Art World

If women in the corporate realm think they've got it tough, they should ask a female artist what it's like to navigate through the art world's treacherous straits. Or better yet, query a Guerrilla Girl. A band of women artists who wear ape suits, pun simian, and call attention to sexism in the art world, the Guerrilla Girls: Have plastered the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City with posters when the institutions neglected to include women in major exhibitions.

"Exit Though the Gift Shop" is a funny romp through the art world, and while I don't know if it's a bona fide documentary, I know what I like. The movie is the purported record of a friendship between notorious U.K. street-art renegade Banksy and a goofball camera bug named Thierry Guetta. They met as Guetta assembled a video archive of the street-art movement in Europe and the United States. Or so says Banksy, who does not inspire confidence as a reliable narrator. He lives an anonymous life and appears on camera in shadow, underneath a hoodie.

Courtney Curtis and Pete Stengel are strolling on Walnut Street, chatting and occasionally glancing in the shop windows, when suddenly they do a double- take. On the other side of the pane of glass, in the empty storefront in the 1700 block, is a colorful, three-dimensional installation that is definitely not a display of merchandise. Peering in, they see several small windows that seem to open on to a penthouse party, with here a man sitting at a table, there a couple whispering over drinks, over there a dancing couple silhouetted against the skyline - 10 windows in all. What do they think of it?

Two women who have helped shape the Philadelphia art world - one on the bricks and stone of city walls and buildings, the other within the sanctified confines of a world-class museum - will share the Philadelphia Award. Jane Golden, artistic director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and Anne d'Harnoncourt, director and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, have been named to receive the award that honors the local citizen who has done the most to "advance the best and largest interests of the community," according to award guidelines.

Some weeks ago I let loose in this space an admittedly sensation-seeking, largely unprovoked, shotgun blast aimed at the current arts scene in America. The result was a most heartening fusillade of return fire that has left me, truth to tell, enjoying what Winston Churchill described as one of life's most exhilarating circumstances - that of being shot at, and missed. Emboldened, I thought I would return to the subject today. For those who may have forgotten, repressed or missed the original outrage, I was writing in response to the recent victories of the forces of free expression over the hordes of censorious darkness in such matters as whether the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe were legally obscene.

The art world can be intimidating. Not the impressionists or Andrew Wyeth, or a third grader's cubist interpretation of Stegosaurus With Amputated Leg, or the portraitists who commit Elvis to black velvet. Those, we get. But in many galleries, and some museums as well, visitors get the feeling that unless they have a degree in fine arts, a hand in the business, or an intuitive misanthropic bent, they're not welcome. "People feel there's this sense of 'otherness' in the art world," says Shelley Spector, a Philadelphia sculptor and gallery owner.

Mark David Norris, who was killed Monday in the boardroom of his Navy Yard marketing company, was an entrepreneur who projected a stylish image and the sense that he had an inside line on the next big business trend. "He was a talented designer, a real great business person," said David Brown, president of Brown Partners MultiCultural Marketing. "Mark has always been such a level-headed guy. I can't imagine him being involved in this. " Others say there were clues that Norris, 46, of Pilesgrove, N.J., the president and chief executive of Zigzag Net Inc., may have operated several businesses too close to the margins.

Philadelphia is capturing the art world by storm; artists everywhere are gasping. Everyone is talking, of course, about the Rocky statue. This summer, the Daily News is asking readers where they think the statue should find a permanent home. Currently, it's on display at the Arena Formerly Known as the Spectrum, but the statue is too great a treasure to stay there forever. Does Rome hide the Sistine Chapel? Does Paris hide the Mona Lisa? To help our quest, we've asked people in Philadelphia's art world where they think the statue should go. Some dare to suggest that Rocky is nothing more than a movie prop.

Ben Wolf, 82, Philadelphia artist, critic, writer and, in general, a much-admired man-about-art, died Thursday of a heart attack at Waverly Heights, a retirement community in Gladwyne where he had been living the last six years. There was practically no aspect of art that Mr. Wolf did not touch during his long and varied career. He was an art critic and columnist, a biographer of artists, an art teacher and lecturer, and a publisher or editor of art magazines. "He was a general, all-around, Renaissance man with a deep and committed interest in the arts in general," said Philadelphia artist Peter Paone, who met Mr. Wolf when Paone was a student at Philadelphia College of Art in 1954.

To be sure, the discovery of a secret cache of paintings by local artist Andrew Wyeth is a major find for the art world. But why must the world know about the model? What will be achieved by locating her and talking to her? Finding out who Helga is and what her relationship with Mr. Wyeth is will have no effect on the artistic or monetary value of the paintings. The press and public should stop their frantic assault into private lives. The paintings are obviously a very private and emotional effort, one that should not be tainted by examinations into the relationship between artist and subject.

H OW THE HELL does she do it? Looking at one of Zoe Strauss' photographs, it's an easy question to ask. Strauss' great talent is being able to capture the intimate moments of total strangers - stark images mostly of working-class life, people and places rarely in the spotlight. Take "Victoria's Hysterectomy Scar," a photo shot in Philly in 2004 that's part of "Zoe Strauss: 10 years," a midcareer retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art beginning tomorrow.

LONDON - Lucian Freud, 88, a towering and uncompromising figure in the art world for more than 50 years, died Wednesday after an illness at his London home. Mr. Freud was known for his intense realist portraits, particularly of nudes. In recent years his paintings commanded staggering prices at auction, including one of an overweight nude woman sleeping on a couch that sold in 2008 for $33.6 million. William R. Acquavella, his art dealer, said in a statement that he would mourn Mr. Freud "as one of the great painters of the 20th century.

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. - This is hallowed ground. It feels wrong to walk on Jackson Pollock's studio floor because the wooden floorboards are splashed with bright streaks of paint. It is as if you were standing on one of the explosive paintings he produced in the 1940s and 1950s that completely rearranged the art world. But at the former fishing shack behind the quiet country home in East Hampton that he shared with his wife and fellow artist, Lee Krasner, you can almost see him crouched over a canvas in a black T-shirt, with a cigarette dangling from his lip and a brush dripping with Devoe house paint.

"Exit Though the Gift Shop" is a funny romp through the art world, and while I don't know if it's a bona fide documentary, I know what I like. The movie is the purported record of a friendship between notorious U.K. street-art renegade Banksy and a goofball camera bug named Thierry Guetta. They met as Guetta assembled a video archive of the street-art movement in Europe and the United States. Or so says Banksy, who does not inspire confidence as a reliable narrator. He lives an anonymous life and appears on camera in shadow, underneath a hoodie.

Si Lewen begins his paintings as he sleeps. Images crowd his dreams until one rises above the rest to wake him and beg to be put on canvas. Lewen always obliges. "My art is my life, my world," he said from the Foulkeways at Gwynedd apartment he shares with his wife, Rennie. They moved there from New Paltz, N.Y., two years ago to be near their daughter, Nina Kardon, and her family, who live in Ambler. Lewen - whose work once was exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and galleries in New York and around the country - has been painting for most of his 91 years.

To be sure, New York's art scene - with its clad-in-black gallerists, its attitudinal hangers-on, its moneyed collectors, and most of all, its variously self-promoting, insecure, insufferable artists - is ripe for movie satire. (Untitled) , however, is not that movie, not that satire. Starring a brooding Adam Goldberg as a composer of new (and extremely dissonant, listener-unfriendly) music and Marley Shelton as a fashionably bespectacled gallery owner, the film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so. Goldberg's scowling Adrian leads a trio of musicians through a jolting cacophony of pieces written for piano, reeds, and percussion - and the percussion includes clanging buckets, crumpled paper, and breaking glass.

"(Untitled)" isn't untitled - its title is a hint that it has something to do with contemporary art. The movie (directed by "Bartelby" helmer Jonathan Parker) stars Adam Goldberg and Eion Bailey as contrasting brothers. Goldberg's a poor and obscure composer of atonal music, the other guy a rich and successful painter of soulless hotel art. Right away, you wonder if the filmmakers are trying hard enough. They cast the blandly handsome Bailey as the vacuous artist, the bearded, glaring Goldberg as the difficult genius.

Today - the day the Barnes Foundation, long of Latchs Lane in Merion, unveils the design for its $200 million gallery on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway - is one that many in the art world will regard as infamous, and many in Philadelphia will applaud. The incomparable Barnes collection won't be moving from its home of 84 years just yet; the city Art Commission, which oversees Parkway construction, will review the concept this morning and is expected to endorse it, with final approval to follow.

Philadelphia artist Ed Hughes could use an electrician. So if you happen to be an electrician, and you think you might want some art in your home, Hughes has a deal for you: your electrical work in exchange for his mixed-media metal-on-wood panels with enamel-based paint, now on display at the SoHa Gallery & Salon in Haddon Heights. Hughes is one of 16 artists - most of whom regularly show their work in galleries - in a new Art4Barter exhibit that debuted in Fishtown in January, moved to its current Jersey home last month, has a date in Manhattan's West Village beginning Saturday, and then will go wherever anyone offers a venue in exchange for a painting by organizer Antonio Puri of West Chester.

Anne d'Harnoncourt, 64, the formidable, high-spirited personification of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and an indefatigable advocate for the arts as central to the city's identity, died Sunday night. She passed away at her Center City home after undergoing a surgical procedure last week, said Art Museum chairman H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest. The Art Museum did not release a cause of death; there will be no autopsy, he said. "It's a shock and it's very sad. It's unimaginable - the museum world without her," said Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a friend and colleague for decades.