Brigadoon Weekend
An emerging issue shaping commerce + culture
November 28, 2020
Art Auctions only.
ART AUCTIONS DEEP DIVE
A beginner's guide to art auctions: Auctions are the art world's blood sport, with wealthy collectors and art speculators convening in tony salesrooms to compete with one another for the finest works coming to market—providing delight for the rows of onlookers who attend the events to watch the action.
+ Andrew M. Goldstein
How does an art auction work? Art auctions attract global attention with their glittery A-list collectors, bidding wars, and unexpected events such as artworks shredding right in front of bidders’ eyes. But behind the glamour and drama sits a serious business, centuries of history, and practices that consistently set the tone for the art market at large. Here’s your guide to everything that happens before the inevitable ‘Sold!’
+ Singulart Magazine
Auction houses: House pride: The art world is changing faster than Sotheby’s and Christie’s are adapting their business model.
+ Economist
Sold to the highest bidder: Why Sotheby’s is going private: Going once, going twice … sold for $3.7 billion dollars. As a legendary auction house, Sotheby’s prepares to go private, a slew of new opportunities beckon. They include the financial flexibility and the necessary confidentiality to go after bigger business deals; tapping into expanding global markets and the use of advanced technology that could help Sotheby’s fetch the best prices by matching collections with art lovers’ preferences.
+ Knowledge @ Wharton
Sotheby’s and Christie’s look to luxury as a coronavirus antidote: The world’s two biggest auction houses are selling more watches, jewelry, and handbags, but art’s still where the money is.
+ Scott Reyburn
Meet Aurel Bacs, the man who sparked the vintage watch boom: Why are classic timepieces suddenly more sought-after, more Instagrammed, and more valuable than ever before? The answer has a lot to do with auctioneer extraordinaire Aurel Bacs.
+ Cam Wolf
Art speculators bid to lose: David Geffen, Peter Brant, and other collectors pledge to bid on the art they want but new third-party backers aim to reap fees by getting outbid; ‘they don’t know what they’re doing.’
+ Kelly Crow
"Increasingly, the goal is to earn a quick payout from the fees surrounding guarantees rather than to bring home any actual paintings. New investors, many from real-estate and international finance, have discovered the guarantee and want to reshape it into a financial instrument entirely distinct from collecting art, with its own margins and strategies. All of this is roiling the houses and old-guard collectors, with some warning that the new generation is propping up the art market."
Sale of rare Nazi-era Porsche sputters after Sotheby’s auction blunder: The bidding for the Porsche Type 64, built by Ferdinand Porsche in 1939, was supposed to open at $13 million but instead started at $30 million. The one-of-a-kind Porsche, built for an unrealized road race on Germany’s new autobahn, through the Austrian Alps to Rome, failed to sell and the auction was halted. “As bidding opened on the Type 64, increments were mistakenly displayed on the screen, causing unfortunate confusion in the room,” RM Sotheby’s said in a statement on Sunday. “We take pride in conducting our world-class auctions with integrity and we take our responsibility to our clients very seriously.” It did not name the auctioneer.
+ Neil Vigdor
"The biggest secret in the art world is that no one knows what's contemporary art!" -- Holger Liebs - Art critic + former editor-in-chief of Monopol magazine
BRIGADOON EVENT
Brigadoon Monthly | Member Call
December 16, 2020
2:00 pm ET
Title: The geopolitics of the digital economy
Speaker: Paul Triolo (@pstAsiatech) | Practice Head, Geotechnology @ Eurasia Group
Details + RSVP - click here.
ART AUCTIONS DATA POINTS
The fine art auction business has remained a duopoly over its 250-year history. The industry is dominated by Sotheby's and Christie's Inc. Curiously, neither competitor has been able to overtake the other by a notable margin despite the clear network effects of this platform business.
Global sales: Showing a second consecutive year of positive growth, the global art market in 2018 reached $67.4 billion, up 6% year-on-year. This brings the market to its second-highest level in 10 years, with values advancing 9% over the decade from 2008 to 2018.
Sales at public auction of fine and decorative art and antiques reached $29.1 billion in 2018, up 3% year-on-year. Works of art selling at prices in excess of $1 million accounted for 61% of total sales value in the fine art auction market in just 1% of lots.
North America held the highest share of the global art market, with Europe placing second. The United States was again the largest market by value with an estimated market share of 44%, up 2% in 2018. Sales reached $29.9 billion in 2018, their highest recorded level to date.
Art fairs: Art fairs continue to be a central part of the global art market, with aggregate sales estimated to reach $16.5 billion in 2018, up 6% year-on-year. The share of the total value of global dealer sales made at art fairs has grown from less than 30% in 2010 to 46% in 2018, stable year-on-year
Online sales: The online art market reached an estimated new high of $6 billion in 2018, up 11% year-on-year. This represents 9% of the value of global sales. Online sales gathered pace at the major auction houses in 2018, while second-tier houses reported making 19% of their annual sales online, with 74% through third-party platforms
A plastic crown worn by rapper Biggie during a photoshoot just days before his murder has sold at auction for $594,750 in New York. The crown headlined Sotheby's first-ever sale devoted to hip hop that featured more than 120 lots including jewelry, art, and other ephemera of the genre born in the Bronx.
In December 2020, Sotheby's will auction off a pair of Air Jordan worn by Michael Jordan during the 1991 NBA finals. Jordan himself wore and signed (twice) these black sneakers. They come from the personal collection of a former Nike executive called Sonny Vaccaro. The Air Jordan High Top Sneakers could fetch between $500,000 and $700,000 and could become the most expensive sports shoes in history. A pair of Air Jordans 1 Chicago sold for $615,000 dollars in August 2019 at Christie's, setting a new record for the basketball legend.
@Banksy: "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge" - Picasso
#ArtAuctions #BrigadoonWeekend
BRIGADOON WATCHES | VIDEOS ON ART AUCTIONS
The Art Market Explained: What you need to know about auctions: Auctions launches a four-part documentary series, followed by Galleries, Patrons, and Art Fairs, released weekly through mid-June. Together, the four segments will tell a comprehensive story about the art market’s history and cultural influence, providing an approachable yet nuanced introduction to an extraordinary subject.
+ Artsy
The Price of Everything: With unprecedented access to pivotal artists and the white-hot market surrounding them, The Price of Everything dives deep into the labyrinth of the contemporary art world. It examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society — where everything can be bought and sold. In January 2018, The Price Of Everything premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
+ The Price of Everything
Ways of Seeing: We’ve been coming to terms with technology’s effect on art for more than a century, and the issue seems particularly salient now that we are depending on the internet for all of our social and aesthetic needs. But there’s still no better guide to the way modernity has upended our experience of the world than the critic, novelist, and screenwriter John Berger in his groundbreaking 1972 BBC series.
+ BBC
F for Fake: Orson Welles’s idiosyncratic master class on the philosophical underpinnings of art, the art market, performance, and self-consciousness focuses on a prolific art forger, Elmyr de Hory, and begins with a mind-bending quotation from the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin: “A magician,” Welles says that Houdin said, “is just an actor playing the part of a magician.”
+ Amazon
American Animals: Based on the unbelievable true story of four middle-class college kids who hatched a harebrained scheme to stage a daylight robbery of several rare, multi-million dollar books from a university campus in Kentucky. In 2004, the thieves tried to pull off the audacious theft of four double-sized volumes of John James Audobon’s Birds of America from Transylvania University’s Special Collections Library. Although they failed in their initial goal, they nabbed some Audobon drawings and other rare books, which they then took to Christie’s as (supposed) representatives of a private collector. Police caught up with the gang in 2005 and they were later each sentenced to seven years in prison.
+ Trailer
BRIGADOON READS | BOOKS ON ART AUCTIONS
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
+ Don Thompson
Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
+ Chrystia Freeland
Christina Alexandra Freeland PC MP is a former journalist for Reuters and is currently the deputy prime minister of Canada as well as the minister of finance.
Seven Days in the Art World
+ Sarah Thornton
Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market
+ Georgina Adam
I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)
+ Richard Polsky
I'd Rather Be in the Studio: The Artist's No-Excuse Guide to Self-Promotion
+ Alyson Stanfield
The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives, and Methods of Master Forgers
+ Noah Charney
Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden Players in the History of Art
+ Philip Hook
100 Secrets of the Art World: Everything You Always Wanted to Know from Artists, Collectors, and Curators but Were Afraid to Ask
+ Thomas Girst + Magnus Resch
TWEET
Record setting purple-pink diamond from Russia sells for $26.6m at Sotheby’s
@artmarket
Art Market Monitor = Updates on artists, auctions, and sales
Have a great weekend. See you next week.
-Marc
Curation and commentary by Marc A. Ross | Founder @ Brigadoon
Brigadoon is conversations and insights for a better world.
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