Below the Mark

In reference to the auction held at Christie’s New York on Tuesday evening, one dealer was quoted by the New York Times as stating, “It was a night where the buyers did the editing.”

From The New York Times:

It was a thin sale of Impressionist and modern art, with just 40 works on offer and prices that fell below estimates. The evening totaled $65.6 million but had been estimated to bring at least $68.6 million.

Throughout the night at the salesroom at Rockefeller Center, what bidding there was took place mostly on the telephone … only 29 percent of the buyers were Americans, while 42 percent of the buyers were Europeans, a category that includes Russians.

There were some high points to what was clearly a disappointing evening. The star was an 1896 Degas pastel of a young dancer rubbing her foot, the image on the cover of the sale catalog. It brought $9.5 million ($10.7 million including fees to Christie’s), well above its $9 million high estimate. The winning bid was taken by Ken Yeh, deputy chairman of Christie’s in Asia.

(…) But not all such appealing images sold. One surprising failure was Pissarro’s “Pont du chemin de fer, Pontoise,” an 1873 landscape. Christie’s had estimated that it would bring at least $3.5 million. But there was only one bidder, who was not prepared to spend more than $3.2 million, so the painting went unsold. “I was surprised,” said Lionel Pissarro, a Paris dealer who is a great-grandson of the artist. “It is a beautiful painting and it wasn’t overpriced.”

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Vintage Posters

Poster Auctions International is hosting Soaring Posters, an auction featuring over five hundred lots, on November 8, 2009. The vintage posters to be auctioned are currently on display at the International Poster Center (IPC) in New York City. The items are available for free public viewing until Saturday, November 7, 2009.

From the IPC website:

HIGHLIGHTS: Aviation Posters (52 of the best, including classic early air meets and later airline images); Early American Theater (21 posters demonstarte how America’s show posters led to a theatrical phenomenon); A collection of Soviet Cold War posters, 20 fine Bicycle Posters; Olympic Posters (Paris, Amsterdam and Montreal); Rare and important Books & Periodicals.

 

 

 

 

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Old Masters Sales

During the summer, for the first time in years, old master paintings outsold contemporary, modern and impressionist works at a number of London auctions.

From The Art Newspaper:

Christie’s sale on 7 July reached a total of £20m, with 76% of the 63 lots selling–a 10% improvement on sell-through rates in recent years, bolstered by the inclusion of 19th-century paintings for the first time.

At Sotheby’s, the evening old master sale on 8 July brought in a total of £36m, compared with £33m for the summer impressionist auctions and £25m for the modern and contemporary sales. Both major auction houses have struggled in the latter categories to find strong material, reducing pre-sale price estimates.

This has not been the case for old master paintings, according to Sotheby’s department co-chairman George Gordon. “Estimates are no lower than two years ago–the market has been maintained,” he said…

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France and Droit de Suite

France has recently acquired a new Minister for culture, Frederic Mitterrand. He is trying to give Paris a bigger presence in the global art scene and world cultural presence. He aims to make museums in Paris free for all EU students, a long-term idea aimed at uniting museums west of Paris with auction houses and theatres to build more of a network, develop regional contemporary art funds called FRAC. 

However, one of the first topics on his agenda is what to do about artist resale rights, otherwise known as droit de suite. The argument is the droit de suite (most of the time imposed on the buyers) is deterring potential business in France, the EU, and UK, which have this law in place compared to the USA and Asia that do not.

The Art Newspapers covers this topic in its article How Will Mitterrand Handle Artist’s Resale Rights Dispute?

The UK recently implemented the artist resale, so it will be interesting to see from auction results whether it has in fact deterred sales and business in the arts.

Most people are saying they would like to see more liberalization of the paris art markets, which would mean the culture and finance ministries would work together to make Paris a more attractive destination for art markets.

ArtMark, A Romanian Art Initiative

ArtMark is an art commercial organization in Bucharest, Romania.

This Art Newspaper article gives an introduction to Artmark:

A major new commercial art venture, Artmark, has opened for business in central Bucharest. It will incorporate an auction house and two galleries, and is set to become the largest privately funded project in the Romanian art world. 

The organisation’s first auction, “The Winter Session”, was held in late December in Bucharest’s Radisson Hotel. This was followed by the opening of Artmark’s permanent headquarters, and the ArtSociety modern art gallery, in a palatial 19th-century building. Another gallery, Point Contemporary, specialising in contemporary art, will open in separate premises in the near future.

Now that Point Contemporary is near completion we can get a better idea of what this means for the Romanian art market.

An Art Newspaper article focusing on the new Project Point Contemporary in Bucharest:

Artmark, which also comprises an auction house and modern art gallery, is the largest commercial art project in Romania, with funding connected to the country’s richest individual, Dinu Patriciu. The Point Contemporary premises, visited by The Art Newspaper while under renovation, amounts to one of the most extensive spaces in Bucharest, with galleries covering two floors of a newly built villa in the centre of the city.

The sign of an emerging market in yet another emrging economy is a good sign for Romania and its people. More art for the people, a developing artistic community, entrance into the international art world, and it also means the country has enough people with money and interest in arts and culture.

The only caution I would have with ArtMark is that it is set up as a big commercial family with auction houses, contemporary galleries, and museums all concentrated in one area. Hopefully there will be enough diversity to have competitive auctions and galleries existing simultaneously.

 

Point Contemporary currently represents the following artists:

Antoaneta by Zoltan Bela

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sofa with Handles by Gili Mocanu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EDF (installation) by Claudia Radulescu

Christie’s New Red Hook Storage Space

The Dangerous Battle for Supremacy between art auction houses was highlighted by a New York Times article a few weeks ago:

“The company’s (Sotheby’s) auction sales for the first six months of 2009 added up to $994.8 million, only slightly more than half of Christie’s $1.8 billion. More alarmingly, it represents a 66 percent drop from the first half of 2008.”

 

 

This basically means that Christie’s is leading the battle (at least for now) and has taken measures to expand. It’s opening a New York Christie’s storage space in Red Hook Brooklyn where…

 ”come January, Christie’s executives say, the building will boast infrared video cameras, biometric readers and motion-activated monitors, as well as smoke-, heat- and water-detection systems.

Inside, the warehouse will hold the likes of van Gogh, Monet, Picasso and Brancusi, with each collection potentially worth more than the building itself.”

 

Christie’s is expanding to accommodate its clients and potentially show their strength and ability to survive over Sotheby’s as they build storage spaces near both their New York and Singapore locations. Previously, they only had a storage space near their London office.

These big industrial buildings found in Brooklyn and Queens are perfect for being turned into storage spaces, like the art storage company  SurroundArt.

 But come January, Christie’s executives say, the building will boast infrared video cameras, biometric readers and motion-activated monitors, as well as smoke-, heat- and water-detection systems.

Inside, the warehouse will hold the likes of van Gogh, Monet, Picasso and Brancusi, with each collection potentially worth more than the building itself.

Winnie the Pooh Items at Auction

Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh

The Fine Books & Manuscripts auctions department at Bonhams & Butterfields is organizing an auction with rare Christopher Robin related material, such as correspondence letters and black and white photographs between A. A. Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh series), his wife, and his son Christopher Robin.

These photographs give an idea of the kind of inspiration A.A. Milne had when creating Winnie the Pooh and the world around Christopher Robin, a very precious part of children’s literary history. This article highlights the items to be auctioned from the Milne family archive

The auction will take place on October 19, 2009

YSL Auction Gets ready for Round Two

The month of August tends to be a slow one for the art world, art galleries sometimes close down, their shows don’t show the latest finds, and art auctions are not as populated.

Basically it’s vacation time, people are refreshing for the challenging months to come with a slowly recovering economy and the past few months being packed with ’safer’ and already established artists and artworks as the main works on show.

However, in November Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge fans can prepare for round two of what is going to be another art auction from pieces in the duo’s art collection. Christie’s has another trick up its sleeve where it’s estimated to fetch up to 4 million euros ($5.7 million), it will be hard to outdo the last YSL art auction in February totaling a 342.5 million euros, the biggest record fro a private art collection

It will take place in the Paris Christie’s auction sale room on November 17, 18 and 19 2009

Mercedes Benz S Class 350L

The lots in the art auction will differ a little and include some of YSL’s personal items like his black Mercedes Benz S Class 350L dating from 2007 (ideal fetishist item), Fernand Leger’s 1950 gouache “Les travailleurs au repos,” and other items from their Paris apartments and house in Normandy.

Just like the previous auction the proceeds will go towards HIV research and the fight against AIDS.

Value Systems by Tim Griffin

Tim Griffin

Tim Griffin, a writer for ArtForum magazine has written a piece on value systems and questions what these mean and how they are made in our society with relevance to art.

“There is value, in other words, and then there are values—wherein the organization of the system is wrapped up not only in matters of supply and demand but also in the very substance of identity, both social and individual.”

“The comment obtains a kind of historical depth and perspective when considered alongside another observation made some thirty years ago by Richard Serra in a video appropriated by artist Seth Price: “Economic facility actually inhibits work from growing the way it could grow,” Serra says. “Most of our young artists get ripped off at a very early age, because they get stuck knocking out the same products.”

Yet the pairing of these two remarks today also raises the question of whether the “same products” could ever be, in fact, a shape-shifting thing—and whether, moreover, making an effort to elude the market is sometimes precisely to engage it, since to deviate from already accepted values might be to create another, perhaps even keener desire. After all, one could say it was difference—or a similarity in difference, a kind of shape-shifting in art—that got Trecartin noticed in the first place.”

Ryan Trecartin Mango Lady

“What makes both artists’ practices worth considering, then, is that they readily give a sense of the stakes for the subject inside the system—the person who must negotiate and navigate these larger conditions even while bearing their imprint. At what point is such an artistic endeavor mere gamesmanship? When is the artistic activity a symptom, and when is it a solution?

And for that matter, when are the critic, the gallerist, the collector, and the curator merely playing their given roles, needing some “evasion” on the part of artists in order to have a raison d’être? Such systemic dilemmas in art—which possesses a whole intellectual and financial economy of its own—find a canny counterpoint among those of society at large, prompting us to wonder what analogous transformation in artistic conception might be wanted in turn.”

Souren Melikian on Current Art Auction Market

Souren Melikian is a writer for the global arts section of the New York Times and is one of the most knowledgeable in the field of art markets giving a weekly insight into what the situation really looks like, especially in art auctions.

His most recent article tries to decipher why it is that art sales are down at Christie’s and Sotheby’s compared to last year (a 35% drop) by a tremendous amount but still manage to create worldwide records. This is a problem for art auction houses because somehow they have to convince buyers and sellers of art that the market is in fact as good as ever for buying and selling. Now is this a reality or are these the same kinds of illusions our favorite artists create for our enjoyment?

He says the reason why sales dropped is not because of a lack of consignments or a hesitancy from the side of buyers but simply because ” the offerings were miserable” the works were not good and that is all.

The Bagpipe Player in Profile

“The minute anything arguably rare and important appeared, enthusiasm broke out among bidders and world records were set.On Jan. 28, when gloom was deep in New York, Sotheby’s held its traditional midwinter Old Masters sale.

The contents were a mixed bag. However, an extraordinary painting stood out, Hendrick Ter Brugghen’s portrait of a “Bagpipe Player in Profile,” worthy of any museum. It became the most expensive work by the great Dutch master of the Northern Caravagesque school ever auctioned as it inched its way up to $10.16 million. Nor was it the only startling price in that sale.

French 18th-century painting at its most conventionally cute style is not riding high these days. This did not prevent “The Muse Erato” by François Boucher from soaring to $1.31 million, double its high estimate. The high failure rate that day, affecting 45 percent of the lots, largely reflected the undesirability of the goods.”

The Muse Erato

In an economy going under a recession this can be a terrible time for many people. Nonetheless, as survival of the fittest would have it, it’s also a time for downsizing and pretty much keeping the essentials, the strongest and best win (which by the way has nothing to do with fairness or justice it’s simply survival.)

What this can mean, however, for the artworks that stand out is that these are the ones that are in fact truly valuable no matter what recession is going on and it’s hard to say whether they would “do even better in a prosperous economy” or if this is the same value they would obtain in that ideal prosperous economy.

Maybe more truth comes out in a recession and the works that have created records seem to reflect this notion. The ones that don’t well maybe are simply lucky in a prosperous economy.