Critics remember Mike Kelley as an artistic polymath — he was a writer, musician, critic, and artist whose media ranged from felt paintings to stuffed animals to high school yearbook photos. But many in the art community of Detroit, where Kelley grew up, find themselves coming back to one artwork in particular when reminiscing about the artist, who died on Tuesday at age 57: “Mobile Homestead.” The unfinished replica of Kelley’s childhood home was to function simultaneously as a public artwork, community center, and private monument. The work is more timely than ever: three documentaries Kelley made to chronicle the life of “Mobile Homestead” will be featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Back in Detroit, however, the future of the work — Kelley’s only piece of public art and his only permanent installation in his hometown — is now uncertain.

The project has preoccupied the staff of the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art for over five years — it was in the works before the museum itself even opened. The idea for “Mobile Homestead” was born on one of Kelley’s periodic visits to Westland, the Detroit suburb where his family once lived. “He came back with this idea that he wanted to do a piece about the house that he grew up in,” said Marsha Miro, a former art critic for the Detroit Free Press and the founding director of MOCAD. After unsuccessfully offering to buy the house from the current tenant, Kelley decided to make a replica of the home instead. Artangel, the influential British nonprofit that commissions large-scale public art installations, agreed to provide the funding. It was that organization’s first-ever commission in the United States.

Over the next several years, Kelley worked closely with Artangel and members of the Detroit community to develop the project. “Mobile Homestead” would be reminiscent of many single-floor houses in the Westland neighborhood, which in the ’50s and ’60s were populated largely by workers for the Big Three automakers. Kelley considered several venues for the finished product, from an abandoned drive-in movie theater to Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford Historical Museum, an outdoor space that is home to replicas of the residences of Thomas Edison and Rosa Parks as well as the Wright Brothers’ cycle shop. When neither panned out, Kelley called Miro, who was finalizing plans for MOCAD. “We weren’t even open yet, and he came over and looked around. I said, ‘Why don’t we put it in the back of the museum?’ We had an open lot, and I told him we could use it as a project space. He liked the idea of transplanting a lower-class suburban home into the middle of an urban center.”

Before constructing the entire model, Kelley decided to build a mobile home bearing the façade of his childhood residence. The trailer would travel throughout the surrounding neighborhoods, most of which are now filled with abandoned houses and dilapidated buildings. The idea was for Mobile Homestead to enact a reversal of the “white flight” that took place in Detroit after the inner city race riots of the 1960s. If the community responded well, Kelley and MOCAD would proceed with the entire replica. To date, only the trailer is complete. “He had approved all the construction drawings, we had an agreement that was signed, and we were supposed to break ground on the rest of the house in April,” said Miro. Because the property is still registered in Kelley’s name, Miro says she doesn’t know what will happen to the project now.

The main floor of the house was to reflect Kelley’s home exactly — the same size kitchen, bedrooms, and garage — but there would be very little furniture to allow space for public programming. “Mike very much wanted a social component to it — he thought we could use it for blood drives, and all sorts of things,” said Miro. Other ideas tossed around included neighborhood barbeques and a weekly barbershop that offered free haircuts. Miro thought the space might also be able to function as a permanent mailing address for the area’s homeless.

Below the ground floor, Kelley designed two private floors for artist studios. “He called them the ‘underground artist floors,’” said Miro, “punning on that stereotype of the underground.” Maze-like, the high-ceilinged rooms had no doors, only ladders providing a link from one floor to the next. “It played with the idea of this being his house and reflecting the stages of consciousness and repressed desires,” said Miro. Kelley planned to use the space as his own studio when he visited the city. “Who knows the demons he was battling, thinking about this deep, underground space as his own.”

While Kelley was preparing the trailer portion of “Mobile Homestead,” he created the films that will be included in the Whitney Biennial. He traveled along Michigan Avenue, which stretches from downtown Detroit out to suburbs like Westland, interviewing the characters he found along the way. The videos attempt to capture the people that line the route “Mobile Homestead” was to take on its maiden voyage from MOCAD to the site of Kelley’s childhood home in the suburbs. “It’s a fascinating thing, because Detroit is full of people who have been left behind in so many ways,” said Miro. “He edited the video very carefully to reflect all the flavors he saw in the city.”

The Whitney Biennial curators hadn’t seen “Mobile Homestead” until they visited Detroit last year on a research trip. Curator Elisabeth Sussman notes the films are “a work in progress,” but “even in their unfinished state, we were blown away by how well they told a story about Detroit. They were so hard-hitting, and so honest. But Mike’s genius is that there would have been a meta-text he would have put over the films, about the whole project. I think he wanted to present the complications of creating public art in a city that doesn’t have a penny to it’s name.” The films will be accompanied by a text on “Mobile Homestead” Kelley wrote especially for the Biennial.  

For many, “Mobile Homestead” is a symbol of Kelley’s deep connection to Detroit. “He may have lived in California, but he never left Westland,” said Julia Reyes Taubman, a longtime board member at MOCAD. “He always thought of himself as a blue collar worker from Westland, even when Larry Gagosian was representing him.”

Shortly after the trailer portion of “Mobile Homestead” was complete in 2010, Miro and Kelley prepared to send it off on its first public sojourn down Michigan Avenue. “He wanted to have a big county fair where we would all send the trailer off,” said Miro. The Michigan poet John Sinclair gave an invocation, and crowds gathered for the send-off. Though “Mobile Homestead” had made the journey successfully in a trial run, the hitch inside the trailer wasn’t quite right this time, and it got a flat tire. “It fell over before it even got downtown — it was just the beginning,” said Miro.

“It made Mike so sad, it broke my heart. I don’t even want to think about it because it made him so sad,” she said. “Everyone was excited because off it went down the street, and people were watching and cheering. And then, it didn’t make it all the way.”

Followers of the art market in recent years are well aquainted with the usual parade of records and unthinkably huge numbers when yearly results are announced. Well, Christie’s has just announced its sales totals for 2011, and they do indeed involve a parade of records and some unthinkably huge numbers. Business, it would seem, is booming: With some $5.7 million in total sales reported, this was a very good year for Christie’s. 

What to make of all this? What’s going on beneath all those numbers? Below, we look at some of the finer grained details of Christie’s 2011 performance:   

Total sales for 2011: £3.6 billion ($5.7 million)

According to the auction house, the total is a record in pounds (but not in dollars because of conversion rates) — and it’s up a truly massive £300 million (nine percent in pounds, 14 percent in dollars) from last year’s £3.3 billion sum. The company is based in London, so it reports sales in British pounds sterling. Because it’s not a public company it isn’t required to report revenue or profit, the twice-yearly reported sales totals are the some of the only financials to analyze.  

Most expensive lot of the year: Roy Lichtenstein’s “I Can See the Whole Room!… And There’s Nobody in It!” (1961) at $43.2 million

Pop art, as ever, is hot. Our own Judd Tully covered the November contemporary sale in New York and noted that the lot was scooped up by New York-based dealer Guy Bennett, who took it home for a client at a price near the high end of its $35-45 million estimate. It helped Christie’s to a $773 million total for contemporary art, which continues its run as the best-performing category of the year.

Most expensive Impressionist and modern lot of the year: Pablo Picasso’s “Femme Assise, Robe Bleue” (1939) at £18 million ($28 million)

Its Nazi-looted history helped this portrait of Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar sell for several million pounds above its £4-8 million estimate in London last June. However, the Imp-mod category as a whole declined 28 percent to £548.6 million.

Asian art sales: £552.9 million

Meanwhile, the total for the Asian art category is up 13 percent from 2010, and now trumps Impressionist and modern art for sales. Something to think about. 

Growth in Hong Kong: 11 percent

That would seem to be quite respectable — but it’s also a notable leveling off from the epic 114 percent growth it reported in 2010 in Asia.

The Elizabeth Taylor Sale: $157 million with 100 percent of 1,778 lots sold.

The Taylor sale was one was one of the undoubted media events of the year — and the hype paid off for the house, clearly. The $157 million total presumably doesn’t even include any revenue from all those people buying tickets and standing around the block to see Liz’s baubles when the auction house toured them around the world. As for the sale itself, probably enough has been said.

Private sales totals: £502 million

The house’s incursion into the private market continues, and the half-a-billion total for Christie’s in this department amounted to a 44 percent increase from 2010. It’s a boon for Christie’s, clearly — but for journalists, the increasing attachment of auction houses to this kind of transaction also means that trying to make sense of the art market becomes more difficult, for those not privy to the back-room deals, that is.

Originally posted on Above the Estimate.

Carsguide.com.au  compares the Corvette ZR1 with the Mercedes SLS…

The Pavilion of Art and Design New York, the French design fair that launched a successful stateside edition last November, will not return to the Park Avenue Armory this year. In its place is a new, somewhat more focused fine art and design fair called the Salon of Art and Design, which will specialize in contemporary and 20th-century design. The fair will feature 53 dealers, many of whom participated in PAD, including New York’s Jason Jacques and Friedman Benda and Paris’s Galerie Vallois. 

“We’ll have the highest quality of art and design there is, and it will be primarily 20th-century, with just a few dealers who specialize in earlier work,” said veteran fair organizer Sanford Smith, who co-produced PAD NY with Patrick Perrin, founder of the French edition. For his new venture, Smith will team up with the Syndicat National des Antiquaires, a Paris-based association of 400 antiques, art, and design dealers that organizes the respected Biennale des Antiquaires. The partners hopes to recruit new names, like Tel Aviv’s Le Minotaure Gallery, alongside established galleries from PAD NY’s roster.

The shift in leadership comes after Smith, who has a five-year contract with the Armory for the second week in November, clashed with PAD’s Perrin. Though Smith said sales were strong at the debut fair, he and Perrin disagreed over how to use resources. Booths at the reconceived design fair will cost dealers ten to 15 percent less than those at PAD, according to Smith, who promises the event will maintain “the same level of creature comforts and more.”

The breakup may be news to PAD. The Pavilion of Art & Design’s Web site currently advertises PAD NY’s return to the Armory from November 7-12, 2012. (Smith says the Salon of Art and Design will run from November 8-12.) A representative from PAD did not return a request for comment inquiring about the status or location of the fair.  

The design fair shuffle isn’t the only shakeup happening at the Armory. Two other fairs that were canceled in recent years due to the recession will return. The Works on Paper fair, which took place at the Armory for 21 years before being postponed in 2009, will return to Park Avenue in February 2013. It will run alongside a revived version of the design fair Modernism, which began in 1985 as New York’s first design show but went on hiatus last year. (PAD ran in its usual November time slot.) “I’ll split the Armory down the middle,” said Smith of his plans for the two-part fair, which will run from February 21-24, 2013.

Asked whether he felt New Yorkers had an appetite for more art fairs, Smith said, “I’ve always thought from the very beginning, in order to be successful you need a target market show. You don’t need 20,000 people to attend, you need 3,000 to 5,000 serious people. These are target shows.” 

Can Leonardo da Vinci‘s star power translate to the big screen? After the blockbuster exhibition devoted to the Renaissance master closes at London’s National Gallery, Leonardo will hit theaters across the United States as the subject of “Leonardo Live.” The film offers a virtual tour of the blockbuster exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,” which closes on February 4.

The 85-minute documentary offers a combination of interviews filmed in the galleries, segments on Leonardo’s life, and mini-documentaries about the works on view, which include a full-scale copy of the “Last Supper” and “Salvator Mundi,” which was only recently attributed to the Renaissance master. Most of the paintings will never travel again; those from private collections may never again be on public view.

“Leonardo Live” premiered to enthusiastic crowds in Britain in November. The film was beamed live into 41 nearly sold-out cinemas across the United Kingdom on the exhibition’s preview night. “The National Gallery has spent five years putting this exhibition together, and basically only 500,000 people will get to see it in person,” “Leonardo Live” director Phil Grabsky told BLOUIN ARTINFO. (Tickets to the National Gallery’s show were famously scalped and resold online for up to $400.)  The film will now premiere in the U.S. on February 16.

But what can one really glean from seeing art — which so often benefits from careful in-person inspection — on film? “Even if you’re lucky enough to get a ticket to the Leonardo show, you get about 18 seconds in front of a painting,” Grabsky said. “The great thing about a film is that I can focus on a detail and hold it.”

The film’s hosts, art historian and White Cube exhibitions director Tim Marlow and journalist Mariella Frostrup, get various perspectives on the masterpieces. They interview ballet dancer Deborah Bull about movement in the paintings, while “Harry Potter” actress Fiona Shaw discusses their theatricality.

“It’s one thing to go in and do a recorded documentary,” Grabsky said. “It’s another thing entirely to do a live show in a gallery filled with what is perhaps the most expensive grouping of paintings on exhibition anywhere in the world.” (A few hiccups from the live shooting — a camera that broke, an autocue that stopped — will be corrected in the United States version.)

The film came out of Grabsky’s interest in doing a collaboration with the National Gallery even before he knew about the Leonardo exhibition. “I told them, ‘I want to do a live screening, have you got anything coming up?’ And they kind of smiled, and said, ‘We’ve got perhaps the biggest artist there is.’”

It’s been a while since ARTINFO took up the subject of the art exchange, where investors buy and sell shares of artworks on an open market. However, there is a new exchange in the works — an enterprise based in Luxembourg called SplitArt — which was featured in the Deloitte Luxembourg-ArtTactic 2011 art market report (previously discussed in relation to SWAG, the latest bundled cultural commodity). According to an interview with founder and general manager Dror Chevion, the new exchange is in the process of being approved by regulators and could be the world’s first regulated art exchange that securitizes artworks and sells shares to investors, lending it a certain legitimacy that other exchanges have yet to realize. But even if it gets approved by regulators, that doesn’t mean it’s a good investment idea.

Here’s how it works, according to Chevion: When the owner of an artwork decides to sell, he gets in touch with a bank and Splitart, which then go through the process of securitizing it. The bank values the work and agrees on a price range with the owner. There is a period of “blind bidding” for shares of the work. The lowest bidder sets the price for the shares — provided that price meets the minimum per share that the owner of the artwork initially set — and everyone who placed a bid pays that price for shares. Then trading begins, like any other financial exchange.

Why would anyone want to do this? As far as selling an artwork goes, it’s pretty simple — it’s just another way to get liquid value out of a piece of art that you own without taking it to auction. Theoretically, that could be less risky, since myriad smaller shares are sold to investors rather than waiting for one buyer to bid a price higher than the stated minimum at auction. However, that is not to say that many people bidding on share prices for a work are guaranteed to meet the seller’s minimum sale price. A work could go unsold on an exchange and get “burned,” just as well as it could get burned at auction.

But what about buying a work? In the interview Chevion told ArtTactic that “one of the most alluring aspects of using Art Certificates [what SplitArt is calling shares] as liquid, transparent financial instruments is that neither buyers nor sellers need to buy or sell a whole work of art.”

The downside of that, of course, is that you don’t actually own the work of art, so the aesthetic pleasure of owning a painting or sculpture — which offsets the risk inherent in buying art for many collectors — isn’t there. Buying a share in an art exchange has nothing to do with the art itself, but rather has to do with betting the work will grow in value — which is an extremely risky bet unless you are just speculating based on the “greater fool theory” that even if you overpaid, a greater fool will come along and pay a higher price. You can’t take the work home with you unless you buy 100 percent of the shares, and you can’t force shareholders to sell on the SplitArt system unless you are in possession of 80 percent of shares of a work.

This isn’t the first time that there has been a much-publicized launch of an art exchange in Europe. Last January there was much hoopla surrounding Art Exchange, a Paris-based exchange that promised to sell shares of work by Francesco Vezzoli and Sol LeWitt for as little as €10 ($13) per share. There has been little follow-up since it’s launch — shares are still listed at €10 and the Web site doesn’t appear to have been updated since March 2011. However, founder Pierre Naquin assured ARTINFO that Art Exchange is indeed up and running. “People can and are buying shares,” he said, adding, “We are in the process of signing distribution deals with financial institutions which will enlarge our client base.”

The problem with Art Exchange and other exchanges that currently securitize artworks (which are mostly based in China) is that they are not under the umbrella of any regulatory authority. Caroline Matthews, the operating manager of Art Exchange’s parent company, A&F Markets, told CNNInternational last year that “at present there is no official authority for this sort of trading. We are obviously regulated in the sense that we are subjected to property laws, especially those regarding artworks.”

But without regulation, shares can spike 1,700 percent (as they did in the Tianjin exchange in China last March) before anyone begins to think that the stated value of the outstanding shares is vastly more than the value of the underlying artwork and everyone starts to dump their shares, leading to panic. The Tianjin exchange had to halt trading to keep from a total market collapse.

If there is hope for SplitArt, it will be in the confidence given to investors by the backing of a regulatory authority. However, no announcements have been formally made about regulators, and SplitArt declined to comment to ARTINFO at this time. Is this exchange to be taken seriously? We will have to wait and see. 

Sotheby’s ongoing lockout of its union art handlers thrust a group of historically behind-the-scenes professionals into the media spotlight. But auction houses aren’t the only institutions negotiating with the people who look after their art. The art handlers at the Whitney Museum are also in protracted contract negotiations with their employer, though the talks aren’t quite as bitter. A look at the negotiations in progress shows that there is an alternative to Sotheby’s aggressive tactics, but also suggests how difficult it is for museums to reach an agreement on union contracts when budgets are tight.

The discussions “have been cordial but difficult,” said Teamsters Local 966 manager James Anderson, who is negotiating on behalf of the art handlers. Unable to settle on a new contract, the museum has twice extended the old one, which expired in October. As it stands, the art handlers’ contract is set to expire again on January 31 — just before preparation for March’s Whitney Biennial kicks into high gear. Anderson hopes to bring an offer to the union members within the week — then, it’ll be up to them to accept or reject the proposal. If the art handlers reject it, “the Whitney could lock us out, we could go on strike, or the employer may agree to sit down and make some modifications,” he said.

Though the handlers are normally split between the Whitney’s Upper East Side gallery and its offsite storage facility, “everybody will be called uptown for the installation of the biennial in February, so if there was going to be a strike, that would be the time,” said another source close to the negotiations. The small band of Whitney union art handlers, which consists of around 10 people, is reportedly divided on considering such a dramatic move.

The negotiations center on wages and health care. The handlers are fighting to maintain their current health care contributions, though the Whitney has increased required contributions for non-union and many union employees from 10 to 20 percent museum-wide. The museum’s lawyers verbally suggested during negotiations that art handlers could make up for a loss of income by working more overtime, according to two people with knowledge of the negotiations. “The situation is different from Sotheby’s because the Whitney is a nonprofit that intends to represent American cultural values,” said one Whitney art handler, “so they should be doing more.”

Two smaller elements under negotiation offer a peek into field of art handling, which almost always occurs out of public view. At one point, the union sought full paid maternity leave since a member of the art handling team is currently pregnant. (“I don’t think were going to be successful in getting the Whitney to agree to that,” said Anderson, who noted that the woman will still receive disability pay under the Family Medical Leave Act.)

The union is also seeking to extend weekend overtime pay to temp workers — who make up a large portion of the Whitney’s art handlers — even if they have not worked a full week beforehand. When temporary art handlers stayed at the museum for 36-hour stretches during Hurricane Irene, they were not contractually entitled to overtime, though the museum provided it as an informal emergency measure. 

A representative from the Whitney said the museum could not comment on a negotiation in process but noted, “Our talks so far have been cordial and respectful, and we expect negotiations to continue until a mutually satisfying resolution is achieved.”

Those close to negotiations said the contract issue is particularly sensitive in light of the Whitney’s impending move to its new downtown location in 2015. The union was careful to negotiate a five-year contract so that their jobs would be safe after the move. “We have a long history with the Whitney — they’re rather progressive,” said Anderson. “They’re not coming at this from a place where they’re going to lock people out. Hopefully, we’re not going to be another Sotheby’s.”

Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli isn’t known for holding back in his work. He has cast superstar actors, actresses, and directors in fake movie trailers and political campaign ads, created a perfume that smells like “greed,” put Nicki Minaj in a baroque dress for W Magazine, and had Lady Gaga play a piano painted by Damien Hirst. In fact, most of Vezzoli’s oeuvre has been star-studded (which is why it’s surprising to hear him complain that he is “tiring of working with stars” in a recent interview with the Guardian.)

Yet the artist’s latest proposal for a 24-hour-only pop-up museum, still carries the reflected shine of celebrity, despite its posture of institutional critique. Vezzoli will take over Paris’s Palais d’Iéna (the exact date is still TBA), filling it with 16-foot-tall neoclassical figures topped by the heads of celebrities he has worked with, including Courtney Love and Cate Blanchett. The Palais d’Iéna was originally built as a museum, but currently hosts France’s social, economic, and environmental councils. Vezzoli will kick out the government for a day and install his own version of a museum, featuring an institution with its own press conferences and student tours during the day that transforms into a fully functioning nightclub in the evening. In its final three hours, the museum will throw a public party. 

Vezzoli’s 24-hour museum could be just another spectacle, but the artist sees it as a parody of institutional integrity compromised by money (Vezzoli’s museum, as with several other of his projects, is sponsored by Prada). “[Cultural institutions] have gone from being small and protected to being big and less protected,” Vezzoli said. “The only institutions that aren’t for rent are the private ones because people like Prada don’t need the money.” The artist balances on the line between over-the-top kitsch and pointed critique — though he doesn’t always fall on the side he intends to. In a 2010 interview Vezzoli told ARTINFO, “I have given up trying to claim a political aspect to my work. I leave it to others to judge.”

For Vezzoli, the takeover is “a parody of a retrospective.” “If you’re setting up this whole extravaganza and make it completely self-referential, you become the object of the ridiculousness,” the artist told the Guardian. The comment seems to be a thinly veiled jibe at Maurizio Cattelan, whose hanging Guggenheim retrospective seemed to descend into pure self-collapsing parody on its own.