Post-Auction Reports Identify Clients for Whom Dealers Bought Top Lots

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Last Wednesday, I noted that dealers had been the top bidders on a number of key lots in Christie’s contemporary evening sale, which caused me to observe:
[This] raises the question of how much of the results of this sale, which everyone had been eyeing warily as a barometer of the art market, were bolstered by dealers who have a big stake in its price levels….It is also entirely possible that the dealer-bidders yesterday were acting on behalf of their clients, not themselves.
After that, a couple of mainstream media reporters took the first of these two hypotheses one step further, by indicating that dealers were, in fact, bidding to support their artists’ prices. It wasn’t clear from what they wrote whether they had any hard information to go on.
Now Carol Vogel in the NY Times (here) and Colin Gleadell in the London Telegraph (here) have set us straight with detailed accounts of who bought what. It turns out that my second hypothesis was probably more correct: On the top lots, dealers were bidding for deep-pocketed clients, such as Laurence Graff, Eli Broad and Steve Cohen. Damien Hirst bought one of the two Bacons, the somewhat skull-like self-portrait, by phone.
Despite the strong results of the contemporary sales, both Vogel and Gleadell ended their pieces with pessimism about the market’s future.
Gleadell warned:
The bubble has not burst. But clouds are still gathering ominously.
We journalists always tend to look on the dark side.
Though my musings about possible dealer machinations last week my have been wrong, what I stated in my post about legendary contemporary dealer Leo Castelli‘s placing bids at auction to bolster the price levels of his artists was not speculation but fact. He said so himself—in a Nov. 9,1975 letter to the editor of the NY Times, and in comments he made to journalist/critic Grace Glueck for a Jan. 20, 1976 NY Times article. (If you have Times Select, you can find those two texts through an “advanced search” on Castelli’s name and the dates.)
With prices levels for top works now in the eight figures, I suppose it’s much less likely today for dealers to casually throw in a few inflationary bids.