New Guide in Venice

Samuele Pellecchia for The New York Times

Massimiliano Gioni, 39, the 2013 Venice Biennale curator is also the associate director and director of exhibitions for the New Museum. More Photos »

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: May 23, 2013

Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of this year’s Venice Biennale, was marveling at the rich history of this 118-year-old international contemporary art exhibition.

“Klimt showed there in 1905,” he said. “That is mind-blowing to me. Since then there has been Morandi and Picasso, Rauschenberg, Johns and so on. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but the past is still very present.”

On a rainy afternoon in April Mr. Gioni was having lunch at his regular haunt, a tiny Italian restaurant in Lower Manhattan near the New Museum, where he is associate director and director of exhibitions. His BlackBerry was buzzing with e-mails and his phone kept ringing. Yet Mr. Gioni, 39, ignored it all, speaking earnestly with his usual intellectual intensity jolted with unexpected moments of deadpan humor. He was explaining what it’s like to be the youngest artistic director in 110 years to organize the first, oldest and most venerable international art event in a calendar packed with an unrivaled number of them.

“Of course I’m nervous,” he said. “This is center stage and it’s difficult because it comes with so many expectations and so much history.”

As he braces for the art world to descend on Venice for three preview days beginning on Wednesday, followed by the public opening on Saturday, Mr. Gioni estimated that nearly 500,000 people would come to see the Biennale by the time it ends on Nov. 24. As artistic director, his job is not only to be the diplomatic face of the Biennale but also to organize an enormous exhibition in two sites: one in a central building in the shaded gardens at the tip of Venice where the national pavilions are, and the other in the nearby Arsenale, the meandering medieval network of shipyards. The job entails an overwhelming amount of juggling and his ambitious vision has only made it worse.

Even though Mr. Gioni was born in Italy — in Busto Arsizio, 40 minutes northwest of Milan — the logistics of working in a city like Venice are a notorious nightmare. Adamant that this will not be a boiler plate survey of contemporary art, Mr. Gioni has enlisted 158 artists, nearly double the number of the two previous Biennales.

“It will zigzag across histories, covering 100 years of dreams and visions,” said Mr. Gioni, noting 38 countries are represented. “A biennale can be pedagogical without being boring.”

“The Encyclopedic Palace” is the theme. It is taken from the title of a symbol of 1950s-era Futurism — an 11-foot-tall architectural model of a 136-story cylindrical skyscraper that was intended to house all the knowledge in the world. Its creator, the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti, dreamed it would be built on the National Mall in Washington. The model now belongs to the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, which is lending it to the Biennale. “It best reflects the giant scope of this international exhibition,” Mr. Gioni said, “the impossibility of capturing the sheer enormity of the art world today.”

Paolo Baratta, the longtime president of the Biennale, said that “after 14 years of having traditional curators I thought it was time to ask a man of the next generation.”

“At a time when contemporary art is flooding the world,” he added, “it seemed to make more sense to present a show that doesn’t just include a list of artists from the present but rather looks at today’s art through the eyes of history.”

Philippe Ségalot, a private art dealer, called Mr. Gioni “a rising star.”

“Even though he’s so young,” Mr. Ségalot said, “he’s already a brand and one of the most sought after curators around. As a result expectations are unusually high. Everyone wants to see what he’ll deliver.”

Mr. Gioni is mixing high and low, with masters mingling with self-taught and outsider artists. Besides Mr. Auriti, there will be work by names likely to be unfamiliar to even art world insiders. There are arcane objects like a deck of tarot cards created by the British occultist and artist Aleister Crowley, abstract paintings by the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint and shaker drawings on loan from the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass. For one show within a show, the photographer Cindy Sherman is organizing an exhibition at the Arsenale. Known for photographing herself transformed into hundreds of different personas, including movie stars, Valley girls and menacing clowns, she appealed to Mr. Gioni because, he said, “image plays a big role at this year’s Biennale, and Cindy has spent her life representing herself as others.” Ms. Sherman is creating a kind of bizarre doll’s house with works by little-known artists, prison inmates and popular figures like Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy and Rosemarie Trockel.

An old ship is coming by boat from Iceland; a 200-year-old church is en route from Vietnam; and dozens of contemporary artists need hand-holding while they grapple with installing videos or preparing for complex performances. “Right now I wish there was another me,” Mr. Gioni said with a sigh.

Besides organizing the event he has also been a fund-raiser. Money is always tight at any Biennale, and his budget of about $2.3 million simply wasn’t enough to cover his expenses. He has raised more than $2 million on top of that, he said, “mostly from private individuals and foundations and philanthropists.”

Although Mr. Gioni is considered something of a star within the close-knit world of contemporary art, he had a larger presence early in his career as the doppelgänger of the mischievous Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Mr. Cattelan, who is more than a decade older, routinely sent him in his place to do radio and television interviews and even lectures. The prank worked for a while, Mr. Gioni recalled, until a series of mishaps. He was speaking at a lecture organized by the Public Art Fund when Tom Eccles, its director, showed slides of Mr. Cattelan’s self-portraits. “It was obvious I wasn’t him,” Mr. Gioni recalled.

Then there was the time he posed as Mr. Cattelan on television and the station’s switchboard became jammed with viewers complaining that an impostor was on the air.

“Maurizio was so in demand and I liked it because I thought it was a way to be a committed critic, giving your words to an artist,” Mr. Gioni said.

Less than a month before the Biennale was set to open, Mr. Gioni could be found sitting around the dining room table of his apartment, a spare sun-filled East Village walk-up that he shares with his wife of three years, Cecilia Alemani, director of art at the High Line. With him were three assistants, each glued to laptops. Wearing jeans, a white shirt and red sneakers, Mr. Gioni had a way of juggling complex issues with a cool head, quoting wise words from a philosopher one moment and making a wry joke the next. The group was reviewing each artist in the exhibition, name by name, and checking the status of their work.

What about Roger Hiorns? Mr. Gioni asked.

“He’s concerned his installation will be too near a door,” replied Helga Christoffersen, an assistant.

Mr. Gioni explained, “It’s a pulverized altar from a church from England.”

“That’s going to be a big hit with the Catholic folks,” he said deadpan, receiving a big laugh from the group. (For the first time the Vatican is represented in its own pavilion at the Biennale.)

Camille Henrot? “Missing in action,” Mr. Gioni said slightly nervously.

The group then looked at images online of the “S. S. Hangover,” the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s fishing boat that will have six horn players performing on the water in the Arsenale for four hours every day for six months. “We’re working with a conservatory in Venice to find the players,” Mr. Gioni said.

When trying to visualize the installation of the circular entrance in the main pavilion where he plans to display 40 pages of Carl Jung’s “Red Book,” an illuminated manuscript on which he worked for more than 16 years, Mr. Gioni grabbed a ruler, went into the living room and measured out the space on the floor with masking tape, trying to figure out the correct height for the climate-controlled vitrine.

“He’s obsessed,” Mr. Cattelan said. “When he gets in bed at night he’s not just thinking about the big picture but also about the number of electrical outlets or the height of a video. He gets caught up in the details most curators normally don’t take care of. Being super bright helps; so does his superior knowledge of art.”

Mr. Gioni’s methods may be a bit unconventional, but then he didn’t come to the job in the same way as many of his predecessors. He never got a Ph.D. in art history; nor did he spend years climbing his way up the curatorial ladder. But at 39 he has had more hands-on experience overseeing biennales than anyone of his generation: In 2003 he was the curator of the section called “La Zona” at the Venice Biennale. In 2004 he was co-curator of the fifth edition of the traveling biennial Manifesta, a roving European event that was held that year in San Sebastián, Spain; in 2006 he organized the fourth Berlin Biennale in collaboration with Mr. Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. And in 2010 he was the youngest and first European director of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, its eighth, which attracted more than 500,000 visitors and got rave reviews.

Besides his role at the New Museum, where he has spearheaded many ground breaking shows including “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” its first triennial, he is also artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan. Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, said Mr. Gioni “sees curating as an art form.”

“He is terribly well read without being academic so that he can cut across centuries and create a new story,” Ms. Phillips said.

Although it all sounds like pretty serious stuff, but Mr. Gioni has a lighter side too. In 2002 Mr. Gioni, along with Mr. Cattelan and Ms. Subotnick, started “The Wrong Gallery,” a minuscule space that was little more than a doorway with a classic Chelsea aluminum-glass front door on West 20th Street. (In 2005 the spoof gallery was evicted, then decamped to the Tate Modern in London in 2005, closing three years later.)

Mr. Gioni’s parents are retired — his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was the manager of an ink factory. When he was 15 he moved on his own to Vancouver Island in Canada, where he attended the United World Colleges; later he received a degree in art history from the University of Bologna. The youngest of three siblings, he describes himself as the black sheep of the family.

To support himself through school he worked as a translator and eventually became editor of the Italian edition of Flash Art, where he met Mr. Cattelan; in 1999 he moved to New York as its American editor. He met Francesco Bonami, now an independent curator, and did some work with him. Mr. Bonami was the artistic director of the Venice Biennale in 2003 and it was he who asked Mr. Gioni to organize “La Zona” there. Ms. Phillips hired him at the New Museum in 2006 after seeing the Berlin Biennale, which she called “a standout.”

Despite the instantaneous nature of culture today and the proliferation of art fairs and giant exhibitions, Mr. Gioni still believes there is a place for biennales. “I grew up with them,” he said. “I saw my first one in Venice in 1993. They are no longer a fixed formula. This is the first decade of a new century and this show will deal with our age of hyperconnectivity, by looking at what goes on in our heads rather than online. It is about the synchronicity of the past, the present and the future.”

The George Lindemann Journal      

Organizers hope to draw 60,000 visitors to the initial Art

By David Walter

Special to the Miami Herald

George Lindemann Wins Inaugural Better Beach Award

March 26, 2013

Congratulations, George Lindemann!

By ELLEN GAMERMAN and MARY M. LANE

A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world.

When "After Lunch," Berthe Morisot's portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for $10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work ever sold by a female artist at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists.

Yayoi Kusama/David Zwirner, Victoria Miro Gallery, Ota Fine Arts, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

YAYOI KUSAMA: The 84-year-old is the top-selling living female artist of all time, fetching $118 million total at auction.

A woman's signature in the bottom corner of a painting has long spelled a bargain—men in the same artistic school or period can fetch more than 10 times the price of a woman's best sale. While an age-old debate rages over whether talent, sexism or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world's boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged behind those of their male counterparts.

Today's flourishing art market—marked by last year's record-setting sale at auction of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for nearly $120 million—has lifted prices for male and female artists alike. As the supply of great pictures diminishes, more collectors are priced out of blue-chip works and are combing the market for previously overlooked names. A number of highly regarded women artists are seeing their prices rise as a result.

"Remember 'plastics' from 'The Graduate'? It should be 'women,' " says Tony Podesta, the Washington lobbyist who is one of a handful of collectors aggressively buying work by women artists.

  

This winter, a painting by Berthe Morisot sold for $11 million--the most ever paid for a woman's artwork at auction. Along with other big art-market moments for women in recent years, the record has auction houses and dealers re-examining this historically undervalued niche. Ellen Gamerman reports.

The records are toppling. Nine of the top 10 auction sales of work by women occurred within the last five years. The last two years marked record-high prices at auction for artists including Joan Mitchell, Tamara de Lempicka, Louise Bourgeois, Irma Stern, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Helen Frankenthaler, Rosemarie Trockel and Louise Lawler.

Auction experts and collectors are anxious to see how three Morisot paintings will sell next month during Impressionist and modern sales in New York, two at Sotheby's BID +2.20%and one at Christie's.

"Whereas before we looked at female artists as the land of opportunity, with prices like these, collectors say the window is closing for gender-specificity bargain buying," says Gabriela Palmieri, a senior vice president and contemporary-art specialist at Sotheby's.

Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures

CINDY SHERMAN: In 2011, the artist was the auction world's highest-priced photographer, male or female, with a $3.9 million sale. Here, the artist models in an untitled portrait.

Spanning centuries and a wide variety of styles, work by women is hardly a cohesive market category. Still, some collectors eagerly seek out female artwork.

Prominent women like Wal-Mart WMT +1.47%heiress Alice Walton, pop queen Madonna and songstress Barbra Streisand have long collected work by women. Barbara Lee, a national activist for women in politics, has filled her collection almost entirely with work by women partly to support artists she believes are underrepresented by museums and galleries. She recalled visiting Louise Bourgeois's studio in the early 1990s. "It was filled with sculpture from every period of her life—no one had purchased it," says Ms. Lee.

Others have less-altruistic motives. "A lot of collectors look for undervalued groups of art, and women could easily be considered the last big group," says Michel Witmer, a New York collector and board member of the European Fine Art Fair.

Dealers and auction experts are using several tactics as they scour the market. One is to find female artists whose works, backgrounds or artistic movements mirror those of prohibitively expensive male artists. These artists include: Joan Mitchell, who worked in the shadows of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock; Natalia Goncharova, one of the turn-of-the-century Russian artists led by Wassily Kandinsky; and Agnes Martin, who forged a path in a male-dominated period led by minimalists like Donald Judd.

Others track female artists whose works have hovered just under $1 million at auction, expecting them to pop into seven figures. Among those attracting attention: conceptual artist Sherrie Levine, known for appropriating photographs by artists like Edward Weston and Walker Evans; and Barbara Kruger, who plasters black-and-white photographs with loud slogans. Both their prices have been dwarfed by the multimillion-dollar sums fetched by fellow contemporary artists like Richard Prince or Christopher Wool.

Another contender: Helen Frankenthaler. There's some debate over the merits of the late abstract expressionist's work compared with those of the men who came before her—like Pollock, whose biggest auction sale topped $40 million—but collectors have shown they're ready to bet on her. Frankenthaler's auction record is just under $1 million, but her early work was recently featured in a show at New York's Gagosian Gallery, where a canvas sold privately for $3 million, according to a gallery official.

The evolution in the market for Joan Mitchell's work illustrates how collectors have recently "discovered" an artist long in the shadows of her male counterparts.

Mitchell, the late Chicago-born painter known for splattering strokes and bold colors, operated just outside circles of older abstract-expressionist peers like de Kooning and Pollock. In 1951, she exhibited alongside them in New York, but by the 1960s she had exiled herself to France.

In 2006, as the art market boomed, a 1970s de Kooning sold for $27 million at Christie's. A Mitchell work fetched $2 million, a big sum for the artist at the time, but one that suddenly had the whiff of a good deal in the Christie's salesroom. New York art adviser Abigail Asher remembers the scene: "A client turned to me and said, 'Wow, doesn't that seem inexpensive?' " she recalled of the collector, who had just bought a Mitchell privately earlier that week.

By 2011, Mitchell's market had climbed as hedge-fund managers and other trophy hunters pegged her work as a good investment. Ms. Asher recalled chasing a Mitchell canvas past its $6 million high estimate against another bidder at Sotheby's. The piece, a large-scale canvas in a riot of colors, sold for $9.3 million—her highest sum ever at auction. Ms. Asher, who lost out, slumped in her seat after the hammer fell: "It was the feeling of: 'The cat's out of the bag.' "

Last year, Mitchell's canvases were the two most expensive works by any woman artist sold at auction, according to auction database Artnet. Her work now hangs in museums around the world, including Ms. Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. A 1958 Mitchell painting will be on the block next month at Christie's.

A number of theories exist for why women have languished in the art world's bargain basement. Experts point to the smaller supply of work by women from certain periods—after all they're called Old Masters, not Old Mistresses—which limits the frequency of sales and holds down prices. Women also are underrepresented by major museums, where purchases and exhibits boost prices. Famous artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo do appear in museum shows, but the permanent modern art collections of most major institutions are comprised largely of work by male artists.

Others say women haven't marketed themselves as well as men. "Male artists are much more pushy and power-related," says Eva Presenhuber, a Zurich-based dealer who noted she recently threw a toned-down party for the artist Karen Kilimnik because the artist doesn't like to promote herself with splashy events.

Indeed, the upper echelons of the art world still belong to men: All of the top 100 works ever sold at auction were created by male artists, and fewer than 3% of auctioned works over $1 million last year were by female artists, according to Artnet. No living woman has cleared $10 million at auction to date, compared with scores of men.

One reason Morisot took off, experts say, is because she and artists like Mary Cassatt have styles similar to those of famous male painters of the period, in this case Manet and Renoir. They also have recognizable brand looks that are easy to live with. "It's no coincidence that the art you see reproduced in doctors' waiting rooms is [their] type of Impressionist work," says Philip Hook, a senior specialist in Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department.

Morisot and Cassatt were prolific artists, but most of their work is ferreted away in museums, making those paintings that do crop up on the market highly sought-after.

In a packed Christie's salesroom in London last February, the Morisot canvas, "After Lunch," sold for roughly three times its high estimate after a protracted back-and-forth between two telephone bidders from Russia and the U.S. The piece is believed to have gone to an American.

The market prizes other female artists because of artistic styles and cultural sensibilities that translate well over time. Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish-born artist with a booze-and-party-fueled lifestyle, moved to Hollywood in 1939 and became a wild fixture on the movie-industry scene. Her Art Deco paintings, brimming with men in tuxes, busty blondes and lesbian trysts, draw famous admirers today—and have reached record auction prices in recent years. Sotheby's will feature a moody Manhattan skyline by the artist during next month's sales.

Madonna, who owns at least two de Lempickas, has collected her for decades and considers her work a source of inspiration, a spokeswoman confirmed. When the singer's "Vogue" video came out in 1990, featuring Madonna's de Lempickas in the background, it sent a frisson through auction houses and art galleries. For years later, whenever anyone had a de Lempicka to sell, the reaction was always the same: "Everyone said, 'Oh, offer it to Madonna,' " says David Norman, Sotheby's co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art world-wide.

Other avid collectors include Barbra Streisand, who was first drawn to the artist's paintings in the 1970s when she was building a house in Art Deco style. "I found Lempicka's work to be so original," Ms. Streisand said in an email, praising the artist's style and technique. "The fact that she was a woman artist made her even more intriguing."

The gender gap narrows within smaller niche markets like photography. Cindy Sherman, a 59-year-old chameleon who spends years planning portraits of herself in various personae, briefly held the title as the auction world's highest-priced photographer, female or male, in 2011. An image of herself splayed across a brown linoleum floor sold for $3.9 million. Ms. Sherman's works, which sold for $1,000 at her long-standing gallery Metro Pictures in 1981, now typically fetch $450,000 at the gallery and are collected by art-market heavyweights such as Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and Christie's owner François Pinault.

An older generation of women artists sees a much different art market today than the one they grew up with. Pat Steir, a 74-year-old New York artist who pours paint down her monumental canvases, recalled one summer in 1964 visiting a friend whose father was an abstract painter. One of his guests was Mark Rothko. Ms. Steir approached him, explaining that she had just gotten out of art school. "I said, 'Mr. Rothko, you're such a great artist, I admire your work so much,' and he said, 'You're a pretty girl. Why aren't you married?' "

Ms. Steir's art now hangs in most major museums across the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Partner Without the Prize

By ROBIN POGREBIN

Twenty-two years after being passed by, the architect Denise Scott Brown, 81, said at an awards ceremony for women in architecture last month that it was time she share in the 1991 Pritzker Prize that was given to her design partner and husband, Robert Venturi, with whom she had worked side by side.

 

 

 

Arielle Assouline-Lichten, foreground, and Caroline James started the Pritzker petition.

By Erika Bolstad

McClatchy Newspapers

Sen. Denise Grimsley was credited with bringing the opposing sides together to resolve their differences over her water supply planning bill. File photo by Ana Goni-Lessan.

A bill that was shaping up to be the most controversial fight over water in the legislative session now has support from environmental groups that were opposing it.

SB 948 by Sen. Denise Grimsley, R-Sebring, would place the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services on par with utilities in water supply planning. The bill is a priority of Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.

Agriculture department officials said the bill would help ensure water is available to support agricultural jobs and to ensure that estimates of water use are standard across water district lines. Environmental groups, though, said they were concerned the bill would place a priority on agricultural water use at the expense of springs, wetlands and streams during droughts.

But a series of amendments offered by Grimsley on Monday in the Senate Committee on Agriculture won support from opponents. The bill passed with support from The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club Florida, Audubon Florida and the Florida Wildlife Federation.

"We had some concerns about the bill," said Janet Bowman, director of legislative policy and strategies for The Nature Conservancy's state chapter. "Some comfort language that tightened up the bill was worked out."

Eric Draper, executive director of Audubon Florida, said environmental groups "remarkably" now are supporting an expansion of the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services into water planning, an issue where he sees a historic alliance among the agricultural water users and environmentalists.

"The sponsor, Denise Grimsley, took a controversial subject and brought people together to resolve the other issues and demonstrated what is often missing in these environmental debates: a willingness to really sit down and give people a chance to talk through things," Draper said.

A series of amendments offered by Grimsley ensured that water conservation be factored into projections of agricultural water use and  water projects on private lands. The amendments also ensured that water supply projects on private lands meet the state "public interest" test for water use and don't harm existing users.

The bill passed with support from the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, Associated Industries of Florida and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Adam Basford, director of state legislative affairs for the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, said the bill wasn't a power grab by agriculture and the amendments made that "explicitly clear."

"Agricultural water use is important to our state," he said. "Having the Department of Agriculture (and Consumer Services) being able to provide accurate data, we think it's a no-brainer."

Elements of the bill are in SB 1684, which is being heard Tuesday by the Senate Committee on Environmental Preservation and Conservation. That's the Senate companion of a wide-ranging environmental permitting bill, HB 999, that has faced environmental opposition in the House.

Portions of SB 948 also are contained in HB 1063, which passed its first committee stop in the House last week and has two more to go. 

A month-long hunt for invasive Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades didn’t result in much of a haul, but scientists and outdoors experts say the data collected will be invaluable.

By CHARLES RABIN

crabin@miamiherald.com

“The data we’ll get will be unbelievable,” he said.

Ever fearful that Florida isn’t seen as insane enough, the state has invited the gun-toting world to come here and blast a python.

Would you like to make some extra money, and at the same time run the risk of being eaten by a carnivorous reptile the size of a war canoe?

If your answer is “yes,” I have an exciting opportunity for you. It’s called the Python Challenge, and I am not making it up. It’s a real event that was dreamed up by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which apparently was concerned that Florida does not seem insane enough to people in normal states.

The Python Challenge is a month-long contest; its purpose, according to the official website (pythonchallenge.org) is “to raise public awareness about Burmese pythons.”

Q. What do they mean by “raise public awareness about?”

A. They mean “kill.”

The contest is open to anybody who registers, pays a $25 fee and takes an online training course; so far about 400 people have signed up. These people have from Jan. 12 through Feb. 10 to go out in the Everglades and raise public awareness on as many pythons as they can. There’s a $1,500 prize for whoever kills the most pythons, a $1,000 prize for whoever kills the longest python, and a $500 prize for whoever kills the python with the best personality.

I’m kidding about that last prize, of course. Burmese pythons do not have personalities: All they do is eat and destroy the ecosystem. They are the teenage males of the animal kingdom. That’s why the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is trying to get rid of them.

Be advised, however, that you cannot kill these pythons any old way you want. No, sir: This is an official state-sponsored event, and if there is one word that comes to mind whenever you hear the name “Florida,” that word is “ethics.” The Python Challenge guidelines clearly state that you have — this is an actual quote — “an ethical obligation to ensure a Burmese python is killed in a humane manner.” That means you cannot kill your python using cruel and inhumane methods such as forcing it to watch Here Comes Honey Boo Boo until it commits suicide, or placing it at the entrance to a Boca Raton restaurant just as the Early Bird special begins, where it would be trampled to death in seconds.

So how do you ethically kill a Burmese python? According to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, you can use a device called a “captive bolt,” or you can shoot it in the head with a firearm of “a safe, but effective caliber.” (Got that? You want your caliber to be safe, but also effective.)

You are also permitted to whack off the python’s head with a machete, provided you do so in an ethical manner. To quote the commission: “Make sure your technique results in immediate loss of consciousness and destruction of the Burmese python’s brain.” (If you think I’m making any of this up, I urge you to go read the Python Challenge guidelines.)

One thing the guidelines are not very specific about is how you’re supposed to catch the python in the first place. I happen to have some experience in this area. A few years ago, I captured a snake that somehow got into my office and onto my desk, despite the fact that I live in Coral Gables, where snakes are a clear violation of the zoning code. The technique I used to capture this particular snake was as follows:

1. Make an extremely non-masculine sound such as might be emitted by a recently castrated Teletubby.

2. Run out to the patio and grab the barbecue tongs.

3. Run back into the office and, while squinting really hard so as not to make eye contact with the snake, pick it up with the tongs.

4. Run, whimpering, back out onto the patio with mincing steps and quickly release the snake in such a manner that it falls into your swimming pool.

5. Change your underwear.

Bear in mind that the snake I captured was of the non-python variety, and was only about two feet long. To capture a Burmese python, which can grow to nearly 20 feet, you will need really big barbecue tongs.

At this point you are no doubt wondering: “If I capture a python, is it safe to eat the meat?” I will answer that with another question: Where do you think Slim Jims come from?

No! That is a joke, and as such it is protected from lawsuits by the Constitution. The actual answer, according to the Python Challenge website, is that “neither the Florida Department of Health nor the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services have stated that python meat is safe to consume.” I interpret that to mean: “Yes.”

Here’s some more good news: You can keep your python skins! The website lists the names of some companies that might want them, including a company called Dragon Backbone, which “will trade a knife for four python skins at least four feet long.” (I am still not making this up.) The website also says that a company called All American Gator Products “can tan a Burmese python skin and fashion it into something you want.” (The website does not come right out and use the term “thong,” but we can read between the lines.)

In conclusion, I think the Python Challenge is one of those ideas that cannot possibly go wrong, and, assuming it goes off with a minimum of unnecessary deaths, it should be extended to other unwanted species, starting with a Cockroach Challenge. So to all you python hunters, I say: Good luck! We Floridians all look forward to the big moment when the dead pythons are counted and the winner declared. It’s bound to be exciting. You know how good this state is at counting things.

If we’re serious about sending forth an army of gun-toting, beer-drinking, redneck snake-hunters to wade into the Everglades and eradicate the python hordes, we’re going to need more than a couple of piddling cash prizes.

We’ll need a queen.

Any officially sanctioned snake-killing frenzy worth a damn comes with a beauty contest. Apparently, girls in bathing attire, presumably of the snakeskin variety, are downright essential to a successful hunt.

So far, only about 400 contestants have signed up for South Florida’s “2013 Python Challenge,” which kicks off Saturday. Compare that to the Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater (that’s the other Sweetwater) which brings in about 30,000 apparent lunatics every year to a dusty town in the middle of Texas with a population of not quite 11,000, where the only other tourist attraction is the National WASP Museum (for the women Army fliers, not the insects.) South Florida’s python shindig would need 18 million attendees just to keep pace, proportionately, with the festivities in Sweetwater.

What Sweetwater offers, along with the rattlesnake holocaust, is a Miss Snake Charmer, though the title is a bit of misnomer, given that pageant winners are required to decapitate a rattlesnake. I dug up this charming Associated Press quote from Laney Wallace, 16, Miss Snake Charmer circa 2011. “Tomorrow I get to skin snakes and chop their heads off. And I’m super excited about it.”

Go ahead with your snide Freudian analysis, but last year that giant posse of displaced Texas cowboys collected bounties on 1,700 pounds of rattlesnake redeemed at $5.50 a pound.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, meanwhile, is offering $1,000 to the hunter who brings in the longest python, and $1,500 for the fellow who bring in the most pythons. Of course, certain rules apply. No roadkill. No pets. “DON’T dismember pythons into more than two pieces or they will not qualify for the ‘longest snake’ category.”

Also, pythons must be dispatched humanely. Miss Snake Charmer would be disappointed, but Florida rules won’t allow decapitations. Gunshots to the head, however, will be okay. Also, “captive bolts,” a slaughterhouse instrument familiar to moviegoers as the killer’s favored weapon in No Country for Old Men. A special FWC online python challenge training course suggests: “To target the correct area, draw an imaginary line from the rear left of the head to the right eye, and then draw another line from the rear right of the head to the left eye. While one person is holding the snake in place, position the captive bolt where those lines intersect. The bolt must enter at a slight angle, not flush to the skull.”

Imagine some conscientious serpent hunter, trying to figure the prescribed humane angle while wrestling a 15-foot Burmese python in two feet of black swamp water. No, this particular snake extravaganza will be all about gunplay. If the hunters can find something to shoot.

Apparently, the idea of a python hunt came out of the governor’s office, where it was conceived as a “market driven” solution to a fast-breeding exotic that’s caused considerable damage to native wading bird and small mammal populations. (Instead of, say, pushing Congress to ban the importation of exotic reptiles.)

But Michael Dorcas, a herpetology researcher, author of I nvasive Pythons in the United States and an expert in these stealthy exotics, suggested Monday that the marketplace may seem a little bare. “The one thing I know about these snakes,” said Dorcas, who knows everything about these snakes, “is that they’re very difficult to find.” Dorcas said that Burmese pythons are so secretive and so well camouflaged, “we’ve walked right past a 15-foot python without seeing it.”

He said the snakes range across thousands of square kilometers of southern Florida, most of that habitat away from roads and canals and nearly inaccessible to most hunters. “Probably, some pythons will be removed, but the damage to the overall population will be minimal.”

Dorcas worries more about unintended consequences to other populations, including humans. The Sun-Sentinel reported that hunters from 17 states have signed up for the month-long python chase. They’ll be coming into unfamiliar terrain, laden with poisonous native snakes, underwater limestone holes and other local hazards. The required 30-minute online training course seems a bit inadequate.

Dorcas is more worried about native snakes, likely to be scarfed up by frustrated python hunters, ready to blast away at any reticulated reptile that happens their way. Saturday could be a very bad day to be a brown water snake caught out without proper identification.

Ironically, the Rick Scott Python Challenge comes the same year that the famous Rattlesnake Roundup in Claxton, Ga., immortalized in the Harry Crews novel Feast of Snakes, stopped rounding up snakes. Wildlife officials noticed that the hunters had been pouring kerosene down tortoise burrows, setting them alight and catching the panicked snakes as they escaped. Several hundred other species also resided in those burned-out turtle abodes. Meanwhile, the Eastern rattlesnake has neared extinction. So this year, the roundup became a non-lethal wildlife celebration.

Texans, of course, don’t care much about biodiversity and the relative value of venomous native snakes. Rattlesnake hunts persist, guilt free. Maybe some of the promotional ideas that make these Texas hunts so damn successful might be worth emulating in python-plagued Florida. For instance, in Brownsville, home of the Brownsville Rattlesnake Roundup, locals distinguish themselves from the crazies in Sweetwater by devouring the still-beating hearts of freshly killed rattlesnakes. “They’re little-bitty. You don’t really chew them up. You just put them in your mouth and swallow them,” a festival organizer explained to BigCountry.com, an Abilene, Texas, news website.

A first-time taster compared rattlesnake heart to “eating a slug….. It sure doesn’t taste like chicken.”

Who knows if the still-beating heart of a Burmese python heart in South Florida would have the same gourmet appeal as a west Texas rattlesnake? No, what we need is a queen, Miss Python Challenge 2013.

With a little luck, she’ll be as adept at public relations and reptile dissection as Miss Snake Charmer Laney Wallace, who didn’t slither away from her queenly duties. “You have to make sure you don’t pop the bladder,” she warned. “That’s a huge mess.”

By Fred Grimm