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ART: THESE PRICES ARE SURREALThe art market's climb looks unstoppable. But if you can do without a van Gogh...The Christie's International auction in London on the afternoon of Dec. 8 wasn't for the fainthearted. It featured daring ''Brit Pack'' works by young London-based artists from the cutting-edge collection of advertising baron Charles Saatchi. Among the pieces gaveled down at astonishing prices were Damien Hirst's The Lovers, four jars filled with cow organs in formaldehyde that went for $229,350, and a plaster cast of the underside of a sink by Rachel Whiteread that fetched $220,275, nearly three times the pre-auction high estimate. For the first time, a work of performance art sold at a major auction: The buyer paid $13,000 for a viewing and rights to perform it in the future. The London sale illustrates the millennium fever gripping the world art market. The Asia crisis, tanking emerging markets, stock jitters, and slowing economies in the U.S. and Europe haven't stopped the upward swing in art prices. To be sure, Asian and Latin American buyers are scarce. But collectors elsewhere remain unchastened. The London-based Daily Telegraph Art 100 Index, which traces prices of works by 100 top artists, rose 26% through November, double the rise for all of 1997. ''The market is extremely strong,'' says New York dealer David Nash, a former Sotheby's top gun. ''There's a lot of money around, most of it in the hands of Americans and Europeans--with Americans clearly dominant.'' GLUTTED. High rollers who venture out into this market, however, should know that it's a little like buying stock with the Dow not far from 9000. The art market has been getting ever more treacherous for over a year now. This isn't to say that there are bargains in every segment. But some buyers, especially those shelling out fast bucks earned in booming stock markets, may be overpaying. A prolonged stock market correction in the U.S. and Europe could easily clobber art prices at any time. Another constant worry among buyers is that a deepening of the world financial crisis could cause Japanese buyers to flood the market with too much art. A single painting, a van Gogh called Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which sold for an all-time record of $82.5 million in 1990, has been up for sale privately for months. The minimum asking price: $80 million. The fall auctions in New York this November demonstrated that the best works by well-known artists still fetch such prices. The top lot of all, an 1889 self-portrait believed to be the last painted by van Gogh, sold for $71.5 million. Experts had expected it to go for perhaps $25 million, but a bidding war between two unidentified buyers drove the price into the stratosphere. And Rene Magritte's Personal Values, one of his masterpieces, went for $7.1 million, a record for the artist. But there were also bargains to be had. Los Angeles collector Eli Broad snapped up Dry Run, a 1963 Robert Rauschenberg silk screen over photographic images for just under $1 million, which wasn't much more than the pre-auction minimum estimate. THE WYNN FACTOR. Many collectors see more value than usual in Impressionist works, which rose by only 9% this year in the Daily Telegraph survey. Real gems still cost a bundle: A sun-dappled boating scene by Claude Monet, Boatmen in Argenteuil, brought in $9 million, vs. a $6 million to $8 million pre-auction estimate. BuT Christopher Burge, chairman of Christie's North and South America operations, notes that the Japanese are now parceling out the troves of Renoirs and other works they paid millions for in a late-'80s frenzy, in an attempt to avoid tanking the market for any given painter. ''It has taken a long time to get the banks and insurance companies who own the paintings to accept that they have to come way down on price,'' Burge says. Perhaps the most active buyer is Las Vegas impresArio Steve Wynn, who art dealers figure has laid out $300 million over the last year on Impressionist art to display at his casinos. Indeed, there are more good Impressionist-era works available now than at any time since the 1980s--though buyers still must be wary. Boston money manager Scott M. Black, a careful and experienced collector, dropped out of the bidding for a Monet that eventually sold for $2.4 million. But he ended up getting good prices on works by Emile Bernard and Toulouse-Lautrec. And he spied values among some of the paintings he didn't bid on, notably a beautiful Sisley that went for about $600,000, a fraction of its price in the 1980s. ''I was pleasantly surprised,'' he says. ''You can buy good paintings for reasonable prices.'' The tab for an Impressionist work, of course, is still way out of reach for most collectors. A better bet this year for buyers on a budget is the red-hot contemporary art market. The London Saatchi sale demonstrated two key trends: The contemporary market is rapidly globalizing, and art from the 1990s now has substantial resale value at auction. Some controversial 1980s U.S. artists also are making a bit of a comeback: Prices of works by Jeff Koons, whose durability many had doubted, have jumped. And a self-portrait by 1980s phenom Jean-Michel Basquiat soared to $3.3 million. The key to getting good value, however, is to catch a trend early on. One way is to monitor museum purchases and shows of young artists--often a sign that an artist's rep is about to rise. For instance, London gallery owner Victoria Miro recommends Peter Doig, a young painter whose work is getting a museum show in Berlin in 1999. Josh Baer, editor of Baer Faxt, a Manhattan-based weekly art newsletter, singles out Los Angeles artist Charles Ray, who had a retrospective this summer at the Whitney. Prices of Ray's works skyrocketed to up to $200,000 at auction this autumn. A leading-edge collector like New York money manager Arthur Goldberg, however, bought his Charles Ray five years ago, at a fraction of that price. So who is Goldberg buying today? He's high on Olafur Eliasson, a young Icelandic photographer who has been shown widely only in the last three years and whose works are now in an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Eliasson also shows up this year in an annual ranking of rising new artists compiled by the German magazine Capital. ''UNDERAPPRECIATED.'' Another technique worth emulating is to buy works of established painters who have fallen out of favor. Lately, for instance, Goldberg has been buying works of Willem de Kooning from the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawings from this late period in the artist's life are ''underappreciated,'' he says, and sell for $15,000 to $40,000. San Francisco dealer Richard I. Polsky recommends paintings on paper by the late artist Sam Francis, available for as little as $15,000. These days, photos in general also tend to be excellent buys. Goldberg is buying photos by Harry Callahan, who is in his 80s. Callahan's new work goes for as little as $2,500 and is ''badly undervalued,'' he says. But some classic photos are going for unprecedented premiums. Noire et Blanche, Paris (Positive and Negative), 1926, a haunting study of a woman's head by the surrealist Man Ray, set an all-time record for a photo when it sold for $607,500 at auction this fall. Up-and-comers, obviously, are far more affordable. And Victoria Miro, who handles many hot Brit Pack artists, points to Thomas Demand, a little-known photographer who has just done a film that will be shown at the Tate Gallery in February. Photographers on the Capital list include German Andreas Gursky and American Nan Goldin. The lesson is that for a careful buyer, art may be a less risky investment than most. After all, if you do what the experts recommend, you'll study up on a few artists you really love, for these are investments that may hang on your wall for the long term. Jeremy L. Eckstein, a London art investment consultant, figures even conservative Old Master paintings appreciate by 10% or 12% annually. Impressionist works have gone up by 15% annually, he says. The savviest collectors never stop buying, through good times and bad. But these days they're buying warily.
By Thane Peterson in Frankfurt RELATED ITEMS
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Updated Dec. 17, 1998 by bwwebmaster
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