Deaccessioning, as the Baltimore Museum of Art just discovered when it was forced to withdraw works from sale at Sotheby’s in late October, has its perils. The Brooklyn Museum was able to sell works in the same sale that BMA had to abandon. Sometimes the difference between a scandal and success is planning and advice. At least, that’s what a new team of experienced lawyers and public relations people are betting as they launch a new service for museums.

In February of this year, Jon Olsoff, John Cahill and Paul Cossu announced the formation of a new law firm (OCC) catering to the art world. The lawyers at OCC have decades of experience working with institutions as they picked their way through the complex issues associated with these kinds of sales, both at auction and privately.

Now they’ve enlisted the help of Sotheby’s former communications head, Lauren Gioia, who will lend her 20+ years expertise as a consultant to OCC. During her time at Sotheby’s, Gioia led the communications strategies for the largest and many of the most complicated deaccessions in history.  Gioia and OCC are pooling their wealth of knowledge, experience and specific expertise—they’ve worked on a range of deaccessioning events at City of Denver/Clyfford Still Museum (2011), SF MoMA (2019), Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (2014, 2018), Dia Art Foundation (2013), MFA Boston (2003, 2011), New York Public Library (2005), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (2007), Berkshire Museum (2017/2018)—to provide integrated communications and legal counsel to museums and cultural institutions embarking on deaccessions and sales.

“Most museums have very capable communications and legal counsel,” Gioia said, “but deaccessions and sales require specific expertise and experience that we can provide.  Our role would be to partner with the existing teams to ensure institutions achieve a successful outcome based on their goals.”

It’s probably not an accident that Gagosian Gallery announced the launch of its new digital event initiative Gagosian Premieres—an attempt to re-create the excitement, exclusivity and novelty of a gallery opening for our pandemic-challenged times—on the eve of Christie’s hybrid New York Evening Sale. In a very short span of time, the art market has inverted from a world that prized exclusivity and access to one that has begun to attract a broader (if not to say, mass) audience through events broadcast on the web and through social media.

To be broadcast on YouTube and done in close collaboration with select artists from the dealer’s roster, Gagosian Premieres will showcase a new kind of programming that brings artists alongside a series of collaborators from film, music and media. In a statement, the mega-gallery said the series will “present intimate music performances inspired by and composed in response to the work of featured artists, as well as in-depth conversations that explore how the profound challenges and conflicts we are facing in society today resonate through contemporary art. Artists to be featured in the upcoming series include Mary Weatherford, Gregory Crewdson and Titus Kaphar, each of whom have exhibitions scheduled for this fall, to be paired with collaborators such as writer Malcolm Gladwell, and musicians Jeff Tweedy and Thurston Moore.

One part group hang, two parts creative showcase and one part special event, Gagosian Premieres is meant to address the growing success of auction house live-stream sales. You read that right. These special events are a response to the growing visibility of the biggest art auctions.

Why is that? Although auctions have been freely available on the web for more than a decade, the audience has previously been limited to interested parties. For some reason yet to be explained, the conversion of the marquee auctions from live events broadcast on the web to broadcast-only events has unleashed a substantial wave of outside interest. Suddenly, live-streamed auctions are getting stadium-sized audiences where once a great turnout would have meant enough viewers to fill a large theater.Continue Reading

The Russian art market hasn’t had the same vigor in recent years since the sanctions imposed upon the country after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But there are a few Russian artists whose international caché reaches far beyond the category. Among those artists only Ilya Kabakov resonates through the Contemporary art world. Tomorrow, September 24th, Sotheby’s Escape Artists—The Non-conformists Online opens with more than 90 lots of Russian Contemporary art from the post-war era. These artists were not officially sanctioned but also flourished as a sometimes called, ‘second avant-garde.’

Leading the sale is Kabakov’s Conditional Reflex (£350k-500k) which was made in 1964. The work is considered Kabakov’s the second conceptual piece. The title refers to the Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, but also to the reality of life in Krushchev’s Soviet Union. The work is also the earliest piece made by the artist to be sold at auction. It has never before been offered.

In the catalogue entry includes this explanation of the work by the artist:

Firstly, the title and subject of the painting. Conditional Reflex was a scientific discovery made at the beginning of the 20th century by the great Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, forever inscribed in the annals of the history of science. The essence of the discovery is as follows: a piece of meat is placed before an animal (a dog), to which it reacts by salivating. Simultaneously, a bell is rung. If this is repeated a certain number of times and then the meat is removed, the dog will salivate in response to the bell alone. So too does man, essentially a member of the animal kingdom, react with different feelings to the appearance of images in his consciousness. In the painting this is the image of a house with a rocking chair and a car parked nearby. At a compositional level, the painting uses the conflict between the horizontal arrangement of some elements and the head-on placement of others: the dog is rendered in profile, along the plane of the painting. The man’s head is placed at the centre of the painting, facing us, creating the stereoscopic effect of being perpendicular to the motion of the painting’s surface. Since the contour of the head connects with that of the dog, the contradiction and tension between the two structural elements of the painting is perpetual.