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Auction Results
Marion Maneker0May 15, 2013

Pure Koons, Big Richter and Last Chance Newman Make Sotheby’s Contemporary Sale

 Sotheby's NY Cont Eve 513

A tone of blasé resignation seems to be creeping into the inner circle of the Contemporary art market even though Sotheby’s $294m sale showed demand for a broad range of established artists and a smattering of new names. After Monday’s free-for-all charity sale at Christie’s market observer Josh Baer called a top. Last night at Sotheby’s despite many strong prices for a range of works and nary a Warhol to be seen, the response was more resignation than excitement.

Out on the sidewalk after the sale, Carol Vogel got this reaction:

“I guess a million dollars doesn’t buy you much anymore,” remarked Stephen Mazoh, a private dealer.

And Judd Tully got an explanation for the failure of the night’s big Bacon (see below) followed by an echo of Baer’s market top call:

“Still,” remarked New York dealer Roland Augustine later, “it was a very strong sale and it’s remarkable that the market continues this way. We’re pretty close to the top now, so I think it will plateau soon.”

Interestingly, Katya Kazakina spoke to an art advisor who sees hot money coming back to the market though it is unclear whether he is referring to the works offered straight from artists to benefit the Whitney, the startling prices for Nate Lowman and Dan Colen or the trophy sales:

“The speculative element is returning to the market,” said Jonathan Binstock, senior adviser in postwar and contemporary art at Citi Private Bank. “There’s more money to spend on riskier opportunities, ones that would have seemed unappealing just a few years prior.”

On the failure of the large Bacon portrait that had not been seen in public for decades, Judd Tully had this explanation:

“It’s very simple,” said Faggionato, “too high of an estimate. It’s not complicated and it didn’t attract any bids.” The dealer also said the painting had changed hands fairly recently at a high price, close to the over-reaching estimate.

The other artist who surprised to the downside was Jeff Koons. Peter Brant’s provenance could not put two familiar works over at the prices quoted even after the opening success of the rare early work was a raging success selling for nearly three times the high estimate at $9.4m:

Dealer David Nisenson compared the later lots with the Koons light box, whose appeal he understood. “It’s early, it’s totally deadpan, conceptually it’s very much what early Koons is about,” he said, “and it’s a unique piece. You have to be a real purist to pay that much for it, but that’s really a piece for purists.”

Sotheby’s Contemporary Auction Totals $293.6 M., With Newman, Richter in Front (GalleristNY)

Record Auction Price for Barnett Newman, $43.8 Million, Is Set at Sotheby’s (NY Times)

Sotheby’s Snares $294 Million, Led by a Record-Busting $44-Million Newman (Artinfo)

Barnett Newman Leads Sotheby’s NYC $294 Million Auction (Bloomberg)

Artists
Marion Maneker0May 14, 2013

Picasso Sales Tumble 40% in New York

Picasso Avedon Detail

Colin Gleadell does a little calculation on one of the most important drivers of the Modern market, Picasso. Like Warhol in the Contemporary market, the previous driver of sales seems to have lost luster:

Sales of Picasso were down last week from $106 million — or 25 per cent of last November’s New York auction takings — to $64 million, or 13.4 per cent of the spring sales takings.

Frieze New York: 80ft inflatable balloon dog sells for almost $1m (Telegraph)

General
Marion Maneker0May 14, 2013

Sotheby’s NY Contemporary Eve = $293.6m

Artists
Marion Maneker0May 14, 2013

Kenny Schachter’s Cady Noland Sighting

Cady Noland at Christie's

Cady Noland at Christie’s

Kenny Schachter stormed New York last week for the Frieze fair and wrote a diary of his whirlwind trip for Artspace. During his tour of Christie’s auction exhibition he noticed something odd:

At Christie’s, there was a woman hunched over on the floor next to a group of traffic barricades, drawing feverish compilations with pencil on paper, which I joked was  an actual artwork for sale. Actually, it turned out to be the reclusive artist Cady Noland herself, fastidiously reconstituting an artwork that was indeed for sale.

A Dealer’s Diary of Frieze (Artspace)

Auction Results
Marion Maneker0May 14, 2013

Christie’s 11th Hour Charity Auction = $33.3m

Robert Longo, 11th HourLast night’s sale had all the hallmarks of a market driven by anything but fundamentals. Already there are cautionary notes coming out of the sale suggesting we’ve returned to an atmosphere not unlike 2007. And a number of collectors and sale watchers are remarking upon the artificial prices. What will the effect be of a sale price that was doubled with a matching grant for charity?

Judd Tully reinforces this point when he interviewed one of the evening’s big buyers, Stewart Rahr, a social presence in New York who is not known to be an art collector:

Caught on the stairway exiting the salesroom, a second or so after dealer Gavin Brown thrust his business card in his hand, explaining he represented the artist, Rahr explained his modus operandi. “I’m like this all my life, period,” the billionaire said. “All I do is philanthropy now, ever since I sold my company. Look it up.”

From the perspective of the art market—as opposed to the charity which was well served last night—the sale suggests random prices unconnected to the art market itself. Bharti Kher’s The Skin Speaks a Language Not It’s Own confirmed that when it sold for $1.78m, a hair below the low estimate including the reduced fees.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Wildlife Charity Auction Raises $38.5 Million at Christie’s (Artinfo)

General
Marion Maneker0May 13, 2013

Art & Money Laundering

It is an open secret in the art world but now the Helly Nahmad gambling case seems to have tipped off the New York Times:

Most of these industries have checks. Real estate titles and deeds at least require a name. Mortgage brokers, stockbrokers, casinos, banks and Western Union must report suspicious financial activity to the federal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Banks must report all transactions of $10,000 or more. Altogether, the network logs more than 15 million currency transactions each year that can be used to track dirty money, said Steve Hudak, a spokesman for the agency. The art market lacks these safeguards. Roll up a canvas and it is easy to stash or move between countries; prices can be raised or lowered by millions of dollars in a heartbeat; and the names of buyers and sellers tend to be guarded zealously, leaving law enforcement to guess who was involved, where the money came from and whether the price was suspicious.

Valuable as Art but Priceless as a Tool to Launder Money (New York Times)

Art Fairs
Marion Maneker2May 13, 2013

The Herd of Independently Wealthy Minds

Frieze Art Fair

Guy Trebay does his best to epater la haute bourgoisie in his New York Times piece on Frieze NY 2013 with the obligatory darkly threatening reminder that all of this fascination with art and the money that drives it will surely end soon…and in tears. Nonetheless, Trebay is a very talented depicter of scenes:

It is well established that over the last decade the seasonally migrating creatures at the top of the economic food chain have turned the pursuit of contemporary art into a defining marker of wealth and social status. They move across continents and oceans — Frieze this week, Venice later in the month for the Biennale, Switzerland in June for the august Basel Art Fair, granddaddy of them all — in a pack, showing all the signs of what the collector Don Rubell on Thursday termed “a herd mentality.” They browse and they forage. They consume voraciously.

“I bought already a Piotr Uklanski and a Jeppe Hein,” Joanna Przetakiewicz, a collector based in London and St. Moritz, said early Thursday afternoon, tapping open her smartphone to check the details of an hourlong shopping spree during which she had spent close to a million dollars on just two works.

“I am going to buy as well an Anish Kapoor,” Ms. Przetakiewicz added, referring to a wall-mounted stainless steel disc with an asking price she said was 650,000 British pounds. “But I want it in pink.”

This is surely what Jed Perl had in mind when he wrote:

Art collectors used to be inclined to be secretive. Now they’re pretty much all publicity hounds.[…] The bleached-chic style can make ignorance and mendacity look pretty. At a time when the people with the heaps of money are terrified of anything that isn’t “curated,” whether it’s their Louboutins or their Warhols, Frieze is so finely curated that it becomes its own conceptual art work, annihilating whatever art happens to be on display. […] Henry James would have savored the drop-dead elegance and seen straight through to the corruption, although you might want a little help from Marx or Keynes (take your pick) to explain exactly how it all works.

At Frieze, The Elite Browse and Forage (NY Times)

Frieze New York, a VIP Art Fair for Our Gilded Age (The New Republic)

Fraud, Theft & Restitution
Marion Maneker0May 12, 2013

Egyptian Antiquities Move Fast on Black Market

Georgina Adam remarks in her Financial Times column on the recent discovery of Egyptian antiquities that may have been illegally removed from the country recently:

In London, six lots of Egyptian material had to be withdrawn shortly before Christie’s May 2 London sale because they were believed to have been stolen from a recently discovered and excavated tomb in Thebes. According to the Metropolitan Police’s art and antiques unit, an unnamed man in his early 60s from northeast London was arrested the day after the sale “on suspicion of handling stolen goods, tax and fraud offences”. The suspect was released on bail until August.

Christie’s said the works “came with a convincing provenance”. The seller apparently said he had inherited the pieces (which included a red granite relief of a Nubian prisoner, dated 1550-1069 BC, and another limestone relief, both from the Theban tomb) from an uncle who had served in Egypt during the second world war.

After the catalogue was printed, the saleroom checked with the Egyptology Department of the British Museum and discovered that there was doubt about the works. “[Christie’s] is working with the police to ensure their speedy return to Egypt,” it said in a statement.

The Art Market: Apples—Only $41.6m a Bowl (Financial Times)

Art Fairs
Marion Maneker0May 12, 2013

Vernissage TV: Art Beijing

Vernissage TV Art Beijing 2013

 

The Vernissage TV folks take you to Art Beijing:

In this video we look back at Art Beijing 艺术北京 2013, the 8th edition of the art fair in Beijing, China. Around 150 art galleries and institutions, mostly from Beijing, participated in Art Beijing 2013. The fair features both a contemporary and classic art section. Among the participating galleries this year were Chinese and international galleries such as ShanghART, Tang Contemporary, Continua, Beijing Commune, Chambers Fine Art, Halcyon Gallery, and Asia Art Center. According to the organizers, more than a third of the galleries have attended Art Beijing for the first time.

Artists
Marion Maneker0May 12, 2013

Paul McCarthy: Reluctant Sculptor, Committed Critic

Paul McCarthy, Tomato Head (Green Shirt)

Randy Kennedy tries to get to the bottom of Paul McCarthy’s success and appeal in a New York Times Magazine profile. What McCarthy wants is to puncture the acceptance of the entertainment-as-reality culture that dominates the US:

To anyone who thinks of contemporary art as a confrontational, profane, puerile, nihilistic, body-obsessed in-joke, McCarthy provides a near-perfect example of all that has gone wrong since the ’60s. His work can — and does — provoke physical revulsion. But it is not mere provocation; it’s intended as an all-out assault, a “program of resistance,” as he calls it. And the older he gets, the more explicit he has become that his target is the American entertainment-consumer economy. “I can see much more clearly now that we are living in the middle of this kind of insanity,” he told me, “and it runs itself. And the really scary thing is that we’re not conscious of it anymore. It’s a kind of fascism. The end goal of this kind of capitalism is to erase difference, to eradicate cultures, to turn us all into a form of cyborg, people who all want the same thing.”

McCarthy emerged from a group of California artists like Christopher Bureden who relied on performances. Yet to have an effective voice, both discovered the need to make objects:

Like Burden, who gave up pure performance and started creating sculpture and installations, McCarthy decided that to have a lasting influence in the art world, he had to begin making objects. […] His work was never meant to be easy for the commercial art world to digest, which for a long time, it didn’t. “A lot of stuff got thrown out,” he says. “There were times when we needed space, and we would just take a load out to the dump.”

That approach to art making still leaves a mark on McCarthy’s view of the market:

“I never really think about the money,” McCarthy told me over sandwiches one afternoon at the house. “I just think about the next piece and about how we’ll do it and how much it will be. And sometimes I think, Wow, that’s a lot. And sometimes we have it, and sometimes we don’t.”

The Demented Engineer (NY Times)

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