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☆ At Christie’s, the Show Goes On, Despite a Hack
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-14 | by ( Zachary Small | Julia Halperin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The salesroom at Christie’s was packed on Tuesday evening, as spectators rubbernecked to see if buyers would compete for multimillion-dollar artworks at an auction house still hobbled by a cyberattack. Could she succeed despite the headwinds of a slumping market and concerns about whether a cyberattack might have compromised the financial data of Christie’s clientele? There were only four withdrawals ahead of the evening sales, as Christie’s salespeople worked hard to assure buyers and sellers that business would continue without a glitch. There was a depth of bidding not seen the night before at the contemporary art sales at Sotheby’s, where out of its 52 lots, most sold on just a few bids. Still, Sotheby’s managed to outdo its rival with a total of $267 million on Monday — more than double Christie’s final result of $115 million, from a total of 57 lots, offered on Tuesday.

Persons: Georgina Hilton, Rosa de la Cruz, Christie’s salespeople, Sotheby’s Organizations: Cuban Locations: Christie’s, Cuban American, Sotheby’s

☆ At Art Auctions Market Seeks Its Footing After Stumbling Sales and a Hack at Christie’s
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-12 | by ( Zachary Small | Julia Halperin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Estimates are still soaring past the $20 million mark and canvases still bear the signatures of dependable ringers like Warhol, Basquiat and Picasso. A cyberattack at Christie’s brought down the company’s website on Thursday, and as of Sunday morning, Christie’s had not yet regained control of it, but promised the auctions would proceed, at least in person. (A place-holder website was set up allowing access to the digital catalogs, but did not allow online bidding.) With the site down and questions still unanswered about the fate of confidential data, analysts are uncertain about the impact on buyers and sellers. Over the next week, more than 1,700 works of modern and contemporary art are expected to be offered at the three major houses — Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips — with an estimate of $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion.

Persons: Warhol, Basquiat, Picasso, Christie’s, Phillips Organizations: Christie’s Locations: Christie’s

They used to call this waterlogged city the Most Serene Republic, but there is nothing serenissima about the opening days of the Venice Biennale. The world’s longest-running and most extravagant festival of contemporary art opens to the public on Saturday after a preview biathlon of fine art and financial profligacy that has grown more hectic than ever. You exchange tips on shows not to miss. You judge, you gossip, you wash it all down with Prosecco. Have you seen the Uzbekistan pavilion?

Organizations: Venice Biennale, Prosecco Locations: Serene, Venice, Uzbekistan

He was a model to me of artistic labor and discipline, even if those early paintings were painfully amateurish. The painting followed me from Amherst to my first job in New York, and on to London and Delhi. IT WASN’T MY intention to start an essay about artistic beginnings with a story of artistic death. I’m especially moved by those first moments of validation by which an artist comes out to himself, as it were. It’s this, the inexorability of the correspondence between an artist and the world, that gives those first steps their magical quality.

Persons: Naipaul, Neil Shah, James Wood —, Zack, who’d, ”, Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna, Elders ”, I’m, ” Gustave Flaubert, “, ” Zack, it’s, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Gauguin, Salman Rushdie, Somerset Maugham, Kathryn Bigelow, Philip Glass, Arundhati Roy, Booker, Joseph Conrad, Conrad, Jacques, ” Conrad, brimming, ’, ’ ”, Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, ” Lispector, Maugham, eludes, Jan van Kessel, Elder, — Pieter Bruegel, —, Rebecca West —, “ Black Lamb, J.R, Hammond, Wells, Rebecca West ”, sloughed, Henrik Ibsen’s, Rosmersholm ”, Karan Mahajan, Salman Toor, what’s, ” Hemingway, Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar, Harold Bloom, Ravi, Uday, René Daumal, Rasa ”, ” Anoushka, Norah Jones, Norah, I’ve, “ Raphael, Rachel Cusk, Italy ”, Perugino, Raphael, Cusk, J.M, Samuel Beckett, Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Pynchon’s, James Joyce, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Marcel Proust’s, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Read, Emma Kehlbeck, Quinton Kamara Organizations: Amherst College, Elders, Fayerweather, ”, Google, Sunday Times, Somerset, Yugoslavia, The, “, . Locations: Delhi, ”, Massachusetts, Italian, Topeka, Kan, Amherst, New York, London, Patagonia, New Delhi, Torrens, Cambridge, Polish, Ukrainian, Brazil, Flemish, Victorian England, “ H.G, Fairfield, United States, “, East, Lahore, Europe, America, Texas, Side, Manhattan, India, Italy

He was a model to me of artistic labor and discipline, even if those early paintings were painfully amateurish. IT WASN’T MY intention to start an essay about artistic beginnings with a story of artistic death. No one captured the massive cultural and economic disparities of my life in Delhi (and his in Lahore) like Toor. But quite unbeknown to me, Toor’s life in New York had opened up a new vein of material. Not everyone who sees a Michelangelo can go off and paint a Michelangelo.”THERE ARE SO many ways to begin.

☆ A Night With New York’s Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-08 | by ( Julia Halperin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

There’s the pirate who’s said to have buried treasure on Liberty Island. And then there’s the Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League. “I’d heard whispers of this game for so long,” says the photographer Kate Owen, 35. For a year, she’d wondered where the mysterious tournament was held and who exactly was behind it. Then, on Valentine’s Day, she saw an Instagram post by the queer collective GayJoy calling for “a few more artsy gays to play backgammon” that evening.

Persons: who’s, “ I’d, ”, Kate Owen, she’d, optimistically, ’ Organizations: Lesbian Locations: York City, Liberty, Bortolami, TriBeCa

☆ Bidders Chase Elton John Memorabilia and a Banksy in First Week of Sales
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-23 | by ( Julia Halperin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

More than 3,500 people from 34 countries registered for the chance to bid on the superstar Elton John’s rocket-shaped cocktail shakers, ornate jumpsuits, and black-and-white fashion photography at Christie’s “Goodbye Peachtree Road” auction this week. Two sales over three days featuring the celebrated musician’s belongings rocketed to $14.4 million, with auction-house fees, outperforming the high estimate of $11.3 million. Bidders vied for silver leather platform boots the singer wore throughout the 1970s (they sold for $94,000, more than nine times the high estimate) and an 18-karat gold Rolex watch with a leopard-print dial (it fetched $176,400, about three times the high estimate). Most of the remaining auctions will take place online through Feb. 28, including sales of John’s celebrity portraits, jewelry and Versace clothes. With six online sales to go, the collection has already exceeded the original (and perhaps conservative) expectation of $10 million set by Christie’s.

Persons: Elton John’s, rocketed, John, David Locations: Peachtree, Atlanta

☆ 1962 Ferrari Brings $51.7 Million at Sotheby’s
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-13 | by ( Julia Halperin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A bright red Ferrari with a storied history sold for $51.7 million, with buyer’s fees, on Monday, becoming the most expensive automobile from that Italian carmaker ever sold at auction. RM Sotheby’s, the automobile seller in which Sotheby’s bought a controlling stake in 2022, offered the 1962 Ferrari 330 LM/250 GTO by Scaglietti with an unpublished estimate of $60 million. Two bidders drove the price to $47 million before auction-house fees. Sotheby’s promoted the car as a luxury object, offering it in a stand-alone sale during its marquee fall auctions of fine art in New York. There are only 36 Ferrari 250 GTOs in existence, produced between 1962 and 1964.

Persons: Sotheby’s, Oliver Barker —, Europe —, Jonas Wood, Ralph Lauren, Nick Mason, Pink Floyd Organizations: Ferrari Locations: New York, Europe

☆ The Man Behind 250 Masks
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-06 | by ( Julia Halperin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As a child making home videos, Marcel Dzama, 49, asked his father and sister to cover their faces with masks because they couldn’t stop grinning. The collection: Handmade masks, in materials ranging from paper to wood to cloth. I said, ‘A mask.’ It was made out of ceramic and had a happy face on one side and a sad face on the other. I’ve been sending her masks because she likes to paint them.”Most expensive: “Probably these 40 wooden masks from Guadalajara [in Mexico]. José inherited his mask collection, but he couldn’t look at it because he felt too sad.

Persons: Marcel Dzama, “, Lorca, ”, Federico García Lorca, Mamma Andersson, I’ve, José, Salceda Organizations: Performa, Arts Locations: Canadian, Spanish, Hawaii, Winnipeg, Brooklyn, Guadalajara, Mexico

☆ Fiber Art Is Finally Being Taken Seriously
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-11 | by ( Julia Halperin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Made of more than 3,000 “ponytails” of linen thread, as the artist called them, stitched together and piled atop one another, it looked at first glance like something one might encounter in a commercial fabric store. Neither traditional sculpture nor painting, it conjured both, a monumental object made from the humblest materials. The show that featured Hicks’s work, “Wall Hangings,” was a rare American institutional endorsement of artists who make ambitious work out of fiber and broadened the idea of what art could be. But the exhibition received only one major review, in the niche publication Craft Horizons, by the sculptor Louise Bourgeois. If they must be classified, they would fall somewhere between fine and applied art.” They “rarely liberate themselves from decoration,” she concluded, deploying what might be art’s most insulting critical term.

Persons: Sheila Hicks, ”, Louise Bourgeois, Bourgeois, she’d, “ Organizations: Museum of Modern Art Locations: New York, Paris

Nicholas O’Donnell, an art market lawyer in Boston who has been involved with efforts to get the industry to police itself without government regulation, said in the Ahmad case the market could have done a better job of reviewing its clients. When Mr. Ahmad was cited, the government issued a news release and his name and those of companies he was known to trade under were published on the database. The indictment cited relatives and associates of Mr. Ahmad who it said had helped him buy art in violation of sanctions and often dealt directly with the artists or galleries. Mr. Ahmad, who was born into a wealthy family of diamond traders, remains at large outside the United States, the authorities have said. The video shows a man it identifies as Mr. Ahmad firing a shoulder-launched rocket, in what the government presents as evidence of his connections to Hezbollah.

Persons: Nicholas O’Donnell, Ahmad, ”, “ It’s, Mr, Ahmad’s, Hind Ahmad Organizations: U.S . Office, Foreign Assets Control, The State Department Locations: U.S, Europe, Boston, Lebanon, United States

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