This week's Art Collecting and Investment News

Sunday, 20^th July 2008

Art.view Collecting collectors
LONDON - James Stourton, the chairman of Sotheby's UK, is a tall, stooping man with a faintly academic air about him who manages to make his work his play. He collects collectors; indeed he has written the book about them.
                                                                                                                            Economist - UK

YSL art hoard to trouser £250m
PARIS - His art collection, to be auctioned by Christie's in February in Paris's Grand Palais, also includes ancient Roman works, Renaissance statues, paintings by Ingres, Goya and Warhol, art deco furniture and silver. It is being sold by Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent's business partner and companion.
                                                                                                                        Times Online - UK

Tracey Emin is about more than sex
SCOTLAND - That is not the reason that Emin is a great artist. If you look at her drawings and paintings -- which are where her gift lies, rather than the famous unmade bed, with its condoms and knickers -- they are concerned with her almost painful honesty.
                                                                                                                                     Times Online - UK

Saturday, 19^th July 2008

Squabble over Mandela art
LONDON - The London Gallery in Mayfair opened the Nelson Mandela 90th Birthday Exhibition on Tuesday - three days before the Nobel laureate's birthday. This was despite Mandela's public disassociation from the show and a warning of legal action earlier this month.
                                                                           Independent Online - Cape Town,South Africa

Tabakalera Hosts a Major Exhibition on Latin American Contemporary Art
SAN SEBASTIAN - From July 19th to October 5th, Tabakalera will showcase the work of 25 artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Uruguay. Thirty works of art will reveal some of the latest, most ground-breaking art.    
                                                                                                                             Art Daily - USA

Christie's rides art boom in India, China
LONDON - Auction house Christie's says it has recorded a 63% growth entirely due to the emergence of Indian and Chinese buyers of both their own art and western art.
                                                                             Economic Times - Gurgaon,Haryana,India

Friday, 18^th July 2008

Miami Art Museum Presents Today Sean Duffy: New Work
MIAMI, US - Duffy received his BA from the University of California in San Diego and an MFA from the University of California at Irvine. His work has been shown in numerous museum exhibitions.
                                                                                                                             Art Daily - USA

Op Art Revisited Opens Today at Albright-Knox Art Gallery
NEW YORK - The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is recognized as one of the world's leading collections of modern and contemporary art. It has more than 6,500 works in its collection and a dynamic series of exhibitions and public programs.
                                                                                                                            Art Daily - USA

Christie's International Announces Worldwide Sales of $3.5 Billion ...
LONDON/NEW YORK/ HONG KONG - Christie's International, the world's leading art business, announced today worldwide sales of £1.8 billion ($3.5 billion) for the first six months of 2008.
                                                                                                                             Art Daily - USA

British Art Sales Fall With Stock Prices
LONDON - Demand for in the U.K. for both British Victorian era and 20th-century art has dropped as U.K. stock and real estate prices fall, Bloomberg reports.
                                                                                                    ARTINFO - New York,NY,USA

Alvin Hall's World of Money
BBC - Where do investors put money during the time of a credit crunch - commodities, wine, art, films or exclusive property? Financial guru Alvin Hall explores the options in this new series.
                                                                                                        BBC News - UK

Art market boom benefits Christie's and Sotheby's
LONDON - The boom in the art market has handed strong results to the two big auction houses, with Christie's and Sotheby's together selling about $7bn worth of artworks in the first six months of the year - 12 per cent more than last year.
                                                                             Financial Times - London,England,UK

Thursday, 17^th July 2008

At Christie's and Sotheby's, a penury of Old Masters keeps art ...
LONDON - Christie's had difficulty in cajoling artistic treasures out of the hands of owners fearful that major works might not perform too well in the current economic context. If so, the fretful art owners were proven spectacularly wrong.

                                                                                          International Herald Tribune - France

Christie's Sales Of Art Increase
GLOBAL - Christie's International PLC said it sold $3.5 billion of fine and decorative art in the first half, up 7.7% from the same period last year and up 56% from two years ago.
                                                                                                   Wall Street Journal - USA

Damien Hirst is rewriting the rules of the market (2)
LONDON - What are the strategies of the auction houses with regard to the primary market? Whilst Sotheby's goes public with a straight-from-the-studio sale and is rumoured to be courting Takashi Murakami, Christie's buys the multi-location primary gallery Haunch of Venison.
                                                                                                                   Art Newspaper - UK

Thursday, July 17^th 2008

UK Art Sales Slow as Stock Market Rout Dulls Buying Interest
LONDON - London art dealers said demand for U.K. Victorian and 20th-century art has slowed, reining in prices, after sales in which nearly half the lots failed to sell.         
                                                                                                                         Bloomberg - USA

Christie's First-Half Sales Rise 10% on Emerging-Market Demand
LONDON - Christie's International said auction and private sales increased by 10 percent worldwide in the first half, driven by new buyers from the Middle East, Russia and Asia.           
                                                                                                                         Bloomberg - USA

When Public Art Is Orphaned
US - At a November Bonhams & Butterfields auction in San Francisco, the 18-foot-tall work went to a private collector for $150,250 - far above the auction house's estimate of $60,000 to $80,000. Bonhams & Butterfields was stunned.
                                                                                                            Wall Street Journal - USA

Art's bright spark
CHINA - Most recently in June, Zhang received the 2008 Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award, presented by the German luxury goods manufacturer to honor those who have dedicated time, energy and financial support to the arts and cultural development around the world.
                                                                                             Shanghai Daily - Shanghai,China

Art Auctions on Cruise Ships Lead to Anger, Accusations and Lawsuits
MICHIGAN, US - The biggest player by far, with more than $300 million in annual revenue and nearly 300,000 artworks sold each year, is Park West Gallery, based in Southfield, Mich. It handles such a high volume of art sales at sea that it bills itself as "the world's largest art dealer."
                                                                                                New York Times - United States

Wednesday, 16^th July 2008

A Bourgeois Banksy May Risk Losing Street Creds: Martin Gayford
LONDON - Martin Gayford suspects that Banksy's fans will forgive and forget the contract-managing dad and the public school, and continue to believe in the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel of graffiti art. The question with him is whether the art is as good as the storyline. About that, I'm not so sure.
                                                                                                                         Bloomberg - USA

Ferguson Family Donate Basil Blackshaw Paintings to IMMA
IRELAND - All four paintings were created in the period 2001-2002 and are particularly noteworthy for their remarkable intensity, scale and beauty. When asked by Eamonn Mallie, one of the leading authorities on his work, about the Window Series Blackshaw described them as "my most perfect thought".
                                                                                                                         Art Daily - USA
Graffiti: Street art - or crime?
GLOBAL - A group of south London graffiti artists were jailed last week for up to two years for defacing public property. Yet as they begin their sentences, their work is to be championed by a New York gallery.
                                                                                           Independent - London,England,UK

Christie's to Sell Yves Saint Laurent Art Collection (Update1)
PARIS - Christie's International said it will be selling the art collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge in Paris in February 2009. The auction will be held in association with Pierre Berge & Associates, the Paris auction house owned by the fashion designer's former business partner.
                                                                                                                        Bloomberg - USA

Kay Saatchi: Auntie to the student art scene
LONDON - Take a wander around London's Selfridges this month and you may be confronted by an unexpected spot of student art. This exhibition is the brainchild of contemporary art curators Kay Saatchi and Catriona Warren.
                                                                                                                       Times Online - UK

Tuesday, 15^th July 2008

Art sales: Old Masters tot up £100m
LONDON - With auction prices for contemporary art still somewhere in the stratosphere, it often felt like catch-up time at the Old Master sales in London last week. The Misers was estimated at £100,000, but spiralled on trade competition to £2.1 million.
                                                                                             Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom

Monday, 14^th July 2008

So what if Banksy's cover has been blown?
LONDON - The identity of the secretive street artist has been outed by a Sunday newspaper and, shock horror, he's middle class. But does it matter?
                                                                                                         guardian.co.uk - UK

The Image Is Familiar; the Pitch Isn't                                
GLOBAL - In the 1980s Richard Prince re-photographed magazine ads for Marlboro cigarettes, enlarged the pictures and exhibited them as his own. Works like these are comments on consumer culture that also challenge the idea of originality itself.
                                                                                                  New York Times - United States

RCA artists to have work displayed on 27m bottles of Beck's beer
LONDON - This year Beck's is moving its artist-label beers into mass production for the first time in partnership with the Royal College of Arts (RCA) in Kensington, West London. A panel of RCA judges asked their graduates and present students to submit work on the theme of individuality for the competition.
                                                                                                                        Times Online - UK