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SOTHEBY'S REPORT ON DAMIEN HIRST'S HISTORICAL SALE
14 October 2008
Catégorie : MARKET

The remarkable success of the Damien Hirst auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, has raised several questions about the relationship between the financial markets and the art market. The surprisingly strong numbers have also caused many to wonder about the state of the art market itself. But the results of the sale are quite plain on the subject of Damien Hirst and his stature as a contemporary artist.

This report cannot make arguments about whether the Hirst auction is or is not representative of the art market as a whole or even indicative of the Contemporary art market. But it can draw some important conclusions about the history of the Hirst market which will be presented below in the "market trends" section.

An analysis of the Hirst sale, however, should begin at the beginning: with the art. On September 15th and 16th, 223 lots of Damien Hirst's art work were auctioned with 218 lots finding buyers. The sale total with premium was $200,752,179. To put that figure in perspective, the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale produced a sum equal to all of the auction sales of Damien Hirst's work, according to data provided by Artnet, from 2002 through to 2008.

What accounts for this extraordinary level of success? Clearly several forces were at work. The combination of Sotheby's world-wide marketing efforts and a frenzy of publicity made the auction more than a sale of artwork. It became an international cultural event of significant proportions. Hirst is one of only a handful of artists with global name-recognition--and possibly the only one alive today. The artist's status as a living symbol of Contemporary art set up a rare opportunity for collectors (and non-collectors) from around the world to participate in a unique event. The singularity of the sale as a cultural event also clearly added value to the provenance.

In other words, having the opportunity to buy a work of art by Damien Hirst with an attractive estimate was a great draw to many art buyers. But having the opportunity to participate in the events surrounding the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale--with heavy attendance in London, New York and India--proved to be an extra incentive to buy. Moreover, the success of the sale itself may have given the works purchased from the sale a greater sheen of value.

"The provenance of this sale will be seen as an important one in the future," Sotheby's Tobias Meyer told the Wall Street Journal. "It was Damien Hirst at his most ambitious."

Much has been made of the coincidence of the sale's taking place during the first few days of a massive seizing-up of the Western credit markets. Though it is important not to minimize that event--or its ultimate effect on the art market as time goes on--there are several good reasons not to link the two.

The first reason is simply that the crisis confronting the financial world is a problem in the credit markets caused by the de-leveraging of mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives. Unless an art buyer was heavily invested directly in derivatives--and that is primarily an institutional market--he or she would not have felt the direct repercussions the credit crisis of during the week of the sale.

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which was announced the day of the sale, and the dramatic loss of shareholder value in AIG, the world's largest insurer, certainly cast a climate of fear and doubt over the financial markets during the sale. But the art market is not a financial market. Buyers don't often use borrowed money to acquire art. So the art market should not immediately be affected by the de-leveraging currently freezing up the debt markets.

Having said that, a prolonged credit crunch will eventually have effects on many different types of businesses around the world. This credit squeeze has already lasted more than a year; at the time of the Hirst sale, it moved into a more acute phase. But the consequences of de-leveraging cannot be easily forecast from the outside. So it will be many years before we know which--if any--important art collectors feel an impact.

Significant Sales

Six of the the top ten lots in the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale were formaldehyde works. With the artist having intimated that he is not planning on making many more formaldehyde works, it should not be a surprise that collectors focused on these signature lots. Though it is important to recognize that until the BIMHF sale, "Hirst's top 100 auction prices contained only four formaldehyde works," according to Sarah Thornton's recent story in The Art Newspaper. "After the sale, his top 40 contained nine."

The premiere piece in the sale was The Golden Calf. The Kingdom, a shark reminiscent of Hirst's most famous work, was the second highest lot achieving a price substantially greater than the reported price paid in 2004 for The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (2002).

Beyond the formaldehyde works, three of the four remaining top ten lots were medicine cabinet works similar to Lullaby Spring (2002), the piece that achieved a record price for the artist of $19.3 million in the Summer of 2007. The final top ten lot was a butterfly work, another popular series in the artist's output that Hirst has also said he would stop making after this year.

The works that attracted the most bidders in the evening sale showed a different emphasis. The greatest number of bidders were active in trying to buy works employing butterflies in the composition. These made up five of the top ten lots by bidder participation.

But Epinephrine, one of the artist's celebrated "spot" paintings, had the most bidders. And, Moments of Weakness, diamonds in medicine cabinet, had the greatest number of bidders in the Day sale as well as a the greatest number of bidders overall.

Fragments of Paradise was the work in the Evening sale that was bid the highest above its estimate. Sold at a price with premium of $9,368,104 against a high estimate of $2,705,850, the work achieved a price more than 346% of the high estimate.

Among the other works in the Evening sale bid far beyond the estimate range were (2) spot and (4) butterfly paintings, (2) medicine cabinet works and (2) other types of Hirst work.

Day sale prices with premium were even more aggressive with all of the top ten lots bid above high estimate coming in at numbers more than 300% of the high estimate. The Day sale lot with the greatest percentage of the high estimate was Warm Love, a butterfly work, that sold for $217,777 or 606% of its $35,000 high estimate.

Significant Buyers

One of the most compelling aspects of the sale was the artist and auction house's efforts to focus the sale on new buyers. That is, buyers who were new to art collecting, new to collecting works by Hirst and from regions that had only recently begun to participate in the global art market. Indeed, one of Damien Hirst's central rationales for selling new work through an auction instead of through the artist's network of dealers was his often-repeated desire to "democratize" his market.

So it is worth looking closely at the attributes of the buyers. According to Sotheby's, 91% of the buyers were acquiring their first work of art by Damien Hirst (as far as the auction house can determine from its own records.) Those new buyers bought 69% of the sale's total value.

Sotheby's says that 22% of the buyers and bidders were new to the auction house. Those new buyers and bidders purchased only 17% of the total value of the sale.

At the same time, 16% of the buyers and bidders were previous Sotheby's clients who had not participated in an auction for Contemporary art before. Those buyers and bidders acquired 25% of the total value of the sale. The remaining 62% of the participants were previous Contemporary art buyers at Sotheby's; they bought 58% of the auction's value.

Finally, 14% of that final group of experienced Contemporary art buyers at Sotheby's had already purchased a work by Damien Hirst through Sotheby's (obviously many of the others may already own Hirsts not sourced through the auction house.) But that 14% (or 8.68% of the total participants) bought 31% of the value of the sale.

How should these numbers be interpreted? The previous-buyer figure suggests that collectors with a stake in the Hirst market were willing to purchase a greater proportion of the total value of the sale. They did this by either buying multiple works (41% of the clients at the sale bought two or more lots) or purchasing the higher value works.

In contrast, the buyers who were new to Sotheby's bought lower-priced works that accounted for a smaller portion of overall value than their numbers (22% of buyers and bidders but only 17% of the value.) Those numbers most likely reflect a taste for the more accessible price points.

As for the question of buyers from regions new to the global art market, Sotheby's reports that bidders and buyers at the sale were "primarily Russian, Indian, French, UK and US collectors." Historically, Sotheby's says, buyers of Hirst's work at the auction house have been 26% North American and 66% European; but during the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale, those proportions were 21% North American and 74% European, a fairly consistent ratio.

Sotheby's identifies clients by their country of domicile, many Russian--as well as Gulf State, Asian and Indian--clients may be identified as domiciled in the UK, Switzerland or even France. So the 8% rise in European buyers may represent a greater participation from so-called new buyers.

Overall, the most interesting statistic from the buyer data--that 16% of buyers who were new to Contemporary art but purchased 25% of the sale--suggests that experienced art buyers who were new to the Contemporary art market were willing to buy a greater portion of the sale total. Given the size of the sale, a case can be made that this is evidence of Hirst having established himself as a lasting figure in the art world and these experienced collectors were taking advantage of the sale as a "back-door" opportunity to acquire examples of his work, an opportunity they had missed earlier in the artist's market ascent.

Market Trends

Market History

Taking note of the observation made at the beginning of this report--that the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale is equal to the entire auction market volume of Hirst works from 2002 through 2008--a discussion of trends in the Hirst auction market should begin with a caveat. The vast majority of the Hirst market has taken place in private sales that lie beyond the discovery of market information.

Using data provided by Artnet from their Market Performance Report on Damien Hirst, we can see that there were never more than 30 significant Hirst lots on offer in any given year from 1998 to 2003. Hirst's auction totals in those years, though in the seven figures, never amounted to even 2.5% of the total of the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale.

So our discussion of the Hirst market begins with the first major event to produce market liquidity (a significant number of lots for sale.) The $20 million Pharmacy sale in 2004 jump-started the public market for Hirst's work. Eliminating the serials and prints from the Pharmacy sale and adding other works sold at auction, Artnet records 147 lots of Hirst's work sold in 2004. Until the BIMHF sale, that was the greatest number of Hirsts to be sold in a single year.

It took the art market two years to digest that volume of work but Hirst's annual sale volume never dropped below the 2003 level, though it did take until 2006 for average price to rise above the 2003 peak.

As the Contemporary art market accelerated in 2007, Hirst's sales went into hyper-drive increasing well over four times the previous year's total to reach $84.9 million, the top ten works sold that year accounted for a significant portion of the total. In the first half of 2008, $52.8 million worth of the artist's work changed hands, a pace commensurate with the preceding year.

None of those numbers could have predicted the market would be able to absorb the quantity of art available in the BIMHF sale which makes the total auction volume of Hirst's work for 2008 triple that of 2007.

These numbers suggest something quite different from the conventional wisdom about markets. With Hirst we can see inflection points when sales volume increases. Supply seems to create demand. Though one cannot ignore the role of publicity in increasing the appetite for Hirst's art. Sotheby's surely entered into the BIMHF sale with plans to market the work aggressively. But no one could have expected the level of attention that the sale received around the world. And one reason has to be the artist's specific ability to engage the public imagination.

Sale Metrics

The volume of sales is not the only, or even the best, measure of an artist's market. Especially for an artist who is able to produce work in quantity, auction volume does not always equal market strength.

Two measures we can look at are the average price for an artist's work and the median price for the artist's top ten works sold at auction in a given year. The average price gives a measure of the broader market value of the artist's work. The median top ten price gives a sense of how the top of the market values an artist's work while controlling for heated auctions that might produce an inconsistent price, like the record-setting $19.3 million for Lullaby Spring paid last year that was well above the previous record price for a Hirst.

From 1998 to 2006, Hirst's work fluctuated between an average price of $105,000 and $269,000. The year of the Pharmacy sale, when the public market saw a five-fold increase in the number Hirst works sold, the average price dropped 15% and took two years to recover. In 2007 and 2008, the average price for Hirsts at auction made a substantial leap to $714,000 and $825,000. If the BIMHF sale had followed the pattern set by the Pharmacy sale, there would have been a drop in the average price. Demand was so great, however, that the figure rose instead to $920,000.

The median price for a top ten Hirst at auction, from 1998 to 2002, was range-bound between just under $170,000 to just about $250,000. In 2003, the median top ten price started to break out reaching $1.1 million in 2006. It rose rapidly and consistently from $2.5 million in 2007 to $2.9 million for most of 2008. In the BIMHF sale, the median top ten price jumped dramatically to $4.7 million.

When both of these measures are super-imposed upon each other, they create a picture of strength in Hirst's market. The top ten works rise at a much greater rate than the average price. Although that does mean the top of the Hirst market is accelerating dramatically, with more consistent prices at that median top ten level of $4.7 million, the base of the market is getting broader. The BIMHF sale was large enough to have had a significant downward effect on Hirst's average prices as happened in 2004 and 2005. That wasn't the case. The average price increased for both 2008 and the BIMHF sale.

The Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale was unique event. Hirst is the rare personality who would take the risks involved. Both the volume of art on offer and the level of media interest necessary to propel the sale, suggest that it is an event that cannot easily be repeated. Although it out-performed expectations, the sale does fit within the context of Hirst's past performance in the market.


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