Tina Fineberg for The New York Times
A View Inside the Art World: The author Henry Alford attended the record-breaking auctions of modern art at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but to watch, not buy.
Behold the swirl. At the brunch last Sunday at Christie’s auction house for bidders and attendees of this past Tuesday’s history-making sale of postwar and contemporary art, hundreds of well-dressed art lovers sipped Champagne and nibbled party food while standing just inches from canvases, some of them valued for millions of dollars.
Waiters wandered through the galleries bearing six-foot-long poles from which were suspended shelves heavy with Bloody Marys or dishes of scrambled eggs; generating the din of French and Russian and Japanese well-wishing were enough age-inappropriate couples to suggest that the event’s unannounced theme was Father-Daughter.
I queued up for the very popular “deconstructed bagel-and-lox with panzanella salad” station, where I fell into conversation with a friendly middle-aged art dealer in a leather jacket.
“Are you having fun?” he asked me.
“I am,” I said. “But for a group that can supposedly pony up a few million dollars to buy art, these folks are very aggressive in a buffet line.”
Last week, I attended the record-breaking auctions of modern art at Christie’s ($691.5 million) and Sotheby’s ($380.6 million), as well as their previews. Here, amid a scrum of Euro-kissing and plastic surgery Expressionism and many, many British men in skinny navy blue suits, I watched as titans of commerce like the talent agent Michael Ovitz, the financier Donald B. Marron, the real estate developer Aby Rosen and the Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell tried to gussy up their living room walls.
You see, the hoopla and irrational exuberance surrounding these two auctions had made me wonder: What’s it like to go to these things if you’re not an art-world insider? Moreover, if you don’t arrive in a mirrory black Escalade carrying a gunnysack of gold bullion, will anyone talk to you?
I will admit to a certain amount of fundamental skepticism at the outset. I’m someone who cannot watch “Antiques Roadshow,” so squirm-inducing does this pageant of ritual humiliation strike me. However, after spending time at Christie’s and Sotheby’s last week, this skepticism was neutered. Yes, I still believe that the affixing of a price tag on art, not to mention the frenzy-whipping surrounding same, is essentially vulgar in the same way that the Oscars or personal ads that mention New Haven or Cambridge are. But I now know that attendance at auctions and their previews can be wonderfully convivial and social. Unlike going to a museum, anyone will talk to you, and you can talk to anyone.
Take, for instance, the bearded 20-something gentleman who was standing next to me at the Sotheby’s preview. We were both marveling at Andy Warhol’s portrait of Liz Taylor, being sold by Steven A. Cohen, the head of SAC Capital Advisors, the firm that days earlier had agreed to pay the United States government $1.2 billion in fines for insider trading. The painting is noteworthy for its fluorescent chartreuse background and the overripeness of Ms. Taylor’s carmine lips. I posited, “You’d almost have to be gay to have that in your house.”
He smiled and said, “Or it would make you gay.”
At the Christie’s brunch, upon meeting Capucine Milliot, the auction house’s thin, stylish 30-something vice president, head of communications, postwar and contemporary art, I exclaimed, “I’ve always wanted to meet someone named Capucine! Do your close friends call you Cap’n?” Ms. Milliot replied, “It’s Capu, usually.”
I also chatted up a young woman at the Christie’s brunch about the irony of someone potentially spending $5 million on Warhol’s portrait of the founder of the People’s Republic of China. Just then, an older European woman, seeing that the younger woman and I were standing on copper tiles on the gallery floor, pointed at the tiles and asked, “It’s art?”
The younger woman said, “Yes. It’s by Carl Andre. ‘100 Copper Square.’ You’re allowed to walk on it.” Forming a moue with her mouth, the older woman said, “I’d rather not” and then swerved as if avoiding an overzealous dachshund.
It was also heartening to find that bidders seemingly didn’t care whether I was at the auctions in order to bid or not. In Christie’s jampacked reception area before Tuesday’s sale, an elegant bidder in her 60s asked me, “Do you collect?”
Anxious not to be perceived as an interloper in these rarefied climes, I told her, “Mostly I’m going through a period of deaccession now. I’m heavy in mixed-media, found-object stuff. I’d say ‘outsider art,’ but that would suggest an actual artist was involved.”
She cocked her head wonderingly, so I explained, “I have a wooden salad bowl filled with empty pen cartridges and garlic husks.” She smiled indulgently and introduced me to her husband.
Once the hordes were settled into Christie’s vast, brightly lit salesroom on Tuesday night and the bidding had begun, there was an understandable diminution of socializing. Audience members were either focused on the charmingly deadpan auctioneer, Jussi Pylkkanen, or on Twitter, where they could find updates of who was bidding on what. “Let’s start this at, oh, eight--ty million,” the English-accented Mr. Pylkkanen said upon introducing Francis Bacon’s thorny but beguiling triptych of his friend and rival, the painter Lucian Freud.
For most people in attendance, the highlights of the evening were either the Bacon triptych’s fetching of $142.4 million, an all-time record for a work of art sold at auction, which caused us all to applaud; or Jeff Koons’s 10-foot-tall mirror-polished sculpture of a dog, at $58.4 million, the most expensive work of art by a living artist sold at auction. But for me the big moment was the sale of Mr. Andre’s copper tiles. As soon as Mr. Pylkkanen introduced the Andre lot, I leaned over to my seatmate and said, “I’ve stepped on this one.” Smiling uncertainly, she said, “Good for you,” as if I’d just told her that a colony of tiny people are living inside my salt and pepper shakers. The tiles sold for $2.165 million.
I also found it highly diverting to stare at the skyboxes. In contradistinction to the inherent vibe of each of the auction houses — “If Christie’s is the West Village and Phillips is Williamsburg,” as one young gallerist put it to me, “Sotheby’s is the Upper East Side” — the skyboxes at ebullient Christie’s and fusty Sotheby’s are, respectively, impenetrable and flirty. I detected no motion whatsoever behind the one-way glass of Christie’s private aeries. But at Sotheby’s the denizens of the curtained skyboxes are heavily backlit, causing these folks to appear mostly as silhouettes. Could I see Steve Martin, Warren Buffett, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, the deceased comedian Totie Fields?
A colleague forwarded a tweet in which the Wall Street Journal writer Kelly Crow said she’d just spied Leonardo DiCaprio in a Sotheby’s skybox with the gallery owner Hillel Nahmad, who had that same day pleaded guilty to a single federal charge in connection with a high-stakes gambling ring tied to the Russian mob. I almost imagined showgirls.
If your attention was focused on the crowd rather than the art, you could also engage in speculation — in art-world terms, “important” speculation — as to why people left the salesrooms when they did. At Sotheby’s, I could compute why a tough Angeleno like Mr. Ovitz would leg it during the sale of the adorably named Calder sculpture “Snowflake Tree.”
But how come the dealer Larry “Go Go” Gagosian went-went after the sale of Philip Guston’s “Light on Green Sea?” Maybe he was still seeing green after losing out on the Bacon triptych at Christie’s.
Yes, the people-watching at these high-profile auctions is engaging, but it’s the apparent casualness with which millions of dollars are bandied about that is truly bracing. Upon introducing the Koons sculpture — a work that, to many eyes, would look most at home in front of a Mylar balloon store at a shopping mall, where dried rivulets of frozen yogurt might add variation and tactility to its surface — Mr. Pylkkanen said, “We should start to say numbers, shouldn’t we? Should we say $35 million?”
The Sotheby’s auctioneer, the German, nonbubbly Tobias Meyer, opened the bidding for Andy Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster),” which would go on to establish an auction high for the artist at $104.5 million, with “Let’s start the bid at fifty, sixty million dollars.” Brother can you spare a dime, quarter, dollar.
Some of the buyers, too, seemed to disport themselves with a lack of rigidity. When the bidding for Ad Reinhardt’s “Abstract Painting, Red” ended at $2.7 million, Mr. Pylkkanen asked for the victor’s paddle number. The gentleman said something inaudible to most people in the room and then Mr. Pylkkanen publicly broadcast to the gentleman, “Oh, you didn’t think you’d be needing it?”
The apparent ease with which people decant their bank accounts of millions of dollars made a special impression on me because, when at the Christie’s brunch two days earlier, I’d done a little actuarial work, as all potential buyers of art must. While gazing at my favorite work on sale — a gorgeous Mark Rothko color field of orange, with a white bar at its center — I’d contemplated how I would have to change my life in order to buy a painting whose pre-auction estimate was $25 million to $35 million.
I’d ruled out both a Kickstarter campaign and a massive time-share, and had settled instead on the invention and mass-marketing of an item that could revolutionize modern life: a bidet for armpits. By the time I’d crunched the numbers in my head, I realized that I’d broken out into a light sweat.
Which I suppose is why, at the end of the two auctions, I experienced an unanticipated sensation of buoyancy and uplift. In short, it felt amazing to have witnessed such a cavalcade of overspending. Suddenly all the indulgences I’ve fallen prey to in my life were reduced in size. The last-minute trips to Europe at peak flying times, the unnecessary massages, the $5 bottles of mango juice — all seemed, by comparison, weeny, baublelike.
This mild euphoria returned the day after the Sotheby’s sale when, needing to wrap a present for a friend, I tore a 12-by-15-inch reproduction of an abstract painting by Joan Mitchell out of the 6.8-pound, $60 Christie’s catalog, and wrapped the gift in it. It looked terrific. With 447 more pages of the catalog left to go, my savings on wrapping paper over the next decade should be considerable. Many art lovers hemorrhaged cash this past week, but suddenly I’m minting it.
