Sales hype

An ancient Roman sceptic wondered how, when two augurs passed in the street and caught one another’s eye, they managed not to burst out laughing.

A Damien Hirst bisected lamb suspended in a glass tank of formaldehyde was sold for $3.37 million at Christie’s in New York early in May. Works by Donald Judd, who did not construct his industrial box productions himself, also, like Hirst, having others to do that kind of thing for him, fetched nearly $10 million. The final take for these and similar pieces was $143 million. What started as a joke in the days of Dada has become big business, and postmodern conceptual art is now as solemn a comedy and serious a money-spinner as the augury of old.

The French businessman François Pinault has a number of these highly priced sliced-and-pickled carcases and steel boxes in his private collection, as was revealed at the reopening, under new management at the end of April, of the Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal in Venice.

For nearly 20 years the Palazzo was used by the Fiat motor company for lavishly financed international art exhibitions until it became a luxury neither the cash-strapped car manufacturer nor its hereditary ruling dynasty, the Agnelli family, could any longer afford. The billionaire Pinault filled the vacuum by buying an 80 per cent share of the building (the rest remains in municipal hands).

Pinault had been planning to build his own museum, designed by the fashion world’s current favourite architect, the Japanese Tadao Ando, on an island in the Seine near Paris, the site of a defunct Renault factory. Thwarted by red tape and by the local council’s reluctance or inability to spend public money on urban regeneration in the area around the museum to provide a suitably salubrious setting for the monumental new project, Pinault decided to bail out and head south.