What? The MTA Surplus Material Sale is ending already? A sale this good should last three months at least.
Yes, it’s that time of year when the Metropolitan Transit Authority sells off its old office junk, things found on subways and, for some reason, a bunch of mid-2000 sedans. And this incredible Read More
A little piece of New York society is moving to Russia.
Truman Capote’s typed manuscript of his classic 1958 New York novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which tells the story of a young New York socialite in the 1940s, was sold in an auction to a Russian billionaire for $306,000.
The manuscript comes complete with the Read More
Yesterday, Doyle New York auctioned off a selection of Elaine Kaufman‘s personal estate, making $385,000 total off the memories from one the Upper East Side’s most memorable restaurant fixtures. Read More
The art-auction calendar in the Middle East continues to get busier, with Christie’s announcing that it will add a second day to its October sales of modern and contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish Art in Dubai. Read More
How much would you pay for $20,000 Australian dollars? (That’s about $21,000 in U.S. dollars.)
Last night, at an auction at the Deutscher and Hackett house in Melbourne, Australia, a bidder decided he or she was willing to spend $21,350 Australian dollars (or about US$22,900) for just that sum, a $1,350 Australian (or roughly US$1,900) surplus over the actual value of the money. Read More
Less than 18 months after it failed to find a buyer during an evening sale at Phillips de Pury & Company in London, a gigantic, unusual Roy Lichtenstein piece will be offered by Sotheby’s New York, on Sept. 22, with a far lower estimate.
When it hit the block at Phillips in June 2010, the 8-foot-long acrylic on board work, called Prop for a Film (1969), was tagged with a £500,000 to £700,000 estimate, or about $754,000 to $1.05 million at the time of the sale. This time, it’s expected to sell for a comparatively modest $400,000 to $600,000. Read More
Christie’s CEO Steven P. Murphy announced today that his auction house had set a new record for half-year sales, moving approximately £2 billion, or roughly $3.2 billion, worth of art and other products from January to June this year, according to a report in Bloomberg.
If New York is the center of the art world—and it is—these are the buyers and collectors who run it. With input from top dealers, auction house officials and museum curators, The Observer has identified the 50 people in (and around) the city with the power to move the market.
Which isn’t to say they Read More
In a surprising and unlikely move, auctioneer Christie’s has hired, from outside, a former publishing, record company and Disney executive as its CEO. For the firm known for, literally, centuries (it was founded in 1766) of Eton-educated top managers and very little turnover, this is a huge cultural shift.
Steven Murphy becomes CEO of Christies Read More
It is one of the truisms of the art world that the fine-jewelry market defies recessions. Whether that’s because the very rich don’t even notice downturns, or buyers turn to hard assets in tough times, the demand for baubles is ridiculously undented by economic realities. Since December 2008, a string of jewelry records have been Read More
