Art Galleries Face Pressure to Fund Museum Shows

Galleries have always provided scholarly support for museums exhibiting their artists’ work.  Now they’re expected to provide money, too. In today’s exploding art market, amid diminishing corporate donations and mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more heavily on commercial galleries for larger amounts of money — anywhere from $5,000 to $200,000 each time […]

Forget the Loft: The Newest Trend in Luxury Real Estate is Walls

For Wendy Maitland, Town Residential’s president of sales, an Oscar-winning director client of hers was a typical real estate shopper with typical requests. He had a seven-figure budget and was keen to buy into one of the many new luxury condo complexes sprouting around Manhattan. The client was downsizing from a huge country house in Connecticut since his […]

The unspoken reason why galleries are flocking to Los Angeles

Galleries like Sprüth Magers and Hauser Wirth & Schimmel quietly but fiercely compete for the city’s artists. The grand openings of the Los Angeles branches of European galleries Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth (called Hauser Wirth & Schimmel), on 23 February and 13 March respectively, are sure to generate even more buzz about the […]

Sexy, spotless and sure: the three golden rules of desire

As far as a painting’s hammer price is concerned, other, less noble considerations matter a great deal more than the picture’s intrinsic quality. Determining the market value of a picture can be a surprisingly heartless experience. There before you stands a fine portrait by a great artist, whose energy and creative genius you see emblazoned […]

4 Shifts in the “Unpredictable Art Market” You Should Know About

A lawyer, a financier, an art advisor, and a journalist walk into a room… It sounds like the start to a bad gallery dinner joke. But at The Armory Show the topic of discussion was serious: “How to Optimize the Unpredictable Art Market.” In a testament to the topic’s immediacy, moderator and Financial Times columnist […]

BAC in the Globe & Mail

Second careers are a chance to nurture primary passions Laing Brown decided to “retire” from his 30-plus-year career as a lawyer and partner at two of Canada’s largest law firms.  But instead of carrying on as a consultant or spending his days playing golf, Mr. Brown and his wife, Kathleen Brown, also a lawyer, decided […]

Marcel Broodthaers’s Fraught Relationship with Words

Do words limit our experience of a given artwork? Gustave Flaubert believed that, “Explaining one artistic form by means of another is a monstrosity.” Art critic John Bergerwrote: “When words are applied to visual art, both lose precision.” And what if the words are in the art? Expressed by the artist herself? From Cubism to […]