Today’s Hot Young Artists Are No Bohemians: James Tarmy looks at the Phillips day sale to survey the landscape of young artists and discovers the balance of value tilting toward MFA graduates:

• “I think the market—and the way we look at art—is heavily dependent on the graduate school system,” says Heather Harmon, an art adviser. “It’s been a phenomenon that’s been happening over the last three decades, but recently, in the last few years or so, it’s [become] far more prevalent.”
• In the past three or four years, there have been increasing “conversations with collectors about museum and institutional support,” says Michael Gillespie, who co-founded the New York gallery, Foxy Production, which represents a range of young artists. “That’s come back as an important factor: Are artists supported by different constituencies, be they critical or commercial?” Before, he continues, “there was this idea that the market dictated everything. That’s changed.”
• “A collector will buy an emerging artist for $5,000 to $10,000,” says Rachel Uffner, who has a namesake gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. “But to make that leap into something that’s more expensive, the relevance of the work institutionally—and, to a wider audience, internationally—will be important to collectors that want to spend more.”

Cindy Sherman Is Getting Bored with Selfies: W magazine’s art issue contains a story on Cindy Sherman’s dabbling with Instagram as a facsimile of her artistic practice. First using apps designed to make the user look better, Sherman began to turn the practice in the opposite direction.

• The portraits are not without pathos, in other words, and it seems relevant that Sherman made many of them while convalescing after an injury. “I was kind of just lying around with nothing to do and playing with my phone,” she says, adding that since her recovery, she has had less time to devote to the pursuit, and is beginning to find the experience repetitive. “I feel like I’m looking for something else—another place to take it to.”…

Barbar Kruger Is Not Amused with Supreme: But the story involving the street brand and the artist has too many layers, as The Cut’s Kat Stoeffel explains:

• In May of 2013 — decades after Supreme started slinging T-shirts with a bootleg Kruger logo — Kruger made her opinion of Supreme known. The circumstances of this event involve in-group drama that is tedious to recount — an ouroboros of cringe. …

Beatrix Ruf Breaks Her Silence to the NYTimes: The New York Times has been in touch with Beatrix Ruf about her resignation from the Stedelijk over reports that she had a conflict of interest stemming from her activities as an art advisor. “All of her side activities were ‘contractually approved by the Stedelijk’ before she took the job, Ms. Ruf wrote. Throughout her responses, she said several times, ‘I am confident that I reported everything in good faith.’”

• “Ms. Ruf also said that funds paid to her consulting company came largely from a bonus of 1 million Swiss Francs, or about $1 million, given by a former employer for work completed before she started at the Stedelijk, the city’s leading museum of contemporary art and design. She added that she resigned because she felt the ongoing negative publicity surrounding her side activities was harmful to the museum.”