Olaf Breuning: Seriously Funny
February 6, 2010
The 91 stairs to Olaf Breuning's Tribeca studio via www.olafbreuning.com
The 91 stairs up to Olaf Breuning’s fifth–floor studio in Tribeca are not only formidable, they are ridiculous. Steep and slathered in gray paint, they look like something Breuning might have concocted himself if they hadn’t already been there when he moved in. Breuning has lived and worked here since 2008, when he left his previous studio, a former massage parlor below a seafood bar in SoHo.
“I think he saw that staircase and bought the apartment without seeing it,” says his longtime collaborator and best friend, Brian Kerstetter, who plays the main character—a bumbling, feckless drifter/hoodlum/tourist—in Breuning’s Home films. “He likes to make you jump through hoops and make you work a little bit.”
The stairs are featured in the series of photographs that welcome visitors to Breuning’s scavenger–hunt–like Web site (olafbreuning.com). “It used to be even worse,” says Kerstetter of Breuning’s “click here” online antics. “You used to have to type in long URLs. I told him, ‘I can’t sit here and do this all day.’”
The artist is known for his absurdist sense of humor (a scene in his 2004 film Home 1 follows a crowd of golf–club–wielding bungling mayhem–makers who tackle an “Amish” man, strip him naked, and force him to wear an E. T. mask). But Breuning, 40, who has dark, lush hair and brown eyes, is surprisingly tame in person. “He is very Swiss and very polite,” says Whitney Museum curator Shamim Momin. “But there is something not quite right. You get the sense that he might be messing with you. His bluntness makes you suspicious and unsure of what position to take.”
Artist Ruby Sky Stiler, Breuning’s studio assistant, attributes this in part to his “unusual sense of the English language, and the way he relates to words in a formal, instinctual way. Often he thinks things mean something entirely different than they do, and he has a few commonly used phrases. Like, when he means to ask how one is doing, he often says, ‘It comes good?’”
Continue reading my profile of Olaf Breuning for ARTnews here.
Olaf Breuning's Mammoth, 2008
Baroque Egg with Bow by Jeff Koons, a sculpture from the artist's Celebration series, fetched $5.4 million from Larry Gagosian at Sotheby's on Tuesday night. In November 2007, Gagosian paid the auction house a then-record $23.6 million for Koons's Hanging Heart from the the same series.
With the major New York auctions down about $1 billion this spring over a year ago, it seems like a good time to post my collection of Art Loves Money blogs, which happened to coincide with the peak of the art market, for the defunct Men’s Vogue. (Apologies for the imageless formatting, the posts are no longer available online). If you’re happy not to know another thing about the art market and the incredible boom that collapsed last fall, don’t read on.
Brad Pitt by Steven Klein
Blurring the lines between voyeurism, nostalgia and commodity, photographs of celebrities are easy on the eyes—and the brain. But their prices that rival midtier Old Master paintings demand consideration. Photography itself struggled for respect throughout the 20th century, and its various genres have hit museum walls at different paces. The latest to ascend has been fashion photography—and its shady roommate, the ubiquitous celeb shot, has been gaining ground.
Continue reading my market analysis of celebrity photos for WSJ Magazine here.
Larry Salander
Unregulated and secretive, the art trade occasionally spawns shady characters (like the recently indicted Larry Salander) whose clients lose their paintings, their millions––and their illusions. But after the headlines fade, it’s back to business as usual. Five reasons the industry won’t change its informal ways:
1. Bernie Maddoff makes Larry Salander look like a lightweight.
2. Art is not like real estate.
3. It’s got its own handshake.
4. It’s not about the money; it’s about the love (or so we are encouraged to believe).
5. The boom is over (at least for the moment).
Larry Salander: Masterpiece Theater
March 26, 2009
Amid rampant speculation and $100 million price tags, the dramatic fall of one of the art market’s highest fliers.
“It’s much better than I thought it would be, and it still stinks,” Lawrence Salander says. “I don’t understand where it’s art.” He’s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, scoffing at Damien Hirst’s tank-encased shark, on loan from hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen and estimated to be worth more than $50 million. The proprietor of the palatial Salander-O’Reilly Galleries on the Upper East Side of Manhattan has the careless look of an artist when I meet him at the Met’s information desk on a March afternoon. Big, bald, and unshaven, he’s wearing an untucked T-shirt, hoodie, and paint-splattered corduroys. Three hours earlier he had failed to show. “I am so sorry,” he says, claiming never to have stood up anyone before. His wife and lawyer tracked him down and now here we are, two strangers meeting as if set up on a date — only, one of us is in trouble with the law.
This meeting, the first interview Salander has given since his gallery was closed by court order last October, was arranged after a month of talks with his lawyer, John Moscow, a gruff former Manhattan assistant district attorney who is representing the gallerist in a bankruptcy case brought on by an avalanche of accusations. Among them: that he sold artworks he had no right to sell; that he sold the same works to multiple people; and that he never handed over the proceeds. Moscow was wary of Salander being interviewed — there have been many salacious accounts of his client’s fall from the pinnacle of the art world to a Poughkeepsie courtroom — but I finally got a phone call. “Hey Kelly, it’s Larry Salander, wanna meet at the Met and walk around the galleries and see some art? I’ll be the bald guy who looks like a killer,” he said, hanging up just as I tried to ask for his phone number. Read more of my Men’s Vogue article here.
De Kooning’s Hidden Legacy
January 16, 2009
Behind the curtain of secrecy that descended over Willem de Kooning’s tragic last years, his estate has been settled, his art holdings partially liquidated, and market demand created for his controversial late works.
Like many great artists of his generation, Willem de Kooning led an exalted life that ended in tragedy. An alcoholic who struggled with binges and blackouts, the Dutch-born de Kooning left Manhattan in 1963 for Long Island, where he lived in increasing isolation until his death in 1997, at age 92. He picked up a paintbrush for the last time in 1990. For the last seven years of his life, he was completely debilitated by symptoms attributed to Alzheimer’s disease.
In 1989 de Kooning’s sole heir and only child, Lisa de Kooning, and John Eastman, the son of the artist’s longtime lawyer, Lee V. Eastman, were appointed his conservators by a state supreme court judge who found de Kooning unfit to handle his affairs. They filed a petition to have him declared incompetent ten days after the death of his wife, Elaine, who had overseen his care since the late 1970s. As the court proceedings made public de Kooning’s failing mental health, critics, art historians, and dealers began to question whether the hundreds of artworks he had created during the 1980s could be attributed entirely to him, or whether his assistants had intervened in their creation.
De Kooning’s dealer, Xavier Fourcade, died of AIDS in 1987. Many of the late works were still in the artist’s possession when he was declared incompetent two years later. Lisa and Eastman were faced with the problem of how to handle both a controversial body of work and a legendary artist who was uncommunicative and required round-the-clock care.
So began an epic endeavor to partially liquidate a dying master’s art holdings, create market demand for his final works, and provide Lisa with financial security. Three years ago, de Kooning’s estate was successfully closed. The taxes on it were paid, and the artworks in de Kooning’s possession when he died were divided between Lisa and a foundation established in the artist’s name.
But while de Kooning’s affairs were being handled, the public was largely left in the dark. Over the years, a sense of secrecy–beginning when de Kooning first showed Alzheimer’s disease in the 1980s––has pervaded the handling of his estate, as well as the purpose and art holdings of his foundation. Continue reading . . .
Christenberry vs. Eggleston
December 10, 2008
If the much-hyped William Eggleston (bottom), with his current retrospective at the Whitney Museum, is color photography’s shining star, William Christenberry (top) is its somewhat overlooked founding father.
Consider this: Christenberry’s record at auction for a single photograph is $5,975. A sole print by Eggleston can set you back a quarter of a million dollars. A set of 16 Christenberry images fetched $26,400 at auction two years ago—tripling expectations—which looks like a bargain compared with the $1 million-plus paid for Eggleston’s “Los Alamos” portfolio at Christie’s in October. “Christenberry’s market is very much in the shadow of Eggleston’s,” says Joshua Holdeman, head of photography at Christie’s. That Christenberry’s prints still sell for four and five figures makes him a market rarity: a top-end artist with emerging prices. Read more of my WSJ. article here.
How Jeff Koons Became a Superstar
December 12, 2008
He made banality blue chip, pornography avant-garde, and tchotchkes into trophy art. How Jeff Koons, with the support of a small circle of dealers and collectors, masterminded his fame and fortune. Read an edited version of my ARTnews article here or download the full article as a PDF.
Named one of the top ten ARTnews stories (105th Anniversary Issue)
Sex Symbols
December 17, 2008
The interpretation of sexual symbols in art is everywhere. But what we view as erotic often tells us less about the artists than it does about our own sensibilities.
More than 30 years ago, critic Leo Steinberg wrote in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art about an unidentified major American art historian who had asserted: “Michelangelo’s sex life is, quite frankly, none of our business. We can’t treat him, try him or confess him. His physical pleasures, whatever they may have been, have no importance for his art.” What was astonishing about the historian’s words, observed Steinberg, was a “modern scholar’s assurance that a great artist’s sexual life could be so divorced from his personality as to remain irrelevant to his art and therefore to us.”
How things have changed. Today, says John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “one could argue the climate has moved way to the other side.” Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, agrees: “There has been a sea change in terms of there being a willingness to read iconography, which in the heyday of formalism you had to ignore.”
Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Robert Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat encircled by a tire. Jeff Koons’s appliances. In today’s hypersexual art world, one hardly needs graphic images to stimulate sexual interpretations.
With this critical shift has come the freedom—for both artist and viewer—to conflate the iconographical with the autobiographical. Sometimes artists add erotic elements, but just as often viewers do. As Richard Shiff, a professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin, notes: “Some artists play with sexuality. They can’t resist sticking something in. They know most people won’t recognize it. And they can laugh about it with their friends later.” But other times a viewer can perceive eroticism an artist never intended. “That which obsesses you, you will see everywhere,” says Michael Findlay, a director of Acquavella Galleries in New York. “If it’s there to take out, maybe you put it in.”
Read more of my ARTnews article here.
J. M. W. Turner: Original Art Star
December 17, 2008
“Not since V-J Day in Times Square has there been an equal tumult,” The New York Times crowed during the last major American retrospective of J. M. W. Turner. The 1966 exhibition drew record crowds to the Museum of Modern Art, which presented the 19th-century British master of landscape painting, dead for more than a century, as a hero of the avant-garde.
Last year, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., staged the largest and most comprehensive Turner retrospective ever presented in the U.S. (It traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art last fall.) The exhibition included 85 paintings on loan from Tate Britain and arrived in America after it was postponed for two years owing to indemnity issues that involved its $1 billion-plus value. Read my Men’s Vogue article about it here.
Tom Krens, Peter Lewis & the Guggenheim
December 20, 2008
Back in 2003 when Tom Krens and Peter Lewis were engaged in a titanic struggle over who was in charge of the Guggenheim, I profiled the state of the institution along with their very public spat. Now that both of them have more or less left the museum (one resigned; the other kinda-sorta got the boot or maybe both of them did), Whitney and Carnegie alum Richard Armstrong has stepped in as director.
Thomas Krens enters the large white room layered in grays and greens. His pants, the collar of his shirt, and his lightweight, midlength jacket are a monochromatic, earthy shade. A tall man with an oblong face, light beard, and glasses, Krens sits down at a glass conference table on the second floor of the former site of the Guggenheim Museum’s SoHo branch. The director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and its museums does not remove his outdoorsy-looking jacket, meant to protect against the elements.
It is the 12th day of December, and a brutal year for the Guggenheim Museum in New York is coming to a close. Its staff was slashed nearly in half, its hours were reduced, major exhibitions were postponed, and there was a last-minute rush to pay its bills. Earlier this month, Krens had handed over to the institution’s board of trustees his 80-page operating plan for turning the financially starved museum around. The week before, he had shown his first draft to Peter Lewis, chair of the Progressive Corporation, the nation’s fourth largest automobile-insurance company, and the chairman of the Guggenheim Foundation board since 1998. But it failed to placate Lewis, also the museum’s largest benefactor, who said he would not bail the museum out unless Krens came up with a detailed break-even plan for the upcoming year. And then Lewis followed up with a threat to fire Krens if he wasn’t up to the task.
Download the ARTnews article here.
The Surreal Legacy of Man Ray
December 23, 2008
Four brothers of Man Ray’s widow ended up running his estate out of a Long Island auto shop. Meanwhile, there is confusion bordering on chaos in the market over posthumous prints, misstamped works, and the question of who is doing what without permission. (ARTnews, June 2002)
In a low-rise auto shop and factor in a town on central Long Island, just past a showroom of floor mats and seat covers, there is a door with a sign that reads “Eric Browner Leave Me Alone I’m Retired.” Behind the door there is an office decorated with works by Man Ray, the celebrated Surrealist. A large poster of Glass Tears, an image of a woman weeping glass teardrops, hangs on one wall. An 8-by-10-inch reproduction of Violon d’Ingres, a famous photo of the model Kiki de Monparnasse, is propped on top of a filing cabinet. But the centerpiece of the room is a huge synthetic bloodshot eye with a cushiony top, a 1971 enlargement of Man Ray’s 1941 object The Witness, which used to serve as a seat for people visiting Man Ray’s widow, the late Juliet Man Ray, in her Paris apartment.
The owner of the auto shop, Eric Browner, 76, tall, tan, bearded, bald, and bespectacled, is frowning behind a desk. “I should be golfing,” he says, before asking his son Roger to get him some orange juice. He is in town for a few days from Florida, where he lives most of the year, for a board meeting of the Man Ray Trust, and the April chill in the Long Island air is bothering him . . .
Download the ARTnews article here.
Authenticating Andy Warhol
December 23, 2008
Seventeen years after Andy Warhol’s death, controversies surrounding the Warhol Art Authentication Board and the catalogue raisonne of his work reflect confusion about his intent, his working methods and his legacy. (ARTnews, September 2004)
Andy Warhol was the most successful and famous American artist of the 20th century. His signature images––the Jackies, Elvises, and Marilyns––are as familiar to us as the Mona Lisa. His pictures sell for millions, and he is represented in virtually every public and private collection of contemporary art in the world. Everyone knows what an “Andy Warhol” looks like.
Or do they? The coeditors of the second volume of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne, published by Phaidon, would dispute that statement. Warhol himself, write Neil Printz and Georg Frei, didn’t make it easy. Not only did he “deflect those who would attempt to know his work or to discern his hand in it, he disputed the role of the artist as the author of a work of art.” He made hundreds of virtually identical paintings. He overturned traditional notions of rarity and uniqueness. He even suggested that he didn’t care if people couldn’t see “whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s.”
“There are so many Andy Warhols,” says Printz. “Everyone has their own Andy. We wanted to look at the Warhol we can see.”
Louise Bourgeois at her Sunday Salon
December 23, 2008
A few minutes before 3:30, Jerry Gorovoy lets them in. Those who showed up early had been asked to wait outside. It is a mild, bright afternoon. Children are skateboarding on the sidewalk halfway down the block from the four-story brownstone in Chelsea where Louise Bourgeois lives, works, and has hosted a salon every Sunday for more than 30 years.
The artists file in, carrying notebooks, bags, and cardboard boxes, through the dark hallway and past a wooden staircase to a room at the back of the house where a blue couch, metal stools, and old wood school chairs are assembled in a circle. Pouran Esrafily, who attended her first salon in 1994 and is making a documentary film about the sessions, is busy depositing plastic cups and bottles of liquor and soft drinks on a small table in the center of the room.
The wooden floors creak. Stuff is everywhere. Crammed on a table in the corner are a large bottle of aspirin, a shiny red heart, a can of Lysol, two lamps, rubbing alcohol, paper towels, and a bulky calculator. Filing cabinets and bookshelves line the room. A bulletin board that runs the length of one wall is layered with old museum and gallery posters, articles, and a bumper sticker that reads “Honk If You Hate Fission.” Continue reading . . .
Damien Hirst’s Damien Hirst
December 23, 2008
My interview with Damien Hirst (ARTnews, May 2005) long before he covered a skull with diamonds and sold it for $100 million, becoming the most expensive living artist (we think):
On a morning prior to the opening of Damien Hirst’s first all-paintings exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York last March, one of his assistants, a young girl in a red apron, lay on her stomach finishing off a pink pill in a pharmaceutical painting. Another assistant painted a black asterisk on a canvas, reproducing the logo of the antianxiety drug Ativan. Open Heineken bottles––one sporting a white glove puppet––sat on a worktable next to an unopened carton of orange juice. Hirst, the most famous of the Young British Artists, who will turn 40 next month,was nowhere to be found. His publicist had lost track of him.
Download the article here.
The Most Wanted Works of Art
December 29, 2008
If a piece is “truly, truly to die for” and is still in private hands, it is no doubt on someone else’s wish list. Like that $100 million Cézanne.
The Museum of Modern Art has one. So does Los Angeles collector Eli Broad. They can be predictable or idiosyncratic, practical or fantastical. But most wish lists are very, very private. “That’s really personal stuff,” a top New York collector chuckled when asked to name his most wanted artworks still in private hands.
Yearning—the more discreet the better—makes the art world go ’round. Dealers and auction specialists at the top of their game know where the most wanted artworks are at any given moment and what price might wrest a coveted object from its owner. Museum curators keep track of the same information to court loans and gifts. Collectors, meanwhile, no matter how desired the works in their own collections, always have an eye on something else.
“We all have our wish lists but we don’t go around talking about them. It gets in the way of our getting the work,” says Miami art collector Donald Rubell. “We hope that when our friends die, their children won’t like their art. Those are our silent wishes.”
Continue reading my ARTnews article here or download the pdf.
Listen to me talk about the article on NPR.
Read about it in the New York Times’ Week in Review section.
Mary McFadden’s Odyssey
January 21, 2009
Mangolian mandalas, Tibetan tankas, Japanese sashes, and African sculptures coexist in harmony in the designer’s jewel-box apartment.
Entering fashion designer Mary McFadden’s Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River, I understand why McFadden has been referred to by fashion cognoscenti as the “archeologist of Seventh Avenue,” the main drag of New York’s fashion center. The one-bedroom space on the second floor of a modern black high-rise on the Upper East Side is a jewel box filled with religious iconography and decorative elements based on the remote civilizations that have inspired her couture designs for some 30 years.
“So-called ancient people may have been more evolved than us,” says McFadden. “Look at the pyramids. I’m not sure that we could have built the pyramids with such accuracy.”
Most of what she has collected for the past decade has been Buddhist art, although she says she is not Buddhist herself and declines to specify her religion. The striking brooch she is wearing, of hand-forged brass dipped in 22-karat gold, comes from a jewelry collection she designed and named after Saladin, the Muslim conqueror who unified the Arab world in the 12th century. It is pinned to a quilted black coat worn over a long, white, asymmetrically cut linen skirt that falls to the heels of her black strappy sandals. Continue reading . . .
What’s in a Name: The Meaning of Titles
January 8, 2009
Artists use titles to illuminate, explicate, confound, frustrate––or justify a tax deduction. Even Untitled suggests a meaning.
Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907: originally called The Philosophical Brothel
Frank Stella has named his works after Brooklyn apartment buildings, Polish villages, Nazi death-camp slogans, racetracks, exotic birds, and chapters in Moby-Dick. Janine Antoni has chosen titles like Gnaw and Lick & Lather in part because she likes the way they feel in her mouth when she says them.
Eric Fischl recently found inspiration in an unpublished poem he wrote in the 1970s, using lines from it––like “Surviving the fall meant using you for handholds”––to name a series of bedroom scenes. Helen Frankenthaler says she used to keep a long list of possible titles that she had thought up or come across. “It’s a poetic job,” says Frankenthaler, adding that her titles, like Jacob’s Ladder (1957) and Nature Abhors a Vacuum, are meant “to place a picture.” Continue reading. . .
Analyzing Prices: The Making of an Expensive Artwork
January 5, 2009
What makes one artwork more expensive than a comparable one by the same artist? Provenance, condition, and quality—along with nudity and even the kind of fruit depicted.
It doesn’t always take much insight to figure out why one artwork brings a higher price at auction than another. Everything else being equal, experts say, collectors will spend more for a portrait of an attractive young woman than a portrait of a man or a woman of a certain age. Horizontal canvases appeal to buyers more than vertical ones. Landscapes with water sell better than those without. Nudity beats modesty. And bright colors trump paler ones. New York dealer David Nash offers another observation: “Paintings with cows don’t sell.”
To understand why one artwork sells at auction for more than a similar one, ARTnews examined salesroom prices for artists ranging from Cezanne to Warhol. Experts were asked to explain the data, which revealed a somewhat surprising continuity. “The market has its own logic,” says New York dealer Franck Giraud, former director of 19th-and 20th-century art at Christie’s. “If you want logic, you will find logic.”
Works from the same period and of the same size and style do tend to fetch very similar prices. The most expensive works––the ones that make records and headlines––are those for which no, or few, comparable works have appeared on the market in recent years, or perhaps ever. When two works sell for divergent prices, the reason typically is rooted in quality, size, period, condition, provenance, or the timing of their appearance on the market. Continue reading my price analysis of works by Basquiat, Cezanne, Degas, de Kooning, Giacometti, and Picasso . . .
The Lauder Brothers
December 30, 2008
I profiled brothers Ronald and Leonard Lauder in 2002 as two of the world’s top collectors, patrons, philanthropists, and chairmen of major New York museums. They talk every day and buy art almost as often.
For the first five minutes or so, Ronald Lauder is able to sit still. But then he is a man in motion. He stretches, he squirms, he leans over and back in his chair. He reaches with a lackadaisical arm to roll a therapeutic exercise ball with his fingertips. Austere, gray, yet handsome, the ball fits precisely into the room. “It could be a Joseph Beuys,” says the chaiman of the Museum of Modern Art with a low, rolling chuckle.
Ronald Lauder’s office, 42 floors above New York City in the General Motors Building, near Central Park, is an idiosyncratic melange of art and architecture, both tactile and arresting. The sensibility bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the Neue Galerie New York, the museum of German and Austrian art that he founded. It opened last year in a 1914 brick-and-limestone mansion almost directly across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Not far below, on the G.M. building’s 40th floor, is the headquarters of the Estee Lauder Companies, the cosmetics company founded by his mother, Estee Lauder, and now run by his brother, Leonard. The waiting room for the executive offices is swathed in shades of blue, the company’s signature color, and is decorated with an Old World sense of feminine zeal––flowered porcelain bowls, crystal light fixtures, antique gilt furniture, and Oriental carpets laid over blue carpeting.
Leonard Lauder’s office on the 40th floor, by contrast, is a showcase of 20th-century American works by Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenneth Noland. In private, he is a leading collector of Cubist work; in public, he is the chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art who recently led a donation to the museum of some $200 million worth of postwar art.
Download the entire ARTnews article here.
