Christie's clobbers Sotheby's with a gavel
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THIS May, after billionaires had outbid billionaires in New York's contemporary art auctions, something became immediately clear: Christie's had just clobbered Sotheby's with a gavel.
Over four days, Christie's sales totalled US$1.7 billion, its biggest week ever. On one of those evenings, frantic bidding inside its Rockefeller Center salesroom enabled the auction house to sell US$706 million of art spanning the 20th century in less than two hours. An anonymous bidder even plunked down US$179.4 million for Pablo Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger, smashing the record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction. "We're in a fantasyland," proclaimed collector Michael Ovitz, the former president of Walt Disney Co, as he left the room.
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