Another Example of How Hong Kong Is Rapidly Becoming the Center of Asia’s Art Trade: Enid Tsui reports on another Japanese art trading firm expanding to Hong Kong and beyond. Earlier she reported on Whitestone Gallery’s planned ICO—now on regulatory hold. Now Tokyo Chuo, which has been holding auctions in Hong Kong since 2014 where revenue now equals that from their Japanese location, has filed for an IPO in Hong Kong and Tsui has gone through the documents:

• “Its application to the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (HKEx) says total revenue in the year to March 31, 2018 was HK$173.3 million (US$22.1 million), which came mainly from commissions on the auction of art and collectibles in Tokyo and Hong Kong worth HK$739 million. […] A 17 per cent increase in its annual revenue was almost entirely down to the commission from one particular painting sold in Hong Kong in November. Consonance between Pines and Spring, a 14th-century painting by Qing dynasty artist Wang Meng, had a hammer price of HK$151 million, a record for the artist, and contributed HK$25.7 million in commission.” …

Here’s an Interesting Sign that the Contemporary Art Market Might Have Topped a Few Years Ago:  There’s an old saying on Wall Street to the effect that no one rings a bell to tell you when a market has reached its top and it is time to get out. Instead, there are numerous informal indicators such as the now pretty much obsolete magazine cover indicator which states that when a trend is featured on the cover a mainstream business magazine, the trend has reached its peak. The most famous magazine cover indicator was BusinessWeek‘s feature story, The Death of Equities, published in August of 1979, three years before the birth of the greatest bull market in financial history.

With that in mind, take a look at Jessica Pressler’s excellent tale of a con artist who lived large on other people’s money from early 2017 and through several months while claiming to be launching a Soho-house-like club built on the romance of Contemporary art. The story already came out when one of her victims detailed the scam on Vanity Fair’s The Hive site. But the most important fact may have been left out. The Contemporary art market peaked in 2015. A scam like this could only take place in its afterglow:

• “The heart of the club would be, she said, a “dynamic visual-arts center,” with a rotating array of pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, whom she knew from her Purpledays, and exhibitions and installations from blue-chip artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. For the inaugural event, Anna told people, the artist Christo had agreed to wrap the building. Some people raised their eyebrows at the grandiosity of this plan, but to others it made sense, in a New York kind of way. The building’s owner, developer Aby Rosen, was no stranger to the private-club genre; a few years earlier, he’d bought a midtown building and opened the Core Club, which housed an art collection. He also happened to own 11 Howard.” …

Why Does Georg Baselitz Paint Figures Upside Down? The Wall Street Journal is concerned that you might not understand that Georg Baselitz’s upside down images are meant to be viewed that way. On the occasion of the joint show between the Fondation Beyeler and Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum, the Journal wants you to know the artist took a big risk with his career to make those works:

• Mr. Baselitz wrote that his upside-down paintings emerged when he felt that he had exhausted “an oeuvre that might be considered normal.” It was at this point that he began to “rebel against the convention that determined what the top or bottom, or right or left of a painting should be.” By inverting his paintings he said he “found a way of continuing” with his art. The retrospective’s Canadian co-curator, Stéphane Aquin, said that Mr. Baselitz’s “upside-down guy” reputation, forged in the early 1980s after his first New York gallery shows, “did him a disservice.” The series “came across as a shtick and a stylistic trick, which was truly not the case,” Mr. Aquin said. “This is not a man to play tricks.” …

Ilya Repin’s Famous Ivan the Terrible Painting Damaged: An attack on a famous Russian work of art, Ilya Repin’s depiction of the death of Ivan the Terrible’s son, has revealed the severe lack of security in Russian museums. Over the weekend, the work was damaged at the Tretyakov Gallery. …

How Much Will the Increasing Value of Contemporary Artists Who Are African-American Effect the Artists Who Are Sold in the African-American Art Category: The New York Times is interpreting the strong prices for Contemporary artists like Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Julie Mehretu, and Glenn Ligon as a turn toward revaluing African-American art. As part of the newspaper’s reasoning, they spoke to Mark Godfrey about museums placing a greater emphasis on artists who are not familiar:

• “This has meant looking beyond figures such as Pollock, Rothko, Warhol and Lichtenstein toward African-American artists working in the same period,” added Mr. Godfrey, who co-organized Tate’s “Soul of a Nation” exhibition. He said that it was part of Tate’s “curatorial vision” to “rethink narratives of art history.” Mr. Godfrey added that when acquiring works by living artists such as Mr. Bradford and Mr. Marshall, “We learn that Jack Whitten was as important to Bradford as Jacques de la Villeglé, or that Charles White was as significant for Marshall as Velazquez.”

All but one of the artists who impressed the audience at Sotheby’s with their robust prices were artists whose names were familiar to the Contemporary art category and sales. Only Barkley Hendricks, whose market value was developed over many years of increasing value at Swann’s African-American art sales, was a break out from one category to another. Sotheby’s Amy Cappellazzo deserves a great deal of credit for having boosted his market dramatically in a single year from setting records at nearly $1m to setting records this month at $2m. But for Godfrey’s observation to be meaningful in the market setting, we would need to see robust prices for Norman Lewis, Beauford Delaney, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam and others.

That is happening slowly and at a much lower price point than what is happening for Contemporary artists. And it is important to remember that many of these still undervalued artists were not working as African-American artists but as engaged and integral figures in the same Modern art movement.