Without Drama or Banana, Art Auctions Struggle

Beyond the headline-grabbing sales of the fall auction season, the market tries to soar beyond its two-year slump.

Despite auctioneers selling about 1,600 works of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art within the last week, the only serious moment of excitement came from a $6.2 million banana. The conceptual artwork, “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan, had a crowd of at least 300 jammed into the Sotheby’s salesroom to witness its absurd triumph — becoming the world’s most expensive fruit in a series of sales where several more traditional artworks failed to muster even a single bid.

There were certainly other highlights. A collector, identified as the hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin by the art-market newsletter the Canvas, and by three art advisers who requested anonymity to discuss private business, spent more than $121 million for a 1954 Surrealist painting by René Magritte called “The Empire of Light.” (A spokeswoman for Griffin declined to comment.) A beauty mogul’s Claude Monet picture of water lilies from the 1910s went for $65.5 million. Lower estimates and smaller sales also helped promote a rare depth of bidding in some cases.

But it wasn’t enough to hide the doldrums of an auction market that continues to sag behind its 2022 sales records, when a pent-up supply of masterpieces during the pandemic pushed the fall sales to $3.2 billion. This time around, the three major auction houses — Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips — sold $1.3 billion in art, squarely within expectations but down 40 percent from last November and 60 percent from the market’s peak in 2022.

One reason for the slump is a supply contraction: few wanted to sell prized paintings during an election season, when rich collectors were uncertain about how economic conditions might shift. A hangover from the pandemic sales frenzy also left discretionary sellers with little motivation to engage. By last Friday, market analysts sang a common refrain: the results weren’t great, but they could have been worse.

“The art market has been flat for more than 10 years, regardless of stock prices, interest rates and inflation environments,” said Roman Kräussl, a professor of finance at Bayes Business School in London, who specializes in research on art as an asset class. “It seems like the art market has lost its momentum, its hype, its must-haveness.”

The week’s results — both good and bad — spoke volumes about the current strengths and weaknesses of today’s art market. Here are four insights.