Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 34 2024

Zachary Small and Julia Halperin analyse whether and how the bursting of the current speculative bubble differs from previous ones in the New York Times: "The art market has been experiencing a downturn for the last few years, but the slump has been particularly acute for young artists. During the early pandemic, a speculative boom driven by a misplaced belief in quick returns set in, with collectors spending $712 million at auction in 2021 on works by artists born after 1974 - a giant leap from the $259 million buyers spent just a year earlier. But from 2021 to 2023, the prices for these artists - ‘ultracontemporary’ is the industry term for them - plummeted by almost a third, according to the Artnet Price Database.’ And, as always, people rarely or never seem to learn from the mistakes of others, but at best from their own. But at least: ‘[Amani] Lewis and other artists say the experience of navigating the market gauntlet has made them stronger. [Isshaq] Ismail, for example, now sells his work exclusively through galleries."

Brita Sachs took a tour of Salzburg's galleries for the FAZ: "When Salzburg is in festival mode, not only music and theatre are in full swing, but also art. For the galleries, it's the best time to put the icing on the cake of the annual programme". Werner Remm took a look at the small Art & Antique fair at the Residenz for Artmagazine.

I spoke to Thomas Hug, the former director of Art Genève, for Handelsblatt about his new art network project Maze.

Two reports on the same court case, two contradictory headlines: While Isa Farfan at Hyperallergic sums up, ‘Judge Says Artists Can Sue AI Companies for Using Their Work’, Tessa Solomon for Artnews summarises, ‘Judge Says Major AI Companies Did Not Profit Unfairly from Artists’ Work’. In fact, both seem to be right, as the judge in charge ruled that the AI companies had not taken unfair advantage of the artists, but that their copyrights had indeed been infringed.

Who would have thought it: transparency and affordable prices can also make the art market attractive to young people. An article by George Nelson on digital and physical mediators of prints for The Art Newspaper suggests this conclusion: ‘The prints and multiples sector is subsequently positioning itself as an antidote to the opacity and exclusiveness of other corners of the art market, such as the Old Master trade. The fossilisation of the latter's middle and lower end-partly because of the segment's inability to attract new, younger buyers-is no secret. As Scott Reyburn wrote in The Art Newspaper in January, Old Masters ‘just aren't cool’.’

Christian Herchenröder describes how acquisitions and depreciations influence the market for Old Masters in the Handelsblatt on the occasion of a Frans Hals exhibition in Berlin: ‘This waxing and waning of a complete oeuvre is comparable to the periodic changes in the Rembrandt corpus. Each new generation of experts feels compelled to re-evaluate. Such problems also have an effect on the Old Master market. Time and again, paintings come under the hammer whose authenticity is not unanimously clarified. One example is the double portrait of two fishermen's boys, which was auctioned at Christie's in July 2017 for £1.1 million. It first appeared on the market in 1935 and was described by Seymour Slive as a ‘19th century painting in the style of Frans Hals’. [...] Undisputed works, however, are valued far more highly. This applies, for example, to the two portraits of a married couple that sold for ten million pounds at Christie's in December 2018 and the three-quarter portrait of Tieleman Roosterman, which realised 8.2 million pounds at the same auction house in July 2008. This routine portrait was ennobled by Rothschild provenance.’

Franziska Kiermeier and Maike Brüggen, whose book on the Frankfurt auction house Bangel is presented by Christiane Fricke in the Handelsblatt, have unearthed a piece of art market history from the archives: ‘It speaks in favour of the networker Bangel that his specially advertised “Gemäldesaal” was also booked by other German and even foreign institutions and art dealers. The businessman also had a good nose for what was happening in the art world. He not only invited Edvard Munch, who had previously been fiercely opposed in Berlin, to exhibit with him. The Bangel auction house also responded to the boom in East Asian objects in 1900. According to Frankfurt provenance researcher Laura Vollmers, the company organised 95 of the 155 auctions currently recorded in Frankfurt in this new field of collecting. At the same time, Haus Bangel succeeded in establishing itself as a centre for ethnographic objects from Belgian and German colonial territories.’

Vienna's museums have pulled off a real coup with free admission for ticket holders to the cancelled Taylor Swift concerts, reports Karen K. Ho at Artnews: ‘The Albertina fully embraced the moment, waiving its €19. 90 regular entrance fee (€15.90 for visitors under 26 years) for more than 20,000 Swifties between Thursday, August 8 and Sunday, August 11. ‘On a normal and regular weekend, we would have, I would say 2,000 a day,’ spokesperson Nina Eisterer told ARTnews, noting that these types of visitor numbers are usually for blockbuster exhibitions like the one for Claude Monet in 2018.’ The article goes on to say that the tremendous public success is exclusively due to social media. Perhaps these new media are good for something other than documenting the day-to-day work of a briefcase.

Bernhard Schulz summarises the hassle surrounding the Berlin Pergamon Museum, a billion-dollar grave, for Monopol: ‘Because there are now quite a few lawsuits. Everyone is suing everyone else, the planners and construction companies involved are suing the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR), which is in charge, and vice versa. It's always about money, usually comparatively small sums for some kind of detailed work. Money that some demand and others don't want to pay, money that was due due to additional planning services due to inadequate coordination, the justification for which is contested.’

A Düsseldorf court has awarded Leon Löwentraut 26,000 euros in damages, reports dpa: ‘He had copied and sold the artworks without Löwentraut's consent and published them on his Instagram channel. The overall impression of the adaptations matched the originals - the defendant's own creative work was not recognisable.’ However, making copies of such epigonal images with an even lower level of creativity also constitutes an achievement of its own to a certain extent.

The death of Viennese collector Elisabeth Leopold is reported by the Kurier: ‘The grande dame of the local art scene died on Tuesday evening, the family and the Leopold Museum announced on Wednesday. Alongside her husband Rudolf, who died in 2010, she had built up one of the most important collections of Viennese modernism, which has been on display at the Leopold Museum since 2001 - at least in part.’ Olga Kronsteiner writes in the Standard: ‘She accompanied him on his art trips and supported him in his collecting activities. A mammoth task, because it was not always as idyllic as it may sound in retrospect, given the often financially precarious situation. As his son Diethard Leopold described in his biography of his father: ‘Rudolf was the courageous debtor for ever new purchases, Elisabeth, who practised as an ophthalmologist until the age of 69, was the stable factor in the family structure - living together was “heaven and hell” for his mother.’