Coming to New York
Sept 2012
Chinese Default on 40% of Annual Sales
The Financial Times explains how Chinese auction house figures—and, by extension, China’s place in the global art market—are not to be relied upon. The massive growth has been accompanied by massive acts of defalcation. Set aside:
Clare McAndrew’s annual art market report for TEFAF in Maastricht, the CAA has sounded a strong note of caution. After a countrywide survey of 250 auction houses, it found that of purchases above Rmb10m in the sales of autumn 2010, a full 40 per cent had not been paid for by April of the following year. In other words, close to half of the reported hammer prices turned out not to be real sales at all. The disparity in reporting of such aborted sales may account for the dramatic discrepancies in overall figures.
Asia’s Private Museums (A Partial List)
With ArtHK13 opening today, it is worth focusing on some of the names behind Asia’s private museum movement. Collector Richard Chang sums it up nicely in the Financial Times when he says liquidity is key and “you have to be willing to allocate a great deal of it to your museum. You won’t get it back. Opening a museum is a good deed, an act of generosity, and comes with huge responsibility to the artists you are showing. You need the right mindset to make it meaningful: the danger is you become cheap on the good deed side if you’re worrying about the real estate.”
Here’s a list of the private museum builders included in the FT’s article:
- Richard Chang, owner of the Domus Collection of contemporary art based in New York and Beijing, and board member of the Royal Academy, The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1 and Tate
- Budi Tek shows his collection at his Indonesian museum, the Yuz Foundation, and is set to open an 8,000 sq ft museum in Shanghai next year.
- Nanjing Sifang Art Museum, a $2bn project owned by the Sifang Culture Group, launching in October in Jiangsu province.
- Dai Zhikang, who opened the Zendai Art Museum in Shanghai in 2005, donating the space and funds for conceptual art within a Pudong shopping mall. Dai has since moved his museum to a new, grander development of shopping mall, theatre and hotel, and re-named it the Himalayas Art Museum
- Thomas Ou’s Rockbund Museum, part of a property development on Shanghai’s riverfront, says: “We don’t hide the link but the branding of the area will not come inside the museum; there is interaction, not confusion.” The Rockbund is not based on a collection but collaborates with the world’s top museums and focuses on relationships between artists and curators.
- Li Bing, owner of the Beijing He Jing Yuan Art Museum, says he began collecting 20 years ago. Li founded the Collectors’ Club in Beijing with the aim of “speeding up the learning process in China, where contemporary art developed late and people still don’t understand the international scene”
- Wang Wei, owner of the Long Museum, which is due to open in Shanghai in October, Dr Oei Hong Djin, owner of OHD Museum in Indonesia
Los Angeles Modern Auctions = $2.97m
- Le CorbusierBogota,1950 (Lot 169 est. $40,000-60,000) set a new auction record realizing $131,250
- George Rickey Tidal IV, 1962 (Lot 185 est. $100,000 – 150,000) brought $118,750
- Frederick HammersleyFigure of Speech, 1974-75(Lot 139 est. $30,000 – 50,000) set a new auction record for the artist $87,500
- Roy LichtensteinThunderbolt, 1966 (Lot 240 est. $80,000 – 120,000) brought $87,500
- Richard PettiboneRoy Lichtenstein. Tex. 1962. (Lot 235 est. $40,000 – 60,000) totaled $68,750
- Karl Benjamin#14 (Lot 138 est. $30,000 – 50,000) fetched $58,750
- Ann HamiltonBody/Object series (Lot 184 est. $20,000 – 30,000) realized $53,125
- Karl BenjaminYellow Landscape, 1953 (Lot 134 est. $25,000 – 35,000) exceeded estimate bringing $46,875
- Andy Warhol Liz, 1965(Lot 233 est. $25,000 – 35,000) realized $43,750
Learning How to Be Chinese
Caught between parents who could not see owning an art gallery as a respectable or worthwhile endeavor and the West’s view of Chinese Contemporary art as derivative, Pearl Lam has travelled the globe looking for a venue for her vision of Chinese Contemporary culture. She’s finally found it in Hong Kong, according to the Financial Times:
She returned to her family with a dream of opening a gallery. “It was not acceptable. They didn’t approve of me studying abroad for 10 years only to become a shopkeeper. We have no tradition of galleries in China and they didn’t understand. I was sent to Shanghai to help on a property development project. My parents thought I was too wild and needed calming down. But I negotiated the possibility of doing some pop-up shows.”
The young Chinese artists whom Lam met in Shanghai in the early 1990s had a life-changing influence. “They were talking about Confucius, Daoism, Buddhism,” she recalls. “I was amazed, it seemed so old fashioned; I thought of contemporary art in terms of western street culture. But of course, this kind of discussion had been banned during the Cultural Revolution and to talk about these things was subversive and cool. No one was reading this material in Hong Kong. I learnt how to be Chinese.”
Sotheby’s Geneva Jewels = $108.3m
Sotheby’s released figures for its Geneva sales of gems and jewelry. Less eye-catching in terms of price but possibly more important for understanding the direction of the jewelry market was the white-glove sale of items from the personal collection of Suzanne Belperron. Sixty of the designer’s own items made $3.45m, well above the pre-sale price tags:
Sotheby’s set a new world record of $108,377,219 for a various owner jewellery sale, with the conclusion of its two-day Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels Sale, surpassing the record set by Sotheby’s Geneva in November 2010 of $105 million. Over the two days 24 lots sold for over $1 million. The Beau Sancy, one of the most important royal diamonds to ever come to auction, sold for CHF 9,042,500 ($9,699,618). The result achieved by the celebrated jewel brought the total for the May Jewellery auctions to an outstanding total of CHF 104,298,625 ($111,836,526), almost doubling the pre-sale low estimate of CHF 54 -85 million
Schjeldahl Confesses
In what first appears to be another wailing complaint about money ruining art, the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl finally fesses up to what really bugs him about art fairs:
The triumph of commerce that art fairs advance and symbolize—the subject of my most recent piece in the magazine—gives me philosophical indigestion. The very wondrousness of Frieze New York’s production values made it worse. The spectacle seemed a gesture of noblesse oblige from King Mammon to the non-collector masses, or else a potlatch bonfire of profits that accrue to the Frieze folks, from facilitating intercourse between art and money. The signal drama in new art lately involves a struggle not for esteem and influence—the wonted dreams of artists—but for commercial viability. If you like a certain artist now, it’s hard not to be caught up in rooting for him or her to sell. Simply no other way to gauge, affirm, and discuss quality is in working order. [Emphasis added]
Set aside the misuse of the potlatch analogy (neither the art nor the money involved is destroyed so it’s not a potlatch at all.) Ignore the fact that an art fair is no different from an art district except a few more walls have been eliminated. Schjeldahl’s complaint comes down to feelings that no one listens to him anymore. That’s a shame. Schjeldahl’s a fascinating writer about art. And it isn’t clear why he thinks “no other way to gauge, affirm and discuss quality is in working order.”
More to the point, it seems that he’s lost confidence in himself in the face of mere money when surely his work will be better remembered and more impactful long after the prices paid at Frieze are forgotten.
WHAT IS THE FRIEZE FOR? (New Yorker)
Richter Comes in Second to Picasso with $83m NY Total
Colin Gleadell is still at his sums from last week’s sales in New York. Having tallied $88m for Picasso, Gleadell comes up with Gerhard Richter as a close second:
The other pre-eminent figure was Gerhard Richter, by whom 16 works, estimated to fetch about $54 million, sold for $83 million, eclipsing even the normally dominant Andy Warhol. The largest Richter abstract painting sold for a new record $21.8 million.
The week ended at Phillips, where the most significant sale was a six-foot Jean-Michel Basquiat crucifixion figure which sold for a record $16.3 million – a price that now puts Basquiat on a par with late Picasso, which is just where his fans want him to be.
Munch, Pollock and Calder help New York’s auction houses notch up $1.42 billion (Telegraph)
