Left: Artist Francesco Vezzoli and architect Zaha Hadid. Right: Bernardo Bertolucci. (Except where noted, all photos: Linda Yablonsky)

ONE WAY TO THE VENICE BIENNALE is through Rome. A healthy swath of the art tribe took that option last Sunday, when MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts, hosted the gala premiere of “Galleria Vezzoli.” It was the first installment of a three-part, multinational career retrospective for Francesco Vezzoli, the Italian artist that many Americans love to hate.

“Why is that?” asked the dealer Almine Rech, who attended with her husband Bernard Picasso and other longtime Vezzoli supporters in Europe, such as the erstwhile Italian supermodel Mirella Haggiag, the designer and collector Miuccia Prada, collector Beatrice Trussardi, and the Milanese dealer Gió Marconi, who gave Vezzoli his very first gallery exhibition—“the one where Miuccia discovered Francesco’s work,” he said.

The evening, a fund-raiser that celebrated the post-Berlusconi government’s approach to cultural affairs—one that accepts American-style private support for public institutions—amounted to something of a state dinner. Instead of the movie stars who have come out for Vezzoli in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris, the event drew politicians, collectors, dealers, and curators, as well as royal personages like Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and Alessandra Borghese. They all rubbed shoulders with Balthus’s kimono-clad widow, Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, the film directors Liliana Cavani and Bernardo Bertolucci, and Klaus Biesenbach and Jeffrey Deitch, the directors of the two American museums that will house the other two parts of the retrospective, MoMA PS1 and LA MoCA.

Left: MAXXI president Giovanna Melandri and MAXXI chief curator Anna Mattirolo. Right: Artist Wade Guyton and dealer Gió Marconi.

The show—which includes Vezzoli’s embroideries (hooker calling cards and tearful cultural icons), classical statuary holding flat-screen monitors showing videos, marble busts of the artist, and the installation of a cinema that he once made for the Prada Foundation in Venice—created a nineteenth-century-style salon that beautifully offsets the museum’s rather clumsy, futuristic design by architect Zaha Hadid. Though it pleased the majority of those who accepted the self-portraiture as both an art-historical critique and an indictment of celebrity culture, one resistant guest called it “sheer narcissism” before stealing into the sweeping Luigi Ghirri retrospective on view in adjacent galleries.

This was the first time that the museum had held a dinner in its lobby. MAXXI president Giovanna Melandri emphasized the new chapter in patronage represented by the gala, which added four hundred thousand euros to the institution’s coffers. She also congratulated Vezzoli for rising to the challenge of Hadid’s architecture before concluding with an aphorism. “Let’s remember,” she said, “that of all lies, art is the least deceitful.”

After a lengthy speech by curator Anna Mattirolo that set many eyes rolling, a diplomatic Vezzoli allowed that “making this exhibition was a moment of extreme happiness,” while acknowledging, “Happiness is not common to contemporary art.” Then it was Hadid’s turn to express happiness with a show that “combines art with film, fashion, and many other things.” Adding a sweet personal note, she invoked the spirit of Herbert Muschamp, naming the late architecture critic as the mutual friend who introduced her to Vezzoli two decades ago. Then she gave the museum her own poke in the ribs. “I remember when I first heard the museum was called MAXXI,” she said, “I was horrified. It means something rather different in English. But when I realized it meant a museum of the twenty-first century, I calmed down.”

Left: Curator Alex Gartenfeld. Right: Collectors Shelley Fox Aarons and Phil Aarons.

Rome is actually enjoying something of a contemporary art resurgence, particularly within institutions. On view in the Eternal City are two Sterling Ruby shows (at the Fondazione Memmo and at MACRO, the contemporary exhibition space in a former abattoir) and “Empire State,” an exhibition of art from New York curated by Norman Rosenthal and Alex Gartenfeld for the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Gartenfeld led a few of us visiting New Yorkers through galleries that showed R. H. Quaytman, Virginia Overton, Ryan Sullivan, and Keith Edmier to great advantage. As a whole, though, the show felt, perhaps naturally, somewhat disconnected from its source, though the Helmut Newton retrospective upstairs seemed right at home.

Monday brought an unexpected pleasure, when independent curator Cristiana Perrella and Gagosian Rome director Pepi Marchetti Franchi arranged a private tour of the Villa Borghese, where Thomas Houseago has two monumental plaster figures installed in the aviary. They were surprisingly well suited to the site, though for those of us on the tour—Rech, Picasso, Carl D’Alvia (currently a fellow at the American Academy in Rome), and yours truly—the chance to commune at length with the astonishing Berninis and Caravaggios in this museum on a day when it was closed to the public was a little bit of heaven.

That evening, after visiting the converted seventeenth-century stable where Lorcan O’Neill will move his gallery in the fall, the dealer brought me to the opening of Joan Jonas’s wonderful, fish-themed solo show of ice drawings, ink paintings, and video at the nearby Alessandra Bonomo gallery. This event also attracted Luigi Ontani and private dealer Damiana Leoni, who had that day lost her YouTube campaign for a local political office. I would see Ontani again a short time later at the American Academy, which was bestowing its McKim Medal on Maestro Bertolucci during a gala dinner at the Villa Aurelia, on the 120-year-old institution’s ravishingly beautiful grounds.

Left: Artists Luigi Ontani and Joan Jonas. Right: Art consultant Damiana Leoni and dealer Lorcan O'Neill.

On hand were two previous medal winners (Ontani and Prada), the outgoing American ambassador David Thorne, board members Robert Storr and Francine Prose, philanthropist Mercedes Bass, director Christopher Celenza, poet Karl Kirchwey, and architect Valentina Moncada. The dinner, which raised money specifically to bring Italian artists and scholars to join the Rome Prize–winning Americans in residence next year, brought the sort of cultural Italian-American exchange that is the institution’s mission into focus with an elegance and purpose that made the hill where it sits feel like the Olympus of intellectual life. Which it kind of is.

“No one could exemplify film better than Bernardo Bertolucci,” said Adele Chatfield-Taylor, the Academy’s soon-to-retire president of twenty-five years. Noting that the nine-time Oscar winner is among those individuals who have “changed the world in his medium,” she brought the young actress Tea Falco to present the maestro with the medal, fashioned by jeweler Fabio Salini from a design by Cy Twombly. Though now confined to a wheelchair, following an operation that left him partly paralyzed, Bertolucci was as fascinating as ever, right down to his scarlet sneakers. “My father presented me with Moby-Dick when I was too young to read it,” he said in an acceptance speech that illustrated the high points of his own enduring exchange with American culture, one that he characterized as an “affair.” The opening phrase, “Call me Ishmael,” had a lasting resonance, as did his introduction to jazz. “For me,” he said, “it meant America.” The classic John Ford western Stagecoach “became for me like Homer,” he said, before recalling how he marched with other Italians against the war in Vietnam while smoking pot and listening to Bob Dylan. “So there was a conflict,” he admitted. “But I was very comfortable with that conflict.”

That got a big laugh from an audience that could easily recall feeling the same. Of course, such contradictions are what make the world go round, and a few hours later they would turn it to Venice.

— Linda Yablonsky

Left: MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach with Miuccia Prada and Giovanna Melandri. (Photo courtesy Black Frame) Right: LA MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch.

Left: Installation view of work by Pavlos Tsakonas. Right: Dealer Maria Demetriades and fair director Alexis Caniaris. (All photos: Cathryn Drake)

AFTER A YEARLONG HIATUS, the eighteenth Art-Athina hit the ground running on the evening of Thursday, May 16, and the former Olympic “Tae Kwon Do” Pavilion was packed with enthusiastic party people. The fair had a more national flavor than ever this year under its new director, Alexis Caniaris, the son of recently deceased artist Vlassis Caniaris, whose iconic modern work has recently found great success on the international market. Of the very few foreign galleries exhibiting, most were Greek-owned. The Breeder gallery was dealing with the perceived drop in the market by selling fantastic multiples by artists like Stelios Faitakis, Jannis Varelas, and Andreas Angelidakis at crisis-appropriate prices. “Nobody wants to come here now, but I have already met three interested billionaire collectors today. And if Greeks like you they introduce you to their billionaire friends,” raved Cologne dealer Mirko Mayer, a seven-time exhibitor. “That is what nobody knows: There are at least one-hundred billionaires collecting here.” Most international collectors were delayed several hours due to a union strike, a de rigueur mode of arrival in contemporary Greece.

In lieu of minimal foreign participation, Greek galleries came out of the woodwork, making the fair an excellent snapshot of the country’s current art production and market. “It is important to support the system by being here,” said dealer Eleni Koroneou. Glaring exceptions were Kappatos Gallery, whose booth was mysteriously empty, and Bernier/Eliades. Getting a bad case of agoraphobia among the swarmed dealer booths, on the main floor, I headed upstairs to check out the forty-six international artist-run “Platforms,” invited by curator Artemis Potamianou to present their projects. Michalis Adamis’s mechanical mice running around the floors were amusing likenesses of the frenetic fairgoers below. Sweden’s Museum of Forgetting showcased work by artists Iman Issa, Daniela Ortiz, and Núria Güell. The latter two focused on immigration issues in compelling videos: In Forcible Drugging to Deport, Ortiz reads the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement while being injected with sedatives used forcibly by US border guards; Humanitarian Aid documents Güell’s interview with a prospective Cuban spouse, who had won the chance to marry her and obtain a Spanish visa by submitting love letters, which were displayed on the wall.

Left: Artist Angelika Vaxevanidou and curator Artemis Potamianou. Right: Artist Manos Tsatiris performing Assault.

It was impossible to miss the exuberant activities of the DaDa Da restaurant, a Greek-Austrian collaboration where artist Albert Mayr was waving a skillet and raving nonsense while Lucas Willmann tenderized pink fillets for Wiener schnitzel. “This is Viennese Actionism light,” quipped critic Sotirios Bahtsetzis. Artist Natasha Papadopoulos added, “But here there are hungry Greeks waiting!” On a table with a rotating Sacher tort by Hélène van Duijne, a sign carried the overwhelming spirit: FUCK ART, LET’S EAT SOUVLAKI. An insistent electronic beat and pulsating light emanated from the next booth, the American College of Greece’s “Athens/Urgent,” while hooded performer Manos Tsatiris stood against the wall with his hands tied, perhaps a metaphor for the current Athenian exigency. “This is not the kind of art fair scene we are used to,” said the Economou Collection’s Annie-Claire Geisinger, watching the madness.

I was lucky enough to escape before the crowds, nevertheless encountering the beginnings of a growing traffic jam at the exit on our way to the Kunsthalle Athena, in the hip and edgy Metaxourgeio quarter. We heard nobody had yet arrived for the party, so we stopped at The Friends taverna to dine among the chilled-out chess players and neighborhood dogs. Around midnight we headed to the opening of “This Must Be the Place,” with shows by Katerina Kana, Petros Touloudis, and Thanos Kyriakides. The decadent atmosphere of the Kunsthalle is inevitably part of the art, and Kyriakides had fashioned striking constructions of black yarn, one a virtual column, throughout the rooms. The party moved from there onto the terrace, where people were huddled in groups under the stars among the sympathetic ruins of past installations.

The fair was pleasantly tranquil the next day, so I started at a panel organized by Marina Fokidis, where Filipa Ramos spoke about UFOs and recreating the feeling of being someplace in a particular moment through contemporary technology, citing the absurdity today of Saint Augustine’s distraction by a little bird outside his writing studio. Next I took in the exhibition “Paradise Lost,” where curator Potamianou had skillfully integrated works of participating galleries. A highlight was Panos Tsagaris’s I Have Carried Away the Darkness by My Strength, the text inscribed in 23kt gold on a digital print of his arm; the haunting coda a beautiful girl passing in a car, in Roderik Henderson’s photograph Cassandra.

Left: Artists Elisabeth Penker, Michela Pelusio, Petros Touloudis, Panos Papadopoulos, and Nino Stelzl. Right: Collector Anne-Marie Ros.

Down on the floor, the dealers seemed pleased, particularly given dismal expectations, having already sold a great deal at the preview. Young Rotterdam-based gallery Joey Ramone had sold sculptures by Fotini Gouseti to English and Belgian collectors; dealer Erik Mulier had also sold some work to Belgians. Marc Van den Hende said he had bought a triptych by Eirene Efstathiou and was considering a Vlassis Caniaris piece from the 1970s. “I saw some surprises—young Greek artists I did not know—and great new galleries, like Elika and CAN,” Dutch collector Anne-Marie Ros said. By the end of the day, Dimitra and Sofia Vamiali reported that they had not seen one Greek collector, although another reported a Dakis Joannou sighting.

That evening at the Cypriot collector’s house, Joannou greeted us only in effigy: a sculpture by Paweł Althamer portraying him as an Indian chief, accompanied by a host of other art stars like Jeff Koons and Massimiliano Gioni caricatured all in white. We then embarked to the DESTE Foundation for a tour of “The System of Objects,” where curator Andreas Angelidakis led us around the labyrinthine gathering of objects raided from Joannou’s closets. It was definitely all about spectacle: like an alter ego of the collector’s house, the incredible array of furniture, artworks, dusty old dolls, and other strange objects were arranged throughout the deconstructed space—meandering into the guts of the building, and allowing different views on various rooms and exposing remnants of previous exhibitions. “This is how I felt the first time I went to Saatchi,” an artist said. “Like I was inside a funhouse.”

We moved on to the northern suburb of Ekali, where collector Nineta Vafeia was hosting a dinner in her stunning and sprawling Modernist villa. The collection, mostly large-scale paintings and photographs, were hung throughout the home and in a dedicated building across from a pool, somehow feeling like both a museum and home at once. A discreet corner in the dining room was dedicated to paintings by the grandmother and photos of the children. “Greek people are so nice,” collector Yannicke De Smedt commented over dinner. “We have been coming for years and have seen some great collections.” After dinner Vafeia relieved the pianist with renditions of “Strangers in the Night” and a tango standard while we lounged on giant cushions. These days there are benefits of a fair being less international and more a reflection of the local milieu. “We are entering an era of post-globalization,” said the Biennial Foundation’s Marieke Van Hal, “and places are trying to define their identities again.”

— Cathryn Drake

Left: Artist Thanos Kyriakides and curator Marina Fokidis. Right: Dealer Erik Mulier.

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Left: Dealer Jay Jopling, Kate Moss, artist Jake Chapman, and Rosemary Ferguson. Right: Paul McCarthy's Complex Pile. (All photos: Doretta Lau)

IN THE DAYS leading up to the first edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong, the city made headlines around the world because a giant rubber duck floating in Victoria Harbor—essentially a marketing tool for Hong Kong Art Week—had mysteriously deflated. On social media, the fowl was said to be a victim of the avian flu. Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman had titled his unfortunate piece Spreading Joy Around the World, and indeed the city rejoiced when the duck was revived last Tuesday, the day before the fair’s private view.

That night, many out-of-towners journeyed to the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade, the future home of M+, a museum for visual culture, to see “Inflation!” The exhibition, part of the M+ Mobile project, features seven massive inflatable sculptures—from Cao Fei’s House of Treasures to Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege. Here I saw the first of five women sporting the Skrillex haircut, perhaps a sign that the Art Basel Miami Beach crowd was making headways in Hong Kong. M+ senior curator Pi Li grinned with glee and affixed a sticker depicting Paul McCarthy’s Complex Pile, a giant inflatable poop installation, on my shirt, while collector Uli Sigg talked politics with M+ executive director Lars Nittve and curator Tobias Berger. The crowd clung to what little shade there was and fanned themselves as the sun beat down. “It’s too hot,” Berger said, turning down my request to see the M+ curatorial team bounce around Sacrilege.

Left: Collectors Henry Tang and Lisa Kuo. Right: Curator Tobias Berger, collector Uli Sigg, and Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew.

We were whisked to Central just in time for a flurry of openings. At Pedder Building, a sign indicated that the queue to enter, whether via the elevator or front stairs, would be thirty minutes. “What is this, Disneyland?” someone asked. Those in the know stuck to the back staircase on Theatre Lane and journeyed up to the exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin (“Writings Without Borders”), Simon Lee (Angela Bulloch), Ben Brown Fine Arts (“Not Vital”), Pearl Lam (Zhu Jinshi), Hanart TZ (Qiu Zhijie), and Gagosian (Basquiat). I wondered if they made Stella McCartney and Wendi Deng Murdoch take the back way in too.

The throngs continued to grow at 50 Connaught Road Central, where White Cube founder Jay Jopling held court with the Chapman brothers and Kate Moss amid a swarm of revelers. Farther upstairs, Emmanuel Perrotin was showing Takashi Murakami and Xavier Veilhan. In a room with a Murakami-designed carpet and opulent flower arrangements by florist Azuma Makoto, Perrotin hosted a casual dinner—so casual that it was flooded with crashers, and even guests had to scramble to find a place.

Early morning on Wednesday a storm swept through the city. The Hong Kong Observatory reported more than 18,000 lightning strikes. For the first time since 2010, the government administered a black-rain warning—Hong Kong’s version of a snow day. Precipitation levels were predicted at three inches per hour, and everyone was told to remain indoors. The art world was unfazed by the inclement conditions. Stock market trading was delayed until 1 PM, but Art Basel’s private view started promptly at noon.

Left: Para/Site executive director and curator Cosmin Costinas and curator Inti Guerrero. Right: Actors Louis Koo and Sandra Ng.

At the allotted time, collectors strolled through the gates, making their way through the 245 galleries at a leisurely pace. No mad dashes; a sense of order and tranquility pervaded. If only the prior night’s openings had been so measured! “Most of the major Asian collectors have shown up,” said Art Basel director Marc Spiegler. “We have many more collectors from mainland China than last year. But also what’s great about it is we’re seeing so many of the younger generation of Western collectors, both from Europe and even from America.” Spirits were high among dealers, too. “I wish I had opened my space in Hong Kong,” said Daniele Balice, showing in the city for the first time. “This is the fair I want to do every year.”

The quality of the pieces was high but left little room for surprises. (“Safe” was the keyword.) One dealer in the Discoveries sector confessed that, during install, she had looked at the surrounding booths and decided to tone down her offerings. Another dealer whispered that one of the blue-chip galleries had mounted a piece with a Christie’s sticker still on the frame.

So the vernissage was a rather subdued affair, despite the appearance of movie stars Louis Koo and Sandra Ng, as well as Henry Tang, former chief secretary for administration of Hong Kong, and his wife, Lisa Kuo. After a long day of viewing art, many took refuge in the brassy new VIP area before heading off to various dinners, like the one Georg Jensen and Dior organized for Artsy. The weather might not have delayed the fair, but it did force the Modern Media and K11 afterparty to be relocated from the Grand Hyatt Poolside to the hotel’s interior. At 10 PM, the small space was packed tight as can be, and hosts Adrian Cheng and Thomas Shao could hardly circulate among their guests.

Left: Intelligence Squared director Yana Peel and UCCA director Philip Tinari. Right: Musician and artist Kung Chi-shing during the Paper Rain parade.

The next day, Arto Lindsay’s Paper Rain parade took us on a junk ride from Wan Chai to Central, eventually evolving into an exuberant collaborative performance with musicians, dancers, and artists—a highlight of the Art Basel public activities. As a light drizzle fell, Lindsay turned to me: “Now it’s going to rain!” Apichatpong Weerasethakul filmed from the middle of the procession and the performance culminated in a concert by Otomo Yoshihide.

We stopped by the one-night-only Keith Haring and Retna exhibition at the Apex in Central Plaza before running off to Asia Art Archive’s dinner at the new private members club Duddell’s and a party at the intimate nightclub Fly hosted by collector Richard Chang and Dee Poon. When I arrived, the club was at capacity (no one seemed deterred by the cash bar), and the crowd was gyrating to early-aughts tunes. Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew and I gazed upon the Dionysian scene before us. “Hong Kong is the right place,” he affirmed. “It’s going to keep happening.” Hayward Gallery curator Cliff Lauson, who was visiting the city for the first time, said, “My colleague is going to Basel, but I chose to come to Hong Kong.” And the night wasn’t over yet. We decided to stop by Wun Dun, artist Adrian Wong’s Absolut Vodka bar installation. As the evening wore on, things got dramatic, with a man cutting himself on a champagne flute while outside two others got into a fistfight. I heard it was over art—no joke.

By Friday, everyone was looking a little bleary-eyed, but turnout for the Intelligence Squared Asia debate back at the convention center was strong. The motion this time around was “The market is the best judge of art’s quality.” Amy Cappellazzo of Christie’s and LA MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch argued for, while artist and writer Matthew Collings and Rirkrit Tiravanija were against. “I haven’t done a debate since I was ten years old and I was talking for the existence of UFOs,” said Tiravanija. “I fabricated everything, and we won.” The final tally from the audience? Twenty-five percent for and 73 against, with 2 percent undecided. It seems that even in the midst of a headstrong, popular art fair, the market has some limits.

— Doretta Lau

Left: Art Basel director Marc Spiegler. Right: Filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and artist Ming Wong.

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Left: Developer Alan Faena. (Photo: David X Prutting/BFA) Right: arteBA director Julia Converti and dealer Beatriz Lopez. (Except where noted, all photos: Kate Sutton)

“ALAN’S TRULY MAGICAL, like this unicorn cowboy dressed all in white. You’ll love him!” a friend babbled over brunch last Sunday, a day before I left for Buenos Aires to visit the Faena Arts Center. My first actual glimpse of the mythical Alan Faena would be from the rooftop terrace of the Aleph—the residential building that marks Foster + Partners’s debut in Latin America. Faena, indeed decked out in white, from his fedora to his feet, was strolling down the street outside the Faena Hotel, reappearing minutes later in a penthouse window. “Does he ever leave the district?” one of my companions wondered aloud. “Does he ever need to?” answered another.

CREATING VALUE WHERE THERE WAS NONE Faena Group boasts in the promotional literature. Bombastic, but to be sure, Faena Hotel and Universe has transformed the abandoned southern port of Puerto Madero into Buenos Aires chicest new address. Now Faena is hoping to bring some of his magic to Miami, where plans are in the works for one of the more ambitious developments currently going in the US. Sprawling from Thirty-Second Street to Thirty-Fifth Street, from the beach straight back to Indian Creek, the new Faena District will feature a residential building by Foster + Partners, a hotel by Roman and Williams, and three buildings by Rem Koolhaas and OMA: a bazaar, a parking facility, and an art center. Another art facility in Miami? “We’re working on our angle,” Faena Group representative Alicia Goldstein assured me.

Left: Pablo Banares and Faena Arts Center director Ximena Caminos. Right: Curator Sonia Becce. (Photos: David X Prutting/BFA)

I would get a taste of what said angle might be with Faena Art Center’s dual openings of exhibitions by Russian collective AES+F and Argentinean Eduardo Navarro. AES+F’s “The Liminal Space Trilogy” unites three massive projections: Last Riot (2005–2007), The Feast of Trimalchio (2009–10), and Allegoria Sacra (2011–12), the last of which was recently awarded a Kandinsky Prize for its amusing/unsettling mix of aliens, centaurs, devil-centipedes, and drowning airports, all set to stun. Navarro, meanwhile, parked his modest Estudio Jurídico Mercosur III (Mercosur Law Studio III) in the street behind the center. The eighteen-meter-long semi trailer features both a mobile bar, offering visitors free fruit smoothies, and a law office, where a practicing barrister doles out pro bono legal advice. Navarro admitted to curator Sonia Becce that he found the neighborhood “like Holy Land, the biblical theme park on the Costanera, but for businessmen. Everything’s imitation something or other; nothing’s real, but it doesn’t matter: It’s a lucid dream.”

Monday night certainly felt like a hallucination, as we were treated to the fifth annual Fashion Edition BA. The competition pits five emerging designers against one another for $50,000 to develop their collections. It was like walking in on a Project Runway season finale, where all the build-up drama could be inferred merely from the different sound track selections. More than one designer took the opportunity to pay tribute to the hotel’s famous unicorns, which decorated a dining room. As the reception took over most of the facilities, we were discreetly invited out to the terrace for a bottle of Faena Malbec by the campfire, which Faena himself was stoking, white linen suit be damned. (“He never gets one spot on him!” his wife, Faena Arts Center director Ximena Camenos, laughed.)

“I really believe in the power of art to transform,” Caminos continued, her eyes fixed on the fire. “My grandmother worked at MAMBA, so maybe it’s just in my blood. But I trained to be a painter until I realized that helping other artists is what I do better.” One of those artists is Nicola Costantino, who will represent Argentina in Venice. Costantino originally planned a mournful tribute to Eva Perón, but the concept changed slightly when Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, got wind of the project, and volunteered herself for the role. (“She sees herself as the new Evita,” our taxi driver later explained.)

Left: Artist Eduardo Navarro at his bar. (Photo: David X Prutting/BFA) Right: ArteBA President Facundo Gómez Minujín and curator Abaseh Mirvali.

The next day, I managed to pay my own respects to the famous First Lady (or at least a few of her handbags) at the Evita Museum before ducking over to the Alvear Palace Hotel for a welcome reception for the twenty-second arteBA fair, which kicked off that night at La Rural. Not shy about midday drinking, the primarily Argentinean crowd also included artists Gonzalo Lebrija, Klara Liden, and Alexander Wagner; curators Cuauhtémoc Medina, Pablo León de la Barra, José Roca, and Abaseh Mirvali; and collectors Gail and Louis Adler, Gabriel Werthein, and the colorful Dudu von Thielmann. “Dudu’s an institution,” my companion whispered, reaching for her wine. “Her house may as well be a history museum. You should definitely get yourself invited there.”

Before I had a chance to try, I found myself swept into conversation with Mirvali and genial arteBA foundation president Facundo Gómez Minujín, son of the legendary artist Marta. He had just announced that, after fourteen years on the board, he would be stepping down as its president. Minujín didn’t let on to any exhaustion, and instead rattled off the roster of galleries and special projects: “arteBA is run as a foundation, not to make profit, which is how we can afford to bring in curators like Chus [Martínez], Cuauhtémoc, and Pablo,” Minujín explained. “It really operates more like a biennial; last year alone, we had 120,000 visitors. 120,000!”

Left: Dealers Alexander Schröder and Fernando Mesta. Right: Arcos Dorados Solo Show winner Adriana Minoliti in her Playroom.

arteBA ensures those visitors have plenty to look at, supplementing the traditional fair format with two competition sections and an Open Forum that’s free to the public. The young and the restless were nominally cordoned into the Barrio Joven, where I was particularly charmed by Julio Hilger’s installation at Fiebre, of ceramic cartoon characters learning to play guitar from an instructional video. But the main fair had smart international showings from upstarts like La Central (Bogotá), Emma Thomas (São Paulo), and Revolver (Lima). Meanwhile, Jacques Martínez opted to revisit recent history, with a memorable sampling of painters from the 1970s. “These were the hippest artists of their generation,” director Clara Martínez recalled, as I paused to appreciate a jarring portrait by Hugo Svernini. “Now they’ve been all but forgotten, entirely unjustly.” Over in the Arcos Dorados Prize for Latin American Painting, assembled by de la Barra, the vibrant palettes of Pedro Varela and Adriana Minoliti spiked the intelligent elegance of GT Pellizzi and the Space Invaders–esque animations of Lucía Madriz. (Minoliti ended up taking top honors for her Playroom installation, a live-in bonanza of form and color.)

The real highlight, however, was the U-Turn section, which was put together by Mirvali and featured the fair’s international heavyweights: Esther Schipper, Vermelho, Travesía Cuatro, and Proyectos Monclova among them. Claire Fontaine’s tennis balls—stuffed with the kind of contraband (lipstick, candy, cigarettes) smuggled into prisons—lay scattered on either side of the wall between MD72 and House of Gaga, and there were strong solo shows of Alexander Wagner (RaebervonStenglin) and Roberto Winter (Mendes Wood). I found myself particularly drawn to Gastón Pérsico’s exquisite cabinets at Nora Fisch. “Careful. I put vodka in the humidifier,” Pérsico warned me when I leaned in for a closer look.

That night, the fair was hosting a seated dinner within La Rural, after which U-Turn would throw its own bash at Casa Carlos Calvo, a restored 1860 mansion in the trendy San Telmo district. Before taking in either, however, I had one more pit stop: the famed Rojo Tango at the Faena Cabaret. The hour and a half of twirls, high kicks, and dips made my five hours at the fair look like a warm-up stretch, but it still hardly prepared me for the dance floor at Casa Calvo.

— Kate Sutton

Left: Artist Lev Evzovitch of AES+F and actress Anna Skidanova. Right: artBO director Maria Paz Gaviria, artist GT Pellizzi, and dealer Cecilia Jurado. (Photo: Nacho Valle)

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Left: Left: Fulya Erdemci, curator of the 13th Istanbul Biennial. Right: Andrea Phillips, co-organizer of the biennial's ten-month public program, “Public Alchemy.” (All photos: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie)

WHEN THE ISTANBUL FOUNDATION FOR CULTURE AND ARTS (IKSV) struck a sponsorship deal with Koç Holding to support five editions of the Istanbul Biennial over ten years, from 2006 through 2016, one can reasonably assume that everyone involved wanted something fairly solid—financial stability, reputational fortification—from the arrangement. What no one seems to have imagined, however, was that the deal would so ruffle the feathers of Istanbul’s factional communities of contemporary artists, political activists, and territorial leftists that Koç—Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, which is run by a powerful, wealthy family and has its hands in everything from banking, oil, and gas to defense—has since inspired a veritable performance program of increasingly aggressive protests running parallel to but angled against the biennial itself.

In 2009, a network of anonymous collectives set out to sabotage the event, albeit playfully, by producing posters mocking the curatorial framework, an open letter accusing the biennial of whitewashing arms dealers, a disseminated set of instructions for interrupting video projections and multimedia installations, and a series of demonstrations staged on the opening night, which sucked the air from an otherwise fine and serious exhibition curated by the Croatian collective WHW. At the time, observers across the political spectrum chalked the protests up to the petulance of the so-called “orthodox left” (how’s that for paradox), which apparently saw WHW as a rival and a threat, and perceived the group’s leftist credentials and Bertolt Brecht–inspired themes as an encroachment on its territory.

Left: Artists Ali Kazma and Burak Arikan. Right: Writer Lara Fresko with curator Vasif Kortun, director of research and programs at Salt in Istanbul.

In 2011, when Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa organized a prim and mostly apolitical exhibition, a group known as the Conceptual Art Laboratory took advantage of the ideological vacuum to reprint—and slip into the biennial’s promotional material—a damning letter written by Vehbi Koç, founder of the family fortune, in support of the military coup that overthrew Turkey’s civilian government in 1980, which, among other things, set the country on a path of economic liberalization. The coup was followed by a dark period of roundups, arrests, and tribunals. In the text of his letter, Koç blithely puts himself at the disposal of coup leader Kenan Evren, and offers his services against the malice of communists, Armenians, and Kurds.

So what can we expect in 2013? Well, for one thing, the curator Fulya Erdemci, who is organizing the thirteenth edition of the biennial, is not only rooting her exhibition deeply in the city of Istanbul but is also digging into some of its most pressing urban problems. This firm emphasis on a specific time and place promises to position her biennial as a welcome counterbalance to that of her predecessors, Hoffmann and Pedrosa, whose exhibition could have been anywhere. But it has also exposed Erdemci to a more virulent strain of protest, in part because with the launch of an ambitious, ten-month public program in January, called “Public Alchemy,” she considers her biennial already well underway.

There are still four months to go before the official opening, but Erdemci has titled her show (Mom, Am I Barbarian? after a book by the radical Turkish poet Lale Müldür) and outlined her curatorial themes (the public sphere as a political forum; contemporary art as the thing that both defines and dismantles what we know, experience, and understand to be public). A “prologue” exhibition just opened at TANAS in Berlin, featuring works by Jimmie Durham, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Amal Kenawy, Cinthia Marcelle, Şener Özmen, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, among others. A writing workshop organized alongside the biennial is now hitting its halfway mark, as is “Public Alchemy,” which has so far addressed issues of urban planning, civil rights, censorship, repression, and free speech, all leavened with poetry readings, music, and a walking tour.

Left: Curator and critic Maria Lind, director of Tensta Konsthall. Right: IKSV's production team removing a protester from the performance.

The Conceptual Art Laboratory has inserted itself into every event for “Public Alchemy” to date. In March, protesters countered Erdemci’s Mom, Am I Barbarian? with C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” which they recited until a day’s worth of talks and lectures had to be shut down and rescheduled. Two weeks ago, the group interrupted “Public Alchemy” again, during the third installment in the series, titled “Public Capital,” which delved into the relationship between art and money through a performance on May 10 and a symposium on May 11. A group of young, lanky activists turned up for the performance by the Brussels-based duo Vermeir & Heiremans, which was held in a corporate-style conference room at the Marmara Taksim Hotel. As that piece unfolded, the activists staged their own bit of agitprop theater.

At ten-minute intervals, someone would stand up from the crowd, show off a T-shirt and a faux-branded banner printed with the names of gentrifying neighborhoods in Istanbul, and then drape himself or herself on the floor in the middle of the room, only to be quickly picked up and hastily dispatched by three members of IKSV’s loyal production team, who removed five protesters before the rest of the audience, many more activists among them, left in droves. For the duration of these two bizarrely competing performances—Vermeir & Heiremans were doing the first run-through of a commissioned work called Art House Index, a putative Skype conversation with a fictional financial analyst who breaks down the abject horrors of contemporary art as an asset class—Conceptual Art Laboratory’s Niyazi Selçuk kept a video camera trained on Erdemci’s face, which led to a long, drawn-out confrontation, ending well past midnight with both parties at a police station filing complaints and countercomplaints against each other.

“I’m working on the public domain so of course I am touching the most contested space and opening it up to conflict,” Erdemci says about Taksim Square, in whose proximity the performance was strategically placed. The square sees a million in pedestrian traffic a day. It is Istanbul’s preeminent public space. And it is currently in the throes of a controversial redevelopment plan, which is considered symptomatic of larger issues, including rampant real-estate speculation, demographic shifts, the dispersal of poor communities from the city center to peripheral suburbs, and the tint and scent of corruption that lingers around Turkey’s robust, non-recessionary economy. “Istanbul is undergoing a wild transformation,” Erdemci explains. “What we are doing with the biennial is concurrently commenting on what’s happening, not in the past or the future but in the present. For me it was inevitable that we would look into the city. Art has many ways to communicate. Dialogue and debate are an important part of it. We need to negotiate with local government, the intelligentsia, grassroots activists, and the extreme hard-core activists. There are publics to activate. If people are attacking us, then what we are trying to do is already there.”

Left: Writer and scholar Suhail Malik. Right: Artists Vermeir & Heiremans introducing their performance in a conference room of the Marmara Taksim Hotel.

Of course, one could argue that if the protesters really want to see changes in how Istanbul is developing, then they might want to take their demonstrations elsewhere, to the offices where public policies are actually made, or to the headquarters of Koç, if that is indeed their target. One could also argue that with this latest round, the protests have taken an unfortunate turn toward the personal and potentially chauvinist, attacking Erdemci directly because she is the curator but also, it seems, because she is a woman. A number of Istanbul’s contemporary artists, meanwhile, have the good humor to be critical of the protests from a formalist point of view. “They’re just not creative enough,” one artist told me later. Throughout the program, several artists ducked in and out of the proceedings, amused but somewhat indifferent to the disruptions, including Ali Kazma, who is representing Turkey at this year’s Venice Biennale; Emre Hüner, who was enjoying the tail end of a double-barreled exhibition at Rodeo and the nonprofit Nesrin Esirtgen Collection; Ahmet Öğüt, who was on his way to Beirut to give a talk at Villa Fleming; and Burak Arikan, who hosted the unofficial afterparty in the studio he will soon vacate when he moves to New York this summer.

On Saturday morning, Erdemci was clearly tired and a little rattled. But with Andrea Phillips, who is co-organizing “Public Alchemy” and served as a lively, engaging moderator during the symposium to follow, she had already dashed off a written response, and prepared a small speech. She welcomed the protesters’ repeated use of the biennial as a public platform but cautioned them against veering off into obstruction, harassment, and the vandalism of other artists’ work, including the Vermeir & Heiremans performance. No protesters showed up for that day full of talks and discussions in the Salon IKSV, which was a shame, given the many probing questions that came up, courtesy of some fine contributions by the academics Alberto López Cuenca and Suhail Malik, the dealer Haldun Dostoğlu, and the curators Vasif Kortun, Maria Lind, Barnabás Bencsik, and Kuba Szreder. There was talk of moral versus commercial economies, vernacular culture and self-styled communities as bulwarks against the market, the manipulation and cartelization of that market, Gregory Sholette’s 2010 book Dark Matter and the status of labor in and around contemporary art, the need for institutions to be agile more than sustainable, and the plain fact that art schools are graduating way too many students for the system to bear. Did the participants make radical proposals for reconfiguring that system? Absolutely. With just two biennials left on Koç’s clock, perhaps the sponsorship deal could become the occasion for a critical response more productive and precise.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Left: Artist Emre Hüner. Right: Curator Barnabas Bencsik, 13th Istanbul Biennial curator Fulya Erdemci, Istanbul Biennial director Bige Örer, and scholar Alberto Lopez Cuenca of the Universidad de las Americas in Pueblo, Mexico.

Left: Auckland Triennial curator Hou Hanru. (Photo: Jade Lucas) Right: Volunteers for Peter Robinson's hikoi at Auckland Art Gallery. (Photo: John McIver)

AUCKLAND IS A WEIRD PLACE. It’s routinely identified as one of the most “livable” cities in the world, but it’s also characterized by crippling urban sprawl and prohibitive housing costs. The morning Hou Hanru’s iteration of the Auckland Triennial, “If you were to live here...,” opened to the public, the New Zealand Herald led with a story about the city’s housing bubble: In a few years, the average home, it predicted, will cost a million bucks ($800,000 USD). But Auckland is also energetic, hopeful, and increasingly shaped by a cultural mix of Maori, Pacific Islanders, Asians, and people of European descent that isn’t found anywhere else on the planet.

A place with huge aspirations but plenty of problems. Hou’s title gestured toward solutions while also slipping into the kind of catchall, speculative ambiguity that has defined the global curatorial zeitgeist for the past fifteen years. But despite its definitional fuzziness, “If you were to live here...” is a very good show, and a very good show for Auckland in particular: sophisticated, engaged, and marked at every turn by Hou’s pulling power. International participating artists include Anri Sala, Allora & Calzadilla, Michael Lin, Claire Fontaine, Yto Barrada, Shahzia Sikander, Ryoji Ikeda, and Allan Sekula. There was also a serious cohort of international curators in town—including Pascal Beausse, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Juliana Engberg—to see what Hou’s vision for Auckland looked like.

Most of New Zealand’s significant institutional art folk showed up too. Whether people liked what they saw or not, the important thing was that they were there. And it wasn’t just art-world insiders: Most of the openings were packed; the public program was well attended; and even after a full weekend, Hou’s floor talk at the Auckland Art Gallery (AAG) was crammed with people. It looked more like a student sit-in than a curator’s lecture. It seems Auckland was hungry for Hou and his semiutopian, internationalist vision.

Left: Sarat Maharaj. (Photo: Melissa Laing) Right: Auckland Art Gallery chief curator Zara Stanhope and artist Michael Lin. (Photo: John McIver)

New Zealand artist Peter Robinson kicked off the official proceedings. On Thursday afternoon, two hundred or so volunteers, mostly art students, gathered at AAG and each picked up one of Robinson’s “mood sticks.” The group then moved in a hikoi (a Maori word used to describe a collective journey, often associated with protest) across the central city to the Auckland Museum, where the sticks were left for staff to position throughout the museum’s collections, in places of their own choosing. Robinson’s gentle intervention, generosity, and blurring of boundaries between institutions set the overall tone for the triennial.

Sadly, that same spirit didn’t entirely carry through to that night’s official opening at AAG. There had already been grumblings about the invitations: strictly one admittance and two different entry times, a convoluted and strict protocol that prevented some people from showing up at all. A shame, as the collective feeling about the triennial was positive and the art in AAG was excellent, so it deserved a better party than it got. The invitations did nonetheless inspire the triennial’s funniest guerrilla gesture. On Thursday morning, a YouTube video based on Hitler’s ubiquitous bunker meltdown from Downfall started making the rounds. Granted, it’s been done before (and often), but the “Auckland Triennial” version, in which the Führer loses it because he didn’t get an invite and couldn’t even go as someone’s date, was a riot.

Hitler finds out about the 5th Auckland Triennial opening.

Thankfully, this was a minor blip in the triennial celebrations. Friday saw a low-key breakfast opening for the Robinson and Siegel works at the Auckland Museum. The rest of the day was filled with high-quality panel discussions and artist talks, leading up to an excellent opening at Auckland University of Technology’s (AUT) St Paul St Gallery. The opening was ostensibly for triennial artists Sikander and Ho Tzu Nyen, but it also served as a prelude to the event’s keynote lecture. Professor Sarat Maharaj gave a paper titled “Know How & No How: thinking through art as knowledge production in a time of ‘Creativity Cholera’ ” to a reassuringly full lecture hall. Personally, I wasn’t convinced by Maharaj’s vision of the “global contemporary,” but the argument’s structural intelligence had to be admired.

Saturday provided no letup, with morning openings at Fresh Gallery in South Auckland (a venue that has raised the profiles of Auckland’s Pacific Islands artists), followed by a full program of talks at AAG. Official partner Artspace held an opening that night to celebrate its contributions to the triennial, which included great photographs from Yto Barrada and video work by Angelica Mesiti. Auckland’s art dealers, who play such a vital role in energizing the local scene, also joined in. True to the internationalism of the weekend, Michael Lett Gallery hosted a book launch for one of New Zealand’s most successful expatriate artists, Germany-based Michael Stevenson. And Starkwhite gave its space over to Brisbane-based curator Robert Leonard, who presented a fantastic show of Australian nerd art called “Bazinga!” Leonard, who will soon be returning to Wellington’s City Gallery, is the best New Zealand curator of his generation by some distance, and his show—noisy, obsessive, geeky, a little camp in places—was antithetical, or maybe even antidotal to Hou’s quieter approach. As if to hammer home the point, the opening ended with a live performance by the collective Botborg: a massive audiovisual feedback assault that drove plenty of people out of the gallery.

As the openings wound down, we all moved quickly to the packed club Galatos to witness an immersive, mesmerizing set by Ryoji Ikeda, one of the world’s best electronic artists. Even a fairly catastrophic technological failure halfway through couldn’t undermine the experience. Ikeda’s extraordinary electric surge did little to fill in the ellipses of Hou’s conditional phrase “If you were to live here…” But it was the first major event in the city in some time that made me feel very happy that I do.

— Anthony Byrt

Left: Triennial project Kauri-Oke by Makeshift. (Photo: John McIver) Right: Botborg performs at Starkwhite. (Photo: Anthony Byrt)