Art & Finance Newsletter #15 - Long time, no speak
Apologies to the hundreds of you that religiously follow this newsletter.
There have been several transactions pushing forth on top of my regular Hong Kong travel schedule. Recently I've begun traveling to London regularly and have yet to nail down an efficient manner of traveling from Heathrow to the City of London. I guess I take for granted the Hong Kong Airport Express.
I promise to keep the future newsletter on schedule.
On to the art market...
Two Art Fairs Open In Shanghai This Week
What do gallery owner's do when a nations economy slows - they spend tens of thousands of dollars to participate in an art fair in one of that nations top cities...thats what they do.
China’s economy is slowing. In mid-October, the country’s vice-premier Liu He reported its lowest quarterly growth figure (6.5%) since the financial crisis of 2008-09. On the simmering trade war between China and the US, Liu said: “The psychological impact is greater than the actual impact.” Chau says: “So far we haven’t witnessed much of an impact on the Chinese art market.” He thinks the unease has “made more people realise that art is a great form of alternative investment… and Sotheby’s record-breaking sale in Hong Kong is a testament to that.”
Galleries are seemingly undeterred by tussles between Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping. Like many, Kamel Mennour, who has galleries in Paris and London, is exhibiting at both fairs for the first time, his debut in mainland China.
“Shanghai’s burgeoning contemporary art scene has become so crucial that we wanted to be part of it, and understand its stakeholders better,” he says.
The Art Newspaper - Two Art Fairs Open in Shanghai
Sotheby's & Christie's In Authenticity Battle
Sotheby’s has dragged rival auction house Christie’s into a fight over the sale of an $11 million Old Master painting it says is a fake.
Ahead of a London trial next year, Sotheby’s wants to prove that art specialists at Christie’s had prior doubts about a work attributed to Dutch Golden Age artist Frans Hals, which the firm itself later concluded was a forgery.
After the discovery, Sotheby’s had to reimburse the buyer, U.S. real estate investor Richard Hedreen, and is now suing the art gallery that owned the work to recover its loss. The auction house hopes its biggest competitor could bolster its case, helping to show that “the generally accepted view of scholars and experts" was that the picture is unlikely to be genuine.
Christie’s didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
"It is a question of reputation that has a much broader impact than the value of this one painting," Emily Wood, a lawyer for Sotheby’s, said in court Wednesday.
Bloomberg - Sotheby's & Christie's In Authenticity Battle
Formula For Becoming an Art Star
The secret to making it in the art world? Learn to schmooze.
A handful of U.S. and European museums and galleries have an outsize impact on which contemporary artists achieve lasting, prestigious careers and which don’t, according to a Northeastern University study published Thursday in the journal Science.
New artists who show their work early in a relatively small network of 400 venues—like Gagosian Gallery or the Guggenheim Museum—are all but guaranteed a successful art career, the study said. By contrast, artists who exhibit mainly in lower-level galleries and midtier institutions are likely to remain stuck in that orbit.
“There’s this invisible network of trust that exists in the art world, but the group that decides who matters in art was considerably smaller and more powerful than we expected,” said Albert-László Barabási, a data scientist who studies networks at Northeastern and led the study along with several colleagues including a data scientist now at the World Bank, Samuel Fraiberger. Their findings also show up in Dr. Barabási’s book published earlier this week, “The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success.”
His findings undermine a popular art-world notion that a prodigy could create in obscurity and get discovered years later. Instead, the research suggests that artists who start out seeking connections with powerful curators, dealers and collectors within the nerve center of the art world are far more likely to hit the big time.
WSJ - Formula For Becoming An Art Star
Inaugural Art Business Conference Shanghai
This past week the Art Business Conference group hosted it's first Shanghai based conference in conjunction with Art021. This organization has been hosting stellar conferences for the past five years in London and two years in NYC. These events bring together the best-in-class professionals from all aspects of the art market and provides a forum for sharing and learning from each other.
I highly suggest anybody interested in learning more about the art market plan on attending one of their future conferences. The quality of delegates was astounding.
Expect the next newsletter as previously scheduled.
Until next time,
Blake