Oops! Carol Vogel Did It Again.

Carol Vogel, reporting on last night's contemporary art sale at Sotheby's, in today's NY Times:

The auction total, $125.1 million, was...squarely in the middle of its estimate, $109 million to $148 million.

CultureGrrl, in last night's post:

Tobias Meyer...hammer[ed] down $110.65 million's worth of contemporary art last night (not including the buyer's premium). That total [was] slightly above the $109.3-million low end of the presale estimate.

As I said in a previous post, the presale estimate, as clearly defined by the auction houses, is a prediction of hammer price. It explicitly excludes the buyer's premium. It can therefore only be properly compared with the sale's total hammer price, not the beefed-up total that adds in the auction house's hefty commission from buyers. Comparing apples (estimated hammer total) to oranges (actual sale total of hammer plus buyer's premium) makes an auction house's results look much better than they really are. This is highly misleading. It serves the auction houses' interests in enhancing their sales' appearance of success, but not the interests of readers in getting an accurate understanding of what really happened.

Sorry to keep hammering at the need to report hammer. But it's a number-crunching concept worth assimilating.

(Apropos the state of the contemporary art market, Katya Kazakina has posted a very tasty interview with PaceWildenstein's Arne Glimcher, in today's Bloomberg.)