Art & Finance Newsletter #38 - Centre Pompidou to Open Satellite Space in Shanghai in November
Next month the Centre Pompidou will be opening a satellite space in the West Bund district in Shanghai.
Having been intimately involved in the construction and kick-off a museum in the West Bund Art District in Shanghai, I would absolutely love to read the agreement between the district officials and the Centre Pompidou.
Don't get me started on how to deal with the Party-Masses Relationship Department (actual department name)...
Centre Pompidou Opens Satellite Space in Shanghai West Bund District
The Centre Pompidou’s long-awaited offshoot branch in Shanghai will open on 8 November, according to our sister paper The Art Newspaper France. Exhibitions drawn from the holdings of the Beaubourg Gallery will be shown in the new outpost, called Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum, based in a wing of the 25,000 sq. m West Bund Art Museum designed by the UK architect David Chipperfield.
The opening season of exhibitions will focus on the themes of time and memory; these include The Shape of Things (November-May 2021) organised by Marcella Lista, chief curator of the new media collection at the National Museum of Modern Art-Centre Pompidou, which will encompass around 100 works drawn from the collection. A second show entitled Observations will include around 20 new media works dating from 1972 to 2017.
The project is driven by the district government of Xuhui and the Shanghai-based West Bund Development Group, which builds and manages real estate in the area. The West Bund project comes after plans to set up a Centre Pompidou branch in Shanghai were shelved in 2007.
The Art Newspaper - Pompidou Opens Satellite in Shanghai
Fractional Ownership
Let’s say you’re an investor looking to put your money down on the next mega-art trend. Or say you’re an artist looking to be discovered. Or, for art’s sake, if you want to support the art market ‘without breaking the bank’ – their words not ours – Feral Horses believes it can give you a way to do it.
What fractional ownership of art means is that the total price of an artwork is divided and offered as individual shares – as little as 0.01 per cent of an art piece’s price (that’s £10/$12) for a £100,000 artwork – to investors who can (hopefully) watch it grow in value over time. Here, of course, “value” is synonymous with price. Artistic value is something else.
Lise Arlot, one of the co-founders of Feral Horses, said, “We sell art in shares. It is an investment opportunity for the 99 per cent of art buyers, who have the chance to attend art events and engage with art without collecting.”
Artworks in the Feral Horses collection go live as campaigns every month. These campaigns then remain open for variable amounts of time. Some of the current campaigns are open for another 14 days, 17 days and 202 days respectively. For example, a £24,000 Banksy signed print entitled Soup Can 7/10, which is 90% sold and open for another 11 days, offers shares at £24 apiece and going up to £600 for 25 shares.
Then, fractional owners of artworks are notified each time the work is publicly displayed. They are invited to studio visits and gallery openings and have the chance to interact with the artists as well as with other co-owners. The money raised through Feral Horses is then used, with the help of the sellers, to fuel other art initiatives and to raise the profile of artists through participation in fairs.
Arlot said the model was attractive to collectors who had annual quotas to invest in art. She said: “It’s a way for them to keep supporting artists and having some sort of patronising interaction without necessarily adding a work to their collection.”
She added that, often, commercially successful collectors will jump at the opportunity of investing in non-residential artworks such as installations.
And lastly, when the artwork is resold privately or publicly, its realised price is divided proportionally among the co-owners.
Private Art Investor - Fractional Ownership
FBI Seeking Owner of Dubuffet Painting
Earlier this week, the Department of Justice sent out a press release seeking the owner of a painting by Art Brut master Jean Dubuffet, Site avec 5 personnages (1981), which was seized as part of a long-running case against a notorious former art dealer named Michel Cohen (not to be confused with now incarcerated Trump consigliere Michael Cohen), who fled charges in the US after defrauding clients out of $50 million.
Now, Cohen’s story is the subject of a documentary by Vanessa Engle, who spent 17 years tracking the con artist. The film follows Cohen’s life, which began in a poor suburb of Paris in 1953. He was a natural salesman, who moved to the US and began a business selling French paté, eventually graduating to selling art prints, and working his way up trading big names like Chagall, Picasso, Monet, and, yes, Dubuffet.
When his business went south, Cohen started committing wire and mail fraud, ultimately to the tune of some $50 million. He’s been under indictment for the crimes since 2003. Cohen “induced numerous national and international galleries, collectors, and investors to consign expensive works and to give him large sums of money as part of fraudulent transactions,” according to filings in a New York district court
The Dubuffet painting, which was originally owned by the late artist’s estate and is listed in his catalogue raisonné was sold to an Asian buyer in 1993, though its whereabouts between 1993 and 1996, when Cohen bought it, are unknown. Cohen, who appears to have taken ownership of the painting, left it with the New York art dealer Jerry Solomon in 2001 with the belief that Solomon would attempt to find a new buyer for the work. When Cohen’s crimes were brought to light in New York in 2001, Solomon turned the painting over to the FBI, which has held it ever since.
Cohen was indicted for criminal charges in 2001, but he eluded the authorities for two years, until he was captured by police in Rio de Janeiro. He was jailed in Brazil, but managed to escape custody while being transported for a medical exam. He has not been caught since and, even if he were, the Brazilian government said he could not face extradition back to the US because he fathered a child in Rio de Janeiro.
Because it remains unknown how the Dubuffet painting came into Cohen’s possession, the FBI is asking the public to come forward if they have a claim to the painting, or knows who might.
Artnet - FBI Seeking Owner of Dubuffet Painting
October is one of my favorite months to be in Shanghai. The humidity dissipates. construction for the most part is slowed and there are very few rain storms.
All around pleasant time to move about the city.
Speak soon,
Blake