Wet Paint: Leonardo DiCaprio Flips a Work That Was Dedicated to Him, Hans-Ulrich Obrist Interviews Animals on TikTok, & More Juicy Art-World Gossip

Every week, 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.

ONCE UPON A TIME… IN THE AUCTION WORLD

Leonardo
DiCaprio‘s long been a major contemporary art collector,
attending fairs and auctions for many a year. Just last February—in
the before times—there was Leo at Frieze Los
Angeles, staring long and deep
into the wonders of a new Avery Singer work at the
Hauser & Wirth booth. For the many years that he
worked with the adviser Lisa Schiff, he built up a
formidable collection, snapping up works by Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Jonas Wood, Ed
Ruscha, Takashi Murakami, and
Andreas Gursky. In 2013, his 11th Hour auction at
Christie’s jumpstarted a number of artist’s
markets, setting records for future evening-sale stalwarts such as
Mark Grotjahn, Dan Colen and
Elizabeth Peyton.

But DiCaprio doesn’t just buy
art… he also flips art. 

Rumors have circulated for years
that Leo, despite having a day job as one of the most famous silver
screen leading men alive, has a side-hustle as something of a
“specu-lector,” to borrow a phrase from Artnet
News columnist Kenny Schachter. In fact,
Schachter said back in 2015 that Leo was the one dumping works by
seen-better-days artists such as Christian Rosa at
auction.

Now a Sotheby’s catalogue entry
for a Jeff Elrod offers some cold, hard facts.
According to the official provenance for Untitled
(2014)—which sold for $25,000 last week, below its low estimate of $30,000
but evidently above the reserve—the first home of the work was
“Collection of Leonardo DiCaprio, Los Angeles (acquired directly
from the artist).” Despite the fact that Elrod even dedicated the
work to the actor—it reads “for LEO” on the overlap—at some point
in the past six years, DiCaprio dumped the work, selling it through
another private collection and then to its Sotheby’s consignor. And
who might that be? It
appears that the dealer and active auction bidder Stellan
Holm was at the very least involved in the
transaction—though some sources indicated he could be the
consignor. And look at a picture of the back of the work, which
Sotheby’s added to the digital catalogue, and you’ll see a sticker
that says “STELLAN HOLM GALLERY 1018 MADISON AVENUE NEW YORK
NY.”

Holm didn’t respond to an email,
and neither did Elrod. There was no response to an email to a
DiCaprio rep at Karla Otto. Sotheby’s did not
respond in time for publication.

SYMPATHY FOR THE HACKER

Back when we were allowed to
leave our homes and see other human beings, there would be art
openings, and sometimes you would even see interesting people
there. Hey, you could even see the world’s most
interesting person: Rolling Stones frontman
Mick Jagger. He’s a regular at
Gagosian openings when we had those sorts of
things, and we’ve seen him not once but twice at the
Beverly Hills space. He also has turned up for
Gagosian dinners in London, including one for
Ed Ruscha in 2008, and is at least on acquaintance
terms with Larry Gagosian. The Wall
Street Journal even reported that, after Larry
gave a show to Bob Dylan, Mick called the dealer
asking if he’d show Stones-mate Ronnie Wood’s
art—only to have Larry shoot him down. (Mick told the
Journal the whole thing was Larry’s idea. Who knows with
these guys.)

Maybe there won’t be a show for
Ronnie, but a tantalizing clue pointed to a potential show for
Mick. After the hackers known as REvil released
documents related to the entertainment law firm started by
Allen Grubman, most press was focused on the
lawyer’s dealers with Lady Gaga. But one
eagle-eyed source saw another intriguing item on the client list:
Among the other entities, there is something referred to as
“Gagosian + Jagger Project.” Unfortunately, the content of that
specific file has yet to be leaked, and the gallery would not
comment. But whenever gallery shows return, we might have one where
the frontman of the Stones takes over an outpost of the world’s
biggest gallery empire. If there are still galleries, that
is!

CONVERSATIONS WITH SWANS

Hans-Ulrich
Obrist was—just months ago, before time stopped—so
associated with curating shows in all corners of the world that was
the ubiquitous face of its jet-setting nature. “The Dadaists had
Tzara, the Surrealists
Breton, the futurists
Marinetti, and now the international global art
world has Hans-Ulrich Obrist,” curator
Massimiliano Gioni told The New
Yorker.

Stuck at home, Obrist is still
finding ways of innovating. It will surprise no one that he has a
truly remarkable social media presence on the
built-for-Gen-Z platform TikTok.
I repeat: Do not sleep on Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s TikTok. The art
world’s most renowned interviewer is still asking questions but now
he’s asking them… to unresponsive flora and fauna.

“I wanted to ask you about your
unrealized projects,” he says in one short video, to a group of
swans wading in a pond. The swans keep swimming. One eventually
squawks. “Projects that have been too big to be realized?” Obrist
asks the swans. “Maybe utopic projects? Like dreams?” It’s what you
get when you cross a symposium at a kunsthalle with the classic Saturday Night
Live sketch “Mark Wahlberg Talks to
Animals.” 

Wet Paint asked Obrist about the
inspiration behind his TikTok, and he
mentioned Vinciane Despret‘s book
“What Would Animals Say If
We Asked the Right Questions?”

“As Bruno Latour said, it’s a
book of scientific fables about how difficult it is for us to
figure out what animals are up to,” Obrist said over email. “I keep
meeting all these animals in Kensington Gardens on
my daily walk and daily yoga I do in the park, and started to ask
them my favorite question about their unrealized projects.” Makes
sense to us. He also mentioned he was inspired by other artists on
TikTok, including Jeremy O. Harris,
Precious Okoyomon, Kelsey Lu,
Juliana Huxtable, Alex Israel,
and Haroon Gunn-Salie.

POP QUIZ

The Pop Quiz from the last
edition of Wet Paint sure did fool a bunch of you loyal readers.
Many guessed it was a work by Richard Serra,
perhaps a snippet of a photo of his monumental sculptures at the
the Menil Collection in
Houston, the Brant
Foundation in Greenwich, or Storm
King Art Center in Upstate New York. But
alas, this was not a Serra, but a work by his colleague
Robert Irwin. And is wasn’t Irwin’s majestic
installation at LACMA, as many thought. No: It’s
Irwin’s Tilted Planes, installed at the private home and
world-class private art collection of Cindy and Howard
Rachofsky in Dallas.

Here’s the larger image that the
snippet was taken from. 

And now it’s time to reveal the
winners. Many of you got it correct, but there were three right out
the gate at essentially the same time: writer and curator
Greg Allen, powerhouse art-world publicist
Andrea Schwan, and Curatorial
Services founder Benjamin Godsill. An
honorable mention goes to Gagosian director
Jona Lueddeckens, who was just behind the top
three, but on the horn from Europe after waking up. We’re figuring
out how to deal with the time zone thing here at Wet Paint
HQ.

Congrats to the
winners!

OK, on to this week’s challenge.
Can you name the painting on the left and its owner? We’ll need the
name of the painting, the artist, and the name of owner to clinch
it.

Email nfreeman@artnet.com if you
have a guess. The first readers to respond correctly will take
their place in the Wet Paint Pop Quiz Canyon of Heroes alongside
other trivia-mad fast-typing members of the art world.

WE HEAR…

Lucien—the
East Village French bistro that is the art boite
to end all art boites—is reopen for delivery and take-out,
including martinis to-go! … collector Maja
Hoffmann (a Lucien regular, incidentally) may be spending
her lockdown on the semi-private island of
Mustique, but she’s accomplished more in terms of
pandemic response than arguably anyone, as her family’s
pharmaceutical company, Roche, developed
the first antibody test to be approved by the FDA
… Upper East Side dealer Edward
Ressle quietly moved forward with a new space in
Shanghai in late 2019 and oh boy has the bet paid
off—the Bund gallery will open with Bruce
Nauman‘s first show in mainland China on June 13, while
most of the world’s art cities lay dormant … Lower East
Side bar-cum-gallery Beverley’s has
started a Kickstarter to help it avoid permanent
closure, and when it goes live Saturday, contributors at certain
levels can get artworks or even their own edition of the iconic
Bev’s pink neon sign … the new arty Grand
Cayman hotel Palm Heights—which has
uniforms made by the wonderful Bode designer
Emily Bode!—hosted a COVID-19 fundraiser featuring
remote performances by photographer Tyler Mitchell
and artists Raúl De Nieves and Jacolby
Satterwhite, along with “in-person” performances from
aforementioned HUO fave Kelsey Lu and chef
Angela Dimayuga, who have both been stuck at the
hotel since they started a residency prior to lockdown … the
Kronenhalle has reopened in
Zurich, meaning that Swiss
patrons can once again enjoy a cold beer and zürcher
geschnetzeltes with rösti while
surrounded Picassos, Miros and
Chagalls …

SPOTTED

Morrissey in
everyone’s favorite art city, Marfa *** Artist
Cecily Brown and critic David
Rimanelli lightly bickering in Instagram
comments about the morals of posting a David
Bailey picture of Roman Polanski and
Sharon Tate—“He just grosses me out. Call me old
fashioned,” Brown says in a jab *** Vito Schnabel
inviting Aby Rosen to come over for a play date
after Rosen posts to Instagram
“Need to dance again
” *** Beth Rudin
DeWoody donating $1,000 to save the beloved
Williamsburg independent bookstore Spoonbill &
Sugartown as artists Eddie Martinez and
Leidy Churchman gave $500 each—other contributions
came from artists Nicole Eisenman, Sam McKinniss, Amy
Sillman, Tehching Hsieh, and Zoe Leonard;
dealers Peter Freeman and Andrea
Rosen; writers Barry Schwabsky and
Randy Kennedy, among many others *** Political
commentator John Heilemann going on
MSNBC with a Josef Albers print
hanging on his wall in the background ***

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Leonardo DiCaprio Flips a Work That Was
Dedicated to Him, Hans-Ulrich Obrist Interviews Animals on TikTok,
& More Juicy Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet
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