Relevant Media:
- Robert Hughes’ film features Thomas Krens, who is assessed by Jerry Saltz thus:
“…it turns out he was really a prophet, the first to see that museums, far from a shelter from the tawdry bustle of commerce and fashion, could traffic in it.”
“A prized 1963 Andy Warhol painting that captures the immediate aftermath of a car crash has fetched $105m (£65m) at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City on Wednesday, shattering the record for the pop artist amid a spending frenzy at the high end of the art world.”
“If there were any remaining doubts that “making money is art,” as Andy Warhol famously pronounced in his 1975 book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” they were surely vanquished on Nov. 12. His silk-screen print “Triple Elvis (Ferus Type),” an image taken from a Hollywood studio publicity shot showing Elvis Presley with a gun, sold for nearly $82 million at a Christie’s auction packed with bankers, hedge fund managers and art dealers.”
- Photography has also entered the million-dollar art market. In 2014, “a private collector in Las Vegas […] bought Peter Lik’s, “Phantom,” […] for an unprecedented $6.5 million”.
“Picasso’s Women of Algiers has become the most expensive painting to sell at auction, going for $160m (£102.6m) at Christie’s in New York.”
(2015 also reportedly saw the most expensive art sale of all time, of Paul Gauguin’s oil painting Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?) (1892) to the State of Qatar for $300 million.)
- “Here are four theories on why the bubble keeps inflating, and why it may be a while before it bursts.”
- The 2016 release of the ‘Panama Papers’ helped to reveal how the art market helps the super-rich to store and move “billions of dollars in value in a manner that’s all but untraceable”.
- This article outlines the sums involved in bringing the museum super-brands to Saadiyat Island:
“In 2007, Abu Dhabi signed a deal with French officials worth over £663m to buy the use of the Louvre’s name, to construct the Jean Nouvel-designed building that will house the art, and to facilitate special exhibitions and cultural loans from French institutions. The museum is scheduled to open next year. The Louvre branding itself is worth over half the value of the total: £344m for a period of 30 years.
A similarly gargantuan sum was promised to the Guggenheim, which will open its outpost in Abu Dhabi in 2017 or later (the project has been much delayed). Curators have been granted a £400m budget for new acquisitions, while the museum designed by Frank Gehry – a medieval jumble of cones and impossible angles – will cost £530m to build.”
- In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was sold for $450,312,500, likely giving it the status of the most expensive painting in the world for some considerable time. Its planned unveiling in the Louvre Abu Dhabi remains pending.
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- Touching on much of the material from the module, this 2016 radio piece by Will Self discusses Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, Damien Hirst, the role of the wealthy in the art market, modern galleries, tourism and urban development.
- In a consideration of the trends outlined above, the 2018 essay ‘The End of Middle-Class Art’ argues that “any pretense of a firewall between art and money has been abandoned.” In that vein, why not watch ‘The Banker’s Guide to Art’?
Cultural Guide:
- More information than you can shake a stick at on the half-billion ‘Da Vinci’ at Artwatch UK.