BOOK OF THE DAY: Robert O'Byrnereviews Sold! The inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bugBy John Burns. Red Rock Press, 304pp, €22.99
THE EXCLAMATION mark in the title gives the game away. John Burns is terribly excited by what has been taking place in the Irish art world over the past decade. As far as he is concerned, "From being almost unsaleable in the 1970s, Irish pictures had become the hottest property on the international art market by the late 90s." That's a very big claim and one best not subjected to close scrutiny. Certainly, as Burns reports, Irish art prices grew by more than 1,000 per cent between 1976 and 2008, but he also notes that during the first half of this year nothing here fetched more than €200,000. Meanwhile in New York Roman Abramovich paid $86.3 million for a Francis Bacon triptych and last September a series of items created by Damien Hirst collectively made £111 million at auction in London.
Which isn't to say we haven't had our own breathtaking moments in Ireland, only they have been on a more modest scale. Only seven Irish pictures have ever sold for more than £1 million and just two of those are by a living artist, Louis le Brocquy. In the global art market, Irish art scarcely registers; it may be a subject of enormous interest to us but not to anyone else. This is borne out by Burns's narrative in which he observes how, despite the best efforts of Sotheby's and Christie's, the vast majority of pictures produced in Ireland remain in Ireland; in fact, one of the features of the last 10 years has been the repatriation of so much Irish art as overseas owners of these works have capitalised on our seemingly insatiable appetite for work made here.
The Irish art market is essentially parochial. Many pictures that sell well in Ireland would perform poorly outside the country, just as non-Irish artists generally find few buyers in Ireland. We support our own and show little interest in anything else. This is by no means exclusive to Ireland: Russian collectors buy Russian art; Chinese collectors buy Chinese.
Burns displays an ambivalent attitude towards the domestic consumer. On the one hand, he is keen to state that most Irish people collecting art are knowledgeable about the current state of the market. On the other, he relishes opportunities to feature disparaging quotes about "new buyers, with new money", among whom there are, it seems, "a lot of women, including the wives of property developers" at least some of them "uninformed and paying far too much".
He makes sound points about the expansion of the Irish art market, not least by providing statistics on the housing boom: all those freshly plastered walls needed something to hang on them. But whether his book provides the "inside story" is open to question, since the information he provides is almost all in the public domain (he regularly quotes this newspaper's Saturday fine art page). His other primary source are dealers and auctioneers, a group no more dispassionate than second-hand car salesmen quizzed about the state of their sector. If you are looking for information on the distinctive features of Irish art, this book will be of little help. If, however, you fancy an amusing read about how a large number of people suddenly fancied themselves as fine art connoisseurs then Sold!is for you.
• Robert O'Byrne writes the Irish Arts Review'sUnder the Hammer column. His most recent book is The Irish Georgian Society: A Celebration