Results: Phillips Design Auction

Artinfo has a very good recap of the recent Phillips Design Auction. As the AW Blog has made several recent posts about internet entrepreneur Halsey Minor, he also had property in the Phillips design sale in order to raise funds to pay off debt to M L Finance.  Between this and past sales, it appears Minor will be able to satisfy his outstanding debt with ML Finance.

The Phillips sale of modern and contemporary designs was not a great success.  The Phillips Design Auction was described by the Artinfo article as "lackluster" and "workmanlike". I have heard anecdotally that this market sector is starting to cool, and if looking, there certainly are signs of it.  The question is if there is just a momentary pause, and if so, then in what direction will 20th century design turn.  It is a market segment appraisers should watch closely, as the 20th design market had some fast growth over the past several years, it will be interesting to see if it maintains the attention of collectors or if it does in fact start to show some signs of weakness.

According to Artinfo the Philllips sale offered 226 lots of which only 151 sold for a fair lot selling rate of 62%.  The sale totaled $4.95 million against a pre sale estimate of $5.27 to $7.41 million.

Minor had 10 lots in the sale including the prized lot of a Marc Newson 1987 Pod of Drawers which was estimated to sell between $300,00 and $500,000. It sold for $350,000.00, within the pre sale estimate, but still far between what was paid and perhaps what was truly expected. The last time this Newson item sold was at Christie's in May of 2007, selling for over $1 million to a dealer, who then sold it to Minor. It is not a stretch to assume Minor paid more than the $1 million price paid at auction, and only realized $350,000.00 when selling three years later.

Of the ten Newsons offered (among them two rare prototypes), six sold for a rather anemic $686,300, a poor showing for work by the superstar but safely within the $600,000-915,000 estimate Phillips had attached to the works. “Obviously, it was disappointing,” said Phillips de Pury design head Alexander Payne immediately after the sale, referring to two of the unsold Newsons, Event Horizon and a lot containing his Black Hole tables, which failed to find any bidders. “It was a little difficult to digest this quantity of Newson works.”

Newson was one of the standouts in the May Halsey auction, when his 1988 prototype Lockheed Lounge (est. $1-1.5 million) made an artist record $2.1 million.

All told, the Minor lots made $1.4 million compared to presale expectations of $1.67–2.44 million. Tacked onto the results of the contemporary sessions of May 13 and 14, the Minor's complete auction haul comes to $25.5 million. That cumulative tally — assuming all the winning bidders pays up — will wipe the judgment clean for Minor and put a big feather in Phillips’ cap for marketing the collection. (Phillips was so eager to nail the juicy consignment, it agreed to cough up eight percent of the buyer’s premium on all of the Minor lots to ML Finance. In the trade, this reimbursement, popular during the recent art market boom, is known as “enhanced hammer.”)

To read the full Artinfo article, click HERE.