Even in this tough economic climate, it seems art fair organizers are forging ahead. The latest bold move on the art fair front happened this week, when David and LeeAnn Lester, who currently run the art fair on a boat, Seafair, reacquired the palmbeach3 contemporary fair, which they founded 12 years ago, from dmg world media, the company to whom the couple sold it in 2001. The Lesters take ownership of the fair immediately, and will take control of its management after the 2009 edition, which runs January 14-18. Read more...

Crisis, turmoil, correction, downturn. Recession. The recent events in the global markets have gone by many names. But what about what’s happening in the art market? In late November, Alexandra Peers authored an article in the Wall Street Journal that, well, called it: Read more...

My coverage of Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellites (and one noncommercial show and one Miami gallery show) for Artinfo.com is here, here, here, here, and here. Read more...

New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz’s talk for Art Basel Miami Beach’s Art Salon yesterday, entitled “This is the End: The Rising Tide of Money Goes Out of the Art World and All Boats are Sinking,” took a literal turn when he compared the present moment in the art world to the scene in the movie Titanic where the ship tips vertiginously, and Leonardo diCaprio’s character says, “This is it.” Read more...

This blog has languished a bit as I’ve been busy penning market reports from Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellites for Artinfo.com. Now, a brief word about parties. The art market may be cooling off a bit, but events in Miami have, with a few exceptions, been as packed as ever, and just as absurd. More to come on this, but for the moment, here is one snippet. Last night two parties — you could say they represented, respectively, Japan and Russia — were held simultaneously at two different locations within the Gansevoort Hotel. Downstairs, Rolling Stone magazine put on a soiree for Takashi Murakami and the artists in the Pulse and Geisai art fairs. The party’s gushing press release gushed in terms baroque but confusing: “Guests will take a romp with pomp at Louis Bar-Lounge, where new school elector-glam takes a crash collision course with the regal elegance of the belle epoque.” Um, ok? What was the second part? Anyhow, guests, who were greeted by a cluster of  women outfitted as glammed-out Kabuki strippers complete with sequined pasties – Read more...

[sigh] Bad timing for the art market. This can’t be good news on the eve of one of the world’s biggest art fairs. From the New York Times about two minutes ago: BREAKING NEWS 12:32 PM ET: It’s Official: U.S. Economy in Recession

The Independent ran an article yesterday bearing bad news for the Turner Prize, the winner of which is to be announced today. According to the paper’s report it might, well, just not matter very much anymore. Read more...

Warming up for Miami next week? Before you go, read Dave Hickey’s mindblowing article on art fairs in the December issue of Vanity Fair. Here’s a taste: Read more...

A show of new work by California conceptualist John Baldessari opened last night at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, and it’s curiously zeitgeisty. The show is called “Raised Eyebrows / Furrowed Foreheads,” and it consists of, well, precisely those. That is to say, Baldessari has created a series of three dimensional prints mounted on shaped foam — they look like paintings that have thickened into sculptures — that depict vignettes of faces frozen in expressions of concern, anxiety, befuddlement, bafflement, the sundry moods signaled by raised eyebrows and furrowed foreheads. In the gallery’s press release, Baldessari is quoted calling his pieces “timely, saying ‘Aren’t we all worried?’” And in fact they are perfect emblems for this troubled and uncertain moment. One can imagine any of them as a reaction to the roller-coaster ride that is each morning’s news. This may be a stretch, but the brows and creases, all stark directionals painted in primary colors, recall nothing so much as the Dow’s recent ups and (mostly) downs, as depicted in those alarming line graphs we’ve all become far too adept at parsing. It’s a brilliant if entirely unintentional touch.

Last night I had the great pleasure of attending a compelling and edifying lecture by the historian and writer Simon Schama in which, among other poignant comparisons, he displayed a slide of Damien Hirst’s famous sheep-floating-in-formaldehyde sculpture Away from the Flock, made in 1994, next to Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat of 1854; he juxtaposed these images in order to illustrate what he sees as a penchant among British artists for looking at history through a wistful lens. Hirst certainly wasn’t the focus of Schama’s lecture, which had mainly to do with how artists have depicted the city of London, and cities in general, over the years, but it has to be said that it was shockingly refreshing to hear Hirst’s work discussed outside the context of his recent market machinations. We need more of this. It seems every day there is new news to do with Hirst’s business plan; today brought an article about layoffs in his company, Science Ltd. Read more...

Remember when the internet bubble burst around eight years ago and there was this scurrilous and totally addictive Web site called Dot Com Graveyard that listed the names of sites alongside anonymous reports of their ailing states? (If not, you can find an old screen shot of the graveyard here; it is defunct as of, well, about eight years ago.) It appears that with the art market’s bubble leaking some air there’s a version of the graveyard for New York galleries, this one called “Death Watch,” over at the blog How’s My Dealing. There, anonymous commenters have been very busy over the past several weeks, churning out rumors about the imminent demise of various dealers’ shops. The existence of such a site raises a number of serous issues, all of which New York gallerist and blogger Ed Winkleman brings up in his comments on the site, pitting himself in a heated argument with the soi-disant Buck Naked, the anonymous blogger who runs the site. Here’s the climax of their altercation — and Winkleman’s got a very good point: Read more...

New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz will give a talk at Art Basel Miami Beach on Thursday, December 4, at 4:30pm. Its title: Read more...

The MOCA in Los Angeles is in some serious financial trouble according to a report in the LA Times. Read more...

Floyd Norris, the chief financial correspondent of The New York Times, does a blog for paper’s business section. Today he’s offering a minute by minute account of the turmoil on international markets, titled “United Panic.” Tellingly, he has just done a post about Sotheby’s SEC filing of yesterday, detailing that the house has “incurred a principal loss of approximately $15 million (pre-tax)” as a result of guarantees, after the lackluster sales in Hong Kong and London. “Guaranteeing prices will not fall appears to be a poor decision in almost every market these days,” was Norris’s comment. (scroll down for the post)

Shanghai-based artist Zhang Huan, one of the top Chinese artists working today, has changed his London gallery from Haunch of Venison to White Cube, The Appraisal understands. (In New York, the artist is represented by PaceWildenstein.) Asked about the new arrangement, Haunch of Venison’s Harry Blain confirmed it, but said Haunch of Venison, which is owned by Christie’s, would still do an exhibition with the artist in Zurich in January. When asked why the artist made the switch, Blain said “these situations can be very fluid.” Zhang Huan has shown with several galleries in the past, including New Yorkers Jeffrey Deitch and, before him, Max Protetch. Haunch of Venison will show Zhang’s work in Zurich and “see where it goes from there” says Blain. A reprentative of White Cube was not available when we called for comment.

In yesterday’s Observer, Laura Cumming tallied up all the folks who have recently crossed over from the museum world to the dark side the market. “The entire industry is forming and reforming by the day like some monstrously engorged digestive tract, in which public and commercial are mulched.” Check it out.

The annual Frieze Art Fair opens in London next week, and the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow reports today on some pre-fair jitters. I’ll be reporting daily on the fair, one of the first major gauges of what the contemporary art market’s reaction will be to the global financial crisis.

The marriage of art and luxury goods got quite a bit cozier yesterday, when auctioneer Phillips de Pury & Co. announced that it had been purchased by Mercury, Russia’s largest luxury fashion retailer. Read more...

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London Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak went to see the Tate’s show of late painter Mark Rothko’s late paintings. He wasn’t excited. “The late work is so notoriously sombre and depressing that a show consisting of nothing else would surely make a perfect venue for a suicide convention.” Read more...

From Colin Gleadell’s report on the Hirst sale in the Wall Street Journal – Read more...

An interesting tidbit was buried in Carol Vogel’s New York Times report on Sotheby’s Damien Hirst sale: Read more...

Lehman Brothers is filing for bankruptcy. A.I.G. needs $40 billion in federal aid. The Dow closed down more than 500 points. The first session of the Damien Hirst sale at Sotheby’s made $127 million, about $15 million more than expected. “I love art,” said the artist in response. My colleague Judd Tully has the full report. Wow.

This blog mourns the loss of the great fiction writer and essayist David Foster Wallace, and considers DFW’s long piece on filmmaker David Lynch to be one of the best portraits of an artist ever. Read more...

This space has been silent as the tomb for a bit…but not without good cause. I have been in Shanghai, and am preparing to file numerous reports. So check back! In the meantime, here are just a few of the bags I packed for the trip is a new artwork by Wang Qingsong called Luggage, on display at the Shanghai Biennale. These suitcases, which are made of painted copper, are, according to the wall label, “used to symbolize travelers” and to show the “history of translocalmotion,” translocalmotion being the kind of awkward, neologistic theme of the exhibition. But note that the artist has thrown in what must be a sort of art world in joke, this Takashi Murakami Louis Vuitton handbag. Or knockoff…

The Appraisal has reason to believe that Sylvia Karman Cubina, curator at the Moore Space, a contemporary art exhibition space in Miami, may have been chosen as director of Miami’s Bass Museum of Art. A brief press release issued yesterday indicated that the Moore Space, which was founded by collectors Rosa de la Cruz and Craig Robins in 2001, will shut its doors permanently this October. Interestingly, Cubina, who is well liked in Miami, and respected in the international contemporary art world, was part of the first group of curators to participate in the new Center for Curatorial Leadership program in New York last spring, which trains curators to become museum directors. The Bass has been without a director since its Executive Director Diane Camber resigned a little over a year ago, and a search committee was formed in April. Cubina had no comment.

Can a preview of Damien Hirst’s artworks up for sale at Sotheby’s London two weeks from now hold its own against the televised political spectacle in Denver? Yes, it can! Read more...

Damien Hirst is at it again. A second shop! This one to open next to his new BFF, Sotheby’s New Bond Street. The man has had a restaurant, a line of clothing with Levi’s, two boutiques. What could be next for this entrepreneur? A line of hotels isn’t a bad idea, really. Hirst’s. Old world charm, with a whiff of formaldehyde…

In Rome last December for the opening of Gagosian Gallery’s newest branch, I was hardly surprised to see the unmistakable, then blue haired fashion designer Marc Jacobs perched on a divan in the Palazzo Barberini, where the glitzy afterparty was held. After all, Jacobs’ links to Gogo’s world are many. He has partnered with Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince – both artists that Gagosian shows – on purses for Louis Vuitton. And of course there were those Jacobs’ ads shot by Juergen Teller and featuring artist Rachel Feinstein, wife of Gagosian-represented painter John Currin. Last year Jacobs was also spotted at the evening auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and this week a New Yorker magazine profile by Ariel Levy tells us a bit about his collecting habits: Read more...

On the occasion of the former New York Times art critic John Russell’s death, it’s worth recalling his championing of British artists. In his review of the first American retrospective of Lucian Freud — it appeared at a single venue, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in 1987 — Russell took issue with a passage in critic Robert Hughes’ catalogue essay for the show: Read more...

Melik Kaylan makes a number of excellent points in his Wall Street Journal article on Sotheby’s upcoming Damien Hirst sale, among them that the perceived transparency of the auction houses, and the public nature of the sales that take place there, may be more attractive to buyers from such developing art markets as Russia and China than the discretion offered by dealers. Read more...

As New York Times art critic Ben Genocchio pointed out to me the other day, the most interesting bit of news in this Bloomberg article on Sotheby’s moving its contemporary Asian art sales to Hong Kong is lurking in the very last graf: “Hong Kong is the third-biggest auction market after New York and London.” The revelation that China had soared past France into third place worldwide in terms of auction sales came earlier this year, after research by Artprice.com followed up on a study by economist Clare McAndrew. Clearly Sotheby’s has great faith in the Chinese market. In two weeks, The Appraisal will be heading to Shanghai for the second edition of the Shcontemporary art fair, which may prove to be one test of that market. Stay tuned…

The city of Milwaukee has some things to say to British artist duo Gilbert and George. I saw G&G’s stunning exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum over the weekend, and afterwards flipped through the book of visitor responses at the exit. Read more...

Conceptual artist Pablo Helguera’s clever and laugh out loud funny cartoon over at Art World Salon has sparked a long string of critical commentary and close reading. (Not counting my own comment, which now looks pretty banal.) Is Helguera’s depiction of a tank about to spar with Jeff Koons’ giant puppy sculpture a commentary on the Iraq war? An oblique reference to the Stay Puft marshmallow man in Ghostbusters? Two commenters are hashing it out with the avidity of philosophy undergrads arguing about a passage in Wittgenstein. And yet it is perhaps current events — of the when-giant-artworks-attack variety — that lend a new note of hilarity to Helguera’s efforts.

Yesterday the Toronto Star ran a story about the late William Kingsland, a shadowy figure who died in his New York apartment in spring 2006, leaving behind a cache of apparently stolen art. In December 2006, I wrote an article about Kingsland — aka Melvyn Kohn — for Art+Auction magazine. The story was eerily appropriate for the magazine, given that Kingsland had been a contributor to it in its early days, in the 1980s. When I wrote the article, it had just been discovered that several items in Kingsland’s collection had been stolen, including a Giacometti bust (which was consigned to Christie’s) and a painting by John Singleton Copley (auctioned at Stair Galleries). It appears from the Star’s story that the FBI has concluded its investigation, finding that in fact some 20 pieces in Kingsland’s collection had been stolen. The extent of his involvement in the thefts, however, has not been determined…

The Washington Post has a story today about young artist Julie Camarata, in whose current show, every material used is a petroleum product. There are images of oil refineries on vinyl, an “oil slick” made of poured silicone, and other pieces related to the oil refinery business. “I indict myself in the process — I’m partners in crime with the oil industry,” she quips to the Post. But Camarata isn’t the only artist working in oil, so to speak. Russian artist Andrei Molodkin made crude oil his primary medium several years ago. What’s made of oil in Molodkin’s work? Well, let’s start with George W. Bush, Tony Blair… Check out the piece of his shown a few months ago at Zurich gallery Kashya Hildebrand’s booth at the Art Cologne fair. And read more about his work here and here.

Is the age of “moneyism” drawing to a close? In his (just-shy-of-a-) rave review of the new Massimiliano Gioni-curated New Museum exhibition “After Nature,” New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl says that it is. He writes of “a fashion auditioning as a sea change.” Just what kind of change? A move away from art that caters to the market: Read more...

Not since the infamous “Sausagegate” in Milwaukee have mascots been such hot button issues. Now we have the “Curse of the Fuwa,” the Fuwa being China’s five Olympic mascots . The internet is aflutter with superstitious rants – blaming the five mascots for China’s bad luck (e.g. earthquakes, swamps, Olympic torch troubles). Even their creator, artist Han Meilin, has disowned them, especially incensed at having been forced to include a panda. Here’s a passage from Seth Stevenson’s recent defense of the mascots on Slate: Read more...

First Carol Vogel tells us in the New York Times that the weak dollar is making the London auctions a good place for Americans to sell, and now the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins weighs in that the Tate brand is fast gaining on that of MoMA. It’s no wonder that galleries like Paris and New York’s Yvon Lambert are soon to open London branches

The Ullens Center’s Guy Ullens opined that at the moment his favorite exhibition in Beijing’s ever-growing 798 Gallery district (where the Ullens Centre is located) is the group show “Unmoved” at Gallery Continua, specifically the pieces on the gallery’s ground floor by the duo of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. So I headed over for a gander. It’s no show for the faint-hearted, and indeed one wonders whether it would even be permitted in New York, as it involves moving objects with the potential to slam into visitors. Oh, there’s enter at your own risk signs and whatnot, but still. The artwork in the main space is a large — twice the height of a tall man — rubbish bin on wheels that rolls around seemingly at random, ramming into the gallery’s walls hard enough to wear away their white paint, and dig deep grooves into them. A smaller room at the back of the gallery, enterable — if you dare! — through a narrow opening, is occupied by the piece “Old Persons Home,” some twenty wheelchair-bound models of old men dressed up, it seems, as world leaders. They are creepily lifelike, with wizened skin and long beards, and they, like the rubbish bin, are wheeling around at random on their wheelchairs, such that any brave visitors who join them must stick Read more...

Two weeks ago I was in Beijing for the opening of the large group exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, “Our Future,” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), a private museum that opened last November. While there, I went to the panel discussion “Collecting Chinese Contemporary Art: The Future of Supporting Contemporary Culture.” Mainland Chinese collectors haven’t been known to be very forthcoming about their activities, and therefore the auditorium of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Bejing was packed with journalists, artists and others. Moderated by UCCA’s recently appointed director Jerome Sans, the panel included three Chinese collectors, all of whom are in their forties. There was automotive industry executive Yang Bin, who began his collection seven years ago, media group principal Wang Zhongjun who bought his first pieces in 1994, and telecom entrepreneur and restaurateur Zhang Rui, who started his collection six years ago. (Also joining the group was a French collector of contemporary Chinese art, Sylvain Levy.) Perhaps the most interesting of these, for reasons related to Sans and the UCCA itself, was Zhang Rui. Through his business partner — a rock music impressario — Zhang gained access to work by cutting edge Chinese artists like Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang in 2002, and bought pieces from them long before their work started bringing in mindblowing figures at auction. (In the panel discussion, he recalled visiting the artists’ studios, setting up an art gallery with his business partner in 2004, and acquiring paintings for “cheaper than $10,000.”) More interesting, though, are his current  plans to marry his collecting and his entrepreneurial activities by opening a private art museum in a new Beijing hotel called Le Quai, slated to open in the next few weeks, just in time for the Olympics. The UCCA’s Sans himself exemplifies this sort of spirit — the marriage of art, entertainment and fashion.In addition to running the UCCA, he is the “cultural curator” for Le Meridien hotels worldwide. (He was just on hand for the unveiling of a newly renovated Le Meridien in Barcelona where, being a member of the electro-pop band Liquid Architecture, he also dj’d the opening party.) And the UCCA itself is heading in this direction. Guy Ullens (the Belgian collector who started the UCCA with his wife, Myriam) are hoping its store and restaurant will bring in significant revenues towards running the museum – an unusual model. Word has it they are bringing in Michelin 2 star chef Yves Mattagne from Sea Grill in Brussels. It may just be this kind of think-outside-the-box, entrepreneurial ethos that will increasingly transform the Beijing art scene in years to come: Zhang himself is also planning what he calls an “art factory” for everything from events planning and catering to art acquisitions.

I just had the rather humbling experience of reading a brief article about art blogs that I wrote for the October 2005 issue of Art+Auction magazine. What then still seemed like news is, three years on, just the rules of the road, and far too obvious to any longer warrant remarking upon: “Like the legions of political bloggers who descended on last year’s presidential conventions to file minute-by-minute dispatches,” I wrote then, “art bloggers are gaining press access to museums and art fairs, weighing in on questions of ethics and doing their damnedest to break news ahead of the daily newspapers.” At long last, Art+Auction magazine is joining the fray by launching a blog of its own, with real time news and commentary on art, the art world, and the market. As the magazine’s staff writer of three years, I’ll be at the helm of this blog and, yes, I occasionally may even do my damnedest to break a story before the dailies. Welcome to The Appraisal.