Did The Art Market Go Crazy Again?

After a year of bad results followed by a rebound this Fall, it seems the high art market may have recovered its old nerve. I haven’t got the details yet but I hear via Twitter that Andy Warhol’s painting of dollar bills made a phenomenal $43.7m against an estimate of $8-$12m at Sotheby’s New York tonight! That’s bizarre and shows that common sense has failed in the art market once again. Plus ca change, plus le meme chose.

Update: Here is the NYT story on the sale.

Auction Update

Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Sale is going on as I blog.

Lucian Freud’s small painting of “Girl Reading” just about reached its estimates, selling for $3.8million.  And his iconic portrait of “Francis Bacon” barely crept over the lower estimates to fetch $9.4 million.  A third work, “Susie” didn’t sell.  Francis Bacon’s own “Portrait of Henrietta Moraes“, with pre-sales estimates between $9.5 million and $13 million, also appears not to have sold.

A number of Warhols are  being left on the shelf; presumably they didn’t meet their required minimums, and two Gerhard Richter’s also failed to sell.

The three new Chinese artists who were on display had mixed fortunes.  Yang Pei Ming failed to sell his “Autoportrait“, and a work by Yue Minjun sold for a few points less than the anticipated minimum.  However, Zeng Fanzhi almost doubled his estimate, selling an untitled work for $500,000.

To set my teeth on edge, it seems that Lucio Fontana is going to be the star of this show.   One of his la fine de Dio series just sold for an astonishing $15.6 million!   I really must be missing something.  The Inflated Phrases for this one include:

“Lucio Fontana’s Fine di Dio are a series of thirty-eight oval-shaped oil paintings made between March 1963 and February 1964 for three different exhibitions of his work held in Zurich, Milan and Paris. The supreme encapsulation of the ‘Spatialist’ art that he pioneered in the 1950s and ’60s, these works now stand as mystical icons that since their creation have proved themselves to be strangely prophetic of much about the way that modern physicists now view the cosmos.  Strange, mysterious and imposing, these punctured monochrome canvases in the shape of an egg are more than mere paintings. They are ‘Spatial concepts’ that invoke the fundamental mystery of the cosmos…”

On the other hand, I love Richard Prince’s “Dude Ranch Nurse #2” and I’m glad to see it reach $5.5 million.  I wonder if that is a record for him?

Almost at the end, a Damien Hirst medicine chest called “Untitled AAAAAAA” was left unsold after pre-sale estimates of around $400,000.

In all, the show had a value of around $50million.  But 19 of the 45 lots were left unsold, and I am sure that must be a disappointment.  Was it just the quality of the auction? Or is this a sign that money is tighter than it has been?  Hard to say yet.

Lucian The Small

The next auction that I have an interest in is at Christies, London, on October 19th.  It is a sale of “Post-War and Contemporary Art“.

The first thing that struck me from the catalog were the Notes attached to Jeff Koon’s “Jim Beam Log Car” (estimate up to $1.6m).  They are the epitome of the Inflated Phrases we have discussed before.

But the real treat comes as early as Lot 9:  “Girl Reading“, Lucian Freud’s portait of Lady Caroline Blackwood.

We are used to Freud’s massive images, but this is a tiny 8″ x 6″.

It still took an age to paint.  Blackwood has described sitting for Freud:  “Not only it is slow, but after six months you can be back to where you started. He not only paints the anguish of your age but he also paints the anguish of his sitters” (C. Blackwood, quoted in S. Aronson, Sophisticated Lady, p. 146).

And the pre-sale estimates for this almost-miniature run from $3.5 million to $5.2 million.

A little larger, at 14″ x 14″, is Freud’s portrait of the other giant, Francis Bacon from 1956/7.  The pre-sale estimate for this historic image goes up to $12.3 million.

The catalog also includes a number of works from young Chinese artists, some basic Warhols, along with works by Gerhard Richter, Lucio Fontana, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami and others.  It will be interesting to see if the “financial meltdown” has any effect on this end of the market.   I don’t expect it to.

What Price Genuine?

The day after Damien Hirst’s garage sale, art dealer Richard Feigen wrote an interesting piece about the dearth of connoisseurship and the rise of the factory.  He begins with an acknowledgment that the definition of art was revolutionized by Marcel Duchamp when,

he decreed that the term included found objects, that art need involve only the artist’s choice, not his hand—that the idea is the art. Now that can be true if the idea is profound enough, or the object beautiful enough … Once we accept that the artist’s hand is no longer necessary, only his idea, it’s a short leap to market the concept that beauty is not only no longer essential, it can even be turned into a dirty, “elitist” word.

This in turn has led gto the death of connoisseurship:

Connoisseurship is the identification of the artist by his handwriting. But if his hand isn’t there, the handwriting isn’t, and connoisseurship becomes a dead old discipline. Who needs connoisseurs? Why train them? Why not train museum director-administrators-fundraisers-construction supervisors?

… The artist can simply hatch an idea. Then comes the collaboration of an army of profiteers in “collectors’” clothes; of hungry auctioneers; of empire-building dealers; of trendy museum curators; a press bedazzled by mega-millions flooding in from every corner of the globe—art then has truly been transformed into an “asset class”

The end result is that

any image can be “copyrighted” if an artist gets there with it first. From Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-day dots and Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, it’s a short leap to Jeff Koons’ or Damien Hirst’s or Takashi Murakami’s factories turning the stuff out.  Shock value is enough for a copyright, whether it’s a putrefying shark or a platinum, diamond-studded neo-Augsburg memento mori or a three-dimensional cartoon or a huge, shiny toy dog.

And how, he asks, can we now tell the artist’s true handwriting?  How will be establish “fake” from “real” art?  He concludes that,

with “art” proliferating and the stakes so high, there may … be big rewards in store for the litigators.

Sale Ahoy!

Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art sale is underway as I type. Seven or eight lots have sold so far, including a Warhol self-portrait at $3,513,000 (slightly above the upper estimate) and a work by Richard Prince that sold for $1,497,000, about 20% above the upper estimate.

What we are waiting for, of course the Lucian Freud sale and a couple of major works by Francis Bacon.

Things move fast! As I typed the last line, Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies For Self Portrait” went for $28,041,000, in line with estimates from $25m to $35m, and another Warhol, a monochrome edition of “Last Supper” pulled in $8,777,000, near the top end of pre-sale expectations.

Wow! Warhol’s “Double Marlon” screen print just went for $32,521,000 — above estimate! I think that we are looking good for a record with Lucian Freud. The high estimate mood has been set.

Gerhard Richter’s massive abstract “Abstraktes Bild” was sold for an incredible $14,601,000 — way above the pre-sale estimate 0f $7m to $10m. That makes over $100m of sales in the first 30-40 minutes of the sale. Christie’s must be pleased.

Peter Halley should also be feeling pretty good. His “Dream Game” (a rather off piece, I think) was estimated to fetch $90,000 to $120,000 but actually sold for $457,000. He has another piece in a later auction, the estimate for which will no doubt be raised after this evening. Adolphe Gottlieb’s “Cool Blast” (1960) has gone for double the high estimate at $6,537,000.

OK, now we are talking real money. Mark Rothko’s “Number 15″ (see right) just made $50,441,000. The pre-sale estimate was private, but I suspect this was way above hopes.

De Koonig’s “Untitled IV” went for $12 million (within estimates) but Clyfford Still’s “1946 (PH-142)” broke through to $14,041,000, two million dollars above expectations.

Getting close to the Freud and another Bacon …

A Warhol soup can (“Pepperpot”) sold for $7,097,000, above estimate. I guess these old cans are like Old Masters in this market.

Roy Lichtenstein’s “Ball of Twine” was estimated at $14 million to $18 million. It is currently under the hammer, and seems not to have reached reserve.

Now, this is the one… Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” was snapped up at the high end of estimates for $33,641,000. This is almost exactly $10m higher than the previous price paid for a living artist (Jeff Koons, November 2007). Must make Freud’s in-the-wilderness days of the 1960s and 1970s seem so long ago.

Blogging a live auction was fun. I’ll see if I can do that again.

Update: Last night (Wednesday), Sothebys had a sale of contemporary art, with many of the same artists represented, and much the same high priced results.   The highlight was a massive triptych by Francis Bacon that sold for an incredible $86 million.  The grave disappointment (especially after #15 at Christies) was the withdrawal of Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow” without a bid.