Boom (ctd.)
November 14 2014
Video: Christie's
Wednesday evening saw a new record total for a post-war and contemporary art auction; $852m (at Christie's in New York). Which comes first, the bust or the billion dollar sale? One of the hotly contested lots, an Ed Ruscha painting that made $30m, was actually a giant canvas with the word 'Smash' written on it in large letters. Was the market being prophetic, ironic, or just dumb?
In the Financial Times, Melanie Girlis has this interesting take on who was buying what;
Melanie Gerlis, art market expert at the Art Newspaper, said: “There’s always been a huge American trading circle in modern, postmodern and contemporary art. But there are definitely more Chinese people buying. And at Sotheby’s there was a lot of Russian buying.”
Ms Gerlis said there were about 20 artists whose works had continued to rise “exponentially” over the past decade, fuelled by competitive buying between a comparable number of very wealthy collectors. But she added that these buyers would sometimes pay exceptional amounts for a work in order to boost the value of their existing collection, rather than for the work’s intrinsic value.
Other reports of the bidding frenzy here in The Guardian and here in The New York Times.
