Balls up

Buying the art is one thing, owning it is another. The days when you just hung it on a wall and forgot about it (looking-after-wise) have long gone. Imagine, for instance, owning something by perfectionist Jeff Koons. His demands for his work are so extreme that the Guggenheim Museum once put off mounting a survey show because finding 'the technology to match Jeff’s vision became impossible.' And then we saw this version of Koons's Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tanks. The three basketballs are intended to be symmetrically suspended in the sodium chloride reagent. The basketballs are at such a specific point of equalibrium with the liquid they are immersed in that even the vibrations from people walking by can affect the balance. The solution has to be changed every time the piece is installed and constantly monitored if the work is to be presented as Koons intended. 'Oh, oh, Jeff’s coming. Get the pump.'

Not a Bacon

"It was so badly burned on the secondary market, it was crispy."

Todd Levin, director of New York's Levin Art Group telling Art in America why a Cindy Sherman photograph that had being doing the rounds on the secondary market failed to sell at auction.

“We’re not buying for investment. But we’re not buying for not investment.” 

Liz Christensen, curator for the Deutsche Bank art collection

The iron fist in the iron glove

“Seller now in terrible straits and needs cash …. Are you interested in making a cruel and offensive offer? Come on, want to try?”

Email from the Gagosian Gallery to a collector offering a Roy Lichtenstein from another collection. Full story here in the NYT

Warning to collectors

“The spots are going to stay, I’m going to carry on doing those, the butterflies are going to stop, I’m going to stop the spins...”
Damien Hirst

Warning to collectors

“I love it all. I love you, for what you do not love, what you throw away. There’s a sad paradox in that. I love you for your lack of love for what I love.”

William Davies King is a professor of theatre at the University of California who can’t throw things away. His collection includes 18,000 food labels, 500 bottle caps and 800 distinct envelope linings. As King wistfully comments in his book Collections of Nothing, “I dearly want my collecting to be a selling point, like a mountain cabin ... or Goya prints… instead, I have to anticipate [my wife] coming to terms with 30 years of Cheerios.”

Warning to collectors

As a postscript to our last post (and in the meantime a Francis Bacon has been knocked down for $US86 million) the Kaufmann house we posted on when we were in Palm Springs last year, was sold at the same auction for $US15 million. That’s nearly six of Richard Neutra’s masterpieces for one painting. The warning? Get out of real estate.

Warning to collectors

“Fewer than half of the modern and contemporary artists listed in a Christie's or Sotheby's catalogue 25 years ago are now offered at any major auction.

“Of the 1,000 artists who had serious gallery shows in London and New York during the 1980s, only 20 were still being shown in comparable venues in 2007.”

John Preston reviews The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses by Don Thompson in the New York Times

Warning to collectors

Jill Miller, a San Francisco artist, trained to be a private investigator and then spied for six months on art collectors in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a team of two artist assistants, Miller maintained surveillance on ten houses, concentrating on six. She will be showing the results at San Francisco’s 2nd Floor Project Gallery later this month.
Images: Top left Bob through fence. Bottom left Sushi, others untitled.

Warning to collectors

“That’s the bizarre thing — first you never saw the prices, and now you never see the names. We’re all too frightened to ask.”
Collector at the Frieze Art Fair