Remembering When Citigroup ‘Cared’ about Inequality

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



Remembering When Citigroup ‘Cared’ about Inequality
Citi analysts spent two years obsessing over luxury consumption by the rich. Last week, the ultimate symbol of that consumption — the fine art bubble — finally popped.

May 18, 2009

By Sam Pizzigati


Back a year ago, not long after Bear Stearns bit the Wall Street dust, buyers and sellers at New York’s annual spring fine art auctions shrugged off the rapidly multiplying signs of impending high-finance flop and went on to gleefully conduct business as usual.

At the Sotheby’s contemporary art auction last May, auctioneers pulled in a jaw-dropping $362 million. Over at Christie’s, connoisseurs of contemporary pieces shelled out a nearly as impressive $348 million.

Last week, the auctioneers went back at it. But this time around no one was shrugging. On Tuesday, the Sotheby’s contemporary art take dropped $315 million off last year’s total. A day later, Christie’s netted $254 million less than last year.

Among the disappointed: Daniel Loeb, the CEO of Third Point, a Park Avenue hedge fund. Loeb had brought a seven-foot-high blue-and-pink Easter egg sculpture by Jeff Koons to the Sotheby’s sale. In London, last year, a Koons went for $25.7 million. Loeb’s Koons, this year, fetched only $5.4 million.

Sotheby’s top auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, kept a stiff upper lip after last week’s “lackluster bidding.” He acknowledged only “a general pullback in the level of prices.” A local Manhattan art dealer at the auction gave a Bloomberg reporter a considerably blunter assessment: “It was a struggle to find buyers.”

So how should the rest of us react to all this angst in the high-end art world? Should we take a bit of pleasure, a little spring schadenfreude, at the sight of the excessively comfortable finally getting some comeuppance? ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/may18a.html