Wet Paint: The Biggest Flippers of the Fall Auctions, Warren Kanders Squares Off With the Whitney, & 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.

HE SCHUTZ, HE SCORES

There are plenty of respectable
consignors unloading works next week during New York’s auction
bonanza. The estate of late Interview editor Glenn O’Brien is selling Jean Michel
Basquiat’s
Famous Negro Athletes
for an estimated $2.5 million to
$3.5 million at Sotheby’s. And sources say Robert
Gober’s The Split-Up Conflicted
Sink, guaranteed to sell
at Sotheby’s and estimated at $4.5 million to $6.5 million, is
being sold by Norwegian billionaire Hans Rasmus
Astrup, founder of the
Astrup Fearnley Museet in
Oslo. 

Christie’s would not say
who consigned Dana Schutz’s Shooting in the Air (2016)—a painting from the same series
as Open
Casket, which Schutz
insisted would never be sold after it caused an uproar at the
Whitney Biennial in 2017.
Its companion painting debuted a year earlier in the same Berlin
show as Open
Casket—and it
was most certainly for sale. Sources say that the
Japanese collector Takumi Ikeda bought
it from Berlin gallery
Contemporary Fine Arts in 2016 for $300,000, and that Ikeda is the one who
consigned it to Christie’s. Shooting in the Air—which is a depiction of the killings of TV
broadcaster Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward
live on air by a lone gunman in
2015—can be yours for somewhere between $600,000 to $800,000. Or
much higher. 

LET ‘ER FLIP

The prize for the year’s
most-flipped artist goes to Julie Curtiss, the young French-American imagist who had a
painting, Princess, sell for a staggering
$106,250 over a high estimate of $8,000 at Phillips in May. In
October, another one of her pictures, Hotel, breezed past its £40,000 to £60,000 estimate to hit
£212,500. Those two sales initiated a frenzy of selling on the
secondary market, and now we have Party Down, estimated to go for $30,000 to $50,000,
slotted as the auspicious first lot in Phillips’s New York evening
sale on November 14. Kathy Grayson, who runs The Hole gallery on the Bowery, bought the work in 2017
from the SPRING/BREAK fair for a bargain-bin price of $3,000, and
sold it this year to a so-far-unnamed Miami
flipper-slash-collector, who then sold it to the consignor. And
that consignor must be hoping the Curtiss market is still sizzling,
as a source said the price he or she paid to the Miami cog in this
oh-so-complicated flipping machine was $165,000—more than three
times its current high estimate.

KANDERS WHIPS HOLD ON THE WHITNEY

A few weeks ago, we broke the news
that Warren Kanders—the former board member at the
Whitney Museum who
resigned after artists started
pulling their work from the 2019 Biennial to protest his
ownership of a weapons company that makes tear gas—had put a legal
hold on the papers of his primary antagonist, Amin
Husain, a leader of the museum
board rabble-rousers Decolonize This
Place. But those aren’t the
only papers that Kanders has asked not be destroyed in case he
wants to follow up with legal action. He’s also made the same move
with the Whitney itself—even though its director, Adam
Weinberg, fiercely defended
Kanders to the end. Sources say that as director, Weinberg’s
papers and emails would be subjected to the legal hold as
well. 

BACK TO WORK?

The once-omnipresent
curator Jens Hoffmann hasn’t been heard from since late 2017, when
he was fired from his job at the Jewish Museum
following an investigation into
accusations of sexual
harassment. But now he’s tiptoed his way back into some new
projects, quietly enough that it hasn’t been widely remarked upon.
Last year, he founded a mysterious-sounding endeavor called
the Office for Curatorial Wonders, which is based in New York. He also
co-founded an art space in Bogotá, Colombia, called
Espacio Mango that is
currently exhibiting a group show of local artists he co-organized.
And on Thursday, a show opens that Hoffmann curated at Lisbon
gallery Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, a sculpture survey that includes such artists
as Elmgreen & Dragset, Kathryn Andrews, and Lawrence Weiner. Next up is a show he organized solo at
Espacio Mango—the website says it’s a “group exhibition about life and work at
night”—which opens in February 2020. We also hear that
Hoffmann wrote an essay for a show
that opened earlier this fall on the Lower East Side with the title
“Presumed Innocence, or Fifty Shades of Green.” 

PARTY FAVOR

Those doing a deep dive into
the Phillips afternoon auction catalogue got wind of a
curious lot deep into the proceedings: A postcard-sized
Nicolas Party work “on
cardstock” that bore the inscription “Merry Christmas and Happy new
[sic] Year 2018 Nicolas.” Turns out, the artist distributed the
missive as a Christmas card to friends and gallery staffers that
year—and now that Party’s a bona fide art-market
phenom, one of those lucky recipients was looking to cash in
big. At first, it appeared the seller was about to have a holly
jolly Christmas indeed—the work was originally estimated to sell
for $15,000 to $25,000. But by Wednesday, Phillips had pulled it
from the sale, and now a source says it’ll be slotted into an
online auction and saddled with a much more reasonable estimate of
$2,000 to $3,000. (That’s still a big windfall for a piece of
holiday cheer.) A Phillips spokesperson confirms the house removed
the work from its afternoon sale “after learning that it was not
entirely unique, but rather a unique variant from a group of around
50 similar works.” 

WE HEAR…

For the first time in years,
there will be no pre-auctions jaunt out to Greenwich for the
biannual boozy picnic at the Brant
Foundation, as the compound on
a polo field is “temporarily closed for construction”—but select
VIPs will be able to check out the foundation’s new
Manhattan space, which features a show of works from
Peter Brant’s collection
that have never been shown to the public … Michael
Werner will open a solo show of
works by Raphaela Simon in London later this month, marking the first
time a woman has had a solo show at the gallery since
Elizabeth Peyton in 2013
… Arthur Jafa is
dating Tara Subkoff,
the artist, actress, and fashion designer who filed for divorce
from Urs Fischer in
2016 after three years of marriage. 

SIGHTINGS

*** Gucci
designer Alessandro
Michele gushing over the
93-year-old Betye Saar during the LACMA Art + Film Gala
in Los Angeles (where that
other artist-celebrity duo
made headlines) *** Jay Jopling showing up to the Gladstone
Gallery party at Le
Baron Shanghai Thursday night,
as there wasn’t a White Cube fête during West Bund
this year *** Marina
Abramović delivering a speech at the Hirshhorn
New York Gala at
Lincoln Center that amounted
to a very serious, very solemn “manifesto for artists,” but got
some guffaws from the artist-heavy room when she said that “artists
should not date other artists” *** the artist Lu Yang
lunching with French prime
minister Emmanuel Macron during the opening ceremonies for the new
branch of the Centre Pompidou in Shanghai, which coincides with the openings
of the West Bund Art & Design fair.

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: The Biggest Flippers of the Fall
Auctions, Warren Kanders Squares Off With the Whitney, & More Juicy
Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet News.