How High Can the Art Market Go?
The good times continue: “Self-Portrait” by Andy Warhol, seen here on display at Christie’s New York preview in January. It sold in London at the auction house’s Post-War and Contemporary Art sale on Feb. 16 for 10.8 million British pounds (US$17.4 milion), double the presale high estimate. The art industry, one of the glitzier pieces of the global economy, seems to have shrugged off the 2009 recession with nonchalance. In 2010, Christie’s had the best year in its 245-year history.
The auction house’s numbers, released in late January, show its sales of art last year hit $5 billion, up 53% from 2009. Sotheby’s, too, posted astronomical results in 2010, based on reports from individual auctions; the firm’s aggregate numbers are due out in April.
Growth came across the board — and from across the world. Pablo Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust” set a record for the most expensive art ever sold at an auction, going to a telephone bidder for US$106.5 million. Art sales in the Americas remained the most lucrative — almost $2 billion in 2010 (up 111% from 2009), but sales in Hong Kong doubled from a year earlier. Globally, Asian art — including jadeite, Chinese ceramics, cloisonné and contemporary works — pulled in $882.9 million in sales for the year for Christie’s.
In the words of the infamous Soup Nazi, “No more soup ‘Pablo Picasso’ for you!!”
If you remember an article I posted several weeks ago, the Chinese are willing to bid astronomical sums of money for priceless works of art. Thus, driving the prices of such artwork through the roof. There is a tremendous amount of money coming from Asia!
I think that this is a good time for Steve Wynn to sell his infamous Picasso Le Rêve. Picasso’s 1932 portrait of his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Remember when he was supposed to sell it to Stephen Cohen of SAC and he turned around and saw, on Marie-Thérèse Walter’s left forearm, in the lower-right quadrant of the painting, “a slight puncture, a two-inch tear.
Wynn, who had bought it at auction in 1997 for $48.4 million was to sell it to Cohen for $139 million at that time before the incident occurred. Who knows, perhaps he can get more for it now, the puncture is fixed to perfection and there are far more monied buyers than Picassos out there!