Artelligence Podcast

Innovation is so important to Kenneth Noland's practice, says Pace Gallery's Alex Brown in this podcast. This month, Pace brings a show of Noland's Stripes, Plaids and Shapes to Chelsea after a successful run in their London gallery. To get a better understanding of Noland's career, we spoke with Bill Noland, the artist's son; then Alex Brown and the Noland estate's long-term advisor, Douglas Baxter, help us understand the market for the artist.

Sara Friedlander, a deputy Chairman at Christie’s who styles herself and “art merchant,” joins LiveArt’s George O’Dell to discuss the first New York sales of 2023. The auction calendar is anchored by the May & November sales in New York but the rest of the year is a free-for-all of sales.

On a year-over-year basis, the New York Contemporary art sales were up in dollar volume due to presence of two single-owner sales but down only slightly on a like-for-like basis. Sara points out that she has never seen the primary market so strong which makes her wonder who are the new names that auctioneers should be bringing to market.

Meanwhile, on the secondary market, sales are heavily dependent upon estimates. Bidders are reacting to perceived value. George and Sara talk about the market for Cecily Brown, Albert Oehlen, Shara Hughes, Leon Polk Smith, Bob Thompson and together they plot a Richard Estes show to spearhead the return of Photorealism to market favor.

Philip Guston Now is the biggest international retrospective of the artist's work in a generation. It's debut at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC this month comes shortly after the announcement of a major gift of the artist's work to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Both the retrospective and the donation contain a considerable number of works from the artist's daughter, Musa Mayer.

In this podcast, we speak to the National Gallery's Harry Cooper, a curator of the show, about Guston's long and varied career. Cooper also talks about the confusion around Guston's symbolism and difficulty in knowing the meaning or intent of his paintings.

After that, we speak to collector Claude Reich about Guston's market and why the artist attracts so many elite collectors yet still remains significantly undervalued compared to his peers.

The art market has been holding its breath for nearly three months. How will the global economy affect the art market in 2023? With the important London auctions now on view, we speak to Sotheby's Helena Newman, Phillips's Cheyenne Westphal, Christie's Keith Gill, Olivier Camu and Tessa Lord, as well as Sotheby's James Sevier to learn more about the upcoming lots including a $45 million Kandinsky on offer through restitution, a several Gerhard Richter abstract paintings at different price points, a very early work by Lucian Freud, a collection of diverse Surrealist talents assembled by a San Francisco "tech" couple and much more.

Noah Horowitz returned to Art Basel as CEO after a year and a half away at Sotheby's. In his new role, which is also a new role for the company, Horowitz is rebuilding the Art Basel team around a strategy for a bigger art fair business with more galleries, more fairs and more opportunities. In this podcast, he talks about the importance of each fair in the Art Basel constellation meeting the needs of galleries, collectors and the cities that surround them. But he also looks toward the future and the ways in which Art Basel can grow beyond the art fair business it grew out of.

Acquavella Gallery has represented the artist Wayne Thiebaud since 2011. The artist, who died on Christmas day in 2021 at the age of 101 was serious about his art, teaching and tennis. How serious was he about his art? Thiebaud worked on one painting for 32 years. Now the Fondation Beyeler has a show of 65 works by Thiebaud that will introduce the breadth of his work to a global audience. In this podcast, Eleanor Acquavella explains the unique factors that have led to a dramatic rise in value in the Thiebaud market and the reasons it might have taken so long for the artist to achieve this moment of recognition.

One of the clear trends visible in last year’s auction data is a renewed interest in abstract painting. Bidders are pursuing a range of overlooked artists from the 1940s and 1950s. Into that trend, David Zwirner Gallery has opened a new show, Roma New York, 1953-64. The exhibition more than 50 works by 23 different artists highlights the connection between some of the giants of mid-century art like Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly , as well as lesser known names like Conrad Marca-Relli, and a group of Italian artists in Rome like Carla Accardi, Afro, Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio, Luigi Boille, Gastone Novelli, Jannis Kounellis and Mario Schifano.

The show is filled with discoveries. That may be why one obsessive gallery-goer on Instagram called it, “the most magnificent gallery show in New York right now.”

In this podcast, the show’s curator David Leiber, who is also a partner at David Zwirner Gallery, explains the origins of the show and what he hopes to it will provoke.

Who are the hottest artists at auction in 2022 whose markets are likely to continue to rise in 2023? George O'Dell talks us through the trends that emerged from looking at more than 200 artists whose overall auction prices were well above the estimates. We identified six main trends: 1) strong demand for artists who are women; 2) revivals of forgotten or undervalued artists; 3) big names gaining value; 4) naive painters; 5) surrealists and their contemporary admirers; as well as demand for 6) a wide range of quirky Asian artists and historical Asian painters.

To identify these trends and the artists who drive them, we calculated the hammer ratios for all auction lots by artist. The hammer ratio is the final hammer price of all lots sold divided by the aggregate low estimate of all lots offered. If works don’t sell—an increasingly rare phenomenon these days—or sell below the estimates, the hammer ratio can fall below 1.00. Conversely, if works sell above the estimate range (a hammer ratio of 1.5 or above) and the artist has enough works offered during the year, we can get a sense that demand is at a higher level than sellers anticipated.

Then we removed any artist with fewer than 10 auction records, sorted by hammer ratio and looked at more than 200 artists whose work was bid above the estimates. From those 200, we could see the trends discussed here.

Laura Paulson is Principal at Gagosian Art Advisory where she has recently advised on the sale of David M. Solinger's collection which featured the much-talked about Willem de Kooning "Collage." Earlier this year, Paulson also advised on the sale of the Macklowe collection which galvanized the market and was briefly the most valuable single-owner collection ever sold. In this podcast, Paulson discusses the strategy behind the Solinger heirs decision not to take a global guarantee or third-party guarantees on any of the lots. The result was a 100% sell-through rate on the collection. From her vantage point as a former senior specialist at both Sotheby's and Christie's and in her role as advisor to collections reaching their term, Paulson has a valuable perspective on the current market as well as a considered view as to how the next few years might play out.

Lucius Elliott and Kelsey Leonard go through some of the sales trends in the November auctions with LiveArt's George O'Dell. David Hockney, new market share levels for female artists, Abstract and Color Field painters, Christina Quarles, Lauren Quin, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Louise Nevelson, Andy Warhol and Salmon Toor are the artists and markets covered in this conversation.