Traffic stopped where it should flow, and got absolutely jammed on the diverted sidestreets where it should have trickled, and I assumed Xi Jinping was on the move to or from the Chinese Embassy, which is in the neighborhood.
Just the opposite. I went down the street to see, and it was a huge protest march for Tibet, larger than I’ve seen in years. So I stood to watch. Then this guy walks by with this rad beanie, and so I wade in, and ask him where to get one, and he’s like, “you want this hat?”
And I’m all, “One like this?”
And he goes, “Have this one!”
And I’m like, “Really? Thanks!”
Free as in Tibet: a Free Tibet hat a Tibetan rights marcher just gave me
So I stood there with my new FREE TIBET beanie, smiling back at the marchers, and then I see a couple of other guys with the hat, and so I wade in and ask them where it came from, and they’re like, “My friend just gave it to me.”
So I still don’t know. I see some online, discontinued products on the Amazon archipelago. Some variations are a little more sophisticated, double-sided, or with the red and blue radiating out to better match the flag.
Superflex, Free Beer/Brewing Kit, 2005, installation at Centre d’Art Contemporaine in Geneva in 2007 by Francis Ware via superflex
So maybe this is just a Free Tibet hat that circulates among friends of Tibet, a free Tibet hat. In any case, I will add it to the greg.org Free TibetTextile Collection.
Uniqlo, you know my email conversion rate, and I’m literally inside your linen shirt right now. And The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., I will always be grateful for that AWP award that one time. So know that I am coming from a place of love when I say, “‘ANDY WARHOL TRANSFORMATION Discover the collection that traces the sources of Warhol’s inspiration by exploring the everyday images that inspired his iconic works.’ WTF?”
Did you forget to ask Elaine?
And the image is a workup of the screen from Modern Photography editor Patricia Caulfield’s magazine spread of hibiscus photos, which she successfully sued you for using?
And on the collection banner is one of the self-portraits made with the same photobooth picture as the Red Self Portrait Bruno B that Warhol put on the cover of Rainer Crone’s 1972 catalogue raisonné, the lawsuit over the deauthentication of which led to the dissolution of the Andy Warhol Authentication Board?
How could you put this Warhol Greatest IP Lawyer-trolling Hits collection together and not include the cover of Vanity Fair’s special commemorative issue, The Genius of Prince?
Robert Gober, Plywood, 1987, 94 3/4 x 47 x 5/8 in., verso, via Christie’s
I saw this Robert Gober Plywood at Boesky in 1998, and it blew my Gober sink- and crib- and leg-addled mind. Now it’s for sale.
Gober was already fluent in sinks and beds by 1987 and was seeking to try to make, he said, an abstract sculpture. “What I ended up making is an extremely realistic sculpture of a more or less abstract object.”
The faces are indeed realistic, the kind of rough veneer used to manufacture plywood. Gober got Peter Ballantine’s help to get a minimum order of veneer—one flatbed truckful—from a mill in Oregon. Yet he did not make a truckful of sculptures from it, just two.
In addition to the artisanal dimensions, the Goberian handcrafted moment here is the edges, which are built up from 1/8-inch strips like marquetry to resemble the internal plys of manufactured wood, and to hide the particleboard core within.
Robert Gober, Plywood, 1987, 94 3/4 x 47 x 5/8 in., verso, via Christie’s
I tried to zoom in on Christie’s photo to show the detail of the edges, and it dissolved into what looked like CG or a Sylvia Plimack Mangold, keeping the abstract/realist tension alive.
I love that he signed the very ↑TOP↑ edge. It goes on view—presumably, face out—on Friday, the 25th, for a week.
Gerhard Richter, Untitled [sic], 2001, oil, ink and graphite on paper, inscribed, “Dear Marian, have a great and happy new year/ All best, Gerhard and family,” either 8 1/4 x 11 5/8 in. or 22.2 x 21 cm, but not both, at Christie’s [update: the imperial dimension are right; it’s a big card!]
Now this is the Marian’s Richter I want to see. A squeegee New Year’s card signed from “Gerhard and family.”
“All best, Gerhard and family”: Thomas Struth, The Richter Family I, 2002, 1356 x 1942 mm sheet, c-print facemounted on acrylic, ed. 10, I think? collection: Guggenheim
Who do you think signed it, and who do you think drew the little lines down from the squeegee marks? Because this truly feels like a fun Richter family project. I hope there are 35 more in the next 35 auctions.
Much like mourning, shopping never ends. And though several months have passed since we honored, ogled, and fervently bid on Marian’s Richters, with fall comes a new round of auctions to remind us of what we’ve lost, and what’s newly available.
Orchidee II-II? Marian Goodman’s second Gerhard Richter edition, 1988, offset print on lightweight card between plexiglas, this one is ed. 21/25, the one last May was ed. 18/25
And if some of it feels familiar, that’s just how grief works. And art dealers, who apparently keep at least two examplesfrom the edition for themselves. Orchidee II is both the title of the 1988 print-of-a-painting-in-plexi edition, and the number appearing in Marian Goodman’s collection. So far. If I’m the underbidder from last May’s $57,150 sale, I guess I’m glad to have another chance at a beautiful print. But I’m also asking just how many more of these specific Richters Marian had tucked away, if only for the possibility of staging a Germano Celant-style small utopia of celebration of the art multiple’s democratizing power, by buying them all.
Or maybe this October example, ed. 21/25, is actually unique. Christie’s currently shows the verso of the Gerhard Richter print to be a snow scene from Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō by Utagawa Hiroshige. Which would be truly baller. And almost possible? Richter’s 1988 offset print is 11.5 x 14 5/8 in., and the woodblock on Hiroshige’s 1834 print is 10 x 14 5/8 in.
recto/verso spread from Gerhard Richter’s November, the trade edition published by HENI
At first I thought this was an unusually faint or faded print, but it turns out the image is actually the Hiroshige verso; it shows the ink bleeding through the paper [plus the station number, 16, on the margin, in red]. This material- and absorbency-based image relationship resonates with Richter’s series of ink drawings November, from 2008. The recto/verso pairs are easy enough to see in the book; when they were first exhibited in 2013, the collection of 54 recto were on one wall, and 54 reproductions of the verso on the other.
Orchidee II x Kanbara yoru no yuki, as imagined in Marian Goodman’s powder room for 38 years
This honestly feels like a monkey paw wish situation.
To celebrate 20 years of me nagging them about merch, Glenstone has just launched merch. And it’s got Jeff Koons or Andy Goldsworthy on it.
Glenstone 20th anniversary limited edition t-shirt with one of four illustrations by Jordan Awan, $40. and Glenstone 20 black hat with white embroidered logo, $35. via glenstone
OK, the fox t-shirt with the Serra Contour in the background is kind of nice. And the hats. And the totes.
Gerhard Richter, Pane of Glass / Glasscheibe, GR 876-7, 2002, 150 x 150 cm, image via gerhard-richter.com [rip]Gerhard Richter, Antelio Glass, fka Pane of Glass, CR 876-7, glass and steel, sold at Sotheby’s in 2025 for GBP 292,100
I’m ready to look at Gerhard Richter mirrors all day, but I confess, I’d forgotten completely about his Panes of Glass. Not the sculptural ones, like the iconic 4 Panes of Glass (1967) set into pivoting steel frames. But the singles.
installation view, Gerhard Richter, 180 Farben/180 Colours, 1971, restored and shown at Museum Abteiberg in 2014
Sorry, did you say something? I didn’t hear you; I was too engrossed in the Museum Abteiberg digital archive.
Did you know that in 2014, when the museum loaned its permanent installation of 8 Graue Bilder from 1974 to Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at the Beyeler, Richter made a special loan of long-lost works to fill the space? And so far as I can tell, the only account of the story of these works is in the Museum’s archive?
Richter exhibits a series of 20 lacquer paintings that were shown in 1971 [link added. -ed.] at the Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst / Cabinet for Contemporary Art in Bremerhaven, but which were then lost for a long time. In Richter’s catalogue raisonné, they are listed as Colour Plates (9 Colours), which are actually individual groups from the large concept of 180 Colours which he thematized in the Bremerhaven exhibition. Unexpectedly found again in an early stock [DE: Lager, warehouse] in Cologne, Richter restored them carefully and corrected their title, 180 Colours, presenting the entire series of 20 white-ground colour panels for the first time in public again.
installation view of Gerhard Richter’s 180 Colours reflected in a larger, squarer Spiegel/Mirror than Richter’s exhibition history lets on, at the Museum Abteiberg in 2014
Getsy spoke about Warhol and trans visibility in the 1970s, but it wasn’t so much a critique or analysis of Warhol. Warhol was a lens as Getsy laid out a complicated and fascinating narrative where the prominent but stereotypical depictions of trans Factory actresses like Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis in Paul Morrissey’s Warhol-branded films became an object of critique by queer underground theater artists, specifically The Magic Hype, a 1973 transploitation spoof of Warhol’s Factory by the trans and street queen theater troupe, Hot Peaches. I cannot believe that’s one sentence.
Seeing it again after so long, and after so much art chatter, social media mayhem, and legal wrangling, it really does feel like if he wasn’t everything for making these works, Richard Prince was definitely something.
The voluptuous photo, the bafflingly intense comments [“The fight for earth doesn’t end until one of us is gone?” What even is that?], the austere composition, this really could only have been made twelve years ago, minus five days. Art is a fascinating thing.
And being sold, I think, by Bloomberg commodities commentator-turned-energy-industry-flack Alix Steel. We’re all truly standing an inflection point for our culture.
R.H. Quaytman, ד Chapter 24, 2012, 20 x 20 in., ink and gesso on plywood, selling at Rago Arts
You were staring at R.H. Quaytman’s painting on the auction website, wondering if you were going blind trying to figure out what was happening. This is not something that would happen if you’d seen it installed at the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach in 2012. Because you’d know immediately that you were standing in front of a 20 x 20 inch plywood panel with a beveled edge, that had an image screenprinted on it of a slightly crushed black cardboard box with a die cut square window near the top, and a library label wrapped around the side.
Glenn Ligon’s black Moon Jars got me looking through the exhibitions at Tokyo’s Rat Hole Gallery, which was an underground space operated by the streetwear brand Hysteric Glamour. It closed at the beginning of COVID. Some of their shows are documented on Contemporary Art Library, including their third show with Roni Horn, The Selected Gifts (1974-2015), in 2017-18.
“37 Album of owl postcards, 38 Mosaic color sample card, 39 naturally round rock, 40 ‘Untitled’ (1987) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 41 Handmade miniature olive tree, 42 Fortune cookie fortune, 43 Die (solid sterling silver)” installation view of Roni Horn, The Selected Gifts (1974-2015), 2017 at Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, via Contemporary Art Library
Horn presented “a vicarious self-portrait” as told by a series of mostly life-sized photographs of 43 gifts received over 41 years. “Collectively, the gifts tell a story, through a language of the self as mediated through both objects and others—a reflection through the warped optic of others that shows a level of accuracy beyond that of any mirror,” Horn said in the show’s press release.
“Of course, by selecting and photographing the gifts, and presenting them in the formal language I developed, I am also crafting a self-portrait with a certain level of distance,” Horn did not also say.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres snapshots signed and given to a friend in 1994 who was not Roni Horn, and sold at Phillips in 2021
The press release says the identities of the givers “remains a mystery,” but nine of the gifts are artworks by folks like Tacita Dean, Matthew Barney, Jürgen Teller, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. And two of the gifts are the kitschy little cartoon figurines of the kind that filled Gonzalez-Torres’ apartment, and which he regularly shared with friends. [He also gave snapshots of the toys to friends, and now I imagine this photographic potlach as part of a practice he and Horn also shared.]
Roni Horn, 25 Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone, from The Selected Gifts (1974-2015), at Rat Hole Gallery in 2017-18, via contemporary art library
What else stands out is Horn’s sense of humor as she assembles this self-portrait, airing out friends who’ve given two copies of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, two copies of Djuna Barnes, and wtf—a photo album of owl postcards? Can you imagine giving bird pictures to Roni Horn, and they end up in a show?
Screenshot of Glenn Ligon’s Dec. 17, 2019 instagram announcement of the opening of “In a Year With A Black Moon,” the show at Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo where he first exhibited his black Moon Jars
I have loved Glenn Ligon’s Moon Jars since they first appeared in “In A Year with a Black Moon” in 2019, in what turned out to be the last show at Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo. And by love, I mean hearted them every time I’ve seen them on Instagram.
Their narrative hasn’t changed much in the intervening years, though: Ligon developed them with a Korean ceramicist in Japan over three years. They’re made with black clay instead of the kaolin white clay of Joseon originals. The rest of the discussion quickly shifts to Moon Jars themselves, and their history, and even that can be a very short conversation.
Glenn Ligon Moon Jars installed at “All Over The Place” at the Fitzwiliam in Cambridge in 2024, 📷: ig/glennadamson
Installation view of Glenn Ligon, Black Moons at APMA Cabinet, Seoul, Aug-Sept 2026, 📷: Hauser & Wirth
But there’s no hint yet about Korean responses to these reworkings of an iconic national form, or to its complicated historical entanglements with western Modernism, and with Japan.
From Instagram, at least, Ligon’s long, personal and creative engagement with Japan appears steady and extensive, going well beyond tourism or fandom. And it’s easy to imagine an organic and productive context for the Moon Jars’ development.
Computer, what is the diametric opposite of a photo of a Glenn Ligon Moon Jar? Lucy Rie photographed by Snowdon next to the Joseon moon jar Bernard Leach gave her, which the British Museum bought at Bonham’s in 1998, image via FT
But imagining is all there is, because I don’t see any more discussion of their origins or their making. Or in the moon jars’ intersections with Japanese colonialism, and the complicated dynamics around the elevation of simplified, utilitarian ceramics in the early 20th century by Japanese craft modernists like Sōetsu Yanagi, and then by modernists in the west It feels relevant that both of the major Joseon moon jars at Christie’s came from deep in Japanese collections—and that rather than discuss their provenance at all, Christie’s rehashed the Anglo-centric story of the moon jar at the British Museum.
Screenshot of Glenn Ligon’s Sept. 12, 2026 instagram post of his handmade brick sculpture in St Louis for Counterpublic’s Triennial
In contrast, Ligon just unveiled another sculpture of fired clay, where the complex context of who made what, how, and where, feels baked right in. For Coyote Time, the triennial in St Louis organized by Counterpublic, Ligon has created Who Builds Anything In This Country? a serpentine wall of handmade bricks marked with the fingerprints and marks of local students and seniors. This, in a state and a country where, before the Civil War, most bricks were made by enslaved people.
There’s a fuller moon jar discussion to be had, and almost ten years into Ligon’s project, I cannot be the only one who’d love to have it. I’d also like to see them in person.
Elizabeth Catlett, I am the Black Woman, 1946-47/1989, 9. My role has been important in the struggle to organize the unorganized, 6 1/8×9 in., ed. 9/20, selling in October 2026 at Swann
A rare complete set of Elizabeth Catlett’s iconic linocut portfolio, I am the Black Woman, is coming up for sale at Swann Galleries on October 1st.
Catlett’s first edition, published in Mexico City 1946-47 as I am the Negro Woman, had fifteen prints. The second printing was made in 1989 with the surviving 14 blocks. MoMA bought the last complete set to come up in 2021.
14. My right is a future of equality with other Americans, 9 1/8 x 6 1/8 in., ed. 9/20 via Swann
Even the set in the National Gallery’s Catlett retrospective was assembled from various sources. I don’t know if it’s complete or matching, but the DC public high school Catlett attended and later taught at had an original set in rough condition, which strikes me as the most historically important. For this set, I imagine museums will be competing against themselves to catch up.
Jeff Koons, Puppy, 1992, oil inks on canvas, 120 x 165 in. or so, AP from an ed. of 1, selling at Rago Arts in September 2026
Speaking of unstretched canvases and flowers, this 10-by-14 foot printed canvas edition is hands-down the best way to own Jeff Koons’s Puppy: you still need some space, but it also rolls up; you don’t have to spend $75,000-100,000/year on gardening; and you don’t have to be Peter Brant.
This “oil inks” print is made the same way, I think, as the billboard-sized liquor and cigarette ad canvases from the earlier Luxury & Degradation series. Rago’s calling it a painting, the AP from an edition of 1, and low-key wildly, it’s being sold unstretched, with the original stretcher included. So if you win, you could even just drive out to New Jersey in a Sprinter van and bring it home yourself.
Not sure why the estimate is barely the $274,000 it sold for in 2002. But the money that people spend on Koonses has always confounded me, so why should this be any different?
![a landscape oriented gerhard richter schmear of red green blue and white paint on the top half of a cream card, with tiny pencil lines tracing down from paint dots to the bottom edge of the paper, and an inscription wishing marian [goodman] a very happy new year from gerhard and family written in a hand that does not look like any of gerhard's handwriting i've seen but why should it](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/marian-goodman-richter-new-years-card-christies-1024x729.jpeg)
