[Swprograms] Fw: NYTimes.com Article: Inside Art: Word Pictures on Internet Radio

["Richard Cuff" <richard@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Of possible interest to folks here...from today's NY Times.

Richard C

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Inside Art: Word Pictures on Internet Radio

March 26, 2004
 By CAROL VOGEL





It may seem odd that the director of a contemporary-art
center, whose life is consumed by visual experiences, would
be obsessed with radio. But for 20 years Alanna Heiss has
dreamed of running her own radio station.

"I like the idea of hearing without always looking," said
Ms. Heiss, the director of the P.S. 1 Center for
Contemporary Art in Long Island City, Queens.

She is about to realize her dream. On April 19, P.S. 1 is
starting an online radio station, WPS1, at its Web site,
www.ps1.org. It is based in recently constructed studios in
the Clocktower Building, a city-owned property designed by
Stanford White at Leonard Street and Broadway in Lower
Manhattan, where P.S. 1 has an exhibition space. Bloomberg
L.P. has sponsored the project.

Two years in the making and billed as the world's first art
radio station, WPS1 will present original talk and music
shows with contemporary writers, artists and musicians as
hosts. The station will also broadcast historical audio
material from a variety of sources, like the sound archives
of the Museum of Modern Art, with which P.S. 1 merged in
1999.

Being part of the Modern has its advantages. The radio
station will have access to 2,500 sound recordings of
curators and directors. They include Alfred H. Barr Jr.,
the museum's founding director, giving a talk called "Art
Under the Soviet and Nazi Dictatorships" in 1952.

Also caught on tape is a mix ranging from Walt Disney
giving a speech on the Modern's 10th anniversary on May 10,
1939, to Marcel Duchamp speaking at the Modern on Oct. 20,
1962.

The radio station will coordinate with the Modern's
curatorial programming as well. It plans to play sound
pieces by Dieter Roth, the German-born multimedia artist
now based in Switzerland, whose work is the subject of a
retrospective that opened two weeks ago at the Modern's
temporary space in Long Island City.

Some of the Modern's curators will also be broadcast on the
station. Other plans call for a real estate show featuring
Heather Cohane, the founder of Quest magazine, with advice
for artists on buying and renting places to live.

"This will not be seen as a talking head situation, but an
extension of P.S. 1," Ms. Heiss said. "It's like an
important new wing."

Ms. Heiss is the station's executive producer, and Linda
Yablonsky, a writer, will be the program manager. Several
P.S. 1 staff members are involved, too, including Brett
Littman, the station's managing director, who is P.S. 1's
senior administrator.

P.S. 1 officials hired the architect William Massie to
design the studio. Using bright orange laser-cut steel and
plastic, he has created an ear-shaped space for recording
and broadcasting. The design combines a 1960's psychedelic
feeling with a futuristic one, something that will
eventually be visible on the Web site. In a space that P.S.
1 once used as a gallery, it will show "HiFi," detailed
photographs of vintage recording devices by Todd Eberle.

While the exhibition is not open to the public, in time
P.S. 1 plans to show the images on its radio Web site.

Just outside its offices is the clock tower that
www.wps1.org is using as its symbol. "That's where we're
broadcasting from," Ms. Heiss said. "The tower itself
becomes a symbol of time and sound. Because it's Internet
radio, you have real time and back-in-time."

Modern Art Treasures

On May 6, the night after Sotheby's
is auctioning the fabled art once owned by the financier
and publisher John Hay Whitney and his wife, Betsey Cushing
Roosevelt Whitney, it will auction a group of paintings
collected by Ray Stark, the movie producer, and his wife,
Fran.

The collection was in Stark's West Hollywood home until his
death in January. (Mrs. Stark died in 1992.)

Thirteen works will be offered for sale, seven in the
important evening sale of Impressionist and Modern art on
May 6 and six the following day in its auction of less
expensive works.

The Starks also bought sculpture, forming one of the great
collections of 20th-century Modern sculpture by artists
like Moore and Giacometti, which is not being sold. The
works belong to a foundation set up by Stark.

Among the highlights of the collection that is for sale is
one of Monet's "Water Lilies" paintings, this one executed
from 1917 to 1919. It is large - 39 3/8 by 79 inches - and
like many of the other late "Water Lilies," it is unsigned
but stamped by his son Michel with the artist's signature.
David Norman, a co-chairman of Impressionist and Modern art
for Sotheby's worldwide, said he believed the painting was
one of the artist's best examples from the series.

"It is one of the most complete and most vibrant," Mr.
Norman said. "It was painted in huge sweeps. It virtually
surrounds the viewer."

Sotheby's estimates that the painting will bring $9 million
to $12 million.

Before the foundation decided to sell a portion of the
collection at Sotheby's, officials approached several art
dealers to see if they would be interested in selling the
Monet. That was several months ago. At the time, the asking
price was around $20 million, said some art experts who
were offered the painting, speaking on condition of
anonymity.

Another top painting that belonged to the Starks is
Braque's "Woman With Guitar"(1931), one of his Cubist
interpretations of a classical subject. It is expected to
sell for $1.5 million to $2 million.

Popular Again

At a meeting of the Collectors Committee at the National
Gallery of Art in Washington last week, the patrons' group,
which has been financing acquisitions there since 1975,
agreed to buy a 1962 sculpture by the artist Lee Bontecou.

Ms. Bontecou has been experiencing something of a
renaissance. In the 1960's she was represented by Leo
Castelli and became known for making relief sculptures of
iron, canvas and wire. But tastes and fashions change, and
over the years she faded into relative obscurity - until
now.

Her renewed popularity is due in large part to a traveling
exhibition that opened in October at the U.C.L.A. Hammer
Museum and is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Chicago until May 30. Then it travels to the Museum of
Modern Art from July 30 to Sept. 27.

The National Gallery acquired an untitled 1962 work that
experts say is worth $700,000 to $1 million. "We only had a
small sculpture in our collection," said Earl A. Powell
III, the gallery's director.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/26/arts/design/26INSI.html?ex=1081357875&ei=1&en=6b006703ce70aa0e


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