Deliotte’s Art & Finance Report Expresses Frustration with Wealth Management Industry: The current Art & Finance report from Deliotte has a broad smattering of interesting sentiment measures around the art world. The most notable may be the pervading sense of frustration within the wealth management industry concerning their ability to provide art advisory services:

• “Private banks and family offices are focusing on art advisory services:
  83 percent of wealth managers said they offered art advisory services (this was up from 79 percent in 2016 and 67 percent in 2014), and 47 percent said the services were delivered in-house.”
• “51 percent of wealth managers said that lack of interest internally was a major challenge, up from 26 percent in 2016. This could suggest that as interest in art and wealth management is gaining momentum, there is a lack of leadership support for these types of initiatives.” …

The Barnes Collection Debuts Online Collection Exploration Tool: The Barnes has debuted a new collection exploration tool based upon the eccentric Dr. Barnes’s unique ideas about art. The good news is the whole collection is available in high resolution images that are downloadable. …

Some Art Market Professionals Are Experiencing Auction Exhaustion: Katya Kazakina’s auction preview for Bloomberg features this prominent quote provoked by the presence of the Leonardo in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Evening sale and the Formula 1 Ferrari car in Sotheby’s:

• “There used to be some sophistication and elegance as to how these sales were assembled,” said Todd Levin, who runs his own art advisory firm. “Now it’s just whatever is expensive, let’s sell it.” …

Other Art Market Professionals Complain of Fair Fatigue: Scott Reyburn’s column in the International New York Times takes a look at Italy’s Artissima, “generally regarded as Italy’s destination art fair” which “coincides with Piedmont’s truffle season.”

• “The problem these days is that wherever the exhibition is, whether it’s Beirut or Beijing, you see the same contemporary art again and again,” said Tom Eccles, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at the Bard College, New York, one of the three international curators of “Like a Moth to a Flame.” “Overproduction and overdistribution are an issue.” …

Careful Museum Director Commissions Study on Gifted Malevich, Turns Out to Be Forgery: The Art Newspaper has the results of tests commissioned by the director of the public collections of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Marion Ackermann, who accepted the donation of a Kazimir Malevich work Black Rectangle, Red Square, originally dated at 1915, into the Düsseldorf public collection in 2014 as a gift from the Dr. Harald Hack Foundation, a private collection. Given the prevalence of Malevich forgeries, materials analysis was done on the painting revealing that it could not have been made before 1950.