Wet Paint: Top Galleries Send Blistering Letter to Art Basel Over Hong Kong, Inside the Zhukova-Niarchos Nuptials, & 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.

BASEL DEALBREAKERS

Wet Paint has obtained a
scathing letter sent to the directors of Art Basel
Hong Kong by two dozen of the fair’s highest-profile
participating galleries expressing their disappointment with what
they have deemed an inadequate response to the ongoing political
turmoil in the city. The letter, sent January 16, was signed by
galleries who have been participating in Basel fairs for many
decades, including Paula Cooper Gallery,
Lisson Gallery, and Galerie Chantal
Crousel; top galleries with outposts on multiple
continents, such as Lévy Gorvy,
Sprüth Magers, and Blum & Poe;
and several galleries who have exhibited at Art Basel Hong Kong
since its inception. 

The letter, addressed to Art
Basel global director Marc Spiegler and
Adeline Ooi, its director Asia, did not mince
words when airing complaints about the state of the fair amid the
Hong Kong protests, which have been going on for months. It claims
that “many people who normally attend the fair have indicated that
they will not attend this year” and that “many
of our artists are
unwilling to have their work shown at the fair” because
participation in a territory under threat of increased Chinese
control is not “consistent with their core belief in the freedom of
expression.” 

Ultimately, the letter concluded
that “it is not a good year to hold this fair.” (If the fair
were canceled, it wouldn’t be without precedent,
given the cancellation of the first edition of Art
Basel Miami Beach two months out due to the attacks of
9/11.) But, recognizing that MCH Group seems
hellbent on soldiering on with the proceedings, the galleries asked
for a few concessions instead: the ability to reduce booth sizes
without penalty; an extension on the deadline to pay until late
February; access to reasonable insurance coverage; no late fees for
orders of booth materials such as lights and walls; and, most
notably, a 50 percent reduction on booth fees across the
board. While some sources at
the galleries realized the requests were ambitious, they hoped to
start a negotiation.

When the fair responded to these
requests January 18—in an email that was forwarded to Wet Paint by
one of the galleries—Spiegler and Ooi seemed shaken enough to grant
some of the requests (and call attention to others they had already
made). They extended the late order fee from January 7 to January
31 and noted that they would be willing to work with galleries, as
they had in the past, on extending the payment due date. They also
defended their VIP outreach, saying RSVPs were “consistent overall”
with other editions, including “an increase in VIP registration
from Mainland China.” And they noted pointedly that they had,
indeed, offered galleries the best insurance available on the
market and the chance to reduce their booth size to decrease costs;
nine of the outraged signatories had already taken them up on it.
Still, they dismissed the 50 percent booth fee reduction as
“financially untenable,” especially considering the unforeseen
changes that have already had “a significant financial impact for
Art Basel.” 

Art Basel declined to comment
beyond the letter sent to galleries. The full list of signatories
is as follows: 303 Gallery, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Alfonso
Artiaco, Blum & Poe, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Gavin Brown’s
enterprise, Paula Cooper Gallery, Pilar Corrias, Galerie Chantal
Crousel, Thomas Dane Gallery, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, François
Ghebaly, Greene Naftali, Herald St, Lévy Gorvy, Lisson Gallery,
Matthew Marks Gallery, Fergus McCaffrey, kamel mennour, Metro
Pictures, OMR, Nara Roesler, Lia Rumma, and Sprüth
Magers. None have commented on whether they will drop out
of the fair.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

The last time Dasha
Zhukova got married, to the secretive Russian oligarch
billionaire Roman Abramovich, they kept it quiet.
So quiet, in fact, that she was referred to in the press as his
“girlfriend” for years after the I Do’s took place. Well, for her
second time down the aisle, Zhukova married a Greek billionaire
(quite the departure): Stavros Niarchos. The
nuptials took place last Saturday in St. Moritz,
the Swiss ski town that the groom’s grandfather, a shipping tycoon
with the same name, built up in the 1950s. This time around, the
wedding was captured by the slope-side paparazzi. In attendance
were celeb friends such as Katy Perry,
Orlando Bloom, Kate
Hudson, Karlie Kloss, and her
husband Joshua Kushner (brother to
Jared). There was also a long list of obscure
royals even Wet Paint had never heard of. (Sorry, Ekaterina,
hereditary princess of the House of Hanover, try harder, I
guess!)

And, of course, Zhukova—who is
perhaps most famous for starting Moscow’s leading contemporary arts
institution, the Garage Museum, and founding the art and fashion
magazine of the same name—invited a long list of art-world figures.
Among those spotted by our spies at the festivities, which took
place at the town hall and then at the Niarchos-owned Kulm
Hotel, were collector and photographer Jean
Pigozzi, gallerist Eleanor Acquavella,
dealer Vito Schnabel, Vanity Fair scribe
Bob Colacello, omnipresent
Gagosian gadfly Derek Blasberg,
and the collector Aby Rosen. The theme was Russia
in Switzerland—a nod to Zhukova’s Russian-born parents, and not a
knock on her ex-husband, who is famously close with
Vladimir Putin. OK, maybe it was a little
bit of a knock on dear old Roman. 

FLIPPERS FLIP OFT-FLIPPED FAVE

Despite this very reporter
revealing the
identities of the people flipping
works by millennial art star Julie
Curtiss, people are still flipping Julie Curtisses—and,
inevitably, their names are still getting passed around. Perhaps
the promise of a mind-blowing 10,000 percent increase in value is
just too much to pass up, even if you get outed in the process.
That certainly seems to be the case for the owner of The
Witch (2017), downtown-centric New York collector and
real-estate broker Evan Ruster, who bought
the cropped painting of a blue-skinned figure from the
Spring/Break art show for an astounding price
of just $1,400 the year it was made. Now, he’s flipping it at
Sotheby’s, where its high estimate at the
contemporary art evening sale in London on February 11 is nearly
$100,000. Given that it’s slotted in as the competitive first lot
in the sale, the house evidently has a ton of bidding attention
already, and sources say the work could easily hit $200,000. Other
paintings by Curtiss of this size have gone even higher than that.
There’s another Curtiss of similar scale in the
Christie’s London day sale, and while the estimate
hasn’t been announced yet, sources say there’s no reason it
couldn’t top the $250,000 that small paintings are known to fetch
on the private secondary market. That work was bought at the Rome
gallery T293 in the summer of 2018 for $4,800 by
the Naples-based Francesco Taurisano and his
family, and they are the ones who have flipped it to Christie’s. To
the victor go the spoils.

MANHATTAN TRANSFERS

Speaking of Julie Curtiss: her
dealer Anton Kern is on the move—not his gallery,
which is still next to the St. Regis, though he did just open a
window space in Tribeca. No, Kern is vacating his Chelsea
loft, and he’s departing for new digs on the Upper East
Side. Keeping things in the art-world family, however, Kern is
giving over the apartment to an artist, though it’s not one in his
own gallery’s stable. The apartment is being overtaken by
Nicolas Party, the young art sensation
who will have his first show with global powerhouse Hauser
& Wirth in Los Angeles in February. The apartment has a
long art-world pedigree: Kern himself took it over from fellow art
dealer Andrew Kreps.  

ELLEN BARKIN REVEALS ANDRE ENCOUNTER

A painful memory sent out on Twitter by
a famous actress has initiated a new call to investigate the past
behavior of the late Carl Andre. On Sunday,
the actress Ellen Barkin—who was in attendance at
the criminal trial of Harvey Weinstein in New York on
Thursday—claimed in a tweet that the artist once choked her and
shoved her against the wall while she was working as a waitress at
one of Mickey Ruskin‘s restaurants. “I was
a 22 yr old waitress working a party for painter Carl Andre. Andre
got angry over his service. Shoving me against a wall, his hands
around my neck pulling me up til my feet left the floor. 3 men got
him off me.” The tweet quickly
went viral, with some fans of the Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas actress replying that they had looked up Andre and
learned for the first time about the 1985 death of his wife,
Ana Mendieta, who Andre claimed fell out the
window of their apartment during what he claimed was an argument.
He was acquitted of murder in 1988. 

POP QUIZ

Congrats to last week’s pop quiz winner… Matt
Shuster! He correctly identified the mystery painting
reproduced in last week’s
column hanging above Valentino partner
Giancarlo Giammetti, heiress Nicky Hilton
Rothschild, mid-aughts New York socialite Olivia
Palermo in a recent Instagram photo. It
was Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s Untitled
(History of the Black People) (1983). Pop Quiz will
return next week.

WE HEAR…

… White Cube
and Christie’s vet Sara Kay quietly closed her
eponymous gallery in the East Village late last year, two years after it
opened in the former location of the legendary
Rivington Arms …
Julian Schnabel will have a show of
new work at Pace opening in March, and when
Arne Glimcher announced it at a lunch Wednesday,
he admitted, of Schnabel, “I love him, and he’s a major force, but
he’s often misunderstood” … Deanna Havas—the
artist who once showed at spaces such as Klaus von
Nichtssagend on the Lower East Side and LUMA
Westbau in Zurich but has more recently been known for her
habit of liking or promoting alt-right memes on Twitter—announced
she is “retiring from public life,” meaning she will stop using
social media and no longer make art, though she may at some point
make art under another name.

SPOTTED 

*** UCCA director Philip
Tinari at Davos, sitting directly in
front of climate change activist Greta Thunberg
*** rapper Tyler, the Creator at downtown
art-world hangout Lucien
*** heavyweight German artist Anselm Kiefer chilling
alongside models Gigi Hadid and Kaia
Gerber at the Prada Mode club at
Maxim’s in Paris during haute couture week ***
New Museum director Lisa Phillips
with collectors Phil and Shelley
Aarons at the private preview for a “mixed reality” pop-up
in the sky room of her museum, which features a new work
by Sarah
Meyohas *** Takashi
Murakami (not to be confused with any
other artist) palling around with reggaeton superstar J
Balvin in Paris, also for couture week *** video
artist Jesper Just celebrating the opening of
his solo show at the downtown New York outpost
of Perrotin with a bash at the basement of
Eldridge Street haunt The Flower Shop
***

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Top Galleries Send Blistering Letter to
Art Basel Over Hong Kong, Inside the Zhukova-Niarchos Nuptials, &
More Juicy Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet
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