The New York Times Profiles India’s Most Famous Artist

Half a profile of the spry 93-year-old artist as his passes his productive days in Dubai, and half a look at the volatile identity politics that has made Husain a controversial figure, Somini Sengupta wrote this profile of M.F. Husain that was published on the front page of today’s New York Times.

The rise of an intense brand of identity politics, with India’s many communities mobilizing for political power, has intensified the problem. An accusation that a piece of art or writing is offensive is an easy way to whip up the sentiments of a particular caste, faith or tribe, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an Indian political scientist, points out. He calls it “offense mongering.” [ . . . ]

Even threats of violence from offended parties are a powerful deterrent. In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, where Mr. Husain lived for most of his life, a recent exhibition on Indian masters did not include his work. Nor did India’s first modern art fair, held in New Delhi in August. The same week in the same city, a small show featuring reproductions of Mr. Husain’s work was vandalized.

Of Mr. Husain’s exceptionally large body of work — at least 20,000 pieces, he guesses — there are three that have angered his foes. Two are highly stylized pencil drawings of Durga, the mother goddess, and Saraswati, the goddess of the arts, both faceless and nude. The third is a map of India rendered as a female nude, her head in the Himalayas, a breast jutting out into the Arabian Sea. Mr. Husain insists that nudity symbolizes purity. He has repeatedly said that he had not meant to offend any faith. But one of his paintings, showing a donkey — to the artist, a symbol of nonviolence — at Mecca, created a ruckus among his fellow Muslims.

For more on Husain’s taste for expensive cars and vagabond habits . . . .

An Artist in Exile Tests India’s Democratic Ideals (Bloomberg)

There’s been a lot of talk about the art market this last week. The Financial Times went as far as declaring the art boom over based on the Impressionist and Modern sales. Clearly the ever-rising market has come to a halt. But does that mean art will now go straight down? And how would we know?

Art is different from other assets. But Gold seems to react to some of the same forces. The Wall Street Journal ran this “Heard on the Street” item today that offers a little insight into the financial climate that surrounds art:

Right now, with consumer-price inflation running at 4.9% and Treasury bills yielding less than 1%, real interest rates are negative. This should be supportive of gold. That it isn’t suggests real rates are set to head back toward positive territory. Since major central banks won’t jack up nominal interest rates, it is prices that will give way, as consumption contracts world-wide. Friday’s shocking unemployment data fit that scenario. Gold’s fall also suggests that, despite a raft of reflationary initiatives, the banking sector’s problems mean the transmission mechanism to the rest of the economy remains broken.

As Lorenzo Di Mattia, manager of macro hedge fund Sibilla Global Fund puts it: “Gold is again a barometer of how well the ‘reflation attempt’ by the Fed and government is working and when it seems to be working, both gold and stocks should be up. … If it doesn’t work, you will see gold and stocks down together.”

To translate that, we’re in a deflationary moment when money is more valuable than things. Gold is a thing that has mystical powers for many people in the world–much in the way that art holds a mystical spell on its owners. If Gold rises in dollar value, there’s a good chance that art will do so as well. Both will be responding to the amount of money that is circulation in the world’s economy. Central banks are making lots of money available to banks; banks have not lent that money into the economy. So money is scarce causing both gold and art–and dozens of other asset classes–to deflate in price.

When–or if–that money gets circulated, asset prices may “reflate.” Right now, the price of gold tells us that reflation remains somewhere over the horizon and art prices will remain under pressure to come down.

Gold’s Deflating Decline Augurs More Ills (Bloomberg)

The I/M Day sale at Sotheby’s brought In $26.8 million with under 40% sold but there’s still hope in the art market. Here’s a press release from a small auction house in Westchester County, just outside New York City. What’s more interesting than that they sold one lot for $176,000, is that they sold a $70,000 Orientalist picture to a telephone bidder from the Middle East:

Despite initially strong buzz leading up to the sale, Ronan Clarke was nervous as he stepped to the podium Monday evening to open his Fifth Annual Fine Art Auction October 27th. The day found the stock market swinging wildly again and several bidders had just telephoned to announce they were canceling their bids. The major auction houses were reporting weak art sales with high percentages of unsold works and multimillion dollar losses. While some in the house congratulated Clarke on the breadth and depth of his inventory, and others wished him luck, there were those who openly wanted a fire sale.

(All the drama and excitement after the jump.) Read the rest of this entry »

Anders Petterson: I Saw It All Coming

The Art Newspaper carries this item from Art Tactic’s Anders Petterson:

In November 2007, the ArtTactic Art Market Confidence Indicator fell 40%, signalling a significant change in sentiment from the previous reading in May 2007, largely caused by a gloomy outlook on the economy. The correction started in autumn 2007, but record volumes and prices at the top end of the contemporary art market disguised the fact that the trouble had already started further down the value chain.

In June 2007, ArtTactic’s Auction Indicator (measuring the relationship between the number of lots selling above the average estimate) changed direction, and fell 48% by May 2008. This was an early sign of what has become the market’s biggest problem—the failure to adjust estimates and expectations in light of the global economic environment. The hubris caused by ever-rising prices and high expectations of sellers forced the auction houses to be over-aggressive in setting their estimates, and limited their ability to adjust to the situation.

There’s nothing wrong with Petterson plumping for his services but the story omits most of the texture of the market. First, it lumps everything together. Even in this miserable auction environment, record prices are being set. Second, it ignores the significant ups and downs that took place at the highest end of the art market within the period he is discussing. From Fall 2007 until this week, there has been both caution and aggressive behavior on all sides of the art equation. There was no straight line of declension from Art Tactic’s signals to the struggling sales this week. And, most likely, there won’t be a straight line forward either.

Tough Times Will Provide Opportunities (The Art Newspaper)

It’s a hoary quote from Oscar Wilde–”The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”–but there are times when it is the only trenchant comment to be made. This posting from a private equity trade journal captures Wilde’s idea of cynicism but in the most naive way.

Henry Kravis, co-founder of US buyout group Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, has made a 3.15% annual return on his painting by French impressionist Edgar Degas that sold on Monday night for $37m (€28m).

Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Sale: Was That Good or Bad?

At times during last night’s Impressionist and Modern sale at Sotheby’s, one looked out over the packed sale room and wondered: “Why did you people come here tonight?” The room did not bid with much conviction and if the assembled masses were there to get bargains, it should have been their night. Instead, they were spectators watching a drama unfold on the telephones.

It was a long and tiring evening–though not as tense as last year’s troubled sale–that turned out to be better in terms of the overall total than the mood of the room suggested. Lot after lot struggled to reach its low estimate. Many were sold for prices far below the low estimates. Others got tantalizingly close only to pass without a buyer. Even the top lots in the sale, the very lots that carried the sale for the auction house, sold without the usual snappy bidding. Here’s the Master, Judd Tully, on some of the top lots:

The evening’s second highest earner, Edvard Munch’s Vampire sold for $38,162,500 (est. in excess of $30 million) to a telephone bidder; the underbidder was Victoria Gelfand, a Russian-speaking Gagosian director who was sitting next to Larry Gagosian. [ . . . ] “The sale did exceptionally well,” said London dealer Libby Howie, who bought fauve Maurice de Vlaminck’s Le Remorqueur for $3,666,500 (est. $4–6 million) on behalf of a client. “But I wasn’t going to go any higher.”

Carol Vogel covered the less fortunate lots: Read the rest of this entry »

The Economic Earthquake Has Created a Unique Auction Season

The auction houses held their previews this weekend. A few days beforehand, they invited the press to look at the works on offer. At both houses there was a tension in the air, a mix of giddy relief and somber resignation. Three years of vertiginous growth has created sales that are more directly the product of specialists seeking out great works from collectors than ever before. That has created some of the best sales ever presented with a broad range of very good works on offer.

“This is really going to be one of the last opportunities to find fantastic material,” Christie’s Brett Gorvy told AFP. “If we go in any period of downturn — and I’ve lived through this in the Nineties — the sales are going to be much smaller.” Read the rest of this entry »

This quote from Christopher Eykyn captures the mood of the auction houses perfectly:

“Right now I’m seeing a market frozen in expectation, waiting to see what the next two weeks will bring,” said private New York dealer Christopher Eykyn. “There is a sense that the market is re-calibrating and the auctions will provide a new yardstick as to what the new level is.”

Kravis, Fuld Brace for N.Y. Auctions as Collectors Lower Prices (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg’s Farah Nayeri profiles the Anglo artist as he sets up an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects:

Can art regenerate an area? “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he replies. “That’s not something you can set out to do.” His “Cloud Gate” in Chicago “seems to have become a symbol of the city” and “changed the way people think and talk” of it [ . . . . ]

At the Royal Institute, one eye-catching display is the rust-colored entrance to Naples’s Monte Sant’Angelo subway stop, shaped like a sock turned inside out: a big mouth with up and down escalators. I ask if similarities with female body parts are deliberate. “To make new art, you have to make new form,” he replies. “I know that some of the forms are, in a way, very overtly sexual, but that’s what they are. That’s the nature of that kind of pursuit,” he says. [ . . . ]

Kapoor strives to make work on a scale that will stir the viewer the way the wonders of nature do — give “meaning,” he says. He’s clearly in tune with the trend in “experiential” art [ . . . . ]

Ultimately, Kapoor says he resents classification, especially by his Indian origins. “I think we have to resist being pigeonholed,” he says. “I’m not interested in being an Indian artist. I don’t need that as a peg to hang on.”

Anish Kapoor Turns Art Inside Out, Hates the Smell of Hairspray (Bloomberg)

New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz Conjures Up the Good and Bad of Potential Market Crash

Art and the Art Market are two different things. Jerry Saltz sees a purging of the market as the best opportunity for art itself. Though he doesn’t use the metaphor, he’s thinking of the regenerative powers of a good forest fire:

Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art. The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn. New generations took the stage; new communities spawned energy; things opened up; deadwood washed away.

That’s the good. Here’s the bad:

If the art economy is as bad as it looks—if worse comes to worst—40 to 50 New York galleries will close. Around the same number of European galleries will, too. An art magazine will cease publishing. A major fair will call it quits [. . . .] Museums will cancel shows because they can’t raise funds. Art advisers will be out of work. Read the rest of this entry »