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.

Hey guys! Nope, I haven’t disappeared. Just gotten buried with other things–namely, starting a new job, one that doesn’t immerse me in the collecting markets to the same degree my old one did. But I’m still watching them all with an interested eye. And still weighing in from time to time. Please join me on Friday evening, October 27, 7 pm at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where I’ll be talking about how to cut through the hype and confusion of the contemporary art market.

The talk is entitled Navigating Newer Art: Lessons from the Connoisseurs. The School of Visual Arts is at 209 E. 23rd Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Back in November, I posted about some recently rediscovered Renaissance altarpiece panels. Here’s the followup:

Word was, a modest Oxford librarian named Miss Jean Preston had hung the tiny gold-leaf panels on the back of her guest room door. She thought them “quite nice.”

Last Thursday, having been discovered to be lost masterpieces by Renaissance master Fra Angelico, they sold for $3.4 million.

Back in the 1960s, she had found them in a “box of odds and ends” while traveling in America and had convinced her father to buy them for £200—never suspecting that they had been commissioned back in 1440 by Florentine banker Cosimo de’ Medici.

The Italian government tried, in vain, to buy them back, presumably to hang in the Museo de San Marco, next to the main panel of the altarpiece. But a deeper-pocketed private European collector reportedly prevailed. Pity.

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Sotheby’s Hong Kong
Xu Beihong, Put Down Your Whip, 1939
April 7
Estimate: Not published
Price Fetched: $9.2 million

China has been invaded.

Not only by Western collectors swooping in frantically to buy contemporary art, but by the Western art aesthetic that has driven the market in the last few years. Prices for Chinese oil painting from the earlier part of the 20th century have begun to skyrocket—to the point where some say the market is beginning to look overheated. Above, the painting that achieved the most recent record auction price for Chinese oil painting. The previous record was Xu’s 1926 Slave and Lion, which sold for $6.88 million last fall.

Xu Beihong is an acknowledged master of modern Chinese painting. Originally trained in traditional Chinese arts of brush painting and calligraphy, he traveled to Europe to study Western oil painting, which he mastered. Xu painted this image, which portrays an actress in a patriotic street drama, to promote patriotism and raise war funds for China during the Sino-Japanese conflict.

It’s telling that the current market values his Western-style academic realism over all; the same thing is happening with Chinese contemporary art, where collectors flocked first to Political Pop and Cynical Realism, which are easy for the Western eye to “get.” Is this the first wave of collectors swooping in with immature eyes and driving up the market for the most accessible pieces? Time will tell, as museums start to collect 20th-century Chinese art and weigh in on which styles and artists will be the most enduring.

Memory Lane, Inc.
April 13, 2007
1951 Bowman #305 Willie Mays Rookie Card PSA 9
Starting Bid: $10,000
Price Fetched: $79,500

Another example of how condition, rarity and historic importance come together to part a baseball card collector from his money. Because baseball cards were printed in such quantities, it’s condition, condition, condition that makes all the difference. Here’s how Memory Lane describes this rookie gem: “The color on this card is bright and rich. The tough horizontal centering is near perfect. The narrow borders are clean and white, and overall the card is full of brightness and high gloss.” Bowmans from 1951 and 1952 are particularly prized for their bold graphic design. This example shows why.

I love the green farmhouse-looking structure peeking out from the behind the canvas backdrop. Not only does it tie in visually with the green on the inside of his cap brim. But perhaps it was a deliberate evocation of the heartland, a canny marketing move when you consider that this was only four years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball and black players—even future Hall of Famers like Mays—were still subject to widespread discrimination. Mays won Rookie of the Year honors in 1951 and helped lead his team, the New York Giants, to the World Series that year.

Dealers were incensed in March when Sotheby’s and Christie’s took out booths, front and center, at the Maastricht art fair, traditionally a dealer-only showcase. Here’s a thoughtful discourse by Georgina Adam at The Art Newspaper about the shifting sands of the art market:

The Changing Landscape of the Art Market.

I’d love to hear if anyone has other ideas about how dealers might protect their turf?

What’s in your wallet? If you’re a jet-setting, art-collecting, Grey Poupon-spreading multi-millionaire, Sotheby’s [nyse: BID] hopes it’s their new World or World Elite MasterCard.

In the 1990s, under the leadership of galleria guru Alfred Taubman, Sotheby’s was largely credited with pioneering the auction trade’s shift from a sleepy, dealer-to-dealer business into a super-luxe shopping mall environment. Now, by proffering plastic, it has cannily motored a few miles further down the retail highway.

Of course, membership will have its privileges. Baseline perks include gratis admission to a dozen or so major museums, a complimentary subscription to Sotheby’s Preview magazine and the option to use reward points to make cash donations to cultural institutions.

Most credit cards let you redeem rewards for nights out at Applebee’s and gift certificates to Best Buy. If you are chosen to receive Sotheby’s World Elite card, which is available by invitation only, you can cash in your points for such art-world bragging rights as:

*access to museum facilities for private tours and events
*visits to prominent artists’ studios and tours of major art fairs
*use of a Sotheby’s auctioneer for your own charity auction, or a Sotheby’s wine specialist to hold a local tasting event.
*access to purchase luxe perks such as private jet shares, celeb golf outings or chartered yacht cruises.
*personal travel agent and concierge services, and first-class upgrades.

And the cost of all that social cachet? Priceless.

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Eldred’s Auctioneers
March 31
1957 Gibson Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” left-hand guitar
Estimate: $40,000–$60,000
Price fetched: $253,000

It’s safe to say that this vintage Les Paul was something of a fish out of water in Eldred’s Americana auction on Cape Cod last week, where most buyers came looking for things like hooked rugs, folk portraits, Windsor chairs, nautical pictures, Staffordshire pottery, and scrimshaw. Nevertheless, the fabled Gibson “Black Beauty” attracted two determined bidders, who battled it out like a pair of axe players having a cutting contest.

A quarter-million dollars is a lot of money for an electric guitar not played by Eric Clapton, George Harrison or Keith Richards. So, how exactly does this price register on the crazy scale? Did it tip over, like Nigel Tufnel’s amp on Spinal Tap, to eleven?

Let’s break it down.

[more…]

It’s good to be king.

The numbers are pretty staggering. Artprice.com has compiled a list of the top-selling artists of last year. To give you an idea of just how torrentially money rained into the art market in 2006, the total for the top ten artists alone was $1.2 billion, up from $576 million just two years earlier.

But these numbers don’t tell the full story, as they were calculated using auction sales only. If private sales reports are to be believed, and had they been included, Klimt and de Kooning would’ve earned far more—and been more highly ranked—since each had a single-painting sale that topped $130 million.

So…..what? No Monet? No Renoir? No Rembrandt? With top-flight Impressionists and Old Masters largely embalmed in museums and venerable private collections, the market has shifted its focus to twentieth-century artists. Interestingly, the top two artists on the list, Picasso and Warhol, were among the most prolific in history. Who needs rarity when you’ve got brand power backed by beaucoup de inventory?

1- Pablo PICASSO: $ 339,245,929

2 - Andy WARHOL : $ 199,392,442

3 - Gustav KLIMT :$ 175,143,589

4 - Willem DE KOONING :$ 107,373,446

5 - Amedeo MODIGLIANI : $ 90,713,845

6 - Marc CHAGALL : $ 89,038,897

7 - Egon SCHIELE : $ 79,081,455

8 - Paul GAUGUIN : $ 62,312,914

9 - Henri MATISSE : $ 59,723,249

10 - Roy LICHTENSTEIN : $ 59,670,946

Rago Arts and Auction Center
March 10
Folk art three-panel screen from Vancroft Lodge, W. Va.
Estimate: $30,000–$50,000
Price fetched: $180,000

When Joseph B. Vandergrift went to build Vancroft, his hunting lodge-cum-manse on the banks of the Ohio River in 1901, it’s fair to say that the Standard Oil heir was living large. His 500-acre, million-dollar shangri-la included a bowling alley, an indoor pool, a closed circuit telephone system between the estate’s 20+ buildings, a series of themed rooms (Turkish, Japanese, Presidents, Indian), even its own figure-eight race track. A local newspaper dubbed the W. Virginia property, site of regular horse races, gambling, fox hunts and cock fights, “the Monte Carlo of the Ohio Valley.”

Vancroft was decorated throughout in the rustic arts & crafts mode—Gustav Stickley furniture, Roycroft andirons, and the like. Rago Auctions scored 35 lots from Vancroft in its March Arts and Crafts sale, the first time anything from the fabled estate has hit the open market.

Top lot from the group was this unusual screen from Vancroft’s “Indian” room, a piece that featured 36 platinum-print portraits taken by Frank Rinehart at the Indian Congress of 1898 in Omaha, NE. It’s an incredible who’s who of the native American leadership at the turn of the last century. Somehow I can’t imagine that it was revered as such by the weekend revelers and gamblers, as much as an “authentic” decorative piece, complete with tomahawk and feather motifs, a curiosity to flesh out the rustic hunting lodge theme. But still and all, it’s an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind document of both the robber-baron high life and the proud leadership of vanishing peoples.

P.S. Vancroft has now been converted to a senior living facility. Inquiring minds want to know: do they still have cock fights?