Cherry Picking Data to Prosecute LA MoCA: If you’re wondering what Artnet’s data on the market value of artists given shows under Helen Molesworth’s tenure at LA MoCA says about her ouster, you’re not alone. Although Felix Salmon presents the information as if it explains everything about her having been fired from the institution, there’s no real evidence that trustees weren’t looking for exactly what they got from Molesworth’s curatorial leadership: a move away from artists with market success. After all, she was hired by the museum director who fired her with no indication that the museum wants to change course. Salmon’s data might be interesting or illuminating if the next Chief Curator doubles back to a steady flow of artists with a market presence. Market volume isn’t the only relevant data here. Salmon chose that information because that’s what Artnet has, a database of sales. But foot traffic or the number of shows that traveled to other museums or scholarly publications and citations might be equal, if not more important, indicators of a curator’s successful tenure. Charts showing the change over time for these variables between previous curators and Molesworth’s tenure would offer a better metric for judging the success or failure of her time leading the museum’s curatorial efforts if one wants to try to deduce the board’s decision making. …
Paul Klee, Small Genius: Reviewing the Phillips Collections show “Ten Americans: After Paul Klee,” a show that looks at painters like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis and Norman Lewis who built upon ideas from Klee, Philip Kennicott has this apt quote in the Washington Post about the Swiss artist’s legacy:
- “Klee was a genius,” the critic Clement Greenberg wrote, before adding, “but he was not a big genius, remarkable as he was, and his influence has been viable precisely because it could not occupy for its exclusive use all of the new territory it opened up.” …
New York Asia Week Claims $169m in Sales: We just received this report from the organizers of New York’s Asia Week. The auction houses reported $152.8m in sales to put these figures in context: “Asia Week New York—the ten-day Asian art extravaganza—which concluded on March 24, 2018, reports that combined sales totaled $169,819,000. This figure includes 41 out of 45 galleries and the four auction houses: Bonhams, Christie’s, Doyle, and Sotheby’s.” That would leave the 41 galleries splitting the remaining $16,959,900 in sales. …
Tom Hill Doesn’t Want to Go to Jail: The Blackstone big-wig and hedge fund titan hardly seems like the type to cower in fear. And we suspect there’s more than a little bit of hyperbole in this interview with the New York Times where J. Tomlinson Hill was asked what collecting category he’s shied away from:
- “I wanted to collect Greek and Roman. But I am also risk-averse, and I didn’t want to go to jail. You had all of this great material that was being taken from Turkey, taken from Italy, and put on the market without proper provenance. So, if you’re risk-averse, you can’t buy it.” …
Just Another Data Point in the Picasso Market Momentum: It seems funny to suggest that Picasso is the hot artist driving the art market these days. (Well, Picasso and George Condo.) Because it’s not like the Spanish master was ever out of favor. Nonetheless, when the New York Times interviewed collector Lisa Fayne Cohen in her Plaza pied-a-terre which has a Condo on one wall amid other works by Mark Grotjahn, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hofmann, and Joan Mitchell, she was asked whether there was a blank wall to be filled and what she would like to see hanging there. Her answer:
- Well, I’d love to have a Picasso. One of the hardest things about being an art collector is when you start to run low on wall space. There just aren’t enough walls.
