Basquiat and Banksy boost Christie’s New York season
O’Keeffe’s Hawaiian painting at Phillips; Renaissance rediscoveries at Colnaghi; Sean Kelly opens in LA — and keeps it in the family
Christie’s kicked off the New York season of auctions on Tuesday with an evening sale dedicated to its new category for mostly 21st-century art. The fare was fittingly broad-ranging, including Banksy’s take on Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” from 2005 (spoiler alert: they’re dead), sold by the fashion designer Paul Smith for $12.4m ($14.6m with fees); 13 repurposed African masks in a 2004 sculpture by David Hammons, which sold for $3.1m ($3.8m with fees); a three-part non-fungible token by Urs Fischer, minted less than three weeks before its sale, which went for an above-estimate $180,000 ($225,000 with fees).
There was even the first physical, digital and token-backed work by the NFT superstar Beeple at auction. His “Human One” (2021) sold for $25m to an online bidder registered in Switzerland who revealed himself on Twitter as tech investor Ryan Zurrer ($29m with fees, estimate $15m).
Half the 40 works were covered by guarantees, though some estimates were even more wild than the art in this “let’s see what happens” market. Basquiat’s “The Guilt of Gold Teeth” (1982) had a wide-ranging estimate of $40m-$80m, having last sold publicly for $387,500 in 1998. This time, the painting sold for $37m ($40m with fees), reportedly from the collection of the artist-musician José Cano André.
Perhaps Christie’s most frank valuation was “estimate unknown”, attached to another new NFT, “Arcadia” — a collaboration on existentialism made by a visual artist, a poet and a musician — which went for $420,000 ($525,000 with fees). The evening sale made a within-estimate total of $190.1m ($219.3m with fees), topped by the 1982 Basquiat, and was fully sold, known as a “white glove” auction, injecting some early confidence into a jam-packed fortnight.