“Instead of selling lemonade I would sell necklaces,” she recalled. “I’ve always been a merchant,” she said.Īt 12 she was selling trinkets door to door at the United Nations Plaza, where she lived. But Dubin also shared her entrepreneurial sensibilities with her father, Herbert Rounick, a garment industry executive. Alfred Taubman, the shopping mall developer and Sotheby’s former chairman, who sold his controlling interest in the house in 2005, in the wake of a price fixing scandal. Susan Cummins, founder of the nonprofit Art Jewelry Forum and a co-author of the 2020 book “In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture,” makes a distinction between artists’ jewelry, conceived and often signed by a recognized artist, and art jewelry, created by lesser-known artisans who may not rely on precious materials to lend it worth.ĭubin herself is no stranger to marketing. “It tends to be colorful, large and flamboyant,” she said, “but people are wearing it and showing off their wealth and their fashion sense.”īut is it an investment? That depends. “A lot of collections are going to museums,” said Cynthia Amneus, curator of fashion, arts and textiles at the Cincinnati Art Museum, which exhibited art jewelers last year. (A silver Calder necklace estimated at $400,000 to $600,000, sold for $2 million at Sotheby’s in 2013, and holds the record for an item of jewelry at auction.)Ī segment of the market focused on rare or singular objects made from precious materials - or, as often, everyday ones, including wood, glass shard, brass, bits of clay and the like - the jewelry has transcended its status in recent years as merely decorative “For our clients,” Jiménez said, “wearable art is the next frontier in collecting.” “Where we have featured art’s jewelry as a part of other sales, it did well,” Jiménez said. She is keen to establish the category, poised at the intersection of high jewelry and painting or sculpture, as a scaled-down extension of the artist.Īrtists’ jewelry holds a newly seductive cachet, said Mari-Claudia Jiménez, Sotheby’s managing director and worldwide head of business development, global fine arts. “It’s easy to make something massive, but to make something strong and small is difficult,” said Tiffany Dubin, Sotheby’s artist jewelry specialist, who conceived and organized the event. 4 (when the bidding closes) are diminutive pieces by Picasso, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and Alexander Calder, a selection that demonstrates, Sotheby’s maintains, that when it comes to artists’ prowess, it isn’t always size that counts. The first at the auction house dedicated to artists’ jewelry, it showcases designs by some 65 20th- and 21st-century artists, works deemed by the house as covetable, wearable and eminently collectible. It is also among the highlights of “Art as Jewelry as Art,” a digital-only auction and simultaneous exhibition at Sotheby’s in Manhattan. But on closer inspection, it is a half-pint - a sculptural pendant that stands a mere 4 ¾ inches tall, one of the small but mighty jewelry designs the artist Louise Nevelson crafted for friends or wore like a weighty talisman. It looks at a glance like a monument, a towering edifice of painted wood and brass.
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