"New York Magazine Stirs the Pot on the Sotheby’s Board Fight" (BID)
From Art Market Monitor:
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
