Friday, December 16, 2005

DIARY INSTALLMENT (ART REVIEW MAGAZINE, December 2005)

It’s well over a year since we moved to London and I still haven’t attained the peripheral vision necessary to navigate the width-restricting elevated curbs on the Hammersmith Bridge on the school run every morning. Even my tiny Mini cannot cope with the hurdles encountered on a daily basis as I career from side to side, or worse, from side to side and back again. Either way it doesn’t bode well for long-term tyre usage, nice rims or my current adventures.

Speaking of obstacles, during my house search in 2003 I phoned the Frieze people to say hello after making their acquaintance during a curated show in the mid-1990s, to inform them of my impending move to the UK, the nature of my projects and my hope in attending the fair as more than a viewer. The response was, rather ominously, ‘Even if you are rejected, we can list your opening.’

There’s nothing like a self-fulfilling prophecy to weigh down the odds. Two years on and I only gained admittance to the opening by nicking (it’s been over a year, and Madonna speaks like that) the invitation out of the mail addressed to the former tenant of my house.

It’s the capriciousness of the process that frustrates most – well, frustrates me, anyway. I suppose my chances were not helped by comments made on these pages in a prior diary instalment about the fickleness of the organisers when drawing up the invitation list for last year’s opening night party. Galleries are chosen for inclusion in the international fairs by a small handful of galleries that judge one event after another, and amount to a cluster of worms under a rock. Imagine the cliques, snickering after denying admittance to gallery after gallery. Having been on a selection committee or two for various exhibitions, I have indulged in such tastelessness myself, truth be told.

I’ve opened a gallery space on Britannia Street while the planning application for the Zaha Hadid building for Hoxton Square continues. On the opening night there was much support from my neighbours, Gagosian Gallery, in the form of attendance by the international staff and even flowers. I felt like Sally Fields when she gave her acceptance speech after winning an Oscar in 1985 – they like me!, although a few openings later the idea of my posting kids in front of their entrance to direct gallery-goers to my nascent space across the street started to wear thin.

Then came Basel Miami 04. I was asked by the fair to come up with an architectural concept with Vito Acconci, with whom I have collaborated in the past, to create an intervention that would result in a kind of tunnel, within a passageway that had never before been used. Acconci’s contribution was to reconfigure the booth designs that we had worked on for the Armory in New York and a previous Basel Miami.

The result was a series of interlocking igloo shapes formed out of PVC tubes – a superstructure upon which to install art. The final element of the structure extended out in such a manner as to block nearly 85 percent of the passageway from one side of the fair to the other. Word quickly spread among dealers during the installation that I was intentionally trying to disrupt the event, while in reality I was on the phone with the studio to explain why we needed to open the aperture more, so as not to disrupt ingress or egress. Self-sabotaging I am not.

You see the makings of a pattern. I was informed this year that I would not be invited back for the 2005 edition of Art Basel Miami. When I asked why, after such a wondrous contribution from Vito last year and when there is so little to distinguish the goings-on from one booth to another, I was told my art wasn’t up to snuff. Call it the strong arm of the Miami Beach Art Police. When I pressed on, pointing out the quality of the renowned artists I exhibited, such as Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton, Ed Ruscha, Vito etc, I was told that Acconci’s design was not what was envisioned from computer renderings prior to its implementation.

Me, I could understand them not liking, but my art? Or Vito’s booth? The show will go on without me, and the only thing I will miss more than the practically effortless sales are the parties.

I find another building in King’s Cross, two blocks from my gallery, as my lease runs out in two and a half years. This is one of the rare times I venture out due to my pathological fear of getting lost coupled with my horrendous sense of direction. Even my sat nav system can’t seem to get it right. In any event, wish I had remained home as I end up finding a breed worse then real estate agents. After we have come to an agreement of terms to purchase the former union clubhouse, I experience a modern-day phenomenon unique to the bloated property market here – I am gazumped! That’s when you shake on a deal, call your lawyers, only to have the rug pulled out by profiteering landowners – or worse, a French collector.

I guess as a way of dealing with these daily art-world frustrations, I have become more involved with cars – collecting them and travelling to circuits in the UK and elsewhere in Europe to drive all out. Before my trips to the track I am queasy at the thought that things won’t turn out well, a sensation only overcome by driving at breakneck speed. I have even successfully campaigned for my competition licence at Brands Hatch; though equipped with the personalised helmet and fireproof coveralls, I don’t think I could actually stomach an event. I’m also working on a car/design magazine that will launch in the spring and have commissioned Hadid to design a car that we will build into a functioning prototype.

And then there was The Armory. Despite three years of participation, but now weary of the selection process, I looked into the make-up of the committee and all was instantly clear: despite having a special relationship with two of the founding members of the fair, I would be, and ultimately was, dropped. Between the members and me there was: 1. An affair 15 years ago that didn’t end well; 2. A dispute from a transaction after being charged 50 percent of the purchase price for shipping; 3. A near fistfight at a boozed-up event at Basel last year; 4. The best friend of the preceding three.

Then there was this email sent by a NYC gallery which is working with many of the emerging artists I used to represent: ‘I thought I might get your thoughts on how to get the Armory show committee to let us into their fair. Currently we are on a waiting list. Several galleries already in the fair are looking to showcase our artists … Many on the committee will be at the Frieze Fair. I’ve written them. Maybe you know these people and can put a word in for us… We could use the $.’

While travelling to one of the many fairs I actually did participate in over the past year, my wife and kids rented bikes in Battersea Park on a Sunday afternoon. When my 5-year-old got ahead a bit he was abruptly and violently pushed from his bike by a 9-year-old girl and robbed of it. For a week he was badly shaken. Now we’ve been mugged as a family – welcome to Britain. London is like New York in the 1970s when politics was only a glimmer in Giuliani’s eyes. Most everyone I know here has been robbed, at least once.

But my kids always seem to extract the last laugh in the rough and tumble world here. In a Rondinone installation at Frieze that consisted of a snow machine raining white paper flakes in a perfect mound on the floor, one of my little monsters approached and proceeded to lie prone atop the pile like a dying cowboy in a spaghetti western. By coincidence, it was a gallery that served on two out of three of the selection committees referred to above.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

FRIEZE DISEASE, OR THE BURSTING OF THE BALLOON (ARTinvestor Magazine, Fall 2005)

When will the reassessment come, the day of reckoning, for a time when demand not only influences art but instigates it, determines the form? Isn’t the repetitive nature of some art production in endless series just another name for creating more of the same stuff? Does it stop becoming “art” as conventionally conceived to this point? Will there be accountability from a time when a de Kooning pencil drawing is worth less than a Hirst spot print in an edition of 1000? The Chapman brothers’ chuckle that their embellishments to Goya prints retail for more than the originals, as if that’s something to boast about rather than lament. Welcome to the world of contemporary art. Maybe the Frieze disease will end when rising interest rates throw a wrench into the runway inflation of contemporary art prices. That’s when the fairs will loose their stranglehold on who does and does not get to participate in the international art dealing game. Cliques of self-congratulatory dealers, patting themselves on the back at denying participation of those not deemed cool enough or worthy enough to play. A cesspool of intertwined worms under a rock.

Don’t get me wrong, I too am admittedly complicit in the enterprise, yet another opportunistic virus, taking advantage of the run up in prices of the select artists (like everyone else) coveted by the present market.

Sign of the times: In a recent fair I observed a private dealer friend, invited with room and board to one fair after another like a gambler to Atlantic City, buy down one isle and sell down the next, time and again. In the same fair! Talk about inefficiencies in markets and the vagueness of what passes for hard information in the art world.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe. I learned firsthand art-world-style that sometimes a pipe really isn’t a pipe purchasing a contemporary photograph by a white-hot artist, signed and dated, from a “collector” at last year’s Armory Fair in New York. This occurred when I made a subsequent sale of the work and the purchaser called the well-known, old school New York Chelsea gallerist who then shot down the sale, denying the authenticity of the print. Her reasoning was that it was not what it appeared to be on its face, from a desirable series by the artist, and was worth substantially less than the agreed upon sales price. These comments were communicated to my client in the face of emails from the very gallery to a prior purchaser to the contrary. This happened with 3 further attempts to sell the work and I was only able to attain a proper certificate from the gallery after hiring a lawyer to draw up a complaint for defamation and interference of a contract. Does this happen anywhere other than in the art world?

I have no issues with the fact more people are looking at, making and buying art than at any other time prior in history. This is a good, wonderful, healthy phenomenon and the fairs in the best of worlds act as non-threatening, welcoming environments in which to experience and appreciate art. Perhaps the fairs are even contributing to the ultimate obsolescence of galleries themselves. However, when connoisseurship and aesthetics are sacrificed in the name of fashion and speculation, you end up with a dangerous minefield. Collectors flipping art without sometimes even a rudimentary viewing should be a bright red flag that danger lurks on horizon.

Friday, September 16, 2005

ARTinvestor Magazine Fall 2005

In 1973 Ethel and Robert Skull, as the result of a divorce settlement, staged a significant auction of contemporary art in New York; significant in as much as it was the first time a major evening auction transpired featuring solely contemporary art. Immediately after the sale, which was a monumental, historic success, Robert Rauschenberg punched Robert Skull in the stomach due to the fact two Rauchenberg paintings purchased from the studio for under $3,500 realized a quantum leap from his then primary market to $175,000. What pissed-off the artist so much to the point of fisticuffs was the fact that not only did Rauchenberg himself fail to participate in the upside of this market surge to the extent the Skull’s did, but moreover, the notion that he didn’t stand to make a cent off of the tremendous windfall the works achieved at the sale. Rauchenberg declared he wound henceforth receive a royalty in the resale of his art. He didn’t, but this now quaint anecdote presaged the issue of the Droit de Suite (resale profit-sharing rights) that to this day is widely debated and is sure to be even more hotly contested January 1, 2006 when it takes effect in the UK.

In a nutshell, Droit de Suite affects the public resale of an original work of art (including prints!) by a living artist or the works of dead artists up to 70 years after death. A levy of .25% to 5% (depending on sales proceeds) will benefit the artist or artists’ estate calculated on the sales price, not profit. Generally, no Droit de Suite is payable on sales less than €3000, but for all other transactions the rates are around 4-5% of the sale price up to €50,000, then declining to the lowest rate as the prices climb up to €2,000,000. The total amount of the Droit de Suite is not to exceed €12,500. The origin of the tax in the 1920’s was to assist French widows of artists that perished in WWI. The Droit de Suite provisions were later incorporated into copyright legislation of most nations in what is now the European Union and reflected in the Berne Convention. The Droit is not adapted in the US (except for California), Canada, New Zealand or Asia. Figures it was the French who started it, but can someone explain California?

The points of view (or rather, polemical positions) about the Droit de Suite are fairly straightforward, but nevertheless present an ongoing quagmire in the making. On one side are artists who (if they are lucky) see their works resold at auction but see no profits from subsequent transactions and still can manage to go hungry during such ongoing economic activity. On the other hand are the dealers and auction houses in the countries that adapt the law who stand to lose business, not to mention the poor collectors put out by having to search for tax friendly venues to shift works. The dealer and auction houses also argue artists’ prices will suffer because of the restrictions on trade.

To this writer, not lest of all as I ply my trade buying and selling “original” works of art and frequently arbitrage sales according to local tastes and tax consequences, this measure is clearly anti laissez-faire and bad for business. Though the tax is admittedly small and not too onerous, why not sell in New York (or Switzerland, see below) and not bother about the consequences. Also enforcement must be an expensive Herculean undertaking, to say the least, waiting for an over-zealous prosecutor with political aspirations. In addition, a “starving artist” is by most definitions not one being feted at night sales by Sotheby’s and Christies. When an artwork reaches new heights at auction and on the resale market there is clearly a spillover effect that benefits the artist directly by an increase in their primary market and an increase in the stock of paintings, etc. held by the artist. By the same token, should an artwork turn out to have lost value, (hypothetically speaking of course, as its never happened to me) should the artist chip in to restore the collector to parity? In the end, the consequences might be said to have materialized already in the way of recent gallery migrations from both the UK and Germany to Switzerland: London’s Haunch of Venison Gallery and Berlin’s Arndt and Partners will be launching form Zurich this season.