Category: The Global Art Market Pauses

“As he lay battling for his life, after testing positive for Covid-19 this spring, the board used his condition for their own advantage, and voted while he was incapacitated to permanently close the New York gallery.”

One cannot say that the past few months have lacked drama in the art market, despite the cancellations, closures and shut-downs across its entire landscape. For word has now filtered out that the venerable Marlborough Gallery, which opened in London in 1946 and has enjoyed decades of prominence and power, has now shuttered its rooms on West 57th Street in New York.

Read More “Memory Lane”

“A new chapter opened in the most breathlessly followed art-world scandal of the past year as American federal agents arrested fugitive dealer Inigo Philbrick on the Pacific island of Vanuatu.”

June 18th, 2020: The above flash from Artnet News, on a crime story that has been swirling for months, showcased an alluring but obscure destination. For Vanuatu is a chain of islands in the South Pacific, some 500 miles west of Fiji and far, far removed from the art world.  But it is where the infamous American dealer Inigo Philbrick took refuge from his many creditors and claimants, and where he was finally arrested this past weekend. Soon he may be transferred to another, less enchanting island—the dreaded Rikers—to await his fate.

Read More “The Friendly Face of Fraud”

News this week from Sotheby’s of their “cross-category” evening sale in London on July 28th showcasing an early Rembrandt oil painting brought signs of renewed activity in the salerooms.  And what better name to put front and center at this moment, like a battle shield against the many grim adversities roiling the art market in 2020, than Rembrandt, the gold standard of Dutch old masters.

Read More “Rembrandt and Science”

“All our projects are totally irrational, totally useless. Nobody needs them. The world can live without them.”

On the website for the artist Christo, who died this past week at age 84, one takes a dazzling tour through videos and photographs of the many projects he dreamed up in his long career. One early, unrealized project of 1964 caught my attention, for it summed up Christo’s fearless, poetic vision.

Read More “Wrapped”

In recent years the auction houses have become increasingly enthralled with design and decoration as the new hallmarks of art collecting. Thus many sales with theme-driven titles like “The Elegant Eye” and “Style” have ensued, all bolstering the idea that art collecting now is less about art and more about aspiration, about lifestyle.

Read More “Tastemakers”

In any given year flowers blossoming in the garden would be a glorious if unsurprising herald of May. But of course we are not in any given year. Hence so much about life today seems perplexing, fast-evolving and jarringly new.

Read More “A Backlog Beckons”

“You may not need a million dollar painting on the wall, but you have to have a chair to sit on, and it might as well be an antique one.”

Old-timers—like those who remember the author of the above remark, the late Robert Woolley of Sotheby’s—will remember what the art market was like in 1990. It was a tale of two cities.

Read More “Echoes of 1990”

If all had gone according to plan, Frieze New York would have opened this week on Randalls Island. It is a gray parcel of land, home to a Fire Department training academy, a sports stadium, cemeteries and asylums. But once a year it transforms itself into a glittering city of white tents crammed with contemporary art galleries from around the world. The Patrons Night would have launched a week of frenzied and flamboyant art market commerce. But all that was cancelled. Instead there is a “Frieze Viewing Room” of gallery highlights on the fair’s digital platform.

Read More “Reinventing”

At a time when travel by air has all but ceased and museums are closed, I am reminded of simple pleasures once taken for granted but now curtailed and sorely missed. One of these is flying into the San Francisco airport and arriving at International Terminal Three—an experience that never fails to stop me cold in my tracks.

Read More “Plastics and Pierce-Arrows”

It is an interesting quirk of literary history that April 23rd is celebrated not only as the day that William Shakespeare was born (in 1564) but also the day he died (in 1616). I note this mainly because we’ve just heard that Shakespeare in the Park, the decades-old summertime festival at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, has been cancelled for 2020.

Read More “Shakespeare and Co.”