If you take stock of all the art up in New York City this fall, my Lord—it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches. The museums just rolled out the big shows, which means the highly anticipated “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt” opens at The Met this weekend, and the fabulous Orphism show is up at the Guggenheim, with bold-colored abstract gems dotting the spiral ramp up the rotunda. Christian Marclay’s 24-hour tick-tocking masterwork The Clock is now on view at MoMA, and the Alvin Ailey show at the Whitney is a showstopper. One could spend a whole day crawling through the big shops at Chelsea, or checking out what’s up Tribeca, where dozens of galleries have opened up shop in the blocks between Broadway and Church in the last five years. It’s a lot.
But low-key: The best place to see art for this specific moment in New York isn’t the museums or the galleries, it’s the auction houses—which are open to the general public (and totally free!)—showing off the billions of dollars of art that they expect to sell next week. And if you don’t go now, all this art is gone forever, shipped off to the ports of call and homes of their new owners.
I’ll be on the ground to take in all the gavel action—and to see if the election of Donald Trump and the surging stock market have any impact on the depth of bidding—but before then, let’s take a quick spin through some of the goods on the block next week, shall we?
Christie’s is selling off the estate of Mica Ertegun, the consummate Manhattan doyenne, who counted among her close confidants everyone from Jackie O to Mick Jagger to Henry Kissinger to Bette Midler to the Southampton-based Orthodox priest Father Alexander Karloutsos. She died last year, three years shy of being a centenarian. Until Tuesday, New Yorkers can swing by Rockefeller Center and walk through the aisles to gawk at the elegant objects that filled the life of Mica and her husband, the incredibly influential music executive Ahmet Ertegun, who died in 2006 after a fall at Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday party at the Beacon Theater, while the Rolling Stones performed—one of the great lives lived by anyone, it’s been argued.
“She died at 97, so she was one of these children of the century who got to see and do seemingly everything and travelled everywhere who had homes everywhere,” said Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art.
It’s one of the few estates being sold this week that gives the auctions their oomph, even if it won’t bring in the hundreds of millions that the estates of Paul Allen or David Rockefeller have minted in recent years.
“For the last few seasons, the demand hasn’t been lacking—it’s the supply that’s always variable, and I feel very confident about this particular season because we have so many special things, so many things that are generational opportunities,” Carter went on. “There are many other things in Mica’s collection, many things in the various owners’ collections, which have been tucked away for decades, and which you won’t really find again if you don’t act now.”
The star lot from the collection is a Rene Magritte that the Erteguns bought from Byron Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1968, when Ertegun was nearing his peak as a music industry kingpin and Mica was launching her interior design firm, MAC II. She designed apartments for her incredible array of friends and collaborators: Bill Blass, Alice Walton, Keith Richards, Michael Eisner, and Jimmy Buffett. She also designed her own apartment, and this Magritte had pride of place in their home.
“The Magritte is unparalleled—it’s been off the market for a really long time, so not only is it iconic, it’s irreplaceable, it’s got provenance and a freshness to the market that always drives demand,” said the art adviser Megan Fox Kelly, who has a number of clients planning to bid next week.
Christie’s has an immersive presentation of the Ertegun collection that suggests what it was like to spend time in her Park Avenue townhouse or her Southampton estate or her yacht in Bodrum. But what’s even wilder is the installation over at Sotheby’s on York Avenue, where CEO Charlie Stewart is in the midst of moving his auction house into the Breuer Building now that a $1 billion investment from Abu Dhabi has been finalized. The collector Larry Warsh is selling 31 of his Keith Haring drawings that the artist originally made on blank ad spaces on the subway—Warsh lived on Astor Place and would go into the subterranean tracks to try and rip them off the walls. Finding them difficult to peel off, he eventually sought them out and built up a collection, which he will sell whole harvest to the tune of $6.3 million to $9 million.
The installation of the Harings at Sotheby’s has to be seen to be believed. The house has tried to recreate the original hang, as it were, with legit subway signs and station benches alongside the Haring works. There’s even a subway turnstile and films of Haring making the works in the ’80s. It kind of reminds me of the fake subway station at the Paramount Pictures lot, where Frieze Los Angeles held two editions, in 2019 and 2020. It’s a surreal thing to see at a building that’s a 15-minute walk to the Q train.
There’s also the question of whether it’s ethical to sell something that Haring intended as a public work, but it’s been done a few times—a former convent on 108th Street sold a mural cut into fragments at Bonham’s for $3.9 million in 2019. Haring’s work can still be seen in-situ at the Woodhull Medical Center in Bed-Stuy, the Carmine Street Swimming Pool in the West Village, and the LGBT Community Center on West 13th Street.
Elsewhere at Sotheby’s, there’s the Sydell Miller collection—Picasso, Kandinsky, Klein, Matisse—and of course Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, which I discussed at length with Stewart a few weeks back, in case you missed it. Over the course of the month, Sotheby’s expects its sales to be between $478 million and $659 million, before fees.
That’s way down. Across the various auction houses, next week is aiming to reap $1.6 billion, which is a few hundred million dollars lower than in past years. And there’s a sense that the ultracontemporary markets of a few years ago—when a drumbeat of eye-popping prices for young artists fueled a bubble of speculative buying that eventually burst—isn’t quite happening anymore. It’s been a tricky period for the art market, which seems to go through a slump this bad once a decade.
“Look, we’ve had an incredibly difficult year, not just in the market, but in this country and globally,” Kelly said.
But even if the sales are pared down compared to years past, there’s still some primo works on offer. Phillips has a modest sale on Tuesday led by a Jackson Pollock drip painting estimated at $13 million and a Jean-Michel Basquiat self-portrait once owned by Johnny Depp that’s estimated at $10 million to $15 million. And over at Christie’s, besides the Ertegun collection, there’s an iconic Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, that’s being sold by Fort Worth Texas oil baron Sid Bass. There’s also a pair of Joan Mitchells sold by Rockefeller University, and the artist Joseph Kosuth is selling one of the most iconic works by Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm. It’s estimated to sell for $2 million to $3 million.
Carter noted that these are all what’s called “discretionary sales”—that is, work not put on the block due to death, debt, or divorce, but because the consignor made the decision to sell now.
“These are people that are sensing that the time is right for the right objects,” he said.
And while many of those who work in the business of high cultural production may be disappointed by the results of the 2024 election, there’s every indication that the surging stock market created by Trump’s victory points to a better-than-usual auction cycle. When asked if the art market’s performance can get lifted when collectors are seeing their portfolios enriched, Kelly said, simply, “Yes.”
Carter noted that regardless of the outcome, just having an election decided is good for business. And yeah, the stock market stuff doesn’t hurt.
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…This week the Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue’s cover landed online, along with a bevy of fun video interviews—Sydney Sweeney really loves those giant Parmesan cheese wheels!—and BTS footage from the shoot. Grab it on newsstands too—my profile of Steve McQueen is in there!
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…Speaking of news around the 25th floor of 1 World Trade, Anna Weyant painted Kaia Gerber for the December issue of Vogue, edited by Marc Jacobs. There’s a ton of great details in Weyant’s profile by Dodie Kazanjian, including that Weyant did the initial photos that inform the portrait right in the Vogue offices, very near where your VF correspondents type away.
…A week after the LACMA gala, the Baby2Baby gala went down at the Pacific Design Center, where there was some serious bidding on the painting that Jonas Wood donated to the cause. After starting out at $700,000, the landscape painting Small Japanese Garden hammered at $2.5 million.
…Louis Vuitton is demolishing its 20-story flagship on Fifth Avenue, which is currently wrapped in scaffolding to make the building appear as a series of classic LV trunks stacked on top of each other. But fear not! Just across the street is an LV pop-up that opened last night to great fanfare, and it will perform its suitcase-selling duties admirably during the yearslong reno. The opening party Thursday was a banger, with hundreds of the brand’s top clients, towering suitcases, and Martha Stewart. And the food was provided by the new Stephen Starr joint that LV opened inside the boutique, with a bunch of the brand’s culinary experts consulting. And as is typical with the Bernard Arnault–owned property, there’s a bunch of art inside, including a few great paintings by the artist Chris Martin.
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