[artspace][logo][artspace][news] Spring 2021

Intelligence
Report
Is Robert Nava the Cyborg Art Dealers Inside the Forgery
Best Worst Painter in Are Coming for Scandal That Rocked the
the Art World? Your Collectors Old Masters Market

Superblue
Wants to Blow
Your Mind.
Table of Contents

4 Marketplace
5 Why the art market wasn’t derailed by the pandemic
7 What top collector Karen Levy buys (and why)
12 The top 10 lots of 2020 in every major category

25 Experience Art, Inc. How moving to a post-thing economy could

By Tim Schneider save the art market from obsolescence.

42 Rise of the Cyborg Art Dealers All it took for the art industry to finally embrace
By Eileen Kinsella digital was a global pandemic. What does the
 hybrid IRL-online art market of the post-COVID
era look like?

48 Bad to the Bone Why do Robert Nava’s paintings feel so good to

By Nate Freeman a certain class of moneyed collectors when they
look so… bad?

59 Is This the Crime of the Century? A cache of purported forgeries may have
By Simon Hewitt scammed everyone from top dealers to the
 prince of Liechtenstein. Now, the alleged
mastermind of the fraud is speaking out.

89 Data Dive
By Julia Halperin
90 Which country’s art market thrived during COVID?
92 How much did online sales actually grow?
99 Who are today’s most bankable artists?

105 Methodology
106 Masthead
107 Credits

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Editors’ Letter

In these pages, you’ll find

plenty of signs of an industry
preparing for life after what
has felt like a March 2020 that
went on forever.
Back in December, when we first started thinking about what to focus on
for this issue of the Intelligence Report, a cover story about a new business
dedicated to producing experiential, immersive art for mass consumption
seemed like science fiction (or, at the very least, historical fiction).
But by the time the issue kicked into gear and the snow on the streets
of New York began to melt in late February, the end of the lockdown
seemed like an eventuality, and life afterward something we could credibly
fantasize about, if not yet practically prepare for.
Superblue, the company formed last year by Pace CEO Marc
Glimcher with backing from Laurene Powell Jobs, has been preparing for Andrew Goldstein
this future since social-distancing measures first went into effect a year Editor-in-Chief, Artnet News
@andrwgoldstein
ago. Next month, the company plans to open its 50,000-square-foot Miami
funhouse complex to a much smaller audience than it originally antici-
pated. But Superblue’s borderline-messianic belief in both the artistic and
financial potential of ticketed art experiences has attracted new investors
even during lockdown, fueling a planned expansion into two more cities.
In these pages, you’ll find plenty of signs of an industry preparing
for life after what has felt like a March 2020 that went on forever. Eileen
Kinsella examines which of the digital innovations developed to help
businesses remain afloat during the pandemic are here to stay—and what
areas remain ripe for innovation in a hybrid digital-IRL future.
Our data-led breakdown of the market also reveals which segments
have recovered most quickly (see: China) and which are lagging behind Julia Halperin
(see: art worth over $10 million). Executive Editor, Artnet News
@juliahalperin
Meanwhile, Nate Freeman delves into the artistic enigma that is
Robert Nava, the art market’s new so-bad-it’s-good obsession and critics’
latest object of disdain. Admirers of Nava, whose prices have spiked from
$25,000 to $150,000 in just two years, maintain that his work has to be
experienced in person to be properly appreciated. (We’ll see.)
Finally, we will take you inside the gripping, twist-filled Ruffini affair,
a forgery scandal that has rocked the Old Master sector and showed
just how slippery multimillion-dollar questions of attribution can be. As
it turns out, the man accused of masterminding the scam may be its
biggest victim.
There’s a lot going on in the art market right now. Imagine what will
happen when we can see one another again.

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 3
Marketplace

The biggest takeaways

from the market’s
performance last year—
and insider tips on how
to get ahead in 2021.
Alberto Giacometti, Femme Leoni (1958)

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Marketplace

By the Numbers
When the pandemic struck, many
feared the art market would be
decimated. It wasn’t.
Total Sales (in billions USD) Monthly Fine-Art Auction Sales in 2020

2.5

1.5

0.5

0 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

If fine-art auction sales tumbled almost 25 per- “The biggest surprise was how negative the
cent in any normal year, it would be considered reaction was toward online fairs, but people
a cataclysm for the art market. But 2020 was were happy to watch specialists standing be-
not normal. hind banks of telephones, wearing jewelry and
“I thought it was going to be like 2008 all bidding against each other,” quipped one dealer.
over again, but it hasn’t been,” said Christopher In a testament to the strength of demand,
Gaillard, of the art advisory Gurr Johns. It turns sell-through rates reached near-decade highs
out that even when the traveling art-fair circus in every major collecting category. (Our num-
takes down its tent and private jets are ground- bers do not include private sales, which the
ed, people with means still want to buy art. Big Three houses reported were up around 50
It doesn’t hurt (the art market) that the pan- percent year over year.)
demic-induced economic crisis hit the popula- Nevertheless, many consignors who had
tion far less uniformly than 2008’s financial one, flexibility—like the divorcing couple Harry and
when fine-art auction sales plummeted over Linda Macklowe, whose collection is expected
40 percent. While experts predict it will take to fetch as much as $700 million—chose to hold
until at least 2023 for the economy to recover, off until the world stabilizes, restricting the sup-
American billionaires have seen their collective ply of top material.
wealth grow by an estimated 40 percent since Looking ahead, experts predict a surge of
March 2020. post-lockdown activity, followed by a leveling
In the absence of art fairs, auction houses off. But the innovations developed during the
emerged as the easiest place to transact, par- pandemic—from livestreamed sales to a rolling
ticularly when sales resumed later in the year. battery of online offerings—are here to stay.

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10.1 Billion
Marketplace[artspace]By the Numbers

40%
The total amount of money (in USD) spent on
fine art at auction in 2020—23.7 percent less
than in 2019.

5
The decline in total fine-art sales at Christie’s in 2020, the hardest hit of the Big Three
auction houses. (Sotheby’s saw a slightly slimmer decline of 28 percent, while Phillips’s total
sales fell 19 percent.)

3.5 Billion
The number of works that Revlon owner Ronald Perelman consigned to auction that sold for more than $20 million
each. The billionaire—who said he was downsizing in search of a “simpler life”—is responsible for almost 15 percent of
the high-ticket works sold publicly for over $20 million in 2020.

35,698
The total amount (in USD) spent on postwar
and contemporary art at auction last year,
down 27.3 percent. For comparison, Tesla
reported $10.7 billion in sales… in the fourth
quarter of 2020 alone.

8
The average price (in USD) of a work of fine art sold at auction in 2020,
the lowest figure in eight years. What happened? As auction houses
ripped up the traditional sale calendar, as buyers flocked to lower
price points online, and as consignors opted to hold on to their best
material, the number of trophies on offer plummeted.

0.1%
The number of women among the 100 top-selling artists at auction in 2020—one (just one!) more than in 2019.
They are, in order: Joan Mitchell (18th of 100), Yayoi Kusama (22), Tamara de Lempicka (40), Helen Frankenthaler (50),
Georgia O’Keeffe (66), Cecily Brown (73), Ruth Asawa (81), and Louise Bourgeois (98).

From 0 to Hero
The modest decline in total fine-art auction sales in China year over year. The country’s
art market experienced a dramatic rebound in the second half of 2020, which helped
it overtake the United States (whose sales plummeted 35 percent) to once again become
the world’s largest.

Artist Born No. of Artnet Price Database Searches in 2019 No. of Searches in 2020

Amoako Boafo 1984 0 1,734

Mr. Doodle 1994 0 596

Robert Nava 1985 0 285

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe 1990 0 251

Salman Toor 1983 0 215

Vaughn Spann 1992 0 166

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Marketplace

What Karen Levy Buys

(and Why)
Age City Title Museum Affiliation
34 Paris Co-owner, DSLcollection and Member, Serpentine Future
cofounder, art strategy firm AiKa Contemporaries Committee

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Marketplace[artspace]What Karen Levy Buys (and Why)
What was your first purchase? A painting by What was your most recent purchase? A paint-
Ding Yi during my first trip to China, in 2005. ing by Geng Yini that was exhibited in 2017 at
The work is from his “Cross” series, and I re- the K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong. He is part
member being mesmerized by it. It’s about Pop of the next generation of artists in China that
art and local painting— it questions memory, we want to focus on.
revolution, and the spirit.

Karen Levy’s art-filled Paris apartment, with a screen to show video and new media art by the staircase

Which works or artists are you hoping to add What is the most expensive work of art
to your collection this year? We are closely that you own? It could be a painting by Jia Aili.
following Lu Yang, whose work we first bought We commissioned a large work that took him
at Art Basel Hong Kong from [Berlin gallery] eight years to make. But I do not spend my time
Société. We really believe in the generation of valuing the price of works in the collection.
artists like her, who use digitality as an emblem
for what is happening in Chinese culture.

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Marketplace[artspace]What Karen Levy Buys (and Why)

An installation by Lu Yang at Art Basel Hong Kong, 2019

Where do you buy art most frequently? We buy Is there a work you regret purchasing? Every
most frequently from galleries, and often at Art work reminds me of an encounter. By nature,
Basel Hong Kong as well as Art021 and West I don’t cry over spilt milk.
Bund Art & Design [in Shanghai]. This is really
where we find the newest artists and the most
dynamic work. We also commission a lot.

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Marketplace[artspace]What Karen Levy Buys (and Why)

Karen Levy’s dining room (below) and living room (above), with Zhou Tiehai’s 90 Years of Chinese Cinema (1996) over the sofa and Wang Keping sculptures by the fireplace

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Marketplace[artspace]What Karen Levy Buys (and Why)

What work do you have hanging above your What is the most impractical work of art
sofa? What about in your bathroom? There is you own? A striking piece by Xu Zhen called
no work in the bathroom, but we rotate the art- Comfortable. It is a real minibus that has been
work in our home every six months. Currently, transformed into a washing machine.
a painting by Zheng Guogu hangs above my
sofa—we also have a pair of Oculus VR glasses
to show our virtual museum.

Video stills from Guan Xiao, Hidden Track (2015)

What work do you wish you had bought when If you could steal one work of art without
you had the chance? A painting by Liu Xiao- getting caught, what would it be? A triptych by
dong—the market for this artist has now gone Francis Bacon. I used to work in auction hous-
crazy. es, so I would spend a lot of time with his work.
He has a very unique way of painting.

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Marketplace

The Best-Seller Lists

The top 10 lots of 2020 in every
major category

Ultra-Contemporary
Phillips’s livestreamed auction in New York, October 2020

Contemporary
Postwar
Photography
Impressionist & Modern
European Old Masters
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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List

Ultra-Contemporary
While much of the market witnessed what art advisor Todd Levin
described as a “return to less speculative buying” in 2020, the
ultra-contemporary segment, which encompasses artists born
after 1974, is the exception to the rule. Twenty-three works by the
late Canadian artist Matthew Wong, who made his auction debut
just last year, brought in a whopping $24.7 million at auction.
(That sum is greater than the total sales generated by Rembrandt,
Monet, or Jackson Pollock in the same time period.) This kind
of fizzy activity is driven by a small group of buyers seeking to
assemble sizable stock piles of paintings by in-demand artists
whose work is nearly impossible to get on the primary market.
Artist Life Title Date Sale Price (USD)

1 Adrian Ghenie b. 1977 Lidless Eye 2017 $7,086,543

2 Dana Schutz b. 1976 Elevator 2017 $6,456,648

3 Adrian Ghenie b. 1977 The Arrival 2014 $5,415,426

4 Matthew Wong 1984–2019 River at Dusk 2018 $4,871,441

5 Matthew Wong 1984–2019 Shangri-La 2017 $4,470,000

6 Adrian Ghenie b. 1977 On the Road to Tarascon 2 2013 $4,351,276

7 Adrian Ghenie b. 1977 Pie Fight Interior 2012 $3,753,187

8 Jia Aili b. 1979 Blue Mountains 2010 $3,156,739

9 Jia Aili b. 1979 February Story-Forever (Sea) 2006 $3,090,659

10 Matthew Wong 1984–2019 Pink Wave 2017 $2,349,250

Adrian Ghenie, Lidless Eye [detail] (2017)

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List[artspace] Ultra-Contemporary

Jia Aili
Blue Mountains
2010
Four of Chinese artist Jia Aili’s top 10 prices were achieved
by works sold in 2020, including this one, which now holds his
auction record. The artist is best known for his “Wasteland”
series, which depicts solitary nude figures in gas masks
standing in fragmented landscapes full of flying shards. This
academic-style landscape is far less apocalyptic—and easier
on the eyes.

Matthew Wong
River at Dusk
2018
The market for works by Canadian artist Matthew Wong, who died by suicide
in 2019 at age 35, has officially reached surreal levels. In December, when this
multicolored, Matisse-inspired landscape hit the block at Phillips in Hong Kong,
bidders pushed it to more than triple its high estimate, setting a new record for
the artist (the fourth time this year). As Wong’s family and gallery sort out their
plans for his estate, the artist’s works are essentially unavailable on the primary
market—driving bidders to compete ferociously at auction.

Dana Schutz
Elevator
2017
Dana Schutz’s market has been steadily rising for years, sup-
ported by a strong foundation of museum and scholarly interest.
But with the sale of this work, it has entered either blue-chip
or speculative territory (depending on whom you ask). The
Cubist-inspired painting of a crowd squeezed into an elevator—
the largest work by Schutz ever to come to auction—fetched
$6.5 million at Christie’s Hong Kong, more than double its high
estimate. The price is also more than double her previous auc-
tion record, set in 2019. Elevator, indeed.

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List

Contemporary
For the first time since we’ve been keeping track, Chinese artists
dominated this category, which covers artists born between 1945
and 1974. Four out of the 10 best-selling contemporary artworks
were by Chinese artists—and, what’s more, half of the works on
this list sold in Hong Kong or mainland China. Experts say they
haven’t seen this level of demand for Chinese contemporary
art since just before the Great Recession, when major auction
houses held specialized sales for the category in New York. Now,
the appetite has returned—but it is a largely regional market,
with demand strongly rooted in Asia.
Artist Life Title Date Sale Price (USD)

1 Zeng Fanzhi b. 1964 Mask Series, No. 6 1996 $23,260,182

2 Peter Doig b. 1959 Boiler House 1993 $18,187,827

3 Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–88 Untitled (Head) 1982 $15,184,900

4 Yoshitomo Nara b. 1959 Hothouse Doll 1995 $13,302,930

5 Zhang Xiaogang b. 1958 Bloodline Series, The Big Family No. 2 1995 $12,646,903

6 Zhou Chunya b. 1955 Spring Is Coming 1984 $12,439,425

7 Liu Xiaodong b. 1963 Battlefield Realism: The Eighteen Arhats 2004 $12,324,321

8 Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–88 Portrait of A-One A.K.A. King 1982 $11,500,000

9 Banksy b. 1974 Show Me the Monet 2005 $9,924,563

10 Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–88 Rubber 1985 $9,690,177

Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline Series, The Big Family No. 2 [detail] (1995)

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List[artspace] Contemporary
Zeng Fanzhi
Mask Series, No. 6
1996
This diptych has surfaced at auction three times: in 2008, it
fetched $9.6 million at Christie’s Hong Kong; in 2017, $13.5
million at Poly Auction Hong Kong; and last year, $23.3 million
at Beijing’s Yongle Auction. Some wonder whether Zeng’s
ascendant market is being propped up by a small number of
supporters. “I do not believe this market is as alive as it looks,”
one player said.

Yoshitomo Nara
Hothouse Doll
1995
Yoshitomo Nara has always had a strong collector base in Asia, but his market
went into hyperdrive ahead of his high-wattage traveling retrospective, which
opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April. Nara’s top 10 auction
prices were all achieved in 2019 and 2020. Six of those were for works, like this
one, that depict one of the artist’s trademark sullen adolescents against a white
background. Nara was so confident in the quality of this work that it graces the
cover of the first volume of his catalogue raisonné.

Banksy
Show Me the Monet
2005
Banksy’s cheeky parody of Monet’s “Water Lilies” series was
reportedly consigned by London collectors Roland and Jane
Cowan. The duo hosted the artist’s “Crude Oils” show back
in 2005, which involved releasing 200 live rats into the space.
Following the exhibition, they bought Show Me the Monet for a
reported £15,000 (and were gifted a second work as part of the
deal). Having resisted offers to sell over the years, the couple
found an eager audience at Sotheby’s, where the painting went
to an Asian collector after a prolonged bidding war.

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List

Postwar
While consignors who could afford to wait have opted to hold on
to their best material until the lockdown lifts, those who did sell
last year found solid demand for bold, colorful work by brand-
name artists. To reassure jittery sellers in this sector (which
comprises artists born between 1911 and 1944), auction houses
secured financial guarantees for six of the top 10 lots in advance.
Artist Life Title Date Sale Price (USD)

1 Roy Lichtenstein 1923–97 Nude With Joyous Painting 1994 $46,242,500

2 David Hockney b. 1937 Nichols Canyon 1980 $41,067,500

3 Cy Twombly 1928–2011 Untitled [Bolsena] 1969 $38,685,000

4 Brice Marden b. 1938 Complements 2004–7 $30,920,000

5 David Hockney b. 1937 The Splash 1966 $29,917,174

6 Gerhard Richter b. 1932 Abstraktes Bild (649-2) 1987 $27,694,680

7 Zao Wou-Ki 1920–2013 04.01.79 1979 $26,761,383

8 Roy Lichtenstein 1923–97 White Brushstroke I 1965 $25,417,000

9 Ed Ruscha b. 1937 Annie 1962 $22,975,000

10 Wayne Thiebaud b. 1920 Four Pinball Machines 1962 $19,135,000

Brice Marden, Complements [detail] (2004–7)

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List[artspace] Postwar

David Hockney
Nichols Canyon
1980
Some observers were surprised by the high price paid for this work, which one dealer
called “unbelievable.” Works from this series, which depict Hockney’s hilly neighbor-
hood in Los Angeles, are considered less desirable than both his pool paintings and his
double portraits. Nevertheless, a third-party guarantee and growing demand in Asia
helped this piece fetch $41.1 million, making it the third-priciest by the artist ever sold
at auction.

Cy Twombly
Untitled [Bolsena]
1969
If you are looking for the ultimate Cy Twombly, this work is not for
you. The most coveted examples by the American artist are from his
blackboard series, particularly those from 1967 and ‘68. This canvas—
one of many consigned last year by billionaire Revlon owner Ronald
Perelman—is perhaps the most complex of Twombly’s “Bolsena” series,
in which the artist eschewed looped scrawls in favor of sketches and
diagrams that resemble Abstract Expressionist hieroglyphics.

Gerhard Richter
Abstraktes Bild (649-2)
1987
After a brief period of softening, the market for works by Gerhard
Richter is picking up again. This smashing example, also consigned by
Ronald Perelman, falls within the artist’s most sought-after period for
abstracts, which spans 1987 to 1992. The best works created during
these years make the viewer feel as if she is looking through a complex
skein of color, with various corners offering windows into compositions
buried beneath.

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List

Photography
These results suggest that the photography market, once a
highly specialized field, is evolving into a more porous sector,
accessible even to those who don’t know their Leicas from their
Hasselblads. Five of the top 10 works in this category sold at
contemporary art sales, as opposed to specialized photography
auctions. Landscape photographer Ansel Adams is well repre-
sented here due to a single-artist sale from the collection of oil
tycoon David Arrington. But even among the Arrington lots, the
best-sellers were mural-sized pictures that evoke the scale of
contemporary art rather than the intimacy of vintage prints.
Artist Life Title Date Sale Price (USD)

1 Richard Avedon 1923–2004 Dovima With Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, 1979 $1,815,000
Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, 1955

2 Richard Prince b. 1949 Untitled (Cowboy) 2015 $1,280,000

3 Ansel Adams 1902–84 The Grand Tetons and the Snake River, 1942 $988,000
Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

4 Matson Jones Untitled 1955 $750,000

6 Ansel Adams 1902–84 Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico 1941 $685,500

6 Ansel Adams 1902–84 Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite Valley 1938 $685,500

7 László Moholy-Nagy 1895–1946 Photogram Cover for the Magazine “Broom” 1922 $524,000

8 Thomas Struth b. 1954 Louvre IV, Paris 1989 1989–90 $500,196

10 Tina Modotti 1896–1942 Interior of Church Tower at Tepotzotlán, Mexico 1924 $500,000

10 Hiroshi Sugimoto b. 1948 North Atlantic Ocean, Cape Breton Island 1996 $500,000

Ansel Adams, Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite Valley [detail] (1938)

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List[artspace] Photography

Matson Jones
Untitled
1955
Matson Jones is the name of not one artist but two: Robert
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns used the pseudonym on joint
creative projects. (Matson was Rauschenberg’s paternal grand-
mother’s maiden name; Jones was an adaptation of Johns.) The
pair produced this underwater scene for Bergdorf Goodman’s
Fifth Avenue department store. The cyanotype—created by
placing objects on light-sensitive paper—represented a rare
opportunity to get a large work by either 20th-century titan for
under $1 million.

Ansel Adams
The Grand Tetons and the
Snake River, Grand Teton
National Park, Wyoming
1942
The US Secretary of the Interior commissioned Ansel Adams
to create this work in 1941 for the department’s DC headquarters.
Although the project was derailed by World War II, it was
eventually realized after Adams’s death in 2010. The massive
print, which set a new auction record for the artist, was
among dozens of Adams works sold last year by oil executive
David Arrington.

Thomas Struth
Louvre IV, Paris 1989
1989–90
Struth and his fellow Düsseldorf School photographers Andreas
Gursky and Thomas Ruff have seen their auction prices tumble
since their peak in 2011. This example, however, from Struth’s
beloved series of tourists dwarfed by cultural wonders, more
than doubled its high estimate, achieving among the strongest
results for his work in years. On the primary market, sources
say, Struth’s pictures range from $25,000 for a small example to
$250,000 for a museum-quality piece.

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List

Impressionist & Modern

The Imp-Mod sector (which comprises artists born between
1821 and 1910) was the hardest hit by the pandemic-induced
supply squeeze. Auction sales totals for works valued at more
than $10 million shrank by 41 percent year over year, significantly
more than in any other sector. Much of the activity in this market
was happening privately, sources say—including Sotheby’s
closed-door sale of a nine-foot-tall Giacometti sculpture priced
at around $90 million from the collection of the year’s biggest
consignor, Ronald Perelman.
Artist Life Title Date Sale Price (USD)

1 Francis Bacon 1909–92 Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus 1981 $84,550,000

2 Sanyu 1901–66 Quatre nus 1950 $33,333,462

3 Mark Rothko 1903–70 Untitled 1967 $31,275,000

4 Barnett Newman 1905–70 Onement V 1952 $30,920,000

5 Pablo Picasso 1881–1973 Femme dans un fauteuil 1941 $29,557,500

6 Pablo Picasso 1881–1973 Les femmes d'Alger (Version 'F') 1955 $29,217,500

7 Joan Miró 1893–1983 Peinture (Femme au chapeau rouge) 1927 $28,873,822

8 Clyfford Still 1904–80 PH-144 (1947-Y-No.1) 1947 $28,739,000

9 Paul Cézanne 1839–1906 Nature morte avec pot au lait, melon et sucrier 1900–6 $28,650,000

10 Alberto Giacometti 1901–66 Femme Leoni 1947 $25,916,400

Clyfford Still, PH-144 (1947-Y-No.1) [detail] (1947)

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List[artspace] Impressionist & Modern

Barnett Newman
Onement V
1952
This Abstract Expressionist pioneer’s work is extremely rare—and rarer still are works
from his breakthrough “Onement” series. (He only made six; two are in the collection
of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) Some observers were surprised that this
richly hued example sold for a price on the low end of its estimate. The picture, however,
was not entirely fresh to market: It last sold in 2012 at Christie’s for $22.5 million. This
time around, sources suggest, the consignor may have been the Qatari royal family. (A
representative from the Qatar Museums Authority declined to comment.)

Mark Rothko
Untitled
1967
The artist created this composition not long after he completed the suite of paintings
for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. While sources say the painter’s fiery yellow and red
canvases are his most sought-after, this meditative image achieves the feathered,
floating forms for which the artist is famous. Yet another masterwork offloaded by
Ronald Perelman, it last sold at auction for $1.2 million in 1998. The billionaire had pur-
chased it privately in 2002.

Joan Miró
Peinture (Femme au chapeau rouge)
1927
Art-historical legend has it that Miró created this series of so-called “Dream Paintings”
when he was so poor and hungry as a young man in Paris that he began to hallucinate
shapes while staring at the wall of his studio. This painting, one source said, was a
“good not great” example of the genre. (Canvases that contain both text and amoebic
shapes are more coveted than the plainer ones.) It was—you guessed it—consigned
by Ronald Perelman.

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Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List

European Old Masters

The resolutely analog Old Master market (which covers artists
born between 1250 and 1820) has officially been dragged into
the 21st century. Auction houses reported a record number of
first-time online bidders in the sector; some buyers even (gasp!)
pulled the trigger without having examined their purchases
in person. Seizing the moment for experimentation, specialists
orchestrated successful cross-category sales that placed
Old Masters alongside contemporary fare.
Artist Life Title Date Sale Price (USD)

1 Rembrandt van Rijn 1606–69 Self-Portrait of the Artist, Half-Length, 1632 $18,836,613
Wearing a Ruff and a Black Hat

2 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1696–1770 Madonna of the Rosary With Angels 1735 $17,349,000

3 Andrea Mantegna 1431–1506 The Triumph of Alexandria $11,654,000

4 Jan Davidsz de Heem 1606–84 A Banquet Still Life $7,611,499

5 Peter Paul Rubens 1577–1640 The Virgin and Christ Child, With Saints $7,098,000
Elizabeth and John the Baptist

6 Bernardo Bellotto 1721–80 Dresden, a View of the Moat of the Zwinger $7,039,617

7 Canaletto 1697–1768 Venice, a View of the Grand Canal Looking East $5,275,600
With Santa Maria della Salute

8 Georges de La Tour 1593–1652 A Girl Blowing on a Brazier 1646–48 $5,256,146

9 Peter Paul Rubens 1577–1640 Portrait of a Young Woman, Half-Length, $5,144,331

Holding a Chain

10 Lucas Cranach the Elder 1472–1553 Lucretia $5,070,000

Bernardo Bellotto, Dresden, a View of the Moat of the Zwinger [detail]

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 23
Marketplace[artspace]The Best-Seller List[artspace] European Old Masters

Rembrandt van Rijn

Self-Portrait of the Artist, Half-Length,
Wearing a Ruff and a Black Hat
1632
Scholars have two equally enticing theories about this painting, offered in July
at Sotheby’s first-ever cross-category evening sale in London. The first is that a
26-year-old Rembrandt created it as a kind of calling card for prospective clients
as he was establishing himself in Amsterdam. The second? That he painted it
to woo his future wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh. One of the last Rembrandt
self-portraits not owned by a museum, it is now the fourth most expensive
work by the artist ever sold at auction.

Jan Davidsz de Heem

A Banquet Still Life
This artwork had been tucked away in the same private collec-
tion since the 19th century and was only recently discovered by
scholars. The last of four monumental canvases that the Dutch
Golden Age artist created between 1640 and 1643, it aims to ele-
vate still lifes from a quiet domestic genre to the level of history
painting, endowed with the same pomp and grandeur.

Georges de La Tour
A Girl Blowing on a Brazier
1646–48
Paintings by Georges de La Tour almost never come up for sale—in fact, this one,
offered at Lempertz, is believed to be the only candlelit nocturne by the artist in
private hands. Unsurprisingly, then, it handily smashed the artist’s previous auc-
tion record of $3.4 million, set way back in 1991. Like many of the French Baroque
painter’s works, it reportedly had some condition issues, but the warmth of the
composition helped it become the most expensive Old Master painting ever sold
at a German auction house.

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 24
Why By Tim Schneider

a Brush

the Old-Fashioned Gallery Business, Too

With
COVID
Will
Strenghten
Art’s
Experience
Economy
[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report
and
25
Illustrations by Stefan Marx

T
he launch of Superblue could not have come at a worse time. teamLab, Forest of
Resonating Lamps-One
It was August 2020, in the heat of the summer lockdown, Stroke, Metropolis (2018)
when the company announced its formation to a largely
skeptical art world. It would pursue, it said, a twin mandate:
to produce showstopping immersive artworks for mass audi-
ences of ticket buyers at a 50,000-square-foot “experiential art center”
in Miami and take on experiential commissions for private and public
clients at an ever-evolving array of off-site locations around the world.
Both goals would be achieved in collaboration with A-list artists bridging
the increasingly hazy borders between creative disciplines.
The much-hyped inaugural program would include a mirrored laby-
rinth by the Olivier Award-winning scenic artist and set designer Es Devlin,
a past collaborator with Billie Eilish and Beyoncé; 360-degree interac-
tive software environments by art collective teamLab; and an envelop-
ing “Ganzfeld” light installation by James Turrell, whose roughly 60-year
career awing the public with perceptual wonders has guided the vision of
Superblue.
In other words, it had a very specific cocktail in mind. Big art. Big
names. Big... crowds.
Some would have questioned Superblue’s mission regardless of the
events of 2020. What was the art world supposed to make of this com-
pany, which boasted investment from Laurene Powell Jobs and seemed
to hybridize a cultural-events producer, a major gallery, and a gilt-edge
selfie factory? Was it a competitor to traditional art dealerships, look-
ing to poach their artists and turn their nuanced works into blockbuster

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 26
Beyoncé's Formation tour in 2016,
featuring a collaboration with
Es Devlin

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 27
entertainment? Or was it a thoughtful, fearless effort to expand art’s Visitors in the sprinkle pool
audience beyond the elite clique it’s catered to for more than 100 years? at the Museum of Ice Cream
in New York, 2019
With life as a whole upended by a global pandemic, however, those
questions were largely swept aside by an existential quandary: Could
Superblue, and the experiential art economy it envisioned, survive the
coronavirus?
Despite what appeared to be colossally bad timing, Superblue forged
ahead. Its Miami complex, originally scheduled to launch in December
2020 in the up-and-coming Allapattah district, is now due to debut in
April. The company plans to hire 60 staff mem-
bers there to complement its existing
team of nearly 40 split among New
York, London, and Miami.
Superblue’s leaders are
wagering that, rather than
doom the experience
economy, the COVID
clampdown actually
strengthened it. Even
more surprisingly, the
biggest beneficiary
of Superblue’s radical
focus on charging
admission just might
be the traditional art
market.
Inside Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity
Mirrored Room-Love Forever
at the Hirshhorn Museum in
Washington, DC, 2017

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 28
The Big Blue Picture
Artechouse, “Submerge”
(2020)

Superblue is the next logical destination on a path art and culture have
been traveling for generations. By the dawn of the 21st century, the world’s
most prominent art institutions had spent three decades following the
map drawn by “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” the record-breaking exhibition
of Egyptian artifacts that inaugurated the museum-blockbuster model
with its US tour culminating at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978—
just as the same maximalist, populist mode began dominating Hollywood.
By the early 2010s, smartphones and social media had led many to
devote a good portion of their recreational lives to capturing and broad-
casting their immersion in striking settings. This preoccupation made
overnight global sensations of canonical artworks like Yayoi Kusama’s
“Infinity Mirrored Rooms,” made-for-Instagram play-
grounds like the Museum of Ice Cream, and a
new breed of artist-created participatory
environments like teamLab Borderless,
the art/tech collective’s museums in
Tokyo and Shanghai.
Not everyone has greeted
the shift kindly. “I want to be
challenged, I want to be
uncomfortable, I want to be
provoked,” critic Kriston
Capps said in a 2018
interview about the
Indianapolis Museum
of Art’s transforma-
tion into the main-
stream-courting
mashup rebranded as
Newfields: a Place for
Nature and the Arts.
“And when those
possibilities are not
even on the table,
well, then it’s not art.
It’s more like a food
court or an amuse-
ment park."
But disrup-
tion-hunting
Superblue cofounder
and board chair Marc
Glimcher isn’t par-
ticularly interested
in how Capps might
define art. If “regular
people” pay to see
an installation, as

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 29
 ...it imports to the art market models
that the broader retail industry have
profitably used for years.
Glimcher sees it, the art establishment inevitably dismisses the
work as “just a spectacle”—code signifying that it’s “not good” or,
indeed, even “art” at all.
At Superblue, he said, “we don’t think that’s a very 2021 point
of view.”
The smearing of boundaries between fine art and other
disciplines is necessary for Superblue’s success. For its installa-
tions to attract the maximum number of visitors, some of them
must appeal to audiences interested in the arts, plural: fashion,
theater, design, live music, dance, and more. For Glimcher, that’s
the future.
“These artists, like so many greats throughout history, are
trying to do something that will change the way you think about
everything,” he said. “We’re going to all this trouble and expense
because what these people are offering could be one of the big-
gest impacts on human consciousness since movies or phones.”

How to Do It
Glimcher’s borderline-messianic belief in the value of interdis-
ciplinary experiential art collided with a math problem that has
been vexing the commercial gallery sector for decades: If the
artists you want to work with are primarily interested in creating
shared experiences rather than salable objects, can you sustain-
ably fund the former without diverting their valuable time and
resources to the latter?
Glimcher was intimately acquainted with dealers’ usual
answer, thanks to his day job as president and CEO of Pace
Gallery, the international art juggernaut where his father,
Arne, began collaborating with Turrell, Robert Irwin, and other
experiential-art innovators shortly after its founding in 1960.
(Superblue and Pace insist they are independent businesses,
despite crossover in their executive ranks and artist lists and the
fact that Superblue’s New York team worked out of Pace’s former
Upper East Side gallery before going fully remote in March 2020.)
Producing such installations meant Pace had to “beg, borrow, and
steal” to fundraise the budget, Glimcher explained, then try to sell
enough “souvenirs” to get out of the red.
Granted, the souvenirs he referred to aren’t coffee mugs or
T-shirts; they are unique or limited-edition artworks, often priced
at tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But if a gallery
is trying to produce an experiential work of the magnitude of,
say, Roden Crater, the volcanic cinder cone that Turrell has spent

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 30
 teamLab, The Haze (2018)

Installation view of Artechouse in

Miami, 2020

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 31
more than 40 years transforming into a network of meticulously crafted
architectural installations, it needs to sell a lot of Turrell’s domestically
friendly interior LED installations to cover the costs.
Superblue’s ticketing model changes the equation. It is largely mod-
eled on teamLab, whose museum in Tokyo drew 2.3 million paying visitors
in its first year of operation. (For comparison, the Van Gogh Museum, in
Amsterdam, attracted 1.4 million that same year.)
Superblue pays each artist an upfront fee to create an immersive work,
as well as a royalty from gross ticket sales throughout its run. (The size of
the fee and royalty vary on a case-by-case basis.) Since every Superblue
artist receives funding directly from the general public, the relationship
becomes more lucrative the more popular an installation is—just as in
mass-culture businesses like Hollywood, pop music, and book publishing.
As Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, Superblue’s cofounder and CEO, puts it, “You
couldn’t sell a single visit to a rich collector” and expect the model to func-
tion; it only succeeds at scale.
With admission to the inaugural trio of Miami installations starting at
$30, scale seems plausible. Yes, it’s slightly higher than full-price admis-
sion to the Museum of Modern Art ($25). But it’s also $9 less than a ticket
to, say, the Museum of Ice Cream’s New York flagship.

The Wisdom of The allure of the experiential art economy is easy to

Crowds
grasp when you see the volume of tickets punched and
revenue generated. Here are rough calculations for the
estimated gross sales from four different test cases.

Artechouse teamLab Borderless teamLab Planets teamLab × Pace

Miami Beach Tokyo Tokyo Palo Alto

Washington, DC June 2018–May 2019 June 2018–May 2019 London
New York $ 69 million est. gross $ 37.5 million est. gross Beijing
June 2017–Dec. 2020 2.3 million visitors × $30 gen. admission 1.25 million visitors × $30 gen. admission
2017–19
$ 26.4 million est. gross $ 10 million est. gross
1.1 million visitors × $24 gen. admission 500,000 visitors × $20 gen. admission

From left: Artechouse, “Submerge” (2020); teamLab, Light Evaporating with People (2018); teamLab, Drawing on the
Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People - Infinity (2016–18); teamLab, Flowers and People, Cannot be
Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Hour (2015)

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 32
Identity Politics
Inside Random International’s
Rain Room at MoMA, 2013

It’s not only the art in Superblue’s universe that departs from tradition—the
artists do, too. These aren’t, by and large, lone geniuses working in their
studios with an assistant or two. Some are full-fledged companies that have
grown as immersive art experiences have exploded in popularity.
Take teamLab, whose LinkedIn profile lists “artists, programmers, engi-
neers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects” as part of a team that
exceeds 500 employees. (That the collective has a LinkedIn profile under-
lines the contrast with the old school.)
“When we started looking at the program, it seemed to me that the artists
making the most interesting experiences tended to be collectives,” explained
Dent-Brocklehurst. “To create the high-tech element and monumentality of
these shows, it took a lot to put it all together.”
Another collective working with Superblue, Random International, shot
to international acclaim in 2012 with Rain Room, an environmental installa-
tion that enables visitors to waltz through an artificially generated monsoon
without getting wet, thanks to a halo of dry space that follows them as they
move. After its London debut, the installation went on the road, drawing tens
of thousands of visitors to high-profile institutions like MoMA, in New York;
the Yuz Museum, in Shanghai; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 33
 Random International cofounder Hannes Koch described Rain Room
as “more of a logistical challenge than a creative one” after a certain point.
The studio had to allocate tremendous resources to solving the technical
and bureaucratic issues that arose with each new site. Koch said he and
fellow cofounder Florian Ortkrass soon realized “there wasn’t a sustain-
able model” that would enable them to keep creating public artworks of a
similar scale and complexity.
For one thing, you need someone—not an artist, but a producer of
sorts—to twist arms and get things done, Koch explained: “If you’re hell-
bent on bringing the way you feel about the world into an experience or
public object, you need a lot of backing, a lot of technical and infrastruc-
tural firepower to convince people. You have to feed the monkey in some
sense, and that’s not what we’re here for.”
Random International peaked at 30 full-time employees in early 2019.
Two years later, it is about half that size, with staff members including soft-
ware and architectural designers, a senior commissioning manager, and
even a dramaturge to help craft the narrative and tease out the art-histori-
cal lineage of each new project.
Superblue has been an important part of this “rightsizing” process,
Koch said, noting that Random International now focuses the major-
ity of its in-house energy on “broad experimentation, research, initial
prototyping,” and the final stages of each project; intermediate steps are
largely handled by a mix of studio staff and external partners, including
Superblue. This structure leaves the studio free to “pursue weird hunches
relentlessly,” then call up institutionalized resources on demand rather
than agonizing over every detail.

Beyond the Ticketed

Experience
Beyond solving a problem for ambitious artists, the true innovation of
offerings like Superblue, some observers said, is that it imports to the
art market models that the broader retail industry has profitably used
for years.
Resonant in-person experiences—even when they cost visitors
nothing—have proved hugely effective at driving traditional sales.
Futurist, author, and retail consultant Doug Stephens framed the phenom-
enon through Apple’s “profound” decision to transform its physical stores
into aspirational, high-design temples to product exploration
and customer service.
“What Apple recognized decades before everyone else was that
e-commerce doesn’t negate the value of stores,” he explained. “Stores
became experiential playgrounds aimed not so much at sales but at cus-
tomer acquisition. If we can draw people to touch and play and kinetically
experience the products, it draws them into the ecosystem and gives us
a customer for life that we can service in all kinds of ways.”
Superblue’s immersive installations could have the same effect on
visitors of means who aren’t yet collectors. Since the company works with
multiple artists represented by galleries other than Pace, as well as some

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 34
Artechouse, “Submerge” (2020)

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 35
who have no dealer at all, Superblue could hook visitors in a quasi- Marpi, New Nature (2018)
institutional setting, then send them off to become clients elsewhere in at Artechouse
in Washington, DC
the art-market ecosystem.
(Dealers may still require some convincing on this point. Asked how
Superblue might impact the existing gallery system or whether they
could envision collaborating with the company, five major gallerists
declined to comment.)
In this model, as Koch sees it, artists benefit from “an integrated
landscape where we can show the work wherever it’s most relevant,”
and everyone would make money doing what they do best. Proof of the
virtuous cycle, he hopes, will arrive this spring when Superblue and
BMW i, BMW’s electric vehicle arm, copresent a live rendition of Random
International’s No One Is an Island at a to-be-determined US venue.
Debuted as an online-only presentation last November, the work cen-
ters on a software-driven robotic installation that waves its light-tipped
arms to create ghostly, ephemeral images of different life forms. (Imagine
an automated assembly line reprogrammed to produce flashlight “draw-
ings” in homage to Eadweard Muybridge.)
In-person viewers will soon see this piece complemented by live
choreography and a commissioned score to further explore our evolving
relationship to our environment as software and automation increas-
ingly replace nature and human interaction. The instal-
lation itself grew out of Fifteen Points/I (2016), a
smaller, simpler forebear included in Random
International’s solo show at Pace New York a
half decade ago.
“Domestic objects, editions, and series
we’ve often seen as prototypical stud-
ies,” Koch explained. “The long game
plan is to bring what we do into the
public context.”
No One Is an Island is on sched-
ule to be the first project realized
by the less-discussed arm of
Superblue’s business, which facil-
itates commissions and collabo-
rations with outside parties such
as museums, cities, arts festivals,
and corporations. The way this
is monetized depends on the
project: It could be an admission
fee, the acquisition of the work for
long-term installation, or another
solution entirely. (The live presen-
tation of No One Is an Island will
not be a ticketed affair, but instead
funded by BMW i and Superblue.)
If all goes as planned, Super-
blue’s experiential art center will
support the ticketed side of the
company’s portfolio while this

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 36
teamLab, Universe of Water Particles
on a Rock where People Gather
(2018)

teamLab, Proliferating Immense

Life – A Whole Year per Year
(2020)

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 37
other side organizes projects for hire. Admission revenue from the Miami
complex can keep the coffers full while long-term, modestly remunerative
commissions grind toward completion.
On paper, these shared resources make major commissions viable for
Superblue when they are not for most galleries and artists. Object sales
generate a more sporadic revenue stream (and thus a less reliable sub-
sidy) than ticket sales, and Superblue has the production and operational
expertise to complete projects more suited to a specialty architecture firm
than a traditional art dealer.
“Galleries are where public commissions go to die,” Glimcher said.
“It’s not because dealers aren’t excited. It’s because it requires a different
skill set to deal with municipalities, real-estate committees, community
boards, contractors, engineers.” By fusing in-house ticketed experiences
with outside commissions, Superblue’s infrastructure enables each side of
the business model to support the other for the long run.

All the World’s a Stage

Still, what will make or break all of Superblue’s ideas are its investors. The
Emerson Collective, the organization launched by Laurene Powell Jobs,
receives billing as the company’s founding partner. (She declined to be
interviewed for this story.) Another backer is Therme Group, a Viennese
company specializing in “wellbeing resorts.” The rest remain anonymous,
but Glimcher relayed that none are strictly “money investors’’ seeking
profit. They include leaders in real estate, ticketed events, city planning,
health, and other fields who can contribute knowledge Superblue lacks
even at the top of its org chart.
Their investment pays for much more than just artists’ fees. Superblue
leases the building housing its Miami art center from the Rubell family
(whose luxe museum stands directly across the street), meaning rent on
its 50,000 square feet is an ongoing expense. (Superblue declined to dis-
close rent or renovation costs.) The company also pays expenses through-
out the life cycle of each artwork, including for equipment, production,
shipping, marketing, staffing, maintenance, and de-installation.
Superblue’s profit picture hinges on what it receives in exchange.
The artist and the company co-own the physical components of each
installation, and the artist retains sole ownership of the intellectual prop-
erty. However, in addition to all ticket revenue after the artist’s royalty,
Superblue also retains the right to lease each installation to another venue
(with the artist's approval) at the end of its run in Miami. Crucially, these
non-Superblue venues could be operated by any of the wide-ranging
parties the company partners with, from individual collectors to architects
to municipalities. (In these cases, the artist would still be paid a royalty on
gross ticket sales during the work’s run at the new location, and the host’s
costs and benefits would vary based on the specifics of the project.)
The prospect of touring suggests a surprisingly apt reference point for
Superblue’s ticketed experiences: the high-stakes business of Broadway.
Mitch Weiss, a manager and consultant whose career on Broadway
began in 1985, compared analyzing Superblue’s strategy to “talking to a
28-year-old… who has great ideals and ideas that sound phenomenal, but

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 38
real-world experience may inevitably teach them it doesn’t work The facade of
Superblue Miami
as expected.”
Weiss sees the two businesses linked by the same core tension:
After paying high front-end costs, will the ticket revenue come in fast
enough to keep the show open—and long enough to make it a hit?
Superblue declined to provide information about its budgets for the
opening round of programming at its Miami center, so it is impossible to
judge how steep a climb it faces to profitability. Still, the Broadway com-
parison at least offers a sense of the commercial dynamics at play.
Like Superblue in its ticketed experiences, Broadway producers must
pay up front to rent a venue, outfit it properly (see: stage and scenery,
lighting, costumes), and secure the talent (see: writers, directors, actors).
Accomplishing this feat in 2021 requires signing on a consortium of inves-
tors (usually between 20 and 35 of them).
With the investors’ seed money in hand, the producers prepare the
show, market it like mad—and hold their breath to see if the audience
will come.
According to Weiss, the average Broadway musical costs between
$18 million and $22 million to produce today. Yet while production
expenses have skyrocketed over the decades, he said, the bust rate “has
stayed consistent since I was a little child.” Then and now, he estimated,
80 percent of Broadway shows flop, wiping out their investors’ contribu-
tions in the process. Hits, though, are “better than Vegas ever could be,”
with backers earning annual returns of “hundreds of percent.”
These runaway successes largely come courtesy of tourists and
touring—two factors Superblue hopes to benefit from. But the ongoing
complications of the pandemic raise questions about both.

The Corona Conundrum

In a January 2021 New York Times story, Superblue
COO Marcy Davis responded to a question
about the effect of the pandemic by
stating that the Miami art center
is “not dependent upon fly-in
tourism,” thanks to the large
audience in South Florida
and a likely “increase in
day-trippers driving to
Miami from throughout
the region.” Superblue’s
experiences were con-
ceived from the start
around timed tickets,
controlled capacity, and
unidirectional traffic
flow, but the company
has pledged that the
initial cycle of installa-
tions will open with an

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 39
even lower cap on attendance, and they will remain on view through teamLab, Universe of Water Particles
on a Rock where People Gather
at least the end of 2022. (2018)
All of the above suggests that Superblue has vastly more
cushion from its investors than the average Broadway musical.
According to Weiss, a new musical will normally be forced to close
within its first three months if its audience is restricted to residents
of the tristate area.
If the same show becomes a tourist attraction, however, its lifes-
pan and earnings are limitless. Weiss notes that, in the 1950s and
’60s, the tenure of a Broadway hit maxed out at roughly 18 months.
Fast-forward to 2021, and Phantom of the Opera is entering its 35th
consecutive year. The producers of a hit can also license the show’s

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 40
subsidiary rights to theaters around the world to extend its earnings, just as
Superblue can license its installations to venues elsewhere.
Will the demand be there, though?
Glimcher, for one, is confident. “Somewhere in the middle of COVID,
people started thinking, ‘All those [cultural] dollars… do I really want to spend
them sitting in a chair three and a half inches from another person? Or do I
want to be looking in a really energized way, walking around experiences that
are not jammed?’”
Glimcher relayed that additional Superblue investors are “coming out of
the woodwork during COVID.” The new funding has the company planning to
open two more art centers in undisclosed cities in the US and internationally.
Similar immersive art experiences have also bounced back strongly from
the 2020 shutdowns. Artechouse, which presents experiential exhibitions
from artists melding art, science, and technology, has welcomed more than
150,000 visitors since reopening its three for-profit spaces in New York, Miami
Beach, and Washington, DC, last fall. Cofounders Sandro Kereselidze and Tati
Pastukhova plan to announce locations in “at least” three new cities by the end
of 2021—a feat that is all the more notable since Artechouse has been entirely
self-funded since opening its first building, in 2017.
There is at least one positive indicator on the touring front, too. Carne y
Arena, an immersive installation by the filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu
meant to communicate the harrowing experience of migrants crossing the
southern border of the US, will travel for “the next five years, at least,” accord-
ing to the project’s technology and set design partner, Phi Studio. The com-
pany, which optimized the experience for pandemic touring, sold out the final
weeks of its engagement in Denver after it reopened in January 2021. Carne y
Arena debuted in Montreal in mid-March, with producers in discussions with
venues in the US, Europe, and Asia for later dates. (Another of the installation’s
producing partners happens to be Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective.)
Even if Superblue Miami opens to an attendance drought, the company
could very well weather it. As long as its investors stay on board, short-term
ruptures and inevitable tweaks to the model will be irrelevant. Which is fitting,
since Superblue’s mission is ultimately to aid its artists in leading us away
from the here and now.
“They’re not documenters, these artists, they’re dreaming the future,”
Dent-Brocklehurst said. “It’s not a mirror. It’s a window.”

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 41
After a year of online
innovation sparked
by the pandemic,
the industry looks
very different.
[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 42
“Imagine a world where you could not fly around the globe
anymore. How would you conduct business?”
That was the thinking-out-of-the-box assignment that a
consultant gave Phillips executives at the auction house’s annual
strategy meeting in January 2020.
“We looked at each other, like, ‘What is he talking about?’ ”
Cheyenne Westphal, the company’s chairman, recounted.
“Just imagine there might be a volcano erupting,” the
consultant told the assembled honchos, many of whom had
traveled to New York for the occasion.
They were perplexed then. What a difference 15 months makes.
“I’m sitting here today,” Westphal said, “like, ‘Please ask me that
question now.’ ”
By Eileen Kinsella
The pandemic thrust the still-very-analog art their screens. In the pre-COVID era, New York-
world farther into the virtual realm than it had based art advisory and appraisal firm Winston
ever been—or expected to be. “We all learned Art Group held a handful of wine and whiskey
so much as our business evolved—not just tastings to, as managing director Elizabeth
changed but truly evolved,” Westphal said. von Habsburg put it, “get our expertise and our
As with any kind of evolution, natural brand out in front of people.”
selection has been kinder to some segments of The first few virtual experiments—in which
the industry than others. Art fairs have suffered an in-house expert selected and delivered
dearly—and a rocky vaccine rollout pushed wines to clients and then conducted tastings
their return to later in 2021. (Art Basel, widely via Zoom—proved so popular that Winston
expected to be the first major international fair ultimately made presentations to 120 different
of the post-lockdown era, announced in mid- companies over the course of eight months.
January that it would postpone its Switzerland Now, the firm is launching a wine app
edition another two months, to September.) called Vitis that allows clients to analyze their
On the flip side, the appraisal business collections and keep values up-to-date, and
is booming, in part because collectors with “provides advice about whether to hold, drink,
extra time on their hands got curious about the or sell,” von Habsburg said.
value of the assets they had hanging on their Whether this all-remote moment has
walls. Private sales have also proved resilient— boosted or bruised businesses’ bottom line, it
perhaps not surprising, given that the collective won’t last forever. And the art industry—like all
wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has jumped industries—is starting to process what a hybrid
by $1 trillion since the start of the pandemic. virtual-IRL future might look like. Here is a
Strong interest from millennials, who squirreled breakdown of how four major segments of the
away vast amounts of disposable income amid sector will evolve. One thing is certain: There
the lockdown, and robust activity from Asia are is a whole lot more room to innovate in a post-
further fueling demand. lockdown world than there was before.
Some enterprising companies have also
found unexpected revenue streams behind Previous: Visitors to Lisson Gallery during Frieze Week in London, October 2020

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 43
The pandemic has cemented the necessity of having a digital
footprint—but dealers plan to be extremely judicious about

Galleries
where they put their dollars going forward.

What’s Another What Will What’s Left to

Changed Bonus Stay the Same Innovate
Dealers can no longer put off devel- Artists no longer see a digital show- In-person visits remain important. Secure digital infrastructure and
oping a digital strategy. “If you don’t case as the equivalent of being While Stefania Bortolami is still online vetting programs will be
have a cohesive hybrid, then you’re stuffed into the storage room. Elena waffling on a digital strategy, she more important than ever, given the
just not going to be relevant,” said Soboleva, online sales director at has “doubled down on seeing art,” rise in e-commerce, especially as
Sean Green, cofounder of the art David Zwirner, said artists have having opened another gallery (her dealers transact with new clients
technology company Arternal. “started coming to us and actively third) at 55 Walker Street. and governments like the UK and
That realization has resulted driving the ideas and exhibitions Viewers, it seems, have US tighten oversight of the trade.
in the reallocation of resources. in a way that was not happening doubled down, too. On a Saturday Implementing digital systems to
Tribeca dealer Stefania Bortolami before.” The artist Josh Smith, for in January, Rob Dimin, a partner in adhere to Know Your Client and
admits that while her staff of 12 has example, conceived an open-air downtown New York gallery Denny Anti-Money Laundering rules—not
produced some promotional video show on the roof of his Brooklyn Dimin, counted 60 visitors, even to mention cybersecurity—will be a
content, their capacity is limited. studio that was only accessible with appointment requirements high priority this year.
Now, she’s facing reality: “I might online. All told, solo online-only pre- and capacity restrictions. The tens There is also the looming ques-
have to hire someone who takes sentations have yielded the gallery of thousands of dollars banked tion of the value of a physical foot-
care of digital.” There’s no time like more than $20 million since April, from not doing art fairs, he said, print. The lockdown “was harder for
the present, since, for once, art-fair Soboleva said. is “freeing us up to focus on the some of the galleries that had larger
costs are not eating into budgets. program as opposed to focusing on leases, bigger spaces, and more
the hustle.” overhead,” noted art law specialist
Diana Wierbicki. “If galleries are
only doing a few exhibitions a year,
does it make sense to use a group
exhibition space as a cost-saving
measure?” Central hubs that offer
ad hoc gallery spaces, like Crom-
well Place in London, might be the
wave of the future.
Tom Burr, Bent Booze (2008) at The Upstairs, Bortolami Gallery, New York

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 44
While auction houses nimbly met the challenge of creating
exciting and successful livestreamed sales, the future of the

Auction Houses
market will—as always—hinge on supply of good material.

What’s What Will Lasting What’s

Changed Stay the Same Hybrids Left to Innovate
The typical auction schedule The need to balance supply and Client relationships will follow The drama of quarantine prompt-
historically centered on two weeks demand is an enduring puzzle no a new model—for good. David ed unlikely collaborations between
of megasales in November and matter when or where sales are Norman, chairman of Phillips, said fairs, dealers, auction houses,
May in New York, but after a year of taking place. “In 2020,” Christie’s that pre-pandemic, his favorite and even luxury brands. (Bulgari
anything goes, auction executives CEO Guillaume Cerutti said, “sup- part of the job was throwing open sponsored Sotheby’s Old Master
feel empowered to postpone ply was the issue and demand was the doors to an auction preview Week in January, outfitting the
based not only on public health strong,” since so many would-be after months of preparation and auctioneer and staff in the brand’s
but also on political events (like sellers put their plans on ice. But business getting. Champagne and jewels.) Now that the borders
the presidential election) and the that may change in 2021: Some gossip would flow. have been breached, look out for
availability of material. “It’s a bit collectors will have to downsize Last year, he found himself more partnerships like those of
like school semesters at college,” for estate purposes, while others giving more “walkthroughs” via Christie’s with China Guardian
said Sotheby’s chairman Amy may be encouraged by surprisingly individualized FaceTime tours to and Phillips with Poly in Asia, as
Cappellazzo. “Suddenly, summer buoyant results. The next problem clients cozied up in front of their well as auction-art-fair hybrids
school became a viable option.” will be figuring out what to keep fireplaces in Aspen or perched in like Christie’s recent project with
Not everyone is pleased with funneling into online sales when their backyards in Palm Beach. “I the 1:54 contemporary African art
this development. Wierbicki said live auctions return. hold my phone up and say, ‘Let’s fair. “When the market is shrinking,
that, while her clients were happy walk into the galleries together,’ ” when fairs are canceled, there is
to have the opportunity to buy and he noted. Flipping the screen to a mutual interest in collaborating
sell in December before the Biden look at a canvas, he might ask an to keep the market alive,” Cerutti
administration could tinker with art handler to take a work down said. “Collaborations are already
the tax code, “it’s very hard to track and examine it under the black effective. The challenge is to make
when you’re used to a traditional light, just as in real life. On the them more frequent.”
schedule—it felt a little scattered.” bright side, “I don’t have to worry
about wearing nice shoes.”

Scenes from Phillips’s livestreamed evening auction in London, July 2020

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 45
If any art-market players could be declared winners in all this
upheaval, it would be the appraisers. Collectors took advantage
of the lockdown to update insurance policies, use art as collateral
for loans, and get a jump on financial planning—all of which

Appraisers
requires these specialists’ expertise.

What’s What Will What’s Left to

Changed Stay the Same Innovate
Pricing is more transparent. Instead of having Dealing with collections of a certain scale A comprehensive way to capture both primary
to scour art-fair aisles and awkwardly interrupt continues to be a challenge, pandemic or no and secondary market pricing is needed in
gallery directors to ask for prices, appraisers pandemic. For a recent estate appraisal at a an increasingly fast-moving landscape. While
were able to suck up copious figures with a gallery—with a total of 850 works—Chrust had online art fairs have made primary prices some-
strike of the keyboard to track the so-called to settle for a smaller sampling based on what what easier to track, the increased volume of
“comparables” they use to determine fair art handlers were able to bring out at one time. and new formats for online auction sales have
market value. Digital images had to suffice for the rest. “No resulted in increasingly obscure public results.
Primary-market information is particularly matter how high the resolution is on a digital im- Not only are lots that fail to meet their reserves
valuable in the postwar and contemporary art age,” Chrust said, “there still remains a limitation left out of public records, but a growing number
sector, where, as appraiser Sharon Chrust put in the viewer’s ability to absorb the entire work of works are being withdrawn on the day of the
it, “prices change dramatically, in a very short as one would if they were seeing it in person.” sale beacuse of a lack of interest, making the
time, on a regular basis.” true level of demand difficult to discern. What’s
It is no exaggeration to say that increased more, Elizabeth von Habsburg noted, “the vir-
price transparency—a trend that fair organizers tual death of the printed auction catalogue has
and dealers agree is likely to continue beyond some consequences, in that there is no longer
the pandemic—has allowed experts to beef up a permanent record of what was in any given
their spreadsheets in a way that will serve the auction.”
field for years to come.

An expert vetting artworks at TEFAF in Maastricht, 2019

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 46
Of all the sectors in the art market, art fairs have arguably been
hardest hit. Without a physical gathering space or event-driven
demand, “the only works that sell are works that would sell in any

Art Fairs
environment,” said the dealer Rob Dimin. “It’s not unique to the fair.”

What’s What Will What’s Left to

Changed Stay the Same Innovate
It was long an open question whether art fairs In-person experiences are still the best way to Just as Blockbuster’s failure to translate to the
could translate the social shopping experience drive commerce. “The number one thing that web opened the door for Netflix, the face-plant
to the web. Now, we have an answer: no. A scant keeps our galleries awake at night is meeting experienced by online art fairs has created an
10 percent of collectors bought work from new clients,” said Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s opportunity for other art e-commerce models to
online platforms “often or always” during the director of Americas. “Client engagement fill the breach.
yearlong period ending in August 2020, accord- regeneration [comes from] getting in front of Fairs are now sorting out how to offer a
ing to a recent survey. new people.” In January, Art Basel Hong Kong scaled-down physical experience—supplement-
After more than a year of adapting to a offered dealers who might be stymied by travel ed, rather than supplanted, by a robust virtual
fairless environment, expect dealers of all sizes restrictions the opportunity to keep their gal- program. “Now is the time to think about a total
to get selective about which events they take leries front and center by taking out a smaller redesign,” said Tony Karman, the president of
on. Two years ago, Dimin said, he would typically space manned by an Art Basel staff member Expo Chicago. “What size of fair are we? Do we
be gearing up for fairs in Europe, Asia, and Latin for a reduced price. (Call it a “ghost booth.”) almost go back to 2011 levels?” he asked, refer-
America, as well as four in the US. “Now, we’re In a nod to the importance of human contact, ring to the first year of the event.
just going to be concerned about two fairs in the fair mandated that the gallery staff still be The Outsider Art Fair found success in Paris
the US,” he noted. “We’re focusing all our foreign reachable by phone for the event’s full opening with an IRL exhibition curated by Alison Gingeras
efforts on Asia.” hours, time difference be damned. featuring highlights from exhibitors, who showed
their full offerings online. Frieze New York is plan-
ning a 60-gallery event at the Shed in May, along
with digital and offsite programming.
“We’re striving to have some small in-
person events,” said Frieze consultant Loring
Randolph, “together with the in-person event
that is the fair itself.”
From left: Frieze Live in London, October 2020; Peres Projects’ booth at Expo Chicago, September 2019

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 47
[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 48
In early January, Pace Gallery posted to its Instagram an image
of a painting by Robert Nava, a 36-year-old artist from East
Chicago. Pace had started representing Nava in December, and
signing him was a get. Some of the wealthiest, most powerful
art collectors on Earth were fighting for access to Nava’s
paintings. Here’s a sampling of some of the comments on the
Instagram post.

Robert Nava, Splash Cloud (2020)

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 49
The Nava work pictured was Tonight
Shark (2020). In it, a crudely rendered
sea carnivore emerges from chop-
py blue strokes of acrylic paint meant
to be water. The red paint coming
out of the shark’s mouth evokes a
cinematic amount of blood. Yellow
splotches against a black background
represent stars at night.
Tonight Shark is typical of Nava’s practice.
He paints sharks, but also toys, dragons, robots,
angels, bats, stick figures, goblins, hybrid cat-
wolves, hybrid Dracula-Jedis, and skeletons.
All of them are made as juvenile as possi-
ble—in the vein of the mainstream-shunning art
brutists of the 1950s or the bad-painting bad
boys of the ’80s—purposefully disgorging the
orthodoxy slapped into him in Yale’s master of
fine arts program, from which Nava graduated
in 2011.
Despite the opinions shared by much of the
commentariat, these paintings are starting to
sell for a lot of money.
In July, Nava made his auction debut at
Phillips, where The Tunnel (2019), a painting
of a monster’s blood-red eyes, was estimated
to fetch $40,000 to $60,000. Instead, it sold
for $162,500. In the months that followed, his
depiction of a transforming Power Ranger gen-
erated $124,195. A loose rendering of an angel
sold for just over $110,000. A painting of a kid
riding a giant snake brought $100,000.
And this was before he debuted with two
powerhouse galleries. In January, Nava had a
sold-out show at Pace’s ritzy Palm Beach space,
where his works were priced from $35,000
and $50,000. In February, he had his first New
York solo show at Vito Schnabel’s new space in
Chelsea.
What’s more, the Mugrabi family, collectors
with an unimpeachable star-making pedigree,
began shoveling Navas into the collection, a
dog whistle to fellow market players that now is
the time to buy.
Over the past few months, when I told cu-
rators, dealers, and critics that I was profiling
Robert Nava, many wanted to know why. In their
minds, other artists, ones who did not make

Robert Nava, Safety Angel 1 (2021); Star Dust Angel (2020);

Saturn Angel (2020)

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 50
crude renditions of Power Rangers, were far “People are saying, ‘How dare someone make
more worthy of attention. One advisor said they such a simplistic, childish thing?’ There are peo-
would never sell that “trash” to their clients. ple who are like, ‘Oh, this is some Yale kid who
Another said unprintable things about the peo- has come up with this gimmick.’ And nowadays,
ple who were buying Nava’s paintings. people are terrified they’re being sucked into a
But even if they couldn’t see the appeal of gimmick.”
Nava themselves, they wanted me to answer a On a decently warm day in December,
question: How does someone on a journey to I walked up to a building in a still-industrial
the end of taste become the most sought-after segment of Bushwick. On the door were
young artist on the market? fliers for short-term studio spaces and cheap
I started asking around. Marc Glimcher, couches for sale. Surgical mask affixed, I
Pace’s president, is a biased observer, as he’s smashed the right buzzer with the back of my
Nava’s dealer. But he loves the work in a gen- wrist and climbed the stairs to Nava’s studio a
uine, almost giddy way. Glimcher said he grew few stories up.
up with Dungeons & Dragons, and when he saw He greeted me at the door in a full-on gas
Nava’s lovingly raw depictions of the game’s mask. His cat, Jumanji, darted from one end of
mythological creatures, he had a gut reaction. the studio to the door.
Glimcher’s wife, Fairfax Dorn, gave him a small “I hope you like cats—I should have given
Nava for his birthday, and he was elated. you a heads-up. Sorry dude,” a muffled Nava
And yet Glimcher acknowledged that the said.
brash artist’s approach has polarized the Even with the gigantic apparatus hiding
market. most of his face, the creases by Nava’s eyes
“People are furious, just furious,” he said.

Nava with his cat, Jumanji,

in February 2021

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 51
Robert Nava’s solo
show at Pace Gallery in Palm Beach in January 2021
That’s another thing that makes people
indicated a smile. He seemed happy to have a doubt the value of his creations. How can you
visitor. He had not had many recently. spend the cost of your daughter’s Ivy League
Nava offered bottled water, which I declined, education on something that’s made in the time
as I was trying to pet a very mobile Jumanji, who it takes to watch an ad before a YouTube clip?
darted up an elaborate jungle gym in the studio. Nava contends his slapdash process builds on
Beyond the cat, I saw the paintings. an obsessive amount of internalizing, agonizing,
There was an angel, small and scowling, set looking out the window, and looking into past
against a marigold background. And a knight obsessions and the way they resurface.
mounted on a bunny-slash-horse. Sketch-filled Plus, he’s working on taking more time.
notebooks were strewn on small tables spine- “Sometimes you need to go slow in the face of
down, perhaps left for a reporter to see, or left speed to make it look like speed,” he said.
as they always are. Glimcher and others insist that Robert
Though Nava’s output isn’t prodigious, his Nava’s paintings have to be seen in person and
process can alchemize quickly. After hours or don’t translate well to reproductions on a phone
even days of sketching out an idea for a paint- or computer. That’s not an ideal quality for art-
ing, he puts on gigantic noise-canceling head- works in the middle of a pandemic, when critics
phones, blasts techno, and makes art. and collectors are forced to evaluate and pur-
“I can catch what the zone is, in a good chase work based on what they see on a screen.
painting session, and just paint,” he said, walk- I had a similar experience with Nava. As New
ing up to a canvas and gesturing at the strokes. York started to open up last fall, galleries began
He was talking about what’s become a to offer appointment-only visits. The inaugural
Robert Nava mythos: the speed at which he show at the gallery directly across the street
works. His record, he said, is one painting in 27 from my apartment, Bill Brady’s ATM, had two
seconds. The figure emerges in a single swift small Nava drawings, including one of a hungry
moment—a one-hit composition. wolf looking for prey.

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 52
 In an email announcing the show, the
works on paper appeared even more unruly
than Nava’s paintings—a punk band’s demos
screechier than the blitzing studio versions.
But in the flesh, the lines had a powerful kinetic
energy, with fast vrooms of stroke making
the crayon predator look like he was actually
chomping.
They were priced at $3,500 each, 10 times
more than his drawings had cost a year earlier,
and sold before the show opened. A source
at the gallery recounted swatting away daily
inquiries from fans ranging from a Lebanese
megacollector to skate kids who rolled up to the
front door.
A few weeks after the show opened, a simi-
lar crayon drawing sold at auction for $16,250.

Nava grew up in East Chicago. His
father was a craneman for the Inland
Steel Company, and his mother was
a receptionist at Prudential Life
Insurance. Sometimes she would
bring home looseleaf printer paper
from work for Nava to draw on.
When the kids in high school talked
about who could actually draw from
life, they talked about Nava.
After attending nearby Indiana University
Northwest, he split time between the studio
and a number of odd jobs: as a bouncer at a
club, as an office equipment mover. Eventually,
he pulled together a portfolio and applied to
art school. Then came the rejections: UCLA,
CalArts, Cranbrook, the Art Institute of Chicago.
But one letter came back thicker. He’d been
accepted to the Yale University School of Art, an
institution that’s as über-establishment as any
art-star-making degree machine on the planet.
During Robert Storr’s storied decade at
the helm of the school, Nava experienced its
infamous “Pit Crit” sessions, in which painting
students stand alongside their work in a sub-
terranean gladiatorial round as professors and
peers rip into them. (In an email, Storr said, “I
am afraid that I have no memory of Robert Nava
from his time at Yale.”)

Robert Nava, Saturn Angel (2020); Cloud Rider Angel (2020);

Night Storm Angel (2020)

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 53
 ● High Estimate (USD)[artspace]● Sale Price (USD) $180K
Robert Nava’s Auction Sales in 2020

The Tunnel (2019)

$135K
Anu Zord (Transformer) (2018)

Maybe Metatron (2017)

Venom Ride (2018)
$90K

$45K
Ejected Driver (2017)
Smoke Tint (2017)

Untitled
Untitled
Untitled Untitled (Don’t) Untitled
(2019)
(2018) (2018) (2018) (2018) 0

paintings, so I started following Robert,” Janssen

After being pushed to unlearn what he said.
thought he knew, the young artist came out They arranged a studio visit for the next time
the other side with a renewed commitment to the dealer was in New York. In person, Janssen
the dragon drawings of his youth. He moved to said, “the paintings were just as good—better.”
New York, but his career was slow to take off. He gave Nava his first proper solo show
He made 10-hour truck-driving runs to pay rent. in Brussels, asking $12,000 each for large
The trucks began to show up in his art—some paintings. Janssen’s clients needed a bit of
with headlights as eyes, grates agape like giant convincing.
mouths. “They became the masks or the faces “A lot of people say, ‘What’s this shit, what’s
of gods,” Nava said. this children painting, it’s not relevant,’ ” Janssen
By 2016, he was showing the truck paintings said. “I didn’t sell anything at the beginning
at artist-run spaces in Bushwick and working of the show, but I sold everything at the end.
out of a small studio with no heat and one win- Because when people start to look at the works,
dow broken. Around that time, he was scouted they become the paintings they want to see.
by Francisco Rovira Rullán, a dealer and curator He’s a virtuoso in a way.”
based in San Juan, who showed some of Nava’s Los Angeles’s tastemaking Night Gallery and
work at Expo Chicago. Images of the pieces Sorry We’re Closed both brought paintings by
started to circulate on social media, mostly Nava to NADA’s Miami fair in 2018. (At that point,
because they stood out from everything else at a large painting had inched up to $15,000.) There,
the fair. they caught the attention of Ballroom Marfa
One of the people who saw them on founder Fairfax Dorn, who later gushed about
Instagram was Sébastien Janssen, the propri- them to her husband, Marc Glimcher.
etor of the Brussels gallery Sorry We’re Closed. He needed some convincing, too.
“I saw two works, and they were so special, “Fairfax comes back from the NADA art fair,
so weird, I was completely attracted to these she pulls out her phone and says, ‘This is it, this

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 54
is the new guy,’ ” Glimcher said. “I looked at her
phone and said, ‘Honey, you’ve lost it.’ ”
Like many others, Glimcher was unmoved by
the images on the phone, but he was intrigued
enough to do a studio visit after viewing them
on the computer.
Around the same time, the dealer Vito
Schnabel came across Nava’s work on the feed
of well-connected art publicist Andrea Schwan.
Since his early teens, Schnabel had been put-
ting on shows of work by artists, including his
father, Julian Schnabel. But Vito was looking to
start representing talents of his own generation,
and he found himself drawn to Nava’s neon-lit
cave paintings of cultural fixations.
“There’s something very relatable, from the
Transformers to the Power Rangers, and then
they transcend that,” Schnabel said. “There’s
something nostalgic about it for me—it brought
me back to a place.”
The desire to revisit the past is at the heart
of Nava’s appeal to (often white, usually male)
collectors. The work transports them to a time
when the biggest thing they had to worry about
was a monster under the bed.
Nava is not the first institution-branded artist
to paint punch lines for the my-kid-could-do-that
crowd. But he might be the first to do so with only
a hint of irony. Sure, there’s humor here, but it’s
not a coincidence that Marc Glimcher both ear-
nestly likes Dungeons & Dragons and earnestly
likes Robert Nava paintings.
Glimcher—as well as, I’m told, his father,
Pace founder Arne Glimcher—sees Nava as
part of the long line of artists Pace has support-
ed whose work plays with the high-low dynam-
ic, most notably Jean Dubuffet, the founder of
the art brut movement.
“Obviously, there is a tradition in the second
half of the 20th century of pushing against
your training,” said Glimcher, who first visited
Dubuffet’s studio when he was nine years old.
He also compared Nava to an artist whose
insider-outsider status confounded people not
just during his lifetime but for decades after:
Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“Jean-Michel used to come over to the
gallery to see the Dubuffet paintings,” Glimcher
said. “And the same response was leveled at
Basquiat—people saying, ‘What a gimmick this Night Storm Angel (2020); Asteroid Maker Angel (2020);
is.’ There were tons of people saying that.” Volcanic Angel (2020)

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 55
Untitled (2020)

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 56
The Tunnel (2019)

In early spring 2020, Nava’s career was This pent-up demand likely pushed one
accumulating momentum. Then the early Nava collector (er, flipper—they had only
world shut down. As auction houses owned the painting for a few months, sources
retooled their May evening sales said) to consign The Tunnel to Phillips. In a high-
as midsummer online bonanzas, they ly unusual move for an auction debut, the house
looked to fresh contemporary art to slotted it into its evening sale.
create buzz in the absence of boozy The Tunnel came on the block with an
dinners and cocktail parties. estimate of $40,000 to $60,000 and sold for
For Phillips, one particular Nava, The $162,500. Immediately, other Nava collectors
Tunnel, fit the bill. “I found it arresting,” said started calling around asking for appraisals on
Rebekah Bowling, a senior specialist at works—sharks, dragons, Transformers—that
Phillips. “It’s that raw energetic nature of it they had bought not even two years earlier for
that feels very genuine.” $25,000.
When asked if her colleagues shared her In the months that followed, 11 more Navas
convictions, she circled around the question. “I hit the block. Nine handily exceeded their esti-
talked to a lot of people after the show at Night mates; two sold within expectations.
Gallery, and half the people were like, ‘He’s the On the primary market, Nava’s show with
next Basquiat,’ and then half the people were Vito Schnabel sold out before it even opened.
like, ‘I hate this thing.’ ” One advisor told me that these freshly placed
Around this time, Janssen estimated, the paintings, priced at $60,000 a pop, already had
waiting list for a work by Nava was several hun- deep interest on the secondary market, with
dred people long. If you weren’t buying at auction, collectors offering as much as $250,000 to skip
it could take years to get to the front of the line. what’s looking like a never-ending wait list.

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 57
Toward the end of our studio visit, He’s had minimal traction so far: John
I asked Nava how he felt watching Marquez, husband-and-wife Rob Westerholm
that first Phillips sale. and Monica Wesley, and the Simkins fami-
“That auction, when it was first happening, ly gave several works to the Art Institute of
I went to all the worst places I mentally could,” Chicago, while the collector Andy Song donated
he said. “And then I was like, Oh, shit, I hope it one to the ICA Miami last year. (The institute’s
doesn’t even, like, sell—” Nava walked toward a chief curator, Alex Gartenfeld, described Nava’s
cool drawing of a feral wolf. work as “keenly aware of the foundational
“It’s going to keep happening, the auctions,” influence of self-taught artists on art history,
he said. “At this point, I’ve had the nightmares. and the profound impact of figures who disrupt
These people, they’re sharks. If people are ma- dominant art-historical languages.”)
nipulating it, I can’t do anything.” As Jumanji crawled off the cat jungle gym, I
He leaned closer to the wolf drawing. asked Nava if he cared that some people hated
“But it’s crazy, man,” he said. “That person his work.
sold that? For that?” “People make fun of me, I’ve heard it all,”
He paused and turned back toward me, the he said. “People that love it, love the work, and
gigantic gas mask still affixed to his head. people that hate it, they absolutely hate it.”
“And then you keep on making the paintings.” Jumanji scampered into Nava’s sleeping
I wondered aloud if he wanted to have mu- alcove. Hanging above the bed was a gigantic
seum shows in the future. The primary metric of pietà of an exploding neon angel. It was a one-
whether an artist can survive a vogue of popular hit—instant alchemy turning gods into art. Nava
opinion or a swoon in the markets is the ac- never plans to sell it.
ceptance of institutions. And Nava’s curatorial “She has to be able to cut the head off of all
attention has lagged considerably behind his the other things that I make,” Nava said. “And I
market success. think she can.”

Robert Nava’s solo

show at Pace Gallery in Palm Beach in January 2021

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 The
Art
Crime
of the
Century
Giuliano Ruffini has been accused of
masterminding an Old Masters forgery
ring that hoodwinked the world’s experts.
Now, he’s telling his story.

By Simon Hewitt

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 59
 “One name keeps cropping up in regard to
people not to be trusted due to their links
with forgeries—that of Giuliano Ruffini.”

So begins a 3,000-word anonymous letter sent to the Paris art crime squad in
2014 that set in motion a chain of events destined to throw the Old Master market into
turmoil.
The missive—which has never before been made public—called for “an investiga-
tion into the origins of works that have appeared from nowhere.” Over the previous
20 years, the letter claimed, Ruffini had encountered “problems with dealers and auc-
tioneers in France, London, and Italy.” The author identified him as a “dealer in all but
name,” whose activity could be described as “diabolical... given the very high quality of
his fakes,” exemplified by an allegedly faux Venus by Lucas Cranach sold to the prince
of Liechtenstein for €7 million.
The author cited a technical report on the Cranach painting by a London resto-
ration firm that stated the painting’s craquelure, or network of tiny cracks, seemed “to
have appeared recently and suddenly”—suggesting the canvas had been baked to ar-
tificially provoke aging.
This claim, it turns out, was a complete fabrication. The London firm’s report, which
Artnet News has obtained in full, makes no mention of the presence of craquelure.
Quite the opposite: It states that “no cracking is visible, even under magnification.”
This did not deter the poison-pen writer from asserting that, after supplying vin-
tage paints to various accomplices (“the most important of them living a few miles
from his Italian home” in Codena), Ruffini had baked their canvases “in an oven to cre-
ate the craquelure one would expect” in an older work.
“It seems there is a well-hidden oven at his Codena property,” the letter concluded
melodramatically. “Everything can be found if you look hard enough.”

***

In the nearly seven years since the letter was sent, this scandal—now known as “the
Ruffini affair”—has engulfed figures ranging from curators at the Louvre to leading
auction-house executives. It has also given rise to an endless litany of conflicting and
sometimes changing opinions, both technical and connoisseurial.
While those outside the specialized Old Master sector might assume the ques-
tion of whether or not an object is authentic is a simple matter of yes or no, artworks
can in fact pass through a number of different classifications (manner of, follower of,

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attributed to) before they reach full-blown attribution. The Ruffini affair reveals just
how often works can slip between these categories—with millions of dollars and pro-
fessional reputations on the line.
In a series of interviews conducted over several months in 2020, Ruffini—who had
spoken to the press only three times before—claimed that his reputation has been un-
fairly tarnished and that the truth surrounding the complex scandal has yet to be ex-
posed. Now, he has decided to tell his side of the story.
Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuits in which he is embroiled, the scandal’s
impact on the art world is irreversible. It has enabled an auction house to be wide-
ly perceived as a self-appointed arbiter of artistic authenticity while offending one of
France’s leading cultural benefactors (the prince of Liechtenstein), incensing Italian
courts, and casting opprobrium on Ruffini, who has been the biggest loser in the affair
that bears his name.

***

The origins of the saga can be traced back to 2000, when Ruffini met a Parisian by the
name of Jean-Charles Méthiaz at a dinner party in Milan. The two—born a year apart—
hit it off. Soon afterward, Méthiaz visited Ruffini at his Italian farmhouse, where the
host cooked a huge salmon in an industrial oven he had installed to cater lavish parties
thrown by his teenage son.
At the time, Méthiaz’s art-world knowledge was confined to an acquaintance with
second-hand Art Deco, which he acquired while working for a former girlfriend at the
Paris flea market. Ruffini, on the other hand, had been buying and selling Old Masters
for three decades.
The two lost touch in the ensuing years but reconnected at the home of a mutu-
al friend in Paris in 2010. As Ruffini tells it, it was partly because he felt sorry for the
peripatetic Méthiaz and partly because Méthiaz could speak English that Ruffini (who
speaks only French and Italian) offered him the opportunity to sell paintings on his be-
half for a generous 20 percent commission. Méthiaz established a one-man company
in Delaware, The Art Factory, to handle his art business.
One of the works that Ruffini entrusted to Méthiaz was the Venus purportedly by
Lucas Cranach that would later star in the poison-pen letter. Méthiaz signed an agree-
ment with Ruffini in November 2012 and promptly went to see Elvire de Maintenant, an
Old Master expert at Christie's Paris, about the painting. He told her—as she later re-
ported to French police—that he had “found a Cranach in a Belgian private collection”
and had “bought it for around €3 million.” A viewing of the painting was arranged in
Christie's Brussels office before the end of the month, at which the work—designated
as "Lucas Cranach, Venus," with the vendor identified as “Jean-Charles Méthiaz (on
behalf of The Art Factory)”—was assigned a “provisional estimate” of £3 million to £5
million and dispatched to London for analysis by three different specialists.
Their reports, obtained by Artnet News, were somewhat inconclusive. A technical

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expert found “many aspects of the painting consistent with the period of the artist”;
a dendrochronology consultant thought it was painted on a “most peculiar piece of
wood”; and the firm R.M.S. Shepherd Associates declared the picture “of very high
quality”—but felt “the poor condition of the panel does not square well with the superb
state of preservation of the paint.” Given the uncertainty, Christie’s decided not to pro-
ceed with the sale.

The Ruffini affair has given rise to an endless

litany of conflicting and sometimes changing
opinions, both technical and connoisseurial.
Ruffini says he was not apprised of Christie’s findings, even though he called Méthiaz
“at least once a fortnight” to ask about the painting’s whereabouts. (Méthiaz disputes
this version of events, asserting that he kept Ruffini informed of his progress.)
Still, the two continued to do business together. The following year, Méthiaz visit-
ed Ruffini in Paris and offered to buy from him a youthful El Greco—which Ruffini had
bought at auction for €7,500 in 2000—for €560,000. The sale agreement, reviewed by
Artnet News, was addressed to Méthiaz personally (as opposed to the business ad-
dress he used for The Art Factory). This transaction, according to Ruffini, was an anom-
aly, as it was more common for him to consign works to Méthiaz than to sell them to
him outright.
There may have been more to Méthiaz’s visit than that single sale. According to
documents submitted to civil court by Ruffini’s lawyer, a second agreement for a differ-
ent work was produced in Ruffini’s name bearing the same date—this time, addressed
to The Art Factory. It concerned the sale, for €510,000, of an “oil on panel dated 1531 at-
tributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder,” known as Venus With Veil. Ruffini claims he never
saw nor signed such a document.
Apart from the changes to the billing address, work description, and price, this
second invoice was strikingly similar to the first. Even the invoice number is identical:
044764160113. (Méthiaz says the duplicate number was a careless secretarial error.)
There was one more key difference between the two documents, however: the sig-
natures. Three of four graphologists commissioned to examine the handwriting as part
of the case concluded that the signature on the second document had been forged.
(The other said it was “probably authentic.”)
Bank statements show that Méthiaz transferred €560,000 to Ruffini as payment for
the El Greco on April 30. But Ruffini says he never received a second sum of €510,000
from The Art Factory—and Méthiaz has offered no proof it was ever sent.

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A sale agreement between Ruffini and Méthiaz for a work by El Greco, signed by Ruffini.

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The purported sale agreement for the Cranach, dated the same day, which The Art Factory’s
Jean-Charles Méthiaz supplied as evidence to the court. Ruffini says he never signed it.

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A sale contract between Christie’s France and The Art Factory for
Cranach’s Venus

***

On January 17, 2013, the day after Méthiaz and Ruffini met in France to discuss the El
Greco, Méthiaz picked up the Venus from Christie’s in London and took it to the gallery
of Mark Weiss, a veteran Old Master dealer located 250 yards from the auction house.
Méthiaz was accompanied by Michael Tordjman, a Paris-based financial advisor whom
he had introduced to Ruffini a year before.
According to Weiss’s account, Méthiaz represented himself as the owner of the
painting. Weiss—“rather rashly,” he admitted in a statement in 2015—signed a €9.5 mil-
lion deal to buy it on the spot, with a nonrefundable 10 percent deposit due within two
weeks.
The contract, which was later made public through court proceedings, described
the painting as “attributed by The Art Factory to Lucas Cranach the Elder.” The work, it
stated, had been the subject of “in-depth research” by Christie’s, which had provided a
“favorable opinion.”
When Weiss called a high-placed friend at Christie’s to brag about his purchase,
however, he learned that the house had doubts about Cranach’s authorship. He imme-
diately contacted Tordjman and Méthiaz and told them the deal was off.
That was not the last the world would see of the picture. It resurfaced at TEFAF
Maastricht, the world’s leading Old Master fair, the following March. (Although it wasn’t
on view publicly, nonparticipating dealers, brokers, and collectors often use the event
as an opportunity to do business.) Before the fair was over, Jean-Charles Méthiaz’s Art

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Factory drew up a purchase agreement transferring the painting, “attributed to Lucas

Cranach the Elder,” to Michael Tordjman’s Skyline Capital for $700,000.
That same day, Tordjman drew up another contract, committing to sell the Venus
for €3.2 million to Konrad Bernheimer, the owner of the storied Old Master gallery
Colnaghi. This time, the painting was no longer “attributed” to Lucas Cranach the Elder
but unequivocally ascribed to him. (Tordjman did not respond to questions about this
transaction.)
Tordjman, documents suggest, assured Bernheimer that the picture was a family
heirloom and had spent the past 150 years in Belgium (Colnaghi would later publish
this provenance on its website). No mention of Méthiaz or The Art Factory appears in
the sale contract. The €3.2 million—which, sources allege, Tordjman split with Méthiaz,
although neither has commented on this point—was to be paid into Tordjman’s bank
account in Singapore. Ruffini says he was not informed of the sale.
The work did not stay in Colnaghi’s storeroom for long. On July 1, at the tony
Masterpiece fair in London, the gallery triumphantly announced it had sold the Venus
to the prince of Liechtenstein. The price: €7 million.
Méthiaz headed to a large villa in southern Italy that he had purchased a few weeks
earlier. “His lifestyle changed overnight,” recalls his acquaintance Raphaël Wertheimer.
“He boasted to me about buying a boat and a house in Apulia.”

***

Giuliano Ruffini remained blissfully unaware of the Cranach’s fate. He assumed Méthiaz
was still having the work tested and looking for a buyer. He was disabused by art bro-
ker Giammarco Cappuzzo, who told him about a Lucas Cranach the Younger he had
recently sold to Mark Weiss.
“May have a Cranach myself!” Ruffini replied, bringing up a photo on his cell phone.
“It’s with a friend, we’re having it studied. Had it over 30 years—never been on the
market.”
Cappuzzo recognized the painting immediately. “Colnaghi sold that for €7 million
at Masterpiece,” he said.
Ruffini’s face, Cappuzzo recalled later, “turned all the colors of the rainbow.”
From this moment forward, the situation began to deteriorate. In January, Ruffini
and Cappuzzo visited Konrad Bernheimer. As Ruffini recalls, Bernheimer showed them
the invoice confirming he bought the Cranach from Michael Tordjman. Ruffini promptly
emailed Tordjman to announce he was “canceling all my contracts with The Art Factory
and your friend Méthiaz.” Ruffini emailed Méthiaz a few days later, snarling, “I never au-
thorized you to sell my Cranach…. You’re the worst piece of shit I’ve ever come across.”
Ruffini filed a civil lawsuit against Méthiaz, Tordjman, and The Art Factory on May 2,
2014, for allegedly defrauding him of €3.2 million in the sale of the Cranach. Méthiaz’s
defense revolved around the January 16, 2013, contract, in which Ruffini supposedly
ceded the Cranach to The Art Factory for €510,000. Tordjman’s lawyer asserted that

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Giuliano Ruffini at his son’s villa in Emilia-Romagna, 2020

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 THE ART CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Tordjman, for his part, “bought the work from The Art Factory through the intermediary
of the Skyline Capital Corporation.” Tordjman himself declared the work was of Belgian
provenance in a customs declaration.

***

The Paris art crime squad received the anonymous letter implicating Ruffini on May 26,
2014—just 10 days after the first hearing in the civil case he had brought over the sale
of the Cranach.
During a preliminary inquiry into alleged forgery and fraud, Méthiaz—according
to a police report obtained by Artnet News—emailed investigators suggesting they
Google an Italian painter named Lino Frongia. Among the search results: an article,
published in La Repubblica in 2008, that referred to him as a forger.
Two months after the preliminary inquiry was completed, French authorities
launched a full-scale criminal investigation into allegations of forgery, fraud, and mon-
ey-laundering. It was soon placed in the hands of examining magistrate Aude Buresi, a
fiscal specialist (who, over the next five years, would investigate former French Prime
Minister François Fillon and former President Nicolas Sarkozy).
Buresi lost no time in asking the procurator of Reggio Emilia to have the Guardia
di Finanza, Italy’s financial crime squad, check out Giuliano Ruffini and Lino Frongia.
Buresi appeared to be taking the poison-pen letter’s view that “the fiscal aspect is im-
portant as, relatively speaking, this may cause [Ruffini’s] downfall, like Al Capone.”
The Guardia reported that Frongia had a “reputation for morality and good con-
duct.” Ruffini had been fined 40,000 lire (about €20) in 1973 for illegally possessing a
firearm, and 300,000 lire (€155) for assault in 1984.
Buresi also asked the Guardia to look for a “hidden oven” used to “give paintings
craquelure to create the illusion of age.”
At dawn on January 28, 2016, the Guardia swooped down on the homes of Ruffini
and Frongia, impounding computers, phones, pictures, and paperwork. The search of
Frongia’s residence, according to a Guardia follow-up report, “confirmed that painting
is his main activity—his dwelling had a very large studio.” The search of Ruffini’s, the
Guardia boasted in bold capitals, yielded “POSITIVE results,” with the discovery of a
concealed industrial oven “supporting the hypothesis of criminal activity.”
But the oven may not have been the smoking gun it seemed to be. As the Guardia
acknowledged, it was Ruffini who volunteered its existence, welcoming them into a
compartment behind an armored door in his laundry room. (Ruffini said he originally
carved out the space to store valuables.)
Ruffini was unaware of the poison-pen letter at the time of the Guardia’s raid—his
lawyers learned of its contents only in 2017—and failed to realize the oven’s significance.
“I had the industrial oven installed in the laundry because there was nowhere else
to put it,” he says. “The oven was used for bread, pizzas, fish.... I’ve owned two restau-
rants. There’s nothing unusual about a cook having a large oven!”

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Colnaghi’s stand at TEFAF in Maastricht, 2018 (above); Ruffini's secret laundry room, where he
kept the oven that authorities claimed he used to bake Old Master forgeries

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 THE ART CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Ruffini dismisses out of hand the accusation that he used the oven to “bake” paint-
ings. “It was an old artisanal oven with large electrical resistors,” he says. “If you tried to
dry paintings in it, the vapors would have caught fire at the merest spark.”
During the raid, the Guardia confiscated 15 paintings from Ruffini’s home. But on
February 15, the criminal court of Reggio Emilia ordered them to be returned.
“There is nothing to suggest these paintings are fakes,” the court stated. “The sup-
posed faking appears to have been evoked by a confidential source [i.e. the anony-
mous letter] which can in no circumstances be taken into consideration.” (Italy’s crimi-
nal procedure code outlaws the reliance on anonymous accounts in a judicial context.)

***

Emboldened by the oven-yielding Codena raid and undaunted by the Italian court’s re-
sponse, Aude Buresi had the Cranach Venus impounded in Aix-en-Provence on March
1. (Buresi did not respond to questions for this story.) The painting was on view as part
of a traveling exhibition of the collection of the prince of Liechtenstein. It had been the
exhibition’s catalogue cover and headlined its PR campaign.
The confiscation was an unheard-of offense to the prince, who had lent hundreds
of works to French institutions from his opulent holdings. He was outraged by Buresi’s
behavior and immediately filed a claim to register his concern with the investigation.
The Cranach was taken to Paris for analysis by a forensic scientist and a graphol-
ogist, both appointed by Buresi. The former cast doubt on the painting’s authenticity
because the paintwork on the figure of Venus displayed craquelure but not the black
background.
Experts connected with the prince’s collection claimed this was normal for works
of the period and “remained fully convinced of the painting’s authenticity,” according to
a statement issued that fall by Johann Kräftner, the collection’s director.
The situation was ubuesque: A painting considered bona fide by its lawful owners
remained confiscated as a fake by the representative of a foreign state.

***

While the criminal investigation sparked by the poison-pen letter was humming along,
the civil proceedings hit a snag. On June 30, 2016, 12 weeks before the date of the fi-
nal hearing, the case pitting Ruffini against Méthiaz and Tordjman was suspended—for
four years, as it would happen—due to what the court described as “doubts about the
Cranach’s authenticity” and an ongoing “investigation concerning an international net-
work of forgers.”
The suspension of the civil suit confirmed Ruffini’s belief that Méthiaz was the au-
thor of the poison-pen letter. He knew about Ruffini’s hidden oven; the letter also in-
cluded a reference to an artwork that Ruffini says only Méthiaz knew he owned.
“Je l’ai bien baisé ce Rital” (“I really screwed that Italian”), Méthiaz told Raphaël
Wertheimer in 2014—the same year the poison-pen letter was sent—according to a

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 Ascribed to Lucas Cranach the Elder
Venus With a Veil

Presumed Date 1531

Owner Prince of Liechtenstein
Previously André Borie, Andrée Borie (1971), Giuliano Ruffini (1973), Konrad Bernheimer
(2013)
Exhibited (Selected) National Art Center, Tokyo (2012); National Museum of Singapore
(2013); National Museum of China, Beijing (2013/14); Pushkin Museum,
Moscow (2014)
Experts For German art historian Werner Schade, Old Master curator Bodo Brinkmann
(later hesitated); Swiss art historian Dieter Koepplin (later reversed)
Experts Against Cranach Digital Archive director Gunnar Heydenreich, curator Guido
Messling
Scientific Tests Seven tests by different analysts 2012–17, two conclusive: Robert Wald (2014),
commissioned by prince of Liechtenstein, affirms authenticity; Violaine de
Villemereuil (2016), commissioned by Aude Buresi, refutes authenticity
Legal History Impounded in Aix-en-Provence in March 2016; prince of Liechtenstein lodges
retaliatory legal complaint
Where Now With the French Judiciary
Top Value €7 million (paid by prince of Liechtenstein, 2013)

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 Ascribed to Orazio Gentileschi
David Gazing at the Head
of Goliath

Presumed Date c. 1612

Owner Hedge-fund founder David Kowitz
Previously André Borie (1937?), Jean-Claude Bacchiana (1971), Giuliano Ruffini (1995),
Mark Weiss (2012)
Exhibited Musée Maillol, Paris (2012); National Gallery, London (2013–16)
Experts For (All 2012) Longhi Foundation president Mina Gregori; Kunsthistorisches
Museum curator Wolfgang Prohaska (“aesthetically worthy of a
Kunstkammer”); Berlin Gemäldegalerie curator Roberto Contini (“I am filled
with admiration for this precious version of our superb David”)
Scientific Tests (All 2016) conservator Katherine Ara (Paris) refutes authenticity; painting
restorer Cynthia Pasquali (Paris) and Arte Lab (Rome) confirm authenticity
Where Now Fairlight Hall, Sussex
Top Value €3.6 million (paid by Mark Weiss, 2012)

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 Ascribed to Frans Hals
Portrait of aYoung Man

Presumed Date c. 1655

Owner Sotheby’s
Previously Duke de Baena (1985), Rafael Perez-Menendez (1994), Giuliano Ruffini (2000),
Mark Weiss (2010), EPC/Richard Hedreen (2011)
Exhibited Seattle Art Museum (2013)
Experts For Louvre curator Blaise Ducros ( “the quintessence of Golden Age Holland”);
Frans Hals Museum curator emeritus Pieter Biesboer (“one of Hals’s finest
late works”); Frans Hals Museum curator Quentin Buvelot; art historian
Seymour Slive; former Rijksmuseum chief curator Martin Bijl
Experts Against Claus Grimm (“Frans Hals the Younger the only possible candidate… no
suspicion it could be a modern forgery”)
Scientific Tests Eight tests by eight researchers and labs between 2008–18, notably
James Martin, of Orion Analytical (painted “after the mid-20th century”);
Erhard Jägers, of Mikroanalytisches Laboratorium (“nothing that tends
against an attribution to the 17th century”)
Legal History 2008 French export permit denied; Louvre launches €5 million
appeal to buy it
2011  Louvre unsuccessful; export permit issued
2016  Sotheby’s deems work fake, sues Kowitz and Weiss (who pays £3.2
million in out-of-court settlement)
2018  Sotheby’s v. Kowitz court case; Kowitz sentenced to pay £4.5 million;
appeals
Where Now With Sotheby’s, pending Kowitz appeal
Top Value $11.3 million (paid by Richard Hedreen, 2011)

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 Ascribed to El Greco
St. Francis

Presumed Date c.1576

Owner Lino Frongia
Previously Bought at Parma antiques fair for €1,800 in 2005
Exhibited Casa dei Carraresi, Treviso (2015/16)
Experts For Former Italian culture secretary Vittorio Sgarbi; Ca’ Foscari University
professor emeritus Lionello Puppi; Prado curator Leticia Ruiz Gómez
Scientific Tests CSG Palladio (2016) supports authenticity (“no trace of modern binders or
pigments” and presence of “oily, orange-brown second layer—a technique
learned by El Greco in Venice”); Violaine de Villemereuil (Paris Court of
Appeal, 2017) refutes authenticity (“found a few irregularities, including the
presence of Naples yellow and “unusual granulometry of pigments”)
Legal History 2016 impounded in Italy by order of French magistrate Aude Buresi; seizure
declared null & void by Treviso Regional Court
Where Now With the French Judiciary
Top Value €500,000 (as insured, 2016)

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 Ascribed to Parmigianino
St. Jerome

Presumed Date c.1530

Owner Sotheby’s
Previously André Borie, Andrée Borie (1971), Giuliano Ruffini (1975), Lionel de Saint Donat-
Pourrières (2001), anonymous (2012)
Exhibited Galleria Nazionale, Parma (2003); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2003)
Scientific Tests Four tests between 2007–18, three that refute authenticity and one (by the
Louvre) that remains confidential. James Martin (commissioned by Sotheby’s)
finds synthetic pigment phthalocyanine green and declares painting a modern
forgery
Experts For Parisian art historian Mario di Giampaolo; honorary Louvre curator Sylvie
Béguin; University of Texas professor Mary Vaccaro; University of Parma
professor Elisabetta Fadda; curator Davide Gasparotto)
Experts Against University of Leicester professor David Ekserdjian (attribution to Michelangelo
Anselmi)
Legal History 2001 Giuliano Ruffini v. Lionel de Saint Donat-Pourrière (ownership
dispute)
2017 Sotheby’s sues Saint Donat-Pourrières in US district court for
refusing to return auction proceeds
2018 US district court orders Saint Donat-Pourrières to reimburse
Sotheby’s in full
Where Now With Sotheby’s
Top Value $842,500 at Sotheby’s New York in 2012 (sold as “Circle of Parmigianino”)

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sworn affidavit Wertheimer supplied to Ruffini’s lawyer.

There were other coincidences, too: Both the anonymous letter writer and Méthiaz
(in Facebook posts) evoke the devil and Al Capone in connection with Ruffini. Both
combine references to Al Capone with praise for Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, and both
use the verbose French phrase toutes proportions gardées (“relatively speaking”),
misspelled on each occasion.
Asked to respond to Ruffini’s allegation that he was the author of the poison-pen
letter, Méthiaz issued no denial but claimed that Ruffini had previously declared its
author to be Michael Tordjman. “Given all his rantings about me, what else can I say?”
Méthiaz added.
The identity of its author aside, the letter did raise one important question: Where
did a man like Ruffini get his hands on all these artworks—which, depending on whom
you ask, were either overlooked masterpieces or dubious fakes?
A trawl through Ruffini’s past suggests a remarkable story of a street-wise immi-
grant with a passion for art, women, and wheeling and dealing who has been compul-
sively scouring galleries, flea markets, and antique fairs for over half a century.

***

Ruffini was born in 1945 in a farmhouse 30 miles south of Parma but grew up in Paris,
where his father was a cobbler. In 1961, he fled with a girlfriend to Cannes, where he be-
gan to paint. His works caught the eye of singing legend Damia, who arranged a show
for him at Galerie du Colisée, off the Champs-Elysées, in 1964. It sold out.
Ruffini blew his windfall on the Riviera high life, then left to see the world—working
in Rome (painting furniture), Australia (as a cook), New Caledonia (as a newspaper car-
toonist), and the Ivory Coast (as artistic director for Inter Afrique Presse). He returned
to Europe in 1971 and opened an art gallery in Castelnovo ne’ Monti, near his birthplace.
On a trip to Paris, he visited La Brocanterie du Marais, an antiques gallery just off Place
des Vosges. Ruffini, then 26, and its 50-year-old owner, Andrée Borie, became lovers.
Borie was childless, twice divorced, and mourning the recent death of her father,
André Borie, who oversaw the construction of the Mont Blanc Tunnel. His obituary in Le
Monde dubbed him “rustic yet refined,” adding, “His level of culture took technocrats
by surprise.”
Borie had lined the walls of his Paris townhouse on upscale Avenue de Wagram
with pictures. Andrée’s elder sister, Georgette, inherited his Modern pieces; Andrée,
his Old Masters. She put some in her shop and consigned others for auction at the
city’s Hôtel Drouot. Ruffini contends that Borie also gave a few of them to him as gifts:
Six works from “la collection de Monsieur ANDRE BORIE” are recorded in a typewritten
list as ceded to Ruffini on April 4, 1973 (his 28th birthday).
Borie closed her gallery in December 1974. A year earlier, she and Ruffini had pur-
chased a 150-acre farm at Codena, near Ruffini’s birthplace in the Apennines. The
walls were festooned with Old Master pictures, some of them unsold stock. An early

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A young Giuliano Ruffini with his former girlfriend, art dealer Andrée Borie

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A list of six paintings ceded to Ruffini from

André Borie’s collection, gifted to him by his
daughter, Andrée Borie

client, Adelio Bertolazzi, recalls the youthful Ruffini as “kind and sensitive… he loved
art.” Bertolazzi described Andrée Borie as “very much in love with Giuliano and always
giving him presents.”
Bertolazzi still owns three works he acquired in Codena, including a Crucifixion he
bought as by the “circle of Guido Reni” but that appears to have served as the mod-
el for the Martyrdom of St Andrew painted by French artist Guillaume Courtois for
Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in Rome in 1668.
Andrée Borie died of a heart attack in March 1980. Partly for fiscal reasons and
partly due to his innate wanderlust, Ruffini went on to live in Florence, Rome, Madrid,
Paris, Brussels, and Malta, running a piano bar, giving karate lessons, and opening an
ice-cream parlor along the way. He gained access to the Madrid art scene through
a Spanish socialite he met. The Franco dictatorship had placed Spain off-limits to
the European art trade for decades, and, Ruffini says with a grin, “it was full of big
collections.”
He also befriended artist Lino Frongia, a graduate of the Parma Fine Art Academy.
Ruffini says he admired Frongia’s art-historical knowledge and painterly savvy and
would “seldom buy a painting without sending Lino a photo—he told me if it was a copy
or an original. He taught me a lot.”
The first public evidence of Ruffini’s own phenomenal eye came in early 1992, when
he bought a damaged Étude du Christ that Paris auctioneer Francis Briest had cata-
logued as “School of Correggio.” It came with a 1970s certificate by Roberto Salvini
(the onetime head of the Uffizi), which, being written in Italian, Briest appears not to

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Lino Frongia, an artist embroiled in the Ruffini affair

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have read. It asserted that Salvini had “no doubt” the painting was a youthful work by
Antonio da Correggio himself. The Museum of Correggio bought it from Ruffini for 350
million lire (€180,000) in 1997.

***

Apart from the Venus, the only work of importance that Méthiaz was actually involved
in selling was a David & Goliath on lapis lazuli entrusted to him by Ruffini as a “19th-cen-
tury copy” of larger versions of the subject by Orazio Gentileschi in Rome’s Galleria
Spada and Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. A contract signed by both Ruffini and Méthiaz,
which was reviewed by Artnet News, states that the painting should not be sold for less
than €2 million.
Méthiaz showed the work to Francesco Solinas, cocurator of a forthcoming Paris
exhibition devoted to Orazio’s daughter Artemisia. In a letter to a fellow curator, Solinas
wrote that he was enthralled by this “extraoWrdinary” picture, whose “assured, lengthy,
vigorous brushstrokes” had all the elegance and precision of a true Orazio Gentileschi.
A freshly discovered Gentileschi was sensational news. Mark Weiss was so im-
pressed he asked his Paris broker, Giammarco Cappuzzo, to arrange a meeting with
Méthiaz, whom Cappuzzo believed to be the work’s owner.
After agreeing with Weiss on a price of €3.6 million, Cappuzzo recalls, Méthiaz took
him aside and asked him “not to say anything about this to Giuliano Ruffini.” Cappuzzo
found the request “bizarre.” It wasn’t: According to Ruffini, Méthiaz later told him he’d
sold the Gentileschi for just €1.4 million. Ruffini, who should have received €2.88 mil-
lion (once Méthiaz had deducted his 20 percent commission), instead received €1.12
million. A copy of Ruffini’s bank statement shows The Art Factory transferred the sum
(in dollars) to his Monaco account on May 2.

***

Another ex-Ruffini work was caught up in the whirlwind that engulfed the art world af-
ter the Cranach seizure: a portrait of a young man that Ruffini had bought as “attribut-
ed to the workshop of Frans Hals” for €8,000 in 2000.
When Ruffini showed Portrait of a Man to specialists at Christie’s Paris in 2008, he
says, they proposed offering it for sale with a higher classification, “attributed to Frans
Hals,” and an estimate of $300,000. But its export was blocked by the French state,
which deemed the work a national treasure and offered the Louvre the chance to buy
it for €5 million.
While the Louvre was working to raise the funds, Ruffini—in need of cash, he says,
to build a palatial house for his beloved only son, Mathieu—sold the painting to Mark
Weiss for €3 million in a deal partially financed by hedge-fund manager David Kowitz.
When the Louvre failed to raise the €5 million, Weiss sold it via Sotheby’s to a company
owned by Seattle billionaire Richard Hedreen for $11.29 million.

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Six years after the sale, new developments cast the picture in a different light.
Sotheby’s had been alarmed to learn that both the Hals and the recently confiscated
Cranach had been owned by Ruffini. The auction house contacted Hedreen—one of
its biggest clients—and arranged for a technical inspection of the work by a forensic
laboratory in Massachusetts called Orion Analytical.
“Sotheby’s stands behind our authenticity guarantee and contractual obligation to
the buyer of a work, with the expectation that the seller stand behind their obligation
as well,” a representative from the auction house says.
Lab owner James Martin is best known for his work with postwar art, having helped
resolve a scandal that had embroiled New York’s venerable Knoedler Gallery a few
years earlier by identifying anachronisic pigments in purported Abstract Expressionist
paintings. (Domenico de Sole, the chairman of Sotheby’s board, reached an out-of-
court settlement with Knoedler over his purchase of a fake Rothko based in part on
Martin’s evidence.)
Martin discovered in the Hals plastic-coated air abrasive (colored with phthalo-
cyanine blue) and coarse agglomerates that contained titanium white—materials first
produced in the 20th century. The air abrasive, he said, likely was used to strip decora-
tive paint from the centuries-old wood panel for reuse, while he attributed the titanium
dioxide to dust in the studio where the fake was painted. His conclusion that the por-
trait must have been painted “after the mid-20th century” made the Louvre (which had
spent more than two years trying to buy it) look like a Mickey Mouse outfit.
Sotheby’s found Orion’s work on the Hals so satisfactory that, in December 2016, it
bought the company and made James Martin a director (later promoting him to chief
science officer).
The house also sued Weiss and Kowitz. Weiss—who maintains to this day that the
painting is authentic—agreed to pay £3.2 million in an out-of-court settlement. Kowitz
was ordered to pay Sotheby’s £4.5 million by the London High Court in December 2019,
although, when delivering the ruling, Justice Knowles insisted that his judgment was
based solely on the terms of the contract and “does not determine whether the paint-
ing is by Frans Hals…. It is to be hoped that its intrinsic qualities will not be ignored, and
that it might be enjoyed for what it is, which is a fine painting.”
It was refreshing to hear someone—significantly, someone not connected to the
art world—talk about a work of art in terms of its intrinsic quality rather than obsessing
over its commercial value and who exactly painted it. Beauty would be sacrificed on the
altar of scientific data throughout the Ruffini affair.
Justice Knowles was no doubt aware of the 147-page, 30,000-word report on the
Hals by German forensic scientist Erhard Jägers, commissioned by Mark Weiss and
submitted to the London High Court. (Its contents have not been made public until
now.)
In it, Jägers describes Martin’s findings as “fundamentally flawed.” He contends
that the areas on the painting where Martin found particles of phthalocyanine blue and
titanium white (including the top layer of varnish) were irrelevant to its authenticity.

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From left, Jean-Charles Méthiaz and Michael Tordjman with the Venus
at Weiss Gallery, London

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“It appears,” he wrote, that Martin “sought out areas of loss and damage which would
corroborate his views.”
Sotheby’s claims that Martin’s in-depth analysis was “peer reviewed and endorsed
by another leading independent scientist in the field.” Furthermore, a statement from
the auction house reads, the judge “accepted that Sotheby’s made a reasonable deter-
mination in deciding to rescind the sale on the basis of our assessment that the work
was not authentic” and “was quoted as stating that they were ‘satisfied that Mr. Martin
worked conscientiously and expertly, to a high professional standard and with profes-
sional integrity.’ ”
Jägers, for his part, thought it impossible for a modern forger to have created such a
“complex, multi-layered structure.” The portrait’s pigments were commonly used in the
17th century; dendrochronology suggested that the oak panel dated to 1588 or later.
Jägers also addressed the technical findings of a report on the Hals commissioned
from a technical expert by Aude Buresi. He disputed its claim that “lead soaps and their
protrusions can be accelerated artificially by means of heat.” On the contrary, asserted
Jägers, “such protrusions are a well-known feature of old works… a normal reaction
between oil and lead. If the panel had been artificially heated, I would have expected to
see more damage.”

***

Aude Buresi issued two European arrest warrants in 2019 calling for the extradition of
Frongia and Ruffini from Italy to France. They had no effect. On February 28, 2020, the
Bologna appeals court dismissed all nine of Buresi’s accusations against Frongia.
Breaking the media silence he has observed since his home was raided in 2016,
Frongia says he had expected the investigation to “blow over in a few weeks, once the
senselessness of the accusations had become clear.” He has maintained throughout
that it would be impossible for one artist to imitate so many masters so well. “To per-
fectly imitate just one artist would take a lifetime,” he tells Artnet News.
More than one year later, Buresi has yet to bring Ruffini and Frongia to court. Some
suspect the investigation will be quietly dropped after her term ends, later this year.
Ruffini, meanwhile, faces an investigation by Italian fiscal authorities, who suspect him
of owing tax on the income he derived from selling art between 2013 and 2017. (Ruffini
claims he is not liable for tax because he is a collector rather than a dealer and was
fiscally resident outside Italy for much of that period.)
In the end, of the €6.8 million generated by Ruffini’s Cranach and Gentileschi, he
received just €1.12 million. Five of the six paintings on the 1973 André Borie list have
been sold, for a total of €3.65 million—of which Ruffini has received €450,000. It is hard
to believe that a man of such supposedly mephistophelian cunning, accused of making
his fortune by peddling forgeries, could be such a lousy businessman (and so naive and
trusting in his dealings with others).
On July 2, 2020, Ruffini’s criminal lawyer addressed a blistering note to France’s

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public prosecutor accusing Buresi’s investigation of lacking objectivity and impartial-

ity, according “boundless and inexplicable credit” to an anonymous denunciation, and
failing to investigate Jean-Charles Méthiaz and Michael Tordjman over the sale of the
Cranach Venus.
“If the Cranach is indeed a fake,” he wrote, “Tordjman and Méthiaz are accomplices
to the criminal activity of which Ruffini stands accused. If it is authentic, they are swin-
dlers. Why have they not been asked to explain themselves?”
Through his lawyer, Tordjman has refused to offer any public comment. Méthiaz,
for his part, staunchly maintains he is neither accomplice nor swindler. “The only per-
son who could have helped the progress of investigations is Mr. Ruffini, who is perfect-
ly aware of what he is doing,” he says. “If there is any victim in this affair, it certainly isn’t
Ruffini. And I am not an accomplice to anything.”

***

Ruffini and Méthiaz, now in their mid-70s, have spent the pandemic lockdown in virtual
isolation at opposite ends of Italy: Ruffini with his son Mathieu in the rugged Apennine
Hills; Méthiaz with his dogs, Oscar and Gaston, amid the olive groves of Apulia.
Ruffini has been spending his time renovating; Méthiaz, posting lengthy diatribes
on Facebook. His favorite targets: French President Emmanuel Macron (“mad, danger-
ous”) and Joe Biden (“Creepy Joe and his government of Village People”).
When Ruffini and Méthiaz finally emerge blinking into the sunlight, it will be at high
noon on May 20, 2021, for a shoot-out in civil court over what, in another Facebook
post, Méthiaz has dubbed “l’escroquerie du siècle”: the crime of the century.

Simon Hewitt is the author of Leonardo da Vinci and

the Book of Doom (Unicorn, London 2019). A full-length,
abundantly illustrated version of his investigation into the
Ruffini affair will be published on artdependence.com.

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Data

Here’s What Really Happened

to the Art Market in 2020

By Julia Halperin Dive

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 89
Data Dive

How Much Fine Art Sold at

Auction in 2020?
Last year, $10.1 billion worth of fine art sold at auction—the lowest total in
more than a decade and roughly 24 percent less than in 2019.
Experts cite one major factor driving the drop: a lack of supply, par-
ticularly of trophy works. (If you had a $95 million Modigliani lying around,
would you sell it in the middle of a global pandemic?) The number of lots
offered at auction and the average price of a work sold both shrank around
15 percent as sellers kept their best material in storage and buyers flocked
to lower price points online.
But it wasn’t all bad news: Works that did hit the block were more likely
to sell than they have been in years. “There’s a tendency at a certain point
in a downturn for your sell-through rates to go up,” notes Michael Plummer,
cofounder of Artvest Partners. “It’s not necessarily the best inventory, but it’s
either unique or well priced or some combination of the two.”

Total Fine-Art Sales (USD) Number of Lots Sold

$15B 450,000

$10B 300,000

$5B 150,000

$0 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 0

©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

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Data Dive

Which Country’s Fine-Art

Auction Sales Were Hit Hardest
by the Pandemic?
China overtook the United States last year to once again become the largest
auction market in the world, amassing $3.4 billion in fine-art sales.
Two factors helped the Asian nation (narrowly) come out ahead. First,
it imposed the world’s most aggressive lockdown measures, enabling its
economy to recover more quickly than the West’s. (China was the only G20
economy to see its GDP grow last year.) The country consequently recorded
only a 0.1 percent dip in fine-art auction sales year over year, while the US
and the UK posted losses of around 35 percent.
Art-market demographics also favored China. The country minted
more than 250 billionaires in 2020—around five per week—bringing its total
to 878, according to wealth-tracker the Hurun Rich List. (The US is home to
around 650.) Still, our figures may say more about buyer behavior than actual
demand: Chinese collectors generally prefer to acquire at auction, while
American collectors are increasingly keen to transact privately.
Another bright spot in the global auction-sales landscape was Germany,
which posted a 3.2 percent gain in 2020. How? Unlike many countries,
Germany managed to keep the majority of its traditional auction schedule in-
tact throughout the year. German houses also began beefing up their online
infrastructure before the pandemic, so they were better prepared to adapt to
the lockdown than smaller houses in France and the UK.

Total Fine-Art Sales (USD) by Country ● China[artspace]● USA [artspace] ● UK [artspace] ● France [artspace] ● Germany

$8B

$6B

$4B

$2B

$0 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 91
Data Dive

How Much Did Online Sales

Grow at Top Auction Houses
Last Year?
If you want to know what hustle looks like, watch a top auction house
reshuffle its online-sales strategy in the midst of a global pandemic. The
numbers tell the story: Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips offloaded a
total of $1 billion worth of fine art in exclusively digital sales last year, up
a whopping 1,056 percent from 2019. The number of works sold over the
web also more than doubled, while the number of online-only auctions
almost tripled.
This trajectory held for online-only auction houses, too: Artnet
Auctions had the biggest year in its history, with sales up almost 30 per-
cent. “We expect this upward trend to continue apace,” says Colleen Cash,
VP of Artnet Auctions.
These results helped puncture the conventional wisdom that collec-
tors will only buy small-ticket items digitally. To wit: The underbidder for
the $84.6 million Francis Bacon triptych at Sotheby’s last summer was an
online bidder. More broadly, the average price of a work sold via web at the
Big Three houses rose a staggering 374 percent, from $10,910 to $51,706.
While the impossibility of holding in-person sales certainly supercharged
these upswings, the strong results and the new buying habits they point
to suggest we will see auction houses keep many, if not most, of their
bread-and-butter sales online-only after lockdown lifts—even when the
estimates are on the high end.

Online-Only Fine-Art Sales (USD) at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips

$1.25B

$1B

$750M

$500M

$250M

$0 2018 2019 2020

©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

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Data Dive

Which Continent Won the

Race for Market Share in
2020?
North America emerged from 2020 as the continent most damaged by the
lockdown, with total fine-art auction sales plummeting almost 35 percent.
Asia, on the other hand, managed to remain somewhat steady, posting a
barely noticeable decline of just 4 percent.
Why was Asia so adept at treading water? Not only did Eastern
auction houses return to business as somewhat usual more quickly than
those in Europe and the US, but sellers in Asia were also less spooked by
the disruption—especially in the highest price band. For the first time in
memory, Asia made more money from sales of works valued at over $10
million than any other continent. (Traditionally, North America corners the
market on such trophies.)
Most observers suspect this trend will not be permanent; the mas-
terpiece market could surge in North America as soon as daily life regains
equilibrium. But the next time major Western economies take a downturn,
art sellers would do well to remember how resilient Asia’s buyer base
proved to be in 2020.

Total Fine-Art Sales (USD) by Continent ● Asia[artspace]● Europe[artspace]● North America

$8B

$6B

$4B

$2B

$0 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 93
Data Dive

Which Auction House Came Out

on Top Last Year?
The Big Three auction houses all saw their fine-art sales totals drop sig-
nificantly last year. As salerooms around the world were forced to shutter
for months on end and houses had to rapidly reorient to selling the major-
ity of their wares online, hundreds of staff members were furloughed and
dozens were laid off.
The hardest hit was Christie’s, which had been slower than rival
Sotheby’s to build out its digital infrastructure in advance of the pandemic.
Christie’s saw its total sales nosedive by almost 40 percent, to $2.4 billion.
In its first full year under new owner Patrick Drahi, Sotheby’s came out on
top, with total sales of $2.7 billion, a decline of 28 percent year over year.
Phillips remained a distant third, accumulating $497 million in fine-art
auction sales courtesy of a comparatively modest year-over-year decline
of just under 19 percent.

Total Fine-Art Sales (USD) by Auction House ● Christie’s[artspace]● Sotheby’s[artspace]● Phillips

$6B

$4B

$2B

$0 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 94
Data Dive

What Genre Was the Most

Lucrative in 2020?
Compared with total sales in 2019, every genre but one underperformed in
2020. Postwar and contemporary art solidified its position as the juiciest
slice of the market, generating $3.5 billion in sales, down 27.3 percent year
over year. The Impressionist and Modern category came in second with $3
billion, a drop of 33.1 percent year over year. (The dip reflects the fact that
Imp-Mod traditionally offers the largest concentration of trophy lots, which
were even rarer commodities on the auction block this year.)
The fastest-growing piece of the pie was ultra-contemporary, our
classification for work by artists born after 1974. This segment saw its total
sales increase by a whopping 32.5 percent in 2020. It doesn’t hurt that ul-
tra-contemporary also has the lowest average price of any sector, as well
as the fastest-growing supply of desirable material.
Across the board, appetites remained healthy for the works that actu-
ally came to market. As auction houses fought for realistic estimates, the
sell-through rate was higher for each genre than it was in 2019.
A note on methodology: Our categories don’t always coincide with auction-house
ones. Because they were born before 1910, for example, Willem de Kooning and Francis
Bacon are included in our Modern category, even though they are usually offered in
postwar and contemporary sales at auction. These days, however, auction houses
seem to be collapsing traditional categories as well—so consider us trendsetters.

Total Fine-Art Sales (USD) by Genre Total Sales (USD) for Ultra-Contemporary
● Old Masters[artspace]● Impressionist & Modern
● Postwar & Contemporary $250M

$6B $200M

$150M
$4B

$100M

$2B
$50M

$0 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 $0 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation ©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 95
Data Dive

How Did Price Points Change in

Each Genre in 2020?
For both the Impressionist and Modern segment and the postwar and
contemporary category, the $1 million-to-$10 million price bracket was
the most lucrative in 2020. In the Old Masters and ultra-contemporary
sectors, the sweet spot was lower on the price scale: $100,000 to
$1 million.
Among all genres and price points, one of the most dramatic contrac-
tions came in the elite $10 million-and-up slice of the Imp-Mod market,
which shrank more than 40 percent. But observers noted that some
trophy lots in this category changed hands in private transactions. “People
are more concerned about the optics of things that would have seemed
easy or uneventful just a year ago,” notes Jeff Rabin, cofounder of Artvest.
“Big prices at big, splashy auctions—I don’t think Jeff Bezos will be doing
that publicly right now.”

Share of Total Sales (USD) by Price Bracket and Genre, 2020 ● $0–10K ● $10K–100K ● $100K–1M ● $1M–10M ● $10M+

Old Masters

Impressionist & Modern

Postwar, Contemporary, & Ultra-Contemporary

0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 96
Data Dive

How Much Fine Art Sold in Hong

Kong Last Year?
While the traditional sales calendar was less disrupted by the pandemic
in Hong Kong than in other market capitals, the city faced a crisis all its
own, brought on by the passage, in June 2020, of a sweeping new national
security law that made all forms of “subversion” of the state a crime. The
legislation has already resulted in the arrest of dozens of opposition fig-
ures, including some cultural leaders.
Last year, however, the crackdown had little impact on the city’s pub-
lic art market. Fine-art auction sales in Hong Kong downshifted a modest
14.7 percent, to $1.2 billion. Sources say the appetites of both local and
mainland Chinese collectors remained healthy throughout the year. Still,
some wonder how long the city can remain a truly international hub.
“It’s hard to imagine what kind of talent you can hire there, what kind
of millionaires are going to live there,” says one market player. “It is hard to
sustain a thriving art market in a totalitarian state.”

Total Fine-Art Sales (USD) in Hong Kong 

$1.5B

$1B

$0.5B

$0 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 97
Data Dive

Which Countries Produced

the Most Successful Artists at
Auction in 2020?
The Chinese came out ahead in our ranking of the 100 best-selling artists
under the hammer last year, accounting for 29 percent of the group. (In
particular, you can thank Zao Wou-Ki, Zhang Daqian, Qi Baishi, and Sanyu,
who claimed four of the top five spots.) American artists were close be-
hind, with a 27 percent share, while French artists took third place, with 15
percent. In a year when almost everything transformed, though, there was
still one constant: Pablo Picasso remained the most sought-after artist at
auction, accumulating $248.3 million in total sales.

Top 100 Artists by Nationality in 2020

Spanish Swiss
Scottish Canadian
Romanian British
Polish Belgian
Norwegian Argentine/Italian
Japanese American/French
Italian American/Dutch
Indian
German
French/Russian
French/Japanese

French American

Flemish

Dutch
Danish/French
Cuban
Colombian
Chinese/French

Chinese

©2021 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 98
Who Are the
Data Dive

Most
Bankable
Artists?

See the 10 best-selling artists in

each genre in 2020—and how the
list has changed from 2019.
Up from 2019[artspace] Down from 2019 [artspace] New to the top 10 since 2019[artspace] No change from 2019

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 99
Data Dive[artspace]Most Bankable Artists

European Old Masters

Jan Davidsz de Heem, A Banquet Still Life

Name Life Lots Sold Lots Offered Sell-Through Rate Total Sales

1 Rembrandt van Rijn 1606–69 368 503 73.2% $21,584,532

2 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1696–1770 16 22 72.7% $18,922,607

3 Peter Paul Rubens 1577–1640 11 13 84.6% $18,835,947

4 Andrea Mantegna 1431–1506 5 6 83.3% $11,691,965

5 Bernardo Bellotto 1721–80 10 14 71.4% $11,409,317

6 Canaletto 1697–1768 24 32 75.0% $11,231,291

7 Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky 1817–1900 14 16 87.5% $9,232,554

8 Lucas Cranach the Elder 1472–1553 16 22 72.7% $7,836,117

9 Jan Davidsz de Heem 1606–64 2 2 100% $7,613,099

10 David Teniers the Younger 1610–90 14 25 56% $5,830,751

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Data Dive[artspace]Most Bankable Artists

Impressionist & Modern

Francis Bacon, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981)

Name Life Lots Sold Lots Offered Sell-Through Rate Total Sales

1 Pablo Picasso 1881–1973 2,978 3,538 84.2% $248,259,402

2 Sanyu 1901–66 88 93 94.6% $178,762,545

3 Francis Bacon 1909–92 80 97 82.5% $107,375,679

4 René Magritte 1898–1967 68 82 82.9% $106,974,430

5 Alexander Calder 1898–1976 329 420 78.3% $76,879,367

6 Alberto Giacometti 1901–66 113 152 74.3% $70,295,715

7 Joan Miró 1893–1983 897 1,138 78.8% $62,174,186

8 Clyfford Still 1904–80 4 4 100% $55,868,716

9 Jean Dubuffet 1901–85 192 226 85% $47,860,894

10 Mark Rothko 1903–70 6 10 60% $40,747,500

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Data Dive[artspace]Most Bankable Artists

Postwar

Roy Lichtenstein, White Brushstroke I (1965)

Name Life Lots Sold Lots Offered Sell-Through Rate Total Sales

1 Zao Wou-Ki 1920–2013 346 397 87.2% $181,788,589

2 David Hockney b. 1937 440 480 91.7% $131,743,388

3 Andy Warhol 1928–87 1,174 1,481 79.3% $115,359,134

4 Gerhard Richter b. 1932 263 293 89.8% $104,375,554

5 Roy Lichtenstein 1923–97 379 454 83.5% $97,964,236

6 Joan Mitchell 1925–92 52 56 92.9% $70,926,202

7 Yayoi Kusama b. 1929 574 639 89.8% $68,426,126

8 Chu Teh-Chun 1920–2014 96 122 78.7% $59,022,818

9 Cy Twombly 1928–2011 53 62 85.5% $54,888,605

10 Ed Ruscha b. 1937 155 197 78.7% $46,567,003

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Data Dive[artspace]Most Bankable Artists

Contemporary

From left: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Portrait of A-One A.K.A. King (1982); RUBBER (1985)

Name Life Lots Sold Lots Offered Sell-Through Rate Total Sales

1 Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960–88 54 69 78.3% $117,281,045

2 Banksy b. 1974 790 905 87.3% $70,414,426

3 Yoshitomo Nara b. 1959 373 422 88.4% $70,216,940

4 George Condo b. 1957 125 141 88.7% $51,404,545

5 Zeng Fanzhi b. 1964 34 38 89.5% $40,739,942

6 Liu Ye b. 1964 78 82 95.1% $36,576,061

7 Zhou Chunya b. 1955 49 54 90.7% $34,594,484

8 Keith Haring 1958–90 381 475 80.2% $29,992,519

9 KAWS b. 1974 1,257 1,494 84.1% $29,039,441

10 Zhang Xiaogang b. 1958 45 70 64.3% $27,452,521

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Data Dive[artspace]Most Bankable Artists

Ultra-Contemporary

Jia Aili, February Story-Forever (Sea) (2006)

Name Life Lots Sold Lots Offered Sell-Through Rate Total Sales

1 Matthew Wong 1984–2019 23 23 100% $24,727,929

2 Adrian Ghenie b. 1977 19 24 79.2% $21,742,000

3 Eddie Martinez b. 1977 81 86 94.2% $17,467,218

4 Jia Aili b. 1979 9 9 100% $11,982,058

5 Dana Schutz b. 1976 21 23 91.3% $10,605,531

6 Jonas Wood b. 1977 108 129 83.7% $8,739,928

7 Amoako Boafo b. 1984 32 32 100% $8,246,317

8 Ayako Rokkaku b. 1982 82 82 100% $7,416,113

9 Nicolas Party b. 1980 50 58 86.2% $6,852,223

10 Huang Yuxing b. 1975 25 25 100% $6,262,538

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Methodology
This report reflects results from 532 auction houses worldwide from
January 1–December 31, 2020. To consider how 2020’s results stacked up
to previous years’, we compared them with worldwide auction sales from
2012 through 2019.
Artnet’s Fine Art and Design Database includes fine-art objects such
as paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures by artists ranging from
Old Masters to contemporary artists and beyond. The Decorative Art
Database contains antiques, antiquities, and collectibles. Both databases
include only items with low estimates of $500 and above.
Every lot included in the Artnet Price Database is verified against
auction catalogues or directly with the auction houses and then catego-
rized by a team of multilingual art history specialists to ensure the highest
level of accuracy and allow for detailed data analysis. We only include
Chinese auction houses that have been vetted by the China Association
of Auctioneers, a national association in China that is seeking to standard-
ize the auction industry. This report reflects the numbers in Artnet’s Price
Database as of February 2, 2021.
All sales prices are adjusted to include the buyer’s premium. Price
data from previous years has not been adjusted for inflation. All results
are logged in the currency native to the auction house where the sale took
place, then converted to US dollars based on the exchange rate on the day
of the sale.
We defined online-only sales as those held exclusively online with no
live bidders in attendance.
We defined artistic categories as follows: “European Old Masters”
covers European artists from any country born between 1250 and 1820;
“Old Masters” covers artists born between 1250 and 1820; “Impressionist
and Modern” concerns artists born in any country except China between
1821 and 1910; “postwar” concerns artists born in any country except China
between 1911 and 1944; “contemporary” covers artists born in any country
between 1945 and 1974; and “ultra-contemporary” covers artists born after
1974. To avoid anomalies, all genre breakdowns in the “Data Dive” section
and the Impressionist and Modern and postwar artistic categories exclude
Chinese artists (but include Chinese artists with dual nationalities).
Notes on geographic terms: Oceania covers auction houses located
in Australia and New Zealand. North America covers auction houses in the
US, Canada, and Mexico. China includes results from both the mainland
and Hong Kong.

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 105

Masthead
Artnet News

Editor-in-Chief ........................... Andrew Goldstein

Executive Editor and Editor of
Artnet Intelligence ....................... Julia Halperin
Art Business Editor and Deputy
Editor of Artnet Intelligence .......... Tim Schneider
Assistant Editor ........................... Caroline Goldstein
Contributors ............................... Kate Brown
Nate Freeman
Simon Hewitt
Eileen Kinsella

Artnet Price Database

Vice President, Operations ........... Ning Lu

Manager, Business Intelligence ..... Robert Cacharani
Senior Analyst, Business
Intelligence ................................. Michaela Ben Yehuda

Production

Designer ..................................... Other Means

Photo Editor ................................ Amanda Perez
Copy Editor ................................. Elizabeth Ungar

[logo][artspace]news[artspace]Intelligence Report 106

Image Credits
Front Cover People visit the teamLab SuperNature museum on October The Best Bad Painter Robert Nava Portrait © Matteo Mobilio, courtesy Pace
27, 2020 in Macao, China. Photo: Jiang Lingguang/VCG via Getty Images. Gallery; Robert Nava, Splash Cloud (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Pace;
Illustrations by Stefan Marx. Robert Nava, Safety Angel 1 (2021). © Robert Nava; Courtesy the artist and Vito
Schnabel Gallery; Robert Nava, Star Dust Angel (2020). © Robert Nava; Courtesy
Marketplace Alberto Giacometti, Femme Leoni (1958). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery; Robert Nava, Saturn Angel (2020). © Robert
What I Buy & Why Interior images of Karen Levy’s art-filled Paris apartment. Nava; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery; Robert Nava in his New York
All interiors courtesy of Karen Levy and DSLcollection; An installation by Lu Studio. Photo: Taylor Dafoe; Installation view of “Robert Nava” at Pace Gallery,
Yang presented by Société at Art Basel Hong Kong, 2019. © Art Basel. The Palm Beach. Courtesy of Pace Gallery; Robert Nava, Saturn Angel (2020). ©
Best-Seller List Phillips livestream auction in New York, October 2020. Photo: Robert Nava; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery; Robert Nava, Cloud
Thomas De Cruz Media: Haydon Perrior.; Ultra-Contemporary Adrian Ghenie, Rider Angel (2020). © Robert Nava; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gal-
Lidless Eye (2017). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Jia Aili, Blue Mountains (2010). Cour- lery; Robert Nava, Night Storm Angel (2020). © Robert Nava; Courtesy the artist
tesy of Yongle Auction House; Matthew Wong, River at Dusk (2018). Courtesy and Vito Schnabel Gallery. Sidebar Robert Nava, The Tunnel (2019). Courtesy of
of Phillips; Dana Schutz, Elevator (2017). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd. Phillips; Robert Nava, Anu Zord (Transformer) (2018). Courtesy of Phillips; Robert
Contemporary Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline Series, The Big Family No. 2 (1995). Nava, Maybe Metatron (2017). Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.; Robert Nava,
Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Zeng Fanzhi, Mask Series #6 (1996). Courtesy Venom Ride (2018). Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.; Robert Nava, Ejected
of Yongle Auction House; Yoshitomo Nara, Hothouse Doll (1995). Courtesy of Driver (2017). Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.; Robert Nava, Smoke Tint (2017).
Phillips; Banksy, Show Me the Monet (2005). Courtesy of Sotheby’s. Postwar Courtesy of Phillips; Robert Nava, Untitled (2019). Courtesy of Phillips; Robert
Brice Marden, Complements (2004–7). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.; David Nava, Untitled (2018). Courtesy of Phillips; Robert Nava, Untitled (2018). Courtesy
Hockney, Nichols Canyon (1980). Courtesy of Phillips; Cy Twombly, Untitled [Bol- of Wright Robert Nava, Untitled (don’t) (2018). Courtesy of Wright; Robert Nava,
sena] (1969). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild Untitled (2018). Courtesy of Phillips. Robert Nava, Night Storm Angel (2020). ©
(649-2) (1987). Courtesy of Sotheby’s. Photographs Ansel Adams, Half Dome, Robert Nava; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery; Robert Nava, Aster-
Merced River, Winter, Yosemite Valley (1938). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Matson oid Maker Angel (2020). © Robert Nava; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel
Jones, Untitled (1955). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Ansel Adams, The Gallery; Robert Nava, Volcanic Angel (2020). © Robert Nava; Courtesy the artist
Grand Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (1942). and Vito Schnabel Gallery; Robert Nava, Untitled (2020). © Robert Nava; Courte-
Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Thomas Struth, Louvre IV, Paris 1989 (1989–90). Cour- sy Pace Gallery; Robert Nava, The Tunnel (2019). Courtesy of Phillips; Installation
tesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd. Impressionist & Modern Clyfford Still, PH-144 view of “Robert Nava” at Pace Gallery, Palm Beach. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
(1947-Y-NO.1) (1947). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Barnett Newman, Onement V (1952).
Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Mark Rothko, Untitled (1967). Courtesy of Is This the Crime of the Century? Giuliano Ruffini in Emilie-Romagne near
Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Joan Miró, Peinture (Femme Au Chapeau Rouge) (1927). Parma, 2020. Photo: Baptiste Giroudon/Paris Match via Getty Images; The
Courtesy of Sotheby’s. European Old Masters Bernardo Bellotto, Dresden, a purported sale agreement for the Cranach, which Ruffini says he did not sign.
View of the Moat of the Zwinger. Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Rembrandt van Rijn, © Giuliano Ruffini; The legitimate sale agreement between Ruffini and Méthiaz,
Self-Portrait of the Artist, Half-Length, Wearing a Ruff and a Black Hat (1632). signed by Ruffini. © Giuliano Ruffini; Giuliano Ruffini in Emilie-Romagne near
Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Jan Davidsz de Heem, A Banquet Still Life. Courtesy of Parma, 2020. Photo: Baptiste Giroudon/Paris Match via Getty Images; Col-
Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Georges de La Tour, A Girl Blowing on a Brazier (1646). naghi’s stand at TEFAF in Maastricht, 2018. Courtesy of Tefaf. Photo: Natascha
Courtesy of Lempertz. Libbert; Ruffini’s secret laundry room with the oven authorities claimed he used
to bake Old Master forgeries. Courtesy of Giuliano Ruiffini; Ascribed to Lucas
Experience Art, Inc. teamLab, Forest of Resonating Lamps-One Stroke, Cranach the Elder, Venus With a Veil (c. 1531). Photo: Colnaghi Gallery; Ascribed
Metropolis (2018). Installation at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, teamLab to Orazio Gentileschi, David Gazing at the Head of Goliath (c. 1612); Ascribed to
“Borderless.” Courtesy of teamLab and Pace Gallery; Beyoncé’s Formation tour Frans Hals, Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1655). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Ascribed
in Miami, 2016. Courtesy of Es Devlin; Museum of Ice Cream flagship open- to El Greco, St. Francis (c. 1576); Ascribed to Parmigianino, St. Jerome (c. 1530).
ing in Soho, 2019. Photo: Cindy Ord, Getty Images for Museum of Ice Cream; Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Giuliano Ruffini with former girlfriend Andrée Borie. ©
Installation view of “Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Mirrors” at the Hirshhorn Museum & Giuliano Ruffini. List of six paintings ceded to Ruffini from the Collection of André
Sculpture Garden. Photo: Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images; Borie. © Giuliano Ruffini; Portrait of Lino Frongia © Lino Frongia; Jean-Charles
Artechouse, “Submerge” (2020). Courtesy of Artechouse NYC; teamLab, The Méthiaz and Michael Tordjman with the Cranach Venus at the Weiss Gallery,
Haze (2018). Installation at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, teamLab “Border- London. © The Weiss Gallery, London.
less.” Courtesy of teamLab and Pace Gallery; Installation view of Artechouse in
Miami, 2020. Courtesy of Artechouse; Artechouse, “Submerge” (2020). Courtesy Data Dive Pablo Picasso, Les femmes d’Alger (version ‘F’) (1955). Courtesy of
of Artechouse NYC; teamLab, Light Evaporating with People (2018). Installation Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Matthew Wong, Shangri-La (2017). Courtesy of Christie’s
at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, teamLab “Borderless.” Courtesy of teamLab Images, Ltd.; Wayne Thiebaud, Four Pinball Machines (1962). Courtesy of Chris-
and Pace Gallery; teamLab, Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance tie’s Images, Ltd.; Paul Cézanne, Nature morte avec pot au lait, melon et sucrier
of Koi and People - Infinity (2016–18). Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, (1900–06). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Peter Paul Rubens, The Virgin and
Sound: Hideaki Takahashi. Courtesy of teamLab and Pace Gallery; teamLab, Christ Child, with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist. Courtesy of Sotheby’s;
Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Sanyu, Quatre Nus (c. 1950’s). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Gerhard Richter, Abstrak-
Hour (2015). Interactive Digital Installation, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi. tes Bild (1987). Courtesy of Sotheby’s. Most Bankable Artists Jan Davidsz de
Courtesy of teamLab and Pace Gallery; Installation view, Random International, Heem, A Banquet Still Life. Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.; Francis Bacon,
“Rain Room” (2013) at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo:Timothy Clary/AFP via Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Roy
Getty Images; Artechouse, “Submerge” (2020). Courtesy of Artechouse NYC; Lichtenstein, White Brushstroke I (1965). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Jean-Michel
Marpi, New Nature at Artechouse Washington, DC (2018). Photo: Daniel Garcia; Basquiat, Portrait of A-One A.K.A. King (1982). Courtesy of Phillips; Jean-Michel
teamLab, Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where People Gather (2018). Basquiat, RUBBER (1985). Courtesy of Sotheby’s; Jia Aili, February Story-Forever
Installation at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, teamLab “Borderless.” Courtesy (Sea) (2006). Courtesy of Poly International Auction.
of teamLab and Pace Gallery; teamLab, Proliferating Immense Life - A Whole
Year per Year (2020). Installation at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, teamLab
“Borderless.” Courtesy of teamLab and Pace Gallery; Experiential Art Center
in Miami, Façade Rendering courtesy of Superblue. Photo: Moris Moreno;
teamLab, Universe of Water Particles on a Rock where People Gather (2018).
Installation at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, teamLab “Borderless.” Courtesy
of teamLab and Pace Gallery. Illustrations by Stefan Marx.

Rise of the Cyborg Art Dealers Visitors at Lisson Gallery’s booth at Frieze
London, May 2020. Photo: Linda Nylind for Frieze; Brigitte Kowanz presented
by Galerie Krinzinger at Art Basel in Miami Beach, 2017. © Art Basel; Tom Burr,
Bent Booze (2008) at The Upstairs, Bortolami Gallery, New York. Image courtesy
the artist and Bortolami, New York. Photo: Kristian Laudrup; ARTERNAL founder
Sean Green with Faith Wilding, Euronyme & Ophion, (1977-78) at Anat Ebgi Gal-
lery. Photo: Greyson Tarantino; Phillips London, July 2020 livestream auctions.
Photo: Thomas De Cruz. Media: Haydon Perrior. Courtesy of Phillips; TEFAF
Maastricht 2019. Photo: Loraine Bodewes. Courtesy of TEFAF; An appraiser vet-
ting artworks at TEFAF in Maastricht, 2019. Photo: Loraine Bodewes. Courtesy
of TEFAF; Denzil Forrester in conversation with Victor Wang, at Frieze Live in
London, October 2020. Photo: Deniz Guzel. Courtesy of Deniz Guzel/Frieze;
Visitors in Peres Projects booth at EXPO Chicago, September 2019. Photo: Kevin
Serna, courtesy of Expo Chicago.

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