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'Mao' to 'Marilyn': Art is big business

By Porter Anderson
CNN

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- Christmas at Christie's came early this year.

"From where we're sitting, it all looks pretty rosy right now," said Jonathan Rendell, deputy chairman for Christie's Americas.

"In the last two weeks, we have sold $866 million worth of art," he said in mid-November, pausing to savor the figure as he might muse over a major Monet. "That is by far the highest amount we've ever sold during the full season of major Impressionist and post-war contemporary art."

Once considered an esoteric sideline at best, the fine art market is putting the names Klimt, Gauguin, Kirchner and Eakins beside Google, Boeing, Microsoft and Dell as viable investments, properties to be returned within a few years to the auction block for big gains. (View a gallery of some of the art in the Christie's auction)

The Internet and emerging technology play a key role in the process.

A piece of history

For most of history, you couldn't have known a valuable piece was available without your own grapevine of artists, dealers or museums' staffers.

Learning of those works' existence, their sales histories and what they cost when last sold was about as easy as reading Leonardo's mirror-image cursive.

Today, in the same way that online investing has blown the lid off the mystique once cultivated by stock brokers, services such as ArtNet.com's Price Database lets us all in on artworks in play. It can help you search out other pieces by artists you like and alert you when various works start moving on the market.

The recent $17.4 million sale of "Mao" by Andy Warhol, Christie's reveals, was to Joseph Lau of Hong Kong. What the ArtNet database gives you is immediate context: There are no fewer than 327 results for your search of the title. And that represents a Tiananmen Square-ful of quotes on "Mao" -- electric colors morphing from one version to the next -- the bounty of Warhol's mass-produced silkscreens between 1972 and 1974.

"The market is really robust," said ArtNet executive vice president Brian McConville, about both the auction floor and in galleries and at art fairs. "Our business has grown 30 percent, year over year."

The Web can even help in the process of purchasing art.

If you like running a portfolio for yourself on an online brokerage, you may want to check out Christie's LIVE -- a software application you download from the venerable auction house to bid real-time in actual auctions.

"You don't even have to talk to the scary people," Rendell chortled, in a reference to the perfectly cordial telephone associates who handle long-distance bids the old-fashioned way.

"Our auctioneers are all trained to look right at the camera," in a streaming-video presentation from the salesroom, he said.

The software will tell you when the bidding is going your way, or is "with you," and that directly represents the auctioneer's acceptance of your bid.

Christie's main rival, Sotheby's, has pursued online bidding on a comparatively limited basis. Representatives say Internet bidding has paid off only in auctions of certain collectibles.

But both houses do offer extensive online catalogue displays of upcoming sale items, Internet notifications of pending auctions and very fast reports on sales results.

And the reach shows. (Read about how globalization is affecting the art world)

"Look at the breadth of the market," Rendell said. "In the previous high point of the art market -- 1989 and 1990 -- it was really fueled by the Japanese bubble economy. What we're seeing now is strong bidding from all around the world.

"There is a lot of money out there. And people are willing to treat themselves by putting a considerable amount into art."

On the ether and off

The arrival of Internet marketing requires many working artists to learn new moves.

Steven Kenny is a 44-year-old American artist who has trained in Rome and knows the figurative genius of old masters.

His paintings sell in the range of tens of thousands of dollars and he is represented by galleries in a range of countries from cities across the United States to Denmark and the Netherlands.

The tricky part about selling your work in the Internet age, Kenny said, is balance.

"I'm very pleased with the sales that have come directly from the Internet," he said, referring to his self-run Web site and galleries' sites. "I now have a worldwide audience thanks to the ease with which people can view my work and correspond with me.

"But for the average artist -- that includes me -- it's as difficult as ever to find representation."

What might surprise some is the downside: keeping up inventory.

"This year I just squeaked by," he said. "I'm just finishing a painting that's scheduled to be included in my solo show at Klaudia Marr (in Santa Fe, New Mexico), which opens on December 8. Having three solo shows and numerous group shows has really tested my ability to produce enough work and juggle existing pieces."

Inventory, inventory, inventory

That struggle to find and maintain adequate inventory may, in fact, be the greatest link between emerging new artists like Kenny and the centuries-old auction houses that might one day sell his work.

"That's why we have many hundreds of specialists on planes every day, going to see collectors to let them know what's going on in the market," said Rendell at Christie's. "We follow up with people who bought things 15 or 20 years ago. If you buy something at 50, you may be ready for a change in lifestyle at 70.

"This is recycling. I personally go to Japan several times a year and still am bringing back (to put on the auction block in New York) things I sold to Japan in 1989. There's a weird experience of being in a warehouse in Nagoya and opening boxes and finding my handwriting on the back of things."

Does this mean that art is moving so fast on the market that it may never be enjoyed on a wall and just held as an investment to flip later?

Rendell doesn't miss a beat: "Well yes. But at least it's in very good condition."

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