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)

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)

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)

Carl Swanson does a great job putting up with the interviewers in this HuffPo Live segment on his New York Magazine cover story on Jeff Koons. (Click on the image to see the video.)

Christie’s has created this infographic (click to see it in all its huge glory) about painter Jean-Michel Basquiat along with a series of videos that range from poignant to bathetic. Two of Basquiat’s compadres, Al Diaz and Torrick Ablack, remind us that the young Haitian painter was a difficult person and inspiring mentor.

Georgina Adam has more on the aftermath of Zhao Wou-ki’s death:

The painter, who was 92 and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, died in Switzerland, where he had been moved in 2011 by his third wife, Françoise Marquet. She is pitted against his son by a first marriage, Jia Ling Zhao, 66, and the two were battling even before the artist’s death, both seeking guardianship of the artist and thus of a stockpile of paintings worth up to €500m.

Zhao claimed his father wanted to stay in France, and that Marquet’s decision to move to Switzerland was motivated by the anticipated election of a Socialist president in France, and a possible increase in taxes. In emails published in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, she spoke of the “alarming political situation” and predicted “tough economic conditions with heavy taxation”. Marquet, a former curator in Paris’s Museum of Modern Art, also took some 400 works of art to establish a foundation in Nyon, Switzerland. Both have gone to court, and Marquet has accused Zhao’s lawyer, Jean-Philippe Hugot, of “orchestrating a media campaign” about the circumstances of her husband’s death.

Art Market: Iznik Great (Financial Times)

Bloomberg’s Aaron Eglitis spent a little time in Latvia with Mark Rothko’s son who, even though the family maintains a stockpile of very valuable work, isn’t very interested in the prices that his father’s work attract :

“He would think it’s a distraction,” Christopher says in an interview at the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Center. “When you have prices that are not simply large, but make headlines, people don’t look at the artwork but at the dollar figures, the pound figures or the euro figures.”

The transfer of works to eastern Latvia comes as the country tries to boost tourism through its ties with Rothko, whose paintings were mainly produced in New York. The art center cost 4 million lati ($7.5 million) to refurbish, about 85 percent of which was provided by the European Commission.

“He really wanted you to have this direct communication with art,” Christopher says of his father before we admire the works on show. “He doesn’t want you to look at the paintings and think about how much it might be worth and how much it might be insured for and all that. He really wants you to have a genuine experience. I think he would not be happy about prices.”

Rothko Family Brings Burning Red Paintings to Latvia (Bloomberg)

The Brooklyn Museum’s El Anatsui show is filled with recent work lent by the Jack Shainman Gallery. Now the museum has taken advantage of the loans to buy one of the works for its own collection, Carol Vogel reports. No word on the price of the work but the Met bought their El Anatsui a few years ago for what was said to be $1 million and Bonhams will sell one next month with an estimate that reaches over seven figures:

This week the museum announced that it has acquired “Black Block,” its first work by Mr. Anatsui. The two-panel wall hanging from 2010 is part of the show. “It’s one of his signature pieces,” said Eugenie Tsai, the museum’s curator of contemporary art.

Unlike the colorful, shimmering wall hangings that Mr. Anatsui has become known for, “Black Block” is monochromatic. When the exhibition closes in August, “Black Block” will travel with the show to the Des Moines Art Center, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

Inside Art: El Anatsui in Brooklyn (New York Times)

Berthe Morisot, Apres Le Dejeuner (£1.5-2.5m) £6.9m

It seems hard to imagine that it has taken this long for the market to view work by first-class women artists as undervalued. But it has. And though a few isolated painters—Goncharova, Mitchell and Kusama—have reached into the mid-seven figures and above, collectors seem to finally be wising up.

Ellen Gamerman and Mary M. Lane report that a Helen Frankenthaler was sold privately by Gagosian Gallery for $3m after a recent show. They add these anecdotal observations:

“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.

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 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.

Women on the Verge (WSJ)