notes

London’s Daily Mail is reporting that the front runner to acquire international auction house Bonhams is Poly Culture, an auction house owned by the Chinese government, and a subsidiary of the Poly Group, whose interests range from property development to arms exports. The why of this acquisition may be known in the fullness of time, but for the moment, seems rather surprising as it would likewise prove surprising to find that Bonhams has been operating with any pronounced degree of profitability and, with its recent bricks and mortar expansion on Bond Street, without a fair bit of debt. Moreover, as is endemic with any auction house, its revenue and profitability must vary wildly, depending on consignments the acquisition of which is hard to predict or control, but yet a business whose substantial monthly overhead expenses carry on regardless of the quantity or quality of consigned items sold through its salesrooms. There has been a bit of ‘rationalizing’ over the last couple of years at Bonhams, with reductions in sales, and sales venues. Bonhams has not, however, been precisely leading the pack when it comes to online sales activity, behaving in this regard more like a regional salesroom, which with its single Knightsbridge location until its acquisition a decade and a half ago of the Bond Street and regional salesrooms of Phillips, it largely resembled.

Still, we do see a number of Chinese nationals participating in sales at Bonhams, certainly in the well attended Asian art sales in San Francisco. Interestingly, our experience has been that Chinese buyers will often pay more at auction than they will for comparable pieces offered for sale through the accredited trade. Presumably the Chinese buyers have divined that the auction house is a wholesale resource, and consequently, so the received wisdom goes, the best buys will necessarily be made there. That may once have been so, but in this age when online marketing makes all things transparent to both buyer and seller, everyone in the trade in art and antiques has to be price competitive.

But one other thing occurs to me, and this has to do with the nature of the Poly Group itself.

Few people will remember, although it was only a few years ago, that Butterfields, the old line San Francisco auction room acquired by Bonhams, was formerly owned by investor Bernie Osher, who used the salesroom not just as a profit center but as an adjunct to his own collecting interests. The best consignments, if they were pieces that were within his collecting ambit, were purchased by him by private treaty. It may be that that is part of the motivation of the Chinese government, the Poly Group’s alter ego, in an effort to flesh out Chinese institutional collections, and do it on the quiet.

Perhaps that’s a strategy that will pay off. Perhaps- but one wonders whether, with the ongoing operating expenses and debt servicing requirements of Bonhams, whether the Poly Group won’t find, at the end of the day, that they have paid a premium price, very far removed from a wholesale price, for acquisitions.

An interesting facet of spending more time in the local berg after an absence of nearly 20 years is to find and gauge the level of dynamism in the arts community. Sadly, arts organizations around the world are suffering from a lack of funding, brought about by a dearth of societal and consequently governmental interest. What used to garner even occasional public interest is now co-opted by the internet, social media, and 157 channels of cable TV in every home.

With all that, arts organizations are soldiering on. Locally at least, not very many new on the scene, but those with which I was familiar either through participation or financial support, are surviving, even if in a reduced state.

And, even 20 years on, very many of them continue to be reliant on a familiar cadre of names, for financial support and also for governance. Familiarity with a number of those who over time have wormed their way into positions of influence with many of the arts organizations, moving from one to the other and then back again, is a worrying phenomenon. Although probably not unique to Fresno, that a very few people seem to control what goes on in the arts functions to exclude participation by very many others, and goodness knows, with the meteoric growth in population locally, the pool of talented potential board members and active participants has doubtless increased. Not everyone is home watching TV.

‘Give, get, or get off’ is, or should be, the simple by word of non-profit boards of any stripe, but not subscribed to by very many local board members. It was the other evening at dinner out my misfortune to sit, by happenstance, at a table adjacent to one of these serial board members, whose financial contributions have always been, shall we say, limited. He is convinced, as he has repeated to me many times, that the boards he sits on would be unable to function without the valuable advice he provides to the professional management. Hmmm… He once told me he would clandestinely approach management below the executive director level to let them know that, if they had any problems, they could approach him directly for an assist and guidance. As well, this fellow will gleefully tell new board members that, since they’re new, their contributions to the board may not be as useful as his, given his long tenure. Divisive, dismisssive and interfering, he would hardly be considered a dream director, yet he’s served on at least half dozen prominent local boards.

I suppose what one has to get over is that, while arts organizations need money, endemically, they don’t need all that much advice, and certainly not much from those who are not arts professionals. This hasn’t occurred to my ‘dream director’, or to a number of others, nor has it occurred to any one that direct outreach to potential directors can’t be limited to just one’s circle of board cronies.

In what must be characterized as the desperate move of a slow learner, Sotheby’s has made their financial straits apparent in their plan to, yet again, link with eBay in an attempt to bolster their core auction business. In a New York Times article of a couple days ago, it appears that Sotheby’s feels left in the dust given the bricks and mortar expansions of rivals Bonham’s, Phillips, and Christies, and so is desperately, it seems, moving down-market. I suppose senior management overlooked the fact that, in the case of Bonham’s, following on from their 60,000 square foot expansion on Bond Street last year, the auction house is now on the market.

Still, I suppose the prospect of tapping into the reported 150 million eBay users at the lowest of the low end of the art and antiques market seems too tempting to pass up. All this reminds me of the story of the optimistic little boy who, when put in a room full of horse manure, started shoveling furiously. When asked why, the boy replied, ‘With all this horse manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere.’

Well, perhaps there is, but what I know for certain is that eBay serves as a recreation for vast numbers of their users, who spend their spare time tinkering with their accounts while selling and buying $25 items. I’d opine that the rate of compensation for the average eBay user is probably about 30 cents an hour.  And how is that divisible, exactly, by the six figure salaries  of Sotheby’s senior employees?

Suffice to say, the linkage between Sotheby’s and eBay strikes me as, shall we say, a poor fit that cannot be any better now than it was the first time the company’s tried it.

When word surfaced a few weeks ago that Bonham’s was in play, I asked my partner Keith McCullar if he was interested in being in the auction business. His response was an emphatic no. Actually, his no was intensified by a word we hear frequently these days that begins with the letter ‘f’.  Nevertheless, point taken. The better auction houses in the better venues are plagued inherently by high overheads and wildly fluctuating revenues. Yes of course a high end collector would prefer to make his purchase or consign his seven figure item in a lovely venue, but the fact is, these types of items are not daily making their way through any saleroom.

Moreover, the actual number of these types of items is finite, and so, frankly, are those people who would constitute a market, either as buyer or seller. After we had been in business ten years, Keith and I thought we could put together an economic profile of our customers, and mind you, even at the lower end of our business, our buyers are not strangers to any of the major salesrooms. But the fact is, we calculated that this pool consisted of only perhaps 50,000 people- in the world! To say, for instance, that on any given day an Eli Broad will be purchasing a Jeff Koons sculpture is ludicrous, but the fact is, in terms of appearance and accompanying overhead, the auction houses have to appear as though that very thing will happen.

The news media is historically given to hyperbole, so to say the art world is reeling over the revelations of fake Rothko and Pollack paintings is for me, albeit cosseted in my own little sphere, not much news. After the ABC Nightline broadcast, my email inbox was about as full as it always is and no welter of phone calls prevented anyone from ringing through.  In fact, I sold a painting- mind you, a painting by an artist well established in the canon, and the painting itself with a fairly long provenance.  I suppose what I’m saying is that the art world remains pretty much as it’s been.

What amidst the media brouhaha I managed to sell was a painting by an artist whose work we had handled before, which painting had been fairly extensively restored, with the upshot of those restorations creating some problems of their own. While one of the giveaways, per the ABC correspondent, that a Pollack was a phony was the use of a yellow pigment of a type unavailable to the artist, our painting, of mid 19th century vintage with a fine linen support, had been cleaned, revarnished, and mounted on hardboard sometime in the middle of the last century.  Does this make for difficulty in determining a painting’s authenticity? Absolutely. Does or should this kind of thing raise suspicions and affect the picture’s merchantability? Well- yes and no.

I hedge because, frankly, what results in a sale is as varied as the paintings we handle and the buyers who purchase them. We always chuckle when we see on broadcasts like Antiques Roadshow discussions about original condition, because the fact is, for most period material, either fine or decorative, if it is a century or more old, original condition often time means poor, unsalable condition. Invariably, canvas stretches and paint shrinks, leading to paint loss and tears to the support, and the very varnish used to protect the painting’s design layer is typically over time so yellowed and so approaching opacity that what’s depicted in the picture plane is often difficult to make out.  Our general rule of thumb is, whether painting or furniture, everything requires significant restoration at least once a century. When one sees a picture of some age that appears fresh from the easel, what one is admiring, without knowing it, is oftentimes the restorer’s art.  The yellowed varnish that is removed takes with it a fair old bit of the design layer which the skillful restorer oftentimes has to put back with his brush which, he hopes, will be guided by his knowledge of the original artist’s working technique- if that can be determined. Or, as is frequently the case, by the restorer’s own best judgment.

That there is no hard, fast and immutable rule for restoration, and that techniques have changed over time, complicates matters even further.  In the case of the painting remounted on hardboard, we see this fairly often and while it is perhaps not ideal, in the cases where we have seen it, it provided a simple, durable lining. No lining is ideal. Stretching the canvas over the lining and the effect of the heat table invariably result in a flattened appearance, with brushstrokes and impasto marking the technique of the artist diminished in the process.

Perhaps this discussion of restoration runs afield from outright fakery, but the fact is, artworks, even when genuine in their origin, oftentimes, and perhaps inevitably, have that originality occluded the result of attentions that were of the best intention. And these attentions might be interpreted to be if not fakery, than at least misleading.  Moreover, though personally we try to limit whatever restoration we carry out to what is the least required and always the least invasive, most of our clients require that paintings be wall ready and furniture pieces be room ready.  We do, like everyone else, have our living to earn, so pieces do need to be in saleable condition.

That’s where disclosure by the dealer comes in, as it should with all members of the accredited trade, and where better to disclose than in writing and on the face of the invoice.

The art newspapers are full of the possible fate of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Will the so called ‘grand bargain’ that allows a few heavy hitters to stump up save the museum and its artwork, or will there be a selloff in an attempt to whittle down the city’s enormous debt? Based on a Christie’s valuation of a few months ago, with the collection valued in the $500 million range, the grand bargain seemed likely. Now, however, it appears creditors want the collection revalued, with some indication that the Christies figure is very low indeed, with the collection probably worth in the range of several billion dollars.

On the one hand, the disbursal of any great collection is freighted with powerful emotion, and none of them positive, except for those, in this instance, felt by the city’s creditors, but the fact is, collections come and go. Nearly all the period holdings of any institutional collection were at one time owned by someone else, and acquired when the fortunes of the acquisitor were waxing and those of the disbursing party were waning. One can be sentimental about the industrial gigantism that was Detroit through most of the 20th century, a byproduct of which was the purchasing of cultural trophies that bedizened the museum, but that time has come and gone, and the city is in eclipse. No- eclipse implies that its problems are short lived and its fortunes will, in the manner of an eclipse, inevitably recover. Does anyone believe that? I suppose we are all bit by the same nostalgia bug, with the belief that America’s postwar economic expansion will return with the same force and effect as felt by nearly everyone in this country in the 1950’s. As I look out my window, I don’t see a single man with a crew cut, white short sleeve shirt and dark narrow tie, or any women with Mamie Eisenhower bangs. By which I mean, of course, this country and the economic engine that powers it is as different now as the appearance and modes of endeavor of its population.

To think the Detroit Institute of Arts and its collections should be saved as a public institution is, in the abstract, laudable in the way that making culture accessible to the general run of the populace who might not otherwise have access to it is always laudable, but now the collection serves a purpose that might yield it of far greater and much more immediate importance than it held formerly. The Detroit Institute of Arts as a civic ornament has, as the city it adorned, seen its day come, and now that day has gone.