THE contemporary

The contemporary art market
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2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
MOCA – Los Angeles
Piazza May 24th - Milan
Now – Paris
Auction > $3 million
Retrospective – MMK Frankfurt
Auction > $7 million
L.O.V.E. - Milan
ALL – Guggenheim
Him – Warsaw Ghetto
Fondation Beyeler – Basel
Venus over Manhattan
Price Index for Maurizio Cattelan Base 100 in January 2002
© ARTPRICE.COM
Rockefeller Center. By becoming a highly visible
part of the urban panorama of these major cities,
Kapoor succeeded in seducing the general public
and simultaneously earned himself a place in Contemporary
art’s top bracket.
In 2009, Kapoor’s career and market were
further consolidated by a series of exhibitions in
Beijing, Madrid, Los Angeles and Vienna, New
York (Guggenheim). However, his strongest news
was generated by a mobile block of 40 tons of red
wax slowly crossing the five galleries of London’s
Royal Academy on rails. Each time the waxy
block scraped the arches dividing the galleries, it
shed a little of its mass transforming the RA space
little by little. Gigantic and powerful, the project
received a lot of media exposure and undoubtedly
had a positive impact on his auction prices. Indeed,
in turnover terms, that was his best year.
Although Kapoor’s works have generated 28
results above the million-dollar line, his prices
have remained relatively subdued. On the one
hand, more than a third of his works sell for less
than $10,000 thanks to numerous multiples and
prints; on the other hand, his auction record of
$3.9 million 1 is quite reasonable compared with
the summits attained by the likes of Jeff Koons,
Peter Doig and Christopher Wool.
1) Untitled alabaster sculpture (2003), sold by Sotheby’s London
on 1 July 2008.
Maurizio Cattelan –
a pre-meditated career end
Maurizio Cattelan became an artist somewhat by
accident (after working in a hospital and building
furniture, among other jobs), but he became the
most mischievous of the art world’s provocateurs. His
works combine a substantial dose of derision with
a deliberately immature critique of today’s world.
Cattelan belongs to that family of artists – direct
descendents of Marcel Duchamp – who manage
to shake the foundations of the very structures on
which they rely, in order to undermine the accepted
beliefs of the art world and its market.
For his first invitation to the Venice Biennale in
1993, Maurizio Cattelan rented out his space to a
brand of perfume, which duly erected a large billboard.
Two years later, he disguised the owner of
the gallery his show was hosted in, Emmanuel
Perrotin, as a phallic-shaped pink rabbit (Errotin le
Vrai Lapin, 1995). Subsequently invited to exhibit in
Amsterdam, he stole the exhibition of a fellow artist
from a neighbouring gallery, entitling his show:
Another Fucking Readymade!
Maurizio Cattelan rapidly became an expert
in creating provocative and boundary-breaking
events and his career has been riddled with heated
controversy. He attracted public attention in 2000
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