appresearch 's List: Art Fairs and Biennials

• The Moscow PG group's graphic collages won a prize for the media project - an art manifestation of the Russian fears of a Chinese invasion, complete with ironic use of offensive stereotypes and socialite rape. "The future belongs to people in masks," the masked PG stated as they received their award. "Your fat-cat lifestyle will soon end and then you'll all be hung up high. We're not joking."
• Having just cashed out for performances by art world superstars Marina Abramovic and the Gao Brothers, boasted about the consistently record sale value of Kandinsky paintings on the official site, and with audience full of noeveau-riche patrons, the organized may have gulped at this.

• Claudia Djanbbari, was molding self-hardening clay into a coffee-table-size version of a South Korean artist’s version of a Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” sculpture. “I’m making a copy of a copy,” Ms. Djanbbari said.
• The buyer, Mimi Brown, a collector who is based in Hong Kong, happily paid $243 for the miniature third-generation knockoff. The second generation, a commentary on the Koons work by the Korean artist Gimhongsok, was fashioned out of trash bags and cast in resin. It is prominently displayed at the Kukje Gallery stand, priced at $50,000. One of Mr. Koons’s original “Balloon Dog” sculptures sold for around $20 million two years ago.
• Syjuco’s project, “Copystand: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone,” which includes duplicates of paintings by Philip Guston and A. R. Penck, speaks volumes about Frieze — the most prestigious fair of contemporary art in a city known for contemporary art — and the state of the current art market. There is a hunger to buy, but at the right price.
• “Business is O.K., a lot better than last year,” the New York dealer Gavin Brown said a few hours after the fair had begun.
• A year ago Frieze opened on the heels of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the meltdown of the financial markets. While the world has changed since then, and sales were being made this week, the pace isn’t what it once was. Some dealers acknowledged that prices were about 30 percent lower than they had been in more flush times. And haggling seems de rigueur.
• “It’s no longer about making sales in the first two hours,” said Allan Schwartzman, a New York art adviser.
• in its seventh year, the Frieze Art Fair has become an annual see-and-be-seen event. When it ends on Sunday, organizers estimate that about 60,000 people will have passed through the white temporary tent in Regent’s Park, where the fair is held.
• 28 dealers dropped out of this year’s fair
• Matthew Slotover, one of the directors, said he had no trouble replacing them. “In fact, it’s larger this year,” he said, noting that 164 exhibitors are included, compared with 151 in the previous year.
• Gwyneth Paltrow
• Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich
• Valentino
• Nicholas Serota from the Tate
• Richard Armstrong from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
• there were not as many American collectors as there have been in years past,
• Donald and Mera Rubell from Miami
• Stefan Edlis from Chicago
• Mimi Haas from San Francisco
• David Ganek and Jane Holzer from New York
• Peter Brant from Greenwich, Conn
• Dealers are playing it safe with tried-and-true artists
• many are capitalizing on current museum exhibitions
• The main fair is not a place for discoveries.
• One of the most dramatic of his works is “Beethoven’s Trumpet (With Ear) Opus #133,” from 2007, prominently displayed at Sprüth Magers, a Berlin gallery. At the booth a bronze-plated trumpet protrudes from a six-foot-tall ear. Visitors who put their own ear up to the trumpet can hear Beethoven softly playing.
• Barbara Gladstone Gallery features a red, round sculpture by Anish Kapoor, who has an exhibition at the Royal Academy here and another opening on Wednesday at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
• Near it is a suite of 10 blue pastel drawings by Jim Hodges, the American artist who now has a show at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
• Stephen Friedman, a London dealer, has devoted his entire booth to a single installation by Mr. Hodges. Called “The Dark Gate,” it is an all-black wood room with an aperture made of large, sharpened steel spikes scented with perfume made by the artist.
• Eva Presenhuber, a dealer from Zurich, has created an elegant setting by showing just two artists. In the center is a 19-foot-tall white tree of cast aluminum by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone; behind it hangs a colorful triptych by the Swiss artist Dieter Roth.
• At Lehmann Maupin, the New York gallery, visitors can fill out questionnaires from the British artist Tracey Emin asking, for example, “Do you believe in God?” and “Is there any color that makes you violently sick?” From the answers, Ms. Emin will create a drawing and a neon piece. The first of her custom-made pieces was sold to Amy Phelan, a Guggenheim trustee and former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader; four other buyers followed.
• “Last year we were in denial, between the canceled sales and no sales at all,” David Maupin said. “This year people we know are back, and they are feeling better about the economy.”
• Frame, a new section of 29 galleries from around the world that have been in existence for less than six years.
• Each of these galleries has a small booth (far less roomy but cheaper than booths in the main fair) that is showing only one artist.
• Project 88, a two-year-old gallery from Mumbai, for example, has filled its space with cartoonlike drawings by Sarnath Banerjee, an artist in New Delhi.
• AMP, a year-old gallery from Athens, displaying an installation by Joep van Liefland, a Dutch artist who lives in Berlin.
• Lisa Cooley, which came with an elegant group of minimalist black-and-white photographs by Erin Shirreff, a New York artist, that resemble blown-up images of knives.
• “I’ve always liked Frieze,” said Ms. Cooley, who has been running her gallery on Orchard Street for just two years. “Until now I always thought it would be the last fair I could afford to do.”

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• Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Financier J. Ezra Merkin’s $310 million collection of Mark Rothko paintings, sold earlier this year to a mystery buyer, will be exhibited at Moscow’s new Garage Center for Contemporary Culture next spring.

• Demand for contemporary art has fallen over the last year. Volumes of auction sales shrank between 70 percent and 80 percent, and prices of some artists more than halved, said the London-based research company ArtTactic in an e-mail last month.
• Twenty-eight galleries that showed at the 2008 event have not come back.
• Hodges, 52, currently has an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Within a few hours of the opening, the work attracted “serious interest” from a museum, said Friedman.
• Chicago-based Stefan Edlis, Italian Jean Pigozzi and London-based David Roberts were also among collectors spotted during the early hours of the fair. Fashion designers Alexander McQueen and Valentino Garavani were also seen browsing.
• New York- based dealer Marianne Boesky. “Now the feeling is positive. It’s real. There’s no hype or depression. We’re now selling to people who just love art.”
• Boesky sold 13 of a new series of 15 watercolors by U.S. artist Barnaby Furnas, showing the capture and execution of the Civil War abolitionist, John Brown. The watercolors, painted specially for Frieze by Furnas, 38, sold for prices between $25,000 and $30,000.
• “We’ve kept the prices the same for Furnas over the last year,” said Boesky, “though we are offering buyers a 10 percent discount at Frieze.”
• “It’s all about decency of transaction,” said Nicholas Logsdail, director of the London-based Lisson Gallery, which attracted three reserves on a new 4-foot-diameter Anish Kapoor gold mirror sculpture, “Turning the World Upside Down,” priced at 475,000 pounds ($759,000).
• Kapoor, who has a one-man show at the Royal Academy of Arts, is one of the few contemporary artists whose gallery prices have increased over the last year, said Logsdail.

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• It’s a humid night in Shanghai, and I’m sitting in a private club with my host, Colin Chinnery, the new director of the ShContemporary art fair, Sept. 10-13, 2009, which brings 75 dealers from a dozen countries to the neo-classical Shanghai Exhibition Center. Chinnery is happily serving as translator in a conversation between Serpentine Gallery director Hans Ulrich Obrist and the Chinese conceptual artist Xu Zhen. Like many in China, Chinnery wears multiple hats. He’s also an artist who has just opened an installation at Pekin Fine Arts, a Beijing gallery that has a booth at ShContemporary.
• Obrist is in town to deliver a talk titled "What is Contemporary Art?", the high point of the VIP lecture series that was organized by e-Flux founder Anton Vidokle. Obrist is also launching his new book, The China Interviews, conversations with 26 Chinese contemporary artists, including Xu Zhen. Xu has been so busy this year that his comments are already out of date.
• "Are you Xu Zhen or are you MadeIn?" Obrist is asking, referring to Xu Zhen’s newly formed corporation that now is listed as the creator of his works. Without ever answering the curator’s question, Xu Zhen replies that with his new company, he is able to get much more done. And indeed, Xu Zhen seems uncommonly busy. His Chinese gallery, Shanghart, is presenting a show produced by MadeIn that "reflects a Chinese point of view about the Middle East," and his New York gallery, James Cohan, is currently exhibiting "Lonely Miracle: Middle East Contemporary Art," a faux group show of works by fictional Middle Eastern artists that is actually produced by MadeIn.
• MadeIn also has a large-scale installation of five flamboyantly costumed mannequins prancing on top of a grassy hill at the center of the "Discoveries" section of ShContemporary, and is one of the key organizers of "Bourgeiosified Proletariat," an expansive exhibition of new works by over 70 local artists, taking place in three buildings in an empty design complex one hour from Shanghai. Additionally, Xu Zhen’s video from 1998, titled Rainbow and showing the artist’s back turning red as it is slapped by an invisible whip, is featured in "History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009," curated by Biljana Ciric, another excellent show in a vacant real estate development here in Shanghai.
• It is typical of China that the best shows I’ve seen this week have not taken place in museums, but in the hallways of the fair, at real estate developments and at a tourist site. At ShContemporary, Chinnery is determined to set an example and make "Discoveries" a strong conceptual art show, able to attract top international galleries in a year when few opted to take booths in the exhibitors’ hall. He recruited three curators -- Vidokle, the Mori Art Museum’s Mami Kataoka and Beijing multimedia artist Wang Jianwei -- to assemble the "Discoveries" section, which included works by Joseph Kosuth and Marina Abramovic, Martha Rosler, Japanese artists Shinjin Omaki and Ayiko Mianagi, Anri Sala and Fiona Tan, among others. Many of these artists had not previously shown their work in China.
• Coinciding with the fair was the Shanghai eArts festival, an annual event now in its third year and sponsored by the Shanghai municipality, gearing up for a major blow-out next year during the World Expo. This year, eArts Beyond, China’s first retrospective of new media art -- Nam June Paik through Jennifer and Kevin McCoy -- was installed in two floors of the sci-fi-worthy Oriental Pearl TV Tower, the iconic pink skyscraper over in Pudong, curated by part-time New Yorker Zheng Ga. These efforts were a great leap forward for China, where museum shows at the Shanghai Art Museum and the Zendai Museum of Modern Art were disappointing as usual.
• "We need to prove ourselves," said Chinnery, who had been chief curator of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. ShContemporary, produced by the Italian company Bolognafiere SpA, was originally founded by former Art Basel director Lorenzo Rudolf and Swiss art dealer Pierre Huber. After the first year, Huber left in a cloud of controversy, and Rudolf, who was a better manager but failed to attract European collectors, resigned in 2008.
• global players like PaceWildenstein, Max Protetch and Jack Tilton, who participated last year,
• number of participating galleries from 150 to 75
• focus in earnest on attracting Asian buyers.
• "Dealers did not have confidence in us and had skepticism about the Chinese art market, but it is my job to prove them wrong," said Chinnery, evidently sure of his accomplishment.
• "Last year was a complete disaster, poorly organized, so we decided we would not do it again," said Saskia Draxler of Galerie Christian Nagel, who came in 2009 because she, like other dealers in "Discoveries," was offered a small stipend to bring works by Martha Rosler to the fair.
• She stood beside one of Rosler’s most famous images, the 1966 Cargo Cult, which shows photos of high-fashion models collaged onto shipping containers, now reprinted as wallpaper and priced at $49,000. The gallery had originally intended to show the artist’s more recent series on the war in Iraq, but this plan was nixed by censors due to its Middle Eastern imagery, which could be interpreted as commentary on the unrest by the Uyghurs in western China this spring. All the same, Rosler’s "Body Beautiful" series, on offer for $15,000-25,000 and featuring pictures of naked women cropped from advertisements, attracted plenty of attention in this country where nudity can still cause a certain amount of trouble.
• Tamas Banovich of New York’s Postmasters Gallery ran into problems with Eva and Franco Mattes’ video projection, Synthetic Performance in Second Life, in which digital avatars reenacted Marina Abramovic’s 1977 Imponderablilia, also on view across the hall. Censors didn’t mind the nudity in the Abramovic performance but complained that the female avatar’s breasts in the digital reenactment were too big and Banovich had to replace video with another Second Life performance of Gilbert and George’s Singing Sculpture.
• Ota Fine Arts from Tokyo sold over $800,000 worth of works by Yayoi Kusama, ranging in price from $200,000 for a pumpkin sculpture to $450,000 for a large painting. "Kusama is well known in China, but mainly through her prints," said dealer Yoriko Tsuroto. "So we decided to bring strong masterpieces to a Chinese audience." Her clients were local Shanghainese as well as collectors from the Philippines. Given that China imposes a 34 percent luxury tax on the sale of art and that Tsuroto did not reduce prices for the fair, these collectors paid well above the market price for these works.
• Long March Space from Beijing, which started off as a nonprofit venture but has since evolved into one of the more powerful galleries in China, boasted sales from the moment the fair opened. "We sold a small sculpture by Zhan Wang for $60,000 in the first five minutes," reported gallery deputy director David Tung, who also sold three acrylic wall pieces by a young woman artist named Yu Hong, priced around $30,000. Larger works were on offer too, including a full-scale scholar’s rock fabricated in stainless steel by Zhan Wang for $250,000 and a mural-sized painting of coal miners by Yang Shaobin for $350,000. "No one is buying in that range right now," Tung said.
• The Beijing branch of San Gimignano’s Galleria Continua is one of the stronger galleries in China, bravely introducing a program of Western art to a Chinese audience. Its booth featured a new series of carbon drawings by Antony Gormley, priced at $15,000 each, as well as two large sculptures with video monitors playing views of clouds by conceptual artist Gu Dexin, priced at $60,000. "We didn’t think that Gormley would be the taste of Asian buyers," said Beijing gallery director Federica Beltrame, "but we did well with drawings by Hans Op de Beeck this year and discovered that Chinese collectors like drawings."
• Arthur Solway at the Shanghai branch of James Cohan Gallery was doing well with a series of tapestries by Western contemporary artists, initially commissioned by the British organization Banners of Persuasion. Priced from $50,000 to $100,000, banners by Fred Tomaselli and Kara Walker had sold. "China has a long tradition of paintings on fabric, so these tapestries are a good way to introduce western big names here," said gallery director Leo Xu.
• Yang Zhenzhong, decided to take the issue of plagiarism head-on at the booth of Shanghai’s Shopping Gallery, where images by Matthew Barney, Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano and Jeff Wall, found on the internet, were reproduced as full-scale works. "Because in China you find a lot of fake products, this is very Chinese in its way and also very ironic because it is so commercial," said a young Italian woman, who was standing in as manager for the gallery, which is basically a collective of young Shanghainese artists.
• The suite of fakes even included a famous Chinese work, To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, a photograph documenting a 1995 performance in which several naked bodies pile one on top of the other to incrementally raise the height of the titular hill. The work is highly controversial in China, because several artists claim authorship, though it is best known and sells for the most when credited to PaceWildenstein artist Zhang Huan. The reproductions in this booth, obviously not originals and with pixels and errors in plain view, were offered for $1,000 to $5,000.
• Platform China, which specializes in more experimental projects by emerging artists, devoted its booth to a single artist, Jia Aili. In one series of exquisitely done black-and-white paintings, the artist has added Mickey Mouse ears to images from 1950s East European documentary photographs; gallery founder Natalie Sun had sold three for $36,000 each. "Capitalism is reclaiming socialist society," she said with a smile, evidently aware of the parallel to holding an art fair in once-Communist China. "All our American collectors stopped buying this year, but it seems that interest from the Chinese and Southeast Asian buyers is quite good."
• Michael Schultz, was also getting strong results for some new Chinese artists, selling a landscape by Huang Min to a local real estate company for $84,000, two paintings from the "Peerless Beauty" series by Zou Cao for $35,000 each and a porcelain computer by Ma Jun for $21,000. "Last year, the fair had more international galleries, very high quality but not good for the Chinese domestic market," said Schulz. "Now the fair concentrates on the young Chinese market with lots of Chinese galleries and adjusted price levels and this is good for the domestic market in China."
• Schulz and other dealers were happy that fair organizers had made a concerted effort to bring in art buyers with its bureaucratically named "Collectors Development Program," flying in nearly 300 guests and putting them up in the nearby Swissotel. Organizers managed to lure a few European and American collectors to the fair, including Cees Hendrikse from the Netherlands, who has a large collection of Chinese contemporary art, and Dr. Howard Osofsky, a board member of the New Orleans Museum of Art.
• ShContemporary’s true success was with Asian buyers, many of whom have only just begun to patronize private art galleries. At the gala dinner held for these VIPs, I had the chance to meet Hong Kong attorney Hallam Chow, a partner at White & Chase who has been funding experimental and new media projects in mainland China, Takeo Obayashi, former chairman and CEO of one of Japan’s largest global contractor corporations, and Tseng Wen-Chuan, aka Rudy Tseng, former managing director of the Walt Disney Company in Taiwan. These Asian collectors are the new players in the Asian art market and their names are well known in the East, Asia’s counterparts to Don and Mera Rubell, Aby Rosen and Eli Broad.
• "This was our first participation in ShContemporary and we are very pleased," said Meg Maggio, director of Pekin Fine Arts in Beijing. "Much more attention to collector needs and interests went into this year's fair and the result is -- from what I've heard from fellow dealers -- more sales than last year's fair." She had brought to ShContemporary works by Choi Jeong Hwa, the star of Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recent show of contemporary Korean art, "Your Bright Future."
• Arthur Solway, who opened a show of works by American artists Trenton Doyle Hancock, Erick Swenson, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor at James Cohan Shanghai during the fair, was even more positive about the market for western contemporary art in China. "I think things are getting better and better for the gallery and I can definitely say that there are Shanghai collectors, and other Asian collectors, for western work," he said.
• The fair was just as interesting for the presence of those who were not participating as those with art on sale. I ran into Leng Lin, president of Pace Beijing, who is about to open a solo show of new works by Zhang Xiaogang, best known in the west for his "Bloodlines" series. According to Leng, the artist has expanded into painting on steel plates as well as making small sculptures, which will be priced around $200,000, substantially less than the $450,000 to $1 million for the canvases recently shown in New York.
• Yin Xiuzhen with her upcoming show at the Museum of Modern Art, scheduled to open in February. Yin is the wife of artist Song Dong, who recently placed his massive installation of material collected by his late mother, Want Not, in the MoMA atrium. "The number of local buyers is still very small, but even with the economic crisis, they have remained active so the market is not bad here," he explained.
• Eric Chang, the director of Asian contemporary art at Christie’s Hong Kong, was also on hand and spoke positively about the art business’ economic prospects. "The young generation of buyers now coming into the market are very smart and have a new perspective on value," he said. "We have a very strong confident feeling about China and the upcoming sales."
• Magnus Renfrew, director of Art HK, the Hong Kong art fair which has had much greater success attracting top galleries like Gagosian and Lisson. Hong Kong is a duty-free zone with a state-of-the art convention center, making it much more suitable for international galleries. Renfrew boasted about the number of galleries that have contacted him about participating in the fair, ShContemporary’s main competitor, next May.
• BARBARA POLLACK is author of The Wild, WIld East:  An American Art Critic's Adventures in China (Timezone 8 Books).

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