Arts sales boom may be over, but profits go on amid financial crisis
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/10/2008

Last week a collection of works by the highly influential 20th-century American photographer William Eggleston almost sold out in New York; both Sotheby's and Christie's announced their second-highest totals for an autumn contemporary art sale in London; and at the Frieze and Zoo art fairs, some dealers reported bullish sales (see Market News).

Market News: Quieter Frieze art fair 'still exceeded expectations'
Two Marilyns by Andy Warhol fetched £3.7 million, nearly £1 million less than estimated
At Frieze, for instance, London dealer Thomas Dane sold out within an hour of opening.
These are not, perhaps, the headlines you would expect after a week which, by most counts, heralded the end of the art boom. But they do illustrate the fact that the art market, while diminished, is by no means dead and buried.
The bald facts are that after 15 months of apparent insulation from the credit crunch, the contemporary art auctions held between Friday and Sunday came in well below estimates set before the financial mayhem of the past few weeks.
Sotheby's main contemporary art sale fell £8 million short of its expected minimum of £30 million. Phillips de Pury & Co amassed £5 million when at least £19 million had been anticipated. And at Christie's, nearly half the lots were unsold in an auction which raised £32 million - half the pre-sale estimate.
One record that was set was the time in which these auctions - usually long-drawn-out affairs - were completed due to lack of bidding. The hush from the banks of saleroom staff, normally busy chatting to their telephone bidders, said it all.
There was relief, however, that as much sold as it did. For each sale, owners had agreed to lower their asking prices in the hope of finding a buyer.
At Sotheby's, Andy Warhol's set of 10 paintings of skulls sold for £4.3 million, nearly £1 million less than hoped, to New York dealer Alberto Mugrabi (who already owns 800 Warhols and was doing his bit to protect the market).
A chalk drawing by Roy Lichtenstein was snapped up by British collector Joyce Reuben with a £160,000 bid - £90,000 below the low estimate.
Notable unsold works were a view of Jerusalem, priced at £5 million, by German art's superstar, Gerhard Richter, and a set of six portraits of Kate Moss by the graffiti artist Banksy looking to fetch a quarter of a million pounds.
But these results obscure the point that big profits were still being made. A wall hanging made from bottle tops by the African artist El Anatsui, for example, bought two years ago for £30,000, sold for almost £350,000.
At Phillips's, a bronze sculpture of an airport luggage trolley by the Indian artist Subodh Gupta, bought two years ago for around £45,000, sold for £139,000. For the Laugh of God, a parody of Hirst's infamous diamond-studded skull made by the Polish artist Peter Fuss last summer out of plastic and imitation diamonds and sold at London's Art Car Boot Fair for £1,000, sold for just over £19,000. At Christie's, a Richard Prince nurse painting, bought by an American collector 18 months ago for £1.25 million, sold for £3.2 million, and a late Willem de Kooning painting that was bought two years ago for £1.7 million sold for £2.7 million.
The sales were also assisted by an element of opportunistic buying. If the market continues to go down, the thinking goes, great works are less likely to be sent for sale. As a result, collectors made bids, even though there were no other competitive bids, to ensure they grasped their treasure.
A small, early portrait of a girl reading by Lucian Freud sold on a single bid for £2.2 million to a buyer who feared that if it was unsold, it would not return to the market. Similarly, a classic double portrait of Marilyn Monroe by Warhol was snapped up by art adviser Hugues Joffre for £3.7 million, nearly £1 million less than estimated, not because it was a bargain, but because it was a great painting.That said, the top end of the sales, the best supported until now, looked no less immune to the downturn than the lower end, and other million-pound-plus pictures by Bacon, Freud, Richter and Warhol found no buyers.The global financial crisis may have changed the art market, but for many there could be a positive result. As the art critic Robert Hughes so effectively argued in his television programme The Mona Lisa Curse, the appreciation of art has become too tainted by its association with bloated values.Art insurers, at least, can now have a happy time readjusting those values - though to what extent might not become apparent until after the more important auctions in New York next month.

AUCTIONS
At contemporary art sales, market stumbles on
By Souren Melikian / Published: October 20, 2008

LONDON: The two-round match played out on the London auction scene this weekend left contemporary art badly bruised. Round One, fought at Sotheby's, revealed for the first time in years that all is not well in that field.
Sotheby's session on Friday night got off to a dashing start thanks to Oliver Barker, a "senior international specialist" and one of the most brilliant upcoming young auctioneers in London. Calling out bids at top speed, he managed to convey for a while the impression that raving buyers were scrambling on top of each other to put in bids.
Lot 1, "The Pink Tree" by John Currin, an oil on paper that could be a spoof of 16th century German painting, improbably doubled its estimate at £139,250, or $241,300. Next came Antony Gormley's "Domain LXIV," a construction of small stainless steel rods conjuring up the figure of a man standing. Like so much of contemporary art, it has a whiff of Dada, the art of the absurd invented a century ago by Marcel Duchamp as a slap in the face of the then-bourgeois establishment. Today's new establishment coughed up £193,250, well above the high estimate.
But an auctioneer's brio will take you just so far. By the time the third lot, Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Jaggy Snake Charity Painting" came up, enthusiasm was dying down. The 2007 Hirst, which resembles an enlarged close-up of traditional marbled paper painted in gaudy household gloss, sold with difficulty, under the low estimate, for £115,250.That made the public uneasy. Howard Hodgkin's "Ekow," a kind of haphazard smear, dropped dead. Next, an abstract bronze and lacquer sculpture by Anish Kapoor also crashed. The failure of two works, both executed in 2008, did not augur well.

The sale became sticky. The first big lot, Andy Warhol's "skulls" of 1976, which reproduced 10 times in acrylic and silkscreen ink the image of a skull, very nearly failed and was retrieved by one £3.85 million bid, bringing the full price to £4.35 million, still far below the lowest expectations.
The second biggest lot, Gerhard Richter's "Abstract Picture (Red)," likewise sold by the skin of its teeth, for £2.84 million - one fifth less than the lowest price forecast by Sotheby's.
By the end of the sale, 27 percent of the works remained stranded. At the press conference held in a subdued atmosphere, a Sotheby's spokesperson revealed that the auction house had worked hard to persuade consignors to bring down their reserves. The house evidently succeeded to some extent - the six highest prices paid that evening were all well below the lower end of the estimate. All told, sales added up to £22 million. This was not a debacle, but undoubtedly a severe retreat.
As Christie's took over on Sunday afternoon in a leaden atmosphere, there were empty seats in the room.
In an eerie parallel to Sotheby's, the first three lots sold. Ron Arad's "London Parpadelle," a steel contraption which looked like a rug of steel mail unfolding and was No.6 in an edition of six, managed a generous £139,250. Takashi Murakami's composition "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," done in a futuristic comic strip style, then rose to £421,250, followed by Farhad Moshiri's "Golden Love Super Deluxe," a spoofy gilt wood cabinet filled with equally spoofy gilt porcelain and wooden pieces at £145,250.
At that point, the room lost interest. Andy Warhol's "Nine Multicolored Marilyns" dropped dead, and so did Jeff Koons's "Jim Beam-Log Car," a small stainless object produced in 1986 in an edition of three plus an artist proof. It matched its description but amused no one.

But Gilbert & George's set of 29 gelatin silver prints did. Titled "Muscadet," the set was "executed in 1973." Featured in many exhibitions, ranging from the Centre George Pompidou in Paris (1981) to the Hayward gallery in London (1987), it sold for £301,250.
Christie's, like Sotheby's, had persuaded some consignors to bring down their reserves, and that allowed the auctioneer to unload several heavyweights, all below the low reserve. A Lucio Fontana pulled through, on a single £8 million bid, missing the £10 million estimate quoted by Christie's "on request." But the oval piece of canvas, pierced with holes that give it the appearance of a moth-eaten doormat, was not cheap at £9 million, the price it cost with the sale charge.
Neither was the second most expensive painting, a realistic study of Bacon's face done more than 50 years ago by Lucian Freud. That realized £5.42 million, also less than the low estimate - but, again, a huge price.
By the auction's end, Christie's had sold 26 of 47 works for £32 million. The short message is that there is life left in the contemporary art market at 25 to 30 percent below current ambitions. That is very good in the current circumstances. Auction houses and their consigners had better heed the lesson.

Shocked Collectors Seek Bargains as Frieze Buying Stampede Ebbs
By Katya Kazakina and Scott Reyburn
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- The annual frenzied sales at London's Frieze Art Fair evaporated this year as collectors felt no pressure to make expensive purchases instantly, dealers said.
``People are shell-shocked by the world economy,'' said New York gallerist Marianne Boesky, who had a booth at the five-day fair, which ended yesterday. ``People are buying but they're taking it slowly and not rushing into things.''
Boesky sold a small painting by Barnaby Furnas for $50,000 and a sculpture-and-photo installation by emerging artist William J. O'Brien for $12,500. Her more expensive works -- a $400,000 painting by Lisa Yuskavage and $1.8 million painting by Takashi Murakami -- had a harder time finding buyers.
Now in its sixth year, Frieze is considered one of the world's three most important contemporary-art fairs, along with Art Basel in Switzerland in June and Art Basel Miami Beach in December.
Even visits from Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, his partner Dasha Zhukova, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, singer George Michael, New York collectors Susan and Michael Hort and art advisers to hedge-fund managers Sandy Heller and Todd Levin, didn't spur much excitement.
Slower Is Better
``Sometimes slower is better,'' said Jill Silverman, director at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and Salzburg. ``I didn't like the stampede approach. I've been through three of these recessions. If you keep prices reasonable, you'll be OK.''
At Ropac's booth, an American collector paid 220,000 pounds ($380,182) for Antony Gormley's steel sculpture ``Stand II.'' Two private collectors and one European museum foundation lined up for Ilya & Emilia Kabakov's 9-foot-high 2007 painting, ``Canon #1,'' for $550,000.
An American buyer paid 875,000 pounds for a stainless steel mirror by Anish Kapoor at London's Lisson Gallery, said director of sales Michelle d'Souza. London and Zurich dealers Hauser & Wirth sold both editions of Subodh Gupta's 8-foot-high stainless steel skull sculpture, ``Mind Shut Down,'' for just over 1 million euros ($1.34 million) each.
The contemporary-art market has enjoyed a bull run for the past five years, with prices for artists including Andy Warhol, Murakami and Richard Prince more than quadrupling.
Some collectors wondered when art prices will adjust to reflect the global economic meltdown.
``The art world is totally disconnected from the financial world,'' said London collector Amir Shariat, an adviser to hedge funds and private-equity firms at Auctor Capital Partners Ltd.
Too Costly
Unlike last year, Shariat didn't buy anything at Frieze because prices were too high.
``I can buy companies for the price of art,'' he said.
Moscow-based collectors Sardor and Lida Mirzazhanov, who attended Frieze for the second year, looked at an ornate, $180,000 steel work by Teresita Fernandez at Lehmann Maupin gallery but passed on it.
``Whatever we liked cost more than what we considered adequate, especially given the current economic situation,'' said Lida Mirzazhanov.
Some dealers appeared to have lowered prices. At London's White Cube, a richly enameled painting by Anglo-Indian star Raqib Shaw was on hold at 575,000 pounds. In June at Art Basel, a similar-sized work by Shaw sold for 750,000 pounds.
``This is not a good time for expensive things,'' said Cologne-based dealer Alex Lachmann. ``Works priced reasonably between 100,000 pounds and 500,000 pounds can do OK.''
Young Artists Sell
Younger artists showing at Frieze attracted buyers. Victoria Miro sold five etchings by Turner Prize-winning Grayson Perry and an edition of six images by a U.K. photographer Idris Khan, all priced at 16,000 pounds each.
Critically acclaimed young Los Angeles artist Sterling Ruby had two large sculptures at Frieze: New York's Metro Pictures sold his plywood circle dripping with polyurethane paint for $150,000 while his 16-foot-high obelisk at Spruth Magers gallery went for $135,000.
Striking color photographs depicting bear skins and a giant bronze boot by Ukrainian artist Sergey Bratkov cost 1,200 euros to 10,000 euros at Regina Gallery from Moscow. Several pieces sold, but collectors were asking for discounts.
``They wanted prices to be in dollars, not in euros,'' said the gallery owner Vladimir Ovcharenko. ``That's a 35 percent discount.''
At the Zoo Art Fair, a satellite show that features emerging artists and galleries that have been in business for less than six years, works below 50,000 pounds were popular sellers. The fair attracted curators from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London's Tate Modern and the Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Elvis Portrait
London's Riflemaker gallery sold Gavin Turk's ``Faded Glory,'' a Warhol-style yellow silkscreen portrait of the young Elvis Presley, for 34,000 pounds. Bose Pacia of New York sold 9 collage and mixed media pieces by Indian artist Radhika Khimji for prices between 850 pounds and 2,000 pounds.
At the small Kounter Kulture fair in an old brewery in East London, 37-year-old artist Dave White was on hand to discuss his work with customers. His Pop Art-like paintings and watercolors of planes and tanks inspired by vintage war comics sold briskly for prices that ranged from 1,762 pounds to 45,000 pounds.
``In this financial climate, if a client is taking the time to invest in my work, I want to meet them and invest in them,'' White said.
(Katya Kazakina and Scott Reyburn are reporters for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are their own.)

To contact the reporters on the story: Katya Kazakina in London at kkazakina@bloomberg.net. Scott Reyburn in London at sreyburn@hotmail.com.
Last Updated: October 19, 2008 19:59 EDT
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Art worth £100,000 up for grabs

Art lovers have been queuing to get their hands on free artworks by some of the UK's leading and emerging contemporary artists.
More than £100,000 worth of art is being given away at the Free Art Fair, in London.
Some people have queued overnight to get their hands on work by artists like Gavin Turk and Stella Vine for nothing.
Free Art Fair founder Jasper Joffe said: "This gives anyone the chance to own a serious piece of art."
Valuable pieces
He said the idea was to provide an antidote to the hype that surrounded Damien Hirst's recent record-breaking sale at Sotheby's, which raised £111m.
Peter Harris, one of the exhibitors at the fair, which kicks off at 1800 GMT on Sunday, is offering a piece of paper said to have been touched by the multi-millionaire Hirst.
Work by artists such as Stella Vine will be given away
Joffe told the BBC: "We have a mix of really well known artists and emerging artists and many of them have made specific pieces for the show.
"We want people to value them because they really like the pieces and not just because they are worth a lot of money, but some of the more valuable pieces will be worth £10-15,000.
"We are giving away a five-metre painting by James Jessop that has a market value of £15,000.
"We want people to think of art not just as what its worth or who buys it, but we want people to think that anyone can be an art collector and that they should really love the piece and want to live with it and not just see it as an investment."

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Art
Frieze Art Fair Feels a Big Chill
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: October 17, 2008
LONDON — They hoped for the best, expected the worst and took what came. Art is selling at this week’s Frieze Art Fair, but nothing like before. After several weeks of financial havoc in stock exchanges across the globe, the feeding frenzy is over.

“You certainly didn’t have to fight to get into the building,” said the American art adviser Allan Schwartzman a few minutes after the start of the top-tier V.I.P. opening at 11 on Wednesday morning. “The days of the three-minute reserve are over.” He was referring to the amount of time dealers have sometimes given even first-rank collectors to consider a purchase in the recent art-boom years, while competing buyers wait.
“Our committed collectors showed up,” said Joel Yoss of the gallery Hauser & Wirth. But by the end of the first day, there were intermittent reports of sales, along with rumors that more than a few collectors were merely looking — not buying.

Underneath it all was a sense that if the art world had dodged a bullet, it was a momentary reprieve. More pervasive was a grim sense that a shake-out of world markets was just beginning, and in the end art would probably be the least of anyone’s worries.

In other ways it was London Frieze Week as usual — that is, more than a bit out of touch with reality, with the fair surrounded by eddies of ancillary exhibitions, opening parties and other festivities vying for attention.

The fair itself, with 152 participants, continues its quest to meet all conceivable art cravings while behaving as much as possible like the nonprofit organization that it isn’t. Front and center of course are the art dealers and their booths, which presented an enormous range of product and anti-product, including an art performance or three.

But there is also a program of workshops for schoolchildren, and dispersed among the booths is the usual slate of somewhat subversive Frieze projects. Most of these are in the realm of the ephemeral, participatory genre called relational-aesthetics.

Visitors to the fair could get foot rubs from the artist Bert Rodriguez (who conducted therapy sessions at the Park Avenue Armory in this year’s Whitney Biennial), or sit around the Kling and Bang collaborative’s “Sirkus,” a dark, noisy, utterly convincing rendition of a bar in Reykjavik, Iceland, that figured prominently in the country’s alternative arts scene.

In Tue Greenfort’s “Condensation,” a dehumidifier in the form of a dark, quiet room collects moisture exuded by visitors’ bodies, converting it into water that is funneled into discarded plastic bottles. A Freize staff member informed me that when traffic is brisk, a bottle can fill in under 10 minutes.

An artist known only as Norma Jeane has made it possible for smokers to put themselves on display while having cigarettes in three clear plastic booths, each outfitted with a chair, a water cooler and an ashtray. But my favorite relational-aesthetics moment was provided by one of Frieze’s forays into new-design and product placement: the two-sided hand dryers in the fair’s restrooms, courtesy of Dyson, creator of the bag-free vacuum cleaner.

The booths divide logistically into those that put up display labels and those that do not (making it necessary to ask), and between those that attempt a modicum of curatorial thought and those that just put out the merch.

There are the usual gimmicky showstoppers, like Petroc Sesti’s “Perpetual Void,” a large glass sphere of clear oil in which a braidlike vortex twists perpetually, seemingly down the drain. But with first-time exhibitors from China, Turkey, India and Argentina (from Buenos Aires, Appetite, where the work of about 10 artists is displayed in a kind of continuous trash heap), Frieze still managed to provide a random snapshot of an increasingly global and youthful art world in transition.

There are paintings galore, from a beautiful new Picabia-esque abstraction by Albert Oehlen at Juana de Aizpuru to Merlin Carpenter’s latest put-downs at Reena Spaulings (cashmere Burberry throws, genuine and knockoff, on stretchers). Nonetheless, a great deal of what is most worthwhile here falls under the heading of adventures in appropriation, 21st-century Conceptualism and art mediums formerly designated as craft (especially ceramics and tapestries, including some by Gobelins).

One of the fair’s best-looking booths is Eva Presenhuber, lined on the outside with paintings by Josh Smith. Inside, two imposing perforated sculptures by the ever-inventive Ugo Rondinone are fashioned from an aggregate of plastic pebbles and concrete and set on big bases of wood-textured concrete. Giant Brutalist versions of Chinese scholars’ rocks, these sculptures share an apocalyptic title that makes them suddenly resemble distorted skulls: “We Run Through a Desert on Burning Feet, All of Us Are Glowing Our Faces Look Twisted.”

At Francesca Kaufmann, downsizing carries the day. Visitors enter through a small door by the Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker that is scaled to her own height. Framed by a cartoonish wall drawing that proclaims “No reason, no goals,” it suggests a shrunken or more selective art world.

Across the aisle, flamboyance resurfaces at Salon 94, where an expanse of red carpet is dotted with 16 sculptures by the Italian artist Martino Gamper that in their own formalist way suggest mangled bodies. They are made from the parts of 24 red leatherette side chairs by the modernist designer Carlo Mollino, known for imbuing furniture with a certain suggestive anthropomorphism.

Modernism is also treated as a dustbin rich with ideas at the Modern Institute, a Glasgow gallery where blurry, atmospheric paper in a color-separation palette by Simon Starling covers the walls. It looks great, but the explanation is the main point: The pattern is based on a gigantic blow-up from a photograph of a late-’60s performance by the first-generation Conceptualist Robert Barry in which he released various gases into the air.

At Cabinet, an eerie interactive piece by an unknown named Tris Vonna-Michell presented a variation on the image-text duality of Conceptual art. One part is a large reel-to-reel tape on which can be heard (on headphones) a work of word-art: The artist races through disjointed phrases with Tourette’s-like speed and repetition, as if narrating a solitary, slightly terrifying journey. The other part is a box of black-and-white photographs of anonymous sidewalks, streets and parks that the viewer can browse through. Proceed fast enough, and the images form a cinematic flip-book of the trip, with headphones increasing the sense of isolation.

Also impressive is the Conceptualized Surrealism of Goshka Macuga, a Polish-born, London-based artist who is a finalist for this year’s Turner Prize in Britain and whose bizarre combinations of found images and objects were featured at Kate MacGarry. One piece, on a pedestal, is a kind of half figure cobbled together from a cut-out image of a woman’s head, an old book and, for a torso, what appears to be a large chunk of glazed ceramic. The effect becomes stranger still when it emerges that the torso is actually fossilized wood, a piece of nature as wild as the book and image are not.

Work in this vein, with its balance of the sensuous and cerebral, seems to point forward and away from the overactive art market that has held sway for the past few years.

Yet some booths seemed so mired in that market as to almost resemble period rooms. The mood of art-as-trophy was almost unbearably thick at Gagosian, where nearly every work on view was by an artist whose career had largely been shaped by their previous dealers: Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, Tom Friedman, Piotr Uklanski and Mark Grotjahn. You could call it an object lesson.