Jan Dalley observes the shifting roles of the art world in the FT and spots this interesting proliferation of museum gift shop material into marketable work. It’s hardly the first instance—think of the Koons balloon dog plates—but even more interesting for being divided into a grid:
Almost the only certainty is that public galleries are not (yet) selling art straight off their walls. Even so, Tate Modern sailed pretty close to that possibility when, in the shop at the exit of its magnificent Gerhard Richter retrospective in 2012, a full-size digital ink-jet version of one of the mighty abstract canvases in the show, “Cage IV”, was for sale. The price was £48,000, for all 16 parts of the “grid” into which it was divided. I saw one of the edition of 9 on sale at an art fair last month – with vastly higher price tag.
