A common misperception is that you have to be a millionaire to shop at Sotheby’s. News outlets cover the $110 Million Basquiat we sold, rather than the current Movie Posters Online-Only Sale, which has lots beginning at $500. We’re seeing tremendous growth in the middle and low priced markets, which has a great deal to do with our recent acquisition of Viyet, an ecommerce platform focused on decorative arts.
We wanted to highlight portions of two recent articles on the middle market, the first is Architectural Digest’s coverage of the Viyet acquisition, which you can read in full here. The second is from a fantastic piece on the growth of the prints category, published by Bloomberg, which you can read in full here.
Sotheby’s Acquires Viyet.com
Originally published by Architectural Digest, February 13, 2018
Sotheby’s is moving deeper into the online decorative arts business, with the announcement today that is it acquiring Viyet.com, a four-year-old online marketplace for vintage and antique furniture and decorative objects. The purchase is meant to help Sotheby’s chief executive Tad Smith fulfill a goal he set soon after he joined the company in 2015 — to expand sales in the “middle market,” defined as $5,000 to $50,000 for decorative arts and $25,000 to $1 million for fine arts.
“For us, it’s about being there to service existing and new customers when, where, and how they want to buy or sell in different categories and at different price points,” says John Auerbach, the general manager of Sotheby’s Art & Objects Division, who was hired last August to direct the middle-market expansion.
Buying Viyet provides Sotheby’s with a channel to attract clients who might be lured up the value chain to higher-priced auction lots and to sell goods that currently have no home at the auction house. “We have more inbound material than we can sell online and in live auctions,” Auerbach explains. Owning Viyet will make it easier for Sotheby’s to accept entire estates…
Items, according to Viyet’s website, generally sell for “50 to 80 percent below retail prices.” For example, a BDDW table, originally priced at $40,000, cost $25,000 on Viyet. Viyet’s highest prices include $24,000 for a set of antique Russian neoclassical mahogany armchairs and $100,000 for a contemporary artwork.
Sotheby’s declined to provide details of the transaction, noting that the cost of buying Viyet was not material to its financial position and did not require disclosure. The company continues to increase its online business overall: In 2017, 23 percent of all auction lots sold were purchased online, totaling more than $180 million in gross revenues, 16 percent more than the 2016 total. Equally important to the company, 53 percent of all online bidders last year were new customers.
Is the Fastest-Growing Segment of the Art Market the Cheapest?
Originally published by Bloomberg, January 29th, 2018
Prints have been around since the Renaissance, and have always occupied a slightly uneasy place in the art market. They’re designed by an artist and often signed by the artist, but they are, by definition, reproductions. “They used to call it a gateway drug,” says Deborah Ripley, director of Bonhams auction house’s prints and multiples department. “It was where beginners in the art world started collecting, and that would encourage them: They might have been buying works at a lower price point, but they could tell their friends, ‘Yes, I have a work by Warhol.”
Prints might be an entry point into the art market, specialists say, but it’s increasingly clear that for many, the category has become a destination in itself over the last two years or so. “Off the top of my head, I’d say that 50 percent of every auction [is made up of] new bidders,” says Benrimon. That’s a lot of new people each time. “And that’s not after one or two auctions — that’s after 15 of them. And we just look at it, and we don’t get it: How is that possible?”…
The value of a print — any print — is largely determined by two things: “The reputation of the artist and the quality of a print,” says Dick Solomon, president of Pace Prints, a New York gallery and publisher that deals with the very highest end of the market. “To a lesser extent, there’s also the number of prints in the edition.” The edition size, or number of reproductions, is decided beforehand by the artist, and it is finite: If it’s an edition of 72, you can be sure only 72 exist. (This is fudged slightly by the phenomenon of “artist’s proofs,” the initial impressions used to test the print, which can add to the total number of works in an edition.)…
Ultimately, the rise in the prints market is indicative, dealers say, of the proliferation of art and art collecting in mainstream society. Street artists such as Banksy and KAWS have a thriving print market, largely fueled by relatively young devotees.
Auction houses hope that today’s print buyer will become tomorrow’s major collector — “today they’re buying something for $4,000, but in five years, when they’re doing much better or upgrading, they’re going to know Heritage Auctions, and that’s a big part of it,” says Benrimon. Still, the category’s growth could just as easily point to a collecting base with the means, or inclination, to buy work that has a ceiling of a few thousand dollars. That might not be ideal for the high end of the art market, generally, but it’s great news for proponents of a medium that’s long been considered second-tier.
