criticizing Damien Hirst’s ‘factory’ approach to making art

Pressed by the Radio Times for clarification of whether this was a sly dig at Hirst, Hockney replied that the prevailing approach to art making promoted by today’s art schools and adopted by Hirst et al was “a little insulting to craftsmen.”

This inevitably invited the predictable gale of references to Leonardo, Rubens, and Rembrandt, all of whom used assistants. In fact, the history of art is replete with instances in which an artist’s success has prompted the recruitment of assistants to help meet the demand of a growing number of collectors.

But what these knee-jerk comparisons between Hirst and Rubens always leave out is that many of the collectors who sought to acquire a work by Rubens direct from the artist stipulated that the work be made entirely by him and not by his assistants. To some clients, not even those pictures to which the artist himself applied the finishing touch were acceptable.

Henry Danvers (1573-1643), art adviser to Charles I, wrote to his colleagues recommending Rubens for a royal portrait commission, but made clear that, “In every painter’s opinion he hath sent hither a piece scarce touched by his own hand,” and demanded that Rubens paint another “to redeem his reputation in this house.” Rubens, in response, promised “a large picture entirely by my own hand.” (Jerry Brotton, The Sale of the Late King’s Goods, Pan, 2006, p75).

Similar skepticism has long surrounded the work of Rembrandt for similar reasons. In the 1950s, David Roell, director of the Rijksmuseum, wisely declined an offer from Duveen Brothers in New York to buy aPortrait of Hendrickje Stoeffels, attributed to Rembrandt (right), stating that he did not “feel the inner conviction that it is entirely by the hand of Rembrandt.” (Suzanne Muchnic, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, University of Caifornia Press, 1998, p43). In the event the picture was sold in 1957 (as a Rembrandt) to Norton Simon for $133,500. Simon’s wife Lucille later inherited it as part of their divorce settlement, but it was eventually sold at Christie’s in New York in 2002 as “Studio of Rembrandt” for $152,500.

Such connoisseurial ponderings are unlikely ever to surround the work of Hirst or Koons since neither of them are artists in the sense that Rubens or Rembrandt were. Hirst and Koons are manufacturers and their output ought to be considered as ‘products’ rather than as works of art. The fact that they are not is testament to the impoverished critical judgement underpinning the contemporary art market. This is essentially what Hockney was referring to when he said “…you can teach the craft; it’s the poetry you can’t teach.”

This also helps explain Hirst’s justification for employing other people to execute his spot paintings — “I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it,” he was quoted as saying.

That blunt statement implies a mean-spirited disdain for the art market and the credulous millionaires whose collective aesthetic myopia has made him rich as Croesus. In other words, they got the ‘art’ they deserved. The fact that his products lack poetry and indeed even craft (Hirst’s butterfly pictures tend to fall to bits) — is confirmation of the gaping chasm separating Hirst — and for that matter Koons, Murakami and the rest of that warehouse generation — from Rubens, Rembrandt, and yes, despite his ludicrous recent landscapes, Hockney himself.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

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This er, seminal performance piece was not, however, what ‘super-collector’ Charles Saatchi was referring to in today’s Guardian when he blasted the denizens of today’s art world as “masturbatory”, although as Acconci’s performance piece makes clear, onanism has long been a feature of the art world.

Saatchi doesn’t often address the media, generally preferring to keep his opinions to himself. Something of an art vampire, he is rarely glimpsed, only venturing out to feed on the freshest young contemporary talent for his Chelsea gallery.

I was therefore surprised, on emerging from the White Cube stand at the Frieze fair a few weeks ago, to spot the curmudgeonly old collector strolling towards me (above left), his features cast in a rictus of disgust, presumably at the acres of expensive tat that surrounded him. But given his usual reticence, it was even more surprising to see that look of disgust translated into an article for The Guardian, in which he rails at the “Eurotrashy, Hedgefundy, Hamptonites,” and the “trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs…nestling together in their super yachts” at this year’s Venice biennale.

He is right, of course. Loud money is everywhere in the art world. The big media draw at this year’s Frieze fair was a super yacht and matching Riva power boat (right) by Italian company CRN, both of which had been blessed by German artist Christian Jankowski to become something more than mere maritime vessels…or so they would have you believe.
Luca Boldini, CRN’s marketing director, told me, with an alarming lack of irony, “This is very much in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp and the idea of the Readymade. I am very confident that we will sell it. If we do, it will send a great wave around the world that will confirm the value of the project.” It didn’t sell. It sank like a rusty rowing boat in a force ten gale of mocking laughter. It’s amazing that the Frieze curators give tent-room to this stuff.

Such crass stunts surely endorse Saatchi’s central point, which is that the art world is overrun by witless opportunists with no taste and too much money. He suggests that “the success of the uber art dealers is based upon the mystical power that art now holds over the super-rich.” But ’twas ever thus.

You could probably track this trend back to the period of rising post-war affluence when Greek shipping magnates like Stavros Niarchos and Basil Goulandris — the oligarchs of their time, thanks largely to the Suez Crisis which made their shipping businesses so profitable — were paying top dollar for Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings to stick on the walls of their many mansions. At the Biddle sale in Paris in 1957, Basil Goulandris bought Gauguin’s Still Life with Apples for $297,142 (buying power equivalent to $2.3m today), at which point “…the entire audience rose and burst into applause,” reported the New York Times.

Art has always been about conspicuous consumption (Veblen coined the term as far back as 1897), but it was really the Cognacq, Lurcy, Weinberg and Goldschmidt sales of the 1950s that marked the moment when the newly wealthy really discovered what Saatchi dismisses as the “pleasure to be found in having their lovely friends measure the weight of their baubles.” (At least a Gauguin was a bauble worth measuring, unlike the dismal rubbish commanding top prices in the market today.)

Saatchi clearly has a problem with the oligarchs (one assumes he means Russianoligarchs) and on that point he’s right on the money. Anyone who has bothered to read the recent history of Russia’s power struggles and the turmoil in its economy will know that the Russian people were robbed blind by a few ruthless individuals in the early 1990s (Londongrad by Mark Holingsworth and Stewart Lansley is a good place to start.)

Recent BBC Radio 4 reports have focused attention on the corruption in Moscow’s civic government and one can only wonder how far its tentacles spread. How much dirty money is being channelled into art? One sensed a good deal of it washing around Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams this week as all three houses dispersed Russian art to rooms full of what looked like paddle-waving gangsters with their anorexic girlfriends in tow.

The ‘art world’ has never been a particularly pleasant place in which to do business, but whether it’s as bad as Saatchi maintains depends on your moral bias…or your taste (or lack of it).

Then again, Saatchi himself has hardly been an unequivocal force for good. Ask those artists whose paintings he bought back in the 1980s before unceremoniously dumping them a short while later. I’ve spoken to one or two who still can’t bury the hatchet. Back then his approach to art was widely perceived as just as crude and philistine as the crapulous oligarchs and other freeloaders he’s gunning for today.

Plus ça change…

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

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- The Art Tribune, commenting on the case of the disputed Baroque painting by Nicolas Tournier which is pitting London dealer Mark Weiss against the French Ministry of Culture.

If it is indeed true that works in French public collections are not subject to conventional statutes of limitations (and if found in the trade cannot therefore be legally transacted) then this increases the need to incorporate data about missing museum objects into due diligence databases. If the French Ministry of Culture places no time limitations on objects missing from its museums, then due diligence providers should do likewise.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

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As the newswires reported yesterday (and which I blogged here), the painting of Christ carrying the Cross by French Baroque artist Nicolas Tournier was, according to the French state, stolen from the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse in 1818. When the picture turned up on the stand of London Old Master dealer Weiss at the recent Paris Tableau art fair, the French government immediately stepped in to try and confiscate the picture. It was reported that an export block would be placed on it.

It was also reported that Weiss had bought the picture from French dealer Didier Aaron at TEFAF Maastricht in 2010 and then offered it on their own stand at TEFAF in 2011.

The Art Loss Register has now written to Messrs Weiss and Aaron (below) to reassure them that the picture was checked by their staff on both occasions, neither of which revealed any problems with its provenance. At present, the ALR’s records do not extend back as far as 1818.

This would seem to indicate that some improvement in communications is required between agencies like the ALR and those state bodies who see a duty to intervene when problematic pictures appear at art fairs in their jurisdiction. It is embarrassing for the dealers and it is embarrassing for the ALR which, on this occasion, seems to have done what it was required to do.

How far back should stolen art databases go? The Tournier picture may have been stolen way back in the mists of the early nineteenth century and a statute of limitations may have expired long ago; but the theft remains part of its provenance. Information on the 1818 theft ought to be included in the painting’s historical profile. That data can only be acquired and incorporated if data companies work proactively with state departments to blend all the known data. That might be a step towards an even more comprehensive process of Due Diligence.

Forewarned is forearmed.

[I thank the Art Loss Register for sending me a copy of the letter below]

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

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Wolfgang Beltracchi

Well, you’d care if you were London dealer Mark Weiss, who finds himself carrying the cross in a $550,000 title dispute after offering a work that had been stolen during the early nineteenth century. That fact failed to emerge despite two appearances at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht in 2010 and 2011.

The Jermyn Street Old Master dealer was an exhibitor at the recent Paris Tableau art fair where he was showing a work by the French Baroque painter Nicolas Tournier (c.1590-1639) — a typically Caravaggiste rendering of Christ stumbling with the Cross (above left).

Tout à coup, the French state intervened, laying claim to the painting on the grounds that it had been stolen from the Augustins Museum in Toulouse as far back as 1818. That’s just a few years after Lord Elgin brought the Parthenon Marbles back to England, another misappropriated work of art that continues to generate controversy.

On the surface at least, it would seem that the Weiss Gallery had nothing to hide. Their given provenance even includes reference to the picture’s sojourn at the Augustins Museum. But evidently the archival records they consulted didn’t include the fact that the painting had been stolen. Or perhaps Weiss felt that a statute of limitations would kick in. The theft was, after all, almost 200 years ago — a time-lag that seems to protect any number of other illicit artworks on the global hot list.

It also seems that the picture was for a time with French dealer Didier Aaron & Cie., who sold the painting to Weiss at TEFAF in Maastricht in 2010 for €400,000 ($550,000). According to the French paper Libération Weiss re-offered it at TEFAF in 2011, now priced at €675,000.

All of this raises a number of questions. The first and most obvious one is why Didier Aaron, a respected and responsible member of the Paris Old Masters trade, failed to discover during its provenance research into the painting that it had been stolen from a French museum in 1818. Nor did that information emerge during Weiss’s own research, if any was conducted.

Secondly, why did the French state not intervene when Didier Aaron advertised the picture at the world’s most prestigious and high-profile Old Master art fair in Maastricht in 2010? Or again in 2011 when Weiss showed it?

Thirdly, why was the painting not detected during Due Diligence vetting at the European Fine Art Fair on either occasion? If the Due Diligence mechanisms at Maastricht don’t embrace the international stolen art records that now seem to have revealed the Tournier as problematic, then the art trade is more vulnerable than we thought.

It would be interesting to know whether the picture’s uncertain title status was discovered at the Paris Tableau fair as a result of the fair’s Due Diligence vetting or through more anecdotal circumstances. Either way, Weiss now seem to find themselves on the wrong end of a title dispute that ought to have been picked up much earlier in the supply chain.

What happens to Weiss’s investment in the painting? Will the French state (which has placed an export bar on the work) compensate them? Was Didier Aaron negligent in failing to investigate the Augustins theft and its potential impact on a future owner of the picture? What are the implications of Maastricht being branded as a place where stolen works of art are traded?

It’s understandable that the painting could languish undetected in a wealthy Florentine private collection for almost 200 years following its original theft. But if there was something wrong with its provenance, as now seems to be the case, one would reasonably expect it to have been detected at Maastricht in 2010 and/or 2011 or during Didier Aaron’s researches.

This sounds like yet an another compelling argument for better integration of international stolen art databases, but who is pushing for that?

Then again, who cares? It’s only art.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

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The fine and rare Chinese Qing dynasty Imperial gilt metal box (shown left), appearing at Woolley & Wallis’s November 16 sale of Asian Art, bears an inscription — “Loot from the Summer Palace, Pekin, Oct. 1860. Capt. James Gunter, King’s Dragoon Guards.”

Rarely does colonial booty declare itself with such proud candour. The box is estimated to make £50,000-80,000 and is just one of half a dozen lots at this Part I sale that requires prospective bidders to register and provide financial guarantees and deposits prior to the sale. (There is still some caution in auction circles despite rumours that Bainbridge’s Qing vase account has finally been settled).

Another item likely to get Asian pulses racing is a rare Chinese celadon jade seal of the Empress Xiaoyiren (right) which isestimated to fetch £500,000-800,000, but how does one estimate such a thing?
For the time being Chinese mainland collectors remain preoccupied with securing from Western collections examples of Imperial jades and porcelains, some of which were legitimately acquired during the eighteenth century, but many of which (like the box referred to above) were looted during the era of colonial confrontation.

By contrast, Chinese dealers and collectors have yet to catch on to mark and period Export Porcelain — those wares made and decorated specifically for export to Europe and elsewhere.

However, it is a widely held belief in the relevant European and North American trade and collecting communities that this will eventually change. It is not a matter of if, but when the Chinese will recognise export wares — but that ‘when’ could turn out to be sooner than many expect. And it may be when the store of imperial objects from European collections dries up.

Recent auctions in the UK — even those held in the British provinces — have demonstrated the lengths to which Chinese dealers and collectors will travel — and indeed how high they are prepared to bid — to secure imperial wares. Their buying power has now reached a level at which few Western dealers can compete, as the recent May sales of Asian Art at Duke’s in Dorchester and Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury made clear.

Equally notable is the quantity of such material now being secured by provincial firms. Not so very long ago, most significant consignments of real quality would have been destined for London hammers. Yet firms like Duke’s and Woolley & Wallis have demonstrated that they can offer as efficient and expert a service as their London counterparts and often at more competitive rates.

The next opportunity to test the market — and the to gauge the extent to which the Chinese and other Asian buyers remain active bidders for such material — comes in mid-November when Woolley & Wallis mount three sales. On 15 November they will offer around 360 lots of Yixing Zisha wares, including items from the Arthur J. Harris collection of Yixing teapots. This was doubtless prompted by the success of Woolley & Wallis’s last Asian Art sale back on 18 May this year when a small selection of the distinctive and characterful Yixing red stoneware teapots from the Arthur J. Harris Collection performed encouragingly well.

The example illustrated (left), estimated at £1,200-1,800, fetched £105,000, one of a host of examples that roundly demolished its pre-sale forecast.

These little stoneware teapots are not just beautiful and historically interesting works of art. Woolley & Wallis inform us that the Yixing unglazed stoneware actually enhances the taste and olfactory pleasures of the tea brewed within. In fact many believe one should never wash a Yixing teapot but simply rinse it. We’re led to believe that over time the red ware body absorbs so much of the tea’s natural character that one can even brew a pot of tea without using any tea leaves. I’m not sure the Irish would buy that.

In economic terms, it goes without saying that Yixing wares have proved a superb investment for collectors like Arthur Harris, but anyone who has assembled a quality collection of Kangxi or Qianlong mark and period export porcelain is also likely to be quids in when the Chinese eventually come round to understanding it.

It is perhaps a measure of its basic rarity that there are no significant export wares included in Woolley & Wallis’s Asian Art Part 1 sale on 16 November (nor indeed in Part II on 17 November). Imperial wares, on the other hand, are plentiful. It will be interesting to see how many Asian buyers are present on sale day.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

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In his short films and visual devices, Pierrick Sorin makes fun of human existence and artistic creation. In his films he is often the only actor (and he has also starred in two feature films). Since 2006, Pierrick Sorin dedicates himself to the staging of performances, opera in particular. With his “Théâtres Optiques”, he blends new media and the traditional diorama. In these miniature stage sets he magically appears as small hologram.

Pierrick Sorin was born in 1960 in Nantes, France. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and received his Diplôme national supérieur d’expression plastique in 1988. In 2010, the culture center Lieu Unique in Nantes organized his first major retrospective. The exhibition at Galerie Albert Benamou runs until October 21, 2011.

Pierrick Sorin, solo exhibition at Galerie Albert Benamou. Interview with Pierrick Sorin, September 22, 2011. Video by VTV correspondent Christophe Ecoffet.

I am reliably informed by my well-placed spies in London and China that the Qing Dynasty porcelain vase bought by a Chinese bidder at Bainbridge’s Auction Galleries in the London borough of Ruislip almost exactly twelve months ago (left), has finally been paid for. Many people in the art market (and indeed the mainstream media) had begun to doubt whether the £51.6 million bill for ‘The Ruislip Vase’, as it has become known, would ever be settled.

The delay in resolving that seemingly epochal transaction prompted a number of European auction houses to initiate new regulations at their sales of Asian art, requesting Asian bidders to pay a deposit prior to the sale. Whether those requirements will now be relaxed in the light of the apparent settlement of the Ruislip account remains to be seen.

The sticking point for the Chinese buyer who bought the vase at Bainbridge’s was the auctioneer’s commission. The hammer fell at £43 million but once the commission and VAT had been added, the bill soared to £51.6 million. On paper at least, that staggering buyer’s premium (which includes VAT) made the auctioneer Peter Bainbridge an instant millionaire. But it now seems that the Chinese buyer only agreed to settle the account after re-negotiating the auctioneer’s fees.

The hammer price for the vase was extraordinary in itself, but arguably even more bizarre is the idea that an auctioneer can suddenly find himself almost £10 million richer simply on account of having been fortunate enough to receive instructions to wield the gavel for an object about which he knows next to nothing. Nice work if you can get it, but how fair and reasonable is that?

There are no rules and regulations on auction fees, nor indeed on an art dealer’s commission. It is widely known that dealers in contemporary art generally take up to 50% of the sale price of works they sell on the primary market, with the other 50% going to the artist. These percentages may change in favour of the artist as his or her reputation grows. That traditional arrangement — often open to negotiation — is regarded as broadly fair given the risk the dealer takes to promote the artist — the cost overheads of running a bricks and mortar gallery, catalogue publishing, and so on. But it has also encouraged some artists — Damien Hirst perhaps most famously — to demand a larger slice of the cake once fame and celebrity has properly kicked in.

The academic Olav Velthuis, who conducted extensive research on the the economic and social structures of the art market (Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art), found that some dealers considered their own 50% cut to be too much once an artist had reached a certain price point. From that moment it suddenly seemed disproportionate — and unfair to the artist — for the dealer to be taking such a large percentage of the transaction.

Today, vendors consigning high-value goods to auction can often negotiate the auctioneer’s sales commission right down, sometimes playing one auction house off against another to do so. Auctioneers are prepared to cooperate because they know they will gain on the buyer side through the premium set out in the conditions of sale, and which is generally non-negotiable.

And yet, in the case of the Ruislip vase, the Chinese buyer has indeed finally succeeded in negotiating a more favourable premium. Presumably Bainbridge’s were only too willing to cooperate given the alternative of continued delays and perhaps even the possibility of not being paid at all (the spectre of the Yves St. Laurent/Pierre Bergé Chinese rat and rabbit still haunts the market).

As prices continue to rise, are we likely to see more of this kind of thing? Will auctioneers come under increasing pressure to put a cap on their buyer’s premium? Somehow £10 million seems an unreasonable amount to levy for a few minutes work. And so it has indeed proved.

From here, the next logical question concerns the not unrelated issue of recovery fees for stolen or looted art. Can anyone explain why it cost Michael Bakwin $3.1 million to get his stolen pictures back (including his Cézanne, shown right)? Exactly what is the cost breakdown behind that sum? Understandably, Bakwin is suing for recovery of those costs. But is he suing the right people?

When it comes to recovery fees and commissions, how much is too much?

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

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here

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Nothing could be more illustrative of the extent to which money is dislodging traditional connoisseurial expertise in today’s art market than the news that a rich collector and his wife have been allowed to ascribe a cache of previously unknown plasters to Degas — one of the most academically problematic “sculptors” of the modern period — without the involvement of recognised Degas experts and scholars. Indeed, according to Cohan, Degas scholarship has suddenly descended into Trappist silence.

At the heart of this story is an issue that warrants further scrutiny — namely the willingness of the Degas heirs to rubber-stamp the suspect process of authentication in return for a share of the proceeds.

But Cohan’s piece is really about the omertà that has descended among museum directors and Degas scholars who, despite deep reservations about the authenticity of the plasters from which the new bronzes have been cast, are reluctant to express their doubts to journalists for fear of being sued. Here is yet another eloquent symbol of the power of money to corrupt due process in the art market.

Sadly, it is by no means unusual for an artist’s hears to authorise posthumous bronze casting. But is it right to do so, just because the artist in question left no explicit prohibition on such activities? As Cohan notes, Degas had his own reservations about it:

“Before his death in 1917, he repeatedly expressed concern that charlatans might highjack his legacy by casting his sculptures in bronze and selling them to collectors, and is said to have told his fellow painter Georges Rouault, ‘What I fear most is not dust but the hand of man.’”

That hand, it seems, is proving more grasping than even Degas might have imagined. Nor is the dead hand of acquisitive opportunism by any means unusual in the sculpture realm.

Not long ago, at the opening of an exhibition of recent casts of works by an important late British sculptor, one prominent UK museum curator confided to me his serious reservations about whether these “new” works ought to have been made at all, particularly when many of them had been cast from models that were never intended for translation into bronze. But it’s one thing to murmur such concernssotto voce over a glass of cheap white wine at a private view and quite another to express them on the record for publication.

As for the ability of expensive lawyers to foreclose disputes before they can be properly explored, this too is becoming almost endemic in the art market. Last year, we heard how Joe Simon-Whelan had to retreat from his dispute with the Andy Warhol Foundation after being engulfed by a tsunami of legal costs. In an email to Bloomberg, he said, “I am deeply saddened that I was unable to reveal the truth in court, but when faced with threats of bankruptcy, continuing personal attacks and counterclaims, I realized I no longer stood a chance of proceeding further.”

It’s coming to something when disputes might be resolved the wrong way just to avoid onerous legal costs, but when differences of opinion don’t even make it to the level of open public discussion, that is a lot more worrying. One of the Degas scholars Cohan spoke to expressed hope for a “litigation-free zone” in which to air the issues properly and without redress, a notion promptly scorned by Delaware law professor,Ann Althouse.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, a similarly glaring mismatch between corporate muscle and the broader public good is playing out in the realm of public sculpture. A case currently developing in California is pitting the intimidating financial reach of an oligarch against not only an artist, but against a local arts-commissioning authority cowed by the threat of lawsuits. Watch this space.

As threats and personal attacks rain down from wealthy, bullying collectors and foundations, the experts scuttle for cover, lips firmly sealed. Whither the artist’s rights?

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

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Many of the works in question — unauthorised copies (left) by Chinese craftsmen of an original 1992 work by the Californian sculptors Don Wakefield and Chick Glickman — are situated in the grounds of the Olen Property Corporation’s buildings in Newport Beach and Brea, California and have benefited from the Art in Public Places policy used in many US cities. This is how the Public Art scheme works:

Under the current Art in Public Places Policy, developments with a total building valuation of 1.5 million dollars ($1,500,000) or more are required to integrate publicly visible sculptures into their development projects. The artwork is regarded as an on-site amenity, a fixed asset on the property.

Developers are responsible for selecting an artist, commissioning the artwork, and maintaining the artwork. Each developer submits their proposed artwork for review by the Art in Public Places Advisory Committee, which reviews the artwork application based upon policy-defined criteria, such as the artist’s qualifications and the durability of materials. The developer is required to put one per cent of the total development budget towards the art.

The Olen Corporation is owned by the Florida-based billionaire property developer and convicted tax felon Igor Olenicoff who has real estate holdings in California, Arizona and Florida. He acquired the ‘fake’ sculptures in China during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and subsequently instructed the craftsmen there to adapt one of them from Wakefield’s original design (image right shows Don Wakefield making the original work in a photograph date-marked 18 June 1992). The copies are now distributed around Olenicoff’s corporate properties in Newport Beach and surrounding areas, including the City of Brea.
In the first instance, if these works are indeed unauthorised copies — and all the available evidence seems to suggest that they are — and if a craftsman (Chinese or otherwise) has been prepared to adapt the work of another artist without that artist’s consent, this would likely constitute a breach of copyright under the Fair Use application. This would represent a breach of Mr Wakefield’s moral rights as an artist which would have serious legal implications.

More importantly, the City of Brea seems to be failing to collect the comprehensive information on the artist, which is required under the regulations of the Art in Public Places scheme. Olenicoff has also declined to reveal the identity of the Chinese craftsmen. If the City of Brea is failing to collect the necessary information from the developer, it is, by default, encouraging the abuse of the scheme, in this case by allowing developers to use Chinese craftsmen to copy works at a fraction of the cost of the original. Whether this is a way for corporate developers to save money remains unclear, but it is in everyone’s interest to ensure that the rights of artists are not abused by corporations.

I approached a Beijing-based stone-carving company and requested an estimate to make a single copy of Don Wakefield’s 1992 sculpture based on a photograph. I was quoted $1,250, with the price dropping to $950 per unit for three. According to Wakefield, to make an original, unique work today of the kind he and Glickman made in 1992 would cost around $35,000. As they say in the States, do the math.

There is also the critical issue of how many other works might have been copied from original sculptures by other artists without their original creator’s consent. The City of Brea appears to be turning a blind eye to this by not demanding comprehensive biographical information about the artists whose work is used in the Art In Public Places scheme. I have requested clarification of this from the City of Brea and from the Public Art authorities in Newport Beach, but have received no response.

We need to know the exact source of the sculptures acquired by Olen Corp. and the identity of the craftsman from whom Olenicoff commissioned the copied and adapted works. It would also be interesting to know how many other sculptures from the Chinese source have been used by Olen Corporation in Newport Beach and Brea. All this information ought to be on file under the Art in Public Places scheme.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

Visit his blog