At a panel discussion led by Lindsay Pollock a few months ago, Roland Augustine, the president of the ADAA, casually described the majority of contemporary art buyers as “speculators.” Put aside the strangeness of a trade association head branding the bulk of his industry’s customers with a perjorative.

Focus on the issue of speculation. Can the majority of art buyers in 2007 and 2008 really have been speculators? Who are these people and can no one identify a single one of these speculators?

The subject comes to mind again after last week’s report on the Phillips de Pury sale contained this quote from an art advisor [emphasis ours]:

Grotjahn’s colorful early painting, with a low estimate of $400,000, didn’t find a buyer. Another work — a fiery orange butterfly painting — fetched $458,500 against the estimate range of $450,000 to $650,000.

In 2003, paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist cost around $20,000, said his New York dealer Anton Kern. In May, one of his canvases fetched $1.2 million at Phillips in New York, setting an auction record for the artist.

“You can’t have increases like that unless people are buying for investment purposes or everyone is leveraged,’‘ said Cristina Delgado, a New York art adviser, before the auction. “We need to come down to prices in the art market before everyone began leveraging, probably another 30 to 40 percent.” Read the rest of this entry »

Everything You Wanted to Know About Contemporary Indian Art

. . . But Were Afraid to Ask!

The single best story to read on the boom in Indian art comes from Abu Dhabi’s The National. Click through to read the whole story. It’s worth the time. If you’re not convinced, here is a capsule version:

Bharti Kher [is] one of India’s rising art superstars. A year ago, the 39-year-old was part of a growing group of struggling artists whose work was virtually unknown outside of India. [ . . . ] As interest in Kher’s work balloons, so have prices. Misdemeanours, a piece of sculpture of a snarling hyena made from fibre glass, wood and fur that examines the shattered harmony between man and nature sold for $167,000 (Dh613,000) at an auction as Sotheby’s this summer. Another work, Missing, sold through the auction house for $210,900 (Dh774,600) in May, while An Absence of Assignable Cause – a giant heart of a blue whale cast in fibre glass and festooned in bindis – was snapped up by Charles Saatchi [ . . . ]

Although she’s lived in India since 1992 and her work is conspicuously from the subcontinent, Kher was born and raised in Britain. She arrived in Delhi and ended up marrying a small town boy from Bihar who had not long arrived in the Indian capital himself. His name is Subodh Gupta, the current king of Indian contemporary art, who was the first Indian installation artist to sell his work for more than $1 million (Dh3.67 million). [ . . . ] Kher and Gupta symbolise the breakthrough of Indian contemporary art onto the international scene as it rides the wave of the nation’s fast-growing economy. Works are reaching prices never previously seen – or imagined. In the last three years alone, Gupta’s prices at auction for an oil painting increased by 5,000 per cent, while modern Indian artists, such as the 82-year-old Tyeb Mehta, who has lived a lifetime of financial struggle, have seen their paintings suddenly fetch more than a million dollars. [ . . . ]

(The best stuff, after the jump.)

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What Do Mnuchin and Edelman Know About Markets That You Don’t?

Art + Auction ran two interviews with art dealers–Bob Mnuchin and Asher Adelman–who are better known for their financial skills. That is, their reputations were built on significant careers in finance. We suppose the interviewer hoped to find some wisdom about markets and art as an asset–the interviews were published under the headline, The Wise Men. But the most interesting part of both interviews is the seamless way both men incorporate their financial views into the art market without trying to turn the art market into a financial market. As Edelman points out in discussing art funds–and we would expand to cover the art market as a whole–the art market lacks the structure to be a financial market. Read the rest of this entry »

The Art Trading Fund strikes a deal with Saatchi; Meridian Art Partners goes into Emerging Market

Dealbook and The New York Times pick up this dispatch from The Art Trading Fund. They’ll be working with Saatchi to identify contemporary art and give him a share of the profits. But the Times is just scraping the lead from Scott Reyburn’s broader story on Bloomberg.com updating the progress of the $110 million fund. They’re making progress on their second fund and claim 9% returns after fees on their first quarter of trading.

Meanwhile, Meridian announces that they’re going into emerging markets looking for returns.