Word: marketeering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What drives the art market, some people say, is the desire to invest. Of course, it is more than that; genuine love of art, and even a curious yearning for transcendence, fuel it as well. But does art-investment success have an upper limit? Is there a limit to demand? Economists Bruno Frey and Angel , Serna, in an excellent inquiry in the October issue of Art & Antiques, examine the case of Yo Picasso. Humana Inc. president Wendell Cherry, who bought it in 1981 for $5.83 million and sold it in 1989 for $47.85 million, got a "real net rate...
This may be why so much of the auction action has shifted to contemporary art. It is a field that can still produce huge unsettling leaps of price that shake a market to its core, as publisher S.I. Newhouse's gesture of paying $17.7 million for Jasper Johns' False Start in New York a year ago proved. (It made sense, of a kind, for Newhouse to buy the Johns: he owns quite a few others, whose book value has accordingly multiplied...
...keys to the transformation of the contemporary market is going to be the discreet dispersal of the huge collection formed, mostly after 1980, by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, whose London firm is now in difficulties. Saatchi bought in bulk, sometimes whole exhibitions at a time. He acquired, for instance, more than 20 Anselm Kiefers, whose prices are now past the $1 million mark, and at least 15 Eric Fischls, which are on or around it. Artists let him have the cream of their work because it was understood -- though never explicitly said -- that Saatchi would never sell; his collection...
Sean Scully's prices through his regular dealer David McKee have jumped from $90,000 to $140,000 in the past six months, but Scullys are trading on the secondary market as high as $350,000, and Saatchi recently unloaded a block of nine of them on the Swedish dealer Bo Alveryd, who last month spent $70 million at three London galleries (Marlborough, Waddington and Bernard Jacobson) before moving on to the New York fall auctions. There he underbid the $20.68 million De Kooning and bought, among other things, a Johns for $12.1 million. "I thought Saatchi had good intentions...
...guess what kind of dealing structure will emerge from this mud wrestling in the '90s? Pessimists think the world contemporary art market, just like the communications industry, could implode into six or seven megadealers, each with an international corporate base formed by gobbling up aging or lesser competitors. The middle rank of dealers will have been squeezed out by the raids on their artists and stock, and at the bottom of the heap a litter of small galleries, treated as seedbeds by those on top, will be kept to service the impression of healthy diversity...