Auction Results: Contemporary Art, Parts I and II, May 14 and 15, 2009 @Phillips

The mixed bag of contemporary photography in the Phillips Contemporary Art sales delivered generally suitable results, led by the four lots in the evening sale, which all sold in or near the estimate range. Overall, the total proceeds from the photography in the two sales covered the total low estimate for those lots, and more than a third of the photo lots that sold brought in more than their high estimate (which says that the estimates were appropriately conservative).

The summary statistics are below:

Total Photography Lots: 53
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $1714000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $2396000

Total Lots Sold: 36
Total Lots Bought In: 17
Buy In %: 32.08%
Total Sale Proceeds: $1776000

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 6
Low Sold: 4
Low Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 33.33%
Total Low Estimate: $49000
Total Low Sold: $43125

Mid Total Lots: 36
Mid Sold: 23
Mid Bought In: 13
Buy In %: 36.11%
Total Mid Estimate: $917000
Total Mid Sold: $625625

High Total Lots: 11
High Sold: 9
High Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 18.18%
Total High Estimate: $1430000
Total High Sold: $1107250

83.33% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range, with 36.11% above. There was only one surprise (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate) in this sale: lot 132, Sharon Core, Bakery Counter, 2004 at $37500.

Complete lot by lot results can be found here and here.

Phillips De Pury & Company
450 West 15th Street
New York, NY 10011

Auction Results: Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening, Morning and Afternoon Sales, May 13 and 14, 2009 @Christie's

While there was much less photography on offer at Christie's three Contemporary Art sales than at the other houses, the available lots performed well; if three out of the top four lots (measured by high estimate) had sold rather than passed, it would have been a resounding success. As it was, the proceeds for photography fell in the estimate range, the buy in rate was low, and a third of the lots that sold came in above their estimates.

The summary statistics are below:

Total Photography Lots: 25
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $765000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $1103000

Total Lots Sold: 21
Total Lots Bought In: 4
Buy In %: 16.00%
Total Sale Proceeds: $797350

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 2
Low Sold: 2
Low Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 0.00%
Total Low Estimate: $15000
Total Low Sold: $98350

Mid Total Lots: 15
Mid Sold: 14
Mid Bought In: 1
Buy In %: 6.67%
Total Mid Estimate: $428000
Total Mid Sold: $390500

High Total Lots: 8
High Sold: 5
High Bought In: 3
Buy In %: 37.50%
Total High Estimate: $660000
Total High Sold: $308500

90.48% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range, with 33.33% above. There were only two surprises (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate) in this sale: lot 115, Ed Ruscha, A Group of Fourteen Artist's Books at $96100 (more than 10x the high estimate) and lot 392, Thomas Struth, Dallas Parking Lot, Dallas, 2001 at $80500.

Complete lot by lot results can be found here, here and here.

Christie's
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Auction Results: Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales, May 12 and 13, 2009 @Sotheby's

Perhaps the prevailing art market story of the past year has been the effect of the economic crisis on contemporary art buyers and sellers, with the collapse of prices, the retrenching of galleries and the shotgun deaccessioning of artworks by museums to raise cash all as subplots with their own twists and turns. And while it is too early to call a bottom, the photography buried in Sotheby's pair of Contemporary Art sales performed just fine thank you, with over $4 million of proceeds (in the estimate range), an acceptable buy in rate, and a solid percentage of lots selling above their estimates. Given that the work in this sale did not reach the upper most levels of quality, this was certainly a positive outcome, and perhaps a sign that a new equilibrium is being found.

The summary statistics are below:

Total Photography Lots: 52
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $3813000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $5337000

Total Lots Sold: 38
Total Lots Bought In: 14
Buy In %: 26.92%
Total Sale Proceeds: $4228900

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 0
Low Sold: NA
Low Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total Low Estimate: NA
Total Low Sold: NA

Mid Total Lots: 29
Mid Sold: 21
Mid Bought In: 8
Buy In %: 27.59%
Total Mid Estimate: $877000
Total Mid Sold: $567500

High Total Lots: 23
High Sold: 17
High Bought In: 6
Buy In %: 26.09%
Total High Estimate: $4460000
Total High Sold: $3661400

92.11% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range, with 31.58% above. There were only two surprises (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate) in this sale: lot 305, JR, Favela Morro Da Providencia at $25000 and lot 450, Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Open Wide) at $146500.

Complete lot by lot results can be found here and here.

Sotheby's
1334 York Avenue at 72nd St
New York, NY 10021

Developing Democracy: a New Focus on South African Photography @Kauffman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 works (21 photographs and 1 sculpture), framed in blond wood and variously matted, in the main gallery room, and bending around into another smaller space with a table. (Installation shots at right.) 7 artists are represented in this group show (the number of pieces in the exhibit in parentheses):

David Goldblatt (5)
Pieter Hugo (1)
Raymond Keeping (10)
Senzeni Marasela (1 sculpture)
Zwelethu Mthethwa (1)
Mikhael Subotzky (1)
Nontisikelelo 'Lolo' Veleko (5)

Goldblatt's works are digital prints, from 2002 and 2003, in various sizes (from 16x12 to 40x50), in editions of 6, 35, and 60. Hugo's work is a pigment print on cloth, from 2003, 18x14, in an edition of 5. Keeping's images are c-prints of 1957 negatives printed in 2007; they come in two sizes 34x34 or 60x40, in editions of 9 and 1 respectively. Mthethwa's image is a 4x6 c-print from 1996. Subotzky's work is a pigment ink print, 18x28, in an edition of 60 from 2004. Veleko's prints are digital prints with pigment dyes on cotton paper, 14x10, from 2006, in editions of 10 or 60.

Comments/Context: This small group exhibit provides a useful sampler of post-apartheid South African photography, and goes hand in hand as background to Zwelethu Mthethwa's show of new work discussed this morning (here).

The standout pictures in this show are the funky August Sander meets Malick Sidibé portraits by Nontsikelelo 'Lolo' Veleko. While we have certainly seen plenty of full body deadpan portraits of unusual people floating around in contemporary photography, Veleko's images of young, hip Johannesburg residents have a uniquely African vibe, full of energy, optimism and clashing colorful patterns. These come as a surprising contrast to the more anthropological roadside portraits of Zulu and Xhosa people in traditional dress by Raymond Keeping, and show how the generations are indeed changing.

David Goldblatt's pictures tell a more subtle story of societal evolution, with images depicting the remnants of the past still visible today: an unfinished cinder block housing project without roofs, a massive but now abandoned asbestos mine, a parched sports field, and an AIDS afflicted cleaning lady with her family. While this is a small show, it does a remarkably good job to telling the story of a nation simultaneously looking for answers, both from the past and the future.

Collector's POV: David Goldblatt's images in this show range in price from $1200 to $2150. Lolo Veleko's portraits are priced either at $1400 or $2600 depending on the edition size. Raymond Keeping's images are either $1750 or $3900 based on size. The rest of the prices are as follows: Subotzky $2000, Hugo $4500, Mthethwa $3000, and Marasela $2800. The work closest to our collecting focus in this show would be Goldblatt's image of the roofless housing development, which might resonate well with a Robert Adams or Lewis Baltz subdivision picture. If we were portrait collectors, we would certainly snap up a few of Veleko's addictive images.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• David Goldblatt: 1998 MoMA show (here)
• David Goldblatt: 2006 Hasselblad Award winner (here)
• Lolo Veleko: Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2008 (here)
• Pieter Hugo: artist site (here)
• Mikhael Subotzky: Magnum page (here)

Developing Democracy: a New Focus on South African Photography
Through May 30th

Kyle Kauffman Gallery
150 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Zwelethu Mthethwa, New Works @Shainman

JTF (just the facts): A total of large scale 18 chromogenic prints, framed in blond wood with no mat, hung in the entry, the main gallery, and two smaller side rooms. The prints come in two sizes, 59x76 (in an edition of 1) and 32x41 (in an edition of 3), and were made between 2006 and 2008. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa's show of new work now on view at Jack Shainman continues an approach seen in his earlier images: powerful documentary portraits made out in the real world of his native country (and neighboring lands), rather than in the sterilized confines of the commercial studio.

There are three sets of work in this show, all with evocative and memorable settings: ragged children with found treasures atop seemingly endless trash heaps (Contemporary Gladiator), young men amidst huge stacks of lumpy white bags of coal at the market (Coal Miner), and workers digging in crumbled and dry red earth (Quartz Miner). All of the subjects stare directly (almost defiantly) into the camera, posing with a sense of pride, regardless of the wretched environments and harsh working conditions that surround them.
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The Coal Miner portraits are the most successful of the three series, as the stacked bags create both unusual visual patterns and small rooms and spaces where the workers are posed. Beneath the baseball caps and grubby t-shirts are men who are trying to make a life out of tasks the world has generally forgotten; there are plenty of parallels with Sebastiao Salgado's humanist pictures of workers, but with a particular African look and feel, full of thick, warm color.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced at $14000 and $22000 depending on the size. A handful of images by the artist have appeared at auction in the past few years, selling between $8000 and $11000. Since we are not portrait collectors, Mthethwa's images aren't a fit for our particular collection, but I certainly came away impressed with the expressive nature of these large well crafted works.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Upcoming Aperture monograph (here)
• Additional monographs from 1999, 2000 (here)

Zwelethu Mthethwa, New Works
Through May 23rd

Jack Shainman Gallery

513 West 20th Street

New York, NY 10011

Collector Michael Mattis on Edward Weston

Photography collector Michael Mattis and his wife almost certainly have the best and deepest collection of Edward Weston photographs in private hands. An exhibit containing a selection of works from their Weston collection was recently on view at the Akron Art Museum, entitled Edward Weston: Life Work (here, including shots of the installation).

Michael is an example of a professional collector who meticulously develops scholarly knowledge of his chosen subjects. He can be seen talking about Weston in a short video produced by Ohio public television (here); there is a short introduction, followed by 5 or 6 minutes of video.

Layered Expressions: Korean Contemporary Photography @Gana Art

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 works by four different photographers: Seung-Woo Back (3 images), Bien-U Bae (2), In Sook Kim (3) and Jungjin Lee (2). The images are hung in a large, one room gallery with dark walls, framed in grey or black with no mats. Back's works are digital prints, ranging from 63x45 to 70x88, made between 2006 and 2008. Bae's works are c-prints on Diasec, approximately 50x100, made in editions of 5 in 2002 and 2006. Kim's images are also c-prints on Diasec, ranging in size between 16x31 and 72x48, made in editions of 20 or 50, between 2005 and 2007. Lee's works are photo emulsion on rice paper, 57x21, made in editions of 5 in 2007.

Comments/Context: The truth of the matter is that we don't really know much about Korean photography (vintage or contemporary). But we've started to notice more Korean photographers in the contemporary mix lately (at the Armory, in auctions etc.), so we've begun to feel the need to be more educated on what's happening, thus our visit to this group show at Gana Art in Chelsea.

Bien-U Bae's misty images of dark swirling pine trees are on the left wall as you enter the gallery (installation shot above, top). These works have a "magical forest" feel to them, with an undertone of creepiness, and would fit well into a collection of black and white tree images across the history of the medium.

In Sook Kim's Saturday Night (one of three images by the artist on view) is voyeuristic look into the nocturnal activities of a variety of apartment dwellers in a single building, Rear Window style. (The work is on the far right of the installation shot at right, second from the top.) Each window is tinted a different color by the lighting, creating a mixed rainbow effect from afar. Close up, each small box tells a tale of sex, loneliness, criminality or boredom (there's even a woman hanging herself).

Jungjin Lee's delicate images on rice paper certainly have the handmade "Asian" feel of traditional scrolls or calligraphy, but up close, the abstract patterns turn out to be fragments of images of pagodas, overlapped and repeated to create the stylized inkblot forms. (Installation shot at right.) These are quiet, meditative works that open a dialogue between historical art and contemporary methods.

And finally, Seung-Woo Back's pair of images on the back wall (ironically entitled Utopia) have a 1950s collage aesthetic, combining black and white post Korean War found photographs with acid yellow and orange backgrounds. (Installation shot at right, bottom.)

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Overall, this diverse show seems to be a decent primer on current trends in Korean photography, especially for neophytes like ourselves who need a survey-type overview.

Collector's POV: Here's a quick run down on the prices: Bien-U Bae's two works are $60000 each; In Sook Kim's Saturday Night is $40000, the other two adjacent images are $3500 each; Jungjin Lee's two images are $10000 each; and Seung-Woo Back's Utopia series images are $20000 each, a third image from Real World is $25000. For our particular collection, I would gravitate towards the works of Jungjin Lee, as they might interact in intriguing ways with other architectural images we own.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Seung-Woo Back: Real World (here)
• Bien-U Bae: artist site (here)
• Bien-U Bae: Sacred Wood (here)
• In Sook Kim: interview (here)
• Jungjin Lee: artist site (here)

Layered Expressions: Korean Contemporary Photography

Through May 16th

Gana Art
568 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Beate Gütschow @Sonnabend

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 black and white light jet prints, framed in white with no mat, hung in the entry and three back galleries. The works are printed in various sizes, ranging from 36x31 up to 70x105, and are made in editions of 5 or 15. The images were created between 2004 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While deadpan images of decaying cities and towns have become a commonplace subject for many contemporary photographers, Beate Gütschow has taken this idea to an entirely different level in the works now on view at Sonnabend. Gütschow starts by taking hundreds of analog images of architecture in locations all over the world, and then combines fragments from these pictures digitally into seamless and entirely original views that walk the line between apparent reality and obvious falsehood.
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On first glance, these abandoned buildings and empty plazas look hauntingly plausible, perhaps a documentary record of desolation from a far off failed state or a Julius Shulman-type record of some unknown architect's massive constructions. And yet, something is just not quite right - the scale of the buildings is so immense, the wastelands that surround them are so expansive - where on earth could this be?

The word "post-apocalyptic" has become a science fiction cliché, but these images truly seem to depict a world after some kind of disaster, where nearly all the people are gone (leaving behind only a few disoriented survivors, seen wandering aimlessly between the overly huge buildings) and the open sky has become a cloudless monotone grey. The images portray a convincing alternate reality (the cobblestones and concrete are cracked and worn), one that is more than a bit unsettling and depressing.
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What I think is compelling here is that Gütschow is using significant digital manipulation not in an obvious, attention grabbing fashion (look at me!), but with a degree of subtlety and understatement that draws the viewer into the trap. Once the viewer catches on (and gets over the staggering amazement of how these pictures were actually constructed), a second level of meaning in the works is discovered and their implicit commentary on our world is delivered with much more force. Even if you are not an architectural photography fan, this show merits a visit to see how digital tools can be used in sophisticated new ways.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between 8000 and 20000 Euros. To date, there have been few if any images available in the secondary markets. I very much enjoyed the works in this show, and if they weren't so large, I could absolutely imagine adding one to our collection. I have a strong sense that these images will age well, and would provide an interesting dialogue with traditional architectural works, in the same way that Joan Fontcuberta's fabricated flowers offer unique contrasts to normal floral still lifes.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• MOCP show, 2006 (here)
• LS/S Aperture monograph (here), Conscientious review of the book (here)
• Frieze magazine article (here)
• Danziger Projects Landscape show, 2005 (here)

Beate Gütschow

Through July

Sonnabend Gallery (artnet page here)

536 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Auction: Photographs, May 21, 2009 @Bloomsbury London

Bloomsbury's upcoming Photographs sale in London has a heavy dose of portraiture: musicians and rock stars, actors and actresses, celebrities and artists, political figures and wealthy patrons. For collectors interested in pictures of famous (and not so famous) people, this sale has plenty to explore. Overall, the auction has a total of 269 lots on offer, with a total high estimate of £443200. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate £5000 and below): 254

Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £293200

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 14

Total Mid Estimate: £100000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 1

Total High Estimate: £50000

Given the overall focus of this sale, there aren't as many lots that fit our collection well. The elegant cover image, Lot 8 Erwin Blumenfeld, (Nude), 1943, would however match nicely with our other nudes.

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs

May 21st

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Bloomsbury Auctions

24 Maddox Street

Mayfair

London WS1 1PP

Book: Naoki Honjo, Small Planet

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Little More (here). 144 pages, with 68 color images. Includes short texts by Masahiko Sato and Naoki Honjo. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: We were first exposed to the work of Naoki Honjo in the Reality Check group show at the Met (review here) last winter, where a single image by the artist was on view. Seeing this picture made us want to know more, and so we recently purchased a copy of his book, Small Planet, which contains a broader sample of this body of work.

Honjo's images are created by taking an aerial view with a very shallow depth of field, distorting and blurring nearly the entire image except a small area/narrow plane of crisp focus. The effect is to make the images look miniaturized, like a toy diorama. This technique ("tilt shift") is used by Honjo in a variety of locations: dense cityscapes, seashores, warehouses and railyards, construction sites, swimming pools, roadways, sporting events and parks. The clever inversion is, of course, that these scenes which look entirely fake/constructed are indeed all too real.

A detractor might characterize this work a simple exercise in optical trickery, and certainly, there is an element of forcing the viewer to consider how his/her eyes actually work, how seeing and perception actually happen. But after looking at the dozens of images in this book, I remain intrigued by each successive image, the weird novelty of scenes that shift between real/unreal still somehow fresh. The compositions from higher up and farther away, where the figures and cars are the size of ants, seem to be the most successful in using the technique for dramatic effect. While the majority of these pictures were taken in Japan (and a more recent series was made in London), given the visual diversity of our world, I'm sure Honjo will have no shortage of subject matter to be reconsidered using this approach.

Collector's POV: Honjo is represented in North America by TAI Gallery in Santa Fe (here). Images are available in either 20x24 (edition of 15) or 40x50 (edition of 5) sizes.

Transit Hub:

• CNN Interview (here)
• Exhibit of London series at Paul Smith (here)
• Ihei Kimura Photography Award (here)
• Tilt shift miniaturization (here)

Book: Michael Schmidt, Irgendwo

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by Snoeck. 140 pages, with 67 black and white images. Includes an interview with the artist by Dietmar Elger. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the dominance of the the Becher students (Gursky, Ruff, Struth, et al) in the art markets in recent years, it would be easy for collectors to come to the conclusion that everything interesting in German photography was and is emanating from Dusseldorf. The reality is far more complex than a monolithic movement would allow. This book by Michael Schmidt is an example of some of the excellent work coming from a group of photographers who have been working in and around Berlin/Essen for decades, with loose ties to Lewis Baltz and Paul Graham.

In contrast to a search for single individual image, Schmidt works in serial format, gathering together sequences of images that together provide a more nuanced view of a subject (just like the Robert Adams book we reviewed last week). It is not so much that these groups tell a deeper or more linear narrative or story, it is that the relationships between a group of fragments or moments can broaden our understanding of the overall realities and rhythms buried underneath the surface.

In this particular book (and Schmidt has made several), the photographer has spent time in small provincial towns, capturing a mix of intimate landscapes, views of both traditional and modern suburban buildings, portraits of the inhabitants (primarily young people), and miscellaneous fragments (windows, walls, shopping carts, and loading docks). The title of the book can be translated as "somewhere" or "anywhere", and the pictures together portray a dismal monotony of vague places lacking identifiable details. In the interview, Schmidt alludes to the "loss of home as a place with identity", and there is certainly a cheerless melancholy that pervades the whole series of pictures.

And yet, this chronicle of German non-places is somehow surprisingly powerful and evocative. The spectrum of greys in this book have a rich, tactile quality, with a less than perfect sharpness that makes them softer; these "colors" help create the overall mood of the book. It is however the sequencing that seems most important in the end. It is the juxtaposition of a blank concrete wall, next to a teenage woman's face, next to a less than beautiful modern house, next to an image of a supermarket parking lot, next to an ornate architectural detail, next to a closed window that bring together all the pieces of this life into a subtle and complex whole.

Collector's POV: Michael Schmidt's works can be found at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin (here) and Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York (here). Galerie Nordenhake has just opened a mini-retrospective of Schmidt's work, on view through June 20th (here). Mitchell-Innes & Nash had a show in the spring of 2008 (here). Only a handful of works by Schmidt have appeared at auction in the past five years, most selling for under $2000.

This book has been a real eye opener for me and has continued to keep me thinking; I now feel compelled to dig deeper on Schmidt and his contemporaries, as this work seems to have been somewhat overlooked (at least by collectors we know here in America) and well worth further review/education on our part. There are clearly images in this series, especially the more deadpan architectural fragments, that would fit perfectly into our collection.

Transit Hub:

• Other Berlin/Essen photographers to explore: Joachim Brohm, Gosbert Adler, Volker Heinze (please put others in the comments if you can add to the list)
• U-NI-TY at MoMA, 1996 (here)
• Waffenruhe (here)
  

Gallery Conflict/Confidentiality Follow-Ups

There is a terrific post called Keeping Private Collections Private at Edward Winkleman today which tackles the tricky issues of gallery conflict and private information flow. While the piece admirably works through most of the salient points, I’d like to add a few collector-focused nuances. (It probably makes sense to read his post first if you haven’t already, as these comments build on the context of his discussion.)

When we, as collectors, get interested in a certain artist’s work, we tend to do our homework. This means that while we may have been introduced to the work at one gallery, it is not at all unusual for us to contact half a dozen other galleries around the world who carry work by this artist, in search of that single piece that we find most appealing. We do this not to “go around” our local or preferred dealer, but because the reality is that work is unevenly distributed in the market, and our favorite piece may just as likely be in Los Angeles, Chicago, Berlin or London as in New York.

For photographers who are no longer living, this is particularly true: in searching out prints by Bill Brandt or Imogen Cunningham for example, we have talked with the galleries that represent their estates, but also with literally dozens of others who may have had a piece at one time or another. For living artists, the search area tends to be smaller (perhaps a handful of galleries), but even in this case, certain galleries resonate with certain bodies of work more than others or certain dealers only carry certain sizes, and so it isn’t unreasonable to check with all of them, even if there might be quite a bit of overlap. A byproduct of this search is often some surprising information about pricing, showing works from the same edition priced differently in different markets. Once we have all the data, we can then decide from whom we might want to make a purchase, armed with quite a bit more context about the reality of the overall situation (perhaps knowing that there are multiple options or perhaps knowing that there is only one print that we really want).

At this point, all else equal, we would certainly prefer to patronize our favorite dealers (most collectors feel the same way I imagine). But the reality is that more often than not, all else is not equal, and the piece we want most is somewhere else. I think the argument about supporting your “local” dealer goes along an entirely different plane. This line of thinking centers on supporting businesses that you like and want to succeed, keeping dollars in your local community, and making sure neighborhood storefronts have galleries in them rather than big box stores. And if as a collector, you can find a way to balance finding the work you want with supporting the local gallery, this is a great outcome. But being harassed by your local dealer for buying elsewhere seems shortsighted and/or naïve on his/her part (I entirely agree with the argument as put forth in the original post), as if you’re local, you’ll almost certainly be back in the future.

Over the years, we have seen that collectors seem to fall into one of two buckets. One group selects two or three primary dealers and funnels nearly all of their buying through these galleries, building up deep trust relationships over time. Often they ask them to search out certain works for their collections or use the dealers to bid for them at auction. These collectors work in partnership with these galleries to build their collections over a long time scale. In return for the focused attention by the dealer, there are expectations that a collector will buy if not frequently at least consistently.

The other group (to which we belong) feels comfortable interacting with a wide range of dealers from all over the world, and so we tend to do our own searching and comparing, rather than having a specific dealer present us with a prescreened set of choices. For us, the hunting and gathering process is actually the fun part, and we don’t mind investing the time to do the leg work and go down plenty of blind alleys. This makes us less “loyal” to any one dealer or gallery, but more likely to build up a broader group of galleries that we patronize from time to time. The danger of this approach is that the very best pieces may be offered to the key clients first, leaving us to pick up what is left over. So part of our challenge is to make sure we stay well connected to the galleries that have the kind of material we like, so that we stay “top of mind” when a new piece becomes available. Buying history undoubtedly influences access to new work.

The final topic covered in this post is keeping buying information private. I think the post does an excellent job of making clear that the art world is a small universe and gossip and information are important currencies flowing in all directions (back to the word-of-mouth effects I was discussing yesterday). There is no way to change this, so collectors must find ways to comfortably handle the natural information exchange that goes on. We certainly understand the desire to have confidentiality. But we have also found that being open and sharing our collection (via this site and our collection site) has created all sorts of unexpected opportunities and relationships, and that these positives have vastly outweighed any negatives associated with posting our collection on the Internet. Galleries and dealers now need only look at our site to know what we are interested or what we have bought recently. This enables much deeper and more relevant discussions to happen more quickly, with less time spent on preliminaries that aren’t a fit.

I do agree that if confidentiality is paramount to a collector, they need only to make this clear to the dealer and the information will with all likelihood stay secret (as no gallery owner is looking to overtly anger a client). But while there is something more than a little distasteful about prices being bandied about, in the end, the art world information machine can be turned to a collector’s advantage by learning how to leverage it. In our experience, the more people that have a clear understanding of what we’re interested in, the more likely it is that we will be exposed to work that lights up our eyes. If that comes from one dealer telling another we bought a certain piece for a certain price, then so be it.

Auction: Photographs, May 19, 2009 @Bonhams

The Photographs sales at the old San Francisco-based Butterfields (now part of Bonhams in New York) have always had a heavier dose of West coast material (Ansel Adams et al) and have often been a good place to look for bargains. The upcoming sale matches this description and includes mostly affordable works, with the standout lot (to our eyes) being a 1950s print of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, although from the online image, it looks like it might have a few condition problems in one corner. (No catalog cover image available.)

Here are the statistics for the auction:

Total Lots: 166
Total Low Estimate: $642800
Total High Estimate: $938300

Total Low Lots (high estimate $10000 and below ): 149
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $619300

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 17
Total Mid Estimate: $319000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA

A couple of lots that would fit into our specific collection include:

Lot 61, Harry Callahan, Eleanor, 1947/Later
Lot 62, Imogen Cunningham, Triangles, 1928/1960s

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
May 19th

Bonhams & Butterfields
580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022

A Few Additions to the Discussion of Artist Statements

Over the past few days, Conscientious has had a series of insightful posts about the positives and negatives of artist’s statements (here, here, here, and here). While most of the ground has been covered in a thoughtful way, I thought there might be a couple of nuances from a collector’s perspective that would be worth adding to the discussion.

For us, artist statements are like road maps: they give us clues to better understand the work we are seeing. Optimally, they should be as clear and to the point as possible, thereby making it more likely that any background information that is important is actually passed along and internalized. Statements that are lost in jargon and art speak miss the chance to educate us. Our attention span for this kind of stuff is short (press releases fall into the same category), so make it hard hitting or you’ll lose us quickly, and we’ll go back to looking at the pictures and deciding for ourselves.

The Silicon Valley style “elevator pitch” (a one to two sentence summary) is probably an oversimplified way of communicating for the art world, but the reason entrepreneurs use it is that it is the single easiest way to control the message to someone who doesn’t know much about you (and it's also the most likely way to ensure the message is passed on to another person without getting garbled). To my mind, the artist statement should have the same goal: convey the salient points quickly and cleanly, in the hopes that the reader/viewer will actually remember them.

In some ways, an artist’s career can be thought of as the ultimate exercise in word of mouth. Galleries are constantly trying to place important works with well known museums to validate their quality. Positive remarks by an influential critic are circulated to the mailing list. Select pieces are “placed” with important collectors, so that other collectors can see them and hear about them. It’s all about creating a positive feedback loop and feeding the beast, year after year, with each successive release of new work.

When you’re early in your career, there is no word of mouth yet, and very few opinions have been formed. This is the exact moment that the statement was designed for; it is the one opportunity to frame the discussion before it goes its own way. If you decide not to take it and leave the work open for interpretation, fair enough, but you missed the chance to anchor us somewhere.

Once you’re an established or mid-career artist, the word of mouth is in full swing, and many voices have added their opinions (valid or invalid) to the mix. The crowd has spoken and the collective wisdom drowns out much of the rest of the commentary. With each successive group of new work, the marginal utility/value of any single statement by the artist is decreased, because it has to compete with the larger and larger pile of consensus thought about the artist’s overall approach and history. Therefore, the statements at the beginning of the career are the ones that have the most power to direct the discussion; later on, the overall flow has a mind of its own that is nearly impossible to modify.

So our simple summary advice on statements would be the following: don't miss the chance to direct our thinking (especially early in your career) and make sure you do it concisely so it sticks.

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 @Met

JTF (just the facts): A total of 280 works by 30 different artists, beginning in the main Contemporary Photography gallery, and winding back through an additional 5 rooms, with 3 adjacent spaces containing installations or video. In addition to the photography, there are paintings, sculpture, installations, video/film, collage, drawings, posters, magazines and books. An audio guide is available for the show. No photography was allowed in the exhibition, so unfortunately there are no installation shots.

Comments/Context: Even though The Pictures Generation has only been open a few short weeks, there is already a mountain of commentary on this superlative show. Much of it centers on who was included, whether these artists in different locations were really a “movement”, how this work related to Minimalism, Pop Art, Conceptualism, Postmodernism and plenty of other theoretical constructions, how feminism impacted the development of this work, and how the baby boomer environment contributed to the varying but related approaches these artists took. All of these are fruitful and necessary lines of thought, given the breadth and depth of this exhibition.

One discussion that has been remarkably absent in all this criticism is that there is a compelling argument to be made that it is this moment in the history of art when photography jumps into the mainstream of contemporary art. While the avant-garde and surrealist photography of the 1920s may well have been out on the bleeding edge at the time, I think a case can be made that photography generally remained within its own separate realm until the early 1970s, when work by artists in this exhibit jumped the gap and became particularly relevant to the ongoing discussions about media and its influence on modern life.

From my point of view, this is the key reason to see this important exhibition. For the first time, we have a comprehensive look at much of the contemporary art action going on during these years, and we can trace the use of photography and photographic techniques, side by side with painting, collage, video, and installation art. It is in these years that media saturation first appears, and these artists thoroughly deconstruct this creeping influence in myriad ways, often taking a cool, cynical look at the images that had become inundating. Placed in this context, the diversity of Cindy Sherman’s film stills (Untitled Film Still #54, 1980, above right), Laurie Simmons’ dollhouses, appropriations by Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine and James Welling, James Casebere’s architectural constructions, Barbara Bloom’s travel posters, Barbara Kruger’s collages, and Louise Lawler’s arrangements all suddenly coalesce into a multi-faceted view of how photography could be used very effectively to unpack the prepackaged culture that surrounded them. By intermingling work in other mediums by David Salle (The Coffee Drinkers, 1973, below right), Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Dara Birnbaum, Alan McCollum and many, many others, the show explores how all kinds of artists were riffing on the same set of interrelated ideas, many grappling with the issues of photography and image making, even if they weren’t always using a camera to do so.

Even today, nearly all of the photographers represented here are routinely categorized as Contemporary Art, rather than Photography, evidence of their lasting influence on the larger artistic dialogue. With passage of nearly 30 years, while many traditional photography subjects have disappeared, the influence of images, media, and popular culture are still as relevant as ever, perhaps even more so, given the explosion of marketing and consumerism that now surrounds us. A large percentage of contemporary artists are still wrestling with these same exact issues, only now with the help of digital technologies instead of hand crafted approaches. Appropriation and stage setting are now commonplace, the boundaries and playing fields of these styles being extended further each day. Much of the reason the work of The Pictures Generation still seems fresh is that nearly all of the same concerns the artists raised are still bothering us today. Unbelievably, our overall skepticism may have actually increased over time, which is why many of these overlooked and under appreciated works now seem even more prescient.

Collector’s POV: This is a deep and diverse show, with recognizable images hung side by side with obscure and lesser known pictures, all contributing to an environment of experimentation with and criticism of media. Much of the resonance of the show comes via comparison and juxtaposition, seeing the images inside the context of the shared consciousness of the time, and comparing how each artist took the same general raw material and came up with a piece of the larger puzzle.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a show that fits in the usual Contemporary Photography space; I started in, looking at each piece with utmost care, assuming it was only the usual one-room affair; I got to the other end of the first room and saw that the exhibit continued on through a hole in the wall for many more rooms, and my pace was suddenly way off and I had to recalibrate.

Finally, in particular, I came away with a much deeper appreciation for the work of Laurie Simmons and Louise Lawler (Pollock and Tureen, 1984, above right), both of which seemed to resonate more for me when placed within this environment than they had previously. I had several “ah ha” moments with these two, the light bulb going on above my head as I started to understand better what they were really trying to do.

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Bloomberg (here)
• Audio clips at WNYC (here)
• Art in America interview with Met curator Douglas Eklund (here)
• Show catalog (here)

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984
Through August 2nd

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Tough Choices for Museums

Last evening, we attended a party for an out of town friend at a cozy restaurant on the Lower East Side. It was one of those dinners where you are separated from your spouse and carefully placed by the host according to some grand plan for maximum social effectiveness. One of my dinner partners turned out to be a person who works in the development department of an art museum. Through the first several courses of the meal, we had a wide ranging insider discussion about museums, capital and annual campaigns, how big gifts are targeted and brought in, how boards and accession committees are filled out, and the hierarchical nature of different classes of donors.

The singular takeaway for me from this entertaining conversation was that given the current economic environment, museums are really struggling to uncover new, fresh, deep pocketed donors that aren’t already affiliated with another museum in some meaningful way or that they haven’t already talked with. The list of targets is pretty stale, and it’s arguably shrinking. This has led them to start searching farther afield (the net has to get wider), often outside the local geography, and most intriguingly, getting connected to many folks who haven’t as yet shown any interest whatsoever in art. The sales pitch to these targets is that even if art isn’t your thing, a large donation to such a museum brings with it an important mark of status and an entrée into a network of high powered people of all kinds.

None of this is of course news or should be wildly surprising; in fact it’s standard operating procedure - if you’ve got to raise a big pile of money (in whatever context), you focus on those who have such money to give, and come up with some factors that will appeal to them. But it got me to wondering more deeply, is there an impact on the spirit of your institution over time if the majority of your board members and major supporters are giving money not because they are passionate about the cause (in this case, art), but because they are doing it for the ancillary benefits of the gala invitations or business contacts? Does the soul of the place get hollowed out? How many mail-it-in directors and donors can an institution handle?

Having seen firsthand plenty of dysfunctional boards/companies in a business context, it is clear to me that a less than attentive board can do an enormous amount of damage, can waste precious time focusing on the wrong things, and can derail positive momentum quite quickly. But it’s also true, and we’re seeing it in spades these days with the daily news stories about museum layoffs, that without money, these institutions crumble under their own weight equally fast. Money is what pays for exhibitions, and salaries, and conservation, and new buildings, not passion and erudition.

Which brings me to the paradox: is it a fantasy that a major museum can be fully funded by wealthy donors who also happen to be passionate about art? Is it inevitable that a museum has to choose between more money from donors who may not have much interest in the activities of the institution, or less from those who care more deeply? Of course, many will now immediately protest that their specific institution is only funded by passionate art patrons, that their board is filled with only important collectors and art world professionals, etc. etc. But imagine you are a museum with a less than perfect financial picture right now (not hard to do). Do you take the much needed money from donors who aren’t obviously aligned with your going forward plan (and may potentially be a permanent pain in the ass), or go without, thereby reducing your options for producing good exhibitions and holding onto key staff, forcing you to scale back your program? While this might be an oversimplification of a complex situation, and perhaps the easy answer is always "take the money", either way, it is an undeniably tough choice. No wonder museum directors and development groups are so stressed these days.

Ray Mortenson, Manhattan @Borden

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white images, taken in 2008 and 2009, framed in white, with no mat, and hung chronologically in the main gallery space. The images are 9x9 (on paper 18x14.5) and are titled with their location and exact date. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Given all of the famous images of New York (the previous post as just one example of many), the challenge of making contemporary images of classic views and moments of the city without rehashing the recognized masters is a daunting one. And yet, the city has certainly changed dramatically over the years, so there must be new discoveries to be made, even in the context of these traditional subjects.

Ray Mortenson has stepped into this realm with his recent body of work and has found some surprisingly fresh perspectives on old favorites. A handful of images take vertiginous upward views of abstracted skyscrapers that echo the well known images of Abbott and Newhall (linked below), but highlight new sleek forms of glass and steel, rather than the stone carved facades of the 1920s. Others capture light poles, water towers, billboards, and street grates; fragments of the city that become geometric forms. Images taken at morning and night, complete with wispy smoke, use the available light to broaden the tonal ranges. And Mortenson has even found new ways to see many iconic New York moments: skating at Rockefeller Center, the ceiling at Grand Central, the Chrysler building, Times Square, and Bryant Park.

Of course, all of this has been done before, but a good many of these images still find a way to be unexpected. While I think this show would have benefited from a slightly heavier hand in the editing process (the show might have been tighter at 20 pictures instead of 30), it is refreshing to see that overworked subjects can still be new in the hands of a talented photographer.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show have been made in editions of 3, and are priced at either $3000 or $3500, depending on the location in the edition. I particularly enjoyed the image of a skewed angle light post against some tall buildings entitled Broadway & Columbus Circle, 15 April 2008.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Broken Glass, Photographs of the South Bronx @MCNY, DLK COLLECTION review (here)
• Berenice Abbott, Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place (here)
• Beaumont Newhall, Chase National Bank (here)

Ray Mortenson, Manhattan
Through May 29th

Janet Borden, Inc.
560 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

Paul Himmel, 1914-2009, An Unerring Vision @De Lellis

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 black and white photographs: 11 larger modern prints of New York scenes, 6 smaller vintage prints of New York, and 3 large nudes. The large city shots are between 40x54 and 60x40, with original negatives between 1947 and 1950. The vintage works are all approximately 10x14, from the same time period. The nudes are tall and thin, 22x70, from c1950. All of the works are framed in black (the larger images without mats), and are hung in the main gallery and back into the office area. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Paul Himmel's images of 1950's New York combine a nostalgic look at the city with a shadowy, gumshoe noir. Most of the contrasty pictures feature silhouettes of men in overcoats and hats: on the Brooklyn Bridge, near the Third Avenue El, and streaming through Grand Central on the way to catching a train. Other images capture iconic New York moments: the blurred lights at Rockefeller Center, the parachute jump at Coney Island, or snow falling near windows and fire escapes.

While the large modern prints in this show are clearly eye catching, some of the enlargements have a hackneyed feel to them, these classic New York moments and landmarks having become overly familiar and a bit clichéd. The exception to this are the three images of the blurred masses at Grand Central, where the large scale reinforces the chaos of the environment and the swirling shape of the movement of the crowd.

Collector's POV: The large modern New York prints in this show are priced between $10000 and $12000. The vintage city prints range between $6500 and $9500; the nudes are priced at $8000 each. Very few works by Himmel have come up for auction in the past five years, so there isn't a defined pricing pattern available for reference. For our collection, I can imagine looking for one of the smaller vintage prints, perhaps with a little less romance and a little more dark abstraction.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Paul Himmel monograph (here)
• Galerie fur Fotografie, Munich (here)

Paul Himmel, 1914-2009, An Unerring Vision

Through May 20th

Keith De Lellis Gallery

1045 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10075

Auction: Photographs, May 16, 2009 @Phillips London

In the past few weeks, we've touched several times on the idea of the democratization of contemporary photography and the positive impact of allowing a wide diversity of work to be pursued and exhibited. The upcoming Photographs sale at Phillips in London is a perfect example of following this trend, of not doing it the same old way, and thereby injecting some fresh excitement into the process.

The sale Phillips has put together is the most international sale I have seen in quite a while. It is a veritable United Nations of photography: work from China and Japan, Germany and Holland, Iran and Scandinavia, Korea and India, Britain and America, and the list goes on and on. There is a small portion of traditional "vintage" work by the recognized masters available, but the sale is generally dominated by contemporary work, most of it in color, some of it from relatively unknown names. Whether this approach maximizes the total proceeds to the house, I'm not sure, but Phillips has certainly created some energy and separated itself with this type of focus. The sale has a total of 170 lots on offer, with a total high estimate of £1462600. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate £5000 and below): 77
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £262600

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 87
Total Mid Estimate: £880000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 6
Total High Estimate: £320000

Here are a few of the images that fit with our collection, and several more that caught our attention even though they don't match our particular framework:

Lot 5 Ola Kolehmainen, Red with Black and Bulbs, 2004
Lot 13 Stephen Shore, West 9th Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974
Lot 49 Nobuyoshi Araki, From Close to Range, 1991/Later
Lot 67 Andy Warhol, Untitled (Hairdryer), 1976-1986
Lot 94 Lewis Baltz, Santa Fe, 1973
Lot 97 Susan Derges, River Taw, 1997
Lot 123 Vee Speers, Untitled #30, 2007
Lot 156 Alex Prager, Desiree, 2008

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
May 16th

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Auction: Photobooks, May 19, 2009 @Christie's London

In the past several years, the photobook market has dramatically changed shape. A sleepy subculture that was once the domain of enthusiasts and bibliophiles has now been transformed into a worldwide market, with much more attention, more auction activity/liquidity, and generally higher prices. This is likely a result of a handful of reference books that made a strong case for the photobook as an art form distinct from photography itself, as well as the wider use of the Internet to match buyers and sellers of scare titles. Auction houses were quick to pick up on this emerging market, and Swann, Bloomsbury, and Christie's are now all battling for market share.

Evidence of this continuing evolution is the Christie's photobook sale coming up in mid May in London. It is a single subject sale of photobooks, not attached as an afterthought to the photography sale, run by the Printed Books & Manuscripts department, not the Photography department. In fact, this sale is scheduled at exactly the same time as the Sotheby's Photographs sale in London, further evidence I think that the Christie's specialists think the buyers of photography and the buyers of photobooks are not necessarily a completely overlapping group of people.

In general, this is a solid looking sale, with a wide variety of material. It has a total of 191 lots on offer, with a total high estimate of £558900. (Catalog cover, at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate £5000 and below): 172
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £298900

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 17
Total Mid Estimate: £165000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 2
Total High Estimate: £95000

One of the things I continue to wonder about is how the publication of certain photo book reference guides has influenced this market. So I went through this catalog and counted the number of books on offer that are mentioned in the handful of the best known guides. Here's what I found, with the title of the book, followed by the number of lots in this sale found there:

The Photobook, Vol. I: 63
The Photobook, Vol. II: 43
101 Books: 38
The Open Book: 58

Given that there is no overlap between volumes I and II of The Photobook series, more than 55% of the lots in this sale are referenced in those two books combined, many of the lots also mentioned in one or both of the other books. To me this is evidence that either this market is very concentrated, or that collectors are somewhat uncertain about how to approach this market and are taking guidance from these expert driven reference volumes.

As we have mentioned before, we are first and foremost photography collectors, with books providing a much needed reference library for our activities. As such, there are plenty of books in this sale that are missing from our shelves that would be welcome. Some of them would include:

Lot 8, Karl Blossfeldt, La Plante
Lot 14, Emile Otto Hoppe, Deutsche Arbeit
Lot 59, Yoshikazu Suzuki and Shohachi Kimura, Ginza Kaiwai
Lot 81, William Klein, Tokyo
Lot 87, Shomei Tomatsu, 11:02 Nagasaki
Lot 90, Ed Ruscha, Thirtyfour Parking Lots
Lot 111, Ed Ruscha, Dutch Details
Lot 125, Shoji Ueda, Sketch Album
Lot 150, Paul Graham, A1. The Great North Road
Lot 179, Ryuji Miyamoto, Kobe 1995. After the Earthquake

If you think these books cost an arm and a leg, a review of the sale at 5B4 (here) is worth a look.

One other final question for the audience: I have recently been asked several times what the total size of the photo book market is. I have no idea. If anyone can provide an answer with some decent logic or facts behind it, please put it in the comments.

The complete lot by lot "ecatalog" can be found here.

Photobooks
May 19th

Christie's
85 Old Brompton Road
London SW7 3LD