Billionaire Collector Eli Broad Expecting Price Drop at Basel [Bloomberg]
Art Buying Frenzy Increasing Fine Art Storage Business [WSJ]

On Wednesday, June 6, the Whitney Museum of American Art played host to ART PARTY, a charitable event whose proceeds benefited the Whitney’s 40-year-old Independent Study Program, at Skylight Studios. The guestlist featured an array of celebrities who ran the gamut from Ivanka Trump and Kate Bosworth to Freddie Prinze Jr. and Moby. The music of DJ La Jauretsi powered the event while visual performances by Joshua Light Show and Bec Stupak dazzled guests with a spray of dreadlocks and fluid hula hoop movements. The affair’s dresscode, “Hippy Chic”, revealed refreshingly whimsical pieces by Hervé Léger worn by Arden Wohl, by ThreeAsFour worn by Genevieve Jones and, of course, a slew of damsels garbed in the host’s Max Azria summer frocks. (more…)

Running June 3 – September 10, The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective exhibit of the work of Richard Serra brings forty years worth of sculpture, often gigantic, to the museum’s forefront. On Tuesday night, LVMH hosted a dinner in honor of the new MoMA’s most ambitious sculpture exhibition to date. The opening of Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years drew over 500 guests to the midtown museum. Among them were painters Brice Marden, Frank Stella, and Chuck Close and a clutch of connoisseurs in the form of Larry Gagosian, Veronica Hearst, and Lily Safra. Beginning at the inception of the artist’s career in the late 1960s, the exhibit features his work with nontraditional materials like neon, rubber and lead, and moves chronologically through the many phases of Serra’s sculpting. (more…)

With the art market reaching new highs, the plague of middlemen taking portions of multi-million dollar sale prices rises, ultimately decreasing the seller’s proceeds (Christie’s typically takes 20% of the first $500,000 and 12% of the rest of the work’s sale price). As a result, a new hedge fund known as the Art Trading Fund was born with hopes of exploiting the art market’s current inefficiencies. Founded by Justin Williams, an investor well-versed in the sale of highly-priced fine art, and partner Chris Carlson, former trader and Deutsche Bank and UBS, the fund hopes to have raised more than $50 million by the end of the summer. (more…)

In the UK, Justin Williams and Chris Carlson have set up the Art Trading Fund, an investment group aiming to trade art much like a hedge fund. According to their website, they are “focused on 3 to 12 month returns” and “buys and sells art via its global network of dealers, renowned artists, auction houses and galleries.” (more…)

Dinner with Donner Party: Jim Shaw’s Cannibal Exhibition [P.S. 1 Gallery]

Marianne Boesky and the Big Bad World of Art Business [Portfolio]

With Chinese contemporary art sales through the roof and seeing a burst of Korean and Indian artists breaking through New York City’s contemporary art scene, it’s not surprising that the Asian Contemporary Art Fair is debuting this year.

From November 8-12, about 80 galleries will be showing works from more than 10 Asian countries. Thomas Arnold, a co-director of the fair, tells Crain’s that he estimates more than 25,000 visitors and around $11.5 million for the local economy.

“This will be the first time we’ve actually had so much Asian art from so many different countries under one roof… The interest in Asian art and culture has never been greater.”

New York City is host to Asia Week, organized by the Asia Society, usually in the Spring. Perhaps ACAF NY is trying to avoid becoming a satellite event in the roster of the affluent Asia Week and emerge as a prominent event in its own right. However, they did use the opportunity on March 18th to hold a Fair preview at Sotheby’s.
ACAF NY | Asian Contemporary Art Fair New York
Asian Art Fair Comes to NY [Crain’s]

This month and next, British sculptor Marc Quinn brings his most recent exhibition, “Sphinx,” to New York’s Mary Boone Gallery. Known best for creating busts out of frozen blood and sculptures that depict the limbless, Quinn tackles a new form in Sphinx. Attempting to comment on mortality alongside divinity (each work in the exhibit is titled after a different Greek god or goddess), Sphinx features a collection of sculptures of supermodel Kate Moss, each twisted into a different Yogic position.The piece titled “Sphinx (Road to Enlightenment),” perhaps the exhibitions stand-out work, is unpainted bronze, unlike the majority of painted sculptures, and portrays Moss in a Buddha-like position, complete with robes and an exposed ribcage. Other sculptures feature Moss in a less overtly religious, yet equally posed form. (more…)

On a cloudy day in May, in a drab gray room in Rockefeller Center, three hours ticked by at a normal pace. Within these 3 three hours, nearly $400 million worth of postwar and contemporary art was sold at the Christie’s auction house Wednesday evening. Only one day before, the post-war and contemporary art auctions at Sotheby’s closed at a grand total of $255 million, enabling the two-day total sales in Manhattan alone to surpass a cool half-billion dollars with ease. The undoubted financial star of Christie’s evening was Andy Warhol‘s silkscreen painting “Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I).” Inspired by a 1963 Newsweek photo depicting a car crash that impaled one driver on a telephone pole, the painting ignited a heated bidding war between two parties, urging bids to as high as $64 million. (more…)

With a cluttered presentation sprawled over two floors of Midtown space, the Columbia University MFA show comes across as energetic, adventurous, but undeniably student-y work; heck, at times it’s slightly muddled, unfinished, and, yes, even downright messy. Who’d ever have thought this would amount to a good thing? But, I must admit, it was all surprisingly refreshing. Over the last couple of years, Columbia has consistently met the challenge of its increasingly high profile, pumping out art stars in the making with graduate presentations as smoothed and polished as anything Chelsea might throw at you. Last year’s class’ offering in Dumbo was no exception: a cavernous space, filled with pristine pieces, thoughtfully arranged into a compelling exhibition which gave the Whitney Biennial “Day for Night” (on view at the same time) more than a run for its money. As expected, a new set of rising stars was ushered in, such as Tamy Ben-Tor and Julieta Aranda, who have already garnered pretty major accolades (and with good cause). (more…)

Spring auction season is here in New York and in this heated seller’s market collectors are cleaning out their storage spaces to make room for large loads of cash.

Here is the schedule for those ready to wield a paddle and get spanked by an often much more than six figure invoice.

Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale – Session 1: Tuesday, May 15th, 7:00 pm

Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Sale – Session 1: Wednesday, May 16th, 10:00 am

Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Sale – Session 2: Wednesday, May 16th, 2:00 pm

Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale – Wednesday, May 16th, 7:00 pm

Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Morning Session – Thursday, May 17th, 10:00 am

Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Afternoon Session – Thursday, May 17th, 2:00 pm

via Maccarone

Much like its title, Corey McCorkle’s current show initially strikes one as cryptic. Sparingly, he scatters a series of remnants across Maccarone’s cavernous West Village space: one room contains architectural photographs of an abandoned zoo, in the adjacent one, a looping video projects images of wild dogs roaming the overgrowth, and around the corner, down a narrow hallway, we come to a mirrored passageway that funnels to a point and creates endless, dizzying reflections. The overall effect is oblique but somehow uncanny, as abandonment haunts these commonplace sites, transforming them into pseudo-romantic ruins: the empty cages, the barren fields, the howling of dogs. And as the sense of desolation grows, so does the show’s subtle but insightful effect. (more…)

Matthew Brannon opened his first solo museum show at the Whitney Museum Altria on Park Avenue and 42nd Street. At the intersection of this transportation hub, a predominantly suited populace come in and out of Grand Central en route to power lunches, the racquet club, and the confined dreams of cubicle days. Just a sheet of plate glass away from the bustle, Brannon’s prints sit neatly. They are evenly spaced on wooden trestles inside a calm and sparse interior.
His work references the neat tableau of the white collar worker. Brannon’s muse is the dark circled, fake tanned, coked up, business class, success story that we urbanites are all in touch with in our global capitalist system. His imagery pulls together the signifiers of our contemporary life “on the road”, or more aptly, on the plane, in the cab, at the bar, in the hotel. (more…)

Jonathan Monk at Casey Kaplan – March 30 to May 5, 2007

“…Jonathan Monk, will present a new body of work that takes shape from key principles of Conceptual art — the favoring of ideas over object-making, serialism, the dematerialization of the art object — interpreting them with a playful sensibility and through a variety of media: 16 mm film, painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and a laser light installation.”

– Casey Kaplan Gallery

To read the entire press release click here.

Andreas Hofer at Metro Pictures – March 23 to April 21, 2007

“For his New York debut, Andreas Hofer presents “Only Gods Could Survive,” a haunting and hallucinogenic installation of sculpture, painting, drawing and collage…Using subject matter that includes comic book heroes, science fiction, bygone Hollywood and symbols of the Third Reich, Hofer extracts these signs from a forbidden world, producing artworks that traverse time to become an ominous and fanciful meditation on history and popular culture.”

– Metro Pictures Gallery

Photo courtesy of of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery

To read the entire press release click here.

Karel Funk at 303 Gallery – March 10 to April 7, 2007

“Karel Funk’s paintings are made with layers of thin paint that reflect light, influenced by Dutch and Flemish painters of the 17th century and Renaissance portraiture, as well as by American figurative painters from the past 20 years and their relationship to photography based work. In the end, the tenderness of each painstaking detail that goes into Funk’s handling brings the viewer closer to the subjects, even as they turn further away from us.”

– 303 Gallery

To read the entire press release click here.

The king of kitsch has big plans with (of course) a big budget to stake his claim on the Los Angeles landscape. Known for his now iconic Rabbit (2003) and giant Puppy (1992), Jeff Koons is planning to build a suspended, moving steam train. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art already has 1 million dollars to cover the cost of an outside engineering group to consider the feasibility of the project which will attempt to imitate the real effects of a working train from the 1940s…hanging sideways from a crane. Koons would like the train to make chugging noises and emit periodic smoke.

Koons plans dangling engine (smokin’!) [NYtimes]