CHANGING TIMES FOR THE ART Page 108

Business Art News

CHANGING TIMES FOR THE ART AUCTION BUSINESS

www.aspireart.net

The news last month that the almost

300-year-old Sotheby’s fine art auction house has been put up for sale to a private entity brought to an end a period of some 31 years during which the company was the only publically traded auction house in the world – listed during that time on the New York exchange.

At the time of writing the prospective buyer is a French-Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur called Patrick Drahi, who has put forward an offer of $3.7 billion, to be effected through his US-based family holding company, a sum which offers a substantial premium to shareholders. According to the New York Post, the auction house has subsequently cast around for better offers. The offer of a private purchase comes as Sotheby’s has consistently been losing ground and marketshare to its major competitor, Christie’s, which is privately held by French billionaire François-Henri Pinault.

The two auction houses, originally both English, and both dating back to the mid eighteenth century, still dominate the global art auction industry, despite the rise of Asian, especially Chinese, houses in the last decade. Christie’s recent, heavily publicised, successes include selling the most expensive single painting in history in 2017, Salvator Mundi, at the time credited to Leonardo da Vinci, for $450m. In 2018 the company sold the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller for $835m, by far the largest amount ever achieved for a private collection.

A common refrain in the competition between the two auction houses, and the main business reason given for the prospective sale of Sotheby’s, is the ‘flexibility’ it will provide

William Kentridge, Stereoscope

108WWW.ARTTIMES.CO.ZA

Sam Nhlengethwa, Glimpses. Right: David Goldblatt, Kibble lashers

the company. What this essentially means is that Sotheby’s will have access to funding and potential investment in order to acquire stock and potentially guarantee a minimum price to sellers. Publically traded companies are of course beholden to shareholders, whether institutional or private, in any such dealings. Reporting to shareholders and getting the go-ahead to fund guarantees – essentially a form of future hedging which ensures the work is pre-sold before auction at a minimum amount – can take time. The more agile and flexible position offered by private and wealthy ownership means that highly valuable work can be guaranteed quicker, and thus can be consigned to the privately-held auction house.

The guarantee system has been widelydiscussed and both praised and criticised. Praised because it offers a safety net for sellers, yet criticised because its speculative nature attracts investment capital ‘cowboys’,

looking to make quick money at the highend of the market. Auction house guarantees also represent a considerable competitive advantage in securing vital and scarce inventory.

Locally the guarantee system has never been used in the art auction market, primarily because of the risks involved to both potential third party ‘speculative’ guarantors, and to the auction houses themselves. South Africa’s art auction market has also always been comprised of privately held companies. The ability of these businesses to attract, consign and sell stock is complicated by the relatively small size of the market here, with the consequent smaller pool of local collectors, especially of top-end, high-value signatures. This can be traced in part to the long decades of cultural isolationism South Africa lived through under apartheid, making collecting tastes in the country somewhat insulated from international trends.

110 WWW.ARTTIMES.CO.ZA

William Kentridge, Mine

Of course, this position has begun to change as the country’s art market is exposed to and becomes much more a part of these international currents. Local auction houses find themselves at a crossroads – do they continue to deal in local work with diminishing returns and collector bases, or do they internationalise where South African work is saleable on international auction platforms? After all, exchange rates mean that guarantees at the multi-million dollar level for such work would not be necessary, and new collectors may well be intrigued.

Among the small roll-call of South African artists who have current international value, William Kentridge is perhaps most prominent. Aspire Art Auctions has positioned itself as the go-to contemporary auction house in SA, and its successes achieved with Kentridge in comparison to international sales make for interesting reading. Its second highest price for a Kentridge drawing, in 2017, was in line with the upper reaches of dollar-linked auction market prices, and its world-record price of R6,600,400, achieved in 2018, for a drawing from the film Stereoscope, still stands to date.

Outside of the contemporary segment, Aspire is focused on other areas of the market that are currently ripe for growth and potential internationalisation. One of these is the underrepresented work by black twentieth century artists, with a recent highlight the selling of a suite of photo-collages, Glimpses of the Fifties and Sixties by well-known Johannesburg artist Sam Nhlengethwa for a world record of R967,300 earlier this year. At the same sale in June, the company also highlighted the depth and collectability of South African fine art photography, selling another local artist with an international market and appeal, David Goldblatt. His powerful image The last of the bigger rocks has just been dropped into a kibble. Now, with shovels, the team “lashes” (loads) the small stuff into the kibble. (1969) achieved R443,440, a world auction record.

Aspire’s results, and its burgeoning roster of international buyers in the South African market, indicate that a lot can be achieved by a smaller, more agile player, with artworks that are poised to grow in value on the global stage. Just ask Christie’s.

112 WWW.ARTTIMES.CO.ZA