NEUBERGER MUSEUM’S NEW CHIEF CURATOR; AUCTION HOUSE ROUNDUP
Helaine Posner, contemporary art curator and coauthor of the award-winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, has been named chief curator and deputy director of curatorial affairs of the Neuberger Museum of Art. Most recently, Posner was an independent and adjunct curator at the American Federation of Arts in New York. She assumes her new position today. In 1999, she was a commissioner of the US pavilion at the forty-eighth Venice Biennale, where she and museum director Katy Kline presented a major site-specific installation by the sculptor Ann Hamilton. Some of Posner’s other independent projects include “Kiki Smith: Telling Tales,” a multimedia exhibition of the artist’s work curated for the International Center of Photography in New York. Her major exhibition for AFA was the first midcareer survey of Lorna Simpson’s elegant and provocative photographic works and video installations. This exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Miami Art Museum; and the Whitney Museum in New York. “We could not be more pleased to welcome Helaine Posner, a distinguished scholar and respected curator, to the museum,” Collins said. “Her exceptional background makes her the perfect choice to further the Neuberger tradition of presenting invigorating presentations of and insights about the best of contemporary and modern art.”
In other news, Carol Vogel sums up the recent downturn at auction houses, reporting in the New York Times that Sotheby’s revealed it had lost $28.2 million from guarantees at its contemporary art auctions last week. That brought its total losses to about $52 million this fall, all from guarantees. Vogel writes that executives at Christie’s, which is a private company and therefore not obligated to release its finances, also admitted to having lost millions of dollars. Edward Dolman, Christie’s chief executive, said his company would, for the most part, give guarantees only in “exceptional circumstances” and it would not be rebating any of the buyer’s fees back to the seller. “We’re going to be a more traditional business,” Dolman said and quoted the adage about relying instead on “the three D’s: death, divorce, and debt.”
