Gareth Harris

 

Tony Salamé, the Lebanese founder of the Aïshti fashion chain, hopes to put Lebanon on the contemporary art map with a new museum due to open in Jal el Dib, a coastal site in Beirut, in October. The Aïshti Foundation building, designed by the British architect David Adjaye, is costing $100m. The opening show will be organised by Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the New Museum in New York. The building will form part of a commercial centre with a sculpture terrace on the waterfront, to be overseen by Cecilia Alemani, director of High Line Art in New York.

Salamé began buying art in 2003, initially acquiring Arte Povera works by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Penone and Michelangelo Pistoletto. His 2,000-strong collection now includes pieces by artists such as Christopher Wool, Gerhard Richter, Franz West, Richard Prince, Wade Guyton, Danh Vō and Carol Bove.

“We faced many delays due to the instabilities in the regions, but now we’re almost done,” says Salamé, adding that “the art gallery spaces measure around 3,000 sq metres”.

.A controversy over a painting by the 19th-century artist Ivan Aivazovsky made waves during Russian Art Week in London. The striking 1870 work, “Evening in Cairo”, was withdrawn from an auction at Sotheby’s on Tuesday. The Russian Interior Ministry spokeswoman Yelena Alexeyeva told the Interfax news agency that Russian Interpol tried to block the sale of the piece, which was allegedly stolen in 1997.

The consignor (or seller) later requested the painting, estimated at £1.5m-£2m, be removed from the sale roster. Sotheby’s catalogue states that the work came from the collection of NI Dedov, as referenced in a 1950 State Tretyakov Gallery catalogue (Russian media reported that it was purchased in the 1940s by the Nosenko family).

A Sotheby’s spokesman stressed that the painting is not mentioned in the database of stolen cultural objects distributed by the Russian Ministry of Culture, or in the database of The Art Loss Register. “As part of our due diligence, Sotheby’s contacted Moscow police, who confirmed in November last year that they have no information that the painting in [our] sale is the allegedly stolen painting,” he said. The Russian Embassy in London declined to comment.

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The major auction houses continue to ride the soaring contemporary art wave but some collectors are bypassing traditional selling routes. These include the Geneva-based collector and interior designer Bibi Gritti, who has consigned 72 works to Paddle8, the New York-based online auction house, for a single-owner sale (the auction runs to June 15). Works on offer include Oscar Murillo’s 2013 work “Untitled (La Era de la Sinceridad)” (est $20,000-$30,000) and “Enhanced Techniques White” (2010) by Jenny Holzer (est $200,000-$250,000). The presale total estimate is $1.8m-$2.5m.

Gritti, who began collecting 15 years ago, says: “Sometimes, auction houses pick and choose what they want but this sale selection reflects the breadth of my collection.”

The New York-based jewellery designer Christophe de Menil brought her collection to the Paddle8 block last year. A spokeswoman for the company says collectors opt to consign works “because of the very short timelines — an auction can go live less than a month after the sale is confirmed — and the fact that works ship only once they’re sold, which cuts down substantially on fees and logistics”. Paddle8 charges a flat vendor’s commission of 8 per cent, which is automatically deducted from the hammer price.

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The long-running saga over the sale of sacred objects at auction in France made by the Hopi tribe, a group of Native Americans based in Arizona, rumbles on. In April, Herman Honanie, chairman of the Hopi Tribal Council, launched legal action against the Conseil des ventes (CVV), a regulatory body that oversees French auctions, after it approved a sale of Hopi items at Drouot salesroom, Paris, in December last year.

The 275-lot sale, organised by Eve auction house, which included at least 50 Hopi artefacts, totalled €952,000. Earlier this week, the same auctioneer held another sale in Paris, which saw six Hopi kwaa tsi (sacred figures) go under the hammer. Honanie, backed by the Washington DC-based group the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, asked the CVV to halt the auction. The CVV, under president Catherine Chadelat, had examined all aspects of the sales in question for evidence of any illegalities, said a spokeswoman. “To date, there have not been any,” she added. Eve auctioneer Alain Leroy said: “The Hopis have stated in their own newspaper, the Tutuveni, that selling Indian religious objects is not illegal in France or the US.”

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In his new book, Cosmopolitan Canvases: the Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art, the Dutch academic Olav Velthuis claims that the global dimension of the art market has been exaggerated. Writing in The Art Newspaper, he points out that “it is assumed that contemporary art is now traded in a globally integrated flat market, where distance no longer matters . . . fairs, such as the Venice Biennale and the opening of prestigious museum shows, function as the village square where people keep running into each other”.

Velthuis’s main argument is that our obsession with the top end of the market is misleading. Emerging art markets may have adopted western blueprints for cross-border flows of contemporary art, such as white cube spaces and Basel-style art fairs, but the volume traded remains limited.

The statistics presented are an eye-opener: while art exports have increased 500 per cent in the past 25 years, the US and UK account for two-thirds of this business. Academics Christophe Spaenjers and Luc Renneboog have also calculated that 80 per cent of works by US and British artists auctioned between 1957 and 2007 were sold domestically, while two-thirds of participating galleries at Art Basel 2014 came from only four countries: the US, UK, Germany and Switzerland.

Photographs: Adjaye Associates; Oscar Murillo/Paddle8