This week saw the first post-Brexit art auctions in London, and they brought considerable cheer to a market predominantly dismayed at the Leave decision. To a backdrop of a declining exchange rate for the pound and Britain losing its AAA rating status, on Monday Phillips turned in a modest total of £9.8m hammer (£11.9m with […]
Global companies with an eye on the bigger picture invest in contemporary creations. Just beyond the turnstiles of Deutsche Bank’s London reception sits a large object resembling several huge dollops of creamy Plasticine. As the viewer comes close, it turns out to be a sculpture made entirely of dice. “Secretions” (1998) by British artist Tony […]
Yorkshire Sculpture Park has a strange new tree. Solid yet graceful, inspired by the street vendors of Jingdezhen in southern China, who sell wood for its beauty, “Iron Tree” (2013) is a collection of fragments held together with bolts. It seems to have been in the wars, this tree, much like its maker Ai Weiwei. […]
The international art market is having its time in the sun: auction records keep tumbling, living artists have become superstars, and their punchy paintings and shiny sculptures have become the billionaire’s playthings of choice. Amid all this noise, however, it is time to question the much-touted belief that art is also an investment-grade asset.
“The National Gallery’s great advantage is that we are obliged to give prominence to works of art that are important in the collection but don’t mean much to people today,” he says cheerfully. Conceptual works by trendy names – notably installations by Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger alongside Titian in 2012 – have entered the […]
Will 2013 go down in art market history as the peak of a boom, or the beginning of a new world order for art sales?
Coming just two weeks after the slam-dunk New York auction sales of contemporary art, Art Basel Miami Beach’s sales were reportedly excellent. At the high end of the market, …
Wealthy Chinese collectors are increasingly buying up western art as their tastes move beyond the traditional confines of Chinese ceramics and paintings.
The not-so-young British artists on provocation, prostitution and spicy soup Jake picks up a paper napkin. “The second that Martin Creed does that” – he crumples up the napkin – “then it’s worth £50,000 or whatever. The point is there has to be some sort of syndicative agreement that if he or she does it” […]
Words like “surreal” and “dizzying” were used a lot over the last couple of weeks to describe the atmosphere at major fall auctions of Impressionist, modern and especially contemporary art at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as prices for individual works shattered records, hitting new nine-figure highs, and overall sales of contemporary art surged to a new […]