Apologies for the silence but I’m back from Venice, Basel and studio visits in Berlin and Paris and have lots to report! Also, I will have a debrief of the MFA shows in New York.

In the meantime, join me for the 10% Pride week celebration and silent auction conducted by the Rena Hort Foundation in support of the Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Cancer Foundation, the Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Acquisition Fund at MoMA and gay and lesbian visual artists.Check out the works on offer by artists like Jack Pierson–whose Cheim and Read booth at Basel with William Engleston was one of the art fair’s highlights–John Waters, Terence Koh, etc. here.

There’s a beautiful drawing by Paulo Arao, for example.

Paolo Arao, “Come Undone” (2008), charcoal on paper, 18 x 28 in. Courtesy of the artist and Jeff Bailey. 

– Through its support of The Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Cancer Foundation and The Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Acquisition Fund at The Museum of Modern Art, The Armory Show has long worked to aid members of the visual arts community suffering from cancer and to promote under-represented artists. We share these goals with our friends at the Rema Hort Mann Foundation.

This is why we are pleased to let you know about 10%, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s silent art auction featuring over 70 works by LGBTQ artists, Wednesday, June 24, 6 to 9 pm, at 28 Wooster Street in New York City. We encourage you to celebrate Pride Week by visiting the event - tickets are $20 at the door and proceeds support visual artists and cancer patients, plus a new year-long fund to support lectures, presentations and events by gay artists.

 

Participating artists include assume vivid astro focus, Lucky DeBellevue, Tony Feher, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jim Hodges, Deborah Kass, Matt Keegan, Cary Leibowitz (aka Candyass), Danica Phelps, Andy Warhol and many more; The Armory Show is proud to have contributed a print by John Waters. You can see the full list and images of the work athttp://www.rhmfoundation.org/10percent/.

 

John Waters Study Art, 2007, C-print, 20″ x 30″, Edition of 45 + 15 APs

Wannabe “l’enfant terrible” Adel Abdessemed, favorite of Pinault, in his first solo show in New York has created a bunch of silly works. I unfortunately mean this with very little love. Don’t get me wrong, we love silly works but unfortunately Adessemed has given us little to love.

In one of Zwirner’s hanger-like galleries, Abdessemed fashions a “braid” of three airplanes, twisted together likes snakes. Perhaps a comment to the seminal Samuel L. Jackson driven film “Snakes on a Plane” and a comment on terrorism, the piece just looks very expensive. Very, very expensive.

Adel Abdessemed, “Telle mère tel fils,” 2008, Airplanes, felt, aluminum, metal, 27 x 4 x 5 meters/88.6 x 13.12 x 16.4 feet. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.

Recalling Carolee Schneeman’s performance of painting while hanging nude in a gallery, Adessemed goes perhaps the rational next step and hangs from a helicopter while painting on a roof top in Brooklyn. In an associated work,the two-part video “Les ailes de dieu I” (2009) and “Les ailes de dieu I”I (2009), a man without legs draws with his hands as he hangs down and a man without arms is suspended from a helicopter to make a drawing with his feet, respectively. A nod to the Surrealist dictation, the work appears just painful to watch, much like a dog fight, another scenario Abdessemed has taken up.

Adel Abdessemed, “Les ailes de dieu I,” 2009, Video on monitor, 39 sec (loop), color, sound. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.

Adel Abdessemed, “Les ailes de dieu II,” 2009, Video on monitor, 39 sec (loop), color, sound. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.

Please understand I am not trying to moralize the works. Rather, our critique is that they offer little by way of serious critique or contemplation. Even as “art object” they do not cover new territory as much as they play within a given system to the most banal conclusions. Much of the work appear to be attempts to out-Maurizio Cattelan, enacting darkly humorous scenarious but without the attendant political or aesthetic ramifications. What is left is a art student’s self-reflexsive prank.

One piece though that I do particular like and saw at Armory this year is “Prostitute” (2008), a hanging file folder in which leather-bound notebooks are filled by prostitutes’ hand-writings the Bible, the Torah and the Koran. They exemplify the misogyny and hyprocrisy of organized religions while at the same time referencing Judd’s boxes.

Adel Abdessemed, “Prostitute,” 2008, Two manuscripts of the Koran, three manuscripts of the Bible, three manuscripts of the Torah 3 plexiglass boxes inside paper shopping bags; Manuscripts are 11.81 x 8.46 inches; Paper bags: One is 12 2/4 x 1 x 6 inches. Two are 13 3/8 x 16 3/8 x 6 inches each. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.

Below, a rather helpful interview with Zwirner himself. Not any new territory but was surprised to know he thinks minimalist masters like Flavin and Judd are under-priced!

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Gallerist David Zwirner on the Art Crash

Posted By admin On April 30, 2009 @ 4:00 am In Rebel Yell | 1 Comment

Francesco Carrozzini

David Zwirner, 44, runs the galleries David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth in New York City. (Shown with a recent exhibition of 1,000 Philip-Lorca diCorcia photos.)

The schadenfreude we’re feeling now is a result of this elitist, bubbly picture that the art world painted of itself. One where the chosen few could hobnob with the NetJets while the regular folks went to work. At the end of 2007, we went to Art Basel Miami Beach, and people were just snapping their fingers and saying, “I’ll take this piece and oh, I’ll take this one too.” There were times when we spent more effort making plans for the night than talking about what we brought to the fair booth. If I’m honest, I enjoyed it, but I told myself, “This cannot go on forever.”

Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami are going to get tested, and the jury is out. Andy Warhol’s market collapsed completely in the early 1990s. He withstood his test. Hirst and Murakami—I’ll be curious to see where their careers are in five years.

Money alone does not make a great collector. It is really a certain obsession that I’m attracted to in collectors. A lot of people jumped in because they had an excess of funds and art was a very fashionable endeavor. Lifestyle magazines were full of pictures of artists and coverage of the art fairs. I was always a little suspicious because when you dock yourself too close to fashion, you also run the risk of sharing some of the basic principles of fashion, namely, “Here today, gone tomorrow.”

If Larry Salander really was running a Ponzi scheme, put his numbers up against Bernie Madoff and it’ll be a fraction. We’ve had our spectacular failures recently. [Art dealer Salander was recently charged with 100 counts including grand larceny.] But the distrust people have in the art market is a function of the secondary market with long-gone artists, where art prices are subjective. We get a bad rap because the spotlight gets thrown on the bad apples disproportionately.

Gut feelings are good. When I look at an artist for the first time, the initial reaction I’m hoping for can be anything from discomfort to puzzlement. I go up to any artwork with a huge storage of information that I’ve accumulated over the years, and if I can’t file it or it makes me angry, I think, “Interesting.”

Art should be the most democratic of all endeavors, but these days it’s not. You see cartoons in the New Yorker and stereo­types on soap operas where the galleries are filled with haughty people standing around. It bugs me tremendously that the white-cube gallery is this intimidating, turnoff-ish kind of environment. My front-desk people are instructed to be particularly friendly. You can test us on that and let me know.

There’s one misconception that wherever there is money, there’s an art market. Dubai was always an overrated market. They need a certain level of intellectual discourse and aesthetic dialogue. They need institutions and to come to terms with their censorship—and then eventually, maybe, they’ll get an art world.

India is a growing market and one of the better new ones. One of the brightest artists in India right now is Subodh Gupta. He and his wife are collectors too, and they recently made an offer on a work here so they’re doing just fine. People are buying Subodh’s work and he’s buying other work.

China is not going to go away. It’s going through its great first art bubble and aftermath, which will leave some careers stranded, and speculators separated from collectors, because there’s no easy money to be made in Chinese art right now. It’s a huge country with enormous potential, but a lot of the Chinese art has been so affirmative—pro-money, pro-products, pro-success—it’s not subversive work. I like art that asks questions.

Some buyers won’t come back. There’s a bunch of Russian collectors who won’t be back. There’s folks in the financial industry that made tons of money and jumped into the art circus and bought without educating themselves. But there will be new ones. They always come.

The art fairs are important, but they’re overvalued. I can always make a work of art look better in a gallery—galleries ought to be the point of entry for collectors. Darwinian selection is happening all over the art world. Art Basel is pitch perfect—every other fair has to prove itself again.

It’s extremely hard to sell a $100 million picture this year. The peak prices in the art market really will be peaks for a long time, and it’ll be really hard to break records now. I don’t think the auction houses will pull it together for May and maybe not even in the fall, but I predict it buds up next spring.

I’d like a 25-year moratorium on selling living artists’ work at auction. It would give artists time to develop their work without worrying about auction prices. Auction houses got greedy and wanted in on selling new work—right up to the infamous Hirst sale when they stepped in and played art gallery. I don’t like it, and my artists don’t like it. When a piece they’ve sold is flipped for $1.5 million at auction, they don’t get anything out of it—and they’re left standing in front of blank canvases worrying about money when that should be the last thing on their minds.

We have an art market that’s really interesting for buyers that have the guts to step in right now. People are saying art prices dropped 34 percent this year and that sounds correct to me. If you look at auction catalogs from 1992 and 1993, you’ll see incredible masterpieces at bargain prices, so the message to serious collectors is to step in and look hard at what’s there.

I’d be looking into works from the Minimalist era, which are grossly undervalued. Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, John McCracken, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre—they’re a fraction of the Pop guys and their rediscovery will be exciting. Surrealism isn’t fully valued right now, either. I find it really interesting because it’s completely alive in artists today, whether it’s Cindy Sherman, Neo Rauch, Matthew Barney, Martin Kippenberger—you’re looking at Surrealist strategies. But when I look at Max Ernst or René Magritte, I feel they could have stronger prices.

If you have deep, deep pockets, go buy Early Modernists. They’re the closest thing we have to a blue-chip market. It’s going to be difficult to get a Titian or a Rembrandt because the good ones are already in museums. We’re not quite there yet with Cézanne and Monet.

I just spent a week in Rome, and I’ll admit I’m pretty knocked out by Caravaggio. Michelangelo wasn’t so bad either. I’d take those two any day.

Edited from Kelly Crow’s interview with Zwirner. To read more from Zwirner, click [3] here.

URL to article: http://magazine.wsj.com/hunter/rebel-yell/arts-go-to-gallerist/

Great run-down on the market today.

I am particularly looking at the auctions coming up in New York. There’s a glut of great work, especially at Sotheby’s. If you are looking for a priceless Robert Gober or Dan Flavin Tatlin monument, this is the season for you!

Here’s a quick run down of piece I will be taking a very close look.

At Sotheby’s:

ROBERT GOBER, “UNTITLED,” 1990, beeswax, wood, oil paint and human hair, 18 7/8 x 14 3/4 x 7 1/2 in/47.9 x 37.5 x 19 cm. Courtesy of Sotheby’s, New York.

Yayoi Kusama, “Stamens Sorrow,” 1985, fabric covered wood box constructions with filled cotton, wire stamens and spray paint in 120 parts, 14 1/4 x 9 5/8 x 5 1/2 in/36.2 x 24.6 x 14 cm, Overall: 86 x 193 x 5 1/2 in./218.4 x 490.2 x 14 cm. Courtesy of Sotheby’s, New York.

Dan Flavin, “MONUMENT” FOR V. TATLIN,” 1967, cool white fluorescent light, height: 96 in./244 cm. Courtesy of Sotheby’s, New York.

And at Christie’s:

Bruce Nauman, “Do It Right,” 1982, orange, green, red, blue, pink and yellow neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frame, 23½ x 42½ x 2¼ in./59.7 x 108 x 5.7 cm. Courtesy of Christie’s, New York.

Dan Flavin, “monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death),” 1966, red fluorescent light, 96 x 72 in./244 x 183 cm. Courtesy of Christie’s, New York.

Willem de Kooning, “Woman,” oil, charcoal, wax crayon and graphite on paper laid down on canvas, 24 x 18¾ in./61 x 47.6 cm. Courtesy, Christie’s New York.

Kerry James Marshall, “Our Town,” 1995, acrylic and printed paper collage on canvas, 100 x 142 in./254 x 360.7 cm. Courtesy of Christie’s, New York.

And at Phillips:

Cecily Brown, “Suddenly Last Summer,” 1999, Oil on linen. 100 x 110 1/4 in./254 x 280 cm. Courtesy of Phillips de Pury, New York.

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April 26, 2009

More Artworks Sell in Private in Slowdown

By CAROL VOGEL

During good times, an auction is the obvious choice for any collector wanting to sell a work of art. But as the recession takes its toll, many collectors have changed strategies and retreated to the more hidden, and potentially less lucrative, world of private sales.

For many sellers, the driving factor is fear. Fear that their friends will discover they need money. Fear that if a Picasso or Warhol, Monet or Modigliani does not sell at auction, it will be considered yesterday’s goods.

If they do not have to, fewer collectors are putting their holdings up for auction at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, where prices and profits have plummeted. But executives at both houses say business in their private-sale departments has more than doubled in recent months.

Even institutions like the Museum of Modern Art are avoiding auctions. This season it has decided to sell two early classic 1960s paintings by Wayne Thiebaud through Haunch of Venison, a gallery owned by Christie’s. In 2005, when the market was nearing its peak, it sold a variety of works at auction at Christie’s for strong prices.

“There’s an element of uncertainty with an auction that in this climate makes it more prudent to sell privately,” said Ann Temkin, chief curator in the department of painting and sculpture at MoMA. (The Thiebauds were donated to the Modern with the express purpose of selling them to raise cash for future acquisitions.)

“The game has definitely shifted,” said Christopher Eykyn, a former head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s who is now a dealer in New York. “A lot of clients don’t want to be seen selling, so the private route is suddenly more attractive.”

Just six months ago Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art sale brought $223.8 million; its May 5 sale is expected to fetch only $81.5 million. Christie’s Impressionist and modern art auction in November totaled $146.7 million; its May 6 sale is estimated at only $94.9 million.

“Clients want it now,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s in America. “And that means cash in their pockets.” Why wait months for the regularly scheduled auctions when you can have instant money, even if it means forfeiting the possibility of sparking a bidding war at auction?

Another factor is that collectors, seeing prices fall, are for the most part hanging on to their art, waiting for the auction market to rebound.

So secret are private transactions that confidentiality agreements bind the dealers and auction-house executives. Still, the art world loves to talk, and in recent months among the expensive paintings that have quietly changed hands are a 1970s de Kooning abstract canvas sold for around $30 million; a Cy Twombly “Blackboard” painting for $12 million; one of Gerhard Richter’s “Color Charts” for $18 million; and Jeff Koons’s “Hanging Heart Violet” sculpture for $11 million.

There are exceptions, of course. Estates continue to go to auction because executors have a fiduciary responsibility and prices are rarely challenged after public sales.

For the auction houses, private sales are lucrative and inexpensive. Generally Sotheby’s and Christie’s charge 5 to 10 percent of the purchase price of an artwork, depending on its value and the agreement with the seller. (If a work goes to auction the houses charge sellers 25 percent of the first $50,000, 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent of the rest.) Money earned from private transactions comes cheap, without expenses like advertising, insurance and shipping associated with auctions.

The dismal sales in New York in November, when night after night paintings by Monet and Matisse, Bacon and Warhol went unsold, meant big losses for Sotheby’s and Christie’s, which had a financial interest in most of this expensive art in the form of guarantees, undisclosed sums paid to sellers regardless of a sale’s outcome.

After the fall auctions, both houses immediately began changing the way they conduct business. In addition to announcing hundreds of layoffs, with perhaps more to come, they mostly halted the practice of guarantees and stopped giving consignors a cut in the fees they charge buyers. The days of publishing luscious catalogs have ended as well.

For their part, dealers say that their phones started ringing after Sept. 15, the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. “It’s been pretty steady ever since,” said Steven P. Henry, director of the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea. He said he had been getting inquiries about selling art from people who had investments with Bernard L. Madoff, or who had seen the value of their stock or real estate assets collapse.

Matthew Marks, another Chelsea dealer, has noticed that sellers “just aren’t into gambling anymore and auctions are no longer a sure thing.”

Gone are the new rich — the Russian oligarchs and oil-rich Middle Easterners, as well as the American hedge fund magnates — who in flush times were willing to pay any price. Gone too are the Europeans who were active when the weak dollar made their purchases seem cheap.

Today’s buyers tend to be older collectors who bowed out of the market when prices began escalating several years ago. These patrons have far more conservative tastes, preferring works by tried-and-true names like Alexander Calder or Robert Ryman rather than those by younger artists like Takashi Murakami or Damien Hirst who were snapped up by speculators and have now lost some 50 percent of their value.

What is selling, said Brett Gorvy, a co-head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary-art department, is “ the right artist and the right work.”

Tobias Meyer, head of Sotheby’s contemporary-art department worldwide, concurred: “If it’s blue chip, like a Richard Serra sculpture, then we have a list of people who want them.”

For the last six months, pricing has been tricky, a kind of tug of war between greedy sellers and bargain hunters. “Nobody knows where the market is right now,” Mr. Meyer said. “If it’s not something totally unique, the problem is figuring out what it’s worth when something comparable could come up at auction for 50 percent less.”

Indeed the sales next month include works that had been kicking around the private market at prices significantly higher than their estimates from the auction houses. Among them are a late Picasso canvas owned by Julian Schnabel at Christie’s, as well as a Giacometti cat sculpture owned by an undisclosed European collector and a Koons sculpture belonging to the hedge fund manager Daniel S. Loeb, both for sale at Sotheby’s.

Dealers say that despite the increase in private sales, deals do not happen as briskly as they did in the days when collectors were on waiting lists for hot artists. “Everything is a negotiation,” Mr. Marks said.

Still, Mr. Marks is grateful for business. “I’m not asking sellers any questions,” he said. “I’m just happy the phone is ringing.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

 

Stephanie Seymour relaxing with her pet at home. Courtesy of V magazine.

Peter Brant probably needs no introduction. His collection spans from his close relationship with Andy Warhol when he was a mere undergrad to Jeff Koons, etc. Brant tends to collect select artists deeply, a very good way of collecting historically. Opening a little barn/exhibition hall makes complete sense in the scheme of things.

And perhaps you might run into the legendary Axl Rose ex-lover and current Mrs. Brant, Stephanie Seymour, walking around with a fur coat and nothing else!

The interview below is very helpful, especially as it gives a glimpse of how collector’s view other collectors.

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Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour put their contemporary art collection on show

The newsprint magnate and his wife have one of the largest collections of American art in the world. Next month it goes on display in a new permanent gallery in Connecticut

By Jason Edward Kaufman | From Features | Posted: 8.4.09

NEW YORK. Peter Brant, the collector of contemporary American art, and his wife, the model Stephanie Seymour Brant, have turned a Connecticut fruit barn into a gallery for the display of their paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos.Located on rolling countryside at Conyers Farm, a luxury residential community that Brant developed in Greenwich, the Brant Foundation Art Study Centre, which opens in late May, will mount two exhibitions per year drawn mainly from the approximately 600 works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and dozens of other artists that Brant has amassed over the last four decades.Architect Richard Gluckman has converted the interior of the 1902 stone barn into three skylit galleries and a video room in which the Brants, or guest curators, will organise single-artist or thematic shows of around 40 to 60 works. Brant also collects English and American furniture, and will display 20th-century pieces in the centre. The fields outside will be home to monumental works such as Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, 1994-2000, and his topiary terrier Puppy, 1993, as well as Paul McCarthy’s Santa, 2002, and Richard Serra’s Ali-Frazier, 2001.“We believe it is part of our stewardship to exhibit and share as much of the collection as possible,” says Brant, whose fortune derives from his family-run White Birch Paper Company, the second largest producer of newsprint in North America. He also owns Brant Publications, the publisher of Art in America, the magazines Antiques and Interview (founded by Andy Warhol), and he produced the films “Basquiat”, 1996, “Pollock”, 2000, and “Andy Warhol: a Documentary”, 2006.Because the area is zoned for residential use, the centre will be open by appointment, but Brant anticipates many visitors on Sundays in the summer when hundreds come to watch polo games at the club he founded nearby. The inaugural exhibition, which continues until February 2010, will present around 60 works made between 1978 and 2008 by the aforementioned artists as well as Maurizio Cattelan, Larry Clark, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Eric Fischl, Karen Kilimnik, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel and Cindy Sherman, among others. After that there will be a one-man show devoted to the Swiss artist Urs Fischer. Brant spoke to us by telephone from Palm Beach, Florida where he was competing in the Gold Cup at the US Open Polo Tournament. Now 62, he was the highest ranked amateur in the world for many years. “It’s a game I really love,” he says, “but I think I’m coming towards the end.” However, he has no inclination to withdraw from the art world.

The Art Newspaper: You’re a successful businessman. Why collect art and create a foundation? Peter Brant: My whole philosophy of life revolves around aesthetics and I believe that you should try and sell the gospel. You need to preach and I’ve been doing that my whole life. It’s not something I decided to do four or five years ago…I took one hiatus between 1976 and 1982 when I was involved in horseracing, but besides that I’ve been a very serious collector. We never really acquired art for the purposes of decorating. We always collected because we were very interested in art and art history. We thought this was a good opportunity to give something back to the art world and to our community.

TAN: Do you intend to donate your collection to a museum?PB: Ultimately, if I could afford to, I would like to have the collection put away in the foundation in perpetuity, to be able to show it and to be guaranteed that it would be shown…There are many possibilities. I’ve given works of art to probably 20 or 25 museums, including the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Whitney—and some stand today as pretty major things. Many times when you give works to museums they’re not put on display. I would very much like the foundation to ensure that the works would be shown to the public, and that could be done through an affiliation in the future with a museum, but it might be tied to some sort of condition or guarantee that the works would be exhibited over a period of time.

TAN: What do you think of Eli Broad’s idea of maintaining a collection like a lending library? PB: I’m a great admirer and think he’s one of the really great patrons of the arts. I like the lending library idea, but I do believe that the works should be shown…I have been very active in lending to large retrospective shows of artists we’ve collected. And it’s not just museums [but] gallery shows as well, because I think they have equal importance in many ways…Larry [Gagosian] has had some of the most memorable shows that I can remember. And he’s not the only one. Per Skarstedt, Luhring Augustine, Tony Shafrazi, Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Gavin Brown—there are a number of galleries that have had phenomenal shows. It keeps museum on their toes because they get that portion of the art press and attention, so mediocre exhibitions don’t fly that easily.

TAN: Which other collectors do you admire?PB: David Geffen has a great collection specifically focused in on 1948 to 1961 or 1962—one of the really great collections in the world of that period. Si Newhouse has a great collection. He’s been a collector as long as I have and loves art and has been very dedicated…Some have more depth than others, but to me a great collection is if you have one great work of art.

TAN: Why has your collecting focused on contemporary American artists? PB: Stephanie and I love European art, but collecting is about focusing and doing it in depth. Occasionally I’ll branch out, like in the case of Urs Fischer, but I consider artists like that in a sense American because they live and work in America. For me Francesco Clemente is not an Italian artist, he’s an American artist. I concentrate on what I have some knowledge of and where I can obtain the knowledge easily.

TAN: Have you ever had advisers? PB: I’ve never had an official advisor but I’ve had mentors like Leo Castelli…I would say the one dealer who probably influenced me the most and started me in the right direction was Bruno Bischofberger. I’ve known Bruno since I was 15 or 16 years old—I met him skiing in San Moritz —and he’s still a very close friend. He has one of the best eyes and is one of the most knowledgeable dealers in the world.

TAN: In an interview with the collector Adam Lindemann you said, “As a collector, you really have to be thinking about what people’s tastes are going to be like ten or 15 years from now.” If you buy work you love, what do you care what other people will think in 15 years? PB: You really have to be looking 15 or 20 years from now because an artist should be that much ahead of his time to forecast something aesthetically, politically or culturally…For instance, one of the earliest pictures that I bought was [Andy Warhol’s] Shot Blue Marilyn. Today that is like looking at the Mona Lisa. Marilyn Monroe has a totally different image than she had in 1964 when she passed away. It’s like Elton John’s song. We’ve looked at her life in retrospect since then and what Andy Warhol projected is something that now is very accurate—but nobody knew it at the time. The art world cognoscenti thought that picture was garish and photographic. It was not considered beautiful and not embraced by the art world…But that’s what Andy did, he was the radical artist at that time.To me it’s about looking at something visually or conceptually that is really going to change your view, something that is going to set a new aesthetic because of what it means culturally. Then it will become socialised and become beautiful. But it has to have some importance, some angst that changes your life in some sense. It has to be troublesome in some way.

TAN: So innovation is an important criterion?PB: Yes, the beauty is not enough. If I look at a work by Elizabeth Peyton or Karen Kilimnik or John Currin, it’s not because it’s beautifully done. It stands for something that’s culturally important…One common thread in our collection is that a lot of these artists have gotten their ideas from an image—from going through a magazine or seeing something on a billboard or in a comic book—and it becomes iconic as an image that is available to us subconsciously in some way in our society. That’s what’s happened to our society: we’re looking at pictures.

TAN: You have many works by David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl and Francesco Clemente, who were especially prominent in the 1980s. Why did their stars fall?PB: Their stars have not fallen to me. I think Julian is still an extremely important artist [and] an extremely creative man. He has no fear of branching out and becoming a film-maker and getting involved in music or architecture. I think that confuses people and infuriates them in a jealous way. They felt the same about Andy. He became a film-maker and when he branched out to do Hollywood films, which I was involved in, the art world resented it. But he became more famous in Europe for the films than for the art.You have art dealers who have only been in the business for five years who will comment on the likes of Schnabel, Salle, Fischl and Clemente and talk about them like they’re dinosaurs. Actually they are artists that are in the history books and important in their own right. [We] want to show them with some of the artists who are more, say, au courant than they are. But, again, Warhol is a god today; in the early 1980s he was almost persona non grata. People forget that. Why do you think so much of his late great work was in the estate?

TAN: What do you think of the Mugrabi family trying to corner the Warhol market?PB: It’s a large family and they all have their different qualities and talents. Jose Mugrabi loves art, but it’s also a serious business for him. He started collecting in the early 1980s…but nobody will ever corner the Andy Warhol market. Andy did thousands of pictures. I don’t know how many pictures Jose Mugrabi owns, but like anything in art it’s really the quality that counts, not the number. He does have some quality works as well, and lives with them. People have asked me if I’m trying to corner the market, but I buy maybe one or two works a year of Andy’s to fill in the collection, but it’s not anything sizeable.

TAN: How important is it for you that the work you acquire retains or generates value?PB: I never bought art with the idea that the primary push was that the values are going to go up. I know I have a reputation of buying the right stuff but my primary push is that I have a feeling that something is really great. It’s playful, there’s genius in it and it gets my juices going—that’s why I buy works. And the ones that have appreciated the most are some of the ones that most advisors would tell you never to buy.A perfect example would be the [Jeff Koons] Puppy. I mean, what advisor would tell you to buy the Puppy? It’s maybe Jeff’s greatest work. I started to try and buy it in 1993 when he had just shown it in Aarhus and they couldn’t deliver it because it was in wood and structurally not fit. They had to do it in stainless steel and have it manufactured in Australia so it was a long wait. The idea to plant 80,000 flowers every year—nobody is going to tell you to buy something like that. But to me it was like the greatest public sculpture that I’d seen, as important as anything done in the last couple of hundred years, and [I knew that] one day this foundation would display works and this was a pivotal piece to show and have. It’s probably my favourite work of art.

TAN: Do you sometimes sell or trade works to raise funds for other purchases?PB: Absolutely. I have done that all my life. If I am short and I have extra works of a certain period and don’t have the funding to buy something I need, I sell from time to time. But on balance I am a buyer…The last time was over a year ago when I sold some of Andy’s work that I felt that I had other examples of in order to raise money. In that case we were making a large acquisition for my company and [needed to raise money] because of the capital markets shutting down about a year and a half ago, so I did sell some things.

TAN: How is the downturn of the economy and the art market going to affect your collecting?PB: In the last two or three months I actually have been buying. I find that the opportunity is there today to buy higher quality and it’s available at lower prices because more people need the liquidity and the money. For collectors it’s an opportunity to buy at a different level. The level that the art was at nine months to a year-and-a-half ago was an unrealistic level and an unhealthy level considering that it made it very difficult for collectors to collect. It’s much better that dealers have to think now about pricing their work more reasonably both in the primary and on the secondary market to entice collectors. It’s about time that happened…I feel that it’s very important that artists realise that the world is what it is today and they have to adjust and not be unreasonable. [That means] scaling back projects that are not realistic in today’s economy and depending more on being creative and having brilliant ideas that don’t have to be executed in gold or platinum or diamonds. 

TAN: What about Damien Hirst? Did you buy at the Hirst auction at Sotheby’s? PB: No. I think Damien is a great artist, but it’s the old saying: You live by the sword, you die by the sword. He kind of maximised the commerciality of his business. I believe that the volume that you turn out and the way in which it’s executed has some meaning in the traditional sense in the art world. That has no bearing on how great an artist you are—Picasso, Monet and Warhol, a lot of the greatest artists have done a huge amount of volume. But you have to be prepared to go through those moments when the supply is going to outdo the demand. I think I have one very early Hirst Apothecary cabinet piece done in 1989 that I bought probably in 1991. I have had other works by him, but I did not buy anything in that sale.

TAN: What have you bought recently?PB: Some of Urs Fischer’s work, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, some work from Gavin Brown’s show of Jonathan Horowitz on the Obama election, Cindy Sherman I like a lot.

TAN: Does the current climate favour auction houses or dealers?PB: I think there are better opportunities for dealers only because the transition in the auction houses has been so severe. They were very strong over a period of six years, then as the market turned they naturally got hit because of the guarantees they had out there. Everything that was part of their formula for growth all of a sudden hit in the ninth inning. It’s a temporary hit, but in the meantime the dealers have an opportunity to do private sales and secondary-market transactions. What the auction houses have to do is scale down their evening sales for contemporary art and really concentrate on getting the best quality. How do you do that when the prices come down and you can’t offer anything attractive to the [consignors]? They have to still continue to actively pursue quality things…if they [once] had 60 works in an evening sale they should have perhaps 30 and make them really good. Dealers have sour grapes about the auction houses because they’ve eroded into their business especially on the secondary market for private sales, which is a very stupid place for the auction houses to be. They don’t have the expertise and you’re competing against your customers—the largest portion of customers of the auction houses is the art dealers. I think the auction houses are making some mistakes now by trying to underestimate where the market is to increase the percentage of their sell-through. That’s very destructive to the art market. Just like they were responsible for increasing the values faster than they should have, they also are now responsible for decreasing the values faster than they should be. That’s because some moron in these auction houses, a financial guy, says they think the market’s gone down 50% so everything’s 50% lower—every appraisal that is given for a bank on collateral, every insurance appraisal. That’s a self-defeating position. I don’t think the market has deteriorated as much as the press believes that it has because I’m talking to dealers that are doing business. They might be doing business at a lower level, but it’s not 50% or 60% below where it was a year or two ago. For quality things it might be 25% lower.

TAN: A recent debate organised by Robert Rosenkranz of Delphi Fund postulated that the art market is less ethical than the stock market. Would you agree?PB: I think that there’s no comparison. I believe that the country is in the condition that it’s in today largely because of what transpired on Wall Street. I’m not a great fan of such a large population of people that are effectively controlling our resources that don’t really make or produce anything. What got us into trouble was the packaging of these mortgages and the lack of contact with individuals on the street, and this idea to package it and sell it off to someone else—mortgages, credits, derivatives and the whole works. The transparency in the art world is 100 times better and greater than on Wall Street. The very nature of the art market being entrepreneurial and having such a cast of characters involved, it forms like a knitting group of people that are yakking away like old ladies. It might be regulated on Wall Street but nobody understands it. Can you read Citibank’s balance sheet? Who the hell can read that? You can have a masters in business administration or accounting and you can’t read that balance sheet. It’s impossible. I’ve had a lot of dealings with purchasing and selling through these auction companies over the last 40 years, and I think today they’ve regulated themselves a lot more, especially since the anti-trust case that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Sotheby’s and Christie’s. These companies are so large with so many employees that if anything like that went on it would be known, and I don’t believe that they do that. They’re very strict on setting reserves, and people can’t bid up to the reserves.

TAN: I understand that you’re commissioning portraits of your wife by various artists?PB: We’ve been doing that for around ten years. There are probably 15 or 16 artists who have already done it: Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, George Condo, Thomas Ruff, Maurizio Cattelan, Kenny Scharf, Piotr Uklanski, Enoc Perez, another artist I’ve been collecting. Jeff Koons, Urs Fischer and Karen Kilimnik are working on theirs. I’m going to ask John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton but I want them to want to do it. I want it to be collaborative because Stephanie is a professional poser and a great art collector. The whole idea is that the artist can do whatever they want. It will take probably another ten years and at some point we’ll show all the portraits at our foundation and in conjunction with a couple of museums. Those are all commissioned by the foundation and can never be sold. To visit the Brant collection email: thebrantfoundation@gmail.com

©2009 The Art Newspaper

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Sophie Call, “Take Care of Yourself,” installation with photography, text and video, 2007-2009. Courtesy of Paula Cooper, New York.

If you can make it, come to the opening at Paula Cooper tonight, 6-8PM, 9 April 2009. Ms. Calle will be in attendance.

If you didn’t catch the exhibition at the last Venice, it concerns Calle’s incomprehension at a Dear John letter she received. She rather asked 107 women, mainly based on professions but also because some are her friends, to respond to the letter: A translator translates the letter into English, a traditional Indian dancer interprets through performance, etc. Although Calle is know for her self-reflexivity and photography, I have always been intrigued by her experimentation between aesthetics and language–or in this case the failure of. This is why this particular project is so important and a nice enjoinder to her previous project, “Exquisite Pain,” also about the end of a relationship. Perhaps the most important piece is the piece by the Translator, from French to English, who notes the failture of faithful translation.

Sophie Call, “Take Care of Yourself,” installation with photography, text and video, 2007-2009. Courtesy of Paula Cooper, New York.

Amazing! MMM was quiet touched in Venice, more so now, after a recent break up. I hear ya sistah!

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Sophie Calle

Take Care of Yourself

April 9 - May 22, 2009534 W 21st Street

NEW YORK — The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present the first U.S. exhibition of Sophie Calle’s “Take Care of Yourself,” a body of work created for the French Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale.  The show will open on 9 April 2009 and will remain on view through May at 534 West 21st Street.I received an email telling me it was over.I didn’t know how to respond.It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me.It ended with the words, “Take care of yourself.”And so I did.I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers),chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter.To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it.Dissect it.  Exhaust it.  Understand it for me.Answer for me.It was a way of taking the time to break up.A way of taking care of myself.In this “tour de force of feminine responses…executed in a wild range of media,” Sophie Calle orchestrates a virtual chorus of women’s interpretations and assessments of a breakup letter she received in an email. In photographic portraits, textual analysis, and filmed performances, the show presents a seemingly exhaustive compendium with contributions ranging from a clairvoyant’s response to a scientific study, a children’s fairytale to a Talmudic exegesis, among many others. Examining the conditions and possibilities of human emotions, Take Care of Yourself opens up ideas about love and heartache, gender and intimacy, labor and identity. 107 women (including a parrot) from the realms of anthropology, criminology, philosophy, psychiatry, theater, opera, soap opera and beyond each take on this letter, reading and re-reading it, performing it, transforming it, and pursuing the emotions it contains and elicits. Since the late 1970s, Sophie Calle has made work that investigates provocative and often controversial methods for confronting her emotional and psychological life.  She is well-known for her sleuth-like explorations of human relationships, which led her to follow a stranger in the streets of Venice and document his every move, or to find work as a hotel chambermaid in order to photograph the belongings of the hotel’s guests. Calle’s work has been shown in international venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum Boymans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), among others.Take Care of Yourself was first presented at the French Pavillion in the 2007 Venice Biennale. It traveled to the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (4/1 – 6/7/08) and to DHC/ART, Montréal, Canada (7/4 – 10/19/08).  It is scheduled to continue traveling to various international venues, including Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, in 2009 and 2010. In addition, the artist will have one-person exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (Oct. 2009), the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (5/26/09 – 9/13/09) and the DePont Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands (1/16/10 – 5/16/10).A catalogue titled Take Care of Yourself was published by Actes Sud in 2007.

 In a brilliant sales and media campaign move, Mary “Devil wears Prada” Boone has decided to sue a collector who agreed to purchase a Will Cotton painting at Basel Miami 2008 for not completing the sale.

Will Cotton and Mary Boone. Courtesy of New York Social Diary.

First of all, Will Cotton?!?! You have got to be kidding me. Of all the artists to sue over, the silly, amateurish work of Will Cotton wouldn’t be my bet. I suppose, each to her own. Just look at the Lisa Yuskavage wannabee cartoon porn below from his latest show at Boone.

Will Cotton, REVERIE, 2008, oil on linen, 34 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

I know dealers are desperate, but a lawsuit!?!? I do feel the art market is far too informal: for goodness sakes, you can make a six figure purchase by the shake of the hand. If I was a dealer, I would have collectors sign contracts on the spot and a small deposit for each purchase. If that’s what it takes to buy a house or a car in this world…

Of course, MMM does not need to remind dear reader that this is not the first time Ms. Boone has sued someone. In fact, she has sued her own artists! Just five months after re-signing David Salle in 2000, Boone sued him for $1 million. According to Boone, Salle broke a contract they signed where Boone promised to advance Salle $500,000, in return for which he would consign work worth at least $850,000 to her gallery. She’d pay all the promotional costs, and they’d split the sales, 60-40 in his favor. She forked over the advance. But, according to Boone’s lawsuit, Salle has “refused to consign” his work. Three years before, Boone sued Salle for selling work directly out of the studio to the late designer Gianni Versace after Versace backed out of a deal to buy an $80,000 Salle from Boone’s gallery.

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Mary Boone Sues Collector   Published: March 13, 2009   NEW YORK— Mary Boone Gallery is suing an Ohio collector in an attempt to compel her to complete her purchase of a painting, Artnet reports. Mary Kidder, a trustee of the Columbus Museum of Art, first saw the painting in question, a piece by Will Cotton, at Mary Boone’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2008. The work, Ribbon Candy, was priced at $50,000, but the gallery sold it to Kidder at a discounted price of $32,000, “in recognition of Kidder’s prominence in the art world and the gallery’s desire to do business with her.” According to the suit, Kidder agreed to buy the painting and was sent an invoice. Two weeks later, however, she changed her mind and canceled the transaction. Mary Boone is now arguing that there was a “binding contract” for the purchase and that Kidder must either complete the purchase or compensate the gallery for the $30,000 it already paid Cotton. The suit, which was filed in early February, remains unsettled. According to New York attorney John Koegel, who represents neither party in the dispute, the gallery’s argument contradicts both regular commercial practice and rules covering purchases over $500.

Copyright © 2009, Louise Blouin Media.

Beyond their support of amazing artists and possessing one of the truly phenomenal collections of contemporary art, they know how to cut through the bullshit. Just read below, though I’m sure you don’t need any more advice of being bull in this market, do you?

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Experts explain where the values are—and what to avoid—in the current market

by Milton Esterow

“It’s the best time to buy,” said Don Rubell, who with his wife, Mera, is on the ARTnews list of the world’s top 200 collectors.

“I’d buy till it hurts right now,” said Peter Marzio, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

“If you’re liquid, this is the time when there are bargains,” said Michael Findlay, a director of Acquavella Galleries in New York.

“There are unbelievable opportunities,” said William Ruprecht, Sotheby’s chief executive officer.

What’s going on? Where have these folks been lately? After all, the Wall Street bankers, the Russian oligarchs, the hedge-fund poo-bahs, the casino tycoons, and the Asian billionaires no longer have so many billions. It’s no secret that the art bubble has burst.

The sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar, and contemporary art at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips de Pury & Company last November yielded a total of $803.3 million, less than half of the $1.75 billion total of November 2007. No one is convinced that private art sales, which annually reach between $25 billion and $30 billion, will climb that high this year.

Last year Leslie Waddington, the London dealer, told me that the good times had to end. “Everything is cyclical,” he said. “I just don’t understand what’s happening.” He added: “I’m expecting trouble, but I have been expecting trouble for a year and a half, and nothing has happened.”

Some weeks ago, he told me, “The telephones aren’t ringing.”

However, Roland Augustine, president of Luhring Augustine and president of the Art Dealers Association of America, is “very positive” about 2009.

“As painful as this contraction is, it’s a welcome time for the art market because the inflationary conditions in the market in the last few years have seen their final days,” he said. “I welcome that. Collectors welcome it. The speculation, at least for the moment, has seen its demise. We have moved away from appreciating the language of art toward treating art as a commodity, and as long as you treat it that way you lose the value of the language.

“I think we will also see better art produced. I think in times like these artists will spend more time considering the art they are creating, instead of being driven to produce art for the marketplace. Artists in many cases have spread themselves very thinly over the last decade.”

The last time there was trouble in the art market was in the 1990s. “I was at the art fair in Basel,” said Rubell, who with his wife established the Rubell Family Collection as a museum of contemporary art in Miami. “It was so empty that you could roll a bowling ball down the aisles.”

Two years ago, at the height of the art boom,you could not roll bowling balls during the Art Basel Miami Beach fair. The fair organizers usually arrange for very rich collectors—dealers are not invited—to attend in advance of the official opening. They line up at the entrance and are permitted to come into the fair two hours before collectors who are not so rich. This gives them a head start in seeing works for sale at the various booths.

“They weren’t exactly grabbing works off the wall, but it was something like a stampede,” said one observer. “It was a feeding frenzy,” said another. One private dealer disguised himself, managed to get on the line, and hurried to various booths so he could advise his clients what to buy.

So if the good times have ended, how do you buy and sell works of art in a recession?

“The current economy provides opportunities for collectors who are really serious about acquiring works of art at the highest quality level, which may have seemed impossible before,” said Marzio. “Now is the time to go up in quality. Everyone always says they buy the best, but they don’t.”

“The real collectors are still buying—but less,” said Pierre Levai, president of Marlborough.

Raymond J. Learsy, a prominent New York collector with his wife, Melva Bucksbaum, agreed. He said, “I’ve always felt that the art market marches to a different drummer than financial markets. People who are really interested in art are a little bit like smokers. You just can’t give it up. It becomes intrinsic to your life and you go and delve into resources that you might not have thought you had to continue collecting.”

Rubell told me that some of the best pieces in his collection were bought during the last recession. “It takes courage to buy at a moment like this, but you get rewarded very much,” he said. “Things are available now. There’s more negotiating going on. Buy pieces from artists who are totally established, who have a track record, or buy from very young artists. There’s always a new generation of artists coming up.”

Jay Gorney, director of contemporary art at the New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash, agreed: “It’s certainly an opportunity to look at the work of younger artists whose work may have been undervalued. It also gives you a chance to look at those artists who may not have realized huge prices or reached the popularity of some of their peers.”

Findlay had another suggestion. He said, “Rather than look for things that may have diminished greatly because they went up quickly in value, look for works by artists who have had a steady increase, who have a track record from before the bubble. Avoid artists who may have risen enormously. I don’t think the market yet knows what those values might be.”

He added, “People who have works of high quality are not going to give them away. And when they are forced to sell, there will be a degree of competition for works that are very good. Also, collectors are going to be more patient. They don’t have to make their minds up overnight.”

One reason collectors no longer have to make a decision in a hurry is that the waiting list some galleries had for works by certain artists has disappeared.

Chelsea art dealer Edward Winkleman offered advice on his blog on how to buy, urging collectors not to stop looking, “even if your art buying budget has been squeezed due to the economy. . . . Looking is free. I suspect many collectors cringe at the thought of an anxious young dealer swooping down upon them with desperate discount offers or pleas for any purchase, but it’s easy enough to be frank with such gallerists, saying you can’t make any purchases at the moment, but you’re still very interested in their program and wish to continue to see their new shows.”

What about discounts? Winkleman says, “You can expect a much meeker response from dealers to your inquiries about discounts these days, I’ll bet on that. But focusing on discounts alone may not be your best means of securing that piece you want. Discussing discounts in conjunction with a long-term interest in the gallery program is your best avenue here.”

Another tip: “Many young collectors may not know that most galleries are happy to work out some sort of payment plan.”

Auctioneers have changed payment plans, too. They have said they would cut guarantees, stop offering bargains on commission charges to sellers, and tighten credit terms to buyers. Price estimates have also been revised.

Museums, of course, have had to change plans, too. Some have made cuts in staff and reduced budgets. I asked Everett Fahy, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the European paintings department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, how museums have been affected during other periods of economic turmoil.

“Some of the greatest paintings at the Metropolitan, including Andrea Mantegna’s The Adoration of the Shepherds, Jean Antoine Watteau’s Mezzetin, and Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates, came to the museum during the Great Depression in the 1930s because people were forced to sell,” he said.

I asked Rubell if the “feeding frenzy” will return.

“Collectors are obsessive, compulsive, and competitive people who always like to get the best first,” he said.

Milton Esterow is editor and publisher of ARTnews. Additional reporting by Ann Landi.

Interesting and rather catty: never a consultant, always an advisor. I do love the comment by Alan Schwartzman about the transfer from being “decorators” to “art advisors.”

As I’m sure everyone who reads this knows, its an AMAZING time to buy, though I do disagree that buying privately is better than at auctions. If you are tapped into a circle of dealers and advisors and communicate interest in certain artists/times/works, wonders will emerge, like David Hammons body prints! Can’t say much know, but basically, auctions are just another way to access material but in a more transparent manner.

I would though focus on secondary material from artists you thought you could never get/afford rather than new artists: You may find the prices are remarkably similar.

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Art Advisers Roundtable Photo by Michael Edwards “Art+Auction” Editor in Chief Anthony Barzilay Freund; advisers Abigail Asher, Allan Schwartzman, Stefano Basilico, and Mary Hoeveler; “Art+Auction” Staff Writer Sarah Douglas   Published: March 1, 2009   Where are we headed? We brought together four of the best art market minds to talk about the advice they give and how the landscape has changed. START: 01/09/09 10:05 P.M. NAME OF THE GAME SARAH DOUGLAS: What does an art adviser do? Are the terms art adviser and art consultant interchangeable? ABIGAIL ASHER: When I hear art consultant I break out in hives. Don’t you? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: At some point in the ’90s, the business cards went from interior decorator to art consultant. MARY HOEVELER: As an art adviser, you establish a longer-term relationship. An art consultant is typically more project-oriented. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: I think of myself more as a curator. MARY HOEVELER: Curator isn’t exactly accurate either, because there’s a lot of knowledge about the market that enables me to do what I do. ABIGAIL ASHER: Clients are looking for someone with curatorial expertise who is watching their back with investments. STEFANO BASILICO: When I had a gallery, my clients were my artists. Now my job is to protect my collector clients. But the activity is the same: to make sense of art — in this case, to put together a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Value in the marketplace is an essential part of the advice. Having said that, I don’t think any of us would ever work with somebody whose desire is to be an art investor. MARY HOEVELER: They do want to make sure the price is appropriate and that we believe there is going to be some future for an artwork. SARAH DOUGLAS: Mary, you started with the Citibank art advisory. Was there more of an expectation there that art would play an investment role with your clients? MARY HOEVELER: The assumption was always that because it was within a bank, we were an art-investment advisory group. We weren’t. We made it very clear to prospective clients that this was not about putting together a diversified asset-allocation portfolio. We had clients who would come to us and say, “I’m allocating 2 percent of my portfolio to art. Just buy stuff.” We shied away from that. Neither at Citibank nor in my present practice do I take on people with strictly investment mentalities. SARAH DOUGLAS: In the recent boom, there seemed to be a glut of art advisers. Did this give the profession a bad name? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Most people who do this are gatekeepers. They know rich people, they have some access to art, and they provide people who may be interested in collecting art with access. Having said that, I believe that whether it’s art advisers, dealers, curators or critics, most people in the contemporary-art field are enthusiasts more than experts. MARY HOEVELER: It’s a term people use loosely. I’ve seen freelance registrars who call themselves art advisers; really they do collection management. STEFANO BASILICO: The problem with boom times is that you get the list of 10 artists that everyone should have. TONY FREUND: Have clients come to you in the past decade and actually said, “This is my list. Let’s go shopping now?” MARY HOEVELER: Absolutely not. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Any collection that was put together by a list, no matter how good the individual artworks, is not a good collection. LIVING WITH IT TONY FREUND: Take us through the ideal relationship with a particular client. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: In 1996, Howard Rachofsky had this great house built in Dallas by Richard Meier. When he finished it, he realized it was more than a house; it was a work of art. He decided then that when he died, he wanted the house to become an adjunct facility of the Dallas Museum of Art. He wanted to be more thoughtful about collecting. TONY FREUND: What did he collect before he built the house and before you started working with him in 1997? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Mostly it had been a handful of midcentury European masters. He had an Arp, a Hofmann, and he also had large-scale, colorful ‘80s paintings. But the house undermined large-scale painting. That led us into Minimalism, which was the language that had given birth to the architect. It just so happened that it was a moment when there were great opportunities to buy major Minimalist works. Because he loved American art of the ’50s, that naturally led us to Ad Reinhardt. This led us to Italian Art of the ’50s, principally to Fontana and Manzoni. MARY HOEVELER: You can’t buy a work in the abstract unless it’s for somebody who has an institutional intention, like the Rubell Family Collection. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that your client has a six-by-eight-foot wall. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: A real collector buys beyond the capacity of the house. MARY HOEVELER: But the reality is that there is a specific environment in which these works of art have to make sense. I have a client who is a Minimalist collector and really wants a Richard Serra prop piece. But he has toddlers and a dog running around, so he can’t do that right now. STEFANO BASILICO: I have clients whose collecting is more adventurous than their house allows. They realize they have to build a new house. TONY FREUND: As part of your advisory services, have you ever collaborated with the architect to make sure the art would have the right home? ABIGAIL ASHER: Often you work with an architect from the very beginning, to make sure there are the right walls, lighting and everything else. SARAH DOUGLAS: Are private museums a big part of what you do? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: That’s half my clientele. A project I worked on for years was with Marieluise Hessel, who is the patron behind the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She engaged me when she decided to create a permanent museum building for her collection. I have a project in Brazil now with the collector Bernardo Paz, a museum that’s in its infant stages of being open to the public. SARAH DOUGLAS: How about inexperienced collectors — what are the challenges of working with someone just starting out? ABIGAIL ASHER: With someone who has never bought before, who has never looked, it’s very different from editing or reeducating. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: I don’t work with beginners. The way I work is about figuring out what the priorities are, not coming to the client until I’ve found the right work for them to acquire. MARY HOEVELER: Working with new collectors is harder because they are so impressionable. There are a lot of false starts. ABIGAIL ASHER: It’s much more of an education process with a new collector. MARY HOEVELER: I have also had new collectors who are so decisive and have such a clear vision of what they want that it’s been an absolute pleasure. But I’ve had whole years of no buying at all, just education. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: It takes a lot of getting to know people to begin to understand what their priorities are. These are usually things they have not articulated for themselves. SARAH DOUGLAS: Have there been collectors you refused to work with? MARY HOEVELER: I had to fire a client once because he violated the rules of engagement that we had established. Of course, you don’t actually fire a client. You say, “I don’t think I can offer you the kind of service you are looking for, and you are going to be better served by somebody else. We’re not a good match.” ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: I was approached several years ago by a rather established collector about working with him. Although he was a member of several substantial museum boards, he was known to be problematic in certain ways. So I went to a dealer whose discretion I trust and asked him what he thought. He said, “You can’t bring him up. He can only bring you down.” Those words resonate in my head whenever I consider working with someone new. THE NEW REALITY SARAH DOUGLAS: How are your clients reacting to what’s happening in the art market now? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Virtually all my clients are collecting art now. The critical issue for them is confidence that a price is an appropriate value. In some instances this does mean adjusting prices. In other instances, it’s indicating why prices aren’t being adjusted. MARY HOEVELER: While my clients are waiting for a clear signal from the market on secondary-market material, they are still quite active. Everyone seems to be full speed ahead on the primary market. They recognize that it’s a great time to buy art. SARAH DOUGLAS: Are you talking about established artists or emerging artists? MARY HOEVELER: Emerging and solid midcareer. ABIGAIL ASHER: There are opportunities now. In the past few years a lot of people have been feeling shut out. A lot of our clients are feeling that this is a moment in history when they will be able to get truly great things back into their collections. Great things that people are forced to sell are going to be available. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Primary-market galleries are particularly appreciative of collectors who continue to patronize them during this period, and the goodwill that gets created will perhaps re-position certain collectors who were sidelined. ABIGAIL ASHER: I feel that the primary market will be slower to recover than the secondary market. STEFANO BASILICO: It’s an amazing time to do the kind of work we do. It was in the ‘90s — the bottom of the market — that some important collectors like Si Newhouse and Leonard Lauder built their collections. One conversation I’ve had with my clients is making it clear to them that masterpieces don’t come around every day. Even though you think the market may drop a little bit more tomorrow, this particular work may not be available tomorrow. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Some of the greatest opportunities I’ve had in my own collecting have been in the last number of months, when there’s been less collecting going on in general — when some of my clients have taken a pause, and I’ve had the opportunity to buy the things myself. MARY HOEVELER: I’ve never heard a collector say that they regretted spending too much for something great. I’ve heard them say they regretted not buying something. SARAH DOUGLAS: Are dealers readier to give you discounts these days? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: There’s still a lack of clarity as to where prices can and should be. A few have been quick to adapt to the times in both primary- and secondary-market pricing. SARAH DOUGLAS: Are your clients pressuring you to bargain more as well? STEFANO BASILICO: I’ve always seen it as my job to bargain. Sometimes you have to understand what a bargain is. Is the bargain having an opportunity to purchase the work? Or getting a discount? MARY HOEVELER: If the dealer is asking a fair price for the work to begin with, I really don’t have any interest in chiseling the dealer down on it. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: In terms of the overall market, there has been a great disservice in how it has been reported recently. There’s been a tendency to look upon it monolithically. This is not one market. It’s not gold or pork bellies. In the evening sales, the market decided that there was a certain amount of work it wasn’t interested in. I think that true connoisseurship was being exercised in a great way. ABIGAIL ASHER: Overpriced second-rate works were not selling. That’s great for the market. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: I was surrounded at the fall auctions by real collectors, many of whom were probably sidelined in the past few years, who were actively buying. They were sane; they were thoughtful; they knew what they wanted. In two or three days, $300 million got spent on contemporary art, which is extraordinary. STEFANO BASILICO: The poster child was the Yayoi Kusama painting at Christie’s. It set a record for Kusama, more than $5 million. It was in great condition and had been owned by Donald Judd. It became about connoisseurship. MARY HOEVELER: Shows have sold out since September, in both secondary- and primary market material. The market is still quite active — it’s just that the urgency is gone and the prices are no longer going sky high. TONY FREUND: The party is over, but the party isn’t what the art market should be about. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: This has been a period in which there’s been a confusion between important artists and artists who have performed well in the marketplace. STEFANO BASILICO: Money became the only barometer with which we evaluated art. MARY HOEVELER: Wall Street began to take notice of what was happening to prices in the art market. After the softening of the [stock] market in 2002 and 2003, people gravitated toward the art market, which was relatively strong, because they saw the returns that art was bringing. The media fueled that. The feeding frenzy began, and people who were not traditional collectors came in. STEFANO BASILICO: The same thing happened at the end of the ‘80s. In 1987 the stock and real estate markets tanked, but the art world kept going strong until about 1990. Money decided that the art world was a safer home. That will happen again at some point. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: You had a new tier of collectors, and they had precipitated a kind of hedge-fund-ification of the art market. Stefano Basilico: Most collectors haven’t been collecting for 10 years; most galleries haven’t been around for 10 years. What they know is a fairly hothouse environment. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: The number of committed, substantial collectors is great now — greater than it was 10 years ago. But there will be some interesting shifts, and I think that a lot of this is not totally knowable yet. The ‘80s began as a period that collected large-scale, brash, ego-driven, ultraconfident painting and ended with intimate, handmade, flawed, inwardly turning, psychological art. No one could have predicted that. We are similarly at a time when there will be a shift in priorities of taste and this will help shift the attention of the market. PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE SARAH DOUGLAS: Will there be a movement away from auctions and fairs to private transactions? Journalists depend on auctions and fairs to understand what’s going on. STEFANO BASILICO: In the past 15 years, a larger portion of the market has become more public and allowed more people to know, up to a point, what was happening. The Mei Moses indexes, based on auction records, are fascinating, but they represent only 5 percent of all transactions. MARY HOEVELER: Even in the boom day of auctions, you had only a tiny piece of the story. The art market is so hard to analyze. The same work of art has to come back to auction several times for you to see any kind of pattern. ABIGAIL ASHER: In an economic downturn, people prefer to buy in private. MARY HOEVELER: The brilliance of auctions is the competition they create, adding 20 to 30 percent of value to something because of that extra bid. A lot of collectors didn’t want to get caught up in that, and they are now quietly coming back into the market. ABIGAIL ASHER: We’ve all bought at auctions. They’ve served an amazing purpose in bringing works in a democratic way to the market. MARY HOEVELER: Yes, they remain an unparalleled source for material. They’re also a place where a lot of new buyers feel comfortable. STEFANO BASILICO: And an art adviser does incredible work at auction. I’ve found myself in one specific instance saying to a client during the sale, “That’s enough. You shouldn’t bid any higher.” It was too high a price. MARY HOEVELER: The auction house strategy is typically to get as low an estimate as it can on something. It has to deal with consignor greed, obviously. But its interest is going to be to try to get the estimate as attractive as possible to generate competitive bidding. So most people realize that estimates are a marketing tool more than a guideline as to what you should be spending on the piece. ABIGAIL ASHER: There were so many other factors that came into play that would lead to the houses having to do estimates that weren’t necessarily reflective of value. TONY FREUND: Primarily their competition to snag consignments. ABIGAIL ASHER: But an innocent buyer doesn’t necessarily know or understand that! MARY HOEVELER: In the past, if you had anything of remotely commercial value, you would put it up at auction. It was a seller’s market. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: And the auction houses were giving guarantees way in advance of perceived value, so there was no risk involved. MARY HOEVELER: It no longer is necessary to sell at auction. Dealers get to come back into the picture. The dealers know the work as well as or better than the auction houses do. ABIGAIL ASHER: When you go to look at something privately, you like the idea of having time to spend with that object. Maybe you live with it for 10 days; 15 or 20 years ago that was the norm, a much slower process. FAIR GAME TONY FREUND: Speed has been the name of the game, particularly at fairs. MARY HOEVELER: Collectors have been a bit bullied by the market. The one-hour reserve — all of that is over, and people have the luxury now of being able to reflect on their purchases. That’s very welcome. There is going to be a level of client service that we haven’t seen in the past five years. Collectors will demand it. SARAH DOUGLAS: During the boom, you had huge growth in art fairs. ABIGAIL ASHER: It was fair overkill, and the quality suffered. There’s a limit to how many great secondary-market things any dealer can get during the year. MARY HOEVELER: From a professional standpoint, my sense was always that fairs were a bit of a farce, because you were sent jpegs weeks before, and many of the deals were done before the fair. ABIGAIL ASHER: Our job is to filter that for clients so that they don’t have to walk into a fair and be overwhelmed. The pressure is taken off them. STEFANO BASILICO: It’s not an ideal way to look at art. A spectacular fair booth doesn’t compare to a good exhibition. MARY HOEVELER: My clients actually love fairs. I am much less enamored of them because I feel like everything is degraded — it just looks like so much merchandise. You have no context in which to make assessments of new work. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Fairs are dangerous for developing collectors. It’s like when you go on vacation and you have a certain budget you are prepared to spend, and then you spend money you wouldn’t spend otherwise. For me, the fairs are useful. Every year at Basel I see something that I didn’t know to look for. And it’s a great opportunity to interact with a wide range of dealers. SARAH DOUGLAS: What changes did you observe in Miami this time? ABIGAIL ASHER: People were more interested in looking at art than worrying about the silly social things. The mood was strange. MARY HOEVELER: It felt more like a cultural event than a marketplace. People were looking more than buying. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: It was depressing. I saw a lot of younger galleries that made a big effort and sold nothing. STEFANO BASILICO: I think there is a difference between art-fair art and exhibition art. Art-fair art is sort of filler. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: There’s a fallacy that people discover artists at fairs. The only time I’ve discovered an artist at a fair is when a dealer is taking me by the hand and saying, “Here’s an interesting artist. I’d like to show you her work.” Which makes it a great opportunity for collectors who are just getting grounded. How many people walk into Pace and ask a price and have Arne Glimcher come out and tell them? MARY HOEVELER: But you get saturated after one aisle. That’s the other thing that puzzles me about people’s passion for art fairs. They’re physically, mentally, intellectually exhausting. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: I have a rule for fairs. For the first few hours, I run around, engage in as few conversations as possible. If I see something for a client, I put it on hold. To have that clarity of scanning at the beginning is essential. TONY FREUND: Do you think the Art Basel Miami Beach phenomenon will continue in the current economy? STEFANO BASILICO: Yes. The 110 other fairs next to it, I don’t think so. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: It’s a totally unnecessary fair. Somehow Basel underattended is an opportunity, whereas Miami underattended is depressing. LOOKING FORWARD SARAH DOUGLAS: What do you predict will happen in the art market over the next several months? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: There will be a process of natural selection. The market will sacrifice a certain number of artists and galleries. What will result is a greater preservation of prices for a large number of artists. STEFANO BASILICO: Or everything could more or less stop for a period of time, like in the ’90s. The market is behaving reasonably at the moment. But that’s not a guarantee that it will continue to do so. ABIGAIL ASHER: There’s going to be a shift toward seeking out top-quality, rare things. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Certain price levels will be particularly vulnerable. The low-seven-figure range is problematic at this point. And the upper level — the $40 million, $60 million, $80 million range — seems to have taken a vacation. MARY HOEVELER: All the conventional wisdom was defied in the past market. I hope we are returning to some semblance of rationality in terms of understanding value. SARAH DOUGLAS: How do you provide context for prices and value for your clients right now? MARY HOEVELER: You have to bring it down to the micro level, object by object. Why is this appropriate? What gap does it fill in your collection? Opportunities don’t happen that frequently. My client has a good expression: “Are you jumping up and down?” TONY FREUND: And how do you think emerging artists’ work will fare in these days of uncertainty? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: There are different levels of emerging art. For the emerging artists whose prices got pushed, after one show, to the $30,000 level, there might be a lot more thought that goes into buying them. One of the vulnerabilities in this market is that in the past year or two there was an acceleration of raising primary-market prices to the secondary-market level. SARAH DOUGLAS: What do you say to a client who is holding on to some works by an artist whose prices have become significantly inflated? ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: Art has never been a highly liquid asset. To look upon it in terms of three-month, six-month, even one-year projections in value is dangerous and inappropriate. Most collectors, except for a handful who entered in the past year and a half, will find that over a 10-year period, if they bought art wisely, they will have done better with their art than they did with their stocks. And as I kept hearing in the ’90s, “at least it’s something I love and believe in, and I can enjoy it.” ABIGAIL ASHER: In boom times the herd mentality is dominant. What we learned from the ’90s was that you had to be looking at things as an individual, not just do what everybody else was doing. ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN: In the past decade, emerging collectors have had a much higher level of knowledge. MARY HOEVELER: The legacy of the ’80s was that the market got democratized. That was part of the auction house legacy. But I do think people are much more sophisticated as collectors now. That’s why this crash hasn’t been as extreme. STEFANO BASILICO: In the ’80s, informed collectors didn’t have advisers. Now they do, because we bring something to the table that is valuable to them. END: 01/09/09 2:35 P.M. “Art Advisers Round-Table” originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction’s March 2009 Table of Contents.

Copyright © 2009, Louise Blouin Media. All rights reserved.

Mix in cultural transactions with good, old fashion commerce. Who doesn’t want their artists displayed in a museum, especially in Havana?!?!

I tried to fine a full list of artists involved but found none so if you got the 411, please do send it to MMM!

Personally, I’m excited about discovering Alejandro Almanza Pereda, represented by Magnan Projects. Born in 1997, Mexico City, he works with various materials, objects, connotations, situations, circumstances and conditions. Pereda constructs large instilations enjoining work tools with mirrors, lights and built-in environments. He’s had solo project at Art in General and a residence with the Cisneros Foundation.

 

Alejandro Almanza Pereda, “Rock Paper Scissors,” 2008. Glass, cinderblocks, paper lanterns, axes, bonsai trees, cardboard boxes, bricks, confetti, concrete, diamond, book, nail clipper, shears, plastic cutlery, coal, money, paper bag, dimension vary. Courtesy of Magnan Projects, New York.

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Chelsea galleries visit Havana

US dealers challenge Cuba embargo in test of new president’s cultural policies

By Charmaine Picard | From Art Market | Posted: 11.3.09

NEW YORK. Twenty-eight US art galleries have been invited to show work at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba, for the first time since 1986. Organised by New York art dealers Alberto Magnan and Dara Metz, “Chelsea Visits Havana” opens on 28 March, with the participation of dealers including Andrea Rosen, Sean Kelly, Barbara Gladstone, Mary Boone and Matthew Marks.

The organisers approached Cuban officials nearly two years ago with a proposal for a comprehensive survey of contemporary art from the Chelsea gallery district in New York. In January, Mr Magnan and Ms Metz were notified that the project had officially become part of the Tenth Havana Biennial, which opens on 27 March. The Chelsea show is part of a wider programme of exhibitions throughout Havana and presents a selection of 35 international artists including Marina Abramovic, Will Cotton, Loretta Lux, Matthew Barney, and Guy Ben-Ner.

Mr Magnan says: “We’ve been under the harsh policies of the Bush administration for such a long time, and the reintroduction of cultural exchanges will hopefully move both sides closer to dialogue.” In mid-2004, President Bush strengthened the US trade embargo on Cuba by imposing tougher restrictions on travel, effectively ending all travel-related cultural exchange programmes. Since then, Cuban artists have regularly been denied visas to attend exhibitions or claim prizes and fellowships in the US.

Abelardo Mena, curator of contemporary international art at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, told The Art Newspaper that efforts to bring US artists to Cuba have frequently been blocked by the US Interests Section in Havana, an office that functions de facto as an embassy and represents US interests in the country. Mr Mena, who is coordinating “Chelsea Visits Havana” for the Cuban national museum, says the institution has a small collection of contemporary American art, which was donated by artists who participated in the 1986 exhibition, “Por Encima del Bloqueo/ Surpassing the Embargo”, organised by the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Centre. The collection includes works by Mel Edwards, Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, Miriam Shapiro, Kiki Smith, and Tim Rollins and K.O.S. After 23 years, Rollins and K.O.S. will again be showing their work in Havana with the Lehmann Maupin Gallery as part of the Chelsea project.

Although artists have regularly been denied visas, according to Christopher Klatell, an attorney at Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman in New York, “the export of artworks to Cuba is exempt from the embargo under both statute and regulation”. He said that the Berman Amendment of 1988, also known as the Free Trade in Ideas Act, does not allow the US government to regulate or prohibit the exportation of art. This means that art can legally travel between the two countries, even when artists cannot.

Mr Magnan and Ms Metz have enlisted the help of the non-profit Fundación Amistad, which brings humanitarian aid to Cuba and sponsors art-related projects in the US and abroad. According to Luly Duke, president and founder, the organisation is raising funds to pay for the shipping and insurance of the art, as well as a catalogue. It is linked to academic, cultural and humanitarian institutions in Cuba, and will coordinate the complex shipment of work from the US to Havana and back. Mr Magnan, a Cuban American and the director of Magnan Projects gallery, said: “I’m not making any money from this and none of the art pieces are for sale. This is about exchanging culture. I couldn’t do this without the foundation’s help.”

President Obama has promised changes in US foreign policy towards Cuba, pledging to lift travel restrictions and limits on remittances to relatives on the island. Mr Mena said: “I don’t believe the exhibition would have been possible under the Bush administration. I hope the new president and his secretary of state recognise the value of cultural diplomacy based on mutual respect, and the free exchange of cultural goods.”

©2009 The Art Newspaper

I finally made it to Pulse and Volta on a rainy Sunday early afternoon after a lovely and tipsy brunch. I didn’t even bother to go to Bridge, Scope, etc.

While Pulse was teeming with the babystroller and student crowd, angling for dealer attention, I thought the fair looked especially cramped and fleamarket-ish. Everything just seemed so loud and tedious.

These quiet works by Hungarian artist Roza El-Hassan at Lena Roselli Gallery were lovely though. They had a very Cy Twonbly meets the Beats quality I loved and priced to sell at under US$2000 per. I bought all three. Roza El-Hassan was born in Budapest in 1966, of Hungarian and Syrian descent, and currently lives in Budapest, teaching at the Intermedia department at University of Fine Arts, Budapest. Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions, among others including the Drawing Center in 2003 and represented Hungary at Venice in 1997.

Roza El-Hassan, “Gold, Pear, Sleave I,” 1999-2007. mixed media and graphite on canvas, 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of Lena Roselli, Budapest.

Roza El-Hassan, “Gold, Pear, Sleave II,” 1999-2007. mixed media and graphite on canvas, 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of Lena Roselli, Budapest.

Roza El-Hassan, “Gold, Pear, Sleave III,” 1999-2007. mixed media and graphite on canvas, 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of Lena Roselli, Budapest.

At Volta, one of the best fairs mostly because of its focus on solo shows so you can really see the development of an artist’s work, Futo Akiyoshi’s minimalist play of space caught my eye. Born and currently working in Osaka, he is represented by Taro Nasu and has has exhibited at NADIFF and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007.

In addition, I took one last look around Armory and forgot to mention these sweet paper sculptures by Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins! Quiet pricey at 40-50K but beautiful nonetheless.

Kara Walker, Description/Atrocity/Witness/”yawn”/warning warning/Repeat, 2008, cut paper, wood, adhesive, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins, New York.

Kara Walker, Description/Atrocity/Witness/”yawn”/warning warning/Repeat, 2008, cut paper, wood, adhesive, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins, New York.

Kara Walker, Description/Atrocity/Witness/”yawn”/warning warning/Repeat, 2008, cut paper, wood, adhesive, variable dimensions. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins, New York.

And for now, that’s all folks!