Artforum

Press Play

NEW YORK

05.16.11

Left: The scene outside Christie’s “Bear Party.” Right: Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale. (Photo: Erika Nusser)

THE SATURDAY BEFORE LAST, Christie’s hosted a tony “Bear Party” in a big plastic tent erected at the Seagram Plaza in Midtown. No bears attended. “A straight person must have thought of that name,” someone murmured outside, their face washed in the glow of Urs Fischer’s twenty-ton teddy bear/streetlight, which sat, slumped and lonely, looking out at Park Avenue. Flashbulbs bounced off the glittering girls vamping in front of a CHRISTIE’S photo-op backdrop and lining up for entrance bracelets. It was like a Millionaire Matchmaker mixer, except here the goal was to partner rich people with merch. Or maybe just media and merch. “There’s no one here who could afford this,” another guest speculated, waving toward Fischer’s sculpture. “These people are comfortable wearing wristbands.”

Inside, Alberto Mugrabi, the dealer whose family was putting the feted object up for auction, admired his bear. “It would look great anywhere. It would look great in Paris. In Dubai. It will go to either the Russians or the Arabs.” Mugrabi knows how to hit the selling points, also detailed in the work’s fifty-four-page advert/catalogue, which featured a multipage spread, “A Bear for All Cities,” with the sculpture Photoshopped, like a traveling gnome prank, into various world locales: Untitled (Lamp/Bear) in Abu Dhabi, Untitled (Lamp/Bear) in the Red Square, Untitled (Lamp/Bear) in Paris’s Place de la Concorde, etc.

The auctions may or may not be a place where the mysteries of art and money are resolved or even clarified. But the way we look at them you’d think that the esoteric happenings of the salesroom might reveal something concrete about the market, something besides the fact that some people in the world are richer than you or I. If the auctions are one thing, they are a cipher for privilege, a place where entitlement is made salient, where class is rigorously policed.

On Tuesday evening, those arriving at Sotheby’s for the biannual Contemporary Art Evening Sale were greeted by a massive inflatable rat and a line of picketers who passed out information sheets decrying the auction house’s hiring of presumably nonunion painters. Sotheby’s handed out their own information sheets—a new, passive-aggressive “Media Guide to Attendance at Sotheby’s Auctions”—to reporters checking in at the entrance, each of whom was then escorted by an official representative to the auction room on the seventh floor. “All journalists must remain in the designated press areas,” read item one (of eight)—a rule that doesn’t apply to the New York Times’ Carol Vogel, who always stands beyond the ropes.

Left: Collector Peter Brant and dealer Larry Gagosian outside Sotheby’s. (Photo: Erika Nusser) Right: Collector David Ganek and dealer Alberto Mugrabi.

Sotheby’s sale began convincingly enough in the scheme of these things but never fully picked up, with audible bids for the most hyped works (Lot 10: Koons’s porcelain Pink Panther, 1988, put up by Benedikt Taschen, and Lot 21: Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies, 1964) staying below the low estimates. “This is a tough night for Tobias,” someone in the press pack observed sympathetically, referring to chief auctioneerTobias Meyer. In the end, the sale brought $128.1 million with premiums, just over the house’s low estimate of $120 million. “We took slightly larger steps, anticipating a market that isn’t there quite yet,”Anthony Grant, one of the house’s senior contemporary art specialists, explained during the press conference.

“I’m asking please that you stand in the designated area.” The next night, just before Christie’s evening sale, Toby Usnik, the house’s head of communication, tried to corral press behind the crowd-control stanchions at the back of the room. “Do we really need to suffer the additional humiliation of standing behind the line?” one writer cried. “I’m asking nicely,” Usnik grimaced. “And I’m telling you nicely,” came the retort. The face-off fizzled when a bulky security guard picked up the velvet rope and placed it in front of dissident reporters.

The press pack is a kind of collective hermeneutics—a para-society forming around a common impossible task and a similarly restricted view of events. Members try to divine meaning from the smallest gestures: a glance at the phone banks, a stutter in the bids—any wrinkle in the proceedings is weighed and interpreted. Thus, seeing is everything: “Those ladies better get out of our way,” a writer said loudly before the proceedings. “Press don’t get many perks, but one is a fucking sight line.” Penned up like unruly sports fanatics, or unmanageable oracles, reporters are the Greek chorus of the auction drama.

Left: Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international co-head of post-war and contemporary art. Right: Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale. (Photo: Erika Nusser)

A good narrative is essential to the action. The plot of Christie’s sixty-five-lot sale that night was strategically calibrated, with the right mix of pathos, climax, denouement. The first “moment” was Lot 6,Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #96, 1981, one of the artist’s iconic centerfolds, first commissioned forArtforum. Consigned by Jane Kaplowitz, wife of the late Robert Rosenblum, the print went to adviserPhilippe Ségalot for $3.89 million (with premium): a world record not just for Sherman but for any photograph at auction. “It’s great to see an artist from our community, a real collector, reap some rewards,” an exuberant Amy Cappellazzo said later.

A pair of Warhol self-portraits—a red “fright wig” from 1986 (Lot 16) and a blue quartet from 1963–64 (Lot 22) constituted the pinnacle of the sale. The first went to Jose Mugrabi for $24.5 million hammer, under its low estimate of $30 million. My neighbor in the press pack was rooting for the second, which was “so covetable. I really want it to go for more than ‘Fright Wig.’ ” And it did. Auctioneer Christopher Burge kept the bidding war going for an unheard-of fifteen minutes, eventually landing it, to much applause, at $38.4 million (with premium). “That’s what you want—a little show, some drama!” a colleague yelled.

Fischer’s Untitled (Lamp/Bear) was at Lot 32. It quickly went for its high estimate—$6 million, an easy record for the thirty-seven-year-old artist, though considering the hype, it was a relatively small amount in the grand scheme of the evening. In the end, Christie’s raked in $301.7 million, selling 95 percent of its lots. “We broke the $300 million barrier. You have to go back to 2007 to see that,” a nearly giddy Brett Gorvy said during the press conference, as Cappellazzo teasingly shushed him.

During and after the show, in the foyer and in the plaza, many journalists, freshly free from the confines of the pen, stalked principals from whom they could pry a choice sound bite. Outside, Vogel caught up with Alberto Mugrabi, whose family had done quite a bit of business that night. He plucked Vogel’s cigarette from her mouth, used it to light his own, and then held hers as she took notes. “The two sales were day and night,” he told her: a nice, summative phrase that she used in her Times report. Another writer hovered, waiting for her quote, but was blocked (“Dammit!”) by the arrival of Greek tycoon Stavros Niarchos. “Why am I even bothering with this?”

Left: Simon de Pury at Phillips de Pury & Company’s Contemporary Art Part 1 sale. Right: Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s international co-head of post-war and contemporary art.

“What! Another auction? Don’t these people ever run out of money?” The next night, walking toward Phillips de Pury down Fifty-Seventh Street with a colleague from another magazine, I considered this weird masochistic voyeurism, how shopping becomes sport, how transaction becomes transubstantiation. How the stuff of money tangles with the stuff of history.

“I come to get a sense of the market,” said a dealer next to me at the back of the room. “It’s good so far, but still soft. And it’s hard to say what it all means. Three hundred million dollars is nothing in terms of a whole industry. It’s two planes. Or a development project in Miami during the boom.”

The cover lot and talk of the evening at Phillips de Pury was a turquoise Warhol Liz from 1963 (similar to the one Hugh Grant sold at Christie’s for $21 million hammer in 2007). Many considered it a coup for the auction house to land it in their sale. The work went in a flash, just shy of a minute, quickly achieving $24 million hammer.

Later on, an early-1980s Robert Morris wall piece came up on the block. “Oh, this isn’t going to do well,” reported the same dealer. “Too serious. Too gloomy.” And indeed, the droopy felt was passed over with nary a bid.

The sale was finished in just under an hour. Fifty-one lots brought in $94.8 million—less than one-third of Christie’s evening sale from the night prior, but just $33 million shy of Sotheby’s take-home on Tuesday. Other people will no doubt parse what, if anything, this means. It seemed like a lot of money.

Out on Park Avenue that night, after an exhausting week at the theater of privilege, members of the press pack bid their adieus in the gloaming:

“So, you fly out tomorrow?” he asked. “How about a drink next time? You never have time for a drink when you’re in town.”

“That’d be lovely,” she said, buttoning her coat. “Tea though. I don’t drink before the sales . . . I’ll see you in November?”

“Yeah, see you in November.”

— David Velasco

Recession! Pish Posh!

Wild Carte

NEW YORK

11.12.10

Left: Artist Abdi Farah with Simon de Pury. Right: Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s International co-Head of Postwar and Contemporary Art. (Photos: David Velasco)

“GOOD EVENING! And now let’s start with Carte Blanche—Philippe Ségalot!” Kicking off a dizzy week of contemporary art sales, Monday night’s auction at Phillips de Pury & Company’s freshly unwrapped Park Avenue HQ got off at 6:14 PM, a fashionably late start for the inaugural haul. Ségalot’s Carte Blanche program of works, “curated” according to mysterious but supposedly non-financial criteria by the private dealer (and former head of contemporary art for Christie’s), opened the two-part evening sale. It drew a real crowd: Larry Gagosian, the Mugrabi family, Aby Rosen, Peter Brant, Maria Baibakova, Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan, and, as it goes, all the rest. There were no hoi polloi in attendance.

The first Cindy Sherman, Lot 14, Untitled #153, 1985, secured a new record for the artist ($2.8 million, with buyer’s premium), but it was the second Sherman, Untitled #420 from the “Clown” series, that set my neighbors off. “$1.2 million… I never would have guessed. Champagne and caviar tonight!” Was it theirs? “Not even—we have a better one at home.” Everyone’s a winner.

Between Ségalot’s thirty-three-lot kitty and the regular twenty-six-lot Contemporary Art Part I sale that immediately followed, Phillips de Pury raked in $137 million, more than twice the amount made for any evening sale in the house’s history. Nearly half that number came from one big Warhol, Men in Her Life, 1962, a silkscreen of Liz and her exes, which sold for $63.3 million with premium, the second-highest amount ever paid for a Warhol at auction.

According to de Pury, who lingered in the auction room in the aftermath, the sale was “a self-portrait of Philippe” and had “the aura of a private collection.” (Earlier, someone had invoked Christie’s controversial 2007 sale of dealer Pierre Huber’s personal collection—a “Carte Blanche,” some argued, avant la lettre.) Ségalot himself continued in this vein in manifesto-like rhetoric: “The sale was very personal to me, telling the outside world that this is where we are, this is who I am, this is my taste, and these are the artists I believe in.” The next thing in conspicuous consumption: the statement auction.

Left: Dealers Dominique Lévy and Robert Mnuchin. (Photo: Erika Nusser) Right: Dealer and Carte Blanche curator Philippe Ségalot. (Photo: David Velasco)

A visibly excited de Pury contextualized his house as a sort of grand private academy. “Some of the artists from the Part II (morning) sale will someday become the artists of the Part I sale, and part of the great future blue-chip artists!” One of those Part II artists was in fact present that evening: Abdi Farah, the first winner of Bravo’s reality program Work of Art, an artist de Pury had “mentored” on that show. Part of his prize-package was to have a work sent to auction (remember when Rauschenberg punched Robert Scull for putting his work on the block?) and his large work-on-paper, Baptism, was kicking off the Part II sale the next day at 10 AM. (Estimated at $6,000–$8,000, it ended up fetching an eyebrow-raising $20,000.) Farah thought it was all “pretty darned exciting.”

For those dealers and collectors impatient with $5,000 bidding increments there were Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales on Tuesday and Wednesday evening, respectively. At Sotheby’s, Tobias Meyer hammered out four new artist records (Urs Fischer [$1.1 million], Jim Hodges [$2.1 million], Cady Noland [$1.8 million], and Larry Rivers [$1.1 million]) in the first eleven lots. They rang like the opening bars to a highly produced pop song. With Lot 12 came Warhol’s 1962 Coca Cola [4] [Large Coca-Cola] and the evening’s big money-maker: $35.4 million, with buyer’s premium. “What you saw tonight was a single global iconic market,” Meyer later explained to the press.

After the sale, Takashi Murakami, perhaps the only artist who is a habitué of the auction circuit, was enthusiastic, a stark contrast to his crew of soigné attendants. “I really learn from this environment,” he said. (In more ways then one, no doubt. His 1997 sculpture Miss ko² had sold for $6.8 million to Warhol wallah Jose Mugrabiduring Ségalot’s sale the night prior.) “Tobias is amazing—bam bam bam. Asia sales are much slower. Hong Kong Christie’s can go on for nine hours.”

The next night’s auction at Christie’s at Rockefeller Center wasn’t nearly that long, but with seventy-five lots on the docket, punters were grouching before it even began. “Well this’ll be a quick one…” Christie’s chief auctioneer Christopher Burgestarted shortly after 7 PM and ended a little over two hours later, after some fifteen Warhols, seven Lichtensteins, six Calders, five Twomblys, and four Richard Lindners(?), among others, had had their shot at art-market immortality.

Left: Dealer Tim Blum with artist Takashi Murakami. Right: Tobias Meyer at Sotheby’s. (Photos: Erika Nusser)

“Right here is the mirage of capitalism. It proves its power by accruing around arbitrary objects,” a colleague espoused. “We’re lucky that rich people like art. It’s trickle-down Reaganomics in action. They could just like yachts and cars. Then we’d all be doing something else. Making documentary movies, maybe.” Just philosophizing in the press pack.

The night’s star was also the catalogue’s cover, Lot 5, Lichtenstein’s 1964 paintingOhhh … Alright… Bidding began at 7:16 PM at $29 million and ended roughly a minute later at $38 million, or $42.6 million with buyer’s premium, a new world record for the artist. There was some scattered applause, and small bills changed hands as a guy who’d made the right bet on the price point took his pot. “Too easy,” he announced brusquely.

Thirty minutes later, with the sale not even half over, men in suits were sheepishly passing out a three-page, stapled, and color-illustrated “Media Alert” announcing that Christie’s had “made history” with the sale of this “striking and subtly and humorous” painting. [Sic].

In the end, Christie’s brought in $272.8 million after premiums, well within its estimate. On Tuesday, Sotheby’s reached $222.4 million with nearly a third fewer lots. Both results were well above last spring’s already dramatic rebounds, and at the nocturne sales records were set for more than twenty artists—Noland, Hodges, Fischer, Rivers, Sherman, and Lichtenstein, of course, but also Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lee Lozano, Thomas Schütte, Wade Guyton, and Julie Mehretu, among others: the entering class of 2010.

Leaving Rockefeller Center Wednesday evening, during a week in which more than three-quarters of a billion dollars was publicly spilled on contemporary art, a bemused Mera Rubell put it best: “It’s another reality in there.” Out here, it was simply cold.

— David Velasc
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Fashion night !

Nicky Epstein Photo Shoot!

Here are some photos I did for Nicky Epstein!

Travel 2010

Denver was amazing! From snowy mountains to desert in minutes!

Artforum!

“LADIES!—TEN TO FIFTEEN,” said a woman in gray sweatpants eyeing Lot 45, Warhol’s Silver Liz, 1963. She meant the estimate: ten to fifteen million.

http://artforum.com/diary/id=25606

“Not very well stretched,” sniffed another, wearing a quilted Burberry jacket. She meant the canvas.

“Trixie’s husband has a self-portrait Warhol did on a napkin in a restaurant,” boasted a third.

Christie’s last public “viewing,” as the house calls it, of works in Tuesday’s Post-War and Contemporary evening auction did have some of the character of a funeral visitation, with long-lost relatives gathering to size up the competition. Determined-looking women with bouffants and antique 35-mm cameras scanned the goods; men in bespoke suits juggled paper coffee cups. John McEnroe floated around the ground-floor galleries in a ball cap and white Converse, pausing to examine at length a blue Warhol “Electric Chair” from 1964–65. The art, of course, looked impeccable.

Louise Lawler was there too, hauling a medium-format Mamiya and a tripod. “I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here—I often plan not to come, but jump in at the last moment,” she said. “Many years ago I came to shoot the actual auction, having gotten permission, but when I arrived with my camera I was confronted by someone higher up who looked at me and said, ‘I thought we’d decided not to do that.’ It was like I wasn’t a person. Now, I feel totally welcomed. I’m certainly not the only camera around.”

Indeed she wasn’t—but her presence added a bit of aura to the proceedings: art transmuted to merchandise and turned, again, into art. (Then, probably—hopefully?—back to merchandise.) One thing was clear: Auction houses seem to lean more and more heavily in the direction of the contemporary, the enduring Warholian “moment” continuing to encourage the sublime marriages (and bitter divorces) of art and commerce.

Left: Salman Rushdie. Right: Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (Photos: Erika Nusser)

That night the regular crowds made their way to Rockefeller Center for Christie’s biannual contemporary evening sale. The usual, more genteel starting time of 7 PM had been pushed forward to 6:30 PM to accommodate works from author Michael Crichton’s estate, which constituted the first thirty-one lots of the immense seventy-nine-lot auction. It was going to be a long night. Salman Rushdie was there with his “good friend,” art advisor Kim Heirston. “I wish I could buy,” he said. “I did know Michael. It will be interesting to see his collection.”

People seemed in high—if slightly anxious—spirits. The fall 2009 Christie’s sale had been a nadir, with a mere thirty-nine lots selling for $74.1 million, and a solid run seemed necessary. Auctioneer Christopher Burge kicked it all off at 6:41 PM, hitting his stride early and handily steering bidders through the first six lots, all of which went for over their high estimates.

At Lot 7 there was a slight pause, murmurs. Jasper Johns’s Flag, from 1960–66, would be a bellwether for the week. Burge began the bidding at $7 million—$3 million below the low estimate—and it quickly began to rise. “I always wanted to sell a painting for a million dollars,” Crichton quotes Johns as saying, in his monograph on the artist. This one went for $28.6 million, with buyer’s premium, to New York dealer Michael Altman. A world auction record for the artist. A good way to kick off the night.

From there it was smooth sailing. The next “major” lot was the aforementioned Liz. The painting quickly hit its $15 million high estimate and soon after began to rise in $100,000 increments, a duel between Christie’s Jean-Paul Engelen on the phone and a mysterious bidder standing in the room. With no guess as to who he was, my neighbor began calling him “The Quarterback,” after his youthful, brawny appearance. At $15.9 million, dealer Dominique Lévy joined in the game, eventually picking it up for $18.3 million, with premium. “Well, you’ve had a time,” Burge said in consolation, as the mystery bidder briefly left the room.

Left: Collectors Don and Mera Rubell. (Photo: Erika Nusser) Right: Collector Jonathan Colby at Sotheby’s.

But in fact he’d just begun. The next Warhol, Lot 51, Holly Solomon, was his for $4.8 million hammer—a relative steal, being one of very few works in the sale to go under estimate (in this case, $7 million).

Outside, after the auction, Marc Jacobs stood smoking with diamond dealer (and “Rattle Ring” inventor) John Reinhold. “He really wanted that Liz,” the designer said. Jacobs himself had just picked up Ellsworth Kelly’s Yellow Curve, 1962, for a little under a million dollars. “Auctions are a lot of fun,” he remarked casually.

“Fun if you win—sad if you lose,” Reinhold clarified.

“Depressing,” Jacobs concurred.

At Sotheby’s the next night, the bidder, by now identified as Miami-based medical malpractice lawyer Jonathan Colby, could be seen in a busy skybox in the southwest corner of the room. Still, no one (not even the Rubells, who sat in an adjacent skybox) seemed to actually know him—an unusual situation in the cozy, predictable cadre of high-end collectors. Every so often, Colby would ceremoniously descend from the loge to the auction-house floor, where he would loom auspiciously. Several times he bid, crossing his arms and shaking his head when he reached his limit (as high as $27 million, when underbidding a Rothko), high-fiving his partner when he won (twice, on an early-’60s Joan Mitchell and a 2005 stainless steel Anish Kapoor). It was an inspired performance.

But the most compelling drama of the evening was the cover lot, Warhol’s 1986 “big fright wig,” being sold by Tom Ford. At Lot 9, the work would either be a kick-starter, like Johns at Christie’s, or a bump in the road. Auctioneer Tobias Meyer began bidding at $8 million but the next bid leapt to $15 million, then $18 million. It then climbed in million-dollar increments until going to an unknown buyer on the phone for a cool $32.6 million with premium, more than double the high estimate and an (unofficial) record for the artist’s late period. The only other work that night to elicit as many claps was the back-cover lot, Maurizio Cattelan’s sculptural portrait of himself peeking through a hole in the floor, which went for just under $8 million.

Left: Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer. Right: Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti. (Photos: Erika Nusser)

In the end, Christie’s pulled in an impressive $231.9 million and Sotheby’s $189.9 million, each house selling 94 percent of its lots—by all appearances two controlled, confident sales. Christie’s total was more than triple its fall auctions; Sotheby’s more than quadrupled its results from last May. Sales especially “paid off” for living artists, with Cattelan, Brice Marden, Richard Tuttle, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly achieving new records at Sotheby’s; Johns, Mark Tansey, Lee Bontecou, and Christopher Wool setting records at Christie’s. “While the euro may be falling, America is clearly in recovery,” Christie’s Amy Cappellazzo said after Tuesday’s sale.

At Sotheby’s, Meyer brought back the human angle: “May I add that Tom Ford is very happy, too.”

— David Velasco

Left: The salesroom at Sotheby’s. Right: Art advisor Thea Westreich. (Photos: Erika Nusser)

Left: Dealer Larry Gagosian. (Photo: Erika Nusser) Right: Brett Gorvy, Christie’s International Co-Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art. (Photo: David Velasco)

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