The Art Angle

A few years back, electrifying bidding wars and monumental transactions routinely had us all on the edge of our seats in the auction room, but this sort of in-room excitement now feels a long way off. Although you wouldn't necessarily know it from the triumphant post-sale press releases that are just as routinely put out by the auction houses who are keen to signal confidence in the market and, of course, in their performance. But in 2023, there's no denying that the art market finally came back down to earth.

It took a breather for a combination of reasons, including rising interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, and let's not forget the crypto crash. But the point is not to wax poetic about the state of the art market because Artnet's Intelligence Report is all about data, and we have the numbers to back it up.

Let's refresh with some top line figures: The average price of a fine artwork sold at auction last year dropped almost 16 percent from 2022. Total fine arts sales generated by the big three auction houses—that's Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips—dropped 23 percent year over year. And the total spent on fine art at auction in 2023 is down 12.7 percent.

This week we have two speakers here to pull back the curtain on the findings of the latest Intelligence Report, from a conversation first recorded exclusively for Artnet Pro members. First, is Artnet's investigative journalist Katya Kazakina, who won a 2023 National Arts and Entertainment award from the Los Angeles Press Club for her cover story of the last Intelligence Report.

Her feature story this time around is just as fascinating. It delves into the Oscar-worthy performances of those very auction houses. To the casual observer (and often, even to those in the art world) it's not that obvious how the houses carefully stage manage their proceedings and, sometimes, even the results. The practice has become all the more insidious following the repeal of a set of laws governing the auction houses in New York City. The second guest this week is Margaret Carrigan, another sharp market mind and the editor behind our insightful Artnet Pro newsletter "The Back Room."

Read the full story at the heart of Katya and Margaret's conversation, and the entire Intelligence Report, now.

The contemporary art world is nothing if not confusing. It is simultaneously deeply frivolous, and takes itself way too seriously. Its business dealings combine total mystification with conspicuous consumption, and the exact mechanisms by which one type of art gets celebrated above another are very often impossible to figure out.

If you've ever struggled to make sense of it all, the journalist, Bianca Bosker's new book is worth picking up. It's called Get the Picture, A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends who Taught Me How to See, and it joins books like Anthony Hayden Guest's classic True Colors from 1998 and Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World from 2008, as an entertaining behind-the-scenes chronicle of art, though in a very different and maybe even more confusing moment. Bosker previously wrote Original Copies (2013) about architecture in China that replicates famous world monuments, and Cork Dork (2017), where she went inside the world of fine wine to try to decode its rituals.

For Get the Picture, Bosker inserted herself in the striving, less-visible layers of the art industry, just beneath the glamorous images. She works the booth at a satellite fair in Miami where a gallery's very survival hinges on a few sales. And as a studio assistant for a painter whose success becomes a major headache as speculators start flipping her work.

In some ways, Get the Picture will confirm all of the worst stereotypes about the contemporary art industry, and in others is the story of someone who slowly learns how to look past the caricatures by throwing herself into the thick of it, finding her own way to appreciate some of art's more eccentric values.

It has been 17 years since James Fuentes first hung a shingle out under his own name. In the years since, he has carved out a unique position in the contemporary art world, representing an eclectic mix of older, sometimes overlooked artists, alongside younger, buzzier names.

Prior to striking out on his own, Fuentes worked for a handful of high-profile gallerists, including Jeffrey Deitch, whose eye he first caught with an ambitious pitch for a reality television show about artists, an idea that was way ahead of its time, considering it was the early aughts.

Fuentes has long been a mainstay of the Lower East Side, which happens to be the same area where he grew up. Between his first smaller gallery on the appropriately named St James Place, and later at a larger location on Delancey Street, he has watched neighborhood undergo seismic shifts. Amid all of the changes, he still regards the Lower East Side as a thriving and incredibly diverse place to live and work.

Last year, Fuentes joined the ranks of East Coast dealers heading out West to open a gallery in the burgeoning art scene of Los Angeles. Just as he is set to mark the one year anniversary on Melrose Avenue, another major change is underway: a big move across town in Manhattan to the new gallery hub of Tribeca, into a 3,000-square-foot, ground-floor space on White Street.

This week on the podcast, senior reporter Eileen Kinsella caught up with Fuentes to talk about growing up in New York City during the heyday of hip hop and graffiti art, and his unique approach to the art business, alongside the broader growth and changes in the art world at large.

On this week's episode, hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined by the newly-minted Artnet Pro editor and veteran art journalist and critic Andrew Russeth. We're thrilled to have him as a part of our team, and he's making his Art Angle debut with another edition of the Round Up, where we discuss three topics making headlines and sparking conversation in and around the art world.

The first subject is the opening of The Dean Collection at the Brooklyn Museum, a show featuring the collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys titled "Giants," which is generating a lot of buzz for championing the works of Black artists including Kehinde Wiley, Ebony G. Patterson, Jordan Casteel, Henry Taylor, and Hank Willis Thomas, among many, many others. But that's not the only reason it's in the news. Andrew edited a piece by resident Art Detective Katya Kazakina titled "Should Museums Show Art Owned by Patrons? It's Tempting. It Can Also Blow Up" that investigates the fraught history of institutions doing just that. Though Swizz Beatz resigned as a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum three months before the show opened, "Public museums, critics argue, need to guard their curatorial independence and should not be used by wealthy patrons to boost the value of their holdings."

The next topic of conversation is about a long-standing issue of ownership and repatriation surrounding an ancestral sculpture from Africa that was bought and sold to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where it has resided since 2015. A recent push by the art collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) has resulted in a temporary loan agreement in which the sculpture will be shown at a local gallery in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and simultaneously live-streamed to the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Finally, on a lighter note, we turn to the recent news of Jeff Koons's art making its lunar landing after hitching a ride on the Odysseus Lander. Koons set a record in 2019 when his mirrored sculpture Rabbit fetched a total of $538.9 million, the most expensive price for a living artist at auction. In recent years though, his market has faltered, and the trio discusses if his moonshot will help send his prices back into the stratosphere.

The words the “Harlem Renaissance” have immense magnetism for vast numbers of people. In art history, however, the Harlem Renaissance has often been treated as a footnote to the main story of 20th century art. It’s often been given scant attention in textbooks, and even U.S. museums have historically given more attention to European movements of the 1920s, such as French Surrealism and Russian Constructivism, than to what was happening with Black artists in their own cities.

A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” is out to correct the record. Curated by Denise Murrell, it places the explosion of creativity and experimentation by Black artists from the '20s to the '40s at the center of international art conversation in those years. The 160 works on view range from figures like Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, whose works have long been celebrated, to a host of less familiar names whose stories are not widely known. There’s so much to say about it.

To get some perspective on what makes this show such a big deal, art critic Ben Davis spoke to Bridget Cooks. Cooks teaches art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Exhibiting Blackness, an important 2011 book about the history of U.S. museums’s relationship to Black artists. Cooks also happens to be one of a star group of experts who was on the Advisory Committee for this Met show. With “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” drawing major attention, they talked about both the history of the Harlem Renaissance itself and the history how museums have treated the subject in the past.

Last month, much of the art industry was transfixed on the goings-on in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan, where the Russian businessman Dimitry Rybolovlev and a group of Sotheby’s auction house representatives were taking turns on the witness stand. 

The matter at issue was artworks that Rybolovlev had purchased via the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier. The Russian accused Sotheby’s of conspiring with Bouvier and defrauding Rybolovlev out of tens of millions of dollars in art sales and Sotheby’s denied any wrongdoing. The works in question are masterpieces, not least of which was Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. That work later made headlines for a totally different reason, when Rybolovlev sold it at Christie’s for $450 million in 2017

Rybolovlev ended up losing his case against the auction house last month, and the verdict is likely the last gasp in a high profile art fraud dispute that has travelled to courtrooms all over the world over the last years. And the Sotheby's trial this January was just part of a wider story that actually tracks back to a time before 2014 when the Russian businessman spent around $2 billion acquiring a world class art, collection of art by the likes of Paul Gaugin, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. His right-hand man in getting him these works was Bouvier. Their relationship soured though when Rybolovlev discovered that Bouvier was marking up the prices. In some cases, Bouvier would speak with Sotheby's to get works evaluated After years of litigation in court actions, the two men eventually settled out of court in December, 2023.

While the details of their settlement are fully confidential, the proceedings with Sotheby's in January have shed light on the secretive world of our business dealings. Artnet’s Senior Editor, Kate Brown spoke about the case with Senior Market spoke with Eileen Kinsella, who has been following this dispute for years, since the very beginning and watched the trial in person last month.

The term “abstraction” gets thrown around a lot in the art world, usually as a vague catchall to describe an otherwise inexpressible style of painting or sculpture. Just going by the dictionary’s definition, “abstract” is described as being disassociated from any specific instance, or having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content.

Today, abstract art is not in and of itself considered particularly revolutionary, it is just one of many approaches artists take in pursuit of their vision. But this wasn’t always the case, and the history and tradition of abstraction and abstract art is still rather new in comparison to the long stretch of art history. And there is a lot that can still be mined by looking back to the roots of the movement, to learn about what inspired artists' departure from traditional figurative and representational modes of art making—as well as by looking at how the reverberations of early abstraction can still be felt today.

To delve into what abstractionism is, and highlight some of the most important historical practitioners, Artnet's Gallery Editor Annikka Olsen spoke to Artnet’s Co-Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art Martina Batovic, and curator, collector and partner at Leslie Feely Gallery Dakota Sica.

Artificial intelligence was one of the hottest topics in art in 2023—and we can predict that it will continue to be a major topic in 2024. We can debate whether we should be cautiously optimistic or in an existential panic, but most of us can agree that the impact will be enormous.

Way back in May 2022, Art Angle co-pilot, art critic Ben Davis, talked about what A.I. means for art in an episode of the Art Angle in his book, Art in the After-Culture—just when the world was first being transfixed by images generated by Dall-E 2, and before ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022. The year and a half after that conversation brought a huge wave of fascinating—if unnerving—developments around the fields of art and creativity—the most human of pursuits.

As we head deeper into 2024, what forms and aesthetics could emerge or take precedence? Recently, Ben put together a new essay, offering 10 speculative predictions about how generative A.I. might transform how art is made, how artists work, and what an audience expects from art. We found them very persuasive. Some are unexpected. Some are alarming. We will have to wait and see if he’s right, but things are moving pretty quickly, so we may not have to wait long.

In a wide-ranging conversation, senior editor Kate Brown and Ben review some of the most memorable touchstones around A.I. and art from last year, before going in depth about a few of Ben’s predictions that jumped out from his article—if you want to read all 10, you can check out the full essay, “10 Predictions About Unexpected Ways A.I. Will Reshape Art (Part 1 of 2) and 10 Predictions About Unexpected Ways A.I. Will Reshape Art (Part 2 of 2).

We are well into 2024 now, coming to the end of January, and looking back at 2023, one of our favorite innovations was this monthly round up here at the Art Angle. Each month, we bring together Artnet News editors and writers to discuss the biggest art news developments of the last month, and take the pulse of what's happening around the world.

This week, we have a fully-international cohort, with Ben Davis in New York, Kate Brown in Berlin, and Jo Lawson-Tancred in London. We also have a very diverse set of talking points today, including performance artist Marina Abramović's new skincare line (which may or may not actually be a work of art in itself); a spate of controversies dogging the national pavilions gearing up for the Venice Biennale; and some predictions from art advisors about what to expect in the art market this year.

The author Ishmael Reed is known as a major force in literature and has been called one of the key thinkers of multiculturalism. Born in 1938, Reed arrived with a bang in 1972 with Mumbo Jumbo, a vibrant, hard-to-describe novel that blends real historical events with outrageous fantasy, about a plague of dancing that breaks out, spread by Black artists and musicians, and a shadowy international conspiracy to contain its disruptive power.

Reed’s storied career has included novels, essays, and polemics, as well as plays. And he has recently come out with a work for the stage that looks at how we tell the story of another giant of the late 20th century: Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Basquiat is today among the most widely known painters, and his life story is almost as famous as his art itself. He burst into the spotlight in the early ‘80s, first as a savvy street artist and then with his vibrant style of painting. By 1985, he was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the symbol of the 1980s art boom. By the end of the decade, he was dead of an overdose of heroin, at the age of 27.

Reed’s play, titled The Slave Who Loved Caviar, is sharply critical of how Basquiat’s story gets told as one of self-destruction instead of exploitation. It homes in on Basquiat’s famous relationship with the edler Andy Warhol, which has been told and retold, in the painter Julian Schnabel’s famous 1996 film Basquiat, as well as more recently Anthony McCarten’s Broadway play, The Collaboration, soon to be a film, and in many other places.

Like Mumbo Jumbo, The Slave Who Loved Caviar tackles the serious subject of how Black culture is treated in society, in a fantastic way. It features police investigators literarily reviewing the evidence that the white art world failed Basquiat. But it also has a Vampire aristocrat character, depicted as a present-day, Andy Warhol-like figure out to collaborate with a young Black artist, who goes by the name Young Blood.

The play was performed in 2021 and 2022 at the Theater for the New City. It has just been published in a text by Archway Editions, with a forward and afterward where Reed responds to some of the criticism his take on Basquiat’s story stirred up then. This week on the podcast, Reed joins Artnet's chief art critic Ben Davis to discuss his work.