The sale of the Estella Collection at Sotheby’s this month (pp1,4) shows the extent to which dealers and the auction houses are intertwined.
Three days after the Israel Museum took the Estella collection off its walls, a press release from Sotheby’s announcing the sale was published, swiftly followed by a luxuriously-produced catalogue, in English and Chinese, complete with biographies for each artist. A notice inside the catalogue signalled that the auction house had an “ownership interest” in all the lots in the sale, but the vendor, it turns out, is none other than the respected New York dealer Bill Acquavella.
A dealer selling at auction? Surely dealers sell in their galleries, not through their great rivals the auction houses?
Actually, no. Few people outside the trade realise just how closely the two worlds work together. This is not new: in 1990, in one of the biggest art-world deals ever, Acquavella and Sotheby’s teamed up to buy the stock of the Pierre Matisse Gallery, acquiring at the stroke of a pen (and $143m) some 2,300 works by the likes of Miró, Giacometti, Chagall and Dubuffet. That partnership continues today.
The trade goes both ways. Dealers traditionally used the saleroom to get rid of works they were having difficulty selling, while the auction houses called on dealers to plug holes in their sales.
In today’s booming market, the salerooms are achieving prices the dealers can only dream of. These are driven by the arrival en masse of new buyers, many from economies where the gallery tradition is not well established (India, China and Russia). In its recent annual report, Sotheby’s noted the number of buyers spending over $500,000 came from 58 countries in 2007, as opposed to 38 in 2003. These new buyers are reassured by what they see as the transparent auction process and the visible competition. And buyers from the financial industries also feel at home in the trading-floor atmosphere of a major sale.
But there is a negative side to dealers selling at auction. On the secondary market it is understandable, prices being what they are and dealers being…well, dealers. On the primary market it is more dangerous. Galleries have a different role than auction houses, which is not always just getting the highest price for a work, but rather finding new talent and nurturing careers. If dealers start selling at auction, as the Swiss dealer Pierre Huber did last year at Christie’s, they just become suppliers for the auction houses, which in the long run would be a suicidal manoeuvre.
And there is another, more insidious danger. People are beginning to think all art is sold at auction. Twice recently, I have had conversations—once about Damien Hirst’s skull For the Love of God, 2007, and once about Van Gogh’s 1890 L’Enfant à l’Orange, shown at the Maastricht fair. In both cases, I was told the works were “coming up for sale” at auction, and it took a good deal of insistence to persuade the speakers otherwise. Dealers selling at auction can only increase this perception.
The writer is the Art Market Editor at Large of The Art Newspaper
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘Dealers’ use of auction houses is short-sighted and self-defeating'