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Art Carny, Part 3: The Price of Frame

What to even caption this? image via austrianfineart.com

In 2016, Luna Luna organizer André Heller consigned a forged Jean-Michel Basquiat work to a very respectable dealer in Vienna, who made a pitchbook for it and took it to TEFAF in 2017. Heller made a frame out of painted broomsticks studded with nails, and bound together with twine. Heller cut up some of Basquiat’s little sketches that Heller had enlarged for the artist’s Luna Luna ferris wheel, collaged them around the frame, and then painted over them. Heller put a Basquiat head, a work on paper he bought in 1990 from Robert Miller Gallery, in the forged frame.

They were presented together, and available separately, as separate works: Untitled (1983) and Untitled (Frame) 1987. At TEFAF the drawing was $2 million, and the frame was $3 million. In the dealer’s catalogue for the work, Heller was interviewed by curator Dieter Buchhart, a leading expert on Basquiat, who asked repeatedly for details and context about the creation of the frame. Over and over, Heller spoke specifically, to make it sound like Basquiat made it, without explicitly saying he did. He talked about the idea, how he helped with the nails, because there were so many. It was part of the collaboration for Luna Luna. Heller connected the frame to Vodou, and said that Basquiat considered it an altar.

The drawing sold after TEFAF, and then the frame to go with it, for EUR800,000. At some point, the whole thing started to unravel, as Basquiat’s former assistant, and later Buchhart, called bullshit on the frame. Heller bought it back, unwinding the deal before it hit the media, and caught the attention of Viennese authorities, who decided not to pursue the fraud. Heller dismissed his actions as a “childish prank,” and his statements to Buchhart as an attempt to trip up a self-proclaimed Basquiat expert. He tried to get out of his forgery hole by saying he’d always just presented the frame as *A* frame with Basquiat drawings stuck to it, but his buyer called bullshit on that.

And so did Heller himself. Here [pdf] is the interview he arranged with Buchhart, published by the dealer he consigned with, to sell the forged Basquiat concoction he made and lied about. There was a lot of bullshit flying around the world in 2016, and this interview is definitely some of it.

And all of this was coming out literally at the moment Live Nation was buying Luna Luna and extracting it from its shipping containers for the first time in decades. So wild.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wienerbroither & Kollbacher [pdf, aws/amazon]
2022: A work attributed to Basquiat at TEFAF was made by André Heller [artnews]
2023: Viennese prosecutors drop investigation into artist who forged Basquiat painting’s frame as a ‘prank’ [artnews]

Art Carny, Part 2: Birch, Please

When we last saw Luna Luna, the 1987 art amusement park recently reopened in Los Angeles after spending the last 37 years in a bunch of shipping containers in fields in Vienna and Texas, one thing seemed clear: Drake did not spend $100 million to buy it from its previous owners, the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation.

But the $100 million price is sort of unfair, a cheat, a third-round shorthand that was meant to get repeated in the same breath as Luna Luna and Drake. When the NYT first half-reported on Live Nation’s project, introduced to them by the Mugrabis, of bringing Luna Luna to Drake, the figure was floated as the “overall investment” that was “approaching $100 million.” What if it was the Mugrabis who tracked down Luna Luna at the Birch Foundation’s ranchette, made a deal for it, and flipped it, Yves Bouvier-to-Ryobolovlev-style, for a nice profit?

The Birch Foundation’s 990 filings with the IRS show that they sold the Luna Luna assets in 2022 for $15 million, $1.8 million below the “market value” carried on their balance sheet. So they actually lost money on their collection of Basquiats, Harings, and their Hockney, Dali, and Lichtenstein pavilions, at least on paper. Not-for-profit indeed. But they did still get $15 million in cash, right? Where’d that go?

While trying to figure out the details of Luna Luna’s history between its hype launch in 1987 by André Heller, and it’s re-emergence with Live Nation & Drake, two sidebar stories kept jumping into view: the first is Heller’s near miss with forgery charges. Heller tried to turn a minor Basquiat drawing into a major “Basquiat Artwork” by collaging the artist’s little sketches for his Luna Luna monkey butt ferris wheel onto a crude Africanist frame. He sold the work, then scrambled to buy it back when the heat was on, and then tried to blow off the whole thing as a “prank.”

The second, is the giant WTF that is the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation, and how did they end up with an agreement in 1990 to buy Luna Luna from Heller in the first place? We could ask André Heller, but I think the answer to the first question is also the answer to the second: the Birch Foundation is a giant pile of money and vast tracts of land under the complete and unaccountable control of one or two people who use it for what they want.

Art Carny, Part 1: Hundred. Million Dollars

Screenshot from Luna Luna dot com, with an adaptation of Sabine Sarnitz’ 1987 aerial photo of Luna Luna installed in Hamburg

So Luna Luna is now a Drake joint, and it is open in Los Angeles. In the year-plus since news of the art amusement park’s re-emergence for the first time since its brief debut in Hamburg in 1987, the number being floated is $100 million. $100 million for a one-of-a-kind, first-ever, long-lost traveling carnival filled with rides and games designed by art stars like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenny Scharf, Salvador Dali…Sonia Delaunay…Jörg Immendorff…Georg Baselitz…did I mention Kenny Scharf? The list of 38 artists Viennese artist André Heller wrangled [actually 37, plus himself] was split neatly between famous artists and famous in Austria artists.

Sabine Sarnit’z 1987 aerial view of Luna Luna, first shot for Neue Revue, provided by the new Luna Luna Entity to the NYT

Heller worked from 1985-87 to make Luna Luna happen. It feels the initial $350,000 grant [sponsorship?] from Neue Revue, a German magazine, would have been eaten up by the $10,000 honorarium each artist was supposedly paid. And that’s before fabrication. It does sound like Heller had a rickety old traveling carnival at hand, so maybe all that was left was Viennese scenery painters blowing up artists’ sketches. [Heller claimed Delaunay “discussed her ideas” for a gateway to the park before she died in 1979, which “Heller’s artisans” realized. Or created from scratch. But let’s circle back to that.] It opened in a Hamburg park, had 250,000 visitors, according, I assume, to Heller, and was set to travel the world bring peace or whatever. It didn’t happen.

From 356 Mission To Luna Luna

I woke up this morning thinking about the Boyle Heights anti-gentrification protests against 356 Mission, the studio/exhibition/performance space run by artist Laura Owens and bookstore owner Wendy Yao, with support from Gavin Brown, that preceded, if not precipitated, the project’s closure in 2018.

It’s just a couple of minutes walk from 356, south toward the Instagram Influencer Bridge, past the Explore Vatican Immersive Sistine Chapel Experience, to Luna Luna, the Artist Carnival Immersive Experience Drake just installed in a 60,000 square-foot soundstage that’s part of the 18-acre property being assembled by Anderson Real Estate, which owns and manages 4.5 million square feet of commercial properties in California, Hawaii, and the US Virgin Islands.

Happy Public Domain Day To All Who Celebrate

Maybe it’ll take more than a few hours for Mickey Mouse to make a meaningful mark on the public domain. In the mean time, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University Law School has an extensive list of texts, art, films, music, and recordings that entered the public domain today.

Top on my list, at least, is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. And it’s interesting that both W.E.B. DuBois’ uplifting international romance Dark Princess and Claude McKay’s gritty street novel Home to Harlem are listed together; DuBois hated McKay’s book.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is probably the most significant non-rodent-related film to be freed this year. And for music composition, it’s probably Mack the Knife, originally published as part of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (which is also now public domain.)

There are many, many more works in various copyright registries, most unknown, or underknown, and ready for rediscovery. Life starts at 95.

January 1, 2024 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923! [law.duke.edu]
Previously, related: The Greg Gatsby, 2021

MTA Monochromes

Keith Haring drawing at 42nd St, 1983, photo by Makoto Murata via twixnmix via scavengedluxury via wernerherzoghaircut

Seeing these photos of Keith Haring drawing on the subway platform on my tumblr dashboard this morning, I was struck for the first time by the pristine surface of his background.

Did the MTA really have a street team installing fresh black monochromes on unsold ad spaces while the rest of the system buckled? How long did they stay clean? Did they go up on a schedule? Did Keith have to rush out on the first of the month to beat other street artists to the empty space? Did Richard Serra ever make drawings in the subway, or did he just make a lifetime of drawings of the subway? Subway Delivers People.

Did anyone take photos of subway stations with all black monochrome ad units, or was it the de facto state that became invisible to people who had to deal with it?

Keith Haring in the subway at 42nd at 8th, I think, photo: Ivan Dalla Tana via NYT, but the Haring Foundation has a ton of his photos of subway drawings, including a lot of diptychs with ads

[after 30 seconds of googling update: yeah nevermind, Haring’s subway landscape was not a monochrome’d out paradise. It looked a lot like it’s always looked, with occasional blacked out ad boards interspersed among actual ads. Which would make his tagging more opportunistic. He probably didn’t have to look too hard for space, but it wasn’t everywhere all the time.]

Goodbye 2023

I hate that this needed to come back: *Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors*, 2021 —

NGL, it does not feel like a moment to celebrate, and it’ll take a lot of work for 2024 to not become the biggest dumpster fire yet.

But whether via email, commentary, hyping or buying things, many people have engaged with me, the blog, and the various projects this year, and I’m grateful for all of the thoughtful and invigorating interactions. To close out the year, here are a couple of art accomplishments in 2023 which I found satisfying. They are in roughly chronological order:

Celebrating Ellsworth Kelly’s 100th: *EK 10 MAR 23 T* [via]

Biggest show of the year: *Mural With Girl With A Pearl*, obv [via]

Meanwhile, in this, year three of me swearing I’m not a dog painting guy: *Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre Facsimile Object (D1), ‘Pompon’*, obv [via]

*Underground Projection Room (for Rattlesnakes)*, 2023 [via]

*Proposed Katharina Grosse (PKG)* for Basel, 2023 [via]

*The Second Deposition of Richard Prince*, 2023—? [via]

le Cube d’Alberto Giacometti

So when I saw this, the earliest photo of Cube, which was taken in Alberto Giacometti’s studio by Man Ray and published in Minotaure in 1934 under the title Nocturnal Pavilion, float by on a timeline somewhere, I thought, hell yeah I’ll repost that. Just let me read Georges Didi-Huberman’s book about it, Le Cube et le Visage, first, for a little value-add.

Four months later update: Wow, seriously? How does art writing like this exist? What is that headspace even like? Maybe I should have just stuck with the old wall text from the Pompidou, which holds one of the two plaster versions of the 94cm tall sculpture that gave Didi-Huberman so much trouble. And, tbf, Giacometti before him.

Henry Codecs

[L to R] Henry Codax, *Lemonade 1*, *Strawberry 1*, *Lemonade 2*, *Strawberry 2*, all 2017, all 7’x3.5′, all acrylic on canvas, as installed in “Strawberry Lemonade,” 2017-18 at Everybody, Tucson, Arizona

I confess I thought Henry Codex’s project had fizzled out, when in fact, I had just lost the thread. Since 2017 Codax has had solo shows in Zürich, Paris, and Tucson—twice. This morning Joshua Caleb Weibley skeeted some begrudging praise for Tucson gallery Everybody’s second Codax exhibition, which is currently on view.

Installation view of Henry Codax’s 2023-24 exhibition at Everybody

Unlike the first, “Strawberry Lemonade,” which was staged in Everybody’s original warehouse situation, this untitled show of untitled works fills Everybody’s current murdered-out bungalow space. For an artist known [sic] for large, pristinely executed monochromes, these new paintings, as the gallery’s terse press release notes, “mark a shift in the artist’s approach.” Well, yes and no.

On The First Photographs of Manet’s Olympia

Édouard Manet’s *Portrait of Émile Zola*, 1868, 146.5 x 114 cm, from the Musée d’Orsay, at the Met

NGL, it was not until I saw this painting of one last week at the Met that I started wondering about photographs of Manet’s Olympia.

Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon (1959) by Robert Brownjohn

Robert Brownjohn’s *Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon*, 1959, seen from inside the lobby of 500 Park Avenue, via Peter Huestis’ skeet

Designer/adman Robert Brownjohn had been pumping up the design of Pepsi-Cola World, the monthly corporate magazine sent to bottlers, for a couple of years when he was commissioned to create a sculpture for the lobby of the company’s soon-to-open world headquarters at 500 Park Avenue.

Robert Brownjohn, *Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon*, chicken wire and Christmas ornaments, Dec. 1959, detail, installed at 500 Park Ave., image: robertbrownjohn.com

The result was Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon, described by Brownjohn’s official site as “a giant wave supported by pilotti” which was “elaborately constructed with thousands of multi-coloured Christmas baubles embedded in an armature of chicken wire.”

Robert Brownjohn, *Pepsi-Cola Christmas Ribbon*, chicken wire and Christmas ornaments, Dec. 1959, exterior view, installed at 500 Park Ave., image: robertbrownjohn.com

From the exterior views on Brownjohn’s site, the sculpture seems to have filled almost the entire 100-foot wide facade of Natalie de Blois’ building. The Pepsi-Cola Building is, along with Lever House, the Seagram Building, and the Manufacturers Trust Building (510 Fifth Ave.), one the greatest International Style building in New York. It is certainly the most quietly elegant.

Ezra Stoller, *Pepsi-Cola Building, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1960*, silver gelatin print, 20×16 in., ed. 20 +4AP, via Yossi Milo

The lobby, entirely open, was originally designed as an exhibition space, but no exhibition mentioned in the building’s history sounds remotely as successful as Robert Brownjohn’s chicken wire sculpture that went on view for a couple of months before the building even opened. And which I had never heard a peep about until this morning, when Peter Huestis posted it on BlueSky.

Virtual Mural With Girl With A Pearl

*Mural With Girl With A Pearl*, 2023, paint on plaster, Vermeer painting, as installed at Rijksmuseum

It was the exhibition of the year, and it was truly an unexpected honor to be a part of it. The Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition lives online in a 360-degree panoramic version, and I’m thrilled to confirm that Mural With Girl With A Pearl (2023) can also still be experienced and studied virtually.

Like the Vermeer it incorporates, Mural With Girl With A Pearl deploys paint to hint at a spatial complexity that extends beyond the field of vision. And it also relies on subtle shifts of light to activate its painterly gestures. That these nuances can be communicated in the mediated experience of the virtual pseudo-space is truly a testament to the enduring magic of painting.

Vermeer 360 [rikjsmuseum.nl thanks Alain Servais]
Previously: Mural With Girl With A Pearl (2023)

Basket II by Marie Laurencin

On Bluesky, Michael Lobel keeps ringing the dog painting bell, and I keep salivating. Friday morning he posted this photo of Gertrude Stein sitting with her and Alice B. Toklas’ dog, holding a portrait of the dog by Marie Laurencin. Stein and Toklas had three dogs in succession, all named Basket. This was Basket II.

Marie Laurencin, Basket II, n.d., oil on canvas, probably 20 x 16 in., in the Stein/Toklas Papers collection at the Beinecke

The painting is in the Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas Papers collection at the Beinecke Library, and has not, as yet, been transferred to the Yale Art Gallery. [next day update: I was wrong. The painting is indeed on permanent loan to the Gallery. Who nevertheless does not show it in their collection.]

There is no date. Laurencin came into Stein’s orbit as early as 1908-1910, during her (Laurencin’s obv) affairs with Apollinaire and Nicole Groult. Basket I makes many appearances in the second and fourth albums of Stein’s photographs in the Beinecke, the mid- to late 1930s. Basket II appears in Vol. 4. Oh, the photo above is from Vol. 5, which dates from 1940-1945, and includes soldiers’ photos of a burned out Berchtesgaden. So this presumably follows Laurencin’s rehabilitation after her affairs with the Nazis during the occupation. The verso of the photo has a label, “From tHe CollECtioN Of CaRl VAN VecHten.”

[Next day update: from the published letters between Stein & Van Vechten, the portrait was painted in 1946, before March. Stein sent Van Vechten a photo; was it this one? The photo is well-published, if thinly discussed.]

There is also in the collection a one-page object from 1950 titled, Hommage à Basket : an impression, by Surrealist instigator Lise Deharme, which includes a portrait by Laurencin. Posthumous to Stein, of course, but perhaps relevant.

What I Saw: Manhattan Speedrun

self-portrait in Liz Deschenes’ *Untitled (Gorilla Glass Indigo 100)*, 2023 at Miguel Abreu

I had a speedrun through Manhattan to pick up some gifts and see some shows, starting with Gravity Pull, Liz Deschenes’ beautiful show of monochromes on Gorilla Glass in the morning light, plus some handblown Claude Glass-inspired pictures? Objects? Optical devices? Transfixing.

The Shekvetili Dendrological Park: Land Art For Oligarchs

Still from Salomé Jashi’s *Taming The Garden*, 2021, showing a giant tree on the Black Sea en route to Ivanishvili’s private tree zoo. images via a German-titled arte broadcast uploaded to YouTube

In 2021 Georgian filmmaker Salomé Jashi released Taming The Garden, a documentary about the creation of the Shekvetili Dendrological Park. Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian oligarch-turned-politician who minted his $6 billion fortune in Russia, spent five years collecting over 200 old-growth trees from around the country, which he had transplanted in a park of his own design next to his estate on the Black Sea. The park opened to the public in 2020.

Residents of a Georgian village follow their tree as it drives out of town in *Taming The Garden*, along a route with probably 90% fewer infrastructure hassles or regulatory hoops to jump through than that rock had to face on its way to LACMA

In her film, Jashi follows several trees as they are removed from the village s, farms, and forests where they’ve been for centuries. She records the resignation and loss of the locals, as well as the surreal transport of the uprooted trees along rural roads, and on barges. The filmmaking is quietly powerful, with dramatic images that only reveal the project’s traumas and absurdities and slowly.

NO SPOILERS but Jashi’s quiet revelations of the sheer artificiality of this ostensibly idyllic natural landscape are amazing

A 2022 dispatch from Ivan Nechepurenko in the New York Times, with striking photos by Daro Sulaukari, reports that around half the trees arrived by sea, and half by truck. The entire project cost Ivanishvili “tens of millions” of dollars, which seems like a pittance for what he did and what he got.

Robert Smithson’s *Floating Island*, 2005, image via NYT

Why, in 2005, when Nancy Holt authorized Floating Island, a previously unrealized project of her late husband, Robert Smithson, it cost $250,000 to drive a single barge around lower Manhattan for a week.

A miniature version of *The Gates* chasing a miniature version of Central Park, by, as it turned out, Bruce High Quality Foundation and Robert Smithson, respectively, as captured by Ian Adelman in 2005 in the NYT

I guess I should be more shocked, surprised, dismayed, whatever that Land Art, created in opposition to the collector-pandering commodification of the gallery system, has been so thoroughly subsumed by the billionaire class. But then again, Double Negative was produced and owned by a 3M heiress who donated the first version of Lightning Field, realized on her New Mexico ranch, to the foundation started by the oil heiress which built the permanent version. And which now manages Spiral Jetty. And of course, it was New York’s own oligarch-turned-politician Michael Bloomberg who made Christo & Jeanne Claude’s Gates happen. And the industrialist with the private museum has taken on the care and funding of City. Is Land Art actually about real estate and power? Always was.

“For me, a floating tree was a symbol of power, of desire, of wanting something at any cost,” Ms. Jashi told the NYT. If Land Art can accommodate the Department of Defense’s creations at Dugway Proving Grounds, the cost-be-damned symbolic gestures of a tree-obsessed oligarch should fit right in.