Caught between parents who could not see owning an art gallery as a respectable or worthwhile endeavor and the West’s view of Chinese Contemporary art as derivative, Pearl Lam has travelled the globe looking for a venue for her vision of Chinese Contemporary culture.  She’s finally found it in Hong Kong, according to the Financial Times:

She returned to her family with a dream of opening a gallery. “It was not acceptable. They didn’t approve of me studying abroad for 10 years only to become a shopkeeper. We have no tradition of galleries in China and they didn’t understand. I was sent to Shanghai to help on a property development project. My parents thought I was too wild and needed calming down. But I negotiated the possibility of doing some pop-up shows.”

The young Chinese artists whom Lam met in Shanghai in the early 1990s had a life-changing influence. “They were talking about Confucius, Daoism, Buddhism,” she recalls. “I was amazed, it seemed so old fashioned; I thought of contemporary art in terms of western street culture. But of course, this kind of discussion had been banned during the Cultural Revolution and to talk about these things was subversive and cool. No one was reading this material in Hong Kong. I learnt how to be Chinese.”

The New York Times reports on the publication of an archeological article outlining the discovery of 37,000-year-old cave drawings that show our earliest ancestors had a taste for pornography:

The drawings include what appear to be images of the female vulva, illustrated by circles with small slits on one side. “You see this again and again and again,” Dr. White said. There are also very simple images, in profile, of animals, including horses and lionlike big cats, he said.

The work was discovered on a collapsed roof of a rock shelter at the Abri Castanet site in the Vézère River valley in southwest France. Humans at the time lived in such shelters, Dr. White said, and it was a period of cultural naissance.

A Precursor to Playboy: Graphic Images in Rock (New York Times)

Upon the open polo fields hued a perfect shade of Kelly green, Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour welcomed 1000 guests last Sunday for the opening party and preview of the new installation by  Karen Kilimnik at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center  in Connecticut. A parade of town cars delivered the guests, which included Agnes Gund, Jose Mugrabi, Jeffrey Deitch, Linda Evangelista and Leelee Sobieski to the idyllic country setting, offering a respite from Randall’s Island and the ensuing contemporary auction week. Collectors weren’t the only ones to make the trek and artists in attendance included: Julian Schnabel, Francesco Vezzoli,  KAWS, David Salle and Francesco Clemente.

As the row of arrivals wound up the walkway to the stone mansion housing the exhibit, they caught sight of the monumental Urs Fischer enshrouded in smoke rising up from rows of roasting lamb. The scene was an intoxicating concoction of Gatsby and la Grande Jatte, with a white billowing tent, lounging guests upon grapefruit-colored cushions and jovial laughter spilling forth from perfectly manicured lawns.

The exhibition brought together a selection of Kilimnik’s new and historical works from the past three decades, evoking the history of painting through the construction of fantastical narratives which drew on a rich pastiche and personal flights of fancy. The intimate-scaled canvases depicting estate interiors, animals, chateaux and country cottages, portraits of mysterious women, as well as dashing suitors, and sweeping period landscapes were set alongside hand-painted wallpaper and room installations outfitted by the artist.  Walking through the carefully conceived environments, viewers wandered from a voodoo den into an open hall with Napoleon’s Egyptian expeditionary tent, each space offering a uniquely constructed narrative of the past.

Entering through an Uffizi-inspired marbled arch one encountered the Fountain of Youth, a feature piece, which occupied the upstairs space. Perfectly trimmed artificial hedges encircled the bucolic garden fountain with cosmetic products of youth and beauty scattered about in tempting disarray.  This work was particularly suggestive given how it mimicked the exterior setting and invoked the guests to partake in the piece, transposing the lavish reality into a painterly scene sur l’hebre.

All photos courtesy of Billy Farrell Agency

In the past I’ve harped on some of Felix Salmon’s art market posts, especially his knee-jerk tendency to condescend to the rich. So it’s worth my taking a moment to point out when Felix is spot on about something.

In trying to explain the record price for Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Salmon reminds us that the work is one of a series of four works. The other three are in Norwegian museums. The same is true of an earlier record holder, Giacometti’s Walking Man, which was one of an edition of six with four artists proofs (effectively making 10 of them.)

Remember the Card Players which sold for $250 million? Or, for that matter, the Jeff Koons Rabbit I wrote about earlier this week, which is probably worth the same amount of money asThe Scream, more or less? The three artworks all have something in common: they’re editions, broadly speaking. There are four Screams, five versions of the Card Players, and four Rabbits. And in each case, the value of any given work goes up, not down, as a result of the existence of the others.

That’s because what people are buying, when they buy one of these pieces, is a cultural icon, something instantly recognizable.

Salmon suggests that its simply a matter of vulgar billionaires lacking independent taste that drives these prices. But he’s ignoring a simple market mechanism. Prices, we’re always told, are set on the margin. In the case of art, when a series is owned by important collectors and museums, the highest price is achieved when a work is considered the last available one to sell.

We saw some of this effect when the Matisse series of bronze “backs” were sold last year for $120 million. The original asking price was based upon a sale the previous year of a single back for $48.8m. That price provoked an institution that owned the full series to offers theirs up for sale by simply multiplying the price of one back by four times and asking for $200m. Of course, that violates a simple rule of markets. The $48m price was paid with the idea that no other Matisse back would come up for sale. If all of the editions were up for sale at one time, the prices would necessarily have been even lower. That’s the way markets work.

Salmon focuses on the fact that multiples validate the work for an insecure buyer. That’s unknowable. But in market terms, multiples make it easier for their to be more buyers than dictated by individual taste. The Backs, of course, are hardly “instantly recognizable” even after sales that equalled the Munch.

Art Valuation Data Points of the Day (Reuters)

Much has been made these last two days of a lawsuit that reveals the Picasso Dora Maar being sold by Ted Forstmann’s heirs has been repaired. That information is included, of course, in the condition report.

That hasn’t stopped the press from trying to make a scandal out of the issue. One art market reporter asks:

“Should more of the painting’s history be disclosed before it changes hands for more money than the price of a jumbo jet?”

Except that a jumbo jet starts at $300 million for a 747 and nearly $400m for an Airbus 380 (the two planes generally considered jumbo jets.) Further down the transportation scale, Boeing’s barebones 737 goes for about $60m and an entry level Airbus sets you back just a little more.

Since we’re talking about Teddy Forstmann, a better comparison might have been to the cost of a Gulfstream private jet. Even there, you’d be looking at $38m for a G4, not the sexiest plane in the jet set. Either way, we’d expect anyone buying jets or top-flight Picasso’s to do their homework and send an expert to check it out before flying off.

The $20-30 Million Picasso Portrait at Sotheby’s, Going Under Hammer Wednesday, Has Checkered Condition History (VF.com)