Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [10]
Alfred Taubman, the American shopping mall mogul whose assets included the A&W chain, equated fine art with one of his products. “There is more similarity . . . in a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible,” he told a business audience about the marketing challenges he faced after buying Sotheby’s auction house in 1983.4
Taubman’s $139 million purchase of the 241-year-old company was a sign that the once insular market was open to newcomers. Under Taubman, Sotheby’s began offering financing terms, insurance, restoration services, and storage as inducements to its new and relatively inexperienced collectors. It encouraged Wall Street to move into art investment and assigned staffers to reach out to corporations that wanted to set up on-site galleries. Taubman also sent works scheduled for sale on preauction tours across the United States and abroad, backing the tours with aggressive advertising campaigns. A different language sprang up at the auction houses: The new catchphrases were “threshold resistance,” “value,” and “liquidity.”
Christie’s, Sotheby’s rival, followed suit.
In this climate it was hardly surprising that the price of an artwork could increase as much as fivefold in a single year. In the past the media had seldom paid much attention to art auctions and sales, except for the occasional story about a rare find or a well-known collection that was headed for the block. Now auction prices routinely made headlines, and the investment returns were phenomenal. A Kentucky nursing home magnate who bought Pablo Picasso’s self-portrait Yo Picasso for $5.8 million in 1981 sold it seven years later for nearly $48 million, a net rate of return of 19.6 percent a year. Jackson Pollock’s Search, purchased in 1971 for $200,000, would sell for $4.8 million in May 1988, a 2,400 percent increase. Pollock, who had sold only a handful of
Although art investors were constantly being reminded that the bubble would inevitably burst, even the stock market crash of October 1987 failed to punch a hole in the balloon. A month later, van Gogh’s Irises, bought in 1947 for $84,000, sold for $53.9 million at Sotheby’s. Those who recalled art’s historical role in civilizing society, a larger and nobler role than enriching speculators, warned of the dangers of “canvas greed.”
“Art is no longer priceless, it is priceful,” said Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes.
Arguably, in many cases, style was winning out over substance. Young painters who wanted their work to attract a share of the free-flowing money quickly figured out that the key to success lay not only in the quality of the work itself but in the practice of “branding,” the establishment of a strong public association of the product with positive values. In the past, an aspiring artist struggled to build an alliance with a respected and powerful dealer, hoping that over time the dealer would persuade the world of art patrons and collectors that the young artist’s maturing talent deserved to be recognized and supported. Now, in the commodities-driven eighties, artists like Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, and Julian Schnabel followed Warhol’s example and became businessmen as much as artists. Art schools began offering business classes to their more enterprising students.
Some artists developed product lines, opened trademark stores, and pushed for their works to appear on billboards or in commercials in bald-faced campaigns to increase the market value of whatever they put their names to. At a time when the world seemed more interested in the art of the deal than in the art, the worth of a piece was often determined by the auctioneer’s gavel rather than by critical evaluation.
When Picasso’s Au Lapin Agile sold at Sotheby’s in 1989 for $40 million and change, it became the third most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, but the market