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Kenny Schachter Fingers the Seller of Wool’s $17m ‘Cats in Bag Bags in River’: The Rubells

November 18, 2015 by Marion Maneker

Wool, Untitled (1990)

Kenny Schachter left all the good barbs out of his auction report in The Art Newspaper. Luckily, the irrepressible Kenny published the best stuff on Artnet, including this bit of sleuthing:

Wool’s CATS IN BAG BAGS IN RIVER, enamel on aluminum also from 1990, sold for $17 million at Christie’s second evening sale of contemporary art (a single evening sale used to do the trick). Now the cat is out of the bag: From my research, I located the painting on the Rubell Family Collection (RFC, sounds like KFC) Museum web site. True there is often more than one iteration of many of the catchiest Wool text works, but I’m not sure Cats is one of them. Granted, it’s not a flip when you’ve owned it since it was ten dollars a million years ago, but it’s not a keep either. Or a museum move if that’s what you hold yourself out to be. And from what I understand, it’s not an isolated example of the family employing Christie’s removal service. I guess $17 million is an awful lot of hotel rooms in South Beach or Washington, D.C.

Kenny Schachter Give Details On New York Auctions  (artnet News)

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