Surprise, surprise: Richter’s prices keep going up. His Abstract Painting (809-4) set a new living artist record at London Christie’s on Friday, where it sold for $34.2 million. You can imagine our astonishment when we learned this morning that Sotheby’s will be jacking its ask for another squeegee painting. Kelly Crow of The Wall Street Journal broke the news:
SCOOP! @sothebys NY to offer a 1990 Gerhard Richter abstract for $16m+ after getting record $34.2m for Eric Clapton’s 1994 Richter last wk
— Kelly Crow (@KellyCrowWSJ) October 16, 2012
BREAKING: @sothebys asking $16m+ for this 1990 Gerhard Richter abstract on Nov. 13 in NY; a ’94 version just got $34.2m twitter.com/KellyCrowWSJ/s… — Kelly Crow (@KellyCrowWSJ) October 16, 2012
Blake Gopnik complained that Richter’s squeegees are too polite:
The wrong Gerhard Richter painting broke the living-artist auction record, selling for $34.3m thebea.st/RPvnHU — The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 16, 2012
And ARTinfo’s Julia Halperin, a voice of reason:
Can’t get worked up about another Richter heading to auction. Collectors capitalizing on crazy prices; sky is blue; some people have money. — Julia Halperin (@Juliahalperin) October 16, 2012
Unrelated: mere hours after Liz Gannes reports that Upworthy received $4 million to find non-cat-related viral videos, Vice tweets this one of surfing dogs.
Nothing will be better for you than watching this video of surfing dogs. trib.al/kyaZhM #TheCuteShow
— VICE (@VICE) October 16, 2012
{ 6 comments }
the movie just went up on netflix. coincidence?
I saw the giant Richter show in Berlin and was so confused. The paintings looked like art school experimentation with poor technique, little specificity. I actually thought, oh no this guy is color blind and its too late to face it. Am I taking crazy pills or are there folks who feel the same way?
I hate those squeegee paintings, and I’m sure art history will soon forget them. He’s made so much other good work though, that anything that he touches becomes expensive.
ok good, I feel better already 🙂 Ema nude on staircase was powerful. still I think his application makes his works look way better in digital form.
Are you joking? I saw some of these at the art institute in chicago—wait wait wait, poor technique? Richter?
Usually when I go to a show of an artist whose work I have seen pictured in books or on the computer, I am blown away by the many dimensions that emerge when seeing it in person. But Richter’s was the opposite His work seemed to embrace a flatness, maintaining a distance of some kind of a viewing that was lost in translation. Conceptually I get it. But the execution does not seem to embrace the medium’s potential, rather it feels like an exercise (especially the squeegee ones) . When Alex Katz plays with flatness he manipulates color to still come alive, vibrating and filling the space between the viewer and the canvas, establishing a new sense of space. Richter just seemed to sit there, with all colors in a piece tightly hugging lackluster grey or fresh from the tube over-saturated messes. But hey, to each their own. Believe me, you are in the majority.
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