Victoria Miro‘s
Victoria Miro‘s co-director Glenn Scott Wright A good art consultant is a way to get access to highly sought-after work. If we have a track record with them, we’ll [be reassured] their clients are good too – Glenn Scott Wright all this speculation going on” and for their work to be reduced to the status of a commodity to be traded at will. Last autumn, for example, the secondary market went wild for Flora Yukhnovich’s glorious splashy paintings that are at once contemporary yet also rococo in their references to Fragonard, Boucher and Tiepolo. In 2021, the presciently titled I’ll Have What She’s Having sold at Sotheby’s for £2.235m, against an estimate of £60,000-£80,000. (The consignor had bought it from Parafin, a gallery with an impressive record of identifying emerging talents, barely a year earlier, when her paintings had been priced at around £30,000.) Then, earlier this year, Christie’s sold another (an earlier work, You’re Going to Make Me Blush from 2017) for £1.9m. “Flora’s market came almost out of nowhere with its escalated auction prices,” says Scott Wright, who represents her. “So we have to guard quite carefully against selling to people who might be buying speculatively, who know they can buy something on the primary market for 0,000 and put it up for auction after two months and sell it for m.” Hence the need, as he puts it, to “choose” the buyer. “She’d done a couple of shows before we took her on, and we don’t have control over what happens to those earlier paintings. But now, if we have 100 people who want to buy one, we aim to make a placement that will enhance her standing and reputation.” In other words, they’ll aim to sell to a museum “whether that’s a public or a private one”. Not least “because that way the work is highly unlikely to come back on the market”. Take Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose large-scale fusions of paint, acrylic transfer and collage Scott Wright first encountered in 2012. “Almost everything she’s produced in the last 10 years has gone to a museum,” he says. (Her work can now be found in more than a dozen important institutional collections across the US, the Metropolitan and Whitney among them, as well as Tate and Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town.) “I think only two have gone to private collectors,” he says, wise to the fact that five or six years ago, what few works of hers were in private hands were selling for millions when, exceptionally, they came to market. (Since 2018 only a single significant one has been consigned.) With a handful of obvious exceptions – let’s not forget Jeff Koons began his career as a commodities broker on Wall Street – making big money is less of a motivation for an artist than having their work seen and leaving a legacy. So whatever anyone says about the venality of the art market, a blue-chip gallery will always be protective of its primary assets. Hauser & Wirth’s global CEO Ewan Venters may have had a career that’s taken him from citrus buying for one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains to head of the venerable grocer Fortnum & Mason, but even for him, it’s all about the artists now. “We are extraordinarily artist-centric,” he says. “Everything we do is about them. Because without them and their work, there is nothing.” PHOTO TOM COCKRAM 40 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
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