The year is young, but it’s already provided us with lots of metrics. I spent some time at the Winter Show, watched auctions at Christie’s and Sothebys with some interest, and dug into my reading list—so what can we learn?
I. American Week.
Christie’s and Sotheby’s have both moved their American sales to January, so now there is consensus that this is the time for “American Week.” The auction houses have historically lined their big sales up together, and only in the last few years did they break step. Part of the reason for falling out of synch is that the art fairs that anchored the auction calendar were all given a shuffle by COVID. For decades, the ADAA Art Show was in the spring, and the Armory Show was about the same time. The American Art Fair was in the fall and the Winter Show was—you guessed it—in the winter.
Now, stay with me because the nomenclature gets thornier. The Art Show was at the Armory, the Armory Show was not.1 The Park Avenue Armory is booked out basically for the rest of time with immersive theater, but the ADAA held their springtime slot in part because they gave the door to the Henry Street Settlement, a charitable cause of some magnitude. Good on them—but what do you do when global pandemic makes that slot unusable, as it does from time to time these days? I was just hearing the word “coronavirus” for the first time on the floor of the fair in March of 2020, and we snuck the whole thing in just before lockdown began. But the following year—2021—there was no hope in the spring, and some in the fall, and everyone gave their calendars a shuffle—a once-a-generation opportunity to unseat Sleep No More and Cirque or whatever from the straining floorboards of that hallowed drill hall. As the rest of the fairs lined up around those new blocks, the auction houses had choices to make: spring and fall as usual? Winter in alignment with the Winter Show, which was bounced over to the recently-closed Barney’s New York?2 Or just roll everything into a few big online sales?
The answer turned out to be a few years of trying everything. Christie’s went deeper into online sales, but Sotheby’s grabbed the biggest sale of crypto art, and after a few laps around the sun, we settled into “Americana Week” falling into alignment with the Winter Show.
II. The Winter Show.
The Winter Show: first conceived as the Winter Antiques Show, the fair is a fun mix of suits of armor, archaic maps, brown furniture dealers—and art dealers. Come for the moscato, stay for the muskets. It’s a lovely fair, but even the acronym feels nostalgic— “WAS” is not a great verb to inspire people with the excitement of collecting today and tomorrow, and the business model of the art fair is to manufacture urgency around things that are old and will remain unchanged for the foreseeable future, so over the pandemic break its organizers rebranded as simply “The Winter Show.”
The only thing that wasn’t going to change was the Winter part.
Or was it?
The Winter Show is fabulously long—ten luxurious/excruciating days, depending on your perspective—and the thinking behind such a long show was that, in the winter time, New York in January is likely to see one weekend of snowy weather, but not two in a row. All those international dealers of Winston Churchill ephemera won’t go to the trouble of schlepping across the pond if there’s a good chance that the whole show will be snowed-out. So scoop out the whole middle of January for WAS and you know that eventually everyone who wants to see antiquities can—at least that was the thinking thirty years ago, when we had winters.
Well, it hasn’t snowed in years3 and it may never again, so the epic length of the Winter Show may be the last remnant our children will have of a time we walked uphill both ways in thirty foot snow drifts. At any rate, it’s locked into the Park Avenue Armory’s schedule again, so that’s here to stay.
And so will the auctions, is my outsider’s guess: they did pretty good.
III. Auctions.
Here’s one glance: most lots sold for right within their estimates; a few special things went for a lot more, and a few things failed to sell. That landscape sounds really healthy—it’s exactly what you want the secondary market to look like. But on a much bigger scale, there’s a troublesome downward trend for older American art as a class: while the sales hit their targets, those targets are lower than they were in the past. This is not a market falling off a cliff, it is a years-long depreciation. Because of the opacity of the art market, it’s very hard to say where the bottom is, especially when there’s this sort of “soft landing.”
So what do we learn from a healthy performance across lots at the big auction houses in light of that lower waterline? This is a picture of auction houses doing their job well: they are bringing good material to market at realistic numbers, and that is a hard thing to do, and an important one. Any consignor who is thinking of rosier times could just decide not to sell, or not to sell at auction, and then you’d have a freeze-up, terrible sales, and that’s when things do fall off a cliff. So while this is not gangbusters time for traditional American art, this is a good sign for the market generally. And the upshot for that is that this might be a great time to buy American art. Markets are functioning, great property is available and available less expensively than it has been for a long time—if you believe as I do that these artifacts have value that spans generations and centuries, this feels like an opportunity for collectors.
IV. Consolidation.
A new book by Magnus Resch gives us a bigger picture of the art market that explains this American-art phenomenon:
“Despite the global number of millionaires doubling in the last decade and record attendance at art events, the value of the art market has remained only stable. This discrepancy points to a conversion problem, wherein the newly affluent aren’t seamlessly transitioning into art buyers.”4
Apply that observation to the American art market and de-jargonify: kids today aren’t collecting traditional American art.
Collectors are exiting the market faster than new ones are joining it. This means a smaller number of collectors are keeping the market going, and so they are spoiled for choices and don’t have to compete with one another to get nice things. All of which equals a lower price point.
Resch is a bestselling author and a decorated academic, but he’s also, as his website discloses right up front, “active in the art market as an entrepreneur and a book author.”5 He has launched art-market-adjacent online platforms, so when he writes a book warning of the bogeyman of low engagement, it should be kept in mind that his success as an entrepreneur is at least partly built on how you respond to that warning.
IV. An invitation.
I’m “active in the art market” as well, but my response is less a warning and more an invitation. The problem that the affluent aren’t buying, but that the art-engaged public don’t identify as collectors—that is, they understand their role in the art world to be a chiefly spectatorial one, not a market-participation one. The art world has become so event-driven that our consensus of what it is to be a citizen of Planet Art is to show up, maybe to buy, but not to collect. That’s a different activity, and with prices at historic lows for historically valuable objects, I observe that the barrier to entry has never been lower. The “newly affluent” buy plenty of things—that’s not the problem. I invite you to consider yourself a collector and connoisseur at whatever price point is available to you, and exercise your connoisseurship faculties and your stewardship responsibilities as a citizen of the art world at an exciting time.
Me and Magnus want you along for this excellent adventure.
Thanks for reading. Next week, we get back into some annals of American modernism. Join us again in seven days for more Hanging Papers.
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
…Because the Armory Show was named after the famous 1913 Armory Show not its location; and the Art Show was named after Art.
Fun fact about Barney’s: the last time I went in there when it was still Barney’s, I bought a pair of Tom Ford sunglasses for my first trip to Miami for Art Basel. Simpler times!
I mean, not legit snow anyway.
As quoted by Angelica Villa in “In New Book, Art Economist Contends Gallery World Suffers Scarcity of New Collectors,” ArtNews, January 31, 2024, here.
From the landing page of his website, here.