There were audible gasps in Sotheby’s New York saleroom last week when Alberto Giacometti’s weighty sculpture of an emaciated head, privately priced at $70mn, failed to elicit any bids. Offering the 1955 work without an advance guarantee of sale — a rarity these days — was “a big gamble to take in the current market” and its failure “could further lower the present appetite for risk at the top level,” says Stephanie Armstrong, managing partner of the art advisory firm Beaumont Nathan.
It is easy to dismiss such moments, and auctions in general, as having no relevance beyond the rarefied echelons of the art market. But for the wider art world, including artists themselves and the institutions that support their work (and so perhaps for anyone who loves art), such high-profile flops can carry worrying implications.
“Although many grassroots organisations might shun the art market, its obsession with objects over content and its focus on solo stars over collective movements, we are all interlinked by the money that circulates between us,” says Aaron Cezar, director of Delfina Foundation, a creative incubator and residency programme headquartered in London.
He is in the midst of a campaign to raise £7mn to secure ownership of its building (which has housed 450 artists over the past 18 years) and this month expanded its support to North America. Ultimately, he says, “auctions are signifiers of the confidence that drives the for-profit and non-profit world.”
Charlotte Appleyard, director of development and business innovation at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, is of a similar mind. “Auction results are not an official proxy, but we care about them, we keep an eye on who is bidding, we subscribe to The Baer Faxt [an industry newsletter],” she says.
Individual collectors aren’t the only market forces that keep museums and other institutions ticking. “Conversations with auction houses and galleries are almost constant,” Appleyard says. Sotheby’s is among the sponsors for the Royal Academy’s forthcoming show of the African-American painter Kerry James Marshall, while Gagosian gallery supported the recent show of the British artist Michael Craig-Martin (who it also represents). “It isn’t just about sponsorship,” Appleyard says, “auction houses and galleries know where a lot of the works are, so we can get loans.”
The once-sacrosanct view that the market and museums should keep separate is clearly a thing of the past, particularly in straitened economic times. “The idea of church and state makes me chuckle a bit,” Appleyard says, noting that the Royal Academy was set up to be a commercially focused institution. “We actually sell art, through the Summer Exhibition. But that’s no bad thing — artists need to make a living,” she says.
Artists can get overlooked amid the market’s sky-high figures, some say. “From our point of view, the art world, which I call the art elite, is not that interested in supporting the art that is being made in the first place,” says Rob Pepper, principal of London’s The Art Academy art school. His organisation, he says, would need “a tiny fraction” of what people are spending at auction and, while he hosted a successful fundraising event last week, he identifies a problem: “I see the same group of people being called on, the same people bidding [at charity auctions].” Appleyard says that “we are having to work harder than ever to raise money, there is just a bit more competition.”
Where it gets murky is when money is perceived to have an impact on programming. It isn’t something that any institution will admit — “there has to be a gap between market forces and what curators decide to show,” Appleyard says — though there can be some uncomfortable optics. A recent analysis by the journalists Julia Halperin and Zachary Small for the New York Times found that nearly 25 per cent of more than 350 solo-artist museum shows in New York since 2019 went to artists represented by just 11 of the biggest commercial galleries, notably Hauser & Wirth this season.
“It’s a great observation, but these are important galleries with a really strong roster of artists,” says the collector and philanthropist Dan Sallick, who recently joined the board of New York’s Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation. He compares the situation to the influence of the sports agent Scott Boras on baseball. “He represents all the best people and because he represents all the best people, anybody who’s really good wants to sign with him. So he’s seen as this person who is the hidden hand but it’s more that he is just really good at what he does.”
For Sallick, founder of the communications firm Avoq and chair of the board at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden for eight years, buying art and supporting institutions “come together with deep passion. The power of art is not just the marketplace.” There is, he says, “a trade-off . . . without supporting museums, collecting would be a lot more boring.”
Each has become harder in today’s challenging economic and political environment, though Delfina’s Cezar says that can work to the favour of institutions. “In times of crises, many art patrons and philanthropists might spend less but give more to causes that are deeply affected by an economic downfall or cuts, like to the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] in America.”
Sallick sees both the weaker auction environment and tougher fundraising climate as symptoms of the same seismic generational shift. “Collecting has been the pipeline to future museum supporters. The baby boom generation made a ton of money, built incredible collections and have been incredible museum patrons. Millennials and the next generations have grown up on their phones, and are thinking more about immersive experiences, travel, maybe owning less, while the world outside is chaotic and turbulent, which is a big distraction.”
He concludes: “There is a changing of the guard. When I look at a situation like the Giacometti, it matters because it is almost emblematic of a bigger question, which is what does the pipeline look like for future arts patrons and supporters? And the answer is really unclear.”
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