Art and Auctions 30th Anniversary

Art and Auction is celebrating its 30th anniversary and has some very good articles about the art market and how it has changed as well as refections on Art and Auction. There are four in particular that are of interest:

• Marisa Bartolucci - The World Has Changed But We Are Still Here

Economists assure us that markets operate in cycles and good times will come again, yet it seems unlikely that the heady days of the naughts will return any time soon. Their apotheosis, you may recall, came last September with the Damien Hirst auction at Sotheby’s London. "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" was what that now-graying enfant terrible called the sale, which circumvented his dealers and ultimately reaped an improbable $200 million-plus. His self-flattering phrase would likely have resonated with the wizards at Lehman Brothers, whose own gorgeous cerebrations begat some of the exquisitely complex credit derivatives that were inflating global markets to impossible dimensions. Until, that is, their artful machinations bankrupted their firm — ironically on the very first day of Hirst’s anomalous sale — driving those markets to the precipice of collapse. As for the contemporary-art market, après the "Beautiful" auction, it was indeed le déluge.

• Souren Melikian - The Art Business Comes Full Circle

Auctions, which had been of secondary importance in America until the early 1970s, hugely expanded, prompting Christie’s to start its own New York sales in 1977. As its center of gravity shifted to the New World, the auction market underwent a radical change. In New York, socialites went to previews and attended sales to be seen. Thousands of new buyers were gradually drawn into the game.

Meanwhile, the English auction houses, driven by an increasingly competitive spirit, were multiplying offices and organizing sales across the world. In November 1973, Sotheby’s conducted an auction of Chinese art in Hong Kong, the first ever in that part of the world. This triggered a process that pulled Asia into the auction market. The Japanese, who had been the dominant buyers of Chinese art since the 1960s, came to these auctions in droves. By the mid-1980s, the crown colony’s dealers and collectors had become a major force, and in 1990, when the Japanese were driven away by a slump to their economy, the Taiwanese stepped in. Around 2000, the first mainland Chinese buyers made a timid appearance. Today they swamp Chinese-art auctions in New York and London.

• Judd Tully - A Seasoned Art Market Reporter Tells His Own Story

When you’re a journalist, there’s a divide between you and whomever you’re talking to. A lot of collectors are superwealthy, and there’s no similarity between your station and theirs. The only reason you’re sitting in their living room is because you’re writing something. You do get a certain access, but I think journalists are generally regarded as pretty low in the pecking order. It’s not that you can’t be friendly. My favorite collector whom I met and profiled was Richard Brown Baker, who died in 2002. He went to Yale and worked in intelligence during World War II. After the war he came to New York to be a novelist, and he started to go to galleries and buy art. I’d see him at auctions in the ’80s. When Roy Lichtenstein’s Torpedo ... Los! sold for $5.5 million in 1989, he said, chuckling, "I got my Lichtenstein for $5,000 from Leo Castelli."

The art world is small but very secretive. Sometimes it’s hard to get the real story. It’s only once a situation gets to the lawsuit stage, when there are papers documenting what one side is charging against the other, that you ever see it in black and white. And that’s a pleasure, in a way, but most of the time it isn’t that clear-cut.

• Jori Frinkel - A Rare Home For Serious Arts Journalism

We all know that newspapers and magazines these days are in financial crisis. And the business model that supports investigative journalism — a project that can suck up huge blocks of time and resources, without a predictable outcome — is even more precarious. That makes it all the more important that we remember the power of investigative journalism in exposing and potentially correcting abuses of power, both inside and outside the art world. There’s been a lot of talk this year about the possibility of newspapers setting up university-style endowments for investigative reporting, and even a for-profit art magazine could consider some kind of philanthropic model. Meanwhile, nonprofits that already offer writing grants, starting with the Warhol Foundation, would be smart to add a separate category for investigative reporting, since work in this arena is highly unlikely to meet current award criteria.

As long as the art world has some money coursing through its veins, there will be criminal operators and operations, small-time forgers and widespread fraud to investigate. Let’s do what we can to support the few journalists and publications still willing and able to do so.

To read the full collection of Reflection articles in Art and Auction, click HERE.