Kobel's Art Weekly

Kobel's Art Weekly 51 2023 - the last one for this year

The war in Ukraine will soon have been going on for two years, and the war in the Middle East is a new development. Nevertheless, the art market has almost returned to business as usual. This time, the review of the last six months consists of two parts.

The reckoning comes at the end, and Ukraine is prudently keeping records, including of art owned by sanctioned Russians, Ursula Scheer reports in early August in the FAZ: "The country's National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NACP) has compiled the database, which is open to further reports, under the heading 'War & Art'. It is intended not only to publicise the wealth of Putin's business elite, but also to serve as an easy-to-use tool to prevent the resale of listed works of art or to facilitate confiscations. According to NACP, it is still too easy for oligarchs to launder or hide money with art. However, the database, which focuses on sanctions enforcement, has inaccuracies: for example, it lists not only artworks in current Russian ownership, but also those that have previously passed through the hands of oligarchs."

After Sotheby's and Christie's, Phillips also delivers poor figures, reports Angelica Villa at Artnews: "Phillips said its global sales for the first half of 2023 were $453 million, a substantial 39 percent drop compared to the $746 million it reported for the first half of 2022. That year was a 37 percent increase compared to the $542.7 million in total sales reported for the first half of 2021. Auction sales accounted for $409 million of the total sum for the first half of 2023, which also includes private sales. That's a 31 percent decrease from the $590 million reported for the same period last year. This year's figure was also lower than the $452 million reported in the first half of 2021. Private sales were also down significantly, to $44 million, a 72 percent decrease from last year's result of $156 million. The drop in private sales appears even more stark considering that last year's result was a record high".

Far too little on the art market's radar is probably precisely the segment that is always eyed with disdain when it pushes its way to the periphery of the art market, but is never really taken seriously: Luxury goods. Christian Herchenröder describes the development for the Handelsblatt: "In its worldwide luxury auctions, Christie's fetched an impressive $779 million in 2022. By way of comparison: in the same year, auctions of art by the so-called 'emerging artists' in all three major houses fetched no more than 350 million dollars. Asians are the most important group of buyers. In the first half of 2023, according to 'Asianews', Asian buyers dominated 38 per cent of global luxury goods auctions, while American bidders were only 28 per cent active. The strong presence of luxury goods in global auctions is accompanied by a creeping market shift from thematic to multi-faceted collecting."

A US court ruling on the copyright of AI-generated images is likely to have far-reaching consequences not only for the art market, even if it is upheld by the court of last instance. Tessa Salomon reports at Artnews: "A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled Friday that artwork generated by artificial intelligence is not eligible for copyright protection because it lacks 'human involvement,' reaffirming a March decision of the United States copyright office. The ruling is the first in the US to establish boundaries on legal protections for AI-generated art, whose immense popularity has opened a nebulous legal frontier dictated-for better or worse-by assessments of aesthetics and originality. Judge Beryl A. Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the US Copyright Office's decision to deny grant copyright protections to an artwork created by computer scientist Stephen Thaler using 'Creativity Machine,' an AI system of his own design. Howell wrote in her motion that 'courts have uniformly declined to recognise copyright in works created absent any human involvement.'"

The scandal surrounding art advisor Lisa Schiff is spreading, reports Alex Greenberger at Artnews: "According to the Winston Art Group, the advisory firm selected by [the liquidator Douglas J. ] Pick to inventory Schiff's company, there are 108 artworks whose whereabouts are still unknown by artists such as Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Virgil Abloh, Jana Euler, Alex Israel, Joel Mesler, Ugo Rondinone, Julie Mehretu, and Lisa Edelstein, an actress who has previously produced art and is a friend of Schiff." The number of injured parties is now also much larger than previously known.

Nicole Scheyerer attests to a mediocre season for the Austrian auction industry in the FAZ, in early September without naming sales revenues: "There were few outliers in the first half of the year in the Austrian auction business. There was, however, sure demand for high-quality Orientalist paintings".

The parent company of Art Basel is making a profit again, according to its annual report, which I am summarising for the Handelsblatt .

The magazine “art” seems not to be sold after all, reports dpa: 'Gruner + Jahr boss Bernd Hellermann told 'Art': 'The magazine is profitable and well positioned. We will now - together with editor-in-chief Tim Sommer and the entire team - develop it further ourselves.' With its 'excellent positioning at the top of the segment, the brand has great potential, especially in digital, which we want to tap.'" To get in the back of the queue on the internet, because the company had shut down its online activities except for the shop a few years ago. Maybe it would be a good idea for a change to let publishers run publishing houses and journalists run magazines and not bean-counters driven by quarterly figures.

The scandal at the British Museum prompts Tobias Timm to look to Germany and its deficits for the ZEIT: "In many German museums, too, we hear from employees who wish to remain anonymous, there are still boxes of antique objects, graphic collections, bequests that are poorly documented - and could thus become easy prey for thieves. Moreover, the collectibles usually remain unexplored and unseen. One of the great tasks of the 21st century, says art historian Bénédicte Savoy, who teaches in Berlin and Paris, is to create a political awareness of the fact that what European museums guard is not in their sole possession, but is the responsibility of the general public - in both an ethical and a material sense. 'The more complete and transparent a collection is accessible on the internet, the better this responsibility can be met worldwide and the safer this is for the cultural property.'"

The beginning of September has become the new hotspot in the art world calendar, the selection is now so unmanageable that not only the public, but also the media have to strongly select whom to pay attention to. The Brussels Gallery Weekend is at best still covered by local media.

The Viennese art fairs have a turbulent history, which Nicole Scheyerer outlines on the occasion of the Viennacontemporary in the FAZ: "The Viennacontemporary has had three difficult years, and not only because of Covid. Although it was one of the few art fairs in Europe to physically take place in autumn 2020, it did so with hardly any foreign participation, lower stand rents and a reduced audience. After these losses, the competitor Spark Art Fair also entered the scene in 2021, to which many Viennese galleries gave priority. After the war in Ukraine began, the Russian majority owner Dmitry Aksenov, who had invested a lot of money in Viennacontemporary since 2013, withdrew. The fair is said never to have made a profit anyway. According to trade fair manager Huber, Aksenov's loss carry-forwards made his farewell an expensive process of cutting the cord. The public sector helped Viennacontemporary with 1.69 million euros. The amount of this Corona aid - more than for any other fair in Austria - is causing discussion. This year, Viennacontemporary invested in a better stand design, which the BWM Architekten office built in the form of elongated bunks."

After numerous western galleries, Frieze with its second edition is preparing to strengthen Seoul as a new market centre in Asia, observes Laura Storfner in the Tagesspiegel (paywall) : "The question of whether Hong Kong will be replaced by Seoul as a hub in the region has been occupying the art world not only since this autumn of fairs. Some say Singapore and the South Korean capital are in a neck-and-neck race for pole position on the Asian art market. Others see the return of Art Basel as a resurgence of Hong Kong after Covid - despite increasing repression. But everyone agrees: Seoul is vibrating. The city deserves to rise - thanks to ambitious institutions like the Leeum Museum and a gallery scene that can compete internationally."

The focus of Frauke Steffens' report for the FAZ is on the Armory Show: "Back are the art collectors from their summer residences on Long Island or Cape Cod. They are now pushing their way back through the halls of the first major art fair of the season instead of through traffic jams on the roads to the beaches. The Armory Show is making only its third guest appearance at the Javits Center on the west side of Manhattan, and already big changes are afoot: London-based art fair organiser Frieze has bought its New York rival - for $124 million from an investor conglomerate (F.A.Z. 15 July). The newspaper 'The Art Newspaper' is on display in the exhibition hall, with the dramatic headline that there is a 'British invasion'. At least on the personnel level, it looks more like continuity so far: Fair chief Nicole Berry, in post since 2017, is staying on."

At first Niklas Maak grumbles a bit about Berlin Art Week in the FAZ, but in the end he is somewhat reconciled: "Berlin has a lot of art, but no big fair. Time and again there have been attempts to turn the capital into a place where art is not only produced but also bought: There was the Art Forum, the abc, the Art Berlin; only the Gallery Weekend, which takes place at the beginning of May, and the small fair Positions, which has been around for ten years and is currently again offering a forum to galleries from twenty countries in the former Tempelhof Airport, have survived. It, too, is part of Berlin Art Week, where art can be seen in more than a hundred museums, exhibition spaces, project rooms, discos, hotel ruins and galleries until the end of this week. One can find the concept of the festival, which is organised by the state-owned Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, richly endowed from several senate budgets, chaotic and the money not well spent in all cases. But of course there's always a lot to discover at such a large-scale event." Christian Herchenröder compresses the art marathon Berlin Art Week on one page in the Handelsblatt, and he even accommodates the Positions fair: "Running parallel to the gallery programme in Tempelhof is the "Positions" fair, which in its tenth year makes no bad impression. The best of the 100 or so exhibitors can be found in Hangar 6."

95 percent of all NFT collections are now worthless, reports Jörn Brien at t3n: "According to this, there are currently 73,257 NFT collections, of which 69,795 - or a good 95 percent - are completely worthless. As a result, almost 23 million investors are said to have lost money. Another interesting fact is that 79 percent of all NFT collections were never sold in the first place. Due to this significant increase in supply, it will probably be difficult to revive the market in the future." The author, like Phil Rosen in Business Insider, refers to an investigation by NFT gaming specialist Vlad Hategan for the platform dappGambl. If only someone had warned us beforehand that the whole NFT spectacle was just a Ponzi scheme!

The circumstances of the break-in at the East Asian Museum seem once again to confirm all kinds of prejudices about Cologne's slovenliness. Regine Müller has compiled hair-raising facts for the Handelsblatt: "When asked about the museum's security situation, art expert Christoph Bouillon is surprisingly clear: 'One may ask whether the insurer does not consider this to be gross negligence. After two attempted break-ins, the window is only boarded up?' There is still no trace of the stolen goods. It is safe to assume that it has long since left the country on its way to its potential customers. They are probably waiting for the delivery in Asia, Bouillon suspects: 'When I think who buys such porcelain at auctions? Ninety-eight per cent of them are Chinese collectors'."

How New York's galleries have become the market-dominating and -defining power they are today is explored in several long texts by T, the style magazine of the New York Times. The reading is more for the weekend than for a Monday morning.

After seven years, Andrew Goldstein is no longer editor-in-chief of Artnet News, reports Artforum: "Though his plans after that remain nebulous, he acknowledged that he hoped to do some writing and to explore new projects."

Titus Blome reflects in early October on the reasons for the collapse of the NFT market for the Freitag: "The vision behind NFTs was not a grassroots network, divided among its users. It began and ended with the vain desire to be able to own things online and to bring digital culture into a format tangible to markets. Behind this is a murky, late capitalist view of humanity that can't imagine any motivation for cultural production other than money. Memes, art, tweets and everything else should be turned into tokens that can be sold and auctioned. Their artistic and even their social value should be determined by the speculative logic of financial markets. NFTs have never been more than the financialisation of absolutely everything." The metaverse is equally "in a coma", explains Berlin computer science professor Raúl Rojas González at Telepolis.

And another editor-in-chief is leaving, reports Francesca Aton at Artnews: "On Monday, The Art Newspaper announced Cole's departure after five and a half years at the helm. She will, however, retain a position as editor-at-large.Cole is leaving the publication to oversee a newly-created policy unit that will inform cultural policies in the arts and creative industries in the UK."