No Sale For This Gloomy Rothko

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Nov 6th 2008 at 8:02PM

In the last few years Rothko paintings have reached some amazing numbers. In May 2007 one sold for $72.8 million and last May another, Rothko's No. 15 sold for $50.4 million. Those days are gone. Mark Rothko's No 43 (Mauve) was estimated to bring $20-$30 million at Christie's earlier this week. In fact it didn't even get a single bid at $10 million. As the always insightful Felix Salmon points out, this is especially interesting because it goes against the prevailing wisdom that the top of the market would be last to fall. In fact at this particular sale it was the second-tier works which sold while other more high profile pieces got no bids at all. Several articles on the auction used two "b" words in quick succession, "bleak" and "bargains." Perhaps we are really hitting a buyer's market for art once again.

Tags: art, auction, christies, rothko

Filed under: Art

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beanspants Nov 7th 2008 8:26PM

it's just a Rothko. I'm not sure you can actually call it a down art market overall quite yet, just a return to sanity and a rejection of crappy art that in the last few sales has been dramatically overpriced.

Deidre Woollard Nov 7th 2008 8:32PM

Good point, beanspants. It's not even that great a Rothko in my opinion, I think the brighter ones tend to sell higher. But it is significant because for the last few years he's been one of those marquee artists whose prices have really jumped.

I do think the down market is upon us overall. A necessary correction from a bit of exuberance over the past few years. But I recently read that a recession is good for the production of art, all that angst leads to great works, so there should be wonderful new art to invest in.