A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

The conversation was upbeat at the very fancy Midtown restaurant where I found myself yesterday, talking with a few serious participants in the art market. Not even a kitchen snafu—which derailed the meal and compelled an assistant manager to apologize to us and the nearby real estate mogul who owned the building—could dampen the mood. Sure, the summer had been slow, but there was a low-eight-figure deal about which to trade tidbits of info. Plus, there was the Elaine Wynn estate sale to look forward to, as well as the latest tranche of Lichtenstein family material, and Pauline Karpidas’s collection next week. In perhaps the most auspicious sign of all, my art world lunchmates were spending money at a tony restaurant and not complaining. (Nor was the finance skylord at the table to our left, who was so enmeshed in the art world that his ex-wife wound up living with an art dealer.)

Certainly some recent market trends warrant sobriety, but whether you see the burgundy glass as half-empty or half-full is all a matter of perspective. On the half-empty side, a banker friend remarked that he hadn’t read “a more downbeat piece on the state of things” than this week’s Artnet Intelligence Report, which tried to gather as much evidence for a market rout as it possibly could, from the scare subhead—“Who’s getting swept away?”—to the piece’s view that the “market’s bloated infrastructure is now struggling to support itself.” Meanwhile, Morgen & Stern’s recent Global Blue-Chip Art Market Report depicted a narrowed market turning toward historically significant art, where bid and ask spreads run 10-25 percent for “blue-chip works.” It’s “the strongest buyer’s market in more than a decade,” the report declared, where high-value transactions have moved to private dealing.

The Artnet report builds its narrative around some unrelated gallery closings; scare quotes from a perma-bear “collector” who appears more in the press than in the art market; and a legitimate discussion of “inversion”—when primary prices, especially at the big galleries, are quite high, but work by the same artists trades much lower on the secondary market. Some mid-career and recently established artists are experiencing this right now, which is not what the last few decades have trained them to expect.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Impressionist and modern art had fewer top prices over $20 million than the same period last year. Nevertheless, the top names at auction—Picasso, Magritte, Monet, and Giacometti—were consistent with past years. It was both surprising and not to see Marc Chagall rank in the top 10 artists at auction in the imp-mod category.

In contrast, the postwar category had a far greater variety of names among the top 10 lots at auction: two Indian postwar masters, Tyeb Mehta and M.F. Husain; François-Xavier Lalanne; and Michael Andrews. Switching to the top artists by auction volume in the postwar period, those familiar names reemerge. Because of the way Artnet pulls its data—by the birthday of the artist—there are some artists, like Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, and Lucio Fontana, who end up on the imp-mod list, when we really think of them as postwar artists. But no matter how they’re categorized, each of these three artists saw strong sales in the $40 million to $60 million range for the first half of the year. If they were included on the postwar list, they would rank below Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who both sold close to $80 million in the first half, but above Gerhard Richter, Lalanne, Yayoi Kusama, Ed Ruscha, and David Hockney. M.F. Husain and Zao Wou-Ki each sold $30 million-plus at auction, reminding us that despite the slowdown in Asian buying, Asian and South Asian artists remain important fixtures in the art market.

The contemporary market was dominated by sales of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work, which accounts for six of the top 10 auction prices in the category. Three of the remaining four went to women artists, and two of those—Marlene Dumas and Jenny Saville—also appear on the list of top 10 contemporary artists by auction volume. Basquiat unsurprisingly leads the list with $101 million in auction sales for the first half of the year. Yoshitomo Nara and Richard Prince follow with $20 million. George Condo saw just more than $15 million in auction sales. Banksy, Christopher Wool, and Keith Haring also made that chart.

As I’ve said before, I expected we’d see more of a rise in the art market in the first half of this year, and that the growing sales would take place around historical artists of one type or another. I was right about the historical part; the faltering auction volume may be a function of political and economic uncertainty, or a sign of secular decline. And though I don’t really subscribe to the Morgen & Stern idea of a buyer’s market—there’s nothing forcing art holders to sell except death and taxes—I do think we’re in an era where buyers are looking to get back in, now that prices have come down substantially. So I’m optimistic that much of this historically proven art is going to be attractive to buyers. We’ll have to wait and see how the next 18 months play out.