Bloomberg describes the art of appraisal.
[Two art] appraisers [attempting to appraise an Anish Kapoor work, Hole and Vessell II,] honed in on two [of his] pieces as the most comparable to [it]… One, Mother as a Ship, which looks like a blue canoe, sold for $321,600. The other, Untitled 1984, which appears to be a red, wall-mounted daisy, went for $142,400. To determine whether Hole and Vessel II was worth more or less than the two other sculptures, the appraisers resorted to their own aesthetic judgments.
The assessments, it turned out, partly hinged on their opinions of the so-called voids, or the concave holes in Kapoor’s work. While the circular opening in Hole and Vessel II is about 1 foot in diameter, similar to the hole in the middle of the daisy in Untitled 1984, the void in Mother as a Ship spans the 7-foot length of the boatlike work. After looking at photos of these sculptures, [one appraiser] surmised that Hole and Vessel II had a lower value, much like Untitled 1984, due partly to their similar voids.
[The other appraiser] disagreed. He said the void in Hole and Vessel II, which he said could be compared to a vagina, helped make the sculpture more sexy than Untitled 1984.
“Isn’t that slightly sensuous?” Brown says. “That means I think the market will go for it.”
He concluded that the cone-shaped sculpture was worth as much as three times the flowerlike work.
October 5th, 2010 at 12:28PM
Possibly off-topic– one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics won an Ig Nobel Prize a few years ago for magnetic levitation of a mouse. He’s the first individual to win both.
October 5th, 2010 at 12:58PM
For the curious, an image of Hole and Vessel II (along with an amusing article about how it was lost): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1545697/Turner-prize-artists-work-dumped-in-skip.html
October 5th, 2010 at 1:10PM
Thanks, Eric.