Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips modernist works sales last week topped US$2.5bn with more fast money chasing art than at any time since 2008. Picasso’s Women of Algiers made a new auction record for a work of art of US$179m. Giacometti’s life-size sculpture L’homme au doigt sold for US$141.3m confirming that sculpture has now achieved the
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Sotheby’s have revealed their new President is Tad Smith, the former head of Madison Square Gardens.  Mr Smith acknowledges he knows nothing about art or the art world but apparently likes Ai Weiwei and Damien Hirst (which confirms he knows nothing about art).  He said he recently bought a photograph of a floating ballet dancer
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The dispute between the art collector Dmitri Rybolovlev and broker Yves Bouvier is rippling out on both sides of the Atlantic as both sides enter the discovery period seeking documents and witnesses. Some of Bouvier assets and bank accounts have been frozen and dealers, curators and lawyers who were involved in the deals are all
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The art market powered on through 2014 with gains in most areas. There is plenty of cash looking for a home at this stage of the economic cycle and art continues to gain traction as an alternative asset. Whether the art market needs further regulation has become of interest to mainstream economists and the subject
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Nouriel Roubini, the leading economist, has lately turned his attention to art and the art market (which he believes needs regulation due to “shady behaviour”).  He has now decided that art is a new asset class.  Actually, art has always been an asset class except previous generations just called it something else.  Throughout history good
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Rumours have been circulating that the fine Tahitian Gauguin of 1892, ‘When Will You Marry?’ has been in play and it has now been announced that it has been sold for a reported US$300m, with the most likely buyer the Royal Family of Qatar.   If Qatar is the buyer, then they have beaten their
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Christopher Marinello is to launch a new database devoted to art recovery and research on the 19th January 2015.  This new business, Art Recovery International,  is to specialise in art recovery, resolving complex title disputes, due diligence and provenance research.  If a dealer. auction room or collector wants to check out an artwork then the
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  What is art?  A question that has puzzled thinkers since the beginning of time.  It can be hieratic, metaphysical, other worldly, beautiful, ugly, precious, technically accomplished, literal, abstact……the list goes on and on.  The only thing for sure is that with the passage of time people gradually understand what is great art and the
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                      In Art as an Investment Melanie Gerlis successfully manages to strip away some of the mystique on how art acts an investment.  Her format consists of a series of chapters comparing the record of art as an investment with other investments such as the
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  Sotheby’s stock price is considered a bell weather of the art market and its stock price is currently at a 52 week low.  James Bjorkman of Seeking Alpha makes the case below that for contrarians this might be a good time to load up on Sotheby’s stock.  Alternatively Sotheby’s share price has proved a
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