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The most famous sculpture in the AT&T Building at 195 Broadway is obviously Evelyn Beatrice Longman’s Golden Boy (1914). Officially titled Spirit of Communication, the monumental winged, gilded figure decorated with telephone cables and lighting bolts. It used to stand on top of the building downtown. Then it filled the lobby of AT&T’s midtown building, until that got gutted. Then it moved to New Jersey, and nd now it’s apparently on some Dallas street corner. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

The second most famous sculptures at 195 Broadway are still there, kind of: replicas of Paul Manship’s Four Elements gilt and bronze reliefs are installed over the Broadway revolving doors. The originals are somewhere.

Which I guess means this drinking fountain is likely to max out as only the fifth most famous Paul Manship sculpture from the AT&T Building, and at best the sixth most famous Manship sculpture ever. But unless you’re buying Rockefeller Center, and until we find out about those panels, it IS the best one you can buy.

Drinking Fountain Boy is like a baby Kouros, with Greek dolphins on his shoulders and the bubbler goblet balanced on his head, and can you even imagine drinking from this at the office?

Imagine a little bit harder. This fountain is currently 18 inches tall, which is at least 20 inches lower than standard drinking fountain height. It has little feet, but what did it stand on? Was it in a marble niche? It should be again. And the custom display stand being sold with it at Toomey & Co needs to go.

And about those dolphins. They are not just ornamental, but strucutural, and seem to have pipes coming out of their mouths. Did water flow out of them, too? Are they the drains? That’d be gross. Are they for refilling your Hydroflask?That seems ahistoric. Are they just for soaking the pants of whoever was leaning in for a drink?

[Next Morning Update]: Claudio suggests the dolphins might function like some drinking fountains in Milan: “Water flows out of the dolphins, down into the basin below.  When you want to drink, you tap your finger onto one of these pipes, and the water starts gently flowing out of the top nozzle. You want a stronger flow – you close also the other dolphin.”

9 Oct 2025, Lot 197: Paul Manship, AT&T Co. HQ Drinking Fountain, est. $4-6,000 [update: sold for $6985][toomeyco]

Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha is a perfect artwork. Though some of the series are better than others, I’m not able to rank them. Maybe we need to see them all side by side, a thousand TV Buddhas, to figure it out. Enlightenment is just around the corner, I can feel it.

Anyway, Aste Boetto, the Genoese auction house, says this TV Buddha is from 1985. When the presumed sellers, the Fondazione Pier Luigi e Natalina Remotti, showed it in 2014, they said it had no date.

That show, The Future Is Now, also included Paik’s TV Frogs, 1979-95, which feels like it should be perfect, but is not. There are two frogs? And they watch a videotape of frog-related programming? Who rewinds the tape? TV Buddha feels like an incisive and alluring comment on our world springing the contemplative trap of the self on us all, but TV Frogs just feels like an ad for our 500-channel cable future. Is there perhaps a Buddhist frog-in-a-well parable involved, where the images on the TV don’t begin to account for the vast world beyond the frame? Because just googling for Buddha frog is kind of ridiculous.

Anyway, the Fondazione Remottis bought TV Frogs from the Emily Harvey Foundation, and then they sold it in 2016. Not sure how any of that works, karmically.

Yesterday on artnet ace market reporter Katya Kazakina noted the mighty fall of Dan Colen’s 2004-06 painting, Holy Shit, a 4×3-ft plywood board with the words HOLY SHIT painted on it, and turned upside down. It was the last lot in Christie’s modern/contemporary sale Monday, where it sold for $12,700, a 96% drop from its last public sale, when it opened Sotheby’s evening sale on November 13, 2013. As befits its title, Holy Shit has passed through the art world’s dual systems of veneration and digestion. Now is the fleeting, interstitial moment to stare at it, try to think back to what we ate and think forward to what it means.

The excerpt from Mungo Thompson’s video Time Life, Vol. 5: Sideways Thought (2020-22) that Artforum posted last week is full of Rodin sculptures morphing into each other. It reminds me of the Minotaure-Centaure sculpture Rodin glommed together from parts laying around the studio, which became the secret source of the silhouetted figure in Jasper Johns’ Green Angel works, which was revealed around the same time.

Also, a surprising array of folks have been making videos for Artforum, so I guess we’ve all just moved on, bummer about the genocide.

NGL, I had not given much thought to Ron Perelman’s $410 million lawsuit over his five most heavily insured paintings; it just seemed like a scam, and he seemed broke and desperate, which, after years of being an aggressive asshole, kind of tied everything up with a karmic bow, no further inquiry needed.

But then Cultured’s John Vincler posted a court filing of a bonkers condition report on insta for one of Perelman’s two Warhols, 21 Elvises (1962), and I had to know more.

Thankfully, unlike federal court documents, the New York State Supreme Court e-filings are free, and now I have almost 500mb of depositions and exhibits. And I’m surprised even as I type this, to find myself at least a little sympathetic towards Perelman—who just lost, ofc. Perelman had paid exorbitantly for years for extravagant and permissive insurance coverage, including regularly negotiated replacement values for a specific group of artworks. And when a devastating fire and its aftermath affected these works—exposing them to water, heat, violent fluctuations in humidity and climate, and frantic movement—and his conservator scientists filed their findings that though the damage was not immediately visible, the artworks had been damaged, the insurance companies said nope, we’re not paying. So on that transactional front, at least, I think Perelman was wronged.

OK, I’m over it. He can manage, and he keeps or sells the art as he wants. The point here is, check out these wild condition reports. They really do feel dire, until you get into them and find most of the anomalies are by the artist, or old, or fine, and seemingly almost nothing is attributable to the fire. [I know, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but a deluge of data is not evidence, either.]

The full condition reports, with detailed analytical text and scientific findings are filed multiple times for each artwork, including some that were actually damaged or lost. But this first document is a filing with just all five of these condition report diagrams, by Perelman’s conservator Sandra Amman. [They were actually in the filing twice, so I deleted the dupes, because I’m hosting this pdf myself. Similarly, I deleted dupes of the fax sent back and forth in the next one.]

The second one is the best of the earlier, hand-drawn condition reports made in 1997 by Joseph Levene. I just love the 21 smiling Elvises, and the amount of inpainting and staining this work had as it entered Perelman’s collection. Partly, this shows, I think, Warhol’s care in touching up his screenprinted paintings. It also shows how this painting, which came from Fred Hughes, had kind of a rough life. Perelman’s guy calls all his works masterpieces, because Perelman only buys masterpieces, but these five paintings—two early Warhols, two early Ruschas, and a Twombly—are fine. Would you run into a burning house to save one? No. But would you carry one out the next morning and load it into the art handler’s truck for triage? We already have that answer.

via I Heart Noise comes a wonderful essay by Stephen Vitiello about his work with Michael Raphael to go through the media and audio archive left behind by artist Steve Roden. Vitiello first presented the project at a CAA panel on sound art methodologies last fall in Chicago.

Roden, who passed away in 2023, left hundreds of recordings ranging back to his earliest punk band days: “Michael focused on organizing digital media onto an 18TB master drive. I began sorting through the physical formats. On each visit to Pasadena, I’d take a box or two home with me, sometimes also having originals shipped. The process was both overwhelming and deeply intimate. The audio and video formats have included DAT tapes, standard and 4-track cassettes, MiniDiscs, CDRs, as well as hi8, VHS and DV videos.”

Rather than non-systematic, the material Vitiello describes feels continuously variable and multi-systematic, and somehow if a piece with Roden’s own history and way of working. This first pass through the material is in preparation, Vitiello explains, for a more comprehensive archival processing, when an institutional home for it is determined. This phase is the sorting and sense-making and memory-stretching for a group of family, friends and collaborators, so that Roden’s work will be preserved and presented to the world as effectively as possible.

Meanwhile, a slow but steady collection of rediscovered or remastered works from Roden’s many years of exhibitions and performances are turning up on Roden’s Bandcamp. The latest, from July 2025, is Ear(th), recordings based on a 1999 earthquake monitor for a 2004 sound/sculptural collaboration with scientists, sculptors, and coders in Pasadena.

Steve Roden: An Archive, An Unreliable Narrator [thekitchen.org via @iheartnoise]

On the evening of September 28th and into the dark morning of the 29th, 2018, East Hampton firefighters worked tirelessly to put out a fire in the Georgica Pond home of Ron Perelman. Through their valiant efforts and those of the illiquid billionaire’s minions, most of the most valuable artworks in the house were saved.

Well, actually, Joseph Beuys’ 1974 blackboard painting, Chikago, which Perelman had just acquired in 2017, did suffer some water damage. And I can’t figure out what happened to the Franz Kline evacuated to the home’s detached home theater, surrounded by a bunch of Prouvé that, I assume, became part of the nearly $200 million insurance payout for furniture.

But Perelman’s 1971 Twombly, his Warhol Elvis and Soup Can paintings, and his two Ruschas, which were also in the library and dining room, and which were also evacuated to the home theater, survived unscathed. Perelman had been worried, as any good steward of artworks would, of course, that these five significant pieces, which he’d insured for $410 million, well above their market value, might have been damaged or diminished in some way, even invisibly, by the fire, or their association with it. Perelman only “collected masterpieces,” his risk manager testified. And the value of a masterpiece can only be determined by the owner of a similar masterpiece, and “if we have to go and buy it off Steve Wynn’s wall, we’ll pay his asking price.”

And so Perelman suggested that instead of possibly embarrassingly realizing a loss of value, his insurance companies should just pay him $205 million, and—by tautological virtue of remaining in his collection—the artworks would remain masterpieces.

And when his insurance companies insulted them by declining to pay, he sued, putting the integrity of these artworks to the courts to decide.

And last week, a NY State Supreme Court judge declared that indeed, Perelman’s paintings were not damaged, their honor was not besmirched by the light patches of soot on the edges of their frames, and they were as valuable and certifiable masterpieces as they were the day before the fire.

What a relief that must be for an artlover like Ron Perelman, that his Twombly had not, in fact, “lost its ‘oomph,'” and what a victory for art.