When a local artist intentionally shattered a vase, last week, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s ongoing Ai Weiwei retrospective, most journalists predictably focussed on the price of the destroyed work, which was said to be a million dollars. CNN’sheadline was typical of the coverage: “MIAMI ARTIST DESTROYS $1 MILLION AI WEIWEI VASE IN PROTEST.” Variations […]
David Roberts is an art-world oxymoron: a property developer who collects art and almost never sells, a businessman worth more than £80m who doesn’t see art as an asset class. As one of Britain’s most significant contemporary art collectors and founder of the charitable David Roberts Arts Foundation (DRAF), Roberts is a major presence on the international art […]
The Britannia Street Gagosian gallery is currently showing the works of Georg Baselitz in Farewell Bill. The new Baselitz paintings are self-portraits that pay reverence to the great artist Willem de Kooning. Baselitz encountered Kooning’s gestural paintings, Woman I and Woman II, as a student in Germany in 1958. A traditional portrait depicts a realistic […]
Browsing the International Art Market. From Tutankhamun to the ancient Greeks, the church to the Medicis, there’s a long history of shopping for art. Comedian Sally Phillips explains the bulk-buys and the beheadings – then explores the international art fair circuit to find out what’s worth its weight in gold … and why Tate bought […]
I have been an invited interloper in the fiefdoms of the decimal-pointed rich long enough now to know that when rich men want to distinguish themselves from other rich men they buy art. Among practitioners of modern-day social one-upmanship this is hardly new. The nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age were the first Americans to […]
London—The contemporary art market continued its steady climb at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, with a sale dominated by a strong grouping of paintings by international blue chip artists that brought in £87,915,500 ($144,550,665). Ten of the 57 lots offered went unsold, for a trim buy-in rate by lot of 17.5 percent and seven percent by value. Twenty […]
London—The market for the relatively esoteric Italian art movement of the mid-1960s known as Arte Povera (Poor Art) took a giant leap forward at Christie’s on Tuesday evening with a single-owner sale that earned £38,427,400 ($63,020,930). The figure compared well to pre-sale expectations of £25.7-36.5 ($42.1-59.9 million). Of the very large number of offerings in the […]
Art dealers who believe galleries are no longer necessary have forgotten an essential reason why works are valued. As the virtual replaces the physical and the world gets globalised, we’ve been hearing that art galleries, material and settled in a single place are bound to be on their way out. Collectors are now more likely […]
According to ArtForum there will be nearly sixty international art fairs taking place in 2014. And there must be hundreds of other fairs around the world too. They are everywhere, and whilst not a new phenomenon their numbers have increased inexorably since the end of the 1990s. The art world has become increasingly globalised during […]
A widely respected tastemaker in the contemporary art scene, the New York dealer Stefania Bortolami cut her teeth with Anthony d’Offay, a legendary London dealer known for his connoisseurial eye in both art—after closing his gallery in 2001, he donated his $140 million collection to the Tate and theNational Galleries of Scotland—and in budding star gallerists. Moving afterwards to Gagosian Gallery, […]
Anchored by superb works on paper from a storied collector-dealer and an important restituted painting by a French Impressionist, Sotheby’s evening sale of Impressionism, Modernism, and Surrealism brought a stellar £163,461,500 ($266,654,745) on Wednesday night, making it the firm’s highest-earning London auction ever. Of the 89 lots offered, only ten failed to sell, for a […]
A study reveals troubling import/export anomalies between China and the US. Money-laundering, tax evasion and the illicit transfer of cultural heritage objects could be factors explaining large discrepancies that have emerged in an analysis of art shipments between China and the US. Read on …
The internet offers the visual art market great potential for growth and change. Currently, online sales make up just 1.6% of total global sales, but this is set to change. In the past couple of years millions of dollars have been invested in online sales platforms. In 2013 Artspace received $8.5m (£5.2m) of investment, Paddle8 received $6m (£3.6m) of investment – backers […]
New Masters of the ART Universe Hedge-fund managers are roiling the clubby art market – seeking “distressed” artists, paying record sums and dumping those who don’t pay off; ‘Going long on Rodin’. Aggressive, efficientand armed with up-to- the-minute intelligence supplied by well-paid art advisers, these collectors are shaking up the way business gets done in […]
While it’s a good time to be at the very top or at the emerging end of the market, the middle tier of galleries and artists are feeling the squeeze. We ask New York’s dealers and directors what are the alternatives to the mega gallery system? Check out the Video, it is less than 5 […]
Back in 2012, I wrote a post with the headline “How Larry Gagosian is like Goldman Sachs”. The general idea was that both of them use their relationships and their balance sheet to make money off and/or with their clients. Since then, as Christian Viveros-Fauné says, the art world has become even more coterminous with the art market: “Business […]
Holland Cotter Looks at Money in Art A new year. A new New York mayor. Old problems with art in New York. I have a collection of complaints and a few (very few) ideas for change. Money — the grotesque amounts spent, the inequitable distribution — has dominated talk about art in the 21st century […]
Christie’s and Sotheby’s Woo Big Sellers With a Cut When Christie’s sold Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog (Orange)”for $58.4 million in November, it seemed as if the auction house had just earned a pretty penny. After all, Christie’s, like other auction houses, typically charge commissions to buyers and sellers, which for high-priced works might be an […]
Handicapping 2014, maybe I see up to a 10% gain for the S&P 500 Index, refusing to anticipate the death toll of rapidly escalating interest rates or inflation. The market can sell at a high teens price-earnings ratio, even with earnings rising mid-single digits. Speculation is in the air so good stock pickers can do […]
We begin 2014 with a resolution, and that is to leave all the unfinished business of 2013 behind—to be done with it, to turn our back on it and give it not another thought. After all, we don’t want to start the new year by getting distracted by all the unexplored themes and missed opportunities […]