Convinced that consumers are finally ready to shop online for Picassos and choice Persian rugs in addition to car parts and Pez dispensers, Sotheby’s, the blue-chip auction house, and eBay, the Internet shopping giant, plan to announce Monday that they have formed a partnership to stream Sotheby’s sales worldwide. Starting this fall, most of Sotheby’s […]
Art Basel and the London summer auctions are behind us, and the auction market continues to hit unprecedented peaks. But today’s records and art stars came straight out of yesterday’s headline-grabbing auctions. With that in mind, we take a look back at some major milestones of the last few decades—from the 1973 sale that arguably […]
Moving the opening of the Venice Biennale to May has set the cat among the pigeons. When it was announced that the Venice Biennale was shifting the date for the opening of its 2015 edition to 9 May (with previews from 6 to 8 May), it sent the whole art market into a frenzy. The […]
BAC is off to Frieze NY for the 3rd instalment of this excellent Fair (hopefully it will be a little less, ah, dramatic, this time…). Lots of other things are happening in New York at the same time, including the “satellite” Art Fairs: NADA, PULSE, and even “outsiders” are invited, to the Outsider Art Fair. […]
The herd is spooked. That’s one interpretation of why there has been so much outrage over the the borderline heretical views that the collector Stefan Simchowitz espoused in Artspace‘s recent interview with him—what he said has evidently struck a chord that resonates jarringly with collectors, dealers, artists, curators… everyone, really. A collector who has amassed a hoard of recent art, […]
The truth of the art market is that art sells better at auction than it does in the galleries. This is primarily due to the “new buyer” phenomenon, which for the time being is what rules the day. All hail the rule of the auction season! Here’s my take on the recent sales in London. […]
I have been an invited interloper in the fiefdoms of the decimal-pointed rich long enough now to know that when rich men want to distinguish themselves from other rich men they buy art. Among practitioners of modern-day social one-upmanship this is hardly new. The nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age were the first Americans to […]
Anchored by superb works on paper from a storied collector-dealer and an important restituted painting by a French Impressionist, Sotheby’s evening sale of Impressionism, Modernism, and Surrealism brought a stellar £163,461,500 ($266,654,745) on Wednesday night, making it the firm’s highest-earning London auction ever. Of the 89 lots offered, only ten failed to sell, for a […]
New Masters of the ART Universe Hedge-fund managers are roiling the clubby art market – seeking “distressed” artists, paying record sums and dumping those who don’t pay off; ‘Going long on Rodin’. Aggressive, efficientand armed with up-to- the-minute intelligence supplied by well-paid art advisers, these collectors are shaking up the way business gets done in […]
Holland Cotter Looks at Money in Art A new year. A new New York mayor. Old problems with art in New York. I have a collection of complaints and a few (very few) ideas for change. Money — the grotesque amounts spent, the inequitable distribution — has dominated talk about art in the 21st century […]
Handicapping 2014, maybe I see up to a 10% gain for the S&P 500 Index, refusing to anticipate the death toll of rapidly escalating interest rates or inflation. The market can sell at a high teens price-earnings ratio, even with earnings rising mid-single digits. Speculation is in the air so good stock pickers can do […]
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?
Wealthy Chinese collectors are increasingly buying up western art as their tastes move beyond the traditional confines of Chinese ceramics and paintings.
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 […]
A View Inside the Art World: Author Henry Alford attended the record-breaking auctions of modern art at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but to watch, not buy. Henry’s hilarious commentary in the NYT on his experiences at the Christie’s including at the preview auction brunch: “Are you having fun?” he asked me. “I am,” I said. “But […]
The man behind the World’s Most Expensive Painting