Auction Blooper: Who Stole Carol Vogel's Heart? UPDATED

Vogel's Pick: Signac, "Cap Canaille, Cassis," 1889

All of you NY Times readers who are heading over to Sotheby's this weekend on the strength of Carol Vogel's first-paragraph assertion (in her front-page Sunday "Arts & Leisure" article) that you can now ogle Jeff Koons' "shiny, bright-red dangling heart," please turn right around and come back on Nov. 10.

It's been taken off view so as not to upstage the Impressionist/modern offerings. If you go to the presale exhibition area now, you will have to make do with the likes of Gauguin and Picasso. For those who arrive on the premises with heart pangs, Sotheby's is continuously screening this video, in which auctioneer Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's head of contemporary art, and Lisa Dennison, executive vice president (who plays her Guggenheim card while extolling Koons) gaze lovingly at the enormous cardio-bauble.

We all make mistakes, and CultureGrrl's first fall auction prediction has already proven wrong: I suggested that Vogel, as is her wont, would out the "anonymous" consignors. But she tells no such tales in her "Telltale Art" piece. Scanning the merchandise, she particularly admires a Signac offered at Christie's, "Cap Canaille, Cassis" (above), "whose owner has not been identified."

Its most recent exhibitor HAS been identified---the National Gallery, London, where it was on loan from December 2003 until last August. Someone ought to tell that museum to take it off the website, where it is still listed, at this writing, as "on loan from a private collection."

Like everyone else, Vogel focuses on the "will it burst?" question and ramps up market anxiety by making a blanket assertion, for which she offers no evidence, that the works in the big sales are being offered with "optimistically high estimates."

At yesterday's press preview, both David Norman, Impressionist/modern chairman, and Anthony Grant, senior contemporary art specialist, painstakingly explained how their estimates on key pieces were reasonably conservative, given previous prices for comparable works.

The market will soon tell us who's right. The megabucks buyers, not impecunious pundits, are the ones who will make (or break) this market.

UPDATE: I've just had another of those "Did she really say that?" moments: Listening to Vogel's audio slide show accompanying the online version of her piece, can it be that I heard her say this:

In seasons past, when there's been trouble in the financial markets, the auctions have enjoyed an incredible boom, with people feeling safer putting money in art...than they have in things like stocks.

I've heard of art as a speculative investment and even as a hedge against inflation. But a flight to safety?!?

Gee, I think I'll get my parents' money out of Treasury Bills and buy them this Basquiat (Lot 481 at Sotheby's contemporary day sale):