NEWS
The Art Market Is Tanking. Sotheby’s Has Even Bigger Problems.
The auction house, owned by highly leveraged billionaire Patrick Drahi, is pushing off payments, awaiting a financial lifeline from an Abu Dhabi fund
The art market is grinding through a rough patch, and no one is feeling the pain more than Sotheby’s.
The sales downturn, driven in part by China’s economic slowdown, wars and volatile U.S. elections, has hit at a crunchtime for the auction house’s highly leveraged billionaire owner, Patrick Drahi, who is fighting fires amid restructuring in his broader telecom empire, Altice.
Sotheby’s had been riding a rollicking art market wave in recent years, bringing in at least $7 billion in sales annually and setting record-level prices for trophies by Gustav Klimt and René Magritte.
Now, amid signs cash is running low, it is pushing off payments to its art shippers and conservators by as much as six months. Several former and current employees said Sotheby’s this spring gave senior staffers IOUs instead of their incentive pay. And at a meeting this month of higher-ranking executives, some executives expressed worries about whether the company would be able to keep paying its employees on time, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Italy’s Princess Camilla Speaks on Van Gogh Set to Smash Auction Records: ‘A Painting of Incredible History’
From ARTnews
A Vincent van Gogh painting is expected to hammer for its $50 million high estimate at Christie’s Hong Kong on Thursday. It is being offered in the 20th/21st Century evening art sale that will inaugurate the house’s new Asia Pacific HQ, The Henderson.
Les canots amarrés (1887) – translated as The moored boats – is owned by Princess Camilla of Bourbon Two Sicilies. Christie’s hopes it will set the record for the most expensive painting sold in Asia.
To date, the most expensive Western painting sold in the region is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Warrior (1982), sold in 2021 for $42 million by Christie’s.
Artists, art workers and historians’ open letter to Judge Hehir
From Greenpeace
Liberate Tate and Greenpeace are currently collaborating to try and make an intervention in the sentencing of the Just Stop Oil activists who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The judge sentencing them on the 27th of September has threatened custodial sentences and recently sent other JSO activists to jail. Phoebe and Anna, the two activists, are both 22 years old.
Later this month, a judge will sentence Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland for criminal damage for throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Judge Christopher Hehir of Southwark Crown Court told them to be “prepared in practical and emotional terms to go to prison”.
As artists, art workers and art historians, we are concerned by the courts’ defence of a false notion of artistic purity in their judgement and sentencing. Art can be and frequently is, iconoclasm. These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon.
Since at least 1900, avant-garde artists have called for or delivered iconoclasm as part of their artistic practice, from the Futurists and Dadaists in the early twentieth century; to Asger Jorn’s ‘modifications’ or Robert Rauschenberg erasing a drawing by De Kooning in the 1950s; to Gustav Metzger, the Gutai Group, Jim Dine, Marta Minujín and many other performance artists in the 1960s; to the rise of 1990s iconoclasts like Alexander Brenner spray-painting a Malevich painting; Jake and Dinos Chapman ‘rectifying’ rare Goya etchings; or the graffiti of Banksy and other street artists of today. The work of all these iconoclasts, often far more physically destructive than the work of JSO, is now venerated in museums around the world.
Wayne Thiebaud Made an Art Out of Appropriation. A New Show Will Unpack Just How
From Artnet
The artist was known to call himself a "thief." Now, the Legion of Honor has identified everything he stole.
Wayne Thiebaud, appropriation artist? That’s the thesis of a forthcoming exhibition at the Legion of Honor, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
“It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such an obsessive thief,” Thiebaud told the New York Times back in 1996.
The California artist, who died at 101 in 2021, is of course best known for his still life paintings of cakes and other sugary confections. But he was also a dedicated student of art history, infusing his works with references to masterpieces of the past—both subtle and overt.
Louvre to Open Byzantine and Greek Orthodox Art Department
From ARTnews
A new department dedicated to Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox Christian art is expected to open at the Musée du Louvre in 2027. A delegation, led by Louvre director Laurence des Cars, presented plans for the new department in Athens on Thursday.
On display in the new department will be nearly 20,000 objects of Byzantine art depicting religious and social themes. Greece will play a central role in the development of the department, des Cars announced at an informal meeting at the French ambassador’s house, according to the Greek Reporter.
ART MATERIAL
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