THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: By kelly Crow. Picasso and Warhol are being outsold by Chinese painters as a new wave of wealthy buyers reshapes the global market. Inside China's high-rolling art world.On the outskirts of Beijing in a private club house called Paradise, there is a large, windowless room where Yang Bin displays his collection of modern and contemporary art.  [more...]

THE GUARDIAN: By Matt Roberts. The golden age of public funding in arts is over – it's time policy makers help visual artists link creativity to revenue. As a fine arts student in the West Midlands, I can't remember any of my tutors discussing the commercial system, even conversationally.   [more...]

FORBES: By Abigail R. Esman. Vanity Fair announced the story the other day, but it was Josh Baer of BaerFaxt who first broke it in 2011: the purchase of Cezanne’s “Card Players” for $250 million from the estate of Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos. While no one had actually announced the identity of the buyers, the size of the purchase made it reasonably obvious to most art-market cogniscenti: the royal family of Qatar, longtime players in the international art scene with a history of making magnificent –if at times troublesome — purchases.  [more...]

BLOOMBERG: By Mark C Taylor. Art and money have always been inseparable. As Andy Warhol declared almost four decades ago, “Business art is the step that comes after Art.” During the past several decades, however, this relationship has been transformed by the appearance of a new form of capitalism: finance capitalism.   [more...]

FINANCIAL TIMES: By Adam Palin. It may be reasonable to associate business education with the rational and the tangible. It is intriguing therefore that many business schools place great emphasis and in certain cases devote great resources, to their collections of art.Like most schools’ collections, art at the University of Chicago Booth School has not been acquired with investment in mind. “We are educators, not investors”, explains Canice Prendergast, a professor of economics at Booth who is intimately involved in the collection’s development.  [more...]

THE NEW YORK TIMES: By Randy Kennedy. Artspace.com, one of a wave of online art dealers that is starting to change the way contemporary art is bought and sold, said on Monday that it had raised $2.5 million from a group of investors. Additionally, it said, it had signed up several prominent museums and galleries – among them the New Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Mexico City gallery kurimanzutto – as partners that will offer works to buyers through the Web site.  [more...]

FINANCIAL MAIL: By Gabrielle de Saint Clair. First posted on 22nd Dec 2011. The SA art market is under pressure and a number of paintings have failed to sell at recent auctions, but the rise in the number of serious collectors means quality works are still sought after.  [more...]

By Michael Coulson : With each of the three major auction houses holding sales in the next couple of months, there’s a good deal of apprehension whether the softer trend apparent in the market in the last quarter of 2011 will be sustained, extended, or – the least likely outcome – reversed. Bonhams’ Giles Peppiatt, in SA on a final hunt for work for his firm’s March 21 auction in London, reckons that it was more a case of buyers sitting on their hands at a particularly difficult stage of the international financial crisis than an intrinsic collapse in demand, but concedes that this year’s pipe-opener will be less ambitious than last year.  [more...]

By Michael Coulson. While there are only three lots by Irma Stern (one a minor graphic) and one Pierneef (a charcoal study for one of his Joburg station panels), the success of Stephan Welz & Co’s first sale of 2012 still depends heavily on the former artist. To be held at the Alphen in Cape Town on February 21 and 22, the works of SA art carry a gross low estimate of about R17.2m, of which the Sterns contribute about 44%.SA art features in two of the four sessions. Session two includes 130 lots, but the gross low estimate is only about R715 000, while session three includes 108 lots, with a gross low estimate of about R16.5m.   [more...]

ARTTHROB: By M Blackman. According to the chairman of the Visual Arts Network of South Africa Western Cape (VANSA-WC), Jonathan Garnham, VANSA-WC is in ‘a process of reducing its overheads and subletting its premises.’ The decision to downsize was taken after the news that the Department of Economic Development and Tourism (DEDAT) would not be renewing its funding allocation to the Western Cape branch of the network.This decision has resulted in VANSA affectively closing its doors and several staff members losing their jobs. Mr. Ruarc Peffers, a now ex-staff member of VANSA, stated that this has meant that some of the poorest sections of the arts community ‘have lost the access to resources and training that VANSA provides.’  [more...]