Last fall it was reported that the great Tom Krens was off the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi project, which seemed like big news because Mr. Krens was the creative mind and promoter of the project, but what’s even more strange is that we haven’t heard boo from the art world’s consummate museum showman since. Read More
Back in early June I wrote a piece for the Art Newspaper in which I predicted that bad news would drive the price of gold, then at $1,500 an ounce, substantially higher.
Well, the bad news came, with the Standard & Poor’s rating agency’s downgrading our U.S. government debt, precipitating massive fear of a double-dip Read More
I spent almost a decade chasing the new new art but for the past year or two I’ve felt that there is less and less there there. What do I mean? I’d always sought to collect artists who were “emerging” or on the cusp of international renown, but in the postcrash, recessionary environment I’ve changed Read More
Charles Saatchi is the most influential collector of the past 25 years, and one of the most controversial. Notorious for never appearing at his own openings and for not granting interviews, the British former advertising magnate remains a mysterious figure who wields his influence through his Saatchi Gallery shows and the subsequent sale of the Read More
The annual summer art tour is finally over. It was bookended by the Venice Biennale and the mega-fair Art Basel and included a few stops in between. Basel was packed with collectors and dealers and was very successful, with art changing hands at the fastest pace we’ve seen since ’07. If the art market isn’t Read More
Last week the massive Hong Kong Exhibition Center hosted a triple header–the four-year-old art fair Art HK; a luxurious Christie’s auction preview; and a Christie’s-sponsored exhibition of new work by Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi–that provided a window into the state of the art market in China.
The fair now draws a good portion of the Read More
At the Paris Theatre, I recently saw L’Amour Fou, the wonderful documentary about the February 2009 sale at Christie’s Paris of the art and design collection of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, decorator Pierre Bergé. The auction totaled almost $300 million and set many records: an Eileen Gray chair sold for $28 million after Read More
Last November, Andy Warhol’s 1962 painting “Men in Her Life” sold for over $60 million at Phillips de Pury & Co. It went for well over its high estimate, and became the second most expensive Warhol painting ever to sell at public auction. Because both the buyer and the under bidder were on the phone, Read More
It wasn’t all that long ago that Richard Prince was an artist respected by curators and a few collectors who was largely overlooked by the art market. (He was best known for his 1983 Spiritual America, an unauthorized “re-photograph” of an nude, underage Brooke Shields.) A serious mid-career show at the Whitney in 1992 was Read More
I was just in Paris, visiting a painting I had loaned to the wonderful Basquiat show at the Musee d’Art Moderne and marveling at the two-hour-long line to get into the show. The French love our American mythic pop figures–Elvis, Marilyn, James Dean–and you could feel how easily Jean-Michel, prodigy, addict and star, fit right Read More
