Artelligence Podcast

David Norman applies his 30+ years experience in the Impressionist and Modern category to the results from this May's sales in New York where $1.5bn in Modern and Impressionist art was sold. As a result, this season the Impressionist and Modern category returns to a pride of place as the biggest market, a stature it has not held for a decade.

The season was packed with stories from the Rockefeller Estate which featured an extraordinary concentration of Impressionist pictures from artists like Monet, Picasso, Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Ferdnand Léger, and Georges Seurat.

The biggest, and some of the most impressive, sales came from the Impressionist and Modern Evening sales where works by Modigliani, Kazimir Malevich and Constantin Brancusi set new benchmarks.

Even with those successes and the stratospheric sales totals, the sales results do show that nearly a decade of uninterrupted growth in art prices may be beginning to have an effect on the market. Buyers and sellers are increasingly having a standoff over estimates and expectations.

The Impressionist and Modern market is strong but picky. David Norman explains why.

The Peggy and David Rockefeller collection is likely to be the most valuable single-owner sale in history. The great breadth of the Rockefeller collection—with extraordinary examples of French, German and American painting—furniture, ceramics and other decorative objects—will be on view at Christie's Rockefeller Center headquarters in late April with a series of auctions held the first week in May.

In this podcast, Marc Porter, Chairman of Christie's Americas, discusses the unique opportunities and challenges of organizing and marketing the estate of one of the world's most famous families. From China to Europe to the Gulf States to the UK and America, Christie's has tailored its marketing and publicity to the attributes of the Rockefeller family and the collection that are key to exciting the interest of each of these distinct populations.

Porter goes further to tell some of the history of the Rockefeller's collecting experiences and the goals of the estate.

Lock Kresler discusses Lévy Gorvy's exhibition, 'Source and Stimulus' open until April 21, 2018 at 22 Old Bond St in London. The show features a series of outstanding museum quality loans and seminal examples of works by all three artists in the exhibition including Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Frightened Girl’ (1964), being seen publicly for the first time in 25 years having been hidden away in a private collection in Europe since its last public display in 1993, when it was shown in the artist’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Lévy Gorvy is also exhibiting Sigmar Polke’s ‘Untitled (Couple)’ (1965-66), which was purchased directly from the artist and has never been seen publicly or published before, and ‘Girlfriends’ (1964-65), which featured prominently in Polke’s retrospectives in 2014 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Modern.

The exhibition also sees two paintings by Gerald Laing reunited for the first time since they were created in 1965. ‘Shout’ and ‘Rain Check’ were sold the same year by Richard Feigen to two different collectors in the US, and neither work has been seen publicly since then.

In addition, Lévy Gorvy has a video (https://youtu.be/_9tFL9b1LDI)about the exhibition and you can see images of the show on the gallery's website (https://www.levygorvy.com/exhibitions/source-and-stimulus-polke-lichtenstein-laing/).

Mark Lurie is the founder of Lofty, a seller of art and collectibles online that he sold a little over a year ago. Since then, Mark, who has worked as a venture captialist as well as a founder, saw the natural fit between the art market and blockchain technology. His new venture Codex seeks to create an title registry for the art market. But Codex is more than that. It seeks to be a foundational technology for many different businesses and services in the art market. In this podcast, Mark explains his vision of the future of the art market and how we'll get there.

Bloomberg's art market reporter, James Tarmy, discusses the unexpected corners of the Contemporary art market by looking at six different artists and their markets. They range from Lawrence Abu Hamdan who has strong support from museums and other institutions but no real market to John McAllister whose work thrives without much fanfare. In between, Tarmy looks at Laura Owens, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Michael Krebber, all artists who have thriving but very different market trajectories. Each of these case studies attempts to ask how we can identify an artist whose work and reputation will last.

David Norman talks through the results from November's Impressionist and Modern auctions in New York. Norman discusses the use of guarantees, the differences between the public and private markets, the relative strength of different types of work by Pablo Picasso, the tastes of Asian buyers and the impact of private museums on that Modern market.

Cheyenne Westphal speaks, after two full New York sales cycles with Phillips, about the company's strategy moving forward to carve out a place for itself in a Contemporary and Modern art market dominated by two larger houses.

Speaking a few days before the November Evening sale, Westphal talks about attracting buyers and sellers, the increased use of guarantees, collectors' interest in identifying new artists and the use of shows with unexpected focus to bring attention to historically undervalued art.

The $450m sale of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi was surrounded by a the near constant repetition of the erroneous idea that there are doubts about the work's authenticity. From news reports to essays by Contemporary art critics miffed at the growing spectacle, writers ignored the consensus among scholars and scientific researchers that the work is the lost work of the Renaissance master.

In this podcast, Bendor Grosvenor, an Old Master dealer credited with numerous 'sleeper' finds and the host of "Britain's Lost Masterpieces," discusses the 2011 National Gallery show on Leonardo that admitted the Salvator Mundi into the canon of the few recognized works by the artist.

Grosvenor also addresses the tone of the Old Masters market, his hopes that this sale will remind art collectors of the enduring popularity of Old Master paintings and spur more attention to the field.

Michael Findlay, the author of The Value of Art, has a new book out about changing the way we approach a work of art. In Seeing Slowly, Findlay suggests we put our experience of the art itself first. Ignore the wall labels, avoid pontificating to your companion and simply look at the art informed by own connoisseurship, the experience of having looked at art in the past, and your own cultural awareness.

In this podcast, Findlay explains what he means and why he thinks we would all be better off approaching art this way. Then he talks about Instagram and the way that the business of selling art has changed—and how buyers and sellers would benefit from seeing slowly.

Nicholas Lisson on his philosophy of running an enduring gallery business: "The money will come if the art is good enough."

Lisson Gallery's father-son duo Nicholas and Alex Logsdail discuss the history of their gallery, its more than 500 exhibitions over 50 years now only partially captured in a book of 1,200 pages.

In this intimate conversation between Elena Platonova and the Logsdails we learn about the path both men took from pursuing their own artistic visions—Nicholas as a painter; Alexander as a musician—to running a transatlantic gallery. We hear about their plans for further global expansion and their own fifty-year rule for gauging the quality of an artist.