Auctions in the Pits

By ROBERT HUGHES

No person of feeling, quipped Oscar Wilde, could read Dickens' account of the death of Little Nell without laughing. The same is true of the fall of contemporary art auctions. Last week, once again, Sotheby's and Christie's began their big spring sales of newish art. In the palmy days of the market boom, before the great flopperoola of 1990, these used to be attended with bated breath as a spectacle of utterly crazed consumption. Watch the chap from the Mountain Turtle Gallery in Japan bid half a million dollars for a Brice Marden drawing! Don't miss the sight of S.I. Newhouse and a Scandinavian squillionaire driving a Jasper Johns to an unimaginable $17 million! See the De Kooning go for $20.7 million, and listen to the whole room applaud the bid as though they had just heard Pavarotti sing Vesti la Giubba!

Well, as another aria put it, Addio, sublimi incanti al pensier -- "farewell, sublime incitements to thought." That market is as dead as Otello at the fall of the final curtain. Other areas of the art market that were badly shaken in the crash of the late '80s, from Old Masters to Impressionism and Americana, have shown cautious signs of life; but for most contemporary material, the bottom of the pit has not yet been plumbed.

This was proved once again at last week's sales. The Christie's sale totaled $12.5 million, less than half its high-end pre-sale estimate of $25.8 million. Of 76 works on offer, 32 failed to sell. Sotheby's guessed that its sale the next night would bring in $31 to $42 million; it actually made $20.4 million. At Sotheby's, 18 of 63 works failed to sell.

The star picture at Christie's, a 1949 Jackson Pollock carrying a house estimate of $2 million to $3 million, scraped through at $1.7 million. And the star picture at Sotheby's the next night, an early Jasper Johns, was expected to bring $8 million but failed to sell at all. The contrast between this and the remembered glories of the $17 million Johns was so poignant that many bidders simply sat moping on their paddles for the rest of the night.

A few works did well: one of David Smith's Cubi from 1963, a series long acknowledged as being among the peak efforts of America's finest modern sculptor, fetched $4 million; and an extraordinarily fine Arshile Gorky, Dark Green Painting, 1948, made its low estimate of $3.5 million. But you could hardly call a classic of Abstract Expressionism a contemporary picture.

Generally, things made closer to the present fared much worse, and for quite a number of recent darlings of the market, such as Julian Schnabel and Andy / Warhol, the silence was funereal. The surprise, perhaps, is not that a Warhol made only $190,000; the prices of Old Silverwig's work have been going downhill like a runaway bobsled. The true mystery is who on earth could have actually wanted to own a 31-ft. pastiche of Leonardo's Last Supper overlaid with green camouflage patterns. Is some Christian fundamentalist group planning to open a restaurant?

The auctioneers did their best at spin control afterward, but some spins are uncontrollable, and this is one. "There was an obvious mismatch," said Diane Upright of Christie's to the New York Times, "between sellers' expectations and the buyers or potential buyers who were looking for bargains."

Yeah, right, but the question remains: Why has contemporary art, after all the hullaballoo and hype of its market potential that filled the '80s, turned out to be such a hopelessly bad investment? And why did it take the punters so long to wake up? The art market isn't like other cultural markets, such as books or movies. It takes 100,000 people plunking down $24.95 each to make a best-seller -- a small plebiscite. But it needs only two collectors butting horns to send a painting into the stratosphere; and if they aren't in rut that night, nothing happens.

The art market is plagued by superstition. If a painting has been seen at auction three or four years ago, it's considered tainted -- a judgment not usually made about other expensive investments, like real estate. In the '80s a great deal of very new money was spent on a lot of very new art. Now those new collectors are, quite often, the very ones who find themselves in the worst trouble, as their schemes and scams cave in on them. Auction houses are basically scavengers, sniffing the air for death, bankruptcy and divorce; but there is trouble when too many owners can't afford to keep their pictures off the market. Back they cycle to the auction room, where nobody wants them enough to pay '80s prices for them. And even if they did pay '80s prices, it would still be a net loss, because works of art are not interest bearing.

Meanwhile, the only thing that might inject some vigor into the sluggish demand -- the appearance of major works, in some quantity, in the sales -- is blocked by the understandable reluctance of owners to sell on a flat market. Flatness perpetuates flatness, with no end in sight. Thus, finita la commedia -- at least for the foreseeable future.