Shlock horror - art prices have tanked
Sotheby’s shares lost 80% of their value since January 2008. The bank of Ponzi has stopped printing Mickey Mouse currency for idiots to buy pickled sharks at loony prices on the greater fool market. Why are we not surprised? It’s deja vu all over again (pace Sam Goldwyn). Although the media have focused on the lunatic fringe of the contemporary art market, high ticket trophy art from all periods has taken a dive. Portfolio magazine reported that ‘last month Sotheby’s withdrew Picasso’s Arlequin (1909), which they valued at more than $30 million, “for private reasons.” But the 1991 crash, for example, was worse than what we’re seeing (so far). Milkman-turned Aussie oligarch Alan Bond’s folly in paying $US 53.9 million for Van Gogh’s Irises (1889) back in 1987, (Sotheby’s lent him half the price paid) landed him in gaol, not for paying too much for a painting, but that particular unauthorised purchase drew attention to his recklessness. Four months earlier, a Japanese bank paid £30 million for the earless one’s Sunflowers. A Japanese collector, who coincidentally also went to gaol, notoriously paid $100 million in 1991 for a clutch of above-average but largely ‘squint-free’ Expressionist paintings, just as the world, and, belatedly, Japan, convulsed into slump.
Despite Damien Hirst’s claimed success in shifting a pile of stuffed animals, skulls and dots at an unprecedented public auction in September (some of which was allegedly bought in by his own intermediaries and collectors), October public sales of contemporary art in London missed minimum forecasts by up to £30 million. Though pre-sale estimates were largely established before the financial crisis, art valued at millions went unsold. A rare portrait of (artist) Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud went under the hammer for over £1.5 million less than expected.
The rubes had all but evaporated at the 2008 Frieze Art Fair, normally a babble of hot air. Piles of untidy bric-a-brac, reminiscent of an art show by the mentally challenged, languished reproachfully at the Zoo Art Fair. Nobody bought the installation of a naked bloke screaming curses in a greenhouse, or the witty father and child crossing the road with full-sized plaster cast adult genitals stuck on their faces, much less Garbage Bin with Protruding Spotty Dog’s Arse.
Will all those dealers have to find proper jobs selling London Bridge to tourists? Will this trickle down to the black turtleneck market? What about the taxidermists? Will Yayoi Kusuma need to resort to Care in the Community? What will this mean to the average family struggling to stay afloat in a rising tide of recession? Nowt.
So why am I telling you this? Because hubris is fun, should be instructional, but invariably isn’t, otherwise there wouldn’t be any more hubris. The fine art market in general is not doomed. Emerging artists won’t rise so stratospherically: most didn’t anyway. Good work will always sell to people who want it – extraordinary work even more so – but for the next five years, none of it will move as easily or at anything like the steroid prices largely generated to give people the illusion that they were ‘creating’ an elite, upwards-only market. Artists such as Hirst, Cattelan, Emin, Koons, Murakami, Prince, Taylor-Wood, investor-collectors such as Saatchi and dealers such as Gagosian understood how to manipulate the market and may indeed have done so, partly for art’s sake, but the game is temporarily up.
I’m telling you this because a lot of public museums lost the opportunity to buy or keep important works during the latter stages of this madness, not because a bunch of Houyhnhnms might have overpaid for well-executed emperor’s suits, but because it proves that false markets can, and will fool some of the people all of the time. It is worrying that some of those buyers were custodians of vast equity and finance market investment funds, and perhaps not surprising that they weren’t good judges of the art market either.
To show you how little I care, you’ll find me at Crunch, Art in a New Era, at Hay-on-Wye, from 28-30 November. Needless to say, they haven’t invited me to talk, but I’ll be there to hear my friend, the magnificent brooding genius Patrick Hughes whose work is cheap at twice the price, kick out the jams and épate the (Louise) Bourgeoisie.
