Seven Days in the Art World (29 page)

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In 2007, Pinault was ranked thirty-fourth in
Forbes
’s list of world billionaires. He has many luxury goods holdings, including the brands Gucci, Yves St. Laurent, Sergio Rossi, Balenciaga, and Château Latour.

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Agnes Martin died shortly after this sale. Since then, Cecily Brown, Yayoi Kusama, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Cindy Sherman, and Lisa Yuskavage have joined the ranks of living women artists whose work has broken the million-dollar mark at auction. One might think that the art world was at the vanguard of gender equality, but the disparities in price in an auction room are quite extreme. Although one finds many powerful women dealers and curators, the bulk of the big-spending collectors are male—a fact that no doubt contributes to the complex dynamic of undervaluation that befalls women’s artwork.

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Jasper Johns’s
False Start
, which sold for $17.7 million at Sotheby’s in 1988, held the record for the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist at auction on and off for nineteen years, until Damien Hirst’s
Lullaby Spring
sold for $22.7 million in june 2007. The Hirst work was knocked off the top spot when Jeff Koons’s
Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)
sold for $23.6 million in november 2007, and the Koons was cast aside when Lucian Freud’s
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping
sold for $33.6 million in May 2008. The buyers of these recent record-priced works were later revealed to be, respectively, the Sheikha Al Mayassa, Victor Pinchuk, and Roman Abramovich—three billionaires for whom these sums would seem to be small change.

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Hirst told me in a 2005 interview that he intended to “quit spots,” but guesstimates have since increased to twelve hundred.

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In May 2005, Richard Prince’s
A Nurse Involved
sold for $1,024,000. Prince’s prices have climbed steadily. In June 2008, a different “nurse painting” (
Overseas Nurse
) sold for $8.5 million.

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For example, artist Dave Muller told me, “I prefer the expression
stink eye,
which is when someone always picks the wrong thing. I am skeptical of the tastemaker stance. It is fortune-telling, trying to recognize what will be significant before it is.”

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“Outsider art,” also called “naive art,” usually refers to the art made by inmates of insane asylums, mentally disabled people, or self-taught artists who have had little or no contact with art institutions.

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Frieze
is an international art magazine that began publication in 1991 and comes out eight times a year. Since 2003, its owners, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, have also run the Frieze Art Fair.

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I later learned that François Pinault had edged out several museums to buy all seven paintings in a deal brokered by Philippe Ségalot.

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The fact that rich countries like Saudi Arabia have not hosted pavilions makes it clear that having a developed art scene is not just about wealth.

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The pavilion contained two works. The Art Gallery of Ontario bought one, Jouannou the other.

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Francesco Bonami, an Italian-born American citizen, is a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and artistic director of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.