"Art Selling Like Hot Cakes in New York Auctions" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Warhols Triple Elvis silk-screen left sold for 82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday Soon afterward his Four Marlons sold for 696 million                  

Warhol’s ‘Triple Elvis’ silk-screen, left, sold for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday. Soon afterward, his ‘Four Marlons’ sold for $69.6 million. Reuters

The art market just had the biggest two weeks in its history.

Since Nov. 4, collectors have flocked to the world’s chief auction houses in New York to buy more than $2 billion of art, a historic high in which 23 works sold for more than $20 million apiece. (In 2009, Christie’s International sold only six artworks for that much all year.)

Night after night at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the titans of the world’s far-flung industries squeezed like sardines into packed auction salesrooms to compete for hundreds of artworks created by the world’s best-known Impressionist, modern and contemporary artists.

To win, bidders often had to splurge: Billionaire investor Steve Cohen paid Sotheby’s $101 million for an Alberto Giacometti bronze chariot sculpture; other bidders at Christie’s paid $82 million for an Andy Warhol silk-screen of a gun-toting Elvis Presley and $65 million for Édouard Manet’s portrait of pretty woman with a parasol.

Top Lots at Sotheby’s and Christie’s Contemporary Art Sales

Christie’s International in New York made auction history Wednesday when it sold $853 million of contemporary art.

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An untitled Robert Ryman from 1961 sold for 15 million at Sothebys
An untitled Robert Ryman from 1961 sold for $15 million at Sotheby’s. © 2014 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Andy Warhols 1963 silk-screen of a trio of overlapping gun-toting images of Elvis Presley Triple Elvis Ferus Type sold to an anonymous European telephone bidder for 82 million
Seconds after selling Elvis Christies sold Warhols 1966 gridlike portrait of actor Marlon Brando Four Marlons for 70 million
Cy Twomblys untitled lasso-like scribbles atop a blackboard-gray canvas sold for 70 million
Francis Bacons Seated Figure sold for 45 million
A mainland Chinese collector won this painting by Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild 648-3 for 17 million
At the Sothebys auction on Tuesday Mark Rothko s 1951 abstract No 21 Red Brown Black and Orange sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for 45 million
Sothebys reset Jasper Johnss auction record by selling a placemat-size version of the artists signature US Flag for 36 million to an anonymous collector bidding by telephone
Elsewhere in the sale a mint-green portrait of Elizabeth Taylor by Warhol Liz 3 Early Colored Liz sold for 315 million
A cherry-red Gerhard Richter Abstract Painting 747-4 sold for 214 million
An untitled Robert Ryman from 1961 sold for 15 million at Sothebys
Andy Warhols 1963 silk-screen of a trio of overlapping gun-toting images of Elvis Presley Triple Elvis Ferus Type sold to an anonymous European telephone bidder for 82 million
Andy Warhol’s 1963 silk-screen of a trio of overlapping, gun-toting images of Elvis Presley, ‘Triple Elvis [Ferus Type],’ sold to an anonymous European telephone bidder for $82 million. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Andy Warhol’s 1963 silk-screen of a trio of overlapping, gun-toting images of Elvis Presley, ‘Triple Elvis [Ferus Type],’ sold to an anonymous European telephone bidder for $82…
Seconds after selling ‘Elvis,’ Christie’s sold Warhol’s 1966 gridlike portrait of actor Marlon Brando, ‘Four Marlons,’ for $70 million. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Cy Twombly’s untitled, lasso-like scribbles atop a blackboard-gray canvas sold for $70 million. Christie’s
Francis Bacon’s ‘Seated Figure,’ sold for $45 million. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/DACS, London/ARS, NY 2014
A mainland Chinese collector won this painting by Gerhard Richter, ‘Abstraktes Bild (648-3),’ for $17 million. Christie’s
At the Sotheby’s auction on Tuesday, Mark Rothko ’s 1951 abstract, ‘No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),’ sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for $45 million. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Sotheby’s reset Jasper Johns’s auction record by selling a placemat-size version of the artist’s signature U.S. ‘Flag’ for $36 million to an anonymous collector bidding by telephone. Sotheby’s
Elsewhere in the sale, a mint-green portrait of Elizabeth Taylor by Warhol, ‘Liz #3 (Early Colored Liz),’ sold for $31.5 million. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
A cherry-red Gerhard Richter ‘Abstract Painting 747-4’ sold for $21.4 million. Sotheby’s
An untitled Robert Ryman from 1961 sold for $15 million at Sotheby’s. © 2014 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

On Wednesday, Christie’s conducted the biggest auction in history when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in a two-hour span.

Len Riggio , chairman of Barnes & Noble, said he intended to bid on a few items in Christie’s sale, but rivals outpaced him. “I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena,” he said. “Everyone wants to put their money somewhere, but what are these guys going to do, buy another house or keep $3 billion in the bank? No, they all want to put a little bit in art.”

When it comes to what collectors want, Sotheby’s chief executive Bill Ruprecht said they want “blue blue blue,” meaning blue-chip masterpieces by name-brand artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol who trade widely and often enough at auction to represent this market’s version of a Dow Jones Industrial Average. Seconds after Christie’s sold Warhol’s “Triple Elvis” for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday, the house sold another Warhol portrait of actor Marlon Brando, “Four Marlons,” for $69.6 million. Both Warhols are wall-power large—“Elvis” stands nearly 7-feet high—and convey the Pop artist’s signature silk-screen style

‘I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena. ’

—Len Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble

Mark Rothko, who painted hundreds of rectangular abstracts, also fared well in these sales, including an untitled indigo version that Sotheby’s sold for $40 million on Monday, twice its high estimate. The following day, the same house sold another Rothko, “No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),” for $45 million. (Estimates, unlike final sale prices, don't include the auction houses’ commissions.)

But collectors also glommed onto rarely seen works that stood out like gems, like a placemat-size Jasper Johns “Flag” from 1983 that Sotheby’s sold for $36 million, over its $20 million high estimate. Manet’s 1881 “Spring” portrait of a woman walking in a park also sold well in part because the work was the last painting Manet ever submitted to Paris’s taste-making Salon. The J. Paul Getty Museum paid $65.1 million for it at Christie’s on Nov. 5.

The art market cycles through good years and bad like the broader financial markets—art values notoriously crashed in 1990 and plummeted briefly in 2009—but in recent seasons, art prices have only gone one direction: Up. Dealers say that is because an influx of newly wealthy international buyers, from Chinese tech entrepreneurs to Brazilian bankers to Middle Eastern oil barons, have entered the art marketplace over the past decade. Most arrive seeking to store their extra cash in any art they can find at auctions and art fairs; others hope to reap the social cachet that comes with owning world-class art. Investors and speculators have also joined in, seeking to profit by buying and selling artworks like stocks.

Once the historic domain of merchant princes and popes, fine art has become attainable for the modern-day millionaire—an asset or currency that merits a place alongside stocks in an investment portfolio.Around 76% of art buyers surveyed earlier this fall by ArtTactic, a London-based auction watchdog, and auditor Deloitte Luxembourg said they are “increasingly acquiring art and collectibles from an investment standpoint,” compared with 53% two years ago.

Unlike Europeans, U.S. collectors have long been comfortable discussing art in investment-grade terms, and Americans now buy more art than anyone else on the planet—particularly the trophy pieces in these major seasonal auctions, according to Dublin-based art economist Clare McAndrew. Last year, art sales in the U.S. totaled more than $22 billion, up 25% from the year before, according to Ms. McAndrew’s latest Art Market Report. Moreover, buyers in the U.S. also took home around half the million-dollar artworks offered at auctions world-wide, she added.

China continues to emerge as the next great purchasing power, though. Xin Li, a former model who now works for Christie’s and often represents collectors from mainland China, won for a client a $17.5 million Willem de Kooning and a $16.9 million Gerhard Richter during Christie’s sale on Wednesday. A Lucian Freud portrait, “Julie and Martin,” also sold for $17 million to a young Asian man at Christie’s dressed in a black, silk-lapel suit.

No wonder collectors wishing to sell their art trophies at auction lined up to consign pieces into these November auctions. Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky said he sold a pair of pieces (he declined to say which) in large part because the mood remained reassuringly chipper—and because the auction houses offered to buy his artworks if no one else did. “I thought my works were overpriced,” he said, “but they did well—and there were other things I wanted that sold for too much.”

Longtime New York dealer and former Sotheby’s auctioneer David Nash said the market feels bloated and “hyperinflated” to him, but he saw few signs of a market bubble about to burst—yet. All but five of the 80 lots offered in Christie’s $853 million sale found buyers. On Monday, Sotheby’s sold 100% of the offerings in its estate sale of Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny. Such “white glove” sales are a rarity in the industry.

“Every season, I say the prices can’t get any higher, and then they do,” Mr. Nash said.

"Jeffrey Deitch Is Back on the Art Auction Scene" @nytimes by By GUY TREBAY

Jeffrey Deitch at Christie’s preview with Pol Bury’s “Punctuation.”

Call the cops, there’s Yukon gridlock at Christie’s.

It is the Tuesday afternoon before the big postwar contemporary art auctions, and mirrored in the Jeff Koons sculpture “Balloon Monkey (Orange),” a half-dozen shiny sport utility vehicles can be seen ganging up at curbside, attempting to disgorge their big-dog passengers all at once.

There goes Ralph Lauren. And here comes the former Hollywood mover and shaker Michael Ovitz. Over there is a hedge fund honcho with an Eddie Munster hairdo and more than $50 billion under management.

It is the last day of previews before several auctions, the first of which (to the surprise of practically no one) will one day from now go on to set soaring records, shaking loose $852.9 million (including premiums) from the deep pockets of a select group for whom pursuing blue-chip contemporary artworks is what shooting tuskers was to Hemingway.

If it all seems so remote from the lives of ordinary people — of the sort now innocently gawping at a less exotic public spectacle, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, erected a half-block away on the spot where Mr. Koons’s “Split/Rocker” stood not long ago — it is not. Or, anyway, not altogether.

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Jeffrey Deitch at Christie’s with Lichtenstein’s “10¢” and “Hot Dog.” “One of the games is to outsmart the market,” he said. Credit Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

Concealed behind the breathless hype, the eye-popping sales figures, the inevitable aura of Tulipmania attached to the ever-advancing art industrial machine is something unexpectedly democratic.

Increasingly, at these twice-yearly sales, the auction houses stage art exhibitions impressive by any standards, hanging what experts at Christie’s term once-in-a-lifetime pieces in displays organized and lighted to nearly museum standards — and all open to the curious, no barrier to entry, no admission fee.

“That, to me, is amazing,” Jeffrey Deitch was saying on Tuesday as he conducted a reporter on a tour of the pictures available. “I began when Christie’s was a stuffy place,” he added. “There were no pictures in the catalogs, no price estimates, no specialists. And the art was displayed with very little attention to aesthetics.”

That would have been in the Pictures Generation-era, the long-ago 1980s, before art fairs mushroomed around the globe and along with them a population of newly created art advisers, among whom Mr. Deitch, now 62, was one of the earliest.

That was also before multinationals added auction houses to their portfolios and started applying to the stodgy auction business merchandising techniques so effective in selling shoes and handbags.

In the decades before Jeffrey Deitch became an industry fixture and gadfly, he was first an art critic and then a corporate art adviser and also a shrewd collector. He became a pioneering dealer when Deitch Projects opened in 1996 on Grand Street and a lamented loss to fans of the wackadoodle downtown Art Parade he sponsored every year in SoHo when he closed shop in 2010 to direct the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. There he spent a lively if controversial three years before ending a contract with two years remaining, a classic example of “jumped” or “was pushed.

And now he is back in New York and has a new book (“Live the Art”) and new catalog (“The MOCA Index 2010-2013”), new artist collaborations in the offing and a renewed relationship with all the old clients from his database.

“He’s a man who would want to be very discreet,” Mr. Deitch said in a hushed voice on Tuesday when urged to identify a young zillionaire he had been escorting through the viewing rooms at Christie’s. From behind a pair of eyeglasses resembling twin portholes, Mr. Deitch gave a look that seemed to bind a listener to the code of art-world omerta.

And then, as the art collectors Jay Johnson and Tom Cashin and the aristocratic Milanese art dealer Giangaleazzo Visconti di Modrone silently slipped past, Mr. Deitch made a beeline for what he considered some of the auction’s choicest pictures.

That they were not in every case the headline offerings made sense; Mr. Deitch made his reputation finding and championing underdogs. “The great thing about the auctions is that you see the good, the bad, the things that make you say, ‘Why is this $100,000, and why is this $5,000?' ” he said. “One of the games is to outsmart the market, to anticipate trends. There’s always something that’s neglected.”

The Ed Ruscha picture “Smash” would not be one. The navy blue 1963 canvas with the word “smash” centered on the canvas (and painted along its perimeters) was among the auction’s choicest offerings and sold Wednesday evening to Larry Gagosian, the Manhattan dealer, for $30.4 million (including premium), well above its $20 million high estimate.

What interested Mr. Deitch more were pictures scattered throughout the galleries and created by world-famous artists at what could be termed threshold moments and, equally, paintings by those artists that fashions seemed to pass by. “Look at this Pol Bury,” he said of a canvas by the Belgian kinetic sculptor from which small filaments waved like tiny white sand eels. “Look at this painting, which has the comparative simplicity of Carl Andre and is a fusion of art and design that you had in the 1960s in Italy,” he said then, of a work by the obscure International Optical artist Getulio Alviani, still hard at work in Rome at 75.

Much as a weirdly surrealist 1938 painting by Jackson Pollock illustrated, as Mr. Deitch said, “the genesis of the greatest moment in American art,” a fine small painting by Yayoi Kusama showed the troubled Japanese master — who took up residence at the Seiwa Institute for the Mentally Ill four decades ago — at a presumably less fraught moment in her early career.

“It’s not going to be expensive,” Mr. Deitch said of the Kusama, whose presale estimate was $400,000 to $600,000. He paused. “That depends on what you consider expensive,” Mr. Deitch added, as the billionaire Mr. Lauren ambled past.

"Vast Space and Art to Fill It" @nytimes by JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSK

Site of a planned Mass MoCA expansion. Credit Aoife Morris

Taking another leap in its evolution from a disused 19th-century factory complex into a 21st-century center for visual and performing arts, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is set to announce on Monday that it has forged six new 15- to 25-year partnerships with big names in contemporary art, including James Turrell; the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; the Easton Foundation, which controls the estate of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois; Laurie Anderson; and Jenny Holzer.

Together, the artists’ work will fill about 90,000 square feet of new space. These galleries will bring Mass MoCA’s exhibition areas to roughly 260,000 square feet after the renovations announced last summer, funded partly with $25.4 million from the state. Mass MoCA will then rank among the largest art museums in the country, just shy of the gallery space at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

When the new spaces are opened in 2017, they will turn this institution in North Adams, Mass., into what Joseph C. Thompson, its director, calls “a campus of museums” with a diverse set of curatorial viewpoints. “We’re teaming up with people who have great bodies of artworks that we are hosting,” he said.

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“Breathing Light” by James Turrell. Credit Floriann Holzerr

At its opening in 1999, Mass MoCA, which has no permanent collection, was a showcase for large-scale art exhibitions, often commissioned or created on site, and a contemporary performing arts program. But in 2008, in a 25-year agreement with the Yale University Art Gallery, Mass MoCA turned over several galleries to Sol LeWitt’s large-scale wall drawings. When they proved popular, drawing visitors between the museum’s changing exhibitions, a light bulb went off for Mr. Thompson; he has been working on partnerships to fill his empty buildings ever since.

The long-term pacts he has devised — sometimes structured as cost-shares, allowing Mass MoCA to expand at minimal expense — are unusual for art museums, which more typically borrow collections for short-term exhibitions. “These partnerships come from the opportunities created by the space,” said Michael Govan, who worked on Mass MoCA in the 1980s, when it was just an idea, and is now director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Most museums are looking to expand, or they are expanding.” Mass MoCA “could be a model for communities that are willing to invest in space,” he added. “There are a lot of collections out there in storage.”

And there are a lot of artists who would like to fill space. “If you go there and see the Sol LeWitt installation, you’ll understand how meaningful it can be,” said Mr. Turrell, who works with light. He will have 35,000 square feet at Mass MoCA — as much as he had at his recent 10-month retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — for 25 years. In it he will place nine or 10 of his works, including several borrowed from his family and from the Guggenheim Museum. Mr. Turrell is also creating a two-story version of his Ganzfeld work — an immersive light field that challenges visitors’ depth perceptions — and he will turn a water tank into one of his “skyspaces.” As his part of the deal, he plans to donate one or two works.

 

The Rauschenberg Foundation will use its 20,000 square feet to show some of Robert Rauschenberg’s monumental works, including “Synapsis Shuffle,” a 52-panel piece from 1999 with painted passages and photographic images that he intended viewers to shuffle like a deck of cards, changing the sequence. It will also exhibit works by artists who have had residencies at Rauschenberg’s former home in Captiva, Fla.; and it will invite scholars from the Williams College/Clark Art Institute art history program to curate exhibitions of his pieces and art by others to provide a “new view” of Rauschenberg’s works.

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Laurie Anderson performing “Delusion.” Credit Leland Brewster

“We don’t want to build a Robert Rauschenberg museum,” said Christy MacLear, executive director of the foundation, which has been placing the artist’s works in museums around the country. She said the financial details at Mass MoCA remain to be defined, but added, “We’ll support the programs.”

In another space, Ms. Holzer, a Conceptual artist, said she would display “some old, some new” works, including her signature electronic light projections of poetry and slogans, and a new piece, still in development, that would allow visitors with smartphones to see augmented reality projections, blending the real with 3-D virtual objects.

The Easton Foundation will fill 5,000 square feet with six to eight massive carved marble sculptures by Bourgeois. Some have never been seen in public and at least one, about 7 by 7 by 11 feet, will require cutting through a wall for installation.

For Ms. Anderson, Mass MoCA is creating installation galleries; a production studio where visitors can watch her create audio and video works; and a display of the costumes, instruments, paintings and other objects she makes.

Finally, in collaboration with Bang on a Can, a new-music consortium, Mass MoCA will develop an interactive music room, where people can try hundreds of original instruments that were handmade by the composer Gunnar Schonbeck.

The museum’s curatorial team will gain about 20,000 square feet of gallery space in the renovation and installation projects, leaving only one significant building in the 26-building complex left to develop. Mass MoCA has raised $13.5 million of the $30 million it needs to supplement the state funds and to build a maintenance reserve and endowment.      

 

"Olafur Eliasson on How to Do Good Art" by NED BEAUMAN

Olafur Eliasson on How to Do Good Art   

By NED BEAUMAN
November 13, 2014 10:00 amNovember 13, 2014 10:00 am 2 Comments

On the eve of his exhibition at the new Fondation Louis Vuitton, the artist discusses his work — which includes a school, an architecture practice, a charity, a cookbook and a herd of Icelandic sheep, and which is meant to make the world a better place. Really.

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Unfinished wooden sculptures at Studio Olafur Eliasson which occupies a converted brewery in Prenzlauer Berg Berlin
Unfinished wooden sculptures at Studio Olafur Eliasson, which occupies a converted brewery in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.Credit Nigel Shafran

“Irony or not?” said Olafur Eliasson, looking around the meeting table. At his studio in Berlin, the answer is almost invariably “not,” but perhaps here an exception could be made. Eliasson and a few of his staff were finalizing the title of a new book chronicling the five-year history of the Institut für Raumexperimente, a small art school that Eliasson ran until February. The title under consideration was “How to Make the Best Art School in the World.” “It would be nice to piss off the very academic art schools,” Eliasson said. “I do think we had the best students in the world. But is irony really the economy I want to support?” In the end, Eliasson and his staff agreed that such good-natured braggadocio was pretty harmless in irony terms, although the cover would be designed so that at first glance the book would appear to be titled simply “How to Make.” Eliasson had also ensured that the book would include a photograph of a puppy that one of the students had met on a field trip. “Every book should have a picture of a puppy in it,” he told me, “because it just makes you so happy.”

If, like me, you operate under the assumption that irony is automatically more sophisticated than earnestness, it is confounding to enter Eliasson’s world. One of the most extensive private holdings of his work belongs to the advertising executive Christian Boros, whose appointment-only museum in the Mitte district, the Boros Collection, was originally built as a Nazi air-raid shelter but over the years has also functioned as a banana warehouse and a notoriously debauched techno club. This is the nature of Berlin, where things cascade with contradictory meanings, where “post-” is a ubiquitous prefix, where hipsters chase oblivion in the ruins of old dogmas. Irony is almost always a safe bet here, not least in the expat art scene. So you arrive at Studio Olafur Eliasson with certain expectations, and when you find that, on the contrary, it is one of the most earnest places you have ever been, you start looking around for the cracks.

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Clockwise from top left Inside the Horizon a recently completed installation at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris One-way colour tunnel at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2007 Your waste of time 2013 for which chunks of ice were transported from Icelands largest glacier into MoMAs PS1 gallery Your wave is a three-dimensional mesh of light-emitting cables hung over the Palazzo Grassi on Venices Grand Canal in 2006
Clockwise from top left: ‘‘Inside the Horizon,’’ a recently completed installation at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; ‘‘One-way colour tunnel’’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007; ‘‘Your waste of time,’’ 2013, for which chunks of ice were transported from Iceland’s largest glacier into MoMA’s PS1 gallery; ‘‘Your wave is,’’ a three-dimensional mesh of light-emitting cables hung over the Palazzo Grassi on Venice’s Grand Canal in 2006.Credit Clockwise from top left: Iwan Baan; Ian Reeves/Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Matthew Septimus; Santi Caleca.

Eliasson was born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents in 1967. His most celebrated work to date is 2003’s “The weather project,” for which the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern was converted into a gigantic, artificial solarium, attracting over the course of six months two million visitors, who often felt compelled to lie down on the floor, spelling out political messages with their bodies or just gazing at themselves and each other in the mirror on the ceiling. My own favorite work of Eliasson’s is “Your waste of time,” an installation at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City last year that consisted of several chunks of ice, detached by seasonal melting from an Icelandic glacier, that had been fished out of a lake, shipped to New York and installed in the refrigerated gallery. There they sat for nearly four months, crystalline but also surprisingly grimy, stout as rock but also frail enough to need their own microclimate — individual and real and lost.

A lot of Eliasson’s works are like this: irruptions of the elemental into a museum setting, as if the building had sprung some mythic leak. Others are harder to convey in a high-concept pitch. When I visited the studio, Eliasson was working on a commission for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a major new museum that opened in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris last month. In addition to taking over the ground floor for the Fondation’s inaugural temporary show, he would be constructing a permanent “grotto” from which the Frank Gehry-designed building could be flatteringly viewed. Although Eliasson showed me plenty of sketches and models for the exhibition, I never quite formed a clear idea of what he was planning to do, apart from that it involved mirrors and curves and tinted glass. This side of Eliasson’s practice takes the form of a highly refined fun house, subjecting you to experiments in human perception that don’t sound like much until you see them firsthand. The intended effect often seems to be a pre-intellectual wonder, so that you will have basically the same experience as the 5-year-old next to you. There’s a reason why Eliasson feels an imperative to appeal to the broadest possible audience. He believes that in normal life we have a tendency to hurry along on autopilot, seldom questioning our deeper assumptions. Art, by goosing the senses, can make us more conscious of our positions in time, space, hierarchy, society, culture, the planet. In the long run, this heightened consciousness will result in change for the better — emotionally, socially, politically.

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Clockwise from left The weather project of 2003 which drew more than two million visitors to the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern Your rainbow panorama built on top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark in 2007 an interior viewemAndrew Dunkley  Marcus Leith Ole Hein Pedersen Studio Olafur Eliassonem
Clockwise from left: ‘‘The weather project’’ of 2003, which drew more than two million visitors to the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern;  ‘‘Your rainbow panorama,’’ built on top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark in 2007; an interior view. Andrew Dunkley & Marcus Leith; Ole Hein Pedersen; Studio Olafur Eliasson.Credit

In other words, Eliasson has a faith in the improving power of art that has been out of fashion since Victorian times. But his ambitions aren’t bounded by his studio. He is on friendly terms with Bill Gates, Kofi Annan and Michael Bloomberg, and regularly attends the World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss public policy with the people who make it. “I don’t go there to meet world leaders,” he joked. “I go to become a world leader!” In fact, he already talks like a politician much of the time, with a habit of disappearing into a haze of generalities and wonk-speak and anecdotes of uncertain relevance. The concepts he draws on — inclusivity and engagement and trust and so on — seem to have been filtered to ensure that you could no more be offended by his statements than you could be offended by the colored lights he puts in museums. Yes, he has given a TED talk.

And yet the longer I spent with Eliasson, the harder I found it to cling to my cynicism, because he’s such a good advertisement for sincerity. One of Eliasson’s friends, the author Jonathan Safran Foer, told me over the phone that he found spending time with Eliasson “overwhelming, whether overwhelming in the sense of at times feeling almost too much, or overwhelming in the sense of being really moving. You sit down with Olafur for a meal and he picks up the fork and stares at it for a moment and you think, Oh my god, he’s either inventing a new fork or wondering how to get forks to people who don’t have forks. ” He added: “After I’ve spent an hour with him I feel like I need a nap, but it’s because he has more curiosity than anyone I’ve ever met, and a greater belief in a person’s ability to be useful and to change things. Somehow he lives his entire life with the urgency of someone who just walked out of the doctor’s office with a dire prognosis.”

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Clockwise from top left cooking using the Studio Olafur Eliasson cookbook Brooklyn Bridge as seen during Eliassons The New York City Waterfalls project in 2008 from the Grey Sheep series 2013 featuring Eliassons own herd of Icelandic sheep bred to rehabilitate the Icelandic economy at the studio two of the 90 staff members who assist the artist an advertisement for the Little Sun a solar-powered LED lamp distributed worldwide
Clockwise from top left: cooking using the Studio Olafur Eliasson cookbook; Brooklyn Bridge as seen during Eliasson’s ‘‘The New York City Waterfalls’’ project in 2008; from the ‘‘Grey Sheep’’ series, 2013, featuring Eliasson’s own herd of Icelandic sheep, bred to rehabilitate the Icelandic economy; at the studio, two of the 90 staff members who assist the artist; an advertisement for the ‘‘Little Sun,’’ a solar-powered LED lamp distributed worldwideCredit Clockwise from top left: Fg | Architektur & Indechs; Julienne Schaer/Courtesy Public Art Fund; Studio Olafur Eliasson; Nigel Shafran; Maddalena Valeri.

Eliasson has 90 people working for him. Few of them have job titles. Four days a week they all eat a healthy vegetarian lunch together in the light-filled canteen upstairs, with a rotating schedule for washing the dishes afterward. Initially, I found the atmosphere at the studio rather too good to be true, like a hippie cult before night falls. But when I joined Eliasson for lunch on my second day at the studio, I sat there eating my roasted carrots and enviously contemplating how much better my life would be if I, too, received that bounty of vegetables and sunlight and intelligent chatter. Sebastian Behmann, who heads Eliasson’s architecture practice, told me that you can track how long someone has worked at Studio Olafur Eliasson by how much healthier they look every year (and indeed many people have stayed on for a decade or more). Last year, Studio Olafur Eliasson published its own 368-page cookbook of sustainable vegetarian recipes.

This is just one of the unpredictable byproducts of the studio, which often resembles a sort of ongoing Apollo project. Others have included the art school, a full-scale architecture practice, a series of publications, a charity and a herd of Icelandic sheep. As motley as these pursuits may sound, Eliasson would argue that they all emerge from a single mind-set, and that they’ve all been made viable by his years of practical experience as an artist. “If you can make a show in Venice, which is the most difficult damned thing one can do, not just because working with Italians is a mess, but also because you’re in a city on water in the middle of nowhere and getting a hammer and a nail is impossible . . . you can make a show on the moon,” he told me. “So as an artist, you become an entrepreneur by definition. . . . The art world underestimates its own relevance when it insists on always staying inside the art world. Maybe one can take some of the tools, methodologies, and see if one can apply them to something outside the art world.”

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Eliasson at work
 Eliasson at work.Credit Nigel Shafran

For instance, sheep. “It started with the financial crisis,” Eliasson told me when I asked about his herd. “Björk said everybody must think innovatively. So we started buying up lambs to rescue the Icelandic economy — but I think we ended up burdening it! My mistake was I wanted to turn it into an art project. Still, it was a nice excuse to go to the countryside and drink vodka and play with the sheep.” Eliasson began breeding lambs whose meat would be particularly well-suited to Moroccan tagines, with the intention of selling diced, marinated lamb to delis in Iceland. “I just couldn’t convince my partners that people in Iceland would eat tagine.” In the end, the lambs were slaughtered, their meat frozen and their wool knitted into 20 “secular prayer mats.”

Other ventures have been less quixotic. After they adopted two children from Addis Ababa, Eliasson and his wife, the art historian Marianne Krogh Jensen, started 121Ethiopia, a project that works to improve the lives of children in Ethiopian orphanages. 121Ethiopia operates on a modest scale. Little Sun, Eliasson’s other philanthropic enterprise, does not. Developed with the Danish engineer Frederik Ottesen, the Little Sun is a very efficient solar-powered LED lamp, cheerful in design and lightweight enough to wear around the neck on a lanyard. Since the lamp’s debut in 2012, more than 200,000 have been distributed, over a third of them to regions in Africa with no electricity, the rest at venues like Tate Modern or Coachella. While Eliasson was still discussing the Institut für Raumexperimente book, I was taken upstairs to the Little Sun workshop to meet Felix Tristan Hallwachs, who heads the project. “We’re not going to solve the Ukraine crisis, we’re not going to solve IS [Islamic State],” he said. “But in theory if everyone has a light at home and can study, then you have less chaos in the world, probably.”

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One of Eliassons hanging sculptures in the studio
One of Eliasson’s hanging sculptures in the studio.Credit Nigel Shafran

If there isn’t much irony at Studio Olafur Eliasson, I came to feel, it’s not because irony is proscribed. Irony doesn’t offend anyone and it doesn’t go over anyone’s head. Irony is simply not required, because the things you can achieve with crusading sincerity are self-evidently so much better. At worst, you could argue that Little Sun makes Eliasson’s talk about the power of museum art look a bit vaporous by comparison. But at Studio Olafur Eliasson the distinction between art and direct intervention is barely even recognized. Hallwachs told me: “Olafur’s work uses media from photography to oil paint to all kinds of installations and architecture. Now business is part of the range of media as well.” Eliasson told me that he was hoping to present a work at the next G7 conference that would evaluate the German public’s degree of trust in Chancellor Angela Merkel and perhaps in the process inspire a renewal of the European relationship with Africa. I asked him whether, in order to achieve such an ambitious and specific political objective he would need to make a new type of work, something more targeted, more explicit. Possibly, he replied — but he would be just as likely to bring along something like “Riverbed,” which consists of a riparian landscape constructed inside the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen from 180 tons of Icelandic bluestone. For Eliasson, art need never be marginal, and art need never be just a carrier for a message. Art can change the world with the sheer intensity of its art-ness. Or, perhaps, by helping to get the artist in a room with the energy minister of Nigeria.

If Eliasson had his way, the same “everyone’s invited!” quality that makes his work so appealing to institutions might sometimes be pushed to extremes that would leave even those institutions flustered. Before I left the studio, I related to Eliasson something that happened to me in July last year at Warm Up, the Saturday afternoon dance party held in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. It was oppressively hot and muggy on the outdoor dance floor, and halfway through the afternoon I had the idea of going inside to spend a few minutes with “Your waste of time,” the piece with the chunks of ice, to cool off. Arriving at the gallery, however, my friends and I found that it had been locked for the duration of the event, so we could do no more than press ourselves against the chilly door. When I told Eliasson this story, he looked genuinely pained. “What a pity!” he kept saying. “What a pity! I would have left that door open.” But would he really have wanted drunken revelers slithering over this ancient ice that he’d imported from thousands of miles away? “If the ice melts and disappears — well, maybe it’s beautiful that there was once an iceberg, and then there was a party and now the iceberg is gone.” He pointed out that this would have been an excellent metaphor for man-made climate change. “People underestimate how robust art is.” He added: “If we don’t believe that creativity as a language can be as powerful as the language of the politicians, we would be very sad — and I would have failed. I am convinced that creativity is a fierce weapon.”

“Inside the Horizon,” a specially commissioned grotto by Olafur Eliasson, is now on view at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. An exhibition of Eliasson’s work, the inaugural show at the Fondation, will open on Dec. 17 and run until Feb. 16, 2015.

"With Self-Portrait of a Lifetime, Picasso Returns to Paris Pedestal" @nytimes by HOLLAND COTTER

   
PARIS — “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it,” Pablo Picasso reportedly said. Whether he did say it or not, it sounds like him, serial overproducer. And in a gray, leaf-drifting October here he’s as good as his word. The Picasso Museum, which closed for expansion in 2009, has finally reopened at more than twice its former size, but years overschedule and wrapped in a swirl of intrigue.

For the news media, the renovation project has been a gift. Work on the Baroque mansion that houses the museum, the world’s largest Picasso collection, dragged scandalously on and on. Budgets ballooned. There were shocked firings (Anne Baldassari, the museum’s director was dismissed), high-level hissy fits and ad hominem attacks galore. Who could ask for more?

The art-loving public could. The museum, which debuted in 1985, is a popular draw. No matter how many great individual Picasso works there are in London, Madrid or New York, in its museum Paris has the artist himself, early and late, in major and minor mode. No wonder anxious crowds lined the sidewalks and swarmed the front door here for the public opening on Saturday.

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The renovated Picasso Museum, closed since 2009 for renovation, finally reopened on Saturday in the Hôtel Salé, a Baroque 17th-century mansion. Credit Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Once inside, what do they get? Fabulousness — and frustration. On the unqualified positive side, there are more than 400 Picasso works encompassing his career, along with a gemlike selection of pieces he owned by artists he loved: Chardin, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Henri Rousseau. And in a sense, even his own work here represents a personal choice.

In breadth, texture and spirit, the exhibition is like no other. It is utterly different from, say, the large selection of Picassos in “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met show is a classic lineup of trophy masterpieces. What’s at the Picasso Museum is closer to a sublime teaching collection, with scraps and masterworks mixed together. The goal here is less to monumentalize an artist or a style than to tell a complex story of how art is made by one person of protean energy over a specific stretch of time.

 

Picasso was a lifelong self-collector who kept examples of his art that he couldn’t or didn’t want to relinquish: juvenilia, pictorial notes to self, finished favorites, and souvenirs of loves and traumas gone by. He left this archive, or accumulation, to family members when he died in 1973. They sifted it and gave a vast amount to the French government in lieu of paying inheritance tax. It is this collection, essentially shaped by the artist himself, that the museum is built on.

Given such richly personal material, it’s too bad the new presentation at the Picasso Museum — officially the Musée Picasso Paris — isn’t telling that story more persuasively. Architecture is part of the problem. The museum’s 17th-century home, the Hôtel Salé, in the historic Marais district, with its garden, courtyard and two-story, sculpture-encrusted entrance hall, has never been ideal for showing art.

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A visitor viewing some of the museum’s 437 works on display, which include not only ones by Picasso but works by artists he admired. Credit Ed Alcock for The New York Times

The interior is choppy, with smallish spaces, dead ends, and illogical connections. The original 1980s renovation laid a white-walled Corbusian gloss over this without achieving a sense of unity. The new design, by the architect Jean-François Bodin, is basically a magnified version of the old plan. There’s more space — four floors of galleries, including a vaulted basement and loftlike attic with exposed beams and views of surrounding rooftops — but their order is still hard to navigate.

 

An impression of discontinuity is compounded by the idiosyncratic arrangement of art devised by Ms. Baldassari, who stayed on the job just long enough to organize the inaugural show. The main installation, on the first and second floors, begins with a few paintings by the adolescent Picasso in Spain, where he was born in 1881, and others from his first stay in Paris when he was barely out of his teens. The shift is dramatic: Murillo-style realism one year, the equivalent of psychedelia the next.

But the time frame quickly grows confusing. The collection’s earliest painting, “The Barefoot Girl,” from 1895, turns up two galleries away with some near-abstract 1930s sculpture. Elsewhere, a pairing of the “blue” self-portrait from 1901 with a sketchy moon-face one from 1972 makes sense in a compare-and-contrast way. But putting them with the 1914 Cubist “Man With a Mustache” and a bronze head from 1958 doesn’t, unless you’re saying that all Picasso male heads are self-portraits, which they aren’t.

The trouble is, Ms. Baldassari doesn’t say anything at all about the choices she’s making. Labels with information are absent. The unstated idea, in curatorial vogue at the moment, is that art speaks for itself, end of story. But this isn’t so, and hasn’t been since the 18th century, when most art was still about politics and religion and pitched to a privileged insider audience. Art has changed; audiences have changed, widened. Today, no single body of shared knowledge can be assumed. Viewers need help, and deserve the choice to avail themselves of it.

   
 

By way of compromise, Ms. Baldassari shapes the show around a few loose themes. Under the label “Primitive” she has brought together an astonishing array of small paintings and drawings that demonstrate, step by audacious step, how “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon” came into being in 1907. Under “War Paintings,” we see the 1937 “Guernica” simultaneously coalescing and sending sparks out in future directions.

Much of the museum’s collection, though, is from an in-between period, the late 1920s to the early 1930s, when Picasso was coming off his post-World War I “classical” phase, getting his radical mojo back, and beginning to think of himself as a surrealist. It was tough going. The new work didn’t sell too well — possibly that’s the reason he kept so much of it — and you can see why: It’s strong, aggressive stuff. Everything is teeth and genitals, penetrations and impalings. Bodies, mostly female, are crudités of detached limbs. Picasso appears repeatedly in the alter-ego of the Minotaur, an Ovidian sex machine.

Work from his sex-and-violence phase feels right at home in Paris this fall. An exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, “Sade: Attacking the Sun,” is a tribute to the Divine Marquis and an orgy of erotically tortured figures. (The Picasso Museum lent paintings to the show.) At the Pompidou Center, Marcel Duchamp makes all sorts of slice-and-dice moves on the human form in a fine-tuned show of his paintings. And the Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy has brought his elaborately offensive “Chocolate Factory” to Monnaie de Paris, a former mint, where blonde-wigged workers of various genders turn out edible versions of sex toys and Santa Clauses.

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When Mr. McCarthy installed a big blowup sculpture of one of the sex toys — he coyly titled it “Tree” — in the Place Vendôme, he was slapped by an offended local, opening a window on a reactionary side of French politics usually hidden from short-term visitors. But it’s there, always has been, and Picasso, the insider who was always an outsider, knew this.

All together, you can learn a tremendous amount about him in the Picasso Museum show, not least that he could be a truly terrible artist. Maybe the biggest revelation, though, comes on the top floor, when you catch your first glimpse of a Cézanne landscape Picasso once owned, and instantly sense what’s been missing from the two floors below: focus, concentration, a point of repose, warmth like a light in a tunnel, a fire in a hearth, a vigil lamp in a church.

The comparison of Cézanne to Picasso we see here is of painter to cartoonist, of steady walker to competition dancer. It’s hard even to imagine Picasso painting landscapes — though he did; there’s one nearby — because, judging by this jumpy show, he doesn’t know how to be quiet, to sit there, stop spewing, do nothing, look long. Yet I can imagine him entering the gallery, as we do, nerves keyed up, and seeing Cézanne with a jolt of relief. It’s fitting that after Picasso died at 91, he was laid to rest in the garden of his summer home, a chateau not so different from the Hôtel Salé, but in the South of France, in view of Cézanne’s beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. Not that he was particularly sentimental about the connection. He was territorial to the end. “Cézanne painted these mountains and now they are mine,” he is said to have boasted. And Paris owns Picasso, or a comprehensive chunk of him, and whatever the failings of the Picasso Museum, that’s just a fact.

"All 43 Works From Bunny Mellon’s Collection Sell at Sotheby’s Auction" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

"All 43 Works From Bunny Mellon’s Collection Sell at Sotheby’s Auction" @nytimes by  CAROL VOGEL

A 1932 painting by Georgia O’Keeffe sold on Monday for $3.1 million. It had adorned Bunny Mellon’s Virginia dining room. Credit 2014 The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny, spent her lifetime collecting whatever caught her eye, from antique porcelains and shaker baskets to abstract paintings by Rothko and Diebenkorn. Her legendary taste and style, from an era long gone, proved irresistible for scores of collectors who descended on Sotheby’s York Avenue salesroom on Monday night to see 43 “masterworks,” as the auction house called them, bringing prices that were well past anyone’s expectations.

“History, legend, taste — you had everything tonight,” Lionel Pissarro, a great-grandson of the painter Camille Pissarro and a Paris-based art dealer, said after the auction.

Artwork spanning 400 years attracted bidders from 32 countries and four continents. The evening brought $158.7 million, topping a high estimate of $121 million. All 43 works sold. Among the stars: a 1970 abstract canvas by Mark Rothko of intense blues and greens that brought nearly $40 million, twice its high estimate, and several paintings and drawings by Richard Diebenkorn, including “Ocean Park No. 89,” which sold for $9.6 million, below its high estimate of $12 million.

The auction on Monday was the first in a series devoted to the art and objects that Mrs. Mellon, and her husband, Paul Mellon, had lived with and loved.

Mrs. Mellon, who died in March at 103, and her husband, the son of the financier Andrew W. Mellon, were celebrated philanthropists. The couple had either donated or bequeathed world-class artworks to many museums such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received more than 900 works, including Cézanne’s “Boy in a Red Waistcoat.”

But there was still a lot left over, and on Monday night Sotheby’s was selling a personal selection of artwork that decorated the couple’s five homes, including Oak Spring Farms, the 2,000-acre estate in Upperville, Va., where Mrs. Mellon spent the last years of her life. The next Mellon auctions will feature everything from a blue diamond pendant to furniture, porcelains, baskets and even a fire truck.

Throughout her life, Mrs. Mellon was a passionate supporter of Rothko. Besides the canvas of blues and greens the sale also featured one from 1955, “Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange).” Eight bidders competed for the painting, which had been estimated to bring $20 million to $30 million and sold to the Nahmad Gallery for $36.5 million.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent from $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Diebenkorn was another artist Mrs. Mellon championed. Eight examples of his work — paintings as well as works on paper — were up for sale. Among the best of them was “Ocean Park No. 89,” a 1975 painting from the artist’s celebrated series, this one an abstract image of a sunset. Valentino, the fashion designer who was sitting in the front row, snapped up the painting for $9.68 million. It had been estimated to sell for $8 million to $12 million.

 

Mrs. Mellon was known for her love of blue — in her choice of porcelains, wall coverings and furniture, but also paintings. Lucio Fontana’s “Concetto Spaziale (Blu)” from 1968 was estimated at $300,000 to $400,000 but was bought by a telephone bidder for $965,000. It had hung in the bedroom of Mrs. Mellon’s 70th Street townhouse in Manhattan.

A spare painting of a barn that Georgia O’Keeffe painted during a 1932 visit to Canada that adorned Mrs. Mellon’s Virginia dining room was bought by another telephone bidder for $3.1 million, above its high $2.5 million estimate.

Mrs. Mellon was a well-known horticulturalist who redesigned the White House Rose Garden at the request of her friend Jacqueline Kennedy in the early 1960s. Many works had a botanical theme, like a tiny still life of flowers by the Dutch Golden Age painter Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, which sold for $4.6 million, above its high $4 million estimate.

The auction included several examples of furniture by Diego Giacometti (brother of the famous sculptor Alberto Giacometti), whom Mrs. Mellon met through her friend, the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy. She commissioned him to make bronze furniture and sculptures for her homes. Not fond of his usual bronze patina, she asked him to paint them off-white especially for her. Two coffee tables that featured birds were in hot demand. One, from 1970 that was expected to bring $200,000 to $300,000, sold for $1.7 million; another that was expected to sell for $150,000 to $200,000 was purchased for $1.4 million.

“It’s all in a name,” Rachel Mauro, a Manhattan dealer, said as she was leaving the sale. Many other dealers hope that names like Warhol, Twombly and de Kooning — which fill the mega contemporary art auctions later this week — will have as much allure.

"Art Selling Like Hot Cakes in New York Auctions" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Warhols Triple Elvis silk-screen left sold for 82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday Soon afterward his Four Marlons sold for 696 million                                          

Warhol’s ‘Triple Elvis’ silk-screen, left, sold for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday. Soon afterward, his ‘Four Marlons’ sold for $69.6 million. Reuters

The art market just had the biggest two weeks in its history.

Since Nov. 4, collectors have flocked to the world’s chief auction houses in New York to buy more than $2 billion of art, a historic high in which 23 works sold for more than $20 million apiece. (In 2009, Christie’s International sold only six artworks for that much all year.)

Night after night at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the titans of the world’s far-flung industries squeezed like sardines into packed auction salesrooms to compete for hundreds of artworks created by the world’s best-known Impressionist, modern and contemporary artists.

To win, bidders often had to splurge: Billionaire investor Steve Cohen paid Sotheby’s $101 million for an Alberto Giacometti bronze chariot sculpture; other bidders at Christie’s paid $82 million for an Andy Warhol silk-screen of a gun-toting Elvis Presley and $65 million for Édouard Manet’s portrait of pretty woman with a parasol.

On Wednesday, Christie’s conducted the biggest auction in history when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in a two-hour span.

Len Riggio , chairman of Barnes & Noble, said he intended to bid on a few items in Christie’s sale, but rivals outpaced him. “I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena,” he said. “Everyone wants to put their money somewhere, but what are these guys going to do, buy another house or keep $3 billion in the bank? No, they all want to put a little bit in art.”

When it comes to what collectors want, Sotheby’s chief executive Bill Ruprecht said they want “blue blue blue,” meaning blue-chip masterpieces by name-brand artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol who trade widely and often enough at auction to represent this market’s version of a Dow Jones Industrial Average. Seconds after Christie’s sold Warhol’s “Triple Elvis” for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday, the house sold another Warhol portrait of actor Marlon Brando, “Four Marlons,” for $69.6 million. Both Warhols are wall-power large—“Elvis” stands nearly 7-feet high—and convey the Pop artist’s signature silk-screen style

On Wednesday, Christie’s conducted the biggest auction in history when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in a two-hour span.

Len Riggio , chairman of Barnes & Noble, said he intended to bid on a few items in Christie’s sale, but rivals outpaced him. “I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena,” he said. “Everyone wants to put their money somewhere, but what are these guys going to do, buy another house or keep $3 billion in the bank? No, they all want to put a little bit in art.”

When it comes to what collectors want, Sotheby’s chief executive Bill Ruprecht said they want “blue blue blue,” meaning blue-chip masterpieces by name-brand artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol who trade widely and often enough at auction to represent this market’s version of a Dow Jones Industrial Average. Seconds after Christie’s sold Warhol’s “Triple Elvis” for $82 million to a phone bidder on Wednesday, the house sold another Warhol portrait of actor Marlon Brando, “Four Marlons,” for $69.6 million. Both Warhols are wall-power large—“Elvis” stands nearly 7-feet high—and convey the Pop artist’s signature silk-screen style

‘I feel like I’m surrounded by gladiators in this shiny big arena. ’

—Len Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble

Mark Rothko, who painted hundreds of rectangular abstracts, also fared well in these sales, including an untitled indigo version that Sotheby’s sold for $40 million on Monday, twice its high estimate. The following day, the same house sold another Rothko, “No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),” for $45 million. (Estimates, unlike final sale prices, don't include the auction houses’ commissions.)

But collectors also glommed onto rarely seen works that stood out like gems, like a placemat-size Jasper Johns “Flag” from 1983 that Sotheby’s sold for $36 million, over its $20 million high estimate. Manet’s 1881 “Spring” portrait of a woman walking in a park also sold well in part because the work was the last painting Manet ever submitted to Paris’s taste-making Salon. The J. Paul Getty Museum paid $65.1 million for it at Christie’s on Nov. 5.

The art market cycles through good years and bad like the broader financial markets—art values notoriously crashed in 1990 and plummeted briefly in 2009—but in recent seasons, art prices have only gone one direction: Up. Dealers say that is because an influx of newly wealthy international buyers, from Chinese tech entrepreneurs to Brazilian bankers to Middle Eastern oil barons, have entered the art marketplace over the past decade. Most arrive seeking to store their extra cash in any art they can find at auctions and art fairs; others hope to reap the social cachet that comes with owning world-class art. Investors and speculators have also joined in, seeking to profit by buying and selling artworks like stocks.

Once the historic domain of merchant princes and popes, fine art has become attainable for the modern-day millionaire—an asset or currency that merits a place alongside stocks in an investment portfolio.Around 76% of art buyers surveyed earlier this fall by ArtTactic, a London-based auction watchdog, and auditor Deloitte Luxembourg said they are “increasingly acquiring art and collectibles from an investment standpoint,” compared with 53% two years ago.

Unlike Europeans, U.S. collectors have long been comfortable discussing art in investment-grade terms, and Americans now buy more art than anyone else on the planet—particularly the trophy pieces in these major seasonal auctions, according to Dublin-based art economist Clare McAndrew. Last year, art sales in the U.S. totaled more than $22 billion, up 25% from the year before, according to Ms. McAndrew’s latest Art Market Report. Moreover, buyers in the U.S. also took home around half the million-dollar artworks offered at auctions world-wide, she added.

China continues to emerge as the next great purchasing power, though. Xin Li, a former model who now works for Christie’s and often represents collectors from mainland China, won for a client a $17.5 million Willem de Kooning and a $16.9 million Gerhard Richter during Christie’s sale on Wednesday. A Lucian Freud portrait, “Julie and Martin,” also sold for $17 million to a young Asian man at Christie’s dressed in a black, silk-lapel suit.

No wonder collectors wishing to sell their art trophies at auction lined up to consign pieces into these November auctions. Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky said he sold a pair of pieces (he declined to say which) in large part because the mood remained reassuringly chipper—and because the auction houses offered to buy his artworks if no one else did. “I thought my works were overpriced,” he said, “but they did well—and there were other things I wanted that sold for too much.”

Longtime New York dealer and former Sotheby’s auctioneer David Nash said the market feels bloated and “hyperinflated” to him, but he saw few signs of a market bubble about to burst—yet. All but five of the 80 lots offered in Christie’s $853 million sale found buyers. On Monday, Sotheby’s sold 100% of the offerings in its estate sale of Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny. Such “white glove” sales are a rarity in the industry.

“Every season, I say the prices can’t get any higher, and then they do,” Mr. Nash said.

George Lindemann Journal - "The Art World’s High-Roller Specialist" @wsj by Kelly Crow

Christies Xin Li with Pens-The Two Celestial Bodies by Hong Kyoung-Tack                   

        

In mid-October, Christie’s art expert Xin Li—a former professional basketball star and model from China’s Manchuria region—was escorting billionaire collectors through the Louvre in Paris. Days later, she popped up in Hong Kong to wine and dine tech millionaires at the auction house’s showroom. Now, Ms. Xin is in New York to field phone bids during the season’s major fall auctions, which started Tuesday and continue through next week.

“I’m never in one place for more than 10 days,” said the 38-year-old deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia. “I can’t be.”

Ms. Xin is a leading player in the art business’s central game right now: a race to match a small number of $10 million-plus masterpieces with a small number of mega-collectors, who are increasingly coming from Asia.

Xin Li was a fashion model in Paris pictured here in 1999                                 

Next Tuesday, Sotheby’s will offer a top-heavy sale of contemporary art in which nearly half of its estimated $320 million sale total is tied up in eight of its 79 lots. The priciest, a red-and-black Mark Rothko, “No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),” is estimated to sell for at least $50 million. There is also an avocado-green Andy Warhol silk-screen of Elizabeth Taylor sporting a swath of turquoise eye shadow, “Liz #3 (Early Colored Liz),” that is expected to sell for $30 million or more.

Over at Christie’s, the emphasis on blue chips is even more pronounced. Its Wednesday sale, where Ms. Xin said she may be bidding on at least a half-dozen major works, is estimated to bring in at least $600 million, the house’s highest-ever presale expectation. During the recession, these auction houses only offered a handful of $10 million-plus works across a two-week sale series. Next week, a quarter of Christie’s offerings are estimated to cross that bar—including examples by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jeff Koons.

The price increases matter because they are buoying the entire art market, experts say. Nearly $60 billion in art changed hands last year, second only to sales in 2007 and up 8% over 2012, according to art economist Clare McAndrew. “A significant part of the uplift of the market was due to higher-priced works, rather than simply more works sold,” she wrote in a March report.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-art-worlds-high-roller-specialist-1415314210

Bass Museum of Art Receives Donation of $1 Million

Bass Museum of Art Receives Donation of $1 Million

Diane and Alan Lieberman

The Bass Museum of Art announced over the weekend that art collectors and patrons Diane and Alan Lieberman—who own the South Beach Hotel Group—have donated $1 million to the museum. The funds will support the museum’s exhibitions of contemporary art and education programs, according to director George Lindemann. A host to year-round exhibitions, the museum's planning an internal expansion in June of next year, working with architects Arata Isozaki and David Gauld. Said Alan Lieberman of the donation, “Miami Beach has been my home for the past twenty-five years. My business is here and I have raised my family here. I want to give back to this community that has given my family so much.”

Bass Museum Gifted $1 Million at 50th Anniversary Gala

During the 50th anniversary gala for Miami’s Bass Museum of Art, trustee board president George Lindemann announced that the museum had received a donation of $1 million from Diane and Alan Lieberman, owners of the South Beach Hotel Group. “Miami Beach is a creative and forward thinking city, and we are so fortunate to have such visionaries as the Liebermans as patrons,” Lindemann added. This gift seems particularly well timed given the museum’s forthcoming internal renovation: Beginning in June of 2015, architect David Gauld and design consultant Arata Isozaki will work within the existing structure to expand programmable space by 37 percent.