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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Cult of the masterpiece

Susan Moore on the art market

New York dealer L&M Arts was happy to oblige, and a show of 15 additional Warhol Mao portraits will be unveiled alongside Christie’s forthcoming season of Asian and Chinese contemporary and classical art sales in Hong Kong next week, 22–29 May. Just last month, Sotheby’s collaborated with another New York dealer, Acquavella, to offer what proved to be a hugely successful sale of the Estella Collection of Chinese contemporary art in Hong Kong.

Most tellingly — and depressingly — the marketing of the Giant Mao is pandering to that other phenomenon of our age: the cult of the masterpiece. Warhol would no doubt approve. A premium has always been paid for the greatest works of art, but the past few years have seen the price chasm between the best and the rest widen to epic proportions. It has happened across the market, from antiquities to contemporary. And the incrementals of subsequent leap-frogging prices are breathtaking. In June last year, for instance, a sensational Roman bronze, ‘Artemis and the Stag’, unexpectedly deaccessioned by the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, sold for a staggering $28.6 million, a record price for an antiquity and for any sculpture at auction. By December, a powerful yet diminutive 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian carving, the Guennol lioness, had wrested the title. It realised over $57 million.

As for Warhol, the record set by Mr Lau’s Mao lasted six months and was dwarfed when ‘Green Car Crash’ fetched a whopping $71.7 million. Similarly, the accolade of world’s most expensive living artist changed hands four times in quick succession last year, passing from Jasper Johns to Lucian Freud, then Damien Hirst and on to Jeff Koons. In November, a Fabergé egg found a new auction record price for any Russian work of art at almost £9 million; already this spring a 12th-century wooden Buddha has set a new record for any Japanese work of art — $14.4 million (estimate $1.5 million–$2 million) — and a ka’ba key expected to fetch around half a million realised a new record for any Islamic piece, £9.2 million.

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