It was supposed to be the highlight of New York’s spring auction week: Sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s masterpiece “Large Thin Head” was this year’s most hotly anticipated piece up for sale. But when the bidding opened, collectors went silent. WSJ’s Kelly Crow explains what this unexpected auction week bust reveals about today’s art market. Annie Minoff hosts. Further Listening: - The $6 Million Banana's Appeal - Is This Painting a Masterpiece? AI Is On the Case - The Basquiat Sisters on Managing One of Art's Hottest Brands Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What was the significance of the auction week in New York?
Our colleague Kelly Crow covers the art market. And last week was a big one for her. It was auction week in New York.
Yeah, it's kind of the art world's version of the Super Bowl. The world's biggest auction houses roll out a series of sales that happen every night of the week. And for years, this has sort of served as a public reckoning moment to reassess price levels for hundreds of the world's most expensive artists.
Auction Week showcases the biggest art sales. It's a chance for art watchers like Kelly to see which artists are hot and what kind of eye-popping prices their work can command. And what was the hottest piece up for sale this auction week?
So heading into last week, all eyes were on this Alberto Giacometti sculpture, a bronze bust of the artist's younger brother, Diego. It kind of came in with the highest estimate of the week at around $70 million.
Chapter 2: Why was Alberto Giacometti's sculpture so highly anticipated?
Collectors and curators consider the bust a masterpiece. And Kelly was in the room when it went up for sale at the auction house Sotheby's New York headquarters.
It's this soaring tall building built to sort of feel like a luxury shopping mall, if you will. There's escalators that run right up the middle with galleries ringing each floor. And so you kind of go up these series of escalators and... There's polite women greeting you at every floor. And everyone's in pinstripe suits and, you know, nice dresses.
And you sort of make your way finally to this huge room that has, you can see it, around 600 or 700 people. And it was pretty packed. There it is. I'm sitting there watching it, and I actually pulled out my phone and started Instagram-living. Hey, guys, I'm here outside of these.
And here we go.
What happened next was unlike anything Kelly's seen at an auction for decades.
Oh, my goodness.
The collective gasp that came out of these 600 mouths in the room was so audible that it was really startling.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Monday, May 19th. Coming up on the show, an auction night shocker and what it says about the art market right now.
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Chapter 3: What happened during the auction for Large Thin Head?
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The Giacometti bust that went up for auction last week is called Grand Tête Mance, or Large Thin Head. It's a bronze sculpture about two feet high of a man's head and shoulders, and it's called Large Thin Head for a reason.
So what you're seeing is it kind of depends on where you're standing. Like from the side, you're going to see a pretty gnarly, knobby portrait of a guy with spiky hair and big ears and his mouth is sort of slightly opened and he has a collar and it's just really his head and shoulders in a bust. What's interesting is if you stand in front of it, it becomes kind of knife edge.
The creator of the piece is Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss-Italian sculptor whose work reflects the horrors of World War II. He sculpted Large Thin Head in the post-war period in 1954.
Art really did change irrevocably after World War II. You just couldn't make pretty things. I mean, you see it in painting, too, all these Jackson Pollock abstracts. Like, the whole world just sort of exploded, and the artists are trying to figure out, how do we come back to art and make it matter differently? And so he sort of is known for creating these haunting figures
Giacometti is one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, and collectors pay big money for his work. Other casts of the bust have sold for over $50 million, and another Giacometti masterpiece, Pointing Man, sold for over $140 million about a decade ago. All of which is to say, when this particular bust came up for auction, it was an event, and Sotheby's pulled out all the stops.
I feel like when I look at the bust de Diego, I'm feeling human. There's something which is like he's nearly touching my soul.
Did you see the video that Sotheby's posted about this bust heading into the auction?
I mean, the marketing's pretty spectacular, right? This is substantial, monumental.
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Chapter 4: How does the art market react to high-profile auctions?
I mean, they were laying it on pretty thick.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's their job. That's why people bring things to auction rather than just take it to a dealer and sell it privately.
But a public auction does present a risk. What if the piece doesn't sell? To get around that, auction houses like Sotheby's will often find what's called a guarantor, somebody willing to buy the piece for an undisclosed price just in case no one steps up during the auction. In exchange for that guarantee, Sotheby's will typically take a bigger cut of the sale price.
But in this case, the seller didn't want to guarantor. Large Thin Head was being sold by a foundation tied to the late real estate tycoon Sheldon Solo. And the Solo family was feeling confident.
Zola was a famous collector, and his son believes that his dad had really good taste. And so what that has created is a scenario where, you know, they're pretty sure what the work is worth, and they're not known to budge on that, right? So I don't think Sotheby's had a lot of options. The bust would hit the auction block without a guarantor. To go up naked is what we say in auction parlance.
It's very rare for a work, I think, at this price anymore to come to market naked, which, to be honest, was really refreshing for someone like me who likes to sort of see, like, you know. Because it's a true test. Yeah, it's a true test of sort of how the market is and where the price, you know, should be and could be.
Which brings us to Tuesday night and that packed auction room. The auctioneer started the bidding at $59 million.
Now, for a minute, that seems like a good deal because the folks who knew Giacometti knew that other pieces of his, you know, had sold for far more, like over $100 million. He doesn't have a bidder yet.
Even without a bidder, the auctioneer began raising the price tag, bringing it all the way up to the reserve price, the minimum that the seller would accept.
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Chapter 5: Why is the concept of a guarantor important in art auctions?
He's sort of stalling it at 64.2.
He just needs one bed.
They can't do it. Everyone's sort of waiting with bated breath for one of them to take the bait. And then, four minutes later, they didn't. And then when the hammer, you know, came down, the collective gasp that came out of these 600 mouths in the room was so audible that it was really startling.
No one stepped up to buy the most anticipated piece of the week. There wasn't a single bidder. The thing flopped. Sotheby's chief executive said that the auction house stands by the importance of the Giacometti piece. What this bust bust says about the art market, that's next.
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What was your reaction in that moment when you realized this thing isn't going to sell?
Well, immediately my heart starts racing, right? Because, you know, I've been covering the art market for 20 odd years. I mean, I have to go back to like 2008 to remember a piece that sold at this level, you know, this badly or that didn't sell right at this level, this badly.
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Chapter 6: What were the reactions of the audience during the auction?
Luxury markets like the art market can be a powerful economic indicator. In 2008, art collectors were nervous. This flop might be a sign that they're nervous again. A Sotheby's executive made the point that collectors might be concerned about the current political and economic turmoil.
The art market is an alternative asset, just like real estate, you know, and it tells us how wealthy people spend their money. And you kind of want to see how the world's wealthiest people who are arguably more insulated than the rest of us, how confident or wary are they of to go big or go home, you know, when it comes to these artworks that are over $30 million, over $50 million.
It's a very small pool of people to begin with, but you can glean a lot about how they feel about the overall market's health by seeing how willing they are to go shopping.
Just a few months ago, it seemed like they were willing, at least for the right piece.
We talked to you not long ago in December about this banana taped to the wall that sold for $6 million.
The banana at the grocery store costs about 30 cents. This one just sold for $6.2 million. The cryptocurrency entrepreneur paid more than $6 million for this piece at an art auction last night. And it's...
And that seemed to be a good sign for the art market at the time. People were definitely feeling spendy. Was that a red herring?
I'm not sure if it was a red herring or if it was just like the great sort of theater, right? You know, it went viral from the moment it was taped up to the wall at the fair. It had a whole backstory that this generation of collectors and young people and folks on Instagram, you know, were dressing as this banana for Halloween. It sort of had this pop culture breakthrough.
You know, I just think you really have to capture a different level of attention to burst through
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Chapter 7: What does the bust reveal about the current art market?
Chapter 8: What were the implications of not having a bidder at the auction?
And that seemed to be a good sign for the art market at the time. People were definitely feeling spendy. Was that a red herring?
I'm not sure if it was a red herring or if it was just like the great sort of theater, right? You know, it went viral from the moment it was taped up to the wall at the fair. It had a whole backstory that this generation of collectors and young people and folks on Instagram, you know, were dressing as this banana for Halloween. It sort of had this pop culture breakthrough.
You know, I just think you really have to capture a different level of attention to burst through
Maybe the banana was an exception. Or maybe the economic mood really has changed since December.
We could look at how Wall Street was doing, you know, at the end of last year versus, you know, how it was doing three months ago when a lot of this property was getting gathered for the sale as opposed to how it's doing now, right?
Very different kind of mood about the economy.
Yeah, very roller coaster, very volatile, and the tariffs are a factor. And so all these little factors can affect a collector sitting in the room or sitting on their computer watching something sell. What makes them push the button and what makes them not?
The whole week wasn't a bust. There were some notable success stories.
People did buy things. They weren't buying things really for more than $16 million, but they were. And sort of some fluky things sort of did very well. You know, this Frank Lloyd Wright desk lamp was estimated to sell for $3 to $5 million, and the thing sold for like $7.5 million, like a record for Frank Lloyd Wright at auction.
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