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One of the keys to the transformation of the contemporary market is going to be the discreet dispersal of the huge collection formed, mostly after 1980, by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, whose London firm is now in difficulties. Saatchi bought in bulk, sometimes whole exhibitions at a time. He acquired, for instance, more than 20 Anselm Kiefers, whose prices are now past the $1 million mark, and at least 15 Eric Fischls, which are on or around it. Artists let him have the cream of their work because it was understood -- though never explicitly said -- that Saatchi would never sell; his collection would become a museum in its own right, supplementing the cash- strapped Tate Gallery.
Now that he is pruning his collection, the bewilderment is great. What artists fear is not so much that their prices will falter -- though that happened to Italy's Sandro Chia when Saatchi dumped him -- as that new traders can move in and, by buying blocks from Saatchi, bypass the artists' dealers and force prices up out of all proportion to those of their new work. Robert Ryman, one of whose chaste minimalist paintings made $1.8 million at auction recently (gallery prices: from $50,000 to $300,000), now thinks it "unfortunate" that he ever let Saatchi have twelve of his prime works.
Sean Scully's prices through his regular dealer David McKee have jumped from $90,000 to $140,000 in the past six months, but Scullys are trading on the secondary market as high as $350,000, and Saatchi recently unloaded a block of nine of them on the Swedish dealer Bo Alveryd, who last month spent $70 million at three London galleries (Marlborough, Waddington and Bernard Jacobson) before moving on to the New York fall auctions. There he underbid the $20.68 million De Kooning and bought, among other things, a Johns for $12.1 million. "I thought Saatchi had good intentions," Scully says. "Now it turns out that he's only a superdealer. These guys create price levels for themselves. They put one painting in a sale and bid it up to huge levels. And the artist loses control of his work, while his relations with the dealer he has worked with so long go for nothing, absolutely nothing. We are just pawns."
The new kind of raider-dealer is exemplified by Larry ("Go-Go") Gagosian, who a few short years ago was selling posters out of a shopfront in Los Angeles but recently, with massive financing, tried (without success, according to dealing sources) to take over the estate of the senile but still living Willem de Kooning, 85.
His detractors say, perhaps unfairly, that if you put Gagosian and the rest of his ilk in a bag and shook it for a week you wouldn't get an ounce of connoisseurship. But that is not what counts. What does count is the instinct for when to grab the chicken, the hot artist, and get a lock on his or her work.
Can one guess what kind of dealing structure will emerge from this mud wrestling in the '90s? Pessimists think the world contemporary art market, just like the communications industry, could implode into six or seven megadealers, each with an international corporate base formed by gobbling up aging or lesser competitors. The middle rank of dealers will have been squeezed out by the raids on their artists and stock, and at the bottom of the heap a litter of small galleries, treated as seedbeds by those on top, will be kept to service the impression of healthy diversity.