Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

October 31, 2006

Commensuration and pricing

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 7:16 pm

One of the striking things from my interview was about the structure of commensuration with regard to pricing art. I’m thinking here about categories. From the interview:

This is a reasonable example. There’s an artist named T., and he was born in [Latin America], and he spent most of his adult career in Paris, he came to New York. For many years he was known as an international modern artist. For some reason, in the course of, since he passed away, he’s been put into the Latin American sales. So his market is mostly Latin American collectors. This season for the first time, we have a T. in the impressionist and modern sale. I mean, he worked in the 30s, mostly with M. and D. and, we have something in our sale. So, that’s a huge thing for an auction house to actually get behind this artist and say ‘actually, it’s an international artist’. That’s what putting T., taking it out of the Latin American sale and putting it into an international modern art sale does. On an individual level, we [pause] basically have to pay a lot of attention to this and make sure that it sells well. Because we want to widen the modern market, we want to make sure that there’s, because there a very kind of pool that can be offered in an impressionist and modern sale, and we find someone who could potentially be included, you want to make sure it’s a successful sale. So on an individual level, what I need to do is get out there and make sure people know that it’s in the sale. Make sure that the people I’ve worked with in the past on T. just know that it’s in the sale, and to really be very diligent about it, so on a level of the, on a corporate level, this could change the market for this artist.

What’s going on here?

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