kind of lighting and even furniture that should be in the room. "I think it's the only exhibit Rothko himself installed," Ms. Kosinski says.

Now, for only the second time in its history, the Phillips Collection is dedicating another space for permanent residence, and Rothko has a lot to do with it. Two years ago, while participating in the museum's "Conversations With Artists" series, Mr. Laib stepped into the Rothko Room for the first time and was transported by "a very emotional, deep feeling," he says. "Like being in another world." Not unlike the effect Mr. Laib seeks in beeswax chambers.

Until then, Mr. Laib had concentrated on pieces that could easily tour. But he says he had begun to think it was "important that some things should stay, be permanent." He thought a permanent wax chamber in the Phillips would be ideal for intertwining reasons: The compatibility he felt between the color-fields and his wax chambers, and the chance to dispel what Mr. Laib has long considered a facile comparison some have made between his work and Rothko's. Mr. Laib's pollen pieces consist of the brightly colorful substance, which he gathers from near his home in southern Germany and then feathers on a dark platform, prompting a reaction he says he has heard too often—"Rothko on the floor." (Mr. Laib's "Pollen From Hazelnut" installation is on display at MoMA through March 11.)

"I have a deeper, more complex relationship with Rothko," Mr. Laib says, "and a permanent room would demonstrate that." His room is in the center of the original Phillips mansion; the Rothko room is at the far end of the Sant Building, an extension added in 2006.

"My immediate reaction," says Ms. Kosinski, recalling when she learned of Mr. Laib's desire to install a permanent beeswax chamber in the Phillips, "was that he's right. It would make total sense to have it here."

The Phillips had been exhibiting contemporary art, but Ms. Kosinski saw an opportunity for "the perfect expression of the desire to experiment, to let viewers have encounters with art on their own terms," she says, thus reinvigorating a key component of the museum's original mission.

"Duncan Phillips started off as a kind of timid collector," Ms. Behrends Frank says. "But toward the end of his life he made a really bold move by creating the Rothko Room. And now the beeswax chamber is really bold."

"Besides," adds Ms. Kosinski, "it's just cool."

Mr. Triplett is a writer in Washington

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A Perfect Day in Miami

Arriving on private jets and armed with personal art advisers, the global culture crowd will soon descend upon Miami Beach for the annual Art Basel show (miamibeach.artbasel.com), which takes place from Dec. 6 to 9 in the heart of South Beach. Now in its 11th year, Art Basel is the most influential art event in all of the Americas, luring a global audience of art lovers, along with models, moguls and celebrities. While many of Art Basel’s choicest events are invite-only affairs, most of Miami Beach’s most desirable destinations, from temples of haute cuisine to temples of high culture, are open to all. We asked four Miami-mad regulars for their own personal black books.

Michael Tilson Thomas, artistic director, New World Symphony I rise just before dawn for a walk around the Sunset Islands or to a local park like South Pointe overlooking the Atlantic. Back home, I read the newspapers and eat breakfast sitting on my dock looking over musical scores. I then head for the New World Center, the recently completed, Frank Gehry–designed home of the New World Symphony (nws.edu). So much is happening there that once I get in the building it’s hard to get out. But I take my breaks out on our roof garden or head out to the many little restaurants in the surrounding Lincoln Road district. I especially like the modern Cuban cuisine at Yuca (yuca.com), the unique Latin-Asian fusion dishes at Sushi Samba (sushisamba.com) and our ever reliable Italian family restaurant, Rosinella (rosinella.net).

On days I go home early, I try and stop at some of the small markets where sport fishermen sell their fresh catches. If I have the chance, I’ll also pop into the rapidly growing Wynwood area, or the Design District, where Miami’s gallery scene is thriving. I particularly like the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse (margulieswarehouse.com). Finally, if I’m not cooking fish for dinner, I’ll eat at Michael’s Genuine (michaelsgenuine.com), where the indoor-outdoor setup is also great for weekend brunch.

(LIST: 10 Things to Do in Miami)

Nadja Swarovski, board member, Swarovski Crystal Whenever I’m in town, I stay at the Soho Beach House (sohobeachhouse.com). I start every day with a speed walk on the hotel’s private beach—a rarity in Miami—and then get my hair done at the Cowshed Spa. Before I head out, I have breakfast at Cecconi’s, imported from Venice, by way of London.

I usually head straight to the De la Cruz Collection (delacruzcollection.org) in the Design District, which houses an impeccable collection of contemporary art. From there I’ll swing over to the Bass Museum of Art (bassmuseum.org), which presents historical works and makes for a great counterpoint to the more ultra­modern pieces on display in the Design District.

Next, it’s a dose of retail therapy and a much needed coffee at the Webster (thewebstermiami.com), which has three floors of fashion and accessories from well-known luxury brands and edgy, up-and-coming designers. The rooftop restaurant has fabulous views of the ocean and is a perfect spot for a late afternoon rest.

Then it’s back to Soho House for another walk along the beach before heading out for the evening. My favorite place for dinner is the garden at Casa Tua (casatualifestyle.com) in South Beach, which is tucked away in an early 1920s Mediterranean villa. The restaurant is run by a stylish husband-and-wife team from Italy and the interiors are filled with charming familial touches. The northern Italian cuisine is exquisite, especially the truffle risotto.

Marianne Goebl, director, Design Miami I like to start my day with breakfast at the French bakery Buena Vista Deli (buenavistadeli.com), which offers what I consider to be Miami’s best selection of pastries. From there I’ll take a stroll through the Design District, popping into some of the great high-end-fashion boutiques before heading for lunch at Mandolin (mandolinmiami.com). It’s a low-key, neighborhood restaurant serving great Turkish and Greek food and very popular with families on weekends.

To see one of the best examples of contemporary architecture in Miami, I’d drive over to the 1111 Lincoln Road complex (1111lincolnroad.com), which has a stunning car park­—yes, car park—designed by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. The structure stands as a true homage to the car and offers a beautiful view over Miami Beach.

(MORE: Art Basel Miami: How the City on the Beach Became an International Cultural Hotspot)

Next, I’ll pay a visit to the Wolfsonian (wolfsonian.org), which is an extraordinary design museum right in the heart of South Beach. I love its eclectic collection of decorative artifacts and propaganda materials from 1885 to 1945.

I end the day at the W South Beach hotel (starwoodhotels.com), which has managed to retain its great buzz three years after its debut. I’ll do dinner at the Dutch, which offers a truly American remix of Caribbean, Latin and Asian flavors, and I’ll end the evening with drinks amid the lavish landscaping of Grove, the W’s indoor-outdoor lounge.

Lenny Kravitz, musician and president, Kravitz Design Miami is a place I return to often and love to call home. When I’m in town I try to take advantage of the beautiful weather and begin my day with a seafront run on South Beach. If I go early enough, the beaches are nearly empty and really peaceful. After my run I hit JugoFresh (jugofresh.com) for one of their organic, cold-pressed juice blends.

In the early part of the day, I like to check out the Wynwood district. Many of the buildings have been painted by graffiti artists, and there’s always something new to see. If I have time, I’ll check out the Rubell Family Collection (rfc.museum), which is one of the world’s premier modern-art collections. I also go to Clive’s (clivescafe.com), a local Caribbean restaurant I’ve been visiting for years. They have great curries, stews and jerk dishes.

In the evening, I’ll go to the New World Symphony. During concerts, they project the performance on an exterior wall of the building, so you can sit on the lawn and enjoy. It’s a great opportunity for the community to experience classical music, and this season they’ll present works by everyone from Mahler to Rachmaninoff. Before the concert I’ll stop at the SLS South Beach hotel (slshotels.com) for a preshow cocktail at the Bazaar. They have this nitrogen caipirinha that is delicious—and since Kravitz Design created the hotel’s bungalow and presidential suite, I always feel at home.

Dinner is at my favorite restaurant, Zuma (zumarestaurant.com), where I can easily eat three times a week. Or, if I’m craving something more casual, I’ll head over to Pubbelly (pubbelly.com) on South Beach’s cooler, quieter western side. The young owners have also opened the hip tapas joint Barceloneta (barcelonetarestaurant.com) nearby.

Miami is a late-night city, so after dinner I’ll hit a club or two. I like to go upstairs at Casa Tua, which most folks think of as a dining spot, but they have a lot of percussion instruments, and you can play along with the DJ. It’s always packed.

Read more: http://style.time.com/2012/11/22/a-perfect-day-in-miami/#ixzz2Df0US4Mc - George Lindemann Jr

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Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Pillar Breakfast at the beautiful Bass Museum of Art- July 27, 2012. Pillar members enjoyed a wide array of artwork, a guided museum tour and a speaker panel discussing the highly-anticipated Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach. Speakers: Terry Riley, K/R Architect PC and Jeffrey Lawson, Art Fairs Unlimited. Moderator: Silvia Cubina, Bass Museum of Art Executive Director

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"After Complaints, Picasso Nude Is Covered Up at Edinburgh Airport" in @nytimes

National Galleries of Scotland A poster advertising an exhibition of work by Picasso and modern British artists at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

  By DAVE ITZKOFF August 8, 2012

With a presumable sigh and some acerbic remarks from a Scottish museum, the Edinburgh Airport has agreed to remove the image of a nude portrait painted by Picasso being used to advertise a local exhibition after some travelers complained about it, BBC News reported.

The painting, “Nude Woman in a Red Armchair,” appeared on a poster at the airport advertising an exhibition on Picasso and modern British art at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. After some departing passengers expressed concerns about the picture, which offers a stylized depiction of Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s mistress and the mother of one of his daughters, Maya, the airport and the National Galleries of Scotland have agreed to put a white cover over it and replace it with a different image from the exhibition – though not without a rejoinder from gallery officials.

John Leighton, the director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, told the BBC: “It is obviously bizarre that all kinds of images of women in various states of dress and undress can be used in contemporary advertising without comment, but somehow a painted nude by one of the world’s most famous artists is found to be disturbing and has to be removed.”

Mr. Leighton continued, “I hope that the public will come and see the real thing, which is a joyous and affectionate portrait of one of Picasso’s favorite models, an image that has been shown around the world.”

A spokeswoman for the airport told the BBC, “While we considered the content of the poster appropriate for use in the airport terminal, we were happy to ask the exhibition organizers for an alternative following feedback from some of our passengers.”

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Paley Art Collection Heading to the de Young Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco

August 2, 2012, 2:57 PM By CAROL VOGEL

The William S. Paley Collection, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New YorkPicasso’s 1905-6 painting “Boy Leading a Horse.”

The staggering art collection put together by William S. Paley, the television impresario who founded the Columbia Broadcasting System, first went on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 1992. Paley, a longtime trustee at MoMA, had left his paintings, drawings and sculptures to the museum upon his death in 1990. After MoMA showed the collection it then traveled to museums in Indianapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego and Baltimore. One city that did not get the show was San Francisco. But on Sept. 15, “The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism,’’ will open the de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco before going to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Fine Arts Museum of Quebec and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. On view will be highlights of the Paley holdings, including Picasso’s famous 1905-6 painting “Boy Leading a Horse,’’ Gauguin’s “Seed of the Areoi’’ (1892), from the artist’s first trip to Tahiti, and Degas’s 1905 large-scale pastel and charcoal “Two Dancers.’’ The exhibition will remain on view in San Francisco through Dec. 30.

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A Los Angeles Museum on Life-Support

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Art in the Streets” show.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Maybe two out of three isn’t bad. Los Angeles has gotten two quite effective museum directors from New York. Ann Philbin went from the Drawing Center to head the Hammer Museum. Michael Govan went from the Dia Art Foundation to become director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Both seem to be doing swimmingly.

Published: July 22, 2012 

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles since 2010.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“Art in the Streets,” mounted at the museum in 2011, focused on graffiti art and skateboard culture, including special coverage of the Los Angeles scene.

But a much rougher time is being had by the third, Jeffrey Deitch, who closed his SoHo gallery in the spring of 2010 to become director of theMuseum of Contemporary Art, an institution with an enviable curatorial record but historically plagued by financial problems. Criticism about his tenure has been constant, but has intensified over the last three and a half weeks in the wake of the departure under pressure of Paul Schimmel, the museum’s brilliant, headstrong chief curator, after a vote by the trustees. The chemistry between the two men was known to be troubled.

Even more disturbing than Mr. Schimmel’s leaving after 22 years was news that his position would not be filled and that the museum would rely more on freelance curators. Around the same time there was increasing talk in both the press and the art world of Mr. Deitch’s problems in fund-raising.

And then came word that an exhibition about art and disco was in development. Complaints escalated that Mr. Deitch was emphasizing populist entertainment and glitz at the expense of the scholarly rigor associated with Mr. Schimmel. The next week or so brought the resignations of all four artist-trustees: John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha.

The museum, which counted artists among its most active founders, has always had them on its board. In a sense their loss was as shocking as anything that came before, because it signaled in the extreme a loss of faith on the part of artists. Mr. Deitch’s tenure as director has so far been a disappointment even to the people who thought it was a feasible idea in the first place, of whom I was one.

I considered it “a brilliant stroke,” I wrote at the time, calling it an example of a museum thinking outside the box, and also an appropriately desperate measure for desperate times. The museum had come close to collapse in 2008 after drawing its endowment down to $5 million (it was once around $40 million), and there was talk of selling the collection or merging with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That threat was averted by the real estate developer and cultural philanthropist Eli Broad, a founding trustee of the museum, who returned to the museum’s board after a 15-year hiatus and donated a $30 million bailout, and then had a big hand in Mr. Deitch’s appointment.

I didn’t buy the idea that someone from the gallery world cannot cross over into the museum sphere or that advanced degrees in art history are essential, and I still don’t. It was certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that given Mr. Deitch’s wide art world experience he could have met the challenge of a big museum. But instead of redefining himself in a bid to do that, he seems to have redefined the job.

Rather than encourage and cultivate curators much the way an art dealer encourages and cultivates artists, he has frequently chosen to assume the role of curator himself, when he wasn’t commissioning celebrities to do it. He started with an exhibition devoted to photographs and other artworks by the actor Dennis Hopper organized by Julian Schnabel, then staged an off-site show about James Dean organized by James Franco. His 2011 “Art in the Streets” exhibition, although better received by critics and very well-attended, didn’t help establish a serious tone. And it included several artists whom Mr. Deitch had represented as an art dealer — at-best a sloppy-looking overlap between his former role as a dealer and his current one as a custodian of a public institution.

For all his missteps, though, it is much too simplistic to blame Mr. Deitch alone for the air of crisis that now surrounds the museum. He has certainly hurt its image and he has failed to make much of a dent in its more urgent financial problems. But he did not create those. They preceded him by many years and are part of a tortuous history with many players. The museum has long been financially fragile; its board has rarely provided the kind of financial support that an institution of its quality requires and deserves. It continues not to, which brings us back to Mr. Broad.

His bailout of the museum four years ago gave him a dominance on the board that caused some trustees to leave and suggested to many people the possibility that his bailout might someday morph into a takeover that would merge the museum’s exemplary collection of art with his own, more predictable, market-driven one. It didn’t help that within months of Mr. Deitch’s appointment Mr. Broad finalized plans to build his own museum across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, now scheduled to open within a year or two.

Given Mr. Broad’s fraught history with other Los Angeles museums, his denials about taking over this one remain hard to trust. In an interview in The Los Angeles Times he said, “If I wanted to do that, why would I have saved MOCA?” But he hasn’t so much saved it as staved off its demise, and without more money either from him or other trustees, the place is more or less on life-support. (It is interesting to note that its $14.3 million budget for the fiscal year 2011 is a little below the $16 million of the Hammer, a museum with roughly one-quarter its gallery space. And yet, while the Museum of Contemporary Art’s staff has been whittled down to a skeletal 45, the Hammer has 95.)

Meanwhile a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by Mr. Broad contributed to a widespread and unhelpful binary view of the situation, calling the museum’s great exhibitions of the past “insular” and Mr. Deitch’s vision “populist,” a gross simplification and misrepresentation on both counts. Mr. Broad also cited attendance as a sign of a show’s success, a very limited idea of the cultural benefits of museums to say the least.

Whether or not Mr. Deitch was the best person for the job now seems largely moot. He is the one who said yes, who showed up and has thrown himself into what may actually be a kind of mission impossible, with or without his many errors in judgment. At this point he, Mr. Broad and the other trustees only have one another. They have got to make it work. The main way for this to happen is for the other board members to step up to the plate and give enough money to counterbalance Mr. Broad’s contributions and his views. You can’t have a one-person board any more than you can have a one-person museum.

For his part Mr. Deitch has to become a real museum director. He has to stop organizing exhibitions — in part to create more of a firewall between his new job and his previous identity. He has to hone his fund-raising skills and hire and cultivate curators, including, as The Los Angeles Times said in an editorial on Friday, a new chief curator — which of course will take money.

And although one can be grateful for the wake-up call delivered by the departures of the four artist-trustees, artists need to reassert themselves in the life of this museum. They have the numbers and the clout to make a difference. Above all they have the vision. The Los Angeles cultural world cannot turn its back on an institution that has been so central to its stature as one of the world’s greatest art capitals.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 23, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Los Angeles Museum on Life-Support.

[bassmuseumpres]

"Technology Advances, Then Art Inquires: ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ at the New Museum"

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Ghosts in the Machine , at the New Museum, features some 140 works, including “Movie-Drome,” a mix of projected films, slides and drawings on the walls of a hemispherical room, by the filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 19, 2012

If “Ghosts in the Machine,” an ambitious, multitasking, somewhat austere exhibition at the New Museum were itself a machine, it would have lots of moving parts, but not all of them would be performing with equal efficiency.

Walking through this enormous show, which has been orchestrated by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s associate director and head of exhibitions, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, its curator, can call to mind one of Marcel Duchamp’s lesser-known quips. In a 1963 interview in Vogue, cited in Calvin Tomkins’s 1996 biography of him, Duchamp claimed that the aesthetic life span of an art object — what he called its “emanation” — “doesn’t last more than 20 or 30 years.” Referring to his most famous painting, the 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” he added, “I mean, for example that my ‘Nude’ is dead, completely dead.” Mr. Tomkins suggests that his subject was half-joking, but only half.

The New Museum show repeatedly proves Duchamp about half right. As smart and thought stirring as this exhibition is, it is also a little short on living, breathing artworks, and slightly overloaded with rather stale ones and other objects and diagrams that, altogether, function primarily as interesting period pieces or historical artifacts.

In the catalog Mr. Gioni writes that the show was not conceived as “a classic historical survey” but as a “cabinet of curiosities.” Casting a wide net and moving quickly and a little capriciously across time and national boundaries, it sets out to examine some of the artistic reflections of our machine-haunted, technology-dependent era, especially in the second half of the last century. It is far less interested in bringing together established masterpieces than in using unfamiliar artworks to shed light on a machine-infested terrain that is as social and psychological as it is visual. The exhibition contains just enough powerful art — including some surprising resurrections — to pull it off.

The show’s mixture of marginal art movements and neglected objects ranges from 1960s Op Art paintings by Bridget Riley and Julian Stanczak to a reconstruction of Wilhelm Reich’s notorious Orgone Energy Accumulator from 1940; sitting in it was supposed to unblock the flow of life energy. There are constant swings among decades, allowing you, for example, in the museum’s lobby, to peruse “The Way Things Go,” the brilliantly witty 1987 video of chain reactions involving ordinary objects by Peter Fischli and David Weiss that is often likened to the creations of Rube Goldberg, and then go upstairs and study some drawings from the 1930s by Goldberg himself, sharpening your appreciation of the analogy. There are works by machine-obsessed outsider artists, healers and mental patients, including a series of suspended wire constructions by the self-taught American sculptor Emery Blagdon (1907-86), who thought they could cure illness. One of the show’s few dips into the premodern era is an 1810 engraving based on the delusional drawing by James Tilly Matthews, an Englishman who is generally considered the first person to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, that depicts his domination by a machine he called the Air Loom.

A majority of the show’s roughly 140 artworks, diagrams and related objects date from the mid 1950s to the mid-’70s — the halcyon years of postwar art and, not coincidentally, the beginning of the technological blossoming in which we currently find ourselves. The machine theme means that the show largely avoids the period’s dominant styles — especially Pop and Minimalism — favoring the more science- and technology-focused tendencies that they overrode or shunted aside. These include not only Op Art but also Kinetic art and what might be called op-kinetic hybrids, pursued in particular by little-known Italian artists. There are also several computer-generated films and a cache of wan computer-made drawings. This show repeatedly reminds you that every major scientific advance has artistic repercussions, artists who see it as the basis for something new and revolutionary, a way to go beyond conventional notions of touch, authorship and personal expression (even though it sometimes seems that the baby has been discarded with the bath water).

The largely abstract Op and kinetic works are balanced by profusely image-based efforts that predate Pop’s embrace of popular culture, or dissent from its emphasis on painting while also presaging 1980s appropriation art. These include two impressive resurrections of almost-never-seen works: “Man, Machine and Motion,” a large, rather stilted but nonetheless proto-Pop labyrinthine photo installation from 1955 by the British artist Richard Hamilton, and “Movie-Drome,” from 1963-66, by the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. A dense, hallucinatory mix of projected films, slides and drawings splayed across the walls of a hemispherical room — originally a converted silo in Stony Point, N.Y. — it saw action fewer than five times. An enthralling rediscovery suggestive of a cross between an animated Rauschenberg silk-screen painting and the Internet’s deluge of images, it is a tantalizing rediscovery.

Duchamp is of course one of the show’s foundational presences, represented by a 1959-60 reconstruction of “The Large Glass” from 1915-23, one of modernism’s earliest and certainly most significant depictions of the machine in art. Its subtitle — “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” — highlights the eroticized fusion of machines and humans that is one of the show’s underlying themes. Next to it stands a frightening bedlike structure inspired by the implement of torture central to Kafka’s 1919 short story “In the Penal Colony.” Complete with an overhead array of needles, it executed its victims by inscribing their crimes on their bodies and was commissioned by the influential Swiss curator Harald Szeemann for his 1975 Duchamp-inspired exhibition “The Bachelor Machines.” (Prior exhibitions about the machine are among this one’s subthemes.)

In another gallery you’ll come across “Crash!,” a short film that the British science fiction writer J. G. Ballard made with Harley Cokeliss in 1971 (more than 20 years before the release of David Cronenberg’s Ballard-based feature of the same name, without the exclamation point). A meditation on the car as the central form and fantasy of modern society — and on the car crash as a kind of wish-fulfillment or consummation — it is both insightful and noticeably dated, especially in its juxtaposition of scenes of a car moving through a carwash and close-ups of a woman showering.

As usual, the stronger works provide built-in criticisms of their neighbors. On the third floor, for example, the rather clinical inertness of the Hamilton photo installation is pointed up by “The History of Nothing,” a 12-minute film from 1963 by Eduardo Paolozzi, another proto-Pop artist working in Britain, that will be new to most viewers. Combining drawings, engravings and photographs with a grinding, spluttering sound track, it depicts a dreamlike urban landscape with a personal intensity that leaves the Hamilton in the dust, while suggesting a missing link between Max Ernst’s collages and the 1968 animation of “Yellow Submarine.”

On the second floor most of the mechanized kinetic works and the eye-buzzing Op reliefs and sculptures keep the eye busy without giving the mind enough to do. Some feel like precursors to nothing so much as screen savers. Exceptions include a piece by the French-Argentine artist Julio le Parc in which big black-and-white moiré circles amusingly suggest woozy eyes, and a small, sweetly solemn motorized aperturelike wall piece in painted wood by the Belgian Pol Bury. More convincing, however, is the straightforward kineticism of Hans Haacke’s 1964-65 “Blue Sail” — a big square of blue chiffon held aloft by the blowing of an electric fan — and Gianni Colombo’s small, dark 1968 walk-in environment, “Elastic Space.” It surrounds the viewer with a luminous, attenuated grid of white cord that is gently stretched this way and that by a quietly whirring motor. Standing inside this work is like inhabiting something akin to a living organism, a friendly, encompassing, unified ghost-machine.

“Ghosts in the Machine” continues through Sept. 30 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery at Prince Street, Lower East Side; [phone], newmuseum.org.