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2008 in Review

Shepard Fairey's "PROGRESS", "HOPE", and "CHANGE" posters offered tremendous visibility to the Obama campaign. The senator (now president-elect) personally thanked Fairey for making the works.


Ah, 2008 was the year of Obama. D'oh, it was also the year of the recession. From the inspiring president-elect to the sobering new reality, here are the top 5 trends in art in 2008.

1. Artists Heart Obama

Artists have often rallied around political causes, but this year the cause had a face and a name: Barack Obama. It was street artist Shepard Fairey who got the ball rolling, stenciling the now-president-elect’s face in red, white, and blue with the word “Progress” — later changed to “Hope” — underneath. The icon soon became famous and turned into one of the most ubiquitous images of our time.

After that, so many limited-edition prints and auctions for Obama followed suit that it was hard to keep up. Fairey teamed up with MoveOn.org to create a pop-up gallery devoted to art for Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. And the celebration hardly stopped once Obama won: Fairey placed his famous portrait of the president-elect at the center of a new victory design, which was quickly printed on stickers, more limited-edition prints, and posters, while Elizabeth Peyton added a portrait of future First Lady Michelle Obama to her retrospective at the New Museum. Will the Obama lovefest continue once he’s safely sworn in, or will artists have to find a new cause? We’ll just have to wait and see.

2. The Russians Are Coming. Are the Russians Coming?

The Russians are coming. In 2008, this cry, which in decades past signaled (the paranoia of) a communist invasion, came to herald the arrival of the latest class of deep-pocketed art-world financiers. As the year began, the expression might have been tinged with resentment (nouveau riche billionaire oligarchs driving up auction prices), but as 2008 rounded the halfway mark the cry was one of hope (could billionaire oligarchs rescue a teetering art market?). Among the highlights of the Russian year in art: the record-setting auction prices paid for works by Bacon and Koons by Roman Abramovich; the opening of CCCM, aka the Garage, a new art space run by it-girl Dasha Zhukova, who also happens to be Abramovich’s companion; the multi-venue Ilya Kabakov retrospective, the first major exhibition of the most expensive living Russian artist in the country of his birth; and the temporary exhibition in Moscow organized by uberdealer Larry Gagosian, whose gallery admitted to doing half its business with Russians. Alas, by year’s end, one had the sense that that the Russian art moment had passed, with cascading stock markets freezing activity in the local art market and rumors of the postponement of a highly anticipated wedding dashing, or at least delaying, dreams of a new Camelot in Moscow.

3. Museums Show Their Feminine Side

Things have certainly improved for women artists in the past couple decades, but they haven’t gotten so good that the sheer number of major exhibitions this year, particularly in New York, hasn’t felt like a major coup. Louise Bourgeois and Catherine Opie overlapped at the Guggenheim this fall, and on view right now are Mary Heilmann and Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum and Marlene Dumas and Pipilotti Rist at MoMA. And it’s not just New York, either: Tara Donovan, who had an installation at the Met earlier this year, now has her first major museum retrospective at ICA, Boston; Bourgeois’s tour includes L.A. MOCA, the Tate, the Pompidou, and the Hirshhorn; and Peyton’s going to Whitechapel in London, Bonnefanten in Maastricht, and the Walker in Minneapolis, which has had a slew of its own offerings this year, including shows by Trisha Brown and JoAnn Verburg. We could get used to this.

4. Unmonumental Everything

This year, the Whitney Biennial curators offered the Beckettian term “lessness” to describe the Zeitgeist reflected in their exhibition. The term well describes one of the most ubiquitous trends of the year, thanks (or perhaps no thanks) to the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Unmonumental” (which ran through April 9). Presenting three floors of abject found-object sculpture, the exhibition confirmed the lackadaisical, grabbed-it-from-the-sidewalk style as a movement worthy of institutional branding. Soon unmonumental art was everywhere you looked, but even this was not enough to halt the trend — no, sheets of cardboard and droopy carpet scraps continued to appear in gallery after gallery, often sporting a little ripped-out found image from an old magazine to give a hint of enigma. Add some Venetian blinds and a cylinder of faded foam, and you can re-create 2008 on your sidewalk, absolutely free.

5 . The Recession

The fifth item in our top 5 trends of 2008 article is so enormous in scope and importance that it spawned its own list. Here are the top 5 trends of the recession.

1. The Boom Is Over

But what a boom it was! As much as the past year or so will be remembered as the beginning of the end, let us not forget that it also saw the peak of one of the longest art market upturns in history. The thing swelled to epic proportions. New buyers came in from all over the world: A soccer club–owning Russian bought a Francis Bacon triptych for £46 mllion ($86.3 million) at Sotheby’s London in February. The Qatari royal family was revealed as the buyers of a $72.8 million Mark Rothko at Sotheby’s London in May 2007. And, finally, Damien Hirst sold $200 million worth of his own work at Sotheby’s London in September of this year. That, really, was the apex. For on that same day, Lehman Brothers failed, and it wasn’t long before the art market began, finally, to feel the reverberations of the global economic crisis. A few months later, even Hirst laid off some employees.

2. Blood on the Block

The bloodbath began in London, when the annual London contemporary art sales timed to follow the Frieze fair resulted in unusually high buy-in rates. A few weeks later, there were the New York sales, where, yes, a Malevich sold for $60 million and a Munch for $38 million at Sotheby’s. But many lots were bought in, and many prices sank to 2006 levels. In both London and New York, what saved the sales was, in several cases, the houses’ ability to lower reserves; still, Sotheby’s lost big on guarantees, and the recession is sure to put a damper on the practice of giving them. Inevitably, Sotheby’s announced salary reductions and layoffs this month, and Christie’s looks to be following suit, with a reorganization in the works. Phillips’ contemporary sale in New York was particularly dreary — the results couldn’t have been pleasing to the Russian luxury goods concern, Mercury, that had just purchased controlling interest in the auction house — but at least Phillips hadn’t given very many guarantees. The interesting thing was the reaction to those figures, as members of the trade tended to split into roughly two groups: those who thought these sales spelled impending doom, and those who saw them as a return to sanity. The speculators were out; the seasoned collectors — Eli Broad, Donald Fisher — were in. Bargain hunters began to appear. The auction landscape has changed dramatically.

3. Kinder, Gentler (Less Profitable) Art Fairs

The boom spawned a bevy of fairs, which were increasingly seen as the dealer’s last bastion against the auction houses. Jitters had already begun last March, when the Armory Show opened in New York to the lowest U.S. consumer confidence in 30 years, yet things pretty much proceeded as usual. In June, Art Basel may have been quieter, but there was still action. By October, when Frieze opened, things were looking grim on the global economic front — and yet the mood, overall, was one of cautious optimism: Art sold, and dealers talked about a “soft landing.” At Miami in December, though, things started to look shakier. Collectors bought, but much more slowly. Their stampede down the aisles at the starting gun was a thing of the past. There were bargains to be had, with some prices rolling back to where they were two years ago. And second-tier fairs in particular have started to show signs of weakness this year. The Art Newspaper reported that 19 galleries had attempted to pull out of Art Miami, an Art Basel Miami Beach satellite fair, and several non-Miami fairs bowed out altogether this year. Frankfurt bit the dust, Bridge and Pulse canceled their London editions, and most recently, the Asian Art Fair, run by venerable organizers Brian and Anna Haughton, was put on hold.

4. Tough Times for Galleries

And what about all the galleries packing the booths in those fairs? Recessions are, it goes without saying, bad news for galleries. The downturn in the early ’90s saw dealers like John Good and Perry Rubenstein close up shop. (The former went to work for Gagosian, the latter became active in the secondary market and went on, in 2004, to open a successful two-space gallery in Chelsea.) In 2008, changes are again afoot. A few galleries, such as New York’s Clementine, shuttered earlier in the year, citing the new economic realities; Rivington Arms and 31Grand are soon to follow. The bad news also spread to the top tier. The news just recently broke that Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin Miami will be closed all next year — going on "sabbatical," as the director calls it — with plans only to reopen temporarily around the time of Art Basel Miami Beach. Several publications have reported slashed event budgets and new scrutiny over production costs. The future of galleries has become so uncertain that a blog has popped up to chart the various rumors.

5. Museums in Trouble

Just as the juicy scandal of Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme has lately stolen news headlines from the wider financial crisis, the turmoil at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles — the museum spent its endowment over the last eight years and has essentially run out of money — and the subsequent $30 million bailout plan offered by L.A. collector Eli Broad, has taken the spotlight off the broader troubles facing museums in the current economic climate.

The problems began last spring, when interest rates on municipal bonds skyrocketed, causing institutions like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty to have to do some refinancing. In mid-September, Lehman Brothers collapsed, a bad sign for the museums worldwide that have received support from the investment bank, and it wasn’t long before news of museums tightening their belts began to trickle in. The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, cut its operating budget and laid off 25 employees. LACMA implemented a hiring freeze. The Saint Louis Art Museum delayed its expansion plans. Washington, D.C.’s Newseum announced it would reduce staff by 10 percent. The Las Vegas Art Museum had to halve its budget, and its director abruptly resigned. In Southern California, the Pacific Asia Museum and the Bowers Museum announced budget cuts and layoffs and canceled exhibitions. The Getty confirmed that its endowment had gone down 25 percent and that a hiring freeze was in place. And, most recently, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology announced it will lay off 18 researchers and nix its Museum Applied Science Center. Perhaps most alarming, the National Academy Museum in New York deaccessioned two works to finance its operating budget.

The Association of Art Museum Directors responded quickly and forcefully, but one senses that this will not be the last time an artwork is sold to keep a museum open.

Sarah Douglas, David Grosz, Lyra Kilston, Jillian Steinhauer, and Kris Wilton contributed to this article from Art+Auction.

Arts Economic Impact on New York City and New York State

In 2005 the arts industry in New York City generated:

* An economic impact of $21.2 billion
* 160,000 jobs
* $8.2 billion in wages
* $904 million in taxes to the city

40 million visits were made in 2005 to New York City's cultural attractions which generated:

* An economic impact of $5.4 billion
* 55,700 job
* $1.9 billion in wages
* $369 million in taxes to the city

Source: Arts as an Industry: Their Economic Impact on New York City and New York State (2007)

Nonprofit cultural venues draw an audience of almost 26 million people--many more than the numbers going to Broadway theaters and all live commercial sporting events in the city from Yankee Stadium to Aqueduct combined.

Source: NYC Arts Audiences: Attendance at NYC's Cultural Venues (2005)

From 1997 to 2002, capital expenditures of $1.8 billion generated $2.3 billion in total economic impact, including:

* $512 million in wages
* 2,255 full-time equivalent jobs in each of the six years
* $36 million in personal income, sales and corporate taxes to the City

Source: Culture Builds New York: The Economic Impact of Capital Spending at New York City's Cultural Institutions, 2003--2010 (Alliance for the Arts, 2007)

Banks’ latest writedown woe – their art

Ever since the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century when the wealthy Medici family started to build an art collection in Florence that grew into one of the greatest art galleries on earth, there has been a symbiotic relationship between artists and financiers.

And modern banking is no exception. But as investment banks grapple with billions of dollars in losses and struggle to value complex assets on their balance sheets, they are facing growing pressure from shareholders and the taxpayers who have bailed them out to justify their often sprawling art collections, worth, in many cases, hundreds of millions of dollars.

Stacey Gershon, a New York-based art adviser and former senior curator of the JP Morgan Chase art collection, said corporate art has a perception problem. “It just does not jibe with the new lean-and-mean attitude on the street,” she said.

Charles Thomson, co-founder of the art movement known as Stuckism, believes it will not be long before clients and staff start to question the point of hanging a small fortune on the wall. Thomson said: “If banks have been and are being bailed out by the Government, it seems superfluous and insensitive to hoard art collections worth millions.

Maybe a bank thinks it is keeping up morale and the appearances of a healthy balance sheet by showing off expensive art on the walls, but if I were a client, I wouldn’t be fooled. ”

Deutsche Bank, which last week reported its first annual loss since the Second World War, has one of the largest corporate art collections in the world, owning 53,000 works.

The collection was last publicly valued at more than £75m in 2004 and is now likely to be worth “far, far north” of that, according to one expert, despite the collapse in the contemporary art market in the past six months. Deutsche Bank, which lost €3.9bn ($5bn) last year, does not put a value on its collection in its accounts and declined to comment on its estimated value.

UBS has a collection of 45,000 works worth at least $150m (€117m) with big name artists such as Lucian Freud, Roy Lichtenstein, Candida Hofer, Edward Ruscha and Julian Schnabel hanging on its walls in Zurich, London and New York.

But the Zurich-based bank’s share price has gone into free fall since early 2008. So acute are the problems at UBS that the bank’s management have had to go cap in hand to the Swiss Government for a bailout package worth Sfr60bn (€40bn).

Barclays, Bank of America and Credit Suisse also have large collections and are suffering from financial difficulties associated with bad debts and deepening recessions. JP Morgan is in better shape and sold a large part of its art collection between 2004 and 2006, although it still retains 35,000 works.

Banks argue that their art collections maintain staff and client morale, and play a significant role in promoting the arts. But industry sources wonder whether public sector rescuers, hard-pressed staff and hard-up clients would really miss a nice painting or sculpture in the office. Banks are unlikely to be supporting the art market as strongly in years to come.

Some banks have already cut back. Annabel Fell-Clark, chief executive of insurance provider Axa Art, said: “In recent years some banks have divested themselves of any large art collections as it has not been considered as adding value by shareholders. Back in the 90s it was the Japanese banks that had to sell a load of art because of their own economic crisis.”

When Jamie Dimon took over as chief executive of JP Morgan in 2004, he sold about 20,000 pieces of art as part of the “waste-cutting” scheme, according to a source close to the bank. This programme also included cutting corporate credit cards and forcing managers to reclaim their own expenses. It now has about 35,000 pieces, many of which are antiques – including the world’s first dollar bill and the mahogany desk of the bank’s founder John Pierpont Morgan.

Lehman Brothers and its former chief executive Dick Fuld owned several works of art at the time of the bank’s collapse. Around $13.5m worth of its art was sold through auction house Christie’s in New York last year. A spokesman said the 16 post-war drawings sold were part of Fuld and his wife Kathy’s private collection.

At an earlier Christie’s auction in Manhattan last May, one of the first signs of the collapse of £2bn property-to-financial-services empire Dawnay Day was the sale of Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. The 1995 painting of the 20-stone nude, which was sold to Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich for $34m, was put under the hammer by the firm’s chairman Guy Naggar in a desperate attempt to raise cash.

Sources at a London-based auction house say it is unlikely banks will put large parts of their collection on the block, credit crunch or not. But the removal of buying support from the banks will not help the market as galleries cut back and distressed vendors appear. Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams season-opening auctions this month have been halved in terms of number of lots compared with last year, to try to encourage bidders by increasing the rarity value.

Making an impression

One of the main arguments banks use to justify their art collections is that many of their clients – both corporate and private – have an interest in art, and a display of quality art is a draw for new customers.

Walk into Deutsche Bank’s headquarters at Winchester House in London and you are greeted by an enormous stainless steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor, Turning the World Upside Down II, and a 4m x 3m spot painting by Damien Hirst called Biotin-Maleimide.

Down at Canary Wharf, Citigroup’s atrium has a 50m-high mobile consisting of more than 1,000 multi-coloured aluminium panels by English artist Bridget Riley. Given that even the smallest Riley prints sell for between £1,000 and £10,000, the installation is, to all intents and purposes, priceless. At the Tate Modern gallery on London’s south bank, UBS fills two entire floors with its artwork.

Deutsche Bank, which also sponsors the annual Frieze Art Festival in London and has a joint venture with the Guggenheim museum in Berlin, says many of its private clients have an interest in art and collect it. Through Frieze, and other initiatives, the bank has encouraged young talent to step forward and engage with its clients.

The bank has an advisory service headed by Alistair Hicks, who is also responsible for buying art for the bank. He bought between 20 and 30 pieces in last year’s Frieze Art Festival in October, mainly from emerging artists.

The bank does not publish its budget for purchasing art, and does not include a valuation of its art collection in its annual report. However, in 2007, when the bank made net profits of €6.51bn, it spent €24m on exhibitions and art purchases, according to its annual report. Typically, the works the bank buys cost between $800 and $15,000 each.

Intangible value

Germany’s largest bank said its motive for having a large art collection is twofold. “Deutsche Bank buys art globally to enrich its working environment for colleagues and clients, and support contemporary artists around the world,” said a spokeswoman.

She added: “Deutsche Bank chooses art not for investment, but for involvement. Aiming always to support working artists directly and to buy from both established and emerging talents, our collecting underscores the bank’s commitment to the communities in which it does business.”

Bank of America in 2007 put several of its pieces on the block to raise money for local charities. At the time, Rena DeSisto, head of arts and culture at Bank of America said: “We view our art collection as an asset to be shared with our customers and the communities we serve.”

Other banks argue that the value of their art is but a fraction of their assets under management, and even if they were to sell it the difference it would make to a balance sheet would be minimal.

A spokesman for UBS said: “Although the value of the collection has increased over time along with the art market itself, the financial value has never been a motivating factor for the collection. The value of the collection is fully written down in our financial accounts. With our professional leadership we ensure that the value of the collection is preserved and managed in the best interest of all the firm’s stakeholders.”

UK private bank Coutts takes a different approach to art. Most of what the Queen’s bank has in its offices is on loan from the Full Circle Art Consultancy and is for sale to clients.

Banks can also argue that art prices have soared in recent years, as a result of which their collections are still worth more than they paid for them. The UK Railways pension fund was frequently criticised for its investment in art in the 1980s but, on selling the works, it was able to argue that the prices kept pace with inflation, just as planned.

Forced sellers?

If banks did want to sell their collections to raise capital, finding a buyer could be a struggle. Sotheby’s season-opener, the Impressionist and modern art sale last week fell short of its lowest estimate, raising £32.5m after an estimate of £46m to £56m for 29 lots.

Christie’s sale the night after raised £63m, around half what it made last year. Auction houses are prizing rarity and are pushing out “tightly edited sales”, according to Melanie Clore, co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s.

Nowhere was the symbiosis between banking and art more publicly on display than in the collapse of the contemporary art market in the fourth quarter of 2008. On September 15, the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed, British artist Damien Hirst raised £111m in an unprecedented direct auction of his works through Sotheby’s, with a record number of pieces selling for more than £1m.

Within weeks, however, works by Hirst were failing to sell at auction in the US, as the artprice.com contemporary art index fell 20% in less than six weeks.

It looks like it could be as difficult to value the huge dot painting by Hirst in the lobby of Deutsche Bank’s London offices as it is to value many of the other assets on its balance sheet.

9 February 2009 - Tara Loader Wilkinson

TOP 300

Sally Mann Photograph available at Hamburg Kennedy Gallery, NY
TOP 300 Most Searched Artists on artnet.com
Sally Mann
Andy Warhol
Andrew Wyeth
Pablo Picasso
Nobuyoshi Araki
David LaChapelle
Nan Goldin
Jock Sturges
Andreas Gursky
Diane Arbus
Damien Hirst
Gregory Crewdson
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Ed Ruscha
Frank Stella
Helmut Newton
Cindy Sherman
Francis Bacon
Jim Dine
Thomas Ruff
Elizabeth Peyton
Gerhard Richter
Banksy
Salvador Dalí
Wayne Thiebaud
Robert Mapplethorpe
Julian Schnabel
Andy Goldsworthy
Robert Rauschenberg
Yoshitomo Nara
Joan Miró
Chuck Close
Victor Vasarely
Henri Matisse
Jeff Koons
Nicole Buffett
Roy Lichtenstein
Bettina Rheims
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Jenny Saville
Emil Nolde
Sam Taylor-Wood
Takashi Murakami
David Hockney
Annie Leibovitz
Keith Haring
Fernando Botero
Cy Twombly
Lucian Freud
Louise Bourgeois
Sol LeWitt
Marc Chagall
Robert Indiana
Julian Opie
Marilyn Minter
Alexander Calder
Alex Katz
David Hamilton
Marina Abramovic
Jackson Pollock
Juergen Teller
Tom Wesselmann
Kiki Smith
Bernard Buffet
Chuck Connelly
Jasper Johns
Walton Ford
Helen Frankenthaler
Maurice Utrillo
Thomas Struth
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Mark Chamberlain
Marlene Dumas
Wolfgang Tillmans
Peter Doig
Vik Muniz
Peter Lik
Candida Höfer
Elger Esser
Bill Henson
Paul Klee
Richard Avedon
Irving Penn
Raoul Dufy
Erwin Wurm
Janet Fish
Joan Mitchell
Yue Minjun
Ellsworth Kelly
Beatriz Milhazes
Milton Avery
Robert Longo
Jeff Wall
Bridget Riley
Louise Nevelson
Fiona Rae
John Currin
Bert Stern
Anselm Kiefer
Sam Francis
Oleg Kulik
Peter Max
Sigmar Polke
Antoni Tàpies
Arman
Dale Chihuly
Francesco Clemente
Niki de Saint Phalle
Richard Phillips
Donald Sultan
Andres Serrano
Rineke Dijkstra
Vernon Ward
Raymond Pettibon
James Rosenquist
Egon Schiele
Joseph Beuys
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Vanessa Beecroft
Richard Estes
Karel Appel
Wolf Kahn
Duane Michals
Jean Dubuffet
Richard Prince
René Magritte
Claude Monet
Alison Guest
Stephan Balkenhol
William Kentridge
Sean Scully
Robert Motherwell
Richard Serra
Zhang Xiaogang
David Salle
Man Ray
Gary Hume
Alexandra Penney
Lee Krasner
Yayoi Kusama
Anish Kapoor
Chris Ofili
Adam Fuss
Henry Moore
Shirin Neshat
Vija Celmins
Hans Bellmer
Claes Oldenburg
John Chamberlain
Ron Arad
Tracey Emin
Yan Pei Ming
John Baldessari
Richard Hamilton
Rufino Tamayo
Kara Walker
Käthe Kollwitz
Maurice de Vlaminck
Christo
Richard Misrach
Mary Heilmann
Georg Baselitz
Mark Gonzales
Agnes Martin
Larry Clark
Rosina Wachtmeister
Mark Ryden
Spencer Tunick
Michael Craig-Martin
Gilbert & George
Donald Baechler
Beate Gütschow
Alberto Giacometti
Lalla Essaydi
Matisse
Patrick Nagel
Peter Saul
Donald Judd
William Wegman
Lucio Fontana
Max Ernst
Cecily Brown
Nate Lowman
George Condo
Izima Kaoru
Christopher Wool
Francesca Woodman
Joel-Peter Witkin
Louis Icart
Hans Aarsman
Peter Beard
Yves Klein
René Gruau
Zhang Peng
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Richard Diebenkorn
Axel Hütte
Eero Aarnio
Gary Gross
Subodh Gupta
Robert Ryman
Robert Polidori
Wassily Kandinsky
Ghada Amer
Mel Ramos
Thomas Hirschhorn
Bill Brandt
Edward Hopper
Liu Jianhua
Katy Grannan
Mario Testino
Red Grooms
Roni Horn
Rachel Whiteread
Paul McCarthy
Christian Boltanski
Sarah Morris
Guido Argentini
Tony Cragg
Sylvia Ji
Euan Uglow
Fang Lijun
Olivo Barbieri
Gustav Klimt
Stephen Shore
Willem de Kooning
Ellen von Unwerth
Nikki S. Lee
Paul Cadmus
Hans von Aachen
Ansel Adams
Marcel Dzama
Deborah Butterfield
Jenny Holzer
Berenice Abbott
Kees van Dongen
Arnulf Rainer
Shepard Fairey
Steven Klein
Ellsworth Woodward
Glenn Brown
William Eggleston
James Turrell
Barbara Kruger
John Coplans
Joseph Stella
Philip Guston
Grayson Perry
Josef Albers
Sophie Calle
Justine Kurland
Dennis Hopper
Naum Gabo
Mimmo Rotella
Imi Knoebel
Jennifer Bartlett
Jim Shaw
Graciela Iturbide
Paul P.
Antoni Abad
George Segal
Markus Lüpertz
Robert Arneson
Carl Andre
Jonathan Meese
A.R. Penck
Hans Haacke
Gillian Ayres
Laura Owens
Eric Fischl
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Franz Ackermann
Zeng Fanzhi
Jamie Reid
Anselm Reyle
Mark Rothko
Helena Almeida
Thomas Hart Benton
Jamie Hewlett
KAWS
Emile Gallé
Albert Watson
Grandma Moses
José Bedia
Sylvie Fleury
Ma Liuming
Karen Kilimnik
David Armstrong
Amy Cutler
Robert Riger
Manolo Valdés
Arshile Gorky
Lee Friedlander
Jack Pierson
François-Xavier Lalanne
Hans Hofmann
Bruce Nauman
Chamberlain
Brice Marden

TOP ARTISTS as of Feb. 2009 by $ales

Andy Warhol 1928-1987 US 1 ±0 481,209.41 +45,947.69
Pablo Picasso 1881-1973 ES 2 ±0 449,337.22 +43,335.60
Bruce Nauman *1941 (68) US 3 ±0 272,318.34 +27,695.14
Gerhard Richter *1932 (77) DE 4 ±0 246,359.05 +22,997.53
Joseph Beuys 1921-1986 DE 5 ±0 218,238.73 +28,080.39
Paul Klee 1879-1940 DE 6 ±0 209,941.80 +24,609.18
Robert Rauschenberg 1925-2008 US 7 ±0 191,054.81 +16,485.62
Sol LeWitt 1928-2007 US 8 +2 188,910.45 +21,161.04
Cindy Sherman *1954 (55) US 9 -1 185,947.47 +13,047.95
Henri Matisse 1869-1954 FR 10 -1 184,026.11 +13,709.78
Ed Ruscha *1937 (72) US 11 +1 178,221.52 +23,084.07
Louise Bourgeois *1911 (98) FR 12 -1 176,274.25 +20,865.69
Joàn Miró 1893-1983 ES 13 +1 174,214.80 +24,347.27
Sigmar Polke *1941 (68) PL 14 +1 164,782.83 +16,297.28
Roy Lichtenstein 1923-1997 US 15 -2 163,025.95 +9,059.23
Martin Kippenberger 1953-1997 DE 16 ±0 160,986.20 +15,314.79
Max Ernst 1891-1976 DE 17 +8 151,046.44 +26,907.89
Georg Baselitz *1938 (71) DE 18 ±0 149,643.33 +15,794.02
Olafur Eliasson *1967 (42) DK 19 +2 148,773.14 +21,392.98
Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944 RU 20 ±0 148,510.20 +18,098.97
Andreas Gursky *1955 (54) DE 21 -4 147,544.84 +9,313.54
Man Ray 1890-1976 US 22 +8 147,020.23 +31,951.14
Fischli & Weiss *1979 (30) CH 23 -4 142,714.23 +12,027.98
Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968 FR 24 +10 142,344.23 +29,225.44
John Baldessari *1931 (78) US 25 +2 140,636.92 +20,482.98
Douglas Gordon *1966 (43) UK 26 -4 140,588.34 +15,003.21
Lawrence Weiner *1940 (69) US 27 +2 138,554.00 +21,280.54
Thomas Ruff *1958 (51) DE 28 -2 137,519.94 +14,992.00
William Kentridge *1955 (54) ZA 29 -5 137,031.47 +12,629.43
Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966 CH 30 -7 136,048.73 +11,233.51
Pierre Huyghe *1962 (47) FR 31 -3 133,682.02 +15,637.93
Salvador Dalí 1904-1989 ES 32 ±0 131,392.48 +17,246.70
Jasper Johns *1930 (79) US 33 ±0 128,087.29 +14,203.70
Dan Graham *1942 (67) US 34 +1 127,852.32 +16,022.00
Donald Judd 1928-1994 US 35 +4 122,466.56 +13,560.51
Mike Kelley *1954 (55) US 36 +6 122,251.00 +14,895.05
Paul Cézanne 1839-1906 FR 37 -6 122,215.24 +7,826.09
Damien Hirst *1965 (44) UK 38 +6 122,059.32 +15,692.56
Anselm Kiefer *1945 (64) DE 39 -3 121,584.91 +10,985.75
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1880-1938 DE 40 +18 121,346.48 +22,775.20
Max Beckmann 1884-1950 DE 41 ±0 120,700.34 +13,016.50
Francis Alÿs *1959 (50) BE 42 +15 119,905.43 +21,004.73
Pipilotti Rist *1962 (47) CH 43 -6 119,539.10 +10,032.03
Jeff Wall *1946 (63) CA 44 -4 119,401.82 +11,023.99
Marina Abramovic *1946 (63) RS 45 ±0 119,187.40 +13,698.90
Franz West *1947 (62) AT 46 -8 118,031.50 +9,042.73
Richard Serra *1939 (70) US 47 +1 117,187.21 +13,796.58
Fernand Léger 1881-1955 FR 48 +1 116,566.39 +13,188.29
Thomas Struth *1954 (55) DE 49 +1 115,346.13 +12,119.06
Alexander Calder 1898-1976 US 50 +2 114,976.62 +14,712.35
Gilbert & George *1967 (42) UK 51 -8 114,729.33 +8,108.09
Vincent van Gogh 1853-1890 NL 52 -6 114,664.54 +9,354.52
Nam June Paik 1932-2006 KR 53 ±0 112,831.18 +12,687.61
Paul McCarthy *1945 (64) US 54 +5 111,952.87 +13,428.14

Courtesy of Artfacts.net

Uncertain art world eyes key European auctions

By Mike Collett-White

LONDON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Big art sales in Europe this month are a step into the unknown for auction houses, as they seek to gauge how the economic turmoil is affecting wealthy clients' appetite for multi-million dollar works of art.
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The booming market for top-quality works turned sharply lower in late 2008, particularly for contemporary art which had enjoyed a long run of spectacular gains.

But the fallout from the banking crisis and tumbling values of oil, stocks and property has not yet been as bad as some experts predicted.

Auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's (nyse: BID - news - people ) this week and next in London, and at the end of February in Paris, will tell more about whether the worsening financial climate is to be fully reflected in prices as the hammers go down.

'It is a question of whether one feels that the market reflects the general economy and to what extent the banking crisis influences values of works of art which collectors have only one opportunity in a lifetime to buy,' said Jussi Pylkkanen, president of Christie's Europe.

'After the sales in London and Paris the market will have a clearer idea,' he told Reuters at the auctioneer's London showroom surrounded by works by Monet, Modigliani, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Sotheby's and Christie's have tried to focus on fewer works of high quality that have rarely, if ever, come to market, in order to lure big spenders during difficult economic times.

They face a tough task, as confidence plummets.

ArtTactic, which measures the mood of the art market, said in a recent report that its U.S. and European Contemporary Art Market Confidence Indicator fell 81 percent between May and December last year to its lowest on record.

'The current reading implies that pessimists outweigh optimists in the Western contemporary art market by a ratio of 10:1,' it said.

Although works by old masters and impressionist painters have held up better, auction houses are feeling the pinch.

The practice of guaranteeing sellers a minimum price to secure a work for auction has become a rarity, and Christie's said last month its was considering a number of cost-cutting measures including job cuts.

Sotheby's kicks off the European sales with an impressionist and modern art auction on Tuesday, when it hopes a sculpture of a young ballet dancer by Degas will fetch up to $17.5 million.

Christie's holds its equivalent sale the following night, and among the highlights is Monet's 'Dans la Prairie', which is expected to sell for around $21 million.

Sotheby's holds its contemprary art sales in London later this week, while Christie's goes a week later.

In Paris from Feb. 23-35, the collection of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent goes under the hammer at Christie's and is estimated to fetch $255-383 million.

Pre-sale estimates for Sotheby's London day and evening sales of impressionist and modern art plus the equivalent auctions for contemporary works range from 70-97 million pounds, sharply down on the 196-275 million at the same time last year.

At Christie's the decline in overall estimates is also marked, falling to 91-131 million pounds from 197-278 million.



(Editing by Paul Casciato)
(To read more about our entertainment news, visit our blog 'Fan Fare' online at http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare) Keywords: ARTS AUCTIONS/
(London newsroom: tel +44 20 7542 4015; mike.collett-white@reuters.com)
Copyright Thomson Reuters 2009. All rights reserved.

Inside Yves Saint Laurent's Art Collection

When iconic designer Yves Saint Laurent died of brain cancer in June last year at the age of 71, he left behind a rich fashion legacy: He popularized the women's pantsuit, see-through blouses and the safari jacket. But he also left behind one of the world's greatest art collections.

Assembled over 50 years with his lover and business partner Pierre Bergé, the 700-plus works will go on the block Feb. 23 in a three-day auction that art-world aficionados are referring to as the sale of the century. The collection spans a range of styles and eras, including old master paintings and drawings, rare works by impressionist greats, African art and more. Christie's International, which is running the sale at Paris' Grand Palais, is estimating a total take as high as $390 million.

Proceeds from the sale will go to two charitable foundations set up by Saint Laurent and Bergé.

Since the financial markets started collapsing in the fall, auctions have struggled, and auction houses have limited the number of lots for sale. Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on Feb. 3 in London fetched just $46 million including commissions, compared with the $230 million the sale hauled in a year ago. But Christie's--and the benefactors--hope that the greatness of the Saint Laurent collection will defy the downward trend.

Among the works in the painting portion of the sale, which takes place the evening of Feb. 23, is a 1911 canvas by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), "Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose," which Christie's head of impressionist and modern art, Thomas Seydoux, says defines Saint Laurent's approach to design.

"This picture by Matisse is all about juxtaposition and defined balance between color and motif," observes Seydoux. "That's what Saint Laurent was all about: finding balance in his clothes between color and motif."

The still life depicts a blue-and-white vase holding a tight bouquet of yellow flowers atop a tablecloth of deep blue and pink. The swirling designs on the fabric are reminiscent of the famous 1910 Matisse depiction of dancing figures, "The Dance," which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In "Les coucous," a vibrant light blue wall serves as the backdrop to the flowers, and a diminutive painting of a painting by fellow fauvist Albert Marquet hangs just to the right of the vase.

Christie's estimates the picture will sell for $16 million to $23 million.

Who has that kind of cash right now? International art dealer David Nahmad, for one, who says he owned the picture briefly in 1979, when Christie's tried to sell the canvas during the Middle East oil crisis at a London auction.

"The painting didn't sell," remembers Nahmad. "It was bought in." Nahmad snapped it up post-sale for 250,000 British pounds (the equivalent of $1.6 million today), and then sold it shortly thereafter to Paris dealer Alain Tarica. Saint Laurent and Bergé bought it from Tarica in 1981.

Nahmad, who often makes decisions about his purchases mid-auction (he bought a Miró at Sotheby's yesterday for $2 million including commissions), won't say what he's willing to pay now to reacquire the work.

Seydoux, however, believes an institution may be the ultimate owner.

"This is appalling for me to say as a Frenchman," he confesses, "but the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a whole department devoted to costumes and design; this painting combines the two." - Susan Adams Forbes.com

Fashion Photos as Art

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Most men in suits don’t look like sex symbols. Gary Cooper did, at least in Edward Steichen’s come- hither 1930 photograph of the actor for Vogue.

In those days, a fashion magazine was the go-to place for seduction by portraiture, publishing the most provocative photographers, writers and designers of the moment.

Today, a style magazine is literally a museum piece at New York’s International Center of Photography. Proclaiming 2009 as its Year of Fashion, ICP is presenting four separate but unequal exhibitions that propose fashion photography as a crucible for new ideas in art.

To accomplish this, the ICP, which prides itself on classic photojournalism, has taken a radical step. Its lead show, “Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now,” pretty much dispenses with photographic prints. Those it does show are nearly lost within a blizzard of magazine layouts, and not even original ones at that. All are reproductions, most published within the past two years.

Fashion trades on fantasy and “Weird Beauty” includes some startling images. Several center on the mouth, exemplified by Miles Aldridge’s bright color close-up of a woman’s blinding white teeth clenching a yellow gemstone between her fiery red lips.

Languid Young Men

This picture is surrounded by Aldridge images from recent magazines, some featuring languid young men sleeping under bushes. Their clothing is secondary to their presentation as objects of desire themselves.

That is what is most striking about the images in this show: Clothes are not the center of attention. The artifice of the image itself is what takes center stage -- the dramatic lighting, framing, styling and posing that combine to brand the style of each of the show’s 40 photographers rather than any designer of fashion.

From Nick Knight we get an overhead, black-and-white shot of a model in a laced-string camisole laid out on an examination table as if begging to be ravished. Paolo Roversi’s “Blue Mask” surrounds the model’s face behind the blow-up of another Roversi photograph of her tinted blue face, with a fake pink mouth attached.

Removed from their commercial context, it might be easier to consider these images as ingenious works of art. But we see them here only in the service of commerce, to sell a label or a concept, not to create any larger understanding of the human condition.

Steichen, who mined the Romantic tradition of the sublime before becoming a hard-core modernist, was one of the stars of the Conde Nast firmament in the salad days of Vogue and Vanity Fair, from 1923 to 1937.

Socialites, Celebrities

His work for those magazines is the subject of a retrospective at the ICP, with 175 photographs of socialites and celebrities who ruled the gossip columns of the day.

It’s interesting to move from the abject surrealism of “Weird Beauty” to the pronounced glamour of Steichen, who established the photography department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His formal iconography of famous figures like Winston Churchill, Amelia Earhart, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and Cooper has influenced contemporary photographers as disparate as Robert Mapplethorpe and Irving Penn.

Two smaller shows force a closer consideration of the artistry behind a fashion photograph. “Munkacsi’s Lost Archive” presents a small selection of new prints from a cache of glass negatives by the Hungarian photographer, acquired by the ICP after they appeared on EBay.

Before he died in 1963, Martin Munkacsi was a top talent at Harper’s Bazaar whose art took place as much in his darkroom as on a set. The show reveals his process, juxtaposing original shots that include an assistant’s hands or feet in the frame with the tight focus of a cropped, finished print.

Stylish Satchel

More absorbing -- and curious -- is “This Is Not a Fashion Photograph,” a group of unrelated photographs from ICP’s collections that curator Vince Aletti cites as having as much calculated style as documentary truth.

It would be difficult to find a more fashionable image than George Strock’s 1941 photograph of the very stylish baseball great Satchel Paige, who lights a cigarette at a Harlem pool hall.

It has personality, it has social realism, it has class. Which means it may not matter if we label it art, journalism or fashion. At the ICP, such distinctions are completely without a difference.

“Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now,” “Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Conde Nast Years, 1923-1937,” “This is Not a Fashion Photograph: Selections from the ICP Collection” and “Munkacsi’s Lost Archive” are on view through May 3 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of Americas at West 43rd St. Information: +1-212-857-0045; http://www.icp.org.

(Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Linda Yablonsky in New York at fabyab@earthlink.net.

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