Katya Kazakina. Photo courtesy of Katya Kazakina.
Katya Kazakina. Photo courtesy of Katya Kazakina.

Artnet News senior reporter Katya Kazakina has won a 2023 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club.

The winning story, “The Fight Against Flippers,” was published as the cover feature of The Artnet Intelligence Report. It explored various mechanisms artists and their galleries use to fight speculators, ranging from blacklisting the worst offenders to devising smart contracts and selling new artworks directly from their studios at auctions.

“This richly detailed and sourced story by Kazakina shows how artists lose out when their works are quickly flipped for quick profits by speculative buyers,” the judges wrote in their commentary.

Kazakina also took second place in the online soft news feature category for her weekly column “The Art Detective” about the explosive market for paintings by the late Pulitzer Prize-winner Winfred Rembert.

The article details Rembert’s extraordinary life and deeply unconventional route to art fame: he survived a near-lynching and seven years in a Georgia prison gathering cotton on a chain gang before he began making art, then snuck into the Yale Graduate Club and met the director of the university’s art gallery, who gave him a show.

Last year, Kazakina won a Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page award in the category “Specialized Reporting: Arts” for “The Art Detective” and placed second in the columnist category at the Los Angeles Press Club behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s writing for the Hollywood Reporter.

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The Fight Against Flippers: How Artists and Dealers Are Trying to Beat Speculators at Their Own Game

Unfairly Imprisoned, He Labored on a Chain Gang for Years. Now Winfred Rembert’s Paintings About That Experience Are Selling for Nearly $300,000

 

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