real estate – greg.org

Rockefeller Blur, 2018

a 2018 real estate listing photo of the 2nd floor living room of david and peggy rockefellers' extremely wide east 65th st townhouse shows wood paneled walls, a giant persian carpet, several seating areas with antique chairs and upholstered sofas, a lot of table lamps, tall casement windows, a built in bookcase in one corner, a thin chandelier in the center of the unadorned ceiling, which is nonetheless surrounded by a thick af carved wood crown moulding, but the point here is, the painting over the fireplace at the far end of the room is blurred out with a terra cotta square, and the painting between the windows on the north wall, over a yellow sofa, is blurred out, too. both these pictures were for sale at the same time as the house though, so wtf? the first is a bonnard, the second a corot. — 2018 real estate listing photo of the Rockefellers’ E 65th St living room with a Bonnard [L] and a Corot [R] obscured

In 2018, while I was still in my late blur and middle monochrome and real estate eras, I conceived a project that would realize all the blurred artworks in the real estate listing for Peggy and David Rockefeller’s extrawide townhouse on East 65th Street. I’d seen digitally blurred art from MoMA before. I’d seen significant art obscured in real estate listings before. But I had not seen the same art that had been photographed in situ before, being blurred in a real estate listing, at the same moment it was being promoted and sold in the biggest private collection sale in Christie’s history.

a pic of the rockefeller's 65th st living room with cezanne's boy in a red vest, a 1955 gift to moma, with some strings, hanging between two red curtained tall windows and over a yellow sofa. table lamps on various chippendale pie crust tables give the whole wood palneled room a golden glow. there is an ancient figure of a seated pipe player of some kind in the corner, i didn't look it up. this is already going on too long — Cezanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat, a 1955 gift to MoMA, but not yet; the Rockefellers kept an interest in the work until their deaths, and it came home with them from time to time. via Christie’s, I think

So I went through the listing, the auction, and other documentation of the Rockefellers’ house to identify everything, so that each work would be the correct dimension and appearance. No slapdash conceptualism here; authenticity rules. So the Bonnard Interieur over the fireplace and a Corot to occupy the spot between the windows when the Cezanne is at the Modern. [The Rockefellers retained a life interest in the works they donated to museums, so they could keep them around.]

the rockefellers entry hallway and foyer where the curved staircase is set in an arched niche, but the parquet floor has some carpet on it, and the furniture is american antique because the house is colonial revival, like the rockefellers themselves i guess, but this is where the manet vase of lilacs was hanging, on the right, though it's been replaced here by a redon which is blurred out in this real estate listing, both were clearly presented at christies — 2018 real estate listing photo of the Rockefellers’ foyer with ten blurred out artworks including a Picasso by the stairs and a Redon on the right.

Though I mapped out the project, 30 works, I was undecided on the best way to realize the blurred works. Transmuting such digital-first source material into another medium has been a challenge since the first blurred and pixellated and pano-torqued images appeared on Google Maps and Streetview. But the Facsimile Object-style dye sublimated prints on aluminum seem promising. I just found my 2018 spreadsheet this morning, though, so it’ll take me a minute to reorient myself to this project.

Meanwhile, I have posted some pics of the pointless flipper renovation of the house that the Rockefellers lived in for 69 years on bluesky.

Unrealized Rockefeller Diptych (1650-2018); Untitled (Love, Henry) (2018)

They Photoshopped Dianne Feinstein’s Pool

Dianne Feinstein’s house is for sale, and it includes a pool, where her aides probably said she went swimming every day.

Study for Blue Panel (Ground Zero), 2024, jpg

Meanwhile, the ghost of Ellsworth Kelly says to expand the court.

Nebelmeer, Nebelmeer

a real estate listing photo of the living room of a townhouse in georgetown using staged furniture and a giant inkjet on canvas version of friedrich's wanderer, a 19th century flaneur on a mountain outcropping, with his back to the painter and viewer as he surveys a foggy mountain landscape before and below him. the wall behind this fake art is painted baby blue, which inadvertently complements the friedrich, because it's not like they'd let a stager paint it that color, right? anyway, i have declared this installation a work in itself, and am ready to repeat it somewhere for public enlightment and entertaining — *Untitled (Nebelmeer)*, 2024, 48 x 48 in., paint on canvas, installed on a wall painted in complementary Benjamin Moore color with a suitably atmospheric name, via zillow

In what, from the finishes, looks like the early 90s, A police station in Georgetown was converted into two townhouses. One of them is being sold with help from a little known version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea and Fog. The H on the throw on the sofa stands for Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Previously, related: Monochrome House, 2016
Untitled (A Painting for Two Rooms by Cactus Cantina), 2017
Untitled (Blurred Frida), 2020
LMAO I have works like this that I haven’t even posted, just grabbed the MLS image and declared it, talk about tree falling in the forest

Welcome To The Marfa of The Mined

I listen to Proof, a podcast about NFTs by entrepreneur/collector Kevin Rose, with co-host Derek Edwards Schloss. It emerges from a world full of bullshit as a sincere, well-versed discussion. But, ngl, sometimes I just sit back and soak in the vocab, letting the effusive wordstream wash over me.

The current episode features an absolutely en fuego conversation with another collector/investor Todd Goldberg, and it is just an all-cylinders-firing romp through the topics of smart investing during the crypto and NFT market collapse, and the embers of generative, on-chain innovation that will surely rise from the ashes to set the art world on fire anew. These guys are sharp, confident and on point the whole time, speedrunning a game I do not play.

And in this game is a place called Marfa, which inhabits the same X, Y, Z coordinates as the Marfa I am quite familiar with. Last year the generative art platform Art Blocks brought the NFT circus to town when founder Snowfro put on an IRL show in a gallery/space/house that is now their headquarters? Anyway, I was so fascinated by their description and experience of Marfa, I transcribed it below. It starts around 28:00, but seriously, however far you back it up for context, you’ll just find literary and informational gold.

The Whitney House

Bring your conservator! image: GSV last month, slightly altered

I have never been able to understand* why the Whitney hates the Whitney so much that they moved out, but they do, and they did. And now, as Katya Kazakina reports at artnet , there’s talk of selling it when the Met’s lease runs out in 2023.

[June 2023 UPDATE: They sold it to Sotheby’s, for around $100 million, a pittance for an iconic UES townhouse.]

If you lived here, you’d be home now. image: GSV, 2018

Of course, there was talk of selling the building in 2008, too, when the plan to build in the Meatpacking District was a thing. Those rumors were floated and batted down immediately, but also repeatedly, in the Times. Now, with the Met a mess and not exercising the purchase option Kazakina reports was in their original 8-year lease, and the Frick just subletting while its own building is renovated, the question is no longer, “Is it for sale?” but “How much could they get, and who would buy it?” [Or as Kazakina actually put it, “Now, the multi-million-dollar question is: If the building is sold, can it be developed?”]

my 2008 shoutout to Elmgreen & Dragset the first/last time the Whitney went on the whisper market

Kazakina’s list of hypothetical buyers includes a random country, Sotheby’s new owner Patrick Drahi, a future Larry Gagosian foundation, or a condo tower developer** who’d want to turn Marcel Breuer’s museum into “a really ritzy gym.” Which is all well and good–or spiraling levels of cringe, depending, obv–but which also misses the most obvious solution: turn Breuer’s Whitney into a house.

Untitled (Blurred Frida), 2020

Sometimes it feels like I find these works, and sometimes it feels like they find me. Now [gesturing around at the world] is definitely one of those times where I’ve been actively not, and yet I see a work like this, installed like this, and srsly, what am I supposed to do?

Untitled (Blurred Frida), 2020, installation view detail

It first seemed like this 1932 portrait of Frida Kahlo by her father Guillermo Kahlo was blurred algorithmically a la Google Street View. But the absence of peripheral blurring, plus the unblurred shoulder at left, indicates it is blurred in the print.

[update: when asked for theories, the kid pointed out that the photo has a border along the bottom and right sides, but not along the left. Also, there is a shadow along the left corner, cast by the naked lamp below, but the shadow is blurred above. Thus the portrait was blurred in the listing photo. I feel like I’m raisin’em right.]

Frida Kahlo by Guillermo Kahlo, 1932, 6 x 4.5 in., silver gelatin print, via sothebys

It also looks at first like the image from Frida Kahlo’s Wikipedia page, but it is a cropped version of the fuller image, similar to the vintage print sold at Sotheby’s in 2014, just without the in-negative datestamp.

It will be hard for the second print from the edition, or the AP, to ever match the grandeur of this original installation, though, the world is welcome to try.

Previously, related: Monochrome House and Untitled (Border), both early 2016
UPDATE: though the property is still for sale, the images have been removed lmao

AZ Solitude Cabin, 2017

Last year I spotted this structure in a front yard in Washington, DC. It is a wedge-shaped cabin [?] made of wood and siding and decking and corrugated plastic. The translucent plastic panel on the angled side facing the house is hinged and often propped open, like a canopy. There is a small platform in front, but I could not see what, if anything, is inside, without going into the yard.

It reminded me, in the accumulation of fleeting instants I’d see it, of Andrea Zittel’s Wagon Stations.

Andrea Zittel, Wagon Station, First Generation, 2004, customized by Giovanni Jance

And her Homestead Units.

Andrea Zittel, Homestead Unit at A-Z West

And her Cellular Compartment Units.

Andrea Zittel, Cellular Compartment Units, 2001, all images via zittel.org

Those Cellular Compartment Units especially stood out for me, as I wondered what this structure could be for, what could be inside. Zittel created a separate space for each, “single human need or desire from sleeping to eating to reading to watching TV.”

I resisted the impulse to declare someone else’s garden folly a work, and nothing I googled ever brought me any closer to finding one of my own, or figuring out what it is.

I happened to drive by the house again recently, and the structure is still there. So I’ve been thinking of it again.

I had three chairs in my house, but only one in my sitting shed in my front yard, Thoreau did not write.

I’ve passed this writer shack in Salt Lake, hard up against what’s basically a highway, for years. This is like the third or fourth renovation.

I just need a quiet place to write, but I live on a very busy street with constant traffic.

Gehry’s Norton House writer’s nest, on the boardwalk at Venice Beach, but from the back. It’s open to the house. image: thegrumpyoldlimey

Anyway, I’ve decided to go ahead, and let this stay as is, as ed. 1. And I am ready to make another. A structure customized for a single human need or purpose. It could be writing, or reading, or sitting, or showering, or pissing. Actually, there’s already a structure for that.

Untitled (A Painting For Two Rooms By Cactus Cantina), 2017

Untitled (One Painting For Two Rooms By Cactus Cantina), 2017, cornflower blue and green wall paint, landscape painting (framed), charcoal, dimensions variable, installation view

I am pleased to announce that a work I thought was gone has perhaps come back on view in Washington, D.C. The title, obviously, is derived from Gerhard Richter’s 1971 work, Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo (below). But its creation, including all the vagaries involved, are inspired directly by Palermo’s work and practice.

Gerhard Richter, Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, 1971, plaster & wood, painted, in ochre room, image:gerhard-richter.com

Talking about his late student in a 1984 interview with Laszlo Glozer, Joseph Beuys said:

I believe that one of the most important things for art–and he knew it too–is the behavior of people in general. The way people live, the way they live in their space. The way people live was very important for him. The way they inhabit, the way they live, what chairs they sit on, or what they have around them, what they stuff into themselves.

I’d seen the painting first (what they have around them), but it was that charcoal (the way they live) and the horizontal blue passage on the upper left that made the work come into being (the way they inhabit). But that was last year.

Beuys again:

Well, if I could, I would say one should perceive his works like a breath. They have something of a breath about them, a breath that vanishes…One ought to see his paintings more like breath that comes and goes, it has something porous, and it can easily vanish again. It is also highly vulnerable. Vulnerable, say, like a cornflower: when you out it into light, it fades very quickly. So one has to perceive that breathlike being as an aesthetic concept and not as a solid structure…

I still don’t know whether to post these matters, or whether it differs from filing it away, or from seeing it, or thinking it. I mean, it’s posted now because the house where this was installed last year came back on the market, with the same listing photos, and I saw them again. But what changes? Is the work still there? Would it matter if it is or isn’t? Does it matter what that crappy little painting even is?

Which seems as good a time as any to mention another work from last year, which I intentionally didn’t post, to see what it was like. Does it change now? Now that situation has been moved out and gut renovated for sure? Now that I can search for it in a different dialogue box? Now that someone else can, too?

Untitled (Macomb Wall Painting), 2017, eggshell finish paint, painting hook, est. 36×40 in., installation view

For me the value lies in the wonder, the fleeting marvel, the tiny layers of history, of how some people lived overlaid with how other people staged. So I’m good.

Breuer’s Whitney: NFSFN

So after the Whitney opens its downtown branch, it’ll sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison?
That’s the way I read the blueprints being unfurled in the NY Times the last couple of months. Buried in a late December story led by the Smithsonian, Robin Pogrebin first floated the idea in this lighter-than-air paragraph. It’s not even a lob; it’s a feather, and so’s the denial:

Rumors have circulated that the Whitney might consider selling its 1966 building by Breuer, but [Whitney director Adam] Weinberg dismissed the idea. “That’s not going to happen, because we love it,” he said.

Then this morning, in Carol Vogel’s piece about Leonard Lauder’s $131 million pledge, the idea of a sale came up again, this time with a time frame:

Mr. Lauder said that the money required the museum not to sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue at 75th Street for an extended period, although he declined to specify how long.

A idea of a Breuer sale is raised repeatedly and without attribution, then quickly, but just as squishily batted down:

Although Mr. Lauder’s donation is likely to quiet rumors that the Whitney might decamp from the Breuer building, the museum’s plans remain an open question. Since the Whitney set its sights on the meatpacking district, the city’s arts world has fretted that the institution might not be able to afford two locations.

Oh, has it? I’m clearly a MoMA fanboi, so maybe I’m just out of the loop–every loop in the city’s art world–but I have never heard a rumor or a plan or even a speculation about the Whitney selling its Madison Avenue building. Nor have I heard anyone fret that the museum, which has operated up to four locations in the city at one time, might be unable to operate two.
So unless these Times reporters are totally making this up, which I doubt, where are they hearing this? From Whitney insiders? Is a deal not to sell the building “for an extended period” substantively different from a plan to sell the building after “an extended period”?
Whitney Museum to Receive $131 Million Gift [nyt]
High five to Elmgreen & Dragset for their 2001 piece, Opening Soon / Powerless Structures, Fig. 242 [via tanyabonakdargallery]