Critic’s Pick:
My own experience with collecting will most likely be forever limited to dusty binders full of trading cards, and those free posters that artists like Jeremy Deller leave around their shows. But the mechanics and machinations that go into the long-term care for an artwork is a fascinating world, fraught with acid-free archival paper, acerbic egos, and things that just happen to go missing. For two weeks at Hauser & Wirth, a minimal library of sorts puts the collecting activities of Giovanna and Giuseppe Panza on display, including sketches, photographs, correspondence with artists like Hanne Darboven, plans for James Turrell’s interminable crater project, which they helped fund, and the ‘performative’ installation of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing. Giuseppe Panza, an Italian wine distributor with a taste for American art, was at times a controversial figure (Donald Judd accused him in the ’80s of making unauthorised works from sketches), but his efforts went on to form major parts of the MOCA and Guggenheim collections, and others. This reading room and accompanying events might shed a little light on what the unknown factor of time does to the equation of art + money.
- Chris Fite-Wassilak
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