Category: art

The Internet is a series of tubes.
Also, the art world is a series of dinner parties.
My favorite out-of-nowhere aphorism: “Forget about one-on-one art. This fall, elitism will find its feet in a rush of exclusive, invitation-only performances, like Damien Hirst’s debut as a fashion designer, at Gagosian on Saturday night.”
Spectator Sport by Linda Yablonsky [artforum]

I continue to be baffled by the breathlessly uninformed reportage of the supposed sale of Damien Hirst’s diamond-and-platinum skull. From the very first news report of the sale in the Evening Standard journalists have gotten it wrong, and everyone else happily repeats the unsupported headline [“Investment group pays £50m cash for Hirst’s diamond skull”], as fact, despite plenty of information to the contrary.
If the media and its reflexive echoes through the audience are so easily gulled on something irrelevant, like a diamond skull, what would happen if a serious issue of global importance came along, like someone trying to start a series of wars across the Middle East? [oh wait…]
Forget Carol Vogel’s buried bombshell today that the skull is actually an edition of three. Has anyone ever mentioned that before, anywhere? I’m a collector of $100 million sculptures, I want to know if it’s unique or a multiple, it’s not a trivial question. But whatever.
Forget the persistent claims that it cost $25 million to build. For one thing, it was first reported to cost $20 million to build. Is the difference in reports from the same sources due to late-arriving invoices from the diamond guy? Are they expensing the cost of marketing and security for the show? Is it the heinous-and-getting-worse dollar/pound exchange rate? Or is it willfully and strategically inflated and or shifting claims on the part of Hirst & Co?
First reports from two weeks ago said the sale would close “in three to four weeks,” and that Hirst has “has retained a stake to keep some control over what happens to it.” Based on a conversation with Hirst manager Frank Dunphy, Bloomberg reported “the price hadn’t been discounted and would be paid in cash, though he wouldn’t say over what period, or identify the investment group.”
If an “investment group” is involved, why not try discussing the deal as if it were any other private equity investment? Consider Hirst as launching a start-up. He invested his own seed capital to make the skull. I’ll be generous and say it was $15 million. He has 100% of the skull for $15 million.
Now he brings it to Jay to sell. They say it’s now worth $100 million. If it were any other work or any other artist, Jay would take a 50% cut of the sale price, $50 million. But that means Damien would only net $35 million. While I’m sure it’s good to be Jay, it’s not that good. Jay will get a nice piece of the sale of the thousands of prints, but let’s say he only gets 10% of the sale, or $10 million. Now two people have stakes in the skull, though: on paper at least, Damien’s $15 million investment is already worth $90 million.
The NYT reports that dealer Alberto Mugrabi’s offer of $50 million was refused. No duh. VC money is always expensive, and if you don’t need it, don’t take it. Mugrabi would’ve doubled his money on paper instantly, paying just $50mm for a perceived-$100mm work, while Hirst would’ve netted a mere $30 million [$50 – 5 -15], a return of just 100%. [Note, if the skull actually did cost $20-25 million to make, Hirst’s return would’ve been even worse. Either way, though he thinks his reported offer makes him a player, Mugrabi comes off looking like a lowballing goof.]
But now we come to the “investment group,” whose ownership stake in the skull and the price they’re paying for it is undetermined. All we know is that the deal gets done at a valuation of $100 million. With two unknown variables, it could literally be anything: $10 million for a 10% stake, $50 million for 50%, etc.
Let’s look at one possible scenario, that an investor takes a quarter of the skull and lets Hirst and Jopling pull their own initial investments out: $25 million. Which leaves Hirst with a $75 million stake and control of the skull, which he’ll continue to promote around the world. In 2-3 years, after the tour ends, they can sell the skull, or bring in another round of investors at a [hopefully] higher valuation.
Another scenario hinted at by the non-disclosure to Bloomberg is payments over time. Maybe the deal lets Hirst pull his cash out now–$15 million– and has an earn-out, another payment after the tour, either at the same or a higher valuation.
Jopling could keep his skin in the game, too, by converting his $10 million owed into equity [I would hope he’d get a discount, or at least a nice friends & family offering price, but who knows?]
Since the possibility was raised and not answered, I would guess there’s a payment schedule involved. If a deal goes through, it’d probably give Hirst at least an immediate 100% return on his investment, i.e., $30-50 million, for a commensurate share in the skull, with additional payments along the way and/or a nice post-tour bonus/buyout option.
The most aggressive scenario may be the first one reported in The Art Newspaper, which had the skull’s price discounted about 20-25% to from 50 to 38 million pounds, $76 million. If this were the offer, and Hirst wanted to preserve the $100 mm valuation, his and Jopling’s stakes would be 25%, roughly what they “put in.”
Then the question arises again of the timing of the payments. The $100mm price could just as easily be the future value of a series of payments which could total $100mm, but because of the time value of money, would be–aha–discounted to the present value. The most familiar–and in this case, perhaps most appropriate–example of this is the lottery; the $330 million in the US news recently had a lump sum payment of $197 million, 59% of the “value.”
By fixing only the announced price and leaving almost every other variable on the table, the transaction value of Hirst’s skull could literally be almost anything. The whole exercise exposes the content-free ridiculousness of public obsession with the price of a work of art, especially as an indicator of its importance. [Or rarity. Remember, it’s now an edition of three. Are there any artist proofs?]
Or maybe there’s a more conceptual explanation. Duchamp opened the door for art to be whatever an artist declares it to be. Perhaps Hirst is simply extending that practice to the work’s price as well. Price is not an object, it’s the subject. The essence of the work exists in the deal’s spreadsheet and term sheet, a score for a multi-year performance of wire transfers and receipts that plays out while most people are distracted by the shiny object.

Ugh, Lee Rosenbaum’s op-ed in the LA Times is so wrong in so many ways, even Tyler Green can’t keep track of them all. She opines on the looming crisis facing museums [“Public collecting is endangered”!] who can’t buy any more art because it’s gotten too expensive:

It has always been hard for museums to compete with private collectors, but driven by the scarcity of great old works and an expanding class of wealthy buyers, the recent stratospheric rise of art prices has utterly outstripped most acquisitions budgets.

It’s hard to even refute her points because her data are so incomplete or contradictory; the only dire example she cites, $30 million/year for 45 departments at the Metropolitan Museum, are undermined by the Met’s dramatic, opportunistic purchase of a $44 million Duccio using “timely” donations. As if donors willing to hand over that much money on a single ask just fall into a museum director’s lap.
The risk museums face, Rosenbaum says, is that by not buying actively in the current contemporary market, they’ll wake up fifty years from now, unable to afford this generation’s Jackson Pollocks.

Had the Met followed that policy in 1957 [of not buying works from emerging or mid-career artists], it wouldn’t have made its landmark purchase of “Autumn Rhythm” (1950) by Jackson Pollock. Just try buying a comparable Pollock in today’s market, 50 years later, where one of his major works was reportedly sold by David Geffen for about $140 million

In fact, the Met’s Pollock acquisition is a perfect example of how ill-suited museums can be about collecting the work of contemporary and living artists. And the entry of iconic Pollocks into both the Met’s and the Modern’s collections show just how important trustee collectors have always been to building museum collections. The “crisis” Rosenbaum imagines now has existed almost from the founding of both these great American museums; they have almost always been too cheap, too slow, or too risk-averse to collect cutting-edge art, so instead, they collect collectors.
The Met bought Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm [top] in 1957, the year after Pollock’s death, and the year Frank O’Hara’s mid-career survey of the artist at the Modern was tragically transformed into a retrospective. The Met paid $30,000 for the painting to Sidney Janis, a collector and dealer who’d shown it several times over the years, without being able to sell it anywhere.
In fact, Alfred Barr, the director of the Modern, had turned down the painting when his trustee, Janis, had offered it for sale for just $8,000 a couple of years earlier. Barr was unable to raise the money from his acquisitions committee for the still-controversial New York School work. Barr had the chance after Pollock’s death, too, but balked again at the price, even though the work would be in the museum’s own reputation-sealing exhibition.
The Met bought Autumn Rhythm using, not funds for contemporary art per se, but an acquisitions endowment set up by a turn-of-the-century trustee, George A. Hearn, for the acquisition of living, American artists. For the Euro-loving founders of the Met, American art was barely an afterthought before Hearn donated a core group of 27 works to found the American department. The history of the Met, in fact, can almost be told through its own, repeated, institutional failures to recognize the important art of the time, and its reliance on prescient trustees or formative private collections to rectify the situation. American, Impressionist, Pacific/Oceanic, Photography, all these departments were founded with the donation of significant private collections. [the link above is to an answers.com copy of the Met’s wikipedia entry, which has mysteriously been cleansed of most critical accounts of its collecting history.

But back to Pollock and MoMA [where I should mention my longtime allegiances as a small-time fundraiser and supporter who most definitely does not write in any official capacity on these matters for the Museum. My knowledge comes from books by the likes of O’Hara, William Rubin, the art historian Irving Sandler, among many, many others, none of whom Ms. Rosenbaum seems familiar with, btw. Another good synthesis is “Selling American Art,” Christine Bianco’s 2000 MFA thesis at the University of Florida, which is a pdf here]:
Despite Janis’s decades-long association with the Museum, MoMA’s own iconic 1950 Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950 [above], only came into the collection in 1967, long after Barr had been replaced by William Rubin. Ironically, even at that point, Rubin had to raise the money to buy One from Janis by selling two paintings by Mondrian–two of five which Janis had donated in the first place. I say ironic because the other of Rosenbaum’s laments is that museums are “selling to buy,” deaccessioning works in order to buy other works.
Or to put it another way, had the Modern followed Rosenbaum’s ideal policy in 1967, it wouldn’t have made its landmark purchase of “One: Number 31, 1950” (1950) by Jackson Pollock. But hey, at least it’d have 45 Mondrians instead of the measly 43 it has now.
Finally, a cursory look at many of the labels of recent acquisitions at MoMA shows a credit to the Fund for the Twenty-First Century, which was established for the express purpose of buying current works by living, contemporary artists. In describing the Museum’s contemporary acquisitions approach during a gallery talk at a recent recent acquisitions show, co-curator Klaus Biesenbach mentioned the hope that even 50 of the 1,000-plus new works the Museum buys each year would stand the test of time. I don’t know what other museums would even want to collect at that pace or with those odds. The Guggenheim’s 2003 show of photography and video, “Moving Pictures,” was similarly put together almost entirely of new work entering the collection. So without even Googling for anything, there are at least two major institutions doing exactly what Rosenbaum claims they are unable to do.
And as for the museums who want to collect Pollocks now, nearly forty years after most of his most important works have already settled into other museums? If you find people to give you $140 million, you should probably see what they have hanging on their walls, and try to get that, too.

Is John Wilmerding the Karl Rove of the American Art world?
In May 2005, Alice Walton effectively broke ground on her Bentonville, Ark. museum project Crystal Bridges, by buying Asher Durand’s 1849 painting Kindred Spirits from the New York Public Library for a reported $35 million.
As Carol Vogel reported at the time, Kindred Spirits had “long been considered one of the finest examples of Hudson River School painting.” It depicts painter Thomas Cole and poet, abolitionist, and NY Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant. Bryant was a proponent for the creation of both Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Durand was commissioned to paint Kindred Spirits as a gift for Bryant. It was donated to the Library by his daughter in 1904, three years after the Library began construction in Bryant Park. [The site, Reservoir Square, had been renamed in honor of Bryant 20 years earlier, in 1884. I don’t know if Julia Bryant was marking that anniversary with her donation.]
Kindred Spirits was one of 19 works the NYPL trustees decided to sell after what chairwoman Catherine Marron called, “Through deliberate review and thought over a couple of years.” The Library selected Sotheby’s to sell the works via both auction and private sale.
A month later, Walton won a sealed-bid auction conducted by Dara Mitchell, Sotheby’s head of American Paintings and a Walton adviser. The underbidder was a joint proposal by the Met and the National Gallery to share the work.
Reports and critics noted the conflicts of parties in the transaction, to no effect: Walton was being advised by Princeton art professor John Wilmerding, who had recently been named a trustee at the NGA. The implication, of course, was that Walton had an unfair or unethical advantage vis a vis the NGA/Met’s bid. Also, the sale was being conducted by another of her advisers. Also, she has $18 billion.
What I did not realize until now, despite following the Crystal Bridges story very closely, is that Wilmerding advised the NYPL on the sale of the Durand, too. From the NYT article in April that first announced the sale of Kindred Spirits:

“Sure there may be some politician who starts screaming that New York patrimony could be lost,” said John Wilmerding, an American art scholar and Princeton University professor who was asked to advise the library. “But that would be unfair and unrealistic.”
“If this has to happen, this is the way to go about it,” he added.

l: the Eakins Crystal Bridges got from Jefferson after locals hastily bought Gross Clinic
r: the Eakins the PAFA sold to someone they don’t know to pay for their share of same

And if I were the richest woman in the world who wanted to build a museum in my home town filled with art from a period in which, “the best works have been long spoken for,” this is the way to go about it:
I would draw up a list of those works in the collections of non-museum institutions–libraries, medical schools, universities [the more cash-strapped the better], fine art academies, hospitals, schools, trusts, foundations, local and state governments–and then I’d send out my esteemed advisers to broach the topic of fiduciary responsibility and core mission over the course of several years, if necessary.
Wilmerding has been coy on the subject [link via todd], but the directorship of Crystal Bridges is almost certainly part of his deal with Walton. Does that deal also involve a multi-year strategy of rolling up major artworks in local, nominally public collections across the country by coaxing their institutions’ non-expert boards into selling to you?
Karl Rove orchestrated the systematic firing of US Attorneys across the country and undisclosed changes in the congressional approval process for their appointed replacements. Rove’s strategy to manipulate local prosecutions and investigations to Republicans’ favor by installing political loyalists in the top law enforcement jobs in key electoral battlegrounds only began to come to light when locally isolated patterns and evidence were considered together.
With their low, low prices, Wal-Mart stores systematically destroyed the locally owned-and-run economies of thousands of cities and towns across the country. All the profits that used to stay in town are now shipped off to Bentonville. Now, Alice Walton is spending some of that money, by coming back to those same regions and buying up their artistic patrimony.
With the announced involvement in yet another highly localized dispute over the sale of major, donated artworks, it’s time for Crystal Bridges and its advisers, its director apparent, John Wilmerding, and people on the other side of the boardroom table, to come clean on its actual role in such sales, including Kindred Spirits.
Ah, forget it. “It’s time for” what? Who do I think I am, Lee Rosenbaum? I’d just like to see this whole thing blown wide open and to be entertained by the increased trouble and expense it could make for some ethically challenged, sanctimonious, yet unaccountable people. New York’s greatest cultural institutions have either already been thoroughly schnookered by Crystal Bridges, or are in on the fix. I got no horse left in this race. Besides, twenty years from now, visiting Walton’s one-stop shop for American Art will be so much more convenient than traveling to a bunch of fourth-tier college museums anyway. Roll’em up, John!
9/20 update: And then there was another one. I missed the reports from May that Alice Walton was seen shopping at the Maier Museum of Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and that College officials refused to acknowledge her visit. A short time later, the college, in dire financial straits, announced it was considering selling its 100-year-old collection. [thanks to Kriston for the story. He has a great deal of coverage of Crystal Bridges goings-on on Grammar Police.]
Apr 11, 2005: New York Public Library to Sell Major Artworks to Raise Funds
May 13, 2005: New York Public Library’s Durand Painting Sold to Wal-Mart Heiress
May 14, 2005:A Determined Heiress Plots An Art Collection [nyt]
Upstaged by Architecture: Crystal Bridges’ modern design contrasts with collection. [arktimes via fromthefloor]

When I saw images of front architecture’s billboard-shaped house-on-a-pole floating about, the first thing I thought of was one of the first sculptures by Michael Ashkin I ever saw.

It’s title, “For Months He Lived Between The Billboards,” pretty much says it all. It’s from 1993. Like the sculptural work of the mid-to-late 1990’s for which Ashkin first became known, “Between The Billboards” is a table-sized diorama made of model train pieces.
Unlike the later pieces, wasted desert and industrial landscapes which were abstract enough to evoke minimalist paintings, “Between The Billboards” is explicitly narrative. Still, they all feel like they were scenes from the same JG Ballard-by-way-of-Robert Smithson-and-Antonioni movie.
There’s a better reproduction out there somewhere. [It was in Harper’s Magazine, fwiw] this one’s from the collector, Howard Tullman’s site [tullman.com]

Gerhard Richter’s design for the stained glass window in the Köln Cathedral was unveiled yesterday. 11,500 handblown glass squares in 72 colors.

German: das Gerhard Richter Fenster in Köln
English: Gerhard Richter window in Cologne, hires image [washjeff.edu via boingboing]
Previously: Richter’s Window – background and The Making Of