Charles Saatchi eschews conventional auction houses to sell his collection of Middle Eastern contemporary art online, says Colin Gleadell.
Charles Saatchi has chosen a new online-only auctioneer to sell works from his collection of Middle Eastern contemporary art this month, rather than a more familiar live auction at Sotheby’s, Christie’s or Phillips.
The 15 works, valued at more than £250,000, were exhibited in Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, held at the Saatchi Gallery in 2009.
The sale is being staged by the Auction Room, which was formed earlier this year by Sotheby’s former managing director of Europe, George Bailey, and is directed by Janet Rady, an independent expert in Middle Eastern art .
Forty works are currently viewable online, with estimates ranging from £1,200 to £80,000, and bidding has already begun on half of them. A popular lot is Hayv Kahraman’s pair of portraits, Carrying on Shoulder 1 and 2 from the Saatchi collection.
Since I last wrote about the artist’s work at Art Dubai in 2009, where her paintings were priced at $10,000 each, they have risen to nearly $100,000 (£62,000) at auction. An exhibition of her latest work which opens today at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York has already sold out, so bidding on this work is likely to exceed the estimated £36,000 to £40,000.
Equally interesting will be the artists who have had no exposure to auction before, such as Sohelia Sokhanvari, an Iranian artist who lives in England and was trained as a traditional miniature painter. In this sale she presents Shahrzad the Storyteller, the legendary Persian queen, in modern-day dress, using Iranian crude oil for shading, 22-carat gold and semi-precious pigments. Painted this year, it has an estimate of £4,000 to £6,000 and has had two bids up to £3,600 so far.
Next week, the 40 works will all go on view physically in two adjacent galleries in London’s Cork Street, prior to the sale closing on the evening of September 19. At 7pm, online viewers and bidders will hear Bailey’s voice as he runs through the final bids on each lot consecutively. Each lot will be given 40 seconds, unless a bid is made before the planned closure of the sale, in which case a rival bidder will be given a further 15 seconds to make their bid. When the bidding concludes, the sound of Bailey’s gavel will ring out as he declares the lot sold or unsold. He might also reveal the locations of the bidders to add some extra colour to the proceedings.
The whole process has been devised to replicate a live sale as far as possible. Unlike other online-only auction sites, such as eBay or Artnet, which simply act as a conduit between buyer and seller, the Auction Room employs specialists to catalogue lots and advise clients, and supervises collection and distribution of payment. An atypical feature is that there will be no publicly accessible records kept of individual sale results. So in theory, if Saatchi’s lots flop, it will be easier for him to reoffer them without the shadow of failure hanging over them.
Rady believes her sale fills a gap in the market, as none of the major salerooms are holding a contemporary Middle Eastern Art sale in London this year. Outside Europe there is increasing activity. The Ayyam Gallery in Dubai holds its 16th sale for young collectors next Tuesday, where prices range from $1,000 to $15,000, while the Tehran Auction, which held its second sale of contemporary art by Iranian artists in June, sold all 82 lots for $2 million. Next month, Christie’s holds its annual sale of Arab and Iranian art in Dubai, and will add an online-only sale to its two regular live sales for the first time.
Online only auctions are now sprouting up like mushrooms. In addition to newly formed operations such as the Auction Room and Paddle8 fine art online auction house, Christie’s is staging online sales this month for Andy Warhol fashion design, contemporary Asian prints, and Australian drawings, while Artnet is casting its net to cover contemporary African and Asian art, photography, street art, and “pop” art prints. All are aimed at the more affordable end of the art market, which the live auctions at the larger auctioneers do not cater for any more. For sellers, online is also a cheaper way to sell. The Auction Room, for instance, provides expertise but only charges 7.5 per cent to sellers, which is half the price charged by the larger auctioneers. In addition, there are no illustration, insurance or unsold lot charges to pay.
So the action online is really heating up. The big question, though, is what will sell? Saatchi is gambling that his lots will.