The Week That Was (Feb. 1 – 8, 2008)

NEW YORK—How many metaphors for a nervous market? In the lead-up to last week’s London auctions the art world was... what? A patient facing test results with a mixture of dread and resignation? One of Poe’s Red Death revelers, who are so caught up in the party they’re oblivious to the plague that’s already crept in the door? That doomed fellow in Mann, watching the beautiful boy Tadeusz swan around on the Lido beach while disease nibbles away at his innards? Or more like Venice itself, where despite the lovely views something doesn’t smell right?  

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. And yet... no ominous bells tolled very loudly, unless you count the buy ins at Christie’s contemporary sale in London. The week's three major evening sales earned an overall total of some $581 million! Last week at least, the money still flowed. Even if some of it went in funny directions.

A California man made $300,000 selling fake Damien Hirst artworks on eBay. Hirst will sell a £250,000 charm bracelet, and other items, at his new store in London. Hirst’s work will feature in Sotheby’s Red (Bono’s charity) auction next week, along with work by, among others, street artist Banksy. Banksy’s portrait of supermodel Kate Moss sold for £96,000 at Bonham’s auction house in London. The portrait is modeled on the famous image of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol. A Warhol "Dollar Sign" portrait is the subject of a lawsuit filed by New York’s Martin Lawrence Gallery, from which the work was stolen ten years ago. It recently turned up at Christie’s and the gallery wants it back. A Warhol “Camouflage” silkscreen painting valued at $2.4 million will travel to Moscow for a preview before coming up for sale at Phillips de Pury & Co.

The Pulse contemporary art fair may get money back on fees extorted by the former superintendent of the armory building where the fair was held last year. With Russia’s introduction of a new database, it may become easier to reclaim some 46,000 artworks missing after Nazi looting. Lawyers suggested a process for getting artworks back from the bankrupt Salander O’Reilly Galleries.

Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of Work Architecture will build an urban farm on the patio outside Long Island City, New York's P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. Developers plan to build a 14-story luxury apartment building next to Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park. “When I look at the design and size of that building, to my mind it's going to dominate the skyline in this whole area and encroach on the park considerably," a Seattle resident told the Seattle Times. An interpretive center is planned next to Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial. “If a planned visitor center is built, it will diminish the evocative power of Maya Lin's great 1982 work—by trying to explain it,” writes Bloomberg critic James Russell. The White House proposed an increase of $34 million for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2009 budget. Miami arts institutions got $20 million in donations. Military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost $170 billion in the next fiscal year. Tim Hetherington’s photograph of an exhausted American soldier resting in his bunker in Afghanistan last September won the World Press Photo of the year award. The Vancouver Art Gallery acquired Jeff Wall’s photograph War Game (2007), in which boys play with toy guns.

A large painting of writhing figures on a beach by Francis Bacon sold for $51.5 million at the aforementioned Christie’s contemporary sale in London. The figures evoke his former lover George Dyer, who committed suicide. “Perhaps British culture, which tends to be factual and literary, was out of tune with the abstracting, intellectualizing tendency of high modernism,” wrote critic Martin Gayford of the high price. “Now that the tide of modernism is receding into history, the local preoccupation with the life and death of real people suddenly seems more mainstream.”