In the two decades that the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen has collected art, he has been not only a high-profile buyer but also a high-profile seller, disposing of a painting one season, a sculpture the next.

But Mr. Cohen is now parting with about $80 million worth of blue-chip art at the important auctions that begin next week at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. It is the largest single group of artworks he has sold at one time and includes top examples of paintings and sculptures by Brice Marden, Rudolf Stingel and Cy Twombly, along with previously reported Warhols and a Gerhard Richter.

“We’re in a robust market, and we are actively managing the collection,” said Sandy Heller, his longtime art adviser.

The sales come just as Mr. Cohen’s fund, SAC Capital Advisors, has reached a deal with the government to plead guilty to securities fraud as part of the criminal prosecution of the firm, according to people briefed on the case, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the case. Prosecutors have not brought criminal charges against Mr. Cohen, but federal regulators filed a lawsuit accusing him of failing to supervise his employees and turning a blind eye to insider trading at his firm. In July, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan brought insider trading charges against SAC, calling it “a magnet for market cheaters.” Six former SAC employees have pleaded guilty to illegal trading while at the fund.

Lawyers for SAC and federal prosecutors are putting the final touches on a settlement that, in addition to the guilty plea, will include an agreement for the fund to stop managing money for clients as well as to pay penalties of about $1.2 billion. Combined with $616 million in government fines assessed this year in two related civil cases, SAC will have paid penalties of more than $1.8 billion. Because Mr. Cohen owns 100 percent of SAC, that money will effectively come out of his pocket.

People close to Mr. Cohen, who were not authorized to speak, say that the art sales from his fabled collection are not an effort to raise money for his mounting fines and legal fees. Even after his fines are paid, Mr. Cohen will still have billions of dollars in the bank.

Ever the trader, Mr. Cohen is also taking advantage of today’s active art market where new collectors will often pay far more for artworks than they are worth.

As an opportunistic seller, he is in good company. Among this season’s high-profile sellers are the newsprint magnate Peter Brant, Eric Clapton and the New York financier Donald L. Bryant Jr.

Officials at Sotheby’s and Christie’s declined to comment about Mr. Cohen’s consignments, citing confidentiality. Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesman for SAC and Mr. Cohen, declined to comment. But details emerged late last month that he is selling three works at Sotheby’s on Nov. 13: a 1986 abstract canvas by Gerhard Richter and two Warhols, both from 1963: “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz)” and “5 Deaths on Turquoise” from the artist’s celebrated “Death and Disaster” series.

The Richter, which Mr. Cohen bought from the Pace Gallery in 2012 for around $20 million, is now estimated to fetch $15 million to $20 million. Both Warhols belonged to the legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend for decades. The Warhols are expected to bring a combined total of as much as $40 million.

In addition to those marquee works, Mr. Cohen is selling about a dozen other pieces, mostly at Sotheby’s, that he acquired in recent years at art fairs and auctions. He is not parting with his most valuable paintings, like “Le Rêve” by Picasso, bought from the casino owner Stephen A. Wynn for $155 million in March, or any of his de Koonings, including “Woman III,” bought from David Geffen in 2006 for about $137.5 million. The works for sale are less expensive, representing a fraction of his holdings.

One gem coming up at Sotheby’s is “The Attended” (1996-99), by Brice Marden, a reference to pottery figures placed in Chinese tombs to accompany the dead in the afterlife. Mr. Cohen acquired the work, estimated to sell for $7 million to $10 million, from the Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan for an undisclosed price. Other top works include a 2010 self-portrait by Rudolf Stingel, expected to go for $3 million to $5 million, and a 2009 bronze sculpture by Cy Twombly estimated at $2 million to $3 million; both were purchased from Larry Gagosian.

“Atlantic Side,” a 1960-61 painting by Joan Mitchell bought in 2007 at Christie’s, is also for sale with an estimate of $5 million to $7 million. The Nov. 13 Sotheby’s contemporary art catalog indicates that Mr. Cohen is receiving a guarantee — an undisclosed sum of money — for some of the more expensive works, regardless of whether the auction house is able to sell them.

While Mr. Cohen has some negotiating power over auction houses competing to sell his collection, he has had little leverage in his talks with the government. An entity like SAC can be held responsible for the acts of its employees, and the six former SAC traders who pleaded guilty would likely have testified at trial that they committed insider trading while working for Mr. Cohen.

Such testimony would have made it difficult for SAC to defend itself at trial.

<img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>                

A version of this article appears in print on October 31, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Under Fire, Hedge-Fund Billionaire to Sell Choice Art.

By CAROL VOGEL and PETER LATTMAN

Published: October 30, 2013

The George Lindemann Journal

The bond between dealer and artist can be a kind of love affair, with its attendant passions and confidences, interests and intrigues. Such was the case with the sculptor Alexander Calder and Klaus G. Perls, who represented him from 1954 until Calder’s death in 1976. The two frequently dined and traveled together, and visited each other’s families. When Calder came to Manhattan, he often stayed at Perls’s Madison Avenue townhouse.

“He trusted him completely,” said Calder’s grandson Alexander S. C. Rower, who added that he himself considered Perls and his wife, Amelia, “a dear aunt and uncle.”

But now that bond has dissolved into a bitter dispute between the families of the two men.

In a recently amended complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court, the Calder estate says the Perlses surreptitiously held on to hundreds of Calder’s works and swindled the artist’s estate out of tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps most surprising, it says that Perls, a dealer with a sterling reputation who campaigned to rid his industry of forgeries, sold dozens of fake Calders. The suit depicts Perls as a tax cheat who stashed millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account, a secret his daughter said she maintained by paying off a former gallery employee with $5 million. She added that Calder had his own hidden Swiss account.

Mr. Rower, seated in the Chelsea headquarters of the Calder Foundation, surrounded by small black-and-red maquettes made by his grandfather, reflected on the case one recent afternoon. “It’s really kind of heartbreaking that they turned out to be thieves,” he said of Klaus and Amelia Perls.

Steven W. Wolfe, a lawyer for the Perls side, declined to comment, saying a judge’s ruling on pending motions was imminent. But in court papers, he described the Calder lawsuit as a “sham and manufactured claim.” He characterized it as a fishing expedition, one that is finding only the sort of gaps in records that are normal when tracking 25-year-old transactions from a gallery that has been closed for more than 15 years. The Perls family has asked the court to dismiss the case, also arguing that the statute of limitations has expired.

That this close partnership has devolved into a lawsuit is a sorrowful development. While Calder is renowned as one of the 20th century’s most innovative artists, Perls has his own corner in the history of modern art. He was a pioneering collector of African art, and donated dozens of those pieces, as well as $60 million worth of masterworks by Modernists like Picasso and Modigliani, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When Perls died five years ago, at the age of 96, that museum’s director called him “a connoisseur and a scholar,” a “distinguished honorary trustee, donor and friend.”

Although many of the most surprising accusations surfaced in additional papers filed over the summer, the legal dispute began three years ago with a chance discovery. In 2010, a Canadian gallery contacted the Calder Foundation, of which Mr. Rower is chairman, about a $1.5 million wooden mobile titled “Standing Constellation.” It had been purchased from the Perls Foundation, a trust set up after the Perls Gallery closed in 1997. Mr. Rower said he was puzzled because “Standing Constellation” had not been listed on an inventory of holdings provided by the Perls Gallery after Calder’s death, nor had the Calder estate received any payment from its sale.

Mr. Rower, who has spent more than 15 years compiling the definitive catalog of Calder’s work, examined the Calder Foundation’s provenance records and said he found several other works in the Perls inventory that were later sold without the estate’s knowledge. Many were listed as being consigned by a woman in Switzerland known only as “Madame Andre.”

Mr. Rower said he was already frustrated with the dealer’s family because it had not turned over a large bundle of archives, drawings and monogramming tools used by Calder to sign his works that Amelia Perls, who died in 2002, had previously promised in a letter to give him. So in 2010, the Calder family sued the Perls estate; the dealer’s daughter, Katherine Perls; and “Madame Andre” for the archives and the works missing from the inventory.

As the estate began to dig, however, it made several discoveries.

First, “Standing Constellation” was only one of nearly 700 Calder bronze sculptures, jewelry and other works worth well in excess of $20 million that had been in the Perlses’ hands and are unaccounted for, court papers say.

The Calder estate also learned that the gallery kept at least two sets of books — a practice that the Perls side said was not unusual. Then it came out that the mysterious “Madame Andre” was not a person at all, but a nickname for the Perls Swiss bank account. As Katherine Perls acknowledged in an affidavit, “Madame Andre” was a euphemism for her father’s Swiss account, “perhaps even a humorous or shorthand reference for this account, or to avoid disclosing to others who were present that he did have this Swiss account.”

Ms. Perls added that Calder, too, kept a Swiss bank account, to which Perls regularly transferred the artist’s profits. In court papers, Mr. Wolfe, the Perls lawyer, said, “Alexander Calder and Klaus Perls were kindred spirits in that they both had an aversion to paying taxes.”

Mr. Rower said that he has found no record of such an account and that the estate has never received any assets from it.

Ms. Perls, in a deposition, dismissed the assertion that her family had hidden anything from Calder or his estate. While the original ledgers are missing, she said a copy shows that, in 1970, Calder gave “Standing Constellation” to her mother as a gift.

Ms. Perls has acknowledged that when a gallery employee, Douglas Mayhew, sued the family for severance worth $10 million in 2005, she feared he would reveal the hidden accounts in Switzerland to the I.R.S. and expose her aged father. As a result, she said, she agreed to pay Mr. Mayhew $5 million after taxes. According to court papers, she said she believed she was “being blackmailed.” Michael R. Gordon, Mr. Mayhew’s lawyer, declined to comment.

When the government instituted a tax amnesty program in 2009 for Americans who were hiding money in offshore accounts, the Perls estate applied, court papers show, and a settlement was reached.

Mr. Rower said the disturbing discoveries continued. In a deposition, Mr. Mayhew said that the Perls Gallery had sold approximately 30 fake Calders. Mr. Rower said that he is not sure whether such sales were intentional but that he knows the gallery had to settle some claims related to the sale of counterfeits in the 1980s.

“I was in there when someone walked in who had bought a fake,” Mr. Rower recalled.

But the number of these sales astounded him. By going through the foundation’s records and analyzing photographs of supposed Calder works, some of which were linked to known forgers, he said he has determined that the gallery handled at least 61 counterfeits.

Ms. Perls said in a deposition that she is convinced that her father never knowingly sold any fakes.

The Calder estate’s lawsuit contends that some illicit proceeds — from the sale of counterfeits and misappropriated Calder originals — were used to purchase the modern and African art that Perls gave to the Met, although the papers do not contain any specific evidence. The museum declined to comment.

James Goodman, a veteran dealer who was one of the founders, with Perls, of the Art Dealers Association of America, said he remains skeptical of the accusations, adding he always knew Klaus Perls to be an honorable dealer.

Mr. Rower says he came to his conclusion about Perls reluctantly. “It gives me no pleasure to talk about this,” he said, but “there is just example after example after example after example of misdeeds.”

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: October 29, 2013

The George Lindemann Journal

Oct. 28, 2013 5:47 p.m. ET

Chris Burden : Extreme Measures

New Museum Through Jan. 12

'The Big Wheel' (1979) New Museum, New York/ Benoit Pailley

New York

'This is boy art," my wife whispered to me as we began to stroll very slowly through "Chris Burden: Extreme Measures," the artist's first major museum exhibition in the U.S. in 25 years and his first ever in New York. It sure is, but it's great boy art (and near-great art, period), with all the adolescent adventurousness the term implies.

Mr. Burden was born in Boston in 1946, but he spent much of his childhood in a Swiss boarding school because his parents split up and his mother took the kids off to Europe. He might have missed, early on, those formative, impractical and sometimes dangerous things that boys do because . . . well, just because. The artist's early performance pieces—necessarily present only in photos and video in what is otherwise a succinctly handsome show—are the best examples of this Huck-Finn-noir attitude.

"Shoot" (1971), in which the young Mr. Burden had himself shot in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle from a distance of about 15 feet, is an avant-guardedly delinquent version of "playing guns." "Dead Man" (1972)—Mr. Burden lying motionless under a tarp and bracketed by highway flares on La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles's gallery row of the time—is a riskier iteration (he was arrested for concocting a false emergency) of "playing dead" in the back yard.

"The Big Wheel" (1979), fortunately present in the exhibition and the hit of the show's opening, has a smallish, 250cc motorcycle with its rear wheel lifted off the floor and making contact with an adjacent 8-foot, 6,000-pound cast-iron flywheel. When the bike is revved for a few minutes, the big wheel can get going at 200rpm and subsequently spin for an hour and a half on its own momentum—a steroidal rendering of clothespinning a playing card to a bicycle sprocket to produce the sound of a motorcycle engine.

Mr. Burden in 1971 after 'Shoot,' in which he had himself shot in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle. Chris Burden

Mr. Burden did his undergraduate study in physics, architecture and art at Pomona College in California (a local T-shirt says that Harvard is "the Pomona College of the East"), then switched exclusively to art and earned a master's degree at the University of California at Irvine, studying under that sage of light-and-space art, Robert Irwin, who recognized the kid's maverick intelligence and let him go his own way.

Mr. Burden's thesis work had him living in a locker for five days. After about 50 performances dedicated to self-discipline, endurance and not a little exhibitionism—including pieces in which Mr. Burden was crucified (yes, his hands were pierced by nails) to a Volkswagen VOW3.XE +0.34% Volkswagen AG Non-Vtg Pfd. Germany: Xetra ^€174.85 +0.60 +0.34% Oct. 29, 2013 5:35 pm Volume : 985,592 P/E Ratio 4.62 Market Cap€79.43 Billion Dividend Yield 2.04% Rev. per Employee €356,490 17617417210a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 10/28/13 Consumer Reports Drops Camry F... 10/24/13 Global Car Firms Ride Profit G... 10/24/13 Daimler Earnings: Mercedes Sal... More quote details and news » VOW3.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position Beetle, and had himself kicked down some concrete stairs—he gave up the practice as too arduous.

Which is where "Extreme Measures" gets good as an art exhibition. Mr. Burden's big conceptual objects (he calls them "sculpture") continue to combine a kind of guileless masculinity—he's never macho—with an ingratiating "what if?" outlook on life. Among his 2013 efforts are "Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, 1/4 Scale" and "Porsche With Meteorite." "Bridge" is simply a model bridge, 4 feet tall and 28 feet long, made from hand-cast concrete blocks and held together by nothing more than balanced pressure on three keystones. What makes it art? It looks good and the New Museum's installation gives it room to breathe. "Porsche," on the other hand, is a cantilevering exercise right out of Design 101: a 1974 Porsche 914 (that hybrid VW that enabled lots of wannabes to say they drove a Porsche) weighing a ton or so making up a giant mobile, with a 365-pound meteorite on the other end, that's stable because the fulcrum is placed just right, much nearer the car.

What makes it boy art? The car is carefully restored, just like the 1964 Ford truck in 2009's "1 Ton Crane Truck" (an iron block of that avoirdupois hangs from the crane). Mr. Burden (who's written the show's label descriptions in a no-nonsense declarative prose that should henceforth be requisite in museums) notes: "The truck's bed and headache rest have been replaced with new oak. Six new tires, new rubber mats, new seat covers, a new headliner, and two new visors have been installed."

Perhaps surprising—to those heretofore unfamiliar with Mr. Burden's work—are his subtly sardonic political pieces. The 625 miniature cardboard submarines, each suspended in midair formation by a piece of monofilament, in "All the Submarines of the United States of America" (1987) are a visceral reminder of just how much the country spends on national defense and how globally lethal the weaponry is. The frieze of "LAPD Uniforms" (1993), tailored for apparent 8-footers, constitutes a deadpan but stinging indictment of the force's conduct in the Rodney King beating. But Mr. Burden, whose politics are hardly party-line PC, can also go against what's presumably the art-world grain: In 1979, he covered the floor of a SoHo gallery with 50,000 neatly ordered nickels, each topped with a wooden match. Every visually witty combination stood for one Soviet tank, and the work was titled "The Reason for the Neutron Bomb." I wish it were in the show.

But a work that does make an appearance on a screen in the corner of one gallery, and which, for me, is an unexpected highlight, is "The Rant" (2006)—a two-minute video excoriation of the Other ("diseased dogs," "invisible snails," and so forth) delivered by Mr. Burden in well-accented French. (The artist is inexplicably up to his chin in water and wearing swimmer's goggles.) Although he insists that he's assumed the "persona of a ranting xenophobic preacher," you can't tell me the people he's really sending up aren't pretentious art theorists who would read even more into a work like this than I do.

Not everything concerning Mr. Burden and his oeuvre, however, is praiseworthy. The two 36-foot-high "Quasi-Legal Skyscrapers" (2003), reconstructed atop the New Museum's facade and allegedly allusive to the Twin Towers, are a misfire. As was—pun intended—his cringe-inducing "747" (1973), in which he stood on a beach and fired real bullets from a small pistol at an airliner that had just taken off from Los Angeles International Airport. (No, the bullets never got close to the plane, but the show's beautiful catalog could have done without that big photo.)

The underlying premise of "Extreme Measures" is that any artist, no matter how radical, can eventually be contained and made politely intelligible by what the art-world naysayer Dave Hickey calls the "therapeutic institution." For better or worse, the New Museum makes that case. The exhibition ends, as it were, with "Pair of Namur Mortars" (2013), two fully functional re-creations of squat, antique cannons that fire cannonballs a yard in diameter. In the wrong hands, they could probably bring down the museum. But here, they're cartoonish, almost cuddly and strangely reassuring—just big toys. To tweak the old saying, you can take the artiness out of the boy, but you can't take the boy out of the art.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

Fair play: Ben Luke's guide to Frieze Art Fair

Have fun with it: Jeff Koons's silly 'Lobster' has a serious price tag

If there's one quality that leaps out from the stands at this years Frieze Art Fair, it's a childlike exuberance. Humour is such a prominent tactic in contemporary art, but in recent years the fair, now in its eleventh year, has had a more mature, modest mood. This year, it’s as if many of the 150 dealers have declared: “It’s playtime!” The booths are awash with colour and comedy, even if it often lurches into black humour and satire.

The generally upbeat mood of the art suits Frieze’s new design – they’ve stripped back the number of galleries by 30 and created a bigger and higher space, so the fair feels more open, lighter and more welcoming than it has for years. Of course, there are many, much more poetic, darker and more troubling items on view, but the frequent characterisation of Frieze as a kind of arty theme park has never seemed more apt.

Showstopper

Showstopper: 'Safety Cones (After Richard Serra),' 23 Sculptures, 2013, by Rob Pruitt

ROB PRUITT

Safety Cones (After Richard Serra), 2013

Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York

The maverick American artist Pruitt, who is best-known for his paintings of pandas, is one of the art world’s current darlings and this work — which has pride of place right at the entrance to Frieze — has proved an instant hit. Twenty-three traffic cones fill the gallery’s allocated space, and each is decorated with gurning faces, crazy glasses, wigs, beanies and hi-vis fleeces — these bland and ubiquitous bits of street furniture have been given personalities. Sitting on black-and-white geometric plinths, the cones cordon off the rest of the booth, particularly two paintings by Alex Katz, acting like deranged security guards. The title’s reference to sculptor Richard Serra is baffling — their quirky playfulness represents everything the minimalist sculptor’s steel monoliths are not. Perhaps these fluorescent sentinels might guard the public from being caught beneath one of Serra’s famously weighty works.

And so to bed

And so to bed: 'Untitled,' 2011, by Lili Reynaud

LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR

I Am Intact and I Don’t Care, 2013

Frieze Projects

As well as inviting galleries to show their best, Frieze always commissions a handful of artists from across the world to produce new projects, which this year all sit in a space at one extreme of the Regent’s Park tent, with a buzzing atmosphere that feels like an artist’s studio. Reynaud-Dewar’s performance piece is among the most memorable in the fair’s history. In a trippy decorative bedroom, she lies, sits or leans against a bed, in the middle of which is a pool of black liquid, frothing and spurting its contents on to the sheet and the artist’s pure white outfit. There, she reads from novels — I caught a racy drugs-and-sex section from Guillaume Dustan’s In My Room. It’s the latest in a series of bedrooms created by the French artist, exposing her private life to the world.

Biggest price tag

Très cher: 'Titi Tire,' left, and 'Sacred Heart,' right, by Jeff Koons  

JEFF KOONS

Lobster, 2007-12

Gagosian Gallery, London, W1

Gagosian isn’t revealing how much its cluster of Koons kitsch costs but a version of Lobster went for $6.3m at auction in May, so the collection of four works on show together are the costliest at Freize. The security guards stationed nearby almost look like part of the installation, turning the whole thing into an unintentional satire on the excesses — even the insanity — of the art world

Pretty expensive: 'Cat on Clothesline (Yellow),' by Jeff Koons

Wittiest work

Witty: 'Made in Africa (Assembled in China),' 2013, by Djordje Ozbolt  

DJORDJE OZBOLT

Made in Africa, Assembled in China, 2013

Herald Street, London, E2

Ozbolt is best known for his vivid figurative paintings, which have a surreal, often macabre feel, infused with absurd humour, and underlying political messages. Recently, the Serbian-born artist has turned to sculpture, and his balance of wit and visual allure remains intact. These five sculptures, seen as a single work, are based on gaudy pseudo-African sculptures bought from street vendors and flea markets, which explains the “Assembled in China” part of the work’s title. It’s a sardonic take on globalisation and the incongruence of African objects being fashionable home-decor trinkets – and with its beacon-bright colours, it’s also an arresting sight from across the fair.

Womb with a view

Original: 'Portrait of the Artist,' 2013, by Jennifer Rubell, photographed at Frieze Art Fair  

JENNIFER RUBELL

Portrait of the Artist 2013

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Inspired by the emotions triggered by her recent pregnancy, Rubell’s vast “self-portrait” is, she says, both “feminist and feminine”  — intended to stick two fingers up at the notion that women can’t be creative when with child. It’s made of fibreglass but more closely resembles marble, as Rubell wanted to reference classical and neo-classical sculpture through the ages, and particularly its masculine history.

Despite its scale, though, it doesn’t feel too bombastic, partly because it’s so welcoming — you’re invited to climb into the void in the reclining figure’s abdomen.

 

After the fun of the fair, there is plenty of cerebral art at Frieze, too. Ben Luke picks his top five

Double aspect: 'A double basement being built in Hampstead', 2013, by Jeremy Deller  

JEREMY DELLER

A double basement being built in Hampstead

The Modern Institute, Glasgow (£75,000)

Ever the most topical of artists, Deller continues his satire on modern Britain that was such a hit at this year’s Venice Biennale with this new work. With a banner created by his trusty friend Ed Hall, Deller targets the phenomenon of London’s super-rich creating vast luxurious basements in historical homes. Around the banner, Deller has created a decorative pattern by using tiny neolithic arrowheads, a reminder of the breadth of British history and a hint at a simpler age.

 

SARAH LUCAS

Sheela Na Gig, 2012

Sadie Coles HQ, London, W1

(price not disclosed)

The historical tradition of the Sheela Na Gig is ideal territory for the lewd surrealism of Lucas. Medieval gargoyles and grotesques found on churches and castles, they feature naked women opening their vaginas — it’s thought they are pagan goddesses or fertility symbols. Lucas recasts them for the modern age, using her trademark stuffed tights to represent the figure, and vast concrete toilets to represent the genitals. Standing on sandy Mexican bricks, Lucas pulls off a work which is bawdy and brilliant.

 

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET

He, 2013

Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris (€150k)

Always looking for witty plays on the history of art and design, the Scandinavian duo have created this homoerotic retort to the famous (but rather boring) sculpture The Little Mermaid, which sits in Copenhagen’s harbour. Unlike her solemn bronze, he glimmers with silver-coated resin, and is an exuberant accompaniment to their other famous image of childhood, the golden boy on a rocking horse, which stood on the Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth, and is recreated on a less monumental scale on Victoria Miro’s stand at Frieze.

 

DAVID SHRIGLEY

A Burden, 2012

Anton Kern Gallery, New York ($35K)

Few artists are funnier than Shrigley, who has a series of drawings and sculptures on one of the fair’s best stands. The bronze sculpture Lady Having a Poop (2013) is as absurd as it sounds but the pick of his works is this take on backpackers that will ring true with anyone assaulted by rucksacks on the Tube. Huge and cumbersome and stuck on the back of a musclebound male mannequin, it’s typical Shrigley — by adjusting a regular daily object, he propels it into surrealism.

 

HELEN CHADWICK

Piss Flowers, 1991-92

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, W1 (price not disclosed)

Chadwick’s cluster of white floral forms in the sculpture park sneaks up on you, with simple shapes looking almost childlike from afar. But when you get close you notice the strange organic growths that spring up from them, made by the artist and her partner, David Notarious, peeing into snow and then making casts in bronze from the holes left behind. It’s a mischievous play on masculinity and femininity, as Chadwick’s holes create phallic shapes and Notarious’s make shallow voids.

Read our art fair food guide

friezelondon.com

Conceptual works like 'Bett,' by Joseph Beuys, tend to sell better at galleries. Sotheby's

LONDON—The debut of the new S2 contemporary-art space here this month had all the trappings of a high-end gallery opening: young, chic women with iPads checked in guests at the door while suited waiters served flutes of Champagne to art-world insiders eager to see works by German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys.

The only difference was that the gallery's backers weren't wealthy London dealers, but Sotheby's BID -0.19% Sotheby's U.S.: NYSE ^$51.80 -0.10-0.19% Oct 21, 2013 11:06 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 80,348 P/E Ratio 34.61 Market Cap $3.55 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $510,458 52.2052.0051.8051.6010a11a12p1p2p3p 10/20/13 Auction Houses Muscle In on Ar... 10/17/13 Sotheby's London Sale Produces... 10/10/13 Sotheby's, Christie's Square O... More quote details and news » BID in Your Value Your Change Short position , which along with rival auction house Christie's is elbowing its way into the high-end gallery world, shaking up the clubby international art scene. Just the previous night, Christie's had opened its own nearby gallery, Christie's Mayfair.

For decades, the art business thrived on a symbiosis between galleries and auction houses. Galleries and the dealers who ran them traditionally made long-term investments in discovering and developing young artists, placing their artworks with influential collectors whose patronage would further an artist's reputation and ultimately increase his selling prices.

Auction houses, for their part, provided a lucrative secondary market for the most enduring of those artworks, but rarely handled trendy new artists.

market and margin pressures in the auction business are changing all that. Those forces are prompting the houses to experiment with new ways of auctioning art and to arrange more private sales of contemporary works outside the auction room, where profits are richer.

Increasingly Sotheby's and Christie's are catering to a new breed of art buyers from the hedge-fund world and emerging economies who prefer to quickly acquire big-name pieces of art instead of building relationships with galleries where they might buy the art more cheaply.

Last year, private-contract sales of fine art accounted for $1 billion of Christie's $6.27 billion of revenue and $906.5 million of Sotheby's $5.4 billion. That's a big jump from before the global financial crisis: In 2006, Christie's sold $256 million of art in private sales, while Sotheby's sold $328 million.

Meanwhile, the global auction market for contemporary art—generally defined as art created after 1945—ballooned to $6.2 billion in 2012 from $1.9 billion in 2009, according to data from research group Art Economics.

The continuing battle between Sotheby's and its largest shareholder, Daniel Loeb, underscores the pressure auction houses face to deliver fatter profits. Mr. Loeb has publicly blamed Chief Executive Bill Ruprecht for allowing privately held Christie's to pull ahead in both auctions and private sales of contemporary art and called for his resignation.

Sotheby's has called the accusations "baseless" and has adopted a shareholder rights plan, also known as a poison pill, to keep Mr. Loeb at bay.

The word "gallery" is "just nomenclature" in today's market, says Christie's Chief Executive Steven Murphy. "I always think it's better to talk about the art instead of the marketing," he says.

That kind of talk worries old-school art dealers, who are concerned that the houses' expansion into art dealing could skew the art market and has already created bubbles around the works of buzzy artists like Wade Guyton and Christopher Wool.

Enlarge Image

'Tier und Sonne' (Animal and Sun) was one of the Joseph Beuys drawings offered at the Sotheby's London show for about $113,200 to $323,300. Sotheby's

The auction houses focus mainly on obtaining the highest possible price for an artwork. Dealers, by contrast, say they typically sell coveted works only to buyers whom they trust won't try to resell them without their approval and in this way can control their artists' resale prices and owners.

"I've had my fair share of collectors shouting me down on the phone," says London dealer Thomas Dane. "Simply having the money and wanting to buy a work does not mean I will sell it to you," says Mr. Dane, who adds that the auction prices of his painter Hurvin Anderson have spiked due to market speculation and an uptick in privately negotiated sales via auction houses.

Galleries rely on traditional auctions to establish solid prices for artists, which in turn can boost their primary market, works sold through galleries.

But in what galleries regard as another potentially threatening development for their business, the houses have started to experiment with their auction rules. Last week in central London, Christie's held an auction that broke with the decades-old practice of setting a minimum bid, or reserve, for each work and assigning it an estimated value.

Dealers say removing those controls will create a much more volatile market and make auctions riskier for artists, particularly emerging ones, who could have the value of all of their work plummet after a poor auction showing.

In the past, the sale of highly experimental works like those Christie's sold last week—so gargantuan in size that they had to be displayed in a nearby gutted factory space—are typically handled privately and slowly.

"The most responsible thing we did was not to tell the market what the values of those works were," said Christie's specialist Francis Outred, when asked why there were no estimates given for them.

The works in the Christie's sale were all consigned by Charles Saatchi, a London dealer well-known for buying low and then using auction sales to "flip" works by up-and-coming artists including Mr. Anderson, Mr. Dane's painter, whose deeply colored paintings subtly refer to immigration and multiculturalism.

London dealer Simon Lee says he participated in Christie's pre-sale marketing to help one of his artists, Toby Ziegler, who had never been sold at auction before. Mr. Ziegler's massive cardboard dog statues "The Liberals" brought in just $24,200, a disappointing figure.

Representatives for Mr. Saatchi didn't respond to requests for comment.

Despite the inroads they have made into art dealing, it's far from clear that auction houses will succeed as art dealers. Christie's now is staging a show of British pop art, which private dealers have long said is an underpriced niche market. Christie's threw thousands of dollars and around 40 employees into the project and has commissioned a museum-style catalog.

Sotheby's plans to use its new London gallery space, S2, to hold a steady stream of shows to sell contemporary art. The auction house opened the first S2 in New York in 2011. The gallery's first London show is dedicated to works by the late Mr. Beuys, who typically has been a tough sell at auctions, while garnering higher prices in galleries.

Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac is the leading Beuys dealer in Europe, having sold two major works by the artist last year for around $2.7 million each. By contrast, Mr. Beuys's best auction price is $1 million.

Mr. Ropac says his gallery's strength lies in its close ties to the Beuys estate to acquire top works and his gallery's reputation as a specialized institution. "We are not just a selling machine. Auction houses are drilled in this mentality," he said, adding that Sotheby's even approached him about buying some of the work in its sale.

Mr. Ropac sees the auction house's encroachment as unavoidable. "What can we do? We need them to build up prices for our artists."

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Maverick and Scavenger: A Mike Kelley retrospective completely fills MoMA PS1.           

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: October 10, 2013

Only a few days after the artist Mike Kelley committed suicide last year by sealing himself inside his bathroom in South Pasadena, Calif., and asphyxiating himself with fumes from a barbecue grill, an impromptu memorial sprouted near his studio in Los Angeles.

Next to an empty lot, friends and fans filled an abandoned carport with many of the things that had come to be seen as Kelley’s formal calling cards: stuffed animals, crocheted blankets, melted candles and other crafty castoffs he said he was drawn to because they were usually invisible as aesthetic objects, and about as antiheroic as art materials could be. The memorial’s location could hardly have been more fitting for an artist who spent much of his time scavenging in America’s cultural cul-de-sacs.

But if you were to try to imagine a fitting place to see the breadth of Kelley’s work, you might come up with something like this: a defunct school; a cavernous, looming neo-Romanesque one whose walls breathe civic religiosity and generations of public education. Again and again in his career, Kelley — whose father was a public school janitorial chief in Detroit — returned to the school as the crucible of American identity, of values (some of which we’d be better off without), of high and low culture, of repression and cruelty and of modern folk rituals.

Beginning on Sunday, his vast, very dark and very funny body of work will completely fill such a school building, the century-old one that houses MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s affiliate in Long Island City, Queens. It will be the first time the entire building has been given over to one artist, with a survey that covers almost three decades of video, sculpture, performance, painting and installation, and seeks to make a case for Kelley’s career, even cut short, as one of the most important and influential in contemporary art.

“In a term that Mike would have probably used, it’s uncanny that the show is going to be there in a school building,” said the curator Ann Goldstein, who originated the retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in late 2012.

In New York, the show will contain, sometimes literally, schools within schools. “Educational Complex,” a 1995 work, is a huge white architectural model that clusters together every single school Kelley ever attended, a comic accumulation that looks like a military complex gone mad. It is a riff less about Modernism and Minimalism than about the idea of education — specifically art education, the received notions of art history itself — as a kind of abuse. (Using the psychological concept of repressed memory syndrome, the parts of the schools that Kelley couldn’t remember are rendered as blanks.)

“Since I am an artist,” Kelley once wrote, with a characteristic bone-dry wit, “it seemed natural to look to my own aesthetic training as the root of my secret indoctrination in perversity and possibly as the site of my own abuse. My education must have been a form of mental abuse, of brainwashing.”

But of course Kelley, who was raised in a Roman Catholic family in the suburbs of Detroit, was a deeply academically trained artist. He not only went to graduate school but also was a beloved teacher at one, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, for almost two decades.

He was an incisive, sometimes dizzyingly erudite writer about his own work and that of others, sweeping from Egyptian funerary practices to Penthouse letters in the space of a single essay. And he approached the subject matter that defined much of his art — mass culture, trash culture and all manner of subcultures — with a taxonomical zeal to rival that of any sociologist. His knowledge of things usually considered beneath serious cultural consideration, much less study — U.F.O. theorists, donkey basketball games, horror films, sci-fi illustration, Satanism, ’70s smut magazines, Superman, Mexican wrestlers, antiquing, yarn dolls, Basil Wolverton drawings — was prodigious.

And yet he repeatedly made clear that he did not particularly like pop culture. “I think it’s garbage,” he said in one interview. “But that’s the culture I live in, and that’s the culture people speak. I’m an avant-gardist. We’re living in the postmodern age, the death of the avant-garde. So, all I can really do now is work with this dominant culture and flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it, expose it — because popular culture is really invisible. People are really visually illiterate. They learn to read in school, but they don’t learn to decode images.” (The director John Waters once aptly called Kelley a “terrorist and a healer.”)

The art historian Thomas Crow, who taught a semester-long seminar on Kelley at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts this year, described his work as pivotal. “I see him as having been a figure who was a bridge from the breakout ’60s generation of minimalists and conceptualists, who took art away from a rather austere sense of itself and made it into something that could touch on almost every aspect of experience.”

He added: “I taught the seminar because I felt that something should be done in response to that great loss. I’m always very interested in looking at artists who are asking themselves the question of why they do what they do, who are looking at deep decisions about how we’re going to live our lives. I thought Mike was somebody who right from the beginning did that implicitly as well as explicitly.”

In large part because of that, fellow artists were drawn to him from the beginning, and he was the rare contemporary figure who could be described as both an artist’s artist and, by the end of his career, a commercial luminary, showing at the Gagosian Gallery and commanding million-plus market prices for works.

“When I first knew him in the late ’70s and early ’80s, only artists had his work up in their homes and collected him avidly,” said the painter Lari Pittman, whose work Kelley also collected. “And a lot of those artists found that they had to sell that work because then they could afford to build their own studios or houses. It became worth that much.” Mr. Pittman and other friends of Kelley’s said they believed that his emergence as an establishment art star was both a vindication and a burden he struggled to carry.

“He was fiercely competitive, as he should have been,” said Mr. Pittman, who added that he was “anguished over his death.”

“And I think he was always trying to figure out what was going to be best for his work.”

The musician and artist Kim Gordon, a longtime friend, said: “I think he was on a ride, and he just didn’t quite know how to get off it. He was so driven and he was working all the time.”

The idea for a survey of Kelley’s career was under way while he was alive, and he worked actively with the curator Eva Meyer-Hermann on what would have been a thematic exhibition at the Stedelijk. But in late 2011 and early 2012, his battles with depression and drinking deepened, and his death at 57 transformed the show into a retrospective in every sense of the word, a fact curators have had to keep constantly in view.

“There are many ways people will want to make sense of the suicide through his work,” said Peter Eleey, PS1’s associate director of exhibitions and the organizer of the New York version of the show along with Connie Butler. “But I think our job is to try to create more room around the work, so it’s not bound to that, and you can come at it from lots of directions.”

“In some ways, it’s strange,” he added, “because the work can feel very complete when you look at it — like a mathematical proof in its elegance.”

Klaus Biesenbach, PS1’s director, visited Kelley in Los Angeles three times in 2010 and 2011 as PS1 and the Museum of Modern Art were exploring being sites for the survey. “I didn’t know him that well,” Mr. Biesenbach said. “But he seemed very strong at the time. He was challenging me in a way that was impressive to me. He wanted to figure out a way to make a show that was something different and unexpected.”

Asked if he thought Kelley would approve of how the scope of his career was being presented in his absence, he said: “I don’t know if he would have liked it, but with Mike what was important was both ‘What did he like?’ and ‘What did he like to not like?’ ”

On a recent afternoon, crates from museums and private collections around the world filled several floors of PS1, as dozens of works — beautiful, banal, creepy, hilarious and abstrusely intellectual — were being installed. One from 2006, “Rose Hobart II,” is as good an example as any of Kelley’s stylistic compass. Situated by itself in an otherwise empty room, it is a plain black geometric structure that looks something like a failed doghouse or a Minimalist work by Robert Morris.

But the shape is inspired by the movie production studio, nicknamed Black Maria, that Thomas Edison built in West Orange, N.J., and by megaphone-shaped structures that Kelley made early in his career. And the sculpture is not simply to be looked at; it’s to be crawled inside of, where the visitor can peer through peepholes and watch the shower scene from the 1982 sex romp “Porky’s,” edited down by Kelley to be accompanied by passages from the electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnik.

For those who worked with Kelley and helped run his studio, assisting in the minutiae of the retrospective has been a difficult job. “We’re in this position of standing in for Mike, as it were, although it’s impossible for anyone really to do that,” said Mary Clare Stevens, who worked closely with Kelley for a decade and is now executive director of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, which he created before his death. “It’s been a rough process. It brings up a lot of things, but it’s also kind of healing. I had a lot of doubts initially about whether it was right to go ahead with a retrospective so soon, but I think it was the right decision.”

“I’m just sad,” Ms. Stevens added, “because Mike always had an unbelievably huge backlog of work, and if he had lived to be 90, I don’t think he would have been able to do even a fraction of what he wanted to do.”

If he had lived to see the work come to PS1, she said, he undoubtedly would have been brimming with ideas about how to use the old school building, and he would have created new pieces for it. One such piece might have been truly memorable, a melding of two American institutions in a way that could occur only in a Kelleyian universe.

“Before he died, he was talking a lot about mud wrestling,” Ms. Stevens said. “He was really fascinated by it. So my fantasy was that we were going to have mud wrestling matches there, probably somewhere down in the basement.”

The Gang’s All There, Talking Art in Qatar

Eyes in Doha Are on Damien Hirsts and Warhols

Natalie Naccache for The New York Times

The Qatar Museums Authority’s Al Riwaq exhibition space in Doha is decorated as a giant Damien Hirst spot painting.

                                                                                                                

Balance the buzz and the business: That seems to be the motto of the 11th Frieze London art fair. Concerned that the crowds and parties were starting to elbow out sales, organizers are aiming for a smaller, more focused event.

They have cut by 20% the number of available tickets, including those for VIPs, and reduced the number of galleries presenting their works to 152 from 175 last year. Meanwhile, some galleries that formerly brought in a range of artists are turning to one-artist booths to boost the profiles of lower-priced new or middle-market artists.

The vaunted party scene, second only to Art Basel Miami Beach on the art-fair circuit, is a double-edged sword, some galleries say. "A lot of people don't realize that dealers aren't there just to hang out. This is a huge part of our business," says Cuban-American dealer Javier Peres, who has shown at Frieze London since 2004. He sat out last year—a move prompted by uneven sales and the fact that many of the fair's 55,000 visitors were only window-shopping—but his gallery will be back on Wednesday, when the five-day fair begins.

The cutbacks are meant to "make the fair more luxurious," says Frieze London's co-founder and director Amanda Sharp.

Some things will be the same: Large galleries with stables of high-profile artists typically opt to show a sampling of fresh work at Frieze. U.S.-based Bloom & Poe will offer a $400,000 painting by Takashi Murakami, while Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac is bringing a $1.8 million abstract sculpture by Georg Baselitz.

In previous years, many dealers say, visitors ended up suffering from "fair fatigue"—overwhelmed by the number of galleries and artists represented. To counter this, the New York-based Marianne Boesky gallery is focusing on just one artist: 11 works on paper and oil paintings by Russian-born artist Kon Trubkovich. His eerie, blurry images, often preoccupied with incarceration, range from $9,000 to $65,000.

Gerd Harry Lybke, whose Leipzig, Germany, gallery Eigen + Art represents Neo Rauch, says a safe bet would be bringing to Frieze the superstar painter's works, which range from about $160,000 to $950,000 on the primary market. But many Frieze visitors already know Mr. Rauch's work, and it is a better long-term strategy to introduce them to a less familiar figure, Mr. Lybke says. He says he hopes to raise the profile of Mr. Rauch's contemporary Uwe Kowski, whose works, often hovering somewhere between representation and abstraction, range from $2,700 to $80,000.

It is a risky move at a fair where an average-size booth costs around $35,000—not including thousands more for art transport and lodging. "If you go to a fair like Frieze and don't earn money, you're screwed," says Mr. Lybke. "I'm bringing two people whose sole jobs are to concern themselves with Uwe's work and explain it to you in a few sentences."

Lisson Gallery is hosting a solo booth of only one work, asking around $600,000 for an installation by Dan Graham, an American artist in his 70s.

While Frieze London cuts back, Frieze Masters is adding 30 galleries for 131 overall. The sister fair, which runs simultaneously, launched last year to show works created before 2000 and racked up strong sales figures, including Van de Weghe Fine Art's sale of an $8.5 million Pablo Picasso painting and a 1968 Joan Miró sold by Helly Nahmad for around $20 million.

Simon Dickinson is one of a handful of galleries leaving the smaller Pavilion of Art and Design, another London-based autumn fair, for Frieze Masters. Director Emma Ward says her gallery will be bringing 30 works including "Study for Discs," a 1919 oil painting by Fernand Léger priced at around $9.6 million.

Meanwhile, Acquavella Galleries is upping the ante with Picasso's 1949 "Woman Sitting," offered for around $20 million, and a 1950 Francis Bacon for around $11 million. Zurich-based David Koetser will be bringing a $6.2 million oil on copper by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Many of the new galleries are major players who held back last autumn to see if the fair took root. "We had nothing to base the caliber of the fair on," says Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner at Manhattan's Mnuchin Gallery and a 2012 holdout. But she was "blown away" by last year's "boutique atmosphere" and is bringing a dozen works on paper, bronzes and oil paintings by Willem de Kooning, including a 1983 painting selling for $8 million and a 1973 sculpture for $8.5 million.

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

Loeb. (Courtesy PMC)

Last week, Daniel Loeb’s activist hedge fund, Third Point Partners, which weighs in at a hefty $15 billion, increased to 9.3 percent its share in Sotheby’s (aka BID) stock. Another activist fund, Marcato Capital Management, owns about 6 percent of the auction house, and billionaire Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management owns another 3, putting about 19 percent of the company shares in “hostile” hands.

Right on cue, Mr. Loeb wrote one of his classic letters excoriating BID Chairman Bill Ruprecht for his extravagant perks and salary while demanding that he step down in favor of a new management team and a few Third Point appointed directors.

By Friday morning, Mr. Ruprecht had dug in his heels, announcing that the company he chairs had taken a “poison pill.” This is not an uncommon defense mechanism for public companies; poison pills are intended to dilute the value of the stock by flooding the market with additional shares if a hostile buyer goes over 10 percent. But one can’t help but savor the irony, in Sotheby’s case, that a company that specializes in making or faking bidding wars for art should create obstacles for professional investors who want to bid up the company’s shares. BID is currently up to more than $50 per share, a nearly 47 percent increase over its share price at the beginning of this year, so even if this is all smoke and mirrors, the sizzle is working on the street.

If Mr. Loeb’s track record outside the art world is any indication, we may well see BID achieve $60 or even $70 per share, a market capitalization of $4.5 billion to $5 billion. Third Point has delivered outstanding results for its investors since Mr. Loeb founded the firm in 1995. Mr. Loeb has made a habit of tilting at large companies, most recently his 7 percent position in Sony and his subsequent demand that it split the entertainment business from the rest of the company: The split did not occur, but the stock did go up handsomely. In the case of Third Point’s investment in Yahoo, Mr. Loeb was successful in bringing in a new CEO and literally doubling the stock price, a big win for both shareholders and investors in his fund.

But is BID really worth it? Is the company as old-fashioned and stodgy as Mr. Loeb and his co-investors believe—in his own words, an “Old Master painting” badly in need of restoration? As Mr. Loeb pointed out in his scathing letter, BID has lagged behind its archrival, Christie’s, in both market share and the hunt for top lots to feature in major biannual evening sales. Christie’s has set more records recently for blue-chip artists like Calder, Yves Klein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s achieved lackluster results for a large Barnett Newman painting featured last season. Consigners have responded to Christie’s momentum by bringing valuable artworks to the block, like Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, estimated to sell for $35 million to $55 million in a Christie’s sale next month. Sotheby’s has parried with a major Warhol disaster diptych in its corresponding November sale, but silver paintings from the ’60s don’t have the same spark.

Would that Newman painting have done better at Christie’s? There is one macro difference between the two companies, from which many other differences stem. Sotheby’s is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Christie’s is a private company controlled by the French art collecting luxury goods tycoon Francois Pinault. In 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, Christie’s continued offering consignors juicy guarantees for major evening sale lots, even if it then tried to lay them off on third parties, locking in profits for the house. Mr. Ruprecht, wanting to sound more prudent, told the stock market that Sotheby’s would no longer offer guarantees, because the company had been so badly burned in evening sales of November 2008.

Mr. Ruprecht’s approach might have sounded good to myopic Wall Street types who see the art market as fraught with risk and view the art business as narrowly as any other business, but the strategy was wrong.

Art is a fashion-driven business prone to either feast or famine, and star lots and market share are critical in maintaining the appearance of success, even when fierce competition leads to side deals where house premiums sometimes get cut to the bone. Though art collecting has grown globally, and prices have risen overall, every artwork, and each artist’s individual market, tells a different story; the line between a world record sale and a flop is all too often razor-thin. In order to remain at the top of their game, the auction houses must charge after those few lots in a season that have the potential to make headlines. Having no one to report to but Mr. Pinault, Christie’s was able to be more nimble, despite an uncertain world economy.

Since the epic disaster of the painfully absurd “price fixing” scandal back in 2000, Sotheby’s and Christie’s have developed very different styles of doing business. Sotheby’s acts like a European academic institution where department heads are virtually tenured and there is limited incentive or leeway for underlings to go hunting for deals. This feeling is palpable as one walks into the building; behind the information desk are tight-suited staffers who insist on asking where you are going before they let you up the elevator. There is a British, clubby feeling of privilege and stuffy pedigree; it’s a place where you, the nouveau riche, have come to ogle the dusty treasures of the refined Old World while the natty experts stand aloof as if you have interrupted their rereading of Proust.

Christie’s is considerably warmer. Until recently, a genial, mustachioed doorman, Gil Perez, welcomed you. (Sadly he retired last year.) You walk into a labyrinth of art for sale. Sometimes, large pieces are plopped awkwardly in front of the building. One is never really sure which of the experts is the department head, but they are always in a rush, as if you are talking to them in an airport and they have just a few minutes between flights.

Fine art has traditionally been marketed in the buttoned-up, European manner, and Christie’s lack of hierarchy and more democratic approach has made some new buyers feel less like they are trying to get into a club where they know they are not welcome. I happen to favor the snottier style—as Groucho said, I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member—but times have changed, and the social dynamic of collecting is more powerful than ever. Sales are not just about the quality of the works or an elegant, sophisticated presentation. Aggressive marketing, over-the-top parties and elaborate catalogs have raised the stakes of this expensive battle.

Still, Sotheby’s is the premier name in art. It has been around since 1744. I would guess that the name alone is worth at least $1 billion, or about $14 per share. For the value of Sotheby’s to be maximized—and for it to exist on a level playing field with Christie’s—it would likely have to go private or be merged into a larger entity. Look at eBay, which has a market cap of $72 billion; sources tell me it is looking to expand its presence in art. It could easily swallow up Sotheby’s and instantly change the value and global reach of the company. Far-fetched? I don’t think so. EBay certainly knows how to build efficient online selling platforms. Then there’s the more natural and obvious fit with Bernard Arnault’s LVMH luxury conglomerate, which sports a market cap of $72.66 billion. Here’s a company that knows how to maximize brands globally and is not afraid to take on fixer-uppers with great brand strength and identity. Mr. Arnault gave auction house ownership a go when LVMH financed Phillips from 1999 to 2002—maybe he has learned from that lesson and is ready for another round. And perhaps Mr. Arnault would enjoy challenging Christie’s and the Pinault family, his archrivals in luxury retail.

Every system benefits from being challenged, and I believe the present firefight will benefit Sotheby’s and in fact already has. But don’t expect it to last long: The art world is a lot smaller than outsiders believe. Don’t be surprised if New Canaan’s own Mr. Ruprecht and the Upper West Side’s influential Mr. Loeb kiss and make up. Yesterday’s archenemies can be tomorrow’s BFFs when there is money to be made.

Art, From Conception to Birth in Qatar

Damien Hirst’s Anatomical Sculptures Have Their Debut

By Natalia V. Osipova

Damien Hirst Sculptures Unveiled: On Monday, the British artist Damien Hirst unveiled 14 monumental bronze sculptures in Doha, Qatar. The installation is considered a particularly bold move by the Qatar Museums Authority.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: October 7, 2013

DOHA, Qatar — For weeks, 14 giant balloons had been mysteriously parked in front of the Sidra Medical and Research Center, a hulking steel, glass and white ceramic building devoted to women’s and children’s health that is to open on the outskirts of this city in 2015.

At 7 on Monday evening, to the amplified sound of a beating heart, members of Qatar’s royal family, government officials and local artists watched as each balloon, bathed in purple light, opened like a giant flower to reveal an unusually provocative public artwork. Called “The Miraculous Journey,” it consists of 14 monumental bronze sculptures, by the British artist Damien Hirst, chronicling the gestation of a fetus inside a uterus, from conception to birth, ending with a statue of a 46-foot-tall anatomically correct baby boy.

Even for a Persian Gulf country that is aggressively buying its way into modernity, this installation takes official acceptance of Western art to a new level. Local women still adhere to centuries-old Islamic traditions, wearing the abaya, a long cloak, and niqab, or face covering; images of women are routinely censored in books and magazines. Even the representation of the human form is unusual.

To commission such an audacious work of art is considered a particularly bold move for Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, 30, chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority and a sister to the new emir of this oil- and gas-rich state. The sculptures are reported to have cost $20 million.

“To have something like this is less daring than having a lot of nudity,” said the sheikha, interviewed on Monday morning in her office at the Museum of Islamic Art, a modern, sun-filled space with sweeping views of the gulf. “There is a verse in the Koran about the miracle of birth,” she said. “It is not against our culture or our religion.”

Rather, she sees the sculptures as an extension of her mission to create a platform for contemporary artists from around the world, transforming this city of gleaming skyscrapers and sandy beaches into a center for arts and culture. Whether the public likes it or not, she believes, “it’s important to have an ongoing conversation.”

The museums authority has also organized a giant retrospective of Mr. Hirst’s work, “Relics,” which opens on Thursday.

Known as one of the most powerful forces in the international art world today, with exceptional buying power and forward thinking, Sheikha al Mayassa is a vocal advocate of contemporary art and arts education. She has been criticized by some as brazen or for embracing only celebrated artists, yet is praised by others for her commitment to the art of the new.

“She’s brave to introduce new visuals and new thoughts, especially in Doha, which is more conservative than other Middle Eastern cities,” said Nada Shabout, a professor of art history at the University of North Texas who works with the Arab Museum of Modern Art here. “Most of the Arab world has not seen public nudity. Sex is not taboo here, it’s just a very private affair. I have no idea how the public will react to these sculptures.”

Generally, the public does not take to the streets to voice disapproval and is considered unlikely to deface any public artwork. Instead, residents seize on social media platforms, like Twitter or blogs. After a 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture depicting one soccer player head-butting another was installed last week on the Corniche, a popular waterfront promenade here, some residents called online for its removal on the grounds that the sculpture, by the Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed, offended religious sensibilities. The sheikha shrugs off the criticism, saying that contemporary art is vital to the city’s landscape.

Purposely provocative, Mr. Hirst, 48, was long controversial in his own country, known for startling works that have included rotting cows positioned to simulate copulation; sharks and sheep preserved in formaldehyde; maggots attacking a cow’s head; and medicine cabinets full of hundreds of different kinds of drugs. Yet, in recent years, exposure to his work has been oversaturated in the United States and Europe.

He is fascinating to many, nonetheless, in a city like Doha. Sheikha al Mayassa recalled visiting Mr. Hirst’s studio in Gloucestershire, England, around 2009 and asking him to consider creating an outdoor sculpture.

Mr. Hirst showed her some drawings of prenatal and natal development he had made in 2005, from sperm to fetus to newborn. “I had always envisioned them to be monumental sculptures, and the sheikha had the idea of putting them in front of a woman’s hospital,” he said. (The installation’s full title is “The Miraculous Journey (2005 to 2013).”

It was a commission fraught with secrecy. “The first meeting I had with the architects, I was not allowed to tell them what the sculptures were because they wanted it to be a surprise,” he recalled. Most of the work, which took three years, was carried out in his studio in England.

There is nothing secret about them now: he positioned the sculptures so they can be seen both from the motorway and the desert. Together they weigh a total of 216 tons.

Wearing scruffy blue jeans and a white T-shirt, Mr. Hirst was watching workers put the finishing touches on his retrospective at Al Riwaq, a nondescript building — now covered in his signature dots — that is next to the Museum of Islamic Art, which was designed by I. M. Pei and opened in 2008.

Mr. Hirst said he became fascinated with childbirth after having children of his own. “Everyone talks about our life’s journey, but we have a whole journey before you’re born,” he explained.

Both Ms. Shabout and Zainab Bahrani, a professor of Near Eastern art and archaeology at Columbia University, pointed out that depictions of naked women bathing have been common throughout the history of Islamic art — for example, in ancient illuminated manuscripts. Such images are not, however, readily available to the population here.

“People are not aware here that it has a long tradition,” Ms. Shabout said.

Ms. Bahrani said: “I am sympathetic to the fact that art makes us feel uncomfortable, can challenge. On the other hand, you don’t want to shock. So it’s a fine line.”

But to Sheikha al Mayassa, it is one more step in the process of introducing art to Doha. Already she is planning two more museums here: the National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, and the Orientalist Museum, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron.

Although the sheikha declined to confirm or deny the reported cost of Mr. Hirst’s sculptures, she said the outlay was “not a crazy number.”

“For us, it’s about the bigger picture,” she said. With an impish grin, she added: “Although he denies it, I think the baby is really Damien. It looks like him.”

When winds kicked up the other day, the balloon shrouding the baby boy accidentally blew off. Mr. Hirst, who was in London at the time, received an e-mail from Sheikha al Mayassa that read:

“Your baby appears to want to come early.”