Three Dealers Go on the Record in Advance of the Hirst Auction

Bloomberg has three comments on the upcoming auction. White Cube’s Jay Jopling denies there is a mountain of unsold works:

“The appetite for Damien’s art,” Jay Jopling, White Cube’s owner, said in the statement, “is such that we never have enough and I’m always keen to have as much work on consignment as possible.” The market for Hirst was strong and suggestions to the contrary were based on “redundant documents.”

Robert Sandelson suggests Hirst is making an end run around his galleries:

“Sotheby’s auction is payback time for Damien,” said London dealer Robert Sandelson, who in the summer of 2006 hosted a selling exhibition of Hirst works acquired through secondary sources. “He’s saying to the dealers, `If you can’t sell these pieces, I’ll find someone who can,”’ said Sandelson in an interview.

But Kenny Schachter thinks everybody will benefit from the sale:

“Any revelations about unsold works shouldn’t affect the auction,” said the London-based dealer Kenny Schachter, who was on the guest-list for Sotheby’s preview at the Hamptons. “Hirst and Sotheby’s are looking for new collectors for this material. In the end it could help sell some of the dealers’ inventory — if it goes well.”

Hirst’s Dealer Denies `Mountain’ of Unsold Works Before Auction (Bloomberg)

Interview with Guy Bennett

In our continuing effort to de-mystify the art market and make the auction houses more accessible, we bring you this interview with Christie’s Guy Bennett (along with some video excerpts.)

First, a little background. Guy Bennett is Senior Vice President, International Co-Head of Impressionist and Modern Art. In addition to overseeing the day to day running of the department worldwide, he is responsible for the daily management, marketing and promotion of Christie’s sales of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York. And, of course, it’s his job to find the right properties to sell at the right time. He headed the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale in November 2006 which totaled $491.5 million, making it the most valuable auction ever. The next year, he organized the second most valuable sale totaling $396 million in November 2007.

In 2008, Bennett landed the Miller Collection, which included Monet’s spectacular “Le bassin aux nymphéas” which sold for $80.4 million in London in June, doubling the artist’s previous record set a month earlier when Bennett had orchestrated the sale of Monet’s “Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil” in New York which sold for $41.5 million. (The interview, with video, after the jump.) Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob Rothschild lets the Economist browse among his acquisitions:

The first artist he collected was an idiosyncratic Swiss-Italian sculptor, Giacometti. He has been collecting ever since, not just for the walls of his sitting rooms, but for Spencer House in St James’s, London, which he helped to restore (he lent a Panini and a Romney from his own collection), and for Waddesdon Manor, the vast pile in Buckinghamshire, which he inherited from an aunt. Read the rest of this entry »

The Wall Street Journal has this think piece on the meaning the Hirst auction for the art market. And The Art Newspaper claims to have an inventory of White Cube’s unsold stock totaling £100 million.

Melik Kaylan’s tart views in the WSJ spare no one. Dealers are haughty but also panderers; Hirst is creature of the vulgar new money being made in Russia, China and the Gulf States; and art is for social climbers.

Because Sotheby’s and Christie’s appear to operate a species of global commodities exchange, with dates and prices instantly disclosed on the Internet, it all feels so much more transparent to, say, a new Chinese millionaire. In the first place, there will be a local office near him co-headed by a Chinese speaker who understands the millionaire’s social sensitivities — so much more pleasant than having to kow-tow to a self-important New York or London gallerist. It puts an end to a long era in which superior dealers could treat outsider clients with the snooty hauteur of a French waiter. Above all, though, the auction houses’ relative transparency — the fact that prices are set and transactions occur out in the open, for all to see — will appeal to the international new money crowd that knows plenty about how money and markets work.

Dealers have always offered clients a higher degree of discretion than the public space of an auction ever can. That has traditionally been their great asset. But let’s be candid: Nobody in Dubai or Shanghai wants a pickled cow to gaze at musingly in solitude for the sheer beauty of its hindquarters. When today’s clients buy such wares, privacy is the last thing on their minds.

The important question is whether the Hirst sale is truly driven by new buyers seeking access to his work that can’t be satisfied by his dealers. Sotheby’s is sending the works to New York (well, the Hamptons) and New Delhi but not to Dubai or Shanghai. But The Art Newspaper turns the equation around by suggesting that Hirst’s volume of production has overflowed what his dealers can place:

the scale of his output requires him to find a steady stream of new buyers; the global reach of the auction house will have proved decisive. “Sotheby’s promotion is not directed at existing collectors. They are targeting new buyers, especially in parts of the world which have only recently started collecting contemporary art,” says a trade source

The Times also picks up the Art Newspaper’s claims and wraps up the whole package including the shows in Bridgehampton and New Delhi:

This will be Hirst’s first show in India. “Until now Indian collectors have primarily shown interest in art from their own culture,” said Oliver Barker, senior international specialist at Sotheby’s. “Now they are thinking global.”

Hirst’s Marketing End Run (Wall Street Journal)

Revealed: the Art Damien Hirst Failed to Sell (The Art Newspaper)

200 Unsold Hirst Works Looking for An Owner at Sotheby’s (The Times of London)

The Tate’s Director Stirs A Little More Controversy

Fresh on the heels of the tut-tutting over his role advising Dasha Zhukova and the potential conflict posed, Sir Nicholas Serota gets the British papers rolling on the subject of his re-appointment. It seems the Prime Minister never signed off on the Tate boards decision to make the 62-year-old’s job permanent. The controversy merely gives some of Sir Nicholas’s opponents an opportunity to vent. Nonetheless, Serota’s legacy, as this brief summary suggests, is pretty one-sided: Read the rest of this entry »

Category Focus update with all of your favorite charts which try to answer that nagging feeling something’s not quite right

If anyone expected the Contemporary Art sales in London to exhaust interest in the subject–at least until the next round of sales in October–they were rudely awakened by the announcement of Damien Hirst’s sale with Sotheby’s. Given the nature of both the artist and the sale, it is worth updating our data on the London Contemporary auction market. Read the rest of this entry »

The “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” auction tests the market

Let’s start with the assumption that the experts at Sotheby’s have made a good survey of the market (see below) and are fairly confident that they can move all of the art Damien Hirst is planning to sell on September 14th and 15th in London. (Though one assumes there are no guarantees here so the auction is relatively risk-free for the house.) With that firmly in mind, Sotheby’s announced today the size and scope of the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale (including The Dream, left, estimated at between $4-6 million.) The sale will be 223 lots (divided into a day and evening sale) and is estimated at 65 million pounds! (That’s $130 million in funny American money.)

But the estimate isn’t really the issue. Hirst’s market performance continues to be strong despite a few recent failures of spot and spin paintings. Read the rest of this entry »

Combined sales; press coverage; pre-sale previews; critical assessements

–all on one post!

Read the rest of this entry »

Sotheby’s Old Master blows up the market with a $101 million sale

–19 artist records set.

What’s going on the Old Master market? Sotheby’s July sale surpassed estimates with 58% of the lots selling above the high estimates. The sale was 76.7% sold by lot. The value of the sale was 49% higher than July 2007. 13 lots sold for more than 1 million Pounds. In both 2007 sales, there were only 9 lots over 1 million pounds.

Watteau’s La Surprise goes for $24 million at Christie’s

Christie’s re-discovered Goya drawings (including this and this) made nearly $8 million as the pre-opener to last night’s Old Master’s sale in London. The star of the Evening sale was the Watteau found in the corner of a country house during a routine valuation trip. But the sale had other surprises with Sir Thomas Lawrence’s sketch portrait of his mother Lucy Lawrence going for nearly five times the high estimate or $736,000. The catalogue essay reads like a scene from Trollope but the price was no fiction. Even the sales, second highest lot was the subject of some surprise and doubt. van Dyck’s Rearing Stallion was only recently accepted as the work of the master and that was enough to interest buyers to the tune of 3 million pounds.