The smell of it…

Author:

Simon Bainbridge

Leigh Bowery, Vandam Street studio, New York, 1993 © Annie Leibovitz/Contact Press Images/nbpictures.com, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Life is pretty hectic for Annie Liebovitz right now. BJP met her in Rome on Tuesday night for the launch of Lavazza’s latest ad and calendar campaign (a report from which follows in our 22 October issue), and yesterday her show at the National Portrait Gallery opened (she wasn’t there) in London – plus there’s another next week at Phillips de Pury, and a new book from Jonathan Cape.

She’s also just left her longtime dealer, Edwynn Houk in New York – not for another gallery, but for an auction house (you guessed it, Phillips de Pury).

Auction houses are playing an increasingly prominent role in artists’ careers, which not everyone is happy about because they are party to inside information that normal gallery dealers aren’t. Even when collectors don’t win what they’re bidding on at a sale, the auction house knows what they’re interested in, and what they are prepared to pay – and now that they are opening up their own galleries and also representing artists, they’re in prime position to offer collectors an alternative.

Many think the art world has become way too overheated, and that public institutions are too much in the pocket of commercial galleries and private collectors.

There’s an excellent article explaining the background to all this (but focusing largely on the ‘brain drain’ of curators from public galleries to the commercial art realm) written by Laura Cumming in The Observer.

After you’ve read that, check out The Art Newspaper’s report on the first night of Frieze Art Fair, which only serves to emphasise Cumming’s closing comments:

‘Museum art should be tested by time and not the market; if you want to see what hyper-liquidity has done to contemporary art just go to an auction. Knitted sea urchins, discarded leather jackets, front covers of the New York Times spattered with the artist's semen; these days, there is no art too sorry to be sold at auction. And anyone who thinks they are poorly served by the Tate, which shows extraordinary discrimination by comparison, need only go to the Frieze art fair this week and see what they can find to inspire the mind in that great acreage of product. As Robert Shapazian said after leaving the commercial sector behind, “We have around us excess of all kinds, yet an intimation of essential impoverishment”.'

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