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June 14, 2023

Good morning.  Big-ticket sales on Art Basel’s opening day. Picasso-centric presentations abound at the fair David Castillo Gallery, Miami fair mainstay, makes its Swiss debut. As always, please visit ARTnews.com for the latest news. On the Ground Since Monday, when the first sections of Art Basel opened to VIP invitees, the international art world has been trying to make sense of the news, first reported by Bloomberg, that real estate investment firm Colony Investment Management, headed up by French entrepreneur Nadra Moussalem, has taken a 60 percent stake in Perrotin gallery. Emmanuel Perrotin commented to Bloomberg, and to the Art Newspaper , when the news broke, saying that the investment will help him expand, whether that means opening more branches of his gallery, or even possibly acquiring other galleries. “We need to boost our activities throughout the world and conquer new geographies,” he told Bloomberg. Since then, however, Perrotin has apparently been keeping things pretty close to the vest; on Tuesday, FT art reporter Melanie Gerlis put up an Instagram post of the dealer cheekily wearing on his suit jacket a sticker bearing a smiley face emoji and the words “Sorry No Comment.”   Last night, at a gallery dinner, I sat next to a dealer who remembers Perrotin from when he was operating his first gallery space, a shoebox in Paris, when he was in his early 20s. Perrotin has since expanded considerably. He was almost singlehandedly responsible for the meteoric art market rise of KAWS, whose work he showed from 2008 to 2019. (Not to mention the super-stardom of artists like Takashi Murakami and Maurizio Cattelan.) Over the past 20 years, Perrotin has seen his talent depart for other megas. KAWS now shows with Skarstedt. Murakami is with Gagosian. Cattelan went to Marian Goodman. The list goes on. But Perrotin is a kind of stealth mega-gallery, one who has never quite figured in the pantheon of the megas (Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Zwirner, Pace), perhaps because he has not shied away from what some people refer to as the “Hypebeast artists,” ones like KAWS and Daniel Arsham whose work appeals to an audience far wider than the art world, and also, perhaps, because he has always been willing to have a bit of fun playing along with his artists’ hijinks (he once dressed up as a giant bunny/penis, at the behest of Cattelan).  Perrotin is not to-the-manor-born, telling the Art Newspaper in an interview in 2011, “I didn’t have family money behind me,” a quality that distinguishes him from three of the four megas. Gagosian, who started out selling posters in Los Angeles, will always be the king of the self-starters, but Gagosian had something of a societal advantage: In the United States, and especially on the West Coast, with its gold rush history, making money is not frowned upon. Even the art world, which has historically pretended to frown upon making money, is not immune to the glories of American-style capitalism. It was New York in the 1980s, one long celebration of money, that provided the headwinds for Gagosian; the late art critic Peter Schjeldahl famously observed of Gagosian during that era that “selling paintings, [he] may be in …vertical real estate, flat condos, prestige addresses for the eye.” Perrotin, by contrast, started out in Paris in the recession-plagued 1990s; in that same 2011 interview, he said, “When you have money from the beginning, you can hide your commercial success, you don’t need to talk about turnover, which is preferred in France. They are very skeptical of success here.” Colony IM wants to talk about success in terms of dollar signs; and no one in the art world even bothers to pretend to shy away from that these days. And those “Hypebeast artists” not only sell, they represent the wider audiences the art world has to go after if it wants to expand. Perrotin may well finally be in the catbird seat.   —Sarah Douglas, Editor-in-Chief