Hedge-Fund Manager Sender's
Curator Faults Art Basel (Update1)
By Linda Sandler
June 12 (Bloomberg) -- Todd Levin, hedge-fund manager Adam Sender's art curator, did most of his shopping before going to Art Basel, which previews today.
``We don't buy much at the fair,'' said Levin, who oversees the $100 million Sender Collection from New York, in a telephone interview. ``Art fairs have morphed into a `fairorama' and consumer paradise or hell that is not conducive to spending time to investigate a work.''
The Swiss fair expects 56,000 people to spend $500 million at 300 dealers including Larry Gagosian and Doris Ammann through June 17. Sender bought new works by John Baldessari, Jeff Wall, Alighiero e Boetti, Sterling Ruby, the Tobias Brothers and Andro Wekua from galleries in advance of the event, Levin said. Another hedge-fund manager said he reserved five works at the fair.
Hedge-fund managers are reshaping the art market, often working through advisers. They're also caught in a wave of buying by new billionaires from Russia and Asia.
``Some of the hedge funds are changing or driving the market,'' said Sam Keller, Art Basel's director. ``But they aren't the whole market.''
MCH Messe Schweiz AG, which owns Art Basel, named journalist Marc Spiegler director of strategy for the fair, succeeding Sam Keller, who leaves in January 2008, said Chief Executive Officer Rene Kamm. The fair also named finance and artistic directors after a trebling of staff and budgets since 2000. More
Eli Broad Says Art Basel
Overvalued, Sees Price Drop (Update2)
By Linda Sandler
June 13 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Eli Broad said contemporary art prices might drop in a similar way to the crash after 1990, when values fell by half.
Broad spoke in an interview at Art Basel, the world's biggest contemporary art fair, where he bought a Jeff Wall photograph, a street scene framed in a light box, his first major acquisition of the artist. Prices of Wall's art have doubled in the last three years, said Broad. He declined to say how much he paid.
``Prices at the fair and at auctions for contemporary art are overvalued,'' said Broad. ``I don't know how long it can keep going on.''
Broad is one of the big U.S. collectors who passed through the Swiss fair, along with Henry Kravis, co-founder of private equity investor Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., and French billionaire Francois Pinault. Broad has attended the Swiss fair for 30 years, he said in interviews before and after a press conference.
Broad, a slight, gray-haired man of 74, compared today's art market with that of 1989. Prices of top contemporary artists declined in the following years as leveraged buyers were sidelined.
``Now we've got U.S. and European hedge funds and Russian oligarchs buying art,'' Broad said. ``Some of the new buyers are genuine collectors and others are buying because it's the socially acceptable thing to do. Nothing should go up in a straight line, and we're looking at an adjustment like we had in 1989 and 1990.'' More