Meanwhile, in New York...
November 9 2012
Picture: Sotheby's
Last night the above Picasso sold at Sotheby's New York for $41.5m (inc. buyer's premium), coming in at the lower end of the estimate of $35m-$50m (which does not include premium). The picture had been guaranteed, and had sold for $28.6m in 2000 at Christie's New York. The increase in the 12 years since is not perhaps as big as you might expect.
Despite Christie's sale on Wednesday of a Monet water lillies for $43.8m, the New York Impressionist and Modern Art sales this week have been a mixed bag, as Carol Vogel in the New York Times reports:
It has been a tough week for Sotheby’s and its archrival, Christie’s. Both auction houses had padded their sales with mediocre material, and buyers knew it. On both nights, second-tier examples of artists including Cézanne, Matisse, Monet and Picasso went unsold. Christie’s auction on Wednesday night had been a struggle, but in the end it had more high-priced works and its total, $204.8 million, was higher than Sotheby’s, which brought $163 million on Thursday. Both were below their estimates.
The varying prices tell Jonathan Jones, in The Guardian, that there is evil everywhere in the art market:
Is it all teetering on the edge of apocalypse? Is the boom in art prices that has defied a wider economic stagnation about to end? If so, it would be bad for no one except a few "rich bastards" (to quote the artist Mark Rothko on the people he had no wish to paint for). A fall in art prices would be good for museums, good for public collections and good for the mental health of our culture.
At least we know now whom art collectors vote for. One reason for the flat sale at Christie's, it has been suggested, is that buyers were depressed by the re-election of Barack Obama. The art market, it seems, may be the Republican party at play, to add to its other charms.
Readers will know that this little corner of the art market, at least, was relieved at Obama's re-election. Which feelings, incidentally, drew this response from a reader in America:
Several of the people who would consider shopping in your gallery would not appreciate your political comments about Obama. Your clients, I am sure, are in another category and would find it difficult to read your comments in your blog. The American political situation is terribly complicated and very sensitive at the moment. I would stay away from it--by miles.
To which, as we say in England, bollocks.
