Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 48 2024

Banana again. In an unusually extensive report, even CNN's Oscar Holland talks about the sale of Maurizio Catellan's work at Sotheby's in New York for $6.24 million. The Chinese collector Justin Sun will pay with his play money from the crypto-currency industry. He had indicated that he wanted to eat the banana. Perhaps a suitable use can also be found for the duct tape. The result triggers exactly the biting reflexes that were to be expected. The already highly opinionated Hyperallergic has Hakim Bishara foaming at the mouth: “This is wrong. It's beyond wrong. It's obscene and immoral. It's the ugliest display of excess I've seen in a long time.” With a little more distance, Daniel Völzke looks at the stunt at Monopol: “It is still impressive today how Cattelan created this huge effect with the least amount of effort. He used a trick: he made the media and the public believe that he was making fun of the art market, of people who had spent $120,000 or even $6.2 million on a banana. The joke is at the expense of those who flaunt this very contempt for the supposedly crazy world of contemporary art and use it to write articles and posts: after all, they did all the work and helped Cattelan to achieve this coup.” Whereby he also fails to mention that the consignor is the biggest winner in material terms. On the current Monopol Top 100 (paywall), Cattelan is ranked 46th. Incidentally, Justin Sun was the underbidder in the famous Beeple record, who consoled himself over his defeat with a Picasso.

Barbara Kutscher summarises the whole auction week in New York for the Handelsblatt: “The houses had entered the race cautiously with a reduced volume. In total, the duopoly took in over 908 million dollars (gross) in the five evening auctions from Monday to Wednesday. Above all, market-fresh works from estates sold well in a fickle market that only appreciates the exceptional. The highlight of the week and probably of the whole year was the competition for René Magritte's painting ‘L'Empire des Lumières’, which is certainly one of the most famous motifs by the Belgian surrealist. He had varied it seventeen times over sixteen years, but today we also know it from posters or shopping bags. [...] After ten minutes, Rotter was able to congratulate his client. He had set a new artist's record at $121.2 million gross.’ Anne Reimers announces a conciliatory end in the FAZ: “At the end of auction week, at Christie's '21st Century Evening Sale', collectors’ restraint seemed to have been blown away. No fewer than three artworks with bananas – by Jonas Wood, Nicolas Party and Urs Fischer – were up for grabs here. Sales rose to 105.6 million dollars, led by a 1982 portrait on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat. ‘Untitled’ (20/30 million) set a record for the painter in this medium with a hammer price of 19.5 million. Two lots were withdrawn, the remaining 42 were sold, 17 were guaranteed. Eight new records were set.” Katya Kazakina takes an analytical look at the auction week at Artnet (possibly paywall): "The total haul so far is $1.2 billion, just clearing the low end of the week's presale range. That total includes buyer's premiums, while the estimates do not. And it does not reflect all the drama and auction wizardry that happened behind the scenes to achieve such relatively positive optics. Reserves were lowered at the 11th hour, irrevocable bids negotiated within minutes of sales, some lots withdrawn, and others reopened after having failed to sell. The houses deserve credit for pulling it off."

With so much tabloid coverage, the week's news, which is much more significant for the German art market, has almost been overlooked: the reduction in VAT on art has passed the Bundesrat with the Annual Tax Act. Marcus Woeller explains in Die WeLT: “Claudia Roth, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, also counts it as her success that the reduction will take effect in Germany at the turn of the year. [...] The law implements the plan to support independent cultural venues such as galleries. This was agreed in the coalition agreement of the now defunct traffic light government and finally passed by the federal cabinet in the summer of 2024. In this respect, at least, there was still consensus on this point”. And promptly, Art Karlsruhe presents itself as the “First Art Fair with 7% VAT.” Is this a successful marketing coup or just silly?

I write about the reasons for Artnet's cancellation of the Annual General Meeting in the Handelsblatt. Marion Maneker writes at Puck (paywall) about the company's troubles: "Yet the stock price remains at a nine-month high, which isn't great news for the Neuendorfs, who previously enlisted passive investors to buy the company's stock at depressed prices and vote with their bloc. If the stock isn't budging after the grim financials, it means that shareholders are sticking around; they haven't given up on the company, but they may have given up on the Neuendorfs."

Art seems to have played a secondary role at Abu Dhabi Art, as Melissa Gronlund's report for The Art Newspaper suggests: "Contemporary dealers reported mixed results, with numerous works on reserve but fewer confirmed sales. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi team, which is edging closer to its full opening, were circulating at the fair and underlined that acquisitions were ongoing and will continue after the museum opens next year. [...] As usual in the close-knit Middle Eastern art world, rumours were on overdrive—this time around the all-but-certain takeover of Abu Dhabi Art by Art Basel. Though the Art Newspaper was unable to confirm the $20m figure that has been floated in the press—a sum one source with knowledge of the UAE leadership called ‘peanuts’ for Abu Dhabi—MCH staffers were in attendance and everyone was expecting the news to drop at any moment."

Lee Sharrock from Forbes: “Held on the main floor of the Grand Palais, FAB Paris is less hectic than Art Basel Paris or Paris Photo, allowing visitors time to take in creative excellence across a wide range of art forms, from ancient to altarpieces, baroque to minimal. My highlights also include works from the post-war and contemporary periods, including Otto Fried at Brame & Lorenceau, Vasarely at Galerie Hurtebize and ‘Picabia, Miro, Picasso’ at Galerie Helene Bailly.” I was in Paris for the Tagesspiegel. The Luxembourg Art Week, which I visited for Monopol, met with similarly little media interest.

Rising rents and falling revenues have fostered a new trend in the world's art centres, explains By Kin Woo in the New York Times: "Now, however, a growing number of gallerists and curators are, like [Rajan] Biljani, taking the opposite approach, exhibiting in the very places where daily life dominates: their own homes. In Manhattan's Financial District, the dealer Michael Bargo, 41, sells rare furniture out of his one-bedroom apartment. In Los Angeles's Frogtown, the collector Jonathan Pessin, 54, has converted his residence into a veritable bazaar of vintage design objects. And on New York's Lower East Side, the pro skater turned artist and gallerist Tony Cox, 49, runs Club Rhubarb — a tiny, deliberately hard-to-find contemporary art gallery — out of his sixth-floor abode. There is some precedent for the idea: The Parisian antiques dealer Florence Lopez, 65, for example, has used her Paris home – a former sculpture studio in the Sixth Arrondissement – as a showroom for clients like Charlotte Gainsbourg since 1995. But now, whether driven by skyrocketing rents, a collective urge to experiment or a longing to encourage active participation with the art, the concept is taking hold."

In an interview with Jan Kage at Monopol, the Leipzig/Berlin gallerist Judy Lybke from Eigen + Art talks about the development of the gallery, the art market and the Berlin scene: “In 1990 there was hardly any street lighting on Auguststraße. When the sun went down, it stayed dark. That changed. Suddenly events were being held and tickets were available to buy. You could suddenly do something with money. So it became an important accessory. One that you had or didn't have. So it was also the beginning of a time when you thought about it when you went out to eat: What does the other person earn, can they come or not? So the differentiation among each other began. Before that, you just opened a gallery. Or you woke up and became a journalist or a radio announcer. You could decide every morning what you were going to be and then claim it. You told someone, yourself and others, and then that was it. At some point, that was no longer possible. From then on, we also had professionalisation problems as a gallery and had to do that too.”

In an article in Die WeLT, Marcus Woeller looks at the younger generation of gallerists: “Robert Grunenberg, who just turned 39, is open about the questions that are usually deliberately not asked in his industry. For example, how do young gallerists actually finance themselves? Without a good cushion, establishing a gallery that not only enables the artists to make a living is a challenge. He took out a private loan of 300,000 euros to start his business. Was his belief in success greater than his fear of risk? ‘In retrospect, taking out such a large loan was pretty crazy,’ he says in conversation. Especially since he couldn't have known that Corona would come in the second year. But he sold well from the first exhibition.”

The third institution to receive a donation from Berlin gallerist Alexander Schröder (Galerie Neu) is the Hamburger Kunsthalle, as reported by Johannes Wendland in the Handelsblatt: “Alexander Schröder collects artworks that irritate: Who is the creator of the work of art? Who is the owner? What is the relationship between the artist and the collector? And because Schröder does not see these questions as mere figments of the imagination, he takes them seriously. Time and again, he has parted with his possessions, donating considerable parts of his collection to public art museums. After the Mumok in Vienna and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Hamburger Kunsthalle has now benefited – Schröder has bequeathed 63 works by 25 artists to it.”