LONDON - Demonstrators against the Government’s public spending cuts invaded Sotheby’s last week, emitting loud orgasmic moans, tossing photocopies of £50 notes into the air, and waving a banner that read “Orgy of the Rich” – but they could not prevent the rich spending vast sums on contemporary art.
Buyers oozed confidence in the art selected for the three main evening sales. Three bidders discounted Sotheby’s £100,000 estimate for Ai Weiwei’s 100kg pile of ceramic sunflower seeds as it sold for almost £350,000. If valued by weight, as apparently the seeds are, one seed would now be worth £3.50, and the Tate Turbine Hall installation £350 million. The price sets a benchmark for Weiwei’s dealers, who have nine more 100kg piles to price and distribute.
Pricing art by the inch seemed to come into play when Christie’s offered Andy Warhol’s rediscovered 6ft self-portrait for £3-£5 million. Announcing the sale last month, I calculated that, based on a comparison with the price achieved for a similar, smaller work, it should be worth more than £10 million. That may not have been the sole determining logic, but New York dealer Larry Gagosian bid £10.8 million for it on behalf of a client.
Some historical values were overturned. Historians have not really recognised the term “French pop art”, confining the “pop” phenomenon mainly to America and Britain. But if there is one French artist who qualifies, it is Martial Raysse, who visited and exhibited in America during the early Sixties. Raysse’s Last Year in Capri was painted in 1962, the same year as Warhol’s first “pop art” exhibition of Campbell’s soup can paintings, and exhibited in Los Angeles in 1963. The 6ft painted collage, probably taken from a fashion magazine, places Raysse at the birth of pop art, and was always going to excite collectors. In the past, his work has mostly been sold in Paris. But in 2007 he was promoted to the international art set at the Venice Biennale with a mini-retrospective at Francois Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi, and the following year broke the million-pound mark at a sale in London. Last week, with an estimate of £1-£1.5 million, Last Year in Capri became the most expensive work made by a living French artist, selling for £4 million to New York-based advisor Christopher Eykyn.
If the painting has gone to America, that would not be surprising. The internationalism of these sales cannot be understated. Christie’s calculated that its registered bidders came from 21 countries. Works by leading German artist Gerhard Richter were selling in the millions to Chinese and Russian-speaking buyers. In spite of the weak Spanish economy, Spanish artists Miguel Barcelo, Juan Munoz and Eduardo Chillida were all achieving high prices, and not just from Spanish buyers.
The brazilian artist Adriana Varejao is sold mostly in Latin American art auctions in New York. But she exhibits internationally, and a painting, aping the cut canvases of Lucio Fontana 40 years earlier, which was bought at London’s Victoria Miro gallery in 2002 for approximately £30,000, sold for £1.1 million. Brazilian art is hot, and Varejao is the hottest, they say – this price ranking her as the most expensive living artist from South America.
Nowhere do fashions ebb and flow more than in North America. Although the last art boom leaders, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, were in the action, their prices were subdued. Americans have found a new star in Wade Guyton, who makes pictures using commercial inkjet printers. Barely recognised five years ago, Guyton’s record tumbled twice, latterly at Phillips de Pury & Co, where a 3ft sq image of the letter X sold for a triple estimate £213,650 to New York dealer Stellan Holm.
British artists riding the wave of optimism with record prices were Jenny Saville, Glenn Brown, Gary Hume, and new auction star Ged Quinn. Including the £23 million Francis Bacon and other contemporary art from the Kostalitz collection the week before, the grand total for contemporary art came to £187.4 million, the second highest, after 2008, for a February series of sales in London.
To outsiders, the high end of the art market does look gluttonous. But don’t forget, in times of government cuts, it’s the art dealers and collectors at the auctions who can provide the jobs and sponsorship to keep the arts going. So let’s not discourage them. (www.telegraph.co.uk)
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