On the face of it, perhaps there’s nothing extraordinary about Ben Brown opening a new show of Alighiero Boetti’s Aerei—the templated images of various airplanes, often tinted with watercolors or hand-colored with ballpoint pen or both—at his underground London gallery. Yes, Boetti is one of the most important conceptual artists of the late 20th century, and his fame, influence, and market seem to have only grown in recent years. And, yes, the gallery attests that there has never been a show of the Aerei, which are all works on paper and therefore considered less valuable than oil paintings or his signature tapestry works. But the show plays a meaningful role in the market structure for Boetti, an artist with numerous discrete bodies of work within his broader practice. Boetti, an Italian artist who worked with artisans and assistants around the world, was fascinated by order and disorder, global interconnectedness and classification systems. Much of his subject matter deals with maps and alphabets and other systems. The Aerei, which can be viewed as a taxonomy of airplanes, were created in the late 1970s, at a time when global air travel was expanding rapidly, connecting everyone to everywhere.

The original image of the Aerei, created by Guido Fuga in collaboration with Boetti, depicts passenger jets, fighter planes, the Concorde, and even propeller planes frozen in mid-flight—each hurtling in a different direction, none touching or overlapping. Brown’s show contains the first tiny version, but Boetti eventually scaled the works to triptychs of varying sizes and employed different methods to color the sky upon which the planes forever fly. All of the Aerei are works on paper, even though many are paper laid on canvas. Brown’s show is an excellent opportunity to see the depth and variety of the works Boetti made, even within the narrow band of one of his many series. According to the data from our friends at ARTDAI, Boetti’s auction sales first peaked in 2014 and 2015—right after a huge Boetti retrospective traveled from MoMA in New York to the Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London in 2012. Global auction sales were $30 million in 2014 and almost $25 million in 2015. Auction volume slid over the following years until it bottomed in 2020. Then, suddenly, sales rose to almost $25 million again in 2021 and $31 million in 2022. Auction volume took a breather in 2023, but last year, his sales were back up to $24.75 million. And this is where Brown’s hypothesis becomes so extraordinary.

Notably, the composition of sales has evolved. “I felt for a number of years that the discrepancy between the good and the great pictures was too narrow,” Brown told me on a WhatsApp video call as he showed me around his Mayfair gallery. “You had a mediocre Mappa”—the large embroidered maps created for Boetti by Afghan craftswomen—“worth $1.5 million, and a great one was worth $3 million.” At the same time, Brown observed, “a mediocre Picasso was worth $5 million, and a great one $100 million.” That didn’t last long. Starting in 2021, prices for Boetti’s maps at auction started to expand, climaxing with one piece setting a record for the artist at $8.8 million. I’ve talked a lot about how new high auction values will create confirmation prices. Not only did this dynamic occur with the maps, but it also had a knock-on effect for the small embroidery works. Most people in the art market are familiar with the unique, colorful, and gridded works that Boetti commissioned from his artisans, many of which were done in smaller five-by-five grids or similar sizes. Those works can be considered entry-level Boettis. In the past half-decade or so, they began to double in price from around €30,000 to €60,000, Brown said. (You can check ARTDAI and see for yourself that this is roughly true of the auction market, but Brown was also referring to many private sales.) That didn’t entirely make sense to Brown, but he wasn’t going to fight the market. Instead, he started stockpiling Aerei at auction. Now he’s selling them through this show and at his booth in Hong Kong. “I have no problem investing in this market,” he said on the call. He believes in the work. Also, he said, “I think I have the arbitrage right.” Since the airplanes are works on paper, they tend to be undervalued. But that’s not a bias the entire art world holds. In Asia, there’s a long tradition of works on paper, especially ink paintings, being valued at the same level as oil paintings. (Remember, there’s not a long tradition of oil painting in Asia.) The secret to the Boetti market is the strong support from museums and collectors. Brown says there are a number of deep Boetti collectors who own something from each series. Even though they might have 20 works by the artist, there’s often that one last piece they need to complete the collection. Brown says he’s sold maps to U.S. buyers recently, but the collector base is mostly European. Interestingly, one of the last things that Len Riggio bought at auction was an embroidery work composed of 49 four-by-four embroidery works spelling out Ammazzare il tempo. Riggio paid $3.9 million for it. You won’t see his heirs selling it any time soon.

Thank you for stopping by today. I’ll be back on Friday with another edition of Wall Power for the broader group. M P.S.: If you click on the ARTDAI link, you’ll be taken to a landing page. ARTDAI is primarily an institutional data service, but we’ve partnered with them to give Wall Power users access to the service as individuals or small agencies. If you do sign up with ARTDAI, we may receive an affiliate fee.