New Doubts Raised Over Famous War Photo

Robert Capa/Magnum Photos

Another Photography scandal!

First Annie Leibovitz

Then Edgar Martins

Now Robert Capa?

Please read article by Larry Rohter for the NY Times

By LARRY ROHTER
Published: August 17, 2009
After nearly three-quarters of a century Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” picture from the Spanish Civil War remains one of the most famous images of combat ever. It is also one of the most debated, with a long string of critics claiming that the photo, of a soldier seemingly at the moment of death, was faked. Now, a new book by a Spanish researcher asserts that the picture could not have been made where, when or how Capa’s admirers and heirs have claimed.

Read more here:www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/arts/design/18capa.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

RIP Charles Gwathmey, Modernist Architect

Charles Gwathmey parents house completed in 1966 while he was in his twenties. At that time these houses were considered one of the most influential building of the modern era.

Architect Charles Gwathmey

The addition to the Guggenheim Museum

Charles Gwathmey, part of a generation of architects who put their own aesthetic stamp on the "high Modernist" style, died on August 3. He was known both for residential work -- he built houses for Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jerry Seinfeld -- and sometimes controversial public buildings. To me he represented one of my main inspirations and motivation to study Architecture and become an Architect.

RIP

More about Charles Gwathmey here:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/arts/design/05gwathmey.html?ref=arts

Dash Snow RIP

Dash Snow -photo by Terry Richardson

I  HATE DRUGS...!

Dash Snow RIP

Dash Snow, New York Artist, Dies at 27

By ROBERTA SMITH
Dash Snow, a promising young New York artist, died Monday night at Layfayette House, a hotel in Lower Manhattan. He was 27 and lived in Manhattan. His death was confirmed by his grandmother, the art collector and philanthropist Christophe de Menil, who said that Mr. Snow had died of a drug overdose.

Mr. Snow gained prominence after being featured in an article titled “Warhol’s Children” that appeared in New York magazine in 2007. He worked in video and photography and also developed a distinctive collage style that fused and contrasted found images in fresh and suggestive ways. He exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles and Europe and is currently featured in “Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture” at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Ms. de Menil said that he had been in rehabilitation in March and had been off drugs until very recently.

Photography Scandal!

ARTmostfierce interviewed photographer Edgar Martins about a year ago  (see and read here) and HE swore that, HE never got involved in any type of image manipulation while creating his great photographs. Well...his latest editorial work with the NY Times has come under great scrutiny after some EAGLE EYES found that Edgar Martins work was seriously photo-shoped and manipulated to death!

I am not a big fan of manipulated photographs unless, A-the artist uses it to take photography to another creativity level (Burtynsky, Gorsky, Gregory Crewdson, Jill Greenburg)  and B-they come clean about it. Sorry folks but, I can't hide my disappointment knowing about it!

I haven't been closely following this budding controversy over the photos by Edgar Martins that appeared in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, but I think that's because what coverage I have seen underplays the seriousness of the issue by referring to "digitally altered" photographs. In fact, that's how the Times itself phrased it when they took the photos down pending further review (suspicions were apparently first raised by a commenter at MetaFilter). When I hear digitally altered, I think of the usual ethical dust-ups over filters, brushing up details, or removing inconvenient obstructions in the line of sight.

But it turns out that in fact the images weren't merely altered, they were digitally composed. Elements of the images were real photos, but the photos were manipulated in such a way that the final product was not in fact a reproduction of an image that an observer would be able to see in real life. Artistically, they were compelling, as you can see here. Journalistically they were fakes. And The Times has now admitted as much in a new "Editor's Note" published today:

A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled "Ruins of the Second Gilded Age" showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, "creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation."
A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NY Times.com.

One picture shows an evenly-lit room in an unsold mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. The room appears near-perfect in its symmetry, down to have two identical thermostats and light switch plates facing each other on opposite walls. There are also repeating patterns in the leaves on the floor.

Another picture shows a Las Vegas development with construction fencing in the foreground. The piece of fence on the left is a perfect mirror of the one on the right.

Risk-Defying Sale of Contemporary Art at Christie's

The second highest price, £1,721, 250, went to a perfectly figural picture. Richard Prince’s “Country Nurse” in inkjet print and red paint is the enlarged interpretation of the cover design of a novel by Maud McCurdy Welch.
Photo: Christie's

Well...ART news from across the pond (London) seem to indicate that there is still hungry appetite for works of art. Let's keep it going folks for art's sake!

Newcomer, Artist Jules De Balincourt is moving up to to the high big auction leagues after this auction result. 

Please read NY Times article by Souren Melikian.

Enjoy!

By SOUREN MELIKIAN
Published: July 1, 2009
LONDON — The art market jauntily jumped the last of the most dreaded hurdles laid in its path on Tuesday evening. To the considerable delight of many professionals, Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Sale, seen by market pundits as the most risk-fraught of all fields, brought £19.06 million, or $31.77 million.


Of the 40 paintings, color prints and three-dimensional works in sundry media and techniques, only five remained unwanted. The minimal failure rate, 12.4 percent, compares with the finest performances on record when the market was at its height. True, the money spent that evening is a fraction of what contemporary art auctions achieved in the glorious recent past when the proceeds at Christie’s and at Sotheby’s easily exceeded $300 million in New York and the equivalent of at least half that amount in London — the all-time high at Christie’s New York was $384 million in May 2007, and at Christie’s London it was £86.24 million in June 2008.

But if the Tuesday evening session came nowhere near achieving such numbers, the fault does not lie with bidders. It was the consignors who displayed timidity and balked at the thought of entrusting auction houses with any of those works that somehow drive contemporary art buyers into a frenzy of desire.

As it is, they gladly took what was on offer. Peter Doig, one of the most interesting artists on the contemporary scene, was represented by a large scene, “Night Playground,” done between 1997 and 1998 in a semi-Naif style, very different from his accomplished manner of more recent years. Yet that became his second most expensive work ever at auction as it fetched £3.01 million, the highest price paid that evening.

From the moment go, bidders were so keen that they chased artists rarely or even never seen at auction.

Jules de Balincourt is hardly a worldwide celebrity even if Christie’s experts graciously hailed him in the catalog as “one of New York’s fastest rising art stars.” “Internal Renovations,” painted in oil, acrylic and spray paint on paper in two parts looks like the picture of an architect’s presentation maquette for an urban rehabilitation campaign in some Godforsaken dump. If it is not, it is a pretty good spoof of one. Done in 2006, it went to a Berlin gallery, Arndt & Partner, where it was acquired by the consignor, whose love of the art may be rather fickle. Financially, he or she did very well. “Internal Renovation” made £67,250, exceeding the highest expectations. This was the third time that the artist’s work had appeared at Christie’s.

Joana Vasconcelos, a Lisbon artist born in 1971, was trying her luck at auction for the first time with “Golden Independent Heart.” The title refers to a big affair in translucent yellow plastic cutlery involving the use of painted iron, a motor, a metallic chain and a CD. Keen to make sure that her Independent Heart would be spinning at the right speed, to the sound of music chosen by her, the artist made the trip to assist Christie’s team as they mounted the whole thing in the viewing room. This is an old Vasconcelos. It was “executed in 2004,” the catalog notes. The consignor bought it from Ms. Vasconcelos but the entry does not say whether he tired of the spinning heart or just wanted to make a few bucks. Thus the artist got lucky. At £163,250, her musical contraption went well over the high estimate.

As ever in contemporary art sales, there was no remote suggestion of a common denominator between the works that did best.

The second highest price, £1,721, 250, went to a perfectly figural picture. Richard Prince’s “Country Nurse” in inkjet print and red paint is the enlarged interpretation of the cover design of a novel by Maud McCurdy Welch. The writer is unkindly characterized in Christie’s catalog as “the author of many ... steamy, dime-store love stories.” Perhaps this is why it only just matched the lower estimate, still costing its new owner a hefty price.

Contrast that with the third highest price in the sale, £1.39 million, paid for a 1974 picture by Gerhard Richter, “1025 Farben” (1025 Colors). Here the painter, who would later display a stunning mastery in the brushwork of some of the most beautiful abstract compositions of the 20th century, was content with painting tiny color rectangles. The picture deceptively resembles some color chart with endlessly repeated variants, destined for a supplier of deluxe house paint. It did not match the lower end of the estimate, but as color charts go, it was not cheap.

Jeff Koons came fourth in line after Mr. Doig, Mr. Prince and Mr. Richter in the race to high scores. Market commentators will have difficulty in building up a rationale to explain how he managed to join the club of the First Five runners with “Moustache,” which sold for £1.1 million. The painted aluminum and wrought iron apparition hanging from an orange steel chain irresistibly calls to mind some outsize prop for a Walt Disney movie or animation.

The last of the Big Five in declining order was Frank Auerbach’s “Tree in Mornington Crescent.” Done in 1991-1992, it betrays the legacy of German Expressionism in the uncontrolled fury of the brushwork. Figuration only faintly survives in a work that points to the influence of Expressionist Abstractionism. Enthusiasm greeted this picture, which went above its high estimate at £886,000. By contrast, Francis Bacon’s very fine “Study for Portrait” dating from 1986-1988 barely made it, selling for £870,050, below the lower end of the estimate.

The sale followed no discernible aesthetic direction, perhaps because aesthetics had no place in such an event. Ironically, this is a sign of financial health if nothing else. It has always been so in past sales of contemporary art. And in the current recessionary climate, no news is splendid news.

Who is that woman and what is she doing?

I got to meet this Puerto Rican woman someday!
Talk about breaking sterotypes!
Her style, looks and drive for causes...bravo!

Please NY Times article by Robin Progrebin

Philanthropist With a Sense of Timing Raises Her Profile


By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: June 29, 2009

Who is that woman and what is she doing?


Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

Lisa Maria Falcone at her home on the Upper East Side.
Neil Rasmus/Patrickmcmullan.com

That is what seemed to be going through the minds of many guests at a gala dinner in early June atop the High Line, the elevated downtown railway that has been transformed into a landscaped esplanade.

The long, elegantly decorated tables were packed with luminaries of the New York social circuit, including Oscar de la Renta, Martha Stewart, Harvey Weinstein and Jerry Seinfeld.

Joshua David, a founder of Friends of the High Line, which had saved the structure from demolition and spearheaded its revival, had just announced a $10 million challenge grant to the project from the media mogul Barry Diller and his wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, prompting a standing ovation. Suddenly, a leggy brunette in a cropped bob, flouncy Roberto Cavalli minidress and slingback, peep-toe heels by Christian Louboutin (who was in attendance) rose from her seat, approached Mr. David in the middle of his remarks, whispered in his ear and took over the microphone.

She was Lisa Maria Falcone, she said, and she and her husband, Philip A. Falcone, were so excited about the High Line and so moved by Mr. Diller and Ms. von Furstenberg’s gift that they decided to match it.

This unscripted, somewhat messy moment may go down in the annals of cultural philanthropy as the debut of a major new donor on the New York scene. Although the Falcones have given money before to the High Line and other organizations, they have usually done it less conspicuously. But little by little Ms. Falcone — along with her husband, No. 296 on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires — is stepping into the spotlight, beginning the transition from one wealthy patron among many to the kind of highly visible player sought after by the city’s leading arts organizations.

In the last two years she has been a chairwoman of several galas at the American Museum of Natural History. Last year New York City Ballet recruited her for its board, and she was a chairwoman of the dance company’s spring gala last month.

Ms. Falcone said that she and her husband had decided to be more public about their High Line contribution to demonstrate that people don’t have to live near the elevated track — the Falcones live on the Upper East Side — to be invested in its success.

“No matter where you come from, you’re still a New Yorker, and you can give,” she said in a recent interview at her town house.

Ms. Falcone does not fit the usual image of the society arts patron. She said that she was Puerto Rican and that she was raised in Spanish Harlem by a single, alcoholic mother on welfare. Her mother died eight years ago. Growing up, she saw her father — a busboy who paid for her Catholic school — once a week. “I’ve never seen anyone clear tables like him,” Ms. Falcone said of her father, who is now 92. “He never complained about it.”

She studied art history at Pace University, earning an associate’s degree. She was in her early 20s, working as a fashion model, when she met her husband at a restaurant — they have been together for 17 years and married for 12. When they met Mr. Falcone, now 46, was a young businessman who had worked in junk bonds; in 2001 he founded Harbinger Capital, a private investment firm. Just two years ago he became a billionaire, by betting against subprime credit. His firm, which started with $25 million, now manages two funds with roughly $9 billion in assets and owns about 20 percent of The New York Times Company.

She was careful in answering questions about her husband, stopping herself from discussing his business in any detail or allowing Matthew Hiltzik, a publicist who was present throughout the interview, to stop her. She alluded to a time when she and Mr. Falcone didn’t have it so easy, saying, “When they turned the lights off on us, we lit candles.” Mr. Hiltzik advised her against saying anything further. (In a telephone interview later Mr. Falcone acknowledged that the early to mid-1990s was a difficult time for them.)

Ms. Falcone was also reluctant to reveal her age, 40, saying she wanted to be a role model for young people.

Otherwise she seemed surprisingly unguarded. She talks about the causes she cares about with the kind of wide-eyed idealism that makes you wonder how a New Yorker toughened by her share of adversity can seem so cheery. “They say people who have had a hard childhood are optimistic,” she said.

Ms. Falcone seems to have a quirky, independent streak. She collects crosses, large glittering examples of which she usually wears around her neck, and does her own hair and makeup. She pairs her couture clothing with thrift shop finds — at this interview, she wore a second-hand fur-lined sweater over a Lanvin dress.

 Continue reading:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/arts/30falcone.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th

Reality Check

Photo

Marilyn K. Yee/The New York Times

The Charles Cowles Gallery, which is closing this month.

Is really happening folks and as much as I hate to help broadcast it, the truth is in black and white. I am on hold from purchasing anything till the fall. More gallery closings coming soon. Please read great article by Dorothy Spears for the NY Times. It is more than a reality check!

ART
This Summer, Some Galleries Are Sweating

By DOROTHY SPEARS
Published: June 19, 2009
Postscript Appended

IT’S hard to believe that only nine months ago art dealers everywhere were still dreaming up plans for vast multinational expansions. Since September, however, the contemporary art market has careened from boom to bust. Nowhere has that reversal of fortune been more sharply felt than in New York, whose galleries represent the full spectrum of the art world’s pecking order.



Some two dozen galleries here have folded. The most notable among them — Clementine, Guild & Greyshkul, Roebling Hall and Rivington Arms — are midsize galleries, where the reputations of up-and-coming artists first gain traction.

Aside from slashing prices or deepening discounts, art dealers across the city have been coping not just by laying off employees but by dropping artists with poor sales records, creating partnerships with other galleries and reaching out in desperation to tried-and-true customers, many of whom were priced out of the market during its peak. Still, with the exception of several blue-chip galleries who show well-known artists, foot traffic in Chelsea and other gallery precincts has thinned markedly where crowds jostled just a year ago.

Now, on the heels of the annual Art Basel fair in Switzerland, dealers are bracing for the notoriously quiet summer months. “Art galleries typically bring in very little revenue from mid-June to October,” said Josh Baer, founder of the art industry newsletter Baer Faxt, “which is already pretty tough on the cash flow. But when business is off 50 to 80 percent, one wonders how many galleries will reopen in September.”

The most recent casualty, the Charles Cowles Gallery, set to close before the end of the month, will leave a gaping storefront on West 24th Street, the heart of the Chelsea gallery district. After 30 years of selling art, Mr. Cowles said in a recent interview, he was ready to retire. But the economic slide left little room for hesitation. “It’s shocking how bad business has been,” he said. During the big New York auctions last month, he said, “I didn’t see a single major collector in the gallery.”

Also absent in Manhattan these days are the young Wall Street executives who in flusher times routinely dropped the occasional $10,000 on an artwork. Now it’s the wealthiest collectors who are calling the shots. And while they continue to buy, albeit more slowly, they’ve been taking far fewer risks, favoring bigger galleries, like Gagosian and David Zwirner, whose menu of services ranges from discreet backroom sales to name-brand artists with a long history of museum shows and works in prestigious collections.

“What’s going on with the collectors,” said Roland Augustine, co-owner of the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea and president of the Art Dealers Association of America, “is that there’s far more selectivity in the buying at all levels.”

The tougher times have led many dealers to cancel expensive installations and fat, splashy catalogs, keep exhibits running longer, ask artists to cover their own production costs and drastically limit their participation in art fairs, once considered a boon to business. Although the downturn affects everybody, some younger dealers have responded by promoting low-priced artworks and forging collaborative relationships with fellow dealers.

At Schroeder Romero on West 27th Street, for example, Sara Jo Romero said that Compound Editions, a joint venture founded last fall with the neighboring Winkleman Gallery, offers artworks produced in multiples in the $100 to $300 price range. “That’s been a big success for us,” Ms. Romero said. “Also we don’t have any employees, and our space is off the beaten track,” she added, which helps to minimize her gallery’s costs.

Tracy Williams, whose gallery is in the West Village, is also focusing on lower-priced art. Seeing her bottom line plummet in December, Ms. Williams said, she asked a consultant to take a look at her books. After being told, “This is what you did last year, this is what you’re going to do next year, this where you have to cut back,” she said, she let go one of two full-time employees.

Continue reading here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/arts/design/21spea.html?pagewanted=2&sq=sara%20jo%20romero&st=cse&scp=1

And listen to three art experts here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/21/arts/design/20090621-artists-feature.html

A tough and sexy statement

I love when all of the sudden... there is a new building in Manhattan, NYC that makes a bold statement and enriches our surroundings. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art: The college’s new academic building, a contemporary work designed between Sixth and Seventh Streets in the East Village in my opinion does that. Please read architectural review by Nicolai Oroussoff of the NY Times.
Enjoy!

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: June 4, 2009
We’ll have to wait to find out exactly what the end of the Age of Excess means for architecture in New York. Yes, the glut of high-concept luxury towers was wearisome. But some great civic works were also commissioned in that era. And given the hard economic times, they may be the last we see for quite some time.


The new academic building at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is yet more proof that some great art was produced in those self-indulgent times. Designed by Thom Mayne of the Los Angeles firm Morphosis, it is not a perfect building, but it is the kind of serious work that we don’t see enough of in New York: a bold architectural statement of genuine civic value. Its lively public spaces reaffirm that enlightenment comes from the free exchange of ideas, not just inward contemplation.

Perhaps more important, the building seems to strike just the right tone for this time in New York’s history. A wholly contemporary work, it has a bold, aggressive profile that says as much about the city we’ve lost as it does about the future we are building. It proves that a brash, rebellious attitude can be a legitimate form of civic pride.

The building occupies a contentious site at Cooper Square, between Sixth and Seventh Streets, in the East Village. The area has experienced a particularly painful process of gentrification in the past decade. First, generic glass boxes began popping up along the Bowery. Then CBGB closed. For me the final straw was the opening in 2005 of Gwathmey Siegel’s undulating glass luxury apartment tower at Astor Place, a vulgar knockoff of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Glass Skyscraper project and a symbol of the era’s me-first mentality.

Mr. Mayne’s building does not shy away from this debate by trying to fade into the background. Seen from the old Cooper Union Foundation building across the street, its big concave facade is enveloped in a glittering perforated metal screen, like armor, so that it’s hard at first to get a grip on the building’s scale. A big vertical slot is cut out of the facade’s center, as if it had been ripped open.

Yet the more you look at the building, the more it looks right at home in its surroundings. From certain angles the facade’s concave form seems to exert a magnetic pull, as if it were trying to embrace the neighborhood in front of it. The curve of the corner, which lifts up to invite people inside the lobby, has an unexpected softness. Even the bulky exterior mirrors the proportions of the Foundation building — a friendly nod to its older neighbor.


The effect is tough and sexy at the same time. One of the most overlooked strengths of Mr. Mayne’s designs is his feel for material. He is not a finicky designer; you don’t look to his work for refined details. He tends instead to extract beauty from the crudest industrial materials: raw concrete, steel I-beams, metal screens. The connections between materials are always clearly expressed, never smoothed over, so that you can feel the memory of the workers’ hands. It is what makes his buildings — like the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, Calif. — so approachable.

This strategy is social as well as aesthetic. Here the big V-shaped columns that line the sidewalk not only support the building, but they also create small pockets of space where students can hang out along the street. Behind them the lobby is clad entirely in glass. Just inside, a narrow staircase runs along the base of the window down to a basement gallery and theater. Other views open down to the gallery from Seventh Street.

The idea is to create a series of interlocking social spaces, many undefined, and to allow for the kind of casual encounter that is a central part of urban life. And it reflects Mr. Mayne’s ambivalence over the Modernist obsession with transparency. To the Modernists transparency equaled truth. To Mr. Mayne’s generation, which formed its ideas in the 1960s, it could also mean uniformity. Like other radical architects of his age, he is more interested in the dark, hidden corners where people can loiter, get into mischief, escape from authority.

The social heart of the building is a vast internal staircase, which sweeps from the lobby all the way to the fourth floor. The staircase, 20 feet wide at its base, has a classical grandeur, as if the Met’s front stairs had been pulled inside the building. The stair narrows as it rises, creating a forced perspective that exaggerates its length. A big window frames the top, allowing light to spill down into the lobby and drawing you up into the space.

From the top people will filter around to each side and climb a smaller, asymmetrical spiral stair to the upper floors. When I first looked up through this space I immediately thought of the Baroque domes of Guarino Guarini, except that the complex order of Guarini’s domes represents divine order. In Mayne’s version that world has been set off balance, as if to allow for imperfections, and it is inhabited by students.

The building’s flaws, though, lie not in a failure of vision but in questions about its execution. The most serious of these have to do with circulation. I expect there will be complaints, for example, about the main elevators, which only go up to the fifth and eighth floors. The system is based on a design by Le Corbusier, who used it in his 1952 Unité d’Habitation housing block in Marseilles. Since it eliminated the need for corridors on every other floor, he could create big, floor-through duplex apartments with windows on both sides. But here it doesn’t make much sense, because the building is made up of standard, single-story offices and classrooms. Most students will have to walk an extra flight up or down to get to their classes.

Another subtle but important problem is the depth of the treads on the grand staircase. The stairs in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are 14 inches deep, which is what makes them such a nice place to sit, rest, chat with a stranger. Mr. Mayne’s stairs are a standard 11 inches, like a conventional fire stairwell. They are hard to sit on, and they gave me vertigo when I began my descent from the third floor. Does this sound picky? Not in a design that is all about the informal use of public space. It is the difference between a very good building and a great one.

Still, Mr. Mayne has created a serious work of architecture. And when we look back on this era, the new academic building will stand out with a handful of other designs — the New Museum, perhaps, and the renovation of Alice Tully Hall — as projects that we, as a city, can feel proud of. They leave you with the comforting thought that even in egotistical times, a spirit of generosity can assert itself.

Architect Renzo Piano Embraces Chicago

The new $294 million addition to the Art Institute of Chicago.

This is worth reading and a trip to Chicago is in order!

I can't not wait to see this anex for the Art Institute of Chicago designed by the greatest Architect , Renzo Piano. Please read architectural review by NY Times Nicolai Ouroussoff. ARTmostfierce is on is way to round two of The NY Photo Festival.There is also a link of an art review by Roberta Smith about this new building interior.
Enjoy!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/arts/design/14inst.html?th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/arts/design/14muse.html?th&emc=th

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOF
Published: May 13, 2009
CHICAGO — America has been suffering from Renzo Piano fatigue.


For years Mr. Piano seemed to be snapping up all the best commissions: the renovation of the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan, a science center in San Francisco and museum additions in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Fort Worth. (He even designed The New York Times Building.)

Many of his peers gripe that this is because of the subdued nature of his designs — sophisticated but not too threatening or unfamiliar — which seem tailored to ease the insecurities of museum boards. Some envy his elegance, which makes him seem equally at home in corporate boardrooms and lofty cultural circles.

It’s hard to know how these qualities will play out amid the gloom and doom of the new economy. In some ways Mr. Piano’s refined, risk-averse architecture may be more appealing than ever. He is not out to start a revolution. His designs are about tranquillity, not conflict. The serenity of his best buildings can almost make you believe that we live in a civilized world.

The new $294 million Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, which opens on Saturday, is the closest Mr. Piano has come in at least a decade to achieving this near-classical ideal. Its delicate structural frame is a sparkling counterpart to the museum’s 1893 Beaux Arts building. The light-filled galleries show the Art Institute’s marvelous collections of postwar and contemporary art in their full glory, including many works that have been buried in storage for decades. Most of all, the addition manages to weave the various strands of Chicago’s rich architectural history into a cohesive vision, one that is made more beautiful by its remarkable fragility.

The 264,000-square-foot wing is the largest expansion in the museum’s 130-year history. The addition stands behind the original building, across a set of commuter railroad tracks. The two structures are joined by a small gallery building from 1916 that bridges the tracks. Millennium Park, its far end punctuated by the swirling steel forms of Frank Gehry’s band shell, extends to the north.

Seen from the park Mr. Piano’s structure immediately brings to mind the work of Mies van der Rohe, a pillar of modern architecture who moved to Chicago from Germany in the 1930s. The taut forms and refined details, the elevation of an industrial aesthetic to an art form — all are hallmarks of Mies’s work. Mr. Piano’s towering glass-and-steel facade, with its floating roof and excruciatingly slender columns, even evokes a lighter, more ethereal incarnation of Mies’s 1968 Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, a landmark of 20th-century design.

Mr. Piano carefully knits these forms into the surrounding fabric. The addition’s main entry hall is parallel to the tracks, so that their grittiness becomes part of the overall composition. A series of heavy walls that frame the entry are made of limestone to match the original building. A long, slender bridge, one of the design’s most whimsical features, connects the addition to the park across the street.

The play between Modern and classical themes continues inside. The entry hall, a long towering space enclosed beneath a glittering glass roof, could be a contemporary version of a cathedral, designed for the worship of art. Its elongated form is used to draw you into the building. From there people turn and look out at a grassy outdoor court before climbing a staircase to the main galleries. The staircase, suspended on slender rods, was inspired by Mies’s design for the Arts Club of Chicago.

Some will feel that the journey from the front door to the art is too drawn out, but it gives you the impression of having ascended to “a sacred space.” Occasionally Mr. Piano’s galleries can be too precious: the level of refinement gives them a cool, almost sterile feel. But these rank among his best. The rooms are beautifully proportioned. A thin steel border frames the plaster walls, giving them a clean industrial look.

Mr. Piano also seems to have created the right amount of intimacy between art and viewer, without completely shutting out the world. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the park and courtyard from some galleries. The windows are covered with white screens, lending the views a soft, ghostlike quality. This effect is reinforced by the layering of glass, which shuts out street noise and gives the sight of people walking below a particularly eerie, cinematic quality.

But it is the light that most people will notice. Mr. Piano has been slowly refining his lighting systems since the mid-1980s, when he completed his design for the Menil Collection building in Houston. Over the years these efforts have taken on a quasi-religious aura, with curators and museum directors analyzing the light in his galleries like priests dissecting holy texts.

At the Art Institute Mr. Piano has stripped the system down to its essence. The glass roof of the top-floor galleries is supported on delicate steel trusses. Rows of white blades rest on top of the trusses to filter out strong southern light; thin fabric panels soften the view from below.

The idea is to make you aware of the shifts in daylight — over the course of a visit, from one season to another — without distracting you from the artwork, and the effect is magical. On a clear afternoon you can catch faint glimpses through the structural frame of clouds drifting by overhead. But most of the time the art takes center stage, everything else fading quietly into the background.

It is this obsessive refinement that raises Mr. Piano’s best architecture to the level of art. In an age with few idealists, he exudes a touching faith in the value of slow, incremental progress. He has never fully abandoned the belief that machines can elevate as well as destroy.

The beauty of his designs stems from his stubborn insistence that the placement of a column or a window, when done with enough patience and care, brings us a step closer to a more enlightened society.

Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95

Untitled (broken mirror), Helen Levitt, New York, c.1940/all photos: Laurence Miller Gallery

© Estate of Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt in 1963.



© Estate of Helen Levitt
A 1939 image of trick-or-treaters by Ms. Levitt was part of the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department in 1940


Helen Levitt is one of my most admired photographers and an inspiration for some of my own photography.

By MARGARETT LOKE
Published: March 30, 2009



Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.

As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.

In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.

“At the peak of Helen’s form,” John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, once said, “there was no one better.”

The late 1930s and early ’40s, when Ms. Levitt created an astonishing body of work, was a time when many noted photographers produced stark images to inspire social change. Ms. Levitt also took her camera to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as their living rooms and where she showed an unerring instinct for a street drama’s perfect pitch. In his 1999 biography of Walker Evans, James R. Mellow wrote that the only photographers Evans “felt had something original to say were Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and himself.”

Helen Levitt was born on Aug. 31, 1913, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Her father, Sam, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, ran a successful wholesale knit-goods business; her mother, May, was a bookkeeper before her marriage.

Finding high school unstimulating, Ms. Levitt dropped out during her senior year. In a 2002 interview with The New York Times in her fourth-floor walk-up near Union Square, she said that as a young woman she had wanted to do something in the arts though she could not draw well.

Her mother knew the family of J. Florian Mitchell, a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx, and in 1931 Ms. Levitt began to work for him. “I helped in darkroom printing and developing,” she said. “My salary was six bucks a week.”

With a used Voigtländer camera, she photographed her mother’s friends. Through publications and exhibitions, she knew the documentary work of members of the Film and Photo League and of Cartier-Bresson, Evans and Ben Shahn.

In 1935 she met Cartier-Bresson when he spent a year in New York. On one occasion she accompanied him when he photographed along the Brooklyn waterfront. She also trained her eye, she said, by going to museums and art galleries. “I looked at paintings for composition,” she said. In 1936, she bought a secondhand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson favored.

Two years later, she contacted Evans to show him the photographs she had taken of children playing in the streets and their buoyantly unrestrained chalk graffiti. “I went to see him,” she recalled, “the way kids do, and got to be friends with him.” She helped Evans make prints for his exhibition and book “American Photographs.”

Both the quintessentially French Cartier-Bresson and the essentially American Evans influenced Ms. Levitt. Cartier-Bresson had a gift for catching everyday life in graceful, seemingly transparent flux; Evans had a way of being sparingly, frontally direct with his commonplace subjects. Ms. Levitt credited Shahn, whom she had met through Evans, with being a greater influence than Evans. Photographs Shahn took of life on New York sidewalks in the ’30s have an unmediated, gritty spontaneity.

James Agee, a good friend, was also a major influence. She had met him through Evans, who noted, “Levitt’s work was one of James Agee’s great loves, and, in turn, Agee’s own magnificent eye was part of her early training.”





Please read more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/arts/design/30levitt.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=arts

Vanessa Beecroft's 'VB65' Attempts to Force Spectators to See Africans Differently

Photo-Vanessa Beecroft
Here is anoher controversial but, quite fascinating artist... Vanessa Beecroft

Some people just don't get her!

Read about it in this NY Times article by Elisabeta Povoledo.

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Published: March 29, 2009

These days, the most talked about representation of a ritual repast in Milan is not the “Last Supper” that Leonardo da Vinci painted 510 years ago, but a performance by the conceptual artist Vanessa Beecroft for the city that launched her artistic career.

For “VB65” (Ms. Beecroft numbers her performances sequentially) the artist selected about two dozen African immigrants (some in Italy illegally, others with papers) and posed them along a 12-meter, or 39-foot, table for a three-hour meal during which they languidly munched on roast chicken with their bare hands. The men wore vintage dinner jackets or suits by the designer Martin Margiela, but some were bare-chested, others sans shoes.

“I wanted to force the Milanese bourgeoisie to enter a private space regulated by the statutes of art, that is the museum, and observe people widely seen as the violators of privacy, people that are seen as different,” Ms. Beecroft, 39, said during an interview at the Pavilion of Contemporary Art, or PAC, where the performance took place on March 16. “You need to put something crude on show to provoke a reaction in the public.”

Compared with other European countries, Italy’s immigrants are relative newcomers, and the country’s response to its growing foreign population has been colored by a political agenda that has shifted much of the blame for criminal activity onto immigrants. “There’s widespread diffidence here; I feel it, it’s on the streets,” said Ms. Beecroft, who is Italian.

The performance was a major event for this fashion and design capital accustomed to its fair share of happenings, and hundreds thronged to the museum for a rare chance to see the artist — who photographs the performances — in action.

“It was like a rock concert,” said Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, the show’s curator, who has known Beecroft since her student days at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, which she attended during the early 1990s.

Even in art school, “she was provocative and her work focused on society,” Mr. Di Pietrantonio said. Her first exhibit, in a Milanese art gallery in 1993, centered on a diet diary she had kept for a decade and the performance involved other Brera students — some with eating disorders — parading around the so-called “Book of Food.” Three years later she moved to New York (she now lives in Los Angeles) and began working on the ever more extravagant performances — involving usually nude models remaining still for hours — that has defined her work as an artist.

Beecroft courts controversy and contradiction, frequently working with designers even as she critiques our fashion and body-obsessed culture.

Or, in the case of “VB65,” showcasing “our prejudices towards Africans as primitive or savage” because they are eating with their hands, she said, adding that she could not have done this performance in the United States, where the piece might have been taken in the wrong way.

“I feel free to do more exaggerated works in Italy,” she said.

She claims to be tormented, from an ethical point of view, as to whether or not she exploits her subjects.

That issue has been very much in the public domain since the release last year of a documentary by Pietra Brettkelly, “The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins,” that chronicles Beecroft’s unsuccessful attempt to adopt a couple of orphaned babies that she’d breast-fed during a 2006 trip to Sudan. (It’s a long story.) The documentary leaves open the question whether Ms. Beecroft is just another adoption-obsessed celebrity of the Angelina Jolie or Madonna ilk, a postmodern colonialist, or is sincerely concerned about giving the twins a better life.

Although she allowed Ms. Brettkelly to film her for 16 months, Ms. Beecroft has now distanced herself from the film, claiming that it only tells a partial story.

Read more about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/arts/26iht-beecroft.html?pagewanted=2&ref=arts

Artwork... As Collateral?

ARTmostfierce found this article and could not believe what he was reading.This article titled That Old Master? Its at the Pawnshop by Allen Salkin of the NY Times is quite telling.Please read.

Last fall, Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, borrowed $5 million from a company called Art Capital Group. In December, she borrowed $10.5 million more from the same firm. As collateral, among other items, she used town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs.


Photgrapher Annie Leibovitz

Julian Schnabel turned to an art lender when building Palazzo Chupi in Greenwich Village, later borrowing against his artwork with a bank.

By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: February 23, 2009

In other words, according to loan documents filed with the city, one of the world’s most successful photographers essentially pawned every snap of the shutter she had made or will make until the loans are paid off.

Those who know Ms. Leibovitz said she used the money to pay off mortgages and deal with other financial stresses. But whatever her reasons, she is not alone in doing business with Art Capital and similar lenders. At a time when stock portfolios are plunging and many homes, even grand ones, have no equity left to borrow against, an increasing number of art owners are realizing that an Old Master or a prime photograph, when used as collateral, can bring in much-needed cash.

“It’s very discreet,” said Ian Peck, a co-owner of Art Capital.

This little-known corner of the art business is lightly regulated and highly litigious. But this has not dissuaded clients who have included rich collectors like Veronica Hearst, art galleries and prominent artists themselves, including Ms. Leibovitz and Julian Schnabel.

Art Capital’s headquarters in the former Sotheby’s building on Madison Avenue looks at first glance like an art gallery. Two Warhols, a pair of Rubens portraits of Roman emperors and a pink nude by the contemporary Mexican painter Victor Rodriguez hang on the cool white walls. A sculpture of a faun by Rembrandt Bugatti sits on a windowsill in a conference room where transactions are discussed.

But it would be more accurate to describe the airy space as something far less genteel: a pawnshop.

Art Capital issues loans of $500,000 or more at interest rates from 6 percent to 16 percent. Fail to pay and you lose your Rubens; several of the works on display in Art Capital’s office on Madison became subject to sale after their owners defaulted.

The company expects to make about $120 million in art-related loans in 2009, up from $80 million in 2008. At a Manhattan-based competitor, Art Finance Partners, “we are up 40 percent in originations in the last six months,” said Meghan Carleton, a partner.

ArtLoan, a similar company in San Francisco, is actually regulated by California’s pawn laws. It opened in 2004 and has seen “exponential” growth in the last year even though it charges interest rates of 18 percent to 24 percent, said Ray Parker Gaylord, an owner.

“It’s a very rough-and-tumble corner of the business,” said Marc Porter, who heads the American operations of Christie’s auction house. Christie’s and Sotheby’s also offer loans against fine art but focus on bridge loans to customers who have pledged their art for planned auctions.

“For years, one of the reasons this wasn’t an especially big business is that everyone was getting money for something else,” Mr. Porter said. “It was easy money everywhere. But now people are looking to every asset they have to unlock cash.”

ArtLoan prefers to make loans on items that are physically small and thus easy to store or to ship to auction houses and dealers in case of a default. A recent loan was for $115,000 against a collection that included an early 20th-century bronze sculpture, a 19th-century Persian carpet and a Swiss music box.

Art lenders typically lend up to 40 percent of what they appraise the artworks to be worth, and usually take possession of the works.

A former investment banker in New York, who spoke anonymously because he did not want friends to know his financial situation, is sending six modern paintings to ArtLoan, hoping to borrow $50,000 against them to finance a business venture. His former company’s stock, which he was given as part of his annual bonuses, has gone from the high $70s a share to $22, he said.

“At this point, I’ve been not working for a year and a half,” he said. “I have a choice, which is sell part of my art collection, which when I first left my job in 2007 was an option because the art market was strong, but like all markets it has gone south. Now I can take a loan without having to sell at a discount.”

For her $5 million loan, Ms. Leibovitz put up as collateral a country house in Rhinebeck, N.Y., three town houses in Greenwich Village and all “copyrights ... photographic negatives ... contract rights” existing or to be created in the future, according to a loan document filed with the City Register’s Office in December. That month, Art Capital granted her an additional $10.5 million loan, which was to consolidate the existing mortgages on her homes, according to loan documents.

Please read more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/arts/design/24artloans.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/02/25/photographer-annie-leibovitz-overexposed-is-forced-to-sell-her/

The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!

Just in case you missed the Sunday NY Times please, read this article by Holland Cotter. I am partying my ass off this weekend so (still chasing cupid) and having a good time at it. Only food, gym , sex and party for me this holiday.Good medicine for stress...and for the soul!

Enjoy!

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: February 12, 2009
LAST year Artforum magazine, one of the country’s leading contemporary art monthlies, felt as fat as a phone book, with issues running to 500 pages, most of them gallery advertisements. The current issue has just over 200 pages. Many ads have disappeared.



Sotheby’s/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Damien Hirst’s “Golden Calf” sold for $18.6 million last year, but the art climate has changed.



The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing. Careers are leaking air. Chelsea rents are due. The boom that was is no more.

Anyone with memories of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing.

The diminishment has not, God knows, been quantitative. Never has there been so much product. Never has the American art world functioned so efficiently as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model.

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

Many of those specialists are, directly or indirectly, on the industry payroll, which is controlled by another set of personnel: the dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and — crucial in the era of art fairs — event planners who represent the industry’s marketing and sales division. They are the people who scan school rosters, pick off fresh talent, direct careers and, by some inscrutable calculus, determine what will sell for what.

Not that these departments are in any way separated; ethical firewalls are not this industry’s style. Despite the professionalization of the past decade, the art world still likes to think of itself as one big Love Boat. Night after night critics and collectors scarf down meals paid for by dealers promoting artists, or museums promoting shows, with everyone together at the table, schmoozing, stroking, prodding, weighing the vibes.

And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

The ideas don’t vary much. For a while we heard a lot about the radicalism of Beauty; lately about the subversive politics of aestheticized Ambiguity. Whatever, it is all market fodder. The trend reached some kind of nadir on the eve of the presidential election, when the New Museum trotted out, with triumphalist fanfare, an Elizabeth Peyton painting of Michelle Obama and added it to the artist’s retrospective. The promotional plug for the show was obvious. And the big political statement? That the art establishment voted Democratic.

Art in New York has not, of course, always been so anodyne an affair, and will not continue to be if a recession sweeps away such collectibles and clears space for other things. This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case it has been artists who have reshaped the game.

The first real contemporary boom was in the early 1960s, when art decisively stopped being a coterie interest and briefly became an adjunct to the entertainment industry. Cash was abundant. Pop was hot. And the White House was culture conscious enough to create the National Endowment for the Arts so Americans wouldn’t keeping looking, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., like “money-grubbing materialists.”

The boom was short. The Vietnam War and racism were ripping the country apart. The economy tanked. In the early ’70s New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, bleeding money and jobs. With virtually no commercial infrastructure for experimental art in place, artists had to create their own marginal, bootstrap model.

They moved, often illegally, into the derelict industrial area now called SoHo, and made art from what they found there. Trisha Brown choreographed dances for factory rooftops; Gordon Matta-Clark turned architecture into sculpture by slicing out pieces of walls. Everyone treated the city as a found object.

Please read more by clicking below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/arts/design/15cott.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th

Poster Boy Is Caught, or Is It a Stand-In?

Photo-Poster BOY in action!

ARTmostfierce for quite a while , has seen the work of Poster Boy mostly in the 8th Avenue 23rd St C& E train stop in Chelsea . I must tell you ...the collages are brilliant,hilarious and so are its messages.Reminiscent of Keith Haring and Basquiat but,in a more contemporary and newer technique. I find so silly that the Police Department is wasting time and tax money , like they did with Keith Haring, (he was arrested so many times) chasing a guy that his work is so cool. At first glance, you can't even notice that the advertising sign was altered.It is a joy for me to see the work and I tried to peel it from the wall and take it home. Maybe next time I see the guys putting new ones...
Anyway Randy Kennedy from the NY Times wrote about Poster Boy. Watch out Bansky...we got something good across the pond...
Watch him in action!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21iVQ0iXs00

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: February 3, 2009
If you’ve been half-awake in the subway sometime in the last year or so and thought you noticed two guys drowning in a glass of beer in a Michelob ad, or saw an ad for a television program about the Drug Enforcement Administration altered to say, “Iran: Every Deal Can Turn Deadly,” or that familiar subway door sign reworded to read, “Do Not Lean on Poor,” you have most likely seen the work of Poster Boy.

While most other street or graffiti artists concentrate on adding their own imagery, illegally, to parts of the subway system, Poster Boy, a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade, a sense of humor and a talent for collage, has made his outlaw presence known all over the city by cutting and pasting the images that are already there in the form of ads.

But his stealth campaign, which has entertained thousands of normally glassy-eyed commuters and infuriated the police and the companies whose costly ads he has chopped up and scrambled, will probably get a lot harder now. At an art event in SoHo on Saturday, a group of plainclothes New York City police officers finally caught up to and unmasked, at least metaphorically, the man they say is Poster Boy.

He is Henry Matyjewicz, a 27-year-old who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and he was found after a tip from someone who saw the name Poster Boy on a flier for the event, the police said.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that Mr. Matyjewicz (pronounced Mat-ee-YAY-veetch), who was also being sought on a warrant for a petty larceny charge from last year, was arrested in the art space, at Broadway and Howard Street in SoHo, and charged with two misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief.

“The officers had information that he was, in fact, going to be at that gallery that night,” Mr. Browne said, adding that he believed that the department had evidence of Mr. Matyjewicz at work scrambling parts of subway posters. (Although his face is obscured, there is also plentiful video of Poster Boy doing his thing at friendswelove.com and on YouTube.)

But a man identifying himself as “Henry,” who called The New York Times on Tuesday in response to messages for Poster Boy sent through friends, cast some existential doubt on whether Mr. Matyjewicz was, in fact, the man the police were after.

“Henry is one of many individuals who believe in the Poster Boy ‘movement,’ ” the man wrote later on Tuesday in an e-mail message, referring to Mr. Matyjewicz in the third person. “Henry’s part is to do legal artwork while propagating the ideas behind Poster Boy. That’s why it was O.K. for him to take the fall the other night.”

He added, “Henry Matyjewicz is innocent.”

Moni Pineda, a co-creator and producer for Friends We Love, a New York documentary video series that profiles young artists, said that she and the series’s other creator, Mike Vargas, had just begun a benefit event in the SoHo space on Saturday evening when they noticed a commotion involving a person Ms. Pineda would identify only as “a friend,” adding, “Poster Boy could be anybody.”

“The police came into a private event,” Ms. Pineda said. “They didn’t show a warrant to me or anybody. And the next thing we know, our friend is walking out with a bunch of guys we didn’t know.”

Ms. Pineda said she and others came up with bail for their friend, but not before he had been transferred to Rikers Island, where he stayed before being released in the wee hours of Monday morning.

In one of his YouTube videos, Poster Boy says that he started rearranging subway ads because he wanted to make art but could not afford materials. “I mean, a razor pretty much anybody can afford,” he says.

His work grows out of a wave of remix culture that has inspired many young artists and musicians over the last decade, though in Poster Boy’s case it is decidedly analog. And he would like to see the idea spread, he wrote on Tuesday in a series of answers to e-mailed questions.

“Socially, I’d like people to understand that there is a difference between what is right and what is just,” he said. “If there is a law that is outdated, impractical, and/or immoral, people should have the right to challenge it. Remember, slavery was considered legal at one point. I consider the world’s current modus operandi a modern slave system. I intend to challenge it in any way I can.”

In a recent interview with Gothamist.com, Poster Boy bragged that the police vandal squad officers had been “hounding” him for his autograph. He added that he had begun moving on to more ambitious — and, legally, probably riskier — projects involving whole billboards and, mysteriously, “something planned that, if successful, will make the poster and billboard stuff look trivial.”

On Tuesday Poster Boy said that Mr. Matyjewicz’s arrest meant only good things for Poster Boy. “More awareness,” he wrote in the e-mail interview . “More support. Outdoor advertising, a blight that can’t be ignored, will become illegal.”

Yet Ms. Pineda, who said she had seen her friend on Monday after his release from jail, said he might have to reassess his plans in light of his looming legal problems.

“He believes in what he’s doing,” she said. “He still has a lot to say. But I don’t think even he knows how things are going to shape up.”

“And again,” she made a point to add, “Poster Boy can be anybody.”