Artelligence Podcast

Following a year in uncharted territory, Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti takes stock of his company’s performance and ventures a look ahead to the challenges of 2021, which include increasing art market access to a broader range of clients and property. Cerutti highlights the bright spots in Christie’s 2020 auction results—especially the strength of the Asian market even as European and American buyers continue to grapple with the constraints of the pandemic—as well as the novel strategies his team has used to transform the sales calendar from in-person events to livestreams.

Barry Avrich is a prolific documentary film producer. In 2017, he released "Blurred Lines" about the Contemporary art market. Avrich's latest project, "Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art," deals with the Knoedler forgery trial that took place in 2016. Avrich talks about how he got former Knoedler director Ann Freedman to participate in the documentary as well as alleged mastermind of the fraud, Juan Carlos Bergantinos. Throughout the movie, Avrich allows the parties to speak for themselves. The result is a fair but compelling look at the illusions and delusions that surround the world's most valuable art.

The film will open with a limited theatrical release later this Fall in New York, London and Los Angeles. It will be streamed in wide release in early 2021.

Bill Griffin of Los Angeles's Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery joins Cynthia Sachs and Naomi Baigell of Athena Art Finance to discuss the current state of art market. Griffin discusses the ways that the pandemic has had an impact upon his business and the surprising ways that it has not. Gallerists are traveling less but collectors seem no less keen on continuing conversations and re-thinking the composition of their collections.

Nick Olney, Director at KASMIN Gallery, discusses the life and legacy of Paul Kasmin, the gallery's founder who died in March 2020. Olney illustrates Kasmin's vision through an examination of the William Copley show that opened just days before New York fell under a "stay-at-home" order that closed the galleries temporarily. Copley was a California-bred painter who became an ardent and self-styled surrealist before becoming an artist in his own right. Copley's experience dovetails with the subject of another show at KASMIN Gallery—"Valley of Gold: Southern California and the Phantasmagoric"— temporarily suspended too.

This is another episode in our series of collaborations between ARTnews and Yieldstreet x Athena Art Finance. At the Armory Show in New York, Vajra Kingsley moderated a panel on what it takes for women to be successful in creative leadership positions featuring Angela Redai, founder of Artine Advisory; Samantha Bloom, partner at Unbranded Pictures; Lexie Komisar, global head of Startup Ecosystems & Partner Platforms at IBM; and Wen-You Cai, founder and director at Special Special.

Since 2017, Athena Art Finance has awarded $10,000 to the best booth in The Armory Show Presents, a section of the fair for emerging galleries. In this podcast recorded at the fair, Athena's Naomi Baigell and ARTnews Editor-in-Chief Sarah Douglas talk to Mariane Ibrahim, a gallerist and former winner of the prize, about what it takes to put on a winning art fair presentation. You'll learn here about all of the thinking, planning and strategy that goes into making an effective art fair booth.

Continuing ARTnews's collaboration with Yieldstreet for the Armory Show fair in New York, Michael Weisz talks about bringing liquidity to art collectors in the form of non-recourse loans backed by Yieldstreet's platform. Weisz, co-founder and President of Yieldstreet, talks about the transformation Yieldstreet is bringing to investors looking for diversified investments and the opportunities that offers to art collectors and dealers. Loans, properly applied, offer those with significant capital tied up in art greater flexibility and spending power.

At the 2020 Armory Show Art Fair, three entrepreneurs—Yieldstreet's Co-Founder and President Michael Weisz, PRZM Co-Founder Larry Milstein and Athena Art Finance's CIO Cynthia Sachs—got together to talk about the challenges to building a business in the creative industries. Milstein's PRZM guides companies through the complexities of marketing to Gen Z consumers who prize experiences and cultural property in ways that are novel and rapidly expanding. Sachs has built Athena into the leading non-recourse lender in the art finance category. Now owned by Yieldstreet and benefiting from the capital sourced through Yieldstreet's platform, Athena provides art collectors and dealers with a different model for managing the capital and liquidity requirements of owning art. Weisz shared his experiences in building the Yieldstreet platform and vision for the future of finance.

To kick off the second Frieze LA art fair, ARTnews Editor-in-Chief Sarah Douglas interviewed Los Angeles collectors Ric Whitney and Tina Perry-Whitney at the Four Seasons Los Angeles, exploring ways to begin collecting art.

During the panel the Whitneys spoke about their interest in patronage of such institutions as CalArts, getting to know artists as individuals, and how they got involved in the art world in Los Angeles and beyond. “All this art we live with, there’s an energy emanating from it,” said Tina. “It is a privilege to get to buy this work and live with it.” Since 2012, the couple—Ric is a music publishing and talent management entrepreneur, and Tina is president of Oprah Winfrey Network—have been building a collection that is diverse not only in terms of the artists’ ethnicity and gender, but in medium, comprising sculpture, installation, painting, and photography. Among the artists whose work they hold are Charles Gaines, Genevieve Gaignard, Joe Goode, Henry Taylor, Sadie Barnette, David Shrigley, Thinh Nguyen, and many others.

At the Peninsula hotel in Los Angeles, Art in America hosted a brunch for the highlighting the magazine's January Issue on Artificial Intelligence and Generative art. Artist, scholar, and collector Anne Spalter joined A.i.A. editor William S. Smith and tech entrepreneur Laura Lehmann for a conversation about the history and future of computer art.

Spalter, author of the influential history The Computer in the Visual Arts (1999), described how her research into a field within art history that was neglected at the time led to her interest in collecting. She and her spouse, Michael Spalter, have built a significant collection that includes work created between the 1950s and 1980s by pioneering figures such as Vera Molnár, Georg Nees, and Koji Fujino. Though many of the compositions were produced by algorithms, the designs were fabricated with plotter printers on paper. The Spalters’ collection of computer art features many pieces in traditional mediums. Lehmann articulated an expanded view of collecting, noting that the meaning of collecting and curating is changing as those activities become widespread on social media. A new generation accustomed to managing collections of digital imagery on a daily basis could very well transform fundamental values in art and assumptions about its singularity.