[Burart Diary] The World Moving on the SBI Art Auction Floor — and the View from Our Side

An irregularly updated Burart Diary. A diary-style piece in which the editor rambles about daily life and passing observations.
Read whenever you have a spare moment.

SBI Art Auction

July 27, 2019, 1:00 p.m., Hillside Forum in Daikanyama, Tokyo.
The contemporary art auction “SBI Art Auction — Modern & Contemporary Sale” was held.

The venue was set up seated-style with rows of chairs, and every seat was taken — the buzz was strong enough that people were even standing.

Walking in, you might expect the air to be thick with the aggressive energy of collectors dead-set on buying. To my surprise, the atmosphere was quite relaxed.
I was struck by pairs of well-dressed women in their twenties and thirties, alongside young couples, groups of male collectors, and gentlemen with a wealthy air who came alone — a remarkably broad audience.

The auction begins

The auction started right on time.
After the auctioneer ran through the usual notices, the very first lot went under the hammer without missing a beat. The first work of the day was a small oil-on-canvas titled Untitled — an 18 cm piece painted by Izumi Kato in 2006.

Once the starting signal was given, the auctioneer called out bids second by second — 200,000, 220,000, 240,000 yen — while the hammer price on the big screen at the front of the room climbed rapidly.

SBI Art Auction uses three bidding channels — written bids, telephone bids, and internet bids — and they are integrated systematically at the venue so that prices update in real time.

Once the price shot past one million yen right after the start, the bidding pace gradually settled. A common sight in the later stages of an auction is the no-holds-barred battle among collectors who absolutely refuse to lose. To the audience — myself included — the way unseen contenders throw prices at each other, driving the number ever higher, feels almost like a form of entertainment.

It is a battle between unseen bidders over a one-of-a-kind work.
The accelerating auction eventually landed at 2.2 million yen, with the auctioneer’s call of “Sold!” closing the lot.
Note: 2.2 million yen is the hammer price. The buyer’s final total actually includes a 15% buyer’s premium and 8% consumption tax on top. In other words, the buyer’s real cost was 2,530,000 yen with the premium, and 2,732,400 yen once consumption tax is added (as of July 2019).

The auction house’s calculus

This SBI Art Auction saw an unexpectedly high price right on the very first lot.
Watching that opening move, I get the sense that leading with a popular work is a way to draw in the audience’s attention and, by landing at a strong price, to “stage” the mood of the room. It cultivates a sense of elation and an overall high-price vibe — but this is just my personal impression.

Lavos by Kazuki Umezawa, used as the cover image of the auction’s pre-sale catalog, also sold for a high price. The work was shown in the 2018 exhibition “Landscape Beyond” (Kazuki Umezawa x TAKU OBATA) at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (Watarium), and is one of Umezawa’s signature pieces.

Perhaps when the marquee works pile up in the first half, they push the participants’ motivation up. Against an estimate of 600,000 – 900,000 yen, this piece sold for 4.6 million yen (5.29 million yen including the premium) — an explosive result that even outstripped the opening momentum of the Izumi Kato work.

The overheated contemporary art market

An original unique work by Kazuki Umezawa, which I saw at a group show about a year ago, was priced around 500,000 yen.

Of course, the size, motif, and style differ, but faced with such an abnormal price jump, one can only call it an overheated, abnormal price. The Izumi Kato piece at the top of the sale is a wonderful work, no question — but for an 18 cm-square piece, it is an outlandish, out-of-the-ordinary figure. It is worlds away from the primary-market prices for Izumi Kato works that I know of.

At the venue, guests are served drinks including well-known champagne brands.
As lot after lot is introduced and the auctioneer’s calling of prices reverberates through the hall — echoing into your ears and lodging in your brain — you start to feel your own sense of money go numb.
The A4-sized paddle handed to each participant is so thin and flimsy that, in the right mood, you feel it could slip right up on its own. With a little champagne coursing through your body, it becomes easy to imagine yourself raising it in a rush.

Hidden gems

For headline and stalwart artists like KYNE, Ayako Rokkaku, Tomoo Gokita, KAWS, Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, and Yayoi Kusama, the rate at which prices climb is easy to read, and the numbers rise smoothly and naturally. Works by other, less-established artists, on the other hand, seem to inch upward more cautiously. Naoya Inose’s watercolor Contract, which I had my eye on this time — a cynical piece using Disney as its theme — landed at a strikingly reasonable price.

There were also a few strong works that surprisingly failed to gain much traction.
The one that stayed with me most was by a certain artist whose work I had previously seen at a primary-market gallery.
The piece I saw in May 2018 was priced at 600,000 yen before tax. That same work turned up at this auction and sold for less than 150,000 yen.

Auction lots are primarily consigned by collectors, but I’ve heard that many works come in directly from galleries as well. Depending on the piece, you may end up snapping something up at an unexpectedly low price.

Summary

I had experience of watching auctions in real time over the internet, but this was my first time attending the venue in person.

What I took away is that it is, above all, a genuinely fascinating piece of entertainment content.

For anyone interested in art, comparing the works on display with the prices they change hands for at the venue lets you feel the current market rhythm of contemporary art in a tangible way. Note: viewing of the lots is generally available only up to the day before, and only some works are on display on auction day.

The bidding on some in-demand artists’ works also lets you feel, in real time, the rising prices sweeping across contemporary art today.
Watching the room, I found myself repeatedly muttering things like “That’s an impossible price…” or “This is crazy — it’s gone way too high.” Still, as material for building your own axis of judgment about art, it may be a valuable opportunity. You have to keep a cool head amid a fever-pitch boom.

Training your eye by seeing many works, and grasping the fast-shifting economy of art through hammer prices —
as a collector, if you want to build a collection of works you genuinely love at appropriate prices, you cannot ignore the secondary market either.

Note: Unless otherwise stated, hammer prices in this article are inclusive of the buyer’s premium.