The tradition of auctions, from yesterday to today, from low prices to very high value objects. Last text of a series of three.
The boat party, a painting by the impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte, entered the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The painting, estimated at 43 million euros, was purchased by LVMH. Owned by Frenchman Bernard Arnault, this luxury group includes, among others, Moët Chandon champagnes, Louis Vuitton leather goods, Tag Heuer watches, Tiffany Co. jeweler, Guerlain and Christian Dior products, to name just a few of its signs.
These are gigantic fortunes who now negotiate high-value works, most often on the occasion of auctions in one or other of the great halls of the world. This trade is essentially the preserve of a few large globalized brands.
Christie’s has offices in 43 countries. Founded in 1744, Sotheby’s is the oldest listed company in New York. In 2021, its sales were more than 7.2 billion, up, in the midst of a pandemic, by 68% compared to the previous year. Christie’s, for its part, did only slightly worse for the same period.
At Phillips, another auction house, wealthy modern and contemporary art lovers flock. Major photography collectors often meet there, like at Swann’s in New York. The photography market is exploding. In May 2022, a draw of the Violin of Ingres by Man Ray, a surreal photograph of the famous Kiki de Montparnasse, was sold for 17.8 million. This image, reproduced in millions of copies, became the most expensive photograph ever sold.
The huge Asian art market is also very popular. It is channeled in good part by houses like China Guardian or Frieze Seoul. But all the big houses now have divisions dedicated to Asian art.
Over the past two years, Heffel, run in Canada by brothers Robert and David Heffel, has also developed the Asian art market. “It’s a booming market. A very strong and global market,” says Tania Poggione, director of the Montreal office.
Everything’s good
At all these signs, we do not know the crisis. They have at most been a little shaken in recent years by stories of embezzlement quickly forgotten. At the old Drouot auction house, established in Paris in 1852, several employees were heard in court. Commissioners stole objects to resell them. About fifty employees, with the complicity of auctioneers, found themselves charged in 2016.
In 2002, Sotheby’s was for its part condemned by the European Commission to a fine of more than 200 million Canadian dollars. Pattern ? Having fixed the prices, during the 1990s, with its competitor Christie’s. He got off with a few smacks on the nose. Christie’s was also prosecuted for the sale of paintings that had been looted by the Nazis.
Auction houses are periodically attacked more or less violently. One of the most publicized recent cases involves the Russian Dmitri Rybolovlev, who, after taking over state companies, has become one of the largest fertilizer producers in the world. Rybolovlev claimed several million dollars from Sotheby’s. In long proceedings, conducted around the world, this oligarch claimed that the auction company had helped a dealer, Yves Bouvier, to cheat him when he had acquired paintings, including Picassos, Rothkos and Modigliani.
Not for everybody
The manager of Heffel’s Montreal office defends herself against the idea that auctions are the preserve of very wealthy people. “We have works for all budgets,” says Tania Poggione. We offer works from $500 to $10 million or more. We have a very diversified range of works, for private and corporate collectors. »
The Heffel house is pleased to have sold, in the fall of 2022, a painting by Marcelle Ferron for 1.8 million. The untitled work, dated 1962, was estimated at a price five times lower. A portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, signed by Andy Warhol, was also sold, during the same sale, for the tidy sum of 1.1 million.
Last May, the Royal Canadian Mint commissioned the Heffel house to sell a unique piece, manufactured by them. soberly baptized pinnacle, this coin contains one kilogram of pure platinum, topped with hundreds of pink diamonds. A far cry from the look of old parking tokens, the coin is the pinnacle of the “Opulence collection”. The room pinnacle sold for 1.2 million, including buyer’s rights, “after very lively auctions”. This sale was “very interesting”, comments Tania Poggione.
At Heffel, as with many houses of its kind, the buyer must add 25% to the sale price for works priced below $25,000. The rate then becomes variable. For his part, the seller who entrusts his pieces for sale must pay, depending on the prices obtained, between 10 and 25%. In other words, an auction house makes money from both sides at once.
The new terms of the market
On October 5, 2018, the contemporary artist Banksy partially destroyed one of his works, sold at auction for 1.2 million euros. Girl with Balloon is shredded, while the sale is concluded, thanks to a hidden mechanism. The operation was supposedly carried out to denounce the “commodification” of art. Was that enough to make the buyer balk? Quite the contrary! Banksy’s offices have also hastened to certify the authenticity of the “product” that resulted from this imitation destruction. It was now, according to them, a new work called Love is in the Bin.
The alleged initial destruction of this painting has gone viral. Millions of people have seen it, as if the number of pairs of eyes resting on an object gave it its interest. Love is in the Bin was relisted for sale in 2021. The buyer of the shreds of the original painting spent more than 21.8 million euros. So that four years after the initial sale, the value enhanced by this publicity stunt has been multiplied by 18. With each sale, of course, the house presiding over the sale pockets a hefty commission.
Essayist Annie Le Brun believes that we have entered a period where the event establishes the equivalence between image and money. These are also digital objects that are now on sale. The technology, as well, is producing the work of art. So much so that merchants have reached the point where they concede title to something whose materiality and reality appear to be diffuse, to say the least.
The international stars of the world of contemporary art, from Kapoor to Banksy via Damien Hirst, explains Annie Le Brun, “have systematically worked to annihilate both the original itself and the notion of materiality that was its essence. essence”, in a world where, moreover, art and its appropriation have become issues of high finance.
The world of auctions, well trained to follow the path traced by the repercussions of money, is it complicit in a strange programmed asphyxiation? All these sales, which are constantly breaking records, risk in any case having the consequence of completely neutralizing the insurrectionary nature of certain artists, bringing all artists back to the floor of the sparkle of money. According to Annie Le Brun, again, we have thus gone “from art to the art market”.