That’s a comparative bargain, unless of course you consider iTunes U, which offers an immense array of course lectures taught by academics (some award winning) from institutions (’esteemed’ ones we would say) with brand names such as Oxford, UC Berkley and Yale, and all for the low download price of $0.00.

Of course, Beck U’s point is that it is exactly such institutions of Higher Ed which are mired in what it would call bias and what most everyone else calls reality.  (Best that one take American History from the likes of David Barton, whose campaign against the First Amendment of the Constitution is grounded upon the persistent falsification and misattribution of historical quotation, rather than from, say, the Gilder Lehrman Institute).

Now, one cannot but view Beck U as a cynical foray into the education business (and probably something very much akin to Thomas Kinkade’s successful foray into the art business), because a business it is, but I also cannot help thinking that part of what prepared the ground for Beck’s easy entry into this likely very lucrative landscape, aside from the obvious platform of the internet, has to do with a greater crisis of authority, institutional and otherwise, that shapes so much of what we hear and see today, both at large and in the art world itself.  And in this, I’m inclined to think that Beck U takes its place next to enterprises such as the BHQFU, or to Night School, or to any of the other ‘alternatives’ to institutionalized programs of art ‘learning’ (though of course not with nearly the same broadcast audience, a difference which is probably all the difference), insofar as they are symptoms of some particular, our particular, social pathology.

The question it seems to me then becomes this: At what turn of the screw do we stop so easily accepting, even desiring, challenges to authority (and their commodification)?  What might the project of building or securing authority entail?  Or has this notion become so infected with ‘authoritarianism’ that it’s best to let it die?

As well as the headline figures of the 200 works being donated (including Tracey Emin’s notorious bed and various bits by the Chapmans and so on), valued at around £25 million, there was no little devil in the detail. None of the running costs will be passed to the state, which makes a change from those country piles that get left to crumble without National Heritage status, and the gift is not in lieu of taxes, said the small print. So what is this donation really about, if Saatchi is not going to retire anytime soon, as a gallery spokesperson revealed (although he will be past pensionable age, turning 70 in 2012)?

Well, despite grumbles that Saatchi’s collection isn’t comprehensive or coherent (there is no film or video admittedly), this is a fantastic offer for London (it’s free!). But the decision to change its name to the Museum of Contemporary Art London does present a problem for the current holder of nominal MoCA status, namely Tate Modern. And there is some history here. Nicholas Serota was rumoured to have refused a donation of Saatchi’s YBA holdings, so perhaps bad blood remains. Either way, should a collector be allowed to impose his taste on a nation in this way, leaving a marker of his personal choices for posterity to validate it as part of a millennial canon? Shouldn’t our nation’s keepers decide what flows into this cache? Or is this what has always happened with bequests to the nation and this is just another mausoleum by another name?

Yesterday bought more confirmation of the winner-take-all pattern, when The Wall Street Journal reported that MoMA “attracted its highest-ever number of visitors, 3.09 million, during its 2010 fiscal year.” That’s up a quarter million from last year and a half-million from the year of reopening. Attendance is now double of what MoMA’s saw in its old building. Tourist numbers and memberships are also up.

Of course, there is fodder for doubters. While it’s heartening to see critical stalwarts Marina Abramovic and William Kentridge draw in the neighborhood of half a million visitors–more than the annual attendance of many respectable museums–the big numbers are partly linked to exhibitions with “strong public appeal,” with Tim Burton and Water Lilies clocking in well over 800,000 visits. Whatever the case, MoMA’s popular formula is working.

The larger question is whether such success is replicable, or even desirable in every respect. Another recent report about crowd-pleasing fare at a major New York museum, in Brooklyn, didn’t reach the same conclusion. What seems to be happening is that the biggest fish are capturing more attention, while medium and small organizations struggle to keep their numbers up. This pattern is holding true not just in museums, but also with galleries and art fairs, as recent lines outside Gagosian’s historical shows and the huge throngs at Art Basel pointedly demonstrated.

What can we read into these trends?

There is no shortage of science-fiction-like mega-projects here, including the Global City of Saemangeum, to be built on the world’s largest reclaimed land mass behind a 33 km sea dyke, the world’s longest, which was just completed after 19 years of effort. But this is no Dubai. I asked a government official in the ancient city of Jeonju, which hosted my group in a bid to become a UNESCO Creative City, what’s the goal for South Korea in the years ahead. He said, “to get to between 5th and 10th in GDP in the world.” He didn’t mean per capita.

Underlying South Korea’s epic success, of course, is the most comprehensive public education effort in its hemisphere, and possibly the world. South Koreans are simply obsessed with learning, and the results are plain to see. Korea’s literate, world-wise population is, among other positive traits, deeply interested in the arts. This is probably the only place in the world where Bach can be heard in the bathrooms at a highway rest stop.

Here’s the most impressive thing about South Korea: It seems to have found a balance between warp-speed development and respect for local identity. As part of this balancing act, the state is extremely generous to local art. Seoul alone installs more than one thousand public art works a year. Historic sites are preserved and documented meticulously. Local governments are building creative complexes for artists where they can live, create, and interact for six months at a time. Arts patronage is considered obligatory for big firms and wealthy business clans, for reasons of both national pride and marketing. There is no interest in the wholesale franchising of Euro-American culture here. The country is open to foreign influences—Seoul’s top Zagat restaurant is Italian, the pastries of choice are French, Starbucks is ubiquitous, and women are as label conscious as anywhere—but the country has avoided drowning in globalization.

All this is reflected in Seoul’s vast and varied network of art institutions. The astonishing Leeum museum, in the Hannam-dong district, is a private collection run by the Samsung Cultural Foundation. It is without doubt one of the most advanced museums in the world. Its three wings, designed by Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel, and Rem Koolhaas, are devoted, respectively, to traditional Korean art and artifacts, a world-class selection of Western art, and a state-of-the art educational and media complex “to express the future of art and culture.” It makes a pilgrimage to Seoul worthwhile all by itself. There are many privately operated museums and Kunsthalles around Seoul. Among the most acclaimed is ArtSonje Center, which was hosting an exhibition by Kim Beom when I visited the space with its influential curator, Sunjung Kim, a leading advocate of Korean art. Many Korean artists do not have or seek gallery representation, the curator explained. Spaces like Sonje provide exposure while allowing them to stay free of commercial pressures.

Seoul has four major commercial gallery neighborhoods, along with several other smaller clusters—altogether perhaps as many as 400 galleries. With their crisp interior design, museum-quality lighting, and handsome publications, they exude sophistication. Music is piped into some spaces and prices at even some of the more advanced galleries are calculated by picture size. Although some art experts complained that Korean collectors don’t have a strong eye for contemporary art yet, prices, by all accounts, are robust. After a severe slowdown in the crisis years, red dots abound. Some of the larger galleries opened chic restaurants during the downturn to diversify their businesses. Now they use them to host clients.

The most striking fact about Seoul’s galleries is their devotion to local artists. A few plainly commercial spaces exhibit A-list American and European brand names. But the majority of dealers promote Koreans. Kukje and PKM are the largest galleries, familiar to visitors of international art fairs. Several top galleries—notably Hyundai, Gana Art, and Arario—are working on a Gagosianesque scale. Hyundai boasts two locations, each one capable of hosting multiple exhibitions, as well as project spaces for emerging artists. Hyundai and Gana Art also operate auction houses, which seem to be doing brisk business.

In the picturesque neighborhood of Samchong-dong, a web of winding streets and alleys between two palace complexes in the north end of Seoul, a smattering of super-sophisticated galleries have opened in new and refurbished buildings. It’s a kind of mini Chelsea, only with smarter spaces and a setting that reminds of the more scenic precincts of Los Angeles. During my visit, all the galleries were showing Korean artists. Their owners and employees, their architects and designers, and the exhibited artists themselves are all clearly steeped in the aesthetic and institutional approaches of the West. But they are addressing their own issues, in their own language. And they are just getting started.

Not all is perfect, of course. There will be growing pains. Some corporate foundations have been accused of corruption. Recent conflicts over institutional appointments remind of the pitfalls of a government-run cultural sector. And in a conformist nation where cars, with few exceptions, come only in black, white or grey, confrontational artists have a hard time fitting in. Even so, over the next few years, as its massive investments into education and infrastructure bear fruit, expect South Korea to command more and more of our attention.

As South Korea and the world tries to sort the best response to the latest provocations from North Korea, an exhibition of contemporary ‘official’ art of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea) opened at the MAK (the Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna, with a rather dodgy title. “Flowers for Kim Il Sung” was launched despite opposition and questions about the nature of the museum’s collaboration with the Pyongyang regime.

By admission of MAK director Peter Noever in a number of interviews, the work is presented without any critical context.

Perhaps there is no other art in North Korea, as it seems the MAK believes. While that may be true, it is hard to imagine that much first hand research went into that position being taken. Perhaps the director’s trip to the DPRK was not so unlike this one taken by Vice correspondents:

http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3

Watch all three episodes. But perhaps it is another experience for a European museum director.

Surely there is a difference between exhibiting a display of historical propaganda versus a contemporary, active one constructed through forced labor and dictated entirely by one family’s aesthetic viewpoint, if you can even call it that.

The MAK makes a case that this show fits in a tradition of previous exhibitions centering about specific political systems, and yet the defense of this show is that it is about aesthetics, not politics, and about seeing the visual production of an ‘other.’ It is hard to imagine that this will open doors for us to see anything except what the current regime wants us to see.

Beyond the occasional report in English that this show is causing big controversy in Austria, the picture left behind for outsiders is the critical context created for the Museum itself through the multiple, self-condemning interviews with the director of this museum saying, among other things, that this is the same as showing Russian constructivism.

Anyway, the images are out there now, for all of you to see, and let’s hope for now everyone’s curiosity about the art of the DPRK and the architecture of Pyongyang (presented in this exhibition as the model city, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a manifesto of Juche ideals with Utopian elements) is satisfied. What you do not see in these pictures is that there is no electricity, no items to buy in the supermarket, destroyed farmland, extreme poverty, and even in this model city of Pyongyang, reportedly only two hours of drinking water available per day, and not enough food to feed even high-ranking military officers.

The show seems to exist merely as a provocation itself. If this is the case, is there a benefit gained over what is lost here in the sense of academic scholarship and institutional research? That is Mr. Noever’s core argument in defense of the show. I am open to new experiences if someone can back it up, however I fear what a lack of education does for visitors in this case.

Reference material (there’s plenty more than this):

MAK website in English: http://mak.at/e/jetzt/f_jetzt_b_blumenfuer_e.htm

Some perspective from a North Korean defector living now in Vienna: http://www.falter.at/web/shop/detail.php?id=32233

Interview with Peter Noever: http://derstandard.at/1271376865449/Blumen-fuer-Kim-Il-Sung-Es-war-ein-staendiges-Ringen-um-Vertrauen

This perceived lack of financial support drew fire from an anonymous British group of artists and arts professionals, calling themselves Making A Living. In an open letter to Tate, widely emailed and posted online, they took umbrage with No Soul For Sale’s ‘romantic connotations of the soulful artist, who makes art from inner necessity without thought of recompense’ as well as the concomitant expectation that ‘we should expect to work for free and that it is acceptable to forego the right to be paid for our labour.’

In an interview I conducted beforehand with the curators of No Soul For Sale – Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Cecilia Alemani, with Vicente Todolí on behalf of Tate – here, they defend the event (once previously staged as part of X-Initiative in New York) variously as ‘a tribute to the people, the artists and the art lovers who work beyond the traditional market system’ (Cattelan), or an act of ‘hospitality and generosity’ (Alemani). While Gioni adds that, ‘Nobody really ever pays respect to the people who work in situations in which there is very little money involved and yet a lot of energy and enthusiasm’, Todolí qualifies this by saying: ‘Obviously we are not the only ones being hospitable here. All the participants are … as generous as Tate, if not more. But that’s when things get interesting: when people are willing to share, going beyond any immediate quantifiable gain.‘

Not everyone was in sharing mood, however. The greatest visual equivalent of this underclass attitude among the half-empty and shambolic spaces of No Soul For Sale was the padlocked façade of a foreclosed home presented by the Brooklyn-based Not An Alternative. In the installation’s accompanying essay, filmmaker Astra Taylor posits a critical stance towards such participatory celebrations, in which: ‘Every action is subsumed by a new framework, including our very sociability – our likes and desires, our heartfelt comments and curiosities – which are mined, analyzed, and monetized by the new powerbrokers.’ Rather than looking towards the wider economic crisis or social media’s digital encroachment onto privacy, maybe they should have looked closer to home.

And what of this mythical, unquantifiable gain? Is it meant to be a warm, fuzzy feeling? Perhaps for those at Tate Modern it was supposed to be a great showcase for their alternative positions in the belly of the institutional beast? Those who penned the open letter clearly believe that this exchange might be closer to outright exploitation, with Tate benefiting through increased audiences and shop revenues while participants remain out of pocket. One commenter to my piece online said: ‘No money for materials, tickets or accommodation… Some coffee I think. Nice one Tate.’ Let’s call this the art system’s hidden ‘Gift Economy’ – working for nothing or for some ethereal glow of mutual advantage. We should even be grateful. Never mind the political backdrop of a new government here in the UK that’s about to slash arts budgets across the board, this must be a familiar scenario for struggling art professionals the world over.

Anyway, on one score, the article, along with most others I have read, is unambiguous: The Picasso claimed “the highest price ever for a work of art at auction”—a “world record.” Technically speaking, the number is the highest—the largest pile of US dollars ever spent on an artwork at auction. But adjusted for inflation, this Picasso is a far cry from Van Gogh’s 1989 record-setter, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” which, at $82 million at the time, would be worth about $140 million in today’s dollars.

Leaving out inflation is a bit like measuring one high jumper’s performance in inches and another’s in centimeters. It’s worth noting, for context, that we have had at least three private sales in the neighborhood of $140M in recent years. And there have been a couple of auction sales exceeding $106 million in 2010 dollars, including a Picasso, “Garcon a la pipe,” which sold in 2004 for just over $104 million.

All of which is to say, Buyer X doesn’t get the gold medal after all. As Smith rightly points out, record mania is something of an irksome diversion in itself. In any event, the search for the mystery collector continues. Anyone have a clue?

My first impression is that the scene is much, much bigger than before, so big that one really needs to make choices about what to see and do. I guess there are 500 some galleries in Berlin, 40 of which participated in Gallery Weekend.

My second impression is that the Gallery Weekend was trying to be just that—a weekend for a carefully selected group of people. If you came, like me, without a particular invitation, you were pretty much on your own. If I didn’t know people in Berlin, I would not have met a soul. I would have eaten every meal alone. I imagine that would have turned me off deeply if I were a serious collector who didn’t have a particular gallery invitation.

My third impression was that the programming was decidedly blue chippy international artists, rather than being focused on the new and local talent on which Berlin has built its reputation.

I do wonder what exactly this Gallery Weekend is meant to accomplish. Zürich has done them for years. There, it is clear where you are supposed to be and when; there are gallery clusters, so the openings are split over three days for the three clusters. There is talk of a gallery weekend to come in Vienna, where I live, in September. We could organize it on the Zürich model, as the galleries already cooperate in coordinating their openings. But it is also quite easy to imagine it being organized in a way that leaves out new arrivals and curious outsiders. (This week in Vienna we have an art fair, but also a new kind of event, for the second year. A selected group of galleries have organized shows, all curated by artists, on the theme of “Art & Film” (http://curatedby.at/index_en.html).

And what of the upcoming New York gallery weekend? Are so few people buying in New York that such an event is necessary? Are these meant to be an alternative to art fairs? Is it necessary to have an event in order for sales to happen? Does the size of a city change the meaning of such an event?

My main question, in the end: is this event model really sustainable? As soon as there is a group of galleries presenting what you can already see anywhere else in the world, the rest, the core local scene, seems irrelevant. And yet, that is often where the good stuff is. Will people continue to visit if they think the local scene is irrelevant?