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.