The morning after Christie’s held its $301 million Wednesday-evening sale of Post-war and Contemporary art, the apex of last week’s marquee auction season, you might have expected auctioneers, dealers and collectors to wake up with a queasy combination of winner’s elation and buyer’s remorse. The Christie’s sale was the third headline event in a five-day Read More
Last November, Andy Warhol’s 1962 painting “Men in Her Life” sold for over $60 million at Phillips de Pury & Co. It went for well over its high estimate, and became the second most expensive Warhol painting ever to sell at public auction. Because both the buyer and the under bidder were on the phone, Read More
In 2003, artist David Hammons presented “Which Mike Would You Like to Be Like,” three vintage microphones standing alone in a room, representing three Michaels: Jackson, Tyson and Jordan. It was an ironic commentary on role models for African-Americans, a funny play on words, a great pun, all of the above; that’s the magic we’ve Read More
Last Saturday, as the wind whistled by the horse paddocks and the sun set on publisher Peter Brant’s enormous Greenwich, Conn., lawn, his multimillionaire guests sipped spiked Paul Newman lemonade and talked art. The exclusive party closed the two-week auction season, and the mood was jovial: Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury had raised $1.2 Read More
As top collectors pour into town for spring art auctions that may total nearly $1 billion, Chelsea galleries put out their best wares. This season features a slew of fantasy images, works by women artists and one museum-style, Impressionist-art blockbuster.
Here, from downtown north, is a stroll through some of our favorite Read More
Tobias Meyer, a chairman of Sotheby’s and worldwide head of its contemporary art department, has been watching the contemporary art world for more than two decades from the auction rostrum. This week and next, in the midst of a persistent recession, he’ll try to hammer down nearly $400 million of art. We talked Read More
Clichés die hard and slow, mainly because most people simplify things in order to process them. When it comes to art collecting, people love to talk up the storied collectors of old to give hope to new art buyers. Consider the oft-told tale of Herb and Dorothy Vogel, a retired postal clerk and an ex-librarian Read More
