Editor's Note

While the scope of what is understood as art continues to expand, is the world of art itself shrinking? This is one of the questions posed by John Zarobell in his review of Art of the Deal, Noah Horowitz's recent book on art and the global financial market. The currency of the term globalization in our electronically connected age can make the word seem less like a complex process, and more like an inevitable fact of life. Nevertheless, the question can be posed: does a globalized market make for a bigger or smaller art world? New York and London may not enjoy the exclusive status that they once did as world capitals of culture and commerce, but as the number of stops on the international circuit of biennials and fairs multiplies from one year to the next, will this growing infrastructure profit art as much as it does the marketplace?

In her review of Art as Life, the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican, Elizabeth Lebas regrets the facile analogy proposed by the show's organizers between the internationalism of the Bauhaus and this summer's London Olympics, but the ersatz global village that greeted visitors to the Games was more akin, in spirit, to the exhibition's venue—a post-modern planned community—than to the school founded by Walter Gropius in 1919.

As Tabula Quarterly continues to grow, expanding its coverage to include exhibitions big and small, it is to be hoped that diversity and internationalism, not market hegemony, remain hallmarks of the art world discussed in its reviews.

Ariel Plotek

Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes
Washington | New York

Catalogue by Eleonora Luciano with Denise Allen and Claudia Kryza-Gersch. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2011.

The aspirations and goals of Antico, the moniker that Pier Jacopo Alari de' Bonacolsi (ca. 1455-1528) took around the time when he was thirty, are highlighted when one considers that a rival Northern Italian artist, whose identity is debated, assumed the name Moderno as early as 1487. These two nicknames express the self-conscious fashioning of identity and varying gravitational poles of historicism and modernism that increasingly shaped artistic production in Italy during the late quattrocento and beyond. Defining precisely what made Moderno's work 'modern' remains elusive, other than to note that his antique referents are eclectic, making many of his objects erudite pastiches. Antico's interests, by comparison, as well as the techniques that were used to make his objects, have come into focus through a delightful, tightly organized exhibition held at the National Gallery in Washington and reviewed here at The Frick Collection in New York (closed July 29, 2012). Antico worked almost exclusively, as far as we know, for the Gongaza court in Mantua and elsewhere. Although he restored ancient marble sculptures, his production in stone is difficult to exhibit—the major extant pieces that he worked on are the Dioscuri on the Quirinal Hill in Rome—thus, the present show concentrates on the medium in which Antico primarily excelled: bronze. Antico's medals, reliefs, decorative works, scaled-down versions of classical sculptures, and busts of historical figures and ancient deities are thrillingly refined. Often they are darkly patinated, gilded, and/or have silvered eyes—all hallmarks of his artistic production.

The exhibition concentrates on several core points about the metalworker: Antico's preoccupation with antiquity; issues surrounding authorship when several hands are involved in an object's production; and his pioneering work with indirect casting, which facilitated making multiples. The final theme is perhaps the show's most striking concern as several objects on display are grouped by multiple, allowing for tantalizing comparisons. Seeing three versions of Antico's Hercules together, for example, presses the question of whether the piece in the collection of the Musée du Louvre was an antique object restored by Antico that motivated the creation of other sculptures by him in the same vein, as is now thought likely; or if it is an object manufactured by the Renaissance artist himself. One anticipates that future technical analysis and scholarship will lay this question to rest. The exhibition catalogue, rather than focusing on object entries, takes the form of a monograph composed of seven essays that compliment the show's chief concerns. A useful photographic compendium of the artist's antique sources follows the text.

Looking mainly to documentary evidence, including the inventory of Antico's first patron, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga (1446-1496), Eleonora Luciano introduces the artist and contextualizes his works in the catalogue's first essay. Curiously, Gianfrancesco's inventory does not mention gilding on any of Antico's bronzes, nor was this technique, one of the characteristics of his oeuvre now so esteemed, ever mentioned during the artist's lifetime. Another distinctive feature of the inventory is its nomenclature for Antico's copper alloys, which are called ramo (copper), bronzo (bronze), and metale (metal). Luciano suggests that the latter word may have been a catchall indicating the presence of multiple types of metal in an object. She proposes that Cristoforo di Geremia might have taught Antico and she raises issues of authorship and collaboration, pointing out that by the middle of Antico's career his sculptures were sometimes cast by others, most often by Gian Marco Cavalli and Master Iohane (Zoan).

Claudia Kryza-Gersch argues emphatically in her essay, "Why Antico Matters," that Antico was "extraordinarily uncompromising" in his preoccupation with antiquity. He was "a true antiquarian" in comparison to the contemporary orbit of sculptors, perhaps with the exception of Filarete (ca. 1400-ca. 1469), who she believes may have passed through Mantua in 1465, leaving behind his Marcus Aurelius, a sculpture she suggests was familiar to Antico. Kryza-Gersch also proposes that a possible encounter between the two artists would have been an important formative experience for Antico. Antico's objects, she stresses, "are entirely devoid of any references to his own time." This is perhaps an overstatement. As the exhibit itself demonstrates, significant formal differences between Antico's Apollo Belvedere, ca. 1490 (Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt am Main) and a sculpture of the same subject produced roughly a decade later ca. 1502 (Galleria Franchetti alla Ca' d'Oro, Venice) after Antico's original molds were stolen respond to shifts in Renaissance thought about the constitution of masculine beauty. Stephen Campbell discusses the relationship of Antico's work to humanism, seeing the artist's sculptures as material correlatives rather than responses to the movement's textual interests. For Campbell, Antico's objects are a signifier of antiquity that allowed his patrons to promote their ongoing allegiance to the remote past. Campbell draws a sustained comparison between Antico and Andrea Mantegna (ca. 1431-1506). He argues that Antico drew upon and helped to solidify the nascent development of a canon of ancient works, while Mantegna's sophisticated and multivalent literary and artistic references meant that his creations were "meta-artifacts" that resisted the very objecthood so embodied by Antico's output. This difference led to alternate paths in the later reception of each artist: Mantegna was highly celebrated while Antico is a conspicuous absence. After his death, Antico's pseudonym was lost until the eighteenth century.

Commenting that Antico's early numismatic work became more classicizing over time—that is to say his later medals are smaller, more philologically accurate, and take-up complex allegories, following his patrons' lines of desire—Davide Gasparotto offers a sensitive essay on Antico's work as a portraitist. Along with Antico's medals, his eight busts now in the Seminario Vescovile in Mantua are discussed. Four of them join reworked ancient heads to plaster and terracotta 'busts'; the others consist of all'antica bronze heads and gilded plaster busts all by the Renaissance artist. Examining these portraits and others, Gasparotto makes the point that Antico's objects interpret as much as they emulate.

Scrutinizing significant collections on par with those of the Gonzaga court, Denise Allen elegantly considers the low but changing valuation of small bronzes during the late quattrocento, particularly in comparison to coins and engraved gems. Surviving ancient bronze works usually were obscured by corrosion in contrast to the pristine condition of coins, cameos and intaglios. Bronze sculptures embellished Renaissance collections, but they were not assigned high monetary values. Antico, particularly though his impressive sculpting and partial gilding abilities, shifted the interest in small-scale bronzes so that they became marks of wealth, decorum, and dynastic longevity. Allen considers how Antico's facility in gilding, silvering and his innovative use of patination mimicked ancient practices, while perfecting the ancient artistry to the delight of his patrons. She astutely discusses Corinthian bronze, which is a dark coloration of metal as described by Pliny the Elder. This ancient medium was often combined with colorful inlays. Allen suggests a generic similarity between the classical adoration and production of bronze and Antico's inventive methods for manipulating metal.

Two material investigations of Antico's bronzes conclude the catalogue. Dylan Smith and Shelley Sturman tackle the difficult question of the sequence of Antico's production. Only one statuette, the Hercules and Antaeus (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Kunstkamer), can be securely dated and assigned a patron based on documentary evidence. Their thoughts on chronology thereby enrich our understanding of the artist. Richard Stone, who three decades ago argued that Antico was the first artist to revive the technique of indirect casting, here considers aspects of Antico's chemical patinas. Stone leaves us with a stimulating point of discussion: Antico and his patrons knew ancient bronzes through their green patinas and could have imitated this effect in stable ways if so desired. Why this sign of authenticity was not emulated remains an open question. The show and catalogue elect to bypass examining recent scholarship by Jane Bennett and others on bronze as a vibrant medium. Likewise, intriguing links between the medieval and Renaissance use of bronze are neglected. Nonetheless, in its exhibit and catalogue, Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes presents a fascinating and much needed scrutiny of Antico that will doubtless shape studies of the artist and his contemporaries for generations to come.

Lauren Jacobi

Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon.
Munich: Prestel, 2012.

Exhibition catalogues rarely receive the respect accorded to proper books. Beginning with the standard "exh. cat." citation, which does not acknowledge authorship, exhibition catalogues are typically considered in a class apart from scholarly volumes not associated with exhibitions, and it is true that many do function as relatively uncritical inventories of the art works and sponsors associated with an exhibition. More unusual is the catalogue that manages to codify or substantially reevaluate a movement or zeitgeist. In the field of art made after 1960, particularly that produced in the western hemisphere, a high percentage of these groundbreaking publications have been produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Key examples include Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer's Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975 (1995) which became an indispensible primer for students of conceptual art, and Goldstein's A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968 (2004), an influential revisionist history of minimalism. Cornelia Butler's Afterimage: Drawing Through Process (1999) underscored a sea change in drawing during the 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on the medium's generative and material properties. Paul Schimmel's scholarly contributions to this roster include Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-1962 (1992) and Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 (1998). To this list of research-driven exhibition catalogues issuing from MOCA must be added Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary, closed August 20, 2012), introduced and co-organized by curator Philipp Kaiser and art historian Miwon Kwon.

In the volume's introductory essay, Kaiser and Kwon articulate their thesis as a set of four main arguments: land art is international, land art engages urban grounds, land art does not escape the art system, and land art is a media practice in addition to being a sculptural one. As a glance through Ends of the Earth's own bibliography makes clear, none of these points is entirely new. The genre's internationalism was evident in its first exhibitions and is amply illustrated by more recent surveys including Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis' Land and Environmental Art (Phaidon, 1998), which documents the work of nearly seventy artists and artists' collectives hailing from around the globe. While Canada, England, and the United States are featured most prominently in Kastner and Wallis' account, artists from Brazil, China, Israel, Italy, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland, and Vietnam are also represented. Kaiser and Kwon cover this territory and more, with the welcome inclusion of artists working in France, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Slovenia, among other places (further on the subject of demographics, female artists comprise 15%, male artists 75%, and artist collectives 15% of the nearly 100 artists surveyed in Ends of the Earth). It seems to me that Kaiser and Kwon's additional points – land art's engagement with the urban surround, the art system, and the media – are closely linked and have long since been established in relationship to certain artists, particularly Robert Smithson. One could start with Smithson's own collected writings (first published in 1979), page through Caroline Jones' portrait of Smithson in her book, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (University of Chicago, 1996), and see Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler's excellent exhibition catalogue, Robert Smithson (MOCA, 2004) for in-depth discussions of the ways that earthworks depended upon major patronage, re-inscribed the gallery system by participating in dialogue with it, and blossomed in the public imagination by generating sensational press. This having been said, Ends of the Earth succeeds in substantially broadening and deepening the discussion of land art's internationalism and anchors this inquiry in the cultural, aesthetic, geographic, and political specifics of each project under consideration.

Ends of the Earth is a compelling and thought-provoking book, in part because of its excellent design. Designer Lorraine Wilde employed a flexible grid to map the proliferative text and generous graphics compiled for the catalogue. Featured art works that contain diagrams or narratives are reproduced at a scale large enough to be read, so that the catalogue may be thought of as another iteration of the exhibition. For example, Douglas Huebler's Site Sculpture Project, Windham College Pentagon, Putney, Vermont, (1968) appears as five black and white photographs, two maps, and a typewritten statement across a two-page spread. The typescript explains that at the close of the show, "the maps, photographs, and this statement constitute the work" and a warning inscribed on one of the maps – "Roads are shifted, houses burn, are abandoned, or rebuilt; a round world distorts a flat map; man's memory is fallible; expect not exactness" – applies more broadly to the unstable territory charted in the book.

The level of research and the quality of prose is consistently high throughout Ends of the Earth. Essays by five relatively young scholars alternate with first-hand accounts by key practitioners. Interviews with Willoughby Sharp and Seth Siegelaub, both of whom organized early shows of land art, emphasize the spirit of risk-taking and trust necessary to commission new work on location (Sharp also comments provocatively that American artists Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer lobbied him to exclude European artists from his Earth Art show at Cornell, a suggestion that Sharp disregarded). Virginia Dwan, the American gallerist most closely associated with land art, summarizes the contributions of the artists she represented and encourages readers to venture out to the original sites and experience earthworks as "actual, palpable structures." Germano Celant explains how his interest in American land art grew from his research on Italian artists sculpting with organic materials, and Yona Fischer discusses the challenges of organizing the exhibition Concept + Information (particularly an indoor/outdoor work by artist Avital Geva) at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Internationalism is a leitmotif in the essays as well as the interviews included in Ends of the Earth. The reception of land art in Germany is explored both by Julienne Lorz in her essay, "Transatlantic Crossings: The Case of Munich, 1968-1972" (Lorz is curator at Haus der Kunst in Munich, to which the exhibition will travel after the MOCA venue) and by journalist Laszlo Glozer, who offers a remembrance of Walter de Maria's earth room in Munich. Lorz focuses on the enthusiastic patronage of gallerist Heiner Friedrich and the proposals by Michael Heizer, both realized and unrealized, that Friedrich championed. Among these projects was Munich Depression, 1969, an excavation of 1000 tons of earth that Lorz reads (against the grain of Heizer's own statements) as a critique of nearby housing projects. Lorz also discusses Friedrich's patronage of Levitated Mass, an installation that Heizer proposed in conjunction with the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich (Levitated Mass was not realized for the Munich Olympics, but a version of the work was unveiled this summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Casting a much broader net, Jane McFadden's essay, "Not Sculpture: Along the Way to Land Art" draws social and political connections between the international and "intermedia" aspects of numerous art movements and practices of the 1960s and 1970s, including land art, Fluxus, and Arte Povera in addition to the projects of Group Zero and Pop.

The roles of photography as both material for and documentation of land art are touched upon in virtually all of the essays featured in Ends of the Earth; for some authors this topic is a primary focus. In his essay, "Media: Land Art's Multiple Sites," Tom Holert illuminates the ways that aerial and satellite photography were critical to the conceptualization, production and dissemination of monumental earth works, and elucidates the vexed and conflicting relationships that the artists had to photography as a component of and/or representation or their work. In "Elsewhere: Desert Ends," Emily Eliza Scott analyzes the staging of projects for television and radio by German artist Heinz Mack in the Sahara, French artists Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle in the Nevada desert outside of Las Vegas, and American artists Ed Ruscha, Patrick Blackwell and Mason Williams, also near Las Vegas. Scott explains that although these desert locations were remote, they "occupied center-stage in the cultural imaginary," in part because of their use as nuclear test sites. Indeed, Scott hypothesizes that for these artists, "to confront wasted lands was to confront the contemporary."

Ends of the Earth excels at putting land art in a broader context. Some of the authors achieve this by surveying a range of projects produced by artists working around the globe, but in his essay, "Urban Grounds: Earth Beneath Detroit," Julian Myers drills deep into one situation, exploring the local response to Michael Heizer's Dragged Mass Displacement at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1971. After a nuanced discussion of earthworks in relationship to the myth of the American West, Myers circles back to the hostility evinced by Heizer's Dragged Mass, which stirred anticipation with monumental earthmoving equipment only to anticlimactically scar the lawn of a grand museum in a disintegrating city. Through a close reading of Heizer's drawings for the piece (which exclude the urban context), and a review of daily newspaper reports at the time of the installation, Myers reveals the ways that Heizer's work suffered in juxtaposition with news of declining public housing and rising crime rates. So it happens that a project that might have resonated a few years before did not, in the minds of many, connect with its time and place.

As of this writing, the Ends of the Earth exhibition is on view at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary, but chief curator Paul Schimmel, senior curator Philipp Kaiser, and the four artists on MOCA's board of trustees – John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Cathie Opie, and Ed Ruscha (an image of Ruscha at work on Royal Road Test graces the cover of the catalogue) – have all precipitously and regrettably decamped. In addition to being a landmark exhibition, Ends of the Earth is a superlative example of MOCA's longstanding commitment to books on art that matter. Hopefully that mission will continue to resonate with this time and place.

Robin Clark

The Last Things Before the Last
Hamilton, Ontario

It has become increasingly familiar to visitors of public galleries and museums to find the permanent holdings curated into exhibitions where the intention is not only to show off the collection in conventional categories, but also to offer novel conceptual frameworks to organize and give context to the work on view. The opportunities to include 'minor' works, prints and pages from sketchbooks, ephemera, as well as forgotten or less known artists, can, when done intelligently, allow for complex nuances and connections to occur, often recharging more familiar works and allowing for the discovery of others. Neither blockbusters nor greatest hits, these exhibitions can suggest new ways to think about specific works.

The McMaster Museum of Art's recent exhibition The Last Things Before the Last (closed August 4, 2012), guest curated by E.C. Woodley, draws on the collection and its history with a particularly layered and thoughtful approach. In a small entrance gallery, pages and photo fragments from an old photo album are displayed across from a small oil painting by Gerhard Richter. Titled Isa, the painting is a characteristically blurred portrait of his wife at the time, Isa Genzken. One learns from the annotated exhibition guide that the photos facing Isa are those of the Levy family; Hamiltonians of German-Jewish background. Dated just before the first World War, they feature the family vacationing in Europe, and include Herman Herzog Levy; an art collector and one of the primary donors to the McMaster. His collection and his bequest to the Museum feature prominently in the rest of the exhibition. In his extensive guidebook, Woodley reveals some of his goals in setting up this initial juxtaposition:

"Placing Isa across from the Levy family photos brings into proximity two different but related media. Some old photos are capable of immersing a viewer in an immediate depth of time and history. The faces of the dead look out at the museum viewer across a gap of future time that is forever unknown to them. Richter seems to depict an existential distance—between artist and subject, viewer and artwork, or between self and other—using the specific material and object life of painting."

This "existential distance" of figures on and across walls, with the viewer immersed in between, is manifest in the synoptic selection of figurative works. This central thesis is elaborated upon and given depth through a number of overlapping sub-themes: a homage to two previously curated exhibitions at the museum; a reflection on Levy as a collector and benefactor; and most importantly, a meditation on the material, formal and iconographic content in representations of the figure.

A Homage

The Last Things Before The Last quotes two previous exhibitions in the museum's history, the most recent being the 2010-11 exhibition The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt. Here, a corner installation of drawings, prints and an Egyptian funerary figure is seamlessly reinstalled amid the current exhibition. The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt was originally installed so that figures in the works faced each other and the viewer. Staring out across the room, their gazes do, at times, meet the audience's. As a main theme in the current exhibition, this grouping emphasizes a portrait's ability to uncannily 'look out' across time, partly like apparitions. Conversely, the other re-installation, dates back to the museum's opening in 1994 and touches on the entangled concerns of museological reconstruction itself. The purpose of the Herman H. Levy Gallery (in which The Last Things is installed) was to evoke the quaint domestic environment where he hung his collection, including a smaller room in the centre that recreated the arrangement of paintings as they would have been in his living room. This small centre room is included in The Last Things—a reinstallation of a recreation. Here small portraits by Tintoretto and the school of Rubens are hung low with Dutch still lives and genre scenes. The re-installation includes information cards, replete with anecdotes about the works and their acquisition. But here the question of simply reconstructing a history is called into question. The consciousness of the gesture undermines its purpose, mostly because the power of these images to remain vital in the present moment—to transcend collector and context—jars engagingly with the memorial tone of the main show.

A Reflection

Besides the centre gallery, the exhibition includes work from Levy's collection as well as European work purchased with his bequest to the museum (including the Richter). Levy did not solely (or even primarily) collect portraits, but with so many portraits in the show, including self-portraits, family members and even a photo of the 4th century BC urn containing Sigmund and Martha Freud's ashes, the exhibition creates a memorial character that seems to reflect back upon the collector. The collection and gallery have his name after all. Those pre-WWI era holiday photos in the first gallery imply links to a number of similarly dated works in the exhibition. While work from the war is certainly another thematic arc for the show, its reverberation with family photos creates associative narratives where family and cultural histories overlap. But it is not a rigorous history: it is part curatorial fiction with a larger scope. The re-installed Levy Gallery and the personal photographs are both context for and contextualized by this 'family' of work; suggesting that the reflection is construed through works and objects themselves, their histories overlapping in the holdings and on the walls of this museum. It is a gesture encouraging an existential narrative of the collection.

A Meditation

The "existential distance" between viewer and artwork, history and the present is continuously reinforced by the resonance each work has with others in the show, both iconographically and formally. In the main gallery, the viewer is surrounded by portraits of all kinds. The first two images of the hanging are a precisely engraved memorial image of a woman from the 17th century, Magdeleine de Lamoignon by Gerard Edelinck; followed by an exacting etching after an Albrecht Durer painting, Woman with coiled hair (Portrait of Katharina Frey). Both are illusionistic portraits, as well as images of other pictures. But, as one looks further down this line of selected works, the dates move closer to the 20th century and the formality of the mark-making loosens. In a Max Beckman self-portrait his face is described by agitated straight cuts of a dry-point needle. This print reverberates with the adjacent self-portrait by Max Liebermann, whose deep dry-point burrows converge in the face but fade into shallow scratches before the head meets the background. Meanwhile, on an adjacent wall, two early drawings by Degas have faded (I was surprised to see them hanging at all) almost to the point of disappearing; in one the stains on the paper are easier to make out than the drawing itself. Beside the Degas is another faded chalk drawing of a woman crying. In different ways, these works reinforce the material and contingent nature of representation: images are conjured, broken-up and ultimately disappearing.

When I first entered the gallery, my eye was caught by a crouching figure in the shadow of a central wall. Life-size and in three dimensions (yet strangely absorbing the shadow it is placed in), Antony Gormely's Proof provides another take on the exhibition's theme; how a representation of the body is also an absence of its living model. The installation makes iconographic connections with a photographed self-portrait by Max Dean, his face covered and his body balancing in a two-legged chair, as well as one of the reaching figures in Ernst Barlach's cast bronze wall relief, The Transition. The repetitions compound the works' gestural force. Formally, Proof, shares dark, emphatic shapes with Edvard Munch's raw woodcut, The Kiss, and Stephen Andrews' Self-Portrait as Jim Black. Andrews' crayon and ink drawing is laid out on a table like a corpse: a meditation on himself as one of Toronto's first victims of AIDS. This work, like much of the exhibition, reverberates amongst the other works, impacting how we read it, and the other works on view. Layered together with the histories of the museum and its collection, The Last Things Before The Last is an exhibition assembled with rare consideration of the uncanny power of representation and its material cogency.

Patrick Howlett

Art of the Deal. Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market by Noah Horowitz.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Globalization is by now a cliché but that does not mean it has lost any force as a means of illuminating the present historical moment. The expansion of markets to a global scale that began centuries ago has accelerated considerably in the past generation and has affected every aspect of the economy. In Art of the Deal. Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, Noah Horowitz sets out to articulate how these historical shifts have increased the appetite for contemporary art, but he brings a new rigor and depth to considerations of recent art market expansion. Further, he extends the analysis to provide insight into the economic processes that guide not only the marketing of art but the dynamic of its creation as well.

Horowitz has provided readers with a very thorough and wide-ranging analysis of the contemporary art market that brings an unprecedented complexity to this discussion. His synthesis of the literature on the topic is sophisticated yet lucid and the book is exceptionally well researched, supported by countless citations. There are three significant chapters: one on video art, another on what the author terms "experiential" art, and a third on art investment funds. While one might not conceive of these diverse aspects of the contemporary art world together, each draws from the same network of economic interpretations, market analyses and historical developments.

The most straightforward contribution to the economy of art is the last chapter on art investment funds. Though many in the art world know that they exist, few understand how they operate, and the author explains this clearly before demonstrating why so many have failed recently. After reading Horowitz's account, it seems most are doomed to play a minor role in the economics of the art trade since, at its core, art investment is anathema to the primary market and, in the secondary market, it is difficult to leverage the insider position that many art investment professionals enjoy for the benefit of a fund. This chapter brings to bear a wealth of economic literature on the art market that almost no one in the art world would venture to read, but the author makes it considerably more accessible and explains its shortcomings and applications. Horowitz marries these abstractions to a tight historical account, supplemented by an appendix listing every recent art investment fund and its current status. All of this is masterful and impressive but it is not, I think, the heart of the book.

The kernel of this work is the innovative position that developments in contemporary art can be productively researched historically through the lens of the market. As such, the comparatives for this book are not, as one might expect, works such as Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World or Don Thompson's The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, but instead the notional, theory-infused approaches to recent art world developments such as appear in the pages of Artforum or October. In essence, Horowitz raises writing on art economics to the level of theory and applies it not to the usual suspect—blue-chip painting—but to the far more ephemeral and harder to quantify domains of video art and experiential art (think relational aesthetics). Such an enterprise seems perilous at best, irrelevant at worst, and yet Horowitz enters these dire straits and emerges with considerable success.

The historical treatment of video art follows the transition of a medium that began as a manifestation of an anti-institutional perspective on art in the mid-1960's but has developed into a widely collected and institutionalized form today. Horowitz traces here both the successful marketing of video art by commercial galleries and the canonization of video art by museums around the world. This is a major historical shift that takes place in a single generation, and the author explains how an art form that was made to be both easily transmitted and reproduced was enshrined in a system that values the uniqueness of the object above all. The treatment here is very rich, with a history of the video mechanism itself and its incorporation by artists in the early years, as well as early broadcasts and attempts at marketing (the proliferation of video journals is one of the only aspects that is overlooked). Horowitz goes on explore both the institutionalization of video by looking at the growth of museum collections, traveling exhibitions and even the relative stability of the medium, as well as recent efforts to master its conservation.

By leveraging both the immaterial aspect of the form and its potential for editioning to suit niche audiences (private collectors, institutions, enthusiasts), commercial galleries achieved success with the medium. Horowitz explains how videos were incorporated into galleries as "loss-leaders" (one of the many examples of the productive insertion of business-speak in this book), which highlight a gallery's avant-garde status and shore up their credibility as forerunners in the field. Interestingly, the author finds that it is the recent increase in photography prices that sustains the production of more sophisticated video works by artists such as Matthew Barney and Isaac Julien. Horowitz also underlines the significance of private collectors, such as the Kramlichs, who play a key role between the market and institutions, as both consumers and benefactors. In this case, the collectors also formed the New Art Trust which not only makes works available to institutions but provides for the study of preservation of the elusive matter which is the stuff of video.

The complexity of the video chapter notwithstanding, it is the chapter on experiential art that is the most ambitious of the book. In this section, Nicholas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics meet Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory and V.V.V.I.P.'s shop for access at ABMB (Art Basel Miami Beach). Horowitz's self-stated position here is that he means to demystify pretentions without taking sides and, to his credit, he provides a best-case reading of some of the most apparently insubstantial art works while underlining the significant role the market has in shaping such works. Perhaps this is counterintuitive, but the author provides a sophisticated group of examples to demonstrate how such works operate in the market and, in the process, he explains the nitty-gritty mechanics of how a work by Rikrit Taravanija or Tino Sehgal is bought and even resold without so much as a contract. It is immeasurably productive simply to explain where the rubber hits the road when it comes to post-conceptual contemporary production but the argument does not gel quite as effectively as in the video chapter. One can sense a materialist critique lurking just beneath the surface. For example, on Taravanija's untitled 1996 [box lunch], he declares: "It is a collectible. No more. No less." Yet Horowitz is no Marxist and he compellingly complicates some of the esoteric proposals for the significance of immaterial works of contemporary art. Implied institutional and capitalist critique of such art aside, the author clarifies that these works do function in a market system and even reinvent that system. It makes me wonder whether these artists and their dealers are not engaged in a form of derivatives trading.

This brings us to the central question of how the market for contemporary art is defined. The very term "art market" indicates a general agreement on definitions and limits and yet this is precisely what globalization challenges, in terms of both process and experience. On the process side, market expansion can no longer be usefully tabulated through auction house records, which everyone concerned with the economics of art—Horowitz included—has so far relied upon. The globalized art market is rather the cumulative exchange of art, or art–like products, many of which now bleed into domains of social transformation and political action, to say nothing of indigenous spiritual traditions. The narrow market focus in Art of the Deal and elsewhere, privileges actors in Europe and America. Though auction-house sales—buyers, sellers and producers—are primarily located there, this is hardly the current domain of artistic exchange. The market has expanded not just to locations such as Dubai and Hong Kong, bastions of High Net Worth individuals, but to the streets of Bogota and the studios of Bamako. In terms of experience, globalization exposes denizens of art world capitals to a variety of cultural traditions that intercede in the domain of contemporary art. While Horowitz has carefully articulated how the market co-opts emergent forms of artistic production, he has not attended to the development of hybrid cultural expressions in which the very notion of art, as produced by an individual on spec for a market, is contested. In some cases, works shown in institutions or galleries as contemporary art may have been qualified as such due to our misperceptions or inability to see beyond our own dominant model of contemporary production. Consider the oft-displayed sand paintings of Tibetan monks or the installations of Benin-based Georges Adéagbo.

These critiques, while relevant to the discussion in this book, fall outside of its scope. My assertions of how the globalization of the art market could be otherwise conceived should not detract from the rigor of Horowitz's arguments and the complexity and nuance of his synthesis of economics and contemporary art. Yet it does seem that the boundaries of the market need to be reevaluated just as contemporary art has been reinvented by a global domain of artistic practices.

John Zarobell

Two Readings of Picasso et les Maîtres
| Jet Lag |

In an era in which art criticism has deserted the pages of popular newspapers, any exhibition that provokes controversy in a public arena has to be welcomed. In the last decade, the most important polemic in France was certainly the show organized at the Grand Palais in the fall of 2008: Picasso et les Maîtres. The familiar gap between the overall acclaim of the mainstream media and the harsh criticism of specialized publications was predictably present, and can be summarized by two reviews: on December 21, 2008, the prestigious center-left French daily Le Monde ran on its front page "Bravo, Picasso," whereas the same month's issue of the London based Burlington Magazine, one of the most venerable art historical reviews, preferred to denounce "Vainglory at the Grand Palais." Rather than these titles, however, it is the way each article argued its opinion, but also considered the opposition, that account for their great interest today. Let us read them again at a four-year distance, and try to understand what was at stake in a show that will remain a great opportunity for future generations to understand the ambiguity of our own.

The first surprising aspect emerging from this compared reading is to note that it was Le Monde, and not The Burlington Magazine, that listed more thoroughly the problems raised by Picasso et les Maîtres: no less than trivial curatorship; packed rooms that made many paintings difficult to see; and the threat of damage to the works of art. The Burlington chose instead to concentrate almost entirely on the curating of the show, explicitly opposing it to two satellite events at the Musée du Louvre and at the Musée d'Orsay, dedicated with greater focus to the influence on Picasso of Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe. The numerous naivetés of the comparisons displayed at the Grand Palais, and foregrounded, ironically, by the magazine, lead its editor to conclude that nothing was to be learned from this "house built on sand." Indeed, Picasso's relation to the art of the past was "both simpler and more complex than this show allow[ed]." The event was, in other words, a missed opportunity.

Yet, The Burlington did not fear to appear contradictory when it asserted that "anyone passionate about European painting could do worse than visit the Grand Palais." This position is common in the art historical milieu, where even the most hastily assembled exhibition is said to be a chance to see unfamiliar works of art, whether they come from remote places or inaccessible collections. From the point of view of the non-specialist, we can understand the irritation of Le Monde towards such an attitude: for the vast majority of visitors, who care little about the subtleness of the historical argument or the level of scholarship of the catalogue, an impressive gathering of masterpieces should be the decisive aspect of a successful exhibition. This is why the review in the French newspaper was so enthusiastic.

One single painting, cited by both reviews is emblematic of these fundamentally different interpretations. While The Burlington lamented that Goya's Maya desnuda, shown alongside Manet's Olympia, had "only the slenderest connections with the late nudes of Picasso in whose company [both works] find themselves," Le Monde preferred to underline the simple wonder that characterized the loan of the painting from the Prado. What, finally, should be preferred: the authoritative reproach of the superficial comparison with Picasso's work, or the discovery of a famous painting that had never been seen by the majority of the eight hundred thousand visitors (more than half of whom, it was noted, were attending an exhibition for the first time in their life)? The answer seemed easy. It was as if professional art historians were unhappy that the general public could share their interest for the discipline: as the theme of the exhibition focused not only on a single genius, but on his relationship with the art of the past, its success should have been seen as a general acclaim for art history. One could be tempted to say "bravo."

When I visited the Grand Palais exhibition, however, I remember having been truly disappointed. Let us consider the Maya: its effect was infinitely less powerful on the walls of the Grand Palais than at the Prado. Not only because the artistic dialogue with the Maya vestida was lacking, but also because the work was juxtaposed with nudes by Picasso of an entirely different, violent, and primary type, which had the visual effect of destroying the aura of Goya's painting—that I so deeply felt in its original location. There is obviously no evidence for what I advance (especially given that I was not seeing the Maya for the first time), but I am sure that this impression was not uncommon, and was at the root of the peculiar criticism leveled by The Burlington. Such an example makes me believe that there is no need to accept either the view of The Burlington or that of Le Monde: however opposed they may seem, both reviews seem to suggest that it is possible to separate the appreciation of the works themselves from the way they were hung together. I do not think that this can be done, and the main reproach I would address to Picasso et les Maîtres concerns precisely the incapacity of the curators to hang works of art—whether masterpieces or not—in a manner that could make them not only dialogue, but exist.

I must add another personal criticism of the show: the fact that the memory of the actual exhibition has quickly faded in my mind, leaving only the souvenir of one of the major curatorial controversies of the last decade. Leafing through the pages of the catalogue, I cannot even remember having actually seen a great number of the juxtapositions presented. No doubt such an argument is, again, highly subjective; but it is also representative of a majority of visitors who now go to exhibitions and say "I have been there" rather than "I remember this." My hope is that some day a great writer will make from his or her visit to the Grand Palais something eternal, in the similar way that Marcel Proust turned the pointless Exposition hollandaise organized in 1921 at the Jeu de Paume and dedicated to the "Masterpieces of the Dutch Museums" into a monumental description of the death of Bergotte in front of Vermeer's View of Delft. This would prove, at last, that Picasso et les Maîtres was not organized in vain. This would also be a perfect echo of the actual attitude that Picasso had towards the masters: not one of respect, but of rape.

Neville Rowley

Bauhaus: Art as Life
London

Catalogue by Catherine Ince. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2012.

A founding principle of the Bauhaus School was that exhibitions, as a contact with people and public life, were to solve the problem of displaying visual work and sculpture within the framework of architecture. This principle can also serve as a measure of the meaning and value of the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life (closed August 12, 2012) situated, a little ironically, in a complex that to many represents the Brutalist ending of British modernism in architecture some fifty years after the Bauhaus. If the Bauhaus represented the light, open, eminently economical and communal side of classical modernism, the Barbican, also a complex for living and creativity, represents an opulence and exclusivity prefigurative of private institutional postmodernist architecture. This could be, without too much imagination, the Bonaventure Hotel. As it turns out, things are not always what they seem, or at least, what they were initially intended to be. Be that as it may, the exhibition's curators have had to accommodate many small, chrome and white objects, bits of coloured paper and cloth, ceramics, a collection of black and white photographs—in short what are effectively the memorabilia of an institution, into a space not intended for them.

What kind of objects and to what end was this gallery space intended for? What unites the contents of the exhibition and its site is pragmatism (understood as the institutional and reciprocal amiability of both site and collection) rather than aesthetics or politics. It is assumed that for the public "Old Masters" need redundant palaces or buildings that pretend to be palaces, but what kind of architecture do the everyday remains of social democracy, including its art, need today? The public is ready for them, but are the curators? It would have been useful if the preface in the otherwise wonderfully designed and informative catalogue had addressed this kind of issue rather than make what can politely be termed a lazy marketing analogy between the internationalism of the Bauhaus and the Olympic Games then currently being held. Opening a discussion about the unavoidable struggle between showing things and buildings would have been a more suitable homage to the spirit of the Bauhaus.

The exhibition is on two floors. Ingress to and exit from the upper floor are gained by means of a grand staircase that bisects the lower floor entrance and rises to what is effectively a wide bridge suspended on four sides of a square void. This is not an easy space to wrestle with. Along the wall flanking this four-sided bridge is an enfilade of open rooms suffused with a low honeyed light. On the walls and in vitrines are displayed objects mostly produced by the masters in the school's first period in Weimar: for example, a series of works on paper by Kandinsky, Klee's achingly moving puppets for his son, a bland, cream coloured and slightly soiled polished plaster sculpture by Itten, some heavy domestic ceramics and a set of uncanningly familiar metal tea glass holders. What are these objects, cheaply produced, experimental, transient, some private and many meant to be shown only as demonstration to colleagues and students, doing in this formal setting? Accepting the need to preserve them, what does their elevation to this status speak of? The other side of the bridge offers the experience of being suspended over a void and as one peers into it an inviting labyrinth of partitions and rooms can be seen below and the visitor can have an angled, quasi-aerial view, of a montage of blown-up photographs, pieces of furniture and original costumes for Oskar Schlemmer's stage workshop. This is more like it.

Once back on the lower floor dedicated to the activities of the school after its move to Dessau in 1925, and then briefly to Berlin in 1933, the exhibition on the upper floor makes more sense as a somewhat elegiac prelude to the flowering and tragic demise of the school. Here the focus is on the collective self-publicity of the school as a vehicle for individual creativity. The space brims with energy and fun and self-promotion. Suspended against a wall high across the void is a huge photograph of 'Breuer and his Hareem': a devastatingly handsome young man looks quizzically sideways at three tiny young women lined up beside him. They look spaced-out, quirky and quite a handful. Art and design students have been trying to imitate this look ever since. The Bauhaus becomes the school of art and design we would all have wanted to go to. Finally, however, we are reminded of the price that was paid for this free and easy yet committed creativity in a small photograph of a woman student sitting alone in the cafeteria at Dessau the day before the closure of the school. This is a penultimate photograph of the story of the School. The final one, not shown at this exhibition, is an anonymous photograph taken at a relatively safe distance, of students at the Bauhaus in Berlin being herded by Nazi soldiers into an open truck. We never know what Bauhaus students really were and what became of them. The exhibition ends on a note of sadness that lasts for days.

A proper exhibition is still a 19th century popular pedagogical instrument; it must bring something to each visitor learned and ignorant alike. This exhibition revealed to me the extraordinarily early and daring uses of photography (as advertising, document, tract, souvenir, etc.) developed by both staff and students, and in a somewhat roundabout way, the suitability of this exhibition space for photography. The photographs make the exhibition sing, yet more could have been done. For example, I was delighted by the tongue-in-cheek cine demos on how to live in a Bauhaus flat but wondered whether the placement of the films during a key moment in the circulation programme and the lack of sub-titles and seating were a mistake or a deliberate method of moving the punters along. Moreover, I could not find reference to the 1926 Frankfort Film and Foto Exhibition in which Moholy Nagy played a central role nor any reference to his first wife, Lucia Moholy, whose wonderful portraits were a discovery. Otherwise the boards were fine, neither too wordy nor uninformed, although a first mention of the founder of the Bauhaus as simply 'Gropius' spoke a little too much to the initiated. It would not have been too difficult to add that he was an architect.

Elizabeth Lebas