NYC and Miami Art Updates
Installation view of artwork (stones on particle board covered with sand) by Mary Bauermeister (1934-2023) currently on display in a show titled “Fuck the System,” Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Chelsea, NYC
‘Tis the season for art spectating (and speculating)
I had intended to send out an update earlier, but I was in NYC last week for auction sale previews, a few museum shows, and many, many gallery exhibitions.
Despite a quick and easy trip home to Miami, it took me several days to recover.
When I visit New York these days, I am pretty much constantly on the move from morning till night — 25,000-30,000 steps a day — from one art venue to the next, in my own very focused and idiosyncratic way.
For example, I make incredibly good use of a 7-day subway pass in as little as 2 days (in fact, I can’t remember the last time I took a taxi or Uber in Manhattan).
To keep from starving I buy dollar slices (which now cost $1.50) or frequent some of my favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurants among what I consider to be the best, most affordable and authentic Chinese food you can get anywhere in the country.
Charged by the energy of the city, I immerse myself in art, culture and stories all day long, for 3 to 4 days straight. My head literally swims in images, information and affect.
I learn, recall, and connect the dots between what I’ve seen that day, the day before, and years prior.
These are the things I do well and have been doing in dozens of major cities around the world for more than 25 years now. This is the secret sauce behind Charting Transcendence.
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Should you or anyone you know may be interested in learning more about what it’s like to work with an art advisor, please drop me a line or reach out to me to schedule a call — I’m available!
And now for some news, starting with: some insights about auction houses
On this particular trip to the Big Apple, I spent an entire day between the four major auction houses: Sotheby’s (which is dearest to my heart because it’s where I delivered the valedictorian speech for my master’s program;) Christie’s; Phillips and Bonhams.
Twice a year (May and November) these auction houses host a series of major modern and contemporary auction sales. The provide not only free, museum-quality entertainment, but also an outstanding opportunity to get a survey of the art market at present.
On broad, macroeconomic note, given turmoil in the Middle East and uncertainly in the political process domestically, it isn’t surprising that sales at the top end of the market (multi-million dollar artworks) on the whole have fallen a bit shorter than hoped by the auction houses.
However, there are still a lot of good deals and opportunities for those in my audience interested in relatively affordable works by established as well as emerging artists.
The following images provide two such examples of artworks I recommended to a client last week.
Richard Anuszkiewicz, Translumina - Light Yellow to Dark Blue (1988), enamel on wood, 47 3/4” x 47 3/4”, lot 66 at Bonhams New York November 16, 2023, Post-War and Contemporary Sale, estimate $25,000-$35,000
Personally, if I had roughly $50,000 to spend on an artwork, I would probably want to be bidding on one of the two pieces above. Although both are meant to hang on a large wall, they are fundamentally different in terms of both subject matter (abstract vs. figurative) and value.
Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930-2020) is one of my favorite (and somewhat underrated, in my opinion) 20th-century artists, who was associated with the “Op Art” or optical art movement of the 1960s and 70s. An “established” artist, his work is visually appealing and is in major museum collections across the country and around the world.
Anuszkiewicz had a long career, worked across a variety of media, and his artworks are traded frequently on the secondary market, giving advisors like myself plenty of data points to work with.
Based on what I know today, I could say confidently that, if you want to buy some late 20th-century, museum-quality abstract art that will hold its value, you should look at buying Anuszkiewicz (as long as you like it — my tastes are certainly not those of everyone). His works differ widely in style, but are cohesive on the whole.
Even more approachable than the above are Anuszkiewicz’s prints and multiples — very affordable for such an important American artist. So — and this is just “for example” — should anyone be interested in learning more about his work, I’m happy to look into details and availability.
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Noel W. Anderson (b. 1981) on the other hand is someone we might call an “emerging” artist whose accomplishments do not give us nearly as many data points for analysis, with just 4 auction sales over his career, all of them recent.
I can tell you that I have been following Noel since I first met him in his small Manhattan studio in 2018, and since then he has achieved a level of critical acclaim that I think is indicative of an emerging art-world superstar, with a show currently on in Austria and another opening today in France. However, for me to say that his work is headed for the art-world stratosphere, or would even be acknowledged much 20 years from now, would be purely speculative.
Nevertheless, I do believe that given the trend for thread-based art (noted in my previous emails), and the strong market interest for African-American artists and themes, the demand is clearly there for an artist, who (although formally trained in sculpture) taught himself for years how to weave French-style jacquard tapestries in order to mimic the visual effect of an analog television screen, adding a whole different conceptual layer to the complex imagery he depicts. This complex conceptual approach is something I believe in paying close attention to among budding “superstar” artists.
I intend to share more about Noel’s work in a future email, perhaps in early 2024 after I am able to visit Noel’s new studio in the South Bronx (he recently invited me after I attended a gallery opening of his back in September) he took at look at my website.
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Interestingly enough, both of the artists above studied at my undergraduate alma mater — Yale University — although this is not surprising since Yale has, by far, hands down, the best art school in the country, if not the world.
A funny story about an
”old school” kind of art advisor
Credit: Guy Richards Smit for Artnet News
One of the reasons I hesitated for many years to launch Charting Transcendence was because I could not identify with the way that many of the established art advisors comport themselves, and therefore could simply not see myself being one among them.
I had to do a great deal of soul-searching and internal structuring before understanding how to approach this business on my own terms. I look forward to sharing more about that in a future edition of this weekly missive.
Having started to work in this field, I have pledged that I will always provide my clients with my best, most honest and unvarnished opinion on how to acquire meaningful and valuable artwork at the best possible prices.
I will also do this in a way that’s personalized, approachable and fun.
I am a guide, a teacher, and an expert on approaching art openly, generally, and from the outside-in.
What I never want to do is be the kind of art advisor who acts as “gatekeeper,” is judgmental about the client’s taste, tries too hard to impress, or to put distance in between the client and the information or access that the client needs to experience the art on their own terms.
That being said, here’s a funny story — something that I found very validating about my own personal (and perhaps non-traditional) approach as an art-world professional.
While browsing a NYC auction house last week, I overheard the familiar voice of a well-established, nearly octogenarian New York City-based art advisor, who (unlike yours truly) has neither a lovely, poetic brand name for their company, nor even a website, nor even an Instagram account — as far as I am aware.
Suffice it to say the advisor in question is experienced, shrewd, but rather opinionated. I know this from spending time with them at an art fair last year, enjoying some insightful exchanges about the market in spite of their somewhat avuncular and judgmental tone.
This advisor (who shall remain nameless) was beckoning to their well-dressed client “come closer!” while approaching one of the artworks. Taking the client by the hand, they zoomed up towards the label next to the artwork and said, very matter-of-factly, “now this is how you read a wall label…”
Now, for those of you who would like to experience what it’s like to browse an auction preview with me, it’s certainly not true that I WON’T teach you to read an auction-house wall label — in fact, I’d be more than happy to translate it into one of the several languages I speak!
But wall labels are pretty basic, to be honest. I’m more interested in getting you to think beyond just what you’re seeing and understanding in front of your eyes, and go beyond towards a personalized art exploration experience that you’ll find truly integrative and inspiring.
MUST SEE MUSEUM SHOW:
Judy Chicago “Herstory” @ New Museum The Bowery, New York City
Installation views of Judy Chicago’s “Herstory” at the New Museum, NYC
Amid stiff competition (and I’m happy to debate this with anyone who’s seen even a fraction of the art I have this year), I believe “Herstory” is a serious contender for the best museum show I’ve seen in 2023.
Now in her mid-80s, Judy Chicago (born Judy Cohen, later Judy Gerowitz — in 1970 she changed her surname to the city of her birth as a way to shake off the patriarchy) never thought she would live to see a full, 3-floor retrospective of her work at one of the best curated contemporary art museums in the country.
Chicago began her career as an artist in the early 1960s when women artists were simply not taken seriously by the art world in general. At best they could be considered curious tokens of their gender among “serious,” “professional” male artists (e.g. Joan Mitchell or Helen Frankenthaler to Jackson Pollock or Robert Motherwell); at worst, they were subject to harassment, abuse, and institutional ignorance and eventual oblivion of their artworks (all of which Chicago endured).
Of course, nowadays this is far from the case (even though at the top end of the market, works by male artists still dominate the price registers at auction as well as at galleries). Truth be told, Chicago played no small part in changing the paradigm and setting an example for how a woman artist can succeed on her own terms in a male-dominated world.
There’s too much for me to say about Judy Chicago’s brilliant career, from the fact that she mastered the male-dominated art of automotive painting to create a beautiful body of car hood paintings, to the fact that she founded the world’s first feminist art program in the early 1970s.
But take for example her late-1970s masterpiece, The Dinner Party, which involved collaboration with 100 skilled female and male artisans. Or some of her more recent work, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, exhibited in 2019 at the outstanding but highly underrated National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.
On the whole, Chicago’s life work proves not only that women artists can do it all and much, much more, but have been doing so for millenia. “Herstory” has the added bonus of Chicago’s expert curation of work by approximately 80 non-living female artists who have inspired her, including the relatively recently “rediscovered” Swedish spiritualist painter Hilma af Klint, whose 2018 show at the Guggenheim Museum, rewrote the art historical canon on abstraction.
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), The Dove No. 2 (1915), oil on canvas, displayed at the New Museum as part of Judy Chicago’s “Herstory”
If you are in New York City before January 14, 2024, PLEASE go see Judy Chicago’s historic show and let me know your thoughts!
Last, but not least, please consider referring Charting Transcendence to family, friends and colleagues coming to Miami this winter for Art Basel Miami Beach & Miami Art Week
Charting Transcendence (a Florida-registered C-Corporation for which I am still soliciting some strategic investment — contact me for details) is the product of many years of focused exploration, growth, and personal development.
This business is the natural extension of my passions and gifts that I am ready to share with the world. It is an idea I truly believe in because I find art so compelling and necessary in order to make sense of the world.
I am ready to work with clients anywhere to make art that speaks deeply to them more accessible and approachable, as well as to build meaningful collections for the future, while having fun and learning more about the world and its incredible array of humanity and culture.
Thank you for reading, and I hope that you will continue to like and follow the experiences I share with you, a.k.a. Charting Transcendence.
