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"Keeping the Artists in Williamsburg and Attracting the Bankers" - New York Times (6/7/10)
New York Times original article: Keeping the Artists in Williamsburg and Attracting the Bankers
One developer is hoping the deal he struck with the choreographer Elizabeth Streb will help the sales of his $1-million-plus town homes and apartments.
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: June 7, 2010
Some New Yorkers — no matter how uncreative their jobs and lives may be — love to mention how they live in neighborhoods once romantically settled by poets, painters and musicians.
Developers often talk up these histories when selling apartments.
But while many of them think of artists as place holders for lawyers and investment bankers, Douglas Steiner, one developer struggling to sell units in the vastly overbuilt Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, is betting it pays to keep artists in the neighborhood even after wealthier buyers move in. He is hoping the deal he struck with the choreographer Elizabeth Streb will help the sales of his $1 million-plus town homes and apartments.
“She’s part of what makes Williamsburg attractive,” Mr. Steiner said while he and Ms. Streb sat in her warehouse, which was filled with dancers swinging from candy-colored curtainlike ribbons and troupe members rehearsing on a yellow steel mouse wheel contraption called the Whizzing Gizmo. “We wanted to preserve that artistic character.”
Mr. Steiner and Ms. Streb make an unlikely pair. Mr. Steiner, the reserved heir to an industrial real estate fortune and chairman of Steiner Studios, jokes about how his father’s definition of a beautiful building is property with “positive cash flow.” Ms. Streb speaks in bursts of enthusiasm about how “action is a panacea” for children and how she runs her troupe like a contrarian Lincoln Center.
Ms. Streb has plenty of reasons to dislike landlords: For more than a decade she fought to stay in her rented 3,000-square-foot SoHo loft, finally winning the right to buy it for $130,000 in 2008.
When Mr. Steiner bought the North First Street building that houses Ms. Streb’s studio and performance space in 2006, she had been there for three years paying $5,000 a month in rent. A former food storage center, it was overrun by pigeons and squirrels when she moved in and smelled so strongly of tamari that Ms. Streb had the scent sandblasted from the concrete floors. The concrete walls were so porous that on some winter days she sent dancers home because it was too cold to rehearse.
Even though Ms. Streb thought her studio was doomed to become a residential development, she boldly asked Mr. Steiner to sell her the building. He refused. Then he realized he needed the backyard for a development project he was assembling, but Ms. Streb was entitled to use it for at least three more years under her lease.
So over lunch close by at Fabiane’s Cafe, Ms. Streb told him she would let him have the backyard if he would sell her the building. They sealed the agreement with a handshake and a cherry Tootsie Pop that Mr. Steiner gave to Ms. Streb. In 2007, the troupe, Streb Extreme Action, closed on the purchase with financial help from the city and the borough president’s office; if the troupe sells the building, it must be to another nonprofit organization.
Mr. Steiner said he did not make money on the deal because he sold the property to the troupe for the same amount he had paid for it, $1.3 million. But he did keep the backyard space. And he said that the recession meant he would lose money on the broader development project: nine town houses on North First Street, 114 luxury apartments at 80 Metropolitan Avenue and 50 apartments at 58 Metropolitan that are all tucked around Ms. Streb’s building. But he said he would like to build in Williamsburg in the future, which he said had not become “homogenized” like Manhattan.
He also formed a friendship of sorts with Ms. Streb. Mr. Steiner attends Ms. Streb’s annual fund-raisers and calls them among the best parties of the year. He marvels at how the dancers climb on walls, and how at Ms. Streb’s building he met Philippe Petit, who keeps part of the wire he used to walk between the World Trade Center towers and who holds clinics at the studio. Ms. Streb is even considering selling her SoHo loft, which would probably fetch more than $1 million, and buying a neighboring town house Mr. Steiner built.
By then, Ms. Streb could be one of only two people from her troupe in the neighborhood, where she would join Fabio Tavares Da Silva, the associate artistic director. He has been able to stay because his partner’s friend works in real estate and helped them find an affordable rental. Other troupe members commute from Washington Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Philadelphia.
But some local families have connected with Ms. Streb’s studio. Jenny Williams, a painter who has lived in the neighborhood since 1992, has been sending her son, Whitman, 10, and daughter, Clementine, 8, to classes there since the studio opened. She said her daughter learned to do splits, and her son became more coordinated. Most of all, the family has a place to go.
“When people ask me why I would want to raise kids in New York City, it’s one of those places that is sort of the reason,” she said.
That is what Mr. Steiner is counting on. In December, Nanette Guarda moved into a $1.125 million apartment at 80 Metropolitan with her husband, Michael Guarda, her 7-year-old daughter, Natasha, and her 6-month-old daughter, Gemma. Ms. Guarda said Natasha already “peeks in there every time we go by.” For her family to take classes there, she said, “it’s really a matter of time.”
"Marquis Celebrates Art Basel Day And Night" - Haute Living (12/15/09)
Haute Living original article: Marquis Celebrates Basel Day and Night
On December 4, Marquis condo tower began its celebration of Art Basel-day and night. The luxury downtown Miami tower, overlooking Miami Beach, Museum Park, and the Adrienne Arsht Center was the ideal venue to host the awards ceremony for DawnTown, an annual international architecture competition. Elites in the design, architecture and art worlds including Dawntown founder Andrew Frey, Adriaan Geuze (landscape architect recently selected for the New World Symphony's new building on Miami Beach), Marquis' architect Bernardo Fort-Brescia, and Mera Rubell were on hand to announce the winners. Guests enjoyed a continental breakfast buffet on Marquis' third floor luxe lounge while browsing the innovative designs for this year's challenge to redesign the Museum Park Metromover station.
At noon, the party continued as Marquis hosted an off-site installation performance as part of the Truly Truthful exhibition at Art Asia Miami on the property's Piazza, located at the dynamic intersection of downtown, the arts district and the Port of Miami. Marya Kazoun's "Time After Self Portrait," positioned mysterious stuffed black "creatures" throughout the streetside lawn of the Marquis Piazza, which came alive with a dazzling artistic performance, engaging guests, stopping traffic on Biscayne Boulevard as the "creature" crossed the busy street and lay in the median, and even came back up into the party and curled up on the floor as guests reached over the creature for cherry-filled champagne flutes.
Marquis celebrated the arts into the night as the host for Art Nexus' private collectors dinner and RBC Wealth Management presentation. Guests were treated to a special "After Glow" dessert reception in the tower's luxurious third floor lounge. Marquis was also the venue for the first stateside performance in the U.S. by chart-topping Columbian duo, Las Marti. The twin sisters' blend of Afro-Cuban, Mexican and Colombian songs thrilled the over 250 art world VIPS that were in attendance.
"Art Market Shows Signs of New Life" - Crain's New York Business (11/17/09)
Crain's New York Business original article: Art Market Shows Signs of Life
By MIRIAM KRENIN SOUCCAR
Published: November 17, 2009
The picture is looking prettier for the beleaguered art market.
The important fall evening sales at Christie's and Sotheby's that ended last week fetched a total of $423.9 million, a whopping 40% increase from the previous round of evening sales in New York last May.
Local gallery owners also report that business has picked up dramatically in the past few months, most importantly with American collectors who had disappeared completely in the past year.
“I feel as though we're back,” says Rachel Lehmann, a partner in the Lehmann Maupin gallery in Chelsea and the Lower East Side, where sales have increased considerably since September, though she wouldn't release numbers. “Things aren't like they were before the recession, [the work] takes longer to sell, but the public is back in the buying game.”
Of course, the market is still falling far short of the heady days of just a couple of years ago, when art students became stars overnight and young investment bankers morphed into major collectors.
Smaller in every way
Every aspect of the market is smaller. The next major event in the art world, Art Basel Miami Beach in December, has about 800 participating in that fair and the 15 satellite fairs that take place at the same time, a 20% drop from recent years. The number of satellite fairs is down also, from 20 the past two years.
“We're getting some indicators that suggest the market has bottomed out, but I don't think the growth resumes immediately,” says Baird Ryan, managing partner of Art Capital Group. “Revenues are still way down from a few years ago.”
Even so, dealers are now optimistic that collectors are gaining confidence and that prices will continue to rise. At the same time, the success of the fall auctions—Andy Warhol's 200 One Dollar Bills went for $43.7 million, almost four times Sotheby's high estimate of $12 million—will bring out more sellers, thus increasing the amount of high-quality work on the market.
“As long as the financial markets continue as they are, Basel Miami is going to exceed expectations for everybody,” says Michael Sellinger, a principal at art consulting firm Cottelston Advisors. “The Chicken Little 'end of the world' scenario has not played out.”
Indeed. The forecasts that hordes of galleries would close were largely unfounded. In the past six months, only 11 galleries out of more than 350 in Chelsea went out of business, and five new galleries opened in the neighborhood, according to OneArtWorld.com, an online provider of information about the art industry.
Poster child of the boom
The most high-profile loss was Becky Smith's Bellwether Gallery in Chelsea, which closed in July after a year of declining sales. Ms. Smith became somewhat of a poster child for the art boom, when The New York Times Magazine wrote a profile of her, titled “How to Become an Instant Art Star,” in 1999. So her exit from the clubby New York art scene attracted a lot of attention.
Ms. Smith declined to be interviewed, writing in an e-mail, “I would rather not be the voice of forced closings anymore.” She then added, “Aren't things pretty OK for most folks these days?”
It certainly seems so. It didn't take long for someone to snap up Ms. Smith's vacant space. Andrew Edlin Gallery moved from a gallery multiplex on West 20th Street into Ms. Smith's spot, a much pricier, street-level space on 10th Avenue. And David Zwirner recently opened a 5,000-square-foot gallery, his fourth in Chelsea, on West 19th Street, a space that will enable the dealer to pursue more ambitious, large-scale exhibitions.
Despite the optimism, dealers aren't taking the recovery for granted. Around 50 galleries are getting together to create a new event, New York Gallery Week. The event will debut in May, and will feature parties, panels and gallery tours in an effort to get people to visit galleries rather than just coming to New York for the art fairs.
“We're trying to invigorate people to come to galleries again and to invigorate sales,” reports Jason Murison, the manager of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, one of the event's organizers.
Correction: Some 800 galleries will participate in the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, as well as all the other ancillary fairs that will run in Miami at the same time. That was unclear in the original article, published online Nov. 15. In addition, Rachel Lehmann owns Lehmann Maupin Gallery. Her name was misspelled in the original article.
"An Art Park Sprouts (for Now) Where New Buildings Were to Grow" - New York Times (9/16/09)
New York Times original article: An Art Park Sprouts (for Now) Where New Buildings Were to Grow
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: September 16, 2009
On Friday morning, in what might be seen as evidence that tough economic times can be good for art, a new 37,000-square-foot outdoor exhibition and performance space will open in Lower Manhattan.
Occupying an irregularly shaped city block at the northwest corner of Canal and Sullivan Streets, it will be both a park and a showcase for established and newer artists, open from 7 a.m. till dusk daily, except in January, February and part of March. Appropriately — given that the lot is on loan for about three years from developers who had hoped to build there by now — the project will be called LentSpace.
Maggie Boepple, the president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which is running the project, said that it had been in the works since early 2008, but that recent troubles in the real estate market undoubtedly contributed to “the generous length of time” of the loan.
The land is owned by Trinity Church on Wall Street, whose development company, Trinity Real Estate, cleared it of several old buildings a few years ago. Carl Weisbrod, the company’s president, said that when he realized that “the market was not yet ready for a new development here,” he contacted Ms. Boepple to offer use of the lot to the council, which is best known for its efforts to revitalize the arts downtown after 9/11.
In addition to the public spiritedness of the gesture — and to the tax write-off it earned the company — Mr. Weisbrod said Trinity was interested in cultivating the goodwill of the neighborhood, where most of its property is located. (The site is one of several near the Holland Tunnel that the church has owned since 1705, when Queen Anne gave it about 300 acres of farmland along the west side of Manhattan.)
For the last year, with the site shielded from view by a chain-link fence lined with black plastic tarps, workers have been transforming it into a meticulously designed, if rough-hewn, outdoor museum.
Because of a tight budget — Ms. Boepple said she raised about $1 million — and the space’s temporary status, the architects, Interboro Partners of Brooklyn, used inexpensive materials with an impermanent and somewhat industrial feel. The ground was covered in gravel, and benches and planters — holding flowering plants, desert grasses and trees donated by the Parks Department — were built from waterproof plywood.
The architects used the planters and benches to create zones for the park and paths that would steer people crossing it into contact with the artworks.
“There’s a lot of very strict formalism in the park if you want to look for it,” said Adam G. Kleinman, the curator for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council who will be programming exhibitions and performances in the park.
The eastern edge of the space — abutting a pedestrian stretch of Sullivan Street and a small wedge of park known as Juan Pablo Duarte Square — is bordered by a 215-foot fence made up of independently rotating, eight-foot-wide plywood panels. The panels’ exterior sides are covered with hundreds of small silver and blue aluminum disks, which make the wall glint in the sun like a mirage.
“They use them on oil derricks so that people can see them shine from miles away,” Mr. Kleinman explained, adding that the disks were the idea of Thumb, a graphic design company in Brooklyn. Every three months or so, a different design firm will be commissioned to come up with a project for the fence. (The fence’s blue and silver pattern isn’t random: if you look at it from the right angle, you see that the blue panels are the doors that align with the four main paths through the park.)
Mr. Kleinman will commission three rotating series of artworks: in addition to the fence project, there is also a print series, to be distributed in limited-edition newspapers inside the park and, most notably, a series of installations and sculptures.
The seven sculptural pieces in the inaugural lineup all, in one form or another, incorporate visual puns playing on the conventions of city park design or on the idea of what deserves to be classified as public art.
A small piece by Olga Chernysheva (four models of fences with holes torn in them) is encased in plexiglass and mounted on a plywood column built onto a plywood plinth. Anybody who wants to get a good look at the piece must climb onto the plinth, “so that you’re on display, like a statue you see in a typical park monument,” Mr. Kleinman said.
Other works, by Corban Walker, Ryan Taber, the brothers Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen, and Graham Hudson, make use of flagpoles, ladders, climbing wall holds, concrete, steel channels and a fluorescent light bulb.
A piece by Tobias Putrih began as a critique of the unsightly chain-link fence that still surrounds the park. “The management company insisted that the fence was there to stay because it’s private land,” Mr. Putrih said. “But what does it mean to have a fence around public art?”
His work, “Canal/Varick,” consists of seven lengths of chain-link fence running parallel to the official one. “It blurs the line — the existing fence becomes part of the artwork,” he said. “I decided to work with it.”
"Is graffiti art? Public to decide" - The Telegraph (UK) (9/1/09)
Read the original article in The Telegraph: "Is graffiti art? Public to decide"
Published: 7:00AM BST 01 Sep 2009
A council will let the public decide whether graffiti should be removed from buildings, or if they would prefer to keep it to promote street artists like Banksy.
Bristol City Council will put to the public vote whether murals which appear on buildings, walls and fences are street art or graffiti.
As part of a formal street art policy, the council's street clean team will not take action if people decide the graffiti is nice and want to keep it.
The approach was prompted by a Banksy work which shows a naked man hanging out of a window while his lover's partner looks for him.
When it first appeared on a council-owned building in the city's Frogmore Lane in 2005 it sparked debate over whether it should be removed.
The council set up an online poll and said that 93% of people wanted to keep it.
Now they are extending the public vote to any other street art that appears across the city.
Although the council has pledged to remove offensive and unsightly graffiti, a street art policy will ''seek to define and support the display of Public Art''.
The plan states that ''where people tell us that murals or artworks make a positive contribution to the local environment and where the property owner has raised no objection'' the council will not remove the graffiti.
Councillor Gary Hopkins, cabinet member for Environment and Community Safety, said: ''We have said informally that if it is street art that people like we will keep it but we want to formalise it now into a policy.
''People want us to keep up the war against the taggers so we have had to work out a way to differentiate between the taggers and the artists.
''Tagging is still removed but if it is art that people say they want to see they can take a photo and upload it on to our consultation website and we will ask people they think.''
Bristol City Council have faced embarrassment after workers removed a Banksy worth £100,000 in March 2007.
Workers painted over the 10-year-old mural across a row of garages with black paint, prompting outrage.
The council had ordered all Banksy works to be preserved.
The elusive artist has been a hit with the people of Bristol, with his current Banksy vs Bristol Museum exhibition attracting more than 250,000 people since June.
Cllr Hopkins said: ''A couple of pieces of art have been scrubbed off in error but staff now know if it is a really good piece of art work they refer it on.
''Street art is part of Bristol and people have complained about Banksy in the past but I think public opinion on it has shifted.
''The Banksy exhibition, for example, has attracted a quarter of a million people, 70% of which were from outside the city, so street art has generated masses of money for Bristol.
''Some people feel threatened by tags so we have commissioned murals to give a positive image and that does prevent graffiti.
''We also get the kids that have been involved in illegal tagging and get the artist to train them.''
The move is part of a plan to make Bristol one of the ''cleanest and greenest'' cities in the country.
It includes measures to increase waste recycling and composting from 36% to 50% by December 2010 and reduce the annual average household waste to 468kgs by 2015.
Bristol City Council will consider the proposal on September 15.
"Pop! An Empty Shop Fills With Art" - New York Times (8/31/09)
New York Times original article: Pop! An Empty Shop Fills With Art
By JULIA WERDIGIER
New York Times
Published: August 31, 2009
LONDON — Three months ago Simon Tarrant, a 44-year-old painter here who has never had gallery representation and has had only two solo shows in his 15-year career, decided to try something different. He approached the owners of a vacant building on a busy street in one of London’s most affluent neighborhoods, and by June he had turned it into an exhibition space, where two of his semi-abstract landscapes now hang prominently.
With its four floors of high ceilings and big windows, the building — formerly a fashion boutique on Fulham Road in Chelsea — makes an ideal gallery for Mr. Tarrant’s art, along with that of 14 of his friends and acquaintances.
Best of all, from Mr. Tarrant’s point of view, he — or rather Queen’s Elm Artists, a collective he recently helped found — can use the space for the rest of the year, rent free.
In Britain as in America, the recession has forced many retail businesses to close or move to cheaper premises, leaving behind vast spaces that have generally remained empty. According to the Local Data Company, a retail industry research concern, the average store vacancy rate here was almost 12 percent at the end of June, up from 4 percent the previous year.
Before Mr. Tarrant opened the first Queen’s Elm Artists exhibition, which runs through this week, the building stood vacant for more than a year, as its landlord, Sloane Stanley Estate, tried to find a tenant willing to pay £150,000, or $243,300, in rent, taxes and other costs annually.
Now independent curators and entrepreneurial artists like Mr. Tarrant are stepping into the breach, persuading landlords and municipal councils to turn vacant spaces over to them temporarily. Galleries have sprung up throughout the country, and particularly in London, in spots as varied as shopping mall outlets, a scooter showroom and a video store. Last month the British government, worried about the economic, psychological and criminal hazards of retail vacancies, announced a $5 million “revival fund” for local governments in hard-hit areas to transform empty shops into something useful, like showrooms for local artists, and another $800,000 to help artists and arts organizations turn vacant high street shops into artistic spaces.
Having a place like the Fulham Road building “is a dream come true” for artists without galleries, Mr. Tarrant said, but the arrangement also offers obvious benefits to a landlord concerned about high upkeep costs or their alternative, dereliction. In an agreement typical of many being struck, Mr. Tarrant said he would pay for all utilities and return the property in the same or better condition than when the collective moved in.
In addition, he has agreed to hand over 15 percent of the proceeds from any artwork sold, and, although he is not required to, has plastered and painted the walls. And in its new role as a gallery, the building has been attracting a constant flow of visitors, two of whom, Mr. Tarrant said, had already expressed interest in renting the space.
Most of the arrangements are for shorter periods than the six months in Mr. Tarrant’s lease, and as a result the exhibition spaces have come to be widely known as pop-up galleries. Three miles northeast of the Queen’s Elm Artists building, in the bustle of Covent Garden, two young freelance curators, Lee Johnson and Bakul Patki, are running an exhibition called “DIY London Seen.” It is up for just three weeks in a disused shop interior that still smells strongly of the bath soap sold by Lush, a beauty products retailer that moved to another space nearby.
An oversize bear covered in small mirrors (by Arran Gregory, a recent art school graduate) stands guard at the entrance to the show, which was inspired by the New York do-it-yourself art scene documented in the film “Beautiful Losers,” and put together through the curators’ looking at MySpace pages and art school shows. (The landlord, Covent Garden Estates, said it saw the current economic climate as a good opportunity to support the arts.)
Not that all pop-up galleries involve early-career or struggling artists. This year Charlie Phillips, the owner of the contemporary gallery Eleven, in the fashionable neighborhood of Belgravia, happily entered into partnership with the Grosvenor property group to take advantage of vacancies in two former clothing shops in Belgravia and neighboring Mayfair.
The resulting spaces, each open for two months, showed work by well-known artists like Natasha Law and Olly & Suzi. Each, Mr. Phillips said, represented a chance, if temporary, to expand to “a great location that under normal circumstances we could not afford.”
But most of these galleries do show less established artists, many in considerably less glamorous locales. In June, for example, a few artists turned the abandoned Apollo Video Store in the borough of Lambeth in South London into the Apollo Project, an art gallery and performance center, while art students in Leytonstone, in East London, used a 20,000-square-foot space formerly occupied by a branch of the now-defunct Woolworths chain to exhibit their works.
Even in more affluent precincts, though, exposure does not necessarily translate into sales, at least in these recessionary times. As pleased as Mr. Tarrant is with the Queen’s Elm Artists space, he has been a little disappointed that only 10 of the 70 or so works in the group’s first show have sold.
Still, in spite of his agreement with the landlord to leave by the end of the year, he has already decided he would prefer to stay. “We started off as a temporary thing, but it’s now turning into something more permanent,” he said. “We’re drawing up a business plan and really want to make it financially viable.”
