For the first News Analysis column, I’d like to further develop an idea from Lily’s Art Market column, posted earlier today. After this week’s New York Post War and Contemporary sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury, plenty of trends are being spotted and proposed in this weeks news. Spun through all these post-auction and post-art boom articles is a common thread worth looking at: the goods are gone.
We started with Impressionist and Modern art sales last week, which did pretty well, but the lots were small. “The only real threat hanging over the art market became evident as seldom before in this week’s sales of Impressionist and Modern art in New York. It is the drying up of art supplies, and that has little to do with the recession,” wrote Souren Melikian in The New York Times. Melikian went on to say that everything is either locked up in a museum or spread across the globe – it’s all been bought. That may be true, but in the Post War and Contemporary sales it has everything to do with the recession.
We assumed that when the economy crashed, auction houses would be flooded with consignments. Reasons ranging from collector’s putting up works to increase cash flow as their investments sunk to hedge fund collector-newbies who flooded the contemporary art market during the boom who now want out since their funds went bust. Arne Glimcher of Pace Wildenstein in the Daily Beast this week remembers a similar prediction, “For one thing, everyone expected an avalanche of art to come to market—especially from the collections of hedge-fund guys and real-estate moguls whose fortunes dissolved even more rapidly than they were made. We anticipated auction catalogs stacked liked skyscrapers, but we were wrong.”
We sure were. The number of lots at the PWC sales was much lower than in previous years. The only sign of the recession seemed to be the recalibrated high estimates. So where has all the art gone? Why is no one selling? One reason fewer works are up at auction is that auction houses can’t afford to put up everything offered to them. If the works isn’t of a high enough quality to be guaranteed to sell, the auction house can’t afford to gamble – there aren’t enough gullible buyers. So collectors are holding on to those high value works.
When a collector does have some work that he or she would like to sell they are now looking at another option – selling private over publicly. Two weeks ago, the New York Times published a story on just that. Said Carol Vogel, “For many sellers, the driving factor is fear. Fear that their friends will discover they need money. Fear that if a Picasso or Warhol, Monet or Modigliani does not sell at auction, it will be considered yesterday’s goods. If they do not have to, fewer collectors are putting their holdings up for auction at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, where prices and profits have plummeted. But executives at both houses say business in their private-sale departments has more than doubled in recent months.”
