Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Art Market in Review

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The State of Cool Britannia: Art Market in Review

BY MICHAEL PRODGER, ART+AUCTION | NOVEMBER 20, 2017

The State of Cool Britannia: Art Market in Review

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Antony Gormley’s A Case for an Angel I, 1989. Plaster, fiberglass, lead, steel and air 197 x 858 x 46 cm. At Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction in November last year, it was estimated at £5,000,000 - £7,000,000.

(Courtesy Sotheby’s)

When in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Young British Artists announced themselves in an alcohol-fueled cacophony of controversy it looked as though the British art scene would never be the same again.

Here was a media-savvy group untrammeled by artistic or behavioral politeness. Shock and outrage were a key part of their modus operandi, from Tracey Emin’s drunken cavorting on television after the 1997 Turner Prize and Marcus Harvey’s portrait of the Moors Murderer Myra Hindley composed of children’s handprints to Jake and Dinos Chapman’s phallus-faced sculptures and Damien Hirst’s pickled animals.

While the group had no shared aesthetic or intention other than to grab attention, they managed to put art on the front page of newspapers and take their place alongside musicians and designers as an integral part of the cultural renaissance tagged Cool Britannia. In the process, many of the group finessed their devil-may-care attitude into enormous wealth.

The group’s figurehead Damien Hirst is thought by some to be worth $1 billion and even the more considered “Sunday Times Rich List” thinks $370 million is realistic: what is not in doubt is that they have made a great deal of money.

With the passing of time, however, a rather different judgement as to the YBAs’ importance has coalesced. Even in their pomp the group never had the same impact beyond the British Isles and their ability to rattle the collective cage of the British public has also decreased as their reputations have begun to settle. As Philip Hook, senior director in Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s in London put it, “inevitably there is a danger that the bubble will burst” when the YBAs are no longer seen to be as cool as they once were.

Hook thinks death will be the arbiter: “An artist who simply is very good at playing the market and is good at marketing himself,” he said, “will, of course, be found out by dying because they won’t be able to market themselves any longer.” Others might say that there’s no need to wait so long and that the market has already found them out.

The highpoint of the YBA phenomenon reads like something from myth. On September 15 and 16, 2008 Damien Hirst bypassed his dealer and held a two-day auction of his works at Sotheby’s in London. The sale was called “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” and so it must have seemed: the 218 lots raised £111 million ($198 million).

In a curious twist that set tongues wagging, it emerged that three of Hirst’s dealer-associates were among the bidders, which seemed to some that they were propping up their boy’s prices. Whatever was happening in London was, however, dwarfed by news from the other side of the Atlantic; as the first day of the Hirst sale concluded in triumph the financial services firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in New York City. Lehman’s fall sparked the global financial crash, among the collateral damage of which was the ascendancy of the YBAs.

In 2008, some 70 works by YBAs sold for more than a million dollars, in 2009 fewer than five reached that sum and over the succeeding years the figures have not recovered. In 2008 the cumulative sales of the YBAs touched $275 million while the figure for the following year hovered around a paltry $25 million: by 2016 the sum had inched its way up to nearly $40 million. What the financial crisis seemed to reveal was that the success of Hirst, Emin et al was a case of the emperor’s new art; in the light of the prevailing economic reality the YBAs did not seem a very big deal after all. (All figures are from the Blouin Art Sales Index.)

A look at the individual sales records of the artists gives a clear and surprising indication of which ones the market now thinks are worth backing. Hirst tops the list with auction sales between 1987 and September 2017 amounting to a staggering $607,462,373. Hirst, however, is a prolific artist — or rather his cohort of assistants is — and this Croesus-like sum was generated by a whopping 4,219 lots, many of them multiples — the spot, spin and butterfly pictures and prints that have been produced by the quire. What the figures show is that the average price for a Hirst work is a still impressive but possibly less than eye-catching $144,000. It might be worth remembering that Howard Hodgkin, an older British artist of a very different type, was regularly selling his small, poetry-rich paintings for upwards of £200,000-£250,000 during this same period.

Among the other core YBAs, Marc Quinn sold 506 pieces at an average of $67,000, Rachel Whiteread 189 works at an average of $57,000, and Sarah Lucas 201 works at $43,000. The big surprises are the headline-friendly Emin and the Chapman Brothers. The former has publicly and apparently without irony declared herself to be a great artist but her 497 works (again, like Hirst, many of them multiples) fetched on average only $40,000 each, which seems something of a snip for a “great.” Emin has complained that her prices seem low because few of her works reach the secondary markets, but 497 lots gives the lie to this line of argument. All these things are relative, but the Chapmans have fared worse than Emin, their 211 pieces making an average of $25,000.

The flip side of the list is that it also reveals three figures in particular who the market believes promise artistic longevity: Chris Ofili, who sold 331 works at an average of $96,000; Jenny Saville, whose 94 lots went for an average of $315,000; and the biggest surprise of all, Glenn Brown with 96 works at $557,000. Part of the appeal of the latter, more lucrative pair is perhaps that both are highly skilled painters who do something new with established genres.

Saville has long been appreciated for her uncomfortable but insistently fleshy close-up paintings of the nude, a fact recognized in 2016 when “Shift,” a sardine can of top-to-tail naked bodies, sold for £6.8 million ($9.1 million); it was last seen at the “Sensation” exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997 that cemented the YBA brand. Brown, meanwhile, appropriates works by everyone from Frank Auerbach and Velázquez to Rembrandt and Fragonard and gives them his own unnerving and dramatic twist — heightening colors, accentuating poses, upping their painterliness and expressiveness.

Both these artists are resolutely unjokey and, unlike some of their peers, neither seeks the limelight. Their pictures can be easily placed in the art historical tradition and indeed can be seen as developing it. This gives them a provenance that makes some of the other YBAs seem transient and technically flimsy.

Brown and Saville’s attributes are those buyers obviously like. This pair represent the exception though. Since 1987, 5,328 works by the YBAs have sold at auction but only 163 fetched more than $1 million and of those just three made more than $10 million (topped by one of Hirst’s medicine cabinet pieces, “Lullaby Spring,” which sold for £9.65 million in 2007 – $19.2 million at the time). The vast majority of the works, 3,729 of them, sold for less than $50,000, hardly small change but the sort of price fetched by contemporary photographers such as Rineke Dijkstra and Nan Goldin.

A caveat is perhaps due at this point. These figures do not take into account the number of YBA works sold through the artists’ dealers where both the volume and the prices fetched are rarely released. Pieces from “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” Hirst’s massive and vainglorious show at this year’s Venice Biennale, for example, were said to be selling well. There were 189 works in the show, each in an edition of three, with a rumored entry point for buyers of $1.3 million while the most expensive item carried a price-tag of $14 million. Among those who supposedly snapped up pieces were the Nahmad and the Mugrabi families, François Pinault (who was asked if he was indeed a buyer and responded “Perhaps. Probably. But I am not going to tell you which ones!”) and Qiao Zhibing, the Chinese collector behind the Tank Shanghai, which opened last year.

As with the furor surrounding Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, “For the Love of God,” the truth behind his and other dealers’ sales is unlikely to emerge. Hirst claimed first that he sold the skull for the asking price of £50 million to an anonymous consortium. This was contradicted by others who claimed he had been offering it for £38 million. Hirst then countered by saying he had sold it for cash leaving no paper trail, while later still he said: “In the end I covered my fabrication and a few other costs by selling a third of it to an investment group, who are anonymous.”

Members of that investment group were said in news reports at the time to include both Hirst himself and his dealer Jay Jopling, thus protecting his price base and making the nature of the “sale” somewhat less than clear cut.

The secondary market for YBA works is less open to such manoeuvers and it is the place where they can be judged against their peers, both British and foreign. Among their contemporaries the bulk of the YBAs are outperformed by such fellow, yet slightly older, Brits as Peter Doig (whose “Swamped” from 1990 sold in 2015 at Christie’s New York, not London, for $25.9 million) and Antony Gormley (his “A Case for an Angel I,” 1989, made £5.30 million, or $6.93 million, during this year’s Frieze Week in London), and abroad by the likes of Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Andreas Gursky (producer of the world’s most expensive photograph, “Rhein II,” which sold for more than $4.3 million in 2011), Rudolf Stingel and Mark Grotjahn.

When put next to these figures, and others such as Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close and Ed Ruscha, the YBAs start to look very parochial indeed — and that’s before the biggest gun of all, Jasper Johns, enters the equation. His sales record is in an altogether different league; his “Flag” of 1954 sold for $110 million in 2010 and his “False Start” for $80 million in 2006.

The genuinely Cool Britannia artists, it seems, are not the YBAs at all but largely belong to an older generation. Among the established and perhaps expected names are, for example, Henry Moore, whose “Reclining Figure: Festival” from 1951 sold in 2016 for $32.7 million; Frank Auerbach, whose “Head of Gerda Boehm,” previously owned by David Bowie, also sold last year, for £3.8 million; and of course David Hockney, whose most expensive painting, “Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26,” fetched $11.7m in 2016 and whose 15 canvas “Study of the Grand Canyon” of 1998 fetched more than £6 million just this October (at the same sale Hodgkin’s “House” sold for £704,750, more than double its estimate).

Some less familiar names are also overtaking the YBAs. Hurvin Anderson, for example, passed the £1 million mark back in 2008. Best known for his lush, almost abstract (and Doig-inflected) landscapes, his “Peter’s Series: Back,” a figurative work from 2008 showing a man alone in a room from behind, has just made more than £1.8 million (from an estimate of £600,000-£900,000).

All of these artists pale into insignificance beside the two capos of the British art scene, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. When Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Resting,” a pressingly fleshy portrait of 1994 showing a naked and corpulent Job Centre worker called Sue Tilley, was sold to Roman Abramovich in 2015 for some $56 million it nailed down his lofty auction position. Another portrait of Tilley, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” had fetched $33.6 million in 2008, setting the then record price for a living artist (and taking the title from Jeff Koons, whose “Hanging Heart” had sold for $23.5 million).

Freud though is barely in the foothills when compared with his one-time friend Francis Bacon. Indeed it was Bacon’s 1969 work, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” that became, when it went to Christie’s New York in 2013, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction and the most expensive work of contemporary art. At $142.4 million it put him in the super-league, leaving his own “Triptych, 1976,” which made a hefty $86.3 million in 2008, in its wake. Only 15 paintings have cost more and the sale meant that Bacon found himself keeping heady company with the most notable names of 20th-century art: Picasso, Modigliani, Roy Lichtenstein and a clutch of Abstract Expressionists – Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

Many observers thought the price excessive; the triptych, with its custard-yellow color scheme, is unpleasant on the eye and fails to break new stylistic ground. The fact that it shows another major artist undoubtedly boosted the price but few would claim that it ranks among his most significant works.

Ironically, having seemed ironclad in auction terms, a major Bacon, “Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971,” the star lot of this year’s Frieze Week, failed to sell. The painting showed not just a pope but also Bacon’s lover George Dyer, who died from a drug overdose in Paris a mere two days before the work was first exhibited, and it was vigorously hyped by Francis Outred, Christie’s chairman and head of Postwar and Contemporary art: “this painting is quite simply art history.” Clearly not everyone thought it was. The painting carried a top estimate of £80 million which, had it been achieved, would have made it the most expensive work ever sold at auction in Europe. In fact the bidding flatlined after reaching £58 million, still £2 million shy of the reserve, and it went unsold.

Of course what this means for Bacons in the future remains to be seen. While it seems a failure, it is worth noting that had it been allowed to go for £58 million it would still have been one of the 30 most expensive paintings ever sold at auction, so there’s failure and failure. The offered sum nevertheless represents the sort of price that is so far out of sight to the YBAs as to be over the horizon. The YBA generation is of course no longer young; now in their 50s, they have become the Middle Aged British Artists. And while the younger Hirst, Emin and the Chapmans may have learned some of their hard-living skills from Bacon they have yet to learn how to match him in their art.

This article first appeared in the print edition of November issue of Art+ Auction magazine.

Top auction results for Francis Bacon

ARTIST / TITLE	SALE INFORMATION	PRICE SOLD
Francis Bacon Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969	November 11, 2013 Christie's New York Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale (Lot 8)	$ 142,405,000 USD Premium
Francis Bacon Triptych, 1976	May 13, 2008 Sotheby's New York Contemporary Art Evening Auction (Lot 33)	$ 86,281,000 USD Premium
Francis Bacon Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984	May 12, 2014 Christie's New York Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale (Lot 20)	$ 80,805,000 USD Premium
Francis Bacon Portrait of George Dyer Talking, 1966	February 12, 2014 Christie's London Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction (Lot 10)	$ 70,266,501 USD Premium