«GOOD BUSINESS IS THE BEST ART»

The comments from David Nahmad, a Monaco-based dealer who is possibly the biggest in the world, come as art buyers reel from the collapse of the contemporary market...Mr Nahmad, who is reputed to have a £2bn collection of some 5,000 paintings, including 300 Picassos, told The Independent on Sunday: “There are a lot of embarrassed people who bought art that is now not worth what they paid for it. For the past three or four years it’s been a very, very thin market, with just two or three buyers pushing up prices by bidding against each other.“Unfortunately, a lot of people knew the game. So those people who did not know are realising it now. It’s almost a fraud. I would never advise my clients to buy contemporary art.”

Mr Nahmad and his family have made billions of dollars trading art. They specialise in the works of great modern artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Rothko. He added that he doesn’t think any artist since Francis Bacon had pushed art forward. The last notable artists were Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, he said. “There is the real art market, with real artists, and then there is the stupid art market which uses publicity to make some artists become very expensive. That doesn’t mean they are good. Damien Hirst’s diamond skull at $100m was a stupid thing; $100m is an offence. Hirst started with $10,000 – that’s OK. But $100m? That’s ridiculous.”

The Independent
Feb 22 2009