Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 49 2024

When someone points at the moon, the fool will look at the finger – or so the Buddhist wisdom goes. Or maybe it was Bruce Lee who said it. In any case, the shocking thing about the banana man is not that he has eaten the fruit (unfortunately not the fruit of knowledge). Nor the obscene display of his wealth, acquired in a questionable manner, which seems to exceed his style by several orders of magnitude. Nor does the outrage of the banana-selling class and their sympathisers, who lament the injustice of the supposed price increase. The apparently successful burying that goes with it is worrying, since hardly any of the frantic media notice that the money laundering suspect in the US has almost simultaneously invested five times the amount in the crypto currency of the orange man, who will soon be the most powerful man in the world again, as Jörn Brien reports at t3n. So please move along, there is nothing to see here. At least not the moon, only the finger.

With this fruitless topic, as well as the declaration of bankruptcy of part of the (Berlin) art scene in connection with the Nan Goldin exhibition and the financial devastation of the cultural policy there, not only the German-language media are so busy that the pure art market topics are somewhat neglected. Christine Lemke-Matwey in Die Zeit and his predecessor Klaus Lederer in the Instagram video say everything there is to say. Finally, however, we would like to quote Christiane Peltz, who, in the Tagesspiegel, lays out the full misery of Berlin's cultural policy: ‘It is already clear that the educational programmes and low-threshold offers will be the first to fall victim to the inevitable commercialisation of culture.’

Barbara Kutscher's review of New York auction week in the Handelsblatt is mixed: ‘Despite a few top prices and the occasional extended distribution struggle, last week's New York auctions made it clear that the market, which has been shrinking for almost two years, is still in a recovery phase. The 211 artworks sold at Christie's, Phillips and Sotheby's on four evenings alone, for $1.3 billion gross, were down 42 per cent from last November's results, but only three per cent below spring revenues. London-based market research firm Art Tactic sees a silver lining. There are signs that the tone of the market is changing. Thirty-five per cent of the lots exceeded their median estimates and a whole series of artist records were broken.’ Karen K. Ho provides a detailed analysis for Artnews: ’This time, there were a few big winners and some surprising disappointments, even for blue-chip names. That may come down to what we might call a granular market: one dependent on the quality of the specific work that hits the block. ‘The art market is not a monolith,’ art adviser Megan Fox Kelly told ARTnews after the sales week. ‘It's often more accurate, I think, to analyze the market at the level of the individual work.’’

Nina Schedlmayer for the Handelsblatt, saw more light than shadow at the auctions at Vienna's Dorotheum.

I spoke to Isabel Apiarius-Hanstein from the Cologne auction house Kunsthaus Lempertz for Monopol.

Million Euro sales at Grisebach in Berlin and at Lempertz in Cologne, reports Ursula Scheer in the FAZ.

In view of the waning interest in buying, galleries could start charging for admission, suggests Annika von Taube in Monopol (paywall): ‘The idea that viewing art presented for sale must cost nothing, has certainly been called into question since gallery tours have become a popular leisure activity, where the highest possible entertainment factor is desired for children and parents, but this is rarely rewarded with the purchase of art. For precisely this reason, art fairs have always charged an entrance fee on the days when they were open to the public. An annual ticket for gallery visits (to be presented only on sporadic demand for the sake of simplicity) would be quite conceivable, preferably through a concerted surcharge by a corresponding gallery coalition.’ No.

Leo Xu, former director of David Zwirner Hong Kong, attempts to explain the current Chinese market on Artnet: ‘There is also a shift away from young artists, which have dominated the market the past few years. Many of these works carry an exotic quality or are closely tied to personal, intimate narratives, but they often lack critical reflection on contemporary society and humanity. It feels akin to trending topics on social media. This is a global issue, but it has taken on a huge scale of consumption in Asia, which in turn has swept through Western markets. From my experience, the Western art market operates in tiers, with collectors of different ages and backgrounds having their preferences. In contrast, the Asian market is relatively new, constantly being revised and rebuilt. Many buyers frequently shift between categories—moving from antiques to contemporary Chinese art, abandoning it for Western blue-chip artists, and then spotting opportunities in young Western artists at lower price points for faster returns.’

Kabir Jhala reports in The Art Newspaper on the cancellation of the India Art Fair's planned subsidiary in Mumbai, which was scheduled for November.

The Groucho Club in London, which has been part of the Hauser & Wirth empire for two years, has been closed by the police, reports Kabir Jhala in The Art Newspaper: ‘Westminster City Council said in a statement on Tuesday that the Groucho Club's licence has been revoked for 28 days after a request from the Metropolitan Police. ‘This decision follows reports that a serious crime may have taken place at the premises in circumstances linked to a breach in the premise's licensing conditions,’ a council spokesperson said in a statement. The nature of the crime has not been revealed.’

In Mexico City, the paths for galleries do not seem to be paved with gold after all, according to a report by Maricarmen Barrios for Artnews: ‘Over the course of just three months this year, three mid-sized US galleries have shuttered their outposts in Mexico City: Morán Morán (Los Angeles), Deli (formerly based in New York and now permanently shuttered), and Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles). None of them had been in the country for longer than three years.’

The endangerment and preservation of material cultural heritage in the face of multiple crises was the subject of a symposium, which was reported on by dpa: ‘But the explosiveness of the topic has not yet really been recognised, said [Hesse's Minister of Culture Timon] Gremmels. Especially since it is necessary to accomplish all these tasks at a time when financial resources are becoming increasingly scarce. To do this, it is also necessary to set priorities. There will be painful and tough discussions about where collections will have to be dissolved. ‘But these discussions must be conducted from a position of strength. And they must be conducted with concepts and a clear attitude.’ ‘We have to stop dreaming,’ said the president of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Ulrike Lorenz. ‘Prioritising also means deprioritising.’ She added that the cultural sector can no longer rely on growth alone. This transformation requires viable future strategies and a confident cultural policy.

The Kunsthaus Göttingen will probably have to file for bankruptcy after just four years, reports Monopol: ‘The Göttingen city council decided that a payment of 200,000 euros to bridge a liquidity bottleneck cannot be approved. Lord Mayor Petra Broistedt, who is also Chairwoman of the Supervisory Board of Kunsthaus Göttingen gGmbH, emphasised that this was a bitter step, but that it does not necessarily mean the end of the Kunsthaus’.