In June, Sotheby’s announced that it would move its flagship New York auction rooms to the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue, the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art and, more recently, the modern and contemporary outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dating back to 1966, this Brutalist-style monument was designed by Marcel Breuer, who in the 1920s had been one of the most influential teachers of the Bauhaus school. Sotheby’s bought the building for $100 million.
Some see it as a symbolic moment. A revered public museum turns into an outlet for art, sneakers, handbags, watches, jewelry and other luxuries for the wealthy.
“The wonderful old Whitney Museum will be transformed into an exhibition hall, open to the public only when something is for sale. It’s in tune with the times and it’s very sad,” says New York-based artist Deborah Kass, a graduate of the Whitney Museum’s independent study program.
There is, of course, a long history of buildings of historical and architectural interest which have been repurposed. Many churches have been transformed into restaurants and luxury homes. Many royal palaces have been turned into art museums. Polish entrepreneur Grażyna Kulczyk recently transformed a 12th-century Swiss monastery into a museum devoted exclusively to works by female artists.
But doesn’t the fate of the Breuer Building signify a moment of some cultural significance? To understand what this might be, it’s worth shifting the focus from New York to Paris to take a look at the current money in art show at the Monnaie de Paris. Housed in the city’s historic Mint, a building designed – literally – to make money, this rambling, didactic yet thought-provoking exhibition traces the complex relationship between art and money from ancient times to the present day. Information panels cleverly refer to philosophers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Georges Bataille and Guy Debord — and Andy Warhol, whose great 1981 dollar sign screen printing is a compulsory exhibition.
The exhibition convincingly demonstrates that what we now recognize as the “financialization” of art, as opposed to its wider secular art market, dates back to the early 19th century. Gambling casinos were legalized in France in 1806. The Paris Bourse opened in 1826, spawning a new professional class of bankers and speculators who gambled to make money with money. This new crowd, in their shiny top hats, is vividly evoked in the show by Edgar Degas’ 1878 painting, Portrait on the Stock Exchange.
“It was a moment of fundamental change in society. It was the beginning of the financial economy,” says the curator of the exhibition, Jean-Michel Bouhours, former chief curator of the Center Pompidou. “Unlike agriculture or industry, it is not a productive economy. It was really new. »
The exhibition also shows how the history of the art market keeps repeating itself. At the end of the 19th century, for example, the Parisian gallery owner Paul Durand-Ruel made a huge bet on Impressionism, buying hundreds of paintings by artists such as Monet, Degas and Manet. He took exactly the same kind of speculative stance as Charles Saatchi when he stockpiled works from the Young British Artists in the 1980s and 1990s. Both shrewdly marketed their artists as part of a historic move to maximize their investments .
The Warhol effect
During the 20th century, avant-garde artists spent decades trying in earnest to produce works that turned the market upside down. Then came Warhol. “He was relaxed about the money,” says Bouhours, who shows he was the first artist to have serious conceptual fun with money. Since the 2000s, Damien Hirst has been actively involved in the financialization and commodification of art, and the speculation that goes with it. “The concept of financial value becomes part of the job,” says Bouhours. The contemporary art market is exploding.
Bouhours says he organized this Paris exhibition to investigate what Marx called “the mystery of value.” By the time the exhibit closes with non-fungible tokens, the culminating disembodiment of art as a commodity that has “no practical value,” the mystery seems solved. “Financial value is aesthetic value,” says Bouhours, who may have missed a trick a bit by not including Hirst’s 2022 Currency NFT project in its Paris salon to demonstrate this equivalence.
Price being the dominant measure of aesthetic value can work just fine, as long as it continues to rise. The problem right now is that prices in some areas of the market seem to be weakening. In May, nightly marquee sales of modern and contemporary art at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips’ in New York brought in a total of $1.4 billion, down from $2.5 billion at equivalent sales to the previous May, according to London-based auction analysts Pi-ex.
With high interest rates, inflation and geopolitical uncertainty weighing on the global economy, sellers were unwilling to test the market with trophies. It has always been assumed that if sellers only had the courage to offer works without warranties, then serious competition could be generated at these auctions. At Christie’s, the collection of the late Boston real estate developer Gerald Fineberg tested this theory with 65 lots of contemporary art with seemingly desirable names, without any guarantees. Estimated to raise a total of $163 million, these raised $153 million with fees. Reserves had to be reduced to make sales. A 1993 Christopher Wool stenciled multicolored word painting topped the auction at $8.4 million, well below its low estimate of $15 million.
As Josh Baer observed in his Baer-Fax newsletter, if a consignor keeps too much of the sale price, the auction house isn’t going to “work too hard for not much more reward”.
This could of course be a temporary drop. But London-based adviser Constanze Kubern said “the secondary market will continue to face supply issues as sellers hold on to their trophies and buyers only spend on stellar works of art.” Commenting in its own newsletter, Kubern added, “Sales will continue to be robust in the primary market.”
money in art explores how the opening of the Paris Stock Exchange in 1826 created a new professional class of bankers and speculators eager to generate wealth through art
Photo: Martin Argyroglo © Monnaie de Paris
Most of this robustness is currently generated by an intense demand for new paintings by young artists of the moment which are introduced to the market through dealer exhibitions, gallery weekends and fairs. There are many sociological and psychological reasons why wealthy art collectors want to buy young art of a certain type. Take the case of the dreamy, neo-surrealist paintings of 31-year-old Belgian artist Ben Sledsens, represented by Antwerp gallerist Tim Van Laere, who counts tennis star Venus Williams among his valued clients.
“It’s about escape, about creating a utopia. The reality is not so bright,” Van Laere said at Antwerp Art Weekend in May. “It makes people happy.”
Last March, at Tefaf Maastricht, Van Laere sold one of the dozen paintings Sledsens produces each year for €140,000. Van Laere says he has at least 500 customers who want to buy a Sledsens. Anyone lucky enough to buy one is also happy to know that if that same painting were to come up for auction again, those lower on the waiting list would be willing to pay multiples of the purchase price to buy it. . Market demand for these images, rather than the judgments of critics and curators, creates the value.
As she prepared to leave for Art Basel, New York-based art consultant Candace Worth said the market had around 100 to 150 coveted contemporary artists like Sledsens, with huge waiting lists. Downtime is synonymous with value, both financially and aesthetically. “I had a client ask me, ‘I want a list of the top 100 artists that I can’t get,'” Worth says.
Bouhours remembers noticing how, while working at the Center Pompidou, over the decades museums and public exhibitions gradually lost their central role in certifying value. “It was the market that validated the work,” he says.
Is it really such a surprise that the Breuer turns into a stock exchange?
