The Sober Mood Moves to Paris

Art Price Releases Its 2007-2008 Report in Time for FIAC

Bloomberg reports on the Art Price report predicting a correction in Contemporary art prices. According to Art Price, Contemporary art prices outpaced the rest of the market by a wide margin. But sales at FIAC are strong, especially under €100,000.

“FIAC is Paris, and everything that goes with it,” said Jennifer Flay, the fair’s New Zealand-born artistic director, who used to run a gallery in the French capital. [ . . . ] Flay said that contemporary-art dealers had been expecting a decline in the market for the last three or four years. “When it comes it’s not going to be like 1991,” she said. “There will still be pondered and measured activity. The art market will be occupied by art lovers and true collectors. People will drop out of the market, but perhaps they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Among the VIPs spotted at FIAC’s opening were the Miami collectors Donald and Mera Rubell, San Francisco collectors Themis and Dare Michos, New York-based art advisers Thea Westreich and Todd Levin, Roxana Marcoci, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and French collector Marcel Brient. [ . . . ]

“It’s definitely a bit more international this year,” said Joe Tang, a director at the Paris gallery Chez Valentin. “We’re seeing people come on from Frieze.” Valentin sold the purple resin computer monitor-shaped sculpture, “Imac Del,” by French artist Eric Baudart to a Russian collector for 12,000 euros.

Middle Eastern contemporary art continues to be in demand. The Paris gallery La B.A.N.K. sold four colorful photographic works by the Cairo-based Lebanese artist Lara Baladi. Two versions of the 10-foot-wide piece, “Roba Vecchia,” a mosaic of images of kaleidoscopes set on polished steel, sold for 32,000 euros each.

Today, a further 113 FIAC exhibitors will be testing the market at higher prices with pieces by established contemporary and modern names in the Grand Palais. New York gallery Sperone Westwater and London’s White Cube are among the new exhibitors.