Despite auctioneers selling about 1,600 works of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art within the last week, the only serious moment of excitement came from a $6.2 million banana. The conceptual artwork, “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan, had a crowd of at least 300 jammed into the Sotheby’s salesroom to witness its absurd triumph — becoming the world’s most expensive fruit in a series of sales where several more traditional artworks failed to muster even a single bid.
There were certainly other highlights. A collector, identified as the hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin by the art-market newsletter the Canvas, and by three art advisers who requested anonymity to discuss private business, spent more than $121 million for a 1954 Surrealist painting by René Magritte called “The Empire of Light.” (A spokeswoman for Griffin declined to comment.) A beauty mogul’s Claude Monet picture of water lilies from the 1910s went for $65.5 million. Lower estimates and smaller sales also helped promote a rare depth of bidding in some cases.
But it wasn’t enough to hide the doldrums of an auction market that continues to sag behind its 2022 sales records, when a pent-up supply of masterpieces during the pandemic pushed the fall sales to $3.2 billion. This time around, the three major auction houses — Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips — sold $1.3 billion in art, squarely within expectations but down 40 percent from last November and 60 percent from the market’s peak in 2022.
One reason for the slump is a supply contraction: few wanted to sell prized paintings during an election season, when rich collectors were uncertain about how economic conditions might shift. A hangover from the pandemic sales frenzy also left discretionary sellers with little motivation to engage. By last Friday, market analysts sang a common refrain: the results weren’t great, but they could have been worse.
“The art market has been flat for more than 10 years, regardless of stock prices, interest rates and inflation environments,” said Roman Kräussl, a professor of finance at Bayes Business School in London, who specializes in research on art as an asset class. “It seems like the art market has lost its momentum, its hype, its must-haveness.”
The week’s results — both good and bad — spoke volumes about the current strengths and weaknesses of today’s art market. Here are four insights.
A ‘Trump Bump’ That Didn’t Materialize
Some analysts expected that Donald J. Trump’s victory in the presidential election would cast a glow over the art market after seeing the prices of some stocks, cryptocurrencies and the dollar lift shortly after his win.
But with a few notable exceptions, mainly at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions of estates representing two important collectors — Sydell Miller and Mica Ertegun — bidding remained cautiously measured, with most works selling within their estimates. Several big-ticket pieces by major names failed to sell, including Henri Matisse’s early 1920s portrait of a topless woman in a feathered headdress, carrying a low estimate of $12 million.
If anything, the presidential election had only a slight ripple effect on the art market. The recent boost in cryptocurrency values allowed for some young bidders to compete for a chance to own Cattelan’s banana, which had also become a popular meme on social media since the auction was announced.
At least three of the seven bidders on the work — including the winner, the 34-year-old entrepreneur Justin Sun — were cryptocurrency investors. One underbidder, Bob Liu, said in an interview that the post-election crypto rally boosted his ability to compete. Sporting a white T-shirt with a picture of the duct-taped banana on it, Liu said he represented a group of around 22,000 people that formed just two weeks ago to invest in a new cryptocurrency named after the artwork. Several bidders on Keith Haring’s suite of 31 subway graffiti drawings, which sold for a total of $9.2 million, also planned to pay with cryptocurrency, according to Sotheby’s.
Members of the traditional art world found less evidence that Trump’s election made a difference in the fall auction season. “The stock market had already priced in rate cuts under Biden,” said the art adviser Wendy Cromwell, who attended the sales. “Post-election, buyers remain highly selective. There is healthy demand for exceptional works of art and middling results for much of the rest.”
Masterpieces Move. Others Don’t.
With potential sellers still nervous about the results of the election, this latest series of marquee auctions were noticeably thinner than in previous years. It seemed like only paintings of true historical importance and unmistakable quality gained attention.
Seven works sold for more than $20 million each, compared with 24 in last year’s November sales, when the market was already showing signs of a slump. “I’m not rushing to tell people to sell at auction unless they are desperate for cash and want to get out,” said Philip Hoffman, the founder of the Fine Art Group.
Experts also said that Sotheby’s had compromised its ability to secure top-notch paintings earlier this year, when the company overhauled its commission structure. Although the changes were designed to make the calculations clearer and more beneficial for buyers, they also hurt the ability of specialists to negotiate attractive terms for sellers.
Several art advisers said the challenge of winning consignments became so great that Sotheby’s began offering perks to clients, like a cut of the auction house’s own fee, even when it was not explicitly permitted under its new policy. Sotheby’s declined to comment. Christie’s ended up winning the best consignment of the week through Ertegun’s estate. The $121 million sale of her Magritte painting made the Surrealist only the 16th artist to break the $100 million threshold at auction, according to data compiled by the French market analyst company Artprice. It came down to just two determined bidders who took 10 minutes to push the price up to $121.2 million with fees, above its estimate.
Christie’s sold the second-priciest work of the week, too — by Ed Ruscha, the witty painter of the American West, who is 86. His monumental gas-station scene from 1964, which was a centerpiece in his recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, went for $68.3 million with fees, an auction high for the artist.
Surrealism and Whimsy Take Top Dollar
In addition to gauging the strength of the market, auctions also serve as a barometer of changing taste.
Some of the more macho name-brand artists failed to curry favor this week. Gloopy late works by Pablo Picasso, which experts say have seen inflated prices in recent years, fared poorly. (Two, including the 1967 painting “Mousquetaire et Petit Personnage,” which carried a low estimate of $8 million at Christie’s, failed to sell, and one was withdrawn ahead of the auction, a sign of a lack of interest among buyers.) And two of four high-profile works on offer by Jeff Koons, one of the most expensive living artists at auction, performed significantly below expectations or failed to sell. A Koons sculpture featuring five vacuums enshrined in a vitrine, meanwhile, sold at Christie’s for $5.1 million — within expectations, but $1.3 million less than it fetched at auction in 2017.
Buyers were more partial to surreal, sometimes whimsical objects that blurred the line between the fine and decorative arts. The week’s darlings included the married French duo Claude Lalanne (1925–2019) and François-Xavier Lalanne (1927-2008), known collectively as Les Lalanne. Beginning in the 1960s, the pair created sculptures, tables and chairs elaborately adorned with animals and foliage. They were mavericks at a time when abstraction was the dominant style and furniture was not considered fine art. But ever since an estate sale following Claude’s death in 2019 quadrupled expectations, their market has been on fire.
“It’s pretty correction-resistant,” said Jodi Pollack, the co-head of 20th century design at Sotheby’s, which sold several Les Lalanne works from the Miller estate. “Their work is so relatable and so humanizing.”
Three of the duo’s top 10 auction results were recorded this week, including an estimate-shattering $11.6 million table by François-Xavier Lalanne. Its glass surface is held up by a network of bronze leafy branches; underneath the canopy is a herd of free-standing elephants.
Les Lalanne have benefited from the support of influential tastemakers like the designer and art collector Yves Saint Laurent and the architect Peter Marino. The duo’s market has also managed to avoid a pitfall that has marred auction results for many other artists. Despite the fact that their prices continue to rise, estimates have climbed relatively slowly, allowing the work to overperform and creating a positive feedback loop.
Speculation Wanes for Young Artists
Two years ago, it seemed like the art market was tilting toward ever-younger generations of artists, many fresh out of graduate school and surprised to see their paintings going for six figures at auction. That is no longer the case.
In May 2022, Sotheby’s “The Now” sale of contemporary art raised $72.9 million from 23 lots. This time around, the sale of 10 lots totaled a far more modest $16.5 million — almost 40 percent of which came from the Cattelan banana. A vanishingly small number of young artists exceeded their estimates in the evening sales. One that did was the London-based artist Li Hei Di (born in 1997), whose $127,000 dreamy abstract landscape more than doubled its high estimate at Phillips.
“A handful of young artists shooting up in prices were the last speculative tokens introduced by the art market,” said Alain Servais, a Brussels-based collector.
Just three works in Sotheby’s latest “The Now” auction were by artists under 40. The vibrant pink 2021 abstract, “Taught Thought,” by the British painter Jadé Fadojutimi (born in 1993) was the most ambitiously estimated of these, at $500,000-$700,000. It sold for $780,000, with fees.
In March, by contrast, a Fadojutimi abstract of the same size and date had sold at auction for $2 million, her high price and the 11th seven-figure auction price for the artist since 2021. Back in 2020, these were being sold by the London gallerist Pippy Houldsworth for between $26,000 to $58,500. Fadojutimi is now represented by Gagosian, where her works in a current show are priced around $525,000 each, according to advisers.
”After such a stratospheric rise in prices post-Covid there was only one way things could go once the market cooled down,” said Matt Watkins, the co-founder of Parafin gallery in London, which closed its doors in March. “The prices that were being achieved didn’t make sense to any sane observer and were always unlikely to be sustained longer term.”
The correction Watkins anticipated has arrived in many parts of the market. “Speculators have stepped back,” said Caroline Sayan, an art adviser and former auction executive. Market veterans, she said, “felt there needed to be a recalibration in pricing. We’re definitely getting that.”
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