The verdict, which was first published in the Los Angeles Times, marks the end of a tumultuous career for the 80-year-old contemporary art dealer, who now faces a statutory maximum sentence of 15 years in federal prison.

Allegations of fraud and dirty dealing have followed Chrismas since the 1970s. But the dealer, who was once considered among the most powerful in the US, with a roster that held names as influential as Richard Serra and Ed Ruscha, was long able to avoid prosecution, despite accusations of fabricating works, withholding payments to his artists, and refusing to return works that hadn’t sold.

The first major lawsuit came in the mid-1970s when artist Robert Motherwell sued him for the disappearance of nine works. A decade later, Chrismas was accused of losing $1.2 million worth of art that collector Frederick Stimpson had given Ace Gallery for safekeeping; he spent three days in jail on felony grand theft charges.

His current situation stems from the latest in a string of bankruptcy filings. In 2013, unable to pay rent on his 30,000-square-foot flagship gallery on LA’s Miracle Mile, Chrismas filed for Chapter 11. During the bankruptcy proceedings, which took place between 2013 and 2016, Chrismas remained Ace Gallery’s president, trustee, and custodian.

It was during this time that prosecutors said Chrismas embezzled $264,595 from the bankruptcy estate by writing checks to the Ace Museum, a nonprofit corporation that Chrismas owned and controlled, and securing funds owed the gallery from previous sales, some of which was given to Ace Museum’s landlord for the space’s $225,000 monthly rent.

According to the Los Angeles Times, prosecutors said during the trial that Ace Museum was meant to be “the culmination of [Chrismas’s] life’s work.”

“He wanted a legacy and he was willing to use other people’s money to buy that legacy,” David Williams, an assistant US attorney, said during the trial. “You can’t chase your dreams with somebody else’s money. That’s called stealing.”

Chrismas’s attorney, Jennifer Williams, disputed these claims during trial, saying “There’s no evidence, zero evidence that Mr. Chrismas as the owner of the gallery couldn’t make loans himself to other companies within his gallery universe.”

Chrismas was arrested by the FBI in July 2021 on three federal counts of embezzlement, and released the following day on $50,000 bail. In 2022, a federal court ordered Chrismas to pay $14.2 million in a bankruptcy case that dated back to 2013.

A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for September 9.

THE HEADLINES

EMBEZZLEMENT CONVICTION. Douglas Chrismas, the 80-year-old, notorious founder of Los Angeles’s defunct blue-chip Ace Gallery, has been convicted of embezzlement by a jury. The May 31 ruling in a Los Angeles court means the once powerful dealer, who has been the defendant in over 55 lawsuits, some of which were for stealing artworks and not paying artists, faces up to 15 years in federal prison. In less than an hour, according to the Los Angeles Times, the jury found Chrismas guilty of three separate counts of embezzling a total of over $260,000 from Ace Gallery’s bankruptcy estate while acting as trustee and custodian of the bankruptcy estate. Chrismas had “champagne wishes and caviar dreams,” when he illegally deposited those funds towards an entity called Ace Museum in 2016, Asst. U.S. Atty. Vallerie Makarewicz told the jury. Meanwhile, the defense argued Chrismas “was desperate to save his business,” and had understood his Ace Museum legacy project to be part of the bankruptcy estate property. The jury, however, wasn’t buying it, and a sentencing is scheduled for September 9.

RESTITUTION ERROR. In a complicated case, judges for the US Fifth Circuit court ruled the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Houston can keep an 18^th century painting by Bernardo Bellotto that was looted by Nazis and accidentally restituted to the wrong person right after WWII, reports The Art Newspaper. Their decision upholds a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit brought by the Jewish heirs of its original owner Max J. Emden. Emden sold the work under duress, but it was confused with another Nazi-looted painting that was painted after the original Bellotto, by an anonymous artist. Allied forces recovered both paintings, but the Dutch Art Property Foundation for restitution claims erroneously gave the original painting to a claimant who had only requested the copy. The mistaken restitution could not be challenged by US courts, which are forbidden to judge another state’s acts of government done in its territory.

THE DIGEST

El Museo del Barrio in New York has named the 33 artists that will participate in the second edition of its recently relaunched La Trienal. Taking the title of “Flow States,” the show feature Carmen Argote, Christina Fernandez, Roberto Gil de Montes, Caroline Kent, Karyn Olivier, and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya. [ARTnews]

Students and faculty demonstrated against the sudden closing of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts (UArts) yesterday. On Friday, the school belated announced to its student body and staff that it would shutter this week. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) also revoked the school’s accreditation on June 1, telling reporters the UArts “failed to inform the Commission of closure in a timely manner or to properly plan for closure.” [Hyperallergic]

The Ansel Adams Estate has hit back at Adobe for selling AI-generated images using the photographer’s name, allegedly on repeated occasions. Ironically, Adobe Stock’s own official policy terms don’t allow this, stipulating users are forbidden to upload AI-generated pictures “created using prompts containing other artist names or created using prompts otherwise intended to copy another artist.” [ARTnews]

A week out from Art Basel, one highlight to look out for at the fair’s Unlimited section is Christo’s Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963-2014). Typically, the artist’s preparatory drawings of his monumental installations are made available for sale, making this large sculpture of an actual, wrapped VW Beetle, a rarity, for which Gagosian gallery is asking $4 million. [Bloomberg]

Two Bronze and Iron Age sets of treasure found in Dorset can stay in the county, thanks to a public fundraiser allowing the Dorset Museum to acquire them. The treasure includes a group of 40 coins from the second century BCE, made by a Gaulish tribe, and another stash including a Bronze Age axe head, bangle, and sword. [BBC]

The stories of how the Nazi’s looted and hid thousands of artworks is currently being told in three, simultaneous exhibitions in Austria. For the exhibit “The Journey of the Paintings”, the Lentos art museum in Linz is showing 80 works, including pieces by Goya and Titian, which were plundered and hidden in salt mines to build Hitler’s mega museum, the Führer Museum in Linz. The Altausse mine where they were hidden, and almost blown to bits, can still be visited. [El Pais]

The Kunstmuseum Bonn has named Friederike Fast as its new deputy director and curator. [Monopol Mag]

THE KICKER

WALK THE LINE. Walk south to north along the Thames and the small waterways on east London’s Greenwich Meridian line, and for some 8 km (about 4 miles), you can soak in the constantly evolving public art trail called The Line. From Antony Gormley’s cloud, to Tracey Emin birds, writer Andrew Jones for The Financial Times says “now is the time to visit or revisit,” the sculpture walkway. Doing so, “is to experience contemporary art, but also to explore areas of the city that had, until recently, been largely abandoned and closed. Here you will witness new neighborhoods springing up in historic settings, observe wildlife you may not have expected to see in the capital and spot Londoners slow down and connect with each other,” writes Jones. The path is divided into three sections Jones describes in detail, and the whole features around 25 works by established and emerging artists, including Gary Hume, Yinka Ilori, Eva Rothschild, Madge Gill, plus a new installation by Helen Cammock. Happy trails!

The dream went something like this: Hayward went to meet his dealer, the famed Douglas Chrismas, at a collector’s lavish house. When he arrived, he was surprised to see the collector already owned work by him—a heavy envelope made of lead that he could not remember making or selling. “You were warned, and often,” the dream version of Hayward’s wife Sue told him. Hayward became enraged. He pulled a medieval ax down from the fireplace mantle and hacked away at the collector and his two bodyguards. The dream ended with Chrismas standing dumbfounded in pools of blood. Shortly after Hayward awoke—according to a short story that he published in 2010—Chrismas called, and the artist recounted the dream. Unfazed, the fictionalized Chrismas told him to write it down: “I bet I can sell it for you.”

“It’s a dream. You can’t be held responsible for a dream,” Hayward said when I first interviewed him about Chrismas in 2016. “That Doug’s alive is the only proof we need that the art world is a civilized place.”

Douglas Chrismas, the founder of Los Angeles’s storied blue-chip Ace Gallery and an early promoter of talents like Richard Serra, Michael Heizer, and Ed Ruscha, has often inspired rage in associates. He moved to L.A. in 1966, and opened his first gallery in the city soon after.

Allegations have trailed him at least since the early 1970s. He’s been accused of fabricating artists’ works, failing to return unsold artworks, withholding payments, and financial mismanagement. Several years before Hayward had his vengeful dream, sculptor Donald Judd took out an ad in Artforum accusing Ace of holding an exhibition “wrongly attributed” to the artist. A decade before that, Andy Warhol complained of missing payments from Chrismas.

But none of the accusations ever seemed to stick. Despite Chrismas’s reputation, his roster teemed with sought-after artists for decades and his galleries grew bigger and more ornate.

Even after years embroiled in bankruptcies, Chrismas seemed untouchable. That is until last July, when the dealer was charged with three federal counts of embezzlement. The following day, he was out on $50,000 bail, attending the Felix Art Fair at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. This May, a federal court ordered Chrismas to pay $14.2 million in a bankruptcy case that has dragged on since 2013. With a federal trial scheduled for January, after three delays, that could put the dealer in prison if convicted, Chrismas might finally be out of luck.

But the question of how Chrismas persisted for so long, and how decades of allegations of failure to pay and disappearing artworks finally escalated to the current money laundering and embezzlement charges, speaks to the opacity of the art market and the millions of dollars sloshing around in it. For artists and art-world observers, Chrismas’s case provides a remarkably full look behind a curtain that rarely gets pulled this far back.

Chrismas was renowned for giving major talents, including Ed Ruscha and Michael Heizer, a platform early on at his now defunct Ace Gallery. More recently, a slew of allegations of financial mismanagement overshadowed his reputation. He was repeatedly sued by artists on his roster for withholding payments from sales and failing to return unsold artworks.

Ace Gallery filed for bankruptcy in 2013, but Chrismas continued to lead the business until 2016, when a court-ordered reorganization plan placed bankruptcy trustee and forensic accountant Sam Leslie in charge. (At the time, the gallery ran Beverly Hills and mid-Wilshire branches.)

While sorting through the business’s financial transactions and inventory of artworks, Leslie discovered that between February 2013 and February 2016, Chrismas had diverted around $17 million from the Los Angeles operation to two New York-based shell companies. According to the report Leslie filed with the court in May 2016, Chrismas also had some 60 artworks that had not been accounted for in his bankruptcy trial in a private storage facility.

Last July, the disgraced dealer was arrested on charges of embezzlement by FBI agents in Los Angeles. The indictment accuses Chrismas of redirecting some $265,000 from the bankruptcy estate of Ace Gallery to a separate corporation that he owned. He pleaded not guilty to the charges and was released on bail. Meanwhile, Leslie had opened a civil suit against Chrismas over “these diversions of cash arising from sales of inventory,” Leslie’s attorney told the New York Times in 2021.

On May 4, the U.S. Central District Court of California ruled in favor of Leslie. The court cited the irrefutable evidence against Chrismas, who was ordered to pay $14.2 million in lieu of a trial. However, if convicted of all charges in his upcoming criminal case, he would face a maximum sentence of 15 years in federal prison.

The Headlines

THE LATEST FROM THE SALESROOM. On Tuesday night in New York, one day after it hauled in $195 million for a single Andy Warhol painting, Christie’s staged an evening sale of contemporary art with 29 lots that together earned $103 million, Angelica Villa reports in ARTnews. That result was only about half of what the same sale earned across 37 lots last year—one adviser described it as “lackluster”—and the total was not helped  by two Jean-Michel Basquiat works being withdrawn right before the action began. (One, a 1982 triptych, had been expected to earn $30 million.) Nevertheless, new artists records were set, via an Eric Fischl painting that went for $4.1 million (twice its high estimate) and a Helmut Newton photo that made $2.3 million. The auction action in Manhattan is far from over. Big-ticket sales continue in New York this week and next.

TROUBLE IN L.A. A U.S. court has ruled that veteran Los Angeles dealer Douglas Chrismas, the founder of Ace Gallery, must repay $14.2 million from art sales that he diverted into personal accounts amid a bankruptcy, the Art Newspaper reports. The verdict resulted from a civil suit brought by Sam Leslie , a forensic accountant who was appointed by a court to run Ace after it filed for bankruptcy. Separately, Chrismas is facing federal criminal charges that allege that he embezzled $260,000 from the bankrupt gallery. He faces 15 years in prison, and has pleaded not guilty.

The Digest

The Kicker

LOOKING FOR A NEW ENGLAND. The inventive sculptor Cornelia Parker, who is about to open a show at Tate Britain in London, sat down with the Guardian for an interview that touched on a number of political topics—Brexit, for one. (Parker advocated staying the European Union.) “It affects everything,” she said of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal. “Your freedom of movement, my daughter’s future. I’m thinking of applying for German citizenship because I’m half German. I don’t like feeling not part of Europe. I don’t want to be a little Englander.” [The Guardian]

Chrismas is currently facing three charges of embezzlement. If convicted of all three, the 77-year-old dealer could face a sentence of 15 years in federal prison. He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges and is expected to face trial in September.

A now-unsealed indictment from March accused Chrismas of embezzling $264,595 from the bankruptcy estate. The indictment, filed in the Central District Court of California, alleged that he embezzled $100,000 owed to the gallery as part of a purchase of an artwork from a third party, and put that sum toward his own corporation. Chrismas is also accused of embezzling an additional $114,595 owed to the gallery by a third party for a separate purchase, and of writing a $50,000 check from the bankruptcy estate that he signed and paid out to his own corporation.

Chrismas founded Ace Gallery in 1967 in Los Angeles and later opened a second space in Beverly Hills, as well as a venue known as the Ace Museum. Prior to its closure in 2017, Ace Gallery had been considered one of the city’s top galleries, having shown artists like Tara Donovan, Sam Francis, Tim Hawkinson, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and others at formative stages in their careers.

Over the past five years, Chrismas has been plagued by allegations that his gallery withheld artworks and that he mishandled funds. In 2013, the gallery filed for bankruptcy amid what Chrismas claimed was a real-estate spat with the gallery’s landlord. Three years later, after failing to post a court-ordered payment of $17.5 million, Chrismas was fired from Ace Gallery by the forensic accountant assigned to the gallery’s bankruptcy proceedings.

Also in 2016, artists Mary Corse and DeWain Valentine filed legal complaints to re-obtain artworks allegedly being kept by Ace Gallery. Chrismas subsequently accused Valentine of owing the gallery money, which the artist denied.

ARTnews has attempted to reach Chrismas via the lawyer David Shemano, who represented him in 2016.

The Headlines

JUST HOW PRECARIOUS IS LIFE AS AN ARTIST? In the L.A. Artist Census, created by artist Tatiana Vahan, 95 percent of 2,000 respondents said that they did not make a living wage through their art practices, and 40 percent said they could not afford or had difficulty accessing healthcare. Los Angeles Magazine has delved into the project. Unsurprisingly, when the Artist Pension Trust  launched in 2004 with the idea of pooling artworks from well-regarded artists and selling them over time to generate payouts for all, many were honored to participate. However, a New York Times investigation reveals that many are exasperated about how it actually worked out . . . or didn’t work out. “I really trusted it—it’s very alarming to me what’s happening,” Marc Swanson said.

THE ARTNEWS LEGAL BLOTTER IS JAM-PACKED TODAY. A Eugène Boudin beach scene, purchased at a London flea market, has been identified as a piece that was stolen in 1990, and a search is underway for its rightful owner, the Swindon Advertiser reports. A New York court ruled against Michael Steinhardt, an ARTnews Top 200 Collector, in his suit against Manhattan’s Hirschl and Adler gallery, in which he argued that it should have paid him more when it sold his Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington for $12 million, Artnet News reports. And the family of artist Peter Max, who is reportedly suffering from dementia, is continuing to duel in court, the New York Post reports. Son Adam Max has sued his sister Libra Max  for control of their father’s company, alleging he has been wrongly cut out of the decision-making process. A lawyer for Libra called the suit “warmed over milk and meritless.”

The Digest

More legal news—in criminal court. Veteran art dealer Douglas Chrismas was arrested for allegedly embezzling more than a quarter million dollars from his Ace Gallery in Los Angeles while it was in bankruptcy. Chrismas has pleaded not guilty. A September trial date has been set in federal court. [Press Release/Department of Justice]

In 2024, Christie’s will move its Asian headquarters into four floors of a Zaha Hadid Architects–designed building in Hong Kong. It is a vote of confidence in the future of business in the city, which has experienced political upheaval in recent years. [Art Market Monitor/ARTnews]

Alibaba cofounder, Brooklyn Nets owner, and ARTnews Top 200 Collector Joseph Tsai snapped up two huge apartments on neighboring floors of 220 Central Park South in Manhattan (plus a studio apartment that may be for staff) for $157 million. [New York Post]

The digital artist Qing Han—who worked under the name Qinni—died in 2020, but inauthentic NFTs have recently appeared on the market, in the latest example of how unregulated the token market is. [Wired]

As UNESCO’s marathon meeting marches on, the onetime Rio de Janeiro home of landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx was awarded World Heritage Status. [Associated Press]

Here’s a look inside the Malibu, California home where artist Hunter Biden is living with his family and working out of a converted three-car garage. [New York Post]

The Kicker

WU-TANG IS FOR THE CHILDREN—and for paying forfeiture judgments, apparently. The U.S. Department of Justice said that it sold the only copy of the 2015 Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which was seized from pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli  after he was convicted of fraud. The price was not disclosed, but it seems to have gone for $2.2 million, according to a lawyer for Shkreli. The attorney told the New York Times that her client (who paid $2 million for the album) said he was “pleased with the sale price and RIP ODB.” According to the Associated Press, Shrekli is scheduled to be released next year.

Thank you for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

In Mary Boone with Cube, 2010, the gallerist holds a block of the compressed trash in Squeeze, Mika Rottenberg's 2010 video.

COURTESY NICOLE KLAGSBRUN GALLERY, NEW YORK

For most of the 20th century, the modern world was so involved with progress and abstraction, the utopian and the man-made, the disposable and the throwaway, the obsolescent and the newer-and-better, it was hardly noticeable that the underlying material of modern art and life wasn’t really any of those things. In fact, from our early 21st-century vantage point, it appears that the true fabric of the modernist century was none other than trash. Rubbish was the repressed that is now making its return.

We should have guessed. Picasso’s earliest collages with scraps of newspaper and wallpaper should have warned us; so should have his sculptures using old handlebars and seats. Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, pieced together from canceled tickets, tram receipts, and other discards, made it clearer still. Think of the very process of collage. Remember Joseph Cornell, fitting nostalgic premodern bits and pieces into his compartmented boxes like a jackdaw into its nest, from his brother’s naive drawings to outmoded clay pipes. And let’s not forget Gaudí’s ceramic shards in Barcelona or Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in L.A. or Arman’s most radical pieces, called Poubelles—Plexiglas boxes containing trash, ranging from household detritus to the waste-bin refuse of other artists (Lichtenstein, Kosuth, and LeWitt among them).

In Italy, Alberto Burri stitched together old burlap bags into elegant abstractions, and the arte povera artists made equally refined use of impoverished objects. In the United States, Louise Nevelson, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and a host of others, including the scatter-work artists, Richard Tuttle, Jessica Stockholder, and Tony Feher, employed discards and debris in ways sometimes considered formalist or decorative. John Miller’s excrement-brown sculpture gave way to gilded miniature dump sites. The throwaway culture infiltrated art so slyly over the years that its presence went unnoticed, even in discussions of Abject art, Funk art, and Grunge.

For much of the 20th century, trash was a material that referred to the past—recycled by artists whose credo was to make it new. By using materials that hadn’t yet made their way into art, they were making it new: recycling was an oblique way of trashing the past during a period of optimism about the future. Garbage could also be a source for making form that fit the ethos of the time: it was based as much on chance as on choice. But now, with a subtle but crucial shift in attitude, trash has become a subject with ecological and environmental importance. Context is everything—should we call it ironic that in our society, suddenly aware of greenness and zero-carbon coupons, garbage is coming to the fore? The striking survey of Rauschenberg’s work at Gagosian Gallery in New York last fall couldn’t have been better timed. It revived the full greatness of Rauschenberg’s trash-based oeuvre and managed to obliterate our memories of Rauschenberg’s many late imitations of himself.

It wasn’t until the 21st century that it really began to dawn on most of us: trash, detritus, and the results of what Robert Smithson called entropy are the by-products of the Industrial Revolution and the consumerism it engendered. Trash is the inevitable outcome of a century of disposal. It is also the consequence of an age of earthquakes, floods, melting glaciers, tornadoes, and tsunamis. The earth itself very likely gets several tons heavier every day simply by absorbing garbage. It has also been calculated that if laid end to end, the nonbiodegradable plastic bottles on earth would reach to the moon and back. Space itself is littered with satellite debris, just as the seas are inundated with waste.

Recently, there has been a radical shift in our consciousness of trash, with artists now using obsolete things not just as materials but also as content—turning them into landscape, still life, and other artistic genres. This awareness informs the work of artists like Sarah Sze, Mike Nelson, Christoph Büchel, Marjetica Potrc, El Anatsui, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Kristen Morgin.

Consider three unlikely pioneering artists who chose early on to engage with trash in this way. German action artist HA Schult, feminist service-oriented artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and elusive African American conceptualist David Hammons have long been considered almost as atypical and eccentric as the man in Houston who built a house from 50,000 used beer cans. What is more interesting is that, in the work of Ukeles, Schult, and to some extent Hammons, the trash quotient—while perfectly obvious—has gone mostly unremarked upon.

“I started to work with trash in 1969,” notes Schult, whose public extravaganzas have sometimes been compared to those of Christo, but whose pioneering environmental art acknowledges the crucial role of trash. “We live in the era of trash and we are running the risk of becoming trash ourselves,” says Schult, who has his own museum in Cologne. In 1969, in an installation titled Biokinetic Situations, he filled a museum in Leverkusen with molds, fungi, algae, and anaerobic bacteria and littered a street in Munich with trash. In 1976 he covered the whole Piazza San Marco in Venice with wadded newspapers. In 1977 he staged the crash of a Cessna nose-first into the Staten Island garbage dump. Since 1996, when he began producing life-size “Trash People”—1,000 in all—he has taken this nonbiodegradable army, fashioned from crushed cans, bottles, and discarded electronic parts, to major tourist sites, such as Red Square in Moscow, the Great Wall of China, and the pyramids of Giza. (In addition to the 1,000 figures, he made 500 others for sale at $14,456 each. And they’ve been selling well, according to his manager.)

In the summer of 2010 he built a temporary rubbish hotel on a beach in Spain. Sponsored by Corona beer at a cost of about $720,000, it consisted of 12 tons of refuse that had washed ashore on beaches. Then, this past March, he took the trash people to Longyearbyen, in the Arctic.

Ukeles, too, began her trash work in 1969, issuing her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” in which she stated, “My working will be the work.” The artist, who shows with Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, queried, “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” The manifesto proposed an exhibition titled “Care,” which was to include interviews with maintenance men, maids, and sanitation workers; the contents of one garbage truck; and containers of polluted air, Hudson River water, and ravaged land. It was all to be serviced, depolluted, and conserved throughout the exhibition. Ukeles’s other projects have used recycled materials and garbage trucks. Between 1978 and 1980, her Touch Sanitation Performance involved shaking hands with more than 8,500 workers at the New York City Department of Sanitation. Since 1977 she has been the official artist-in-residence of the New York Sanitation Department.

Cultural overtones have prevailed in Hammons’s work from early on, with his attention to racial content in the ’70s. He has consistently chosen worthless and distressed materials—chicken wings, cheap wine bottles, basketball hoops, gnawed barbecue bones, plastic garbage bags, torn plastic tarps—as a way of paying homage to the inner-city black tradition, forged by necessity, of making the most of hand-me-downs and leftovers. His installations and performative works stress the dirty, worn, and impoverished rather than the clean and pure. His esthetic may appear almost accidental, but the nearly invisible Concerto in Black and Blue—an installation in pitch-black rooms at the former ACE gallery in New York—or the partly hidden tarp-covered paintings in his most recent show in the city, at L & M Arts, are deliberate ploys. They signify that his art is—spiritually, politically, and materially—from and for the streets, not the art world. (Nevertheless, gallery director Sukanya Rajaratnam reports, the show sold out at prices of $800,000 to $1 million.) His art appears to highlight not only deprivation but also the moral beauty of debris.

The landscape of waste as it relates to the inner city has also had an impact on Paul Chan and Vik Muniz. Chan’s 2004 double-screen digital animation, My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future, is a 17-minute two-sided exploration of utopia and violence based on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the Book of Leviticus (it also refers to Goya, Blake, Pasolini, Biggie Smalls, and the Iraq war). Chan went on to stage Waiting for Godot outdoors in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2008, in Rio, Muniz—who has a long history of making images out of chocolate and other unlikely substances—began collaborating with an association of “catadores,” or trash pickers, who think of themselves as environmental recyclers as they sort through one of the largest garbage dumps in South America. The result of the collaboration was a monumental series of portrait photographs made from dirt and trash and containing references to early Picasso and to other purveyors of clichéd masterpieces. Muniz calls them “Pictures of Garbage.”

By intention, or merely coincidence, three solo shows in Chelsea in the late fall had trash as their overt content: Ester Partegàs at Foxy Production, Mika Rottenberg at Mary Boone Gallery, and Chris Doyle at Andrew Edlin Gallery.

The Barcelona-born Partegàs has been making sculpture and installations about formerly overlooked spaces of consumption and the rubble that follows progress since 2001, when she constructed a quarter-scale airport lounge, complete with luggage and litter. From 2001 to 2003 she made a series of “Detours,” pencil-on-paper drawings replicating shopping receipts, and then a series devoted to food labels emphasizing the additives, preservatives, and emulsifiers in packaged food. Hollowmess, her 2003 installation at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York, was a full-scale, trash-littered version of a highway underpass. On view at Foxy Production last fall was “More World,” in which the gallery was wallpapered with a photomural of an empty lot: weeds and trees behind a construction fence. Hanging on the mural were candy-package drawings, while sitting on the floor was Partegàs’s sculpture of a potted plant and plastic bag; adding to the mix was her video Ghost (2009), which reflects the world in a trash-strewn puddle.

Partegàs summed up her enterprise this way in a 2006 issue of the magazine Slave: “I find the subject of garbage especially fascinating as a suggestion of ‘inner dust.’ This way of looking at the city stems from my anthropological interest in the rituals of the body/community in which a decision is made to hide or to celebrate its impurities.”

Rottenberg’s Squeeze (2010), a 20-minute video loop shown last November in a boxlike room within the Mary Boone Gallery, is a mystifying allegory about trash and the globalization of production, the exploitation and pampering of women, and “the mechanisms by which value is generated,” says Rottenberg. Accompanied by the noise of compressors and compacting machines, the video depicts elevatorlike cubicles, conveyor belts of lettuce in Arizona, women being squeezed by walls closing in, and rubber being expressed from trees in India. It shows a tongue poking through a wall, and a row of buttocks appearing on an opposite wall. Migrant women workers in the lettuce fields thrust their hands into holes in the earth to be massaged by a row of kneeling Asian women in a cramped underground space. It is a surreal expression of ideological structures, fusing the social, the economic, and the political into an absurdist symbol of a global production system that is a torture chamber and a massage parlor, as well as an elaborate way of producing garbage.

In yet another sense, Squeeze is about the production of its own materials. It can be seen as a 21st-century update on Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961). To fully explain Squeeze, two details outside the video room were crucial. The first was a photograph of Mary Boone, all dolled up, holding the outcome of this global labor: a cube of compressed garbage. The second, affixed to the opposite wall, was a shipping certificate stating that the cube was sent to be permanently stored “offshore” in the Cayman Islands.

The content of Doyle’s Waste_Generation (2010), at Andrew Edlin Gallery, is also trash, but it is completely virtual. Doyle manipulated the subject into a hand-drawn, animated video in which things continually morph into other things. This approximately six-and-a-half-minute loop is from a series of five videos based on Thomas Cole’s cycle of paintings The Course of Empire. Doyle’s first video, Apocalypse Management (2009), was about destruction—the sack of a city, an approaching storm. As he explains, “In 2009 I was thinking about landscape in general—the destroyed landscape, the landscape of trash. I began thinking about trash as the other side of production or generation, and also what to do about the downside of that overwhelming technological generation.”

Waste_Generation is not only about trash but also, like Squeeze, about global technology and creativity in the face of destruction. Opening to a dump overflowing with computers and other devices, it segues into oil rigs morphing into a paper mill, whose smokestack churns out currency that flits away in the breeze. Weeds sprout, then turn into flowers, and felled trees become wallpaper patterns and oriental rugs. Factories spring up, their smokestacks belching smoke and vultures. A suburban subdivision is subsumed by ornament and symmetrical patterns. All these images mutate, adapt, and transform to the accompaniment of a soundscape composed by Joe Arcidiacono. Doyle has also begun working with dust. His 2011 performance piece and installation, titled Red Rovers, considers the lifeless landscape of Mars—the two robotic rover explorers and the red extraterrestrial dust itself.

But dust is another matter. It is related to trash but is not the same. Dust has to do with disintegration and mortality rather than with obsolete material goods. A study of dust might begin not with Picasso but with Marcel Duchamp; it would move through Joseph Beuys to the Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad, who in 2000 installed a wall-to-wall carpet piece in an exhibition in London. Those who looked closely at the carpet underfoot saw that Auad had fashioned clumps of lint into minuscule animals and figurines.

Detritus continues to be a fertile subject. Consider “Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life,” running through August at the Wellcome Collection in London. The show is about dust and rubbish, but also about bacteria, excrement, and soil. Viewers are left to contemplate Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s installation of five huge slabs fashioned from latrine waste gathered by Dalits (Untouchables) in India.

Kim Levin is an independent art critic and curator.

As far as Vanessa Beecroft performances go, the event unfolded more or less as expected. The usual giant opening exhibition crowd for Deitch projects formed fairly early, and moved around the gallery at about the same rate as a cafeteria line. Twenty women painted entirely in white lay still on the floor and bases along side similar looking casts, all in a formation resembling a highway. All this, according to the press release was supposed to create “tension between life and death”, a light-weight concept had Beecroft even achieved those goals; you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to identify which figures were alive and which were sculptures.

Meanwhile, why these works need to take the form of performances at all remains a sticking point for the art. What you see is what you see; the durational aspect of these works adding little to the viewing experience. But, such events do a good job at drumming up a lot of publicity the documentation on its own would never receive. After all, the Kanye West launch party and performance in 2008, hit a number of news sources, the use of nude models in masks deemed “shocking”. Not that much critical thought was devoted to any of the thornier issues Beecroft’s art brings up — she isn’t exactly propelling women’s rights into the 21st century — but the impact of a few naked women in public is clearly enough to propel popular media story. Separate the buzz from the art itself however and it becomes quite clear there’s about as much to this work as any fashion ad. In fact, considering the assets are all for sale, there’s hardly any distinction at all.