Artelligence Podcast

Dane Jensen just opened his own art advisory firm in Los Angeles. He has worked in the art and auction industry as a curator, auction house specialist and art advisor. He became much more visible after engaging in an epic bidding war over Ernie Barnes’s The Sugar Shack II that sold to energy trader Bill Perkins for more than $15 million at Christie’s in May of 2022. In this podcast, Jensen talks about the role of an art advisor as well as what makes Los Angeles distinctive in terms of its collectors, their goals and what they value. We also talk about Ernie Barnes, how his market has rapidly globalized and, of course, what it was like to bid in that wild auction for The Sugar Shack.

In this podcast, David Galperin, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Art for the Americas talks about the success of Justin Caguiat’s work in last month’s The Now sale, the continuing success of Jadé Fadojutimi’s work and how the cycle of discovery has accelerated. Why do young artists or historically overlooked artists launch so quickly into auction sales cycles? How does the discovery market function and what’s the interplay between galleries and auction houses.

Natasha Degen is the chair of the graduate program in art market studies at FIT in New York. She has just published a book called Merchants of Style, Art and Fashion after Warhol. That subtitle doesn’t really capture the depth and nuance of her book. SHe has written an anatomy of the ways art and fashion have become intertwined in the present-day global economy. It’s not just that major fashion brands have latched onto artists as way to market their wares and their brands. Degen unpacks the cultural codes and institutional structures that have promoted this convergence. In this podcast, she also speculates on what has been gained and lost by both art and fashion—and what’s at risk going forward.

The New York auctions begin this week with just over 2000 lots on offer. The combined low estimate is nearly $1.37 billion dollars. If we remove the Allen collection from last November’s sales, we’re still at about the same level in terms of the value of the low estimate. If that doesn’t surprise you, you’re lucky. That means you didn’t spend three months after November’s auctions waiting for a global recession to begin. During that period, little art traded hands. Now that the economic slowdown hasn’t happened—yet—it would seem as though the art market is trying to make up for lost time and take advantage of this goldilocks moment. Pre-sale guarantees seem to be down but the freight train of collections and estates hasn’t stopped either. In this podcast, we’re going to hear from the specialists at Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s about some of the lots selling this month. There’s so much high quality art on offer, we’re not going to get to it all. But here are some of the interesting stories.

When the $270 million dollar Gerald Fineberg collection was announced, Christie’s Sara Friedlander remarked that the Boston real estate developer, “bought art like a curator.” Citing his ability to go deep into key movements like the artists of Black Mountain College, the Ninth Street Women, Gutai, Pop, Minimalism, Arte Povera and the Pictures Generation, Friedlander also points out that Fineberg had important works by Gerhard Richter, Christopher Wool, Alice Neel, Man Ray, Beauford Delaney and Barkley Hendricks. We sat down this week to talk through as much of the art on offer as we could possibly discuss in 30 minutes. Highlights from the Fineberg collection are on view at Christie’s until May 13th when the entire collection will be on display at the auction house’s Rockefeller Center headquarters. The highlights are hung in an engaging “salon” style—that means the works are sitting edge-to-edge—but the final exhibition will offer a different perspective. Auction season in New York is a rare opportuni

S.I. Newhouse Jr. was a titan of the media business in the late 20th Century, presiding over Conde Nast but also owning with his brother Donald Advance Publication’s chain of newspapers and other cable television properties and networks. He was one of the preeminent collectors of Post-war and Contemporary art. Through the painter Alexander Liberman, who served as Conde Nast’s Editorial Director, he met the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman. Through Newman, he developed an interest in abstract expressionism and color field painting. But Newhouse was also a restless and inquisitive collector open to pursuing new ideas and remaking his collection continually. Alex Rotter, Chairman of Christie’s 20/21 art departments, and Max Carter, a Vice Chairman, sat down to talk about Newhouse as a collector and the important works that are being sold this season.

The global auction and art fair calendar hardly seems like the fascinating subject that it really is. The art world still operates on a schedule largely established decades ago. The disruption of the global pandemic seemed to offer an opportunity to reshape those assumptions. Asia has become more important and art fairs are proliferating from Seoul to Los Angeles and Paris. Nevertheless, 2022 saw the old auction calendar re-emerge. Judging by the very strong numbers posted last year, sales haven’t suffered. So what will happen next? To answer that question, I spoke to Phillips CEO Stephen Brooks. Phillips is the first to open a dedicated Hong Kong headquarters. His rivals will have their own premises next year. That means there is likely to be an auction season twice a year in Hong Kong either in 2024 or sometime thereafter just as there is in New York and London. How that will fit into the calendar and how auction houses view the growing number of sales opportunities is the subject of our conversatio

Cecily Brown has been a prominent painter for more than a quarter century. But starting in the last 5 years, her importance in the art market has grown substantially. With the opening of Death and the Maid at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, it seemed like a good time to discuss her market. The Met show is one of only a handful of museum shows that Brown has participated in including Boston’s MFA in 2006 and the Louisiana Museum in 2018. To get a better sense of how collectors view and value her work, I spoke to Hugo Nathan, one of the principles of art advisory Beaumont Nathan. As an art dealer and collector himself, Hugo has worked on a broad range of art from the Renaissance to Contemporary. His firm have advised a number of clients on the market for Cecily Brown’s work. We spoke early on the morning that the Met show opened

CJ Hendry is an artist “of sorts,” she says. She’s an Instagram phenom, an entrepreneur, a copyright provocateur and an impresario. Last year she converted a church in London into an immersive experience that involved a never-ending indoor “snowstorm.” This month in Brooklyn, she has created a massive indoor playground for children and adults for a show called Plaid. From her renovated Brooklyn townhouse just featured in Architectural Digest to acting as her own gallery to a documentary about her Copyright Infringement public art projects, there’s no shortage of topics to discuss. Hendry and I sat down in her studio to go through them.

Editions, or the sales of prints and multiple works, is an auction category that is rarely discussed. For many artists, editioned work is a significant part of their practice. Over the last several years, there has been an explosion in interest and auction activity. In 2021, Phillips saw a record-breaking year for its Editions sales. Since then, auction volume has risen another 30% to a total of $40 million in sales in 2022. Phillips editions department was founded in 2008. Since that time, there has been a five-fold increase in bidders registered with the house. To discuss the growth of the editions market, we spoke with Robert Kennan, Phillips’s head of editions in Europe.

Innovation is so important to Kenneth Noland's practice, says Pace Gallery's Alex Brown in this podcast. This month, Pace brings a show of Noland's Stripes, Plaids and Shapes to Chelsea after a successful run in their London gallery. To get a better understanding of Noland's career, we spoke with Bill Noland, the artist's son; then Alex Brown and the Noland estate's long-term advisor, Douglas Baxter, help us understand the market for the artist.

Sara Friedlander, a deputy Chairman at Christie’s who styles herself and “art merchant,” joins LiveArt’s George O’Dell to discuss the first New York sales of 2023. The auction calendar is anchored by the May & November sales in New York but the rest of the year is a free-for-all of sales. On a year-over-year basis, the New York Contemporary art sales were up in dollar volume due to presence of two single-owner sales but down only slightly on a like-for-like basis. Sara points out that she has never seen the primary market so strong which makes her wonder who are the new names that auctioneers should be bringing to market. Meanwhile, on the secondary market, sales are heavily dependent upon estimates. Bidders are reacting to perceived value. George and Sara talk about the market for Cecily Brown, Albert Oehlen, Shara Hughes, Leon Polk Smith, Bob Thompson and together they plot a Richard Estes show to spearhead the return of Photorealism to market favor.

Philip Guston Now is the biggest international retrospective of the artist's work in a generation. It's debut at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC this month comes shortly after the announcement of a major gift of the artist's work to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Both the retrospective and the donation contain a considerable number of works from the artist's daughter, Musa Mayer. In this podcast, we speak to the National Gallery's Harry Cooper, a curator of the show, about Guston's long and varied career. Cooper also talks about the confusion around Guston's symbolism and difficulty in knowing the meaning or intent of his paintings. After that, we speak to collector Claude Reich about Guston's market and why the artist attracts so many elite collectors yet still remains significantly undervalued compared to his peers.

The art market has been holding its breath for nearly three months. How will the global economy affect the art market in 2023? With the important London auctions now on view, we speak to Sotheby's Helena Newman, Phillips's Cheyenne Westphal, Christie's Keith Gill, Olivier Camu and Tessa Lord, as well as Sotheby's James Sevier to learn more about the upcoming lots including a $45 million Kandinsky on offer through restitution, a several Gerhard Richter abstract paintings at different price points, a very early work by Lucian Freud, a collection of diverse Surrealist talents assembled by a San Francisco "tech" couple and much more.

Noah Horowitz returned to Art Basel as CEO after a year and a half away at Sotheby's. In his new role, which is also a new role for the company, Horowitz is rebuilding the Art Basel team around a strategy for a bigger art fair business with more galleries, more fairs and more opportunities. In this podcast, he talks about the importance of each fair in the Art Basel constellation meeting the needs of galleries, collectors and the cities that surround them. But he also looks toward the future and the ways in which Art Basel can grow beyond the art fair business it grew out of.

Acquavella Gallery has represented the artist Wayne Thiebaud since 2011. The artist, who died on Christmas day in 2021 at the age of 101 was serious about his art, teaching and tennis. How serious was he about his art? Thiebaud worked on one painting for 32 years. Now the Fondation Beyeler has a show of 65 works by Thiebaud that will introduce the breadth of his work to a global audience. In this podcast, Eleanor Acquavella explains the unique factors that have led to a dramatic rise in value in the Thiebaud market and the reasons it might have taken so long for the artist to achieve this moment of recognition.

One of the clear trends visible in last year’s auction data is a renewed interest in abstract painting. Bidders are pursuing a range of overlooked artists from the 1940s and 1950s. Into that trend, David Zwirner Gallery has opened a new show, Roma New York, 1953-64. The exhibition more than 50 works by 23 different artists highlights the connection between some of the giants of mid-century art like Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly , as well as lesser known names like Conrad Marca-Relli, and a group of Italian artists in Rome like Carla Accardi, Afro, Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio, Luigi Boille, Gastone Novelli, Jannis Kounellis and Mario Schifano. The show is filled with discoveries. That may be why one obsessive gallery-goer on Instagram called it, “the most magnificent gallery show in New York right now.” In this podcast, the show’s curator David Leiber, who is also a partner at David Zwirner Gallery, explains the origins of the show and what he hopes to it will provoke.

Who are the hottest artists at auction in 2022 whose markets are likely to continue to rise in 2023? George O'Dell talks us through the trends that emerged from looking at more than 200 artists whose overall auction prices were well above the estimates. We identified six main trends: 1) strong demand for artists who are women; 2) revivals of forgotten or undervalued artists; 3) big names gaining value; 4) naive painters; 5) surrealists and their contemporary admirers; as well as demand for 6) a wide range of quirky Asian artists and historical Asian painters. To identify these trends and the artists who drive them, we calculated the hammer ratios for all auction lots by artist. The hammer ratio is the final hammer price of all lots sold divided by the aggregate low estimate of all lots offered. If works don’t sell—an increasingly rare phenomenon these days—or sell below the estimates, the hammer ratio can fall below 1.00. Conversely, if works sell above the estimate range (a hammer ratio of 1.5 or above) and

Laura Paulson is Principal at Gagosian Art Advisory where she has recently advised on the sale of David M. Solinger's collection which featured the much-talked about Willem de Kooning "Collage." Earlier this year, Paulson also advised on the sale of the Macklowe collection which galvanized the market and was briefly the most valuable single-owner collection ever sold. In this podcast, Paulson discusses the strategy behind the Solinger heirs decision not to take a global guarantee or third-party guarantees on any of the lots. The result was a 100% sell-through rate on the collection. From her vantage point as a former senior specialist at both Sotheby's and Christie's and in her role as advisor to collections reaching their term, Paulson has a valuable perspective on the current market as well as a considered view as to how the next few years might play out.

Lucius Elliott and Kelsey Leonard go through some of the sales trends in the November auctions with LiveArt's George O'Dell. David Hockney, new market share levels for female artists, Abstract and Color Field painters, Christina Quarles, Lauren Quin, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Louise Nevelson, Andy Warhol and Salmon Toor are the artists and markets covered in this conversation.