Author: admin

Art Today is More Fun than Gold

The art market today is once again rolling along with plenty of momentum, but so is the real estate market, the euro, the price of grain. The cost of crude oil is back over $100 a barrel and even the battered and bloody stock market has rallied. Commodity prices are strong across the board because people are hungry for hard assets, and gold has been on a roll, roaring from… Read more

Wild at Art

I’ve been studying art and design collectors for more than six years through compiling and editing interviews into two books (titled Collecting Contemporary and Collecting Design) as well as writing a regular column in The New York Observer. My own interests in art and design date back to my college days in the ’80s, when meeting and hanging out with artists like Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat had enormous allure… Read more

European Pilgrimage: On the Well-Worn Art Route, from Paris to Basel

The annual summer art tour is finally over. It was bookended by the Venice Biennale and the mega-fair Art Basel and included a few stops in between. Basel was packed with collectors and dealers and was very successful, with art changing hands at the fastest pace we’ve seen since ’07. If the art market isn’t 90 percent back to the good old days it’s damn close.     But I… Read more

The Venice Biennale: New, But Not Necessarily Improved

The Venice Biennale, which opened last week and runs through November, is titled “Illuminations,” but its Swiss curator, Parkett magazine founder Bice Curiger, might as well have called it “The Phoenix.” The event has risen from the ashes of the global financial crisis and soared to new heights—such extreme heights that it is now an entirely different animal from the last five Biennales I’ve attended.   Summing up the tenor… Read more

Why Are All the Dealers Flocking to Hong Kong? A Visit to the Fortune Cookie Art Fair

Last week the massive Hong Kong Exhibition Center hosted a triple header–the four-year-old art fair Art HK; a luxurious Christie’s auction preview; and a Christie’s-sponsored exhibition of new work by Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi–that provided a window into the state of the art market in China.   The fair now draws a good portion of the world’s major galleries as well as many of its better small ones. It’s something… Read more

Roving Eye: The Rolling Eye

Last week the Roving Eye once again rolled through Chelsea in search of fresh ideas and interesting points of view. These days I start my tour with shows of the tried and true, and hope not to find it tired and blue.   My first stop was, of course, the Picasso show at Gagosian on 21st Street, even though I’m feeling totally Picasso-ed out. The recent (and tedious) “Picasso: Guitars… Read more

Roving Eye: A Hunger for New Minimalists

Jacob Kassay, Untitled (detail), 2009
There was plenty to see and think about this past auction week.   The week’s most popular gallery show was the Nate Lowman blockbuster spread across Michele Maccarone’s and Gavin Brown’s galleries. I was told it sold out within hours of the opening. Even if that’s just the gallery spiel, I’m sure it will all sell soon enough.         Lowman’s show was certainly his best yet, even… Read more