Sale-rooms
Big bad auction man
Stomping around the antiques fairs these last two weeks, drifting down Park Lane from Grosvenor House to the cera- mics show at the Dorchester and then scuttling across town to Olympia, one was struck by how Britain's art dealers are an invariably elegant, stylish, if slightly self- satisfied bunch: Brierleys, not Gattings• True, the Americans didn't make it to the fairs this year (down by two-thirds, accord- ing to some estimates); no one is quite sure where Japanese taste is heading or whether the British (and the Portuguese) are begin- ning to collect again; nonetheless a man with Veroneses, vermeil or Vincennes in the vault can take these things in his stride. Only one subject can make the boulevar- diers of Bond Street cry into their kir royal: Alfred Taubman.
If you listen to the dealers, the Old Masters or Ming men and the ladies of Limoges, then it seems that thanks to Big Al all the world is losing the habit of buying through dealers. Auction man is the figure of the day. Everyone had their horror story but the best (or worst) by far was the one about the Mary Cassatt picture that hung in the Hirschl & Adler gallery in New York for months on end priced at $1.5 million and failed to sell. Entered for auction, however, it fetched a cool $4.2 million. As I have said before, a bargain in the art world is no longer something you pick up cheaply but something you pay a record price for.
Despite the fact that, after all, Hirschl & Adler did very well out of the auction, this story (and many others like it) fills dealers with despair. It underlines to them that Taubman has succeeded all too well in turning Sotheby's (and, by implication, the other sale-rooms) into retail outlets, elbowing the dealers aside in the process. When Lord Carrington takes over at Christie's at the beginning of next month, this situation will intensify.
What can be done? The dealers have begun to hit back, sort of. The British Antique Dealers Association, which now has its own stand at Grosvenor House, recently launched a new consumer in- formation service designed to reassure potential buyers that any 'worries' they might have about the antiques trade are unfounded. This is fine so far as it goes but one wonders whether new collectors are as much bothered by this as BADA appears to think they are.
What may be needed, short of another stock market crash so that mediocre ob- jects fall drastically in value (which some dealers seem to hunger for, to teach ignorant collectors a lesson), is more aggressive 'knocking copy' about the auc- tion houses. Dealers regularly make coups in the sale-rooms. Whether it is furniture, Oriental bronzes, antiquities or Old Mas- ters, they often spot miscatalogued items which the auction houses, because of the jumble of things passing through or simply because they lack the expertise, have drastically undervalued. At the same time, inferior examples of almost all classes of objects are fetching higher prices at auc- tion than better examples in dealers' show- rooms. At the moment this is particularly true of the Scottish colourists and English Impressionists.
The next move for the dealers, there- fore, could be to stage an exhibition of their own, underlining these two points. Next year at Grosvenor House, instead of a mildly interesting and rather small loan exhibition, such as this year's on the Booth silver, designed to add a touch of academic substance to the proceedings, BADA should mount a bigger, more eye-catching, more aggressive exhibition which shows the advantages, financial and otherwise, of buying through dealers. The exhibition should show what coups BADA members have made in the past year in the sale- rooms and what items were sold at auction for inflated prices. In short, they should go public with what they are now muttering in private.
It won't be an easy decision for them. After all, Grosvenor House is partly spon- sored by Christie's. But they can't have it both ways. It also won't be easy because it will involve going public on the one issue they don't like to talk about: their mark- up. This problem is neatly encapsulated in the following story from this year's Grosve- nor House Fair.
Just inside the entrance, on the left as you went in, at Stand Number One, Spink's were offering a pair of cloisonnee enamel Buddhist lions, priced at £175,000. When Roger Keverne, head of Spink's Oriental department, spotted these at Christie's, they were very dirty with the metal bands half-hidden by grime and the gilt work almost black. No one else had spotted their beauty or their importance and Keverne was able to snap them up for £25,000.
How are we to view this mark-up of 700 per cent? On the one hand we can con- gratulate Keverne for his astuteness in spotting what Christie's had missed. He may argue — he does argue — that the lions are worth £175,000, if not more. At the same time, there will be many people who are simply not willing to wear that sort of increase. They will concede that dealers have to pay to clean and repair objects, have overheads to meet and must trade at a profit: nonetheless 700 per cent smacks of . . well, it is too much. Many dealers implicitly acknowledge this by their reluct- ance to talk about the financial side of their business as openly as Keverne does.
Taubman has had a good — a very good — run, aided by enormous press offices that churn out statistics of record prices achieved at auction every time they get the chance. If the dealers are hurting as much as some of them say they are, then they need to hit back in like manner. The suggestion outlined above could be a be- ginning. It would mean being less discreet about the green stuff but is that so terrible? Greater openness on such matters is one of the reasons why the sale-rooms prosper in the 1980s. And in any case, rival dealers are well aware who has got what and what was paid for it. If they were more candid, dealers' margins might be cut but that would be offset by a greater turnover. Otherwise the smile on Big Al's face is going to get bigger and bigger.
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