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PAPERS SPECULATE ON COHEN’S INTEREST IN SOTHEBY’S
Could the hedge-fund king and art collector Steve Cohen take over Sotheby’s? As the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Jörg Häntzschel reports, Cohen has been picking up not only artworks but shares in the auction house. According to Häntzschel, some are beginning to speculate that Cohen may have his eye on taking over the auction house.
The link between Cohen and Sotheby’s arose at the beginning of March when Sotheby’s announced a forthcoming exhibition featuring twenty works from Cohen’s collection. “It’s already unusual that the shy Cohen exhibits his trophies,” writes Häntzschel. “More unusual is Sotheby’s playing museum.” Yet according to the collector, the works were not up for sale. And according to Sotheby’s star auctioneer Tobias Meyer, the show is intended to “deepen our relationship” while being “good for our brand.”
Häntzschel links this curious alliance to the fact that Cohen’s company SAC Capital—which now owns 5.9 percent of Sotheby’s shares—is the third-largest shareholder. Sotheby’s value—currently estimated at six hundred million dollars—is starting to look like a song. From a high point of fifty-eight dollars in October, Sotheby’s shares have now fallen to nine dollars while profits have tumbled from $213 million in 2007 to $28.3 million last year. If the rumors prove to be true, Sotheby’s would fall into the hands of a collector—as Christie’s came into the hands of collector François Pinault through his holding company in 1998. What could one expect from the change in ownership? “Cohen apparently has a special affection for portrayals of women,” writes Häntzschel, noting that “Women” is the theme of the exhibition that opens in April at Sotheby’s. The show includes Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, which Cohen is said to have picked up from David Geffen for $137 million. What’s $600 million against that price?
END OF SECRET SWISS ACCOUNTS CREATING MARKET BOOM?
Despite the crisis, the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht saw some spectacular sales, including approximately $3.2 million for a large-format "Concetto spaziale" by Lucio Fontana, almost $6 million for a Basquiat boxer painting, and around $780,000 for Man Ray’s mask photograph Noir et Blanche (Black and White). The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Stefan Koldehoff wonders whether such sales may be due to the fact that the Swiss government will be loosening up the country's secretive banking system, including information on foreigners’ bank accounts. “Never before has so much black money been spent on the international art market as in the last three months, above all in Europe,” writes Koldehoff. “That explains the anticyclical success of the Yves Saint Laurent auction in February by Christie’s in Paris—and makes the high sales at the TEFAF in Maastricht plausible.”
Citing a “New York gallerist,” Koldehoff says that Americans currently see themselves under pressure to spend large sums of money in a short amount of time in Europe. The American financial authorities had threatened to close the American branches of major Swiss banks, should the banks refuse to cooperate with the search for tax evaders. After Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and the Canary Islands were quick to follow suit. These legal changes can lead to “massive buys,” since American collectors can buy works that have been temporarily taken out of European depots—such as the duty-free warehouses Basel-Drespitz, Zürich-Embraport, Genf-Cointrin, and Chiasso in Switzerland—only to put them back into depots as a kind of long-term deposit, relatively removed from the taxman. Looking for long-term investment—or to change cash into art—collectors have lost their interest in contemporary art. Citing another New York dealer, Koldehoff says that the top purchases are old masters and Impressionist paintings, which are sure to be worth more in twenty years.