On October 25th and 26th , Christie’s Dubai held two auctions of Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish art; a day earlier, Ayyam Dubai held its 11th auction of Middle Eastern Art. How do they compare to April 2011 auctions, and can any trends be identified concerning Lebanese art prices?
Like last time, click on pictures to zoom in!
ETA 02/11/2011: A typo inadvertendly occurred concerning Flavia Codsi’s most recent auction result. It is USD 18,000 and not USD 10,800.
The following is an attempt to answer a question I have been interested in for a long time: what is Lebanese art worth?
One way to answer this question is to visit galleries, another is to look at auction results.
Obviously, the auction numbers do not cover each and every living and deceased Lebanese artist. Some of them never appear at auction because none of their works are available on the market, some dealers prefer not to participate in auctions, some artists do not like to their works to appear at auction for whatever reason;.. so these numbers are unfortunately incomplete.
Much has been made of the auctions initiated by Christie’s (2006) in Dubai, followed by Sotheby’s (2008) in Doha and later Ayyam Gallery in Dubai and Beirut. From the onset (and I will speak strictly of Lebanese art), prices were set higher than ever before for deceased artists. For living artists however, estimates tend to mirror gallery prices (see charts 2 and 3).
But for every work that breaks records such as Abboud or Baalbaki, many barely make the reserve price and some do fail to sell.
What I attempt to do here
I compiled the auctions results at all Christie’s Dubai auctions from April 2006 to April 2011. Unfortunately, Sotheby’s Doha results are not available online (or I was not internet-savvy enough to find them). I also compiled all the results from Ayyam auctions that were available online (April 2011).
As a point of comparison, I ran a search for Lebanese artists on Christie’s website to find instances of Lebanese artists sold at auction in Europe but could only find a couple measly results, so I did not take these into account. Fortunately, Sotheby’s disastrous October 2011 London auction came to the rescue to offer allow us a tentative comparison between Lebanese art’s draw in Europe vs. the Middle East.
Methodology
1.I charted the number of times Lebanese artists were sold at auction by Christie’s in Dubai, and how many of these times they were sold within, under or over estimation. Then I did the same for the Ayyam auctions, and Sotheby’s recent London auction.
2.I compared Christie’s Dubai results to Sotheby’s London results
3.For every artist that appeared at auction more than once over the past five years, I charted his or her price evolution to try and identify trends.
4.I weighted each lot equally, regardless of technique and importance within the artist’s oeuvre, i.e. a lithograph from the beginning of a career has the same weight as the artist’s ultimate masterpiece
The results of my findings appear after every chart, followed by general remarks, after the jumb (CLICK TO ZOOM IN ON CHARTS)
Beirut Art Critics 