Oct 18, 2021
So now we know: a work of art can be worth far more once you destroy it. Well that’s true if you’re Banksy. Just a few weeks ago I mused on how much his ‘transformed picture’ Love is in the bin – previously Girl with Balloon – might make when it appeared at Sotheby’s on October 14. It had previously sold for £1m in 2018, and the moment the hammer fell, the canvas dropped through a shredder hidden in the bottom of the frame.
Shocking it may have been at the time, but it was a stunt that caught the art market’s attention, fascination and even admiration, turning the picture immediately into Banksy’s most famous / notorious artwork, and so also the most valuable of his paintings.
It remains the greatest irony that the artist who does more than any other to subvert the art market and its processes has proved himself yet again the ultimate master of the industry’s marketing machine.
In this context, while Sotheby’s estimate of £4-6 million might have looked a little punchy, it did not seem beyond the bounds of possibility. So what happened on the night? Forget the estimate; frenzied bidding took the painting to £18.5 million hammer, a record for any piece of Street art, sealing Banksy’s status at the top of the international art pantheon for living artists alongside the likes of David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Beeple and Jeff Koons.
Oct 10, 2021
Paul McCartney has no desire to write an autobiography, I understand. However, a new broadcast interview does provide further insights into the endlessly fascinating subject of The Beatles. Despite the long-held view that it was Macca who pulled the plug on the Fab Four – the result of his announcement during an interview at the beginning of the 1970s – he now reveals that all he was doing was finally letting slip what had been decided some time before. According to Sir Paul, it was John Lennon who called time on the band as he sought pastures new with Yoko Ono. The other bandmates, including McCartney, had wanted to carry on.
Setting the record straight provides some of the most newsworthy stories, and auctions are often the catalyst for this.
The latest example is the decision by Al Capone’s descendants to consign 174 personal items for auction. Ageing themselves, his grandchildren wish to divest themselves of these important artefacts, firstly so at least some of them can go to public institutions, secondly because they are concerned about wildfires near their homes and thirdly because it creates an opportunity for revising the public opinion of Chicago’s most notorious gangster.
A letter from Capone, written to his son while languishing in Alcatraz, shows his touching human side, argues his granddaughter. “These are not the words or ideas of a man who is a ruthless gangster. These are the words of a loving father,” she told The Guardian.
Maybe, but sadism and sentimentality in the same person are not mutually exclusive, as many a tyrant has shown. Capone may have been cuddly with some, but the Roaring Twenties Capo had a public reputation that was richly deserved.
Oct 5, 2021
What price a rickety old wooden bridge stretched across a small stream in a wood in the south east of England?
Around £60,000 if the auction estimate is accurate.
Surely you could buy a much better new one for a fraction of that sum?
Ah yes, but not one associated with such a dearly loved character as Winnie the Pooh – and certainly not one that could claim to be home to the legendary game of Pooh Sticks.
First described in A.A. Milne’s The House At Pooh Corner, the bridge could be found in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, near the author’s home.
Milne’s son, the model for Christopher Robin, played on it as a boy, as have generations of children since.
After countless thousands of had tramped across it, it was replaced with an iron bridge in 1999; now, 114 years after it was first constructed, the bridge has come up for auction.
So how to put a price on something so simply made and with such little intrinsic value, but whose associations catapult it into the collectables stratosphere?
Certainly, £60,000 for something so iconic does not appear unreasonable, but if a rich enough fan comes up against someone equally determined to secure it on the day, bidding could rise far beyond that figure.
The best way to price such an item is to look at other auction prices for major pieces linked to Milne and Pooh. The original Hundred Acre Wood map illustrated by E.H. Shepard sold for £430,000 in 2018, which makes the bridge’s estimate look a bit of a bargain.
Sep 27, 2021
From Georgian times until the past 20 years or so, Country House Sales were a relatively frequent occurrence. We all loved them because they offered the perfect mix of fabulous pieces across the board with a wonderful provenance. For those selling, a single auction or series of auction provided them with catalogues of the events that could be kept as family mementos. For buyers, it was the chance to nose around a grand home and perhaps pick up something decent that had the gloss and glamour of aristocratic connections.
These sales were relatively commonplace between the end of the Second World War and the late 1960s, when homes that had been turned over to the military were restored to those who could no longer afford to keep or renovate them.
In recent years, such sales have been rarer, although we were delighted to host one in June at Selham House.
Now, however, what promises to be the ‘Country House’ sale of the decade has been announced: in fact it is the sale of the contents of eight homes, all belonging to the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died in 2019.
Although his personal style was one of restrained flamboyance, limiting himself to black and white in his own dress, Lagerfeld’s lavish tastes found magnificent expression in his homes.
From traditional sets of porcelain and antique sculpture to the most contemporary of modern art, the designer’s possessions seem to have no limit. In true country house fashion, items for sale cross a very wide expanse, from furniture and elaborate works of art to handbags, glassware and clothing.
Goodness knows how much money all this will take, but the auctioneers should make a pretty penny simply from selling copies of the catalogues, which will immediately become collectors’ pieces themselves.
Sep 20, 2021
Although auctions date back millennia, they not only remain relevant today as a way of conducting business, but as up to date as ever.
The Romans settled the throny issue of the Empire’s succession by literally lotting it up in its entirety and selling it off to the highest bidder. The lucky winner was Marcus Didius Julianus, who won the prize in AD 133. Luck soon turned against him, though, when the Senate condemned him nine weeks later after his rival – and successor – Severus got the upper hand.
From antique furniture to NFTs, fine art and collectables have always found a happy home at auction. In recent years, as technology has widened its scope considerably, the auction process has been applied to everything from imports confiscated by customs to nuclear power stations.
As an auctioneer myself, I have always been committed to the process, but I have often wondered who else is, so in the past few days I checked by using a simple Google search.
Here are a few of the things I found being offered at auction: a First Class Seat (not a ticket for it but the seat itself) from an aeroplane; a guest role in the TV series Doc Martin; an abandoned chateau in the South of France (sold for just €205,000!); the Porsche used by Tom Cruise in the film Risky Business ($1.8m!); and a First Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (over $1m!).
My favourite article, though, was an opinion column on whether cricket teams should scrap the toss at the beginning of matches because it gave too much of an advantage to the winner. Instead, it suggested, teams should bid against each other, awarding each other runs for the privilege of choosing who should bat first. The highest offer would effectively win ‘the toss’.
Sep 13, 2021
One of my favourite stories of the past week or so has been about the sale of Napoleon’s trademark bicorn hat. So the story goes, the seller did not know when they bought it that it had once belonged to the great French general and emperor. Only when they had investigated inscriptions on it, its dimensions and, ultimately, hairs found within it, was it confirmed to have been the real deal.
Estimated at £100,000-150,000, it seems a conservative price bearing in mind that other Napoleonic hats have made up to £1 million.
The emergence of the hat at auction set me thinking about what other lost treasures might come to light. Which would I most like to see and what might they be worth?
The list may be endless, but assuming you could verify them as the genuine article, few things would excite potential bidders as much as King John’s Treasure, lost in The Wash just over 800 years ago. A modern-day speculator claims to have found the site where it lies near Sutton Bridge – we shall see. No one is certain of its exact contents, but if it lives up to the legend then it must be worth tens of millions of pounds at least.
Another great loss was the Amber Room, presented to Tsar Peter the Great by the Prussian king Fredrich Wilhelm I in 1716. Looted by the Nazis, it was lost from view until salvage experts recently claimed to have found it in a sunken warship off Poland. Divers, however, said they found nothing.
The ultimate lost treasure? Surely it has to be the legendary Holy Grail, an item that would be utterly priceless.
