Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Art Market

Damage/Aid To Chelsea Galleries, Plus Five Questions About Relief

The weather has been beautiful in New York, and galleries in Chelsea continue to reopen after cleaning up the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. It’ll take a long time for complete recovery, though. The other day, Bloomberg reported that

Axa SA, the French insurer that underwrites more than $1 billion of art in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, said it has received $40 million in claims from Hurricane Sandy and has already sent checks to policyholders.

The company insures 66 galleries in Chelsea — you can at least quadruple that number to get a fuller idea of the damage among all Chelsea dealers.

A few more details from Bloomberg are here, and a trade website called PropertyCasualty360 has a more complete report here.

On Friday, the Art Dealers Association of America issues a press release noting that its Relief Fund had doubled in value to more than $500,000, with pledges coming “from galleries, private collectors, publications, and other non-profits and industry supporters.” They include $50,000 pledges from Art Basel, the Pace Gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and David Zwirner.  Here is the full release — ADAA_Relief_Fundraising_Release_11_16_12.

And the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Lambent Foundation on Thursday announced a relief effort to assist artists and non-profit arts organizations who suffered serious damage from the storm — with the Warhol Foundation alone committing $2 million, half for organizations and half for artists. Details here.

Earlier in the week, I’d asked ADAA’s Executive Director Linda Blumberg to answer Five Questions. Here are her reponses:

1) Does ADAA have an estimate of damage to Chelsea galleries overall, and an idea of how many galleries might be eligible to apply to the relief fund? It’s too early to know the full extent of the damage.  We just know the cost of re-building will be enormous.   

2) How many galleries have applied so far?   We have 20 applications to date.  It is a rolling application process.

3) Three have won awards — how did they move the top of the line (I.E., using what criteria?) and what are the size of the grants? Actually, we distributed four grants last Friday and they were the first ones to apply.  The size of the grants will depend on the amount of damage sustained and the need, but usually $10,000.

4) The fund started at $250,000 — how much is it now, and what plans does ADAA have to raise money for it?  With donations from gallerists and others in the arts community, the ADAA Relief Fund has over doubled in size.

5) Do you know of galleries that were hit so hard that they simply will not reopen?  I do not know of any and we hope that our program will help stop that from happening.

As you can see, help from ADAA — while worthwhile — won’t solve the problems of Chelsea’s galleries. Let’s hope they all had good insurance. Chubb and Castle Rock are among the other fine art insurance companies, but I couldn’t find their damage estimates online, at least.

Photo Credit: Getty Images via ArtInfo

Is This Moore Being Sold On A False Premise?

I’m back from a trip to the UK — where I saw much that I hope to write about, some here — and one sad story I learned of while there concerns the east London town of Tower Hamlets, which has voted to sell off a Henry Moore sculpture, Draped Seated Woman. The town, quite poor, is facing budget cuts and wants to use the proceeds to make up the cuts. Christie’s got the consignment and will sell the work in February.

The town council is expecting to raise some $30 million from it, but as The Telegraph points out, the expectation may be built on a lack of understanding of the art market. The “comparable” example that whetted the town’s appetite occurred last February for about that amount, but “the estimate on that sculpture was only 3.5 million to 4.5 million pounds, and the eventual sale was driven by competition between two bidders, the winner being a dealer who represents Russian collectors. If that collector was not bidding, it would have sold for less than half the eventual price, and they[sic], presumably, are now out of the equation.”

Furthermore, the Telegraph notes, the previous comparable, a sculpture called Draped Reclining Woman, fetched the equivalent of about $6 to $7 million in 2008.

It’s reasonable to question whether the town council would sell the piece for that price — which is not enough to cover it projected lost funds.

Moore sold his piece to the city for a price below market value in the 1960s. Artists, Moore’s daughter, Sir Nicholas Serota and other have protested the sale, but to no avail. Part of the problem, however, may be that the work has been on loan to the Yorkshire Scultpure Park, not on view in Tower Hamlets. According to the BBC, “the sculpture was moved after the Tower Hamlets housing estate in which it was housed was demolished in the late 1990s.”

Sadly, this is not a separate case. As previous Telegraph article related:

The sculpture is the latest in a burgeoning list of sales of public artworks by councils. Last year, Bolton Council sold seven works of art, including a painting by John Everett Millais, while Newcastle City Council put £270,000 of publicly funded artwork for sale on eBay, and Gloucester city council approved plans to sell 14 works of art valued at £381,000.

But I wonder if these public sales are built on false hopes.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Press Association via The Telegraph

Life — And Hope — Return To Chelsea — UPDATED

I hadn’t planned to write about Chelsea, because I haven’t been down there yet. But all day long, I’ve received emails from galleries announcing exhibition openings and returns to life.

Which is not what I expected. The first email I received from there today was bleak. Wrote one correspondent: “[The area] is truly a disaster, lost art, lost galleries, lost businesses, massive destruction.  Where is the press on this? … It is an economic story as well as an art story, and it is a human story.”

I pointed out that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, New York Magazine, and many others — some posted here via links — have been writing about it. But nevermind: when one is feeling beleagered, one wants attention.

And today, CNN chimed in with this report, citing dealer Leo Koenig saying, “I would not be surprised if, when it’s all said and done, the damage that is done to our art world will be in the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in unrecoverable work.”

Then the good news began to arrive. C24 Gallery, on W. 24th St., is opening an exhibit of work by Ali Kazma on Wednesday; Maccarone gallery will open an exhibition by Edgar Arceneaux on Nov. 10; Metro Pictures postponed the opening of Gary Simmons, but said its upstairs gallery will be opening soon; the New Museum reopened over this past weekend; Carmichael Gallery is opening a show by Eriberto and Estevan Oriol on Nov. 8, and so on. David Zwirner wrote saying his gallery will reopen on Friday, Nov.. 9.

Being the master of public relations that he is, Zwirner also wrote a “personal letter” that said, among other things:

As you surely know by now, Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on New York City’s Chelsea gallery district. Virtually all the galleries in the area sustained flooding, resulting in damages to spaces and art.

The rescue and rebuilding efforts that got underway immediately after the storm have been extraordinary, and we have been moved by the outpouring of sympathy and support not only from the artists of the gallery but also from the art community at large. Thank you! …

…As telephone lines in the area are still being repaired, you might have a hard time reaching us on our land line so we would encourage you to contact us via email or cell phone instead.

We are very much looking forward to hearing from you or, even better, welcoming you here on 19th Street in Chelsea.

If you’re in New York, another fine art offer came out this afternoon; many museums waived their admission charges last week, and today the Neue Galerie — way uptown, and there out of the problem area –  “free admission to its galleries. Café Sabarsky’s chef Kurt Gutenbrunner and his team will serve complementary Glühwein and hot mulled cider in the lobby. This special offering is made to our visitors in recognition of the recent events brought on by Hurricane Sandy.”

UPDATED: Jerry Saltz is singing a similar tune on New York Magazine’s website.

Photo Credit: CRG Gallery, Courtesy of Art Info

 

 

 

 

Update on Chelsea Galleries — UPDATED

Gallerist NY has an article and more pictures of the damage done by Hurricane Sandy, posted here, and headlined Chelsea Galleries Begin Recovery Work.

UPDATE: Here’s a Reuters story with different details.

I have not been south of 42nd St., and so have not personally seen the damage, but I have spoken to a couple of people, some on second floors or higher of Chelsea buildings who are assuming no damage but can’t gain access to see for sure. Those on the ground floor all seem to have suffered losses, even if they removed some art to storage on higher ground. From Gallerist, here’s a picture of Haunch of Venison Gallery on West 21st St.:

 

 

 

International Print Week, Me And A New Appreciation

Hurricane Sandy has, as my last brief post indicated, messed up a lot of lives and livelihoods in the art world, among others. Late today, Sotheby’s postponed its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, moving it from Monday, Nov. 5, to Thursday, Nov. 8. Christie’s sale had been set for Wednesday, the 7th, and it seems to be going ahead.

Earlier this week, the International Fine Print Dealers Association postponed the annual opening of its print fair here in New York from tonight until tomorrow, and the International Print Center moved the opening of its annual fall print exhibition from last night to tonight and then was forced to postpone until further notice. IPC is based in waterlogged Chelsea, which has little if any electricity.

But I am going ahead with what I planned to blog about anyway — as I had two connections to print week. For a start, I wrote a piece about the print market for the October issue of Art + Auction. It has not been posted on line, though it’s on my website. Here’s the money quote, so to speak:

Traditionally, fine prints have appealed to new art buyers with limited resources as well as to committed collectors who are pursuing the gamut of works made by favored artists. But in recent years, with the very best paintings fetching record-breaking prices that place them beyond the reach of all but the top 0.1 percent of buyers, prints have been getting a second look from a broader range of people. Collectors are learning that prints may be the best way to purchase distinctive images by well-known artists, and that many artists devote considerable effort to making important, highly desirable works in print mediums. Moreover, in the world of online art sales, prints have been a success story.

Read further and you’ll find out where you can buy a Cezanne for $35,000, among other samplings. The best thing about writing that story was reminding myself, and readers, that prints aren’t copies of other works — artists use them for many reasons, including to test out techniques and images, and they’re originals.

Which is a nice segue to my second connection: in August, I served on the jury for the New Prints show at the IPC, and I wrote the essay for the exhibition. It will be published online once the show opens, and I will link to it here. It isn’t easy for six people to review some 2,600 prints together in one day (we could preview them online) and then agree on the “best.” We were tough — we chose only 36 prints by 26 artists.

After reviewing the process in my mind, and explaining in print what we didn’t do (seek balance, etc.), I was forced to distill what we did this way:

If pressed to describe how we made our decisions, I’d say that a print had to strike us viscerally. It had to have visual impact. And it had to speak to us, sometimes directly, sometimes – we discovered afterwards, when we reviewed our selections – in relation to another print. It had to have staying power, lingering in our minds. Nothing slipped in – that’s why the final count is so small…

We chose prints that were funny, beautiful, romantic, shocking, delicate, brutal, inventive, emotional, confronting, confining, expansive, and lyrical….

I’ll give you a few more hints: some were aesthetically pleasing, of course, but others had a built-in conflict, a look but don’t look aspect, perhaps, or a beauty-and-discomfort angle.

All of this has given me a new appreciation for prints, and I’ll be going tomorrow to the delayed opening of the fair.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Pace Master Prints (top); Galerie St. Etienne (bottom)