On a fall evening in 2007, New York-based dealer Arne Glimcher sat in a Sotheby's BID +2.46% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE ^$51.99 +1.25+2.46% Nov 15, 2013 2:20 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 685,095 P/E Ratio 33.76 Market Cap $3.49 Billion Dividend Yield 0.77% Rev. per Employee $536,709 5352515010a11a12p1p2p3p 11/14/13 Peltz Holds On to Mondelez Sta... 11/14/13 'Pink Star' Diamond Fetches Re... 11/12/13 Stocks to Watch: Sarepta, Dish... More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position auction room in London and watched bidding soar for "Garden of Earthly Delights III," a fantastical painting by artist Raqib Shaw.

The seascape—made with glitter, rhinestones and enamel—featured underwater fights between marine chimaera, including a toucan-headed man attacking a malevolent creature with piranha fangs. When the hammer fell, the painting sold for $5.5 million, almost seven times its $811,000 low estimate. (Mr. Glimcher had given up after $2.5 million.)

Seeing the works convinced Mr. Glimcher that the Calcutta-born artist would be a perfect addition to Pace, his New York-based gallery. The dealer began wooing Mr. Shaw with an ambitious plan to fill three of Pace's four Manhattan spaces with the artist's work for his debut gallery show in America.

That exhibition, "Paradise Lost," opened last week and runs through Jan. 11. It depicts bizarre fantasy worlds being destroyed by violent savagery through 10 paintings, three sculptures and three works on paper. The show has been drawing 1,000 visitors a day—a lot for a small gallery space—and represents four years of labor for Mr. Shaw, a self-described "recluse" who goes weeks without leaving his London studio. He lives there with his dogs Minty and Mr. C and a collection of over 50 indoor bonsai trees.

"I don't do friends and family. I think they're a waste of time," he says, adding that he leaves the long-term safekeeping of his career to Mr. Glimcher, who nurtured the careers of heavyweight artists Robert Rauschenberg and Agnes Martin.

At the Pace show in New York, Mr. Shaw's paintings run from $500,000 to $1.5 million, his works on paper are $275,000 and his sculptures are $375,000 to $3 million. All have already sold.

Each of Mr. Shaw's works requires several months. The 39-year-old artist says that their painstaking detail has ensured that he hasn't taken a vacation in 15 years.

He spends weeks crafting intricate drawings on vellum parchment before transferring them to absorbent, high-grain birchwood panels reinforced by metal. Then, Mr. Shaw uses flammable enamels including Mercedes-Benz auto paint to create fantasy characters in loud colors, including neon green and orange.

In "Arrival of the Rain King—Paradise Lost II," Mr. Shaw depicts an imposing neoclassical edifice being torn apart by zebras with human arms and lion-like heads. The creatures also battle for dominance, tearing off chunks of each other's flesh.

Mr. Shaw's inspiration was the contemporary clash between Eastern and Western cultures, the writings of John Milton and the apocalyptic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, he says.

The trio of sculptures by Mr. Shaw all feature athletic male nudes with smooth bodies that contrast sharply with the heads of reptiles, rams and rhinoceroses. Each creature wears a pair of trendy, lace-up boots, a reference to Mr. Shaw's original wish to become a fashion designer as a child.

"I can't do scissors and stitching," he says.

Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday pledged $40 million to speed up a project intended to help clean up polluted Lake Okeechobee water that has poured into the St. Lucie River this summer, triggering toxic algae blooms, killing oysters and sea grass and angering residents and tourists.

But the governor placed most of the blame for the worsening disaster in the St. Lucie, and a similar mess in the Caloosahatchee River on the southwest coast, on the federal government.

In a letter sent Tuesday to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Scott criticized it for “inaction” on repairing the deteriorating dike around the massive lake and for failing to adequately fund water quality and Everglades restoration projects that could help reduce periodic damaging releases of lake water.

“Sadly, had the federal government met all of its obligations in maintaining the Lake Okeechobee dike system . .. the environmental conditions of this region could have been improved and the crisis in the region today would have been mitigated,” Scott wrote in a letter to Corps Brig. Gen. Donald Jackson.

Scott also called on the Corps and other federal agencies to pour $1.6 billion into South Florida environmental projects — “which you owe the state,” he wrote — under 50-50 cost-sharing agreements.

Scott made similar comments later Tuesday after touring a massive flood-control gate along the St. Lucie River where the Corps is releasing about three billion gallons a day from the rain-swollen lake to ease pressures on the aging, leaky dike. The dumping has lowered the lake by several inches in the past few weeks, but massive slugs of nutrients and sudden influx of fresh water have decimated rivers and estuaries on both coasts.

The Corps released a statement defending its work on the dike, which includes a recently completed $220 million project to shore up the most vulnerable 21-mile stretch of the massive earthen embankments and ongoing work to replace 32 culverts that more recent studies suggest are major weak points.

The Corps, said Jacksonville district commander Col. Alan Dodd, can only build what Congress authorizes and agrees to pay for.

“The Corps is disappointed in Governor Scott’s letter,” Dodd said. “However, we welcome the opportunity to better educate our partners and enhance our relationship.”

The lake releases and declining conditions in the St. Lucie and the larger Indian River Lagoon system have become a major issue along the Treasure Coast. Several hundred people showed up to wave “save our river” signs as Scott toured the St. Lucie locks.

Scott said he would ask lawmakers for $40 million next year to speed up completion of the C-44 reservoir and stormwater treatment area in western Martin County, which is intended to clean runoff before sending it to the estuary. The Corps is responsible for building the $225 million-plus project, which includes a 3,400-acre reservoir, but doesn’t currently expect to complete it until 2020.

Scott didn’t address the protesters, but environmentalists were generally pleased with Scott’s announcement — and advocacy for increased federal support for Everglades and water quality projects.

Julie Hill-Gabriel, Audubon’s director of Everglades policy, called Scott’s pledge of an additional $40 million a “positive sign.” But she also said that the C-44 was just one piece of a nearly $1 billion array of projects to store and clean up water flowing from the lake and other areas along the Indian River Lagoon. They can’t move forward without increased political support and funding from both federal and state leaders, she said.

Aerial view of the brown water of the river and inlet areas near the St. Lucie Inlet. Photo credit: Martin County BOCC.

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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