Art dealers enjoyed 'one of the greatest years ever' in 2010

ANDY Warhol once remarked that he liked "money on the wall".

"Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting," he said. "I think you should take that money, tie it up and hang it on the wall. Then, when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall."

Warhol's satirical notion of art as showstopping status symbol may just have reached a new peak, however, to judge by the record-breaking picture of last year's art market that emerged yesterday.

While economies crashed and governments slashed spending, an unprecedented number of incredibly wealthy people all over the world were effectively taking Warhol at his word. What they actually hung on their walls and stood in their rooms were Picassos, Modiglianis and Giacomettis but, at the mind-bending prices that they paid for them, the effect was almost the same as if they had displayed a bunch of dollar bills, or more pertinently a bunch of Chinese yuan.

Their spending spree meant that Christie's, the world's largest auction house, announced yesterday sales of £3.3 billion ($5.3bn) last year, a jump of 53 per cent on its 2009 performance and the highest total in the company's 245-year history.

Its chief rival, Sotheby's, will not announce its results until next month but its auction total, not including private sales, is $US4.3 billion ($4.33bn), a full $US2 billion more than last year.

Bill Ruprecht, president and chief executive officer of Sotheby's, called it an "outstanding year" and celebrated "the largest year-to-year increase ever for any auction house".

Steven P. Murphy, his opposite number at Christie's International, said that it was "one of the greatest years ever for Christie's and the art market".

Beneath the two behemoths, Bonhams, which does not declare its results, trumpeted its best year since 2000, and two Chinese auction houses threatened to usurp its third-place ranking in the global pecking order.

It is an extraordinary turnaround from the gloom that flooded the art market in late 2008 and 2009, when the supply of masterpieces for sale came close to drying up altogether.

Thierry Ehrmann, the chief executive of the data organisation Artprice, said last year that in 2009 "the art market narrowly avoided a complete meltdown". But vendors regained confidence as it became clear that there was an undiminished number of tycoons who would rather invest in art than in stocks or currency.

The rebound began at the end of 2009 but caught fire in London last February when a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss artist, set a new world record for a work of art at auction, selling for more than £65 million at Sotheby's. Three months later Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust broke the record when it fetched $US106 million at Christie's in New York. The major sales at the end of the year were also strong and both auction houses are optimistic that their London sales of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art next month can continue the upward trend.

Their confidence is based on the growing geographical diversity of high-rolling collectors, notably the Chinese, who have become leading players at all levels of the market in the past two years.

Sales of Asian art are now the third biggest category in Christie's portfolio (at £569.6 million), and Chinese collectors' appetite for their cultural heritage is being felt at auction houses across the country, most notably at Bainbridge's in Ruislip, northwest London, where a Chinese vase sold for £43 million in November. And with the expansion of Chinese buying into other areas, Hong Kong has become the centre of the world fine wine market.

Jussi Pylkkanen, the president of Christie's Europe, said last night that Chinese collectors "are coming to the market with a new sensibility and a slightly different taste but with really deep pockets. The Chinese have already changed the market for Picasso and Monet by adding competition."

article by the Australian