$58m ‘dog’ proves that art is BARKING MAD
If you love art, then this probably isn’t for you. If, on the other hand, you’ve always wondered how many air miles you’d earn if you bought a Modigliani on your credit card, read on. In this head-spinning book, packed with insider information about shady Russian oligarchs, dutyfree warehouses and mystery last-minute telephone bidders, economics professor and industry-insider Don Thompson shines a light on the wheelerdealing that drives today’s global art market.
The Orange Balloon Dog of the title refers to a work by Jeff Koons, the avant-garde provocateur who has made a career out of turning kitsch into high art, or at least extremely expensive art.
The shiny stainless-steel structure, which looks like a giant dog shape made out of twisted balloons, recently went
for $58.4 million, the most ever paid for work by a living artist. You might think that the buyer would big up his bragging rights by installing the Balloon Dog on the roof of his Manhattan mansion. Instead the artwork was whisked off to a warehouse in New Jersey from where, Thompson explains, it will probably be sold on for a profit without ever seeing the light of day.
In the world of the super-rich, art is simply another commodity. Employees at elite auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s spend more time schmoozing collectors than they do discussing Rubens’s use of colour or Picasso’s way with cubes.
Most of the great art works described in Thompson’s book never go on public view. By sending a masterpiece directly from the auction room to a bonded warehouse in Luxembourg or Geneva, the buyer avoids paying huge customs duties. In these vast climate-controlled ‘quarantine kennels’, priceless paintings shelter until they are bought by another dealer who may, in turn, continue to keep them in the same dark warehouse until the time comes to sell.
Still, there is one silver lining. If you really had bought a Modigliani on your credit card, as Shanghai-based Liu Yiqian did in 2015, you’d have banked over €36 million worth of air miles.
Enough to keep you hurtling around the world’s great auction houses in style for the rest of your life.