Youssef Nabil @Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 color photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the main gallery space and back alcove. All of the works are hand colored gelatin silver prints, made between 1993 and 2010. Sizes range from roughly 15×10 (in editions of 10+2AP), to 20×29 (in editions of 5+1AP), and finally to 45×30 (in editions of 3+1AP). This is Nabil’s first solo show in New York. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In a time when many contemporary photographs are starting to look strangely alike in their perfect color sharpness, Youssef Nabil’s images have a signature aesthetic that is unmistakably original. His black and white pictures have been tinted and cleaned up, hand colored in soft pastel tones that create an idealized air of mystery and nostalgia.
The largest images in this show echo decades old Egyptian movie posters, where glamorous men and women lounge in exotic cinematic elegance. Women with marbled hair and red lips play cards and drink cocktails, a man in fez holds a rose, and a woman lies on the floor next to a ceramic cheetah. The scenes are both dreamily lethargic and highly charged. Amani by Window is a beguiling portrait of a young woman in a sparkling red wrap staged against a light blue background, and was my favorite image in the exhibit.
Nabil has also applied this hand crafted mix of photography and painting to head shot portraits of celebrities and artists (like Catherine Deneuve and Rossy de Palma) and to self portraits. Seen from behind as only a bare torso and head, Nabil places himself in front of a pyramid, the beach in Rio, the Hollywood sign, and the sunny shores of Istanbul. These pictures mix an old-fashioned aesthetic with a modern looking man, playing with a sense of romantic, unreal, post-card timelessness.
What I like best here is that Nabil has mixed a discarded process with unexpected subject matter and thereby created something entirely fresh and distinctive. With the renewed interest in artistic voices from the Middle East, Nabil seems well positioned to take us somewhere new.
Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The smaller 15×10 prints start at $5400 and extend all the way up to $40400. The 20×29 and 45×30 prints are $32000 each. Nabil’s work as begun to enter the secondary markets in recent years, both in Photographs auctions as well as in sales of Contemporary Arab Art. Prices have ranged between roughly $5000 and $30000.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Feature: Photo Booth (here)
  • Book: I Won’t Let You Die, published by Hatje Cantz (here)
Through December 23rd
525 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers @Sonnabend

JTF (just the facts): A total of 26 single image black and white photographs and 6 black and white typologies, individually framed in white and matted, and hung in the entry gallery and two of the rooms in the rear. All of the single image works are gelatin silver prints in editions of 5, made between 1978 and 1995 in New York city (while no dimensions were given, I believe these works are roughly 24×20). There are five 9-image typologies and one 15-image typology, again consisting of gelatin silver prints, made between 1972 and 2009 (the individual prints in these works appear to be roughly 20×16); the combinations in the typologies are never repeated, so they are all unique works. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Grids of water towers by the Bechers have become so common that it’s pretty hard to visit a major contemporary art museum and not bump into one. With such universal acclaim and ubiquitous display, it seems altogether possible that these works would somehow become overexposed, losing their visual power due to sheer repetition. And yet, their cool conceptualism and crisp execution keep them startlingly fresh; they never fail to stand out in a crowd.

My first reaction when I heard about this show was: what more can Sonnabend have to say about the revolutionary Becher water towers? Haven’t they been completely covered already? And one of the back rooms of the show does provide a sampler of familiar typologies, the kind of work we have come to know and love: groups of bulb towers, concrete cylinders, towers with geometric bases or ones that open upward like funnels, some striped with vertical lines, all arrayed in rigid grids to highlight their architectural variations.

But what is both surprising and exciting are the other images that make up most of the show: iconic New York rooftop water tanks. I had never seen these pictures before; it’s like the Bechers have made a conceptual valentine to the city. In each image, a single cone-topped wood barrel tank sits centered on some kind of iron mounting or platform. The cylindrical banded barrels are generally the same, except for the finials on the top that distinguish the two main manufacturers. But the Bechers theme and variation style finds hundreds of small details worth noting: tubes that run down the sides or from the bottom, arched ladders, brick backgrounds, sculptural frameworks of girders that hold the tanks in the air, patterns and geometries in the angles of bases. In nearly every picture, the dark black form of the tank looms against the white sky of the city, often with a contextual frame of surrounding buildings.

For the Bechers, these tanks are likely just another piece of vernacular industrial architecture to be codified and preserved, another form to be documented and explored. But I think local New Yorkers will find much more to connect with in these pictures. They combine both the exacting standards of the Bechers artistic vision with a tiny twinge of nostalgia for something authentic and original to this city, overlooked subject matter that is deep in the fabric of this particular, crazy place.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The single image water towers from New York are $25000 each. The 9-image typologies are $117000 and the 15-image typology is $195000. The Bechers‘ work is consistently available at auction, with prices for single images ranging from $3000 to $34000 in recent years; typologies (including diptychs of two images as well as much larger groups) have ranged between $23000 to $176000. We continue to covet images by the Bechers for the city/industrial genre of our collection; what we’d really like to find is one of the smaller, earlier diptychs (with one large image on one side and a grid of nine smaller images as one on the other), but both locating such a piece and then having it be the right price (for us) have so far been elusive. But we keep looking.
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

  • Museum Collections: Met (here), Getty (here), Guggenheim (here), Walker (here)
  • Feature: Tate (here)
  • Interview: Art in Amercia, 2002 (here)
Through December

Sonnabend Gallery (artnet page here)
536 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Auction Preview: Photographies, November 19, 2010 @Sotheby’s Paris

Sotheby’s Paris has put together a strong various owner photographs sale to coincide with this year’s Paris Photo. The auction of primarily vintage material is anchored by a deep selection of works by Edward Weston and Tina Modotti from their years in Mexico. (The prints come from the collection of Anita Brenner, who sat for the stunning nudes on offer.) There are also solid groups of images by Eugène Atget and Heinz Hajek–Halke, as well as standout vintage prints by Gustave Le Gray, Richard Avedon, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Overall, there are a total of 152 lots on offer, with a Total High Estimate of 3228300€.

Here’s the breakdown:
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Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including 7500€): 39
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 223300€

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between 7500€ and 35000€): 98
Total Mid Estimate: 1605000€

Total High Lots (high estimate above 35000€): 15
Total High Estimate: 1400000€
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The top lot by High estimate is lot 41, Edward Weston, Nu (Anita Brenner), 1925, at 150000-200000€. (Image at right, top, via Sotheby’s.)

Here is a short list of the photographers who are represented by five or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Edward Weston (23)

Eugène Atget (15)
Heinz Hajek–Halke (12)
Irving Penn (8)
Tina Modotti (7)
Josef Sudek (7)
André Kertész (5)
Heinrich Kühn (5)
Since we are flower collectors, we are particularly interested by lot 63, Karl Blossfeldt, Bullota Ruperstris, c1920 (image at right, bottom, via Sotheby’s). While we already own one image by Blossfeldt, his work does not come up at auction very often, so we are always keen to check out those prints that do surface from time to time.
The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.
November 19th
76, Rue Du Faubourg Saint-Honoré
75008 Paris

Auction Preview: Photographs, November 16, 2010 @Bonhams London

Following up on its New York Photographs sale last week, Bonhams has another Photographs auction scheduled for London next week. The sale includes mostly lower end material, with a solid helping of British photography. Overall, there are a total of 150 lots on offer, with a Total High Estimate of £477000.

Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including £5000): 130
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £285000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 19
Total Mid Estimate: £162000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 1
Total High Estimate: £30000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 43, Frantisek Drtikol, Nude Study, 1927, at £25000-30000. (Image at right, top, via Bonhams.)

Here is the list of the photographers who are represented by four or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Willy Ronis (15)

Brassaï (6)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (6)
Peter Henry Emerson (5)
Wolfgang Suschitzky (5)
Mario Giacomelli (4)
Horst P. Horst (4)
Angus McBean (4)
Sebastião Salgado (4)
Jürgen Schadenberg (4)
Jock Sturges (4)
André Villers (4)
Since we have a collection of vintage Brandt nudes, we would likely be interested in lot 77, Bill Brandt, St. John’s Wood, London, 1958. (Image at right, bottom, via Bonhams.)
The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.
Photographs
November 16th
101 New Bond Street
London W1S 1SR

Marco Breuer, Nature of the Pencil @Von Lintel

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 works, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the single room gallery. The gallery space has been painted with a thick band of dark grey chalkboard paint. The prints have been hung against this background, and Breuer has added (and subsequently erased in some cases) various notations in chalk. A pair of photocopied images have also been taped to the wall. The unique chromogenic prints come in various sizes, from roughly 9×7 to 24×20, and were all made in 2009 or 2010. (Installation shots at right, via Von Lintel.)
Comments/Context: Marco Breuer’s last show at Von Lintel (roughly a year and a half ago, here) was hung in a generally conventional manner: framed images were placed at eye level against the white walls of the gallery. The installation focused the viewer’s attention on the finished product, object quality of the artworks, and on the underlying physical processes that were used to create their abstract colors and patterns.
Fast forward to Breuer’s newest show, and something altogether different is going on. The artist is still hard at work in the darkroom, taking light sensitive papers and experimenting with a dizzying array of loosely controlled scrapes, scratches, and cuts, searching for new visual outcomes. What’s new this time around is that Breuer has installed the recent pictures in a way that invites us into his brain, to watch as he improvises and iterates on ideas. In many ways, it is almost an exhibition of the remnants of a cerebral performance piece more than it is an exhibition of photographs.
Each image or set of images has a series of cryptic annotations written in chalk near the framed works. The analytical, puzzle solver in me felt challenged to figure out what each one meant. Were they dimensions? Or commentary? Or symbolic references? 4.6.6 is scrawled above one of the pastel, geometric abstractions. I stood for a few moments before I figured it out: 4 lines, 6 colors, 6 shapes. Under a spider web of scratchings are images of a light bulbs with strike through slashes. Aha, these works were made by scratching the paper with a piece of glass, trying to find the approximate center of the paper, completely in the dark. As you walk around the room, there is a distinct sense of intellectual art in progress, of process being figured out along the way, with a little help from both chance and craft.
I found the images of vibrant blue and yellow, almost like folded, interrupted waves across the surface of the paper, to be the most visually compelling; they really stick out from far away. The others require a more intimate look: tiny lines that shuttle and wiggle across the image as though they were raked by an array of manic seismograph needles. What I liked best, however, was the exposition of Breuer’s thoughts, the ability to see how he makes aesthetic connections. The unconventional installation gives the artworks a more personal grounding and backstory, opening up an unusual opportunity for the viewer to appreciate the thinking that has gone on.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $5900 and $12500, based on size. (In fact, I was told that there is a mathematical equation for pricing, based on a price per square inch.) Breuer’s work has very little secondary market history, gallery retail remains the best option for collectors interested in following up.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Review: New Yorker (here)
  • Upcoming Talk @SVA, November 16th (here)
  • Exhibition: New Pictures 2 @Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2010 (here)
Marco Breuer, Nature of the Pencil
Through December 4th
Von Lintel Gallery
520 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

Auction Results: Photographs, November 3, 2010 @Phillips London

The results for Phillips’ recent various owner photographs sale in London generally met expectations. While the Total Sale Proceeds fell at the low end of the range, they did cover the low estimate, even with an overall Buy-In rate just under 45%. Irving Penn’s images of the hands of Miles Davis once again proved to be enticing for buyers, the lot here (see below) more than tripling its pre-sale high estimate; a variant image from the same series performed similarly well at Christie’s last month.
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The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):
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Total Lots: 192
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £1092900
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £1552600
Total Lots Sold: 106
Total Lots Bought In: 86
Buy In %: 44.79%
Total Sale Proceeds: £1143863
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Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 106
Low Sold: 47
Low Bought In: 59
Buy In %: 55.66%
Total Low Estimate: £351100
Total Low Sold: £156563
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Mid Total Lots: 72
Mid Sold: 49
Mid Bought In: 23
Buy In %: 31.94%
Total Mid Estimate: £656500
Total Mid Sold: £522100
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High Total Lots: 14
High Sold: 10
High Bought In: 4
Buy In %: 28.57%
Total High Estimate: £545000
Total High Sold: £465200
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The top lot by High estimate was lot 115, Edward Steichen, Charlie Chaplin, 1925, at £50000-70000; it did not sell. The top outcome of the sale was lot 121, Irving Penn, The Hand of Miles Davis (B), New York, 1986/1992, at £99650. (Image at right, middle, via Phillips.)

93.40% of the lots that sold had proceeds above or in the estimate range. There were a total of six surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):
Lot 23, Herb Ritts, Sand Breasts, Hawaii, 1988, at £8125

Lot 41, Werner Bischof, Courtyard of the Meiji Temple, Tokyo, 1951/Later, at £5750
Lot 81, Frank Thiel, Stadt 2/41 (Berlin), 1999/2002, at £32450 (image at right, top, via Phillips)
Lot 102, Peter Beard, Maureen Gallagher and a night feeder at Hog Ranch, February, 1987/Later, at £79250 (image at right, bottom, via Phillips)
Lot 121, Irving Penn, The Hand of Miles Davis (B), New York, 1986/1992, at £99650
Lot 186, Iwao Yamawaki, Untitled, 1932, at £9375
Complete lot by lot results can be found here.
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Tina Barney, Players @Janet Borden

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 large scale color works, generally framed in black and not matted, and hung against pink and white walls in the main gallery space. All of the works are chromogenic color prints and were made between 1998 and 2010. Barney’s prints come in two sizes: 30×40, in editions of 5, and 48×60, in editions of 10; there are 10 images in the large size and 1 image in the small size on display. A monograph of this body of work is should be available from Steidl soon (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In the past decade, Tina Barney has spent much of her time making commissioned work, doing magazine shoots, fashion editorials, family portraits and other commercial assignments, in short, applying the special “Tina Barney look” to a spectrum of different subjects. This show gathers together examples from a multitude of recent projects, loosely tying together images of actors and actresses at work, celebrities, fashion models, and various other staged scenes into a broader exploration of the ideas of drama, artifice and theatrical role playing.
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The best of the works on view here recreate some of the same tension and intensity found in her portraits of her own family, and leverage many of her trademark compositional and aesthetic approaches: the subtle gestures and expressions that tell complex quirky stories, the layered insights to be found in furnishings and environments, the psychology of interaction, and the importance of rituals and traditions. Leo Castelli and his young wife (holding a black cat) pose in their modern living room, surrounded by art that echoes the sweep of her hair. A staged family portrait includes a defiant daughter in a white prom dress holding a snake, a bored brother, and a delusionally proud mother, all set among a floral couch and grandfather clock. A daughter carefully applies bright red lipstick in a mirror while her perfectly-coiffed mother (also dressed in black) looks on in boredom. They are classic examples of multi-generational, nuanced moments of Tina Barney insight.
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The images of actors and fashion models at work have a little less emotional punch; the play acting is more overt and the scenes are less tiered and layered with information. An up-close image of two women from The Wooster Group is the most bold and unsettling of the group – a female face adorned with devil horns, arched eyebrow makeup and a mess of lipstick is perfectly jolting and creepy. Rock star Michael Stipe sits on a leather couch with a dog on his lap, squinting at his glasses held in his outstretched arms, with the black molding on the wall behind him running right through his head – it’s an odd, out-take kind of moment that somehow coalesces into something more. I think the staged fashion shots are the least successful: beautiful facades, yes, but generally hollow of meaning or tension. They are almost like caricatures in their moody seriousness.
With these pictures, Barney has taken the artistic methods she developed by looking inward at her own immediate family and applied them by looking outward at strangers playing at roles. Is the conclusion that we are all “playing”, all the time? By mixing these various genres and projects together as one intermingled whole, she has made a compelling case that the lines get quite a bit blurrier than we might like to believe.
Collector’s POV: The works in this show have two prices: the larger 48×60 prints are $30000 each and the smaller 30×40 prints are $20000 each. Given Barney’s long and successful career, the secondary market for her work is surprisingly thin. Only a few prints seem to change hands at auction in any given year, with prices ranging from $3000 to $42000; the collectors and institutions that bought her work years ago seem to be happily holding on to it. As such, gallery retail is likely the best (and only) option for those who want to follow up.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • 2010 Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture (here)
  • Interview: BOMB, 1995 (here)
  • Review: Wall Street Journal (here, scroll down), NY Times, 2007 (here)
Tina Barney, Players
Through December 18th
Janet Borden, Inc.
560 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

Auction Preview: Photographies Modernes et Contemporaines, November 9, 2010 @Yann Le Mouel

Yann Le Mouel kicks off the Paris auction season for photographs tomorrow with its various owner sale. As usual, the material is mostly French/European and nearly all at the lower end of the market. Overall, there are a total of 250 lots on offer, with a Total High Estimate of 464130€.

Here’s the breakdown:
Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including 7500€): 245
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 401130€
Total Mid Lots (high estimate between 7500€ and 35000€): 5
Total Mid Estimate: 63000€
Total High Lots (high estimate above 35000€): 0
Total High Estimate: NA
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The top lot by High estimate is tied between three lots, all at 10000-15000€: lot 91, Andreas Feininger, The Photojournalist, 1955, lot 214, Kimiko Yoshida, La Mariée abelam au masque d’initiation baba, East Sepik, Papouasie–Nouvelle–Guinée, Autoportrait, 2005, (image at right, bottom, via Yann Le Mouel) and lot 226, Peter Lindbergh, Naomi Campbell, Vogue US, Los Angeles, USA, 1990 (image at right, top, via Yann Le Mouel).
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Here is a short list of the photographers who are represented by four or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):
Robert Doisneau (16)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (9)
Andre Kertesz (8)
Izis (7)
Rene-Jacques (7)

David Bailey (6)
Elliott Eriwtt (5)

Francois Kollar (5)
Willy Ronis (5)
Nicolas Yantchevsky (5)
Edouard Boubat (4)
Raoul Hausmann (4)
The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.
Photographies Modernes et Contemporaines
November 9st
22, Rue Chauchat
75009 Paris

Kim Joon, Fragile @Sundaram Tagore

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 large scale color works, each face mounted to Plexiglas and unframed, and hung in the two entry areas, the main gallery space, and a smaller back room. All of the prints are digital chromogenic prints, in editions of 5 or 8. The works range in size from 35×21 to 83×47 (or reverse), and were made between 2008 and 2010. A thin catalogue of the exhibit is available from the gallery. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Korean photographer/artist Kim Joon’s eye-catching images venture into the unexplored edges of what we call photography, looking for wholly original aesthetics that go beyond the boundaries imposed by the use of a camera. Using the powerful digital tools found in computer labs and animation studios, Kim has pushed the nude figure somewhere unexpected, morphing it into an undulating, intertwined foundation for intense decoration and patterning.
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I think Kim’s work brings forward many of the same underlying ideas and questions that were raised by Thomas Ruff’s show at David Zwirner earlier this spring (here), albeit with an entirely different visual output. While Ruff made images of abstract mathematical equations, he too was working inside the realm of the computer, extending his visual vocabulary into uncharted white spaces. Kim has taken the freedom generated by the technology and used it to re-imagine human bodies, covering them with a heady mix of colorful Asian and Western iconography, like tattoos or body paint. Rendered in 3D and then “skinned” with his choice of coverings, the bodies become an impossible tangle of male and female limbs, a theme and variation exercise in repetition and geometry, with stylized fish, cats and birds mixing with corporate logos (Donald Duck, Mini Cooper and Honda).
Kim’s newest works trade the look and feel of human skin for the alabaster shine of fine porcelain. Bodies have been broken open, revealing hollow insides like headless figurines. Traditional china patterns from Villeroy & Boch, Limoges and Royal Copenhagen cover the cropped torsos and echo across nearby plates and saucers. Floral designs with gold leaf edges and blue and white butterflies wander across clusters of fallen bodies.
I think an overly simple reading of Kim’s work would be to highlight the clash of cultures that can be found a great deal of contemporary Asian art today and conclude that he too is working this same set of “East meets West” ideas, albeit in a more boldly colorful manner, printed big and glossy to attract a certain kind of collector. When I look at these works, however, I am more interested in where his compositional explorations might be taking us, and how to better interpret his computer-generated visual innovation. We’re a long way from clumsy appropriation and photocollage – in fact, we’re somewhere entirely new, with inherently different risks and challenges for those who employ these revolutionary tools. Do it “wrong” and it’s a throwaway gimmick, do it “right” and it breaks all the rules.
To my eye, while not every one of the works in this show hits the mark, there are certainly moments when the swirl of bodies or the arrangements of china are wonderfully woven together. Give them the backhanded compliment of “decorative” if you must, but when these interlaced forms/patterns find just the right balance of fluidity and refinement, there is something here that we haven’t seen anywhere before.
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Collector’s POV: The works in this show are generally priced by size, with the smallest images at $7000 or $10000, and the largest either $23000 or $25000, with a number of intermediate sizes and prices. Kim’s work has recently become more consistently available in the secondary markets for photography, particularly in the past year or two. Prices at auction have ranged between $5000 and $16000.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Interview: Art Radar Aisa (here)
  • Feature: CNN (here)
Through November 13th
547 West 47th Street
New York, NY 10001

Taryn Simon: Contraband @Lever House

JTF (just the facts): A total of 1075 color photographs, mounted on archival paper, and hung in Plexiglas frames on three, two-sided walls in the single room lobby space. Each of the individual images is sized roughly 6×6. They are then grouped by subject matter onto 16 panels, each 95×71. All of the works were taken in 2009 and printed in 2010. A complete monograph of this project was recently published by Steidl (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Taryn Simon’s approach to photography mixes a deadpan documentary style with an undercurrent of cerebral, conceptual ideas that tests the limits of what a photograph can see and communicate. In previous projects, she has photographed people wrongly convicted of crimes at the scenes of their undoing, and made images of objects that have a hidden or indecipherable purpose. In her newest work, she spent five days in the bowels of JFK airport, taking pictures of all the items that were confiscated from passengers and express mail packages. The result is a taxonomy of contraband, a snapshot catalogue of all of the things that fall outside the approved and acceptable.
In this series, Simon’s images are basically commercial still lifes: frontal shots of various objects set against neutral white backgrounds. This aesthetic approach depersonalizes the items, making them cold, pared down, documentary facts. Photographically, the images themselves aren’t particularly interesting.

But taken together, seen as an extremely long and eclectic list of things that are prohibited, illegal, counterfeit, unlicensed, or undeclared, the objects start to take on a different resonance. They start to create a picture of the edges of our culture, telling stories of the forbidden and illicit, of people who pursue activities that fall outside the norms. They paint a picture of a melting pot of puzzling cultural influences and traditions. They tell us about the global commerce that flows in and out of America like a flood each and every day, meeting our demands, fueled by our desires. They highlight what we find threatening or scary. In short, they provide a surprisingly direct social commentary on what we have decided we are not (and yet we still are).

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So what’s on this exhaustive list? Deer blood, Cuban cigars, pirated DVDs, counterfeit Beanie Babies, peyote, moon cakes, pharmaceuticals of various kinds, leaves from endangered species, nesting dolls, bongs, skeletons, berries, chicken feet, sugar cane, unidentified meats, fake watches, seeds, eggshells, pirated handbags, bags of fat, and cigarettes, among many, many others. It’s a parade of oddities and curiosities, a set of both the bizarre and the mundane.
This is a show where the backstory is everything, where the context provides the spark of ideas. It’s a thoughtful conceptual exercise, bounded by a particular slice of time, and it successfully focuses the viewer on a striking inversion. It forces us to look closely at how we have defined our world by seeing what falls outside its boundaries.
Collector’s POV: Taryn Simon is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York (here) and Almine Rech Gallery in Paris and Brussels (here). Simon’s work has only just begun to enter the secondary markets in the last year or so, and no definitive price pattern has yet emerged. As such, gallery retail is likely the only real option for interested collectors at this point.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Feature: NY Times Lens (here)
  • Current exhibitions: Gagosian Beverly Hills (here) and Almine Rech Brussels (here)
Taryn Simon: Contraband
Through December 31st
390 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Auction Results: Photographs, November 2, 2010 @Bonhams

Bonhams had a generally uneventful outcome at its Photographs sale in New York earlier this week. The auction had a Buy-In rate over 45% and Total Sale Proceeds that missed the low estimate by a decent margin. With few in the way of positive surprises, there just wasn’t much to write home about.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):
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Total Lots: 110
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $506500
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $748500
Total Lots Sold: 60
Total Lots Bought In: 50
Buy In %: 45.45%
Total Sale Proceeds: $423767

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 100
Low Sold: 53
Low Bought In: 47
Buy In %: 47.00%
Total Low Estimate: $517500
Total Low Sold: $287127
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Mid Total Lots: 9
Mid Sold: 7
Mid Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 22.22%
Total Mid Estimate: $171000
Total Mid Sold: $136640
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High Total Lots: 1
High Sold: 0
High Bought In: 1
Buy In %: 100.00%
Total High Estimate: $60000
Total High Sold: NA
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The top lot by High estimate was lot 38, Ansel Adams, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, 1927, at $40000-60000; it did not sell. The top outcome of the sale was lot 33, Ansel Adams, Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, 1944/1970s, at $39650.

70.00% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were a total of 2 surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 13, Edward Curtis, The Vanishing Race, Navajo, 1904, at $15860
Lot 89, Duane Michals, Magritte with Hat, 1965/1989, at $5795 (image at right, top, via Bonhams)

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.
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Bonhams
580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Auction Previews: Post-War and Contemporary Art, Evening, Morning, and Afternoon Sales, November 10 and 11, 2010 @Christie’s

Christie’s has the final slot in the Fall Contemporary Art season in New York next week with two days of various owner sales. Works by Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari fill all five of the top photo lots by High estimate. Overall, there are a total of 35 lots of photography available in these sales, with a total High estimate for photography of $4030000.

Here’s the simple statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 0
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): NA

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 17
Total Mid Estimate: $540000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 18
Total High Estimate: $3490000

The top photography lot by High estimate is lot 58, Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#88), 1981, at $400000-600000. (Image at right, top, via Christie’s.)

Here’s the complete list of photographers represented by three or more lots in the sales (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Cindy Sherman (4)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (4)
John Baldessari (3)
Vik Muniz (3)
Jeff Wall (3)

The complete lot by lot catalogs can be found here (Evening), here (Morning), and here (Afternoon). The eCatalogues are here (Evening), here (Morning), and here (Afternoon).
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Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale
November 10th
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Post-War and Contemporary Art Morning Session
November 11th
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Post-War and Contemporary Art Afternoon Session
November 11th
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Christie’s
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

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