The art market: Testing, testing ...

Fairground ball-guzzler from 1934

The opening of London’s “Frieze week” on Monday brings a helter-skelter schedule of exhibitions, fairs, lectures, tours and parties, parties, parties continuing all through the week. Frieze itself, with its 173 exhibitors, is of course the throbbing heart of this frenzy, but there are other fairs around it. Foremost is the Pavilion of Art and Design (PAD), whose 57 exhibitors show modern masters, design, photography and tribal art. Exhibiting for the first time at PAD, indeed at any art fair, is the transatlantic dealership Eykyn-Maclean. “We are opening a new space in London next year,” says Nicholas Maclean. “We are hoping to meet new collectors here in London.” He will be showing a range of works, including a late Miró previously on display in the Maeght Foundation in St Paul de Vence and a large Kapoor sculpture in alabaster.

Meanwhile, for emerging art, visitors have Art London (ends Monday), the Moniker and Sunday fairs, with the specialised, Christie’s-run Multiplied for contemporary editions and Moving Image for video art. Phew: add in auctions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips and even Bonhams, that’s an awful lot of art on offer in the week.

Are there enough buyers for it all? The New York-based art adviser Lisa Schiff says: “The financial turmoil is definitely beginning to rattle collectors, particularly because of the uncertainty. No one knows what is going to happen next. It certainly would help if the markets rallied a little next week.” Nevertheless, her clients are coming to London, and moving on to Paris the following week for Fiac, the French contemporary fair. “We will be picky, and everyone will be chasing the same few high-quality things,” she says.

See our 10-page Frieze Week supplement, published on Wednesday October 12

In the salerooms, more than £111m worth of art is on offer, in 1,178 lots. “This week is going to be a big test of the market, between the fairs and the auctions,” says Maclean. “We have the feeling that New York is a little quieter than it was. There is good material in the sales but I think people are going to play safe.”

Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have separately catalogued sales of Italian art, but the most expensive lot of the week is a candle-piece by Gerhard Richter, currently the subject of a show at Tate Modern. “Kerze (Candle)” (1982, est £6m-£9m) comes up for sale at Christie’s on Friday. Sotheby’s star lot on Thursday is a small but remarkable Lucian Freud 1952 portrait, looking for £3m-£4m.

Phillips’ evening sale on Wednesday is led by one of Koons’ plastic walrus-stuck-in-a wastebasket sculptures. Previously unsold at Art Basel, where it was tagged at $5m, it is offered at £2m-£3m. The new kid on the block is Bonhams, inaugurating its first “Contemporary One” sale on Thursday afternoon with 20 lots, including Alighiero Boetti’s “Anno 1984”, estimated at £1.2m-£1.8m, and Glenn Brown’s “Little Death” (2000). Like the bigger boys, Bonhams is even giving guarantees: there’s one on the Brown, and the firm has a financial interest in the Boetti.

The London sales this year are larger, in value and volume, than the comparable ones last year, a sign of confidence among sellers. But will there be enough buyers? Art adviser Michael Frahm is looking to collectors from “new” economies to take up the slack: “People from China, Indonesia and Brazil are starting to play an important part in the market,” he says. The top end of the market will remain strong, he says, adding that “people will buy fewer mediocre mid-market works, and more young artists”.

Fairground art was a hit in Paris last week when auctioneer Cornette de Saint Cyr put on the block the 700 lots of a collection that Fabienne and François Marchal had spent 40 years building. It included everything from whole roundabouts to distorting mirrors, sideshows and organs. The sale was estimated at €1.5m-€2m, but when the music stopped it had rung up a punchy €3.7m, with 99 per cent of the lots finding buyers.

Jean Paul Favand, owner of a private museum, bought 20 lots, while a French aeronautical museum pre-empted two roundabout aeroplanes. Favand explains: “The craftsmen who carved and painted the animals and statues also worked in churches, where they used the same techniques, such as decorating the statues dramatically, with glittering chips of mirror.” The top price of €90,000 was given for a music hall “ball-guzzler” from 1934 with caricatures of Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier, Mistinguett and Charlie Chaplin. And 200 lots went to pressure-cooker manufacturer Francis Staub, who is creating a museum of fairground art in Colmar, eastern France.

The Arab awakening has done the Islamic art market no favours, judging by early results of the London sales. Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary and Iranian sale saw 55 per cent of the works unsold, including the highest estimated lots, by Farhad Moshiri and Parviz Tanavoli, left on the block. At Sotheby’s Islamic art evening sale the news was even worse – only 30 per cent of the lots were sold. “The problem is that Qatar was the main buyer in this market, but this time it was only bidding sporadically,” said one dealer. “And other countries in the region are worrying about other things at the moment.”

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of the Art Newspaper