Polaroid Collection: Update 22

The Hammer Comes Down, Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

I arrived at Sotheby’s 7th-floor auction space, where the Polaroid Collection would get sold, about half an hour before the scheduled 5 p.m. start of the first of its four sessions. In the lobby outside the main room, slowly filling up, Peter MacGill of Pace/MacGill Gallery approached me. “Sad,” the adjective on the lips of many that day, was one of the first words he spoke also. We chatted for a few minutes; his gallery represents a number of people with work in the collection, and in the auction. I went in to secure a seat, finding one next to Stephen Perloff, who will provide Photocritic International with a detailed account of the auction next week.

Perloff showed me the most recent issue of The Photograph Collector, which he edits, from June 10, 2010. In its “Auction Preview” section he’d written at length about the Polaroid extravaganza. An extract:

“[M]any or most of the images acquired as part of the Artist Support Program were subject to agreements that neither bankruptcy court seems to have been aware of. These agreements did not pass ownership of the works to Polaroid; rather they authorized Polaroid to use them for educational purposes, but left their makers with rights to borrow them for exhibitions and similar uses, which clearly they would not be able to do if their work was sold. There is no doubt that the letter of the law was not followed in these bankruptcy hearings. Polaroid, by oversight or by conscious omission, did not inform the court of the nature of its agreements with the photographers. Thus those photographers, stakeholders in the bankruptcy, were not directly informed as they should have been about the proceedings and the possible loss of their rights.” (Emphasis added.)

Two former curators of the collection were in attendance: Linda Benedict-Jones, who worked with the U.S. collection, and Manfred Heiting, who masterminded the European collection. We commiserated among ourselves as the bidders and gawkers filled up the chairs; I got them, and Perloff, to autograph my copy of the catalogue.

Then the auction kicked off. At her elevated podium, Sotheby’s photo auctioneer, Denise Bethel, announced, without elaborating, that several lots had been withdrawn and would be so indicated as she moved along. (See Part 1 for an explanation of this.) The first lot, William Wegman’s “Avalanche,” appeared on a padded, revolving display stand in the center of the stage. Simultaneously, on huge screens flanking the stage at ceiling height, digital representations of the work appeared, along with the bids in half a dozen currencies — USD, euros, yen, etc. ― updating as rapidly as Bethel called them.

Standing just below her, on the floor, Christopher Mahoney, her second-in-command in Sotheby’s Photographs division, served as spotter for floor bids. Other Sotheby’s spotters, dotted around the room, added their eyes to the process. Two banks of Sotheby’s employees, some twenty of them, sitting behind elevated counters, handled phone bids, calling them out steadily.

And the merchandise jumped off the shelves. Nothing got bought in, or sold for less than its low estimate. Almost everything went for multiples of the high estimates, sometimes staggering multiples. Clearly the auction was going to do very well indeed.

I stayed for the first 55 lots, about half the first session’s offerings. Then — as they began knocking down some 50 Ansel Adams works, the first batch of the 400-some Adams prints in the sale — I left in search of some dinner before my trip home. I didn’t return the next day, for the remaining three sessions of the sale. Not my dish of tea, as I said. I didn’t even follow it online, although you could, lot by lot. Instead, I took care of other business, waiting to see the total.

There it was, at Sotheby’s website on the evening of the 22nd: $12,467,634 USD, exceeding pre-sale estimates of between $6.9 million and $10.7 million by almost 20 percent. And that’s with roughly 10 percent bought in, plus something like $350k worth of work withdrawn as a result of negotiations with photographers who objected to the sale. (I base this conservative estimate on the prices achieved by other works in the sale.) See Part 1 of this report for an account of those objections, and the outcome.

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Some conclusions:

Lucas Samaras, "Ultra-Large Hands," 1983

• Minnesota Bankruptcy Court Trustee John R. Stoebner, at whose request the court authorized this sale, only gives the auction house its due when he says, “Sotheby’s did a superb job in accomplishing our primary goal — to achieve funds with which to pay creditors.” (See “Polaroid photos fetch $12.5M at auction,” Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, June 23, 2010.) The jury is definitely in on this: Sotheby’s cherry-picked the collection brilliantly, gauging the current market with almost perfect pitch. They’re very, very good at what they do.
• As a result, it will prove extremely difficult henceforth to argue that what some now refer to as “the controversy” around this auction deterred any buyers or affected the bidding negatively in a substantive way. Conversely, it becomes plausible to argue that, by drawing attention to the sale, to the quality of the work included, to the significance of the collection from which the auctioned pieces were severed, and to the importance of that work’s provenance, the attendant publicity in fact heightened interest in the auction and increased the desirability and market value of the works offered for sale.
• As Andrew Russeth put it in “Controversial Polaroid Auction Triumphs at Sotheby’s,” his report for ARTINFO, “Sotheby’s [was] forced to pull nine lots over concerns about the company’s right to sell the works.” The only way to prevent any of the “controversial” pieces from going to auction was for photographers with standing to sign on to the legal objection. Only a few did so. Presumably, if more photographers and estates had lent their weight to that challenge, Sotheby’s and the Trustee would have reluctantly withdrawn more works and returned them to the main body of the collection. Obviously, that didn’t happen.


Carrie Mae Weems, from the series "And 22 Million Very Tired and Angry People" (l) and "See No Evil" (r), 1991

• The works sold by Sotheby’s have now gone through two wholesale bankruptcy fire sales, plus a third lot-by-lot sale at the auction. As a result of “the controversy,” the art/photo community certainly had the collection’s agreements with photographers foregrounded for close to a year, giving people with work in the collection a chance to consider their options. Whatever one believes about those bankruptcy court decisions, I think it unlikely at best that any court would revisit those agreements after the work has changed hands three times, this last time with so much fanfare.
• Most of the pieces sold by Sotheby’s got purchased by anonymous bidders. We may eventually learn who owns some of them, but, from a purely practical standpoint, in my opinion (non-legal, I hasten to add) they have become irreversibly separated from the collection, save for the historical fact of their provenance and whatever retrievable data about them endures.
• Having now authorized and overseen the skimming off of the cream of the collection for the auction, Trustee John R. Stoebner has maximized the profit potential of that slice of the collection while necessarily diminishing the significance of the remainder. The ratio of major work by major figures to minor work by minor figures has been adjusted downward substantially. The small number of works retrieved from the auction to rejoin the collection does not notably affect that. This will surely have an effect on efforts to place the collection as it now stands, though the slimmed-down version of the collection retains considerable cultural and artistic value as an entity in its own right.


Laurie Simmons, "Tree with clothes ornaments (from The Education Project," diptych, 1992

• Stoebner has announced that he “will be working with Sotheby’s and a representative of certain of the artists in the Polaroid Collection to try and find an institutional home for the remaining approximately 10,000 works in the Polaroid Collection.” Those “artists in the Polaroid Collection” with whom he’ll now consult presumably are people who had legal standing allowing them to object to the auction — that is, people with work in the auction. We can infer from the Trustee’s itemized list of withdrawn items who those picture-makers most likely are, but neither the Trustee nor the artists’ legal team have specified that.
• Only 72 of the 1500 photographers in the complete collection had work in the auction. And only those artists and photographers with work in the auction had legal standing that enabled them to challenge the auction. However, based on the precedent that Sotheby’s and the Trustee themselves set in withdrawing selected contested works from the auction, it would seem that all those with work in the collection have standing that would enable them to challenge the disposition of the remaining collection, if that disposition takes the form of a sale. (I don’t offer this as legal advice, just a logical extrapolation from the actions of Sotheby’s and the Trustee in re the auction.) It wouldn’t surprise me if more of the photographers in the collection decided to make their voices heard on this issue as placement of the rest of the collection moves to the front burner.

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For a video preview of the auction from TheDeal TV, which includes brief commentaries by Denise Bethel and Christopher Mahoney, click here or see below.

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For an index of links to all posts related to this story, click here.