“These are major artists with international reputations,” trustee Sheila M. Gowan of Diamond McCarthy said in an interview, adding that a professional art adviser helped Dreier curate his collection. Gowan said she hopes the notoriety that has surrounded Dreier’s case increases the turnout for the auction.

[...]Until earlier this year, prosecutors from the Southern District U.S. Attorney’s Office and the trustee had been battling over control of the collection, which represents a fraction of the more than 300 works seized by the government in the months following Dreier’s arrest in December 2008. Earlier this year, Southern District of New York Judge Jed S. Rakoff, who sentenced Dreier to 20 years in prison for peddling $700 million in phony real estate and promissory notes, approved a coordination agreement involving Gowan and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The agreement authorized the government to hand over to Gowan 97 of the 300 recovered artworks that had not been traced to Dreier’s crimes.

Trustee Seeks to Auction 80 Artworks Owned by Defunct Dreier Law Firm (Law.com)

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The Dallas Museum of Art announced today the reattribution of the painting, Young Man with a Flute, to the artist George Romney. The work of art has been in the Museum’s collections for nearly 25 years and entered it in 1987 as part of a bequest of Mrs. Sheridan Thompson. At the time of the painting’s acquisition, the artist was unknown but the painting was thought to be by the American colonial era portrait painter Ralph Earl.

Then in 2000 on a visit to the Museum, British art dealer Phillip Mould suggested that the painting might be the oeuvre of English painter George Romney (1734–1802) but was not able to provide further evidence to the DMA.

Dallas Museum of Art Discovers George Romney Painting in the Collections (Dallas Art News)

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The returned items include a 4,400-year-old statue of King Entemena of Lagash looted from the National Museum here after the American invasion in 2003; an even older pair of gold earrings from Nimrud stolen in the 1990s and seized before an auction at Christie’s in New York last December; and 362 cuneiform clay tablets smuggled out of Iraq that were seized by the American authorities in 2001 and were being stored in the World Trade Center when it was destroyed. [...] The United States has returned 1,046 antiquities since 2003, when looters ransacked buildings across Iraq, including its museums, according to the American Embassy here. For all the international outrage the looting stirred toward the United States and its allies, many of the items were smuggled out of the country before the invasion, often with the connivance of officials in Saddam Hussein’s government, according to archaeological officials here. [...]  Iraq has 12,000 known archaeological sites where Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Persian cities — and later Islamic cities — once stood. Many are unprotected, and have been badly looted for years, especially during the bloodiest years of war in 2006 and 2007. A special police force created in 2008 has yet to fill its ranks, mired at its inception by the government’s bureaucracy and a lack of support for cultural preservation.

The National Museum, which officially reopened last year though many of its galleries remain closed and in disrepair, has recovered roughly half of 15,000 pieces that were looted from its collection. All told, Iraqi officials say they have confiscated and returned to government property more than 30,000 antiquities and artworks since 2003, from inside and outside Iraq. The museum can hold only a fraction of those. “We can make 15 museums like the one we had,” its deputy director, Muhsin Hassan Ali, said on Tuesday.

Looted Treasures Return to Iraq, but Questions Remain (New York Times)

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Effective Sept. 1, the contract leaves Ruprecht’s basic salary unchanged at $700,000. He’s to be paid an “annual target bonus” of $1.4 million cash, with a maximum $2.8 million depending on “performance and other metrics” set by the company’s compensation committee. In addition, Sotheby’s will grant him “performance share units” worth $3.5 million to $4.5 million that vest over time, also contingent on performance.

Sotheby’s Ruprecht Stands to Earn $8 Million a Year as Contract Is Renewed (Bloomberg)

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Proceeds from future sales will be added to the company’s existing community and charitable investment program, the Bank of Ireland said in an e-mailed statement. In recent years, a number of higher-value works, including paintings by Jack. B. Yeats, have been donated to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in lieu of corporation tax, Nolan said.

The most valuable works in the Bank of Ireland collection would currently be estimated at about 100,000 euros each, said James O’Halloran, managing director of the Dublin-based auctioneers James Adam & Sons Ltd., who last month was appointed sole adviser to the Bank of Ireland on the dispersal.

“We’re going to suggest auction to be the best way to sell most of the best pieces,” O’Halloran said in an interview. “There are a lot of lesser things that aren’t sellable and are better off left where they are.” [...] Dealers are awaiting news on the artworks belonging to Allied Irish Banks and the nationalized Anglo Irish Bank.

“It’s well known that Allied has the best collection,” said O’Halloran. “It’s much broader in scope.” The bank’s art purchases in recent decades include works by contemporary Irish artists with international reputations such as Sean Scully and William Scott, as well as paintings by Yeats and tapestries by le Brocquy, dealers said.

Irish Bank in Capital Crisis Sells Artworks; Others May Follow (Bloomberg)

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What is disappointing, however, is how poor the quality of the art world’s economic discourse remains even in the post-Warhol era. It continues to be fashionable among many critics and scholars to claim that art markets are irrational, and that prices have no value as indicators of artistic importance. These claims are both ignorant and foolish. Art scholars must overcome their distaste for economics, and become more sophisticated in examining how changes in art markets have influenced artists’ attitudes and behavior. If they don’t, they will continue to be unable to keep up with the artists.

He might as well have addressed his words directly to Souren Melikian whose recent screed in Art + Auction against auction house guarantees once again confirms that Dr. Melikian is an erudite scholar but a poor economist.

The third-party guarantee system is an inflationary device. It artificially raises prices by granting consignors unreal estimates and evading the risk by bringing in investors ready to pick up the bill in the event of a mishap. It also tips the scales in favor of sellers and auction houses acting as their agents against buyers, who are effectively made to pay whatever the vendor and the auction houses want them to.

Bear in mind that the market is now dominated by newcomers with limited understanding of the intricacies of the auction world. They turn for advice to auction house specialists perceived as experts and consult them about the price they should pay, unaware that the said experts have a stake in the game.

The condescension in these remarks provoked art market observer Josh Baer to anger:

Who is Melikian trying to protect here? His objections voiced in the article all reflect artworks in the seven-figure range and up. There is no little old lady in this scenario — it’s one millionaire aagainst another, all of them with advisors, lawyers, and the full due-diligence. So who is it that he’s afraid is getting screwed? New money? Old money? Who cares, and what business is it of his or ours?

Arti$ts and the Market (The American)

In a Booming Market, Danger Looms (ArtInfo.com)

The Baerfaxt

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The exhibitor list for Abu Dhabi Art, which takes place from November 4 to 7, reveals a striking turnover, with almost half of last year’s 39 participants in the main section not returning. There are 19 newcomers, including some surprising inclusions, such as Halcyon and Opera galleries, which are rarely seen at fairs, and Haunch of Venison, which, because it belongs to Christie’s, is often excluded.

Taking the plunge for the first time is the heavy-hitting New York dealer David Zwirner as well as Edward Tyler Nahem, who says: “We have clients in the Middle East but they don’t come into our gallery, nor necessarily buy at auction, so we’re ‘bringing the mountain’ to them.” He is displaying Frank Stella’s 3m-long “Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation II)” (1970, about $5m).

The Art Market: Legal Battle Comes to Light (Financial Times)

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It is likely that no artist painted more portraits of dealers. During the early period in which he was establishing himself as a leading artist, Picasso painted the dealers Pedro Manach (1901), Clovis Sagot (1909), Ambroise Vollard (1910, 1915), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910), Wilhelm Uhde (1910), Léonce Rosenberg (1915), André Level (1918), Paul Rosenberg (1919), and Berthe Weill (1920). In 1918, he also painted portraits of the wife of Georges Wildenstein and of the wife and daughter of Paul Rosenberg.¹¹

Early in his career, Picasso told Kahnweiler, “I’d like to live like a poor man with a lot of money.”¹² Yet Picasso was careful to keep private his considerable interest in the material rewards of art, and it did not become part of the colorful image that made him the epitome of the modern artist for a vast admiring public.

Arti$ts and the Market (The American)

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Although many artists would be interested in, and motivated by, the prospect of financial gain, the convention that artists should not openly and publicly appear to be concerned with money became a legacy of the Renaissance. Notably, when the French government authorized the establishment of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1648, members of the academy were required to appear to be above commercial activity.The founding statutes included a rule forbidding any member from opening a gallery to sell his work, “Nor to do anything to permit the confounding of two such different things as a mercenary profession and the status of Academician.”⁶ Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick observed that of course these artists lived by selling their work, “But the higher social status embodied in the work of academic art was expressed by a theoretical disdain for monetary considerations; the fine artist, like the aristocrat who was his ideal customer, worked in theory not for money but for personal and national glory.”⁷

Arti$ts and the Market (The American)

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“With its economic situation and rising art market, China is a country in which Turkish contemporary should exist. We need to promote Turkish contemporary art in the East, just like in the West,” said Çağla Cabaoğlu, who is also organizing the show that bears her name. More than 30,000 people are expected to attend the fair, which is coinciding with the ongoing Shanghai World Expo.

Turkish Contemporary Art Looking for an Audience in the Far East (Hurriyet Daily News)

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