Felix Salmon

Well done to Annie Leibovitz, who has managed to extricate herself from her unpleasant embrace with the aggressive and litigious Art Capital Group. Her new sole creditor — and we can only guess at how much the principal amount she owes has risen to at this point — is Colony Capital, the $30 billion private-equity shop which normally has its eye on much bigger deals.

Chances are that Colony is not going to find Leibovitz particularly easy to work with: no one else ever has. But they’re also unlikely to start foreclosing on her assets in the way that Art Capital is prone to do. Technically, this is a debt deal: Colony has bought Art Capital’s loan. But my guess is that Colony is looking at it more like an equity deal: they expect to work with Leibovitz to start generating an income stream for both of them which is going to last more or less indefinitely.

So fingers crossed on this one — but it certainly seems as though Leibovitz had much better advice this time round than she did when she was put into the Art Capital deal initially. Here’s hoping it works out.

I’m disappointed in the way in which the NYT’s Carol Vogel swallowed the disingenuous rationalizations of the vandals tearing apart the unique and irreplaceable Polaroid photography collection:

To pay off creditors, a bankruptcy court in Minnesota is forcing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection at Sotheby’s in New York on June 21 and 22. On offer will be 400 photographs by Ansel Adams alone, along with prints by Mr. Close, Mr. Wegman, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, Warhol and Lucas Samaras. Together the 1,200 objects are expected to fetch $7.5 million to $11.5 million…

What Sotheby’s is selling is just a fraction of Polaroid’s holdings however. There are still more than 10,000 images in a Massachusetts warehouse that could end up in a museum in the future, Mr. Stoebner said…

When selecting the most valuable (and salable) photographs from the collection, Ms. Bethel said she sought a wide price range in the hope of attracting new or young collectors. Thus the auction includes a Wegman dog image estimated at $3,000 to $5,000 and an Adams mural expected to bring $400,000 to $600,000.

Never mind, as Lindsay Pollock notes in her article on the sale, that Polaroid made promises to the artists that will be impossible to keep once the photos are sold to anonymous buyers at auction. The fact is that Stoebner and Bethel have simply creamed off the top 10% or so of the collection — the most valuable works from the biggest-name artists. In doing so, they’ve turned the remaining 90% of the collection, which Stoebner purports to believe could ” could end up in a museum in the future”, into a liability rather than an asset, and something which no museum will ever want.

As for the idea that Sotheby’s “sought a wide price range in the hope of attracting new or young collectors”, the fact is that they just carried on down the Polaroid collection until they ran out of recognizable names which had a decent chance of selling. If they’re selling a Wegman dog image for $3,000 to $5,000, you can be sure there’s nothing in the remainder of the collection which is worth much more.

The really big question, of course, as Marion Maneker asks, is why the collection is being sold off in pieces to begin with. It might be the easiest way to raise the maximum amount of money in the minimum amount of time, but if the decision is purely mercenary, then Stoebner shouldn’t be presenting himself as some kind of high-minded custodian who’s talked to “several museums” about preserving the collection in toto. Insofar as he talked to the museums, I’m sure he was just angling for a sum of money greater than the minimum guarantee offered by Sotheby’s — or else just trying to get a baseline number which he’d then ask Sotheby’s to match.

The Sotheby’s sale constitutes the destruction of a lovingly-constructed artistic endeavor which was ultimately doomed by the greed and fraud engaged in by the chain of speculators and chancers who levered up and broke down the Polaroid company as though it were any other financial commodity. It’s a crying shame, and the art press should be railing against it, rather than talking it up as some kind of art-market milestone.

How did I miss the $104 million Giacometti? Marion has a good round-up of the reactions, to which I’d just add that this is proof of the primacy of the fungible. The most valuable works of art are increasingly not unique, but rather part of an edition: the Giacometti is just one of ten, including four artist’s proofs. Hugely-expensive works by Koons are always in an edition; sculptures by Murakami often are; and in the world of painting, where uniqueness is pretty much a given, the most expensive artists — people like Warhol and Prince and Hirst — are often those who paint the same thing over and over again, allowing many collectors to buy essentially the same artwork.

At the same time, there was clearly a lot of auction psychology going on here. I don’t know whether the identical sculpture being sold by Larry Gagosian for $45 million was cast in Giacometti’s lifetime or not — but even if it wasn’t, that doesn’t come close to explaining the difference in price. It’s just that when you get caught up in the heat of an auction — when you have the winning bid, and you think you own the piece, and then someone else comes along to snatch it out of your hands, and you think only about the marginal cost of taking it back — then it’s very easy to ratchet the price of a great piece like this one into the stratosphere.

The previous work to hold the record for most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction was the Guennol Lioness, which sold for $57 million in 2007, despite being only three inches tall. It’s much more unique than the Giacometti, and can reasonably be described as “the greatest sculpture on Earth” by Sotheby’s auctioneer Richard Keresy; no one is likely to say that about cast 2/6 of the Walking Man. But the Giacometti, largely by dint of its existence in ten different places around the world, is a cultural icon in the way that the lioness never could be.

Every so often, people ask me why I allow my work to be reprinted on Seeking Alpha without them paying me — or Reuters — any money. And I think the answer might lie here: the more you replicate something, the more valuable it becomes. And not just in aggregate, either.

Giacometti’s Walking Man resonates culturally in a way that few other artworks do. And if and when its auction record gets broken, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was by another cultural icon: a Warhol Marilyn, perhaps, or a Jasper Johns flag. These things are valuable because they’re not unique; because there are enough versions of them that they’ve managed to gain extremely wide currency. I just wonder when the romantic conception of a unique artistic masterpiece might start coming back in vogue.

Update: Gareth Williams comments, quite rightly:

If you were looking to buy one of an edition and the others pieces were all owned by wealthy, discerning people or institutions you would get a degree of comfort that there was some objective value there. In art this is particularly important as objects have no utility value and there is no universally agreed benchmark of quality. In fact, it provides the supreme example of something only being worth what someone’s willing to pay for it.

So the more people there are who are not only willing to pay for a work but have actually paid for identical versions of it, the more validation you have that the version you’re buying is worth something. Some sort of consensus about value has been established and it’s been backed up by hard cash. Ultimately, it comes down to the old saw that there’s safety in numbers.

I think, but I’m not sure, that I’m a key vector through which A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter started going viral: my blog entry on the artwork got picked up by Tyler Cowen (and others) before the artist, Caleb Larsen, was interviewed by Wired.co.uk in a story which was then Slashdotted. The work, which was originally priced at $2,500, had a couple of days to go when I blogged it, but didn’t end up selling in that auction.

When the piece automatically relisted itself, however, the bids started rolling in, and the latest bid is $4,250 with over 4 days to go. Since no one bought the work in the previous auction, all of that money is going to go to Larsen (and possibly his gallery).

So here’s one question: say that you put in a bid after seeing my blog entry, and won the piece for $2,500. Would you be sitting on an immediate profit of $1,750 right now, less $262 for Larsen, who gets 15% of any appreciation in value? Or is the fact that Larsen is still the seller one of the reasons for the work’s current price?

It would seem to be reasonably obvious that the higher in value this auction goes, the greater the probability that it will mark the highest point in the piece’s long-term price trajectory, which could weirdly undercut the whole point of the piece. Let’s say that it sells for $10,000, and that the buyer then immediately lists it on eBay for its new market value of $10,000. If it doesn’t sell at that level for a few weeks or months, there’s a good chance that it will never again reach that level.

So what happens when the winning bidder has owned the piece for a while? Here’s what the contract says:

Upon purchasing the Artwork, Collector may establish a new value for the Artwork. The new value may not exceed current market expectations for the Artwork based on the current value of work by the Artist. This value may be reassessed quarterly. This value will be set as the minimum bid of the auction.

This language, it seems to me, allows the winning bidder to keep the minimum $10,000 price tag on the artwork more or less in perpetuity. It’s justifiable the first time around, and then going forwards the winner has only a right, and no obligation, to reduce that price tag if the market value falls. (The value may be reassessed quarterly, but it doesn’t have to be.)

If the buyer wants to sell the work, then, perhaps because eBay starts charging her an insertion fee every week, she can bring down the price to something more likely to clear. But if she likes it and wants to keep this seemingly uncollectable artwork for herself, she probably can — at least until someone is willing to pay more than she did for it.

The upshot is that there’s a decent chance of a rather ironic outcome to this auction: that the piece which constantly sells itself on eBay only ever gets sold once, by the artist to a collector. Just like a normal work of art which never tries to sell itself at all.

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is an artwork by Caleb Larsen, currently for sale on eBay. If it hasn’t sold in the next couple of days — the minimum bid is $2,500 — it will go back on eBay. On the other hand, if it does sell, it will still go back on eBay. That’s what it does, as clearly explained in the legal contract accompanying the work:

Artist has created a work of art titled “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)” (“the Artwork”) which consists of a black box that places itself for sale on the auction website “eBay” (the “Auction Venue”) every seven (7) days. The Artwork consists of the combination of the black box or cube, the electronics contained therein, and the concept that such a physical object “sells itself” every week.

This is clever, I like it a lot, and not in particular because of the insidery nod to Robert Morris. Many artists have tried to remove their art from the commercial aspects of the art world — by making it free, for instance, or by putting on performances, or creating public installations. This one does it by making an artwork which is so commercial that it can’t be collected. You could buy the piece today, and it might be worth $100,000 in a few years’ time. But you wouldn’t own it in a few years time, and you would have personally gained only a tiny fraction of the increase in the piece’s value, if anything at all.

One of the smart things about the way the piece is structured is that its owner has to sell it, even if the price is lower than he values it at. Let’s say I think this is a wonderful work, worth $10,000. If I win it for $2,500, I have to relist it at a price which “may not exceed current market expectations for the Artwork based on the current value of work by the Artist” — and which in any case can only increase once per quarter. Given that the amount I paid is pretty much by definition the current market value of the work, that’s the amount it’s going to get relisted at. And since I’m not allowed to bid on the work once I own it — that would violate eBay’s “shill bidding” restrictions — anybody else can pick it up for $2,500, a massive discount to where I value the work, leaving me to pay all the eBay fees.

Right now, the piece is on show at the Lawrimore Project in Seattle, in an exhibition devoted to the work of the up-and-coming artist Caleb Larsen; it’s quite easy to see the market value of Larsen’s work going up or down from its current level. I hope that future iterations of the auction will include the prior auction history of the work; it’ll be interesting to check in on the box once in a while, to see how it’s doing, price-wise. I certainly hope it’ll stay on eBay for years and decades to come.

Judith Dobrzynski has come up with her own version of the Ellis rule when it comes to museums selling off their art. Adrian Ellis’s rule is quite elegant:

You can deaccession and spend the money on whatever you want – a new roof, working capital, education programs, or even a boffo night out with your chums on the board — provided that you ensure that the institution or individual to whom you sell commits in some binding form to equal or higher conservational standards and equal or higher public access.

Dobrzynski’s proposed alternative has two parts. The first is that any museum wanting to sell art first would need to argue its case before an “impartial arbitrator”, someone “schooled in art, art law and nonprofit regulations”. Given the heat surrounding the deaccessioning debate, I don’t actually believe that there is anybody impartial on this front, so this part of Dobrzynski’s test might be very hard to implement fairly.

Then there’s the second part:

Most important, as part of any deal permitting the sale of art, the de-accessioning museum would have to offer the works to other museums first. If it received no offers, it could sell the pieces via a public auction — and any American museum would then have the opportunity to match a winning bid if it promised to keep the work in a public collection.

Is this realistic? Would auction houses agree to such a deal, whereby the winning bidder might win the auction but still lose the piece in question? I asked Christie’s, who said that although such deals haven’t been seen in the US, they are reasonably common overseas: in the sale of the of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge collection in Paris in February 2009, for instance, several museums exercised just such a right and acquired works for their collections.

I suspect that cultural norms would make the first such sale quite difficult in the US, but that eventually both auction houses and their clients would learn to live with them. On the other hand, that could take some time, if Dobrzynski is correct and her rule makes deaccessioning nearly impossible.

Essentially, Dobrzynski here is taking the Kimmelman rule — that museums should get first dibs on any deaccessioning sale — and beefing it up with two extra layers: first arbitration, and second the option to buy in the wake of a public auction. Personally, I think that the Ellis rule is still the best option, since it puts the focus where it belongs — on the art, rather than on the museum. Both Dobrzynski and Kimmelman would let art disappear from a museum into private hands, never to be seen again; Ellis wouldn’t. I wonder whether Christie’s could find a way of putting an Ellis binder on works before auctioning them.

(As ever, Donn Zaretsky is the first place to go for more on this subject.)

John Quiggin reminds me of Richard Dorment’s wonderful NYBR essay on Andy Warhol and the authenticity of his 1965 Red Self Portraits. While my blog entry on the essay was basically about non-profit politics and the art market, the essay itself was largely about the way in which Warhol reinvented authenticity:

By the 1970s Warhol no longer had any sustained involvement in the mass production of his paintings. In his book about Warhol, Holy Terror, Bob Colacello quotes Warhol’s longtime printer Rupert Smith:

We had so much work that even Augusto [the security man] was doing the painting. We were so busy, Andy and I did everything over the phone. We called it “art by telephone.”

The question is when Warhol started doing this, and Dorment makes a very strong case that he started in 1965, with the Red Self Portraits.

Warhol told Ekstract to send the acetates to a commercial printer for silk-screening. Morrissey further says that Warhol spoke to the printer over the phone to give him specific, detailed instructions regarding the colors he wanted the printer to use. Both Warhol and Morrissey communicated with the printer, but Morrissey is clear that neither was present during the silk-screening process.[5] After the printing, Ekstract returned the acetates to Warhol…

Few artists in the twentieth century were as restlessly experimental as Warhol. This ruling by the board represents a complete misunderstanding of the very nature of what he achieved, and how his approach to making his work changed Western art. Innovation has to start somewhere, and it is precisely because the 1965 Red Self Portraits were made without Warhol’s on-the-spot supervision that they are so critically important.

All of which came back to me when I visited MoMA’s wonderful Bauhaus show a few days ago, and saw László Moholy-Nagy’s beautiful EM 2 and EM 3, which date from 1922-3:

Moholy–Nagy’s Telephone Pictures were made in Berlin via the processes of modern technology: Moholy–Nagy dictated the paintings’ specifications by telephone (a relatively new invention at the time) to the foreman of a sign factory. Three paintings were made, each with identical images, but in different sizes. The telephone was a new studio tool that allowed Moholy–Nagy to produce work independent not just of his own hand but of his presence. The fact that the paintings were made by ordinary laborers demonstrates his commitment to a non–elitist approach to creative work.

Maybe then it’s the very debate over the Red Self Portraits which makes them important. When Moholy-Nagy was doing something functionally identical more than 40 years earlier, no one denied that he had authentic authorship — it was all part of the iconoclastic culture of the times.

In the case of the Warhols, however, there’s a huge fight with the Andy Warhol Foundation over their authenticity — and as a result you’re not going to see any of them exhibited at MoMA or any other museum any time soon.

Quiggin says that all this obsessing over authenticity is really only important in “the market for collectibles, a class that happens to include paintings”, and I think he’s right — although clearly he’s also right that we’d see a lot less of certain Shakespeare plays (or Mozart operas, for that matter) if they were found to be written by someone else. I’m beginning to think that the only thing that really matters is when there’s a fight over authenticity. That’s always when things get interesting, after all. Maybe someone should set up a museum devoted only to disputed works!

File this one under “you could see that one coming a mile off. The Art Trading Fund, which was doomed before it launched, doomed at launch, and even more doomed a year later, has finally failed: its liquidators are holding a creditors’ meeting in January.  

Art is simply not an asset class which lends itself to hedge-fund strategies. If you’re ever approached by a former financial-markets professional who has bright plans for some kind of an art fund, run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction. The art market will happily take full advantage of cocky newcomers like that: it chews such people up and spits them out for breakfast.

All the same, it’s really quite impressive that this fund managed to go from launch to liquidation in less than 18 months two and a half years. Even I didn’t think they were that incompetent.

(Thanks to Teri Buhl for the heads-up.)

I recently took possession of one of the most beautiful art objects I own. It’s a book — an absolutely stunning one — and it’s just been published by Yale University Press. It’s the New Complete Edition of Interaction of Color, the legendary book by Bauhaus master Josef Albers. And if you know anybody who loves color, or art, or ever took a color class at art school, or just has bibliophilic tendencies, they will remember you fondly forever if you give it to them.

At $200, it’s not cheap — but for a work of art of this caliber that’s very little indeed, and beside, the book’s only $126 at Amazon. It’s clearly popular: MoMA reportedly sold out their first installment of six copies on the day they got them, while Amazon is already saying that it won’t be able to deliver the book before Christmas. What’s more, the book is subsidized: the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation provided a publication subvention which allowed Yale to make the project work.

It’s worth noting that the original edition of the work also cost $200 — in 1963. That edition used silkscreen prints in dedicated folios, and rapidly became so sought-after that it was never used as intended, as a teaching aid in art schools. Instead, it got collected by museums and libraries, where devotees would put on white gloves and handle it tenderly.

Since then, a paperback, which originally came out in 1971 and which was revised and extended in 2006, has become something of a cult object, selling over 200,000 copies. But even though the revised edition had many more color plates (30, as opposed to the original 5), it was never a patch on the original, which had 145. This new edition has them all, in an easy-to-page-through and gorgeously-bound book; the only writing on each page is some small typography at the bottom which makes it very easy to cross-reference to the accompanying text book (itself a masterpiece of typography). The text on its own can be dense and difficult, but when accompanied by the illustrations, it comes to life immediately, and everything becomes clear. Meanwhile, the illustrations breathe easily on the heavy paper stock, never competing for attention with words.

We’re in a glorious renaissance when it comes to art books right now, thanks largely to the combination of spectacular new printing technology and the efforts of Benedikt Taschen. Interaction of Color achieves things with offset color lithography that Josef Albers could only dream of; it even uses a technique known as stochastic printing to improve the printing quality and to make sure the individual dots are arranged randomly. That means there are never any inadvertent moiré patterns or other eye-tricks. (Of course, there are some optical illusions in the book, but those are deliberate.)

I’m hoping that as printing technology continues to improve, books like this will become increasingly within the reach of consumers and publishers. Art books are much higher quality and much cheaper now than they ever used to be, and that has to be a good thing. This particular book is at the top of the high end, but I’m happy that YUP isn’t doing anything silly with limited editions and whatnot: Michelle Komie, the press’s art and architecture editor, told me she expects it to be in print for at least 6-8 years. (My guess is that it’ll be in print much longer than that.) It’s still a collector’s item, of course: it just that Yale University Press doesn’t feel the need to inject some ersatz scarcity into the market.

This book phase 2 of a three-part project proposed by Komie: the first part was the reissue of the paperback, and the second part is an electronic version (I sincerely hope it’ll be a free website) which will bring Albers’s book truly to everyone. (As well as acting as fantastic marketing for the book.) “These exercises work so well online,” says Komie, who still has a copy of a now-outdated 1993 CD-Rom. It could be the best example yet of synergy, in the art-book world, between websites and physical books. Well done to YUP on this achievement, and may the website come soon!

Update: I should add that one of the things which makes this book so great is that the plates aren’t reproductions of something else: you’re seeing exactly what you’re meant to see, without having to imagine “what it looks like in real life”. That’s rare, but not unprecedented, in art books.

Allen Salkin has some new facts in the continuing saga of Annie Leibovitz and Art Capital Group: the amount that Leibovitz owes Art Capital has now ballooned to $30 million (the original loan, taken out in September 2008, was for $24 million); and the maturity date on the loan has now been extended only to “next summer”:

A mortgage filed with New York City in October notes, partially in capital letters, the urgency and complexity of the agreements between Ms. Leibovitz and Art Capital: “TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE with respect to each and every covenant, agreement, and obligation of mortgagors under this mortgage, the secured loan agreement and any and all of the other loan documents.”

Leibovitz does seem to be making good-faith efforts to make as much money as she can: she’s reportedly sold two “Master Sets” of 157 prints at $2.5 million apiece (she’s using Lawrence Schiller to broker those deals, which worries Marion Maneker), and she’s talking to Benedikt Taschen about a book deal. But it seems unlikely that she’s going to be able to raise $30 million in less than a year — and it seems even less likely that she’s going to be able to refinance into the bond market.

Salkin reports:

As she tries to increase her earnings, Ms. Leibovitz is also seeking to restructure her debt. She has met with the Pullman Group, the company that issued bonds based on the catalogs of Mr. Bowie, James Brown, the Isley Brothers and others, according to the source who consulted with Ms. Leibovitz but is bound by confidentiality. But Ms. Leibovitz would have to demonstrate that her future earnings would arrive in a dependable and clearly accountable fashion before any bonds could be sold, the source said.

Bonds are good ways of securitizing an income stream — but Leibovitz just has intellectual property, as opposed to anything which looks like a predictable income stream. And to make matters worse, that intellectual property is encumbered by a whopping great lien.

At some point next year, then, Leibovitz is going to find herself back where she was in August: with a huge loan maturity looming, no cash to pay it back, and no ability to refinance except for on Art Capital’s terms, since they hold all the relevant liens. Salkin makes no mention of Leibovitz trying to sell the rights to her art, which means that her only hope of avoiding a replay of this summer’s nightmare is to try to cobble together $30 million between art sales and real-estate sales. It’s not impossible, but it’s definitely unlikely, and of course it would mean Leibovitz losing her beloved custom-built Manhattan studio, along with her home in Rheinbeck.

So the chances of a happy ending here, for anybody concerned, are still very slim. And I suspect that Art Capital Group will think long and hard before ever again advancing a loan against intellectual property, as opposed to real physical art.

If you have any interest in art-world machinations, Richard Dorment’s account of the nefarious doings of the Andy Warhol Foundation is a must-read. But there’s one bit which rings false to me:

Decisions like the one about the “Bruno B Self Portrait” at best raise doubts about this board’s competence and at worst about its integrity. For with assets in the region of $500 million worth of art, the Andy Warhol Foundation funds its charitable activities by selling the works it owns. This has left it open to the accusation that it is in the foundation’s financial interest to control the market in Warhols. Simon-Whelan’s lawsuit alleges that the board routinely denies the authenticity of works by Warhol in order to restrict the number of Warhols on the market and thereby to increase the value of its holdings.

As we’ve seen, the enormous number of Warhols in the market seems to have done nothing to reduce their market value — quite the opposite. If the red self-portraits were to be authenticated by the Foundation, no one else’s Warhols would fall in value.

Instead, I incline to a combination of incompetence (the Foundation refusing to accept that Warhol was happy making “remote-control art” as early as 1965) and personal animus towards Richard Ekstract, who was responsible for physically making the paintings. Maybe the problem is that he’s simply too high-profile: while the likes of Gerard Malanga and Billy Name will always go down in history as Warhol assistants, Ekstract is very much his own person, and was successful before Warhol was. You can get assistants to make paintings, seems to be the implicit statement here: you just can’t get anybody important to do it. How idiotically snobbish can you get.

(Many thanks to the great Heather Horn both for finding the Dorment piece and for including my blog entry on him in her Warhol round-up.)

The Economist has a great report on the market in Warhols, which turns out to have been written by Sarah Thornton. (Incidentally, if the Economist is going to encourage its writers to give radio interviews about their articles, isn’t it about time they had the occasional byline?)

The news in the piece is that Philippe Ségalot brokered a $100 million deal for Eight Elvises a year ago; judging by the success of 200 One Dollar Bills at Sotheby’s last month, he might well be able to get the same amount today. (The dollar bill is iconic. But it ain’t Elvis.) But the most interesting bit is this:

“Warhol really consists of two markets,” explains Brett Gorvy, co-head of Christie’s contemporary-art department. “One market chases ultra-rare, art-historically relevant paintings from the 1960s. The other is a perfect volume market where 24-inch Flowers and single Jackies trade like any other commodity.”

Marion Maneker elucidates:

What drives the Warhol market is a combination of ubiquity and differentiation. Damien Hirst found his way to a similar structure for his artistic output where huge quantity was counter-posed against an elite circle of highly valuable works. Takashi Murakami has accomplished something similar where circumstances and intention have created rare and important works within a large body of output.

The thing to note here is that the ubiquity is a necessary part of the forces driving the artist’s values. I’ve written before about the economic paradoxes of contemporary art, including the central one that the most expensive artists, even on a per-artwork level, are also the most prolific. But it seems that the great churning mass of 10,000 Warhols does more than just create a vibrant and liquid market in which prices are transparent (by art-world standards) and buyers have ever-increasing confidence in the value of what they’re buying, thereby helping to drive values up even further. All that art does something else, too: it helps to create a very strong foundation from which the value of masterpieces can be extrapolated.

But here’s another paradox of contemporary art: photography has been very hot for some time, and the biggest-name photographers (Andreas Gursky, Wolfgang Tillmans, Cindy Sherman) are just as bona fide art stars as any painter. What’s more, photography is valued by many collectors precisely because it’s fungible — even more than a Warhol flower painting, if you have a given photo, you know it’s worth the same as an identical photo from the same edition. So you’d think that photography would be the obvious medium where you’d get runaway art stars making enormous amounts of product and selling for ever-increasing sums. Yet that hasn’t really happened.

It’s almost as though photography is still suffering from an inferiority complex, and photographers feel the need to prune their work down to a relatively small number of pieces in order to be taken seriously. Consider the kind of thing that Team gallery feels the need to write about one of their star photographers, Ryan McGinley:

In the summer of 2007, for example, he traversed the United States with sixteen models and three assistants, shooting 4,000 rolls of film. From the resulting 150,000 photographs, he arduously narrowed down the body of work to some fifty images, the best of which are on display here at the gallery.

That’s so not Warhol. Why is it that Hirst and Murakami can become hugely successful by churning out thousands of artworks, while fine-art photographers still feel the need to keep their output relatively small? Maybe Jen Bekman can weigh in on this one. But I’m sure that if Andy Warhol were alive today, he would have thoroughly embraced the digital-photography revolution and be churning out enormous numbers of C-prints. Who will be anointed his natural heir, getting that much closer to creating the first $10 million photograph?

(Picture from the Andy Warhol foundation)

I had a very interesting lunch with Jen Bekman of 20×200 last week — a woman who has just raised $825,000 in venture funding to help expand her project of bringing art to everybody. “I want anyone who’s educated and even remotely affluent to feel self-conscious if they don’t have an art collection that they can talk about,” she says, and to that end she’s selling limited-edition art starting at just $20 for an 8″x10″ C-print in an edition of 200. (Hence the name.)

The editions are limited not because that makes them more likely to rise in value, necessarily, but rather because it helps to infect her buyers with the collector bug: they are incentivized to buy now, before an edition sells out; they get an experience which only a small number of other people will share; and they feel as though they’re part of a select group of people who are supporting a particular artist. (The artists get 50% of all 20×200′s revenues, and retain copyright in their work.) What’s more, a lot of young artists today come to prominence with one high-profile image; limiting the editions that flow from that image helps to push artists to create more new work.

More generally, limiting editions helps to brand them as being non-generic: artisanal, rather than mass, culture. While 20×200 is certainly curated by Bekman, it also has a broad enough range of art that it allows her buyers to exercise their individualism and feel that they’re buying something uniquely suited to themselves and few others.

And yes, there is a chance of price appreciation too. 20×200 features a lot of artists, and it’s statistically probable that eventually one or two of them will become art-world stars; at that point, their early work will be worth much more than $20 or $50 or $200. And the biggest pieces — Bekman sells 30″x40″ prints for $2,000 and occasionally goes even bigger than that — could conceivably become seriously collectable.

But like any good gallery, 20×200 is all about getting enjoyment out of what you’re buying, rather than speculating on future price appreciation. Most art doesn’t go up in price, and certainly not small works on paper which, due to the limitations of digital printing, are unlikely to last out the century. The thing I really like about 20×200 is that it’s both elite and accessible: it’s not a free-for-all like art.com, without a curatorial sensibility, but at the same time it’s not a forbidding white cube either.

Jen has a real retail sensibility: she’s got big plans for the post-Thanksgiving rush, and she’s more than happy to recommend prints which go with the sofa. Most art is decorative; there’s no shame in that. She’s not even particularly high-end, as retail goes. She’s just trying to persuade the woman with the $2,000 handbag that $500 is not an excessive amount of money to pay for a print. It’s a struggle, sometimes, but she’s going about it in a great, accessible manner. I wish her — and her investors — all the best.

Last year, I applauded Eli Broad for not donating his art to Lacma, and instead keeping it in his own foundation, whence it could and would be lent out around the world. I even suggested that it might make more sense to donate art to the Broad Foundation than to a museum:

Museums tend not to spend any time or effort lending out the works they’re not showing: if they’re asked they might say yes, but they’re not proactive about it. So while they might claim to be driven by the desire to show art to the public, in reality they only really want to do that within their own four walls.

Broad’s new foundation, by contrast, will exist with the stated purpose of truly maximizing the public exposure that its art receives. That’s a proposition which could be very attractive to collectors wondering what to do with their legacy: they provide the art, and Broad will take care of all the paperwork and relationship management. So if you’re buttering up a gallerist, maybe the best thing to do is no longer to hint that you’re thinking of donating your collection to a museum: better that you hint that you’re thinking of donating your collection to Eli Broad.

Of course, this was the charitable view of Broad. The uncharitable view was that he was just another collector with a big ego, who wanted to keep his art for himself and his own greater glory. Now comes the news that he’s playing off Santa Monica against Beverly Hills and a third LA location to build a huge new public monument to himself:

The conceptual drawings for the Beverly Hills museum, delivered to city officials last month, show a much bigger project than the original proposal: a 126,600-square-foot, three-story building with the footprint of an arrow pointing east.

Of that, a museum of about 43,000 square feet and an adjoining 6,100-square-foot outdoor sculpture court would occupy the top floor, compared with the first proposal’s total 25,000 square feet of exhibition space. An additional 67,000 square feet would provide an “archive” for the art not on display and offices for all three Broad foundations — for art, education and medical research.

Inevitably, any museum of this size will overshadow the part of the foundation which exists to lend out unexhibited art. That idea was potentially very powerful and new, but it seems that Broad has retreated to the more boring and old-fashioned paradigm of simply exhibiting his own art himself. It’s now pretty clear where Broad’s priorities lie, and I have no faith at all that his foundation will do something game-changing. A shame.

Nouriel Roubini says the federal government has to be much more aggressive on the unemployment front:

There’s really just one hope for our leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to persistent unemployment rather than job creation.

I’m sympathetic, but I’d note that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, when it comes to “labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects”, with the first stimulus, and I’m not sure that there are actually any left. Instead, might I suggest arts subsidies?