ArtTactic News

Two posts in as many days?! Inconceivable, right?  Well, I’ve started waking up at the crack of dawn again and I must say it does wonders for my daily productivity.

Anyway, finally getting some time to catch up on my ArtTactic emails from the past few weeks.  For those not in the know, ArtTactic publishes an Art Market Confidence Survey every six months.  Their confidence indicator fell 81% in December 2008, so it’s good to see that’s it’s on the rise and art market stakeholders seem to be “cautiously” optimistic about the market’s recovery.  Always good news.

Also, ArtTactic has recently been releasing Podcasts on the art market.  I haven’t had a chance to listen to them all, but the ones I have heard are pretty interesting.  I’m currently listening to the June 17th edition in which Adam Green interviews Randall Willette from Fine Art Wealth Management about the state of the art investment fund industry.  Very informative and interesting.  I really wish ArtTactic would put these up on iTunes so I could easily download them to my iTunes/iPod/iPhone without having to go around the long way.  I’m lazy, I know.  But it would be nice to be able to get these on the go with my iPhone than to have to download them to my computer before uploading them to iTunes. I just got an email from Anders informing me that there is, indeed a “Subscribe on iTunes” button on the podcast page.  I obviously need to put on my glasses sometimes seeing as I managed to subscribe to the RSS feed but totally missed that iTunes button.  Oops!

And, kudos on a really good interview, Adam.  You keep it flowing, have good questions, and keep it interesting.  Well done!

New York May Regulate Deaccessions and Met Museum Lays Off 14% of Staff

Two very interesting articles in yesterday’s NYTimes.  The first that caught my eye was about NY arts institutions trying to slow down a bill in the New York State Legislature that would regulate deaccessioning of pieces in collections.  Regulation of deaccessions is common in Europe, but virtually unheard of here in the States.  However, with the economic troubles that arts institutions are now experiencing, many are trying to deaccession pieces in order to pay the bills.  The State Legislature sees this trend as a problem and believes masterpieces shouldn’t be sold off to pay for bills.  I must say that I’m rather split on this issue.  On the one hand, I don’t think the New York Historical Society should be selling off works to pay its air conditioning bills.  On the other hand, endowments are down and I don’t see the State Legislature stepping in to help out.  The bills have to be paid somehow.

The other article is along the same vein: it talks about the recent layoffs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Ninety-five employees took retirement packages and another 74 were laid off.   The Met Museum also closed 15 satellite merchandise stores around the country, laying off 127 merchandising employees.  Earlier in the year, the Museum had said it needed to cut its staff numbers by 10% to make ends meet, but more employees chose to retire than were expected.  So the staff was actually cut by 14%.  That’s an incredibly large number for such a prominent institution.  It just goes to show how much this economic turmoil has really affected large institutions and their endowments.

Excuse me for a moment while I wax patriotically

It’s that time of every second year again: time to hop in a water taxi and check out the pavilions at the Venice Biennale.  The vernissage was held on the 6 June and it makes me very proud as an American to say that the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to the United States for Bruce Nauman’s Topological Gardens.  Nauman’s exhibition is broken into three differing but corresponding themes that are on show at three different sites in Venice.  For more information on Topological Gardens, visit the official website here.

For a complete list of winners of Lions for 2009, visit the official Biennale di Venezia site.

Robert Frank’s Take on the Art Market

In case you don’t scour the web and newspapers looking for news of the art market, I thought I’d point you in the direction of a post by Robert Frank in his The Wealth Report blog for the Wall Street Journal.  It’s from the beginning of this month, right after the Sotheby’s and Christie’s Spring Impressionist and Modern sales.  Frank does a great job of sifting through the flattering hype spewed by market insiders to say that the sales really weren’t all that great.  Masterpieces didn’t even reach their highest estimate.  The sales were a let down compared to those of the past few years.

However, I will take one issue with Frank’s post: the final sales figure for Christie’s, while much lower than the Spring sale last year and the Yves Saint Laurent sale in February, were still comfortably within the overall estimates for the auction.  While this isn’t the amazing, over-the-top figures we’ve seen the last few years in the art market, it does show that there are buyers out there who are steadily willing to pay good money for good works of art.  The art market seems to have nicely self-corrected from its excesses and is still in good form.  Market correction is needed for further growth, afterall.

I really need to get better at this updating thing…

Again, apologies to anyone who still reads this and has been waiting for updates.  These past months since moving back to the States have seen me heavily concentrated on my family, friends, and finding a job.  This means I’m not checking all the art blogs, papers, and websites as often as I used to.  It’s actually really hard to stay on top of the art world when you’re no longer in the center of it!  But, I’m going to start trying harder and devoting a bit of time each week to keeping up on all the news (and gossip, obviously!). 

A little bit of museum news for everyone: it should be no surprise that Japan once again drew the biggest crowds for exhibitons in 2008.  Though it’s interesting to note that some museums are having a hard time selling high-priced tickets to “must see” blockbusters because of the current economic situation.  Maybe this will cause museums to reconsider what types of shows they will hold in the future.

Kinetica Fair – Win tickets

There’s a new art fair in London this year called Kinetica.  It focuses (obviously) on Kinetic art.  If you’re in London and interested in seeing the fair, there is currently a competition hosted by Spoonfed to give away 5 tickets.  Head on over to their site to check it out.  They also have more information on the fair.

Sixth Moscow Fair Cancelled

It seems the economic downturn is really being felt everywhere these days.  Now The Art Newspaper is reporting that the sixth annual Moscow World Fine Art Fair that was to be held at the end of May has been cancelled.  The company in charge of the show, Art Culture Studio, has cited the economic downturn for the cancellation, saying that they failed to secure any sponsors and that they feel buyers may have cold feet by May.  A spokesperson for the company also said that they “believe it rather tactless to hold such a lavish event in times like these“.  True that.  However, the company is still planning to hold its Salzburg World Fine Art Fair in August.  Hmmmm…

I do agree that it is a bit tacky to hold lavish events in the middle of a depression.  However, it sounds to me more like the company just couldn’t secure sponsors and didn’t want to take the risk of losing the investment involved in holding the fair.  We shall just have to see if they manage to find sponsors for the Salzburg fair in August.

Back in Black

I know it has been far too long since I have updated this blog.  Many things have happened since the last update including my finishing my dissertation, my moving trans-atlantically, a new president being elected and sworn-in, and the economy tanking.  So there’s quite a lot to catch up on.  I’d like to get back to updating this blog weekly, but I don’t want to promise that just yet.  Hopefully I’ll be back more often than not to at least point you in the direction of interesting articles written by other art world insiders.

For example, here’s a great opinion piece by David A. Ross on what President Obama’s administration should do to help the arts in the United States.  I’m a big believer that there should be a Secretary of the Arts/Culture in the US, if only so we have someone to represent us when all the other Ministers/Secretaries of Art and Culture get together to play.  Also, I do think the NEA and NEH need to become less politicized, so that they can simply get the job done regardless of changes in the political sphere.  Sure, they need to report to the government, but they should be independent enough to do their job without worrying about political repercussions.  Art often criticizes politics and politicians, but I don’t believe it’s the place of politicians to criticize art.

New News

Exciting news from New York: The New Museum has bought an adjacent building on the Bowery.  I think this is a good investment for the neighborhood and will probably help the trend of galleries and restaurants moving into the area.

Posting and Running

I’m not back for long, but I thought I’d offer up one of my recent articles for your reading pleasure while I’m occupied with the dissertation and real life.  This was one of my favorite articles to write as it deals with censorship and police, etc.  It was also fun to get in contact with art market players in Australia and see how they reacted to the situation.