Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2021 i ARTnews

Editor’s Letter When this issue reaches subscribers we’ll be about a year out from the beginning of utterly changed times. As Covid-19 charted its grim path around the globe, the art world sustained all manner of maladies: museums and galleries shut their doors, workers lost their jobs, the future looked ominous. In hindsight, these tough times—we certainly aren’t past them yet—have taught us a lesson about the resilience of commercial art galleries. As James Tarmy recently reported in Bloomberg, galleries have in general fared better than museums. In this issue, with our annual focus on Money, Brian Boucher takes a deep dive into the struggles of New York art galleries and how they went from what gallerist Andrew Kreps called a potential “going-out-of-business moment” to adjusting to a new normal…

PERCHED ON A TABLE NEXT to curled tubes of paint and crusty brushes in Ali Banisadr’s homey Brooklyn studio was a copy of an epic poem that, over its thousands of years of history, has been told and retold—including by Banisadr himself. “My wife complains that I can’t stop talking about Gilgamesh,” the artist said, with a laugh, about a storied Mesopotamian text that has consumed him. “I like the idea of something ancient that speaks to our time. I get visions in my head—of the places, the characters, the atmosphere. It just keeps giving.” The geographic origin of Gilgamesh syncs with Banisadr’s roots in Tehran, where he was born and lived before moving to Turkey and then to the United States when he was 12. And the tale it…

Defining Events Collection 260,000 The number of square feet occupied by the Walker Art Center building 700,000 The number of visitors who come to the Walker in a typical year People Shows…

ON THE EVENING OF January 23, 2020, a five-alarm fire broke out at 70 Mulberry Street in New York, in a historic building in the city’s Chinatown; it housed 85,000 objects in the collection of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), a small institution located a few blocks away. The blaze posed an existential threat to the institution’s 40-year effort to document and preserve the experiences and achievements of people of Chinese descent in the United States, with photographs, textiles and garments, business signs, and movie posters among the many items endangered. Members of the museum’s management team were in the neighborhood at the time of the fire. They watched the blaze together for several hours before convening to commiserate at a local bar. The team decided to get…

FOR MCH GROUP, IT WAS A SUMMER of dread. In spring 2020, the Swiss holding company had postponed indefinitely what had once been its cash cow: the struggling Baselworld watch and jewelry fair. Meanwhile, Art Basel, the world’s most important modern and contemporary art fair and MCH’s crown jewel, was on lockdown, able to offer only online viewing rooms to art dealers who would normally pay upward of $100,000 for physical booths. In June, the Swiss press was reporting that capital was urgently needed at MCH, and that it looked like a private investor was the company’s only hope. Slowly it emerged that executives were in talks with one: news broke in September that James Murdoch, heir to a controversial media fortune, had swept in, and would get a controlling…

Caves in Sulawesi, an island off the coast of mainland Indonesia, have repeatedly yielded fascinating insights for historians, thanks to the art that covers their walls. A paper published in Science Advances this past January reveals a startling new discovery there: the oldest figurative painting in the world. The rendering of a pig with a bulging gut is now believed to be at least 45,000 years old, predating by tens of thousands of years better-known prehistoric images, such as the cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Coauthor Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, said that the painting was the work of a modern human—and that there could be others like it. Scientists must act fast though if they hope to find them: with Indonesian cave art swiftly…

Catherine Opie Hilton Als, Douglas Fogle, Helen Molesworth, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, Charlotte Cotton, and Shaun Regen (Phaidon, $150) • Catherine Opie rose to fame in the ’90s, with jarring photographs that included, among other things, a childlike drawing of a home carved into her back and herself in S&M garb. Her output may have grown less shocking over the years—recently, her subject has been the city of Los Angeles—but it continues to be creative fodder for thinkers such as critic Hilton Als, curator Helen Molesworth, and others, who address it in a new monograph. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35) • A decade in the making, New Yorker staff writer Louis Menand’s 880-page look at American art and…

AFTER RUNNING AN art gallery for 16 years, Stefania Bortolami is a diehard optimist. Otherwise, she likes to say, in her brisk Italian accent, “you cannot be an art dealer, because if you really think about it, it’s suicide. You’re selling dreams that, a few years down the line, might be worth nothing.” But even she was frustrated in January when Art Basel, citing international travel restrictions, announced that it would postpone its 2021 marquee fair—the world’s most prestigious marketplace for modern and contemporary art—from its usual time in June to September. By the time she went looking for a room after the announcement, all the hotels she called were already sold out. “It’s almost like someone knew,” she said, sounding a note of conspiracy. Aside from the omnipresent masks…

Mathew Cerletty Born 1980, Milwaukee Lives and works in New York There are realist paintings and hyperrealist paintings—and then there are Mathew Cerletty paintings, in which objects, bits of text, landscapes, and sometimes people are so exquisitely rendered that they seem to live elevated lives apart from the petty concerns of mortal humans. (This can be both exhilarating and disconcerting to behold.) A characteristically uncanny wonder, Female (2020) might be a pelvis for its own sake or a playful riff on Gustave Courbet’s rather fleshier take on the same subject in Origin of the World (1866). Either way, it is a deadpan depiction of our unseen human interior and an unflinching vision of what remains after our death. 1 The number of paintings of broccoli included in Cerletty’s 2019 show…

WINTER IS THE SILLY season in the art market—not much happens from the holidays into March—and this past winter, the first and, one hopes, the last to be stunted by a global pandemic, proved all the sillier. Which might possibly explain why art market reporter Scott Reyburn chose the season to publish a screed in the Art Newspaper against supposed “neoliberalism” in the market he covers. “Art is a financial commodity,” he wrote. “Artists are brands, ranked by price. Collectors are ranked by power.” And that, he says, has turned “the art world into a digital bourse” where everyone, “whether they like it or not, is looking at art through the prism of price.” The fear that the market has reduced the art world to something like a game show…

CECILIA ALEMANI IS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, which will take place in 2022. Since 2011, she has been director and chief curator of High Line Art, the organization that curates exhibitions in New York’s elevated park. Born in Milan, Alemani first achieved wide acclaim as a curator in 2009, when she directed the X Initiative, which staged cutting-edge exhibitions by top artists at the Dia building in Chelsea. From 2012 to 2018, she oversaw a section at the Frieze Art Fair that was devoted to projects by emerging artists, and in 2018, she organized a city-wide exhibition in Buenos Aires under the aegis of Art Basel. In 2017, she curated the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, showing work by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto…

LÉVY GORVY GALLERY runs four primary spaces worldwide—in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Paris—but what with localized lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021, the period when all were open for operation at the same time came to just three days. “It was sad and moving,” cofounder Dominique Lévy said recently of that fleeting glimmer in early December. And even when the individual galleries were open, she added, “people weren’t really going out. We’ve been having a tough time putting art in front of curators, collectors, artists, and writers.” To change that, this past fall, Lévy decided to try pop-ups. “I thought, Let’s be agile,” she said. “Let’s be where some of our clients are. Let’s be in places where people are comfortable outdoors, even if they’re just peeking through the…