It’s hard to tell whether Wade Guyton is inadvertently steering the conversation away from his art and toward his market or whether the artist has simply fallen prey to the Barbra Streisand effect where the more one tries to deflect attention to an event, the greater the interest. By now we’re all familiar with Guyton’s Instagram threats against the buyer of one of his sought-after flaming U works. The artist pulled back the curtain via a few picture posts to suggest he was creating a whole series of works from the previously unique printing of an image file. The implicit threat was that these works might find their way out of the studio and into the hands of collectors. (Though it isn’t clear that such an event would devalue the work that eventually sold within a hair’s breadth of $6m.)
Now the story that is reverberating from ArtBasel is another tale of Guyton trying to orchestrate his own market. Here’s what Carol Vogel wrote late last week: read on …