In London, Museum visitors are dashing through the Tate Modern, taking in works of art—on their smartphones. During the latest Art Basel art fair in Switzerland, a collector agreed to buy a $250,000 painting—while sitting in a hair salon in Los Angeles, looking at the work on her tablet. These days, anyone with an iPad can create their own Damien Hirst painting, thanks to an app from the Gagosian Gallery, which recently showed the artist's work at its 11 global outposts.
Digital tools are changing the way that art is bought, sold and simply looked at. Collectors who once traveled across the world to art fairs and auctions are buying more works without seeing them in person, relying instead on digital views. Galleries now have the ability to show many more works to interested collectors than they have in their showrooms, simply by swiping through digital inventories. Museums are encouraging visitors to download digital apps to get more information about works on display. Some museum and gallery apps allow visitors to zoom in on a work for a closer look than they would get with the naked eye—a development that will likely be bolstered by Apple's introduction this week of a new iPad with a sharper display screen.
"We're in the midst of a sea change in the way museums relate to their audiences," says Peter Samis, associate curator of interpretive media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "There's this booming demand at the highest level, like trustees are all saying, 'Where's our iPad app?' at every museum, large and small, across America."
Officials at Christie's and Sotheby's say they're seeing more iPads and other devices filling the room during sales. Christie's, which already offers absentee bidding via its website, expects to extend absentee bidding to its iPad app next month, along with new features like access to condition reports on works. Sotheby's just updated its iPad catalog app to allow collectors to take notes in digital catalogs during sales.
Tablets are also increasingly a staple of art fairs. At Art Basel in Switzerland last June, dealer Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read, met with a client interested in a work by Ghada Amer, an Egyptian painter whose labor-intensive pieces are filled with intricate embroidery. The gallery's works were inventoried on the iPad using ArtBinder, an app that is swiftly replacing the use of physical binders at art fairs. The Los Angeles-based collector was ready to buy the work, but he wanted the signoff of his wife, who was more than 5,800 miles away in a hair salon in Los Angeles. Mr. Sheffer emailed a close-up of the work to the wife, an art enthusiast, who agreed to the $250,000 sale. "The whole thing took an hour," Mr. Sheffer says.
Miami Beach collector Dennis Scholl says photography and video art are a natural fit when he's considering buying an artwork based on a digital image; for sculpture, with its scale issues, and drawings, with their subtle gradations of shading, he likes to see the works in person. Mr. Scholl recently pulled the trigger on a work by Tamy Ben-Tor, using his iPad to view the video of the Israeli artist as an old woman in a forest. "The iPad, because of the beauty of the images and the clarity of the reproduction, it makes you braver as a collector," he says.
Digital tools can also help collectors organize large inventories they may have stored in locations around the world. Curator Laura J. Mueller tracks more than 700 Japanese works scattered across two homes and a warehouse for a private New York collector by organizing digital images of the pieces using an iPhone and iPad app, Collectrium.
In May, the next edition of the Gagosian app will feature photographer Taryn Simon. A tap on any of roughly 200 photographs by Ms. Simon will take users deeper into the backstory of images from one of her series. Gagosian isn't currently showing Ms. Simon's pieces in its brick-and-mortar galleries, but the app will expose her work to potential buyers.
2012年3月8日星期四
2011年6月15日星期三
Czech art goes international
The days of Czech modern art being a quiet discovery on the international art market seemed to end quite definitively on June 13 following the auction of the Hascoe Family Collection at Sotheby’s in London. Initial estimates of around £5 million were shattered by overall sales of over £11.1 million. Tessa Kostrzewa, deputy director of European paintings at Sotheby’s in London, spoke to Czech Position about the milestone auction and the particular artists involved.
“The market for Czech art has really appreciated over the last year,” Kostrzewa said, adding that the quality and comprehensiveness of the Hascoe collection played a major role in the auction’s remarkable success. “Collections like this are very rare. You will have collections like this in the Czech Republic, but they are unlikely to come onto the international market.”
Since the auction Kostrzewa says that Sotheby’s has already been approached by owners of Czech art that likely were not previously aware of the value of the works in their possession. She says this is particularly the case for people outside the Czech Republic that might have inherited a painting by Kupka or Filla and have no idea that the nice painting on their wall is actually worth a fortune. “They don’t realize the value of Czech art and that the market has moved on,” she said.
Market movement
Not only was his work the headline sale in the auction, but Kostrzewa says that František Kupka was the key artist in the sale. There was a major price difference between the £1.5 million paid for “Movement” and a wide range of other Kupka works sold — a difference that comes down to the medium the artist worked in.
“From a collector’s point of view you have a vast difference between oil and works on paper,” Kostrzewa said. Then there are differences between varieties of works on paper, a drawing tending to be worth less than a pastel, for example. Then the question of the work’s condition comes into play as well. According to Kostrzewa, collectors of works on paper insist on very good condition.
Another artist whose works sold for considerably higher amounts than the estimates was Emil Filla, though Kostrzewa says this was less of a surprise than the record-high prices achieved in sales of paintings by Josef Čapek, whose works are extremely hard to come by on the international market.
A bright spot was Sotheby’s first time sale of works by František Foltýn, whose two top-selling paintings were estimated at between £120,000 and £180,000. In the end Foltýn’s “Imperialism” sold for £433,250 and his “Portrait of Dostoevsky” sold for £337,250.
Bohumír Matal’s painting “The Lovers” was estimated to sell at between £12,000 and £18,000, but ended up going for over £100,000. According to Kostrzewa there was no question of underestimating the artistic value of the painting, particularly considering the scarcity of his work available to collectors, but the lower estimate was due to the size of the canvas itself.
“As a rule of thumb with a four-meter long painting you are worried about finding a buyer with the necessary space to hang it in their home,” Kostrzewa said.
Another significant feature of the auction was the composition of buyers both in the room and on the phones. While a strong Czech element can be expected when a collection of this caliber like this becomes available Kostrzewa found the widespread international interest a vital signpost to how Czech art is looked at these days.
“There were a lot of Czech-speaking people in the room, but not only. It was truly international, at about 50/50. In a way it’s a landmark sale because it put Czech art in a very international setting” Kostrzewa said.
“The market for Czech art has really appreciated over the last year,” Kostrzewa said, adding that the quality and comprehensiveness of the Hascoe collection played a major role in the auction’s remarkable success. “Collections like this are very rare. You will have collections like this in the Czech Republic, but they are unlikely to come onto the international market.”
Since the auction Kostrzewa says that Sotheby’s has already been approached by owners of Czech art that likely were not previously aware of the value of the works in their possession. She says this is particularly the case for people outside the Czech Republic that might have inherited a painting by Kupka or Filla and have no idea that the nice painting on their wall is actually worth a fortune. “They don’t realize the value of Czech art and that the market has moved on,” she said.
Market movement
Not only was his work the headline sale in the auction, but Kostrzewa says that František Kupka was the key artist in the sale. There was a major price difference between the £1.5 million paid for “Movement” and a wide range of other Kupka works sold — a difference that comes down to the medium the artist worked in.
“From a collector’s point of view you have a vast difference between oil and works on paper,” Kostrzewa said. Then there are differences between varieties of works on paper, a drawing tending to be worth less than a pastel, for example. Then the question of the work’s condition comes into play as well. According to Kostrzewa, collectors of works on paper insist on very good condition.
Another artist whose works sold for considerably higher amounts than the estimates was Emil Filla, though Kostrzewa says this was less of a surprise than the record-high prices achieved in sales of paintings by Josef Čapek, whose works are extremely hard to come by on the international market.
A bright spot was Sotheby’s first time sale of works by František Foltýn, whose two top-selling paintings were estimated at between £120,000 and £180,000. In the end Foltýn’s “Imperialism” sold for £433,250 and his “Portrait of Dostoevsky” sold for £337,250.
Bohumír Matal’s painting “The Lovers” was estimated to sell at between £12,000 and £18,000, but ended up going for over £100,000. According to Kostrzewa there was no question of underestimating the artistic value of the painting, particularly considering the scarcity of his work available to collectors, but the lower estimate was due to the size of the canvas itself.
“As a rule of thumb with a four-meter long painting you are worried about finding a buyer with the necessary space to hang it in their home,” Kostrzewa said.
Another significant feature of the auction was the composition of buyers both in the room and on the phones. While a strong Czech element can be expected when a collection of this caliber like this becomes available Kostrzewa found the widespread international interest a vital signpost to how Czech art is looked at these days.
“There were a lot of Czech-speaking people in the room, but not only. It was truly international, at about 50/50. In a way it’s a landmark sale because it put Czech art in a very international setting” Kostrzewa said.
2011年5月18日星期三
Local artist exhibiting thesis work
Local Townsend artist and resident Betsy Popp recently obtained her master's degree in fine art, painting. Popp's formal dissertation presentation concentrated on the personal development of her landscape paintings in oil. This body of work created for her thesis presentation will be exhibited at the Nicolet College campus in the Nicolet Art Gallery, on the first floor of the Learning Resource Center, Rhinelander.
The main exhibit will showcase about 30 landscape paintings with the addition of about 20 wood sculptures, also created by Popp, which compliment her paintings. In addition, the remainder of the gallery space will be filled with photographs from Central Wisconsin photographer and friend Rick Eyre.
The exhibit, "Nature, Travel and Adventure — Through the Eyes of Artist Betsy Popp and Photographer Rick Eyre," will run May 20-June 10. The opening reception will be at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 28. Summer gallery hours are 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday.
The main exhibit will showcase about 30 landscape paintings with the addition of about 20 wood sculptures, also created by Popp, which compliment her paintings. In addition, the remainder of the gallery space will be filled with photographs from Central Wisconsin photographer and friend Rick Eyre.
The exhibit, "Nature, Travel and Adventure — Through the Eyes of Artist Betsy Popp and Photographer Rick Eyre," will run May 20-June 10. The opening reception will be at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 28. Summer gallery hours are 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday.
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