The momentum seems unstoppable. Last week in London, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips raised an aggregate 200 million pounds, or about $340 million, from their evening sales of postwar and contemporary art, a 26 percent increase on the equivalent series of sales last summer.
London’s sales came on the heels of an Art Basel fair in Switzerland last month, where an Andy Warhol self-portrait sold for about $30 million, and a blockbuster series of contemporary evening and day auctions in New York in May that totaled $1.6 billion.
“The sleepy days of collecting are over,” said Amy Cappellazzo, the co-founder of the New York-based Art Agency, Partners, who was in London bidding on works by Lucio Fontana and Roy Lichtenstein on behalf of clients she advises. “The wealthiest of the wealthy now view art as an alternative currency. It’s become a very big business.”
London was the latest stop in what has become a year-round traveling circus of auctions, fairs and gallery events. Contemporary art has become a global monoculture. If you’re seriously rich, and want to enhance your status and your wealth, why not buy top-tier contemporary art, as well as super-prime real estate in London and New York? This seemed to be the message Sotheby’s and Christie’s were trying to convey in the slickly presented views of their June 30 and July 1 auctions of art produced during the last 60 years.
‘‘Country-rock (wing-mirror)’’ by Peter Doig brought a price of £8.5 million. Credit Sotheby’s
But was the rise in overall sales a result of new clients entering the market, or was it simply that existing buyers were spending more money? There weren’t many new faces to be seen at these London sales, as there hadn’t been at Basel. Paradoxically, if that is the case, and new buyers aren’t flooding into the upper reaches of the art market in the way they did in 2007 and 2008, then it is less likely that the current expansion represents, as many people suspect, a speculative bubble.
What is certain is that the wealthiest art buyers are concentrating their investment on a narrow range of low-risk “blue chip” names.
Anders Petterson, the founder and managing director for the London-based analysts ArtTactic, said in an email that the 10 most expensive artists accounted for 73 percent of the £192.6 million aggregate total achieved at Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales.
Francis Bacon is currently the contemporary market’s most valuable artist after the $142.4 million achieved for a large-scale triptych in New York in November. The Irish-born painter also topped the price lists at these latest Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales. Sotheby’s offered a small-scale that had been in a private collection in Milan since 1970. Christie’s had a 1967 head of Lucian Freud from the estate of the children’s author Roald Dahl. Four telephone bidders pushed the price on the triptych to £26.7 million, significantly above the upper estimate of £20 million. An unidentified private collector standing at the back of Christie’s sale room bought the head of Freud for £11.5 million, just below the unpublished upper estimate of £12 million. The seller of the latter work had been guaranteed an undisclosed minimum price, according to Christie’s catalog.
Further research by Arts Economics, based in Dublin, has shown that of the 36,000 artists recorded in the worldwide auction market for postwar and contemporary art, fewer than 50 have sold for more than €10 million.
Francis Bacon’s ‘‘Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground)’’ from 1964 sold for £26.7 million. Credit Sotheby’s
The Scottish-born painter Peter Doig, who is usually sold in London, is one of only two living British artists (the other being Damien Hirst) who can reach that kind of price level. Sotheby’s guaranteed Mr. Doig’s critically acclaimed 1999 canvas, “Country-rock (wing-mirror),” showing an underpass in Toronto. Its estimate of £9 million proved too ambitious and it was bought by a telephone bidder for £8.5 million with fees. Christie’s, by contrast, placed a more modest valuation of £3 million to £5 million on the more decorative and mysterious 2002-4 landscape with a self-portrait of Mr. Doig in theatrical dress, “Gasthof,” and was rewarded with a price of £9.9 million from the dealer Larry Gagosian in the room.
Elsewhere there was the usual procession of seven- and six-figure prices being paid for Andy Warhol silk screens, Lucio Fontana slashed canvases, Yves Klein rectangles of ultramarine and other signature works by postwar and contemporary’s investment-grade brands.
The monotony of what at times felt like factory auctioneering was momentarily broken at Christie’s when Tracey Emin’s most famous and infamous work, “My Bed,” dating from 1998, sold from the Charles Saatchi collection for £2.5 million. The mellowing Ms. Emin, who was a leading figure in the Young British Artists (YBAs) group, installed the bed at Christie’s preview and was in the auction room to see it knocked down to her London dealer Jay Jopling.
Less established artists remain an area of unpredictability. Phillips’s more modest £9.9 million evening sale on July 2, their last before moving to a plush new building in Berkeley Square, tested demand for some of the younger minimalist painters who have recently been generating speculative heat. In February at Sotheby’s, a large 2012 Lucien Smith “Rain” painting, one of an estimated 200 to 300 made by the artist with a fire extinguisher, sold for £224,500. At Phillips, another 2012 example of similar size sold for £116,500. Bidders seemed to have a more positive sense of the long-term values of the Cologne-based abstract painter David Ostrowski, whose ghostly 2012 canvas, “F (Gee Vaucher),” attracted at last five bidders before selling for £170,500, more than three times the estimate based on what galleries charge for his paintings when first released.
At Christie’s post-auction press conference, Francis Outred, the company’s European head of contemporary art, said that although the evening’s buying had been dominated by established collectors, 190 clients from 28 countries had bid at the sale. That’s still just a tiny fraction of the world’s 199,235 individuals who each were estimated byUBS and the consultancy Wealth-X to have more than $30 million cash to spend in 2013. In other words, despite all the media reports devoted to the relentless growth of the art market, that night at Christie’s it remained the preserve of the 0.1 percent of the 0.1 percent.
“It’s a relatively small pool of buyers,” Mr. Petterson said. “They’re financial people in a world of their own. But as long as this group finds monetary value and cultural status in these objects, that pool will remain stocked.”
nytimes.com
Discussion about this post