Art Prices Rollercoster

The Scotsman reports that Gerhard Richter – the man dubbed Europe’s greatest living painter – has attacked the staggering prices that the international art market has notched up in the past decade. Even the price tags on his own paintings, which tipped £7 million earlier this year, he says are “too high”. The painter of giant, vibrant tableaux expresses scorn for the auction antics of celebrity artists such as Damien Hirst. “This has to do with these mad prices we have now, because we are losing our culture, when you see the auction catalogues full of bulls*** and hype,” he says. Aside from the very greatest Old Masters, Raphael or Leonardo, “paintings shouldn’t cost more than a million”. Asked if he thinks auction prices are now falling, he says, “I hope so.” A few days ago the Art Newspaper published figures on the astonishing growth in value of contemporary art sold at auction over the past few decades. From 1984 to the end of September 2008, average prices for the top quarter of art sales rose from $20,000 to $660,000 – up by 3,100 per cent. In the top 10 per cent, the average price grew from $43,000 to $2 million, a gain of nearly 4,400 per cent. After rising steadily from 2000, growth went wild in 2006. Richter, along with the art world’s critics and Cassandras, however, may finally be about to see their gloomy predictions realised. Over the past few months, as the credit crunch has made its impact felt, art dealers and auctioneers have clung to the hope that the art market may be one of the few sectors able ride out the recession. For a while, the see-sawing results seemed to bear them out. Each poor sale in New York or London that brought warnings of a downturn would be followed by one that saw stellar works break multimillion pound records. Serious jitters took hold at the end of last week, however, when auction houses struggled to find buyers for works from Manet and Renoir to Rothko. In New York, two private art collections expected to fetch more than $100 million (£63 million), brought in less than half that. The sale, at Christie’s auctioneers in Manhattan saw 17 out of 58 works failing to sell and others bringing much lower prices than predicted. Toulouse-Lautrec’s Portrait de Henri Nocq, estimated at $6-8 million, sold for $4.5 million. As the week progressed, one Picasso painting went for more than $20 million but two others remained unsold. “Obviously in the future we will have to lower estimates,” said Christie’s honorary chairman and auctioneer Christopher Burge, though he insisted “there is still a great deal of money left for the art market”. (For full source and full article click the Headline). Irish Art