Kenny Recants: The art market’s favorite shoot-from-the-hip, take-no-prisoners truth-tatler, Kenny Schachter, is getting a little tired of all the media folks who want to imagine the art market is a 24/7 international underworld soap opera:

• “I got a call from the BBC’s “Panorama,” the world’s longest-running investigative current-affairs program, asking me to participate in an episode on “endemic money laundering in the art world.” I haven’t been able to live down a flippant comment I made at the 2016 Hay Festival that the art market was a cesspool of corruption (it’s not—okay, maybe a puddle). My intent was more to get a rise out of the sleepy audience than pinpoint rampant crime. When I told the presenter that, in the face of stringent financial compliance regulations that render us all naked before our bankers (both depositing and withdrawing), money laundering through art is far less prevalent than some might think, he was palpably deflated.” …

Only 4% of Museum Curators Are Black But Brooklyn Museum’s New African Art Curator Isn’t One of Them: Social media is up in arms over the appointment of Kristen Windmuller-Luna as a curator of African art at the Brooklyn Museum. But her advisor at Princeton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, professor of African art at Princeton’s department of art and archeology, was on WNYC to discuss the issue of under-representation at museums and the identity politics behind the uproar over Windmuller-Luna’s appointment. Okeke-Agulu points out that out of the 17 curators the Brooklyn Museum has, “seven or so are people of color.” And that the issue of representation in museums should not be confined only to disciplines like African art. …

The Funny Thing About the Saudi Bidding Against the Emirati: Last week’s highly unreliable report in the Daily Mail that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the United Arab Emirates’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed were annoyed to discover that they had been bidding against each other for the Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi seems to have caused consternation and confusion. First, Christie’s was annoyed enough to let it be known the speculation was “pure fantasy.” Second, several supposedly savvy art market commentators seem to have drawn the wrong inference from the story. On Twitter, these folks presumed the Crown Princes ought to have been aware of the other’s bidding. That would have been highly illegal if it were to have happened. Nor could the reverse have happned, as Christie’s points out, because “no bidder can directly or indirectly bid against himself in a sale.”

That brings us to the third, much bigger thing which was the point of the Daily Mail’s bit of gossip. Namely, Tensions in the Persian Gulf have spilled over uncontrollably since MBS’s ascension to become Crown Prince and the election of Donald Trump. At the core of the intra-gulf conflict is the rivalry between Qatar and the Saudis with the UAE siding with Saudia Arabia. Given that the Al-Thani family who rule Qatar have a taste for acquiring art, it was relatively easy for the Daily Mail to gin up a story that suggested the rivalry between Qatar and the other two states caused each Crown Prince to assume he was bidding against a Qatari who must be vanquished. So the issue was their blind desire to best the Qataris, not a lack of communication between crowned heads. …

Comprehensive Art Basel Hong Kong Sales Report: Our comprehensive gathering of Art Basel Hong Kong sales from the reporting press and galleries is almost complete and available to AMMpro subscribers here. …

A Last Look Back at Art Basel Hong Kong: Enid Tsui takes one last look at Hong Kong’s big art week: “even with superstars such as Jeff Koons and the Guerrilla Girls in town, a number of smaller, local galleries still managed to shine through amid an exhausting avalanche of visual and mental stimulation.” …

Sotheby’s Sells Two $30m Works in Hong Kong:  “On the final day of our Spring sale series in #HongKong, two works sell for over HK$200m (US$25.6m) each – two sets of Ming Dynasty Imperial Sutras (new auction record for Buddhist manuscript), and Qing Dynasty bowl each fetch HK$239m / US$30.4m” …

Sotheby’s CEO Talks Tech with the FT: Tad Smith gets the floor in the Financial Times to explain his approach to adding technology to the auction business:

• In March 2017, though, Sotheby’s launched a new estimating service that allows people to take a picture of a work on their phone and whizz it through to the auction house’s experts for valuation. It says unsolicited approaches have risen tenfold over the year and prompted a number of “discoveries” by new clients, including a Ming ewer that sold last week in New York for $3.1m and an emerald ring that went under the hammer for $1.7m. “The hard part of doing what we do is getting good supply,” says Smith. “So anything that makes it easier, less expensive or faster for us either to generate supply or satisfy demand . . . should make our business better, everything else being equal. Digital strikes all those boxes.” …

Sotheby’s Hong Kong Sales Cycle = $466.5m

• Sotheby’s just finished its Hong Kong sales and reports a 15% Increase Year-Over-Year with a sell through rate of 89%
• 30,000+ Visitors, 3,256 Lots Sold, Over 1,000 Online Participants