Ultra-Contemporary Art Falls Flat at London Sales

Art by young contemporary artists performed well at auctions in London this week, but few flew off the auction blocks in a frenzy as had been the case through early last year.

That led the total value of evening sales of works by artists under the age of 45 to sink 80% from a year ago to £1.9 million (US$2.41 million), according to the London art analysis firm ArtTactic. The total value of young contemporary art sold at evening auctions this week was also 63% lower than at the London evening auctions in February, which itself represented a 25% drop in value from a year earlier.

An uncertain global economy, high inflation, and persistent geopolitical conflicts, combined with the fact these sales come at the tail end of a brisk season of art buying at both auctions and fairs, likely all contributed. Also, the evening sale totals this June didn’t include Phillips, which opted to only offer a day sale.

At least a quarter of Phillips “20th Century to Now” auction on Friday of more than 100 works were by ultra-contemporary artists, a category the auction house has long led. But four lots on the block failed to find buyers, including paintings by Shara Hughes and Harold Ancart. With only a few exceptions, most others sold within presale estimates.

A standout was the very last lot of the sale: Belgian artist Albert Willem’s All in All Not Bad For His First Attempt, 2021, depicting an airplane with plumes of black smoke that landed in the middle of a city intersection, sold for £180,000, before fees, several multiples of a £15,000 high estimate.

Anna Weyant, Cloud Hill, 2020, which sold at Phillips for a hammer price of 225,000. Courtesy of Phillips

All-in-all, Phillips’ auction realised only £7.15 million, before fees, below a presale estimate range between £8.6 million and £12.3 million, according to ArtTactic. With fees, the sales brought in £9.1 million, with 84% of lots sold, Phillips said.

Overall evening sale results at Christie’s and Sotheby’s declined 22.1% from a year ago to nearly £219 million, before fees, with only five lots selling for more than £5 million, including Gustav Klimt’s Lady with a Fanfor a record price of US$108 million at Sotheby’s on Tuesday.

One reason ultra-contemporary works didn’t spark lofty bidding at this week’s sales is that many of the works weren’t the best examples from these artists, says Morgan Long, managing director of the Fine Art Group, a London art advisory.

According to Long, galleries have been cracking down on “flipping,” that is, buying works on the primary market and selling them soon afterward via the auction houses. The result: “You’re not getting access to and putting into auction really great primary material,” she says.

And, Long says, “most people who want good primary [works], have access” to them. A buyer who wants to see great works by Caroline Walker—a popular Scottish contemporary artist—can find high-quality examples at her gallery, Stephen Friedman in London. Lesser quality examples head to auction, she says.

There were three works by Walker sold at Phillips, including Reception, 2013, which sold for a price before fees of £140,000, below expectations.

Buyer hype for younger contemporary artists also cycles in and out of fashion. In May 2022, works by Anna Weyant led three evening sales in New York. This spring, sightings of Weyant works were scarce. Cloud Hill, a 2020 portrait by the artist sold for £225,000, before fees, at Phillips, below a £250,000 low estimate.

Currently, artists such as Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Julien Nguyen, and Sahara Longe are gaining more attention. “There are all these new ones that have cropped up in between the old guard of the young and the new guard of the young,” says Naomi Baigell, managing director at TPC Art Finance in New York.

Buyers, Baigell says, “are probably looking to see what they can get that doesn’t fly out of the saleroom. And because we’re still in this political and financial environment, the eye is much more discerning when they’re thinking of acquisitions.”

And, she says, collectors “want to start with artists that are going to increase in value, not ones that have increased in value.”

The price points for most works by young contemporary artists often fit the bill. During the London evening sales tracked by ArtTactic, three of the top five performing works were by young contemporary artists Louis Fratino, Yearwood-Dan, and Guglielmo Castelli. The top-selling young artists were Walker, Amoako Boafo, Fratino, Ahmed Mater, and Yearwood-Dan.

But newer collectors to the market are also drawn to newer works and to the access to the art world buying these pieces can provide. Since the start of the pandemic, these combined factors have drawn in a wider group of newer, often younger collectors in addition to seasoned buyers, Baigell says. That’s a far broader swath of individuals than those able to buy a Klimt for US$108.4 million.

Galleries are responding to this trend by seeking out and bringing in younger artists. For all these reasons, Baigell believes the ultra-contemporary art segment will continue to thrive and drive interest in the market.

“We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this 21st-century [art] be what is exciting to watch at auction,” she says.

Austin, Texas, company Core Scientific went from bankruptcy to stock market darling this year by betting on two technologies: Bitcoin mining and AI data centers. Shares are up 400%.

But if given the choice of whether to invest more in one business over the other, executives answer without hesitating: the data centers.

“We really just value long-term, stable cash flows and predictable returns,” Chief Operating Officer Matt Brown said in an interview. The company began life as a Bitcoin miner. Even though Bitcoin has been a great asset lately, it’s very volatile. By comparison, Core Scientific can earn steady profits for years by hosting servers owned by companies that sell cloud services to AI providers, Brown said.

This year, you couldn’t go wrong betting on either. Bitcoin is up 116%, and data centers are in high demand because tech companies need them to power their AI applications.

The two technologies seem to have little in common, but they both depend on the same thing: access to reliable power. Core Scientific has a lot of it, operating nine grid-connected warehouses in six states with access to so much electricity they could serve several hundred thousand homes. Other Bitcoin miners have similarly transitioned to data center hosting , but few with quite so much success.

Core Scientific’s business didn’t look quite so good at the start of the year. The company started 2024 under the shadow of bankruptcy protection. It had too much debt on its balance sheet after going public through the SPAC process in 2022 and succumbed to a Bitcoin price crash. But the company’s fortunes quickly turned around after it emerged from bankruptcy on Jan. 23 with $400 million less debt.

The company started the year focused entirely on crypto mining, but quickly pivoted as it saw demand surge for electricity for AI data centers.

In June, the company signed a deal with a company called Coreweave to lease data center space for AI cloud services. Coreweave has since agreed to lease 500 megawatts worth of space. Core Scientific says it will get paid $8.7 billion over 12 years under the deal.

Privately held Coreweave is one of the fastest-growing companies behind the AI revolution. It was once a cryptocurrency miner, but has since transitioned to offering cloud services, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. It’s closely connected to Nvidia , which has invested money in Coreweave and given the company access to its top-end chips. Coreweave expects to be one of the first customers for Nvidia ’s upcoming Blackwell GPUs.

Core Scientific’s quick success in this new world has surprised even the people who are driving it.

“Every once in a while I need to pinch myself, to see I’m actually not dreaming,” Brown said.

Core Scientific’s success does create a high bar for the stock to keep rising. The company is expected to lose money this year, largely because of a change in the value of stock warrants—an accounting shift that doesn’t reflect underlying earnings. Analysts see the company becoming profitable in 2025, when more of its data center deals start to hit the bottom line. They see EPS jumping tenfold by 2027. Shares trade at about 13 times those 2027 estimates.

The data center opportunity should only grow from here, as tech companies build more powerful AI systems. Of the 1,200 megawatts worth of gross power capacity Core Scientific has contracted, about 800 megawatts are going to data center computing deals and 400 megawatts toward Bitcoin mining.

Brown said the company has good relationships with its power suppliers and can potentially add more capacity without having to buy more real estate. It expects to be able to secure about 300 more megawatts worth of power at existing sites, perhaps by the end of the year.

It’s also in the hunt for new sites, including at “distressed” conventional data centers that have lost their tenants. Core Scientific has figured out how to quickly spiff up bare-bones data centers and turn them into high-tech sites with resources like liquid cooling equipment and much higher levels of electricity.

A single server rack in a standard data center might need 6 or 7 kilowatts of power. A high-performance data center can use as much as 130 kilowatts per rack; Core Scientific is working on increasing capacity to 400 kilowatts. The company likens the process of upgrading the warehouses to turning a ho-hum passenger vehicle into a Formula One racing car.

Core Scientific’s transformation from a broken-down jalopy to a hot rod has been a wild story. Its fate next year will depend on just how quickly the AI revolution unfolds.