From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
KYNE is hardly a household name in the art world – or indeed one many know how to pronounce correctly (it’s ‘keen-ay’). But that didn’t stop a set of three of his original prints, each in an edition of 30, selling out in less than half an hour on Phillips’s online platform, Dropshop, in September. The works – brightly coloured silkscreen prints of a woman staring out at the viewer in an animé-meets-Pop art vein – were priced between $3,500 and $5,500, totalling $375,000.
KYNE is one of a new breed of artists. Well known in Japan, he has more than 110,000 followers on Instagram, collaborates with fashion brands such as Adidas and recently had a huge mural on show at the Fukuoka Art Museum. He’s arguably a perfect fit for Dropshop. It was launched in 2023 to sell lower-priced editions and multiples aimed at younger buyers. The marketing concept is to release a limited amount of material for a short period of time – a ‘drop’. The technique was pioneered in the 1980s by Nike to sell Air Jordan trainers and was subsequently adopted by streetwear brands and later sellers of NFTs.
‘Dropshop is a part of our efforts to focus on developing, innovative markets,’ says Cheyenne Westphal, chairwoman of Phillips. ‘People have to be aware when the drop is happening, they have to be on their phones, they have to be fast not to miss it. There’s that bit of hype, because once it’s gone, it’s gone.’ She says that each release typically attracts about 50 per cent new buyers. ‘If we get it right, it really resonates.’
It’s not just Phillips that is experimenting with new ways of selling editions. One of the most successful is HENI, which describes itself as ‘a technology company pioneering art markets and information’. It produces editions with artists including Peter Doig and Gerhard Richter, street artists such as JR and Invader – and, notably, Damien Hirst.
His most recent HENI venture was the Civilisation series of four giclée (digital inkjet) prints based on a set of paintings. A total of 2,027 prints priced at $3,800 each were sold in the drop – the final edition size is set by the number sold in a pre-announced time period. That is a total of $7.7m made in just 13 days.
Then there is Avant Arte, an online platform that commissions limited edition sculptures, NFTs and silkscreen prints with artists including Ed Ruscha and Ai Weiwei, to rising stars such as Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Marina Perez Simão and street artist Slawn. It too offers time-limited editions, as well as ‘draws’ for over-subscribed artists that allow collectors to enter a sort of raffle for one of the prized editions.
Mazdak Sanii, one of three founders of Amsterdam-based Avant Arte, says they came from the music industry but fell in love with art – and that this background has helped them connect to younger, more mainstream audiences. ‘It was an authentic journey for us into the art world, and I think our authenticity and our naivety has cut through,’ he says. Using Instagram, Discord, private WhatsApp groups and more traditional email marketing, Avant Arte has built up 3.4m followers on social media and 25,000 buyers.
Since its first outing in 2017, the firm has made around 750 projects with more than 250 artists. It is certainly successful: one of Avant Arte’s recent projects, a set of three prints in editions of 150 by US artist George Condo produced as a fundraiser for the Dia Foundation, made £2.3m before taxes and fees.
‘There’s been some very interesting, unconventional disruptors entering the editions market in recent years, especially in print publishing,’ says Conner Williams, head of prints and multiples at Artnet Auctions.
The department offers prints ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to $800,000, with an average of $14,600 this year. The editions market is growing in importance at the firm, he says. ‘Prints is the strongest department in terms of overall sales: totals have quadrupled since we started in 2008.’
Untitled (Pink) (2024), KYNE. Courtesy Phillips; © the artist
Some may ask why innovation in this market hasn’t happened sooner. The art world has been aware for years that it must attract new collectors, and with prices usually at least a tenth the cost of a painting by the same artist, editions are a logical way in.
Yet prints and works on paper have often been seen as specialist collecting areas. Christie’s New York last month held the first of a series of sales of what many would consider an archetypal, connoisseurial print collection. It was amassed over 60 years by Detroit art collectors Marianne and Alan Schwartz, who died in 2017 and 2023 respectively.
The Schwartzes collected masterpiece prints – engravings, lithographs, woodcuts and etchings – by artists from the Renaissance to the mid 20th century, among them Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Munch, Bellows, Hopper and Picasso. They donated many works to museums, including the British Museum, and in 1990 their collection was the basis of a major exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
‘It’s a time capsule, a sort of ultimate collection of its kind,’ said Robert Kennan, head of editions Europe at Phillips, after the London preview of the sale. ‘It goes back to the kind of collecting of the 1970s to 1990s, when collectors had to have the knowledge to deal with all kinds of prints, jumbled together in auction catalogues and listed alphabetically.’
Phillips is often credited as the first of the major auction houses to shake up its print sales – shifting more than a decade ago to more popular artists such as Warhol, Thiebaud, Hockney and, of course, Hirst. The strategy has paid off: since 2008, earnings from prints at Phillips have increased eight-fold. Kennan says that September’s edition sales in London ‘did exceptionally well’, indeed ‘exceeding expectations’ with a total of £5.6m, up by nearly 20 per cent on last year.
Nevertheless, ‘there’s quite a bit of confusion around contemporary prints and editions,’ says David Cleaton-Roberts, senior director of Cristea Roberts. The gallery is one of only a few that represents artists exclusively for editions. It shows regularly at major fairs including Frieze, Art Basel and the Armory. At Frieze London it was showing a new series of prints by Eva Rothschild, Garland 1–4 (2024), made with up to 21 colours as well as new editions by Michael Craig-Martin and Idris Khan.
‘An important thing to remember is they are original works of art, not copies of other works [such as paintings]. There is also a tendency to immediately start talking about complex print techniques, which can be off-putting,’ Cleaton-Roberts says. ‘The work could be a one-off or a multiple, but we need to talk about it as a work of art – one that cannot be made any other way.’
There are also good reasons why primary market painting and sculpture galleries are happy to work with Cristea Roberts rather than make editions themselves – although two of the mega galleries, Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner, have recently entered the field.
‘We’re a bit like film producers: we work directly with the artists, we match them with the right specialist print studios, we finance the project and we handle distribution to collectors, partner galleries, curators and museums,’ Cleaton-Roberts says. With prices usually in the £3,000 to £12,000 range, it takes expertise to make a project commercially as well as artistically successful.
These challenges have not dissuaded HENI, founded in 2009 by lawyer and accountant Joe Hage. He now manages artists including Hirst, Gerhard Richter and Peter Doig, runs a law firm, Joseph Hage Aaronson, and owns Palm NFT Studios, a firm designed to ‘empower artists, brands and fans to create deep communities on chain’.
Garland 4 (2024), Eva Rothschild. Courtesy Cristea Roberts Gallery, London/the artist; © the artist
One estimate is that Hirst’s editions for HENI may have made more than $200m in just eight years. That figure came from My Art Broker, a ‘live trading platform’ and technology firm designed to make selling editions easier and cheaper on the secondary market. ‘We’ve built the technology to provide auto value indicators for the most in-demand blue chip prints and editions in the modern and contemporary market,’ its website declares.
‘Some of the new platforms are fantastic ways to bring people to contemporary art,’ says Lizzie Glendinning, a curator and co-founder of the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair. ‘Though there are questions around education and how much people really know about what they are buying.’
The next edition of the fair will take place in a converted warehouse in Woolwich Arsenal this month. It now welcomes 15,000 visitors each year. It mixes gallery booths with a large, curated section, with prices ranging from a few hundred to £25,000, and has built up a reputation for spotting emerging talent.
‘Prints are a more accessible way of learning about artists and for collectors to gain confidence in their taste – it’s a really experimental way to enter the art market,’ Glendinning says. ‘It has always been an under-looked medium, but it’s a powerful one in cultural terms and in many artists’ practice.’
Some are less convinced, however, that new businesses entering the editions market are the answer to the art market’s problems. ‘It’s great that people are buying prints and that more people have art in their lives,’ says Carl Freedman, founder of Carl Freedman Gallery. In 2000, he also founded one of the first online print platforms, Counter Editions. ‘But some of the business models – getting the numbers up, getting the volume out there – seem to be very financially driven.’
He says there is little crossover in collectors for the gallery, where he represents artists including Billy Childish and Lindsey Mendick, and his print studio, where he makes prints with Tracy Emin, Katherine Bernhardt and Frank Bowling. ‘There’s probably only five per cent,’ he says, probably because of differences in price and profile. Exceptions include actor, broadcaster and avid art collector Russell Tovey.
Others point out that many of the newer online platforms work only for certain artists. The best performing editions are often by the biggest names – Hirst, Doig, Emin et al – or by the same fast-rising stars and street artists who drive the ultra-contemporary auction market. And whether it’s by accident or design, the pressure to look good online appears to favour works with a brightly coloured, Pop-inspired, graphic aesthetic. Meanwhile, with some publishers producing such large edition sizes – sometimes 10 times the number that would have been considered large by Warhol’s Factory – there are questions around likely value when works reappear on the secondary market.
But whatever the rights and wrongs, there is no getting away from the fact that the editions market – unlike the wider market for paintings and sculpture – appears to be genuinely growing. Artnet collects figures from close to 2,000 auction houses, and although this only represents a part of the total editions market, it gives a fairly reliable indication. In 2015, it estimates, around 38,000 lots were sold worldwide, totalling $372m. This rose to 62,500 lots and a total of $509m last year.
If you factor in galleries and newer sellers, who are not recorded in this data, the market is clearly larger. It is also much more democratic and less exclusive than buying paintings or sculptures. These have become too expensive for most people – the era is long gone when the Vogels, a pair of New York state employees, could collect one-off works by Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Richard Artschwager on a joint salary of $50,000 a year. Given the millions who go to contemporary art museums and might like to own original art, the market for prints and editions looks set to keep growing.
Portrait and Head (2024), George Condo. Courtesy Avant Arte; © the artist
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.