Why the ‘Uber effect’ is proving elusive for online platforms

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Barely a month goes by without the launch of an online initiative that aims to disrupt the art market and bring the “Uber and Airbnb effect” to art transactions. But witness the crowds pacing the aisles at a big-league art fair, or spilling out of the salesrooms during the evening auctions, and the impact of the internet on this object-and-people-business seems minimal.  October saw the official launch of two online art sales platforms: ArtAndOnly, for works valued at typically up to $500,000 and, at the other end of the scale, Arteby’s, an online auction and peer-to-peer marketplace, which has a current minimum lot value of £100.

Meanwhile, ahead of its inaugural New York edition, in late October, the Tefaf art fair announced the launch of a new Digital Excellence Program, supported by its new sponsor, Invaluable, to help the fair’s dealers reach new audiences online.  Invariably, most new online businesses cite data from the latest Hiscox Online Art Trade Report, which found that this market grew 24% to $3.3bn in 2015 and predicted it to reach $9.6bn by 2020.

All this rather glosses over the fact that the online market seems to have hit a bit of a brick wall. Hiscox finds there is “still resistance”, especially from buyers who are 35 and younger. The report says that Generation Y (people born in the 1980s and 90s) is put off by not being able to physically inspect a work and that there is not enough information about quality available online. While this can of course also apply to physical businesses, perception counts for a lot in the art market.

Anish Kapoor is Banned From Buying the World’s Pinkest Paint

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Earlier this year it was revealed that sculptor and color-hoarder Anish Kapoor had been given exclusive rights to the blackest black in the world. Called Vantablack it was developed by British company NanoSystem—specialists in nanomaterials—who created it for military and scientific uses. However, after Kapoor contacted the company he was allowed to be the only artist in the world given permission to paint with it. Created with carbon nanotubes it is able to absorb 99.96% of visible light.

So if you wanted to get hold of some yourself, possibly to turn your living room into an abyss, that wasn’t happening. Kapoor also told The Guardian there’s an issue with producing sufficient quantities to paint with anyway because it’s so dense. Still, if you felt slighted by the exclusivity bestowed on Kapoor, then you might enjoy this retort by British artist Stuart Semple. 

Related:

The World’s Blackest Black Meets the Vacuum of Space

Anish Kapoor Sculpture Censored—In Gold

How the Artist Adrian Ghenie Became an Auction Star

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Many say it was the 2011 exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi museum in Venice that first ignited art buyers’ interest in a young Romanian artist named Adrian Ghenie, whose heavy palette-knife paintings are haunted by historical figures like Stalin, Hitler and the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Then, in 2015, Mr. Ghenie drew more attention when he commandeered the Romanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

These days, this 39-year-old artist’s work has sold for as much as $9 million at auction, with a waiting list of private buyers “spread out between four continents,” according to Marc Glimcher, the president of Pace gallery, which represents Mr. Ghenie in New York and is giving him a solo show opening in January.

Mr. Glimcher added that “134 people think they’re first in line.”

Sean Scully – Paint Speaks Louder Than Words

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Sean Scully now increasingly seems like the most remarkable abstract painter of his generation – this, at a time when abstract art, abstract painting, in particular, is increasingly under attack. We have, however, just received a reminder of how powerful and moving it can be from the magnificent Abstract Expressionist show now on view at the Royal Academy.

Though Scully belongs to a different, younger generation, the big canvases he currently has on show at the Timothy Taylor Gallery would look quite at home in that context. Yet, at the same time, they don’t seem in any way derivative. Throughout his career, he has been very much his own man. Painting, for him, is a declaration of belief – belief in the importance of the activity he is undertaking. Belief in the power of paint on canvas to communicate ideas and feelings – feelings in particular. But there is a lack of the rhetorical egotism that marks a lot of what the major AbEx artists produced. He doesn’t hector the audience.

An Ambitious Survey of the Titans of Abstract Expressionism

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BAC:  We saw this exhibition during Frieze week in London, and it is one of the best exhibitions we have ever seen – bar none.

This expansive AbEx show is brash, irreverent, and unconstrained, just like the period it aims to express.

The titans of Abstract Expressionism are on view now at The Royal Academy of Arts in London. It’s a massive show comprising 163 works by 30 painters, sculptors, and photographers, and will likely go down in history as the largest loan exhibition of its kind.  Recalled painter Jack Tworkov:

The turning point was 1949. 1949 was the year when the idea of a group crystallized. Suddenly you realized that you weren’t talking to the same people that Picasso and Braque were talking to. Suddenly we realized that we were looking at each other’s work and talking to one another, not about Picasso or Braque. We had created for the first time an atmosphere where American artists could talk to American artists […] Suddenly what the guys around me were saying was important […] We suddenly stopped being interested in Paris […] we became interested in one another.

Mark Rothko’s Dark Palette Illuminated

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One evening in 1968, Mark Rothko regaled the art dealer Arne Glimcher, who had dropped by his studio on his way home from Pace Gallery in New York, with the story of a visit from a collector that day.

Pointing to an enormous painting of dark blue and black rectangles floating on a deep burgundy field, Rothko, the Abstract Expressionist painter, described offering his work to the woman, who had been pestering him for a canvas. “Mr. Rothko,” she had said with disappointment, “I want a happy painting, a red and yellow and orange painting, not a sad painting.” Amused, Rothko had responded: “Red, yellow, orange — aren’t those the colors of an inferno?” The woman left empty-handed.

The memory of this exchange now has inspired an exhibition that Mr. Glimcher hopes will “disprove the prevalent interpretation” by many critics, collectors and viewers that Rothko’s brilliantly colored paintings of the 1950s were sunny and joyous, while his darker-palette works in the 1960s reflected his progressing depression and foreshadowed his suicide in 1970.  “There wasn’t a dichotomy,” Mr. Glimcher said. “Mark said many times he felt that tragedy was the only theme noble enough for art.”

MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

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When the influential Museum of Modern Art curator Laura Hoptman claims that she’s “a painting person,” it’s no joke. A veteran organizer of cutting-edge exhibitions, she built her career in part through her insistence on championing the medium, even—or perhaps especially—through its perennial periods of unpopularity and critical disdain. This has earned her both accolades and scorn, but her track record of introducing vital contemporary painters to American audiences largely speaks for itself.

From her start at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in the late 1980s to her assistant curator position at MoMA—where from 1995 to 2001 she oversaw the first American solo museum exhibitions for pathbreaking artists like Luc Tuymans and John Currin—Hoptman has remained steadfast in her belief that good paintings will always be relevant.

What Was Suprematism? A Brief History of the Russian Idealists Who Created Abstraction as We Know It

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At an exhibition entitled “0.10” (“Zero Ten”) in St Petersburg in 1915, Black Square (completed in 1913), the first Suprematist work by Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), hung in the corner of the room, the traditional setting for an icon in an Orthodox Russian home. The artwork was a square canvas painted black. Malevich claimed in 1927 that in works such as this, he was trying to “free art from the dead weight of the real world.” In rejecting narrative subject matter, Malevich chose to ignore both current political events and traditional religious imagery, replacing both with a search for something beyond the physical world. His extreme form of abstraction asks the viewer to meditate on the qualities of form and paint and glorifies these as spiritual in and of themselves.

10 Disruptors Who Are Completely Changing the Art World

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For the second consecutive year, artnet News set out to identify 10 players who are disrupting the status quo.

This year’s edition, like last year’s, is a “subjective, non-comprehensive list of colleagues who have changed the shape of the American art world,” as Brian Boucher writes.

Even still, game changers are necessary to any industry—especially the art world. From artists like Tania Bruguera and Derrick Adams—who are both engaged in activist and curatorial practices, pushing the parameters of what it means to be an artist, to collector Estrellita Brodsky, who’s taking the presentation of Latin American art into her own hands—these disruptors are changing the way we experience art.

Yves Klein review – all things blithe, beautiful and blue

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Tate Liverpool
Klein anticipated pop art with his spirit of mockery and fun, but there was more to the French artist than painting with naked women, as this rare show reveals.

Yves Klein was a joker, a thinker and an extreme provocateur. In his dragonfly life – born in 1928, dead of heart failure at 34 – he became France’s most notorious artist. He patented a shade of blue – International Klein Blue, in fact just ordinary ultramarine pigment bound in polymer to preserve its chromatic intensity – and painted all-blue canvases with it, startling his audiences. He worked with rollers and sponges. He made paintings by harnessing air, rain and fire.

At 19, Klein is said to have signed the sky with his forefinger – “my first artwork” – and he’s always trying to get out of this world. He vanished to Japan to study judo, joined the Rosicrucians, mastered the most esoteric philosophies. Hemmed in by conventional pictures, he aims for that liberating void. The largest and most joyous body painting in Liverpool is a fabulous exclamation – rapid blue handprints across the canvas, the flurried sense of a torso and limbs disappearing fast into space, like a cartoon figure hurtling through a window. As close to unbound freedom as anything Yves Klein ever made, it is sealed with an impish pink farewell kiss.

Kerry James Marshall’s Paintings Show What It Means to Be Black in America

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People say we’re in the middle of a second civil rights movement, and we are. The only surprise is that the first one ever ended. The artistKerry James Marshall was there for it. He was just a kid then, born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955. But kids take in a lot.

He was in Birmingham in 1963, when white supremacists dynamited a Baptist church and killed four young girls. He was 9 and living in Los Angeles in 1965 when Watts went up in flames. He remembers all that, just as he also remembers growing up in those years in a loving family: mother, father, sister, brother. Home.

Artists take in a lot, too. Mr. Marshall has absorbed enough personal history, American history, African-American history and art history to become one of the great history painters of our time. That’s the painter you’ll see in “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” the smashing 35-year career retrospective that opens on Tuesday at the Met Breuer.  You know there would be some interesting choices from this group. Together, they look like an artist-army: mature, sober, purposeful, full of ideas, ready to get great, which Mr. Marshall already is.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist tops list of art world’s most powerful

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Artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, dubbed ‘curator who never sleeps’, wins ArtReview’s accolade for second time.  Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries dubbed as the “curator who never sleeps”, has topped this year’s ArtReview Power 100 of the most influential people in the art world.

It is the second time Obrist has been named the most powerful figure in the global art world for his work, not just at the Serpentine but also as an art critic, curator, author and sought-after panellist.

Oliver Basciano, deputy editor of ArtReview, said the 20-person panel had selected Obrist once again because of “his energy and the fact that he connects so many people; he’s everywhere”.

Obrist first topped the Power100 in 2009 but Basciano said his influence had continued to grow since then.

Tino Sehgal Dances Across the Line Between Art and Life

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Sehgal’s latest work will likely go down as one of the 21st century’s most interesting hybrids between contemporary art and dance.

I came for one reason and one reason only: to see if Sehgal, 40, recipient of this year’s Hans-Molfenter-Preis, could successfully make the exodus from contemporary art back into ballet. Numerous connections to other dance-world notaries like Isadora Duncan, the Ballets Russes, Merce Cunningham, and Yvonne Rainer can be found throughout his work. However, Sehgal is an artist whose work eviscerates any boundary between dance, choreography, human social relations, sculpture, and political economy, in the process forging new ground as one of the world’s most relevant, provocative, and puzzling cultural producers of our time. He has helped breathe new life into contemporary art by deascensioning it away from material-object-oriented culture, creating famously objectless works — what curator Jens Hoffmann famously called a “museum of dance.”

The first work visitors encountered, “This is so contemporary,” consisted of Sehgal’s “interpreters” (his preferred term for the dancers who execute his work) who basically repeat this phrase as they prance and jump around. To be honest, the work—one of Sehgal’s cheekiest and most audaciously childish—kind of pissed me off. But the more I reflected on it, the more I found it appropriate for the audience and context of the Palais Garnier.

The Middle Market Squeeze, Part II: Galleries Get a Reality Check

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Every age gets the kind of gallery it deserves.

In August of 2015, ex-gallerist, private dealer, art fair director, and author Ed Winkleman published his second book on contemporary art galleries in six years. Titled Selling Contemporary Art: How to Navigate the Evolving Market(Allworth Press), the book provides what an Amazon online review calls an “examination of today’s contemporary art market,” a snapshot of a rapidly “evolving” art environment, and a first-hand account of how the 2008 financial crisis torpedoed a number of middle-class galleries, including his own.

Since publication fourteen months ago, the book has garnered positive reviews, resulting in a number of appearances for the author on the art talk circuit. Little did Winkleman know, though, how prescient his words would appear in late 2016—in light of a global art market slowdown and a renewed spate of gallery closings in New York and Los Angeles.

On August 29, Winkleman posted the following quote from his book’s introduction on his Facebook account. “It can happen like that in the contemporary art market,” he began. “In late 2008, just as I was finishing my book How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, it felt like someone he had turned off the spigots of the contemporary art market all at once.”

 

Philippe Parreno – Person of Interest

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Close-shaven and bald, Parreno wears woven bracelets on his right wrist and has the words “do so” tattooed on his left, a reference to the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson’s theories of self-empowerment. He is shy and serious, with an ironic sense of humor so subtle it is easy to miss, and he follows many of his thoughts with an accommodating, or gently insistent, “no?” When forced to call himself anything, he prefers “exhibition producer” to “artist”; his works, which are often collaborative in nature, tend to challenge the idea of an authentic or definitive experience.

“I don’t really deal with topics or subjects,” Parreno agreed, deadpan. “My subject is just art, no? I’m extremely obstinate, so I don’t let things go. I obsess, on and on and on, in a never-ending cycle.” He scratched his head. “It’s an art of loopholes.”

Talk – Collecting Contemporary Art, Audain Art Museum, Whistler, Canada

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Laing Brown is an art collector who is interested in ideas.

Brown, chair of the Audain Art Museum acquisitions committee and an external advisor to the acquisitions committee of the National Gallery of Canada, has just returned from Britain, where he went to check out Frieze London, where 160 of the world’s top commercial galleries show off works by artists they represent.  “Our real passion is collecting art,” he says.

He will be speaking about his 10 Rules for collecting contemporary art and why collecting contemporary art is worthwhile at the Audain on Thursday, Oct. 13 at 7 p.m.

“The 10th rule is just get started. Look at as much art as possible. I’m going to spend time on this because people say this but they don’t really show what this means,” he says.

Thumbs up to David Shrigley’s fabulously feel-bad fourth plinth

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David Shrigley is a mordant and rueful artist. I have a postcard by him that says DEATH in letters that get smaller from left to right, pithily expressing our doom as a diminishing scribble. His take on existence veers between the grimly comic and the cynically absurdist. It is therefore hard to take him entirely at face value when he claims his colossal bronze sculpture of a hand with an elongated thumb jabbing the sky above Trafalgar Square is a simple statement of optimism. I honestly can’t see this gleefully ugly work of art spreading a lot of cheer.

Is this the very first readymade?

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Three million years before Duchamp, an ape-like humanoid in Africa found a stone that is now going on display for the first time at the British Museum.  When Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal into art just by declaring it so, he steered the history of art on an entirely new, conceptual course. But the lineage of the readymade may stretch back far beyond the French-born artist.

Some three million years ago a humanoid in southern Africa stumbled upon a naturally formed stone in the shape of a head and carried it to a nearby cave. The Makapan Pebble, also known as the Stone of Many Faces, was most likely found by an Australopithecus africanus, an ape-like species with some early human characteristics, which became extinct around two million years ago.

The Makapan (or Makapansgat) Pebble, which has never been displayed, will be exhibited for the first time at the British Museum in London this month in a show entitled South Africa: the Art of a Nation (27 October-26 February 2017). The stone belongs to the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, where it is kept in storage. John Giblin, the British Museum’s co-curator of the show, says the pebble “is the perfect size to hold in the palm of the hand”.

Clean, Well-Lighted Places: On Our Nostalgia for the Golden Age of Art Dealing

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The notion that collectors sit atop the hierarchy of today’s art world is axiomatic. They build private museums and control the boards of traditional ones. Through their acquisitions, they determine the fates of artists, and often overshadow curators, historians, and critics—all those ink-stained intellectuals who used to play a larger role in determining art’s value.

And yet, one must not discount the supplier. On the primary market—the placement of new work straight from artists’ studios—art dealers often shape collectors’ tastes. On both the primary and secondary, or resale, markets, they shepherd artworks onto collectors’ walls (or, as the case may be, into their freeport storage spaces in Geneva or Singapore). In a recent profile of David Zwirner in the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote that “one prominent collector referred to Zwirner as his top ‘go-get guy.’ To go and get, you have to know who owns what, how he or his heirs feel about it, how desperately they may need money.” Certain dealers are now celebrities. “Call Larry Gagosian, you belong in museums,” rapped Jay-Z, an art collector himself, and one of Gagosian’s high-profile clients.