As the American economy plummets ever deeper into the tank, the fate of the art market may not be the first concern for most people, but this piece from Bloomberg.com suggests that, the success of the Damien Hirst auction notwithstanding, the long anticipated shakeout in that realm is underway, at least in the mid-price markets that had been softening up anyway for some time.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Francis Bacon, 1944/© TATE

After two weeks on the road I'm back in New York, still thinking about that Francis Bacon show in London. Here's what I had to say about it in this week's Time International.

First the good news. The Los Angeles Times has started an arts blog. The more the merrier, especially if it means that their art critic Christopher Knight, one of the more useful voices around, gets to write more.

Then the bad news. It's called "Culture Monster". To put it mildly, the Times seems to have adapted the name from the well known independent arts blog "C-monster". (Adapted is the polite term here for ripped off, then tweaked.) If you're looking to show that your mainstream publication has the quick reflexes to operate in the nimble world of blogging, grasping for ideas at another blog is a funny way to start out.

Museum of Arts and Design, Allied Works Architecture/PHOTO: Museum of Arts and Design — David Heald

I'm back up and running — literally, I've passed through four airports in the last 96 hours. (Note to self — write anguished blogpost about continuing shortcomings of airport design.) Meanwhile, in New York, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) re-opens to the public this weekend in its new home on Columbus Circle.

To recap: the new museum was at the center of a famous preservation battle a few years ago, because it would, and did, replace a building by the eccentric Modernist Edward Durrell Stone. I've written about my problems with that a few times so I won't repeat myself here. Last fall I toured through the construction site with the architect, Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, and a few weeks ago I went through the nearly completed project with MAD Director Holly Hotchner. As it was reaching completion this summer my constant impression was that Cloepfil's building was a ghostly recollection of Stone's. Cloepfil had closely retained the proportions of Stone's museum, its footprint, its curving facade and something like its white color. Ada Louise Huxtable famously described the earlier building as a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops" and Cloepfil even kept the lower portions of those lollipops, which are now incorporated at the lobby level. It's as though he had dropped a paper lantern skin over Stone's framework.

Paper, Stone...where's the scissors? Well, Cloepfil cut an original fenestration pattern across his new building, an irregular circuitry of two-foot wide windows that form meandering Pac-Man channels across his facade. When you're inside, the same paths sometimes cut across floors. And the skin, which was white marble on Stone's building, is now made of white terra cotta tiles that in some light give off a mild iridescence and at other times look like nothing so much as the glazed bricks of the "white brick" apartment buildings that sprang up all around Manhattan's East Side in the 1950s and early '60s.

Stone's building also had an upper-story loggia that punched a void into its otherwise boxy form. Cloepfil has two wide glass stripes on the front facade but up top, where Stone's loggia used to be, there's now a long glass wall to provide the new museum's restaurant with views out over Columbus Circle and Central Park. The views will be irresistable, but that long glass wall connects Cloepfil's vertical glass panels to make an unmistakable "H" across the front of the building, as though the place has been branded by Hilton. As Paul Goldberger mentioned in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, Cloepfil is not capital "H" happy about that.

The interior spaces are more gratifying. In the lobby, to the left of the elevator banks, a steel and wood staircase is contained within a space frame of thin steel cables, like guitar strings, that carry the vertical striations of the exterior inside. The gallery spaces are ample, though not as nicely proportioned as the ones Cloepfil provided for his recent addition to the Seattle Art Museum. He's working with a famously peculiar space here, but his irregular channel windows (and glass floor strips) answer to the the irregular interiors in ways that tie it all together.

And the Stone building? The case could be made that it's the ghost inside the machine of Cloepfil's.

Back from London, but right out the door again. I'll be up and running on Tuesday from wherever.

Meanwhile, let me leave you with this bit of dialogue from The Hustler, the great Paul Newman movie from 1961 about pool sharks, which was running through my head all week in London after the Damien Hirst auction, and not just because of the word "sharks". It's the scene where George C. Scott, who becomes Newman's manager, explains to him how pool hustling really works:

When you hustle you keep score real simple. At the end of the game you count up your money. That's how you find out who's best. That's the only way.

It's hard to believe he didn't find his way to the art game.

Triptych, 1991, Bacon, /MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

I've been making repeat visits to the phenomenal Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain. To get right to the point, it's one of the most powerful shows I've seen in more than 40 years of museum going. This is Bacon's fifth retrospective, and no show can hope to make his work new. His screaming popes and wrestling lovers and smeared portrait heads are too familiar for that. But this show, which was beautifully curated by Matthew Gale of Tate Modern and Chris Stephens of Tate Britain, organizes the work intelligently — by useful and roughly chronological themes, like Animal, Crucifixion and Memorial — chooses well, introduces the galleries with intelligent texts and then just stands back and lets this majestic work hit you.

The only important canvas that didn't make it to London is Painting 1946, which belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York because Alfred Barr, MoMA's first director, was prescient enough to buy it when he saw it two years later. (Will MoMA lend it to the Metropolitan Museum when the show travels to New York next spring after passing through the Prado? I'll ask.)

I'll have a lot to say about this show on and off in days to come, but here's one impression I came away with repeatedly. To see this many Bacons gathered together reminded me again how rare it is to see new art that attempts, much less achieves, a genuine tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, also low comedy, puerile cool and industrial strength enigma. But in a time that has its share of tragedy — have you noticed? — where is the art that even tries to strike an equivalent note? What we have almost no language for anymore, at least not in art, is acute pain.

Yes, I can think of exceptions. Some older artists like Magdalena Abakanovich, Christian Boltanski and of course Anselm Kiefer. (And let me add that little video I saw at the Venice Biennale last year that Sophie Calle made of her mother's last moments.) And there's a lot of great work by photojournalists — James Nachtwey is the obvious example but there are many, many more — that in a way has taken up where art has left off. But grief without irony, anguish without a punchline? It's hard to do. And it's hard to find.

The Farnsworth House earlier this week /PHOTO: Via THE NEW MODERNIST

The waters are receding around Mies Van der Rohe's great Farnsworth House, the 1951 Modernist jewel box in Plano, Ilinois that was inundated earlier this week. At their highest the waters rose to 18" within the house. Movable furniture had been raised on milk crates before the flood came in and were saved but fixed-in-place wood panels and a wooden wardrobe were damaged.

On his blog The New Modernist, Ed Lifson points out that decades of suburban development around Plano has meant that heavy rains have no place to seep in. As a consequence "since the Farnsworth House was built, it has suffered seven 100-year floods."

The Farnsworth House website has many good — meaning bad — pictures, a blog about clean up efforts and a link where you can contribute to the restoration. Hit that link.

On a visit to Tate Britain yesterday I made a point of checking out a small portrait head that's of very little interest as a work of art. It's a picture of Sir Edwin Manton, who died three years ago at 96. It's placed prominetly at the Tate because Manton was one of the museum's largest benefactors, second only to the founder Sir Henry Tate. Twenty years ago Manton also founded the American Patrons of the Tate. (He had moved to the U.S. in the 1930s.) After his death his foundation also gave a major collection of British art to the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts and a gift of $50 million to the Clark's research and academic program.

I was thinking about Manton yesterday because of the way he made his money — he was a co-founder of A.I.G., the giant insurance company that had a near death experience this week. A.I.G. is still a major corporate member of the American Patrons, but I don't think it will be handing out much money to the arts anytime soon. Meanwhile, Lehman Brothers' arts philanthropy was more focused on performing arts education, but it also had involvements with the visual arts. And of course Kathleen Fuld, the wife of Lehman's CEO Richard Fuld, is a board member of the Museum of Modern Art. The Fulds were frequent donors to MOMA and its collections. I don't know how much of their net worth is tied up in Lehman's battered stock, but I expect they'll be economizing for a while.

As Bloomberg News pointed out this week, if a corporate philanthropic foundation is sufficiently endowed, it can coast for a few years even when the parent is hurting — or even gone. But in all likelihood there's a cold wind about to blow through a lot of museums in the U.S. and elsewhere. In July, when Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, introduced a new modified design for the Herzog & deMeuron addition planned for Tate Modern, he described the current fund raising environment as the most difficult in years, and said that if the Tate couldn't raise the projected $429 million budget for the addition — it was only about a quarter of the way there at the time — the new building would be called off. And that was before the events of this week, which have hammered the markets in London just as hard as the ones in New York. At the very least, I don't recommend that he go calling on A.I.G.

In related news, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced this week that it had completed the $500 million capital campaign to finance its new addition by Norman Foster. Not a moment too soon.

The first night of Hirst's two-day Sotheby's auction went pretty well for him, with hammer prices — meaning the final bids — coming in just short of Sotheby's high end estimate for the sale. Then by tossing in the additional amounts paid to the house as the buyer's premium, Sotheby's was able to report a total sale of 70.5 million pounds ($127.2 million). The second day sales — there are two of them today — may actually turn out to be the acid test, since they include many of the lower priced lots that were supposed to attract new buyers into Hirst's market.

And at this morning's sale of 80 works, which just concluded, things still went very much Hirst's way. Sotheby's reports a result of 24.2 million pounds — a total that also reflects the buyer's premium. Butterfly paintings and medicine cabinets repeatedly sold for amounts above the high end of their pre-sale estimates, sometimes well above. Glass vitrine pieces went for prices within the estimates — even unicorns didn't go for more — though a pair containing winged bull hearts pierced by a sword again went for well above. And a number of insipid spin paintings sold just below the estimated low end. Markets may plummet but butterflies just keep floating upward. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

UPDATE: The second of the two Tuesday sales also outperformed, bringing in 16.6 million pounds, including the premiums paid to the auction house by the buyer. For the three sales over two days that's a total of about 111.3 million pounds, of which Hirst walks away with about 95 million, minus whatever costs of the sale — security, re-fitting the exhibiton space, publishing the catalogue — that he agreed to cover. Interestingly, one of the heaviest bidders was reported to be Jay Jopling, Hirst's London dealer, who may have needed to support Hirst's prices because he has a backlog of Hirst's work that he needs to get rid of himself.

How long will it be before the Murakami auction? Just asking.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of art to be seen in London this week. I'll think I'll go look at some now.

Damien Hirst /PAL HANSEN for TIME

I got into London over the weekend for a number of reasons.  One of them was to see the Sotheby's pre-sale exhibition of Hirst's work at their auction showroom in Mayfair.  The actual sale, which may or may not make Hirst infinitely richer than he already is, I plan to skip.  I do what I can to talk about art but I don't know what to say about shopping.  But a few final observations about Hirst. 

First — what should we think about the Sotheby's auction itself, a sale of work directly from Hirst's studio?  How about this — it's fine for Hirst to do whatever he pleases with his work, and to get for it as much as he can.  I doubt it means the end of the world for galleries.  Very few artists have the power and visibility to give their dealers the slip.  Hirst — and maybe Koons, maybe Murakami — are among the few to have achieved escape velocity.  Even if Hirst's dealers, Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling, stopped working with him tomorrow — not likely — he's already so well known he could go on selling through other channels.  But artists who operate at the lower altitudes of fame still need galleries to cultivate their careers, give them regular shows in decent exhibition spaces and place their work in the right collections. 

To complicate the matter of course, the two-day sale may not live up to expectations anyway.  It's starting on the day that Lehmann Brothers declares bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America.  London markets this morning are in as much of a downturn as the Dow.  Hirst's collectors are international but so is the misery.  

The more important question has to do with Hirst as an artist, not a salesman.  As I said about him in last week's issue of Time, in the end his career threatens to boil down to a kernel of genuine invention surrounded by a vast penumbra of middling merchandise.  That's how it looked at the Sotheby's showrooms on Sunday, some good work surrounded by an asteroid belt of nothing in particular, an orbiting universe of inert material.  As Hirst himself told me in July, Sotheby's is not exactly an ideal place to show art.  Despite a substantial re-fit of the showrooms to accomodate his work, there were still low ceilings and hasty wallboard in some places, bad light in others. Surprisingly, even The Golden Calf, the best thing I saw at Hirst's studio a few weeks ago wasn't placed to advantage. When I saw it in July the Calf's tank was raised on a 6-ft. high marble plinth. At Sotheby's his tank rested on the floor.  Sotheby's had reinforced its floors to carry Hirst's formaldehyde-filled tanks, but the second floor showrooms couldn't support the additional weight of the plinth.  I sympathize — it's called the Richard Serra problem — but the gods must never be brought down to eye level.

And the paintings — the spots, the spins, the photo realist works he barely touches himself?  They looked, as always, like small ideas stretched ever thinner and a cynical misuse of the world painting. Ironically, some of the least expensive lots in the Hirst sale will be drawings done by Hirst himself, large preparatory sketches for some of the preserved animal projects that have pre-sale estimates of $40,000 to $60,000.

So it was a relief to come across a new Hirst sculpture that consists of glass and steel tanks in a Greek-cross formation that rise to a height of about six feet or so.  Each arm of the cross has five shelves. On one side of the cross those shelves hold 41 parchment colored fish of all kinds, each in its own clear formaldehyde tank.  As you circle around the cross to the other side, 41 corresponding fish come into view, but this time as skeletons mounted on black pedestals.  The title?  Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.  Clever boy.

Hirst said earlier this year he plans to end the butterfly and spin paintings, and tail off the spot paintings and animals in vitrines.  If I never see another spin or butterfly painting, I'll be fine.  But I actually hope Hirst revisits the formaldehyde animals when he has a real idea.  At heart Hirst is an 18th-century Englishman. He has the forthright vulgarity and the comic misanthropy we all love in writers like Fielding and Sterne, or in Hogarth, a spirit that mostly went underground in British painting in the 19th century, though it was kept alive sometimes by graphic artists like Cruikshank (Dickens' illustrator), Tenniel (of the Alice books) and that great, obscene oddity-at-large Aubrey Beardsley.  It came back in the 1960s with Hockney, Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, and then with Gilbert and George.  It was a spirit carried on by the Young British Artists that Hirst led into the world in the 90s.  They even did some good with it, but eventually proved that even outrageousness can be an orthodoxy, just another line of sales talk.

But in July, at one of Hirst's vast workshops near Stroud, a converted airplane hangar, I saw a huge work in progress he's been fiddling with for a while, a glass tank triptych of real crucified cows.  As a crucifixion triptych it's another obvious homage to Francis Bacon, but it had what so much of Hirst's work lately has lacked, a sense of real risk taking and a willingness to acknowledge feelings of anxiety and anguish without his usual ironic defense mechanisms.  As everybody knows, Hirst's persistent subject is death, which he treats in a combination serious/light hearted way.  But he also flirts with banality — how else to describe those mass produced paintings? — and banality is a dangerous medium.  If you're not careful it infects your whole enterprise.

Hirst superintends his career in a funny way.  He manages his finances very shrewdly.  It's his legacy he handles carelessly.  With someone who dwells so much on death, you would expect it to be the other way around.