Martin Clist, the director of London’s Charles Ede Gallery, is bringing a 3,400-year-old Egyptian “offering table” to Tefaf New York Spring, an art and antiquities fair that opens next week in New York.
The limestone slab’s delicately carved hieroglyphs will share floor space with other dealers’ vintage Cartier necklaces, 19th century carvings from the Ivory Coast, and cubist paintings.
Unlike those other objects, though, the slab’s $110,000 price is the product of a unique and fairly subjective combination of factors specific to the antiquities market.
“With a Picasso, you can say, ‘It’s this period, it’s that subject, it’s this size,’ and you can give a price range,” says David Ghezelbash, whose Paris gallery is bringing a $4.5 million, 18th dynasty granite head of the goddess Sekhmet to its booth at Tefaf. “With antiquities, it’s a much wider range of price, depending on how artistic the piece is.”
Prices for Egyptian antiquities are determined by a few firm criteria, including authenticity, provenance, condition, and material. (Hardstone objects are priced differently than items made of bronze.)
Beyond that, there’s a certain alchemy you won’t find in any realm of the fine art market.
“People have this idea that all works of art from the ancient world should be priced in the millions,” says Clist. “But of course, one has to work within commercial parameters of our world.”
This ambiguity cuts both ways. Because the market for Egyptian artifacts is much smaller than, say, the market for 20th century drawings, far fewer people compete to buy whatever object comes up for sale. As a result, buyers can get real bargains.
“That’s the good thing about antiquities in general,” says Ghezelbash. “You can buy very fine Egyptian amulets, which were protective artifacts that were put in mummies, for a couple thousand dollars.” Ten thousand dollars, he says, gets you “a masterpiece of an amulet.”
The flip side is that because of the narrowness of the field, newcomers often have to put their trust in dealers, rather than looking to an established market of prior public sales. Still, even without an expert’s help, there are a few ways newcomers to the field can get a rough idea of an object’s value.