This week, the art world watched the marquee New York art auctions at Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s, where sales were estimated to fetch as much as $1.5 billion, with bated breath.
Impressive though the actual $1.3 billion haul might be, it’s down from last year’s $1.84 billion tally, reflecting a much-talked-about market slump. The world’s wealthiest saw their worth climb in the days after the U.S. election as the stock market soared and cryptocurrency reached new highs, so the burning question was, would they spend that wealth on art?
The answer is in: Yes, and if the work is top-notch, collectors will still pay top prices, but if it’s B-grade material, they will likely sit on their hands. The market is bouncing, if not exactly roaring, back. Dealers are characterizing it with words like “discerning.”
“The overall message this week is that everything’s just fine,” says New York gallerist and advisor Cristin Tierney. “The calamity that people were biting their nails about in the first half of 2024 didn’t come to pass. For all those who’ve been sitting around waiting for great deals, they’re not happening. For A-plus material, you have to pay for it.”
The week did not offer the multiplicity of bombshell sales as, say, 2022, when Microsoft magnate Paul Allen’s collection came to auction. New York art advisor Alex Glauber points out that the houses’ consignment deadlines came before the elections, so sellers were likely feeling skittish.
But there were very splashy paintings.
Setting the tone at Sotheby’s on Monday, French Impressionist Claude Monet’s Nymphéas, ca. 1914-1917, a classic water lily painting, inspired an unheard-of seventeen-minute bidding war before hammering at $59 million, about its presale estimate, or $65.5 million with fees.The following night at Christie’s, Belgian Surrealist René Magritte’s 1954 painting Empire of Lights was estimated to bring at least $95 million. It was guaranteed to sell, ensuring that his previous $79.3 million record would topple. And topple it did. After a ten-minute contest, it fetched a whopping $121.2 million, setting a record for any Surrealist painting at auction. The week was a triumph for the art movement in its 100th anniversary year: other Magrittes sold well, as did works by British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington. The surge in market interest has gone hand-in-hand with museum exhibitions all over the globe.
“When I started out twenty years ago, I couldn’t give Surrealist works away,” Tierney recalled. The Monet and the Magritte were classic examples of their creators’ output. Paintings not fitting that description were liable to go down in flames, as Sotheby’s learned on Monday, with Henri Matisse’s Torse de jeune fille (1921-22), estimated at up to $18 million. It had appeared in museum exhibitions from Oslo to Tokyo but it failed to find a buyer. “It didn’t look like people want a Matisse to look like,” Tierney noted.
No discussion of this past auction week would be complete without mentioning Italian artist-cum-prankster . His mega-viral, globally memed hit conceptual work Comedian, 2019, consists of a banana duct-taped to a wall. The artist has called it an inquiry into what we value, so it was a prime work to come to public auction and answer that question on a worldwide stage.
Editions of the work sold for between $120,000 and $150,000 at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, and this lot (the second of an edition of three with two artist’s proofs) was estimated at up to $1.5 million and guaranteed to sell. Sotheby’s accepted bids in cryptocurrency, and the piece hammered for a rousing $5.2 million, or $6.2 million with the house’s fees, to Justin Sun, Chinese collector and founder of Tron, a crypto platform—who paid in crypto, naturally, after beating out six other contestants in a nearly ten-minute bidding war. Despite the relatively modest price, it drowned out higher-priced lots by Jeff Koons and Ed Ruscha that night as it became no doubt one of the priciest works of conceptual art to ever come to auction.
Banana aside, Glauber divined good news on the week and encouraging signs for the next big market bellwether, when hundreds of galleries convene for the Art Basel Miami Beach fair. “Overall, the week was successful,” he concluded. “We saw some really strong prices and records for established blue-chip artists. Collectors showed up and pursued masterpieces competitively. We saw more optimism than we’ve seen in the last couple of seasons. I think people will go into Basel feeling pretty good.”
