News Digest for Oct. 19 - ArtWeLove News

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on October 19, 2009

A Julian Opie cut-out suited the high energy of last week's Frieze art fair. ; Via dou_ble_you's Flickr page

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London's Frieze art fair seemed to put some swing back in the art world's step last week, while controversies continued in the United States and abroad as art history jangled down its long, irregular road. Read on for ArtWeLove’s news digest, now also available in email form—bringing a comprehensive roundup of the week’s art developments to your digital doorstep. If you aren’t signed up, click here. As always, we welcome your feedback at editorial@artwelove.com.

LONDON WRAP-UP: A BRISK FRIEZE, A CRUCIFIED APE, & SOLID AUCTIONS

London was the undisputed capital of the art world last week as the Frieze art fair and an assortment of other art events drew thousands of artists, gallerists, collectors, and celebrities—among them Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Baz Luhrmann—to take the pulse of contemporary art, and the contemporary art market. The latter, at least, proved reassuringly strong and spry. Although dealers said works were selling for about 30 percent less than in the boom years, reasonably-priced art found buyers at a respectable clip, moving much better than last year.

One booth, run by San Francisco artist Stephanie Syjuco, seemed to exemplify the upbeat, irreverent mood: instead of showing her own wares, she and a team of young artists cobbled together knockoffs of some of the fair’s pricier offerings, selling the tabletop copies for a few hundred bucks a pop. (Click here to watch a video tour of the fair by the Guardian's delightfully acid Adrian Searle; note his offhand dig at Tate director Nicholas Serota.) Another success was Frame, Frieze’s new spinoff art fair that showed 29 international galleries that had been around for less than six years, with each economically-priced booth showcasing a single artist. It sold well, as did the alternative Zoo Art Fair and another new hedge-fund-sponsored fair, the Age of the Marvellous, that sparked some controversy thanks to two sculptures by artist Paul Fryer, one featuring an ape on a crucifix and another showing a black Jesus seated on an electric chair. The wealth of art on view challenged the stamina even of art iron men like curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who just rose to first place in Art Review's top 100 influentials list in part due to his round-the-clock consumption of contemporary work.

Then there were the contemporary art auctions. Christie’s had the best night, with bidding wars over two Martin Kippenberger paintings from Charles Saatchi’s collection leading to stunning prices. (Jeffrey Deitch brought home one of them.) The overall auction brought in a total of $18.3 million, with only one of the 25 pieces failing to sell. Sotheby’s much larger sale brought in $20.9 million, but with a weaker sell-through rate. That the once-dominant house has been losing ground to Christie’s was also reflected in Sotheby’s refusal to reveal its executive pay to the SEC, protesting that it would give its privately-owned competitor an advantage when it comes to financial planning, and perhaps poaching. Finally, Phillips de Pury—whose dauntless chief, Simon de Pury, debuted an exhibition of his own photographs in Berlin’s Corner Gallery last week—took in $6.7 million with a 43-lot sale, beating the low estimate with a good sell-through rate. The spunky house would have done even better if Saatchi had sold his Kippenbergers through de Pury, as their partnership would have led people to expect. (The auctioneers said there were no hard feelings, and that Saatchi’s pledge to sell through the house is less exclusive than it sounds.)

LONDON WRAP-UP: JOHN BALDESSARI CRACKS JOKES, BROOKE SHIELDS GETS DRESSED, & AND DAMIEN HIRST TASTES BACKLASH

As if the fairs and the auctions weren’t enough, London also treated its art-world guests to a raft of significant shows. A John Baldessari retrospective at Tate Modern charmed with the artist’s legendary wit, Miroslaw Balka’s “How It Is” blackout installation in Tate’s Turbine Hall stunned with its sublime darkness and historical resonances, a show of the great history painter Anselm Kiefer mined similar ground at White Cube, and an Ed Ruscha survey at the Hayward Gallery brought some cerebral California sunshine. Tate’s “Pop Life” show reopened its controversial Richard Prince room with a different Brooke Shields piece, this time a collaboration between the artist and the actress that shows her older, and clothed. But the center of conversation was unquestionably Damien Hirst’s show of his new paintings at the Wallace Collection.

To unveil the new direction of his work—making paintings with his own hand—the artist paid more than $400,000 to renovate galleries at the august museum so he could show his work alongside canvases by Old Masters like Velázquez and Rembrandt. Displayed in gold, glassed-in frames (a la Bacon) set against a backdrop of blue silk, the paintings feature skulls and other Hirstian subjects against dark backgrounds. (Click here for a photo gallery of the show.) The critical reaction was swift, merciless, and in near total agreement. The Guardian called the show a "memento mori for a reputation"; the Times of London labeled the “ham-fisted” paintings “shockingly bad”; the Independent said “they’re thoroughly derivative. Their handling is week. They’re extremely boring all round”; the Telegraph was the kindest, but concluded “anyone who first encountered Hirst through these works would be entirely justified in wondering what all the fuss had been about.” Considering that painting is the most storied, endlessly refined medium in art, relearning to paint in a matter of months and then paying to show the amateur chiaroscuro results next to Rembrandt has at least got to be considered a breathtakingly audacious gesture. Whether that gesture is an interesting one is another question.

NEFERTITI RENOVATES, THE WHITNEY GETS NEW DIGS, & REPUBLICANS CRY "PORN" IN ARIZONA

In institutional news, Iran, taking advantage of London’s week in the spotlight, declared that it would cease cooperation with the British Museum unless it agreed to loan the ancient Cyrus Cylinder to the National Museum of Iran in the next two months. Certainly they saw how Egypt’s hardball tactics with the Louvre the week before led to the restitution of other artifacts. In Berlin, the Neues Museum, home to a stellar collection that includes Nefertiti’s famous bust, finally reopened 70 years after being bombed to smithereens during World War II; long left in rubble, the institution underwent a $300 million renovation campaign as part of an ambitious project to turn its location, the city’s Museum Island, into a world-class cultural destination.

In the United States, New York’s Whitney Museum at last signed a contract with the city to pay a low $18 million for the Meatpacking District site of its long-planned expansion. Set to gain 50,000 square feet of gallery space and 15,000 square feet of outdoor space to show art, the museum will also have right of first refusal on an enormous meat processing building next door in case they don’t renew their lease in 2014. Whitney director Adam Weinberg says the Renzo Piano-designed expansion will finally allow the museum to show more than a fraction of its permanent collection at its flagship uptown site. Meanwhile, in Tuscon, Arizona, a campaign by the MoCA Tuscon to acquire its own new site has met with frenzied opposition from Republican operatives, who say the city is giving the museum an unused firehouse for an unacceptably low rate. In line with the right's recent nostalgia trip for the 1990s culture wars, the Republicans have cast the museum as a debauched smut palace--on the basis of a single work, Big Dicks #1 by Jaime Scholnick, that was included in a group show four years ago.

Meanwhile, in the resolution of a more reality-based conflict, security guards at the Philadelphia Museum of Art voted to unionize after decades of declining pay and benefits. “A livable wage is the number-one issue," one guard told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Also, affordable health care. And just the general lack of respect for guards." There was some good news for non-profits last week, when Standard & Poor declared that their analysis shows that the three dozen cultural institutions of the kind tracked by the company are weathering the recession well, and are poised to emerge stronger.

THE COLLECTORS WHO CRIED WOLF, A NEW LEONARDO, & A TERRIBLE ART HISTORICAL LOSS

In the week that the phrase “balloon boy” entered the cultural vernacular, signs that old-fashioned American hucksterism is on the rise were also rife in the art world. In a sudden turnaround, art collector Richard Weisman has canceled the insurance claim he filed for a $25 million series of Warhol sports figures that he says was stolen from his Los Angeles house a few weeks ago. The supposed theft involved no forced entry, and more valuable artworks were left untouched. Weisman, who has said he realizes he’s turning into a suspect, has apparently cut off contact with investigators. In Pebble Beach, another heist previously billed as the second-biggest in American history, is looking more and more suspect. Asked to prove that the allegedly $80 million collection ever existed, the owners offered pictures found on Wikipedia and verbal descriptions of works, but no purchase records of any kind. Police openly say they think the collectors are lying. Speaking of false claims, artist Shepard Fairey has stunned supporters by admitting he lied about materials he submitted to court in his suit against the Associated Press over his right to use the agency's photo of Obama in his "Hope" poster. The A.P. now accuses Fairey of suing under false pretenses, and the artist's own lawyers are washing their hands of the case.

A university in Las Vegas ran afoul of Frank Stella, refusing to destroy a painting in the style of the artist’s “protractor” series that he says is a fake. As a compromise, Stella has suggested the school hang a sign next to it saying “This is not a Frank Stella painting.” In another longstanding attribution battle, things are looking up for Joe Simon-Whelan, a collector who is suing the Andy Warhol Foundation for ruling that a Warhol self-portrait he owns is inauthentic, despite being signed, dedicated, and dated by the artist. The coming discovery phase of the case promises to reveal much about the foundation’s mysterious authentication process, which they’ve wielded to tightly define the mass-producing artist’s enormous oeuvre. Then, in a very happy attribution outcome, a previously unidentified painting has been recognized as a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. Previously valued at less than $20,000, the drawing has been embraced by Oxford Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp as a portrait of Bianca Sforza, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan. The tell-tale sign? A patch of the composition, now worth about $150 million, contains a trace of the Renaissance artist’s fingerprint.

In tragic news of art historical proportions, a warehouse fire in Brazil destroyed nearly two thousand works by the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica. The late artist’s brother, who tended the collection, says that 90 percent was lost. A terrible loss to the field of Latin American art, it vastly diminishes the body of work of a brilliant artist who was only recently gaining recognition in the rest of the world, largely thanks to two 2007 shows at the MFA Houston and Tate Modern.

COMINGS & GOINGS

On the musical-chairs front, the Denver Art Museum has named Christoph Heinrich as its new director, promoting him from the institution’s modern and contemporary art department. The Munich Kunstverein has picked art critic and publicist Bart van der Heide to head the venue, replacing Stefan Kalmár, who is the new director of Artists Space in New York. Takashi Murakami has announced that his Geisai art fair will take place in Taiwan this December, and will not appear this year at Art Basel Miami Beach. As for artist movements, New York’s 303 Gallery has won the representation of Sue Williams, a painter famous for her cartoonishly physiological doodle canvases that squirm with body parts doing naughty, squishy things. Revered Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, or Fischli/Weiss, have won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from Cologne’s Society for Modern Art, to receive it during next year’s Art Cologne. The city also honored Georg Baselitz with the Cologne Fine Art Artist Prize. Elsewhere, sculptor David Altmejd won the 2009 Sobey Art Award, accepting it at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Finally, Nancy Spero, the trailblazing antiwar artist who for years was on the front lines of the Feminist art movement, passed away at 83. A painter and sculptor who used motifs from ancient art to address the crises of her time, both within the American home and on the international stage, Spero leaves behind an influential lifetime of work that continues to energize young artists. Recently featured in Chiara Clemente’s film “Our City Dreams,” Spero is survived by the children she had with her husband and frequent creative partner, the late Leon Golub.

Related articles:

"Different Class" [via artforum.com]

"Calm after the storm" [via the Art Newspaper]

"Cunning After Caution at London Art Fair" [via the New York Times]

"Frieze Fair Highlights: Go to Frame!" [via Art Fag City]

"Abramovich, Paltrow Browse at Frieze as Buyers Haggle" [via Bloomberg]

"Notes From the Frieze: Imitation as Art (and Commerce)" [via the New York Times]

"London's Guerrilla Art" [via the Daily Beast]

"Sales at hedge fund-backed art show surge" [via Wealth Bulletin]

"My Week: Hans-Ulrich Obrist" [via the Independent]

"2009 Power 100" [via Art Review]

"Christie’s Sells $18.3 Million, Lures Buyers With Low Estimates" [via Bloomberg]