The Value of Art (New, expanded edition) E-Book

Michael Findlay

• Herausgeber: Prestel Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 425

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

On the tenth anniversary of its publication, this updated edition of a work ARTNews hailed as “one of the best books ever published on the art world” features new material on the latest art deals, reflections on race and culture, the impact of the pandemic on the art world, and more.

Internationally renowned dealer and market expert Michael Findlay offers a lively and authoritative look at the financial and emotional value of art throughout history. In this newly revised, updated, and generously illustrated edition Findlay draws on a half-century in the business and a passion for great art to question and redefine what we mean by “value,” addressing developments in this conversation since the book was first published in 2012: the rise of NFTs and digital art; the auction house as theatre; the pressing relationship between art and society’s fraught political landscape; and the impact of the pandemic. With style and wry wit, Findlay demystifies how art is bought and sold while also constantly looking beyond sales figures to emphasize the primacy of art’s essential, noncommercial worth. Coloring his account with wise advice, insider anecdotes involving scoundrels and scams, stories of celebrity collectors, and remarkable discoveries, Findlay has distilled a lifetime’s experience in this indispensable guide, now updated for today’s sophisticated and discerning audience.

Leseprobe

For my brothers, Robin and John Findlay

MICHAEL FINDLAY

THEVALUEofART

Money, Power, Beauty

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For the text, © Michael Findlay, 2012, 2022

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ISBN 978-3-641-30111-8V002

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Contents

Acknowledgments

· 2022 Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Three Graces

· 2022 Edition Introduction

I Thalia: The Commercial Value of Art

· What Determines the Commercial Value of Art?

· What Makes a Specific Work of Art Valuable?

· Art and Finance

· Is There a Measurable Art Market?

· Art Indexes

· Buying Art Is an Art, Not a Business

· Art Appraisals: Purpose and Method

II Euphrosyne: The Social Value of Art

· First Encounters

· Family, Legacies, and the Personal Museum

· Immortality in an Auction Catalogue

· Artists, Dead or Alive?

· Showing Off at Home

· You Don’t Have to Be Rich

· Free Art for All

· Art, Class, Society

· Art Performed

III Aglaea: The Essential Value of Art

· Theories about the Meaning of Art

· Love at First (and Second) Sight

· Perception Trumps Information

· Decoration

IV Marley’s Ghost: Past, Present, and Future

· Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be

· Art and the Influence of Language

· Museums and Mammon

· Auctions As News and Entertainment

· The Commoditization of Contemporary Art

· The Art Our Culture Deserves

· Is Ours a Golden Age?

· The Reckoning

· An Art Market in Recovery

· AD 2020

· What Values of Art Are Permanent?

· Relax and Enjoy

V The Value of Art in the Cyber Age

· Thalia

· Euphrosyne

· Aglaea

VI The Value of Art in the Age of Identity & Activism

· Thalia

· Euphrosyne

· Aglaea

Afterword: The Judgment of Paris

Notes

Illustration Credits

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book draws on my life’s experiences as an art lover and collector, an auction-house specialist and art dealer. Throughout my journey I have been educated and informed by true connoisseurs in all those categories: the passionate collectors John and Kimiko Powers and Herbert and Adele Klapper, outstanding dealers including Richard Feigen and Bill Beadleston, and the compleat auctioneer, Christopher Burge. I am particularly grateful to William Acquavella, whose remarkable career demonstrates daily that quality, probity, and profit in art dealing are not incompatible.

I have learned from three generations of artists in exchanges both commercial and personal, ranging from relatively decorous studio visits to boisterous all-nighters at Max’s Kansas City. Those that shared their work and ideas with me are too numerous to mention, but some have suffered me in and out of their studios and lives for almost five decades, particularly Bridget Riley, James Rosenquist, Billy Sullivan, John Willenbecher, and the late Gerald Laing.

Roberta Maneker, my first professional reader, gave me excellent advice, and her son Marion Maneker was an early supporter. I owe much thanks to Morton Janklow and Michael Steger at Janklow and Nesbit for having faith in this book; and I am indebted to Ryan Newbanks, Stephen Hulburt, Samantha Waller, and John Farmer at Prestel for their enthusiasm and hard work, as well as to my editor Chris Lyon.

The unflappable John Long managed all the illustrations, and I am particularly grateful to Dorothy Kosinski and Barbara Windom for their help with images. My student researchers Alixandre Greenberg, Elsie Heung, and Sarah Horton all deserve well-paying jobs in the art world.

I could not have embarked on this book without the support of my family: my son Bob, my daughter Beatrice, and in particular my talented wife Victoria Findlay Wolfe, who as an artist and quilter lives the creative process daily, which is a joy to share.

2022 EDITION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My grateful thanks to the following whose expertise, advice and research were essential: Julia May Boddewyn, Maureen Bray, Charlotte Burns, Andrew Butterfield, Allison Carey, Veronique Chagnon-Burke, Jean-Paul Engelen, Hannah Honen, Maeve Lawler, Joyce Liu, Kilolo Luckett, Clare McAndrew and Michelle Yun. I owe the opportunity to revisit this book to Anna Godfrey, formerly at Prestel and now with the National Gallery in London and my hard working agent at Janklow and Nesbit, Michael Steger. It has been a pleasure to work with my editor at Prestel, Katharina Haderer, and her team, including Josephine Fehrenz, Anja Besserer, and ace designer Mark Melnick; and much thanks to my copy editor John Son.

As ever eternal thanks to my wife and daughter Victoria and Beatrice for their constant support, my sounding board son Bob and my grandson Nick, a great field trip companion.

Introduction

THE THREE GRACES

Zeus had three daughters who have been represented throughout the history of Western art as the Three Graces and appear in sculpture and painting from the ruins of Pompeii to the glories of the High Renaissance. These three maidens, standing in close proximity, usually naked, have been celebrated by artists as diverse as Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, Antonio Canova (fig. 1), Edward Burne-Jones, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Sigmar Polke.

Fig. 1ANTONIO CANOVAThe Three Graces, 1814–17 Marble 68 × 381/4 × 221/2 in. (173 × 97.2 × 57 cm) Victoria and Albert Museum, Great Britain

The Three Graces, also known as Charities (from the Greek, karitas, meaning love) were named in order of birth: Thalia, Euphrosyne, and the youngest, Aglaea. Their combined function was to preside over banquets to entertain the gods and their guests. Each has unique qualities, and I appropriated their names to illustrate that the value of art has three components. Thalia is the goddess of fruitfulness and abundance, representing Commerce. Euphrosyne is the goddess of joy; she represents Society. Aglaea is the goddess of beauty, which, being in the eye of the beholder, is the Essential (or intrinsic) value of art.

All works of art have the potential for commercial value, social value, and essential value. But none of those values are constant; all are enhanced or diminished by the fluctuating mores and tastes of different times and cultures.

In the nineteenth century French art lovers were called amateurs, from the Latin amare (to love). The definition in English has degenerated to imply a nonprofessional, but at one time there was no contradiction between amateur and connoisseur. An amateur was simply a person who engaged in a particular activity for pleasure, not profit. Thus, we might consider Cézanne to be an amateur painter; his great patron, the margarine king Auguste Pellerin, an amateur collector; and Émile Zola, when he wrote about art, an amateur critic.

While I expect this book might be of interest to today’s professionals in the world of art, I have written it for those of us who are, at least at heart, amateurs.

2022 EDITION INTRODUCTION

I have continued to be daily engaged as an art dealer during the ten years since the publication of the first edition of this book, years of such turbulence that I was compelled to tackle the value of art anew. As we recover from a global pandemic, societies are polarized by economic and social injustice and climate change continues to threaten our existence. No wonder we are tempted by technology to substitute a virtual world for the real one.

When history turns a corner, the commercial, social, and essential values of art shift. Although no new movements appeared in the last decade, art itself leaped beyond the purview of museumgoers, collectors, art critics, and historians to become firmly imbedded in the worlds of banking, law, entertainment, and fashion. Thus, just as the commercial and social values (Thalia and Euphrosyne) exponentially increased, the essential value of art (Aglaea of my Three Graces) diminished.

The kidnapping of art by the cyber world was sudden and effortless. I post, therefore I am an artist. Enter the NFT, a way to identify anything and everything as art and monetize it, a lucrative process eagerly embraced by auction houses providing a marketplace to trade virtual images immune to quality control. While past artists of genius such as Nam June Paik and Robert Rauschenberg repurposed the technology of their time, many artists venturing into the cyber world simply doodle with what is on offer. The creative iconoclasts of the metaverse are only just starting to emerge.

Balancing this is a possibly sincere and hopefully lasting embrace by the art world of types of art and artists hitherto ignored by the establishment. Today the websites of museums and commercial galleries prominently feature art and dialogues by and with women artists and artists of color, past and present. For the auction houses, “curating” sales to serve any kind of potential buying trend is a no-brainer.

Under fire for having ignored minority artists, museums are playing catch-up with their exhibitions, but the pace of acquisitions is sluggish. The commercial gallery world, meanwhile, has increased representation of non-white artists and many of those who have subsequently achieved critical and financial success are using their wealth and influence to raise the visibility of others both young and old.

Every generation of artists includes a number who support political and social causes. In many respects the ardent advocacy by artists for burning issues of social justice, including but not limited to the Black Lives Matter movement, reminds me of groups like the Art Workers’ Coalition in the 1960s protesting the Vietnam War and demanding, unsuccessfully, increased representation of minorities in museum collections. Sad as it is that fifty years on the slogans are the same, I am encouraged that a new generation of artists are angry enough about inequity and injustice to bite the establishment hand that feeds them.

While virtual art is being traded on smartphones for millions of dollars, real life art is being defined outside commercial systems by activist artists. Balancing the Financial Times headline of an NFT sold for $69 million is the announcement (in a Hanover Street paper benefiting the homeless) that the curation of the prestigious international exhibition documenta is in the hands of an Indonesian artists collective.

The twentieth century dawned with radically new art which evolved far beyond the limitations of canvas and bronze yet remained within the sphere of museums, private collectors, galleries, and academic interest. In the twenty-first century the very nature of art has expanded to suit the greed of cryptocurrency billionaires, the need for social justice, and the salvation of the planet itself.

Thalia is triumphant and Euphrosyne kept busy. My concern is that Aglaea is missing in action. Art that does not reach the feelings and touch the soul is valueless no matter what other purposes it may serve.

THE VALUE OF ART

I Thalia

THE COMMERCIAL VALUE OF ART

WHAT DETERMINES THE COMMERCIAL VALUE OF ART?

Like currency, the commercial value of art is based on collective intentionality. There is no intrinsic, objective value (no more than that of a hundred-dollar bill). Human stipulation and declaration create and sustain the commercial value.

The reason that many people continue to be astonished or enraged when they hear that a particular work of art has been sold for a large sum of money is that they believe art serves no necessary function. It is neither utilitarian, nor does it seem to be linked to any essential activity. You cannot live in it, drive it, eat, drink, or wear it. Even Plato considered the value of art to be dubious because it was mimesis, an imitation of reality.

If you gave most people $25 million and the choice to spend it on a six-bedroom house with spectacular views of Aspen or a painting by Mark Rothko of two misty, dark-red rectangles, the overwhelming majority would choose the house. We understand the notion of paying for size and location in real estate, but most of us have no criteria (or confidence in the criteria) to judge the price for a work of art. We pay for things that can be lived in, driven, consumed, and worn; and we believe in an empirical ability to judge their relative quality and commercial value. No matter how luxurious, such things also sustain the basic human functions of shelter, food, clothing, and transport.

Art predates money. Thirty-two thousand years before the dawn of recorded history Homo sapiens painted the walls of caves in what is now southern France and northern Spain with sophisticated images involving techniques of drawing and coloring that are far from our current definition of “primitive” (fig. 2). Since their discovery in the late eighteenth century, experts have argued over their meaning. Susan Sontag believed that “it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.”3

Fig. 2CHAUVET-PONT-D’ARC CAVE ARTPanel of the Horses (detail), 30,000 BC Length: about 431/2 in. (110.5 cm)

Since time immemorial we have covered the walls of our caves, huts, and castles with images conveying specific information, particularly of the “this is us” variety. Millennia passed before such images, transportable or not, came to support commercial value.4

There are two distinct markets, which are interrelated and sometimes overlapping: the primary market for an artist’s new work and the secondary market for works of art that are second-hand (or third-or twentieth-hand).

The Primary Market

The primary market provides direct payment to the artist for his or her skill and time, plus the cost of bringing the product to the market. Michelangelo on his back covering the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Claude Monet in all weathers painting in his beloved garden, Jackson Pollock crouching over the unstretched canvas on the floor of his freezing cold barn: all hoped to sell their work, so they might pay their rent, eat and drink, hire assistants, and send their children to school. In the last 150 years the role of art dealer evolved, providing premises for the work to be exhibited and bringing it to the attention of buyers. The dealer is paid either by buying directly from the artist and selling at a profit (while assuring the artist of a steady income), or by taking the work on consignment from the artist and earning a commission when the work is sold.

Usually the artist and dealer get together to decide the initial price of the work before it is offered to its first buyers. When I entered the art world in 1964, work by young artists having their first exhibitions might be purchased in the range of $500 to $10,000. At that time in New York there were relatively few dedicated collectors willing to look at emerging artists, and dealers had to encourage them with prices that were modest even for those times. For six months in 1968 a new painting by John Baldessari, Quality Material (1966–68, fig. 3) hung behind my desk priced at $1,200. There were no takers. It sold at Christie’s in May 2007 for $4.4 million.

Fig. 3JOHN BALDESSARIQuality Material, 1966–68 Acrylic on canvas 68 × 561/2 in. (172.7 × 143.5 cm) Private Collection

A body of new work by any artist is usually consistent in theme, but not necessarily in scale. What makes one painting or sculpture more or less expensive than another in this primary market is usually size. Although the artist’s audience has not yet rendered an opinion about which type of work is better or more desirable than any other, and the artist may feel some smaller works are better than some larger ones, usually size wins out, and the smallest works are usually the least expensive. The larger the work, the higher the price, with the exception of paintings and sculptures that may be too large for domestic installation and require the kind of space usually found only in institutions, office buildings, shopping malls, and casinos. Such works may be proportionately less expensive because they are harder to sell.

Depending on the medium used by the artist, there may be a cost of manufacture to consider. In 1895 Auguste Rodin had to pay Le Blanc Barbedienne Foundry in Paris when he cast his Burghers of Calais in bronze. Today Richard Serra has to pay Pickhan Umformtechnik in Siegen, Germany for fabricating his vast steel Torqued Ellipses (fig. 4). These costs are passed on to the first buyers of the work. Many artists create sculpture in editions. If there are five or ten copies of a sculpture, the primary market price will be less for each one than for a unique work of similar size, medium, and appearance by that artist.

Fig. 4RICHARD SERRABelamy, Siegen 2001

Aside from these casting expenses, the cost to the artist for materials used in painting and drawing, though perhaps not insignificant, is not a consideration when it comes to pricing the works. Oil on canvas is generally known to be a highly durable medium. Short of direct trauma, it can withstand handling and extremes of temperature and humidity, as well as sunlight. Not so works on paper, which are usually priced lower to account for their greater fragility. This has led to the notion that works on paper are inherently worth less than paintings, despite the fact that the secondary market in some cases has placed a higher value on works on paper than on oils by certain artists, such as Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt.

Another rule of thumb with the primary market of works on paper is that those with color, be they rendered in oilstick, gouache, watercolor, or crayon, will be priced higher than works that are monochromatic: graphite, charcoal, or sanguine.

When it comes to making lithographs, etchings, silkscreens, and other types of editioned works on paper, costs can be considerable. Printmaking is an art that involves not only the creative talent of the artist who conceives the image, but the skill of master printers using sophisticated and expensive equipment.

The Secondary Market

Other than the purchase of new work either directly from the artist or the artist’s dealer, all art purchases, whether of Dutch Old Masters, nineteenth-century English seascapes, Impressionist paintings, or Cubist masterpieces, are secondary-market transactions.

Once an artist achieves a degree of stature, a secondary market in his or her work is inevitable during the artist’s lifetime. How is the commercial value of an art object decided in the secondary market when it is resold by the first owner? Most things we buy are worth less once we have used them. A car usually is, as are clothes we give to charity. In addition, appliances and electronics have less value when succeeded by newer models. When the real-estate market booms, the second owner of a home may pay more for it than the first, but in a stable market the second-hand house is likely to be worth less than a new one of the same size, design, materials, and location.

Once art passes out of the hands of the first buyer, its commercial value is largely determined by the principle of supply and demand, but it can be managed by the artist’s primary dealer. When making a primary-market sale, I am sometimes asked if I will resell the work when and if the client so decides. I usually agree. By doing this dealers can participate in the pricing of secondary-market works by artists they represent.

Some art dealers, both those with galleries and “private” dealers, (sometimes operating out of their homes), represent no artists directly but buy and sell work by living artists. They may not have any direct relationship with the artist but may be very knowledgeable about the work, and by promoting it they are usually contributing to the solidity of that artist’s market.

Even in the primary market, the relative availability, real or imagined, of a particular artist’s work is key. The art dealer rarely says, “Andy’s studio is packed to the gills with hundreds of paintings just like this one, so take plenty of time to choose the one you want.” Rather: “I’m not sure if there will be any more like this; he’s painting very slowly, and we’ve sold the few others we had to very important museums and collectors.”

A little history. When I entered the art trade in the mid-1960s, there were only a few living artists whose works regularly appeared in the secondary market. They were mostly modern European masters like Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, and Salvador Dalí. Very few midcareer American artists, even those with major reputations, appeared at auction, and virtually no younger contemporary artists did. The postwar American generation of Abstract Expressionists was well established (Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Franz Kline were already dead), and the paintings they did in the late 1940s and 1950s were in demand by the mid-1960s, mostly sold by secondary-market dealers. Only rarely did their works come up at public auction. Exceptions include a 1940 painting by Willem de Kooning that was sold in the Helena Rubinstein auction at Parke-Bernet in April 1966 for $20,000. 5 In October 1965 a group of paintings, including works by Rothko, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and de Kooning, was consigned to Sotheby Parke Bernet by the taxicab mogul Robert Scull, who with his lean, well-coiffed, and miniskirted wife Ethel had turned his attention to the younger generation of Pop artists, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and James Rosenquist. The sale of Scull’s paintings totaled $211,450. Police Gazette (fig. 5), an abstract landscape by de Kooning painted ten years earlier, in 1955, fetched $37,000. Forty-one years later the New York Times reported that it had sold privately for $63.5 million. These examples notwithstanding, in those days auction houses generally avoided selling works by living artists with primary gallery representation.

Fig. 5WILLEM DE KOONINGPolice Gazette, 1955 Oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas 431/4 × 501/4 in. (109.8 × 127.6 cm) Private Collection

This pattern ended loudly and finally in October 1973 with the second Scull sale at Sotheby Parke Bernet.6 By then Bob and Ethel had made a splash in the social columns by promoting themselves as Pop Art collectors. To their credit they were among the first patrons of this movement and purchased many works that have since entered the canon of modern art: Target (1961) by Johns; Large Flowers (1964) by Warhol; F-111 (1964–65, fig. 6) by Rosenquist. They were criticized, however, for putting the work of these young, thirty-something artists on the auction block after having owned them only a few years. Thirty years later criticism was far more muted for a new generation of collectors profiting by bouncing recent gallery purchases into auction after barely months of ownership.

Fig. 6JAMES ROSENQUISTF-111, 1964–65 Oil on canvas with aluminum Twenty-three sections, 120 × 1,032 in. (304.8 × 2,621.3 cm) The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Purchase gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange) Acc. n.: 473.1996.a-w

A confrontation between Rauschenberg and Robert Scull after the 1973 sale set the stage for the enduring tango (who is leading whom?) of artist and collector that has characterized the enormous growth of the contemporary-art market over the ensuing decades. Two paintings by Rauschenberg from 1958 and 1959 that Scull had bought from the Leo Castelli Gallery for hundreds of dollars each sold for $90,000 and $85,000 respectively. At the time the press reported an angry shoving match and caricatured Rauschenberg as embittered by his patron’s profiteering. This narrative survived as art-world myth, and this much was true: the artist grabbed Scull and said, “I’ve been working my ass off for you to make that profit.”7 In fact, the altercation was mostly staged for a documentary film of the auction. Unreported by the press were the generous comments Rauschenberg made praising Scull’s early patronage.

There was a third Scull sale in 1986 at the same auction house (by then called Sotheby’s), divided into two evenings. Bob and Ethel had divorced and “his” and “her” collections were sold on separate nights. Rosenquist’s F-111, now owned by the Museum of Modern Art, was sold for a record $2.09 million. The Sculls had purchased this monumental eighty-six-foot, twenty-three-canvas masterpiece intact from Leo Castelli in 1965 for 45,000, thus preventing it from being sold section by section to several different collectors.

Bob’s aggressive ego and Ethel’s social pretensions made them easy targets in an art world still largely dominated by old money, but Bob’s eye for the best works and his willingness to spend freely in spite of the mocking opinion of the art establishment put him high in the running as the patron saint of self-made patrons of contemporary art.

The price of art, whether sold in the primary or the secondary market, is governed by supply, demand, and marketing.

Supply

Veteran art dealer William Acquavella often tells his clients, accurately, “You can remake your money, but you can’t remake the painting,”8 meaning: you can earn the cost back, but if you miss the opportunity to buy the work when it is available, it is likely gone forever.

Real or imagined, rarity is the ne plus ultra when art is sold. Not only does it justify the price, it also suggests an exclusive club of ownership: “The only other one like this is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Considering the purchase of a work by a living artist, a collector might be told, “She’s not going to make any more paintings like this one,” although there are numerous instances of aging artists revisiting the themes of their fruitful youth, either out of nostalgia or penury. What can be counted on perhaps is that there will be no more paintings like that one with today’s date.

Claims of rarity also have to be examined carefully because not only do artists often explore specific themes in a variety of mediums (paint, pastel, pencil, print), but total output varies widely from artist to artist. Monet—who lived until he was eighty-six, painted virtually every day of his life, and produced 2,000 paintings—is considered to be prolific. Van Gogh died at thirty-seven having made 864 paintings, and Pollock died at forty-four having produced just 382 works on canvas. The most useful tool in determining just how many paintings an artist made of any particular type is the comprehensive listing of his or her entire output known as the catalogue raisonné, which translated literally means “critical catalogue.”

Catalogues Raisonnés

Until the advent of the camera it was difficult to document and record accurately the full extent of any artist’s body of work. Scholars of pre-modern art have to rely on documentary evidence, such as artists’ hand lists and records, bills of sale, letters, known public commissions, and the like.

By the time of the Impressionists the camera was in popular use, and it became standard for artists to have their works photographed, albeit in black and white. This greatly enhanced the creation and use of catalogues raisonnés, which became an essential tool in determining supply. Most indicate the past and (as of the date of publication) present owners of each work listed. Thus, it is possible for the seller of a painting of water lilies by Monet to show a prospective buyer exactly how many of that type, size, and date were painted. A knowledgeable dealer will be able to combine the information in the catalogue raisonné with his or her own knowledge of current ownership and infer how many (or rather, how few) of a particular type of work are ever likely to be sold.

The publication of a catalogue raisonné may have a strong effect on the value of an artist’s work because it defines the supply empirically and provides the basis for reasonable assumptions regarding whether any particular work might be available. A painting designated “Art Institute of Chicago” is likely off-limits forever, whereas “Mr. and Mrs. Worthalot, Los Angeles,” could be approached with an offer to buy.

Warhol called his studio the Factory, and he produced many seemingly identical works (in series, not unlike Monet). When Warhol died in 1987, he was highly celebrated, and paintings of his most publicized subjects (Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe) commanded high but not spectacular prices. The first two volumes of his catalogue raisonné appeared in 2002 and 2004 and cover just eight years of his work (1961–69).9 Almost immediately prices increased, in part because it was evident that although there were indeed many images that he used over and over again, he varied color and size so that not only did each work now appear to be genuinely unique, but the actual number of works in any series (Flowers; Elvis; Dollar Signs) turned out to be less than many people supposed.

Art historian and magazine editor Christian Zervos began to catalogue Picasso’s work in 1932 with the participation of the artist and died in 1970 having produced twenty-two volumes. Picasso died in 1973, and by 1978 a further eleven volumes were published by Zervos’s successors.10 Catalogues raisonnés themselves are not inexpensive. The complete set of “Zervos” sells for approximately $50,000. It is virtually indispensable for museums, libraries, and anyone who deals in work by Picasso. Not all artists are so lucky: Renoir died in 1919, and it was fifty-two years before the first volume of his catalogue raisonné was published.11 This volume lists only his paintings of figures (no landscapes or still lifes) done between 1860 and 1890. No subsequent volumes have yet appeared. Modigliani has been favored with at least five catalogues raisonnés, only one of which is generally accepted as reliable.12 Unscrupulous authors may, for a consideration, include a work of dubious authenticity, thus rendering the entire book suspect.

There is usually a period in every artist’s work life that informed opinion considers to be better than the rest. Like the reputation of artists themselves, this opinion can of course change over time. For American buyers of French painting in the middle of the twentieth century the birth of Impressionism was considered to be the best period, and works by virtually any Impressionist artist dating from the early years 1872–74 commanded premium prices. These works are generally discreetly casual in composition, rural in subject matter, and painted with small brushstrokes. Now, forty years on, the “must-haves” by Monet and Camille Pissarro are their later paintings, which have vigorous large brushstrokes in strong colors and include scenes of urban life. Currently, 1982 is considered to be the late American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s best year. In forty years’ time that opinion may change, but the number and nature of the paintings he did in 1982 will remain identified in a catalogue raisonné.

Presently, some of the most popular and expensive of all Impressionist paintings are the canvases Monet painted of his famous water lily garden at Giverny. Between 1904 and 1908 Monet created his highly prized series of seventy-nine paintings of that subject (fig. 7). Of those seventy-nine, three have disappeared, and twenty-seven are in museums that are unlikely to ever sell them. That leaves forty-nine in private collections. While some collectors cultivate the reputation that they will never sell, no one is immortal, and in time each of those forty-nine will come on the market. That, however, is a minuscule amount when compared with the considerable number of extremely well-heeled collectors extant and yet to be minted, for whom the ownership of such a work is a top priority.

Fig. 7CLAUDE MONETWaterlily Pond, 1904 Oil on canvas 351/2 × 361/4 in. (90 × 92 cm) Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, France

Institutional Holdings

All works owned privately, even gifts promised but not yet given to museums, are in fact potentially available. Works that have been formally accessioned by public museums constitute the “Fort Knox” of works by that particular artist and are off the market. The more works by an established artist that are in public museums, the smaller the supply for the market and the higher the value of those that do circulate.

In many countries in Europe and Asia museums are owned or controlled by the national governments and are prohibited from selling. In the United States, with the exception of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., most museums were founded by private individuals and are run as not-for-profit institutions governed by boards of trustees. The Code of Ethics for the American Association of Museums has stringent guidelines for deaccessioning (selling) works that have been bought by or given to a member institution. An important provision states that “in no event shall they [proceeds from the sale] be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections.”13

The likeliest candidates for sale are donated works that duplicate what the museum already holds and works of such patent inferiority that they are never likely to be exhibited. Nevertheless, even sales by museums that conform to the guidelines often create controversy, the usual argument being that disposing of works that are currently unpopular may shortchange a future generation with different tastes.

A small number of institutions that might appear to be public are privately owned, and the owners may sell works in the collection. This was the case with the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, during Simon’s lifetime. The vast majority of works in museums, however, are genuinely out of circulation.

The collector Tony Ganz, whose parents owned a legendary collection of twentieth-century art, tells of having a playdate with a school friend at the age of six. On entering the house he said innocently, “Where are your Picassos?” It is fair to say that only a small percentage of art lovers grow up in or around collecting families, and the notion is widespread that most or all art by well-known artists, particularly dead ones, is in museums.

What continues to amaze me is how quickly this sense of limited supply is reversed when collectors find themselves able to afford the great art they once saw only in books and museums. Many then assume that there are plenty of top-quality Monets, Picassos, Pollocks, or Warhols out there and that all it takes is their ability and willingness to put a digit and seven (or even eight) zeros on the table to have a van Gogh, “just like that portrait at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.”

The next stage in their education is to find out the painful truth, which is that there are only four such portraits in private hands that might equal the one in Boston, all much smaller. Of these, one is in France and unlikely, for tax reasons, to surface; one is in a private collection in Osaka; the third is promised by its owner to a museum; and the fourth just might, if the collector is extremely patient, become available within the next ten years.

Behind the perception that most great works are in museums lies some truth, but with serious qualification. Historically, museums are often slow off the mark to acquire art of the present time, even as gifts. In the twentieth century there were many instances of museums turning down individual works or entire collections of great distinction. French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte died in 1894 and left almost seventy great works by his fellow artists to the French nation with the stipulation that they should, within twenty years, be exhibited. This now-famous bequest was refused not only in 1894, but again in 1904 and 1908. Eventually some of the paintings did make it into the Louvre (others went to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia). Decades later, in 1944, an extraordinarily diverse collection, including great modern paintings and Marcel Duchamp’s most important works, were offered by the Los Angeles collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg to the University of California if they would build a museum to house the collection. The university would not, and after negotiations fell through with other institutions, including the Denver Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Arensberg Collection finally found a home at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1954. On the other hand, it is the museum’s job to exercise curatorial judgment, and museums cannot afford to warehouse every gift just in case the artist survives the tests of time.

For three decades art-market commentators have been suggesting that the market supply of Impressionist paintings is dwindling. But this is not supported by the facts. Compared to the very considerable number of works that have been bought by private collectors, relatively few have been given to or purchased by museums that acquired most of their Impressionist collections prior to 1980. This means that virtually everything that has been sold, privately and at auction, in the last thirty years is in fact still capable of circulating, along with thousands of Impressionist paintings and drawings, as well as sculpture, still in the hands of families that acquired them forty years ago or more. In fact, there are far fewer post–World War II works of art available than nineteenth-and early twentieth-century works because many of the artists were not prolific and important works by Kline, Rothko, Pollock, and de Kooning were acquired already in the 1950s by American and European museums. A decade later European collectors like Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo in Italy and Dr. Peter Ludwig in Germany built large collections of major works by Johns, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and others that are now in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. The supply of early masterpieces by these artists that are potentially for sale is significantly smaller than equally important works by Impressionist and modern artists such as Cézanne, Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, and Miró. When the overheated contemporary-art market tripped on its heels alongside the general economic downturn of late 2008, the apparently overlooked Impressionist and modern market swung back into view as new buyers looked for the type of blue-chip works of art that traditionally maintain value throughout recessions.

Demand

A reasonably sane, comfortable life can be sustained without the private ownership of fine art so the demand for it is voluntary and determined by means and desire, the latter being learned, not innate, and emphasized in some cultures more than others. The controversial contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is considered knowledgeable about his cultural heritage:

[O]ne must remember that China, since ancient times, has held the value of art to be equal to that of philosophy—which is no small fact, given our relationship with Taoism and Confucianism. Art has a strong, multivalent tradition whether we’re speaking in terms of the imperial court or of the noneducated housewife. And this is very different from art’s role in the West.14

I would further separate the European from the American cultural tradition in this regard. Whether as institutions such as the Church or as individuals, Europeans have experienced a millennium of artistic patronage. Today, in many European countries the former homes of yesterday’s lords, ladies, and robber barons are toured by a public eager to see the works of art they acquired and that became part of their lives. The much younger United States has no such tradition, and among the wealthy, art collectors represent a distinct minority.

A prescient Roy Lichtenstein took a jaundiced and mercenary look at art’s role and the demand for art in mid-century America when, in 1962, still living in Highland Park, New Jersey, he painted Masterpiece (fig. 8). At the time the clamor for his work was barely audible, but subsequent decades have proved his witty message very far from flat.

Fig. 8ROY LICHTENSTEINMasterpiece, 1962 Oil on canvas 54 × 54 in. (137.2 × 137.2 cm) Private Collection © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022

Historically, when fortunes are made in America, disposable income is spent on multiple residences; domestic service; vehicles for land, sea, and air; jewelry; entertaining; and travel. Art is not high on the list. An apocryphal tale has a prominent dealer presenting automobile pioneer Henry Ford with a book of photographs of available paintings by Old Masters and French Impressionists. The then-richest man in America pored over it with enthusiasm, said he would like to buy, and asked the price. Of the book.

Americans continue to outrank all other nationalities in spending on art, simply because there are many more extremely wealthy people in America than in any other single country. Even though the percentage of extremely wealthy individuals in the United States fell by 18.5 percent during the global downturn in 2008, the Capgemini Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report in 2009 identified 2.46 million high-net-worth individuals (with investable assets over $1 million) in the United States vs. 1.202 million total in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Despite the sluggish economy, Japan boasts 1.366 million HNWIs, with China far behind with only 364,000. Perhaps the most significant statistic in this report for the future art market is that the predicted HNWI growth rate in the Asia-Pacific region between 2008 and 2013 will be 12.8 percent, almost double that of the United States and Europe.15 What matters, of course, is not just how many very rich people there are in any one country, but how they spend their wealth when it comes to nonessentials. Depending on the cultural history of the region, it may take more than one generation for the appetite for fine art to become as established as the appetite for jewelry, yachts, and private planes.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there was slow but steady growth in the number of American art collectors, which swelled during each boom period and contracted accordingly when the art market slowed. Real-estate mogul Alfred Taubman bought Sotheby’s in 1983, and many in the art world groaned that shopping-mall marketing tactics would prevail. He did, in fact, reach out to the new-money upwardly mobile and make them comfortable with the idea of buying art. Since the millennium, the ranks of American collectors have swelled again because of the glamorization of art collecting by the media, even more sophisticated marketing by auction houses and galleries, and the generally benign treatment of art as an investment by the financial press. The notion that buying art is a high-risk activity that requires education and exclusive access is dissolving as Wall Street traders with one-year-old collections are profiled in glossy magazines.

There have also been significant changes internationally. Russia and China, two countries with solid cultural traditions of collecting that were interrupted by the advent of communism, seem to have returned to the capitalist business model, now allowing the private ownership of fine art. A few Russian so-called oligarchs have made an impact, and there is considerable evidence that newly minted business moguls in China are developing an interest in modern and contemporary Western art. Indeed, a number of European and American galleries have opened galleries in Beijing and Shanghai since 2005. Overseas Chinese in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong started spending freely in this category in the mid-1980s, and while they were hit hard by the global credit crunch in late 2008, by spring 2010 auction records were being broken in Hong Kong for contemporary Chinese artists.16 Most recently, oil-rich sheikdoms Qatar and Abu Dhabi have announced plans for spanking new world-class museums that will require significant shopping for Asian, Middle-Eastern, and Western masterpieces.

First World or not, countries that boast even a small wealthy class support national artists. In many cases the criteria for the elevation of the work combine subject matter, history, and possibly the relationship of the style of the work to local tradition. Virtually unknown even in his native Germany, Walter Spies (1895–1942) became a Balinese Gauguin, and wealthy Indonesians today pay in the million-dollar range for his dramatic landscapes of their country when it had a lot more trees. Depending on the country’s economy, very high prices can be paid for work by domestic artists—but only by nationals of that country: the market is strictly local.

In a sense all art markets start out this way. Nations that enjoy maximum cultural and economic hegemony elevate their local artists into an international market where they may find a permanent niche or just visit for a decade or two. Quality and genuine innovation are, of course, necessary. Thus, the best French Impressionists, Viennese Secessionists, German Expressionists, American Abstract Expressionists, and British “School of London” artists, to name just a few groups, have semipermanent (nothing lasts forever) positions internationally to the extent that their work attracts significant audiences worldwide and continues to be sought by museums and private collectors. Good artists associated with important movements but not considered to be leaders might enjoy, like Cassatt, the lone American “French” Impressionist, a market almost exclusively national. The value of works by artists with predominantly domestic markets rises and falls in tandem with the fortunes of the native artist’s country. This is particularly apparent with artists from Latin American countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil.

While disposable income is a basic requirement to collect, the demand for one type of art or artist over another is determined by many varied factors. An individual’s background, education, and early exposure to a particular type of fine art often define what he or she buys when the individual has the means to collect. Others collect what they believe will give them entrée into a particular social scene, be it sedately white-gloved or obscurely avant-garde. Ideally, we should be guided only by our personal response to the art itself, but all too often collectors respond to what they read and hear.

At any given period current taste is determined by the mix of dealers, collectors, critics, and museum curators who constitute the “art world.” Some know each other and communicate directly; others communicate through books, art magazines, and blogs. Power shifts from one sector to another as the culture changes. From the 1940s to the 1960s powerful critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg had avid audiences, and the artists they championed fared extremely well, for a time. In the 1970s the so-called blockbuster museum exhibition became ubiquitous after the hugely popular Treasures of Tutankhamun show that toured the world from 1972 through 1979. Following that success museums mounted variously themed exhibitions of work by names well-known by the general public: Gauguin, van Gogh, Monet, Picasso. These were replete with large-type wall texts, mellifluous audio tours, coffee-table catalogues, scarves, and jigsaw puzzles. These are taste-forming events for children and adults alike. In recent years it is often the collectors themselves who influence taste, as more and more of them shed anonymity and become involved in micro-managing the art world, building their own eponymous museums, commissioning artists, and even curating exhibitions. Many are profiled by the media and endlessly discussed as first names only by dealers, artists, and each other.

Marketing

Individual works of art, particular artists and historical styles, and art movements can go up in price as a result of increasingly skillful marketing by a combination of art gallery, auction house, artist, and art fair. A century ago most art dealers were glorified shopkeepers. Now some are themselves celebrity entrepreneurs. For most of the twentieth century auction houses functioned as wholesalers to the trade. Most buyers were dealers who relied on their own acumen to spot undervalued works that would benefit from being identified, catalogued, cleaned, framed, and re-presented to the retail buyer. Now the auction houses make and break the market reputations of midcareer artists whose work they promote with great fanfare. Christie’s and Sotheby’s no longer just conduct auctions of collectibles. They have education divisions, sell real estate, and own and operate art galleries. Customers for any one of their enterprises are targeted for all of their products, be it a Cubist Picasso, a Malibu beach house, or a master’s degree for their daughter. While much more focused in their goals, art galleries are also increasingly sophisticated when it comes to marketing. The Art Dealers Association of America, which has an invited membership and a strong code of ethics, organizes consumer-friendly public events, including art fairs and panel discussions.

The selling agents are not always the tastemakers, and sometimes even the artists and works of art seem to be merely pawns in a game directed not by the dealers or auction houses but by the collectors. Many buyers will sooner ape the buying choices of another collector than listen to a museum curator or a dealer. When Ronald Lauder paid a reported $135 million in 2007 for a painting by Gustav Klimt, his purchase was widely covered by the world press, and collectors who had previously been uninterested in Austrian and German art took notice.17 A property developer from Dubai buys a house in Surrey, meets a neighbor on the golf course who happens to be a collector, and I get a call for “anything by Picasso up to $8 million.”

New buyers, eager to emulate publicized collectors, start at the top, equate price with quality, and increase the demand for the most typical works by the artists, past or present, who are in the news. Prophesies are self-fulfilled, sometimes by careful design, and novice buyers may find themselves falling out of love with an object they were happy to pay a record price for when that artist seemed from the ear-splitting buzz, mostly generated by stakeholders, to be anointed.

Art Galleries

In the 1950s and 1960s even high-profile galleries announced their exhibitions with modest cards or posters folded for mailing. Small advertisements were placed in the New York Times, and a few hundred dollars might be spent on a quarter-page advertisement in an art magazine. A half-page might buy not only the advertisement but a good review. The notion of hiring a public-relations firm to promote an artist would have seemed not only absurd but self-defeating. Collectors then liked to discover new artists for themselves, and word of mouth was by far the most potent marketing tool. By the 1980s full-color catalogues replaced modest mailers, and advertising budgets grew, alas no longer guaranteeing good coverage; but it was not until the late 1990s that galleries unabashedly started hiring public-relations firms. Leading galleries are now very media savvy and keep themselves in the news by holding well-publicized openings and currying favor via exclusive dinner parties for tight groups of artists and collectors.

Auction Houses