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It looks like just another Picasso, one of many on offer during this month’s season of megawatt art auctions and fairs in New York. But such quick judgments are symptomatic of an oversaturated market, says Loïc Gouzer, who is selling Picasso’s richly drawn and vibrant “Tête d’homme à la pipe” (1971) for between $6mn and $8mn via his app called Fair Warning.
“There is too much art to focus on and everything that everyone sells is now called a ‘masterpiece’. I challenge anyone to find a Picasso work from this [late] period that is better than the one we have, but will people realise that? In a world where it is hard to know what is true from what is fake, how can you know what is good from bad?” Gouzer says.
Such saturation is part of the thinking behind the Fair Warning app, which sells just one work every one to two weeks to the sound of an auctioneer’s inviting patter. “It’s about making space to look at something in a way you wouldn’t if the work was, say, one of thousands in an art fair,” says Gouzer, who cut his teeth at Christie’s where he was instrumental in selling Leonardo da Vinci’s $450mn “Salvator Mundi”, the most expensive work ever at auction. For Fair Warning, Gouzer has an unusual vision: “I imagine people are sitting on the toilet to look at the app, because that is the only time they have to focus.”
Meanwhile, Christie’s has recently orchestrated two private auctions, for a handful of select clients, confirms Guillaume Cerutti, former CEO and now chair of the auction house. He can’t reveal the works sold this way, though he says both were by “20th-century masters” and resulted in a final price of “more than $100mn”, a level that has been largely missing from the traditional auctions of late. “For both sales [in 2021 and 2023], clients were excited by the format and flattered to be included in a select group,” Cerutti says. Sellers, he notes, got the best of both worlds — the possible upside of auction and the discretion of a private sale, though he adds, “it is only for the very top works.”
The art market is rethinking its methods, now that its protagonists are facing some uncomfortable realities having benefited from a powered-up scene since the turn of the millennium. “The old models are under stress. Expenses are exploding while revenues and margins are contracting. Suddenly, the industry is asking, where do we go now?” says Marc Glimcher, chief executive of the international gallery business Pace.
His company was embroiled in one of the strongest industry rumours this year — talk of a deal with the auction house Sotheby’s took a long time to die down (though now has) — while other speculations, such as Christie’s being in the running to buy the Frieze art fair and publishing group, characterised a market that knows it needs to shift gear.
No one is commenting on any of it, while Frieze last week confirmed its near $200mn sale to the Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel, fresh from his role as CEO of the fair’s previous owner Endeavor. It might seem more of the same, but, Glimcher says, “Ari has a lot of good ideas, it means something exciting is going to happen.”
That will be needed — art fairs represent a significant and increasing external expense to galleries. This year’s Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report found that while art fair sales accounted for 31 per cent of dealers’ totals in 2024, up by 2 per cent on 2023, as an expense these rose by 10 per cent to 27 per cent of the pie. An anonymised dealer is quoted saying that “costs, in general, are constantly growing. The offer [from fairs], on the contrary, always remains the same, without major innovations or improvements.”
Against this backdrop, alternative art fairs, which tend towards the more experimental and smaller galleries, are increasingly on the scene. To New York this week comes the second edition of Esther (May 6-10), a fair that positions itself as less commercially driven than the big brand events, and geared towards socialising. This year’s events include performances, dinners and even a drag clown bingo night, confirms its gallerist co-founder Margot Samel. At London’s Minor Attractions, which will run its third edition to coincide with the Frieze fairs in October, the emphasis is as much on music as art, with DJs and bands thrown into the mix — rapper AJ Tracey might join the fray this year, says co-founder Jonny Tanna. “We have a cultural gap in this city and I want to show people what London has to offer,” he says. His fair, like many of the alternatives and unlike the major events, is free to visit.
Christie’s Cerutti says that collaborations between auction houses and galleries — for long seen as verboten in the industry — are very much on the cards, though as partnerships rather than shared business ventures. In Hong Kong, the auction house has just closed a selling exhibition of 18th-century French furniture held in partnership with the Paris gallery Steinitz. Pace’s new outpost in Berlin is shared with the city’s Galerie Judin — each takes turns to host an exhibition in a restored 1950s petrol station on Potsdamer Strasse. Other galleries are breaking the mould: during this year’s Art Basel fair and to mark its 15th anniversary, Clearing Gallery has rented a villa to fill with art from the bedrooms to the basement, offering an alternative to its art fair booth and the usual gallery “white cube” format (Maison Clearing, Wettsteinallee, June 15-21).
It remains to be seen if any new models will pull through the current stasis but there is a sense that many market players regret the rampant financialisation of art in recent years — though skirt over the part they have played in it. Glimcher talks about “going back to the artists, not losing sight of what we do”, while Gouzer says: “A lot of people who said they were collectors turned out to be investors and then the magic, that layer of the intangible, left the art world.” With $1bn of art on the auction block next week — including quite a few Picassos — some magic might be what’s needed.
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