ART INVESTOR MAGAZINE, Fall 2003
DOWNTICK:
PIDDLING PAINTING DEALER
I Bought Andy Warhol (Harry Abrams,
2003) is a slim new volume by California private art
dealer and art market chronicler Richard Polsky, a
frequent contributor to artnet.com. The premise of
the book is to weave the search for the Holy Grail,
i.e. the hunt for the perfect Warhol painting, into
a memoir of life as an art dealer. However,
the problem is that Polsky is a not very interesting,
small time dealer in pursuit of a not very interesting,
minor Warhol. In fact, for those actively trading
pictures for a livelihood, the whole affair of Polsky's
book/life is rather depressing. This is a person who
spends his time eking out a living by operating a
dinky gallery in a town, San Francisco, with a negligible
market for contemporary art, and then struggling to
makes ends meet as a private dealer-and often times
not managing at that. This is not to maintain that's
its not a noble cause to struggle to survive doing
something that one is passionate about; rather, it
is simply that this story never really measures up
as a story.
Nevertheless, there are some interesting
factual tidbits and observations and a few engaging
anecdotes. Is there enough here to constitute an engrossing
autobiography? No. However, that little fact certainly
has done nothing to diminish the flood of memoirs
these days from everyone and their grandmother, and
grandmother's grandmother. The gratifying segments
include Warhol's auction record during his lifetime:
$385,000 in 1986 for 200 One Dollar Bills. Another
perceptive thought was that Warhol's is the most democratic
of all markets for artists as his paintings are the
most widely collected and traded works of art in the
world, and name the greatest recognized among the
general public save for Picasso's. There are some
humorous stories spun regarding a food fight that
culminated in a soiled Rucha painting, and an $800,000
check gone missing from an absent minded gallerist.
Lastly, in the worthwhile reminiscences department,
is an encounter with the imperious Vincent Freemont,
the exclusive sales agent for the Warhol estate. The
tale involved a demonic spinning chair episode as
Freemont twirled Polsky around at the warehouse where
the estate's Warhols are stored so as to shield him
from seeing the extent of the cache of paintings still
existing which fact is as guarded as a state secret.
Back to the grim nature of the tome
is an unentertaining, gratuitous chapter about two
wealthy art patrons that invited Polsky to lunch.
When the $300 bill showed up, they ambushed the destitute
dealer with a set of dice supplied by the waiter to
be thrown to determine who would get stuck with the
check. Besides Polsky, dear readers, it was
ultimately we that were stuck with the bill. Recommended
reading are two books referenced in I Bought Andy
Warhol :Duveen (S.N. Behrman, Glenn Lowry, Introduction,
Little Bookroom, 2003 Paperback) ,an autobiography
of perhaps the greatest dealer who ever dealt, that
brazenly borrowed millions in the early 1900's as
a young man (probably hundreds of millions in today's
dollars) to speculate in art. And, Bob Colacello's
Holly Terror (HarperCollins, 1990) a day to day account
of Warhol's factory life and madcap social goings-on
in the 1970's, utterly elucidating if you can get
past Colacello's claiming responsibility for a good
portion of Warhol's output and social connections.
Example: "As I recall, I took mine (a photograph
of a room service set-up with a new camera) seconds
before Andy took his."
UPTICK:
SHoP SHOP
SHoP is an appropriate name for the
architectural firm ShoP Sharples Holden Pasquarelli,
a team composed of two husband and wife couples and
a twin brother of one of the husband's. SHoP is apropos
inasmuch as the word connotes a cottage entrepreneurial
enterprise, in this case with a very innovative approach
to the staid world of building buildings. Sharples
Holden Pasquarelli have won design awards from the
Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, which
entails a commission to build an academic building
(upcoming); a feasibility study from Columbia University
resulted in a commission to build a School of the
Arts building; and, a First Place/Commissioned Young
Architect's Award Competition from The Museum of Modern
Art, which resulted in a 12,000 square foot dunescape
for summer relaxation at PS 1 Museum in Queens, NY.
SHoP built the first infrastructural element to be
installed into the vicinity of the former World Trade
Center site since the tragic events of September 11th.
The bridge reconnected the residents of Battery Park
City and the various businesses of the World Financial
Center to the rest of Lower Manhattan.
The printed matter supplied by SHoP
immediately sets them apart as is apparent in their
profile, which employs a flow chart to depict the
organization of the firm. Aside from obvious backgrounds
of the principals (lots of degrees from Columbia University),
the schematic chart illustrates experience in the
worlds of finance, marketing, structural engineering,
and art history. The key here is finance and
marketing which becomes palpable in the project known
as "The Porter House" referencing a choice
cut of meat for a residential structure in Manhattan's
Meatpacking District. Rather than continuing to passively
design OPP's (Other People's Projects) the SHoP group
brought a property site on the market to the attention
of a former client that is also a developer so they
could actively take a stake in the enterprise. What
resulted was a renovation and conversion of a six
story warehouse to a condominium with a new four story
structure plopped on top and cantilevering over the
lower neighboring buildings to the south. Hence, the
financing and marketing expertise came into play as
Sharples Holden Pasquarelli found the building, helped
cement the financing, designed the job; and, in addition,
put together a snazzy book to market the whole shebang.
The prices of the units were raised several times
before they ultimately sold out-all prior to the completion
of construction. Not bad for a firm established in
1996 with a group comprised of academics from Columbia
(a few still teaching there, among other top-flight
institutions).
Many architects pay lip service to new
systems of practice that employ digital expertise
in the way of three dimensional computer form generation.
Stephen Holl claims that despite his firm's mastery
over new design technologies, all his work emanates
from traditional water colors by the hand, as good
design should-an oxymoron if ever there was. Not only
does SHoP look beyond past architectural practice
to the realms of automotive and aeronautical engineering,
they do so with a view towards using the computer
to often reduce construction budgets. The façade
of The Porter House used a custom fabricated metal
panel system that originated on a desk top and ended
up as a kit of custom parts accompanied by a set of
instructions akin to Lego or a model airplane kit.
A Duchampian Readymade building to go for the streets
of New York City or anywhere for that matter.
A building that functions as an actual Camera Obscura
for a park in Greenport, New York was the fist structure
not only designed but entirely assembled with laser-cut
aluminum and steel components using digital files
directly extracted from the computer model. Rarely
do you find an artistic undertaking with such an acute
business sense and forward thinking technological
stance. Sign me up as a client.
Kenny Schachter
