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Faith and Culture:
Art, Bar of Soap $18,000
June 19, 2005
Source:
Bar of soap sells for ,000 at frenzied Art Basel
Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:25 AM ET
By Stella Dawson
BASEL, Switzerland (Reuters) - Perhaps the oddest piece of work at Art Basel is a bar of soap, displayed on a square of black velvet, purportedly made from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's fat, removed during liposuction.
Gianni Monti's work called 'Clean Hands' -- the title is a play on the name of an anti-Mafia group -- sold in less than an hour for fifteen thousand euros (eighteen thousand dollars) to a private Swiss collector, according to Monti's Galerie Nicola von Senger of Zurich.
The work from the Swiss-based Italian has shock value with a twist, but Monti is not alone reveling in super-charged sales this week at Art Basel, the world's largest annual art fair where 275 dealers in modern and contemporary art display their wares making it a mecca for over fifty-thousand collectors and curators.
Prices are soaring for star-quality artists, topping levels charged for the old masters in a market that has an estimated twenty-billion dollars annual turnover, making veteran art experts wonder if this feeding frenzy can really last.
Cellphones clamped to their ears, clutching lists, buyers clad in high-fashion gear dash from booth to booth. They exchange prices in the clipped shorthand of a seasoned trader.
"Six-eight for that? Or two at 20?" said one, pointing from a Donald Judd minimalist sculpture to photographs. Nothing sells here with less than three zeros added to the price.
Like Internet stocks, bonds, real estate and commodities before it, contemporary art today is luring the type of glitzy investment where anything that sniffs of a potential blockbuster is flying off the walls.
"People with spare cash don't know where to put their money. When the bond market fizzled earlier this year, I started getting a lot more interest from wealthy clients," said Arthur Solway, director at James Cohan Gallery in New York.
His booth was packed at Art Basel. Filmmaker Wim Wenders' work "The Road to Emmaus near Jerusalem," a giant photograph 176 inches long, richly rendered in the deep browns and ochres like an old oil painting, had sold all three available from its edition of six at thirty-six thousand dollars each two hours after first viewing.
Buyers were lining up for Bill Viola's video wall installation "The Lovers," a balletic embrace of two people clinging for survival in a torrent of water. At one-hundred-eighty-thousand dollars per piece from an edition of 12, the price is roughly 80 percent higher than Viola's work would fetch four years ago, at a time when he already was a huge art star.
"The avariciousness of buyers and the bidding up of works of art is happening in quite a bizarre way," said Bruce Wolmar, editor of Art and Auction magazine, at a panel discussion.
So hot is the market that investment vehicles, such as The Fine Art Fund in London and American Art Fund, have got into the swing and about six art funds plan to launch this year.
No wonder when super-stars like Jeff Koons, who constructed the gigantic but endearing puppy of flowers that sits outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao, saw a top auction price of 8,500 before 1999. Since then, 15 Koons have been auctioned for over million and one piece for .5 million, according to ARTnews magazine.
"Art is probably at the moment in a bubble," agreed Karl Schweizer, managing director of UBS's art banking department and a sponsor of Art Basel.
NOUVEAU RICHE
Unless the stock market crashes and washes out smaller time players, though, he expects demand to remain strong. Schweizer sees a growing elite of wealthy entrepreneurs and corporate executives, particularly from the United States and emerging Asia, who have accumulated fortunes, have few family obligations, have several homes and want to invest in art.
Not only do they buy for pleasure, they buy status.
"Art plays a role of social acceptance. You like it, but you also want to expose your personal environment to others. This creates a situation where there is an ongoing demand for good quality work to fulfil their dreams and their level of social acceptance," said Schweizer, whose bank has seen a steady increase in demand since it began art services in 1998.
The huge prices are making some industry experts nervous.
"A lot of people who are spending a lot of money will be left with a lot of stinkers, unless they flip them very quickly," said Wolmar.
Schweizer said he has advised some UBS clients this year to stay on the sidelines because some prices appear inflated.
For Richard Flood, chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the frenzy means museums can no longer afford works of living artists.
"When contemporary art is leaping in price over historical materials, you know you have a problem out there," he said. Continued ...
Still, for an art lover wandering the aisles of Art Basel there is the chance to stumble upon a touchingly intimate 1937 Picasso pen drawing for forty-two-thousand dollars , confront the harsh steel bulks of a Richard Serra sculpture and then encounter some whimsical new work from an artist you may never have known before.
This sheer range and quality of work at Art Basel, along with a lively program of lectures, film and performances, provide an antidote for those concerned that the mix of brazen commerce and high culture dilutes quality and meaning of art.
For Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, it is this very frisson that can be energizing.
"Great artists always lead us to extraordinary experiences, and I think that is still what we always have to look for, and it is still happening," said Obrist.
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