Stock Market Down 300, Giacometti Up 100m
Stock market down 300, Giacometti up 100m: who would believe it? Kate Moss recently made headlines when she said nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. The societal focus on being slim, both male and female, has never been more acute. Then Walking Man I, a 6-foot...
A peech for a 12 year old and a 13 year old: A Leopard Can’t Change Its Spots
When you look at a piece of art what thoughts pass through your mind? One of the first things I think of is what went into making it and how long did it take. Art is an amazing process: besides the making, why? When I look at Damien Hirst art I think the opposite:...
Upcoming Film on Michael Landy
A large part of Michael Landy’s career is about garbage, which is rather interesting as our lives are consumed with so much of it on a daily basis. in addition to installations Landy makes phenomenal black and white drawings that are exquisite in their detail, with...
First Day of Trading 20-10
On the first trading day of 2010, oil topped $80 and gold gained $25 to $1121.50; what is art but another asset class in today’s commodities driven economy. Manufacturing is expanding and money is sticking to art like glue. Look for it to continue to do so but only...
Miami Basel: Art collecting is a macho business
Steve Wynn and Sylvester Stallone at the Galerie Gmurzynska stand at Art Basel Miami Beach 2009. Photo by Patrick McMullan, Inc. Like a casino, void of natural light and any sense of time and with about the same odds of beating the house, so goes another iteration of...
Art Basel Miami Beach 2009
Like a casino, with no natural light or sense of time and about the same odds of beating the house, so goes another iteration of the Basel Art Fair, this time in Miami. Fittingly, gaming impresario Steve Wynn made the rounds towed by a towering blonde, presumably as...
ArtTactic Podcast
In this episode of the ArtTactic Podcast, Kenny Schachter, writer, independent curator and owner of Kenny Schachter Rove dissects the results of Sotheby's and Christie's first Major Contemporary auctions of the season, which were held last week in London. Further, he...
Frieze
When the Daily Telegraph titled an article “Frieze Has Lost their Cool” it signaled more than anything an era of change in the contemporary art market. The subject of the piece was that 40 dealers less than the previous year had been accepted. After the article went...
Scrap Scrappage
As the modern car industry has ground to a halt and valuable older cars are being wastefully crushed to stimulate new car buying, we must seek out the undervalued and underappreciated designs of years past that are well-worth preserving and investing in, rather than...
Appetites…
Two recent articles on Mauizio Cattelan and Damien Hirst made note of their formidable art collections. According to Hegel, when a child finds opposition in the form of the other, the first inclination is to eat it. Could that account for the voracious art collecting...
Rethinking the Shape of Everyday Life
A response to an article by Alice Rawsthorn, New York Times Chris Bangle, former head of design at BMW, expects future car owners to be less concerned about the exterior of vehicles and more focused simply on the interiors. That’s why the resale values of BMW’s are so...
More on Pop Life at the Tate…
It’s not enough for Murakami to spin his own gold but he had to make a literal tie-in with the inclusion of all manner of doodads fabricated from precious metals and gems by the likes of Kanye and Pharrell. In the case of Pharrell, he bedazzled a few of his favorite...
Pop Life at the Tate
With three of my kids in tow (13,12,10) we visited the Tate’s Pop Life show and were repeatedly admonished not to enter various rooms with frontal nudity. Undeterred, we waltzed into the very closed and guarded doors of the Jeff Koons and Cicciolina porno room. After...
A response to Damien Hirst in The Sunday Times Magazine, UK
I for one don’t particularly like Warhol and find some of the work disingenuous, but mainly it leaves me cold. Hirst said a Warhol painting is a sculpture, that it’s not a painting but rather all about the image. However, it’s not a painting or a sculpture but a...
Some Thoughts on the Art Market
In no way is the worst over in the art economy or the wider global financial world. Beware that next year should be at least as equally excruciating as the past 12 months. The stock market, gold and oil will test their lows in the coming year, the same with Richard...
Alternative Investment Evening
The formal component of Antion Olaio’s art imbues painting with another dimension altogether for there are figurative paintings with overlaid text, accompanied by a music video sing-along. These multi-media constructions function as story telling devices with built-in...
“Brrrrain” by Antonio Olaio at Culturgest, Lisbon
On the Occasion of the Exhibition: Brrrrain, by Antonio Olaio at Culturgest, Lisbon, curated by Miguel Wandschneider, Fall 2009 The formal component of Antion Olaio’s art imbues painting with another dimension altogether for there are figurative paintings with...
BBC One: Art in Troubled Times
The big moment for publicly funded art in Britain was the Second World War. "Something absolutely remarkable happened during the war", says actor Simon Callow. "The theatre suddenly was right at the heart of society." After the war, the idea of "art for all" led to...
Dick in hand
Scott Reeder, American Dick, 2007, Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm At the most glamorous of the many fab parties leading up to Art 40 Basel, a museum director told how she’s gone on a day trip to the Venice Biennale, after which she went for a massage and was roused by...
Written for The Daily Mail’s Mail
London art dealer Kenny Schachter has traded in millions as the art market has boomed in recent years. But now the recession is here, he couldn't be happier - because the most lauded works might actually be ones the rest of us like . . . By Kenny Schachter I have...
Puss ‘n Boots, Dick ‘n Hand
At the most glamorous of the many fab parties leading up to the 2009 Basel Art Fair, the granddaddy of them all, a museum director related the story of a day trip to Venice to see the Biennial after which she went for a massage and was awoken by the sensation of...
Price-less
A Banksy graffiti was recently sprayed with graffiti itself: the tagline was: Price-Less. And true it is as the graffiti genre has been swiftly and broadly hit by the onset of recession. Yet, even something priceless has a price less today than a year ago. We have...
Time Isn’t Money (Anymore)
I have made art for years for little or no audience—what better activity could there be in the face of such economic uncertainty? If ever there was an occasion for the mantra: Just Do It (Yourself), its now. Remember how time used to equal money; guess what? It no...
I love Saatchi
The entrance to the Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road, where it remained in residence from 1984 to 2003 First there was the austere, New York-quoting Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road, akin to big museum halls, large and imposing with London artist Richard Wilson’s...
Cars and Couture
There is a new meaning of art appreciation today that has nothing to do with rising investment value. Consider it a reversion to a quaint time in the recent past, say, pre-2004. The era of big, flashy, overproduced art is a thing of the past. Now I understand the...
I kove Saatchi (Artnet)
First there was the austere, New York-quoting Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road, akin to big museum halls, large and imposing with London artist Richard Wilson’s unforgettable oil-filled room, 20:50, tucked into a corner. Wilson’s work looked even more terrifying in...
Fair Fatique
Art Basel and Frieze have been bailed out, nationalized and are presently under federal administration. Not so far fetched in a world that was up in arms when Hugo Chavez nationalized a country club, yet embraced the governmental rescue of Goldman Sachs. In real life,...
Nothing but Time
The newspaper works of Paul Thek, which began in earnest in late 1960’s and continued unabated until his death in 1988, had a narrative arc defined by an idiosyncratic expression of hope and beauty, and ended in a more ambiguous state of disillusionment. They are...
Hoxton Needs Hadid
FOSTER AND ROGERS GRANT ZAHA HADID PERMISSION FOR HER FIRST EVER BUILDING IN LONDON. So it was December 3, 2008, but that would be Sue Foster head Hackney Planning and Ray Rogers, Design and Conservation Manager. In 2004 upon moving to London from New York, I...
Cologne Art Fair, An Obituary
Tumble weeds tumbling down the corridors of the 42nd Art Cologne fair, the oldest fair, even predating Basel on the first public day of attendance. Time used to have it where life expectancies weren’t anticipated beyond the early forties and history has repeated...
Obituary: Art Cologne – An Art Dealer Tolls the Bell
Art Cologne 2008 gets ready for (no) business Yes, I have been guilty of such disingenuousness myself on more than one occasion, but let it be known, after the marathon ten-hour opening and nearly week-long Art Cologne (probably the longest fair of them all), we have...
The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Design Art at Design Miami/Basel
Design Miami/Basel gets underway in the Markthalle Basel I have sold toys, insurance, neckwear and art. And now cars and furniture, the former for fun and the latter for money -- and because I seem to have trouble getting into the fine art fairs. At Art Basel in...
Forget the Art Fairs, Give me the British International Motor Show
The current show at Kenny Schachter Rove in London, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place," curated by Danny Moynihan, with works by Jannis Kounellis (left) and Edward William Cooke Over the spring I purchased two paintings and four drawings by a prominent British painter...
Z.car by Zaha Hadid
Published in Rove Zero, Spring 2006, Premier Issue of the Car Design Magazine. Though the antiques market has crashed (post 9/11, 2001), and impressionist and old master paintings gone soft, modern and contemporary art and post war design are through the roof. Frothy...
Diary Installment
It’s well over a year since we moved to London and I still haven’t attained the peripheral vision necessary to navigate the width-restricting elevated curbs on the Hammersmith Bridge on the school run every morning. Even my tiny Mini cannot cope with the hurdles...
Frieze Disease, or the Bursting of the Balloon
When will the reassessment come, the day of reckoning, for a time when demand not only influences art but instigates it, determines the form? Isn’t the repetitive nature of some art production in endless series just another name for creating more of the same stuff?...
Art Report
In 1973 Ethel and Robert Skull, as the result of a divorce settlement, staged a significant auction of contemporary art in New York; significant in as much as it was the first time a major evening auction transpired featuring solely contemporary art. Immediately after...
Basquiat
QUESTIONS ASKED TO ADDRESS: 1. Should we be glorifying art that at it's inception flourished by desecrating and mutilating public and private property. 2. How did it really happen overnight that a guy living on the streets becomes the toast of New York society and the...
Downtick: Piddling Painting Dealer.
I Bought Andy Warhol (Harry Abrams, 2003) is a slim new volume by California private art dealer and art market chronicler Richard Polsky, a frequent contributor to artnet.com. The premise of the book is to weave the search for the Holy Grail, i.e. the hunt for the...
Celebrity/Artist/King of the Universe
Today, celebrities are collecting art more than ever, and the latest art that they seem to be collecting has shifted from old and modern masters to more and more contemporary stuff. Artists are collecting celebrities as well, but the big trend of the moment is that...
The Three at Jeffrey Deitch
UPTICK: THE THREE Why bother? Many artists toil away day after day in the solitude of their studios not with the intent of creating transcendent objects and to be immortalized by posterity as if in amber, but rather to get some good press and become another famous art...
Art Report
Does your portfolio have the right balance of mutual funds, real estate investment trusts (REIT's) and art funds? It should, says Michael Moses at NYU’s Stern School of Business, who with professor Jainping Mei created the Mei/Moses Fine Art Index...
Interview (Contemporary Mission Statement)
ICON: Why initiate the conTEMPorary exhibition space, which runs counter to your past transient curatorial credentials? Kenny Schachter: The last thing I ever envisioned was opening a gallery. It was the last thing I ever wanted to do. However, I felt compelled to...
The Relationship between Making Art and Curating: Monkey in the Middle
Making art and curating are clearly distinct practices within the rubric of fine art, however there are undeniably areas where they coincide. Concededly, both are very subjective in nature so I do not profess to possess universal truths in this regard! Various stages...
Contemporary Curatorial Practice Panel at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco)
SQUARE TIMES The art world appears to be the most backward thinking, anti laissez-faire environment in which to implement projects; compared even to the accounting or legal realms. Information, contacts, and resources are guarded like state secrets. The de rigueur...
The Unenforceable Andrea Rosen Contract
A John Curin painting appeared in an advertisement for an upcoming auction at Phillips in an art magazine. When Andrea Rosen of the eponymous gallery got wind of the consigned Curin lot, she notified the auction house of a sales agreement in effect that every client...
Jasper Who?
From the 1913 Armory Show in New York which was front page news to Jackson Pollack appearing on the cover of life magazine to Warhol and the Pop movement, it seems that contemporary art has been falling further and further out of the consciousness of the general...
Downticks: Bad Bad Painting
Imagine the worst Howard Hodgkin painting come to life in a horrible nightmare hijacking your very existence: covering walls, floors, utensils, and everything else in sight. Such is the impact of the recent exhibition of Lucas Samaras at PaceWildenstein gallery....
Downtick: New York
The World Trade Center (WTC) disaster was sad, nauseating and unfathomable. After being brought to our collective knees, New Yorkers walk around with a continual knot in our stomachs wondering what will be next. We are gripped by fear for the futures of our children,...
Las Vegas and Art: Public Meets Private (Interview with Robert G. Goldstein, President of the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino)
The manners in which contemporary art galleries and museums function is based upon models that have not changed for decades. One would think with the entrepreneurial nature of the gallery business and the lack of institutional structure and layered bureaucracy...