Kids

“The art market is such a mysterious organism. I will readily admit that seeing Andy achieve such high prices is somewhat exhilarating, a bit like watching your kid perform well in a sport.” 
Eric Shiner, Director Warhol Museum

To go

We posted on this great house designed by Austrian architect Fritz Eisenhofer last year when it was up for rent. Last week when we drove past it was playing second fiddle to the art garage-sale from hell.

End game

“I look at artists like a commodity balance sheet. I like to know the age of the artist, how long he was been painting, how many he does a year, how many come up at auction and the frequency, are the prices coming within the estimate or above or below, what the thresholds are, how each year the price has moved.”

Art-as-commodity dealer Olyvia Kwok talks about making money off the top end of the art market in the London Evening Standard

Now you know

"The reason there is so much talk about money is because it is  so much easier to talk about than art."
Art dealer David Zwirner

(Image via Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void)

By the numbers

The battle of the auction houses is up and running for a new year. Webb’s is publishing another of its mags showcasing results achieved and also previewing some of the star attractions for its first high-end contemporary outing at the end of March. No doubt Art + Object will be close behind. Webb’s top 10 prices for last year once again contradict all those who say art isn’t close to a predictable investment. The first six for instance are typical figurative paintings of well-known male artists all of whom have been setting auction records for years. There is only one abstract work in the list, Ralph Hotere’s banner work Vidyapati’s song at spot number 7.

The first and only woman in the list is Evelyn Page (go figure) but this year Webb’s seems to be pushing another female presence into the arena. That would be the artist known as Lillian Budd whose installation Modern world (a key work in the 1992 Headlands exhibition) is estimated in the first 2014 catalogue at between $50,000 and $60,000. This is a huge jump from the prices usually attached to experimental work of this kind even when its provenance is as good as this one. If Webb’s did achieve its estimate it would certainly bring new life to the market and bring NZ into line with overseas auctions that have been foregrounding contemporary work of this kind for a good while now.

The more things change

“Works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale are becoming articles of trade and following the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion.”
Prince Albert In a speech to Britain’s Royal Academy in 1851

Waving the flag

Changing countries used to be pretty punishing for artists but nowadays you can live, say, in Germany and still retain interest and maybe even a reputation back home (even a market!). It wasn’t always so. Artists like Jeffrey Harris paid a big price for relocating to Australia for a while and so too did Billy Apple when he moved to the United States in 1964 from London. In the time it took to cross the Atlantic Apple went from being a critical figure in the development of British Pop and particularly conceptual art to being virtually forgotten. For someone who was leading the UK charge for conceptual art Apple is simply not represented in British institutions (in its online catalogue the Tate has nothing) or in the British story.

All that may be changing as the UK starts to re-look at the late fifties and sixties giving the opportunity for neglected figures to be reassessed. Apple already has some serious support from the Mayor Gallery in London and now has been included in the recent Christie's show When Britain Went Pop! a curatorial/commercial mash-up designed to bootstrap UK Pop art into that rarefied 'museum-quality' air. So will Apple be sucked along in the jet stream of this promotional foray? At the moment it's still all Hockney, Blake, Hamilton and Jones in the media but Apple’s dramatic American flag featuring JFK is also attracting attention. There's another sign that Apple is being drawn back into the UK fold: he's just been interviewed by the indefatigable Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine Gallery.

Image: Billy Apple’s Xerox on fabric work The Presidential Suite: JFK in the Christie's exhibition When Britain went Pop!

Follow the money

When Andy Warhol said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” he might have been thinking of Webb’s recent broadsheet publication outlining where the contemporary art money flows through auction.

The big bucks all go to paintings of course and mostly painted by guys. And so (via the Australian Sales Digest) Webb’s tells us that the 50 most valuable works by Bill Hammond sold at auction raked in $3.7 million at an average of $74,000 each. Remember though that just three of the top 50 went for a combined total of $858,000 including Hammond’s top dollar sale of $293,000.

In the last 20 years Webb’s alone have sold 194 works by Colin McCahon bringing in $12 million. But Ralph Hotere, we hear you ask, what about Hotere? Well, his top 50 sales at auction have attracted $5.9 million with Webb’s best effort bringing in $315,000. The other heavy auction hitter of course is Shane Cotton with $2 million coming in from the top 50 sales and a highest price of $257,000.

King hit

Art museums often complain that prices have pushed them out of the room as collectors. The other day we saw the other end of this story. Walking into Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts we were stopped in our tracks by a truly great painting by Gerhard Richter. Very impressively it was purchased by the Museum the first time it was exhibited back in 1987, long before Richter was established as one of the most important artists of our time. Even to pay what has been described elsewhere as “significantly less than US$100,000” for a Richter back in 1987 would have required steady nerves. It was his first show in the United States and many years before the 2002 retrospective at MoMA that confirmed his reputation. Now over half of Richter’s abstract paintings are in public collections.

And how the marketplace loves Gerhard Richter. Even Richter thinks it's on another planet when it comes to his work. "It's just as absurd as the banking crisis. It's impossible to understand and it's daft.” Last year Eric Clapton sold one for $33.4 million making Richter at the time the world’s highest priced living artist. It’s big business the Richter business with total sales for the 30 years leading up to 2010 at $538,118,111, with the single boom year 2010 accounting for $76.9million of that total. So great call by whoever was in charge of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the late eighties.

Image: details from Gerhard Richter’s diptych AB Mediation 1986

The difference engine

"The art market is a distribution system. It’s a voting machine. Art History is a value system or a weighing machine."
Marion Maneker of Art Market Monitor

Mark it

Where would we be without the art market? As regular readers will know it's worth about two posts a week (bless it) for OTN. But in the UK art writer Sarah Thornton (Seven days in the art world) is as mad as hell and won’t take any more of it. She's stomped off leaving these ten reasons for not writing about the art market behind her.

1. It gives too much exposure to artists who attain high prices.

2. It enables manipulators to publicize the artists whose prices they spike at auction.

3. It never seems to lead to regulation.

4. The most interesting stories are libelous.

5. Oligarchs and dictators are not cool.

6. Writing about the art market is painfully repetitive.

7. People send you unbelievably stupid press releases.

8. It implies that money is the most important thing about art.

9. It amplifies the influence of the art market.

10. The pay is appalling.

OK, fair enough. Now here's our ten reasons why OTN still finds the art market totally entertaining:

1. You usually get it wrong (which is good medicine for show-offs).

2. In NZ at least the art market is one of the few areas where people are happy to express strong opinions about art

3. It gives a big group of university funded artists something to not participate in

4. It is run by dealers and auction people who have opinions, know a lot, and are better dressed than your average reporter.

5. It brings to the world of one of its most mysterious processes: the pricing of art.

6. Drama and excitement.

7. It’s a world free of wall texts, computer graphics and labels.

8. It is going into a time of fundamental change with bets off as auction houses compete directly with dealers and both try to work online

9. The “what’s it worth” conversation.

10. The chance to bet on how long it will be before Sarah Thornton writes on the market again.

You can get Sarah Thornton’s list with her annotations here

Colour me shameless

When we suggested McCahon black and white as a colour range derived from his late paintings, we were playing the irony card. Turns out the Guggenheim, with out so much as a hint of it, had beaten us to the finish line way back (thanks R). The Museum is in bed with the Netherlands company Fine Paints of Europe and is offering not only the colours of its building as the McCahon house did, but also colour riffs based on paintings from their collection. How do they do that?

“Each colour was carefully chosen from paintings in the Guggenheim galleries. The selection was then refined in consultation with exhibition designers to ensure the colours are appropriate for a variety of architectural settings. Fine Paints of Europe precisely matched each colour and created the final formulations. Each Classical Colour relates to the painting from which it was derived and the artist who created it.” Take that Matisse.

Images: Top gallery colours. Bottom, swatch of colours based on paintings from the collection

Dead reckoning

If you ever wondered why artists have an ambivalent attitude to the art market it is probably because that market believes the only good artist is a dead artist. The latest Artprice figures are out for the top 50 selling contemporary artists of the year. There are only six living artists on the list.

That’s what I want

Can you make money from art? Well, yes you can, although if you read the perennial can-you-make-money-on-art features in mags and newspapers, you’ll find most commentators prefer to front foot with don’t-buy-it-unless-you-love-it. 

Forgetting the all-you-need-is-love line for a moment, how much money can you make? Over the last twenty years, to use a technical term, lots. Quick resales of works by Bill Hammond and Shane Cotton in particular have reaped some very large rewards for people who didn’t want to live with their art for more than 10 to 15 years and, in many cases, as few as three or four.

Of course you have to sell at the right time as art is not very liquid (another technical term), but when you consider the amount made on Don Binney’s Kotare over the Ratana Church, Te Kao ($270,000 over 47 years from a purchase price of around $125), there is money, good money, delivered from the right works (i.e. best looking typical work - preferably figurative - of the highest reputation artists).

Take, for example, Colin McCahon’s He calls for Elias up in the next Art + Object sale. The painting was offered up for £12.12 (aka 12 guineas) at its first outing in 1959 and it is still in its original frame. Now auctioneers Art + Object reckon it will sell for somewhere between $500,000 and $700,000. 

And what is £12.12 worth in today’s inflation adjusted dollars? $497.00 that’s what. So you definitely stand to make a fair bit over the under-the-mattress method, even if it sells under the lower reserve. 

If you put the £12.12 into the bank and went with compound interest at 6% over the 52 years (you’d be lucky), you’d only be rolling in 5,768 dollar bills. 

So could some smart investor parlay £12.12 into $600,000 over 52 years? Sure they could, but we’d all be super impressed. Art at auction. Gotta love it.

Image: the back of McCahon’s He calls for Elias illustrated in the Art + Object catalogue. You can download the fully illustrated catalogue here

There were two in the bed and the little one said…

Ireland’s decision to appoint a commercial art gallery dealer as its commissioner for the Venice Biennale followed by his decision to chose an artist from his own gallery, highlights again the ethical challenges of close relationships between commercially driven art dealers and publicly funded institutions. Jenny Harper, director of the Christchurch Art Gallery, is perfectly clear where the chips fall. As she told The Art Newspaper in its September issue, “It is expensive and, as we know in New Zealand, often difficult for smaller countries to present at Venice. Clearly many parties – public, private and commercial – need to support a given artist, but such a blurring of the lines in this government-to-government invitation is disappointing. I believe the commissioner should be independent of all funding parties and am unimpressed with Ireland’s decision in this case.” 

Other commentators do not draw such a hard line suggesting that the blurring of boundaries between dealers and public art museums is well advanced and we should just get used to it. That seams to be the way we are going here in New Zealand where such blurring can be seen in close, long-term relationships between public institutions and commercial dealers, to the benefit of both.

Schadenfreude

There is a German word schadenfreude which means, loosely translated, to delight in the misfortune of others. Anyone connected with the visual arts recognises schadenfreude as one of the standard media postures. When Damien Hirst glutted his market by selling 200 new works in one day for a record-breaking £111 million, this is not factored in as one of the reasons for Hirst not selling well in a recessionary market.

“In March, Hirst consigned three big new works direct from his studio to Sotheby's first auction in Doha. None of them sold.” Reports the NYT. And why would they? No one but a lunatic optimist would expect them to when every Sheik and nearly every Russian Oligarch already owned one – or possibly half-a-dozen.

Here’s how the international media headlined the Sotheby’s evening contemporary art session on Tuesday. They came at it from all directions.

Sotheby's Sale Fails to Meet Low Expectations – WSJ
Bidders Respond to Lower Prices for Contemporary Art - Reuters
Sotheby's Contemporary Art Sale Slumps 87% From Year-Ago Record – Bloomberg
How the Contemporary Art Bubble Burst - Times
In ‘a Recalibrated Market,’ Auction Buyers Take Over - NYT

The biggest art's-in-the-rubbish-bin story was Jeff Koons’s Baroque Egg With Bow (Turquoise/Magenta) selling under its $6 million low estimate for a ‘mere’ $5.4 million to dealer Larry Gagosian. Sounds like bad news until you hear its owner, a hedge fund guy, purchased it five years ago for $3 million and had made at least $2 million profit.

They say the international art market is now back to 2004 levels. Still that's somewhat better than the US stock market which is slumped down to 1997 levels and the Japanese market at 1983 levels. Watch this space.
Image: Sotheby's Tobias Meyer in front of Christopher Wool's painting Comedian

And when they were up, they were up

So how much has the art market come down? Here is a chart from the Art Market Monitor that shows, averaging out recent sales, things are back to where they were in 2006 - in the US anyway.

By the numbers: Those were the days edition

2100 Number of staff currently working for Christies
200.8 The number in millions of US dollars paid for works at the Damien Hirst auction
30 The salary in thousands of dollars reportedly paid to staff working for Damien Hirst
50 The percentage of staff let go by Hirst after the auction
6000 The number of times work by the painter Zhang Xiaogang appreciated over one year ($US 1000 to $US6 million)
60 The number of assistants working for German artist Anselm Reyle
26 The estimated dollar value in billions for the global contemporary art market over the last eight years
983 The percentage increase in sales of contemporary Chinese art between 2005 and 2006
300 The percentage rise in the Russian stock market between 2000 and 2005
2365 The percentage rise in the contemporary Russian art market between 2000 and 2005
57 The dollar value of Sotheby’s stock in 2007
8 The dollar value of Sotheby’s stock in 2008
23 Highest price in millions of dollars paid for a Jeff Koons sculpture
4 The number of houses Amy Capellazzo, head of Christies contemporary art division, famously referred to in her statement “After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there?”
454 The number of contemporary art works that achieved more than $US1 million in the first half of 2006
15 The number of Chinese artists represented in the 35 most expensive contemporary artworks sold in 2007
1000 The number of contemporary artists that achieved auction record prices for their work in 2006

Growth industry

"Buyers are more selective and more speculative. Four years ago, you could buy something for £50,000. If we went back to that, it's not such a problem. What goes up must come down. It's like when John Lennon went to get his long haircut and someone asked him, 'Why are you cutting it? He said, 'What else can you do after you have grown it long?'"

Damien Hirst in the Independent

Hats off

Last week a Goldie painting, estimated at 240-280K (itself a wide enough margin for error one would have thought) sold for $400,000 ($454,00 with commissions). Even this price is around $50,000 shy of the figure the then-National Art Gallery (like so many national institutions, always a trend setter in pricing) paid 18 years ago for an admittedly bigger Goldie. It’s been a long haul getting to I-told-you-so prices on CF but, so long as we don’t do mean things like insist on dollar value corrections, the end may be in sight.
Image: The Goldie [Detail]
Oh, oh. It's only 8.15 am and an OTN reader tells us, "Goldie's Te Aho O Te Rangi Wharepu sold for $589,625 at Fishersonline in April 2004, the current auction record." Ok, so now this story is only about Goldies at auction.