Beware the Chinese Runup
It’s hard to watch the crazy price velocities in Chinese contemporary art without some skepticism. So I was intrigued to read these articles in the International Herald Tribune and London’s Daily Telegraph. Even news outlets not regularly known for art commentary, like MSNBC, are weighing in.
Make no mistake. The destabilizing factors are all there:
***a lack of art-world infrastructure (ie. established museum scholarship and criticism), which means that the only thing driving valuations is the market, not a considered view of where the work fits into the continuum of art history
***balls-out speculation (hey, Saatchi’s in the game, need we say more?)
***market manipulation aplenty, with both artists and dealers putting brand new works up at auction, and driving up the bidding, just to establish price momentum
***artists pumping out cookie-cutter works, assembly-line-style (see: Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun), to meet the rampant international demand.
Then I heard that one of the early movers in the Chinese contemporary collecting world, Howard Farber, was trimming his holdings this fall at Phillips de Pury in London. This isn’t Farber’s first rodeo by any means. This savvy collector has gotten into (and out of) everything from early American modernism to modernist photography. He has a deep curiosity, an addictive collecting style and a keen sense of when to take profits. Farber bought major works off the walls of the first American museum exhibit of Chinese contemporary art (at Asia Society and P.S. 1, way back in 1998)—for a song. Since then, he’s increased his holdings to the point where much of the work—which encompasses painting, sculpture and photography—remains stacked in crates in his New Jersey storage facility, unseen and unappreciated. (But not unappreciating!) Farber’s primary collecting interests have moved from China to Cuba—speculators, take note—and so he is selling off a chunk of his Chinese stuff, some 44 works by the big-name guys, including Cai Guoqiang, Fang Lijun, Gu Wenda, Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Yue Minjun, and Zhang Xiaogang. Since this is the first important collection of newer Chinese art to hit the block, count on it to be a defining market moment.
