Follow the money

When Andy Warhol said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” he might have been thinking of Webb’s recent broadsheet publication outlining where the contemporary art money flows through auction.

The big bucks all go to paintings of course and mostly painted by guys. And so (via the Australian Sales Digest) Webb’s tells us that the 50 most valuable works by Bill Hammond sold at auction raked in $3.7 million at an average of $74,000 each. Remember though that just three of the top 50 went for a combined total of $858,000 including Hammond’s top dollar sale of $293,000.

In the last 20 years Webb’s alone have sold 194 works by Colin McCahon bringing in $12 million. But Ralph Hotere, we hear you ask, what about Hotere? Well, his top 50 sales at auction have attracted $5.9 million with Webb’s best effort bringing in $315,000. The other heavy auction hitter of course is Shane Cotton with $2 million coming in from the top 50 sales and a highest price of $257,000.

King hit

Art museums often complain that prices have pushed them out of the room as collectors. The other day we saw the other end of this story. Walking into Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts we were stopped in our tracks by a truly great painting by Gerhard Richter. Very impressively it was purchased by the Museum the first time it was exhibited back in 1987, long before Richter was established as one of the most important artists of our time. Even to pay what has been described elsewhere as “significantly less than US$100,000” for a Richter back in 1987 would have required steady nerves. It was his first show in the United States and many years before the 2002 retrospective at MoMA that confirmed his reputation. Now over half of Richter’s abstract paintings are in public collections.

And how the marketplace loves Gerhard Richter. Even Richter thinks it's on another planet when it comes to his work. "It's just as absurd as the banking crisis. It's impossible to understand and it's daft.” Last year Eric Clapton sold one for $33.4 million making Richter at the time the world’s highest priced living artist. It’s big business the Richter business with total sales for the 30 years leading up to 2010 at $538,118,111, with the single boom year 2010 accounting for $76.9million of that total. So great call by whoever was in charge of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the late eighties.

Image: details from Gerhard Richter’s diptych AB Mediation 1986

The difference engine

"The art market is a distribution system. It’s a voting machine. Art History is a value system or a weighing machine."
Marion Maneker of Art Market Monitor

Mark it

Where would we be without the art market? As regular readers will know it's worth about two posts a week (bless it) for OTN. But in the UK art writer Sarah Thornton (Seven days in the art world) is as mad as hell and won’t take any more of it. She's stomped off leaving these ten reasons for not writing about the art market behind her.

1. It gives too much exposure to artists who attain high prices.

2. It enables manipulators to publicize the artists whose prices they spike at auction.

3. It never seems to lead to regulation.

4. The most interesting stories are libelous.

5. Oligarchs and dictators are not cool.

6. Writing about the art market is painfully repetitive.

7. People send you unbelievably stupid press releases.

8. It implies that money is the most important thing about art.

9. It amplifies the influence of the art market.

10. The pay is appalling.

OK, fair enough. Now here's our ten reasons why OTN still finds the art market totally entertaining:

1. You usually get it wrong (which is good medicine for show-offs).

2. In NZ at least the art market is one of the few areas where people are happy to express strong opinions about art

3. It gives a big group of university funded artists something to not participate in

4. It is run by dealers and auction people who have opinions, know a lot, and are better dressed than your average reporter.

5. It brings to the world of one of its most mysterious processes: the pricing of art.

6. Drama and excitement.

7. It’s a world free of wall texts, computer graphics and labels.

8. It is going into a time of fundamental change with bets off as auction houses compete directly with dealers and both try to work online

9. The “what’s it worth” conversation.

10. The chance to bet on how long it will be before Sarah Thornton writes on the market again.

You can get Sarah Thornton’s list with her annotations here