The Theater of Pure Money
The street outside the Rockefeller Center, home to the New York headquarters of Christie’s auction house, was on Tuesday night a sea of black cars with tinted windows. On a night when the super-rich spent more on art than at any auction in history, they could even make a public thoroughfare their private parking lot.
Christie’s had promoted this sale of modern and contemporary art, promising to break records for the most expensive work ever, as well as the priciest by a living artist, with an international PR campaign of unprecedented scope. Auctioneers posed for an ad campaign styled with a pseudo-Annie Leibovitz group portrait, while Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, the star lot, was brought to Britain during Frieze week to entice Londoners or the tax-dodging collectors who flock there.
If they wanted attention, they got it. On Tuesday night, tourists were dutifully Instagramming themselves next to Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (estimated at $35-55m) outside Christie’s entrance, while the lobby was a mix of bidders, hungry press and chancers looking to bag a husband. The most serious collectors, however, stayed home and bid over the phone, or through art dealers representing them. Larry Gagosian, the troubled super-gallerist, was there, as was the young billionaire Helly Nahmad, who just hours earlier pleaded guilty in federal court to a gambling charge.
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“Let’s start this at $80m,” Pylkkänen said impishly, and then began a choreographed spectacle in which at least seven bidders, in the room and on the phones, bid the work into the stratosphere. An unknown 23-year-old Korean in the saleroom jumped in at $100m. Gagosian was out at $110m. A Chinese-speaking specialist on a phone soon bid $120m. We hit $122m, then $124m – and when the auctioneer asked for $126m, a bidder asked for $125m. “Of course,” Pylkkänen said, suavely. “A million dollars is a lot of money!” This brought bitter laughter.
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http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/13/christies-art-auction-bacon-lucian-record
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