Every corporate curator secretly hopes he is buying the next Maguire when he adds a new emerging artist to his company's collection.
The Australian artist whose price has shown the greatest appreciation in the saleroom this decade is Tim Maguire, a painter best known for pictures of oversized flowers and fruit. In 2001, the top price paid for a Maguire at auction was $20,000; in 2003 his price soared to $245,575. Maguire, a Sydney painter who moved to Paris a few years ago, is one of the contemporary painters very much in vogue with Australian collectors these days. Every corporate curator secretly hopes he is buying the next Maguire when he adds a new emerging artist to his company's collection.
The art market has been soft in the past couple of years. The author of the Australian Art Market Movements Handbook, Roger Dedman, says the market, as measured by the saleroom results of 100 leading artists, grew at a rate of 8% a year from the mid-1990s to 2002. Since then, the market has fallen 5% a year.
Dedman says the fall is due to a slowing in demand for, and prices of, works by modernists such as Sidney Nolan, Charles Blackman and Arthur Boyd. The strongest segment of the market is late-modern and contemporary - the segment that now forms the core of most corporate collections.
One curious feature of old corporate collections is that records of purchase prices and valuations were not kept. Foster's Group's chief executive, Trevor O'Hoy, was delighted with the $13.3 million that the company's collection realised when it was sold in May, but no one in the company was able to say what return that figure represented.
Things are different at Macquarie Bank, where a valuation is done by an external valuer every three years, and an internal rate of return for the collection is calculated. A Macquarie director with responsibility for management of the collection, Julian Beaumont, says the value of the collection has increased considerably.
Would Macquarie stop collecting if the value of the art fell? "I might have to do some explaining," Beaumont says. "But we might see a fall in values as a buy signal."