EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. $885,000

A 1,500-square-foot two-bedroom, one-bathroom house on ½ acre in the Hamptons.

DETAILS: The midcentury-style home was recently renovated and has a great room with central fireplace and a swimming pool that overlooks the water. It is within walking distance to the village. There’s also a stainless-steel kitchen and central air conditioning.

WHAT’S OUTSIDE: The house is located near a private community beach as well as a boat mooring at Three Mile Harbor.

GROCERY RUN: The family-run One Stop Market is about a half-mile from the house.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Partly sunny, high 74 degrees.

SOURCE:Tony Cerio with Brown Harris Stevens, 631-903-6151, tcerio@bhshamptons.com.

SPRING ISLAND, S.C. $790,000

A 1,270-square-foot two-bedroom, two-bathroom house on 5.3 acres in a private island community.

DETAILS: The house, built in 1997, has a metal roof, wide-plank wood walls, a wood-burning fireplace and built-in shelving. The master bedroom has a screened-in porch. The 3,000-acre community has golf, art classes and equestrian facilities.

what’s outside: The community has a large nature preserve and the home overlooks a pond and salt marsh in the distance.

grocery run: Major grocery stores on the mainland are about a 15-minute drive away.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Possible thunderstorms, high 89 degrees.

SOURCE:Craig Lehman at Spring Island Realty, 843-987-2200, clehman@springisland.com.

OKEECHOBEE, Fla. $750,000

A 1,700-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom cabin in a private recreation club between Orlando and Palm Beach, Fla.

DETAILS: The two-story home has lake views, a loft and a 1,600-square-foot wrap-around porch with an outdoor fireplace. There are vaulted ceilings, slate floors and marble countertops.

WHAT’S OUTSIDE: The Pine Creek Sporting Club has horseback-riding stables, bird-shooting facilities, fishing and archery.

GROCERY RUN: A concierge service can deliver groceries or the Fort Drum General Store is about a five-minute drive away.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Clouds and sun, high 90 degrees.

SOURCE:John Reynolds, Pine Creek Sporting Club, 561-346-9365, jreynolds@pinecreeksportingclub.com.

—Candace Jackson

By LAURA JACOBS

New York

‘There’s nothing traditional left in Murcia—no earrings or jewelry . . . everything is lost, nothing remains, not even a simple cap I’d hoped to find.” So wrote the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, in 1918, to his wife, Clotilde. He was traveling through Spain doing studies for the kind of commission that is an artist’s dream. Archer Milton Huntington, the founder of the Hispanic Society of America, had asked Sorolla for a cycle of mural-size paintings representing the customs and dress of Spain’s 11 regions. Begun in 1911 and completed in 1919, the majestic, 14-panel “Vision of Spain” would be the climax of Sorolla’s career. His plaintive cri de coeur—“everything is lost”—suggests just how far-reaching and detailed his vision was. It’s an old story, this search for the vivid imprints of one’s early years. “You have to go deep into the countryside,” Sorolla wrote Clotilde.

And deep into the countryside is where “Joaquin Sorolla & the Glory of Spanish Dress,” at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, takes us. Curated by Vogue’s André Leon Talley, the show was conceived by the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who initiated the Institute’s acclaimed exhibition of last year, “Balenciaga: Spanish Master.” That exhibition demonstrated the ways in which Spain’s sartorial inheritance—the matador’s embroidered bolero, the flounces of Flamenco, the lace veils of Catholicism, the stark outerwear of shepherds—had been absorbed and abstracted into Cristóbal Balenciaga’s masterly and vastly influential Paris couture. From the 1940s to the 1960s, many a socialite’s cocktail dress was actually the silhouette of a Spanish goatherd or a Jeronymite nun, ineffably transmuted.

Bohórquez Domecq, S.L./Craig McDean/Art + Commerce

A traje de luces, or ‘suit of lights,’ from the 1950s-60s by Fermín that was once worn by the matador Antonio Ordóñez.

In this current exhibit, however, transmutation is beside the point. Going from Seville to Navarre to Castille, and so on, painting life-size studies as he went, Sorolla was all the time looking for traditional clothing, ceremonial costumes, the history-laden styles and jewelry unique to each region. He wanted to get the details exactly right, and when he found these pieces he often bought them. For the first time ever, Sorolla’s purchases are set side by side here with his painted studies. The resulting connection, as ethnographic as it is aesthetic, is captivating.

From the moment one enters the show, the relationship between form and function comes into play. So many pleats: pin pleats, cartridge pleats and gathers so fine that they read as pleats. This means volume: swaths of fabric pleating up at the neck, or over the bust, thus creating bell-shapes, tents, private homes for the body. Yes, there are corseted shapes in this exhibit, but more mysterious are the brooding, woolen capes and shrouds, which are protective, asexual—rooms, so to speak, of one’s own.

Then there is the surface embellishment—exuberant, zealous, over-the-top. It’s as if Spain is the life of the party, a land of ribbons and bows, cockades and tassels, fringe and lace, not to mention pompoms. One is struck by the correspondence between the ornate gold bullion that ornaments Spanish statues of the Virgin Mary and the same bullion that adorns the matador’s traje de luces (“suit of lights”). Feminine-masculine. Spiritual-corporeal. Where the silhouette of the Virgin is an upside-down V, rooting her to earth, the slim-hipped, broad-shouldered bullfighter is an upright V, opening to the sun and sky. What might this say to us? That the shoulders of men may uphold heaven, but the hemline of heaven brushes the earth. Indeed, the V is a triangle and in this exhibit there are triangular shapes everywhere. The Holy Trinity, it seems, is intrinsic to the metaphorical landscape of Spain.

Museo Sorolla, Madrid

‘Flamenco Dancer’ (1914) by Joaqín Sorolla

Up on the third floor of the exhibition, a panorama of recent haute couture influenced by Spanish dress calls us back to our own hunger for relevance. The most splendid of these is the wedding dress from Christian Lacroix’s final show, in 2009, which takes its inspiration from those festooned statues of the Virgin that are carried aloft through the streets of Spain. I’m not sure how many present-day brides arrive at the altar as virgins, but I don’t doubt that most feel they’re levitating in their dresses. That Mr. Lacroix chose to make this dress the last image of his farewell show attests to the power of Spain’s place as a fount of visual epiphanies.

For me, the most compelling piece in the exhibition is simpler. Downstairs, a fisherman’s shirt from the Basque country is on display. Sorolla bought it in 1912, a loose pullover made of unbleached white wool, its open neckline trimmed with black piping. The shirt had been patched with so many squares and rectangles of white wool that today it suggests Cubism in soft focus—a modern work of art. It expresses austerity, and yet that wool, the color of broken bread, makes one think of the loaves and fishes, the feeding of the multitudes, and this country’s abiding belief in miracles.

Ms. Jacobs is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where she has written extensively on fashion history.

By MAGGIE BEIDELMAN

San Francisco is notorious for making it difficult to open and run small businesses. For Juliet Pries, who just opened The Ice Cream Bar in Cole Valley, it meant months of red tape and rent to realize her goal. Maggie Beidelman reports.

For decades, San Francisco has been a difficult place to set up and run a small business—especially a restaurant. Eager to keep entrepreneurs on their feet and attract new ones, the city is trying to make it easier.

The Board of Supervisors in January proposed an ordinance to reduce the number of restaurant definitions, each with its own zoning regulations, from 13 to three—Restaurant, Limited Restaurant, and Bar.

“There are all these really contradictory rules,” said City Supervisor Christina Olague, who proposed the ordinance along with Supervisor Scott Wiener. The board is expected to consider the measure in the coming weeks.

The move is one of several in San Francisco aimed at helping small businesses start up and keep running.

Mayor Ed Lee announced an additional $1.5 million for the city’s Small Business Revolving Loan Fund in January, and the Board of Supervisors recently approved it. That follows the establishment in 2008 of the Office of Small Business, a program to help potential business owners navigate the city’s cumbersome licensing and permitting requirements, which include a lengthy review process in which neighbors get a say on any new business plans.

The goal is to avoid the kind of experience Candace Combs recently had with her day spa, In-Symmetry. When she decided in 2010 to move her nine-year-old business from one location in San Francisco to another, Ms. Combs ran into zoning regulations and other city rules that dragged out her search for a year and a half. She took on five real-estate agents to find a space with the appropriate zoning and paid roughly $15,000 in permit fees before reopening in December.

“San Francisco is a nightmare,” said Ms. Combs. “You’re constantly butting your head up against the most ridiculous city bureaucracy.”

Restaurants face some of the most onerous rules. An eatery in San Francisco typically completes up to 12 permit applications and filings. The entire process of opening a restaurant usually takes nine to 14 months, sometimes longer, said Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the Office of Small Business.

In contrast, a restaurant in Oakland could open in as little as four months, with only three permits, not including county permits, according to Oakland’s Planning Department. The process rarely takes longer than nine months, and Oakland’s planning code has just four definitions of restaurants, compared with San Francisco’s 13.

“In San Francisco, you could spend a year or two paying rent through the permit process,” said Rob Black, director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, a nonprofit trade association. “In Oakland, they will bend over backwards to help you open a restaurant.”

The city of San Francisco acknowledges the thicket of regulations and even pokes fun at itself for it. Last year, the Planning Commission created a YouTube video, “Hello City Planner,” quoting directly from the planning code. One sample line: “How big is the space you would be renting? 1,000 square feet or less would make you a Small Self-Service restaurant. Above that, you would be a Large Fast-Food Restaurant. …Wait, it doesn’t matter in this district anyway, because neither one is permitted here.”

Overall, there were 71,000 small businesses in San Francisco as of July 2011, not including insurance companies or banks, according to the Office of Small Business. Small businesses employ about 50% of all employees in the city and contribute about 52% of the total sales tax.

San Francisco’s layers of small-business regulations date to 1987, when the city rezoned its mixed-use neighborhood corridors into neighborhood commercial districts, allowing for a more detailed review process. Before the rezoning, the city approved 97% of the permit applications submitted for small businesses, according to the San Francisco Planning Department. By 2007, the latest year for which data were available, only 30% were approved.

The situation began to change in 2008, when then-mayor Gavin Newsom launched the Office of Small Business. The office is a one-stop shop for small businesses looking for help on how to open and operate in the city. It now handles 140 to 185 inquiries a month, 65% of them coming from people who want to start a business.

In 2009, the city started the Revolving Loan Fund with $670,000, to help create jobs and get small businesses access to capital. Microlender Working Solutions distributes the fund and provides five-year assistance for borrowers.

“I can think of nothing worse than seeing vacant storefronts,” Mayor Lee said. “We must make capital available to entrepreneurs to open up shop and support existing small businesses through the revolving loan fund.”

Ron Miguel, a member of the Planning Commission, cautioned that “you’re never going to do away with the bureaucracy,” but added, “We can always come up with a better way of doing things.”

For some small-business owners, the new moves are coming too late. Juliet Pries, 44 years old, said she opened The Ice Cream Bar in Cole Valley in January after spending nearly $300,000 and two years to get her zoning-designated Full-Service Restaurant off the ground.

“I thought I had all the information. But every step I took, there was something more,” Ms. Pries said. If the proposed restaurant ordinance had already been in effect, she added, “I would have been open a year and a half ago.”

Por ELLEN GAMERMAN

Em Londres, visitantes percorrem o museu Tate Modern, parando para olhar obras de arte — ou os seus smartphones. Durante a última feira de arte Art Basel, na Suíça, uma colecionadora fechou a compra de um quadro de US$ 250.000 — sentada num salão de cabelereiro de Los Angeles, vendo a obra no seu tablet. Nos dias de hoje, qualquer um que tenha um iPad pode criar a sua própria versão de uma pintura de Damien Hirst, graças a um aplicativo da galeria Gagosian, que há pouco tempo exibiu obras do artista nas suas 11 filiais ao redor do mundo.

As ferramentas digitais estão mudando a forma como a arte é comprada, vendida ou simplesmente admirada. Colecionadores que antigamente viajavam mundo afora atrás de feiras e leilões de arte estão agora comprando mais obras sem nunca tê-las visto pessoalmente, baseados em imagens digitais. As galerias agora têm a capacidade de mostrar para os colecionadores interessados muitos mais trabalhos do que caberiam nos seus showrooms, simplesmente navegando catálogos digitais. Museus estão encorajando visitantes a usar aplicativos digitais para que tenham mais informações sobre as obras em exibição. Alguns aplicativos de museus e galerias permitem aos visitantes dar um zoom numa obra e ver detalhes mais nitidamente que a olho nu — um recurso que deve se tornar ainda mais poderoso depois que a Apple lançou esta semana seu novo iPad, que tem uma resolução de tela mais alta.

“Nós estamos no meio de uma grande mudança na forma como museus se relacionam com a audiência”, diz Peter Samis, curador associado de mídia interpretativa do Museu de Arte Moderna de San Francisco. “Há uma crescente demanda no nível mais alto, com os curadores todos perguntando: ‘Onde está o nosso aplicativo para iPad?’ em qualquer museu, grande ou pequeno, de toda a América.”

Funcionários das sociedades de leilão Christie’s e da Sotheby’s dizem que estão vendo cada vez mais iPads e outros aparelhos encher as salas durante as vendas. A Christie’s, que já permite lances remotos através do seu website, pretende estender o recurso para o seu aplicativo de iPad no mês que vem, juntamente com novas funções de acesso a relatórios sobre as condições das obras. A Sotheby’s acabou de atualizar o seu aplicativo de catálogo no iPad, para que os colecionadores possam tomar notas em seus catálogos digitais durante as vendas.

Os tablets também estão se tornando corriqueiros em feiras de arte. Em junho passado, na Art Basel da Suíça, o vendedor Adam Sheffer, sócio da galeria Cheim & Read, de Nova York, encontrou-se com um cliente interessado em uma obra de Ghada Amer, uma pintora egípcia cujos trabalhos exigem intensa mão-de-obra e contêm complexos bordados. As obras da galeria estavam catalogadas no iPad por meio do ArtBinder, um aplicativo que está rapidamente substituindo os uso de catálogos físicos nas feiras de arte. O colecionador de Los Angeles estava prestes a comprar a obra, mas ele queria o aval da esposa, que estava a quase 10.000 quilômetros de distância, num cabeleireiro em Los Angeles. Sheffer enviou por email uma imagem ampliada da obra para a esposa, que concordou com o negócio de US$ 250.000. “A coisa toda levou uma hora”, diz Sheffer.

O colecionador Dennis Scholl, de Miami Beach, diz que vídeo e fotografia são uma combinação natural quando ele pensa em comprar uma obra de arte baseado em uma imagem digital; já no caso das esculturas, com suas questões de escala, e dos desenhos, com suas gradações sutis de tonalidades, ele prefere ver as obras pessoalmente. Scholl há pouco tempo adquiriu um trabalho de Tamy Ben-Tor, uma artista israelense que cria vídeos e fotografias de personagens que ela mesmo representa. Ele usou seu iPad para ver o vídeo de Ben-Tor como uma anciã numa floresta. “O iPad, por causa da beleza das imagens e da clareza da reprodução, torna você um colecionador mais corajoso”, diz ele.

Ferramentas digitais também podem ajudar colecionadores a organizar grandes inventários de obras localizadas em diversos lugares do mundo. A curadora Laura J. Mueller cataloga mais de 700 trabalhos japoneses, espalhados por duas casas e um depósito, para um colecionador privado de Nova York, organizando as imagens digitais das peças com um iPhone e um aplicativo de iPad, o Collectrium.

Várias galerias de arte lançaram aplicativos digitais, em parte para atender colecionadores que dependem dos seus aparelhos quando estão comprando arte. Com a função Damien Hirst no aplicativo da galeria Gagosian, desenvolvido pela @radical.media, uma firma de Nova York, usuários não apenas podem ver as “pinturas em tempo real” do artista, mas também manipular os trabalhos para criar novas versões digitais, mudando temporariamente as cores e o tamanho dos pontos ao inclinar e apertar a tela. É ao mesmo tempo uma elegante ferramenta de marketing e um meio original de engajar potenciais compradores.

Cerca de 34.000 pessoas baixaram de graça o aplicativo da Gagosian desde que a primeira versão foi lançada, em junho, diz Kara Vander Weg, gerencia o aplicativo na Gagosian. Vander Weg diz que o dono da galeria, Larry Gagosian, e seus amigos têm iPads, e que eles notaram que os aparelhos vem sendo ubíquos nas feiras de arte. Então, criar um aplicativo tornou-se uma prioridade para os executivos da galeria. “Eles todos chegaram à mesma conclusão”, diz ela. “Esse deve ser o nosso próximo passo.”

Os museus também estão chegando à mesma conclusão. O Guggenheim de Nova York desistiu das tradicionais placas na parede, na sua recente exposição das esculturas do artista italiano Maurizio Cattellan; em vez disso, colocou todas as informações sobre os trabalhos expostos num aplicativo que os visitantes podiam baixar para os seus iPads e smartphones. O museu também pôs iPads nas mãos dos seus guias durante a atual exposição das obras do falecido escultor americano John Chamberlain, mais conhecido pelos seus trabalhos feitos com pedaços amassados da lataria de carros. O aplicativo oferece informações adicionais sobre o artista, bem como um vídeo em que ele aparece trabalhando. Kim Kanatani, diretor de educação do museu, diz que essas táticas são fundamentais para aumentar “a média de três segundos” que os visitantes geralmente passam em frente a uma obra.

O Tate Modern de Londres apresentou há pouco tempo seu aplicativo gratuito para iPhone, o “Correndo Contra o Tempo”, no qual um camaleão viaja pelos grandes movimentos artísticos, enfrentando inimigos como garrafas verde de absinto e um Pablo Picasso que cospe fogo. Usuários só conseguem ativar o “turbo” quando estão dentro do museu Tate — um modo de atrair mais visitantes.

No Museu de Arte Antiga e Nova, uma coleção guardada entre as paredes escuras de um espaço subterrâneo em Tasmânia, Austrália, nenhuma peça tem placa de identificação. Em vez disso, o museu equipa os visitantes com iPhones Touches, os quais eles podem usar para aprender mais sobre as obras e votar se eles amam ou odeiam um determinado trabalho, recebendo uma resposta imediata com a opinião dos outros visitantes. As obras de arte podem mudar de posição no museu dependendo das avaliações, e o museu pode até decidir exibir um trabalho que todo mundo diz que odeia num lugar proeminente, em parte para perturbar o status quo, diz Nic Whyte, diretor de criatividade e cofundador da Art Processors, que ajudou a conceber a estratégia digital do museu.

À medida que os museus continuam a integrar mais aparelhos móveis às suas exposições — o Museu de Belas Artes, de Boston, agora oferece tours multimídia em 750 iPod Touches alugáveis — funcionários estão debatendo como incorporar a tecnologia sem tornar o visitante no que no setor chamam de “zumbis de galeria”, aqueles que param a alguns centímetros de uma obra de arte e mantém os olhos grudados nas suas telas.

A colecionadora e consultora de arte Lauren Prakke, de Londres, diz que gadgets já são parte dos eventos da arte. “Às vezes você pensa, uau, você tem algumas das mais incríveis obras do mundo na sala e alguém está olhando para o telefone”, diz ela. “Eu falo: ‘Por acaso eu sou a única que está admirando a arte?’”.