Further to the Last Post

Right after writing the post before this one about the bubble in the art market, news comes out that Francis Bacon's Thee Studies of Lucien Freud sells for $146 million in six minutes. Link.

Big Picture Art Market News

From Is this the end of the art-market bubble? by Felix Saloman on the Reuters website.

"This is one reason why I’ve long said that even if there is a bubble in the contemporary-art world (and I think there is), it’s not a speculative bubble. The people spending millions of dollars on trophy art aren’t buying to flip; the people selling aren’t selling to make a fast buck. Rather, they’re selling because of one of the “three Ds”: death, divorce, debt. The exceptions to this rule are dealers, of course, along with a small number of collectors who are so active they start becoming quasi-dealers in their own right. If you’re well connected in the art world and willing to make an opportunistic purchase, then you’ll probably be willing to make an opportunistic sale as well, when the price is right. 

"But right now, I’m beginning to see indications that things are changing: if you look at this month’s big contemporary art auctions, you’ll see quite a lot of art being flipped, including art being flipped by one of the biggest collectors of them all, Stevie Cohen. According to Carol Vogel and Peter Lattman in the NYT, Cohen is selling a Gerhard Richter which he bought from the Pace Gallery last year, along with “about a dozen other pieces, mostly at Sotheby’s, that he acquired in recent years at art fairs and auctions”.  

Link.  

Meanwhile, Carol Vogel at the New York Times in an article titled Digging Into Deep Pockets at Auction says:

"It’s strange to think that just a decade ago, Christie’s entire evening sale of postwar and contemporary art totaled $62 million. On Nov. 12, during the second of the two big auction weeks that start in New York on Monday night, Christie’s is offering one painting — a Francis Bacon triptych — that is expected to bring $85 million. Its archrival, Sotheby’s, has a 1963 Warhol that it anticipates will sell for $60 million to $80 million.

And:

"After Christie’s record $495 million postwar and contemporary art auction just six months ago, when buyers from all over the world — New York and Doha, Beijing and São Paulo — competed on everything from a Pollock drip painting to a classic canvas by Lichtenstein, seasoned collectors like the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, the newsprint magnate Peter Brant and the musician Eric Clapton apparently thought it was time to cash in before the good times end.

This season’s contemporary art catalogs are as thick as doorstops, brimming with more paintings, drawings and sculptures with estimates of over $20 million than ever before.

Link.

 Then there's Kathryn Tulley at Forbes whose article is titled, Contemporary Art: End of a Bubble or Already Burst?, cites statistics that suggest Salomon is behind the times in making predictions of a collapse in the market. She says the decline has been underway for a while.

Great Initiative to Get to a Residency

Local charmer, Angela, has taken an initiative and I admire her methodology and determination. She is making market-ready commercially smart art, true to  her passion, and undertaking a campaign on the crowd funding site, Indegogo. Here is how she describes her current purpose to raise funds to attend a residency in France (I love residencies):

My name is Angela Gooliaff and I’m an emerging visual artist living in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I have a passion for telling stories, especially stories about tiny but fascinating creatures among us – bugs!

My favourite subject to draw is ants. And I hope these ants will take me all the way to France. Why ants? Because they are admirable and multi-dimensional little beings. No one works harder than an ant. In my greeting cards, I have also expanded to other interesting and beautiful bugs such as British Columbia’s Rugose stag beetle, a Blue Morpho butterfly, ladybugs, dragonflies and others. 

My goal is to raise $5,000.00 to attend DRAWinternational, an artist residency program in Caylus, France.  DRAWinternational provides illustrators a one-month opportunity to focus entirely on their artwork, expanding their ideas and creativity, and collaborate with other like-minded artists. I am honoured to have received acceptance to this program.

Link to her Indegogo site.

Digital Art Gets Monotized

This (from Forbes) is the first I have ever heard of a digital art auction described thus:

"Earlier this month, Phillips, a prestigious art auction house, partnered with Tumblr, one of the largest repositories of freely-shared GIFs, to showcase GIFs, webcam selfies, video game screenshots and other experiments in screen-based pieces and physical objects derived from digital tools."

The article continues...

"Though digital art is shared, liked, retweeted and embedded free-of-charge all over the web, the 20 pieces Lindsay Howard selected for this exhibition demonstrate a new level of comfort with bringing digital art offline and traditional media online. And, unlike the digital art shared and spread online, these pieces pulled in prices of $800 to $16,000 each."

I also found some interesting commentary on the show here:

Steven Sacks, the owner of bitforms gallery in Chelsea, said that while he thought the auction was a wild success for artists that weren’t well-known, “financially, it’s more difficult to say.” Nine of the 20 lots sold for less than their estimated bids, and four of those were bought-in by the auction house. “Obviously, the numbers weren’t through the roof,” Sacks said. But Phillips was extraordinarily happy with the auction, its head of sale, Megan Newcome, told me. And by its metrics, that’s not just PR. “We were very clear-eyed about this: no matter what the results are, if we’re able to bring these artists to a mainstream audience, then the auction is a success,” she said. About this there is near unanimous agreement. “This auction was great for opening up people to digital art,” art consultant and collector Myriam Vanneschi told me. (Full disclosure: Vanneschi once bought a digital portfolio from AFC.) “For the collectors that I work with... it takes me a lot to even get them to consider digital art. Because the auction took place at Phillips, a big name and brand in the art world, it gives them some sense of assurance.”