In the CultureGrrl tradition of contrarian analysis, puncturing inflated market-hype balloons, here’s my alternate take on the recent major NYC evening auctions of modern and contemporary art, which saw some $2.5-billion worth of art change hands. In its wrap-up of the sales, Sotheby’s touted Spring ’22 as the “Biggest Auction Season the Market Has Ever Seen.”
Capturing the buoyant mood is this image of two high-ranking Christie’s executives jousting (and jesting) in friendly competition—bidding on behalf of competing clients at a major Christie’s evening auction last month:
Screenshot from the livestreamed auction
Notwithstanding the general euphoria, a dispassionate examination of the results suggests that the current frenzy might be less accurately described as “a bullish market” than as “a bulls#%t market.”
Some pundits have marveled at offerings at last month’s major auctions that seem to have outperformed traditional investment vehicles: The Dow Jones has recently taken a licking, while recent works by some relatively untested visual artists fetched bids that were multiples of their presale estimates, causing the NY Times‘ Jason Farago to go into “anaphylactic shock” (his own hyperbolical metaphor). The inflated prices, he said, “made even the 1980s and 2000s look like ancient history” [emphasis added].
A newborn in 1983 (as revealed in his own article), Jason wasn’t covering the art market back then. So let me provide some informed perspective on “ancient history” by quoting from my own immodestly titled 1982 book, The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf):
When a dramatic rise in the market is largely due to an influx of speculators, a dramatic fall is likely to ensue. This makes the recent emphasis on art-as-investment seem slightly ominous….Art prices took several years to recover from the effects of the 1974-75 recession [near the beginning of my own checkered career as an arts reporter and commentator], when large numbers of works failed to sell at auction and many newcomers to the art market, including Japanese buyers of Impressionist and modern paintings, abruptly withdrew.
I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to whether that situation may have relevance to the current state of affairs. For now, enjoy (while you can) the current upbeat mood: In its post-mortem sent to clients—Market Insights and Trends Witnessed in New York’s Spring Marquee Week—Christie’s congratulated itself on its “innovative 20/21 sales platform [which] elevated previously under-recognized artists’ markets to new heights”:
We achieved unprecedented prices for several young artists, including Anna Weyant, Shara Hughes, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Salman Toor, Amoako Boafo, Matthew Wong, Issy Wood and Ernie Barnes, to name a few. Of the 50 new artists records set at Christie’s over the week [with an additional 36 artists’ records boasted by Sotheby’s], 20 were for women and artists of color [at Christie’s].
I was particularly jazzed by this dance-hall scene, which set an auction record for the late Ernie Barnes, a professional football player as well as an artist, at Christie’s 20th-century art evening sale on May 12. Its reported buyer, Bill Perkins (who triumphantly tweeted about his new acquisition), is a hedge fund manager and high-stakes poker player—someone with such a high tolerance for risk that he was willing to pay more than $15 million for a painting bearing a $200,000 high estimate:
Hammer price at Christie’s: $13 million ($15.28 million with fees); high estimate of hammer price: $200,000
Here’s what Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti tweeted about that fluke:
Thank you Bill Perkins @bp22 for making auction history for #ErnieBarnes with all of us @ChristiesInc tonight! pic.twitter.com/1gWkuY09zm
— guillaume cerutti (@gcerutti) May 13, 2022
Some of the record prices in the recent sales were more expeditiously achieved: As I wrote here, “It’s easy to set an ‘auction record’ for emerging artists whose works have rarely appeared at auction.” It should also be noted, though, that bidding on some of the spring season’s most highly hyped works (bearing the heftiest estimates) fell below expectations: Underachievers at Christie’s included works by market stars Jeff Koons ($3.1 million hammer price, below low estimate of $3.5 million) and Gerhard Richter ($33 million hammer, below estimate of $35 million). Even the season’s star Warhol—“Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” from the collection of Thomas and Doris Ammann—estimated by Christie’s at “about $200 million” (but expected by many to bring much more) underachieved—stopping dead, after a few halting bids, at $170 million. (More on that here.)
And then there’s the puzzling case of Anna Weyant, 27, who had the improbable distinction of leading off not only Christie’s contemporary sale, but also two other major New York auctions last month—at Sotheby’s and Phillips. The only thing that renders this confounding concurrence semi-explicable is Weyant’s widely reported status as megadealer Larry Gagosian‘s girlfriend (some 50 years his junior). I know Larry has lots of influence, but who knew that his ability to move markets extended to orchestrating (directly or implicitly) the lead-off lots at three rival auction houses for one of his gallery’s lesser-known artists (who achieved outsized results)?
Sold at Christie’s for $1.2 million, trouncing its high estimate of $300,000
Speaking of market clout, Scott Reyburn, the art-market reporter whose analysis of the recent sales was particularly astute, noted the following in his NY Times analysis pegged to Phillips’ contemporary sale on May 18:
Experts say that the current huge discrepancies between “primary market” prices in galleries and “secondary market” auction resales for works by in-demand artists have been fueled by a global influx of wealthy young collectors, particularly in Asia, who follow the careers of emerging names on Instagram but who have no way of getting to the front of dealers’ waiting lists. Bidding at a public auction gives them access to the names they want even if it means paying what seem to be, to outsiders, irrational prices [emphases added].
Maybe “getting to the front” of the list of Weyant buyers helps them to be noticed by at least one dealer whose more illustrious artists they want access to.
As for the in-vogue notion that art may now be a better investment than traditional financial instruments, I can only say: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Whether the history of past “corrections” will be relevant to today’s manic art market remains to be seen…
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