Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post slips this observation in to what amounts to an interview with dealer Ben Brown. Lamenting the absence of a museum in the capital of the Asian art market, Brown points out that the ideal conditions for art market growth is the right mix of primary and secondary dealers, museums and wealthy collectors.Continue Reading
Judd Tully offers his perspective on the sale on Artinfo.com. Identifying Joseph Nahmad and Vito Schnabel as next generation market makers active and visible at the sales (as well as stalwarts like Jose Mugrabi,) Tully tracks some of the returns from the last peak in the market to today:
Mugrabi flashing out in the Haring market? Definitely worth watching.
Richter and Wool Lead Phillips London’s Snappy $21M Season Opener (Artinfo.com)
60 Minutes are keen to promote their report this Sunday on Contemporary Art with Morley Safer visiting Art Basel Miami Beach and, in this clip above, taking a little beating from Jeffrey Deitch over the rise in value of art Safer heartily lampooned. Of course, the fact that the art sells for a lot of money has no bearing on whether the art is meaningful, valuable or of lasting importance. (In fact, if 60 Minutes is doing a segment on the art market it’s a good sign that market has already topped.)
What’s more interesting is to look at the original report. Given the passage of time, you might expect to find a string of unfamiliar names, artists whose popularity had proved the trendy dalliance Safer so confidently declares them. In the video below, you’ll see Morley mock a Cy Twombly that sells for $2.1m as mere scribbling done with the wrong end of a paintbrush.
Then we get Hilton Kramer and Brian Sewell spouting the angry dismissives we’re so used to hearing about Damien Hirst today. Of course, the report spends a lot of time with Jeff Koons and his martian-like demeanor. There’s a tour of the Basquiat retrospective with a group of young boys all declaring they could paint better than Jean-Michel, whoever the hell he was.
As the 12-minute segment progresses, an unsettling feeling of deja vu begins to creep over you. Each artist Safer fastens upon—Gober, Manzoni, Gonzalez-Torres and even Christopher Wool—is bigger and more established today than he was 20 years ago. We even get an appearance by Jeffrey Deitch (mocked for his artspeak) looking very young indeed.
For a man who loathes all of this new-fangled non-representational art, Safer has a remarkable eye for the lasting talent. Too bad he didn’t buy when he had the chance.
Colin Gleadell gets down with Dimitris Daskalopoulos, the Greek businessman whose collection is now on view at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The collection of Daskalopoulos’s compatiot, Dakis Joannou, is enjoying a much shorter run time at New York’s New Museum, where it has been on display (curated by Jeff Koons) since March. Score one for Daskalopoulos, whose collection will be up at Whitechapel for nearly a year, until May 22, 2011.
But for Daskalopoulos collecting is not a contest… Or is it? Gleadell points out that many of the works in Daskalopoulos’s collection have had major auction moments, a common denominator which suggests that Daskalopoulos has a passion for competing in the fray of the auction salesroom (not to mention a propensity for coming out the victor).
The display reveals Daskalopoulos as a buyer of key works at auction over the years. Apart from the Duchamp, there is a phallic latex sculpture by Louise Bourgeois bought in 2004 for $455,500, the third highest price for Bourgeois at the time. Sarah Lucas’s Bunny Gets Snookered, (1997), was bought a year earlier for $163,500, a record for the British artist then. One of his more recent auction buys is Sherrie Levine’s polished bronze, Fountain (Buddha), cast in 1996 from a different urinal to Duchamp’s, for which he paid a double estimate $444,000 dollars in November 2008, just as the market was plunging into recession.
Dimitris Daskalopoulos interview (The Telegraph)
