Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.

What does the future of the art market look like? It’s a big and thorny question that cannot possibly be answered with a few simple words.

From the big picture issues like how artificial intelligence will factor into business decisions and the global economic situation, to the smaller and more particular aspects, like which multi-million dollar collections will hit the block, and what the expansion of mega-galleries means for the art ecosystem… there are a lot of factors at play.

At the Armory Show’s Live event last week, Artnet News’s senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella hosted a panel of experts including collector Alain Servais, art advisor Megan Fox Kelley, and gallerist Suzanne Veilmetter to discuss what the future may hold.

Megan Fox Kelley is the founder and director of Megan Fox Kelley Art Advisory, as well as a member and former president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. Her practice includes advising clients on acquisitions and sales of works of art for their collections, estate planning and execution, strategic planning, and feasibility studies for museums, exhibition planning and administration, collection management, and fine art appraisal services.

Suzanne Vielmetter is the founder and director of Vielmetter Los Angeles. Since founding the gallery in 2000, she has been committed to presenting artists from a wide range of diverse backgrounds with a focus on idea-based and political work.

Alain Servais is a globally-recognized collector and founder of the Servais Family Collection. For more than 20 years, Servais has focused on underrepresented and museum quality art, which he believes is significant and worthy of preservation.

This week on the podcast, we present the live-recording from the Armory Show event.

Listen to more episodes:

The Art Angle Podcast: What’s Causing the Crisis in Art Criticism?

The Art Angle Round Up: The British Museum’s Theft Crisis, A.I. on Trial, and Dealer Beef in Montauk

The Art Angle Podcast: Why Digital Art Lives Fast and Dies Young

The Art Angle Podcast: The Pleasures and Paradoxes of Seurat’s Iconic ‘Sunday Afternoon’

The Art Angle: How Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington Carved Her Space in a Male-Dominated World

The Art Angle Roundup: Frieze’s Expansion, Pollock’s NFTs, and Barbenheimer’s Impact

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U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors are firing back at disgraced dealer Robert Newland, who pleaded guilty to collaborating with Inigo Philbrick to defraud collectors out of millions, rejecting his recent bid for leniency. 

While the attorneys acknowledged that Newland was not “the instigator and driver” of the scheme—a role they attribute to Philbrick—they emphasize that Newland nonetheless played a significant role that ultimately allowed the fraud to continue longer and to generate greater losses to victims.

“In the role of financial adviser, the defendant partnered with Philbrick, a talented young art dealer, to convince investors and lenders to trust Philbrick with their art and money,” read the memo filed September 12 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. “In fact, lies permeated nearly every aspect of Philbrick’s business, which ultimately grew into a Ponzi-like scheme premised on fractional art investments and fraudulently obtain[sic] loans,” 

The government recommends a sentence that is less than the seven years Philbrick got, but that is nonetheless “meaningful” given the harm caused and the need for deterrence in the “unregulated art market.”

Newland will face a judge next week to learn if and for how long he will serve prison time in the U.S.

In 2015, Newland helped Philbrick receive financing from Fine Art Partners, a financial services company that went on to suffer major losses. Two years later, he left his job at White Cube and joined forces with Philbrick. The government has since identified 29 artworks that Philbrick used to conduct fraudulent art deals that resulted in $86.4 million in losses to victims. They estimate that Newland was involved in roughly half of these transactions over a two-year period, and that he should pay a total restitution of $67.5 million for his role in the fraud.

A now-deleted screenshot of Newland’s staff page via Superblue.com

Prosecutors say that Newland knowingly provided false information to Fine Art Partners and Athena Art Finance, which provides art-backed loans, or failed to disclose competing ownership stakes in artworks. This included drafting emails on Philbrick’s behalf, “including emails from a fictitious character, ‘Martin Herrero’,” to White Cube owner Jay Jopling, who is named among the defrauded victims.

They also say Newland was complicit with making false representations to several clients about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s large-scale painting Humidity 1982, which they believed they owned substantial stakes in. Philbrick and Newland convinced Athena and two investors, Alexander Pesko and Damian Delahunty, to make substantial payments for the Basquiat. The duo then pledged it as part of a “collateral pool” for Athena in exchange for a $10 million loan, “in the process lying to Athena” that they had clear title to the painting.

After Philbrick’s business collapsed, in late 2019, he fled the country. Newland remained in the UK. In 2021, a grand jury returned a sealed indictment charging Newland with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The following year he was arrested in the U.K. and extradited to the U.S., where he pleaded guilty to one of the charges. He has remained free on bail since his arrest, but wears an ankle monitor and abides by a curfew.

Newland has agreed to forfeit $76,000 in cash along with three artworks: Personal Distance A, a painting by Carroll Dunham; Untitled (2016), a painting by Christopher Wool; and Untitled (2007), by Wade Guyton, as well as a desk by French furniture designer Jean Prouvé.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Humidity (1982).

Although prosecutors say Newland did not substantially profit from the fraud, he and Philbrick “have left it up to their victims to fight amongst themselves to unravel the fraudulent art deals and recover their losses.” The prosecutors note that there are many civil lawsuits filed by victims seeking to resolve disputed ownership claims over multiple artworks. “The government expects that many victims, unfortunately, will never be made whole,” according to the memo.

Daniel Tümpel, principal of Fine Art Partners, also filed a nine-page letter to the judge proposing a counter-narrative to Newland’s plea for leniency, in which he described him as remorseful and cowardly.

“When I read Newland’s defense statement, it left me speechless,” wrote Tümpel. “He accepts his guilt but paints a picture of a generous and loving man and father who already suffered enough as a result of the bad light this entire matter has cast on him… When we started gathering more are more information and documents—also from other damaged parties—we could see Newland’s fingerprints all over.“

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Marcus Pritchard, Australia New Zealand Regional Director, Dynata

Estimates say the average person sees between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every day, an almost twofold increase from ten years ago. And not only that, thousands of creators are similarly producing content that competes with yours.

With so much competition for our attention, it’s vital to understand if an ad will be remembered and, more importantly, if it will drive the desired reaction.

With creative testing, marketers will have a blueprint on how the imagery, copy and storyline of their ads can be optimised to best resonate with the target audience, and how memorability could be improved to enhance media ROI.

These insights can help creative teams dramatically improve an ad’s short-term effectiveness and, importantly, show how the ad elements work together to create branded memories that drive long-term revenue growth and profit.

It’s a data-driven approach to accurately predict how an ad will perform in-market and ensures both creative teams and media budgets only support effective advertising concepts.

When leveraged early, often, and correctly, creative testing can greatly improve your advertising’s performance, especially when it comes to brand perception and media placement.

Decide between the most impactful creative concept

The idea behind successful creative testing is figuring out what attracts your audience. After all, to be memorable, advertising needs to drive impact, evoke emotion and convey something relevant about the brand.

Marketers have a variety of tools for this, but not all are created equal. For example, traditional A/B testing helps marketers optimise conversions by isolating which creative elements drive results, but it can’t dig into the why behind performance and what that needs to improve.

That’s where creative testing can help. It can provide an analysis of how well an ad captures and holds attention, the meaning being conveyed, the emotions elicited and how likely someone is to consider the brand in the future.

The diagnostic reporting will help identify the ad’s strengths and weaknesses, understand how viewers internalise the explicit and implicit messages, verify the impact on brand impressions and measure motivation and purchase intent. Then, marketers can make objective decisions on how to fine-tune the creative to capture and hold the audience’s attention in order to create a lasting impact on brand connection and perception.

By doing this, advertising will create long-term branded memories that consumers tap into, either consciously or unconsciously, when making buying decisions. Over time, not only will you understand how to create a longer lasting connection with your consumers, but the quality of your leads will also increase.

Understand cross-channel effectiveness

Companies executing cross or omnichannel marketing strategies must remember each channel has different characteristics, impacting the outcomes they drive and the audiences they attract.

As different channels have specific limitations and audiences, testing ads within the context they will be seen to see how well they perform among competing content will provide the most accurate predictions.

This will help ensure you’re maximising each channel’s unique strengths and opportunities. Ultimately ensuring you’re spending your budget as effectively as possible and driving the desired outcomes with every campaign.

But regardless of the channels you’re testing for, the earlier testing is completed in the development process, the more opportunity there is to improve its quality, minimising the risk of releasing something that doesn’t resonate with your target audience.

When testing an integrated campaign, pre-testing can identify ads with the most potential to drive ROI and highlight the channels that aren’t pulling their weight. It takes the guesswork out of determining which of your many channels a successful conversion may come from.

Marketers can then use this information to optimise their media mix and feature the best-performing copy and imagery in other campaign elements to improve cross-channel effectiveness. For example, the content that tested highest among the target audience could be featured on social media or within an out of home campaign.

Activate custom audiences before launch

The creative testing process must be iterative, testing one element at a time. If the creative tests poorly, you can review the creative and save yourself the time and money you would have otherwise wasted testing multiple versions of the same low-performing creative.

On the other hand, if the initial creative tests well, you can look at adding in alternate call to actions, copy, or formats to continually bring the performance up.

It may feel like a lengthy process, but it saves you time, resources and money before you roll out creative that doesn’t resonate with your target audience.

Regardless of the outcome, there is a wealth of data available about your audience that can be applied across your business in various ways after every round of testing. This data can even be used to model and scale a custom, cookie-free lookalike audience that can be used to boost cross-channel ROI.

Creative testing is about merging the emotive with the formulaic. By blending the art and science of marketing, creative testing can not only help marketers make informed decisions on how to best optimise an ad’s effectiveness, but it can also provide strategic guidance that will have a long-term positive impact on your media planning and brand.

At the end of the day, choosing which creative concepts to invest in shouldn’t be left to chance.

From her studio in Rawa Mazowiecka, Poland, Żaneta Antosik turns her eye toward the delicacies of the natural world as she renders the soft, frail forms of plants and insects. The artist primarily works digitally, sometimes beginning with a simple sketch on paper but often drawing directly in Procreate. Rendered on black or beige backdrops to reference a night sky or daytime light, each piece pays particular attention to the minuscule details, whether the tufted body of a moth or the speckled sepals of a poppy flower.

Evoking entomological displays found in attics or buried in archival collections, the renderings are tinged with nostalgia and an antique feel, as if they’d just been relieved of a thick layer. “I like objects with soul, old cinema, the world of Van Gogh and Pieter Bruegel,” she tells Colossal. ” I feel best in contact with nature. I was inspired to create a series with moths and butterflies by the beauty of these mysterious, small, and fragile creatures, which are extremely graceful models.”

Antosik sells prints and cards on Etsy, and you can follow her latest botanical and entomological renderings on Behance and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Fragile Moths, Butterflies, and Botanicals Commingle in Żaneta Antosik’s Moody Digital Illustrations appeared first on Colossal.