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The conclusion of the 15th edition of the India Art Fair in New Delhi on February 4 saw an increased success compared to last year’s iteration, with the fair reporting a 30 percent uptick in visitors on the VIP day. Many galleries reported buzzing sales and strong pricing, with interest from both Indian private collectors and institutions from across South Asia.

While the global art market has recently faced headwinds, the Indian art market has seemingly only strengthened post-pandemic, buoyed by the country’s robust economic growth, a significant increase in private wealth, and a concurrent boom in real estate. This has been further boosted by a sharp increase in private philanthropy in the arts, resulting in many new private museums and corporate-backed art foundations.

But the art fair landscape in Asia has become more crowded in the past several years, with new fairs debuting in Seoul, Tokyo, and Singapore since fall 2022. Add to this that the India Art Fair is no longer the country’s only major art fair, with Art Mumbai’s debut last November. That’s forced gallerists and collectors to prioritize which fairs to attend. But this year’s India Art Fair proved that the fair is still an essential one for the global fair calendar, as the VIP Day was jampacked and overflowing crowds during the weekend forcing the fair to impose visitor management measures.

One way the fair sought to combat increased competition was to scale up the fair’s number of exhibitors to more than 100. But, there were clear signs of growth pains as several additions this year, including for booths for institutions and a focus on craft and traditional arts, led to many of local contemporary galleries being squeezed into either smaller booths or given suboptimal locations and layouts.

To differentiate itself from other regional fairs, the IAF turned to exhibitors specializing in design, inviting international leaders like Carpenters Workshop Gallery and de Gournay and top Indian ones like Atelier Ashiesh Shah, Vikram Goyal, Gunjan Gupta, and Rooshad Shroff.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery had an impressive debut at the fair, selling all of their large-scale pieces on the VIP day. Sales highlights included a Nacho Carbonell coffee table going for more than €300,000 ($324,000), a Karl Lagerfield water fountain for €150,000 ($162,000), and several pieces by the Verhoeven Twins, including a Cinderella table in Carrara marble for just under €300,000 ($324,000) and their prismatic bubbles-based work for a more accessible €20,000 Euros ($21,500).

“What is really heartening is that they have been acquired by individual Delhi- and Mumbai-based collectors, showing an appetite for the aesthetic that we have presented to the Indian audience,” Loïc le Gaillard, the gallery’s co-founder, told ARTnews.

Other international exhibitors like Galleria Continua also reported brisk sales. The booth’s showpiece was an Anish Kapoor work; priced at £650,000 ($700,000), the work had not sold by the fair’s end but was still on hold, the gallery said. Other highlights included two works by Ai Weiwei priced between €300,000 ($324,000) and €400,000 ($432,000) which sold to Indian private collectors, and a range of works by Eva Jospin, including her forest-like sculptures made from cardboard and embroideries made in collaboration with Mumbai-based Chanakya School of Craft, which were placed with institutions.

Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider returned after a three-year absence with works by Ai, Olafur Eliasson, and Shilpa Gupta, which gallery cofounder Tim Neuger called “a transcultural proposal” of the gallery’s roster. “They all speak a similar language focused on socio-political themes and are all very inclusive for broader audiences to engage with—both on the surface and at an intellectual level,” he said.  

The fair presented a mix of artists not only from India and the West, but many Indian galleries exhibited artists from across South Asia. Rajeeb Samdani, an ARTnews Top 200 Collector who is one of Bangladesh’s leading patrons, said he found it heartening to see many artists from his country represented across multiple galleries at the fair this year.

The top Delhi-based galleries reported strong results as well. Vadehra Gallery pre-sold a major painting by late artist Tyeb Mehta for an undisclosed price and a piece by Rameshwar Broota for $200,000, and sold more than 25 works on the VIP, including pieces by Shilpa Gupta to a prominent European collection, and cabinets by Atul Dodiya at $80,000 each, also with an institutional buyer. Nature Morte significantly rehung its booth on the second day after frenetic sales the previous day, with gallerist Aparajita Jain confirming that almost 85 percent of the booth had sold on the VIP day. While the top billing was the Subodh Gupta sculpture for €250,000 ($ 270,000), a large Martand Khosla work, which attracted a lot of interest from visitors to the booth, sold for $25,000 to a new buyer.

Experimenter, which has spaces in Kolkata and Mumbai, said it sold around 80 percent of its works by the first day’s end, with multiple key works placed with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and a work by multi-disciplinary artist Afrah Shafiq placed with the Garage Museum in Moscow. Chemould Prescott Road, which has two locations in Mumbai, reported sales of their large Jitish Kallat on show to a private collector and also placed work with the Dubai-based Ishara Art Foundation and the private collection of its founder Smita Prabhakar. 

Sabih Ahmed, the foundation’s director, said, “Our focus is to support the contemporary art of South Asia and its diaspora, so the India Art Fair it is not just about India in isolation but that of the subcontinent and its entanglement with the wider global histories.”

This month’s Designer Desktop has us feeling a little peckish! We’re obsessed with pasta-themed design (like tortellini pool floats and rigatoni pendant lamps) and now, we can add Naomi Otsu’s Cavatappi print to our list. The New York-based graphic designer and illustrator’s work is wildly colorful, often intricate, and always includes a healthy serving of playfulness. You might have already seen her art in Vogue, The New York Times, and Playboy. Pulling from her archives, Naomi is sharing this design in all its tomato-y glory, and honestly, we might never change our desktop now.

Naomi will be debuting brand new work soon, which we’ve gotten a sneak peek and can’t wait to share. Until then, download the print for all your tech devices and then put on a pot of boiling water – cavatappi is on the menu tonight.

DESKTOP: 1024×768  1280×1024  1680×1050  1900×1200  2560×1440

MOBILE: iPhone XS  iPhone XS Max  iPad Pro

Learn more about Naomi Otsu here and here.

View and download past Designer Desktops here.

As the Senior Contributing Editor, Vy Yang is obsessed with discovering ways to live well + with intention through design. She's probably sharing what she finds over on Instagram stories. You can also find her at vytranyang.com.

The nephew of the legendary Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Frederick Iseman, has filed an amendment to his November 2023 lawsuit against the artist’s foundation and directors, including his own family members. The complaint further detailed previous accusations, alleging that the non-profit mismanaged funds in a “systematic pay-to-play” scheme, citing “extensive self-dealing” on the part of his cousin, Clifford Ross, Frankenthaler’s stepdaughter, Lise Motherwell, and the foundation’s treasurer, Michael Hecht.

“Ross, Motherwell and Hecht have not responsibly stewarded the foundation but selfishly looted it,” Iseman alleged in an amended complaint filed on 31 January. “At every turn they have used—indeed, wasted—the foundation’s funds and priceless assets in ways that advanced not the foundation’s mission, but their own self-interest.”

According to Iseman, Ross has “routinely tied Frankenthaler’s work to his own”, overseeing donations of his aunt’s paintings to museums that would show and promote his art, all while obfuscating his role on the foundation’s board. Iseman also alleges that Motherwell curated exhibitions of Frankenthaler’s work “despite her complete lack of credentials”, and has accused Hecht of funneling Frankenthaler Foundation funds to other institutions of which he serves as a board member. Iseman further alleged that his family members enabled the foundation’s “incompetent” executive director, Elizabeth Smith, in her oversight of “approximately $20m of corporate waste”. Iseman claims the assets controlled by the Frankenthaler Foundation, which was established in 1984, are worth as much as $1bn.

Iseman’s lawsuit makes the case that Smith and other members of the family approved more than 170 donations from 2013 to 2022, about $10m worth of which went to venues that promoted Ross and his work. “He browbeats museums into showing his work as a condition of putting on a Frankenthaler show,” the complaint states. The complaint cites as an example of such "pay-for-play" arrangements a $250,000 donation to the Brooklyn Rail allegedly facilitated at Ross's behest. The Rail subsequently published an interview with Ross, a poem by him and an article about him.

Iseman was removed from the foundation's board last spring and filed his lawsuit in November. While the foundation has not addressed his new allegations in court filings, the board of directors sent a statement to Artnet News, refuting Iseman’s claims.

“Iseman’s latest complaint is as baseless as his first filing. This is the case of a former director who was not re-elected to the board due to his unprofessional and disruptive conduct. Moreover, Iseman was actively involved in all major decisions made by the board during his tenure and approved the transactions he now criticises,” the statement from the Frankenthaler Foundation's board claims. “Iseman is also essentially accusing some of the most respected arts organisations in the country of collusion and underhanded activities… Iseman’s scattershot approach and reckless allegations about the foundation’s leadership and the nation’s premier arts institutions, which are the foundation’s partners, demonstrates his true character and why he was unsuitable to continue serving as a director of the foundation.”

Iseman’s lawsuit amendment also accuses his family members of plans to dissolve the foundation entirely, alleging a scheme to flood the market with Frankenthaler’s work and wind down operations. “Their blasé reaction to this obvious concern was puzzling in 2019, but it makes sense now,” the amended complaint states.

A new, free tool designed by researchers at the University of Chicago to help artists “poison” artificial intelligence models trained on their images without their consent has proved immensely popular. Less than a week after it went live, the software was downloaded more than 250,000 times.

Released January 18, Nightshade is currently available for download on Windows and Apple computers from the University of Chicago website. Project leader Ben Zhao, in remarks to VentureBeat, said that the milestone number of downloads was reached in just five days—a surprising outcome though the team expected high enthusiasm. The team did not geolocate downloads, but responses on social media indicate it has been downloaded worldwide.

“I still underestimated it,” Zhao said. “The response is simply beyond anything we imagined.”

Artnet News has reached out Zhao, a computer science professor at the university, for comment but did not hear back by press time.

“The demand for Nightshade has been off the charts,” the team said in a statement on social media. “Global requests have actually saturated our campus network link. No DOS attack, just legit downloads.”

Nightshade functions by “shading” images at the pixel level to make them appear entirely different, causing any images generated by an A.I. model to be flawed and affecting how a machine learning algorithm views them. It is a sister product of Glaze, which seeks to cause A.I. models to misidentify an art style and replicate it incorrectly. The team is currently working on combining the tools.

“If you are an artist whose art style might be mimicked, we recommend that you do not post any images that are only shaded but not glazed,” the team wrote on its website. “We are still doing tests to understand how Glaze interacts with Nightshade on the same image.”

For now, artists are encouraged to follow the process of using Nightshade on an image first and then using Glaze for protection. Though, this process might increase the level of visible artifacts in the work.

The team gave a couple other words of warning on social media, including that it’s “probably not best idea to announce an image as poison, kinda defeats the purpose.” The program is also very memory intensive.

The user interface for the program is not visually impressive but intuitive. An artist is easily guided to selecting what image to shade with two mandatory settings to adjust and an optional third, before the output is rendered in between 30 and 180 minutes depending on settings selected.

Some artists on social media have even suggested poisoning everything a person posts online including “daily photos about your meal, family, puppies, kittens, random selfies and street shots.” Other platforms, such as the social and portfolio application Cara currently in open beta, will soon integrate with Nightshade.

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“In the Summers”

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

“Dìdi (弟弟)”

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

“Girls Will Be Girls”

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

“Brief History of a Family”

Reviewing Fiona Maddocks’ beautiful new book on Sergei Rachmaninoff in exile for The American Scholar, I write: 

“With the waning of modernism, Rachmaninoff’s stock began to rise; for the first time, he became an object of serious scholarly inquiry. Today, he ranks with Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Serge Prokofiev as one of four great Russian composers populating the interwar period and after. . . .

“In this company, Rachmaninoff is the one who left Russia yet stayed Russian. At first, he seemed creatively stranded. . . . Then, miraculously, came two late masterpieces. The first, the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, is concise and ingenious, witty and warm. It also somewhat feeds on the smart syncopations and wicked virtuosity of Harlem piano. The second is the Symphonic Dances . . . Summoning his waning energies, he fashioned a musical testament. . . .

“We are drawing a new musical map. Looking back, the twentieth no longer seems the century of Stravinsky. Prokofiev once eclipsed Shostakovich – but no longer. And Sergei Rachmaninoff stands apart from the turmoil that enveloped him, a pillar of implacable poise and sovereign humanity.”

To read the review, click here.

For a related Rachmaninoff blog, clock here.

When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces here.

Any super-rich schmuck can buy a yacht. Or a mansion. Even Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire, owned a mansion and a yacht. Multi-millionaires and billionaires can buy many things that (loudly) telegraph their wealth, from Lamborghinis to Birkins to Rolexes. But instead of asserting the prosperity, taste, and exclusivity the titans of the world assume, these possessions signal that this super-rich person is, in fact, an unsophisticated super-rich schmuck.

But, if a wealthy person aspires to be more than just another Kardashian, one asset transcends all of this and changes the very identity of its owner, notably in the eyes of society. That luxuriously special, quintessentially refined asset is art. I’m not talking about art from a local gallery or poster shop or Etsy or eBay. I’m referring to the most expensive art in the world; by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso,  Monet, Warhol, Pollock, Koons. These are the preferred investment vehicles for really smart and/or really insecure oligarchs. 

The planet’s power brokers know that society will accept the recently wealthy—but only up to a point. When a person wants to take the next step up the food chain, when they want to stick out beyond the others in high society, they buy art. Rich people who become art collectors are no longer viewed by society as simply rich, or (God forbid!) nouveau riche. When a mogul collects art, a whole new set of adjectives is used to describe them: refined, cultured, urbane. Indeed, they have graduated. Art is the way the rich buy legitimacy.

And oligarchs, who are further tainted by the whiff of corruption and undue privilege, need to legitimize themselves more than anyone else. Their art collections soften their image. Surely a person who appreciates beautiful things can’t be that bad. Like Al Capone in The Untouchables, who cries at the opera, an appreciation for art humanizes even the most vicious real-life Bond villains.

Before we continue, let me dispense with a formality. I happen to know all this because, as a high-end art dealer, I’ve personally interacted with oligarchs from all over the world. I’ve sold them Lichtensteins, Rothkos, Matisses, Dalis, and  others at the highest level. Art is a business of discretion and secrecy, qualities that oligarchs prize. But, unlike all my colleagues in the art business, I’ve decided to tell it like it is. Why? I suppose you might say that I am in a unique position. I got busted for wire fraud some years ago and was imprisoned for more than a year in Otisville, a minimum-security camp in upstate New York.

To save my gallery from financial ruin, I had desperately resorted to lying about payments and taking loans on things that weren’t ours. That is until my partner got spooked and turned me in. I admit that I feel guilty about it all; I didn’t want to fuck anyone over—but inadvertently, I did.

I also feel a bit salty for having become the poster boy for corruption in the art business, when most of the industry is about hiding money, misrepresentation, and general malfeasance. But now, the world is a beneficiary of my fuckup, as I’ve decided to share my arcane knowledge so that less-rich people can learn about the shit that goes down with the ruling elite. And shit does go down—all over the world.

We think of oligarchy as a foreign concept, but the truth is that American oligarchs abound, and many of them collect art. It’s a time-honored strategy. The robber barons of old took time between amassing their wealth and industrializing our cities to build world-class museums—the Frick, the Carnegie, MoMA. We can only hope that the new oligarch collectors follow suit.

Should you happen to speak to former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, ask him if he’ll donate his Magritte collection to a museum. Ronald Lauder, a huge Republican donor and confidante of politicians, has a phenomenal collection of Austrian Secessionist art, some of which he displays in his own first-rate museum. The late Ambassador Donald Blinken (Antony’s father) owned four wonderful Rothkos. Even Donald Trump claims to own a Renoir, though an identical one hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, making one of the two a fake (guess which?). One day there may be a Donald Trump museum; his “Renoir” can hang there.

I had high-end galleries in New York and in Moscow for years, and so I got to understand oligarchs pretty well. Over plenty of champagne, or vodka, they explained why they loved buying art. 

“Did you see the ARTnews list of top collectors?” one ultra-wealthy American hedge fund manager asked me many years ago. He had been collecting for about a year, just starting to explore the Impressionists and early moderns—an easy entry point for newbies. But this guy was so rich that he’d bought some very expensive entry-level paintings.

“Are you in the top 200?” I was at once surprised and happy for him.

“I’m in the top 10!” he said, equally dumbfounded.

Simply by buying some expensive art, this really rich guy immediately was transformed. He was no longer one of many in a growing list of lucky, brash, crass billionaires, but a man of culture, sophistication, and taste. Never mind that, as he confessed to me, “I don’t know the difference between Monet and Manet.” He had completed his metamorphosis and emerged a beautiful (social) butterfly.

This instant identity upgrade is a dream scenario and the top reason, psychologically and sociologically, why oligarchs collect art.

The problem is that public adulation of a wealthy new collector attracts a swarm of art insects (dealers, advisors, curators) who are so relentlessly obsequious that the newly minted collector eventually begins to believe the buzz.

“I want to be a tastemaker,” my rich friend told me soon after his ARTnews star turn, indifferent to the fact that any member of the cognoscenti should at least be able to differentiate between two of the most famous Impressionist masters. But you can hardly blame him. After having been enthusiastically fêted and honored, he had to believe that his talents extended beyond the stock ticker and onto the walls of the world’s top museums—where his paintings would occasionally be displayed on loan with the quiet acknowledgment of ownership.

“I want art that fits in my suitcase,” a wealthy Russian collector I’ll call Yevgeny (no real names—I don’t wish to fall out of any windows) told me. “That way, if something crazy happens, I can take my art and get the fuck out of here.”

This sentiment is not unique. One of the draws of art is that it is easily transportable and thus easy to smuggle. Yevgeny could put his small Kandinsky, which is worth $10 million, in a hardshell rollaway bag, and take it on his plane to Malta or Macau or even New York or London. Nobody would know that he just moved all that money across borders. By doing this, Yevgeny would take full advantage of the esoteric nature of the asset and the lack of international regulation. 

If you’ve ever traveled internationally on a private plane (sorry, art dealers can be snobs), you would likely notice the lax enforcement of rules most fliers take for granted. As we mere mortals battle the lines and red tape at airports, for those traveling in the private air corridors, inconveniences like passport control or customs officials are batted away like insignificant bugs. Nobody declares much, and less than nobody checks the cargo onboard.

Authorities’ ignorance about art is another secret weakness in the chain. I often have traveled with art, and I’ve never once had anyone realize that what I was bringing in was, say, a Miró, and not something my young nephew made. This lack of expertise extends to valuations. How could a customs agent know that the work I’m transporting is worth $10 million, and not the $10,000 I may declare? Indeed, the legal import and export channels can become quite porous for art. If you’re wondering whether I’ve ever taken advantage of these weak links to smuggle art, corner me in a bar somewhere and inquire discreetly.

But it is the supreme globalism of the art trade that makes regulation impossible. These are borderless transactions, wherein a deal might close in New York, the funds are transferred in the Bahamas, and the painting is delivered in a Swiss or Singaporean free port. Which jurisdiction would be in charge of such a deal? Nations have little incentive to step in, because strengthening regulation in the US, for example, would just move the trade elsewhere.

Put simply, there is no better vehicle than art with which to hide and transport funds. It is no secret that famed Russian collector Dmitry Rybolovlev amassed his collection of priceless masterworks quietly. The art world buzz was that he aimed to stash the bulk of his wealth into something his soon-to-be ex-wife could not easily track—a buzz confirmed by the Panama Papers. Unfortunately for Rybolovlev, suing his adviser (long story) in a very public fashion, buying a supposed Leonardo (longer story). and now initiating a giant lawsuit against the storied auction house Sotheby’s has brought him enough notoriety to scuttle his original plan

Note to oligarch collectors: If you’re trying to avoid attention, don’t buy Salvator Mundi, the most expensive painting ever sold. I’m talking to you, MBS. (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman is its current owner.)

But this is just a very public example of art being used sneakily. Privately, I’ve seen collectors hide assets from their siblings, parents, wives, mistresses, children, the government, and the public. Mostly these shenanigans remain secret, but plenty have come to light: Imelda Marcus, the Philippines’ former First Lady and current First Mother, and convicted Malaysian financier Jho Low each used their respective countries’ public funds to adorn their homes with Monets. Bernie Madoff’s lieutenant, Ezra Merkin, famously sunk his ill-gotten wealth into a collection of Rothkos. Anita Halpin, chair of the Communist Party of Britain, became fabulously rich when she quietly began to sell off her inherited collection of Nazi-looted-then-restituted pictures. And she would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling journalists.

We know oligarchs exist in every country. The ones in the US are often referred to as “philanthropists,” but they also enjoy their access to the levers of power. At this point, most major Russian oligarch collectors, including some of my former clients, have been sanctioned and thus stopped collecting. One client even was indicted and has since fled back to Russia. Let me pause to send him a private message: I understand what you’re going through, comrade, but I recommend you come back and face the music. Club Fed wasn’t that bad.

But the art world is resilient, and when one set of oligarch buyers dries up, we move on to the next. I’ve lived through periods of mania over billionaire buyers from Japan to the Middle East to Wall Street to Russia to China—and back to the Middle East. There will always be billionaires somewhere searching for something to do with their cash. Whether your name is Abramovich or Lauder, Koch or Zhukova, as long as you have money and influence, I humbly recommend, as any good dealer would, you consider art as a (mostly) legal means to protect your wealth and get you invited to lots of parties—communist or otherwise. 

Marking its 40th anniversary, Marc Jacobs brought together a cast of friends and collaborators for its Spring/Summer 2024 campaign, shot by German photographer Jeurgen Teller. Among the subjects captured were artist and photographer Cindy Sherman and musicians FKA Twigs, Lil Uzi Vert and Bladee.

In the series of lo-fi shots, Teller posed each subject solo on the street in front of Marc Jacobs’ lower Manhattan headquarters.

For Sherman’s, which circulated online Wednesday, the septuagenarian artist donned two personas that have appeared in her own work before: one is in full grunge with long faux-brunette hair and legs spread apart, seated on the side of the street. In the other, Sherman is blonde, with gloved hands, standing outside of the brand’s 72 Spring Street entrance, as she balances in platform heels half-a-foot off the ground.

The collaboration between the American designer and photographers Teller and Sherman dates back almost two decades. In 2005, the three published Ohne Titel, a collection of then-unpublished images that Teller had taken with him and Sherman as the main subjects, dressed eerily like a set of twins. The project derived from Jacobs’s idea to tap the two for an ad campaign. By that time, he’d already been working with Teller since 1997. In 2008, art dealer Barbara Gladstone told the New York Times of the project: “The ads are really for people who get it, and I think Marc and Juergen happily dispense with those who don’t.”

Sherman’s feature in the latest campaign coincides with two other major shows of her work on view in the U.S. and Europe.

In New York earlier this month, she unveiled a new series at Hauser & Wirth, a group of 30 images in which she manipulates her own portraits by adding in prosthetic features and making digital alterations.

The other titled, “Anti-Fashion,” ongoing until early March at the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg, Germany, surveys Sherman’s ties to fashion. The personas she constructs in her photographs have long responded to the industry’s contorted expectations, a curator argued in a catalogue entry accompanying the exhibition, adding that Sherman’s characters “are anything but desirable, and run counter to the fashion world ideals of flawlessness.”