Give it away, give it away, give it away: this should be the name of my column, Richard Prince’s publication of Ted Kaczynski’s “Truth Versus Lies.” One per customer, it’s only morally right to generous Richard. Photo courtesy Kenny Schachter.
Below is a special guest item from the brilliant Wet Paint comrade Kenny Schachter, who is a dealer, artist, and Artnet News columnist. It’s chock full of his own juicy scoops that he has gleaned during quarantine. Take it away, Kenny!
What do you get if you mix a ghost writer with a guest host? Me! I am not one to sit on information for too long, god knows I’ve been sitting on my ass long enough during quarantine, so here I am dropping into Nate Freeman’s inimitable column that I am such a fan of. So impatient, in fact, I got on a nearly empty United Airlines flight to London last week and bounded onboard like an excitable kid on his first flight—it’s been three awfully long months since I last visited an airport. When I asked the steward to move me to a window seat, he refused due to “weight and balance issues”—reassuring on a 747 with less than two dozen passengers.
Now to some juice. A valued source told me, subsequently confirmed by both parties, that Eddie Martinez left Timothy Taylor Gallery (for reasons of “personal growth,” Eddie assured me when I called to confirm). Unrelatedly, private equity suit Jason Levine ran off from his beautiful (and now very available) fiancée, Sophia Cohen (billionaire collector Steve Cohen‘s daughter and a Gagosian sales associate), not only grabbing the engagement ring on his dash out the door, but also a case of valuable red wine.
Tipping point: Don’t move around too much on the flight to London or it may roll over. Photo courtesy Kenny Schachter.
On the subject of Larry G, interviewed by Bloomberg last week from his sumptuous Hamptons digs, the mega gallerist, speaking of himself in the third person, as one so mega is wont to do, said: “When things go down like this you say, ‘Jesus, Larry, do you really need all these galleries?’” Apparently he does, as to date, not a single of his 300+ employees have been furloughed nor fired. Selling take-away bento boxes from Kappo Masa, Gagosian’s sushi restaurant, for $800 a pop goes a long way to hold the 18-gallery-strong fort together.
On the sales front, I have heard of a Basquiat co-owned by the Nahmad and Mugrabi clans offloaded at $16.5 million, and a $9 million Christopher Wool text work flogged to a Swiss financier. Also, the Mugrabis bought a bushel of Joel Mesler works ahead of his upcoming show with Los Angeles gallery David Kordansky in November. Sotheby’s also sold a meaty Picasso private treaty. The market is showing signs of life. Let’s hope the trend continues. Not to mention, when I queried another Swiss friend whether he would part with his blue-period Picasso for $150 million, based on an offer from another pal, he didn’t flinch while shooting down the prospect, saying maybe at $500 million, he’d take it under more serious consideration.
At least I was able to pick up a free copy of Richard Prince’s publication of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, “Truth Versus Lies,” which Prince was giving away from a park bench in Central Park 10 years after he did the same with his reprinted edition of “The Catcher in the Rye,” listing himself as the author. Now I have both. Lastly, a private-museum-owning billionaire, received—via his housekeeper, of course—a government-issued support check for $1,200 signed by none other than Donald Trump. The rich get richer. If you can’t warrant winning votes, why not buy them outright? Now I will hand the mic back from sunny London, where the only masks they wear are the one’s covering their emotions, rather than their faces. Lord help them.