Ask ArtInfo: Valuing the Work of Artists with No Auction Trail

Valuing The Work Of Artists With No Auction Trail

Photo courtesy Morgan Lehman Gallery

John Salvest, "Flag" (2005)

Photo courtesy Morgan Lehman Gallery

John Salvest, "One Square Yard" (2005)

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I began trying to answer your question by talking to Zack Miner, who is head of the "First Open" sale at Christie’s, an auction at they deliberately include emerging artists.

He struck what will be a very familiar note to regular readers of the “On Collecting” column: “The number one thing that should be stressed,” Miner said, “is that although people are obviously interested in the financial advantages of being involved in contemporary art, they also need to be engaged with the core values that it represents, and those are the aesthetic and emotional responses that a collector has to things they acquire.

“With the speculative way in which many people are now approaching the emerging artist market, Miner continued, “I think that something’s being lost, and that’s the role of collectors of emerging artists as true patrons.”

Bu having got that disclaimer out of the way, Miner did have some advice. “The most important thing is patience. And you have to keep your ear to the ground. Let’s say you bought something out of an MFA show. Once that artist has representation, either in New York or elsewhere, and then once that representation increases—the artist might get an ancillary gallery in another area—as that develops, you just continue to watch what those values are, and you stay in contact.”

Very sensible advice, I think, but probably not the sort of specific answer you’re looking for, Anxious Collector, so I decided to speak to a couple of private dealers for you.

The first was Joni Moisant Weyl of the gallery Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl., as she’d given me such helpful advice on our previous reader’s question on print prices. She was rather surprised that you were attaching so much importance to the prices at auction in the first place.

“Auctions are only one way of determining price,” she told me, “and to be honest we use them as a very minor barometer of pricing. Very minor.”

I asked her why, and she suggested that auctions automatically inflate prices: “Auctions are by definition a process where at any given moment there are two or more people bidding for the same object.”

In fact, like Miner, she stressed the greater importance of staying in touch with the source of your purchase. “Presumably this work was bought from a dealer? Well, the accurate price is the price that the dealer puts on it,” she said. “Even if this piece was bought months or years ago, the dealer is still the best person to go back to to ask for a current pricing on it.”

So, having heard that, I decided to find a specific example of a dealer pricing an artist’s work, and I tried to find the sort of artist that your emerging artist of a few years ago might have become, AC.

The Morgan Lehman gallery recently opened a show of sculptures by John Salvest. He is an early mid-career artist, and he showed an installation at the New Museum some years back—but he hasn’t had a solo show in New York before.

I spoke to Jay Lehman Horowitz at the gallery and he was really very forthcoming on the question of how they’d arrived at the prices for the works in the show.

“They’re really based on previous sales by other artists,” he told me. “The two-dimensional work is really based on painting prices, because we show a lot of painting. Paintings by early mid-career artists are in the $7-10,000 range, so we priced [Salvest's]  One Square Yard (2005) at $7,000. Flag (2005), a landscape-format American flag made with the pencils, that piece in $6,500.”

“So,” I asked him, just to get it straight, “your approach to pricing is to compare works of a similar size by artists at a similar stage in their career?”

“Exactly,” he replied. “There are two factors when we price work. They are résumé and size. That’s the reality of it. I can almost group together various pricing structures: emerging artists, 16" x 20" works on paper should be $800 to $1,200. If that same work is a painting, it should be $1200 to $1800, and so on.”