Art Auctions Embrace a Future of Socially Distant Bidding - The New York Times

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Art Auctions Embrace a Future of Socially Distant Bidding – The New York Times

Published

3 years ago

October 22, 2020

Harry Miller

This article is part of our latest Fine Arts & Exhibits special report, which focuses on how art endures and inspires, even in the darkest of times.

It’s no surprise that art auctions aren’t what they were before March.

What’s unexpected, though, is the pace and scope of the pandemic transformation, in terms not only of how sales are conducted but also in every facet of the process — and how technology has enabled these changes.

“It’s been an opportunity to transform the industry,” said Bruno Vinciguerra, the chief executive of Bonhams auction house. “It was bound to happen over years, and it only took a few months.”

He added: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Online auctions have been a growing part of the business for years, and potential buyers have long been able to send in a bid online or by phone, but in-person live sales had remained de rigueur for the most valuable items. A live event held in front of a crowd had an element of theatricality.

“Our business model is very particular,” said Guillaume Cerutti, the chief executive of Christie’s. “It’s based on unique objects and a strong component of face-to-face interactions with our clients.”

Major sales now have a whole new look, thanks in part to the impact of technology. When it became clear in the spring that people couldn’t safely gather in a room, the houses settled on a hybrid model that employed livestreaming to create the feeling of being there.

At Sotheby’s in June, during an auction on contemporary, modern and Impressionist artworks, the auctioneer Oliver Barker was alone in a control room in London fielding online bids and watching screens on which staff members in different locations relayed bids received over the phone.

The total after almost five hours was just over $362 million, with a Francis Bacon triptych garnering $84.6 million from a phone bid and a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing selling for $15.2 million, in what Sotheby’s said was the highest successful online bid in its history.

“We were pleasantly surprised,” said Stefan Pepe, the chief technology and product officer for Sotheby’s. “Clients had comfort to bid at that level.”

At Christie’s in July, a similar livestream effort brought in $420 million. That auction — which replaced sales that would have occurred separately — featured smaller-than-normal audiences of bidders and onlookers gathered in person in both Hong Kong and Paris, as local health guidelines allowed.

Total sales for the livestream auction were lower than what the separate events would usually have brought, but level of engagement was high: Christie’s had 100,000 online viewers.

Credit…Christie’s

Earlier this month, the house held a live-streamed auction of 20th-century material — with a pregame show and color commentary — from its Rockefeller Center auction room. The sales totaled $341 million and the online audience increased to 280,000 viewers.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s weren’t the only ones trying a hybrid model.

“In the past we concentrated on the traditional auction room, and now we concentrate on the virtual auction room,” said Jean-Paul Engelen, the deputy chairman of Phillips.

“The future looks like a hybrid between the two,” Mr. Engelen added. “We’re asking, ‘Do you need 400 people in a room when only a fraction of them bid?’”

Bonhams has been focusing much of its tech development on reducing “bidding latency”: the time it takes for an online bid to be registered by auction house employees, as opposed to a live auctioneer spotting a raised hand.

“It’s critical to make it very, very low,” Mr. Vinciguerra explained. “It’s less than a second now.”

And it’s not just the actual sales that have changed. Many of the technological improvements are focused on the front end of the process: getting people interested enough to bid in the first place.

Phillips announced an exclusive partnership with Articker, an online tool that aggregates open-source data on artists and artworks, including articles and exhibitions, and provides clients with information and context that could guide their bidding and buying.

The hefty, glossy catalogs that auction houses have traditionally relied on are still being distributed, but they are being supplemented by more extensive online offerings that are “arguably richer,” said Mr. Pepe of Sotheby’s.

When clients who have a relationship with Sotheby’s log into the house’s online portal, they may now get personalized suggestions, which the house has been testing, Mr. Pepe said. A recommendation algorithm highlights lots that might interest certain bidders based on their previous activity.

For high-value lots, serious potential bidders would traditionally have gone to see the merchandise in person. Now, At Christie’s, augmented reality is offering an alternative. A buyer could see on a phone screen how that Matisse might look in her living room simply by pointing the camera at a blank wall.

Christie’s already offered the tool on some lots, but relied on it more when the pandemic hit. And so did clients.

“The average user is using it for nine minutes, which is an incredibly long time if you think about it,” said Matthew Rubinger, the head of corporate and digital marketing for Christie’s.

A new innovation this year is “super zoom” technology that allows anyone to examine a work in minute detail — every crack in an old painting and the patinated sheen on a bronze sculpture. “They can zoom in far beyond the naked eye,” Mr. Rubinger said.

Credit…Mediakite and Thomas De Cruz Media Haydon Perrior

But, he added, it was not meant to replace being in the room with a work. “We don’t want to recreate that experience, we want to enhance it,” Mr. Rubinger said. “Now our clients do both.”

Auctions need sellers as well as buyers, and houses have made it easier to consign artworks, too.

At Christie’s, an enhanced online portal helps sellers deal with contracts, track bids and see lot status, and provides three years’ worth of consignment information. Sotheby’s upgraded its online consignment tool, introduced in 2017, to make it easier to add information.

All the auction houses thought that their more tech savvy patrons would embrace the pandemic-era changes, but they have also attracted first-time buyers.

“New clients have been coming to us too,” said Mr. Cerutti of Christie’s. About 35 percent of all buyers so far this year were new to purchasing at the house, with much of the growth coming from online sales.

Mr. Cerutti also predicted that all-online sales eventually could comprise around half of the house’s sales; before this year, they were less than 10 percent.

Houses have also been unsure whether some of their older, more traditional clients would sign on to the brave new auction world.

“People haven’t adapted reluctantly, they’ve given us really positive feedback,” said Mr. Pepe of Sotheby’s.

At Christie’s, some traditional auction buyers made their first online auction purchases this summer, picking up Laurence Stephen Lowry’s oil “Coming from the Match” (1959) for $2.56 million and Tyeb Mehta’s oil “Untitled (Falling Figure)” (1965) for $975,000.

Next up for auction houses is the busy November season, traditionally packed with sales across categories. In the longer term, they must decide what the process will look like if a coronavirus vaccine is introduced.

“When it’s possible to have clients in a room we will do it,” Mr. Cerutti said. “It’s where we belong.”

But the new technological advancements likely won’t recede when that happens.

“The digital tools we’re able to share pre-sale, like super zoom, augmented reality and online galleries, they will stay around in the future,” he added. “They are now the new normal.”

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Art in Bloom returns – CTV News Winnipeg

Published

4 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Harry Miller

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Art in Bloom returns CTV News Winnipeg

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Crafting the Painterly Art Style in Eternal Strands – IGN First – IGN

Published

6 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Harry Miller

Next up in our IGN First coverage of Eternal Strands, we’re diving into the unique and colorful art in the land of the Enclave. We sat down with art director Sebastien Primeau and lead character artist Stephanie Chafe to ask them all about it.

IGN: Let’s talk about Eternal Strands’ distinctive art style. What were some of the guiding principles behind the art direction?

Primeau: I think what was guiding the art direction at the beginning of the project was to find the scale of the game, because we knew that we were having those gigantic 25-meter tall creatures and monsters. So we really wanted to have the architectural elements of the game – the vegetation, the trees – to reflect that kind of size.

So one of my inspirations was coming from an architect called Hugh Ferriss, and I was very impressed by his work, and it was very inspiring for me too. So just the scale of his work. So he was a real influence for Metropolis, Gotham, so I was really inspired by his work.

Chafe: I think one of the things that, just as artists and as creators, we were interested in as well was going for a color palette that can be very bright. And something that can really challenge us too as artists, and going into a bit more of at-hand painterly work, and getting our hands really into it, into the clay, so to speak, and trying to go for something bright and colorful.

Eternal Strands Slideshow – IGN First

IGN: That’s not the first time I’ve heard your team describe the art style as “painterly.” What does that mean?

Primeau: Painterly is just a word that can give so much room to different types of interpretation. I think where we started was Impressionist painters. So I really enjoy looking at many painters, and they have different types of styles. But we wanted to have something that was fresh, colorful, and unique.

And also, I remember when we were starting the project there was that word. “It’s going to be stylized,” but stylized is just a word that gives so much room to different kinds of style. And since we were a small team, we had to figure out a way to create those rough brushstrokes. If it was painted very quickly by an artist, like Bob Ross would say, “Accident is normal.” So I think we wanted to embrace that. And because we’re all artists, it’s hard too, at some point, to disconnect from what you’re doing. It’s like, “Oh, I can maybe add some more details over there.” But I was always the- “Guys, oh, Steph, that’s enough. Let’s stop it right there. I think it looks cool.”

IGN: So, when you create an asset for Eternal Strands, is somebody actually painting something?

Chafe: I can speak more on the character side. For us, we do a lot of that hand painting, a lot of those strokes by hand. And we try to embrace, not the mistakes, but the non-realistic part of it having an extra splotch here and there.

We’ve got brushes that we made that can help us as artists to get the texture we’re looking for. It really is a texture that gives to it. But a lot of the time it’s not just something generated in a substance painter, or getting these things that will layer these things for you, making it quick and procedural. Sometimes we have those as helpers, but more often than not we just go in and paint.

IGN: Eternal Strands is a fair bit more colorful than lots of games today. Why was it important to the team to have lots of bright colors?

Primeau: You need to be careful, actually, with colors. Because with too many colors you can create that kind of pizza of color.

We wanted to balance the color per level, because we’re not making an open-world game. I really wanted each level to have their own color palette identity. So we’re playing a lot with the lighting. The lighting for me is key. It’s very important. You can have gorgeous textures, props, characters, but if your lighting is not that great, it’s like… So lighting is key. And especially with Unreal Five, we have now, access to Lumen. It brought so much richness to the color, how the color is balancing with the entirety of the level. It definitely changed the way we were looking at the game.

We’re using the technology, but in a way to create something that feels like if you were looking at a painting. I think we have achieved that goal.

Chafe: I’m very happy with it.

IGN: What were your inspirations from other games or other media when developing the art style?

Primeau: I have many. I’ll start with graphic novels, European graphic novels. I really wanted to stay away from DC comics, Marvels comics, those kinds of classics.

Before I started Eternal Strand, I saw a video. It was one of the League of Legends short films for a competition. It’s “RISE.” I don’t know if you remember that one, but it was made by Fortiche Studio who did Arcane, and I’m a huge fan of Arcane. When I saw that short film, it was way before Arcane was announced, I was like, “oh gosh, this is freaking cool. This is so amazing. I wish I would be able to work on a game that has that kind of look.”

Chafe: For me, when we started the project, one of the things that I wanted to challenge myself a lot was in concept and drawing and stuff like that and doing more, learning more about color as well, which is something I find super fascinating and also kicks my butt all the time because of just color theory in general.

But with the [character] portraits specifically, I think, I mean, growing up I played a lot of games, a lot of JRPGs too. I played just seeing basic portraits in something like Golden Sun or eventually also Persona and of course Hades, which is a fantastic game. I played way too much of that, early access included. But I really liked that part. Visual novels too, just that kind of thing. You can get an emotion from a 2D image as well when it’s well done, especially if you have voices on top of it.

IGN: Were there any really influential pieces of concept art that served as a guiding document the team would reference later on?

Chafe: I have one personal: It’s really Maxime Desmettre’s stuff because it was so saturated. Blue, blue, blue sky. Maxim Desmettre is our concept artist that we have who works from Korea. When I joined the project, seeing that was just like… and seeing that as a challenge too, like ‘how are we going to get there?’

The one that I’m thinking of that hopefully we could find after, just in general with the work that always speaks so much to me is this blue, blue sky and the saturation of the grass. But also when he gets into his architecture and stuff like that, there’s just a warmth to everything. The warmth to the stone that just makes it look inviting and mysterious at the same time. And I think that really speaks a lot to it.

IGN: How did you go about designing Eternal Strand’s protagonist: Brynn?

Primeau: I think that Mike also, when he pitched me the character, he was using Indiana Jones as an example. So courageous, adventurer guy, cool guy. Also, when you’re looking at Indiana Jones, he’s a cool guy. And we wanted to create that kind of coolness also out of our main protagonist. And I remember it took time. We did many iterations.

Chafe: It was a lot of iterations for sure. Well, I think I had done a bunch of sketches because it’s what’s going to be the face of the player, and also to have her own personality as well in the story, and her history as well. And the mantle was a really big one too. What gives her one of sets of her powers and stuff, figuring that out was actually one of the longest processes. It’s just a cape, but at the same time, it’s getting that to work with gameplay and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, all of Brynn’s personality and her vibe really comes from a lot of good work from the narrative team. So, mostly collaboration there.

IGN: What’s the deal with Brynn’s mentor: Oria? How did you settle on a giant bird?

Chafe: Populating the world of the enclave was, “it’s free real estate.” You get to just throw things on the wall and see what sticks. And, “Oh, that’s really cool. Oh, that’s nice.” At some point I’d done a big sketch of a big bird lady with a claymore, and Seb said, “That’s cool.” And then kind of ran with it.

IGN: What’s the toughest part about the art style you’ve chosen for Eternal Strands?

Primeau: The toughest part was…A lot of people in the team have experience making games, so it was to get outside of that mold that we’ve been to.

For me, working on games that were more realistic in terms of look, I think it was really tough just to think differently, to change our mindset, especially that we knew that we would be a small team, so we had to do the art differently, find recipes, especially when we were talking about textures, for example. So having a good mix.

Chafe: One of the things too is also as we’re all a bunch of artists, and every artist has their own style that they just suddenly have ingrained in them, and that’s what makes us all unique as artists as well. But when you’re on a project, you have to coalesce together. You can’t kind of have one look different from the other. When you’re doing something more realistic, you have your North Star, which is a giant load of references that are real. And you can say “it has to look like that, as close to that as possible.”

When you have a style in mind and you’re developing at the same time, you kind of look at it and you review it and you have a feeling more than anything else.

You’re training each other with your styles as you kind of merge together in the end. And that kind of is how the style happened through, like you mentioned, like finding easy recipes, through just actually creating assets and seeing what comes out and, “Oh, that’s really cool. Okay, we can now use that as kind of our North Star.”

For more on Eternal Strands, check out our preview of the Ark of the Forge boss fight, or read our interview with the founders of Yellow Brick Games on going from AAA studios to their own indie shop, and for everything else stick with IGN.

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