It was still early when the smoke bombs went off at Station to Station. The colorful faux explosives, an installation by artist Olaf Breuning, were simultaneously lit sending clean bold streaks of blue, green, and orange wafting toward the river obscuring everything in its path. “The wind was just right,” said Breuning of the smoke bombs, which were one of the first artistic acts of the multi-city festival conceived by artist Doug Aitken, which kicked off with a party on Friday in New York (the actual train component of the festival departs from Washington, D.C.). 

In the smoke bomb's wake you could see five colored tents, or yurts, designed by visual artists Carsten Holler, Liz Glynn, Ernesto Neto, Kenneth Anger, and Urs Fischer, each of which offered a unique experience for the viewer. These ranged from Neto's plush fabric sanction to Fischer's white mirrored room with a circular bed evocative of the Playboy mansion. Meanwhile, inside the main event space, musical performances by the likes Suicide, No Age,  Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, as well as the trio Yoshimio, Ryan Sawyer and Hisham Akira Bharoocha drew the crowds at the sold out event. There were also spontaneous performances by the marching band the Kansas City Cobras as well as an installation by Rirkrit Tirvanija. 

When asked if he had been in the yurts, Breuning said he had been in all of them and that he particularly liked Fischer’s. “Find an attractive man,” he said, “then go in there and lay down.”

To see photos from the kickoff of Station to Station in New York, click on the slideshow.

While “Super Sad True Love Story” author Gary Shteyngart recently reported on his experience wearing Google Glass to MoMA PS1, and Diane von Furstenberg has used the device to capture her perspective on Fashion Week, art world Glass Explorer Samantha Katz is putting her own spin on the new technology: She has signed up to document the New York art world in a 30-day YouTube series called “Gallery Glass.” Katz, who handles sponsorship and press for Arts in Bushwick and produces the yearly Bushwick Open Studios, plans to record 30 interviews and studio visits with a variety of New York creatives during the month of September.

“A lot of people who have gained access to the device have launched projects, which was essentially what I wanted to do,” Katz told ARTINFO. “To my knowledge there are no art-related projects. A lot of people who have the device are using it for educational purposes or for exploration, but this is the first arts and culture project.”

Katz has already posted nine videos in the series, including tours of the Williamsburg studio of artist Jen Dunlap, Lower East Side artist and curator Jason Voegele, and documentary filmmaker Jean Marie Offenbacher. The short videos are modeled on a journalistic reportage format with Katz kicking off each one with a short intro: “I’m Sam Katz here with Gallery Glass and we’re here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn …”

The quality of the clips often isn’t fantastic, an issue Katz says is due to the developing technology. “The product is still in beta so there are no applications geared toward documentation yet,” she said. “I’m one of the first people using it for video and documentation purposes and the technology isn’t as advanced as I may have hoped. What’s interesting about this is it feels more like the actual experience.”

That's not to say that there's nothing interesting here. Perhaps the most novel component of Gallery Glass comes when the glasses are used to capture the first-person perspective of the artists themselves. During her studio visit, Jen Dunlap answers interview questions while wearing the Glass and working on a drawing. We hear her talking about her creative process as it unfolds on video, basically from her point of view. In another video, Williamsburg-based artist James Moore gives Katz a ride on the back of his motorcycle, giving viewers a first-person tour of Brooklyn.

Thomas Stevenson

“My goal is to feature creatives who are completely varied,” she said. “I want to tackle every medium.” Future episodes will feature the work of artist Rachel Beach, artist and technologist Thomas Stevenson, assistant curator of costume at the Museum at FIT Emma McClendon, director of REVERSE Art Space Andrea Wolf, director of Public Art at Fourth Arts Block Keith Schweitzer, Lehmann Maupin Gallery director Liz Dimmitt, and BAMart visual arts curator Holly Shen Chaves.

“Gallery Glass highlights a range of subjects, aiming to make art more accessible and break barriers,” Katz explains. “There are apparent filters from the creative process to what is ultimately seen on gallery walls and online catalogs, breeding misconceptions like 'I am not affluent enough to collect,''I am not cool enough to create,''I am not versed enough on the subject to talk about the work.' I hope this series will challenge that.” In other words, while many people have fretted that Google Glass will provide a technological filter keeping people from relating to the world in front of them, she hopes that it can do just the opposite. 

First, we noticed the grassy knolls around the defunct gas pumps at the Getty station at 24th Street and 10th Avenue yesterday. By Thursday, we’re told — one of the biggest nights of art openings of the year in Chelsea — there will be sheep meandering around the grass. Not real sheep, of course, but sculptures by the late Francois-Xavier Lalanne. “Sheep Station,” a public program which officially opens on September 17, will feature 25 of Lalanne’s Moutons and will be the largest flock ever shown together en plein air.

The installation is backed by 41-year-old multi-millionaire, real estate developer, and art collector Michael Shvo, whom New York magazine once called both the “most successful” and “most loathed” broker in New York. Earlier this year, Shvo purchased the filling station with Victor Homes and is in the process of building a luxury residence on the site. During the construction, the Getty station will feature a series of exhibitions, and the finished residency promises the same.

For the event, Shvo has teamed up with art dealer Paul Kasmin, who handles Lalanne’s estate. Many of Lalanne’s Moutons will be derived from the private collection of Shvo, who apparently owns a comprehensive collection of Lalanne's work. (Check out his wife Seren's Instagram feed for images of “Moutons de Laine” — a different Lalanne's series of sheep — in action).

This isn’t the first time Shvo has tried his hand at blending the arts with his real estate acumen. There was the time in 2008 that Shvo invited art dealer Jack Shainman to embed an art gallery in his condominium at 650 Sixth Avenue. Then in the winter of 2011, Shvo funded “Documents of Desire & Disaster,” an exhibition by David LaChapelle that kicked off Paul Kasmin's space in Istanbul. This last initiative was part of a larger endeavor to help a partner of his who owns the W hotel there, and the district in which it resides, in an attempt to transform the area into the arts district of Istanbul. “He asked me to oversee the launch of that,” Shvo told ARTINFO over the phone. “Being at that time a real estate guy, producing a show that would bring attention to that area was something that I was very interested in.”

Shvo and his wife Seren are also avid collectors, and divide their art into “three subcollections.” In his Pop Art collection he counts numerous Warhols and works by Robert Indiana. In the Hamptons, he amasses works by color-field painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Tom Downing. 

The third segment of his collection is devoted to the work of Lalanne. “Our life is very much embedded with Lalanne sculptures,” he said. “I enjoy them in my office, in our different homes, in our garden. The sheep are only a small portion of what we own. Crocodiles, monkeys...” Though he had never met the artist, he says he did meet Francois's widow Claude Lalanne, who is still active and with whom he collaborated as a duo called Les Lalannes, also represented by Kasmin.

“There’s no other artist that does what they do. Art in their mind was not there to be taken seriously,” Shvo explained. For him the Getty station project is an extension of that ethos. “There’s nothing more surreal than a sheep meadow in the middle with the gas station rising out of the middle of Chelsea.”

SINGAPORE — Known for his large-scale pencil drawings,  Switzerland-based Chinese artist Qiu Jie is having his first solo exhibition in Singapore at Art Plural Gallery, showing some 30 recent artworks.

His intricate black-and-white works combine contemporary Western popular culture, as well as the iconography drawn from kitschy Cultural Revolution propaganda and billboard advertising. For his Singapore show, he also worked in some local references such as an image of the Singapore Girl from Singapore Airlines, as well as text drawn from local brands.

Another trademark of his work is a recurring cat, whose face is attached to a human body. In one, the cat head is attached to Chairman Mao’s body, next to French actress Brigitte Bardot; in others, the cat is a muscular male model in sexy poses. Qiu tells Blouin ARTINFO that his cat pieces were inspired by a stray cat he took in more than a decade ago, and are usually the first to be sold in any show.

“Qiu Jie: Solo Exhibition” will run at Art Plural Gallery until October 26. 

In his 1968-69 manifesto-cum-logic proof “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” Sol LeWitt offered three declarative leaps of faith. Number 11: “Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.” Number 27: “The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.” Number 33: “It is difficult to bungle a good idea.”

The American postwar artist, largely branded as the leading figure of conceptual art, sought to imbue a novel kind of prominence in the thought behind an artwork. “Concept,” for LeWitt, designated a project’s “general direction,” implemented by its “idea.” Both terms (concept and idea) have materialized in an installation of four of LeWitt’s historic wall drawings at Montreal’s Concordia University, animating once again the intense theoretical and formal debates swirling around the artist's heady output.

First conceived for an 1968 exhibition to benefit anti-Vietnam War activism, LeWitt’s over-1,250 wall drawings have become key references points for the development of contemporary conceptual art in their slippage between artistic gestation and artistic execution. Anthony Sansotta — an assistant to LeWitt (who died in 2007) since 1980, and the curatorial authority on the wall drawings — remarked to BLOUIN ARTINFO Canada: “[Sol is] referred to as the father of conceptual art; he has a lot of children.”

Sansotta has overseen the installation of LeWitt’s wall drawings globally, from MASS MoCA’s vast gallery of 105 LeWitt drawings (the install is ongoing until 2033), to Mercer Union, and last year’s wall drawing retrospective at Centre Pompidou Metz (the seeming point of inspiration for Concordia). In the Montreal installation, Sansotta operates as curator, art handler, and art instructor, leading and critiquing the more than two-dozen students enlisted by the university to install and physically create their four works. Sansotta’s arrival in Montreal followed a successful proposal by François Morelli, a professor in Concordia’s studio arts program and Eric Simon, the department’s chair — both members of the newly formed Drawing Lab Dessin, a research team committed to the act and medium of drawing. Morelli and Simon approached the university’s FOFA Gallery, led by gallery director and artist jake moore, and in broad consultation planned the installation of four LeWitt drawings. Artist Eli Kerr led the team.  

With such a mobilized institutional effort, the group settled on four locations of varying scope and complexity, but with opportunities for public visibility: “Wall Drawing #394” and “Wall Drawing #1099” take residence at the FOFA’s interior vitrine, and within a gallery area facing Rue Sainte-Catherine’s pedestrian traffic, respectively; “Wall Drawing #123A” and “Wall Drawing #103” are nestled among the corridors of Concordia’s visual arts building. Typically for LeWitt’s series, each wall drawing follows the strict guidelines mandated by the artist's script, with deliberate accommodations made for artistic freedom, as well. The resulting give-and-take tension forms a visual drama between system, control, and expression.  

The largest and still continuing endeavor, #394, consists of a floor-to-ceiling grid of 31 x 30 centimeters, with rules determing the visual content of each unit: LeWitt's draughtspeople can choose a straight, not-straight, or broken line in either horizontal, vertical, or diagonal orientations that must bisect the given square. Within the fixed parameters, the room for “play” serves as a kind of contested term for the wall drawings.

Yet as Moore explains, “The thing that’s not really apparent to those who don’t draw is the amount of skill it takes to do these lines the way they should be … The simplest of lines is a kind of knowledge.” Part of Sansotta’s role at Concordia is precisely to monitor the execution of what seems like innocuous artistic demands, and aid those draughtspeople adjusting to LeWitt’s sensibility: “You do need to have some sort of familiarity with material, and then I think you also have to have a familiarity with Sol’s thinking and exactly how to perceive it,” Sansotta clarifies.   

The most demanding drawing, #1099, ups the ante in terms of play versus work — or here, even struggle. LeWitt asks for 10,000 not-straight lines within a relatively large circle, done by marker and tallied by the artists themselves, here as a team of two. #1099 requires its executors to draw from past experience: “Two artists in particular were chosen for that project because they have within their own practices a performative and durational drawing [element],” Moore elucidates. “But it’s not because they could best interpret someone else’s work. They have the skillset to draw 10,000 not-straight lines of equal weight within a milieu. There’s a remarkable amount of embodied knowledge that’s present here.” Sansotta’s role was to guide the completion of the formal field, making sure to avoid “shape-making” and “representation,” he adds. Yet if the formulaic production process of work like #1099 sounds deadening, externally there is a curious discrepancy between construction and product: #1099 carries a demanding presence, its maddening labor achieving a strange grace.

With two drawings completed and two more underway, the Concordia team evokes LeWitt as a sort of ghostly taskmaster, complete with the conceptualist scripture of his scores, and bizarre, authorial authority. Though the project is claimed as both curatorial achievement and pedagogical opportunity, the sense of labor is palpable, mostly on the wall-length #394. LeWitt’s wall drawings, not only at Concordia, but also internationally, operate in a strange economy, wherein the work of either volunteer participants or hired technicians, depending on the demands of each drawing, remains in the service of the canonical LeWitt (it goes without saying the former group receives no payment). It’s collaboration avant la lettre, with collaborators ultimately at play in a larger, distanced project, here re-animated in a kind of institutional choreography. In some sense, Lewitt’s primal concerns still resonate, perhaps even more so in the post-millenial climate of precarious labor and the artworld’s embrace of its uncompensated forms. The physical artwork might be the same in LeWitt’s wall drawings, but its underlying concept still very much compels. 

As the global economy continues to recover from its 2008 woes and the Eurozone crisis begins to slide from the top of the European political agenda, the Continental art market has still reflected collectors’ subdued buying reflex. Throughout the past year, galleries have reported a rebound in sales spurred by contacts made at the ever-increasing number of art fairs but, curiously, often not consummated at the fairs themselves. Combine this tendency with Berlin’s abundance of artists, high concentration of young galleries, and relatively sluggish market regardless of the stock market’s close on any given day, and Art Berlin Contemporary’s (abc) new, artist-focused solo presentations begin to seem particularly rational.

For its sixth edition and first year under the direction of former Art Baselcommunications manager Maike Cruse, abc presents 121 single-artist positions represented by 133 galleries. As in previous years, Berliners make up the majority of dealers at its Station Berlin venue, complemented by notable international positions such as Lisson, Hauser & Wirth, OMR, the Modern Institute, Mendes Wood, and Lisa Cooley. Rather than a typical hierarchical fair layout, a mélange of young and established galleries are spread throughout the three exhibition halls, owing to the fact that most artists not only install their works themselves but select their booth locations as well.

Manuel Raeder’s sustainability-focused fair design consists of scaffolding and wooden walls that get recycled for use in artworks returns, but many artists such as Susanne Kriemann (at Wilfried Lentz / RaebervonStenglin), Laetitia Gendre (Thomas Fischer), and Luca Trevisani (Mehdi Chouakri) have opted to present freestanding sculptures and installations without any official architecture separating them from their neighbors. The extra space created provides boulevard-like sight lines, which allow visitors and collectors alike to raise their heads from the fair map for a more instinctual tour of its works.

More than 80 of those pieces have either been developed specifically for abc or will make their debut at the fair. Many are performance-based. Rather than some imposed criteria or special section of the floor plan, however, Cruse says the focus developed organically. This might well be because the galleries are beginning to better understand how to make abc and these new market trends work for them, using it as much as a platform to attract non-monetary interest — from collectors, curators, journalists, and fellow dealers — as for sales.

In capturing the hearts and minds of Berlin’s up-and-coming creative set, Cruse also takes the long view. “We want to help activate a sustainable art market in Berlin,” she says. “A passion for art can grow by really being focused on one work and falling in love with its artist ,” creating potential lasting relationships between curators, collectors, and artists. It’s an effort to highlight the artists’ practices as they themselves would have it, “rather than presenting various small works that can be sold more easily at the show itself,” she suggests.

While Cruse certainly welcomes on-fair sales, she is firm that the endgame takes place within an area far beyond the boundary lines of the Station Berlin: turnover to come, perhaps many years down the line. As a platform developed by gallerists for gallerists, the aim is to stay structurally nimble, continuing to adapt to the changing face of Berlin and the art world at large, while at the same time pushing forth a value for quality, intellectual artistic production. “abc is not a business model,” Cruse asserts. “The aim is to serve the gallery system and to add something to the arts and culture at large.”

Rio-de-Janeiro-based artist Renata Lucas, whose work mainly focuses on temporary interventions into built environments, has won an €20,000 Absolut Art Award. Lucas picks up the prize winner’s money in the gong’s “art work” category — plus a  €100,000 budget to develop a new project.

Meanwhile, the Absolut Art Bureau's ArtWriting Prize was given to New Yorker Coco Fusco, who takes another €20,000 cash prize along with the same sum to publish and distribute a new book.

The winners were announced at a ceremony today (September 20, 2013) in Stockholm, Sweden. The jury included Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, former artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13), and artist Susan Hiller, who chose the winners from a shortlist of five in each category.

The jury recognized Lucas for her proposal to create a “fragmented and dispersed new museum.” Their citation continued: “She will subtly alter ordinary locations, so that her participants will encounter modified spaces and enter into altered states of understanding of the various departments of this disarticulated museum and open social and public space – a renewed environment for the imaginary to thrive in.”

Lucas has previously participated in group shows at Brazil's own Inhotim (2012), dOCUMENTA (13), and the Istanbul Biennial (2012). 

As for Fusco, her book project proposes “to analyse recent performance practices in Cuba.” The judges described the mooted work as considering “persons considered ‘socially dangerous’ by power against a body defined officially as ‘revolutionary’ and yet restrained and limited by that same power.”

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The fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, "More Light", brings together works of artists from 40 countries and over 70 artists.

One of the largest installations is called "Waste Not" by Chinese artist, Song Dong and comprises items collected by his mother over the course of 50 years.

Song Dong, explains: "'Waste Not' was my mother's generation's idea for the daily life. They said, 'We should waste not, because if you waste a lot, in the future you haven't anything to waste'. So I think now for the modern life - we waste a lot."

A continuous graphic pattern on the glass wall of a conference room, took artist Gosia Wlodarczak more than 200 hours to create.

The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art runs for one month.

An increasing number of hotels in China are doing double duty as somewhere to bed down for the night as well as a place to admire art. “Hotels used to be about selling sleep, but by the end of the 1990s the more intimate, better defined boutique hotels started to attract a different kind of discerning traveler. People will start to choose their hotels today based on design and ambience,” says Alison Pickett. The art consultant and curator has placed art work in some of the region’s most stunning hotels, including the Swire venues: The Opposite House, The Upper House, and East.

Click through the slideshowto see our editor’s picks of the most impressive art at hotels in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, as well as the favorites of Pickett and of independent art consultant Olive Wong. 

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BERLIN – For its sixth edition, Art Berlin Contemporary presents 121 single-artist positions represented by 133 galleries. Catch the highlights in our popular series, 60 Works in 60 Seconds. 

BERLIN – For its sixth edition and first year under the direction of former Art Basel communications manager Maike Cruse, Art Berlin Contemporary(ABC) presents 121 single-artist positions represented by 133 galleries during the second annual Berlin Art Week. As in previous years, Berliners make up the majority of dealers at the Station-Berlin, complemented by notable international positions such as Lisson, Hauser & Wirth, OMR, the Modern Institute, Mendes Wood, and Lisa Cooley. Rather than a typical hierarchical fair layout, a mélange of young and established galleries are spread throughout the three exhibition halls, owing to the fact that most artists not only install their works themselves but select their booth locations as well.

Manuel Raeder’s sustainability-focused fair design consisting of scaffolding and wooden walls that get recycled for use in artworks returns. And, more than 80 of the works on view have either been developed specifically for abc or will make their debut at the fair. Many are performance-based. Rather than some imposed criteria or special section of the floor plan, however, Cruse says the focus developed organically. This might well be because the galleries are beginning to better understand how to make abc and these new market trends work for them, using it as much as a platform to attract nonmonetary interest — from collectors, curators, journalists, and fellow dealers — as for sales.

Above, Cruse discusses the 2013 edition of Art Berlin Contemporary, picking out some highlights from its four-day run and explaining the rationale behind ABC’s innovative and unconventional set up for a commercial show. 

For bad-boy artist Clifford Owens, a performance isn’t something you simply show up for and watch. Rather, it’s a charged participatory sport, one in which a viewer’s racial, gender, and sexual identity is pushed, sometimes uncomfortably, to the front lines. Persuading onlookers to divulge the most intimate of details, Owens’s works are notable for how prominently his viewers are featured, as if he took to heart Jacques Rancière’s call for a more “emancipated” spectator. Passive onlookers become performers, and performers turn back into onlookers—an upending where viewing and performing, artist and audience, become almost one and the same.

In performances such as “Photographs with an Audience,” 2008–ongoing, Owens asks viewers thorny questions, such as “Who voted for Bush?”
and “Who thinks performance art means someone takes their clothes off?” Photographing the groups according to their answers, Owens offers up a representative record of his spectators, each of whom, ready or not, becomes the work’s loaded subject matter. For his solo exhibition “Anthology” at MOMA PS1 from November 2011 to May 2012, Owens invited 26 prominent African-American artists to write or submit scores for him to interpret and perform, in a nod to Fluxus—a movement in the 1960s and ’70s that produced easy, DIY scores anyone could feasibly enact. Benjamin Patterson, an African-American Fluxus artist, wrote a directive to lick whipped cream off a woman. William Pope L., meanwhile, instructed Owens to “Be African-American. Be very African-American.” “Anthology” provided a platform with which to highlight, if not canonize, a neglected legacy of African-American performance art.

More often than not, though, what’s emphasized in Owens’s work is his own outsize personality; one that, as some writers have argued, plays up a virile, hypersexualized, “scary” black-man persona. In that sense he embodies the macho man-of-color archetype that Adrian Piper so memorably parodied in her “Mythic Being” performances from 1972 to 1975. Smoking
a Tiparillo cigar while wearing an Afro wig, sunglasses, and mustache, she walked the streets of New York as a black or Latino man with exaggerated swagger and rode the subway with legs spread wide to accommodate a large fake set of dick and balls.

Owens’s strong presence in his work tends to attract sensationalized press attention that in some ways overshadows his art-historical interests and in others underscores the work’s intrinsic politics and power relations. With an attention-grabbing headline from March 8, 2012, the website Gallerist published a story titled “Will Clifford Owens ‘Force A Sex Act’ on His Audience at MOMA PS1 on Sunday?”, bringing the prospect of rape
into the artist’s first high-profile New York museum showing. The controversial score in question, by Kara Walker, read in full:

French kiss an audience member. Force them against a wall and demand sex. The audience/viewer should be an adult. If they are willing to participate in the forced sex act abruptly turn the tables and you assume the role of victim. Accuse your attacker. Seek help from others, describe your ordeal. Repeat.

"Clifford Owens: Anthology" at MoMA PS1, 2011

Performing it several times, Owens invited unsuspecting museumgoers to participate. Prior to each performance, curator Christopher Y. Lew read the score out loud. All were aware of the instructions, as well as the right to leave if they wished. Lining up a dozen or so diverse individuals along
a wall, Owens stalked them like a vulture, walking up to those he deemed attractive, both men and women. Getting uncomfortably close, he pressed his body firmly against theirs—going in for the kill, so to speak. With his hair styled into a tightly cropped mohawk, he looked like a threatening sex gremlin as he made out earnestly with one person after another. Some got into it. Others didn’t, refusing to reciprocate. Those who invited further play were rewarded with groping of their breasts, asses, and dicks, though it never went beyond that.

For his last performance of the score, he told Gallerist, “There’s a reason I don’t try to force a sex act on the audience. But Sunday, I’m going to take 
it there. And I’m really nervous about it.” Concerned, Walker withdrew her score, and then acquiesced
and took a leading role, directing the performance and telling those gathered the aggressive things Owens would say, including “I’m going to fuck your brains out” and “This is what you think I am, just a nigger toy.” As the performance progressed, she stood by, a leery supervisor. The two spoke intermittently, Walker expressing occasional resentment for being implicated. At one point Owens asked his nervous participants
if they’d like his cock in their mouths. A young blonde woman replied “certainly,” though her wish wasn’t granted—she claimed in a later interview she never feared for her safety.

By trusting viewers to monitor his behavior, as well as the behavior of their peers, such dynamics of mutual responsibility might recall Marina Abramovic ’s Rhythm 0, 1974, in which she placed 72 objects on a table—roses, a pen, scissors, honey, a pistol and bullet, among other things—and let viewers pick a tool and do with it what they wished. Initially tentative, spectators got bolder as the performance progressed. They cut her clothes, stuck thorns in her stomach, and even aimed the gun at her head. As Abramovic recalled later, “What I learned was that...if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

Taking a break from performing himself, Owens was in residence over the summer at Pioneer Works, a beautiful, brick, cathedral-like 19th-century former machine factory turned exhibition space and studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. As part of his residency, 
he taught a five-day performance-art workshop for
a group of young recent MFA graduates, culminating in two evenings of performances titled “seminar,”
on July 20 and 21. Running into him at local bar Brooklyn Ice House, I told him about this profile and that I was excited to see what he would come up
with at “seminar.” What I withheld was that two can play this fun sexual-objectification game; having a thing for black men, the prospect of Owens naked— something he’s wont to do in his performances—was something I was looking forward to. He invites sexual desire in his work, and I was eagerly falling for it, troubling my own critical distance. If his track record was any indication, there could be inches and inches of Owens on display at “seminar.”

Unfortunately, when I met up with him later at 
his sunny Pioneer Works studio, he neither raped me nor “fucked my brains out” as some sort of kinky revenge fantasy on art critics everywhere. Rather, he spent a lot of time complaining about the controversy surrounding his work. Friendly, though wary of press attention in light of the coverage by Gallerist, he downplayed the racial implications of his practice, choosing instead to focus on how race is just one component of people’s assertion of power over one another, and saying that while he intentionally exaggerates the role of sexual aggressor, even relishes it, he’s interested less in “imposing power than in how we share power.”
While this interest in power is undoubtedly genuine, it’s also clear that his skin color plays a pivotal part in his work, as “Anthology” readily illustrates. The performances employ these power dynamics to critically address how blackness is constructed through cultural stereotypes that are inextricably tied to class and social status. (In my case, one effect of this is the impulse of sexual desire for the “other.”) This is not to say that Owens’s aim isn’t ultimately deconstructive, but that it’s a strategy nonetheless, with its own identity politics–related limitations; he posits not a post-race utopia but, rather, a self-perpetuating racialness—and of the most aggressive kind. Calling his detractors “assholes,” it’s easy to see he’s asking for controversy, maybe even benefiting from it.

It’s possible, though, that it’s the other way around, and that his strategy isn’t leading to easy success in the market or in the academic sphere.
He was represented by hot Lower East Side gallery On Stellar Rays, but that relationship ended months ago. Moreover, Yale declined to renew his adjunct teaching position. Maybe, then, Owens is sticking
 it to the man, so to speak, by pursuing a vaguely pedagogical agenda at Pioneer Works because no one else would let him. Documentation indicates that
this might be because pedagogy, as Owens practiced it during the week of 9-to-5 workshops leading
 up to “seminar,” was something like an adult ropes course necessitating the show-and-tell of his penis
 to his pupils, slow-dancing, bear hugging, and swapping clothes, among other performative activities designed to build trust and sexual self-confidence,
if not total liberation.

If the two “seminar” performances were any indication, however, the end result seemed less liberation than exploitation, as nudity was the apparent prerequisite for almost every work, whether or not it was warranted
or substantive. Such was the case with Alexandria Eregbu, who took off her shirt midway through the jumps and sprints of Father’s Heart (all works 2013) for no good reason, before putting it back on again, breathless; one would hope her breasts have little bearing on her father-daughter relationship. Also topless was Angeli Sion for Pneuma et Spiritus: Body Action Studies, though a long red balloon was tied to her neck. It bounced back and forth in the air between two large floor-based fans as she 
stood, silently, before launching into an energetic duet with her two companions. Performer Nina Ber was not topless for Marko Markovic’s Fuck the System. She wasn’t, however, wearing any underwear beneath her long, sliplike red shirt when she lifted it above her waist and her vagina became the grudging receptacle for Markovic’s tongue for nearly 20 minutes. Uncomfortably standing with her fist raised high in the air,
 as if hitting a vague protest gesture, she didn’t seem to be enjoying any of the dude’s earnest attentions as he buried his face deep in her pussy. Maybe she was too busy pondering “protest movements and powers of resistance against oppressive apparatus[es],” as Markovic’s program blurb stated. Or maybe she was just bored like the rest of us, who found little interesting about standard-fare cunnilingus.

Nina Ber and Marko Markovic’s performance "Fuck the System" [Photo by David Deng] 

More circus than revelation, “Seminar” lacked the critical gravitas of “Anthology,” which attempted to both canonize a long-neglected history
of black performance art and address larger questions of performance and re-performance. Abramovic herself has pursued this interest since the
 first Performa biennial in 2005, when she re-performed several historical works in Seven Easy Pieces. Ultimately, there was little to chew on but spectacle itself—a hazard Owens tends to trip over. For the 2013 Performa biennial, he’ll be debuting a new performance involving a range of objects and conflict scenarios, titled Five Days’ Worth at Third streaming. This is in conjunction with the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, at the studio museum in Harlem.

As of this writing Owens is coy about what exactly will transpire, though he will say he’s the principal performer, along with a few others. This is not the first time he’s been featured in Performa. In 2005 he presented a range of scenarios in which invited artists and curators, including the biennial’s director, RoseLee Goldberg, made collaborative works with him. Asked about the more provocative aspects of Owens’s work, Goldberg noted, “They have a reason to be. He has a strong sense of what it means to use performance as a kind of knife through history, of making art that can move people, that forces them to pay attention. Combined with a consciousness of race and gender, he operates on many levels.” While this is true, provocation is Owens’s calling card that tends to trump all others, which is all fine and good as long as there’s a reason
for the feather-ruffling. Sometimes with Owens, though, sensationalism can distract too much from his work. 

This article is published in the November 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

The recent drama over the choice of a new director for Paris's Musée national d'art moderne, the main museum of the Pompidou Center, has given way to surprise. Last week, the rumor mill had the job going to Max Hollein, director of a collective organization of three Frankfurt museums, even as two other front-runners, Catherine Grenier (deputy director of the Pompidou Center) and Laurent Le Bon (director of the Pompidou Center outpost in Metz) were announcing their joint candidacy, arguing the benefits of a "collective approach,"according to Le Monde. But on Friday Pompidou Center president Alain Seban and culture minister Aurélie Fillipetti announced that the post would go instead to Bernard Blistène, director of the Pompidou Center's department of cultural development. According to an article in Libération, which describes the selection process as a comedy of errors, Blistène was only considered at the last minute, after an emergency committee was put together. He will succeed Alfred Pacquement, who has led the museum since 2000.

While his name had not come up in media speculation, Blistène, known as a chaismatic and elegant figure in the French art world, is not an outsider by any means. Born in 1955, he joined the Pompidou Center in 1983 as a curator after studies at the Ecole du Louvre, and went on on to hold various positions at the museum.

In 1990, he became head of the Musées de Marseille, where he created that city's first contemporary art museum. Six years later, he returned to the Pompidou Center as deputy director. In 2002, he was named inspector general of artistic creation in the visual arts delegation of the culture ministry, with the specific task of developing the vacant spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, which was directed at the time by Jérôme Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud. 

His accomplishments as curator include "The Museum That Didn't Exist" (2002), a solo show of Daniel Buren's work, which was co-curated by Alison Gingeras and Laurent Le Bon and shown at the contemporary art exhibition "La Force de l'Art" at the Grand Palais in 2006, and the 2007 show "A Theater Without Theater" with Yann Chateigné at Barcelona's contemporary art museum, where he explored the relationship between theater and visual arts.

Blistène also taught contemporary art  from 1985 to 2005 at the Ecole du Louvre, where he was known for moving back and forth between visual arts and cinema. His father, Marcel Blistène, directed Edith Piaf and Simone Signoret on the screen before moving to television. Bernard Blistène frequently invoked Michelangelo Antonioni and has always been interested in dance, music, and theater.

In 2009, he created the first edition of the Nouveau Festival at the Pompidou Center, which brought new energy to the museum. Every year, for three weeks, the area in front of the museum and its interior spaces are the sites of temporary performances linked to a thematic exhibition. In addition to its multidisciplinary nature, the festival harkens back to the original intention of the Pompidou Center, which was conceived as an active and inventive location. 

The Kunstmuseum Luzerne’s landmark 1974 exhibition of transvestism and queer imagery is to be recreated at Richard Saltoun Gallery this December. Marking the fortieth anniversary of the original show, “Transformer: Aspects of Travesty” will explore the aesthetics of sexuality in 1970s subcultures, and how they have come to be viewed today.

The show took its name from a 1972 album by the late Lou Reed, frontman of the Velvet Underground. Many of the artists are from Switzerland, such as Urs Lüthi and Walter Pfeiffer, although the exhibition will also include work by British artist Tony Morgan, and Andy Warhol.

In 1974 “Transformer: Aspekte der Travestie” received almost no press in the UK; however, it proved seminal in the study of gender and queer theories. Over the course of this year exhibitions such as “David Bowie is” at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the ICA’s off-site show “A Journey Through Subculture: 1980s to Now” have seen these once transgressive ideas gain clout within major British establishments. The show's curator Giulia Casalini told ARTINFO UK: “there has absolutely been an institutionalisation of queer theories and practices.” Citing Tate Liverpool’s recent show “Glam! The Performance of Style,” she explained that this is a good thing: “I have seen myself that over the past year institutions, the Tate for example, have been making a huge effort to show queer and feminist practices to the mainstream culture.”

The show at Richard Saltoun is not going to be an exact recreation of the original, but many of the exhibits will be the same. Where they are not, similar works by the same artists and from the same time period will be shown instead. The gallery is also going to host a series of film screenings, performances and talks that will run concurrently.  

“Transformer: Aspects of Travesty,” December 13 2013 until February 14 2014, Richard Saltoun Gallery

Lada Gaga has announced the launch of a pop-up ARTPOP Gallery Exhibition in Australia in 2014, to celebrate the launch her latest album of the same name.

The Australian ARTPOP Gallery will be the first international art exhibition inspired by Gaga and will feature a digital display of Gaga-inspired fan art created by her “Little Monsters.”

The organizers of the ARTPOP Gallery have confirmed that Lady Gaga will make the trip to Australia to celebrate the launch of her first live gallery exhibition.

Gaga fans can submit their artworks for the digital gallery via the ARTPOP Gallery website. A select few entrants will be given the chance to show Lady Gaga their artwork in person at the opening of the gallery.

“You are the ARTPOP generation and this is the beginning of our revolution,” says Lady Gaga in a video message to Australia. “Your ideas and your creativity are what keep me excited about making music every year.”

“Soon I am coming to Australia where we will be creating our very our very own ARTPOP Gallery to showcase all of your amazing creations. This is really what ARTPOP is all about. It is time for you shine,” she said.

For more information on the Australian ARTPOP Gallery visit the Gallery website here.

Watch Gaga's message to her fans below.

Follow @ARTINFO_Aus

Name: Dotty Attie

Age: 75

Occupation:  Artist

City/Neighborhood: NYC

In your upcoming show at P.P.O.W., you deal with the character of the Lone Ranger by placing his mask onto other figures. Why was the Lone Ranger your inspiration?  

I’ve been interested in masks as long as I can remember. An important underlying theme in my work has always been about our secret selves — the impulses we all have that we would rarely share with others, perhaps from shame, or perhaps just because we find it comforting to conceal part of ourselves from the world. Masks are a manifest example of that concealment, and bring a kind of mystery and fear with them.

 
"The Lone Ranger" 2012-13 / Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York

You’re known for re-imagining famous paintings, but this time you’re incorporating more photography. Does that change your process? 

When I first started to paint from photographs, instead of reproductions of 18th- and 19th-century paintings, the transition was really difficult.  For one thing, it was much easier to make a good painting from a great painting than it was to make a good painting from a photograph or snapshot, and I also started to paint only in black, gray, and white, with flesh tones tinted in at the end, instead of a less limited color palette, as I had been doing. It literally took me a couple of years to work some of the kinks out of the new techniques I’ve had to learn. I’m still working on them.

This series of paintings is derived from a series of found photographs. Where did these photos come from?

My late husband was a photographer, so I had a lot of photography books around the house, and as I started working from photos I sought out books that related to the themes I was working on. I also always had an eye out for any weird or unusual photography books, and I looked for photos on the Web. I have a nice collection of all kinds of photography books now, and I’m still always looking. My most recent purchase was in a junk shop near Scranton — a 20-volume series called “Crimes and Punishment: A Pictorial Encyclopedia of Aberrant Behavior” — they’re out there!

What project are you working on now?

I’ve been fiddling around with a series of paintings under the title “Worst Case Scenarios.” Some of them will be in my show.

What’s the last show that you saw?

Julie Heffernan’s wonderful paintings.

Describe a typical day in your life as an artist. 

I get up around 7, exercise for about an hour, straighten up my house, and go into my studio, usually by about 10. Then I work on whichever painting is next in line, and continue working until I’ve done however much I’ve decided I should do that day. Since my paintings are small, I usually completely paint one in a day, but then I’ll repaint it completely one or two more times. When I’ve finished for the day, I read, eat, watch television, or go out with friends.

Do you make a living off your art?

Not really.

What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?

Probably my opaque projector and my scanner.

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

From the things that have always had a grip on my imagination.

Do you collect anything?

I do. I collect vintage salt and pepper shakers, teapots, small chrome kitchen appliances, Mickey Mouse, small vases and planters, and detective novels from the late 19th- and early 20th-century.

What’s the first artwork you ever sold?

I think it was a portrait of myself and my husband, which his brother bought.

What’s your art-world pet peeve?

Artspeak. I wish some art writers would write more simply and clearly.

What’s your favorite post-gallery watering hole or restaurant?

Co.

What’s the last great book you read?

“Emma” [by Jane Austen].

What international art destination do you most want to visit?

The Musée Ingres in Montauban, France.

What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about?

Altoon Sultan, who lives and works in Vermont, and Julie Bozzi, who lives and works in Texas.  They’re both terrific painters, and do other really interesting things as well.

Who’s your favorite living artist?

Gerhard Richter.

What are your hobbies?

Gardening, cooking, and going to flea markets and thrift shops.

A buzz of activity greeted me when I entered Shoja Azari’s vast second-floor studio, located above SoHo’s bustling Canal Street, on a late-summer afternoon. The Iranian-born artist was helping Shahram Karimi—his childhood friend turned collaborator and studio mate—move a canvas in progress. Acclaimed film and video artist Shirin Neshat, the studio’s third resident and Azari’s partner, emerged from her half
 of the space to say hello. The couple’s dog circled. Such ties speak to the throughline of Azari’s work, grounded in collective practice and concerned with shared experiences of colonialism, trauma, and revolution.

Azari’s collaborations with Neshat have achieved iconic status. Soon after meeting the fellow Iranian in 1997, he helped with production on and played the male singer in Neshat’s 1998 two-channel video Turbulent; the project catalyzed 
their relationship. Since then, he has shared directing and writing credits on all her film projects, including their 2009 collaboration Women Without Men. And over the past few years, his solo artistic output and “video paintings” produced with Karimi have garnered steady attention. On the day of my visit, Azari and Karimi were preparing two upcoming exhibitions. Their joint effort “Magic of Light” opened at Jersey City’s massive arts complex, Mana Contemporary, in September, and this month Leila Heller Gallery in New York presents Azari’s solo show “The King of Black.”

Raised in the town of Shiraz, Azari trained as a filmmaker in New York from 1977 until he felt compelled to return home during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. After engaging in underground collective political activity, he relocated permanently to New York in 1983. Azari takes the long view of history in a cinematic and political sense. His films, such as Windows, 2005, have relied on long, sustained, often painterly views, as opposed to the quick-cut aesthetic of television and news media. Recently, his film works have taken a palimpsestic turn. He and Karimi have invented the technique of video painting. Azari films short sequences of images — trees swaying in the fall breeze, for example — which are looped and projected onto a canvas that Karimi has painted to closely resemble a still from the video. The layering of subtly shifting video footage over painting gives the impression of almost hallucinatory movement.

The artist has focused his desire to “fuse the past and present” in works that take Eastern imagery as a point of departure. Often, Azari layers traditional scenes with contemporary images as a critical gesture. For his “Icons” series from 2010, Azari animated a series of images of martyred Shiite imams — a kind of “religious pop kitsch” you find in every Iranian household, the artist explains. Azari filmed the tear-filled eyes of several Persian women and collaged this video footage over the male imams’ eyes. An indirect response to the death of Neda Agha-Soltan (the female victim whose murder by police during the 2009 Iranian election protests ignited mass political consciousness), the works function as a “subversion of religious patriarchy,” the artist says. An image of Mohammad Modabber’s storyboard-like 19th-century Qajar “coffee house painting” forms the background of The Day of the Last Judgment (Coffee House Painting), 2009. Azari projects contemporary video over Modabber’s composition depicting vignettes of hell and paradise. Each segment of the scene, in turn, is animated by equally hellish sequences sourced from YouTube. These include footage of American soldiers wreaking havoc in Iraq, the 2009 demonstrations in Iran, testimony from the 2005 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse and torture trials, and an epistle from a female suicide bomber.

Azari and Karimi’s new series of four video paintings, “Forsaken,” traces the passage of seasons and the dissolution of a nuclear family in the small, economically depressed mining town of Port Henry, New York. These slices of life, featuring a mother, father, and two children, dramatize the dark underbelly of Western capitalism. Azari would eventually like to produce a film with local actors on this theme.

“The King of Black” will center on Azari’s 24-minute film of the same title. The work premiered in “Love Me, Love
 Me Not,” an exhibition at the Arsenale Nord at this past summer’s Venice Biennale. The King of Black recounts the first chapter of Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi’s 12th-century epic The Seven Beauties. In this Zoroastrian myth, a man comes to know the world through his relationships with seven women, representing seven planets. The live-action 
film takes place in an animated background composited from images of hundreds of Persian miniatures. Structured with intertitles, like a silent film, the work narrates a king’s search for discovery, leading him from a land of sorrows to a paradise populated by unearthly virgin beauties (styled, ironically, according to conventions of Western Orientalist harem scenes). When the king shows his impatience to bed the Queen of
the Virgins, she expels him from paradise to become king of the miserable. Nizami’s proto-postmodern “deconstruction
of Islamic paradise,” Azari says, as well as the original myth’s celebration of female knowledge, attracted him to the story.

The work will join a video painting entitled Idyllic Life, 2012, based on a 16th-century Persian miniature, and an installation
of paintings produced by a hired master painter. In these canvases, contemporary stereotypical signifiers of Middle Eastern “terrorists” will be inserted into traditional Orientalist scenes. For example, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer, circa 1870—the painting that graces the front cover of cultural theorist Edward Said’s 1978 postcolonial groundbreaker Orientalism— will be transformed by the addition of modern weaponry. “The pornographic gaze of today is a continuation of the odalisque first produced by Orientalist painters” of the 18th and 19th centuries, Azari notes. Additional Pop-inspired paintings that emphasize Western erotic tropes underscore this formal connection.

Azari is quick to say that biography — his past political engagements in Iran, his relationship with Neshat — should not overshadow the reading of his work. And indeed, his output stands as more than the distillation of personal details. But these very facts are indissoluble from his artistic position. His personal experience of revolution, marginalization, and consciousness, as much as any abstraction, drives his excavations of history’s grand narratives for connections to our collective present.

This article is published in December 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

Jonathan Schipper’s latest show at Pierogi Gallery’s massive satellite space in Williamsburg, the Boiler, features a hand-built sculpture-making machine,
a giant room filled with 12 tons of salt, and a hot tub open for visitors to watch the installation in action. Over the course of the exhibition, Schipper’s apparatus continues to build tiny white sculptures within the gallery space resulting in a topographical installation that functions as a tongue-in-cheek meditation on impermanence and decay — longtime themes in the artist’s work.

See it before it closes this Sunday.

Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff out into the art world, charged with reviewing the shows they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)

“Brancusi in New York 1913-2013,” at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Closing January 11, 2014.

Kasmin’s 100-year Constantin Brancusi show, an attempt to keep up with the big boys’ historical shows, not only falls flat, but comes off as exceedingly corny with the artist’s Modernist quotes adorning the walls (“what is real is not the external form, but the essence of things”). — Ashton Cooper (Watch video HERE)

Marc Dennis, “An Artist, A Curator, and A Rabbi Walk Into a Bar...” at Hasted Kraeutler. Closing January 4, 2014.

Trompe l’oeil painting gets a decidedly modern twist in Marc Dennis’s masterfully executed, frequently hilarious, hyperreal mashups of art historical references ladden with issues of voyeurism and art world navel-gazing, including a very correctly costumed Dallas Cowboys cheerleader (with pom poms) contemplating Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and uberdealer Larry Gagosian depicted in an Old Master-style portrait with a “vanitas” theme — dressed in all black with a ruffled white collar and holding a skull. — Eileen Kinsella

“The Encyclopedic Palace,” at the 55th Venice Biennale. Closing November 24.

Rich with outsider artists and delightfully obsessive weirdos but dragged down in places by the inclusion of way too many off-theme gallery stars — including what, in a just world, would be a career-ending calamity of an installation by Paweł Althamer — the main show of this year’s Venice Biennale is nevertheless an incredible curatorial achievement, and if it were a nations-based competition its grand champions would be the Japanese artists. — Benjamin Sutton

Julie Evans, “Mylar Constructions,” at Winkleman Gallery. Closing November 27.

Julie Evans’s stunningly executed and delicate constructions of bleeding, brilliant green, pink, brown, grey, and orange paints on mylar and paper, cut-up and pieced together to mimic the forms of ancient or alien vegetation, may seem simplistic at first glance, but will mesmerize and seduce you if you give them the chance — particularly the series mounted directly to the gallery wall. — Alanna Martinez

Using a somewhat odd choice of words, Sotheby’s announced today that it and its worldwide head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer, “have agreed to end his association with Sotheby’s.”

We’ve been hearing news about mounting pressure on Meyer to bring in major consignments for some time now. Weeks before the big fall sales were to begin, it was known that he didn’t have work that could compete with the high caliber offerings (by Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, and Christopher Wool, among others) that Christie’s was putting up for sale. He finally sealed a deal on a major Warhol, "Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)" (1963), which ultimately sold for $105 million. His quest for that work had him flying to Switzerland to woo its owner, then inviting the owner to his Connecticut country house. His summer was apparently so difficult that, recounting the experience to a Newsweek reporter recently, he cried openly.

Even after Meyer landed the Warhol, the contemporary offerings at Christie’s and Sotheby’s were notably unbalanced heading into the fall season, with Christie’s boasting a 17 works in its contemporary evening sale  with estimates above $10 million, as opposed to six at Sotheby’s (though Sotheby’s ended up with nine eight-figure prices by the end of its evening sale).

Meyer joined Sotheby’s as head of the contemporary art department in London in 1992 after working at Christie’s in London for a few years after college, and five years later he moved to New York to head up the worldwide contemporary department. He has served as principal auctioneer for sales of contemporary art and Impressionist & modern art in New York, and contemporary art sales in London.

Meyer has made a career of selling works for unprecedented amounts. In 1998, soon after returning to New York, he sold Warhol’s “Orange Marilyn,” an iconic 1964 portrait of Marilyn Monroe, for $17 million, a record price for a the artist at the time. His sale of David Smith’s “Cubi XXVIII” (1965) for nearly $24 million in 2005 broke the auction record for that artist. And in May 2004, Meyer set the record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction when Picasso’s 1905 work “Boy with a Pipe” went for $104 million.

Last week, the contemporary art evening auction at Sotheby’s brought in $380.6 million, the highest grossing sale in the history of the auction house, with the contemporary-sales total, including the day auction, amounting to a record $474.3 million. Nonetheless, the figures still lagged behind those for the comparable Christie’s sales, which brought in $782.4 million.

“Tobias Meyer is a respected figure and has been at the center of signature moments in Sotheby’s history for more than 20 years and we are grateful for all of his contributions,” said chairman and chief executive officer Bill Ruprecht in a statement. “With Tobias’ contract soon expiring, we all agreed it was time to part ways. We wish Tobias nothing but good fortune.”

“I will always cherish my time at Sotheby’s and look forward to the next chapter in my career,” Meyer said in the same statement.  “I have had over 20 years of the most marvelous experiences at Sotheby’s where I have made many friends and had wonderful times.  I wish Sotheby’s the best of luck in the future.”

Sotheby’s has undergone some other changes in recent months, though it’s not clear if these have any connection to Meyer’s departure. In late September the house announced the appointment of a new chief financial officer, Patrick S. McClymont, who succeeded longtime CFO William Sheridan. Sheridan, who is leaving the company after 17 years in order to spend time with his family and focus on charitable work, agreed to stay on until the end of the year to help with the transition.

In early October, activist investor Daniel Loeb, head of the hedge-fund firm Third Point LLC, posted a copy of a letter filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and addressed to Ruprecht, calling for his resignation and seeking other sweeping changes at the auction house. Over the previous month Loeb had increased his stake in Sotheby’s from 5.7 percent to 9.3 percent, making him its biggest shareholder. There had been growing speculation that Loeb might try to leverage his holding into influence over Sotheby’s business dealings.

Days later, Sotheby’s fired back with a shareholder rights plan meant to make it more difficult for an investor to gain control of the company by diluting the value of that investor’s shares.

According to a statement from Sotheby’s, the Board adopted the rights plan “in response to the recent rapid accumulations of significant portions of Sotheby’s outstanding common stock, including through the use of derivatives.”