on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
|
The Headlines
|
|
A TEN-FIGURE AFFAIR. On Wednesday evening in New York, at the Rockefeller Center headquarters of Christie’s, 60 works from the collection of the late Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen hauled in $1.5 billion, an all-time record for a single auction—by a wide margin. Angelica Villa has a report in ARTnews . (The previous high mark was set earlier this year, when the Macklowe collection brought in $922 million at Sotheby’s.) Every single one of the Allen lots sold—a white-glove sale, in industry parlance. Five met or exceeded $100 million, including an 1888–90 Georges Seurat studio scene, which went for $149 million, and an 1888–90 Paul Cezanne landscape, which brought $138 million . Those sums were new top auction prices for the artists, and illustrated just how fierce demand is for art at the upper-most reaches of the market.
|