ArtForum’s Diarist, Lillian Davies, gives the aisle-level view of FIAC:

As VIP crowds pushed into the tent at 4 PM, someone shouted, “It’s better than Frieze—everything is sold!”  [ . . . ]

Claudia Cargnel noted that there were far fewer American collectors this year. But according to Berlin dealer Jan Wentrup, fewer outside collectors might not really be a problem: “London is play money, and Paris is serious money, serious collectors.” Foxy Production’s Michael Gillespie agreed. “It’s smaller than London, so there’s a hunger for new galleries coming in—it’s not oversaturated. [ . . . ]

Adam Sheffer of Cheim & Read argued that “FIAC seems more important than Frieze because there’s more of a mix of work, and there’s a bigger collector base for blue chip work in France and Belgium. Kunsthalle Basel president Martin Hatebur continued: “The Grand Palais is very airy, and there are fewer people. At Frieze, you are surrounded by ten million people who are not buying. FIAC is more elitist.”

The Art Newspaper files it’s own, more subdued report but includes this kind of enthusiasm:

“As a whole Frieze is not as compelling as I feel it should be,” art advisor Todd Levin told The Art Newspaper. “Over the last two years Fiac has become increasingly essential to me, next year I might skip London—but not Paris.”

Palais Intrigue (ArtForum)

FIAC Puts the Squeeze on Frieze (The Art Newspaper)

Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn surveys the landscape in Paris:

Buyers were looking for less expensive works by contemporary artists with established reputations, exhibitors said at the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain. After U.K. sales where totals missed estimates, and weaker demand at the Frieze Art Fair in London, sellers are nervously awaiting auctions in New York.

Pieces by some living artists such as Christopher Wool and Marc Quinn were selling well. Dealers reported that works by dead artists who regularly feature at auction were fetching larger sums than those by younger painters: Fontana’s minimalist images sold for up to 3.5 million euros ($4.4 million) and a Pablo Picasso drawing went for $725,000.

Collectors Snap Up Fontana, Quinn; Shun Riskier Artists at FIAC (Bloomberg)

Sarah Thornton Sums Up the Frieze Fair

The New Statesman runs this piece by Sarah Thornton. It declares an end to the hyper-market of 2006-2007:

Despite higher sales totals in early 2008, many insiders feel that the market hit its real peak back in May-June 2007, just before the sub-prime crisis struck. In the months since, the market has been thinner and weaker, but it has also been punctuated by dazzlingly expensive sales to Arab royalty and Russian oligarchs buying name artists at devil-may-care prices.

An end to the mania for Hirst:

rumour has it that the Russians have not bought any significant contemporary work since Damien Hirst’s [ . . . ] sale at Sotheby’s last month. [ . . . ] in the past few weeks, many dealers who never trade in Hirsts report being offered Hirst works from collectors who either no longer feel there is much kudos in owning work by the artist or are “distress selling” to cover losses in other fields.

And, an end to the secondary market:

The Frieze Art Fair was a cheerier event, principally because the primary market - galleries representing artists and selling straight out of the studio - is at present healthier than the secondary or resale market for art. As the fair’s co-director Matthew Slotover puts it: “Collectors who buy art on the primary market are interested in art, whereas the secondary market is dominated by people whose primary purpose is to make money.”

So what happens next?

Joel Wachs, president of the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, was philosophical: “People who bought art for the wrong reasons better get used to looking at it.”

Bye Bye to Bling for Billionaires (New Statesman)

Art Price Releases Its 2007-2008 Report in Time for FIAC

Bloomberg reports on the Art Price report predicting a correction in Contemporary art prices. According to Art Price, Contemporary art prices outpaced the rest of the market by a wide margin. But sales at FIAC are strong, especially under €100,000.

“FIAC is Paris, and everything that goes with it,” said Jennifer Flay, the fair’s New Zealand-born artistic director, who used to run a gallery in the French capital. [ . . . ] Flay said that contemporary-art dealers had been expecting a decline in the market for the last three or four years. “When it comes it’s not going to be like 1991,” she said. “There will still be pondered and measured activity. The art market will be occupied by art lovers and true collectors. People will drop out of the market, but perhaps they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Among the VIPs spotted at FIAC’s opening were the Miami collectors Donald and Mera Rubell, San Francisco collectors Themis and Dare Michos, New York-based art advisers Thea Westreich and Todd Levin, Roxana Marcoci, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and French collector Marcel Brient. [ . . . ]

“It’s definitely a bit more international this year,” said Joe Tang, a director at the Paris gallery Chez Valentin. “We’re seeing people come on from Frieze.” Valentin sold the purple resin computer monitor-shaped sculpture, “Imac Del,” by French artist Eric Baudart to a Russian collector for 12,000 euros.

Middle Eastern contemporary art continues to be in demand. The Paris gallery La B.A.N.K. sold four colorful photographic works by the Cairo-based Lebanese artist Lara Baladi. Two versions of the 10-foot-wide piece, “Roba Vecchia,” a mosaic of images of kaleidoscopes set on polished steel, sold for 32,000 euros each.

Today, a further 113 FIAC exhibitors will be testing the market at higher prices with pieces by established contemporary and modern names in the Grand Palais. New York gallery Sperone Westwater and London’s White Cube are among the new exhibitors.

Art Prices May Plummet, Report Says; Works Snapped Up at FIAC (Bloomberg)

CNN on Frieze:

the fair showed that the larger public’s interest in contemporary art remains robust. Frieze brought in thousands of visitors from around the globe and most gallery owners seemed content with sales.

Roger Tatley from the Houser and Wirth gallery, based in Zurich and London, told CNN: “We were a little anxious, but this fair turned out to be the best we’ve had.” Houser and Wirth sold almost all its works in the booth including a Henry Moore piece for $2.7 million. Whilst Moore’s art represents the higher end of prices at Frieze; most works at the fair are cheaper than at auction houses, therefore reflecting a wider art-buying audience.

The Scotsman has this morsel:

Elena Silena, from Moscow’s XL Gallery, says the Russian market has just stopped. “This market will stop for maybe half a year,” she says. “People have money but they have stopped buying. They are thinking about the crisis.”

(many more quotes after the jump)

Read the rest of this entry »

A Return to Normalcy

The Master, Judd Tully, has some more temperature taking at Frieze:

The days of the five-minute decision are over,” said Andreas Gegner, director of Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers’s London branch. “The guideline for the future is that quality works at good prices will sell, and bad pieces won’t.”

Evidently the gallery, which also has a Cologne location and is opening a Berlin branch this weekend, had some good pieces. A new mural-sized manipulated photo work by Andreas Gursky — based on a space-agey music club in Frankfurt — sold for €600,000 ($806,000).

The gallery also sold a two-panel piece by John Baldessari, Beautiful in My Eyes from 2006, for $350,000; a large George Condo drawing in acrylic, charcoal, and oil pastel, Rodrigo with Girlfriend (2008), for $75,000; Thomas Demand’s Kabine, a C-print/Diasec image from 2007, from an edition of 6, for €130,000; Sterling Ruby’s funky, towering sculpture Monument Stalagmite-Wear It (2006), executed in urethane, Formica, and wood, for $135,000; and a fresh work from the Swiss duo Fischli Weiss, Untitled (Egg), in mixed media and plaster, for €450,000. [ . . . ]

Photography and sculpture were also moving at New York’s Metro Pictures. Several prints from a new series by self-portrait icon Cindy Sherman sold at $175,000 apiece. The artist continues to invent new personas, here appearing as a fashionable, middle-aged woman, dripping in Balenciaga and wearing oversized glasses. Her new show opens at the New York gallery next month.

“We came here with no expectations,” said the gallery’s Tom Heman, “and it’s been fine. The whole art world has gotten used to this totally hyperactive market, and now it has returned to a little bit of normalcy.”

The Era of the Five-Minute Decision is Over (ArtInfo)

Charlotte Appleyard writes (do we detect a whiff of pleasure?) in the Huffington Post about the mood at Frieze.

One London based gallerist anxiously told me “things are fine” before flipping out over the fact that her biggest clients had not received the VIP early entry passes. A consultant who works with the larger corporate sponsors sounded concerned. She’s seen a big fall off in clients and the cancellation of several projects; [ . . . ]

With every city starting its own biennale or fair the feeling is that new work has become a bespoke offering - tailored for the next spectacle. It’s the result of the complacency born of the fat years when artists came to believe the market was bigger than the imagination. In London galleries became the new Starbucks, a new branch opening every five minutes. Works by young artists flew off walls for huge sums of money. Customers were not just buying art, they were buying onto the scene.

By 4pm the Frieze fair was starting to feel busy, gallerinas (the terrifyingly beautiful girls that sit at the front desks) stalked the aisles in varying degrees of Prada as the press poured in. Vast crates of champagne are wheeled through the fair — each gallery booth presented with a shiny silver bucket and their own bottle. The corks popped. In celebration? Or did the London artocracy just need a stiff drink to steel themselves for the climb down the cliff face called Depression?

Frieze Art Fair: The Agony and the Ecstasy (The Huffington Post)

The Master, Judd Tully, catalogues several more sales at Frieze on ArtInfo. They include Subodh Gupta, who has last none of his charm for buyers:

Several reserves were in place for late American pop artist Tom Wesselmann’s Sunset Nude, Yellow Curtain, Yellow Tulip from 2003, at $2.2 million. “It’s much better than I thought,” Lambert’s Emilio Steinberger said of the fair, “but slower than last year.”

Dealers are hoping museums will take up some of the slack. The Tate did, according to Bloomberg:

Tate, the U.K. museum network, spent 125,000 pounds ($215,000) buying six contemporary artworks from London’s Frieze Art Fair a day before its public opening. [ . . . ] The Tate team, with help from two outside curators, bought works including two video projections, a reel-to-reel tape recording, and a piece made of paper clips. Four of the six artists have no works in the collection yet, said Tate Director Nicholas Serota, interviewed at the fair; one is Czech, another Lebanese. Serota said Tate’s aim was to broaden its collection beyond Northwest Europe and North America.

More Sales, New Attitude at Frieze (ArtInfo)

Tate Buys $215,000 in Contemporary Art at London’s Frieze Fair (Bloomberg)

The Master, Judd Tully, has the first report from the fair’s opening day for VIP collectors. It’s available at ArtInfo. Read the whole story, Tully has valuable and interesting details throughout the whole piece but here’s the overall accounting of the mood:

“It’s not a gun-to-your-head art fair,” mused one New York art adviser, who appeared pleased with the calmer tenor. “Outside (the exhibition tent) it feels somber, but inside it feels good.”

This seemed to be the general sentiment at the fair. If before the fair people were fearing a near-apocalyptic situation for the market, inside, elite fairgoers seemed almost relieved that the jostling and commodity-pit atmosphere of previous Friezes had disappeared in a cloud of recessionary fears.

Make no mistake: Commerce is taking place here — the art market isn’t in cardiac arrest — but not many things are flying off the wall.

Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn chimes in with these sales:

Among the few works to sell for more than $1 million was Robert Gober’s 2007 mixed-media sculpture “Leg with Anchor.” The piece sold to a private U.S. collector at the booth of Matthew Marks Gallery for $1.2 million. An untitled Gober sculpture, featuring a pair of breasts protruding from a wooden chair seat, also went to an American collector for $650,000. Despite these sales, gallery founder Matthew Marks described collectors at the fair as “cautious.”

Collectors tended to congregate at the booths of the more- established dealers. Hauser & Wirth sold 10 works on the opening morning. Indian artists were in demand with Subodh Gupta’s 12- foot-wide painting, “Still Steal Steel #9,” selling for 450,000 euros ($607,590). Bharti Kher’s 18-foot-wide triptych, “I’m going that way,” made of thousands of arrow-shaped Indian bindi-beads, went for 300,000 euros.

“The numbers feel better than we feared,” said London and Zurich gallery owner Iwan Wirth. “We’ve seen plenty of Americans. The crisis didn’t make them stay away.”

ArtInfo’s Sarah Douglas has her own report from the fair where art is moving cautiously but steadily:

“Dealers were nervous yesterday, talking about what would happen,” said the laid-back San Francisco and New York dealer Jack Hanley, sitting in an enclosed room in his booth filled with works by young artists. “I got here late today, and by that time collectors were fighting over stuff.” Behind him were 18 drawings by American artist Ajit Chauhan, some priced for as little as $600. They had all sold to the same London collector.

New Sobriety at a Slowed Down Frieze (ArtInfo)

Paltrow, Saatchi, Zhukova Browse Frieze Art as Sales Go Slowly (Bloomberg)

A Soft Landing at Frieze? (ArtInfo)

The Frieze Fair Normally Provokes a Lot of Excitement;

But This Year It Takes Place in the Midst of a Panic

The art world seems to be holding its breath to see what happens this weekend. As the VIPs make their way through the fair, we bring you a round up of all the Frieze-related press, including a look at what’s on offer from the ArtInfo slide show. And The Master, Judd Tully’s Overvalued/Undervalued list.

“I know very little about contemporary art but have £1,000 to invest. Any advice?” When Charles Saatchi was asked this in an interview in ‘The Independent’, he responded: “Premium bonds. Art is no investment unless you get very, very lucky, and can beat the professionals at their game. Buy something you really like that will give you a thousand pounds’ worth of pleasure over the years. And take your time looking for something special, because looking is half the fun.”

This is how Alice Jones answers How to Buy Art in the Independent. Among their other tidbits is How to Survive Frieze (as an Artist) and How to Survive Frieze (as a Gallerist).

The Independent’s introduction to their Frieze package, All the Fun of the Fairs, encourages you to abandon your anxiety about the banking meltdown and see the fair as a “golden opportunity for talent-spotting.” To that end, they offer this list of 20 Up-and-comers. Or just play anthropologist: “All human life can be found trooping through the narrow white corridors of the marquee [ . . . ], a truly democratic, if hideously cramped space, where art students with directional hair rub shoulders with their dishevelled artistic heroes, who in turn trawl the stands behind their besuited patrons and subtly designer-clad and nervous dealers. Last year the fair attracted some 68,000 visitors [ . . . ]“

If that’s not enough, try How to Behave at a Private View, which includes this warning “hold back on grooming: a blow-dry and fake tan are about as edgy as Jack Vettriano.”

Elsewhere, we have Frieze-relates stories in the Financial Times which was predicting a strong turnout just a week ago. Their fun fact is about gallery ads: “Matthew Slotover, codirector of the Frieze art fair, said advertising for Frieze’s monthly magazine was up by 15 per cent from last October, although he added that the “frenzy” in the art market had calmed down.” Separately, introducing a discussion of fellowships to be announced at the fair, the Financial Times raises a good question about the art world’s current dilemma: failure will confirm all of the talk of bubbles and irrationality; but success runs the danger of projecting an art world out-of-touch with reality. Or, as Peter Aspden rightly says, “The danger is that it will all feel a little, well, decadent. We are used to the idea that art should say something important and weighty about the world in which it is produced. But what do the pranksters and posers of today’s jet-fuelled scene tell us about the credit crunch and its grim implications?”

The chances of that happening seem slim. The Telegraph quotes Charles Dupplin on the state of the art market: “There are about 200 people in the world who can and will always be able to afford trophy art. But the real market, works valued up to around £1 million, is already dead.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow quotes Rachel Lehmann on this defensive strategy: “she asked her artists, including Ashley Bickerton, to create large-scale works she can shop to museum curators or private art foundations who may need to spend the remainder of their art acquisition budgets by year’s end. She’s also planning to offer longer payment plans and accept less money upfront, as little as 20%, from well-known buyers. “We’re aiming for institutions,” she says.”

And if the end of the art market is truly at hand, Soraya Rodriquez, who runs the Zoo art fair “says she’s starting to feel strangely sanguine about the fate of fair week: “Maybe we’ll just go back to drinking in pubs and discussing Duchamp, which wouldn’t be bad.”

Finally, Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn warns that the Russians everyone is looking toward for salvation just won’t show for either the fair or the auctions: `Frieze will be quiet,” said Moscow-based dealer Vladimir Ovcharenko [ . . . . ] The ultra-rich Russian collectors “lost billions in stocks last months. Nobody wants to think about art now.”

That seems to please some gallerists who can’t help sticking it to the auction houses. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen next week,” said Jill Silverman, a director at the Paris and Salzburg dealers Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, who will be exhibiting at Frieze. “For us, the primary market is still good. Our clients continue to buy works by living artists with price structures that have been established over years. This is different from the secondary market of auctions where values have been created by speculation.”