Tuesday, March 11, 2014

"New York Magazine Stirs the Pot on the Sotheby’s Board Fight" (BID)

From Art Market Monitor:

Screenshot 2014-03-11 16.26.11
New York Magazine’s story about the board battle involving Sotheby’s is oddly off. Not only does it come out the week that New Yorkers are recovering from an art hangover of monstrous proportions but it misses the central fact that on the key issue of the Contemporary art market last week saw Sotheby’s manhandle the competition. Although the sales around the Armory Show are hardly big-money affairs, they do take place at the heart of active collecting.

Last week Sotheby’s not only raised their total year over year by a third but they sold as much as Phillips and Christie’s combined. The low double-digit million-dollar sales won’t close the gap between Sotheby’s and Christie’s in Contemporary but to ignore the stride is unfair.
More to the point, the story gets some simple things wrong. Here’s New York’s take on the activists’ stock gains:
Sotheby’s has adopted a “poison pill” takeover defense, preventing Loeb from amassing more than the roughly 10 percent of shares he currently holds, but last week Marcato, which owns 6.6 percent of the company, announced it would be supporting Loeb’s nominations. Sotheby’s stock has remained fairly flat since the activists disclosed their positions over the summer, so they have every incentive to make some noise.
But the chart above shows that the big gains in the stock came after Marcato’s 13-D filing in June and there were still substantial gains after late September when the Summer ended....MORE