Hugh Scott-Douglas “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” 2013 Installation view Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.
A Bloomberg article making the rounds this morning highlights the end of the emerging-art bubble, with Canadian Hugh Scott-Douglas as its primary example.
Scott-Douglas, who lived and worked in Toronto before relocating to Brooklyn, was setting auction records just a few years ago. In 2014, New York auction house Phillips set an auction record with his work, which sold for $81,250, a 126% increase on prices for his work just nine months prior.
Now, Bloomberg reports that art dealer and collector Niels Kantor is selling a work by Scott-Douglas in another Phillips auction this week for 80% less than the $100,000 he paid for it just two years ago.
“I’d rather take a loss,” Kantor tells Bloomberg. “I feel like it can go to zero. It’s like a stock that crashed.”
The market’s excitement around Scott-Douglas and other associated young artists, like Lucien Smith and Jacob Kassay, was matched by the criticism the work attracted. American critic Walter Robinson coined the pejorative term Zombie Formalism to describe the painting style.
“‘Formalism’ because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting (yes, I admit it, I’m hung up on painting), and ‘Zombie’ because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg, the man who championed Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella’s ‘black paintings,’ among other things.
Do I need to prove that formalist abstraction is a walking corpse?”
The market has decidedly cooled in the last year. “Since auction sales began to drop in late 2015, the emerging names have been hit especially hard,” Katya Kazakina reports. “Sales by some artists are down 90 percent or more as the glut of work and nosebleed prices scare away buyers.”
But not all parties have lost hope. Scott-Douglas’s gallery Casey Kaplan will open a solo exhibition by the artist in New York next month, and expect prices for his new work, which usually fetch $25,000 to $80,000, to hold fast.
“No one is folding tent because auction prices have declined,” Kaplan tells Bloomberg.
