Too Tacky! What Is the Fine Art World Coming To?

From Art Today: “Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady competed over an original George Condo drawing at a charity art auction in Atlantic City. The reality star kicked off the bidding for “Standing Female Figure” (2023) at $500,000. The former NFL star ended up outbidding Kardashian with an offer of $2 million. However, the American artist agreed to make a matching $2 million work for the loser.”

What’s wrong with this? Two things.

Celebrity art auctions are tacky. I can count the number of celebrities that know anything about museum-quality art on one hand. And Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady aren’t two of them. They attend these events for PR purposes. Their publicity agents tell them it will make them look sophisticated. Instead, it makes them look foolish.

In this case, they are bidding on what to me is a very sketchy (pun intended) George Condo piece that might be worth $50,000 to $80,000. On a good George Condo day. But they bid the work up to $2 million, which distorts the market and has all the serious art buyers in the room shaking their heads.

So, who are the celebrities today that have props as serious collections?

At the top of my list is Elton John, who has focused on photography and has a collection that includes Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Minor White, Irving Penn, Man Ray, and George Platt Lynes.

Next, I would nominate Cheech Marin, who almost certainly has the finest private collection of contemporary Chicano art in the world.

Madonna is next on my list, for no other reason than she was an early collector of Frida Kahlo. Also in her collection are works by Frida’s husband, the great Diego Rivera, as well as Picasso, Fernand Leger, and Man Ray

Barbra Streisand. Over the years, she has smartly restricted most of her buying to 18th and 19th century American furniture and folk art, of which she has, I’ve read, a very impressive collection.

Honorable Mentions 

Steve Martin, who has an esoteric collection of relatively unknown but respected artists. He gets on the list for having been a trustee of LACMA from 1984 to 2002, for giving $1 million to the Huntington Library to benefit its American art collection, and for writing Picasso at the Lapin Agile, about a meeting between Picasso and Einstein in a bar.

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi for their collection of works by Giacometti, Mark Grotjahn, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.

Oprah Winfrey. I don’t know anything about her collection except that she has significant pieces by Gaston Lachaise and a Harry Rosalind. But she has proved herself as an art dealer, having made a $62 million profit when, in 2016, she sold a full-length Gustav Klimt portrait for $150 million.

The Current State of the Art Market

Artworks going for $20 million plus comprised half of the art sold at auction between 2018 and 2022. This Botticelli, for example, sold for $92.2 million at Sotheby’s in London in 2021. Click here.

Auctions of modern and contemporary art continue to post record-breaking sales. When it comes to Old Masters, there are some record prices here and there. But at a recent auction at Sotheby’s, a third of the Old Master lots were left unsold, including a pair of small views of Venice by Canaletto, made towards the end of the 1720s. They were purchased for 2.1 million pounds (about $2.7 million), well under the guaranteed low estimate. Click here.

“Things Worth Remembering: T.S. Eliot and the Passage of Time”

In a recent Sunday column for The Free Press, Douglas Murray shared a literary gem he has memorized and the story of how it shaped his life.

Click here.

The Contemporary Art Market Is Still Strong

The high end of the art market has been doing very well for a surprisingly long time. In recent months, however, there’s been some softening. That’s not surprising. In fact, it’s overdue. What I’m comforted to see, however, is that – so far, at least – there’s been nothing that feels like a crash.

I had my eye on a recent Christie’s auction that was dedicated solely to contemporary art. Twenty-seven lots were offered, including a big 1983 triptych by Jean-Michel Basquiat that was, for me, the most important indicator.

The total price for the group came to $75 million ($99 million with buyers’ fees). That was in the middle of the pre-sale estimate. The bulk of those dollars were for the Basquiat. But the most exciting sale was a 2020 painting by Danielle McKinney (“We Need to Talk”), which was estimated to sell for $20,000 but fetched $201,600!

In October 1954, Albert Einstein was asked by the editor of The Reporter to comment on the hostile treatment many American scientists and intellectuals received during the McCarthy era. Einstein replied:

“If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make a living, I would try not to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under the present circumstances.”

Soon after this was published, Einstein received a flood of replies, many from plumbers. The following is one of them:

STANLEY PLUMBING & HEATING CO.

November 11, 1954

Dr. Albert Einstein
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

Dear Dr. Einstein:

As a plumber I am very much interested in your comment made in the letter being published in the Reporter Magazine. Since my ambition has always been to be a scholar and yours seems to be a plumber, I suggest that as a team we would be tremendously successful. We can then be possessed of both knowledge and independence.

I am ready to change the name of my firm to read: Einstein and Stanley Plumbing Co.

Respectfully yours,
R. Stanley Murray

(Source: Letters of Note)