As Coronavirus Upends the Art World, Kenny Schachter Hits the Fairs (and Shares a Convo With His Frenemy Inigo Philbrick)

We seem to be in the midst of some
otherworldly, Kafkaesque, biblically scaled reassessment of modern
life. Every day is now Sunday with new stay-at-home workplace
policies, people are under a mix of self-imposed and
government-imposed no-travel regimes  and there is less public
congregating—we are becoming as allergic to each other as we are to
pollen. Even his holiness has now become the first Digi-Pope—if you
want to see the Prince of the Apostles, the Supreme Pontiff speak
live, you need to tune in and drop out… on your iPhone. (The
Vatican, like all of Italy, is under lockdown.) If I ventured to
write a sci-fi novel like this, you’d collectively roll your
eyes.

Nowhere is unaffected. I went to the shrink and she
declared a new policy necessitating that patients wash their hands
before entering her dank, tiny, overheated office with no air
circulation. Breathing in each other’s vaporous breath with squeaky
clean hands will certainly go far to ward off any incipient viral
infections. Instead of the knockdown Richard Prince “Nurse”
painting I was just offered for $5 million, I rather need a
full-time, live-in nurse.

On a certain level I am relishing the
timeout from my brutal travel schedule—my Blum & Poe show in Tokyo
has been indefinitely postponed, thanks for asking—because it’s a
nice, if forced, slowdown and palate cleanser, affording more room
for family and contemplation. Not to appear insensitive to those
suffering or, worse, who have prematurely lost their lives. God
knows what’s next.

There are musings that the mother of them all, Art Basel, will
be bumped from June, for instance (not to mention Art Brussels and
Cologne being on the chopping block in April). I’m beginning to
melt into my office chair… and relishing it. Considering the
prospect of the big Basel being postponed, Blum & Poe, with 35
full-time employees, was worried about the cash-flow blow if June
ceases to be its reliable sales bonanza and “we all become like
hibernating bears” waiting for the fall. It hasn’t happened yet,
but I wouldn’t be all that surprised. Nowadays, literally anything
and everything goes. Or doesn’t.

Fewer fairs is probably a good
thing—it’s not like you’re missing much when the best works are
pre-sold long before you get past the turnstiles on “VIP” mornings;
it’s like going to a restaurant where they read a long list of
specials and finish with, “Oh, and by the way, none of them are
available.” As to this year’s Armory—an event for the art-world
intrepid, symbolically situated next to the USS Intrepid, which
participated in several campaigns in the Pacific Theatre of
Operations—Lisa Spellman of 303 (herself as plucky as the warship)
said all went swimmingly.

Spellman said of the Armory, in her
own texted words: “Was super good vibes, I was shocked and the
sales were good! Is it the last dance? Who knows. And then a cruise
ship pulled up ha! The Norwegian Gem, there were paparazzi waiting
as people disembarked, but I didn’t see anyone wearing masks.
That’s all, the fair was really good and super upbeat.” Inside the
pier, where I took the bar exam in 1987 (and passed the first time,
you may know), there were many masked crusaders, seemingly as much
for fashion as for health precautions—like the couple with matching
graphic printed masks that they wore hanging below their faces.
Ugh. And the guy with a gas mask color-coordinated to match his
clothes. I can’t decide what’s worse, that or the idiots who stroll
the aisles clad in sunglasses? (I am waging a one-man crusade
against that latter offense these days.)

Besides corona paranoia, talk of Inigo
Philbrick was thick in the fair’s air, as in the case of the dealer
Michael Rosenfeld, who related to me that after recently buying
(and paying for) a Ken Price sculpture from a Phillips private
treaty sale, was informed they didn’t have title to convey the
piece—the telltale hallmark of an Inigo deal—and refunded his
money.

Donald Marron’s estate sales certainly
aren’t suffering from the universal fear-mongering—art is the new
gold, after all. Lisa Reuben, whose family was on record as one of
the many owners of Rudolf Stingel’s portrait of Picasso that
brought down Inigo’s house of Stingels after it sold at Christie’s
in May (swiftly becoming the subject of litigation), just purchased
Marron’s Gerhard Richter for $12 million; meanwhile, one of
Marron’s Twomblys went for $31 million to Ken Griffin—not to be
confused with kgriff38, one of Philbrick’s many Instagram aliases
as he continues to communicate with me via DMs. Funny, I can barely
sell a painting once, and he seemed to sell the same work four or
five times. But letting go is hard to do; you can run and hide, but
not when you are addicted to Insta!

Speaking of Inigo’s inability to stop
messaging me, I happen to have an inability to keep anything to
myself. Here below are a few screengrabs of my (yes, 100 percent
real) dialogues with my infamous ex-friend via one of his fake
accounts, where he suggests, among other things, that the onset of
coronavirus and the crash of the markets may mean he has
effectuated the perfect crime(s). Let’s see.

The post As Coronavirus Upends the Art World, Kenny
Schachter Hits the Fairs (and Shares a Convo With His Frenemy Inigo
Philbrick) appeared first on artnet News.