Art Market Shuts Out All but the Super Rich

El Greco’s ‘‘Saint Dominic in Prayer,’’  expected to sell for  £3 million to  £5 million, went for £9.15 million at Sotheby’s in July.

El Greco’s ‘‘Christ on the Cross’’  did not even make it to the lower end of its estimate at a Sotheby’s London auction in July.

When this column first appeared on March 29-30, 1969, thousands of objets d’art ranging from Antiquity to the 20th century turned up at auction every week.

A budget of £50 was ample to buy, say, eight cups and saucers in Chantilly or Worcester porcelain of the 18th century. Mahogany furniture of the 18th and 19th century, often deemed too plain and dismissed as “brown wood,” could routinely be had in London for less than £100, and its American versions, Georgian or Federal, were amazingly cheap.

In Paris, at the old Hôtel Drouot, which held the monopoly on auctions in the French capital, sales went on every day, many without any catalog. To know what was up for sale, you had to go to the viewing on the working day preceding the sale. The slim catalogs printed for the more ambitious auctions only provided basic information limited to two or three lines. Buyers needed to make their own judgement.

A similar situation prevailed in London. There, auctions were almost exclusively attended by dealers. Sitting at Sotheby’s around one of their time-honored U-shaped tables covered in green baize, where the objects were passed to those in the front row, potential buyers made up their minds after an ultimate verification. Tactile handling was deemed as essential as visual inspection. In contrast to Paris, sales were conducted by category (antiquities, medieval art, silver), but in London, too, it was up to the buyers to decide what they were looking at.

Paintings and sculpture were the two main areas that commanded large prices and yet, even there, the art hunt was not beyond the reach of those with little cash. In Paris, paintings could be bought at sessions where no expert had been brought in. Many coups were made by those blessed with a sharp eye. In a nutshell, collecting was a pastime affordable to all classes. Accordingly, the buyers’ social background was highly diversified.

 At Drouot sales in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a treat to watch well-dressed gentlemen from the expensive Paris neighborhoods standing next to seedy-looking characters from the Saint-Ouen flea market, all waiting for some rarity they had spotted to come up. In London, browsing around Portobello Road antique shops, you met characters straight out of a Charles Dickens novel, walking away, eyes gleaming, a coveted catch in hand.

Together, the auction scene and the many shops selling antiques were the training ground where connoisseurs were formed. The daily encounter with hosts of objects, paintings, drawings and the rest amounted to so many exercises at recognizing authenticity and aesthetic validity — away from the secure environment of museums, where everything is cut and dried.

Several factors contributed to the undoing of this environment.

he attention paid to art sales in the news media probably played a leading role. I plead guilty. In 1969, this column became the first to deal with the art market as a weekly news item. A few months later, a London broadsheet recruited a statistician to tackle the subject.

Actually, there cannot be meaningful statistics regarding art sales. The concept of statistics applied to any market implies the existence of identical units and no two works of art are identical. No one had informed whoever turned to a statistician that one Impressionist landscape by Monet does not equal another Impressionist landscape by Monet. Never mind: The column in the London daily drew attention to the subject.

Auctions became events and buying art a fashionable game played by ever-growing numbers. Countries previously barely involved in buying art in the Western market joined the fun. The sum total of the art of the past available for sale started dwindling, and prices shot up.

Auction houses strove hard to increase their part of the cake and only the fittest survived. The smaller companies gradually closed down, excepting those that had a niche market with a national base.

In the course of the past 30 years, the auction scene has been transformed beyond recognition. Nowhere is this as obvious as in their cataloging style. Those printed in connection with ambitious Old Masters auctions have entries running to several thousand words. Heavily footnoted, complete with bibliographical references that are not always indispensable, these read like excerpts from doctoral dissertations. Impressed, newcomers feel that rock-solid science is the foundation for the estimates. Few are ill-mannered enough to challenge the wisdom and ask, for example, why two paintings by the same artist that carry similar estimates can dramatically diverge.

This happened at a Sotheby’s London sale of Old Masters on July 3. El Greco’s “Saint Dominic in Prayer,” expected to sell between £3 million and £5 million plus the sale charge, cost £9.15 million. Within 30 minutes, a second El Greco, “Christ on the Cross,” also expected to sell within those limits, did not even make it to the lower end of the estimate when it realized £3.44 million. Amusingly, “Christ on the Cross,” which made slightly more than one third of the price paid for the first El Greco, is held by some to be the greater picture. The estimates had been given by highly qualified experts, but the regrettable fact is that wild variations have always characterized the art market.

There is, of course, one big difference with the past. Then, auctiongoers only ventured to buy expensive art if they felt competent to do so. Nowadays, the hard-nosed financiers who are so tough when making millions put a touching faith in the estimates printed in catalogs and in the advice they receive from auction houses. They curiously forget that it is in the auction houses’ commercial interests to sell the goods consigned to them. The higher the estimate is, the larger the charge to the bidder — and the more the auction house cashes in. Whoever heard of a departmental expert warning a client that his estimate was too high?

In areas other than painting and sculpture, where hype is most intense because these hold the strongest appeal to wealthy new players, many categories command lower prices. But even these are no longer within the reach of modest buyers.

Hardly anything worth a glance now sells below the $1,000 mark, whether it is Old Master prints, 18th- and 19th-century decorative art, or painted pots from Great Greece, in modern southern Italy. In New York, the two international auction houses will only process antiquities estimated to be worth at least $2,000, plus the sale charge and the city tax if the buyer is a city resident.

The evolution of the art market has been deeply anti-democratic. It takes a comfortable middle class budget to enter the field of antiquities, even at the lowest level. Old Master drawings that once were plentiful and cost very little, excepting those by the most famous masters, have become expensive rarities. In New York, only two or three yearly sales are held by each of the two leading auction houses. This leaves would-be collectors no chance of mustering the visual knowledge indispensable to turn into connoisseurs.

Academic knowledge can never be a substitute — gazing passively at works in museum exhibitions without the stimulus of the prospect of buying is a different experience. As their visual sense loses its acuity, buyers become unable to concentrate on what they see. Words alone matter and a strong punch is essential to titillate them.

The scene is now set for the exclusive triumph of contemporary art, where “estimates” keep rising. Spoofery is the order of the day. A “Balloon Dog (Orange)” under the Jeff Koons label — the artist does not personally fabricate the object — will appear at Christie’s New York in November. They call it a celebration of childhood and reckon the outsize toy will sell for $35 million to $55 million.

In May, at Christie’s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Dustheads,” in the American painter’s naughty-10-year-old manner, established a world auction record for the artist at $48.8 million. With deadpan (or unintended?) humor, Christie’s special press release for the image commented: “One of Basquiat’s Most Accomplished Paintings.”

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