It’s not news that the market has cooled for some artists, not least many of those emerging names who were unknown pre-pandemic and whose markets mushroomed on the synthetic fertilizer of cheap covid money. Emmanuel Taku’s prices tanked by March, so it’s a wonder why Zachary Small’s NYT article "A Sharp Downturn in the Art Market" (which follows Katya Kazakina’s market-contraction article from that month in using Taku as a key example) flashed on my phone as a timely notification on a Sunday morning. Let’s surmise that the cycle is slow for art-market journalists in August, at a moment between fairs and auctions.
Perhaps more puzzling, however, is Small’s propensity to connect dots. While he rightly cites high interest rates and inflation as factors affecting the markets for emerging artists such as Amani Lewis, Allison Zuckerman, and Taku, he situates that drop in contrast with a market “high point” of Christie’s auction of property from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in November 2022.
The Allen sale realized $1.5 billion, a record, by far, for any art auction. Five paintings fetched over $100 million that night, namely Georges Seurat’s Le Posses, Ensemble (Petite version) ($149.2 million); Paul Cezanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire ($137.8 million); Vincent Van Gogh’s Verger aves cyprès ($117.2 million); Paul Gauguin’s Maternité II ($105.7 million); and Gustav Klimt’s Birch Forest ($104.6 million).
Small opines that the Allen sale “seemed to forecast a booming future for an industry that had been getting hotter by the year”, before he narrates the following phase of contraction, defined by speculative collectors unable to secure favorable financing for acquisitions. While he is quite right that much of the market, not just for the the likes of Taku, has been affected by the larger stringency, this macroeconomic condition may not be so decisive in the market for masterpieces.
The Allen sale was not a malfunctioning weather vane. It was a generational sale, with a concentration of rare and important pieces, unlike in overall caliber to anything we should expect to see offered in a single auction perhaps for decades, much less within the span of less than two years.
Multi-billionaire collectors who buy in the masterpiece market may have a purchasing capability that transcends factors such as interest rates and inflation that significantly affect other market segments. As such, one should ask whether the highest prices realized in the Allen sale for Seurat, Cezanne, et. al, in November 2022 would be substantially different if those same paintings were to be offered for sale today — or if in fact the paucity of results at the highest end is primarily a supply-side issue quite unrelated to the other matters at hand in the market today.
In any case, these are two different articles, crudely hammered together.