Presecan's Soul Touch

What can we say about this? One of this ten artists in Artinfo's slide show : " Donald Sultan  (1951-present) The large-scale still-life painter made his New York debut at  Artists Space  in 1977. Just 10 years later, he found himself mounting simultaneous exhibitions at the  Brooklyn Museum , the  Museum of Modern Art , and  Blum Helman Gallery . Back then, his works sold at auction for six figures (his record is $440,000 for a painting on masonite in 1990). Today, similar paintings might fetch as little as $50,000 at auction."...

Wine | acrylic on newspapers | 120 x 100 | 1995

The founder of what many consider to be one of the leading experimental galleries in Manhattan, Sawon describes the current situation as "completely puppeteered from the top" and says it has "tremendous consequences for everyone else." As for the effects of all the investment-grade cash permeating the art world, she is disarmingly direct about what many in the industry are too timid—or conflicted—to say: "It kills radicality for artists, dealers, and everyone else. I think the word collecting doesn't even apply to that kind of activity. It's about buying to sell, really, it's gambling, and has nothing to do with any of the issues that are central to the creation and appreciation of art in our time."....... .....Take the October auction of Gerhard Richter's Abstract Painting (809–4) . A work widely thought to be—like most of the German painter's abstractions—inferior to his far more influential photo-based paintings, it fet...