ART COLLECTING
NEXT BIG THINGS
Three Australian gallerists let JEN NURICK in on the emerging art talents to invest in (and name-drop) before everyone else does.
Above: installation view of Darren Sylvester’s 2021 exhibition “Shoobie Doobie” at Neon Parc, Brunswick. Opposite: Neon Parc gallerist Geoff Newton. 42
THE LUXURY REPORT | SUMMER 2021/22
HOW DO YOU define a piece of art? In the infancy of his career, Keith Haring may have pointed us underground, to the bare advertising spaces in New York City subway stations that famously became his canvases. Perhaps Jean-Michel Basquiat would have guided us to Great Jones Street, in Manhattan’s NoHo, where he tagged the walls with “SAMO”: shorthand for “same old shit”, a concept he developed with another subway graffiti artist, Al Diaz. Or he may have led us closer to home, to the realm of the domestic, where refrigerator surfaces and other mundane household objects took his fancy, becoming vessels for his art. Artists like Cindy Sherman and, here in Australia, Destiny Deacon and Gerwyn Davies may present their own reflections as an answer, having used their bodies to convey their art. The digital artist Mike Winkelmann (also known as Beeple, his online alias) would surely point us to a screen. It was his non-fungible token, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, that sold at Christie’s for a record $88.9 million in March 2021. Works like his are becoming increasingly desirable but still evade simple definition: they are pieces of art, digital files, a series of hundreds of thousands of intangible pixels.
