Regulating “sleeper” practices in the art trade? You’ve got to be joking…
Some would like to impose a levy on "sleepers", rewarding their original owners who were ignorant of the value of their possessions
Let’s talk for a moment about the concept of the “sleeper” in the art market. We all know what this is. It’s the practice of identifying what you believe to be an object of unrecognised value “sleeping” among the otherwise unremarkable lots in an auction and taking a punt on it.
Anyone with more than merely a passing familiarity with the art market’s professional practices will know that bringing your long, hard-earned knowledge and educated eye to bear on otherwise seemingly neglected or miscatalogued objects has been part of the art trade for centuries. Moreover, not every “sleeper” turns out to be the pot of gold. Dealers put their money where their mouth is and not every punt proves profitable.
Moreover, there is nothing “predatory” about the concept of the “sleeper” in the art market, as journalist Ben Lewis has desperately tried to argue in this month’s Art Newspaper.
I’ve a lot of time for Ben Lewis, but his latest piece is yet another example of someone who has never worked in the art market at any meaningful level and thus displays an ignorance of its core practices and historical development. I would have thought Ben would know better than this, but I’m hardly in a position to criticise provocative journalism, having set the cat among the pigeons myself on many past occasions.
However, to suggest, as Ben does, that one “young co-owner of a sleeper” was reduced to living in a trailer as a result of her painting having been sold for many millions, is frankly laughable. The fact that a painting you consigned for sale turns out to be a valuable masterpiece, does not render you homeless or needing to move to a trailer-park. As for the emergence of serious mental health issues following sleeper cases like this… oh, give me a break.
I enjoyed Ben Lewis’s excellent book on the so-called Salvator Mundi and in this latest piece he mentions that Christie’s originally passed on the picture when asked to look at it by its original owners. Its subsequent journey from obscurity to the most expensive painting in auction history is a graphic illustration of what has become known as the “financialisation” of the market by people who thirty or forty years ago would never have been anywhere near the art market. Hence the tawdry recent court case in New York, the outcome of which most of us with experience of the art market had already foreseen. There were certainly predatory instincts at work among the millionaires and billionaires on that picture’s journey to dubious stardom, but nobody was predating on the original owners.
The now famous case of Luxmoore-May v Messenger May Baverstock (1990) is a signal instance of how the law ought to work in sleeper cases of this kind. I’ll not labour the details as you can look it up for yourselves in Google’s law library. Suffice to say, the Surrey auction house Messenger May sold two small paintings of foxhounds for a relatively small sum (around £800). Unbeknownst to the auctioneers and their consultant, the pictures turned out to have been the work of George Stubbs (1724–1806), one of Britain’s foremost painters of animal subjects (see example above). On their later resale in London they fetched £88,000. The original owner, Mrs Luxmoore-May, sued the Surrey auctioneers for negligence.
In essence, the presiding judge eventually found for Messenger May Baverstock on the grounds that as “general” auctioneers they could not be expected to have specialist knowledge of the Stubbs market. You can disagree with the judgement if you like, but remember that the practice of spotting things that the vast majority of others have ignored through lack of knowledge is the very lifeblood of the art market. To argue otherwise is absurd.
As for suggesting something called a "Sleeper Resale Rights” levy under which the original owners would be compensated for their “loss” — I almost choked on my flat white. Imagine the bureaucratic mayhem that would unleash.
Why are we seeing so many brickbats hurled at the traditional art market when the real predators are those trying to “fractionalise” art assets, or steer the industry towards crapulous NFTs and toxic cryptocurrency scams, to say nothing of some art advisers who, desperate to be as rich as their naive, super-rich clients, cheat and double-deal in the hope of enjoying a comparable lifestyle.
There will always be sleepers in the art market and there will always be experts capable of rescuing them from obscurity. That’s what makes the art market such a fascinating, risky, but deeply rewarding arena in which to work.
You win some, you lose some.
Get over it.