Escultor Paul Sietsema

Paul Sietsema goes the old-fashioned way - Los Angeles Times

Paul Sietsema goes the old-fashioned way


ATTENTION TO DETAIL: "When I’m putting a project together, it’s slowly evolving on its own in my head," says Paul Sietsema, in his Silverlake studio.

For the conceptual sculptor, fabricating objects like crusty coins and cracked jars by hand is arduous, not tedious.

By Suzanne Muchnic, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2008


In the early 1990s, when Paul Sietsema was figuring out what sort of artist he might be, he picked up crushed cigarette packs and other castoffs on the sidewalks of San Francisco, made meticulous facsimiles of them and put his creations where he found the originals.

"I liked having a show along a sidewalk with something that I had invested in, but that nobody would notice," he says, leaning out of a chair that occupies one of the few uncovered spots on the floor of his cluttered studio in a commercial district of Silver Lake. "Or if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with it. They would have no idea why something like that would exist."

The 39-year-old artist has added layers of conceptual depth and technical complexity to his work since 1996, when he enrolled in UCLA's New Genres graduate program and began studying with Charles Ray, Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy. And with solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and de Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam and works in the 55th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, not to mention an exhibition coming up next spring at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Sietsema's days as an anonymous stealth artist are over.

But his sensibility is what it was. Although he has evolved into a conceptual sculptor and filmmaker who explores the shifting nature of perception and photographic representation, he still turns out labor-intensive work that's steeped in mystery. Where he once replicated the ordinary stuff of today with considerable precision, he now fabricates "antiquities" that conjure up an obscure yesterday.

"It's supposed to be outside time," Sietsema, soft-spoken and intensely engaged with his work, says of his recent work. "I'm asserting something I've made that doesn't actually match anything else on the planet one-to-one. The way it's placed in time is completely ambiguous."

Sietsema grew up in Orange County and spent untold hours collecting butterflies and, by his account, "watching television way too much." He likes Los Angeles partly because it's easy to "check out" and concentrate on his work, he says, but he's strategically plugged into the international art scene. He's represented by L.A.'s prestigious Regen Projects, and his works are in collections of such institutions as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Curator Apsara DiQuinzio, who organized SFMoMA's "New Work: Paul Sietsema" -- an exhibition of a film and 20 objects that continues to June 22 -- calls his artistic universe "a layered world that fluctuates between historical periods, material phenomena, documentation and reverie."

The film "Figure 3" looks like an old-fashioned slide show of ancient artifacts, poorly photographed from books. Former art history students of a certain age are likely to find the images familiar, if only in a generic way. But these are not pictures of pictures of historical functional objects.

Using modern utilitarian materials favored by the Post-Minimalists, such as cement, printer's ink and string, Sietsema has fabricated a slew of "old" objects and selected a few -- cracked jars and bowls, pottery shards, crusty coins, a fishing net and harness straps -- for the film. Pictured from various angles, they seem to float in an equivocal time and place. But with the help of wall text and DiQuinzio's essay in the exhibition brochure, the artist has created a murky historical context for the filmed objects and some of the pieces on display, suggesting that they are remnants of some island culture that flourished before Western exploration and colonization.

Much is left to viewers' imaginations, but the display of 20 handmade objects offers clues to Sietsema's conceptual framework and painstaking craftsmanship. Sculptural "gourds," fashioned of cement and epoxy in a process that entails casting, breaking the cast artworks and putting them back together, are similar to the filmed jars. Drawings of barely legible pages of text come from a diary-like travelogue that the artist has concocted from writings by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, Belgian poet Henri Michaux, German art historian Wilhelm Worringer and other authors. One drawing, "The Famous Last Words," resembles a huge, slightly crumpled photographic negative. But Sietsema has fashioned it of ink on folded paper, using a hand-cut stencil for the text.

The workmanship is mind-boggling. But isn't it terribly tedious?

"Not to me," Sietsema says. "It's kind of nice work. You work with your hands; that's what I want to do. When I'm putting a project together, it's slowly evolving on its own in my head. So it's a way of occupying yourself, so that the ideas have a natural progression instead of being forced. I have given myself that freedom. My projects take a long time, three or four years. In 10 years, I have put out three projects. I don't know if I will continue to do that. But most of what's in the film is really fun stuff to make."

His work isn't easy to explain, though.

"I started with the artifacts and looking at island cultures," he says of the film. "You are struck by what people do with materials and how what they make is completely guided by available materials." But his version of the artifacts is equally grounded in Post-Minimalists' preference for nontraditional materials and the processes and visual effects of photography.

As for the travelogue, it's "a mishmash of things," he says. "I was looking at colonialist countries that were picking up objects from the islands. I was looking at colonialists and their relation to island culture in the 17th and 18th centuries as a way of thinking about photographic appropriation and that sort of thing -- as a metaphor for the appropriation of culture that destroys the culture or the creation of images and ideas that destroy the original." The invented story is also about ethnographers who journey to an island and become absorbed in its culture, he says.

All of which is a big change from the period when Sietsema arrived at UCLA determined to reproduce the two things he had to buy to move to L.A.: a pair of running shoes and a used car. The idea was to avoid making Modernist art objects and to work between the boundaries of art and functional objects.

"I think it cost me about $500 in materials to make shoes that sold for $60 at the time," he says. "It took me a month of pretty serious work. I worked the leather and nylon and sewed all the logos. The soles were made of different types of rubber I had to pour. I wore the shoes for a while, but they were very uncomfortable. The soles were way too heavy."

He gave up the notion of making a full-size car when he heard that Ray was planning a comparable project.

"It felt weird," Sietsema says, "thinking your ideas are original and then having your teachers doing similar things. Mine was different, but I ended up making a tiny version of my car, limited only by what my eyes and hands could do. I wasn't using a magnifier or anything like that. It's probably part of the reason I wear glasses now. For me, there was something about being able to put your car in your pocket. When I showed it in San Francisco, I put it in the glove compartment of my car and drove it up there." "I also did this performance thing where I cut my own hair and then glued it on my face as a beard as a way of creating the image of an artist, like Van Gogh or Brancusi," Sietsema says. "But then I heard that Eleanor Antin had cut a friend's hair and glued it on her face. There's nothing you can do that's original.

"There's a collective subconscious thing, where a lot of people are doing the same thing at the same time," he says. "That made me want to enter into a process that was a little more articulated, to have so many elements that it would be impossible to make a simple gesture that had been done before. I was finding myself, but also figuring out my work. I became embroiled in a long process to avoid repeating gestures. That's where the work I'm doing now comes from."

suzanne.muchnic

@latimes.com

Web Arte

Itaú Cultural / revista / www.arte

Por Thiago Rosenberg

Contemplar. Explorar. Interagir. Entreter-se. Perder-se. Incomodar-se. Deparar-se com uma obra de web art é estar sujeito a tudo isso - e muito mais. Mas, afinal, o que é web art?

Uma coisa é certa: não é a arte que se encontra na internet, é a arte feita para a internet. O artista da web, ou web-artista, não é aquele que se apropria da vastidão da rede para divulgar seus trabalhos, mas, sim, aquele que, consciente do potencial artístico do meio, o utiliza criativa e poeticamente. Usa a internet como o pintor usa a tela, como o cineasta usa a câmera.

Artista multimídia e professor do Departamento de Artes Plásticas da Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA/USP), Gilbertto Prado evidencia essa diferença ao definir dois grupos distintos de sites de arte da world wide web: os sites de divulgação e os sites de realização de eventos ou trabalhos artísticos. Enquanto no primeiro grupo existem primordialmente referências a espaços expositivos ou obras concebidos originalmente para outros meios que não a internet - caso de páginas de museus ou de galerias -, no segundo há sites que se apresentam como a própria obra, concebida para a rede e inexistente sem ela - e é aí que se enquadra a web art.

O meio como mensagem
As linguagens, as ferramentas e os processos que caracterizam a internet são muitas vezes o mote dessas obras. São trabalhos auto-referenciais, metalingüísticos, que pensam criticamente o meio em que se inserem. Questionam, problematizam a internet. De acordo com Prado, "o desvio poético que o artista faz do meio: eis o centro da questão".

A navegabilidade na internet é um desses pontos questionados. Navegar é possível, mas nem sempre é necessário. "O meio possibilita a interação", diz Prado, "mas às vezes interessa mais ao artista torná-lo não-interativo, ou ao menos dificultar essa interação".

Riot, de Mark Napier: a navegabilidade da internet em questão | imagem: Screen shot da obra Riot, de Mark Napier

Projetos da dupla Jodi, formada pela holandesa Joan Heemskerk e pelo belga Dirk Paesmans, são exemplos clássicos. Em www.jodi.org, de 1995, os artistas transformam a linguagem de programação em linguagem artística, saturando as páginas do site com códigos que, para um visitante não inteirado do assunto, podem sugerir uma pane ou um vírus no sistema. Caso semelhante é o trabalho Riot, de 2000, com o qual o canadense Mark Napier propõe um navegador alternativo que, misturando em uma única janela textos, imagens e links de diversos sites, impede o usuário de prosseguir sua navegação.

Ao problematizar o meio, essas obras também problematizam o comportamento do usuário da web. O alemão Holger Friese, com Antworten, desenvolvido em parceria com Max Kossatz em 1997, faz esse usuário aguardar por uma chamada que nunca será feita. Os que acessam o site recebem um número de chamada, mas o número que está sendo atendido no momento não é em momento algum atualizado. Resta então a espera - sem fim - por uma conclusão. Já em Unendlich, fast..., de 1995, Friese coloca em pauta a dificuldade que o usuário pode ter para encontrar algo na imensidão da rede. É uma enorme página azul, com barras de rolagem na vertical e na horizontal, sem textos, sem links, sem nada - com exceção de alguns poucos caracteres isolados num canto da página, pequenas linhas e estrelas perdidas no espaço vazio.

Essa subversão do meio torna clara a diferença entre o web-artista e o webdesigner. Salvo exceções, podemos dizer que existe, por parte do segundo, uma preocupação em transmitir mensagens da maneira mais clara e direta possível, o que nem sempre ocorre com os artistas da web, mais preocupados em quebrar as expectativas do usuário.

Em contato com as outras artes
Não só da web trata a web art. Menos metalingüísticas, algumas obras se valem das possibilidades oferecidas pelo meio para propor narrativas ou discussões sobre as mais diversas questões. E, para tal, muitas vezes bebem nas fontes das outras expressões artísticas, como a literatura.

É o que ocorre, por exemplo, em Aleer - Antilogia Laboríntica, trabalho de 1997 do brasileiro André Vallias, designer gráfico, poeta e produtor de mídias interativas. Sua matéria-prima é a literatura, mas essa é rearranjada para a rede. Assim, textos de vários autores - de Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) a Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) - e poemas visuais do próprio Vallias são distribuídos em um labirinto virtual, repleto de links ocultos. Essa transposição da literatura para o meio virtual é mais explorada em O Livro Depois do Livro, espécie de biblioteca de obras de ciberliteratura idealizada por Giselle Beiguelman, artista da web e professora de pós-graduação em comunicação e semiótica da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC/SP).

O espaço virtual artístico
Contemplar uma obra de web art é uma experiência solitária? Em termos. Os apreciadores de cinema se reúnem nas salas de projeção; os que gostam de música ou de teatro se encontram nos espetáculos; os admiradores das artes plásticas se vêem nos museus. Para cada arte há o seu templo. No caso da web art, esse espaço não é físico, mas, se o artista assim quiser, existe.

Desertesejo, trabalho realizado em 1999 por Gilbertto Prado, permite que seus fruidores se encontrem na paisagem onírica criada pelo artista. O contato se dá por meio de avatares [representações virtuais do usuário], como ocorre, por exemplo, no Second Life - espécie de mundo virtual em três dimensões, aberto ao público desde 2003 e acessível pelo site http://secondlife.com. Mas as semelhanças entre esse serviço e obras como Desertesejo acabam por aí. "São propostas diferentes", diz Prado. "O Second Life é bem mais voltado à comunicação social, não é um 'projeto artístico'."

Presente em importantes mostras internacionais, como a Bienal de São Paulo e a Documenta de Kassel (na Alemanha), a web art parece extrapolar o espaço virtual e reunir - fisicamente - uma grande parcela do público interessado em artes. De acordo com Prado, esse crescente interesse pela arte da web se deve, principalmente, à sua extrema contemporaneidade. "É uma manifestação artística eminentemente contemporânea", diz ele. "Tanto no que diz respeito ao meio - intrínseco à vida contemporânea - quanto ao conteúdo."

Joe Goode, After The Fire

After the fire, Joe Goode finds a new passion - Los Angeles Times

POP ART
After the fire, Joe Goode finds a new passion
Artist Joe Goode with his dog, Pollack, at his studio in Los Angeles. Goode moved to a small town in Northern California years ago to paint -- much of his work was lost in a fire. His new show seeks to revive it.

Richard Hartog, Los Angeles Times

RISING FROM THE 'ASHES': Artist Joe Goode with his dog, Pollack, at his studio in Los Angeles. Goode moved to a small town in Northern California years ago to paint -- much of his work was lost in a fire. His new show seeks to revive it.


The artist was devastated when a fire destroyed his art studio. But then he found a digital camera in the damage and got some ideas.

By Anne-Marie O'Connor, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 4, 2008
It was any artist's nightmare.

Painter Joe Goode and his wife, Hiromi Katayama, were sleeping in their Mar Vista home when their wolf-sized dog, Pollock, appeared at the foot of the bed, barking loudly. Pollock wouldn't stop until they stumbled out of bed, and followed him, half-asleep, into the small yard leading to Goode's painting studio.

What Goode recalls seeing that morning seemed unimaginable, unthinkable, impossible. Smoke poured from his studio. Flames licked through the skylights. Inside were more than 100 valuable artworks, representing 40 years of Goode's painting, as well as works by painters Ed Ruscha, Kenneth Price, Larry Bell and Ed Moses. "At first, I was kind of in shock," said Goode, a gray-haired, soft-spoken man with bright blue eyes and a thoughtful demeanor. "I didn't know what to do."


A Los Angeles Fire Department report called the blaze a "spontaneous combustion from oily rags." Goode called it a personal disaster. He stumbled around the charred studio for a couple of days, shaken. On the third day, he found his digital camera, deep in a drawer of a metal cabinet. He figured the camera was ruined. But he idly aimed it at the wreckage, and to his surprise, the shutter clicked, capturing the blackened studio walls, the ravaged paintings that hung like ghosts in their frames. The photos were spooky, intriguing.

That was in May 2005.

Goode took the images of his ravished life's work and began to paint over them. One wall-sized work, "Lost Painting, Fire," captures the inferno, with incendiary splashes of orange and yellow paint, and a superimposed photograph of a forest fire he shot long ago. The painting dominates Goode's new art exhibition, "Ashes," a collection at the DNJ Gallery that represents Goode's phoenix-like comeback.

"It's most people's worst fear," said Moses, a notoriously dapper 82-year-old hipster with a gray Vandyke, sitting in front of the painting at the opening earlier this month. "It's happened to a few artists. He lost paintings that were very valuable. Everybody could identify with it. But he took the residue and made it into something positive."

The feeling that Goode had overcome the insurmountable was the prevailing mood at the exhibition, which runs through May 24.The crowd, many of them close friends, came to pay homage to Goode's tenacity and resilience.

"He sure worked it out," said musician Ry Cooder, his tall frame cloaked in a comfortable brown fleece coat and loose black pants, a knit cap over his gray curls. "It's a fantastic improvisation.

"I was fascinated to see him improvise, given the circumstances," Cooder said. "He would have made a great jazz musician. A lot of people would have been devastated -- or worse. He's a tough man, Joe."

Creative sparks

There was a bizarre coincidence to the disaster. Goode was already working with images of fire when his studio burned. For years he photographed forest fires, awed by their power. In 2004, he was immersed in a series, "Burned Out," in which he photographed previous works, mounted the images on insulation boards and painted over them with oil, then used a blow torch to burn away some of the surface and create depth and shadow. Those 40 works were destroyed.

It's been almost three years since the fire, and Goode has had a chance to absorb his loss.

"Well, you either get up, or you don't, you know," said Goode, sitting on the floor of his rebuilt studio, his black-and-white brindle dog -- named for the painter Jackson Pollock -- at his feet. "I lost it. What's gone is gone."

Behind Goode and Pollock are three blown-up black-and-white photographs of twisting oak trees, the first shot in spring, the last in the winter and laden with snow -- the seasons of life. Goode will paint over them in acrylic, which he began using after the fire to avoid flammable solvents.

"Basically it gave me new life," he said of the fire. "I don't mean I'm glad it happened. But this was the beginning of a whole new body of work I'm immersed in. If I hadn't lost the paintings I lost, I wouldn't be doing the paintings I'm doing today. It evolved out of this."

Moving beyond "this" -- the fire, and its wreckage -- posed a psychological challenge.

"Honestly? The paintings that I lost, of my own, I had a way of dealing with that," Goode said. "But the paintings I lost of my friends', I had no way of dealing with."

Twenty or so of his friends showed up at the studio in the days after the fire to see what could be salvaged. "I went into the studio afterward, and it was gorgeous," Moses said. "Most people would look at it like a burned-out shell. An artist will look at it as a visual thing. They'll say, 'How can I capture this?' "

Eventually Goode got to that place -- with a little help from friends. Fellow artists donated works to an auction at Santa Monica Museum of Art to raise funds to rebuild. His studio is now a soaring skylit space with a second-story loft office whose balcony overlooks the studio and windows capture a sweeping view of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Still, new beginnings can be difficult, at any age.

Goode was born in 1937 in Oklahoma City, where he attended St. Francis of Assisi Catholic school with Ruscha, another Los Angeles artist. Ruscha still recalls seeing Goode's messy, unmade bed when he came to visit on Saturdays.

"Could he, or I, for that matter, have realized that decades later he would be making paintings of unmade beds?" Ruscha asked in a written appreciation of Goode's work distributed by the gallery. "Joe would laugh at the nobleness of a fried-egg sandwich, or even a telephone, and then, sometime in the future, would find himself painting pictures of these very things."

His exhibition of the work he made after he was, literally, burned out is laden with images -- the forest fires, floating steps, a memorable waterfall, a tornado, unmade beds -- suffused with personal meaning. The talismanic leitmotif suggests Goode possesses some secret of internal continuity that defies even the most catastrophic creative loss.

"For 40 years," Goode marvels, he has hung out with the same artist friends, gone to their shows once a month. "For 40 years," he repeats, marveling at the passage of time.

Goode came to Los Angeles in 1959 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. He lived in the Hollywood Hills, supporting himself with odd jobs, including a window-washing gig he got at a Venice party that led to one of his first key exhibitions.

"There was much less stress," in those days, Goode said. "It was certainly better for artists. There was a much smaller art scene. It was like a club. Everybody knew each other. There was much less emphasis on money. In the 1960s, there was nobody buying the art we made."

The work began a slow rise to prominence following a seminal 1962 exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, where Goode's work was shown along with works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Wayne Thiebaud and Ruscha -- an exhibition that helped put Pop Art on the map.

Since then Goode has incorporated conceptual and surreal elements, and become a well-established artist, represented in numerous collections -- LACMA, MOCA, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York.

Maybe a new start, with a new creative quest, is Goode's defiance of mortality. "I'm not so worried about whether my work will look like a Joe Goode," he said, petting Pollock. "I'm worried about seeing something I've never seen before."

anne-marie.oconnor@latimes.com

Um novo leilão de arte chinesa deixa incoerente narizes na sua esteira Por David Barboza Publicado em: 7 de maio de 2008 XANGAI - leilão Sotheby's house chamou-lhe a "mais importante colecção de arte contemporânea chinesa para nunca chegam ao mercado" - cerca de 200 obras de alguns dos nomes mais quentes da China. E quando o primeiro semestre do trove, chamado a Estella Collection, foi sobre o bloco, em abril, em Hong Kong, ele trouxe em US $ 18 milhões e definir preços para gravar alguns artistas, como a US $ 6 milhões para uma tela com o pintor chinês Zhang Xiaogang. Mas a venda das obras tem agitado indignação entre muitos dos artistas e os seus concessionários e alguns curadores. Esses artistas e curadores como dizer que a cobrança estava sendo formada, eles foram enganados em pensar que um rico ocidental foi reunir uma colecção permanente e acabaria por doar algumas das obras a liderança museus. Em vez disso, eles dizem, os compradores foram um grupo de investidores que rapidamente creditadas em vender as obras em agosto passado para o comerciante William Acquavella Manhattan, que é, por sua vez, vendendo-os através da Sotheby's. (A segunda metade da coleção está a ser leiloada esta queda, em Nova Iorque.) Alguns dos artistas dizem que vendeu as obras em Estella Coleção com desconto na crença de que a cobrança iria ganhar notoriedade de longo prazo e ajudar a aumentar as suas reputações. "Eu me sinto enganada", disse um dos artistas, Feng Zhengjie, 40, conhecido por seu gaudy retratos de moda, lushly nome de mulher. "Eu não posso acreditar que acabou por ficar como essa, só para um leilão." Michael Goedhuis, o New York revendedor que formou a coleção para o grupo de investidores, disse ele nunca enganou ninguém tinha esperado e seus investidores para as obras a realizar. "A história era a mesma para todos: trata-se de uma colecção é nossa intenção em manter intacta", disse o Sr. Goedhuis, que viajou para a China por mais de três anos, a fim de recolher os pedaços. "Houve uma mudança de orientação por diversas razões. Foi uma grande surpresa e foi para fora do meu controle. " Mr. Goedhuis recusou a identificar seus investidores, mas The New York Times já foi chamado duas: Ray Debbane, presidente da New York empresa de investimento Invus Financial Advisors, e Sacha Lainovic, uma co-fundador e sócio gerente em Invus. Nem o Sr. Debbane nem o Sr. Lainovic retornou telefonemas procurando comentário. Mr. Goedhuis disse que, em qualquer caso, os artistas não tinham qualquer razão de queixa, porque eles tinham beneficiado da exposição. "Eles estão pilotando a vaga", disse ele. Em uma declaração emitida na semana passada, reconheceu que a Sotheby's, no final semanas antes da venda que "se tornou consciente de que alguns artistas tinham vendido os seus trabalhos com uma expectativa diferente sobre o que iria acontecer com elas no futuro." Ele disse que esperava "A exposição internacional durante este tempo excitante no mercado seria útil para aumentar a sua carreira." Agravando a controvérsia, o leilão foi anunciado logo após as obras tinham sido expostos no Museu de Arte Moderna Louisiana em Humlebaek, Dinamarca, a partir de março a agosto do ano passado. Se tivessem conhecido o Estella Collection rapidamente seria vendido, a funcionários do museu dinamarquês disse, eles nunca teria organizou a exposição. "Nós lamentamos a sério que se viria a revelar-se mera especulação, e houve desonestidade", disse Anders Kold, o curador da mostra, intitulada "Made in China". "Nós não temos essa informação e, por isso, como consequência , Fomos a com ele. " Para manter a confiança pública e para garantir que eles não são utilizados como ferramentas no mercado, museus geralmente tentam evitar expor colecções privadas que estão a ser vendidos em breve. O show também viajou para o Museu Israel em Jerusalém, pouco antes do encerramento há abril leilão em Hong Kong. "No momento em que o museu fez acordos para a exposição, não houve indicação de qualquer intenção de vender a coleção,''o Museu Israel afirmou esta semana em um e-mail." O desenvolvimento deste museu aprendeu apenas até o final da apresentação.'' O conflito que sugere as tensões que surgiram entre artistas, curadores, galerias e museus de todo o mundo desde a arte florescente mercado se tornou global. Os desafios são particularmente graves quando se trata da China, que se tornou um ímã para algumas das maiores do mundo, galerias, museus, coleccionadores e arte mercado especuladores, mas é relativamente novo para o jogo. Os artistas chineses que eram há alguns anos trabalha vendendo por apenas US $ 10000 cada assinatura são subitamente internacional lida com galerias e vendo suas obras buscar US $ 500000 ou mais em leilão. Com efeito, Art Market Trends 2007 relatou que, no ano passado, 5 dos 10 artistas que vivem mais vendido em hasta pública nasceram na China, chefiada pelo Sr. Zhang, 50, cujas obras são vendidas para um total de US $ 56,8 milhões em leilão no ano passado. "É impressionante", disse Fabien Fryns, um dos fundadores da Galeria F2, em Pequim. "Penso que vai ser um US $ 20 milhões de pintura em breve algum tempo." Mr. Goedhuis, um antigo comerciante antiguidades, disse que no passado mês de Agosto da venda ao Sr. Acquavella era extremamente rentável para os seus investidores. Mas ele recusou a dizer o que paga para as obras ou o que vendeu para eles. Art. mercado peritos puseram a Acquavella aquisição em cerca de US $ 25 milhões. Sotheby's é uma das partes interessadas no leilão Estella Collection. Que a primeira metade da colheita tenha vendido para muito acima da estimativa sugere que o Sr. Acquavella e as lotas têm investido com prudência. O Sr. disse que o seu Goedhuis dos investidores "conceito original" foi o de "construir a pré-eminente chinês coleção de arte contemporânea como a base de um grande livro." Uma indicação da gravidade do projeto, disse ele, foi uma decisão de contratar Britta Erickson, um estudioso independente e de uma liderança competente em chinês arte contemporânea, para ajudar a selecionar obras e escrever redações para o livro, "Re China", que foi publicadas pela Louisiana Museum, na Dinamarca. Mas Ms. Erickson agora diz que ela era muito enganados ao pensar que ela estava trabalhando para uma grave, de longo prazo colecionador. "Eu pensava que era para ser uma coleção pessoal a ser montado para o longo prazo, talvez com algumas peças a serem doados a museus," ela disse em uma mensagem de e-mail. "Lamento eu estava mal informado." E acrescentou: "A arte mundo não pode funcionar sem confiança." O artista Ele Sen, 40, que pinta photographlike imagens de mulheres jovens, também disse que o Sr. Goedhuis ele tinha certeza de que um coleccionador de longo prazo foi atrás da Estella Recolha e que algumas das obras pode acabar em um museu. Ele disse que uma pintura que ele vendeu para a recolha de cerca de US $ 60000 passou para mais de 200000 dólares de Hong Kong em leilão. "Muitos artistas, incluindo eu, foi convencido por ele, deu a Michael nossos melhores trabalhos, alguns até mesmo a um preço relativamente barato," Mr. Ele disse que de Mr. Goedhuis. "Então ele viria a revelar-se um leilão. Sentimo-nos para fora vendida por ele. " Feng disse o Sr. suas obras foram leiloadas na Sotheby's de 5 a 10 vezes o preço que ele deu o Sr. Goedhuis. Mr. Goedhuis disse que, na viragem para o Sr. Acquavella, ele esperava que a tycoon casino Las Vegas Steve Wynn, um grande colecionador com interesses em Macau, uma das regiões administrativas especiais da China, que emerge como um comprador de toda a coleção . No final, ela comprou o Sr. Acquavella si próprio, sem restrições. Depois, ele colocou-o para o leilão. "Isso é o que eu faço", disse o Sr. Acquavella. "Eu comprar e vender." Mr. Goedhuis disse que ele tinha dado tentado convencer os artistas que a Estella Collection's foi uma breve história benéfico para eles. " 'Você só beneficiaram desta'", disse ele contou alguns dos artistas após o leilão foi anunciado no outono passado, e ele começou no terreno queixas. " 'Você está em um livro maravilhoso acadêmicos e você foi exibido em dois museus multa". " Ele também ofereceu sua própria crítica mordaz dos artistas, remarking que tinham beneficiado tanto a partir do boom que eles poderiam dar ao luxo de construir grandes estúdios e casas. "O problema é que toda a gente está comprando e lançando, e os artistas também estão lançando", disse ele por telefone a partir de Pequim. "É um faroeste aqui fora."

Some Contemporary Chinese Artists Are Angry About an April Auction at Sotheby’s - New York Times

By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: May 7, 2008

SHANGHAI — Sotheby’s auction house called it the “most important collection of contemporary Chinese art to ever come to market” — some 200 works by some of China’s hottest names.

And when the first half of the trove, called the Estella Collection, went on the block in April in Hong Kong, it brought in $18 million and set some record prices for artists, like $6 million for a canvas by the Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang.

But the sale of the works has stirred indignation among many of the artists and their dealers and some curators.

Those artists and curators say that as the collection was being formed, they were duped into thinking that a rich Westerner was putting together a permanent collection and would eventually donate some of the works to leading museums.

Instead, they say, the buyers were a group of investors who quickly cashed in by selling the works last August to the Manhattan dealer William Acquavella, who is in turn selling them through Sotheby’s. (The second half of the collection is to be auctioned this fall in New York.)

Some of the artists say they sold works in the Estella Collection at a discount in the belief that the collection would gain long-term renown and help enhance their reputations.

“I feel cheated,” said one of the artists, Feng Zhengjie, 40, known for his gaudy portraits of fashionable, lushly made-up women. “I can’t believe it ended up like that, just for an auction.”

Michael Goedhuis, the New York dealer who formed the collection for the group of investors, said he never misled anyone and had expected his investors to hold onto the works.

“The story was the same to everyone: this is a collection we intend on keeping intact,” said Mr. Goedhuis, who traveled to China for more than three years to collect the pieces. “There was a change of direction for various reasons. It was a big surprise and it was out of my control.”

Mr. Goedhuis declined to identify his investors, but The New York Times has already named two: Ray Debbane, president of the New York investment firm Invus Financial Advisors, and Sacha Lainovic, a co-founder and managing partner at Invus. Neither Mr. Debbane nor Mr. Lainovic returned telephone calls seeking comment.

Mr. Goedhuis said that in any case the artists had no reason to complain because they had benefited from the exposure. “They’re riding the wave,” he said.

In a statement issued last week, Sotheby’s acknowledged that in the final weeks before the sale it “became aware that a few artists had sold their works with a different expectation about what would happen to them in the future.” It said it hoped “the international exposure during this exciting time in the market would be helpful in furthering their careers.”

Aggravating the controversy, the auction was announced just after the works had been exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, from March to August of last year. Had they known the Estella Collection would quickly be sold, officials at the Danish museum said, they would never have organized the exhibition.

“We seriously regret that it turned out to be mere speculation, and there was dishonesty,” said Anders Kold, the curator of the show, titled “Made in China.” “We didn’t have that information, and so as a consequence, we went on with it.”

To retain the public trust and ensure that they are not used as marketing tools, museums generally try to avoid exhibiting private collections that are soon to be sold.

The show also traveled to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, closing there shortly before the April auction in Hong Kong. "At the time that the museum made arrangements for the exhibition, there was no indication of any intention to sell the collection,'' the Israel Museum said this week in an e-mail. "The museum learned of this development only toward the end of the showing.''

The conflict suggests the tensions that have arisen between artists, curators, galleries and museums around the world since the booming art market became global. The challenges are particularly acute when it comes to China, which has become a magnet for some of the world’s biggest galleries, museums, collectors and art market speculators, but is relatively new to the game.

Chinese artists who a few years ago were selling works for just $10,000 each are suddenly signing deals with international galleries and seeing their works fetch $500,000 or more at auction. Indeed, Art Market Trends 2007 reported that last year, 5 of the 10 best-selling living artists at auction were born in China, led by Mr. Zhang, 50, whose works sold for a total of $56.8 million at auction last year.

“It’s amazing,” said Fabien Fryns, a founder of F2 Gallery in Beijing. “I think there’ll be a $20 million painting some time soon.”

Mr. Goedhuis, a former antiques dealer, said that last August’s sale to Mr. Acquavella was hugely profitable for his investors. But he declined to say what they paid for the works or what they sold them for. Art market experts have put the Acquavella acquisition at around $25 million.

Sotheby’s is a stakeholder in the Estella Collection auction. That the first half of the collection has sold for far above the estimate suggests that Mr. Acquavella and the auction house have invested wisely.

Mr. Goedhuis said his investors’ “original concept” was to “build the pre-eminent collection of Chinese contemporary art as the basis of a great book.”

One indication of the seriousness of the project, he said, was a decision to hire Britta Erickson, an independent scholar and a leading authority on Chinese contemporary art, to help select works and write essays for the book, “China Onward,” which was published by the Louisiana Museum in Denmark.

But Ms. Erickson now says that she too was misled into thinking she was working for a serious, long-term collector.

“I believed that it was to be a personal collection being assembled for the long term, with perhaps some pieces to be donated to museums,” she said in an e-mail message. “I am sorry I was misinformed.”

She added, “The art world cannot function without trust.”

The artist He Sen, 40, who paints photographlike images of young women, also said that Mr. Goedhuis had assured him that a long-term collector was behind the Estella Collection and that some of the works might end up in a museum.

He said that one painting that he sold to the collection for about $60,000 went for more than $200,000 at the Hong Kong auction.

“Many artists, including me, were convinced by him, gave our best works to Michael, some even at a relatively cheap price,” Mr. He said of Mr. Goedhuis. “Then it turned out to be an auction. We feel sold out by him.”

Mr. Feng said his works were auctioned at Sotheby’s for 5 to 10 times the price he gave Mr. Goedhuis.

Mr. Goedhuis said that in turning to Mr. Acquavella, he had hoped that the Las Vegas casino tycoon Steve Wynn, a major collector with interests in Macao, one of China’s special administrative regions, would emerge as a buyer of the entire collection. In the end Mr. Acquavella bought it himself, without restrictions. Then he put it up for auction.

“That’s what I do,” Mr. Acquavella said. “I buy and sell.”

Mr. Goedhuis said he had since tried to convince the artists that the Estella Collection’s brief history was a boon to them.

“ ‘You only benefited from this,’ ” he said he told some of the artists after the auction was announced last fall, and he began fielding complaints. “ ‘You’re in a wonderful scholarly book and you’ve been exhibited in two fine museums.’ ”

He also offered his own scathing critique of the artists, remarking that they had profited so much from the boom that they could afford to build huge studios and homes.

“The problem is everyone is buying and flipping, and the artists are also flipping,” he said by telephone from Beijing. “It’s a Wild West out here.”