Settled into a new reality, one in which cocktail receptions, crowds and people waving paddles in a packed saleroom all seem a thing of the past, the art market has shown surprising resilience and ingenuity. As we expected in developments over the summer, big changes were coming.
What we didn’t expect was a new era of showmanship in the art world. This was ushered in with a bang on the evening of June 29th at Sotheby’s as they conducted their first-ever virtual sale. It was spectacular: a three-sales-in-one-night format linking three continents simultaneously and yielding $363.2 million.
What theatre! As there would be no live bidders in the room, the entire focus was on the Sotheby’s specialists standing at attention in their fenced-off pods and holding a phone. The five-hour spectacle roared along with no technical glitches, for it had been choreographed to perfection, with the auctioneer reading off a teleprompter to open and close the sale while bobbing and weaving as the online and phone bids poured forth. For sheer televised spectacle it reminded me of the old Hollywood Squares, but much slicker and more suspenseful.
As ArtNews reported:
“Auctioneer Oliver Barker’s ability to keep the impression of momentum going through his skillful patter was somewhat masked by the format’s emphasis on the subtle emotions of Sotheby’s specialists as they pleaded with their eyes, feigned nonchalance or shrugged in exasperation.”
Watching the show on my laptop, I confess to being mesmerized. It was vastly more compelling and dramatic than any comparable high-end evening auction in the saleroom at Sotheby’s or Christie’s from the old days, with people packed in like sardines. This new format was so much more efficient and enlightened! It made me wonder: If they could sell Francis Bacon’s Triptych (1981) for $84.5 million in this Zoom-like extravaganza, why would they ever go back to the old, traditional, in-person format? Apparently Oliver Barker had the same message, as he declared: “These innovations are here to stay!”
As we head into the fall 2020 season it is clear that technology has redefined, even revolutionized the art market. One must now go online for virtually all its offerings, which seem ever more plentiful. Throughout the day one is bombarded with announcements of, say, auction house pop-up sales of jewelry or Hip Hop memorabilia. They’re marketed like snacks!
In another change, the old collecting boundaries seem to have vanished in the blink of an eye. Christie’s, for example, has announced that their major Contemporary art sale on October 6th will feature a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton (estimate: $6-8 million), 17 feet high, 40 feet long and about 67 million years old, discovered in South Dakota in 1987 and named “Stan.”
One has to ask: Why in a Contemporary art sale? To which Christie’s replies, in the irony-laden lingo of the new art market: “T. rex is a brand name in a way that no other dinosaur is. It sits very naturally against a Picasso, a Jeff Koons or an Andy Warhol.”