Art Basel Art Basel co-directors Annette Schönholzer and Marc Spiegler

This year’s Hong Kong International Art Fair is a week away, but its organizers are already focused on 2013.

That’s when the event — Asia’s biggest and most lucrative art fair — will be reborn as the Hong Kong edition of Art Basel. It will be held May 23 to 26 and remain at the city’s convention center.

Associated Press

Paul McCarthy’s ‘Daddies Tamato Ketchup Inflatable 2007′ at the entrance to the Hong Kong International Art Fair in 2011.

Marc Spiegler, co-director of Art Basel and sister event Art Basel Miami Beach, the biggest art fair in the U.S., said there will be “significant differences from this year” but declined to share details. MCH Group, which owns both Art Basel fairs, bought a 60% stake in Hong Kong’s fair last May.

Exhibitors, however, will get some idea of what’s changing on June 11, when Basel releases information on the selection committee and makes its 2013 applications available.

Among galleries’ concerns: that Art Basel Hong Kong will feature the same names that pop up in the U.S. and Europe. That won’t happen, Mr. Spiegler said.

“Every gallery has to apply every time to every show,” he said. “We want [to avoid] shows that all look the same. There will never be a get-in-once, get-in-three times concept, though that would make our lives simpler.”

Magnus Renfrew, the Hong Kong art fair director who is now Art Basel’s director in Asia, said the fair is committed to keeping a 50-50 split between Western and Asian (which they define as including the entire Asia-Pacific region as well as the Middle East and Turkey) galleries.

WOW Productions - Magnus Renfrew

What patrons can expect is to see top-selling Asian artists and galleries appear in Miami and Basel, similar to Art Basel Miami, which raised the profiles of Latin American artists, who were then invited to Switzerland. “There is cross-pollination,” Mr. Spiegler said.

In an effort to cultivate Asian collectors, Art Basel has hired VIP relations officers in Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney, and is seeking representatives in Beijing and Taipei.

“This kind of high-touch approach is important,” said Mr. Renfrew.

While the May date is conveniently near Hong Kong’s spring auctions, it’s not ideal for overseas collectors and galleries, who are already hopping from Frieze in New York to Art Basel in Switzerland this time of year.

Mr. Spiegler cited the logistics of booking Hong Kong’s convention center, which is packed with trade shows and other events in the spring. “This is an issue we’ve been working on,” he said.

Follow Alexandra A. Seno on Twitter @alexandraseno

 

Dick Shack began buying contemporary art in the middle of the 20th Century, when a Jasper Johns could be had for $100, his spending limit at the time.

He and his wife, Ruth, then built a world-class collection that includes works by Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, the Cuban artist José Bedia and the South African artist William Kentridge.

Early on, they agreed their only birthday and holiday gifts to each other would be works of art.

The Shack’s Brickell Avenue penthouse became “a well-known stop on the Art Basel VIP circuit,’’ said fellow collector Dennis Scholl, vice president/arts for the Knight Foundation and, like Dick Shack, a founding board member of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Arts.

The Shacks frequently opened their collection up to visitors, and gave away many pieces to museums. Dick Shack accumulated and donated large photo collections and helped establish ArtCenter/South Florida on Lincoln Road.

Still, there was plenty of art surrounding Shack when he died at home on Monday. His wife of 58 years, a former Miami-Dade Commissioner and longtime community activist, said her husband suffered heart problems and succumbed to a massive stroke, his second in recent years.

Born Richard A. Shack on May 15, 1926 in Brooklyn to Eastern European immigrants, the retired entertainment agent was 85.

His roster of stars included Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, Liberace, George Burns, Johnny Cash, composer Burt Bacharach, actor Robert Shaw ( Jaws), poet Rod McKuen, singer Anita Bryant and her one-time au pair, Kathie Lee Johnson — later Kathie Lee Gifford.

“Dick Shack was the consummate collector of contemporary art,’’ said Scholl. “In 1981, he invited me to his home [then in Miami Shores] to see his and Ruth’s collection. When I walked into the bedroom, I saw three works of art by Gene Davis mounted on the ceiling over their bed...He showed me that there were no limits to collecting and that building an art collection was an artistic experience in its own right.’’

So dedicated were the Shacks to their collection that they once bought an entire apartment to house a single sculpture. By then, they were living on the 28th floor of a Brickell high-rise, having consolidated every apartment on that floor into one 5,000-square-foot flat.

Shack, who held a bachelor’s degree in advertising from the University of North Carolina, was a U.S. Navy veteran of both World War II and the Korean War. He and Ruth moved to South Florida in the late 1950s from New York, where Dick had worked for the DumontTelevision Network and the powerhouse entertainment agencies GMC and MCA.

In Miami, “he was in charge of conventions and special events for Agency for the Performing Arts,’’ his wife said. “It was Richard’s invention to book [entertainers] at conventions instead of nightclubs.’’

He also produced “magnificent Broadway shows’’ for corporate clients like Xerox and Buick.

“The star was the Buick,’’ she said. “The audience would stand and cheer.’’

Ruth Shack, an early South Florida feminist and human-rights leader, said her husband helped desegregate Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale hotels by refusing to book top-flight black entertainers anywhere that wouldn’t accept them as guests.

 

April 4, 2012

“Is it the art or is it the hype?” I’ve been asked this question so many times it makes me ill. It always comes from those who don’t look at art and are trying to explain why they don’t buy it. In a skeptical tone they slip me this line on a regular basis. “Yes,” I tell them with a smile, “it’s all a fraud. These contemporary art stars are all phonies and fakes, it’s the fancy galleries promoting this stuff and you’re the smart one who figured it all out.” But what I’m thinking is, “Cretin, you don’t understand a damn thing about art.” But now even most art believers have to admit that parts of today’s art scene have indeed gone too far. Yet when I spelled it out for the world in my satire of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair last December, I was attacked by many insecure pundits, advisers and dealers who felt threatened by the words. But forgetting the whiners, it’s what everyone was and is still talking about. Just last Sunday 60 Minutes ran a Morley Safer-hosted exposé bashing the fair, highlighting the hype in order to suggest that contemporary art is no more than a marketing circus. We can’t really blame old Morley Safer—he’s just another blowhard—but I was shocked to see one respected dealer, Tim Blum of Blum and Poe in Los Angeles, play right into Mr. Safer’s canard. “We’re from Hollywood, this is theater, only theater,” he said when asked about art prices. “It’s the wild west … competition is vicious … when the question of value comes up we drop the subject.” Mr. Blum misspoke—and that’s regrettable because, let’s face it, when the hype booms louder than the art, the art world invites the philistines right to its gates.

 

What bothers art world outsiders is the reality that everything exists within a context, and if they don’t understand the context, they jump to dismiss what they don’t understand. But what’s the matter with some hype? Most of today’s movie stars didn’t make it on their talent alone; they got the right role at the right time, then parlayed the hype. Would Julia Roberts have become a superstar without her breakthrough role in Pretty Woman? What about Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Liz Taylor in National Velvet? So why shouldn’t a visual artist benefit similarly by a breakthrough show, one “produced” by a smart dealer or curator in the right place at the right time? A film can be advertised and promoted; why not an artist and an exhibition? Fine art is often held to an unrealistic standard, a mistaken belief that there is such a thing as “pure” art that exists outside the context in which it’s created and exhibited. Great art is expected to somehow get by without great salesmanship, and great staging.

 

The artist Dan Colen is the perfect example of someone who has plenty of hype. He’s been created by his dealers at the massive Gagosian gallery, right? Might he just be the product of the “fashion of the moment” effect, the W magazine/Interview magazine scene, a leader of the pack of pretty boys who make big prices at auction? This may seem to be the case to some, but the truth is that he was always a good artist. I’ve followed his work for over eight years, long before he joined Gagosian. Even back when he was showing with the smaller gallery Peres Projects, it was clear to me that he was the standout talent of his peer group. His decision to show with Gagosian, the largest gallery in the world, may, in fact, have been a mistake: though he’s had many shows and sold a lot of work in the short term, his market may experience a severe hangover if there is too much work and the market feels saturated. He’s a real talent, though, and so he’ll probably weather the storm of overmarketing and overproduction. The hype that comes from mass marketing an artist is a double-edged sword: it’s a money-making short-term strategy, but it can kill the artist’s career if the work isn’t truly exceptional.

 

The other night I had the pleasure of discussing this topic with one of the top painters in the world, an American artist in his early 70s who has moved far beyond any hype that helped him along the way. I asked him why he has been so loyal to the gallery he’s been with for 20 years. He doesn’t need a gallery—he makes only 12 paintings a year and could sell them all easily even if he hung them in an IKEA for the weekend. By way of answering, he told me, frankly, that most artists are fearful of change. “Do you mean to tell me that at your age you still need to be handled and managed as if you were a child?” I asked. He smiled and said, “I just want to go to my studio and paint, I don’t want to be bothered with the rest of it.” Now, some artists are proactive; they have taken the marketing of their art into their own hands. Damien Hirst shows what he wants, where he wants and, whether you like it or not, he makes his own hype, with Bono and Jagger and sundry movie stars in tow. But most artists don’t play hardball. They stick with their dealers in the old-fashioned way, because they are conservative, or lazy or simply satisfied. I’m sure this will evolve as time goes on. Recently we have seen more artists changing galleries than ever before, though most of them end up joining the rosters of the few mega galleries. That is where they feel safe and secure.

 

Is switching to a mega gallery a sure-fire recipe for market success? Absolutely not. It can be a good career move—the vast majority of successful midcareer artists have stuck with their original galleries, but then again most of them have stagnated, in part because their new work, shown in the same old gallery, gets tiring after a while. But it can also result in overmarketing because the temptation to overproduce, using the generous production budget available, is too strong, so global demand gets oversupplied. The work ends up looking overhyped and oversold­—the hangover effect we see in the careers of so many artists who have bounced around several galleries.

 

Ultimately, the question of whether an artist’s success is the result of great work or great hype reminds me of the time many years ago when I attended a lecture by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the Q&A, trying to sound clever, I asked, “You often speak of the Platonic versus the Aristotelian views of the universe—are these two not contradictory?” Borges answered, “No, no, no, you do not understand—they are not contradictory, they are complementary!” The audience was hushed, a communal gasp was heard as if great words of wisdom had been spoken, but the real message was simple: the two views were necessary to complete the whole.

 

This is true for art and its context—they are complementary, not contradictory. Those who dismiss contemporary art as an overmarketed Ponzi scheme have missed this truth. Warhol and Dali were masters of hype, and that didn’t make their art less meaningful; nor was it the sole reason for their art’s success. Nothing is separable from its context, not even this article, but when the hype overshadows the art, it’s no surprise the skeptics have a field day.

(CBS News) Two decades after Morley Safer took a critical look at contemporary art in his 60 Minutes story "Yes...But is it Art?" he has found the definitive answer to his snide question: Does it matter what it is if it appreciates in value by a thousand-fold? Safer learns this at Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami's premier contemporary art fair, where he reports on the boom in contemporary art, a market that's defying the world economic slump and outperformed stocks. Safer's story will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, April 1 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

 

Jeffrey Deitch, a former dealer and now the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, has a long memory and can't resist ribbing Safer. "In the art world, we remember very well that famous program that you did 20 years ago...it was almost a send-up of the contemporary art market," he tells Safer. One of the objects of Safer's critical eye back then was a Jeff Koons installation called "Equilibrium," consisting of three basketballs suspended in an aquarium. Koons' works have greatly appreciated. "I think [at] the time we were talking Jeff Koons was very well sold for $250,000," says Deitch. "As you know now, Jeff Koons' works have gone for $25 million or more."

 

Last year, sales of contemporary art reached $5.5 billion, just for auctioned works. Billions more probably changed hands at regularly held shows like Art Basel Miami Beach. The contemporary art market has outperformed the Standard & Poor's list of 500 common stocks since 2003.

 

60 Minutes cameras capture the rich buyers and the art works on sale at Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the most important art fairs held in what is now considered an art capital of the world. Some of the works might pose a quandary for the uninitiated. Among the paintings and sculptures are works incorporating bathroom fixtures and extension cords, works that make noises, works incorporating video. The pieces have no price tags; their worth is negotiable.

 

Foreign money is one factor driving the market. Gallery owner Larry Gagosian says, "I think the wealth in Russia, the Middle East, Asia has changed [the market]...dramatically." Art fairs are now the place to be for people like Gagosian. "The art fair has become a huge part of our business," he tells Safer.

 

Anything can happen in a market comprised of original, one-of-a kind merchandise and billionaires willing to bet monumental sums of money on them. Gallery owner Tim Blum says, "It's the Wild West. This is not a normal retail business. It's an unregulated, utterly bizarre place to conduct business." What sustains it against the odds? "It's inexplicable...almost unexplainable...When we bring it up...begin to talk about it, we sort of drop the subject," says Blum. "Because it almost feels like you should just let it... keep rolling."

 

Long after the Art Basel Miami Beach crowds have left South Florida, the art fairs continue.

"With plans for a proposed mega Walmart store in Midtown moving forward, reality sets in for many art fair organizers who will have to start looking for new venues once the project breaks ground.

Scope Art Fair, Red Dot, and Art Asia, three Art Basel Miami Beach satellite fairs that last year took place on land where Walmart is planing to build its new store, are confident they’ll be able to set up camp on the lot this year too. After that, they’ll have to start searching for a space somewhere else."

Karim Masri, Meir Teper, Tony Shafrazi, and Gianni Nunnari check out Keith Haring’s Untitled (1988) at the VIP Preview at the Miami Beach Convention Center for Art Basel Miami Beach 2011

Just how overheated was the atmosphere at this past December’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach? Start with the record-size crowd of 50,000, including an opening-night vernissage crush that had the Beach’s fire marshal in a panic, hollering, “Nice and easy! Nice and easy!” as he forced hordes of VIPs to march single-file into the Miami Beach Convention Center, like so many kindergartners in high heels. Gaze over the swarm of Hollywood A-listers who winged into town, from Michael Douglas and wife Catherine Zeta-Jones to Sean Penn and Will Smith, turning Basel’s week of velvet-roped parties into a tropical take on the Sundance Film Festival.

Then add the sudden transformation of louche celebs into discerning cultural mavens: If the sight of Sean “Diddy” Combs dropping $70,000 at the fair on one of British neo-feminist Tracey Emin’s sculptures wasn’t jarring enough for you (Emin’s solo exhibition at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art is already scheduled for 2013), there was New York Yankee A-Rod trading in his baseball bat for curatorial duties, having a set of It boy Nate Lowman’s “bullet-hole” paintings installed in his waterfront Miami Beach home (including inside his indoor batting cage, naturally), while a who’s who of visiting Basel-ites ooh-ed and ah-ed over his burgeoning art collection.

Not least, there was a dizzying array of, ahem, art-themed corporate product launches: a pop-up shop hawking a new line of Dior handbags customized by German abstract painter Anselm Reyle? Why not! Perrier copresenting a night with drag queen-cum-videographer Kalup Linzy and post-punkers TV on the Radio? Sure! A poolside fête with alt-rockers Soulwax, courtesy of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Maybach autos, and… the Kingdom of Morocco? “The same publicist who brought us Maybach was working with Morocco,” LA MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch helpfully explained to The Wall Street Journal. “Everybody wants to connect with contemporary art.” Well, pass the lamb tagine.

Maybe it’s best not to overthink this blurring of art and commerce, as evidenced by the spirit inside the Basel booth of Leipzig, Germany’s Eigen + Art. There, a woman stood transfixed before Neo Rauch’s Die Jägerin, a fiercely imposing, nearly eight-foot-tall, bronze statue of a female falconer readying for battle. “Where will this go?” she asked earnestly. It seemed like a fair question—sporting a fearsome necklace of four disembodied heads, the statue seemed best suited for display inside Qaddafi’s revolutionary palace. “Where will it go?” thundered back gallery head Gerd Harry Lybke. “To whoever gives me $850,000!”

Read the Press for “Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach, Now!”

December 6, 2011

Read the waterfall of press for my article: “Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach, Now!” Read the good, the bad, and the indifferent from The New York, Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The New York Observer, W Magazine, Departures, The Spectator, Artinfo.com, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, and Le Quotidien de l’Art.