Art Market Heads For Plunge, Taubman Predicts
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Alfred Taubman, Sotheby ‘s largest individual shareholder and owner of pictures by Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, and David Smith, said the art market is heading for a decline.
“As a collector, prices seem high to me,” Taubman said in an interview in London. “The market has to come down to keep economic balance.”
Taubman, 82, a billionaire, built a shopping-mall empire and was Sotheby’s chairman before being convicted and jailed in 2002 for anti-trust offenses after a price-fixing scandal. He denies ever fixing prices.
As much as $856 million of art will be auctioned by Sotheby’s and Christie’s International in London this week, with works by artists such as Claude Monet and Damien Hirst expected to fetch record prices.
“It’s driven by the personal wealth of individuals,” Taubman said. “Russians and hedge funds and Chinese millionaires like to show their wealth, and they want to decorate their walls with things their friends and relatives envy.”
