Artists Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close. (Courtesy Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan)

Which art-world bigwig owns “a lot of drawings” by John Currin? Which Christie’s director would own Rothkos if she could afford them? And which reporter reveals, “at dinner tonight, I’m sitting next to Richard Serra”?

We won’t divulge all of the details from this Architectural Digest piece, assembled from interviews at a variety of recent art events, but suffice it to say that Ellsworth Kelly, Barbara Walters, Chuck Close, Martha Stewart, January Jones and David Rockefeller, Jr., among others, gave some interesting answers when asked by the magazine to name their fantasy art wish lists.

Chuck Close chose Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, and Ellsworthy Kelly had a whole list, which included Léger, but our favorite response may have been from painter George Condo, who gave a real-world (his “real world,” mind you) alternate to his fantasy choice:

“I wouldn’t mind having a van Gogh,” he said, adding, somewhat more practically, “or a Maurizio Cattelan.”

Grayson Perry

ARTnews explores the complicated issues surrounding copyright laws involving artwork that appropriates—or, reworks, samples, quotes, borrows, remixes, transforms, and/or adapts—in the digital age. [ARTnews]

An exhibition explores how Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and other Parisian painters used photographs in their work. [Los Angeles Times]

Here is a profile of painter Andrew Masullo, who is included in the Whitney Biennial. [NYT]

How big is the global art market? About $60.8 billion, according to a report by TEFAF. That's about one-twelfth of the size of last year's entire U.S. military budget. [Artnet]

Katya Kazakina recaps New York's Asia Week, which saw $140 million of work sold at auction. [Bloomberg]

The LOT-EK education firm will build a "pop-up studio" to house the Whitney's education activities at its forthcoming home in the Meatpacking District. [ArtDaily]

"Contemporary art has become this baggy old bag"—Turner prize winning artist Grayson Perry discusses his life and work and how to avoid "Picasso-napkin syndrome" at Guardian Open Weekend. [Guardian UK]

The Financial Times says Art Dubai has established itself with a noted jump in quality. [FT]

Artist Anita Steckel dies at 82. [NYT]

Cindy Sherman, 'Untitled #96.' (Courtesy Akron Art Museum)

The Akron Art Museum in Ohio will auction off a work from its collection, Cindy Sherman's Untitled #96 (1981), part of the artist's iconic centerfolds series from the 1980s, at Christie's contemporary New York evening sale on May 8. Christie's is already saying the work could set a new record for a work by Ms. Sherman sold at auction.
That previous record was set by a different print of the same photograph, which features Ms. Sherman sprawled on a bed and looking forlorn. It sold for $3.89 million last year, a figure that also set a record for any photograph sold at auction ever (Andreas Gursky's Rhein II surpassed that at the end of 2011, selling for $4.3 million).

Akron Art Museum acquired Untitled #96 in 1981, the same year it was made. They are selling it, according to an article in Reuters, to boost their acquisition fund.

'Untitled' (1981) by Cindy Sherman. (Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures)

I will never cease to be amazed by how much consensus I find among New York’s leading art critics as they all hail and salute the same things, or for that matter, as they all gang up and bash the same things, as they did with Maurizio Cattelan’s recent Guggenheim retrospective.

The unanimity bothers me; I wish someone would offer some counterpoint to the prevailing view, bring some fresh air into the dialogue. What’s the point of everyone saying the same thing? Do they really all like the same things or are they afraid to step out and say something different, even provocative? If I were an artist, I think I’d get suspicious if everyone in town chimed in about how wonderful I was.

There must be some valid reasons not to like something that everyone else likes—even the Cindy Sherman retrospective currently at the Museum of Modern Art, about which just about everyone was resoundingly positive, including this paper’s critic, Maika Pollack.

Before we take a look at the critics on the Sherman show, let’s get this out of the way: It’s a solid show, a chance to see decades of work and rethink the artist’s oeuvre; it’s a must-see grouping of more than 170 photographs spanning over 30 years of the artist’s career. For me, the show evokes the famous portraits of Marcel Duchamp dressed as his female alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy, who first appeared in the early 1920s in a series of photographs taken by Man Ray. One could argue that Ms. Sherman’s entire oeuvre (so far) is a complex elaboration of that single image of Duchamp’s. And what’s the matter with that? Can there ever be too much of a good thing?  Well, yes, there can, so read on…

The show at MoMA is an important one, not least because MoMA has been criticized for not featuring enough female artists in its hallowed halls. Ms. Sherman survived the “Pictures generation” of the ’80s (no small feat) and today she’s at the top of her game. Her work has upended the way we see art history, the way men see women, the way women see themselves, the way we all see ourselves. But, among the critics, I hoped to find some dissenting opinions. And yet, as usual, unanimity reigns—with one exception, which we’ll get to. Here they are, four of New York’s top art critics in a 21 gun salute:

In his well-written review in The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl observes that “Hapless self-images are the ordinary stuff of comedy, but Sherman makes hard, scary truths sustainable as only great artists can.” He also tells us that Ms. Sherman is “the strongest and finest American artist of her time.” Well, she may be in Mr. Schjeldahl’s book but she’s certainly not in mine. I have so many other artists to chose from I don’t know where to begin: Jeff Koons, Richard Prince. Heck, I’m all for a Haim Steinbach retrospective, but everyone is entitled to their opinion: de gustibus et coloribus non disputandum.

In The New York Times, the paper’s co-chief art critic Roberta Smith writes powerfully and with authority, but it often sounds to me as though she’s scolding someone, either the curator or the artist or the reader: “If this show does not go all out for Ms. Sherman, it is still a gift, one that reminds us, when we especially need reminding, what it takes to be a great artist.”

Ms. Smith’s writing is undoubtedly good, but she is often a victim of her own formula. Her system is to masterfully describe the good points of a show and then follow with the “faults” of the curator or the artist. As her loyal reader I invariably am left on both sides of the fence. We all respond to a guilt trip (my mother used it as a weapon against me for years), but after a while it gets predictable—any pattern  can get stale after a while. I’m not sure I need reminding about what it takes to be a great artist. (Are you only great when everyone agrees you are?)

Then I respectfully disagree with her one and only criticism of the show: “Basically, the Modern blinked. Ms. Sherman’s body of work could have easily handled the entire sixth floor, like the recent De Kooning retrospective, instead of just two-thirds.” To me, the show feels too big, at least in the format in which it is presented. It feels like so much of her work is hanging that the sheer weight of it wears me down.

Jerry Saltz, in New York magazine, has a far more personal style than Mr. Schjeldahl or Ms. Smith, whether you “like” him (on Facebook) or not. “For a decade I was cold on her art,” he writes. “The so-called ‘centerfolds’ … and the lurid scenes that followed struck me as pictorially dull. It was obvious noir, New Wave negativity, overconstructed self-consciousness, I thought; it oozed sleepwalking eighties hipness.” That’s really funny, because anyone who follows the art market knows that Ms. Sherman’s “centerfolds” are her single most successful body of work, the one most coveted by museums and collectors. Isn’t it funny that those are the images he trashes for being too hip? One of them (nicknamed the “Orange Girl”) sold for almost $4 million at auction last year, so perhaps it’s best not to hire Mr. Saltz as your art adviser.

He eventually chimes in with his critic peers: “I went the full Sherman (in 1992), when she made darkness visible in her horrific-beautiful ‘sex pictures’—­images I’ve always called, after Goya’s paintings of war, ‘The Disasters of Sex.’ Fashioned from dismembered and recombined mannequins, some adorned with pubic hair, one posed with a tampon in vagina, another with sausages being excreted from vulva, this was anti-porn porn, the unsexiest sex pictures ever made, visions of feigning, fighting, perversion. … Today, I think of Cindy Sherman as an artist who only gets better.”

It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Mr. Saltz dislikes the “commercial” work (the “centerfolds”) and favors the least commercial work (the “sex pictures”). His method, generally, is to try and sound smart by liking what the market doesn’t. The funny thing in this case is that I agree with him. I like the ugly ones too. But, given a choice, I’ll stick with a centerfold image. In fact I was offered the “Orange Girl” a few years ago and every day I regret not buying it.

Linda Yablonsky, a freelancer who in the case of her piece on Cindy Sherman was writing for The Wall Street Journal, is a friendly and positive writer, and for this female artist her admiration knows no bounds: “Today Sherman’s photographs sell at the very top of the art market … The show should give her reason to feel invincible.” Well, that’s just not true. That $4 million achieved last year at auction—Ms. Sherman’s record—is not very high compared to what some of her male peers have achieved.  As for calling Ms. Sherman a photographer, she is not one in a traditional sense. Though she uses a camera she’s rarely grouped into the Photography category at auction; she’s always been firmly inside what we call “Contemporary Art.” Given that, I’d argue that’s she’s still undervalued if indeed she’s as great as they all say she is. (For that matter, she’s overvalued if she’s not.) Her art market success is relative only to other female artists, not to her male peers who sell for up to three or four times her highest price.

Ms. Yablonsky leads the fan club when she writes: “With one marriage to video artist Michel Auder, and relationships with Steve Martin, Richard Prince, Robert Longo and David Byrne behind her, Sherman now lives alone with Frieda, a male parrot, in a splendid Manhattan duplex overlooking the Hudson River.” If any of you saw Guest of Cindy Sherman, the horrid 2008 documentary Paul Hasegawa-Overacker (known as “Paul H-O”) made about his long-term relationship with her—rent it if you’re feeling perverse—you would cease to be interested in her private life; like me, you’d still be trying to forget about it. As far as the tabloid relationships with movie stars, art stars and rock stars, I prefer the part of Ms. Yablonsky’s article where Ms. Sherman admits that these days she lives alone with her parrot, and I sympathize with her because when I got divorced I also lived with a parrot (thankfully my macaw, Baby, now lives at my mother’s house.)

As far as I can tell, only one critic, Bloomberg News’s Lance Esplund, has taken a stance against the show, and he didn’t just throw a monkey wrench at it, he went all out: “As in all of her self-portraits, the figures look down on us with vacuous, mocking stares that suggest that nothing, including Sherman’s art, should be taken very seriously.” Mr. Esplund’s review of course sparked an attack by the apple polishers on Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page, but that’s probably a good sign. I see Mr. Esplund’s point, but I don’t agree with him; to my mind, Ms. Sherman is without a doubt one of the best artists of our time. But in terms of her possible “greatness,” that I will reserve for only the best of the best. Even if I disagree with him, I applaud Mr. Esplund for sticking his neck out. What could be worse than a city where every art critic says the same thing?

editorial@observer.com

The 69 black-and-white “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80), presented in their entirety, were modeled on B-movie publicity pictures, and recycle clichés from Hollywood, European art house films, and Hitchcock. They are tiny, exquisite vignettes of voyeurism and vulnerability: A bobbysoxer hitchhiking on a country road; a busty librarian shelving; a trench-coated power-blonde caught in a paparazzi flash. Each character is fictional but familiar, the series itself iconic.

But Ms. Sherman is no snob: she rejects the sanctity of art. For all that her film stills were immediately embraced as a canny critique of the status of women, her 1997 full-length slasher film Office Killer, starring Molly Ringwald (and sadly not on view here), proved that her dedication to the effects of both makeup and stage gore extended well beyond the intellectual. Vintage Sherman, the movie makes use of her off colors and extreme camera angles and her typically ambitious themes: working women, incest, technology, death. It proves that a major voice is never a boring one, and its existence still makes purists uneasy.

Her large-scale centerfolds were commissioned in 1981 by Artforum magazine, but never accepted for print. They assume what Laura Mulvey once called the male gaze, that voyeuristic, prurient pleasure elicited by images of women who seem unaware of being watched. Untitled #96’s supine subject holds a crumpled want ad; Untitled #92’s light-blue eyes, tartan skirt and pixie hair evoke feminine vulnerability. Each figure offers a glimpse of bare belly or dewy thigh.

Ms. Sherman’s best impulse has perhaps been her ambivalent relationship with success. Just when the market deemed her work desirable, she switched gears to a series based on death, disintegration and disaster. Fake vomit, rot, feces, decay and medical supply dolls arranged in pornographic acts make up her macabre, grotesque tableaux of the 1980s and ’90s: blood sausage seeps out of a prosthetic vagina topped by a mask of an old man’s face in Untitled #250, while Untitled #177 features pustulating boils on a grotesque ass, framed by a schoolgirl’s tartan and lace but also creeping plastic ants. “Put this on your wall,” the works seem to challenge the potential collector. (For #177, that dare was taken up by the late artist Mike Kelley, who owned the print.) These fantasies are farcical, yet there is a Gericault-like integrity to her fascination with the gleam and sheen of dismembered and deliquescing bodies, and an ethos in Ms. Sherman’s punk embrace of the least pretty side of art.

In a salon-style gallery of her history portraits from the late ’80s, you can feel her ambition to challenge the legacy of painting. The photos recreate the poses of subjects in classic works by Raphael, Carravagio and Ingres, but also reveal Ms. Sherman’s desire to spoof: jets of milk stream from a Madonna’s strap-on prosthetic, and comical costume-shop prostheses feature warts and bulbous noses. The work speaks both to Baudelaire’s notion of paint as a medium equivalent to theatrical make-up, and to the power of the genre-busting, unsanctimonious humor that is ultimately Ms. Sherman’s most transgressive tool.

The surprise is how good Ms. Sherman’s recent work looks. She hit her stride in 2000, by which time, like a great actor, she knew every angle of her chin and nose and every trick of makeup and wig. Her virtuosic head shots series gives us Ms. Sherman in the zone: Untitled #360, an oversexed aging blow job queen, Untitled #355, the gothic biker stripper, and Untitled #399, the sag-titted prep. I had previously had doubts about the vast scale of the 2008 “Society Portraits,” mammoth spoofs of “women of a certain age,” but in a museum context not only do they challenge the status of painting, but their scale makes legible the details that render them lethal: the subject of Untitled #468 is a stark manifestation of our fear of aging: crooked smoker’s teeth, teary eyes, mink coat, post-menopausal pooch. These are the sad, spousal flip sides of portraits of successful executive men in their 50s or 60s. Like the film stills, they draw on the viewer to constellate clichés into a feeling of déjà vu, yet these dig deeper: these images of women have a starkness and power to discomfit not seen since Manet’s Olympia.

The show has missteps. Untitled #512 (2011), a chromogenic color print, features a Manet-like digital facture in the background surrounding a dramatic swan of a fashion plate. It is searching too hard to make the large-scale photographs connect to painting, a relationship already entirely evident. In a gallery of Ms. Sherman’s obscure fairy tale photos, Untitled #296 feels off—a fairy with a glitter ball, it is slight and facile. And there are too few examples of Ms. Sherman’s early work—the show would have benefited from more juvenilia by the flannel-and-boot-wearing young “Cynthia M. Sherman,” such as her “Air Shutter Release Fashions” (presented recently in a catalogue raisonné of her work by Gabriele Schor), a series of self-portraits reminiscent of Hans Bellmer’s disassembled and bizarrely reassembled dolls. But, overall, MoMA’s curation is even-handed. If the catalogue has unnecessarily didactic, overly reverential moments, like Ms. Respini’s essay, which feels at odds with Ms. Sherman’s own wit and sense of lowbrow fun, there is also John Waters’s contribution, in which he calls Ms. Sherman “a female female impersonator in [her] work,” effortlessly locating her gender-bending take on Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy but also her relationship to camp and drag. And the museum was smart to have Ms. Sherman curate an accompanying film series that brings together everything from Maya Deren’s radical shorts to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Ms. Sherman’s influence has only grown over the years. There are echoes of her props and costumes in Ryan Trecartin’s videos, and her approach to photography in K8 Hardy’s practice. Photographers like Laurel Nakadate and Nikki S. Lee seem to have misunderstood her—Ms. Sherman was never nude in her own photos, and her strategy has always been to use prosthesis in place of titillation. Her project is not so much about the “I” of the self-portrait as it is about the flexible fiction of photography itself.

Sometimes it seems that the world itself has begun aspiring to the work of Cindy Sherman. From reality TV to celebrity makeovers, Lana del Rey to the anxiety of the Facebook profile, Ms. Sherman’s uses of makeup and costume to create character and comment on a youth-obsessed age have become the stuff of our daily preoccupations. This retrospective proves, if there was ever any doubt, that she remains one of the major voices in contemporary art. It also shows that her influence and prescience extends well beyond the walls of the museum.

editorial@observer.com

Cindy Sherman, 'Murder Mystery' (detail), 1976. (Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures)

Contrary to widespread belief, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) are not her earliest works. Between 1975 and 1977, while Ms. Sherman was still a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, she created a series of black-and-white photographs in which she played characters in a murder mystery. She then cut out the characters and reassembled them in meticulous tableaux. Metro Pictures is exhibiting these unique assemblages at its booth at the ADAA Art Show, which runs through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory.

“It was originally one piece that was a Hollywood-style narrative and she played thirteen different characters herself,” said Alexander Ferrando of Metro Pictures. “She photographed herself and then excruciatingly cut out by hand all of these figures from the photographs and placed them directly on the wall.”

What Mr. Ferrando is referring to is the manner in which these cut-outs were first shown in 1976, at the downtown alternative gallery Artists Space. Hundreds of figures were composed in narratives and mounted individually onto the wall. “Since then they have not been shown anywhere,” he added. Now the artist has arranged them on paper and framed them.

The narrative, which is composed from a series of 80 framed collages, begins at a murder victim’s funeral and flashes back to the scenes from the crime, with characters who would fit in a Weegee photograph, replete with knife-wielding murderers, trench-coated detectives and Marilyn-like blonde actresses.

Though the gallery declined to name a price for the works, one photograph from Ms. Sherman’s “Murder Mystery People” series, the source images for these collages, sold for $16,401 at a Christie’s auction in 2004. But that work was from an edition of 20, Mr. Ferrando noted. The collages that the gallery is offering at the Art Show are unique.

These humble, hand-crafted collages offer a counterpoint to Ms. Sherman’s large-scale glossy color work on view at her MoMA retrospective. Though nicely timed to coincide with that major exhibition, the ADAA display also marks the release of Cindy Sherman: The Early Works, a new catalogue raisonné that was just published in German by Hatje Cantz and will be published in English in May.

Some of our favorites from the show are Tanya Bonakdar's presentation of an installation by Sarah Sze (who will represent the US in the 2013 Venice Biennale), Cheim & Read's display of sculpture by Lynda Benglis and Metro Pictures' set of black and white images from Cindy Sherman's "Murder Mystery" series. With 72 exhibitors, this is an art fair that offers diversity and breadth while still being manageable.

“It’s harder to get into than the actual Whitney Biennial,” one restless hopeful attendee said somewhere around Sullivan Street, blocks away from the entrance.

The artist Haley Mellin, standing outside with one of the Bruces grabbed Gallerist and dragged us inside. The Bruce, skinny and small with big glasses and a few days scruff, was worried that many of the artists could not get in. There were capacity issues—an anxiety reinforced by the frowning police officer watching the door closely. When we requested a face-to-face interview with the Bruce, he grimaced and shook his head “no.”

Ms. Mellin, who helped install the show, called the Brucennial “social sculpture at its best.” She began scanning the room and listing work: “Herbie Fletcher, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman. Oh, this is a great young painter Lauren Bartone,” she said, reaching into the crowd and grabbing the young woman by the arm. She pointed to her work, a simple red painting depicting the front of a chain link fence. It hung below a Mike Kelley drawing, and rested between a Hirst spot painting and a large Julian Schnabel canvas of British redcoats marching next to something that looked like a super-sized white buffalo (it was a tribute to the late Kelley and had “Goodbye” scrawled across it in purple paint).

“It’s always good to be between a Hirst and a Schnabel,” Ms. Bartone said. It was her first time exhibiting work in New York.

Vito Schnabel, who represents BHQF and helped organize the show, was standing near his father’s painting. We asked him if he had a favorite work.

“One of the things I love about this show,” he said, “is obviously there are artists here who are dead, there are artists you don’t know, there are artists you know a little bit more. Even if you wouldn’t necessarily want to have these pictures in your home, all of it together kind of becomes one work. It’s a real nice, diplomatic way of looking at things. There’s a sense of camaraderie.”

That said, he rapid-fire rattled off some names, his eyes jumping around the space: “I like René Ricard’s painting a lot, Rashid Johnson’s, I like Ron Gorchov, a Dash Snow collage, I like the bird shit paintings by Dan Colen, nice Mike Kelley drawing up here, collaboration painting here by Warhol-Basquiat. There’s a big blow-up rat that’s like a blow fish attached to a rope up there that I like a lot. I forget the name of the artist. Some things I don’t even know the names of.”

Artists' names were scribbled faintly on the wall in pencil. Piles of empty PBR cans were beginning to stack up on the floor.

We bumped into the young painter N. Dash, who had a small and understated watercolor hanging among a number of works by artists we wouldn’t even pretend to know the names of. She inspected the work filling the room.

“It’s a perfect storm,” she said kind of gravely then disappeared into the crowd.

Outside, it was still raining. New York's Jerry Saltz stood by the door and looked at us, a little stressed.

“Can you get me into this thing?” he asked.

'Andy Warhol (Roller Skating)' ca. 1979.

Though Andy Warhol was notoriously private, a new exhibition at the New York gallery Affirmation Arts, "Warhol: Confections & Confessions," shows 53 images from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, none of which has ever left Pittsburgh. Eight of the pictures, one of which shows Andy Warhol skating, have never before been exhibited. [WSJ]

A bookie in Britain—a land of amazing and bizarre bets—is giving 3/1 odds that the Munch Scream (1895) set to sell at Sotheby's New York in May will break $125 million. It's estimated to go for more than $80 million. [FT]

This piece compares Kiki Smith's early sculptures of the human body to "a corpse, or an AIDS-racked body." [NYT]

Meet UX, the band of "hacker-artists" that prowl Paris via underground tunnels and fix things. [Wired]

Here's the Art Market Monitor write-up of last week's Art Fag City awards. [Art Market Monitor]

Contemporary art has a "reliance on humor." Who knew? [FT]

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 340-ton boulder will begin its travels from Riverside County quarry, through four counties and 22 cities, to its final resting place at the museum where it will be the centerpiece of artist Michael Heizer’s giant sculpture, Levitated Mass. [Los Angeles Times]

James Gardner provides a brief history of the Louvre. [WSJ]

Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s “Mystic Lamb” (aka the Ghent Altarpiece) one of the most revered works of Western art, has been photographed in extremely high resolution for the first time, the results of which are visible on a new interactive website [NYT]

Here's Peter Schjeldahl on the Cindy Sherman retrospective. [The New Yorker]

Prado's copy of the Mona Lisa is now on view in Spain. [The Art Newspaper]

A photograph by Cindy Sherman for M.A.C.

If you happen to pick up a catalogue for Cindy Sherman's retrospective at MoMA, be sure to check out the interview with director John Waters on page 68. As Ms. Sherman is a sartorial chameleon and Mr. Waters a king of kitsch, it was maybe inevitable that they would land on the topic of thrift stores, and Ms. Sherman reveals that, like most people, she's had trouble finding anything good in New York's second-hand shops.

cs—I would go to a Salvation Army and look for certain kinds of costume-y things. But so much of it was junky stuff. I would rip up a pair of pants and use the legs as sleeves for some other kind of garment that looked like brocade from the seventeenth century. But it was just some cut-up pieces of fabric.
jw—New York must be the worst city to go thrift shopping in, because everybody knows everything, even at the Goodwill. Do you have secret places where you find stuff?
cs—Online, actually. I got some of the clown stuff on eBay, but it wasn’t real clown stuff—it was for square dancing.
jw—When you travel, do you go to thrift shops?
cs—Not so much anymore.
jw—Do you go to costume-rental places?
cs—No, I’ve never done that.
jw—Never? Every one of those historical costumes you found in thrift shops?
cs—About a third of that series was shot when I was in Rome. The woman who owned the studio was related to the Borghese family, and one or two of the outfits were from her family. There’s a Madonna holding a child; that dress was from her family, so that’s the most “real” costume. But they had good flea markets in Rome where I got a bunch of old religious things.

The show opens to the public on Feb. 26.