This week's Art Collecting and Investment News

Sunday, 29^th June 2008

New Sean Scully Work Acquired by Irish Museum of Modern Art
Titian's Robe, 2008, the work was purchased with a grant from the American Ireland Fund, which was made possible by a gift to the Fund by the American businessman and contemporary art collector Kevin Burke and his family.
                                                                                                                      Art Daily - USA

Arts Patrons, the Next Generation
Circulating with the self-assurance of someone who had worked a room for decades was 23-year-old Sarah Arison, granddaughter of the guest of honor and president of the Arison Arts Foundation in Miami.
                                                                                                 New York Times - United States

London Sales Preview: Sotheby's Contemporary
When Bridget Riley's Chant 2  was last offered at auction--in a day sale at Christie's New York in 1992--it sold for $33,000, under the low estimate. So its appearance in Sotheby's evening sale, with this estimate of £2-3 million ($4-6 million), is a measure of the drastic reappraisal that her work has undergone.

                                                                                               ARTINFO - New York,NY,USA

Saturday, 28^th June 2008

Off the wall? A globalised art market defies the doomsayers
GLOBAL - When Roman Abramovich, the Russian metals and minerals tycoon, and Sheikh Saud al-Thani, from the Qatari royal family, both showed up this month at the Basel art fair, this was no surprise. The commodities market and the art market have grown unlikely links.
                                                                                       Financial Times - London,England,UK

The art market: Contemporary art's brand new bag
GLOBAL - A show of work by Richard Prince that opened this week at London's Serpentine Gallery is being held "in collaboration" with the luxury goods company Louis Vuitton, marking yet another crossover between the art and fashion worlds.
                                                                                     Financial Times - London,England,UK

Friday, 27^th June 2008

Is Bacon in more demand than Picasso?
LONDON - As Sotheby's and Christie's gear up for their famously extravagant summer contemporary art sales, the mood is mixed. "In many people's minds, Bacon is now surpassing Picasso. A Bacon is a very strong blue chip," says Oliver Barker, head of contemporary art at Sotheby's.
                                                                                           CITY A.M. - London,England,UK

ART MARKET WATCH
LONDON - Christie's London evening sale of Impressionist and modern art on June 24, 2008, totaled £144,440,500 ($283,970,023), with 66 of 81 lots finding buyers, or 81 percent. The overall total was the highest ever for an art auction in Europe. Exactly two-thirds of the sold lots, 44 works in all, went for over $1 million.
                                                                                                     Artnet - New York,NY,USA

Glass art is attracting more collectors
NEW YORK - Mark Lyman, director of the two annual shows called SOFA, which take place in New York and Chicago, says that 10 to 15 years ago an expensive glass piece would cost between $50,000 to $100,000. Now, such works can reach anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million.
                                                                                            San Francisco Chronicle - CA, USA

Contemporary Auctions Poised To Take Off
LONDON - The promotion helps tout the fact that for the first time in its 242-year history, Christie's is holding a Contemporary summer auction separate and distinct from its Impressionist sale. This is a sign that widespread collectors' interest in the Postmodern art and auction scene has continued to grow considerably during the past decade.
                                                                                              New York Sun - United States

Hiscox Comments on Recent Art Sales
GLOBAL - The Hiscox-Art Market Research (HAMR) index tracks auction sales from March 2007 to March 2008. A finding that will be of particular interest to investors is that after years in the relative doldrums, 19th century European art has seen a remarkable 13 percent rise in value since March 2007," said Hiscox.
                                                                         Insurance Journal - San Diego,CA,USA

Quick Takes
LOS ANGELES - With these nine collectors, L.A. tied the San Francisco Bay Area as the world's fourth-ranked metropolis for art world high-rollers. New York had 34, London had 14 and Paris had 10.
                                                                                                   Los Angeles Times - CA,USA

ARTnews Names Top 200 Collectors
GLOBAL - There were four newcomers among the top 10: Ukrainian businessman and philanthropist Victor Pinchuk; Mexican businessman and telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helú; the New York pair of investor Leon Black and his wife, Debra, and Sheik Saud bin Mohammad bin Ali al-Thani of Qatar.
                                                                                               New York Sun - United States

Fanning the flames of the Asian art market
SINGAPORE - Komala and two friends set up Larasati in Jakarta in 2000 with about $100,000 in savings. Its first auction generated $470,590 in sales. The business has grown steadily since then. In 2007, Larasati generated sales of 9.6 million Singapore dollars, or about $7 million, up 17 percent from 2006. This year Komala expects growth of 30 percent.
                                                                                        International Herald Tribune - France

Auction Houses Test Market With Record Contemporary-Art Sales
LONDON - London auction houses will offer a record 329 million pounds ($654 million) of contemporary art for sale next week. Analysts are saying that demand is weakening for works that don't appeal to the world's richest collectors. Christie's International, Sotheby's and Phillips de Pury will be offering pieces by Jeff Koons, Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst and Lucian Freud.
                                                                                                                       Bloomberg - USA

Dwindling art supplies generate blindness - and erratic prices
LONDON: Of the three most expensive works sold in Christie's Tuesday evening session, only one, Monet's close-up view of waterlilies floating on the pond of his garden at Giverny, painted in 1919, justified the excitement that it created.
                                                                                        International Herald Tribune - France

Thursday, 26^th June 2008

A Severini climbs to £15.04 million in a dazzling Impressionist ...
LONDON - A sensational auction record was set when the stylized rendition of a dancer painted by the Italian Gino Severini in 1915 climbed to £15.04 million, making it the most expensive Futurist work ever auctioned.
                                                                             International Herald Tribune - France

Picasso Shines, Severini Sets Record at Sotheby's Art Auction
LONDON - A painting by Italian Futurist Gino Severini sold for a record 15 million pounds ($29.6 million), while works by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti beat top estimates at an auction by Sotheby's last night that showed continuing demand for 20th-century art classics.
                                                                                                               Bloomberg - USA

Monet avoids the crunch
LONDON - The most important reason for the art market's continued top-end strength is its globalisation, as Jussi Pylkkänen, president of Christie's Europe points out. Pylkkänen describes how the top-end buyers have increased threefold over the past five years; this is largely due to the increased geographical reach of his auctions.
                                                                                                            guardian.co.uk - UK

LA Collector Files Lawsuit Against Louis Vuitton
LOS ANGELES--Private collector Clint Arthur has filed a lawsuit against Louis Vuitton regarding Vuitton's involvement with the Takashi Murakami retrospective at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), reports the Los Angeles Times.
                                                                                                    ARTINFO - New York,NY,USA

Wednesday, 25^th June 2008

Monet painting smashes auction record
LONDON - A Monet water-lily painting sold for 41 million pounds Tuesday, doubling the previous auction record for the artist and ensuring London's key art market season got off to a flying start. This was part of the evening sale of impressionist and modern art at Christie's which raised 144 million pounds, the highest total for an auction in Europe.
                                                                                                                              Reuters - USA

Sotheby's London art auction nets £102 million
LONDON - Iconic works of exceptional quality, which were fresh to the market, triumphed and rewarded us with the strongest sell-through rate of any impressionist and modern art sale ever held at Sotheby's in London.
                                                                                       Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom

A lot of Monet as Christies sells waterlilies for record £40 million
LONDON - The bidding is expected to be dominated by City hedge fund owners, Russian billionaires, Chinese industrialists, Indian technology entrepreneurs and Middle Eastern sheikhs. Twenty-one per cent of lots at Sotheby's Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales last year went to new buyers apparently impervious to market rates.
                                                                                                                       Times Online - UK
Morbidity finds expression in Marlene Dumas' art exhibition at MOCA.
LOS ANGELES - THE large mid-career survey of paintings by South African born, Amsterdam-based artist Marlene Dumas that opened last weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art represents, in effect, her Los Angeles debut.
                                                                                                     Los Angeles Times - CA,USA

Tuesday, 24^th June 2008

Monet record smashed as art market boom goes on
LONDON - On Monday Christie's expects Bacon's "Three Studies for Self-Portrait" to sell for more than 10 million pounds, and a Jeff Koons sculpture called "Balloon Flower (Magenta)" to make about 12 million pounds. Christies will be selling art estimated to be worth up to 300 million pounds.
                                                                                                        Forbes - NY,USA

Crowded art market is running out of big names
GLOBAL - Art is about prestige, many wanting a painting to have the same effect as a Porsche. Contemporary art can cater for that, but perhaps collectors are battening down the hatches, preferring the blue-chip stock. This may be why they are looking to the classics.
                                                                                                                     Times Online - UK

Millionaires defy the credit crunch
GLOBAL - The combined wealth of the millionaires, defined by Merrill Lynch as high net worth individuals (HNWIs), grew by 9.4% to $40.7 trillion, demonstrating once again, the truism that the wealthy are getting wealthier all the time. While the number of super-rich, defined as people with more than $30m, increased by 8.8% to 103,320.
                                                                                                           guardian.co.uk - UK


Art sales: bullish Hirst rattles the market
LONDON - While Christie's is known to have designs on the so-called primary market, Sotheby's is not. The Hirst sale is just "a reflection of our relationship with Hirst and not part of any corporate strategy to enter the retail business," says Oliver Barker of Sotheby's.
                                                                                     Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom

Monday, 23^rd June 2008

Recession-Proof Supercollectors Sustain Patchy Market, Survey Finds
LONDON - According to ArtTactic's June 2008 Art Market Confidence Survey, it is the billionaire collectors that are propping up the upper end of the contemporary-art market, while the middle market for works in the $50k-$500k range is facing considerably more uncertainty, Bloomberg reports.
                                                                                                    ARTINFO - New York,NY,USA

Death As An Art Career Strategy
GLOBAL - Still, the market's embrace of Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein within a decade of their respective deaths. "On the one hand, it's incredibly romantic, these artists are finally getting their due. On the other hand, it's about a commodity. There's a limited supply," the artist Robert Longo said in an interview.

Billionaires Prop `Patchy' Art Market, Survey Finds (Update2)
LONDON - The middle-market $50k-$500k is suffering from lower confidence levels and more uncertainty,'' says Anders Petterson, founder of ArtTactic, in a telephone interview.

                                                                                                                    Bloomberg - USA

Sotheby's sale of contemporary art to feature exciting works by ...
LONDON - Indian artists such as Subodh Gupta (b. 1964), Bharti Kher (b. 1969), Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), Raqib Shaw (b.1974) and T.V. Santhosh (b. 1968. Sotheby's sales on Tuesday, July 1 and Wednesday, July 2, 2008, will present a total of eight works by these cutting-edge and highly sought-after names and together the works are estimated in excess of £2 million.
                                                                                    India Infoline.com - Mumbay,India

Buy Art for 10-Fold Return in a Decade, Say Dealers in Hungary
HUNGARY - ``I don't know of another market which has seen such a price explosion. The Hungarian market for paintings is the best among new members of the European Union.'','' says Judit Virag, owner of Virag Judit Galeria in Budapest.
                                                                                                             Bloomberg - USA