Sold! The Art Market: Goes Crazy

Up to last Wednesday night, Picasso's 1905 Au Lapin Agile was widely expected to become the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. It had been put on the block at Sotheby's in New York City by heiress Linda de Roulet, whose brother John Whitney Payson had sold Van Gogh's Irises for $53.9 million two years before. It was a far better picture than the Picasso self- portrait, Yo Picasso, that had made a freakish $47.85 million last May.

There are, according to Sotheby's CEO Michael Ainslie, about 500 people alive today who might fork out more than $25 million for a work of art. Au Lapin Agile could go, said rumor, to $60 million. But in the end, publishing magnate Walter Annenberg bought it for $40.7 million, and two or three people clapped. It was the third most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

Only $40.7 million. And was that less or more than the GNP of a minor African state? On the other hand, wouldn't it buy only the undercart of a B-2, and maybe the crew's potty? Or a dozen parties for Malcolm Forbes? That a night's art sale could make a total of $269.5 million and yet leave its observers feeling slightly flat is perhaps a measure of the odd cultural values of our fin de siecle. "Personally," said Ainslie a week before the sale, "I would like to see more price stability -- at present levels, of course."

But what is done is done. The hard lesson of the past decade is that liquidity, to many people, may be all that art means. The art market has become the faithful cultural reflection of the wider economy in the '80s, inflated by leveraged buyouts, massive junk-bond issues and vast infusions of credit. What is a picture worth? One bid below what someone will pay for it. And what will that person pay for it? Basically, what he or she can borrow. And how much art can dance for how long on this particular pinhead? Nobody has the slightest idea.

Every game has winners and losers. The winners of this one are some collectors, some dealers and, in particular, the major auctioneers -- Christie's and Sotheby's -- in whose salesrooms the prices are set. The losers are museums and, through museums, the public.

From the point of view of American museums, the art-market boom is an unmitigated disaster. These institutions voice a litany of complaints, a wrenching sense of disfranchisement and weakness, as their once adequate annual buying budgets of $2 million to $5 million are turned to chicken feed by art inflation. "There are many areas where museums can no longer buy," says James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago. "It's bad for the museums, but it goes beyond that. It's bad for the country." The symbol of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's plight is an annual booklet that used to be titled Notable Acquisitions. In 1986 it was renamed Recent Acquisitions because, as the museum's director Philippe de Montebello wrote, the rise in art prices "has limited the quantity and quality of acquisitions to the point where we can no longer expect to match the standards of just a few years ago." To Paul Mellon, long the Maecenas of Washington's National Gallery of Art, "everything important is ridiculously expensive . . . I just refuse to pay these absurd prices." And as the museum's buying power fades, public experience of art is impoverished, and the brain drain of gifted young people from curatorship into art dealing accelerates.