Hammered, Again

    There were two good story lines in the Fall sales and both involved Phillips, the perennial also-ran of the big three major auction houses, and the one that usually supplies the bumpiest ride. First, the smudgy, inky early Warhol that sold for some $70 odd million at the contemporary evening sale organized by Phillipe Segalot. According to news reports, Segalot procured the painting from the Mugrabi family, one of the largest—if not the largest—holders of art by Warhol. He put it up for auction, then declared that it was bought way over the high estimate by one of his very own customers. Why then, you ask, did Segalot even bother with Phillips and their commission in the first place? Why not simply take the safe route and sell the work privately? A work of art is better transferred discreetly because the painting's virginity vis a vis public exhibition makes it more attractive for a future sale. When you know both the user and the seller you can exploit that added value. My only answer is that the market needed a public  demonstration of value in these hard times. So this important early Warhol was trotted out by the major stakeholders to prove itself in the free market, or its cheesy doppelganger, the auction market, since there is no free market in the art world. And it did it's job. Why then, you further ask, would Segalot undermine the newly created public faith by revealing the suspiciously narrow circuit the painting traveled while ostensibly in public? That's the kind of news I would want to suppress. And these are the kind of questions the art market wants to steer us away from. Rather that we focus on the winners, the Mugrabies, whose painting sold way above its estimated value, and all us little people who own a piece of the Warhol pie, and a piece of the contemporary art market pie, who can now use the new Warhol price as a confidence inspiring benchmark to keep this Ponzi scheme of ours chugging along.

    A more uplifting lot, Baptism by Abdi Farrah, hammered down the next morning in the contemporary day sale for $11,000. Abdi won first prize on Work of Art, Bravo's art reality show competition, and with it a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, and the chance to consign a work of art to the Phillips sale. First, I ask you, when did the chance to auction a work become a prize for a young artist? Auction's used to be for art by dead people and art that nobody loved anymore. Things of course have changed. For young artists the auction house is no longer a home for lost children or a tacky casino, it's an international exhibition space with the potential to seriously goose their careers. In China artists work the auctions the way they would any other aspect of the market place. Abdhi figured out how to game the auction world too, although not with shills and chandelier bids. When Baptism appeared on television, it came across as a melodramatic self portrait in tightie whites. In the auction environment it blossomed as a metaphor for his entry into the marketplace, and for the christening of a new mass media path to artistic success through television and the auction house. By getting a room full of white people to bid on this large drawing of a mostly naked black man, briefly turning turning an art sale into a slave auction, Abdhi proved that his work is less static and more interesting than we thought, and that he is politically savvy about his racial identity and the largely rich white audience that will consume his work.

I have to apologize to art writer Jerry Saltz, one of the judges on the show, who helped put Abdhi's work in that sales room. In 2005 he wrote a piece for Artnet.com headlined Hammered, in which he referred to contemporary art auctions as "bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theater and brothel." He's totally right, and I thought him a hypocrite for participating in a show in which the prizes included a trip to the auction house. But Abdhi's aesthetic success at Phillips has gotten him off the hook. It'd be great if Saltz looked at Baptism and thought, this'll prove my point about art sales and slave auctions. It's more likely he looked at Abdhi and thought, he's a real artist and art-making is a basic human endeavor that can survive even the most difficult conditions of which capitalist speculation is one. It appears now that some art actually needs those conditions to thrive. This bodes well for artists who want to escape the nerdy confines of places like the Brooklyn Museum for the rough and tumble world outside.

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