Locker 227, the Australian art market database, released these numbers from 2008:

The top 20 prices for individual artworks has the usual splattering of works by Brett Whiteley, Arthur Boyd and John Brack, although Brett Whiteley could only manage 8th place this year with ‘Balmoral’ selling for $990,000 compared with his top placing in 2007. That honour, as well as 2nd place this year, went to Russell Drysdale with ‘Rocky McCormack, 1962-63′ ($1,800,000) and ‘Country Child, c.1948′ ($1,680,000) taking out the number 1 and 2 positions respectively. Ethel Carrick Fox was a surprise inclusion at number 7 with ‘Market Under Trees’ selling for 1,008,000, a new record for the artist. [ . . . ]

Arthur Boyd took out the number 1 spot on the Top 20 list of Artists by total sales price with sales of $6,664,087, well ahead of Russell Drysdale on $5,279,869 and Fred Williams on $3,959,005. Emily Kame Kngwarreye was the only indigenous artist to make the list at number 13 with $1,567,289. The rest of the list is filled with the usual blue chip artist names. [ . . . ]

Emma Minnie Boyd provided more than just the one surprise result, and topped the list of the 20 most under-estimated artists, with 61% of her works selling above the high estimate, at an average price of more than 4 times the high estimate. With eastern-states auctioneers refusing to believe that a West Australian artist could be sought after on the east-coast, Robert Juniper makes the list at number 14, with 56% of artworks selling above the high estimate. After years of healthy price growth, David Boyd continues to surprise the auctioneers, and rounded out the list at number 20, with 40% of his works selling above the high estimate.(

2008–The Year in Review (Locker 227)

The LA Times’s Culture Monster blog directed us to this small but telling story in Indianapolis about the local Penrod Society:

Police are investigating the theft of $380,000 from the organization. Penrod officials say it was embezzled by its former assistant treasurer. The society hosts the Penrod Arts Fair each September at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The fair typically draws a crowd of 30,000 and serves as Penrod’s principal fundraising source for the $50,000 to $110,000 the group gives out in grants each year.

Penrod officials say the loss of funds will not affect the 2009 art fair. But it has jeopardized the organization’s grants to support the arts at a time when the economy has put a strain on funding for such groups. “This is not only devastating for us,” said Jimmy Art, the Penrod Society’s president, “but it’s about as bad a time that it could happen for the arts community that counts on us.”

Penrod loses $380k in Possible Inside Job (Indiana Star)

One of the funny things about financial journalism and the web is the amplification of speculation. What does that mean? Well, modern day finance is all about the smart money (or, at least, it was until this year.) So financial journalism has tried to keep up by out smarting the smart money. You can see this at Breaking Views or Dealbook or Alphaville on a daily basis as journalists try to think like bankers. (There’s no evidence yet that this is necessarily a good thing.)

With that in mind, the FT’s Alphaville blog took a stab at Francois Pinault’s Artemis and decided it needs to lighten the debt load a little with the sale of Christie’s. Here’s the reasoning:

Consider the state of the French retail tycoon’s assets. Artemis has 40 per cent of luxury goods group PPR, whose shares have fallen around two-thirds this year, leaving the holding worth around €1.8bn. Then there’s five per cent of construction group’s Vinci, down 44 per cent and now worth about €650, and also two per cent of Bouygues - off 50 per cent to about €200m. There are other private assets in the Artemis stable - not least Chateau Latour, worth around €200m, and a very good art collection put at €100m.

We’re not sure where they get the $150 million valuation on M. Pinault’s art collection, which seems quite low, even with fall in Contemporary art prices. Nonetheless, the solution offered for the fall in Artemis’s holdings is to sell Christie’s for €500 million. It’s a nice idea but who would buy at a time like this? No one in the luxury goods sector is acquiring right now.

Those who claim inside knowledge reckon one or two private equity houses have shown interest in Christie’s. The art bubble might well have burst (belatedly), but Christie’s itself remains an intrinsically valuable name.

As absurd as that may sound with all of the trouble private equity firms are facing, there is some sense to it. Private equity prefers to buy when no one else does. Many of the biggest firms are sitting on lots of cash but they’re still waiting to see what happens with distressed debt and other assets that might come free.

So let’s chalk this one up to a nice intellectual exercise for a slow news week at the end of the year.

Is Christie’s About to Come Under the Hammer? (FT Alphaville)

If you believe the auction houses, the problem facing the art market in 2009 is not a lack of demand, as most would think, but a dearth of high-quality, bankable supply. After all, who wants to sell when the market is down and buyers are running for cover? Certainly not those who acquired works in the frenzy years of 2005-2008. And you can’t call anything that’s been on the market this decade fresh, now can you? That leaves sellers who have no choice but to sell.

The Madoff scandal has already caused two deaths. Surely there will be a divorce or two that comes from the recriminations too. But the final D of the auction house troika may not be Debt in 2oo9. For many Madoff investors, the new D is disaster. Sotheby’s CEO Bill Ruprecht is quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying he’s fielded calls from Madoff’s victims:

For sellers, 2009 may be a year of lower expectations. Sellers who have a choice will likely sit on the sidelines, experts say, leaving the market to those who must sell to settle an estate, a divorce or a debt. Mr. Ruprecht says he has spoken with “lots” of collectors who had invested with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the New York firm that allegedly carried out a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. “I have clients for whom art is the sole liquid asset they own today,” he says.

With the Dreier art potentially coming to market too, there’s some hope that 2009 won’t be a total drought.

Art Imitates Crunch, with Few Exceptions (Wall Street Journal)

The National in Abu Dhabi has a nice wrap up of 2008 in art by Hannah Westley. It starts with Anthony d’Offay’s gift (and the tax relief it gave him) and ends with Anthony Caro in France; Bacon’s year-end total; and Freud’s record price. The story is well worth reading in full–but here is the conclusion:

As the credit crunch starts to take its toll, it will be interesting to see whether next year artists will start to address these issues in their work. Will there be a reaction similar to that of the great land artists of the late 1960s and 1970s whose interventions in the landscape were partly intended to defy the limitations of the gallery space and its commodification of art? Perhaps we will see another wave of Arte Povera – the movement of the early 1970s whose works were characterised by the use of extremely inexpensive media. Common materials included sticks, rocks, rope and iron. When the system of art patronage that had kept artists in business throughout the centuries collapsed with the disappearance of the court system in France in the late 19th century, artists had to reinvent themselves in order to stay alive. They went out into the streets and fields to paint straight from nature – and Impressionism was born. Next year could see the start of something exciting indeed.

State of the Art (The National)

The Master, Judd Tully, offers the five outstanding auction lots of 2008. It’s a verions of his overvalued/undervalued feature and mostly covers the record-setting Bacon, Monet and Munch trio. It also looks at the Koons balloon flower and this Guston masterwork:

Sotheby’s bet that a top-rate Guston could fetch the price of a middle-of-the road Rothko failed miserably as this guaranteed lot sold for millions below its estimate. It seems the house overlooked the fact that Guston is virtually unknown in Europe, at least in comparison to the pantheon of expired Ab-Ex colleagues such as de Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko. The work set a record for the under-appreciated American artist nevertheless, easily hurdling the previous record, set at Christie’s New York in May 2005 when “The Street” from 1956 made $7,296,000. Plus, the savvy buyer got a relative bargain, and the seller, the collector and insurance magnate Donald Bryant, made a killing, given that he bought the luminous and beautifully executed 1954–55 canvas at Christie’s New York in November 1996 for a then-record $1.7 million. The work sold in the salesroom to San Francisco art adviser Mary Zlot, who is known to counsel Bay Area billionaires Charles Schwab and George Roberts.

2008 in Review: Five Memorable Auction Lots (ArtInfo)

Willoughby Sharp

The New York Times’s Margalit Fox describes the life and career of the conceptual artist who died at 72:

Mr. Sharp, the Ivy League-educated scion of one of New York’s most socially prominent families, who in the 1960s and afterward was on the cutting edge of the American avant-garde as a performer, producer, writer, publisher, curator, video artist and much else, died on Dec. 17 in Manhattan. He was 72 and lived in Brooklyn.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Pamela Seymour Smith Sharp, said.

A central figure in conceptual and performance art back when those forms were new and daring, Mr. Sharp was concerned with making art that was as much for the mind as it was for the eye. Along with artists like Chris Burden and Nam June Paik, Mr. Sharp helped expand the very idea of what constituted a work of art.

Mr. Sharp was also known as the publisher of Avalanche, a widely respected, handsomely produced art magazine he founded with the writer and filmmaker Liza Béar. Published for just 13 issues between 1970 and 1976, Avalanche featured in-depth interviews with many rising contemporary artists of the day, among them Mr. Burden, William Wegman and Joseph Beuys, the charismatic German artist of whom Mr. Sharp was an early champion.

As a curator, Mr. Sharp attracted international attention with “Earth Art,” a 1969 exhibition at Cornell University. Groundbreaking in every sense of the term, the exhibition featured site-specific installations — by Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke and others — that were hewn, molded or otherwise created from the land itself. Mr. Sharp also ran the Willoughby Sharp Gallery, on Spring Street in SoHo, from 1988 to 2004.

Mr. Sharp’s film and video works are in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1976 he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.

Willoughby Sharp, 72, Versatile Avant-Gardist, Is Dead (The New York Times)

Robert Graham

The Associated Press reported the sculptor’s death at 70 earlier this week. Here’s a brief description of his work:

In Washington, Mr. Graham’s bronze sculptures mark the Roosevelt memorial, where bronze panels symbolize 54 social programs initiated during the New Deal. Mr. Graham also created the life-size bronze figure of Roosevelt in his wheelchair at the entrance to the memorial.

At the northeast corner of Central Park in Harlem, his Duke Ellington Memorial stands 30 feet high, with three columns topped by the Muses holding up an 8-foot figure of the musician next to a piano.

Mr. Graham’s 18-foot monument to Charlie Parker, depicting Parker’s head above the words “Bird Lives,” is in Kansas City, Mo. And in Detroit, his Joe Louis Memorial honors the boxer with a 24-foot bronze monument in the shape of a massive fist and forearm suspended from a pyramid structure.

Mr. Graham also designed a number of prominent works in Los Angeles, including the Great Bronze Doors on the southeast side of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, an intricate imagery-filled project that took almost five years to complete. Another work in Los Angeles, “Olympic Gateway,” consists of the headless figures of a musclebound man and a woman. It stands at entry to the Memorial Coliseum, where the 1984 Olympics were held.

Robert Graham, a Sculptor of Monuments in Bronze, Dies at 70 (Associated Press)

Manjit Bawa

After three years in a coma, Manjit Bawa died at the age of 67 in Delhi, India. He was a member of India’s pioneering generation of modern artists:

Bawa studied at the School of Art in New Delhi and worked as a silkscreen painter in Britain, where he also studied between 1964 and 1971.

Often using animal imagery — tigers and lambs sharing the same space — Bawa sought to convey the message that people could coexist with animals in nature, said art critic Ena Puri, who wrote a biography of Bawa.

His canvases were distinguished by their colors — the ochre of sunflowers, the green of paddy fields, the red of the sun and the blue of the mountain sky, she said.

“He was an icon, a person who was completely head and shoulders above his contemporaries,” Puri said.

Indian Painter Manjit Bawa Dies at Age 67 (Associated Press)

With so many Russians living in London, one estimate puts the number as high as 400,000, dealer Peter London thinks there’s room for a semi-annual Russian art fair that coincides with the Russian auctions, so says This Is London.

Mr London said of Russian art: “It is the biggest explosion in terms of price and desirability and collectors. Art fairs in general were suffering dramatically, but specialist events - such as Frieze for contemporary art - were bucking the trend, he said. “Contemporary art is pretty well covered but there was nothing for Russian art apart from the regular auctions. We also want it to be a social occasion because there are not a huge number of social events for the Russians in London.”

But, wait, didn’t the Russians just go broke? What sense is there in a Russian art fair when the Russian money machine has sand in the gears? London has an explanation for that too:

“These people have been affected badly by what’s happening in the Moscow Stock Exchange - about 75 per cent has been wiped off the value - but many still have a few million in the bank. The top end art has bottomed out and is not finding the stratospheric prices it was, but pieces from £10,000 to £60,000 are still selling well.”

Finally, the site gives us a little context on the growth:

The Russian market has grown rapidly in recent years. The total global sales eight years ago were £7.6million. That figure rose to £85million in 2005 and £128million in 2006. Last year Sotheby’s and Christie’s alone sold art worth £180million.

Art Dealer Sets Up Fair to Draw Wealthy Russians (This Is London)

Bloomberg has a history of running stories that don’t quite live up to the headlines but today’s first part of a two-part story stretches the limits of logic. Under the headline, “How Monet, Freud, Hirst Records Led Art Market Bubble to Burst” Scott Reyburn lists a bunch of prices from 2008 with no causative link. The story simply never offers any connection between the record prices and the fall in the market. That’s because both the record prices and the market correction are epiphenomena of something else: global financial liquidity.

But let’s not stop there. When discussing Chinese Contemporary Art, the story tries to put the successful Estella sale of the Spring in contrast to the weak Estella sale of the Fall. Yet, anyone who was following that market knows that the Chinese Contemporary Art market had softened significantly before the Spring Estella sale. The New York Times sent a reporter to Hong Kong specifically to cover a sale that they expected to be a spectacular bust. When the sale did exceptionally well, most market watchers were left in a quandary. The second Estella sale took place in the midst of the worst of the worldwide market shocks. Many works failed to sell but those that did held to strong prices. Again, another confusing set of data points.

Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

How Monet, Freud, Hirst Records Led Art-Market Bubble to Burst (Bloomberg)

The Guardian asks the haunting question: What happens if the rich need to realize the value of their art on loan to Britain’s national collections. They come up with 2% as the figure for how much of the art is privately owned:

Conservative estimates suggest that one in 50 of all works in the national art collections is a loan - and as even the super-rich face a tough 2009, private owners may be moved to sell.

If all the art on private loan were assembled under one roof, its value would run into billions. As well as the Titians, the loans include the rest of the Bridgewater collection - wonderful paintings by Poussin, Rubens, Raphael, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Monet, Manet, and Gauguin, bronzes and jades, tapestries and marble sculptures. No museum in the land, no possible combination of lottery funds, charity awards and government grants could pay for them all.

The National Gallery in London alone has almost 250 loans, the oldest dating to 1927. Most are from other museums or institutions, or collectors who will never sell, like the Queen’s loan to the V&A of seven enormous tapestry designs by Raphael.

Fatal flaw: why masterpieces on loan could be lost to the nation (The Guardian)