Emigrant Bank Sues Dealer Asher Edelman Over Loan
03.15.10
Asher Edelman has been sued by Emigrant Bank for more than $3.1 million after allegedly defaulting on some loans, including one to buy a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, reports Jonathan Stempel for Reuters. Edelman said in an interview that he plans to repay amounts owed “very shortly.” The case is an unusual twist for the seventy-year-old Edelman, who had been a leading figure in the leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s, before turning his focus to the art world.
According to papers filed Tuesday with the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Emigrant had tolerated Edelman’s “long history of late payments, missed payments, other defaults and collateral sales” in a relationship dating to 2006, before finally issuing a default notice on July 1, 2009.
The bank agreed to give Edelman more time to make good on his obligations, but he failed to do so, the papers allege. Hope Tate, a senior banker for Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance LLC, said in an affidavit that Edelman obtained two loans and a credit line from Emigrant. She said the funds included a $2 million loan for his purchase of Giacometti's Torse de Femme.
Edelman now runs Edelman Arts, a gallery specializing in modern art, on Manhattan's Upper East Side. “Since the year end, the bank and I have been negotiating an extension of a credit that I've had for about the last three or four years,” Edelman said in the interview. “We had negotiations up until Monday and it was only yesterday that I learned from them that they wanted full payment of the loan. They will have full payment of the loan very shortly.”
A lawyer for Emigrant was not immediately available for comment.
Liverpool Profited From Year as Capital of Culture, Says Report
03.15.10
A five-year research program published last week that analyzed Liverpool’s year as “European capital of culture” found that the festival year saw 9.7 million visitors to the city, an increase of 34 percent, and generated $1,135,000 for the economy, reports Helen Carter for The Guardian. Media coverage of Liverpool’s cultural attractions doubled and for the first time in decades. The report found that 85 percent of Liverpool residents agreed that it was a better place to live than before.
Dr. Beatriz Garcia, director of the research program, titled “Impacts 08,” said: “We found that general opinion of Liverpool was informed by very dated images of the city, which ranged from positive but fixed associations with the Beatles in the 1960s to more negative views of social deprivation in the 1980s.” She said it presented a richer picture of the city as a modern, multi-faceted place with a vibrant cultural life that reaches far beyond music and football.
The study, by Liverpool University academics, found the local population initially had increasingly mixed views in the lead-up to the capital of culture year, which persisted until the end of 2007. “Their concerns related in particular to the possibility that the expected positive change might not spread beyond the city center and that it might not impact on their neighborhoods or on ‘ordinary people’,” said Garcia. But these trends were reversed during 2008 itself, showing a more optimistic view appearing by late 2008, when the latest survey took place.
Problems for Prospect Biennial
03.13.10
Prospect, the New Orleans biennial that began in 2008, has become entangled in fund-raising and administrative problems that are jeopardizing its future, Randy Kennedy reports for the New York Times. The event, which installed the work of more than eighty artists at sites throughout New Orleans, ended up badly overbudget after the bills came due in 2008, owing more than one million dollars more than it had raised.
Late last month, its founding director, Dan Cameron, announced that the next iteration of the event, Prospect.2, would be postponed until the fall of 2011 from this November because of fund-raising shortfalls. The Times-Picayune of New Orleans’s Doug MacCash has since reported that several directors who joined the biennial’s board in 2009 to help shore up the finances and raise money for Prospect.2 stepped down in February because of differences with Cameron over how the project should be managed. Two people with knowledge of the board resignations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, confirmed the basic account of the problems to the New York Times. The Times-Picayune reported that the biennial’s executive director, Barbara Motley, a theater owner who was hired last year to oversee the administrative side of the event so that Cameron could focus on selecting artists and helping them to realize their works, had also resigned. Motley told the newspaper that she believed in “organizational charts and management protocols,” while Cameron was “much more organic in his approach to management.”
Earlier this month, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans announced that it would not renew Cameron’s contract as its part-time visual-arts director. The center’s director said it needed someone to work full-time to oversee its art exhibitions.
Brooklyn Museum Appoints Deputy Director for Development
03.12.10
Paul Johnson has been appointed deputy director for development at the Brooklyn Museum following an intensive search. Johnson will assume his new position, which will report to museum director Arnold L. Lehman, in mid-April.
Johnson headed up the development and membership program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, then served as senior vice president for business development and director of Sotheby’s Los Angeles. He has also served as deputy director for external affairs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and director of development at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Most recently, Johnson has worked with the Getty Foundation and Research Institute as a consultant on fund-raising for the enormously complex 2011 project “Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945–1980,” a collaboration of more than forty visual and performing arts institutions throughout Southern California.
Philadelphia Museum of Art Files Suit Against AXA Art Insurance
03.11.10
According to Courthouse News, the Philadelphia Museum of Art says AXA Art Insurance refused to honor a $1.5 million claim for two paintings that an art dealer effectively stole or lost. The museum consigned the art to the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in Manhattan in 2006. The Manhattan District Attorney charged the Upper East Side art dealer with one hundred counts of fraud a year ago, estimating damages at more than $90 million.
The Philadelphia Museum says it consigned The Harbor by Maurice Prendergast and Mountain Landscape by Arthur B. Davies to the Salander Gallery.
“Salander’s entire course of conduct during 2007 with respect to the paintings was a continuation of its effort to cover up the fact that, in violation of the agreement, it had sold the Prendergast for $1.5 million and taken the proceeds for its own use,” according to the complaint.
The museum does not state what became of the Davies, only that it did not turn up during an inventory.
AXA, a New York company, issued a $100 million policy to the museum but has not told the museum anything about its investigation of the paintings’ whereabouts or the status of the insurance claim, the museum says.
Canadian Governor General’s Award Winners Announced
03.11.10
The winners of the Canadian 2010 governor general’s visual- and media-arts awards have been announced, reports the Associated Press. Recipients include Robert Davidson, a key figure in the renaissance of Haida art; Toronto-based Rita Letendre, who has worked in Israel and Europe; and Tom Sherman, who teaches video art at Syracuse University and has represented Canada at the Venice Biennale.
Other recipients include filmmaker Andre Forcier, photographer Gabor Szilasi, and painter Claude Tousignant, all from Quebec, as well as Toronto-based artist Terry Ryan for his leadership in encouraging Inuit art. Manitoba-based glass sculptor Ione Thorkelsson won the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in fine crafts.
Governor General Michaelle Jean will present the awards March 31 during a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa. Winners will receive a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize and a work created by Tony Urquhart, winner of a 2009 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
New Firm to Help Leibovitz Restructure Debt
03.11.10
Colony Capital agreed to take over the debt of Annie Leibovitz after the celebrity photographer bought back control of her works and real estate from Art Capital Group, according to Bloomberg.
Colony, the private-equity firm owned by billionaire Thomas J. Barrack, will help market her photos under the agreement, according to a Financial Times article today that was confirmed by Lisa Baker, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles–based Colony. New York–based Art Capital, in a separate statement, said its loan to Leibovitz has been satisfied, without providing details.
Leibovitz, who photographed John Lennon hours before his death and captured Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk, in September renegotiated a twenty-four-million-dollar loan to gain control of her photographs, as well as her three brownstones in Manhattan’s West Village and a 228-acre property in Rhinebeck, New York. In return, the lender dropped its lawsuit against her.
Her financial troubles stem in part from properties she purchased and their ensuing renovations. From 1999 to 2008, Leibovitz borrowed and refinanced more than a dozen loans, using her real estate assets as collateral, documents filed with New York City’s Finance Department show.
In 2007 and 2008, Leibovitz was late in paying $1.8 million in federal taxes, according to liens filed with the Finance Department.
British Artist Fined for Art “Mocking” Turkish Prime Minister
03.11.10
A British artist whose collage was found to have mocked Turkey’s prime minister has been fined by a court in Istanbul. Michael Dickinson walked smiling from the Kadikoy district court, a free man but not completely off the hook, according to the BBC.
The judge ruled that the British artist had crossed the line with his cartoon, superimposing the head of Tayyip Erdogan on the body of a dog, and found him guilty of insulting Erdogan’s “dignity and honor.” The judge sentenced him to 425 days in prison, the first time anyone has been jailed for criticizing the prime minister. But the sentence was immediately commuted to a fine of about forty-eight hundred dollars.
When a defiant Dickinson insisted he would not pay, the judge explained that, provided he made no new cartoons of the prime minister over the next five years, the fine would be put aside.
“Of course I’m relieved,” he told the BBC outside the court. “I didn’t know what to expect. But I still don’t think I should have been guilty, and I’m not saying I’m not going to make any more cartoons of politicians.”