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It could be that no more new dealers of the traditional sort will actually come to power, so that the tradition that stretched from Ambroise Vollard to Leo Castelli and Paula Cooper will be lost. Big dealers will have their tame resident critics, as princes their poetasters. There will no longer be much distinction between collectors and dealers, and the collector-as-amateur will be extinct. On the boards of many museums, a new breed of broker, the collector-dealer-trus tee, will hold sway. And art will keep draining out of America toward Japan and Europe. Welcome to the future: a full-management art industry. Most of it is here already.
Nothing is more objective than the new class of European and Japanese investors. What the Japanese are doing has very little relation to collecting as it was once understood. They are, quite simply, investment-buying on a huge scale, with limitless quantities of cheap credit: one zaibatsu offers open- ended loans of any size at 7% (3.5 points below the U.S. prime rate) to Japanese who want to buy Western art.
Nor should one suppose that these are dreaming connoisseurs who have just relinquished the ink block and the brush to dabble in the art of the namban, or round-eyed barbarian. Shigeki Kameyama, representing the Mountain Tortoise Gallery in Tokyo, last week bought, among other things, Picasso's The Mirror at $26.4 million. The week before, he had also purchased De Kooning's Interchange at $20.68 million and a Brice Marden drawing at $500,000 at Sotheby's. Kameyama is known to other dealers as "Oddjob," after Goldfinger's hat-flinging chauffeur.
Aska International, the Tokyo art gallery that spent $25 million at the Dorrance sale, is controlled by Aichi Corp., a Tokyo firm that last September became one of the five largest shareholders of Christie's stock, with 6.4%. Aichi, in turn, is controlled by Yasumichi Morishita, a secretive businessman who got a one-year suspended sentence in Tokyo in 1986 for securities fraud. Morishita is reputedly worth a trillion yen ($7 billion), and may be planning a takeover of Christie's -- although it is unlikely that the Monopolies and Mergers Commission would approve his bid.
Japanese buyers may be aesthetically unsophisticated -- they buy names, not pictures -- but this will inevitably change. (It did in America, after 1890, while Europe was laughing.) The Tokyo market still has a weakness for yucky little Renoirs and third-string Ecole de Paris painters like Moise Kisling, whom nobody wanted a few years ago; one Japanese collector is the proud owner of a thousand paintings by Bernard Buffet. But the Japanese started going after bigger game about five years ago, and already the outflow is immense. Contemporary art has become, quite simply, currency. The market burns off all nuances of meaning, and has begun to function like computer-driven investment on Wall Street. Sotheby's and Christie's between them sold $204 million worth of contemporary art the week before last. Of this, American buying represented only a quarter; Europeans bought 34.9% and the Japanese a whopping 39.8%.