Among the most surprising changes is the loosening of restrictions on “chandelier bidding,” wherein auctioneers make up fake bids to generate hype.
Auction Houses
Posted inNews
New Auction Platform Will Contribute to HBCU Art History Scholarships
Greenhouse Auctions, launching its inaugural sale on December 2, will help fund scholarships for students at over 50 historically Black colleges and universities.
Posted inNews
NY Court Ruling Allows Auction Sellers to Remain Anonymous
The New York Court of Appeals has ruled in the case of Jenack v. Rabidazeh, reversing a lower court’s decision and allowing sellers of objects at auction to remain anonymous.
Posted inArt
Traditional Chinese Painter Beats Munch for Fastest-Growing Auction Figures
Could traditional Chinese artists little known in the west take over the global art market? Bloomberg notes that auction price indexes for Li Keran, a prominent 20th-century Chinese landscape painter, are growing at a faster rate than Edvard Munch, the western master behind “The Scream,” a version of which sold at Sotheby’s this year for a record $120 million.
Posted inArt
Connoisseurs and Other Subversives
In an article published on Wednesday in the International Herald Tribune titled “The Impoverished Connoisseurs,” longtime art and auction correspondent Souren Melikian recalls an era that lasted from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, when European art buyers “who went in for small Medieval objects, antiquities and the rest did so because they wanted to live with them, not because they looked for tokens of social status or clever investments.”
Posted inArt
A Guide to New York’s Auction Houses
There is possibly no better place to witness the titans of the art market — the auction houses — duke it out than in New York. But ever wonder what they’re all about? Here’s a straightforward guide.
Posted inOpinion
Why China’s Auction Market is Tops
A study by Artprice finds that the Chinese art market is the largest in the world — but only in terms of auctions. The misleading news bite is telling in other ways, though. The Chinese domestic auction market is growing so quickly in part because Western auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s have failed to dominate even while the Chinese collector community has grown hugely.
Posted inArt
WTF is… the Secondary Market?
Throughout the course of NYC’s art fair week, I overheard questions over what art work was being sold, and who it was being sold to. Of course, art fairs exist to sell work, and the work on display is there to be sold. But where do these works come from? This is where the secondary market comes in. Though most galleries simply sell work from the studios of the artists they represent, the secondary market deals in works that have already been sold, at least once. Fairs like the Armory’s Modern section focus heavily on secondary market works, as do auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s.