www.chrisstiegler.com

 New York’s Spring art auction season did not echo the performance of the contemporary art market.  Christie’s and Sotheby’s have, again, accrued hundreds of millions of dollars selling some of the finest pictures to be sold.  The names of the big tickets remain the same: Warhol, Freud, Bacon.  The buyers are, by and large, the same.  But so are the sellers.  The undercurrent here is one of inclusion, but not exclusion.  Or, if you have the money at auction, you can get anything.  And business is booming. ¶Looking at the sick half-sibling of the auction house, the contemporary market, things are not doing as well.  The reports from the art fairs are reserved at best.  People, apparently, weren’t buying.  At least not the big ticket pictures.  Smaller art fairs, such as Chicago’s NEXT fair, which focused on less expensive art, seemingly outdid bigger comparators, like ArtChicago, according the Baer Faxt.  The more obvious symptom is the closing of galleries around the country.  The market is recoiling slightly as purse strings drawing shut.  ¶Auction houses are where easily salable picture come up again.  A large element of risk is gone, vanquished by a series of connoisseur checkpoints and market research.  The primary market is the proving ground for art.  There are infinite reasons why art objects don’t sell and so the risk is omnipresent. ¶Tough times are ahead for every industry.  Art, like other luxury goods, was afforded some lag time.   But, as the world’s money weathers the storm, so to will art.  One good thing to note: a flush of any market leaves the strong and talented and so we may well be in for a creative explosion.  Just remember that Weimar Germany was equally as creative.  So that explosion may not be a renaissance.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Market Thinking, brief thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.