Why Andy Warhol’s “Bomb” sculpture bombed at auction

Last week, the auction house Bonhams in New York City held an auction featuring a sculpture created by pop artist Andy Warhol. The piece is called “Bomb” and fetched a top bid of $480,000.

That large sum of money, however, was not enough for the piece to actually sell. Most auctions, like this one, have what’s called a reserve. If the piece doesn’t sell for at least X number of dollars, then it doesn’t get sold at all and goes back to the owner.

For a closer look at these market dynamics in the world of expensive art, Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with art critic Blake Gopnik. He’s author of “Warhol,” an award-winning biography of the artist. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: So, let’s just describe this sculpture real quick so people can imagine. It’s called “Bomb.” It looks kind of like a bomb or torpedo …

Blake Gopnik: It looks exactly like a bomb because it actually is a bomb. It was a 100-pound practice bomb that the Air Force used. It’s painted silver. And it actually is uglier than it even looks in photographs. It is not a pretty object, which is why I think it should have sold for tens of millions of dollars, because it’s actually closer to the heart of what matters about Andy Warhol’s art than anything colorful and pleasant and poppy would be.

Ben-Achour: We’re going to get to how much it should have gone for in a second. But before the auction, Bonhams estimated “Bomb” would get somewhere between $600,000 and $800,000. It did not get even to that minimum. So how do art auction houses come up with these estimates? And then really, how are bidders coming up with the bids they’re willing to put in?

Gopnik: The world of the art market, and especially in auctions, is very strange. It’s really about psychology more than anything else. The people who work in auction houses are often trained as art historians, but their real expertise is in psychology and neurosis more than anything else. They’ve got to figure out what these crazy people with too much money want to buy and put on their walls or put in their vaults. And that doesn’t have a lot of reason to it. And I have to admit that the brilliant auctioneer/psychologists at Bonhams were right in realizing that this “Bomb” by Andy Warhol might not appeal so much to collectors. In fact, that ended up appealing less to anyone than they thought. And that’s why it didn’t actually sell; that the highest bid was only $480,000, which, for Warhol, is not much money at all. A Warhol can go for almost $200 million. And here’s one that didn’t even sell for $600,000.

Ben-Achour: Why do you think it should have gotten more than it did?

Gopnik: You know the real heart of Andy Warhol’s art — the thing that drives it — is its use of things that are found around us in everyday culture. It’s really the heir to Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1917 sculpture called “Fountain,” which was nothing more than a store-bought urinal. So, this is like that, something that Warhol just took from the world. That’s what we call a “readymade” in art history. It’s, I think, Warhol’s only actual readymade.

Ben-Achour: You know, here we are talking about art that can fetch millions of dollars. Meanwhile, you know, the rest of us have had to cope with things like inflation. And I’m just wondering if factors like that, like inflation, apply in the art market — the high art market — the same way that it does to our groceries.

Gopnik: The people engaged in collecting art are at such a stratospheric level of social power, economic power, that little baby things like the cost of milk, the cost of gas really don’t affect them at all, and don’t really affect what they’re buying. Really what affects the prices of art is kind of groupthink about what matters and what doesn’t matter. What your neighbor, your wealthy neighbor is buying probably affects it more than anything else. And that means that certain kinds of Andy Warhol works go for incredible fortune. If it’s a picture of Marilyn, or if it’s a picture of flowers, you know, the sort of classic Warhols. But in my opinion, those aren’t really the qualities in Warhol that matter. He’s a conceptual artist, basically. The things that people pay attention to; the traditional aesthetic values are really what he was making fun of most of the time. And this “Bomb” is a perfect example of that.

Ben-Achour: The pop art movement which Andy Warhol kind of headlined made original art accessible to the masses, conceptually, but at this point, it’s not particularly financially accessible. What do you think you’d say about how his art is valued today?

Gopnik: Warhol is a funny creature because I won’t pretend that he didn’t love money. I mean, most of us love money. He loved it maybe a little more than some people, but no more than a lot of people do. But he was also really interested in undermining normal capitalism, undermining the art market. I think he liked the trouble this work causes. People don’t realize this because he’s now such a famous artist — he was really a troublemaker like Marcel Duchamp. He wanted to cause problems for people. And this “Bomb” is a classic example of that.