BRITAIN's art market broke all records with auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's selling pound stg. 260million ($643 million) worth between them. ``London has never before sold so much art in a week,'' declared Bloomberg. ``Demand has outpaced supply, doubling modern art prices since 1998 and raising contemporary values more than sevenfold since 1985.'' It was a similar story across the Atlantic where Gustav Klimt's Gold Adele sold for a staggering $US135 million ($182million) to cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder. The Independent credited the strong sales to a ``weak dollar and a new crop of wealthy buyers from Russia and the Middle and Far East''. Der Spiegel estimated the Russians alone were spending $US300 million to $US500 million each year.
The New York Times reported that as the Russian and Asian new rich had ``far more conservative taste'', dealers were welcoming what some regarded as a return to sanity. ``After years of escalating prices for artists barely out of school, Impressionist paintings are suddenly back in vogue.''
But with what The Guardian described as ``jaw-dropping amounts of money'' being produced to snap up works that ended up in private hands, there was concern the boom was putting significant art outside the scope of public collections. ``Does this mean the end for the great galleries?'' asked Charles Saumarez Smith, the director of London's National Gallery, in the daily. ``Museums and galleries are facing a crisis of acquisition. As the art market booms, it becomes increasingly obvious that we have pitifully meagre resources with which to buy works of art.''
Ruth Wishart in Scotland's The Herald saw a silver lining, however. ``Perhaps we might also celebrate modestly the thought that Moscow's nouveaux riches are eyeing soul food for their walls rather than virility symbols for their garages.''
Some commentators were asking if the boom was likely to go bust. ``Leading auction houses are confident the conditions are in place for sustained growth, unlike 16 years ago when speculative money, much of it Japanese, left the market vulnerable to collapse,'' Reuters Mike Collett-White said. ``Art sale trackers and experts are less sure, arguing that some sectors of the market are overvalued and that art, like other industries, is cyclical.''