IZO

Vagaries of the contemporary art market: the new show by Yuri Ermolenko at Tsekh Gallery, Kiev (Tsekh), sold out immediately: huge dark paintings featuring skulls and not much else: who would have guessed?

Is there a difference, from a commercial POV, between the Venice Biennale an Art Basel (Georgina Adam/FT)? I was interested by this info, which marks the rise of dealer-power and of increasingly comprehensive contracts with artists:

In fact, selling art used to be an accepted part of the Biennale. Between 1942 and 1968, the Italian dealer Ettore Gian Ferrari had the official job of placing works for any willing artist, earning 15 per cent for the Biennale and 2 per cent for himself. This was stopped, ostensibly so that the Biennale was not commercially tainted, although Ferrari’s daughter Claudia says the real reason was that the artists’ regular dealers began to object to the practice.

Of course, Venice has the power to influence what sells at Basel: Pavel Pepperstein, who is in the Russian pavilion at Venice, sold out on the Basel stand of Kewenig Galerie (Art Newspaper) (thanks, EW).

Viktor Pinchuk is a stakeholder in Damien Hirst's diamond-covered skull, along with the artist, his business-manager Frank Dunphy and gallerist Jay Jopling. Apparently a £35 million offer from Alberto Mughrabi for the skull (asking price £50 million) was rejected (Art Newspaper). Was it a bad move to turn the offer down? With hindsight, I would say so. This report also raises the intriguing idea that Pinchuk, hitherto known purely as a collector, is not averse to speculation in art.

Auction round-up, further to last week's first-day comments (IZO); figures in brackets are last year's totals:

Komar and Melamid's What is To Be Done? at £97,250 was top-seller at a disappointing auction of Russian, Ukrainian and Latvian contemporary art at Sotheby's, £900,000 total sales, less than 40% sold. There were successes. Faibisovich made £67,250. Anatoli Osmolovsky's carved slice-of-bread "icon" sold above gallery price at £11,250. Kosolapov, Nemukhin, Koshlyakov were among the others who sold well. Ukrainian art behaved ok, with a top price of £25,000 for Tsagolov, and a couple of Latvian painters sold at circa £10,000. Overall during Russian week Sotheby's raised £17.7 million (£39.7 million).

Macdougalls made £7.1 million, including a £1.3 million Repin, at their main auction, plus £526,000 at an icon sale. Christies raised £4.1 million (£11.3 million).

Overall, despite the freak (IMO) Kustodiev price, the retrenchment is real, especially in the contemporary art sector. More here, including info on a newish collector (John Varoli/Bloomberg):

MacDougall’s top lot yesterday was Ilya Repin’s “Portrait of Madame Alisa Rivoir” (1914), which fetched 1.4 million pounds, beating a top estimate of 1.2 million pounds. The second most expensive lot was Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s, “Maternity,” (1922), which sold for 1.07 million pounds. Its low estimate was 1.1 million pounds. Both were records for these artists at auction.  “I bought both these paintings because I love art, and thanks to the grace of God I have the means to buy them,” Alina Aivazova, a Ukrainian collector, who attended the auction, said in an interview.

UPDATE: Alina Aivazova is the wife of Kiev mayor Leonid Kosmos Chernovetsky (thanks, VK). On Kosmos here (IZO).

At Art Basel Roman Abramovich showed interest in Andy Warhols $53 million Big Retrospective Painting (Frankfurter Neue Presse, in German). If he buys it, I hope he doesn't overpay: apparently Warhol prices are seriously down (Bloomberg). Abramovich and Zhukova also considered a Georg Herold caviar painting, and eventually bought a painting by Norbert Schwontkowski (Suddeutsche Zeitung, in German)

Russian week update: I'll be in Berlin from tomorrow and can't attend any more sales, but here are some first day impressions. BTW, my report on the new Russian Art Fair (in Russian) should appear on the Art Times section of Open Space later this week. I didn't get to MacDougall's morning icon sale, but the report was it went not very well. Bonhams mixed Russian sale seemed to be under 50% sold (my impression). Attractive works by Harlamoff were unsold early on, and other good pieces didn't find bidders. Top price by a long way was for an officer's sword, which fetched over £100,000. So, an inauspicious start. Sotheby's evening sale fared better. The crowd was down on last year, but 17 out of 28 lots sold (61%) and nearly £8 million was raised. Top price was for an (in my opinion) middling-quality bucolic scene by Kustodiev (£2,800,000+); if there wasn't such a dearth of good material I don't think it would have fetched as much: a paradox of the recession. Isaak Brodsky joined the top league when his 1912 pastoral reached £930,000+. The assembled dealers and collectors breathed a sigh of relief at the evidence that there was still life at the top of the Russian market.

On way home today, at Zurich airport (yes, I fly cheap zig-zags...), I bought a (probably quite old - 03/2009) copy of the German mag  Artinvestor. It doesn't have anything to say about Russian art. But the Germans are pre-occupied with the idea that Obama's policies will lead to inflation, possibly hyper-inflation, and this issue contains an analysis from Wolfgang Wilke, a private art-market analyst, about what happens to the price of art in a high-inflation environment. He takes the example of the print market in Germany in the period 1914-23, which ended with hyper-inflation and currency reform. Apparently the prices of the most expensive prints (in those days, by artists such as Zorn and Whistler) ran ahead of quite serious inflation in the period 1914-20, but in the period of hyper-inflation 1920-23 couldn't keep up. Wilke further notes that (a) after the currency reform the prints retained much value, whereas cash didn't and (b) the value of works by most of the top-selling print artists of the period 1915-20 is much less today than it was then (presumably he means in real terms, adjusted for inflation).

The contemporary sales by Sotheby's, Christies and Phillips de Pury last week produced a fraction of the sum they did last year but the slimmed-down catalogues had a good selling rate. Larry Gagosian bought the Jeff Koons Baroque Egg with Bow, which some saw as a market bellwether (IZO, last week), below estimate (WSJ).  I imagine Koons is regarded by the über-dealers as "too big to fail". A Russian or Ukrainian collector may have bought Peter Doig's Night Fishing for $4.7 million (Artforum). I suppose that's all reassuring for the Russian contemporary market. There were four Russian lots in the 15 May Phillips de Pury contemporary sale (by Elena Keller, Natalia Nesterova, Petr Belenok and Dubossarsky and Vinogradov) and they failed; but that number of works isn't representative.

Auctioneer Gene Shapiro is upbeat about the Russian market (Antiques And The Arts).

David Zwirner on the art market (WSJ). What is interesting to me is not what he says but what he doesn't say.

For example, "Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami are going to get tested, and the jury is out." Well, there's an egregious omission from that little list: Jeff Koons. Won't he be tested, too? For example, by the Egg that is upcoming at Sotheby's, put on sale by a distressed hedge-funder, which Todd Levin and Richard Feigen have stated publicly will fail (Forbes)? And will we ever again see anything like the $23.4 million paid for a hanging heart last year (Luxist)?

Zwirner also says that "Andy Warhol’s market collapsed completely in the early 1990s. He withstood his test." But did he in fact only withstand the test only due to the huge in-depth buying of the Mugrabi family, holders of 800 works, who in the NY Times words, are the market in Warhol (IZO, earlier)? If the Mugrabis start to divest themselves of Warhols it will be like the Chinese divesting themselves of dollars: it will lead to price collapse: having a Warhol, of which there are an enormous number, will be like having a bottle of ketchup on the table.

But I think what he says about Dubai is right: it can't possibly become part of the art-world unless it discards its censorship policies and hostility to free intellectual discourse. It remains to be seen how far dealers and auction houses are prepared to go in flogging the Lebanese restaurant-style paintings that dominate the middle eastern art market.

Top lot at Christies 24 April sale, and of the New York Russian week as a whole, was Svyatoslav Roerich's portrait of his father, Nikolai, which made neaely $3 million (AuctionPublicity.com). This was one of collector Valeri Dudakov's picks in an article referenced on IZO last week. As Dudakov points out, the work is primarily of "historical value" (Art Times/Open Space, in Russian). Which is an interesting indicator of the overriding values in the Russian art market. Overall, Christies sold 69% of lots for $13.2 million (Luxist). That's a good selling rate, by dint of course of reduced catalogue size and reduced estimates. Other interesting results: Alexander Gerasimov still-life $146,000; Pavel Chelishchev $230,000; Boris Grigoriev's Portrait of a Girl $206,000, more than doubling its estimate (Kommersant, in Russian).

The new trend in uncertain times: if you want to sell art, do it through a dealer, not an auction (NY Times).

Sotheby's 22 April NY Russian sale had a selling rate of 74% and brought $13.8 million, but that is compared to $46.5 million last year. Works by Aivazovsky and Grigoriev broke the $1 million barrier (Art Times/Open Space, in Russian). Other results include $74,000 for a bureaucratic-looking Alexander Gerasimov (the meeting of Roosevelt and the Shah of Iran); $98,000 for a big Lanskoy; $218,000 for a very unexciting-looking Alexander Volkov.

Last week Andrei Erofeev published an article protesting about the de-accessioning of contemporary art by the Tretyakov Gallery (IZO). An employee of the Tretyakov Gallery has replied to what he/she calls Erofeev's "latest provocative article" (nikto001, in Russian):

Yes, Sergei Anufriev wanted to collect his works, all of them. Because he needed money. We negotiated and agreed that we would give him ONE series, which Pierre Brochet did indeed receive, and that the Tretyakov Gallery would receive THREE series as a gift from Sergei Anufriev.

Andrei Vladimirovich [Erofeev] did not write in his article that the transfer of works by Sergei Anufriev required his [Erofeev's] signature because, according to the documents, the works' owner was the SCCA, the Society of Collectors of Contemporary Art (ОКСИ - общество коллекционеров современного искусства). This society in the person of Andrei Erofeev handed Sergei Anufriev's work over to the TG and according to the documents Andrei was the owner (consignor) of the works. Sergei Anufriev new nothing about this. (...) And when Andrei realised that he had no room for manoeuvre, he was disappointed that the "deal" had taken place without him. (...) So, sorry, Andrei Vladimirovich, but you are making a mistake to reveal the shady side of your curatorial activity.

More Erofeev material here: an interview with him on Ekho Moskvy radio station (Ekho Moskvy, in Russian).

Interview with Igor Markin. Before the Crisis hit, he was thinking of selling his museum collection and buying "interactive" Western art, but the fall in prices has put paid to that idea. He is selling some work in Sotheby's contemporary sale in June. He slags off Roman Abramovich the collector ("he made the whole world laugh with his multi-million dollar purchases") and finds Goncharova's position as the most expensive female artist "laughable". And he considers himself a victim of the bubble (Art Times/Open Space, in Russian):

The autumn sales showed that the prices of top-lots have fallen by half and the cost of contemporary works by second-level artists (Shutov, Dubossarsky and Vinogradov) are an order lower, almost ten times lower. Soon realistic prices will be established and that will be good for collectors. The bubble of high prices is deflating and I deeply regret that I was a part of it.

You think you bought work for your collection at inflated prices?

Yes, in retrospect that's clear. Not much, but two or three works were bought for unjustifiably high sums.

Art prices drop sharply in first quarter of 2009 (FT, registration needed):

Postwar and contemporary art prices fell more than 30 per cent, according to the index, which combines New York and London prices. Such prices had enjoyed an average annual rise of 20 per cent for the past decade. 

Works by Old Masters, a less fashionable genre in recent years, have declined less. A painting by J.M.W. Turner, “The Temple of Jupiter”, sold for $12.9m last quarter, a return of 10 per cent a year for the seller, who bought it in 1982 for $1.1m, said Michael Moses, a co-founder of the index.

Quibble: on that basis Mei Moses seems to be bigging up the old master market slightly. My calculation is that $1.1 million at 10% compound interest (the owner wasn't withdrawing interest each year) over an assumed 26.5 years (I know the second sale was in January 2009 but don't know exactly when the purchase was) would bring $13.75 million. That's for starters. Secondly, the sale price includes the buyer's premium. We don't know what deal the seller struck with Sotheby's, but let's assume he drove a hard bargain and paid no seller's premium at all and also took some of the buyer's premium, with Sotheby's getting, say, 5% of the final gross price. That leaves the seller with a net of about $12.25 million; in reality, he probably got less, but I'm using a best-case scenario as far as the seller is concerned. Over 26.5 years that equals growth of not 10% p.a., as apparently suggested by Mei Moses, but about 9.52%. If, on the other hand, Sotheby's took all of the buyer's premium and the seller was merely excused the seller's commission, perhaps a more likely scenario, then the seller received $11.5 million. In that case his annual appreciation is about 9.26%. Still a good investment, of course.

The end of art as an asset class? UBS Bank shuts down its art advisory division (Felix Salmon). A comment to the post prompts the intriguing thought that this closure is connected less with the retreats in the art market than with looming international crackdown on banking secrecy: that meetings between Swiss bankers and their clients at, say, Art Basel Miami Beach, were less about art than about the management of offshore accounts.

Sotheby's shares have gained nearly 40% or so in the last few weeks; at time of writing (27/3) they're at $10.20, up from the low sevens when I last checked. Why is that? Have art market prospects perked up sufficiently? Or, crazy idea, could someone be building a stake?

Here, 42 photos of fashionable people and a few artworks at the opening of the Pinault Collection display at the Melnikov Garage (Spletnik).

In response to the question, Does Mr Pinault have Russian artists in his collection?, the curator of the show, Caroline Bourgeois, replied (RIA Novosti, in Russian):

He is interested in several Russian artists, but I wouldn't like to mention their names since the information that Francois Pinault would like to buy one or another work could seriously affect the art market. Therefore he has to be very cautious.

Contemporary art performs badly in New York (Chelsea Art Galleries):

...the sales for the contemporary art auctions in New York, March 9-11th, totaled $6.4 million ($8 million including premium), 30% below the low end estimate. The auction results were down 70% from last year's total of $22.7 million, partly because fewer lots were for sale (599 lots versus 1,101 lots in 2008).  (...) The auction results from the last few years indicate that the market peaked in May 2008, though the rate of growth already at that time had slowed significantly. For instance, the May auctions in New York in 2008 grew 10% compared to May 2007, while the prior November auction in 2007 grew 67% from November 2006.   The year-over-year sales decline for the March auctions is in line with the London auctions last month (down 80% from 2008), and the New York auctions in November 2008 (down 64% from 2007), and signals no shift in the current market.

These weren't major sales, but even so it's clear that even after paring the sales right down (as it seemed to them) the major auction houses' imaginations are running ahead of the real market. One problem they have, it seems to me, is this: it's not clear who is hot. For example:

Of the 20 highest grossing artists in 2008, only four reappeared in the top-20 list this year: Romare Bearden, Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, and Andy Warhol.

Colourful, informed article about bellwether of the top of the market, Larry Gagosian (NYT) (thanks, ED and MK):

Mr. Gagosian has “a well-fortified ship, but he’s up against the perfect storm,” says Ed Ruscha, a major artist in Mr. Gagosian’s roster and a longtime friend. “Everyone is on red alert there.”
(...)
[Gallerist] Ms. [Stefani] Bortolami isn’t alone in believing that Mr. Gagosian has achieved the contemporary art market’s version of too big to fail, though for reasons that have nothing to do with toxic assets. The glamour and networking energy that he has brought to the business added a zero to the price of just about everything, Ms. Bortolami says. If his business were to fold, the new buyers he brought to the market, as well as a lot of added, buzz-laden value, would disappear along with him.

The global art market was worth $40 billion in year to end of September 2008 (ATG).

On the Mugrabi family, who have huge holdings of Warhol (including, according to Richard Polsky, "even the stuff that was considered junk"), Prince and Wesselman, among others (NY Times) (thanks, MK):

For the Mugrabis’ preferred artists, the family doesn’t merely operate in the art market; it is the market. “They’re so invested, they’re like the casino, not the gambler,” said the gallery owner Francis Naumann, a friend. What threatens them at an auction is not the presence of other aggressive bidders but cautious bidders.

The article analogises the Mugrabi holdings with a controlling stake in a commodity:

“We’re market makers,” Alberto said. “You can’t have an impact buying one or two pictures per artist. We’re not buying art like Ron Lauder — just to put it on a wall. We want inventory.” He equated inventory with liquidity: “It gives you staying power.” In the commodities sector, the analogue would be making a run on a precious metal — in order to manipulate the price.

But of course art isn't a commodity. I'm not going to say what it is (I'll tell you later ;)) but the commercial demand for it is very much fashion-driven. One presumes the Mugrabis aren't leveraged if only because they began buying so long ago when prices were different, Basquiats were $8,000 etc. The article doesn't address this question (if they were leveraged, they could be staring a disaster in the face).

At some point the younger Mugrabis were given the task of going out and finding new blood for the collection. No doubt after considerable cogitaton and research they came up with, well, er, Damien Hirst. Now they have 150 works by him, mostly in storage. If 150 Hirsts in storage is the best the Mugrabis can do with the art of today, maybe they've missed the point and they might as well be selling refrigerators.

Christies: Russian art sales fell 59% in 2008 (RIA Novosti). That's considerable, but actually masks the fact that the fall-off in sales occurred substantially in the latter half of the year, i.e. it was even more dramatic than the statistic suggests.

Is the emerging Indian market analogous to the Russian market? Let's hope not. "Bodhi art gallery, the sole Indian art gallery that had branches in three international cities, has shut shop in New York and will soon close down in Berlin too. (...) Sources allege that they will soon close their galleries in Delhi and Singapore as well" (Art Radar Asia). In fact, Russian galleries are opening in London this spring: Paris-based Orel Art somewhere in or by the Phillips de Pury accommodation in SW1, and Calvert 22, a non-profit project by Nonna Materkova, in Shoreditch with a show curated by David Thorp.

Results for the few Russian works at Phillips de Pury's 13 February London day sale, all including 25% buyer's premium: Chernyshev and Shulgin (119) sold for £8,750, Afrika (198) sold for £7,500, Pusenkoff (199) was unsold, Koshlyakov (200) sold for £18,750, and Bratkov (216) sold for £375. A good result for Koshlyakov in current conditions, a poor one for Bratkov, who sold for a meagre 10% of the low estimate.

Overall, the auction houses are keeping sales' percentages up by (a) cutting estimates and (b) reducing the number of lots on offer. The result is dramatically reduced turnover. Extract from an email received:

Chelseaartgalleries.com (http://chelseaartgalleries.com)  announced today that the sales for the contemporary art auctions in London, February 5-13th, totaled £36 million (£43 million including premium), 26% below the low end estimate. The auctions brought less than 1/5th of last year's sales total of £207 million, strongly reflecting the current financial climate. 

Not all auction houses were affected equally by the downturn: While Sotheby's and Phillips De Pury's evening auctions reached 18% of last year's sales, Christie's evening auction only reached 11% of last year's sales after failing to find buyers for its two highest estimated lots. The day auctions faired slightly better, with Phillips De Pury at 36% of last years results, Sotheby's at 29%, and Christie's at 19%. 

The very high end of the market has been hit the hardest, as the lack of sellers and buyers has left the auction houses without the super star lots that traditionally make up half of their auction sales. In February 2008, the 15 most valuable lots (of 778 sold lots) contributed more than 50% of the sales total. This month, not only were the high-end lots much less valuable, but 4 of the 7 highest estimated lots failed to sell. In 2008, the average value for the top ten winning bids was £9.4 million, this year it was £1.4 million.

The Salzburg World Fine Art Fair, run by the same people as the Moscow World Fine Art Fair (called off last week), has been cancelled (Artinfo).

Info received, words of leading "art world agitator" Charlie Finch: "the swells in PB [Palm Beach] are saying that 'it is not cool to be seen buying art' under the new dispensation." I'm not saying the swells are trendsetters, too, but the question is, having in mind the Brandeis/Rosa Art Museum business, and general Hirst/Koons etc fatigue, and the new US administration placing a premium on ethics, not e.g. consumption: could art go out of fashion, big-time?

Downloadable paper on a Russian, Chinese and Indian art as a "financial asset". I don't understand its technical language, maybe you will. It's dated December 2008 but doesn't, on a brief look-through, seem to deal much with events of recent months. Even so, its conclusion is that "investing in art is not an effective, purely financial investment" (ssrn.com) (via Felix Salmon). Well, that's applicable to art across the board, not merely emerging markets; and none of these analyses, based on auction-house turnover and average prices, deal with the specificity of individual works, on which value in fact hinges.

On the future of Sotheby's and Christie's (NY Times).

Does the decision by Brandeis University to close its Rose Art Museum and sell its collection (boston.com) herald a new attitude? If so, that could be a problem for the market. Museums soak up works, making those that remain rarer; they endow the artists collected with prestige that draws in other collectors; and a university museum such as this brings the movers-and-shakers of the future into the orbit of visual art. If such museums go out of style across the board it could, I suggest, significantly depress the price of art. Economist Felix Salmon has been following the Brandeis story (portfolio.com).

Mercury puts the boot in? The deluxe Moscow World Fine Art Fair, due to open in Moscow on 25 May, has been cancelled after sponsorship didn't materialise but also after major jewellers, who pay twice as much as art galleries for their booths, pulled out (Artinfo):

[Fair General Manager Sixtine] Crutchfield said that only a few dealers had pulled out of the fair, but two major cancellations came from jewelers Bulgari and Harry Winston. According to Crutchfield, Mercury, the most prominent luxury goods distributor in Russia, discouraged the firms from participating with their own booths, as opposed to under Mercury’s rubric. (Mercury recently bought auction house Philips de Pury & Co.).

ArtTactic sees market decline (Bloomberg):

The ArtTactic sample was asked to give either a positive, negative or neutral response to six unchanging questions. Negative responses outweighed positive by a ratio of 10 to 1, said the survey.

“Prices have fallen somewhere between 30 to 50 percent across the board,” said London-based dealer Ivor Braka, who was not one of the ArtTactic respondents, in a telephone interview.  “Artists whose prices rose quickly over the last two years are particularly vulnerable.

The survey said confidence in high-end works valued at more than $1 million had seen a “significant weakening” because of the diminished buying power of hitherto “recession-proof” collectors from Russia and the Middle East.

Another version of the recent Malevich sale at Sotheby's NY: that the buyer was connected to the legal firm that regained the work for the artist's heirs.

Art dealer's assertion: in the last six months there has not been a single major private sale ($1 million plus) in Moscow (thanks, AS).

Madoff Victims To Flood Art Market (clusterstock):

[Sotheby's CEO Bill] Ruprecht says he has spoken with "lots" of collectors who had invested with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the New York firm that allegedly carried out a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. "I have clients for whom art is the sole liquid asset they own today," he says.

It seems the market in postage stamps is holding up (WSJ):

At [Geneva philatelic specialist and auctioneer] Mr. [David] Feldman's "Rarities of the World" auction in October a unique Imperial Russian cover with stamps from 1857 and 1858 sold for €1.3 million, a new world auction record for a Russian philatelic item. The "Countess Caroline" cover from 1883, so named because the letter was sent from Shanghai to Germany addressed to Gräfin Caroline Tattenback, fetched €1.17 million, the highest auction price ever for a China cover.

At London dealers Stanley Gibbons, investment portfolio manager Geoff Anandappa says the financial crisis has not brought a downturn in demand for investment-quality stamps. Stanley Gibbons publishes an annual May-to-May Great Britain Rarities Index which was up 38.6% on an annual basis this May. Mr. Anandappa expects to see the index up again when published next year. "British stamps are very active," he says.

The contemporary art "bubble of bubbles" (Ben Lewis & Jonathan Ford/Prospect):

The Georgian Boris Ivanishvili spent $95m on Picasso's Dora Maar au Chat—a work of art that he still hasn't unpacked. When it was flown back to Tbilisi, the airport was closed down and the army turned out to ensure the work's transfer to a secure warehouse. 

... work has been churned out by cookie-cutter artists without regard to originality or aesthetic merit. Economist and historian of financial crashes, Edward Chancellor, observed recently: "Most contemporary art is inherently worthless. It is not like Titian and other old masters of which there are few and whose value will not fall away. It's like subprime CDOs."The propaganda of the art entrepreneurs has also reached a final level of absurdity.

We were told that the decline of paper assets would lead to "a flight of capital into art." The art market, Tobias Meyer of Sotheby's said in June, is a one-way street: "For the first time since 1914 we are in a non-cyclical market."

The market decline/collapse or not is highly selective. The painting below, by Jose-Maria Sicilia, 1998, is something I would have bid on at Christies South Ken yesterday had I been in London. As it was I thought, Let it lie, I'll make an offer if it doesn't sell.  It was estimated about £10,000 plus premium. It found a buyer for £33,000.

An interview with Moscow gallerist Gary Tatintsian which took place in the summer but was posted online at the end of last month (artinvestment.ru, in Russian):

AI: To get back to the crisis. Many fear a psychological crisis - a collapse because buyers' moods have been spoilt by news from the financial markets.

GT: There won't be a crisis. You say the mood will be spoilt. On the contrary, as soon as the business mood is spoilt, people turn to entertainment. And art is the best entertainment.