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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
The month of April in New York is always a time of anticipation in the auction market. For the mighty sales that are usually scheduled to take place a few weeks later in May—encompassing Impressionist and Modern art as well as Post-War and Contemporary—are the landmarks of the entire auction season, a bellwether of success or failure.
This week I have been reading a novel by Richard Russo entitled Empire Falls. The story takes place in a fictional mill town in central Maine, once prosperous but now shuttered and impoverished like so many others throughout New England. Still, the town’s founding family, the Whitings, live on in detached grandeur and ghostliness. Here, for example, is a reference to Mrs. C.B. Whiting, the aging matriarch of the family, who retains a puppeteer’s power over the fate of Empire Falls:
On a visit to London with my son and daughter in March 2018, we decided to visit the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall. The drabness of the day was relieved by the sight of several ducklings waddling across the road toward us, oblivious to traffic. A long line of visitors queued up quietly, and soon we were all inside and transported back to the 1940s, and wartime. A sign entitled “The Cabinet War Rooms” distilled the essence of the place:
Since writing to you in early March about the state-of-the-art market amidst the onrushing coronavirus, it would seem that the entire market—like the country, indeed the whole world—is working from home. This state of affairs will continue for as long as necessary. People are adjusting to the new reality of remote art market commerce.