Dumbo Pricing for Jumbo Picture
My jaw is still dragging on the floor from when Andreas Gursky’s supersized, 1999 photograph of bargain-store shelves sold for $2.2 million at Sotheby’s this May. Why would anyone nearly quadruple his record price ($611,000) from only four years ago? Call me a fuddy duddy, but I’m thinking that the dust of art history hasn’t settled enough to inspire a right-minded bidder to confidently paddle his or her way to paying the second highest price ever for a photograph at auction. The piece is only six years old.
I know, I know. His work is marketed and sold within the contemporary art sphere, where speculating hedge funders and trophy hunting collectors are breaching the million-dollar mark with increasing regularity. But the fact is, the $611,000 price was on the spiky side four years ago, riding the buzz wave of Gursky’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective. And in the context of both the photography market and the artist’s own price history, $2.2 million was fairly insane—even with a Peter Brandt provenance and a MoMA exhibition history.
Now comes the rumor that Phillips de Pury is offering hedge funder/collector Adam Sender a guarantee of $2.5 million for a Gursky picture he owns. The exact same image, it turns out.
What, may I ask, are they smoking?
Do they not remember that their auction house nearly fell into ruin a few years back due to its practice of offering exorbitant guarantees to sellers? If this is what it has to do to lure business away from Sotheby’s and Christie’s, can it stay in business? As the article points out, Sender took the work back to dealers for resale, but wasn’t happy with the return they were offering him. Nor did Sotheby’s or Christie’s offer him guarantees as high as Phillips did. So why is it the only house gambling on topping what was already a seriously aberrational price? Especially since, quite frankly, there is one less bidder out there for that piece who is willing to shoot the moon?
Phillips offered similarly eye-popping guarantees on works by Richard Prince and Mike Kelley. I have to say, I question the wisdom, and will be watching the sale closely to see if this market madness continues. —M.S.
