Wet Paint: Coronavirus Panic Grips the Art Market, Jennifer Guidi Deal Revealed on Venmo, and More Juicy Art-World Gossip

Every Thursday afternoon, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint, a
gossip column of original scoops reported and written by Nate
Freeman. If you have a tip, email Nate
at nfreeman@artnet.com.

RAGIN’ CONTAGION

Alarm over the novel 2019 strain
of coronavirus is reaching new heights as the deadly disease
spreads rapidly in Europe and the global death toll nears 3,000.
The financial and art markets alike are feeling the impact: Weeks
after organizers cancelled Art Basel Hong
Kong due to the outbreak, there is new concern that
art expos in Europe and elsewhere could be cancelled in the coming
months, too.

As collectors and dealers
arrived in New York this week with plans to attend what amounts to
two long weeks of art fairs and marquee gallery and museum
openings, talk turned to how radically the globe-trotting fair
calendar might be amended. Several sources said that, while it’s
too early to make a final decision, advisors and clients are still
waiting to book travel to Switzerland for the Art
Basel fair, which is set to celebrate its 50th anniversary
this June. The fair announced its exhibitor
list this week and has not yet commented on the status of
the virus in the country, where there are currently four confirmed
cases. As of Thursday, however, several events there had been
cancelled, including the Watches & Wonders watch
trade show in Geneva, a St. Moritz car fair called The
International Concours of Elegance, and a ski run that’s
considered the largest sporting event annually in Switzerland.
(Baselworld—a leading Swiss watch fair run by Art
Basel’s parent company, MCH—is planning to proceed as
scheduled.) 

In Germany, fears over the
spread of the virus have prompted the cancellation of the
Light + Building fair in Frankfurt, a lighting
fair that two years ago attracted 22,000 visitors. Meanwhile,
Northern Italy is also seeing a spate of cancellations on its
trade-fair calendar, as the number of cases in that country exceeds
400. In Milan, La Scala is staging no operas, and
Salone del Mobile, the world’s biggest design
fair, has been postponed—it was expected to open April 21 and now
will apparently open in June. Sources said that
MiArt, the contemporary art fair that opens the
week before Salone in Milan, is likely to be postponed as well. (A
representative of the fair did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.)

While widespread cancellations
have mostly be limited to Europe, warnings of the impending
outbreak in the US—including news, on Thursday night, of what may be the first
confirmed case in New York—has the industry feeling jittery about
fairs here, too. Some wonder whether Frieze New
York, set to open in May, will be pushed back. A
representative from the Armory Show said in a
statement earlier this week that “as safety of our exhibitors and
guests remains a top priority, we will continue to consult with
experts in the field and pursue best practices in safeguarding The
Armory Show 2020 edition.” Already, the paranoia has set in—at the
VIP opening for ADAA’s The Art Show at the
Park Avenue Armory Wednesday night, patrons were
consciously avoiding any of the customary handshakes and
double-cheek kisses in favor of fist bumps and elbow
taps. 

APP TAPPERS GREEDY FOR GUIDI 

People are always asking for
more transparency in the art market, where secretive billionaires
frequently buy and sell paintings through shell companies without
having any idea who is on the other end of a transaction. Now, we
have a shining beacon of what art-market transparency could be: two
behind-the-scenes advisor-slash-dealers posting their transactions
to the public feed on Venmo. Over the weekend, a
source sent over a screenshot of the social feed of their Venmo app
with something a little more substantial than the usual
notifications (friends hitting back friends for getting dinner, a
roommate paying their half of the utilities bill, that sort of
thing). On the feed appeared an intriguing status update, between
two of the source’s friends, indicating that the Puerto
Rico-based collector and real estate investor
Jacky Aizenman had paid the collector and art
advisor Ronald Harrar for a service that he dubbed
“Delivery Guidi Sotheby’s.” Alas, a price is not
given, and the details stop there. But the Guidi being referred to
is, of course, the artist Jennifer Guidi, who has
her first show at Gagosian in New York opening
Friday, with a dinner at Balthazar to follow. How Sotheby’s is
involved remains to be seen, but if any work from the show ends up
at the auction house in the future, you heard it here
first.

ABY MAYBE BUYING

Last year, the art collector and
real-estate titan Aby Rosen added the
Chrysler Building to his stable of iconic
Manhattan skyscrapers, which includes Lever House,
the Seagram Building, and several others. Now,
he’s been spotted checking out another world-famous structure, one
that was for almost two decades the tallest building in the world:
the Woolworth Building, a neo-Gothic stunner
erected in 1913. How do we know this? Well, on Friday afternoon,
Rosen and his entire team took the elevator to the 26th floor and
strolled up to the window… and right into the Artnet
News bullpen, where this reporter and colleagues were
busily tapping out the day’s stories. While a spokesperson at
RFR Realty, Rosen’s company, insisted that they
were just looking— “We are not a buyer,” is all the director of
leasing had to say—the German collector, who’s amassed a serious
trove of works by Richard Prince, Jeff
Koons, and Damien Hirst, sure looked
pretty interested while strutting around the office. Hopefully he
doesn’t raise our rent. 

POP QUIZ

Can you name the artwork shown
here, the name of its owner, and the location of the house where it
is installed? As usual, the winner will earn fame and fortune in
the form of a mention in an upcoming column. 

WE HEAR…

… That a phishing scam attempted
to ensnare a number of artists, who all received an email from
someone purporting to be an art advisor (though the address given
is actually the address of the new Pace HQ in
New York) promising a wire transfer from a collector but riddled
with typos … That the actress Paz de la Huerta
commented on Artnet News columnist Kenny
Schachter’s Instagram to recall how, when
she was living at 421 West Broadway, directly under Larry
Gagosian, her father would run upstairs to Gagosian’s
apartment with a gaucho knife because the budding dealer’s tub was
leaking through the floor and into the de la Huerta household …
That Raf Simons, the Belgian fashion designer who
will team up with collector Miuccia Prada to
co-direct the her iconic Milan label, is buying up a lot of work by
the Iranian artist Nairy
Baghramian.

SPOTTED

Brian Donnelly,
AKA KAWS, stalking the aisles at ADAA’s
The Art Show on Wednesday *** Talking
Heads frontman and new Broadway star David
Byrne at the New Museum checking out
the new Peter
Saul show *** A number of artists, dealers, advisors,
and writers at a certain gossip columnist’s birthday party at
Clandestino ***

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Coronavirus Panic Grips the Art Market,
Jennifer Guidi Deal Revealed on Venmo, and More Juicy Art-World
Gossip appeared first on artnet News.