Conversation with Clare McAndrew—Part 2

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The web exclusive that follows is an extension
of Conversation with Clare McAndrew, an article originally published in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction.

What else in your study for TEFAF was striking?

The global boom in the past two years. Impressionist and modern will always be the biggest, but the boom in contemporary sales was remarkable. I always knew what was going on, but I didn’t realize the extent to which it was this all-boats-are-rising situation, a global phenomenon.

Do the droit de suite resale royalty laws, which were introduced in the U.K. in 2006, seem like a good measure to you?

People move art to where it’s more favorable to buy and sell. It’s made a mockery of the directive. As an economist I would question the intention of it. It was presented as an emotional appeal, to help emerging artists, but it doesn’t help them. It helps wealthy artists. Most emerging and mid-career artists don’t have a resale market. The best way to benefit artists is to give them the healthiest market that you can. To apply taxes is probably the worst thing you can do. It puts people off buying art.

What are you finding about the relationships between dealers and auction houses?

Traditional boundaries are being blurred. Dealers are up in arms about auction houses moving into their sector, but I think there are also a lot of dealers who are acting more like auction houses—working on commission-only bases, and acting more like agents.

With the market so global, is there still the same attention paid to these May and November evening sales, with all the new events and fairs?

People will always look to the big sales as global reference points. Even with Chinese art, it was in the larger markets where the price records were set. But we do have more geographical democracy.  

In the conclusion to your study, you emphasize that to insure stability, the market needs greater transparency and clearer information to become available to economists. Why is that?  

More institutional investors and art funds have been encouraged to get into the market—and that has been critical to maintain and enhance the global market—but they must have confidence that information is available. There is limited access to sufficient auction house sales data for use by an economist or statistician. There is very strong academic research and a lot of models. The data providers seem to have problems in seeing the benefit of these studies to the wider art market. I think they were all in fear that I was trying to go into competition with them. It is very difficult.  

Isn’t it especially difficult to get transparency from private dealers?

The ones who are getting involved [in providing economists such as myself with information] are really beginning to understand the need for benchmark data, for their own lobbying purposes, and to get investors interested in buying art.

What did the dealers you surveyed say about art fairs?

That there are downsides to this phenomenon, even if on balance it’s positive in terms of access to a global market. A lot of them were more comfortable in the days when there were just three or four important fairs. But it’s gotten expensive and slightly confusing.

"Conversation with Clare McAndrew—Part 2" is a web exclusive published in conjunction with the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.