Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...should one suppose that these are dreaming connoisseurs who have just relinquished the ink block and the brush to dabble in the art of the namban, or round-eyed barbarian. Shigeki Kameyama, representing the Mountain Tortoise Gallery in Tokyo, last week bought, among other things, Picasso's The Mirror at $26.4 million. The week before, he had also purchased De Kooning's Interchange at $20.68 million and a Brice Marden drawing at $500,000 at Sotheby's. Kameyama is known to other dealers as "Oddjob," after Goldfinger's hat-flinging chauffeur...
Aska International, the Tokyo art gallery that spent $25 million at the Dorrance sale, is controlled by Aichi Corp., a Tokyo firm that last September became one of the five largest shareholders of Christie's stock, with 6.4%. Aichi, in turn, is controlled by Yasumichi Morishita, a secretive businessman who got a one-year suspended sentence in Tokyo in 1986 for securities fraud. Morishita is reputedly worth a trillion yen ($7 billion), and may be planning a takeover of Christie's -- although it is unlikely that the Monopolies and Mergers Commission would approve...
...third-string Ecole de Paris painters like Moise Kisling, whom nobody wanted a few years ago; one Japanese collector is the proud owner of a thousand paintings by Bernard Buffet. But the Japanese started going after bigger game about five years ago, and already the outflow is immense. Contemporary art has become, quite simply, currency. The market burns off all nuances of meaning, and has begun to function like computer-driven investment on Wall Street. Sotheby's and Christie's between them sold $204 million worth of contemporary art the week before last. Of this, American buying represented only...
This indicates a radically transformed market structure. In art as in other markets at the end of Reagan's economic follies, America sinks and Japan rises. In this context it is fatuous to utter bromides about art's being the Common Property of Mankind. Americans now begin to view the outflow of their own art with bemused alarm -- just as Italians and Englishmen, at the turn of the century, watched the Titians, Sassettas and Turners, pried loose from palazzo and stately home by the teamwork of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, disappearing into American museums. "The Japanese are awash...
...exactly the feeling of a cultivated Japanese in 1885, watching his cultural patrimony being politely stripped by American collectors, led by Ernest Fenollosa and the "Boston bonzes." The emerging lesson of the late '80s, which is unlikely to change in the '90s, is that America no longer controls the art market to any significant degree. Mostly, it sells. Its buying power is fading fast...