Judy Chicago thinks artists should study her career; Anonymous Was a Woman grants announced; The NYTimes looks down Old Masters; James Rosenquist’s estate sells his townhouse; Lévy and Marino on collecting;

This commentary by Marion Maneker is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

Patriarchy is Passé

One of the big winners to come out of Art Basel in Miami Beach was Judy Chicago whose survey at the ICA was all over Instagram and much remarked upon elsewhere. New York Magazine’s saturation coverage of the art world included an interview with the artist:

• “And what would you tell a young artist, specifically, about the art world? If a young woman wants to be an artist — if she really wants to know the truth about what she’s going to encounter — she should study my career. Because my career is a roadmap that outlines the difficulties. […] I’ve seen a lot of women along the way who’ve thought it was something wrong with them when they faced discrimination, obstacles, rejection, etc. That’s been unfortunate. One woman came to an event this week and told me a story that I’ve heard a million times. She was in art school in the ‘90s and she was inspired by my work, and I guess it showed. She had all-male professors, and they said, “Who are you trying to be? Judy Chicago?” They said, “Feminism is passé.” And I said to her, “Yeah, but patriarchy is not.” If she had been influenced by Jeff Koons, they never would have said that.”

• “Speaking of Jeff Koons, I see that you’re getting a lot of questions about corporate feminism, and partnering with a fashion brand like MaxMara on T-shirts. I don’t think anyone asked him about selling out when he partnered with Louis Vuitton.
  Finally, I came up with an answer. I said: “Well, I’d rather market feminism than the patriarchy.” […] I agree that we have to be careful about articulating that it’s change we’re after, not profit. Change. Do I like it that people are marketing Dinner Party plates with historical information on the back about the woman represented? Yes, I like that.”

Anonymous Was a Woman Grants Announced

Speaking of patiarchy being passé, Susan Unterberg’s long-running $25,000 unrestricted art grants to women over 40 were announced this morning. Over the past 23 years, Anonymous Was a Woman has given more than $5.8m to 230 women artists. This year’s list is: Dotty Attie, 80; María Magdalena Campos-Pons, 59; Patty Chang, 46; Beverly Fishman, 63; Kate Gilmore, 42; Heather Hart, 43; Deborah Roberts, 56; Rocío Rodríguez, 66; Michèle Stephenson, 53; Betty Tompkins, 73

The NYTimes Is a Tough Audience for Old Masters

What did the Old Masters market ever do to the New York Times’s Scott Reyburn? The reporters recap of last week’s London sales was dripping with condescension. Take the noteworthy sale of a Lucas van Leyden drawing for £11.4m at Christie’s. Reyburn who bemoaned the lack of “museum quality” works in the sales looked askance at the price that was multiples of the estimate:

• “Even so, wasn’t almost $15 million quite a lot of money? ‘You can pay that for a bad Picasso,’ Mr. Bosch van Rosenthal said. He was perhaps unaware that only two works on paper by Picasso have made more than that, according to the Artnet price database.”

Did any reader of van Rosenthal’s remarks not think he was comparing a small van Leyden drawing to a Picasso oil, especially a late one, not a Picasso drawing?

Reyburn has been beating up on the Old Masters market for so long he even buries the good news in the sales which he described as characterized by “somewhat thin, within-estimate bidding, mainly from private collectors. Though the final total of £30.2 million was less than half what Sotheby’s achieved at its October contemporary sale, it was up 16 percent from the equivalent old master event a year ago.”

In most markets, a 16% rise is solid progress. But for Reyburn, no good result seems to be enough. He described the small Rembrandt Sotheby’s sold for £9.5m as “not an obvious billionaire’s trophy.” Even the strong sale of a pair of portraits by Frans Hals at Christie’s was deemed a disappointment because the £10m wasn’t a record for the artist. “The price, equivalent to $12.7 million, seemed impressive enough for these two paintings, but was below the artist’s auction high of $14 million.”

Rosenquist Estate Sells Artist’s Townhouse

James Rosenquist’s estate has sold his Tribeca townhouse, according to The Real Deal:

• “In Tribeca, the five-story townhouse at 162 Chambers Street, once home to artist James Rosenquist, sold for $11.7 million to anonymous buyer 162 Chambers Street LLC. The asking price was about $14.5 million, according to StreetEasy.”

“I want what I want. So far it has worked well for me.”

That’s architect and private museum owner Peter Marino in his conversation with James Tarmy and Dominique Lévy at a Bloomberg conference on luxury. The 20-minute video is well worth watching as Lévy talks about the difficulty of getting visitors to the gallery, the centrality of public sculpture, deploring any discussion of art as an investment and the egotism of private museums. Marino pinballs from Thomas Mann’s Glass Bead Game to his view that the best place to really see a work of art is in the bathroom to why buying art is like spending money on clothes while throwing off a few more aphorisms: “I don’t look at trends, I’m not that clever. I try to create them.”