One Eye on Art, the Other on Water

When Adam D. Weinberg was planning a new home in the West Village for the Whitney Museum of American Art, he did not expect to have to worry about waterproofing walls or finding a hydro-engineering firm that makes watertight hatches for the United States Navy.

But then Mr. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, also didn’t expect Hurricane Sandy.

The storm hit the Whitney hard, just as construction had started on the museum’s new home by the Hudson River, flooding the basement with 30 feet of water and ensuring that weather protections would become nearly as important as aesthetics.

Mr. Weinberg talked about these changes during a tour on Wednesday that offered a first glimpse of the building designed by Renzo Piano and expected to be completed in 2015. The new Whitney, Mr. Weinberg said, will be a temple of American art and a model of storm protection.

“It’s the worst thing that ever happened to us and the best thing,” Mr. Weinberg said. “We will now have a building in which we can be assured that the art will never be at risk.”

Fortunately for the museum, work had not progressed very far before the 2012 storm, and the construction equipment was insured. Moreover, the Whitney had taken some precautions because its location, at the corner of Washington and Gansevoort Streets, was just a block from the river. While most museums keep their art-handling activities below grade, the Whitney put them on the fifth floor. “We always knew it was a vulnerability,” Mr. Weinberg said.

Nevertheless Sandy did force significant adjustments. The water had risen a foot above the 500-year flood plain, Mr. Weinberg said, so the museum searched the world’s leading hydro-engineering firms — including those in watery places like the Netherlands and Venice — for help. It settled on the German firm WTM, which partnered with the Franzius Institute at Hanover University, which specializes in storm modeling.

“They did an analysis of water conditions, wave conditions,” Mr. Weinberg said. “They came up with a plan for us to bolster and retrofit the lobby and basement to make sure we could withstand far beyond what happened in Sandy.”

Now the building will have a temporary barrier system — an aluminum wall with steel footings that can quickly be assembled around the perimeter — and the Whitney will conduct flood drills once or twice a year. The northern glass wall will be waterproofed. And both the loading dock and west entrance will have watertight doors, designed by Walz & Krenzer, which made high-pressure doors for Chevron’s “Big Foot” drill rig and a watertight hatch for the Canadian Coast Guard.

To pay for this, the museum has increased its capital goal by $40 million, bringing the project’s total expense to $760 million, including endowment and other costs. Mr. Weinberg said 77 percent of the total had been raised. About half of the additional funds will pay for flood mitigation, Mr. Weinberg said; the other half will cover unexpected costs.

Mr. Weinberg detailed these developments as he walked through the site, riding the construction elevator to the top floor, which offers views of the Statue of Liberty. He was clearly most excited to show off the art-related aspects of the project taking form around him.

These include a fifth-floor temporary exhibition gallery, which will be perhaps the largest column-free exhibition space in the city and has floor-to-ceiling windows at the east and west ends.

“It’s the first thing you can see coming down the street,” Mr. Weinberg said. “So you’ll know it’s a building about art.”

Four terraces will serve as outdoor galleries, doubling the museum’s total exhibition space to 63,000 square feet, and will feature plantings. Piet Oudolf, the garden designer for the nearby High Line, has been hired as a consultant.

The museum’s ground level will be entirely open to the public, including a free gallery space, an outdoor cafe (which Mr. Piano refers to as “the piazza”) and a Danny Meyer restaurant.

“People can get a taste of the museum” before deciding to buy a ticket, Mr. Weinberg said. “It feels like a community space.”

When the Whitney moves, its landmark Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue will be used for at least eight years by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a place to showcase its modern and contemporary art.

Mr. Weinberg said the new Whitney pays homage to Breuer’s brutalist design, namely its use of industrial materials like the concrete core that holds the building’s mechanicals and the central staircase.

“It’s rough, robust, but at the same time has an elegance to it,” Mr. Weinberg said.

Unlike the heavy blockiness of the Breuer, which Mr. Weinberg described as “castle-like,” the rest of the new Whitney aims to be more transparent, welcoming and connected to the neighborhood. The galleries will be warmed by wooden floors made of recycled pine from old factory buildings. The central staircase will be walled in by glass, allowing visitors to look out to the river at every level.

And if another storm does come this way, the Hoppers and DeKoonings will be out of danger, Mr. Weinberg said, 60 feet above the lobby level.

“If the water comes up that high, I’m sure Manhattan is gone,” he said. “And we’ll have a lot more to worry about than art.”
source: www.nytimes.com

‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Star Would Be White Knight for Small Coffee Chain

He only plays a doctor on TV. But Patrick Dempsey is about to become a real-life coffee magnate.

The actor, best known for playing Dr. Derek Shepherd, the heartthrob nicknamed “McDreamy” on “Grey’s Anatomy,” said on Friday that he had prevailed in an auction of Tully’s Coffee, a bankrupt coffee chain based in Seattle.

His company, Global Baristas, agreed to pay $9.15 million for the small coffee shop chain. The total consideration, including noncash adjustments is closer to $10 million, Tully’s chief executive, Scott Pearson, said in an interview on Friday.

Mr. Dempsey topped a number of competitors, including the 800-pound gorilla in the coffee world, Starbucks. The 46-year-old actor was only too happy to crow about that in a Twitter post late Thursday night:

He also has been making the rounds at Tully’s stores in Seattle, having posed for a picture with an employee at one store on Wednesday and taking a victory tour on Friday.

His bid must still be confirmed by the federal judge overseeing Tully’s Chapter 11 case. A hearing on the auction’s results is scheduled for next week at the federal bankruptcy court for the Western District of Washington.

The bid is a bit of a sidestep for Mr. Dempsey, whose “Grey’s Anatomy” character is a top surgeon at a fictional Seattle hospital. (The show is largely filmed on a studio lot in the Los Angeles area.) While a racecar enthusiast, the coffee bid appears to be his first major entrepreneurial undertaking.

And Tully’s makes for an unusual target. Founded in 1992, the company filed for Chapter 11 protection in October, suffering from a number of expensive leases that it has been otherwise unable to shed. The company has 47 company-owned stores with about 500 employees. It also has 70 franchise locations.

But Mr. Dempsey, who was raised in Maine, has claimed a kinship with the rainy city, having raised money for Seattle Children’s Hospital. Mr. Dempsey said in his statement that he decided to bid for Tully’s a week before Christmas, after learning that many of the other bidders had plans to close many of the company’s stores.

Coffee has also proved a bit of a hot commodity among deal makers of late. The German conglomerate Joh. A. Benckiser spent $1.3 billion last year to buy two much bigger java purveyors, Peet’s Coffee & Tea and Caribou Coffee.

Mr. Dempsey’s stated main objective was to preserve as many Tully’s jobs as possible. “I’m thrilled that we won and I’m even more excited about saving Tully’s Coffee and its hundreds of jobs,” he said. “Seattle has been very good to me over my career, and I am honored to have the privilege to own Tully’s and work closely with the company’s employees.”

The actor added that he planned to spend more time in Seattle to supervise his latest venture.

Mr. Pearson, Tully’s chief executive, said that the reaction to Mr. Dempsey’s apparent victory has rallied morale within the company. The bid would serve to pay off creditors and keep most of the retailer’s employees.

“He plans on being very engaged and involved,” he said, cautioning that it’s too early to unveil any immediate plans. “This is a 20-year-old company that needed a kickstart, and Patrick’s really provided that.”

BY MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED/nytimes.com

Dissected Long Before Her Debut

Andy Sheppard/Redferns, via Getty Images

IT’S already difficult to remember Lana Del Rey, but let’s try. She was a meme of 2011, a singer who emerged seemingly fully formed from the ether who was in short order revealed to be, get this, a singer who was not always fully formed. That moll with the dangerous tastes in men and pastimes and the puffed-out lips and hair? That songwriter who used words like “velvet” and “exotic” in the tiki-lounge way of overemphasizing noir culture? Yep, it was a pose, cut from existing, densely patterned cloth. Just like all the other poses. And all the other cloths.

This week brings “Born to Die” (Interscope), Ms. Del Rey’s major-label debut album, but by no means the first of her many lives. This is album as anticlimax, the period that ends the essay, not the beginning of a new paragraph.

It is an island, this album, part of no movement. It was produced by Emile Haynie, who is known best for his atmospheric, theatrical work with Kid Cudi, but who here has codified an alluring style so solid it shows Ms. Del Rey’s flaws in stark relief. The music is slow and full, a smoky mid-1960s cinema soundtrack, deployed pristinely, with crackling hip-hop drums setting the pace. It lulls and stirs and feels like one portent of doom after another. If it’s close to anything it’s to Portishead and the other gauzy British trip-hop of the early- to mid-1990s, which traded aggression for atmosphere, and leaned heavily on drama.

On top of music like that, anything shy of full commitment would underwhelm, and over the course of this album, that’s just what happens. Ms. Del Rey has an idea about her presentation, which counts for something — to some it counts for everything — but her singing still sounds like a road test. “Born to Die” doesn’t solve Ms. Del Rey’s problems because it isn’t aware of them; it’s a multiple choice test with every answer scanned “C.”

Ms. Del Rey, 25, can do better, most likely, or at least different. Earlier, under the name Lizzy Grant, she put out a Lilith Fair-worthy release called “Kill Kill,” that’s sprightly by comparison to “Born to Die.” On the new album four-minute songs feel like seven or eight, so packed are they with short verses and bridges and changes and Sturm und Drang, to say nothing of Ms. Del Rey’s languor, which can verge on pallor.

That was certainly the affect when she performed on “Saturday Night Live” a couple of weeks ago, looking uncertain, like a child singing her grandmother’s favorite songs, dressed in her grandmother’s clothes. The persistent purr she nails on her record was here punctuated with evident breaths and awkward silences.

When she hit her lower register, it was bumpy, as if she needed a backhoe. Her eyes avoided the cameras.

It wasn’t much better at the Bowery Ballroom last month, in her first proper New York concert, where she appeared resistant to the need to be polished, or even prepared.

Maybe Ms. Del Rey is self-immolating. And if so, maybe it’s from reluctance, not lack of talent. Sometimes you make choices, and circumstances force you to have to stick by them. If the Internet hadn’t glommed onto Ms. Del Rey’s video for “Video Games,” which she made herself and released last August, maybe she’d have shrugged her shoulders and moved on to another pose. But notoriety has a way of freezing its targets, and so Ms. Del Rey doubled down in her amber.

It hasn’t helped, maybe because one has to wear clothes for a long time before they fit well. Her success has been presented a fait accompli, largely because of the intensity of ire she arouses: anything dissected this aggressively must be important, no?

No, not really. Whether from boredom or schadenfreude or sexism or rockism, she’s taken an unfair amount of guff: Ms. Del Rey is a fraud! That’s not even her real name! Her father is a heavy in the domain-name industry! She has fuller lips now! Those who discovered Ms. Del Rey on “SNL” — yes, those people still exist — and choose to learn more about her online will find a grotesque, not-at-all hidden background story, like an especially troubling Carfax report on a pristine-looking roadside sale find.

Source: www.nytimes.com

A Jewish Museum Shifts Identity

Keegan Houser

BERKELEY, Calif. — The story of how the Judah L. Magnes Museum — whose collection of Judaica is the third largest in the country — became the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, might not seem terribly ripe with complication or implication. In recent years small private museums facing financial strain have often sought refuge by negotiating new lives within universities. Perhaps on Sunday, when the Magnes opened its doors to the public in a building it had long owned near the campus here, it was simply inaugurating another phase of its 50-year life.

But along the way the Magnes has had more than its share of high drama, including a much anticipated union with another local Jewish museum in 2002, closely followed by a quickie divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences. Then, the Magnes had to watch as its onetime partner achieved local glory as the Contemporary Jewish Museum, opening in downtown San Francisco in 2008 in a new building designed by Daniel Libeskind. Meanwhile the Magnes struggled to map out a future for its rambling and exotic collection of some 15,000 objects and manuscripts, which since 1966 had been housed in a rambling and exotic mansion on a residential street. It attracted no more than 10,000 visitors annually and cost $2 million a year to maintain.

The story also has larger resonance. The fate of the Magnes has much to do with the evolution of the American identity museum, with its chronicles of ethnic liberation amid hardship. And it is also intimately connected to the political and cultural temperament of the Bay Area.

But to understand those issues it is best, first, to consider the collection itself. The Magnes was created in 1962 by Seymour Fromer, a Jewish educator, and Rebecca Camhi Fromer, his wife. Its artifacts were deliberately wide-ranging, including not just Jewish ritual objects but manuscripts, music and ephemera. As the collections grew they shed light on Jewish life in the pioneering era of the American West, on Jewish observance in communities in India or Tunisia, and on artworks that testified in some way to Jewish experience in the 20th century. Over the decades scholarly catalogs were published and exhibitions were mounted in the museum’s Berkeley mansion, examining, say, the culture of Kurdish Jews or the nature of Jewish cemeteries during the Gold Rush.

I visited the Magnes only once in its old home, and its slightly ramshackle style, along with its displays mixing the eccentric traditional and the provocatively experimental, gave it an almost esoteric charm. Only a small fraction of the collection was on site, and only a small part of that was ever on display. But the place, even in its late days, was clearly the work of particular personalities with their own idiosyncrasies and preoccupations. It was not an “objective” museum; it was personal, invitational, as if saying, “Come and look at what we have gathered and learned.”

Now all that has been — as was once said — “modernized.” The Magnes Collection, donated to the university along with a lease on its new building, is still under the directorship of the Russian-born art historian Alla Efimova, who is partly revisiting her past: before joining the Magnes in 2003 she had taught in Berkeley’s art history department and had worked in the school’s art museum. The Magnes’s Italian-born curator, Francesco Spagnolo, who holds a doctorate from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has taught both philosophy and music, remains in place as well. Eighty percent of the collection is now on site; a digital catalog of its riches is developing, along with an online photographic record.

But the new Magnes Collection bears little resemblance to the old Magnes Museum. The new building, near the campus, once a printing plant, filters away most glints of personality. The San Francisco architect Peter Pfau has made it crisp, spare, rectilinear and clean. Its design also ensures that archival storage drawers and cabinets can be seen on either side of a central 1,500-square-foot exhibition gallery.

Function has changed along with design. Its largest space is a gathering place for events, concerts and lectures: an auditorium. Another room is designed for researchers to examine material from the archives. The Magnes, we sense, is primarily a place for study, lectures and social gatherings, the main modes of university life.

The museum aspect — the public display of artifacts and interpretations — is more muted. Partly this is because the largest gallery space is temporarily given over to a video art installation, “Dissolving Localities,” created by Emmanuel Witzthum and Arik Futterman; it overlays sounds and images from Jerusalem on one large screen and of Berkeley on the other. It wasn’t complete when I visited, but it was difficult to imagine it as much more than a conceptual commentary on the collection.

The central gallery is where we are meant to focus, where the first temporary exhibition is titled “The Magnes Effect: Five Decades of Collecting.” It is a sampling of the museum’s holdings. There is a marriage contract from 1915 from the Kochi Jewish community of India and a Jewish wedding dress from 19th-century Rhodes, Greece. A painting shows the early-20th-century incarnation of San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El. A poster advertises the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which the Magnes helped establish. And a sword and scabbard are shown from 19th-century Palestine: they were presented by the Ottoman government to the Jerusalem-born businessman Yosef Navon to honor his role in the creation of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway in 1892.

Each object, of course, could easily become a centerpiece of another exhibition, but their presentation here seemed less important than the suggestion that these were markers for a profusion of other objects, which could be seen on either side, encased in the archival cabinetry. The point of the display is how much more there is to display. But this means that being a museum has become secondary to the other roles the Magnes is taking on.

This may simply be the price a private institution must pay to ensure that its collection is cared for, that it will serve scholars and that it will, over time, become a center for social and intellectual life. (Its current annual budget is $820,000.) But the compromises are significant; it is also unfortunate that one of the cores of the Magnes, the collections relating to Western Jewish life, are being folded into the Bancroft Library. They will fill out the university’s collection about the history of the American West instead of serving the Magnes’s survey of Jewish life and history.

Source: www.nytimes.com