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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Art Market

The Price Of Being A Female Artist

Cheim and Reid, the Chelsea gallery that shows work by many women artists, is circulating a recent piece in The Economist headlined “The Price of Being Female.” It starts with a disheartening paragraph about the recent contemporary auctions, which reads in part:

…Christie’s post-war and contemporary evening sale in New York earlier this month…was unprecedented…it had ten lots by eight women artists, amounting to a male-to-female ratio of five-to-one. (Sotheby’s evening sale offered a more typical display of male-domination with an 11-to-one ratio.) Yet proceeds on all the works by women artists in the Christie’s sale tallied up to a mere $17m—less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein. Indeed, depictions of women often command the highest prices, whereas works by them do not.

Then it switched gears:

An analysis of data provided by artnet, however, suggests that the prospects for women are slowly improving. Compare, for example, the top ten most expensive male and female artists. Admittedly $86.9m, the highest price for a work by a post-war male artist (set by “Orange, Red, Yellow” by Mark Rothko) dwarfs the highest price paid for a work made by a woman—$10.7m for Louise Bourgeois’s large-scale bronze “Spider”. However, of the top-ten men, only two are living, whereas among the top-ten women, five are still working….

The Economist published a chart illustrating that point, using data supplied by artnet — here’s a link to it: ArtistsPrices.

I find it hard to put much stock in that tally, but the article makes other points, which are worth noting. The woman whose work seems most in demand is Joan Mitchell, whom The Economist dubbed “the turnover queen.” Since the mid-1980s, the date artnet’s records begin, her work has brought $199 million, all told, at auction. “Mitchell’s stature in the market,” the article says, “results from an international collector base, which includes Russian, Korean, French and American buyers. Abstraction always aspired to being a universal language; perhaps the new global elite will make it so.”

The living female artist record-holder is not, as I would have guessed, Marlene Dumas, but rather Cady Noland — “a reclusive figurative sculptor whose work explores the sordid underbelly of the American dream.” The top price for her is nearly $6.6 million, for Oozewald. Dumas comes next, at $6.33 million for The Visitor. Another surprise: Bridget Riley, whose Chant 2 (at right) fetched $5.1 million, ranks higher than Cindy Sherman, who comes in at No. 9 with a $3.9 million sale. The other living woman in the top ten is Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist whose work is less familiar (at least to me) even though the article says “Her work has the highest turnover of any living woman.” (No. 2 is above left.)

The Economist offers another positive note (for women artists) with this:

Intriguingly, the auction records for all three women—Mlles Noland, Kusama and Sherman—were the result of winning bids by Philippe Segalot, an art consultant who was then working for Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani, the Western-educated 29-year-old daughter of the emir of Qatar. It is probable that women feel a sense of affinity for art made by women. But perhaps more importantly, younger buyers and advisors find it weird to not include women’s perspectives in their collections. It appears the future will be more female. And as Iwan Wirth, a dealer with galleries in New York, London and Zurich, puts it, “Women artists are the bargains of our time.”

I realize that some readers don’t think that art should be scrutinized this way, as male versus female achievement. Maybe it shouldn’t. Sometimes analysis (including a few points in this) doesn’t (and can’t) go very far. But art is viewed through many prisms; this is just one. And there’s no harm in that.

 

Roy Lichtenstein Exhibition Opening Delayed — Due To Popular Demand

Is this a first? We are quite used to having museums add evening hours for a popular exhibition, staying open all night in the final days, and even extending the run by a few days.

But the Art Institute of Chicago has done the opposite — delayed the opening of its Roy Lichtenstein exhibition, which was supposed to be tomorrow, thanks to popular demand of its members. Now the opening of Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective is slated for May 22. (The museum is closed May 19-21 because of the NATO summit in Chicago.)

As is usual practice, the Art Institute opened the exhibit of about 160 drawings, paintings and sculptures first to members. But more than 3,000 signed up for the preview opportunities, and lectures, which can accommodate up to 1,000 people, also filled up fast. The three planned days for members had to be stretched.

Could it be that Lichtenstein is that popular? Or did the recent record price at auction, $44.9 million for Sleeping Girl (left), which isn’t in the show, add to the attraction?

One-year memberships cost $80, and offer other opportunities to view the show, like pre-opening hours on weekends.

If you can’t get there, you might try the “explore the exhibition” website the Art Institute has created. Some aspects, like the slider feature showing the relationship between his drawings and paintings, are pretty cool.

 

The Market Pays Tribute To Ernst Beyeler — Again

Master dealer Ernst Beyeler died more than two years ago, but he’s still receiving tributes — not least in the auction results achieved at Christie’s last Thursday. 

Beyeler is known as “Europe’s pre-eminent dealer in modern art,” as his obituary in The New York Times put it in February, 2010, but he was more than that; he was a true connoisseur, with a “discerning eye [and] refined taste” in many categories. 

That was amply demonstrated again at Christie’s sale of the Arts of Africa, Oceana and the Americas (sometimes known as tribal art), which was announced in mid-April. That announcement, in part, read:

The genesis of Beyeler’s tribal art odyssey occurred in the late 1950’s. He held his first exhibition of African art in 1958, during a time when ‘tribal’ works of art were reaching an international stage in the post-War art world.  He maintained his interest in tribal art over the years as someone who clearly understood it as key to the language of Modern art.  The African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian works of art from Beyeler’s collection demonstrates [sic] the continued relevance of tribal art within the contemporary art world today.  Many of the sculptures offered in the sale, such as the Pre-Columbian works of art, lined Beyeler’s wall since the early 1960’s.

What caught my eye was the results. In a sale that totaled $1.6 million, 98% of the lots sold, and 100% of the lots Beyeler owned sold — at prices far above their estimates. Of the Top Ten lots, nine were owned by, sold by or exhibited by Beyeler. Let’s look more closely at them (in order of sale, not value brought), with their presale estimate first, followed by the sale price including the buyer’s premium in bold:

  • Lot 1*: $3,000 to $5,000; $116,500 (pictured above right)
  • Lot 6: $80,000 to $120,000; $314,500
  • Lot 8: $20,000 to $30,000; $60,000 (pictured below right)
  • Lot 15*: $8,000 to $12,000; $266,500 (pictured above left)
  • Lot 20: $10,000 to $13,000; $47,500
  • Lot 22: $5,000 to $8,000; $47,500
  • Lot 23: $30,000 to $50,000; $62,500
  • Lot 24: $30,000 to $40,000; $60,000
  • Lot 36: $6,000 to $9,000: $47,500

In the Top Ten, only Lot 31, estimated at $20,000 to $40,000 and fetching $80,500, didn’t have Beyeler’s fingerprints on it – 90% of the Top Ten. In a sale of 51 lots, I counted 36 with a Beyeler connection (using Christie’s search function) — that’s just over 70%. But look at those prices, too — multiples of the estimates.  Two of the pieces, a Bidjogo mask (lot 15) and Aboriginal shield (lot 1), marked above with an asterisk, set new world records. All of the results are here.

When you consider that the best of Beyeler’s collection still resides at his Fondation Beyeler in Basel, these results speak volumes about Beyerler’s discernment.

Sam Keller, now the Beyeler director, has got to find the challenge of maintaining such quality daunting.

 Photo Credits: Courtesy of Christie’s

 

Are New Motivations Driving The Contemporary Art Market? — UPDATED

Is the contemporary art auction world moving to a new plateau, perhaps even new foothills of a higher peak of excess? It is starting to look that way to many people. Last night’s sale at Christie’s, which totalled $388.488 million, may be looked back at as a marker of some sort — with a slightly different dynamic than the past.

It seems to me that some buyers have gone past the notion of paying a lot to buy a masterwork, or just a good painting or sculpture, because they want the piece.

Now they want a work of art because they are paying the record price— in a way that looks discreet but, to their peers, who will see the work sometime soon, is quite ostentatious. “The air is no longer thin at the top,” Allan Schwartzman, a private New York dealer, told The New York Times, and Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s, added, “this is the most popular collecting category we have globally, with the richest and deepest number of buyers.”

Collecting has always been a competitive sport, now these buyers want bragging rights that include paying a record price.

Christie’s press release, meanwhile, was headlined “MOST VALUABLE POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTION EVER” (the Rothko at right) and it announced that “14 New World Auction Records Set” and “41 Works Sell Above $1 million; 9 Works Above $10 Million.” The text said: “Record after record fell throughout the night, as bidders from around the world convened in the saleroom to compete for the sale’s exceptional roster of works by the top artists of the category, including Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Yves Klein, Richard Diebenkorn, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning, among others….”

That’s smart marketing. In many luxury markets, the experts say, you make more sales by raising the price than by lowering it.

At a different art event this morning, I noodled over the sale with a few colleagues — all of whom were aghast at the excess in the room last night. These are people who love art; you have to wonder what people who don’t think.

As I write, the DJ Industrial average is down more than 100 points.

Read the results here.

UPDATE, 5/10: Last night’s Sotheby’s sale adds more evidence — little excitement in the room, only two real records (Lichtenstein and Twombly; the others were for artists that don’t make headlines because the sums are so small (Ligon, Bradford, etc.). No bragging rights with those purchase.

Art Basel Journeys to Hong Kong — UPDATED

We knew this was coming, but now it’s official: Art Basel will have a fair in Hong Kong, starting next May (the 23rd to 26th, 2013). “Just what we need,” you may be thinking, “another art fair.” The truly addicted collector can be on the road, traveling from one to the next fair, pretty much all year now. Why does Art Basel want to start something in Hong Kong?

Proximity to Chinese money is the obvious answer — and Art Basel is doing things the smart way. Instead of starting a brand-new fair, AB co-directors Annette Schönholzer and Marc Spiegler (right) have hired Magnus Renfrew, who previously headed ART HK,  which will have its fifth interation this May 17 through May 20, as Art Basel’s Director Asia. So ART HK will cease to exist. None of this is a surprise because last July, MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Ltd. , which is the parent company of Art Basel, acquired 60 percent of Asian Art Fairs Limited, which presented ART HK. (It has the option of acquiring the remaining 40 percent in 2014.)

The venue, the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, stays the same. And the new show will include more than 250 galleries around the world, chosen by a new selection committee. More than half of them are expected to be based in Asia or somewhere else in the Eastern hemisphere. UPDATE: That comment — that promise — may be in response to what Art in America, in its May issue, said was local “grumbling” about the favor shown to high-profile Western galleries in the fair’s layout, and worry that Art Basel Hong Kong won’t have enough Asian content.

Meantime, Art Basel in Basel gets underway on June 14 (till June 17). It will offer exhibits by more than 300 galleries from 36 countries.

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About Judith H. Dobrzynski

Now an independent journalist, I've worked as a reporter in the culture and business sections of The New York Times, and been the editor of the Sunday business section and deputy business editor there as well as a senior editor of Business Week and the managing editor of CNBC, the cable TV

About Real Clear Arts

This blog is about culture in America as seen through my lens, which is informed and colored by years of reporting not only on the arts and humanities, but also on business, philanthropy, science, government and other subjects. I may break news, but more likely I will comment, provide

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