Read an Excerpt
The Supermodel and the Brillo Box
Back Stories and Peculiar Economics from the World of Contemporary Art
By Don Thompson St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2014 Don Thompson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-137-46413-2
CHAPTER 1
STEPHANIE
Great art is when you just walk round a corner and go: "F — hell! What's that?" — Damien Hirst, artist
Art tells you things you don't know you need to know until you know them. — Peter Schjeldahl, art critic
NEW YORK. On Monday, November 8, 2010, at 6:43 pm, at the brand new auction headquarters of Phillips de Pury at 450 Park Avenue, auctioneer Simon de Pury hammered down lot 12. This was a lifelike, nude waxwork of former actress and supermodel Stephanie Seymour. Designed to be mounted on the wall like a deer's head, it is titled Stephanie but known in the art world as Trophy Wife. The sculpture turns the representation of Seymour into a literal trophy, her nude upper body arching from the wall, breasts covered not very discreetly with her hands (illustrated in center section).
The sculpture, one of four identical versions conceived by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, was expected to bring between $1.5 and $2.5 million. De Pury predicted it might go as high as $4 million. After nine bids from six bidders — two of those bidding on the telephone — it sold in 40 seconds for $2.4 million, including buyer's premium (the additional amount charged by the auction house, above the hammer price). The successful bidder was New York über collector and private dealer Jose Mugrabi.
The very highest levels of the contemporary art world are brand- and event-driven. But over the history of marketing contemporary art, the fall 2010 Phillips auction stands out for its mix of brand, event, celebrity, back story, and astonishing prices. The presentation of Stephanie, and the logic behind the auction of which it was a part, is a wonderful example of marketing high-end contemporary art.
Phillips de Pury is a medium-size art auctioneer operating primarily in New York and London. In celebrity quotient and prestige, Phillips runs a distant third to Christie's and Sotheby's, with about a tenth the annual dollar turnover of either. Those two auction houses sell almost 90 percent of all contemporary art over $2 million. Phillips wanted a greater share of this high value, much more profitable segment. The cost of gaining the consignment and promoting a $2 million work may be twice that of a $200,000 work, but the profit after expenses is five to ten times as large. Those consigning at an exalted price level generally prefer to do business with Christie's and Sotheby's, the assumption being that these houses will produce higher bids.
After a mediocre 2010 New York spring sale in which only one work sold at over $1 million, Phillips's strategic problem was how to create buzz for their fall contemporary art auction. Their expensively renovated new auction room on Park Avenue provided the setting.
Simon de Pury, as chairman and also chief auctioneer of Phillips, created what he called a Carte Blanche auction. He asked Philippe Ségalot to act as guest curator, just as a museum might invite an outsider to curate an exhibition. Ségalot was at one time the international head of contemporary art at Christie's, where he pioneered theme parties — one called Bubble Bash, another Think Pink — to attract younger buyers to the auction house. Later he became co-owner of the art advisory Giraud Pissarro Ségalot. Ségalot's major client is François Pinault, the French billionaire who controls the luxury brands Gucci, Balenciaga, and Stella McCartney — and also owns Christie's auction house. Pinault has a $2 billion collection of art by Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Serra, and older works by Picasso, Braque, and Mondrian.
Ségalot was given freedom to choose the art for the Phillips auction and stage the sale of his dreams, with no interference from de Pury; he described it as "a self-portrait of my own taste." He assembled 33 works, with a total value estimated between $80 and $110 million (all figures US dollars). None of the 33 came from Phillips's regular auction consignors. Three came directly from artists and some from Ségalot's own collection. A few were owned by his private clients, as reported in The Economist: two from Pinault, one of which was Stephanie. The idea that the owner of Christie's would consign work to another auction house raised eyebrows.
A half dozen of the works were chosen for their newsworthiness. This usually means a branded artist or controversial subject. With Stephanie, it meant both.Stephanie was not the most expensive work, but it was the one featured in advertisements and on the cover of the auction catalog.
Phillips was founded in London by Harry Phillips in 1796. Bernard Arnault and his luxury goods firm LVMH acquired the firm in 1999 for a reported $120 million. A year later Arnault brought in art dealers Simon de Pury and Daniella Luxembourg to run the company and to challenge the dominant pairing of Christie's and Sotheby's. LVMH's strategy floundered among overly generous guarantees (that a targeted auction price would be achieved) given to consignors to attract auction lots. Arnault sold control to de Pury and Luxembourg in two tranches in 2002 and 2004. Luxembourg sold her share to de Pury in 2004. In 2008 de Pury sold a controlling share to Russian luxury goods group Mercury for $80 million, half of which reportedly went to paying down Phillips's bank overdraft. Two weeks after the Mercury purchase, the auction house bottomed-out, with a contemporary evening sale in London in which just 25 percent of the lots sold.
Simon de Pury generated more media attention than the auction house. For months before the auction he was familiar to television viewers as mentor and critic to aspiring artists in Bravo's World of Art, a "choose America's next great artist" TV reality show in which one artist was bounced each week until a winner (Abdi Farah) remained.
Under de Pury, Phillips contracted from a full-service auction house to a boutique, selling only contemporary art, design, jewelry, and photography. Sales went from $75 million to over $300 million in four years, reflecting the boom in contemporary art. Then came the 2008 crash. In 2009 Phillips's sales declined to $85 million, and the company bled red ink. Its reliance on contemporary art with its more volatile swings in sales volumes and price levels had left Phillips highly exposed.
However, with Carte Blanche and with Ségalot curating the sale, de Pury produced the most interesting innovation in art auctioneering in a decade. His first move was to time the sale to open the contemporary auction week, preceding the Christie's and Sotheby's sales.
Carte Blanche was an opportunity but also a huge risk. The $80 million minimum estimate for the 33 works represented almost as much as Phillips had sold in total in the first six months of 2010. To attract the works to Phillips rather than see them go to Christie's or Sotheby's, Ségalot and de Purygambled. They secured seven of the major pieces for the auction — including Stephanie — by guaranteeing a substantial minimum price to the consignors.
Five of the seven guarantees were provided by a third party, who was compensated by Phillips for assuming the risk. It was thought the third-party guarantor for most of these was the Mercury Group itself. The seven guarantees in total covered $65 million, at a cost to Phillips of probably between $4.5 and $6 million. I'll return to the subject of guarantees later in the book.
Ségalot received a percentage of the buyer's fees in compensation for his curatorial services (although the major benefit came with publicity of the event, which identified him as an important private dealer). Consigned works and payments went through his office rather than through Phillips so that the identity of sellers and some buyers remained hidden from the auction house. Ségalot further ensured anonymity by manning one of the auction phones himself, resulting in the oddity that having sourced work from his clients, he then bid on the same work on behalf of other clients. At the press conference following the auction, one reporter commented that he could have just eliminated the middleman, Phillips.
The cost of guarantees and the fee to Ségalot, together with heavy promotional costs, raised the break-even figure for the Carte Blanche auction to at least $95 million — almost twice Phillips's previous record for any single auction. Below a $95 million sales total, losses would have mounted quickly.
The other requirement was to generate high-level media coverage, ideally in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Such auction world coverage normally goes primarily to the two major auction houses. The curated auction concept worked brilliantly; both papers previewed the event, with The New York Times offering a long article by art journalist Carol Vogel.
The Carte Blanche gamble paid off. The selling total, including buyer's premium, was $117 million, even with three works unsold. Following the auction, media stories praised de Pury's innovation and daring.
That describes the event; what about the back story to Stephanie? Former supermodel Stephanie Seymour, the center of Phillips's auction promotion, was at the time of the auction a 41-year-old veteran of 300 magazine covers, several Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues and Victoria's Secret catalogs, and two Playboy pictorials. Prior to her marriage to millionaire industrialist Peter Brant she had dated Axl Rose, lead singer of Guns N' Roses, and starred in their video November Rain. Before that she had had highly publicized relationships with Charlie Sheen and Warren Beatty. In 1994 People magazine named her one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. These and other facts were doled out in Phillips's press releases and in briefings to reporters, with the information that Stephanie would be featured on the cover of the auction catalog.
Her husband, Peter Brant, then 63, is a celebrity in his own right. He is chairman and CEO of White Birch Paper Company, one of the largest newsprint manufacturers in North America. He publishes the trade magazine Art in America, owns a polo team, and was for years the top-ranked amateur polo player in America. Brant was the executive producer (with PBS) of the 2006 Emmy Award–winning Andy Warhol: A Documentary, and of the films Basquiat (1996) and Pollock (2000). He had previously commissioned portraits of his wife by artists Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince.
Brant is best known as an art collector. He has one of the world's largest collections of Andy Warhol and 2,000 other works of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and contemporary art. This includes Jeff Koons's famous Puppy, a 13-meter tall, West Highland white terrier, executed in a variety of flowers, a companion work to one that had been displayed for six months at Rockefeller Center and outside the Bilbao Guggenheim.
Maurizio Cattelan, the then 53-year-old Italian artist and creator of Trophy Wife, provided another level of celebrity. In 2002 Cattelan and Ségalot visited the 53-acre Brant-Seymour estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. One wall in the library featured trophies of a gazelle and buffalo shot by Brant on a 1970 Kenya safari. Cattelan had the concept of creating for Brant a version of his wife that was like the gazelle, "hunted and mounted," the result, Cattelan said, of a "domestic safari."
Cattelan said he was afraid to broach the idea directly to Brant; he asked Ségalot to do it. Brant and Seymour agreed. Cattelan produced Stephanie in an edition of four: one for Brant, one for him, and two to be sold by dealers. Cattelan said the last two might first be offered for museum loan "so the world could share Brant's wife."
Stephanie is consistent with the body of Cattelan's work, which involves love, fear, or tragedy. His first high price at auction came in 2004 when La Nona Hora, a sculpture portraying Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite (illustrated), sold for $3 million. According to The Economist, Amy Cappellazzo of Christie's says that "It is a hallmark of bravery to own a Cattelan sculpture; it signals an ambitious collection."
Stephanie was not actually produced by Cattelan. As with many contemporary artists, Cattelan's work is produced by technicians. Stephanie was made by Parisian Daniel Druet, who uses the same technique employed for mannequins in wax museums. Cattelan's contribution was the concept.
Stephanie's back is arched, to match the neck of the gazelle. Brant said later that the work was not really intended as a trophy but rather like something the Greeks would have had on the front of a ship, an elegant woman's form arching from the prow of a sailing vessel, a way of displaying the status of the owner. Mouth color, glass eyes, and hair were added to the wax. The hair is almost waist-length, intended to be styled by the owner: formal, informal, or sexy. For the auction it was perfectly coiffed by celebrity New York stylist Frédéric Fekkai, who said, "We wanted to make her look like a goddess." The eyes have a catatonic gaze, thought to mimic a runway model. At the auction preview, those stopping before the sculpture were bemused or awed. Most made no comment.
A later, curious follow-on was the discovery that artist Urs Fischer had produced a companion, life-size paraffin figure of spouse Peter Brant, standing behind an armchair. Titled Untitled (Standing) (2010), it has 14 wicks extending from the paraffin. The owner can, if desired, turn the sculpture into a huge candle and Mr. Brant into a puddle of wax. Brant commissioned the work by Fischer without being told what would be produced. One of the edition of three surfaced at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary sale in New York in May 2012. It sold for $1.3 million.
Brant's fortune and art collection were at risk when Seymour filed for divorce in March 2009; the couple apparently had not done a prenuptial agreement before marrying in 1993. His wife's divorce petition claimed his worth as at least $500 million. In the midst of the divorce proceedings, Seymour revealed what else Brant might be giving up when she posed for the December 2009 issue of Vanity Fair wearing only a few drops of water. The magazine article, which included an account of the divorce proceedings, was also mentioned by Phillips's PR people.
In September 2010 Seymour and Brant suddenly called off the divorce. The sale of Stephanie proceeded. Brant, but not Seymour, attended the auction. He did not bid.
A jostling crowd of 660 attended the Phillips sale: 360 with numbered tickets, seated in the main auction hall; 150 standing; another 150 in a second hall, watching the proceedings on a television screen. Only 90 of the 660 had auction paddles, and only 32 bid. The others were there for the spectacle.
What else was offered at Carte Blanche? The most valuable work was Andy Warhol's 1962 Men in Her Life, estimated at $40 to $50 million and consigned by Jose Mugrabi, the same collector who purchased Stephanie. Men in Her Life is a two-meter-tall silk screen, highlighted with pencil, of pictures taken from a Life magazine feature on the then 26-year-old actress Elizabeth Taylor. The canvas has 38 blurred images of Taylor at the Epsom Derby, with Mike Todd, her third husband, at her left, and Eddie Fisher, soon-to-be number four, at her right. Beside Fisher is his then wife, actress Debbie Reynolds. The pictures are in seven rows, with varying intensity of reproduction. Men in Her Life has very low visual impact; it is hard to make out the images from more than 3 feet (1 m) away. There are four versions of the work.
Men in Her Life started at $32 million and was bid up in $1 million increments. It was hammered down at $63.4 million, becoming the second most expensive Warhol ever at auction (Green Car Crash brought $71 million at Christie's New York in 2007). Two telephone bidders dueled with $1 million increments over the final ten bids. The purchaser was thought to be the Qatari Royal Family. Even in an art world where the unexpected is routine, having the names of Taylor, Fisher, Reynolds, Warhol, and Qatar in the same paragraph attracted attention.
The great crowd pleaser was another conceptual work by Maurizio Cattelan, titled Charlie (illustrated). This is one of an edition of four, a remote-controlled version of Cattelan as a four-year-old child riding a tricycle. The boy moves his eyes in a cartoonish manner. Charlie is an example of what Cattelan dubbed his "mini-mes," his physical and emotional surrogates. The concept comes from the tricycle-riding boy in Stanley Kubrick's horror film The Shining.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Supermodel and the Brillo Box by Don Thompson. Copyright © 2014 Don Thompson. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
