HOXTON NEEDS HADID (AJ: Architect's Journal December, 2008)

FOSTER AND ROGERS GRANT ZAHA HADID PERMISSION FOR HER FIRST EVER BUILDING IN LONDON. So it was December 3, 2008, but that would be Sue Foster head Hackney Planning and Ray Rogers, Design and Conservation Manager. In 2004 upon moving to London from New York, I purchased 33-34 Hoxton Square, a small L-shaped building I previously went to planning with a Zaha Hadid mixed use residential and commercial development. Though I received permission to demolish the 1980’s eyesore in 2006, right to light issues rendered the project too risky, as the finesse in the design was the roof. For those without helicopters, the building was missing the pizzazz and flow usually associated with Hadid. In the summer of 2007 I purchased 35 Hoxton Square, a decrepit garment workshop to regularize the site, providing more leeway to push the design. Back to planning I went.
This past summer was a review panel lasting into the night; to say planners are without foresight is a generalization, plainly wrong. Slow maybe, but hardworking, thoughtful and bold in the face of opposition. A member of the panel (formerly of the planning committee) expressed dismay the initial design did not go far enough. English Heritage (EH) was another story. The “strong objection” expressed by EH was to the disruption of the “harmonious visual balance” on the square by the “discordant and alien form of the proposed development”. EH would prefer that the few listed buildings on the square sit in isolation, frozen in the past. What is alien is the idea of change, job creation and innovation. The alleged harmony can more likely be described as an architectural mishmash akin to the throngs congregating in Shoreditch on a Saturday night. The EH report also referred to the harming of the social and economic history of the square, which today can be described as clubs, cars, and crime. The design appears quartz-like with a series of fractals expressed in the façade. If that’s discordant, is discordant bad? Of the letters of dissent the most amusing complained that the building would be too “dazzling” blinding neighboring residents. Building blindness sounds like a new American defense to an inexcusable transgression.
Planning was unanimously granted in spite of the protestations, another being that I intended to flip the project for a tidy profit. This was always as much about public sculpture as profit. Zaha is a treasure in every nation but her own (she’s lived here for 35 years). I have fought consultants from the beginning as they advised the difficulties of constructing such a building, and that was in a good economy. This could be the first building in London and possibly the first finished residential project by Hadid, all in time for her 2012 Olympic swimming pavilion.

Hold off the celebrations. If the reactionary mentality of EH was bad enough, Save Britain’s Heritage (SBH) has weighed in, far overreaching their remit to campaign for endangered historic buildings, urging the communities secretary to call in the scheme and revoke planning. The only thing they are trying to save here, where the buildings to be demolished are admittedly unremarkable, is some quaint notion of the way things were. This situation is beginning to recall the Cardiff Opera House fiasco of the mid 1990’s when the results of two Hadid competition victories were overturned by the myopia of the conservative city council. The fallout from an ostensibly successful planning application: Now I am in need of not only an angel investor but also a cracking solicitor and a Christmas miracle to call in the call in.

http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/comments/comment_in_aj/2008/12/hoxton_needs_hadid.html

COLOGNE ART FAIR, AN OBITUARY, 2008 (The Telegraph Blog and Artnet)

Tumble weeds tumbling down the corridors of the 42nd Art Cologne fair, the oldest fair, even predating Basel on the first public day of attendance. Time used to have it where life expectancies weren’t anticipated beyond the early forties and history has repeated itself. If you query any art dealer the world over as to their performance at a given fair, especially if you are press, you will be met with the same cheery response and wide-eyed grin: things are ducky, going swimmingly, wonderful. Sold everything. Yes, I have been guilty of such disingenuousness myself on more than one occasion; I suppose I will be asked to administer to the new portable lie detector test prior to my next press inquiry. Let it be known, after the marathon 10-hour opening and nearly week-long fair (probably the longest of them all) we have sold absolutely nothing. Not a work, not a drawing, not a photo, not a thing. Back at the hotel, church bells of the almighty gothic Dom church resounded just in front of my room and I grieved for, lamented the absence of something that used to be, though now merely a faint memory: the viable fair that was once Cologne. The cycle of life, like the present abysmal economic cycle, has once more repeated itself. I suppose it should have been of no surprise.
In 1991 the Dom itself emblazoned the cover of the New York Times Magazine section with the headline, more or less, What is the Center of the Art World: Cologne or New York? Then a few things transpired on the way to work that forever changed the landscape of art and how it is transacted, namely a deep US recession followed on its heels by a German cyclical downturn; and then, lo and behold, unforeseen by anyone, the upstarts Damien Hirst, Charles Saatchi and Jay Jopling forever changed the course of art commerce and content, for now anyway. Things happen for better and worse, sometimes in paradigmatic shifts like cell phones, the Internet, Goggle and YouTube, and sometimes in art and what swirls around it. Never before had there been such an art boom—more practicing artists, collectors, writers, museums both public and private—and general interest and glamour. If you can call anything associated with the art world attractive in that sense. Fitting that the only English language station on the hotel TV was CNBC as that is the new CNN and Bloomberg the new Artforum. But after ten years that had experienced more growth than in the previous 100 years in art market expansion we are on the verge of a setback and a possibly monumental one at that. Perhaps this is a good thing regarding art fairs, but these events appear to be the first sector in the increasingly global and bloated art world to correct. We have recently witnessed the demise of the Dusseldorf Contemporary fair, the Frankfurt fair, the Mallorca version of the Cologne fair (an anemically attended fair in a Spanish airport in the dead of summer—hello?) and others, and surely a few more will cease in the coming months. Moving the Cologne fair last from the heels of Frieze to the spring, directly clashing with the Brussels fair was also no stroke of genius.

And how has all this affected Cologne? Lest I forget to reference the coup, in all probability the first literal overthrow of an art fair director by popular press not seen since the pamphlets of Thomas Paine campaigned for American independence. However the cause in the Cologne mutiny was not quite so noble or pure. Bemoaning the tragic loss of status of Cologne a group of disaffected local galleriists signed a national newspaper advertisement calling for the resignation of the fair’s director along with a list of some other petty demands. I witnessed these antics from the eye of the selection committee, having been appointed to the position after being rejected or accepted then rejected from just about most every major fair. That these idiots contended by publicly stoning-to-death the outgoing director (all demands were summarily granted by the management of the fair owner) would restore the fair to its former glory is not only laughable but also meaningless in a wider context.

In the end, the ploy was seen as an act of pathetic, petulant children who couldn’t get their way through normal channels, publicly acting out in a world where no one really cares about or pays much heed to such insignificant issues. The problem began with the fact it’s been some years since Cologne has been perceived as the equivalent of the day sales of art fairs to Basel’s night sale. With upcoming spring auctions fast approaching, the long anticipated cracks in the market should finally begin to appear by way of the thick contemporary sales catalogues, much of them filled with works of mediocre quality. Such is the fate of Art Cologne in the present state of the world economy. With the proliferation of fairs in the recent past including the ascension of London, Miami, and even Berlin (stuffed with galleries starved of collectors) and now the inevitable winnowing in the fair marketplace, we could very well see the demise of Cologne, not so much in the near future as in now. And to think, it was the extraordinary public declaration calling for the head of Cologne’s director, an instance worse than typical art world pettiness, a public tarring and feathering no less, that put even the most calloused of the art world ill at ease, and that ultimately backfired. What was left was an aura around Art Cologne of a stinking pile of…
Ok, I am not wholly blameless in the downward trajectory of my own Cologne (mis)fortunes. Due to a rescheduling in my new director’s travel itinerary I was left without wall labels for individual works or visible identification of the artists hanging at the opening, and as a result of a lack of pre-planning we neglected to accurately gauge the booth configuration, failing to account for two inordinately sized exterior walls, which a neighbor so kindly offered to fill for me with their lovely photographs. In the world of art fairs its strictly a matter of horror vacui: the fear of empty spaces and white walls, as the little patches of fair real estate come at a high premium. Yet, you can’t pin it on my lack of aesthetic insight as my booth contained stalwarts of history books and art market favorites alike: Polke, Acconci, Artschwager, Peter Saul, Franz West and industrial designers like Tom Dixon. Admittedly a bit retrograde to the fair fare I normally exhibit, but what better time to do traditional.
The ad hoc plan hatched for the mammoth, naked outside walls adjacent to the pubic passageways was a guerilla installation by William Pope. L, the noted performance artist, that comprised potted house plants on shelves that were heavily, viscously covered in multi-coats of black and blue spray paint till it dripped off the leaves and oozed down the walls. It didn’t take long for the complaints to materialize. Though it didn’t particularly smell all that much in the immediate area of the transgression, when I subsequently went for a coffee I discovered the intra convention center wind pattern had pointed due west, with a wafting toxic cloud of ozone busting fumes—keep it from Al.
The Art Cologne staff acted swiftly and decisively: for hours on end, a three strong security team stood guard watching the paint dry on the leaves, who would not depart till they were utterly convinced the offending spray paint no longer posed a security threat to the barely there public at large, and as it was gloss finish, it was admittedly going to be a long vigilance. What a handy way to repel the few collectors trundling down the quiet aisles. In fact one of the guards ended up attempting to explicate the art to some visitors—I’d love to have been a German-speaking fly on the wall to have witnessed that conversation; to think, we were provided our very own docent, how utterly courteous. An instance of the enlightened discourse on this work, rather than how much is that wonderful art piece, was the comment: “I don’t like to be this plant”.
With fairs such as Cologne, there is an undeniable sense of community at these and other like-minded events that will admittedly be missed, along with the chance to travel to the multitude of destinations that now host them, but soon the surfeit of fairs will exist only in nostalgia. Sitting in the Art Cologne booth there was an eerie stillness, a feeling of listlessness in the air, like being part of a display in a vitrine at a museum of natural history. Though there were occasional big-ticket sales of Richter's and the like, at the same time I witnessed more than one disaffected participant that stated their intention not to return. Nevertheless the regional fairs remain strategic places to source material such as the 1973 Polke work on paper I picked up from his series of erotic drawings. But acquisitions in the face of a no business climate are a dangerous undertaking, like Russian roulette. What the Cologne gallery instigators woefully failed to recognize in their misguided newspaper petition to publicly discharge the director of the fair was that you cannot simply determine to restore the luster of a city or its importance in a global community that is constantly transforming and mutating. No declaration on the part of anyone, be it a politician, or even worse, a group of inconsequential galley owners can sway the march of time and the shifting balance of power. What the Cologne management was after was rather aptly characterized by the title of the 1973 Sidney Pollack film with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford: The Way We Were.

Z.CAR BY ZAHA HADID (ROVE ZERO, Spring 2006, Premier issue of the car/design magazine)

Gentleman and Gentlewoman, Start Your Engines

Though the antiques market has crashed (post 9/11, 2001), and impressionist and old master paintings gone soft, modern and contemporary art and post war design are through the roof. Frothy even. From some cursory research, it appears collectible cars are the next segment poised for a dramatic upward shift. In a nutshell, million dollar sales are up astonishingly today, since the auto market experienced its own precipitous drop in the early 90s. From 16 in 2004 to 41 in 05 and already 21 in just the first quarter of 06, the increase in seven figure sales is nothing less meteoric and signals a fundamental shift in the landscape of car collecting. And its not only the hyper high ticket sales of concept prototypes and rare Ferrari’s galloping ahead, but also the average sales value has climbed from $37,813 in 2004 to $44,071 in 05, and pointedly, to $72,063 in the first quarter of this year. From Geneva to Arizona sales of vintage and collector cars alike are soaring and the breadth of the market, like the art market it is beginning to resemble, is international in scope, and in the throes of a major expansion.

Effectively, we are about to witness a near doubling of the market in two short years. Thus after a long channel of flat sales, cars seems to be aligning themselves with other sought after tangible assets such as real estate and commodities, all experiencing strong price inflation due to the lackluster performance of many other financial asset classes in the recent past. When hedge funds have arisen with art as their stock in trade, and financial indices charting not only art market segments but creating technical analysis of artists themselves, this could be the ground floor of an auto boom. Not to mention the flood of hedge fund’s funds fueling the present market rise.

When you think about it now, in terms of present value, what other business model exists where an individual walks into a room in which goods are for sale, plunks down a huge sum of money and leaves with 10 – 20% less in value when the threshold of the entrance is again crossed? For instance, a sizable portion of money expended for a Rolls Royce Phantom evaporates phantomlike without a trace, immediately upon purchase. Where do those proceeds end up? In the coffers of Volkswagen in all probability. But really, what that reflects as much as cynicism about the modern day auto market is the fervor with which successful and (seemingly) clever people pursue cars. There is a healthy amount of elasticity in the high-end car showrooms of the world. The allure of cars is widespread, deep rooted, and with the unfathomable wealth created in the past 10 years, the stage is set for a big rally!

Back to the present. GM lost a staggering $8.6 BILLION last year due to grossly swollen managerial layers producing mass market cars, with no notion of, or care for, what the consumer actually wanted: design and value. The behemoth, bleeding money with lackluster product of poor quality is being tamed by none other than an octogenarian entrepreneur who probably is the only one who can recall a day and age when GM made decent cars that people wanted to buy. With admittedly circuitous logic at its core, this can only bode well for the continued value and desirability of the classics. The designs of current cars are numbingly the same which appears the result of limited cross ownership of the major marques, more stringent safety regulations and bottom line aesthetics killing off any semblance of innovation. Not only do the classics appear as distinct and covetous by comparison, but they are also grandfathered in to evade the paternalistic regulatory climate that mandates the forms of vehicles to be packaged in a nearly uniform platform. Air bags, electronic safety systems, traction control, even seat belts? Not a chance. The classics, the prototypes, muscle cars of the 60s, therein resides the bastion of value in today’s marketplace—a well designed car, with seductive lines, and performance to match, that is distinct, rare and especially not engineered via marketing based focus groups in an out-of-touch Detroit.

Sipp lightly and at your own expense. That is that the radical expansion of the UK’s Self Invested Personal Pension (Sipp) plan to permit “tangible movable property” such as classic cars, fine wine and works of art to be invested in one’s personal pension fund, thus evading heavy taxation at point of purchase, has been scuttled. The chancellor reneged at the last minute after the adoption of the tax break in all probability fearful that the yellow journalists would seize on the notion of a high living businessman, toasting his art collection from his vintage Lamborghini at the expense of the Inland Revenue service, or more importantly, the Daily Mail readership. Tangible movable property does seem to leave a sordid residue. Nevertheless, it is doubtful this plugged loophole will impact materially on recent market trends.

For the market to continue its trajectory and really flourish, what is needed is more transparency in the trade akin to recent manifestations in the art world, via web sites, market oriented research and analysis and printed matter to disseminate the data and findings. With some forward thinking and innovation, GM could be out of the pits, and things could really turn the corner for the car world as a whole, but we are nowhere near the checkered flag just yet—hold on for the ride. Sorry, admittedly I should be pulled over for that.


Design Anorexia/What’s the Concept?

Meet the first green supercar, the striking concept is powered by a twin- turbo 400 horse power bioethanol v6 driving all four wheels. The result? A heady mix of 0-60 in 4.9 sec and no emissions. There are currently no plans to make it...
AUTOCAR, 29 MARCH 2006, VOL 247 No13/5883

The following is a paraphrase of a capsule excerpt on an experimental Saab concept car (yes, Saab) from one of the UK’s highest circulation and most closely read auto weeklies (yes, there is more than one). It’s great looking! It’s affordable! It’s quick as hell! It’s 300 miles to the gallon! And its revolutionary in its utter lack of emissions! So the choice is obvious: why bother?

Shouldn’t prototypes be put on the road by any means necessary? Like the old mantra from Burger King adverts in the 70s: “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special offers don’t upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way.” Why can’t we have our cars in the same bespoke fashion?

What passes for design today are like remakes of classic movies, when no better, newer, ideas present themselves: witness the Charger, Camaro, Miura, and GT 40. While Marc Newson’s 021C concept car for Ford admittedly resembled a boxed lunch to some extent, had it been produced, it probably would have sold bucket-loads. Why are these exercises just that, conceptual exercises with no intent to pursue further when assuredly there is a market for progressive design. How about architect, artist and designer derived automobiles? There was Buckminster Fullers’ Dymaxion 3 wheeler, Raymond Lowey’s designs for Studebaker, and Renzo Piano’s 1978 Fiat VSS prototype which utilized a steel tubular spaceframe with plastic body panels, issues still relevant to today’s auto industry. Threats to the everyday sameness of things are viewed as just that—threats. The Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, who largely practiced in the US in the early to mid 1900’s, went from designing storefronts, an ashtray, interiors, a gallery, to making art and building Jerusalem’s Dome of the Book. In times considered more conservative, the 50’ s to late 60’s, less conservative feats design-wise were accomplished. We live in an age of niche specialization where straying outside the norm is discounted, and everyone walks around in blinders. Cross-fertilization between related fields is beneficial to all, and like Karl Marx said, why can’t you be an economist in the morning and a fisherman in the afternoon?

Look out for Rove Cars, a company that will offer cars like I-Pod and Motorola snap on cases; change your mood, change your car color or body style. The concept is the concept:  that every car is a veritable prototype for the road. Make cars like art: the painter Jasper Johns described his work as taking something, doing something to it, and then doing something else to it. We just about have the means and technological sophistication with milling processes and such to produce limited, limited volume cars like editions of sculpture.

In the real life world of the auto industry, if its too good to be true, it probably isn’t, its just that the manufactures have too much fear to unsettle the status quo (gas consumption, and lots of it). Like the new Saab, it’s so good its bad. By definition, most production cars are concepts diluted beyond recognition.  Design nowadays is fungible; one man’s Jag is another’s (or the same guy’s) Aston. A good idea need not be followed by a negation, an excuse as to why something formidable will not be made.

Re: the Z. Car, after Zaha Hadid had designed a ski jump, a car factory and a parking lot, the idea of the car was not much of a leap. And rather then just present an idea of a new 3-wheeled car; why not take it to the street.

Kenny Schachter

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.

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.

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.

BASQUIAT, PHOENIX ART MUSEUM LECTURE 4/22/04

QUESTIONS ASKED TO ADDRESS:

1. Should we be glorifying art that at it's inception flourished by desecrating and mutilating public and private property.

2. How did it really happen overnight that a guy living on the streets becomes the toast of New York society and the art world? What kind of business (Anina Nosei, Mary Boone, and Bruno Bischofsberger) did that while other artists struggle to make an impression on NYC art galleries.

1. Beginning with the first issue, re: celebrating art that defaced public property. Firstly it’s a matter of opinion whether graffiti is “desecrating or mutilating”. More than some people find such interventions to embellish a city such as New York, but that’s really not the central question. Artists’ like the poet ee cumings was a reputed racist, and Picasso was notoriously abusive to his wives, mistresses, and children. In one famous, well-reported instance he instigated a physical fight between two competing lovers. Additionally, more than one wife/girlfriend of Picasso’s committed suicide. So really, it’s a matter of do we judge the person, or the art, and must we judge the two together or separately?

In comparison, graffiti in streets of New York doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, does it? Besides these acts of transgression more often than not get subsumed by the things they rise up to fight against: graffiti art became commodified in the early days of east village art scene (when many like Basquiat who’s art was really a world apart from most other so called graffiti artists actually came off the streets and were subsumed wholly in the gallery world. Another example is an artist like Vito Acconci who is most noted for masturbating under the floor boards of the Sonnabend Gallery in 1972, which was act in direct contravention of normative practice in the day to day world, i.e. public lewdness, let alone what one would typically associates with what goes on in a gallery—well, what we know about anyway. Now Vito Acconci is designing buildings, including the interior of my NYC gallery, he has an encyclopedic one person show up at present at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, and an upcoming retrospective in Barcelona. And a few monographs on him to boot.

Lastly on this topic, imagine being young, hungry, and ambitious and wanting to be recognized by a wider audience for your visual output without money to purchase canvas and stretchers and what better way can you conjure to get noticed than to paint directly on the walls in the sole neighborhood where such activity is acknowledged as conferring value?

By the way, present artists such as Barry McGee, who has achieved public prices for his art far and beyond above what Basquiat ever achieved during his short life, boasts of the fact he continues to practice illicit acts of public vandalism concurrently with his traditional gallery art practice. Such assertions and actions, on the part of an artist well absorbed in the institutional mainstream, seem to me disingenuous.
2. How does an artist come in off the streets to be a seeming overnight success, and what kind of business structure catapults an artist such as this at the expense of other artists who appear as talented.

In the art world there are many variables that go into creating overnight successes, most of which so called overnight success occur over the course of many years, including Basquiat’s career. His father, a middle class accountant was utterly dismissive and unsupportive about Jean Michel’s work and was largely responsible for the artist living in the streets early on in his career. The irony being that now the father is the gate keeper of the Basquiat estate, controlling what does and does not pass as authentic.

Among the ingredients that launch a career from 0-60 with the speed of a Ferrari are certain romantic mythologizing ingredients, along with a level of critical response, and dealer and collector support of a particular ilk. In the case of Basquiat, being African-American at a time when there were no other significant contemporary black figures, and making art that was so raw and immediate added to his appeal. That Basquiat spent some time actually living on the streets only magnified the mystique.

Early relationships with curators such as Diego Cortes, who put Basquiat in a now famous PS1 Museum show, and Warhol, who appeared to be looking for street credibility and young blood when he was seen largely as society portrait painter again added to the aura and inscrutability.

Contemporary and not so contemporary examples of the above scenario abound. Joseph Beuys was supposedly struck down in a plane during WWII, and covered in felt and fat for warmth and protection while awaiting rescue, which though never substantiated (and probably not in fact true), served as potent symbols in his work and life for his entire career

Julian Schnabel banged on his chest and shouted for all who would listen how significant and important his art was, including publishing his own coffee table book with an imposing sounding Greek title and ended up becoming emblematic of a type of self-mythologizing that helped define the entire 80’s movement of neo expressionism, and beyond. Back to this delicate subject in a bit!

Throughout his career, Jeff Koons has always embellished his early limited experience with the commodities industry in promoting his brand of object fetishism, and marrying an Italian porn star certainly didn’t hurt on the way to achieving multimillion-dollar sales prices at auction.

Matthew Barney is another example, who began life at Yale as fashion model, and subsequently morphed into a narcissistic god, appearing like Cindy Sherman, though usually indistinguishable, clad in Hollywood style prosthetics, in all of his filmic work, and photography. In a sense not unlike Schnabel, but using unknowable myths of sexuality and creation to create a buzz, along with limited output and venues to view the work.

Really, these types of what appear to be instant levels of monumental success abound in the international art world and are today more common than not. I have experienced this in my own previous curatorial efforts though these artists seemed to flourish in spite of working with me!

There was Janine Antoni, who I couldn’t disseminate any of her early pieces in group shows, until Saatchi snapped up the contents of her entire first one person show. Christian Schumann, who Roberta Smith said bristles with talent when I first showed him in a group show at PS1 Museum I curated, and after his first one person show the same critic said he gave cause for optimism in the state of painting. Cecily Brown, who’s work I couldn’t give away, though maybe that says more about me, now fetches six figures for her work after appearing clad in tank tops in one after another fashion spread in the likes of Vogue, et al, and after word got out that her father was the noted critic David Sylvester, which fact she wasn’t aware of growing up—instant myth readymade for the glossies.

There was Anna Gaskell who dated Gregory Crewsden, her professor at Yale, who’s first one person show was bought en toto by the Guggenheim, not a bad freshman effort, and Saatchi’s latest, that has made headline after sordid headline: the former stripper who painted a portrait of Princess Di with a stream of blood dripping down the side of her mouth. Sorry but I did not make this up!! There were even those who speculated that Saatchi himself was responsible for this winning body of work.

Lastly, I am not a big believer in dealers who take credit for the trajectory of artists’ careers, when on many occasions they have their own selfish interests at heart when dealing. Really, though this is a bit self-negating, there are instance after instance where a dealers interests are at loggerheads with those of the artists they supposedly represent. Now is not the place to get into names, but there are repeated cases of dealers trying to control work by not fully revealing to artists opportunities that are presented, in an effort to control the whereabouts of pieces and in an effort to get larger commissions. On my way to opening in London I have experienced this over and again in the past few months. Another story.

In the end, hopefully, it’s the work that is left to speak for itself; and in the case of Basquiat it is the raw power and graphic freshness that are manifest in the paintings, the congested, dense imagery sticks in the mind and never departs. The overall energy is akin to figurative Pollacks. Long after the hype, the lightening-fast burn out of a life, this passing of this film, etc. the work is still achieving records in the marketplace that I am certain are here to stay. Surely the artist and his coterie of supporters never would have dreamed of such a state.

Schnabel and his hyperbolizing role in this story is left to the viewers to judge for themselves, but for sport, see how many of the directors works you can spot from hereon in.