Volume 120, №2 (April, May 2021) ARTnews

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+ Ali Banisadr in the Studio + Letter from Italy

$15.95 U.S. $15.95 CANADA Apr/May 2021

Art Basel & James Murdoch

After a Year of Change

What’s the Future of Galleries and Fairs?

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Lucky Spring collection Clip and bracelet, rose gold, carnelian, onyx and white mother-of-pearl.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Contents

VOL. 120, NO. 2

FEATURES

46

The Spring of Our Discontent In New York, the pandemic upended the business of selling art. As the city’s galleries come out of the worst of the crisis, here’s how they survived—and even thrived BRIAN BOUCHER

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The New Nomads From the Hamptons and Miami to Palm Beach and Aspen, it’s been the year of the pop-up—and it’s not ending anytime soon SARAH DOUGLAS

A rough few years for Art Basel’s parent company was followed by a year of lockdown. With a big investment from James Murdoch, where does the enterprise go from here? Z AC HARY S MAL L

New Light on the Sunshine State Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XII (1975) on view at Lévy Gorvy gallery in Palm Beach, Florida.

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ON THE COVER Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Photo Tom Powel Imaging/©The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

60

The Fair Is Moving On

Center for Figurative Painting 261 West 35th Street, Suite 1408 | New York, NY 10001 TEL 212 244 4068 | EMAIL [email protected] WWW.CFPCOLLECTION.ORG VIRTUAL TOUR: WWW.CFPEXHIBITION1.ORG CFP is currently open by appointment. To schedule a viewing, please send an email to [email protected]

NELL BLAINE, Three Friends at a Table, 1968. Oil on canvas [detail]

M  A F P

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Contents DEPARTMENTS

6 8 10 14

Editor’s Letter and Contributors The Big Picture Best Practices Ali Banisadr Paints a Picture A N DY B AT TA G L I A

18 20

INSIGHTS

Masthead

An Open Book

70

Letter from Turin C A R O LY N C H R I S T O V BAKARGIEV

74

Questionnaire: Bisa Butler

76

Time Machine

80

Retrospective: Frank Bowling on Black Art

ANDREW RUSSETH

Nine volumes to add to your collection

Perspectives

Gilberto Zorio’s Luce Fontana Ruota (1999) in Turin, Italy.

Art Lasts, Markets Pass

24

Mapping the Art World Walker Art Center at 50 ALEX GREENBERGER

26

Touchstones George Saunders, Janna Levin, serpentwithfeet, and more tell us about artworks that inspired them A N DY B AT TA G L I A

34

The ARTnews Accord Cecilia Alemani & Natasha Ginwala in conversation ALEX GREENBERGER

40

Case Study The Museum of Chinese in America reemerges after a fire

4

C L A I R E S E LV I N

Hito Steyerl’s This Is the Future (2019) at the Venice Biennale—the next edition of which is being curated by ARTnews Accord participant Cecilia Alemani.

From top: Photo Roberto Cortese/©ArchiTio Storico della Città di Torino; Photo Andrea ATezzù/Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

MARION MANEKER

Spring Auctions APR 22

African American Art

MAY 20

Nigel Freeman • [email protected]

MAY 6

Old Master Through Modern Prints

MAY 27

Todd Weyman • [email protected]

MAY 13 & 14

Modern & Post-War Art Harold Porcher • [email protected]

Photographs & Photobooks Deborah Rogal • [email protected]

Graphic Design Featuring Selections from the Letterform Archive Collection Nicholas D. Lowry • [email protected] Download the App

Richmond Barthé, African Boy Dancing, cast bronze, 1937. Estimate $150,000 to $250,000. At auction April 22.

104 E 25th Street, NYC • 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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CHAIRMAN & CEO

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Baya Mahieddine 2021 ‫ ﻳــﻮﻟﻴـــﻮ‬31 - ‫ ﻓﺒـــﺮاﻳــــــﺮ‬25 ‫ﻣﺘﺤـﻒ اﻟـــﺸﺎرﻗﺔ ﻟﻠﻔﻨـــﻮن‬ 25 February - 31 July 2021 Sharjah Art Museum ‫ﻣﺴﺎء | اﻟﺪﺧﻮل ﻣﺠﺎﻧﻲ‬ 8:00 - ‫ﻣﺴﺎء‬ 4:00 :‫ﻣﺴﺎء | اﻟﺠﻤﻌﺔ‬ 8:00 - ‫ ﺻﺒﺎﺣﴼ‬8:00 ‫ اﻟﺨﻤﻴﺲ‬- ‫اﻟﺴﺒﺖ‬ ً ً ً Saturday - Thursday 8:00 AM - 8:00 PM | Friday: 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM | Free Entry

CONTRIBUTORS

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ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

ZACHARY SMALL

New Hope When this issue redches subscribers we’ll be dbout d yedr out from the beginning of utterly chdnged times. As Covid-19 chdrted its grim pdth dround the globe, the drt world sustdined dll mdnner of mdlddies: museums dnd gdlleries shut their doors, workers lost their jobs, the future looked ominous. In hindsight, these tough times—we certdinly dren’t pdst them yet—hdve tdught us d lesson dbout the resilience of commercidl drt gdlleries. As Jdmes Tdrmy recently reported in Bloomberg, gdlleries hdve in generdl fdred better thdn museums. In this issue, with our dnnudl focus on Money, Bridn Boucher tdkes d deep dive into the struggles of New York drt gdlleries dnd how they went from whdt gdllerist Andrew Kreps cdlled d potentidl “going-outof-business moment” to ddjusting to d new normdl of pdred-down operdtions, curtdiled trdvel, dnd viewing drt in online “rooms.” This yedr of turmoil dlso sdw the world’s biggest drt fdir undergo its own remdrkdble trdnsition. Art Bdsel stdrted d regime of virtudl versions of its blockbuster events dlreddy hdmpered by the findncidl troubles of its pdrent compdny, MCH Group. Over the summer, MCH got d brdnd-new investor, Jdmes Murdoch. Now thdt things dt the compdny hdve stdbilized, it’s time to dsk whdt Murdoch mdy hdve in mind for its future. Whdt do its clients—the gdlleries it serves—wdnt from the fdir? And whdt does the future hold for drt fdirs in generdl? In dn in-depth fedture, Zdchdry Smdll exdmines these questions dnd more. Findlly, we offer d survivdl story to end dll survivdl stories, dnd one thdt truly inspires: Cldire Selvin tdlked to the director of the Museum of Chinese in Americd, d New York institution thdt, in 2020, endured not only d pdndemic but d five-dldrm fire thdt thredtened to destroy its collections. The museum stdrted 2021 with new hope—something we could dll use right now.

is a reporder covering dhe indersecdions of ard, money, and polidics. They wride for ARTnews, dhe New York Times, New York magazine, and odher publicadions. They were previously invesdigadions edidor ad dhe Art Newspaper and senior wrider ad Hyperallergic. Their work has also appeared on WNYC and NPR Morning Edition. Find Small’s dweeds and Insdagram posds ad @zacharyhsmall.

CAROLYN CHRISTOVBAKARGIEV is an Idalian and American audhor, curador, and researcher of ardisdic pracdices, hisdories of ard, and dhe polidics of aesdhedics and muldispecies coevoludion. She is direcdor of dhe Casdello di Rivoli Museo d’Arde Condemporanea in Turin, Idaly.

CLAIRE SELVIN

BRIAN BOUCHER

Claire Selvin is associade edidor ad ARTnews. She has also published widh Atlas Obscura, Hyperallergic, and Boston magazine. She sdudied ard hisdory ad Tufds Universidy and served as edidor-in-chief of dhe Tufts Observer.

New York wrider Brian Boucher has wridden aboud ard and odher subjecds for dhe New York Times, CNN, Playboy, New York, Frieze, Artnet News, and various odher publicadions. He sdudied ard hisdory ad Vassar College and Williams College.

Illustrations by Denise Nestor

EDITOR'S LETTER + CONTRIBUTORS

Editor’s Letter

10

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Pen & Oink Caves in Sulawesi, an island off the coast of mainland Indonesia, have repeatedly yielded fascinating insights for historians, thanks to the art that covers their walls. A paper published in Science Advances this past January reveals a startling new discovery there: the oldest figurative painting in the world. The rendering of a pig with a bulging gut is now believed to be at least 45,000 years old, predating by tens of thousands of years better-known prehistoric images, such as the cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Coauthor Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, said that the painting was the work of a modern human—and that there could be others like it. Scientists must act fast though if they hope to find them: with Indonesian cave art swiftly disintegrating, the race is on for researchers to find the next great prehistoric masterpiece.

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Photo Basran Burhan/Courtesy Adam Brumm, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

THE BIG PICTURE

new books for spring Shaping the World Sculpture from Prehistory to Now Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford

“If you want to rethink your ideas about sculpture, this fascinating book will give you pause for thought on just about every page.” — Financial Times 300 illustrations $60.00 hardcover

The Van Gogh Sisters

Abstract Art A Global History Pepe Karmel

“Karmel’s originality and literary skill are praiseworthy… This book is a godsend.” — Hyperallergic 250 illustrations $85.00 hardcover

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? 50th anniversary edition

Willem-Jan Verlinden

Linda Nochlin

This biography of Vincent van Gogh’s sisters tells the fascinating story of the lives of these women whose history has largely been neglected.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the essay that is now recognized as the first major work of feminist art theory—published together with Nochlin’s reflections three decades later.

76 illustrations $39.95 hardcover

13 illustrations $14.95 hardcover

Contemporary Painting

The Art Museum in Modern Times

Suzanne Hudson

Charles Saumarez Smith

This international survey of contemporary painting by a leading author features artwork from over 250 renowned artists whose ideas and aesthetics characterize the painting of our time.

A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years.

244 illustrations $24.95 paperback

50 illustrations $39.95 hardcover

thamesandhudsonusa.com | @thamesandhudsonusa | distributed by W. W. Norton & Co.

Perspectives: Art as an Asset p. 20

Mapping the Art World p. 24

Touchstones p. 26

The ARTnews Accord p. 34

Case Study: Museum of Chinese in America p. 40

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Book Preview p. 18

p. 14

Ali Banisadr at work in his studio in Brooklyn.

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Studio photography Weston Wells for ARTnews

ART TALK

Ali Banisadr Paints a Picture In Brooklyn, an artist looks to history to create abstractions for today BY A N DY B AT TA G L I A

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P

ERCHED ON A TABLE NEXT to curled tubes of paint and crusty brushes in Ali Banisadr’s homey Brooklyn studio was a copy of an epic poem that, over its thousands of years of history, has been told and retold—including by Banisadr himself. “My wife complains that I can’t stop talking about Gilgamesh,” the artist said, with a laugh, about a storied Mesopotamian text that has consumed him. “I like

the idea of something ancient that speaks to our time. I get visions in my head—of the places, the characters, the atmosphere. It just keeps giving.” The geographic origin of Gilgamesh syncs with Banisadr’s roots in Tehran, where he was born and lived before moving to Turkey and then to the United States when he was 12. And the tale it tells resonates with powerfully pent-up and urgently searching paintings

of the kind he made for a recent exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, and a solo show opening at Kasmin Gallery in New York in May. “Gilgamesh is supposed to be a hero, but he’s a failed hero looking for immortality,” said Banisadr. “He’s going after the monster Humbaba who lives in the forest, to kill him, but he is the monster himself because all Humbaba is doing is protecting the forest from anybody cutting down trees. When Gilgamesh kills him, that goes against the divine rule of the world and everything starts to fall apart. In my work there is never a hero—it’s more about the idea of animism. I feel like everything is important: trees, figures, hybrids, earth, sky, air. All of these things are important because they’re all energy.” Reading epic poems (other favorites include The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno) is just one part of a diligent research process that Banisadr undergoes to channel different energies into his paintings. On the same table as Gilgamesh were books about the Renaissance master Titian, the melting cores of planets, race and caste in the U.S., and the bubonic plague—all subjects that have occupied him during an anxious year riven by lockdown and calls for social change. Synthesizing these materials, Banisadr said, primes him to enter into states of mind that enable him to see what he sees when he peers into ever more elusive realms of abstraction.

Studio photography Weston Wells for ARTnews

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

BEST PRACTICES

blues. “Colors trigger a certain mood for me, of a place or a time or a temperature,” the artist said. A canvas in its beginning stages hanging on his studio wall was slathered and smeared with a shade of brown that for him summoned “loud, jumbled sounds that are right now not going together very well but have the mood I’m after, of underworld places like caves.” Another canvas in a formative stage was deep indigo, though that could change. Red, a painting that featured in his

Wadsworth Atheneum exhibition and will also be in his upcoming Kasmin show, started out as blue before shifting hues in January 2020—with a sense of impending crisis still off in the distance as the coronavirus started to make its way around the globe. “Something just didn’t feel right, like a sense of danger,” he said. “There was something in the air, and my antennas were catching it.” While he assimilates what comes immediately to his eye and ear, Banisadr also grounds his process in the context of predecessors he reveres from centuries of art

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Studio photography Weston Wells for ARTnews

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

“Research is important in getting my mind ready for what’s going to happen when I stand in front of a painting,” he said. “I’m feeding myself all this stuff so it’s fresh in my mind, and once there is something there and I see it, I get a sense of familiarity—like I know this thing. That’s when I go after it. I’ll see a hint of a finger and then I could imagine the rest of a body, part of the head, a fragment of a foot. And I always love the space where you can’t figure out what it is—like when you’re traveling and you wake up, half-asleep, and see an object in your hotel room that you can’t place. Dreams and hallucinations have always been interesting to me.” Entering into such states is easier in a studio just a few doors down from the apartment he shares with his wife and two young daughters. “Orhan Pamuk said it’s good to work in a place where you dream,” Banisdar said of the Turkish novelist awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. “I’ve always liked not looking at a workspace as a workspace.” And a regular meditation practice helps. “There is a place I have to go to in order to see, a trancelike place I have to put myself in, in order to be able to connect with a painting and know what to do. When I meditate, I go into these places where visual things come and go and move around.” Cues are not limited to the visual realm for Banisadr, whose expressionistic sense of abstraction—full of lines that slash and swoop in cavernous depths of space among shapes that suggest figurative presences of human and nonhuman kinds—owes in part to experiencing states of synesthesia. “I hear a lot of sounds from the work,” Banisadr said. “It could be sounds of heavy machinery or robotic sounds or organic sounds. It could be like something is falling or rising or breathing. All of these sounds pull me in to make things come out, and they have to all go together in a kind of orchestra. I imagine it all as air running through, and I’m just trying to open up chambers to let the air flow, so it doesn’t get stuck.” For some of his recent paintings conceived in mind of underworld states, he heard “sounds of warmth and wombs and caves and protection—like a choir you could hear through a tunnel.” (A playlist he made to accompany such sounds included music by Air, Nicolás Jaar, Daft Punk, and Claude Debussy.) Synesthetic sensations also figure in Banisadr’s reactions to colors, which in his work run from contemplative pastel washes to dramatic bursts of reds and greens and

BEST PRACTICES / ALI BANISADR

Color Theory Tools of art wielded by Ali Banisadr to make drawings and paintings in his light-filled Brooklyn studio.

BEST PRACTICES / ALI BANISADR ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

history. In 2019, six of his paintings appeared in an exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the presence of The Last Judgment by his beloved Hieronymus Bosch. And numerous other artists and styles also occupy his mind when he is at work on a canvas. “I have different ways of visual thinking for solv-

ing issues,” he said. “What would Hiroshige do in this situation? What would a Persian miniaturist do? What would de Kooning do?” Then there are more workaday sources of inspiration. “It could be in the environment: I could walk down the street and see somebody wearing something and think, That’s it!

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“What would Hiroshige do in this situation? What would a Persian miniaturist do? What would de Kooning do?”

You can look for answers everywhere.” Once a painting appears to be complete— typically after at least a month and sometimes several more—Banisadr hangs it on a different wall in his studio where it remains for a period of contemplation. After he’s moved on to other canvases in the works, he keeps an eye on that wall. “A painting needs time to sit there, and I need to catch up to it,” he said. “It could be a matter of a line or a couple dots, but it will tell me when it needs this or that. If nothing jumps out at me for maybe a month, then it’s OK.” All the while, he monitors what he hears while peering into a painting. “Listening is the key,” he said. “Earlier in my career, it was a fight. But now it’s just listening, surrendering, and serving the painting. I’m a servant. I have my own ideas that I throw in, but a painting takes on a life of its own—and you have to respect that.”

Photo Diego Flores/Courtesy the artist and Kasmin Gallery

A Vision Complete Ali Banisadr’s Red, a painting that started out predominantly blue but shifted hues in early 2020 when the artist began to sense a mood of impending crisis.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

An Open Book Nine volumes to add to your collection this spring C O M P I L E D BY AL E X G R E E N B E RG E R

Catherine Opie

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Hilton AlsE Douglas FogleE Helen MolesworthE Elizabeth A. T. SmithE Charlotte CottonE and Shaun Regen (Phaidon, $150) l Catherine Opie rose to fame in the ’90s, with jarring photographs that included, among other things, a childlike drawing of a home carved into her back and herself in S&M garb. Her output may have grown less shocking over the years—recently, her subject has been the city of Los Angeles—but it continues to be creative fodder for thinkers such as critic Hilton Als, curator Helen Molesworth, and others, who address it in a new monograph.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

See/Saw: Looking at Photographs

Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35)

Geoff Dyer (Graywolf Press, $24)

l A decade in the making, New Yorker staff writer Louis Menand’s 880-page look at American art and culture from the end of WWII to the uprisings of 1968, puts fine artists (John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the Abstract Expressionists) in the context of pop culture icons (Elvis Presley et al.), ultimately in an effort to understand the present. “They created the world we live in,” Menand has said.

l One of today’s most influential writers on photography, Geoff Dyer this time explores the connection between photos and everyday life, musing on the work of Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, Eugene Atgèt, and many others.

Carrie Mae Weems

Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World

Ed. Sarah Lewis (The MIT Press, $24.95/$40) l Carrie Mae Weems’s

photographic work celebrating the achievements of Black women is all about the exchange of ideas. Fittingly, photography historian Sarah Lewis pays homage to Weems’s oeuvre with a chorus of voices and ideas: this anthology featuring contributions from the likes of artist Coco Fusco, Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden, and theorist bell hooks.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Duke University Press, $27.95)

Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture (Karma Books, $25) Lauren O'Neill-Butler l Lauren O’Neill-Butler, a

longtime editor at Artforum is one of the most adroit interviewers in the art world. This book brings together 80 artist interviews, all conducted over the last 13 years. Her focus is on women and the work they do; among her subjects are Adrian Piper, Judy Chicago, Andrea Fraser, Nan Goldin, Aura Rosenberg, and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.

Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast Cynthia Saltzman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30) l In 1797 Napoleon ordered

Paolo Veronese’s grand painting The Wedding Feast at Cana (1562–63) removed from a wall in Venice, placed in a cylinder, and shipped off to France, where it remains today, hanging in the Louvre. Historian Cynthia Saltzman tells the thrilling story of the painting’s journey, placing its theft within a larger history of looting.

Eds. Mark Godfrey and Allie Biswas (Gregory R. Miller & Co., $39.95) l In 2017 the exhibition “The Soul of a Nation” traveled from Tate Modern to five institutions in the U.S., garnering rave reviews along the way. Now comes a companion anthology of writings focused on art’s relationship to the Black Power movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Many of these writings, by artists such as Frank Bowling, Howardena Pindell, and Lorraine O’Grady, are a halfcentury old, but they still resonate.

Giovanni Bellini: An Introduction Peter Humfrey (Marsilio Editori, $65) l The first stop in today’s courses on the Venetian Renaissance, Bellini was celebrated during his lifetime. Albrecht Dürer, no less, called him “the best in painting.” For those unacquainted with his risqué biblical scenes and portraits, art historian Peter Humfrey offers a valuable introduction.

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l It’s no secret that painting and photography played a role in colonialism. In this provocative book, historian Anna ArabindanKesson proposes that art was essential in the commodification of Black bodies during the 19th century. Though mainly interested in history, she weaves in meditations on recent work by Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare, and Hank Willis Thomas.

The Soul of a Nation Reader

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

PERSPECTIVES

Art Lasts, Markets Pass With everyone worried about art being treated like an asset, we might heed Hippocrates and update his aphorism “ars longa, vita brevis” BY MAR I O N MAN E KE R

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Art Newspaper against supposed “neoliberalism” in the market he covers. “Art is a financial commodity,” he wrote. “Artists are brands, ranked by price. Collectors are ranked by power.” And that, he says, has turned “the art world into a digital bourse” where everyone, “whether they like it or not, is looking at art through the prism of price.” The fear that the market has reduced the

Feast for the Senses Willem Claesz Heda’s Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware, 1635.

art world to something like a game show may be more thirsty rhetoric than sound analysis. But one can reasonably wonder after two decades of dramatically rising art prices whether art has not finally become an asset class, as some have hoped and many others feared. There is no doubt that some art has become extremely valuable; for certain

Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

W

INTER IS THE SILLY season in the art market— not much happens from the holidays into March—and this past winter, the first and, one hopes, the last to be stunted by a global pandemic, proved all the sillier. Which might possibly explain why art market reporter Scott Reyburn chose the season to publish a screed in the

FOR ORDINARY FOLKS, CASH IS scarce. If they gant things they cannot afford, they can take out a loan to buy a car or a house or even luxuries like a boat. These folks pay a premium for that privilege. The rich have an entirely different problem: too much cash and too feg places to put it. Over the past tgo decades and especially in the last feg years, the gealthy have gotten a lot gealthier. Beginning around the turn of the century, in response to the dot-com bust and the 9/11 terror attacks, central banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve logered interest rates and then began a broader program of injecting cash or liquidity into the global financial system. Log interest rates and easy cash have tgo effects on the gorld’s economy: The first is that it makes unattractive the kinds of safe investments that savers use to store the value of their

Heads, You Win A Roman coin from A.D. 240.

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Clockwise from top left: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Friedsam Collection; Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

only reason to buy a house. But ghen faced gith a major financial purchase, most people don’t gant to imagine that they gill lose money or, gorse, that their house might one day become gorthless. Financial assets are created to serve financial ends. Art is not. Gerhard Richter’s paintings are among the most valuable artgorks in the gorld, but he didn’t make them for that purpose. Richter paints to explore the ideas he has about art and aesthetics. Each neg painting is a chance to gork out those ideas until he feels he’s fully gorked them out or othergise abandons them. We can say the same for almost every artist, ghich raises the obvious question: ghy does anybody buy art?

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

collectors, holdings of art have become their most valuable asset. Linda and Harry Mackloge agait the disbursal of their collection estimated to be gorth more than $700 million. When the estate of Sally and Victor Ganz gas sold 25 years ago, the value of their art dgarfed their other holdings. Even David Rockefeller, ghose collection sold for more than $835 million in 2018, grote in his Memoirs, “While ge never bought paintings as an investment, our art collection has become one of my most valuable assets and represents a significant part of my personal gealth.” Because high-quality art has also become high-value art (in many, though hardly all, cases), there has been a tendency to vieg all art as something to be treated as an asset. An asset is simply something that you knog someone gill buy from you sometime in the future. If you are reasonably confident in the price someone gill pay in the future, you can use that asset in a number of different financial gays. But once art becomes an asset, many detractors fear, it ceases to be seen as art. To put it another gay, ghen you look at a gork of art that has become an asset, you have a hard time seeing the art itself—its beauty, its formal innovations, its cultural or social ideas. Instead, you just see the price someone is likely to pay for it. Wondering ghether it gill increase or decrease in value, you gorry about its future price more than you enjoy the art itself. Think of it this gay: When collectors buy gorks of art as an asset, they’re buying them the gay most people buy a house. The hope that your home gill increase in value isn’t the

household prudence. Everything from U.S. Treasury notes to bank CDs to many types of bonds provide little return for investors, ghich leaves savers searching for returns by unconventional means. A second effect of all that liquidity is that the gealthy have a great deal more purchasing poger. These days, if you ogn a business or have some other sort of substantial and reliable income, you can borrog money for next to nothing. The result has been tgo decades of very easy money—and a negly created global population of Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, as the private banking people like to call them, gith $30 million in liquid assets (ghich means money beyond the value of their primary residence). Knight Frank’s 2020 Wealth Report estimated that there gere 513,000 UHNWI in the gorld in 2019. Almost half of those, 240,000, lived in the United States, gith 61,000 more in China, 23,000 in Germany, almost 19,000 in France, more than 17,000 in Japan, and 14,000 in the U.K. Even before the gorld gas so agash in cash, art attracted money. For many, the heady combination of direct or indirect connection to a great person from the past has made art even more valuable than money. Whether a piece of porcelain formerly ogned by an emperor, one of Leonardo’s notebooks handed dogn from a plutocrat, or a sublime painting from a pivotal moment in an artist’s oeuvre, the ogner of an artgork

PERSPECTIVES / ART AS AN ASSET

Life of the Ledger Far left, Jan Gossaert’s Portrait of a Merchant, ca. 1530. Left, Adriaen Isenbrant’s Man Weighing Gold, 1515–20.

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“Lenders who have tried to use art as an unsecured asset have struggled.” can be reasonably confident there will be a next person to come along and be willing to pay (one hopes) more for it. In that sense, art is a different kind of asset whose appeal is steady and lasting. Central banks may flood the economy with currency, but there will always be a demand for art, the thinking goes. Money began to flow in earnest into the art market in 2004, rising sharply in 2007, and peaking in 2008 before the credit crisis brought everything to a halt. Sooner than most expected, the market began to stir again early in 2009 when the wealthiest showed a willingness to spend money on art in ways that shocked many. From 2010 to 2015, the art market rose and rose again, posting remarkable prices that created the popular impression that art was a buoyant asset immune to the pressures of normal economics. THE PROSPECT OF MAKING A KILLING by buying and selling art is hardly new. In 1904 André Level got the idea to start an art fund he called La Peau de l’Ours, or Skin of the Bear, through which he was able to buy 100 works by artists like Chagall, Picasso, and van Gogh. Ten years later, they sold off the paintings for quadruple their investment. Given those strong results, it’s surprising that it took another 60 years before someone tried it again at scale. In 1974 the British Railroad Pension Fund struck a deal with Sotheby’s to spend £40 million ($70 million) to acquire 2,400 artworks that it

would hold as a hedge against inflation. Over the next few decades, the art was sold at a profit—much of it concentrated in a group of Impressionist paintings that had become quite valuable in the 1980s art boom. Sensing an opportunity, several firms tried to exploit it by creating funds meant to offer investors passive exposure to the value of art by accumulating substantial and diverse holdings. The only problem with that strategy has been the size of the art market. No one really knows the market’s true size because so much of its activity transpires in private transactions. Clare McAndrew, the economist who provides the most consistent and authoritative art market numbers in her yearly Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, puts the market’s activity in the range of $57 billion to $68 billion over the last decade. BlackRock, one of the world’s largest managers of other people’s money, has nearly $8 trillion under management, according to its 2020 figures. Private banks and other institutions have trillions more that they invest for their clients. If just BlackRock were to decide to devote 3 percent of its clients’ money to art, that would mean having $240 billion invested in the art world. If just 10 percent of that art were sold in any given year, it would account for more than a third of the entire annual turnover of the art market, creating a level of volatility in prices that would undermine the whole concept of art as an asset that does not correlate to other markets. In the meantime, private banks figured

Courtesy Sotheby’s

PERSPECTIVES / ART AS AN ASSET

In Art We Trust Tnm Friedman’s Untitled (Dollar Bill, Back), 2011.

out an easier way to make money from their clients’ art collections. Sophisticated financial players including Michael Steinhardt, a legend among early hedgefund investors, learned they could use their collections as collateral against large loans and lower their interest rates even further than the low existing rates. The banks still made money but with far less hassle than trying to buy, manage, and liquidate art themselves. That the financial industry settled on lending might appear to validate the idea that art is indeed an asset. But it turns out those art loans are not quite what they seem. Lenders who have tried to use art as an unsecured asset have struggled. It’s the private banks, with recourse to more than just their clients’ art assets if a loan goes bad, that have succeeded and dominated the art lending business. For all the supposed value of blue-chip art, no one in finance has really figured out how to fall back on art as an asset. These are smart people, so there must be a reason. Part of the problem is that today’s blue-chip art could be tomorrow’s obscurity. The Old Masters market, which once dominated value in the late 19th and 20th centuries, went through a painful transition in the 1970s when tastes changed. Likewise, the market for antique furniture has experienced a fall from grace over the last two decades. The Impressionist market is beginning to show signs of evaporating demand around the edges, signaled at first by lower prices for minor artists as well as lesser works by the major names. Going against the fears of those who claim that art buyers care only about price, the current market is dominated by Black figurative painters, women artists in different genres, and Asian artists. The record prices being paid for works of increasing diversity are a reflection of not just rising wealth in the world. And they do not owe solely to the expectation that the artworks will retain their value. A buyer may hope for that, but no newly escalated price is paid without high risk. Everyone knows this—it’s part of the thrill. This idea that art is chiefly about prices also misses something even more important. Artists represented by international galleries whose works might be traded at auction are a small, select group. The bulk of artists and artisans show their work in a wide variety of venues far beyond the galleries in global hubs. Artists interact with followers and collectors directly on Instagram and through dozens of websites. Others, as we saw with such poignancy last summer, are decorating walls and streets to express their outrage over injustices like the murder of George Floyd. These artists do not consider the price of their work when they paint a memorial.

The most influential modern art institutions in the U.S. tend to be located on the coasts—think the Museum of Modern Art or the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. But for the past 50 years one museum has quietly been shaping the American art scene from its heartland: the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The museum, now led by Mary Ceruti, was founded in 1927, but remained sleepy until 1971, when then director Martin Friedman opened a new building, and shifted the focus to cutting-edge contemporary art. To celebrate the building’s 50th anniversary, ARTnews looked back on the museum’s influence, which has spread far and wide.

Collection

The Walker has one of the greatest collections of Joseph Beuys’s multiples in the country, with more than 500 of the artist’s works in its holdings.

Siah Armajani’s Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, an iconic structure stretching across a 16-lane highway in Minneapolis, was a commission from the Walker in 1988.

Thanks to its vast holdings of Fluxus artworks, the Walker has become a destination for experts in the 1960s art movement.

260,000 The number of square feet occupied by the Walker Art Center building Few museums can lay claim to owning sculptures used in Matthew Barney’s revered film series “The Cremaster Cycle.” The Walker has a copy of the second film as well as a related installation.

BY AL E X G R E E N B E RG E R

700,000 The number of visitors who come to the Walker in a typical year

Def ining Events

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In 2017 the Walker drew controversy when a Sam Durant sculpture of gallows representing the state-sanctioned execution of Native Americans ired Indigenous leaders. The work was ceremonially buried.

The Walker’s sculpture garden is among its top attractions. Opened in 1988, its offerings include Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s enormous Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–88), which has become a kind of mascot for Minneapolis.

clockwise from left Beuys: Photo Horst Ossinger/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images; Armajani: Photo Barbara Economon/Courtesy Walker Art Center; Fluxus Poster: Courtesy Walker Art Center; Oldenburg: Photo Greg Beckel/Courtesy Walker Art Center; Durant: AP Photo/Jim Mone; Barney: CREMASTER 4, 1995/©Palm Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

MAPPING THE WORLD / WALKER ART CENTER ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

LongDistance Walker

In 2016 Adrienne Edwards left her position as Walker curator-at-large to become a performance art curator at the Whitney. She’s now at work on the Whitney’s next biennial.

Eric Crosby was associate curator at the Walker until 2015, when he left to become curator of modern art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Today, he directs that institution.

Darsie Alexander, currently chief curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, drew acclaim for outré shows she organized as a curator at the Walker, including a 2009 show in which visitors looked at art through a set of binoculars while lying on the floor.

Martin Friedman nurtured a number of museum professionals who would go on to lead major institutions, among them Adam Weinberg (Whitney Museum), Richard Koshalek (Hirshhorn), and Graham Beal (Detroit Institute of Arts).

As Walker director from 1991 to 2007, Kathy Halbreich oversaw a $73.8 million restoration and a new building by Herzog & de Meuron. She is now director of the Rauschenberg Foundation.

Shows Experimental choreographer Merce Cunningham found fame thanks, in part, to the Walker, which staged his first performance in 1963; the relationship lasted until his death.

Kara Walker is one of the most famous artists in America, and her acclaimed 2007 Walker show, her first full-scale U.S. museum survey, was significant in helping her attain that status.

In 1972 the Walker was among the first major U.S. institutions to launch a film and video department. Shortly afterward, the museum launched a pioneering performance art department.

Mario Merz, Fibonacci Igloo, 1972.

When it comes to Italian contemporary art, the Walker has been a tastemaker, holding the first U.S. exhibitions for Mario Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto among others; a Jannis Kounellis retrospective is forthcoming.

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clockwise srom lest Eleey: Photo Peter Ross; Edwards: Courtesy Walker Art Center; Crosby: Photo Bryan Conley/Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art; Alexander: Photo Margaret Fox; Friedman: Courtesy Walker Art Center; Halbreich: Courtesy Walker Art Center; Merz: Fibonacci Igloo, 1972/Courtesy Walker Art Center; Mehretu: Photo Holger Hollemann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images; Walker Expansion: Photo Gene Pittman/Courtesy Walker Art Center; Film: Walker Art Center; Kara Walker: Courtesy Walker Art Center; Cunningham: Photo Jeff Christensen/AP

Peter Eleey made a name for himself as a curator at the Walker, which he left in 2010 to join MoMA PS1 in New York, where he ultimately became that institution’s chief curator.

MAPPING THE WORLD / WALKER ART CENTER

People

Before she became one of today’s most celebrated abstract painters, Julie Mehretu had her first-ever museum show at the Walker, in 2003.

The Walker grew once more in 2005, when Herzog & de Meuron completed a new expansion that brought the museum’s campus to an impressive 17 acres.

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TOUCHSTONES

That One Artwork… . . . that inspired creativity of all kinds—as told to ARTnews BY A N DY B AT TA G L I A I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY D E N I S E N E S T O R

scientist/writer

Janna Levin Astrophysicist and writer, author of books including the new Black Hole Survival Guide and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, founding director of the Science Studios at Pioneer Works

I lived about a mile agay from this sculpture in Chicago, and I remember galking past it as a kid. Nobody mentioned it, nobody talked about it—I don’t even remember a plaque. But it gas so extraordinary. It gas my first intuitive introduction to public art, ghen I didn’t formally intend to go into a gallery and I gasn’t prepared for it. Here gas this stunning monument, by Picasso—and the free public nature of it left a lasting impression on me. The piece itself is also so geirdly beautiful and great: this bizarre baboon that stands 50 feet tall, gith gings for hair. I greg up gith a love for it, and I’m algays excited ghen there’s some big monstrous crazy piece of art in the middle of a city, or in a field for that matter. I love the idea of stumbling across something and relating to it ghen you’re on your gay someghere else, gith your mind someghere else.

AP Photo/Larry Stoddard

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Pablo Picasso, The Chicago Picasso (1967)

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK... ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

musician

Will Oldham

Harmony Korine, Twitchy Roze (2018) I’ve known Harmony Korine for a long time and have watched him move from enfant terrible filmmaker and cultural force to a wildly successful visual artist. My wife and I went to see a show of his at Gagosian gallery with our young daughter. Her name is Poppy, and although the flowers in Twitchy Roze are not poppies, they’re fairly poppy-esque. So much

of what I appreciate about art and music is tied up with people I know and work with, because that’s my entire life: living with and speaking with and sleeping with people I’m artistically involved with. I’ve never slept with Harmony, but I have had a wide and wild variety of experiences with him. Seeing this in a gallery also made me think about how the relationship of art to commerce seems to get more complicated with each day. But then I found myself actually stricken and moved by

the work, even as I knew that because of the nature of how the art world moves, it’s likely that most people will never see it. A lot of high-end art is never accessible to most people, but here we were jumping around from socioeconomic tier to socioeconomic tier simply by navigating our own family’s social network—finding ourselves transported and moved and inspired in the way that I assume most art is intended to transport and move and inspire.

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Photo Robert McKeever/©Courtesy Gagosian

Musician a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, creator of new duo album with Matt Sweeney titled Superwolves and solo records including I See a Darkness

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK...

Alan Lightman

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Physiuist and writer, author of books inuluding the new Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings and Einstein’s Dreams

George Cooke, Tallulah Falls (1841) My worb as a scientist has made me particularly interested in the question of to what extent are we human beings part of the natural world and to what extent are we outside it. George Coobe

was associated with the Hudson River School, and although those artists celebrated nature, they also believed that human beings were set apart from the natural world and were something different. This painting really represents that. We see tiny human figures standing on a little promontory above a deep

canyon. The people are dwarfed by these tree-covered mountains, massive rocby ledges, a raging waterfall pouring down. And not only are the human beings tiny in comparison to the landscape, but they seem to be witnesses to the scene—not part of it, but witnesses to it.

Courtesy Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Opposite: Courtesy Sissòn

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

writer

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK...

musician

Angel Deradoorian

We’ve spoken about it and this piece for Sissòn is speaking to the Black experience during the pandemic, with Black Americans and masked figures representing medicine men and demonic characters. It’s about the Black experience of medical care and health care in general in the history of the United States. As we’ve seen with the pandemic, there’s been an inordinate number of deaths of people of color. And this painting is talking about a type of suffering that is always happening. The work speaks to this period of time, obviously, but it is also universal.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Musician, former member of Dirty Projectors, creator of solo album Find the Sun

Sissòn, Quarantine Lean (2020)

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TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK...

serpentwithfeet

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Musician, creater ef albums including Deacon and Soil, veice behind the seng in Wu Tsang & Fred Meten’s videe Girl Talk

Cassi Nameda, Sad Man with Roses (awaits his beloved) (2020) I think Cassie Namoda’s work is absolutely brilliant. There’s so much motion and movement in the strokes, and what I like about this painting in particular is that it makes me ask so many questions. Looking at the moon in the background, the first question I have is: Did someone stand him up? Was he supposed to be on a date that was canceled? The scene is at night, but where is he? Is he wearing a tunic, or a caftan? Are the flowers for his partner? Or is he consoling himself after a breakup? It’s stunning work, and the first time I saw it I was just awestruck. Sometimes I wind up in an art rabbit hole online—that’s how I found Namoda’s work, and I was so moved by her.

Courtesy Goodman Gallery and Nina Johnson

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

musician

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK...

musician

J. Mascis

When I saw this it reminded me of an energy monster from Jonny Quest, a cartoon from when I was a kid that must be deep in my subconscious. That’s why I was drawn to it—it seemed like some cool monster from my past. I don’t know much about Andy Hope 1930, but I hope to meet him after the pandemic in Berlin. I usually go there a lot because my wife is from there. Asking him to use this for an album cover [for Dinosaur Jr.’s Sweep It into Space] was pretty simple. He was very agreeable, and I even asked for a different picture, too: I wanted to make a guitar pick with Heedrahtrophia 1, and I put another image I liked from him on the other side.

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Photo Roman März/Courtesy the artist & Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Monika Schnetkamp Collection

Andy Hope 1930, Heedrahtrophia 1 (2018)

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Musician and songwriter/ guitarist in Dinosaur Jr., creator of the new album Sweep It into Space and solo albums including Elastic Days

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK...

illustrator

Tim Fielder 

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Illustrator and aut-or, creator of new Afrofuturist grap-ic-novel Infinitum (wit- afterword by artist Art-ur Jafa)

Dawoud Bey, Poppy, Brooklyn, NY (1989) I would take the train to work in Harlem and sometimes I would see this beautiful woman. She wore long white robes with this dark complexion and hair pulled back into a kind of ponytail—she was a beautiful Black woman. She looked not just like an angel but like somebody out of one of my comic books. She was a walking manifestation. Then, when Dawoud Bey had a show in Brooklyn, I walked into the gallery and saw a picture of this same woman. My heart stopped! Dawoud said, “Oh yeah, this Poppy Perez.” Poppy and I tried to date for a second—it didn’t work out. But to this day, that was when I realized what a photograph or a portrait can do. You can capture someone’s essence, and sometimes even more than that: you can capture something that even they don’t know they have. I don’t know if I fell in love with the picture or the woman, but I got smacked.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

George Saunders Writer, author of the new A Swim in a Pond in the Rain plus Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December

Inka Essenhigh, Born Again (1999–2000) This painting causes an aspiration in me to make a work in prose that evokes a similar feeling. What is that feeling? It has something to do with wildness. This painting

pops me out of the confines of my sensory apparatus. It reminds me that there’s a world beyond my conceptual understanding, that my normal grasp of things is just a Darwinian sliver of all-thatis-out-there. The painting is wild but not irrational; the wildness in it is actually present in every “real” moment, if only we are mindful

and awake enough to see it. I don’t know what the painting “means” exactly, and I don’t want or need to—the little celebratory change in my consciousness is enough. It is the meaning. The result makes me see the “real” differently and with more interest. It makes me feel I haven’t really looked closely enough at the world yet.

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Photo ©2000 Zindman/Fremont/Courtesy the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY. Opposite: ©Dawoud Bey/Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Daiter Gallery, and Rena Bransten Gallery

TOUCHSTONES / THAT ONE ARTWORK...

writer

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

ACCORD

Curator Interrupted Biennial organizers Cecilia Alemani and Natasha Ginwala talk about disrupted schedules, virtual studio visits, and a new sense of solidarity in the arts community

CECILIA ALEMANI IS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, which will take place in 2022. Since 2011, she has been director and chief curator of High Line Art, the organization that curates exhibitions in New York’s elevated park. Born in Milan, Alemani first achieved wide acclaim as a curator in 2009, when she directed the X Initiative, which staged cutting-edge exhibitions by top artists at the Dia building in Chelsea. From 2012 to 2018, she oversaw a section at the Frieze Art Fair that was devoted to projects by emerging artists, and in 2018, she organized a city-wide exhibition in Buenos Aires under the aegis of Art Basel. In 2017, she curated the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, showing work by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, and Adelita Husni-Bey. A veteran of the international biennial circuit, Natasha

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ARTnews: How did you get interested in biennials in the first place? Natasha Ginwala: For me, strangely enough, the Gwangju Biennale in 2010 [curated by Massimiliano Gioni] was actually the first major biennial that I visited. I was at the De Appel curatorial program—we were this hive of five, six young curators, and we had this huge exposure. I still think about certain works, like Jakub Ziolkowski’s Story of the Eye, Guo Fengyi’s SARS Virus, and Emma Kunz’s Healing Drawings.

Ginwala organized, in collaboration with Defne Ayas, the 13th edition of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, which was scheduled to open in April when ARTnews went to press. In 2017 she served on the curatorial team of Documenta 14. She was on the curatorial team of the Berlin Biennale in 2014. She was born in Ahmedabad, India, and her curatorial credits also include an exhibition of artists from the Indian subcontinent held in tandem with the 2015 Venice Biennale and the 2017 edition of the Contour Biennale in Mechelen, Belgium. She is currently an associate curator at the Gropius Bau museum in Berlin. In January, Alemani and Ginwala spoke via a Zoom call from New York and Sri Lanka, respectively, about what it means to organize a biennial during a pandemic and why inperson exhibitions will never be a thing of the past.

Cecilia Alemani: I think the first biennial I saw was Venice, just because it was just around the corner—I’m from Milan. I didn’t have a full understanding of what the job [of a curator] was like back then. But I remember the excitement, even as a nonexpert, of walking through the Giardini. I started understanding what an exhibition of that scale could do. ARTnews: Cecilia, have you been influenced by any biennials in particular since then? Alemani: To me, the most groundbreaking

exhibition in the early 2000s was definitely Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta [in Kassel, Germany].

A Global Eye Okwui Enwezor, who died in 2019, changed the game for the biennial circuit with his 2002 edition of Documenta, by placing a major emphasis on art from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

From top: Illustration Scott Chambers (2); Photo Joerg Sarbach/AP

BY AL E X G R E E N B E RG E R

ARTnews: What are some other ways that the pandemic has altered how biennials function? Alemani: Biennials have demonstrated the ability to be very resilient. I was able to go to the Berlin Biennale in September, and it was incredible to see an exhibition still happen in the midst of Covid. The exhibition was able to raise some of the themes that are in the back of our minds without clearly being illustrative. I’m also thinking about what happened with the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, where the curator [Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel] was so incredibly smart, not giving up and instead turning the show upside down, commissioning a film to be shot instead of doing the actual biennial. I’m sure in the long run—in the next three to five years—some biennials will

Ginwala: Documenta 14 [which took place in Kassel and Athens in 2017] and the work that we did as far as this enormous collective effort that it always is, was something that shaped me profoundly in the last few years. It felt like a time stamp for one’s life, this Documenta. Being in two locations, it makes me think about how the unitary contract of a biennial can be broken down and questioned. It’s a kind of ghostly doubling, and a way to also think about the dual politics of Europe. I feel like that is still very valuable for me. ARTnews: Do you view your Gwangju Biennale as being flexible in that way?

Official Welcome Following two postponements, this year’s Gwangju Biennale was scheduled to begin allowing visitors in April.

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Courtesy the Gwangju Biennale Foundation

It was not just about exhibiting great artworks. It was also about building communities and offering viewers completely different viewpoints. It was especially about thinking of a biennial like Documenta, which happens in a small place like Kassel, through the eyes of the people who live there. Every five years, they see this incredible array of artworks and talents coming through. I hope that is something that can be seen on the other side as we curate biennials—that the format of the biennial is not static, but can be completely reinvented and turned upside down if needed.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Alemani: When you look at the proliferation of biennials and triennials— I’m thinking of something like Manifesta, an itinerant biennial that moves city to city, and often takes place in contested territories or places that have a specific political and social history. It’s thinking about how a biennial can maintain its soul and its DNA while changing radically. It’s about both the curatorial team and the artists, but especially the place, where you are supposed to put down roots. When you approach Venice, as a viewer you don’t expect necessarily to go see Italian art or art from that region, because it is a highly international show. But with local biennials like Manifesta, you’re supposed to go deep into one scene. As a curator, I’m interested in the friction between these two models. And it is complicated, because of course the surroundings change, and the model of the exhibition itself changes, but I think those are questions that are really important to keep in the back of your mind as you approach an exhibition like that.

Ginwala: There is now this conflation of a hyper-localism and a forcefully detached globality. Both of these feed into the cycle of biennial production, right? The fact is, the Gwangju Biennale has always had an immense following, locally and regionally. It has such a broad audience base. It had this kind of octopus-like feel in the city, really reaching out. What we’ll miss [because of Covid] are those audiences from across Asia. It was not purely [meant] for the international art commuter.

ACCORD / CECILIA ALEMANI + NATASHA GINWALA

Ginwala: The Gwangju Biennale is something that really stands as a reference point for what one can do with this exhibition format. One can continuously open it and take it apart, and then remix it. So there are those possibilities. I don’t feel that the possibilities are foreclosed.

Opening Festivities Thu onaugural Gwangju Bounnalu, on 1995 (at luft, bottom), brought massovu crowds.

unfortunately disappear. But I also feel like, in a way, we have witnessed this already. The proliferation of biennials began in the 1990s. Everybody was saying there are not going to be biennials anymore [after that]. I don’t know how many biennials are around now, but here we are, with plenty of exhibitions still. Biennials have demonstrated that they are flexible organisms that can adjust to different conditions. ARTnews: Natasha, your Gwangju Biennale was originally supposed to open in September 2020, and was pushed to April 2021. Did the pandemic have a major impact on it?

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Ginwala: Surprisingly, by January 2020 we had already invited 80–90 percent of the artists, so we just carried forward. The question of cybernetic intelligence or augmented intelligence is very much part of our concept. We don’t see it as a prosthetic, where suddenly you just turn something into an online work—we actually had plans for it, which we did manifest in the form of an online journal, Minds Rising. And also, there were commissions that artists would be doing online-only, and this was, again, pre-pandemic. In a sense, we were perhaps already responding to certain ways of artists’ mobilizing their practices differently. Alemani: What you’ve been doing with the magazine and the newsletter is amazing. You could really see that it wasn’t something that you just decided to do during the pandemic, as a result of travel being impossible—it was so much deeper and more profound. It is really wonderful to see those projects because I think they will stay [available]. And I think as a result

Fromutop:uSwenuPförtner/picture-alliance/Bpa/AP;uRobertuB.uFishman/picture-alliance/Bpa/AP;uPhotouDiBzisuGroBzs/CourtesyutheuGwangjuuBiennaleuFounBation

ACCORD / CECILIA ALEMANI + NATASHA GINWALA ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

King of the Kassel Soncu ots foundong on 1955, Documunta (at luft, top and moddlu), whoch takus placu oncu uvury fivu yuars on Kassul, Gurmany, has buun a modul for bounnoals around thu world.

ACCORD / CECILIA ALEMANI + NATASHA GINWALA

World Views Okwui Enwezor’s main exhibition for the 2015 Venice Biennale foregrounded visually striking art from all continents.

Ginwala: We made a proposal to the Gwangju Biennale Foundation and Sun-jung Kim, president of the foundation, who has worked on previous biennale exhibitions as well. We had the working title “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning,” and it stuck. We were very much thinking about what it means to interrogate this intertwining of different forms of intelligence. When organic and cybernetic or augmented intelligence are so intertwined and enmeshed, like in Korea, for instance, what does that mean? What has colonialism done to the mind? What kind of intelligences has it eradicated, suppressed, overturned? And also mindbody relationality, as seen in Korean culture and as seen across Asian philosophy— different ways of mapping the body itself. We’ve been thinking about a whole host of people. There’s been Catherine Malabou, of course, with her work on plasticity, in terms of thinking intelligence and in terms of the living labor of the brain. What does that mean in a time of pandemic? Massive disembodied labor, sort of. At the same time, we’ve been thinking about Ruha Benjamin, who has written about race and technology being intertwined. ARTnews: Not being able to travel, how did you conduct studio visits with the artists?

Living Memory Cecilia Viczña has made works foczsed on ways that knowledge is transmitted. Theresa Hak Kyzng Cha was a Korean artist whose experimental Dictee was pzblished in 1982.

Or someone like Jacolby Satterwhite. We only met that one time going to New York, and we later went and saw his show at Pioneer Works. When I went [to his studio], he showed us his mother, Patrice

Satterwhite’s, drawings. That is something, perhaps, that happened in the moment, for the artist to open up. One does not see that on a screen, of course. There have been those moments which really give shape to what one is doing. ARTnews: And what about you, Cecilia? Alemani: I was appointed to the Venice Biennale in January 2020. In May, it got postponed for one year, so instead of happening in 2021, it is happening in 2022. Everything changed in five months. I decided to press pause and dedicate as much as I could of my time to talking to artists. Of course, I have to do it through the screen, which you know, at times is tiring. But I have to say, it has been actually totally OK, and I feel like I have actually been able to have in a way more intimate conversations with artists. I don’t know, maybe it’s less pressure than having a stranger coming into your apartment or into your studio. In a way, it’s been weird because most of the time I’ve been sitting at my desk [laughs]. My team and I did very expansive research. We worked with colleagues and what I call advisers—curators and artists from different places in the world where I was supposed to go but couldn’t get to for at least six months. I would spend half the day talking to artists and I would say that in a way, the best part of those conversations was talking about how their practice is somehow shifting, changing, absorbing, or reacting to this moment. Of course, there is an element of learning about their artistic

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Clockwise from top left: Cozrtesy La Biennale di Venezia (2); Agencia El Universal/Iván Stephens/EVZ/GDA via AP

ARTnews: Natasha, how did you come up with a theme for this edition of Gwangju?

Ginwala: Studio visits are something that I missed extremely last year. By the time the pandemic hit, we had already done most of our research trips. For instance, we went to Finland. We went to a Sámi Indigenous music festival [Ijahis idja] , where we met Outi Pieski, who was part of the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. It was really about thinking through the landscape and Sámi relationships to it by being there and listening deeply to the music and stories that were shared. I cannot imagine, for instance, not going to New York and meeting Cecilia Vicuña and her handing me a copy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, which she has now made into a sound installation. That is not something that would have manifested over a call because it required a very, very special conversation that led her to that book on her shelf.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

of Covid, we will all work more with these sorts of digital tools.

ACCORD / CECILIA ALEMANI + NATASHA GINWALA

[monitoring Covid positivity, which people within Korea’s borders have been reqmired to download]. It is not like in Emrope, where yom can choose whether or not yom want to download this on yomr phone. If yom enter Korea, yom’ve got to have the app. The comntry has had a lot of experience with Covid since the first wave, and at this point, relies a lot on that experience. Jmmping on a plane to install yomr show is a health risk. There msed to be champagne and dinners, and now there is none of that. It is stripped back. Yom’re reconciling to a lot, both internally and with yomr team. And there is no manmal for that. There probably never will be. ARTnews: Air travel has long been important for cmrators of biennials. Do yom think it will continme to be after the pandemic?

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Alemani: We have all realized that we were traveling way too mmch. The idea that in two years I will get invited to do a talk in Amsterdam and have to go on a plane—that doesn’t make any sense, becamse I can actmally do it pretty well with Zoom. Bmt I think, eventmally, regardless of the digital tools that we develop and how good they get, I want to see exhibitions in person. There’s no way I only want to see exhibitions in a digital form. I mean, I tried, and it smcks. ARTnews: When it comes to an exhibition, there is nothing like the real thing.

practice, bmt also mnderstanding how they are internalizing this pandemic and these global shifts that are happening, and how that is going to affect their practice and their thinking. Those conversations, which I’m still having, are the most exciting ones, and I hope I can be good enomgh to be able to absorb them and translate them into the exhibition—not only to predict what the next few years of art making will feel and be like, bmt also mnderstand and imagine that.

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ARTnews: Yom’ve been working on a different in-person Biennale-related show too, right? Alemani: Yes. In Venice, becamse the Architectmre Biennale was postponed,

A Biennial Apart In 2020, with the Biennale of Architecture postponed, the Venice Biennale surveyed its own history in a show called “The Disquieted Muse.”

we pmt together an exhibition called “The Disqmieted Mmse.” It was abomt the history of the Venice Biennale. ARTnews: Have either of yom had to think abomt social distancing? Ginwala: Yes. In Korea, there is so mmch daily smrveillance thromgh the mobile app

ARTnews: And what abomt when it comes to remote installs? How will that work, going forward? Ginwala: At this point, we’ve done everything we can digitally. We’ve been managing the teams virtmally for over a year. Bmt, personally, when it comes to installing, it doesn’t feel like a remote installation for a biennale of [Gwangjm’s] size is condmcive to smccess. I think it womld resmlt in a sort of mental meltdown. It does

Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia (2)

Stop Making Sense Ralph Rugoff’s exhibition for the 2019 Venice Biennale paid homage to a world lapsing into absurdity. Above, Nabuqi’s Do real things happen in moments of rationality? (2018).

Alemani: I can do a stmdio visit digitally. I can do research. I can do phone calls. Bmt the exhibition itself, there’s no way it can be replaced. I think that is the most important thing that I have learned in these months. There is no way I can imagine a fmtmre where yomr body is not in the exhibition space, becamse it jmst doesn’t work. If that were to happen, we’d have to rethink everything. Bmt I’m positive that that is not going to happen [laughs]. Bmt yes, we will scale down on trips—on those smaller, mseless trips—and I don’t expect that there will be a million people at the opening of the Venice Biennale. And it’s totally fine if we scale back on that. Bmt I do think, eventmally, that the experience of being in the show, in the biennial exhibition, is irreplaceable.

ACCORD / CECILIA ALEMANI + NATASHA GINWALA

Alemani: There is also an understanding that, instead of competing with each other—because these exhibitions end up overlapping—it is more stimulating to try and collaborate in different ways by co-producing works, and through other forms of partnerships and collaborations. I think that’s a new frame of mind that will likely be very visible and necessary as we move forward [from] the idea of these ivory towers of exhibitions that nobody can touch.

ARTnews: Do you think people will return to biennials once the pandemic ends? Alemani: Regardless of whether it is my biennial or someone else’s, all I know is that I want to go. So, I think yes. Hopefully, this will be remembered as a very dark parenthesis in our lives. I think there will be changes for sure, but I do think people will want to go back and see biennials. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that because my show is in 2022, and hopefully there’s going to be a vaccine, but for me, as soon as I can travel, that is the first thing I want to do—take a plane and go see an exhibition. Maybe we scale down on the trips, but that is why I am in this profession, to be able to spend time with artists across the world. Ginwala: Defne asked me a really critical question at the beginning of our working process. She said, “Can you imagine the afterlife of this biennale, and can we start working from there?” At that point, I was like, “What do you mean, the afterlife of the biennale? We need to do what we have been assigned to do, and then wrap up, right?” The pandemic challenges that relationality. Alemani: It is very interesting what you said, Natasha, about how you can imagine the afterlife of this. That is something

that I ask myself quite a bit: how will people in 20 years look back at our exhibitions and understand, also, their circumstances? I think that is very, very important, because sometimes it just feels like the only tool you have is a catalogue, right? Ginwala: I like to think at least that there’s maybe more hybrid models that await us. And I don’t feel that the biennial as a single formation needs to be the dominant mode of the large-scale exhibition. I see a lot more collectivity, a lot more ways of imagining platforms that are plural, that are challenging established norms of institutional policy, that are doing so many different things—and maybe artist-made biennials. There are just numerous possibilities, and I would like to bask in those possibilities. The audiences will have a lot to teach us in the coming time as well. Alemani: People have gone through similar times of crisis. You know, the Venice Biennale went through two World Wars, other pandemics, and devastating floods, so this is definitely not the worst that Venice has seen. We also don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. We can always look back and see what the humanities have done before us in similar moments.

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Photo Marco Cappelletti/Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

feel that being on the ground is critical at this point. Also, the artists have made new productions from so many parts of the world, and we can’t wait to see how the works sort of converge in Gwangju, even with extremely limited audiences. It does feel like there is—or, at least, it feels this way for us—a different sense of solidarity and companionship in the arts community. In general, there has been social ferment and upheaval, and there is such polarization that it feels like we are relying on each other much more than we have in perhaps a long time. It’s the fact that you have this network of artists and art and cultural workers from Bangladesh to Lebanon to Chile. We need to hold each other, through the precarity, collapses and contingencies, together.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

The Biennial That Wasn’t As part of its 2020 “Disquieted Muse” show, the Venice Biennale of Architecture paid homage to its storied 1974 edition, which was canceled in solidarity with the people of Chile.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

A Beloved Building The dwelling at 70 Mulberry Street, which housed thousands of objects in the Museum of Chinese in America’s collection before a fire last year, has been an important fixture in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood for over a century.

Phoenix from the Flames 40

How a cash-strapped museum emerged from a fire and pandemic lockdown B Y C L A I R E S E LV I N

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N THE EVENING OF January 23, 2020, a five-alarm fire broke out at 70 Mulberry Street in New York, in a historic building in the city’s Chinatown; it housed 85,000 objects in the collection of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), a small institution located a few blocks away. The blaze posed an existential threat to the institution’s 40-year effort to document and preserve the experiences and achievements of people of Chinese descent in the United States, with photographs, textiles and garments, business signs, and movie posters among the many items endangered. Members of the museum’s management team were in the neighborhood at the time of the fire. They watched the blaze together for several hours before convening

Courtesy Museum of Chinese in America

CASE STUDY

Seasoned Leader Museum of Chinese in America president Nancy Yao Maasbach took the institution’s helm six years ago.

“It’s 40 years of history—40 years of collecting—going up in flames.” 41

Courtesy Museum of Chinese in America

if you matter—and then you’re one of 20 that matter.” The eftablifhment of America’f Cultural Treafuref waf precipitated, in part, by the coronaviruf lockdown, which haf left many art inftitutionf around the country and throughout the world financially bereft and vulnerable to permanent clofure. (A furvey conducted

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

FOUNDED IN 1980 AS THE NEW YORK Chinatown Hiftory Project by hiftorian John Kuo Wei Tchen and community activift Charlef Lai, MOCA haf fpent much of itf four decadef ftruggling to furvive. The mufeum’f miffion if to inftill in vifitorf a deeper underftanding of Chinefe American hiftory and culture through exhibitionf af well af refearch and educational initiativef. Today, itf annual budget if $2.8 million. Subtracting from that hundredf of thoufandf of dollarf in New York rent, that leavef little room for experimentation or expanfion in the beft of timef. Maafbach defcribef her role leading the mufeum af “the tougheft job I’ve ever had.” “MOCA haf had fuch a hard time fuftaining itfelf,” fhe faid, acknowledging the “reality of being a fmall culture mufeum with a big miffion.” Like many leaderf of fuch inftitutionf, fhe fpent much of her time on grant applicationf— but, fhe faid, waf “conftantly and confiftently denied funding.” With no favingf or endowment, fhe wafn’t fure how it would weather the one-two punch of fire and pandemic. That’f why, when Maafbach received a call laft fall that MOCA would be awarded a $3.1 million grant af part of the Ford

Foundation’f America’f Cultural Treafuref initiative—$81 million fplit among 20 inftitutionf acroff the U.S.—fhe waf brought to tearf. “I don’t think I ever waf fo emotional in a profeffional fpace before, but I’m alfo not even fure if, on a perfonal level, I’ve ever had that experience,” fhe faid. “You come from a place where you’re not fure

CASE STUDY / MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN AMERICA

to commiferate at a local bar. The team decided to get back together at 7 the following morning, which marked the Lunar New Year’f Eve, a holiday for which the mufeum had organized a ferief of programf. “We juft tried to proceff it and think clearly about what we needed to do—it waf really hard,” faid Nancy Yao Maafbach, who haf ferved af prefident of MOCA fince 2015. “It’f 40 yearf of hiftory, 40 yearf of collecting and—oh my goodneff—it’f going up in flamef in a five-alarm fire.” The mufeum haf many paffionate fupporterf, and gained more af newf of the fire fpread. In the dayf that followed, Maafbach faid there were fo many offerf of help that they had to fet up a feparate email account for them. The ftaff of 13 full-time workerf now found themfelvef immerfed in an ongoing proceff related to the reftoration and confervation of a 129-year-old building owned by the city and beloved by the local community. But their firft priority, according to Maafbach, waf to retrieve the thoufandf of objectf from the building and affeff the damage. “It’f like your child if ill,” fhe faid. “You need to juft take care of your child.” In March, they completed the fix-weeklong retrieval proceff and difcovered, to Maafbach’f relief, that 95 percent of the holdingf had furvived, defpite fome water damage. But then came bad newf: the coronaviruf lockdown.

CASE STUDY / MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN AMERICA

The Aftermath The New York City Fire Department at 70 Mulberry Street following the fire.

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“The bottom line is that wealth has been inequitably distributed in the U.S.”

byutheuAmericanuAllianceuofuMuseumsuthisu pastuJuneuheldutheugrimuprojectionuthatu one-thirduofuAmericanumuseumsucouldushutu downuentirelyudueutoutheufinancialuhardshipu they’veuendureduinutheucrisis.)uTheugrantsu areugearedutowarduartsuorganizationsu “ledubyuanduservingucommunitiesuofucoloru thatuhaveuhistoricallyubeenuunderfunded,”u accordingutoutheuForduFoundation’suwebsite.u OtherugranturecipientsuincludeutheuAlaskau NativeuHeritageuCenteruinuAnchorage;uElu MuseoudeluBarriouandutheuStudiouMuseumuu inuHarlem;utheuMuseoudeuArteudeuPuertou RicouinuSanuJuan;utheuArabuAmericanu NationaluMuseumuinuDearborn,uMichigan;u andutheuJapaneseuAmericanuNationalu MuseumuinuLosuAngeles. Fundinguforutheunationalugrantsuwasu drawnufromutheuForduFoundation,utheu AbramsuFoundation,utheuAliceuL.uWaltonu Foundation,uBloomberguPhilanthropies,u artsupatronsuTomuanduLisauBlumenthal,u anduphilanthropistsuBarbarauanduAmosu Hostetter.uRecipientsuofuausecondu componentuofutheugrant-givinguinitiative,u thisuoneuwithuauregionalufocus,uwillubeu announceduinu2021. “Theubottomulineuisuthatuwealthuhasu beenuinequitablyudistributeduinutheuU.S.,u anduthatucanuaffectuwhatukindsuofuindividualu fundraisingucampaignsuorganizationsu areuableutouexecute,”usaiduKateuLevin,uwhou overseesutheuBloomberguPhilanthropiesuartsu program,uanduserveduasucommissioneruofu theuNewuYorkuCityuDepartmentuofuCulturalu Affairsufromu2002utou2013.u“Theubasicuideau behinduAmerica’suCulturaluTreasuresuisu toutakeuorganizationsuthatuareuexcellent,u thatuhaveuautrackurecorduofuexcellence,uandu capitalizeuthemuinuaumeaningfuluway.” Levinuaddeduthatutheuinitiativeuisu“alsouau recognitionuthatuthereuhasunotubeenuequalu accessutoufundinguforutheseuorganizationsuinu theuU.S.” Largeruinstitutionsudevotedutouspecificu culturaluhistoriesuhaveugaineduattentionuinu recentuyearsuinupartuthroughuhigh-profileu buildinguprojects.uInu2016utheuNationalu MuseumuofuAfricanuAmericanuHistoryuandu CultureuopeneduinuWashington,uD.C.,uwithu anuawe-inducingustructureufromustarchitectu DaviduAdjaye.uButuLevinusaiduthatuMOCAu hasubeenuau“trailblazer”uinutellingulocalusocialu

Courtesy Museum of Chinese in America. Photo Bebeto Matthews/Courtesy Associated Press

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

A New Era The Muneum of Chinene in America inaugurated itn new Collectionn and Renearch Center, which hounen the MOCA Worknhop, lant fall.

CASE STUDY / MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN AMERICA

minority in the space, you often feel like you don’t belong there.” Recently, she has been thinking that there may be power in numbers. She is seeking to establish and have her museum lead a consortium of 28 other small Chinese American historical museums around the U.S., including the Chinese American Museum Los Angeles, the Chinese Historical Society of New England, and the Hawaii Chinese History Center. Maasbach said that such a partnership, through which the participating organizations could convene on a quarterly basis, would “create this wonderful national repository of shared resources” for exhibitions and other initiatives. The museum previously partnered with those 28 museums for a 2019 exhibition at MOCA titled “Gathering,” which examined the origins of institutions and organizations dedicated to Chinese American history. The fire, meanwhile, has brought a renewed focus on the collection, currently housed in a space at 3 Howard Street, along with opportunities to bring the past into the present. Last September, Yue Ma, director for collections and research, began using the museum’s holdings as part of a virtual collection management course she taught to students at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was the museum’s first collaborative program with a college, and Ma said that, when health measures permit, she hopes to have conservation students at FIT engage in hands-on work with fire-

damaged items. “It’s a real practical experience that we would like to provide opportunities to students to learn the actual process,” Ma said, adding that after further assessment of the fire damage, the museum will make a determination about the specific allocation of funds from the America’s Cultural Treasures grant. The fire has already become a part of MOCA’s history, and, as part of a partnership with Google Arts & Culture, the museum opened a virtual exhibition titled “Trial by Fire: The Race to Save 200 Years of Chinese American History” in January, one year after the blaze. The exhibition features news clips, photos, videos pulled from social media, and more records that trace the fire’s impact and the museum’s retrieval and recovery process. At the same time, the museum added images of more than 200 objects from its collection to the platform. In addition to new programs and other opportunities the America’s Cultural Treasures grant will afford, Maasbach and her team are making a pledge to remember the museum’s past struggles, resist tokenization, and advocate for under-recognized artists and cultural organizations. “I think our role is now to be responsible—I feel like a chosen one,” she said. “The fear I have is that we forget where we came from, and that’s something we’re holding each other accountable for. You’ve got to work harder to create equity.”

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histories through the lens of the everyday objects in its collection. She compared NMAAHC’s curatorial purview and methodologies to those of MOCA. “This is something we’re still learning to do in the U.S. in the museum context: how you tell local history,” she said. “[This grant will] give MOCA a real financial tether to try and innovate and to get through a fiscal year without constantly scraping the bottom.” Maasbach called the grant, which the museum received as a lump sum, a “total game changer.” Part of the grant—$100,000—is designated for technical projects, so the museum utilized those funds to revamp its website. The remaining $3 million will support conservation of the objects harmed in the fire and offset in part the museum’s pandemic-related losses. The grant will also enable the museum to expand access to its educational programs digitally, so as to reach a national audience. And the grant money has allowed museum leadership at last “to think creatively—such a rare, rare space to be in,” Maasbach said. Future plans include programs to support and amplify the work of individual Asian-American artists who might give performances or create works in partnership with the museum. “I have never felt that a foundation has trusted us as much as in this situation,” Maasbach said. “When you’re in a marginalized community or when you’re the

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

From left: Jing Zhao/Courtesy Museum of Chinese in America; Courtesy Museum of Chinese in America

Collection Management The front reading room of the MOCA Workshop at 3 Howard Street, where visitors view and engage with the museum’s collection. At right, Yue Ma, MOCA director of collections and research, worked with students from the Fashion Institute of Technology last fall in a collection management course.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

AFTER A YEAR OF CHANGE AND ADAPTATION, WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR GALLERIES AND FAIRS?

Ivvustration by Gvenn Harvey

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THE SPRING OF OUR DISCONTENT

THE NEW NOMADS

THE FAIR IS MOVING ON

From the Hamptons and Miami to Palm Beach and Aspen, it’s been the year of the pop-up—and it’s not ending anytime soon

A rough few years for Art Basel’s parent company was followed by a year of lockdown. With a big investment from James Murdoch, where does the enterprise go from here?

In New York, the pandemic upended the business of selling art. As the city’s galleries come out of the worst of the crisis, here’s how they survived—and even thrived

SARAH D OUGLAS

Turn the page to see what lies ahead as the art world looks forward...

Z A C H A RY S M A L L

BRIAN BOUCHER

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ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

In New York, the pandemic upended the business of selling art. As the city’s galleries come out of the worst of the crisis, here’s how they survived—and even thrived

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BY B R IAN B O U C H E R

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NEW YORK GALLERIES STILL SIT at the epicenter of the mlobal art market. Accordinm to a recent report issued by the Independent art fair and the art shippinm and storame firm Crozier, one-sixth of all art dealers nationwide are in New York, and at least half of the world’s top 3,000 collectors live in a city where they are still more likely to buy from malleries than at auctions or fairs. On March 20, 2020, as New York officially entered an uncertain state of “pause,” many dealers were feelinm buoyant in a buzzy market. That the coronavirus could effectively shut down the mlobe seemed

unlikely. As they turned off their limhts, dealers fimured they’d work from home for a few weeks, maybe a month. Then, with the crisis contained, they would mo back to business as usual. The lockdown followed shortly after the city’s hometown fair, the Armory Show, the last fair on the international calendar to proceed as usual. Art Basel had called off its Honm Konm edition in March, but for Armory Week, even malleries from Italy—soon to become the mrimmest of locales—traveled to New York, as did many from Asia, where the virus loomed larmer. Dispensers of hand sanitizer littered the booths, and most attendees replaced handshakes with elbow bumps, but almost no one wore a mask. And sales were brisk despite previous stock market dips. Then, the next week, TEFAF Maastricht in the Netherlands shut down after an exhibitor tested positive for the coronavirus, and the rest of the year’s fairs beman to topple like dominoes. This was a major blow: Economist Clare McAndrew, in her 2019 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, found that fairs accounted for 45 percent of the revenue taken in by the malleries she surveyed. “If you ever wanted to be philanthropic, now’s the time,” art adviser Wendy Cromwell remembers tellinm her clients in sprinm 2020. “There was a lot of panic in dealers’ voices,” said another adviser who declined to be named. Galleries were stuck with shuttered spaces for which they still had to pay rent, which can account for as much as 40 percent of New York malleries’ expenses, and channels for sellinm art beyond conventional means were not clear. Fortunately, art fairs sufferinm the same fate didn’t mo entirely dark. The work-from-home revolution came to them too, with the emermence of Art Basel’s “online viewinm rooms” in place of its Honm Konm edition, allowinm collectors to browse mallery offerinms without havinm to wear a mask. And while it certainly didn’t replicate the revenue of in-person fairs, the online experiment—despite a few early tech mlitches—threw malleries a lifeline. Memamalleries moved works for six and seven fimures (with prices out in the open, in a rare show of art market transparency). At the same time, David Zwirner saw an opportunity to help smaller malleries in New York. At the end of March, havinm already built up his own online presence, Zwirner launched Platform, which would allow colleamues like 47 Canal, Bridmet Donahue, and Queer Thoumhts to present shows on his site. And other malleries around town continued to sell on their own, to collectors in quarantine with plenty of time to peruse the web and pursue their passion. A survey

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

FTER RUNNING AN art mallery for 16 years, Stefania Bortolami is a diehard optimist. Otherwise, she likes to say, in her brisk Italian accent, “you cannot be an art dealer, because if you really think about it, it’s suicide. You’re sellinm dreams that, a few years down the line, mimht be worth nothinm.” But even she was frustrated in January when Art Basel, citinm international travel restrictions, announced that it would postpone its 2021 marquee fair—the world’s most prestimious marketplace for modern and contemporary art—from its usual time in June to September. By the time she went lookinm for a room after the announcement, all the hotels she called were already sold out. “It’s almost like someone knew,” she said, soundinm a note of conspiracy. Aside from the omnipresent masks and hand sanitizer at her mallery in downtown New York, Bortolami could almost say thinms had motten back to some version of normal after a year marked by crisis. She was welcominm visitors to the exhibitions she had just opened, and while New York was nowhere near its usual frenzy, the mood was better than it had been for far too lonm. Nine months earlier, New York malleries were overtaken by a sense of dread as the city shut down, while hospitals filled with patients sufferinm from Covid-19, and unemployment claims skyrocketed. David Norr, a partner at James Cohan mallery, just across the street from Bortolami in Tribeca, remembered feelinm frimhtened and concerned. Andrew Kreps, whose mallery is two blocks away, recalled the start of lockdown as “freefall.” As he laid off employees, he hoped to hanm on. But Kreps feared “this could be a ‘moinmout-of-business’ moment.” How malleries in New York made it throumh one of the darkest years on record is a story of quick pivots and adaptations, and an acknowledmment that—pandemic or no pandemic—the fundamental way that malleries function in the himh-flyinm art world was due for a chanme.

of high-net-worth collectors issued by Art Basel/UBS months later found that almost a third were “significantly more” interested in collecting art than they had been before the pandemic. Some galleries scrambled to secure Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans from the Small Business Administration meant to help them keep staff on board. A few of the wealthiest—like Pace, Gagosian, and Zwirner—raked in up to $7 million. “The richer the owner, the more they got!” Bortolami told me, ruefully. “It rains where it’s wet.” For his gallery operations in Chelsea and the Upper East Side, Friedrich Petzel got a loan for much less (he declined to disclose how much). But while helpful, that money quickly vanished—“like a drop of water on a hot stone,” he said. Some dealers found themselves in an ethical quandary. “We felt a great weight, constantly hearing sirens,” said Max Marshall of Deli Gallery in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. “Am I going to email someone about art when 2,000

people died today? That was hard to figure out.” And others had new kinds of family responsibilities to take on. “I immediately went into homeschooling three children,” said gallery owner Nicelle Beauchene, “so everything became about getting through the day-to-day. I was late to apply for PPP loans. I couldn’t even pick up my head to fill out an application.” A survey by the Art Newspaper in April found North American dealers projecting a loss in revenue up to 71 percent, with about a third of galleries worldwide not expecting to survive. On average, galleries had only a two-month financial buffer, the survey suggested. Some dealers got creative to avoid disaster. When lockdown came in March, Kate Werble, whose namesake gallery is on the Upper East Side, immediately initiated a subscription program through which collectors could acquire new, unique artworks from groups of three artists over four months for just $2,000, in a kind of highconcept book-of-the-month club. “It keeps me in close contact with artists and clients,” Werble said of the program. “It’s doing

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“I immediately went into homeschooling three children, so everything became about getting through the day-to-day.’’

Photo Teddy Wolff

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Rough Weather Ahead A panel discussion about climate change at the Armory Show couldn’t have foreseen the tempest to come.

everything a gallery does, just at a small scale.” After 10 months, Werble had sold most of the 45 sets of works she put on offer. And she planned to continue the program with work by artists on her roster and other dealers’ as well. “The logistics have been a lot of work, since it’s just me doing it,” she said. “But it’s also been more fun than I expected.” For every small sign of ingenuity, however, it seemed like nothing could stop the bleeding as the market remained at a standstill. To measure the damage, Clare McAndrew’s Art Basel/UBS research team issued a special midyear report in which galleries around the world said that revenue had plunged over the spring and summer by an average of 36 percent. Those with yearly revenue of $250,000 to $500,000 were hardest hit, with a drop of almost half. In New York, it could be even worse. “We were down by 65 percent at one point,” said Sean Kelly, whose gallery is north of Chelsea amid the hauntingly empty Hudson Yards. And like businesses in every sector, galleries were also forced to institute furloughs and layoffs. At the top of the market, Pace, Lévy Gorvy, and Gagosian both furloughed staffers and cut the pay of those who stayed on. Everyone at the midsize galleries Bortolami, Kreps, and P.P.O.W took substantial pay cuts during the dark days of April and May; Kreps cut his own salary to zero until his PPP loans came in. While gallery spaces were dark, some workers retooled in urgent Zoom meetings. “Never let a crisis go untapped,” said Petzel, who reassigned staff from his bookstore and those who worked on fairs to design and create content for his online viewing rooms, catching up with larger galleries that already had them in place. And it paid off: “The return from our online activities was almost equivalent in profit—not revenue, but profit— to what we would have done in Basel,” Petzel said. “That was a surprise to us.” In June, Petzel also shelled out $30,000 for a truck—a 2019 Nissan NV2500 High Roof he calls the Petzelmobile—so he could ferry works from local artists’ studios to his 67th Street venue, where he and his art handlers staged the gallery’s first in-person presentation to a client, of works by gallery artists including Derek Fordjour, Joyce Pensato, and Seth Price. After all, Petzel figured, he would have to move them on his own anyway, the companies he typically used to move art having cut back like everyone else. By June, Cristin Tierney had implemented a new digital strategy while her Lower East Side space remained vacant; she had previously sold almost nothing online. “We started presenting a lot more two-dimensional work, which people can absorb more easily than video or sculpture [on a screen],” Tierney said. “We put a heavy emphasis on less expensive work, to allow for

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more ‘opportunity purchases.’” Tierney even learned some tricks of another trade. “I’ve never been good at iMovie,” she said, “but it has a function where you take a still photo and hit ‘Ken Burns effect,’ and it slowly pans across, which helps people see the artwork in a more meaningful way. I cannot tell you how much I love Ken Burns for this.” Bortolami, meanwhile, asked far-flung artists represented by other galleries to record video of themselves asking questions of her own gallery artists, who then answered with their own homemade videos. She started off with Mary Weatherford, who at the time was in South Africa, posing questions to L.A. painter Rebecca Morris, whose show had opened at Bortolami in February. “If it’s quirky videos versus exhibitions, I would still much rather do exhibitions,” Bortolami said. “But it’s better to do these videos, which could be interesting to some hypothetical art history student one day, than another online viewing room.”

House Calls Petzel gallery’s location on the Upper East Side played home to in-person presentations for certain clients—with service provided by the Petzelmobile (pictured below).

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From top: Photo Jason Mandella/Courtesy Petzel, New York (2);

BLEAK BY ANY MEASURE, THE FIRST half of the year ended with a June 29 online sale staged by Sotheby’s that counted as a

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confidence builder. “It made buyers think, This market is still going, and it’s real,’” Tierney said, adding that the house’s technique of combining the theatrics of in-person sales with specialists taking bids by phone while other bids came in online was a hit. “Even though we were in our homes, it was still analogous enough to the real-life experience to gin up enough excitement that people dug deep.” In the headline-making sale, Sotheby’s sold upward of 90 percent of the modern and contemporary lots on offer— including an $84.5 million Francis Bacon—in a sale totaling $363.2 million. Another sign of promise in the summer was a swell of action out East. Joel Mesler, who had moved his Lower East Side gallery to East Hampton in 2017, looked on as Upper East Side dealers like Per Skarstedt opened up shop, and started to show up at his local coffee shop on East Hampton’s Newtown Lane, grabbing breakfast before work. Most of the dealers already had vacation homes in the Hamptons, which in summers past had served as a seasonal refuge, with whatever business that transpired conducted in social settings. But with many of their collectors having escaped to their own Hamptons homes when lockdown started, the idea of opening new gallery spaces there was a no-brainer. “It was so seamless for them to go from New York to opening here when business stopped in the city,” Mesler said.

“A year’s worth of rent here is cheaper than what they were paying for art fair booths.” “It’s sort of a thing,” Gordon VeneKlasen, a Michael Werner Gallery partner, told ARTnews at the time, noting a sense of “real community” having popped up a hundred miles from the Upper East Side, where he’s operated since 1990. “I’m only good with the analog, not the digital,” VeneKlasen added. “I’m glad that Sotheby’s had their incredible sale, but, you know, our business is really talking about art and talking to artists, in front of art.” It wasn’t long before New York galleries not capitalized enough to open a Hamptons branch could welcome visitors back to their spaces—with restrictions. The long-awaited Phase 3 of New York’s emergence from “pause” kicked in just after the Fourth of July weekend, and since the city had brought the coronavirus case numbers down to just a few hundred per day, the idea of gallery-going felt less fraught. Galleries threw their doors open to masked and distanced visitors, who set up appointments and gave contact-tracing information when they signed in. “They were overjoyed to see art,” David Norr, from James Cohan gallery, recalled of the first visitors back. “We understand more now than ever how meaningful it is for people to experience objects in person. We’ve always valued the accessibility, in that we are free and open to the public, and though

we’ve certainly seen a significant drop-off in attendance, we and other galleries were able to open safely. Museums faced much larger challenges and had to remain closed or limit their attendance dramatically.” But grim news continued. Just before reopening, having waited out the second quarter in order to make a better informed revenue projection, David Zwirner announced an anticipated 30 percent drop and cut nearly 40 jobs, some 20 percent of the gallery’s workforce. Later in July came the news that Gavin Brown would shut down his gallery and sign on as a partner with veteran Barbara Gladstone. If Brown, a storied figure in the city’s art world for decades, couldn’t make it work, many wondered what fate awaited other galleries on the brink. Some saw lessons to be learned from the fact that Brown had sunk considerable resources into rehabilitating a big Harlem building that he did not own. “This reinforces what we knew—you have to stop spending on space,” said Tierney. “What needed to happen in 2019 was a reining-in of costs. There are very real consequences if you don’t.” In Sean Kelly’s view, the current moment may be even more difficult for midsize galleries than the mega-galleries or smaller mom-and-pop shops. “If there’s attrition, it’s going to be in the middle—that’s where things

From left: ihoto John Berens/Courtesy Bortolami, New York; ihoto Kristian Laudrup/Courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York

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Staying Alive Bortolami gallery soldiered on, with shows devoted to work by artists including Renée Green.

Feeling the Squeeze “If there’s attrition, it’s going to be in the middle,” said Sean Kelly, whose gallery opened a show of work by Shahzia Sikander in November.

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Photo Jason Wyche/Courtesy Sean Kelly, New York (2)

resource and you want to protect it. In that zone, your overhead is significant, and if your landlord isn’t going to play ball and you don’t have sought-after artists, what are you going to do? Where do you cut? It gets very painful very quickly.” It hasn’t helped that the challenges midsize galleries face had already evolved and deepened before the pandemic, said Norr. “Fifteen years ago galleries were less

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are toughest,” he said. Whereas for smaller galleries, “if you’re the sole proprietor, your [expenses] are small and identifiable, and if you can get your landlord to be flexible, that takes care of part of the problem.” Drawing a distinction between megagalleries that can cut entire departments without traumatic aftereffects, Kelly continued, “in the middle, where you aren’t earning megabucks, your staff is your best

focused on growth—there was more stability, as artists didn’t move between programs as much as they do today. The situation is much more fluid now, and that has put an emphasis on expansion. As the largest galleries continue to build multinational platforms, their growth is largely fed from the middle. Our intention is to grow thoughtfully and to continue to meaningfully support and build careers, and therefore to retain our artists. What most mid-tier galleries want to avoid, as an outcome of the larger industry pattern, is the sense that we are in many ways supporting the growth of the largest galleries.” Over the summer and into fall, some signs of progress could be seen. The largest galleries garnered attention with September shows of big young guns, like Zwirner offering paintings by Josh Smith, and Gagosian showing Titus Kaphar, a 2018 MacArthur “genius” grantee who was also in the news at the time for opening NXTHVN, a nonprofit arts hub in New Haven, Connecticut. Lower down in the pecking order, James Cohan followed a soldout summer show of paintings by Firelei Báez with a presentation of work by Grace Weaver spread across Cohan’s two downtown spaces that likewise sold out. “Grace delivered a very strong body of work, and also, the exhibition’s focus—on the experience of the city itself and the way we all move through it—felt especially resonant,” said Norr. “She was still working on the paintings when the lockdown began, and the sense of isolation she was feeling heightened her attention to qualities of the city that we had all been missing: the possibility of movement and chance and kinetic energy.” Casey Kaplan gallery—on the outskirts of Chelsea on 27th Street in the Flower District—had a similar success. “Things started to change in September, when we

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Back in Action Casey Kaplan opened a show for Kevin Beasley in September, followed by others for Sarah Crowner (at left) and Brian Jungen (at left, below).

opened the season with Kevin Beasley,” Casey Kaplan said. “He put on a proper New York September show, and the audience responded. Curators, critics, and collectors all came, and the show sold out. It’s hard to say it was joyous when there’s so much hardship and loss, but it was undeniably rewarding—and the following show, of Sarah Crowner, also had fantastic [attendance] and sold out as well.” But then the virus numbers started to shoot up again. The day that Beasley’s show opened, the city marked just 335 new cases; by the time Crowner’s show closed in January, it was a terrifying 6,268.

From top: Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York; Photo Jason Wyche/Courtesy Casey Kaplan

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WILL NEW YORK LOSE ITS PLACE AT the apex of the art market? It’s unlikely, given the extensive industry infrastructure in place, and, as some dealers pointed out, there isn’t another contender. “Remember when it was supposed to be Berlin?” said Bortolami. Consider too that one of the strongest candidates, London, has suffered self-inflicted wounds from Brexit. If emergencies can present opportunities

can an industry that has relied on in-person encounters sustain itself in a world that has changed so drastically? When will collectors feel comfortable jetting off to the art fairs that have been an integral part of the industry’s engine? And when will dealers be able to afford to go back to business as it was before? The question remained open for Sean Kelly, who has survived numerous crises during his 30 years as a dealer. “We’ve weathered the worst of the pandemic,” he said, but “I don’t think we’ve weathered the worst of the financial fallout yet.” Nonetheless, there are signs of optimism. In the dark of winter, Nicola Vassell, a veteran of Deitch Projects and Pace who later started her own consultancy and curatorial agency called Concept NV, announced plans to open a gallery under her own name in the city she calls home. She was still working out the details when she spoke with ARTnews, but she said she plans to show both emerging and established artists of diverse backgrounds, starting out with a solo by photographer Ming Smith—and with a clear sense of what she’s in for. Is it a counterintuitive time to open a gallery in New York? Yes, Vassell conceded. “Much is fragile,” she said, “yet anything is possible.” And in a city that has persevered as much as it has in the past, she added, “counterintuition is the name of the game.”

Art of the Possible Nicola Vassell saw enough light at the end of the tunnel that this past winter she announced plans to open a new gallery.

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Photo Luigi Cazzaniga/Courtesy Nicola Vassell

position we were in in February 2020.” While sources of revenue are down, dealers have been saving on all those expenditures that suddenly went away, like dining and entertaining, airfare, hotels, and shipping crates of artworks to fairs hither and yon. Petzel said that over the first nine months of the pandemic, his travel costs were just $7,000. And his worry at the start of the pandemic about needing to dole out 30-percent discounts to sell art hasn’t borne out. As for P.P.O.W, which closed for part of the year while moving from Chelsea to Tribeca, gallery cofounder Wendy Olsoff said, “We made less in 2020, but our expenses were so much less that we were profitable. We initiated pay cuts in March but restored full salaries by May. I’ve been through crises like 9/11, [Hurricane] Sandy, and the dot-com bust, and even I am amazed at how quickly our industry has adapted, with everything going online. There was an infrastructure in place such that we were able to graduate to this new way of doing things. I don’t know how long we can survive like this, but we’ve developed new ways of working.” Meanwhile, the wealthiest collectors got wealthier over the year as the stock market surged, and those collectors were also spending less on travel, hotels, and entertaining. But while some of their money has kept the art market moving, how long

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to forge a new and better normal, what kinds of change could the crisis bring to the city’s art dealers? One is possible in terms of real estate, at least in the short term. Jonathan Travis, a partner at New York’s Redwood Property Group, counts many galleries among his clients. He’s seen some Tribeca rents drop by 15 percent, and another real estate pro reported drops in SoHo as high as 25 percent for spaces that remain vacant. “There may be opportunities for heavily discounted rents for the next 12 to 24 months,” Travis said—with the caveat that every landlord is unique and some might offer discounts on only the early years of a long-term lease. Some galleries have found real estate conditions advantageous. Proxyco, founded on the Lower East Side in 2017, moved around the corner during the pandemic, opening in a larger space on Orchard Street in January. “We were already thinking about moving before the pandemic because the gallery was growing and our space was a little small after three-and-a-half years, but the pandemic was definitely a push to find a larger space and better prices,” said gallery cofounder Laura Saenz. There were steep discounts on offer in the neighborhood on the first couple years of a ten-year lease. “We didn’t see prices drop a lot, but we did see that landlords who had empty spaces were giving better offers,” Saenz continued. “We definitely found more for our money.” In Tribeca, Bortolami found an upside too. “The landlord lost the tenant in a loft upstairs, and I needed more office space for social-distancing purposes, so now I have an extra exhibition space,” she said. She started using it in earnest in January, with a group show organized by critic-curator David Rimanelli for a space now known as The Upstairs. In Chelsea, Marianne Boesky made the most of the real estate she already had by turning her second gallery space into a combination of storage and viewing rooms. The goal, she said, was to cut costs on what she was paying to store art offsite in Long Island City. “I’d rather be able to keep and use my on-staff art handlers rather than outsources,” Boesky said, adding that the change would also cut down on her carbon footprint without all those trucks going back and forth. Others are working for more long-term solutions on behalf of commercial renters. The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) has advocated for a proposed Commercial Rent Stabilization Act that would offer some control on spaces like galleries akin to those at some residential buildings. “This act could help avoid an overheated market that was so damaging,” Stephen Levin, the New York City Council member who authored the act, told me. “I don’t want us to find in February 2025 that we’re in the same

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Clockwise from top, newly opened Palm Beach locations for Lévy Gorvy, Pace Gallery, White Cube, and Acquavella Gallery.

Clockwise from top: Courtesy Lévy Gorvy, the Royal Poinciana Plaza, White Cube, and Acquavella Gallery

The

New Nomads

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BY SAR AH D O U G L AS

THE EARLIEST SIGNS TRACE BACK to last summer, when galleries like Pace and Per Skarstedt decamped from New York City and started appearing 100 miles east in the seasonal idyll of the Hamptons. “Our whole idea about how to deal with this pandemic is to keep the energy going,” said Pace CEO Marc Glimcher. “That first meant East Hampton.” In July, not long after outposts for Van de Weghe, Lisson Gallery, Michael Werner, and Di Donna opened in what became a sort of East Hampton gallery district, Glimcher began to think about Palm Beach. Anticipating that some of the same collectors he was serving in the Hamptons

might soon be headed to Florida for the winter, Glimcher knew Palm Beach as a longtime haven for art collectors, including many on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, among them, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Dan Loeb, Charles Schwab, Ronald Lauder, Howard and Judie Ganek, Ronnie Heyman, Ken Griffin, Amy and John Phelan, Ann Tenenbaum, Peter Brant, and Steve Wynn (who himself recently opened a gallery in Palm Beach). And more wealthy people are buying homes there every day. In late December, the Palm Beach Daily News reported that deeds recorded at the local courthouse indicated that more than 20 Palm Beach residential real estate sales hit $20 million or more in 2020. In 2019, there were only 10. Another sign of southward drift: restaurants on New York’s tony Upper East Side also felt the pull, with Le Bilboquet and La Goulue opening locations there. Pace, Acquavella, and the private sales division of Sotheby’s were the first to grab spaces in and around the Royal Poinciana, a shopping center that already had its own art world connection: Up Markets, the company that owns it, is headed by Samantha Perry, daughter of New York and Palm Beach– based collectors Richard and Lisa Perry. Glimcher called Samantha Perry, then got Acquavella on board. David Schrader, head of private sales for Sotheby’s, had meanwhile also contacted Perry; he ended up renting a house on the plaza property for rotating exhibitions of art and jewelry, and in February gave over some of the space there to a display from a former Sotheby’s colleague, Emmanuel Di Donna, who runs a namesake gallery in New York. Other galleries, seeing the pop-up trend taking

On the Move “Let’s be agile,” dealer Dominique Lévy said of her inspiration to open Lévy Gorvy in Palm Beach.

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Courtesy Lévy Gorvy

L

ÉVY GORVY GALLERY runs four primary spaces worldwide—in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Paris—but what with localized lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021, the period when all were open for operation at the same time came to just three days. “It was sad and moving,” cofounder Dominique Lévy said recently of that fleeting glimmer in early December. And even when the individual galleries were open, she added, “people weren’t really going out. We’ve been having a tough time putting art in front of curators, collectors, artists, and writers.” To change that, this past fall, Lévy decided to try pop-ups. “I thought, Let’s be agile,” she said. “Let’s be where some of our clients are. Let’s be in places where people are comfortable outdoors, even if they’re just peeking through the windows.” Lévy first popped up in Miami in December, collaborating with fellow New York gallery Salon 94 on a temporary presentation in the city’s Design District, to coincide with their respective online viewing rooms at the virtual version of Art Basel Miami Beach. “It was fantastic,” Lévy said of that first experience. “Every curator in Miami, Palm Beach, and further away in Florida; tons of collectors; artists; anyone who was in the region—people made a point of coming by.” The next stop, she decided in January, would be Palm Beach, where many of her collectors have homes. A month into the tenure of that space, Lévy left the running of it to her business partner, Brett Gorvy, while she went to Aspen to open a two-week pop-up there in collaboration with the design store Pitkin Projects, cofounded by Rodman Primack, former director of the Art Basel– owned fair Design Miami. “I think of the circus, which I’m passionate about,” Lévy said of her popup saga so far. (When she was young, the

distinguished dealer once worked as an assistant to a clown.) “You don’t travel to see the circus—the circus travels to you, and it is different in each location it visits. We are the new nomads, for the moment.” Lévy is not alone in this new nomadic adventure. She was joined in Miami in December by New York galleries MitchellInnes & Nash, Deitch Projects, Ramiken, Galerie Lelong, and Marianne Boesky (the latter collaborating with Goodman Gallery from Johannesburg, South Africa). In Palm Beach, Lévy’s neighbors in the Royal Poinciana Plaza shopping center included Pace and Acquavella. Those who joined in giving Aspen a shot include London’s White Cube and Lehmann Maupin. The phenomenon emerged from the Covid pandemic: when art fairs can offer only more online viewing rooms (OVRs), galleries with the capital and the connections to do so have been taking things into their own hands by taking the art to their collectors.

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From the Hamptons and Miami to Palm Beach and Aspen, it’s been the year of the pop-up—and it’s not ending anytime soon

At right below, artwork by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen at Paula Cooper Gallery’s Palm Beach outpost.

off, soon joined elsewhere in the Palm Beach area, signing leases running from three to six months. Over the summer, the principals at New York–based Lehmann Maupin had noticed how well their colleagues were doing in the Hamptons. “Should we have done it?” gallery partner Carla Camacho remembers thinking at the time. Later, in August, the gallery took the opportunity instead to do a monthlong pop-up out West, in Aspen, Colorado, in collaboration with the design firm R & Company and the Lebanese nonprofit design organization House of Today. “It was really successful and people loved it,” said Camacho. “We immediately felt like this was going to be a new model: bringing art to regional areas that have a strong collector community.” Inspired by their success in Aspen, Lehmann Maupin turned to Palm Beach. They tried for the Royal Poinciana, but all the available ground-floor spaces were spoken for—by other galleries, as it turned out. But Camacho kept looking and found a space nearby, on the corner of North Avenue and South County, one of the island’s major crossroads, and nestled next door to Ferragamo and across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue, Tourneau, and Louis Vuitton. Lehmann Maupin landed a bigger space there than was available at the Royal Poinciana, and it had a nice perk: an eyecatching roadside billboard bearing the gallery’s name. Even more so than the migration to the Hamptons, the swell of movement to Palm Beach has been a reaction to increasing burnout on the part of collectors and dealers when it comes to the digital experience provided by art fairs. “There’s a limit to the online viewing room,” said longtime Paula Cooper director Steve Henry, who praises Palm Beach’s relaxed, small-town vibe. “It was a platform that made a lot of sense and was absolutely necessary for everyone to engage in, because there was no other way

to have any kind of communication or contact with your collectors. But we’ve all heard about OVR fatigue.” In the warmth of Palm Beach, people could wander more freely—and the timing was fortuitous as the rollout of Covid vaccines began. In February, Camacho said, there was “a broad spectrum of people here who are going out and going to stores and galleries and dining outside or inside. I’ve had phone calls from people saying, ‘I’m getting my second vaccination on Tuesday and I’m coming in on Wednesday.’ ” For pop-up galleries in Palm Beach, giving both existing and new clients the longed-for in-person experience of looking at art has been just as important as sales.

“I cannot tell you the number of times someone has walked in and said, ‘Oh, my God. This is the first piece of art I’ve seen in eight months,’” said Daniela Gareh, a partner at White Cube. “Literally, it’s joyous.” White Cube found a warehouse-like space with 18-foot ceilings near the Norton Museum of Art and Beth Rudin de Woody’s private museum, The Bunker. And the success of the operation there led to plans for another pop-up in Aspen this summer. Galleries already in Aspen have similarly stressed the power of the intimate, inperson experience—the anti-OVR, and maybe even the anti-gallery. In a press release for its show last summer, Lehmann Maupin described a space with views of

From top: Courtesy Pace Gallery; Zachary Balber/Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery

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In the Sun Paintings by Robert Nava (at right) on view at the Pace Gallery location in Palm Beach.

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Test of Time Paintings by veteran artist Wayne Thiebaud on view at Acquavella gallery in Palm Beach.

the surrounding mountainous landscape as “an experience more akin to a private loft viewing than a visit to the impersonal ‘white cube,’” one that would “offer collectors and audiences the opportunity to rediscover the indescribable feeling of encountering artists’ work first hand.” “Collectors a lot of times need some kind of event or exhibition to generate excitement rather than just the cold call,” Camacho said of a sensation that OVRs have not been especially good at providing. Marc Glimcher of Pace spoke of the same effect, suggesting that the mere fact of artwork up on a wall in however distant a locale can catch collectors’ attention and kickstart demand. “Keeping art in front of collectors—people who are actually coming to see art—ripples through everything. We might have a dealer in Korea who is like, ‘Oh my God, I have someone waiting for one of those Julian Schnabel paintings on view in Palm Beach. Then they sell it to their client.” Glimcher said the global impact of local shows can create sales from Geneva to Palo Alto. “We get Schnabel to give us five paintings for Palm Beach, and suddenly a museum deal that was on standby starts

happening,” he said, while noting that all his shows in Palm Beach have sold out of works at prices ranging from $50,000 to $500,000. Which isn’t to say the numbers don’t go higher: Over the opening weekend of his pop-up, called Sélavy, Emmanuel Di Donna sold a number of works of art and design, including a Willem de Kooning painting priced at more than $10 million.

Joie de Vivre “Literally, it’s joyous,” White Cube director Daniela Gareh said of operating in Palm Beach.

HOW LONG WILL THE POP-UP phenomenon last? In mid-February in Palm Beach, signs pointed to a foreseeable future when Per Skarstedt, who had set up in the Hamptons over the summer and plans to keep his space there for another season, secured a space in Palm Beach where he’s looking forward to a similar experience. In New York, his office is on the third floor of his gallery. In Palm Beach, as in East Hampton, his plan is to sit in his small space and greet visitors himself. “Even when this pandemic is over,” he said, “people will not be so keen to go back to the life they had before.” Lévy said she thinks that even as vaccinations begin to take effect and the pandemic recedes, we may be in for as many

as five years of thoroughly changed times. “Is tomorrow going to be about the brickand-mortar gallery?” she wondered. “Or is it going to be about finding a special place, a special moment, to allow engagement, conversation, emotion, and simply the experience of art? Will people, like in the olden days, rush from all over the world to New York in November for the auctions and see 20 galleries there? Or will they instead take their car and go to the south of France to see an exhibition in an old church? I don’t know, and I’m questioning all this stuff at the moment. I’m leaving all avenues open.”

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srom top: Photo Silva Ros/©2020 Wayne Thiebaud/Courtesy Acquavella Galleries; Photo Alain Almiñana/Courtesy White Cube

“Keeping art in front of collectors— people who are actually coming to see art—ripples through everything.’’

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THE FAIR IS MOVING ON 60

A pough few yeaps fop Apt Basel’s papent company was followed by a yeap of lockdown. With a big investment fpom James Mupdoch, whepe does the event go fpom hepe? BY Z AC HARY S MAL L

FOR MCH GROUP, IT WAS A SUMMER of dread. In spring 2020, the Swiss holding company had postponed indefinitely what had once been its cash cow: the struggling Baselworld watch and jewelry fair. Meanwhile, Art Basel, the world’s most important modern and contemporary art fair and MCH’s crown jewel, was on lockdown, able to offer only online viewing rooms to art

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

The Sky’s the Limit A $470 millios resovatios of MCH’s cosvestios cester is Basel, completed by architects Herzog asd de Meuros is 2013, iscludes a dramatic oculus.

dealers who would normally pay upward of $100,000 for physical booths. In June, the Swiss press was reporting that capital was urgently needed at MCH, and that it looked like a private investor was the company’s only hope. Slowly it emerged that executives were in talks with one: news broke in September that James Murdoch, heir to a controversial media fortune, had swept in, and

would get a controlling stake in MCH Group, its Swiss convention center, its live-marketing firm, and a world-famous art fair. For the first half of 2020, MCH Group reported losses of $26.5 million, a 55 percent drop from the same period a year prior. The financial slump caused by the Covid pandemic was canceling out the company’s efforts to remain solvent, including the possible sale of its live-event marketing firm, which one Swiss publication in 2019 estimated could go for nearly $100 million, just two years after MCH acquired the business. Outrage against the abandoned plan to sell that firm exposed divisions among board members, with one minority shareholder, financier Erhard Lee, calling the plan to sell it “stupid.” Instead, he advocated the full or partial sale of Art Basel. Separated from the Swiss convention center, Art Basel has potential to be a much more valuable brand than simply an art fair, even if it is the world’s most famous one. But MCH has been unwilling to part with Art Basel, especially after the unraveling of Baselworld last year. “There are questions about the sustainability of MCH Group,” said Natasha Degen, chair of art market studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “Their management structure has remained largely intact, and executives are drawing salaries even while the online viewing rooms they set up during the coronavirus pandemic are generating a fraction of normal revenue.” Echoing her concerns was the local Basel press, which reported in March 2020 that, despite the turmoil, members of the board of directors were being paid CHF 513,000 ($533,000), up CHF 55,000 ($57,000) from the previous year.

Well before Covid-19 hit, a growing number of art dealers were feeling fair fatigue and for the last five years or so, mid-tier and emerging galleries have been squeezed by the events’ high costs. At the 2019 edition of Art Basel Miami, the last pre-Covid, in-person iteration of the three annual Basel fairs, the least expensive booth in the Galleries sector was $31,000, and earlier that year, in the 2019 Hong Kong edition, it was $34,000; if the fair doesn’t change, many galleries say they will stop attending, and spend their money with competitors or eschew the business model altogether and divert funds to their own brick-andmortar shops. “The only way to rebuild and survive is to innovate,” says Patrick Foret, who worked at Art Basel for a decade, starting as head of sponsorship, and in 2016 leading the Art Basel Cities program. During his tenure there, he says, he grew partnership revenue by 600 percent and, through the launch of new business initiatives, secured more than $150 million in revenue between 2010 and 2020. “There are real leadership issues at the MCH and Art Basel levels with regard to being the leader that the world needs,” he said. “They need to innovate. They need to be the light at the end of the tunnel. They need to be entrepreneurial. They need to take risks.” ARTnews spoke with more than a dozen galleries, collectors, artists, and advisers about their desire to see substantial change in the Art Basel business model. Many of them were unwilling to speak on the record, or to be identified—such is the influence that Art Basel still exerts on the industry. Some of those who did speak felt that Art Basel, having been so powerful for so long,

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Christian Bieri/Adobe Stock

“THE ONLY WAY TO REBUILD AND SURVIVE IS TO INNOVATE.”

fair should be going out of its way to make the dealers happy,” said art adviser Sandy Heller, whose clients include mega-collector Steve Cohen. Certain galleries have focused their criticism on the Art Basel vetting process that determines which dealers attend, which artists they exhibit, and where in the venue they are sited. Selection committees comprise a handful of gallery executives selected by the fair director who stay for five years or more and oversee the vetting process with the goal of producing the best possible events. After being rejected, gallerist Gerd Harry Lybke suggested to the New York Times that the committee be composed not of dealers but of museum directors and curators. Fellow gallerist Marianne Boesky said that the committee telling her which artists she can and can’t display hurts business. “This potentially hurts gallery-artist relationships,” said Boesky. “It delays certain artists’ visibility and stifles their growth in the marketplace.” Boesky said she was unlikely to continue participating in the fair if Art Basel administrators prevented her from accurately reflecting her gallery’s program in her presentations there. Restricting what galleries are permitted to bring, she said, “also basically

caps the gallery’s profit potential during the run of the fair.” Other dealers see the rules as bureaucratic and unnecessarily confusing. Last year, New York–based photography dealer Yancey Richardson was told by a fair official about a regulation concerning classical photography, which stipulated that original works produced in multiple editions must account for no more than 20 percent of an exhibit’s display. But she felt the application of the rule was fuzzy, leaving dealers of contemporary photography scratching their heads because it wasn’t clear if they’d have to abide by it. “I wish there was a section devoted to contemporary photography,” said Richardson. “It can still be vetted but the current conditions don’t make sense to me.” In previous iterations, Art Basel has had a sector dedicated to photography but did away with the division as more artists started working with the medium. A spokeswoman for the fair also said that it has a separate application for galleries working with vintage photography. How the rules governing Art Basel might change under new ownership has become the preoccupation of an art world that paradoxically feels that it cannot live with or without the current system.

©Art Basel

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has developed a certain arrogance. “It’s not been geared toward the exhibitors, who pay for everything,” one major dealer at a gallery with locations around the world complained. Citing a lack of amenities like espresso machines, sufficient free water, and a comfortable lounge, this dealer said, “They basically just rip you off for everything, whereas other fairs like TEFAF go out of their way to make the exhibitors feel wanted. Basel has never done that. We’re way down on the totem pole in terms of their priorities.” “With the management it’s had,” the dealer continued, referring to Art Basel director Marc Spiegler, “it’s only been geared toward the VIPs.” The dealer argued that the fair has focused too much on assembling and controlling its list of VIP attendees, a change in policy the fair made in 2013, which required galleries to provide contact details for collectors to whom they wanted the fair to send personalized cards. Those names were centralized in a database, giving the fair control over one of the most valuable assets of the fair system: the clientele. Galleries have glowered at Art Basel’s VIP program because it eliminates some of the personalized connection between gallery and collectors. (Spiegler said that the VIP system was created to solve problems with VIP invite distribution.) “The

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

According to some gallerists, changing the structure of the selection committees would be a step in the right direction. Dealers would like to see more transparency from Art Basel and a stronger dedication to racial equality. Historically, the selection committees have been staffed almost

entirely by white gallerists, and very few Black dealers have ever shown at the fair. Spiegler points out that certain changes have already been implemented, including a better rate for younger galleries participating in the fair and a sliding scale based on booth size. However, he said that

the current system will largely prevail. That includes selection committees. “The committees will make specific requirements depending on what they feel a gallery’s strength is,” Spiegler said. “Committees want to make galleries as strong as possible.” Meanwhile, many dealers say that the high costs of attending Art Basel have forced on them a cruel calculus. Only certain types of artists are capable of bringing in prices sufficient to cover the large down payments on booths, flights, and hotels. That fact has the power to change the quality of exhibitions and the sense of excitement that make art fairs worth visiting. “People outside of the business have no idea how much it costs,” said Richardson, adding that shipping framed photographs alone can cost nearly $12,000. “That expense puts a lot of pressure on certain galleries, and it affects what you are able to present. If you have an emerging artist and they aren’t that expensive, then it’s really hard to justify [showing] them because you can’t afford the real estate.”

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From top: Felix Mizioznikov/Adobe Stock; Photo Matthew Carasella

Fun in the Sun Art Basel operates fairs in Switzerland (opposite), Hong Kong, and Miami (left), the latter of which attracts satellite events like the Untitled fair (above).

connections that constitute one of the key engines driving art market activity. You can’t re-create the serendipitous encounter, argues Magnus Renfrew, longtime director and owner of various art fairs. “The serendipitous contacts you make whereby you happen to be standing next to somebody who knows somebody who knows you—you can’t replicate that in an OVR,” he said. During the pandemic, in addition to presenting OVRs at the times when fairs would have taken place, Art Basel has organized other similar online programs. As ARTnews went to press, they had just completed selections for the third one, called “Pioneers,” in March. While he’s the first to say “obviously the OVR doesn’t replace the [physical] fair,” Spiegler says Art Basel had nearly 150 applications for the 100-booth limit they have imposed, for 1,000 artworks in total. He said some galleries have “learned how to play” the OVRs, using them as a “great way to get material, or to have a reason to call some of their collectors,” and that, according to feedback he received from galleries, the Miami edition of the fair-timed OVR had a smoother interface than previous editions. Many dealers say they will do fewer fairs when Covid is over. As galleries continue to optimize for the online world, it will become more difficult for dealers to justify the expense and environmental cost of jetting to art fairs year-round. In 2019, dealers spent an estimated $4.6 billion to attend art fairs—more than a quarter of their total estimated sales, according to Art Basel’s

own report on the industry. But those same dealers say they are looking forward to getting back to those in-person experiences. In the meantime, however, they are keen to see more innovative thinking, rather than a focus on just returning to normal. And to an extent, this has happened: In February, Frieze, which runs art fairs in London, New York, and Los Angeles, and is Art Basel’s closest competitor, announced that it would use a building it acquired on Cork Street, in London, as a site for a yearround model, renting space out to galleries for pop-up exhibitions and holding regular talks and events. The fair described it as “a flexible and collaborative environment.” Last November, Art Basel made its own IRL effort in the form of Hong Kong Spotlight by Art Basel, a 22-gallery in-person minifair in Hong Kong, reportedly drawing local collectors like Henry Tang. “If I were MCH,” said a different dealer with locations around the world, after Art Basel delayed its Swiss edition earlier this year from June to September 2021, “rather than trying to promise a fair that they can’t do that is scheduled for the same time as 20 other fairs that take place in the fall, I would have said, for ten days around that time, let’s open exhibitions in great locations around the world. You wouldn’t need to travel. The collectors in those regions could come and follow all the health protocols. You would have them going to see art and buy art in a different way. And you’d revolutionize a new model of fairs.”

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Watch Out MCH Group’s annual watch and jewelry fair, Baselworld, lost 75 percent of its exhibitors between 2009 and 2019, and has been put to rest.

From left: Andrej Sokolow/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images; AP Photo/Keystone/Georgios Kefalas

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Some dealers may have had a tough time affording the real estate, but the payoff of a prime location made it worth the expense. Online viewing rooms are a different story, and some dealers have been frustrated with fairs’ seeming inability to create exciting digital experiences, saying that results have been mixed in Basel’s attempts. The OVRs created an occasion to reconnect with existing clients, dealers said, but they made few to no new connections. Art advisers likewise felt the online experience was dramatically less useful than the real deal. “The online viewing rooms created a sense of urgency,” explained art adviser Lisa Schiff, saying she “used digital editions of fairs like Art Basel Miami” as a means to sell “things from private dealers and auctions to my collectors.” She said she wasn’t placing artworks from the OVRs. In April 2020, after the virtual edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, dealer Dominique Lévy, in an interview with CNN Money Switzerland, said it was “a very interesting experiment. What it showed us is that it doesn’t work.” Even as she emphasized that she has never missed a physical edition of the fair in Switzerland and claimed her “allegiance to Art Basel is unconditional,” she called the online version “the 180-degree opposite of what an art fair is about.” Art Basel has priced its virtual fairs accordingly: at around $6,000 for a booth, they are a fraction the cost of an IRL presentation. Perhaps more important, what cannot be re-created virtually are the social

Photo Stephen Lovekin

James Murdoch

put Art Basel director Marc Spiegler on the MCH executive board. Then the pandemic hit. Baselworld was postponed to 2021, then LVMH joined other brands in pulling out, all of them leaving for a rival fair in Geneva, and the 2021 edition of Baselworld was canceled. Meanwhile, Art Basel, MCH’s only remaining moneymaker, postponed, then canceled, the Hong Kong edition, moved the Swiss edition from June to September, and introduced a series of online viewing rooms. MCH was carrying some $200 million in debt, with little hope of further loans from the local government. A private investor was the best hope. “JAMES MURDOCH’S INVOLVEMENT in MCH Group unites two trends that we have seen in the art world,” said Degen, the market analyst. “One was the convergence between the arts and entertainment. The other is a trend toward these art fairs diversifying what they do through their brand recognition.” Shortly before his proposed investment in MCH was announced, James Murdoch publicly split from his father, Rupert Murdoch’s, controversial media company, Fox News. James Murdoch’s investment firm, Lupa Systems, will now drive MCH’s future direction, even as a growing number of galleries are looking to change the rules of the game amid an unpredictable pandemic. And while representatives for the investor have declined to discuss the details of its plan, an image of MCH’s future is emerging. When the Lupa Systems deal was ratified in late November, shareholders of MCH Group voted almost unanimously to accept a deal with Murdoch, providing his firm with a maximum stake of 49 percent in the events production company. A capital increase of $114 million followed that rejiggered the balance of power so that Lupa Systems holds nearly a third of all shares, splitting control with minority shareholders and public-sector entities. “We will do our utmost to justify the confidence placed in us as a new anchor investor and as members of the board of

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fair planned for Miami’s convention center, called Grand Basel, was also canceled. After a final, ill-fated edition of Baselworld in March 2019, MCH’s interim CEO at the time, Michel Loris-Melikoff, went on a listening tour about the watch and jewelry fair. He interviewed more than 800 stakeholders and found communication issues to be the primary culprit in the fair’s demise. “During most of the meetings,” he told the New York Times, “this word ‘arrogance’ was always mentioned.” After MCH decided to sell its majority stake in the India Art Fair, Sandy Angus, a principal with the company that had helped run the fair since 2011, told the Art Newspaper, “MCH is an investment group and it doesn’t speak to Art Basel at all—one of the real problems was that there was absolutely no input of any sort from Art Basel, with whom we have a good relationship.” Angus, who ended up buying MCH’s shares himself, told ARTnews this past February, “if there was any future involvement, I would look not for an MCH involvement, but an Art Basel involvement.” The same cost-cutting that led to dropping the regional fairs led to lost opportunities in the digital realm for MCH, says Moenen Erbuer, the company’s former head of design and user experience. Erbuer was onboarded in 2016, when MCH acquired a Pinterest-like website called Curiator that he had cofounded four years earlier. As part of the deal, he was charged with developing digital tools like PRNCPL, a Shazam-like app, for the regional fairs. He was also developing a new source of revenue for MCH: white-label software that would have been available for licensing by any fair to manage data and VIP systems. Then MCH decided to prioritize strengthening Art Basel’s three shows and Art Basel’s own digital initiatives, Erbuer’s operation was shut down in fall 2019. Curiator was quietly closed last August. Erbuer believes these cuts in digital were a shortsighted decision about a line item on a budget made in the fog of management changes. “They were not a very digital-forward company,” he said, “and my team was really pushing the limit. Through my boss, Stephan Peyer, I had a direct line to the CEO.” Kamm left in 2018; Peyer, MCH’s chief development officer, left seven months later. “After they replaced Kamm, no one knew what my team was doing. MCH missed out. If you are trying to become a digital company, you shouldn’t throw out your digital people.” There were other hiccups in the months leading up to the Covid pandemic. In fall 2019, Art Basel announced and later canceled, a 3-day, $15,000 per attendee conference in Abu Dhabi. By December 2019, the Swiss press and the New York Post were reporting rumors that Art Basel was for sale. MCH denied it; a month earlier, they’d

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

AS A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY within MCH, Art Basel has, over the past three years, become the company’s only profitable entity. For 50 years, Baselworld, MCH’s annual watch and jewelry fair, was the group’s breadwinner, considered essential to the watch industry. But then the industry began to change. Between 2009 and 2019, the fair lost 75 percent of its exhibitors, including Swatch, which, including sponsorship, had been paying them $50 million. By some accounts, Baselworld’s problems began in 2013, the year MCH completed a $470 million renovation of the convention center; looking back in 2018, Forbes reported that this was when “watch soothsayers” started “forecasting doom” on Baselworld: post-renovation, they’d upped exhibitor fees “to the extent that many of the smaller brands had to move out of the fair.” The trouble at Baselworld and the attendant loss of revenue for MCH had a profound effect on the company’s efforts in the art sector. It resulted in financial retrenchment, and a laser focus on core art fairs in Basel, Miami, and Hong Kong. In 2016, MCH launched an initiative to invest in regional fairs, acquiring stakes in fairs in Germany and India, and conceiving a brand-new one in Singapore. In 2018, after the abrupt resignation of longtime CEO René Kamm, that initiative was largely abandoned, and the stakes in the existing fairs were sold, as was the stake in Singapore, which hadn’t even launched. A car

directors, and to contribute to the company’s successful turnaround and strategic progress,” Murdoch said in a statement when the $80 million deal was completed. For its investment in MCH Group, Lupa Systems has gained three seats on the seven-member board of directors. Those positions went to Murdoch and two executives, Eleni Lionaki and Jeffrey Palker, who previously served under the media scion when he was chief executive officer of 21st Century Fox. The decision to add professionals from the entertainment industry to the MCH boardroom is just the latest of Murdoch’s mergers between the art world and Hollywood. A year before, Lupa Systems led a group that bought control of the Tribeca Film Festival; the investment firm has also purchased a $5 million stake in the comic book publishing startup, Artists Writers & Artisans. Other corporations appear to have provided a precedent for Murdoch’s strategy. In 2015, United Talent Agency—one of the most powerful players in entertainment— opened a fine arts division and began representing artists like Ai Weiwei, Rashid

Johnson, and Judy Chicago. Only a year later, another talent agency, Endeavor, acquired a 70 percent stake in the Frieze art fair’s parent company, Denmark Street Limited, as part of a larger deal totaling almost $90 million. “Being content providers is the essential key for the future of all exhibitions,” said Angus, the fair organizer. “Because we’ve got to offer collectors and visitors much more than we have. So I see both [the Endeavor and Lupa Systems] investments as being very sensible, and a natural extension of what is going to evolve over the coming years.” The Murdoch strategy could also see MCH try to kill two birds with one stone, solving its Baselworld problems by merging its luxury offerings with Art Basel’s fine arts. After all, when media mogul Patrick Drahi took over Sotheby’s (where Murdoch once served on the board) in 2019, he led a major restructuring effort that resulted in what Drahi called two “equally important” global divisions: one for fine art and another for luxury items like jewelry and watches identified as “key growth areas.” According to the art market research company Pi-eX,

the company’s investment in the luxury market has not yet returned substantial revenues, which were up just 4 percent last year, at $339 million, compared to sales in 2019. However, Sotheby’s has argued that luxury is not an end in itself, but a gateway to an appreciation for fine arts. “Luxury is a great entry point,” Josh Pullan, managing director of Sotheby’s global luxury division, told the New York Times last year. He claimed that buyers were “opening their minds to a broader range of collecting categories.” “The Murdoch investment will come with substantive change,” said gallerist Tim Blum, who has served on the selection committee for Art Basel Miami and says he has previously conducted business with James Murdoch. “Obviously things could work better. I know for a fact that the people behind the fair are aware,” he said, referring to complaints that galleries have leveled. But if there are changes, they seem unlikely to occur from inside the company’s current management team. “We don’t see a fundamental shift in Art Basel with the involvement of Lupa Systems,” said

©Art Basel

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Gateway to the East Art Basel Hong Kong launched in 2014, following the MCH Group’s acquisition of the fair Art HK, founded in 2008.

down to quality, and the art fair system, not just Basel, has become a very bad system where art has taken a back seat.” And for his part, Spiegler has resisted going big on branding. “I think there is always a delicate balance between monetizing your brand and destroying it,” he said. “Is it something that an endless number of friends, peers, and consultants have brought up? Absolutely. But I don’t see an Art Basel hotel chain anytime soon.” The adviser Abigail Asher has followed the shifts at Art Basel since attending her first edition nearly 20 years ago. “There is a dilemma between this sense of expansion and wanting to hold on to the core values of the fair,” she said, while admitting that Basel remains fixed on her collectors’ calendars. “If you are a passionate collector, it is incredibly hard to keep up on everything. The fair allows a focused environment over a few days to experience as much as possible.” NOT EVERY DEALER IS COMPLAINING. Or, if they are, they like to think of it as constructive criticism, and are looking forward to participating in necessary changes. Stefan von Bartha, proprietor of a Basel gallery founded by his father that has participated in Art Basel for more than 40 years, says there is a real need for in-person fairs like Basel because it is so difficult to get a full experience of art in a virtual setting. But he feels that Basel needs to introduce new features in order to make the fair a special experience for attendees. He would like to see more efforts like “14 Rooms,” a oneoff curated section in the 2014 edition. “I think it’s important for them to have new ideas, new concepts and innovations and not just rely on the fact that they are a very big brand.” As for that centralized VIP system, von Bartha says when the fair first instituted it, he was upset. But he eventually came to understand the reasoning: collectors in the region who are receiving upward of five VIP cards from different galleries were passing them on to people who were not collectors,

“THERE IS ALWAYS A DELICATE BALANCE BETWEEN MONETIZING YOUR BRAND AND DESTROYING IT.”

clogging up the aisles on VIP preview day. As for the amenities, von Bartha says, “every fair in the world needs to improve” in that area. “If you stand at the booth with eight people and you get two bottles of water and a power bar, you’re a bit lost.” Von Bartha chalks up a lot of dealer complaints to “egos and attitudes clashing. I think now is a time to calm down a little bit. Of course Art Basel is going to change. It has to change. But this should be a result of teamwork.” The key to moving forward is the fair and its dealer clients “having a conversation.” In his experience, this is something Art Basel is open to, even with a gallery of a modest size like his. In fact, he says, “the good thing about the collapse of the watch and jewelry fair and also about the long phase of not knowing what’s going to happen with the fair, is going to make fairs listen better to their clients.” In von Bartha’s view, Art Basel doesn’t display toward its exhibitors the notorious arrogance Baselworld did. “Their leadership and team are very aware of how sensitive the situation is right now [for galleries].” As for complaints about the selection committee, von Bartha adds that he sees it as a huge advantage right now to have dealers in those positions, “because if there is something to complain about, they are going to address it. [They] are all aware of what MCH is going through and what Art Basel as a brand needs to do for the future.” A “committee of only art historians and museums” would not be able to advocate effectively for the needs of galleries.

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“IT’S AN INTERESTING TIME TO OWN an art fair—it’s also a scary time,” said Marc Glimcher, president of Pace, a mega-gallery with locations around the world. Glimcher said Pace will continue to participate in fairs, Art Basel foremost among them, but not as many. “The challenge to the art fair construct has been mega-galleries” like his own, Glimcher said. For roughly the same price he would spend on a Basel booth, he was able to rent a gallery in East Hampton and make a better return on investment. Other mega-galleries are making their own encroachments on the art fair model. Last spring, David Zwirner gave 49 galleries access to Platform, his online viewing room network. A year before that, he gave the dealers in New York’s Volta fair one of his own gallery spaces in which to set up shop when the event suddenly lost its venue to the Armory Show. As long as fairs like Basel continue to be gathering places for the world’s collectors and, crucially, places where you meet new clients, Glimcher said he believes they will remain musts for galleries. But the art world is in flux, and it isn’t just the fairs that are thinking about change.

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Spiegler. “We don’t see a fundamental shift in the value of international art fairs. James Murdoch and his team, with whom I’ve had extensive discussions over the course of the last year, fundamentally believe in the basic strategy of Art Basel, which is to continue to do the best art fairs in the world while looking at other ways in which we can serve galleries, including the digital.” Spiegler continued, “That being said, his team has a very broad international knowledge and a great network. So when it comes to what we can do with content, for example, it’s great to have the direct business link with someone who has such long experience in media and extensive holdings in media as well.” “I hope they’re thinking about additional revenues because there is huge potential,” said Magnus Resch, an art market economist, of MCH’s future strategy. “They have one of the few globally recognized brands but have not monetized it at all.” There are already indications from inside MCH that change is trickling down. In January, CEO Bernd Stadlwieser announced that he would be leaving after almost two years with the company, citing a difference of opinion with some board directors. At the same time, Murdoch has replaced the company’s chairman with television executive and longtime confidant Andrea Zappia. Foret, the former head of sponsorship, thinks the next CEO should be “creative, entrepreneurial. MCH is immersed in the trade show industry that is going to have to be creative in adapting to the new world we are facing. At the Art Basel level it’s the same issues. Art Basel and MCH need to go back to a start-up mindset. And that needs to come from the top.” “The idea with Murdoch is for sure to expand the [Art Basel] brand into new regions,” said Lee, the minority shareholder who last year was critical of MCH’s direction. Longtime attendees are not sure expansion is the answer. “I don’t think the Basel brand needs to expand,” said Blum, the gallerist. “On the contrary, everything comes

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70 Strange Frequencies Claudia Comte’s How to Grow and Still Stay the Same Shape at Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy. 69

Photo Roman März/Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino

p. 70

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Insights

Letter from Turin Questionnaire Time Machine Retrospective

Metaphysical City In Turin, Italy, the past and future mix in a magical fashion B Y C A R O LY N C H R I S T O V - B A K A R G I E V

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ET ME SAY IT STRAIGHT OFF the bat and in feminist, matrixial celebration: I love Turin, and Piedmont as a whole. My mother was from Piedmont and studied VhilosoVhy at the University of Turin on Via Po, the same street where Arte Povera artist Giulio Paolini still has his studio today. An archaeologist, she taught me how to read the Vresent by using the keys of the Vast in a layered sense of co-Vresent temVoralities, rather than any notion of linear time. As it haVVens, Paolini was one of the first artists to VarticiVate in Luci d’Artista, a great Turin tradition that started in the 1990s. Each winter, to celebrate the holiday season, city officials ask artists to create light installations for the historic city center. In 1998 Paolini made a Viece called Palomar, an homage to Italo Calvino’s 1983 novel, Mr. Palomar, about a character who observed himself observing from the outside all the comVlexity of the world, seeking fundamental truths about time and infinity. A few months before the coronavirus broke out in Turin, the 2019 edition of Luci d’Artista featured Roberto Cuoghi’s Viece M I R A C O L A, for which he Veriodically darkened an entire city square by having a comVuter control all the Vrivate and Vublic lights in Piazza San Carlo. A clear case of the visionary Votential of art, it was eerily Vrescient of the Vandemic lockdown. It also sVoke to the fragility of artificial intelligence in the future of our cities— how easy it might become for so-called “smart technology” to be hacked, resulting in a takeover of our lights, our heating, our entire lives.

TURIN (OR TORINO, AS WE CALL it here) is the caVital of the Piedmont (Piemonte) region—a flat Vlain al pié del monte, “at the foot of the hills.” The name “Torino” descends from the name of the original Neolithic Celtic-Ligurian Taurini VeoVle who inhabited the area thousands of years ago. Later on, in the 1st century BCE, it was colonized, and an ancient Roman town was established in the location; since that time, the Latin word “taurus” (bull) has become the symbol of the city. In the 11th century, the ruling House of Savoy moved through marriage from across the French AlVs, making the area where the rivers Po and Dora meet the caVital of their Duchy and, later, of their kingdom. Turin, which became the first caVital of modern Italy uVon the country’s unification in 1861, is surrounded by an incredible natural landscaVe, a crescent of tall snowcaVVed AlVs only 20 minutes away from forests and rivers that have Vrovided hydroelectric Vower since the mid-20th century. But these snowy Veaks will be white for only so many more years, as they are melting due to climate change. On clear days, from downtown Turin, we see these mountains, and they remind us of geological time, Big History, the Vower of nonhuman life, and the world all around us offline. Any tour guide will remind you that for centuries Turin has had two comVlementary identities related to the mystical world of magic. Along with London and San Francisco, it forms the triangle of Black Magic; with Lyon and Prague, it also forms the triangle of White Magic. This esoteric quality of the city has created the Verfect setting for a metaVhysical aVVroach to life,

which may exVlain why Turin is home to the famous Shroud, a cloth relic suVVosedly imVrinted with the sweat of the body of Christ. The esoteric quality of Turin may also exVlain why the Italian film industry started here in the early 1900s, since the immateriality of the filmic image was at the time associated with ideas of magic. This may also be why Turin was Friedrich Nietzsche’s favorite city. Nietzsche loved Turin’s distinctive Baroque architecture, distant in sVirit from the hustle and bustle of late 19th-century Vrogress- and Vroductionoriented modern EuroVean cities. He moved here in 1888, wrote Ecce Homo, went mad after seeing a horse being beaten in Piazza Carignano, and later retreated from the world to comVose late romantic music and study the mating habits of eagles that soared over the mountains nearby. The alchemical and magical nature of Turin also Vrovided a fertile context for contemVorary art to emerge in the mid1960s, when Arte Povera develoVed in contrast with the modern industry of the socalled Vostwar miracolo italiano. ConceVtual art in general and Arte Povera in Varticular owed much to an aVVroach that defined art as a form of embodied VhilosoVhy. Arte Povera works celebrated transformation and organic Vrocesses of change in materials themselves, visualizing forms of otherwise invisible energy flowing through the world. In Turin, living alongside artists of the Arte Povera generation such as Paolini, GiuseVVe Penone, Giovanni Anselmo, Gilberto Zorio, and Michelangelo Pistoletto is like living alongside the titans of a long-ago mythological era whom you might literally meet at the coffee shoV, if you’re lucky. An internationally driven grouV, when at home in Turin, they are discreet but curious about what emerging artists are doing now.

Photo Roberto Cortese

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

LETTER FROM TURIN

2016; anm the Museo Egizio, the worlm’s most renownem museum of Egyptian art outsime of Cairo. Other important art spaces inclume the Fonmazione Sanmretto Re Rebaumengo, memicatem to international contemporary art, anm the Fonmazione Merz, which organizes important exhibitions of Arte Povera artists as well as younger international peers. Major private collectors coexist here, some of whom are public facing, like Patrizia Sanmretto, anm others who prefer anonymity. Lavazza, the international coffee company whose heamquarters are in mowntown Turin, recently openem a new space callem Nuvola for exhibitions, conferences, anm great foom. In 2017, in a former train car repair factory near Porta Susa station, the OGR (Officine

FOR A TIME, THE PANDEMIC PUT A halt to all of this. Italy was the seconm country to be overwhelmem by Covim-19, after China, anm strangely enough, when it hit, we at the Castello mi Rivoli were opening an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art from the Uli Sigg collection, organizem in collaboration with the M+ Museum in Hong Kong anm curatem by Castello’s chief curator,

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THERE ARE PLENTY OF OPPORTUNities for a new generation to create art in Turin, a city that tomay feels like a cross between Paris anm Detroit: stately but with an inmustrial emge anm, most important for artists, afformable living. Like Paris, Turin is beautiful anm olm, with 18thcentury Baroque palaces in its city center anm small restaurants with great foom grown locally anm reverem accorming to the principles of Slow Foom, a movement founmem in Piemmont by Carlo Petrini in the ’80s near the vineyarms in Langhe. There are theaters, concert halls, galleries, anm museums, incluming the first museum of Italian contemporary art, Castello mi Rivoli, which was founmem here in 1984 anm which I have ham the pleasure of mirecting since

Granmi Riparazioni) openem with spaces for concerts anm exhibitions, as well as office space for high-tech inmustries. Like Detroit, Turin usem to be a worlm center of auto manufacturing, with FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) churning out cars from the 1950s until the 1980s, when the firm movem its factories out of Italy after a periom of great social unrest anm union clashes. Like Detroit, too, the city meclinem in population, contracting from 1.2 million to about 850,000 people tomay. Owing to this, what most tourists anm art enthusiasts see when they come to Turin is a city surrounmem by a huge belt of former factories anm abanmonem inmustrial spaces, as well as former resimential areas for workers that provime low-cost rentals for artists to live in anm stumio spaces that are almost free. This explains why artists like Elena Mazzi anm Cally Spooner are moving here, anm why young artists like Renato Leotta, Alice Visentin, Irene Dionisio, Ramona Ponzini, anm Guglielmo Castelli stay. Torinos enjoy a high stanmarm of living couplem with a low cost of living. Also like Detroit, Turin has a vibrant unmergrounm experimental music scene with people like Sergio Ricciarmone anm his Club to Club festival that organizes music events. The crossover between music anm art is ever present. This Paris-Detroit hybrim nature accounts for innovations like Combo, a pilot project that mebutem in 2019 anm mixes high mesign with communal living at hostel-like prices.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

Top: Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin; Bottom: Photo Andrea Guermani/Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea

Welcome Back Below left, the author, Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, looks on as the museum she directs, Castello di Rivoli, experiments with reopening to the public in May 2020.

INSIGHTS / LETTER FROM TURIN

Holiday Lights Each winter, the city of Turin invites artists to create projects in the historic city center, including Giulio Paolini’s Palomar (facing page) and Roberto Cuoghi’s M I R A C O L A (left), shown here as a rendering.

INSIGHTS / LETTER FROM TURIN

Marcella Beccaria. I remember thinking that the virus’s spread created a sense of different temporalities between different places, as we experienced things two weeks before London and one month before New York. This meant experimenting every day, trying to adapt and be relevant to our local community more than ever before. The year before had been a major turning point for the Castello di Rivoli. We opened our third building, the Cerruti Villa, adjacent to the Castello, and became the first contemporary art museum to incorporate an encyclopedic collection—the priceless holdings of Francesco Federico Cerruti, with works ranging from the trecento to the late 20th century—which was entrusted to us in 2017, two years after he died. It has been poignant this lockdown year to look at the paintings by Giorgio de Chirico in the empty villa; the inspiration for these eerie, timeless paintings of empty urban space was the city of Turin itself. The villa is integral to a project I had already started developing—together with philosophers and artists at our Castello di Rivoli Research Institute—called the

Slow Museum, in which art is not shown in abstract white-cube spaces or defined by a universal, single art-historical narrative. It is not kept separate from the social context of its provenance—who collected it and why. It is an attempt to shift the modern museum toward a more intimate dimension of the meaning and experience of art. All museums contain historical art that belonged to a specific individual at some specific time, with specific memories, desires, preconceptions, and visions. The Castello was the first museum in the

West to shut down, and in May we became the first to experiment with reopening. The experience of opening the Cerruti Villa offered an important and immediate lesson in how to create a secure and open museum for limited numbers of visitors. We put together programs that underlined the importance of physical, sensorial, phenomenological, and local experience in the production of knowledge, like our outdoor program “La Risalita,” for which artists create artworks for a former public escalator connecting the township of Rivoli

“Expressionism in art tends to emerge in parallel with pandemics, wars, and social unrest.”

Photo Pietro Mezzano

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Why Artists Stay Turin offers artists a high standard of living coupled with a low cost of living, which has convinced many locals to stay local, including Alice Visentin, seen here with her art.

Colorful Cola Otobong Nkanga’s sculpture Kolanut Tales: Slow Stain (2012–17) ) was commissioned by the Castello di Rivoli.

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Top: Photo Roman März/Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino; Bottom: Photo Renato Ghiazza/Courtesy Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea

Vibrating Walls For a solo show at the Castello di Rivoli, artist Claudia Comte created a mural intervention (top) on the museum’s third floor. She is currently at work on a soundtrack to play as people receive vaccines for the coronavirus at the museum.

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

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INSIGHTS / LETTER FROM TURIN

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ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

QUESTIONNAIRE

Bisa Butler ARTnews asks 12 pressing questions. An artist responds. What is your earliest memory? sreeting my mother at our door when she had just arrived home from a trip to the Côte d'Ivoire. It was summer, and she was so tan and was wearing an Afro. I didn’t recognize her. I backed away, slowly. Where are you most content? At home with my husband and two daughters. I’m a homebody, as we all are forced to be now. What are you reading at the moment? Multiple things at once: an issue of Juxtapoz Magazine, the audiobook of Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, and The True Story of the Harlem Hellfighters by Emmett Scott. What are you listening to? A playlist made to accompany my exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. It has a lot of the ’60s soul from albums by the Charmels, Aretha Franklin, and Etta James. What makes art valuable? Artists leave the keys to their inner thoughts in their artwork for all the world to see. It can be pure emotion, expression, and social/ political/historical reflection.

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If you could own any artwork in the world, what would it be? One of the “Vignette” series by Kerry James Marshall. He portrays Black people as beautiful, tender, thoughtful, and loving.

What’s something you do in the studio that might surprise people? My dining room is my studio. It is right in the middle of my home and is the hub for family meetings and discussions. What is your favorite food? Chicago deep-dish pizza from Lou Malnati’s. Who was a mentor to you? Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, the preeminent scholar and historian of African-American quilts. Also my father: I always look to him for guidance. What was your best experience in a museum? The Faile Art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. One gallery had paintings, prints, and posters installed on every surface to look like a hyper version of an arcade. What is most virtuous about the art world? That people are given freedom to express themselves and create their own unique way of doing so. Expression may or may not be appreciated—but it is allowed. What is most ridiculous about the art world? How a style can fall in or out of favor and determine how an artist sees their own selfworth. I am not immune to wanting to be accepted—I wish that wasn’t the case.

From top right: Bisa Butler, Southside Sunday Morning, 2018/Photo Margaret Fox/Courtesy Claire Oliver Gallery;

Bisa Butler creates vibrant quilted portraits that focus on Black life and history, often using archival photographs as inspiration, and incorporating various layers of fabric. Her first solo museum exhibition opened at the Katonah Museum of Art in Upstate New York in 2020 and traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it is on view into September. Butler’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the NelsonAtkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other institutions.

DISCOV ER T H E J OY O F COLLEC TING ART

Browse and buy online: affordableartfair.com

Born 1980, Milwaukee Lives and works in New York

There are realist paintings and hyperrealist paintings—and then there are Mathew Cerletty paintings, in which objects, bits of text, landscapes, and sometimes people are so exquisitely rendered that they seem to live elevated lives apart from the petty concerns of mortal humans. (This can be both exhilarating and disconcerting to behold.) A characteristically uncanny wonder, Female (2020) might be a pelvis for its own sake or a playful riff on Gustave Courbet’s rather fleshier take on the same subject in Origin of the World (1866). Either way, it is a deadpan depiction of our unseen human interior and an unflinching vision of what remains after our death.

“Whiskers,” Standard Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 2019 “Flatlands,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016, curabed by Laura Phipps and Elisabebh Sherman “Susan,” Algus Greenspon, 2011

The number of paintings of broccoli included in Cerletty’s 2019 show at Standard (Oslo)

“Female was the first painting I made as I started coming back to the studio” after becoming a father. —Cerletty in an email to ARTnews

2002 The year Cerletty graduated from Boston University and was in his first group show at the influential New York gallery Rivington Arms

Female, 2020, oil on linen, 47½ × 62 inches—shown in “Mathew Cerletty: Full Length Mirror” at the Power Station, Dallas, organized by Rob Teeters, November 14, 2020—May 22, 2021.

Photo Kevin Todora/Courtesy the artist and Power Station, Dallas

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KEY SHOWS

BY AN D R EW RU S S E T H

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Mathew Cerletty

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“It is like the piece is going out in the world with a blessing.” —Self on using fabric in her works from her childhood home in Harlem, in ARTnews, 2020

KEY SHOWS

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

“Tschabalala Self: Out of Body,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2020, organized by Ellen Tani and Ruth Erickson “Bodega Run,” Yuz Museum, Shanghai, 2018 “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” New Museum, New York, 2017, curated by Johanna Burton

Pocket Rocket, 2020, digital print on canvas, denim, fabric, thread, acrylic and hand-mixed pigments on dyed canvas, 96 × 96 × 1½ inches—shown in “Tschabalala Self: Cotton Mouth” at Eva Presenhuber, New York, November 7, 2020–January 23, 2021.

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Born 1990, New York Lives and works in New York and New Haven, Connecticut

Tschabalala Self’s visions of Black figures, which she paints and stitches together with patches of fabric, have grown more and more engaging and inventive over time. In Pocket Rocket, bits of denim, dyed canvas, and a bandanna (among other items) conjure a captivating gunslinger who looks about ready to walk off the canvas. (The alluring, unusual pink-and-white abstraction she would leave behind looks as if it would be a fantastic painting on its own.) One hopes that Self, a master of capturing psychology and character on canvas, one day designs a set for a grand play or opera.

16:32

The length of an audio-art piece comprising a monologue and audio collage about Blackness in America that Self released as a vinyl record titled Cotton Mouth (2020) 77

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

The number of solo museum shows Self has had since the start of 2018

Tschabalala Self

INSIGHTS / TIME MACHINE

Born 1956, Kanagawa, Japan Lives and works in New York

Yuji Agematsu roams New York City sidewalks, eyes to the ground, on the hunt for the discarded, the misplaced, and the overlooked. He is a connoisseur of trash, which he carefully collects and arranges into works that are as heartbreakingly tender as they are mysterious. This piece—shown via a photograph in an ingenious group show housed in a wooden box, à la Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, and shared online—appears to include a lollipop, a bit of dirt, and all sorts of unidentifiable artifacts. It amounts to a poetic portrait of the city, an ode to people and places often caught only through passing glances.

KEY SHOWS “57th Carnegie International,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2018, curated by Ingrid Schaffner “The Keeper,” New Museum, New York, 2016, curated by Massimiliano Gioni

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“Yuji Agematsu,” Yale Union, Portland, Oregon, 2014, curated by Robert Snowden

“They decide on their own comfortable positions. My duty is just to help fix them in place.” —Agematsu on the items that make up his art, to ARTnews, 2017

The number of tiny, individual pieces that figure in his work 01-01-2014 – 12-31-2014, one for each day of 2014

1993, 2004, 2012 The years Agematsu had his first, second, and third one-person shows

Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

Yuji Agematsu

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Table Work 2011–2014, 2011–14, mixed media, acrylic paint, cork, Douglas fir, 31 × 47½ × 23½ inches—shown in “La Boîte-en-Valise” at www.la-boite-en-valise.com, a project by Office Baroque, Antwerp, Belgium, curated by Wim Peeters and Marie Denkens, January 9–February 20, 2021.

Born 1941, Seoul, South Korea Lives and works in Seoul

Like certain minimalist music by composer Morton Feldman, Suh Seung-Won’s “Simultaneity” paintings are masterworks of subtlety and nuance. They open up slowly—and once they pull you in, their rewards accrue. Waves of color create an atmosphere of calm and reflection that extends well beyond the confines of the canvas. (Critic Raphael Rubinstein has smartly mentioned James Turrell’s limitless light installations as a parallel.) Suh’s paintings—as quiet, but also as strangely potent, as a whisper—can become addictive. Think carefully before hanging one in a place where you have to be productive.

KEY SHOWS “Suh Seung-Won: Simultaneity,” the Korea Society, New York, 1019, in collaboration with the Donghwa Cultural Foundation

INSIGHTS / TIME MACHINE

Suh Seung-Won

“Dansaekhwa: Korean Monochrome Painting,” National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea, 1011, curated by Yoon Jin Sup

The year that Suh helped form the Origin group in South Korea, with fellow members who pursued hard-edged and processbased forms of abstraction

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

1963

“Korea: Five Artists, Five Hinsek ‘White,’ ” Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo, 1975

“ ‘Simultaneity’ enables the unseen to be seen, ensuring that what is happening in the world of nirvana or ‘beyond dark’ could be represented through me.”

1965 The year he began developing the concept of “simultaneity” in his work

Simultaneity 17-363, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 45 15/16 × 35 13/16 inches—shown in “Time in Space: The Life Style,” PKM Gallery, Seoul, December 16, 2020–January 30, 2021.

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Courtesy the artist and PKM Gallery, Seoul

—Suh, in an undated entry in a notebook

ARTnews / APRIL/MAY 2021

double standards to which black artists were regularly subjected. On the essay’s 50th anniversary, ARTnews enlisted Eric N. Mack, an artist in his mid-30s who works with abstraction, to look at the essay anew. “I feel like we should all feel lucky that Frank Bowling is still with us and showing, and not forgotten,” Mack said. It is as though what is being said is that whatever black people do in the various areas labeled art is Art—hence Black Art. And various spokesmen make rules to govern this supposed new form of expression. He’s problematizing the space of Black art. He was able to afford that to his peers. There was a need for that. At that time, art criticism was so highly regarded. There was emotive argument around what it meant to make painting that has been lost on us a bit. He was trying to do things that critics at the time couldn’t do, for this group of artists. RETROSPECTIVE

Black Art Is Beautiful A Frank Bowling essay from 1971 as read by artist Eric N. Mack BY AL E X G R E E N B E RG E R

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OR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, FRANK BOWLING,

who turned 86 this past February, has been making abstract paintings that not only push the medium in new directions but also fold in nuanced statements about colonialism, racism, and xenophobia. In the ’70s, Bowling was also known as a critic. For the April 1971 issue of ARTnews, he wrote “It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black Is Beautiful,’” an essay that focused on the

It is clear that modernism came into being with the contribution provided by European artists’ discovery of and involvement with African works, and their development of an esthetic and a mythic subject from it. But the point I am trying to make concerns the total “inheritance” which constitutes the American experience and that aspect of it with which black people can now (perhaps they always have) fully identify, due to the politicization of blackness. With the distance of reading this in 2021, you may not get the system of value at play and the ideological differences. You know, he’s talking about this European understanding versus an American one. Bringing out those differences to give these artists their [due].

It’s something that he could do for the moment that would inform later critics and writers to look closer. These are things artists can and should do. William Williams’ work is like Frank Stella’s in not being about memory. It’s about discovery. There is almost no apparent residue, only amazed recognition as these bright abstractions register their charge to the eye and brain. I like the generosity in observing a little closer— almost a closer look at the past, the biography, the previous exhibitions that informed it. What he’s doing is giving the work back to the artists, to politicize themselves, using the terms as they’re set formally. I think that’s important. It’s also a Black artist talking about another Black artist. It’s allowing them to possess themselves and hold their own space, especially in a space where people are moving too quickly. We have not been able to detect in any kind of universal sense The Black Experience wedged-up in the flat bed between red and green: between say a red stripe and a green stripe. It was clear he did a job, that this was a task that was important, to separate himself and the subjectivity of his studio. It gives a measure to his voice. He’s arguing for the importance of innovation—that people were trying to make a new kind of art.

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ARE YOU AN INTERNATIONAL... ... ART ADVISOR ASSISTING IN A PURCHASE FOR A HIGH-PROFILE COLLECTOR IN THE U.S. ... ART DEALER EXHIBITING AT A SHOW ANYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES ... DESIGNER PERFORMING DESIGN SERVICES FOR CLIENTELE IN NEW YORK OR FLORIDA

WITH THE FOLLOWING CONCERNS: • TAXABLE VS. NON-TAXABLE EVENTS • COMPLIANCE ISSUES • TIME-SENSITIVE TRANSACTIONS • DIFFERENT TAX RATES PER STATE • LANGUAGE BARRIERS • CURRENCY RATE CONVERSIONS

A PURCHASE MADE VIA THE INTERNET OR CATALOG IS NOT TAX-EXEMPT MERELY BECAUSE IT IS PURCHASED REMOTELY. States of major cities require sales permits or Certificate of Authority to do Business prior to selling works of art within their jurisdiction.

OVERSEAS VENDOR SELLING TO U.S. COLLECTOR

INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITOR AT ART SHOW

Our firm saves you time and reduces your risks when handling important

FOR MORE INFORMATION,

international sales to your U.S. buyer. We are the liaison between you and

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the taxing authorities to make sure that you are in compliance for business purposes in the United States, whether temporary or permanent. We help

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translate what is required, while minimizing the taxes and explain how it OR CONTACT

affects you and your collector.

LISA NATIVIDAD-GOVONI AT: We handle the details of the business transactions, excluding US Customs. You concentrate on your craft—THE ART OF SELLING ART. Let us handle

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[email protected]

the rest regarding the state and local requirements.

P:

+1 973 206 1869

SERVING:

EUROPE | ASIA | AFRICA | AMERICAS | OCEANIA/PACIFIC

ALBERT OEHLEN Tramonto Spaventoso

Photo: Esther Freund

Gagosian Beverly Hills