Art Market Rules

Earlier this week, The Financial Times published a fascinating piece on Annie Leibovitz, her ongoing financial challenges and the international market for fine-art photography in general.
As one who is just now wading into the shallow end of the fine art-photography market, I found the piece to be educational, informative and very enlightening. The gist of the article focused on the disparity in value at auction of Leibovitz's amassed body of work - work considered to be far more commercial than the images of such fine-art photography notables & top auction earners Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gurskey, Herb Ritts, Bettina Rheims ( I Yher work!), Irving Penn and others. Sherman's work, for example, has fetched lofty prices at auction, as much & more than $2 Million while Annie's best price at auction, to date, as been £31,200 but more often is the case, according the the FT article, fetching prices this year in the single-figure thousands of dollars and some to have sold as low as several hundred.


The point taken from the story is that Annie, as she readily admits, was focused on her career and a well-know & arguably the best editorial & celebrity portrait photographer of her time. In the process, she ignored the fine-art market, auction houses & dealers... that is, until her free-spending ways caught up with her.

The problem is that, as Jeffrey Boloten, a managing director of the ArtInsight consultancy in London, puts it: “You do have to play by the art market rules.” That means working closely with auction houses and galleries and doing what they tell you, from making small limited editions of your prints to signing and marketing them adeptly.

Leibovitz has failed this test, at least until she got into her current straits, and her credibility among the movers, shakers and brokers of the art world is low. “She had very little interest in the art world for most of her career,” says Edwynn Houk, a gallery owner in New York who used to represent her. “She suffered from not caring about it, not paying enough attention.” 

 Read more here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/76af3c7a-dbf2-11df-af09-00144feabdc0.html

(Thanks to Rob @ APE for the find)

Annie Shoots Keith Richards For Louis Vitton

A great subject, inexpensive portable light with soft umbrella and lots of sumptuous ambient light. God she makes it look easy. It's not.

More On the Financial Predicament of Annie Leibovitz

We've been hearing a lot this past year about Annie Leibovitz and her financial fiasco. 

Arguably one of the greatest portrait artists of our time, Miz Leibovitz has had a super-sized career spanning four decades, creating many of the most iconic portraits of celebrities and pop-culture personalities ever snapped. Until very recently, most of us assumed that Annie must be wallowing in fat wads of cash given the rumours about her reported fees, editorial deals & contracts with the likes of Vogue, Conde Nast, Rolling Stone, American Express and others. Last year it was disclosed that exactly the opposite was true when a stylist, lighting and rental houses and other vendors began suing Annie for non-payment of tabs racking up to $700,000 plus. Then, the reports began surfacing that Mizz Leibovitz was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and had pawned her complete works both past & future to survive economically. 

For the past year, we've been provided tantalizing glimpses into some of the causes of her financial problems but never much of a complete picture as to how this could possibly happen to, ostensibly, the most recognized photographer of the day.

This weekend, New York Magazine, published a rather detailed accounting of Annie's woes, painting the most complete picture of the her impending financial ruin to date. I also note that the article quotes the sister of Leibovitz's long time love, writer/intellectual Susan Sontag's sister, Maui resident Judith Cohen. You can find the complete article here.

Thanks go out to photographer/blogger Andrew Hetherington of the famed What's the Jackanory blog for posting the link, along with an interesting portrait of Mizz Leibovitz by John Keatley, in this morning's entry.