Maynards Bids on the Future of Auctions
The rise of Craigslist and Ebay, and a declining interest in Victorian furniture, have dramatically changed the business model for auctioneers such as Maynards Industries Ltd.
There was a telling scene at an auction I attended recently. It was the Modern Woman show at Maynards, where the 108-year-old auction house had assembled a group of 35 contemporary fine-art works from 24 emerging artists. Unlike the typical Maynards auction of items sourced from estates and other sellers, this show was made up of items selected by newcomer contemporary art specialist Kate Bellringer, a UBC and Sotheby’s Art Institute graduate. And by all appearances, the new show and the new approach looked set to be a smash success. A good-sized crowd had turned out, 60 or 70 people, milling around and sipping Pinot Gris and San Pellegrino water. And while it was a younger crowd than normally comes out to auctions, according to Maynards’ vice-president of fine art and antiques, Hugh Bulmer, who also acts as chief auctioneer, it was clearly a fashionable and affluent group, with Manolo Blahniks and Prada frames sprinkled liberally through the crowd. The room looked ready to buy some art, in other words. And the hip work Bellringer had chosen seemed well suited to the audience.
Only the crowd wasn’t buying art. Or not with much confidence, anyway. Bids were sparse and hesitant. Only a single item in the first 17 lots sold at even the bottom of the estimated price range, with most selling for less than half that minimum and many of these on a single uncontested bid. The telling scene finally came about just following the sale of a beautiful oil-on-canvas piece by Roselina Hung, Saint-Germain-des-Pres. True to the evening’s form, Hung’s piece sold for $1,000 on a single bid, after Bulmer dropped the price twice to less than half of its minimum estimated value of $2,400, which provoked the auctioneer to mutter sotto voce in his ironic British style, “Well, that certainly was a good buy.” And after three subsequent lots had sold at fractions of their estimated value with no competitive bidding, Bulmer finally stopped the whole auction in its tracks.
“Can I just ask something?” he said, removing his glasses and speaking with the tested patience of a parent addressing a child over homework. “How many people here have been to an auction before?”
Bulmer played it for laughs and people obliged, particularly when he followed up with a quip to the effect that we shouldn’t let auctions intimidate us as they were a great place to meet people and, you never know, “you might find yourself going home with something you like.” But as the auction proceeded, and bidding did modestly loosen up, his comment seemed to clarify why we’d all been invited to the event. Maynards wanted to showcase emerging
talent and sell a few paintings, of course. But sales were never the main objective here. (The show grossed only slightly over $20,000 in the end, hardly enough to cover its costs.) We were there for the purposes of our own education.
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