The Animated Life: NY Times (click on this title to go to site)

By Jeff Scher

June 29, 2009, 7:27 PM

‘The Parade’http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/the-parade/

The streets of the city are a non-stop parade of humanity. It’s a kind of grand, unchoreographed ballet of human locomotion. One of the great pleasures and measures of being urban is losing yourself in the crowd, with your feet and mind wandering, alone in your head but elbow to elbow with an inexhaustible supply of strangers.

The street etiquette of avoiding eye contact lets us go about our business without the distraction of interaction. Most people wear the New York “street face.” It’s a kind of neutral expression with a touch of “don’t mess with me.” It has a do-not-disturb aura. But the truth is that everyone is looking at everyone else all the time. It’s done on the sly, looking away when caught, often with instinctive pretense (as in, I wasn’t looking at you, but at that very interesting doorknob just behind you).

We can’t help it. We are fascinated by faces and bodies alike. Every face tells a story, and the story is a mystery. The clues abound and we read them instinctively in the blink of an eye. We categorize one another as bums, businessmen, tourists, models, etc., almost unconsciously. But what fun it is to stare, and revel in the passing faces, reading wardrobe, ethnicity, posture, age. Indeed, it’s a feast with every possible variation of the species on parade. By walking in their midst we too become a part of the constantly changing people-scape and offer our own version of the mystery.

Walking is life at its most immediate. The combination of people and places changes constantly and never repeats. It makes you small in the face of sheer numbers, but at the same time it’s reassuring. It’s nice to be one of the fish in this teeming sea.

This film is an attempt to capture the feeling of looking at people. And it’s o.k. to stare, they are only flickering watercolor ghosts of people observed fleetingly on a summer afternoon in midtown. Shay Lynch’s score adds drama to the mystery.

About The Animated Life
Jeff Scher is a painter who makes experimental films and an experimental filmmaker who paints. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum, and has been screened at the Guggenheim Museum, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and at many film festivals around the world, including opening night at the New York Film Festival. Mr. Scher has also had two solo shows of his paintings, which have also been included in many group shows in New York galleries. Additionally, he has created commissioned work for HBO, HBO Family, PBS, the Sundance Channel and more. Mr. Scher teaches graduate courses at the School of Visual Arts and at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Kanbar Institute of Film & Television's Animation program. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

Jeff Scher's Web Site www.fezfilms.net
Shay Lynch, Composer www.shaylynch.com

New York: The Fifties and early Sixties

This was my family and their life in Manhattan in the 1950s and early sixties. From these impressions I began to develop a documentary about the era. This interest of mine in the time period became the Atkinson-Hammond film PLUCK, a New York centric documentary I wrote, co-directed and co-produced.

I was born and reared in Manhattan with a Ford model mother and an Advertising Executive father. Growing up in the 1950s and early sixties I was enthralled listening to my parents stories about dancing at black tie parties to The Count Basie Band who was playing on fashion photographer's studio rooftops or Ella Fitzgerald stopping by after a performance. I had always wanted to create a work that payed homage to the creative forces and glamour of the 1950s. I feel I have done so in PLUCK with first hand accounts of the time by people who lived it at center stage. Luckily I was able to interview people who were working in New York in the 1950s-1960s such as Betty Comden, Dick Hyman, Eileen Ford, Magnum photographer Burt Glinn, William F. Buckley and others. My quest to preserve their memories for posterity became the documentary film PLUCK. These New Yorkers and many others have made illustrious contributions to the culture and the arts that are often not known to a younger generation. I felt that their unique contributions should be archived first hand. Although I personally interviewed all the people in the film I believe that a documentary should focus on the subject matter not the interviewer and with that in mind you will not hear my questions. I wanted to bring the documentary viewer into the room without my presence, so I edited out my questions and left only the replies. By editing the film in this manner I hoped it would create a casual style and the illusion you are not watching a film as much as visiting with a friend who is talking about a time in his/her life. I was delighted to develop a rapport with each person interviewed which I believe comes across by their relaxed and conversational manner. Through these relationships with my subjects and their generosity I was personally granted use of all William F. Buckley's FIRING LINE TV show footage, many of Burt Glinn's Magnum photographs and Dick Hyman's piano performance of DANNY BOY all kindly given gratis. I am honored that this film is now in the permanent collection at The Hoover Institute Archives at Stanford University.

Currently I am working on producing a documentary on the painter FRANCIS BACON.

HAUSER & WORTH to open in New York

Gallery hopes to buck the downturn with transatlantic expansion

By Charmaine Picard | From issue 203, June 2009
Published online 27.5.09 (market)

NEW YORK. Hauser & Wirth is opening a gallery space in New York in September as part of its long-term strategy to increase US market share. The gallery will expand its Zurich- and London-based operations at a time when shrinking demand for contemporary art has led several galleries to close international branches and others to cut staff.
“Everybody is looking at costs, and so are we,” said gallery owner Iwan Wirth. He added: “The art market has shrunk, but we made a decision one year ago that if there’s one place we want to be, and need to be, for the next 20 years it’s New York.”
The space will be located on the first four floors of the Upper East Side townhouse currently occupied by Zwirner & Wirth gallery. The six-story building, which was purchased by Ursula Hauser in 1997, is the site of the former Martha Jackson Gallery where Allan Kaprow installed his famed work Yard in 1961. The gallery, which represents the artist’s estate, will recreate the installation for its inaugural exhibition. Mr Wirth told The Art Newspaper: “Many of our artists, like Allan Kaprow, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse and Roni Horn, have no gallery representation in New York. We have great relationships in America and we want to shorten the distances.” Hauser & Wirth partner Marc Payot will run day-to-day operations at the New York outpost.
Although Mr Wirth will no longer share a space with New York dealer David Zwirner, the pair will continue their collaboration in the secondary market. Meanwhile, Mr Zwirner will also open a new space on 19th Street in Chelsea this September, in a building designed by Shigeru Ban, whose new Centre Pompidou-Metz opens next year.
According to Mr Wirth: “The good thing about the moment is there are lots of opportunities—you get great staff and great works of art with more realistic prices. It’s a buyer’s market.”

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/imgart/203-am-bsm-iwan2-WEB.jpg

Inside the World of the Art Adviser

Auction house layoffs make consultancy a smart career move for the experts

By Georgina Adam | From Art Basel daily edition, 12.6.09
Published online 12.6.09
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/imgart/advisers_1.jpg

Even before the Art Basel fair opened, the Paris-based dealer and art adviser Philippe Ségalot had bought Matthew Day Jackson’s installation of four hanging skeletal figures in mirrored coffins, Dymaxion Family, 2009, in Art Unlimited (Blum, 054). The piece went, for an undisclosed price, to a “private collector”. Ségalot has unprecedented access to works of art—among his major clients is François Pinault, whose new Venetian museum Punta della Dogana already features three works by Day Jackson. Then, at the fair’s VIP opening, other advisers were closing deals: Stefano Basilico bought a Louise Lawler, Triangle, 2009, from Metro Pictures (2.1/G1) for one of his clients, while Todd Levin snared a Warhol silkscreen from the “Death and Disaster” series. It wasn’t on view, and he would not even reveal the name of the stand where he bought it. Allan Schwartzman, whose clients include the major Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky, was only prepared to say he had “bought a number of works at the fair”.
Welcome to the highly discreet world of art advisers, consultants, agents—call them what you will—terms that cover everything from a curator for a major corporation to a young ex-gallery staffer with a cell phone and a blue-chip address book.
Anyone can become an adviser. “With the auction houses and galleries letting staff go, we are seeing many more people setting up,” says Gérard Goodrow of Galerie Kewenig (2.0/J4), who in his career has been a curator, an adviser and a fair director as well as now being a dealer.
So what do the advisers do? “The good ones give us, as dealers, access to great collections,” says Andrew Silewicz of Sprüth Magers (2.0/D4). “They focus their clients and do the legwork for them.” This means, as well as buying art, they are curating, keeping abreast of the art world and dealing with loans and exhibitions. And according to Basilico, the adviser can have an educational role for newcomers to the market: “He or she can turn a new buyer into a speculator—or a collector,” he says.
But for every good one, say dealers, there are plenty of less recommendable individuals. “You have to be very careful,” says Goodrow. “They come to your stand, reserve pieces, take jpegs and then shop them around, adding 20%. Then another agent takes them on and adds another 20%. Pretty soon your work of art is being offered around at double the price.” He cites the case of an abstract Gerhard Richter at Art Cologne, tagged at €2.2m. By the time it had passed through various advisers it ended up at €4.5m before finally selling for €2.5m. Another questionable practice is “double dipping”, when the adviser is taking a cut from both his client and the vendor. The industry norm is to take 10% from the client on the purchase price, or work on a retainer, or a pre-agreed combination of the two. “I prefer a retainer,” says Levin, “because otherwise the temptation might be to advise a more expensive purchase, to get a bigger cut.”
But there are other pitfalls to avoid, he says. “A major problem as an adviser is avoiding conflicts of interest, in what is an unregulated market. If you represent artists in any way, you can’t be an adviser too,” he says. “And an adviser should not be sourcing the same sort of work for different clients,” he adds. “If you are offered one work and three clients collect in that field, how do you choose who to give it to?”
So how do you find a good adviser? Word of mouth is worth its weight in fine art. “We typically get our clients through recommendation,” says Basilico. “We check new clients very carefully before accepting reservations,” says Goodrow. And Schwartzman advises the starter collector to be guided by their local museum community.
“Lots of people travel in monied circles and they don’t actually know anything except what was in the magazines last week,” says Basilico. “Recently a curator told me how he met a 27-year-old who had worked in two galleries and now was going to be an ‘art adviser’—that’s ridiculous. To do this job, you need to have a bit more experience before you advise other people.”

Press Release June 2009

Please click on this link to read The Center for Fine Art Photography Press Release!

Gibson%2C%20Hammond%2C%20Herzog.pdf