This week’s most breathlessly discussed topic in contemporary art circles has undoubtedly been Artspace’s interview with “cultural entrepreneur” Stefan Simchowitz, who essentially comes out of the exercise sounding like a creature manufactured in a lab from the worst nightmares of art historians and established gallerists. If you don’t have time for the interview, I think I can sum it up by stating that mankind may manage to map every inch of the ocean floor before it finds a more enthusiastic representative of the nascent practice of art-flipping than Simchowitz. Unless you’ve been lobotomized, I think you can probably extrapolate anything else you might want to know about him from that. 

However, I have zero interest in using my column space to savage Simchowitz’s character at length. If you’d like to read that post, I suggest clicking over to Jerry Saltz’s reaction piece. My problem, as always, is that it also immediately re-routes what could be a more nuanced or unexpected discussion into the usual “us vs. them” dead-end. I don’t engage in it for the same reason I never connected with Tolkien: parsing the world into absolute good vs. absolute evil eliminates what I find to be the richest, most interesting parts. 

On Wednesday, the New York Times ran a piece by Carol Vogel about Christie’s plans to present a separate, specially branded contemporary art auction the day before their annual blockbuster spring post-war sale. Organized by a 33 year-old in-house specialist named Loic Gouzer (no relation to the antagonist from Ghostbusters), the sale, dubbed If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday, will be driven by a specific thesis: that young, rich collectors crave edgier work than what’s typically featured by the big houses. Christie’s aims to fill that perceived void, and if successful, their move could lay the groundwork for a new era of auction strategy. 

This morning Rozalia Jovanovic of artnet posted an excellent piece on the eastward-aimed buckshot spread of LA galleries formerly concentrated in Santa Monica, Culver City, Beverly Hills, and West Hollywood. It raises a lot of interesting points worth discussing. I just want to spotlight one in particular since I’ve already got a longer piece on a related topic in progress. 

Only a few months ago, the art world was bracing itself for the likelihood that the Detroit Institute of Arts might be forced to deaccession a chunk of its permanent collection to raise funds for its host city’s bankruptcy recovery plan. But the winds have shifted dramatically since then. First the judge presiding over the case raised doubts about the legality of this unorthodox debt settlement method. Then came a proposal for the museum to buy itself out of city control - and thus permanently destroy any jurisdiction Detroit’s creditors might claim to its collection - in exchange for a $100M contribution to the rescue fund. Now both Detroit’s emergency manager and the mediator in the case have endorsed that proposal as a part of an $815M grand bargain to settle the bankruptcy once and for all. 

News leaked a few days ago that last year Sotheby’s privately sold a 1506 painting titled Salvador Mundi, recently credited to Leonardo da Vinci after years of alleged misattribution, for between $75-80M. The price caught me off guard. Not because it seemed too high, but because it seemed too low. Consider that just last fall the comparatively prolific Francis Bacon’s triptych of Lucian Freud sold for $142.4M via Christie’s, almost twice the value of Salvator Mundi, thought to be one of only fifteen to twenty paintings ever identified as Leonardo’s.

Highly respected LA Times art critic Christopher Knight expressed a similar sentiment on Twitter this morning. In fact, he took the idea one step further by noting that if the reported sales price was accurate, the buyer acquired it for a 60% discount off the $200M estimate placed on the piece after the re-attribution - a staggering difference in value.

So why and how did this happen? I think there are two factors in play here - one on the buy side, one on the sell side. I’ll try to walk through both quickly. 

Over the past few months, I’ve had discussions with various people both inside and outside the art world about the Bay Area’s prospects for evolving into an arts powerhouse. The argument in favor looks strong on the surface: a huge supply of money (i.e. potential collectors, patrons, and donors) combined with a hunger for innovation set amid one vibrant, world-class city (San Francisco) and a handful of others ripe for advancement (Oakland and San Jose). Why would artists not flock to that situation? 

The truth is that the Bay Area has a major perception problem within the art world. And while that perception predates even the first tech boom, Silicon Valley’s growing domination of the region today is only making matters worse. I encountered two stories on Friday that illustrated why the narrative of antagonism to the arts not only persists there, but seems to be strengthening - and as a result, why the region’s potential as a serious arts hub continues to underperform what objective analysis might suggest.

Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper reported this morning that London mayor and shag haircut endurance champ Boris Johnson is attempting to woo the Guggenheim Foundation into opening a new international outpost on the grounds of one of his city’s former Olympic sites. The move is reportedly Johnson’s first step toward generating “a major new cultural quarter in East London.” And Johnson couldn’t have asked for a more primed and ready institutional dance partner in the art world. 

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend a conversation between shock (and schlock) cinema impresario John Waters and perpetual Gray Market conversation piece Jeff Koons. The event was the 2014 debut of The Un-Private Collection interview series jointly presented by The Broad Museum (set to open in DTLA in 2015) and The Library Foundation of Los Angeles. By pairing artists prominently represented in the museum’s collections with like-minded figures in related disciplines, the program seeks to tease out new thoughts and appreciation of the artists’ work. And while that definitely happened for me tonight, I’m not sure that it happened in quite the way that anyone involved intended. 

The Guardian reported on Wednesday that a highly publicized Banksy mural, Kissing Coppers, had just been sold at auction in Miami for a price of $575,000.00. According to The Argus, the work had been removed from the exterior wall of a pub in Brighton and transported to the US back in 2011. Though it’s not clear who was responsible for the expatriation, the piece was consigned to auction by gallerist Stephen Keszler. He claims to have played a hand in the sale of 11 Banksy pieces in similar fashion over the course of the past three years.

News of the sale comes less than two weeks after a report that “concierge firm” The Sincura Group would be removing another Banksy work, Girl and Balloon, from the exterior of an East London printing shop and exhibiting it for private sale. I put “concierge firm” in quotes because it’s not entirely clear to me what that term means - and apparently I’m not the only one. This will mark the second time that Sincura has in their own words “recovered” a Banksy piece for the purposes of sale; Slave Labour, their first foray into the business last June, brought a reported sales price of $1.1M.