By CURTIS MORGAN

Cmorgan@MiamiHerald.com

Lake Okeechobee keeps rising — and so do worries about an aging dike the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ranks among the most vulnerable to failure in the country.

With the massive lake swollen by a more than a month of heavy rain, the Corps cranked the flood gates open to “maximum” two weeks ago. That move infuriated residents on both coasts, coursing billions of gallons of foul nutrient-laced runoff down two rivers, but it also managed to at least slow the rate of rise.

So far, however, it hasn’t been nearly enough to reverse a troubling climb. Even with South Florida dodging the wettest remnants of Tropical Storm Dorian last week, daily storms continue to slowly push water levels up and put pressure on the 143-mile-long Herbert Hoover Dike.

The Corps held a news conference Wednesday to insist federal engineers are doing everything they can to minimize environmental impacts while protecting public safety but cautioned that nature, particularly the tropics, may play the biggest role in whether the lake will reach the dike’s danger zone over the next few months.

“We still have several months left in the wet season. We still have not reached the peak of the hurricane season,’’ said Lt. Col. Tom Greco, the Corps’ deputy district commander for South Florida. “We’re taking that very seriously.’’

Lake water levels were set to top 16 feet sometime Wednesday. That’s just six inches short of a mark that triggers the Corps to move from weekly to daily inspections of a massive but nearly 80-year-old mound built out of sand, shell, rock and peat. Despite some $300 million-plus in on-going repairs, sections remain highly vulnerable to high water and storm damage, weakened over the decades by internal erosion.

At current rates, Greco said, the lake will hit 16.5 feet in about two weeks. Unless the lake slows, projections show a 50-50 chance it could top 18 feet in coming months, which would significantly raise the risk of a potentially disastrous breach.

Emergency managers and leaders in Pahokee, Belle Glade and a string of other small towns in the shadow of the dike are monitoring water levels daily and consulting with the Corps and the South Florida Water Management District, which runs the regional flood control system.

“We’re starting to get nervous,’’ said Palm Beach County Administrator Robert Weisman. “It’s added a whole new level of risk in that area. You can’t drain water of the lake quickly enough if there is a substantial rainfall.”

The lake, which doubles as a flood control and water supply reservoir for the sugar industry, has risen 1.27 feet over the last 30 days. In the past, hurricane and tropical storms have raised lake levels twice as fast and experts are forecasting an active next few months.

Since 2006, when an alarming report by state engineering consultants pronounced the dike “a grave and imminent danger,” the Corps has shored up the dike’s most vulnerable stretch from Port Mayaca to Belle Glade with a cement-like internal dam engineers call a “curtain wall.” The agency also is overhauling or planning to beef up half of the lake’s 32 drainage culverts, considered high-risk spots.

The Corps adopted a new scheme to protect the levee by keeping a lake that doubles as a flood control and water supply reservoir at lower levels, aiming to have it rise and fall seasonally from 12.5 feet to 15.5 feet.

At its current level, the Corps considers the risk of a breach minimal and Greco said that surveys showed no significant increases in seepage. But, with the lake more than two feet above its historic average for this time of year and more than three feet above where the Corps wants it, risks will only rise through hurricane season.

According to a 2000 Corps study, the risks of a dike failure rise significantly at 17 feet. At 18 feet, the probability is 45 percent. At 20, a breach somewhere along the dike is likely, with damaging and potentially deadly flooding. Those probabilities didn’t take into account the most recent repairs, but even with those, the Corps still rates the dike among a handful of the most high-risk in the nation.

The lake has topped 18 feet a handful of times in the past. It peaked at 18.8 feet in 1995, an event that opened serious leaks at nine spots along the south and southeast shorelines, and again topped 18 feet after a string of hurricanes in 2004. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma chewed a chunk from the dike near the Pahokee airport. The Corps cited an old repair job that failed and said the dike was not at risk of a breach.

With or without storms, the Corps expects to continue dumping water down the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Rivers for the foreseeable future.

The surge of polluted water, high in phosphorus and other agricultural chemicals, has added to local runoff that has fouled waters on both coasts, angering residents, tourists, environmentalists and local political leaders. Besides killing oysters and sea grass, the dumping has triggered a toxic algae bloom in the St. Lucie River and warnings from health authorities to stay out of the water.

State agencies on Wednesday released a joint statement saying that state and local governments had already spent more than a half-billion dollars to reduce pollution impacts from local runoff and were looking for solutions to address “complex environmental and public health issues’’ that balanced flood control, water quality and water supply needs

Greco said the Corps was working with water managers and state agencies for potential solutions, including putting more water into already brimming Everglades water conservation areas, but public safety concerns about the dike have forced dumping “that isn’t popular but is necessary.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/07/v-fullstory/3549066/despite-lake-okeechobee-dumping.html#storylink=cpy

With Lake Okeechobee two feet too high and still rising after a month of heavy rain and far-off Tropical Storm Dorian posing a potential but highly uncertain threat, federal engineers on Thursday cranked opened the flood gates on the big lake, spilling tens of billions of gallons of polluted water down rivers on both coasts.

The “maximized” releases are intended to protect public safety, making room for flood waters and easing pressure on the aging, vulnerable Herbert Hoover Dike. The lake remained more than a foot below the danger zone where risks of leaks, erosion or even potentially catastrophic breaches to the massive levee begin to sharply rise. But Dorian or some other future tropical deluge could quickly fill that gap as South Florida enters the peak of the hurricane season.

“It is imperative that we take additional measures to control the rise of the lake to ensure we have enough storage capacity,’’ said Col. Alan Dodd, commander of the U.S. Army Crops of Engineers’ Jacksonville District.

But stepped-up dumping flow spells an expanding environmental disaster for once-rich estuaries on both sides of the state: the Caloosahatchee River on the southwest coast and the St. Lucie River on the southeast. Sprawling black plumes already foul both rivers, a brew produced by local storm runoff but worsened by weeks of steadily increasing dumping of lake water laced with farm and yard nutrients like phosphorous, nitrogen, animal waste and silt.

In the St. Lucie, oysters are shriveling, sea grass beds are withering and waste-related bacteria levels have soared so high that Martin County health authorities have posted signs warning people not to swim in the river. It’s a mess that makes an unrelated algae bloom in Biscayne Bay appear relatively benign.

For frustrated residents, river advocated and environmentalists, it’s dirty water déjà vu.

Both rivers, which double as relief valves for Lake Okeechobee in the region’s flood-control system, have been repeatedly pounded by lake dump over the last few decades. The St. Lucie, about 50 miles north of West Palm Beach, has been hammered hardest — most recently and destructively after the hectic 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons repeatedly filled Lake Okeechobee.

Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch, a commissioner for Sewall’s Point, an upscale enclave near the mouth of the St. Lucie inlet, has regularly flown in her husband’s plane to photograph impacts that have spread though much of the Indian River Lagoon complex, from Fort Pierce to south of Stuart.

“This is just ridiculous for black water to be running through our estuaries in front of our homes where we play and fish,’’ said Thurlow-Lippisch. “I am angry at my government and I am part of the government. There is no excuse for this to keep happening.’’

The Corps, which co-manages the lake and regional flood-control system with the South Florida Water Management District, insists the agencies are doing everything they can with an outdated regional drainage system periodically overwhelmed by South Florida’s extreme weather. When it rains like it has so far in July, approaching double the typical amounts in some areas, the lake can rise much faster than the Corps can lower it.

Easing South Florida flooding concerns means sending a bigger polluting flush of Lake Okeechobee water toward the already-suffering coast.

Above-normal July rains prompted the Army Corps of Engineers on Friday to increase the amount of water being drained from Lake Okeechobee west to the Caloosahatchee River and east to the St. Lucie River.

The Army Corps since May has been dumping billions of gallons of lake water through the rivers and out to sea to ease the strain on Lake Okeechobee's 70-year-old dike — considered one of the country's most at-risk of failing.

But the lake draining that helps flood control also wastes water that could be needed to boost South Florida water supplies when dry weather returns. And of greater concern now for the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, the prolonged dumping from the lake is fouling coastal water quality and killing marine habitat. That threatens fishing grounds and can make waterways unsafe for swimming.

"It is a damaging, devastating, horrible effect," said Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart. "We are expecting [environmental] damage all across the board."

The increased Lake Okeechobee water releases could drain up to 6 billion gallons per day of lake water, enough to fill more than 9,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Lake Okeechobee on Friday had risen to 15.24 above sea level, about 3 feet higher than this time last year.

The Army Corps tries to keep lake levels between 12.5 feet and 15.5 feet, both for the environmental health of the lake and to protect the dike. The dike is in the midst of a decades-long rehab, the initial phases of which are expected to cost $750 million.

Rising lake levels increase the risk of erosion in the lake's earthen dike, which can lead to a breach.

"We are hopeful these larger [lake] releases will allow us to stabilize the rising lake before we have to maximize flows throughout the system," said Jorge Tous, the Army Corps' chief of water management for Florida.

Lake water being dumped into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers is a man-made consequence of the vast flood-control system aimed at keeping South Florida dry.

Water once naturally overlapped Lake Okeechobee's southern rim, flowing south in shallow sheets that replenished the Everglades.

But then farming and development got in the way, leading to the creation of the 143-mile-long Herbert Hoover Dike that now encircles the lake. Drainage canals were added to send lake water to the coast.

In addition to threatening the dike, high water can have damaging environmental consequences for the lake — drowning the aquatic plants that provide vital wildlife habitat and fishing grounds.

Yet high-volume, prolonged releases of lake water into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers throw off the delicate balance of fresh and salt water in the estuaries. They also bring an infusion of pollutants and cloud the water along the coast.

That damaging combination can kill off oyster beds and sea grasses — vital habitat for fish, manatees and other marine life. The lake releases are already leading to algae blooms that can lead to fish kills and even make contact with the water harmful to people.

Aside from beefing up the dike, long-term help to avoid releasing lake water to the coast involves building more of the water storage and treatment areas that are part of backlogged Everglades restoration plans.

Until then, the rainy-season lake releases are expected to continue.

"It's a major problem right now because we are in the early part of tropical storm season," Perry said. "Where's our protection?"

abreid@tribune.com, 561-228-5504 or Twitter @abreidnews

Copyright © 2013, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The national museum for art of the 21st century in Rome, called the Maxxi, hopes to become a global player in contemporary art.

Jay-Z greets art-world guests before a taping of the music video of his song “Picasso Baby” at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea.

“I have no idea why I’m here,” the artist Marilyn Minter said, as she sat in a temporary V.I.P. room at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea on a steamy Wednesday. “I’m just a fame whore.”

Ms. Minter was one of hundreds of fans and art-world types — Kalup Linzy; Lawrence Weiner; Andres Serrano; George Condo; Yvonne Force Villareal; Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum; and Agnes Gund, MoMA’s president emerita — invited to take part in a live filming of Jay-Z’s music video for “Picasso Baby,” the art-centric song off his new album, “Magna Carta ...Holy Grail.”

The rap marathon was inspired by the performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA exhibition, “The Artist Is Present,” said the art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who is Jay-Z’s art adviser and was a host of the event along with the film director Mark Romanek. “Jay has been wanting to do something durational for some time.”

The video shoot added a welcome frisson to Chelsea as the dozy season hit its annual doldrums. And it livened up a corner of the Web, where the topic of art-world fame whores racing to sell out can be counted on to set the thumb-tappers in motion.

Stephanie Theodore, a Bushwick gallery owner, tweeted a wry suggestion that the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei divorce his wife, marry Ms. Abramovic and form a megacult. Why not invite James Franco, the art blog Hyperallergic added, and make it an unholy threesome?

At a mere six hours, the taping was a water-cooler break by the usual standards of Ms. Abramovic, who during the run of “The Artist Is Present,” spent the equivalent of 30 full days sitting immobile in the museum atrium, while spectators took turns sitting opposite her. Still, as Mr. Linzy, a performance artist, said, “It’s epic.”

Dressed for the performance not in the Tom Ford suits he favors, but a pair of black jeans, white sneakers, a white short-sleeve shirt, a heavy gold chain, a gumball-size pinkie ring and a wristwatch from his collection of six-figure timepieces, Jay-Z rapped from a platform facing a bench reminiscent of the set of Ms. Abramovic’s original artwork.

Like Ms. Abramovic, he was a mesmeric presence, shifting spectators around as though they were iron filings drawn by a magnet. With his usual braggadocio, Jay-Z rapped lyrics like: “I want a Picasso, in my casa ... I wanna Rothko, no I wanna brothel,” and “What’s it gonna take for me to go, For y’all to see I’m the modern-day Pablo Picasso baby.”

He reminded his listeners that, like most every self-respecting millionaire mogul these days, he is an avid collector of contemporary art, although he alone turns the pursuit to his singular ends in lyrics that knowingly name-check everyone from Jeff Koons to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In “Picasso Baby,” Jay-Z’s grab bag of references includes Mr. Condo, Art Basel Miami Beach, Francis Bacon, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and Andy Warhol. He cites Basquiat twice, preening his insider knowledge by lyrically incorporating both the artist’s given name and Samo, his original graffiti tag.

To some spectators, it was particularly bracing to watch a hip-hop god colonize a white cube world that must once have seemed as distant as Mars from the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, the projects where Jay-Z grew up (and where he was known by his given name, Shawn Carter). “For a young black man in America to be on his level of success and rapping about art, and not what he’s wearing, is the coolest thing,” the artist Mickalene Thomas said.

“People have to realize he’s referencing artists who have been shape-shifters in themselves,” she added. “They have to know that a young person hearing him saying ‘I am Picasso,’ is going to look up Picasso.”

Ms. Minter, whose lush photorealist paintings comment on glamour and decadence, said, “Jay-Z speaks to the times we live in.”

An Mr. Weiner, an austere conceptualist, added, “Jay-Z speaks with the times he lives in.”

Unquestionably, Jay-Z manipulates our credulous times as deftly as he did a crowd that also included Judd Apatow, the designer Cynthia Rowley, Alan Cumming, Adam Driver and the artist Marcel Dzama, who came to the filming wearing a cow costume he constructed for a recent video.

“It’s great how he has really recreated the whole MoMA feel,” Mr. Dzama said. And it helped that Ms. Abramovic herself was on hand, arriving theatrically an hour into the event and emerging from a stretch S.U.V. with a turbaned chauffeur. Wearing one of the floor-length black dresses that a friend, the Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci, creates for her, Ms. Abramovic stepped from the vehicle and glided into the gallery with the hypnotic gravity of some loopy space priestess from a sci-fi kitsch classic of the ’50s.

Cameras in her wake, she parted the crowd — “Queen of Outer Space” meets the hip-hop monarch — crossing the gallery to mount a low platform, where she and Jay-Z engaged in a pas de deux sure to go down as among the oddest moments in the annals of performance art.

Two minutes later, the dance had already been posted to Vine and gone art-world viral. “OK the video in Infinite Jest that entertains you to death has finally come and it is the Vine of Jay-Z & Marina Abramovic,” wrote @LindsayZoladz. “R.I.P. US ALL.”

Don’t close the coffin lid quite yet.

Like Ms. Abramovic, whose stare-downs at MoMA left so many participants in tears that it inspired the blog “Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry,” the Jay-Z video was too sincere, even in its cynicism, to be all bad.

To a large extent, that was owed to the hip-hop artist’s way with the crowd, both mellow and collaborative. When a generator cut out, taking with it the background music, Jay-Z called out: “Anyone got unusual talents? Anyone can do something awesome?” He then invited a ballet dancer to perform some pirouettes; the performance artist Jacolby Satterwhite to show off his vogueing; and Kiah Victoria, a music student, to blow the roof off the gallery with her a cappella rendition of a torch song.

“I just love the way Jay-Z riffs on what Marina did,” said Roselee Goldberg, the performance art historian and founder of Performa.

That the boo-birds on Twitter failed to share the love will doubtless help Jay-Z’s cause or, anyway, his record sales. The shock and peril that once characterized much performance art had been co-opted by a marketing wizard, turned, as the bloggers carped, into a tool of aesthetic predictability.

Here it seems proper to resuscitate both Andy Warhol’s famous observation that “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” and to paraphrase an aphorism often attributed to the actual Picasso: mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal.

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A Big Sugar ad campaign has struck a sour note with environmentalists.

In fliers mailed to thousands of South Florida homes and in a television spot, the sugar industry touts legislation signed by Gov. Rick Scott in May — which extends a $25-an-acre tax on cane fields to help pay for an $880 million expansion of projects to reduce the flow of farm pollution flowing in the Everglades — as a “historic partnership” with environmentalists and the state that will “put the final phase of restoration into place.”

The ad boasts that “smart farming techniques" have helped preserve the Everglades and proclaims farmers the “largest private funders of Everglades restoration” with some $400 million invested in the effort to date.

The state’s three largest growers — Florida Crystals, U.S. Sugar and the Florida Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative — bankrolled the ad targeting key communities and residents in South Florida, said Brian Hughes, president of Tallahassee-based Meteoric Media Strategies, which created the ad. He wouldn’t discuss the cost or say how many people will get fliers, but called it a “modest” campaign.

“It’s not uncommon for coalitions and businesses to reach out in whatever media form to make sure people understand the facts,’’ said Hughes. “The sugar farmers are proud of the work they have put in to be part of the solution.’’

But two environmental leaders quoted in the flier supporting the legislation — Eric Draper of Florida Audubon and Eric Eikenberg of the Everglades Foundation — aren’t exactly on board with its message.

Both groups caught some flak during the legislative session from other activists who wanted the industry to pay more of the massive clean-up costs. The state has already spend some $1.2 billion constructing sprawling pollution-scrubbing artificial marshes that have not yet met strict water-quality standards for the Everglades.

Under pressure from federal judges overseeing two long-running environmental lawsuits, Scott championed an expanded clean-up plan expected to take several decades to construct. The law, aimed at raising $32 million a year, adds 10 years to a $25-per-acre tax that Everglades sugar growers pay, extending it to 2026. After that, the tax declines to $20 and then, in 2036, to $10 per acre.

Draper said the flier tells only “half of the story.”

The industry has significantly reduced its use of the damaging nutrient phosphorus, which harms native vegetation, but environmentalists contend farms should do more to reduce the volume of pollution that wash off fields after storms into South Florida’s canal system. They also argue that South Florida taxpayers, not the industry, have been stuck with the bulk of the clean-up costs through property taxes that support the South Florida Water Management District, which is managing the clean-up.

Eikenberg, chief executive officer of the Everglades Foundation, also said the bill addresses only one part of restoration efforts — water quality — and is far from the “final phase.”

There are billions of dollars of pending projects and decades of work ahead to boost the water supply and restore the natural flow to the River of Grass. That starts with a critical project for the Central Everglades that needs support from water managers to secure federal funding but has been questioned by the industry. Water managers face a key vote on the $2.2 billion suite of projects next week.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's painting "Untitled" set a world auction record for the artist when it sold at Christie's on Tuesday for £18.76 million.

By SOUREN MELIKIAN

Published: June 28, 2013

LONDON — Even minor auctions can herald small changes in a shrinking market.

The sales of contemporary art held here this week at Christie’s and Sotheby’s were surprisingly thin. Perhaps consignors feared that in these times of recession buyers might not fully respond to art that is not always obvious. After all, who can guarantee that a sponge dipped in blue paint will forever be recognized as a work of art?

One of those actually got that accolade Tuesday at Christie’s, where 51 lots sold for £70 million, about $106 million, but, annoyingly, 13 others were left stranded. You never can tell.

Luckily, one picture accounted for almost a quarter of the proceeds. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting “Untitled,” done in 1982 when the young American was 21, is executed in the cartoon manner that remained his trademark until his death six years later. The rough lines and the color spread in random fits of child-like enthusiasm simulate street graffiti. The outsized picture set a world auction record for the artist at £18.76 million.

The next three top prices for paintings greeted works that all differed hugely from each other.

A landscape painted with considerable skill by Peter Doig brought £7.34 million. Dated 1994, “Jetty” is filled with an atmosphere of mystery, at once lyrical and threatening. A small shadowy figure stands on a jetty gazing at a boat in the distance against a backdrop of dark olive shot through with white streaks suggestive of a snowy mountainside.

Touches of color applied with the tip of the brush create a scintillating pointillist effect that contrasts with the hazy dark tree shapes in the foreground. The landscape, which reconnects with the traditional painter’s art in an innovative style, is far removed from Basquiat’s picture.

So is the next one down on the price scale, Nicolas de Staël’s “Marseille,” which sold for £3.08 million. The supposed view of the French Mediterranean harbor painted in 1954 is effectively an abstract work in which the vague memory of structures defies identification. The violent color contrast in red and blue sends back an echo to a letter written by the Russian-born artist: “One never paints what one sees or thinks one sees; rather one records the shock one has received.”

The third highest price for a picture at Christie’s, £2.8 million, says all about the enduring fascination for the 1960s, when Pop Art broke out on the New York scene. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Cup of Coffee” dates from 1961. The linear monochrome image that recalls some posters of the period is a far cry from the strongly colored style inspired by comic strips that defines Pop Art. This makes the price quite extraordinary. It apparently greeted the name as much as the picture.

If doubts lingered on that score, the £2.7 million paid for the sponge dipped in blue paint by Yves Klein would dispel them. “SE 181,” as Klein called the sponge stuck on a metal stem also painted blue, is signed and dated 1961, a year before the French artist’s death at age 34. Some might believe that there is a limit to the time you can spend gazing in admiration at a blue sponge. But Klein has been celebrated for several decades and his name looks good in an inventory.

In short, notoriety defined by the media, whose role in the making of contemporary art prices has steadily increased over the past 50 years, is the common denominator among the paintings that performed well at Christie’s. That criterion is equally relevant to three-dimensional art.

A world record auction was thus established for Eduardo Chillida when an eight-meter-high chunk of steel executed in 2001 sold for £4.09 million. The 26-foot rectangle that broadens at the top, like some anvil wrought for a world of giants, was called by the Spanish artist, “Buscando La Luz IV” (Looking for the Light IV). The cryptic title goads viewers into marveling about the exact meaning of the 17-ton piece, which can certainly not be ignored. And therein lies the deeper reason for the gigantic price. Call it the “shock and awe” effect that is a fundamental factor in the success of contemporary art.

That same criterion worked at Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening, where the auction of contemporary art was just as disparate. Of the 68 works offered, 53 found takers, realizing £75.8 million.

Topping the lot was Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne,” which was dated 1966 and made £11.28 million. It was not quite the roaring success expected by its owner, as may be gathered from the £10 million to £15 million estimate plus a sale charge in excess of 12 percent. Even so, the price paid for a triptych of three small portraits was phenomenal. The consignor who bought the Bacon at Christie’s in 2004 for £2.35 million can hardly feel sorry for himself. A glance at the three faces that seem to be melting away in Bacon’s best nightmarish manner is enough to reveal that the triptych is not the easiest work to sell.

The second highest price, £10.44 million, also greeted a Bacon, “Head III” painted in 1949. The arresting bespectacled face has a ghoulish expression as it peers through vertical streaks of gray and white that resemble rainwater brushed by wind across a dingy glass pane.

A Lucio Fontana of a rare type fetched the third top price at Sotheby’s. “Concetto Spaziale, le Chiese di Venezia,” which went for £4.45 million, is a square composition in which two yellow crescent moons are confronted in a nondescript space painted a deep purple. Holes have been irregularly cut through the entire surface. Never mind that the title does not make the meaning of it all any clearer. It is big and it catches the eye from far away. That rescued the Fontana, sold under the lower end of the estimate.

Two lots down, it was the turn of a 1959 abstract painting by Pierre Soulages to fetch a large price, £4.33 million. Enormous strokes of blue color are piled on top of each other. Violence is conveyed by the thrust of the brushwork. At Sotheby’s viewing, the picture had a compelling presence that struck me as dwarfing whatever happened to be nearby.

In the same vein, the fury conveyed by the slashes cut through another Fontana canvas, this one painted white, helped “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” from 1965 to match the reserve price — at a steep £4.33 million. The consignor earned the right to some self-congratulation — in 1997, the Fontana cost him or her £155,500, also at Sotheby’s London.

Unfortunately for contemporary art consignors, the impact of a visual shock cannot be guaranteed to last forever. Buyers in search of security have a weak spot for artists no longer alive. They instinctively feel their art has been consecrated by the passage of time.

Hailed for decades in the media, artists as far apart as Bacon, de Staël or Lichtenstein are perceived as equally entrenched in the cultural history of the recent past. The works do not matter so much for what they are as for what has been written about them.

Yet the state of the market this week suggested that those holding contemporary art and postwar works by artists now dead fear that even that is no longer an iron-clad guarantee of future success.

The New York November auctions will tell us whether the consignors’ reticence this week was a mere passing fit of bad feeling. Should it persist, it could adversely affect market values.

The South Florida Water Management District, one of the state’s largest landowners with some 1.5 million acres ranging from wild banks of the restored Kissimmee River to bird-covered marshes at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, is pondering unloading some of its vast holdings.

Environmentalists are closely watching what the district is calling a “land assessment process,” worried that an agency that has been forced to slash its budget over the past few years by Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature may shed important acreage that could shrink wildlife habitat, compromise Everglades restoration projects or, worse, wind up in the hands of developers.

The district’s initial assessment, for example, includes 209 acres along Old Cutler Road bordering Biscayne Bay in Cutler Bay, which includes a 138-acre chunk the district purchased for $24.5 million less than three years ago to protect it from pending conversion into suburbia.

“Are we really going to get into the business of the South Florida Water Management District selling land fronting Biscayne Bay to a private developer?’’ said Charles Lee, director of advocacy for Audubon of Florida.

Water managers insist that’s not the intention and say they expect to keep the vast majority of the lands. One goal is to transfer or swap parcels to other government agencies, where they would continue to be used as conservation or recreation areas. The district, for instance, is negotiating transferring ownership of the 3,300-acre-plus Strazzulla wetlands in Palm Beach County to the bordering Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.

“Clearly, we would like to see that lands bought with public money continue to be used in some public fashion,’’ said Tommy Strowd, the district’s deputy executive director.

But water managers also won’t rule out that some scattered tracts that no longer serve useful purposes may wind up for sale to private bidders — but only after another round of more thorough evaluation and appraisals, public comment and approval from the agency’s governing board.

Lawmakers ordered the state’s water-management districts to slash property tax rates by nearly a third several years ago, but Strowd said the district is not pursuing the assessment as a money maker — though it could wind up saving millions in maintenance costs.

It comes, he said, as part of an initiative ordered by Scott for every state agency to analyze whether public lands they manage fulfill “core missions.” In the case of the district, that’s defined as flood protection along with maintaining water supply, water quality and the ecological health of natural areas.

Some of the district’s parcels are clearly a poor fit — like the graceful home and 16-acre estate of former state lawmaker Edna Pearce Lockett along the Kissimmee River in Highlands County, which the district wound up with as part of a 1993 deal to acquire 423 surrounding acres. But other agencies have since passed on offers to take it over, largely because of the expense of maintaining it.