Sidewalk Chalk Art Contest and Historic Farmers Market still on in downtown Salem | South Central Illinois’ News, Sports and Weather Station
HUMBOLDT — A coming street festival aims to bring people to Humboldt’s downtown with an evening market, chalk artworks and live music.
The Humboldt Downtown Business Improvement District Streetfest Evening Market will be held Aug. 16 on Sixth Avenue beside the Humboldt and District Museum.
There will be vendors, food, bouncy castles and a barbecue hosted by Humboldt Collegiate’s Travel Club.
Live music includes the Horse’s Mouth from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., as well as Brian Grest and Walter Bushman from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Local artists Laura Kneeshaw and Dylan Burton will be working creating chalk art. Everyone is invited to see the works in progress and add their own creations to the pavement in the surrounding area.
Kneeshaw is based in Humboldt. Growing up in the new media era she began making art digitally from a young age, starting with computer graphics and moving to a painterly style over time. She is self-taught and has studied art full-time since 2015. Currently, she is exploring ways to bring visual internet culture offline while using digital techniques in traditional oil painting. Laura’s work uses shape, design, and high contrast colour to create striking images with unique personalities. Focusing on portraiture, she aims to showcase how individuals present themselves online. Her work is heavily influenced by art movements such as tonalism, American realism, and draws a lot of inspiration from the baroque period.
Dylan Burton has been making chalk art since her childhood and has slowly expanded from making chalk doodles to more advanced creations. Dylan’s family has been very supportive of her hobby, often buying out a store’s chalk supply when she would run out. One of Dylan’s favourite things about chalk art is that she can share her art with a lot of people and hopefully make their days a little brighter. Besides chalk art, Dylan also enjoys writing, crocheting, and acting. Dylan is an artist at heart and likes to make things that others can see and enjoy.
The Humboldt Fire Department drone program will take aerial photos and video of the chalk artworks created during the Street Fest Evening Market event which will be shared on our website.
Free chalk is available at the Museum from August 1-16th (while supplies last) for anyone who wants to create their own works of art on the sidewalks of Humboldt.
This article is part of the Artnet Intelligence Report Mid-Year Review 2023. Marking five years of our biannual Intelligence Reports, this inaugural half-year edition paints a data-driven picture of today’s art world, from the latest market results to the artists and artworks leading the conversation. Read the full report here.
As the fine-art auction market has grown more and more financialized in recent years, it has also grown more and more opaque to nearly everyone except the auction houses, their consignors, a small group of wealthy financiers who have become increasingly pivotal to the sector’s inner workings, and various agents and intermediaries for the aforementioned parties.1 The irony is that the business of auctions has never before delivered such impressive sales totals so consistently, even as it has never before so consistently presented such difficulty to observers hoping to plainly understand (let alone quantify) demand for individual lots, artists, genres, and the overall market.2
In an earlier era, perhaps the greatest impediments to a clear view of the fine-art auction market were mathematical, in that final prices reported by the auction houses included the buyer’s premium, a sizable fee owed by the winning bidder and calculated as a percentage of each lot’s hammer price (i.e., winning bid).3 Buyer’s premiums vary slightly from auction house to auction house, but in general, the percentage declines as the hammer price increases through a series of predetermined price brackets (which themselves differ slightly from house to house and from dominant regional currency to dominant regional currency).4 Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and other houses have also raised their buyer’s premiums multiple times over the years, making historical comparisons of demand in the fine-art auction market even more challenging.5
Auction houses have long preferred to communicate only the larger premium-inclusive prices to the media and the public, a practice that muddies comprehension of the auction market in multiple ways: first, by making it more difficult to seamlessly compare sales results with presale estimates, as the latter omit the buyer’s premium; and second, by intimating that competition for the lots in question was more active than actual bidding reflected.6 The complication radiates outward via auction price databases, which generally log only final, premium-inclusive prices to match each house’s public-facing records. (This is also true for the Artnet Price Database; all prices in this article include the buyer’s premium unless otherwise expressly noted.)
And yet, the houses’ preference for reporting premium-inclusive prices adds only a relatively modest amount of opacity in comparison with an array of extenuating financial circumstances negotiated between houses, consignors, financiers, and various intermediaries for select lots.7 Below, four of the most important such scenarios in the present-day fine-art auction market.
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The auction house agrees to pay the consignor a guaranteed amount for one or more lots, regardless of the outcome of the public sale. While guaranteed lots are indicated as such to the public in presale materials (typically including a distinct icon in the online lot listing), the actual amount of the guarantee is known only by the house, the consignor, and any agent(s) working on behalf of the involved parties.
In advance of the public sale, the auction house secures an agreement from a third party to bid a certain amount for one or more lots. If the irrevocable bid wins during the live sale, then the irrevocable bidder acquires the lot, typically for that bid plus the buyer’s premium but less a financing fee paid by the house in the form of a discount on the final sale price. If another bidder tops the irrevocable bid, then the irrevocable bidder typically receives a percentage of the difference between their bid and the winning bid. While lots with an irrevocable bid are indicated as such to the public (typically including a distinct icon in the lot listing), the actual amount of the bid is generally known only by the house, the consignor, the irrevocable bidder, and any agent(s) working on behalf of the involved parties. (One minor nod to transparency: when an irrevocable bidder wins a lot, U.S. law requires houses to revise down the final sale price to reflect the discount given as a financing fee.)
The auction house agrees to pay the consignor a percentage of the buyer’s premium for one or more lots. Unlike guaranteed minimum prices and irrevocable bids, enhanced hammer deals still were not specifically indicated to the public by Christie’s, Sotheby’s, or Phillips as of June 1, 2023, and the actual amount paid to the consignor is known only by the house, the consignor, and any agent(s) working on behalf of the involved parties.
A party with a direct or indirect financial interest in a given lot registers to bid on said lot. Examples include a co-owner of the lot and a beneficiary of the estate from which the lot has been consigned. The only scenario in which the house discloses the identity of the financially interested party is when the auction house itself owns the lot in whole or in part. Even in this case, the house indicates to the public only that such an arrangement exists for a lot (typically using a distinct icon in the lot listing); the exact nature or size of the financially interested party’s stake is not detailed to the public.
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As the definitions above show, these presale deals and ownership complexities create obstacles to understanding not only how much was paid for many lots but also who won them and through what mechanism, as well as which party bore the risk en route to the lots’ acquisition by new buyers. In fact, even the overview above simplifies the landscape to some extent; against the auction houses’ wishes, an unsanctioned secondary market for irrevocable bids has developed among financiers in recent years.12 Further, the above summary does not reflect financial arrangements made on the buyer side, including extended payment terms to attract bidders.
Houses and consignors have also become increasingly willing to voluntarily withdraw lots attracting relatively weak presale interest in order to prevent them from being publicly bought in (or “burned,” in auction parlance).13 This maneuver boosts sell-through performance at public auction, helps preserve lots’ future resale value for the owners, and can provide appealing inventory for the houses’ private sales departments, which undertake the job of finding buyers for works under more discreet, less pressurized conditions.14
Whether coincidentally or not, the recent rise in presale withdrawals has taken place alongside multiple larger shifts toward opacity in the fine-art auction sector. Major auction houses, including Christie’s and Phillips, have reduced or discontinued production and distribution of physical auction catalogues since 2020.15 This decision has made it even harder to track withdrawn lots, which are typically removed entirely from the houses’ public-facing online records.16 Upon being acquired by telecom magnate Patrick Drahi’s BidFair USA, in 2019, Sotheby’s joined the world’s two other largest auction houses—Christie’s and Phillips—in being privately owned and thus freed from the requirement to publicly report extensive financial results on a regular basis.17 Last but not least, in the summer of 2022, New York City repealed all industry-specific regulations governing auctioneers, thereby allowing houses of all sizes to disclose less information to consignors, bidders, and the general public than before.18
However, at least one certainty remains in this increasingly complex market: every year, fine artworks in the market’s uppermost price echelon have an outsized effect on the overall performance of fine art at auction. More specifically, the availability and performance of so-called trophy lots—works of fine art sold for more than $10 million each—have never been more important.19 In 2022, lots sold for more than $10 million each made up the single largest portion of the fine-art auction market by value, and this price bracket was also the only one to increase in total sales year over year, according to the Artnet Price Database and Artnet Analytics.20
The financialized nuances of the fine-art auction market impact the highest-priced lots more than any other sector of the market, whether the focus is on house guarantees, withdrawn lots, or other extenuating circumstances.21 This makes intuitive sense: the higher the stakes, the more inclined sellers and auction houses alike may be to limit their downside risk using the tools available.
The major Christie’s and Sotheby’s evening auctions held in New York in May 2023 provided a sampling of the financial aspects of the 21st-century auction landscape. The executors of the S.I. Newhouse estate negotiated a guarantee to cover all works from the collection offered by Christie’s, including in its latest dedicated single-owner evening sale, on May 11, 2023.22 In contrast, the heirs of the Gerald Fineberg estate opted for an enhanced hammer deal from the same house on all works consigned from the collection.23 The dangers of eschewing house and/or third-party guarantees were exemplified when Picasso’s Femme assise au chapeau de paille (MarieThérèse) (1938), carrying a presale estimate of $20 million to $30 million, failed to sell on a maximum bid of $18.5 million during Christie’s 20th-century art evening auction.24
Sotheby’s, meanwhile, made minimum price guarantees for the star lots in its marquee May evening sales, then accepted irrevocable bids for both works: Gustav Klimt’s Insel im Attersee (1901–02), which hammered at $46 million, slightly above its estimate in the region of $45 million; and Louise Bourgeois’s Spider (1996), which hammered at its low estimate of $30 million.25 Sotheby’s also withdrew Yoshitomo Nara’s 1998 painting Haze Days, despite its status as the anchor lot of “The Now” evening sale; the work had the highest estimate ($12 million to $18 million) of the event but, notably, no house-guaranteed minimum price or irrevocable bid.26
The relationship between the growing importance of trophy lots and the growing financialization of the fine-art auction market is symbiotic. As prices for the most sought-after artworks have escalated to higher levels, the cost of losing such artworks to a rival auction house has escalated in kind, along with the financial arrangements required to win consignments and incentivize buyers.
This dynamic has created something of a feedback loop at the apex of the auction market for fine art: as the owners of highly prized artworks have seen estimates and sale prices in the auction sector rise significantly, the potential for similar (if not greater) gains has motivated them to drive harder bargains when consigning to major auction houses, which must then compete to offer the most favorable terms, incentivizing the houses to offset the corresponding financial risk by negotiating irrevocable bids with third parties. But by ensuring that trophy lots continue to sell for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars through such financialization, the houses arguably put pressure on themselves to repeat the process with the next wave of major auctions.
Recent auction data helps us frame the scale and proliferation of prices, guarantees, and irrevocable bids herein. Across the nine fine-art evening auctions held in Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips’s New York salesrooms in May 2023, the three houses made minimum price guarantees for 87 out of the 332 lots on offer before withdrawals (26.2 percent by volume). The combined low estimate of the 87 guaranteed lots was $730.9 million, an amount totaling roughly 57.1 percent by value of the $1.28 billion aggregate low estimate of all 332 works in those same auctions.27 Yet the houses also accepted irrevocable bids on 85 lots whose combined low estimates reached $663.5 million, equating to roughly 52 percent by value of the aforementioned $1.28 billion aggregate low estimate.28
In terms of the impact on trophy lots, we have utilized the Artnet Price Database and Artnet Analytics to determine that 32 artworks in the above auctions carried presale low estimates of more than $10 million each, with their aggregate low estimates totaling $648 million. Of those 32 lots, we found that 22 of them (68.8 percent by volume) came with house guarantees, and 22 (68.8 percent by volume) also had irrevocable bids. Further, we calculate the combined low estimate of the lots with house guarantees was $489 million, while the combined low estimate of the lots with irrevocable bids was $487 million—meaning each financial arrangement had been made for just over 75 percent of the $648 million low estimate of all trophy lots by value.
Although the data above covers only one seasonal auction cycle in one major auction market, it suggests that trophy lots correlate to the financialization of the fine-art auction sector much more strongly than works in lower price brackets. In the absence of comprehensive public data about the dollar value of guarantees and irrevocable bids, studying the performance of trophy lots becomes perhaps the best proxy for understanding the private machinations that increasingly shape the peak of the public auction market.
Our analysis looks at the price bracket for lots sold above $10 million from January 1 through May 20 in each year since 2018. In concert with the Artnet Price Database and Artnet Analytics, we separated the broad “trophy lots” price bracket into a series of more specific high-end brackets: lots sold for more than $10 million through $25 million; lots sold for more than $25 million through $50 million; lots sold for more than $50 million through $75 million; lots sold for more than $75 million through $100 million; and lots sold for more than $100 million.
To provide further insight, we examined those price brackets’ interaction with secondary factors, including genre of artwork, city of sale, and type of evening auction (meaning, the regularly scheduled “marquee” evening sales, with the highest-priced lots, held seasonally by Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips worldwide, versus premier single-owner collection evening sales). The analysis focuses on fine art, which includes paintings, works on paper, sculptures, prints, photographs, digital artworks, and more, from artists born from 1250 to the present; it excludes decorative art, defined here as encompassing antiques, antiquities, and collectibles of all other types.
Source: Artnet Price Database and Artnet Analytics.
The data shows that the trophy-lot category is not quite as top-heavy as one might think: the 15 lots that sold for more than $75 million during the sample period since 2018 made up about $1.5 billion, or only about 17.5 percent, of the $8.8 billion in sales generated by all trophy lots during that period.
In terms of total sales of trophy lots, the only year in the sample period quieter than 2023 was 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic upended the auction calendar. Less than $1.2 billion worth of trophy lots changed hands between January 1 and May 20, 2023—and no lots at all traded for more than $75 million. The only other year in the data set where that happened was, again, 2020.
In fact, the dollar value of trophy-lot sales in 2023 was less than half the $2.4 billion generated by such sales in 2022, when the “Big Three” houses’ usual marquee evening art auctions were supplemented by dedicated single-owner auctions of works from the collections of Texas oil heiress Anne H. Bass; Swiss sibling art dealers and collectors Thomas and Doris Ammann; real-estate tycoon Harry Macklowe and his ex-wife, Linda Macklowe; and David M. Solinger, the first president of the Whitney Museum of American Art who was not a member of the Whitney family. (More details on the sales split between these two categories later.)
In terms of quantity, in only two years were fewer trophy lots sold during the sample than the 53 traded in 2023. Those years were 2019, which saw 51 lots sold for more than $10 million, and 2020, which saw only eight such lots. Supply was especially limited at the top: in 2023, no lots at all had been sold in the price brackets above $75 million by May 20; the only other year for which this was the case was 2020. (More on supply when we look at trophy lot sales by auction type later.)
Source: Artnet Price Database and Artnet Analytics.
Trophy-lot sales volume remained concentrated in Impressionist and Modern works (defined here as those made by artists born from 1821 through 1910) throughout the data set, especially when it comes to fine artworks sold for more than $50 million. Except in 2020, the Impressionist and Modern genre did not see aggregate trophy-lot sales dip below $600.5 million (the 2023 total) during the sample period, and there were only two years in the past six (2020 and 2023) in which the genre generated less than $325.4 million in sales for artworks traded for more than $50 million each.
Even the closest competitor to the Impressionist and Modern genre—the Postwar and Contemporary genre (defined here as consisting of works made by artists born from 1911 through 1974)—has lagged significantly behind.
Postwar and Contemporary trophy lots have not outsold their Impressionist and Modern counterparts by value. The closest they came was in 2021, when the sales volume for Postwar and Contemporary trophy lots was $586 million against $727.8 million in sales for Impressionist and Modern trophy lots. The biggest divide between the genres was in 2018, when the $1.5 billion worth of Impressionist and Modern trophy sales topped the equivalent total for Postwar and Contemporary ($546.7 million) by more than $953 million.
Old Master trophy lots have performed better since the pandemic than before, generating at least $80 million in total sales in the sample period of every year since 2021. (We define Old Masters as artists born from 1250 through 1820.) In contrast, only one trophy lot by an Ultra-Contemporary artist (defined as any artist born in 1975 or later) was sold during the sample period: Beeple’s Everydays – the First 5000 Days (2021) in 2021, for $69.3 million. (See the final section of this article for more details.)
Source: Artnet Price Database and Artnet Analytics.
New York City was the dominant market for fine artworks sold for more than $10 million in the studied period. The exception was the COVID year of 2020, when London bested New York by roughly $91 million in trophy-lot sales—a quirk of timing, in that London’s major February evening sales were able to go on as planned, whereas the virus’s subsequent spread forced the postponement and restructuring of the usual marquee evening sales in New York in May.29 Otherwise, London routinely placed a distant second, trailing New York in trophy-lot sales by at least $726.9 million each year during the sample period.
The disparity was especially pronounced when it came to artworks that sold for more than $50 million each at auction. Setting aside 2020, the closest the two hubs were at this price level was in 2023, when New York auction houses sold $120.3 million worth of fine artworks traded for more than $50 million each and London houses sold none at all. London’s apex in such transactions arrived in 2022, when the city’s auction houses sold $187.5 million worth— and New York’s sold $709.6 million worth. New York and London were the only two cities that sold even a single fine artwork for more than $50 million during the period studied. In 2022, London became the only city besides New York where an artwork sold for more than $75 million in any of the past six years through May 20, when L’empire des lumières (1961) by René Magritte found a buyer for more than $79.4 million in 2022.
Except for the industry-wide anomaly of 2020, Hong Kong trended up steadily as a trophy lot sales destination in the period studied. Sales at the top of the market peaked at nearly $213.8 million in 2021. However, they fell by nearly 50 percent year over year in both 2022 and 2023, to $139 million and $67.4 million, respectively. This tracks with a larger drop in supply spread across all price brackets in Hong Kong in 2022—perhaps an effect of the unusually high number of works to have come to auction the prior year—as well as larger strains on the Chinese macroeconomy in 2023.30 Paris has been trending up in this competition lately. Granted, it took until 2021 for the city to sell its first trophy lot: another Magritte painting, La vengeance (1936), which brought roughly $17.4 million in its auction debut. Paris nearly quadrupled its trophy-lot sales year over year, selling three works for a combined $65.4 million in 2022 before coming up empty in 2023.
Source: Artnet Price Database and Artnet Analytics.
Although sales of trophy lots in marquee evening auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips peaked in 2018 at just under $1.5 billion, such auctions have delivered less than $1.2 billion worth of such sales only twice during the sample period: the outlier COVID year of 2020 and 2023. Sales of trophy lots in marquee evening auctions were down nearly 43 percent by value year over year through May 20, 2023, with total sales landing at $823.4 million. Notably, no fine artworks traded above $75 million in marquee evening auctions in 2023, while at least two lots sold at that lofty price level in every other year in the data set except 2020.
Single-owner sales have become an increasingly large part of the conversation surrounding auction performance in recent years, but their impact on trophy-lot sales has been volatile during the sample period. One year after $590.6 million worth of trophy-lot sales were generated via single-owner evening auctions in 2018—notably, the year that the Peggy and David Rockefeller collection set a then-record for the largest single-owner collection at auction, largely thanks to a dedicated evening sale in May—the same figure for the relevant period dropped to a mere $45.1 million. After an understandably silent showing in 2020 ($0), trophy-lot sales in single-owner evening auctions rose to $142.7 million in 2021. Then, in 2022—when works from the Ammann, Bass, Macklowe, and Solinger collections were the subject of dedicated evening auctions—that number burgeoned more than fivefold, to $746.7 million, before receding to $241.4 million in 2023.
The supply (or lack thereof) of the very highest-priced lots marked the difference between healthy and anemic years of trophy sales in single-owner evening auctions during the period studied. Setting aside 2020, when zero trophy lots were sold in single-owner evening auctions, the three worst-performing years (2019, 2021, and 2023) saw no lots at all sell for more than $50 million each in single-owner evening auctions. By contrast, the best-performing year (2022) saw four such lots bring a total of $394.3 million in single-owner evening sales, while the second-best-performing year (2018) saw three such lots bring $280.4 million. Taken together, the data suggests that any year of high-volume trophy-lot sales in single-owner evening auctions is routinely followed by a down year of the same, a correlation that likely speaks to the reliance of single-owner evening auctions on estate sales of extreme consequence, the timing of which are unpredictable by nature. (The Macklowe auction, the result of a divorce settlement, is the rare exception.)
Although the single-owner evening auctions’ trophy-lot sales were therefore uneven in the relevant period, their volume increased appreciably over time compared with the equivalent in marquee evening sales in the timeframe examined. In other words, the overall supply of artworks selling for more than $10 million each seems to depend more and more on the number of major single-owner collections offered in standalone evening auctions over the time period in question. While the two figures diverged by nearly $1.3 billion in 2019, the differential declined to slightly more than $1 billion in 2021, then to $692.3 million in 2022, and finally to $582 million in 2023. Only time will tell if this trend persists, but it is a relationship that bears watching.
Complementing the macro analysis in the prior section, below are capsule studies of six trophy artworks. All were selected from a list of the 15 highest-priced fine artworks sold at auction during the January 1 through May 20 sample period from 2018 through 2023. Each artwork was chosen for how it illustrates or expands upon one or more major themes discussed.
Nu Couché (sur le côté gauche) (1917). Photo by Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images.” width=”1024″ height=”536″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-1-1024×536.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-1-300×157.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-1-1536×804.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-1-2048×1072.jpg 2048w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-1-50×26.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-1-1920×1005.jpg 1920w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché (sur le côté gauche) (1917). Photo by Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images.
Based on macro data, Modigliani’s reclining nude represents the platonic ideal of a trophy lot in terms of genre (Impressionist and Modern) and city of sale (New York). Impressionist and Modern artworks accounted for between 55.8 percent and 73 percent of trophy-lot sales by value in every year studied except 2021, when the genre accounted for only 49.3 percent ($727.8 million) of the nearly $1.5 billion worth of sales.
The New York skew was even more pronounced, as auctions in the city sold between 66.1 percent and 85.1 percent of all trophy lots by value in five of the past six years. (Here, the anomalous year was unsurprisingly 2020, when New York houses sold two trophy lots for a combined $29 million, roughly 14.9 percent of the $194.9 million worth of such artworks sold at auction worldwide.)
Nu Couché (sur le côté gauche) is also one of just five lots sold for more than $100 million during the sample period since 2018—and one of just two sold for more than $150 million. However, the high-stakes work hammered at $139 million, considerably below its $150 million presale estimate; it also carried an irrevocable bid.31
Rabbit (1986). Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images.” width=”1024″ height=”906″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-2-1024×906.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-2-300×265.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-2-1536×1358.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-2-2048×1811.jpg 2048w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-2-50×44.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-2-1920×1698.jpg 1920w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Jeff Koons, Rabbit (1986). Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images.
In 2019, Rabbit became the most expensive fine artwork by a living artist ever sold at auction. Part of the reason this record still stands more than four years later is the gleaming metallic sculpture’s sterling provenance—a major driver of value among trophy lots. Rabbit came to Christie’s from the estate of publishing tycoon and renowned collector S.I. Newhouse, who acquired it from Gagosian in 1992 and kept it in his collection for the remainder of his life. Gagosian, for his part, bought the sculpture from a private collector who had acquired it on the primary market from Koons’s then-gallerist, the famed Ileana Sonnabend.32 This made the May 2019 Christie’s sale not only the first time Rabbit had returned to the market in 27 years but also the first time it had ever appeared at auction, ensuring that it was fresh to market and thus a significant draw to buyers. The work was offered without a house guarantee or an irrevocable bid.
In retrospect, the sale of Rabbit signified that the fine-art auction market had entered an era in which demand for Postwar and Contemporary trophy lots rivaled that for more time-tested works. It marked the first time in the period studied that a work from the Postwar and Contemporary genre sold for more than $75 million. In fact, two such lots found buyers at this lofty price level on the same night: Rabbit, and Robert Rauschenberg’s silkscreen Buffalo II (1964), which Christie’s New York sold for $88.8 million.
The combined $179.9 million brought by that pair eclipsed the equivalent total brought by all Impressionist and Modern lots that sold for more than $75 million that year. (The only entry in the latter category was Claude Monet’s 1891 haystack painting Meules, which sold for $110.7 million at Sotheby’s New York a day earlier.) The Postwar and Contemporary genre repeated this feat in 2022, proving that the dynamic created by Rabbit was not a one-time occurrence.
The Splash (1966). Photo by Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images.” width=”1024″ height=”704″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-3-1024×704.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-3-300×206.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-3-1536×1056.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-3-2048×1407.jpg 2048w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-3-50×34.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-3-1920×1319.jpg 1920w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
David Hockney, The Splash (1966). Photo by Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images.
That The Splash (which carried a house guarantee from Sotheby’s) was the top-selling fine-art lot during the sample period in 2020 highlights just how anomalous that pandemic year was for the auction sector. At roughly $29.9 million, The Splash would not have been among even the 10 priciest lots in any other year in the period studied.
It was not even a particularly expensive work by Hockney. Consider, for example, that his Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972), sold for an artist record of $90.3 million in November 2018.33 For comparison within the sample period, note that Hockney’s double portrait Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969) sold for £37.7 million ($49.5 million) in March 2018—only the ninth most expensive lot by any fine artist to change hands during the sample period that year.
Due to extraordinary global events that disrupted the auction calendar, many consignors chose to hold their choicest works back from the market in 2020.34 Only eight fine artworks fetched more than $10 million between January 1 and May 20 that year. Notably, six were sold in London during the month of February. The other two crossed the auction block in New York’s January sales of Old Masters and brought a combined total of barely more than $29 million—about $900,000 less than The Splash on its own.
These sales further contextualize how and why London auction houses outperformed New York’s in total sales of trophy lots during the sample period in 2020—again, the only time London has done so since 2018. The Splash was not just the only artwork to be sold in London for between $25 million and $50 million; it was the only fine-art lot to be sold for more than $25 million anywhere in the world in 2020. For comparison, four works were sold in London for more than $25 million during the equivalent period in 2019 and 2022, respectively, while New York auction houses sold at least 12 artworks for more than $25 million each during the sample period of every year under examination, with the lone exception of 2020.
Everydays: the First 5000 Days (2021). Photo by Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images.” width=”1024″ height=”683″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-4-1024×683.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-4-300×200.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-4-1536×1024.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-4-2048×1366.jpg 2048w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-4-50×33.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-4-1920×1280.jpg 1920w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Beeple, Everydays: the First 5000 Days (2021). Photo by Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images.
Everydays – the First 5000 Days, a digital collage backed by an NFT, was responsible for a string of “firsts” and “onlys” among the annual lists of the 15 top-selling fine artworks at auction during the period ending May 20. It is the first and only one made by an Ultra-Contemporary artist (defined as artists born in 1975 or later); the first and only digital trophy lot; the first and only trophy lot sold in an online-only auction; and the first and only trophy lot to be sold directly from the artist’s studio during the sample period.
Experts can debate whether these traits make Beeple’s (aka Mike Winkelmann’s) work a turning point, an exception that proves the rule, or something in between. What is without question is that its unexpectedly high price initiated a surge of interest in NFTs in the fine-art auction sector that has had a lasting legacy. Though results have yet to be repeated at this level, Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips all still regularly offer NFTs in 2023, and nearly two years ago, Sotheby’s even launched a dedicated platform for blockchain-based works called Sotheby’s Metaverse.35
Although it may seem unusual in retrospect that the work carried neither a house guarantee nor an irrevocable bid, it is important to remember that Christie’s started the bidding for Everydays at $100, implying that the work was not considered a trophy lot before the sale.36 Yet it is now in rare company. Across all genres, only 36 works have sold for more than $50 million during the sample period from 2018 through 2023, good for a combined $2.8 billion worth of sales.
As in the Ultra-Contemporary genre, only one Old Master artwork sold at this level through May 20 in each of the past six years: Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel, for $92.2 million. Of the remaining 34 fine artworks traded for more than $50 million during the period examined, 25 are by Impressionist and Modern artists, and the remaining nine are by Postwar and Contemporary artists.
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964). Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images.” width=”1024″ height=”536″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-5-1024×536.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-5-300×157.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-5-1536×804.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-5-2048×1072.jpg 2048w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-5-50×26.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-5-1920×1005.jpg 1920w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Andy Warhol, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964). Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images.
Thanks to this transaction, Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn became not only the priciest fine-art lot of any kind sold since Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which brought $450.3 million in November 2017, but also the most expensive work by an American artist ever sold at auction.37 Exceptional provenance again played a role. The painting passed through S.I. Newhouse’s collection en route to the equally esteemed collection of the Swiss art-dealing Ammann siblings, whose family it stayed in for 36 years before being offered at auction for the first time in 2022.38 It carried neither a house guarantee nor an irrevocable bid, and it is possible that the Ammanns’ executors left money on the table as a result given that the work hammered at just $170 million ($195 million after fees), below its unpublished $200 million estimate.39
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn also reflects the recent importance of single-owner evening auctions within the realm of fine artworks sold for more than $10 million each. In 2022, such auctions generated $746.7 million worth of sales of fine-art trophy lots during the sample period, or 34.2 percent of all such sales by value across all evening auctions staged through May 20. While that share is the highest of any year in the sample, it is not a complete outlier. In three of the past six years (including 2023), single-owner evening auctions accounted for at least 22.7 percent of all trophy-lot sales by value in evening auctions.
Single-owner sales have been an even greater factor when it comes to fine artworks sold for more than $100 million at auction in recent years. Only five such works have traded during the sample period since 2018. Of those five, three were sold in marquee evening sales, generating $371.3 million in total. The other two (including Shot Sage Blue Marilyn) were offered in single-owner evening sales and brought a combined $310 million. Of the $681.4 million worth of fine artworks that traded for more than $100 million each at auction, then, about 45.5 percent of sales by value came from single-owner evening sales, versus roughly 54.5 percent from marquee evening sales.
Pink Lotuses on Gold Screen (1973). Photo by South China Morning Post / Alamy Stock Photo.” width=”1024″ height=”677″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-6-1024×677.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-6-300×198.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-6-1536×1016.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-6-2048×1355.jpg 2048w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-6-50×33.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Trophy-Lots-Artwork-6-1920×1270.jpg 1920w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Zhang Daqian, Pink Lotuses on Gold Screen (1973). Photo by South China Morning Post / Alamy Stock Photo.
Equipped with a house guarantee and an irrevocable bid, this painting was auctioned from the family collection of Chinese textile entrepreneur C.S. Loh, whose wife acquired it directly from the artist in 1973.40 It exemplifies the fine-art auction market’s rise in Hong Kong in recent history, including in the post-pandemic era.
Of the top 15 lots by price in each year of the sample period since 2018, only three were sold in Hong Kong. Pink Lotuses on Gold Screen is the most recent of the transactions; the other two took place in 2021. Together, the trio fetched HK$804.8 million ($103.3 million), or 17.6 percent by value of the $584.3 million generated by all trophy lots auctioned in Hong Kong through May 20 in each of the past six years.
The most expensive artwork sold in Hong Kong during the sample period since 2018 was also by Zhang Daqian, whose Landscape After Wang Ximeng (1947) brought HK$370.5 million ($47.2 million) at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in April 2022. Between this earlier transaction and Pink Lotuses on Gold Screen, lots by Zhang accounted for more than half the value (52.7 percent) of the $150.5 million worth of fine artworks sold for more than $25 million each in Hong Kong through May 20 of the past six years.
Discussing trophy lots in Hong Kong also necessitates a word about the globalization of taste. Although three of the four lots sold in the city for more than $25 million each are by Asian artists (Chu Teh-Chun joins Zhang in this group), the second most expensive lot sold there to date during the sample period is a painting by an American artist: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Warrior (1982), which traded for HK$323.6 million ($41.7 million) in a single-lot evening sale at Christie’s Hong Kong in March 2021. Deepening the nuance is the fact that Warrior was won by New York-based dealer Christophe van de Weghe, a reminder that not all lots sold in Hong Kong are bought by bidders based in Asia—and that the city’s growth as an auction market has been an international phenomenon in more ways than one.41
While the quantifiable details of minimum price guarantees, irrevocable bids, and other financial machinations remain opaque to outsiders, their effects are influential at the top of the fine-art auction market, where competition among houses to offer the most sought-after works intensified as prices escalated. Sales of lots above $10 million are therefore unusually indicative of significant new trends and longstanding stabilities alike, as the stakes have become so high that very little develops without both outsized demand and careful financial planning.
In this sense, one can have confidence that a market shift is real when it is reflected in the performance of trophy lots. This applies to such nascent phenomena as the emergence of Hong Kong and Paris as viable auction markets for works priced above $10 million, the sale of the first UltraContemporary trophy lot, and the sizable impact of single-owner evening sales on the marketing and sale of artworks in the highest price brackets.
The same is true of market dynamics that consistently repeat among trophy lots, including the dominance of the Impressionist and Modern genre, the overwhelming preference for New York as a sales venue, and the continuing rarity of works capable of selling for more than $50 million (let alone for more than $100 million), no matter what financing deals have been struck behind the scenes. The performance of trophy lots cannot tell observers everything about the state of the fine-art auction market, but it nevertheless speaks volumes.
Endnotes
Morgan Stanley Disclosures: This material was published in August 2023 and has been prepared for informational purposes only. Charts and graphs were published by Artnet News in the Mid-Year 2023 Artnet Intelligence Report. The information and data in the material has been obtained from sources outside of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC (“Morgan Stanley”). Morgan Stanley makes no representations or guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the information or data from sources outside of Morgan Stanley.
This material is not investment advice, nor does it constitute a recommendation, offer or advice regarding the purchase and/or sale of any artwork. It has been prepared without regard to the individual financial circumstances and objectives of persons who receive it. It is not a recommendation to purchase or sell artwork nor is it to be used to value any artwork. Investors must independently evaluate particular artwork, artwork investments and strategies, and should seek the advice of an appropriate third-party advisor for assistance in that regard as Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, its affiliates, employees and Morgan Stanley Financial Advisors and Private Wealth Advisors (“Morgan Stanley”) do not provide advice on artwork nor provide tax or legal advice. Tax laws are complex and subject to change. Investors should consult their tax advisor for matters involving taxation and tax planning and their attorney for matters involving trusts and estate planning, charitable giving, philanthropic planning and other legal matters. Morgan Stanley does not assist with buying or selling art in any way and merely provides information to investors interested in learning more about the different types of art markets at a high level. Any investor interested in buying or selling art should consult with their own independent art advisor. This material may contain forward-looking statements and there can be no guarantee that they will come to pass.
Past performance is not a guarantee or indicative of future results.
Because of their narrow focus, sector investments tend to be more volatile than investments that diversify across many sectors and companies. Diversification does not guarantee a profit or protect against loss in a declining financial market.
By providing links to third party websites or online publication(s) or article(s), Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC (“Morgan Stanley” or “we”) is not implying an affiliation, sponsorship, endorsement, approval, investigation, verification with the third parties or that any monitoring is being done by Morgan Stanley of any information contained within the articles or websites. Morgan Stanley is not responsible for the information contained on the third party websites or your use of or inability to use such site, nor do we guarantee their accuracy and completeness. The terms, conditions, and privacy policy of any third party website may be different from those applicable to your use of any Morgan Stanley website.
The information and data provided by the third party websites or publications are as of the date when they were written and subject to change without notice.
This material may provide the addresses of, or contain hyperlinks to, websites. Except to the extent to which the material refers to website material of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, the firm has not reviewed the linked site. Equally, except to the extent to which the material refers to website material of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, the firm takes no responsibility for, and makes no representations or warranties whatsoever as to, the data and information contained therein. Such address or hyperlink (including addresses or hyperlinks to website material of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management) is provided solely for your convenience and information and the content of the linked site does not in any way form part of this document. Accessing such website or following such link through the material or the website of the firm shall be at your own risk and we shall have no liability arising out of, or in connection with, any such referenced website. Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is a business of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC.© 2023 Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. Member SIPC. CRC 5839076 08/2023
Artnet Price Database From Michelangelo drawings to Warhol paintings, Le Corbusier chairs to Banksy prints, there are more than 14 million color-illustrated art auction records dating back to 1985 in the Artnet Price Database. The Artnet Price Database covers more than 1,800 auction houses and 385,000 artists, and every lot is vetted by Artnet’s team of multilingual specialists.
Artnet Disclosures: This Artnet Intelligence Report Mid-Year Review 2023 (“the Report”) was published by Artnet Worldwide Corporation (“Artnet”) in July 2023 and has been prepared for informational purposes only. Portions of the information and data in the Report have been obtained from sources outside of Artnet. Artnet makes no representations or guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the information or data in the Report, including from the sources outside of Artnet.
This material is not investment advice, nor does it constitute a recommendation, offer or advice regarding the purchase and/or sale of any artwork. It has been prepared without regard to the individual financial circumstances and objectives of persons who receive it. It is not a recommendation to purchase or sell artwork nor is it to be used to value any artwork. Investors must independently evaluate particular artwork, artwork investments and strategies, and should seek the advice of an appropriate third-party advisor for assistance in that regard as the Report does not provide advice on artwork nor provide tax or legal advice. Tax laws are complex and subject to change. Investors should consult their tax advisor for matters involving taxation and tax planning and their attorney for matters involving trusts and estate planning, charitable giving, philanthropic planning and other legal matters. The Report does not assist with buying or selling art in any way and merely provides information to parties interested in learning more about the different types of art markets at a high level. Any investor interested in buying or selling art should consult with their own independent art advisor.
This material may contain forward-looking statements and there can be no guarantee that they will come to pass. Past performance is not a guarantee or indicative of future results.
Because of their narrow focus, sector investments tend to be more volatile than investments that diversify across many sectors and companies. Diversification does not guarantee a profit or protect against loss in a declining financial market.
By providing links to third-party websites or online publication(s) or article(s) in this Report, Artnet is not implying an affiliation, sponsorship, endorsement, approval, investigation, or verification with any third parties or that any monitoring is being done by Artnet of any information contained within the articles or websites. Artnet is not responsible for the information contained on the third party websites or your use of or inability to use such site, nor do we guarantee their accuracy and completeness. The terms, conditions, and privacy policy of any third party website may be different from those applicable to your use of Artnet website.
The information and data provided by the third party websites or publications are as of the date when they were written and subject to change without notice.
This material may provide the addresses of, or contain hyperlinks to, websites. Except to the extent to which the material refers to website material of Artnet, Artnet takes no responsibility for, and makes no representations or warranties whatsoever as to, the data and information contained therein. Such address or hyperlink (including addresses or hyperlinks to website material of Artnet) is provided solely for your convenience and information and the content of the linked site does not in any way form part of this document. Accessing such website or following such link through the material or the website of the firm shall be at your own risk and we shall have no liability arising out of, or in connection with, any such referenced website.
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All images courtesy of Marei/@mareiii04, shared with permission
Sacred in the Shinto religion and an officially designated national treasure, the deer in Nara, Japan, are widely known for roaming a public park and bowing for treats—although the animals in recent years have been dubbed the “devious deer” because of their increasingly demanding behavior.
Those traveling to the region to fawn over the uncharacteristically mannered creatures can now ride in an equally adorable coach. Operated by Kintetsu Railways, the Deer Train is decked out with lush, spotted seats, grassy flooring, handles shaped like pudgy animals, and illustrations by Tokyo-based artist Gemi that transform the cars into a whimsical, cervine world.
The specially designed transit started operating in late 2022 and runs between Nara, which is about 45 minutes south of Kyoto via rail, and Sannomiya. (via Spoon & Tamago)
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article The Adorably Whimsical ‘Deer Train’ Transports Visitors to Japan’s Famed Nara Park appeared first on Colossal.
All images © EMXW, shared with permission
If you’ve ever felt like your head is full of cotton—or sea shells or dryer lint—well, you’re not alone. For the better part of a decade, Chicago-based artists Edwige Massart and Xavier Wynn (previously) have been creating sliced sculptural skulls full of everything from yarn and river rocks to crayon tips, shattered car windows, circuit boards, and sleeping pills. The occupied minds are part of the ongoing series Heads, which distills the complexities of relationships into dense, topographical psyches.
Working as EMXW, the duo begins each piece with a mishmash of found objects that together, create a narrative or “topic of conversation.” They each create simultaneously, adding red LEGO for teeth or shaping a jawbone with the broken handle of a cup to render a thematic collection that relates to an imagined dialogue between the two. The resulting works are playful and rich with texture and color as they explore the inner workings of the mind and the unique makeup of our emotional landscapes.
Some of EMXW’s most recent sculptures are on view through the end of the month at Gallery 901 in Evanston, Illinois. Find more of the duo’s work on Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Quirky Collections of Found Objects Preoccupy the Anatomical Sculptures of EMXW’s ‘Heads’ appeared first on Colossal.
This article is part of the Artnet Intelligence Report Mid-Year Review 2023. Marking five years of our biannual Intelligence Reports, this inaugural half-year edition paints a data-driven picture of today’s art world, from the latest market results to the artists and artworks leading the conversation. Read the full report here.
Auction houses want to start their sales with a bang. That’s why they select as the first lot a work they are virtually certain will fly. But at the beginning of one of Christie’s highest-profile sales of the major spring season in New York, only three bidders went after a blue porcelain head by Simone Leigh. A large sculpture had set a record for the celebrated American artist just a few days earlier.1 After a brief back-and-forth, bidding stopped in its tracks at $500,000, the high estimate. The room was immediately on edge.
That was the first of many surprises during the two-hour auction of Gerald Fineberg’s collection in May, which encapsulated this anxiety-filled, transitional art-market moment. While the sale wasn’t a bloodbath, even the most optimistic observers could no longer deny what it meant: The irrational exuberance that had gripped the market since COVID-19 struck was officially over. “Dealers have been saying for a year that there’s been a reset,” said art advisor Wendy Cromwell. “The auctions were just the public acknowledgement of that.”
Glenstone founders Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales. Photo: Saul
Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.
Periods of retrenchment or correction are tough, but for those who know what they are doing and have the cash to execute, they can also be great opportunities to build collections, and even entire museums. Just think of the late Eli Broad, who amassed the bulk of his collection in the 1990s, during the biggest art-market correction in recent history, and Glenstone founder Mitchell Rales, who did the same during the 2008 financial crisis.2 Of course, for the generation of market participants who have never experienced a downturn and came of age during the era of near-zero-percent interest rates, this moment— as the market’s ground shifts beneath their feet—is alarming. The data is sobering, too: Global auction sales from January 1 through May 20 declined about 14 percent, to just under $5 billion, compared with the same period a year ago. On a six-year basis, we are in between the $1.2 billion nadir of 2020 and last year’s peak of $5.8 billion.3 A new era has arrived. Welcome to the buyer’s market. At the spring sales, “I made out like a bandit,” said art advisor Ben Godsill.
A web of factors contributed to the dismal results of the Gerald Fineberg sale, which was estimated to bring in as much as $270 million and instead delivered $210 million (with many lower-value lots still to be sold).4 The details of the consignment were finalized early this year, in a considerably more robust market environment.5 The heirs of the late real-estate mogul, who died in December, refused the guarantees offered by the house and third parties, expecting a windfall but dramatically misreading the market.6 With no floor, prices seemed in freefall as lot after lot—by Gerhard Richter, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Christopher Wool, Lucio Fontana, Roy Lichtenstein—failed to reach their low estimates. Works by Mark Grotjahn, James Rosenquist, Louise Bourgeois, and Martin Kippenberger went unsold.7
Stanley (1971) for a record price. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Limited 2023.” width=”1024″ height=”536″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-2-1024×536.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-2-300×157.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-2-1536×804.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-2-2048×1072.jpg 2048w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-2-50×26.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-2-1920×1005.jpg 1920w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Christie’s Global President, Jussi Pylkkänen, sells Barkley L. Hendricks’s Stanley (1971) for a record price. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Limited 2023.
“They left millions of dollars on the table,” said a New York-based art advisor whose client bought one of the top lots of the sale. Going into the auction, the client was ready to pay $8 million for the historic work, which carried an estimate of $5 million to $7 million. The final price, including fees, was $6.1 million.8 It was an auction record for the artist—but considerably less than the buyer had been willing to fork over. “My client is very happy,” the advisor said.
The Fine Art Group, which advises collectors internationally, ended up making several clients happy, too. A day before the Fineberg auction, Christie’s staffers began making panicked calls to clients asking for bids, any bids, sources say. The market was shifting in real time, and the estimates across New York’s semiannual auctions suddenly seemed too high. “We got phone calls saying, ‘The reserves are coming down,’” Philip Hoffman, the advisory’s CEO, recalled. “Suddenly you’ve got to rush to get your reviews done. You’ve got to check the condition. It’s bad marketing to do that.” But it wasn’t about marketing at that point. Christie’s was looking at the very real threat of the art market tanking.9 In the end, “our clients said, ‘At this price we are buying,’” Hoffman said.
El Gran Espactaculo (1983). Courtesy of Christie’s Images Limited 2023.” width=”1024″ height=”536″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-3-1024×536.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-3-300×157.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-3-1536×804.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-3-50×26.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-3.jpg 1800w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Auctioneer Georgina Hilton sells the top lot of Christie’s 21st century
evening sale, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s El Gran Espactaculo (1983). Courtesy of Christie’s Images Limited 2023.
Galleries jumped on the discounted works by the artists they represent and support: David Zwirner bought an Alice Neel, Gagosian bought a Wool, Skarstedt a de Kooning, and Jeffrey Deitch a Basquiat, the Baer Faxt newsletter reported.10 Advisor Gabriela Palmieri won Ada With Pink Hat by Alex Katz on one bid, below the low estimate. The $1.1 million hammer price looked like a steal given the artist’s recent retrospective at the Guggenheim.
“It’s a reset, a recalibration,” said Jean-Paul Engelen, president of the Americas at Phillips, where the evening sale of 20th- and 21st-century art in New York totaled $69.5 million, a third of the $225 million tally in May 2022.11 The team withdrew some lots and lowered the reserves on many others to make things work, he noted. “Buyers are there, but money became more expensive. So people are more conscious of their spending.”
Sales at Sotheby’s (which generated $1.7 billion between January 1 and May 20), Christie’s ($1.7 billion), and Phillips ($254.9 million) have fallen 22 percent from the equivalent period in 2022.12 Of the top three national art markets, just one—China—increased its auction revenue. The U.S. remained the largest art market, with sales of $2.6 billion in the first five months of the year, but that total represents a 25 percent decline from the same period in 2022.13
To be sure, some of this dip is because of a lack of supply. After top inventory piled up during the pandemic, recent seasons saw copious collections of unusually high quality, like those of divorcing couple Linda and Harry Macklowe, sibling art dealers Thomas and Doris Ammann, and the late arts patron Anne Bass.14 So far this year, the highest-end segment—works priced at $10 million or more—has contracted 51 percent, more than any other price bracket.15 (The majority of Microsoft founder Paul Allen’s estate was sold last fall, and so is not included in this report’s calculations.)
Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat (1964) sold below the low estimate at Sotheby’s. Courtesy of Sotheby’s © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.” width=”1024″ height=”681″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-4-1024×681.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-4-300×200.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-4-1536×1021.jpg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-4-50×33.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-4.jpg 1800w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Pablo Picasso, Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat (1964) sold below the low estimate at Sotheby’s. Courtesy of Sotheby’s © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Still, “it’s not all doom and gloom,” said one auction-house executive. “If you bring a special thing to the table, the collectors, the museums will show up. But it’s not like any Picasso is going to make $20 million.” Indeed, Picasso’s 1938 portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, estimated at $20 million to $30 million, failed to sell at Christie’s in May. A large-scale late Picasso, Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat (1964), hammered below the low estimate of $20 million at Sotheby’s.16
“When the market was frothier, people were buying just the name,” said Miami-based advisor Karen Boyer. “And now people are looking at the quality.”
But it’s not just supply—demand is also shifting. This is especially evident in the once white-hot ultra-contemporary segment, which declined 26 percent compared with 2022.17 Consider Louise Bonnet, whose Figure With Tablecloth (2020) failed to sell at Sotheby’s. Its estimate was $600,000 to $800,000, in line with last year’s breakout results for the fashionable, Surrealist-inspired painter.18 Two other works by the artist, each estimated $300,000 to $500,000 at Christie’s and Phillips, did sell, but for around $400,000.19
It seems that the broader economic volatility finally caught up with the art market, which usually lags other indicators by at least six months.20 One challenge looming large: Money is not as cheap as it used to be. When hedge-fund managers discovered the art market, at the turn of the 21st century, they introduced and popularized various financial mechanisms to take advantage of the genteel, opaque trade. They loved 1031 like-kind exchanges, which enabled a buyer to use the proceeds from the sale of one artwork to purchase another in short order, deferring capital gains tax in the process.21 So prevalent was the use of the tax loophole that when the Trump Administration removed art from the list of allowed assets in 2018, dealers scrambled to lobby Washington to reinstate it.22 When they failed, they feared the market would crash.23
Auctioneer Henry Highley presides over the Phillips London contemporary art
evening sale in March 2023. Courtesy of Phillips.
It didn’t. Collectors simply shifted gears to capitalize on another economic advantage: low interest rates. Instead of selling the art and paying the tax, savvy buyers borrowed against their collections, because low rates meant that it cost them almost nothing. Art lending expanded dramatically.24 The loan book at Bank of America, one of the major players in this segment, saw 250 percent growth in the past decade, according to a representative.
But money is no longer free. And those highly leveraged individuals are now facing debt service that’s gone from, say, 2 percent to 7 percent, according to Deborah Larrison, a national art credit executive at Bank of America. In other words, it costs three times more than it did even a year ago to borrow the same amount. Add to that the ongoing turbulence in financial markets, not to mention the war in Ukraine, tech layoffs, continued inflation, and the commercial real estate doldrums, and you land in… the buyer’s market.
The full extent of the reset isn’t yet clear, partly because art businesses use various strategies to obscure what’s really going on. For example, many works were withdrawn from May auctions at the last minute—some while the sales were already in progress, a popular new tactic. “It used to be a big deal, it’s no longer a big deal,” Engelen said. “It’s protecting the seller, protecting the artist’s market.”
Take Sotheby’s, where just two withdrawn lots (a Yoshitomo Nara estimated at $12 million to $18 million and a Wade Guyton painting with a $1.2 million low estimate) accounted for almost one-third of “The Now” auction’s low estimate.
“The sales would look tougher if we didn’t withdraw,” Engelen noted.
By the time June rolled in, buyers had begun making low-ball offers on the secondary market. Often, sellers weren’t desperate enough to take them, advisors and dealers said. On the primary market, a slew of galleries started reaching out to advisors and collectors to offer works by artists who until recently had waiting lists.25
Lookin’ for a Treasure during the inaugural auction in Phillips’s new Asia headquarters.” width=”1024″ height=”682″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-6-1024×682.jpg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-6-300×200.jpg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-6-50×33.jpg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/08/Artnet-IR-MY23-Main-Feature-Image-6.jpg 1200w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
Phillips Asia Chairman Jonathan Crockett sells Yoshitomo Nara’s Lookin’ for a Treasure
during the inaugural auction in Phillips’s new Asia headquarters. Courtesy of Phillips.
“Sometimes in a good market, a person is asking $18 million and when you offer them $16 million, they spit at you,” one advisor said. “Today, they will pay attention to you. This is the buyer’s market.”
In June, Art Basel, the art market’s most prestigious fair, offered a mixed picture. Some owners went for serious markups: Hauser & Wirth offered a wall-mounted spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois for $22.5 million, up 37 percent from what it fetched at Sotheby’s in April 2022. Landau Fine Art was asking $25 million for a Picasso that had sold for $9.9 million in November.26 Others took a more cautious tack. Jeffrey Deitch offered a Warhol Mao portrait at the fair on behalf of a client for $10 million, down 31 percent from its purchase price of $14.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2018. “People are not willing to just say, ‘I don’t care what price it is, I am getting it,’” said Marc Glimcher, the CEO of Pace Gallery. “It’s a time for rational pricing and fresh material.”
The current reset may dissuade speculators who have entered the market in recent years from gambling on fast, outsize returns, experts say.
“I keep hearing ‘opportunity costs, opportunity costs,’” one major art advisor said. The phrase refers to what collector-investors are not buying when they choose to buy an artwork, which doesn’t yield any interest or dividends. With the same money, they could buy stock in Meta, a share of a private company, or a U.S. treasury bond.
“That is causing people to be a little more cautious,” said a senior executive of a major art business. “They say, ‘I’m going to buy a painting that I really, really need at this moment’ rather than ‘Let me get a big exposure to art.’”
There are plenty of “opportunity cost” conversations taking place within the art space, too. “When someone wants me to buy a Mark Bradford for $7 million primary, look what else I can get for that price,” the major advisor said. “I can get great things. I can buy a great Picasso work on paper. I can buy something made 50 years ago that stood the test of time in categories that take us in a whole new direction.”
As liquidity dries up, the pendulum is starting to swing back from untested hot names toward tried-and-true blue-chip fare. The clients of the Fine Art Group are looking for classics, according to Hoffman.
With prices for ultra-contemporary works less likely to shatter estimates, smart money is investing in historical, but still comparatively affordable, work. During Christie’s day sale of the Fineberg trove, newly rediscovered market darling Lynne Drexler’s Summer Blossom (1962) fetched $1.4 million, obliterating its $200,000 high estimate, while Abstract Expressionist Grace Hartigan’s On Orchard Street (1957) generated $1.2 million, 12 times the low estimate of $100,000.27
“Anything uncommercial, anything out of fashion—it’s zero interest,” Hoffman said. “The wrong Picasso, the wrong Magritte, the wrong Cézanne—no interest. The right Van Gogh—huge interest. The right diamond—huge interest. The right book—huge interest. Our clients are happy to pay record prices.”
Going forward, if works are not extremely rare, of high quality, and in excellent condition, “their prices will suffer,” said art advisor Todd Levin.
To be sure, there are still in-demand artists with wait lists and sold-out shows. But there’s a growing awareness that a tremendous amount of product changed hands over the past two years.
“A lot of people are saturated,” Cromwell said.
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This article is part of the Artnet Intelligence Report Mid-Year Review 2023. Marking five years of our biannual Intelligence Reports, this inaugural half-year edition paints a data-driven picture of today’s art world, from the latest market results to the artists and artworks leading the conversation. Read the full report here.
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Quince. All images courtesy of Abbeville Press, shared with permission
Slices of quince revealing tiny seed pockets, serrated dandelion leaves cradling spindly stems, and juicy elderberries growing in dense clusters are a few of the specimens that intrigued Elizabeth Blackwell (1699–c. 1758). An always passionate artist living during a time that saw a burgeoning interest in the natural world, Blackwell illustrated a thick, detailed compendium of approximately 500 plants and their properties to aid doctors and medical professionals in treatment.
Titled A Curious Herbal: Elizabeth Blackwell’s Pioneering Masterpiece of Botanical Art, the book today is hailed for both its exquisitely detailed renderings and the fact that it’s the first of its kind created by a woman. Abbeville Press released the first modern edition earlier this year, finally granting Blackwell long-deserved recognition and offering today’s readers a chance to peek inside the vivid, botanical encyclopedia.
Artistically talented and ambitious, Blackwell first got the idea for A Curious Herbal when she needed to make money after her husband was jailed in a debtor’s prison. The project was all-encompassing, with the artist not only researching, drawing, hand-coloring the printing plates, and writing the descriptions for each specimen but also selling the book herself.
In addition to undertaking such a herculean amount of work, Blackwell was doing so at a time when women were largely barred from scientific institutions and medical professions. Given its commercial success, A Curious Herbal was not only a creative feat but also a social one, emphasizing the value of women’s knowledge and artistic output particularly as it related to male-dominated fields.
A Curious Herbal is available now on Bookshop. (via Hyperallergic)
Dandelion
Love apple, a.k.a. tomato
Cacao
Left: Garden radish. Right: Elecampane
Elder
Creeping birthwort
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article An 18th-Century Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants Honors the Groundbreaking Artist Elizabeth Blackwell appeared first on Colossal.
Encouragement, profit or exploitation?
I’ve often thought that if one was looking for niche curses to place on enemies, “May you be profiled by Patrick Radden Keefe” would be a particularly potent option. The New Yorker staff writer and author has written with devastating precision about the Sacklers, the wealthy family who reaped billions from America’s devastating opioid epidemic; Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug-cartel kingpin known as “El Chapo”; and Gerry Adams, the Irish Republican activist turned politician.
Amid such company, Larry Gagosian, the global art-market king who is the subject of Radden Keefe’s latest profile, gets off relatively lightly. While noting that Gagosian’s contemporaries tend to “summon carnivore analogies” when asked to describe him (“a tiger, a shark, a snake,”) Radden Keefe paints a vivid picture of a man who did more than perhaps anyone else to transform fine art into an asset class, reducing the world’s greatest works of art to “stock lists, packing orders, lines on a piece of paper,” valuables to be stashed in Swiss vaults, rather than viewed or enjoyed. But at the same time, Gagosian comes across as someone who genuinely cares about art and has done as much as anyone in the last half-century to shape and encourage it.
I was reminded of one of my favorite exhibitions of all time, “The Steins Collect,” which I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a decade ago. The works themselves were stunning, including canvases by Matisse and Picasso. But what was particularly interesting was how the show presented the artists in conversation with Gertrude Stein and her siblings, whose status as collectors with ready money and interest in innovative works made them hugely influential over nascent movements like Cubism. (The exhibition is long gone, but you can get some sense of its themes from the hard-bound book about it.)
Regular readers will know that I like biographies about artists, so you might have expected the Gagosian profile to send me reaching for more of those. But in fact, the portrayal of a man who built a market and then dominated it reminded me more of “Liar’s Poker,” the book by Michael Lewis about Wall Street in the 1980s, which I dipped into again for the fourth or fifth time. (I wonder what Lewis, who studied art history as a Princeton undergraduate before going into finance and then journalism, would make of Gagosian.)
I’m going on vacation next week, which means the Interpreter will be on hiatus. I have two young children, so vacations aren’t exactly read-by-the-pool time, but I’m sure I can fit in some novels here and there as I always do. I’m excited to finally read “The Guest,” by Emma Cline, which has been on my list for a while.
I can get very emotionally involved in novels, so there’s a risk, I think, that the book’s dark take on the ultrawealthy beach enclaves of the Hamptons might cast a shadow on my trip to a not-at-all-wealthy coastal suburb in Spain. But hopefully it will have the opposite effect, reminding me as I gaze at the distant ocean from a rented holiday apartment that it’s good to stay outside the gilded cage.
Enjoy the waning weeks of summer. I’ll be back soon.
Here’s another novel I think I’ll be bringing on vacation: Jill Switzer, a reader in Pasadena, CA, recommends the movie “The Wife,” and the novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer on which it is based:
Once again or rather, I should say, still, a woman’s artistic and creative merit is subsumed/devoured by her husband, lover, significant other, or whomever and passed off as his own. Glenn Close is brilliant as the wife.
Thank you to everyone who wrote in to tell me about what you’re reading. Please keep the submissions coming!
I want to hear about things you have read (or watched or listened to) that you recommend to other Interpreter readers.
If you’d like to participate, you can fill out this form. I may publish your response in a future newsletter.
As India celebrates the seventy-sixth anniversary of its independence from British rule, colonial practices continue to intersect with nationalist modes of expression. In the late nineteenth century, a compelling example of Indian “tradition” intersecting with Western “modernity” was observed in the colonial sensibility that affected local Bengali artistic practices, widening the gulf between “mass art” available on the market and refined oil paintings gaining popularity under the Calcutta school. The former was created largely by the Kalighat patuas (traditional painters who worked near Calcutta’s Goddess Kali temple at Kalighat) while the latter was created by local artists educated in Western techniques. Despite differences, however, both approaches influenced each other, especially in their depiction of women.
Historian Tapati Guha Thakurta’s 1991 article “Women as ‘Calendar Art’ Icons: Emergence of Pictorial Stereotype in Colonial India” traces the history of “feminine images” that have become the “stock-type of today’s ‘calendar’ pictures.” She relies on early prints—lithographs and oleographs (chromolithographs)—created for mass consumption to reconstruct the perception of the feminine image at the time.
“Gender featured as the central plank in the construction of new ‘icons,’” she writes. “The woman’s image, like the very ideas of womanliness and womanhood, exuded strong ‘iconic’ potentials.” Women’s roles as icons ranged from being seductive and erotic to mythical and religious as they imparted social, political, and ethical values.
The introduction of printing altered the existing imagery of women, which became more “dramatic” as it began to draw inspiration from Western art. Hence, female characters from Indian epics took on European aesthetics while still fitting into the mold of the Indian “feminine divine.” By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the clientele of Kalighat art “widened into an undifferentiated mass clientele,” fed by mass-produced picture prints featuring this aesthetic and philosophical fusion.
One sees this in the rising popularity of the art works of Raja Ravi Varma, the famed painter from Travancore who founded India’s largest lithography presses in 1894. Writing of his work, Guha Thakurta notes that the “woman’s image became the main site on which the artist (and his critics) negotiated and reconstructed notions of the ‘mythic’ and ‘sacred’, of ‘tradition’ and a new national ethos.”
Ravi Varma clothed his women in Indian finery and placed them within a mythic narrative, yet they were often inspired by the “nude Venuses and Psyches and their allegorical images of Chastity or Charity” made by Boulanger and Bouguereau, two artists from the French academy. Apart from deification, the feminine figure was also effectively employed to spread a nationalistic message: “rousing her ‘sons’ to patriotic action.”
According to Guha Thakurta, such depictions made the female image the central figure in both popular and high art. She terms this process as “one of ‘resacralisation,’ where the rise of modernity, instead of separating the secular from the sacred, draws the two into a new synthesis.”
At the same time, these images also portrayed women as sexual objects designed to please the “male gaze” of the artist as well as the audience. Likening Indian mythological paintings to European allegorical ones, she asserts that “the act of male voyeurism was legitimised in these pictures by directly incorporating the erotic experience within the religious and mythological narrative.”
The female figures that weren’t sexualized overtly were portrayed in their roles as middle-class wives and mothers, often captured performing daily household tasks or rituals of personal vanity. Yet these, too, argues historian Chitrita Banerji, fed the hunger of the male gaze.
“The bonti’s uniqueness comes from the posture required to use it: one must either squat on one’s haunches or sit on the floor with one knee raised while the corresponding foot presses down on the base,” she writes.
The knife became “inextricably associated with Bengali women, and the image of a woman seated at her bonti, surrounded by baskets of vegetables [became] a cultural icon.” A fully-clothed cultural icon, but nonetheless, the frequent appearance of the bonti in Khaligat paintings still left scope for viewers to use the images for “erotic stimulation.” As Banerji points out, in case we think we are reading too much into the images, the sexualization of the bonti was soon made obvious with Gurudas Chattopadhyay’s publication of photographs of Calcutta prostitutes working with the knife, offering “a uniquely erotic vision of the female figure, rich in implication and suggestiveness.”
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