Buyers Balk At Prices Of Art
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LONDON — Prices for contemporary art may be stalling as Sotheby’s and Christie’s international gear up for some $400 million of such sales in New York.
At London weekend auctions, Neo Rauch and other fashionable young German artists went unsold while Chinese painters Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang sometimes sold near low valuations, as did a Damien Hirst spot painting. Established artists Martin Kippenberger and Bill Viola sold below their low estimates.
The sales showed buyers are starting to balk at the prices demanded by sellers. Since 1995, contemporary values have tripled, and some artists have made tenfold gains in two years.
“I don’t think the market can keep going up,” the billionaire Eli Broad said in an interview last week after buying Jeff Koons’s “Cracked Egg” sculpture in London for about $3.5 million. “In the U.S., we see real estate not going up — houses are selling at lower prices. You can’t have anything going up 10% to 20% to 30% indefinitely.”
London auction rooms filled with between 500 and 1,500 people this weekend, from dealers Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch to publishers Benedict Taschen and Louise MacBain. At Christie’s, where many estimates were low, Mr. Zhang’s family trio fetched a hammer price of $1.3 million, or 1.8 times its top valuation. A Tom Wesselmann nude went for a record $2.4 million, more than twice its high estimate. Most nudes fared well.
The London sales, which continue this week, aim to raise as much as $147 million. They’re part of a series of contemporary fairs and auctions that may take in about $800 million by year end, according to published numbers and estimates by fair organizers.The Frieze Art Fair ended on Sunday.
Phillips de Pury & Co.’s Saturday sale used live music and D.J.-style auctioneering to draw more than 1,500 people to a former post-office building near Victoria Station. The art, about a quarter guaranteed, reached its $16 million top estimate only after adding commissions.
“A lot of people are interested in contemporary art, but there’s a small circle of players,” Mr. Deitch said. His $930,962 bid won a 1998 Piotr Uklanski photograph, “The Nazis,” whose top estimate was $651,673, and he bought a Maurizio Cattelan photo, too.
Among the guaranteed lots, Kippenberger’s 1984 “Frau mit Viel Zeit,” an oil painting of a woman on a pier, took a hammer price of $707,583, missing its $744,824 low valuation. Mr. Viola’s “Eternal Return,” a 2000 video work with a low estimate of $651,673, sold to a telephone bidder for a hammer price of $614,490.
Guarantors, including Phillips and outside investors, promised minimum prices to sellers of 17 lots. A guarantor may make little money, or lose some, when the hammer price is below the low estimate.That happened to at least five Phillips lots, though other guaranteed works did well.
The 7 p.m. sale stretched about two hours, and auctioneer Simon de Pury competed with a roar of talk as guests waited for the bar to open and the Human League rock group to perform.