AUTUMN HAS ARRIVED!
Our show at Landskrona Konsthall is over now. It was a big success! Record attendance, spontaneous appreciations from many people and people repeatedly coming back. The combination of 8 Masters and a retrospective view of their oevres was a much appreciated approach and showed the Collection as thoughtful, long term and well-planned endeavor. The book from the show, 110 pages with all works reproduced, was also a success. The Swedish Financial Times, Dagens Industri, devoted a full page to the show and our Collection. It was a great summer for the Olsson Art Collection!
In other news…
The art world is steaming on.. In China, 40% of the buyers at the major contemporary art auctions never pay for and collect their ”finds”. Auction houses now will take only one spot painting by Damien Hirst (of reported some 1500 made, of which some 10 made early on by Hirst himself; the rest being factory fabricated) at a time – his prices are drastically coming down. Sales at his current two shows in Venice (where he himself put in £50 mill into the factory production) can not be confirmed by the involved!
The ongoing big Shows in the world; Venice Biannual, Documenta and Münster, all got bad reviews. We saw Münster and can agree – nothing new or even exciting and very badly organized. Therefore it is not surprising at all that the most publicized ”news” from the show were the two separate beheadings of the Eisenman sculpture fountain (a pretty awful one by the way!).
And we must say that we are happy to note that the Chinese “urban village,” Dafen, which once produced an estimated 60 percent of all the world’s oil paintings, still is in decline. During its heyday—when the village’s reputation as an art factory rang truer than today—it almost exclusively cranked out copies of paintings in the Western art canon. These canvases found their way into hotel rooms, show homes and furniture outlets all around the world. We can still see them but now easily hail them more as a criteria of bad taste, education and knowledge.
Sadly we note that the Freymond-Guth gallery in Zürich suddenly has closed its doors. One comment from the gallery, which we totally support and acknowledge was: ”Alienation in a climate where space and time for reflection, discussion and personal identification with form and content of contemporary art have become incompatible with the ever growing demand in constant, global participation, production and competition”.
On the happy side, we also support and acknowledge the latest move from Sotheby´s to include Latin American Art in their international auctions (they will still keep the special Latin American Auctions as well). Allan Schwartzman, the chairman of Sotheby’s global fine arts division, said in a statement that he hopes the move will “open the door” for collectors to explore “new realms of brilliant, unique, and historically important artists—some of the most important of the last 70 years. We welcome this opportunity to guide Sotheby’s clients to discover what may appear to be a new world of great art, just as major art historians and museums from MoMA to the Tate have been doing more and more.” Haven’t we said this for years?
Eventhough we don’t believe in artists painting with assistants, we could think of making an exception for Marios new assistent, see picture above!
– Greger Olsson
September, 2017
