On Tuesday, Phillips’s “New Now” sale in London generated a total of £3.8 million ($5.1 million) across 172 lots, landing at the low end of the pre-sale estimate of £3.7 million–£5.5 million (with premium) and realizing a 76.6 percent sell-through rate. The total was a disappointment when measured against the hopes of the estimates but not against the history of these sales. The £3.8 million marks the house’s highest total achieved for its “New Now” iteration in London.
The “New Now” sales showcase Phillips’s prowess in creating markets for emerging artists. With speculative buying returning to the forefront of collecting (as opposed to a flight to blue-chip quality) the series in London and New York continues to gradually expand. Last year’s equivalent sale brought in a total of £3.7 million, though that 2019 sale’s top lot was a work by an established mid-career artist, William Kentridge; it realized the same total achieved the year before in 2018.
The London sale follows Phillips record-setting $134.6 million contemporary art evening sale total in New York, achieving the highest figure for an evening sale in the house’s history. The sale was led by a $41 million David Hockney landscape Nichols Canyon (1980), sold by Seattle-based real-estate developer Richard Hedreen.
Leading the New Now auction by price was Pakistan-born New-York based market darling Salman Toor’s Liberty Porcelain (2012), which found a new buyer for a £378,000 ($505,688) premium price. That was nine times the estimate of £40,000. Toor’s growing value, bolstered by a current solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York which runs until April, is moving toward the forefront of the market’s attention. The sale comes on the heels of Toor’s auction debut when one part of his triptych Rooftop Ghost Party I from 2015 sold for $822,000. That sale made eight times the estimate of $100,000 during a Christie’s New York contemporary art day sale in early December.
The second-most expensive lot was Banksy’s well-known image Girl with Balloon from 2004, which sold for £189,000 ($252,800), against an estimate of £100,000–150,000. Another staple artist in the Phillips contemporary sales is Eddie Martinez, whose Skullscape 3 (large), from 2012, sold on Tuesday for £163,800 ($219,100), double its estimate of £80,000.
Installation view of work by Kevork Mourad, Seeing Through Babel (2019) in the Asia Society Triennial. (Photo by Ben Davis.)The promise of the Asia Society Triennial had been to launch a new event, something spectacular enough to compete with the Whitney’s Biennial and the New Museum’s Triennial, but with a spotlight on styles of art coming out of Asia’s booming, diverse art worlds that had not yet been seen in NYC. Five years in the making, the show’s grander ambitions of a sprawling event loaded with immersive installation had to be scaled back—for now at least—due to COVID.
“To say there was not some heartache would not be true,” co-curator Michelle Yun told the New York Times. (A part 2 will open in February, conditions permitting.) Yet, all things being equal, a less-punishing scale and an end to pointless gigantism are actually positive developments when it comes to the universe of international biennials. The central part of the show at the Asia Society’s HQ on Madison Avenue gives you a manageable selection of works by twenty-some artists, spaced out over two floors. (There’s an auxiliary section installed at the New York Historical Society, which I’m not getting into.) Yet in rolling back the tide of ambition, the event also ends up flushing to the surface some of the dilemmas of this style of show as well.
The Asia Society. (Photo by Ben Davis.)
Take a work like that by Xu Bing, commissioned by the Asia Society for the Triennial. Xu is an already famous Chinese artist, and a good one. Here, he’s been asked to respond via art to the US Declaration of Independence, a reproduction of which is hung on the wall, for a show-within-a-show called “We the People” (it also features Sun Xun’s folding album depicting Donald Trump as an evil dragon).
Xu presents a copy of Confucius’s Analects, inspired by the fact, previously unknown to me, that the Founding Fathers were interested in classical Chinese philosophy. Displayed beneath a plexiglass box, the book has been coated in a fine cobweb of silk, via a process that involves letting live silkworms extrude on them, documented in a nearby film.
Xu Bing, Silkworm Book: The Analects of Confucius (2019). (Photo by Ben Davis.)
The silk-covered book is an interesting object. The idea behind the gesture, I think, is to point to a deep, wholesome cosmopolitanism, as if asking people who fetishize “American” identity by appealing to mythical Founding Fathers, in a time of anti-Chinese xenophobia, to think again—a fine idea, albeit one unlikely to move anyone who doesn’t already agree. As a whole installation, though, the parts don’t really connect. Silkworm Book ends up reducing to the contemporary-art formula: “interesting object + piece of trivia + text explaining connection.” This has been a general problem with new commissions made in our (temporarily slowed) production-for-production’s sake biennial circuit, with its bottomless hunger for made-to-order meaning.
Detail of Ken and Julia Yonetani, Three Wishes (2014) in the Asia Society Triennial. (Photo by Ben Davis.)
Overall, this first Asia Society Triennial spotlights an immense geographic area in its handful of figures, from Israel to Japan, passing through countries that represent the bulk of the world population in between. Yet despite this staggering breadth of different geographies and national cultures, artistically, the overall tone here is set by a music box version of It’s a Small World emanating from Japanese duo Ken and Julia Yonetani’s small installation featuring little glass Tinkerbells in jars, affixed with real butterfly wings, which a text explains is a commentary on Walt Disney’s role in promoting nuclear power.
Which is to say that this is a biennial that looks like it is full of biennial art. Its themes feel broadly representative of those acculturated to what is effectively its own cosmopolitan, educated, and mobile global subculture. These tropes include globalization itself as subject matter; a distanced but not aggressive irony towards traditional practices and beliefs; and respectful, semi-conceptual work documenting marginalized groups and political trauma. For my taste, the artwork that pops out here is a corner full of ink paintings by Nandalal Bose (1882-1966). Born literally a century before some of the other figures here, he hails from a totally other configuration of culture than today’s hyper-connected one. In his home country, Bose is an artist of immense stature. He was in charge of illuminating India’s first, hand-written Constitution in 1950.
Untitled works by Nandalal Bose in the Asia Society Triennial. (Photo by Ben Davis.)
Bose’s modest corner gives only a whisper of a sense of his status as having helped define India’s modern artistic identity. But the small suite of airy ink wash images of flowers and Indian landscapes explicitly show the way his art was shaped by his encounter with East Asian artistic traditions. They sent me home to discover Inaga Shigemi’s article on Bose’s relation with Japanese artists, which argues that his ink works are “an appeal for a Pan-Asian challenge to the overwhelming domination of Western modernism.” Connecting to that story is worth the price of admission as far as I’m concerned.
For myself, aside from the Bose and Shahzia Sikander’s delightful The Scroll—a storybook-like work, made when she was a student in Lahore, that evidently launched the well-known artist’s career back in the ’90s—what most interested me here was how this Triennial helped throw into focus a larger contemporary-art trend.
No less than three works at the Asia Society involve delegated craft production, where the fact that the object in front of you is the product of a commission by the artist from anonymous artisans, working across borders, is symbolically important.
Works from Kyungah Ham’s “What You See Is the Unseen / Chandeliers for Five Cities DSK 04-D-05” series (2016-17) in the Asia Society Triennial. (Photo by Ben Davis.)
