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Jeff Koons's $50m Picasso Collection

May 23, 2011 by Marion Maneker

Laura Gilbert has discovered a number of works owned by Jeff Koons on display at the Met in New York. In the process, she’s also discovered a website that appears to be a catalogue of Koons’s collection based upon works that are already known to be owned by the artist.

Working backward from the list, we find three Picasso’s that were bought at the height of the art boom for a combined total of $51.68m, a substantial amount of money even for wealthy artist like Koons.

Superstar Koons’ Sideline: Loaning Old Masters to the Met, Including the Dreadful. Meantime, 51 of His Own Holdings Appear Online (Art Unwashed)

Picasso, Deux Personnages (Christie’s)

Picasso, Dora Maar Tete de Femme, 1941 (Christie’s)

Picasso, Le Baiser (Sotheby’s)

 

Pink Panther in Perspective

May 11, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The Master, Judd Tully, lays out the landscape on Sotheby’s disappointing Pink Panther sale. Even below the low estimate, the price still pushes the artist’s market along:

a Sotheby’s specialist defensively pointed out after the sale, the last “Pink Panther” to come to the market sold at Christie’s in 1999 to Peter Brant for a then-record $1.8 million against a presale estimate of $600-800,000. Last night’s “Panther” also crushed the previous high for a Koons’s porcelain, set at Sotheby’s New York in May 2008 when “Naked,” another “Banality” piece from 1988, sold for $9 million (est. $1.5-2 million). The new mark ranks as the third-most-expensive Koons at auction, trailing the giant, heavy metal “Balloon Flower – Magenta” from 1995-2000, which sold at Christie’s London in June 2008 for $26 million, and “Hanging Heart” (1994-2006), which sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2007 for $23.6 million.

Excessive Estimates Dampen Enthusiasm at Sotheby’s $128 Million Contemporary Art Auction (Artinfo.com)

 

Christie's Koons Winter Bears

February 11, 2011 by Marion Maneker

Small Shop Beats Big Artist Koons

February 3, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The San Francisco shop Park Life has won its stare-down with Jeff Koons’s lawyers. Kate Taylor tells the epic drama:

On January 20, its lawyer, Jedediah Wakefield of Fenwick and West, working pro bono, sued Jeff Koons LLC in San Francisco federal court, asking the court to declare that Park Life wasn’t infringing on Mr. Koons’s i rights. “They very quickly indicated they weren’t interested in putting up a fight,” Mr. Wakefield said of Mr. Koons’s lawyers. Ultimately, Jeff Koons LLC agreed not to pursue the gallery for the sale of the bookends, and the gallery agreed not to indicate that the bookends were by Mr. Koons, which, Mr. Wakefield added, “they hadn’t done and weren’t going to do anyway.” As a result of the deal, he said, he was planning to file on Thursday for a dismissal of the declaratory judgment suit.

All Bark, No Bite: Settlement Reached in Balloon Dog Dispute (Arts Beat/New York Times)

Koons v. Originality

February 3, 2011 by Marion Maneker

Jed Perl is no fan of the appropriationist idea in art. That doesn’t stop him from writing a strong précis of the argument on The New Republic’s site as well as offering his own uncompromising dismissal. The quote runs long to do justice to Perl, not appropriate The New Republic’s content. What’s worth noting is Perl’s ability to draw the Koons balloon-dog legal case into the Warhol authentication controversy, citing art historian Rainer Crone along the way:

Jeff Koons, when accused of copyright infringement, tends to settle out of court. One has the impression that he prefers writing a check to actually discovering what a judge or a jury might have to say. But in his heart of hearts Koons probably feels that if Poussin became Poussin by stealing from Titian and Raphael, why on earth is he being bothered by questions of copyright and fair use? With the balloon dog case, he has decided to go on the offensive. Crone’s argument that “the rejection of authorship” can be “an essential feature of authenticity and originality,” although absurd to some, is not so easily refuted. One can, if so inclined, certainly find support for this view in the history of Western art. Don’t the gorgeously impersonal, porcelain-like surfaces of Ingres’s greatest portraits suggest a rejection of authorship? Continue Reading

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