Smithsonian.com

A few weeks ago, I spoke with an art collector who is more than comfortable buying works (in his case, photographs) via the Internet without seeing the prints in person. For many collectors, this is the norm, especially if thousands of miles separate the work from the buyer. The owner merely sends a jpg, the collector takes a look, and the sale is a matter of a few exchanged emails.

This kind of hands-off sale makes sense if you know the seller; the quality of the image; and have a good deal of background knowledge in terms of the artist and the provenance of the work. But that’s not always enough in the cyberspace art world. You also need a bit of art counterfeiting savvy because the presence of fake works sold online has skyrocketed in the past several years.

In 2004, the FBI started a division dedicated to art crimes, and one of the trends they have witnessed since then is the wholesale increase in art fraud, up as much as 300 percent. The latest indication of this came in March, when an FBI inquiry led to the prosecution of an international counterfeit ring that had pocketed over $5 million by selling fake prints—works supposedly by Chagall, Miro, Warhol and Picasso—on eBay.

Most vulnerable are art prints, which are perhaps the easiest works to counterfeit, especially with the use of modern technology like laser printers and scanners. There’s no surefire way to avoid getting swindled by a seller bent on deceit, but buyers can protect themselves by verifying the identity of a seller or source of a work, and walking away if a deal seems too good to be true.

If you used Google to research anything over the last couple of days, you may have noticed that the icon above the search bar has been replaced with a sculpture of multi-colored chrome tulips. Artist Jeff Koons crafted the work specifically for the search engine as part of a larger effort to bring homepage personalization to an artistic level.

iGoogle Artists, as the collaborative project is called, offers a wide range of themes created by artists for users who want to update their internet pages with a bit of high art. It is as easy as clicking on the suite of your choice, and the chosen design will decorate your Google taskbar until you change or deactivate it.

An international group, over 70 artists from 17 countries and six continents, has been amassed. It is an interdisciplinary group as well. Designs from visual artists like Koons, Mario Toral and Dale Chihuly are available, as are those from cartoonist Robert Mankoff and Korean illustrator, Snowcat. The choreographer and opera director Mark Morris is represented, as is architect Michale Graves. Fashion designers Marc Ecko, Fátima Lopes and Dolce & Gabbana have also participated. Musicians such as Coldplay and the Beastie Boys have submitted works as well.

Gregor Schneider works in peculiar ways. A German sculptor and installation artist, he came on the scene in the mid-1980s for spending almost a decade dismantling, recreating and exhibiting, down to the slightest detail, the rooms in his home. The mere reconstruction is a fairly prosaic exercise, but the attentive focus on recapturing every last cracked ceiling tile, stained carpet or water stain, comes off as a perverse compulsion and taints the viewer’s visit with unease; very likely the artist’s intention.

In a similar response to architecture, Schneider used white or “clean” torture (interrogation tactics that leave no physical mark on victims) and images of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay as inspiration for building interrogation rooms or holding cells, and inserting these environments into a museum context.

The artist is also known for “Cube Venice,” his contribution to the 2005 Venice Biennale in the form of a 50-ft.-sq. scaffolding, draped in black and erected in the middle of touristy San Marco square—a play on the Ka’aba in Mecca.

Schneider’s sculptures also evoke psychological anxiety. “Mann mit Schwanz” (Man with Cock) (2004) is a prime example. The top half of a plaster cast of a man’s body is swathed in a black trash bag, obscuring identity or expression. The lower half of the body is dressed in sweat pants and fitted with an erection. Perversion and death are inextricably intertwined, as the viewer is not sure if this is a disturbing murder scene or sexual tableau.

All that being said, it is still startling to hear that most recently Schneider announced his plans for a performance piece that includes a person dying or the body of someone who is recently deceased. He aims “to show the beauty of death” as quoted in The Art Newspaper. Schneider has teamed up with a physician who is apparently willing to help him find volunteers who think art is worth dying for.

A number of zoos in the U.S. have realized that artistry is not limited to those who walk upright on two legs. Parrots, cougars, raccoons, apes and elephants at various venues have been given the opportunity to dabble in painting.

The Houston Zoo gives visitors the opportunity to sit and watch a resident orangutan make a painting just for them. You pick the colors and the animal does the rest. It is also possible to skip seeing the “artist” working and go straight to purchasing a canvas from the zoo’s website. They go for $250-$500.

Gram, an Indian rhinoceros from the San Diego Zoo (now he’s in Kansas’s Tanganyika Wildlife Park), paints with his prehensile top lip. His works were raffled or auctioned to raise money for the zoo’s programs.

Apparently, though, painting doesn’t always come easy to the animals. It is a matter of extensive training between keepers and their charges. The purpose behind it involves honing the animals’ motor skills, but the reward is that the critters find it stimulating and the sale of the artworks raise public awareness about the animals.

(Photo courtesy of the San Diego Zoo.)

Last week I visited The Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery, a delightful space in the Washington DC Jewish Community Center. Their current show “L(A)TTITUDES” attempts to mediate a discussion surrounding the borders and boundaries of Israel and Palestine.

On the surface, I expected a historical survey of the area’s cartography, giving perhaps a sterile, graphical representation of the boundaries and as they moved to and fro with the political winds. Happily, this was not the case. The works show more personal views of the effects and repercussions of drawing these lines, whether figuratively with a “security fence” or physically through a look at where a virtual map line falls on the ground. These lines show the inclusions and exclusions, the trusts and distrusts, the hopes and realities, and the “us vs. them.”

In the photographic series “The Green(er) Side of the Line,” Alban Biaussat documents places and spaces along the Green Line of the 1949 Rhodes armistice agreement, and thereby shows the improbability of separating the physical space of a family’s back patio or a local butcher’s shop that happens to be on the line. Yoav Galai’s “East Jerusalem Outside the Slogans” is a photojournalistic essay that documents the physical wall/fence that runs through East Jerusalem and the neighborhoods it bisects.

Karey Kessler’s “Desert” maps her personal journeys and memories of traveling through and living in Israel. Joyce Kozloff’s love of traditional technique is displayed in a series of small frescos that display how a culture’s societies and biases become evident in the way they draw their maps.

Anna Fine Foer and Doug Beube examine the alternate scenarios. Foer’s collaged “Vayikra” looks at what an absence of Israel could mean to its neighbors. Beube’s “Amendment,” an altered atlas, takes the idea a step further by physically zipping other countries onto Israel’s borders.

Wendy Fergusson, the gallery’s director, navigated heated discussions, tensions, and withdrawals of both works and donor support to curate a show that reaches across the line to embrace many difficult and divergent points of view. Such courage in the time of political correctness is both refreshing and commendable.

(Photo Credit: Sam Hunter. Joyce Kozloff’s “#31. Knowledge: The Holy Land, 1584.” Permission for use granted by The Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery at the Washington DCJCC.)