2008年5月13日 星期二

Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Robert Rauschenberg at his home and studio in Captiva, Fla. in 2005. More Photos >

Published: May 14, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.

He died of heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the artist's gallery in Manhattan.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”

Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a Saint Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that nevertheless masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.

Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, Fla., these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on a project that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he believed, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”

He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”

That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for these Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from the torn scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.

But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers as flotsam in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 50’s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.

At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.

Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles, into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric, akin to bandages, from which paint dripped, like blood. “Interview,” which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photographs of toreros, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.

There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected places; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who immigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a full-blooded Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste.

For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks” sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing.

He studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas in Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Gallery in California while stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps, and it occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.

He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the GI Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her.

Albers, a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg, was on the other hand recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”

“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”

Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new media, which Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool.

For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950, he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s companion, Darryl Pottorf.

Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery. “Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, as Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all-black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.

“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings, which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events like passing shadows. “I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well, hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, he began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. The artist thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,’’ he wrote to the critic.

Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages like ‘“Monogram.’’ Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world.

Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.

In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.’’ Living together in a succession of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960’s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.

Along with the combines, Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s ‘Inferno’,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secretive. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him combine images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.

Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing. His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963, he choreographed “Pelican,’’ in which he performed on roller skates wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination both with collaboration and with mixing art with technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster collaborations between artists and scientists.

In 1964, he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.’’ He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution.

Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.

When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was in Captiva, a slender island off Florida’s Gulf coast, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became Captiva’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village back in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island.

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview in the giant studio on Captiva in 2000. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”

He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

2008年5月8日 星期四

在地活力》迷你藝術品 擺進辦公室

活動名稱:藝流台北春拍預展

活期期間:5月16、17日上午10:00至下午5:00

活動地點:台北展演二館(世貿二館,台北市松廉路3號)

主辦人:藝流國際拍賣

藝術本是人人皆可親近,藝流國際這次台北春拍特別規劃一般價位的藝術品,讓年輕的新一代藏家們以較低的門檻進入藝術投資領域。預展中,除了可以看到精品,也可以看到名家較小號、價位較低的作品,這些較小號的作品適合擺掛在辦公室或家裏。

預展中可以看到書畫家溥心畬的墨跡、江兆申的五言對聯、臺靜農行書對聯等;當代藝術名家也有不少小品,包括趙無極的系列版畫、水彩名家馬白水的作品、朱銘的青銅12生肖系列、攝影大師郎靜山作品…。不少作品都是數萬元起標。

還有張大千和黃君璧作品、林玉山的老虎畫作、于右任的草書、國父孫中山先生的墨跡「博愛」、安迪沃荷的普普藝術、朱銘的木雕、周春芽和侯俊明的版畫、李善單國際大獎畫作,起標價也在百萬元以內。

店家傳奇》故宮晶華獨家曝光

「故宮晶華」提供觀光客更完備的用餐環境。
記者蘇健忠/攝影
斥資台幣四億元,歷時兩年半興建的「故宮晶華」,終於要在5月中旬試營運了!這家規畫在故宮展覽大樓西側的宴飲中心,提供八大菜系,將可同時容納近千人用餐。

外觀由建築師姚仁喜設計,以仿宋朝青瓷自然形成的「冰裂紋」為外觀,古意與時尚感交錯,比起故宮更像故宮。

這棟地上三層、地下兩層的建築物,內部由日本空間設計師橋本夕紀夫操刀,他擅長使用燈光來營造氣氛,包廂牆面有「蘭亭序」、「前赤壁賦」的燈影,地板更是變化多端,使用了仿古灰磚等十種材質,讓人猶如身處古畫中,享受杯觥交錯的樂趣。

「冰裂紋」是構成故宮晶華內外連貫的主要符號,概念來自宋朝青瓷的自然裂紋。
記者蘇健忠/攝影

包廂牆面是宋朝「清明上河圖」剪影,經光線透視出當時市井小民的風貌。
記者蘇健忠/攝影

餐廳內部與故宮展品有許多巧妙連結,像柱身是根據新石器時代的玉琮(祭祀的禮器)打造而成。
記者蘇健忠/攝影

【2008/05/09 聯合報】

時尚城市王 倫敦打敗巴黎

【富比世/Nicola Ruiz】

德國柏林。富比世/提供
巴黎有 La Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré。紐約有第五大道和麥迪森大街。對於最新的時裝流行趨勢,購物者只要到義大利米蘭的蒙提拿破崙街 (Via Monte Napoleone) 看看就可以瞭解了。但是這些都不能與人口多元化的倫敦相媲美。這座城市三分之一的人口都不是在英國出生;230萬倫敦人共用著他們的文化風格、時尚與美 食。這種融合為這座城市帶來的極大的活力,最近的一項調查將它評為了全球最時尚的城市。

《Place Branding and Public Diplomacy》雜誌編輯兼《2008 City Brands Index》(2008年城市品牌指數)調查(上月公佈的排名就基於該調查)作者 Simon Anholt 表示:「倫敦的唯一不利因素就是它的安全性和消費水準。」Anholt 還與城市及國家政府就提高其國家聲譽的政策、投資和策略進行了諮詢。他說:「但是這兩個因素也幫助提升了其形象:如果太安全,人們就感覺不到刺激,如果消 費水準太低,它的受尊重度就會降低。」

名列前10的城市還包括澳洲雪梨、羅馬(義大利)、西班牙巴賽隆納、澳洲墨爾本、柏林(德國)、荷蘭鹿特丹、和西班牙馬德里。

數字背後

Anholt City Brands Index(Anholt 城市品牌指數)對18個國家的18,000人進行了調查。評判城市的標準包括生活方式、口碑、文化多元性、文化生活和吸引力。比如,受訪者會被要求根據氣 候和天氣、污染程度以及建築和公園的外表吸引力列出40佳城市。他們被問及他們所預期的每個城市人們的熱情度,以及每個城市在過去30年裏在科技、文化和 政治領域對世界的貢獻大小。

Anholt 說:「較精明的政府一直以來都將他們的城市看作是一個需要向外推廣的品牌。但全球化的後果之一就是城市之間對遊客、投資者、企業和重大盛事的競爭變得空前激烈,因此適當注重聲譽現在已經以一種以前所未有的方式加以強制。」

酷都

倫敦位居榜首,這部分歸功於全球近三分之一的人口(包括澳洲、印度和加拿大)與英聯邦有聯繫,並將倫敦視為世界金融、時尚和音樂之都。之前宣佈的2012年奧運會舉辦權又給這座城市貼上了一枚時尚的印章。

其孕育超凡魅力領導人的能力也沒有減弱。在1997年掌權之際,首相東尼‧布萊爾 (Tony Blair) 推出了「酷不列顛」(Cool Britannia) 計畫,旨在將倫敦定位為一個酷而時尚的新銳城市,展現在世人面前。這個推廣口號旨在嘗試為英國重塑一個進取、有遠見且多元化的形象,並同時推廣 Oasis、辣妹 (Spice Girls) 和 Blur 等英倫搖滾品牌。

這似乎起了作用。美國西北大學 (Northwestern University) 國際行銷學教授、40多本區域行銷著作作者 Philip Kotler 表示:「這裏有悠久的歷史和多元文化的人口。這裏是世界金融中心、藝術中心及文物中心,並有著生機勃勃的能量。」

關於巴黎排名第二,Anholt 表示,在贏得這一領先位置方面巴黎所做的努力少於其他城市。自20年前的 Arche de La Defense 至今,巴黎就沒有出現新的著名建築,最近也很少舉辦過受大眾喜愛的盛大活動。Anholt 說,與羅馬和米蘭一樣,巴黎是坐享其成。

他表示:「巴黎是最時尚的城市之一,這幾乎成了一種陳詞濫調。但它卻已發展成為一種全球性的流行文化。尤其是在發展中國家,人們都期望能在法國享受美食、時尚以及精緻的生活方式。多年後它可能會變成一座糟糕的城市,但它卻不會因此失去這種聲譽。」

不管怎樣,如果你希望置身於美景當中,那麼巴黎仍是不二選擇。當被問及哪座城市最美時,50%的受訪者表示巴黎最為迷人,而46%的人認為當屬羅馬,29%的人選擇紐約,只有5%的人認為是北京。

位居最時尚城市排行榜第15名的城市米蘭被選為對全球時裝作出最重要貢獻的城市,而華盛頓、馬德里和東京則分別在政治、文化和科技方面做出了最重要的貢獻。

當然,每座城市都有其自身獨特的榮譽需要保持。有些政府想打造一座安全乾淨的城市,而有些政府卻努力將自己的城市打造得更加酷勁十足。

Anholt 說:「荷蘭給人的印象是穩定、可靠、高效、富有和無趣。而阿姆斯特丹給人的感覺就時尚很多。這一切都是因為色情、毒品和搖滾。該城市政府希望能保持那樣鮮 明時尚的吸引力。」Anholt 稱位居最時尚城市排行榜第9名的阿姆斯特丹是少數幾座透過酷T恤測試 (cool T-shirt test) 的城市之一。「如果你將『I heart Amsterdam』印在一件白色T恤衫上,那麼它的售價比沒有這幾個單詞的白色T恤要高。」

雪梨同樣也透過了 Anholt 的酷T恤測試,該城市在最時尚城市排行榜上排在紐約、羅馬和巴賽隆納之前,位居第三位,這令除了那些在雪梨享受生活的人們之外的所有其他人都感到非常驚訝。

Anholt 稱:「每個人都熱愛澳洲。它代表了一種令人嚮往的品牌,這幾乎在《鱷魚先生》(Crocodile Dundee) 裏都有所體現。這部電影為澳洲城市的形象增添了奇跡般的光彩。該電影已風靡全球。如今澳洲被認為是一個完美的國家:熱情、富有、好客和文明。」

全球最時尚城市
排名
城市
簡介
1
辣妹 (Spice Girls) 和大衛‧貝克漢 (David Beckham) 可能都受益於東尼‧布萊爾(Tony Blair) 於20世紀90年代末提倡的「酷不列顛」運動,該運動旨在將倫敦打造成一座「酷」勁十足的新潮城市,但該城市之所以能夠位居全球最時尚城市排行榜榜首,還得益於它的悠久歷史、多元文化和富有。唯一對倫敦不利的因素是其安全性和消費水準。
2
Kotler 表示:「巴黎擁有一種其他城市所沒有的魅力。除了精緻美食之外,它還具有浪漫、經典、流行和時尚的特質。」
3
研 究型作家 Simon Anholt 表示:「雪梨已能夠將自身塑造成一座更加成熟的城市形象,給人的印象不再僅僅是袋鼠和澳洲人煙稀少的內地,在這點上,雪梨就顯得特別睿智。雪梨歌劇院有助 於使人們聯想到高雅文化、上等美食和夜生活,但真正讓該城市揚名的是2000年雪梨奧運會。」
4
研究型作家 Simon Anholt 表示:「住在美國之外的人們會認為紐約才是美國的首都。這座位於美國東海岸的城市並沒有因為美國的對外政策而遭受非議,而華盛頓特區卻因此而飽受非議。紐約囊括了一切總是與美國相關的美好的事物。」
5
「羅馬的魅力來自於義大利式的生活方式。在這座城市,高水準的生活方式主要體現在藝術、美食、音樂、美景和歷史上。」
查看所有全球最時尚的城市(圖)
包括西班牙馬德里 (Madrid, Spain)、荷蘭阿姆斯特丹 (Amsterdam, Netherlands)、德國柏林 (Berlin, Germany)、澳洲墨爾本 (Melbourne, Australia) 和西班牙巴賽隆納 (Barcelona, Spain)
資料來源:富比世,製表:許惠雯

原文:Forbes.com The World's Most Stylish Cities

【2008-04-24 富比世】

2008年5月7日 星期三

法國》第一夫人賣包包? 為乳癌義賣

掛著法國第一夫人卡拉布妮玉照的Tommy Hilfiger公益包,現在是巴黎最「吸睛」的櫥窗景致。
記者袁青/攝影

哪些人事物 現在紅不讓?地球很小,今天東京的發燒貨,明天你可以拿到手;世界很大,哪裡又有人賣怪東西,或用很怪的方式賣東西嗎?天羅地網,記者幫你包打聽!

此刻,巴黎街頭最吸引人的櫥窗,恐怕非貴為法國第一夫人的卡拉布妮(Carla Bruni),輕擁一只Tommy Hilfiger皮包的廣告畫面莫屬了。

以紅絲帶繫著現為法國總統夫人的卡拉布妮玉照吊牌(如右圖),這款Tommy Hilfiger包,是設計師和布妮合作的作品,'06年第一次在米蘭上市100枚,立即被搶購一空。這款為專門研究及治療乳癌的非營利事業機構 Breast Health Institute (BHI)募款的公益包款,因如今搖身一變成為法國第一夫人的布妮掛保證,人氣更旺。

為讓更多人參與,Tommy Hilfiger再追加1千枚限量包作義賣。但該計畫目前只限Tommy Hilfiger米蘭、巴黎、倫敦等歐洲重要旗艦店販賣,所有包款60%收入都將提供捐助。

現為法國第一夫人的布妮,當時是以藝人身分參與Tommy Hilfiger的公益活動。由名攝影師Raymond Depardon操刀, 選在她巴黎的寓所拍攝,當時布妮才從歐洲巡迴演唱回來,鏡頭前,她側著頭,輕擁包包,完美地呈現出優雅、美麗和聰明的氣質。

這款包'06年首次上市時,每枚2千歐元。今年4月21日,由布妮親自簽名的義賣包,在巴黎Tommy Hilfiger旗艦店,舉行公開慈善募款競標,以1萬歐元(約台幣47萬元)拍出,算是第一夫人上任後的第一樁善舉。

2008年5月4日 星期日

The collected utterances of Charles Saatchi, 1994-2003

Charles Saatchi Biography : British art collector and founder of Saatchi and Saatchi
Famous for : founding the popular Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency and for supporting contemporary British artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

I don't buy art in order to leave a mark or to be remembered; clutching at immortality is of zero interest to anyone sane.
Charles Saatchi - Art Collecting


The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life.
Charles Saatchi - Criticism - Employee


There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artist's dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good.
Charles Saatchi - Art Collecting - Investing


I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.
Charles Saatchi - Art Collecting - Advertising


If you can't take a good kicking, you shouldn't parade how much luckier you are than other people.
Charles Saatchi - Criticism - Luck - People


Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches.
Charles Saatchi - Art Collecting - Ambition - Selling


I don't have a romantic attachment to what could have been. If I had kept all the work I had ever bought it would feel like Kane sitting in Xanadu surrounded by his loot. It's enough to know that I have owned and shown so many masterpieces of modern times.
Charles Saatchi - Art Collecting


Nobody can give you advice after you've been collecting for a while. If you don't enjoy making your own decisions, you're never going to be much of a collector anyway.
Charles Saatchi - Art Collecting - Investing - Decisions

On his reclusive nature:
If I continued to turn up, people would realise how ordinary I am.

On his hidden depths:
There's nothing complicated about me. There are no hidden depths. As Frank Stella said about minimalism, what you see is what you see.

On the charge that he is thin-skinned:
True.

On claims that he was the most powerful force in the rise of British art:
False.

On artistic judgment:
I don't have any ground rules for judging art. Sometimes you look and don't feel very comfortable with it - but that doesn't tell you very much. It doesn't necessarily reveal much about the quality of the work.

On art as an investment:
If I were interested in art as investment, I would just show Picasso and Matisse. But that's not what I do. I buy new art, and 90% of the art I buy will probably be worthless in 10 years' time to anyone except me.

On changing tastes:
I don't know how much of the art I like is significant. Who knows what will last? I try to keep my collection fresh. I don't want to end up like William Randolph Hearst in Xanadu, who just squirrelled art away. I do it for the pleasure of putting on shows. It's for my personal gratification.

On buying his first piece of art at the age of 16:
I thought I could afford it.

On claims that he is a dealer rather than a collector:
It would be entirely inappropriate for me to continue to endlessly buy and not try to keep the collection on some kind of cutting edge. I very much want it to be a living collection.

On selling his early collection:
I loved minimalism passionately, but when you realise there are other things in life besides Carl Andre and Robert Ryman, it is difficult to look at them and have the same love affair.

On the mother of Britart:
Margaret Thatcher created an environment in Britain in which people felt they could escape the roles they had been pushed into. They no longer had to be dropouts and failures. Students such as Damien Hirst felt they could do absolutely anything.

On the US:
I grew up in the cinema. I was in love with anything American. When I was 19, I went to New York City and saw a Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art: it was life-changing.

On Tracey Emin:
I was very slow to get the loopiness of Tracey's work. I'm a helpless fan now.

On Jake and Dinos Chapman:
That is what great art should be. Something that gives visual pleasure and makes you sit up and think, not the pseudo-controversial claptrap that Turner judges believe is cutting-edge.

On buying his first piece by Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years:
I thought of it as punked-over minimalism - Donald Judd gone mad.

On his new gallery:
Tate Modern is astonishing and I love the Hayward and the Serpentine. But I think that new British art is the most exciting and needs a dedicated showcase. I don't want the artists who I believe in having to wait until they are pensioners before the public sees their works in large-scale shows.

On Tate Modern:
It is daft to imagine that we are moving to County Hall to compete with the Tate... We are a small pimple showing off new bits of art. The Tate is the most fabulously successful museum in the world, thanks to Nick Serota.

On why he gave art worth £100,000 to the Tate:
Because they asked me.

On why he gave £1.25m worth of modern art to NHS hospitals:
Having paintings around creates a friendlier atmosphere. If the paintings are fun, so much the better.

On his success in advertising:
A fairy tale.

On advertising today:
I'm too old for advertising. I show my stuff to people and they laugh at me.

On his brother:
Maurice is the interesting one.

On tobacco advertising:
Silk Cut advertising was memorably striking. The tobacco industry provided a breath of fresh air.

On smoking:
I'll never quit.

On the gossip he heard about Charles Saatchi:
He'd been shot dead in Miami. But it turned out that was Versace.


Sources Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, New York Times, Observer.

For Sale: Art and Optimism

Christie’s Images Ltd.

Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for Self-Portrait” (1976) is expected to sell for between $25 million and $35 million at Christie’s New York. More Photos >


Published: May 4, 2008

YOU can’t help but wonder just how many of the smartly dressed people sitting night after night at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury over the next two weeks will be serious bidders and how many will be voyeurs hoping to witness an implosion of the multibillion dollar art market.

For years collectors and the news media have been speculating about when prices would finally top out. Spring sales estimates don’t suggest pessimism. The auction houses clearly hope that things will play out as they did three months ago in London, when, despite global economic queasiness, a Francis Bacon triptych sold for $51.6 million. Now two Bacon triptychs, whose owners no doubt want to capitalize on that high, are going on the block, at estimates of $25 million to $35 million (Christie’s, shown above) and a whopping $70 million (Sotheby’s).

But despite the bullish prices, this auction season feels different. Economic anxiety has deepened in recent months, with the proposed bailout of Bear Stearns in March, continuing stock-market gyrations and increasing signs that we either are in or about to be in a recession.

And the art market has its own problems. Sotheby’s stock price is roughly half what it was last October, and its latest annual report shows that the amount of money owed to the house more than doubled to $835 million last year. Hoping to keep the bubble afloat, Sotheby’s has been giving buyers more time to hand over the money for their purchases. (It is the only publicly traded company of the three houses.)

But despite it all, sales estimates at the auction houses are more robust than ever.

Aside from the Bacon triptychs (to be auctioned at Christie’s on May 13 and at Sotheby’s on May 14), Sotheby’s is selling a coveted Cubist painting by Fernand Léger at its Impressionist and modern art sale on Wednesday. It is estimated to fetch $35 million to $45 million.

Christie’s boasts some splashy offerings too. A rare Monet will be auctioned on Tuesday, and next week’s sale includes a strong sampling of Pop Art by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann. Sotheby’s and Christie’s are also selling 1950s red-and-yellow Rothkos that they predict will bring $35 million to $45 million each.

This season’s sellers include the television producer Douglas S. Cramer; the newsprint magnate Peter Brant; and Helga Lauffs of Germany, who is selling pieces by Robert Rauschenberg, Mr. Wesselmann and Donald Judd after terminating a long-term loan to the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld.

To land consignments like these, auction houses have given most of these collectors guarantees, an undisclosed sum promised to the seller regardless of the outcome of a sale. Obviously this poses a considerable risk for the houses. Whether the gamble will pay off is anyone’s guess.

Seasoned dealers and collectors are guessing that market cracks will emerge first in sales of less expensive works, that this is the season of the great divide between the Best and the Rest.

Auction house executives are busy talking up the soaring numbers of Asian, Russian and Middle Eastern collectors, trophy hunting with cash to burn. They also cite the recent $600 million private sale of art from the estate of the dealer Ileana Sonnabend — proof, they say, that there is still enough money out there and that no price is too high.

Yet the creative business maneuvers adopted by the auction houses to land big consignments and encourage buyers speak of desperation. Sotheby’s and Christie’s are at the point where they are often willing to forgo profits just to win commissions and beat out the other on sales totals. In addition to the guarantees granted to sellers, which in some cases this season are said to be even higher than the works’ sales estimates, the two companies are buying works of art outright, advancing sellers money ahead of the sales and in rare cases even becoming involved in sellers’ real estate transactions.

These confidential deals are so abundant that it is difficult to judge whether a strong evening sales result is a smoke screen. But if profits dry up, such face-saving strategies can’t last forever.

For now auction houses are playing up the suspense. “We really won’t know till the night,” said Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide. “Even in this market collectors are tortured by the idea that they could miss an opportunity.”

Risky Play?

ARTIST Monet
TITLE “Le Pont du Cheminde Fer à Argenteuil,” 1873
AUCTION HOUSE Christie’s
ESTIMATE $35 million

SOME dealers must have gulped when they saw that the most expensive painting in Christie’s May 6 Impressionist and modern art auction is a Monet, not a modern work. In a sense Christie’s seems to be swimming against the tide. (The most expensive work in Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern art is a 1912-13 Léger, “Étude Pour ‘La Femme en Bleu,’” which carries a $35 million to $45 million estimate.) Yet the Monet, “Le Pont du Chemin de Fer à Argenteuil,” depicting two puffing locomotives, was considered unabashedly modern in its time. In 1988 Stavros Niarchos, the Greek shipping magnate, sold it for $12.6 million at Christie’s in London to the Nahmads, dealers with galleries in New York and London.

Defending the house’s decision to give this painting a starring role, Guy Bennett, co-head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s worldwide, said the work was a seminal one for Monet. He said Monet produced only three other comparable paintings of the subject. One is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, another in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the third in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. “I still believe there are buyers for top Impressionist paintings,” he added.

If Mr. Bennett is wrong, it could be an expensive mistake. He declined to disclose what guarantee Christie’s promised the Nahmads, but experts in the field say it was around $34 million. (Sotheby’s is taking a parallel gamble on its Léger. Experts familiar with the terms said the auction house guaranteed it for $38 million. “It’s one of those last-chance pictures,” said Simon Shaw of Sotheby’s. “We wouldn’t have put our money in it if we’d believed otherwise.”)

Undervalued?

ARTIST Alberto Giacometti
TITLE “Grande Femme Debout II,” 1959-60
AUCTION HOUSE Christie’s
ESTIMATE $18 million

CATALOGS are brimming with interesting sculptures this spring. The medium has been a particularly popular market choice lately, and experts are betting the trend has far from peaked. “Getting great pictures is expensive, but sculptures are less so,” said Simon Shaw of Sotheby’s, whose Impressionist and Modern sale on May 14 includes sculptures by Julio González and Giacometti as well as a rare painted Picasso bronze. “These sculptures make an instant impact,” he said.

Christie’s will serve up an exceptional group of Giacomettis from various periods on May 13, including a plaster from his Surrealist period.

The $100 Million Man

ARTIST Roy Lichtenstein
TITLE “Ball of Twine,” 1963
AUCTION HOUSE Christie’s

PETER Brant, the Greenwich, Conn., newsprint magnate, is emerging as the season’s craftiest seller. Seeking to raise money to buy another paper mill, he hit up both Sotheby’s and Christie’s for substantial guarantees. Experts familiar with the deals say Sotheby’s came through with between $70 million and $80 million in exchange for various paintings and sculptures. Christie’s got a share of art too, providing Mr. Brant with a reported $35 million.

Mr. Brant’s collection boasts hundreds of works by artists like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Chamberlain, Richard Prince and Jeff Koons. It may appear that he is unloading the bulk of what he owns, but the art being sold now amounts to only a fraction of his holdings. Among the best for sale is Lichtenstein’s “Ball of Twine,” a 1963 painting. Mr. Brant bought it in 2001 at Sotheby’s for $4 million, the highest price paid for a work in that sale. Now it is estimated at $14 million to $18 million.

Mr. Brant is also selling Warhols, including two self-portraits (one at each auction house) and works by Basquiat, Mr. Koons andMr. Prince.

Topping Out?

ARTIST Richard Prince
TITLE “Millionaire Nurse,” 2002
AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

RICHARD PRINCE, whose retrospective last year at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York won critical acclaim, is still considered a hot commodity. Yet it seems surprising that so many Princes have surfaced on the market recently, privately as well as at auction. Sotheby’s and Christie’s are both selling paintings from Mr. Prince’s popular nurse series, images inspired by the covers of erotic pulp fiction of the 1940s.

Some experts say the private sellers are hedge-fund managers who have supported Mr. Prince but are now facing tough times and need cash. Other collectors received overtures from auction houses they simply couldn’t refuse. One of the nurse canvases belongs to Peter Brant, who has a large collection of Prince works, including other nurse paintings.

Sotheby’s is selling his “Millionaire Nurse,” depicting a blonde wearing a surgical mask. It is estimated to fetch $3.5 million to $4.5 million. At Christie’s the television producer Douglas S. Cramer is offering “Man-Crazy Nurse #2.” He bought this image of a buttoned-up blonde literally dripping paint, from the dealer Barbara Gladstone for less than $100,000 shortly after it was painted in 2002. Christie’s has estimated it will bring $6 million to $8 million. “Eight months ago I was privately offered $10 million for it,”Mr. Cramer said in a telephone interview. “And I said no.” He said Christie’s had offered him a “gratifying’’ guarantee but that he might one day regret the deal, not least because he is fond of the picture. “Five years from now I may think ‘I’ve been taken,’” he joked.

Higher, Higher!

ARTIST Edvard Munch
TITLE ”Girls on a Bridge,” 1902
AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby’s
ESTIMATE $24 million to $28 million

YOU might presume that Graham Kirkham, the London collector and founder of the retail chain DFS Furniture, decided to sell Munch’s “Girls on a Bridge” because he thinks he can get a good return. But some wonder how high collectors will be willing to go. Consider this: In 1980 Wendell Cherry, a founder of the Humana healthcare corporation, bought the painting at Christie’s for $2.8 million. In 1996 Mr. Cherry’s widow put it on the block at Sotheby’s, where Mr. Kirkham bought it for $7.2 million. Now Sotheby’s predicts this boldly colorful canvas, depicting a group of young women huddled together, will fetch $24 million to $28 million.

“Munch is one of those artists that people are finally recognizing for his position in the development of modern art,” said Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department in New York.

Foreign Enticements

ARTIST Erik Bulatov
TITLE “New York,” 1989
AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's
ESTIMATE $700,000 to $900,000

IN an overture to Russia’s new rich, Sotheby’s sent highlights of its big spring sale of contemporary art from New York to Moscow this year for the first time. Sotheby’s also has works that should appeal to new collectors in other emerging markets. Curiously, fewer examples of today’s hot Chinese contemporary artists are on offer than a year ago, but Sotheby’s contemporary sale on May 14 includes examples by two of today’s most sought-after artists from Russia and India. Erik Bulatov, a Russian born in 1933, is being represented for the first time with his painting “New York.” And the auction also includes a 2003 painting by the Indian artist Subodh Gupta, “Across the Seven Seas,” which depicts a bustling airport. Its $500,000 to $700,000 estimate isn’t cheap, but Mr. Gupta, 44, is considered one of the hottest artists of his generation in India. His work has been exhibited in high-profile shows like the 2005 Venice Biennale.


2008年5月3日 星期六

New York Photo Festival: the big picture show

BST 03/05/2008 Telegraph

  • More on the New York Photo Festival
  • This month New York City is hosting its first major photo festival. Drusilla Beyfus introduces this celebration of contemporary talent and looks at the work of the featured photographer Thomas Bangsted

    With its galleries, photo agencies, studios, history of magazine publishing and reputation for breeding leading photographers, New York is commonly hailed as the home of photography. Yet until this spring the city has lacked a major festival of photography to call its own. This position is set to change with the inaugural New York Photo Festival that opens this month, with the Telegraph Media Group as the British media sponsor.

    Anchor Bay
    Anchor Bay (2006)

    More a showcase than a market place, it aims to present what the contemporary camera is up to when artistry and creativity come first. To this end, four photo people with outstanding reputations will curate the show. Their range of experience varies but they are united in having a strong personal take on photography. The festival is to be held in historic industrial property on the waterfront between Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge and each of the arbiters has their own show in a dedicated building. The source of the exhibits is nothing if not global.

    The Telegraph Media Group's interest feeds directly into the Telegraph Magazine. It strengthens the tie between the editorial and outstanding photography, confirms the international character of much of the photographic skill that appears on our pages, and at the same time, widens the opportunity for readers to catch up with the story and sample the pictures that might otherwise be limited to gallery-goers and buffs on the spot.

    Magnum's Martin Parr is the only Brit among the curatorial team. He is globally exhibited and was the featured curator at the influential Les Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in 2004. He says that the New York festival will be 'a welcome escape from the norms of museums and established galleries. It is great to have the space to show young photographers.'

    Moc'kinbird Hill
    Moc'kinbird Hill (2004)

    His show, called New Typologies, develops a well-known theory about photographic series. An example might be his selection of two full-length portraits of a man and a woman shown in a similar pose, each holding a revolver pointed downward. The repetition of the image with its visual affinities is thought to enlarge the viewer's understanding of the subject. Among his choices for the festival is Wassink Lundgren's sequence of Chinese city dwellers salvaging bottles lying in the street, and work from a fellow Briton and Magnum colleague, Donovan Wylie.

    Kathy Ryan, one of the other curators, is the award-winning picture editor of the New York Times Magazine. She says, 'It's going to be this wonderfully contained, focused, intimate gathering.' Mulling over a theme, she realised that the pictures that most intrigued her were those in which the photographer's mindset was more attuned to painters and sculptors than to photography.

    Citing Roger Ballen, a senior figure among her selection, whose black-and-white pictures are composed of real-life images, symbols, idea associations and elements of pure painting, it struck her that he was engaged with what Picasso and Braque were grappling with early in the 20th century. Comparing the camera with the fine arts, she says, 'Photography is to some extent rooted in the real world. Whatever is pictured has some kind of inherent history.'

    Another artist in Ryan's show, titled Chisel, is Horacio Salinas, who 'collected shredded rubber tyres across the States and turned them into beautiful abstract forms for photography.' It suggested to Ryan that he was working in the way a sculptor would. 'Photography adds another layer of meaning. Knowing that that piece of rubber tyre was on a road at a certain moment in the past, I love that.'

    Nordland
    Nordland (2006)

    Simon Norfolk, who shot the rocket base at Cape Canaveral and is one of the Telegraph Magazine's regular contributors, is also on her list. 'In the two-minute exposure a streak of light flashes across a magnificent roll of blue sky. You can appreciate these pictures as an abstraction, much as you love seeing a blue shade into red in a Rothko painting.'

    The remaining two curators are Lesley A Martin, the head of the book publishing programme at the Aperture Foundation (a not-for-profit organisation that advances the cause of photography through its magazines, books and an educational programme), who has been studying the way photographers use disseminated images to create new work, and Tim Barber, a photographer and the former photo editor for Vice magazine who runs the online gallery tinyvices.com.

    The hope that the lesser-known would not be overlooked has substance in the pictures reproduced here. They are from a small portfolio by a 31-year-old Dane, Thomas Bangsted. A Yale University School of Art graduate, who last year was awarded a Tierney Fellowship (which support emerging artists studying in the field of photography, principally in the States), Bangsted's work will feature in the Fellowship's satellite exhibition on show at Brooklyn's Tobacco Warehouse.


    Bangsted does landscapes and seascapes and although at a glance his pictures appear straightforward, he says, 'They are not about documenting a certain place or situation, but are more like pic­torial puzzles.' He likes a subtle element of humour in his composition. 'Some of the images are constructed and some are found, it's not clear to the viewer and I'm not interested in making it clear.'

    Watering Place
    Watering Place (2005). These Bangsted images will feature in the Tierney Fellowship satellite exhibition at the Tobacco Warehouse

    The cool, silvery light in which many of his pictures are bathed is a result of his northern background. Wherever he works, this quality of light seems a constant. 'I want to make work that feels familiar to me. I like light that is flat, without shadows. It helps me paint a more neutral picture. In some of my photographs there is a certain oppressive, slightly depressive quality.'

    At the moment his eye is on maritime themes in Florida. 'In some ways the ships are substitutes for people in the pictures,' he says. 'They have a very distinct character. I find it hard to incorp­orate people without the picture becoming something else.' He is also attracted to animals as subjects, but not in the sense of being a naturalist photographer. 'I like the pictures to have a George Orwell quality, where the people have gone and only the animals remain.' He uses an 8x10 or 4x5 camera and shoots subjects on a one-by-one basis as they occur to him.

    The two co-founders of the festival are Frank Evers, the managing director of VII Photo Agency and a former entrepreneur in the video game world, and David Power, the founder and publisher of PowerHouse Books, which publishes progressive and classic art, photography, advertising and pop culture books. His company is located in Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), the off-beat Brooklyn neighbourhood which has become home to the festival.

    But why did it take so long for New York to instigate its own photography festival? Ryan suggests it might be related to the intense pressure on New York real estate; but Power has a more romantic interpretation. 'New Yorkers have long relished the opportunities to reconnect with what is going on abroad at picturesque locales for photography in Madrid, Arles and Perpignan. But when we [PowerHouse] moved to a wonderful venue right in the middle of New York City that few know very well, we couldn't help but start our own tradition here in the heart of the world.'

  • The New York Photo Festival runs from May 14-18 (nyphotofestival.com).