UrbanEye: The Moth Ball An Evening of Old-Fashioned Storytelling

Click on title and see video on THE MOTHBALL held last night in New York City.

Preview May 2007 Contemporary Art at Sotheby's

GILBERT AND GEORGE at THE TATE

Bjork

Francis Bacon "Study for Self-Portrait" (1964) $40 Million estimate fails to sell at Christie's Auction

ARTIST: Francis Bacon
TITLE: “Study for Self-Portrait” (1964)
AUCTION HOUSE: Christie’s
ESTIMATED PRICE: $40 million

This full-length portrait is one of the highlights of Christie's Nov. 12 sale. Christie's is hoping to capitalize on the record prices paid for Bacon's works recently. A 1976 Bacon triptych went for $86.3 million in May. Still, there is no getting around the fact that ''the market has changed,'' said Brett Gorvy, co-head of Christie's postwar and contemporary art department.

In Faltering Economy, Auction Houses Crash Back to Earth

ARTS / ART & DESIGN
In Faltering Economy, Auction Houses Crash Back to Earth
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: November 17, 2008 New York Times

Recent art auctions seemed to signal a new era in sales, one that featured the return of the seasoned collector and more-sober business practices.

It was easily the worst two weeks of high-end Impressionist, modern and contemporary art auctions in more than a decade. Night after night, collectors and dealers tentatively watched as paintings by Monet and Matisse, Bacon and Warhol went unsold. Each time the hammer fell, it seemed to signal a new era in sales, one that featured the return of the seasoned collector and more-sober business practices. Still, given the depth of the global economic crisis, auction house experts were expecting worse.

A Kazimir Malevich work sold for $60 million, a record for this artist at auction.
So when a painting by Kazimir Malevich brought $60 million, and a Cubist canvas by Juan Gris fetched nearly $21 million — both record prices for those artists at auction — there was an audible sigh of relief. Dealers and auction house experts said it was proof that some high rollers still had the cash and the appetite to buy art. “In a period as frightening as this, it is still amazing to think that over $600 million worth of art changed hands over the past two weeks,” said William Ruprecht, Sotheby’s chief executive.

But timing was not kind to the auction houses. The sales were put together in summer, well before the financial picture darkened, and were overloaded with works from sellers trying to cash in on the last several seasons’ wave of inflation. To win their business the highly competitive auction houses bankrolled them with guarantees, undisclosed sums promised to sellers regardless of a sale’s outcome.

Late Friday afternoon Sotheby’s, the a public company, reported that it had lost $28.2 million from guarantees at its contemporary art auctions last week. That brought its total losses to about $52 million this fall, all from guarantees. Executives at Christie’s, which is a private company and therefore not obligated to release its finances, also admitted to having lost millions of dollars.

More fancy financial footwork compounded their losses. For several years now Sotheby’s and Christie’s have given sellers a cut of fees they charge buyers. The companies also spent a lot of money producing lush vanity catalogs and had become the art world’s equivalent of Avon, taking previews of the art coming up for sale across the globe to clients as though they were shop-at-home services.

The winners of the last two weeks were savvy veterans like the financier Henry Kravis and his wife, Marie-Josée, who parted with a Degas pastel that sold for less than the guarantee they received from Sotheby’s. And the prominent lawyer Aaron Fleischman was said to have been given $5 million by Christie’s for a 1973 Warhol, a Mao portrait that failed to sell.

Guarantees like these may seem like folly today, but at the time auction house experts were concentrating on collectors thought to be interested in specific works. That was in the summer. By November the trophy hunters — Russian oligarchs and oil-rich Middle Easterners as well as Americans — had for the most part fled. So had many Europeans who embraced the New York auctions a year ago when the weak dollar made their purchases seem comparatively cheap.

In their place were seasoned collectors who sat out the boom years and were now returning for what seemed like bargain prices. The Los Angeles financier Eli Broad, for example, could be seen near the front of the Sotheby’s salesroom last week and bought more than $8 million worth of art by Jeff Koons, Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg at an auction he called a “half-price sale.”

Tobias Meyer, head of Sotheby’s contemporary-art department and the company’s chief auctioneer, said prices for contemporary art had fallen to around 2006 levels and in some cases 2004 and 2005 levels. “Over the past 18 months we’ve had a super market due to the new buyers from Russia and other parts of Europe who hadn’t bought art before,” he said. “But it’s a new world now.”

Going forward, he said, “works are going to be priced far differently.” In trying to determine the new price levels for sales next year he and other auction house executives said they were beginning to evaluate the history of prices artist by artist. (Art dealers too are slashing prices, in some cases as much as 50 percent.)

To say the party is over is an understatement. Edward Dolman, Christie’s chief executive, said his company would, for the most part, give guarantees only in “exceptional circumstances” and it would not be rebating any of the buyer’s fees back to the seller. Mr. Ruprecht of Sotheby’s expressed similar sentiments: “We’re preparing for a different market. We are out of the guarantee business at least for a while. It’s too hard to predict what tomorrow looks like.”

Both companies said they would be also be cutting back on general expenses like lavish dinner parties for clients, extravagant catalogs and travel that takes art around the world. Staff cuts are inevitable too, auction house executives said.

“We’re predicting volumes to fall,” Mr. Dolman said of next year’s sales.

Without guarantees, gone will be the sellers trying to turn a quick profit. “We’re going to be a more traditional business,” Mr. Dolman said and quoted the adage about relying instead on “the three D’s — death, divorce and debt” — to get business.

The manner in which art is purchased will probably become more conventional too. In the flush years it was common for auction houses to sell to people who never actually saw a work live but bought simply based on an e-mailed image or a picture in a catalog.

“The jpeg market is over,” Mr. Meyer said. “We’re getting back to selling art you really have to look at.” As an example he pointed to the top seller in his contemporary art auction, a signature blue sponge relief by Yves Klein that brought $21.3 million. The work is so abstract it can only be appreciated in person.

Tastes are changing too. Prices for works by artists like Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince and Peter Doig, who were considered hot just a few months ago, softened considerably. Damien Hirst, who might have looked like a gravity-defying artist in September when he staged a landmark sale in London, seemed like yesterday’s news, with few of his works selling at all. The Warhol market fell flat this season too. “We are going to see a lot of young art being very difficult to sell, at least for a while,” Mr. Ruprecht said.

Instead established, reasonably priced artists like Alexander Calder, for example, whose works never appealed to new buyers are once again bringing high prices. And seasoned collectors are eagerly waiting to see what will come on the market next. In February, for instance, Christie’s is holding a much-anticipated sale of art and objects that belonged to the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who died in June.

“Now might be a good opportunity to acquire really great things,” said Mr. Fleischman, the collector. “Works that haven’t been around before.”

WHAT IS ART FOR? By Daniel B. Smith

Excerpt below is from article, by Daniel B. Smith. Click on the "WHAT IS ART FOR" and you will be able to read entire New York Times article from this past Sunday's magazine section.

By DANIEL B. SMITH
Published: November 14, 2008

Last April I asked the writer Lewis Hyde if he would take a trip with me to Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. At 63, Hyde has boyishly tousled brown-gray hair, freckled, soft-looking cheeks and the slightly abstracted gaze of a man who spends a disproportionate amount of his time in library carrels. He has an ironic streak, but his default mode is a kind of easygoing acquiescence, and so one slate gray Saturday afternoon he picked me up in Cambridge, where he lives and works half the year, and drove us the 12 miles west to Walden.

Hyde knows the area well — among his ongoing projects is a detailed series of annotations of Henry David Thoreau’s essays — and he led me down a dirt path from the parking lot to the site of the cabin where, more than 150 years ago, Thoreau wrote his celebrated paean to solitude and self-reliance. The cabin no longer exists. In its place there is a lightly excavated, cordoned-off square of soil and, to its side, a waist-high cairn erected in commemoration by generations of pilgrims.

Our own visit wasn’t commemorative, but it was a pilgrimage of a sort. Hyde has been writing and publishing for more than three decades, and he has received numerous high-profile awards, including a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1991, but his name is still obscure to most readers. His body of work is slim; he has published two books, a volume of poems and a smattering of essays, translations and edited anthologies. His reputation, however, is rich. David Foster Wallace called him “one of our true superstars of nonfiction.” Hyde’s fans — among them Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem — routinely use words like “transformative” and “life-altering” to describe his books, which they’ve been known to pass hand to hand like spiritual texts or samizdat manifestoes. The source of much of this reverence is Hyde’s first book, “The Gift” (1983), which has never been out of print (it was recently rereleased by Vintage in a 25th-anniversary edition) and which tries to reconcile the value of doing creative work with the exigencies of a market economy.

Hyde began his career as a poet in the naturalistic vein of Gary Snyder or Mary Oliver, but over the years he has transformed himself into an accomplished scholar. “The Gift,” the core argument of which depends on establishing an analogy between the making of art and how objects accrue value in traditional “gift economies,” has been praised as the most subtle, influential study of reciprocity since the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s 1924 essay of the same name. His second book, “Trickster Makes This World” (1998), a cross-cultural study of the mischievous, mythological trickster figure (examples from the 20th century include Duchamp, Picasso and Ginsberg), weaves together literary strands from West Africa, India and China and concludes with a new translation of the “Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” for which Hyde spent months working one on one with a tutor in ancient Greek. Jonathan Lethem told me that when he first read “The Gift,” he pictured its author as a kind of inapproachable seer, either long dead or soaring so high in the intellectual stratosphere as to be unreachable. “It’d be like reading a book by Nietzsche or Freud when they were alive and thinking, Oh, I gotta send this guy a note!”

Hyde’s admirers often point out with awe (and his reviewers with frustration) that his books are all but impossible to summarize. Hyde doesn’t object to this assessment. He wrote “The Gift” because he could find no place where his own motivations for writing poetry were well articulated, but articulating them required a poet’s suggestiveness. “One thing I’ve always liked to read is the kind of literature you find in Jung and Freud, which combines personal anecdote, philosophy, mythology, dreams,” he told me in his Cambridge office last May. “I like the way it jumps from one discursive realm to another.” His books exhibit this lively heterogeneity to an at-times dizzying extent; in the course of 12 pages in “The Gift,” Hyde hops from a discussion of a Pali Buddhist parable to Marx’s “Capital” to the Ford Pinto and then moves quickly on, in the next 3 pages, to Christmas, country-western music and the psychological fates of Vietnamese refugees in Southern California.

In the late 1990s, Hyde began extending his lifelong project of examining “the public life of the imagination” into what had become newly topical territory: the “cultural commons.” The advent of Internet file-sharing services like Napster and Gnutella sparked urgent debates over how to strike a balance between public and private claims to creative work. For more than a decade, the so-called Copy Left — a diverse group of lawyers, activists, artists and intellectuals — has argued that new digital technologies are responsible for an unprecedented wave of innovation and that excessive legal restrictions should not be placed on, say, music remixes, image mashups or “read-write” sites like Wikipedia, where users create their own content. The Copy Left, or the “free culture movement,” as it is sometimes known, has articulated this position in part by drawing on the tradition of the medieval agricultural commons, the collective right of villagers, vassals and serfs —“commoners” — to make use of a plot of land. This analogy is also central to Hyde’s book in progress, which looks closely at how the tradition of the commons was transformed once it was brought from Europe to America.

For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways. Over dinner not long ago, he told me about the legal fate of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson died in 1886, but it was not until 1955 that an “official” volume of her collected works was published, by Harvard University Press. The length of copyright terms has expanded substantially in the last century, and Harvard holds the exclusive right to Dickinson’s poems until 2050 — more than 160 years after they were first written. When the poet Robert Pinsky asked Harvard for permission to include a Dickinson poem in an article that he was writing for Slate about poetic insults, it refused, even for a fee. “Their feeling was that once the poem was online, they’d lose control of it,” Hyde told me.

In highlighting the absurd ways in which intellectual copyright has overreached, Hyde brings to mind such iconic Copy Left figures as Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional-law scholar at Stanford. Yet Hyde’s new book, which he allowed me to read in draft form (it is unfinished and untitled), addresses what he considers a more fundamental issue. We may believe there should be a limit on the market in cultural property, he argues, but that doesn’t mean that we have “a good public sense” of where to set that limit. Hyde’s book is, at its core, an attempt to help formulate that sense.

Lucian Freud Interview (Part 4/5)

Francis Bacon - Documentary part 3/6

Francis Bacon Interview (part 1)