Art Basel Miami: Day Four

December 08, 2013 / Tim Schneider

Hiro, "Apollo Spaceflight Training Suits, Houston, Texas." (2013)  Edition of 8, at Pace/MacGill Gallery's booth. — *Hiro, "Apollo Spaceflight Training Suits, Houston, Texas." (2013) Edition of 8, at Pace/MacGill Gallery's booth.*

After a trip to the fresh-out-the-plastic Peres Art Museum, I did a final lap at Basel late this afternoon. Those two hours ended up raising a fundamental question: What good is a major contemporary art fair? Who does it really benefit? Who extracts the most value from it?

The obvious part of the answer is that it enriches the gallerists above all. Let’s look beyond that. What other types of people should really be encouraged to attend?

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Art Basel Miami: Day Three

December 07, 2013 / Tim Schneider

*Vanessa Beecroft X Kanye West collaboration, at the Flaunt Magazine party.*

Today I ventured out from the main fair to some of the satellite events in North Beach and Miami proper. Stepping away from the convention center opened my eyes to one simple observation: There’s too much going on here during Basel week.

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tags / ArtBaselMiami, art fair, art economics

Art Basel Miami: Day Two, Part Two

December 06, 2013 / Tim Schneider

*Kader Attia, "Soldat Blesse, Masque Malade (Lega)" (2013), at Galleria Continua's booth.*

Following up on what I was discussing yesterday (since the draft of this post I saved last night disappeared into the ether): Tech tends not to benefit the collector at a fair because of a fundamental reality of the art market - the asymmetry of information.

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tags / artbaselmiami, art fairs, economics

Art Basel Miami: Day Two

December 05, 2013 / Tim Schneider

*Ai Weiwei, "Table with Two Legs" (2008). At the Rubell Family Collection.*

Realizing today how tech has (and has not) shifted the landscape of fairs. When I was prepping my old boss for his trips to these events years ago, it was a frantic and paranoid process because he could only show clients works that he had actual hard copy images of.

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tags / ArtBaselMiami, art fairs

Art Basel Miami: Day 1 Takeaway

December 05, 2013 / Tim Schneider

*Melvin Edwards, "John Henry for John Scott" (2012).*

The psychology of a major art fair is equal parts fascinating and, if you’re looking to buy, perilous. The reality is that the event is one giant trap for collectors. The illusion of scarcity is amplified dramatically. As much ground as there is to cover inside the convention center, there is also a bizarre sense that the fair is the entire art world. Practically every major global gallery has a booth, thereby creating the mirage of completeness.

But the twist is the consequence of that mirage: It feels as if the handful of pieces each booth is exhibiting equates to all that’s left on the market - or at the very least, all that’s left at the highest level of the market - worldwide, when overall this is a blatant falsehood.

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David Zwirner & Goliath

December 04, 2013 / Tim Schneider

*Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, "David & Goliath" (ca. 1608). Image credit: Fine Art America.*

Nick Paumgarten just published an expansive profile on the contemporary art impresario David Zwirner in this week’s edition of The New Yorker. If you have an interest in the business and about half an hour to kill, I highly recommend diving in. It’s currently outside the pay wall, so all it will cost you is time.

My major take-away from the piece centers on the friction between how Zwirner thinks about the business and how practically all other gallerists think about the business. Today, the art world is still dominated by a reliance on staggeringly primitive business practices.

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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Tobias?

December 04, 2013 / Tim Schneider

*Tobias Meyer with a Francis Bacon painting. Image credit: Neil Bridge.*

This past Friday, Sotheby’s released the news that Tobias Meyer, chief auctioneer and worldwide head of their contemporary art department, will be departing “by mutual decision” at the end of his current contract. Originally elevated to run the London office’s contemporary art wing in 1992, Meyer was crowned as global lead in the department five years later, then handed the auction house’s top gavel in 2000. This means he has been the public face of Sotheby’s throughout the contemporary market’s explosive growth this millennium. (As noted here, the research firm Arts Economics calculates that the market’s value has grown by 2,000% since 2009, now topping out at a tidy $6B total. Yes, that’s a ‘B.’) According to the official statement, he will transition from Sotheby’s New York headquarters into the role of a private dealer.

The core question surrounding this news is simple: How big a loss is Meyer’s exit for Sotheby’s? While it’s impossible to quantify, my answer is that it’s a potentially crippling blow.

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Did Bloomberg Just Betray the Arts?

December 04, 2013 / Tim Schneider

Jean-Léon Gérôme, "The Death of Caesar" (1859-1867). Image credit: The Walters Art Museum. — *Jean-Léon Gérôme, "The Death of Caesar" (1859-1867). Image credit: The Walters Art Museum.*

While catching up on the world via Twitter Monday morning, I saw a few different mentions of the announcement by Bloomberg that… well, why recap it myself when the LA Times already did such a nice job?

Bloomberg, the New York-based financial news giant, is shutting down its Muse brand of cultural journalism and has laid off its theater critic. The shake-up was part of a company-wide reorganization that came down on Monday and resulted in layoffs around the newsroom.

Bloomberg plans to continue to cover the arts, but with an emphasis on luxury.

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Banksy in the Booth, or: How Art Brands Blow Bubbles

December 04, 2013 / Tim Schneider

*Banksy's "Spray Art" pop-up in Central Park. Image credit: The Guardian.*

If you follow the visual arts at all, you’ve undoubtedly read something this month about Banksy’s increasingly (in)famous Better Out Than In New York “residency.” For those that haven’t, here are the Spark Notes: Instead of moving his studio to a school or institution to produce work in a closed environment (as in a traditional artist’s residency), the elusive British street artist has instead chosen to live covertly in NYC and create a different unsanctioned artwork in a different public space in the city every day.

This hasn’t gone flawlessly. Police pressure forced Banksy to cancel the planned piece for October 23rd, and The New York Times refused to publish the op ed he’d intended to be released as his October 27th contribution. (He substituted a graf piece in Greenpoint instead. You can see both the op ed and the replacement work in the previous link.)

While Better Out Than In presents acres of intellectually fertile territory to till, the piece I want to zero in on today is the half-installation, half-performance piece Banksy set up in Central Park on October 13th.

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What happens when someone buys a room-wide installation?

December 04, 2013 / Tim Schneider / Source

*James Turrell, "Bridget's Bardo" (2008). Image credit: Wallpaper.*

Tim Schneider’s answer: What’s true in all cases is that acquiring an installation art piece really means acquiring the intellectual property. In art world terms, the IP translates to the right to exhibit the piece and all information needed to (re)build it on or transfer it to…

Continuing in the fine tradition I established two posts ago, here's another of my answers on Quora about the inner workings of the weird, wonderful world of the fine art market. Hope you enjoy.

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