Reading list, 22 September 2019

ON WOMEN

Art Agency, Partners and Artnet News have partnered on a significant piece of research and publishing on women's place in the (American) art world. As the headline article states: Museums Claim They’re Paying More Attention to Female Artists. That’s an Illusion. Depressing and important reading.

In a similar vein - Emily Hartley-Skudder's pretty wrenching piece for The Pantograph Punch, The Power of the Pussy Bow: Fighting Back Against Rape-Art, recounting her experience on a recent residency in China, where another (older, male, European) artist made performance art about his attraction to Chinese women.

Fighting the good fight: Judy Chicago on Rescuing Women From Art History’s Sidelines.

ON PHILANTHROPY

This article makes me realise I'm definitely an incrementalist - and that I need to be mixed in with people who are not, in order to create change ‘We Don’t Need to Demonize Wealthy People’: Ford Foundation President Darren Walker on the Unnerving Aftermath of the Warren Kanders Protests

Philanthropy, but at what price? US museums wake up to public's ethical concerns - with comments from Daniel Weiss, Adam Weinberg et al

Second verse, same as the first How Rich Donors Like Epstein (and Others) Undermine Science (Wired)

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

Curated resources on diversity, inclusion, accessibility and equity for libraries

On curating difficult ideas A Nazi Design Show Draws Criticism. Its Curator’s Comments Didn’t Help.

A call for cultural courage - a slightly odd direct email from Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum (maybe just odd because emails like this don't get sent out often by directors)

How Lonnie Burch built a museum dream team (a sampler from his new book on opening the NMAAHC)

Web Muster

Another awesome post about museums and the benefits of transparency (IMA blog)

Koons's train project for LACMA stalled (Bloomberg)

A round-up of (financially) 'ethically-dubious' exhibitions (Financial Times)

Paul McCarthy takes on fairytales (NYTimes)

Making exhibitions for men - condescension or irony? (NYTimes)

Matthew Collings on beauty in art (Telegraph)

Staff in French cultural institutions strike over potential cuts (Guardian)

Also a touch condescending: interest-free scheme encourages "the ordinary man" to buy art (Telegraph)

Special report on the art market (The Economist)

Shuffle

Randomised thoughts from the end of the week ...

@brooklynmuseum brought the Walker Art Center & Minneapolis Institute of Arts' http://artsconnected.org site to my attention this morning. I haven't yet delved properly into the content, but the design and layout of this collection of tools for teaching the arts is just exquisite, and I'm looking forward to digging into it further. Would it make sense of New Zealand galleries to join forces and aggregate their teaching resources for web users?

Proving how fickle one art consumer can be, this post about the installation of a two-storey high artwork (again, from the Walker) reminded me of how much I love the behind the scenes of exhibition installation, and how seeing paintings propped on sponge blocks and inflatable bunnies being blown up is such a different, more personal, more valued experience than just visiting a hung show like every other punter. On the other hand, it also made me reflect that one of my most-loathed types of art "journalism" is time-lapsed recordings of portrait painting; that's a behind the scenes that can stay there, as far as I'm concerned.

Talking about arts journalism, this week Russell Brown took on the topic of the arts market on Media 7, with a panel made up of Warwick Brown, Hamish Keith and Hamish Coney (curiously not introduced with his Art+Object affiliation). The conversation was kick-started by the topic of the Auckland Art Fair, which according to organiser Jennifer Buckley was largely unaffected by the economic situation.

Russell Brown used the presence of guest speaker economist Don Thomson (he of the stuffed shark) to try to start a conversation about art and the marketplace which Keith deftly turned into a discussion about the art sector's largely overlooked contribution to the economy. This turned into a brief discussion of the lack of media coverage for the arts (output and industry), with Brown rolling out the old saw about the paucity of arts coverage in our daily newspapers compared to sports (more on that later). Russell asked Coney a potentially very interesting question (Russell (paraphrased) You're all old guys. Where's the next generation of art commentators hiding?) which turned into a ramble about how young NZ artists' work doesn't look like young NZ artists' work, just young artists' work.

At any rate, despite being a bit fragmented, it was one of the best pieces of NZ TV coverage of the visual arts I've seen in a long time, in that it was people involved in the sector, axes left mostly to the side, being asked questions by an intelligent interviewer who was interested in talking about more than (a) whether his four-year-old could have done it (b) that a four-year-old had actually done it (c) should the tax-payer be funding it or (d) wasn't it really just pornography under another name?

Back to the arts-sports comparison. I think that one of the reasons that sports gets coverage (and an entire radio station, for goodness sake) and art doesn't is that it's easy and rewarding to be a sports fan. It's hard and often unsatisfying to try to be a fan of an art gallery or even an artist (without shading into stalker territory). I'm going to be mulling over this topic at Webstock Mini on May 19th, if anyone wants to join in ...

The price is right

A few weeks ago I was thinking about the constraints dealers are under when it comes to pricing their artists' work. Over the weekend Ed Winkleman was musing on the same topic: 'Established prices never die, they are just discounted away ...'.

From the post:

Knowing that eventually the art market will cycle back up again, there's no reason not to expect a good artist's prices to regain any losses, but that here and now, the most surefire way to cripple that artist's market is to keep the prices as high as they were. In other words, by getting the collector to participate in the continuation of the artist's market, rather than focusing on a momentarily downturn in pricing, both dealer and collector continue to protect their investment. And, of course, in the meanwhile, the collector still gets to enjoy a fantastic work of art.

Ed's is one of the few blogs that I've stayed faithful to. Some blogs I become briefly infatuated with, visiting regularly, hanging round on the off-chance a new post might appear unexpectedly. Then the passion cools and the relationship reduces to a space in my feedreader, a holding bay I visit when I don't have anything better to do, catching up to fill an idle moment. Eventually I give up the pretence that there's still any spark, and delete the subscription.

But Ed I keep coming back to, and it's because of his openness, and the insights he gives me into an art dealer's way of working. From the comments to the above post:

The artist, being owner of the work, has ultimate say in the retail price, of course, but most contemporary art dealers rightfully have input in how the work is priced through their gallery. Usually artist and dealer are on the same page, though, so it's not as contentious as your question might imply. When I say the dealer overpriced the work, I mean to implicate both the dealer and the artist, but the collector works directly only with the dealer, so they're not part of that previous conversation.

Sometimes, however, a dealer should speak up or back out when they know the artist is making a mistake. If an artist insists that a painting be priced at $100,000 when the dealer believes its market value is $40,000, for example, the dealer would be wrong to price at what the artist insisted on. If the artist still insists after a respectful conversation, at that point they should part ways. The dealer has the markets of his other artists and how his reputation impacts them to consider here as well.

Dross, dross, dross, dross, dross, gem

Amidst the plethora of articles about the purported collapse of the art market (which are so repetitive I'm going to spare you links) lurks the odd spark of interest. Yesterday, it was Carol Vogel's article in the New York Times looking at what impact corporate belt-tightening might have on American museums and galleries.

Directors interviewed for the article seem to have been remarkably frank. Glenn Lowry acknowledged that MoMA has instituted a temporary hiring freeze and a 10% cut in its operating budget; Brooklyn Museum's Arnold Lehman said they were struggling to find sponsorship to pay for a scheduled Yinka Shonibare retrospective.

Vogel also pointed to an increasing number of collection-based shows (rather than shows reliant on costly loan works) as evidence of cost-saving. However, as LACMA's Michael Govan noted, the news might not be all bad: if art prices go into freefall, “maybe we’ll finally be able to afford to buy things.”

This morning the article seemed even more relevant as here in NZ councils started announcing planned spending cutbacks. Without wanting to jinx anything, you've got to wonder what this might mean for the redevelopments of Auckland Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington ....

Not in it for the money ....

Our own Venice 09 rep Francis Upritchard is one of eight artists (along with the likes of Gavin Turk and Anya Gallaccio) talking about art and the market in the Guardian today.

Twitter post for my blog

Today I am pondering: what does 'value for money' mean when you're talking about art?

Friday muster

1.

Australian auction house Deutscher and Hackett get offered a "contentious nude" by Bill Henson, decide to give it a miss - The Australian and Art Market Monitor suggest the decision is based more on a failing art market than the chance of a resurgence of this year's earlier outcry.

2.

As Cheryl Bernstein observes, Pundit's Keith Ovenden is no fan of Fiona Hall. I have no love of the heavy-breathing show myself, but found Ovenden's repeated use of "Ms" Hall condescending. I'm a bit of a bone-picker here - I also loathe it when people write of Rita and Frances, not Angus and Hodgkins - and think a simple surname will suffice. It's Ovenden's first review on Pundit, so time will tell - maybe the next will be of Mr Van Hout's two openings next week?

3.

LACMA are blogging, and in the most recent post, a curator goes that extra mile for the sake of her collection items.

4.

Finally - does your gallery or museum site have RSS feeds? If you do, think about adding them to Ideum's latest project, the RSS feed mixer.

Opportunities (for the PSBs)

The economy is flailing - but will art prices come down?

One of the interesting points I picked up in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark was that it's very hard for dealers to put the prices of their artists' work down. Whether the work's getting better or worse, prices have to go up - or at least remain stable. However, dealers can give clients a quiet discount - and not-so-quiet clients can ask for them outright.

All questions of the connections between the art market and financial markets (and doing the dirty on your dealer) aside, by taking new work straight to the market via auction Damien Hirst got what people were prepared at that exact moment to pay for it. (BTW, some of the best commentary on this whole hoo-ha is here and here on Art Market Monitor)

The idea of people going to auctions to "pick up deals" makes me deeply uncomfortable. I hate seeing a great work going for a song - mostly because I find that somehow disrespectful to the artist. Sure, it's not the auction house's job to look out for individual artists' reputations by guarding the prices, and sure, fashion plays a strong part in the vagaries of the secondary market, but I still don't like it.

Anyway - what got me thinking about this today was Judd Tully's Art + Auction article Wrangling Over Resales which includes this quote:

Although the wording varies, these clauses basically require or request the buyer to agree, in writing or otherwise, to give the gallery or artist the right of first refusal, usually for a limited time, when the work is about to be resold. A typical clause appears in the invoices of the Chelsea dealer Friederich Petzel: “If the purchaser decides to sell this work within five years of purchase, the gallery will have the right of first refusal to buy back the work at fair market value. Fair market value shall be determined by the gallery’s retail price for works of similar scale and significance at the time of resale and/or auction house estimates, if applicable.”

In this case, resale agreement work two ways: they stop speculators (or speculating collectors) from flipping a work in 6 months for a big profit, but they also protect an artist if the market for their work slumps. Their dealer can quietly buy it back rather than see it achieve a bad price - which could create disparities in the pricing of work in the primary market and the resale market. As noted on Art Market Monitor:

What the article doesn’t say is that the art market may finally be moving to a greater acceptance of transactions as part of the life of a work of art–not unlike a museum show or a retrospective. Of course, that would require dealers to be more accepting of the idea that an artist’s value might fluctuate over time.

All of this is a bit heavy, of course, so to leaven today's post - a cartoon from ArtWorldSalon about arty Facebook status updates (click to enlarge):

Friday's child is ... pissed off

Reviews like this make me wonder whether people who clearly hate contemporary art and all it touches should be allowed to write about it.

Selected gems from Richard Morrison's review of economist Don Thompson's recently-published The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, about the contemporary art market:

"Thompson sets out to discover why someone thought it was fulfilling and rational to spend $12 million buying a dead shark that had been turned into an artwork by Damien Hirst. "

"In what sense is a buyer acquiring a unique work, if the artist feels free to create near-identical pieces for other buyers (as Warhol did and Hirst does)?"

"In what sense do they [artists] “create” artworks that unnamed assistants actually paint, cut up or assemble?"

"Should we lament the present confusion between cash price and artistic worth – or, as Thompson puts it, “the ease with which art history is now rewritten with a cheque-book”?"

"Is the success of a few superstar artists good or bad for the rest – those who scrape by on the poverty line, yet produce art that may well be far richer in significance than some of the conceptual piffle churned out by the big names?"

Image: Damien Hirst's The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living (1991) - conceptual piffle. Image from boingboing.net.

Advice for collectors

Buy futures

Getting lucky in the auction room

Charlotte Higgins reported in yesterday's Guardian on the sale of an 18th-century painting in an auction in Market Harborough, Leicestershire:

The estimate on the picture was £300-£500. When its turn came last Tuesday at Gilding's - a small, family-run auction house that holds about 45 sales per year - something truly extraordinary happened. "The atmosphere in the room became very tense - the bidding just went on and on," said the auctioneer, Mark Gilding. The final hammer price was £205,000.

Described in the auctioneer's catalogue as "18th-century continental school, half-length portrait of an aesthete", it depicted a black-clad, bearded man, his face half turned to the right, a rather distant, soulful expression in his eyes.

Speculation is now abuzz that the work is actually an early Titian, dating between 1510 and 1520, and possibly worth something in the region of £5 million. The buyer has not come forward - the vendor picked the work up in an estate sale in 1974.

Stories like this make me happy - I like that there's still room for surprises and discoveries 9and, I guess, false attributions) in today's art market. I do wonder though if the vendor will be pleased that the work sold for 400 times its top reserve, or pissed that they unknowingly let a £5 million Titian slip through their fingers?

Landscape + irish setter + pheasant = Dollars

A recent post on Free Exchange, one of The Economist's blogs, highlighted Tyler Cowen's discussion of the factors that determine the price of art, featured in his recent book Discover Your Inner Economist. These include:

1. Landscapes can triple in value when there are horses or figures in the foreground. Evidence of industry usually lowers a picture’s value.
2. A still life with flowers is worth more than one with fruit. Roses stand at the top of the flower hierarchy. Chrysanthemums and lupines (seen as working class) stand at the bottom.
3. There is a price hierarchy for animals. Purebred dogs help a picture more than mongrels do. Spaniels are worth more than collies. Racehorses are worth more than carthorses. When it comes to game birds the following rule of thumb holds: the more expensive it is to shoot the bird, the more the bird adds to the value of the painting. A grouse is worth more than a mallard, and the painter should show the animal from the front, not the back.
4. Water adds value to a picture, but only if it is calm. Shipwrecks are a no-no.

Read the full post

Meanwhile, in the Art Newspaper, Richard Feigen looks at the overheated art market, and points out that several areas - including 16th and 17th century Italian, French and Flemings and the 18th and 19th-century British - seem to have remained immune to crazy price hikes.

Schrödinger's sh*t

Speculation is afoot that Piero Manzoni's Merda d'Artista (a 1961 work in which Manzoni filled 90 30-gram cans with his faeces and then sold them as art, as a critique of the art market) might not be exactly what they seem.

In an article titled 'Solo gesso, nella scatoletta di Manzoni' published in Corriere della Sera (Italian) Agostino Bonalumi, who worked with Manzoni, claims that the tins are actually filled with plaster.

The problem: no one can confirm this without peeling open one - or all - of the tins. The tins, mind you, have a current market value of £81,000 (as paid at Sotheby's Milan last month).

Stuart Jeffries has posted on the Guardian arts blog about the conundrum, quoting a Tate spokesperson statement that "Keeping the viewer in suspense is part of the work's subversive humour." (The Tate purchased a can in 2000 for £22,350).

Journey to the Center of My Rolodex

That's Jerry Saltz's alternative title for Alanna Heiss's 'Not for sale' exhibition at P. S. 1 - a collection of works by 46 artists that are held in their own collections, and are not available for purchase.

The title is a response to Heiss's stated curatorial strategy: "This show is a personal one: I called artists whom I know well and who happened to be at home. It also represents some kind of manifestation of my unfortunate allergy to the commercial aspects of art.”

Read Saltz's review here: 'Not buying it' - New York Magazine

Read more about the exhibition here: 'Not for sale' - PS1 website

Read Edward Winkleman's response here: 'It's NOT the art market - Edward Winkleman'