The International Herald Tribune, France
May 14 2005

A ‘get it while you can’ mood drives postwar sales

By Souren Melikian International Herald Tribune

SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2005

NEW YORK The art market entered a new era this week as Christie’s
posted the highest total ever achieved in a sale of postwar and
contemporary paintings and sculpture.

What made Christie’s performance different from previous contemporary
art auctions was the ease with which every work perceived as major
found takers, no matter what their style or medium.

Of the lots offered Wednesday, 65 of 76 sold for a combined $133.7
million.

The 17 world records set that night were revealing, not just for the
amount of money involved but for the new relativist approach to which
they point. It was as if punters had stepped back, taken a look at
the entire artistic production of the second half of the 20th century
and decided that it was time to start creaming the field, regardless
of aesthetics, before it was too late.

True, the highest price paid that night, $14 million, went to a
classic that does not really belong to the post-World War II
movements even though it was painted in 1965. “Chair Car” by Edward
Hopper is one of the high points in the work of the American artist
whose style, matured long before the outbreak of World War II, places
him at the tail end of a long Western tradition that goes back to
early 20th-century Expressionism. It was painted by a master who knew
how to wield the brush and scrutinized the mood of the characters
whose somber solitude he conveyed.

An abyss separates Hopper from the artist honored with the next
record down the list, Philip Guston: “The Street” ascended to $7.29
million, quadrupling the previous record set at Sotheby’s New York in
November 2002. It is an abstract splash of color that explodes with
the Expressionist vim of the New York school of the late 1950s.

Guston in turn does not relate in any way to the two artists who
commanded the second- and third-highest prices on Wednesday.

Willem de Kooning’s “Sailing Cloth,” dated 1949, brought $13.12
million. While critics would also place it under the banner of
Abstract Expressionism, its brisk black lines painted across the pale
ground in salmon and yellow hues and its suggestions of the living
world – an eye here, an animal silhouette there – give it a different
twist. The influence of Joan Miró and other Surrealists lingers here.

Mark Rothko’s untitled bands of dark brown framed in maroon, which
the New York artist painted in 1964, are equally far removed from
Guston or de Kooning’s work. The picture is dark and austere, which
makes the $10 million it cost remarkable.

The success of the Rothko illustrates the “get it while you can” mood
that drove enthusiastic bidders on Wednesday night as they ran after
every trophy with a well-known signature by any postwar artist
consecrated by the passage of time. So does Franz Kline’s “Crow
Dancer” of 1958, painted in hard idiosyncratic black strokes. The
abstract work rose to a world record $6.4 million.

In a telling sign of this massive swing toward the blue chips of
contemporary art, works usually confined to a narrower circle of
contemporary art fans because they are seen as more esoteric –
small-size sculpture, drawings – were sought with the same fervor as
supposedly easier colorful pictures.

A large abstract drawing done in 1942, “Composition II,” established
a record for a work on paper by Arshile Gorky, the Armenian-born
artist of the Paris school, at $2.76 million, more than doubling
Christie’s highest expectations.

Later an astonishing record was set for a sculpture by Jasper Johns,
better known for his “American Flag” paintings. Called “The Critic
Sees,” the object, only 16.5 centimeters, or 6.5 inches, long, is a
rectangular block carved in low relief, with a pair of spectacles
behind which slits stand for the eyes. At $3.96 million, this was one
of the most unexpected scores in Christie’s sale, even if the
estimate was higher – Johns appears here as the disciple of the
earlier Paris school of Surrealists.

The question that now haunts analysts is how long contemporary art
can remain on a high.

Even in Christie’s triumphant sale there were some warnings of
possible fits of weakness. Maurizio Cattelan’s three-dimensional
realistic figures – apparently meant to perpetuate the witticisms of
Dada, the art of the inept – were not received with uniform
admiration. “Frank and Jamie,” two dummies in police uniform standing
on their heads, did not elicit a single bid from those attending who
disregarded Christie’s $1.4 million to $1.8 million estimate. Later,
they failed to succumb to the charm of Cattelan’s “Ostrich,” a
taxidermied animal “executed in 1997,” a Christie’s expert noted in
an unfortunate choice of words.

Indeed, the many works of contemporary art that find their unspoken
raison d’être in the Dada-cum-Surrealist legacy are potentially at
risk. Richard Prince’s solid blue painting with six lines of white
writing simulating print that conclude with the words “The Wrong
Joke” sold for $800,000. It might yet turn out to justify its title
from a financial viewpoint.

Already this week there were some discreet suggestions of a shift of
interest in the market. The makeup of Sotheby’s more modest
contemporary art sale on Tuesday, which took in $68 million, laid
greater emphasis on figural art. Much of it was photographic in
character or inspiration.

The picture that Sotheby’s ran on the catalogue cover was a
self-portrait by Chuck Close, “John,” painted as a gigantic
enlargement, 254 by 228 centimeters, of an identification photograph.
It became the evening’s first success story when it made $4.83
million, a record for the artist.

Later, another close-up portrait based on photography transformed by
technically engineered stylization brought the highest price paid
that evening at Sotheby’s. “Liz,” done by Andy Warhol in 1963,
finished its upward course at $12.6 million.

Photography, produced for serial consumption in the form of
chromogenic color prints in an edition of six, allowed Andreas
Gursky’s work to rise to a new record. “May Day IV,” showing a vast
crowd seen from above in 2000, sold for $652,000.

The closing lot in the sale was a cibachrome print executed in 1990
in an edition of 10 by Thomas Struth. The color shot shows one of the
Louvre’s long galleries with people sitting in the middle or milling
about. “Musée du Louvre I” fetched $204,000.

Pranks? Partly so. But these pranks have been elevated to the status
of a work of art.

That is also the case with the realistic three-dimensional renditions
of humans, or of parts of their bodies, or of daily life objects.
Whether Robert Gober took himself seriously or not when he made in
1990 a human leg, duly shod, that comes out of a trouser leg, matters
little. Someone was eventually willing to pay $912,000 for the
privilege of living with it.

Another buyer gave almost $700,000 to secure Gober’s “Two Urinals,” a
conscientious white plaster, wire, lath and wood reproduction of two
urinals attached to a plank. These are the parody of a parody –
Marcel Duchamp dispatched to a 1917 show a real urinal, offering it
as art.

All this may in part reflect a reaction against other pranks –
neon-lighted tubes, made by (or rather for?) Dan Flavin, or
industrially manufactured metallic objects commissioned by Donald
Judd and described as his “work” – all offered without a shred of
humorous intention as art.

Defining quality criteria for these, and the rest, from taxidermied
ostriches to neon-lighted tubes, is a task that has so far defied the
ability of the finest experts.

Much of contemporary art is art as long as you/they say so. If it is
to be the substitute for vanishing Impressionist and modern art, it
is in danger of proving an unstable one. The prominence it gained
this week might be a prelude to considerable turbulence in years to
come.