Seven Days in the Art World Read online

  Cappellazzo is refreshingly unpretentious. When I asked her, What kind of art does well at auction? her answer was uncannily appropriate to this lot. First, “people have a litmus test with color. Brown paintings don’t sell as well as blue or red paintings. A glum painting is not going to go as well as a painting that makes people feel happy.” Second, certain subject matters are more commercial than others: “A male nude doesn’t usually go over as well as a buxom female.” Third, painting tends to fare better than other media. “Collectors get confused and concerned about things that plug in. They shy away from art that looks complicated to install.” Finally, size makes a difference. “Anything larger than the standard dimension of a Park Avenue elevator generally cuts out a certain sector of the market.” Cappellazzo is keen to make clear that “these are just basic commercial benchmarks that have nothing to do with artistic merit.”

  So what’s the relationship between aesthetic value and economic value? I ask.

  “It’s not fully correlative. There are lots of wonderful artists who don’t have strong markets. What is the correlation between good looks and good fortune in life? It is that kind of discussion.

  It’s moot. It’s nihilistic.” Hmm. Both good looks and aesthetic value are in the eye of the beholder, but beholders are social animals that tend to (consciously and unconsciously) cluster into consensuses. Cappellazzo doesn’t apologize for the market. It is what it is. “I used to be a curator,” she says. “When I run into academics that I knew back then who ask what I’m doing now, I say, ‘I do the Lord’s work in the marketplace at Christie’s.’ It’s one of my personal jokes.”

  The bidding on Lot 5, a classic Gilbert and George from 1975, went up to $410,000, while the bidding for Lot 6, a Maurizio Cattelan sculpture from 2001, has started at $400,000. Gilbert and George may be Britain’s most important conceptual artists, but on this occasion they are no competition for the less prolific, hip-and-happening Italian. The catalogue is the auction house’s main marketing tool. It’s a full-color, glossy tome on which the images on the front and back covers are part of the negotiations meant to entice vendors to consign their art with Christie’s. This Cattelan work, a self-portrait in which he peers through a hole in the floor, not only graces the back cover of the catalogue but is also reproduced on the invitation-only ticket.

  The “Maurizio market” (it’s de rigueur to refer to living artists by their first name) is much debated. Cattelan is a cynical prankster who polarizes opinion. Some people think he is the Marcel Duchamp of the twenty-first century, others say he is the over-hyped Julian Schnabel of our time. It can initially be difficult to distinguish innovators from charlatans, because the former challenge extant versions of artistic authenticity in such a way that they can easily look like pretenders. The test is in the perceived depth and longevity of their “intervention” in art history. Some heavyweight collectors buy Cattelan’s work in such serious bulk that it leads others to complain that his market is manipulated. However, as one consultant puts it, “It’s not manipulation—it’s more unconditional support.”

  The bidding on the Cattelan is “fast and furious,” as the auction cliché goes, and the work sells for $1.8 million, twice Cattelan’s previous auction record. “William Acquavella,” mutters Baer as he scribbles in his catalogue. Acquavella is a wealthy second-generation dealer whose gallery is located in a plush townhouse on East Seventy-ninth Street—one of the few who can afford to buy at that price for inventory. For consultants and dealers, buying in the room acts as an advertisement for their services.

  Lot 7 is one of three Ed Ruscha paintings for sale this evening. It “flies” for $680,000. Baer grumbles “Meltzer” and “Gagosian,” the buyer and underbidder. Gagosian represents Ruscha on the primary market and “protects” his artists at auction. If Ruscha were to go out of favor, Gagosian would probably buy key paintings and sit it out until the artist came back into fashion.

  Lot 8 is a Gursky photograph. It exceeds its high estimate but sells for well below the artist’s record. It is not one of his more celebrated works. Lot 9, Dan Flavin’s elegant Untitled Monument for Tatlin, sets a new record for the artist.

  In general, this auction is bearing witness to an incredibly strong market. “Every season we wait for the big correction,” says Jack Gold. “No boom lasts forever,” adds Juliette. It’s not a bubble until it bursts, say those in the business.

  I ask Josh Baer about the “endless bull market.” As he peers over the crowd, he replies nonchalantly, “Without auctions, the art world wouldn’t have the financial value it has. They give the illusion of liquidity.” He stops to jot down the starting bid of Lot 10, then continues. “A liquid market is the New York Stock Exchange. Someone will buy your IBM stock at a price. There is no law to say that someone will buy your Maurizio, but the auctions give a sense that most of the time, most things will sell. If people thought they couldn’t resell—or that if they died, their heirs couldn’t sell—many wouldn’t buy a thing.”

  Lot 10 is bought with a nod for a flat $800,000. Baer turns to me and adds, “We live in a climate where everyone expects prices to go in one direction only. But a lot of artists who are doing well now will be worth zero in ten years. You should look back at old auction catalogues. People have short memories.”

  Amy Cappellazzo is laughing with someone on the phone. The Christie’s staff are gearing up for the next two lots of “museum pieces”—Lot 11, a ready-made sculpture of three Hoovers, guaranteed to make a collector’s housekeeper laugh, by auction darling Jeff Koons, and Lot 12, a large-scale 1960s history painting by the king of postmodern art, Andy Warhol.

  The estimate-leaping and record-setting of the first ten lots partly relate to the way Christie’s has constructed the flow of the sale. People need to feel secure when they are spending extraordinary sums of money on luxury goods. As Cappellazzo explains, “We lay out a sale commercially. If we laid it out art-historically—chronologically or thematically—it would probably bomb. The first ten lots all have to go well. We tend to put things in there that will soar past the high estimate—young, hot, contemporary things that get the room going. At around Lot twelve or thirteen, we’d better be entering a serious price point.”

  The Koons “sells in the room” for $2,350,000.

  “Time for the big kahuna,” says Baer.

  “Lot twelve. The Andy Warhol. Mustard Race Riot…of 1963,” says Christopher Burge. Most works are not referred to by title. They are simply “The Gursky,” “The Flavin,” “The Nauman.” The time-wasting gesture toward the subject matter of the work is reserved only for the most expensive lots. Very slowly, Burge says, “And…eight…million…to start.” The bids are unhurried and come in increments of $500,000. A sober silence descends on the room. It takes about a minute to get to $12 million, and Burge threatens to sell: “Fair warning. Twelve million dollars.” In ten seconds, with three alternating finger waves worth half a million each, the price jumps to $13.5 million. There it stays. Burge manages to linger for a laid-back forty seconds, hoping to elicit another half-million with inviting eye contact, but it doesn’t happen. Whack goes his hammer. “Sold for thirteen million, five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Rafael Jablonka…probably for Udo Brandhorst,” Baer asserts confidently.

  When I asked Amy Cappellazzo, What is the art market? she was matter-of-fact. “Art is more like real estate than stocks. Some Warhols are like studio apartments in midblock buildings with northern exposures, while other Warhols are penthouse properties with 360-degree views. A share of Cisco, however, is always just a share of Cisco.” Judging from the rhythm of the bidding on Mustard Race Riot, the painting may have been a penthouse, but the lobby was poorly renovated and some eyesore must have been obstructing the view. The painting is made up of two panels, and connoisseurs were concerned that the two sides weren’t exactly the same shade of mustard. One rumor had it that the panels had not been painted at the same time, while another suggested that the difference
was entirely intentional. Either way, as Juliette Gold said, “It’s a great historical piece, but it’s not a very appealing color and it’s too large to hang easily in one’s home.”

  The Warhol market is probably the most complex market in the field of contemporary art. The hierarchy of works reflects a fine balance between rarity and popularity, size and subject matter. The most expensive years are 1962, 1963, and 1964, but the quality of the silkscreen factors into the price. Whether the picture is “fresh to market” or has been repeatedly resold also has an impact on its desirability.

  Warhol is a globally recognized brand with a fair distribution of works around the world, but a handful of super-rich dealers and collectors with vast Warhol holdings are said to move his market. Peter Brant, a newsprint mogul who knew Warhol (and owns Art in America and Interview magazines), is considered to have the best collection, but the Mugrabi family, reputed to own around six hundred Warhol works, is likely to have the biggest. Then there are the Nahmads and high-rolling dealers like Gagosian and Bob Mnuchin, who buy and sell Warhol as well. These top-echelon players are, in the words of one insider, “willing to overbid in order to keep up the overall value of their holdings.” Their opaque activities make a joke of the auction houses’ claims to bring transparency and democracy to the art market.

  Warhol once said, “Buying is much more American than thinking, and I’m as American as they come.” This week, Christophe van de Weghe, one of the few secondary-market dealers in Chelsea, is hosting an exhibition of Warhol’s large, colorful dollar-sign paintings. Is the show a homage to or a parody of the art market? The irony that no doubt accompanied the making of the paintings has dissipated some twenty years after the artist’s death.

  In New York, the divide between galleries that focus on the primary market and those that are principally secondary has a geographical dimension. Most of the primary galleries are in Chelsea between West Nineteenth and West Twenty-ninth, and most of the secondary galleries are on or just off Madison Avenue, between East Fifty-ninth and East Seventy-ninth Streets. Dealers like Gagosian, PaceWildenstein, and David Zwirner have shops in both locations, one for each kind of dealing.

  While secondary-market dealers need to have a “good eye,” a command of art history, an instinct for the market, an ability to take risks, and a steady circle of supportive clients, the thing that most distinguishes them from primary dealers is their need to be “cashed up.” The strongest players have the capital to buy with no financial pressure to sell. They take control of the object rather than acting as a go-between. As one dealer laments, “I’ve always suffered from not being able to hang on to things for long enough. I absolutely love buying things and I hate selling things. If you’re extremely rigorous about the objects you buy and buy only the best, then you don’t want to let them go.”

  Few like to admit that they enjoy selling art. The experience certainly contrasts markedly with the glory of buying. For collectors, the traditional reasons for selling are the “three D’s”—death, debt, and divorce—so the act has been associated with misfortune and social embarrassment. Today, says Josh Baer, there are “four D’s—because you’ve got to take account of the collectors who are effectively dealing.” Many collectors are in the practice of rotating their collection, much as dealers rotate their stock. They sell overvalued objects whose prices have moved up at rates that are historically unsustainable and buy undervalued works that they think are more likely to stand the test of time. Or they sell off objects by less fashionable artists before the works are worth nothing at all, in order to “upgrade” their collection. As one Sotheby’s specialist explained, “Many collectors who consign works to auction are of-the-moment people who have a very plastic approach to their collection.”

  Plastic is a peculiar word. It reminds me of something an older female collector said to me after a couple of glasses of champagne: “An auctioneer is like a plastic surgeon. You want to go to someone you can trust.” Sitting a couple of seats away, I notice a young, long-haired blonde writing in her catalogue with an old arthritic hand. Upon closer inspection, I realize she is withered but immaculately unwrinkled; her scalp is dotted with hair implants; her body is draped with distracting jewelry and animal pelts. She’s seventy-two going on twenty-two. A “plastic” sense of art collecting may indeed relate to the pursuit of youth and to a determined attempt to rejuvenate oneself through owning novelties.

  Compared to the pleasures and victories of buying, selling is an uncomfortable chore. Many collectors say they never sell when they actually do, partly because being known as a seller inhibits their ability to buy work from primary dealers. When Jack and Juliette Gold sold a work that was on the cover of an auction catalogue several years ago, they regretted the experience. As usual, Jack is pragmatic: “Selling at auction was unpleasant. I had a buzz in putting the deal together, getting the guarantee, negotiating the cover, but once it came to it, I didn’t like the publicity. I would rather have sold it privately through a dealer. The only problem would have been that whatever price we got from a dealer, I would have had a nagging suspicion that we could have got more at auction.” For Juliette, selling was much more of a trauma: “It was horrible. I wanted to hyperventilate and die. It felt like I was being undressed. The work was guaranteed, so we didn’t have to worry about anything financially, but what if nobody wanted it? We had lived with that painting for a long time. It was something we loved, so it felt like we were being personally assessed. We had a private room upstairs where, thank God, you could drink. I had three scotches in forty-five minutes and I was still dead cold sober.”

  Baer passes out some Ricola lozenges. Many lots have whizzed by—three Twomblys, two Calders, another Warhol, another Koons. I lose track of the prices as I take note of the full range of gestures people use to participate in this ritual. Among clients in the room, you have the full-hand waves, the two-and one-finger salutes, the paddle punches and bunts, nervous nods and double-blinking. Cappellazzo jokes, “I’ve always suspected that people’s bidding strategies are connected to their sexual performance. Some bidders are not afraid to let the auctioneer know what they want. They’re transparent about their needs. Others tease you and keep you guessing.” The Christie’s reps on the telephones have no doubt been told to heighten the sense of excitement, so their bidding styles are more expressive. Some adopt an aerobic full-arm extension with wrist flick, while others yell out a slightly hysterical “Bidding!” or make a stopping-traffic hand signal to indicate that they are anticipating a bid from a collector who is lounging on the sofa at home with a glass of wine, oblivious of the sense of urgency in the salesroom.

  “Lot thirty-three. The Cindy Sherman showing on my right,” says Burge. “And one hundred and forty thousand starts. One-fifty, one-sixty, one-seventy, one-eighty, one-ninety—new bidder. The bid is at the back now with one hundred and ninety thousand. The gentleman’s bid, and selling at one-ninety. All done.” Wham. The deal is done in thirty-five seconds.

  For people who are passionate about art, selling is often associated with a sense of a loss, and this is compounded when the selling is spurred by the loss of a loved one. During a Christie’s contemporary sale in London, I sat next to Honor James (not her real name), a tall, slim, upright woman who had consigned ninety-nine works from her parents’ collection of six hundred. As paintings and sculptures from her family home came up on the block, she would tell me, “That was in my parents’ bedroom” or “That was on the table in the hall.”

  James comes from a different world from most auction-goers and espouses markedly different values. She is not an art world jetsetter but a social worker from the Midwest. Upon her father’s death, she was made executor and charged with liquidating her parents’ $100 million estate so the proceeds could be entirely donated to a local community foundation. “None of us was upset about the fact that there was no inheritance. We weren’t surprised,” explains James. “When you make your own way in life, it has more meaning. Inherited w
ealth can ruin people. My mother raised us with the adage ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected.’”

  James’s parents were active members of the International Council at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) but kept their collection very private. Nevertheless, “it was very important for my father to meet the artist. He met every living artist whose work he owned except for Jackson Pollock,” James tells me. And although “there was a story behind every piece,” the status of these objects was never emphasized. “I remember sitting in my Art 101 class, my freshman year at Duke. It was a survey course where we went through the centuries, and at the end of the year we got up to the modern era. All of a sudden an Arshile Gorky came up on the screen and I said, ‘Oh my God. We have one of those.’ All these slides went by of artists whose work we had in the house. We had never been told that they were valuable or famous. I had no idea.”

  Selling the first few works from the collection was tough. “It was really difficult to see the Pollock and the Rothko being packed up to leave. It was like having your children leave home,” says James. “I didn’t have any appreciation of the huge sense of personal loss that I’d feel. Then it was really weird to see my parents’ pieces hanging in the Christie’s showrooms. The whole thing seemed like a dream. People were touching them and taking them off the wall. When we were growing up, we weren’t allowed to go near anything.

  “For the first auction, in New York, I wore my mom’s blazer and her favorite pin, but I still felt awful. I was so nervous. I had to run to the ladies’ room to have an anxiety attack. At the second sale, in London, I was nauseous with anxiety.” After that, James went through a phase in which selling became easier and more rewarding. “It was such a thrill to walk in my parents’ footsteps. I felt so connected to them. It was a cathartic experience for me.” James admits that she has since tired of the process. “It’s been a real loss of innocence. When you think of all the good that money could do…Nobody in the auction room thinks about that.”