Previous Posts: October 2013

This book is not just bad; it's obviously bad. Its badness isn't disguised by dense prose and it doesn't hint at hidden depths.

The task of the private gallery is a serious one: to connect purchasers with the art they need. The chief skill required for running a gallery should therefore be not salesmanship, but the ability to diagnose what is missing from the inner life of the client. The art dealer should strive to identify what kind of art a person needs to rebalance themselves and then meet that need as efficiently as possible. 

The key activity of a dealer would be to conduct consultations sessions that would reveal the state of the client's soul. Before one can know what someone should buy, one has to know who they are, and more importantly, what areas of their psyches are vulnerable. The role of the art dealer would overlap with that of a therapist. The standard layout of a commercial gallery would evolve to include a therapy room, which one might need to pass through before getting to see any works for sale. Thus the dealer would operate as a matchmaker, bringing together an inner need of the client with a work best able to assuage it.

Yes, but the book is surely a satire, like Swift on Irish children to be eaten or Machiavelli satirizing the Medici in "The Prince", right?  Oh, I forgot, Swift and Machiavelli actually had a sense of humour, if somewhat dark.....

I was at Alain de Botton's event at the National Gallery on Friday night. There he claimed that he has been invited to re-hang the entire Rijksmuseum according to his new curatorial for the period April - September 2014!

 One of the many things that surprise me about de Botton's mission is that he seems blissfully unaware that his big 'themed hang' idea is more or less standard pratice when curating exhibitions these days - I've lost count of the number of times I have grumbled that I "would have preferred a chronological arrangement".

Yes, very good video, very skillful painting: I just can't get over my impression that Cronach (Elder) was both deeply misogynist, even for his day, even in paintings of the Madonna, and a pedlar of creepy "keyhole views" for voyeurs.  Which may say as much about his patrons as him.  No doubt others see him differently.....

Your comments about presentation of work that’s already been seen are absolutely right.

The labelling issue vis-à-vis modern and contemporary rumbles on and is a reflection of the snootery and elitism that is rife, all to do with deep insecurity and anxiety I expect.

Just a short message to let you know I completely agree with your review of Frieze Masters; I had exactly the same feeling at Gagosian - "yeah that's a Rothko (but if you have to ask you're too stupid to become a client of us" - extremely pompous indeed.

Old masters isn't my core interest but I did have some déja-vu's too - and I saw the Velazques portrait you discussed earlier on your blog.

For Modern art FM is definitely at the same level at Tefaf in my view, but there are still some holes, for example the almost total lack of anything new or old from the Asian continent.

Great location in the park too, a fine excuses for a day-trip to London - and such great weather!

1. Act rich. For all their democratic brio, people who sell art are only really interested in people who can afford to buy it. The average price of an artwork at Frieze is £20,000, which is more than an Alfa Romeo. But acting rich is not as easy as it used to be. Pressed jeans and Tod’s loafers are a uniform of the past. Assume a casual, studied air. When confronted by a work designed to make you laugh, don’t laugh. Haughty disdain goes a long way, although if you can match that of the gallerist, you are made of ice. Don’t be embarrassed to ask the price of anything but never, ever, mention any currency denomination (see point two).

2. So you quite like the look of something, and you ask how much it costs. “Two,” may be the reply. The air of vagueness is a test. You will know, from your studies of the artist in question, whether that means £2 (no), £200 (unlikely), £200,000, or £2m. But if the gallerist’s assistant is American, she (almost always a she) may be talking dollars. Don’t ask. Make a rough calculation in your head that covers all possible options. Any physical reaction is ill-advised, other than the barely perceptible raising of an eyebrow. Finally, ask if she will accept roubles. You’re on the front foot now.

3. Don’t check in your sense of humour at the VIP lounge. Take it with you, wherever you go. There is no need to LOL but a steady, wry chuckle as you wind your way round the aisles will serve you well. If asked your opinion on anything, there are some stock phrases that will come in useful: for example, “referencing Duchamp”, or “rethinking the space between the artist and the spectator”. Almost all contemporary art references or rethinks something or other. As an exercise, try and talk about art without using any word that begins with “re”. Don’t ever use the word “postmodern”, which is dated and not very funny at all.

right now the mix is a total disaster. I was told by one of the organizers that they came under huge pressure from some of the very large contemporary galleries to include them, as they wanted to show off expensive minimalists. Many of the larger galleries, and even some mid-size ones are busily hoovering up the estates of dead artists (they have all learned the art of dodgy editions). The fair obviously cannot refuse them as they are too powerful, and bring too many collectors there, but it really risks the future integrity of the fair. The organizer told me confidentially that they are waiting a few years to push further back the date remit - I imagine to the start of the 1980's, but we will have to see if they do it. If there is one way of deciding how to draw a line, it may be to decide who is already in an established cannon, and who is not. The Masters fair would be a perfect vehicle to investigate these parameters.  Koons has added to the post-Warhol debate, so he is in. Damien Hirst and Takahashi Murakami are yet to be decided.

“I can tell you, it nearly blew my socks off,” Johnny Van Haeften laughed. “In my – what is it? – almost 44 years in the art world I’ve never known an experience like this.”

Van Haeften, one of London’s most respected dealers in Old Masters, sounded almost breathless as he told his story. Speaking from his Mayfair gallery, he was describing his first sight of a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger that has for the 400 years since its creation been completely unknown to the world.

It has been continuously in the possession of the same English family since a distant ancestor bought it, direct from the artist’s studio, in Antwerp in 1611.

The owners had never publicised their precious possession, although they were well aware of its pedigree. Until the 1950s they even had among the family papers the original receipt, Van Haeften tells me, made out in Antwerp in 1611 for the purchase price of 200 florints. (If that mislaid piece of paper ever comes to light, it will in itself be a fascinating object for art historians.)

The problem for this exhibition, until it reaches the end of the 17th century (when the Puritans too behaved as perversely as Henry’s men), is that the iconoclasts destroyed almost everything that was once worth exhibiting and it exists — if it exists at all — only in fragments and in such records as paintings and prints. Two rouge marble fragments from the tomb of Thomas Becket in Canterbury — one of a thousand pilgrimage shrines destroyed — are of no interest in themselves but only provide evidence that some structural part of it was in this rich material; without the legend these could as easily be fragments of a Georgian fireplace. Fragments of lead and carved stone from Rievaulx are exactly that too — fragments of architectural evidence. Larger sculptures, headless and handless, are evidence of the physical effort involved in destruction. Fragments of small alabaster sculptures even have something of the fetish souvenir about them.

We then move on to the tumbling of statues — away with William the Turd and George I, Nelson and the Duke of Cumberland — and to defaced coins, among them one with a noose about the neck of George III and another of Victoria scarred with the legend “I love shag”. Such trivia from the local junk shop make for a very thin exhibition, and it is hardly thickened by its treatment of the suffragettes from Manchester — a couple of the 13 paintings the glass of which they smashed, and from the National Gallery a photograph of Velázquez’s Venus, hacked by stupid Mary Richardson with a butcher’s cleaver, and one of the five Bellinis attacked with her cane by the equally stupid Freda Graham. These are not to be recognised as examples of iconoclasm, for any painting of anything would have served as well, or badly, to draw attention to their cause; had they attacked the paintings in Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912, they would have attracted just as much attention and won the public to their side.

Call me old-fashioned, but generally I find that good art makes for good exhibitions. Which is why, alas, this show was always destined for failure.

It tells the ostensibly stirring tale of Elizabethan England through portraits of the queen, her courtiers and subjects. But the trouble is – though the era was one of great advances in science, finance, architecture, poetry, drama, and exploration – art remained stuck in the Middle Ages.

Take the portraits of Elizabeth herself: stiff, flat, linear, and with neck ruffs so tight they might choke her. Nicholas Hilliard’s "Ermine Portrait" from 1585 is typical. Far more attention is lavished on the queen’s ruby pendant and voluminous, black dress with gold beads than on probing her psyche through a meaningful look on her face. Elizabeth is rendered as an over-decorated Christmas tree.

It sounds too good to be true – a Picasso worth an estimated $1m (£670,500) for €100. But “L’homme au Gibus”, or “Man with Opera Hat”, a gouache on paper dating from 1914, could be yours for the price of a Eurostar ticket.

For the first time, a work by Picasso is to be raffled. A total of 50,000 tickets will be issued, each costing €100. The work will be displayed at the Pavilion of Art and Design (PAD) in London from October 16 to 20; tickets will be on sale at PAD and are also available on the raffle website. The lottery draw will take place in Paris on December 18 and will be broadcast live on the website.

The contrast could not have been more acute. It came the day after a press release from Christie’s New York pinged into my inbox announcing the forthcoming sale of Jeff Koons’s ‘Balloon Dog (Orange)’ on 12 November. Even by current auction-house standards, the hype was of heroic immoderation but it was the novel brazen pandering that shocked me.

It is a moot point whether Mr Koons’s monumental party balloon — sleekly engineered in high chromium stainless steel and more than three metres long and some three and a half metres high — is indeed ‘the most beloved of all contemporary sculptures’, or whether the auction itself will be a ‘landmark’ event ‘set to make history’. It is presented almost as a foregone conclusion that the sculpture, bearing an estimate of $35 million to $55 million, will eclipse not only the artist’s current auction record but also that set at Sotheby’s in May by Gerhard Richter’s ‘Domplatz, Mailand’ — $37.1 million — to become the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction.

‘Balloon Dog (Orange)’ can, of course, be described quite legitimately as ‘a Pop icon of our age’. Koons’s sculptures, not least the gleaming oversize trophies in his Celebration series, are a perfect reflection — and indictment — of our appearance-obsessed and infantilised age. Their ‘wow’ is one of instant gratification, a response dependent on immediate, pleasurable recognition, unexpected scale, a perfection of surface and exuberant colour. By their very nature, they are banal and superficial.

According to Christie’s usually sensible and estimable Brett Gorvy, ‘Balloon Dog’ is nothing short of ‘the Holy Grail for collectors and foundations’. Then he continues: ‘In private hands, the work has always communicated the prominence and stature of its owner…To own this work immediately positions the buyer alongside the very top collectors in the world and transforms a collection to an unparalleled level of greatness.’ Really?

A valuable Henry Moore bronze has been stolen from an open-air sculpture park in the latest high-profile theft of the British artist's work.

Standing Figure (1950) was one of four Moore pieces in Glenkiln Sculpture Park, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland.

The park in moorland on the Lincluden Estate also includes his world-renowned King and Queen (1952-53), Upright Motive No.1: Glenkiln Cross (1955-56) and Two Piece Reclining Figure No.1 (1959). They sit among work by other artists including Auguste Rodin and Jacob Epstein.

Police said Standing Figure was a high-value sculpture and are appealing for anyone who saw any suspicious people or vehicles in the Glenkiln reservoir area last Thursday or Friday.

Acquired directly from the artist by the previous owner

Thence by descent to the present owner