Garage Radio nyfw will also bring sounds direct from the Le Baron DJ booth at 11 p.m. each night. So if you can't make it past the front door at club, rest assured that you can still be part of the fun. Sort of.

Zhukova. (Patrick McMullan)

Dasha Zhukova has been awarded the 2012 Leo Award by the Independent Curators International. Named after the pioneering art dealer Leo Castelli, the award honors the achievements of similarly ground-breaking figures in the field of contemporary art. Ms. Zhukova's being recognized for her “pioneering and forward-thinking” approach to conceiving of and building new institutions and creating international opportunities for artists and curators.

Ms. Zhukova is the founder of the Garage: Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, the editor-in-chief of Garage magazine and the creative director of Art.sy and has been very busy turning Moscow into an epicenter of contemporary art activity. She recently announced that Garage, a Kunsthalle-like exhibition space, would be getting a redesign by Rem Koolhaas.

With the Leo Award, Ms. Zhukova is keeping good company, as always. She follows a long list of renowned recipients including critics, collectors and artists such as Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close, Christo & Jeanne-Claude and John Waters. The award will be presentedat ICI’s Annual Fall Benefit and Auction on Nov. 19, 2012, by ICI trustee emerita Agnes Gund.

Congratulations to Ms. Zhukova.

Owen Wilson and Val Kilmer at the Art.sy party at Soho Beach House during Art Basel Miami Beach, 2011. (Courtesy Nadine Johnson, Inc.)

“That was covered on Perez Hilton,” PR agent Michelle Finocchi announced proudly to The Observer. She wasn’t talking about a Kim Kardashian marriage breakup or wardrobe mishap but was instead referring to an artwork, Lindsay Lohan, a short film by artist Richard Phillips, which debuted last June on the Gagosian Gallery YouTube channel and at the Venice Biennale, before getting picked up by the tabloids—all part of Ms. Finocchi’s plan.

We’d called Ms. Finocchi to ask her about PR’s incursion into the art world. Yes, PR. Before going further, let’s get the bite-the-hand-that-feeds-us stuff out of the way: this is an article about publicists and the art world. Now more than ever, PR controls access (or at least tries to) in the art world—when journalists know things, how we know things, whether or not we get to know things in the first place. We wanted to take a look at how that became the case; in what follows we’re not biting the hand that feeds us. We’re just, you know, examining it.

PR is an old industry, but it’s a relatively new phenomenon in the art world. In the mid-1990s, art PR was almost nonexistent, save for large general practice firms like Ruder Finn (which had arts divisions that handled mostly institutional clients like museums) and some burgeoning agencies like Fitz & Co. For commercial galleries, which had just lurched their way through a recession, hiring a PR firm was considered an extravagance, and maybe even a little gauche; the received wisdom was that if a gallery had good artists and exhibitions, the press would come clamoring.

>> Believe the Hype! A Guide to 21 Art World Publicists

“I have a funny anecdote,” said Sara Fitzmaurice, founder of Fitz & Co, an agency that now has 15 New York-based staff and a newly opened Los Angeles office and serves as the U.S. office for Art Basel Miami Beach. “About 12 years ago, I was invited to pitch a very senior lady gallerist. It was a very prestigious account.” The pitch went well, but the gallerist had a stipulation. “I don’t want anyone to know you’re working with us,” Ms. Fitzmaurice remembers being told.

Museums have a long tradition of working with PR as a matter of strategy and branding. For galleries and fairs, even as recently as the early 2000s, it was relatively rare. But then came expansion. The number of galleries in Manhattan quintupled, from around 100 to today’s 500 or so. The number of art fairs in the world more than doubled. A gallery needed not only to be the best but to set itself apart. Enter the PR professionals. These days, Ms. Fitzmaurice gets inquiries daily from people who want her to represent them, as opposed to the half-dozen who would trickle in monthly in the old days. And they are hardly shy about it.

Even firms that have exclusively worked with museums and other nonprofits are now getting calls from the commercial side. “Six months ago, we would get one to two calls a month from galleries, artists and website entrepreneurs,” said David Resnicow, of Resnicow Schroeder, whose clients include the Israel Museum and the Menil Collection. “Now we get that many a week.” He’s considering taking on his first major commercial art enterprise.

“It’s a completely different world,” said Ms. Fitzmaurice. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the art world who would say they didn’t need PR.” And there are plenty of them out there to do the job. To name only a few of the most prominent of the publicists in New York who work with the arts and specifically with clients from the commercial world there’s Fitz & Co (Paul Kasmin Gallery, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Gagosian Gallery), Susan Grant Lewin (Jack Tilton Gallery), Nadine Johnson (Gagosian Gallery, Marlborough Galleries), Blue Medium (Sperone Westwater), Bettina Prentice (Haunch of Venison, Bortolami) and Andrea Schwan (Hauser & Wirth). It can cost a gallery up to between $5,000 and $10,000 per month to put a PR firm on retainer. Monthly, that’s around how much it costs to place an ad or two in an art magazine; yearly, it adds up to the cost of participating in a handful of art fairs.

Of course, the art world has never lacked for publicity stunts. The high-flying ’80s had its share, but it was DIY. At her 1982 exhibition of Julian Schnabel, a collaboration with Leo Castelli, Mary Boone, then “The Queen of the Art Scene,” as New York Magazine dubbed her, presold the work, then affixed next to each painting wall labels carrying the bold-faced names of the works’ new owners—shipping heir Phillip Niarchos, Swedish financier Fredrik Roos and Cologne candy manufacturer Peter Ludwig among them. “The tactic made the few works still up for grabs twinkle with desirability,” Anthony Haden Guest wrote in New York at the time.

These days, during art fairs, PR agents send out press releases that give reporters a heads up on what artworks galleries have sold—and for how much they sold them. As recently as the early 2000s, dealers were reluctant to give out that kind of information. But they’ve since buckled to a new kind of demand from the press. “We created the tools and the tools recreated us,” said Andrea Schwan, who launched her own business in 1996 after 10 years as senior vice president at the arts PR firm The Kreisberg Group. “Speed is not necessarily the friend of art.”

In 2004, The Art Newspaper, a venerable monthly publication, launched a daily paper at Art Basel Miami Beach and went on to offer dailies at Art Basel, London’s Frieze Art Fair and New York’s Armory Show, as well; websites, too, got in on the game, providing daily coverage of fairs. Julia Joern, director of marketing/press/publications for David Zwirner Gallery, said that when, two or three years ago, she started sending out her sales report on Day 1 of the art fairs, there were only about 12 recipients. Now she sends it out to around a hundred writers and editors globally.

Art fairs have become the mecca of PR. Last December, on the eve of Art Basel Miami Beach, Nadine Johnson sent out an event list that had swelled to two pages: a dinner for Aby Rosen, a Ferrari party, a Louis Vuitton/Art.sy beachside barbecue at Soho Beach House, a dinner hosted by P. Diddy, Jimmy Iovine and Andy Valmorbida in collaboration with VistaJet and Bombardier Aerospace. “It’s a hell of a lot more work than it used to be,” said Adam Abdalla, vice president at Nadine Johnson, who says that at Art Basel Miami Beach they set up temporary offices and work 20-hour days that end only after post-event networking “at Le Baron or wherever everyone else is going to be.”

One of New York’s premier PR doyennes, Ms. Johnson has been a force since Toby Young was calling her for invites in the 1990s [see his 2001 book How to Lose Friends & Alienate People], and it was around that time that she started repping high-powered art clients like megadealer Larry Gagosian (who now, in addition to Nadine Johnson and Fitz & Co, also has in-house PR). But it’s only since 2009 that she’s had an official art division, headed up by Mr. Abdalla, whom she poached from Susan Grant Lewin. Mr. Abdalla is a veteran of art fairs. “I’ve been to 500 parties in five years,” he said, with a glint of pride.

Now, other firms are starting art divisions. The two-year-old Musmanno Group, which has specialized in fashion, music and beauty products, recently hired Ali Price, a former photographer who spent some time working for Howard Greenberg gallery, to run theirs. Chelsea’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is their first client. Michele Finocchi, the one who got Richard Phillips on Perez Hilton, is one of a new breed of art PR consultants and agencies, which include Brian Phillips’s Black Frame, the rep for Frieze Art Fair’s New York edition, that operate at the intersection of fashion and art. Whether it’s the Marc Jacobs show designed by artist Rachel Feinstein or the Dior pop-up in Miami for artist Anselm Reyle, fashion and art make better bed partners than ever. “They’re kissing cousins,” said one publicist, “but it’s more like forced sex.”

But they jumped in bed together for a reason: they have a lot in common. The art world has recently achieved the same kind of event-driven frenzy as the fashion world, and PR people are required to man the gates, sometimes at their peril. Last year’s Venice Biennale achieved full Miami-fication, exemplified by the iPad-wielding Nadine Johnson reps guarding the velvet gates at the Bauer Hotel during the mob scene that was Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Contemporary Art Center party there. During a downpour, the crowds surged, and the flacks were nearly mowed down. (That was nothing compared to what happened to another PR rep at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2005. Manning the door for a particularly popular party, he was smacked with the event’s invite by a reveler who wasn’t allowed in. It was a very thick invite.)

And it’s not just the fairs. As top galleries like Gagosian and David Zwirner—the latter boasts an eight-person staff to handle marketing, press, events and archiving—have expanded, taking on more and more square footage, where they can do more and more elaborate exhibitions, they’ve introduced press previews, once the province solely of museums. Last November, some 70 journalists and art professionals turned up at Zwirner for a walk-through of a two-show opening of Neo Rauch and Michaël Borremans. And Zwirner has additional regular press events a few times a year to provide a rundown of upcoming shows.

Publicists’ power lies not so much in their sway over journalists at insider art publications, though they can facilitate access. They’re coveted for their connection to that New York Times style or food writer whom a gallery might not even think of reaching out to.

The one thing a publicist can’t guarantee a client is an exhibition review; critics, on the whole, are by nature resistant to the entreaties of PR people.

In a way, PR exposes some of the fault lines of the art world. There’s the curator who sat down with a colleague of ours at a meeting that had been set up by a PR firm and said, “I don’t do the whole PR thing.” (“These days everyone asks me ‘Who does your PR?’” said a dealer at a dinner during the Art Basel fair two weeks ago. “My exhibition program does my PR!”) And then there’s artist Richard Phillips, the client of Michele Finocchi. “It’s not absolutely necessary for an artist to try to maximize the use of new media and the effectiveness of that use, where public relations comes in handy,” Mr. Phillips told The Observer. “But if you don’t, you’re not as much in control of your message.”

Once, the art world didn’t talk about PR. Now, it talks about the right PR. As visible as she would seem to be, the right PR is a stealth warrior. She is everywhere and nowhere. She is at an art fair near you, she is on the phone, she is in your inbox.

“The right PR is like suspension in a luxury car,” said Bill Powers, gallerist and judge on the reality TV show Work of Art. “You kind of don’t feel it. And that’s how you know it’s good.”

Correction: June 27, 2012: An earlier version of this article failed to state that Nadine Johnson works with Gagosian Gallery.

rjovanovic@observer.com

]]>

Owen Wilson and Val Kilmer at the Art.sy party at Soho Beach House during Art Basel Miami Beach, 2011. (Courtesy Nadine Johnson, Inc.)

“That was covered on Perez Hilton,” PR agent Michelle Finocchi announced proudly to The Observer. She wasn’t talking about a Kim Kardashian marriage breakup or wardrobe mishap but was instead referring to an artwork, Lindsay Lohan, a short film by artist Richard Phillips, which debuted last June on the Gagosian Gallery YouTube channel and at the Venice Biennale, before getting picked up by the tabloids—all part of Ms. Finocchi’s plan.

We’d called Ms. Finocchi to ask her about PR’s incursion into the art world. Yes, PR. Before going further, let’s get the bite-the-hand-that-feeds-us stuff out of the way: this is an article about publicists and the art world. Now more than ever, PR controls access (or at least tries to) in the art world—when journalists know things, how we know things, whether or not we get to know things in the first place. We wanted to take a look at how that became the case; in what follows we’re not biting the hand that feeds us. We’re just, you know, examining it.

PR is an old industry, but it’s a relatively new phenomenon in the art world. In the mid-1990s, art PR was almost nonexistent, save for large general practice firms like Ruder Finn (which had arts divisions that handled mostly institutional clients like museums) and some burgeoning agencies like Fitz & Co. For commercial galleries, which had just lurched their way through a recession, hiring a PR firm was considered an extravagance, and maybe even a little gauche; the received wisdom was that if a gallery had good artists and exhibitions, the press would come clamoring.

>> Believe the Hype! A Guide to 21 Art World Publicists

“I have a funny anecdote,” said Sara Fitzmaurice, founder of Fitz & Co, an agency that now has 15 New York-based staff and a newly opened Los Angeles office and serves as the U.S. office for Art Basel Miami Beach. “About 12 years ago, I was invited to pitch a very senior lady gallerist. It was a very prestigious account.” The pitch went well, but the gallerist had a stipulation. “I don’t want anyone to know you’re working with us,” Ms. Fitzmaurice remembers being told.

Museums have a long tradition of working with PR as a matter of strategy and branding. For galleries and fairs, even as recently as the early 2000s, it was relatively rare. But then came expansion. The number of galleries in Manhattan quintupled, from around 100 to today’s 500 or so. The number of art fairs in the world more than doubled. A gallery needed not only to be the best but to set itself apart. Enter the PR professionals. These days, Ms. Fitzmaurice gets inquiries daily from people who want her to represent them, as opposed to the half-dozen who would trickle in monthly in the old days. And they are hardly shy about it.

Even firms that have exclusively worked with museums and other nonprofits are now getting calls from the commercial side. “Six months ago, we would get one to two calls a month from galleries, artists and website entrepreneurs,” said David Resnicow, of Resnicow Schroeder, whose clients include the Israel Museum and the Menil Collection. “Now we get that many a week.” He’s considering taking on his first major commercial art enterprise.

“It’s a completely different world,” said Ms. Fitzmaurice. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the art world who would say they didn’t need PR.” And there are plenty of them out there to do the job. To name only a few of the most prominent of the publicists in New York who work with the arts and specifically with clients from the commercial world there’s Fitz & Co (Paul Kasmin Gallery, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Gagosian Gallery), Susan Grant Lewin (Jack Tilton Gallery), Nadine Johnson (Gagosian Gallery, Marlborough Galleries), Blue Medium (Sperone Westwater), Bettina Prentice (Haunch of Venison, Bortolami) and Andrea Schwan (Hauser & Wirth). It can cost a gallery up to between $5,000 and $10,000 per month to put a PR firm on retainer. Monthly, that’s around how much it costs to place an ad or two in an art magazine; yearly, it adds up to the cost of participating in a handful of art fairs.

Of course, the art world has never lacked for publicity stunts. The high-flying ’80s had its share, but it was DIY. At her 1982 exhibition of Julian Schnabel, a collaboration with Leo Castelli, Mary Boone, then “The Queen of the Art Scene,” as New York Magazine dubbed her, presold the work, then affixed next to each painting wall labels carrying the bold-faced names of the works’ new owners—shipping heir Phillip Niarchos, Swedish financier Fredrik Roos and Cologne candy manufacturer Peter Ludwig among them. “The tactic made the few works still up for grabs twinkle with desirability,” Anthony Haden Guest wrote in New York at the time.

These days, during art fairs, PR agents send out press releases that give reporters a heads up on what artworks galleries have sold—and for how much they sold them. As recently as the early 2000s, dealers were reluctant to give out that kind of information. But they’ve since buckled to a new kind of demand from the press. “We created the tools and the tools recreated us,” said Andrea Schwan, who launched her own business in 1996 after 10 years as senior vice president at the arts PR firm The Kreisberg Group. “Speed is not necessarily the friend of art.”

In 2004, The Art Newspaper, a venerable monthly publication, launched a daily paper at Art Basel Miami Beach and went on to offer dailies at Art Basel, London’s Frieze Art Fair and New York’s Armory Show, as well; websites, too, got in on the game, providing daily coverage of fairs. Julia Joern, director of marketing/press/publications for David Zwirner Gallery, said that when, two or three years ago, she started sending out her sales report on Day 1 of the art fairs, there were only about 12 recipients. Now she sends it out to around a hundred writers and editors globally.

Art fairs have become the mecca of PR. Last December, on the eve of Art Basel Miami Beach, Nadine Johnson sent out an event list that had swelled to two pages: a dinner for Aby Rosen, a Ferrari party, a Louis Vuitton/Art.sy beachside barbecue at Soho Beach House, a dinner hosted by P. Diddy, Jimmy Iovine and Andy Valmorbida in collaboration with VistaJet and Bombardier Aerospace. “It’s a hell of a lot more work than it used to be,” said Adam Abdalla, vice president at Nadine Johnson, who says that at Art Basel Miami Beach they set up temporary offices and work 20-hour days that end only after post-event networking “at Le Baron or wherever everyone else is going to be.”

One of New York’s premier PR doyennes, Ms. Johnson has been a force since Toby Young was calling her for invites in the 1990s [see his 2001 book How to Lose Friends & Alienate People], and it was around that time that she started repping high-powered art clients like megadealer Larry Gagosian (who now, in addition to Nadine Johnson and Fitz & Co, also has in-house PR). But it’s only since 2009 that she’s had an official art division, headed up by Mr. Abdalla, whom she poached from Susan Grant Lewin. Mr. Abdalla is a veteran of art fairs. “I’ve been to 500 parties in five years,” he said, with a glint of pride.

Now, other firms are starting art divisions. The two-year-old Musmanno Group, which has specialized in fashion, music and beauty products, recently hired Ali Price, a former photographer who spent some time working for Howard Greenberg gallery, to run theirs. Chelsea’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is their first client. Michele Finocchi, the one who got Richard Phillips on Perez Hilton, is one of a new breed of art PR consultants and agencies, which include Brian Phillips’s Black Frame, the rep for Frieze Art Fair’s New York edition, that operate at the intersection of fashion and art. Whether it’s the Marc Jacobs show designed by artist Rachel Feinstein or the Dior pop-up in Miami for artist Anselm Reyle, fashion and art make better bed partners than ever. “They’re kissing cousins,” said one publicist, “but it’s more like forced sex.”

But they jumped in bed together for a reason: they have a lot in common. The art world has recently achieved the same kind of event-driven frenzy as the fashion world, and PR people are required to man the gates, sometimes at their peril. Last year’s Venice Biennale achieved full Miami-fication, exemplified by the iPad-wielding Nadine Johnson reps guarding the velvet gates at the Bauer Hotel during the mob scene that was Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Contemporary Art Center party there. During a downpour, the crowds surged, and the flacks were nearly mowed down. (That was nothing compared to what happened to another PR rep at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2005. Manning the door for a particularly popular party, he was smacked with the event’s invite by a reveler who wasn’t allowed in. It was a very thick invite.)

And it’s not just the fairs. As top galleries like Gagosian and David Zwirner—the latter boasts an eight-person staff to handle marketing, press, events and archiving—have expanded, taking on more and more square footage, where they can do more and more elaborate exhibitions, they’ve introduced press previews, once the province solely of museums. Last November, some 70 journalists and art professionals turned up at Zwirner for a walk-through of a two-show opening of Neo Rauch and Michaël Borremans. And Zwirner has additional regular press events a few times a year to provide a rundown of upcoming shows.

Publicists’ power lies not so much in their sway over journalists at insider art publications, though they can facilitate access. They’re coveted for their connection to that New York Times style or food writer whom a gallery might not even think of reaching out to.

The one thing a publicist can’t guarantee a client is an exhibition review; critics, on the whole, are by nature resistant to the entreaties of PR people.

In a way, PR exposes some of the fault lines of the art world. There’s the curator who sat down with a colleague of ours at a meeting that had been set up by a PR firm and said, “I don’t do the whole PR thing.” (“These days everyone asks me ‘Who does your PR?’” said a dealer at a dinner during the Art Basel fair two weeks ago. “My exhibition program does my PR!”) And then there’s artist Richard Phillips, the client of Michele Finocchi. “It’s not absolutely necessary for an artist to try to maximize the use of new media and the effectiveness of that use, where public relations comes in handy,” Mr. Phillips told The Observer. “But if you don’t, you’re not as much in control of your message.”

Once, the art world didn’t talk about PR. Now, it talks about the right PR. As visible as she would seem to be, the right PR is a stealth warrior. She is everywhere and nowhere. She is at an art fair near you, she is on the phone, she is in your inbox.

“The right PR is like suspension in a luxury car,” said Bill Powers, gallerist and judge on the reality TV show Work of Art. “You kind of don’t feel it. And that’s how you know it’s good.”

Correction: June 27, 2012: An earlier version of this article failed to state that Nadine Johnson works with Gagosian Gallery.

rjovanovic@observer.com

]]> http://galleristny.com/2012/06/believe-the-hype-how-pr-took-the-art-world/feed/ 0 rjovanovicobserver Owen Wilson, Val Kilmer http://galleristny.com/2012/04/dasha-zhukovas-garage-center-plans-new-rem-koolhaus-digs/#comments Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:19:39 -0400 http://galleristny.com/2012/04/dasha-zhukovas-garage-center-plans-new-rem-koolhaus-digs/ Rozalia Jovanovic http://www.galleristny.com/?p=18150

(Courtesy the Garage)

The Garage Center for Contemporary Art, the museum started by Dasha Zhukova in a former bus depot, announced that it has plans for a new home that will be designed by Rem Koolhaus's firm Offices for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Gorky Park, a Soviet-era recreation ground.

Ever since its lease ran out in 2011 at the depot, the Garage Center has set up a temporary home—a launch pad of sorts—to "develop and regenerate a number of temporary and permanent spaces," according to a statement it issued.

One of these off-shoot projects is the Rem Koolhaus temporary space that is being developed on the site of Gorky Park’s renowned '60s Vremena Goda (Four Seasons) restaurant, which has been abandoned for more than two decades. The rehabilitated historic spot is scheduled to open in late 2012. It combines a "double height entrance space, two levels of unobstructed exhibition galleries, creative center for children, roof terrace, shop, cafe, learning facilities and offices."

The new design will incorporate Soviet-era design elements like tiles, mosaic and brick, keeping the new space aesthetically linked to the roots of the historic park, a 300-acre terrain along the Moskva River designed in the 1920s by avant-garde Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov who is also responsible for Garage’s current space. The Russian design firm Form Bureau, headed by architect Olga Trevias, is working with Koolhaus's OMA to bring the plan to completion.

The new space will embrace the Garage Center's mission, which, since it first opened in 2008, is to explore and develop contemporary culture while also being a community center and catalyst for the emerging arts scene in Moscow. Some of its notable shows are Christian Marclay's The Clock, the first solo exhibition in Russia of James Turrell and the group show "New York Minute."

Mr Abramovich in London (Photo courtesy of Getty Images)

• Lets party! Roman Abramovich and girlfriend Dasha Zhukova chat to Wendi Murdoch at their New Year's Eve party in St Barts
• No risk of anyone going thirsty! Film producer Harvey Weinstein talks to his fashion designer wife Georgina Chapman [foreground: booze]
• Many guests stayed on Abramovich's super-yacht, Eclipse, which has been a dominating feature of the pretty harbour of Gustavia over the past few weeks
• What a gentleman: George [Lucas] wraps up his girlfriend in a blanket on a boat after the party
• Amidst the carnage: Film producer Brian Grazer and his female companion look distracted, despite the mess and dancing around them
• Not very good sailing attire: Martha [Stewart] hands her shoes to the captain before hopping on a boat to get to the party

Accompanying photos may be found here.

A partial view of the Hirst. (Courtesy Garage)

Courtesy of Dasha Zhukova's Garage, The Greatest Magazine in the History of Mankind, we have come across a trailer for a documentary entitled Skin.

It was produced as part of the body-as-canvas photo shoots that were showcased in The Greatest Magazine in the History of Mankind's first issue. They feature the work, in tattoo form, of Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, John Baldessari and—on an unfortunate young woman’s labia—Damien Hirst (recall that butterfly cover that debuted in the, uh, greener pastures of summer).

The trailer is very dramatic, but we would expect nothing less from The Greatest Magazine in the History of Mankind. Here is the text that appears on the screen at the end of the 90-second preview:

"MAJOR WORKS OF ART… ON A DIFFERENT TYPE OF CANVAS"

Indeed!

This is followed by a split-screen video of the tattoo pieces in progress. Behold, in the corner, the ominous face of a young model being forever branded on her hoo-ha with a Damien Hirst butterfly. Ah, the sacrifices we make for art.

Watch the video here.

"The Artist is Present."

A truncated version of Marina Abramovic’s "The Artist is Present" exhibition, shown in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, traveled to collector Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow. Forty-seven Russian artists were trained by Ms. Abramovic to stage live re-enactments of some of the artist’s past works. Ms. Zhukova, if you’ll recall, recently launched The Greatest Magazine in the History of Mankind. It is called Garage. It is not about Garages.

The Moscow Times ran a review of the show (thanks to In the Air for calling our attention to this). It reads as if the writer had never been exposed to performance art before, which we suppose is entirely possible. Ms. Abramovic is referred to casually as “a Yugoslav performance artist.” We are also told “one of the most notable aspects of the show is its interactive nature.” The author concludes “despite the strangeness, nudity, and wildly dangerous acts, there is something magical about performance art.”

Indeed, Moscow Times. Indeed.

The final take-away message here, however, seems to be that the best aspect of the show deals with efficient time management. Ms. Abramovic was around only for one week, for three hours a day, staging the centerpiece of "The Artist is Present," in which the artist sits in a chair and stares at audience members sitting across from her (remember that in New York people waited around for hours to take a seat with Ms. Abramovic). The writer quotes the artist as saying that in the performance “time stops.” The article continues:

“If such a time commitment seems a bit ambitious, it may be better to just accept an old joke retold by Abramovic: 'How many performance artists does it take to fix a light bulb?' Answer: 'I don't know. I was only there 6 hours.' Save yourself a few, OK, many, hours and experience the magic in highly condensed form at Garage.”

Ah, yes. This art is magical. But I’ve got places to be, people to see. In fact, I’ve got to get out of here right now.