Art and its Market E-Book

Dirk Boll

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 1042

Beschreibung

The new look on the history of art and its blind spots, the far-reaching digitization of structures and content, the changing role of museums and art criticism, new forces from influencers to NFTs: Hardly any market system has evolved as profoundly in the last decade as the distribution of art.  With 25 years of experience in the art industry, Dirk Boll acts as a continuous chronicler and seasonal commentator of these pervasive developments. His handbook Art and its Market  is a reliable source of in-depth knowledge about the inner workings of global art market systems. How do auctions, the network of galleries, and fairs work? How are prices being made, and how do trends both in the production of art as well as its collection emerge? What is more, this edition provides comprehensive information on the practical issues of art acquisition: What are the customs and pitfalls, the economic interdependencies between the artists, buyers and other market players, and the legal regulations governing the trade with art?

Leseprobe

Dirk Boll

Art and Its Market

A Handbook

Dirk Boll

ARTANDITS MARKET

A Manual — volume 1

Foreword & History

contents

I. Foreword

1. History

1.1 The Art Markets

1.2 The History of the Art Markets

1.2.1 The Beginnings

Antiquities: Messengers from a Distant Past

1.2.2 The Market of the Early Modern Era

Artists and their Portraits

Into the Wunderkammer to be Amazed

Old Masters: A Safe Bet for the Art Markets?

Tapestries: More Than a Carpet on the Wall

Architecture Spolia: Stony Messengers From the Past

Grand Tour Objects: Reverences for the Greatness of the Past

Pompei Under a Cold Sky: Neoclassicism as a Global Trend

1.2.3 Early Expertise

Napoleon’s Veneration on Coffee Cups: Egyptomania

Not, or Not Just, the Emperor’s New Clothes: The Art of the Empire

Neogothic: The Middle Ages for Everybody

1.2.4 The Modern Art Market

Art-historical Significance Counts: The Renaissance of Impressionism

1.2.5 Post-War Developments

Attic Sales Concquer the Continent

1.2.6 Boom and Disillusionment

The Art World’s Captains of Industry: A. Alfred Taubman

Japonisme as a Bridge between Europe and Asia

The Regional Economic Crisis: Harbingers of the Asia Crisis and the Market Slump of 1990

1.2.7 Crises and Cartels

The Art World’s Captains of Industry: François Pinault

The Crisis of the Digital Industry: The Burst of the Dotcom Bubble, 2000/2001

1.2.8 The Twenty-First Century

The Art World’s Captains of Industry: Bernard Arnault

The Global Financial Crisis: Megalomania and Hangover in the Fall of 2009

Warholmania: Highlights of Classic Post-War Art

1.2.9 Pandemic Reforms

Covid Causes a Global Health Crisis in 2020

Cutting Edge: Absolutely Contemporary Art

War in Ukraine and the Middle East

Notes

ARTAND ITSMARKET

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I

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FOREWORD

Foreword

Money has possibly always played a role in the appreciation of art. This became obvious in the 1980s at the latest, when Japanese collectors started acquiring Impressionist works after British pension funds had invested in that area a few years before. Or in the 1990s, when almost everybody started to buy contemporary art. Or at the turn of the millennium, when for the first time the price for a work of art passed the magical threshold of 100 million dollars. Today, the market value of art is generally accepted as a factor in the process of canonization.1 That may be a cause for regret, but it is not likely to change. The comprehensive transparency of market activities enabled by the Internet provides an almost grassroots democratic base to this development, and ensures that it will last. The fact that according to the art market reports of tefaf or art Basel, for decades more than half of the auction prices for works of art worldwide were below 3000 euros, demonstrates at the same time the important role the market plays in the popularization of the arts.2

The growing interest in art markets, their frameworks and foundations, structures and secrets has also increased demand for books on the art market. This handbook is intended to provide an introduction to all those interested in the field and to contribute to transparency, with the hope that the engagement with market systems will become more professional. In the first part, this book will explore the history of the art markets, in the second chapter their structure, followed by a consideration of the legal and economic framework. The fourth chapteris devoted to the objects traded on these markets. Procurement and sales will be the subject of the last two chapters. Supplementary background chapters will highlight certain subjects as well as collecting fields, and in addition, a comprehensive bibliography is intended to invite readers to expand their knowledge—because this is a handbook intended to provide an overview.

My genesis as an author owes a great deal to the influence of four strong women to whom I am very grateful. Kunst ist käuflich, my first published book, appeared in 2009 as a hardback with Rüffer & Rub in Zurich and owed its existence to the entrepreneurial courage and the infectious energy of Anne Rüffer, who discovered me as an author and has continually encouraged me to write. In 2010, with the same publisher, the essay collection Marktplatz Museum: Sollen Museen Kunst verkaufen dürfen? appeared.

The second edition of Kunst ist käuflich is due to Annette Kulenkampff, at the time publisher at Hatje Cantz. Her decision to take on the text from Rüffer & Rub, have it translated into English, and publish it as a revised paperback edition in 2011, has given the book a new life and a significantly broadened readership. Since then, Hatje Cantz has published numerous other texts of mine, including Ein gastliches Kunstwerk: Die Zürcher Kronenhalle und ihre Sammlung.

Her successor Cristina Steingräber has welcomed this legacy and has taken good care of it. She gave me and my subsequent books a home at Hatje Cantz: in 2013, Dasabcder Kunstmärkte appeared, in 2014 Helden der Kunstauktion (Auctioneers who made art history), and in 2017, the third edition of Kunst ist käuflich was published.

After all the travails of the pandemic, I found myself back with Hatje Cantz and was able to publish my observations about this time at the end of 2020 under the title Was ist diesmal anders? Wirtschaftskrisen und die neuen Kunstmärkte 1990-2001-2008-2020. I owe that publication as well as this handbook Art and Its Market to their current publisher Nicola von Velsen: it was her idea to bring together the research topics and reportage in this handbook, and to enrich it with up-to-date accounts of the various fields of collecting. The readability and the visual appearance of the book benefitted greatly from Rutger Fuchs’s design, the content from Richard Hagemann’s careful input, and the translation from the work of Brian Currid and Wilhelm Werthern. I owe all of them a huge debt of gratitude.

London, Spring 2024

Dirk Boll

ARTAND ITSMARKET

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1

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HISTORY

introduction

That art and its reception are receiving increased attention is reflected in the numbers of visitors of museums, galleries, art fairs, and auctions, and their respective websites. This goes hand in hand with public debates about the social value of the museum and its classical mission, namely collecting, preserving, and researching art. In view of the prices of masterpieces, shrinking public budgets, and the skeptical evaluation of event culture, the discourse is becoming politically controversial, as is amply echoed in the media.

This is because art is for sale. The art market is perceived by many observers as an expanding system that is gaining comprehensive control over the reception of art, gradually overriding the hegemony of museums and the academy. This is especially showcased at the large art fairs and auctions, and how they are reported by the media on all digital channels, which also points to the changes of the power relationships within this market—between the competing distribution systems gallery/art dealers and art auctions on the one hand, but, ever since the digitalization of market systems, also between established market structures and artists marketing their own works, mainly through social media, on the other hand.3

In the last decade of the twentieth century, the technological development of the Internet insured a great degree of transparency in other economic fields, generally through fast data transmission, and above all, however, through the greatly simplified accessibility of information. Such an acceleration can also be observed on the art market, followed by an increase in the number of events. However, for a long time the art market system managed to dominate the flow of information to a large degree. Only the digitalization of the distribution systems for art necessitated by the pandemic has made these markets also more transparent and thus more accessible—and as a consequence also questioned the classic assignation of roles in this market.

This is this book’s point of departure—a portrayal of the structures, the participants, the general conditions and their developments over the past twenty years: an open perspective on the art market.

Even though in their form, the art markets follow traditional rules and laws, they have changed more since the last turn of the millennium than ever before. The auction houses have finally managed to develop from wholesalers to retailers. This was only possible because from the perspective of the buyers, they managed to establish themselves as a third form of distribution in addition to art fairs on the one hand and the gallery system and art trade on the other hand. It became apparent that the art world, at least that part dealing with commercial sales, has in the course of this development become an art industry; an industry that acts like one. Procurement analysis, sales planning, customer service, communication, brand maintenance—there are numerous indications.4 Given the public nature of auctions, they become especially obvious in the case of auction companies, which obviously take on more industrial characteristics the bigger they are—but then, this applies equally to auction companies and to corporate galleries.

What becomes clear here is that the changes in the general framework of the art market have fundamentally challenged assignations of functions, because originally, art auctions were above all a form of intermediate trade, forming the most important supply source for art dealers. Even as recent as before World War II, direct buyers were a clear minority at auctions.

This has changed dramatically. The limited number of artworks hinder modern procurement and sales planning. Since an increase in turnover cannot be achieved by increasing the number of objects for sale, it can only be achieved by broadening demand and the increase in prices linked to that. Growth is thus directly dependent on an increase of direct customers: the increased competition among bidders leads to higher price levels; also, direct customers are not limited by the requirement to buy for a hammer price that will still enable them to resell the item at a profit. This development has brought the distribution systems into direct competition, and since the mid-1980s, the situation between auction houses and art dealers has to be described as one of predatory competition. The art market crises of 1990/91, 2001, 2008/09, and 2020 have exacerbated the situation; the digitization of the early 2020s has pushed this development even more. Especially the large, financially strong auction houses were looking for niches on the markets that they could fill with a range of goods and services of their own. The art dealers who occupy these niches see the foundations of their business increasingly under threat. At the same time, the gallery system is following the example of the auction industry; a few chains that dominate the market are facing a large number of comparatively small individual companies.

Will the changes in the basic framework and foundations of the art market, as well as the expansion of multi-national corporations in the worlds of galleries and auction houses, drive traditional art dealers into market niches? One niche might be on the highest levels and in market areas that due to the increasing scarcity of material don’t allow for other forms of sale, on the other hand those on a lower quality level where due to the average prices auctions don’t make economic sense, and sales through Internet platforms exacerbate the competition of auction companies. Or will we see large corporations linking up, thus overcoming the division between auction and art dealing to join forces, pushing out the smaller companies?

1.1 The Art Markets

The art market that is the subject of this book deals with the fields of fine and applied arts. Between the artists as producers of the goods and the public, there are intermediaries in the art market. The commercial aspect is dealt with by galleries, dealers, and auction houses, while museums serve as intermediaries on the level of content and in the sense of maintaining cultural values and creating social identity. To the extent that art and culture are defined through social discourse, the work of the intermediaries in this second sense is done by the media, art criticism, and art scholarship. Since this discourse also, and indeed mainly, takes place on digital channels, the interested public, the community, is also part of it today.

The art market can be divided into a primary and secondary market. While on the primary market, artists and their galleries sell works for the first time, on the secondary market these goods are resold by a gallery, an art dealer, or an auction house.

In past years and decades, the art market has undergone powerful transformations, and the speed of this transformation is continuously accelerating. There is no model for making prognoses on the development of the art market, there is no instrument for analyzing it. The reasons for this lie in the widespread perception of the business and its structures through the parameters of art rather than those of economics. In an economic analysis, no link between the content and the value of a work of art can be established. In contrast to most other industries, there is little reliable empirical data about the overall turnover of the art market. Public statistics about the art market are rare; they are not specifically recorded by national offices or by the European Union.

Thus, developments on the art market can only be traced by indexes, surveys of participants, and the sales figures of individual companies. In the latter category, only the sales figures of the auction houses can be meaningfully consulted, because the sales numbers of dealers usually describe just micro-structures and are as a rule not publicly accessible—in scholarship, the term used is “spurious precision.”5 Nonetheless, scholarly studies are more than merely descriptive. The European Fine Art Foundation/tefaf (until 2017), Art Basel/ubs, Deloitte, Artnet, or Hiscox: put together by various organizations, these reports have in common that they are forced to operate with a comparatively narrow data base, and thus are of limited informational value.6 They nevertheless offer insights and reveal links that point to new constellations. If we use data from these reports from recent years to draw up an art market diagram, a surprising view of the world emerges. Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which partly due to their media presence appear so dominant, share between them less than 20 percent of the international markets. The share of groups such as Chinese auction houses on the one hand, and regional and local auction companies on the other, is higher. Here we can see how the fragmentation in this field influences public perception. Together with Internet auctions, all auction companies only make up half of all the art markets. Compared to what people commonly think, and the fears of art dealers, these numbers are rather surprising.

We also have to keep in mind that the art market with its turnover of 65 billion dollars in 2023 is still the smallest sub-segment of the cultural industry. The share of the entire art market in the global gdp is at around 1.5 per mill; in his Theories of Surplus Value, Karl Marx called it a quantité négligeable. Nevertheless, art as a commodity is not necessarily a luxury good, but plays a key role in the popularization of the arts: more than half of all transactions in Europe are in regions below 3,000 euros; the companies employ around 2.9 million people worldwide.7

There is another reason why prognoses about the art market’s development are diffuse and of only limited informational value: de facto, this market is the sum of micro-markets that are all subject to their own laws. Certainly, some conditions apply equally to the markets of contemporary art, porcelain, antique furniture, and fine prints, to just mention a few of the submarkets. At the same time, each of these micro-markets is subject to specific influences and fashions. For this reason, it is impossible to make precise predictions about the development of the art market, i.e., the entirety of the various market segments. This is all the more regrettable as the history of the art market is always also economic history, because the stream of artworks traditionally follows economic changes. English collectors in the seventeenth century bought the artworks of the impoverished Italian aristocracy, after the French revolution, artworks that were sold by the republican government found their way to other European countries, just as the big industrialists in the US tried to acquire the treasures of the czars that the Soviet regime sold in order to obtain foreign currency. American collectors were also the main takers of works the English aristocracy had to give up at the end of the nineteenth century, and a hundred years later they sold them to Russian oligarchs, among whom there was great demand around the turn of the millennium, and subsequently they were in turn overtaken by the moneyed elite in mainland China or the gulf region: ars longa!8

1.2 The History of the Art Markets

1.2.1 The Beginnings

The beginnings of the art markets are shrouded in the mists of history. They have their roots in Egyptian and Phoenician trade relations with numerous neighboring peoples. As early as 1500 BC, Egyptian traders brought their goods to Crete. At the same time, the exchange of goods between Europe and Asia was established via the silk road. Works of art were at that time not private property; they adorned temples and altars and belonged to the community. There are no traces of any secular private collecting activity. However, at places of worship in ancient Greece, copies of effigies of gods were sold to the faithful. Artists held only a low rank in the community; those who worked creatively were merely acting as tools of the gods.9

The first important collections were in the cultural sphere of Hellenism and in ancient Rome. Both the kings of Pergamon and the Egyptian pharaohs collected artworks they had bought, received as gifts, or looted, in art chambers. Private collectors, however, only emerged with the rise of the ruling class in Rome. Artworks were spoils of war, and for this reason were exhibited for representative reasons, and later also traded. The high esteem in which especially Greek art was held led to a culture of collecting independent from the representation of military success. At the latest by the time of the emperors, an art collection of one’s own was one of the attributes of the Roman upper class.10

To service this demand, soon a limited art market established itself. For example, there was a street in Rome, Via Iulia, that was known for its density of art trade. The Roman art dealer Iunius Damasippus was famous, less so for the Greek antiquities he sold than for his spectacular bankruptcy.11 We also know of forgeries of such antiquities during that time.12 Art dealing was frequently just a sideline to other commercial activities—“specialized” in the sale of art were above all the artists themselves who offered their own work.13 Nevertheless, the markets seem to have been highly specialized in niches. Collecting objects of art was, even by today’s notions, very exclusive: the prices of sculptures or works of the applied arts reported by Cicero can easily stand comparison with the sums that were paid at auctions at the height of the craze for the art of French ebenistes in the last third of the nineteenth century.14

The term itself, derived from the Latin auctio, or increase, suggests an auction model with ascending bids. The details of such auctions only became known after a spectacular find in 1875 in Pompei: the documents of the Roman banker and auctioneer Lucius Caecilius Iucundus. Not only did he carefully document his business transactions, he also stored his documents securely. His 153 wax tablets were stored in a wooden box that was heavily mounted with metal, which shielded it from the heat of the ash rain. As was the custom in the Roman Empire, these documents were tablets of boxwood that were on one side covered with wax, which could be inscribed with pens. Once the space in the wax area was exhausted, the writing continued on the edges or the verso side of the wooden tablet, with ink. As is to expected, the wax melted in the heat of the volcanic eruption, so that today we learn about individual business transactions above all from the ink inscriptions.15

They provide deep insights into the structure of such a business that reveals surprising parallels to today’s auction business. We know from ancient writers like Pliny, Cicero, or Cato the Elder that objects were auctioned off when an estate was dissolved or the owner couldn’t pay his debts.16 From the time of Augustus onwards, these auctions had a one percent auction tax levied on them. Even then, the seller in such a transaction was represented by a commercial intermediary, the coactor. This activity as intermediary was paid for by the buyer with merces, a fee in the amount of an additional percent. We know from other Roman sources that a sliding scale was used: for transactions below a certain value threshold, a 2 percent surcharge was applied, above it only 1 percent. For objects where the sale required a disproportionate effort in relation to the anticipated price, there were fixed base fees.17 The coactor subtracted all these costs as well as the auction tax from the selling price, and paid the remainder to the seller.

In addition to the coactor, a banker with the title of argentarius was responsible for financial and overall supervision of the auction; these two offices were also often performed by the same person. This supervisory function can be compared to today’s Ammann or hussier, who to this day supervise auctions in Switzerland and France. The argentarius could also lend money to someone interested in buying, and could therefore be compared to today’s guarantor in the concept of a “third party guarantee”18: the banker Lucius Caecilius Iucundus was called such a coactor argentarius.19 The call for bids was issued by the praeco, who also accepted the bid.20 That meant that the tasks of the auctioneer—on the one hand, a neutral party acting as an intermediary between seller and buyer, on the other hand a master of ceremonies of the sale transaction—were here divided between two people.21

These details from Iucundus’ documents demonstrate that auctions were a central part of Roman economic life and were used daily for a rapid turnover of goods. Even though individual steps of auctioneering were distributed to several actors, the main features of one of the central distribution systems of modern art markets were already determined as early as the first century. Even though the appearance and the degree of specialization have changed significantly, the structure of the sale transaction has basically remained the same. The saying about the “archaic competition” in the auction room is not just a metaphor.

Antiquities: Messengers from a Distant Past

Appreciation of antiquities was reawakened in the course of early modern interest in the past. In demand since the Renaissance, up to now antiquities end up in a niche market for mainly Western connoisseurs. Even though the knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek is continuously declining, due to current, eclecticist trends in collecting that started at the turn of the millennium, interest in the arts of antiquity has increased. Mix & match: the archaic form of Cycladic figures also appeals to collectors of classical modernism, and a Roman or Egyptian bust fits perfectly into an environment characterized mainly by contemporary art. The big price difference that still exists between antiquities and fine artworks from later centuries has been quickly balanced out at least where top objects were concerned.22 The new demand originates frequently from established collectors who have recognized the quality of sculpture from antiquity. Beside the quality of the design and the delicacy of material and execution, an important factor influencing the price is whether the represented god or person can be identified. With sculptures, another factor is the “room power,” which is also frequently described as “sexiness.” Despite great enthusiasm for terracottas or mosaics, collectors of antiquities are still mostly interested in Roman sculptures.23

It goes without saying that museums, reputable dealers and auctioneers will only accept objects that were legally exported. These laws are relevant for the art markets especially because of the export controls of cultural goods, including permit procedures as well as the regulations concerning restitution claims for cultural goods illegally exported from their country of origin. This means that an object should have left its country of origin either before 1970 (the year of the UNESCO agreement) or with an export permit; otherwise, it could be considered an illegal excavation piece.24

Egyptian limestone group ofMehernefer and hisSon, limestone, Old Kingdom, mid-late 5th dynasty, ca. 2,400–2,300 B.C., sold for 6 million pounds (2022)

Attic, bilingual Hydria,Eastnor Castle Bilingual Hydria, attributed to the potter of the Hypsis Hydria, ca. 520–510 B.C., sold for 906,000 pounds (2022)

Marble bust of Antinous, Roman Imperial, between 130 and 138 A.D., sold for 24 million dollars (2010)

Marble Athena head ofVescovalitype, late Flavian-early Trajanic, ca. 2nd century A.D., sold for 819,000 pounds (2022)

In fifteenth-century Rome, an extraordinary gesture by a ruler would both fuel and ennoble collecting antiquities. In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV “donated” several ancient Roman bronzes to the city, which had previously been located on the square in front of St. Lateran, and they were moved for this purpose to the Capitoline.

The inscription with which he celebrated this donation mentions not just the sculptures’ outstanding quality, but also dedicates them to the people of Rome, from whose midst they had once (namely in antiquity) come. Quite apart from the almost aggressively displayed “generosity” of a sovereign, the pope recognizes the contemporary citizenry as the descendants of ancient Rome, and at the same time legitimizes collecting antiquities, which could then already be found in numerous Roman households, as instruments and acts of cultural appropriation. This led subsequently to competitive collecting by representatives both of old families and the new aristocracy, and antiquities became required fixtures of the palaces of the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Borghese, Medici, D’Este, Farnese, or Della Rovere.25

1.2.2 The Market of the Early Modern Era

After the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Christian church as the culture-determining authority in Europe, artistic production was influenced by the Church to such a degree that there was hardly an art market to speak of.26 The close relationship between Church officials commissioning works and artists generally required no intermediaries. Only over the course of the Reformation did a further demand for information arise that led to an increasing demand for images; this demand was mainly met by dealers who not only sold art objects, but also maintained their own workshops. Gutenberg’s invention of the mechanized printing press created the first mass medium, because in addition to manuscripts and panel paintings, suddenly books and pamphlets became important means of communication.27 At that time, professional artists established themselves who became increasingly independent of church commissions or guild regulations, and whose increasing confidence and assertiveness is reflected in the writings of Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci.28

Specialized art dealing only emerged during the Renaissance. In Italy at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century, ruling families’ passion for collecting was served by a network of (art) agents. The artists at the time worked as a rule exclusively for the courts; only those most in demand could afford to work independently and thus for a range of clients.31 At that time, the auction business was increasingly regulated by the state, most strongly so in France: an edict of Henry II in 1552 created the Huissiers-Priseurs, both court marshals and auctioneers, the only profession allowed to transfer property by auction.32 The exceptional status of this French professional group only ended with the harmonization of EU law in 2001.33

Artists and their portraits

At the beginning of art history, artists were invisible, and in the time of classical antiquity, they had quite a low rank—certainly not high enough to justify (self) portraiture. Only the Renaissance, when professional artists established themselves, gave rise to the idea of buying a work of art because of the painter’s reputation. Subsequently, as a rule paintings were ascribed to famous painters. At a time of slow information flows, archives that were not accessible for private research, and the lack of means of reproduction for images, this practice carried little risk.

With his self-portraits, Genre scenes and images of fauna, Albrecht Dürer was a progressive exception; most artists worked on commissions. This only changed with the Impressionists, a movement that was initially not very successful on the market. This rejection meant that the artists were able to become independent of the taste of potential clients commissioning works, seeing themselves increasingly as independent masters.29

This attitude brought the idea of the artistic genius to the interested public, and this complexity makes self-portraits today sought-after objects in the art markets: as a historical documentation of the person behind the artist and thus not just an artistic product, but also a document of cultural history. It is surely also the personal encounter between collectors and artists that—mediated by a self-portrait—accounts for its special fascination. Over the course of centuries, artists from Rembrandt to Picasso added a very personal note to the self-portrait: for many, it was an instrument to help them establish their work and their name virtually as a brand.30

Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Self portrait, 1966/67, sold for 8.2 million Dollar (2007)

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890),Portraitde l’artiste sans barbe, 1889, sold for 71.5 million dollars (1998)

Francis Bacon (1909–1992),Self portrait, 1969, sold for 34.6 million dollars (2023)

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669),Self portrait with Saskia, 1636, sold for 52,500 pounds (2021)

In the Netherlands, a flourishing professional art market existed in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, aided by the predominant Calvinism, because the Calvinist iconoclasm meant that the church no longer commissioned art, and artists had to look elsewhere to sell their works. As a consequence, not only were (art) trading relationships with all other European countries established, artists also no longer worked exclusively for commissions, but also worked ahead and had works in store. These works were offered in the studios and by art dealers, at an art market in the rooms of the Antwerp stock exchange with more than 100 stands, but at markets and auctions as well, and also as part of lotteries.39

The motifs also changed along with this new demand. The focus of the production was now no longer on traditional biblical subjects, but on popular genre paintings and landscapes, which could be produced more efficiently and cheaply than portraits or still lifes.40 Making these changes was easier for members of this culture partly because the formal ideas of the northern Renaissance were more inclined to allow the representation of everyday objects, whereas southern notions of art integrated every represented person, every object into the work’s higher mythological or otherwise moral subject.41

In the Netherlands, this new way of presenting and selling art led to a an artistic and (art) economic heyday. For the first time, the art market was characterized by an expanding demand from an (admittedly mainly male) mass public. It is believed that in those roughly 150 years of the Golden Age, several hundred artists created ten million paintings.49

In addition to religious freedom, a special economy for this region was responsible for this boom. The foundation for this social situation was wealth based on international trade, which due to the size of the country could not be invested in land. Instead, people invested in mobile goods like textiles of daily life or more lasting movable investment goods such as jewelry, silverware, or tapestries. Together with works of fine art, for centuries the latter were the most expensive furnishings of a household.50

This art market was an anomaly in Europe, and quickly became famous beyond the country’s borders, so that visiting the studio of a Dutch artist became an inherent part of the itinerary of young gentlemen on the Grand Tour.

Such trips served educative purposes, but were also devoted to purchasing luxury goods and marked the coming of age of heirs of large estates. The most popular destination in the seventeenth and eighteenth century was Italy, initially Rome, and after the spectacular discovery of Pompei in 1748 increasingly also Naples. Even though access to the excavation sites was initially very strictly controlled by the Neapolitan royal house, news spread fast, in part due to expensive, but available portfolios of engravings: from all over Europe, archeologists as well as dilettanti travelled there to study this buried world and to divulge their research and what they had experienced.54 Generally, the contemporary notion of collecting, preserving, and researching art, and thus the quintessence of the modern museum, was strongly influenced by this period and these events. It is no accident that the first antiquities acquired by the British Museum were the so-called Etruscan Vases excavated in southern Italy, a collection assembled by Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador in Naples.55 Classic artifacts, antiquities, small bronzes, and architectural spoils were then collected like art chamber objects had been in the previous century.

Into the Wunderkammer to be Amazed

The tradition of presenting works of art in a room especially designed for that purpose, the so-called art chamber, emerged in the sixteenth century. This cultural-historical phenomenon marks the beginning of modern collecting. After numerous popes of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had already collected antiquities, Pope Leo X (1475–1521, pontiff from 1513–1521) appointed his court architect Raffaello Sanzio (“Raphael,”1483-1520) supervisor of the Roman antiquities, and assigned him with the task of coming up with an exhibition concept for the collection in the Villa Madama, begun in 1518. The result was a first mouseion, a “seat of the muses.”34 The so-called studiolo, a cabinet of a prince or princess in his or her apartments, served as storage and for private viewing of small bronzes, coins, or gems. Family archive and treasure chamber, this room was above all a storage space for precious objects, and a private haven. Only the studiolo of Isabelle d’Este (1474–1539) was also a reception room, and therefore furnished artistically and containing objects that belonged into a collection context: it is regarded as the first feudal art chamber. Subsequently, such chambers served not just to exhibit works of art, but also rare found objects, including those found in nature, which lead to the term Wunderkammer or chamber of wonders. There you found taxidermies and animals preserved in formalin, drinking horns and goblets made of silver-mounted conchs and of horns of rhinos or ibex; carvings or turnings of amber, corals, or ivory; complicated clocks and astronomical instruments. All this formed a bizarre and strange assemblage of artefacts signaling the owners’ intellectual curiosity and wealth to those who entered. 35

The fashion petered out in the eighteenth century, even though the Leipzig art dealer C. F. Neickel published his Museographia in 1727, the first memorandum on the classification and conservation of collected items—perhaps the increasing systematization of the arrangement took away its aura.36 Late manifestations of the art chamber are the Green Vault of the Saxon Elector August the Strong in Dresden or the Theatre of Wisdom of the English Queen Charlotte in London; a special case is the Wunderkammer of the Francke’sche Stiftungen in Halle/Saale which was established at the beginning of the eighteenth century purely for teaching purposes.37

Since the turn into the twenty-first century, there has been increasing interest in Wunderkammer objects. Such fashions are never born of themselves, but rather reflect more or less complex intellectual interests present in society as a whole. Whereas in the sixteenth century, it was the disruption of the Ptolemaic system and Nicolaus Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is by no means the center of the universe, today’s society is confronted with similarly pathbreaking developments of the globalization of information and production. Both epochs have in common that new scientific discoveries und political upheavals brought with them new insecurity. This led to a new interest in the scientific and especially physical backgrounds and correlations of the world. The rising demand for art chamber objects reflects this focus. The integration of Wunderkammer artefacts into modern interiors does not just add an exotic and intellectual touch, but also reflects a reawakened interest in an increasingly eclectic way of collecting. It is not for nothing that artworks showing the human skull are once again in great demand, especially as ivory momento mori, but perhaps also as a diamond-encrusted contemporary interpretation by Damien Hirst. The inclusion of objects of natural history in fine art auctions—for the first time at Christie’s New York, where the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex was included in the evening auction of works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in 2020—demonstrates how today’s markets are approaching the practices of the Wunderkammer, offering objects for their rarity.38

Yves Saint Laurent’s Kunstkammer, designed by Jacques Grange (b. 1944), Paris, 1980s

Kunstkammer cabinet, designed by Axel Vervoordt (b. 1947), s’Gravenwezel, 1990se

Renaissance Automation in the Form of an Elephant, gilded bronze and silver, Augsburg, ca. 1600–10, sold for 2.6 million dollars (2021)

Animalia cabinet, Kunst- and Wunderkammer in the Francke’sche Stiftungen, Halle (Saale), 18th century

Tash Perrin offers a Tyrannosaurus Rex as a lot at an art auction, Christie’s New York, 2020

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553),TheNymph of the Spring, ca. 1540–1545, sold for 9.4 million pounds (2022)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519),Salvator Mundi, ca. 1500, sold for 450.3 million dollars (2017)

Franz Christoph Janneck (attr., 1703–1761),Immaculata, sold for 5,000 euros (2009)

Alessandro Filipepi, called Sandro Botticelli (1444/5–1510),Madonna of the Magnificat, first half 1480s, sold for 48.5 million dollars (2022)

Old Masters: A Safe Bet for the Art Markets?

The fear of great volatility—be it in the assignation of authorship or market value—makes Old Master paintings seem a comparatively “safe” area of collecting, perhaps even as an investment. In twenty-first-century markets, new demand regularly emerges even from the circles of collectors of contemporary art. They sometimes consider the latter to be overvalued, and buy on the Old Masters market for quality assured by being in museum collections.42

For the interested public, the demand for old art is surprising, because these paintings often depict unpopular, didactic subjects. The most important areas of the Old Masters market are still Dutch landscapes from the seventeenth century, as well as Italian landscapes and vedute, because to most people, living under a Venetian veduta seems more appealing than under a St. Sebastian. Here, too, the big names function as “brands,” a veduta by Breughel or Canaletto attract greater interest, as the Canaletto prices in the auction of the estate of Paul Allen in November 2022 have demonstrated so clearly. This also explains the demand for works from the Italian High Renaissance that was spurred by the world-record sale of the panel depicting the Salvator Mundi that had been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, but due to fact that da Vincis are hard to come by, it is now Luini instead of Leonardo (Bernardo Luini, c. 1480–1532) for whose works demand is increasing.

Roman school,The Rape of Ganymede, ca. 1630–40, sold for 252,000 francs (2008)

Only in recent years have we seen a greater openness and growing private demand for religious topics. Curator Thierry Morel cannot understand that some collectors still have reservations when it comes to religious subjects: “The church was hugely wealthy and patronized many artists. For this reason, the best work by an artist is likely to have a religious subject matter.”43 At the same time, there is also increased interest in early portraits. And in the realm of Old Master paintings, there is a noticeable interest in the minimalistic, which influences the selection of still lifes.

Numerous record prices for Old Masters since the turn of the millennium illustrate their great market potential, and at least at the highest quality level; the disparity between prices for Old Masters and contemporary artists, often lamented by collectors, has decreased, even if the number of top works on offer is, naturally, comparatively low.44 At the same time, art historical research creates a certain dynamic when works are rediscovered or newly attributed. As to the reasons for why top-level works are brought to market, in the field of Old Masters the restitution of paintings from museums is added to the list of reasons that are otherwise of a private nature. This is why we need to add to “death, divorce, disaster” also “rediscovery, restitution, and reattribution.” Rediscoveries and restitutions happen regularly in the field of the so-called masterpieces, which have outstanding significance for this area of collecting. Reattributions result from the research on works that are largely unsigned.45

The growing interest also applies to Old Master drawings and prints. These are often bought by people who can no longer afford oil paintings. A large part of the offerings has comparatively low prices; there are only a few areas of collecting where the gap between the highly competitive market for masterpieces and the work of an unknown lesser master is as visible as it is here.46 This situation means people who are interested in this segment are confronted with a buyers’ market. “We also discovered that Old Masters paintings were not necessarily expensive. That you can buy paintings without being extremely rich,” the Paris collector Edwin Milgrom reminisces about the beginnings of his passion for collecting.47

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of the Old Masters is that it takes longer to understand them, so that a quick recognition and ranking as with contemporary works is only possible to a limited extent. The art critic Scott Reyburn, however, thinks that a society that now appreciates slowness in issues concerning food should also transfer this to art: “There’s a Slow Food movement. How about Slow Art?”48

Tapestries: More Than a Carpet on the Wall

Tapestry is one of the applied arts with a very long tradition. The name tapestry is derived from the French term tapis, or carpet. These textiles were conceived as art for walls (and by no means for covering floors). Since the Gothic period, they were an important part of interior decorations. In addition to their aesthetic value, they have practical advantages. In large spaces with high ceilings, they served for thermal and acoustic insulation, and were mobile. When the court moved on to a different residence, or citizens to the countryside for the summer, tapestries were taken down, rolled up, and either safely stored or hung at the new site. It wasn’t until the late seventeenth century that tapestries were produced for specific rooms.51

A piece of tapestry is initially conceived as a (painted) design, and then transferred to a weaving model, the so-called cartoon. This cartoon determines the silhouettes of the image and the run of colors; at the loom, the image is then executed in wool and linen (or, especially elegant because of the shine, linen and silk). This work is extremely time-consuming—it takes weavers around two months per square meter.

The rediscovery of the elegant country house style with haute époche furnishings and the renaissance of the Wunderkammer as a design model have ensured a revival on the art markets for tapestry. At least as long as it is woven in a classic style, in calm natural colors, and is suitable as a background for an impressive stately home atmosphere. However, the highest prices are paid for tapestries from the Gothic and Baroque periods.52

Here, the condition plays an important role—sometimes, previous owners have removed borders or segments in order to fit a piece of tapestry into a specific room. In contrast to such a fragment, a tapestry in good condition retains all ornamented border zones. Apart from the subject, provenance can also contribute to the value, which often can be traced by coats of arms woven into them.

The enthusiasm for unusual materials and the newly discovered openness for textiles in interior decorating have also led to demand for modern textile artworks. This is evidenced not only by the prices of embroidery à la Alighiero e Boetti, but also the attention now paid to textiles from the Bauhaus period by Gunta Stölzl or Annie Albers, or contemporary tapestries in that tradition by artists such as Yaakov Agam.53

Aubusson TapestryLa Tente de Darius, after Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), late 17th century, sold for 23,000 euros (2022)

William Kentridge (*1955),Peripheral Thought No. 1 (Nose Series), 2015, sold for 151,000 pounds (2023)

Gothic tapestry, Tournai or Brussels, ca. 1490–1510, sold for 504,000 pounds (2022)

Bauhaus Weaving Workshop: Tapestry, Dessau, late 1920s, sold for 34,000 pounds (2008)

Architecture Spolia: Stony Messengers From the Past

Spolia are remnants of perished buildings that were placed in a new architectural context. Traditionally these were fragments of building sculptures that were affixed into walls for a permanent presentation—familiar from the streets of Rome, but also on the walls of Schloss Glienicke, the summer residence of Prussia’s Prince Karl just outside of Berlin. Today, the term also covers the use of historical building elements, i.e., the integration of old parts into completely newly constructed buildings. All this recalls the origin of the term: the Latin term for spoils of war, spolium. Taking the architectural decoration from destroyed buildings and reusing it signals two things: that the enemy was rich and therefore important, and that he was defeated. Thus, the first spolia can be found in the villas of Roman generals. At the same time, spolia speak of their origins and thus transfer tradition and significance. This was widespread after changes in power and religion, so that sometimes churches contain spolia from previous heathen buildings.

For centuries, the reuse of building materials was a sensible way of dealing with scarce resources. Even though from the Renaissance onwards, ancient spolia were sometimes offered in the art market, a broad demand for historical elements only emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century. The auction of the estate of the Duke of Chandos in 1747 (with remnants of his country house Cannons in Middlesex) is considered the first auction of historic building materials.56

Sometimes the architecture of the new building referred to these collection objects—a pattern that was repeated in the classicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Sometimes spolia were integrated into the use of rooms, such as in the dining room of the Hôtel d’Aumont in Paris. In the eighteenth century, a Roman sarcophagus was integrated as a cooling basin (rafraichissoir) for bottles.57

Two companies were the leading tastemakers in this field of collecting. In the 1920s, Feau&Cie in Paris started to deal with historical wood panels, which could be more easily adjusted to new measurements than elements made of stone. Especially American museums made use of this and bought entire rooms in order to resurrect them as backgrounds for their collections—the “period rooms” at the New York Metropolitan Museum are famous for the quality of their wall-mounted fitments. How well wooden floors, tiles, and other elements of historic houses can fit into modern buildings has been demonstrated by the Belgian art dealer Axel Vervoordt ever since the 1990s. Every year, his booth at TEFAF in Maastricht shows how the breath of history can be brought into a (sometime) brand new home.58

Walnut, oak, and cherrywood parquet floor, France 1st half of the 19th century, sold for 8,100 euros (2012)

Prometheus plaque, England ca. 1800, sold for 1,500 pounds (2022)

English marble and jasper mantelpiece, ca. 1750, sold for 38,000 dollars (2017)

Armand Albert Rateau (1882–1938), Marble bath, 1924–1925, sold for 62,000 euros (2013)

From the seventeenth century, the (mainly English) “grand tourists” constituted an important client base for the continent’s art markets, with the exception of the time when Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658, governed 1652–59) ruled, whose Puritan laws forbade all imports of art from abroad.59 Impressions from these tours were not least the basis for people’s activity as collectors after they returned home; and thus a highly specialized and strong art market emerged in London. 60 But not just originals from classical antiquity were traded there, famous sculptures at the Vatican were also reproduced in large numbers and numerous materials to adorn British country house libraries.61 Paintings and sculptures in the reception rooms at the residences of the English aristocracy in the eighteenth century were not just meant to demonstrate intellectual curiosity and attest to the owners’ travels and collection activities, but also indicate the moral validity of these historical societies.62 Soon it became indispensable to own an art collection for prestige reasons. Due to the beginning dominance of the state over European trade, large amounts of money came into the country; while the Italian aristocracy impoverished and had to sell their possessions, the English aristocracy established itself on the buyers’ side.63

The bourgeoisie increasingly became a target for the art trade. With a population of 676,000 around 1750, London was the largest city in the world.64 From the middle of the century onwards, London and Paris far outranked all other European cultural centers, not least because, the extremely increased demand from the well-off middle classes had to be met in addition to the requirements of the royal courts in both cities.65 Whereas people interested in art traveled to the sites of classical antiquity, buyers of art traveled instead to London and Paris in the early eighteenth century. The art trade adapted to this with a new openness: shops invited customers to enjoy the art and spend time there, thus becoming increasingly places of intellectual exchange and an intellectualization that crossed social strata.66

Thus, the 1760s became a turning point in England. After the establishment of the Royal Academy, the first Annual Exhibitions fostered both the enjoyment of art and the art trade. The rivalry between the markets in London and Paris influenced the prices of works of art,67 and this in turn had consequences for the auction business: in 1674, Auktionverket was founded in Stockholm, the first auction house that still exists today, in 1707 the Dorotheum in Vienna followed, initially as a state-run pawn shop. The London auction house Sotheby’s, established in 1744, looked quite different then, because only books were auctioned there until the twentieth century.68

James Christie established his company, which specialized in paintings, silver, and furniture in 1766, making it the oldest art auction house in the world. His premises in the elegant London neighborhood St. James’s, the home of the art trade, quickly became a meeting point for the elite. James Christie was the first to transform auctions from events to facilitate the exchange of money for goods into social events—events that were cherished for their entertainment value and which facilitated the enjoyment of art and intellectual conversations. He was not just a good promoter of his goods—it was not accident that he was caricatured as the “king of epithets”—but with his auction previews he created a platform where people, without regard of social rank, could engage with fine art and meet the like-minded—many years and indeed decades before this became the mission of a publicly financed museum landscape.

Grand Tour Objects: Reverence for the Greatness of the Past

During the seventeenth century, it became common for young gentlemen to complete their education and refine their taste on a Grand Tour through Europe. For almost 300 years, the young heirs to European realms or large fortunes traveled to Paris, Venice, Florence, and above all to Rome and Naples. Depending on their age, they were sometimes accompanied by their wives, but usually the gentleman traveled alone. Visits of universities and ministries were rounded off by the study of museums and galleries, which awakened in many the desire to start their own collections. Crates with acquisitions were regularly shipped home and became the foundations not just of collections, but also of local art market structures.

Until well into the eighteenth century, antiquities and works by painters like Claude Lorrain or Canaletto were collected that depicted the places visited on the Grand Tour, or used the places seen in reality as set pieces for arcadian scenes. The Forum Romanum was the perfect staffage for an arcadian landscape. Subsequently, northern European stately homes were increasingly furnished with views of an idealized vision of the south, which in turn influenced the next generation of grand tourists. Traveling to the objects of study from classical antiquity increasingly became viewing originals that were quite familiar from depictions.

With the Enlightenment, attitudes changed. The improvement of domestic academies made the knowledge of foreign societies seem less significant. The trip became a lucullan inspection of the unfamiliar, and travelers tended to be rich aristocrats rather than the heirs to thrones. Purchasing behavior changed in line with this. The new tourists were also fond of contemporary souvenirs in a classical style, and thus in addition to a statue from antiquity, an ink well in a classical sarcophagus shape would be bought: from that point onwards, no desk without a miniature bronze of Trajan’s Column. These objects are similar to today’s souvenirs: without purpose, anonymous, and produced in large numbers with materials typical for the region. Then as today, a highly desired, but purposeless ornament for a chest of drawers that could not really be considered art.

Laocoön and his Sons, group, after the antique, bronze, Roman, 2nd half 17th century, sold for 227,000 dollars (2023)

Francesco Righetti (1780–1852), Ormolu, white marble and semi-precious hardstone-inlaid center table, marble top attributed to Giacomo Raffelli (1753–1836), Rome or Milan, ca, 1800–1810, sold for 1.5 million dollars (2023)

Grand Tour objects, specimen marble, Italy ca. 1820, sold for 12,000 dollars (2012)

Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto (1697–1768),Piazza San Marco, Venice, ca. 1730/1731, sold for 10.5 million dollars (2022)

Pompei Under a Cold Sky: Neoclassicism as a Global Trend

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the elegant world started once again to take an interest in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. One reason may have been that people had grown tired of the exuberance of the Rococo and were looking for a new way of designing buildings, interiors, and everyday objects. A further trigger for the new fashion were the reports of the discovery and subsequent excavations of the cities Pompei and Herculaneum that were buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The findings revealed unprecedented details about life in antiquity and many of the murals, sculptures, vases, and bronze equipment were published in splendid copper engravings. The reports of travelers to Italy such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Joachim Winkelmann increased the yearning for ancient art. Especially Winkelmann’s report that Roman antiquity had been decisively influenced by Greek culture distinguished the Neoclassicism from the first wave of enthusiasm in the early modern period, because the Renaissance was above all an Italian style referring back to Rome. The simple and rigorous canon of forms abbreviated by Winkelmann as “noble simplicity, quiet greatness” became an ideal in both the applied and the fine arts. It is important to note that this was not just a fashion in design, but rather an Enlightenment concern to improve sensibility for form and taste through an understanding and imitation of antiquity.71

Even more than had been the case for the Renaissance or the Baroque, Neoclassicism became an international style of tectonic, graphic, and clear design that was followed throughout Europe. This means that its formal vocabulary became part of almost every nation’s cultural heritage: from Stockholm to Naples, from St. Petersburg to Washington, DC. This is today an important reason for the demand for works and objects in a classical style. But here, too, we can make out regional differences. Whereas typically German manifestations such as the national version of Louis-Seize mocked as Zopfstil or the Viennese Biedermeier have taken a step back after having been in great demand for many years, the richer classicism prevalent in Russia now has many fans, especially in the US.

Giovanni Volpato (1733–1809),Logge di Rafaele nel Vaticano: Pilaster No. 9, 1776, colored copperplate engraving, sold for 1,600 euros (2012)

Joseph Baumhauer, called Joseph (d. 1772), Writing table (bureau plat), ca. 1765–1772, sold for 2.3 million euros (2022)

Georges Jacob (1739–1814), Sofa from Louis XVI’s Salon des Jeux at Saint Cloud, ca. 1785, sold for 530,000 dollars (2023)

Rundell, Bridge & Rundell (active 1797–1843), Set of four candelabra, ca. 1800, gilded bronze, sold for 164,000 euros (2022)

By selling the art collection of George Walpole, which the latter had inherited from his grandfather, the British prime minister, to the czarina Catherine the Great, in a discreet, initially non-public transaction, he probably also made the first private sale by an auction house.69 In its auctions, in addition to historical works of art, the company offered mainly contemporary production; the choice of the business premises was owed to the fact that numerous artist’s studios were in the neighborhood. This paid off, because quite a few studio and estate sales took place at Christie’s.70

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars strengthened London as a place for auctions, because the émigré aristocracy were forced to sell their only movable possessions, their art and their jewels. Important continental collections were sold between 1790 and 1820 in London: the collections of the Calonne, Conti, Lafitte, Orléans, and as highpoint the jewels of the Countess Du Barry at Christie’s and the Collection Talleyrand at Phillips.72 At the same time, numerous art dealerships were established, such as the Old Masters specialists Colnaghi and Sulley and in 1817 the gallery Agnew, which also sold works of art saved from the French Revolution to British collectors.73 Even then, art dealers recognized the greater reach of auction houses; especially European players from the continent supplied large numbers of works to London auctions which they could not (or not any longer) sell themselves.74

One consequence of the French Revolution was a decoupling of fashions in collecting. Whereas in France, the desire was to shape the future, and a new calendar began with the year 1, in England an interest in the country’s own history deepened, which for the first time was thematized in mass media such as fine prints, books, or entertainment formats, and thus became accessible to a broader public.75 The elite started to collect artifacts of the deposed monarchy from the neighboring country. Even as Prince of Wales, the later George IV was keenly interested in (or, according to some contemporaries, “obsessed by”) objects with a royal French provenance. Many of the items he bought for his collection originated from members of the Bourbon family or its direct entourage, for example works from Madame de Pompadour’s collection.76

In Paris, on the other hand, the ancien régime was not just out of fashion, but also politically inacceptable. The art trade therefore created a market for unsellable objects by exporting them. Only after the fall of Napoleon I was there also an interest in historic epochs and styles in France, led by the kings of the restoration, who in their ways of representation looked back to the first Bourbon king Henri IV in terms of style and iconography, surrounding themselves with a mixture of historical objects and contemporary recreations “in the old style.” 77

In the end, the release of objects through the French Revolution had the effect that perhaps for the first time in the history of collecting, charming objects that had little intrinsic value were sold. Honoré de Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons, published in 1847 as a serial novel, shows this new form of art reception and collecting: the object appeals to the connoisseur, indeed, it “speaks to him” (with Balzac it is always “him”), and in this conversation, which will lead to desire and in the best case to a purchase, suddenly aspects like authenticity or provenance, even “charm,” play a bigger role than art historical significance—the birth of “bric-a-brac.”78

That Christie’s and Sotheby’s today dominate in the media should not obscure the fact that at all times, numerous competitors have also offered their services to potential clients. In the eighteenth century, in London alone there were around 60 other auction houses and 200 independent auctioneers.79