Munich - Art auction houses are not all gloomy about prospects in 2009 despite the global financial and economic crisis.

While art works remained unsold at auctions last autumn and the flurry of record prices in recent years has given way to a more sober-minded market, art buyers with bags of money are still out there, said the president of Sotheby's Germany.

"My personal feeling is that not all the people I meet invested money with Lehman Brothers or Kaupthing Bank," remarked Heinrich Graf von Spreti, who has headed the German branch of the London-based auction house for the past 30 years.

He noted, however, that collectors had become more discriminating. "There may not be money for something that's not exceptional," he said.

Contemporary art, lacking a "long lineage," has experienced the sharpest drop in prices and is now back at 2004 levels, according to Spreti, who said that some paintings went up for auction in pre-crisis days even before the oil colours had dried.

He remains optimistic nonetheless. "We sell a lot of things that don't get headlines," Spreti said, citing a Faberge auction in London in November during which nearly 100 items were sold at double their valuation price. And in early December, a 16th-century bronze sculpture from the Netherlands - found in a German castle - brought 1.1 million pounds (1.2 million euros); it had been valued at 400,000 pounds.

"It's a matter of an object's singularity," Spreti emphasized. Hence works by Old Masters such as Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681) and Renaissance painter Girolamo da Carpi (ca. 1501-1556) were fetching record, seven-figure sums at Sotheby's despite the economic downturn.

Robert Ketterer, managing director of Ketterer Kunst, a Munich-based art auction house, has similar observations. The market for works by living artists is sluggish now "because artists 30 to 40 years of age will still be producing next year," he remarked. But he said that extremely rare objects were going for high prices. Ketterer recently auctioned off a watercolour by August Macke, valued at
300,000 euros (404,920 dollars) for 816,000 euros.

"Money is still there," he noted. "But people are buying things that are irreplaceable." While more items are going unsold and prices for "middling wares" are falling, he said, "extraordinary things are getting more and more expensive."

"Art is increasingly becoming a value class of its own with our wealthy clientele," said a spokesman for Reuschel & Co., a private bank in Munich. Some banks, however, have stopped financing art investments by their customers.

In Spreti's view, art can never be a store of value like an equity fund because an unfortunate investment may be worth only half the purchase price - or even next to nothing. "Art should therefore be bought out of love and passion," he said. (dpa)