With an 82% sell-through, Sotheby’s scores with Monet, Schiele, Magritte and Picabia; George Michael tests the YBA market; Phillips new buyer’s premium; Bisi Silva, Nigerian curator, dies at 56.
This commentary by Marion Maneker is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)
Sotheby’s London Imp-Mod, Surrealism Evening = £87.7m
Ignore the 22 works offered statistic. There were 22 works offered in the Imp-Mod Evening sale. Another 17 or so were offered during the Surrealism sale. Together the two sales totaled £87.7m. £79.3m was in Impressionist and Modern Art. An additonal £13.9m was sold in the Surrealism auction.
Some of the surprise runners were the Magritte, L’Étoile du matin which made £5.3m over a £4.5m high estimate, Picabia’s Atrata which made £3.7m over a £2m high estimate. Egon Schiele’s Triestiner Fischerboot also out-performed dramatically to sell for £10.67m over at £8m high estimate.
George Michael’s Sale Might Test the YBA Market
Colin Gleadell makes a couple of good points about George Michael’s collection of YBA art that will be sold by Christie’s in March. Michael and his companion, Kenny Goss, bought the bulk of the art in a brief period in 2006-2008:
- “Less academic than David Bowie’s art collection, and less focused on a single medium, as Elton John’s was with photography, Michael and Goss began their collection by buying art they liked and that amused them. After a time, though, according to their adviser, Aphrodite Gonou, they wanted to expand their vision to create something more meaningful, which would support artists. The Goss-Michael Foundation was founded, to make exhibitions and raise funds for charity, as well as house their collection.Michael donated millions to charity and some of his purchases were at charity sales, where he bought without regard to profit and often way over estimate. These works are all now estimated to make significant losses.“
Phillips New Buyer’s Premium
Not to be left out of the rising fee structures, Phillips has put a new fee schedule into place:
London
- 25.0% on the hammer price up to and including £300,000
- 20.0% on the hammer price exceeding £300,000 up to and including £3,000,000
- 13.5% on the hammer price exceeding £3,000,000
New York
- 25.0% on the hammer price up to and including $400,000
- 20.0% on the hammer price exceeding $400,000 up to and including $4,000,000
- 13.5% on the hammer price exceeding $4,000,000 and above
Hong Kong
- 25.0% on the hammer price up to and including HK$3,000,000
- 20.0% on the hammer price exceeding HK$3,000,000 up to and including HK$30,000,000
- 13.5% on the hammer price exceeding HK$30,000,000
Geneva
- 25.0% on the hammer price up to and including CHF400,000
- 20.0% on the hammer price exceeding CHF400,00 up to and including CHF4,000,000
- 13.5% on the hammer price exceeding CHF4,000,000
International Curator and Nigerian Arts Edcuator, Bisi Silva, Dies at 56
The New York Times has the obituary for Bisi Silva who died of complications due to breast cancer earlier this month:
- “Ms. Silva felt that her mission was to change the way contemporary African art was being viewed from a Western perspective and to develop African artists in ways that their schools were not.“The gaps in the art education system are jarring,” she told Frieze, an art and culture magazine, in 2017. While some West African nations like Nigeria had arts education programs, she called them “a colonial relic out of tune with present-day contextual, stylistic and intellectual realities.”
To fill the gaps, she created the Asiko Art School — actually a series of pop-up schools holding annual, monthlong educational gatherings in various African countries including Senegal, Ghana and Ethiopia, where artists, writers, historians, curators and teachers immersed themselves in seminars, workshops and exhibitions. The events gave Ms. Silva opportunities to evaluate artists’ work.”
