Rogues’ Gallery

"We can go back even further than the Renaissance. In ancient Rome, for example, there was for a time a great vogue for possessing Greek sculpture, the ‘earliest civilization’. As a result, there was actually a thriving trade in fakes. You had people faking Greek sculpture and selling it to rich Romans. Sound familiar? Art has had a high price tag through the ages. It’s been a luxury product which by extension has been exchanged in some form of marketplace for many centuries. Even before the Renaissance there used to be art fairs, in Holland in the late Middle Ages, for example. It’s important to remember that the auction houses which today appear to be the most important force in the commercial world of art—the best known ones like Sotheby’s, Christie’s, even Bonhams and Phillips—were founded 250 years ago, approximately. They were wholesale operations at the beginning. They sold to dealers, who were the public face of the art market, and auction prices in those days tended to be lower than dealer prices. It was the dealer who bought at auction and marked it up. And this was not something the general public was aware of, in the way they are today. There’s more to it than just a commercial transaction. I think it’s very interesting that dealers had such an influence on taste. When they chose to show an artist, they believed in that artist. They were really pushing forward taste, and they were curating shows, and they were sometimes giving stipends to artists to support their work. There are numerous examples of dealers that influenced and directed artistic trends. That’s what Leo Castelli did in America, for example. He would enable artists. And in doing so, he had a bearing on the direction of art history in the latter half of the twentieth century. “He took the auction houses from being somewhat grubby dens of art dealings and turned them into somewhere to see and be seen” Until the end of the last century, auction houses generally did not sell on the primary market. They didn’t sell works from the artists’ studios. They were purely acting on the secondary market; that is, when artwork was offered as a resale. The dealers did all the spadework of finding an artist, promoting him, and finding collectors to buy an artist’s work. He was a rogue, it has to be said. He was sometimes a little bit careless, shall we say, in how he operated, but he was a genius. He took the auction houses from being somewhat grubby dens of art dealings and turned them into somewhere to see and be seen. Watson produced smart evening sales with everybody in black tie. He even managed to get the Queen to come along to a view of one of the big sales. This was in the 1950s. Singlehandedly, he put the auction houses on the map as being a society thing to do—to go to private views with other smart people going, and the sales themselves attracting attention for being big ticket events. Now the big auction sales are, of course, the high moment of the art calendar, and a way of tracking the market."