The Baerfaxt writes that, according to a study by Thomas & Associates, 77 percent of professionals who work in international museums, galleries, auction houses, foundations, and performing arts centers said they were planning on staying in their current position for five years or less “due to lack of career advancement and other opportunities.” I guess this includes much of the art world. It shows that, contrary to all recent exhortations about the professionalization of the arts, we still have a long way to go.

I know, just by listening to anecdotal chatter, that many young artists coming out of art schools do not count on pursuing art as a career for too long. They count on doing the art thing for a while, then getting a real job. They are well aware that youth is the prime commodity in the global art world, and that the logistics of party-going and biennale-hopping Read More »

I picked up the International Herald Tribune today for my train ride after spotting a teaser headline referring to the artworld: “The latest status investment shows signs of a bubble.” I was eager to see what data Times art-market maven Carol Vogel could be citing. First surprise: It wasn’t Vogel, but Sharon Reier, whose name I didn’t recognize (turns out she’s an IHT business writer). Second surprise was the lede: “When Marta Guitart, an art teacher, lived in her native Spain seven years ago, she brushed up on the latest trends in contemporary art by attending art fairs like ARCO in Madrid and Documenta in Essen, Germany.” Given the fact that Documenta is a quinquennial exhibition (not a fair) taking place in Kassel (not Essen), this was not confidence-inspiring.

I didn’t spot any other factual errors in the rest of the 1,500-word piece. But then there weren’t many facts. Certainly nothing that justified the headline. Reier cites two art-market experts from academe: William Goetzmann of Yale and the ubiquitous Michael Moses of NYU. But neither one says the market’s ripe for bursting; their data, if anything, indicates Read More »

Almost a decade ago, I first met journalist Jonathan Napack, who died at 39 last weekend in a Hong Kong hospital, apparently due to a severe lung infection. There’s an excellent obituary, albeit brief, by Charlie Finch in the latest Artnet News, to which I’ll only add a few personal observations.

When we first met, Jonathan was in the process of decamping from New York to Hong Kong, and over the following years his byline popped up from all over Asia - not just Beijing and Hong Kong, but also Hanoi and Gwangju. His move seemed quixotic then, when no one cared about Asian contemporary art. Now it seems visionary.

He traveled the continent relentlessly, first as a journalist and then as Art Basel’s man in Asia. When I did my Singapore-Shanghai-Gwangju biennials marathon last fall, he and I ended up in quite a few of the same bars, planes and restaurants. Everywhere we went, he had could parse the internecine skirmishes Read More »

Okay, I can’t decide if this genius or absurdity: www.myspace.com/artreview. Though it’s pretty funny that the magazine has chosen to describe itself as a 58-year-old female.

Still I think when it comes to the Web 2.0/social networking category of the Weich/ArtReview vs. Wilson/Saatchi Online Throwdown, you have to give round 1 to Rebecca Wilson and the Saatchi collection, whose YourGallery section has become the MySpace/Friendster/Facebook of the artworld, dis-intermediating the space between collectors and artists. That should make Charles Saatchi even more of a hero among art dealers. Not.

Had a funny moment while walking around Zurich yesterday: I stopped in at Galerie Jamileh Weber and saw this little maquette of the gallery’s fair ABMB booth. First off, I just love models. And this one was accurate right down to the Eames chairs and the storage closet filled with paintings.

But my favorite part of this was finding out that a collector had been visiting the gallery, spotted a Frank Stella hanging in the “booth,” then bought the painting after seeing a JPG of the work. In a way this is a precursor to ArtNet’s upcoming arrangement to build a fully 3D digital model of Art Basel that can be perused online long after the art dealers have packed up the far and started summering in Capri, the Hamptons and St Tropez. But that’s another post.

From this week’s Economist article “Going, going, up,” a paint-by-numbers rehash on the rising market:

Among the anxious are Jianping Mei and Michael Moses of New York University, who compile an index which shows that prices of post-war and contemporary art have done better than the S&P 500 Total Return index over the past ten years.

Once again, a journalist fails to specify that the Mei Moses index only tracks art that was auctioned twice. This is a very select group of artworks, and it’s thus a crucial point. In fact, when I interviewed Moses for my New York magazine feature on the art market last spring, he was anguished by such mistakes, saying: “As an economist, that bothers me. Because I have no idea what the non-auction market is doing, since there’s no transparency of prices.” Well, I have an idea: If you tracked down all the art sold during that ten-year period and measured its value now, the returns would be pitiful, because 75 percent would be totally illiquid.

I’d excoriate the writer, but since the Economist is un-bylined, maybe we can just suggest a remedial course in reading economic studies. Seriously, if people writing about finance were this loose with the data, they’d get sacked. But, hey, it’s only the art market - why bother being accurate?

Sometimes you start writing an article with an assumption that rapidly collapses. That happened with this Artnet Magazine article on the Steve Wynn vs Lloyds Lawsuit, over Picasso’s “Le Reve.” To recap, Wynn is suing Lloyds for $54 million, the difference between $139 million, (the sum that hedge-fund king Steve Cohen agreed to pay for it September 19) and $85 million (what Wynn says it’s worth after he put his elbow through it 24 hours later, despite a $90,500 restoration.)

Usually such cases hinge on both sides debating the damaged piece’s value both before and after the accident. So I assumed that Lloyd’s would contest the $139M, because that was arguably not Le Reve’s “fair market value’ at the time of the accident, just what Cohen had agreed to pay. So I was hoping this case would start a courtroom battle (and an artworld discussion) on the distortional market effect of Read More »

The Hungarian art market is being reshaped by the same two fundamental forces that are changing the art market everywhere: the appearance of tremendous amounts of wealth and concomitant purchasing power (and need for social validation), and the inexorable drying up of inventory in pre-contemporary markets. Thus, prices escalate and collectors’ interests shift from old to contemporary, where inventory is theoretically boundless. After some major auction milestones in 19th and 20th c. masters, there is now vibrancy in the contemporary market as well. Formerly scattershot gut-impulse buyers are starting to purchase on a scale that may be called “collecting.” A notion is beginning to take hold among successful men and women that, through a methodical pattern of purchases, you can build up a collection with a specific identity. The thirty-somethings and forty-somethings at the upper echelons of business and finance have been exposed to the west. They have traveled, studied, and lived abroad. They speak languages and know the cultural codes. They’re paying attention, and they want to emulate the symbolic patterns of behavior common among the wealthy in the west.

Last spring, I visited a celebrity fundraising auction at the Budapest Kunsthalle presided over by a Habsburg princess. There was no gap between what I saw there and what you would perceive at any similar event in New York or London. Erika Deak, a dealer of the younger generation, reports Read More »

Budapest: the city continues to wake up, artwise. There is no shortage of money, and this helps. A friend reports brisk sales of Porsche Cayennes and other luxury cars, which are everywhere. Thousand-dollar handbags can be purchased (and are being purchased even by Hungarians) at the new Louis Vuitton store next to the opera house, which also diligently displays the Olafur Eliasson Eye in its window. The art market is also coming to life. Last fall saw the million-dollar sale of a small painting by Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka, the wonderful and woefully under-appreciated mad pharmacist who was Hungary’s answer to Van Gogh.

Pictures of Csontvary can be viewed at the Museum of Fine Arts which is currently showing its own Van Gogh exhibition, the first ever in the country with dozens of smaller and major works set in a unique viewing gallery where pictures are set in triptych-like viewing booths in which people can look at works undisturbed by the hordes of visitors. (A space-age entryway has been installed at the gallery, with pneumatic double doors which first let you into a tiny cubicle, close behind you, then open in front of you.) There is the requisite cinderblock-sized catalog. The show is the first major exhibition to receive full-on corporate funding (from ING) — it all looks and feels very western. Best of all, Van Gogh did the museum a favor in having a name consisting of seven letters: precisely the number of spaces between the vast pillars on the museum’s facade, which are now filled with giant banners, one for each letter. The whole paraphernalia of modern museum marketing is in evidence.

Across town, the Ludwig museum is humming along on the Duna embankment. It’s part of a mega office-apartment park development where the developers installed a controversial cultural block. One element of it is Europe’s ugliest cultural building, the spectacularly awful Read More »

Interesting piece on nytimes.com today about the state of the contemporary Art market in China. Highlights the names of the current stars, and evokes the scene at the opening of star Zeng Hao’s new Shanghai show, but also raises some concerns about the role of auction houses in the curent market frenzy.

In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism

Auction houses “sell art like people sell cabbage,” said Weng Ling, the director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art. “They are not educating the public or helping artists develop. Many of them know nothing about art.”

(David Barbosa, nytimes.com, Jan 4, 2007)

Sounds like complaints we have heard elsewhere…