Money talk

At least one market posted strong results in November. That was the market for contemporary art. In just four days in New York — 7 to 10 November — a phenomenal $775 million was spent on postwar and contemporary art at auction alone (who knows what deals were transacted privately). Sotheby’s evening sale exceeded its expectations by more than $45 million. Here, a real market rarity, a magnificent painting by the American Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, fetched a mighty $61.7 million. Some 45 works sold for over $1 million; seven sold for more than $10 million. Good news, one might say — but only up to a point.

It is a sign of the times that the flow of funds that has been diverted into the contemporary art market over the past two decades has turned into a flood. What was once — in commercial terms — a relative backwater has become the chosen vehicle for global financial speculation. Why contemporary art in particular? The reason is simple: the universal language of the international avant-garde makes it a globally marketable asset. Moreover, it is the only art market where there is no shortage of supply; indeed, this roaring bear of a market has attracted more and more artists as well as buyers.

That said, one of its peculiarities is that most of the money chases a gilded few. And while a growing divergence in prices between the best and the rest is evident throughout the entire art market, in the case of contemporary art, of course, history has yet to relate what the ‘best’ might be.

There are all manner of quantifiers used by this market’s speculators— rankings, indexes and auction prices themselves — to indicate artistic quality except, one sometimes suspects, an understanding of what is artistic quality.