Auctions stage powerful dramas about the different values that are ascribed to artworks. On the one hand, the outcome of a competitive bidding process imposes temporary clarity on the financial worth of artefacts that are typically difficult to price. On the other hand, the extent to which an artwork’s price tag corresponds to its aesthetic, historical and social importance is something that has been, and continues to be, a subject of contention. By tracing the changing spectacle of art auctions, this book explores the ongoing relevance of this public sales format to contemporary art markets and discusses important opportunities, controversies and conflicts of value to which it gives rise.
When a painting titled Peinture-poème (Musique, Seine, Michel, Bataille et moi) by Surrealist artist Joan Miró failed to meet its reserve price at a Christie’s auction in 2022, it was later acquired by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in a private sale for approximately US$8.3 million. Post-auction sales are often a corrective to high estimates (sometimes demanded by the seller), and unsold works are graphically referred to as ‘burned’ on the market. The museum managed to acquire Miró’s painting at the lower end of the auction house estimate. If public failure in the market did not impinge on the museum’s estimation of the work’s cultural significance, what does this tell us about the supposed consensus on value achieved in the auction arena? Which factors take precedence in determining the broader cultural merits of an artwork: institutional recognition, expert opinion or market success? Auctions are the most visible arena of clashes between these competing ideas about value, and their dramas have long-term consequences for artists, collectors, gallerists, museums and publics.
If auctions are a familiar part of the art landscape, what makes them a ‘hot topic’ today? The first reason concerns the visibility of their action and outcomes. Auctions generate eye-catching spectacle in their physical set-up, bidding rivalries, auctioneer performances and creation of legend. Applause frequently breaks out when a work is knocked down at a record-breaking price. Describing the 2017 Christie’s sale of Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci for US$450.3 million, art journalist Scott Reyburn recalls that the audience ‘gasped and whooped as if they’d just seen a rocket explode high above their heads’. Whereas the prices at which artworks change hands in private sales remain undisclosed, the results of auctions are public (with the exception of certain details regarding fees and guarantees) and are widely covered in the press. In consequence, these events produce a wealth of financial information about art and artists that is often used as a barometer for gauging the condition of the art market as a whole. Although the methodologies for data collection are often inconsistent, the hunger for pricing information among collectors and gallerists is voracious. This has seen the rise of a data industry specialised in the gathering and analysis of auction estimates, results and trends.
According to one such business, Artprice, the global turnover in the fine art auction market in 2022 was US$16.5 billion (the fourth-highest year in history). Within that headline figure, large auction houses achieved some eye-catching returns across a range of striking events. Phillips boasted a ‘white glove’ auction (a sale in which all lots are sold) of works by David Hockney in September 2022 and followed this with another sale dedicated entirely to the artist’s output in 2023. Christie’s auctions of works by noted collectors including the late Paul G. Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), the French fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy and the Swiss gallerists Thomas and Doris Ammann broke records for the prices achieved by individual lots and, in the case of the Allen sale, for an art auction itself (over US$1.5 billion). In November 2023, Sotheby’s sale of works from the collection of the late Whitney Museum patron, Emily Fisher Landau, became the highest grossing auction sale dedicated to a female collector (US$406.4 million).
Events such as these generate market spectacle in their own right, but they also highlight a second theme that attests to the ‘hotness’ of auctions: power. Sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre argue that international auction businesses have attained unprecedented levels of influence in the 21st century and that they fashion a global art market ‘unified from above’. By encouraging the public’s focus on international market trends, record-breaking prices, celebrity artists and ultra-high-net-worth collectors, activities at the top end of the market mirror, and arguably reinforce, broader inequalities of wealth and income within and across nations. In Boltanski and Esquerre’s view, the result is a cultural environment that contrasts ‘a very small number of ultra-beneficiaries – the stars – with a very large number of rejects’. This means that the auction industry is capable of encouraging a ‘winner-take-all’ market in which rewards go to artists with the strongest brands, and high prices are often mistaken for indicators of a work’s aesthetic value.
The ability of large auction houses to shape taste, make reputations and set market trends is undeniable, but this is only part of the picture. Increasingly, the auction format is being appropriated and transformed by those who work outside the upper echelons of the international art market. While some innovative auction activities are undertaken by artists, individuals and collectives in emulation of top-tier businesses, others are designed as a subversion of them. Experimentation with this historic sales format attests further to the contemporary importance of art auctions and broadens the remit of their spectacle. Arguably, the more dominant a set of norms, the stronger is the incentive to devise and implement counter-cultural strategies. As the following chapters will demonstrate, the auction has become a surprisingly mutable format in the 21st century and is capable of both reinforcing and challenging preconceptions about art markets and the values they create or perpetuate.
Whether large or small, international or regional, auction houses are always keen to launch new initiatives. The 21st century has witnessed the development of novel, online sales formats as well as innovative collaborations between auction businesses, artists, collectors and museums. Increasingly, some of these strategies are bringing about structural changes in the art market itself. Auctions have historically been associated with the secondary market – a sphere in which transactions take place after an artwork’s first acquisition by, for example, a collector, gallerist or museum (a primary market sale). While I will examine some of the culturally specific issues that impact on the firmness of the distinction between these market segments, it is widely recognised that auction houses around the world have encroached on the primary market by facilitating sales direct from artists to publics. In some senses, private sales on the part of auction houses are nothing new. They can help to prop up an auction house’s balance sheet when the secondary market is thin, and the 1990s saw both Sotheby’s and Christie’s move into this arena. Increasingly, however, auction houses are collaborating with, and selling works by, living artists, thereby usurping the traditional role of gallerists as those artists’ representatives. While this can lead to productive collaboration by auction houses with both artists and their gallerists, it has also generated tensions that I will examine in different art-world contexts.
Market expansion is matched by transformations in the cultural positioning of auction houses. No longer simply places for transacting in art, many of these businesses are styling themselves as multi-purpose cultural centres with spaces for exhibitions, education and public engagement. Such activities are often matched by the commissioning of new architecture and the resulting transformation of built environments. Taken together, these strategic innovations mark a significant extension of auction businesses and a spectacular reshaping of familiar cultural economies.
My hope in this book is to highlight the diversity of auctions while drawing out points of contrast and entanglement. This also entails consideration of the dematerialised spectacle to which art auctions give rise, including the production of knowledge and news. Throughout the discussion, I emphasise that auctions are far more than economic mechanisms for transacting in precious artefacts. They are also important platforms for human interaction. Whether propelling the ebbs and flows of artists’ careers, showcasing the private passions of collectors or simply generating events for people to watch in person or online, auctions constitute a spectacular sphere of information about art and its values in the 21st century.