Price and value may diverge in art market

Since the documentary “The Price of Everything” was acquired at Sundance in January — many months before its HBO run, which begins Nov. 12 — there’s been reason for raised eyebrows about the price of art. If he were making the movie now, said director Nathaniel Kahn after a recent showing at the Kabuki, he would have ended it with an image of the Banksy artwork that shredded itself a few weeks ago.

Larger issues of our time were alluded to by Kahn in remarks he made at a dinner, sponsored by Cartier, at the Presidio Terrace home of Tracy Leeds and Evan Marwell following the showing. His aim, he said, was “to make something that communicates something about art and these dangerous times. We are in a crisis of values today. Art, in the end, lasts. The market goes up and down ... but in the end, the eyes of Rembrandt are on you.”

In “these dangerous times” is a general assessment of the cultural moment. But the doc is specific, moving from the apartment of collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson (who gave $400 million worth of art to the Chicago Art Institute); to the studio of Larry Poons, a largely forgotten artist preparing for his first exhibition in years; to Gerhard Richter ruefully comparing the price of a painting with the cost of a house, to the studio of Njideka Akunyili Crosby ,a Nigeria-born artist worried about the effect of a $900,000 sale on the arc of her career; and to the Sotheby’s auction where crisp auctioneers dispassionately find buyers for works by Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons as if they presiding over the trading in of Mercedes-Benzes for Teslas.

There is art-loving defense for the current state of the market: “The only way to make sure that cultural artifacts survive is to give them high values.” But we have come, said Kahn, to confuse “price and value. They’re not the same thing.” Much of the film reflects that push and pull between saving and selling, the “uneasy embrace between art and money,” said Kahn, as auction houses complete with museums for collections.

Producers Jennifer Stockman and Debi Wisch conceived the project while hiking in Aspen, Colo. Stockman for 15 years was president of the board of the Guggenheim Museum. Wisch’s background is in marketing. They were joined by seasoned doc producer Carla Solomon.

But perhaps you’ve never been in the market for a Koons, and although you treasure your museum memberships and the art on your walls, you’ve never raised a paddle at Sotheby’s. What can you learn from this documentary?

Advice from Edlis, examining images of two Richters that are about to be auctioned: “Red is better than brown. And don’t buy anything with fish.”

Drake, who was performing a series of concerts at Oracle Arena, and a party of seven dined at Waterbar on Sunday, Oct. 28.

The Berkeley Police Department reported in its Cases of Community Interest email, received by Jessica Abbe, that “A man was standing on the corner of San Pablo Avenue and Dwight Way when a vehicle drove up and the two occupants tried to take his recycling.”

The East Bay tutoring and writing program Chapter 510 & the Department of Make Believe threw itself a benefit on Saturday, Oct. 27, attended by Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and “Sorry to Bother You” director Boots Riley, who was part of a panel discussion. When Aissaade Negus, 13, asked Riley “What do you think your 13-year-old self would think of your movie?” Riley answered, “I think my 13-year-old self made the movie.”

At the San Francisco Art Institute, the Postcommodity art collective (composed of the school’s technology chair Cristóbal Martínez and Kade Twist) is planning a fall 2019 art installation called “The Point of Final Collapse.” This exhibition project will be at the Fort Mason campus.

The installation focuses Postcommodity’s “aesthetic lens on the sinking Millennium Tower,” says the announcement, which uses such unsimple language that I’m stymied by the challenge of paraphrasing. The project will be “responding to systems of justice and capital that are forming new conceptual and legal frameworks of accountability with national and global socio-economic implications. Postcommodity’s competition will model the cognitive dissonance of San Francisco’s socio-economic systems by using engineering and legal data tied to the sinking Millennium Tower as the engine for driving the installation’s therapeutic and sacred sounds.”

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “Well, I just have to say it’s pretty damn dope that in our lifetime we’re likely to be the generation who experiences the apocalypse.” Young man on cell phone, overheard at Washington and Franklin streets by Tosha Silver