Every week, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint, a gossip column of original scoops. If you have a tip, email Annie Armstrong at aarmstrong@artnet.com.
ART MARKET CYNICISM ON DISPLAY
The market right now is tough, as you know. As I landed back in New York ahead of Armory Week, after a long summer in Los Angeles, I feared that we would soon be seeing a lot of desperation in the art industry, with cash-strapped dealers putting forth market-friendly works to try to stay afloat. But my worries were misplaced. Much of what I’ve seen over the past few weeks reflects a reticence about, or even cynicism toward, present market conditions, expressed through irreverently conceptual means.
At King’s Leap last night, dealer Alec Petty gestured around his Henry Street gallery, which is now hosting Nandi Loaf’s incisive exhibition “Ever,” and said, “It’s a literal image of the gallery and art system not working.” Every part of the show aims to question how the art market functions, including its (unconventional) opening reception. The gallery sent out invitations to an emphatically exclusive guest list, which was strictly maintained by artist Joe W. Speier. Outside of the gallery, Speier perched at the top end of a velvet-roped line, and grinned. “These are the victims of a failing system,” he said, as he let the elect through.
I won’t spoil what goes on behind the doors, but I will tell you that somehow, Loaf was able to hold many luminaries of the Downtown scene captive around several blank plinths, wondering why they were there. Loaf put it this way (which will not illuminate much more for you): “It’s a black sabbath confronting each part of what happens at an art opening. I wanted to create chaos.”
That spirit lives in a lot of different art spaces right now. Just a few streets over, Ramiken opened its show of sculpture by the late French conceptual artist Daniel Pommereulle. The works are strange and little bit threatening, with knives poking out of many of them. If Pommereulle isn’t familiar to you, you may know him as the artist from Éric Rohmer’s French New Wave film La Collectionneuse (1967), in which he delivers the following devastating send-up of collecting culture.
Also, you may recall, Blade Study won the Gramercy International Prize for its sharp presentation at the Armory Show by Paige K.B. Titled “Very Beautiful Images With Quite A Bit Of Concerning Text Laid Over The Artwork,” the display incorporated collaged paintings with bits of sculpture, and was created to challenge how fairgoers encounter art at fairs—specifically in regard to the attention economy that social media’s infinite scrolls has created.
Far from New York’s Downtown, the mother of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser, has a show at Marian Goodman in Paris. It includes her instantly infamous 2003 video of a sexual encounter in a hotel room between the artist and an art collector. (It’s an edition of five, and the collector acquired the first edition.) The artist said at the time that the work “is about the relationship between artists and collectors, about what it means to be an artist and sell your work—sell what may be, what should be, a very intimate part of yourself.”
Fraser is back with rare new work: five sculptures of toddlers made with wax and displayed in vitrines, presented in Goodman’s lower galleries. According to the gallery, they represent her return “to a reflection on the intersection between financial and emotional economies in the art world.”
Seeing these recent works, I am reminded of a moment in my colleague Ben Davis’s podcast interview with artist Joshua Citarella. Citarella speaks about the current cultural climate, in which risk-averse artists feel market pressure to produce paintings that can live above a collector’s couch. Citarella has taken a rather different approach in his career. His 2015 project with Brad Troemel, UV Production House, took the form of an Etsy store that sold art collectors “pre-fabricated artworks.” He described it as a troll on collectors: when an artwork was purchased, the duo would send the buyer all of the base materials (screws, screwdrivers, blocks of wood) to create the artwork themselves—at a 100 percent markup.
To their surprise, they weren’t met with angry collectors wanting their money back. Instead, their audience grew to understand that they were purchasing fake products and wanted to buy them anyway. “They wanted to support us,” Citarella said. “They wanted to purchase things they would never receive, just because they wanted to say, ‘Keep going, I like this project, and what you’re doing is interesting.’”
All these efforts share the belief that fortune favors the brave, and that the right collectors will respond to daring impulses. I, for one, am feeling hopeful. Let’s keep going.
BIDEN THE YOUNGER
All the chatter this week has been about the presidential debate, but before we leave the Biden era completely, I’d like to thank Diamond Joe for all of the art gossip that his presidency has provided. I look back at Hunter Biden’s infamous art shows in Los Angeles and New York during the fall of 2021 with particular fondness—I was only one month into writing this column, and one year out from running into Hunter himself in the office of, I kid you not, advisor Lisa Schiff.
These are happy memories, and I will always remain a fan of Hunter Biden’s art pursuits. So, it is with true glee that I can report that his artistic gene was transferred to one of his daughters, Maisy Biden, whose mother is his first wife, writer Kathleen Buhle.
A tipster in the D.C. area, alerted me to her budding art career, and a little social-media sleuthing revealed that Maisy earned her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania, and hosted her senior thesis show at the university’s Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery last year.
Her MFA show suggests that she is artist with plenty of ambition in different media, and included a minimalist metallic wall work, several hanging pamphlets, a self-portrait, and a floor sculpture incorporating photography. Elsewhere on the young Biden’s Instagram page, you can see Pop Art-y paintings with layers of different materials, some with a color palette that recalls the work her father had on view at Georges Bergès Gallery in SoHo three years ago.
From Wet Paint to Biden: Congratulations, and good luck. This industry can be almost as brutal as politics.
WE HEAR
The New York Review of Books is republishing Leonora Carrington’s fabulous 1977 surrealist novel The Stone Door (perfectly timed for the Halloween season)… Has anyone else noticed the trend of gallery director power couples co-representing artists? It was announced last week that Sasha Gordon is now jointly represented by Matthew Brown and his future father-in-law’s gallery David Zwirner (where his fiancée Marlene Zwirner works); this week, Nicelle Beauchene and Mills Morán said they will co-rep David Benjamin Sherry. Aw!… Rachel Comey‘s recent fashion show was hosted at the same Financial District venue where Christopher Wool self-organized his smash-hit exhibition “See Stop Run”; a Richard Maxwell play is set to run there next… The internet is in a twist over whether Mark Rothko‘s work counts as political or not… And finally, for all the gossip I have to offer you this week, I think I’m trumped by this Instagram post from former Alice Neel muse Annie Sprinkle…