Hasta La Ideas

Get thee to Los Angeles. The Getty-led artfest known as Pacific Standard Time, an unprecedented series of concurrent exhibitions that highlight the significance of art in postwar L.A., is in full swing and lasts through the spring. Once you’ve devoured Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s new tome on the ‘60s art scene and reread City of Quartz, relax by the pool with the latest dishy page-turner from Michael Gross. The intrepid author of 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery switched coasts to write Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust For Land in Los Angeles (Broadway), a scandal-studded survey of 16 trophy estates in L.A.’s best neighborhoods. But don’t mistake this book for a text-based tour of movie star homes. This is La-La Land, “a figurative geography as much as a real one,” writes Gross in the opening pages. “It’s a place of pregnant possibility and polar opposites, good and evil, American dreams and nightmares, sudden rises and vertiginous falls. So it appeals equally to dreamers and schemers, all of them gambling to survive on an L.A. mountaintop.” With a Joel Silver-produced HBO series in the works (Unreality television?), Gross talked with us about his adventures in “the mecca of self-invention.”

Having focused on Manhattan with your last two books, what led you to look west for Unreal Estate?
I never want to repeat myself but to some extent that’s just what the book business wants. So in order to continue writing social history/exposes, I have to find new subjects. I thought of writing a book about the South of France and my then-publisher countered with the suggestion that I write about L.A. Once I started looking into it, I saw a fantastic untold story and I was off to the races.

You tell the story through 16 homes. How did you go about selecting these homes? Were there particularly criteria that an estate needed to make the cut?
The homes had to be special and redolent with history, and they had to have a chain of ownership that helped me tell the story of the region and the people who populate it. I started with about fifty, winnowed it down to about eighteen, and then focused on six, through which I could tell the larger story.
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“I’m always looking for an unconventional way to do holiday,” Simon Doonan told us the other day. The famed window dresser and style authority, who holds the plum title of creative ambassador-at-large for Barneys New York, prides himself on “crafty ingenuity”—think Rudolph made from old Coke cans&#8212and his latest project came with a high-tech twist. PayPal hired Doonan to whip up festive window displays for its pop-up “Shopping Showcase,” a ground-level space in New York where the online payments giant will show off its latest offerings to retailers beginning tonight. So how did he conquer the challenge of selling, well, selling? “After they called me, I was walking past an art supply store, and I saw these,” he said, holding up a posable wooden manikin. “I thought they would be a great way to represent the 100 million people that use PayPal. They’re zillions of these in different sizes in the windows. They’re chic, they’re connected, they’re flexible.”

After Doonan submitted his initial sketches (one is pictured above), the displays were fabricated on site. “That’s a tremendous advantage, because it allows you to keep running outside and seeing what everything’s actually going to look like,” explained Doonan, dressed in a snappy Thom Browne jacket in a shade that he described as “PayPal blue.” The company’s signature color is a key theme of the windows, which feature an industrious bunch of wooden people going about their seasonal preparations amidst a flurry of wintry tissue and tulle. “It’s a fantasy holiday vignette,” he said, standing in front of the largest window. “Buy your gifts, throw them all in a sleigh, and then haul them off through the snow.” For those eager to bring a bit of Doonan’s kooky approach to their own December decor, he recommends a trip to Home Depot for some chicken wire, which he used to make the PayPal wreath. “Chicken wire is such a versatile, incredible material,” he said. “Make yourself a chicken wire Christmas tree and then just start shoving things into it.”
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Another big batch of recognition is set to be placed upon artist Ai Weiwei this week. Following Art Review‘s listing of the artist as their top pick in their Power 100 ranking, the artist, who earlier this year served a three-month detainment at the hands of Chinese government officials for whom Weiwei continues to be a thorn in the side of, will be named on Thursday WSJ‘s Innovator of the Year in the art category. It’s the first year of the Innovator’s issue for the Wall Street Journal‘s magazine counterpart, with a dinner honoring the winners this Thursday evening at the MoMA, with the issue in print following this Saturday. However, despite Weiwei’s recent ever-presence, he’s still under house arrest in his native China, so it’s been planned that fellow artist Marina Abramovic will accept the honor on his behalf. At the event, the artist will join the ranks of designer Katie Grand, winning for the fashion category, Bjarke Ingels for architecture, and Chipotle founder Steve Ells for food.

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The art world has been operating like a Dallas cliffhanger this week with the publication of Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith‘s book, Van Gogh, The Life, which has left people wondering, “Who really shot Van Gogh?” The book posits that the shot that ultimately killed him was delivered by the hands of two teenage boys, not from a suicide attempt by the artist himself as has long been presumed (helped along because that’s what Van Gogh told everyone before his death). The authors have stirred up something of a controversy by introducing this new theory, claiming that the shooting was either an accident or an intentional act and that the artist simply didn’t want to see the boys punished. Given Van Gogh’s posthumous legacy, with his name now synonymous with “great art” and his paintings now selling in the millions, it’s just the sort of theory that commands attention and helps to sell books. Case in point, 60 Minutes even dedicated a whole feature to it this past Sunday. However, the organization who perhaps knows the artist best, the Amsterdam-based Van Gogh Museum, isn’t quite ready to update all of their information just yet. In a post on the museum’s site, they agree that the book poses an interesting theory, but raising a few issues they have with the theory, state that “plenty of questions remain unanswered” and that “it would be premature to rule out suicide as the cause of death.”

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For the last few months, since his release from a three month detainment by Chinese authorities, we’ve kept believing that Ai Weiwei is finally going to keep to the demands imposed by his former captors by removing himself entirely from social media and from talking to the “regular” media. How foolish we’ve been. At last we left Weiwei back at the end of September, and following a few months of occasional bursts of chatter, sometimes even saying directly negative things about his native China, we quoted him as saying “my situation isn’t very good” and that he is absolutely not allowed to use the internet. Yet less than half a month later, here we are again. The NY Times reports that the artist recently collaborated with W magazine, serving as the artist on a location shoot from afar, using a webcam. Though he’s kept quiet about the work, the images he help put together feature models somewhat recreating the photos of the Tompkins Square riots in the 1980s Weiwei himself had taken while he was living in New York, one of which is set to be used for the cover for the November issue. Seeing as the feature will concentrate on detainment and was shot on Rikers Island, the connection and statement to the artist’s own life seem fairly obvious. If that wasn’t enough to further wrangle Chinese authorities’ tempers, this week Weiwei was also crowned #1 in Art Review‘s annual “The Power 100” ranking. Writing that his work itself was not only remarkably successful between 2010 and 2011, like with his Sunflower Seeds piece at the Tate Modern, but that his imprisonment for his outspoken opinions makes him nearly a work of art himself. They write that his “power and influence derive from the fact that his work and his words have become catalysts for international political debates that affect every nation on the planet.” In response to this top ranking, the Chinese government has come out against his selection, telling the Wall Street Journal that “China has a lot of famous artists who are strong enough to qualify for selection by this magazine” and that the government feels that he was picked for political reasons, which “violates the magazine’s objective,” which is something Art Review has immediately owned up to, given that they had said as much in their initial write-up about why they chose him.

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