Colin Gleadell offers this interesting vignette on the attempts at cross-pollinating art constituencies:
Early Italian art dealer Fabrizio Moretti has juxtaposed a religious gold ground painting with an all-white, shaped canvas from the 1960s by Enrico Castellani, both priced around €2.5 million. Agnew’s has introduced two video screens from his recent St Paul’s Cathedral installation by Bill Viola, priced at $200,000, next to 17th-century crucifixion paintings priced at rather more.
Now that modern and contemporary art is eclipsing Old Masters in the auction rooms and dominating art fairs world-wide, there is an undercurrent at Tefaf that is trying pull in more modern and contemporary art exhibitors. It’s a reverse pull to the one that took place when the contemporary art fair Frieze launched a sibling fair, Frieze Masters, three years ago, and plundered Tefaf for its Old Master dealers with the promise that they might be able to introduce them to new contemporary art buyers.
By all accounts this was a promise that has yet to be fulfilled, and several Old Master dealers at Tefaf are saying they will not be returning to Frieze Masters this October. By the same token, some of the bigger contemporary galleries that have shown at Tefaf before have not returned.
Art Sales: Tefaf Maastrict highlights (Telegraph)
