Forget the largely dour results of the pulverized sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s major auctions this week and last (they will eventually rebound perhaps more quickly than we suspect), the contemporary art auction season has been dealt a more mortal blow. Gone is the promise of watching a stallion-like Stephanie Seymour stride up the center aisle of Christie’s saleroom in some seductive getup to find her seat beside hubby Peter Brant, publisher of Art in America and Interview, polo and interview extraordinaire, and infamous Gagosian comrade. Just as the opening of the Brant Foundation Art Study Center is providing a peek at some of the 1,000 artworks that Brant has collected over the years, the 14-year marriage between Seymour and Brant (whose duo involvement with Interview as of late has been a bit disconcerting) is dissolving into Page Six reports detailing their bitter divorce and putting a final nail in the coffin of a decadent art collecting era. There are lots of questions here beyond whether Seymour is drugging and boozing and whether Brant’s ownership of a Maurizio Cattelan sculpture of Seymour (see above) that looks like it belongs in a hunting lodge qualifies as exhibiting “hostile, threatening and intimidating behavior.” The implications for contemporary art (at least some 1,000 works) is just beginning.
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