Archives for July 2010

Make what you will of surveys of the “best” — they may be predictable, or tainted by politics and friendships among peers and rivals, but they are still interesting. Vanity Fair‘s August issue is out with a list of the best buildings erected since 1980, chosen by 52 architects. Among the voters were Zaha Hadid, Hugh Hardy, Ricardo Scofidio, Cesar Pelli, and David Chipperfield.

The No. 1 building is no surprise: Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao with 28 votes (at left). As critic Paul Goldberger says in the article, the museum was a “rare moment” when critics, academics and the public agreed on a building’s merit.

But considering all the museum-building that has taken place the world over since 1980, and the talk that museums are the cathedrals of today, it’s notable that three other museum made the top 10, but with not all that many votes: the Menil Collection in Houston, by Renzo Piano, at No. 2 (10 votes); the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, by Sir James Stirling (6 votes), tied with three others at No. 5, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, by Daniel Libeskind (4 votes), tied with two others at No. 10.

It’s also notable that the extended list — of all 21 buildings receiving more than two votes — extends the honor to Steven Holl’s addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (3 votes). (I liked that building, too.)

So, five buildings out of 21 for visual arts structures. I’d say several highly-touted buildings are missing. And, just maybe, that several architects have been coasting for the last decade or so.  

And don’t think that’s because the architects want to spread the honors, with few repeats. Three buildings by Rem Koolhas make the list — he’s the only one with more than one building on the main list. The entire roster, with pictures, of the vote-getters is here. The pictures are really worth a look. 

VF’s other list, of the top 21st century structures, includes Hadid’s MAXXI museum in Rome — it also received 2 votes. 

ArtTactic, the London-based market research and advice company, has added the world of Contemporary Design to its portfolio. This week, it published a report reviewing the market, including a list of “its important players and the most important Contemporary Designers of today.” It also launched the “ArtTactic Contemporary Design Index, which will track the performance in the Contemporary Design market going forward.”

Most of this is behind a paywall. The report, just 13 pages, costs £75.00.

But I’ve procured some highlights for RCA readers that go beyond the press release, which itself had some interesting items (quoting):

• The ArtTactic Contemporary Design Market Price Index has experienced a recovery of 17.6% in 2010.
• Total value of Contemporary Design is down 18% for the first half of 2010, compared to the same period last year. This is largely a result of Christie’s focus on early 20th century design, with no significant contemporary design material sold in 2010.
• Phillips de Pury becomes the leading house for Contemporary Design, with 68% market share for the first half of 2010.
• The top 10 designers account for 67.6% of the total auction turnover of contemporary design. The rest is shared among approximately 270 designers that have come to auction since 2006.
• Marc Newson defines the top end of the Contemporary Design auction market, with a 24% share of the total contemporary design value. One of his ‘Lockheed Lounge’ chairs sold for a record $1.8 million in May 2010.

Now for the exclusive part: Totalling auction sales by Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury between 2006-10 (to date), the top ten designers and their market share, with the dollar value of their sales, are: 

1) Marc Newson: $7,652,490 (23.9% market share)
2) George Nakashima: $3,321,721 (10.4% market share) (that’s his bench, below)
3) Ron Arad: $3,148,899  (9.8% market share)
4) Claude Lalanne: $2,119,493 (6.6% market share)
5) Francois-Xavier Lalanne: $1,433,157  (4.5% market share)
6) Campana Brothers: $1,182,940 (3.7% market share)
7) Zaha Hadid: $789,181 (2.5% market share)
8) Shiro Kuramata: $660,507 (2.1% market share)

9) Shigeru Ban: $500,000 (1.6% market share)
10) Gaetano Pesce: %336,930 (1.1% market share)

These numbers are limited, obviously — they can’t tell what’s happening in galleries, the same way we can’t know what’s happening in the gallery sector of the art markets. But they’re interesting as a guideline.

And for other reasons.

Contemporary design, I’m told, is of growing interest to museums — partly because they can afford it, while much contemporary art is out of their reach, price-wise. If so few designers are truly in demand, it suggests that the big collectors are behaving in a herd manner — just as they are in contemporary art. Only a few artists dominate the market, creating a virtuous circle for their work and ever-higher prices.

That’s not usually good in contemporary works, where to borrow from Mao, we should let a hundred — or more — designers bloom. Then, over time, history can settle its judgment.    

1760 wasn’t all that great a year for art, at least according to Wikipedia. Thomas Lawrence and Hokusai were the most prominent painters born that year, and Guardi and Shen Quan were among those artists who died. Wikipedia’s Year in Art doesn’t list any art works created in 1760.

But in Paris, a man named Giovanni Battista Torre established a shop called “Cabinet de Physique Experimentale,” which sold scientific instruments, books and prints. He set up another shop, in London, in 1767.

From this enterprise, which depended on print sales for its first 150 years, came Colnaghi, the great Old Master dealer. Colnaghi now claims to be “the world’s oldest commercial art gallery,” and since mid-June and through July, it has been celebrating with an exhibition about its fascinating history — pulling out manuscripts, drawings, prints, photos and account books from its archives. I wish I were in London — the shop is now located at 15 Old Bond Street (not far from where I once worked, for four years, in London, but I was too intimidated by its presence to enter) — to see it.

Paul Colnaghi went to work for Torre’s son Anthony in 1783 (against the advice of Benjamin Franklin, who told him to move to America), and took control of the business by 1788.  

Colnaghi moved into Old Master paintings in the last quarter of the 19th century, and says it sold many masterpieces to the Berlin Museum and many great paintings bought by Henry Frick, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Andrew Mellon — works that “form the backbone of some of the greatest American museum collections.”

Artists wrote many of the documents on view:

• John Constable wrote to Dominic Colnaghi asking if he could help arrange shipment of a painting (not identified in the letter but known to be The Cornfield, now in the National Gallery in London) to the Paris Salon.
• Delacroix asked Colnaghi for help getting a painting accepted at the British Institution.
• Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun wants help finding sales of engravings of one of her potraits (top).
• George Bernard Shaw writes to ask where a portrait bust he lent to an exhibition is (bottom).

Colnaghi has also put on view the letters, photos, account books that trace the sale of one of his most transactions to Americans: Titian’s Europa, bought by Gardner, which some view as the most important Italian Renaissance painting on these shores.

There’s much more to the gallery’s history — though not all is there, either (including its one-time branch on New York — if anyone remembers why it close, please comment below). It would probably take a book.

Colnaghi held a study day about its history and art during the period on July 2, too, and all I can say is, congratulations.

A few more images are below:

[Read more…] about 250 Years Of Art-Dealing: Colnaghi Celebrates Big Sales, Big Buyers, Long History

Now that all the euphoria has died down about the Whitney Museum’s announcement in May to break ground in downtown Manhattan, it’s time to take a look at a few issues the move raises.

For a start, in the press coverage, little if any attention was paid to the Whitney’s declining attendance. Yet its drop is far worse than other museums. As I write for the June issue of The Art Newspaper, 

The board’s excitement about the move has as much to do with the building’s location at the south end of the elevated High Line park created on a disused railway line [as it does with the new space]. The site is seen as the answer to the Whitney’s attendance problem. Last year the museum drew a meagre 322,000 visitors–a sharp decline from past years. In the late 1990s the museum regularly attracted 650,000 to 670,000 visitors.

[But] New York’s meatpacking district hums with activity morning, day and night, and the High Line, which opened in June 2009, attracted more than two million visitors in its first year. “Many of these people will wander into the Whitney, and be smitten with art,” hopes a board member.”The core of people that go to the Whitney will grow exponentially.”

UPDATED: I should have added here that neither the Metropolitan Museum, nor the Museum of Modern Art, have trouble attracting audiences uptown. MoMA’s in particular is the younger audience the Whitney seems to crave.

So why should the Whitney have problems? Something has obviously gone wrong with its programming. Museums like the Whitney should, if they’re programming well, offer a mix of programming. I suspect that’s part of the Whitney’s problem. It may also be marketing, or lack thereof. 

But a move downtown may not solve this problem. The Guggenheim’s Soho outpost, after all, failed.

NOW BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POST:

Whitney staff is also working now with architect Renzo Piano, brainstorming how all the new space, including outdoor terraces, might go beyond the “white box” look.

And the Whitney board is considering nighttime hours, according to Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, a longtime trustee. That’s something I’ve argued for here. The Whitney currently closes at 6pm, and 9pm on Fridays, and I hope the trustees will blaze a trail here for other museums — staying open until 8 or 9 most nights, even if it means opening at noon.

The Whitney is mum on what it will do — long-term — with the uptown Breuer building (it can’t afford two buildings, most outsiders say), probably because it doesn’t know. The posssible leasing deal with the Metropolitan Museum is short-term.

At my suggestion, The Art Newspaper asked a couple of people for their thoughts on the long-term. My own feelings align most closely with those of David Ross, a former director, who said, in part:

…an idea that has for quite some time has intrigued me, would be that the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum (and possibly even MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem) would collaborate on a space devoted to an expansive presentation of early though mid-century 20th-century American Art. The building is perfectly suited to the exhibition of American Modernism, and frankly, neither the Met nor MoMA devote enough major space or sufficient resources to this period, and the Studio Museum is years away from being able to provide space appropriate to its important mission.

I hadn’t thought about the need for collaboration, but I love the idea of a museum of American Modernism.

(That’s Breuer in his Whitney in the photo, btw.)

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Art Newspaper 

You know the work — Charles Demuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold — and probably appreciate it viscerally. Even children do, as I write in today’s Wall Street Journal, where I’ve written an anatomy of the painting for the Saturday Masterpiece column.

But there’s so much more to the painting. To wit:

“…It’s the best work in a genre Demuth created, the “poster portrait.” It’s a witty homage to his close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, and a transliteration into paint of his poem, “The Great Figure.” It’s a decidedly American work made at a time when U.S. artists were just moving beyond European influences. It’s a reference to the intertwined relationships among the arts in the 1920s, a moment of cross-pollination that led to American Modernism. And it anticipates Pop art.”

Read the rest here. And read more about the Masterpiece column here.

Photo Credit: Courtesty Metropolitan Museum of Art