Whispering Gallery: Climate Change
By DT
The summer is off to a hot start in Hong Kong, as the mercury passed 36°C on the last day of Art Basel Hong Kong—in May. For those dealers wishing to stay cool and continue exhibiting and selling works of art, the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, held an invitation-only Zoom roundtable with a small group of heavyweight local, regional, and international galleries. During this virtual closed-door meeting, Lam fielded red-hot questions such as whether commercial galleries would be penalized for showing artists like Ai Weiwei. Although her answer was vague, in a nutshell, she said, “galleries would have to work hard to break the rules.” That sounds remarkably liberal, although presumably Ai’s middle finger will still have to remain in storage to keep the temperature so tepid.
Speaking of getting over- heated, in capital markets across the globe, industry shake-ups are sparking new endeavors. In April, fiery Sotheby’s fine art chairperson Amy Cappellazzo—famously captured in the sobering documentary The Price of Everything (2018) referring to museums as “cemeteries”— decided to blaze her own path. Almost a month later, Yuki Terase, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in Asia, followed and lit up her contract. It is widely speculated that the Japanese specialist— who devised the Mandopop- infused Jay Chou-curated sale as her swan song—will join forces with Cappellazzo to ignite private sales for Western clients eager to offload any grade of artwork to moneyed Asian clients. No matter what shape or form Cappellazzo’s next chapter will take, she has little to sweat about since Sotheby’s shelled out USD 85 million to keep the AC running at the advisory firm, Art Agency, Partners, that she co-founded.
