Auction Results: First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art, March 10, 2011 @Christie's

Christie's has to be happy with the results for the photography in its First Open sale last week. The overall Buy-In rate was under 10%, and every price range brought in more proceeds than its aggregate high estimate. Even without a lot of positive surprises, the auction performed well from top to bottom.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 42
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $757000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $1100000
Total Lots Sold: 38
Total Lots Bought In: 4
Buy In %: 9.52%
Total Sale Proceeds: $1158875

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

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Low Total Lots: 13
Low Sold: 11
Low Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 15.38%
Total Low Estimate: $99000

Total Low Sold: $113500

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Mid Total Lots: 24
Mid Sold: 22

Mid Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 8.33%
Total Mid Estimate: $531000
Total Mid Sold: $541875

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High Total Lots: 5
High Sold: 5
High Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 0.00%
Total High Estimate: $470000
Total High Sold: $503500

The top lot by High estimate was lot 117, Thomas Struth, El Capitan (Yosemite National Park), California, 1999 at $100000-150000: it was also the top outcome of the sale at $206500.
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94.74% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range, and there were a total of three surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 34, Louise Lawler, Chandelier, 2007, at $52500 (image at right, top, via Christie's)

Lot 130, Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Family Dinner), 2001-2002, at $43750 (image at right, middle, via Christie's)

Lot 131, Peter Doig, Untitled, 2000, at $17500 (image at right, bottom, via Christie's)

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Complete lot by lot results can be found here.
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Christie's

20 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, NY 10020

Gregory Crewdson: Sanctuary @Gagosian

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 black and white works, framed in silver and matted, and hung in a pair of rooms on the 6th floor of the gallery. All of the works are pigment inkjet prints, each sized 29x35, printed in editions of 6+2AP, and made in 2009. 20 of the images are hung in the main room, with an additional 2 images on display in a smaller side room. The works in the show have been drawn from a series of 41 photographs. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Elaborate, cinematic staging has been the hallmark of Gregory Crewdson's photography for more than a decade. In recent years, his sets have become increasingly extravagant, with massive crews of professionals on hand to create his dramatic (and often surreal) film-still scenes of suburban life. I have often wondered where the logical limit to these overblown constructions would lie - what is your next step when your last image took an army of people weeks to put together?

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Crewdson's newest work seems to begin again from the rubble of his previous ideas, as if his entire artistic enterprise finally collapsed under its own ponderous weight and Crewdson was left looking for a new path forward. It has all the trappings of a mid-life crisis, including big frame-breaking changes: he's gone back to black and white, traveled to Europe, embraced digital, slimmed down his retinue, and returned to a closer connection with photographic truth. The result is a set of quiet, elegant images that are rooted in the traditions of the medium, but continue to explore some of the artist's interests in the nature of visual fiction.

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All of the pictures in this show were taken in the abandoned back lots of the famous Cinecittà studios in Rome, where streets filled with old stage sets rot and fade into obscurity. Stylistically, apart from a little bit of dramatic mist and some soft lighting (dawn and dusk), the images seem almost classically documentary. The architecture of the dilapidated stage sets is rendered in a array of crisp, controlled greys, empty and understated rather than operatic. His subjects are the layers of film-making fakery, gone to seed: scaffolding holding up paper thin facades, weeds pushing through molded cobblestones, muddy puddles dotting behind-the-scenes dirt paths, faux colonnades falling down. Stairs lead to nowhere, a broken boat lies in the middle of an intersection, sky pokes through splintered walls and a shattered plaster urn lies in pieces on the ground. In nearly every image, Crewdson captures the contrast of the frontal stage and the background machinations, both sides now coming apart, the illusion uncovered. Several pictures add an additional element of formal compositional framing, using an arch, alleyway, or door as a portal through which to view the truth of the deserted ruins.
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What I found most striking about these pictures was their overwhelming sense of silence. There are no actors, artfully posed in some enigmatic narrative; the stage sets themselves are the actors, and the movie was finished a very long time ago. At first glance, the images can seem a bit underwhelming (especially from afar given their middle tonality), but after further looking, they slowly reveal a more complex mixing of the ideas of reality and artifice. For me, this new work seems most like a bridge for Crewdson: leaving behind most of what came before and taking along a thin thread of connection to explore further going forward.
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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced at $30000 each. Crewdson's prints are regularly available in the secondary markets (both in the photography and contemporary art auctions), with prices ranging from roughly $4000 to nearly $100000.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Yale faculty page (here)
• Reviews: Daylight (here), Vanity Fair (here), NY Times, 2005 (here)
• Feature: Artinfo (here)

Gregory Crewdson: Sanctuary

Through October 30th

Gagosian Gallery

98o Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10075