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The Art World’s Mini-Madoff and Me – Vulture

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lnigo Philbrick, left, and the writer, in St. Moritz on New Year’s Eve in 2015.
Photo: Courtesy Schachter

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When I first met Inigo Philbrick in 2012, he was all of 25, looked an awful lot like Justin Timberlake, and was running an art gallery called Modern Collections in London’s Mayfair district. Despite sounding like a spinoff of Bed Bath & Beyond, it was backed by the astute and prescient art insider Jay Jopling, who’d founded White Cube gallery and helped give the world the careers of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst — for better or worse. I was immediately smitten, professionally and personally; Philbrick was sharp, fun, and funny.

He was slim, neither short nor tall, with closely cropped gingerish curls and carefully manicured stubble to the point just shy of reaching a fully fledged beard. He was American but vaguely posh accented, with an English-educated art-museum-curator father, Harry Philbrick, whom he’d followed to Goldsmiths, University of London, as a fine-arts student. The sort of person who fit in seamlessly among the well-educated, well-tailored, well-traveled tribe that populates the art world, even if, unlike so many of them, he didn’t happen to have the inherited funds. Already, however, he had the airy arrogance and profound self-assuredness you find in the smoothest and most convincing of art dealers.

And for a long time, I thought that was one of the most fortunate days of my life, since, soon after I bought a Nate Lowman painting from Modern Collections, we became friends and art-world wingmen for each other in life and business. Though I’d been making art, teaching, and curating as well as buying and selling art at auction and brokering sales between art dealers for more than 20 years by then, the last eight while living in London — all the while writing about the trade from an insider’s perspective — I’d never made all that much money off it all. The art world seems like it’s flooded with dough, and it is, but its best-publicized assets (pricey name-brand artworks) are for the most part bid up and exchanged among a rather limited number of people, most of whom are already deeply entrenched in the market. It’s a game easy to gawk at but not as easy to be dealt into. And Philbrick was determined to be a player.

For a few years, we drank a great deal of very expensive wine and ate obscenely priced sushi rolls. We took trips together: New Year’s in St. Moritz, summers in Spain (not Ibiza; he was too busy, he told me, when he was with the “clients” he never wanted me to interact with), and art trips to Dijon, Milan, Paris, and even Crystal Bridges in Arkansas, frequently on jets he’d chartered for the occasion. Between competing for steps on the iPhone Health app and drinking institutional amounts of red wine and Monkey 47 gin, we talked shop. We were friends. We loved art. He was a key source of information for my column on Artnet; a character I invented called Deep Pockets was an amalgam of insiders but primarily Philbrick. My kids would always say, “Inigo is either the next Larry G. [Gagosian] or a future jailbird,” years before any major red flags arose — little geniuses that they are.

Friends would accuse me of loving him, and I can’t deny that. Not in a physical way so much, though there was admittedly a lot of horsing around, especially under the influence, which we often were. He’d frequently slip my glasses on when I’d remove them to text. He even grabbed me once following an afternoon consumed by consuming a few bottles and put me into a violent bear hug on a London street corner that I had to struggle my way out of.

Through all of this, he helped me make a good deal of money, I’ll admit. He’d sell me, say, a Christopher Wool work on paper for around $800,000 or a Rudolf Stingel on canvas for around a million dollars, then he’d resell it to another client and we’d both pocket a few hundred thousand. Philbrick sauntered into the salesrooms like a seasoned veteran beyond his years with balls of steel. I used him to get access to evening auction tickets, as I was blacklisted from time to time for my writing, and he liked the breadth of my experience and the profile that my writing enjoys. As recently as December 2018, I wrote on Artnet News that “the young dealer … has kept a low profile as a secondary trader well known among the cognoscenti for being shrewd and having a mind of his own … a rarity in the market.”

I didn’t realize how he might be in over his head — or the extent of it — until six months or so after I wrote that. It was around then that he was accused of selling art that wasn’t his to sell in elaborate transactions and trying to hide that even more elaborately. Philbrick, it seemed, was a mini-Madoff of the art world.

It appears he could have cheated people out of $70 million or more. I wasn’t immune either; he took me — his friend! — for $1.75 million when we (or so he told me, anyway) bought a Stingel copper cast together with another partner.

As all of this came to light, last November, he vanished.

November 2017: At the auctions (left) and dinner in London. Photo: Courtesy of Schachter.

November 2017: At the auctions (left) and dinner in London. Photo: Courtesy of Schachter.

As an art dealer, he had few rivals, from his generation or beyond. He had an uncanny knack for finding the very best examples of a select group of artists who were in demand (or would soon be) and knowing the minutiae of those markets better than anyone I’ve met. It was his facility for finding great examples of highly sought-after art, and the well-endowed homes and art storages to park it in, no matter how temporarily, that attracted the deep-pocketed, from Jopling to a coterie of the young, privileged, and entitled.

Here’s how it worked: Philbrick made his money betting big on a rise in price for a few artists, notably Stingel, who is known for his seemingly endless series of indistinguishable paintings of wallpaper (I’m not kidding, though I admit to liking them), and Wool, whose most famous text painting fittingly spells out the word FOOL. It worked so well for a while — Stingel’s prices went as high as $10.5 million in May 2017 — that he called himself “Stingeldamus.”

Philbrick had a close-knit group of friends and supporters he regularly traded with who were steadily driving up prices from one deal to the next. Often it was “secondary market” works (what car dealerships might call “pre-owned”), since galleries in various ways make it difficult to buy works of coveted “primary market” art (art that has not been previously sold, sometimes hot off the easel) by giving early access to their established collectors. These are people trusted not to flip the art and instead play along to the subtle and incremental holding game lest its value shoot up unsustainably quickly and then deflate. In practice, this often means that only insiders can reliably make money in an art market.

Sometimes you’d have to do clever things to get access. Philbrick would use a network of art advisers and proxies — even actual actors playing an art-interested version of their recognizable selves to starstruck gallerists — to buy works that might not be for sale directly to him, only to flip them.

The flip is what mattered, the prices going ever higher. If this sounds like the condo market in Miami Beach in 2007, there’s a reason for that.

The art market was estimated at $64 billion last year. But the value of art in existence is much more. Art is an asset class, but one that offers no dividends or income by hanging on the wall or, as is so often the case, being jammed into Fort Knox–like storage facilities in places like Geneva, designated “free ports” that function as government-sanctioned holding pens where, if the art is never hung on the walls, the owner doesn’t have to pay taxes on it. There it sits, hopefully maturing in value like a vintage wine. (There’s also wine and even cars parked in these facilities.)

How do you take advantage of that? The past decade has seen an avalanche of banks and finance companies offering easy credit collateralized by fine art and spurred by low interest rates and the highly publicized spike in art prices. Basically, you’d borrow against your holdings and do what you could to ensure that the values rose, including selling off shares of the artworks and teaming up with others to spread the risk of artificially bidding up the prices.

With the greater expansion in the global art market in the past 25 years, things soon got a little too easygoing. Lenders once mandated that art collateral be held in neutral storage facilities they controlled, but over this time the requirements were loosened and borrowers were allowed to hang on to the art, giving some the opportunity to unscrupulously deal it (or to borrow more against the same collateral), supposedly to contribute to paying back the initial debt.

The art world is to some extent unregulated and not particularly transparent. There is no centralized database of artworks’ ownership and nothing resembling title with regard to a work of art, as with real estate and cars (other than when there’s an outstanding loan and a creditor chooses to file for protection under local Uniform Commercial Code statutes, which means some lenders in jurisdictions that permit it can file a searchable lien against a painting or sculpture). Consequently, prices sometimes can be manipulated by the very well connected, who would be consistently selling and reselling the same works at increasing prices to an unwitting clientele or choreographing the selling of those works at auction to give the impression of ever-rising value. It’s easy to think you can mastermind this, and in various ways you can, but since nothing goes up forever (in a straight line, anyway), your big bet can rather quickly become as overleveraged as WeWork. Stingel’s prices went up through 2017 but then began to fall. As ARTnews put it in December of last year, “a torpid Stingel market was a threat to Philbrick’s business strategy, as it began to shut off the supply of new money,” though he profited handsomely on the way up.

You can partly credit, or blame, the election of Donald Trump for this. In a more woke art world, the group of white male artists Philbrick dealt in, after experiencing meteoric rises, began to plateau and tumble. Meanwhile, the prices of some artists of color skyrocketed. Rather than rein his bets in, Philbrick seemed to grow ever more audacious. There is an adage with which my father frequently admonished me as a child: You can lie as much as you like, but don’t believe your own lies.

Philbrick bought more and more expensive works of art at auction, ostensibly to quickly resell them, and played the auction-guarantee game — placing bets on artworks about to be auctioned with a view to pocketing a quick profit (with no money down required to make the wager, like those late-night infomercials encouraging real-estate investments) if they sold for more than the guarantee. But if you guessed wrong or misjudged the market, you ended up with the goods whether you could afford to pay for them or not.

Increasingly, Philbrick got stuck with the art he’d placed wagers on and had to juggle to pay, stealing, as it were, from Peter and Paul to pay Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Christie’s, and he was more than once banned from bidding at auction houses because of late payments — though the houses never admitted to this when his tune was up. No one, in fact, wanted to admit to even knowing him, much less doing business with him, but they all did. Philbrick’s unbridled hubris had a big hand in his implosion, which is slowly becoming apparent still.

March 2016: Roughhousing in Hong Kong. Photo: Courtesy of Schachter.

March 2016: Roughhousing in Hong Kong. Photo: Courtesy of Schachter.

I should also mention his penchant for partying. Not only did he drink, he had a hefty appetite for drugs and enjoyed the company of prostitutes. I witnessed all of this (not the hookers, mind you, though I did see phone snaps, I’m afraid to say), and what I did not see firsthand he bragged about to me later. As time went on, it became clear that it might be affecting his judgment. He was rarely, in my experience with him, without a stash of MDMA or ketamine brazenly carried in his briefcase or jacket pocket from one airport to another. He had no fear when it came to being caught with the contraband, or much else. I will never forgive myself (or him) for permitting one of my sons to join him on an Ibiza jaunt where they had a three-night ecstasy bender. And that wasn’t the only time he fed drugs to my kids, which I found out about only afterward. At the same time, he was very supportive of my making and selling my own art and that of my sons, which likely contributed to my turning a blind eye.

His easygoing sense of entitlement was partly bluff, partly something he was bred for. He was born in 1987 in Redding, Connecticut, and his father went on to lead the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts museum and currently runs Philadelphia Contemporary. His mother is a writer whom he never went into much detail about. His father was selfish and capricious with money, at least according to him. Philbrick once told me he’d supported his mother and sister financially. Though I never saw or had any contact with either woman throughout our relationship.

Philbrick Sr. and son were estranged by the time I met him and rarely, if ever, spoke throughout the time we were close. Although he had studied to be an artist, as a teen he told a friend of his dad’s that he wanted to be an art adviser, an unusual aspiration for a kid (or anyone else). It’s probably difficult to grow up around the very wealthy when you are merely upper-middle class and well educated. He recalled as a child meeting the German artist Jörg Immendorff when accompanying his father somewhere or other; the artist was clad in a full-length fur coat. Philbrick told me he’d sworn to himself that, one day, that would be him. By way of role models, I’m not certain Immendorff was the ideal example: He was arrested in 2003 after being found naked in a five-star Düsseldorf hotel room hosting a little soirée with nine prostitutes next to a Versace ashtray filled with 11 grams of cocaine.

When I met Philbrick, he had a girlfriend, Fran Mancini, an Argentine part-time art dealer and perfumer with short brunette hair; she was from a well-off family, and her mother was in the waste-removal industry. They lived in a modest but art-filled London apartment on Grosvenor Square, a short walk from Cipriani, the Connaught hotel, and Harry’s, the highfalutin haunts where he regularly drank and ate. Though they never married, Philbrick and Mancini had a baby daughter in 2017.

That same year, he began an affair with Victoria Baker-Harber. Mancini and Baker-Harber were acquaintances and vacationed at the same summer rental in Ibiza. Baker-Harber’s nickname for Philbrick was “Fruit,” from his being “forbidden fruit” as the partner of a woman he was having a child with.

Baker-Harber is a sometime cast member on the U.K. reality-TV show Made in Chelsea, in which wealthy young people are shown being bitchy to each other and everyone around them. In other words, it’s a cliché of obnoxious characters in toxic relationships, all striving for vacuous notoriety. It’s not too far removed from the art world these days. (Says Baker-Harber on the show, “Don’t fucking open your fucking fat fucking mouth, you fucking fat turkey.”) But this isn’t her only reality-TV foray; she was thrown off another show for a disparaging remark she’d made about a Hindu castmate, Baker-Harber laughingly told me herself.

Though Philbrick lived large the entire time I knew him, a diamond lodged in the pin of his belt, wearing custom suits and shoes, things seemed to start to go off the rails around the time he hooked up with Baker-Harber. He opened a gallery in Miami, and they spent more and more time there.

April 2018: With Victoria Baker-Harber at Cipriani in London.
Photo: Courtesy Schachter

The private planes came off multiple contracts for six figures apiece, while the wine went for $5,000 a bottle, drunk at $25,000 tables at clubs from Ibiza to Miami as Philbrick began to follow techno raves by star DJ Marco Carola across the globe like a groupie.

The only night I ever accompanied him in Ibiza, the dinner began at his rental house and ended up at the club Amnesia. Though I tossed the MDMA pill he’d handed me over my shoulder (I’ve never wanted to do a drug that would make me like everyone else; it would ruin my shtick), I managed to get plenty wasted enough to return home at 9 a.m. the following day to my less-than-amused wife, whom I saw while clambering through the bathroom window after being locked out of the bedroom. My family grew to expect such antics after just about every time he and I went out together.

The bravado of drunken backgammon games, with betting at up to $100,000 each, played with wealthy art speculators (or, more often, their offspring) and a bevy of prostitutes, was all part of the program. Philbrick’s, anyway. He once spent a weekend playing checkers with a high-end hooker in a rented villa in Antigua and sent me a picture when I expressed my incredulousness at the very thought — who over 8 years old plays checkers?

Inigo! Inigo! Inigo! Inigo! Each and every morning, the young art dealer would shout at himself at full volume in the shower to fire himself up for the daily dealing tasks at hand. He related this to me endearingly, while Baker-Harber recounted this unusual habit with more than a little alarm. The young man was clearly under a great deal of pressure. Maybe its meaning changed as his elaborate façade fell to pieces. He even had a sweatshirt with INIGO INIGO INIGO printed on it that his girlfriend had made for him.

I refer to the participants who regularly traded with Philbrick and whom he went to exceptional lengths to keep apart — lest we all compare notes and realize what was afoot — as the victim support group of people who got Inigo’d, hoodwinked by the sleight of hand of the art world’s David Blaine. Among the key players were Aleksandar “Sasha” Pesko, a tall, dashing young British investor who bought with Philbrick a share in a Stingel portrait of Pablo Picasso, or so he thought. (It’s not uncommon to jointly invest in a painting.)

This is where it gets a bit confusing: He sold a majority share of a Basquiat to Pesko, then used the Basquiat as collateral for a $10 million loan from Athena Art Finance, allegedly claiming he still owned the entire thing. Around the same time, he sold yet another share of it to another dealer in London, Damian Delahunty. Are you still with me? (I didn’t think so, but you get the idea.) I happened to be the one who informed Pesko of Philbrick’s initial wrongdoing. Pesko went dead quiet when I told him something was amiss; I could practically hear the panic in his silence. I wouldn’t exactly call it a Ponzi scheme but rather a carousel on which the same works were sold or used as collateral for loans more than once. And often more than twice. Not only should the buyer beware but the seller, too! Today, Pesko can express his disdain at Philbrick only in expletive-filled sentences beginning with sleazy and ending with I want to see the MF in jail.

Then there are Andre Sakhai and Victoria Brooks, a pair of collector-investors who, as I understand it, partnered with and bought works from Philbrick repeatedly, as many of us did. Sakhai, a Japanese-Iranian in his mid-30s, is, I was told, the godfather of Philbrick’s daughter, but that didn’t render him immune from the foul play that grew more pronounced as things fell apart, including the outright sale brokered by Philbrick of a work Sakhai had merely asked Philbrick to help obtain a condition report for. When a lawsuit appeared on Sakhai’s doorstep affirming ownership of a work, the full extent of his double-dealing became manifest. Sakhai’s father, Ely, served time in 2005 for selling forged art. Sakhai told me he’d like to get some out-of-work Mossad agents to track down Philbrick.

Clockwise from left: April 2017: Flying private. August 2018: In the Hamptons. October 2018: Drinks in Paris. Photo: Courtesy of Schachter.

Clockwise from left: April 2017: Flying private. August 2018: In the Hamptons. October 2018: Drinks in Paris. Photo: Courtesy of Schachter.

Brooks is a pixieish, behind-the-scenes art-worlder whose father, David, passed away in prison under suspicious circumstances in 2016 while serving time for insider trading and securities fraud; he’d spent lavishly for her bat mitzvah featuring performances by 50 Cent and Aerosmith. Works owned by Sakhai and Brooks ended up as collateral for Philbrick loans without their knowledge.

When the art market peaked and began to fall for the artists Philbrick specialized in, the lies became more on the order of psychopathic in lockstep with his increased alcohol-and-drug intake. There were instances of forged bank documents sent to me and others to evidence transfers that were never transferred as well as reports attesting to the condition of various artworks that were as phony as the fake SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) he concocted. I received such a concocted SWIFT myself and was told of creative-condition reports from a young London-based French collector. The stories of money he owed began to pile up and circulate. The world is small, and the art world is minuscule — and there is nothing the participants like to gossip about more than someone speeding off en route to a horrific crash.

Before the extent of his crimes bubbled to the surface, Philbrick himself related to me the occasion on which he tried to negotiate the sale of a badly damaged Stingel painting from Hiscox insurance company that had been written off owing to catastrophic water damage. An employee of the company confirmed to me that Philbrick indeed had tried unsuccessfully to purchase the damaged painting. Simultaneously, he engaged his assistants to buy the super-rare German paint Stingel uses, which was available only seasonally, so they could replicate over the course of months the precise method of the pricey artist and create an exact replica. Though Philbrick never managed to buy the destroyed work from the insurer — such companies often facilitate or contribute to the restoration of a work that has a claim against it to repatriate it into the marketplace, or they sell it discounted with damage — the fate of Philbrick’s meticulously crafted copy is at present a mystery. Chances are it will be on offer at an auction house near you, if it hasn’t been sold already.

Another scheme (or scam, rather) entailed consigning an Ai Weiwei work entitled Map of China to Christie’s in May 2016 with an estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000 that was then bid up well beyond expectations to $2,142,000, it turns out by a shell company Philbrick controlled. He then secured financing on the full hammer price — it normally takes one to six months to get paid for art sold at auction — from an investor group led by Ethan Vallarino. After months of radio silence, Vallarino’s calls and correspondence went unanswered, then were blocked, until he finally discovered from Christie’s that the “buyer” had reneged owing to a faint, though not uncommon, scratch on the base of the sculpture and refused to pay. After the finance group filed suit to reclaim the funds advanced on the fictitious sale, Vallarino spotted Philbrick exiting the salesroom at Sotheby’s at a later auction and followed him into a crowded elevator. When the door opened, before he could be collared, Philbrick darted out of Sotheby’s into oncoming traffic and was nearly run over by a taxi. Vallarino and his partners closed down their art-finance company after their Philbrick experience.

The last straw was that Stingel portrait of Picasso he’d already sold, which came for auction at Christie’s in May 2019. His original purchase had been financed by FAP, a German art-investment company; although a percentage of the work had previously been sold to Pesko and then to yet another finance company. (I can barely sell a painting once!) Philbrick had given forged documents to FAP stating that Christie’s had guaranteed to sell for $9 million, which he subsequently told me was no biggie, lie-wise. Stingel’s painting sold for $6,517,500 that night, far below the amount Philbrick had repeatedly assured FAP it would make. The painting has since been impounded by a judge, and there it remains, embroiled in a handful of lawsuits.

When it came time to pay for the painting, it was at this juncture that Philbrick’s shams in assuming the role of larger-than-life art-world wheeler-dealer came apart, and since then, the claims, lawsuits, and published articles about him have surfaced with nothing short of a tsunami’s force. Not to mention the speculation as to what’s next. Meanwhile, Pesko’s payment to Philbrick for yet a further share of the work he now assumed he owned outright formed the basis of Philbrick’s getaway stash. It was after this time that he absconded.

There are rumors of fraudulent insurance claims and offshore bank accounts in addition to the cases described above; no one yet knows how all this will pan out or what the full scope will be. Though criminal charges have yet to be filed, he’s worth more out of jail to some than behind bars (not the ones he loved to patronize), as the duped investors who desperately want their money back feel it would be easier to negotiate a repayment plan from a civilian rather than a captive clad in stripes. But as the worldwide manhunt continues, the art world ponders what’s next for the slippery and, so far, elusive young dealer.

Recently, the FBI is said to have taken an interest. In the meantime, he’s been DM-ing me from multiple fake accounts, offering various self-serving explanations for why none of this mess is of his making. Philbrick’s defenses have grown from diplomatic to progressively more hostile, accusing me of everything from lying and not knowing the facts — everything I’ve told here is from my direct observations or conversations with those defrauded out of millions — to having an agenda and fake Instagram followers, and having confused readers of my regular Artnet column, who will never read me again after the publication of this epic tale.

What gets to me more than the loss of my money is Philbrick’s attitude of denying responsibility, blaming Jay Jopling for his own crimes, stating it was simply a matter of being young and getting in over his head. And, let’s not forget, when his misdeeds came to the surface, he decided to go on an extended holiday to Australia and various surrounding islands (according to several witnesses). As he stated in a DM: “Are you suggesting this was all done alone?” And besides, it was “just regular art dealing like everyone else.” Worse, and more alarming, was his observation that the people he screwed “shouldn’t have been in the game in the first instance.” When I asked how he could so nonchalantly forge loan documents and auction-house agreements, he replied that art lenders “own to lend and lend to own,” whatever that means.

Because of a really good run from 2012 to 2015, I might have overlooked being taken to the cleaners for a few million by my dear “friend.”

Even as his lies began to snowball from run-of-the-mill art-world sketchy to cartoonish, I kept coming back to the fact that he undoubtedly cared an awful lot about art and knew more about the artists he championed than just about anyone else did. Certainly, no one of his generation came (or comes) close. Have I learned anything? For one thing, a year ago I stopped drinking. Still, to this day, I catch myself reaching for the phone to seek his advice.

Among his last remarks to me on Instagram were that this has “died down and everybody has moved on” and he will “be back this time only bigger better stronger wiser and fitter.” All this despite undefended lawsuits being filed against him by the bushel.

Another recent faux account went after my kids, asking them if they weren’t embarrassed by my actions (clearly, they’ve grown used to the condition of being mortified by me over the years). In his own words, I am “a joke,” he feels “sorry for my family,” and I made “a fool out of my wife”!

This is a far cry from the Philbrick I last saw when we walked in circles around a couple of square blocks in New York City on the eve he went missing (the thought occurred to me that he might be wired by the Feds) and confided in me his “crimes” of embezzling money through forged loan documents and selling works to multiple parties. He showed regret and contrition, if only for a fleeting moment. That was the first and only time I’ve known him to act humbly — and that mind-set has clearly deserted him since. He’s now back to his foolishly overconfident self (he had been in hiding with Baker-Harber in an apartment in Sydney she inherited from her grandmother, though I was told he has since left), and instead of bragging about his unflagging genius, he’s raging that he didn’t do a damn thing wrong, only behaved like every other art dealer.

After a piece came out last week in the Times about him, I was DM’d by another account, inspector_barker. We soon began to argue over his treatment. “Ever heard of the phrase ‘token villain,’ ” he DM’d. “Easy to have the young innocent guy as the scapegoat rather than the experienced pros who won’t make you popular if you castigate them.” This was too much: I responded, “Reality test. Inigo inigo inigo look hard in the mirror.”

I remember around Christmas, I was contacted via DM by Steve_Irwin, the Australian naturalist who died from a pierced heart after he was impaled trying to film a stingray, an animal he had devoted his life to preserving. I became convinced that this was Philbrick as well. The symbolism of using a figure analogous to Saint Sebastian, a martyr who suffered multiple arrow wounds in defending his religion, was clear, though perhaps it was lost on Philbrick that Sebastian was later clubbed to death.

*This article appears in the March 16, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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At Tiffany's Flagship, Luxe Art Helps Sell the Jewels – The New York Times

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Now that tickets to the Museum of Modern Art are priced at an astonishing $30 apiece, you could be forgiven for timing your visits carefully, making sure that they count.

So, let’s say you find yourself in Midtown Manhattan with an hour or two to spare, and you are yearning for some culture. Perhaps you have already seen MoMA’s latest exhibitions, or perhaps you are not quite in the mood to fork over that kind of money. May I instead suggest stopping by Tiffany & Co.’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue?

No, there are no “Demoiselles d’Avignon” there, and no “Starry Night,” but what The Landmark (as it is called) does offer is a heady fusion of contemporary art and luxury retailing that is as relevant, and discomfiting, as anything you could hope to find in a museum.

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After a renovation by the leather-clad architect Peter Marino that debuted last April, 58 pieces that he selected by major artists — many of them blue, or silver, or both — now fill the 84-year-old building. A color-shifting James Turrell oval is embedded in a wall near one set of elevator doors. Hanging by another is a shiny Damien Hirst cabinet filled with rows of cubic zirconia. Hovering next to the engagement rings is one of Anish Kapoor’s eye-bending mirrored discs. On the ground floor, 14 arched window frames glow with a state of the art animation by Oyoram Visual Composer, of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park — the city is immaculate, with no people, just birds.

And that giant-size, faux-deteriorated Venus of Arles with a Tiffany Blue patina? That comes from the mind of Daniel Arsham, who has devoted his career to such banal corporate collaborations. He has designed a limited-edition bracelet and sculpture for the brand, as well as, I quote, “exclusive Pokémon-inspired jewelry.”

The key work here is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting “Equals Pi,” from 1982, his milestone year. (MoMA, for the record, does not own a Basquiat painting.) It is high up on a wall on the ground floor, covered by a translucent shield, looking a little forlorn. It has Basquiat’s classic crowns and handwritten text, and its turquoise ground is awfully close to Tiffany’s trademarked color. When the Tiffany executive Alexandre Arnault used it in an ad campaign with Beyoncé and Jay-Z back in 2021, he proposed that the artist may have been making a “homage” to the brand. Some who actually knew Basquiat were quick to reject that.

But let’s not dwell on conflict. Just about everything in this 10-story palace is bright, polished, antiseptic and exactly where it should be. There are stunning flower arrangements, stacks of art books, and capacious public restrooms. The salespeople are unfailingly polite. “I’m just poking around,” I told one who asked to help. “Poke away,” he replied. The atmosphere is subtly disorienting, a bit unnerving, as in a casino or an elite art fair during its early hours. There is money at stake here.

Buyers sip sparkling wine or ice water as they try on jewelry. Two are being led to a private room, where pastel-colored macarons might await. Behind one discreet blue velvet rope is a hallway with paintings by Hans Hartung and Jules de Balincourt (blue and blue).

It is tempting to wring one’s hands about this instrumentalization of high art to sell high-end accessories, but many decades have passed since Mark Rothko canceled his commission for the lavish Four Seasons Restaurant, reportedly saying that “anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” Ideas about art’s purity, and the stigma of selling out, have less currency today.

In any case, Marino’s Tiffany project follows in a rich tradition. In the 1950s, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg collaborated on window displays for Bergdorf Goodman, across the intersection from Tiffany’s, and Bonwit Teller, a block south. They used a pseudonym, but Rauschenberg later had work on view at Bonwit Teller. (The pair also worked with Gene Moore at Tiffany; the designer’s displays are featured in exhibits at the Landmark.)

Andy Warhol showed in the Bonwit Teller windows, too, in 1963, just as he was becoming a star. The venturesome Robert Irwin produced a spectral sculpture for a California mall in 1970, and Takashi Murakami infamously incorporated a Louis Vuitton pop-up in his 2007—08 traveling museum retrospective. (Vuitton’s parent company, LVMH, which is controlled by France’s art-loving Arnault family, acquired Tiffany in 2021.)

The works at Tiffany are, alas, not for sale — they have been purchased, commissioned, or borrowed by the company — but there is a robust history of department stores hawking art. In the 1960s, the actor and art historian Vincent Price was involved with art sales at Sears, and in Minneapolis at that time, the Dayton’s department store (which created Target) had a gallery with material by leading artists, some via the famed New York dealer Leo Castelli.

In China, the developer Adrian Cheng has filled his K11 malls with trendy art, and in Seoul, where I lived until recently, a Frank Gehry-designed Vuitton store has hosted compact shows of Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz and Warhol from the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s holdings. (Marino handled the interiors.) Last year, the Shinsegae department store’s gallery, at a high-end clothing offshoot called Boon the Shop, had a Rirkrit Tiravanija show that included free T-shirts by the artist, just as his recent MoMA PS1 survey did.

In 1970, the Print Collector’s Newsletter quipped that “being a ‘department store gallery’ is a dubious distinction; it is not quite an insult, but surely not a compliment,” calling it a domain of “middlebrow art.” As it happens, much of the art at Tiffany is middling — the sort of adequate, professional things one could find in auction house day sales or uninspired booths at art fairs anywhere in the world. A brand this rich could have been far more ambitious and daring.

Anyway, for the next two months, you can take a closer look at Marino’s taste by booking a free ticket to “Culture of Creativity: An Exhibition from the Peter Marino Art Foundation,” which is on view in the Tiffany Gallery — an airy space high in the building that was designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, with excellent views of Billionaires’ Row. You will find almost 70 more pieces, including intricate, witty 19th-century Tiffany silver, bronze sheep (by François-Xavier Lalanne) atop artificial grass, serviceable pieces by artists represented elsewhere in the store (Francesco Clemente, Vik Muniz, Sarah Sze), and many portraits of Marino: emblazoned on a Michelangelo Pistoletto mirror, in Roe Ethridge photos, and painted atop broken dishes in a Julian Schnabel.

There is one very dark moment that surprised me in the Marino show: a large 1980 Sarah Charlesworth photo, an appropriated image of a man falling from a building. It curiously echoes two grand wall pieces that Rashid Johnson created for the store, as part of his “Falling Man” series. Johnson’s depictions of pixelated, upside-down (Tiffany Blue) men recall 8-bit videogame characters. They are surrounded by mirrored panels that have been scratched and partially cracked, as if smashed by a hammer.

These works are meant to be “existential investigations, meaning the idea of man falling through space, finding himself,” Johnson told an interviewer last year. Fair enough. But you could also see them as portraits of a culture intent on self-destruction (or outlines of bodies at a crime scene); spend time with them, and you may find that their hints of violence stick with you.

You will want to relax after this dizzying experience. The $30 you have saved will not go too far at the Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud, on the sixth floor, where the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” menu is $59 per person (before tax and tip), but you can at least enjoy a glass of Champagne as you reflect. Why not order a second, or a third? This moment will not last forever.

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Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’ – The Guardian

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Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland, who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave, came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs (Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter (The Proposition) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

Cave studied art in Melbourne in the mid-70s before being chucked off his degree course. He reckons he was too fascinated by the subject for his own good. He spent all his time talking about art to the older students and didn’t find the hours to do the actual work. Now, he is making up for lost time.

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We are at the headquarters of Susie’s business, where she makes and stores the beautiful dresses she designs as The Vampire’s Wife. For now, it’s doubling as Cave’s studio. He gives me a tour of the 17 ceramic figurines, which will be exhibited at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels next month. The pieces are stunning in a creepy, Cave-esque way, all blood-curdling pastoral idylls. But it’s as a series that they are most powerful. The sculptures, inspired by Staffordshire “flatback” ceramics from the Victorian era, forge a shocking and deeply personal narrative.

Initially, we see the devil as a child – a cute little lad, dimple-cheeked in a white jumpsuit sitting next to a red monkey. “Look at his little face,” Cave says, lovingly. We see the devil getting up to erotic mischief with a sailor, then ecstatic with his first love. “I’m extremely happy with this one,” Cave says. “His impish pleasure and her just drained of life.”

We see the devil going to war in a field of flowers, wading through a field of blood and skulls on his return, getting married. Then the series takes a traumatic turn. “This is The Devil Kills His First Child,” Cave says. “It’s a little Isaac and Abraham thing. Then he’s separated from the world. Life goes on. Then he dances for the last time.” And now we are at the final piece. “He bleeds to death. He’s found washed up and the child is forgiving him, leaning out to him with his hand.”

It’s impossible to know how to respond when Cave reaches the story’s conclusion other than to gulp or weep. After all, this is a man who has lost two sons over the past nine years. In 2015, 15-year-old Arthur died after taking LSD for the first time and falling from a cliff near his home in Brighton. In 2022, 31-year-old Jethro, who had schizophrenia, died in Melbourne. Death and grief have informed all of Cave’s work since Arthur died. But this takes it to another level.

We say goodbye to the Cave twins, who continue painting pubic hair in gold lustre on the devil’s first love. “We’ll see you, guys! Slave away, my children!” Cave says.

Liv smiles.

“I’m already dressed like a Victorian child’,” Dom says.

“A pint of stout for lunch!” Cave says.

We move into Susie’s office to chat. It’s dark, gothic, a dream home for bats. He whips off his lab coat to reveal an immaculate three-piece suit and sits behind the desk. Before I sit down, I ask if I can do something I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. I reach over the desk and clumsily hug him.

“Aaah, man! Here, let me stand up.” The last time we talked was 16 years ago. He was making a video that featured Arthur and his twin brother, Earl, who were then seven, gorgeous and already musical (Arthur was playing drums, Earl guitar).

Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub. But he is one of the nicest people I have met. In 2008, I turned up knowing sod all about him. I tell him that he was so generous with his time and nonjudgmental about my ignorance. “Really?” he says, surprised. “That’s good to know. I tend to have a low opinion of myself back then. I see a cutoff point around the death of my first son of a change of character. But it’s not as black and white as I thought.”

Every Cave story seems to begin with a death. Take the origin of the figurines. He went into the studio to start work on them the day his mother, Dawn, died. He had planned to start on that date – 15 September 2020 – for a while. “Susie made me go. She said: ‘Get there and do your work.’” He adored Dawn – she had always stood by him, no matter what trouble he was in. (The day his father died in a car crash, she was called to the police station to bail out 19-year-old Cave after he had been charged with burglary.)

Did he have any idea what he wanted to create in the studio? No, he says, but there was an inevitability about the subject. “Even when I’m trying to use art to escape certain feelings and sorrows I have, everything just seems to fall into the slipstream of the loss of my son. And even when I was glazing these, Jethro died, so it’s like …” He comes to a stop. “What I’m trying to say is these losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in. They’re just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.”

Does he feel culpable for the death of his sons? “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die.” He comes to another abrupt stop, almost as if he is dictating notes. “Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”

He returns to the final figurine. “You have this hollowed-out old man with a little child, possibly a dead old man, dead in a pool of tears – a biblical flood of tears, shall we say – and the little child is reaching down in forgiveness. It’s called The Devil Forgiven.” He smiles. “I hope this isn’t too abstract, too woo-woo. Art has a way of bringing to you the things you need to know. It feels to me that art knows what’s going on more than the artist knows what’s going on.”

Does he feel culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death? “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

Cave believes he is emerging from his losses a different man. He has a point. It is hard to imagine the old Cave curating the Red Hand Files, a website in which he invites fans to ask questions about anything they want, many of them profoundly personal.

Soon after Arthur’s death, the family moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years: “We were triggered too much by things. We were just down the road from where it happened.” Everybody seemed to know what had happened to Arthur, because it was so widely reported, but he says that ended up being a positive. “I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough. It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”

He was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. “I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing. And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me. I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”

Did his experience of bereavement help after Jethro died? “Yes. It really helped, because I knew I could get through. I’d been through it.” Did he feel cursed? “No. No, I don’t feel cursed, no.” He says it would be wrong to talk publicly about Jethro – he didn’t meet Jethro till he was seven and their relationship was complex; although they became close, it would be disrespectful to his mother, who brought him up. (Cave’s first two children, Luke and Jethro, were born 10 days apart to different women.)

Cave says one way in which he has changed is that he appreciates life more. In the past, he has described learning to live again, refinding happiness, as an act of defiance. But he no longer thinks it’s an appropriate word. “Defiance has a fuck-you element to the world; we’re not going to let it get us down. That sounds a little too heroic now. I’m pretty simple-minded about things. It says something to my children who have died that I can enjoy my life now. It’s what they would want. I think it’s a softer relationship we have to the world now.”

Rather than a two-fingered salute to fate, it goes back to culpability and his Christian (if questioning) faith. “Look, this is extremely difficult to talk about, but one of the things that used to really worry me is that Arthur, wherever he may be, if he is somewhere, somehow understands what his parents are going through because of something he did, and that his condition of culpability is not dissimilar to mine. And I think that’s the reason behind a lot of what I do. It’s to say it’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, but we’re OK. We’re OK. I think Susie feels that, too.”

He stresses that he is not just talking about his personal tragedies. “What’s it saying to all those who’ve passed away in their multitudes if we lead lives where we’re just pathologically pissed off at the world? What does it say to those who have left the world to be in a perpetual state of misery and fury and depression and cynicism towards the world? What legacy are they leaving if that’s how we manifest the passing of that person?”

He thinks people sometimes misunderstand what he is saying about loss. It’s not that there is more joy in his world than there was – far from it. But when it comes, it tends to be more intense. “Joy is something that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering. That’s how Susie and I are. That’s in no way saying we’re not affected, or we’ve somehow gotten over it, or we’ve had closure or even acceptance. I think closure is a dumb thing. Even acceptance is, like: ‘Just give it a few years and life goes back to how it was.’ It doesn’t happen. You’re fundamentally changed. Your very chemistry is changed. And when you’re put back together again, you’re a different person. The world feels more meaningful.”

He knows plenty of people disagree with him. “I get people, mothers particularly, occasionally saying: ‘How dare you suggest there is joy involved in any of this?’ People are so angry, and they have every right to be enraged by the fucked-up cosmic mischief that goes on, and it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not personal. It feels like it is, but it’s just the vicissitudes of life.”

Cave feels he is misunderstood in another way, after saying recently that he has always been “temperamentally” conservative and attacking the “self-righteous belief” and “lack of humility” of woke culture. This has led some to assume he is supping with the “alt-right”, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

Is he a Tory? “I’m not a Tory, no.” Has he ever been? “No. No, I’ve never voted Tory.” And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

He hates dogma, whether religious or political. His work has always embraced uncertainty. “People don’t like me to say this, but I do feel it’s in my nature to constantly be redressing the balance of my own ideas about things. My mother was exactly the same – she always saw the other side. It was incredibly frustrating. You’d be angry about something and she’d go: ‘Yes darling, but …’”

Like his mother, he has never shied away from the trickiest “buts”. When he talks about his appalling loss, he also knows he has been lucky. Not only has he been able to express his grief in his work, but it has also fed his creativity. Even at its bleakest, he has found it cathartic. “Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. Even when I’m making The Devil Kills His First Child, I’m not depressed, I’m like: ‘Wow! Look at the head!’ It’s a joyful occupation, no matter what. And when I’m singing a very sad lyric, it doesn’t mean I’m sad inside.”

The forthcoming Bad Seeds album is the first thing he has created since Arthur’s death that isn’t “set through a lens of loss”. He is funny when talking about his work – so angsty and uncertain early in the process, almost messianic by the end. “The new album is really good. It’s really strong. Great songs,” he says.

Similarly with The Devil – A Life. He has got over the doubts and now he is buzzing with self-belief. Is he nervous about the exhibition? “No, I’m excited. I think the ceramics are really good and really strange.” But he feels unusually protective towards his figurines and the story that they tell. “These guys feel extraordinarily vulnerable. They are vulnerable little things, and they are saying something deeply personal.”

Nick Cave: The Devil – A Life is at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels from 5 April to 11 May

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Appreciating Richard Serra, who made us giddy and afraid. – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

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Richard Serra made modern sculpture exciting. He did it by creating the feeling that it might fall on you.

Facetious as that may sound, it’s somewhere near the heart of what made Serra, who died Tuesday at 85, both a wonderful artist and intermittently vulnerable to accusations that he was a bully.

If you don’t find his works beautiful, you could easily hate them for being ugly, imposing and in-your-face. But attitudes toward modern art — even minimalist sculpture — changed enormously over Serra’s lifetime, and he personally played a role in converting millions of people to the possibilities of abstract sculpture. After years of operating as an edgy, uncompromising avant-gardist, he began to make things that, losing none of their toughness — and only growing in ambition — were undeniably seductive, dazzlingly original and just very cool.

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I don’t know what he was like to work with, but as an artist, he was no bully. Rather, he was a physicist. He wanted you to know, and to feel in your bones, that weight isn’t just a thing — it’s a force. It’s mass times acceleration.

As such, it carries an inherent threat.

Sculpture, for Serra, wasn’t just something over there — passive and separate. It was right here, all around us. And it wasn’t just active, it was involving.

A pioneer of process art, Serra loved verbs — action words like twist and roll — and spent part of his early career thinking about materials in terms of what he could do with them (as opposed to what they would become once things had been done to them).

But he also came to love nouns. And you can’t talk about Serra without tossing around big heavy nouns — words that most of us would never otherwise use but which make you feel suddenly tough just uttering. Cor-Ten steel and antimonial lead, for instance.

Serra used antimonial lead (an alloy that makes soft lead very hard) for “One Ton Prop” (1969), a key piece from his early mature period. The sculpture was four pieces of lead leaning against each other like the walls of a card house. No welding. No plinth. Nothing propping them up except each other.

“One Ton Prop” proposed a strange — and strangely intimidating — new way to think of sculpture. It was physical — emphatically so. But it was also psychological. It involved you in ways that had nothing to do with stories or sentimentality but that somehow went beyond pure form. “One Ton Prop” — like a lot of Serra sculptures — was about as ingratiating as a sewer cover, but it induced fear and giddy excitement, and you wanted to linger with it.

Most people’s favorite Serras — and mine too — are the ones he made after “One Ton Prop.” For the enormous, bending, exquisitely balanced sculptures he called Torqued Ellipses, he used Cor-Ten steel. Sometimes used for the prows of ships, Cor-Ten is weathering steel, protected from corrosion, that changes color in the open air. There, it takes on seductive shades of orange and textures as rich and streaky as the surface of Gerhard Richter paintings.

The colors and textures (and the spiderwebs and other marks of the organic world they can play host to) are important. They pull you in to the sculptures’ surfaces, even as you’re conscious of your body’s relationship to something that is overwhelmingly large — almost too big to grasp, and definitely too big to explain.

Engaging with them reduces the brain to the status of a six-year-old tugging at the sleeve of an adult with a checklist of unanswerable questions: How do these things stay upright? How were they made? How did they even get here?

The engineering behind Serra’s late works was indeed mind-blowing. But the pleasure of his greatest creations is afforded by a sensation of the mind giving up, and the body yielding. He dealt out stimulants to sublimity like a croupier dealing aces.

Serra was a practitioner — I would say the greatest — of what was sometimes called “walk-in modernism.” That’s to say, you don’t just admire his sculptures from afar. You walk into and out of them. Looming over you, they close in on you, then veer away from you. And they make you conscious of time as you make your way through, along or around them.

They sometimes induce vertigo. But they’re also remarkably liberating. You can come out of them with feelings of secret and victorious expansion, as if you were Theseus after slaying the Minotaur.

Serra’s sculptures fulfilled the primary purpose of minimalist sculpture — making you acutely self-conscious of yourself in relation to the thing you’re looking at or walking around. But they did something more. They challenged and seduced with psychology and undeniable emotion. They turned nouns into verbs, things into actions, and stray thoughts into lasting feelings.

Placed outdoors, they aren’t merely sculptures, of course. They do double duty as architecture, landscape design, urban planning. Ways of ordering space, in other words, often on a large scale.

It’s true that some of Serra’s outdoor sculptures prevent you getting from A to B, and that this has sometimes proved controversial. In the art world, an air of legend lingers like romantic fog over the “Tilted Arc” affair. Serra’s rude division of an open plaza in Manhattan with an enormous, hostile-looking steel arc, 120 feet long and twice the height of most humans, was one of the last moments of meaningful tension between public opinion and an uncompromising artistic avant-garde. In the end, the work came down.

Works like “Tilted Arc” made it easy to dislike Serra for being domineering. I can appreciate that line of thought, and I’m happy that there are other kinds of art, keyed to transience and delicacy, art with a light and poetic touch. But I love what Serra achieved. In fact, I’m in awe of it. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, at Glenstone, at SF MoMA and in St. Louis — in so many places around the world — Serra’s adamantine sculptures act on you. And they activate everything around them. Life quickens in their presence. We have lost a great artist, but we have not lost that quickening.

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