November 2007 Archives

Arquitectonica's Recent Wing for the Bronx Museum of the Arts

Architectural criticism's big guns---Paul Goldberger (the New Yorker), Nicolai Ouroussoff (the NY Times) and James Russell (Bloomberg)---have already weighed in on the architectural strengths (the first two writers) and weaknesses (the last) of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANNA's design for the new New Museum.

I think I can bring a slightly different perspective: I believe it's relevant to compare the effect of the SANAA building's exterior with that of another recent addition to New York museumdom that performs similar functions, in another gritty neighborhood, in a different borough---the Bronx Museum of the Arts (above).

As a born-and-bred Bronx-ite, I think I have a gut sense about apt interventions in modest neighborhoods (as opposed to the showy corporate and cultural centers of the city). And I think the two museum buildings by different architectural firms (Arquitectonica in the Bronx) both admirably understood the notion of elevating the surroundings while seeming to fit in (and doing so on a relatively modest budget). The architecture appears to respect and key off of the built environment of the neighborhood, rather than taking a posture that is condescendingly and discordantly aloof. And in both cases, I experienced this as a pleasant surprise.

On the Grand Concourse, where I grew up, that meant relating to a line-up of modestly vertical apartment buildings. On the Bowery, the context consists of squat, boxy structures. Arquitectonica took the verticality and sliced and streamlined it. SANAA took the boxes and sliced and scrambled them. Both firms decided to clad their interventions in shiny silver, to set them apart as enticingly distinctive.

It's too bad that this current exhibition devoted to New Museum's architects, now at Seattle's Henry Art Gallery, could not be seen in New York...or maybe it still can.

UPDATE---Gentrification Alert: On WNYC's "Morning Edition" today, host Soterios Johnson interviewed New Museum director Lisa Phillips and director of special exhibitions Massimiliano Gioni, and got a prediction from Phillips that her institution's new neighborhood may soon become "another alternative arts district."

STILL TO COME: My photo essay on the New Museum's new building.

You thought maybe now that Andrew Lloyd Webber got a favorable court ruling against a Nazi-loot claim for his Picasso, he might put it up for auction, to provide funds for his foundation, as had been originally planned?

Think again.

According to the London Independent, Lloyd Webber will now ask the British High Court to rule on whether he has clear title to "Angel Fernández de Soto."

Ciar Byrne reports:

The charity [Lloyd Webber's art foundation] is seeking a "negative declaration" to prove its ownership. It is estimated the High Court case could take two years to reach a conclusion.

Two years? Who knows where the art market will be by then?

No word from Christie's (I've asked) on whether it intends to seek damages from the unsuccessful claimant in the NY Supreme Court case, Julius Schoeps, for the last-minute withdrawal of the painting (which had been estimated to bring $40-60 million) from the auction house's landmark record-shattering Impressionist/modern sale a year ago. Marc Porter, the auction house's president, had warned at that time: "We reserve the right" to do so.

(Note: My first post on the new New Museum is here.)

The first show in the new New Museum's three floors of gallery space, "Unmonumental," is only one-third installed. A motley assortment of three-dimensional objects now occupies the floors and ceilings, but on Jan. 16 the pictures go on the walls and on Feb. 13 sound art will resonate. I'm not sure I'm looking forward to this sensory overload; the galleries seem quite intensely installed already.

As for the nature of the current show, "Unmonumental" translates for me as "unpretentious." I like how Time magazine critic Richard Lacayo described the show's focus yesterday in his Looking Around blog post---"flotsam assemblage." One of the primary forebears for the artists in this show, senior curator Laura Hoptman told me, is Robert Rauschenberg.

Some of these objects have a strange, mutant beauty...

Isa Genken, "Elefant," 2006, Collection of Mari and Peter Shaw

...but many are more than a little rough around the edges:

Gedi Sibony, "The Circumstance, The Illusion, and Light Absorbed as Light," 2007, Courtesy the Artist

I indicated in my previous post that the New Museum's scrappy display is a welcome corrective to the "market-obsessed, reputation-fixated artworld." I didn't mean to suggest, though, that these artists are artworld or art-market outsiders. Urs Fischer has been much in the public eye of late. And one of his works now at the New Museum has given Steve Cohen his New York museum quadrifecta. (Is that the next increment after "trifecta"?):

Urs Fischer, "Untitled," 2003, Steven A. Cohen Collection

It might be worth asking: Is there any New York art museum NOT currently showing a work owned by this voracious collector?

And this work, owned by Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer, can hardly be said to be operating under the market radar:

Matthew Monahan, "Fundamental Shadow," 2006, Collection of Mark Fletcher and Tobias Meyer

What's more, at least one artist is already trying to reap commercial advantage from the New Museum's exposure. I just received a press release, pegged to "Unmonumental," about Shinique Smith's upcoming show at Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, as well as her inclusion in various art fairs and museums. Here's an installation shot of her three "Unmonumental" clothing bundles:

Shinique Smith's Clothing Bundles

Still, most of the Unmonumentalists are uncatalogued by Sotheby's or Christie's. And the experimental nature of the show is further evidenced by the fact that only two works were borrowed from institutions (instead of artists, galleries or collectors). One of those is by Sam Durant, the oldest American in the show (born 1961):

Sam Durant, "...For People Who Refuse to Knuckle Down," 2004, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, gift of Blake Byrne

As the Durant piece suggests, "Unmonumental" is unafraid of political provocation. Another case in point---Lara Schnitger's ramshackle construction composed of polemical T-shirts:

Lara Schnitger, "Rabble Rouser," 2005, Courtesy the Artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Here's a detail from the same piece:

Perhaps because I've been writing so much about antiquities lately, some of my favorite pieces were the evocative, skeletal vessels containing old photos, by Kristen Morgin:

Kristen Morgin, "Untitled Urn," 2001, Courtesy the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles

But the piece that made me laugh was this one by Rachel Harrison, not because of the photo of a hirsute Mel Gibson on the right...

Rachel Harrison, "Huffy Howler," 2004, Courtesy the Artist and Green Naftali, New York

...but because of the handbags filled with rocks and bricks, hanging off the back end of the bike:

For the complete list of artists in all three parts of "Unmonumental," including those not yet on display, go here.

COMING SOON: The New Museum's new building.

Mary Cassatt, "Françoise in Green, Sewing"

The ghost of Adelyn Breeskin intervened in the St. Louis Art Museum's attempt to sell its only Cassatt, "Françoise in Green, Sewing." The painting, which Cassatt expert Breeskin had exhibited at the Baltimore Museum, failed to find a buyer today at the same Christie's auction where the Bellows' "Men of the Docks" and two other works from the Maier Museum of Randolph College would also have been put on the block, had opponents to those sales not gotten a court-ordered reprieve.

Even so, the auction house came away with its biggest total ever for a sale of American paintings, drawings and sculpture---$71.3 million. And the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University succeeded in jettisoning its Childe Hassam for $3.74 million, including buyer's premium.

Sotheby's American art sale the day before totaled $65.2 million. At both houses, about a quarter of the lots failed to sell.

Rendering (not actual photo) of the new New Museum

Before I get to yet another mischievous photo essay, let's cut to the chase: New York's new New Museum, despite its larger and more elegant Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANNA-designed digs (above), is still an uninstitutional institution, as envisioned by its late founder, Marcia Tucker. And that's all to the good: New York's market-obsessed, reputation-fixated artworld sorely needs a scrappy, edgy, bobbing-and-weaving outpost of the untidy cutting edge.

With this Bowery powerhouse's 30-hour free public opening on Saturday (no more timed tickets available, alas), we've now got what we need, along with a group of curator/scouts who know their way around this dangerous territory and aren't afraid to be REALLY provocative.

This true subversiveness contrasts with the so-called "Provocation" section in yet another lifeless installation of the Museum of Modern Art's contemporary collection, recently opened. MoMA's idea of provocation is "overturning standards of good taste and decorum," which seems somehow decorous, compared to what goes down at the Bowery. We can only hope that MoMA takes some notes on how to unleash contemporary energy. Its incoming associate director, Kathy Halbreich, must Walker-ize the place, immediately.

The New Museum's chief curator, Richard Flood, told me at the press preview today that part of his place's "new art, new ideas" credo involves being poised to "turn on a dime....We will move shows very quickly. Our pace is faster than our colleagues'."

Not quite fast enough, however, to get those labels up in time for the press preview:

Senior Curator Laura Hoptman, left, and Director of Special Exhibitions Massimiliano Gioni, right, work so fast to sort the object labels on the floor that they blur my photograph.

COMING SOON: More Images and Irreverence.

Michael Conforti, director of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, and president-elect of the Association of Art Museum Directors, must have too much time on his hands working on only three books during his current stint as scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome.

Along with Gianfranco Varvesi of the Italian Ministry of National Heritage and Cultural Activities, Conforti organized a high-level conference, held yesterday at the Rome academy, on "ways to foster improved cooperation between the two countries that would lead to enhanced intellectual and cultural exchange."

According to the post-conference press release:

Italian Cultural Minister Francesco Rutelli spoke of the establishment of an office in the Cultural Ministry to coordinate loans of works of art and facilitate cooperation. The American Association of Art Museum Directors could play a similar role in the U.S.

Other initiatives discussed included online educational projects and web-based information sharing as well as convening professionals in the two countries to examine issues of restoration and conservation. Future archaeological excavations were touched on, with a desire for ongoing cooperation and emphasis on context and historical understanding.

The press release is silent, though, on whether the give-and-take about "reaching a higher level of cooperation on several issues" dealt with constructive approaches to deescalating the cultural property wars (which I have recently discussed here and here and will address in further detail---with a view to what source countries ought to do---in an upcoming post).

The 28 American and Italian museum and cultural officials at the conference (closed to the public) included: Anne-Imelda Radice, director of the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services; James Wood, president of the Getty Trust; James Ballinger, director of the Phoenix Art Museum and immediate past president of AAMD; Cristina Acidini, special superintendent of Polo Museale Florence; Maria Vittoria Clarelli, superintendent of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; Stefano De Caro, director general of Beni Archeologici; Claudio Strinati, special superintendent of Polo Museale Rome; and Salvatore Settis, director of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa.

Geoff Edgers of the Exhibitionist blog dug up a few more American attendees, including Max Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Michael Brand, director of the Getty Museum; and Don Bacigalupi, director of the Toledo Museum of Art.

What, they didn't invite CultureGrrl?

A museum curator, who unfortunately would not allow me to quote his comments, sent me a well argued e-mail suggesting that my objections to museums' mounting single-collector exhibitions may make sense for large, prestigious museums, but are less persuasive for smaller museums that have a greater need for these shows and the possible art donations that can ensue.

Similarly, the Modern Kicks blog said this in a thoughtful post about the controversy over the sales at Christie's of the Hartman jades that had been exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts:

I still think there's value in displaying privately owned work, but it's good to remember these cautionary tales: You hold your exhibition and you takes your chances.

A young docent at the Honolulu Academy of Arts responds here to my recent post about the $41-million Hartman sales, in which I asserted that "a museum should not mount a show devoted to a single-owner collection unless that collection is pledged to the museum."

Phyllis Nakasone writes:

How can museums avoid being used as prestigious showcases by profit-minded private collectors?

If the stuff is junk, the public isn't stupid. Let the museum take the punches. They'll learn. Besides, museums aren't all sacred places.

The Broadway strike is over! The NY Times has the story here.

Reading Richard Lacayo's Q & A in his Looking Around blog with Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello gave me a traumatic flashback to the unexpected curve I was thrown at the very beginning of my talk two weeks ago to Richard Leventhal's class at the University of Pennsylvania.

In answering Lacayo's question about whether the Met should "have gone about things differently when it made acquisitions in the past," de Montebello declared:

Everybody lives according to the norms, the ethics and the behavioral patterns of their own day. Retrospective judgments aren't very useful. There was a laissez-faire attitude then that there isn't today. Times change.

I had decided to make a similar point at the beginning of my talk, by holding up a copy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin from Spring 1992, which catalogued the works of ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Greek and Roman art given to the museum by Norbert Schimmel, a collector who was then widely respected for his connoisseurship and public spiritedness, despite the fact that his collecting philosophy (as described by me here) was not all that different from that of the controversial Shelby White, who knew Schimmel and regarded him as her role model.

I noted that many of the entries for objects in the Met's bulletin were written by Oscar White Muscarella, the museum's senior research fellow, who was close to Schimmel and went on to become a thorn in the side of the museum by unrelentingly criticizing its antiquities policies and practices.

At that point, Leventhal interrupted my introduction to inform me of the identity of one of the students (below), who was gazing at me from the back of the room:

Grace Freed Muscarella

I gulped twice, exchanged pleasantries and moved on to discussing today's burning cultural-property conflicts and possible resolutions. Grace later informed me that her husband had, in fact, implored Schimmel to stop collecting, and that he had complied for a time but ultimately couldn't kick the habit.

The problem with justifying past collecting on the grounds that "the ethics and the behavioral patterns" were previously different is that many old-time collectors, like Schimmel, knew full well that their activities were ethically dicey.

It's just that, in the bad old days, they could mostly get away with it.

Although we've yet to learn what position Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper Jr. will take when the deal between Fisk University and Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum comes up for court approval (or disapproval) on Feb. 19, the Governor himself, Phil Bredesen, has now weighed in.

Erik Schelzig of the Associated Press reports [via]:

Bredesen...said estimates from art experts and insurers indicate the collection "could easily be worth $150 million. And $30 million for half of it [the agreement signed by Fisk and Crystal Bridges] is not a very good deal."...As a former Nashville mayor, Bredesen said he also would like to see the collection stay in the city....

"If you're going to sell it, I'd rather they go out and sell it properly and take the money and put it in the bank and secure Fisk's long-term future," he said.

Now that's a REALLY dicey idea. The works should remain in the public domain, preferably at or near the institution where donor Georgia O'Keeffe deposited them. Can the trustees and administration think of no other fiscal solution than selling off the university's educational and cultural assets?

More from the Tennessean on the university's dire financial situation, which is behind all this controversy, here and here. NPR weighs in here.

Coinciding with the Getty Museum's publication of the above book comes another "Great Moment in Greek Archaeology"---the dismissal in Greek court of the Getty-related charges against the museum's former antiquities curator, Marion True. Now that the Getty has returned the objects that Greece has sought, the judges have discovered that the statute of limitations has run. Did this expiration just happen?

There are still non-Getty related Greek charges outstanding against True. The Associated Press reports:

True still faces charges of illegally possessing at least a dozen antiquities found during a police raid on her holiday home on the Aegean island of Paros in April last year. No trial date has been set in that case.

It remains to be seen whether Italian prosecutors will now also lay off of True, as they indicated they would, two months ago, after the signing of an antiquities agreement between Italy and the Getty.

Perhaps they're still waiting for resolution of that little dispute over the Getty Bronze.

Cylindrical Brushpot, Qianlong period (1736-1795)
$7 million at Christie's (presale estimate: $1.3-1.9 million)

Notwithstanding Malcolm Rogers' comments to the Boston Globe, it should be no great surprise that Alan and Simone Hartman turned around and put on the market the Chinese jades (top lot, above) that they displayed three years ago at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where Rogers is director. Christie's second auction of Hartman jades today in Hong Kong brought $25.7 million (presale estimate: over $10 million). The auction house sold the first group from the collection a year ago for $15 million.

In his article Saturday about today's Hartman sale, the Globe's Geoff Edgers quoted Rogers expressing disappointment that works from the collection had not been donated to the museum, as had been hoped. Edgers also quoted various commentators on the dicey aspects of granting private owners a prestigious showcase for entire collections that they may turn around and sell.

But the Hartmans' commercial proclivities were no secret. Unmentioned in the museum's description of the exhibition on its website is the fact that the Hartmans aren't just collectors. As Christie's notes in its press release, Alan has long been "an influential and respected dealer...His father opened his first gallery in 1927 specializing in Oriental Art in New York and it was only natural for Alan Hartman to follow in his father's footsteps."

Perhaps it was also only natural that he would think of selling at Christie's. In 2001, that auction house got a Hartman consignment of 48 pieces of Tang polychrome pottery.

As the auction house last year noted:

The entire personal collection of Alan and Simone Hartman was published in 1996 in a catalogue by Robert Kleiner [now a London dealer of Chinese art]....The collection was then exhibited at Christie's New York in 2001, and subsequently at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 2003 to 2004.

Some have suggested that private owners should be required to promise that they will not precipitously send to market collections that they display at museums. But collectors are entitled to do what they want with unencumbered private property, so I believe a more stringent guideline is needed:

Museums should continue to borrow and display individual works from private collections, unless such works are known to be on the market (or are about to be). But a museum should not mount a show devoted to a single-owner collection unless that collection is pledged to the museum. The Museum of Modern Art has long followed this policy (although it loosened its standards for the recent show of works from the UBS corporate collection, only some of which had been given or promised to MoMA).

Those of us with long memories can recall the flap over the 1973 disposal at Sotheby's by Allen Funt (host of the "Candid Camera" TV show) of his 35 Alma-Tademas, embarrassing the Metropolitan Museum, which had displayed Funt's collection earlier the same year. (If you have Times Select, you can access the NY Times article about this contretemps here.) The Met learned its lesson the hard way. I don't recall its ever putting itself in such a position again.

The Broadway theater strike must be settled before this Sunday. That's when I have tickets to see Tom Stoppard's "Rock 'n' Roll."

Meanwhile, have New York's theater critics, with only the reopened "Grinch" to review on Broadway these days, managed to discover Off Broadway's "Celia: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz," about which I wrote favorably two months ago?

The NY Post has been there. The Daily News has done that.

And the NY Times???

I guess this play, with only a couple of performances a week in English, is largely aimed at Latinos, who were the late monolingual Cuban diva's target audience. Perhaps they're not the Times' target audience. My Spanish (like Celia's English) is "not very good looking," and my taste runs more to Stoppard than salsa. But I still was swept up in the propulsive performance of the Queen of Salsa's infectious music, persuasively recreated by the show's musicians and, especially, by Xiomara Laugart Sánchez in the title role.

I guess word-of-mouth has been good enough: New World Stages announced last month that it was extending the run till Jan. 27.

Even then, it might not be over if the Gray Lady finally sings.

Nicholas Penny

From London"s National Gallery, to Washington's National Gallery, to London's National Gallery:

Nicholas Penny, one of those whom I identified in October as the two leading candidates to become next director of the National Gallery in London, has apparently won the prized assignment.

Louise Jury of the London Evening Standard reports:

National Gallery staff have not yet been told of the appointment which is awaiting ratification by the Prime Minister via the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which is considered to be a formality.

That's a lot of "whiches," but it looks like a done deal. I've got an (unanswered) call in to the press office of the National Gallery, London. But Deborah Ziska, chief press officer of Washington's National Gallery, today informed me:

Neither he [Penny] nor we can comment on the NG appointment until it becomes official. In the meantime, I have not heard anyone denying the press reports.

That sounds like a backhanded confirmation to me.

Penny is currently senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery, Washington, where he arrived five years ago from London's National Gallery. In London, where he had been curator of Renaissance painting since 1990, he lost out in a bid five years ago for the directorship that he has now won. (It then went, instead, to Charles Saumarez Smith, who left, under controversial circumstances, to become secretary of the Royal Academy.)

Penny is expected to assume his new post this spring. As I noted in October: Sometimes you've just got to leave a museum for it to fully appreciate you.

Is the artworld getting increasingly litigious? While I've been focused on the saleroom, there's been so much going on in the courtroom that I need to do an international round-up of artworld legal developments:

---First and foremost, let's remember good causes during this holiday season and consider the desperate fundraising campaign of the embattled opponents to the Maier Museum's art sales. They need to raise a cool million by Dec. 3 to secure the court injunction that they won Nov. 16 against the disposals. According to Preserve Educational Choice (the organization leading the effort to keep the four paintings---including an important Bellows---at Randolph College), "Grassroots efforts are already underway in Lynchburg and within the larger national arts community to help meet this fundraising challenge." For information about how to contribute, go here. There is a pledge form here. (Use pull-down menu to get to "Art Defense Fund.")

---Marion True, the Getty Museum's beleaguered former antiquities curator, continues her midlife career as defendant in foreign courts: Greece still, at least for now, is still continuing its legal vendetta against her, despite the fact that the Getty has turned over the goods, as promised in an agreement signed last February. True's lawyer submitted a motion in Greek court for dismissal of charges against her.

---Meanwhile, an Italian judge ruled against a legal claim for the Getty Bronze made by prosecutors in Pesaro, Italy. The ruling, which may be appealed, was "a blow to Italy's battle to claim the work," according to a report by ANSA, the Italian news agency. ANSA also says that 39 of the antiquities that the Getty has agreed to relinquish to Italy are being flown there "in batches and should be in Rome by Christmas." The so-called Aphrodite takes flight in 2010.

---Andrew Lloyd Webber wins one in NY Supreme Court, where Judge Rolando Acosta decided, on technical grounds, against a Nazi-loot claim for the composer's Picasso, "Angel Fernández de Soto." No word yet on whether the painting, which was to have been sold at Christie's a year ago, will be put back on the block.

---William Cohan reports in the December ARTnews (no link yet) that U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska (who took over the never-ending "Portrait of Wally" Nazi-loot case from newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey) "may decide sometime next year how much longer the Schiele painting must remain under house arrest in a "secure, undislosed location." According to ARTnews, Judge Preska set the end of this month as "the deadline for the filing of each side's summary judgment motions" and Mar. 28 as "the deadline for responses and replies....She will then rule on the motions and decide whether to try the case at all."

We won't hold our breath.

---Last, and probably least, actor Robert De Niro has joined the list of boldface names with a beef against embattled dealer Lawrence Salander, whose gallery showed works by the actor's late father, Robert De Niro Sr.

I'm a lover (and closet singer) of old standards---the songs that were popular back in my parents' day. So when Matthew Price, a BCC-TV journalist who had just arrived here from Jerusalem, began the auction report, in which he gave me my two minutes of fame, with the words, "Autumn in New York," my thoughts of course strayed to that Vernon Duke classic.

Being CultureGrrl, I immediately considered the possibility of recasting "Autumn in New York" as "Auctions in New York." I have a weakness for writing spoof songs, and with the big fall auction season concluded, I could restrain myself no longer.

So, with apologies to Billie Holiday, whose classy arrangement (with, I believe, Oscar Peterson on piano) I've appropriated, and with additional apologies to Vernon Duke, whose composition I've mangled, I invite you to click below, if you dare, to hear CultureGrrl's first (and probably last) singing podcast:

"Auctions in New York"

(Should I mention that I'm available for weddings and corporate events? Maybe not.)

I'm sure that many of you interrupted your Thanksgiving revels yesterday to see that the NY Times actually did run a correction to Carol Vogel's article that had misidentified purchasers of works at Sotheby's contemporary sale. But I just got back into the CultureGrrl newsroom this afternoon, and discovered that this correction (scroll down) had slipped into the paper while I was otherwise engaged:

Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about the outcome of the big fall art auctions in Manhattan misidentified the buyer of "Hanging Heart," a sculpture by the artist Jeff Koons that was sold at Sotheby's on Nov. 14. Although speculation about the buyer's identity centered last week on the Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, Mr. Broad says he did not purchase the work.

Apparently "speculation about the buyer's identity" had also centered on Steve Cohen as supposed purchaser of the Bacon "Bullfight" and Laurence Graff as suspected acquirer of the Koons "Diamond (Blue)." But those misapprehensions, also given currency in Vogel's article, remain uncorrected.

As I've already noted, an informed source close to Steve Cohen told me unequivocally on Wednesday that the hedge fund mogul did not bring home the Bacon.

And this just in from Penny Weatherall, personal assistant to jewelry magnate Laurence Graff:

I can tell you that Mr. Graff was not the buyer of the Jeff Koons "Diamond (Blue)."

But will the Times ever correct the incorrect impression befuddling its readers about Cohen's and Graff's purported purchases? Probably not. Unlike Broad, who, in Carol Vogel's report, "took home" Koons's "Hanging Heart" (language that the correction ascribes to an "editing error"), the other two collectors were only "thought to have" or "said to have" bought their respective non-acquisitions.

This contretemps inevitably brings to mind another purported purchase---Mexican financier David Martinez's Vogel-reported outlay of $140 million for Pollock's ''No. 5, 1948," sold by David Geffen. Vogel stubbornly stood by her story, despite explicit denials by Martinez. At that time, I gave her the benefit of the doubt that her unnamed source was, in my words, probably "reliable and...in a position to know the truth about the transaction."

Before passing on any more information to us from anonymous sources, Vogel should reread her newspaper's own policy, which I also quoted in my post a year ago on the Martinez fracas.

The Times' Confidential News Sources Policy states:

Whenever anonymity is granted, it should be the subject of energetic negotiation to arrive at phrasing that will tell the reader as much as possible about the placement and motivation of the source---in particular, whether the source has firsthand knowledge of the facts.

Perhaps Vogel's source(s) for the auction story should have been described as someone who "declined to be identified because he was providing misinformation."

Having reported yesterday on the big-money auction buyers identified in articles in the NY Times and London Telegraph, I've now been getting e-mails suggesting that some of those deep-pocketed collectors did not actually purchase the objects connected to them in those reports.

Carol Vogel had announced that Laurence Graff "is thought to have bought Jeff Koons's 'Diamond (Blue),'" and Steve Cohen "is said to have bought several artworks, among them Francis Bacon's 1969 "Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1," for $45.9 million." She also said, "The Los Angeles financier Eli Broad took home Mr. Koons's 'Hanging Heart' for $23.5 million."

I have now been unequivocally informed, by a source who is absolutely in a position to know, that Steve Cohen did NOT buy the Bacon "Bullfight." I'm trying to check further about the other supposed buyers, but the day before Thanksgiving is not a great time to get hold of people. I'll update this if any more news comes my way. (SEE BELOW)

I had assumed, the Times being the Times, that these tips came from highly reliable sources. I also assume that if that has proven not to be the case, corrections will ensue.

Now, before I get myself into any more journalistic trouble, I think I'll get myself into a culinary morass and go stuff my turkey.

UPDATE: While I was elbow-deep in stuffing, I got a call from Karen Denne, chief communications officer for the Broad Foundation, who told me firsthand what I've been hearing secondhand all day: Neither Eli Broad nor his foundation purchased "Hanging Heart."

It is theoretically possible that Cohen and Broad bought the works in question, but want to keep quiet about it. But these are both collectors who have in the past been forthright about disclosing their art holdings. I have every reason to believe the knowledge and veracity of my well-placed sources on this.

If I'm right, the interesting question, on this Thanksgiving Eve, is: Who has been stuffing Carol Vogel full of misinformation, and why did she have enough confidence in these "tips" to serve them up hot to a gossip-hungry readership?

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

The Guggenheim...Unpainted

Traditionalists rejoice: The restored exterior of the Guggenheim Museum will not be buffed with Powell Buff after all.

So decreed the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission today in a 7-2 vote. Sewell Chan reported this afternoon on the NY Times' City Room blog that the commission's public meeting today included a presentation by Tom Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, who stated that the off-white color "commonly associated with the building...seems to work well" with the surrounding buildings and with the 1992 museum addition.

Powell Buff, more yellow than the off-white we now associate with the Guggenheim's famous exterior, was said to be the hue favored by Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum's architect.

Whether you side with some archaeologists and scholars who believe that the U.S. State Department's Cultural Property Advisory Committee is admirably safeguarding the cultural heritage of foreign countries, or you agree with some dealers, collectors and museums who feel that CPAC inappropriately rubber stamps source countries' excessively retentionist requests, you ought to buy into the argument set forth in a lawsuit just filed in U.S. District Court by a group of numismatists---that CPAC's deliberations and decisions should, under federal Sunshine and Freedom of Information laws, be publicly disclosed.

The group of 11 representatives from the scholarly, commercial and museum communities meets and votes in secret. The State Department then decides how to act on its recommendations. But as Jeremy Kahn previously reported in the NY Times, "it has never failed to grant an initial request for import controls."

The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild, International Association of Professional Numismatists and Professional Numismatists Guild, roiled by import restrictions on ancient coins from Cyprus that took effect July 16, have brought suit against the U.S. State Department for its failing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests that were "designed to bring some transparency to the opaque process by which the State Department processes requests for import restrictions," in the words of a letter dated Nov. 15 by Peter Tompa, president of the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild. "Some of these requests date as far back as 2004."

Meanwhile, rumors continue to fly that CPAC has approved China's controversially broad request for the State Department to impose import restrictions on pre-1911 cultural material from that country. In his Nov. 15 letter, ACCG's Tompa noted:

Concerns about transparency of process have been previously raised by others as well, but with no discernable effect. Such concerns will no doubt be raised yet again if the State Department, as is rumored, announces broad import restrictions on Chinese cultural artifacts before the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Last Wednesday, I noted that dealers had been the top bidders on a number of key lots in Christie's contemporary evening sale, which caused me to observe:

[This] raises the question of how much of the results of this sale, which everyone had been eyeing warily as a barometer of the art market, were bolstered by dealers who have a big stake in its price levels....It is also entirely possible that the dealer-bidders yesterday were acting on behalf of their clients, not themselves.

After that, a couple of mainstream media reporters took the first of these two hypotheses one step further, by indicating that dealers were, in fact, bidding to support their artists' prices. It wasn't clear from what they wrote whether they had any hard information to go on.

Now Carol Vogel in the NY Times (here) and Colin Gleadell in the London Telegraph (here) have set us straight with detailed accounts of who bought what. It turns out that my second hypothesis was probably more correct: On the top lots, dealers were bidding for deep-pocketed clients, such as Laurence Graff, Eli Broad and Steve Cohen. Damien Hirst bought one of the two Bacons, the somewhat skull-like self-portrait, by phone.

Despite the strong results of the contemporary sales, both Vogel and Gleadell ended their pieces with pessimism about the market's future.

Gleadell warned:

The bubble has not burst. But clouds are still gathering ominously.

We journalists always tend to look on the dark side.

Though my musings about possible dealer machinations last week my have been wrong, what I stated in my post about legendary contemporary dealer Leo Castelli's placing bids at auction to bolster the price levels of his artists was not speculation but fact. He said so himself---in a Nov. 9,1975 letter to the editor of the NY Times, and in comments he made to journalist/critic Grace Glueck for a Jan. 20, 1976 NY Times article. (If you have Times Select, you can find those two texts through an "advanced search" on Castelli's name and the dates.)

With prices levels for top works now in the eight figures, I suppose it's much less likely today for dealers to casually throw in a few inflationary bids.

Bruno LeMieux-Ruibal, a New York correspondent for the Spanish-language Lápiz International Art Magazine, comments on Alice Walton, MoMA's planned skyscraper and Hirst's shark at the Met. On the shark, I want to clear up one misunderstanding (which other readers shared, because I wrote unclearly in my original post): I don't object to the photography ban. What irked me was the obtrusive freestanding sign that, when I visited, was positioned right next to the artwork, demanding attention and detracting from the experience of the piece.

Here's what LeMieux-Ruibal wrote:

It saddens me that your thoughts and ideas are so conservative and traditional. Because Alice Walton has money and is building a fine museum in Arkansas, you call her a "vulture" and beyond in that unhinged WSJ article. (She's lending art to the nation, giving loads of money to institutions, funding scholarships and creating a first-rate cultural attraction in Arkansas, but all of this is nothing compared to her "vultureness.")

And so on. I don't know if your opposition to advancement, collection-building, personal wealth, good architecture, progress and change are a way of life, but to me the creation of a new museum (Crystal Bridges), philanthropy (Walton), culture-enhancing development (Nouvel) and artwork protection (the shark) are positive things or, in any case, just a sign of our times.

(Part I is here.)

The most important next step in achieving a ceasefire in the cultural-property wars is to move beyond the current case-by-case chaos to a more reasoned, consistent handling of these issues. The most obvious need is for some sort of consensus about a cutoff date for future acquisitions: Should museums not acquire any objects that don't have a known provenance going back for at least 10 years (the policy of the Met and the Association of Art Museum Directors)? Should the known provenance have to go back to before the 1970 date of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property? Or should the date be in 1983, the year when the U.S. officially became a party to the UNESCO Convention?

My feeling is that the AAMD/Met 10-year rolling rule improperly institutionalizes the time-honored practice of thieves who let hot merchandise cool off for a decent interval before marketing it. I favor moving the cutoff to 1983, the year when all museums were on unequivocal notice that this country adheres to the UNESCO Convention. Works with no clear provenance before that year could still be acquired if they were legally exported from the source countries, or if the source countries were contacted in advance for their consent.

I particularly like the language of the Getty's acquisition policy, which indicates that it's not enough that an object merely has a known provenance predating the cutoff year. The Getty's policy states:

For the acquisition of any ancient work of art or archaeological material, the revised policy requires:

* Documentation or substantial evidence that an item was in the United States by November 17, 1970 and that there is no reason to suspect it was illegally exported from its country of origin [emphasis added] OR
* Documentation or substantial evidence that the item was out of its country of origin before November 17, 1970 and that it has been or will be legally imported into the United States, OR
* Documentation or substantial evidence that the item was legally exported from its country of origin after November 17, 1970 and that it has been or will be legally imported into the United States.

As the first provision indicates, good faith counts. And it seems to me that this is the best argument for returning the Getty Bronze: There was plenty of "reason to suspect it was illegally exported from its country of origin," and plenty of people DID suspect it, at the time of the acquisition.

Near the end of my talks last week at the University of Pennsylvania, I tentatively proffered two controversial ideas that I think should at least be considered in thinking about a long-term resolution of the problems of looting and smuggling. At Penn, I was embedded deep in the archaeologists' camp, so I knew I was recklessly preaching to the unconverted.

COMING SOON: The case for a licit market and "citizen archaeologists."

The topic that I chose to address in my two talks at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday was Towards a Ceasefire in the Cultural Property Wars, in which I discussed the recent repatriation agreements between American museums and source countries, and made some proposals about where things should go from here. I think it's safe to say that my ideas are not squarely in either camp---the source countries and archaeological community on the one side; museum officials, dealers and collectors on the other.

The bringing of criminal charges by Italy against the Getty Museum's Marion True got the attention of every American museum with an antiquities collection. The result has been a sea change U.S. institutions' handling of this issue, as evidenced by a growing list of repatriation agreements: three between Italy and the Metropolitan Museum, the Getty Museum and the Princeton University Art Museum, as well as those between Greece and the Getty (here and here), and Peru and Yale University.

These accords have certain common features, using as prototype the February 2006 deal between the Met and Italy. But they also differ somewhat in their terms and especially in the amount of public disclosure about the details of the agreement and the objects involved. Based on the developing case history, I suggested to my Penn listeners what provisions such pacts should contain.

I am particularly concerned that there be full disclosure, to the extent possible, of how the objects to be repatriated got into the American museum's collection in the first place (i.e., through which dealers or collectors) and why the museum has now decided to relinquish pieces that it once acquired and held in trust for its public (i.e., some description of the evidence that led to the conclusion that the works had to go). The Boston Museum of Fine Arts did a particularly good job of posting every piece on its website, with images and complete provenance. I believe that the public has a right to know why objects that were formerly part of this country's cultural patrimony are now leaving.

There also needs to be full disclosure of museums' current antiquities acquisition policies, many of which have recently been revised. Some museums already do disclose their policies; some don't.

COMING NEXT: Part II---Moving Beyond Case-By-Case Chaos

Jori Finkel's excellent NY Times "Arts & Leisure" article today, Museums Solicit Dealers' Largess, brings to mind how much the Brooklyn Museum's director, Arnold Lehman, was criticized for asking dealers to become patrons of the benefit gala for the highly controversial "Sensation" show, drawn from the Young British Artists collection of Charles Saatchi. What to many seemed unseemly eight years ago is now far outstripped by current practices that, pre-Finkel, received little scrutiny.

To put in perspective dealer support for the Takashi Murakami show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Richard Prince show at the Guggenheim Museum, it's worth going back to what I wrote in Art in America magazine about the controversy over dealer support for Brooklyn's "Sensation" show in a January 2000 article, Brooklyn Hangs Tough:

Perhaps the most damning criticism of Brooklyn has been the suggestion that it was too dependent on funds from those who stood to profit from "Sensation," thereby sacrificing its public mission to commercial interests....Of the 38 dealers contacted by Lehman to be patrons of the "Sensation" gala, several purchased blocks of tickets for the benefit dinner, including Larry Gagosian, who paid $10,000 for a table. "It was a no-brainer," explained Gagosian, who represents Damien Hirst and Jenny Saville, two artists in the show.

Gagosian, who considers Saatchi "one of my best friends," told A.i.A. that he had also recently spent $10,000 to support a gala at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and he had split with two other dealers the entire cost of a recent lavish Guggenheim Museum dinner in New York.

"This seems like normal art-world business as I know it," commented the dealer. "It's just common sense. If I can afford to be helpful, it's a win-win situation: It helps the institution and it helps the artist. I don't think it contaminates anything. They're not doing the show based on the $10,000 I gave them." He added that he never contributes "direct exhibition support" to museums and that he does not believe that "Sensation" will have "any impact, negative or positive" on the market for the artists' works. Potential purchasers "already knew these artists," he asserted.

Lehman said that other dealers who supported the gala included Luhring Augustine (representing Rachel Whiteread), Lehmann Maupin (representing Tracey Emin) and Sperone Westwater (no artists in "Sensation"). "Not one dealer did anything but buy tickets" to the gala, according to Lehman. "I had asked if some dealers would help [in other ways] and they didn't."

Dealers' kicking in cash to support museum catalogues for shows devoted to gallery artists has been a longstanding practice. But direct support for exhibitions from self-interested salesmen is far over the line that should separate the nonprofit museum world from the commercial world. It's a situation rife with unacceptable conflict of interest, whatever museum officials may say about how the money doesn't actually influence their decisions.

This is not just a blurring of the lines; it's an erasure. Maybe Arnold Lehman, in soliciting dealer support, was merely a few years ahead of his time.

The Virginia Supreme Court yesterday handed a major victory to the opponents of the sale of four works from the Maier Museum of Randolph College. At the very least, the auctions of the works planned for this month at Christie's, where they were to have been star lots, will be postponed.

The court denied the college's request that the temporary injunction imposed by Lynchburg, VA, Circuit Court on the sales be removed. Instead, it extended to Dec. 3 from Nov. 15 the deadline by which sales' opponents will be required to post a surety bond to secure a six-month injunction (which would run from Nov. 10 to the time when the case is decided on its merits) against the works' sale . What's more, the court slashed the amount of the bond from $10 million to $1 million.

With the temporary injunction now running until Dec. 3, the four Maier works will have to be withdrawn from Monday's Latin American art sale, where Tamayo's "Trovador," was to have been the highlight, and from the Nov. 29 American art sale, where Bellows' "Men of the Docks" was expected to have been top lot.

Anne Yastremski, executive director of Preserve Educational Choice, the group opposing the art sales, told the Lynchburg News & Advance yesterday that the reduced bond amount was "a lot more manageable," and added that she was not sure whether the entire $1 million would have to be raised, or whether a fraction of that could serve to guarantee full payment if the college ultimately prevailed in court.

75 stories? Did they say 75 STORIES???

Trust me, the neighbors and, hopefully, the City Planning Commission are not going to stand for a 75-story look-at-me skyscraper on this cross street. New York skyscrapers in this part of midtown are customarily consigned to the avenues; the cross streets are less dense and more lowrise in character. West 54th Street is partly residential. Does Hines, the developer, really have the air rights to do this? Is a big zoning variance slugfest on the drawing boards? Fire up Sandy Lindenbaum!

Speaking of zoning, Hines states that "Nouvels' design maximizes the site while considering the zoning envelope." The key word may be "considering."

This brings to mind the big fight a couple of decades ago over whether MoMA's mixed-use Museum Tower, designed by Cesar Pelli, should be allowed to rise beside it on 53rd Street. There was much talk about possible shadows to be cast on the sculpture garden and traffic nightmares on W.53rd and 54th streets But that 52-story building is dwarfed by Nouvel's overweening jagged "scream for freedom," as NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff approvingly called it in his breathlessly supportive preview of the plans.

Ouroussoff writes:

The melding of cultural and commercial worlds offers further proof, if any were needed, that Mr. Nouvel is a master at balancing conflicting urban forces.

Since when is mixed used a stroke of genius? Not for a few decades, at least.

From Hines' website, we learn that the project will include "a 50,000-square-foot expansion of MoMA's galleries (levels two to five); a 100-room, seven-star hotel and 120 highest-end residential condominiums on the upper floors....The Hines firm has collaborated with Nouvel on both 40 Mercer in New York's SoHo neighborhood and on the C1 Tower currently under development in Paris."

It has also collaborated on big transactions with Tishman Speyer, the real estate firm of MoMA's board chairman Jerry Speyer, from which Hines has recently purchased several properties (here and here).

I'm still in Philly and not able to manipulate photos for my blog, but you can go here, on Hines' website, to see a manipulative photo making it appear that the new tower will be less tall that one next to it. Don't believe it.

I've been uncharacteristically offline today because of my enjoyable foray into academia. But while you await my return from Philly, here are some cultural-property links that I've prepared for my captive University of Pennsylvania audience, which you might also find of interest:

Princeton Art Museum Agreement with Italy

Yale University Agreement with Peru

Getty Museum Agreement with Italy

Getty Museum Agreement with Greece:
---Joint Statement
---Return of two objects
---Return of additional two objects

Boston Museum of Fine Arts Agreement with Italy

Metropolitan Museum Agreement with Italy

Association of Art Museum Directors Acquisition Guidelines

Association of Art Museum Directors Guidelines On Loans Of Antiquities And Ancient Art

Getty Museum Acquisition Policy

U.S. State Department Actions:
---List of Emergency Actions & Bilateral Agreements for Protection of Cultural Property

---Recent and Pending Actions

Travel complications preclude me from giving you a complete rundown of Sotheby's strong contemporary art sale tonight, other than to say:

---The total of $315.9 million fell just shy of Christie's $325 million the night before.

---Sotheby's decisively won the battle of the mega-Koonses with a $23.56 million price for "Hanging Heart" (again, as at Christie's, from Koons' dealer, Larry Gagosian, according to Bloomberg). The two Bacons ($45.96 million for "Bullfight" and $33.08 million for the self-portrait) did well and the Chinese artists were strong (particularly Zhang Xiaogang, $4.97 million).

---Only six of the 71 lots failed to sell (all relatively minor by dollar value). Deep sighs of relief issued from art dealers and, particularly, from Sotheby's personnel, and several bursts of hearty saleroom applause were heard throughout the land.

"Give me your paddle number again," the usually undemonstrative auctioneer Tobias Meyer asked the winning bidder for the Bacon self-portrait. "I was too happy."

I could not find this anywhere on the Wall Street Journal's website, but on its "Letters to the Editor" page today it ran the following as a correction, concerning Alexandra Peers' article that had suggested that the major art auction houses sometimes reduce the buyer's premium for third-party guarantors who are successful bidders:

Christie's does not discount its buyer's premium. In return for assuming the risk involved in a third-party guarantee, the guarantor---who can be a dealer, collector or financial institution---receives a fee based on a percentage of the hammer price and the buyer's commission. "What the Auction Houses Are Doing to Try to Keep the Art Market Booming" (Leisure & Arts page, Nov. 6) reported that only dealers were third-party guarantors, and that they were directly rewarded with a reduced buyer's premium.

The Circuit Court of Lynchburg, VA, yesterday ruled against the opponents of the Maier Museum's art sales. It rejected their request that the court reduce or eliminate the $10-million bond they must post by tomorrow, to make permanent the court's temporary injunction against impending auctions of four paintings by Christie's later this month.

"Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the plaintiffs will be able to raise such a large sum of money in such a short time period," said Anne Yastremski, executive director of Preserve Educational Choice, the organization fighting the sales.

Anthony Troy, a former Virginia Attorney General who is representing the litigants, said that the matter would be "taken immediately to the Supreme Court of Virginia."

Troy added:

Injunction or no, if we prevail on the merits of the case next year---and it is shown that [Randolph] College holds the art for the benefit of the citizens of Lynchburg and students---then further litigation focusing on the return of the art will commence with those that purchase these paintings.

That's playing hardball---an attempt to discourage buyers with the threat of possible future litigation.

Christa Desrets of the Lynchburg News & Advance has more on the story here.

Before I embark on my glorious fall folliage trip down the scenic New Jersey Turnpike today (to hold forth tomorrow at U. Penn), here are a couple of art-auction thoughts as we await the big contemporary sale tonight at Sotheby's.

Carol Vogel, in today's NY Times, does her usual excellent job of tracking down the names of the "anonymous" buyers and sellers of key works last night at the contemporary sale at Christie's (which I have discussed here).

The record-priced Richard Prince , she said, was bought by London dealer Jay Jopling. Larry Gagosian made no secret of the fact that he was the buyer of the record Koons: He allowed Christie's to publish his name in the post-sale release.

And Bloomberg tells us that Warhol's (and Hugh Grant's) "Liz" "attracted lackluster bidding from just two contenders, including Alberto Mugrabi, a dealer heavily invested in the artist."

All of which raises the question of how much of the results of this sale, which everyone had been eyeing warily as a barometer of the art market, were bolstered by dealers who have a big stake in its price levels. If the dealers did provide some strategic support, that's nothing new: I can remember, when I first started covering auctions, watching with astonishment as the legendary contemporary dealer Leo Castelli repeatedly bid up prices of his artists. He usually, but not always, managed to drop out before the works were hammered down to someone else. But his participation had the effect of supporting his artists' price levels. It is also entirely possible that the dealer-bidders yesterday were acting on behalf of their clients, not themselves.

My other thought (and you've heard me belabor this before) is that art-market journalists are doing the auction houses, but not their readers, a service when they persist in comparing pre-sale estimates to prices that INCLUDE the buyer's premium. Estimates are based on hammer price only. Misleadingly comparing estimates to the premium-inflated results makes the auction house look good, by making the sale look more successful than it actually is. The apples-to-apples comparison is HAMMER PRICE to pre-sale estimate. But you have to hammer at the auction houses (as I do) for the hammer total; it's never in the press release.

Andy Warhol, "Muhammad Ali," 1978

It wasn't at the stratospheric levels of the $70 million-plus top lots at Christie's and Sotheby's last spring, but Christie's contemporary sale tonight did fine, with only five of the 67 lots unsold---none of them the big-money offerings. The sound of firm applause could be heard throughout the land (if, like me, you were watching the proceedings online).

The sale totaled $325 million with buyer's premium; the $287.93 million hammer total was within the presale estimate range of $271.25 million to $373.35 million. The auction was 93% sold by lot; 94% sold by dollar amount. Buyers were 51% American, 26% European, 7% Asian, 16% other. Solid all around.

The surprise was that Jeff Koons' overblown "Diamond (Blue)" did sell, given that bids only reached $10.5 million against the unpublished $20 million estimate. It seemed clear from the get-go that auctioneeer Christopher Burge wasn't expecting to get that high: He generally starts the bidding at about 50-60% of the low estimates, and he started the Koons at a mere $6.5 million. Nevertheless, the $11.8 million price (including buyer's premium) trounced the previous auction record for the artist. The record rates an asterisk, though, since it was paid by Koons' own dealer Larry Gagosian (who, according to the catalogue, had sold the big bauble to the consignor). At least we can now get that clunky chunk of ungainly glitz off the sidewalk in front of Christie's.

In all, 16 auction records were broken, the big one being Lucian Freud, despite the fact that the $17.25 million hammer price for his "Ib and Her Husband" fell short of the unpublished $20 million estimate. Similarly, the $10 million hammer for Richter's "Jet Fighter," consigned by well known Chicago collectors Susan and Lewis Manilow, broke the auction-record barrier but only equaled its low estimate.

The most spirited bidding battle was, appropriately, over a boxing picture---Warhol's "Muhammad Ali" (above), who fought his way to a $8.2 million hammer price, over an estimate of only $2 million to $3 million. The highest-priced of the five Warhols in the sale, "Liz," fell below her $25 million to $35 million estimate: Her hammer price was a "mere" $21 million, but that was good enough for the consignor, actor Hugh Grant, who had paid only $3.58 million six years ago.

Top price in the sale was $34.2 million (including buyer's premium) for a 1955 Rothko, greeted with applause at the fall of the hammer. The auction prices (with premium) are posted here. The lots are identified (with images) here.

Whatever happens tomorrow at Sotheby's, the market watchers can stop biting their nails. But Sotheby's, for its own sake, needs a good showing on this one.

Could it be that Christie's was enjoying the ripple effect of a good day on Wall Street? The Dow was up today 319.54, compared to its big plunge the day of Sotheby's lackluster Impressionist/modern sale. At a time when so many of the big art buyers are in the financial industry, does stock market psychology affect art market psychology?

We're only six lots into the Christie's contemporary sale, and I think I can safely say that the bubble has not burst. Five of the six lots set new auction records, with Richard Prince's "Piney Woods Nurse" just knocked down at $5.4 million (to applause), against a presale estimate of $1.8 million to $2.2 million.

True we haven't gotten to the "big" lots yet, but the money, up to this point, is just swirling around the room.

My recent revelation about the magazine-reading habits of the Metropolitan Opera's idle orchestra members has inspired a string of comments by clarinet players, answering this burning question on their Clarinet BBoard:

What Do You Do During Long Rests?

Dave, for example, reveals:

I have seen people reading, doing crosswords, knitting, and even minor instrument repair.

And I was just joking when I suggested that knitting might be next!

As previously mentioned, I'm going to drop the ball and NOT attend this week's major contemporary art sales, even though all other eyes will be anxiously upon them to assess the health of the market. I may try to weigh in with some quick art-market quips (or even analysis), but I need to keep my eye on another ball this week---my invitation, extended by Professor Richard Leventhal, to give two talks at the University of Pennsylvania (to an undergraduate class and to a workshop for graduate students and professors), both on cultural property issues.

Since I've prepared certain materials for my captive academic audience, I thought I'd also share them with my faithful readers.

So here's the series of links I was asked to prepare, to a selection of my own mainstream-media and blog writings about cultural property issues. I'll post later my other U. Penn handout---a list of links to recent repatriation agreements, museum antiquities acquisition policies, and U.S. State Department actions designed to help protect other nations' cultural heritage.

The CultureGrrl Reader on Cultural Property

Wall Street Journal:
Truth in Booty: Coming---and Staying---Clean
A Betrayal of Trust: At the New York Public Library, It's Sell Now, Raise Money Later
The Walton Effect: Art World Is Roiled By Wal-Mart Heiress

CultureGrrl:
Rosetta Stone: Why the British Museum Distrusts Hawass
MacGregor Considers Egypt's Rosetta Stone Loan Request
Italy/Princeton Antiquities Deal: Reasons for Give-Backs Hide Behind Wall of "Confidentiality"
Acropolis Acrimony: MacGregor Condescends to the Greeks
The Broader Significance of the Maier Massacre and the Stieglitz Egress
What's Missing from the Getty/Italy Accord
Perot's Magna Carta Up for Grabs
The Met to Monteleone: Drop Your Chariot Claim and We'll Host a Celebratory Event
Should the "Getty Bronze" Go Back to Italy?
Rethinking Antiquities
Rethinking Antiquities (again)
China's Ironhanded Cultural Patrimony Request

And while we're on the topic, let's add this Associated Press piece about Italy's latest repatriation coup, which involves a dealer, Jerome Eisenberg of New York's Royal Athena-Galleries. CultureGrrl readers may remember Eisenberg from this post detailing his allegation that the Metropolitan Museum's Etruscan chariot is "a pastiche of ancient and modern elements" and this post about two objects returned by Eisenberg to Italy.

As the Lynchburg News & Advance reported here, opponents of the impending sales of four works from Randolph College's Maier Museum are balking at Judge Leyburn Mosby Jr.'s requirement that they post a $10-million bond to make permanent (until the case is decided on its merits) the judge's temporary injunction against the disposals set for this month at Christie's.

Now, this just in from Anne Yastremski of Preserve Educational Choice, the group fighting the sales:

Today a Motion to Reconsider is being filed with the [Lynchburg] Circuit Court, asking that the bond be eliminated entirely, given that the plaintiffs are serving in a representative capacity and not as individuals.

It is my understanding that appeals are being filed by both sides with the Supreme Court of Virginia as well today---the College to appeal the injunction, the Plaintiffs to appeal the imposition of a bond and the amount.

The bond amount was set by the judge as possible compensation to the college for the delay and possible loss of financial benefit, if the injunction is eventually lifted and the disposal allowed to go forward.

CORRECTION: Due to incorrect figures e-mailed to me by Christie's press office prior to this sale, I published the wrong amounts for the presale estimate range. The right figures are in the corrected version, below:

A little sigh of relief: Christie's Allan Stone sale (which was eclectic, but with an emphasis on contemporary art) was a triumph: 90% sold by lot; 94% sold by dollar amount; 12 records (some for decorative arts, but also for John Chamberlain, Wayne Thiebaud, Alfred Leslie, John Graham, Michael Goldberg and (for a work on paper) Joseph Cornell. The sale total with buyer's premium was $52.42 million. The hammer total was $45.45 million, within the presale estimate (which does not include buyer's premium) of $40.6 million to $59.7 million.

The price list is here. The list of works, here.

Now on to the big game---the evening contemporary sales tomorrow at Christie's and Wednesday at Sotheby's. If, like me, you won't be attending those sales in person, here's how you can watch the live webcasts.

---In case you were maybe thinking of bidding on Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat or Takashi Murakami during this week's big contemporary sales, please be advised that they are on Richard Feigen's hitlist of nine overvalued artists, published today in Bloomberg. Feigen is a knowledgeable, veteran dealer who is always a helpful source for journalists (including me), but is he really the right go-to person on what's important in today's contemporary artworld?

Old timers (especially generalists like Feigen, not primarily focused on contemporary art) often have trouble seeing the merits of current work, and are typically heard uttering variants of Feigen's lament---that the $850,000 value of his 1557 Frans Floris painting "wouldn't get you a minor Basquiat." So it goes.

---In other news of hot contemporary art, the Mumbai-based Daily News & Analysis reports on the superheated market for new art from India:

International galleries have begun to fish in Indian waters for the Next Big Thing. So with the invasion of all these art dealers, gallerists, curators and art writers on the prowl like treasure-hunters, the heat is now on the artists to churn out works as if there were no tomorrow....Many artists' studios emulate assembly line productions----they could just as well be making cars or toys.

---Among the many ill-informed press analyses interpreting Sotheby's soft Impressionist/modern results, this one about the auction house's "disastrous sale," from the Manchester Guardian, stands out for cluelessness:

Overall, Sotheby's brought in $270 million from Wednesday night's sale, failing to meet even its low estimate of $401 million including commissions....Some experts put the total value of guarantees as high as $240 million, which would have left Sotheby's with just $30 million to pay for the marketing and organisation of the sale. "That's deadly," said Milton Esterow, editor of the New York-based magazine ARTnews. "The cost of these sales is enormous."

Listen up! The total value offered in guarantees is NOT the same as the amount of money LOST on the guarantees---not even close. The auction house only loses if bidding on a guaranteed work falls short of the amount guaranteed.. And we already know what Sotheby's lost on the guarantees in that sale, because the auction house has told us---$14.6 million. This is no cause for joy, but not "disastrous" either (the freefall of Sotheby's share price notwithstanding).

---Enough of this seriousness. Let's have some fun for a change: Contemporary dealer Jeffrey Deitch, "A Fool for Art," is profiled by Calvin Tomkins in the Nov. 12 New Yorker. Unfortunately, the only link is to an abstract. Actually, there's some serious art-market talk here too, including the bit about how fabrication costs for Koons' "Celebration" project had "nearly brought Deitch to financial ruin." He appears to have recovered nicely, however.

---And in non-market contemporary artworld news, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger in the Nov. 19 issue weighs in with an early, highly favorable review of the new SANAA-designed facility for the cutting-edge New Museum in New York. Maybe someone should ask director Lisa Phillips which artists are "overvalued."

On second thought, please don't.

The Rosetta Stone, 196 BC, British Museum

I guess maybe I was wrong when I indicated that the British Museum is reluctant to lend the Rosetta Stone to Egypt, for fear that it may never come back.

In the third part of Richard Lacayo's interview with the director of the British Museum, published in the Time art critic's Looking Around blog, Neil MacGregor said:

The Egyptians have never questioned the [British Museum] Trustees' ownership of the Stone. The Trustees have received a letter from the Egyptians asking the museum to lend the Stone for a number of months. So it's a perfectly ordinary loan request, of exactly the sort that has never been received for the Parthenon sculptures. The Egyptians have started from the position that legal title is absolutely clear and that they want to borrow it like anything else and then return it.

It would appear that MacGregor hasn't been watching Al Jazeera lately.

I think the time that the Metropolitan Opera's music director, James Levine is spending at his other job (leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra) is beginning to take a toll on orchestral discipline and choral excellence in New York.

On Saturday night, I attended the luxuriously cast performance of "La Traviata" (an opera I haven't seen in at least a decade, because I tend to avoid the warhorses). I always sit in the side boxes, putting me almost right above the orchestra pit, where I witnessed something this time that I've never seen before: A horn player, with little to do for much of the third act, passed the time by flipping through a magazine on her music stand, and then placed it on a shelf beneath the stand of a absent colleague, so she could flip through yet another publication on her stand. (I believe the reader was a woman, but I only saw her from behind.)

From where I was sitting, I could actually hear those pages rustling while Renée Fleming was singing the dying Violetta's heart out. When the reader's missing colleague showed up later to take his part in the final pages of the score, he first picked up the magazine that had been put beneath his stand, donned his eyeglasses, and proceeded to read it until it was his moment to pick up his horn. I tried to determine through my binoculars what so engrossed these inattentive musicians, but couldn't quite make it out.

As you can tell from this detailed account, the low drama in the pit distracted me from the high drama onstage and from Fleming's luscious singing. She seemed to have used the first act to warm up, though, singing a bit tentatively and completely ducking the ringing high note that should triumphantly crown her famous "Sempre libera" aria, bringing down the the house and the curtain. It was a bit like watching an ice skater who was planning to dazzle with a triple axel, but doubled instead.

I assume she didn't opt for the easier note at the first performance. Bernard Holland wrote this in his NY Times review:

In the fireworks of Act I the high notes are there, though a little thinned by the pressure.

I guess by this performance, the pressure was too much.

The chorus also fell short, lacking some of the clarity, brilliance and precision under conductor Marco Armiliato that I have taken for granted in the glorious but now waning Levine era.

Still, the generally thrilling singing and acting by Fleming, Dwayne Croft and Matthew Polenzani swept away these quibbles, as did the poignant display on the Dress Circle level of a rack of Luciano Pavarotti's costumes, labeled inside the collars with his name and the opera:

"La Fille du Régiment"

Written on This Label: "Otello" and "Mr. Pavarotti"

UPDATE: The Opera Chic blogger informs me that she's seen multitasking in the Met pit before. (Maybe I've usually kept my attention onstage, where it belongs.) Opera Chic informs me:

I believe it's been tolerated for a while (at least for the past 5 years since I've been going to the Met), but it's something you don't see very often. At La Scala, they'd chop off your fingers if you did it.

In this post, I commented on serious issues raised in an in-depth Wall Street Journal article by the veteran, highly respected art-market writer, Alexandra Peers. The article described changes, of which I had been previously unaware, in auction-house practices regarding the buyer's premium charged to successful bidders.

In subsequent conversation with me, officials of both auction houses have disputed the article's suggestion that they sometimes reduce the buyer's premium for third-party guarantors who are successful bidders at auction. (Such guarantors are dealers, collectors or others who agree to take on some or all of the risk if a given work fails to sell. The consignor gets the guaranteed amount. The auction house and/or third-party guarantor pays the money and takes possession of the work.)

Bill Ruprecht, president and CEO of Sotheby's, denied that the buyer's premiums are ever reduced, and said that the only monetary compensation for Sotheby's third-party guarantors is participation in the fee that consignors must pay to the auction house if bidding exceeds the amount of the guarantee. If a work fails to achieve its guarantee, the third party may take possession of all or a share of it and may be able to sell it later for a profit.

Toby Usnik, head of public relations at Christie's, said that his company also compensates guarantors this way:

Third party guarantors, who may be dealers, collectors, or financiers, receive a fee for assuming some or all of Christie's risk with respect to a particular sale, regardless of whether they are the ultimate purchaser of the lot.

Alexandra, whose knowledge, passion for accuracy and long experience as an art-market writer I deeply respect, says she stands by her story and has the documentation to back it up.

I'm now going to recuse myself and let them work this out among themselves.

The amount of risk involved in auction-house guarantees to consignors (whereby the house agrees to pay the guaranteed amount in the event that bidding does not reach that level) has been the subject of much recent speculation, in light of the failure to sell of several high-ticket guaranteed works in Wednesday's Impressionist/modern sale at Sotheby's.

Sotheby's latest Form 10-Q quarterly filing with the SEC, just released, provides some current statistics.

It shows that the total dollar value of Sotheby's outstanding guarantees as of Sept. 30 amounted to less than the middle of the presale estimate range for the guaranteed property.

Sotheby's 10-Q states:

As of September 30, 2007, the Company had outstanding auction guarantees totaling $458.5 million, the property relating to which had a mid-estimate sales price of $478.1 million. The Company's financial exposure under these auction guarantees is reduced by $6.8 million as a result of arrangements with unaffiliated third parties.

On November 7 and 8, 2007, the Company held its major autumn sales of Impressionist and Modern Art. While these sales were profitable overall, the Company did incur losses on certain auction guarantees that were outstanding as of September 30, 2007 and, as a result, the Company recorded a principal loss of $14.6 million within Auction and Related Revenues in the third quarter of 2007.

Now that the Greeks, emboldened by the imminent completion of the New Acropolis Museum, have ramped up their rhetoric calling for the return of the Acropolis marbles, the British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, who had previously sounded nominally receptive to the idea of lending the marbles to the new museum (if the Greeks accepted British ownership), appears to have ramped up his own rhetoric against the Greeks. His condescension borders on insult.

Richard Lacayo of Time magazine, in his Looking Around blog, recently scored an in-depth, revelatory two-part interview with MacGregor---here and here.

Some MacGregor quotes:

No Trustees in the Anglo-Saxon legal system could lend to people who didn't recognize their title....The Trustees [of the British Museum] have said they would not consider the removal of all the marbles at one time....They would consider a [loan] request [if Greece recognized British ownership], and it would then be a question of how long the request was for, whether the objects were fit to travel, all those things....

Elgin removed them, and it was...bringing the marbles to London that actually allowed the European educated world, French, German, Russian, Italian and British, to discover for the first time what great Greek sculpture was. And this is the purpose of a museum like this---to bring things not previously appreciated for their proper worth, and put them in the context of other things from around the world.

Are the Greeks not part of the "European educated world"? Did they not appreciate the marbles "for their proper worth" and promote their appreciation as such? I assume that MacGregor would say that he didn't intend his words to convey insulting implications.

But they do.

Bill Ruprecht, president and CEO of Sotheby's, this morning used his third-quarter conference call with financial analysts to try to bolster the confidence of the company's stock investors and the broader art-market public, who were spooked by Wednesday night's shaky Impressionist/modern performance.

He revealed that the auction house had suffered a $14.6 million pre-tax loss from works at that sale whose bids fell short of the guarantees offered by Sotheby's to certain consignors. But he added that despite that hit, the Impressionist/modern auction, overall, was profitable.

The company traditionally reports a loss from continuing operations in the third quarter ending Sept. 30, when few auctions are held. But this year's loss, reported today, was a significant improvement over last year's: $20.9 million, or 33 cents per diluted share, compared to $30.4 million, or 49 cents, for the same period last year. The third-quarter results reflect this week's loss on the Impressionist/modern guarantees, because "these guarantees were outstanding as of Sept. 30."

Ruprecht also gave his version of what went wrong at the sale, and why he feels the overall state of the market in general, and Sotheby's in particular, remains promising:

"We took on minimal inventory [as a result of guarantees for unsold works], except for the van Gogh...which we are pleased to invest in," Ruprecht asserted. "It's a terrific picture, and one that we have a great deal of confidence in."

The failure of that landscape to sell caught Sotheby's by surprise, he said, because "three people had traveled to New York to buy that picture" (or maybe not). Flopping early in the sale, it "colored the mood of that evening" and "rattled the participants." Placing some of the blame on the economic climate, he declared, "I don't think the financial markets that day [Wednesday] helped us one little bit. Some of our estimates were ambitious, informed by the great success we had earlier in the year."

He also stated that the company's "guarantee book," as a whole, is "expected to be profitable" this year, as it has been for the past 17 years. By the end of next week's contemporary sales, he said, "we will have cleared the guarantee portfolio," and will evaluate any future guarantees in light of current conditions.

As for the overall prognosis, he pointed to the company's sale of Chinese art in London yesterday as evidence that there has not been "a transforming shift in the whole world of markets that we operate in." But while fetching some breakout prices, that sale was only 54.8% sold by lot, 82.2% sold by value. He also observed that the "wealth at the top of the economic pyramid [where the big buyers come from] is not anything that we see abating any time soon." That might come as news to those in the financial industry who have been hard hit by the ripple effect of the global credit crisis.

Getting back to the balance sheet: Operating revenues for the third quarter were $85.1 million, up 48% over the same period last year. For the first nine months of 2007, they were a record $572 million, up 42%. For Sotheby's press release on its third-quarter and nine-month results, go here.

Whether Ruprecht's remarks have succeeded as damage control remains to be seen: Sotheby's stock opened down today, and has continued to head south, at 33.59, down 2.25 from yesterday's close, as of 11:15 a.m.

As Ruprecht observed, we'll be "a lot smarter" after the big contemporary sales next week.

This chart from Sotheby's website says it all:

It's a graphic illustration of the auction house's stock in freefall. It closed yesterday at 35.84, rebounding from a low of 30.80, but down 14.23 (28.42%) from the previous day's close. Volume, shown in the bar graph at the bottom, was off the charts: 24.11 million shares traded yesterday, compared to the previous day's 2.78 million shares.

Is the stock market overreacting to one bad night? Sotheby's website shows that its auction totals for the month of October were $139.7 million higher than in October 2006, and its year-to-date total at the end of October was $1.11 billion more than the previous year.

The Lynchburg, VA, News & Advance has the story. Christa Desrets reports:

A Lynchburg Circuit Court judge Tuesday evening granted a temporary injunction that would delay the sale of four paintings from the Maier Museum of Art until other ongoing litigation against Randolph College is settled. The injunction would be set once the opponents to the sale post a $10 million bond, Judge Leyburn Mosby Jr. said.

Randolph College said it would appeal to Virginia Supreme Court. The auctions of four paintings were scheduled for Christie's Nov. 19 Latin American art sale and its Nov. 29 American art sale.

Not all is bleak in the world of art auctions. This just in from MASS MoCA's director of marketing & PR, Katherine Myers:

Our benefit results were heartening, to say the least. The Sol LeWitt wall drawing donated by Paula Cooper slammed through it's pre-auction estimate of $150,000, bringing $260,000. A small Crewdson production print attracted lively competition and sold for $28,000. Spencer Finch's light work sold for $24,000, a small drawing by Matthew Ritchie fetched $22,000, and a Chuck Close lithogragh went for $80,000, all exceeding their estimates by good margins. A small Jasper Johns print went for double its estimate.

A large recent Rauschenberg print skyrocketed past its estimate and sold for $45,000. (It included a studio visit in Captiva, FL, and dinner with the artist.) The evening brought in $960,000 in total for MASS MoCA, which was nearly four times higher than the receipts of last year's New York benefit. 300 people attended the sold-out evening, 75 more than attended last year.

Does this bode well for next week's big contemporary sales at Sotheby's and Christie's? Or did the benefit auction benefit from the Büchel recovery factor?

It must be my week to attract attention from the British: The Independent of London today published an article, The Woman Who Put the Art in Wal-Mart, that begins with an allusion to my Wall Street Journal article on Alice Walton's collecting practices, and ends with a mention of her desire to acquire works from the Maier Museum's collection.

Like Walton's local defenders, the Independent charges her critics with snobbery:

The greatest unspoken objection is, of course, that no self-respecting East Coast art snob would be seen dead in rural Arkansas.

In my case, at least, there's a good reason why this supposed bias is "unspoken": Whether or not I ever make it to Bentonville (and I hope I do), I have nothing against great art's being gathered there. It might even make more sense than assembling the great masterpieces of world culture on an earthquake faultline. (Now I'm in trouble with the Getty!) I think if there's any snobbery in this, it's the other way around---Arkansas razzing New York (or, in my case, New Jersey).

Meanwhile, under the guise of taking Walton's side, the Independent dredges up elements of her past that I knew about but deemed irrelevant to my topic, which was her artworld activities. My comments, while strong, were directed specifically at her art-collecting practices and their effect on the artworld. I may have been harsh, but I hope I was fair.

As of 11:55 a.m., the stock price for publicly traded Sotheby's was at 34.25, down 15.82 points (32%) from yesterday's 50.07 close. You can follow the carnage on Sotheby's website here.

Linda Sandler and Philip Boroff of Bloomberg report on the downgrading of Sotheby's stock by analysts.

The Bespoke BBC: Would you get in the back seat of a car with these chaps?

I look a little tired on camera, but so did auctioneer Tobias Meyer, on a rocky night. My interviewer for the piece on art prices is the appropriately named Matthew Price, above right. His trusty cameraman sidekick, left, is Keith Tayman. They abducted me in a black SUV for the presale interview, then waylaid me again at Sotheby's after the sale.

To see and hear my pre- and post-auction soundbites, go here.

Attention art-market press: This video clip includes a shot of you lined up at the front of the saleroom, pads and pens poised.

The pesky headline and caption writers are at it again: This piece is about the softening of the market and captures on camera Tobias Meyer reluctantly dispatching the rejected van Gogh. But the headline highlights "record prices" and its caption is similarly bullish:

The global credit crunch does not seem to have affected the art market with record prices achieved in New York.

At yesterday's post-sale press conference, David Norman, Sotheby's Impressionist/modern chairman, declined to blame last night's weak results on global economics. But art-market psychology could not have been helped by the big financial news of the day---recounted in the lead story in today's Wall Street Journal, "Markets Tumble As Dollar's Fall Adds to Anxiety":

The credit crisis sparked by mortgage problems reared its head anew, as stocks tumbled on fears about shaky financial institutions. This time, the dollar's fall to record lows and oil's flirtation with $100 a barrel added to the worrisome brew.

In this context, I'm somewhat relieved to inform you that I will not be reporting live from the big contemporary art auctions next week: I've been asked to give a couple of lectures on cultural property issues (from antiquities to Eakins) at the University of Pennsylvania.

More on this latest addition to the "CultureGrrl Curriculum," COMING SOON.

Let's be merciful and avert our eyes from the dispiriting Impressionist/modern sale last night at Sotheby's, which ended with stony silence from the audience, rather than the smattering of relieved applause that had accompanied Christie's relatively solid sale the night before. Some 20 of the 76 works offered failed to sell last night, and they included many of the highest estimated works, led by the late van Gogh landscape, "The Fields." Estimated at $28-35 million, it drew no apparent bidders and was withdrawn at $25 million. The other pricey failure was Picasso's "La Lampe," a painting that had also been estimated to bring up to $35 million.

The auction's sold total, by dollar value, was a paltry 67.6%, compared to 83% at Sotheby's Impressionist/modern sale last November.

The $35-million hammer price for the highest-estimated work in the sale, Gauguin's "Te Poipoi," fell short of its low estimate of $40 million; its $39.24 total price (with buyers premium) just missed the auction record for the artist that Sotheby's had been hoping for. The painting was bought by real estate mogul Joseph Lau of Hong Kong, ranked by Forbes at 458 on its list of the world's billionaires. Lau had purchased Warhol's "Mao" for $17.38 million at Christie's, New York, last November.

Other strong prices were the $29.16 milllion for the Picasso bronze bust of Dora Maar, an auction record for a sculpture by the artist, and the $11.35 million for a Schiele self-portrait, which not only soared above its $4.5-6.5 million presale estimate but also edged out the previous auction record for a work on paper by the artist.

The total hammer price for the sale was $238.8 million, falling considerably short of the $355 million low end of the presale estimate. The sale total including buyers premium was $269.74 million, compared to $394.98 million at Christie's the night before. (Presale estimates are based on hammer price.)

David Norman, Sotheby's Impressionist/modern chairman, blamed his presale estimates for scaring bidders away, and tried, in his comments to reporters, to preempt use of the "C" word:

I don't read this as a warning of the correction in the market. I think it was the composition of the sale. The responsibility lies here.

American buyers acquired 44% of the night's purchases, with Europeans picking up 48% of the sold lots.

He noted that "people were hurrying to ask about the availability of [unsold] pieces," including the van Gogh, directly after the sale. Is it time for some bargain hunting? If "correction" is too strong a word, "softening" isn't.

On a lighter note, I did have my moment before the BBC's TV cameras---in the back seat of a car, of all places. Are you sure Katie Couric started like this?

I'll have more on that tomorrow.

Rather than my filling you in on further details about last night's Impressionist/modern auction at Christie's (which I've already discussed here and here), I'm going to let the NY Times and Bloomberg do it for me.

And you can track the thoughts of the Wall Street Journal's Kelly Crow and Lauren A.E. Schuker in the newspaper's new auction blog, On the Block.

But the most fascinating article, from my informed perspective, was a WSJ piece by the peerless Alexandra Peers, which describes a business practice that was news to me, and would represent yet another serious erosion of the auction house's former role as disinterested broker between buyer and seller, with all participants on a level playing field.

Peers reports:

The financial arrangements underpinning these sales go beyond standard guarantees. In...third-party arrangements, dealers agree to place the first bid, or several bids, in exchange for a lessened buyer's commission [emphasis added] if they win. Such deals are a welcome safety net for the seller---or for the auction house, if it's the guarantor. But they're controversial in that they give dealers a financial edge over private buyers. And they mislead the market. The price reported isn't the one actually paid.

That this raises disturbing questions goes without saying. While the seller's commission is now sometimes negotiated to zero, to help lure important consignments, the fixed buyer's premium had previously been regarded as inviolable. If, as Peers asserts, the prices reported are more than actual prices paid (because of the secretly discounted buyer's premium), there's serious deception going on. Auction prices, publicly arrived at and reported, have traditionally been regarded by everyone, including the IRS, as the best gauge of fair market value.

Maybe we should now change that to unfair market value.

Click below to hear my four auction minutes, "Fall Auction Season Starts Today" (actually, yesterday) from today's Morning Edition on New York Public Radio (WNYC):

Christopher Burge gets a lot more done in four minutes than I do. If you're tuning in to CultureGrrl today from WNYC's website link, please check out my report on last night's first episode of "As the Market Turns," here.

But am I ready for my close-up? The BBC just called to see if I could do a television interview on the auctions today. I'll let you know if it happens. Can we get the BBC-TV in New Jersey?

Where'd everyone go? (Christie's, about two-thirds though the Impressionist/modern marathon)

I think I pretty much got it right in my art-market musings for WNYC's Morning Edition, airing today. But you can listen later and judge for yourself.

Here's a quick recap of tonight's somewhat humdrum but solid sale at Christie's:

The hammer-price total was $349.99 million ($394.98 million with buyers premium), near the low end of the presale estimate of $348.65-$487.45 million. The biggest surprise was the geographical distribution of the buyers: 48.5% American, 24% European, 3% Asian, 1.5% Russian, 1.5% Latin American and 21.5% others. Americans had been expected to play a weaker role, due to the weaker dollar.

The only electricity in the room was reserved for Matisse's "L'Odalisque, Harmonie Bleue," which set an auction record for the artist at $33.64 million. Some 17 of the 91 works in this overly long sale failed to find buyers---a larger percentage of buy-ins than at the comparable Christie's sales last November or last May.

The St. Louis Art Museum's deaccessioned Metzinger, estimated at $700,000-$1 million, fetched a hammer price of $2.1 million ($2.39 million with buyers premium), trouncing the previous auction record for the artist. But its Matisse and Renoir both sold slightly below their estimates.

By the last third of the sale, the place was about two-thirds empty. The remaining people shuffled out at the end looking slightly numb. The evening possessed none of the ebullience of the last two seasons.

I suspect there may be more buzz at Sotheby's tomorrow, where the total presale estimate range, $355-494 million, is slightly higher for 15 fewer works. I'm guessing that the Tahitian Gauguin, the Picasso bronze bust of Dora Maar, the Schiele self-portrait and maybe the late van Gogh landscape and a couple of Picasso paintings could generate some sparks. Dora Maar already got off to a good start last night at Christie's, where Picasso's 1941 painting of her head on a pedestal was knocked down at $14.5 million, compared to an estimate of $6.5-8.5 million.

Do you think the buyer plans to corner the Maar head-on-a-pedestal market by acquiring the bronze, also conceived in 1941, at Sotheby's tonight? That could prove a lot pricier.

Listen to the sound of me falling on my face, as I hazard some some opinions about the state of the art market, taped in the WNYC studio today (face-to-face with the Soterios the Voice!), for airing on Morning Edition tomorrow---by which time the results of tonight's Impressionist/modern sale at Christie's will probably have made a complete fool of me.

If you want to laugh at me (or, preferably, marvel at my perspicacity), you can listen tomorrow morning to NY Public Radio, 93.9 FM or 820 AM. Those of you in Beijing and Moscow can listen live on the station's website, or, later, on the podcast, which I'll post as usual here on CultureGrrl.

Since I always have more to say than I can fit into my allotted radio slot, you can expect me to flesh out (or possibly recant) my views here tomorrow, with the benefit of one auction's worth of chastening hindsight.

---Christa Desrets of the Lynchburg, VA, News & Advance reports that the motion for a temporary injunction to stop the Christie's auctions of four works from Randolph College's Maier Museum (scheduled for Nov. 19 and 29) is to be heard in Lynchburg Circuit Court on Thursday. It's all up to Judge Leyburn Mosby Jr.

---Word arrived from Bloomberg yesterday and the NY Times today on embattled dealer Lawrence Salander's bankruptcy filing. Bloomberg's tireless Philip Boroff keeps advancing the story, with revelations about one of Salander O'Reilly's biggest creditors, First Republic Bank, which Merrill Lynch bought last September. The unfolding scandal, involving a dealer who, until recently, was a member of the prestigious Art Dealers Association of America, cannot help but shake art-consumer confidence. Will a statement from ADAA, which purports to promote "the highest standards of connoisseurship, scholarship and ethical practice within the profession," be forthcoming? I wouldn't count on it.

---Bob Workman, executive director of Crystal Bridges, Alice Walton's nascent American art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, talks back, in the pages of the Benton County Daily Record, to those (including, by name, me) who fret about the Walton Effect's impact on the artworld [via].

---Here's the shortlist of architects now being considered for the Sheikh Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi. With displays about the eponymous first president of the United Arab Emirates and about the history and traditions of Abu Dhabi, the museum is planned for Saadiyat Island, future home to branch offices for the Guggenheim and Louvre brands. Those still in the running in the National Museum competition are: Foster & Partners, Great Britain; Snohetta, Norway; Shingeru Ban, Japan; Moriyama & Teshima, Canada.

No problem. For Christie's sale tonight at 6:30, you can download software here to watch the action from the comfort of your own computer via Christie's Live. You do not have to register, reveal your net worth or raise a cyber-paddle.

Whatever happens to the market, auctioneer Christopher Burge, above, is sure to put on a great show.

Similarly, you can view the Sotheby's action tomorrow night at 7 p.m. in a live webcast here.

Depending on how it goes, you may want to take two aspirins and call your dealer in the morning.

CultureGrrl reader W. Douglass Paschall, curator of collections at the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, responds to Hawking the Auctions: An Irreverent Photo Essay:

"Sotheby's Blue," the color the auction house is using for this season, looks remarkably similar to the wall color we used at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for a show of Francis Criss' paintings in 2002. Had I known the color was going to be claimed, I'd have cited it in the credits. Hope they'll understand.

The most fun about auction press previews is that interested potential bidders start filtering in at the same time, so you get to see the sales specialists romancing potential clients.

This was Lisa Dennison's first chance to work the room for a major sale since she defected from her directorship of the Guggenheim Museum to become a Sotheby's rainmaker.

Here she is in a starring role on the auction house's podcast (running continuously at the presale exhibition), telling us how much she had hoped to show Koons' "Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)" at the museum. "But the show kept getting postponed and postponed and postponed. So when I came to Sotheby's, it gave me great joy to know that it has been consigned." Such joy is fleeting.

She certainly knows her way around the Koons, but how about the Corot that she is discussing, below, with potential clients?

And here's Sotheby's veteran John Tancock, the auction world's reigning Rodin expert, called over to share his connoisseurship about posthumous casts (which, for this artist, are widely accepted by the art market and by major museums). This example of "The Thinker" was cast in the early 1920s, not long after the sculptor's death. Tancock made sure to note the piece's previous owner---Laurance Rockefeller.

Speaking of Rockefeller provenance, you'd think that after selling David's Rothko for $72.8 million last season, Sotheby's would have gotten the cataloguing of this season's Rothko right. Alex Rotter of Sotheby's contemporary department had told Bloomberg: "We were offered Rothkos right, left and center." And also upside down, it seems:

[Please note this work is reproduced upside down in the catalogue.]

David Norman, Impressionist/modern chairman of Sotheby's, noted that he had received many compliments about "Sotheby's Blue," the new color chosen for the walls by senior vice president Emmanuel Di-Donna:

Afterwards, just as I had once been attuned to Christo Gates Orange, I started noticing Sotheby's Blue all over the place---a row of dresses in the window display of a Madison Avenue boutique near the Whitney...

...and, what's that? It's on every front door of every apartment in my own building!

Could it be that Di-Donna resides in my New Jersey apartment complex?

Wait...stop the presses! This just in from Christopher Riopelle, curator of post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, London:

Many thanks for alerting us that Signac's"Cap Canaille, Cassis" [about to be auctioned by Christie's] is still on our website even though the loan of the painting ended some three months ago. There's supposed to be a system in place to coordinate such things but, as you remind us, it still takes eternal vigilance.

It certainly does.

Okay, so you think these auctions are very important, and you want to us get serious. For that, I refer you to Linda Sandler in today's Bloomberg. Just note (which Sandler doesn't) that the third quarter is traditionally a loser for the auction houses, because there are so few sales scheduled then. (Their officials are all off at the Hamptons, offering big guarantees for major fall consignments.)

Twice in the last few days, I heard art-market pundits equate art with stocks. What's wrong with this picture?

In this podcast, I'll look ahead to the crucial major art sales coming up in the next two weeks, compare sale results thus far this year with results for the same period in 2006, and debunk a few myths.

If all goes according to plan (which it seldom does), you'll hear me comment on the market, in a somewhat different vein, later this week on New York Public Radio (WNYC).

Click below to listen:

Brace yourself.

Click on this Associated Press story and you will see photos of the uncovered face of Tutankhamun's mummy.

Anna Johnson reports:

Archeologists carefully lifted the fragile mummy out of a quartz sarcophagus decorated with stone-carved protective goddesses, momentarily pulling aside a beige covering to reveal a leathery black body.

"I can say for the first time that the mummy is safe and the mummy is well preserved, and at the same time, all the tourists who will enter this tomb will be able to see the face of Tutankhamun for the first time," Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said from inside the hot and sticky tomb.

More photos of the mummy unveiling are on the BBC's website, here. Egypt plans to display mummy indefinitely in Tut's tomb in Luxor, according to the AP report.

You mean he doesn't get to travel to London and Dallas with the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs extravaganza?

Vogel's Pick: Signac, "Cap Canaille, Cassis," 1889

All of you NY Times readers who are heading over to Sotheby's this weekend on the strength of Carol Vogel's first-paragraph assertion (in her front-page Sunday "Arts & Leisure" article) that you can now ogle Jeff Koons' "shiny, bright-red dangling heart," please turn right around and come back on Nov. 10.

It's been taken off view so as not to upstage the Impressionist/modern offerings. If you go to the presale exhibition area now, you will have to make do with the likes of Gauguin and Picasso. For those who arrive on the premises with heart pangs, Sotheby's is continuously screening this video, in which auctioneer Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's head of contemporary art, and Lisa Dennison, executive vice president (who plays her Guggenheim card while extolling Koons) gaze lovingly at the enormous cardio-bauble.

We all make mistakes, and CultureGrrl's first fall auction prediction has already proven wrong: I suggested that Vogel, as is her wont, would out the "anonymous" consignors. But she tells no such tales in her "Telltale Art" piece. Scanning the merchandise, she particularly admires a Signac offered at Christie's, "Cap Canaille, Cassis" (above), "whose owner has not been identified."

Its most recent exhibitor HAS been identified---the National Gallery, London, where it was on loan from December 2003 until last August. Someone ought to tell that museum to take it off the website, where it is still listed, at this writing, as "on loan from a private collection."

Like everyone else, Vogel focuses on the "will it burst?" question and ramps up market anxiety by making a blanket assertion, for which she offers no evidence, that the works in the big sales are being offered with "optimistically high estimates."

At yesterday's press preview, both David Norman, Impressionist/modern chairman, and Anthony Grant, senior contemporary art specialist, painstakingly explained how their estimates on key pieces were reasonably conservative, given previous prices for comparable works.

The market will soon tell us who's right. The megabucks buyers, not impecunious pundits, are the ones who will make (or break) this market.

UPDATE: I've just had another of those "Did she really say that?" moments: Listening to Vogel's audio slide show accompanying the online version of her piece, can it be that I heard her say this:

In seasons past, when there's been trouble in the financial markets, the auctions have enjoyed an incredible boom, with people feeling safer putting money in art...than they have in things like stocks.

I've heard of art as a speculative investment and even as a hedge against inflation. But a flight to safety?!?

Gee, I think I'll get my parents' money out of Treasury Bills and buy them this Basquiat (Lot 481 at Sotheby's contemporary day sale):

Sotheby's David Norman smiles for the camera.
Picasso's bronze "Dora Maar" doesn't.

I know, I know. You want CultureGrrl to give you some inside insights about how the art market will fare at the big Impressionist/modern sales next week and the big contemporary sales the following week, so that you can decide just how many millions you ought to shell out.

But I'd rather let Reuters do it for me. Actually, so would the NY Times, on whose website this Reuters piece appeared.

"Where," we all ask ourselves plaintively, "is the usual Friday round-up, outing all those "anonymous" consignors, from the NY Times' own auction sage, Carol Vogel? How could she be silent, letting herself be scooped by Reuters on her own website?"

Don't fret, art-lings. Her usual major sales preview has been moved to this Sunday's "Arts & Leisure" section, according to David Norman of Sotheby's. Chatting with me at today's press preview for the big evening sales, the chairman of the auction house's Impressionist/modern department strove to debunk the "bubble burst" babble by noting that the "presale build-up," in terms of visits and in-depth inquiries from potential buyers, "has been just as strong as last season."

Whether this will translate into the same astonishingly manic bidding that we saw in New York last spring is anybody's guess.

So while we await word from Carol, here's what the market mavens at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal have already filed.

To confuse you even further, you can glance through the following articles that appeared after last month's London contemporary sales, each of which conflicts with the others in interpreting the results: the International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg (here and here).

I think this calls for another irreverent photo essay, don't you? COMING SOON.

Red figure loutrophoros (ceramic), attributed to the Darius Painter. South Italian, Apulian, ca. 335-325 B.C. Image courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum

As I previously reported, the Princeton University Art Museum determined which works it should send back to Italy based on a "matrix" that took into consideration, among other things, "connection to individuals and ongoing investigations."

Which individuals or investigations, it would not say.

But in his blog "Looting Matters," David Gill, a member of the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Egyptology at Swansea University, Wales, manages to dot some "i's," cross some "t's" and raise some red flags.

His posts, which give some background about the objects, including their Princeton accession numbers are here. He notes the probably not merely coincidental fact that Princeton, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Getty Museum all agreed to return Apulian pottery attributed to the Darius painter. (Princeton's is pictured above.)

But the history of these objects is still murky and the public has not been given any specific information about why these works are being relinquished to Italy. Gill therefore asks:

Were the curatorial staff unaware of the previous histories? Will Princeton be releasing the names of the individuals, dealers or galleries who handled the pieces prior to acquisition?

Universities, of all places, ought not to suppress information that they have about their holdings...unless releasing this would compromise ongoing investigations. In that case, they should just say so.

Photo of François Boucher, "Reclining Girls and Cupid," Confiscated Collection: R 360 (Rothschild Collection, France)

The National Archives yesterday announced the discovery of two original leather-bound albums of photographs documenting art looted by the Nazis during World War II. Both will be donated to the Archives by Robert Edsel, author of "Rescuing Da Vinci" and president of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. (The foundation provides no information on its website about its officials or members, or about whether they have any connection to the original Monuments Men---the celebrated World War II era's art rescuers, several of whom were interviewed in the absorbing Rape of Europa movie about the Nazis' art confiscations and the subsequent recoveries and restitutions.)

Images (including the example above) from one of the two recently discovered albums can be seen here.

CNN gives further details:

The albums...came from the descendants of an American soldier stationed in Germany who found them at Hitler's home in Berghof, tossed them into his rucksack and brought them home with him. They sat in an attic for years until the family of the now-deceased soldier contacted the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, a group that helps to recover and find the home of previously stolen artwork.

Unexplained in any account I have seen thus far are why the volumes are being donated by Edsel, rather than by the family, and why he is relinquishing only one of them immediately. He intends to hand over the second album to the Archives at an unspecified "future time," but will "make this volume or images of it available to researchers upon request," according to the Archives.

Yesterday's announcement noted:

The National Archives has custody of the 39 original ERR photograph albums that were discovered at Neuschwanstein, where the Germans, in April 1945, had placed them for safekeeping. In late 1945, this set of 39 albums was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials to document the massive Nazi art looting operations.

Some 100 such volumes are said to have been created by the ERR, the unit responsible for confiscating Jewish art collections. It had been thought that the missing albums were destroyed towards the end of World War II.

According to U.S. Archivist Allen Weinstein, "Documents such as these may play a role in...helping victims recover their treasures."

Is it time for another round of provenance research?

On Zahi Hawass' "Wanted" List: "Bust of Prince Ankhhaf," Egyptian, Old Kingdom, 2520-2494 B.C., Boston Museum of Fine Arts

In his revealing Al Jazeera television interview, posted today on ArtsJournal's home page, Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, unintentionally demonstrated why the British Museum; Louvre; Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim; Egyptian Museum, Berlin; and Boston Museum of Fine Arts may be justifiably wary about his request that they send their signature ancient artifacts to Egypt for a temporary vacation in their native land.

At one point in the conversation with journalist Riz Khan, Hawass stated:

I want them [the ancient artifacts] to come for a visit for three months, for the opening of the great museum in the shadow of the Pyramid.

But later in the interview, he sounded less the kind host than the potential captor. He forcefully declared:

The Rosetta Stone [the "loan" he desires from the British Museum] is in England. We own that stone. The motherland should own this.

Comments like that are why museums asked to lend coveted objects to repatriation-minded source countries are concerned that once in the bosom of the "motherland," the loans may not get to use their return tickets.

During the interview, Hawass also provided one of those priceless "Did he really say that?" moments. In describing his ongoing row with the St. Louis Art Museum over its 3,200-year-old mummy mask, he confided to Khan:

I even wrote to schools of kids and told them not to go and visit that museum, because there is an artifact that belongs to a country that was stolen and should come back to Egypt.

If your powers of persuasion don't work on the State Department (to which he also wrote), try St. Louis' six-year-olds---schoolyard diplomacy.

On the Block: Childe Hassam, "Sunset at Sea," 1911, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University

Auction houses always tout museum consignments in their presale press releases, because of the cachet and higher market value that distinguished provenance confers. Not so in the press release (click on Nov. 29) for Christie's upcoming American paintings, drawings and sculpture sale, which highlights major works by George Bellows and Edward Hicks, as well as the "finest example" by Ernest Martin Hennings to appear at auction. It conspicuously fails to mention that they are all tainted by the deplorable deaccessioning disaster at the Maier Museum, engineered by the administration of Randolph College.

Similarly, the Maier provenance is omitted from the press release for this month's Latin American art sale trumpeting the Rufino Tamayo offered at Christie's by the Maier.

I guess the auction house doesn't want potential buyers to be spooked by visions of the Maier Monday Massacre. They want the kind of buoyant bidding that will justify their prediction that Bellows' "Men of the Docks" will set a new auction record for any American painting and that Tamayo's "Trovador" may set an auction record for that artist. Might some principled buyers have appropriate scruples about participating in this widely condemned sell-off?

The auction house had no similar reticence, in its press release, about publicizing the museum provenance of two other works in the American sale: Cassatt's "Françoise in Green, Sewing," deemed expendable by the St. Louis Art Museum (which owns no other painting by that artist); and a "shimmering Childe Hassam, 'Sunset at Sea' [above] from the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University...a spectacular example of Hassam working at the height of his powers."

Hasn't the Rose Museum learned anything?

Calmer Times at MASS MoCA

MASS MoCA is trying to move beyond its recent trials by opening, later this month, an exhibition of new projection works (above) by Jenny Holzer. To help get back on its financial feet, it's counting on the kindness of friends like Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns and Meryl Streep.

Those luminaries are among the donors of art and/or time to MASS MoCA's benefit auction next Wednesday in New York. (The benefit party is sold out, but absentee bidding, using an online form, is open.) Rauschenberg has donated not only a lithograph, but also a two-night stay at his beach house on Captiva Island, Florida, and tours of his and Darryl Pottorf's studios on their Captiva compound. "The winning bidder will have dinner with Rauschenberg, Pottorf, and their gallerists Jane and Henry Eckert at the enigmatic Mad Hatter restaurant....Total Package Value: Inestimable."

Or you can visit the Long Island City studio of sculptor Don Gummer, whose "Primary Separation" is installed at MASS MoCA, and enjoy dinner for six at a restaurant with Gummer and his celebrated wife, Meryl Streep. "Dinner includes six hard-to-find, spectacular wines." Will Streep do her best Anna Wintour impersonation?

The North Adams, MA, institution is going to need some heedless, well-heeled bidders to help it climb out of the financial hole created by Debacle Büchel. Speaking of which, one of the artist's attorneys, Art Law Blog-ger Donn Zaretsky, has just informed me that his client is still awaiting U.S. District Court Judge Michael Ponsor's written decision, formalizing his Sept. 21 oral ruling in favor of MASS MoCA. Once that is handed down, Zaretsky said, Büchel will make "a final decision on the [possible] appeal."