Now the dust has settled after the takeover of Sotheby’s Australia by Tim Goodman’s operation, it’s clear Sotheby’s will effectively use Leonard Joel as its clearing house for cheaper artworks.
Leonard Joel's equivalent Sydney operation (at the former Bonhams & Goodman Double Bay rooms, and the site of Sotheby's Australia August art sale) conducts bimonthly 'Art & Book' sales that have been performing well in this niche, with recent averages (March to July) at 100% by value and 81% by lot.
Deutscher and Hackett, after dismantling its Artemis alliance with Mossgreen, teamed up with GraysOnline, and has churned through $400,000 (incl. BP) of artworks since the inaugural June auction, and they estimate surpassing half a million dollars by August. The benefit of being able to remove lower valued material from the major catalogues is apparent in the stronger results for the fine art sales, which now carry greater cachet and a larger volume of higher valued material.
Now the venerable Lawsons auction house, a member of the Menzies Art Brands group, has followed the trend – drawing a bead on the more modest end of the market.
In a related move, it’s also reinstating art auctions under the Lawson Menzies brand, which were discontinued from the beginning of this year, when sales from the Deutscher~Menzies and Lawson~Menzies entities were combined into a single catalogue under the Menzies brand, after many years of holding separately branded sales over consecutive days. Now they will hold sales six weeks apart.
Lawson's already holds monthly antiques and art auctions at its Annandale salerooms, with the 200 to 300 lots of art being offered in these sales coming in at the lower end of the market, effectively giving it a three-tier model.
And for its Lawson Menzies sales, it’s launched a new facility, following a small number of Australian auction houses by offering internet bidding, but with a further refinement of having the live bidding with saleroom action “streamed” through the internet.
Lawsons is making no bones its quarterly Lawson Menzies sales in Sydney’s Kensington – beginning with a 250-lot sale on August 30 - will be pitched more towards the modest end of the market, with artworks priced from $500 up to $20,000, and most in the below $5000 level.
Works on offer next week run the gamut from, a Lloyd Rees print “Upper Tamar River, Tasmania” (Lot 248 ) estimated at $400 to $600, a Henry Moore sketchbook from 1926 (Lot 186 ) estimated at $900 to $1200, right up to, Arthur Boyd’s Magic Flute II from 1990 (Lot 80 ) estimated at $55,000 to $65,000.
Its managing director, Martin Farrah, says the downshift to more affordable art meets a market need. He says the market philosophy among the major auctioneers had been to fight for the high end paintings and then put together a reduced and selective catalogue, since the time and cost of cataloguing a cheap picture is the same as that for a pricey one.
For cheaper works, he says, “it’s been very hard for vendors, trade or private, to get an auctioneer to take them on, especially with a full physical catalogue.”
“At the end of the day it’s all about the showmanship”, Farrah says.
The live bidding facility means a buyer sitting at home or in the office can not only bid on a lot through his or her computer but also hear the bidding activity in the room and see the auctioneer in action. While buyers are increasingly prepared to bid remotely via a mouse click, many do not feel comfortable being cut off from the “theatre” of the saleroom.
Farrah says live bidding is going from strength to strength. The experience at Christie’s Live in London – a costly in-house system – is that 25 per cent of all successful bids are online, he says.
Lawsons’s online bidding facility is being offered through the US based Artfact website, which is already used by some local auctioneers but without the live streaming refinement. Unfortunately online bidding comes at a price to vendors, with successful bids incurring an extra 3 per cent of the hammer price, on top of the buyer’s premium of 20 per cent.
