I think our cultural desires have far weightier influences than our brains but the study does appear to show how we are motivated by a desire for exclusivity.

Kinda obvious, but…

–

Why we like art less when its price goes down

By Anna Somers Cocks | From Editorial & Commentary | Posted: 13.3.08

Now it’s scientifically proven: we really do enjoy expensive things more. In an experiment conducted by Antonio Rangel at the California Institute of Technology, the brains of 20 volunteers were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they tasted five different wines costing $5 to $90 a bottle. But Rangel fibbed, telling them that the cheap wine was the most expensive, or giving the same price to two different wines.

The scanner showed consistently that the flow of blood to the part of the brain that registers pleasure, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, increased when the price was declared to be high, not according to the quality of the wine. In case this got attributed simply to the ignorant palates of the volunteers, Rangel repeated the experiment with members of the Stanford University wine club and got widely similar results.

What this does is to explain the effect first described by the economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899 when he noted that certain goods become more in demand as their price rises. Diamonds and luxury cars are an obvious example of this, but so is art, especially contemporary art.

In the recent boom, for artists whose reputation was still unconsolidated it has been enough for the word to get out at fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach that their prices were rising for a frenzy of buying to begin. We have seen this happen with the Leipzig School and certain Polish artists previously unknown outside their countries of origin. We have probably been too crude in attributing this boom primarily to speculation in the art market; it is also an expression of the Veblen effect, an effect that we now know to be physiological.

Rangel’s discovery will be relevant when the recession hits. Here at The Art Newspaper, we have survived two recessions, 1990 and 2000, and we know that a fall in the art market follows a bear market, but always with a certain time lag (in the past this has been as long as nine months, but we think the cycle will speed up now).

The speculators will try to unload their art, but will have difficulty doing so because the art market not only falls but freezes, except for the rarest and most widely admired works. This is for two reasons. The thousands of people who still have money to spend choose not to do so until they are certain that the market has bottomed out. But they are almost certainly also affected by what we should call the Veblen-Rangel effect from now onwards: they actually find works of art less attractive as their price goes down.

The writer is General Editorial Director of The Art Newspaper

The report “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness” can be read online at: http://www.pnas.org/

©2008 The Art Newspaper

The art market will not be hitting rock bottom anytime soon!–

April 14, 2008

Despite Tough Times, Ultrarich Keep Spending

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY and ERIC KONIGSBERG

Who said anything about a recession? Sometime between the government bailout of Bear Stearns and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that America lost 80,000 jobs in March, Lee Tachman spent roughly $50,000 last month on a four-day jaunt to Miami for himself and three close friends.

The trip was an exercise in luxuriant male bonding. Mr. Tachman, who is 38, and his friends got around by private jet, helicopter, Hummer limousine, Ferraris and Lamborghinis; stayed in V.I.P. rooms at Casa Casuarina, the South Beach hotel that was formerly Gianni Versace’s mansion; and played “extreme adventure paintball” with former agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Mr. Tachman, a manager for a company that executes trades for hedge funds and the owner of “a handful” of buildings in New York, said he has not felt the need to cut back.

“I always feel like there’s a sword of Damocles over my head, like it could all come crashing down at any time,” he said. “But there’s always going to be people who are trading, and there’s always going to be a demand for real estate in New York.”

He is hardly alone in his eagerness to keep spending. Some businesses that cater to the superrich report that clients — many of them traders and private equity investors whose work is tied to Wall Street — are still splurging on multimillion-dollar Manhattan apartments, custom-built yachts, contemporary art and lavish parties.

Buyers this year have already closed on 71 Manhattan apartments that each cost more than $10 million, compared with 17 apartments in that price range during all of 2007. Last week, a New York art dealer paid a record $1.6 million for an Edward Weston photograph at Sotheby’s. And the GoldBar, a downtown lounge, reports that bankers continue to order $3,000 bottles of Rémy Martin Louis XIII Cognac.

“When times get tough, the smart spend money,” said David Monn, an event planner who is organizing a black-tie party on May 10 for dignitaries and recent purchasers of apartments at the Plaza Hotel; the average price there was $7 million. “Short of our country going on food stamps, I don’t think we’re doing anything differently.”

Some extreme spenders say they have not cut back on their impulse Bentley or apartment purchases because they have made so much money in the good times from the Internet, stock market and real estate. Some have been able to move their money into investments like private equity that are available only to those with extensive capital. Some rationalize cars and home renovations as “investments.” And some simply don’t want to skimp on the weddings and anniversary parties that they see as milestone events.

“We’re trying to spend on what we feel is important,” said Victor Self, an executive with a fitness company who, with his partner, is planning to spend $100,000 on a commitment ceremony on St. Barts and a dessert party for 200 to 300 guests at Jeffrey, a clothing store in the meatpacking district.

Many economists warn that the nation’s financial troubles may spread far more widely, and could ultimately touch even the wealthiest. The financial sector could lose as many as 20,000 jobs in New York City by the end of 2009, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office. And at a March 18 policy meeting, Federal Reserve Board members raised the possibility of a “prolonged and severe economic downturn,” recently released minutes show. That threat has undoubtedly caused some affluent people to consider some degree of frugality.

But that still leaves plenty who are consuming away, and one of the things New Yorkers love to consume is real estate. In October, Marc Sperling, the 36-year-old president of an equity-trading company, bought a new condo on the Upper West Side in a building where four-bedroom apartments like his cost more than $4 million. When he moves into the completed building next year, he plans to hold on to his other two apartments in Murray Hill and Miami Beach — each of which he values at about $2.5 million.

Mr. Sperling views the nation’s economic slump as a temporary problem, and is grateful that it has yet to affect him. “I think if you have the means to ride it out, that’s what you do,” he said.

His view of the subprime mortgage crisis seemed to reflect a sort of inverse class resentment.

“I don’t want to sound harsh, but the people who were buying million-dollar houses with a combined household income of $70,000 or $80,000 were the ones who were chasing easy money,” he said.

Days before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the bank’s chairman, James E. Cayne, paid $25 million for a 14th-floor condo at the Plaza Hotel.

He, too, is invited to the May 10 party at the Plaza. It will feature a dozen female string musicians made up to look like statues and clothed in dresses of fresh flowers, like roses and gardenias. There will be caviar and Cognac bars, as well as a buffet designed to visually replicate 17th-century Dutch paintings from the recent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, “The Age of Rembrandt.”

Even high-end rentals are going fast. In just the three weeks since it arrived on the market, a four-bedroom apartment at 15 Central Park West, advertised for $55,000 a month, has gone to contract. The broker, Roberta Golubock with Sotheby’s International Realty, said she showed the apartment to eight financially qualified prospects.

Some New Yorkers defend their spending as investments or gifts to themselves. In August, Karen Borkowsky and Robert Kennedy, a partner in a law firm, were married at the Rainbow Room. The reception, which the event planner, Shawn Rabideau, lavished with glass and calla lilies, cost $150,000 to $200,000. But when Ms. Kennedy considered that she had survived breast cancer and, at age 41, married a guy she had dated in high school, the wedding’s cost seemed less exorbitant. Then, shortly after returning from their honeymoon, the couple started a $400,000 project to combine and restore two apartments into a three-bedroom, three-bath co-op on the Upper West Side. “We are investing in the longevity of the apartment,” she said.

There are also some people who say they have not been hurt because they have poured so much money into opportunities not available to the Main Street investor. Paul Parmar, a 37-year-old investor in companies specializing in health care, defense, media, luxury items and private aviation, says he is living just as large as ever.

In recent months, Mr. Parmar, who lives in Colts Neck, N.J., said he bought 140 acres in Mineola, Tex., and is spending $20 million to begin building a refuge there for abused tigers. Since January, he said he added to his car collection with a $110,000 BMW 750 Li (for his girlfriend) and a Bentley Arnage for himself, for about $300,000. He is leasing a Maybach through Luxautica, an “ultimate car club” that has annual fees of about $125,000.

“On a spending level,” Mr. Parmar said, speaking about a possible recession, “it doesn’t affect me at all.” That said, providers of luxury goods reported anecdotal evidence of a widening gap between the merely rich and the ultrarich. Clifford Greenhouse, who owns a household-staff employment company, said he suspects that the merely rich might be starting to lag behind their far richer counterparts, and are trimming their budgets. He cited reduced demand for chauffeurs — a relatively small-ticket service — yet ever-strong demand for private chefs, butlers and “household managers.”

Darren Sukenik, a real estate broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman, said that while business may be slower for clients with a mere million to spend on apartments, none of his clients with budgets of more than $2.5 million have stopped shopping. Seth Semilof, the publisher of Haute Living, a luxury magazine, said that luxury car dealerships that advertise with him are pushing Bentleys and Rolls-Royces at the expense of less-extravagant cars like the BMW 5 Series.

“If you look at the $20 million-plus market, it’s still strong as ever,” Mr. Semilof said. Some of the ultrarich are still willing to pay above sticker price for things they want badly enough. Mr. Semilof helped three buyers in the past two months acquire Rolls-Royce Phantom convertibles for as much as $200,000 above the asking price of $465,000.

And Eric Lepeingle, a yacht salesman for the Rodriguez Group, said that since January, three New Yorkers bought yachts worth $8 million to $35 million. Although the weak dollar does give some pause to buyers considering Italian-built yachts, Mr. Lepeingle said, they eventually give in. “They want the product anyway,” he said.

All sorts of products, actually.

“They want their Jeroboam, or Methuselah, or Nebuchadnezzar,” said Ronnie Madra, referring to the sizes of Champagne bottles served at 1OAK, a lounge on West 17th Street where he is a part-owner. A Nebuchadnezzar, weighing in at 15 liters, costs up to $35,000.

There would be no Nebuchadnezzar for Mr. Tachman and his friends in Miami, but they soldiered on until the moment the wheels of their private jet returned to the tarmac in New York.

There were hand-rolled cigars, massages, guided rides in racing boats and fighter jets — all arranged by In The Know Experiences, a travel and concierge service in Manhattan.

“It was just all out — it was insane,” said Mr. Tachman. “I’m not afraid to spend money like that.”

Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an animal lover but this is the typical knee-jerk “liberal” SF reaction: ban and censor rather than discussion and exploration even though discrimination of such type is similar to totalitarian tactics.

Glad I live in New York where you can still buy live seafood!

–

Copyright © 2008, LTB Media. All rights reserved.

For once I agree with Roberta Smith of the NY Times. It was a pretty safe art fair, considering its an art fair in the first place.

I found it hard to find the jewels between the shit, though with all the big works on offer, I did find relief (and pleasantly affordable) purchases with small works on paper.

Makiko Kudo, a young artist I love, produces very few works on paper but these were absolutely beautiful. They are works from edsel paper, thus showing the artist’s process:

Such as this lovely drawing by Marcel Dzama from Richard Heller at LA Art Fair.

Or this work by Paul P. from Marc Selwyn.

I did get two lovely big works by Tomoo Gokita and an amazing Lee Bul sculpture from the Global Feminisms show in Brooklyn, which shouldn’t count but since they were pre-bought.

Tomoo Gokita, Association Reflex, 2007, oil on canvas. Courtesy of ATM Gallery.

Tomoo Gokita, March of the Black Queen, 2007, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery.

Lee Bul, “Ein Hungerkunsler” after Franz Kafka, 2004, mixed media. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.

One thing I would highlight from the Smith review is how great the solo shows were! The installations by Elanor Antin and Jenny Holzer showed both the history of the artists as well as how they pushed the boundaries of contemporary art, via performance for Antin or technology for Holzer.

I also loved the single Huma Bhabha sculpture at ATM! I’m glad to report it has been snapped up by a public institution!

Installation view of Huma Bhabha and Tomoo Gokita, ATM Gallery, Armory Show 2008.

Thus, the review by Smith:

–

March 28, 2008

Art Review

Smooth and Safe at Pier 94

By ROBERTA SMITH

These days contemporary-art fairs tend to travel in franchised packs. A large successful fair spawns parasite copycat fairs, and before you know it, you’ve got an art-fair fair.

New York is having one this weekend. The Armory Show, now in its 10th incarnation, is back, accompanied by nine younger, smaller, less prestigious fairs, the most ever. Those who make their way through all of them should be honored — like the seven-summits climbers who scale the highest peak on each of the world’s continents — or medicated for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Given a downwardly spiraling economy that no doubt will affect all aspects of the art world, fairs included, this situation may be temporary. But even without the falling dollar and nervous hedge funders, there is a point at which critical mass fosters inertia.

There is nothing wrong with art fairs that fewer of them wouldn’t cure. Once, they were finite tribal rituals. Dealers around the world who didn’t see one another often would set up camp for a few days, experience the hive mind, exchange information (and goods) and network. The public came, first the frenzied-shopping few and the informed observers, then the general audience.

But these days, with so many fairs, dealers now see entirely too much of one another. They often spend most of their time at fairs or preparing for, or recovering from, them. And the fairs now run like clockwork, almost in their sleep, you could say.

The Armory Show on Pier 94, for example, is in top form. It lacks the stylish comforts and city-wide branding of the Frieze Fair in London, but at least it is now being held under one roof, on one pier instead of two. And there’s always Chelsea, the world’s biggest nonstop art fair 30 blocks to the south. The Armory doesn’t have the balmy weather and exposed skin of Art Basel Miami Beach, but, hey, it is happening in March, not February — this year anyway. And while it lacks Art Basel’s older European dealers, with their booths full of choice modern masters, a sense of maturity seems to have settled upon the place.

This year’s Armory should take as its motto a recent poster (unfortunately not at the fair) by Mads Lynnerup, a Danish-born artist based in San Francisco. It reads: “If you see anything interesting please let someone know immediately!” This polite elongation of the paranoid counterterrorism campaign mounted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York (“If you see something, say something”) promotes the art world’s oldest information highway: word of mouth. But the anxious tone suggests that things of interest have lately been too few and far between.

And so it is that the Armory Show goes down very smoothly, not unlike the Whitney Biennial or last summer’s Venice Biennale. An air of orderly professionalism pervades; outrageousness of any kind is rare. There are no cringe-inducing moments, although the cluttered, quasi-Rauschenbergian installation cooked up by Assume Vivid Astro Focus for the exterior of the V.I.P. Lounge comes close. And there is almost nothing that makes you stop in your tracks. Yes, there is the annual tape-’n’-things sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn. This one, “Tool Table,” is, for a change, bloodless and cerebral: a sea of mannequin hands clutching de rigueur books (Nietzsche, Sartre, Thomas More) or tools (hammer, saw, trowel). It proves how much Mr. Hirschhorn’s work needs some form of sex or violence.

The show’s smoothness extends to the layout, which is surprisingly nonhierarchical, with more- and less-established dealers in larger and smaller spaces mingled throughout. Some booths are like large vitrines; you can see everything from the aisle. Others are like small galleries; you can walk in, browse and admire the furniture, which is sometimes as interesting as the art. If things seem a bit more crowded in the shorter arms of the fair — which is laid out in a giant capital T that you enter at the crossing — they also feel nominally looser and more playful, like an earlier version of the fair.

The attraction of any art fair is that many kinds of art all talk at once, randomly, democratically, in a relatively direct way, unedited by museum curators, magazine editors, international exhibition commissioners or even art critics. Still, it is possible to string together different conversations. One concerns the persistence of painting or paintinglike surfaces, something that few museums seem willing to broach these days. If you want to call this market-driven, fine. Paintings are portable and salable. But, like the novel or the love song, the medium is also wonderfully mutable and susceptible to physical, emotional and symbolic variation.

At Galerie nächst St. Stephan, the different concepts of painting all but come to blows, what with Imi Knoebel’s update of Russian Suprematism in beams of bright, anodized aluminum; Adrian Schiess’s wall-size, iridescent, lyrical abstraction (based on a photograph and printed by ink-jet); Helmut Federle’s wispy little abstractions, the result of time spent in Japan; and Adam Adach’s rough rendering of trash compactors hanging on a wall covered with newspaper front pages from around the world, each neatly shorn of images. Bjarne Melgaard’s parody of Neo-Expressionism snarls forth from several booths, while Jonathan Meese’s equally satirical version — more colorful than usual — chews up the carpet at Contemporary Fine Arts.

At Modern Institute, Anselm Reyle, Cathy Wilkes, Katja Strunz, Jim Lambie and Victoria Morton pursue different pictorial languages, from flat to sculptural, on the wall, on the floor and free-standing. (For more free-standing color, try Meschac Gaba’s knit hats as architectural models at Michael Stevenson, and, at Jack Shainman, Jonathan Seliger’s towering rendition of an Hermès shopping bag in car enamel on aluminum.) At Canada, Joe Bradley presents the fair’s most stripped-down, to-the-point painting: four panels of unpainted beigey vinyl titled “Bread.”

At Blum & Poe, Chiho Aoshima abandons her usual high-gloss surfaces to create a soft, cartoony, urban wrap-around mural on paper, melding photography and digital manipulation with clouds as old as Japanese screens. At Patrick Painter, Ivan Morley reiterates a mildly Abstract Expressionist composition (middle-period Guston) with thread, while Tim Berresheim uses ink-jet to print a frazzled, linear, computer-derived motif on wood. At Rivington Arms, John Finneran is painting stacks of things like trash cans and free-floating lips on metal with panache and humor, conjuring a cameraless Warhol.

The nonpainting conversation is, of course, vociferous. At Bellwether, Daphne Fitzpatrick’s raw-wood ramp and gigantic copper-lined shoe create their own strange world, aided by Anne Hardy’s ambitious set-up photograph and Chihcheng Peng’s “Shadow Your Man,” a series of hilarious digital variations on a short sequence from Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.,” in which shoes figure prominently.

At Murray Guy, a dozen large images by the German photographer Barbara Probst show the same woman photographed at the same instant from all angles, stretching one second into three-dimensional space, like Cubism.

The galleries of Foxy Production and Marc Foxx have landed across the aisle from each other with large, competing sculptures by Sterling Ruby in vandalized white Formica.

Another conversation concerns one-person shows. Some are little retrospectives, like the surveys of Eleanor Antin (Ronald Feldman), Adrian Piper (Elizabeth Dee), Martin Creed (Hauser & Wirth) and Jenny Holzer (Cheim & Read).

Other solos feature new, unfamiliar names. One of the best is at Hotel, a London gallery, which has devoted its small, black-walled booth to the elegantly goth paintings and also the sculptures of Michael Bauer.

Also outstanding is Eigen & Art’s presentation of Maix Mayer, an artist from Leipzig, Germany, who, unbelievably, is not a painter. Mr. Mayer’s subject is the failure of the future, recounted in photographs of derelict modernist buildings in Taiwan and the former East Germany and in short films shot in and around them. The booth is covered with wallpaper in patterns based on these structures, creating a total environment in which banality and tragedy conspire.

Nearby, at the Derek Eller booth, the manic master draftsman Dominic McGill also meditates on modernism past and future, while adding collage to his arsenal in “Moloch.” In this enormous, new, volcanic drawing-collage, the words of Baudrillard, Santayana, George W. Bush and many others collide and combust around a fiery newsreel-like cluster of magazine images, all red. Their shape is based on the flailing monster at the center of Max Ernst’s “Fireside Angel,” which was inspired by the rise of Franco. Mr. McGill has mustered a commensurately apocalyptic tone. He makes the end seem near, and for much more than just art fairs.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

I thought this was rather funny.Rather makes concrete the relationships between art, sex and commerce!

–

Emperor’s Club Contemporary Art?

By ARTINFO

Published: March 14, 2008

NEW YORK—Emperor’s Club — the escort service at the heart of the Eliot Spitzer scandal — also has a foothold in the art world, assuming one can trust that a related Web site is not a joke, Artnet reports. Emperors Publishing Media, which ran the site for Emperors Club VIP until it went defunct last week, also runs a site called Emperors Club Contemporary Art, which (as of publication) is still live and well.

Artnet reports that the site claims to link artists and dealers with the same sort of “ultra-affluent market (millionaires and billionaires) and some of the richest people in the world” who frequented the other Emperors Club.

“One of the many ways by which we create and add special value to already extraordinarily affluent lives,” according to the site, “is by enabling direct access to some of the world’s most captivating, authentic contemporary art available.”

Clients to the site have access to “exclusive” art auctions, which have a 15 percent commission on the first $100,000, and 10 percent on sums above that. Web pages feature artists such as Carl Andre, John Chamberlain, Gregory Crewdson, Hilary Harkness, Jeff Koons, Vera Lutter, Richard Prince, David Salle, Andrew Wyeth, and Dr. Hugo Heyrman — each of whom has an individual entry, complete with illustrations of two works and excerpts from catalog essays and reviews. The site also includes ads for elite auction houses (Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonham’s) and art firms (Maison Gerard and Baccarat).

There is no word yet on how many clients the art site has, or who they are.

Check out young gun Fawad Khan’s New York solo debut, “Fast Traveling Passenger” with new works of gouache and ink on paper as well as a large-scale sculptural installation. Heavily inspired by media depictions of the continued wars in the Middle East, Khan connects current politics with childhood fantasies of cars and toys.

Comes to no surprise that the drive for contemporary Indian art comes not just from Global North collectors as Saarchi but also from home-grown collectors. Same story in the hyper economies of China and the Russian Federation.

What is a more interesting story not often written about is the movements of local Global South collectors: What drives their passions for their national art? Why aren’t they collecting Hirsts and Warhols in greater numbers?

–

Will Saatchi’s Indian Summer make NRIs buy bolder?

By Lucian Harris | From Features | Posted: 12.3.08

DELHI. “The story is no longer about the NRIs (non-resident Indians), it’s now about the NIs (non-Indians),” says Delhi-based entrepreneur and collector Nitin Bhayana. He is referring to the clutch of influential foreign collectors whose systematic buying of Indian and Pakistani contemporary art over the past 18 months has had an immediate impact on the market.

It remains to be seen how India’s contemporary art scene will be affected by such outside intervention, which stands in direct contrast to the way the booming market for modern Indian art has been driven almost exclusively by Indian money.

The revival of the Indian art market began in the late 1990s and saw Indians and NRIs in cities such as Dubai, New York and London, flush with new found wealth, joining the rush to buy art. They turned to a long undervalued and critically underrated tradition of post-war Indian painting. Prices for Progressive group artists such as F.N. Souza, M.F. Hussain and S.H. Raza went through the roof.

“It created a very stable foundation on which the market could build,” says the international director of Asian art at Christie’s, Amin Jaffer, about the phenomenon. “The dynamic of a people buying into their own cultural heritage was very important in a country where there has been a lack of art historical writing.”

But to the frustration of art world insiders, investment potential rather than cultural appreciation was often the compelling factor for many business professionals drawn to the heavily hyped market for modern Indian art.

Osian’s, India’s first auction house, published an art index in the Economic Times and calculated the value of works according to the square inch. Art funds flourished and the Indian press paid regular homage to a market driven by the same bullish confidence that was turning India into one of the world’s most dynamic industrial economies.

Tipping point

Then, in a metallic flash, everything changed. Within a year of his installation of gleaming stainless steel milk churns appearing at London’s 2005 Frieze art fair, Subodh Gupta had become India’s first international contemporary art superstar. Very Hungry God,

his monumental 1,000kg skull made of pots and pans which François Pinault placed outside his Venice gallery, the Palazzo Grassi, became one of the must-see attractions at last year’s Biennale.

Suddenly Indian contemporary art was fetching big prices while the once booming market for Moderns and Progressives began to plateau. In addition to Gupta, attention turned to the likes of Bharti Kher, T.V. Santosh, Jitish Kallat, Sudarshan Shetty and Pakistani artist Rashid Rana. With an eye-catching pop aesthetic, it is hardly surprising this art attracted three major foreign buyers—British collectors Charles Saatchi and Frank Cohen, and Korean magnate C.I. Kim—all enthusiastic collectors of the YBA art of the 1990s.

At present, Mr Saatchi and Mr Cohen are powering the top end of the market as they vie for works for competing exhibitions in the UK later this year (p45). But so far they remain the only important foreign collectors; while billionaire Eli Broad has been on a recent visit to India, as yet no major US collectors have shown a similar commitment.

It would be wrong, however, to ascribe the progress of Indian contemporary art exclusively to foreign collectors and curators. A few domestic buyers have made a difference. By far the most influential is Anupam Poddar whose not-for-profit Devi Art Foundation opens in Delhi later this year (p42). Nitin Bhayana has also assembled a substantial contemporary collection, while in Mumbai the likes of Amrita Jhaveri, an art advisor, and Czaee Shah, an independent curator, have acquired the best works of successive generations.

However, for NRI collectors who have only just filled their walls with Souzas and Hussains, much contemporary art represents a further leap of faith.

“NRIs will still take a lot of convincing to buy really cutting-edge contemporary art,” says Renu Modi of Delhi’s Gallery Espace. “Taste is never static though. Until recently the taste of NRIs in the Gulf rarely extended beyond decorative scenes of village India, but with the arrival of international auctions, the opening of galleries, and now with Art Dubai, we are definitely seeing changes.”

The auction houses have had an influential role in bringing Indian art to the global NRI community. While Sotheby’s and Christie’s confer a seal of international approval on the art they handle, Mumbai-based auction house Saffronart has been particularly important according to Ms Modi. “Its online auctions reach out to the Indian diaspora and being Indian-run it inspires confidence with NRI clients.”

Conor Macklin of Grosvenor Gallery in London has also seen a rise in online buying: “NRIs based in Europe and the US, such as Rajiv and Payal Chaudhri in New York…have been buying more contemporary Indian art in the past two years. These new collectors are very techno-savvy and are confident in buying over the internet.”

For the moment, Indian buying of contemporary art remains limited. “NRI collectors are definitely buying contemporary, but it is usually just a few prestige pieces,” says Prajit Dutta of Aicon gallery (p44). According to Mr Dutta, regional differences in taste are mainly due to cultural exposure: “A client in New York is likely to have more access to Indian and international art than in Dubai, or even California which is a wealthy but conservative market.”

Specialist Asian art consultant Arianne Levene predicts that: “As they see more art in India and abroad, Indians will get more confident and adventurous about what they buy.”

©2008 The Art Newspaper

As I wrote before, the current “instability” of the art market will only damper the lower and middle markets for art work. Quality will continue to rock.

Armory week is only three weeks away, and I think sales there will be a better indicator.

–

London February Sales Not So Stellar After All, Says ArtTactic

By ARTINFO

Published: March 6, 2008

LONDON—According to the research company ArtTactic, about 60 percent of lots at London’s record-breaking February auctions failed to achieve expected prices, reports Bloomberg.

ArtTactic reports in its March “Rawfacts” newsletter that although Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips de Pury & Co. raised a total of £189.8 million ($378.4 million) in February, the most for a series of contemporary sales in London, most items sold below or at the lower end of their presale estimates, or did not sell at all, indicating that consignors’ and auction houses’ expectations were not being met.

ArtTactic said that 10 lots accounted for 70 percent of the total sales at both Christie’s February 6 evening auction and Sotheby’s February 27 sale, with Francis Bacon paintings going for £26.3 and £20 million respectively.

“The auction houses are continually raising the stakes at the top end of the market,” said ArtTactic managing director Anders Petterson. “But this masks how demand is slowing in the middle.”

“The problem for the auction houses is that they have to find these masterpieces for every sale.”

I love to read about artists who collect. Most, of course, don’t have much money to collect, between paying the rent of their studios and hustling, but when they do, they tend towards art works of old and modern masters, such as Schnabel’s penchant for Picasso and Koons’ for 16th century German sculpture, as the article below highlights.

Do they know something we don’t?

–

Jeff Koons’s taste for the classics

By Paul Jeromack and Jason Edward Kaufman | Posted: 28.2.08

NEW YORK. Jeff Koons, the artist known for his kitsch sculptures inspired by pop imagery, has emerged as a major spender on traditional masters. Last month, Koons paid $6.3m at Sotheby’s in New York for a large limewood carving of St Catherine, dating from around 1505, by the great German 16th-century sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider (p63).

He had previously been identified by The New Yorker as the lender of an 1866 Gustave Courbet nude to the Metropolitan Museum’s current exhibition on the French artist. He acquired this at Sotheby’s London on 27 June 2007 for £1.64m ($3.2m).

Koons currently holds the record for the most expensive living artist: his nine-foot suspended Hanging Heart sold for $23.6m to his dealer Larry Gagosian at Sotheby’s New York in November.

In a lecture delivered at the 92nd Street Y community centre in New York last month, Koons professed his affinity for Courbet, comparing works from his “Made in Heaven” series—which show him having sex with his former wife, the Hungarian-born Ilona Staller, a former porn star and then MP in Italy—with Courbet’s l’Origine du Monde (1866) in the Musée d’Orsay.

Koons told the audience that while his own work is based on balloon rabbits, porcelain figurines and flower puppies, he collects older art, including a Dalí gouache that he bought as a memento of his visit to the Catalan artist at New York’s St Regis hotel in the early 1970s.

©2008 The Art Newspaper

Anyone who has seen mere images of the new expansion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will agree: millions of dollars just went down the drain. Not only does the entrance to LACMA and the Broad Contemporary building, both designed by star architect Renzo Piano, look like an outlet mall in Arizona, but the art on display is a run down of a Sotheby’s May sale of contemporary art. Nothing new or exciting, unless you are a billionaire senior citizen looking for something to do in his retirement.

The LACMA/BCAM marriage is yet another notch in the turgid history of LACMA renovations and expansions, one Rem Koolhaas wanted to break with his own brilliant design.

But what can you do when you have Eli Broad calling the shots?

Christopher Knight in the LA Times wrote a great piece on the other LA institution, MOCA, and their desperate need for a new space, money which could have been better spent there than in LACMA.

–

Inequities in art

MOCA is short on space while BCAM needs art of its own. The Broad Foundation could solve both problems.

By Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 27, 2008

The spanking new Broad Contemporary Art Museum is now open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, featuring a yearlong display of mostly borrowed paintings, sculptures and photographs. Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown has just opened “Collecting Collections: Highlights From the Permanent Collection,” a show that fills the building until mid-May.

Is something a bit odd here?

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. One major L.A. museum is celebrating construction of plentiful new gallery space filled with art it doesn’t own, and another is celebrating 250 works of art it does own but can install in its galleries only for a short time.

LACMA: Lots of museum space, very little museum art.

MOCA: Lots of museum art, very little museum space.

This is a puzzle worth parsing because buried deep inside is one possible solution to several vexing problems in the city’s cultural life. So let’s parse. BCAM’s jubilant debut was marred by the eleventh-hour revelation that, contrary to previously published comments, L.A. super-collectors Eli and Edythe Broad would not donate any of their art to the eponymous building, for which they picked up the $56-million tab. Plans are instead afoot to fold their personal collection (about 400 works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, etc.) into their foundation collection (almost 1,600 works by nearly 200 artists). The Broad Art Foundation has successfully operated as an art lending library for more than 20 years, and LACMA will get dibs on up to 200 loans at a time.

This frustrating news generated a bizarre flurry of public feints, dodges and weird claims. It was said that art museums don’t really need art collections, museum collecting is actually more trouble than it’s worth and perpetual loans from private collectors could be a new museum paradigm. Editorials in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, remarkable for their obsequious philistinism, effectively said, “Swell!”

When, exactly, did art collections turn into an insufferable burden for museums? When did the need for a new museum paradigm arise? When, in the wide-ranging cultural conversation about art museums today, did we lose our collective mind?

The answers to these questions, in order, are: never, never and last January.

Art collections are not a museum burden. They are the reason art museums exist.

Professional progress in museum management, such as putting art collection archives online or increasing public access, is helpful. But no new paradigm is needed.

And Jan. 8 is when the Broad bombshell dropped. The news that one of the world’s great contemporary art collections would remain wholly uncommitted, except to itself, created shock waves. It caused otherwise sober people to hallucinate that, at the very least, rotating foundation loans would always be available.

“Always” is a long time, as Albert C. Barnes might say. Barnes, who died in 1951, was America’s greatest, crankiest Modern art collector, who amassed a stupendous collection of Impressionist, Postimpressionist and African art. A rich Pennsylvania entrepreneur, he established an incomparable foundation to carry out in perpetuity his explicit artistic wishes. But lately Philadelphia’s philanthropic establishment has banded together to wreck that legacy, dismantling what Barnes built. For the inimitable Barnes Foundation, “always” is turning out to be about 50 years.

The Barnes’ cautionary tale is instructive. Fifty years of Broad Art Foundation loans would be nice, but 50 years of Broad Art Foundation gifts would be nicer. A fundamental difference distinguishes a private foundation from a public museum. One operates strictly according to the founder’s wishes, as long as the founder is around to crack the whip; the other sustains its program, including collections, by virtue of institutional inertia.

Over at MOCA, the impressive show “Collecting Collections” is a marvelous pileup of 254 paintings, sculptures and other post-1939 art. Much of it was acquired from celebrated collections — Panza, Lowen, Schreiber, Weisman, Lannan and more. One work, a sparkly 1999 painting of a shaman-like monkey by British artist Chris Ofili, was bought with funds from the Broad Art Foundation, which also helped underwrite the show.

Following the law of unintended consequences, however, the exhibition turns out to be less a noisy celebration than a quiet and wholly unexpected plea: MOCA is in desperate need of a bigger building.

Current gallery space is horribly inadequate. When MOCA opened in 1986, half the 25,000 square feet of galleries was pegged to permanent collection display. The allocation surely seemed brave for a fledgling museum with barely any collection, but today commercial galleries in Chelsea are bigger than that. (So is each of BCAM’s three floors.) Given 5,000 collection works now, plus MOCA’s hard-earned stature as the nation’s most prominent contemporary art museum, the minuscule permanent collection space has become laughable.

The joke’s on us. Take Mark Rothko (1903 to 1970), the great American artist who melded saturated color and compositional structure to create some of the 20th century’s most powerful abstractions. MOCA owns one of the finest Rothko groups anywhere. At least six of the 11 works, which together tell a 27-year story, are among his best.

Three are included in “Collecting Collections.” Looking at them I wondered: How did the curator choose which Rothko masterpieces to include and which to omit?

With the aforementioned puzzle now parsed a bit, let’s turn to a possible solution. It has three parts.

First, the Broad Art Foundation should buy MOCA’s building and move its art lending library there. The foundation has been looking to relocate from its cramped Santa Monica quarters, and MOCA’s building already has the requisite art storage and maintenance functions. It’s also adjacent to the proposed Grand Avenue redevelopment site, which Broad has guided, and near a subway stop. Long-term foundation installations could be mounted in the galleries and opened to the public.

Second, MOCA should use proceeds from the building sale as seed money for a serious capital campaign. The goal would be a new building with plenty of essential permanent collection space, preferably near the Geffen Contemporary warehouse, plus a decent operating endowment.

Finally, the Broad Art Foundation should invite LACMA and MOCA curators to make formal requests for specific gifts, complete with written rationales for why each particular work makes sense as part of the museum’s permanent collection and restricted to the foundation’s pre-1978 art. Make it an annual practice, with a rolling 30-year buffer. Museum gifts would yield a full generation of historical distance, and the foundation could continue to buy. Risk would shift away from the cash-strapped museums to the wealthy foundation, while leaving plenty of lending-library art.

The idea is a variation on a standard practice, such as the Ahmanson Foundation’s long and magnanimous relationship with LACMA, in which the foundation has worked with curators to build an increasingly impressive European painting collection through annual gifts. A lending-plus-rolling-gift Broad initiative might not represent a whole new paradigm, but at least it’s one that would make sense.