The Art World Unites to Recover From Sandy, Richard Prince Weighs in on Obama's Victory, and More Top Art News

THE BIG STORY

Nearly two weeks have passed since Hurricane Sandy sank much of New York under a tide of brackish water, and while life has returned to something like normal in most of the city (lights, heat, Internet!) the art world remains in critical condition. Galleries in Chelsea are still dredging their basements for scraps of art, the indispensable art-book resources Printed Matter and Primary Informationhave lost the bulk of their inventory in the floodwaters, nonprofits like The Kitchen (which suffered up to $500,000 in damage) are reeling, and we're still learning about losses—such as what is said to be a ravaging of Trisha Donnelly's work on paper at Casey Kaplan—that are tough to take in. Chelsea is "on its knees," Tanya Bonakdartold Gallerist NY. (Larry Gagosian expresses his empathy a different way: "I have no desire to go down there," he told the site. "It'll just depress me.")

But there are bright spots. Printed Matter, miraculously, is back in business, and David Zwirner, Petzel, and others are reopening their spaces this weekend, often with provisional, thrown-together-in-the-last-minute shows. Other, harder-hit galleries like Zach Feuer and Nicole Klagsbrun are beginning the slow steps of rebuilding. And help, thankfully, is on the way. The Art Dealers Association of America announced on Tuesday that it was creating an aid program to provide funds to all affected galleries in Zone A, which includes Chelsea, the East Village, and large swaths of Greenpoint and Long Island City, along with other waterfront areas.

So far Wallspace, Printed Matter, Bortolami, and Derek Eller Galleryhave received grants and loans from the program. To help the relief effort, Artspace will be proud to join with Paul Kasmin Gallery, Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze, and other members of the art world to throw a fundraising cocktail party on Friday the 16th to benefit the ADAA's program. And then there's MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, who plans to take a crew of volunteers out to the Rockaways on Saturday morning for a second rescue mission.

The galleries can rebuild, claim insurance, and, one hopes, eventually recoup their losses. It's a different story for artists, however. It's heartbreaking to read stories about how years of sedulous, hard-fought work has been destroyed right in front of artists' eyes—literally in the case of Dustin Yellin, who ignored evacuation orders to stay in his Red Hook studio and watch his art get swept away—and to think of the others who live in the artist-friendly waterfront areas in Brooklyn and Queens, like Rachel Owens, who lost their homes to the storm.

Hoping to keep hold of some of what has disappeared, Modern Art Notes's Tyler Greenhas issued a call for the creation of a digital archive that could present JPEGs of work annihilated by the hurricane. In a beautiful essay, Andrew Russeth takes a more forward-looking view, writing about how some artists are using their work to confront the issue of climate change, such as Peter Fend, who days after Sandy opened a show of drawings titled "What to Do Next" that proposes ways the city can reshape itself to adjust to its changing environmental reality. It's a bracing way to confront a disaster that could be termed a once-in-a-generation storm if not for the fact that climate change all but ensures we'll see its likes again.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Does this Romney loss mean I don't get to pay 13 per cent Federal Income Tax?" - The artist Richard Princeusing his Twitter account to comment on Barack Obama's reelection (via Gallerist NY)

MUST READ

Obama Makes a Better Arts President: If your sole consideration at the polling booth was the health of the arts in the United States you should be thrilled at Obama's reelection, since his policies are far, far friendlier to culture than the ones Mitt Romney vowed to institute. (Artinfo)

CCS Acquires the Colin de Land and Pat Hearn Archives: Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies has won the invaluable archives of de Land's American Fine Arts and the Pat Hearn Gallery, downtown dealerships owned by two seminal gallerists who also happen to have lived one of the most romantic love stories you could imagine. (Press Release)

Remembering de Land's Art Club 2000: The brilliant artist Daniel McDonald talks about his early days as a member of Art Club 2000, the '90s collective that Colin de Land engineered as a critique of art-world careerism. (Sex Magazine)

Lost Titian Discovered at the Prado: Curator Miguel Falomir unearthed the Venetian master's circa 1555 painting of John the Baptist, previously attributed by the Spanish museum to "an anonymous Madrid School artist of the 17th century," while researching a Titian catalogue raisonne. (Art Newspaper)

James Franco Shares a Bed With Rauschenberg: That is to say, the actor-turned-artist has uploaded photos of his bed after he painted it (rather nicely) in what could be seen as a twisted homage to Rauschenberg's 1955 Bed, perhaps with some Mike Kelley thrown in for good measure. (HuffPo)

Want to See a Dodge Pickup Truck That Was Painted by Donald Judd?: Here you go. (NYT, via Gallerist NY)

Putin Woos Jews With New Museum: The Russian president and a circle of his oligarch supporters have opened a new state-of-the-art $50 million institution showcasing multimedia tributes to the Jewish experience in Russia and the former USSR in an attempt to encourage Jewish emigres to move back to the country. (NYT)

Broad Museum Director Is a Possible Highlander: How else could you explain the extraordinary and weird variety of pursuits that Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum head Michael Rush has followed over the course of his life, including proselytizing as a Jesuit priest in the '70s, acting on Law and Order, getting a psychology PhD from Harvard, and most recently directing Brandeis's Rose Art Museum until resigning in protest over the planned sale of its collection. (Gallerist NY)

Richard Prince Doesn't Like It When You Quote His Twitter: Oh yes, and he invented Twitter (he calls it "birding"). (Artinfo)

MARKET NEWS

Market Rains on Christie's Imp/Mod Sale: Perhaps hampered by an inconvenient Nor'easter the night of the auction, the house failed to meet its low estimate with the $204.8 million evening sale, in which 21 lots couldn't find buyers (though an early Kandinsky from 1909 made an artist-record $23 million, and a Monet water lilies painting fetched a top-lot $43.8 million). (Artinfo)

Sotheby's Imp/Mod Sale Also Struggles: Despite a slate of five dynamite Picassos that sold for a combined $81.3 million, Sotheby's also saw 21 lots go unbought in the its $163 million evening sale, which likewise fell short of the overall low estimate. (Artinfo)

Sotheby's Prints Sale Makes $11.7 Million: The sale was the best-performing auction of the week in terms of buy-in rates, with top-lot honors going to an Andy Warhol print of Marilyn Monroe that sold for $1.7 million. (Press Release)

Why the Imp/Mod Auctions Fared Poorly: "Both auction houses had padded their sales with mediocre material, and buyers knew it," writes Carol Vogel. (NYT)

Huh, Christopher Burge Retired From Christie's: Who knew, but the white-haired auctioneer who presided over the auction house's marquee sales for years retired "quietly" in May, a fact noticed last night when he was replaced at the rostrum by Christie's Switzerland chairman Andreas Rumbler. (NYT)

Sotheby's Releases 3rd Quarter Report: The auction house revealed that it lost $32.6 million in the quarter ending September 30, disappointing investors in the publicly-held company. (Bloomberg)

The Met Makes a Big Purchase of Its Own: The museum paid about $1.3 million for a circa 1612 painting of Saint Peter by Jusepe de Ribera, the first purchase of a major Spanish painting since late Met director Thomas Hoving finagled the towering coup of landing Velazquez's Juan de Pareja at Christie's for $5.7 million in 1971. (NYT)

Fancy New Art & Antiques Fair Debuts in NYC: Organized by Paris's prestigious Syndicat National des Antiquaires, the Salon: Art + Design has opened its inaugural edition at the Park Avenue Armory with museum-quality works by artists like Brueghel the Younger, El Lissitzky, Fontana, Kusama, and many others on offer through Monday. (NYT)

Controversial Moore Sale Gets Green Light: Despite opposition from the art world and the Henry Moore Foundation, the London city council has okayed the sale of an important 1957 Henry Moore sculpture of a draped, seated woman, which the artist sold for a pittance to the London County Council in 1960 with the intention that it be displayed for the public. (NYT)

Court Papers Show Double Agency in Gagosian Case:Randy Kennedy reports that a deposition in the complex case over the gallery's sale of Lichtenstein's Girl in Mirror, in which Gagosian scooped up a whopping $1 million commission in part by representing both the seller and buyer with out alerting either party, the megadealer told the court "To be honest with you, the question hardly ever gets asked.... I never get asked the question, 'Are you representing both sides'" (NYT)

U.S. Plagued by Zombie Art Fakes: Because the United States doesn't allow heirs of artists to order fake artworks to be destroyed under "moral rights" laws, unlike many European countries, fake artworks that are discredited one year have a nasty habit of reappearing in reputable venues later on thanks to flaws in record keeping and unscrupulous people. (NYT)

IN & OUT

Sculptor Kathy Butterly, an artist known for her surrealistic tabletop ceramic pieces, has beat out Ryan Trecartin, Rachel Harrison, and other extraordinary artists to win the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Contemporary Artist Award in recognition of creating a "significant body of artwork that is considered emblematic of this period in contemporary art." (Art in America)

Whitney performing arts curator Jay Sanders and MuHKA curator Nav Haq have won this year's Independent Vision Curatorial Awards from Independent Curators International. (Gallerist NY)

Yoko Ono has been named director of next year's Meltdown Festival at England's Southbank Centre, where she will bring together work from the art and music worlds. (Artlyst)

The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation has given its first-prize $150k grants for an upcoming show to white-hot curator Johanna Burton for a planned exhibition at CCS Bard examining the interconnectivities of art and dance, with the two $100k runner-up grants going to Claire S. Carter of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson of New Orleans's Contemporary Arts Center. (Gallerist NY)

The Menil Collection has named curator Cuauhtémoc Medina as the latest winner of its biennial Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. (Press Release)

Hauser & Wirthhas submitted schematics to build a cultural center in Somerset, England, where the husband-and-wife owners, Manuela Hauser and Iwan Wirth, live. (Gallerist NY)

Art dealer, poet, and Miró biographer Jacques Dupin, who represented Chagall, Giacometti, Bacon and other towering artists as the director of Paris's Galerie Maeght, has passed away at the age of 85. (NYT)