Last week, I was speaking to Alain Servais, a jet-setting collector who during the Before Times–era peak of globetrotting madness attended roughly 30 fairs a year, when he brought up something of an open secret among art dealers and their clients. At surveys of new art such as Greater New York and the New Museum Triennial, if the wall text says that the work is courtesy of the artist and their commercial gallery, that means, more often than not, the work is for sale.
“My favorite place to see art and even to buy art is at museums and biennials,” Servais said on air as I interviewed him for a podcast. “People are shocked sometimes when I say that.… Rather than going to art fairs and getting the second- or the third-quality works—because normally the artists will keep the best for the museums—you go to MoMA PS1 or go to the New Museum and the works are sometimes available, even if some know this trick. This is the best place to buy.”
Until recently, this would be considered a pretty niche approach—Greater New York could never be confused with an art fair. Held in MoMA PS1’s former schoolhouse digs in Long Island City and put together just once every five years, the show is a scaled-back, NYC–minded version of, say, Documenta, the quinquennial survey of contemporary art that goes down next year in the sleepy town of Kassel, Germany. It’s a methodical show where artists are picked following years of studio visits, and market buzz takes a back seat to curatorial crit-speak.
But the thirst for fresh material among the world’s collecting class is such that any high-profile exhibition of new work by institution-appointed artists is greeted with a feeding frenzy. Greater New York—and, later this month, the New Museum Triennial, another few-times-per-decade survey that attempts to take the cultural temperature—comes at a time when the demand for whisked-from-the-studio work is hitting an apex. Mega-galleries such as Hauser & Wirth have priced works by their art stars at unheard of prices, putting off collectors with medium-sized pocketbooks. Last month that very gallery sold out a show of new work by Avery Singer for as much as $1.2 million per painting. In February 2020, similarly sized works were going for just under $500,000. It’s not just Singer. Hauser & Wirth also sold a new painting by Rashid Johnson for $975,000 in September. In the months before lockdown, a larger work by Johnson sold from the gallery for $595,000.
And the gold rush has spurred on change in real time. The hiring of art-fair guru Noah Horowitz at Sotheby’s (reported by True Colors in August) was apparently spurred on partially by the hope that he could convince galleries that he worked with at Art Basel to consign new work to the auction house instead. The online endeavour Platform is essentially an eternal digital art fair backed by David Zwirner where smaller galleries can offer works by their lesser-known artists to the ever-ravenous clientele.
And this week, Sotheby’s announced that it would whip up out of thin air an entirely new evening sale called The Now, devoted to work by emerging artists, who previously were relegated to the minor-league auctions that happen during the daytime.The demand for new work, the house suggested, was simply too much to ignore.
“We are seeing the rapid emergence of a new generation of collectors who feel a real connection with the art of their own time,” said Brooke Lampley, Sotheby’s worldwide head of sales for global fine art, in a press release, by way of explaining the creation of an entirely new category of art that’s more contemporary than Contemporary.
Which brings us to Greater New York, which opened to the public Thursday after a couple days of preview for press and patrons. I visited Tuesday morning, arriving at the still-scrappy art space to find a thorough, impressive survey of 47 artists and collectives, from millennial discoveries to older artists with work placed in a new context—a show that, in curator-ese, “offers new insights and opens up geographic and historical boundaries by pinpointing both specific and expanded narratives of the local in a city that provokes a multitude of perspectives.” Um, sure!
But the careful observer was able to read between the lines when it came to how these works will eventually go from institution to collection. (It’s worth noting that MoMA PS1, unlike its big sister in Manhattan, is not a collecting institution, and thus does not acquire any works itself.) On the second floor, an installation by Steffani Jemison consisted of a series of polished stones on a platform, and rumbling next to the platform were three rock tumblers, smoothing over the rough products of geology that would eventually be turned into a work, the churn of art-making laid bare in the museum.
The wall text was revealing. Jemison had exhibited at the small but influential New York art space run by Kai Matsumiya, but the work was “courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali,” referring to the Chelsea stalwart that represents global artists such as Alex Israel, Haegue Yang, and Cory Arcangel. Indeed, the gallery’s website confirms that they had taken on the rising star, and will open a show next month, apparently to take advantage of the propulsion caused by the show in Queens.
When reached by email, Greene Naftali cofounder Carol Greene said she would rather not comment “on the market issue.”
“It’s not really the focus I want to place on my artists,” she explained.
Other dealers took a similar approach, and focused on the curatorial vision of the work rather than marketplace machinations. Of the works by Andy Robert—a young in-demand artist who takes years to finish his gigantic abstract paintings that sometimes reference walks through Harlem, placing him in the lineage of Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu—only one work on paper is for sale, his dealer Hannah Hoffman said.
“Andy’s paintings are the result of long periods of research and work,” she said. “With this, all of the works with the exception of a new work on paper are on loan.”
According to the wall text, one work by Robert is in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, while another is in the Kravis collection, the trove of masterpieces owned by the billionaire couple Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis.
When asked about dealers selling works from the show, MoMA PS1 director Kate Fowle said that the show exists to amplify artists careers and connect them with movers in the market—she noted that several of the artists don’t have a gallery. But she stressed that, as the director of a nonprofit museum, she’s an uninvolved facilitator.
“PS1 doesn’t have anything to do with the sale of the works,” Fowle said on the phone Thursday. “If somebody were to come to me and say, I love this work, I would put them in contact with the artists and the gallery. If the artist sells the work, that’s fantastic, but we didn’t curate the show based on the value of their work.”
And yet, the sales aspect can’t fully be ignored, especially at a time when there’s such a thirst for “The Now,” as Sotheby’s has so ponderously dubbed it. Ramiken, which has spaces in East Williamsburg and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, represents the young sculptor Kristi Cavataro, whose slinky-like creations have drawn hosannas for their intriguing, glassy, deco-gone-Tiffany-lamp aura—they’re coveted enough that there’s a long waiting list, says Ramiken owner Mike Egan, meaning every work in Greater New York had been spoken for.
Similarly, London dealer Taymour Grahne said that, when it comes to the bold neo-Surrealist paintings by Nadia Ayari that hold sway on the second floor, about half the works are already sold to private collections, and the other half are “available but they’re not really available” unless the entity asking is a legit museum.
“There’s a big waiting list for Nadia’s new work, so now it’s about placing in institutions,” Grahne told me.
And the showstopper of the exhibition is already spoken for. The wall text indicates that Yuji Agematsu’s zip: 01.01.20…12.31.20, 2020—a massive wall-length work consisting of several cabinets containing 366 sculptures assembled from the debris found on 366 pandemic-era walks through New York City—was in the collection of Lonti Ebers, the museum patron who has a new sprawling exhibition space in an industrial pocket of East Williamsburg and collects alongside her husband, Brookfield Asset Management CEO Bruce Flatt.
On Wednesday, a private evening viewing at the museum first brought out the artists, then their gallery honchos, and eventually a few collectors, including Bernard Lumpkin, whose holdings of works by Black artists is so deep that D.A.P. published a volume detailing the collection, with contributions from Gagosian director Antwaun Sargent and Studio Museum director Thelma Golden.
Also present was the collector Scott Lorinsky, and when asked if anyone at the vernissage was angling for a deal, he said in a text, “I was softly (and not so softly) reminded by a few dealers of the artists they represent in the exhibition.” It seems that some were already moving past this show and on to the next. Lorinsky noted that one dealer took the opportunity of a Greater New York stop-and-chat to offer him work that’s going to be in the booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, months away—it’s the earliest in the calendar year he’s ever been offered Miami works. But why wait when you can sell now?
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…Louis Eisner—the artist and boyfriend to Ashley Olsen, who just made his arm-candy red-carpet debut weeks ago—once had collectors paying six figures for his abstract canvases when he was part of the hot-in-the-aughts art-star factory the Still House Group. His works are selling for significantly less now. A mobile first sold in 2013 was consigned to Sotheby’s by its owner at no reserve, and this week it sold for just $378, essentially the price of an art collector’s lunch. (On the bright side, that means the Louis Eisner mobile in Ivanka Trump’s collection may be worth way, way less than what she paid for it.)
…Fairs are indeed happening in Miami in December, meaning the art world will be taking its talents to South Beach for the first time in about two years. Art Basel’s still at the convention center, though Meridians, the sector for large-format installations too big for booths, is moving downstairs in the middle of the main fair layout. And meanwhile, the beloved NADA Miami fair will be returning as well, holding it down once again across the causeway at Ice Palace Studios. It has more than 130 galleries, about the same as the 2019 edition, which was 135 galleries strong.
…Spotted recently at the below-ground Dimes Square–adjacent haunt Bacaro, though sadly not together: the musician and artist Kim Gordon, and Selena Gomez, who popped in for a tequila soda to escape the paparazzi.
…While Facebook was recovering from a more than five-hour-long blackout of its social network that cost its founder a cool $6-billion-plus haircut off his net worth, Apple CEO Tim Cook was happily strolling through the International Center of Photography on the Lower East Side, not a care in the world, getting a tour of the show with one of its artists, the photographer Brad Ogbonna.
…Gagosian is teaming up with the downtown indie-minded movie theater Metrograph, which recently reopened after a lengthy COVID-era closure. Jim Shaw—who joined the stable at the gallery’s sprawling empire after the closure of Metro Pictures earlier this year—will be the theater’s first artist programmer-in-residence, and he’s chosen a run of cult conspiracy-minded films such as John Carpenter’s They Live and William Richert’s Winter Kills. Shaw said he chose movies that somehow embody the insanity of Frazzledrip, a particularly unhinged part of the broader QAnon belief structure.
Shot Chasers
What happens when a $16-million, long-gestating artwork by Christo and Jeanne-Claude containing 270,000 square feet of fabric is installed on the Arc de Triomphe by 1,200 workers at the same time as the first in-person Paris Fashion Week since the pandemic hit? You get a whole lot of Instagram, that’s what. A by-no-means-exhaustive sampling:
And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
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