Magnus + Leo = ?: Yesterday, the art identification app Magnus announced an investment from Leonardo DiCaprio. The actor has played a number of roles in the art market as buyer, charity auction impressario and a behind-the-scenes agent for sellers who feared a buyer would default on an auction bid. How DiCaprio will help Magnus grow in the art market is anybody’s guess. …
Why Is the Art Press Fixated on an Irrelevant Thought Experiment? It was odd but understandable when Artsy picked up this academic paper last week that posits artists would benefit from fractional ownership in their. The academics can get publishing credits for engaging in a study plagued by survivorship bias. That’s nice for those artists on those works but the overwhelming majority of work created by artists both known and unknown never has secondary market value.
We can go further. Rauschenberg & Johns might have made out well by retaining a fractional share of their work but they also did pretty well by holding on to their work (anyone seen the valuation of the Rauschenberg foundation?) They also might not have. Fractional ownership rights don’t behave in the same way that outright ownership does. Just look at the last 35+ years of the private equity business. Speculating on how unknown and untried system of fractional ownership is more fantasy than social science.
Having said all of that. It’s not clear the academic article was worth the coverage Artsy gave it let alone having The Art Newspaper run exactly the same piece a week later. …
Speaking of Jasper Johns: Deborah Solomon checks in with the artist as retrospective opens at the Broad ahead of the joint Whitney-Philadelphia Museum event coming in 2020. Here Johns rejects interpretation of his work:
- “Mr. Johns himself is loath to offer biographical interpretations of his work — or any interpretations, for that matter. He is famously elusive and his humor tends toward the sardonic. He once joked that, of the dozens of books that have been written about his art, his favorite one was written in Japanese. What he liked is that he could not understand it.” …
Lehmann Maupin Adds 70-year-old Chilean Artist to Stable: The trend of reclaiming the art historical position of aging artists hasn’t abated yet with the news released late last week through the Financial Times that Lehmann Maupin has taken on the artist Cecila Vicuna:
- “In her 70th year, Chile-born multi-disciplinary artist Cecilia Vicuña has been taken on by Lehmann Maupin gallery, which plans its first show of the artist in New York from May 19. A joint project is also planned for the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston this spring and autumn.” …
Art Stage Singapore Offers Alternative for Financialization of Art: Lorenzo Rudolf made no secret of his frustrations with Art Stage Singapore’s shrinking size and failure to gain purchase in the regional battle between Hong Kong and Singapore to become the center of Asia’s art trade. Artforum’s Kathleen Ditzig flips those assumptions on their head and declares Singapore Art Week (SAW) an alternative art venue:
- Challenging the common assumption of the importance of a marketplace for any art scene, SAW offers glimpses of an alternative to the systematic financialization of art that defines most art arenas in the Global North. Here the scene, and its small market, is made buoyant by state funding; the political project of art is not an existential crisis of meaning based on capital flows, but a lived reality built on recreational consumption. It is no surprise then, outside the status quo of a populist light art festival in the civic district and an art party in Gillman Barracks, the real high points of SAW were performative, site-specific, and affective interrogations of the politics of the Social.