A rare Botticelli’s drawing soon on auction introduced by contemporary master Richard Prince

 

As many online media are reporting, this rare Botticelli’s drawing is the only one by the artist which is still in private hands and it will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s on 9 July. Aside from an album of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, there are only 12 surviving drawings by Botticelli – all but this “Study for a Seated St Joseph” are in museums. It comes from the collection of art connoisseur and philanthropist Barbara Piasecka Johnson, wife of John Seward Johnson, the co-founder of the Johnson and Johnson medical and pharmaceutical firm.

 

The estimate for this pen and brown ink heightened with white over black chalk sheet of beige-pink washed paper is between 1 and 1.5m GBP. That is nothing if compared to the ridiculous prices recently achieved at auctions by certain contemporary living artists. One of them, Richard Prince, has written on this subject a sort of pamphlet, whose main idea is that art auctions have nothing to do with art – the very same concept Wade Guyton told us a few months ago.

 

Here below two meaningful passages that perfectly summarize the core of the matter.

 

I promised (and I’m not sure to who) I would never talk about the auctions. I have nothing to do with them. Why should I? It’s none of my business. Their deal is between the consignor and the new collector. The auction house is the middleman. It’s another “market”. Gold, bonds, futures, derivatives, energy, apps, start-ups, IPO’s, stocks, wine, watches, coins and stamps. Art has always had a market. But now there’s a ton of publicity around it and high in the sky skyboxes. Like all the other markets it’s a crapshoot. The house always wins. 

…

The auctions might think they have something to do with what I make, but they don’t. What they have is what they’ve always had… themselves.

 

It has to be said that if on the one hand all these advertising and extremely high prices help young artists and give a boost also to the lower levels of the art market, on the other hand both Prince and Guyton have made their point. The auctions’ market is indeed a parallel world, most of the time opaque, even for the insiders. How could we be safe from this opacity? Always keeping in mind that a drawing is just a drawing, no matter how old or rare it is.

September 22, 2014