Trashy Art

Newsweek had a nice look at Vivan Sundaram’s work: “In his vast Delhi studio, he created a faux cityscape with the garbage he collected from waste pickers. Then he directed two photographers to capture the tableau from various perspectives and digitized the results, adding music to turn some into video installation. Though his process reflects the works of some early modern artists—collages by Picasso and Matisse or Joseph Cornell’s boxes—his subject is contemporary: the detritus of rapid globalization. With the collected garbage, he built miniature landfills and precarious towers that tumble repeatedly in his videos. The uncanny effect of assembling such ugly waste is that it produces esthetic pleasure. ‘Artifice is central,’ he says. ‘The work is meant to be beautiful.’”

Renaissance Individual

Bloomberg’s Martin Gayford looks at the National Gallery’s Renaissance Portraits: Van Eyck to Titian show in London: “The Renaissance, of course, was the era of what school history used to call “the rise of the individual.” If the 1980s and 1990s were the me-decades, the 15th and 16th were the “me- centuries.” There was an exponential rise in the sheer quantity of portraiture produced and a corresponding improvement in the techniques for making it: that is, painting and sculpture”

The Original Art?

Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald looks at Sotheby’s Aboriginal and Oceanic Art Sale taking place today: “Nobody can deny it has rounded up plenty of fascinating and highly desirable pieces from all over - after all, it’s had more than a year to pull together the $7 million sale. But many would-be buyers are likely to think carefully in such troubled times before paying $100,000 on a top-level dot painting, or $20,000 for an outstanding bark or artefact. Indeed the once-booming market for Aboriginal desert painting had already turned patchy long before the recent economic ructions. Nevertheless, collectors are an obsessive breed - and the best material always seems to find a buyer or two even when the household budget is stretched, the superannuation has taken a hit and the annual bonus is toast. This sale is particularly rich in artefacts conveying the glossy glow of age and usage - perhaps even a sense of having been venerated by their tribal owners.”

The Antiquity of Hope

Souren Melikian finds hope in Bonham’s sale of antiquities: “The Bonhams sale demonstrated to the delighted surprise of professionals that the eagerness to own antiquities is, for now, strong enough to beat financial worries, even at the lowest quality level. It was highly significant because this is where any market is most likely to suffer when a recession looms. In the art market, human emotions apparently remain stronger than rational calculations.”

Armory Amour

Wendy Moonen raves about the Armory show in the New York Times.

The Persistence of Art

Reuters focuses on the importance of art, coin and jewelry services for banks and wealth management firms: “”I definitely believe the art advisory service belongs to the overall wealth management offer. I don’t think it will be cut back,” said Karl Schweizer, head of art banking and numismatics at UBS. [ . . . ] Many wealthy clients are increasingly focusing on tangibles such as gold or art which has an aesthetic worth as they see ephemeral financial investments losing value. “Gold, diamonds, at the moment investments in precious stones are also doing well,” said Marco Mazzoni, founder and chairman of Magstat which tracks private banking in Italy.”

Clearing the Fogg

Carol Vogel outlines the Pulitzer gift of $45 million to build a replacement to the Fogg Museum and about $200 million worth of Postwar art.

It was a long holiday weekend here in New York, so we’re bringing you these tidbits of weekend reading at the beginning of our week:

Islamic Art Breaks

Souren Melikian’s coverage of the London sales of Islamic art calls out the usual suspects: callow middle-market speculators and juiced-up estimates. But amid the rest of the financial turmoil, the market for Islamic works may have truly shifted.

Financial Turmoil Reshaps a Corner of the Art Market (International Herald Tribune)

A Taste of Tooker

The New York Times’s Ken Johnson reviews the George Tooker retrospective at the National Academy Museum in New York:

Window VII

“The first museum survey of Mr. Tooker’s paintings in three decades, it comes at a favorable moment, as many contemporary artists — Hilary Harkness, Lisa Yuskavage and Mark Greenwold, to name three — fruitfully explore imaginatively far-reaching possibilities of traditional figurative painting. [ . . . ] Part of what makes Mr. Tooker’s baleful visions of modern life so gripping is how he updates models and methods that Modernism had supposedly rendered obsolete. He emulates masters of the Italian Renaissance, especially the rounded, simplified figures and exactingly calculated architectural perspectives of Piero della Francesca. And he uses egg tempera, a recalcitrant medium that oil paint drove close to extinction 600 years ago.”

Baleful Visions of Modernity, Mystically Rendered (New York Times)

The Muse Lands on the Mersey

“The founding of the Liverpool Biennial a decade ago by James Moores, a relation of the great art patron of the region, John Moores, was an inspirational breakthrough. At long last, Britain cast off its national habit of refusing to stage a spectacular, regular survey of new international art. Before then, the whole notion of holding a UK biennial was regarded as a hopeless fantasy. Such events were only held abroad, preferably in sublime locations like Venice.” So opens Richard Cork’s review of the Liverpool Biennial in the Financial Times.

Liverpool Unleashed (Financial Times)

Picasso, the Pupil

You’ve undoubtedly already heard of the gigantic “Picasso and the Masters” exhibition up in Paris. The Economist takes a minute to make this claim: “RARE is the event that pushes the financial crisis off the front pages. But “Picasso et les Maîtres”—a visual conversation between the cubist master and the great painters that shaped him—claims that honour. Ten rooms are devoted to ten themes at the Grand Palais, where the bulk of the exhibition is displayed: self-portraits, colours, still-lifes, variations, portraits, nudes. In each room, works by Picasso join those of the masters he cannibalised. Some 210 masterpieces—by El Greco, Goya, Ingres, Manet, Poussin, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh, Velázquez and others—have been gathered from collections the world over. [ . . . ] The exhibition deftly avoids a two-dimensional confrontation between simple pairs of paintings. The thematic collections act almost like a hall of mirrors, reflecting layered influences over the centuries.”

Though not everyone is pleased with the success of the exhibit. According to UPI, it seems to be attracting the wrong crowd: “They visit the Louvre like they’d visit Chernobyl,” Marc Dumaroli, the chairman of the Society of Friends of the Louvre, told the newspaper, adding the masses descending on the museum were “a cancer.”

A Garden of Visual Delights (Economist)  Club Irked by Exhibit’s Popularity (UPI)

Peyton’s Popularity

Elizabeth Peyton has had ups and downs in her prominence as a painter. But a recent run of auction records and a new retrospective opening at the New Museum brings her back to center stage. Roberta Smith wrote last Friday about the museumshow of 100 works:

Piotr Uklanski

“Few are much larger than your face. The best collapse the distances between realist painting, modernist abstraction, personal snapshot and magazine, and are accessible, devotional and visually alive. Their gem-rich colors are applied with brazen abandon, like miniature action paintings. This elegantly micromanaged presentation doesn’t have the best timing. It comes after the first peak of Ms. Peyton’s career, in the late 1990s, when her influence

Princess Elizabeth

was at its height, but before a second phase has completely gelled.  [ . . . ] This will help perpetuate the underestimation that has often surrounded her work.”

There’s also a lovely portrait of Princess Elizabeth Age 16 in Phillips de Pury’s London sale this weekend. The lot is estimated at between £250,000-350,000. Her top prices reach well into the £400,000 range.

The Personal and the Painterly (The New York Times)

Melikian’s Asian Adventure

The International Herald Tribune’s Art market reporter, Souren Melikian, vents on estimates and mythic speculative buyers but declares Asia Week a happy hunting ground for the worthy connoisseur.

Boom Market for Russian Fakes

ArtInfo runs a fascinating story on the thriving market for fake Russian works of art. There is now a website for searching out fakes too (link included in the story.) What’s fascinating is how the fakes are made: “Many of the fraudulent works are authentic 19th-century paintings by minor Western artists that have been doctored to look Russian, thus making them more appealing to the new collectors. Forgers comb European salesrooms for cheap but passable canvases to transform. “Buy an old Dutch painting, add a birch tree, take a cow off, and you have a Shishkin and a 1,000 percent profit,” jokes the Guggenheim’s Europe-based consultant, Nic Iljine” With the growing importance of Russian art to the entire art trade–has anyone noticed that Russian art features prominently in the upcoming New York Impressionist and Modern categories?–the fakes may blossom for some time to come.

Monster Mash Note

The Independent ran this parody of the thinking of London’s rich hedge fund managers. “They’re all on to contemporary art now – it’s an important global asset class after all – but he was there 10 years ago and more. You just had to listen to those Sensation people or meet Jay Jopling to know they could sell anything. They could beat most young City recruits, class of ‘96 like him, for sheer ambition and pretty naked aggression. Wonderful. Now it’s moving at three times the speed, with the Chinese and Indian contemporary sales making big numbers and people talking up the Koreans. It’s starting to look dangerously over-subscribed. All those Notting Hill American bankers wanting “wall-power” – huge, knock-’em-dead stunners from big branded artists so they can say “it’s a Baselitz” or whatever.” The raging gale of redemptions hitting the hedge fund business may make this bit of satire a historical documentary momentarily.

Smuggler’s Delight

The AP has a story about the dramatic increase in smuggling of antiquities through US ports. “This whole market is driven by the demand for all kinds of antiquities, and the demand is constantly increasing,” explained Robert Sharer, curator of the Americas section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. Adding to the problem, too often people who live in poor areas of Latin America, the Middle East and Africa are willing to loot ancient graves for cash. “A lot of pieces are disappearing,” said Edouard Planche, an assistant program specialist for UNESCO in France. “And these poorer countries have less capacity to control the illegal smuggling.”

Quinn Profile

We dawdled on posting this profile of Marc Quinn’s work and the exhibition at Chatsworth last month. But our negligence shouldn’t be your loss. It’s still well worth reading. Larger than Life

The Oligarts

Okay, it’s a lousy headline but blame the editors at The Independent where this summary of Russian art buying habits appeared. The story  suggests that we’ve seen this movie before: “At the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, one of its curators, Alexis Leporc, tells me that some of the new money is indeed spent indiscriminately, buying up job lots of art. But there’s precedent for it. Catherine the Great put together the massive collection that’s at the heart of the Hermitage in much the same way, as part of a scheme to make Russia an imperial power”

Some Stories We Finally Caught Up On

Like you, we’ve got a pile of magazines, books and newspaper articles sitting on our desk and at our beside table. This weekend we plowed through a layer or two. Read the rest of this entry »