AUCTIONEERS' SLUGFEST

By ROBERT HUGHES

In today's art market, million-dollar prices are as common as bugs on a bayou pickup's windshield. You need eight figures to make news, and even then it may not work. The early results of the fall auction season--which began last week and will continue through this week--confirm this: one big bang, and not much else. The bang was afforded by the collection of works by Picasso (plus some by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and other American artists) put together over 50 years, on a fairly modest budget, by Victor and Sally Ganz. It was one of the more famous American private collections, and it contained some works--especially the Picassos--of very high quality.

Christie's promoted the Ganz sale with the determination of a Panzer division hitting the French border. To woo the heirs, Christie's, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, struck a complicated guarantee deal whereby the four Ganz children would get a total of $120 million, no matter what the pictures realized on the block. Then came a thick calendar of promotional dinner parties (catered in a town house hung with the Ganz artworks), symposiums on Picasso and the collection, private and public viewings, and a general media blitz.

For once, all the elements meshed. The sale totaled $206.5 million, the largest return ever on a private collection sold at auction. The $48.4 million bid by an undisclosed buyer for Picasso's The Dream, a lyrically erotic 1932 portrait of his mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, was the second highest sum ever paid for a Picasso.

Did such heavy fiscal lifting presage, as some hoped, a return to the market boom of the '80s, when squillionaires competed for favored artworks like mountain rams in rut clashing horns over a crag or a mate, and when new money would pay just about anything for just about anything? Obviously not. For instance, at the Ganz sale someone paid $7.9 million for a good Jasper Johns--a far cry from the $17 million paid for a comparable picture at Sotheby's nine years ago.

The success of the Ganz sale lay partly in the excellence of some of its contents, but largely in the adroitness of Christie's promotion. If there were any doubts about this, they were dispelled by the results of other sales last week, which were mediocre. Two nights after the Ganz sale, the Evelyn Sharp collection of modern art went on the block at Sotheby's. It was a second-rate affair at best, chopped liver compared with the Ganz foie gras. The auction house had given the Sharp estate a guarantee, undisclosed but somewhere near the low aggregate-sales estimate, which was $59 million. But the whole sale made only $41.2 million, which left the house with a net loss of $10 million to $15 million. Even its star picture--a 1916 Modigliani nude whose rosy skin and cute pubic patch would, one might have thought, rouse the cupidity of any redblooded conglomerateur--failed to reach its $10 million estimate.

That's how presale guarantees have turned the auction business more and more into a casino. The enduring mystery is why people rich and presumably smart enough to have $20 million or $30 million to spend on a painting can be so easily led by the obvious strategies of auction-house promotion. Surely no diner intime in the boardroom is worth that. But the game must perforce go on: Sotheby's, faced by the task later this month of selling a collection of medieval enamels, has even hired the avant-garde director Robert Wilson to stage a show in which the limbs of his actors may emerge from behind drapes, reminding the (presumably) entranced customers that the reliquaries once held the remains of saints.

Behind the hoopla, there is a harder story to the continuous slugfest between the two big auction firms. Through the '80s and early '90s, Sotheby's ruled the roost in sales and aggressive publicity. But last year, for the first time, Christie's took the lead. Sotheby's 1996 sales were $336.5 million, an increase of 7.5% over its '95 results; Christie's sold $389.1 million worth of art and trinkets, for a 31% growth. Art-world insiders attribute some of Sotheby's woes to a loss of top personnel irked, it is alleged, by its abrasive chief executive officer, Diana Brooks. European chairman and top auctioneer Simon de Pury resigned in September to start his own art-investment firm. Before him, the house lost its able duo of contemporary-art specialists, David Nash and Lucy Mitchell-Innes. All three were at the sales last week, buying for their own clients.

Before the sales started, Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's head of contemporary art, confidently asserted that the market was full of new players, younger buyers who "don't even remember the bad days of 1991" when the art market crashed. They should try to. As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.