ArtReview's 2009 Power 100

Coming on the heels of 12 months of extraordinary financial stress, both in the artworld and the real world, the 2009 edition of the Power 100 reflects fundamental changes in influence. Previous No. 1s, both artists and collectors, have plummeted, while only the most ambitious of museums have stayed near the top; meanwhile, percolating up from the middle ranks is a new generation of highly networked, flexible, globetrotting curators – men and women at the very centre of a new way of working.

The ArtReview Power 100 is not just a who’s who to contemporary art but also a guide to general trends and forces that shape the artworld. With almost a third of entries new to the list this year, and sharp divisions among the panel of international experts making the selections, this edition is one of the freshest in years.

1. Hans Ulrich Obrist
2. Glenn D. Lowry
3. Sir Nicholas Serota
4. Daniel Birnbaum
5. Larry Gagosian
6. François Pinault
7. Eli Broad
8. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood
9. Iwona Blazwick
10. Bruce Nauman
11. Iwan Wirth
12. David Zwirner
13. Jeff Koons
14. Jay Jopling
15. Marian Goodman
16. Agnes Gund
17. Takashi Murakami
18. Alfred Pacquement
19. Peter Fischli & David Weiss
20. Mike Kelley
21. Barbara Gladstone
22. Steven A. Cohen
23. Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin
24. Adam D. Weinberg
25. Marc Glimcher
26. Amy Cappellazzo & Brett Gorvy
27. Cheyenne Westphal & Tobias Meyer
28. Ann Philbin
29. Matthew Higgs
30. Matthew Marks
31. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
32. Gavin Brown
33. Ralph Rugoff
34. Liam Gillick
35. Anne Pasternak
36. Dakis Joannou
37. John Baldessari
38. Isa Genzken
39. Paul McCarthy
40. Michael Govan
41. Eugenio López
42. Cindy Sherman
43. Ai Weiwei
44. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
45. Annette Schönholzer & Marc Spiegler
46. Diedrich Diederichsen
47. Richard Prince
48. Damien Hirst
49. Bernard Arnault
50. Massimiliano Gioni
51. Amanda Sharp & Matthew Slotover
52. Joel Wachs
53. Victor Pinchuk
54. Udo Kittelmann
55. Marina Abramović
56. Michael Ringier
57. Gerhard Richter
58. Richard Serra
59. RoseLee Goldberg
60. Kasper König
61. Roberta Smith
62. Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
63. Germano Celant
64. Emmanuel Perrotin
65. Peter Schjeldahl
66. Beatrix Ruf
67. Okwui Enwezor
68. Nicolas Bourriaud
69. Karen & Christian Boros
70. Isabelle Graw
71. Maurizio Cattelan
72. Charles Saatchi
73. Jerry Saltz
74. Jasper Johns
75. Louise Bourgeois
76. Thaddaeus Ropac
77. Mera & Don Rubell
78. Thelma Golden
79. Sarah Morris
80. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
81. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz
82. Paul Schimmel
83. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi
84. Sadie Coles
85. Daniel Buchholz
86. Victoria Miro
87. Maureen Paley
88. Johann König
89. Nicolai Wallner
90. Maria Lind
91. Massimo De Carlo
92. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo
93. Rirkrit Tiravanija
94. Toby Webster
95. Long March Space
96. Nicholas Logsdail
97. Harry Blain & Graham Southern
98. Claire Hsu
99. Peter Nagy
100. Glenn Beck

Goodbye Neo. Goodbye Leipzig.

Replacing Neo Rauch as a professor is not going as smoothly as one might have hoped here at Leipzig’s Academy Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. As Die Tageszeitung’s Robert Schimke reports, the Cologne painter Heribert C. Ottersbach has been selected as the successor to Rauch after the international star of the Leipzig School decided to give up his professorship, due to his workload. According to Schimke, Rauch had his own favorite replacement: the Belgian artist Michaël Borremans. Yet Borremans fell through the hiring process because he does not speak German well and lives too far away from the academy.

After convincing Borremans—both a painter and a filmmaker—to apply for the Leipzig position, Rauch reportedly believed that the artist’s twin specializations would be a nod to a portion of the faculty that has no warm feelings for the traditional Leipzig school of painting, including the academy’s rector Joachim Brohm. While Brohm insists that he was not involved in the hiring process, it doesn’t help matters that Ottersbach is a friend of Brohm and one of three painting professors who come from the Brohm’s Rhineland home in western Germany.

“Already in the past,” writes Schimke, “the rector had earned the reputation of taking his network into the Leipzig professorships.” Schimke doesn’t believe that the conflict represents a mere East-West career skirmish but rather a “cultural clash,” which began as a formalist debate in the 1950s in former East Germany and in the vilifications between state-branded German Democratic Republic painters and liberal-minded painters from the West.

Another antagonism lies in the marginalization throughout the 1990s of the Leipzig painters by new media art and more discursive artistic practices. Schimke speculates that Brohm—a photographer socialized by the arts scene in the Rhine region during the ’70s and ’80s—might just be quickening the end of the Leipzig School.

Daniel Birnbaum on "Making Worlds/Fare Mondi"

La Biennale di Venezia
Making Worlds/Fare Mondi
The 53rd International Art Exhibition
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1887. 20 x 16 x 12 cm.

In posts over the past several months, I’ve been looking at the terror and anxiety of history through the melancholy of Daniel Birnbaum’s 50 moons of Saturn for the Turin Triennale and more recently his soon-to-open Fare Mondi/Making Worlds for the Venice Biennale. By the 1880s, Johann Dieter Wassmann similarly found himself troubled by a deep melancholy, one which he responded to initially by retreating into the romantic past of his forefathers, a response having clear relevance today. But soon he entered into and created for himself a wholly new world, a world of modernist sensibilities leading to some of the most pioneering work of the late 19th century. From here, I’ll hand it over to Maime Stombock, quoting from her seminal essay, A Carpenter’s Tale:


“Despite his considerable achievements, Johann felt increasingly troubled as the century hastened toward its close... His suspicion that the deliberate progress of modernity was fast bearing down overwhelmed him with regular fits of fear and uncertainty. When he first caught sight of this brooding monolith his response was to back-pedal his way out of the 19th century and into his romanticized view of an earlier, less pressured era. As he came to feel more at ease with the medium of the wooden box he staged his retreat by venturing into works that he hoped might help him to combat this anguish. Here his creative impulse was most Germanic: a return to the ancient wood, with Goethe looming large, although his influences were equally eclectic. His great love of the American Transcendentalist authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau is apparent in several works. He had grown fond of their writings while living in Washington, D.C., where he consulted on a long overdue sewerage system for the nation’s capitol during Restoration—the first in the world to be built of concrete, a pioneering design solution born of necessity amid the poorly-drained swamplands of the Potomac.

"Whether conscious or not, his impulse to celebrate the ancient wood twenty years later can be read as an unsurprising response to the soulless concrete, brick and mortar that dominated his professional life. Johann had long found solace in the wood, a passion so deeply imbedded in the German psyche it was the subject of the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus’ classic Germania; or, On the Origin and situation of the Germans, recorded in the year 98. For Roman readers, Germania served to explain why these primitive arcadians were such barbarians. For the Germans themselves, Tacitus’ portrayal of them as little more than arboreal hunters, gatherers and warriors was taken as a compliment. Germania eventually became a raw staple in their literary diet, all the more so after the first native translation was published in Leipzig in 1496.

“For Johann, delving into the ancient wood was an essential catharsis, just as it would be a hundred years later for his compatriot Anselm Kiefer. In a letter to his brother Wolfgang, dated November 10, 1885, Johann writes that from the moment his saw broke the grain of his rough planks of birch, oak, pine, beech, ash, walnut, elm or whatever else might be at hand, he was magically propelled through the looking glass, moving into the wood, first physically—as he cut, planed, joined and finished the timbers—and then mentally—as he deliberated what world might inhabit the inner space of these exquisite boxes.

“His experience of the wood spared none of the senses, however. The sweet freshness of pine, the acrid harshness of elm that burned the eyes and throat, the gentle pleasantries of oak: he genuinely believed as his father had that the souls of men inhabited these timbers and only by cutting into them and experiencing them fully could these souls find release. He reminded Wolfgang of the stories their father would tell them as children, the stories they would insist on hearing again and again of the family workshop in the years that followed the Battle of Leipzig, a time when their father himself was just a child. The terrible destruction of the city and surrounding villages had left such an abundance of floorboards, panelling and structural timbers that Leipzig’s woodcutters found no cause to fell a single tree for three years, instead harvesting their bounty from the rubble. But unlike fresh cut timbers, which house only old souls, August commanded to his sons that recycled timbers uniquely house the souls of those more recently departed.

“The oak parquetry of Madame Troufold’s salon, gracefully planed and mitered by their grandfather to make a small corner cupboard, had overwhelmed the workshop for a week with the perfumed elegance of a life cultured beyond their dreams. The softly worn pine floorboards of Herr Zächer’s bäckerie, despite being scrubbed with bucket and brush each morning, had brought such hunger to the journeymen when they cut into them to frame the carcass of a veneered chest of drawers that they finished their daily bread before noon, venturing out to find more before returning to their work. The walnut panelling recovered from Kapitän Brunheld’s library, the walnut that their grandfather fashioned into several fine wardrobes, had surrendered thick smoky tobacco, aged whiskey and a thousand tales of Saxon glory before the wardrobes left the shop. And the narrow ash planks from the stairway of Fräulein Nau’s bordell, the planks their grandfather had hoped to shape into dough bins, brought work to such a halt and lowered the integrity of the conversation to such a degree that he gave up in disgust, burning them as firewood, although the smoke from the fire provoked one of the men to partake in a debaucherous drinking binge lasting three days, ending with his arrest for committing unnatural acts in the public square.

“Wolfgang’s reply to his letter was that old men tell tall tales, so leave it at that, but Johann was undeterred, at least for the moment. While this period was both cathartic and crucial in defining the roots of Johann’s dissatisfaction, and while his output might seem to us today to be quite charming, within the decade he too would come to question the romantic overtones in his response.”


La Biennale di Venezia
Making Worlds
The 53rd International Art Exhibition
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Easter in Leipzig

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Nikolaikirche, Leipzig, 1894, 18 x 23 cm.

Artists announced for Venice Biennale

Venice, 23rd March 2009 (press release)

The 53rd International Art Exhibition, entitled Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…, directed by Daniel Birnbaum (pictured), organized by La Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta, will open to the public from Sunday June, 7th to Sunday November, 22nd 2009 in the Giardini (50,000 sq.m.) and the Arsenale (38,000 sq.m.) as well as in various other locations around the city. The press preview will take place on June 4th, 5th, and 6th 2009.

The Director of the 53rd Exhibition, Daniel Birnbaum, has been Rector of the Staedelschule Frankfurt/Main and its Kunsthalle Portikus since 2001. Fare Mondi // Making Worlds, presented in the renewed Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini and in the Arsenale, is a single, large exhibition that articulates different themes woven into one whole. It is not divided into sections. Considering collectives, it comprises works by over 90 artists from all over the world and includes many new works and on-site commissions in all disciplines.

“The title of the exhibition, Fare Mondi // Making Worlds,” says Director Daniel Birnbaum, “expresses my wish to emphasize the process of creation. A work of art represents a vision of the world and if taken seriously it can be seen as a way of making a world. The strength of the vision is not dependent on the kind or complexity of the tools brought into play. Hence all forms of artistic expression are present: installation art, video and film, sculpture, performance, painting and drawing, and a live parade. Taking 'worldmaking' as a starting point, also allows the exhibition to highlight the fundamental importance of certain key artists for the creativity of successive generations, just as much as exploring new spaces for art to unfold outside the institutional context and beyond the expectations of the art market. Fare Mondi // Making Worlds is an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead. It is about possible new beginnings—this is what I would like to share with the visitors of the Biennale.”

For the direction of the exhibition Daniel Birnbaum is supported by Jochen Volz, artistic organization. Additional advice is provided by an international team of correspondents consisting of Savita Apte, Tom Eccles, Hu Fang, and Maria Finders.

On the occasion of the 53rd International Art Exhibition – the Venice Biennale Foundation inaugurates a number of important structural and organisational developments:

At the Arsenale, the Italian Pavilion has been enlarged from 800 to 1,800 square meters, now opening out to the Giardino delle Vergini and adjacent to a new public entrance. Here a newly constructed bridge links the far side of the Arsenale to the Sestiere di Castello. This renewed Italian Pavilion will be reserved for exhibitions organised by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs. The Italian participation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition is curated by Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice. Furthermore, the Arsenale’s exhibition spaces have been extended by developing a larger part of the Giardino delle Vergini (Garden of the Virgins), now measuring 6,000 square meters and offering an enchanting new exhibition space for the main exhibition.

In the Giardini, the historic Italian Pavilion has been renamed Palazzo delle Esposizioni della Biennale and extensively transformed, now providing a permanent exhibition and multi-functional venue opened to the public throughout the year. The transformed Palazzo delle Esposizioni includes a newly refurbished wing housing the library of the Historic Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), made available again to the public after ten years of closure. The Archive comprises documents, books, catalogues and periodicals, freely consultable by researchers and exhibition visitors. Apart from exhibition spaces, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni also comprises a new bookstore, a new café and new spaces for educational activities, respectively designed by three artists participating in the main exhibition. The Palazzo delle Esposizioni will therefore become an important platform for the Foundation’s permanent activities and a point of reference for the other Pavilions in the Giardini.

Ca’ Giustinian, the beautiful 15th century palace on the Canale Grande near San Marco and the traditional site of the Foundation’s headquarters, will reopen in June after several years of renovation. Apart from housing the offices of the Biennale, it will then also become an “open house” for the general public, among others boosting a café on the Grand Canal.

The Awards and Opening Ceremony of the 53rd International Art Exhibition will take place on Saturday, June 6th in the Giardini. Following Director’s suggestion, the President and the Board of the Foundation are this year awarding two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement , one to Yoko Ono and one to John Baldessari.

The other Golden Lion Awards – the Golden Lion for Best National Participation of the 53rd International Art Exhibition; the Golden Lion for the Best Artist of the exhibition Fare Mondi // Making Worlds; and the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist of the exhibition Fare Mondi // Making Worlds – will be selected by an International Jury chaired by Angela Vettese (Italy), and comprising Jack Bankowsky (USA), Homi K. Bhabha (India), Sarat Maharaj (South Africa), and Julia Voss (Germany).

The National Participations of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, presented in the historical Pavilions in the Giardini, in selected areas of the Arsenale and in numerous venues throughout the city, are this year amounting to the record number of 77 Nations participating, including first-time participations of Montenegro, Principality of Monaco, Republic of Gabon, Union of Comoros, and United Arab Emirates.

Furthermore there is a record number of 38 Collateral Events, proposed by international organizations and institutions, which will organize their own exhibitions and initiatives in Venice during the occasion.

Inaugurating the renovated headquarters of the Biennale as yet another exhibition venue, The Vision Machine: Futurists in the Biennale will be presented at Ca’ Giustinian from June to November 2009. The exhibition explores the presence of Futurist artists, ideas and works in the Biennale. Curated by IUAV, International Semiotics Laboratory Venice, it is the result of a research undertaken at the Historic Archive of the Contemporary Arts (ASAC).

The two volume catalogue of the 53rd International Art Exhibition will be published by Marsilio.


Participating Artists:

Jumana Emil Abboud
Born in Shefa-Amer, Palestine, 1971
Lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel

Georges Adéagbo
Born in Cotonou, Benin, 1942
Lives and works in Cotonou, Benin

John Baldessari
Born in National City, USA, 1931
Lives and works in Santa Monica, USA

Rosa Barba
Born in Agrigento, Italy, 1972
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Massimo Bartolini
Born in Cecina, Italy, 1962
Lives and works in Cecina, Italy

Thomas Bayrle
Born in Berlin, Germany, 1937
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Simone Berti
Born in Adria, Italy, 1966
Lives and works in Milan and Berlin, Germany

Bestué /Vives
Born in Barcelona, Spain, 1980
Born in Barcelona, Spain, 1978
They live and work in Barcelona, Spain

Mike Bouchet
Born in Castro Valley, USA, 1970
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Ulla Von Brandenburg
Born in Karlsruhe, Germany, 1974
Lives and works in Paris, France

André Cadere
Warsaw, Poland, 1934 - Paris, France, 1978

Paul Chan
Born in Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 1973
Lives and works in New York, USA

Chen Zhen
Shanghai, China, 1955 – Paris, France, 2000

Nikhil Chopra
Born in Calcutta, India, 1974
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Chu Yun
Born in Jiangxi, China, 1977
Lives and works in Beijing, China

Tony Conrad
Born in Concord, USA, 1940
Lives and works in Buffalo and New York, USA

Keren Cytter
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, 1977
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Nathalie Djurberg
Born in Lysekil, Sweden, 1978
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Anju Dodiya
Born in Mumbai, India, 1964
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Gino De Dominicis
Ancona, Italy, 1947 – Roma, Italy, 1998

Elena Elagina, Igor Makarevich
Born in Moscow,Russia, 1949
Born in Trialety, Georgia, 1943
They live and work in Moscow, Russia

Öyvind Fahlström
São Paulo, Brazil, 1928 – Stockholm, Sweden, 1976

Lara Favaretto
Born in Treviso, Italy, 1973
Lives and works in Turin, Italy

Hans-Peter Feldmann
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, 1941
Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany

Spencer Finch
Born in New Haven, USA, 1962
Lives and works in New York, USA

Ceal Floyer
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, 1968
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

William Forsythe
Born in New York, USA, 1949
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Yona Friedman
Born in Budapest, Hungary, 1923
Lives and works in Paris , France

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Born in Strasbourg, France, 1965
Lives and works in Paris, France

Sheela Gowda
Born in Bhadravati, India, 1957
Lives and works in Bangalore, India

Tamara Grcic
Born in Munich, Germany, 1964
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany


GUTAI

Akira Kanayama
Nara, Japan, 1924 – Nara, Japan, 2005

Sadamasa Motonaga
Born in Iga, Japan, 1922
Lives and works in Takarazuka City, Japan

Saburo Murakami
Kobe, Japan, 1925 – Nishinomiya, Japan, 1996

Shozo Shimamoto
Born in Osaka, Japan, 1928
Lives and works in Kyoto, Japan

Kazuo Shiraga
Amagasaki, Japan, 1924 – Amagasaki, Japan, 2008

Atsuko Tanaka
Nara, Japan, 1932 – Nara, Japan, 2005

Tsuruko Yamazaki
Born in Ashiya, Japan, 1925
Lives and works in Ashiya, Japan

Jiro Yoshihara
Osaka, Japan, 1905 – Ashiya, Japan, 1972

Michio Yoshihara
Ashiya, Japan, 1933 – Ashiya, Japan, 1996


Guyton\Walker
Born in Indiana, USA, 1972
Born in Georgia, USA, 1969
They live and work in New York, USA

Gonkar Gyatso
Born in Lhasa, Tibet, 1961
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Jan Håfström
Born in Stockholm, Sweden, 1937
Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden

Anawana Haloba
Born in Livingstone, Zambia,1978
Lives and works in Oslo, Norway

Rachel Harrison
Born in New York, USA, 1966
Lives and works in New York, USA

Susan Hefuna
Born in Cairo, Egypt, 1962
Lives and works in Egypt and Germany

Carsten Höller
Born in Brussels, Belgium, 1961
Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden

Huang Yong Ping
Born in Quanzhou, China, 1954
Lives and works in Paris, France

Joan Jonas
Born in New York, USA, 1965
Lives and works in New York, USA

Miranda July
Born in Barre, USA, 1974
Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Rachel Khedoori
Born in Sydney, Australia, 1964
Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Toba Khedoori
Born in Sydney, Australia, 1964
Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Koo Jeong A.
Born in Seoul, Korea, 1967
Lives and works in Paris, France

Moshekwa Langa
Born in Bakenburg, South Africa, 1975
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Arto Lindsay
Born in Richmond, USA, 1953
Lives and works in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Renata Lucas
Born in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil, 1971
Lives and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Goshka Macuga
Born in Warsaw, Poland, 1967
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Gordon Matta-Clark
New York, USA, 1943 – New York, USA, 1978

Cildo Meireles
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1948
Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Aleksandra Mir
Born in Lubin, Poland, 1967
Lives and works in Palermo, Italy

Moscow Poetry Club

Yoko Ono
Born in Tokyo, Japan, 1933
Lives and works in New York, USA

Jorge Otero-Pailos
Born in Madrid, Spain, 1971
Lives and works in New York, USA

Blinky Palermo
Leipzig, Germany, 1943 - Kurumba, Maldives, 1977

Lygia Pape
Novo Friburgo, Brazil, 1927 – Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, 2004

Anna Parkina
Born in Moscow, Russia, 1979
Lives and works in Moscow, Russia

Philippe Parreno
Born in Oran, Algeria, 1964
Lives and works in Paris, France

Pavel Pepperstein
Born in Moscow, Russia, 1966
Lives and works in Moscow, Russia

Alessandro Pessoli
Born in Cervia, Italy, 1963
Lives and works in Milan, Italy

Falke Pisano
Born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1978
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Michelangelo Pistoletto
Born in Biella, Italy, 1933
Lives and works in Biella, Italy

Att Poomtangon
Born in Bangkok, Thailand, 1973
Lives and works in Frankfurt and Chiangmai, Thailand

Marjetica Potrč
Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1953
Lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Sara Ramo
Born in Madrid, Spain, 1975
Lives and works in Paris, France

Tobias Rehberger
Born in Esslingen, Germany, 1966
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Pietro Roccasalva
Born in Modica, Italy, 1970
Lives and works in Milan, Italy

Tomas Saraceno
Born in Tucuman, Argentina, 1973
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Amy Simon
Born in New York, USA, 1957
Lives and works in Stockholm and Tel Aviv, Israel

Simon Starling
Born in Epsom, Great Britain, 1967
Lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin, Germany

Pascale Marthine Tayou
Born in Kamerun, Africa, 1967
Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Wolfgang Tillmans
Born in Remscheid, Germany, 1968
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Rirkrit Tiravanija
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1961
Lives and works in New York, USA

Grazia Toderi
Born in Padua, Italy, 1963
Lives and works in Milan, Italy

Madelon Vriesendorp
Born in Bilthoven, The Netherlands, 1945
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Tian Tian Wang
Born in Qingdao, China, 1980
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Richard Wentworth
Born in Samoa, Oceania, 1947
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Pae White
Born in Pasadena, USA, 1963
Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Cerith Wyn Evans & Florian Hecker
Born in Llanelli, Wales, 1958
Born in Augsburg, Germany, 1975
Lives and works in London, Great Britain
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Xu Tan
Born in Wuhan, China, 1957
Lives and works in Shanghai and Guangzhou, China

Haegue Yang
Born in Seoul, Korea, 1971
Lives and works in Berlin and Seoul, Korea

Héctor Zamora
Born in Mexico City, Mexico, 1974
Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

Anya Zholud
Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1981
Lives and works in Moscow, Russia

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

At this curious place in time, the once exuberant art world stands stunned and bedazzled — like a deer in the glaring headlights of the oncoming global financial crisis. The inability of the art world to respond in any meaningful way is testament to the cul-de-sac it has been driving headily and headlong into in recent years.

In a debate last week at New York’s Rockefeller University, the proposition was put forward that “the art market is less ethical than the stock market.” Speaking against were Christie’s deputy chair Amy Cappellazzo, painter Chuck Close, and critic Jerry Saltz. Despite their humour, charm and best efforts, the proposition was carried: 55 percent for, 33 percent against, with 12 percent undecided.

In the most recent Sunday New York Times, Holland Cotter sums up our current state in an article titled “The Boom is Over. Long Live the Art!” He writes, “ethical firewalls are not this industry’s style.”

In these depths of winter, the art world sits by the fire, lost and befuddled, reading Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World, pining in remembrance of things past.

Few industries have been left more exposed and bereft by their own inadequacies than the art world. On Monday, Standard & Poor’s warned that it may cut its rating of Sotheby’s bonds to below investment grade, a rating known appropriately as “junk.” Much the same could be said for the industry at large.

In further news out of New York this week, Guild & Greyshkul closed its doors on Tuesday, following on from the recent closures of Roebling Hall and Cohan and Leslie in Chelsea; Rivington Arms in the East Village and 31 Grand on the Lower East Side.

The moral failure of the art market is by no means peculiar to New York City. Writing in the New Statesman earlier this month, Alice O’Keeffe observes, “I remember, in March 2007, going to see Tony Blair make a speech on the arts at Tate Modern, in which he boldly claimed to have presided over a cultural ‘golden age’. The arts, he told the gathered great and good, were a vital component of Britain's continued economic success: ‘A nation that cares about art will not just be a better nation. In the early 21st century, it will be a more successful one.’

“In new Labour parlance, the arts had become the ‘creative industries’. Like bankers and stockbrokers, artists were expected to prop up the wobbly edifice of consumer capitalism, to generate profit, attract tourists, help Britain market itself as a cultural — and therefore financial — ‘hub’.

“Placing culture firmly at the service of finance had its advantages for the arts administrators in the audience, too, as it gave them a clear claim on their slice of the government pie. Blair's speech was received with enthusiastic applause and was followed by polite questions about future funding. Nobody asked whether generating cash was an appropriate raison d'être for the arts — let alone what, if anything, a man who holidayed with the Bee Gees and Cliff Richard could tell us about cultural value.”

Here in Leipzig, it’s been hard, if not impossible, to tell the collector from the curator over the past year. The city’s Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (Gallery of Contemporary Art) has faced stinging criticism for hosting a series of exhibitions giving dealers, collectors and corporate art collections total freedom to display their works as they wish. Chris Dercon, the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, describes the initiative, entitled “Carte Blanche”, as “exactly the kind of thing that we do not need in public galleries”. 
The GfZK, which is a public-private partnership, receives much of its funding from public sources. It has now ceded curatorial control of half of its galleries until 2010. 
Many German museum directors, including myself, have expressed disquiet at the exhibitions which will give commercial galleries such as Leipzig’s Dogenhaus and Eigen + Art free run of the museum space.
 Further exhibitions will be drawn from collections assembled by the publishers Leipziger Verlags, industrialist Arend Oetker and his wife Brigitte; consultant Klaus and Doris Schmidt; and collectors Leon Janucek, and Vivian and Horst Schmitter. The costs are being met by the private participants, who may display the works as they please.


Quoted in The Art Newspaper, Dr. Dercon points out, “You can raise questions about public and private museums, but what we need to discuss is the usurping of intellectual power by the commercial world.” Dr Dercon criticises these contemporary collectors, saying many viewed art collections as “luxury goods”. He adds, “We all deal, with private collectors and many, especially old master collectors, have been generous with loans, gifts and sharing scholarship, much more so, in fact, than many contemporary art collectors.” 
But he questions the Leipzig initiative, saying “it may be intelligent [politically] but it is not intellectual and if we are trying to find a way to work with the private sector, this is not it. It is partly an issue of public responsibility and partly an issue of transparency. One of the biggest problems in the art world is that the same people can be critics, curators, dealers, crypto-collectors, even museum directors. I don’t think this is going to shed much light on what is an opaque situation.”


The challenge facing Swedish curator Daniel Birnbaum, as he plans this summer’s Venice Biennale — and many other curators as they prepare upcoming events — is to prove they’re anything more than yesterday’s junk bond dealers. Will the goods they have on offer provide any real meaning to a world teetering on the brink of Depression, or are they just so many more Bernie Madoffs, peddling their Ponzi schemes as they have in recent years.

The greater challenge, however, falls upon artists themselves. The collapse of the art market has meant a realignment of power, with once mighty gatekeepers now unemployed also-rans and artists back in the studio facing an enviable blank canvas on which to build a new world.

As Holland Cotter writes, “This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case it has been artists who have reshaped the game. At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again…

“But there will be many, many changes for art and artists in the years ahead. Trying to predict them is like trying to forecast the economy. You can only ask questions. The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture. What will artists do with this?

“Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?

“I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.

“Right. Exactly. Crazy.”

Palestine c/o Venice

Palestine c/o Venice marks the first Palestinian participation at the Venice Biennale. Rather than adopt one theme, the exhibition takes on a conceptual framework that embraces the Palestinian people questioning the disproportionate use of the media image of nameless faces and voiceless people. Two of the art projects are collaborative interventions with diverse Palestinian communities whose members will travel to Venice to participate in the art performance and/or the Symposium.

In the same spirit, it is appropriate and necessary to insure that the Palestinian communities under siege, unable to obtain travel passes, join in celebrating the first Palestinian exhibition at the Venice Biennale. In this respect, six Palestinian art institutions in Palestine will exhibit duplicates of the art works, thereby allowing Palestinian audiences to participate in the opening of the exhibition simultaneously to its opening in Venice. The Palestinian venues are: A.M. Qattan Foundation, Birzeit University Art Museum, Al-Hoash Palestinian Art court, International Academy of Art Palestine, Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, and Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation.

The seven participating artists, commissioned to create new works, were chosen for their outstanding commitment to their art and their ability to bridge local and global themes. Among them are emerging and established artists. They employ diverse techniques including sound installation, multimedia performance installation, site specific work, animation, photography, and video. Their art references Palestinian issues within an international artistic discourse. It is self-reflexive on the artistic process outside the boundaries of the traditional exhibition space, tackles themes ranging from the epistemology of the concept of biennales to the dialogue of cultures within architecture and urban design, and explores visual perception of objects in the mechanical state, marginality via the structural geography of the refugee camp, and the activation of an almost non-exiting community discourse on the colonialist socio-spatial reconfiguration of urban centers.

Participating Artists
Taysir Batniji, lives and works in Paris
Shadi HabibAllah, lives and works in Ramallah
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, live and work in Bethlehem
Jawad Al Malhi, lives and work in Jerusalem
Emily Jacir, lives and works in Ramallah/New York
Khalil Rabah, lives and works in Ramallah
Curator: Salwa Mikdadi, Independent Curator based in Berkeley, CA
Commissioner: Vittorio Urbani, Director Nuova Icona

Symposium: Conversations
Date: June 5th, 2009 9:30 until 5:00 pm
Free Admission. Limited seating, early registration required
Contact: info@palestinecoveniceb09.org

Issues to be discussed will focus on art in the time of perpetual crisis, the role artists play in civil society as activist and as catalysts of democratic discourse, and the artists' activation of public spaces as alternative venues in the absence of museums and state support.

Symposium participants include the artists as well as art historian Yazid Anani (Birzeit University, W. Bank), Kamal Boullata (artist & art historian), Salwa Mikdadi, Vittorio Urbani, Tina Sherwell (art historian and director of The International Academy of Art Palestine), Jack Persekian (curator, al Ma'mal Foundation for the Arts, Jerusalem & artistic director of the Sharjah Biennale) architects Suad Al Amiry (Director, Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation) and Farhat Yousef (Head of Planning Unit, Riwaq), Ramallah.

Making Worlds
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
La Biennale di Venezia
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009