Christie’s Says Salable Detroit Art Worth Under $1-Billion

Auction house Christie’s has preliminarily valued nearly 2,800 fully or partially city-owned works in the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection at $452-million to $866-million and recommended five ways the bankrupt city can monetize the art without selling it, The Detroit News and Reuters report.

The valuation suggests that selling art to satisfy Detroit’s creditors would make little headway in tackling the city’s $18.5-billion debt, but some dealers and appraisers said the Christie’s assessment of a trove that includes works by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Matisse is too conservative. Some early, unofficial estimates had pegged the works’ collective value at about $2-billion.

Detroit could leverage city-owned art financially by using it as loan collateral, leasing works for long periods, or selling them to philanthropists who might loan them back to the museum, among other options, the auction house suggested in its report.

The lower-than-expected appraisal could buoy chances for a fund backed by private foundations to protect the institute’s collection from liquidation, as proposed last month by a mediator in the bankruptcy case, a Detroit News business columnist writes.