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The Collectors' Forum





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Hosted by Althea Viafora-Kress

Armory Show 2007: The Collectors' Forum Edition


Wim Delvoye - listen | listen with RealPlayer

Host Althea Viafora Kress and Belgian artist Wim Delvoye sit down in Danny Meyer's Café One at the 2007 Armory Show. Hear the social, cultural, and political contradictions around Delvoye's projects and art. His Art Pig Farm in China where Delvoye, a vegetarian, tattoos his pigs and "harvests" his art. The Cloaca Machines is his sculpture that is fed in museums and has a digestive system from beginning to end. And more. Once you hear it and see it you can't take their contradictions apart. It's not classical art, modernism, or formalism. It's not high or low. What is this new pollination of practices? (32 minutes)

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Edition #9: Althea Viafora-Kress with Tom Eccles - listen | listen with RealPlayer
First broadcast January 8, 2007

Find out what it takes to be entrusted with with ideas and art from Tom Eccles the newly appointed executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard. Host Althea Viafora Kress goes behind the scenes.

Tom Eccles was the director and curator of The Public Art Fund from 1997-2005. Now he has curated the Hessel Museum of Art inaugural exhibition: Wrestle with Trevor Smith. How does Tom move from a living museum to a universal museum? How does he bring these two ideas together and break open the container? What are the curatorial goals around a private collection? If collecting is self-representation how does he curate a collector's choices for the public? As a result of private philanthropy how do you curate for a larger audience? Find out from this dynamic interview about the art of our time in the public domain. (16 minutes)

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Edition #8: David Brafman, Getty Research Institute - listen | listen with RealPlayer
First broadcast April 18, 2005

Althea Viafora-Kress in conversation with the collections curator of rare books, David Brafman, for the Getty Research Institute, who visited recently during the Grolier Club exhibition of Past Presence, Objects of Study at The Getty Research Institute. The wide-ranging display looks at how artists, writers, and architects responded to the ephemeral quality of time and the urge to capture a moment, recreate the past, record the present, or imagine the future. Among many fine objects on display, an 18th-century etching by Francesco Piranesi recreates a long-destroyed monument from the 1st century B.C. The exhibition also features the earliest known copperplate engraving of a curiosity cabinet from 1622 alongside Marcel Duchamp's Box, produced three centuries later in 1958. Inviting comparison.

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Edition #7: Werner H. Kramarsky - listen | listen with RealPlayer

Collector, curator and educator, Werner (Wynn) Kramarsky is chairman of the board of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, and also serves on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art In New York and the Hammer Museum at UCLA. In this conversation with Althea Viafora-Kress, he speaks of the formation of his sensibility and his concentration on postwar drawings of the reductive, abstract variety. Kramarsky says he dislikes the word patronage but he is certainly one of the world's most enthusiastic and generous collectors of drawings by contemporary artists. In the last six years, he has given the Museum of Modern Art nearly 200 separate pieces, 81 in the last year alone. "You have a responsibility to challenge, to move the world along, to add insight to what beauty can be," he says.

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Edition #6: Architects for Art - listen | listen with RealPlayer

Althea Viafora-Kress persuades architects Richard Gluckman, Mark Dubois and Steven Learner to reveal their relationships with clients private and public while discussing a range of bracing issues associated with such challenges as building a museum on the 52nd floor of a skyscraper, adapting a design to a client's aesthetic, and making a space for viewing art where people are going to live or work.

Architect Richard Gluckman has made a specialty of working with artists, galleries and museums. He has been the principal architect at Gluckman Mayner in New York since 1977, designing commercial, residential and institutional projects around the world. These include, among many others, the Larry Gagosian, Paula Cooper and Mary Boone galleries and the Dia Center for the Arts, all in Chelsea; the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA; and most recently, the Mori Art Center in Tokyo and the Museo Picasso in Malaga, Spain. He has also completed homes and studios for artists Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra and Chuck Close. The Steven Learner Studio recently completed an apartment in the Richard Meier-designed residential towers on the Hudson River in New York, the VBH jewelry store in New York, the Sean Kelly Gallery and several private residences in Del Mar, California; Greenwich, CT; Sag Harbor, NY and elsewhere. Mark Dubois is a partner in Ohlhausen Dubois Architects. Recent art-related design projects include the spectacular Klein residence and the Sherrie Levine studio, both in Santa Fe, NM; the Danese Gallery in New York; the Orozco Room at the New School University, and work with the Metropolitan Transit Authority on the Elizabeth Murray mosaic in the Lexington Avenue/59th Street subway station, also in New York. Dubois has also done exhibition design for the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archeology in Beijing, China.

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Edition #5: Cynthia Hazen Polsky - listen | listen with RealPlayer

If proof were needed for Cynthia Polsky's taste and erudition in the visual and decorative arts of India, it is currently available in the exhibition, "In the Realm of Gods and Kings: Selections from the Polsky Collections and The Metropolitan Museum of Art", more than 200 works on view at the Asia Society through January 6, 2005. Here she speaks to Althea Viafora-Kress about her education in Indian art and aesthetics, the disparate export laws in Europe and Asia, and her seat on the acquisitions board for photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is a trustee. She is also a trustee of the Morgan Library, Trustee Emerita of the American Academy in Rome, Honorary Life Trustee of the Asia Society, and a member of Collectors Committee National Gallery of Art, in Washington.

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Edition #4: Thomas Crow, Elizabeth Dee, Alexis Hubshman - listen | listen with RealPlayer

Althea Viafora-Kress meets with Getty Research Institute director Thomas Crow, New York gallerist Elizabeth Dee and Alexis Hubshman, art dealer and founder of the Scope Art Fair.

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Edition #3: Ben Heller - listen | listen with RealPlayer

What's it like to live with a Pollock and a Rothko or two? Host Althea Viafora-Kress invites Ben Heller, one of abstract expressionism's greatest appreciators, to tell all.

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Edition #2: Agnes Gund - listen | listen with RealPlayer

Host Althea Viafora-Kress presents a rare interview with art collector and President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund.

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Edition #1: Arthur and Carol Goldberg, Lisa Mamounas - listen | listen with RealPlayer

Guests today are the prominent collectors Arthur and Carol Goldberg and, representing a new generation of art patrons, MoMA Junior Associate Lisa Mamounas. Althea is an art advisor and private dealer who has specialized in both emerging artists and advising young collectors.

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