What We Learned this Week (2413)
Inigo Philbrick's Offensive Charm + $18m Warhol/Basquiat collab at Sotheby's + Is the sky falling in the ultra-contemporary market? + Swann's African American sale
Welcome to Artelligence
If you have comments, complaints, tips or just want to vent, feel free to contact us directly:
In This Issue
Lot Watch: Sotheby’s $18 million Warhol-Basquiat collaboration; Swann’s African American sale
Art Basel Hong Kong sales: Gladstone sold three Salvos and White Cube made deals for 15 works
Look Out, World: Here comes Inigo again
Is the Sky is Falling? And why are so few contemporary collectors concerned about it?
Lot Watch
Warhol-Basquiat collaboration work at Sotheby’s for $18m in May
Prices for the late body of works that were a collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat began bubbling up on the auction market in 2016. They eventually reached their peak when Taxi, 45th/Broadway from 1984, once owned by Gianni Versace was sold for $9.4 million in 2018. The collaboration works were featured in the second show of Basquiat’s work shared between collector Peter Brant and the Fondation Louis Vuitton. That show last year would seem to have had a significant effect on demand for these works as one of the untitled paintings from 1984 featured in the exhibition is now coming to Sotheby’s to anchor their May sale with an $18 million estimate.
Howardena Pindell, Sam Gilliam, Hughie Lee Smith and Jacob Lawrence featured at Swann’s African American art auction
It’s been more than a decade since art made by African American artists has been sought after in the market. Black artists who work in diverse styles and genres like Ernie Barnes, Rashid Johnson, Mark Bradford and Amy Sherald regularly sell for high prices and are featured lots at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips. Before that demand filtered up to those global houses, Swann auctions in midtown Manhattan has been building markets for African American artists and educating collectors. Led by the OG Nigel Freeman, Swann’s sales continue to thrive now that the other houses have discovered the artists and their markets.
Rather than compete, Freeman stays ahead of the trend selling works by artists that museums still desperately need and collectors are still learning about. The preview for Swann’s April 4th sale opens tomorrow with important works by Kermit Oliver, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Jacob Lawrence and Hugie Lee Smith.
The 80-year-old Howardena Pindell has been quietly built into a million-dollar artist by Garth Greenan gallery, Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the last several years. That didn’t come easily for an artist who got her MFA at Yale in the mid-sixties before working at MoMA for a dozen years then teaching at Stonybrook after 1979. It has only been since 2022 that her public auction prices have reached the seven-figure mark for the large subtle works that she created in the 1970s fusing painting, textiles and a tonal approach to color. To give you a sense of how quickly the market for her work has turned, Freeman had a large work from that period on offer in 2009 with an estimate at $75,000. It passed. Today, that work would be reasonably estimated above $500,000. Freeman can’t go back and get that work but he has two stunning small assemblages that perfectly capture the themes of Pindell’s career. Estimated at $75,000 and $30,000, the two works are decorated with colored paper punch outs evoking minimalism and memory.
Pindell’s postcard-based works have a hint of Surrealism around them. That’s also a specter haunting Hugie Lee Smith’s work whose estate is now represented by trend-setting gallery Karma. The Ball Player from 1970 is estimated at $150,000. Smith came of age in the shadow of the Harlem Renaissance but his work transforms landscapes into pageantry with a raking light and empty spaces that bring Giorgio de Chirico to mind. There’s also his much smaller beachscape Bather from 1954 with a $75,000 estimate.
Jacob Lawrence is another African American artist whose career was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance. His 1977 set of 22 prints, The Legend of John Brown, has 60 impressions. Swann has a complete set that is still in the original box having never been mounted or displayed. It’s estimated at $100,000.
Kermit Oliver is an artist who worked as a postal service employee for most of his career to leave himself time for painting. The son of Texas cowboy, Oliver was asked to design Southwest-themed scarves for Hermès in the 1980s upon the recommendation of Neiman Marcus’s Lawrence Marcus. Swann has a self portrait in a Hill Country landscape from 1983. Hay Rolls is estimated at $100,000.
Sam Gilliam’s big break as an artist came in 1967 when he had his frist museum show at the Phillips Collection in his native Washington, DC. At the time, Gilliam was making “slice” paintings and experimenting with beveling the edges of his canvases. In the case of the untitled 1967 work in Swann’s sale, the bevel goes behind the picture to make the work appear to float off the wall. Gilliam included seven of his slice paintings in the Phillips show. This one, estimated at $80,000, has a palette of metallic silver and muted orange, olive green and faded blues. Works from the same era with similar hues have made as much as $250,000.
More Art Basel HK Sales
White Cube sold a total of 15 works by the end of the second day with “indicative sale prices” including:
Lynne Drexler, Plumed Bloom 1967 USD 1,200,000
Christine Ay Tjoe, 3->2 #05 2010 USD750,000
TARWUK, MRTISKLAAH_emoC_saH_eM_gnilbmeseR_enoemoS, 2024 USD80,000
Jessica Rankin, Sea Flare 2023 USD60,000
Sarah Morris, Lippo [Hong Kong] 2024 USD125,000
Cinga Samson, Igcukuma 2024 USD95,000
Gladstone gallery also sold three works by Salvo priced at $375,000, $225,000, and $175,000
Who Choked Off the Ultra Contemporary Art Market
Last weekend, my phone blew up (okay, I got a couple of texts) from active market participants—the kinds of collectors who often get called flippers or speculators—pointing to an Artnet post declaring a crash in Contemporary art prices. You would expect these guys—and they are mostly guys—holding a lot of pictures by mostly young artists to be a bit panicked or, at least, a little queasy when they read a headline quoting Jeffrey Deitch stating flatly that “it’s not a soft landing.”
The soft landing referred to the idea that the art market could make a transition from the cyclical focus on (mostly) painters with short market track records to something else without seeing those markets dry up entirely. The art market, like all markets, cycles over several years between historical artists and new artists. No two cycles are ever the same. Some artists are evergreen, even as their markets wax and wane with intensity; others come and go. Stepping back, though, we can see the broad, slow rhythm of change not unlike the stock market’s oscillation between value stocks and growth companies.
Artnet’s Chicken Little article didn't faze these collectors. It didn’t say anything they didn’t already know. They’re active buyers and sellers. They have a better sense of pricing—in a market where this is no central or public display of prices—than anybody else. For one reason, Chicken Little’s evidence was a few random examples that often confused fundamental elements of the art market to make its point. A random Frank Stella auction price was compared to the asking prices of new works ignoring the what everybody knows in the art market—in good times and bad— that you price by body of work, size, medium, and example, to name just a few factors. That didn’t stop Chicken Little from comparing the price of works at auction by Dan Colen, Oscar Murillo, and Pat Stier to asking prices from dealers for different bodies of work. In the Pat Stier example, strong sales in Los Angeles seemed to directly contradict the hand waving thesis of the article.
What the collectors who called me were more amused by was how close the article seemed to come to grasping what they felt is actually taking place here, that primary dealers had choked off many emerging artists’ markets by raising prices.
From the experience of the collectors I spoke to over the weekend, real experience buying artists they are happy to continue to own (and good luck to them,) the market for artists with emerging markets—not the entire art market—has been choked off by their primary galleries. The usual model has been for the primary galleries to keep prices below the secondary market to maintain control over who gets which works.
In recent years, buoyed by pandemic demand, primary prices have been moved up to secondary market levels. That’s fine as long holds. And you can’t really blame a gallery for wanting the artist and gallery to benefit from the full market value of the artist’s work. The problem with gallery pricing, though, is that it is far from dynamic. Galleries can clear inventory by offering discounts but that tactic has its own limitations. Backing down an artist’s broader price structure is far more difficult to do than hiking prices.
Nearly a year and a half into the downward price trajectory precipitated by the rise in interest rates—remember that in a higher interest rate environment active-trading collectors have to look at pictures on their walls every day that are not making them the 5% interest they would get from cash in the bank—these collectors are chasing the demand that remains for these emerging artists by underpricing the galleries. So now the secondary market is trading at a discount to primary prices. Early buyers can still make money in that environment and many probably are.
The funny thing is that the collectors who got in touch with me last weekend weren’t pulling out of the market. They’re just not buying from art fairs or directly from galleries. They’re picking up work they like at prices they think make sense. We can see this in some of Chicken Little’s examples. Take the Emmanuel Taku, Sisters in Pink that was auctioned in 2021 for $189,000 and sold again at auction this year for $8,000. Yes, that’s an eye-catching drop. But if the work was back at auction in early 2024, it must have been offered privately all through 2023 and possibly before. Two years of shopping a work privately—presumably at prices above $200,000—will thoroughly burn a painting. There may even have been offers in the six figures that got turned down. No buyer likes to reward a seller they believe spurned a reasonable offer which is how you get to a painting selling for $8,000 instead of seeing it withdrawn from the sale. And, of course, someone did buy it.
None of this is new. Chicken Little offers a list of “cautionary tales” including Anselm Reyle, the German artist known for his use of foil, and the Zombie Formalists. Each represents a period when Contemporary art was hot on the market. For Reyle it was 2007-2008; the Zombies were around 2014. Reyle’s market collapsed so badly that he closed his studio for a number of years. Recent work hasn’t quite had the punch of his earlier work. But a foil painting just sold in London for $106,000. That price is 17% of what his best foil painting did at auction 16 years ago. Nevertheless, it sold. And Reyles have been selling slowly and steadily for years now with a blip in 2023 that suggests we’ll see more works at auction in the future.
As for the Zombies, Jacob Kassay, who made a splash on the auction market from 2011-13 with his silver-dipped process paintings, also disappeared from the art market for a decade. Yet right now he has a show at 303 Gallery that shows up approvingly and often on Instagram feeds. Who knows if they sold? But that’s as good an indicator as much of what were given in Artnet.
No one said it was easy to become—and stay—a successful artist. Reputations rise and fall when artists are alive and long after they are gone. Markets do too. The worst thing that can happen to an artist is not having prices go down but having no price at all. Those Reyle’s selling at a deep discount to his best prices aren’t necessarily being sold at a loss though it is surely not much of a gain after so long. But the lower prices brings in new buyers who now become advocates for the artist.
When collectors and dealers don’t compromise on prices, that makes the market for an artist freeze up. And when that happens, we’ve truly reached the end.
Inigo Philbrick’s Charm Offensive
When word first started filtering out that double-dealer Inigo Philbrick was switching from federal prison to home confinement in January, a few questions came to mind: Had the arrogant sociopath been changed at all by the experience of being brought to justice? Had prison taught him anything? And, would he start fresh with a new life not seeking attention, not trying to project a life of glamor that he cannot afford, and not dealing art?
It appears from the “confession” published in Vanity Fair this week that the answer is a firm: No!
Inigo wants you to know that he’s back, that he can explain away his behavior, shift blame to others, and that he’s going to somehow dazzle the art world with his brilliance again. The Vanity Fair story seems to be an attempt at a charm offensive but the story is spectacularly tone deaf, the product of a self-deluded conman collaborating with an extremely gullible journalist. Judge for yourself. Here are a few of Philbrick’s claims or comments:
Philbrick was shocked to realize how few of the folks he met in prison had any “conception of what an art dealer does”
“‘I would never have had an offshore company nor an art-backed loan had I not met Robert Newland,’ Philbrick says.”
“‘By no means am I blameless, but the people I was partnered with were all seeking an edge,’ he says.”
“Among the documents he left behind were spreadsheets showing the dizzying positions each investor owned in the various percentages of the oversold art, along with a handwritten note that read, according to the government’s sentencing memorandum, ‘How to fuck them?’ Philbrick says the note was in Newland’s handwriting, but Newland’s attorney Burlingame calls this claim ‘false (and ridiculous) […]’”
“‘I was traveling on my US passport, hardly a fugitive,’ insists Philbrick. The Justice Department, which considered him one in April 2020, disagrees.”
“‘I’m 36, still a young man, and a second act is going to require my having been up front and sincere, but also not a martyr,’ he says.'“
“‘Of course, I did things the wrong way,’ says Philbrick. ‘But creatively and with the best of intentions. I’ll have to tick the box for the felony. But I believe the art world is sophisticated enough to understand that I wasn’t Bernie Madoff (who never made an actual investment).’”
The comparison to Madoff, a sociopath who reveled in the deception, is particularly telling. Like Madoff, Philbrick believed his victims deserved to be exploited and that their trust was evidence of his own superiority. Nothing in this Vanity Fair piece contradicts that.
As much as Philbrick wants to insist he was sincerely trying to recoup losses or that there will be revelations that can change how his actions are viewed, that’s all delusional thinking. Philbrick didn’t defraud his partners because of unexpected losses. Like Jho Low, he was a compulsive spender and needed to defraud others to pay for the ridiculous excesses. Like Michel Cohen a generation before him, the financial pressures came from his own reckless behavior.
There’s another problem with this coordinated attempt to play up Philbrick’s notoriety. His girlfriend, Victoria Baker-Harber, posted pictures from the Vanity Fair story on her Instagram profile. The comments from her 193,000 followers are obsequious. But like those Philbrick met in prison, they have no conception of what an art dealer does. Back in the claustrophobic world of art dealing, his criminality is the least of his limitations. Christopher Wool and Rudolf Stingel no longer have markets active enough for Philbrick to stage a comeback. He’s got $86 million to pay in restitution but no viable leads on art he might sell or flip even if he can convince someone to deal with him. Then there’s the current state of the market which is not favorable to a quick score. Finally, Philbrick’s been out of the game too long. He no longer has a fulcrum, an edge, on any part of the market.
Who’s going to let him back in and why?