Page Six reports that the Core Club, Aby Rosen’s art-filled hang-out for the private capital set, is struggling. Members seem less concerned with getting their membership fees returned than having a lein on some of the art stored there:
Lyor Cohen, the Warner Music Group honcho, joked, “All I want is the Jean-Michel Basquiat,” referring to one of valuable artworks decorating the club’s walls.
Core of the Problem: No Dough (NY Post)
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 »
The Financial Times takes a look at the burgeoning art storage business. Alison Gregor turns that into a fascinating tour of the collector’s side of the art boom–even as it sets up for a lengthy hibernation. Where will all of the art go in a recession? Storage or will the increasing circulation of art continue?
A burgeoning fine art market saw sales surpass $40bn in 2007, which was a catalyst for the growth of a fine-art storage and logistics industry. Even though sales might slow with the financial crisis, and indeed, art collectors will be watching forthcoming auctions with trepidation, the fine art being bought and sold – and which does not make it into museums, galleries, corporate offices or homes – must be stored somewhere. This is a task that involves a high degree of specialisation.
Besides cataloguing, packaging, shipping and installing the art works, fine art storage facilities house them for long periods in crates inside vaults controlled for such factors as temperature, humidity and light. The warehouses also have viewing rooms where pieces can be bought and sold, photographed, assessed or repaired. [ . . . ]
There are about 100 to 125 top-notch fine art warehouses worldwide, according to Bob Crozier, founder and president of Crozier Fine Arts, along with dozens of smaller, regional facilities in various countries. [ . . . ]
Sigrid Thorne, chief executive of Fortress Corporation, which has fine art warehouses in New York, Boston and Miami, said private collectors are the fastest growing segment of her business.
“Values in the modern art market have gone up 20 per cent a year for the last six years,” she said, though that growth may lag behind this year. “That’s very attractive. And the pieces are so large, most people cannot install them in their homes. They have to put them in storage.” Once there, the works are often shipped in and out by serious collectors to museums and galleries for shows.
“People loan their art work out for various museum shows throughout the world, so maybe it comes out of their storage for a while, and then maybe it goes into their homes,” said Andrea Hazen, an art adviser with Hazen Partners Art Advisory. [ . . . ]
“One of the ways this business has really changed is that it’s really no longer about storage,” he said. “It’s about private banking. We know who’s shipping what, who’s buying what, and we become sort of the keepers of secrets.”
With the number of loans from Transcon’s private collections soaring, what was once “slam it into a case and send it” is no longer, Mr Blodget said. Countless condition reports are done at all stages of the shipment for insurance purposes.
John Mullane, president of Transcon, said insurance companies have shown growing interest in fine art storage facilities as the values in the fine art world increase exponentially. “We had a collector who bought a piece about two years ago for about $600,000, and [five or six] months ago, it was sold for $12m,” he said. While appreciation rates of 1,900 per cent over a short period may no longer be seen in the market, insurers are nonetheless paying attention.
The LA Times’s culture blog points out that Thomas Kincade is on the ArtReview’s Power 100 list in the final spot. Whether this is hat tip to the realities of the broader market for kitsch or a mischievious wink, is less interesting than the comments the post provoked. They range from the expected anger at everyone from Brits to all manner of Contemporary art to a self-declared student of Renaissance art who admires Kincade’s technique.
Today brings two very different stories that, when combined, suggest the Contemporary art market will slow down for reasons outside of the economy. Bloomberg discusses guarantees in a story about Sotheby’s raising cash. Josh Baer writes a piece for The Art Newspaper that discusses the end of a certain kind of career-making speculation in lesser-known artists.
Guarantees have been used at both the top and emerging ends of the art market. But their biggest effect is at the top. As part of a defensive measure announced much earlier in the year, Sotheby’s has been reducing its guarantees and shifting them to third party deals. Here’s Bloomberg with the details: Read the rest of this entry »
The Wall Street Journal takes a look at corporate art collections in the wake of the Lehman bankruptcy and comes up with some interesting tidbits on how other distressed sales of have been handled:
Companies in trouble sell whatever can raise them money, and art collections are but one more asset. Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm brought down by the Enron scandal, for instance, turned two floors of its Chicago offices into a gallery showroom in 2002, selling more than 2,000 artworks over a five-day period. In 2006, the New York futures broker Refco Inc., which filed for bankruptcy protection the previous year while under investigation for hiding $430 million in debt, sold 321 photographs for $9.7 million at Christie’s auction house over a three-day period. Read the rest of this entry »
Susan Moore in the Financial Times looks at Shanghai’s Zendai MoMA, the pet project of Dai Zhikang, the 44-year-old developer and accidental art collector:
“When I went to the Shanghai Art Fair in 2002 I found a piece by the French sculptor César Baldaccini, ‘Thumb’. It was easy to understand and I figured out that it would be very popular with the public, so I bought it for the plaza. The unveiling ceremony got a lot of media coverage. From that time on, people have presumed that I was a very big collector and I have been deluged with material.” Read the rest of this entry »
Kate Taylor was a star at the New York Sun. She reappears quickly after that paper’s demise in the New York Times. Let’s hope they make the most of their good fortune. Here Taylor details the internecine battle among John and Marcia Friede’s heirs over their collection of tribal art ear-marked for San Francisco’s de Young Museum:
A feud between Mr. Friede, 70, and his two brothers over their mother’s estate has led to litigation in three states, with the two brothers, the museum and Sotheby’s auction house all laying claim to the art.
[ . . . ] “My enormous preference would be to do what is traditionally done by big collectors who are not just boiling over with cash, where there is a small purchase and a large gift,” he said, referring to the common museum practice of paying for only part of a donation’s value, which allows the donor to claim a tax deduction and also reap direct proceeds. “Another possibility would be having to sell off a section” of the collection, he said. “That would be a darned shame.” Read the rest of this entry »
In what may be a sign of the future of the art market, where exponential growth leads to class action lawsuits, it turns out that Halsey Minor wasn’t the first person to think of using a class-action suit to resolve an art deal dispute. Portfolio tells a breathless story about Clint Arthur (left, in a photo by Dave Lauridsen), an LA buyer of a Takashi Murakami print, who got a limited-edition work without a number: Read the rest of this entry »
Martin Gayford on Bloomberg and Waldemar Januszczak in the Times of London reviews the inaugural show of Chinese contemporary art at Charles Saatchi’s new Chelsea museum. The Daily Telegraph has a story and pictures of the building and the art.
Here’s the Times’s Januszczak on the building and show:
It is always difficult to tell from an opening visit what kind of service a new location will provide for the art inside it, but to my eyes, we have here 70,000 sq ft of well-nigh-perfect modern art space. Behind the portentous Duke of York HQ facade, four floors of interconnecting white cubes have been tastefully stacked, illuminated from above by what appears to be a sequence of soft and shrouded roof windows. It’s a beautiful illusion. All the lighting is artificial. But how lofty and airy the galleries appear. Some spaces are spectacular, others modest, as the higgledy-piggledy nature of the original building bequeaths a useful air of variety to the new arrangement. All this is a big architectural improvement on the depressing wooden sarcophagus in which the art struggled so hopelessly in the old Saatchi Gallery on the South Bank.
(The Best Stuff After the Jump) Read the rest of this entry »
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