The British economy is in trouble. The same goes for its art and antiques business.
In recent months, several well-established fairs at different levels of the market have announced their cancellations: the Art & Antiques for Everyone fair in Birmingham, held three times a year; the Antique Home & Vintage Fair in York; and in London, the Chelsea Antiques Fair, the Alexandra Palace Antiques & Collectors Fair, the summer edition of Art & Antiques Fair Olympia, the Open Art Fair and, perhaps most shockingly, the very chic Masterpiece London, Swiss property. At their peak, Masterpiece and Olympia both attracted over 30,000 visitors.
The wave of cancellations suggests something fundamental is happening in this particular sector of the UK economy. Is this just a momentary local difficulty, or do we have a larger international problem?
In terms of the global financial backdrop, the International Monetary Fund has predicted that Britain will be the only G7 economy in recession in 2023. A triple whammy from Covid, Brexit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has driven up the cost of living and doing business in the UK.
MCH, the Swiss owner of the Art Basel fairground franchise, cited “escalating costs and declining numbers of international exhibitors” as the two main reasons it decided Masterpiece was “not commercially viable this year. By 2022, with only a fifth of the approximately 130 participating dealers based outside the UK, Masterpiece had effectively become a UK art and antiques fair.
After its first edition in 2010, Masterpiece “has never ceased to improve”, according to Rhonda Long-Sharp, founder of the American exhibitor Long-Sharp Gallery, which specializes in modern and contemporary prints. “But Brexit and the pandemic have left problems in their wake,” she says. As it became more difficult for international galleries, particularly from the EU, to participate, “many simply stopped doing so”. “The same goes for collectors in the EU,” she adds.
Nonetheless, Long-Sharp says around 30% of her business is from the UK and she will continue to visit. His gallery is currently planning to take part in the new London Summer Art Fair in June, which will be half the size of Masterpiece, to be held in a smaller temporary space at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea.
The UK middle market fair scene may be shrinking after Brexit, but there’s still plenty of money in London. A recent report by the charity Equality Trust says that last year the number of UK billionaires rose by 20% to 177. In February, the FTSE 100 index of blue chip stocks hit a record high. Last year, more than 600 homes worth over £5million were sold in London, the highest number ever recorded by Savills estate agents.
“London has always been good to us,” says Isaac Pineus, co-director of Stockholm-based Modernity, dealers specializing in “rare and high-end” 20th-century Nordic design, priced mostly between 5,000 and £50,000. Masterpiece pillars.
“We’ve done very well over the years at Masterpiece,” says Pineus, who hasn’t worried too much about the extra costs and red tape created by Brexit. “But last year, the fair was not so successful. It seemed like a lot of people weren’t doing so well.
Pineus says Modernity will no longer be exhibiting at a summer fair in the capital. The concessionaire will continue to show at TEFAF New York in May and at PAD London in October, when thousands of international visitors are in town for Frieze. Modernity will continue to sell 20th century furniture in its new 2,100 square foot gallery in Pimlico. “We are doing very well there,” adds Pineus. “We sell to customers all over London.”
A two-level structure
The thousands of dollars spent on tasteful Danish dining tables and Swedish chandeliers to decorate multimillion-pound homes in Chelsea and Notting Hill illustrate the ‘two-tier’ structure now prevalent in the art trade and antiques.
In 2013, economists Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner used World Bank data to publish a graph showing global income gains from the poorest to the richest over the period 1988-2008. The chart rises sharply to the left to show improved outcomes in the developing world, then plummets as it reaches the working and middle classes in developed economies, before finally swooping upwards when it shows the gains of the 1% worldwide. This graphic illustration of how neoliberal capitalism has shaped the wealth of the world’s population looks like an elephant. Updated versions show the trunks of the top 1% rising almost vertically.
Britain’s post-Thatcherite economic settlement made it difficult for the country’s professional classes to maintain a customary standard of living. Now, if they have a few thousand dollars in reserve, they spend it on helping their children climb Britain’s increasingly steep housing ladder, not on art or antiques.
“Their priorities became different,” says Charles Plante, a London dealer in 18th and 19th century works on paper in the £1,000-5,000 range, who was previously a successful exhibitor at the Art & Antiques summer fair. from Olympia. He moved his business to the United States and is now focusing on the San Francisco Fall Show in October. “There’s more money in America, and there’s an appreciation for objects and connoisseurs,” he says. “I don’t find that in England.”
“Olympia declined so quickly,” he adds. “Magazines have had a huge influence. A day, Home and Garden would feature interiors with interesting objects and china. The next day it was all the rooms swept. He might also have mentioned the influence of television, game show type shows like Whip it!, Money in the attic And Dickinson’s Real Deal encourage a culture of selling rather than collecting.
Events focusing primarily on modern furniture or contemporary art still seem to have a future in post-Brexit Britain. There was plenty of business in January during the winter edition of the triannual decoration fair in Battersea, which attracted around 10,000 visitors. And collectors and curators still regard Frieze London, owned by California-based entertainment group Endeavour, as one of the most important dates on the global contemporary art calendar. However, with the demise of Masterpiece, more than one question could hang over the longevity of the Frieze Masters fair, also aimed at the wealthy community of “crossover collectors”, albeit at a more business-friendly time of year. .
But the graphic of the elephant in the room remains the way central Britain’s traditional collecting culture has been eroded by local and global economic forces. It’s not just a post-Brexit UK phenomenon. “New collectors are no longer buying cheap and moving up,” says Jill Newhouse, a New York-based dealer in European master drawings in what is traditionally considered the “affordable” segment of the market. “They now start by buying works for $20,000 or $30,000. It’s not a question of money. »
Where did these new collectors earn this money? “Some have inherited,” Newhouse says. “We have a writer. And someone in the film industry.
In San Francisco, Plante says he sells to “upper-class Americans” who buy half a dozen of his designs at a time to create French “salon style” in their fine homes.
So we have it. Quietly, without anyone noticing or really reporting it, the lower level of this particular company was compressed. And the British art and antiques fairs were the glitches.
