This week's Art Collecting and Investment News

Sunday, 22^nd June 2008

Market Uplift
FRANCE - France's annual auction earnings exceed €1.3 billion ($2 billion), with private sales taking in "probably five times that much," according to Albanel's report. Impressive as those figures may seem, she noted with alarm that the auction earnings amount to just 6 percent of global auction income.
                                                                                                    ARTINFO - New York,NY,USA

Hirst hopes to revolutionise art market with 'Golden Calf'
LONDON - Sotheby's is conducting the sale over two days in September, enough time for up to 180 works to be sold, according to experts. Qatar's royal family and the Scottish property entrepreneur David Roberts are said to be among the biggest buyers of Hirst's work, as are a number of wealthy Russians.
                                                                                    Independent - London,England,UK


Thursday, 19^th June 2008

Comment: Hirst auction will be a bellwether for the art market and ...
LONDON - Just as Hirst's £50m diamond-encrusted skull, For The Love Of God, became an emblem of the excess and inevitable ending of the debt-fuelled boom, the 15 - 16^th September sale could signal the depth of the current market malaise.
                                                                           Wealth Bulletin - London,England,UK

Young talent showcased at Art Taipei 2008
TAIWAN - Eight young Taiwanese artists will be given the opportunity to exhibit their work alongside pieces shown by galleries from around the world at Art Taipei 2008. Turnover is expected to exceed US$20 million this year with a record number of art lovers and collectors thronging to the TWTC exhibition hall.
                                                                                                             Taiwan Journal - Taiwan

Hirst to Offer `Golden Calf' for 12 Million Pounds at Sotheby's
LONDON - Hirst now takes a 70 percent cut of all new work he sells through dealers, rather than the usual 50-50 split for artists, said the Sunday Times Rich List. Auction houses generally do not charge fees to sellers of multimillion dollar contemporary art collections.                                                                                          Bloomberg - USA

Monet, Picasso to Anchor Planned $1.2 Billion London Art Sales
LONDON - The 6-foot, 7-inch wide Monet, one of a series of four large-scale signed water lily paintings the artist sold in 1919, has not appeared at auction since 1971. ``That's exactly the sort of work that Russian collectors want,'' comments London dealer Alan Hobart in a telephone interview. ``They're bound to go for it.''

                                                                                                                       Bloomberg - USA

Hidden dragon
LONDON - He comes to London this month for his first solo UK show, "Frolic", at the Barbican Art Gallery. Despite his self-effacing manner, Huang is an artist with plenty of fire in the belly. Xiamen Dada, the movement he founded, was one of the boldest of the avant-garde groups that emerged in China in the 1980s.  
                                                                                        New Statesman - London,England,UK

A Dialogue of the Collections Lafrenz, Hamburg,
BERLIN - The Daimler Art Collection is pleased to announce the exhibition Private/Corporate V at Daimler Contemporary at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. This is a collaboration with Collection Lafrenz, Hamburg and is the fifth in a series of exhibitions initiated in 2002, in which the Daimler Art Collection presents itself in a dialogue with an international private collection once a year.
                                                                                                      E-Flux - New York,NY,USA

Wednesday, 18^th June 2008

Haring Charity Gives $1 Million to New Museum for Art Education
NEW YORK - ``The gift is a way of ensuring that Keith's name is connected in a permanent way to a position at the museum,'' Julia Gruen, the Haring Foundation's executive director, said. ``It's a way of keeping his name alive for a new generation.''
                                                                                                                        Bloomberg - USA

Conversation with Kavi Gupta
CHICAGO - At a time when the contemporary-art scene in Chicago pales beside those in New York, Los Angeles and perhaps even Miami, Kavi Gupta is doing his part to put his hometown back on the map. He runs an eponymous gallery in the West Loop neighborhood, and notably, in April he launched the emerging-art fair Next--the Midwestern cousin to the Volta shows that he cofounded in Basel and New York.     
                                                                                                    ARTINFO - New York,NY,USA

Heffel's break from format focuses on contemporary art
TORONTO - This fall it will run, in Toronto, a live auction devoted almost exclusively to important Canadian art done from 1945 through to the present. And the country's other large auction houses may also follow suit.
                                                                                                  Globe and Mail - Canada

Tuesday, 17^th June 2008

Guttman Cements Lead in Art Storage Biz with $45 M. Buildings Buy
NEW YORK - Jack Guttman this week cemented his place atop what is perhaps New York City's largest fine-arts storage and moving company with the purchase of two loft buildings on West 55th Street for $45 million.
                                                                                  New York Observer - New York,NY,USA


Banksy's Chimp, Pensioners Beat Estimates in London Art Auction
LONDON - Two spray paintings by Banksy sold for an above-estimate 120,000 pounds ($234,000) each in a London sale of urban art last night. Both were bought by telephone bidders.
                                                                                                                       Bloomberg - USA

Dealer Sues Basquiat Authentication Committee
NEW YORK--Swedish entrepreneur and art collector Gerard De Geer has filed a complaint against the authentication committee for the Jean-Michel Basquiat estate, according to The Art Newspaper.  
                                                                                                    ARTINFO - New York,NY,USA

Market news: records tumbling
LONDON - Among other notable records was £982,000 for 83-year-old artist Tyeb Mehta's Untitled (Figure on Rickshaw), which sold to a telephone bidder, thought to be New York hedge-fund manager, Rajiv Chaudri.
                                                                                      Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom

Art sales: sailing into choppy waters?
LONDON - MacDougall's, the specialist Russian art auctioneers in only its fourth year of business, had just passed near-neighbour Christie's £11.3 million Russian art sale held on Wednesday. But was it also toasting the health of the Russian art market?
                                                                                      Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom
Monday, 16^th June 2008

The art market: That's not all folks
INTERNATIONAL - The Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee has made a huge splash with his show, Animatus, running at the Natural History Museum in Basel until August 31. Lee, who represented Korea at the 2007 Venice Biennale, makes "skeletal sculptures" of cartoon characters - a cross between palaeontology and Looney Tunes.
                                                                                        Financial Times - London,England,UK

Guilty Pleasures
ATHENS - There I found some familiar faces: Greek construction tycoon Dakis Joannou introduced one hundred or so select artists, dealers, curators, and fellow art patrons to the latest incarnation of the Joannou Collection and the christening of "Guilty," a thirty-eight-yard-long yacht with a razzle-dazzle finish by Jeff Koons.
                                                                                                  Artforum - New York,NY,USA