Is anybody buying art these days?
This Sunday's New York Times Magazine includes an interesting profile of the Mugrabi family, New York art dealers whose collection of Warhol, Hirst, Basquiat and other modern artists, is one of the largest and most valuable in the world. The Mugrabis' collection of Warhols (around 800 pieces last year, according to the Wall Street Journal) essentially singlehandedly controls the price of the remaining Warhols on the market. According to that WSJ article, "Most people don't realize that Warhol is the Dow Industrial Average" for the art world, said Richard Polsky, a longtime private dealer in Sausalito.
The article looks at the economic climate through the Mugrabis' eyes—they attended a record-shattering Sotheby's auction on the same day Lehman Bothers declared bankruptcy. I encourage you to read the whole article, but here are a few teasers of the things I found most interesting (emphasis mine, of course):Jose [Mugrabi, the patriarch] had been talking about the incongruity between the day’s financial news and the auction frenzy, and ventured an interpretation: “When the empires fall — Roman, Greek — all that is left is the art.”
“You can’t have an impact buying one or two pictures per artist. We’re not buying art like Ron Lauder — just to put it on a wall. We want inventory.” [Older son Alberto] equated inventory with liquidity: “It gives you staying power.” In the commodities sector, the analogue would be making a run on a precious metal — in order to manipulate the price.
Last year, when Jose learned that a sculpture by the Cuban duo Los Carpinteros he’d just donated to the Guggenheim was requisitioned to storage, he bought it back. “From now on, if I make a gift, I tell them, ‘You have to expose the art,’ ” he said.The sheer volume of the family’s collection strikes some people as something that is in opposition to the public good. “It’s not that they don’t love art,” Charlie Finch, a columnist for Artnet.com, said. “They’ve just been hogging everything. Come on, let someone else in on the game.”
[Artist George Condo] considered [the Mugrabis' interest in his works] a pretty big stamp of commercial approval: “They’re prestigious collectors. To see your own paintings in one of their apartments, hanging next to a beautiful Basquiat — it feels great.”
“They said it was Black Monday — well, not for Damien,” Tony Shafrazi, a gallerist from New York, said. “It was magic, it was. It was rainbows. This proves that art is more important than money.”
“Damien Hirst should be running Lehman Brothers,” Alberto said.
Related note: The De Young in San Francisco just opened Warhol Live, an exhibit that showcases Warhol's relationship with music. I haven't checked it out yet but have heard that it's enjoyable.
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