Artelligence Podcast

Lisanne Skyler's parents were art collectors in the 1970s. Her father was a young lawyer in Manhattan who spent his weekends going to gallery shows looking for exciting young artists. To buy new paintings he often had to sell the works he already owned. That's how he came in 1969 to buy from the OK Harris gallery a small yellow Brillo Box sculpture made by Andy Warhol. Two years later, Skyler sold the work to buy a drawing by another artist who, at the time, seemed like he was going to have a career that would eclipse the faltering Warhol's. 

Over time, the Skylers' Brillo Box passed through the hands of collectors like Charles Saatchi and other anonymous figures before landing among the possessions of Robert Shapazian, a noted gallerist who ran Gagosian in Los Angeles. When Shapazian's estate was sold at Christie's in 2010, the little yellow Brillo Box made $3m, a shock to Lisanne Skyler who was now an adult. 

Curious about her family's glancing role in the art world, Lisanne made a documentary film now available on HBO. Brillo Box (3¢ Off) is not just about the sculpture's journey from her childhood living room to the auction block at Christie's but about how and why her parents collected art; what became of the works they owned and the stress art collecting eventually placed on their marriage.

In this podcast, Lisanne Skyler talks about the role art played in her parents marriage, their personal evolution and the family that they raised.

Amy Cappellazzo talks about her record setting sales of three works by Barkley Hendricks, the recently deceased artist whose unique portrait style, developed in the 1960s and 70s, has been gaining attention for the last decade since the Nasher Museum held a retrospective of his work called, The Birth of Cool.

In this podcast, Cappellazzo talks about having encountered the artists work and then getting the rare opportunity a few decades later to sell three works from one collection as it came to market.

Faced with a series of choices about how to position and market the work, Cappellazzo walks us through her thinking and strategy. The record prices ultimately achieved were the product of a combination of cultivating new buyers, personal selling and the value of a sense of discovery.

Timothy Taylor has a space in New York that measures 16 x 34 feet. The intimacy of the gallery appealed to his artist Alex Katz who helped create a show around one of his student sketchbooks. The small works set in a small space offer a very different experience of the artist known for his work at scale.

In this podcast, Timothy Taylor talks about the changing ways in which art dealers must operate to represent their artists well while coping with the constraints of ever-rising retail space rents in major metropolitan centers and the growing interest in art from collectors in far-flung cities across Asia and the West.

Taylor, who has just opened a show of Ding Yi's new work in his London space, has also brought Alex Katz and Sean Scully to China. He sees the way that dealers represent their artists requires thinking creatively and hints that the future of art dealing may already be upon us.

David Norman, formerly head of the Impressionist and Modern department at Sotheby's, and Brooke Lampley, formerly the head of the same department at Christie's (and scheduled to join Sotheby's in 2018,) get together to discuss the results of the Impressionist and Modern art auctions in May of 2017.

From the stunning performance of a number of sculptures to the quandary of Monet's results to the use of guarantees and mix of lots in the Evening sales, Norman and Lampley offer their insights into the sometimes opaque bidding.

The buyers of Impressionist and Modern art are changing. Their approach and objectives are different from the way in which buyers in the category used to see Impressionist and Modern art. Lampley and Norman illuminate these shifting trends.

Elena Platonova sits down with Stefania Bortolami to talk about her new gallery in Tribeca, Daniel Buren's show inaugurating the space and her ambitious plan to get art across America including into former fast food outlets.

In this podcast, Bortolami and Platonova discuss:

*Has Chelsea left galleries no more room for error?

*Will TriBeCa take over from the Lower East Side as the next gallery neighborhood?

*Daniel Buren—"the Stripe Guy"—his latest exhibition and his career?

*Her program to bring art exhibitions to cities around the US. Next up, New Haven's remarkable Marcel Breuer masterpiece.

Sirius XM produced this interview between artist Sam Gilliam and Jonathan Binstock, the director of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery and a Gilliam scholar.

On the occasion of Gilliam's return to the Venice Biennale 45 years after he represented the United States, this far-ranging conversation covers the artist's entire career. Born in Louisville, Kentucky where Cassius Clay, Sr. (Muhammed Ali's father) was a prominent painter, Gilliam encountered a European refugee Ulfert Wilke at the Louisville and became his studio assistant.

He also eventually encountered the Gutai artists in Japan, Bob Thompson and moved eventually to Washington, DC where Kenneth Noland was at the center of the Color Field movement and the city was "a town of connection."

Throughout this conversation Gilliam talks of the lifelong struggle to make art and make a life as an artist. His career followed no clear trajectory but has been punctuated by encounters with an endless cast of 20th Century artistic influences culminating in his most recent turn in the center stage.

Santa Fe, NM has long been a center of the visual arts in the United States. For more than a century, modern artists have retreated to the dry climate. The region is also home to a rich array of native and Spanish artists and artisans that have attracted visitors for hundreds of years.

With a large number of vacation homes and occasional visitors, a long-running international opera that attracts foreign visitors and being a major tourist have made Santa Fe a magnet for art dealers as well as art buyers.

There are more than 200 galleries in the city spread across four major neighborhoods. SITE Santa Fe, a national and international Contemporary art venue, re-opens in expanded form this Fall.

Mike Tansey and Barry Ellsworth are two prominent gallerists in the city, they talk about the culture of art dealing in Santa Fe.

Acquavella galleries has brought together the 23 gouaches in Joan Miró's Constellations series that were last seen together in 1993 at the Museum of Modern Art.

Considered by many to be the height of Miró's achievement as an artist, these works gain power and impact from being shown all together. Indeed, the condition for many of the loans was that the entire series had to be on view.

The suite of images was produced between January of 1940 and September of 1941—but it was not until 1958 that André Breton named them “Constellations." When Miró and his family fled France for Spain ahead of the German invasion in June of 1940, he took virtually nothing with him apart from the portfolio of his ten completed Constellations.

"Since they were first exhibited at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in early 1945, after having been smuggled out of Europe, the Constellations have been celebrated as one of the most powerful artistic statements of the 20th century," said Bill Acquavella.

Margit Rowell is an art historian and curator who works mostly in Paris and New York. She has held curatorial positions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and as curator of drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Adam Lindemann discusses hisVenus Over Manhattan gallery's presentation of a survey of Bernard Buffet's paintings:

The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Estate of Bernard Buffet, marks the first major solo presentation of Buffet’s work in New York in nearly three decades.

While Bernard Buffet (b. 1928, Paris, France; d. 1999, Tourtour, France) was once hailed as the next Picasso in France and internationally, the artist’s work has weathered dizzying cycles of acclaim and rejection. Immensely popular – and always commercially successful – at numerous points in his career, Buffet suffered long spells of vicious critical repudiation, when his work was considered the ultimate embodiment of poor taste. But curatorial attention has returned to his oeuvre in the years since his death, culminating in a major retrospective of his work at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2016, organized by the museum’s director, Fabrice Hergott. At this moment of renewed relevance, Bernard Buffet: Paintings from 1956 to 1999 reintroduces the artist’s oeuvre to a new generation of American viewers, charting a history of the artist’s development through a tightly focused selection of highlights from Buffet’s career.

"This is why Phillips positioning is right. We essentially believe in an international Contemporary art marketplace and we believe most tastes converge at some point." ——Edward Dolman, CEO Phillips Auction House

In the two and a half years since Edward Dolman took over the helm of Phillips auction house, he has been engaged in a remaking of the firm from an upstart auction house focusing on the fringes of the Contemporary art market to a serious alternative to Sotheby's and Christie's with a seat at the table when the biggest art deals are being made.

In this podcast, Dolman talks about how the expansion of the Contemporary art market has made Phillips's strategy viable and profitable.

He talks about the new team he has spent the last two years hiring—with leading specialists who decamped from Christie's and Sotheby's—and how their arrival will position the auction house to expand into new collecting fields and penetrate other regions of the world.

He discusses the growing financialization of the art market and the role guarantees play in facilitating art transactions, especially public ones. Dolman shares his view of the watch, jewelry and collectible markets. Finally, shares his thoughts on the global auction calendar and how that is likely to change in the coming months and years.