On that day, it will have been eight months since The Curve started flattening in New York and Los Angeles. The stock market’s wild gyrations will likely have been replaced by the Dow’s slow march back up the hill. So, will the art market have been marching in lockstep with the stock market? From a collector’s standpoint, just what will it look like on that first day of 2021?
For an answer, I turn to Elizabeth von Habsburg, Managing Director of Winston Art Group, America’s largest independent art advisory and appraisal firm.
“It will be a different age, with a lot more technology,” she predicts. Take the ubiquitous art fairs, for instance. “The larger fairs will be back in person, but they will start to be smaller, with an online component. The small fairs will be online permanently.” Many would be relieved by such a development, as it would obviate the need for hop scotching across the globe to attend them all in person.
The burgeoning art fair scene, though, has been a 21st C. phenomenon; its participants are already internet savvy. By contrast, the roots of the auction world date back hundreds of years. (Sotheby’s was founded in 1744, and Christie’s just 22 years later.) A dramatic pivot to an online model would represent an existential shift in the way it does business, and, indeed von Habsburg foresees transition pains. She has already witnessed auctions in which way too many items went unsold; “the first sales were not great- as estimates adjust, though, the rate will improve.” Additionally, once the houses realize that they can move not only the auctions themselves, but much of their staff-work online, they can shed office space and employees.
Traffic flows up York Avenue past Sotheby’s offices in New York City. (Photo by Stephen … [+] Chernin/Getty Images)
Getty Images
“I would imagine, yes, they will shrink their footprints, in the model of Phillips, which has done a great job,” she adds. (N.B.- As of this writing, Sotheby’s has already furloughed 200 staffmembers.)
This transition, though, will be easier for some auctioneers than others. “Sotheby’s and Christie’s have the corporate knowledge and will emerge healthy,” she anticipates. Additionally, as the purveyors of the highest-end works, they will enjoy another advantage. Von Habsburg references Sotheby’s recent online sale for $1.27 million of George Condo’s Antipodal Reunion, “probably the most expensive online sale I have seen.”
George Condo’s “Antipodal Reunion”
Sotheby’s
The profit margin on such high-end sales can be staggering. The item is easily transported, takes up very little room, is easy to research, and has great collector appeal. Pity, then, the poor regional houses, which, to survive, have to take on estates with 50 pieces of mammoth traditional furniture.
In the days when everything was supersized
Liveauctioneers
The logistics surrounding the sale of such items eats mightily into their bottom line. Adding insult to injury, “the markets for these types of items have not been terribly vibrant,” she understates.
Regardless, art fairs and auction houses at least have the advantage of being able to shotgun a broad array of material to collectors. What, then, of the typical retail gallery, which markets just a handful of artists out of its stable? “I think that one-third of the galleries in Los Angeles will close, and I would not be surprised to see 25% close in New York and other major art cities,” she predicts. (Her estimate of the impact on L.A. echoes that of an L.A. Times survey from earlier this week.) Right now, they are all struggling to find their footing on the web, bombarding collectors with news of their new online viewing rooms. “I am receiving too many individual gallery notifications; it feels like 200 per day,” (though she admits that it is not really that many). To reduce such stress on the collecting public, she foresees the galleries coalescing into online collectives, along the lines of the newly minted Gallery Association Los Angeles. 60 Contemporary galleries there have combined their offerings on a single platform, galleryplatform.la, which will open in three weeks.
Granularizing the view down even further, how will individual artists weather the rest of 2020? “These are the people who can least afford this; they will be the hardest hit,” she fears. Consequently, she encourages her own collector clients to “go see what the emerging artists have out there. Jump in!” To get through this, she predicts that isolated painters will need to form communities, not unlike GALA.
The crisis, she believes, can have “a positive outcome. Everyone will pull together to find solutions that will benefit everyone.” If such art world titans as Hauser and Wirth and Gagosian can agree to cohabitate on GALA then maybe, just maybe….
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
