LOS ANGELES — Maura Brewer’s video essay “Leverage” (2024) unfolds the contemporary phenomenon of art as an asset class by focusing on the financial transactions of one individual: Daniel Sundheim. Using simple diagrams, stock photos and film clips, the work avoids simplistic conclusions about the mixing of capital and culture, instead laying out Brewer’s findings in an accessible way that encourages further research.
This is the first contribution to Brewer’s ongoing project “mapping the history of the financialization of art,” according to the press release. Using publicly available documents, she tracks twelve art-backed loans that Sundheim, a billionaire investor and trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, took out between 2013 and 2019, a period of feverish art market speculation driven by low interest rates. As Brewer explains in the concise 18-minute video, Sundheim used works in his art collection as collateral to secure loans, which he used to purchase art, and he placed that art as collateral to secure more loans, in a self-perpetuating loop. The works of art have never changed hands; they are simply listed as line items on the loan documents, known as Uniform Commercial Code Filings.
Brewer talks about the ebb and flow of Sundheim’s loans and debts as images of the pieces in question flash by: Basquiat, Grotjahn, Gursky, Koons, Prince, Ryman, Wool, Twombly and other market enthusiasts. Appearing on the screen of an iPhone held by the artist’s hands, the works draw us in with a human connection, but also mediate our experience, distancing us from the actual artworks. This underlines the way most of us interact with art today, as uniform digital rectangles on a screen, as sterile as the corresponding numbers on a balance sheet.
Sundheim’s story is interwoven with autobiographical stories about Brewer’s struggles with money, art and relationships. After receiving the biggest grant of her career in 2023, she received a bitter email from a former friend that brought up old grudges and rivalries. The relationship between art and money is very different for a working artist than for a wealthy investor. These scenes are illustrated with excerpts from the 1988 film Beacheswhich follows the tumultuous relationship between two longtime friends, played by Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. Conversely, she uses fragments from The Wolf of Wall StreetMartin Scorsese’s disgusting 2013 celebration of amoral greed, illustrating the art market bubble of the 2010s, which burst when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022.
For her exhibition Leverage In the artist-run space Timeshare, the video is projected on the floor and takes up a large portion of the real estate. While this makes viewing the work comfortably a challenge, it is also impossible to avoid, like an elephant in the room. Its horizontal nature affirms the sculptural quality over the cinematic. In the video, Brewer compares the abstract features of the “zombie formalism” that surpassed auction records during this period with financial ledgers and spreadsheets, a connection made literal in three small pastel drawings on the wall. These minimalist grids derive their structure from the Uniform Financial Code Filings of art patrons Ronald Lauder and Peter Norton, with the text removed. The bright white lines and boxes stand out against the dark, gestural backgrounds, which Brewer composed with her fingerprints, as if to assert the artist’s hand against the cold monetary logic of the market.
However, Brewer does not simply create a binary relationship between artist and investor. Instead, she pulls back the curtain on these often invisible or elusive systems that overlap with the art world, as they become increasingly difficult to disentangle. “In the debt theory of money, there is an empty hole at the center of the universe, which animates all our actions,” Brewer says at one point in the video, as she cuts a hole through the black background with an electric knife and reaches her hands through it and seemingly into our space.
Maura Brewer: Leverage continues at Timeshare (3526 North Broadway, Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles) through November 16. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
