The main hall and this includes the art | nova section is incredibly fluid. I was a little bitter by what was for display on Friday feeling that I only saw a small cross section of the art world on display, Saturday that cross section started opening up and by Sunday it was wide open – and the more I think about this the more it makes sense. Your richest collectors are clearly looking for blue chip artists only and really thats the initial market for many. After the dust settles in about 40 hours or so things start getting replaced on the wall and then (for me) it starts to get more interesting. Sunday proved to be no different.
Great Richard Prince’s are everywhere. I’m sorry that I never had money in the eighties to buy what I thought was great – the Prince photo I passed up (cowboys) then for $1300 was on sale at one gallery for $795,000. However the other work of his that is available is just terrific, people are clearly going to go home happy from both sides of the sale. I also saw a lot of J M Basquait works, these however are clearly not of the same caliber as the Princes that are available. I remember reading 4 or 5 months ago about how the higher end of the Basquait market was tapped and that collectors were holding on to them tightly – I didn’t really think about it then – but its clear to me now.
A surprising great William Wegman is available from Paula Cooper (I think) “Vacationland” is a wry look at US car culture and family vacations across the country – It’s practically a map of old and new theme parks and vacation venues. Its big as well – maybe 7 feet tall x 12 wide (I’m guessing). It’s densely populated and ambitious I always liked his early video work but never was a big fan of the watercolors – but this is quite the piece.
Barbara Mathes had a great selection of work – “Atmosphere” by Neal Jenney (always a favorite painter of mine) Vik Muniz also was represented with a version of Manet’s “Haystacks” done in Pantone color chips.
After thoughts about ABMB: I would go again – the energy around the entire city is just fantastic. ABMB, along with AQUA (a full on success in my book) and ~pulse art (very strong) as well as a million things I did not do makes the art world just crackle with energy and most importantly culturally relevant.
Here are the stats for ABMB:
Museum Groups: more than 100
Journalists: 1000 (bloggers don’t count)
UBS Clients at fair: 3000
Attendance at vernissage: 6000
Net Jets: 185
Value of art shown: 2,000,000,000
Last note: I’ve read a few places that “hold is the new sold” it’s clear that with all the excitement that some people hold back on pulling the trigger – I’d love to hear more of this – or will galleries just say how great the show was and leave it at that?
The Virginia MFA has two nice Neil Jenneys.
They do – the corcoran also has a nice “Bad Painting” – my favorite series of his by far.