Lost in New York: What happened to the trophy art market?
By the art world's own accounting, the spring auction season in New York fell short of even its lowest target. Reaching for a combined estimate from $US1.2 billion ($1.85 billion) to $US1.6 billion, the three major auction houses fell short at $US1 billion when excluding the hefty buyer fees that inflate their totals.
Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips all underperformed their own estimates, which the companies had previously said were conservative predictions based on a market that has continued to decline over the last three years. Analysts placed the blame largely on an uncertain global economy and the changing tastes of collectors.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mercury
2 days ago
- Mercury
Barbara Corcoran reveals her controversial moves to boost career - realestate.com.au
A real estate mogul has revealed the controversial steps she took to boost her career and did several 'unhinged things' to make a name for herself. Barbara Corcoran took to TikTok to lift the lid on the ways she attempted to boost her real estate company, The Corcoran Group — which was founded in 1973 — in its earliest days, Realtor reports. The 76-year-old 'Shark Tank' star posted a series of throwback photos from the earliest days in her real estate career, which she launched in New York City. Noting that her business was the 'first brokerage on the internet,' Ms Corcoran explained that she took to tracking the prospective URLs of her competitors so she could see who joined the web behind her. 'When I was the first brokerage on the internet, I registered my competitors' URLs so I could keep track of when everyone else woke up,' she shared, adding: 'The big guys came calling last.' Ms Corcoran then revealed that she came up with a genius idea to use a market crash to her advantage by essentially conducting a real estate fire sale, one that ultimately netted her an incredible profit. '[I] priced 88 apartments alike during a market crash and sold out within an hour. I made $US1 million commission in a single day,' she added. MORE: Bombers star finalises new $2m+ deal Where Aus tenants pay the most Developer's bold plan for $50m Melbourne site Corcoran has confessed that she went to extreme lengths while finding her footing in the homing industry and did several 'unhinged things' to make a name for herself. Picture: The 76-year-old 'Shark Tank' star took to TikTok to lift the lid on the ways she attempted to grow her brand and real estate company. Picture: The entrepreneur also confessed that she had to bet on herself and aim high — even at the beginning of her career — noting that, to a certain extent, she had to fake it until she made it, at least where her status within the industry was concerned. To that end, the 'Shark Tank' investor wrote her own self-titled industry analysis, called The Corcoran Report, which she first published during a recession, relying solely on data from her own sales in order to offer a market evaluation. '[I] wrote The Corcoran Report, declaring that NYC prices hit an all-time low, based only on my 14 sales for the year,' she confessed in the TikTok video. Despite the lack of data in the report, her strategy worked, with Ms Corcoran revealing in a previous LinkedIn post that she was stunned to find herself quoted in a New York Times piece just days after she'd published it. 'They quoted my report, and I couldn't believe my eyes!' she recalled. 'And right after that, our phones never stopped ringing. It immediately put us on the map. I could hear my salespeople answer the phones and say, 'Oh, you've heard of us?!' 'I was still the same small company I was the week before, but I now had the power of the press behind me, and everyone treated us differently.' But still, Ms Corcoran didn't stop her efforts to woo more clients — as well as their pets. In fact, the industry expert shared that she even drew in new customers by appealing to pet owners and acting as both a real estate mogul and dog trainer. 'When the co-op board revealed they would start interviewing dogs, I taught dogs how to shake hands in Central Park,' she said. And she didn't just drive business by training dogs, she also 'took a job as a messenger delivering packages at night to help make ends meet.' Alongside a slew of throwback pictures from the early days of her stellar career, the home pro revealed that she had to think outside of the box. Picture: At the time, the real estate tycoon began by registering and tracking her competitors' URLs. Picture: Unlike many other businesses at the time, Ms Corcoran used the press to her advantage and even invited them to 'open the elusive safe in the Guggenheim mansion without knowing what was inside.' She revealed the safe ended up being 'empty.' And she even dressed up to draw attention. 'I threw a company party where everyone dressed as nuns. It was a riot,' she said alongside a snap of members of the real estate company dressed up. In addition to pretending it was Halloween, Ms Corcoran revealed she also recruited the help of farm animals to make sales. 'I put real cows on the penthouse roof to help sell Stewart Mott's overpriced apartment and got major press for it. (Yes, Mott of the applesauce empire),' she revealed. Lastly, to establish herself in the celebrity home market, Ms Corcoran threw out an A-lister's name — who wasn't her client — and flew to success. 'I published the Madonna report based on what I imagined Madonna would want in a home,' the 76-year-old said. 'The media went wild and started calling me the 'broker to the stars.' She wasn't even my client.' Corcoran then revealed that she came up with a genius idea to use the market crash to her advantage, allowing her to cash in big time. Picture: And she even dressed up to draw attention. Picture: Corcoran previously showed off her $US12 million New York City penthouse for the last time after she offloaded the property. Picture: calebwsimpson/TikTok Just days before she candidly revealed her 'unhinged' behaviour, Ms Corcoran welcomed Caleb Simpson, the TikTok star-turned-real estate influencer, into her NYC dwelling for one last time. She offers an intimate glimpse of the property's most impressive amenities, including jaw-dropping views of Manhattan's iconic skyline. In Simpson's viral video, Ms Corcoran joked that even her most dedicated followers likely wouldn't have 'recognised' the pad when it was first listed, because she had removed all of her possessions in order to stage it for sale. Though she seemed firm in her decision to offload the abode — which she first came across in 1992, 23 years before she bought it in 2015 — she confessed that she 'can't believe' she's bidding farewell to the home after so many years. Ms Corcoran first came across the penthouse dwelling on the Upper East Side in 1992 when she was working as a messenger to make ends meet and delivered a letter to the unit's resident. At the time, the opulent home wasn't on the market — nor would it have been anywhere close to fitting within Corcoran's budget if it had been. Yet, she couldn't get the property out of her mind. 'I thought, 'My God, I've never seen anything as beautiful in my life,'' she told the New York Times. So, she asked the then-owner to get in touch if she ever decided to sell her penthouse — a decision that she ended up making more than two decades later. Parts of this story first appeared in Realtor and was republished with permission. Sign up to the Herald Sun Weekly Real Estate Update. Click here to get the latest Victorian property market news delivered direct to your inbox. MORE: Huge star slams 'violent' Trump after quitting US 'Wrong side': Ellen loses $8m+ overnight 'Gone, everything': Gibson on trashed pad
The Age
3 days ago
- The Age
Meet the EMILLIs, our everyday millionaires. Australia has plenty of them
It says a lot that economists have created a new term – 'everyday millionaires', or for short, EMILLIs – to describe the rapidly growing number of people whose net wealth sits between $US1 million and $US5million ($1.5 million and $7.7 million). Of the 60 million EMILLIs worldwide, Australia boasts about 2 million people who own $US1 million or more, which stands to show that while in this cost-of-living crisis we may not feel economically lucky, relative to the rest of the world a lot of us definitely are. Given our adult population sits at roughly 21 million, about 10 per cent of us are millionaires in US dollar terms, according to the numbers contained in the UBS Global Wealth Report for 2024 published this week. Looking at the investment bank's global EMILLI rankings, Switzerland and Luxembourg sit at the top, with more than one in seven adults classified as a US dollar millionaire. A further four places on the planet have a ratio of one in 10: Hong Kong, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands. EMILLIs may not live in mansions, drive Maseratis or jet off to the Maldives. They're more likely the person driving by in his Lexus, the woman walking her Labrador at the park, or your next-door neighbour. We sit around eighth in the world for the total number of US dollar millionaires, which includes EMILLIs and those even richer, behind the US, China, France, Japan, Germany, the UK and Canada. With their ranks swelling by more than 1000 a day last year, the US now counts nearly 24 million millionaires – about 40 per cent of all millionaires around the world, and four times as many as the runner-up, China. In terms of individual wealth, we punch well above our weight. Last year, Australia's median personal wealth grew by 11 per cent to $US268,000 ($413,500), ranking us second in the world on this measure. Luxembourg sits in the top spot. In terms of average wealth per adult, Australia came in fifth with $US516,000 ($796,000). Switzerland tops that list, ahead of the US, Hong Kong and Luxembourg.
Sydney Morning Herald
7 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Despite what Donald Trump says, factory work is overrated. Here are the jobs of the future
Even a heroic reshoring effort eliminating America's $US1.2 trillion (about $1.9 trillion) goods-trade deficit would do little for jobs. In the production of that amount of goods, about $US630 billion (about $973 billion) of value-added would come from manufacturing (with the rest from raw materials, transport and so on). Robert Lawrence of Harvard University estimates that, with each manufacturing worker generating $US230,000 (about $355,000) or so in value added, bringing back production to close the deficit would create around three million jobs, half on the factory floor. That would lift the share of the workforce in manufacturing production by barely a percentage point. Assume this was done by levying an average effective tariff rate of 20 per cent on America's $US3 trillion (about $4.6 trillion) of imports, and it could cost an extra $US600 billion (about $926 billion), or $US200,000 (about $308,000) per manufacturing job 'saved'. That is a high price for jobs that are not as attractive as in the past. Seven decades ago, factories offered a rare bundle: good pay, job security, union protection, plentiful employment and no degree requirement. By the 1980s manufacturing workers still earned 10 per cent more than comparable peers in other parts of the economy. Their productivity was also growing faster. Loading Today factory-floor work lags behind non-supervisory roles in services on hourly pay. Even if you control for age, gender, race and more, the manufacturing wage premium has collapsed. Using methods similar to the Department of Commerce and the Economic Policy Institute, we estimate by 2024 the premium had more than halved since the 1980s. For those without a college education, it has gone entirely, even though such workers still enjoy a premium in construction and transport. Productivity growth has fallen, too: output per industrial worker is now rising more slowly than per service-sector worker, suggesting wage growth will be weak as well. A crucial component of the 'manufacturing jobs are good jobs' argument no longer holds. A job in industry is also now harder to attain. Modern factories are high-tech, run by engineers and technicians. In the early 1980s blue-collar assemblers, machine operators and repair workers made up more than half of the manufacturing workforce. Today they account for less than a third. White-collar professionals outnumber blue-collar factory-floor workers by a wide margin. Even once obtained, a factory job is far less likely to be unionised than in previous decades, with membership having fallen from one in four workers in the 1980s to less than one in ten today. In order to find the modern equivalent of such jobs, we looked for employment with the same traits. What offers decent pay, unionisation, requires no degree and can soak up the male workforce? The result: mechanics, repair technicians, security workers and the skilled trades. Over seven million Americans work as carpenters, electricians, solar-panel installers and in other such trades; almost all are male and lack a degree. The median wage is a solid $US25 (about $39) an hour, unionisation is above average and demand is expected to rise as America upgrades its infrastructure. Another five million toil as repair and maintenance workers – think HVAC technicians and telecom installers – and mechanics, earning wages well above the factory-floor average. Emergency and security workers also show similarities; over a third are union members. An air-con capital of the world Still, these jobs differ from manufacturing in one important way: there is no such thing as an HVAC company town. Factories once powered whole cities, creating demand for suppliers, logistics and dive bars. The new jobs are more dispersed and, as such, less likely to prop up local economies. Yet although the benefits are more diffuse, they are almost as large. Nearly as many people are employed in such categories as held manufacturing jobs in the 1990s. With better wages, less credentialism and stronger unions, they may look more attractive than modern factory jobs to working-class Americans. Loading The future is drifting even further from factories. Skilled trades and repair workers should see growth of five per cent over the next decade, according to official projections; the number of manufacturing jobs is expected to fall. The fastest-growing categories for workers without degrees are in health-care support and personal care, which are expected to grow by 15 per cent and six per cent, respectively. These include roles such as nursing assistants and child-care workers, and do not look anything like old manufacturing jobs owing to their low pay. The task, as Dani Rodrik of Harvard puts it, is to boost the productivity of the jobs that are actually growing. Perhaps that might include ensuring the adoption of AI, whether for managing medication or diagnosis. In the late 18th century, Thomas Jefferson viewed farming as the foundation of a self-reliant republic. Influenced by French physiocrats who saw agriculture as the noblest source of national wealth, he believed that working the land was the path to liberty and abundance. By the 20th century, factory work had inherited that symbolic role. But like farming before it, manufacturing employment fades with rising prosperity and productivity. The heart of working-class America now beats elsewhere.
