Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Art By The Numbers: A New Report On The Market In 2011

 

On the eve of a big week for the art market in New York — the ADAA Art Show opens Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, The Armory Show opens on Thursday on Piers 92 and 94, and there are several smaller fairs, too — I thought it was time for a review of the market.

Conveniently, ArtPrice recently released its 2011 annual report. It contains some very revealing statistics, showing what’s been in the air for some time now — namely, that the art market at the top is strong, despite continuing worldwide economic troubles, and that it’s stronger in China, which has fewer of those woes, than anywhere else. But the interest is in the details, and below, I have excerpted several points the report made. They are verbatim except for the words in brackets, which I have added for clarity:

  • Art in fact sold better in 2011 than at any other time in history with $11.57 billion in total global annual revenue [based on 6.3 million auction results from 4,500 auction houses around the world], up $2 billion versus 2010, which already produced the best performance of the decade.
  • The Asian art market has become the most high-end area of the entire globe. For example, 12.1% of works sold in Asia sell for between $100,000 and $1m, versus 2.2% for the rest of the world.
  • 1,675 artworks sold above the $1 million threshold (including 59 above the $10 million threshold) representing a 32% increase of 7-figure (or more) auction sales versus 2010 and an increase of 493% versus the start of the decade! China accounts for the highest auction results (with 774 auction results above $1 million recorded in 2011 compared with 426 in the USA and 377 in the UK), mostly generated at auctions in Beijing and Hong Kong.
  • In 2011, the global art auction market generated 21% more than in 2010 and there is not a single segment of the art market that did not progress in terms of turnover. Compared with 2010, Modern art added $1.2B, Post-war art added $372m, Contemporary art added $291m, Old Masters added $124 million and 19th century art posted an increase of $43 million.
  • The Beijing based China Guardian can boast the highest bid of 2011 after selling Qi Baishi’s Eagle Standing on Pine Tree, Four-Character Couplet in Seal Script for Â¥370 million ($57.2 million) against an initial estimate of Â¥88 million on 22 May 2011. This is the world record for a work of Modern Chinese art. 
  • Beijing is where the market’s pulse beats strongest now, generating over $3.17 billion in annual revenue, representing more than 27% of global art auction revenue. Behind Beijing there is New York ($2.593 billion), $380 million ahead of London with $2.214 billion and then Hong Kong, which has climbed to fourth place with $796m, representing nearly 7% of global art auction revenue.
  • [While Modern art is the largest category by far], The Old Masters market has doubled in value in two years. The peaks reached in the Old Masters segment (whose market is very contracted for Western signatures) were largely, here too, generated by the rebalancing of the Chinese art market towards other segments. China is in fact the champion for sales of Old Masters (its market is by far the densest) with a total for the segment of more than $704 million in 2011 vs. $248 million in the UK, $128 million in the USA and $46 million in France. After the Modern Qi Baishi, the artist with the best annual auction result was indeed the Old Master Wang Meng. His ink on paper Zhi Chuan moving to Mountain fetched Â¥350 million ($54 million) on 4 June 2011 at Poly International.
  • The number of contemporary works of art sold has more than tripled over the decade. In 2011, more than 41,000 Contemporary works sold worldwide, a record number which generated a revenue total of over $1.26 billion compared with $87.7 million in 2001. Contemporary art certainly has the wind in its sails, but it has not become unaffordable since 62% of Contemporary works sold for less than $5,000 in 2011.
  • The global unsold rate has been above 35% since 2008. In 2011, it dipped below this threshold to 34.8% despite a 7% increase in the number of lots offered at auctions.
  • The most expensive “1%” of all lots sold generated 58.5% of the world’s total auction revenue in 2011. Hence, the remaining 99% of auction results generated less than half of the entire market’s revenue. Again, it is not surprising that China accounts for the largest share of this “1%” (50%) with the USA representing 23% and the UK 20%.

Photo Credit: Christoph Morlinghaus (the 2006 Armory Show)/Courtesy of New York Magazine

The Curator, The Portrait, The Blogger And The Donor

Here’s a tall tale (or rather a shaggy dog story) about the power of blogs — even for finding “lost” works of art and courting donors.

It involves the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, which for a long time has owned a portrait of Benjamin Gratz (below) painted by Thomas Sully in 1831, but not the partner picture, a portrait of his wife, Maria. When the Rosenbach acquired Benjamin’s portrait in 1970, a bequest of  Benjamin’s granddaughter, there was no sign of the companion painting.

But the Rosenbach owns four other Gratz family portraits, including a Sully painting of philanthropist, social activist and Jewish leader Rebecca Gratz, and the enterprising curator there, Judith Guston, wondered where the Maria portrait was. Last June, she decided to ask a blogger – Susan Sklaroff, who writes at Rebecca Gratz & 19th-Century America to write a post about the missing painting. Sklaroff asked readers to check their attics, friends’ homes and local museums for traces of Maria. A press release continues the story:

Three weeks later, Guston got a call from Atlanta, Georgia. Maria Gratz Roberts, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Maria, had the original Sully portrait [right] in her parlor. Although Roberts had lived with the painting throughout her life, she believed Benjamin and Maria’s portraits should be reunited. Roberts donated to the Rosenbach the Sully portrait of Maria, a pastel copy (which she also owned) and a chair that Benjamin had brought from Pennsylvania.

So ends the tale with a happy ending that illustrates, as if we needed it, the power of the internet. Except — there never would have been such a blog had not Sklaroff been a docent at the Rosenbach. As she tells the tale:

I discovered Rebecca Gratz when I became a docent at the Rosenbach Museum & Library which has a lovely portrait of her by Thomas Sully. To learn more, I began to read the hundreds of Gratz family letters which survive in libraries around the country and found wonderful stories about Rebecca as well as information about customs, events and technological changes of her time. I cannot fit all this material into the talks I give on Rebecca nor into my proposed book. This blog makes it accessible to those who are interested in Rebecca Gratz and antebellum America.

So it’s the power of people, and their interests, too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Rosenbach

 

The DIA’s Many Facebook Fans: Will They Show Up in Person? — UPDATED

The Detroit Institute of Arts sent me a press release today that, at first, made me chuckle. It wasn’t about art at all — it was about the number of people who “like” the DIA on Facebook — or, as the DIA says, its Facebook fans. They now number more than 100,000. In fact, when I checked this evening, they numbered 102,758 — are probably growing fast.

There’s a reason. The DIA is offering its Facebook fans free admission during the month of March. Furthermore, one such pass admits four people. Coming off a strong turnout for “Rembrandt and Jesus,” this is smart marketing. (see update, below.)

The press release cites Museum Analytics, a website that tracks museums’ social-media audiences, for comparison numbers. It says that, as of Feb. 28, only six U.S. art museums have more Facebook fans than the DIA, and they are all in New York.

The Museum of Modern Art has the largest number among museums worldwide, with 978,838 fans when I checked, while the Met has 610,000. The Whitney Museum of American Art has 145,317, the DIA said.

Detroit also stacked itself up against non-NYC museums (I did not double-check these):  Art Institute of Chicago, 97,095; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 56,280; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 32,612; Cleveland Museum of Art, 22,168; and Toledo Museum of Art, 31,545.

I checked a few others: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 20,633; Seattle Art Museum, 32,807; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a surprisingly low 78,818, and the Dallas Museum of Art, 28,748.

These numbers are changing all the time — and spending a lot of time and effort to build them is probably over-rated. But the DIA was enterprising when, on Feb. 24, it announced the free pass offer with a goal of reaching 100,000. On that day, it had just over 97,000 fans.

The point is conversion — I’ll look for press release that says how many fans took up the DIA’s offer and visited the museum’s stellar collection. Here’s what else they’ll see.

UPDATE: Here are some specifics on the “Rembrandt and Jesus” exhibition at the DIA:

–116,392 visitors to the show
–More than 4,800 new and renewed memberships were purchased during the run of the exhibition
–CaféDIA saw an almost 50% increase in customers.
–Visitors came from 48 states, including Hawaii and Alaska. Group sales were robust, and tours were booked as early as last spring. In addition to metro Detroit, groups came from Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Windsor, Canada.
–Private third-party rentals for the show: 22 bookings and a total of 1590 visitors. Some of the organizations that booked private events include the Harvard Club of Eastern Michigan, Archdiocese of Detroit, University of Pennsylvania, and the College of Wooster in Ohio.
–Both the hard and soft cover exhibition catalogs sold out, as did the postcards that feature the DIA’s Face of Jesus. Very strong store sales, period, especially for Dutch candies (!).

Photo Credit: The DIA’s Great Hall, Courtesy of the museum

 

 

What’s The Most Exciting Part of the Art World? But, A Downside

Sculpture rocks nowadays. That’s the one-line summary of a long article I’ve written on contemporary sculpture, published in the March issue of Gotham magazine.

You may or may not have noticed that, as you’ve wander galleries, but a lot of people, viewing it from different standpoints, think it’s true — galleries, art advisors, academics, and so on.  “Some of the strongest work being made today is sculpture,” art advisor Mary Hoeveler told me.  Joseph Seipel, dean of the arts school at Virginia Commonwealth University, called this “a really experimental age for sculpture.”

There are many, more detailed, explanations for the buoyancy of contemporary sculpture, all in the article, but the overarching, or underpinning, rationale is two-fold: “sculpture” now encompasses so many materials, from wax to glass to found objects to feathers to metals and more, that the opportunities for creativity are endless. And equally important, so many artists today do not consider themselves “painters,” “sculptors,” “installation artists,” etc. As Seipel put it, “They’re just artists, and if they have a three-dimensional idea, it’s a 3-D piece; if it’s virtual, they do that; and if the idea works best with paint on a canvas, they do that.” And let’s face it, this is a 3D world for younger generations in particular.

This freedom is good, but it does have a downside that I did not cover in the article: it’s something I began thinking about after the piece went to print, as I re-read some notes I’d made talking with three different museum directors over the last six or so months. To varying degrees, they had each voluntarily mentioned or agreed that a lot of contemporary art is not well made. It’s probably because artists switch materials and disciplines so frequently that they don’t master the medium.

That, obviously, creates enormous conservation issues and doesn’t bode well for the future of some sculpture.

Photo Credit: piece by Diana al-Hadid (who’s in this article), Courtesy of the Hammer Museum, UCLA

The Städel Museum Expands: Four Reasons To Note

In the last few days, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt has opened its doors on an expansion that’s significant for a couple of reasons. 

First, the art: The Städel has long been known for its great collection of Old Masters. Now, with the completion of new galleries designed by the architectural firm schneider+schumacher (of Frankfurt), it is showing Western art of the past 700 years. The new space, almost 32,300 square feet, doubles the area available to show the Städel’s holdings. Although the museum has collected some contemporary art in the past, two recent acquisitions – 600 works from the Deutsche Bank collection and 220 photographs from that of the DZ Bank — plus many major donations and some purchases have added what the museum says is 1,200 new contemporary works to the Städel’s collections. About 330 works are on view in the current hanging.

Second, the locale: these new galleries are all located underground, beneath the museum’s garden. They’re invisible from the outside, yet they still soar more than 26 feet in some places, allowing the presentation of big works. The ceiling is supported by juts 12 columns, and the galleries are lit naturally by 195 round skylights, each nearly 5 feet to about 8 feet in diameter, that form a distinctive pattern in the garden. Not that many museums have pulled off such a feat — most just enlarge their footprint, which is not necessarily a good thing. The grassy garden remains pretty much in tact.

Third, the cost: how did the Stadel manage to build these galleries and renovate its old building for less than $72 million at today’s exchange rate? I couldn’t find an exact comparion, but that sounds low to me — especially because the construction was  underground.

Finally, the funding: 50% of that total came from foundations, corporations and individuals. The rest came from the city and the state. Private largesse may be traditional in the U.S. but it’s new to Frankfurt, new to much of Europe. It shows that, whether people like it or not, government support for the arts in Europe is not going to be enough in the future. The museums I speak with in Europe are all talking about emulating the U.S. model, which has its own problems.  

But Max Hollein, the Städel’s director, has worked in the U.S., at the Guggenheim, and he’s said he learned how to raise money here. “One shouldn’t take a ‘no’ as a ‘no,'” he told Der Spiegel. “Rather, it is a sign that the question has merely been formulated wrong.” That article continues:

In Frankfurt, the bankers and collectors like this attitude, even if they insist that the art culture in Germany is very different from the US. But the mindset comes across when they refer to the museum as a “good product” — a comment that many German art lovers would find profoundly profane.

One collector sent Hollein, who had been persistent in his requests, a postcard with a picture of a vulture on it. Nevertheless, she donated four important paintings. The approach clearly works here in Frankfurt, even if it would be unthinkable in other, similarly wealthy German cities such as Hamburg.

I commend the rest of that article to you, if you’re at all interested in Hollein’s thinking.  

Hollein visited with me in New York when he was here last year, and explained some of the legal questions/arrangements that had to be settled before various donations were accepted. Good for him for working things out. And he’s not shy about gimmicks either — selling yellow rain boots to supporters of the museum, who wear their support in public, for example. (He’s shown in some photos wearing the yellow boots.) So while this transition isn’t always easy, above and beyond asking people for money, it’s done.

And by the accounts I’ve read so far, it’s a job well done.

Here’s a link the the museum’s press releases on the expansion, which are full of more details.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Der Spiegel