COLOGNE—Cologne’s art elite has been playing musical chairs—or is that musical fairs?—lately. Gérard Goodrow, 43, who served as the director of Art Cologne for nearly five years, departed recently in the wake of complaints from a group of prominent German dealers that the event was losing ground to competitors like Frieze and Art Basel. Taking over is the 39-year-old Los Angeles dealer Daniel Hug, a grandson of the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Hug has exhibited at Art Cologne and has numerous personal connections to Germany: His mother was born in Berlin, and he has relatives all over. He’s keeping his L.A. gallery but handing over day-to-day operations there to his new partners, Joel Mesler, of New York’s Rental Gallery, and Natalia Tkachev, of Vancouver’s Blanket Gallery.

As for Goodrow, he’s going back to the auction world, where he was head of the contemporary-art department at Christie’s London from 1996 to 2003. Phillips de Pury & Co. recently opened a Cologne office and named him director of business development, a job he started on April 18, during Art Cologne. Lacking a salesroom, the new Phillips outpost will host previews of material from New York sales, as well as shows and events.Goodrow’s primary duty is researching new business ideas, such as adding more international offices and forging partnerships with publishers and collectors, plus getting consignments from top clients. “There may be a lot happening in Berlin,” he says, “but the Rhine is where the money, the collectors and the galleries are.” And, adds the American-born Goodrow, “I’m stuck on Cologne."

"Right as Rhine" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.