Each year 30,000 visitors arrive in Miami for the Art Basel fair. Many are art dealers and art collectors looking to buy or build relationships. But Art Basel in Miami Beach is also the art market’s trade convention or annual Christmas party, take your pick.

In this podcast, we speak to 8 different attendees about why they come to Art Basel and what they do at the fair. You’ll hear from auction house professionals and appraisers, art lawyers and magazine publishers, the creator of Artsy’s activation and a museum director.

Featured in this podcast are:Continue Reading

Georgina Adam saw “plenty of enthusiasm under $100,000” at Art Basel:

Casa Triângulo of São Paulo placing three paintings by Mariana Palma at $35,000 each and a work by assume vivid astro focus (sic) at $40,000.

London’s Alan Cristea, in the new Edition section, did well with works by Julian Opie ($21,500) and Gordon Cheung ($16,000).

At Untitled and at Pulse some booths sold out: London’s Vigo Gallery sold all its works by the Emirati Ayan Farah, at prices from $2,000 to $9,800, and now has a waiting list for her work.

The Art Market: strong sales at Art Basel Miami Beach (FT)

The Art Newspaper recorded these sales:

Victoria Miro: Yayoi Kusama’s Flowers That Bloom Tomorrow, 2010, priced around $500,000.

Greene Naftali: sold four colourful mattresses by Guyton/Walker (all Untitled, 2013) for $65,000 each to collectors from the “four corners of the world”.

Casa Triângulo: three paintings by Mariana Palma for $35,000 each.

Galeria Nara Roesler: sold Artur Lescher’s Fuso #02, 2013, for $50,000.

Timothy Taylor: Josephine Meckseper’s Pyromaniac 1, 2003, for $55,000

What a difference five years make (The Art Newspaper)

The Hollywood Reporter grabbed these sales:

A number of works sold in the seven figures:

Michael Werner: a $1.4 million Sigmar Polke

Cheim+Read: a $6 million Joan Mitchell,

Helly Nahmad: a spate of multimillion-dollar works by Leger, Calder, and Miro.

Sadie Coles: $40,000 Sam Durant piece

While undoubtedly attention-grabbing, these sales are far from representative of the market as a whole. “It’s been a good fair for us,” Napolitan dealer Alfonso Artiaco admitted. “But it’s still nothing like it was in 2006, 2007.”

Art Basel Miami Beach Wrap-Up: Hollywood Faces, Strong Sales.

Judd Tully has the heavy hitters:

Van de Weghe Gallery: Gerhard Richter “Abstraktes Bild (595-3),” 1986, which sold in the region of the $3.2 million asking price to an American collector; a 2005 Damien Hirst spin painting embedded with two expired credit cards — “Beautiful, I Pushed the Controls and Ahead of Me Rockets Blazed, I Don’t Want to Be a Dead Artist Painting” — for $580,000; and Jean-Michel Basquiat “Head,” 1985, also sold, for approximately $580,000.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac old Georg Baselitz patinated bronze, “Louise Fuller,” 2013 to a private American collector for $2 million

Pace Gallery, a wind-driven Alexander Calder “Untitled” standing mobile from 1962 that went for more than a million dollars.

Sprüth Magers: Sterling Ruby’s large-scale spray painting “SP256” sold for $550,000 and Barbara Kruger’s digital print on vinyl “Untitled (Don’t Shoot),” 2013 went for $275,000. Several found-object sculptures by Cyprien Geillard, also sold, at 40,000 euros each — including “Untitled (Tooth),” 2012.

Blum & Poe gallery: “Untitled,” a five-panel dye sublimation print on linen by 25-year-old Brooklyn-based artist Hugh Scott-Douglas, sold for $90,000 to Montreal collector Francois Odermatt.

Lisson Gallery: Ai Weiwei’s beautiful “Jade Handcuffs,” 2012, which sold for 70,000 euros

Out of the Gate: What ABMB Buyers Had to Have on Day One (BLOUIN ARTINFO)

Kelly Crow got these sales:

Gagosian Gallery: “Baroque Egg with Bow (Turquoise/Magenta),” that the gallery won at Sotheby’s for $5.4 million four years ago, under its $6 million low estimate. On Wednesday, the gallery put the egg back on the market and sold it for around $9 million.

Klaus Malonek: Kris Martin’s new series of “Helmets,” recreations of ordinary motorcycle helmets and hard-hats cast in bronze, around $44,000 apiece for six of the 10 helmets displayed.

Galeria Fortes Vilaça: Erika Verzutti’s $37,000 cemetery-like assemblage of concrete, granite and crystal slabs

Almine Rech Gallery:  Mark Hagen’s salt-lick sculptures several sold for $8,000 apiece on Wednesday.

At Art Basel Miami Beach, High Confidence (and Prices) (WSJ.com)

Katya Kazakina has the first rings on the register:

Sprueth Magers: Sterling Ruby abstract spray-painted canvas for $550,000 to a museum.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash sold two large spray-painted paintings by emerging artist Keltie Ferris at prices from $40,000 to $50,000.

Mary Boone Gallery sold a group of 12 Han Dynasty urns splattered in bright paint by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei; it was priced at $350,000. Barbara Kruger’s digital print on vinyl stamped with the word “Value” went for $275,000, the New York gallery said.

White Cube gallery sold 90 percent of its booth including Damien Hirst’s 8-by-8-foot glass vitrine, “Devil’s Gate,” filled with butterflies and bugs; the asking price was 1.85 million pounds ($3 million). Theaster Gates’s 7-by-7-foot abstract piece made of wood, rubber and tar sold for $175,000.
The gallery sold out an edition of three neon signs — each spelling “The Last Great Adventure is You” — by Tracey Emin The asking price was 65,000 pounds.

diCaprio and Wilbur Ross Stalk Black Friday for Art World

Sarah Hanson went to Pulse for Blouin Artinfo:

Zemack Contemporary: sold “Unitled; Olya,” Yigal Ozeri, for $50,000.

Jerome Zodo Contemporary: a skull sold at $20,000.

Hosfelt Gallery: a David Hammons basketball drawing for an undisclosed price in the six-figure range.

James Danziger: placed several C-prints by Hendrik Kerstens, inspired by 17th-century Dutch portraiture, in the $15,000 to $36,000 range.

Bryce Wolkowitz: had sold six from an edition of eight digital pieces by Yorgo Alexopolous at $11,000 each, as well as a graffiti-inspired José Parla collage for $25,000 and a handful of lit-up book sculptures by Aaron Kang for $5,500.

Yancey Richardson: Zanele Muholi’s portraits at $5,000 a pop (Muholi will have a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015.)

Kuckei + Kuckei: C-prints of junkyards and industrial worktables byphotographer Guillermo Srodek-Hart sold for $4,500 each

Pulse Beats on With Strong Sales at the Middle-Market Satellite Fair (Blouin Artinfo)

Eileen Kinsella had these sales:

Kavi Gupta sold works by Tony Tasset including two versions of the artist’s “Snowman” sculptures, made of glass, resin, and enamel paint, with bronze “sticks” for arms, at $75,000 each; and two versions of “Bear” for $65,000 each; Roxy Paine’s “Labor Saving Device” to the Brooklyn Museum on the fair’s opening night, for $85,000. And he sold “almost all” of Theaster Gates’s installation pieces,” at prices that he stated ranged from $50,000 to $175,000.

Pace sold a painting by Adolph Gottlieb, “White Halo-Black Ground” (1967), for $400,000.

Gmurzynska: works by Scott Campbell, Wifredo Lam, Richard Meier, Enrico Castellani, Adolf Luther, and Tom Wesselmann. The price range of the sales were between $50,000 to $1 million.”

Galerie Terminus: a Gerhard Richter painting that sold for $3 million at Munich’s

Scott White Contemporary: a sculpture by Henry Moore for $1 million

Galerie von Vertes: a Lucio Fontana painting at  Zurich, that sold for more than $1 million.

Edward Winkleman: sales included three 2013 “Binocular” videos by Leslie Thornton, priced at $8,000 each, which went to Louisville collectors Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown; a dozen small 3D-printed pieces by Shane Hope, including “Freerange-Femtofacture-Lure no 11,” priced at $850 each.

Royale Projects: wall hangings by Phillip K. Smith III, selling all of an edition of three for $27,000 each.

William Baczek Fine Arts: a dozen paintings and drawings by Travis Louie, the gallery sold four paintings by Margaret Withers to a Swiss collector; and placed works by sculptor Anne Lilly

New Art Projects sold a four-minute video piece, “Love Story,” to the Cisneros Foundation, the first piece of an edition of five (prices ranged from $6,000 to $12,000).

At This Year’s Miami Art Fairs, a Boost in Buyer Turnout (BLouin Artinfo)

 

Vernissage TV has lots of video from Miami’s art fairs this last week. (Click on the video to see.)

The Miami Herald explains the logic behind Art Basel Miami Beach as the art fair of Latin America especially as those collectors increasingly become global players:

Art Basel Miami Beach attracts with its quality offerings a growing number of sophisticated Latin American art collectors — the established, such as Brazil’s Ricard Akagawa, a presence every year at the world’s top fairs; and younger sophisticates like [José Miguel] Sokoloff, whose acquisitions point to the development of a strong contemporary art market in Latin America.

“Art Basel was what put Miami on the art map for me,” says Sokoloff, who collects post-1960 Latin American art with a political edge and has a second home in Boca Raton. […]

Sokoloff’s 168-piece collection includes works by artists as diverse as Fernando Bryce, Vik Muniz, William Córdova, Rosangela Rennó, Johanna Calle and Miler Lagos. He began collecting ‘‘100 percent Colombian’’ then expanded to the rest of Latin America about five years ago. Continue Reading

The Financial Times points out that Miami fair is very popular with a wide range of nationalities:

The fair, which this year has 260 stands, also proves popular with NRIs (non-resident Indians) based in London, New York and California’s Silicon Valley, along with Russian collectors, says Spiegler. But what about the Chinese, who have been so dominant at recent auctions? Craig Robins, founder of the Design Miami Basel fair, expects a “substantial” showing of Chinese visitors this year, building on the steady flux of collectors in recent years, among them property developers Zhang Xin (Soho China) and Dai Zhi Kang (Zendai Group).

Art Basel Miami Beach (Financial Times)

The Miami Herald’s Douglas Hanks stumbles onto a two-fer in his story on the surging value of Contemporary art. First, he reveals that the Artist Pension Trust will try to realize gains this week during the fair. Second, he gives a nice illustration of the batting average most collectors of new work would consider a great success:

At this year’s Art Basel week, Pamela Auchincloss will officially launch a novel test for art’s staying power as an investment.

She presides over a fund started six years ago that signs artists willing to pool sales of their works. The artist agrees to let the Artist Pension Trust sell the works for up to 20 years, taking a 40 percent share of the purchase price for his or her own work and then sharing the rest of the proceeds with fellow trust artists.

The fund hopes to make its first sales at Miami’s Scope fair — the debut transactions in a collection of 6,500 works from 1,400 artists that is valued at roughly $5 million.Continue Reading