Recession helps New York artist

Recession helps artist
(01:42) Rough Cut (Reuters Video)

Peter Zonis Website, http://www.peterzonisny.com/

Apr 9 - A New York street painter gets the chance to exhibit his work due to recession-themed art that features coins and dollars falling from the sky in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
The recession may have given New York artist Peter Zonis just the break he needed.
For a decade, Zonis been showcasing his art on the street but recently a series of his large-scale recession-themed paintings called "Metropolis Now" has gone on exhibit in the lobby of the Durst Organization building in midtown Manhattan.
Until now, Zonis was selling his oil pastels from a sidewalk outside Barney's, an upscale department store on famed Madison Avenue. The paintings in the Durst exhibition are larger than his usual pieces.
The paintings sell for about $500 to $10,000, and well-known buyers have included former baseball star Reggie Jackson and television host Pat O'Brien.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) PETER ZONIS, ARTIST: "I just wanted to turn a negative into a positive and by doing these paintings that it would somehow give people more hope and a solution to what was happening. That this was just going to be a period of time that would pass."
"When this all started to happen rather than doing a painting like I had already done of the bull where it was located, I thought maybe from a good luck point-of-view I could reposition the bull, bring it right in front of the New York Stock Exchange and just take more risks with the painting and create - I mean it's. It's basically - what it is, is a cash give-away."

Moscow Art Fair Postponed, Russia's Rich cash strapped

Moscow Art Fair Postponed as Russia’s Rich Curb Purchases

Feb. 18 (Source Bloomberg, John Varoli) -- Art Moscow, one of Russia’s biggest contemporary-art fairs, has been postponed to September to tap a crowd headed for a larger exhibition, as falling oil prices and squeezed credit quell art purchases among the nation’s rich.
The 13th Annual Art Moscow will now be timed to coincide with the state-run Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, which starts Sept. 24, said organizer Expo Park Exhibition Projects Ltd. Art Moscow was originally planned to open May 14.
“By September, everyone will have gotten used to the new reality of the crisis,” said Vasily Bychkov, Expo Park’s general director. “Foreign galleries will be more willing to come to Art Moscow when they know it coincides with the Biennale, which attracts leading international curators and collectors.”
The New York benchmark crude-oil prices have fallen more than 40 percent the past six months, causing Russia’s economic growth to hover at near zero. Stock-market declines and the credit squeeze are also ailing the nation’s richest. According to Moscow’s Finans magazine, the number of Russian billionaires declined in the past six months from 101 to 49.
Expo Park’s decision comes a month after the Geneva-based Art Culture Studio canceled the Moscow World Fine Art Fair planned for the last week of May. Last year, it brought to Moscow about 1 billion euros ($1.26 billion) of art from 70 international galleries.
At the peak of crude-oil prices last year, Russia’s rich drove contemporary-art prices to records.

The new reality—the state of the art market in 2009 is not easy to predict

The new reality—the state of the art market in 2009 is not easy to predict

The Outlook for the 2009 Art Market is noy very good. A tremendous amount of money was lost in the Stock Market. People with Art Collections are selling with losses. Signals are reaching us from individual artist, galleries and dealers about a rapidly deteriorating Art market. The traditional fairs and exhibitions in the first month of 2009 until now have been underperforming.
From the financial point of view Art is a luxury. This could become the year of 'the shrinking Art market'.

(This article is an excerpt from The Art Newspaper, click on the link to read the whole article).
The general economy and also the art economy is clearly headed for some choppy waters…” This is what mega-dealer Larry Gagosian told his staff in a tough-talking, if ungrammatical, memo published last November in Flash Art, as the global financial meltdown continued to panic investors, the US recession was officially confirmed and unemployment figures for the country soared by 533,000 in that month alone.

In Miami, the trendy French dealer Emmanuel Perrotin has shuttered his gallery, and now will only reopen it for Art Basel Miami Beach next December. Sotheby’s is also trimming its workforce, and has announced it has abandoned guarantees for the foreseeable future. The firm, and its arch-rival Christie’s, were badly hit by the collapse in art prices during New York’s sales of impressionist, modern and contemporary art in November, which garnered only half the expected totals. Those sales were prepared before the autumn, when art prices were still riding high. Some works sold in November for half their low estimates, and up to 75% of the works in some sales were bought in.
Today a different reality prevails. The lacklustre 2008 autumn fairs, Frieze and Art Basel Miami Beach, saw dealers prepared to be flexible on prices, accepting discounts of up to 30%. But, as journalist, sociologist and lecturer (and The Art Newspaper contributor) András Szántó points out: “Just as designer brands are now being offered at huge discounts in the high street—were those shoes or handbags really worth the previous prices?—so those [pre-financial meltdown] prices should never have been so huge. Some dealers priced art so aggressively, and the prices went up with such velocity, that it is inevitable that they should fall back sharply.”
These prices rose with the greatest speed for contemporary art. But the picture of the art market, as 2009 opens, is far from simple. It is always worth remembering that the market is not a single block, but a whole series of sub-sections.