The first night of the fall auctions in New York on Tuesday totaled more than $ 200 million at Christie’s, including a $ 40 million Basquiat and a shower of records among contemporary artists.
A sign of the vitality of the contemporary art market, the forty lots in this “21st century” sale have all found buyers, from the Christie’s auction room at the Rockefeller center.
The auction house found the public again, after several entirely virtual seasons because of the pandemic, but in a hybrid format, where it was possible to bid physically from the room, via connected rooms in London and Hong-Kong, or still online.
The most anticipated work, “Guild of golden teeth”, a monumental canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the artists who has dominated the auction for years, went to 40 million dollars. “Flash in Naples”, another painting by the New York designer who died at 27, in 1988, sold for $ 19.8 million.
Just below Basquiat, the Scotsman Peter Doig also reached Tuesday evening nearly 40 million dollars (39.8), for a canvas, “Swamped”, painted in 1990. A record for the Briton, one of the most efficient also on the art market.
Two paintings by British street artist Banksy, “Sunflowers from Petrol Station” and “Monkey Detonator”, were sold for $ 14.5 million and $ 2.19 million respectively.
“Human one”, the first “physical” work of the American artist Beeple, known for his digital works and holder of the record for the NFT – unique digital object – the most expensive at auction ($ 69.3 million in March), went down to $ 28.9 million.
The installation, a pillar of four LED screens two meters high rotating on itself, represents the image of a human in a futuristic suit, Daft Punk type, who advances in a setting evolving between vegetation, desert and glacier.
But what makes the work unique is that it has the particularity of being modified remotely by the artist, via blockchain technology.
During the evening, ten artists broke their auction records, such as African-Americans Rashid Johnson ($ 2.5 million) or Stanley Whitney ($ 1.2 million). The works of the painter born in China Xinyi Cheng, the American Hilary Pecis or the Swiss Nicolas Party sold ten times more than the initial estimate, between 300,000 and 3.2 million dollars.
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