Suddenly the high end art market isn’t doing to well. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:
“As far as I am concerned, this is a catastrophe.”
After a blistering five-year boom of near limitless possibilities, it is suddenly getting tough in another asset class – one that mere commoner millionaires are not invited to play in: the high-dollar art market.
Auction house Sotheby’s reported on Monday that revenues in the first quarter plunged 32% from a year ago. Agency commissions and fees, the largest subcategory, plummeted 37%. Expenses edged up. Hence a resounding operating loss of $32 million – a $50-million swing from its $18 million profit a year ago.
On the news, Sotheby’s shares plunged 8%, at one point trading below $26 a share, but then miraculously bounced back and today closed at $28.72. Yet, they’re still down 38% from their 52-week high last June, and 46% from the post-financial crisis high in December 2013, the halcyon days when QE was still inflating the art market and the wealth of its participants.
At the same time, a debacle played out at Sotheby’s art sale. At its auction in New York yesterday evening, Sotheby’s sold $144.5 million in impressionist and modern art, down 61% from the auction a year ago, the worst performance since 2009.
Of the 61 lots, 21 went unsold. So only 66% of the offered pieces turned into deals.
“As far as I am concerned, this is a catastrophe,” Todd Levin, director of Levin Art Group in New York, told Bloomberg. “It’s not just enough to get the works, you have to close the deals,” he said.
There were some winners, including Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “L’Eternel Printemps,” which sold for $20.4 million, well above the presale estimate of $8 million. But those were the lucky ones. Bloomberg:
The biggest casualty at Sotheby’s was Andre Derain’s painting of a red sailboat, estimated at $15 million to $20 million. It didn’t get a single bid in the Upper East Side salesroom. Several works by Pablo Picasso also flopped, along with pieces by Paul Gauguin and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
“That’s very much a reflection of the marketplace we are in right now,” said Helena Newman, Sotheby’s global co-head of Impressionist and modern art. Like many dealers and advisers, she described the market as “discerning” and “selective.” She added that the estimates for London sales in June will “reflect what we saw tonight.”
Premonitions of the debacle already became clear on Sunday at the post-war and contemporary art auctions held at Christie’s and Phillips, that kicked off a series of big semiannual auctions this week with a combined target estimate of $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion.
At Christie’s auction, only $78.1 million in post-war and contemporary art was sold. By comparison, at its auction a year ago, sales reached $658.5 million – over eight times this year’s tally!
To continue reading: Another Asset Bubble Cracks: Art Sales Plunge
