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After last month’s auction sales saw a more subdued sales environment across the major auction houses, a new filing with the UK government reveals the clearest indication yet that at least one of them is struggling. London-based Phillips saw its losses in the UK double from 2021 to 2022, after rising costs due to inflation outpaced sales growth amid a “market slowdown,” according to the October filing.

In the filing, the Phillips board of directors, including executive chairman Ed Dolman—who served as CEO from 2014 to 2021—recommended against paying a dividend to investors, after a report from UK auditing firm Buzzacott described its position as in a “current net liability,” meaning that financial liabilities outweigh assets.

Generally, a board’s decision not to issue a dividend can signal financial strain or a lack of confidence, even for a private company, as the Wall Street Journal explained last year amid a spate of major companies failing to pay out to investors.

Owned by Leonid Fridlyand and Leonid Strunin, the founders of Russian luxury retailer Mercury Group, Phillips remains reliant on financing from Mercury, according to the March and October disclosures, which the auditor’s report said put the house’s financial position in a state of “uncertainty.” It echoes similar findings noted in a report from this past March that appeared in the Guardian, when Buzzacott stated that the ability of Mercury Group’s individual owners to provide support could not be guaranteed, leaving “significant doubt” around the auction house’s ability to continue.

The October report makes clear that, amid the downturn, the auction house is currently unsure how much financial support it can rely on from Mercury. In it, the directors pointed to “continued access to funding” and a lack of a “binding commitment” for funding from Mercury as an ongoing risk to the auction house’s financial stability. It also cited a “general reluctance” among art sellers in a “volatile” marketplace as an additional challenge faced by Phillips last year. In the same financial documents, Phillips directors noted that Mercury Group’s owners “as individuals” had confirmed they would not, in the next year, seek repayment of financial support they had already put toward developing Phillips.

Not even a surge in revenue could make up for the hurdles Phillips faced in a more difficult sale environment in 2022. Last year, Phillips generated £208.6 million ($262 million) in revenue in the UK from auction and private sales combined, a figure that accounts for 20 percent of its reported overall sales figure of $1.3 billion. While revenue increased by $38.3 million from 2021 to 2022, or 8.5 percent, the report cited that “inflationary pressure” in transportation and shipping forced a surge in costs of 25.7 percent. The resulting loss for its UK operation more than doubled from £5.6 million ($7 million) in 2021 to £13 million ($16 million) in 2022. Those rising costs saw the company’s profit margin in the UK drop by 4 percent, from 57 percent to 53 percent between 2021 and 2022.

In October, Phillips directors said in a report included in the filing, they’re aiming in the future to “keep costs stable.” When Phillips reported it made $1.3 billion in sales in 2022 last December, it withheld any indication of decreased profitability. Instead, the house suggested publicly that the sales growth was a sign of the company’s health, allowing it to expand its operations in Asia. (The big three auction houses project their year-end sales annually around mid-December; Sotheby’s did so last week, and Christie’s says it plans to report theirs on Monday. A company representative said Phillips does not plan to publish its 2023 sales results at this time.)

In a statement to ARTnews, a Phillips spokesperson said “filings made in the UK in October 2023 contain information that is now more than a year old. They only take into account Phillips’ operations in the UK, excluding any operations outside of the UK. They do not represent an accurate view of Phillips’ global financial status.”

Phillips, as well as its competitors, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, do not typically publish their overall financial performances from year to year, particularly if they underperform or the market is weak. Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart recently disclosed that the house’s 2023 sales reached a collective $8 billion, the same figure reported in 2022. While such sales figures are often reported, revenue or profit margins are not usually published annually, which are more accurate measures of financial health.

A Phillips spokesperson told the Guardian this past March that after Mercury Group acquired the company in 2012, the new owners made “significant investments” in developing the house, and that its objective was to “repay the investment in due course.” (A representative for Phillips did not respond to an ARTnews inquiry on whether the October 3 directors’ decision signified a stall in achieving the stated goal.)

By the end of 2022, according to the October report, there were signs of a “gradual slowdown” in sales across the art trade, a shift that many New York galleries recently told ARTnews they experienced during the first half of 2023. Gallerists specializing in early-career artists told ARTnews that over the past six months collectors held off on completing acquisitions, even after long-running inquiries into the practices of artists.

Further indicators of strain came during the important contemporary evening sales this past November in New York, in which Phillips, for the first time in years, debuted no artists. Recent years had seen Phillips emphasize a strategy of introducing early-career artists through its sales, pointing to records set for younger talent as a key metric of its success and growing influence in the trade. In 2023, Phillips debuted 123 artists across other sales.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the media and US and UK governments have more closely scrutinized the financial maneuvering of high-profile figures in the luxury and art sectors, many of whom are Russian. That scrutiny has only increased since Israel began airstrikes and a ground invasion in Gaza, raising tensions across the Middle East.

While it went unmentioned in the October report, UK public records show that in April 2022 Mercury Group owners Fridlyand and Strunin officially changed their nationality from Russian to Israeli.

“The company’s shareholders have been steadfastly committed to the company and continue to invest in Phillips’ future,” a spokesperson for the auction house said.

For this year’s Miami Art & Design Week, Lexus unveiled its latest designer collaboration with Marjan van Aubel, a Dutch solar designer who reinterprets the Lexus Future Zero-emission Catalyze (LF-ZC) concept car using solar cells. The installation is titled “8 Minutes and 20 Seconds” in reference to the approximate time it takes a light particle to reach the earth. Using 15 Organic Photovoltaics (OPV) solar sheets, van Aubel harnesses the power of the sun to fill the batteries that are hidden in the sculpture’s base. During the day, the transparent yet colorful installation looks like a mirage, a true-to-size representation of the LF-ZC. By night, it comes to life, a futuristic light show that interacts with people passing by.

“8 Minutes and 20 Seconds” was actualized with the help of spatial and experience design firm Random Studio. Four individual motion sensors detect the presence of viewers and create a kaleidoscopic and melodic reaction using colors and sounds by Sabina SweetRice and Malloy James. Light bounces across the installation’s base which represents the car’s EV platform while an ambient melody of string instruments, soft piano, chimes, birdsong, and bamboo notes transports viewers to a zen-like auditory experience.

Marjan van Aubel

The installation is on view through December 17, 2023 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami).

Photography by Steve Benisty.

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.

Although this year’s Meridians section at Art Basel in Miami Beach lacks an official theme, many of its large-scale works reference some sort of metaphorical largeness—whether global connectivity, the environment or the universal language of music. Magalí Arriola, the section’s curator and director of Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo, specifically included two video pieces this year, an effort to expand the very concept of “large-scale” work into the fourth dimension. “Spending time with video or performance—it’s not large-scale in terms of size, but in terms of how to expand artistic practice,” she says. “Video is a very different way of experiencing art because it demands time. It’s a medium that evolves in time rather than space.”

Lee Mullican, Entrance of the Entertainers (1984-85), Marc Selwyn Fine Art

“Lee Mullican was part of a group called the Dynaton, who were preoccupied with spirituality, creating a link between European Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism and the extinction of the planet in the atomic age. Mullican was a surveillance pilot during the Second World War, and all of his work is very textural and relates to the bird’s-eye view.”

Seung-taek Lee, Earth Play (1990s), Gallery Hyundai

“This is an inflatable balloon painted with a satellite image of the Earth—meant to be activated not only by the artist but also by the public, when Lee would do performances outdoors, dragging the balloon or riding on a bike with the balloon attached to it. He would activate it in different contexts—all of them very loaded politically—such as in a plaza next to the Berlin Wall or Tiananmen Square.”

Eric N. Mack, Flourish (2023), Paula Cooper Gallery, Morán Morán, Galleria Franco Noero

“Eric N. Mack works with a lot of recycled fabrics. He sees this as an evolution of what painting could be. It’s really a dialogue between painting and sculpture. There are so many references in this work, like Alexander Calder with these mobile-like structures, but it’s also a way of finding how to deploy painting out of the canvas.”

Oliver Beer, Composition for Face and Hands (ASMR) (2023), Almine Rech

“Oliver Beer was a musician and composer before becoming an artist. Much of his work is about finding resonances within bodies or objects—human bodies, in this case. He collaborated for this project with percussionists, who play compositions on each other’s faces. All this rubbing and tapping accelerates until it creates a huge tension between the performers, and when the tension goes to its maximum, it stops.”

Marcelo Brodsky, 1968: The fire of ideas (2014-18), Rolf Art

“This is a series of photographs that offers a survey of different political demonstrations that took place globally in the 1960s and 70s. Brodsky took pictures from his own archive or media archives from all these demonstrations, and he coloured them. The text he wrote is against the grain of the captions that many of these images would have had in their original context when they were printed in newspapers—a way of counteracting the official history and balancing history and memory.”

Reginald O’Neal, The Cellist (2023), Spinello Projects

“Reginald O’Neal is an artist from Miami, who was raised in Overtown, where all the Black entertainers that flew in to play for white audiences would be obliged to stay during segregation. This is his first large-scale sculpture, which comes from a series of smaller-scale paintings that represent figurines. The figure is turning his back to the audience, which is a very political move.”

Hew Locke, Gilt (2022), Almine Rech

“Hew Locke presented this work in 2022 for the Metropolitan Museum’s façade project. A lot of his work is about what he calls the ‘heritage industry’. The elements here are like conceptual collages of different historical pieces—all of them objects in the Met’s collection—blown up to this monumental scale. It’s very close to institutional critique, speaking about how museums implement these kind of colonial practices.”

A painting by Marlene Dumas sold for $9 million at Art Basel Miami Beach, according to David Zwirner gallery, which represents the highly touted South African artist.

The price for The Schoolboys (1986–87) marks a new personal high for Dumas, in terms of what market observers can track. When it comes to her auction track record, the high of $6.3 million was established back in 2008.

It’s the latest big-ticket item sold at the fair, which kicked off to the drumbeat of a $20 million sale by Hauser & Wirth during the VIP opening on Tuesday. Gagosian has already sold upwards of 60 works for more than $35 million, including a major Richter painting from 1982 that carried a $12.5 million asking price.

Although it’s unclear what the final selling price for that Richter was, it means that the Dumas—which was touted as the highest-priced work to sell on Thursday—is not the second most expensive work that has been reported sold at the fair, but the third.

And that’s with two days still to go. A painting by Frank Stella, with the asking price of $45 million, remains unsold at Yares Art. 

Galleries often broadcast sales such as these as a marketing tool to generate publicity. What makes David Zwirner’s announcement of the Dumas transaction particularly noteworthy is that it comes six months after the gallery took a public stance against revealing private sales at art fairs.

“David Zwirner took the surprise decision not to disclose prices on secondary-market sales made this year, and reported to press that he would no longer do so going forward,” Artnet’s Naomi Rea reported from Art Basel in June. At the time, the gallery featured secondary-market paintings by Joan Mitchell, Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter, and Agnes Martin.

A representative for David Zwirner didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment about the change of strategy.

“I believe that it is the gallery’s responsibility to look after the best interests of our consignors,” Zwirner told the Art Newspaper in June. “We have a responsibility to our clients to value their privacy and to appreciate when they choose to sell through the gallery versus taking the works to auction.”

This particular Dumas painting, The Schoolboys, returned to the market 15 years after it first appeared, when it fetched $1.8 million at Christie’s in London in 2011, according to the Artnet Price Database. At the time, it was sold by Museum Gouda, which owned it, to raise money for its acquisition fund.

The work is part of a small group of portraits, primarily of schoolchildren, that Dumas painted in the late 1980s after moving to the Netherlands. It depicts four teenage boys in striped school uniforms, some sneering, with the composition recalling the group portraits of the 17th century Dutch Golden Age.

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“Miami,” in the art world, is short for Miami Art Week, which is short for a week-long bacchanal of eye candy, nose candy, parties, and pills held in the name of shopping for art. The first week of December marks the kickoff to Miami, which features two or maybe three dozen different art fairs, the most prestigious of them being Art Basel Miami Beach, an import from Switzerland that, if you’re in the know, is simply called “the main fair.”

I wasn’t in the know, or at least I hadn’t been until recently. I’d spent much of my adult life convinced that art wasn’t for me. But as I hit my mid-30s, I started to worry that I was missing out on something important. I wanted to understand art—why it matters, how to engage with it, why both artists and scientists insist it’s fundamental to our humanity. So a few years ago, I spent months working in galleries and artists’ studios, spackling walls, stretching canvases, writing press releases. Then, as December neared, I started to hear more about Miami.

Depending on whom I asked, Miami was either an unmissable art pilgrimage or as tasteless as a Señor Frog’s wet-T-shirt contest. “If I had to choose between going to Art Basel Miami and dying in a plane crash, I’d pick going down in flames,” one erstwhile attendee said. It was fun. It was gross. It was “the bourgeois indulgence that comes before a Communist revolution.” I read that the year before, the galleries participating in Art Basel Miami Beach had brought $3.5 billion worth of art to sell, and that was just one fair out of dozens. Is there any other gathering where people spend so much money in so little time? Only defense expos come to mind.

Lots of art galleries try to hold money at arm’s length—pieces aren’t sold but placed, one dealer had coached me to say—but Miami, with its unapologetic buy buy buy mentality, sounded like a rare moment when the art world let it all hang out. I was curious to study buyers in action in the hopes that seeing what compelled them to pay huge sums of money for an artwork would reveal more about art’s place in our lives. But this late in the game, I couldn’t nail down a hotel room, let alone an invitation to tag along with someone who was going.

Read: The week Miami becomes the center of the art world

Just as I was running out of ideas for how to get myself behind-the-scenes access to the fairs, the opportunity came: Elizabeth Denny and Rob Dimin, then the co-owners of the Denny Dimin Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, invited me to come on board as their assistant—with the expectation that I’d get in there and sell. “In Miami, you’ll see,” Rob said, breathy with excitement, “it’s all about the fucking deals.”

Elizabeth and Rob had decided against applying for a spot at Art Basel Miami Beach. Instead, they would be bringing abstract photographs by Erin O’Keefe to a fair called Untitled, which was considered one of only two acceptable alternatives to Art Basel Miami. (The NADA—New Art Dealers Alliance—fair was the other.)

Art fairs are, I kept hearing, either a necessary evil or just evil. They offer exposure: 40,000 people, including museum curators and big-time collectors, had visited Untitled the year before I went. But also, fairs “do destroy galleries,” Rob told me. “If you have two bad fairs in a row, people can’t dig themselves out from them.”

In the weeks leading up to Miami, thick plumes of anxiety poured out of the Denny Dimin office each day—it didn’t help that the gallery’s recent show in New York had sold barely to not at all—and Elizabeth, keeper of bills and invoices, finally pulled up a spreadsheet to show me her budget. They were betting $39,000, cobbled together on credit cards, that they could fly to a different state, hang 21 pieces of colorful paper in a glorified elementary-school science-fair booth, and, over the course of five days, persuade strangers to fork over tens of thousands of dollars for said paper. Oh, and Elizabeth and Rob had the harebrained idea of bringing me along to help them pull it off.

Like a coach rallying players for a big game, Elizabeth gathered us shortly before leaving for Miami to announce that the gallery needed to sell about $70,000 worth of art, or 13 or so photographs, to break even. Really, we needed to sell a lot more, both to avoid Elizabeth going into cardiac arrest and to afford their ambitious expansion plans. Elizabeth and Rob hoped spending money would ensure that the gallery would grow in lockstep with their artists, who were “emerging” now, but asking for more as their careers swelled. Bigger-name fairs. More help paying to produce expensive pieces. “If they’re doing their job well, they’re demanding,” Elizabeth said. It was grow or be outgrown, and they worried that artists would ditch them for larger galleries. The finish line was the museum door. “I can’t wait for the day an artist of mine has a show at the Whitney,” Rob said.

Yet even with so much at stake, in Miami, sobriety was apparently optional. Perhaps even a liability. “A very prolific art dealer who’s a friend of mine said to me five years ago that the only way to have a successful Miami is to either be drunk, high, or hungover during fair days, and so two years ago, I tested his philosophy,” Rob announced one day. “It was our best Miami.”

Rob’s other advice: “RSVP to everything. Literally, like, literally—RSVP to everything.”

I RSVPed to everything. At least I tried to. Rob forwarded me more than a dozen invitations and a friend shared a list of parties that ran seven single-spaced pages yet opened with the disclaimer that it included only evening events—“daytime art touring plans elsewhere.” From the Monday before the fairs opened until the following Monday, from cocktail hour through breakfast, I could, if on the guest list and immune to sleep, bowl with Swizz Beatz, pay $70 to celebrate a billionaire real-estate developer’s birthday, watch a photographer’s live photo shoot of a Brazilian supermodel, and get down to beats beats beats while a DJ and artist held space for a “collective catharsis” from commercial activities (this was sponsored by Facebook). Every party was a “bash”; music was “tunes”; food was “culinary cuisine.” The invitations leaned in close to yell, “COME TO THIS GLITZY BASH FEATURING ’NSYNC’S LANCE BASS.”

I quickly realized that RSVPing was a competitive sport, and I was losing. This was confirmed when a gallerist flashed me his schedule—a mess of bashes I hadn’t known existed. I begged an art-dealer friend to help me get a VIP pass to the main fair, which allowed me to RSVP for even more events and enjoy a satisfaction akin to leveling up in a video game. This must be the feeling Art Basel Miami’s ex-director had in mind when he congratulated the fair for having “fine-tuned the idea of contemporary art as a lifestyle choice.”

Two days before Untitled officially opened, I flew to Miami. On the taxi ride to my hotel, I passed sprawling art fairs, billboards advertising fairs I’d never heard of, and three art museums. There were two art fairs on the beach across from my hotel and a plane over the ocean dragging a banner by the artist Mister E: MONEY ISN’T REAL.

Watch: The problem with art fairs

Collectors had begun assembling in Miami as well. They intrigued me: Artists and gallerists discussed them with a mix of fear, reverence, and occasional disdain that made them sound so powerful, so otherworldly, that I’d gotten fixated on the idea of studying these buyers up close—preferably surrounded by their spoils. I’d spent the previous six months trying to weasel into art collectors’ homes. But how? I couldn’t very well just show up at a billionaire’s door, ring the doorbell, and ask to see the joint.

In fact, I discovered in Miami, that’s exactly what you do. South Florida’s biggest art collectors have a pre-art-fair ritual of flinging open their doors to let strangers gawk at what they’ve bought. As was my right as the proud holder of an Art Basel VIP pass, I joined the poreless and exquisitely orthodontiaed in touring these sprawling homes. Uniformed valets relieved visitors of their Maseratis, rented baristas fed us espresso shots, and pretty young women handed out maps in case we’d failed to recognize that the painting over the couch was a priceless Anselm Kiefer, which, feeling smug, I had recognized.

I’d understood that rich people could buy lots of art, but I hadn’t realized until this moment that my definitions of rich and lots were off by many orders of magnitude. “Clients ask me, ‘Are we collectors?’ And I say, ‘Has the word warehouse entered your vocabulary?’” said an art adviser, an old hand on the Miami circuit.

One collector, Beth Rudin DeWoody, had taken over a former munitions depot to show all the art she couldn’t fit in her art-filled apartment in New York, her three art-filled apartments in Los Angeles, or her three art-filled homes in Palm Beach. Wandering through her invitation-only bunker, The Bunker, I abandoned all hope of savoring each work—I’d be here for days, possibly weeks—and videoed the rooms like everyone else was, vowing to review the footage later.

I managed to claim a few minutes with DeWoody, flanked by her two curators. Her support for emerging artists had made her something of a patron saint to gallerists, and she was legendary for buying art omnivorously—so much so that she sometimes had trouble keeping track of what she had. She told me she’d gone to a show by the artist Theresa Chromati and raved to the gallerist about how much she loved Chromati’s work. “He said, ‘Oh, you know you own one of these,’” DeWoody recalled. Her response: “I do?”

Tuesday morning, the first day of Untitled, I woke up late and hungover, thanks to Rob’s advice, and was a sweaty mess by the time I hustled to the art fair. At 1 p.m., Untitled would officially open its doors—to the VIPs, that is. Collectors, curators, museum patrons, and journalists were Very Important. Untitled’s organizers and exhibitors gave them free passes. The “schmos”—one gallerist’s term for “general public”—could come starting tomorrow, at $35 a head.

At 1:15, I was talking to my first VIP. I’d spent days reading everything I could find on Erin O’Keefe, then memorizing two pages of talking points. “So the artist paints wooden blocks,” I told the VIP. That didn’t sound right. I tried: “She cuts out painted pieces of cardboard.” I was making her sound like a preschooler.

At 1:19, Rob made the day’s first sale. “This gentleman would like to acquire edition one,” he announced.

Nearby, a man in a dark blazer was explaining how to set up and structure trusts. A middle-aged woman with a soft blowout reviewed her daughter’s headshots, occasionally zooming to scrutinize invisible flaws. The men, in pastel linen button-downs over pressed khakis, were delicious little sorbets plopped on ice-cream cones, while the women—gold pants, metallic jackets—glittered like disco balls. From across the tent, I heard the hollow thop of popped champagne.

Another piece sold. By 3 p.m., I’d upgraded from “O’Keefe photographs her sculptural arrangements and then destroys them” to “She dismantles them.” “They look very painterly, but they’re photographs of physical materials,” I tried, to no avail. I referenced Piet Mondrian, then threw in “Mondrianesque,” just because. I was beginning to annoy myself. “That work has been placed,” I told a woman. “Does placed mean ‘sold’?” she asked. I wanted to fire myself.

At 7:11 p.m., I counted nine pieces sold that day, none by me. Determined to prove myself, I asked Elizabeth for sales advice. I’d heard gallerists try to sell work using what they called “context”: by mentioning that this artist was beloved by The New York Times’ art critic or was in the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection or was currently dating a more famous artist.

But Elizabeth didn’t like spiels about the artist’s résumé. Focus on the art, she advised. And don’t say placed. “It sounds too pompous.” Elizabeth reiterated her golden rule: “I don’t leave the work until someone asks me a question that leaves the work. Until then, I stay in the work.” It was a kind of Hippocratic oath: Stay. In. The. Work.

The artist Gina Malek had made a similar suggestion when I visited her studio in the Bronx. “Just walk up to a piece and try to think of five things that it brings up,” she suggested. Not five things that the art is about. The observations don’t need to be grandiose, like This probes masculinity in the postinternet age. Just: What are five things you notice, either in the work or in how it makes you feel? “Like, that red is very cool or very warm … That shape really dominates the canvas … I love how that paint is gushy and then it thins out,” Gina said. “All those things are important, and they’re intentional.”

The next afternoon, during a brief moment of calm, I let Erin O’Keefe’s work wash over me. While trying to appear available to passersby, I stared at a small photo, 20 by 16 inches, just to the left of my shoulder. Stay in the work, I ordered myself. Five things.

O’Keefe had photographed three objects positioned on a watermelon-pink surface that butted up against a brushy, hollandaise-yellow expanse. On the left-hand side of the image rested a half-moon of canary-yellow cardboard; behind it was a long, skinny brown pole thing; to the right of that was an hourglass-shape chunk of wood painted red with a curvy swoop of green. Or at least I think the things were cardboard and wood. O’Keefe’s photos could pass for paintings and consistently made me second-guess what I was seeing.

Now that was interesting. From some cobwebby corner of my brain, there surfaced the memory of an old college professor lecturing that photographs were duplicitous by nature. In theory, photos faithfully capture a snapshot of reality. And yet photographers, like journalists, inevitably frame each scene in a way that cuts out some details and calls attention to others. O’Keefe’s photos seemed to be toying with photography’s untrustworthiness. I kept staring, transfixed. There, hovering on the yellow backdrop, was a shape I’d never noticed before: a mysterious pale circle, some kind of tiny glowing orb. I had no idea how it got there. Was it painted on the backdrop? A reflection of light? For the first time, I felt the thrill of being lost.

Doubts immediately rushed in. Look at the pretty colors! The preciousness of the paper! O’Keefe’s photos were beautiful, I realized with a sinking feeling.

After spending time in the art world, I’d grown suspicious of beauty. It had become clear to me that elite society considered beauty to be toxic, and saw seeking it out as a sign of moral weakness. Philosophers, art critics, scientists, and garden-variety intellectuals have, over the past 100 years, teamed up with artists to declare beauty both corrupted and corrupting. It’s “superficial and consoling,” “tainted by bourgeois values,” and “manipulated by those in power,” writes the professor Rhett Diessner in his book on beauty. “Today,” he says, “it is simply treated by the art world as a joke, a con, an idiotic, old-fashioned idea.” I worried that enjoying a beautiful artwork meant I wasn’t really moved.

Being around O’Keefe’s photos just felt good, like lying on a beach towel in the sun. Only that wasn’t necessarily something erudite art connoisseurs were supposed to say. The reviews of O’Keefe’s work that I’d memorized and repeated had praised her references to cubism and “carefully structured architectonics.” None of them alluded to the way O’Keefe’s photos could make you feel warm, tingly, and relaxed.

My sales pitch changed. I stayed in the work, and people stayed there with me.

By Thursday, the VIPs had been joined by a more diverse crowd. In spite of the overstimulating chaos of the fair, lots of them circled the booth over and over, jaws slack as if they’d been hypnotized, then came back later tugging friends behind them. “These are photos?” I got asked a lot. “Wait—that’s not a painting?” Nope. “What about that one?” Still a photo.

Partway through the day, a middle-aged couple, dressed like matching sailboats in crisp white button-downs and navy loafers, wandered into Denny Dimin’s booth. I hovered beside them as they paused in front of each photo.

The woman stopped at one of O’Keefe’s biggest pieces—a photograph of squiggly cardboard shapes that made me think of cubist houseplants. She didn’t move. She didn’t even blink.

“The gallery—so this is a New York gallery?” she asked at last.

Lower East Side, I confirmed.

“Her studio’s in New York?” Yes. “Do you do a lot of fairs?” Yes. “How long have you been representing her?” Four years. Silence. I sensed she needed a nudge. Context, I understood, was also a way to try to securitize your investment, a way to be sure you weren’t the only one who thought this work was special. I murmured a sweet nothing about O’Keefe’s “institutional support.”

The woman turned to the man she was with. “Is it going to Boston?”

“Or Palm Beach?” he said.

And that’s how I sold my first piece: $9,800, thank you very much. I felt giddy, as if I’d just been called onstage to accept a prize, but I played it cool, tight smile and firm handshake, while I swiped their credit card.

That first sale chummed the water. I got a little bloodthirsty after that. I sold two more pieces and put one on reserve for a woman I’ll call Isabel. I gobbled down dinner and was on my way to the Pérez Art Museum Miami cocktail party when a sexagenarian named Poodle—smoky eyes, crocodile purse—tried to steal my Uber, but Poodle was going to the party too, so I invited her to tag along.

Rob found me at the museum and took me to another party, where I pitched O’Keefe to a guy next to us in line for tequila sodas whose reply was “A lot of my art is in storage,” which translates to “collector” and immediately got him our full and undivided attention. “The Tate reached out to ask if they could have this for their upcoming retrospective,” he said, showing me his phone, and Rob couldn’t pull out his business card fast enough. Drinks by the pool with gallerists from Germany (“Have you seen O’Keefe’s work?” I asked, rummaging for my phone) turned into the backseat of someone’s Escalade destined for Soho Beach House. My phone buzzed with a text from Isabel saying she wanted to buy the photo she’d put on reserve, just as someone beside me in the Escalade noisily hrooonfed a line of cocaine. Dive bar from 12:30 to 1:30 a.m. Gay-bar dancing with half the population of Brooklyn from 1:30 to 4:13 a.m.

“Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffee,” Rob was chanting when he got to the fair a few hours later. “We ended up going down to the beach at 5:30 in the morning.”

I made another sale. Scarsdale or Florida? “You have too many houses!” chirped the clients’ art adviser.

I sold a piece to a couple in their 40s who came back three times before taking the plunge, and another to a young couple who decided to splurge on a small O’Keefe print. Scratch that—make it two, they decided.

We ran out of the red-dot stickers we used to mark pieces as sold, and I bounced between booths asking if anyone had some to spare, which was obnoxious, but I did it anyway, dizzy and manic off the high of selling.

It’s easy to sneer at the spectacle that is Miami Art Week. And I could see how doing Miami every year for a decade would make you want to lock yourself in a closet and scream into a pillow. But I’m not sure where else you’d find thousands of people shouting about art over dinners, over dance floors, overnight, and at all hours of the day. As the week had worn on, instead of feeling exhausted, I was exhilarated.

Sunday, the last day of the fair. A steady stream of artists filed through the booth, chatting and pressing business cards into our hands while stressing their deep interest in the gallery. Sean Fader, an artist represented by Denny Dimin, dropped by. He was curious to know how I was feeling now that the fair was nearly over.

A little shell-shocked, I confessed.

“You never thought you’d be wheeling and dealing art in Miami,” Sean said.

“Definitely not.”

Sean got very serious, which was unusual for him, and he leaned in so close that our foreheads were practically touching. “Every red dot means an angel gets its wings. And some fucking artist can pay their rent, okay?” he said. “It means that somebody who’s a maker gets to keep making.”

In the final hours of the fair, I learned that the gallery across from us, which hadn’t sold anything, would be shutting down at the end of the year. Denny Dimin was not closing. We’d had a blowout fair. I’d sold seven pieces. The gallery had sold more than two dozen, for a total of—Elizabeth was still adding up all the invoices—more than $200,000. They’d live another day to share artists’ work. And that, in the absence of a more perfect system, was something.

This article was adapted from Bianca Bosker’s forthcoming book, Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See.

Get The Picture - A Mind-Bending Journey Among The Inspired Artists And Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How To See

By Bianca Bosker

Parts from a lead sculpture by Anselm Kiefer have been stolen from a warehouse in France, it was revealed last week in court. The work has been seriously damaged, and the German artist has estimated that the overall losses amount to more than $1 million.

The thefts took place at around 2:30 a.m. on the morning of November 30 at Keifer’s warehouse in Croissy-Beaubourg, a town about 14 miles east of Paris. Security arrived on the scene within around 20 minutes and chased the thieves away.

“CCTV footage showed four individuals breaching the car park barrier, entering the premises and cutting through the steel fence surrounding the work, before making off with lead books that were part of it,” said Jean-Baptiste Bladier, the prosector for the nearby town of Meaux, according to the Guardian.

Renown for his examinations of post-war German identity, Kiefer has been using lead for decades thanks to his interest in medieval alchemy. In works like The High Priestess/Zweistromland (1985–89), two book cases stacked with vast lead books, the material lends the installation a gray monumentality and symbolizes the weight of knowledge.

As a result of his love of lead, the artist has been frequently targeted by thieves who are interested in his work for the resale value of its raw materials rather than its artistic worth, even if the latter is much greater. A major theft occurred at the same workshop in 2016, and though a security guard arrived on the scene, the perpetrators managed to get away. They had taken lead that in its raw form was worth just €1,670 ($1,860), although the damaged sculpture had an estimated value of around €1.3 million ($1.4 million).

In 2008, 7.5 tons of lead were stolen from a previous workshop in Barjac. Another attempted theft took place in 2019, but although the targeted sculpture was damaged, the thieves were interrupted by a security guard and fled the scene. The Meaux judicial police did not yet confirm whether any suspects have been identified.

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“They were like magnets, man, from the start,” her son Robert said. “Soul mates.”

Nobuko Emoto was born on March 3, 1926, in San Pedro, Calif. Her father, Kazumasa Emoto, was a farmer who brought fresh vegetables to Los Angeles markets. Her mother, Kimiko (Hamamoto) Emoto, was a homemaker.

Nobuko, her parents, her two sisters and her two brothers were among the estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly relocated during World War II to internment camps, mostly in Western states. Mr. Emoto lost his trucks, his equipment and his land.

During her incarceration at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona, Nobuko wrote a newsletter about goings-on at the camp.

She and her family were released in 1945, and she finished high school. She soon married Masao Narita, with whom she would have seven children. She entered Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania in 1948 and studied theater there, but left after one year.

After Ms. Narita and her husband divorced in the mid-1950s, she worked in various jobs in the Long Beach, Calif., area. Looking for a better career opportunity, she left for New York City in 1969, taking a job with the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Soon after her move, she was walking in Central Park when she heard jazz being played. One of the musicians, the bassist Gene Taylor, urged her to volunteer for the renowned jazz ministry at St. Peter’s Church, on Lexington Avenue near East 54th Street. (In later years the church would be the site of her annual birthday party, which featured live jazz.)

Museums have long been compared to mausoleums, lifeless places in which objects are permanently laid to rest. In most cases, this is true: artworks tend to spend a lot of time stacked in storage once they enter institutions. Edgar Calel’s 2021 installation The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge (Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el) tests that logic and refuses to be confined.

There are seven versions of the installation, one for each star in the Big Dipper. This year, two versions premiered in biennials: one in Gwangju, the other in Liverpool. Both comprise a group of stones, with actual peppers, bananas, lemons, and other fruits laid on top.

In a unique agreement, Tate assumed the role of custodian rather than owner of one version, along with the Mayan ritual associated with it. The institution agreed to steward the work for 13 years, a number corresponding to that of the major joints in the human body, according to the Mayan cosmovision. Thereafter, Tate has the option to renew custodianship; Calel retains the right to choose whether to renew or to send it elsewhere. Calel also stipulated that he be allowed to have a Kaqchikel person perform the ritual of laying out the fruit. If none were available, the artist would personally choose someone to do it.

Calel, 36, sees the arrangement as a means of bringing his Maya Kaqchikel heritage to the rest of the world. “I want to invite the public to see what I see daily in my community, and to see how all the knowledge has been handed down by my ancestors,” Calel said, speaking by Zoom, with the help of a translator, from Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa), his Guatemalan hometown.

Calel’s studio, which includes an altar where members of his community make offerings, represents the merger of conceptualism and Indigenous tradition that undergirds his work. His father is a painter, his mother is a weaver, and Calel himself trained at the Rafael Rodríguez Padilla National School of Plastic Arts in Guatemala City.

His paintings contain plainspoken scenes that convey the sense of unity he has found in Chi Xot. Ru raxalh ri Rua Ch’ ulew (The Greenness of the Land), 2022, shows three men bent over the hood of a pickup truck as a child peers out a passenger window, and no fewer than 17 people stand in the truck bed, posing as if for a group picture. Yet on the biennial circuit—where Calel has emerged as a star in recent years at the Berlin Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Bienal de São Paulo—he is best known for sculpture.

Calel doesn’t seem interested in explaining Kaqchikel heritage and mythology to viewers. Instead, his primary audience appears to be his own community. If others find ways to relate to the work, perhaps through participation or contemplation, he accepts that, and, to some extent, even encourages it.

In the case of his recent SculptureCenter commission, B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone)—a gorgeous expansive installation of soil, rocks, wood, and fire that references a landmark stone in the Chi Xot foothills—Calel made sure to engage the New York institution’s staff in the work’s making: the workers themselves lit arrays of candles set near large rocks in the arrangement, just as worshippers in Chi Xot might do in rituals at the piece’s namesake stone. “I requested that when they light the candles, they be conscious of what they’re doing,” Calel said. “It’s knowing that there’s a sense of spirituality that’s involved in the process, not only in lighting the candles, but in being present in the installation.” 

Danny Easterbrook’s studio. photo copyright Spitalfields Life

Our Level 4 students are all exploring ways of making art from the concept of 'The City' this term. I have recommended the wonderful daily blog 'Spitalfields Life to them as an inspirational treasure chest of what a City can be when you look at it through its people. Posts have been categorised and can be searched by sections including  Night Life, Criminal Life, Past Life, Plant, Animal and Literary Lives to name just some. Today's blog is particularly magical. Read here about a musician and artist exploring the paintings of Giorgione by re-creating them in authentic materials in a beautiful studio in the middle of an abandoned tramshed in Clapton, London.