David Hockney Painting Sells For $90.3m, A Record For A Living Artist
Source: The Guardian
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) beats $58.4m record set by Jeff Koons image.
A celebrated swimming pool painting by the British modern artist David Hockney sold for $90.3m in New York on Thursday, setting a new auction record for a living artist, the auctioneer Christie's said.
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was snapped up after more than nine minutes of bidding, dominated by two rival telephone bidders. The previous record was held by American Jeff Koons and his Balloon Dog (Orange), which sold for $58.4m at Christie's in 2013.
It was standing-room-only in the packed sales room at the Christie's auction house in Manhattan, where a smattering of applause broke out when the sale of the Bradford-born, 81-year-old artist's work concluded, the painting hammering for $80m.
The buyer's premium took the final price to $90,312,500, the auction house announced.
Christie's had estimated the 1972 oil painting at $80m and called the Hockney "one of the great masterpieces of the modern era". -MORE...
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/15/david-hockney-painting-record-auction-living-artist
'Portrait of An Artist' ('Pool with Two Figures') by David Hockney, 1972.
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*The single most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction was the eye-watering $450.3m paid for *Leonardo da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi' last year at Christie's in New York.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/14/leonardo-da-vinci-mystery-why-is-his-450m-masterpiece-really-being-kept-under-wraps-salvator-mundi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvator_Mundi_(Leonardo)
Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500.
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About halfway through 'The Price of Everything,' director Nathaniel Kahn’s new documentary about the vicissitudes of the contemporary art market, mega-collector Stefan Edlis gives the filmmaker his title: “There’s a lot of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” quips Edlis in his thick Austrian accent, summing up the dichotomy at the heart of Kahn’s project. The film is a largely cinema verité study of a pressure cooker world flush with ultra-rich buyers, high-on-the-hog middlemen, and artists anointed with the Midas touch.
It meanders from character to character, in the process posing big questions: Is there a way to conceive of value outside of how much things cost? What happens when art enters an unregulated, bullish market with no ceiling on price, and no clarity around what is prized and what is ignored? How does an artist weather such a maelstrom?
Kahn’s film airs on HBO in November but first will premiere in select theaters this Friday, nearly 45 years to the day after the notorious Scull auction, widely regarded as the event that marked the birth of the contemporary art bubble as we know it (Robert Scull was a taxi fleet owner who scooped up pieces by nobodies like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and flipped them at then-unheard-of prices a decade or so later).
Now we take it as a given, though the average layperson may be less cognizant of the extent to which the international billionaire class uses contemporary art as an asset allocation much like real estate or stocks—and the toll that takes on the ability of museums to compete at auction.
Vogue, In Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything, a Lively Portrait of Money Run Amok in the Contemporary Art Market
https://www.vogue.com/article/the-price-of-everything-documentary-review-nathaniel-kahn-interview
Artist Jeff Koons in front of his 'Gazing Ball' paintings.
