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- Christie’s sold $162.7 million in postwar and contemporary art across three auctions yesterday, barely meeting expectations.
- Spain’s parliament has threatened to fire the director of the Reina Sofia museum if the institution doesn’t straighten out its fragmented inventory and the question of missing artworks.
- A Buddhist temple in Japan that housed the “eternal flame,” believed to have been lit for over 1,200 years, has burned down.
THE HEADLINES
LESS THAN GREAT EXPECTATIONS. Christie’s New York brought in $162.7 million for a trio of postwar and contemporary art auctions yesterday evening, led by a $35.1 million Gerhard Richter Kerze (Candle) painting from the late Marian Goodman estate. Yet these results, an improvement from last year, “barely meet expectations,” and “tepid” sales regularly closed on lower estimates, writes ARTnews’ Brian Boucher. Wednesday’s auction, with nearly a week left in the May auction season, was expected to bring between $129 million and $191 million from 42 lots. The hammer total before the house’s fees came to $133.6 million. Dealer Marian Goodman’s collection was also estimated to bring in about $65 million, and it fetched $66 million without fees. With the house’s fees, the sale totaled $78.8 million. But experts interviewed for Boucher’s story struck a positive note: “There wasn’t much speculative capital in the room tonight. A sign of a healthy, rational art market,” said New York dealer Evan Beard.
CLEAN UP OR CLEAR OUT. The Spanish parliament has formally taken Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum to task over the mismanagement of its collections and, surprisingly, threatened to oust its director, Manuel Segade, if it doesn’t shape up, reports the Journal des Arts. Lawmakers, led by right-leaning politicians, adopted a resolution ordering the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía to complete a “total and absolute” audit of its collections, including updating its inventory and monetary value, by December 31, 2026, or else. Gaps in the museum’s tracking of artworks, such as a reportedly lost donation in 2021, have been a known problem for some time, but they predate Segade’s term, which began in 2023. Indeed, the museum doesn’t deny it needs a thorough clean-up. A representative told Le Journal des Arts the Reina Sofía “is engaged in a process of internal regularization concerning the inventory, the valuation of its holdings, the monitoring of artworks, and the security of the collection.” This is also being done with a new computerized tracking program called Artis. The museum nevertheless argued that “the main anomalies detected correspond to periods prior to the creation of the current museum” in 1990. In 1988, the collections of the former Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (MEAC) were combined with the new museum, leading to a tangle of inconsistencies, they explained. It’s just taken years for alarms to go off.
THE DIGEST
Reikado Hall, Japan’s Buddhist temple that houses an “eternal flame,” which spiritual leaders say has been continuously lit for over 1,200 years, burned down yesterday. [The New York Times]
The Trump administration says it doesn’t need congressional approval to build its 250-foot triumphal arch on Washington, D.C.’s Memorial Circle, because another, never-built project was already granted a century ago. [The Washington Post]
Chanel is partnering with the Centre Pompidou for five years and will support the Paris museum’s current $535 million renovation. [press release]
The artist JR talks about his monumental trompe-l’œil installation that is transforming the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris into a mountainous landscape, in homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who wrapped the same bridge in 1985. [Le Figaro]
California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) President Ravi S. Rajan was booed during his commencement speech at a graduation ceremony where students held signs protesting staff layoffs at the art school, which is facing a multi-million-dollar budget deficit. [Hyperallergic]
THE KICKER
NOT ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL. Brooklyn artist Dustin Yellin is better known for his glass sculptures and Pioneer Works, the nonprofit art space he opened in Red Hook in 2012. But now he’s showing his first film, Goodnight Lamby, a short, animated love letter to his four-year-old daughter Zia, produced by Darren Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup, which just premiered at Cannes. It stars his daughter and Yellin’s friend, the actor Paul Rudd, who plays the father. For Cultured Magazine, the two discuss a project made with the help of AI tools that takes readers on an adventure through one of Yellin’s sculptures. “I don’t have a lot of walls between ideas that come into being,” Yellin tells Rudd, who asked about venturing into film from the visual arts. “Whether I’m working on a sculpture where I’m painting on layers of glass, or on a canvas, or I’m building stuff out of rocks, or in this case, with animation, I always feel like it’s about how ideas are born.”
