| The best part of my job, unquestionably, is that I get to learn from my partners here at Puck. To wit: When my new-ish colleague Marion Maneker started at the company, earlier this spring, I confessed to him that I was neither an art market savant nor any sort of connoisseur, but I was nevertheless fascinated by the world he covered—the auction houses, the dealers, the interlopers, the institutions, the hustlers, and sheer opacity of it all. In many ways, being an editor is merely playing the foil for the reader, and I was thrilled that Marion could inhabit the position of bard.
In particular, I was fascinated by where the art market is right now—slightly down on its luck from the sugar high of the zero interest rate era, and slightly insecure about its rebound. It seemed like the perfect moment to add this power corridor to Puck’s cinematic universe.
And, in some ways, this very insecurity is the leitmotif of Marion’s latest masterstroke here at Puck, Sotheby’s Case of the Mondays, a fascinating blow-by-blow of the house’s big auction earlier this week. On the one hand, the $267 million in aggregate hammer sales were up 30 percent over the previous year. On the other, the whole affair was colored by a decidedly melancholy mood, with only a single bidder or two on many lots. And yet, this fate was decidedly preferable to that of Christie’s, whose website fell victim to a cyberattack during the most important bidding week on the calendar. If you want a more poignant view about where the market is headed, I’d direct your attention to Marion’s equally excellent story on the vibe shift in the New York scene in his aptly titled Tenth-Avenue Frieze Out.
The art world is hardly the only volatile market under Puck’s jurisdiction. In Delphine to the Rescue, Lauren Sherman details the surprising executive shake-up at LVMH, the world’s largest luxury conglomerate and Europe’s biggest company, that has placed Bernard Arnault’s daughter, Delphine, at least temporarily in the catbird seat. Much like the art world, the luxury fashion ecosystem is still weaning itself from the artificial Covid economy, and trying with difficulty to understand the whims of wealthy Chinese consumers. (As Lauren acknowledged in her recent piece, Tiffany’s Clash de Cartier, no one has adequately figured this out.) Arnault isn’t going anywhere, and his grown children all appear to be handling their public succession exercise with aplomb. But Delphine now has the greatest incentives of them all to figure it out.
But perhaps the most dynamic market right now is the battle between legacy media companies and streamers for sports rights—the last anchor of the pay TV business. John Ourand, Puck’s resident sports business expert, has been Magellan-like in this unfolding drama. This week, in particular, John published an excellent dispatch about the sour grapes surrounding Netflix’s recent deal with the NFL, a relatively small two-game Christmas Day package. But like so many squabbles, the bickering among sports media executives was hardly about the deal itself. (Netflix paid between $70 and $80 million per game for the next three seasons.) Instead, what rankled was the idea that the NFL would look beyond its existing partners to bring in a newbie. And that this new player, of course, happened to be the world’s largest streamer—one capable of not only undercutting ad rates in the near term but outbidding them in the long term. The NFL-Netflix Broken Hearts Club is a good reminder that jocks have feelings, too.
But if you only have time to read one piece this weekend, I’d turn your attention to the singular Matt Belloni’s brilliant reported analysis on the recent travails of Judd Apatow. As Matt notes, Apatow had one of the most prolific decades of any filmmaker in any genre. Between 2005 and 15, Apatow wrote, directed, and/or produced The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Talladega Nights, Superbad, Walk Hard, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Step Brothers, Pineapple Express, Year One, Funny People, Get Him to the Greek, Bridesmaids, Wanderlust, The Five-Year Engagement, Begin Again, This Is 40, Anchorman 2, and Trainwreck.
These days, however, Apatow is having a hell of a time getting his work greenlit—the result, of course, of the changing economics of the movie business, in general, and comedy films, in particular. It’s a metaphor for how industries change, and The Judd Apatow Sign of the Times is a reminder of how quickly the transformation can happen. And that, in many ways, is the story of our time and precisely what you should expect from Puck. |
