In an interview with Elephant in 2016, Kerry James Marshall described the challenges he has faced as a black person making art, mentioning “the kind of conversation that circulates among black people all the time: How do you get from the margins to the centre?” His paintings are remarkable portraits of African-American lives, his subjects’ skin coloured in pointedly jet black. His has been a fairly quiet ascent to the centre, but the announcement of the record-breaking sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night of the painting Past Times for $21.1 million has shattered any semblance of calm. It quadruples his past sales record, and it has been suggested that it is the most ever paid for a work by a living black American artist. The inevitable speculation around the identity of the buyer is now over, after Marshall’s gallerist Jack Shainman announced that the buyer was Sean Combs, better known as P Diddy or Puff Daddy, the American rapper, singer, songwriter, actor, record producer and entrepreneur.
In more New York news, the writer Tom Wolfe died in Manhattan on Monday, aged eighty-eight. Wolfe’s name has long been synonymous with the city, where he lived since 1962, and which he wrote about frequently in his uniquely subjective style. “The New Journalism” was a term applied by Wolfe to his new and unconventional way of writing, and a 1973 anthology of the same name brought together pieces by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Gay Talese and others. The art world (and its absurdities) were woven into his distinctive worldview, and he took the industry on directly in The Painted Word (1975), in which he gave short shrift to critics and those who read their work. His final novel, Back to Blood, featured a section on Art Basel Miami Beach.
A near-unbelievable art-world tale worthy of Wolfe’s wry voice is the reported loss of an entire finger from the Bernini sculpture of St. Bibiana, damaged in transit from Galleria Borghese back to its home in the St. Bibiana church in Rome. The missing digit was only noticed by an art professor, who described it as “a wound to the Baroque era”. The finger was apparently reattached last week by conservators.
Meanwhile, in the UK a new fund for Artangel, the London-based organization who for the last thirty years has pioneered the exhibition of artworks in unconventional locations, has just been established with gifts from artists including Jeremy Deller, Rachel Whiteread and Taryn Simon. Named Artists for Artangel, the fund will see works by thirty-seven artists sold at a silent auction on 28 June, the proceeds of which will go towards future Artangel projects.
