George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Choose the Artists, Ignore the Critics" @nytimes by BLAKE GOPNIK

Anthony Elms, one of the curators of this year’s Whitney Biennial. Abe Frajndlich for The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — Anthony Elms says that the first artwork he fell in love with, as a boy growing up in southern Michigan, was John Singleton Copley’s painting of a swimmer pulled from the clutches of sharks, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Mr. Elms may soon be casting his mind back to that picture as he starts to feel like chum.

He is in the last stages of being a co-curator for the latest biennial survey of this country’s art, which opens on March 7 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Now 82 years old, the show — which ran annually from 1932 until 1973 — is as famous for the vitriol it provokes as for its works: “When it comes to being boring, the Whitney staff is inexhaustibly inventive,” read one slam from 1977. “It’s glum, preachy, sophomoric and aesthetically aimless,” another critic wrote in 1993.

Encountered on his home turf at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art here, where he has been an associate curator since 2011, Mr. Elms doesn’t come across as girded for battle. He’s wearing pink jeans, a dress shirt and a tweed jacket — a sedate style he says he’s favored since high school. “I used to be the kid where they’d go, ‘Who’s the narc?’ ” Slight, almost pretty, Mr. Elms looks at least a decade younger than his 43 years.

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He’s the wild card in the curatorial mix, somewhat junior beside Stuart Comer, the chief curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art, and Michelle Grabner, a longtime professor of painting now teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Yale. (The Whitney is giving one floor to each curator.) Before his current job, Mr. Elms helped run a minor university gallery in Chicago, after a decade spent as an exhibition preparator and a freelance writer and curator, and also making art. The invitation to do the Biennial came pretty much out of the blue, he said, after he was asked to submit a one-page proposal.

Mr. Elms said he’s read the stack of previous Biennial pans, “and I actually found that kind of liberating,” he said. “I know someone’s not going to like the show, so I might as well just go forward and try to do it the way that seems right. Maybe this is about the part of me that comes from scrappy Michigan.” He added, “Anything I can do to put more artists in more people’s faces is something I’ll say yes to.”

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Mr. Elms’s Biennial spread will include works by 24 artists and collectives — the unknowns and the unheralded, as well as a few famous figures. Elijah Burgher is a 35-year-old painter who remembers getting the email from Mr. Elms saying he would be in the Biennial. “It sounds really silly, but I felt like I was going to faint,” Mr. Burgher said, speaking by Skype from his Chicago studio. Wearing an old red hoodie, he was bleary-eyed from finishing his Whitney work at 4 a.m.to meet the shipping deadline. Behind him on a wall hung a canvas like those he was sending to New York. The painting invokes the occult and carries a self-designed “magic” symbol, a bit like a Wiccan pentacle, that Mr. Burgher called a sigil. It seems to cross the stick figures of Keith Haring with rigorous geometric abstraction. The last-minute Biennial piece is a detailed drawing, in colored pencil, of three nude males posed in front of a crude mural of naked swordsmen.

Making esoteric work in Chicago about spells and sex can leave a young artist feeling invisible, Mr. Burgher said. A Whitney invitation promises critical validation and a market boost: “I want both — who doesn’t?”

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Marc Fischer is another of the eight Chicagoans whom Mr. Elms will feature on his Whitney floor. Mr. Fischer rarely makes salable objects — he lives mostly off part-time teaching and fees from museum projects — and the Biennial doesn’t offer financial rewards. “It’s a bit bizarre how special it’s treated — maybe a few more people will ask me to give a lecture,” he said in a phone interview. Although he normally works as part of a collective — this year’s Biennial will have a full eight of those — his Whitney work comes under the aegis of Public Collectors, a kind of community project that he runs solo to bring attention to the weird stuff people amass.

For the Biennial, Mr. Fischer has delved into the estate of Malachi Ritscher, who was well known in Chicago as a peace activist and for the thousands of recordings he made of the city’s music scene. He came to national attention in 2006, when he immolated himself in protest against the American war in Iraq. Mr. Fischer’s installation will include recordings by Ritscher and listening stations for them, but also a skateboard that Ritscher designed and documentation of his life, ideals and death. “I want to see the museum lend its authority to something which is not normally accorded it,” Mr. Fischer said.

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If Mr. Elms’s tastes run from magic paintings to cassette tapes and skateboards, documentary photos and day-in-the-life videos, his eclecticism may be a reflection of a shifting moment in art, said the 36-year-old artist Paul P., whom Mr. Elms recently met. “I think that at this moment to be a curator could be a more modest act,” said the artist from his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That is, instead of making choices based on some idea of setting the art agenda, a curator could aim instead to sample the vast range of interests that artists now have.

Paul P. found success with luscious, Whistlerian paintings of young men culled from the pages of gay pornography. He said he was grateful to Mr. Elms for letting him go in a new direction: He’ll be showing his fountain-pen drawings of old master sculptures, as well as a wooden desk and stool that he designed in the refined Victorian style known as Anglo-Japanese; it was built by a Toronto craftsman.

“To have what was on the forefront of my interest be what Anthony was interested in is great,” Paul P. said.

Mr. Elms has called for a Biennial with “a multiplicity of voices and a sense of poetry,” but the role of poet these days risks being less about complex ideas rendered with maximum concision than about portentous, high-seeming confusion.

Worse yet, his party-mix approach could make his floor at the Whitney read as an avatar of the art fair, geared to collectors’ lust for variety.

The market implications of the Biennial — a recent article in Forbes discussed it as a guide to art investing — left one rigorous conceptualist, Angie Keefer, hesitant about accepting Mr. Elms’s invitation to exhibit, although she counts herself a fan of his work as a curator. After much back and forth, the piece she agreed to make will be installed near where visitors pay to enter, and will address “economic versus artistic definitions of what value is,” she said from her home in Hudson, N.Y. A projection of a lovely waterfall will be manipulated to give visitors a visceral sense — literally — of the rise and fall of commodities futures. Whether the public likes what it gets is not very much on her mind, she said — or Mr. Elms’s.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Marianne Boesky: In Search of Art Stars" @wsj by Alexandra Wolfe

When gallerist Marianne Boesky first showed the works of Takashi Murakami —the Japanese artist renowned for work that combines traditional Japanese style with contemporary Pop, whose career she launched in 1997—the art world thought she was crazy. "I couldn't even give his work away," she says. "I could even go so far as to say I was mocked for showing it." One of his pieces recently sold for over $15 million at auction. And Ms. Boesky has had her own success, introducing art stars such as Lisa Yuskavage, Yoshitomo Nara and Barnaby Furnas.

In a few weeks, Ms. Boesky, 46, is taking another risk. At this year's Armory Show, a New York art fair that runs from March 6 to 9, she will showcase the work of emerging South African-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka. While Ms. Boesky has never devoted her entire booth to one artist at the Armory, she is reserving all her space for him—not bad for an artist who's never been seen in the U.S.

With the contemporary art market booming, fairs such as the Armory Show—in which booths often cost galleries at least $100,000—have become increasingly influential. They're a one-stop shop for global collectors looking to buy more efficiently than ever before. Some collectors forgo in-person shopping altogether. These days, Ms. Boesky never even meets some of her clients, who often buy the works of recognized artists based just on seeing photos of them. "An email comes in, and you Google the person, and it's the 14th-richest person in Japan or something," she says.

But while she thinks collecting is now "a lot less personal" than it used to be, one motivation for buying remains the same. "Art is a status symbol and always has been," she says. "People arrive at a certain level of wealth, and they've bought their umpteenth car, and art is that great equalizer of having arrived."

On this day, Ms. Boesky is sitting in her white minimalist office in her spacious Chelsea gallery in Manhattan. She has a second gallery in a rental space on the Upper East Side, opened in 2010. Now she is planning to announce the creation of another gallery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she will showcase the emerging artists she has increasingly represented in recent years.

Ms. Boesky has come a long way from the first space she opened 18 years ago in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. She grew up around the art owned by her father, Ivan Boesky, the investment banker convicted of insider trading in 1986. Even then she had dreams of opening a gallery one day, she says.

Ms. Boesky spent her childhood in and around New York City, and her father often took her to galleries and auctions, where he let her raise the paddle. Her mother liked "pretty" art while her father "tended toward dark and tough art, and that's really what I related to, too." Together her parents built a collection of blue-chip artwork, including works by Auguste Rodin and Édouard Vuillard. "It was great art for somebody who grew up with nothing," she says, referring to her father.

But he tended to buy work by more established artists. Mr. Boesky met Andy Warhol and was offered works by Willem de Kooning, but she says he had no interest. "If he was going to be a successful, rich man, he was going to have a Renoir and a Monet, but he also liked the really tough stuff." Ms. Boesky was especially interested in her father's sculptures by Alberto Giacometti. "To me, their raw, ugly, roughness was relatable and sad and beautiful," she says. "But that's all gone and in the past."

When Mr. Boesky was convicted, she says, "everything sort of imploded." She was then in college—first at Duke University, then at Middlebury College. After graduating, Ms. Boesky supported herself working for a few private dealers and interning at Sotheby's before she realized that she needed to make more money if she wanted to amass her own collection. During a brief stint in law, while working for the American Civil Liberties Union, she met her first artist, Lisa Yuskavage, through an art dealer.

She got a loan to rent a space on Greene Street and continued to add artists, eventually selling her apartment to open her current gallery in Chelsea. "I borrowed money to get started, and I've continued borrowing money to grow, and I just keep borrowing money," she says, laughing. "I am a risk taker, but I have never defaulted on a single loan." Her parents didn't help finance the gallery. "It was not something that my parents were going to be in a position or have an interest in supporting and bankrolling," she says.

Now, Ms. Boesky lives with her husband and daughter above the Chelsea gallery in an art-filled apartment. "My hope was just to be able to feed myself and keep the doors open," she says. "It never occurred to me I'd be able to buy a house and a boat and all these things…but it's a nice incidental benefit, no doubt about it." She's also glad to have been able to help artists have the same opportunities. "I like that artists don't need to be burned-out hippies anymore."

With recent artwork drawing high prices—such as the record sale of a 1969 Francis Bacon triptych for $142.4 million last fall—some are asking whether there could be an art bubble. Ms. Boesky says she doesn't believe so because prices aren't high across the board. "People are chasing young, hyped, hip, and they're chasing the rarefied blue-chip, hard-to-get art and paying whatever it takes to get it, but the middle remains to be seen," she says.

Since the contemporary art market weathered the economic downturn better than assets like homes, Ms. Boesky thinks art is now considered a less volatile asset than it once was. "Late 2009 and 2010 wasn't easy for anyone, but it's kind of incredible," she says. "The richest people…even in the worst of times are still rich, and they need to put their money somewhere." Unlike stock in a tech company, art is a physical asset. "Things go up and down, but they don't go to zero…and at least I have a storage facility in Delaware I could visit," she quips.

In the past few years, the art market has come under fire for its lack of oversight. Art-fair transactions are not public, and auction houses rarely disclose buyers or sellers of works they bring to market. Most galleries don't post the prices of their artwork, in defiance of a decades-old law that mandates they do so.

And groups of speculators can buy a large amount of work by a particular artist, put the pieces up for sale at auction and then enlist their friends to bid up the prices. If the works sell well, the speculators can reap tidy profits. "You can call that collusion, but it's not illegal, and I don't even know if it's unethical," she says. She admits there is a fine line. "You could compare it to insider trading in that…all the little people who don't get access get hurt by losing opportunity," she says, "but it's all very gray."

Ms. Boesky does think the art world, traditionally a handshake business, would be better served by embracing written contracts, which would avoid many of the legal spats over payments that have plagued countless deals. In the end, though, she says most people buy art because they love it. "We're talking about art," she says. "Nobody gets hurt."

Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com

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Salzburg art stash 'more important than Munich'

Contemplative Woman, by the German artist Fritz Maskos (1896-1967), was seized from Cornelius Gurlitt's collection in Munich

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Paintings found at the Austrian home of art collector Cornelius Gurlitt are even more significant than those found at his Munich flat, his lawyer says.

Works by Renoir, Monet and other French impressionists are among the 60 or so pieces, Hannes Hartung told BBC News.

Last year it was revealed that hundreds of artworks had been kept at Mr Gurlitt's home in Munich, many believed to have been looted by the Nazis.

He denies the works were looted but Jewish groups want further details.

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A wonderful Seine scene by Pissarro, a wonderful bridge picture by Monet and a sailing boat sea scape by Manet”

End Quote Hannes Hartung Cornelius Gurlitt's lawyer, describing some of the newly found works

No decision has been taken yet about publishing photos of the newly found works and giving further details about them.

Jewish groups have called for a list of the works to be published, to assist identification of any works stolen or extorted from victims of Nazi persecution.

Mr Gurlitt, 81, is the son of the Nazi-approved art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, who died in 1956.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was described by the Claims Conference, a Holocaust restitution organisation, as "one of the four art dealers commissioned by Hitler to handle stolen art".

"Therefore the origins of his inheritance should be checked," it said in a statement.

'Many Renoirs'

The discovery of the pictures at Mr Gurlitt's Salzburg home was announced on Monday.

"They are very prominent works," said Mr Hartung.

Cornelius Gurlitt's Salzburg home has been secured against potential break-in and theft, reports say

Mr Gurlitt's spokesman said initial assessment suggested the works had not been stolen

These previously unknown works by German artist Otto Dix were found in the Munich flat

"A wonderful Seine scene by Pissarro, a wonderful bridge picture by Monet and a sailing boat sea scape by Manet.

"Then there are also many other works by Renoir, and by Liebermann. They are in general artistically outstandingly good pieces, which are of more significance than the collection from Schwabing [a district of Munich]."

More than 1,400 long-lost or unknown art works, estimated to be worth $1.35bn (£846m; 989m euros), were discovered in Mr Gurlitt's apartment in Munich in March 2012.

They included pieces by Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Otto Dix.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was accused of working with the Nazis to acquire looted art

The cousin of Cornelius Gurlitt's father, Wolfgang Gurlitt, was also an art collector, who dealt with "degenerate art" during the Nazi era.

Wolfgang went to live in Austria during the war and gave his significant art collection to a museum in Linz.

The Linz Lentos museum has had to restitute a number of paintings from his collection in recent years as it was established they were stolen during the Nazi era.

In November, the director of the Linz museum said there were no indications of a connection between the two cousins but art historians are less certain, the BBC's Bethany Bell reports from Vienna.

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Homing In on a Couple’s Basquiat Drawings" @nytimes by CAROL VOGEL

                              

“Portrait of Herb and Lenore,” a 1983 acrylic on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat depicting the couple who own it. Schorr Family Collection, Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris — Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2014

 

Longtime collectors like Herbert and Lenore Schorr are luckier than most. In 1981, while visiting the Annina Nosei Gallery, which was then on Prince Street in SoHo, the couple met Jean-Michel Basquiat, fell in love with his work and bought one of his paintings. That purchase was quickly followed by others — drawings as well as canvases — and, over the years, the Schorrs amassed one of the most important Basquiat collections in the country. The Schorrs also became friends with the artist, who died of a drug overdose at 27 in 1988, and occasionally bought a painting or drawing right out of his Manhattan studio.

“Jean-Michel himself was fascinated that we always gravitated toward the complex work,” said Ms. Schorr, who argues that the drawings are “the key to all his work.”

While institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh have shown Basquiats from the Schorrs’ collection, there has never been an exhibition focusing chiefly on the couple’s works on paper by the artist. Now, however, the Schorrs are lending 22 of their Basquiat drawings for a show running from May 1 through June 13 at the Acquavella Galleries. Eleanor Acquavella, one of the gallery’s directors, said she welcomed the opportunity because “there is a complex side to his drawings that few people are familiar with.”

In addition to the 22 drawings, dense with the artist’s signature graffiti scrawls, words and images, the Schorrs will lend two paintings that incorporate drawing and collage with some of the same imagery.

Fred Hoffman, a dealer turned curator who helped organize a traveling Basquiat exhibition that opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005, is also assembling the Acquavella show. “About two and a half years ago, I realized how Basquiat’s works on paper had been overlooked and how important they are,” he said. “In contrast to most artists, Basquiat’s drawings were not a solution to a problem. They were complete works unto themselves.”

As is often the case these days with exhibitions at blue chip galleries, nothing at the Acquavella show will be for sale. “It is strictly educational,” Ms. Schorr said. “We still own all our paintings and drawings by the artist.”

HUGUETTE CLARK’S TROVE

Two weeks ago, Christie’s announced that it had won property from the estate of Huguette Clark, the reclusive copper heiress who died in 2011 at the age of 104. While the auction house said it would be selling some 400 items — art, musical instruments, furniture and rare books — in two sales in Manhattan this spring, it provided few specifics. The overall sales estimate for the property is over $50 million.

This week, some details about the art and objects began to emerge, giving a fuller picture of Mrs. Clark’s taste and that of her parents. French furniture and important Impressionist paintings apparently filled her three apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, as well as sprawling mansions in Santa Barbara, Calif., and New Canaan, Conn.

“It’s a time capsule,” said Conor Jordan, Christie’s deputy chairman of Impressionist and Modern art. “In the New York apartments, we found newspapers lining some of the drawers from the 1930s. There were also French periodicals stretching back to the 19th century.”

Mrs. Clark, who chose to live at a Manhattan hospital during the last two decades of her life, rather than in her homes, has been a focus of fascination since her death. Depicted as a poor little rich girl who loved to paint and collect dolls, she is the subject of a best-selling book (a second book is due out in the spring), and her $300 million estate has been the focus of a highly publicized court battle.

Mrs. Clark came from a deeply Francophile family. Although her father, Senator William A. Clark, Democrat of Montana, was said to be a hard-nosed businessman whose life was his work, he had a soft spot for all things French (including his second wife, Anna). Anna and Huguette Clark did as well: Both women bought French paintings that will be among the highlights of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern art auction on May 6. The top attraction is one of Monet’s “Nymphéas,” or Water Lilies, from 1907, which has an estimate of $25 million to $35 million. Huguette Clark bought the painting in 1930 from the Durand-Ruel Galleries, and it has not been seen in public since.

Also coming to auction are three paintings by Renoir, including “Jeunes Filles Jouant au Volant” (“Young Women Playing Badminton”), painted toward the end of the 1880s. Mr. Jordan of Christie’s said Mrs. Clark purchased it in 1958 for $125,000, a high price at the time, when the Minneapolis Institute of Arts deaccessioned it; it is now expected to bring $10 million to $15 million. (The painting had been on loan to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, another beneficiary under the settlement of Mrs. Clark’s estate.)

The Clarks also collected American art. On June 18, Christie’s is to auction a 1913 canvas of a girl fishing in the Italian lakes region, by John Singer Sargent, estimated at $3 million to $5 million. More personal is “Prospect Park,” an 1886 painting by William Merritt Chase that is expected to fetch 700,000 to $1 million.

“It is likely that this was a gift from the artist to Senator Clark when Chase was commissioned by him to paint his portrait in 1915,” said Elizabeth Sterling, head of Christie’s American paintings department. “Chase was known to give token presents to his patrons.”

Highlights from the sales of Mrs. Clark’s art are on view through Tuesday at Christie’s in London and will travel to Hong Kong (April 4 through 9), Tokyo (April 10 through 12) and then back to Rockefeller Center later that month. All of the works will be shown at Christie’s New York headquarters just before the sales in May and June.

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George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann - "Detroit Art Museum Offers Plan to Avoid Sale of Art" by RANDY KENNEDY

A still-life painting by the 17-century Flemish artist Frans Snyders was hung at the Detroit Institute of Arts on Wednesday. Daniel Mears/The Detroit News, via Associated Press

The Detroit Institute of Arts, whose world-class collection has been targeted as a potential source of cash to help dig Detroit out of federal bankruptcy, announced Wednesday that it would raise $100 million to help save itself, joining a group of private foundations that have already pledged $370 million toward the effort.

Officials at the city-owned museum, which, along with Detroit, has struggled financially for many years, had said as recently as two weeks ago that such a huge commitment — money to help the city pay its pensions — would be “completely unfeasible.” But in a statement on Wednesday the museum said that it had reached out to corporate leaders in Detroit and would commit to a multiyear effort that would “stretch our fund-raising abilities to their capacity” as a way to protect its collection.

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“The D.I.A. has consistently met its financial challenges and goals and will meet this challenge with enthusiasm and confidence,” said Eugene A. Gargaro, the chairman of the museum’s board. Like the money committed recently by 10 national and local foundations, the money raised by the museum would be pledged toward the city’s pension obligations, which are believed to be underfunded by as much as $3.5 billion.

As part of the deal, the city would relinquish ownership of the museum, and it would be owned by a nonprofit organization, as most large public museums across the country are. This would relieve the city of any future financial responsibility for the institute while also shielding the institute from future municipal threats.

Gerald E. Rosen, the federal judge who is mediating the bankruptcy case and who devised the plan to try to protect the art by aiding pensioners, said in a statement on Wednesday: “We all recognize the magnitude of this great undertaking and appreciate the depth of the D.I.A.’s commitment to the city of Detroit and its retirees.”

Last week, Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, asked the State Legislature to provide $350 million to the overall fund to reduce possible pension cuts and save the art collection. But even if that money comes through — leading to an overall fund of more than $800 million — it remains unclear whether a deal could be struck with creditors in bankruptcy court to prevent the sale of art.

The Detroit emergency manager’s office last year hired Christie’s to appraise a portion of the collection that included many of the museum’s masterpieces. The auction house said that selling this portion would generate $454 million to $867 million, a number that has been criticized by some of the city’s creditors as being inaccurately low for the best of the museum’s collection.

The possibility of selling part of the city’s cultural history to pay its bills has enraged many, who say it would be a betrayal and would hurt Detroit’s chances of being able to revive itself economically. Museum officials have warned that a sale of masterpieces would not just diminish the museum but would lead to its eventual dissolution because donors would cease to give to it and a three-county tax fund that now provides it with crucial operating money would be withdrawn.

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George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann - "Is collecting art as profitable as it is painted?" @FinancialTimes by By Melanie Gerlis

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Work by Yayoi Kusama at Art Basel Miami Beach last year

The international art market is having its time in the sun: auction records keep tumbling, living artists have become superstars, and their punchy paintings and shiny sculptures have become the billionaire’s playthings of choice. Amid all this noise, however, it is time to question the much-touted belief that art is also an investment-grade asset.

Most of the related books and headlines of recent years have extolled the potential of art as an investment, not least in comparison to the volatile stock markets and dwindling returns on alternative assets that have characterised the financial markets since the most recent economic downturn. One joke going around the City of London a couple of years ago was that UBS’s art collection had proved more profitable than its investment banking division.

It is understandable that the wider market gloom moved the debate about art as an asset into a new territory. Art, said its proponents, was not only a source of great value, but was also impervious to the world’s economic slings and arrows.

Yet when looked at more carefully as an investment category, art falls short relative to many of the other assets to which it is frequently – and favourably – compared. These include both traditional and alternative investments, whether public and private equity, gold, wine, or residential property. Its lack of correlation to such assets is also questionable.

The combination of the market’s illiquidity, opacity, lumpy supply and asymmetry of information undermines art’s profile as an asset. This is reinforced by the unique qualities of each work – including its history of ownership, trading and display – which create enormous ranges of pricing and valuation, and preclude sensible data aggregation or comparison. The market’s opacity further opens it up to unchecked manipulation.

Price transparency is another huge problem facing those who would map art’s returns on to a Bloomberg screen, alongside their other investments. Only 50 per cent of an already relatively small number of art trades are recorded (auction results are made public, dealers’ prices are not). To put this into perspective, Artnet, a database of auction sales, records that 1.8m works of fine art were offered at auction in 2012. By comparison, there were an average 1.5m trades per day through the London Stock Exchange alone in May 2012.

Even if the limited, patchy and inconsistent available data on art sales could be put into a hypothetical basket of all segments of art, its financial profile is hardly compelling. Most such theoretical analyses of the art market find that the average compound return for works kept for between five and 10 years is around 4 per cent.

Relatively speaking, this is already less than for gold, wine and both public and private equity, and also lower than the residential property market – another market of unique goods, but with more trading volume and available data (as well as an actual and economic utility) than the art market. And this is before considering the so-called risk adjusted return (the profits needed to make up for the peculiarities of any market). One investment professional whom I interviewed for my book* said that, given the risks in the art market, anyone who is content with less than a 50 per cent return on art “needs a lesson in investment”.

Meanwhile, art’s supposed lack of correlation with other markets is not entirely convincing. The price levels for art do not reflect its fundamental characteristics, rather the fortunes of its buyers. The art market as a whole crashed soon after the economic downturn began in earnest in 2008. Thereafter, only the top-priced works recovered as the wealthiest few emerged relatively unscathed from the credit crisis and new wealth was created outside the gloom of Europe and the United States. Many experts also agree that the data frequency to support the correlation claim is much too short to be meaningful, given how relatively infrequently art is sold for a known price. What may seem to be a lack of correlation may in fact just be a lack of information.

This is not to say that art doesn’t offer a different type of return – and even one with some grounding in economic analysis, should this be important. In a 2007 paper, the economists Erdal Atukeren and Aylin Seckin estimated the intangible joy of looking at a work of art – which they define as its “psychic return” – at around 28 per cent. While it would be difficult to persuade a bank to lend money on the back of this estimate (or indeed against most estimates of art’s value), owning and looking at art certainly offer something that a stock certificate or bar of gold do not.

Meanwhile, the social worth of art also cannot be ignored. In recent years, contemporary art in particular has become fashionable. Art fairs such as Frieze and Art Basel – essentially slick trade shows – have transformed themselves into “to be seen at” events around the world, complete with celebrities and VIP events. Participation in today’s art market offers an unparalleled presence in today’s experiential economy: how else could a hedge fund trader find himself sitting next to a film star at an exclusive dinner in a Miami Beach hotel?

For investment purposes, however, while all assets have their risks and peculiarities, art seems to offer none of the saving graces. Like gold, art is a hard asset with no intrinsic worth. But gold, which also divides opinion as an asset, has a daily, fixed, per-ounce price that enables it to be traded as a commodity and certainly a more convincing hedge against inflation. Private equity is a notoriously opaque and often illiquid area of investment, but still offers enough genuine data points from which to create indexes, assess risk and attempt to gauge returns.

Meanwhile, there does not seem to be any impetus to rectify the lack of verifiable and meaningful data in the art market – which underpins most of its profit potential anyway. There is a chance that you make money on your art, and a greater chance that you don’t; the difference is largely luck. Equating a popular asset with a profitable asset is misleading. From an investment point of view, art seems to be a very fragile prospect.

* ‘Art as an Investment? A Survey of Comparative Assets’ by Melanie Gerlis is published by Lund Humphries in the UK (£30) on January 17 and in the US in February ($60)

Melanie Gerlis is the art market editor of The Art Newspaper. She will be taking part in a panel discussion, “Is art really a good investment?”, at the London Art Fair on January 17, londonartfair.co.uk

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Lost in the Gallery-Industrial Complex" @nytimes by HOLLAND COTTER

A new year. A new New York mayor. Old problems with art in New York. I have a collection of complaints and a few (very few) ideas for change.

Money — the grotesque amounts spent, the inequitable distribution — has dominated talk about art in the 21st century so far. It’s a basic fact of art history. Emperors, popes and robber barons set the model for the billionaire buyers of today. Of course, it is today that matters to the thousands of artists who live and work in this punitively expensive city, where the art industry is often confused with the art world.

The distinction between the two, though porous, is real. The art industry is the nexus of high-price galleries, auction houses and collectors who control an art market renowned for its funny-money practices. In numbers of personnel, the industry is a mere subset of the circle of artists, teachers, students, writers, curators and middle-range dealers spread out over five boroughs. But in terms of power, the proportions are reversed, to the degree that the art world basically functions as a labor source, supplying the industry with product, services and exotic color but, with the age of apprenticeships long gone, only uncertainly sharing in its wealth.

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Do I exaggerate? A bit. The argument can be made that labor is benefiting from its ties to management, in a high-tide-floats-all-boats way. Visit art schools or galleries, and you get the impression that a substantial portion of the art world is content to serve as support staff to a global ruling class.

The reality is that, directly or indirectly, in large ways and small, the current market system is shaping every aspect of art in the city: not just how artists live, but also what kind of art is made, and how art is presented in the media and in museums.

I got tired of money talk a while back. Rather than just sputter with indignation, I figured it would be more useful to turn in another direction, toward art that the industry wasn’t looking at, which is a whole lot of art. But reminders keep pulling you back to the bottom line. With every visit to the gallery-packed Lower East Side, I see fewer of the working-class Latinos who once called the neighborhood home. In what feels like overnight, I’ve watched Dumbo in Brooklyn go from an artist’s refuge to an economically gated community.

Recently, my attention was drawn to a controversy surrounding a large and much praised group exhibition installed at a complex of converted warehouses called Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The show, “Come Together: Surviving Sandy,” was conceived as a benefit for artists who had suffered losses in the 2012 hurricane and was promoted as evidence of art-world solidarity. Yet a widely read blog, Art F City, reported that the owners of the complex, which had for some years provided low-rent studios for artists, were now raising rents dramatically, forcing many artists to vacate. (Landlords say 25 percent of Industry City tenants are artists). The new residents seem to be an upscale clientele drawn by the artsy atmosphere.

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Whatever the full facts, money is the winner, and with that comes caution and conservatism. This is almost absurdly obvious on the high-end of the market. Sales of retrograde “masterworks” can be relied on to jack up the auction charts at regular intervals; the most recent record was set last fall by a $142.4 million Francis Bacon painting of Lucian Freud, a monument to two overpraised painters for the price of one. Meanwhile, big, hugely pricey tchotchkes — new whatevers by Jeff Koons, say — roll out of fabrication shops and into personal museums being assembled by members of the international power elite.

Outside auctions, the marketing mechanics buzz on. Roughly since the end of the multicultural, postmodern 1990s, we’ve watched new art being re-Modernized and domesticated, with painting the medium of choice, abstraction the mode of preference. Together they offer significant advantages. Paintings can be assembly-line produced but still carry the aura of being hand-touched. They can be tailored to small spaces, such as fair booths. Abstraction, especially if color is involved, can establish instant eye contact from afar. If, in addition, the work’s graphic impact translates well online, where stock can be moved eBay style, so much the better.

Other traditional forms — drawing, photography, some sculpture — similarly work well in this marketing context. But an enormous range of art does not, beginning with film, performance and installation, and extending into rich realms of creative activity that defy classification as art at all. To note this dynamic is not to dismiss painting or object making, but to point to the restrictive range of art that the market supports, that dealers are encouraged to sell, and that artists are encouraged to make.

The narrowing of the market has been successful in attracting a wave of neophyte buyers who have made art shopping chic. It has also produced an epidemic of copycat collecting. To judge by the amounts of money piled up on a tiny handful of reputations, few of these collectors have the guts, or the eye or the interest, to venture far from blue-chip boilerplate. They let galleries, art advisers and the media do the choosing, and the media doesn’t particularly include art critics. What, after all, does thumbs up, thumbs down matter when winners are preselected before the critical votes are in? In this economy, it can appear that the critic’s job is to broadcast names and contribute to fame.

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Conservative art can encourage conservative criticism. We’re seeing a revival — some would say a disinterment — of a describe-the-strokes style of writing popular in the formalist 1950s and again in the 1970s: basically, glorified advertising copy. Evaluative approaches that developed in the 1980s and 1990s, based on the assumption that art inevitably comments on the social and political realities that produce it, tend to be met with disparagement now, in part because they’re often couched in academic jargon, which has become yet another form of sales-speak.

There’s no question that we need — art needs — an influx of new commentators who don’t mistake attitude for ideas, who move easily between cultures and geographies. Regular gigs in mainstream print journalism have all but dried up, but the Internet offers ambitious options in a growing number of blogazines including Art F City (edited by Paddy Johnson) and Hyperallergic (edited by Hrag Vartanian), which combine criticism, reporting, political activism and gossip on an almost-24-hour news cycle.

And although both are based in New York, they include national coverage and in a feisty mix of voices, a welcome alternative to the one-personality blog of yore. That mix would probably be even more varied, and transcultural, if a few forward-thinking, art-minded investors would infuse some serious capital into such enterprises so they could pay writers a living wage and make online freelance writing a viable way of life.

I don’t know what it would take to get a global mix of voices into some of New York’s big, rich art museums. If archaeologists of the future unearthed the Museum of Modern Art as it exists today, they would have to assume that Modernism was a purely European and North American invention. They would be wrong. Modernism was, and is, an international phenomenon, happening in different ways, on different timetables, for different reasons in Africa, Asia, Australia and South America.

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Why aren’t museums telling that story? Because it doesn’t sell. Why doesn’t it sell? Because it’s unfamiliar. Why is it unfamiliar? Because museums, with their eyes glued to box office, aren’t telling the story.

Yes, MoMA and the Guggenheim have recently organized a few “non-Western” shows. MoMA’s  2012 “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” packed to the ceiling with art we’ve rarely if ever seen, was a revelation. But they need to take actions far more fundamental and committed. International Modernism should be fully integrated into the permanent collection, regularly, consistently.

Their job as public institutions is to change our habits of thinking and seeing. One way to do this is by bringing disparate cultures together in the same room, on the same wall, side by side. This sends two vital, accurate messages: that all these cultures are different but equally valuable; and all these cultures are also alike in essential ways, as becomes clear with exposure.

With its recently announced plans for an expansion, MoMA has an ideal chance to expand its horizons organically. The new spaces, which should certainly be devoted to the permanent collection, won’t be ready for several years, but the museum has no excuse for waiting for its long-overdue integration process to begin.

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And on the subject of integration, why, in one of the most ethnically diverse cities, does the art world continue to be a bastion of whiteness? Why are African-American curators and administrators, and especially directors, all but absent from our big museums? Why are there still so few black — and Latino, and Asian-American — critics and editors?

Not long ago, these questions — of policy but also political and ethical questions — seemed to be out there on institutional tables, demanding discussion. Technically, they may be there still, but museums seem to be most interested in talking about real estate, assiduously courting oligarchs for collections, and anxiously scouting for the next “Rain Room.” Political questions, about which cultures get represented in museums and who gets to make the decisions, and how, are buried.

Political art brings me back to where I started, with artists, and one final, baffled complaint, this one about art schools, which seem, in their present form, designed to accommodate the general art economy and its competitive, caste-system values. Programs are increasingly specialized, jamming students into ever narrower and flakier disciplinary tracks. Tuitions are prodigious, leaving artists indentured to creditors for years.

How experimental can artists be under such circumstances? How confidently can they take risks in an environment that acknowledges only dollar-value success? How can they contemplate sustaining — to me this is crucial to New York’s future as an art center — long and evolving creative careers? The temptation for many artists, after a postgraduate spurt of confidence, is to look around, see what’s selling, and consider riffing on that. We’re seeing a depressing number of such riffs these days.

Again, do I exaggerate? And, again, sure, to some degree. By no means is all the news bad. Start-up galleries are opening; middle-tier galleries are holding their own, or doing better than that. Artist-intensive neighborhoods like Bushwick and Ridgewood are still affordable, companionable and fun.

But when the rents get too high, or the economy fails, or art buying falls out of fashion, and the art industry decides to liquidate its overvalued assets and leave? Artists, the first and last stakeholders, will have themselves to fall back on. They’ll learn to organize and agitate for what they need, to let City Hall know, in no uncertain terms, that they’re there. They’ll learn to share, not just on special occasions, but all the time. They’ll learn that art and politics are inseparable, and both can be anything and everything. They’ll learn to bring art back from the brink of inconsequence.

As someone long on questions and short on answers, let me ask: Why not start now?

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Let Curators Be Curators, MOCA’s New Chief Says" @nytimes by By RANDY KENNEDY and JORI FINKELJAN

The New York office of Philippe Vergne, the Dia Art Foundation director, who was named on Wednesday to lead the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, looks out onto a brick vista of Chelsea art galleries. But hanging on the wall next to the windows is a photograph of Walter De Maria’s New Mexico land-art work “The Lightning Field,” showing a vast sweep of Western plateau.

As Mr. Vergne heads to California — the second New York-based director in a row chosen by the Los Angeles museum — he will in one sense be taking over an institution whose possibilities are just as wide-open. Barely more than 30 years old, beloved and fiercely defended by local artists and in possession of one of the best collections of postwar art in the country, the museum is still in the early stages of defining itself in a rapidly growing international art world. And its board, after years of failing to give the museum enough money to meet its ambitions, recently announced that it had raised $100 million toward an endowment that it hoped to increase to $150 million.

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But Mr. Vergne will also take over an institution that, by the standards of most large-city museums, is now little more than a shell. It employs only two full-time curators, after several departures in recent years, most during the tumultuous tenure of the previous director, Jeffrey Deitch, who himself left in 2013, with two years left on a five-year contract. After years of cost-cutting and layoffs, the museum has 42 full-time employees. By contrast the Hammer Museum, across town, has 93 full-time employees, including six curators, even though its collection and exhibition space is much smaller than the Museum of Contemporary Art’s.

In a wide-ranging interview Friday morning, Mr. Vergne said that, unlike Mr. Deitch — who was criticized for running the museum as de facto chief curator, leading to the acrimonious departure of the longtime head of the curatorial staff, Paul Schimmel — he believed in the importance of a chief curator. He said he would make his first priority finding one and recruiting a staff, and then would mostly stand back and help them work.

Mr. Vergne, 47, who was born and educated in France but who has worked for many years in the United States, said that he understood how much work would have to be done to rebuild the museum. And while he is highly respected as a curator, he said, “I don’t think I will curate.”

“The role of the director is to support the curators and let the curators be curators,” said Mr. Vergne, an animated man known for dry wit and a persistently thick Gallic accent.

He added that even with the recent growth of the endowment, he expects much of his job to watch the bottom line and to woo donors. “I know that to do that,” he said, “my time will be consumed with making sure the institution is financially secure.”

His goal, he said, is to have the resources to be able to use the collection as a launching pad to make the museum “the most experimental institution in this country.”

Mr. Vergne’s record as a fund-raiser for Dia is not clear. In 2009 the foundation announced plans to build a new space on West 22nd Street. But construction has not begun and Dia has not commented on the state of its capital campaign. In the interview, Mr. Vergne insisted that progress would be announced soon and that the “proof will be in the pudding.”

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“I feel very strong about where Dia is compared to where Dia was when I found it,” he said.

Fred Sands, the new president of the museum’s board, said it chose Mr. Vergne in part because he had solid administrative talents as well as the respect of artists and a deep understanding of the contemporary-art terrain.

“He knows how to run a business,” he said. “A museum is a not-for-profit business, but it is a businesAs for Mr. Deitch, a veteran New York gallery owner whom he described as “sort of a loner,” Mr. Sands said: “He was not focused on running the museum. I love the guy, but that’s not what he was interested in.”

He added: “I think the artists and curators are looking for a good dad and Philippe is that. People have been saying to me, ‘Well, you finally did it.’ ”

A question that has hovered over the appointment is the role of Eli Broad, the billionaire collector who was deeply involved in recruiting Mr. Deitch and who later this year will open a museum featuring his own vast contemporary collection across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s downtown site. Mr. Broad, the museum’s founding chairman, bailed it out in 2008 when it almost went under, but he has also been criticized as a kind of puppet master.

While Mr. Vergne said he met Mr. Broad as “part of one conversation” during his visits, search committee leaders said Mr. Broad was not involved in making the selection.

But Mr. Vergne emphasized that he was open to the idea, when appropriate, of sharing pieces from the museum’s collection with Mr. Broad’s museum. “What makes a collection alive is for a collection to be seen, so I think it would be great if there is a relationship between the two institutions,” he said. “For me it’s almost a no-brainer.”

“I like Modernism,” he added, “but more is more.”

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George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - George Lindemann

The (Auction) House Doesn’t Always Win - By GRAHAM BOWLEY

Christie’s and Sotheby’s Woo Big Sellers With a Cut

When Christie’s sold Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog (Orange)” for $58.4 million in November, it seemed as if the auction house had just earned a pretty penny.

After all, Christie’s, like other auction houses, typically charge commissions to buyers and sellers, which for high-priced works might be an eighth to a quarter of the gavel price.

But the owner of the work, the newsprint magnate Peter M. Brant, said Christie’s certainly made no money from him. To secure his business, the house waived the seller’s commission, he said, and then, as a sweetener, gave him a large share of the buyer’s fees.

“I was not required to give them anything from the buyer’s commission until it reached a certain price — which it did not make,” Mr. Brant said in an interview, rather wistfully, since he was hoping for a higher price.

Factor in Christie’s other costs — buying insurance and newspaper ads, publishing glossy catalogs, moving the towering Balloon Dog to its Rockefeller Center headquarters, where it was parked outside for gawking — and the possibility of making lots of money seems to be limited.

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“Balloon Dog (Orange)” at Christie’s last fall. Its seller says Christie’s made no money from him. Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Christie’s would not comment on this, or any individual, sale. But Mr. Brant is not alone in his bargaining, and far from alone in noting that even as bidding prices go ever higher, the auction houses’ cut is rapidly shrinking.

Caught in a scramble to outmaneuver their competitors for the top works and market share, the major auction houses have increasingly offered all kinds of financial incentives to lure the top consignments — essentially giving away a big share of their commissions for the privilege of selling someone’s art.

“The process of consigning artwork to the major auction houses today is like buying an airplane ticket, and just as opaque,” said Thomas C. Danziger, an art market lawyer. “You never really know how much the guy in the seat next to you at the auction — or on your flight — has paid for the same ride.”

In this game, the biggest collectors receive the best deals, which, several in the industry said, has led to an auction house paradox: The pricier the artwork, the lower the profit margin.

That has not stopped the main houses — including Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips — from doggedly pursuing a small clutch of millionaires and their art collections. The sales fuel splashy headlines and perhaps rope in other sellers. But these companies may also be repeating tactics that got them into trouble five years ago, when an art market bubble collapsed with the financial crisis, analysts and industry experts said.

The auction houses deny that they are trimming profits with givebacks or putting themselves at financial risk. Christie’s may have reaped little from the 10-foot-high “Balloon Dog,” but it made money on the whole night, in part because the sculpture’s presence helped attract other sellers.

“The evening sales are immensely profitable,” said Christie’s chief executive, Steven P. Murphy. “Yes, the margins on the top lots are much thinner than the middle market. But sometimes, volume makes up for that. A thin margin on a $50 million lot is still a profit.”

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Andy Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” at auction at Sotheby’s in November. It fetched $104.5 million. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

But the activist hedge-fund investor Daniel S. Loeb, who announced last year that he had bought a 9.2 percent stake in Sotheby’s, has called for the ouster of William F. Ruprecht, its longtime chief executive for, among other things, giving up profits.

In a public letter to Mr. Ruprecht, Mr. Loeb wrote, “It has been Sotheby’s who has most aggressively competed on margin, often by rebating all of the seller’s commission and, in certain instances, much of the buyer’s premium to consignors of contested works.”

In an interview, Mr. Ruprecht said it is impossible to compare Sotheby’s, a publicly traded company that releases audited results quarterly, with other houses, which are privately held. Christie’s is owned by François Pinault, the French luxury-goods magnate, while Phillips’s owner is the Russian company Mercury Group. And Mr. Ruprecht told analysts that an increase in the buyer’s fee last year had helped stabilize its business. Some analysts agree that conditions may get easier, if rising prices tempt reluctant sellers off the sidelines even without discounted fees.

The competition is fierce, in part because the number of elite collectors is small. According to Christie’s, about 150 collectors worldwide can buy a painting for more than $20 million.

“It is small but it is growing,” said Mr. Murphy, whose company has been seeking to expand the number of collectors in countries like China and India.

Typically, a seller might pay about 10 percent commission on a $100,000 artwork. A buyer would pay about 25 percent. But for some works of art — commonly those worth $1 million or above — sellers don’t usually pay anything.

And the buyer’s fee, which drops to about 12 percent for works worth more than $2 million, can be split among many parties. For the most expensive works, the sellers can receive 4 percent to 7 percent of that fee on top of the hammer price, a practice called “enhanced hammer,” auction experts said. Some of the buyer’s fee can also go to an outside guarantor, an investor who promises to buy the work for a minimum price. (That investor also typically receives a share of any amount above the minimum price.) What’s left of the fee goes to the house.

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Daniel S. Loeb. Jacob Kepler/Bloomberg News

Mr. Danziger, the art market lawyer, said that one of his clients, selling a postwar painting in November, received a part of the buyer’s fee, prominent placement on the auction website and in the catalog, and paid no commission. The work sold for seven figures.

Michael McGinnis, chief executive of the Phillips auction house, said marketing was a strategic way to promote sales and attract future business.

“You have to give some here to get some there,” he said.

In the case of the “Balloon Dog (Orange),” Christie’s arranged for an outside guarantor, identified several potential buyers, and structured the sale so it would get part of the buyer’s fee only if the price exceeded a certain target, which it failed to reach.

These arrangements cost a lot of money. Sotheby’s annual reports show that in 2011 and 2012, it gave up more than $40 million annually in sellers’ commissions, and analysts said this trend continued last year.

At Sotheby’s the total amount of buyers’ and sellers’ fees as a proportion of gavel prices has been falling steadily since 2009; in 2012, it was 16.3 percent, the lowest since 2008. Analysts expect a slightly lower number in 2013. In 2012, Sotheby’s profits were $108.3 million — up from 2008, but down from 2010 and 2011, when the market began to recover.

The figures for 2013 promise to be slightly better. But in November, the company acknowledged the economic pressures, including the negotiations over sellers’ commissions and buyers’ premiums. “Competition is still affecting our revenue margins,” Mr. Ruprecht said in a call with analysts at the time.

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Sotheby’s chief, William F. Ruprecht. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Whitney Museum of American Art

Analysts said similar pressures are playing out at Christie’s, though Christie’s may be better placed to weather the competition because it sells more lower-priced artwork, where profit margins are fatter.

Auction houses offer guarantees backed by outside investors, but can also guarantee works themselves. Now Sotheby’s is preparing to offer more such guarantees to the richest sellers. In June, it tripled its borrowing capacity to $300 million.

The level of Christie’s direct guarantees is unknown. But the total value of artwork carrying guarantees has been increasing for the past three years, accounting for 10 percent of Christie’s lots sold in 2012, the company said.

Both houses said their level of risk-taking is well below pre-2008 levels, and they are offloading liability by having outside investors take on some of the new guarantees.

In 2008, both auction houses ratcheted back guarantees after prices fell sharply, leaving them with millions of dollars in unsold works, as well as painful losses. Following that, Mr. Ruprecht said Sotheby’s was abandoning them almost entirely and returning to a simpler model as agents for buyers and sellers.

The auction houses have also expanded into private art sales, becoming dealers in their own right. The transformation can sometimes mean owning the art, with the risks this entails.

“The auction houses are not set up to calculate the financial risk,” said David Kusin, who runs Kusin & Company, a consulting firm in Dallas that specializes in the economics of the art market. “Getting into a business they are unsuited for and unprepared for puts all market participants at risk.”

To some in the industry, it sounds a bit like 2008. Howard Rachofsky, a Dallas collector and former hedge-fund manager, sold his own Koons sculpture, “Balloon Flower (Magenta)” back then for $25.7 million at Christie’s in London.

Christie’s offered him an outside guarantee, too, no seller’s commission and a share of the buyer’s fee.

“They didn’t make a lot, they made a little bit,” he said. “But in terms of visibility, it gives bragging rights.”

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