Bidding wars and record prices ignite Sotheby’s New York art sale
Women and African-American artists are knocking the ball out of the ball park. It’s like a new frontier
New York — Sotheby’s crushed it on Wednesday. The auction house sold $392.3m of art in New York, setting 15 records and igniting numerous bidding wars. Of the 74 lots offered, all but two found buyers. A monumental painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for $30.7m, more than 2,000 times its purchase price 35 years ago. Three living black artists set auction records in bidding frenzies. "There’s a lot of money chasing good quality material that’s fresh to the market, correctly estimated, with good stories and ‘wow’ factor," Sotheby’s CEO Tad Smith said in an interview after the sale. Basquiat’s roughly 12-foot-by-12-foot Flesh and Spirit was sold by the estate of Dolores Ormandy Neumann, an early champion of 1980s New York graffiti artists. It was offered during Sotheby’s contemporary art sale in New York. It is the most expensive Basquiat to go on the block since Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa bought a painting of a skull by the artist at Sotheby’s for $110.5m last May, the auct...
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