That postponement threatens to torpedo efforts to convince Congress to split the $2 billion cost with the state to help restore lake water flows to the Everglades – cut off by decades of drainage to make way for South Florida development and farming.

Sending more lake water south could boost South Florida drinking water supplies in addition to helping Everglades wildlife habitat. It could also lessen the draining of Lake Okeechobee water out to sea for flood control, which hurts coastal fishing grounds.

Gov. Rick Scott Wednesday issued a statement saying he was "extremely disappointed" in the delay and called for the board of top Army Corps' officials to immediately reconvene to reconsider the Central Everglades plan.

"We must do everything it takes to protect the natural treasures that Florida families rely on," Scott said.

The Everglades Foundation environmental group called the delay "a staggering failure of duty and responsibility" that threatens to set back the Central Everglades plan for years.

"The blame for this failure – and future damage to the environment and economy – now is squarely on the epaulets of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers," Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg said.

Army Corps officials on Wednesday countered that they remain committed to the Central Everglades plan, nearly three years in the making. They said concerns about water quality issues in the Everglades need to be addressed with the state before they can give the OK to move the proposal on to Congress.

Army Corps officials say they plan to renew talks with the South Florida Water Management District to overcome the water quality hurdle and then try to sign off on the plan by the end of June.

But they also said that getting it done in time to be included in this year's water bill isn't their primary concern.

"We understand everybody's frustration," said Eric Bush, the Army Corps policy chief overseeing the crafting of the Central Everglades plan. "We haven't failed. We are very close."

The end of June could be too late, according to environmental advocates.

Florida officials are trying to get the Central Everglades project added to a list of water projects that Congress is considering this year.

Not getting that Congressional approval for the Central Everglades project this year could translate to even more years of waiting for construction that was already projected to be a decade away. About seven years passed between the previous water project bills approved by Congress.

"We just can't continue to keep the Everglades parched," said Eric Draper, Audubon Florida's executive director. "We are losing habitat every day."

Tuesday's delay out of Washington D.C. comes less than two weeks after the South Florida Water Management District endorsed the Everglades restoration plan, agreeing to potentially pay half of the nearly $2 billion cost.

The Central Everglades plan involves removing portions of levees, filling in canals and increasing pumping to redirect more Lake Okeechobee water flows toward Everglades National Park.

Moving more Lake Okeechobee water south, where it once naturally flowed, would lessen the amount of lake water that gets drained out to sea through the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers – with damaging water quality consequences along the coast.

Last summer, draining hundreds of billions of gallons of fresh water from the lake into the normally salty estuaries killed sea grass and oyster beds and scared off fish. The influx of pollutants and sediment from the lake draining also hurt water quality, fueling toxic algae blooms that made some coastal waterways unsafe for swimming.

"This (delay) could really signify a missed opportunity and lead to more suffering for ecosystems, estuary communities and local economies," said Caroline McLaughlin, of the National Parks Conservation Association.

Earlier this month, the projected cost of the Central Everglades project was bumped up about $100 million to $1.9 billion.

Florida taxpayers have already spent about $2 billion on Everglades restoration. On top of that, the Florida Legislature last year approved an $880 million ongoing plan to clean up Everglades water pollution.

The water quality concern federal officials cited Wednesday stems from the possibility that increasing the amount of water flowing to the Everglades could also bring an influx of pollutants that makes it harder for the state to meet federal water quality standards.

State officials have sought assurances that they won't ended up getting penalized for moving much-needed water south to the Everglades, but the Army Corps contends it won't roll back water quality standards.

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Overdue answers for how to fix more of Lake Okeechobee's troubled dike may come this summer, but the start of that repair work could still be almost three years away, according to federal officials.

The 70-year-old dike that protects South Florida communities and farmland from flooding is considered one of the country's most at-risk of failing. Despite the concerns, repairs have been slowed through the years by technical problems, escalating costs and other setbacks.

George Lindemann, George-Lindemann, George Lindemann Jr, George-Lindemann-Jr, Lindemann, Lindemann George, Lindemann George Jr, George Lindemann Junior, Jr George Lindemann, Lindemann Jr George, George L Lindemann, https://www.facebook.com/pages/George-Lindemann/284564361662689, https://www.facebook.com/pages/George-Lindemann-Jr/284564361662689,

George Lindemann is an American businessman and the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Southern Union, a pipeline company.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} He also owns 19 Spanish-language radio stations.^[4][6]

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal - "MOCA mum on move rumors" @miamiherald By Hannah Sampson and Jordan Levin

Is the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami preparing to shed the “North Miami” from its name?

The Art Newspaper reported Thursday that the museum might be moving, and cited unnamed sources who said MOCA could potentially merge with the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach.

Thursday afternoon, MOCA interim director Alex Gartenfeld would only say that the board is “thinking very deeply about what the future of MOCA might hold.” But he said such conversations have been going on for years and there was no new urgency to those talks.

“There have been longstanding discussions and rumors about the relationship between our institutional mission and our location,” he said.

Rumors of a potential move, however vague, angered one prominent Miami collector who has donated several works to MOCA.

Rosa de la Cruz said she and husband Carlos were upset because in her mind, moving the museum would be akin to closing it — and merging with another museum would be the same as giving the collection away.

“I gave work to that museum,” de la Cruz said. “I didn’t give works to the Bass Museum.”

Although de la Cruz would not say where she heard the rumor, she said she was disappointed that no one from the board reached out to her directly.

“I think the collectors and the people that gave and the artists that gave work to that museum should have at least been informed and asked for advice,” she said. “It would have been a little more elegant, I think.”

Co-chairs of the museum’s board of trustees, Irma Braman and Ray Ellen Yarkin, declined to comment.

The rumors follow a period of change for the institution, which is partially funded by North Miami. Longtime director and chief curator Bonnie Clearwater announced her departure in July to take the same position at Nova Southeastern University’s Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale.

A year earlier, the museum suffered a blow to its plans for an expansion that would have tripled its space when voters in North Miami rejected a $15 million city bond issue to fund the project.

When Clearwater announced that she was leaving, she said the city and board were looking at all options and “being very creative.”

“The museum’s reputation is really not tied to the building,” she said at the time. “It’s where we built our reputation.”

Gartenfeld pointed to that comment in an interview Thursday. He said a robust exhibition program has already been announced through early 2015, and daily educational activities and regular public programs are continuing.

“The worry that MOCA will go away, that’s not something that’s going to happen,” he said.

The Art Newspaper’s story took city officials in North Miami by surprise.

“I cannot answer to rumors that they are leaving because I have not been formally informed,” Mayor Lucie Tondreau said Thursday.

Although city manager Stephen Johnson was slated to meet Friday with the museum’s board, that meeting was scheduled several weeks ago to discuss the appointment of a permanent executive director, city spokeswoman Pam Solomon said.

Tucked between city hall and the police department, MOCA is the centerpiece of downtown North Miami and the city’s emphasis on arts and culture; it had been allocated $982,000 in the city’s 2014 preliminary budget.

“Absolutely MOCA is an important part of our arts and culture,” said Solomon.

At the Bass Museum of Art, executive director Silvia Karman Cubiñá was not available to comment.

In an emailed statement, the president of the board of directors, George Lindemann, said in part: “The Bass Museum welcomes collaborations with institutions in Miami and from around the world....We are continually evaluating opportunities for these collaborations so as to strengthen our programming and widen our audiences.”

Reached by phone, he declined to talk about any arrangement with MOCA.

Gartenfeld also avoided specifics, saying: “I can’t comment on probabilities and things like that. It’s too much speculation.”

He said the museum already collaborates with other institutions in South Florida, highlighting the recently formed Miami Art Museums Alliance.

George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal - "California Presses On With Water Project" @wsj by Jim Carlton

California state and federal officials unveiled a final environmental analysis for the Bay Delta Conversation Plan on Monday to dig massive tunnels to divert imported water supplies in the state past an ecologically sensitive river delta. But the $25 billion project faces intense opposition, WSJ's Jim Carlton reports.

A contentious project to divert water supplied to Southern California past an ecologically sensitive river delta moved a step closer to fruition Monday, as state and federal officials unveiled a draft final environmental analysis.

Under the $25 billion plan, which is backed by Gov. Jerry Brown, two 30-mile-long tunnels would bypass the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in Northern California. The area often serves as a choke point for water destined for more than 20 million people and farmland in semiarid parts of Southern California and the Central Valley because of pumping restrictions to protect endangered smelt and other fish.

                                  

Environmentalists near the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta fear a water project will upend the ecosystem. Reuters

In a nod to environmental concerns, the plan would also create a program to help restore the ecology of the delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast.

At stake is the reliability of one of the largest water-delivery systems in the U.S., whose customers are now vulnerable to shortfalls triggered by drought and the environmental bottlenecks in the delta. Farmers in the Central Valley's Westlands Water District, for example, this year had federally controlled water shipments cut to 20% of their contracted allocation during a drought that is entering its third year. Urban water districts also have been put on notice to expect sharp cutbacks of state-provided water next year, barring an unusually wet winter.

But the so-called Bay Delta Conservation Plan, which has been seven years in the planning, still faces intense opposition, including from environmental groups and farmers in the affected area. No amount of restoration work will offset the disruption of constructing what would become one of the largest infrastructure projects in California history, said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, a coalition of groups that oppose the project.

"The physical construction of the tunnels would turn the delta into a war zone," Ms. Barrigan-Parrilla said. She also believes there would be other unintended consequences from having water bypass the delta, a farming and wetlands area of some 700,000 acres about 70 miles east of San Francisco.

Meanwhile, even some supporters of the project remain wary of its cost. The estimated $16 billion price of the tunnel project would come from water districts south of the delta, but officials of some of those agencies are concerned because a detailed financial plan hasn't been released. The remaining $9 billion would go toward the delta restoration program.

"We have been clamoring for years to find out how this will be paid for," said Dennis Cushman, assistant general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority, a big customer of the water that flows to southern destinations via a state aqueduct.

State officials said a discussion of financing is still in the works, adding that the project has been modified from an earlier proposal to lessen the environmental impact. For example, its proposed water-transporting rate has been reduced from 15,000 cubic feet per second to 9,000, and the route of the tunnels has been shifted several miles east to avoid some towns and farmland, said Paul Helliker, a deputy director of the California Department of Water Resources, which is spearheading the project with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Nearly everyone in the debate agrees something needs to be done to safeguard the reliability of the water-delivery system. Besides the environmental constraints, many of the delta's earthen levees—some of which are more than 100 years old—are crumbling and vulnerable to earthquakes, state and federal officials have said. Critics of the tunnel project say a better solution would be to upgrade the levees and existing pumping infrastructure, while encouraging more water conservation.

State officials say a 120-day public comment period begins Friday on the project's draft environmental-impact statement and report, as well as the delta conservation plan. Final state and federal approval of the environmental project is expected by the end of next year, followed by a permitting process that could lead to construction beginning in 2017, Mr. Helliker said.

Write to Jim Carlton at jim.carlton@wsj.com        

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Go ahead. Grab a rough-hewn Adirondack chair, settle down on the expansively shaded deck under the pendulous greenery and bask in what may be the best public views — inside and out — anywhere along the water in downtown Miami.

This is, after all, your new museum of art — a $131 million haute-design showcase for modern and contemporary work that also manages to extend an open, dare we say homespun, welcome.

When it opens to the public at the edge of Biscayne Bay on Wednesday, on time and on budget, the strikingly original and meticulously thought-out Perez Art Museum Miami will put art front and center on the city’s landscape for the first time. In doing so, supporters and civic leaders fervently hope it will redefine Miami as a cultural destination.

With wrap-around verandas cooled by lush gardens and a monumental overhanging roof, 360-degree views of bay and city from within and without, and an adjacent new plaza, park and baywalk, the unusually porous museum could also become something else, backers say: a spectacular new front porch for the people of Miami.

“It’s going to be a Miami icon without trying to be anything other than a great museum,’’ said Terry Riley, the architect and former museum director who oversaw the launch of the building effort, in a recent public talk. “I think it’s going to be considered one of the most important contemporary museums anywhere.’’

Bold words, for sure, especially for a young institution that until relatively recently had but a small, uneven collection and a nearly invisible profile, thanks to its location behind fortress-like walls on an elevated plaza on Flagler Street.

During the new museum building’s long gestation, the use of scarce city park land and a public subsidy of $100 million (approved by voters in 2004 as part of a larger, $2.9 billion Miami-Dade County bond package) became a persistent target for critics, including some prominent local art collectors. So did the subsequent renaming of the onetime Miami Art Museum after developer Jorge Perez, whose $40 million gift of art and cash boosted its collection and bottom line but provoked raised eyebrows in the art world and a rift among the institution’s own supporters.

Against this backdrop, museum leaders say they were acutely aware of the need to avoid the cost overruns and construction issues that plagued the nearby Arsht Center even as they built a home and collection defined by high aspirations. PAMM officials say they’ve also nearly met a private fundraising goal of $120 million to supplement the public investment and create an endowment to support the expanded operation.

To design the building, Riley and board leaders picked the powerhouse Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, famed for the conversion of a massive London power plant into what is now the world’s most popular museum of contemporary art, the Tate Modern. More recently, the firm designed San Francisco’s de Young Museum, which is covered in punctured, oxidized copper and has a tower shaped like an inverted pyramid rising from Golden Gate Park. The firm, though known for its raw look and rigorous execution, has no signature style, which meant its approach would not be cookie-cutter, Riley said.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Talk of the Turner Prize, Where, for One Thing, Talk Is Art

Johnny Green

Tino Sehgal, foreground, is one of four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize. His work “This is exchange” involves a simple chat.

By ROSLYN SULCAS

Published: November 29, 2013

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — On a recent morning, a group of teenagers stood in a room, now an art gallery in a former military barracks here, and stared at the bare white walls. They were searching for the work of Tino Sehgal, one of the four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.

What they didn’t yet know was that they were the work: Mr. Sehgal’s art exists only as personal encounters between members of the public and a guide paid to engage them in conversation. It was a moment worthy of the oft-contentious reputation of the Turner, an annual award of £25,000 (around $41,000) under the aegis of the Tate Museum that is given to a British artist under 50. The winner will be announced on Monday.

Mr. Sehgal’s performance art piece — here in a three-month exhibition, along with works by his fellow nominees, David Shrigley, Laure Prouvost and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye — is one sign that the 29-year-old Turner Prize can still be counted on to provide at least a few challenges to traditional expectations.

The finalists are nominated by a four-person international jury of curators and gallery and museum directors, led by Penelope Curtis, the director of Tate Britain, who plays no part in the final decision. The prize is well known in Britain, and it makes for a moment when people entirely uninterested in contemporary art discuss contemporary art. The award ceremony on Monday will be shown live on national television, as it is each year, and bookmakers are eagerly taking bets on the winner. (A few days before the announcement, Mr. Sehgal was the favorite at Ladbrokes, with 7 to 4 odds.)

But winning isn’t required. Even a nomination for the Turner can be a turning point in an artist’s career, said Chris Hammond, whose gallery, MOT International, represents Ms. Prouvost. “What the Turner Prize does is to instantaneously bring the artist to a new, broad audience,” he said.

Tracey Emin, nominated for the prize in 1999, was blunter. Writing in 2006, she said: “If I were speaking to the artists who are in it this year, I’d say something like: ‘Don’t worry too much. The price of your work is going to double.’ ”

Critics have often been scathing about the quality and shock value of some art that has been nominated for the Turner. The prize “is perhaps most famous for trying — sometimes desperately — to elicit a reaction from its visitors,” Zoe Pilger wrote in The Independent last month.

The prize is also popular partly because of that shock value, much enjoyed by the British tabloids, which have followed some of the exhibits with delirious glee: Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, or Ms. Emin’s unmade bed with detritus from her stay there during a siege of depression, including condoms and cigarettes.

This year, the prize apparatus is also breaking a barrier with its setting: For the first time, the Turner Prize exhibition and award ceremony are being held outside of England, here in Londonderry (called Derry-Londonderry in all Turner publicity), designated as Britain’s first City of Culture.

The city is deeply associated with the Troubles, the violent sectarian conflict that raged on the Irish island for decades. Londonderry bears testament to sensitivities that prevail, despite the 1998 Good Friday agreement. (Some see the London prefix, added to Derry in 1613, as a British imposition, thus the double name that is popular with many.) The placing of the exhibition in the Ebrington Barracks, where the British Army was garrisoned and which remained barred and inaccessible until relatively recently, is meant to symbolize a transformation from devastation to regeneration.

“We recognized there would be challenges, but there was always a desire on our part to make it work,” said Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate Museums, in a telephone interview. “I hope that by putting it in Ebrington, we lay down another layer of history.”

The exhibition is part of the extensive calendar of events planned by Culture City, an organization working in concert with the city’s designation. The art is in building 80/81, transformed by a $3.9 million renovation from dilapidation to a gleaming series of galleries facing the curving Peace Bridge, built in 2011.

What will happen to Ebrington when the Turner exhibition closes is uncertain. “The real value of having the Turner here has been showing the potential of those buildings as a cultural center,” said Willie Doherty, a Londonderry-born photographer who has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize. “I think we will have missed a huge opportunity if we don’t develop and build upon the success of this year.”

The galleries provide an unobtrusive, custom-made space for the artists. Mr. Shrigley’s “Life Model 2012” is an ill-proportioned animatronic naked man, three meters (about 10 feet) tall, surrounded by chairs and, usually, groups of people earnestly drawing it.

Mr. Shrigley, 45, has been producing books of illustrations — and photography, cartoons, sculpture, animation and painting — since the early 1990s, and he has been commercially and artistically successful; last year the Hayward Gallery in London presented a 20-year retrospective of his work, the source of his nomination. His pieces are funny and accessible; therefore, he said cheerfully in a telephone interview, “I don’t have any expectation of winning the prize.” A giant man urinating in a bucket, he said, is not a winner.

A video and sculpture installation from the French-born Ms. Prouvost, 35, who moved to London at 18 to study experimental film and video, is in the next gallery. Her whimsical film installation “Wantee,” for which she was nominated, is animated by her voice telling the story of her (fictional) conceptual artist grandfather, whose creations, displayed around a space resembling a tearoom, are used as domestic objects by her grandmother.

“The idea of a dialogue with the audience is important to me,” Ms. Prouvost said in a Skype interview. “I am coming from the experimental scene and questioning the idea of telling the story and making moving images.”

Ms. Yiadom-Boakye, 36, a Londoner of Ghanaian descent, is perhaps the wild card in the pack because she is a straightforward portrait painter. But her portraits are of imaginary people that she describes as “composites” of memory, images and imagination. At Ebrington, the dark-hued figures emerge from the dark, textured oil-painted canvases and low lighting with almost palpable intensity.

And then there is Mr. Sehgal’s 2003 “This is exchange,” which centers on a discussion of the market economy. (There is an incentive for visitors to participate: a small sum of cash.) Mr. Sehgal, 37, who studied dance and economics before turning to the world of visual art, is enjoying a moment in the sun; he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale this year.

No matter how many bets are taken, the Turner Prize outcome is never predictable. “It’s not a vote but a discussion, which makes it unpredictable because passions come into play,” said Judith Nesbitt, the head of National and International Initiatives at Tate. “It’s opinionated. It’s not objective. It can’t be.”

From a local point of view, said Graeme Farrow, the programming director of Culture City, it hardly matters. “The real winner,” he said, “is Derry.”

George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann

The art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn at her townhouse on the Upper East Side.

By GUY TREBAY

Published: November 29, 2013

As the art mob descends on South Florida this week for the 12th edition of the cross-platform marketing frenzy that is Art Basel Miami Beach — private jets disgorging art sharks and their adviser remoras — one slight and fashionable figure will stand out.

A thin and dark-haired woman with a knife-slash smile, Rooney Mara bangs and a collection of jersey weeds from Saint Laurent and Rick Owens, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn is, at 46, no one’s idea of a late bloomer

For well over a decade, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn has been a stealth force in the art world, the “art brat” daughter of a respected dealer who, after her college studies, went on to become an independent curator; a private dealer and adviser; a judge in the Bravo reality series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”; a widely photographed socialite with a prominent banker husband; a prodigious Democratic fund-raiser; and a proprietor of three increasingly influential galleries with clients from both inside the circles of usual art-world suspects as well as powerful and unexpected outliers like the hip-hop mogul Jay Z.

It is at her Salon 94, Salon 94 Freemans and Salon 94 Bowery that Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn came into her own, showcasing a signature knack for discovering young and emerging artists, for kick-starting the reputation of those in midcareer, and for engineering unlikely aesthetic mash-ups combining the disparate worlds of fashion, sports, entertainment and art.

Consider that when, during the 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees opened his North Bay Road mansion to a select group of Art Basel attendees, the witty batting-cage installation by the New York-based sculptor and painter Nate Lowman was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s inspiration, generated out of a visit the ballplayer made to her gallery.

“I first came to Jeanne’s uptown space to view several monochrome Richard Prince ‘Joke’ paintings,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote in an email. “Our real conversation happened upstairs looking at a Nate Lowman ‘Smile’ painting.”

Having introduced the Yankee to the artist, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn suggested they collaborate. Thus, Mr. Lowman “tricked out my batting cage” with an array of his obsessive smiley-face paintings, Mr. Rodriguez said.

“The Smiles became a stadium audience around the room,” he added. “We joked about me hitting a baseball through one of his bullet-hole paintings hung high on the net.”

When Jay Z appeared at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea last summer to film a video for the single “Picasso Baby” with a cast of celebrated art-world conscripts, it was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn who subtly and with little fanfare acted as a guiding force.

There she was, on a muggy July afternoon, discreetly stage-managing as the rapper mesmerized a crowd including the artists Lawrence Weiner, Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas, and the philanthropist Agnes Gund. Gliding through the white cube gallery in a one-shouldered Lanvin jumpsuit and with her signature cluster of stone talismans strung from her neck, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn supervised the proceedings, darting from improvised green room to curb, where she greeted the performance artist Marina Abramovic as she descended from a chauffeured S.U.V., a nutty lunar priestess in a self-induced trance.

“The interesting thing about Jeanne is how involved she is in the ‘becoming’ of an artist’s creations,” the artist Terry Adkins recently said.

Recruited by Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn and added to her roster after a 10-year absence from the art scene, Mr. Adkins found himself emerging from semi-obscurity as a newly minted breakaway star. For the October Frieze Art Fair in London, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn installed a cut-down version of Mr. Adkins’s totemic “Muffled Drums,” a stacked drum sculpture paying symbolic homage to the black writer and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois.

The piece, quickly snapped up by the Tate Modern, represented an element of political engagement that is Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s signature. “I was really attracted to her in the first place because she had black artists and women, and never made a big deal out of it,” said Marilyn Minter, one of the gallery’s marquee names. In fact, her list of artists was never preferential of race or sex, yet the range of her interests and connections goes well beyond the confines of an often insular gallery scene.

“How many dealers,” Mr. Adkins asked, “would even think to collaborate with Jay Z on a video?” How many, for that matter, could hope to elicit his consent?

On a recent chill evening, the crowd for an opening of a jewelry exhibition by the sculptor Alexander Calder at Salon 94 was indicative of the atmosphere Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn specializes in creating, one bearing little resemblance to the typical art-world assembly.

Teetering about the room in the townhouse that serves as both gallery and residence for Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s family, Michele Lamy — wife and muse of Mr. Owens, the designer — wore vertiginous heelless platform shoes and a gold grille on her teeth. Gareth Pugh, the British designer, mugged for a camera in a Calder tiara, closely watched by a security guard in white cotton gloves.

Bearded and wearing a thigh-high miniskirt, the gender-torquing party promoter Andre J. took snapshots as Fran Lebowitz, in a studied Robert Benchley pose, held up a wall. Wandering through it all was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s daughter Coco, one of her three children with Nicolas Rohatyn, a financier whose father is the eminent banker Felix Rohatyn, best known perhaps for his brinksman role in staving off New York City’s bankruptcy in the 1970s.

“You go into Jeanne’s house, and you see this phenomenal taste and incredible mix,” said Lisa Perry, the fashion designer and art collector, noting how offhandedly the valuable Calder jewelry was displayed — in a 1952 Lattes bookcase by the Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (whose estate Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn represents); atop a Hella Jongerius Frog table; and on a charred-looking bronze sculpture by the artist Huma Bhabha. “It’s all kind of seamless,” she said.

Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn (her first name is pronounced “genie”) moved quietly about the space dressed in black leather trousers and with her hair slicked back. “This is all normal,” she said. Yet normal people seldom inhabit double-wide townhouses chock-full of costly contemporary art, including a Calder stabile and David Hammons’s backboard chandelier Untitled, a version of which sold at the recent auctions for $8 million. “The idea is to elevate the way you live your domestic life,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn coolly remarked.

Not all of her projects have been high-minded; a stint on a cable reality show struck some in the industry as a curious career move for a woman who struggled to shake off an early reputation as a Vogue “It” girl, a fashion favorite often spotted in designers’ front rows. “I’m glad I took the risk and did something unknown to me,” she said of “Work of Art,” in which she appeared alongside China Chow, the gallery owner Bill Powers and Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine. “You can’t be too predictable,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn explained in a text message. “It shook up my image.” It also “made me fix my posture,” she said.

“What is fascinating about Jeanne is the sheer force of her personality,” a New York museum official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid the appearance of favoritism. “She loves art, she loves artists and she loves objects. You look across the roster of emerging to midcareer to well-known artists she shows, and you can see there’s something there that requires a passionate, individual approach.”

For Roselee Goldberg, an art historian and the founder of Performa, the performance art foundation whose board Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn leads, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn “has an ease” in navigating the art world because it is her native terrain. A daughter of a prominent art dealer, Ronald Greenberg, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn — who studied art history at Vassar and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and was raised in a vast Gothic Revival pile in suburban St. Louis — comes by her easy conversancy with art-world machinations and folkways naturally.

“She is comfortable across the entire spectrum, from established artists to the youngest and most emerging,” Ms. Goldberg added of the dealer’s catholicity of taste. Ms. Goldberg pointed out that at Salon 94, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn has exhibited artists, sculptors and designers as varied as Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson, Mr. Lowman and also Mr. Owens, whose massive, neo-brutalist furniture she once showed in tandem with sprightly organic vessels by Betty Woodman, a beloved octogenarian ceramist.

“The thing with Jeanne is she’s not coming from a place of cold calculation,” Ms. Goldberg added, and surely few other dealers would be as willing to risk reviving the reputation of an artist like Jimmy DeSana, a gifted and all-but-forgotten photographic explorer of dark sexual impulses and an early AIDS fatality.

It was most likely her passionate and unorthodox approach that made her attractive to an equally passionate group of novice collectors, said Lyor Cohen, a music industry executive who brokered Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s introduction to Jay Z.

“Her aesthetic and taste is impeccable,” Mr. Cohen said by telephone. “She is on the front end of a lot of things.”

Unlike many who travel the art fair circuit with billionaire clients and a shopping list of fashionable requisites in hand, he suggested, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn builds collections with an intuitive eye. “If you wanted that art adviser playbook, she wouldn’t have contorted her body for that playbook,” he said.

Although requests for comment made through representatives for Jay Z went unanswered, those familiar with his collection note that, in a surprisingly short time, he has amassed a grouping notable for breadth and discernment, one that includes works by, among many others, Ms. Minter, Gary Simmons, Mr. Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“Jeanne’s as courageous as he is, and that’s what he wants,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to Jay Z. “He wants the best of her.”

Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn, for her part, invokes omertà when discussion turns to her clients. “But, yes,” she said curtly, “art does sometimes need a lot of help.”

For Ms. Minter, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s editorial eye and her ability to reconfigure careers was in some ways life-changing. “I’d been somebody who was always slightly marginalized,” the artist told a recent visitor to her Garment Center studio. “When Jeanne first came to me, after I was in the Whitney Biennial, she said, ‘You’ve had such an out-of-the-box kind of career, I want to represent you.’ ”

Ms. Minter had no gallery at the time and sold few pictures; these days, there is a waiting list for her paintings, whose prices range from $45,000 to $500,000. “Now Jerry Seinfeld owns photos of my mother, if you can believe that,” Ms. Minter said. “That’s Jeanne!”

At Art Basel Miami Beach, 258 galleries from 31 countries will set up shop, and 50,000 visitors are expected to flood the halls of the city’s convention center. For her own white-walled space, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn is taking a chance by displaying only Ms. Minter’s new paintings and a motorcycle by the designer Sebastian Errazuriz customized and with a topiary bird affixed to the handlebars. “Objects have their own integrity and energy, which is something people who live among objects understand,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said. “They speak to each other, creating a dialogue, which is what personally gets my heart beating.”

One afternoon last week, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn wandered about Ms. Minter’s studio checking the progress of her Miami pictures, as several of the artist’s nine assistants applied final touches to paintings that were not yet dry.

Musing about whether to bring along examples of the painter’s older work, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn asked, “Do you have the singer in the studio?”

Ms. Minter, who was wearing motorcycle boots, black tights and a Kelly green T-shirt with the legend “Draw Me,” called out to an assistant, “Do we have that painting here, or is it in storage?”

“The singer,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said.

As Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn and Ms. Minter hunched over a desktop computer, scanning images from an online inventory, a visitor suddenly recalled an observation Ms. Perry, the designer, had made about Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn. “I think her connection to Jay Z and to me and to the people she advises works because she opens our eyes to stuff we would not have even known about before,” Ms. Perry said. “We love Jeanne for that reason: She’s going to open our eyes.”

Just then, a blurred image popped onto the screen depicting a woman whose mouth was widened as if in song. The image, Ms. Minter noted, came from an early series titled “Hard Core Porn.” On close inspection, it became clear the woman was no singer and the object she gripped so tightly in her hand was no microphone.

“Oh,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said, grinning wryly. “Let’s not take that.”

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Squeezing Art Out of the Picture

From left, Remo Ruffino, the creative director of Moncler; Uma Thurman; and Jean Pigozzi at the Moncler anniversary party last year during Art Basel Miami Beach. Such stargazing events are overshadowing art-related events.

By NATE FREEMAN

Published: November 29, 2013

Let’s play a game: Are the following parties taking place during New York Fashion Week or Art Basel Miami Beach?

A brunch to toast a T-shirt designed by Visionaire and Gap. A cocktail party to celebrate a new fashion fair. A dinner hosted by Louis Vuitton for a modernist beachfront house. A Dom Pérignon party hosted by the playboys Alex Dellal, Stavros Niarchos and Vito Schnabel?

O.K., O.K., they are all parties from Art Basel, the annual South Florida pilgrimage this week by seemingly every social person in New York. But while fashion parties in the art world are nothing new, the sheer volume of events (dinners, cocktails and blowout parties) not related to art this year is deafening. Sure, the art fairs still display paintings at gobsmacking prices during the day, but the serious art folk are getting sick of the nighttime excess.

“You basically have to treat Art Basel Miami Beach like Vegas,” said Bill Powers, a gallerist and constant fixture at cocktail functions and openings. “You get in, then you get out. Nobody I know is staying the whole weekend.”

Mr. Powers is just dipping his toe in the Miami Beach melee: he’s staying for two days. He forwarded an email with an invitation to a screening of “Her,” the latest film by Spike Jonze. Highly anticipated, sure, but not exactly art-related (even with Jeffrey Deitch moderating a Q-and-A with Mr. Jonze). And it’s slated for Thursday. “I’ll be home already,” Mr. Powers said.

Would he be missing much by skipping out early? Perhaps not.

“So much of the Basel fatigue is that a lot of the events are not that fun,” said Manish Vora, who, along with Kyle DeWoody, is a founder of Grey Area, the art collective and online retailer. “Every conversation is about what parties you’re going to. It’s not about the actual party. No one goes and says, like, ‘Oh, I had the craziest time.’ ”

Granted, last year’s spate of parties had its highlights, and it just so happened that most had little to nothing to do with art. The most-discussed moment wasn’t a bidding war or a Damien Hirst brawl. It was the Chanel dinner where Demi Moore spent the evening petting a stray cat, even during an auction for a Dash Snow charity. Or the Moncler 60th anniversary party, held at the parking lot at 1111 Lincoln Road, which was reimagined as a tropical ski chalet for celebrities like Uma Thurman and Pharrell Williams.

This year’s edition of Art Basel, which officially starts Thursday, is shaping up to be no different. Sure, there are the week’s usual marquee art parties: White Cube’s poolside party at the Soho Beach House, Aby Rosen’s A-list dinner at the Dutch and the opening and V.I.P. dinner for the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami’s winter exhibition (this time, for Tracy Emin). There are notable newcomers, too. The Pérez Art Museum Miami, a contemporary art museum, is opening this week with a series of private brunches, V.I.P. previews and dinners.

But they pale in comparison this year to the flood of parties not related to art but with tie-ins to luxury brands, alcohol sponsors, fashion labels and boutiques. One public relations firm has compiled a party calendar that runs 14 pages and includes 27 events on Tuesday alone, including a fashion show, a brunch for a pop-up store and a dinner for a new furniture line.

And partygoers are already talking about Wednesday night, with word circulating online that Kanye West is to participate with the artist Vanessa Beecroft in a performance art piece at Mana Wynwood, a sprawling production village in the Miami Art District.

The art fairs themselves are not immune to the hubbub. NADA Miami Beach, a satellite fair that showcases emerging contemporary artists, has partnered this year with American Apparel on a line of artist-designed T-shirts. And SCOPE Miami Beach, another satellite fair, is showcasing an art project curated by Red Bull.

No wonder that with each passing year, more and more attendees don’t even seem to bother with the art. “I don’t have a relationship with the art world in any profound capacity, so for me it’s just a way for me to unwind,” said Leandra Medine, the fashion blogger known as Man Repeller.

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George Lindemann Journal

You Loved Me Like a Distant Star (2012)
Ms. Emin's neons are all hand-blown by London-based sign-maker Kerry Ryan, who then fills the glass with a mixture of neon, argon and mercury using a century-old technique. Lehmann Maupin

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The Scream (2002)
Many of the show's works, including "The Scream" from 2002, reflect Ms. Emin's struggle with feelings of depression. Ms. Emin believes her soul was "tangled up" in that of her twin brother, Paul. Tracey Emin/White Cube

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The Tracey Emin Museum (1995)
Kerry Ryan made Ms. Emin's first neon, shown here, for her studio in 1995. The two are now close friends, but upon meeting the "boisterous" artist, Mr. Ryan says he initially thought she was "a bit off her rocker." Tracey Emin/White Cube

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I Can Feel your Smile (2005)
The seemingly random capitalized letters in Tracey Emin's signs are cosmetic touches. Some letters such as "i" or "s" look better capitalized than others, she explains. Lehmann Maupin

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Meet Me in Heaven I Will Wait for You (2004)
Ms. Emin became famous for brassy, sexually explicit work, which are themes in some of her neons in the show. But the vast majority of her works deal with topics like love, God and depression. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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Only God Knows I'm Good (2009)
The green used in this sign is similar to that used in the neon signs of apothecaries in Europe, because it also glows during the day, says Ms. Emin. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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You Forgot to Kiss My Soul (2001)
Ms. Emin has never held a show of neons before, partly because the process of putting it together is so expensive that most museums would require that the show then travel to recoup costs, says Ms. Emin, who refuses to do traveling shows. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube

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Sorry Flowers Die (1999)
MOCA Miami was the first American museum to purchase one of Ms. Emin's works, a film called "Why I Never Became a Dancer," whichi will be screened at the exhibition. Lehmann Maupin/Whitecube