Kate Taylor had this story on p. 1 of today's New York Sun:
"Last week, Christie's auctioned off 74 pieces from the collection of the Swiss art dealer Pierre Huber .... The sale netted almost $17 million and set auction records for [On] Kawara, Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy, and Albert Oehlen. But some of these artists and their dealers say that for years Mr. Huber claimed he was building a collection that would end up in a museum. On that basis, he acquired works, sometimes at discount prices, that he couldn't have otherwise. When the artists learned that, instead of going to an institution, their works would be going to auction at Christie's, they were furious."
Marc Spiegler has more over at Artworld Salon. He says "these situations always leave me a little equivocal. Granted, if someone lied to get work at a major-museum discount and then cashed in ... that’s one thing. On the other hand, if they made no such explicit promises, then from an ethical standpoint this is simply private property, purchased at a price agreed between consenting adults. So when the owner wants to sell, that’s his right." And he adds: "To me this furore makes the case for wider-spread resale agreements. Because the handshake-deal days are clearly over."
Here is a short piece on the results of the sale, which doesn't mention the controversy. Rebecca Mead also had a pre-sale Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker about one of the works -- “Flying Rats,” by Kader Attia, which Mead describes as consisting of "a hundred-and-fifty-square-foot cage, a couple of dozen figures of children molded from birdseed, and a hundred and fifty hungry pigeons." To install the work at Christie's, it had to get permission from its landlord, Tishman Speyer, which agreed only on the condition that it be indemnified against damages. “It’s all about the shit, and the smell of the shit,” Mead quotes Amy Cappellazzo of Christie's as saying. “We said, how much can they shit in six days?” More on "Flying Rats," with photos, here.
