Essay: City Center
Courtesy Christie's
The glittering possibilities—and the sharp edges—of globalization are visible in Farhad Moshiri’s crystal-studded "One World/Yek Donia" (2007) which sold for $601,000 at Christie’s Dubai in 2007.
By Sarah Douglas
Published: December 1, 2008
power profiles
hot spots
Usually when New York’s superlative position is questioned, it’s London that is seen as toppling it. The English capital, with its cutting-edge artists and galleries growing out of the YBA ‘90s, its hipper-than-thou Frieze Art Fair, its sturdy auction houses, its powerful collectors and—oh, right!—a currency that has made the dollar look like Monopoly money, has a lot going for it. That’s certainly the take of Olivier Belot, the director of the Paris and New York gallery Yvon Lambert, which in October opened a London space. “We think it may take New York’s place,” he says. “You have Indian collectors and Russians. You have the Tate growing in importance as a museum. Why open in London? Because there are people who buy only there.” While acknowledging that there is no place like New York for showing off an artist’s work to the world’s important curators and collectors, Belot is a little worried about how Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars in the current downturn. “You have a lot of hedge funds and people investing in art for the wrong reasons,” he says. “When the economy slows, these people could vanish. In Europe people tend to continue to buy.” London is not alone in asserting a new supremacy. Russia is becoming a contender, at least in terms of collector clout. And Asia, too, is challenging for the lead. New fairs popped up this year in Singapore and in Hong Kong, where the megadealer Larry Gagosian is looking for space, while other New York galleries have opened branches on the mainland—PaceWildenstein in Beijing and James Cohan in Shanghai. This October, meanwhile, Sotheby’s staged its first Asian contemporary-art sale in Hong Kong since deciding to move the auctions there from New York. Unfortunately, the worldwide financial crisis put a bit of a damper on the inaugural party. Despite this global insurgence, however, players wanting a piece of the action must have at least a foothold, and usually a headquarters, in the Big Apple. Gagosian may have gone global—one of his directors recently told a reporter that more than half his business is with collectors from Russia and other former Soviet republics. But although the dealer temporarily shows his wares in a former chocolate factory near the Kremlin, he is still identified with New York. If the city feels less zeitgeisty these days, some critics like to point a finger at the Chelsea art district, with its glut of galleries and its somewhat monotonous architecture, arguing that places like Los Angeles and Berlin boast edgier scenes where artists can still find cheap studio space. Yet neither of those places has a fully formed market—perhaps to the benefit of their scruffy charm. “Berlin doesn’t want to get sullied by that stuff,” PaceWildenstein’s Marc Glimcher says sardonically. “Which is great—it’s why we all love Berlin.” And New York has a way of renewing itself; witness the Lower East Side, with the new New Museum anchoring the reemergence of a vigorous downtown. In any event, the big money and the big sales volume are still in Manhattan. Consider the Francis Bacon painting that went for $86.2 million last spring at Sotheby’s New York, albeit to a Russian, Roman Abramovich. Or consider the vast Chelsea outpost of the Beijing- and Seoul-based Arario Gallery and the new midtown branch of the London gallery Haunch of Venison, which opened in September around the corner from its owner, Christie’s. Finally, consider the fact that Hauser & Wirth, with locations in London and Zurich, is scouting for space in Manhattan and that Michael Hue Williams’s Albion gallery, a London mainstay, launched a space in SoHo that is headed up by the former Whitney Museum director David Ross.
All that motion is simply evidence of an undeniable truth: The world
has become interconnected. In October, U.S. financial woes rippled
around the globe. A decentered art market is just part of the new
equation. “It’s not that New York is less of a center,” says Ross.
“It’s just that a center is a 20th-century idea, an antiquated idea.”
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