Art World

Who decides what is art? What constitutes censorship? How are indecency and obscenity to be defined, and what is the artist's responsibility to the public when public funds are involved?These questions increasingly confront the arts in America during this final decade of the 20th century, a period in which art and artists have become targets of a conservative cultural backlash against the social upheavals of the last 50 years.This week, an expected ruling by a federal court judge may offer at least short-term answers to these questions.

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. - Ye denizens of uber-cool galleries and art happenings, admit it - you like Norman Rockwell.It's OK. Rockwell is no longer a guilty pleasure of the art world.Yes, critics used to insist that we, if not exactly scorn him, at least dismiss his genial, sentimental art. "Normal Norman," as art critic Robert Hughes snidely dubbed him, was devalued even by the artist himself, who deflected charges against him by saying he was an illustrator, not an artist.Nevertheless, through eight decades he has burrowed deep into the American psyche.

What's a work of art worth? The simple answer is: whatever the market will bear.I know that. You know that. So does art journalist Peter Watson, who somewhat belatedly fills in the details about what we already know in "Sotheby's: The Inside Story," an absorbing if slightly breathless account of shady goings-on inside one of the world's most prestigious auction houses.Smuggled art, stolen art, art with questionable provenance - Sotheby's sells it all, Watson charges. And not because it's good, or important, or even beautiful, one might add, but simply because what the market will bear these days is quite a lot.Part spy thriller, part true-crime story, Watson's book recounts his decade-long attempt to uncover a mystery art historians and curators have long been puzzled by but only reluctantly have examined: Given the strict export controls many countries imposed a generation ago to prevent speculators from plundering their national treasures, how was it that so many foreign artworks regularly turned up on the auction block in cities like New York and London?

NEW YORK -- Fakes are a fact of life in the art world. They slip into even the finest museum collections and auction or gallery offerings, usually one at a time.But on Sunday, some prominent art dealers charge, a Florida auctioneer plans to put not one, not two, but dozens on the block, attributed to artists like Piet Mondrian, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jasper Johns and Helen Frankenthaler."It looks like virtually nothing in the catalog is authentic," said Robert C. Graham Jr., president of James Graham & Sons, a gallery on upper Madison Avenue.

An oil painting, Jasper John's "False Start," was bought by Robert Scull from the New York dealer Leo Castelli in 1960 for $3,150. At the Sotheby's Contemporary Sale, also in New York, in November of 1988, the same canvas was bought for $17 million by S.I. Newhouse. It was the highest price ever paid for a piece of 20th century art -- for exactly one week, until a Picasso went for $24.8 million.In the same period, thousands of other art objects enjoyed similar explosions in paid price, many of approximately the same astronomical proportions.

WASHINGTON -- Like P. T. Barnum, Thomas Hoving holds certain firm beliefs about suckers. His eyebrows wriggle like caterpillars in a mating frenzy as he leans across the table to make his point: The whole world -- and he's not excluding himself -- wants to be fooled."

The American Visionary Art Museum is still the baby of the art world, but judging by the numbers so far, and the reception the 2-month-old facility has gotten in the press, it should have a bright future.The 40,000-square-foot museum at the Inner Harbor, devoted to the artwork of self-taught people outside the mainstream, opened on Nov. 24. In the first 41 days (it was closed four days because of the blizzard) 12,175 people have visited -- about 300 a day. Income from admissions and the gift shop totaled about $113,000.

"The Art Fair," by David Lipsky.Doubleday. 271 pages. $22.50.The novel's narrator, Richard Freely, is a precocious youngster who is shuttled between his artist mother in Manhattan and his writer father in Los Angeles. Their split was brought on by their mother's sudden arrival in the art world.Before she gained fame, their lives were idyllic, but as her work garned attention, the family life crumbled.If Lipsky's book reads so remarkably assured, perhaps it's because his story is drawn from real life: He is the son of painter Pat Lipsky Sutton.

Life is short, and art is long, but sometimes both life and art can be short. That seems to be the thrust of "Basquiat," a biographical look at the young painter who blazed through the New York art world in the '80s but died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. He didn't outlast the decade he dominated.The movie, directed by painter Julian Schnabel, has a good sense of authenticity (it was shot where it occurred) and is particularly mordant and incisive about the operations of the art world, a subject about which Schnabel obviously has a good deal of knowledge, and not a small amount of cynicism.

Between 1910 and 1950, America underwent profound and irreversible changes. We fought in two world wars and went through the worst depression in our history. We experienced an immense growth in industry. We saw the coming of the automobile, movies, radio and television. And we witnessed a huge migration from rural to urban America in response to industrialization, the Depression and World War II.Not surprisingly, art in this country underwent similar upheaval. In 1910, America was an outpost of the art world; its center was Paris, where Matisse and Picasso caught the eye of forward-looking collectors such as Gertrude Stein and Baltimore's Cone sisters.

Before she passed away Saturday after a long illness, Grace Hartigan was adamant, even imperious about the arrangements for how she would be memorialized. And she will get her way, as Hartigan, a seminal figure in the U.S. art world and a longtime Baltimore resident, usually did. "There will be no memorial service. She said that her memorial should be more about her body of work than about her physical body. She's always felt that way," says Rex Stevens, chairman of the drawing and general fine arts department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The 86-year-old painter will be cremated, he said.

His prints have been collected by celebrities such as Bill Cosby, and can be found in galleries from Baltimore to Brazil. Yet Baltimore native Larry Poncho Brown is keenly aware of how in the rarified, often elitist, art world, commercially successful artists like himself are sometimes viewed with condescension. "The commercial world and the fine art world have butted heads since the beginning of time," says Brown, a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. "All artists have to deal with that divide ... but I would rather have my work in 500,000 homes than be in one museum."

This year's Big Show at the Creative Alliance reflects the community-based art group's wide-ranging grass-roots appeal locally, as well as the prevailing mood in the larger art world outside Baltimore. There are about 175 works in the show in all styles and media, and if there's anything like the much-ballyhooed "Baltimore style" of art-making, this should be the place to find it. What one in fact finds in The Big Show, however, is something very much like the determined pluralism to be found virtually everywhere else in the art world these days.

The idea of an emerging artist is a familiar but still rather amorphous concept. It can mean young artists fresh out of bachelor's or master's degree programs who are embarking on professional careers. Or it can refer to artists who are well-experienced but whose works have only recently crossed some major threshold of visibility in the art world - a major museum exhibition, for example, or the proverbial solo show in a prestigious New York gallery. And it can mean everything in between as well.

To its practitioners and enthusiasts, fashion photography has always been the most underappreciated of modern art forms. With its unavoidable links to advertising and commerce, the fashion photo was until only recently the orphan stepchild of the art world, indisputably easy on the eye but calculated to stimulate material desire and consumption rather than to elevate the spirit. Irving Penn, who along with his sometime rival and colleague Richard Avedon set a new standard for the art of postwar fashion photography, was a perfectionist in matters of craft and wholly original in his pictorial imagination.

Forty 6-foot-tall decorated crabs will hit the streets of Baltimore today, and with their fiberglass pincers thrust into the air, they might resemble the crustacean version of baseball fans doing the wave. Or the Village People performing "YMCA." The crabs, scheduled to be unveiled today by Mayor Martin O'Malley, are the latest incarnation of a public art form that has charmed viewers nationwide - remember the Fish Out of Water project that raised $670,000 for Baltimore schools in 2001?

De Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. Alfred A. Knopf. 752 pages. $35. Willem de Kooning, one of the towering figures of 20th-century American art, arrived in New York aboard a British freighter in 1926 as a 22-year-old Dutch stowaway. He was fleeing a troubled childhood of poverty and neglect in his native city of Rotterdam. Over the following decades, he would transform himself from a penniless immigrant who barely spoke English into one of the country's most celebrated artists, achieving undreamed of success just as New York was becoming the cultural capital of the world.

Say you're an up-and-coming contemporary art enthusiast and you're trying to spot the Next Big Thing. What to do? Well, you could bone up on your connoisseurship - sharpen an expert eye for line, color, etc. But maybe you've done that; the next best thing might be to look for "dark matter." Artistic "dark matter," like the celestial kind astronomers search for through their telescopes, is that 90 percent of the whole enchilada we can't see, even though we know it's got to be there. It's what Baltimore Museum of Art contemporary art curator Chris Gilbert calls the welter of images, objects, performances, happenings and collective projects by mostly younger artist-activists that lie just under the radar screens of mainstream institutions like art museums and galleries.

Ana Mendieta left her mark on the art world of the 1970s and '80s by pressing her naked body into the earth, by covering it with feathers and mud and filming it, by carving its imprint into trees and rocks and setting them afire. Her art was a continual exploration of the most primal means of mark-making possible using the most primal materials imaginable - earth, water, fire; flesh, blood and bone - to record her oh-so-brief but prolific passage through this world as a woman and as an artist.

What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt. Henry Holt. 384 pages. $25. The tone of Siri Hustvedt's new novel, What I Loved, is established by the very title. It's distant, elegiac, even a bit fatigued. Not quite a sentence, not quite a declaration, it is the tale of loves and passions past, not present, and a life nearing its end. Hustvedt's greatest accomplishment in this, her third novel, is the ruminative tone of a man nearing the becalmed end of his life after fiery times. Art historian Leo Hertzberg has been through a lot -- along with his friend, the painter Bill Wechsler, and their respective wives, Erica and Violet, and their children, Matthew and Mark.