After briefly listing his 4,450-square-foot Tribeca triplex for $5.5 million in 2005—generating rumors that he was not much longer for the Guggenheim's top spot—Mr. Krens took the condo off the market, and there it stayed for the next seven years.

But times change. These days Mr. Krens is the Guggenheim's senior adviser for international affairs, and he has  sold his glorious loft for a glorious $6.32 million, according to city records. You'd think this was an auction at Christie's with that kind of appreciation.

Better yet, Mr. Kren only paid $2.35 million when he bought the okace in 1999, but then, this is a man who took the museum's endowment from $20 million to $118 million.

The penthouse  at 45 Warren Street does not have any starchitects attached to it, but at least you can probably see Frank Gehry's tower looming over Lower Manhattan. The new owners, Andrew and Alison Isaacs, apparently found the huge, sunlit space alluring enough.

The main floor is particularly attractive. As the listing, held by Corcoran broker Amalia Ferrante screams in its cap-laden text, it is "nearly 50 FEET WIDE, 22 FEET TALL to the top of the GIANT SKYLIGHTS and it glows with EXCEPTIONAL LIGHT AND SUN. There is a VAST LIVING AREA with a WOODBURNING FIREPLACE. Here there are SIX BIG WINDOWS and there are another six across the south end of the loft as well. The elegant FORMAL DINING ROOM has its own SKYLIGHT and easily seats twenty for GRAND SCALE entertaining."

Sorry. Catching our breath...

Mr. Krens bought the apartment with the help of an interest-free $1.5 million loan from the foundation. City records show that he finished repaying in 2007. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy he told the board at the time that he needed a larger place to entertain properly. This certainly fits the bill.

kvelsey@observer.com

He knows where he's going. Do you? (PeterJBellis, flickr)

Aside from their adherence to sidewalk etiquette and an affinity for one-handing pizza, when they put their feet to the street New Yorkers may not differ as much from their touristy brethren as they thought they did.

A New York Post survey of 100 New Yorkers showed that an overwhelming number don’t know where basic Big Apple landmarks are, making them little better than the confused Times Square tourists trying to navigate the city.

Apparently, only 32 percent of New York residents know where the Guggenheim is and only 21 percent can name the location of The Algonquin, the New York Post reports.

In fact, 71 percent of the surveyed New York natives answered five or fewer answers correctly. The Post used questions from the Taxi Master Academy to test New Yorkers' where-are-we? wherewithal.

The good news is that at least somebody in New York knows where they're going—the largely foreign-born New Yorkers who work as professional taxi drivers. The cabbies, when questioned, proved adept at identifying what the Joe DiMaggio Highway (a.k.a. The Westside Highway) turns into downtown (West Street), although they were less successful identifying Joe DiMaggio himself. (The baseball star's marriage to Marilyn Monroe proved an effective prod).

“They always know that,” Terry Gelber, an ex-cabby, told The Post.

New Yorkers may not know their streets, but at least they know their celebrities.

sgrothjan@observer.com

"Mini-Me" (1999) by Maurizio Cattelan. (Photo: Attilio Maranzano, courtesy the artist)

Occasionally exhibitions of contemporary art are eerily timely. Curatorial programs click into step with the zeitgeist, and notions that have been floating around in the air coalesce in concrete form, in a museum near you. Such will be the case in New York this fall, as the Guggenheim and the New Museum unveil retrospectives of two midcareer European artists who have never before had surveys in the U.S. The two are old friends and collaborators, and their concurrent shows are almost certain to provoke heated debates about the health and importance of contemporary art.

Meet Italian prankster Maurizio Cattelan and Belgian mad scientist Carsten Höller.

First, some history. Mr. Cattelan, whose work will fill the Guggenheim as of Nov. 4, and Mr. Höller, who will take over the New Museum on Oct. 26, came to prominence in the mid-1990s, championed by macro-thinking French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, who noticed that artists were engaging in unusual behavior in galleries and calling it art: Rirkrit Tiravanija was cooking Thai food, Vanessa Beecroft was posing groups of women to look like mannequins, and Philippe Parreno was organizing parties.

“For some years now,” Mr. Bourriaud wrote in a 1997 essay that has since become famous or infamous, depending on your perspective, “there has been an upsurge of convivial, user-friendly artistic projects, festive, collective and participatory, exploring the varied potential in the relationship to the other.” The curator dubbed this phenomenon relational aesthetics.

Very quickly, the artists whom Mr. Bourriaud and a handful of other curators identified became a potent force, appearing regularly at museums in Europe and at international exhibitions. “They created the most influential stylistic strain to emerge in art since the early ’70s,” New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz wrote when, in 2008, the Guggenheim presented “theanyspacewhatever,” a group show including many of the artists associated with relational aesthetics. By the time that show went up, that “stylistic strain” had become known to many simply by the acronymic shorthand “RA.”

“The goal of ‘relational aesthetics’ is less to overthrow the museum than to turn it upside down, wreaking temporary havoc with its conventions and the visitor’s expectations of awe-inspiring objects by revered masters,” Times critic Roberta Smith wrote on the occasion of that exhibition. “The larger point is to resensitize people to their everyday surroundings and, moreover, to one another in a time when so much—technology, stress, shopping—conspires against human connection.”

From the beginning, Mr. Bourriaud had ascribed potentially positive societal effects to relational aesthetics. “Art is like an angelic program, a set of tasks carried out beside or beneath the real economic system,” he argued floridly in one essay. In another, oft-quoted passage he sounded almost like a community organizer: “It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbors in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows.”

But there was a darkness embedded within the relational aesthetics program, and it was perhaps best exemplified by Messrs. Cattelan and Höller. In its preview for Mr. Cattelan’s upcoming Guggenheim show, in Time Out New York Howard Halle described the artist as the “bad boy of relational aesthetics,” succinctly capturing the reputation he has acquired over the years, one that has distanced him from his RA compatriots. A furniture designer who leapt to art in the early 1990s, the artist has generally favored provocative, realistic sculptures—the pope felled by a meteorite, two cops standing on their heads, a collector’s grandmother shoved in a refrigerator—over the open-ended situations that Mr. Bourriaud claimed to favor.

On the rare occasions that Mr. Cattelan has involved relationships in his work, however tangentially, they have tended toward the antisocial, the exploitative and even the criminal—always done with a wink. In 1995, he required his Paris gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin to dress as a giant pink penis, with rabbit ears, for the duration of his exhibition. The next year, he burglarized an Amsterdam gallery to acquire work for his own show, and in 1997, for another show with Perrotin, he produced exact copies of the work that Mr. Höller was showing at the neighboring Air de Paris gallery.

Mr. Cattelan is also the most commercially successful member of the group that Mr. Bourriaud defined. During the recession in 2009, The Economist noted that the artist’s prices were rising. A kneeling sculpture of Hitler traded hands for £10 million (or about $16 million at the time), which ranks Mr. Cattelan among the world’s most expensive living artists. Unsurprisingly, he is a canny promoter of his own work, limiting supply and almost always debuting only one work at a time, typically in a museum.

“The way he has always showed his work—one piece at a time—resisted the very idea of a survey, which we liked quite a lot,” Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett, the proprietors of Triple Candie, a Harlem-based nonprofit that closed last year, told The Observer in an email.

Though the Guggenheim is rightly billing its show as the first official retrospective of Mr. Cattelan’s work, Triple Candie actually staged its own Cattelan retrospective in 2009 without the artist’s permission, as it has done for other artists, like David Hammons and Cady Noland. (Mr. Cattelan is represented in New York by Marian Goodman Gallery.)

“We prized the humor, the craft, his staging of individual pieces, his daring,” Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett said. “But we also had difficulty with his material success, his celebrity and the übersociety he is a part of.”

Triple Candie’s retrospective was, in other words, intended as more than a simple critique. “Our show, which brought together a large sampling of his work for the first time, provided gallery viewers an educational opportunity while at the same time undermining the will of the artist,” the Triple Candie proprietors explained. Instead of borrowing artworks, they photocopied images of Mr. Cattelan’s exhibitions and created “surrogates that stood in for absent sculptures but which looked only marginally like the originals,” crafting a thorough overview of the artist’s career. Essentially, they pulled a Maurizio Cattelan on Maurizio Cattelan.

Triple Candie called its exhibition “Maurizio Cattelan Is Dead: Life & Work, 1960-2009,” since, in the depths of the recession, it seemed unthinkable that another artist would achieve so much so quickly. They explained, “Obviously, Maurizio wasn’t dead; but, at least it seemed at the time, his example was.”

Mr. Cattelan visited Triple Candie’s exhibition, and promptly suggested to the Athens, Greece-based Deste Foundation—the foundation of Dakis Joannou, one of the world’s most ambitious contemporary art collectors, who has major holdings of Mr. Cattelan’s work—that it acquire the entire display, which it did. “In 2010, Deste flew us to Athens to install it there, in a room of mirrors, specially selected by Cattelan himself,” the Triple Candie gallerists explained—a coda that would be almost impossible to believe about any other artist. Mr. Cattelan manages to subsume just about anything into his art.

In contrast to Mr. Cattelan’s work, which engages viewers with shock and controversy, Mr. Höller’s has indulged interactivity to an almost comical degree and disoriented viewers with crafty inventions and bizarre interventions in museum practice.

Jerry Saltz’s review of the Guggenheim’s RA show back in 2008 featured a photo of the critic, in the Guggenheim rotunda, reclining in a bed (with black satin sheets) that Mr. Höller made available for rent in the museum for few hundred dollars a night. Every night sold out for the run of the three-month exhibition.

A former scientist who specialized in the communications systems of insects, Mr. Höller has produced technically advanced works that ground users in their own private experiences, cutting them off from easy association with others. He has designed a pill to simulate love and glasses that flip the world upside down. At the New Museum’s show, there will be one of the artist’s trademark Psycho Tanks, a sensory deprivation pool that renders participants weightless, and a mirrored carousel that provides surreal, fractured fun-house rides.

These two epic museum shows arrive at a moment of intense skepticism about the thesis of relational aesthetics and the potential of interactive, socially based work in general.

Consider “Fear Eats the Soul,” the recent show by Rirkrit Tiravanija—perhaps the group’s most visible exponent—at Gavin Brown’s enterprise. The artist removed the doors and windows from a section of the gallery, built a modestly sized T-shirt shop and established a soup kitchen in a side room. Mr. Brown took to parking his Volvo station wagon inside the nearly vacant show. One day two young artists hopped in and, finding the dealer’s keys inside, took it for a short short ride.

“We didn’t know much about the show beyond the usual ‘do as you please’ side,” one of the artists claimed later, after posting images from their joyride onto critic Jerry Saltz’s Facebook profile. “The absence of authority made it feel so fresh.”

Mr. Brown was not pleased. In the comment section of an article that Mr. Saltz wrote about the affair on New York’s site, he wrote to the artists, “I quote you as you exited the car: ‘We thought it was part of the interactivity.’—Is this Disney?” People responded to Mr. Brown and discussed the state of RA. Most were critical. The comments section of the magazine’s website briefly became the battleground for a fierce fight over an art term that until then had seemed relatively innocuous. One anonymous writer described the car theft as “a trendy stab at wishful critical significance, a desperate search for frisson within the smug, rotting corpse of RA.”

“When I looked on the Internet, people were quite unself-consciously referring to the term RA,” Mr. Brown told The Observer over the phone last week. “I had to stop for a moment and figure out what RA was.” The phrase, he said, “provides people a way to not actually look. It’s a catch-all for a generation of humans who are alienated from day-to-day experience. You give them a pill they can swallow and suddenly they can experience things.”

Mr. Brown noted that Mr. Tiravanija was hosting his cooking exhibitions—along with other work—well before Mr. Bourriaud coined the term, and recalled that, when the artist hosted meals in 1992 at 303 Gallery “there was surprise at the ease with which one could–excuse the pun–digest his work.

For Mr. Brown, no theory was necessary to understand Mr. Tiravanija’s work. “There was a sense somehow that this had taken all of the modernist ideas of radicality and turned them upside down,” he said, “and that perhaps the world had changed without us knowing it, and that appealed to us.”

Times critic Ken Johnson slammed Mr. Tiravanija’s recent exhibition. “All of this would appear less self-congratulatory if the show delivered on its promise of full disclosure by, say, revealing the social and financial machinations by which Mr. Tiravanija and Mr. Brown have achieved their considerable success in the international art world,” he declared. “Or if the soup kitchen were kept permanently open to serve the truly needy.”

Mr. Johnson’s criticism is not the type of complaint one would levy at a painting, but it points to the fact that, 15 years after it was coined, the term RA has perhaps saddled the art it purports to group together with unrealistic or inappropriate expectations. Ms. Smith may have put it best in her 2008 review of “theanyspacewhatever” when she wrote that “the claims by these artists and advocates that their work can help heal human relations and create a sense of community, any more than any other art does, are hard to prove.”

In this month’s Artforum, critic John Kelsey goes further, proclaiming that artist Bjarne Melgaard’s installation at the Venice Biennale, which Mr. Melgaard and his collaborators, students from a nearby university, filled with references to H.I.V.—which is spread through bodily contact—“can be seen as a brutally kitsch catastrophe of relational aesthetics.” Mr. Kelsey noted, “The press release insisted that art could never change anything.”

Like Fauvism, Cubism and the names of many other art movements, RA is a label that was applied to artists by a writer, not a name those artists came up with to describe their work, or one that they’ve ever really embraced. Maybe it’s time to rethink the term; maybe it’s time to discard it. This fall, you can decide for yourself.

arusseth@observer.com

Hans-Peter Feldmann's installation.

There is a room in the Guggenheim museum with a pervasive, musty smell that would be familiar to anyone in this country: The room is filled with tens of thousands of used dollar bills, some stained or wrinkled, others crossed with stray red or blue or black marks.
This is an art show, but it looks more like something you would take a Treasury Department employee to see. It’s also strangely lovely. When people walk in, their first reaction—it’s obvious from the looks on their faces—is wonder.

Few things are as inherently contradictory as money; its value is a mass delusion, yet every abstract swell and ebb of its worth has some real effect chronicled in the daily news. The German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann’s installation at the Guggenheim was created on the occasion of his winning the biennial $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize. Every dollar of his prize money is on display. Such a gesture initially might strike you as hollow or uninteresting—a case of the emperor’s new clothes. But upon closer examination, the show is moving.

Mr. Feldmann, a conceptual artist, has previously photographed parts that make a whole, documenting every strawberry in a pound of strawberries (One Pound of Strawberries, 2005) and every item of a woman’s wardrobe (All the Clothes of a Woman, 1973). In displaying a grid of 100,000 overlapping one-dollar bills, he is both engaging in a logical extension of his work and crossing through the picture plane dividing the represented from the real.

Nine walls and two columns in a windowless gallery are hung floor-to-ceiling with single dollar bills. The dollars dissolve from a distance into a nice, muted green; about half of them face forward, half backward, so Masonic pyramids and George Washingtons obliquely greet you. They are tucked in vertically, shingling the wall like the siding of a Cape Cod cottage.

When you check—by inspecting a part of the piece that runs along the edge of a doorway, or lifting the thicket of green with your hands as some visitors tried to do—you see that the bills are individually fixed to the wall with single finishing nails. Maybe because they already know what money feels like, visitors seem eager to touch this artwork. Every time the sole security guard turns her back, hands shoot out proprietarily to the wall.

In fact, Mr. Feldmann’s room at the Guggenheim has become a minor sociological experiment. Unlike other art about money (pieces by Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons come to mind), Mr. Feldmann’s effort doesn’t come off as aloof or stand-offish. During this summer of perpetual financial crises, his artwork has given New York an immersive environment in which to think about dollars, a place to talk about and reflect on these enchanted, and preoccupying, everyday objects.

While The Observer was in the gallery, a fleet of suited money managers entered. “Ah!” one of them said with a smile. “Money!” The group laughed. The room would appear to function as a spatialization of our collective desires. A man in a hat blew softly on the cash. A woman sat down cross-legged to write in her journal. High bills fluttered in the stray, climate-controlled breeze. Their scent was pronounced: “It reeks of culture,” someone joked.

There is something comforting in all these out-of-circulation bills, magical papers pinned down like a collection of butterflies. Watching people gaze at the walls from different angles, lingering and talking to strangers, it becomes apparent that Mr. Feldmann’s prize work, like a cathedral from another era, is a monument to an abstract obsession we share.

In its desire to make visible the financial underpinnings of an exhibition at the Guggenheim, the installation is initially reminiscent of Hans Haacke, the artist who famously, and in the same museum, tried to put on display, for his solo show, photographs of all 142 slum apartment buildings owned by a landlord who had personal and institutional connections to the museum. Mr. Haacke’s piece, Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), was never displayed, however, and the curator responsible was fired.

Mr. Feldmann’s is a softer-focus attempt than Mr. Haacke’s to confront the limits and economic conditions under which the exhibition is taking place. In this way it is more reminiscent of Urs Fischer’s 2007 installation at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, You, which excavated the gallery floor to a depth of eight feet. Both Mr. Feldmann’s and Mr. Fischer’s works aim at creating the visual effect of transparency; both ultimately do so not as a critique of the exhibition environment but to create a novel phenomenological viewing experience for the spectator.

Finally, like the late Sigmar Polke, Mr. Feldmann’s most obvious peer, Mr. Feldmann was born in Düsseldorf in 1941, and there is a taste of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf professor Joseph Beuys’s love for the magic of materials in this display of dollars. There is also some of the fascination Polke bore for Western capitalism.

What will happen to the piece? One guard thought Mr. Feldmann might donate it to the museum. Another guard said it was a loan from a bank that Hugo Boss helped the artist co-sign, and that the bills—each bearing a single nail hole—would go back to the bank and then into circulation after the installation came down. For some reason no one assumed Mr. Feldmann would keep the money, although a New York Times article specifies that the bills belong to the artist.

Assistant curator Katherine Brinson provides the usual explanatory apparatus to help us apprehend the work’s meaning: we are told that the artist was born in 1941, in Düsseldorf, that he often works in unlimited editions, that Mr. Feldmann resists the art world’s commercial structures and comments more generally on capitalism; that he didn’t make work at all in the 1980s.

But none of this background really explains the effect of the installation, or the reactions of the people who visit it, which—as worn as the phrase may be—are priceless.

editorial@observer.com

Krens. (Patrick McMullan)

Last fall it was reported that the great Tom Krens was off the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi project, which seemed like big news because Mr. Krens was the creative mind and promoter of the project, but what’s even more strange is that we haven’t heard boo from the art world’s consummate museum showman since.

The Whitney Museum of American Art will soon abandon its architectural landmark on Park Avenue (it will be rented out to the Metropolitan Museum) because the Whitney is creating a new building downtown. The Dia Foundation just completed an $11.5 million purchase of a new building site in Chelsea (it will be the site of an all-new N.Y.C. Dia). All this construction makes me think of Tom Krens, the man who changed the Guggenheim forever, and influenced the world of museum construction in our town and around the world. Tom Krens has gone M.I.A., so it’s time to wind back the clock and think about his tremendous fall from grace, and what it might teach us about these other initiatives.

Back in ’97 Mr. Krens, the Guggenheim’s towering, N.F.L.-linebacker-size director, was at the top of his game. He had just launched the hugely successful Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao and in so doing had changed the art world forever. Quite an achievement for a guy from modest beginnings. After all, the young Mr. Krens was running only a little museum at Williams College in the late ’70s when he completed his M.B.A. at Yale: he cleverly leveraged it into a consultancy at the Guggenheim, eventually succeeding in getting himself hired as director.

He didn’t have a strong art historical background (he was originally an artist, not an art historian), and, thinking back, I can only wonder how desperate the Guggenheim board must have been in 1988 when they fired their exhausted director Thomas Messer and brought in a virtual neophyte to reposition the institution and fill its empty coffers. Fill them he did, by raising the endowment from $20 million to over a $100 million.

In the end, his arrogant manner and John Wayne swagger pissed off his major donor, Peter Lewis, who lasted 11 years as chairman of the board and gave over $70 million. Mr. Lewis felt the museum should focus on housekeeping at its base in New York rather than opening more Guggenheim branches around the world, and in a showdown befitting a true Western movie he threatened the board with an ultimatum: either Mr. Krens goes or he would.

In a shocker, the board stuck with Mr. Krens, though with their main patron gone—Mr. Lewis left the board in 2005—the Guggenheim’s budget was dealt a serious blow. Blockbuster shows were one way to get financing, and Mr. Krens did them in a big way, with motorcycle shows sponsored by BMW and a fashion show sponsored by Armani, as well as shows from Brazil, China and India. He found sponsors for a branch in Berlin (care of Deutsche Bank), and another branch housed and paid for by a Las Vegas casino (now closed) and he never stopped hunting for financing to open everywhere and anywhere he could.

Though Mr. Lewis rightly anticipated that Mr. Krens’s vision would eventually crash, a global vision is what made Mr. Krens special, and it’s what he’ll always be remembered for. With Bilbao Mr. Krens rewrote the recipe for a successful museum, taking his cue from the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece in New York that is the Guggenheim’s historic home and talisman. In a nod to Wright’s genius, Mr. Krens put architectural spectacle first, by hiring Mr. Gehry and giving him free rein. He then put fund-raising second, by getting a local government to foot the entire bill, and he put brand building third, by creating a Spanish flagship that he could use to showcase his vision and pitch governments, corporations and anyone else who might pony up for future Guggenheim branches around the world.

What of art, I hear you say? Well, museum building at the end of the 20th century was in need of a makeover, and, right or wrong, the funding sources dictated that art alone wasn’t enough. Mr. Krens anticipated the need to boost attendance and create a tourist destination as well as an identity and a global brand. Let’s not forget that Bilbao is a crummy postindustrial dump in the center of Spain (almost as bad as Flint, Mich.)—the kind of place you wouldn’t go even on a paid vacation. But the Bilbao museum became the monumental success that changed the museum world forever, and it still boasts attendance of over a million people a year. I had the pleasure of touring the place in the fall of ’99 as a guest of Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller. We got the full celebrity tour from Mr. Gehry, including lighting up the flame throwers that spurt out of the water fountains. This was followed up by a little motorcycle spin with Mr. Krens and celebrity guests Jeremy Irons, Lawrence Fishburne and Lauren Hutton, all sponsored, of course, by BMW.

None of it had anything to do with “art.” It was about marketing, fund-raising and architecture as spectacle. I can barely remember the Warhol exhibit inside the museum, perhaps because it was dwarfed by the eccentric spaces that Mr. Gehry’s titanium-skin “baked Alaska” structure provided. Who cared, since no one was there to see the art. We were there to see the new “wonder of the world,” and to party. I wasn’t just overcome; I was overwhelmed by the ambition, the imagination and the chutzpah of this new godless cathedral.

In the years that followed, Mr. Krens tried to create new satellite Guggenheims around the world, including a huge one in lower Manhattan that never got off the ground. But despite the roadblocks, Frank Gehry became the most lauded and famous architect of our time. Sadly, I find much of his recent work grossly overrated, and though it was a great formula for Bilbao, it’s not a recipe that will work as well anywhere else. The fact that other museums have sought to hire Mr. Gehry over and over again to create their own “Bilbao monument” is a guaranteed recipe for failure, because what made Mr. Gehry’s building great was its newness, its originality, so by definition to copy the formula is to miss the point.

For these reasons and many more, the Abu Dhabi Gehry-Guggenheim museum will be at best a facsimile, and the two new proposed French Gehry museums, one in Arles and another in Paris (for Louis Vuitton’s Bernard Arnault), will also flop, if they ever see the light of day. It’s actually quite sad because there are so many great architects working today (think Herzog and de Meuron, Peter Zumthor, Thomas Mayne … ), it’s the perfect time to let some others have a go.

But there’s more to Mr. Krens’s formula than just a flashy building. First and foremost he understood the value of his own New York building’s identity. He restored and elevated the profile of the amazing Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece on Fifth Avenue, a building that never even pretended to be a great museum but succeeds 150 percent as architectural monument. Reliable sources tell me that, thanks to Mr. Krens’s branding strategy, 80 percent of the museum’s current New York visitors are foreign, and they flock in every year irrespective of what’s on view.

Compare this to the poor job done by the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is the owner of a fantastic brutalist Marcel Breuer masterpiece, a building that sadly has less than half the attendance of the Guggenheim, and 80 percent of its visitors are mere New Yorkers. To add insult to injury, the museum is abandoning its flagship on Park Avenue and renting it out to the Metropolitan Museum, because the Whitney is pouring all its resources into a newer, bigger, downtown Whitney designed by Renzo Piano, the volume of which will allow the Whitney to show more of its vast collection.

If bigger doesn’t result in better, the Whitney will have done New York a terrible disservice, one that could have been easily avoided if only it had raised funds by selling a few artworks out of its vast holdings. Isn’t the Breuer building a work of art, one that is more meaningful to the museum’s identity than any painting could ever be? Imagine if it had the vision to leave the “uptown Whitney” as a true museum of American Art, the only one in New York, where the museum’s amazing collection of Ash Can artists like Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and George Bellows would be on permanent display. Would I care if the downtown museum were cut in half? Absolutely not. There is plenty of museum quality free art to see downtown in all the Chelsea galleries; who needs to pay good money to see any more of it?

But “de-accessioning”—the selling of artworks from the collection—is a no-no in the museum world. It’s also another rule that Mr. Krens broke early in his tenure. Back in 1990 he raised $47 million by selling off a Kandinsky, a Chagall and a Modigliani (the museum had several other works by these artists) and he acquired the fantastic Count Panza collection of minimalist art, thus making a quantum leap for the Guggenheim’s collection. Sadly, though, his programming overall veered so far from the museum’s original mission of showing “non-objective painting” (think Kandinsky) that it was hard to tell what to expect from him, other than the promise of a spectacle.

The other pieces to Mr. Krens’s museum formula include making space for plenty of restaurants and nice, big gift shops, and putting lots of emphasis on logos and advertising. And, of course, putting on mega blockbuster shows complete with celebrities, politicians and corporate sponsors. This very same formula worked like a charm for another art world giant, the dealer Larry Gagosian. He opened satellite galleries around the world and brought show business glamour to the stodgy and conservative gallery system, thus swallowing up many of the best artists in the world and providing collectors with a one-stop destination for almost all their art needs.

But money is what a gallery thrives on, whereas in the American museum world, fund-raising is a semi-secret part of every director’s job. Our museums run on private donations, so finding collectors or socially motivated patrons to pay the tab is a large part of every director’s responsibility, as it is in the world of private education and cultural institutions of all kinds. That’s in large part why our cultural institutions suffer outside of large cities like New York and Los Angeles. In bureaucratic old Europe this conflict doesn’t exist because museums are funded by the government and museum directors work for the state, so they are free to focus on the art, not on fund-raising. But in the U.S., with little state or federal support of the arts, museum folks are condemned to a life of panhandling wealthy patrons, to sell them a seat on their the board or to get them to host benefit dinners, cocktail parties and anything else that’ll bring in the tax-deductible bucks.

I’m not saying that the European system is always better—state-run institutions tend to become bureaucratic and didactic—but it is not fraught with the types of conflicts of interest that took down Tom Krens. Mr. Krens was guilty of finding every possible way to shortcut the fund-raising conundrum, and though he never was able to replace mega donor Peter Lewis, he did secure corporate and government sponsorship from Deutsche Bank, BMW, Hugo Boss and Armani, as well as municipalities like Bilbao and even whole countries like Brazil and China.

Sadly for everyone he eventually dead-ended, and the board finally pushed him out, by giving him a highly paid consultancy on a massive Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project. But his consulting contract was eventually dropped when hubris once again got the better of him, a sad ending to what has to be one of the most exciting and inspiring museum director sagas of the past 50 years.

Tom Krens succeeded in changing the art world forever, and, since his tenure at the Guggenheim, numerous new museums have been built as architectural monuments—Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi in Rome and Sanaa’s New Museum in New York, to name just two. These new cathedrals of architecture where some art will hang are inevitably focused on attendance, tourist traffic and boosting the local economy. The “bigger is better” mentality prevails to this day, even though many of the new buildings are oversize and over budget and end up looking like misguided monuments of excess.

Was this change for the good? The question matters not: change is inevitable because the museum system in this country was and is still in need of some shake up. Until a part of our state and federal tax money goes toward supporting the arts, it’s impossible to avoid conflicts of interest. Mayor Bloomberg understands this, and he’s quietly been New York’s number one patron, but that’s not enough. In the end Mr. Krens’s legacy will remain, and the status and respect he deserves as a museum visionary will one day prevail. I can only hope he finds a way to rise again and show the stodgy museum world a new twist on the very formula he created. Does “art” suffer when the attendance and the spectacle take center stage? Of course it does, but one way or another, the show must go on.

editorial@observer.com

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University will open in spring 2012. (Photo: Broad Art Museum)

As it nears its spring 2012 opening date, the Zaha Hadid-designed Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, is filling out the remainder of its leadership, announcing that Min Jung Kim, who has been at the Guggenheim for 12 years, will be its new deputy director.

"It is rare to be able to help shape a museum from its beginning," said Ms. Kim in a statement, "and I look forward to the opportunity.”

During her time at the Guggenheim, Ms. Kim served as managing director of exhibitions and programming in its global cultural asset management group and director of strategic development for Asia, working on projects such as the Guggenheim's upcoming Abu Dhabi museum and partnerships with St. Petersburg, Russia's Hermitage Museum and Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Michael Rush, the Broad Art Museum's founding director, who previously headed the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, said in a statement, "Min Jung Kim’s experience in developing innovative museum programming and mounting international collaborations makes her particularly well-suited for the Broad Art Museum, which will focus on engaging audiences with contemporary artists around the world."

Ms. Kim previously worked as assistant curator at the Samsung Foundation for Art and Culture and at Sotheby’s in Korea.

Rangel.

 

Wednesday, August 3

The Ultimate Art Machine

Is the Guggenheim the Shake Shack of museums? Locations, locations, locations! Not content with outposts in the Basque Country and the United Arab Emirates (as well as the now-shuttered Las Vegas outpost, which seems in retrospect a bit of an overreach…to expect real culture to take hold in the land of bilk and money), the Guggenheim is now creating a mobile lab, opening today, that will set up shop in nine cities over six years in a quest to spur discussion on urban life. The slow migration of the auto-company-sponsored BMW Guggenheim Lab (a mobile laboratory isn’t cheap, dears!) begins in New York with the erection of a mobile structure themed around “Confronting Comfort.” (While the Guggenheim Lab is referring to balancing individual desire with the common good, surely you’ll be reminded that a new BMW forces you to “confront comfort” in a whole new way!) Catch it while you can—the mobile lab jaunts to Berlin next, then on to a yet-to-be-announced city in Asia.

BMW Guggenheim Lab, 33 East First Street, opens today from 1-9pm, visit guggenheim.org for more information.

Thursday, August 4

Single-Source Stories

When we hear “Talking Head,” we think rock star/bicycle enthusiast David Byrne, of course—we see that guy everywhere! But some talking heads come on reels, not wheels: the Anthology Film Archives continue their Talking Head screening series of documentary films featuring testimonials from a single individual. The mini-genre’s rife with unreliable narrators and charismatic characters: today brings screenings of The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (about Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law and her friendship with Adolf Hitler) and Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican and American Boy (regarding, respectively, his parents and the Taxi Driver actor Steven Prince).

Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, The Confessions of Winifred Wagner at 6:45pm, Italianamerican and American Boy at 9pm, visit anthologyfilmarchives.org for tickets and information.

Friday, August 5

Soundgarden

This weekend, the Shinnecock Indian reservation, in Southampton, is invaded by hordes even wilder than cigarette buyers looking for a tax-free carton. The Escape to New York music festival brings electro-loving ravers in for a weekend spent sleeping in campers (it’s glamorous camping, or “glamping,” for the Sunday Styles set), listening to music and enjoying all the good, clean fun the Hamptons have to offer. Tonight, noted memoirist Patti Smith and girl-group-but-not-in-the-Phil-Spector-way Best Coast perform on the main stage. It’s not just music and glamping (something about that word—we just can’t take ourselves seriously when we say it!): the organizers were responsible for the U.K.’s Secret Garden Party, an annual festival that transforms a manor house’s grounds into what a Telegraph reporter described as “a fairy woodland filled with strange sculptures” and “a Tower of Babel disco.” If this all sounds a bit foreign to you, gentle partygoing reader, know that in bringing a manic all-weekend festival to the States, the organizers adopted one indigenous custom: there will be a massive brunch for all attendees. Glamorous!

Escape to New York runs through August 7, Shinnecock Reservation (Southampton), visit escape2ny.com for tickets and information.

Saturday, August 6

Newport Lights

If you find yourself among the Gilded Age relics in Newport tonight (we mean the mansions, not the social set), contribute to the preservation of one grand home. Once owned by Pennsylvania coal baron Edward Julius Berwind and modeled after a French chauteau, the house at the Elms is fine ($1.4 million in 1901 money could buy you a pretty sturdy house), but its carriage house and stables are in need of a pick-me-up. Tonight’s black-tie dinner dance—whose theme is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”--will raise money for Newport’s Preservation Society, which plans to turn the stables of The Elms from equine domicile into a historical society devoted to researching the town’s architectural history. Let’s make sure that horsey smell is powerwashed out before the important work of this research center begins!

The Elms, 367 Bellevue Avenue (Newport, R.I.), 7pm, call (401) 847-1000 x120 for reservations.

Sunday, August 7

McQueen for a Day

The Met is open until midnight tonight so that late, late latecomers can check out Alexander McQueen’s wares before the exhibit closes permanently. A night spent experiencing the glories of the museum? We remember that children’s book! Most everyone we know has raved about the Costume Institute show, but we’ve been pretty busy all summer (the Newport mansions can’t save themselves, you know, and there’s pretty intriguing costumery to check out there as well!), and the museum’s been bending over backwards to accommodate busy (lazy!) people like us all summer, with admission on Mondays and now late-night shows. Is any innovation quite so welcome in this go-go city as a museum for the nocturnal? We hope the trend catches on—nothing would lull us to sleep quite like the soft glow of MoMA’s Rothkos. (We do love McQueen, too, but we’re sure those severe, radical clothes will give us a few nightmares!)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, exhibition open until 12am August 6 and 7, visit metmuseum.org for more information.

Monday, August 8

Day for Night

We’re still vicariously embarrassed for dear old drama geek Anne Hathaway in her noble, pathetic attempt to host the Oscars by sheer force of will. She tried so very hard! She laughed at her own jokes to fill cavernous silences! Well, her new film might have put the brakes on her earnest, overbearing schtick and given us the chance to remember why we loved her in the first place. Ms. Hathaway, as a British lady separated from her one true love but for an annual brief encounter, puts her high-school-production-of-Oliver! on for the new film One Day, which she’s fêteing at the red carpet premiere tonight. Do you think Ms. Hathaway’s erstwhile Oscar co-host James Franco would consider it a suitable art project to come as our plus-one?

One Day premiere, an Upper West Side movie palace, screening at 7pm.

Wednesday, August 10

Rangel Me an Invite

It’s Christmas for politicos with the annual Charles Rangel birthday gala (the Congressman was born in June, but that’s not a slow news month that will guarantee headlines!). Planned attendees at the Plaza Hotel bash include Governor Andrew Cuomo, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer—all familiar faces from last year’s bash, which went on during Mr. Rangel’s ethics investigation. Also planning to attend is Aretha Franklin, who’ll sing for the assembled guests: she was supposed to sing last year, but fell and broke her ribs, so Psychic Friend Dionne Warwick turned up instead. Broken ribs are perhaps the only excuse that can keep prominent machers away from the ever-popular Mr. Rangel: “I felt bad—because Aretha felt so bad!,” said Mr. Rangel’s fundraising consultant Darren Rigger, who noted that Ms. Franklin was pleased to make up for her truancy. As for the party--why the Plaza and not, you know, something in Mr. Rangel’s district? “Charlie is iconic,” said Mr. Rigger. “We needed a place that had that same feel—you remember the Black and White Balls, the galas, it sends a powerful message. There’s a lot of places, and I’m not going to say bad things about other places, but this place is iconic for throwing a gala.” Indeed! If Truman Capote were alive today, he’d love nothing more than hanging out with New York politicians.

Plaza Hotel Grand Ballroom, Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, 6pm-8pm, visit charlierangel.org for tickets and information.

Dancers Perform On Vanishing by Jonah Bokaer

At the Guggenheim's rotunda on Thursday evening, five dancers, accompanied by John Cage’s solo cello piece One⁸, performed On Vanishing, a new work by the young New York-based choreographer Jonah Bokaer that the museum had commissioned in conjunction with its current exhibition, Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity.

Audience members, including Mr. Bokaer's mother, leaned against the museum's low, spiraling railings, and watched the action unfold on the marble floor below, where three person-sized sheets of white paper sat next to a Lee Ufan sculpture called Dialogue, which consisted of a steel wall and two large stones. The setting alluded to Mr. Lee’s 1969 Things and Words piece, for which he exposed three sheets of Japanese paper to the elements and then exhibited them inside a museum.

During the performance, the dancers—who included Mr. Bokaer—interacted with each other in and around the sheets of paper and Mr. Lee’s sculpture. They created sounds with the paper, slapping it, shaking it, and crumbling it into a wad in order to communicate and interact with one another. At one point, three dancers each curled into a fetal position on one of the sheets and scrunched the paper together to form a cocoon around themselves. “I loved the paperwork!” one audience member chirped to The Observer.

Mr. Lee, the artist for whose retrospective the "paperwork" was commissioned, was a pivotal figure in the Japanese Mono-ha and Korean monochrome movements. Mr. Lee frequently utilizes austere industrial and natural materials, like rock, steel, and glass in his spare sculptures, which seem to engage in conversations with their viewers and the sites in which they are installed about what is seen and unseen in the world. In a Western museum, it looks like accomplished work by a long-forgotten Minimalist or Post-Minimalist.

Mr. Lee’s paintings are similarly understated, often consisting of single brushstrokes that begin firmly and slowly disappear as they cross the canvas. “The work literally evaporates,” Mr. Bokaer said of Mr. Lee’s paintings, a comment that recalls the title of the choreographer's work, On Vanishing.

Being performance-based and site-specific, concerned with the metaphysics of presence, and immersed in the abstract vocabulary of space, Mr. Bokaer's performance proved to be an ideal analog to Mr. Lee's work. At the same time, it went beyond being a mere supplement, becoming a nuanced expansion on Mr. Lee's piece, particularly by introducing a comparison between dance and sculpture.

“Dance is very ephemeral, whereas the sculpture is much more concrete,” Mr. Bokaer told The Observer of his thinking about the relationship between his choreography and Mr. Lee's piece, Dialogue.  However, “Lee Ufan’s philosophy [is] wonderful source material for dance, particularly his use of space, how line is used, how form is used, and absolutely, how the artist thinks about materials.”

The Museum of Modern Art has dipped into its permanent collection to give a broad view of the red-hot movement, just weeks after the close of its massive exhibition on Weimar film; Galerie St. Etienne has a classic exhibition of the big names of the era on view, and the Neue Galerie museum has long saluted old-world cafe society.

A host of recent events and exhibitions are seeking to remind viewers that life is a cabaret, old chum, and often a quite grim or erotic one.

In Frank Lloyd Wright's theater Friday night at the Guggenheim, and presented as part of the Museum's "The Great Upheaval," a survey of art made in Europe before and during World War I, the troupe acted out vignettes of seduction wearing restraints and see-through jockstraps, guzzling whipped cream. Museum producer Charles Fabius called the show, with pride, "a punch in the face."

The Weimar style is garish, gruesome and, right now, fantastically popular, though no one is quite sure why. "Weimar Republic" is usually used to describe the time in Germany between the two World Wars. Violence, upheaval and prostitution thrived, but so did the avant-garde art and performance scene, particularly at nightclubs. The period has become associated with, at best, an artistic playfulness and, at worst, a dark decadence.

Speaking to the Guggenheim curators about the art-world vogue for the period, the word "visceral" came up again and again, suggesting that the intensity of the teens and twenties so shocks visitors that they cannot help but come. Historians of the period, meanwhile, said that in a city still traumatized by 9/11 and the financial meltdown, sympathy for those who careened from World War I to hyperinflation is natural. But most important, they all agree, is that this was a sexually saturated period, and that's never a bad draw.

"In many ways, the 1920s in Germany was a far more open period about sex than contemporary United States society," said Eric Weitz, a historian of the period. "Everything that people think has been discovered since the so-called sexual revolution, Germans were discussing in the 1920s." Sex manuals sold like Stieg Larsson novels, and social reformers saw bedroom antics as a path to social equality.

Last summer's Otto Dix spectacular at the Neue Galerie included a room dedicated to gruesome battlefield etchings, entrancing visitors even as it horrified them, a sensation that Viola Kolarov, a German cultural historian at New York University, boiled down to a frustration of the city's "war-ego." As the theory goes, the city remains tortured by the Sept. 11th attacks, in psychological agony at our inability to fight back. For solace, we turn to work created "at a time of war, a time of trauma, a time of mourning," and see ourselves in Dix's crippled soldiers.

All these exhibitions owe a debt to "Glitter and Doom," the 2006 exhibition of 1920s portraiture by the likes of Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz. A surprise blockbuster with a catalog went into four printings, the show reaffirmed the perception of the postwar Weimar Republic as a sinister place peopled by obese plutocrats and underfed whores. Curator Sabine Rewald believes the portraits shocked a city that had grown used to watered-down portrayals of old Berlin.

At the Galerie St. Etienne, on 57th Street, director Jane Kallir has organized a show that she calls "a sequel and follow-up to what the Met did." Adhering to pattern, she dubbed this exhibition--of again Dix, Beckmann and Grosz--"Decadence and Decay." Using loans and some recent acquisitions, she has assembled an exhibition that no one would accuse of being too cheery. In the Galerie St. Etienne, despair hangs in the air like the stale cigar smoke that fills the paintings on the walls. "It's not a 'let-the-good-times-roll' scenario," said Ms. Kallir.

Such exhibitions irk Mr. Weitz, whose book Weimar Germany was an attempt to define the period as more than "only a culture of despair and agony." What's missing, he said, is the sense of utopian possibility that had not died with the war--this was an era when architect Bruno Taut dreamed of building cities at the tops of the Alps--and the positive sense of sexuality on display at the Guggenheim.

The powerful works at St. Etienne are also permeated with sex, but not the fun kind. The grotesque figures who people Dix and Grosz's canvasses seem lascivious, yes, but sickly, as though one could contract syphilis by spending too long inspecting the brushwork.

At the nearby Museum of Modern Art, meanwhile, is the less ostentatiously titled "German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse." Curator Starr Figura mined the permanent collection to build a show that, spanning from 1905 to 1934, could perhaps serve as a compromise between the other two. It opened at the tail end of "Weimar Cinema," a well-reviewed film series chock full of films that organizer Laurence Kardish called "not pornographic, but fairly explicit." This included a young, seductive Marlene Dietrich in Three Loves, and Sex in Chains, a film about a homosexual romance born in jail. "The people who love it really love it, but too many in the general public have no idea what German Expressionism is."

Of course, there's such a thing as over-analysis. Sex is more fun than death, and the Guggenheim ran with it. The actors onstage this weekend spent the evening cursing, exposing themselves and fiddling with a cigar that was, for three nights only, hardly just a cigar.

"It felt a bit like the audience was in two parts," said company co-founder Kuno Bakker. "A part really enjoyed it and was laughing and very attentive and had a great time, and there was a part that I think in a way was shocked. A very small part unfortunately, left the room." Mr. Fabius, who invited Dood Paard to perform based on their provocative reputation, was keen to emphasize the show's fixation. "Every single word that's pronounced onstage is to get laid," he said.

editorial@observer.com

But the protesters may be getting ahead of themselves in several respects.

Although the co-organizer of the petition, Cooper Union professor and artist Walid Raad, has work in the Guggenheim collection, as do prominent signers Shirin Neshat and Martha Rosler, the vast majority (more than 80 percent) of petitioners do not--nor, say insiders, is their work likely to be on the museum's must-have list anytime soon. As one dealer noted, "Few artists were burning bridges here."

The protest has been a public-relations embarrassment for the museum and for the art community, which has largely embraced aggressive plans by the Abu Dhabi Tourism, Development and Investment Company to build a cultural center that would include the new Guggenheim. Art dealer Larry Gagosian has spoken at TDIC events and last year loaned his private collection to the entity for view in Abu Dhabi. Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry, an Islamic art scholar, was in neighboring Dubai at an art fair when the petition was released and was visibly upset by it, according to sources who were present. (So far, none of the artists who signed the petition, many of them from the region, have requested that their art be banned from sale at the TDIC's annual art fair.)

Meanwhile, construction of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi remains far from a sure thing. In the past decade, the Guggenheim has announced plans for branches in Taiwan, Rio de Janeiro, Guadalajara and Hong Kong, all of which remain unbuilt. When the Abu Dhabi satellite was announced in July 2006, it was expected to open in 2011. That date has been pushed back to 2013.

Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi's Ferrari World, the largest indoor amusement park in the world, which was announced around the same time, is now open for business.