Art Market Monitor

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A Managed Market: NY Nov Contemporary Evening Sales, 2007-18

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This detailed analysis of the November Contemporary Evening sales over the last 12 years was provided by our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

Our friends at Pi-eX have put together their analysis for the Contemporary Evening sales. The results, which need to take into account the large lump of the Leonardo that was sold fro $450m last year during a Contemporary Evening sale, show the Contemporary evening sales gaining ground slightly but at a controlled pace.

First, let's look at the sold lots in New York by value over the last 12 November Evening sales of Contemporary art. You can see that the Contemporary market peaked in 2014. Remember that these numbers do not include curate sales which emerged in 2015 and had some impact on the market.

Pi-eX also annotated the sales by guarantee with third-party guarantees represented in light blue and direct auction house guarantees shown in red. Without direct guarantees, the market would have peaked in 2013 instead of 2014. Starting in 2016, third-party guarantees began to play a central role in the November results. Over these three years, the volume of third party guarantees was the greatest of any period during the previous dozen years. 

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Art Basel Miami Beach Sales Report

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This comprehensive Art Basel sales report is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free on monthly subscriptions. Feel free to cancel at any time before the month is up. Sign up for AMMpro here. We'll keep the initial sales reports outside of the paywall before they are only available to subscribers.

Katya Kazakina wraps up her Art Basel Miami Beach coverage with a story that suggests the fair might have been pretty quiet on the sales front. Christophe van de Weghe claimed to have had his best ABMB ever (which is a common line to hear from dealers after nearly every fair) where he sold works by Warhol, Wesselman and Picasso totaling $28m after claiming to have sold a $17m Picasso on the first day (see below.)

The tone and tenor of the other comments Kazakina got from dealers, collector-dealers and collectors—along with the talk of paintings familiar from previous fairs and recent auctions—suggests the fair was slower and the private market is sparser than some dealers would like to project.

We've unscrambled our sales report to list everything by gallery:

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A Strong, Complacent Market: November Contemporary Market Analysis

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This analysis of the November 2018 Contemporary sales in New York is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed.

The Contemporary art market may feel pricey and pushed by guarantees to the point where the sales are often anti-climactic. By the numbers, Contemporary art is striking in its strength, breadth and depth. Yes, the top lot of the week dominated with its will-it-won't-it tension over the sale price. In the end, the Hockney painting sold for the low estimate the consignor was demanding which demonstrates the amount of energy that has gone into this market achieving its ambitions. Nonetheless, the broader numbers were a step forward for the market. In Contemporary art, nearly $1bn in transaction volume took place at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips. That was up 35% from last November's sales cycle. Much of the increase came from the Ebsworth collection so top heavy in works by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns, but the presence of the Hockney and Mary Tyler Moore's Richard Diebenkorn painting that made a near-record were important contributors to the soaring totals.

There were significant sales for a number of classic artists like Alexander Calder and Gerhard Richter at strong prices. For the first time in some time, the day sales found a limit to their momentum. With $218m in sales during the auctions held between evening events, down from $233m the previous year, the day sales were hardly damaged or facing serious problems. The blip in sales volume, sell-through rates and average prices during the day sales could easily be a seasonal anomaly or the product of the mix of works on offer.

The only directional information the day sale totals provide is a sense that the middle market's upward momentum has some limit. In the longer run, that may be a much healthier market development.

The most dynamic lot on offer last month was the Philip Guston drawing, Window, (above) sold from the Anderson collection of works on paper that did not do as well as many (us included) expected. Individual high quality works like the Guston drawing were bid up. But the collection itself did not perform to the level of the best works perhaps because they were distributed through different sales like the Contemporary Evening sale rather than sold together as a group either in a single-owner sale or during the day sales.

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A Picker’s Market: Impressionist and Modern Market Analysis, Nov 2018

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This analysis of the November 2018 Impressionist and Modern sales in New York is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed.

The November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales were 19.4% lower this season than a year ago. The sell-through rates were down by 10% and the hammer ratio (the measure of hammer performance against low estimates) was also substantially lower falling from 1.17 to .89 which shows the willingness of sellers to compromise and the need to accept more realistic estimates for classic art.

The average price for an evening sale lot sold in November fell 12.5% year over year. Last year it was $5.4m; this year the average lot value was $4.77m for the evening sale. Lots were fairly evenly distributed with almost half the lots failing to find buyers or selling at prices below the low estimates. Another way to look at that breakdown is to say that 52% of lots sold within or above estimates.

Finally, evidence of the top end of the market losing steam comes in the portion of the sale accounted for by the top ten lots. Last year, nearly half of the value generated in the evening sales, 47.5%, came from the top ten lots. This year, that proportion fell to 39.5%. A falling share for the top ten lots is not necessarily a bad signal for the market.

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The November Impressionist & Modern Sales 2007-18

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This detailed analysis of the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales over the last 12 years was provided by our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

The November Impressionist and Modern sales seemed to leave many disappointed. It was true that many lots struggled against seller's expectations. But the total for the sales was among the best over the last dozen years. Looking at these charts provided by Pi-eX, you can see the that this year's hammer totals were in the same range as those of 2014 (though remember that we're comparing like sales and excluding some of the curated and single-owner collections.) Only 2007 and 2017 have exceeded the totals of this year.

This year was also among the sales where works over $10m accounted for the greatest proportion of the sale total but still behind 2017, 2007 and 2014.

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New York Contemporary Evening Sale Market Mix, 2007-2017

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This detailed analysis of the composition of the November Contemporary Evening sales was provided by our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

Last week, we published some charts displaying the diverging paths each auction house took toward their Impressionist and Modern sales. Now we have something similar for all three houses. Before we get into the substance, a quick word on the charts. These have been run as percentage of the total sale devoted to each artist. We chose this to make it slightly easier to read over time. 

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The Changing Market Mix for Impressionist and Modern Art, 2007-2017

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This detailed analysis of the composition of the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales was provided by our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

Earlier this week, we remarked upon the diverging strategies in the Impressionist and Modern market taken by Christie's and Sotheby's this November. Our friends at Pi-eX created chart of the last 11 years of November Evening sales in the Imp-Mod category for each house.

The results are revealing. For the last three years, Christie's has relied upon Picasso and Monet as the bedrock of their sales. Last year, the much larger sale had greater contributions from van Gogh and Léger among other artists. But Picasso and Monet were consistent contributors. Monet's dollar volume rose and fell over those three years expanding in '16 and '18 when the sales levels were comparable. Picasso's dollar volume at Christie's has grown each November from 2014 to present.

Sotheby's took the radical step of only including one Picasso work in the evening sale. But this was not always the case.

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Christie’s Ebsworth Scores with $317m Evening Sale

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This round-up of the reporting on the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. The first month of a monthly subscription is free which makes it easy to subscribe and cancel before you pay.

There’s a market impression forming that the combination of high expectations and the armature of third-party guarantees is creating a successful but muted art market. With so much effort going into pre-selling works at auction to meet the estimate demands of sellers, the auctions this week themselves have begun to feel anti-climactic.

The Ebsworth sale at Christie’s is a case in point. The $317m total made the sale a solid success but the room felt muted with a fair number of empty seats, hardly the gala evening event befitting a collection of Ebsworth’s reputation. Maybe it was the shadow of the Rockefeller sale or the market hangover or simply the spreading presumption of a tougher macroeconomic environment in the future. Whatever the underlying cause, the numbers told a different story from the bidding where most works sold without excitement.

The New York Times’s Scott Reyburn got this quote from one dealer who has been on both sides of the equation:

“It didn’t fly, but it was pretty solid,” said Philippe Ségalot, a private art dealer based in New York, referring to the auction.

The Wall Street Journal had a different take that might need a grain of salt to be taken with it:

“The fact that so many of these evening-sale lots are now guaranteed gives people the misleading impression that big auctions are riskless propositions, but that’s clearly not the case,” said art lawyer Thomas Danziger.

It’s hard to believe anyone thinks auctions are riskless. But a single-owner collection with a global guarantee is a substantially different market proposition than individually guaranteed lots.

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Impressionist-Modern Market Tacks Away from Obvious Names

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This round-up of the reporting on the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. We will have a detailed report on the sales based on lot data next week. 

Anticipating the art market is never easy. This season, the Impressionist and Modern market was particularly hard to read. Christie’s ran sale with heavy emphasis on the big names—Picasso, Monet, Giacometti—that drive the Imp-Mod market; Sotheby’s tacked off in a different direction with a mix of Expressionist and other names that don’t normally carry a sale in this category. Christie’s managed their sale to a solid sell-through rate at the cost of a strong headline number; Sotheby’s pulled off strong sales for its most important offerings (save one) and seemed to abandon the latter quarter of the sale to market forces and consignor pride achieving a strong sale number with a devil-may-care sell-through rate of 75%.

At both houses, the bidding was fractured, halting and wary. Buyers were happy to slice the salami in thin bidding increments or hold their fire until another bidder showed his or her hand. All of that suggests the high asset value Impressionist and Modern market is burdened by seller expectations. In response, buyers are staging something of a strike.

That is, the buyers who were not engaged in attention-seeking stunts. Several reporters were charmed by the collector who brought his dog to Christie’s auction. But when Judd Tully tried to speak to the buyer of two works, he got this reaction:

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Sotheby’s Hints at Strategy to Break Historic Valuation

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This look at Sotheby's earnings for the third quarter of 2018 is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed. 

Sotheby’s released its third quarter earnings report yesterday. Spanning the slow Summer months of July, August and September, the quarter rarely provides much in the way of directional information about the tone of the art market or the evolution of Sotheby’s strategy. Paradoxically, the absence of data usually allows or, even, requires Sotheby’s management to use their earnings call as a bully pulpit on their business.

Before we survey the color commentary Sotheby’s provided, there were some numbers worth paying attention to. For the first nine months of 2018, sales are up a solid 20% to $4.04bn. Half of that rise came from a 49% updraft in private sales to $675.4m. That puts the division on track towards a nice round $1bn in private sales. That number surely reflects the new-ish private sales division hitting its stride but also a quietly increasing industry trend away from public auction to private transactions.

Nowhere is that better seen than in the Warhol market where industry players insist four massive private sales have taken place behind the scenes while the 20th Century’s giant has all but vanished from the auction block.

Digging deeper into Sotheby’s numbers, one can see that auction sales are up in 2018 without relying upon Sotheby’s to empty its storerooms as the firm did in 2017. That means Sotheby's business improved markedly in 2018 without anyone really noticing. In the third quarter of 2018, Sotheby’s sold $6.5m of property that it already owned. These are works previously guaranteed that didn’t find buyers or inventory acquired in other ways. During the same period in 2017, that figure was more than 12 times that amount or $81m. For the nine months of 2018, inventory sales were $62.8m. The year before that figure was almost three times as high or $172m. Overall revenue was down but without an impact on the profit.

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