High Art Helped Make Paris’s Gallery Scene Hip Again

Art Market

How High Art Helped Make Paris’s Gallery Scene Hip Again

Nate Freeman

Oct 18, 2018 6:24 pm

Philippe Joppin, Jason Hwang, Romain Chenais in High Art. Courtesy of High Art.

Dealers setting up shop in Paris generally choose between two different districts. There’s Le Marais, where galleries started sprouting up after the Musée Picasso opened in 1985, and is now home to Thaddaeus Ropac, Galerie Max Hetzler, and Marian Goodman Gallery, alongside the Paris-bred establishment. Then there’s Belleville in the 20th arrondissement, where young dealers can open spaces with cheap rents.

Meanwhile, High Art, the 5-year-old gallery that graduated to the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) this year after three years at the secondary fair Paris Internationale (which it also co-founded), left Belleville a year ago, choosing instead seedy Pigalle, a stone’s throw from a dozen sex shops, late-night cabarets, and a bar called Dirty Dick.

Such environs belie the fact that in its short life, High Art has evolved from a shoestring project space to one of the most vital young galleries in Paris. Its directors—Romain Chenais, Jason Hwang, and Philippe Joppin—graduated from the scruffy Belleville set and gained a global clientele by regularly appearing in major fairs, such as Frieze London and Art Basel in Miami Beach and Hong Kong. It has a proven track record for discovering talent: The gallery gave early solo shows to artists such as 

Rachel Rose

, 

Max Hooper Schneider

, and 

Valerie Keane

, who have since had shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Line, and Dallas Contemporary, respectively. This year, Keane had a museum show at Dallas Contemporary in January 2018, when she was just 28. High Art gave Rose her first solo gallery show in 2014, and by 2015, she had a solo show at the Whitney. In 2017, Hooper Schneider had gotten a commission to install his intricate and original terrarium works on the High Line for its 7 million annual visitors.

On Tuesday, the day before the VIP preview of FIAC, High Art was abuzz with art handlers and gallery assistants as Los Angeles–based artist 

Cooper Jacoby

 installed his solo show, “Susceptibles.” His last solo show at High Art, in 2015, featured a grey and black palette of lead and aluminum. This year, he presented an immediate burst of color, courtesy of two witty and visually eye-catching sculptures installed on the wall: One was an old-fashioned alarm bell, made out of rubber, resplendent in hot orange and blue. “I was trying to go against expectations,” Jacoby said.

In the next room were mattress-like forms made by stuffing shards of aluminum into a metal cloth, with robin’s-egg blue stress balls studding the surface to make the mattress beads. As we walked through the second room, Jacoby explained that the new Pigalle space was a major factor in the gallery’s success. Its unique quality comes from the two different architectural styles at play: The first room is in an 18th-century 

Rococo

building with ornate frescos and curlicues framing the ceiling, while the second room, in the same building and connected through a small doorway, is your classic white cube.

“It’s almost like you have to make two different shows for each one,” Jacoby said.

Keane, who makes large, quicksilver-like cut-acrylic sheets that hang elegantly from the ceiling, also attributed the gallery’s strong roster to its directors’ excellent sense of space: They understand the power of installation-as-art when done right, a quality that many fear may be disappearing as galleries do more and more of their business at fairs.

“Because my work is relational to its site, its installation sometimes incorporates a lighting effect or a modification of the actual architecture,” she said. “High Art has always been open to these more elaborate constructions around my work.”

She also described them as dogged in their search for new talent.

“Philippe, Jason, and Romain were interested in my work very early on, at a time when I’d only shown in New York, in non-commercial project spaces or apartment galleries,” she said.

Interior view of High Art. Courtesy of High Art.

Pentti Monkkonen, V.S.O.P, 2017. Courtesy of High Art.

After Jacoby took me through the show, Hwang and Chenais bounded into the gallery fresh from the Grand Palais, where they had been putting the finishing touches on a FIAC booth that includes work by Jacoby alongside Hooper Schneider, 

Melanie Matranga

, and 

Aaron Garber-Maikovska

. Chenais was wearing some of the gallery’s merch, a sweater that has a giant marijuana leaf on it—“High Art” indeed. We walked to one end of the 

Baroque

 side of the gallery, which truly is a contrast to the second half of the space, the sleek, modernist white cube. One is the classic place in Paris to first see a show, the pre-war salons with art hung among living spaces, and the second is the post-war place to see a show, in a designated minimalist exhibition space. When I asked Hwang about dueling environments, he said: “It was kind of an inside joke between us, because we were interested in the two histories of art, split between modernism and rationalism. It’s the salon, and then the white cube.”

They moved into the space a year ago after searching all over the city for months. Prior to that, they had staged shows in Belleville, first with a project space called Shanaynay, which started in 2011. They originally gravitated toward the 20th arrondissement because, well, they didn’t have any money.

“It was just pragmatics, because we started the gallery with nothing,” Hwang said. “We didn’t have backers, we didn’t have anything, we just pooled money together and opened a small gallery.”

The programming switched to a more formal gallery setting in 2014, when High Art opened its first space in Belleville. (Shanaynay is still going strong under other directors.) In 2016, they decided to expand, and ultimately chose to look at other parts of the city. Hwang said that they were having conversations with other gallery owners in Belleville as they weighed the decision to leave.

“We didn’t want to be gentrifiers,” Hwang said. “When we opened the gallery with Shanaynay, the idea of a gallery being a gentrifier didn’t exist at that point. People were still being hipster gallery owners. That was a model.”

They looked to the Marais, but it felt like it was at “the tail end of the gentrification,” as Hwang put it. They found a space in Pigalle in a building where George Bizet is said to have written the 1875 opera Carmen, and decided to convert only half to a gallery—half would become the white cube, and half would be the raw remnants of Paris’s avant-garde culture in the 1800s.

“When we saw this space, it felt so natural—but it also felt really difficult,” Hwang said. “One of the ideas that we always talked about was that the space is an obstacle, physically and conceptually. In our experience, when artists have an obstacle they tend to respond better.”

A year after the new space opened, collectors arrived at the Grand Palais for FIAC on Wednesday and saw High Art in the context of the global mega-galleries who come to Paris to show there, such as Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace.

“I think we were just ready to expand our audience,” Hwang said. “FIAC was opening us up to something else. That’s how we saw it and how our artists saw it, too.”

But they have nothing but respect for Paris Internationale, which they co-founded in 2015 with Galerie Antoine Levi, Galerie Crèvecoeur, Gregor Staiger, and Galerie Sultana—and Guillaume Sultana, that gallery’s owner, said that there was no bad blood.

“They are still founders because they founded it with us,” he said in the Sultana booth at Paris Internationale, which was showing work by 

Jesse Darling

. “Some galleries want to change and grow, it’s different for each gallery.”

He added that High Art had reached a level that was beyond what the smaller, funkier fair could offer.

“They wanted to be able to show more expensive artists and more established artists,” Sultana said. “In a way, it’s kind of a normal evolution for them.”

Hwang doesn’t see Paris Internationale as a secondary fair to FIAC, but rather a fair catering to a specific clientele. Hwang also praised the nonprofit nature of the fair, which is operated on a volunteer basis by the galleries who co-founded it.

“The amount of work you have to put into Paris Internationale is intense,” Hwang said. “They’re running the entire fair.”

And as far as the gallery’s place in the storied Paris art scene, Hwang said he was simply humbled that, seven years removed from a scrappy project space, it could be spoken of among the city’s best galleries, who consider its owners as peers. Unlike some young dealers in Paris who grew up around the market due to their collector parents, the High Art founders had no financial ties to the art world, no connections that they could work, no leg up.

“We started with nothing—we don’t come from art, any of us; our parents weren’t collectors, none of us knew anybody,” he said. “When me and Romain started Shanaynay, we had to write a four-page text on a show to get artists to show at Shanaynay, because a text is how we got artists to show with us. They were like, ‘Who the hell are you guys?’”

Hwang paused for a second to look around the room, at Jacoby’s brightly colored sculptures popping against the white-washed ornate designs of the salon room.

“And now we have a conversation with Chantal Crousel every once in a while,” Hwang said. “And with Air de Paris. I geek out on it sometimes.”

Nate Freeman is Artsy’s Senior Reporter.

Documentary Perfectly Captures the Passion and Absurdity of the Art Market

Art Market

A New Documentary Perfectly Captures the Passion and Absurdity of the Art Market

Nate Freeman

Oct 15, 2018 12:52 pm

Still from The Price of Everything (2018), featuring George Condo. Courtesy of HBO.

“It’s very important for good art to be expensive,” Simon de Pury says at the beginning of The Price of Everything, the explosive documentary about the contemporary art market that airs on HBO in November.

“You only protect things that are valuable,” de Pury continues. “If something has no financial value, people don’t care.”

Such a brazen quote sets the tone for a slick feature that pulls the curtain back on the top tiers of the art market, as told by its power players. The filmmakers gained access to their inner sanctums, and let their subjects explain this kooky world themselves.

The result is a superficial but deeply entertaining romp driven by a propulsive soundtrack, which helps explain to the layperson what the contemporary art market has become in the last few years. There is no narration, no moralizing, no definitive conclusions, just director Nathaniel Kahn behind the camera asking questions. Because of the compulsive watchability of the footage and the high-gloss presentation, it very well could be a crossover hit on the level of The September Issue (2009), a film about making the September issue of Vogue, which drew in viewers with no previous interest in the fashion world.

But even for those in the industry, The Price of Everything is a worthwhile watch, as longtime market players from across the art world talk uninterrupted about the relationship between art and money. The film lets their fierce opinions coexist without any kind of forced resolution.

Still from The Price of Everything (2018). Courtesy of HBO.

The primary push-and-pull running through the film is between those who support sky-high prices for certain artists, and those who find this spiraling vile. There’s Amy Cappellazzo, the executive vice president of Sotheby’s, who is filmed as she plans for the sale of the Steven and Ann Ames collection in November 2016. At one point, she casually claims that a 

Henri Matisse

referenced in a catalogue could sell for “a couple hundo”—as in a couple hundred million dollars. There’s Stefan Edlis, the collector who purchased 

Jeff Koons

’s Rabbit (1986) for $945,000, bragging that it’s now worth $65 million. There’s Koons himself, who takes Kahn into his studio, where an army of assistants are reproducing 

Renaissance

 masterpieces for his “Gazing Ball” works. There are critics, such as Jerry Saltz and Barbara Rose, who argue that any major infusion of money into the contemporary art world is a force for evil.

The film opens with a dizzying montage of auctioneers taking increasingly high bids punctuated with the sound of smacking gavels, then whirls through Frieze New York before landing in a Sotheby’s storage room, where Cappellazzo and two staffers are putting together the catalogue for the upcoming sale. From there, it travels to the spacious Chicago apartment that Stefan Edlis shares with his wife, Gael Neeson, with its views of the Centennial Wheel, where he sits down at his computer to show Kahn some of his recent additions to a collection he says contains 200 works by 40 artists. The camera lingers on the screen for a moment, giving eagle-eyed viewers a chance to glimpse the acquisition statements that the world’s richest collectors rarely share. The spreadsheet indicates whether the work was currently installed at the home in Chicago, or at their home in Aspen.

At the time of the interview, according to the spreadsheet on the screen, Edlis had purchased 13 works in 2016 for a total of $16.2 million. Among those were 

Glenn Brown

’s Star Dust (2009) for $7.5 million from Gagosian, and Untitled (Cowboy) (2011–13), the 

Richard Prince

 sculpture that was installed as the only work in the gallery when it was shown at Barbara Gladstone in 2015, and which cost Edlis $3.5 million. He also purchased the 

Luc Tuymans

 painting Corso IV (2015) from David Zwirner for $1.6 million, and Koons’s Gazing Ball (Courbet Sleep) (2015) for $2.5 million from Gagosian.

In the film, the collector spends a giddy moment in his Chicago apartment admiring the Koons, with its purple gazing ball set in front of a precise replica of 

Gustave Courbet

’s Le Sommeil.

“I have a Courbet!” Edlis exclaims. “A knockoff doesn’t get you a lot of credit as an art collector because anybody can do that, but put a gazing ball on it and presto!”

Still from The Price of Everything (2018), featuring Amy Cappellazzo. Courtesy of HBO.

Art historian Alexander Nemerov is not as big of a fan of Koons. At one point in the documentary, he’s taken up to the Sutton Place rooftop of collectors Lisa and Richard Perry. There, the Perrys have installed their Koons work Diamond (Green) (1994–2005), purchased from Gagosian at Art Basel in Miami Beach in 2005 for $2.3 million. Nemerov stares angrily at the sculpture, the giant depiction of a precious jewel, and compares himself to the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, aiming to defeat the Koonsian demon.

“I’m like Jason and this is one of the beasts, this sort of momentous mythical creature that I’ve been called upon to slay,” Nemerov says.

Similarly, another skirmish occurs after Kahn interviews 

Gerhard Richter

 at Marian Goodman Gallery, where the German artist with an estimated net worth of $40 million has an opening. Kahn had already discussed Richter’s prices with Cappellazzo, who was preparing to sell a series of his works from the Ames collection, including A.B., Still (1986), which sold for $34 million when it was auctioned in November 2016.

“Richter’s just got it, everybody knows this is greatness,” she says, later comparing him to 

Mark Rothko

. “Gerhard Richter is probably the greatest living European artist.”

But Richter himself is troubled by these prices, which put most of his works well out of reach of museums (consider that even a well-endowed museum such as the Museum of Modern Art has an annual acquisitions budget of around $50 million). Few museums would or could spend their entire acquisition budgets on one of his $30 million canvases, so much of his work gets purchased by wealthy oligarchs who, more often than not, stuff them away, out of view of the public, forever.

Still from The Price of Everything (2018), featuring Larry Poons. Courtesy of HBO.

“I prefer to see it in a museum, not in a private collection,” Richter tells Kahn, in his slow, soft-spoken English.

Even Richter’s new works that are sold on the primary market are too expensive, in his opinion. Pointing at a particular work on the wall at Marian Goodman, Richter says that the price is too high.

“It’s not good when this is the value of a house, it’s not fair,” Richter says. “I like it, but it’s not a house.”

Kahn then tells Cappellazzo about Richter’s sentiment, and she says, “Museums? Ugh! I mean, museums are great, we love them, but they’re also…I mean, if they have too many, they’ll never come upstairs and see the light of day. So then it’s like a cemetery—why do you want your things in a cemetery? They’re buried underground somewhere. So, museums, for him—that’s just a very socialist democratic way, like, of avoiding having to deal with, like, rich people who want them.”

The documentary does not explicitly take sides with Richter or Cappellazzo, de Pury or Saltz, Koons or Nemerov. Perhaps the only person close to a sympathetic figure is 

Larry Poons

, an artist once shown by dealer Leo Castelli, and a former friend of 

Jasper Johns

 and 

Robert Rauschenberg

, who now makes art in upstate New York, wholly detached from the marketplace.

“[People] think I’m dead,” Poons says to Kahn, without a hint of malice.

As the film ends, it turns out that Dennis Yares, the director of New York’s Yares Art, wants to give Poons a show. This becomes the one clear storyline a viewer can unequivocally root for. It’s also when the context from which the title comes proves helpful in understanding the film: It’s a line from the 1892 Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere’s Fan. Lord Darlington is asked to define a cynic; he says a cynic is “a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”

Nate Freeman is Artsy’s Senior Reporter.