Urban Art Association

Art Sale: Is now the time to sell, sell, sell?, by Deleted on Sept 20, 2010 20:30:37 GMT 1, Article in todays Telegraph - interesting comments about Banksy's Tesco Generation original

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/artsales/8014339/Art-Sales-Is-now-the-time-to-sell-sell-sell.html

Art Sales: Is now the time to sell, sell, sell?
Next month’s London auctions will reveal the truth about the strength of the revival after June’s disappointing figures, says Colin Gleadell .

Eric Clapton, Jerry Hall and Charles Saatchi are among the numerous art collectors who will be selling at next month’s contemporary art auctions in London.

The array of sellers is matched by the variety of some of the subjects. A pregnant Jerry Hall by Lucian Freud is joined by paintings of the last pope by Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi, Prince Harry at an Arsenal football match by Elizabeth Peyton, Ronald Reagan as a centaur by Russian artists Komar and Melamid, and portraits of 164 actors, including Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood, who have starred in film roles as Nazi soldiers, by Polish artist Piotr Uklanski.

Irony, wit, and celebrity pepper the sales, but the serious question is whether it will all sell. At last June’s auctions there were questions raised about the strength of the revival of the contemporary market as sales, though much greater than the previous year, fell below their targets. Traditionally of lower value than London’s February and June sales, the October sales are aimed at younger buyers, in direct competition with Frieze, which lures collectors to London from all over the world. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, for instance, have opted to open proceedings with paintings by Liverpool artist Ged Quinn, who is only just emerging as an auctionable artist. Quinn borrows from art history, particularly the 18th century Arcadian landscapes of French painter Claude Lorraine, to create fantasies of his own. Quinn, who is one of the stars of Saatchi’s Newspeak exhibition, has a waiting list of clients at his gallery, Wilkinson, in Bethnal Green. His latest exhibition there sold out with prices up to £55,000, so the paintings at auction in October, estimated at £20,000 to £30,000 each, are sure to attract competition.

Also at the lower end of the price range is the chance to have your portrait painted by Jake and Dinos Chapman, which can be bought at Sotheby’s (estimate £15,000 to £20,000) to raise funds for the Royal College of Art.

This could be popular, though risky. At Frieze in 2006, the Chapmans painted 125 portraits for those willing to stand in a queue for long enough. One woman was portrayed as a skull with worms coming out of it and a swastika on her forehead.

Highest price of the sales is the £2.5 million to £3.5 million expected at Christie’s for one of the largest paintings ever made by Damien Hirst. More than five metres wide, it is one of only four densely packed butterfly compositions with an ecclesiastical, stained-glass effect which Hirst made in this size. One of those four made a record £4.7 million for a Hirst painting at auction in 2007, when the Hirst market was at its peak.

Other highlights of the Christie’s sale are a large abstract painting by the German superstar Gerhard Richter from the collection of Eric Clapton, estimated at £600,000 to £800,000, and a large, digitally manipulated photograph of the New York Stock Exchange by Andreas Gursky, estimated at £100,000 to £150,000, which is being sold by the bankruptcy administrators of Lehman Brothers – a poignant provenance.

Saatchi is hoping to raise upwards of £2 million at the sales with works by young American artists such as Kelley Walker and Mark Bradford, who will be enjoying his first exhibition at London’s White Cube at the same time.

At the end of the Sotheby’s sale is a painting by Banksy with an interesting history. Donated by the artist to an auction to raise funds for Ken Livingstone’s failed mayoral election campaign in 2008, it sold for £195,000, more than double its expected price. In the event, the price exceeded the amount the Labour Party was allowed to receive, and it was reduced to £120,000. The buyer, reportedly, was Banksy’s then dealer Steve Lazarides. Like Hirst, Banksy’s auction market has suffered in the recession, and the painting is now estimated at £60,000.

All these works, and about 850 others, are scheduled to go on view in London on the weekend of October 9. Frieze opens to the public on October 14, and the auctions, in an act of direct confrontation, begin on the same evening.