Category Archives: art

It makes sense that Deutsche Bank is sponsoring the Richard Prince retrospective at the Guggenheim. Prince is the ultimate art-world hot commodity: he was the first artist to break the $1 million barrier for a photograph, one of his cowboy … Continue reading →

My friends don’t tend to collect art, but it seems that their friends do. Yesterday afternoon, I found out that a friend of a friend had sold his Zhang Xiaogang at Sotheby’s for $400,000; and then yesterday evening I found … Continue reading →

Callen Bair, responding to my post on speculative bubbles, tells me that there is speculation in the art market after all. Who are these speculators? They’re rich; they want to spend their money; and it might as well be on … Continue reading →

Lauren Schuker has a big piece entitled "Art’s Anxiety Attack" in the weekend WSJ. Let’s see if we can detect a theme here: The soaring prices for art in recent years partly reflect booming financial markets, with hedge-fund managers delving … Continue reading →

One idiosyncracy of my native England is that many property owners don’t technically own their homes at all; instead, they have very long-term leases, which are typically initially 99 years long, and which can be bought and sold and speculated … Continue reading →

Portfolio.com launched its new art blog, Figure Painting, last month, and I’ve been an occasional contributor there ever since. (Which is one reason why you’re not going to find much art-related content in Market Movers any more.) My contributions can … Continue reading →

Are you worth a few million bucks? Do you live near the ocean in a large and
ostentatious house with a lot of walls? Do you not know much about art but you
know what you like? Then welcome aboard the Grande Luxe!
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The Epicurean Dealmaker reckons that modern art is rubbish
contemporary
art is kitsch.
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Bess Levin today finds
a most
peculiar editorial in the International Herald Tribune, on one of my favorite
subjects, the intersection of art and money.
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The Art Trading Fund, which seemed
like a bad idea when we first encountered it last month, is going to officially
launch
on July 1, reports Kit Roane. Which seems like another bad idea to me: who
launches anything on a Sunday?
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Contemporary art is not a good investment.
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I’m always very hesitant to call a bubble, but I’m doing that now, with respect to Richard Prince’s latest works.
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The acres of press that this skull is receiving is testament to the fact that he has – again – created an icon which transcends the art world and resonates in the public’s mind like the art of no other contemporary artist.
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If you look at the art stars of the last bubble – Schnabel, Fischl, Longo
– most of them are still nowhere to be seen, as far as the auction houses
are concerned. Basquiat, of course, is the exception. With the present crop,
working out who’s the Fischl and who’s the Basquiat is the real multimillion-dollar
question.
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Chris Carlson has decided he’s had enough of prop trading,
and so he’s moving into the art world instead, setting up an art
hedge fund. Apparently it’s already "raised" £10 million,
although I suspect that a very large chunk of that belongs to one C. Carlson.
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