As the world economy began to tank about five years ago, a curious thing happened at the top level of the international art market: It started to boom. At the annual spring art auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York and their branches around the globe, deep-pocketed bidders snapped up Braques and Bacons, Klimts and Kandinskys, often at record prices.
Now with the global recession officially over but the American and European economies still shaky, auction records for blue-chip modern and contemporary art continue to be shattered. Just a few months ago, a pastel version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1895) fetched an astounding $119.9 million at Sotheby’s, by far the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art, surpassing the winning bid of $106.5 million for Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” (1932) at Christie’s two years earlier. A week after the gavel fell on the Munch, Mark Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow” (1961) went for nearly $87 million, the artist’s personal best at auction. Works by 13 other artists also brought record prices at the same sale at Christie’s, which at $388.5 million was the largest haul in the history of contemporary art auctions.
(LEON NEAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) - Telephone operators take bids as Pablo Picasso's \"La Lecture\" (1932) is sold during an auction at the Sotheby's auction house in central London, on February 8, 2011. The painting sold for more than $3.5 million.
(THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) - French auctioneer Francois de Ricqles sales a photography entitled \"Dovima with elephants, evening dress by Dior\", Cirque d'Hiver Paris, August 1955 by US fashion photographer Richard Avedon at Christie's. it recently sold for $1.1 million.
Art photography is also bringing skyrocketing prices at auction, with new records set in the past three years for works by Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky and others. In 2010, a Christie’s sale of a group of Avedon photographs in Paris set an auction record for a sale of its kind in France; a single photograph, “Dovima With Elephants,” sold to Maison Christian Dior for $1.1 million, a world auction record for the photographer. Last year, at Christie’s New York, Sherman’s “Untitled No. 96” went for $3.89 million, a record auction price for a single photograph. “The global economic downturn briefly introduced insecurity into the market, but then it went right back to where it was before, which is a constantly ascending state,” says Paul Roth, senior curator and director of photography and media art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and former director of the Richard Avedon Foundation. “Prices just keep going up and up and up.”
The trend is a narrow one, confined to the stratosphere at the major auction houses and their well-heeled, privacy-loving and therefore largely anonymous clientele.
The boom is less evident, for example, at galleries and art fairs, which have only recently begun to recover from recession-era sales slumps. “The best of the best goes for big, big prices, but when you drop down to the secondary and tertiary levels of the market, it’s not the same thing,” says Douglas Druick, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “It’s not like that moment in the late ’80s where everything — the best and the less-than-best — was rising. Now the market is much more savvy.”
But narrow or no, the great Art Rush of the early 21st century is a phenomenon. What’s happening here? Has art become the new gold, a refuge for super-rich investors fleeing volatile stock markets and wobbly currencies around the world? Some close observers of the art-auction circus think so.
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