2021-12-02
52 分钟The art market is so opaque and illiquid that it barely functions like a market at all. A handful of big names get all the headlines (and most of the dollars). Beneath the surface is a tangled web of dealers, curators, auction houses, speculators — and, of course, artists. In the first episode of a three-part series, we meet the key players and learn how an obscure, long-dead American painter suddenly became a superstar. (Part 1 of “The Hidden Side of the Art Market.”)
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to our 20th century evening sale at Christie's.
Earlier this year, in the course of just one evening, Christie's auction house in New York sold nearly half a billion dollars worth of artworks by Matisse, Picasso, Warhol and Alice Neil.
Lot number six, the Alice Neil Doctor Finger's waiting room, the artist of which is having a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum.
Rise we speak.
And for this early work, we should start here at 400.
5500 thousand.
At 500,000.
550,000.
There is a good chance you have not heard of Alice Neil.
600.
That's 600,000.
At 650,000, with an absentee bid.
Neil was known for an intense and direct style of portraiture but most of the people she painted weren't famous or rich.
Also, Neil didn't like to call her paintings portraits.
She called them pictures of people that are also history.
At 850,000.
$900,000.
Here's Neil from an interview on FreSH Air in 1981 describing what she was going for in a painting.
What I want to get is the person, the zeitgeist and a feeling of spontaneity.
I don't like things to look dull and worked over.