Newark’s Quirks: Examining the Museum’s (& Sotheby’s) Art Sale Shenanigans

In my previous post on the Newark Museum of Art’s dicey deaccessions, I reported on the highlights (and low points) of its May 19 American art sales at Sotheby’s. Close readers of CultureGrrl readers may have noticed that I didn’t analyze the overall sale totals—my customary practice when covering auctions. Here’s why: It took a while for me to assemble the information I needed, because Sotheby’s now intentionally withholds the figures that I’ve habitually relied upon to evaluate results.

When I had recently asked the press office at the rival auction house, Christie’s, for “the complete price lists and totals—final prices, and hammer prices and hammer total” for its May 13th “20th Century Evening Sale,” its obliging spokesperson replied with alacrity: “Happy to pass along! Please see the docs attached, and do let us know if you need anything else.”

At Sotheby’s, it was a different story. Its spokesperson told me this:

Regarding totals last night, we only report aggregate (including fees) not hammer prices. So I don’t have a list of hammer price results that I can share.

To which I replied:

I’ve been covering auctions since John Marion was Parke Bernet’s (later Sotheby Parke Bernet) auctioneer and chief executive, and I have ALWAYS been given a list of hammer prices and hammer total, upon request. (Actually, there was no buyer’s premium at Sotheby’s New York, until some time after Christie’s introduced that fee when it opened in NYC.) The presale estimates are estimates of hammer prices, so one must compare hammer to estimates, not to final prices, to get apples-to-apples. [As it happened, two paintings from the collection of Anne Marion, John’s late wife, were offered in the same American art sale as the Newark works.]

Has Sotheby’s now changed the policy on this, which it had always followed in its dealings with me over decades?

I never got an answer to my testy question.

There’s no justification for trying to hide hammer prices and hammer totals: They are public information, readily available to anyone who attends the sales and knows how to add. Having observed the Newark sale online, I did Sotheby’s work—tallying the hammer results on paper, and checking my math on my calculator. The totals matched, proving that I still know how to add. (Even so, I sought to confirm all my numbers with the Sotheby’s press office, but received no reply.)

Even putting the hammer price of the unsold Remington at zero dollars (estimated at $400,000-600,000), Newark’s hammer total for its 11 offerings at the American art sale—$4.775 million, by my unofficial calculations—fell comfortably within the works’ $3.95-$5.77 million presale estimate (my unofficial calculation, adding up the estimates for the individual Newark lots). Newark’s take at Sotheby’s got a good head start, thanks to the outsized interest in a work it had offered a few days earlier—at the May 14 Impressionist/Modern day sale: De Chirico‘s Horse and Zebra by the Sea evidently hadn’t needed the extra security of the irrevocable bid that had been committed by an interested buyer in advance of the sale.

These steeds far outstripped their presale estimate:

In my 2008 Wall Street Journal article—Making Sales Look Stronger—and in my subsequent CultureGrrl post on Statistical Shenanigans, I explained how auction houses have encouraged misleading comparisons of final prices (including fees) to estimates of hammer prices, by not reporting hammer prices and hammer totals unless specifically asked to do so by pesky journalists (me).

Here’s an excerpt from my WSJ diatribe:

Press accounts, relying on the information released by the auction houses [emphasis added], don’t normally measure a sale’s success by comparing an object’s hammer price–the last amount announced by the auctioneer—with the presale estimate of hammer price. Instead, they almost invariably compare the estimate of hammer price to a figure arrived at by adding hammer price to the commission that the auction house charges the buyer. The result is an apples-to-oranges comparison that makes the sale results look better than they actually are, because they’ve been inflated by the commission.

There are more works yet to be offered from the 17 that Newark had announced it would be deaccessioning. Only 15 were publicly listed by Sotheby’s. A museum spokesperson told me that “for now, the 15 works on the list are those that have been presented for public sale this season.” I asked whether the other two works were being offered privately, but I have thus far received no reply. The public has a right to know what is being sold out of the public domain.

Two of Newark’s deaccessioned works have been publicly announced but have not yet been sold. They are monumental sculptures that “had been displayed in our sculpture garden for many decades since they were initially acquired,” according to the museum’s spokesperson. Under the current regime, these works have been deemed expendable:

Why offload signature works that had been acquired with the help of federal funds?

“We are now looking to give our visitors new experiences in our garden,” the spokesperson explained to me. “Additionally, the subsequent storage of these sculptures, in terms of space, was prohibitive for the museum.” 

In response to my query about the appropriateness of monetizing works for which the museum had sought and was awarded federal purchase funds, the museum’s spokesperson stated:

As part of our due diligence during the rigorous deaccessioning process, we communicated with the two federal agencies connected to the funding of these works.

A better solution for monumental works that a museum can’t exhibit (especially those that have been publicly funded) would be collection-sharing with other public institutions, such as the loans arranged by Houston Museum of Fine Arts director Gary Tinterow, back when he was the Metropolitan Museum’s curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art.

Newark’s Rosati and the Stankiewicz are due to be included in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Online sale, July 14-21. According to a Sotheby’s spokesperson, that sale “is not up online yet, as it’s still over a month away.”

With Newark’s holdings in a state of flux, perhaps it’s not surprising that clicking Collections Search on the museum’s website is, at this writing, a futile exercise: “The Collections Search is currently under construction…”

We don’t yet know what Linda Harrison, the current director of the Newark Museum (which reopens June 3), may decide to acquire with the auction proceeds (or how else she may decide to use that money, under the recently relaxed deaccession guidelines). It seems safe to assume, though, that many purchases will accord with the perceived need to “cast a critical eye on outdated and harmful narratives that have hung in our galleries without enough questions being asked” and to “right previous misrepresentations and ensure that as many voices as possible are heard.”

That mandate reads like an implied dig at Holly Pyne Connor, the museum’s curator emerita of 19th-century American art, who tellingly signed an open letter opposing Newark’s American art deaccessions and may have sensed that her less trendy area of expertise would be dismissed as “outdated.” After I posting my favorable mention of her 2006 show that focused on “the late 19th-century emancipated woman,” I recalled another of her feminist-friendly efforts that had attracted me to Newark, six years later:

All of which is to say that directors who want to broaden and redefine the scope of their institutions’ collections should think twice about bankrolling curatorial shopping sprees by cashing in works that had been purposefully accessioned by knowledgeable predecessors and admired by past visitors.

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