Posted by: naquashv | September 20, 2008

Damien Hirst and the future of auction houses

Art.view

Winds of change

Sep 20th 2008
From Economist.com

Damien Hirst and the future of auction houses

Damien Hirst

“AUCTION rooms are democratic”, Damien Hirst told The Economist just before the two-day sale of 223 of his new works at Sotheby’s London branch last week. “That’s what I like about them. Anyone with enough money can buy what they want—immediately. They just have to be prepared to make that final bid.”

But democratic is not the same as open.

Sotheby’s theory before the auction was simple and compelling: the global contemporary-art market is much bigger than anyone supposes; galleries are exclusive rather than inclusive (meaning they are off-putting to all but the richest buyers); auction houses are friendlier to buyers of every pocket; they are also the most sophisticated global players in the art world and have the best contacts in the realms of new money—Russia, China, India and the Middle East.

If you are rich and impatient, buying through an auction room is the place for you.

The simplest way for Sotheby’s to substantiate this theory would have been to publish as much supporting evidence as possible from the Hirst sale. But the furthest Sotheby’s went in its after-sale press release was to state that, of the bidders registered for the sale, 16% were new to Sotheby’s. A quarter of those, ie just 4%, came from the “new markets”, which include Russia, Asia and the Middle East. The press release says nothing about the ratio of bidders to buyers or where they all originated.

Gentle probing produced just one more figure: 24.3% of the buyers in all three sessions of the Hirst sale on September 15th and 16th were new to Sotheby’s. In that figure lies the key to the auctioneers’ thinking.

Careful notetaking during the sale indicated that the 223 lots were shared out between about 140 different buyers. Some spent more than others. It is believed, for example, that the buyer of the star piece, “The Golden Calf”, also purchased two other works. The bullock with gold hooves, horns and halo, all preserved in formaldehyde, set a new world record for the artist at auction, fetching £9.2m ($16.7m), or £10.3m with the auction house’s premiums. Another buyer, the by-now famous paddle number L035, bidding on the first evening of the sale through Sotheby’s Russian-speaking Alina Davey from the private-client services department, spent £12.9m and bought all nine lots it bid for.

However, by far the biggest group—over 90 buyers—left with just one memento. If 24.3% of the buyers at the auction were new, it means 35 people had never bought from Sotheby’s before—35 buyers whose names can be added to Sotheby’s contact list, and who may return.

For help in the future is what the auction houses will need. Next month, both Sotheby’s and Christie’s will face a far tougher test when they hold three days of contemporary-art sales in London. Christie’s plans to hold another three similar sales in New York in November. Christie’s is offering an important portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud, which is estimated to sell for £5m-7m, while Sotheby’s expects to obtain the same price for a selection of Andy Warhol skulls.

In 2007 Christie’s and Sotheby’s together sold $2.7 billion worth of post-war and contemporary art. For Christie’s alone, that represented a 75% increase in sales on the previous year. By next month, the little oasis represented by the Damien Hirst sale may have been blown completely away by the whirlwind in the financial markets.

The London sales will be the market’s first major test. Every buyer, even the person who bid £19,000 for “Beautiful Resolution Spin”, the cheapest lot in the Hirst sale, will be crucial. No wonder Sotheby’s is keeping its cards close to its chest.

exibhition at moscow

New York’s Larry Gagosian — the art dealer with the most commercial gallery space worldwide — is planning a show next month of more than 100 contemporary works by almost 50 artists in a former chocolate factory near Moscow’s Kremlin.

Titled “For What You Are About to Receive,” the show is Gagosian’s second in the Russian capital, and runs from September 18 through October 25. The gallery said it sold “about two-thirds” of the 40 artworks it brought to a luxury mall in a Moscow suburb for 10 days at the end of October 2007.

Russia, now in its 10th year of economic growth, is the world’s second-biggest oil exporter. According to Forbes, the number of Russian billionaires jumped to 110 in 2008 from 36 in 2004. This new wealthy class is eager to spend on luxury items and fine art.

“Gagosian Gallery’s first exhibition in 2007 was a success and encouraged the gallery to come back this year with a more ambitious presentation,” the gallery said in a statement.

Artists to be shown include Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Pablo Picasso. The show will also have new works, never displayed before, by Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly. The gallery said that “some” of the works are for sale.

The exhibition will be in Red October, a 19th-century red brick former chocolate factory on the Moscow River, diagonally across from the Kremlin. Gagosian’s show will inaugurate this space as a new arts center in Moscow.

Gagosian has seven spaces worldwide. Three are in New York City, one in Beverly Hills, two in London, and one in Rome. The gallery denied speculation that it plans to open a permanent space in Moscow.

damien hirst

Why people should feel outraged when an artist makes a quick couple of hundred million, and not even blink when bankers or investors do it is hard to say. But the spectacle of Damien Hirst earning an almost-effortless fortune in the same week that saw banks collapsing was morbidly entertaining, if nothing else.

When it comes to making money from his art, Hirst is flagrant, manipulative, and greedy. But in this he is no different from other people interested in making money (including some artists). And it doesn’t change the fact that he has produced some remarkably powerful pieces during a nearly two-decade career.

Hirst’s factory-style studio churns out a massive quantity of work. The challenge is to find buyers for it. At the moment, as Cristina Ruiz of the Art Newspaper recently uncovered, the artist has more than $180 million worth of unsold work sitting in his London gallery. His decision to cut out his dealers and take his latest work straight to auction made perfect sense.

He could avoid adding to the glut of inventory sitting with his dealers, and at the same time attract new collectors – especially those from emerging markets like Russia and Asia. (An auction house like Sotheby’s has a much vaster reach than a commercial dealer.)

The strategy worked. Over two days of auctions, Hirst sold 220 works of art for $200.8 million, exceeding Sotheby’s high estimate of $177.6 million. Only three works failed to find buyers.

The novelty of the sale – it was the first time an artist has sold a substantial body of new work at auction like this – helped guarantee the kind of buzz that generates strong bidding.

The timing of the sale was pure genius. Yes, the financial markets were collapsing dramatically even as the auction unfolded. But when people sell stocks, they often fall for the idea that art is a safer, more durable investment.

Impressionist and modern art may be. But contemporary art is much more speculative. And the evidence suggests that, while a sinking economy usually causes a slight spike in the art market as wealthy investors put their money into luxuries like art, the art market eventually slides with the rest of the economy – usually after a delay of about six months.

So if Hirst was going to go public with a massive auction of recent work, now was the right time. He made sure of it, with a protracted publicity blitz in the lead-up to the sale.

Did the crazy spectacle of Monday and Tuesday represent a new low in the ongoing debasement of art?

Attaching monetary value to art is always irrational. In many people it breeds resentment. But then, as recent events suggest, irrationality pervades the entire economy.Continued…

Even as he profits from it, Hirst – like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons before him – is obsessed with the relationship between money and art. It has become part of what his work is about. His diamond-encrusted skull called “For the Love of God,” which has an intrinsic value of $15 million, is only the most obvious example. (It wasn’t one of the pieces up for auction.)

For almost two decades, Hirst has been near the center of an extraordinary flourishing of art in Britain. He is not a great artist, but he is not all bad either. His best pieces combine images of visceral power or glamour – a shark, a bull, an orgy of diamonds – with palpable reminders of death or putrefaction.

“I’ve always adhered to the principle that the simplest ideas are the best,” he has said. And indeed, he is part of a generation of artists that has sought refuge in the literal – the thing itself – rather than in abstractions and symbols.

His great hero is Francis Bacon, who was a master at conveying an awareness of death through paint. Hirst, in a move typical of his generation, tries to convey a similar awareness not through paint but through . . . dead things. Like Bacon, he has a theatrical side, and no doubt enjoyed the theater of the auction – a very public roll of the dice.

I once asked Lucian Freud, a friend of Bacon, what he thought of Hirst. “I think he’s really capable,” he replied, adding: “There’s a sense with a lot of artists today that the public is potentially theirs, which is very interesting to me. ‘How can we woo them and involve them with something new?’ In an odd way it’s the same as it was a long time ago – say, in Hogarth’s time. ‘What can we do to get them interested? Shock and surprise them. . .’ “

The insight is valid: Hirst’s approach to the public is not unprecedented. It’s just that today there is a lot more money sloshing around.

While it is obvious by now that Hirst is an artist of great chutzpah but limited ideas, it’s also true that he has come up with a few pieces that have branded themselves onto the public imagination, especially in Britain – works like the dead sharks suspended in formaldehyde, the butterfly paintings, and the diamond skull.

This alone has been enough to make plenty of collectors eager to have a piece of him. Hirst, with a huge team of assistants and financial managers at his disposal, has happily obliged.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.