Batman Cover Goes for $2.4 M., Walter De Maria Sites Get Upgrades, and More: Morning Links for June 17, 2022

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The Headlines

CALENDAR CONFIRMATION. The new New York fair from Independent, which will focus on 20th-century art, was just announced in May, but it already has an exhibitor list, and it is 31 galleries strong, Maximilíano Durón reports in ARTnews. Independent 20th Century, as the venture is called, will land at the Battery Maritime Building at the southern tip of Manhattan in early September as the Armory Show runs in Midtown. The galleries taking part include Corbett vs. Dempsey of Chicago, Garth Greenan of New York, and Parker Gallery of Los Angeles. About half of them will be doing an Independent fair for the first time. For more on the event, head to ARTnews.

MARKET MOVEMENT. It not just at Art Basel where artworks are selling for substantial sums, defying the downturn in the equities markets: On Thursday, Heritage Auctions sold the cover art of the first issue of the vaunted miniseries Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) for a cool $2.4 million, the New York Times reports. Created by Frank Miller , it is the latest in a number of comic piece to sell for seven figures in recent years, as the paper details. Meanwhile, the market for female Old Masters has been heating up in recent years, the Financial Times reports. “I think everyone, museums and private collectors alike, took a step back and thought about their collections and realized how important it was to make sure they had a diverse collection,” Calvine Harvey, of Sotheby’s, told the paper.

The Digest

Federal charges have been filed against a 71-year-old man for allegedly illegally excavating Native American artifacts near Tightwad, Missouri, over the course of five years, causing extensive damage. The man’s lawyers have not commented. [The Washington Post]

Good news for Walter De Maria fans: Two of his key installations in Manhattan, The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), are closing for temporary renovations that will allow them to stay open all year round. (They currently shutter for the summer.) [The Art Newspaper]

The Swiss watch giant Audemars Piguet has commissioned artist Andreas Angelidakis to create an artwork that will alight at the Espace Niemeyer in Paris for 19 days in October, coinciding with the inaugural edition of Art Basel’s Paris fair. [ARTnews]

Artist Lydia Wood is at work on a project to make a drawing of every single pub in London, which number some 3,500. She has done “a few hundred” so far. Wood took up the project during the pandemic. “It did kind of stem from just being, you know, a pub person,” she said. [AFP/France 24]

Damien Hirst—boy king of the Young British Artists, indefatigable provocateur, prolific creator and collector—has been at it for more than 30 years now. Here are five of his most controversial works, from his dead shark to his diamond skull. [ARTnews]

The Kicker

A NEW BREW. Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic, is notorious for his unusual coffee habit. For the uninitiated: It involves buying many cups of deli coffee each night, pouring them into 7-Eleven Big Gulp cups the next day, and sweetening the elixir with Stevia. But a change is afoot, he revealed on Twitter. “I am going to teach myself to make coffee,” Saltz wrote. “Explain this as if I were nine.” Some of his 543,000 followers have been kind enough to provide counsel. If you have advice, chime in! [@jerrysaltz/Twitter]