Scope, one of the many art fairs going on in New York this weekend, runs through Sunday in a tent at Lincoln Center (10th Avenue at 62nd Street). Galleries from all over Europe, China, South America and the US converge to display emerging contemporary artists. Here are a few of my favorite pieces at the fair:

Antti Laitinen, It’s My Island at Nettie Horn. This London-based gallery has devoted their entire exhibition to the work of this Finnish performance artist and photographer. Laitinen built his own island in the Finish sea by dragging approximately 200 sand bags out into the water and piling them together to form a “landmass”. Three simultaneous videos in the booth show the process of the artist dragging the bags into the water and across the sea and eventually piling them together to form his island. A pile of the actual sandbags rests on the floor beneath the monitors. Six beautiful large-scale photographs document the result of the project, the island, in different light and weather conditions.

Beau Chamberlain acrylic paintings at Project 4 Gallery from Washington, DC. The works are jewel-like when viewed up close with a surface texture reminiscent of English marquetry furniture designs or Italian inlaid colored marble furniture.

Peter Fox paintings at Curator’s Office. Fox uses acrylic paint thickened with a gel medium. The multicolored globs of paint are then applied to a canvas in swathes which look much like handmade Italian marble paper. The texture is rich and thick and creates a three dimensional effect.

New York’s Krampf Gallery is showing a work by Bahk Seon Ghi of a series of burned wood and coal pieces hung with string to form a staircase.

Steinar Jacobsen’s Look Back in Puzzlement II at Oslo’s Galleri K. A group of eighty works, a mixture of green and black photography and painting (oil on aluminum), surround you as you enter this exhibition. The urban street scenes, snapshots taken at night, glow green around the viewer. This is a single, encompassing work and measures approximately 12.5 x 19.5 feet.

Michael Laube at Berlin’s Kuckei + Kuckei. Laube creates works comprised of three glass panels, mounted one in front of the the other with a few inches between them, each decorated with colorful acrylic paint. The horizontal piece is then wall-mounted. As a result of the layering of colors, lines and patterns the pieces seem to change when you look at them from varying angles.

Photo of Michael Laube’s work from Kuckei+Kuckei.

Often in doing research on a work of art for a client I rely on past auction records as a gauge of the market and its trends over time for a particular artist. This type of analysis allows me to advise collectors on what something should cost or what it might be worth in the marketplace. There are a variety of art price databases available on-line, and they are excellent tools for market research purposes. These databases, such as artnet.com, artprice.com, and artfact.com (The Art Sales Index), are generally inexpensive subscription services available to the public, usually for a monthly fee.

How do they work? Say, for example, you need to know what a Degas bronze sculpture sells for at auction. Perhaps you are interested in buying one, and you want to know how much they generally cost. You would enter the relevant ramifications into the database (artist, title of a specific work if you know it, medium/material, year, price range, etc.) and the database will gather all related results and sort them according to your preferences (prices high-low, low-high, etc.). You will be able to see all such results meeting your criteria for similar works by Degas sold at auction. You can then export the data or print it for future use.

How does this information help you? The price history of a certain artist or work of art will give you a general sense of how high or low the prices go for that artist and what you might expect to pay at auction for such a work. They can also show you trends in the market. For example, the auction results might indicate that a certain artist’s work got very valuable in the 1990s when there were some very high prices paid at auction while before that it seemed to sell for consistently low prices. This type of information might arm you with buying power or with market knowledge that will be key in negotiating the price for a work of art that you wish to purchase. It might also keep you from making a costly mistake by significantly overpaying for a common or low valued work of art about which you might otherwise have known nothing.

That said, there are two very important things to keep in mind in gathering data from art auction databases. First, these auction results tell only part of the picture. These are only auction results, or publicly available data from public sales, and do not account for prices of works sold through private dealers, galleries or between private parties all of which may be higher or lower than the auction prices you have found.

A second important thing to remember, as well, is that it is how you use the search results that matters. Good analysis is key and unless you know how to do that analysis the data will be useless to you. Just as when you purchase a piece of real estate, it is important to identify relevant market comparables that meet the same criteria. In real estate, for example, you might find that houses in a certain neighborhood of similar age with the same numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms are good comparables. With art, you want to look at equally comparable pieces. You want to look at works of roughly the same size (comparing the sales price of a huge painting to a very small one is not very helpful), the same age, the same style or series, the date of the auction (was it an inflated market or a down market when this sales result was earned?) and so on, in order to find good comparables. Not only are the sale prices important to look at but you should also consider the auction estimates are often, though not always, a very good indicator of market trends and price ranges.

The more you use the databases the easier it becomes to spot trends and to find good comparables. They are another useful tool in the marketplace and one which is available to all.

Now on exhibition at the Guggenheim, NY is a retrospective of the work of multidisciplinary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Cai (b. 1957, Shanghai) works in a variety of media from installation pieces using found and manufactured materials, site specific works displayed via video such as his “explosion events”, as well as paintings and drawings made with gunpowder. The piece pictured here hangs in the rotunda of the museum and is called Inopportune: Stage I and is a visual re-creation of a car bombing inspired by car bombings around the world post 9/11. The nine suspended cars build from the ground level where the car is lit with white/ yellow light and each successive car, suspended higher in the air at varying angles, erupts with colors turning brighter as they ascend into shades of purple, pink and blue. Cai’s fascination with explosives appears throughout the exhibition as he painted with gunpowder on canvas early in his career and then later created gunpowder drawings on what appear to be Chinese folding screens. He later evokes the traditional Chinese visual language of inky drawings on simple cream paper but in an explosive new media. Juxtaposed with his gunpowder drawings and paintings are videos of “explosion events” where, for example, the artist attempted to extend the Great Wall by continuing a snaking line of explosion from one end of the Great Wall to mimic the form of the wall running through the landscape or he responded to the Madrid bombings by creating a fireworks display in broad daylight in Valencia Spain using only black fireworks to replicate the Spanish train station explosions. The body of work creates both a visual language of line and form and a theoretical, conceptual response to explosions and world events.

The exhibition, entitled I Want To Believe, runs through May 28th.

Photo: David heald

How does one go about commissioning a work of art?

If the work of art will be for a personal space, such as a portrait of a particular person (including a self portrait), a pet, a specific location or home, there are some basic steps to follow.

First, select an artist whose work you have seen and enjoyed. It seems obvious but this is important. Just as you would check references and ask to see a portfolio of an interior designer before retaining her to decorate your home or office, it is a good idea to look at as many examples of an artist’s work as possible before commissioning her to paint for you so that you really know her style (and you like it), and you know her strengths and weaknesses.

Next, be very specific about what you want in advance. An artist will likely ask you about size and orientation of the work (horizontal, vertical) in quoting you a price for the project. You should agree to these basic points before work begins. In addition, chances are that you have some conception in your mind of how you want the finished product to look, and it is very helpful to the artist if you can identify that. If, for example, you envision your portrait in an outdoor setting such as a garden as opposed to a formal, interior space that is an important difference and one which you should discuss with your painter. If you are commissioning an artist to paint a specific place but you really like the loosely-rendered style of another of her works then you should say that before she begins to paint. All of this allows the artist the opportunity to create something that will better meet with your expectations, and then everyone is happy.

Third, if the artist will be working from photographs as opposed to in-person, provide a variety of images as background material. Explain what you like about the images so that you and the artist see eye-to-eye.

Finally, allow the artist creative freedom once work has begun. After all, this is a work of art and not a digital photograph that you can re-touch. Do not try to edit the work by asking the artist to repaint certain details and basically put the artist in the position of creating a paint-by-numbers.

I used to have this idea that in order to fully appreciate a museum exhibition one had to go early in the day when the show was not crowded and read every word of text on the walls in addition to studying the paintings themselves. And then came the audio tours. I spent a few years resisting the audio tours in all but those exhibitions about which I knew absolutely nothing in favor of proceeding to the works of art of my own selection upon entering a room. I became a bit annoyed with what seemed like a herd of cattle proceeding from one wall placard with a headphone symbol and a corresponding number to another, with no regard for anything else in the room. I would purposefully examine the other objects, the lesser crowds in front of them, and try to scoot back to the popular audio tour pieces when the masses moved on to the next audio tour selection.

However, in recent months I have come to really enjoy the audio tours as a way to enjoy the artwork often with a soothing background of period music or the addition of voices, accented appropriately to the content of the exhibition, to give flavor and feel to the shows. I realized that one can always turn off the audio tour and enjoy the “other” works in a room but still learn something extra that might come with the audio tour. It is an especially nice way to peruse an exhibition, especially on a solo museum visit. The more high tech these devices get, the more fun they are. Try one out the next time you go to a museum. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.