Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a sale of art by people who usually help sell art — art handlers, client service representatives and product developers at Christie’s. We’ll also get details on a possible guilty plea to the federal charges that Luigi Mangione is facing.
Have you ever wondered what hung on the whiter-than-white wall before the painting you were looking at in an art gallery or an auction house?
Madeleine Lill all but squealed when she was told that her canvas “Cipher” was occupying the spot at Christie’s in Rockefeller Center where a painting by the abstract artist Jack Whitten had hung in the last big sale. “His work is amazing,” she said. “The movement, the colors, the textures — it’s incredible. It’s surreal to be on the same wall where he was.”
Lill works at Christie’s. Her job involves helping to sell “crazy money-value works,” she said — not making art. But many of the firm’s employees have aspired to be artists, and they paint or sculpt on their own time, away from the office.
So Christie’s did what it does: It organized a sale of 109 works by 64 employees — art handlers, client service representatives and product developers, among others. All the works in the show, “Inside Job,” will be on display at Christie’s through Tuesday. Online bidding will end on Wednesday.
No one expects any of the works in “Inside Job” to go for as much as the Whitten, “Shalimar: the Longest Garden in the World,” which sold for $406,400 in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary sale in May. The presale estimate for Lill’s “Cipher” is $800 to $1,000.
Christie’s treats the artists in “Inside Job” as consignors; they will receive the hammer prices of their pieces. The buyer’s premium, the percentage-based fee that Christie’s adds to each winning bid, will go to Publicolor, a nonprofit that runs programs for students at risk of dropping out of school.
Julia Lucas, who was the sale coordinator for Christie’s 21st-century sales in November and May, served as the head of sale for “Inside Job,” coordinating the submissions — and entering one herself, “Hung Up,” a gouache-and-colored-pencil-on-stuffed-canvas sculpture of an old-fashioned telephone receiver and a long cord.
“I work from the floor of my living room — my roommates are very accommodating,” Lucas said, explaining that she had begun as a painter but found it more interesting to work in three dimensions.
Sharks in the water
Maggie Moran, who manages a team that develops internal software and apps and has two paintings in “Inside Job,” said that she tries to paint for at least an hour when she gets home from work. She also spends one day of every weekend painting.
Moran has a degree in studio art. “But really quickly after graduation, I found out it’s very, very hard to make a sustainable living in fine art,” she said. She started her own business in Pennsylvania, coordinating digital art inventories for collectors. Eventually she moved to New York and was hired by a Christie’s subsidiary and then Christie’s itself.
Just before the pandemic shutdown, her roommate moved out of her two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Moran decided not to find another roommate and turned the second bedroom into a home office and studio. “Instead of sitting home and watching all the Netflix — which I did, of course, because everyone did,” she said, “I was like, I’m really going to take advantage of this extra time” — and paint.
One of her paintings in the sale is “Man Eaters,” an oil-on-canvas painting with three women in bathing suits in a small boat surrounded by sharks.
“They’re like, we’re good,” she said. “They’re armed only with a single fishing rod and a tiny boat.” The name of the boat is the Orca, the same as the shark-hunting vessel in the movie “Jaws.”
“These women became metaphors for myself, and for women in general who are venturing into the world,” she said. “Who’s really in trouble here? I’m rooting for the women.”
Across the room, Lill talked about incorporating different mediums in a single canvas. “Cipher” brings together papier-mâché, gold leaf, moss and acrylic paint.
The gold leaf was a challenge “because it flakes so easily,” she said. “Growing up, I made a lot of jewelry and worked for a bead store — I am attracted to shiny objects. But I’d never used gold leaf before.”
Unlike Moran, she does not have a separate room for a studio. She works from the kitchen table in her apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
“I’m mostly just trying to make sure my cat doesn’t jump on something while it’s drying,” she said.
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny day, with a high near 87. Tonight will be partly cloudy, and the low will be around 70.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Saturday (Feast of the Assumption).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Our call volume has doubled. People are confused and upset. They’re going without insurance.” — Elisabeth Benjamin of the nonprofit Community Service Society, on the fallout out from the Trump administration’s cuts to funding for a low-cost health plan.
The latest Metro news
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Outdoor dining comeback: The City Council approved bills that would allow outdoor dining on city streets all year long. The bills would allow restaurants to winterize the structures — on both sidewalks and streets — making them more comfortable in the cold.
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A third migrant dies at Delaney Hall: Jose Chajon-Raxon, a Guatemalan migrant, died after being detained at the troubled detention center in Newark. The New Jersey attorney general has opened a civil rights investigation into conditions at Delaney Hall.
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L’Rain’s new LP: Taja Cheek, a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn who is known as L’Rain, has a new LP, “Fata Morgana.” The album looks at her accomplishments and the limits of her career.
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J.J. Martin’s new store: The fashion entrepreneur and founder of La DoubleJ, a luxury and lifestyle brand, has a new store in the Upper East Side. It has a “gong temple.”
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What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” Emma G. Fitzsimmons, who covers public policy for the Metro desk, joins Sarah Maslin Nir to discuss Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s affordability agenda. Also, in the wake of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s announcement that she would be freezing her eggs, Pam Belluck, a health and science reporter for The Times, explains what women should know about the treatment. The program is broadcast on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Mangione expected to plead guilty to a federal charge
On Tuesday, the judge in Luigi Mangione’s New York murder trial ruled that the jurors’ identities would not be disclosed when jury selection begins next month.
Today, Mangione is expected to plead guilty to a separate federal charge of stalking that resulted in the death of an insurance executive two years ago.
Mangione is not charged with murder in the federal case, and how a plea in that case might affect the state murder trial is unclear. Mangione had been set to go on trial on the stalking charges in January. Those charges carry a potential life sentence.
The dueling cases have escalated the tension between President Trump’s Justice Department and the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, the only prosecutor to have won a conviction against Trump. Mangione is accused of shooting the insurance executive, Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, on the sidewalk outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
My colleagues Benjamin Weiser, Devlin Barrett and Hurubie Meko write that the talks between federal prosecutors and Mangione’s lawyers could fall apart before or during today’s hearing. But if Mangione pleads guilty in federal court, his lawyers could move for the dismissal of the state charges, claiming double jeopardy, a legal principal that bars someone from being tried more than once for the same offense.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office is likely to oppose such a motion, arguing that it could still prosecute Mangione because the two cases involve different charges — murder in one, stalking in the other.
In January, Judge Margaret Garnett, who is handling the federal case, threw out two other charges that Mangione had been facing, including using a firearm to commit murder. The dismissal meant that prosecutors could not seek the death penalty.
METROPOLITAN diary
Crosstown check-in
Dear Diary:
As a longtime resident of the Upper West Side, I often take the 86th Street crosstown bus to get to the East Side.
One time not long ago, I was using the ride to catch up on some texts and texted a friend who lives on the Upper East Side.
We exchanged a few messages back and forth, bringing each other up-to-date on various things. When I stood to get off at Third Avenue, lo and behold, the friend I had been texting stood up as well.
— Susan Rubin
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Steven Moity and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Now for Sale at Christie’s: Art by People Who Work at Christie’s appeared first on New York Times.
