$10 Million Painting Boosts Chinese Contemporary Market

"In a $54.8 million sale of contemporary Chinese art from the collection of Belgian collector Baron Guy Ullens, a packed auction room bid ferociously for 106 works acquired over decades by the now retired tycoon. The star lot was Zhang's early 1988 work ..." [Read Full Article]

Published By: Reuters
On: 04/05/11
Website: http://www.reuters.com/

 

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Triptych Sets Chinese Art Record

"A three-panel oil painting by artist Zhang Xiaogang has sold for 79m Hong Kong dollars (£6.3m) - a record auction price for Chinese contemporary art. The 1988 work, Forever Lasting Love, shows half-naked figures in an arid landscape surrounded by ..." [Read Full Article]

Published By: BBC News
On: 04/04/11
Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/

 

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Museums Dip Their Digital Toes

Time to lose control

Museums have made great strides in adapting to the digital age but they need to go much further

By András Szántó



Numbers scroll on a screen. Ethereal music fills the air. Cityscapes flash by. New York. Hong Kong. Venice. San Francisco. Streets and skylines are dipped in golden sunlight. But something is different. From the heart of each metropolis arises the same futuristic skyscraper. Its three shimmering towers are locked in a helical embrace. Its milky, undulating forms sprang from the imagination of Italian architect Filippo Innocenti, a Zaha Hadid associate.

Welcome to the Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM). Located nowhere and everywhere, it opened in October on the web (adobemuseum.com). It has a curator, Tom Eccles, and an inaugural exhibition by Tony Oursler. It even has a “personal viewing pod”, a one-eyed fish in a soap bubble that flaps about like a Pixar character. “For the artist’s biography, click the museum directory,” she says, in a vaguely French accent that invokes Simon de Pury’s mellifluous auction chant.

Is this the digital future of the museum? Don’t count on it. The AMDM is a mesmerising virtual ride but it bears little resemblance to how museums are using digital tools, or to what lies ahead once they fully embrace new media.

1.0.

With few exceptions, museums came late to the digital party. Until quite recently, most have used their websites as extended online brochures, limited to practical information and collection highlights. Digitising and sharing the breadth of a museum’s collection is a costly, time-consuming and complicated endeavour (especially for contemporary art, where copyright restrictions are in effect). As for videos, apps, social media and all things wiki—such bells and whistles have only just started popping up on museum sites.

But in fairness, museums are further along on their new-media projects than other kinds of fine-art institutions. And they are more digitally dexterous than most commercial galleries. “The art world is constitutionally reluctant to commit to a real digital presence, whatever the platform,” says Kevin Conley, a former New Yorker writer who created The Exhibitionist mobile app for gallery-goers, “because so much of the value in the art business is based on the control of information.” Meagre budgets and a vogue for minimalist design contribute to a dull uniformity in the promotion of art online.

There are glimpses of promising innovation around the art world, of course. Lehmann Maupin Gallery’s website features elegant videos showcasing artists and exhibitions (lehmannmaupin.com). Jen Bekman’s 20x200 project (20x200.com) has shown that online gallery sales can be successful. Pace Gallery, in addition to its content-rich website and archive, is publishing digital catalogues raisonnés through its Artifex Press (artifexpress.com). Intrepid dealers like Ed Winkleman are well known as bloggers (edwardwinkleman.com). Auction houses are uploading catalogues, videos and viewing tools that help clients examine and bid—some are even tweeting their sales. Art Basel’s 3D smartphone app, launched last June, has solved the vexing problem of finding a gallery booth or a midday sandwich (artbasel.com/go/id/lre). There’s even an online art fair (vipartfair.com), coming in January to a device near you.

Museums are watching these developments closely. They know that they too must conquer new media and respond to the changing habits of their audiences, or risk losing their relevancy. But art museums are, by design, conservative. They are understandably anxious about investing in technology that could become obsolete. And they don’t want to be seen jumping on bandwagons. Mastering the digital future takes time, resources and a willingness to test comfort zones, even for the most open-minded institutions.

2.0.

Despite these obstacles, the most widely recognised museum innovators—MoMA, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Tate, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to name a few—have been steadily expanding their digital footprints. Dramatic changes have happened in the past 18 months. Major upgrades are in the works at the Metropolitan Museum and other bellwether institutions. Progress is accelerating.

First, technology is changing the relationship between objects, curators and visitors. The linchpin is collection searching, which has improved by an order of magnitude in recent years. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s jam-packed site (collections.vam.ac.uk), which can search a million objects with the help of an intuitive user interface, is a prime example. (Advances in so-called semantic data, which analyse the kind of complex queries that arise in humanities research, mean that even more sophisticated searches may be around the corner.) Digital tools are letting visitors experience objects in new ways. On the Louvre’s site, visitors can zoom in on masterpieces and tour virtual galleries (louvre.fr). Some museums, including MoMA, now invite visitors to curate their own art selections with an “add to my collection” button. As for that time-honoured delivery mechanism for curatorial research, the catalogue, experts predict a wholesale shift to electronic publishing within five years.

Second, much of this innovation is being spurred by an explosion in usage of mobile media. Museums are developing mobile versions of their websites for smartphones and tablets. They are migrating from Acoustigides to cheaper, more flexible cellphone technology, which they can customise in clever ways. At the Brooklyn Museum visitors can play “gallery tag”, finding works with certain attributes and entering their accession numbers via cellphone to earn points and prizes (brooklynmuseum.org). Not a week passes, of course, without a fanfare about a newly launched museum app. These are still a work in progress. Some have less information than wall labels. But progress and economics are on their side.

Third, museums are venturing beyond traditional curatorial material. Their homepages are beginning to look like magazine sites, with channels for news, streaming content and audience dialogue. Blogs, written by staffers or professionals, routinely attract the most traffic on museum websites. Some institutions are experimenting with user-generated content. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum is collecting pictures and videos from witnesses and victims’ family members (makehistory. national911memorial.org). The V&A is asking for public input on how to crop 140,000 digitised photographs (collections.vam.ac.uk/ crowdsourcing). New distribution platforms, such as ArtBabble, a kind of YouTube for art videos from a consortium of institutions (artbabble.org), are putting museums in the communications business.

Fourth, technology is revitalising museum education. Digital media open up new pathways for exchange between experts and visitors, and are making it possible for members of the public to learn from each other. Digital initiatives can make learning fun. The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s multimedia scavenger hunt, “Ghost of a Chance”, in which players used text messages, email and the web to find hidden objects in the museum, drew 3,000 participants. A few museums are even dipping their toes into online education. MoMA’s education portal lists 20 courses aimed at the general audience, starting at $220, with titles like “The 1960s: Art and Life” (www.moma.org/learn/courses/courses).

Fifth, the web is, of course, a marketing tool par excellence. Social media initiatives are blending education and marketing. An international web event last September called “Ask a Curator” made available experts from 340 museums for online questions (askacurator.com). It generated a lot of new visitors. The Guggenheim Museum’s creative video biennial, “YouTube Play”, a collaboration with YouTube, HP and Intel, attracted a staggering 23,000 submissions this autumn (youtube.com/play). From the Prado’s Google Earth tool, which zooms in from space on the collection’s most iconic paintings (google.com/intl/en/landing/prado), to Jeffrey Deitch’s personal tour of his Los Feliz home (moca.org/audio/blog/?p=988), museums are discovering ingenious ways to build audiences.

Last but not least, technology is transforming professional museum practice. The Museum Dashboard, developed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, takes transparency to a new level by providing real-time information on everything from the size of the endowment to objects slated for deaccessioning (dashboard.imamuseum.org). Some of the least sexy but most significant improvements are happening behind the scenes, where digital tools are helping museums gather data about visitors, manage collections, and keep a handle on budgets and human resources.

3.0.

As they feel their way toward a digital future, museums need to think deeply about what they stand for: what are they willing to sacrifice for the sake of evolution, and where will they draw the line against technological disruption? There are crunchy practical dilemmas to solve: can museums recover the costs of their digital operations? How will they deal with copyright restrictions? What to do about privacy protections or unwanted commercial intrusion?

And there are the intangibles: what is the ideal balance between physical objects and virtual experience? Is the function of technology to turn the museum into more of a community space, or to facilitate encounters of a deeply personal kind? Should museum websites aspire to the frenzied hyper-realism of video games, or should they leave that kind of thing to purveyors of popular entertainment?

Privately, some directors and curators are anxious about unintended consequences. Many older visitors like their museums just as they are. There is something to be said, after all, about the museum as a gadget-free zone—a last bulwark against computerisation. A smartphone is a cool and quick way to find the great blue whale or The Garden of Earthly Delights, but what’s wrong with getting lost in a museum?

In any event, technological change hasn’t seeped yet all the way into museums’ innermost structures and attitudes. When it does, museums will look very different. Digital innovation doesn’t just enable institutions to do old things in new ways. It forces fundamental and often painful realignments. Just look at the news.

For art institutions of all stripes, embracing new media will mean “not just a lot of whiz-bang technology, but a rethinking of the relationship with the audience,” says Artsjournal.com founder Douglas McLennan. It means adopting a new approach to information across all departments. A decade ago, a museum’s IT department was a backwater. Today, it belongs next to the director’s office. The notion that technology is less of a tool and more of mindset doesn’t come naturally to experts steeped in object-oriented practice.

The hardest part may be letting go.

Museums have a long history of exercising total command over their content. That’s over. “Museums in the future will still be reliable sources of information, and a curator will continue to be the authority on a particular work of art,” says Rob Stein, chief information officer of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. “But we won’t control the information channels.”

 

This article is from: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Time+to+lose+control/22092

Rise Of The Art Mega-Galleries

Gallery giants tighten their grip

Competition forces smaller dealers to play the branding game—or find alternative models

By Melanie Gerlis



MIAMI. The rise and rise of the mega-gallery—intent on creating a global brand—has never been more obvious than this week at Art Basel Miami Beach. The fair’s floorplan is something of a blueprint for the increasingly hierarchical market, with the best spots in the convention centre given over to dealers such as Barbara Gladstone (H13), David Zwirner (J19), Gagosian Gallery (J13), Pace (C10) and, at the oceanfront entrance, Hauser & Wirth (K17).

“The market now concentrates on the bigger and the bolder. It isn’t just about multiple cities but also multiple sites in the same cities,” says dealer Thaddaeus Ropac (C11), who this year opened a second, larger, space in Salzburg and is soon to do the same in Paris.

At the extreme end of this increasingly competitive environment is the Gagosian Gallery, due to open its 11th space in its eighth city (Hong Kong) early next year. The gallery’s rapid expansion seems to play to today’s cash-rich but time-poor collectors. (Gagosian is rumoured to have sold seven works within the opening hour of the fair on Wednesday.) Other galleries have to play the same game—assuming they can afford to—or are forced to rethink their business models.

So how did art galleries become such big business? For those who believe that art belongs in the luxury goods market, the shift towards big-brand commercialism has been inevitable for some time. Look at the events around South Beach this week: LVMH, Fendi, Absolut and Cartier are all firms who know how to generate success from global marketing. This trend suits buying habits in some of the newer geographic pockets of wealth, many of which are temples to international brands.

The retail analogy is repeated by many dealers. “I would rather be a haute-couture house than a luxury goods provider,” says Xavier Hufkens (C13), who has had one space in Brussels for over 20 years. Adam Sheffer at New York’s Cheim & Read (K8), rumoured to be opening a second space in LA, says: “Some artists prefer a boutique environment, others Walmart.”

Another important driver has been the shift to contemporary art over the past ten years. “The growth of physical space to show art has primarily happened because of the growth of contemporary art,” says Iwan Wirth of Hauser & Wirth, another of this week’s success stories. It recently opened a 15,000 sq. ft second space in London, in addition to galleries in New York and Zurich. “Artists don’t want to wait another two years for a show,” Ropac says. “If we can’t offer them one straight away, someone else will.”

The stakes are also higher now that dealers are facing intense competition from the big-brand auction houses, who regularly host more curated selling exhibitions: “They are opening spaces all over the world, so why shouldn’t the galleries?” says Sheffer. “We’re all on the same team.”

One gallery with an alternative business model is Arndt (B24). Owner Matthias Arndt was in four countries in 2005 (with three spaces in Berlin alone) but now has just one exhibition space, in Berlin. He says that refocusing his business on to a smaller scale has enabled him to “do what I want to do—be a primary market gallerist, rather than spending time meeting with tax advisers in three different countries”.

Hufkens also emphasises the importance of face-to-face contact: “It’s about having one space, one person to talk to, one person a collector or artist can meet with—that’s the only way you can really follow what happens to your work.”

Galleries also need money to expand. Arndt estimates that a gallery would need a turnover of about $100m a year to have five international spaces outside its HQ.

Despite such overheads, the mega-dealers seem to have the upper hand in terms of winning clients, artists and staff from smaller rivals. However, Wirth believes there is a trickle-down effect: “It’s not just that the big are getting bigger, galleries who had two people now have five, those that wouldn’t have opened, now open,” he says. “If Gagosian and Pace can afford to expose their artists to a broader audience then more power to them,” says Sheffer. But he adds: “Since when was Walmart good news for small grocers?”

 

This article is from: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Gallery+giants+tighten+their+grip/22112

Chinese Art Prices Soar, Signalling A Shift In Taste

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Art sales: the great haul of China

China's young millionaires have driven this new trend in Asian porcelain sales, says Colin Gleadell.

The phenomenal prices being paid for Chinese works of art provides a fascinating insight into the tastes of China’s new rich who are driving the market. Traditional western preferences were for older and more subtle workmanship, a fusion of aesthetic and academic values. Now, Chinese buyers are investing most in later works, particularly in 18th century porcelain made for the Emperor Qianlong, such as the record £53 million vase sold at Bainbridge auctions in Ruislip this month, which has been described as ‘gaudy’ and ‘flamboyant’ by critics. Chinese collector and TV personality, Ma Weidu said: “Really it is pretty, but that’s all.” The Emperor Qianlong, who reigned from 1736 to 1795, is seen as the last great Emperor of China, and his style is back in fashion with a vengeance.

The previous record for a Chinese work of art was set last month by Sotheby’s in Hong Kong when a Qianlong double gourd shaped vase with an imperial seal under its base, denoting its use in the emperor’s palace, sold for $32.4 million. It had been bought in 1971 for £1,680 ($4,200) by a New York based Chinese dealer who could never sell it. The buyer, Shanghai born Hong Kong collector, Alice Cheng, said: “As long as you like something, even if it’s expensive it’s worth it.” According to the Hurun Report, a rich list compiled by Shanghai based accountant, Rupert Hoogewerf, there are an estimated 875,000 millionaires and 110 billionaires in China, the majority of whom are aged in their 30’s and 40’s. Typically, says the report, they will own three houses, and spend their money on cars, watches and art.

Before last month, the record for a Chinese work of art was the £15.7 million ($28 million dollars) paid at Christie’s in London in 2005 for a beautiful but less ornate 14th century blue and white porcelain jar. The jar was bought by London dealer, Giuseppe Eskenazi for Bruno Eberli, a Swiss-born financier based in New York. Eskenazi says that the traditional, scholarly taste for earlier Song dynasty (11-13th century AD) ceramics and Ming (14th — 17th century AD) porcelain, on which so many western collections were founded, has been pushed aside over the last 2 or 3 years.

“Western and Japanese collectors liked imperial porcelain,” he says” but not the later more showy examples, which didn’t excite them.” Celebrating his 50th year in business, he has just sold an 18th century Qing dynasty vase for which he was asking $25 million to a Chinese buyer. “It would have been much less three or four years ago,” he says. “The interest I had was all Chinese, and I priced it accordingly.” For auctions outside China, repatriation is an important motive, as it was during the early surges of the Russian and Middle Eastern art markets. The Bainbridge vase is believed to have come from Old Summer Palace that was looted by French and British troops during second Opium War in 1860, providing added incentive to return it to China. Some important works are being donated by wealthy collectors, such as Alice Cheng, to Chinese museums. In addition, John Axford of Woolley & Wallis, which last week sold an 18th century white jade carving of a deer for £3.8 million to a collector in Hangzhou, believes the Chinese are comparing the price of their antiques with Western modern art in the belief that it should be worth as much or more.

The rate of price increases is leaving even Andy Warhol in the shade. At Sotheby’s in Hong Kong last month a Qianlong jade imperial seal which had been bought in London in 1997 for £25,300 ($42,600) sold for $16 million. At Sotheby’s in London this month, a yellow jade censer from the Qianlong dynasty, estimated at £3,000 to £5,000, sold for £313,250, or 45 times the higher estimate.

Western collectors are getting priced out of the top of the market, but are still active elsewhere, says Eskenazi. From his current exhibition, he has sold a 6th century limestone carving of an asparas, or heavenly being, for $2 million to a UK based collector.

Sotheby’s Hong Kong sales in October of everything from wine and watches to contemporary Asian art, doubled estimates to make almost $400 million - a record for such a series in Hong Kong. Next week, Christie’s will be attempting to emulate that figure with a similar series that is estimated to fetch $220 million. In the current climate, that must be just an educated guess.

This article is from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/artsales/8152180/Art-sales-the-great-haul-of-China.html

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