“Two days in London, two days in Paris, two days in Brussels, two days in Venice,” said one jet-setting patron at the VIP presentation of TEFAF, the leading art and antiques fair, on Thursday, adding a lament: “It just puts me in a bad mood.”
The woman and a companion had joined hundreds of other wealthy patrons lining up at the Park Avenue Armory, as if waiting for an imaginary starting gun to sound, to frantically funnel, leaning behind their Birkins, through security and rushing through flower-bedecked doorways and into carpeted hallways filled with the material wonders of the centuries.
This has happened regularly over the past decade, as the European Fine Arts Foundation comes to Manhattan from its headquarters in Maastricht, Netherlands, to present this multimillion-dollar version of the classic TV show “Supermarket Sweep.” And if the atmosphere this time was unusually lively, perhaps it was in response to the resurgence of the stock market or the waiters circulating with trays of free rosé champagne.
During several tours of the fair on a beautiful spring afternoon, it seemed to this observer (at least superficially) that wars, inflation, oil blockades, and government gridlock had a negligible impact on the group most likely to be affected by the proposed pied-à-terre tax. That is, the billionaire class.
“Money, money, money, money, money,” said Wendy Goodman, design editor of New York magazine, as she surveyed the vast interior of the Armory, which resonated that day with lively conversations in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and American and British English.
Between them, auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips intend to sell more than $2.6 billion in art over the next week. Much of it is work of impeccable provenance and unmatched quality. Artworks from the estate of publishing magnate SI Newhouse, philanthropist Agnes Gund and dealers Marian Goodman and Robert Mnuchin are coming up for sale, and this rare confluence of collections has had a bracing effect on a market that, not long ago, was entrenched. Eleven of those lots are conservatively estimated to generate more than $50 million each.
“Our entire status system has been oriented toward money,” said art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. “They’ll probably kill me for saying this,” he added while standing at the entrance to a luxurious booth operated by his gallery Salon 94. “But we used to privilege culture, and that system is disappearing, and we have to talk about it.”
In the meantime, why not stop for an oyster? Circling the 55,000-square-foot drill hall—where, this year, 88 galleries from around the world displayed their wares under a massive barrel roof—were men and women dressed in leather aprons, chainmail gloves, and murderous-looking shellers. From aluminum buckets they wore hanging from their waists they deftly plucked and cut the briny mollusks. “It’s called Oystertainment,” said a waiter, Haydn Harvey. And in fact, Oystertainment is a trademarked term in the name of New York-based catering company Red Oyster.
As it happened, Harvey was shelling right outside a booth operated by the Galerie Chastel-Maréchal, Paris-based antique dealers specializing in the major French decorative arts of the 20th century. Near the entrance stood Alexandre Maréchal, a descendant of the family that owned the gallery. When asked to identify notable distinctions between savvy collectors of the past and those among the growing ranks of modern billionaires, he had a one-word answer: advisors.
“The new rich have one, two, three advisors,” he said. “And they think more about the investment quality of what they are acquiring, its resale value three years from now.”
And what about the aesthetic value? “They still love the job,” he said.
For Simona Fantinelli, a Zurich-based private art consultant, the appeal of fairs like TEFAF for those at the top end of the market goes far beyond the transactional. “The search for beautiful things remains a magical aspect of our world,” he said. “It’s so much more than finding the right art for the mantel.”
She herself was presenting to a client a rare perforated aluminum work by the Italian-Argentine artist Lucio Fontana. It was offered by the ML Fine Art gallery in Milan for just over a million dollars. “People are cautious, of course, and risk averse, and I understand that,” Fantinelli said. “But you shouldn’t forget how much walking into a room and being surrounded by beautiful objects can change your life.”
