The month of April in New York is always a time of anticipation in the auction market. For the mighty sales that are usually scheduled to take place a few weeks later in May—encompassing Impressionist and Modern art as well as Post-War and Contemporary—are the landmarks of the entire auction season, a bellwether of success or failure.
This week I have been reading a novel by Richard Russo entitled Empire Falls. The story takes place in a fictional mill town in central Maine, once prosperous but now shuttered and impoverished like so many others throughout New England. Still, the town’s founding family, the Whitings, live on in detached grandeur and ghostliness. Here, for example, is a reference to Mrs. C.B. Whiting, the aging matriarch of the family, who retains a puppeteer’s power over the fate of Empire Falls:
On a visit to London with my son and daughter in March 2018, we decided to visit the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall. The drabness of the day was relieved by the sight of several ducklings waddling across the road toward us, oblivious to traffic. A long line of visitors queued up quietly, and soon we were all inside and transported back to the 1940s, and wartime. A sign entitled “The Cabinet War Rooms” distilled the essence of the place:
Since writing to you in early March about the state-of-the-art market amidst the onrushing coronavirus, it would seem that the entire market—like the country, indeed the whole world—is working from home. This state of affairs will continue for as long as necessary. People are adjusting to the new reality of remote art market commerce.
To those old-timers in the art market who profess to have “seen it all” in the past few decades, the Coronavirus now spreading across the globe must be jarring and disorienting. For no one has seen this measure of uncertainty in recent memory.