She returned to her family with a dream of opening a gallery. “It was not acceptable. They didn’t approve of me studying abroad for 10 years only to become a shopkeeper. We have no tradition of galleries in China and they didn’t understand. I was sent to Shanghai to help on a property development project. My parents thought I was too wild and needed calming down. But I negotiated the possibility of doing some pop-up shows.”

The young Chinese artists whom Lam met in Shanghai in the early 1990s had a life-changing influence. “They were talking about Confucius, Daoism, Buddhism,” she recalls. “I was amazed, it seemed so old fashioned; I thought of contemporary art in terms of western street culture. But of course, this kind of discussion had been banned during the Cultural Revolution and to talk about these things was subversive and cool. No one was reading this material in Hong Kong. I learnt how to be Chinese.”

Sotheby’s set a new world record of $108,377,219 for a various owner jewellery sale, with the conclusion of its two-day Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels Sale, surpassing the record set by Sotheby’s Geneva in November 2010 of $105 million. Over the two days 24 lots sold for over $1 million. The Beau Sancy, one of the most important royal diamonds to ever come to auction, sold for CHF 9,042,500 ($9,699,618). The result achieved by the celebrated jewel brought the total for the May Jewellery auctions to an outstanding total of CHF 104,298,625 ($111,836,526), almost doubling the pre-sale low estimate of CHF 54 -85 million

The triumph of commerce that art fairs advance and symbolize—the subject of my most recent piece in the magazine—gives me philosophical indigestion. The very wondrousness of Frieze New York’s production values made it worse. The spectacle seemed a gesture of noblesse oblige from King Mammon to the non-collector masses, or else a potlatch bonfire of profits that accrue to the Frieze folks, from facilitating intercourse between art and money. The signal drama in new art lately involves a struggle not for esteem and influence—the wonted dreams of artists—but for commercial viability. If you like a certain artist now, it’s hard not to be caught up in rooting for him or her to sell. Simply no other way to gauge, affirm, and discuss quality is in working order. [Emphasis added]

Set aside the misuse of the potlatch analogy (neither the art nor the money involved is destroyed so it’s not a potlatch at all.) Ignore the fact that an art fair is no different from an art district except a few more walls have been eliminated. Schjeldahl’s complaint comes down to feelings that no one listens to him anymore. That’s a shame. Schjeldahl’s a fascinating writer about art. And it isn’t clear why he thinks “no other way to gauge, affirm and discuss quality is in working order.”

More to the point, it seems that he’s lost confidence in himself in the face of mere money when surely his work will be better remembered and more impactful long after the prices paid at Frieze are forgotten.

WHAT IS THE FRIEZE FOR? (New Yorker)

The other pre-eminent figure was Gerhard Richter, by whom 16 works, estimated to fetch about $54 million, sold for $83 million, eclipsing even the normally dominant Andy Warhol. The largest Richter abstract painting sold for a new record $21.8 million.

The week ended at Phillips, where the most significant sale was a six-foot Jean-Michel Basquiat crucifixion figure which sold for a record $16.3 million – a price that now puts Basquiat on a par with late Picasso, which is just where his fans want him to be.

Munch, Pollock and Calder help New York’s auction houses notch up $1.42 billion (Telegraph)

“Art HK has done for the territory what Frieze did for London: it made people much more aware of art.” Her neighbour, Simon Lee, sees his gallery as “building bridges” to local collectors. “We had 20 Chinese for lunch recently and three were founding museums on the mainland,” he says. He is opening with a show by Sherrie Levine but comments: “I’m not expecting a bonanza of sales, this is a long-term project for me.”

“Over the past five years, we have been in touch with about 300 art-related businesses … and some 20 galleries have subsequently set up here,” says Andrew Davies, associate director-general of the government-funded InvestHK, which created a dedicated creative industries team two years ago. “There are more than 3m high net worth individuals in Asia with wealth totalling $10.8 trillion,” says Davies, who adds that the rapidly growing number of wealthy Asian and Chinese collectors “has added to the buoyancy of Hong Kong’s art market”.

The drawings include what appear to be images of the female vulva, illustrated by circles with small slits on one side. “You see this again and again and again,” Dr. White said. There are also very simple images, in profile, of animals, including horses and lionlike big cats, he said.

The work was discovered on a collapsed roof of a rock shelter at the Abri Castanet site in the Vézère River valley in southwest France. Humans at the time lived in such shelters, Dr. White said, and it was a period of cultural naissance.

A Precursor to Playboy: Graphic Images in Rock (New York Times)

Rumors that Gagosian Gallery’s John Good, who resigned last week, is going to work at Christie’s in their private sales division, headed by Amy Cappellazzo, remind us that new CEO Steven Murphy has put private sales at the center of his strategy for the future of the company. But one question nags. Can an auction house, which is ultimately an agent for the seller, find within itself the culture and drive of a sales organization?

As anyone who has worked in sales will tell you, truly effective sales organizations are different animals from almost any other type of enterprise. Think Glengarry Glenn Ross.

Here’s the Observer’s GalleristNY on the move:

“This shows that Christie’s is ambitious about private sales,” said one collector familiar with Mr. Good’s new position. “It will bring in a large number of relationships.”

Before joining Gagosian, Mr. Good had his own gallery, which closed in the early 1990s after the market crash. At Gagosian, he worked with a number of artists and estates, including the estate of sculptor David Smith. He was instrumental in bringing the estate of Alberto Giacometti to the gallery.

John Good Leaves Gagosian, Reportedly For Christie’s Private Sales (GalleristNY)