🍎🐍 Art As A Consequence #20
🌐 The best in art, crypto and sometimes luxury. Meet you in the email body.
Welcome to the twentieth edition of the ART AS A CONSEQUENCE weekly briefing. Let’s catch up on a messy but also inspiring couple of days that saw legend Barbara Gladstone go to heavens, Harry Potter making $$$ waves, and a messy crypto space. All of that and more below. So, grab a snack 🍎 and happy scrolling.
Lol (lots of love),
Dimitria
Notable news from the art world 🦋✨
🍎 An end of an era, Barbara Gladstone passed away at the age of 89. An incredible force and innovator in the art space. Gladstone was an art history professor at Hofstra University when she decided to quit and open a gallery space in Midtown. In a 2018 W magazine interview she said: “The art business curiously has had a lot of women in it, because it was considered harmless (…) You could still be a good wife and mother. It wasn’t dangerous, because you weren’t going to make any money anyway.” the brutal truth, I guess.
On her passing, Jerry Saltz commented:
“Gallerist in extreme. A friend, tremendous business woman, a force behind the scenes, whose gallery was always changing but grew and grew without going “mega,” into one of the greatest galleries in the world.
🍎 If you are in Athens in the next months, head to Hydra for George Condo’s show, “The Mad and the Lonely” at Dakis’ DESTE Slaughter House (it’s 90 mins away from Athens by ferry and show open until the end of October). There are beautiful mini paintings and sculpture, and the instagram stories at the opening looked phenomenal and I must add that the entire art world elite went there post Basel (see humble Jeff Koons sitting on the street of Hydra in his galazio shirt with Jeffrey Deitch on the right side).
🍎 London auction week summary: Sotheby’s contemporary art evening sale in London faced challenging conditions, including the sluggish UK economy and a cooling art market. Despite this, the auction achieved a total over $100M, short of $20M of the high estimate. Works from the late Chicago collector Ralph I. Goldenberg added significant value, with a Cy Twombly piece notably doubling its estimate.
Sotheby’s vice chairman, Simon Shaw, described the result as “solid” but acknowledged the difficulty in curating the auction due to a lack of sellers. Despite some market softness, Sotheby’s specialists expressed confidence in London’s continued prominence in the art world.
🍎 The original watercolour illustration for the first edition of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" was auctioned in New York by Sotheby's. Estimated between $400-600M the lot fetched a whopping $1.9M. It was first auctioned in 2001, before the book series was complete, for £85,750 (about $108,000 at current exchange rates). A great example of memorabilia raising in value.
Created by Thomas Taylor, then a 23-year-old artist, at the time of the book’s release in 1997, neither J.K. Rowling nor Taylor were well-known, and the book had a limited first print run of 500 copies.
🚀 Rise and Shine: the crypto space
🍎 On June 25, CryptoPunks #627 was sold for ETH 250 ($846K). Currently the floor for Punks are at slightly over ETH 28.
🍎 Chromie Squiggle mathematical discrepancy. Following Sotheby’s “Grails: Property from an Iconic Digital Art Collection Part V” auction sale it was revealed (to the masses at least) that the "full spectrum" squiggles (the ones that were valued between $400-600K each during the bull run) were total 43 from the 10k collection. However, mathematician and generative art expert Yamamoto revealed that, according to the precise mathematical definition, there are only 35 true "full spectrum" squiggles. This discrepancy has sparked a debate in the community, as the creator, Snowfro (Erick Calderon), acknowledged the error but chose not to update the metadata to reflect the corrected values. This has led to a significant devaluation, exemplified by the recent sale of a "full spectrum" Chromie Squiggle #3830 for just $58k. Wondering what would the potential implications for the valuation of other traits in this 10k NFT series will be….
🍎 The once secret album by Wu-Tang Clan's "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin" is now available as a $1 NFT - with a conceptual twist I may add. The album was originally sold in 2015 to Martin Shkreli for $2M under a contract prohibiting public release for 88 years, has now been democratized by PleasrDAO, a digital art collective that bought it from the U.S. government for $4 M in 2021, is making the album available as a $1 NFT, reducing the wait for its full public release by 88 seconds for each dollar received. The album’s distribution involves collaborations with various blockchain and e-commerce platforms, ensuring accessibility even without cryptocurrency. So, basically they need 180,657 sales in order to realease the album by 31st of December. Ain’t bad.
🍎 After two years, Mark Cuban is back selling his NFTs. His markcuban.eth wallet sold 14 NFTs for $38,533, with the highest sale the Pudgy Penguin #6239 at around $30,578.
🍎 Lastly, for my frens that use exchanges to store their crypto - that’s a red flag. Lykke exchange was hacked in the first weeks of June that resulted in the theft of $22M in digital assets. Ouch. Get a hard wallet.
🍒 Bonus: Sunday Watch
Noam Chomsky and the principles of concentration of wealth & power
REQUIEM FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM is the definitive discourse with Noam Chomsky. Filmed over four years, Chomsky unpacks the principles that have brought us to the crossroads of historically unprecedented inequality - tracing a half-century of policies designed to favour the most wealthy at the expense of the majority - while also looking back on his own life of activism and political participation.
That’s all frens! 👋 toodeloo
See you next Sunday - if there is a next Sunday.
Visit artasaconsequence.net to discover more about my work in the art industry. You can contact me over email or find me on social media: Instagram | X | LinkedIn
