He wasn’t able to share concrete dates for the move, and couldn’t drop any hints as to what ambitious restaurateur would be opening a new spot in the Breuer Building’s basement, once home to Ignacio Mattos’s Flora Bar. I told Stewart that I noticed Mario Carbone had commented on the Instagram post when Stewart announced the ADQ investment. “HUGE!!!!! Congrats my brother,” Carbone wrote.
“Let’s talk. We’re not there yet,” Stewart said, throwing cold water on True Colors’ visions of a brutalist steakhouse with the toughest reservation on the Upper East Side. “The building has a long history of successful restaurants and associations. We will do our own take on it, but it will definitely be worthy of the building.”
In the last few weeks Sotheby’s has been rolling out the star consignments of the fall auction season, all of which should inspire confidence among the skeptics. There’s the Monet from the collection of Palm Beach eyelash titan Sydell Miller, reportedly estimated to sell for around $60 million. There’s a Ferrari that Michael Schumacher rode to Formula 1 victory, which could go for over $15 million. There’s a bunch of rare watches from the collection of Tom Brady—who also happens to be on the cover of the second edition of Sotheby’s Magazine, launched this summer by former Wall Street Journal editor Kristina O’Neill.
When asked about the role of the magazine in the whole Sotheby’s ecosystem, Stewart noted some similarities between the “personal journeys” of Brady and the subject of the inaugural cover, the artist Titus Kaphar, and called Brady “a very noteworthy and committed collector of things,” while adding that O’Neill has complete editorial control over mag content.
But the November consignment that’s getting the most attention is Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian. Yes, the banana taped to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 is back, and it is about to become one very expensive piece of produce. The original frenzy over Comedian came about when the general populace heard about art collectors paying $120,000 for the first two editions and then $150,000 for the third. Get ready for the reaction when this thing sells for between $1 million and $1.5 million, which is the estimate that’s backed by a guarantee.
Stewart mused on this as we left the conference room and started to move toward the entrance, where a car would shuttle him to the next appointment. It’s a conceptual artwork about the absurdity of conceptual art, the contradictions of comedy, the history of fruit production toppling governments—and there’s a guy in charge of making enough money off of it to keep a company thriving.
“There’s something about it that gets at the nature of what we do—trying to pin down what is its value,” Stewart said. “But frankly, you could say that about a Monet on canvas. You can say it about a Ferrari. You can say it about a lot of things. I mean, why is the value this and not this? And nothing puts that in a sharper relief than the banana. It’s such a simple gesture. To be so subversive and to capture everyone’s imagination is astonishing. So I love that about the thing, and I hope it’s bought by a museum because it’s probably going to boost their attendance by 20% a year.”
But the real question is, will the New York Post put Comedian on the cover once again after it sells for millions?
“We can only hope,” Stewart said. “We can only hope.”
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…When the Met Costume Institute director Andrew Bolton saw that he was getting a call from Hannah Young, His Majesty King Charles’s consul general to New York, he assumed it was one of the infrequent favors that the royal’s envoy has the privilege of reaching out about. “I was convinced she was going to ask me to give Meghan Markle a tour,” Bolton recalled. “She was in town, I think, doing a charity event.” In fact, Young was asking if she could throw Bolton a party at the consul’s official residence—a penthouse apartment at 50 UN Plaza purchased by the British government for $16 million in 2019—to celebrate the fact that His Majesty was honoring the fashion curator with an Order of the British Empire.
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