LOS ANGELES — Maura Brewer’s video essay “Leverage” (2024) uncovers the contemporary phenomenon of art as an asset class by focusing on the financial transactions of one individual: Daniel Sundheim. Using simple diagrams, archival photos, and film clips, the book avoids simplistic conclusions about the mixing of capital and culture, instead presenting Brewer’s findings in an accessible way that encourages a closer examination.
This is the first entry in Brewer’s ongoing project “which traces the history of the financialization of art,” according to the press release. Using publicly available documents, she traces 12 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 speculation in the art market. ‘art driven by low interest rates. As Brewer explains in the concise 18-minute video, Sundheim used works from his art collection as collateral to secure loans, with which he purchased works of art, and he put those works up as collateral to obtain more loans, in a self-sustaining loop. The works of art have never changed hands; They are simply listed as lines on loan documents, known as Uniform Commercial Code filings.
Brewer recounts 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 darlings. The works appear on the screen of an iPhone held by the artist’s hands, drawing us in with a point of human connection, but also mediating our experience, keeping us at a distance from the artworks themselves. It underscores the way most of us now interact with art, as uniform digital rectangles on a screen, as sterile as their corresponding numbers on a balance sheet.
Sundheim’s narrative is interwoven with autobiographical stories about Brewer’s struggles with money, art, and relationships. After receiving the biggest purse of her career in 2023, she received a scathing email from a former friend, discussing old resentments and rivalries. The relationship between art and money is very different for a working artist and 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 extracts from The Wolf of Wall StreetMartin Scorsese’s disgusting celebration of amoral greed in 2013, to illustrate the art market bubble of the 2010s, which burst when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022.
For his exhibition Leverage in the Timeshare artist space, the video is projected onto the floor, taking up a large portion of the space. While this makes it difficult to comfortably visualize the work, it is also impossible to avoid, like an elephant in the room. Its horizontality asserts its sculptural quality on cinema. In the video, Brewer compares the abstract marks of “zombie formalism” which topped 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 take their structure from the Uniform Financial Code documents Filings by patrons Ronald Lauder and Peter Norton, the text removed. The bright white lines and boxes stand out against the dark, gestural backgrounds that Brewer composed with his fingerprints, as if to assert the artist’s hand. against the cold monetary logic of the market.
However, Brewer does not simply establish a binary between artist and investor. Rather, it pulls back the curtain on these often invisible or elusive systems that overlap with the art world, as they become increasingly difficult to unravel. “In the theory of debt and money, there is an empty hole at the center of the universe, animating all of our actions,” Brewer says at one point in the video, as she punches a hole in the black background with an electric knife, reaching his hands through 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.
