I was in listen-only mode for Sotheby’s conference call with stock analysts late Thursday to see if Bill Ruprecht, the firm’s president and chief executive, would venture to repeat his misleading claim about Wednesday evening’s Impressionist/modern sale results.
He didn’t.
While he twice boasted that Sotheby’s Impressionist/modern total was three times what it had been last year, he never repeated his previous assertion that the results “were near the high end of the presale estimate.” (Making the apples-to-apples comparison of hammer total to the presale estimate of hammer total, the results were, in fact, slightly below the midpoint of the low-high estimate.)
Now we’ll see if the art-market journalists at this week’s big contemporary art auctions also got my message.
Ruprecht also indicated to the analysts that despite Christie’s increased willingness to provide consignors with minimum-price guarantees, Sotheby’s would likely continue being conservative about taking such risks. The strongly performing 27 works from the Brody Collection at Christie’s were all
backed by guarantees.
The catalogues for this week’s evening contemporary sales show Sotheby’s offering no guarantees, compared to only two at Christie’s. (Both of those Christie’s lots have third-party guarantors, reducing or eliminating the auction house’s risk.)
Speaking of the big auctions, why would any megabucks purchaser in his right mind want to take up Roberta Smith‘s challenge to publicly identify himself? He would only expose himself as a target for the kind of denigrating media coverage served up in the NY Times by Roberta and, previously, by Holland Cotter, not to mention the British Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones, who decried the sale of Picasso‘s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” as “a theft of world culture, art history and beauty from we, the people, by
the super-rich.”
The only people who really need to know where such treasures are hidden are the museum curators who want to borrow them for exhibition and the scholars who want to study them for publication. The leading professionals usually do, eventually, find out where the masterpieces are buried, and can usually be relied upon to keep collectors’ confidences for the benefit of their own projects and, ultimately, the public.