June 1 – July 13, 2024

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Breakfast With ARTnews, our daily newsletter about the art world. Sign up here to receive it every weekday.

While the VIP preview Thursday of Tokyo Gendai’s second edition brought healthy buzz—along with major collectors like Takeo Obayashi, Shunji and Asako Oketa, Yoshiko Mori, Jenny Wang and Simian Wang—the atmosphere on Friday was more subdued. ARTnews took the opportunity to ask galleries how their sales had been so far.

Two brand-name galleries with Tokyo branches saw robust sales. By the middle of day two, mega-gallery Pace Gallery, a newcomer to the fair that did a soft opening for its new Tokyo space this week, either sold or had on strong reserve all eight works they were showing by Robert Longo, at prices ranging from $90,000 to $750,000. (All the works were going to local collections.) Meanwhile, Los Angeles’s BLUM, which has spaces in New York and Tokyo, sold a Ha Chong-Hyun painting for $250,000, a work on paper by Yoshitomo Nara for $180,000, a Kenjiro Okazaki painting for $160,000, and ceramics by Kazunori Hamana and Yuji Ueda for $20,000 each, among other pieces.

Tokyo’s ShugoArts sold two Lee Kit works, priced in the range of $30,000. Another Tokyo gallery, Anomaly, had sold out almost all of their works by Yusuke Asai, though the gallery declined to give prices.

BLUM founder Tim Blum told ARTNews that the fair seemed more or less the same as last year, but Taku Sato, director of Tokyo gallery Parcel, another returnee to the fair, had a less positive impression. “Compared to last year, as my expectations were not that high, I think so far [the second edition] is good,” Sato said. “However, I do feel there were more people from abroad last year than this year, and more institutional curators last year.” Parcel is showing large works by Tomonari Hashimoto. So far, numerous smaller pieces by Hashimoto have sold, ranging from $3,000 to $5,000, some going into notable private collections in Japan.

The Bangkok Art Biennale has announced its lineup of the 45 local and international artists set to participate in its fourth edition, scheduled to open on October 25.

The artists hail from 28 countries and according to organizers, approximately 25 percent of the works featured will have never been exhibited before.

The artists include Algerian-French installation artist Adel Abdessemed, Italian ceramicist and visual artist Chiara Camoni, Singaporean time-based media artist Priyageetha Dia, French-American multi-media artist Camille Henrot, South Korean sculpture designer Choi Jeong Hwa, Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh, Japanese multidisciplinary artist Aki Inomata, Scandinavian sculptural artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Hong Kong-based conceptual artist Isaac Chong Wai, and New Zealand video artist Lisa Reihana. Also included will be works by French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, German artist Joseph Beuys and Guerreiro do Divino Amor, who represented Switzerland at the most recent Venice Biennale.

The theme of the 4th edition is “Nurture Gaia”, showcasing artworks exploring femininity and ecology and the event will take place across nine venues across Thailand’s capital city. The theme was announced last October.

This year’s venues include local museums, galleries, a shopping mall as well as three ancient heritage sites: Temple of Dawn (Wat Arun), Temple of the Reclining Buddha (Wat Pho), and Temple of Iron Fences (Wat Prayoon).

Some 51,200 years ago on the ceiling of a limestone cave in the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi, art history was made. A wild pig was painted with crude red pigment, standing at peace beside three human-like figures.

This newly discovered artwork is now heralded as the oldest known cave painting, surpassing the previous record-holder by some 10,000 years, per a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The method is a significant improvement over other methods and should revolutionize rock art dating worldwide,” Maxime Aubert, archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia and one of the lead authors of the study, told Reuters. 

According to the study, the scene in the Leang Karampuang cave in the Maros-Pangkep region of South Sulawesi province features a pig measuring 36 inches by 15 inches. The pig depicted standing upright by the group of people. Several smaller images of pigs were also found in the cave, and were similarly dated using a laser to assess a crystal called calcium carbonate that develops organically on the pigment. Barring any future discoveries, the paintings represent the earliest example of narrative storytelling in visual art. 

“The three human-like figures and the pig figure were clearly not depicted in isolation in separate parts of the rock art panel,” Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm, a fellow study leader, said in a statement. The relationship between the humanoids and the pig, however, is still unknown. 

Real estate mogul and arts patron Jorge Pérez slammed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, calling the politician’s recent slashing of arts and culture grants from the state budget “a horrible message to send” to the people of Florida.

As the chairman and chief executive of the Related Group, Pérez has built a real estate empire in Miami and donated hundreds of millions to arts organizations in the city, including $80 million to a contemporary art museum that bears his name.

“A lot of the people who are coming from New York are involved in the arts, participate in the arts,” Pérez, who has appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list, said in an interview with Bloomberg about the budget cuts. “We want to be a serious city, and serious means that we have great education and we have great exposure to culture.”

Last summer, Miami Beach sold $97.6 million of municipal debt to help fund theaters, concert venues, and museums, in push to cleanse the city of it’s “Spring Break or Bust” reputation.

Earlier this month, DeSantis vetoed more than $32 million in arts and culture grants from the 2025 state budget, which led both politicians and supporters of the arts to warn that the move could disadvantage institutions across Florida state.

Charges were dropped on Wednesday against 80 protestors who were arrested during a pro-Palestine demonstration at the Art Institute of Chicago in May.

During that protest, a group of students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago called on the university to “divest from all entities and individuals financially supporting the Zionist occupation of Palestine.”

The school had reportedly asked the protestors to move an encampment they had set up, but they did not do so. A museum spokesperson said that some protestors “surrounded and shoved a security officer and stole their keys to the museum, blocked emergency exits and barricaded gates.”

The museum called the police, and sixty-eight arrests on counts of trespassing followed. The institution previously said that the protestors were “given many opportunities to leave.” Shortly afterward, the museum requested that the charges be dropped.

According to ABC’s Chicago affiliate, the Illinois Attorney’s Office ultimately decided to drop the charges because the protests were peaceful, echoing the terminology used by the museum itself to describe the how it negotiated with demonstrators. The report included a quote from a police admiral who disputed this, accusing the protestors of vandalism and “assault,” and alleging that “several police officers were physically attacked.”

People still struggling to wrap their heads around NFTs, generative AI art, and other new forms of expression might just give up at the idea of collecting experiences as art. The mere mention of the concept elicits questioning, like the title of the panel discussion, “Can you collect experiences?” hosted by VIV Arts, a new sales platform supporting artists and collectors in the experiential art sector, which was held at Christie’s London on Wednesday evening.

At Christie’s, VIV Arts co-founders Carlota Dochao Naveira and Oliva Sartogo, were joined by Ana Ofak, a co-founder of “hybrid” art collective Transmoderna, and Nassia Inglessis, founder of Studio INI, which couples design and scientific research with public engagement through immersive installations. The all-female panel, sadly lacking artist and stage designer Es Devlin due to unfortunate logistics, was all smiles as Nicole Ching, specialist advisor of 20th/21st century art at Christie’s, introduced them.

“If one is able to collect experiences, I can’t imagine anyone discussing this hefty topic better than these women,” she told the 90 or so people in attendance.

Prior to the event, Naveira told ARTnews that experiential art has “existed since the advent of installation art, ‘artist environments,’ ‘happenings’—a term coined by Allan Kaprow in the late ’50s—and time-based performance.” (Naveira and Sartogo were part of the founding team of Miami experiential art center Superblue).

Before the speakers dissected the topic at hand, the room was quickly profiled via a quiz entered by scanning a QR code on a flyer to reveal each audience member’s “artistic persona.” Answering a series of multiple-choice questions led to one of four personality outcomes: “aesthetic enthusiast”; “modern maverick”; social collector”; or “experiences explorer.” When the results came in, a show of hands indicated most people were the latter. Things were off to a good start.

“We launched VIV Arts this year with a mission to support artists creating experiences, and what we mean by experiences is essentially putting audiences at the center of artistic experiences.” Naveira said. “Having them become active participants of the experience instead of being passive viewers of arts.”

Is being a “passive viewer of art” becoming passé or even unacceptable? Naveira would probably argue so, and not just in the field of art. In an email she sent ARTnews prior to the event, she wrote that numerous reports have pointed to the “growing importance of experiences in many luxury and consumer industries.” (A survey released Tuesday by Dotdash Meredith and market research firm Ipsos, for example, found that luxury consumers, particularly Gen Z, value “experience over product.”)

Naveira gave the floor to Ofak. She explained that Transmoderna, which she co-founded with DJ Steffen “Dixon” Berkhahn in 2018, is both an artistic collective based in Berlin and also a small studio comprised of a team of artists, “developers from the computational realm,” engineers, and sonographers. They “explore the possibilities that arise from merging electronic music with computational arts.”

“Transmoderna is moving away from our home in the digital realm into a hybrid of sound imaging and media setup,” Ofak said. “We have tried, uncommonly, to intervene in the scene of clubbing and dance music. When we started, we wanted to break with DJing and introduce something more involved in internet and digital art, meaning introducing VR and AR into dance experiences.”

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THE HEADLINES

EARLIEST NARRATIVE PAINTING. New evidence backs findings that the earliest known cave paintings were not made in Europe, and reveals they were older than first thought. Thanks to new dating technology, researchers have determined that a newly discovered artwork in the Indonesian Leang Karampuang cave on the island of Sulawesi is now the world’s oldest-known cave art, reports Reuters. The dark red depiction of a large pig and three small, human-like figures was created a minimum of 51,200 years ago, according to researchers using new laser dating technology, which analyzes calcium carbonate crystals on top of the painting. This makes the image the oldest evidence of narrative storytelling in art. “There is something happening between these figures. A story is being told,” said Griffith University archeologist Adam Brumm, one of the study leaders who published their findings in the journal Nature. Another cave painting in Sulawesi was re-dated using the new technology to be at least 48,000 years old, all of which predate the earliest, undisputed European cave paintings. “This discovery of very old cave art in Indonesia drives home the point that Europe was not the birthplace of cave art, as had long been assumed,” said Brumm.

VIRGIN MARY VANDALISM. A new, wooden statue depicting Mary giving birth to Jesus, conceived by Esther Strauss and carved by Theresa Limberger, was beheaded with a saw on July 1, in Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral, not long after it was installed. Police have begun an investigation and are looking into an apparent letter of confession posted on the platform Telegram, signed “Catholic Resistance,” reports the dpa and the German Press Agency. The controversial statue was intended to encourage discussion, as part of a project about female roles and gender equality, according to the National Catholic Reporter. The vandalized art piece showing a Mary in labor, her full belly and spread legs exposed, will remain on display until mid-July, though it will now be kept in the dark and placed behind a glass door. “You shouldn’t see the image of the destroyed sculpture,” a spokesperson told dpa, adding no photos were published of the beheaded statue. “This violence is an expression of the fact that there are still people who question women’s rights to their own bodies. We must take a firm stand against this, said the Vienna-based Strauss in a statement.

THE DIGEST

No sooner had Tokyo Gendai thrown open the doors to the VIP preview of its second edition on Thursday than ARTnews Top 200 Collector Takeo Obayashi could be seen admiring a striking Robert Longo drawing of a tiger at the booth of Pace Gallery, and collecting couple Shunji and Asako Oketa were wandering through the booth of Blum. They weren’t the only machers on hand. Also making the rounds were the likes of Yoshiko Mori, chairperson of the Mori Art Museum; Jenny Wang, head of the Fosun Foundation; Simian Wang, founder of the Simian Foundation; and many others. The fair, in other words, opened on a high note. The extent to which that will translate into sales is best measured in ARTnews’s report tomorrow, as the fair continues through Sunday. In the meantime, here is a roundup of some particularly compelling booths.

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Breakfast With ARTnews, our daily newsletter about the art world. Sign up here to receive it every weekday.

The flight to Japan from art world centers like New York, London, and Paris isn’t exactly short. Those that do make the trip this year, however, won’t be disappointed with the art offerings, which span modern to contemporary. This week, during the Tokyo Gendai fair, the shows to see in the city are dominated by strong sculpture.

First up on the itinerary: the Artizon Museum’s exhibition of Constantin Brancusi, the first proper survey of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work in Japan.

Brancusi’s The Kiss has it all: it’s cute, it’s romantic, it’s profoundly Instagrammable. Made at the turn of the twentieth century, it also happens to mark the starting line of modern sculpture: from The Kiss’s economy of means, the rest was a sprint, from Picasso to Moore to Giacometti all the way up through Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread. So it’s no surprise that the Kiss is situated front and center at the Artizon show.

The exhibition neatly charts Brancusi’s wiggling free of Rodin’s influence and taking flight: the show culminates in a section dedicated to the form of the bird, represented by the rightly famous Bird in Space, an elegant skyward swipe of bronze. There are also photographs, and a section dedicated to recreating Brancusi’s Montparnasse studio. Purists will gripe about the large number of posthumous casts but, for a lay audience, the show serves as a decent dose of beauty and a fine introduction to a titan of modern sculpture.

The names of late Korean artists Lee Jung-seob and Park Soo-keun have been dragged into a scandal after several of their paintings exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) were branded as fakes.

The show – titled “Korean Treasures from the Chester and Cameron Chang Collection” – ran for four months and ended on Sunday. Suspicion about the authenticity of some of the artworks, including two paintings apiece by Lee and Park, was apparently rife from the onset. Ceramics from the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) were also exhibited.

Last week, LACMA held an official appraisal session at the museum, where four Korean art experts examined the suspected forgeries, South Korean national daily newspaper JoongAng reported Tuesday. They were Hong Sun-pyo, professor emeritus from Ewha University; Lee Dong-kook, director of the Gyeonggi Province Museum; Kim Sun-hee, former director of the Busan Museum of Art; and Tae Hyun-seon, curator at the Leeum Museum of Art.

The experts concluded that Lee’s A Bull and a Child and Crawling Children, and Park’s Waikiki and Three Women and Chile are counterfeits. The experts criticized LACMA’s due diligence process and also said the museum lacked an understanding of Korean art.

In a statement to ARTnews, the museum said, “LACMA has confidence in the scientific findings that our research has produced to date, and we are committed to continuing to conduct additional research on works in the Chester and Cameron Chang Collection. Further contextualization of these works and their art historical significance will appear in future LACMA publications, both online and in print. As is longstanding practice, the works in LACMA’s permanent collection are continuously studied as new discoveries are made and research progresses.”

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