Art Basel Opens in Hong Kong
ABHK sales report + Heffel to offer Canadian art dealer's collection + Christie's strong Modern British & Irish results + Former Artforum editor David Velasco has more to say
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In This Issue
Lot Watch: Heffel has Torben Kristiansen’s collection in May
Results: Christie’s Modern British & Irish = $37m
Art Basel Opens in Hong Kong: Tempered expectations met
David Velasco Has More to Say: The former editor explains his choices in Airmail
Lot Watch
Heffel Has $3m Torben V. Kristiansen Collection of Canadian Masters
Heffel announced it will auction the collection of Torben Kristiansen, the Danish-born pilot turned Canadian art dealer who died last year after 60 years in the business. Kristiansen’s holdings include significant works from the Canadian artists with strong international appeal like Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, Thom Thomson and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The significant works by those four artists have a combined low estimate of $4.5 million Canadian dollars which is $3.3 million USD. Except for the Riopelle and one of the Harris works, the other four top lots are intimate works like Thom Thomson’s Fall Woods, Algonquin Park (above) with a low estimate of $500,000 Canadian or Lawren Harris’s Above Moraine Lake estimated at $400,000 (below). Harris was the subject of a show, The Idea of the North, organized with the help of collector Steve Martin, that toured the US in 2016.
Results
Christie’s Modern British & Irish Art = $37m
While the Contemporary art market searches for a bottom, other markets continue to gain momentum. Unfortunately much smaller than the market for recently made works, the Modern British and Irish art market had a strong sale in London at Christie’s. The combined Evening and Day sales made £28 million with an industry average sell-through rate of 83% and a strong hammer ratio of 1.27.
The bidding breakdown: Nearly half of the lots, 46%, were bid above the estimate range; 32% of the lots were sold within the estimates; and 22% of lots were sold but at prices below the estimates. Although not as overwhelmingly positive as last week’s South Asian Modern art sales in New York, these are still very strong numbers.
What the big money bought: Among the top 25 lots by price were more than one work by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, L. S. Lowry and Barry Flanagan. Lowry’s Sunday Afternoon made £6.2m ($8m); Henry Moore’s 1930 Head sold for more than five times the estimate at £5.1m ($6.5m) with fees; and Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour sold for £3.5m ($4.5m.) Pauline Boty’s rare Pop art work, Epitaph to Something’s Gotta Give from 1962 made double the estimate at £1.3m ($1.6m.) A new auction record was set for another rare auction sight, an R.B. Kitaj painting: Clerk’s Dream from 1972 sold for £529,200 ($677,376.)
What the bidders chased: The Kitaj was the most aggressively bid upon lot. Most of the other lots with very aggressive bidding remained in the five figures even after the run-up in bids and adding the premium. So the trend of buyers chasing low-value lots continues. Henry Moore’s Head was the highest value of the dynamic lots. Works by Bryan Wynter, Euan Uglow, Charles Sargeant Jagger, Roy de Maistre, Paul Feiler, Pauline Boty, Emily Young and William Scott were the other artists who saw their works bid above the estimate range and into the six figures.
Art Basel Hong Kong sales report
Hong Kong’s appeal to the international art market is as a gateway to mainland Chinese buyers who, by all reports, streamed into the city this year in even greater numbers than last. A year ago, Hong Kong was riding a wave of pent-up demand held back by pandemic closures. But, according to Clare McAndrew, sales slowed later in the year in Asia once that demand was satisfied.
First day reports from Hong Kong offer mixed signals. Some galleries, like David Zwirner, are loudly claiming better opening day sales than in 2023. In well-rehearsed statement to the South China Morning Post’s excellent reporter Enid Tsui, Zwirner called the fair “a vast improvement on last year” before adding what might be considered all-purpose Art Basel boilerplate,“it is especially exciting that the client mix is truly international, including many museum directors and curators this year.”
As a counterpoint, Tsui reports that Brendan Dugan’s Karma admitted to “fewer confirmed sales on VIP day than in 2023.”
Gagosian’s Nick Simunovic continued the theme of singling out museum buyers and describing sales as “steady and efficient” which could easily be read as nice but not earth shattering. Gagosian doesn’t provide asking prices but the artists named were Carol Bove, Hao Liang, Tetsuya Ishida, Sarah Sze, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Mary Weatherford, and Stanley Whitney”
Gladstone gallery had sales including a 10-foot x 10-foot Alex Katz painting from 2021 with an asking price of $1.3 million; Rirkrit Tiravanija diptych priced at $200,000; Ugo Rondinone’s sculpture yellow pink monk made this year priced at $90,000, along with “multiple” paintings priced at $70,000; an untitled Amy Sillman work on paper priced at $75,000; and Annicka Yi’s Late Clasical XVIII from 2022 priced at $110,00.
Marc Payot at Hauser & Wirth said in a release that "The energy […] exceeded our expectations this year and is a reflection of the highly engaged and sophisticated audience for art in the wider region and our sustained engagement here.” He cited sales for Philip Guston's'The Desire' (1978) at $8.5 million and Willem de Kooning’s, 'Untitled III' (1986) for $9 million. Neither work was included in Hauser’s initial list of sales. It would be rare for a seven-figure painting to be sold to a walk-in buyer. So it is likely that both the Guston and de Kooning received approval from their buyers some time during the first day of the vernissage. Hauser also announced sales of Mark Bradford’s ‘May the Lord be the first one in the car… and the last out.’ (2023) for $3.5 million; a Maria Lassnig painting from 1995 for $650,000; a Charles Gaines work from his Numbers and Trees series; a work from Rashid Johnson’s ‘God Painting’ series made in 2023 for $750,000; a major painting by Pat Steir from 2022 for $850,000 and Avery Singer’s ‘Poppers’ (2024) for $800,000."
Angelica Villa from ARTnews reported on these sales from Pace and David Kordansky: “Pace […] sold 15 works by artists across its roster, including ones by Adam Pendleton, Kylie Manning, and Maysha Mohamedi. […] The Pendleton, a 2023 painting titled Black Dada (D), brought in the highest price of the sold works, going for $275,000. […] David Kordansky reported selling a total of 17 works on the first day. Five of them, works by Joel Mesler to Shara Hughes, went for prices north of $100,000.”
David Velasco Calls In from the Wilderness
We should talk about what’s going on with David Velasco, the former editor in chief of Artforum who lost his job in the emotionally and politically super-heated aftermath of Hamas’s horrific terror attack on Israeli citizens and Israel’s brutal response in Gaza. Over the weekend, he revealed in Airmail that he is currently “living out of a suitcase.” Velasco says he can no longer afford his apartment, has few job prospects, was living “paycheck to paycheck,” even before he lost his job, and “didn’t have a savings account.”
That’s tough for anyone who once had a fair bit of status in the art world and a decently paid job. Still, I’m sure there are a lot of people who won’t have sympathy for him. After all, even by his own account, he seems to have misjudged the situation surrounding the publication of an open letter from artists and others pleading for the safety of Palestinians. By his own admission, he courted controversy with the letter but got a lot more than he bargained for. Velasco seems to have believed that it was essential to make a statement even though the essence of an editor’s role is to anticipate the way in which editorial decisions will land. Five months later, Airmail still finds him pinioned by his own choices.
The peculiar nature of Artforum, its recent history and the ambivalence of the art world’s audience, explains more about how Velasco got where he is than any question of free speech. There’s no denying that the hot-house identity politics of much art writing over the last two decades has helped fuel a market for artists whose collectors might not actually share all of their political views. The Trump years have only further exposed that many wealthy collectors may not have been fully aligned with the political views of the artists they collect.
But that’s not really what got Velasco fired. Again, just going by his own account to Airmail, it’s pretty clear that Velasco didn’t—and still doesn’t—understand a basic principle of journalism. He wasn’t fired because of his political views. He was fired because he didn’t give his publisher the opportunity to discuss his decision to sign the open letter before he put it on the magazine’s website.
Signing the letter transformed the act of publishing it from journalism into advocacy, a distinction Velasco still doesn’t accept. He could have published the open letter as a news item with the appropriate caveats and distance. Indeed, that’s what was quickly done to help diffuse the controversy. There was only one more step required for Velasco to bring down the temperature and save his job. It wasn’t really even very hard. All he had to do was say he didn’t understand the need to consult his peers on the business side and that it wouldn’t happen again.
Here is how Louis Cheslaw relates Velasco’s understanding of his meeting with Penske Media’s owner, Jay Penske, “When they eventually met, Penske asked him for ‘some kind of mea culpa,’ which he was not prepared to give. By the end of the day, he had been fired and shut out of his accounts.”
Some kind of mea culpa doesn’t seem like a high price to pay for a decision that Velasco “felt […] was done with integrity and the right spirit” but that had also obviously backfired.
Since changes were made to the original post after the outraged response, why was it too hard to admit that maybe he got it wrong and, in the future, he would to inform his publisher of these decisions before he made them public? Or did mea culpa mean something different to him?
Because Velasco refused to walk back any of his decisions, it created a perfect storm for the business. Any gallery that continued to advertise in Artforum would potentially offend someone on either side. The safest stance was to stop advertising. Some did it vocally. Many others did it quietly.
There was another reason for galleries to pull ads, too. In the five years since Velasco became editor, galleries had continued to build their own direct relationship with the art audience through email lists and Instagram accounts. While the third-party validation of reviews, feature stories, critical appraisals—and even ads—remains useful to galleries, that is no longer the only route to maintaining contact with a large and diverse audience. For years, dealers kept advertising in Artforum less for its effectiveness and more because their artists might have felt slighted. But now some of the artists were calling for their gallery’s ads to be removed.
There was also the Knight Landesman factor. Landesman had built Artforum into a thick catalog of gallery ads over a 35-year career that ended in a #metoo moment when nine women sued him for sexual harassment and retaliation. It was Landesman’s relentlessness as a seller that kept the art industry advertising in Artforum long after it had abandoned other publications.
Inadvertently, Landesman had also played a role in putting Velasco in his current bind. Put simply, because the editorial content had little effect on ad sales, Artforum gave free reign to its editors and, it would appear, very little oversight. Velasco didn’t tell his publishers he was going to sign and publish a provocative letter because no one had ever asked him to do that before. Cheslaw writes that “Velasco […] claims there wasn’t any precedent of running editorial initiatives up the corporate chain.” The implication in Airmail is that the corporate chain refers to Penske Media but it appears that the lack of oversight also applied to Artforum when it was independently owned.
One of those owners was Knight Landesman. Six years to the month before Velasco lost his job, Landesman was accused of sexual harassment and retaliation by nine women. The accusations caused the previous editor in chief, Michelle Kuo, to resign because she could no longer publicly represent the organization.
The suit against Landesman would eventually get dismissed due to the statute of limitations and the issue of standing on some of the charges; but an appeals court did eventually let the claims of one former employee—that Artforum failed to protect her from Landesman— proceed against the magazine. Artforum eventually settled.
The revelations shocked and perturbed the art industry—but not Velasco. Or, at least, not enough for him to share Kuo’s inability to represent the organization where he had already worked for more than a dozen years. Editor in chief of Artforum, he told Airmail, was his dream job.
But you can also imagine how, in the aftermath of the Landesman revelations, that the editorial side would want to insulate itself from the business side even more than it already had been. That might have made it easier for Velasco to move ahead in the wake of Landesman’s departure but it had the unexpected effect of leaving him isolated from his colleagues when he most needed their counsel.
If Velasco had consulted with Artforum’s publisher before posting the open letter on his website with his own signature and the signature of some of his colleagues and they had advised him against it, would he have changed Velasco’s decision? From what we’re shown in Airmail, the answer is probably not. And if he’s comfortable with that, there’s nothing more to say.