Data Based Art Investing

Bloomberg posted an interesting article on Arthena (not to be confused with Athena Art Finance which I posted on yesterday) a start-up art investment group which will used data points and human insight for selecting works of art for as an investment. The article notes Arthena art fund has already partnered with Charles Schwab as a potential alternative investment platform for their investors. According to Bloomberg the for the time being only investors accredited by the Securities and Exchange Commission—generally individuals with annual incomes of $200,000 (or $300,000 for a couple), or $1 million in assets—can put money in an Arthena fund.

As we can see by the Bloomberg article, and has been pointed in the past in numerous AW posts, that new technologies and artificial intelligence are quickly moving into fine art investments and collecting, and that as appraisers we should not only be aware of these new platforms, but understand them as well.

To visit the Arthena website, click HERE.

Bloomberg reports

Hedge funds and some of the world’s biggest banks have embraced the predictive properties of machine learning to spot patterns and guide their investment decisions. Could this branch of artificial intelligence be used to divine the vagaries of the art market? A New York startup says it can.

Arthena analyzes hundreds of thousands of data points on works of art—artist, style, medium, size and so forth. Adding a touch of human insight, the company picks pieces it says will generate handsome returns for investors. Arthena currently manages several funds, ranging from low-risk ones that invest in modern art to higher-risk funds that buy works from emerging artists.  The startup, which is backed by Foundation Capital, Beamonte Investments and Y Combinator, recently teamed up with brokerage Charles Schwab, which offers a suite of alternative investment offerings.

Valuing art is inherently subjective, and many experts are skeptical that it can be profitably bought and sold simply by the numbers. But Arthena co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Madelaine d’Angelo says AI could shed light on a market where deals are often done privately, lower the barriers to entry and help democratize art investing.

“Most people in the art world don’t like what we’re doing,” D’Angelo says, noting that she’s been accused of stealing the soul from art investing. “We’re not advocating that art shouldn't exist for art's sake, or that people should stop building collections, but we want to make it more widely available as an asset class and investment opportunity.”

Arthena’s pitch coincides with a surge of interest in art investing. Many investors are seeking to diversify their portfolios amid low bond yields and what some consider a frothy equities market. Sales at the big auction houses have jumped 18 percent in the first half of 2017, according to Deloitte’s latest Art & Finance report, and well-known works are fetching record prices. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting of a skull sold earlier this year for $110.5 million, 5,800 times what it was bought for 33 years earlier, according to Artprice, and a record for an American artist.

But the game has traditionally been the province of the uber-rich—like the mysterious buyer who just spent a record $450.3 million on Leonardo da Vinci’s `Salvator Mundi’ (up from a mere $127.5 million four years ago). Art funds are another way to get into the market, but these are usually sold to high net-worth individuals or family offices and managed by professional experts with connections in the art world. Arthena wants to make art investing accessible to more people and attract the next generation of art enthusiasts, including data-obsessed millennials.

“What you see with a lot of innovation happening in art and technology and finance, is that it’s the same repackaged product continued to be sold to the same pool” of investors without bringing in a wider audience, says D’Angelo, 30. “What we are asking is, what can we do to make that happen?”

D’Angelo, who has a master’s degree in museum studies from Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian, founded Arthena in 2013 with her brother Michael, 27, who studied computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford; he’s the chief technology officer. The company also has an office in San Francisco and is opening one in Luxembourg, the center of the art investing world.

Investing in art is a daunting prospect for most people because there’s not much available data. That’s changing thanks to the likes of Magnus, a startup with ambitions to catalogue the existence and price of every artwork and to make that information publicly available; another startup, Artsy, streams auctions on smartphones and tablets and lists inventory from a global network of galleries.

Arthena is talking to investors in their own language: math. D’Angelo says her team of data scientists uses the same rigorous data-driven approach that fund managers apply to any financial product. She declined to provide specifics, but art investment experts say AI is well suited to crunching a range of indicators to predict trends. Among them: prices at public auctions, the number of gallery or museum exhibits an artist has had, how often an artist’s name comes up in data bases or is mentioned on social media and works collectors already own of a given artist. 

D’Angelo says her company can spot trends across more dimensions and a broader body of work than a team of human analysts or advisers could do (although art experts review the algorithms’ findings). Arthena targets works below $1 million and says pieces selling for less than $50,000 are the most liquid.

For now, only wealthy investors accredited by the Securities and Exchange Commission—generally individuals with annual incomes of $200,000 (or $300,000 for a couple), or $1 million in assets—can put money in an Arthena fund. The amount invested varies based on the fund and the manager’s needs but is typically about $10,000. The company says it has 10s of millions of dollars in commitments so far and hopes to generate 12.5 percent to 15.5 percent annual returns. Investors won’t know how they’ve done until  the company sells its first artworks in a year or so.


Adam Goldstein, who co-founded the travel site Hipmunk, made a “small” investment in an Arthena fund. “To find an asset class that's this different; those don't come along very often,’’ he says. If Arthena succeeds, he adds, it could help make art a more widely accepted asset for a diversified portfolio. “People might ask why you don’t have any art in the same way they might ask why you don’t have any gold,” he says.

Data has already had a huge effect on the art market, lowering prices and improving transparency, says Evan Beard,  an art services executive at U.S. Trust, the private bank owned by Bank of America Corp. But he’s skeptical that technology will totally supplant the way art has been bought and sold for centuries. An algorithm will never replace “going into old ladies’ living rooms and romancing them,” he says. “Selling a work of art still requires romance—even at the low end.’’

While the personal touch will probably never go away, Arthena’s data-first approach could appeal to a new generation of art aficionados. Phillip Ashley Klein, who runs Deloitte Consulting’s U.S. Art & Finance team, says a massive transfer of wealth is underway from boomers to millennials, who want a “more personal experience and more contextual transparency.”

Source: Bloomberg 

November NYC Auction Infographics

Athena Auction Insights posted about 17 pages of infographics on most of the sales from the important November sales in NYC. The infographics include breakdowns on the various sales and categories from Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips.  The contents include sell through rates, top artists, sales flow and performance vs estimates.

Well worth taking a look.

To download or view all of the infographics, click HERE.

The fall auction season kicked off in New York City earlier this month with Christie's and Sotheby's seeing combined art sales of nearly $2bn, led by the much talked about $450 million Da Vinci.

As always, following the sales Athena has compiled summary infographics on each of the major auctions.

Source: Athena 

Impact of Proposed Tax Plan

The Art Newspaper has an interesting post on how the GOP's proposed tax plan will impact the arts. The article looks at the potential changes for museums, collectors, corporate donors and the middle class. Some of the impact is minor, such as donations to museums, while like kind exchanges in buying and selling art may be eliminated and therefore slow the pace and turn over of works of art. Corporate tax reductions probably would not impact the art collection strategies of larger companies. If taxes actually increase for middle income families, then they may have less of a tendency to join museum and cultural programs.

All things considered, the new tax plan may have some ripple effects, but probably not a large impact.

The Art Newspaper reports

The US House of Representatives and Senate introduced separate proposals to overhaul tax law last month, but with an unpredictable legislative process ahead, which will see the upper and lower chambers battling it out for consensus, the final version of the bill was not yet published as we went to press. In keeping with Republican promises, both bills would cut corporate income tax rates from 35% to 20% and reduce or eventually repeal the estate tax, among other changes. Here, we analyse how some of the proposed reforms to US tax legislation could impact the art world.

Museums
A big worry for art museums would be a possible change in the charitable income tax deduction, which “could become almost impossible for people to use”, says Andrew Finch, the director of policy at the Association of Art Museum Directors.

Under the current rules, taxpayers can subtract the year’s charitable gifts from their income, reducing the amount of earnings that are subject to tax. President Trump’s proposal for a higher “standard deduction”, adopted by both the House and Senate bills, could mean that many taxpayers who currently deduct charitable gifts will no longer be able to do so, which could reduce the tax incentive for donating art and money to museums. While museum donors probably will not stop giving as a result, they may give less, Finch says.

Museums could also be affected if Congress repeals or significantly reduces the federal estate tax, which President Trump has promised. Currently, art gifts to a museum by a donor who has died yield a tax benefit for heirs, because the charitable deduction removes the art from the estate tax. Some observers argue that repeal of the estate tax will reduce the amount of art or even cash gifts at death.

Todd Levin, the director of art advisers, the Levin Art Group in New York, says that estate tax repeal could result in fewer collectors giving art to museums, because they would no longer see such gifts as a means of avoiding estate tax on the art. But on a case-by-case basis, tax law changes are unlikely to change a collector’s decision to make a “paradigm-shifting gift to a museum,” he says. In such cases, the donor is likely to be “heavily aligned with the museum”, and planning for the gift will have “been going on for years. That kind of relationship is above and beyond considerations of the tax impact of the gift.”

Collectors
Ageing art collectors face a key question: if their children do not want or are unable to care for the art they may inherit, should the parents sell it or keep it? Tax law changes may sway the decision.

Under current law, US collectors who bought art that later went up in value often postpone a sale until death to avoid the current federal tax of 28% on the gain from sales of collectables, Levin says. If the art is instead held until their death, the art’s tax basis, or cost, is “stepped up” to the then market value—eliminating any taxable gain when the heirs sell the art. But, federal estate tax, which is currently payable at a rate of 45% on estates that are worth more than $5.49m, is currently imposed at death, which encourages many heirs to sell art to help pay the tax.

If the estate tax is rescinded, families with taxable estates will no longer have to sell art to raise funds for it. That could reduce the flow of art to the market, because parents might choose to leave blue-chip art in trust to grow in value for their children. Such trusts can hire experts to manage both the art and its eventual monetisation, Levin says, adding: “Art is the biggest inter-generational wealth generator that has ever existed in history.”

“A significant provision” in both the proposed House and Senate bills is the elimination of the “like-kind exchange” rule for art, which would affect art investors, says Stuart Gross, a tax lawyer at Roberts and Holland in New York. Currently, those holding art for investment can sell and buy art and defer paying a capital gains tax on the sale if the sale and purchase transactions qualify under current rules, which stipulate that what is bought and sold must be fundamentally alike (in other words, money made from the sale of art needs to be invested in more art). But under the new proposals, this like-for-like exchange would be eliminated, except for property, which may lead to greatly reduced spending on art by those who buy it as an investment.

Corporate donors
It is not clear that cutting corporate tax rates would have any impact on arts giving, for several reasons, says Michael Kaiser, the president emeritus of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland.

“Corporations deduct all of their expenses from their revenue and pay taxes on what is left, and there is no special category for charitable donations,” he says. Corporate giving is more likely to be part of an underlying marketing strategy. “If a corporation decides to give $100,000 to a museum because it enhances the corporation’s visibility, that is not going to change because of a tax rate change.”

In addition, corporations are “giving less to the arts” now anyway, Kaiser says. Previously, smaller companies that were at least partly owned by local residents often enhanced their marketing efforts with gifts that associated them with particular art institutions or endeavours, or made “good corporate citizen” gifts that local museums could depend on annually for operating expenses. Now, large corporations face increasing pressures from shareholders located across the country to improve their bottom lines and cut costs, which means “less incentive for corporations to do this kind of community giving” to the arts.

For the same reasons, he says, “increasingly, corporate giving is available only to the largest and most visible museums” and other arts organisations such as opera companies. An exception, he says, was the $5m gift in 2011 by the H-E-B supermarket chain in San Antonio to help create the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts.

Higher taxes for the middle classes
Both the House and Senate bills would eliminate or sharply cut the deduction for state and local income and property taxes, a benefit which currently lets many salaried Americans pay less tax. Cutting the tax break would mean those taxpayers could see their disposable incomes drop. Would they be less likely to pay for higher levels of museum membership, or a ticket to a museum gala, as a result?

Source: The Art Newspaper 

Appraising Personal Property: Principles & Methodology, 8th Edition

I mentioned before Thanksgiving that I now have the newly released edition of Dave Maloney’s Appraising Personal Property: Principles & Methodology.

This is the 8th edition of the book, and as noted on the cover, it contains personal property appraisal theory, principles, practices, methodology, standards, ethics, regulations, report writing, legal issues, and sample appraisals.

Additionally, it conforms to the new edition (2018/2019) of USPAP.  As you will note, Dave updates the book every two years to coincide with the newest edition of USPAP, the next edition is scheduled for release in the fall of 2019.

The new edition with over 700 pages includes a table of contents, multiple appendices, glossary, bibliography and an in-depth index for easy reference and page location.

I must give Dave credit for the newest edition, as the book has changed and expanded over the years, it has not become more complex or cumbersome, but has actually evolved into a more refined and purposeful tool for the personal property appraiser. This is hard to accomplish, as when making changes to an existing text or book, many times after changes a work will become more complex and harder to follow. That is not the case with the 8th edition.

As many AW readers are aware from previous edition postings on Appraising Personal Property, I use the book on a regular basis. The book functions well as either a stand-alone reference guide, or in conjunction with appraisal association manuals, publications and course work as a secondary resource. And, as mentioned above, it takes into considerations  USPAP and the 2018/2019 USPAP updates.

What I find particularly note worthy about the newest edition is the level of detail and depth of content on a wide variety of topics. In addition to the explanatory content on appraisal theory and principles, it also contains many case examples for enhanced user understanding. The new edition makes the text and concepts not only easy to follow but straightforward to apply when developing and writing appraisal reports.

According to the What’s New chapter, Dave has made over 1,500 changes to the 8th edition. All major changes have an “updated’ icon so the reader is aware of the new or changed content. Also, new to the edition are footnotes which refer the user to additional content either in the book, in other publications or web addresses.

The chapters cover most foundational principles, theory and methodology for personal property appraisers, including terminology, five chapters on principles of appraising (such as intended uses, value/cost, approaches to value, types of property, insurance appraisals, federal tax liability appraisals, liquidation appraisals, identification and authentication…), USPAP, ethics, report writing, the appraisal practice, and legal issues. The legal issues chapter covers many topics including bailment, title concerns, fraud, professional negligence, third party liability and tax court cases related to personal property.

Following the main chapters are the multiple appendices which include forms, contracts, appraisal checklists, profile examples, letters of introduction, IRS forms and procedures, Treasury regulations, oral opinion of value disclosures, and sample appraisals.

The coverage and depth of content is so strong the book is useful to both new appraisers and experienced appraisers as well allied professionals.

As I have stated in the past about previous editions, this is an important book for all personal property appraisers to have in their library. The book is a valuable tool for members of the important appraisal personal property organizations such as the International Society of Appraisers (ISA) and The Appraisers Association of America (AAA), and perhaps even more so for independent appraisers. The new edition of Appraising Personal Property is an independent publication, so keep in mind the various association report writing standards if you are a member o one of these organizations.

A few important appraisal books behind my office desk

As the value of art and the interest in art as an investment continues to grow, this book is also a useful tool for many non-appraisers in art related professions. For example, every auction house should have a copy, so they are aware of the many differences between a formal appraisal and an auction estimate. Financial planners, private bankers, bank trust representatives, insurance underwriters, claims representatives, and estate attorneys should also consider owning a reference copy. Dealers in fine art and antiques should also consider having a copy on hand for a better understanding of what a qualified appraisal contains and the criteria for being a qualified appraiser.

Given the number of changes, conforming to the newest edition of USPAP, and expanded content, it is well worth the investment for the latest edition. The new edition is comprehensive and covers the pertinent and important topics in detail and certainly allows the appraiser a better sense of understanding personal property appraisal theory, principles and methodology as well as expanded report development and writing confidence.

Appraising Personal Property: Principles & Methodology with 708 pages is available for $94.95 plus $10 S&H. For more information and to order the 8th edition, click HERE.

Changes in Auction Marketing and Placement

The NY Times recently ran an interesting article on the sale of the da Vinci at Christie's.  I dont mean to over post on this particular sale, but it is interesting how the art market and trade is looking not only at the sale of such a rare piece and how well it performed, but also at auction house marketing.

The mixing of an old master with contemporary and imp/mod works by Christie's worked. This NY Times also notes Sotheby's did something similar with a Formula 1 Ferrari offered in its Contemporary fine art sale. The racing car did well, selling for $7.5 million against a pre-sale low estimate of $4 million.

The point being we can now start to expect more fluid sales with more category breaking offerings which now seem to stand out.

The NY Times reports

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” which sold at Christie’s for $450.3 million, the highest price ever achieved for any artwork at auction, must surely rank as the most spectacular “sleeper” in history.

A sleeper is the art trade term for a work by a major artist that slips unnoticed through a salesroom at low price and is resold for a significant profit. In 2005, the unrecognized and much-overpainted “Salvator Mundi” was bought by the dealer Alexander Parish at a regional auction in Louisiana for less than $10,000, according to court papers filed during the painting’s litigious 12-year journey to Christie’s.

To put that vertiginous rise into perspective, Doug Woodham, managing partner of Art Fiduciary Advisers, based in New York, calculated that if the Christie’s price were represented by a pile of $100 bills, it would reach up 1,616 feet, higher than the Empire State Building. Using the same metric, the original purchase price would amount to roughly a third of an inch, or about the height of a chewed piece of gum on the sidewalk below.

“It was an extraordinary and mind-blowing result,” said Mr. Woodham, a former Christie’s executive, who watched live online the 19-minute battle on Nov. 15 among four telephone bidders and one in the room. The sale, he said, would “create a whole new generation of people trawling low-end auctions and garage sales for undiscovered masterpieces.”

Quite a few people have made money out of this strange, otherworldly image of Christ as savior of the world. And the painting has had quite a few different prices.

Mr. Parish was part of a consortium of owners — the others were Robert Simon, a specialist in old masters, and Warren Adelson, a high-end dealer in American art, both based in New York — who researched the painting and arranged its restoration by Dianne Dwyer Modestini, a conservator based at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

The foundation for its skyscraper of value was laid in 2011 when the “Salvator Mundi” was included in the 2011 Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London. Acknowledging the work’s “aggressively over-cleaned” and damaged condition, the show’s curator, Luke Syson, identified it as the long-lost original of a Leonardo painting from about 1500 recorded in the collection of Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I of England.

In May 2013, the painting, now validated by a prestigious museum, was sold for $80 million to Yves Bouvier, a Swiss businessman, in a private transaction brokered by Sotheby’s. Mr. Bouvier immediately sold the painting for $127.5 million to the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, for whom he was acting as an art adviser. That deal and other spectacular markups charged by Mr. Bouvier have resulted in a protracted and as-yet-unresolved multijurisdictional suit between the two men. Lawyers have done quite nicely out of the “Salvator Mundi,” too.

Mr. Rybolovlev’s family trust has at least had the satisfaction of selling a painting that at the time seemed overpriced for a profit of about $270 million. But it audaciously offered the “Salvator Mundi” in a Christie’s contemporary art auction with the certainty of a minimum bid of $100 million from a third-party guarantor. These arrangements vary, but that certainty would usually cost the seller a percentage of the profit and all of the buyer’s fees, to be shared by the auction house and the guarantor. A typical figure is 20 percent: If that were the case here, the unidentified guarantor would have made more than $50 million. Not bad for 19 minutes’ work.

Christie’s slickly marketed sale of what was cataloged as “The Last da Vinci” painting in private hands has left millions of people across the world wondering whether this strange-looking image could really be a Leonardo. And can it really be worth $450 million?

The last comparable wave-making auction sale was in 1987, when Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” sold for $39.9 million — nearly four times the previous auction high.
The final price more than doubled the $179.4 million given at Christie’s in May 2015 for Picasso’s 1955 “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’),” the previous high for any artwork at auction.

As with that Picasso, the successful bidder was not identified by Christie’s and the buyer’s name has yet to emerge.

Given the Christie’s result, there is a temptation to wonder if the art market will be recalibrated in the way that it was in 1987, when Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” sold for $39.9 million. That price also blew minds, being almost four times the previous high for any artwork at auction at the time.

“That result encouraged other Van Goghs to come on the market. There are no other Leonardos to come out,” said Guy Jennings, managing director of the Fine Art Group, an advisory company based in London. “This result won’t affect the art market as a whole. It’s a really isolated example.”

But that, in a way, was the point. The Christie’s Leonardo was one of several “isolated examples” that reinvigorated a twice-yearly New York “gigaweek” of Impressionist, modern and contemporary auctions whose format had become a procession of predictable prices for the same predictable names.

If Christie’s broke with orthodoxy by including the Leonardo in its contemporary art auction, so too did Sotheby’s by including a Ferrari Formula One racing car in its Nov. 16 contemporary sale. The F2001, in which Michael Schumacher triumphed in the 2001 Monaco and Hungarian Grands Prix, sold for $7.5 million against a presale low estimate of $4 million.

A rather less incongruous-looking interloper was the serene 1901 canvas “Interior With Woman At Piano, Strandgade 30,” by Vilhelm Hammershoi, included in Sotheby’s Nov. 14 evening sale of Impressionist and modern art in New York. Works by the Danish painter are usually offered in auctions of 19th-century pictures, but this was as an exceptional example. Exposure to the wealthy global client base of an evening “Imps and mods” sale resulted in it fetching $6.2 million, an auction high for the artist.

“It probably wouldn’t have made that much in a 19th-century sale,” said Wendy Goldsmith, an art adviser based in London, who formerly headed Christie’s 19th-century picture department. “We’ll probably end up with ‘best of the best’ sales, with complete cross-fertilization.”

Over all, Sotheby’s evening sale of Impressionist and modern works raised $269.6 million from 64 lots, 92 percent of which sold. An almost identically sized auction of 19th-century European art at Sotheby’s on Nov. 21, where the Hammershoi should have been, took $5.9 million, with just over half the lots selling.

And there also, in that same Sotheby’s evening Impressionist and modern sale, was the Georgia O’Keeffe pastel “Yellow Sweet Peas,” which should have been in an auction of American art. Transplanted into “Imps and mods,” it sold for $4.4 million against a low estimate of $2.5 million, setting an auction high for a work on paper by the artist.

“There is a week in May and a week in November that are the ideal times for selling major artworks at auction,” said Hugo Nathan, a partner in the London-based advisory firm Beaumont Nathan who, like Ms. Goldsmith, was in New York during the week of the Leonardo sale. “The departmental divides are being ignored to maximize this potential for anything of exceptional importance, or incredibly high value.”

The incongruous one-off has become the savior of the top end of the auction world.

Source: The NY Times

Looking at Last Week's Sales

AsI mentioned earlier this week, if I saw an interesting post  article on the various NYC auction sales from "gigaweek" I would post. The following is an interesting article from The Telegraph in the UK, which notes total sales from gigaweek reached $2.18 billion. What is interesting beyond the da Vinci at $450 million is the performance of the Impressionist and modern sales being stronger than the contemporary art sector. The Imp/Mod sales outperformed the Contemporary sales at both Sotheby's and Christie's. Also, the article notes the strength in Asian collectors and bidding.

The Telegraph reports

Last week was what the Americans call “gigaweek” in the sale rooms because New York hosts the high value Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art sales. These biannual series (May and November) reached a peak in May 2015 at $2.75 billion , but sunk a year later to just over $1 billion. Since then, they have been edging back up again, reaching $1.6 billion this May. 

For the auction houses – and market confidence in general – it was important that this November’s gigaweek maintained the upward momentum – one good reason for Christie’s to include a Leonardo da Vinci (usually the terrain of the Old Master sales) valued at $100 million .

As it was, Salvator Mundi made $450 million, lifting the week’s takings to $2.18 billion. But to assess the real performance of the core Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary markets we need to disregard the Leonardo because it is an Old Master, so reducing the gigaweek total to $1.7 billion.

This still represents a healthy 30 per cent increase from last November’s $1.3 billion sales, but when broken down reveals an unexpected imbalance between the two categories of Modern and Contemporary art.

Not only did Impressionist and Modern art exceed the normally superior Contemporary art total at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York, but the upward curve for Modern art (up 75 per cent since last November) was far greater than for Contemporary art (up nine per cent, excluding the Leonardo, since last November).

At Christie’s Impressionist and Modern sale, impressive record prices were set for an early, 1913 abstraction by Fernand Leger ($70 million); a surreal landscape by Magritte ($20.6 million); and a classic, densely patterned Vuillard interior ($17.7 million).

The most conspicuous buying pattern was the strength of Asian bidding, which accounted for about 40 per cent of the value of Christie’s $479 million sale, one of its best ever in this category. Asian buyers won top lots by van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir, Chagall, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

The van Gogh of a field worker sold well above estimate for $81.3 million, close to a record a price. The Hepworth, a mahogany carving of an abstracted female figure, sold for $1.6 million – an increase in value by an average 13 per cent each year since 1993, when it last sold, for $57,500.

At Sotheby’s equivalent $270 million modern art sale, Asian bidders contributed to nearer 50 per cent of the total, buying top lots by Cézanne, Chagall, Monet and Gauguin. For the top lot, the Chagall classic, Les Amoureux, an Asian bidder pushed a patriotic Russian collector (Chagall was Russian) into paying a record $28 million.

At Phillips, which straddles the modern and contemporary in one sale, the strongest performer was a drawing by Picasso owned by the family of Elvis Presley’s music publisher, Julian Aberbach, which sold for $9.3 million (eight times the estimate), to an Asian buyer.

Apart from a $32 million Warhol of Mao, a $14.7 million bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois, and a record $8.9 million for an ebullient late work by the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, Asian buyers for high-end contemporary material were hard to detect at any of the evening sales.

There were numerous records lower down the price scale, though. African American artists continue to enjoy increasing interest with new records for Jack Whitten (fresh from a sell-out at Hauser & Wirth in London), and Kerry James Marshall, both represented in Tate Modern’s recent exhibition Soul of a Nation.

As a testimony to the queue of buyers at Marshall’s last show at Jack Shainman’s gallery in New York, a painting that was bought two years ago, reportedly for $750,000, had nine different telephone bidders and sold for five times its $5 million estimate. Also shown by Shainman is Britain’s Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who joined the winners with a six-times estimate record of $1.6 million for a lively dance scene.

All-American stars benefitting from recent and current exposure at the Whitney Museum of American Art included Laura Owens (an eight-times estimate $1.75 million for a swirling mixed media abstract at Sotheby’s), and Shara Hughes, an artist in whom Charles Saatchi has made profitable investments, whose record shifted up to $85,000 for painting of a room with a view of boats sailing, estimated at $10,000 by Phillips.

In the end, it was superior material and Asian bidding that lifted the Impressionist and Modern sales above Contemporary. There was no real difference between Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the Contemporary sales, and had the Leonardo been sold in an Old Master sale, the slow recovery of the Contemporary market would have been clearer for all to see.

Source: The Telegraph 

Marketing Da Vinci

Bloomberg has an interesting article on Christie's and their marketing approach of placing the Da Vinci  “Salvator Mundi”  in a postwar and contemporary sale, instead of the more traditional approach in an Old Masters auction. The record breaking $450 million sale certainly shows the plan worked well.

I was in NYC and tried three times to view the sale, each time being met with long lines, and once with a Christie's rep stating those at the end of the line probably would not get in before closing.

Bloomberg reports on the marketing initiative

The vision came to Loic Gouzer when he was free diving in the Caribbean: Da Vinci and Warhol, together, on sale.

The Renaissance painter was on Gouzer’s mind because his colleague Alex Rotter was trying to secure Andy Warhol’s Da Vinci-inspired “Sixty Last Suppers” for Christie’s to put under the hammer. Wouldn’t it be something, Gouzer recalled thinking, if he landed Leonardo’s “Salvator Mundi” and the two, the very old and the fairly new, were presented at the same auction?

“It was a wild idea,” said Gouzer, 37, who is co-chairman with Rotter of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department in the Americas. “But it felt very natural.”

At least, it did to Gouzer. He’s known for pushing the art-marketing envelope. “He hatches these brilliant, creative plans that at first sound kind of nuts,” said Sandy Heller, the art adviser to Dimitry Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire who owned the Da Vinci before it sold on Nov. 15 for a record-shattering $450.3 million.

The 1986 Warhol went for a respectable $61 million, by the way, not that anyone was really paying much attention. All eyes and astonished gasps were on “Salvator Mundi,” Latin for “Savior of the World.”

Believed to be the last Da Vinci in private hands, it commanded four times what Christie’s had projected. The buyer still hasn’t been identified. Some skeptics question whether it’s the real deal. Rybolovlev is suing the Swiss dealer from whom he purchased it as part of a 40-plus collection of works, claiming he was overcharged by about $1 billion for the lot.

And “Salvator Mundi” was offered in a postwar and contemporary sale, rather than an Old Masters auction. The painting, thought to date to around 1500, was presented alongside a one-year-old installation consisting of a flock of balloonfish. (That fetched $516,500.)

‘Tapping Into The Moment’

Gouzer was one of several Christie’s staffers who pursued the Da Vinci, and Rotter, in fact, placed the winning bid on behalf of the mysterious client. “It has been incredible teamwork that led to this result,” said Christie’s Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Cerutti. But Gouzer, he said, was the catalyst.

Heller said he recognized the wisdom behind the unusual auction plan after he had lunch with Gouzer at Cipriani in Manhattan in May. “The painting deserved that kind of context, to be seen by the most committed art collectors, with the most money -- you have to go where money is.”

Christie’s Old Master specialists worked with Gouzer and Heller over the summer to hatch a strategy for promoting the work: hiring the ad agency Droga5, putting the canvas on a world-wide exhibit tour, lining up scholars who vouched for its brilliance. As luck (or planning) would have it, the efforts coincided with the release of Walter Isaacson’s new Da Vinci biography.

“We were tapping into the moment,” Heller said.

By the time “Salvator Mundi” made it to New York for display in November, people lined up around the block, in the rain, to see it. A video of their reactions, circulated by the auction house, shows some with tears in their eyes.

Gouzer, who grew up in Geneva and earned an art history degree from University College London, has made waves before. Soon after he arrived at Christie’s from rival Sotheby’s in 2011, he won a rare Yves Klein painting by persuading the owner to donate some of the proceeds to Oceana, a conservation nonprofit on whose board Gouzer sits.

“The owner didn’t want to sell,” he said. “He said, ‘No, I don’t need the money. I would not know what to do with it.’ I said, ‘How about saving the world?”’

Gouzer said he likes to test conventions, such as when he marketed an auction with a video of a skateboarder riding among the riches at Christie’s. In May 2015, he devised an uncommon hybrid event combining works from early 1900 to the contemporary era, called “Looking Forward to the Past.”

“I don’t think art should be sold on a horizontal, generational plane,” he said. “Once in a while it’s interesting to hit on a vertical.”

The 2015 sale at Christie’s marked the peak of the last market cycle and included Pablo Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O).” Its sale price was $179.4 million -- and it remained the most expensive work of art sold at auction until this week.

Source: Bloomberg 

Getting Back on Track

Last weekend I headed to NYC for the AAA annual conference and had a great time. I did a short post while in New York on the large turn-out and excellent presentations.  For appraisers the timing of both AAA and ISA annual conferences are perfect, you can attend AAA in the fall and then in spring attend the ISA conference. Between the two organizations and excellent programs you should be able to gain specialty knowledge as well as building networks with fellow appraisers.

I spent an extra day in New York and went to the Met before coming home, and also found time to visit the MoMA.

Upond coming home I had some work to catch up on, attended the TAFAC meeting and prepared for our auction at the Potomack Company. With all of that going on I took a bit of a break in posting. I missed posting on the big NYC sales, but I am sure most appraisers have seen the various results. I will post some post postmortem reports when I spot them.

I will get back to regular posts this week, as I have David Maloney's 8th Edition of Appraising Personal Property: Principles & Methodology to review. From my preliminary scan of the new edition, it just keeps getting better and better, and as in past editions, it is written to conform with 2018-2019 USPAP.

This book, in my opinion is the best non-affiliated work on personal property available for PP appraisers. Each new edition should be in every appraisers library, regardless of skill or experience level. I have relied on my version for many years. Dave has been authoring this guide for years and it performs well as a stand alone book on personal appraisal principles and methodology or for an independent viewpoint as a supplement to augment publications issued by appraisal associations.  I will post more details on the new edition in a few days as I get back into the swing of posting.

Also, as I mention a week or so ago, Cindy Charleston Rosenberg, ISA CAPP and past president of ISA will be presenting an International Society of Appraisers webinar on art market trends. The webinar is scheduled for November 21st.

The one hour webinar is only $40.00 for ISA members and $50.00 for non-members on November 21, 2017. If you are interesting in current trends in the art market, as an appraiser, dealer, collector or allied professional. Cindy's webinar presentation should give good details and fill many of the gaps in understanding current art market trends.

The ISA webinar Leveraging Art Market Trends to Build Your Appraisal Practice is scheduled for Tuesday Nobember 21st at 1:00 pm EST (2:00 pm CST).

For more information and to register click HERE.

The International Society of Appraisers reports on the webinar

Shifting collecting patterns, goals and objectives can present powerful business opportunities for appraisers. What are the emerging trends in the management of art as a tangible asset class? How reliable are art market reports, and how can the appraiser use these statistics to build relationships with tax, wealth and legal advisers?

Learn how to educate wealth managers, attorneys and tax professionals about the seven key questions they should be asking their clients about their collections, and how these discussions can generate repeat sources of high-level appraisal assignments.

Participants are encouraged to email Cindy Charleston-Rosenberg at info@artappraisalfirm.com in advance of the webinar with any challenges they’ve encountered accessing and interacting with the wealth management community.

*This webinar will take place from 2:00-3:00pm CST.

Fees

Members
$40.00 before November 21, 2017
Non-members
$50.00 before November 21, 2017]

Source: International Society of Appraisers 

Full House at AAA Conference

The first day of presentations is almost over and the AAA conference is off to another great start.  I left the conference a bit early to post and then visit the Impressionist/Modern/Contemporary exhibition at Christies.  From what I hear the lines are long to get in.

Unfortunately I was not able to attend art law day, but all of the feedback I heard is that it was an excellent day of presentations and useful content.

The crowd at the AAA conference is large and  and the presentations excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed this morning's Judd Tully keynote and the following panel with Evan Beard of US Trust and Anders Petterson of Art Tactic.

We had a great dinner on Saturday evening with Linda Selvin, ED of AAA along with other AAA leadership and a few members of the ISA leadership team attending the conference. The food was great and the atmosphere and company was excellent.

The 9th floor lounge of the New York Athletic Club was full, and staff kept bringing extra chairs in. The vendor room was also full and I spent some time talking with Eric Kahan of Collector Systems and Mark Bench of Borro.

I am looking forward to the Monday presentation on the Kollsman case.  Overall I am having a great time seeing many appraisal friends, great presentations and taking advantage of what NYC has to offer in food and culture.

Court OKs Sale of Rockwell Works

A Massachusetts court ruled that Sotheby's can proceed with the sale of works from the Berkshire Museum. The Judge stated that those involved in suing to stop the sale had no standing.

Bloomberg reports on the decision

Sotheby’s can go forward with next week’s auction of art from the Berkshire Museum, including a Norman Rockwell painting worth as much as $30 million, over protest by the late artist’s sons that their father donated them to remain on permanent display.

A Massachusetts state judge ruled Tuesday that the two paintings Rockwell gave to the Pittsfield-based museum, as well as works by Albert Bierstadt, Alexander Calder and Frederic Church, can go on the auction block Nov. 13. The art is valued at as much as $68 million, Sotheby’s has estimated.

Rockwell’s sons sued to halt the sale, arguing the paintings, known as “Blacksmith Boy--Heel and Toe” from 1940 and “Shuffleton’s Barbershop” from 1950, could be purchased by a private collector, never to be seen again.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and former and current museum members also joined the effort to stop the sale. The state argued that a sale not only violated general museum ethics but that the trustees chose an “exorbitant” revitalization plan and upgrades that could cost $60 million.

Judge John Agostini rejected their arguments, concluding that neither Rockwell’s sons, the state of Massachusetts, nor former and current museum members had standing to sue to halt the sale. While the museum’s decision generated debate about the rights and responsibilities of museums to sell off works -- called “deacession” -- Agostini said the sale would help boost the museum’s financial outlook, which he said is “otherwise bleak.”

Berkshire Artist

The judge also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument and testimony from a retired museum curator, who said the artist donated the paintings because “they were his favorite oil paintings and he wanted them to stay on display in the Berkshires.”

“This may very well mean that timeless works by an iconic, local artist will be lost to the public in less than a week’s time,” Agostini said. “No doubt many will be disappointed in this outcome, and they may take little comfort knowing that, in their loss, the rights of a charitable board to make thoughtful decisions to steer its charity through troubled times have been vindicated.”

Sotheby’s said in a statement it is “very pleased that the court reaffirmed that the board of trustees acted in good faith and fulfilled its fiduciary duties.”

“We are looking forward to successful auctions beginning next week that will ensure a bright future for the Berkshire Museum in support of the community of Pittsfield and Western Massachusetts.”

Elizabeth McGraw, the president of the Berkshire Museum, said she and the board were grateful to Agostini.

“We believe we acted consistent with our responsibility to this community and our collections, to keep this museum open and strengthen it for generations to come,” she said. 
Jillian Fennimore, a spokeswoman for Healey, and Michael Keating, a lawyer for the Rockwell family, didn’t immediately return voicemail messages left after business hours seeking comment about the ruling or if they would appeal it.

The museum dates back to a collection donated by Zenas Crane, whose family founded the Crane & Co. paper manufacturing company used to make U.S. currency, according to the museum’s website. The family has been in the paper business since 1770, when a paper mill it operated near Boston made the cotton paper used to make Colonial currency.

The case is Thomas Rockwell v. Trustees of the Berkshire Museum, CIV No. 17-0253, Commonwealth of Massachusetts Superior Court (Berkshires).

Source: Bloomberg

Harassment Allegations at the Armory Show

The NY Times reports on complaints of inappropriate comments and touching at the Armory Show, Artnet and Blouin Media. Allegations come from over 15 separate complaints.

The NY Times reports

Benjamin Genocchio, a prominent and influential figure in the art world, has been replaced as executive director of the Armory Show, a top international art fair, after five women who have worked with him over the years told The New York Times that they experienced unwelcome touching by him.

In interviews, a total of eight who had worked with him at the Armory Show, Artnet and Louise Blouin Media said he made sexually inappropriate comments to them, and an additional 11 people said they had observed or knew about Mr. Genocchio making these comments, often in the workplace.

“We have only recently learned of the allegations related to Mr. Genocchio’s previous employment,” the Armory Show said in a statement Wednesday after The Times had published an article about the accusations against Mr. Genocchio. “At this time, deputy director Nicole Berry has assumed the role of executive director.”

Mr. Genocchio had declined to be interviewed but on Tuesday issued a statement: “Launching start-up news websites definitely led to conflicts with a few employees, but I never intentionally acted in an inappropriate manner nor spoke to or touched a colleague in a sexually inappropriate way. To the extent my behavior was perceived as disrespectful, I deeply and sincerely apologize and will ensure it does not happen again.”

In one compelling account related by several women, more than 20 female employees gathered in August 2016 in the conference room at Artnet — the leading art-market information company — to discuss complaints about sexual harassment and the treatment of women in the office. As the director of human resources and other executives listened, women zeroed in on Mr. Genocchio, who had recently stepped down as editor of Artnet News to go to the Armory Show.

One of the women was Colleen Calvo, the marketing coordinator at the time, who began crying as she talked about encounters with Mr. Genocchio that she said had haunted her for months.

Ms. Calvo recounted those experiences in a recent interview. At Artnet’s 2014 holiday party at the Gramercy Park Hotel, as she was helping check in guests at the door, Mr. Genocchio ran his hand up her sequin pants, she said.

“Ben said, ‘Is this the only time I get to touch your ass without getting yelled at?’” Ms. Calvo recalled.

“He was predatory,” she added. “He was a bully.”

The accusations come in the wake of sexual assault allegations against the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, as well as sexual harassment accusations against Knight Landesman, a longtime publisher of Artforum magazine. Mr. Genocchio’s ouster was first reported by ArtNews.

Mr. Genocchio is not as well known as Mr. Weinstein and the complaints against him typically involve misconduct that is described as more verbal than physical. But in the tight-knit and clubby art world, Mr. Genocchio’s contacts give him outsize power in the business. The Armory Show had connected him with art professionals from all over the world. The casual forms of sexual harassment that he was accused of rarely make headlines but can be insidious because of their pervasiveness, and often goes unchecked.

Another complaint against Mr. Genocchio is laid out in an April 17 memo to Michelle Anastassatos, vice president for human resources at Vornado Realty Trust, which owns the Armory Show. In the memo, obtained by The Times, Deborah Harris, the Armory Show’s managing director, reports being “berated and humiliated” by Mr. Genocchio after chastising him for “frisky behavior” that included, she said, making “lewd comments about the bodies and dress” of staff members. (Ms. Harris declined to be interviewed.)

Amanda Coulson, the artistic director of the Volta art fair, an affiliate of the Armory Show, confirmed that one of her female employees asked to work elsewhere because of Mr. Genocchio’s behavior. “She did not want to work in the office because she felt the environment was hostile,” Ms. Coulson recalled. “So I immediately moved her out and got her another office.”

Several people who worked at the Armory described being present when Mr. Genocchio said he couldn’t have an employee in her 50s accompany him to a sponsorship event at a fashion house because he needed instead to bring “some arm candy.”

Vornado in May acknowledged in a letter to Ms. Harris that Mr. Genocchio had “referred to another female employee as arm candy and previously referred to others as sweetie.”

“However,” the letter continued, “multiple employees indicated that as soon as they told him that his comments were objectionable, he stopped making them, he was apologetic, and that no further comments have been made.” (Vornado, in the same letter, informed Ms. Harris that her job was being eliminated and suggested that “a skeptic might even think that the timing of your complaint to human resources was a strategic attempt by you to try to prevent the termination from occurring.”)

Vornado, in a statement Tuesday, had been somewhat supportive of Mr. Genocchio, saying that its outside counsel last spring had conducted an investigation into the allegations contained in Ms. Harris’s memo and “found that while Mr. Genocchio on occasion made inappropriate comments, his conduct did not rise to the level of sexual harassment.”

The company declined on Wednesday to elaborate on the rationale for its decision to replace Mr. Genocchio or whether he will continue to work for it in another capacity.

Mr. Genocchio, who has a doctorate in art history, started his career as an art critic for The Australian, moving to New York in 2001, where he wrote about art for The New York Times. He is married to Melissa Chiu, the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, making them something of a power couple in the art world.

Before Artnet, Mr. Genocchio served as editorial director of Blouin Media from 2010 to 2014. Orit Gat, the former senior editor of one of the company’s publications, Modern Painters, said, “He was incredibly aggressive; he would always touch women.”

“One time, he cornered me in the kitchen,” she added. “If I was at my desk, he would put his hands on my shoulders. He would tell me I should have married better, someone who made more money.”

Shane Ferro, who worked at Blouin’s Artinfo, said that Mr. Genocchio “loved to put his hands on my neck.”

“After the second time, I said: ‘I’m staying away from him. I never want to be alone in a room with him,’” Ms. Ferro added. “But he was the editorial director. He had a lot of power over whether I ever got promoted.”

“It was my first-ever job and the sexual harassment started immediately,” she said. “I’ve always been afraid of male bosses since then because of these small but important things that happened when I was 22.”

In an interview, Ms. Blouin said she was unaware of such behavior.

At Artnet, Jacob Pabst, the chief executive, said that the 2016 women’s meeting “was called to provide an open and comfortable forum for our women employees to discuss ways in which Artnet could further improve the work environment.”

But several women interviewed, who insisted on anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their current positions, said that nothing ever came of the meeting or earlier objections to Mr. Genocchio’s behavior, which included complaints that he gave women unwanted massages at their desks, commented on the size of women’s breasts and, in one case, ran his hand up a female employee’s leg in the elevator after asking if she was wearing tights.

A number of women reported their negative experiences with Mr. Genocchio to Susannah Wilson, who was then Artnet’s director of strategy. Ms. Wilson discussed these complaints with Mr. Pabst — the son of Artnet’s founder, Hans Neuendorf — in a 2015 memo obtained by The Times.

“You are aware of the issues around sexual harassment that have come up, specifically around Ben G, so I will not go into detail,” Ms. Wilson wrote to Mr. Pabst. “I have come to you several times not on my own behalf but because so many other people feel too afraid to speak up.”

Artnet should “have a very low tolerance for these offenses,” Ms. Wilson added in the memo. “Just because the cause of most of these problems is isolated to one individual does not mean that the effects are isolatable.”

In an interview, Mr. Pabst said he could not discuss the specifics of Mr. Genocchio’s tenure. “I have to treat certain types of information as confidential — this is his personal stuff,” he said.

“We have clear processes here at Artnet,” he added. “I can assure you, whenever there has been any issue, it has been dealt with.”

Ms. Calvo said she and her female superior complained to Mr. Pabst but that, when she was about halfway through her remarks, Mr. Pabst interrupted her by saying, “I’ve heard enough.” (Mr. Pabst did not respond to a query about this.)

Many in the company said they felt that Mr. Pabst did not take the complaints more seriously because he was friendly with Mr. Genocchio, with whom he played tennis. “I know you deny your closeness to people like Ben,” Ms. Wilson, the former director of strategy, wrote in her memo to Mr. Pabst. But “the perception is that there is a ‘boys club’ and there are factors that reinforce this perception, no matter how long it has been since you played tennis together.”

In the interview with The Times, Mr. Pabst denied that he and Mr. Genocchio were friends and that he was unresponsive to complaints. “It’s absolutely not true that people came to my office and I didn’t respond,” he said. “In terms of Ben Genocchio, I wasn’t aware of any serious claims by any employees.”

“I would never treat anyone better than anyone else,” he said.

But others say Mr. Genocchio’s special status was obvious to everyone in the office.

“Ben got away with it,” Ms. Calvo said. “The company got away with it.”

Source: The NY Times 

New Art Market Book

The UK Telegraph reports on a new book by Georgina Adam is out next month and titled Dark Side of the Boom.

The Telegraph reports

A new book by Georgina Adam, the former art market editor of The Art Newspaper and Financial Times columnist, is a “must-read” for anyone with an interest in the relationship between art and money. Although not gifted with the same eloquence as the late critic Robert Hughes, whose 1984 essay Art & Money is still the seminal text on the subject, Adam can pack in and organise the information like no one else.

Her last book, Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century, published in 2014, was a tour de force in chronicling the many aspects of the booming art market – from ambitious auctioneers, dealer rivalry and collector snobbery, to the obsession with online and the impact of emerging economies. Barely a box was left unticked.

No pushover for the market’s public relations teams, Adam is also armed with an underlying scepticism and a nose for scandal. This was apparent in the last chapter of Big Bucks, titled The Dark Side of the Moon, which Adam opened with a dealer saying, “after drugs and prostitution, art is the greatest unregulated market in the world”, followed by a consideration of the potential of market transactions for tax evasion and money laundering, mostly based on “hints and nudges rather than hard evidence,” she wrote. 

Georgina Adam's latest text on the relationship between art and money
Adam’s latest is intended as a sequel to Big Bucks, and takes up where she left off. Maintaining the Pink Floyd allusion, it is called The Dark Side of the Boom. On the cover is a 2001 sculpture by British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, of a light in the shape of a dollar sign, a work that rose from £38,000 in 2003 to over £220,000 in 2007, but which dropped this year to £62,500, making it an adroit symbol for the penalties of excess.

The new book, published next month, covers much of the same ground, but the story has been updated and is much more focused on secretive, behind-the-scenes events. Adam’s fondness for court cases and the insights they provide into the otherwise untold machinations of the art market, stands her in good stead in this respect. Over 45 court cases are cited in the book’s 200 pages, from copyright issues (Richard Prince and Jeff Koons’s appropriation art), to sales disputes between dealers and collectors, artists and dealers and advisers and collectors. Cases of forgery and authentication and especially those involving artist foundations such as the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, which had to close down because of the cost of legal fees, are in the majority.

In the world of art finance, so much cash is floating around that it is perhaps inevitable some embezzlement occurs in the areas of art investment funds and loans for art. But the biggest case of all (and the one that I suspect was the trigger for this sequel) is the now infamous dispute between the Russian billionaire “fertiliser king”, Dmitry Rybolovlev, and Swiss Freeport storage magnate – and we discover, private art dealer – Yves Bouvier.

In a nutshell, over a period of 14 years, Rybolovlev coughed up some $2 billion for Bouvier to buy art quietly, then discovered how much profit Bouvier had made and sued him. You should read the book, though, because it is the most detailed account I have read of the affair, down to the mansion in Monaco where Rybolovlev staged his trap for Bouvier’s arrest in February 2015.

Recently, Rybolovlev has been losing money on sales of his art perhaps to prove the extent of the alleged rip-off, the latest development being the sale next week of one of his most expensive acquisitions, Leonardo da Vinci’s heavily restored Salvator Mundi, a highlight of Christie’s contemporary (yes, contemporary, because that is where all the money is!) art sale in New York, with a $100 million (£76 million) estimate and a guarantee that it will sell. The painting had been bought unattributed in 2004 by another dealer for about $10,000 (£7,600), but after extensive cleaning and research, found its way into the London National Gallery’s 2011 Leonardo exhibition as a genuine Leonardo. Bouvier then bought it through Sotheby’s private sales division for $80 million (£61 million) and sold it to Rybolovlev in 2013 for $127.5 million (£97 million).

Very little of that information, however, is in the Christie’s catalogue, and even less in the press release, which is why we need people like Georgina Adam to keep digging for the truth.

Source: Telegraph UK

Artists' Assistants and Theft

The Observer has an interesting article on art theft by artists's assistant theft.  They give an example of Bonhams looking to authenticate a work of Sean Scully and discovered the assistant had possession of Scully works. The article notes it is not an uncommon occurrence, yet it is typically under-reported.

The Observer reports

The basis of so many relationships is trust. We expect our doctors to try to keep or make us well and that our financial advisors will work to protect and grow our money. We assume our spouses are faithful and that the auto mechanic will know what that click-click-clack sound is and make the engine run smoothly again. Come on, I know these guys. It usually comes as a surprise when someone breaks your trust, as it must have for painter Sean Scully when he learned that a former studio assistant, Arturo Rucci, had stolen a three-panel painting from him and tried to consign it for a fall sale at Bonhams auction house.

Bonhams contacted Scully’s studio in order to verify the triptych’s authenticity, which is how the artist learned of the theft in the first place. In late October, the 50 year-old Rucci, an artist in his own right, was arrested for criminal possession of stolen property. The Scully painting had been valued at $400-600,000.

The problem of artists’ assistants stealing from them happens with some unknown amount of frequency, because most instances are not reported in the media. But the arrests of assistants to photographer Steve McCurry, glassblower Dale Chihuly and artist Jasper Johns within the past several years for thefts of their work that they were able to sell suggests that what happened to Scully may not be altogether rare.

In the case of McCurry, whose best-known image is “Afghan Girl,” which appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985, his one-time manager of fine art print sales, Bree DeStephano, was sentenced to jail in 2016 for stealing photographic prints worth $628,000. A warehouse employee in the Chihuly studio with a drug addiction, Christopher Robert Kaul, took more than 90 pieces worth in excess of $3 million and was sent to jail for first degree theft and trafficking in stolen property earlier this year. In 2014, a Queens (New York) foundry owner whom Jasper Johns had hired to create a wax cast of a 1960 sculpture “Flag,” was sentenced to 30 months in jail for making unauthorized copies of the piece that he attempted to sell.

Dan Ostermiller, a sculptor in Loveland, Colorado, has “changed the locks 20 or 30 times” over as many years (“If I have an employee leave, I change the locks”), and Shelburne, Massachusetts glassblowing artist Josh Simpson stated that two assistants with drug problems—one of whom had worked for him for a dozen years—pilfered an unknown number of his pieces in order to support their habits. “My work started to appear on eBay, $35,000 objects being sold for $250,” he said.

Still, some artists just don’t believe this kind of thing could happen to them. “I only employ people I really trust,” sculptor Alice Aycock said, while sculptor Federico Solmi was more hopeful in his confidence: “I assume I work with loyal people. You never really know if something is stolen until Bonhams calls, I guess.” Even more hopeful is multi-media artist Lesley Dill, who claimed that she has “been very lucky,” especially since she gives her assistants “my keys and passwords.”

Photographer and painter William Wegman claimed that he doesn’t even know his own passwords, relying on other people to “do whatever you need passwords for.” Inventory is better guarded than it used to be “when I used to keep stuff in cardboard boxes,” tracked by a full-time registrar and his wife. Still, “we’re very open here,” adding that his principal form of security are “some big scary dogs who make a lot of noise when someone new comes in.”

There have been no studies of art thefts from artists’ studios, although a 2002 report by the art theft crime team of the Federal Bureau of Investigations found that “89 percent of thefts from institutions are inside jobs,” said Robert Wittman, a former FBI agent and currently a security consultant to museums and art galleries. Thefts by artists’ assistants, he claimed, follow the same logic. “Someone works his way into the confidence of the artist. Especially as artists get older and need more caretaking, this person knows where everything is and won’t be missed.”

He added that there is a “psychological aspect” to thefts by artists’ assistants. “They feel they do all the dirty work, while the artist gets all the credit and most of the money, so they feel justified in taking things.” Other artists’ assistants, although claiming that they did not steal, noted that they had conflicted feelings about doing assistant work. While a benefit of the job is being able to work with a noted artist and have access to their contacts, it allows for little time for an assistant to do his or her own work while they’re dedicating their artistic pursuits to contributing to the success of someone else’s career. Perhaps that was part of the make-up of Arturo Rucci, Sean Scully’s former assistant, himself a painter of large abstract works, which have been exhibited in small galleries around New York City, although sales appear to have been few and at a low price point.

Certainly, no one gets rich working as an artist’s assistant, where the going rate of pay is usually between $10 and $20 per hour, often without benefits or health insurance. “It’s hard to live on a small wage, especially in a place like New York,” said Claire Taylor, an artist in Illinois who worked for artist Tara Donovan shortly after completing art school. “I finally found I couldn’t afford it anymore and left.” All of the assistants in Donovan’s studio were “very trustworthy,” she said, adding that “considering the scale of her sculpture, it would have been difficult to steal something.”

Leaving art school does strike some graduates as a slap in the face. They go from an environment where professional artists are trying to help them to a world in which they are viewed as competition and judged on the basis of sales. They have left college art studios that have ample supplies and state-of-the-art equipment and now have none of those things. One of the possible perks of working as an artist’s assistant is the opportunity to use the artist’s tools and discarded materials on one’s own time. “It’s a perk or maybe just a justification for the low wage you get,” one former artist’s assistant said.

This type of encouragement helps, but maybe only so much. “In art school, you can experiment in all kinds of ways, making large-scale objects, and then suddenly you leave and your work becomes real small real fast,” said Carmella Saraceno, a sculptor who had worked as an assistant to Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, Joseph Beuys and Dennis Oppenheim and who, in 1990, founded Methods & Materials, a Chicago-based company that arranges rigging, assembly, installation, re-location, and de-installation of large-scale sculptures and objects. It is easy to become resentful, she noted, of the artists who are paying you to be their assistants, “because everyone wants to see their work and no one wants to see mine. Being exposed to so many successful artists really impacted my self-esteem in so many ways.”

Source: Observer

More on The Berkshire Museum Deaccessioning

The Berkshire Eagle recently ran a very interesting article on the deaccessioning of painting and the Berkshire Museum. There is some really interesting information in the article, such as Sothehby's gifted the museum $500,000 in a previous deaccessioning to secure future consignments from the museum.  The Berkshire Eagle states "The Eagle has learned that, to secure the museum's business in an earlier deaccession, Sotheby's made an upfront gift to the museum of $500,000."

Sotheby's also claims int he litigation that is has already spent over $450,000 to market works to be auctioned from the museum.

This is a really interesting read, I recommend taking a couple of minutes to read the full Berkshire Eagle article.

The Bershire Eagle reports

What's new, goes on view.

What's old, might not soon be sold.

That's the shape of things for the original 40 works culled from the Berkshire Museum collection, as its controversial auctions near and the art world debates the path taken by the 114-year-old institution.

On Friday, museum staff from around the Northeast gathered in Falmouth to discuss the ethics of selling art to fund operations. The debate came during a special forum — "The Deaccessioning Dilemma: How Can We Support Standards AND Museums in Crisis?" — added to a conference of the New England Museum Association.

But last week brought more than talk.

Sotheby's and the museum pushed back at one legal challenge to the art sales, even as they encountered another.

In filings Thursday, the museum presented the most detailed case to date that it has the right to sell the work, as it seeks to block an injunction barring the sales.

An affidavit filed in Berkshire Superior Court included copies of original accession slips filled out over more than a century for 38 of the 40 works. The document shares, for the first time, curatorial records to which the museum has previously declined to provide access.

Nina Garlington, the museum's chief engagement officer and acting co-executive director, says under penalty of perjury in her affidavit that "none of the files contains any express restriction on disposition."

Garlington said four museum staff members worked for about 18 months to check paper and electronic records "and any and all files related to donors ... and correspondence in any way related to the 40 deaccessioned objects."

Cost of delay

In another court filing on the museum's behalf, the chief operating officer for Sotheby's says that delaying the sales would "substantially diminish" prices that the auction house would be able to attract for the museum's art.

To date, the company has spent $451,345 to market the Berkshire Museum auctions and to prepare works for sale, according to an affidavit from Adam Chinn, the chief operating officer.

Presenting the works at another time, Chinn said, would rack up an additional $291,500 in expenses.

Some of the money already spent covered the cost of sending Norman Rockwell's "Shuffleton's Barbershop" and "Shaftsbury Blacksmith Shop" paintings to London, where they were exhibited Oct. 5-8 before being flown to exhibits in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Other works were exhibited in Texas.

Sotheby's created a promotional video just for "Shuffleton's Barbershop."

In its dealings with the museum, Sotheby's has a history of paying to play.

The Eagle has learned that, to secure the museum's business in an earlier deaccession, Sotheby's made an upfront gift to the museum of $500,000.

That figure was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of the transaction, which resulted in the auction house beating out Christie's and Bonhams to handle the sale of three paintings by Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev that netted the museum more than $7 million in 2008.

Proceeds were placed in a fund devoted to the good of the museum collection.

Competing 'harm'

By flagging the amount of money already invested in the sale, the museum's legal team aims to show a judge that it would be harmed if a temporary restraining order is granted.

That is the object of the Oct. 20 lawsuit filed by a group of plaintiffs including three Rockwell sons.

Plaintiffs will argue that they and the community also stand to lose — if the auctions take place.

Other affidavits filed Thursday by the WilmerHale law firm take aim at that lawsuit's claim that a 1958 letter to the artist thanking him for the gift of "Shuffleton's Barbershop" could be considered legally binding.

The question of donor intent — and what, if any, restrictions that imposes on the museum — is expected to be a top question when the request to halt the sales goes to a hearing Wednesday.

At week's end, the museum's WilmerHale legal team, led by William F. Lee, was mobilizing to respond to a second lawsuit, this one filed by three residents of Lenox. The plaintiffs, James and Kristin Hatt and Elizabeth Weinberg, also seek an injunction against the sales, but their action makes a distinct legal argument.

Their attorney, Nicholas M. O'Donnell of the Boston law firm Sullivan & Worcester LLP, argues in the action that members of the museum have the right to challenge how well the museum has represented the public's interest in the art collection.

The art sales, the suit says, violate a public trust. The museum, O'Donnell writes, "has planned a sophisticated campaign of deception to deliver the Artwork to auction."

The winnowing

As of now, only 19 of the original 40 works have firm sale dates, as The Eagle reported last week.

But those 19, most of them acquired far more recently by the museum, are poised to bring the biggest bids in auctions scheduled to begin Nov. 13 in New York City.

The two Rockwell paintings alone could fetch bids of $40 million, according to Sotheby's estimates.

Why some works are headed to sale and others are not remains shrouded in secrecy.

Carol Bosco Baumann, a spokeswoman for the museum, declined to say how the museum will go about deciding when — and if — to sell the 21 works that lack specific auction dates.

She said last week that plans for those sales "will be shared in due course by Sotheby's."

Darrell Rocha, a spokesman for Sotheby's, suggested that the choice is really up to the museum.

In an Oct. 20 email to The Eagle, Rocha wrote, "The Museum has decided to sequence the sale of the de-accessioned works differently."

The museum's latest court filings double down on its view that nothing restricts the sale of all 40 works.

But the pieces being held back are, by and large, from the original works contributed to the museum by its founder, Zenas Crane.

When the museum was formed in 1903, as an adjunct of the Berkshire Athenaeum, it operated under an earlier act of the Legislature that specified that works given to the institution not leave Pittsfield.

Another act of the Legislature in 1932 separated the museum from the library. In the latest legal filings, the museum's lawyers note that, unlike legislation in 1871, the 1932 measure did not carry over that prohibition on elements of the collection leaving the city.

But that legal shift might not be a factor in decisions about when and how to sell pieces that date to the museum's founding.

Leanne Hayden, a former collections manager at the museum, said there might be a simpler explanation as to why many of Crane's gifts were removed from auction schedules.

"The only other theory I would put forward was there wasn't as much interest in those," said Hayden, who works as collections manager at the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk, Maine.

She said Sotheby's might not see a demand now for the 21 works, which include portraits of Revolutionary War figures like George Washington (by Rembrandt Peale) and Gen. David Forman (by Charles Willson Peale).

"I would think that's more the case, rather than testing donor intent," Hayden said, referring to whether the museum felt it didn't have legal clearance to sell.

Hayden said portraits like those of Washington and Forman could be viewed as harder to sell. The auction estimates for both range from $200,000 to $300,000.

But other pieces held back are valued well above that, including Thomas Moran's "The Last Arrow," an oil painting dated 1867. Sotheby's estimates that it could sell for up to $3 million.

"It would be a Sotheby's decision over a museum decision," Hayden said.

A strategic move by Sotheby's might have led it to take one of the museum's two works by Albert Bierstadt, "Giant Redwood Trees of California," out of the American auction lineup, she suggested.

"They don't want to flood one auction with all the Hudson River School paintings," Hayden said.

Rocha, of Sotheby's, did not respond to a follow-up question about how it would decide to time sales of the other 21 works.

Finding a category

A former Sotheby's employee with more than 20 years experience in the art field said Friday that when works are kept back from sales, it is usually because the auction house hasn't found the right category in which to sell them.

The pieces heading to the November auctions fall into clear categories, such as the Nov. 13 sale of American works, followed by auctions of Impressionist and Modern works (Nov. 14 and 15) and European art (Nov. 21).

Works with lower values, the expert said, tend to be grouped in less important sales in which categories might be "lumped together." She spoke on background because she wasn't authorized to comment on Sotheby's practices.

Another observer, with decades of experience in the museum field, suggested that the state Attorney General's Office might have cautioned the museum not to sell works acquired before the 1932 legislation.

The Attorney General's Office has been reviewing the sale, and it plans to weigh in this coming week, ahead of court hearings on the two motions that seek to stop the sales.

The Eagle contacted Christie's, a competing international auction house, to see how it times sales. The company declined comment, saying it does not speak about its competitors. A current employee of the auction house Bonhams also declined to comment.

Other objects no longer headed for specific auction dates include one that Sotheby's said could bring a bid of $7 million: Frederic Edwin Church's "Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada," an oil painting from 1875.

While some landscapes fell off the Sotheby's map, for now, others like George Henry Durrie's "Hunter in Winter Wood" will be auctioned Nov. 13. Durrie's oil painting, dated 1860, holds a bid estimate of $400,000 to $500,000.

Still other pieces on the sidelines for now: Ralph Albert Blakelock's "Rocky Mountains," George Inness' "Mountain Landscape-The Painter at Work," William Bouguereau's "Les deux soeurs (La Bourrique)," Charles Francois Daubigny's "Paysans allant aux champs (Le Matin)," Daniel Ridgway Knight's "Reverie (Leisure Moments)" and Alberto Pasini's "Faubourg de Constantinople."

Timing now

Though Sotheby's isn't revealing how it plans to time future sales of Berkshire Museum works, its chief operating officer goes on at length in the affidavit filed last week about how much harm a delay in scheduled auctions would cause.

Chinn said the aggressive marketing plan for next month's auctions could not be re-created. Publications that have written about the sales would see a later, postponed auction as old news, he said, and buyers have already made travel plans.

"Delaying the sale could ultimately cost the Berkshire Museum an amount that is difficult if not impossible to measure, but that could ultimately cost the Berkshire Museum many millions of dollars," Chinn said in the affidavit. "If the sale of the Property were now postponed, it would be extremely difficult for Sotheby's to re-create the excitement that currently exists around the sales."

Meantime, a strong art market could lose steam. He said that, at the start of the Great Recession in 2008, sales fell 75 percent. And after Sept. 11, 2001, it took the art market a year to recover.

Pulling the museum's works from the November sales, Chinn said, also would hurt sales prospects for pieces being offered by different sellers.

Without a doubt, the Berkshire Museum's artworks are calling cards for the Nov. 13 auction — and two in particular.

When Sotheby's installed a streetside billboard outside its New York headquarters last week, people passing by found themselves looking into country life at a barbershop and at a blacksmith's shop, two iconic places created by Rockwell and long familiar to patrons of the Berkshire Museum.

Source: The Berkshire Eagle