BURGER BOSS TO HEAD ITALIAN MUSEUMS

The Italian Minister of Cultural Affairs, Sandro Bondi wishes to implement a new policy starting next year. First he wants to lease Italian works of Art to foreign museums on the model set up since 2000 by my cousin Bruno Racine, ex-head of the Beaubourg Museum in Paris.

He will start his new policy with leases to "America and to Arabia”. Alain Elkann, an advisor to the Minister who went to the United States a month ago to meet directors from eleven museums, in the role of travelling salesman, thus stated: “The model is the Louvre, who besides lending a part of its collection to Abou Dhabi passed an agreement with a museum in Atlanta, Georgia which will bring in 6 million dollars for the Parisian institution."

In order to carry out the “plan for museums and archeological sites”, a “Super manager” [sic] for museums, with full powers, has just been named by the Minister, without going through the usual screening and selection of applicants. The lucky winner is Mario Resca, 62, a friend of Silvio Berlusconi, head of McDonald’s Italy until 2007 and who has since directed a gambling casino. He of course has no knowledge or experience in museums or art history.

Mario thinks that museum works are “an oil field with zero cost” and that his role will be to “increase the value of this wealth.” Why not ? Of course all the well-thinkers of Italy and France are up in arms but it is well known that the Philistines never admitted that art is nothing else than a big market, for everybody, including the artists.

ART MARKET : DOWN OR UP ?

If you listen to professionals the art market is getting the full blow of the economic crisis we are currently in : "c'est horrible, ma chère Gladys, my Rothko sold for only 500,000 dollars yesterday." Effectively one Rothko belonging to David Rockfeller sold for 72 millions dollars last year and a very similar one just made half a million dollar this week at Christie's. And frankly the differences between the two works do not justify such a tremendous gap.

So is there a crisis or not ? According to French art market expert Artprice, "le marché de l'art est ravagé par la crise". Oh my goodness ! Gladys is passing out and lets her Vuitton purse fall on the floor of the Art market exchange when she hears that. Her ankles swell terribly in her Prada shoes and her chauffeur Maurice, the nice black man from Haiti, rushed to her $70,000 Lexus to bring her back to her Manhattan mansion.

Artprice is convinced that the market is heading towards the levels of 2000 and that it is the worst crisis since 1990. Well I say "tant mieux" because there is no reason for the tech markets to be mauled by a speculative bubble and for the art market to be spared the same.

Having said that I have a simple question : which art market Artprice is talking about ? Rothko, De Kooning, Kelly and other overrated painters ? To my knowledge the Old Masters, famous or not, behaved extremely well this week in Amsterdam reaching prices well beyong the estimates. Even this little "pasticheur" of Jean Michel Basquiat, the Haitian artist who could not overcome an...overdose and draw a face, reached record prices with this atrocious "Boxeur" : the canvas (picture) painted in 1982 is a solid acrylic and oil paintstick on linen and reached this week the fabulous sum of $ 13.5 million. Sincerely I am asking who is most ravaged by the crisis : the art market or the brains of the buyer of this boxing atrocity ?

And Artprice to whine that "important works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet and Modigliani were bought back." So sad !! Well there is no sadness to notice that people's gullibility has its limits and that the art market is like any other exchange a... market. It is that simple. So simple that works by artists like Calder, the inevitable mobile sculptor, went well beyond their estimates and Artprice did not whine when his "Untitled" (picture) was acquired this week by a "ravaged" man for almost $ 800,000 vs. a maximum estimate of $ 780,000.

All that to say that the market is becoming at last reasonable, that old values continue to behave and ignore the storm and that, as always, some overrated artists will continue to be overrated. Who said that the market is smart and wise and that the trees grow up to the sky ? Remember what John Meynard Keynes used to say about the markets :"we have a tendency to forget that the markets are made of a conglomerate of fools, idiots and gullible suckers who are the very same ones that we socialize with at our club."

In conclusion, Artprice wrote in his web letter that "it is highly likely that between now and 2010 we will see an average price drop of 30 to 40%, taking valuations back to 2003-2004 levels." Only ? Personally I'd not be so optimistic.

THE GLOBAL ART MARKET : $ 55 BILLION ?

How big is the International Art Market ?
For Simon de Pury, Chairman of Phillips de Pury,
it is big like that...
But not big enough to prevent him
to sell a majority stake in his house to a Russian investor

According to an exhaustive survey made in 2007 by the European Fine Art Foundation (EFAF) which interviewed 3500 art dealers and 3000 auction houses in the world, the global art market was about $ 55 billion in 2006. Out of this total, the private art market (art dealers only) was $ 28.6 billion.

However for Simon de Pury, Chairman of Phillips de Pury New York, the private art market is at least four times bigger than the public art market. The same survey found that the art dealers concluded 1 million transactions in 2006 which makes an average transaction amount of about $28,600.

In 2007, Sotheby's and Christie's accounted for $12 billion of the global art market whose definitive figure is not yet known. Minor auction houses like Bonhams and Phillips de Pury accounted respectively for $ 600 million and $ 308 million. The five major German auction houses - Lempertz, Grisebach, Ketterer, Hampel and Neumeister- realized global sales of $ 231 million in 2007 while the French houses made $ 1.2 billion.
The volume of Fine Arts (paintings, drawings...) sales realized by Christie's and Sotheby's in 2007 was respectively of $ 5 billion and $ 3.7 billion. The volume of private sales achieved in 2007 by those two auction houses through their galleries and dealers was respectively of $ 730 million (+123%) and $ 542 million (+111%).

Finally the EFAF found that the global art market increased by 95% between 2002 and 2006 from $ 25.3 to $ 54.9 billion of which the USA represent 46% and the UK 27%.

NB : Simon de Pury sold in November 2008 a majority stake in his auction house to a very powerful Russian investor.

MONA LISA WORTH $ 10 BILLION ?

It's been estimated that "Mona Lisa" — if she ever made its way to the market — might sell for up to $10 billion, arguably to status-hungry official buyers in Qatar, Abu Dhabi, or Dubai.