New York City Fall Auctions Kick Off With Over $ 200 Million Party

The first night of the fall auctions in New York on Tuesday, November 9 totaled more than $ 200 million at Christie's, including a $ 40 million Basquiat and a shower of records among contemporary artists.

A sign of the vitality of the contemporary art market, the forty lots in this “21st century” sale have all found buyers, from the Christie's auction room at the Rockefeller center.

The auction house found the public again, after several entirely virtual seasons because of the pandemic, but in a hybrid format, where it was possible to bid physically from the room, via connected rooms in London and Hong Kong, or even in line.

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The most anticipated work,

, a monumental canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the artists who has dominated auctions for years, has gone for $ 40 million.

, another painting by the New York designer who died at 27, in 1988, was sold for $ 19.8 million. Just below Basquiat, the Scottish Peter Doig also reached Tuesday evening nearly 40 million dollars (39.8), for a canvas,

, painted in 1990. A record for the Briton, one of the most successful also in the art market. Two paintings by British street artist Banksy,

and

, were sold for $ 14.5 million and $ 2.19 million, respectively.

Human one

, the first “physical” work by the American artist Beeple, known for his digital works and holder of the record for the NFT - unique digital object - the most expensive at auction ($ 69.3 million in March), went to $ 28.9 million.

The installation, a pillar of four LED screens two meters high rotating on itself, represents the image of a human in a futuristic suit, Daft Punk type, who moves forward in a setting evolving between vegetation, desert and glacier.

But what makes the work unique is that it has the particularity of being modified remotely by the artist, via blockchain technology.

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