英美術館驚現希特勒私家藏畫 由德畫家創作

來源：新聞午報

英國國家美術館日前發現，館藏的一幅油畫竟曾是納粹元首阿道夫·希特勒的私家收藏。它由德國著名宮廷畫家老盧卡斯·克拉納赫創作，美術館正進一步搜集該油畫的相關資料。

這幅名為《丘比特向維納斯訴苦》的油畫名稱用拉丁文標注，是克拉納赫1512年創作的。雖是復制品，但仍然非常珍稀。熱衷收藏希特勒遺物的普林茨·施瓦茨博士在希特勒早年的相冊中首先發現了關于這幅油畫的照片，其中一張能清楚地看到，這幅畫被陳列在希特勒私人藝術館中。這本相冊是希特勒私人圖書館中的藏品，如今已被轉送到美國國會圖書館中收藏。希特勒分別擁有一個館藏1200卷圖書的私人圖書館和一個藝術館。英國國家美術館已著手調查這幅油畫被希特勒收藏的具體時間。據悉，1963年，國家美術館從紐約的希特曼兄弟手中買入該畫，但1909年至1945年間，該畫不知去向。美術館認為，希特勒很可能是在1933年至1945年間通過不合適途徑獲得該畫的。

Angus Fairhurst

From The Times

March 31, 2008

Sensitive and inventive artist who helped to set the contemporary cultural agenda for a decade

Artists Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas at the launch of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida Art Exhibition.

Angus Fairhurst was one of the group of young art college students and recent graduates who exhibited in the famous independent group show Freeze, which took place in an empty port authority building in the Docklands of London in 1988.

That exhibition introduced the world to a generation who became known — for better or worse — as the Young British Artists (YBAs). Their approach and their ideas — provocative, controversial, inventive — would set the tone for contemporary art in Britain over the next two decades.

Thanks to the artists’ own determined efforts to generate publicity, the show attracted a surprising degree of interest, not least from the influential collector Charles Saatchi. Many of the artists involved went on to enjoy enormous critical and commercial success.

At the time of Freeze, Fairhurst and his friends had just left or were just leaving the celebrated and uniquely cross-disciplinary fine art course at Goldsmiths College in South London. In choosing not to wait for the approval of the established art dealers and gallerists of the day but to show together on their own account in a series of exhibitions mounted by one of their number, Damien Hirst, they showed an enterprise not then particularly common among young artists.

That spirit of enterprise — indeed of entrepreneurship — would continue to characterise their work. At the same time, and for all their differences in temperament, ideas and approach, they would remain, on the whole, what they had been in their college days: a remarkably close-knit, selfreliant and mutually supportive group.

Angus Fairhurst was born at Pembury, Kent, in 1966 and studied at Canterbury College of Art before proceeding to Goldsmiths. Strikingly good looking, he was for several years the boyfriend of one of the more prominent of the Freeze group, the sculptor Sarah Lucas, with whom he made some collaborative works. He was also a great friend of the showman Hirst.

He himself, however, was a more obviously sensitive and delicate artist, one whose work was always a subtle combination of conceptual rigour and a generous formalism. Since Freeze he had exhibited in most of the subsequent important exhibitions of his artistic “generation”; Brilliant at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, 1995, Some Went Mad Some Ran Away, at the Serpentine, 1994; Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997, and then, more recently, in In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, with Lucas and Hirst at Tate Britain in 2004.

He also had a number of significant one-person shows, notably at Sadie Coles HQ London, and at galleries in New York and Amsterdam.

Fairhurst made work of consistent subtlety and wit. Like his contemporaries, he embraced painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, practical jokes; taking whatever he needed and turning it to his own distinctive ends.

Confident across his whole range of chosen media, he worked often in sets or series of ideas, touching on such subjects as the ubiquity and power of advertising and the mass media, the nature of the self, and the emptiness of expression, but doing so with humour, usually revealed in his titles: Over Lapping Paintings (1996), for instance, was a series of delicate paintings which explored to great effect the movement of repeated pattern over the surface. In A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling (2003) and several other works, he played with the motif of a gorilla, drawing gorillas, sculpting them in bronze, dressing up in a gorilla suit, playing the fool to make serious points about machismo and male grandiosity and to explore the gaps between the artistic subject, the means of representation and the weight of the viewer’s expectations.

Fairhurst’s close attention to form, his careful, often humorous probing of the possibilities of artistic expression, was part and parcel of his delicacy and self-doubt. For all the glib convenience of the YBA label, his work is in reality a world away from the brash theatricality of a Hirst, the cheerful outrageousness of a Lucas, the confident, manipulative self-revelation of a Tracey Emin. A kind and thoughtful man, he was permanently critical of his own work, and never satisfied with what he had achieved.

Recent projects had allowed him to review several layers of his own past, exploring anew many aspects of his earlier work in collage, painting, printmaking, animation and sculpture. Beauty, luxury and sex were among his themes. But art and illusion were his central concerns, along with some serious questions about the nature and value of art itself, and perhaps therefore of the artist, too.

His most recent exhibition, which has just closed at Sadie Coles Gallery, consisted of two very large paintings, executed during and directly after Christmas, a small bronze which seemed to portray the aftermath of some unspecified incident. There was a strong reference to Bernini’s sculpture of Daphne turning into a tree; there was an empty and wrecked prefabricated For Sale sign at eye height, and there were a number of smaller paintings of graphic delicacy and subtle power.

There was, in it all, a strong sense of place — very local, very London — a world of underground walkways, ripped advertising signs from which figures have been removed.

Here as elsewhere, Fairhurst made his works with an awareness of how and where they would appear, in this case alluring and unsettling behind the gallery’s smart facade. Here, as elsewhere, he used his chosen media in a way that worked.

Angus Fairhurst, artist, was born on October 4, 1966. He was found dead in woodland at Bridge of Orchy, Argyll, on March 29, 2008, aged 41

Is the art market heading for a fall?

From The Sunday Times

March 30, 2008

As contemporary art fetches record prices, artists, dealers and auction houses are quietly tearing each other apart in their fight to control the booming £20 billion business. But now that recession clouds are gathering, is the market heading for a nasty fall?

The Jeff Koons was faltering at £630,000. Simon de Pury, standing at the Phillips de Pury podium and confronting seated ranks of dealers and collectors, was suffused with mock agony. Dressed in a tailored Italian suit, the auctioneer was an expressionist silhouette, his arms out-thrust, fingers stretched, coaxing the music of bidding from the air. A young woman, one of 27 well-groomed individuals sitting on the telephone bank, made a tiny gesture.

“Just in time!” de Pury said breathily. “Six hundred and forty against you, Michael!”

Michael McGinnis, head of contemporary, spoke into his phone. Finally the Koons went for £900,000.

Simon de Pury has been running Phillips de Pury since the 2001 takeover of the venerable, medium-sized London auction house. The house now acts like a feisty pup darting around the grizzled mastiffs, Sotheby’s and Christie’s. This sale was in Phillips de Pury’s new London building, a former post office between Victoria station and Eaton Square.

Immediately behind de Pury, a Damien Hirst “Spin” painting exploded like a round window, giving the auction room the appearance of a chapel. Other trophies hanging in plain view included a “Shadow” painting by Andy Warhol and a “Nurse” canvas by Richard Prince, and a further Koons, a glass sculpture in which the artist is penetrating his former wife, the porn star La Cicciolina, was beside the podium. The artist’s lilac glass buttocks were pointed, doubtless unintentionally, at the art press, who were lined along the left-hand wall.

The contemporary auction at Sotheby’s the night before had been the second most successful in that house’s history. But the auction at Phillips de Pury was more up and down. Indeed, the selling of another Hirst, a huge “Spot” canvas, furnished a classic example of the perils and profits of the auction process. This was one of several pieces put up for sale by the Manhattan developer and collector Aby Rosen. Phillips had secured the consignment by offering fat guarantees, as it had done for much else. Just how fat it isn’t telling, but its low estimate on the

“Spot” piece was £1.5m, its high estimate £2.5m, a risky calculation because Rosen had paid £600,000 for the piece a few years before.

But the bidding sailed merrily up to £1.1m. Then came a lull, like the breeze dropping, until de Pury, whose articulation can put one in mind of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, got things going again. The piece was hammered down to Philippe Ségalot, an art adviser with arena-rock hair, for £1.76m. De Pury later relived the moment the heart of the Hirst bidding seemed to stop. “As the auctioneer you are totally focused, but at the back of your head you think, ‘My God! Why is it halting? What is going on?’ ” he told me. “And then when things continue, and the price continues climbing, you have an inner sigh of relief.” So was this or was it not a success? True, it barely cleared the low estimate. Yet it was an auction record for a Hirst “Spot” painting and the evening was deemed a success. The Richard Prince “Nurse”, sold at the Barbara Gladstone gallery in 2003 for perhaps $60,000, fetched £2,148,500. Sales totalled £21.9m. Clearly, despite the US recession and sub-prime horrors, the art market was still riding high.

Art has become perhaps the biggest legal economy in the world to be almost totally unregulated, so it should come as no surprise that the art world is the scene of a mighty struggle for control. The principal contenders are the auctioneers and the dealers, with a supporting cast of collectors, art advisers, entrepreneurs, curators and an increasingly active group of über-artists.

But it’s not just about the money, huge though that has become. It’s about how the making of art is being affected by its marketing. It’s about the increasingly wide handprint of contemporary art on the whole culture. Tate Modern had 5.2m visitors last year, making it the most popular museum of modern and contemporary art in the world and second only to Blackpool beach as an attraction in the UK.

) ) ) ) )

In 2000, CNN estimated the value of the global art market at $4 billion a year. It also reported that Christie’s and Sotheby’s controlled 90% of it. Ed Dolman, CEO of Christie’s, pooh-poohs that. He says the Big Two control “about 70% of the market”. And how big is the global art market now? “I would say it’s probably between 20 and 30 billion, the total,” Dolman says breezily. “And that is a complete guess.”

Both auction houses have lengthy histories, and for much of them they have been content to be what Robin Woodhead, Sotheby’s CEO for Europe and Asia, calls “clearing houses”, selling to dealers, while the dealers worked directly with collectors, institutions and living artists.

When things began loosening up, it was Sotheby’s that made the running. Peter Wilson, the longtime boss, had a vision of an international art market. He swallowed up Parke Bernet, a venerable Madison Avenue auction house, in 1964. Christie’s followed some years later; its first auction was in the spring of 1977. “The duopoly works,” says James Stourton, Sotheby’s chairman. “When we bought Parke Bernet, nothing really started happening until Christie’s opened up in New York too.” Then Al Taubman, a Detroit real-estate magnate with a keen retail brain, took over Sotheby’s in 1983 and targeted private collectors directly, squeezing the middlemen, the dealers. Until then auctions had been for the trade, humdrum affairs where few private collectors would deign to lift a paddle. In media-addled Manhattan, night sales at both houses became plum destinations for fancy folk. The world of event art was being born.

In the spring of 1990, Sotheby’s made another tactical move, forming a partnership with William Acquavella, a Manhattan dealer, to acquire the estate of the dealer Pierre Matisse, son of Henri. This giddy $143m deal was to be financed by the auction house while the dealer would, well, deal. Christie’s had been nosing around the estate too.

Many art dealers were livid that the auctioneers were getting yet more closely involved with their retail business. But then came the collapse of the Japanese real-estate boom and the great art bust of 1990. In London and New York, for several years things remained flat as a kipper. They began picking up in the mid-1990s. Then came a curious turn of events.

Dr Bernardo Nadal-Ginard, the first president of the Boston Children’s Heart Foundation, was a cardiologist with a sheaf of published papers to his credit. He and his wife, Dr Vijak Mahdavi, were also avid collectors of work by younger contemporary artists. They were discerning and acquired tough, cutting-edge pieces by, among others, Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Matthew Barney, Rachel Whiteread, Robert Gober and Kiki Smith. And they were generous with their collection, lending out pieces for exhibition.

But the doctor was a thief. The collecting had been in part financed by $6.5m plundered from the foundation. This was like shooting Bambi’s mother and turning the hide into a nifty waistcoat. The foundation offered the collection to Sotheby’s. Tobias Meyer arrived from London to run the contemporary department soon after. “I thought, wow! It’s incredible material. And I saw an opportunity to really shake up the market,” he says.

At the time, Sotheby’s and Christie’s would routinely open their night sales of contemporary art with tried and true pieces of material, such as an early Calder. “The young stuff was always relegated to the end,” Meyer says. He moved the focus onto the freshest, most controversial pieces. Lot 7, for instance, was Kiki Smith’s Pee Body, a crouching female nude in wax, with long coils of yellow glass beads denoting urine.

Installing the show for preview presented challenges. Displaying older work was fairly routine: put it on the wall or on a pedestal. Contemporaries could be more demanding. The Nauman needed to be hung from wires, the Kiki Smith was not exactly pedestal-appropriate, and the Matthew Barney, which used petroleum jelly and silicon gel and needed refrigeration, at Barney’s request, wasn’t installed at all.

“Now, when we have to install a Damien Hirst,” Meyer says, “the Damien Hirst studio actually comes up and installs it. But at the time the dialogue between artists’ studios and auction houses wasn’t as open as it is now. When we had the Jeff Koons Hanging Heart, the Jeff Koons studio was very helpful.”

The Children’s Heart Foundation sale was on the evening of May 6, 1997. Dede Brooks, Sotheby’s queenly CEO, approached Meyer that day. “She told me, ‘Tobias! All this crap is going to BI!’” he says. Meaning Buy In. Fail to sell.

Brooks was far from alone in her misgivings. But actually the sale was a rip-roarer. “It went through the roof,” Meyer says. Smith’s Pee Body, estimated at between $60,000 and $80,000, went for $233,500. The Barney, estimated at between $100,000 and $150,000, fetched $343,500. The entire auction made $15.2m, and only seven works failed to sell.

The message rang clear as a bell: contemporary art was the new playpen for collectors. A welcome message. A worldwide, decade-long fever of museum-building has been vacuuming up work in traditional collecting fields. Putting together a strong impressionist sale was harder and harder, and even great modernism was vanishing from the marketplace. The success of the Children’s Heart Foundation sale created an instant change. “I realised that this was a different market we were talking about,” Meyer says.

Up to and including the Heart Foundation sale, catalogues normally printed artists’ names in the sort of fiddly little typeface used, for instance, for newspaper photo captions. The catalogue for Sotheby’s next contemporary-art sale that November printed the artists’ names in slush-grey letters 1½in high. Meaning important. The art stars of the 1980s and their successors were walking the Earth again. And now they were bigger than before.

Christie’s wasn’t laggardly. Its contemporary sale in London on December 8, 1998, included 130 pieces from the Saatchi Collection, listing them in a hefty spiral-bound catalogue. Ed Dolman is proud of the effort. “But it’s amazing how few of those artists went on to become big names. Damien Hirst, Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Whiteread were all there. But an awful lot didn’t go anywhere,” he says.

Sotheby’s attempt to penetrate the clandestine world of dealers continued. In 1996, André Emmerich sold his gallery to the auction house and became a senior vice-president there. And in September 1997 it acquired half of Deitch Projects, one of Manhattan’s edgiest galleries. So the auctioneers were again flexing their muscles. But this time the dealers had a weapon. Art fairs.

) ) ) ) )

At last year’s Art Basel, I was outside in the sun with Samuel Keller, the outgoing director. Shiny-pated, in an open shirt and a chocolate-coloured suit, Keller was speaking about the auctioneers and the dealers. “The art world is an ecosystem,” he said. “It’s not the shark eating up all the fish, because that means they will starve tomorrow. So the galleries are providing the auction houses’ living. Which is the artists who have a career. And only if you have a career and a reputation do you have a secondary market.”

Under Keller, Basel had become the kingpin among fairs, but it was not the earliest. That had been Art Cologne, which was launched in 1967 but which let in middling dealers and indifferent work. It sagged. Ernst Beyeler, the Swiss megadealer and collector who launched Art Basel two years later, saw to it that only the cream of dealers were invited. It was a success from the beginning. Other cities spawned competitive fairs: Paris, Madrid, Berlin. The Chicago Art Fair, America’s first, was launched in 1979. It was a hit, but these were dealers’ fairs. Glamour had touched the auction houses in the 1980s, but the fairs remained as nuts-and-boltsy as any other trade fairs. And they too suffered through the early-1990s doldrums.

In 1994, four Manhattan dealers, Pat Hearn, Colin de Land, Paul Morris and Matthew Marks, came up with a way of gingering up the market by the equivalent of what the rag trade calls a “trunk show”. Avant-garde dealers from around the world were invited to show their wares in rented rooms in New York’s Gramercy Park hotel. Jay Jopling, for instance, brought in the young Tracey Emin. I remember her sitting on the bed, talking and making spidery drawings. There were parties that attracted collectors as well as dealers. “And that made it a little more social,” says Patrick McMullan, Manhattan’s ubiquitous party photographer.

In 1999 the organisers checked out of the Gramercy and transferred to a succession of more spacious venues. It was now The Armory Show, a name borrowed from the exhibition set up in 1913 and best remembered for tossing out the Duchamp urinal. And as Manhattan again sprinkled its media pixie dust, the Armory too became part of the world of event art.

Samuel Keller had been watching. In 2000 Art Basel bought up the Miami Art Fair, a small fair with a corner in Latin American art. Its December 2, 2001 opening was naturally cancelled. But when it opened the following year, it was at once apparent that the Basel fair had acquired a flightier twin.

London was next. Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp launched Frieze the following year, naming it after their magazine, which was itself named for the show Damien Hirst put together after leaving Goldsmiths. Frieze, being set in a city where artists were bold-faced names in the tabloids, was soon clobbering the Berlin fair, as the Armory had deflated Chicago.

Fairs are a mixed blessing. “I think art fairs are actually revolting. It’s like going to Florence and seeing 87 churches. It’s just a blur,” the London-based American dealer Kenny Schachter told me. “But you can’t function in the art world without them.” This has not been lost on the auctioneers. In June 2006, Sotheby’s bought a Dutch dealership, Noortman Master Paintings. Robert Noortman was a founder of the Maastricht Art Fair, and a powerful presence within it, so when Sotheby’s asked that its new subsidiary be allowed to continue to do business there, the committee agreed. Christie’s then let it be known that if it wasn’t allowed entrance to the fair, it would go to Maastricht anyway, even if it meant putting up a marquee in the town square. The committee knuckled under.

Maastricht focuses on old masters but will show anything of tiptop quality, including works of contemporary art. For art dealers it is sacred turf. Most were appalled. Rene Gimpel of Gimpel Fils had been at a Hong Kong fair where Christie’s had a stand some years ago. The stated reason for their presence was that clients buying western art might feel unsure of themselves. “So Christie’s were there to reassure them,” he says. “But that, of course, made one feel that one was in the grips of the goodwill of Christie’s. We joked about it.”

The art economy is information-based. A dealer can be successful with just two or three clients and guards them jealously. A Manhattan dealer, a friend, quivered when I ran into him in an airport bar. He was with such clients. Dealers worry that the auctioneers frequent fairs to fatten up their dossiers. “But we don’t have booths in the auction houses during their big auction weeks,” Gimpel says. “We need to maintain our separate spheres.”

Then Christie’s bought Haunch of Venison in February 2007. Haunch is a leading London gallery with spaces in Berlin and Zurich. Many other dealers hated this, but kept their feelings off the record – François Pinault, the owner of Christie’s, also being an enormous collector.

The selection committees at art fairs are made up of dealers and, in themselves, constitute one of the new powers in the art world. Not all loathed the Haunch sale. “I don’t know how an art gallery can be owned anyway,” says Gavin Brown, a Manhattan-based British dealer who is on the selection committee of Frieze.

“A contemporary art gallery is its artists. It’s only inventory that can be owned. You can’t make an artist stay somewhere if they don’t want to. If they don’t care, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Haunch of Venison failed to make the cut at either Frieze or the Armory, though. And the Basel twins? “Our regulations are very clear. We have never allowed galleries that are owned by auction houses to participate. There is a clear conflict of interest,” Samuel Keller says. “André Emmerich was almost one of the founding members of Art Basel. He was a longtime committee member. And when his gallery was bought, immediately it was not allowed in the fair. We were very strict. We would not allow Jeffrey Deitch as long as he was with Sotheby’s. Art Basel has always had a very clear line. Nothing has changed. Nothing changes for us.”

Things are changing elsewhere, though. Sotheby’s is now working directly with artists. They commissioned artists to create sculpture for Beyond Limits, a selling exhibition of sculpture at Chatsworth last autumn.

“I participated in that exhibition with a piece by Zaha Hadid,” says the dealer Kenny Schachter. “Sotheby’s did one of the most beautiful catalogues I have ever seen.”

The cover showed a marble sculpture of Kate Moss-as-contortionist by Marc Quinn. “It was a piece that I was making already that I consigned to them for that show,” Quinn says.

Clearly the art world is in a state of advanced meltdown, with the players – dealers, collectors, auctioneers, curators and, yes, artists – morphing into each other as in the final passage of Orwell’s Animal Farm. “I’m one of the contrarians. I think that the more they blur things, the more interesting the prospects are to come up with something more innovative,” Schachter says. “But sometimes it gets a little precarious. In terms of conflict-of-interest situations, it gets pretty close to the edge of the envelope.”

Christie’s opened an art gallery, King Street Galleries, at its London building 18 months ago. Could the auction house see itself managing living artists? “We handle living artists’ work through our subsidiary,” Ed Dolman says. “What Sotheby’s have done at Chatsworth we would do at Haunch of Venison.”

Sotheby’s worked directly with Damien Hirst over the auction of material from his defunct restaurant, Pharmacy. Could Robin Woodhead see other such large-scale collaborations with über-artists. What about Takashi Murakami?

“We’re in a changing world,” Woodhead says. “We’re in a new world which requires substantial capital backing. It is a much more global business than it used to be, and the costs of doing that business are much greater. And the auction houses will take advantage of that because of our international distribution networks.

“If you look at the work Pierre Bergé did with Yves Saint Laurent, it’s interesting. Yves Saint Laurent had his own line, his own fashion house and his own financial genius behind him. Then you think of Damien Hirst and his business.”

) ) ) ) )

The reaction of artists to the increasingly naked whirring of the machinery of the industry for which they supply the essential product is as varied as one would expect. When the 1980s overheated, certain art stars took to consigning their works directly to the auction house from their studio, cutting out their dealers.

This is happening again. “I was having a conversation with an artist last night. And he said, ‘Well, I’m thinking it would be quite interesting to consign a work direct to auction. Wouldn’t it?’” says Nicholas Logsdail of London’s Lisson gallery. “I said, ‘You want to do that? Then you had better leave the gallery. Because otherwise there’s no basis on which the services that you enjoy and the career-building that the gallery has given you will continue.’”

Another effect of the boom has been the shrinkage in the time between a work leaving the studio and popping up at auction. Several pieces at the Heart Foundation auction had been acquired from dealers in 1992 – including the Barney and the Kiki Smith – but a five-year gap was considered okay. “Even five years is not a long time. Because work has to ripen,” says Barbara Gladstone, the Manhattan dealer who represents both Barney and Richard Prince. “But now you see things from 2006. It’s dangerous. Artists who are represented by responsible galleries are placed very carefully when they are young and popular. And obviously not everybody can get a work.

“But if a collector feels that he can’t get the work from the primary gallery, he might feel it’s worth it to pay well over the going price at auction. Just to have it. And of course the artist doesn’t participate in the auction price. So one can understand that an artist would resent this.”

Cecily Brown, a Manhattan-based British artist, has had a fine auction career, but loathes the process. “I was in auctions as early as 2001,” she says. “I had only been showing for two years. Thank God, it didn’t go through the roof, so I didn’t get a lot of attention for being one of the crazy, crazy, crazy people. But of course I was very upset. And I did what a lot of artists say they do. Once somebody puts something at auction, the gallery, Gagosian, knows I don’t want that person to be able to buy my work any more.

“For a younger artist, for a living artist, it involves a total loss of control. You’ve worked out your prices with your dealer. You have done this very carefully. You feel you’re controlling it. And then once things start going mad at auction, you just feel there’s nothing you can do about it.”

So auctions affect the careers of living artists? “I find them really insidious, an unhealthy and rather a gross time in the art world.”

Gavin Turk, a founding YBA, was less heated. “I’m in two minds,” he said. “It’s a very convenient way of getting the market going – moving art and money around. And I think it’s impossible to separate art from the financial element. It’s not really something that artists should dwell upon too much. I think it’s important as an artist that you show your work to the maximum capability you’re able to. And if that involves a certain amount of hype or financial credibility, then so be it.”

Turk also pointed out that the auction concept is now thoroughly embedded in the culture at large. “Everybody talks about eBaying this and eBaying that, which is essentially the same sort of thing. Everybody’s up to speed on it. Somehow there’s a collector for everything now.”

Could Turk imagine working directly with an auction house? “I don’t know.” He paused and added: “I could imagine it. I haven’t done it. But I could imagine it.”

) ) ) ) )

There were pieces by both Gavin Turk and Cecily Brown at the Phillips de Pury sale.

Both sold, the Brown canvas for over £600,000.

I went on to a party given by the London collector and dealer Ivor Braka. The mood at the party was exuberant, but the signals were mixed. As we had gone into the February auctions, it seemed ever likelier that America was sliding into recession, and things seemed none too rosy in the UK either.

There are two conventional wisdoms about the art market. One is that seven “up” years are followed by three “down” years. Another is that when the broader economy – real estate, in particular – gets into trouble, the art market will go flat between six months and two years later. So it was with the art bust of 1990. Can things be so different now?

Some believe so. “History is not always an indication of what is going to happen in the future,” says Robin Woodhead of Sotheby’s.

Ed Dolman of Christie’s speaks of “30 or 40 individuals” who have come into the market from Russia, Asia, the Middle East. He predicts that in the future, 30-35% of the market will be Asian. And some feel that these cultures have a traditional faith in alternative investments that will also cushion the art economy.

“If you listen to American buyers, they will tell you that they are priced out of the market,” Tobias Meyer says. “They don’t want to buy things at these prices. They will say, ‘Hey! I bought my Rothko in 1980. I paid $8m. I don’t want to spend $60m!’ But we have huge buyers of contemporary art in Asia. Enormous buyers of contemporary art in Russia. All over the world, new buyers are entering the market at any moment. So it’s become global. And that’s very hard to predict. But I know that the great works of this century and the 20th century will be more and more expensive. That’s an unstoppable trend. When we look at the accumulation of capital all over the world, and the decreasing number of great works of art, there’s your equation!”

There are, as always, changes. “There’s a winnowing-out of all these fairs. And there’ll be a handful left. And the ones that really matter will matter even more so,” says Kenny Schachter.

Haunch of Venison will be opening in New York in the autumn in the handsome 20th-floor space where Christie’s put on a museum-quality Donald Judd exhibition in 2006. The gallery will be run by the former Christie’s private-sales team.

At the party Braka was joyously looking ahead to the next round of auctions in New York. “Well, I mean, it’s roll on May. Isn’t it?” he said. “Things are getting better and better.”

A guest, François Chantala, who works with the London dealer Thomas Dane, was less sanguine: “It’s like the Titanic. The orchestra keeps on playing. We are in denial,” he said.

James Stourton remembers that when he joined Sotheby’s, just one staffer, Mr Wilder from the prints department, had been there for the crash of 1929. They asked what it had been like. “Mr Wilder said it was like the man bitten by a tarantula,” Stourton says. “He was in his nineties. We thought he’d lost it. We said, ‘Yes! Yes! But about 1929?’

“He said, ‘Exactly! A spasm of violent activity. Followed by sudden death.’”

Well, the market will not be wholly tarantulaesque. Seasoned art-worlders have internalised another wisdom. Just as what goes up must come down, so what comes down – the best of it anyway – must surely come up again.

Uptown, Downtown, Fairs Found All Over

Much anticipated, least visible: the Dark Fair, at the Swiss Institute in SoHo, includes Sue de Beer’s spinning zoetropes. More Photos >

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: March 29, 2008

If the health of an art capital can be measured by the number of fairs in town, New York is in pretty good shape. Nine satellite fairs are now orbiting the Armory Show, up from seven last year. (For those keeping score, that’s fewer than in Miami but more than in London.) It’s enough to make weary fairgoers hope for a market meltdown, or at least a little consolidation.

This year’s events have gone to great lengths to distinguish themselves from the Armory Show itself, and from one another. A sampling of them shows that there is a fair devoted to solo-artist projects, a fair of video art in trailers scattered throughout Chelsea and — the ultimate novelty — a fair without natural or electric light.

New this year is Volta, on the 11th floor of an office tower across from the Empire State Building. The fair, which has had a presence at Art Basel since 2005, is making its debut here as a collection of solo projects organized by Amanda Coulson and Christian Viveros-Fauné.

Solo-artist displays, a staple of the Miami Basel scene but less common at the Armory Show, promise relief from fair fatigue. Volta also benefits from its central location, and from its familial relationship to the Armory Show: both are owned by the company Merchandise Mart Properties, based in Chicago.

The thriving scenes of London, Berlin and the Lower East Side have numerous representatives at Volta, but most of the booths reflect international festivalism — none more so than the booth of the Stanton Street gallery Fruit and Flower Deli, where the aptly named collective International Festival has set up a functioning bar strewn with rainbow confetti.

Hamish Morrison, a New Zealand-born dealer based in Berlin, is showing eye-catching, talismanic abstraction by Ronald de Bloeme (an artist from the Netherlands). Kenny Schachter, from London by way of Greenwich Village, has a series of mixed-media works by William Pope.L that comment, with the artist’s typical candor, on the African-American experience.

At the Seventeen gallery in London, the artist David Ersser has turned the booth into a living room made entirely of carved balsa wood. At Hales Gallery, also from London, architecture-inspired drawings by Adam Dant seem to express the incongruity of a cutting-edge art fair in the heart of Midtown (one shows a toppled Chrysler building turned into a playground for medieval warriors).

Leaving Midtown for the West Village, Pulse New York fills Pier 40 with booths for 90 galleries, its largest number to date. Smaller Chelsea dealers like Freight & Volume, Magnan Projects and Monya Rowe are here, as well as the photography specialists Yossi Milo and Julie Saul. Exhibitors from out of town tend to be European, but Mexico City, Beijing, Toronto and Tel Aviv are also part of the mix. The stateless (in theory, at least) Saatchi Online gallery also has a booth here.

Japanese prints can be found at Catharine Clark, and a Henry Darger drawing at the Carl Hammer Gallery of Chicago. Graduate students at Parsons the New School for Design have been commissioned to create “Pulse Pause,” a reading room, which includes a revolving bookcase (by the artist Brandon Nastanski) that leads to a speakeasy.

The Pulse fair has also expanded its special programs to rival those of the Armory. In one of several events slated for “Pulse Performance,” members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will interpret music by Christian Marclay (Saturday at 7 p.m.). Parents, take note: Pulse is the only fair to offer a “V.I.P. Lounge for small collectors.”

Uptown, Scope New York is back for a sixth year, and a second year at Damrosch Park in Lincoln Center. Scope, which has fairs in four other cities, often seems detached from Chelsea trends — not necessarily a bad thing. Only 11 of the 50 or so galleries exhibiting here are from New York.

Art lovers who had hoped for a little more razzle-dazzle at the Whitney Biennial might find it here. Works at Scope tend to be flashy: Noh Sang-Kyoon’s giant, sequined Buddha heads at Bryce Wolkowitz’s booth are typical; so, too, Fawad Khan’s life-size Postal Service truck at 33 Bond; and Johnston Foster’s installation of a flock of seagulls, at the entrance to the Scope tents.

With just 15 galleries (14 from Los Angeles, and a guest from Mexico), the three-year-old LA Art in New York is the most manageable fair in town. It is noticeably smaller than last year’s, possibly because Los Angeles galleries have their strongest presence yet at the main Armory Show.

The emphasis here is on prints, photographs and works on paper, little of which feels new or specific to the West Coast. However, budding collectors looking for, say, a photograph by Martin Parr (at Rose Gallery), a Lee Bontecou drawing (at Daniel Weinberg) or a graphic, neon-hued collage by the emerging artist Eva-Maria Wilde (at Paul Kopekin) may appreciate the unhurried atmosphere.

Wall power is here, too, if you know where to look for it. Louis Stern Fine Arts, one of three galleries tucked away in the basement, has a refreshing selection of midcentury geometric abstractions by Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson and others.

The fair with the most buzz this year is, in one sense, the least visible: the Dark Fair, at the Swiss Institute in SoHo. It was organized by a group of artists that include the brothers Scott and Tyson Reeder and Scott’s wife, Elysia Borowy-Reeder, who in 2006 staged a fair in a Milwaukee bowling alley. This “subversive and experimental miniature art fair,” as they describe it, eliminates most sources of natural and electric light. The diner-style booths, painted black, were inspired by the seating at a favorite artists’ hangout in Milwaukee.

Several participating galleries, including White Columns, Leo Koenig and Marianne Boesky, have booths at the Armory Show but were intrigued by the challenges of exhibiting in the dark. Most are presenting site-specific projects involving oil lamps, glow-in-the-dark paint, manual-powered flashlights and plenty of candles. (Each gallery received a set of instructions, including fire-safety guidelines.)

Collectors who have already emptied their pockets at other fairs may be soothed by the soft glow of Tony Matelli’s unusual candle, at the Koenig booth. It looks exactly like a stack of $100 bills set on fire.

Dark Fair at the Swiss Institute, 495 Broadway, near Spring Street, SoHo (swissinstitute.net); LA Art in NY at the Altman Building, 135 West 18th Street, Manhattan (laartfair.com); Pulse Art Fair New York on Pier 40, 353 West Street, at West Houston Street, West Village (pulse-art.com); Scope New York in Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center (scope-art.com); and Volta NY at 7 West 34th Street, Manhattan (voltashow.com) all continue through Sunday, as does the Armory Show itself, at Pier 94, 12th Avenue at 55th Street, Clinton (thearmoryshow.com).

Microtrends: Geek oil paintings

From The Times

March 29, 2008

Young artists are taking inspiration (and customers) from the internet

(playfulpainter.blogspot.com)

Soft-focus Apple icons by Gautam Rao

Tom Whitwell

Budding young artist? Tired of trying to impress Charles Saatchi? Turn your hand to making “geek art”: painting stuff off the internet and selling it to geeks.

Jeremiah Palecek is the Warhol of geek art. He started painting scenes from classic video games in a naive, smudgy style. After blog acclaim, he graduated to characters from popular YouTube clips, such as “dramatic chipmunk” and “Tom Cruise talking about Scientology”. Theyre all for sale, for about £50 each.

Lots of painters are having trouble looking beyond their laptop screens. Gautam Rao paints soft-focus icons from his Apple Mac (which are very easy to sell), while Handré de Jager paints scary, surreal parodies of video-game characters (which may be less so).

At the other end of the taste spectrum is Second Life Art , which employs unspecified “professional artists from around the world” to paint avatars from Second Life in all their pneumatic glory. If you’ve ever wanted a 4ft-wide picture of yourself as a fantasy superhero, you’ll need about £325.

能否經得起時間考驗 "當代藝術"高價不勝寒

來源：市場報

近兩年，當代藝術似乎一夜走紅，國內國外天價迭出，無論是拍賣交易金額和成交率都超過了傳統國畫和瓷器，至于單件當代藝術作品，更是受到各路藏家的青睞和追逐。

2006年北京保利推出的劉小東的《三峽新移民》巨幅油畫，上拍時各路藏家你爭我奪，互不相讓，最後被國內一買家以2200萬元收入囊中；同年，老畫家吳冠中的《長江萬裏圖》油畫在翰海以3795萬元成交；2007年在嘉德拍賣會上，陳逸飛的代表作《黃河頌》獲價4200萬元，再創國內油畫新高。在海外市場上，當代藝術更是火爆，一批名望在徐悲鴻和陳逸飛之下的異軍突起，傲視群雄。以 2007年為例，這一年張曉剛的《創世篇——一個共和國的誕生》在紐約蘇富比獲價2372.31萬元；岳敏君的《處決》在倫敦蘇富比以4398.7萬元拍出；曾凡志的《協和醫院三聯畫第2幅》在倫敦菲利浦斯以4116萬元成交；蔡國強的精心之作《景觀焰火表演十四幅草圖》在香港佳士得獲價7350.5萬元，此價創下了當代藝術的最高紀錄，並為其他當代藝術作品的價格上升打開了巨大空間。而被媒體稱為藝術界“四大金剛”、“F4”的張曉剛、方力鈞、王廣義、岳敏君在海外市場上大放異彩，他們的作品動輒數百萬乃至上千萬，成為了藝術市場“天價”藝術家。從市場表現看，新一代的價格遠超過老一輩，比如蔡國強的《焰火草圖》以7424萬元力壓徐悲鴻，對此蔡國強表現出清醒的頭腦，他說：“如果你注意到與這個市場熱度相比，世界上對中國當代藝術的研究很冷淡，你就不會因為高價而得意。在紐約現代藝術博物館的20世紀藝術回顧展上，中國的作品少得與它的市場價格完全不成比例……說明高價並不意味著藝術成就。”

那麼，當代藝術究竟能否經得起時間和歷史的考驗，這是廣大收藏者和投資者所關心的。面對當代藝術價格如此局面，有的媒體認為是炒作，有的專家認為是泡沫。總之不少人對當代藝術的前景表示擔憂。美國波普藝術領袖沃霍爾曾說過：“在今天創作和出售的繪畫和雕塑作品中，只有0.5%在未來30年中能夠保持市場價值。”這意味著絕大多數當代藝術品價值被高估，經不起時間和歷史考驗。有的若幹年後消失得無影無蹤。由此可以看出藝術市場是多麼的殘酷、風險是多麼的大。而對中國當代藝術價格問題，也有專家認為是合理的，比如被英國報紙稱為“藝術女王”的路易斯·布勞恩認為，價格沒有離譜，但問題在于要保證博物館有辦法得到這些作品，而中國藝術家也必須在博物館舉辦更多的展覽，為他們自己打下堅實的基礎。

所以，無論是認為當代藝術有泡沫，還是看多當代藝術投資者，最終要用時間和歷史來檢驗。不過，炒作名家油畫的現象已經有前車之鑒。記得十幾年前，日本經濟崛起，日本人在世界藝術品市場上出手闊綽，梵·高的《向日葵》、《鳶尾花》和《加歇醫生肖像》均被日本人買去。這個時候，很多收藏家以為印象派會有升值空間，于是，大量三四流印象派作品流入日本。上世紀90年代日本經濟的衰退，當初高價買來的畫以斬腰一半的價格都沒人要，但是梵·高的畫價格卻要堅挺得多。由此看來，精選作品並以合適的價格吃進才能立于不敗之地。

文/一俊

德國指揮家來台 詮釋巴赫難度最高合唱曲

【中央社╱台北二十七日電】

2008.03.27 07:37 pm

鑽研「音樂之父」巴赫權威的德國指揮家海慕特‧瑞霖 （HelmuthRilling）應邀來台，將在三月二十九日率領台北愛樂合唱團、長榮交響樂團於國家音樂廳演出巴赫的「Ｂ小調彌撒」，此曲華麗而難度甚高的演唱技巧，國內至今尚無演出紀錄，此次台灣首演令人期待。

台北愛樂表示，巴赫的「Ｂ小調彌撒」被譽為「音樂領域中最崇高的作品」，這一次由高齡七十五歲，畢生鑽研巴赫音樂的海慕特‧瑞霖指揮，由知名聲樂家廖聰文、鄧吉龍、旅德聲樂家李佩穎以及德籍女低音安亞‧許洛瑟（Anja Schlosser）擔任獨唱。

海慕特‧瑞霖畢生研究巴赫音樂，自1970年起每年七月皆於美國奧瑞岡州舉行巴赫音樂節，並開設大師班研究巴赫音樂作品。1981年瑞霖又創立國際司徒加巴赫音樂學院，並以十四年的時間完成史上第一套完整的巴赫清唱劇錄音。

西元2000年，海慕特‧瑞霖指導完成了巴赫作品全集錄音，共一百七十二張CD，在國際上贏得了最高的評價。這一次是繼2005年與台北愛樂合唱團合作布拉姆斯德文安魂曲後，再次與台灣的聲樂家與合唱團合作。