An Evening at the Christie’s Auction

L ast week, I wrote about crashing the Met Gala by means of sheer luck and a bit of wiliness. It turned out to be a disappointing experience. When you get up close to high-society glamour, you realize it’s a façade — celebrities are regular people doing regular things, just with more money. I gained little more than bragging rights.

It was a slightly different experience on Tuesday when I found myself at an art auction at Christie’s New York. Founded in London in 1766, Christie’s today is one of the world’s premier auction houses, with locations in some of the world’s most fashionable cities (Paris, Milan, Dubai, and the like). The one in midtown Manhattan is the Christie’s flagship, and regularly breaks price records for world-class art. The night before, Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn — images of which, until today, were being projected onto buildings at Rockefeller Plaza — sold for $195 million, a record-setting price for an American painting and for a 20th-century painting.

On that evening, some of the big names in art whose works were up for auction were those of the American Jean-Michel Basquiat, the German painter Gerhard Richter, and the English artist known as “Banksy,” whose Diamond in the Rough, a truck door spray-painted with graffiti and the image of a little girl holding an enormous diamond, was for sale. The artists’ names were good enough to break some records, I guessed, and I wanted to be in the room where it happened.

Dressed in a three-piece navy-blue suit, I just walked in. No invitation was requested. No press credentials checked. Security tipped their hats. Employees smiled. Just like that, there I was among artworks valued in the millions. Act like you belong somewhere, and you will.

The main auction room, where the world’s richest collectors buy their art, was more like the conference room of a four-star hotel: dimmed lighting, folding chairs on plain carpet, beam lights suspended on bare brackets overhead. Though some of the guests were decked out like the Beckhams, in Burberry and Louboutins, others were in jeans and sneakers, or even Birkenstocks. You’d expect that at a Marriott bistro, but not at Christie’s.

The auction room was bustling. It’s a workplace, after all. The seats were full, and journalists and staff crowded the edges. Dapper sales agents lined long tables along the walls. The agents are given special phones to connect with the buyers they represent — whose identities are not disclosed — on a secure line, as I was told, that can’t be hacked. The high-rolling buyers presumably call in from their yachts, mansions, and private jets all over the world. Maybe (probably) some Russian oligarchs were in the mix.

The real thrills came once the auction began. The auctioneer was a 30-something British woman with a posh accent. (People with degrees in art history do get jobs after all.) The “lots” — as the art to be sold is referred to — were all bid in quick succession. “Beginning at $200,000,” the auctioneer announced for the first painting — Summertime, by the young American artist Anna Weyant — at which point several hands shot up. Then someone called out “250,” and another “450” just a moment later. And the numbers kept climbing: “500,” “650,” “750,” “900.” It reached 1 million in one minute, and the gavel was dropped to seal the sale. Others chatted casually as astronomical sums of money were thrown around. Even so, it was rather democratic: Anyone, even you, could’ve signed up and bid online in several different currencies. Even crypto was accepted, except for those in mainland China (blame Xi for banning Fujian’s finance bros from buying their art in Dogecoin).

As I observed the selling of 32 lots, it seemed to me that the auction (akin to art itself) took on different forms depending on your vantage. The auctioneer was like a schoolmistress, prompting bids from the floor as a teacher coaxes answers from students in a classroom. Beaming, she’d shout expectantly, “Who has 4 million? Give me 4.8!” while gesticulating upward as if trying to coax an answer from a taciturn child. The agents took notes, rummaging through documents while on the phone with buyers, trying to outfox their competing bidders by raising the price without running it up too high, at which point some would fold. For the audience, meanwhile, it was a bit like watching a tennis volley: back and forth between the buyers, sometimes fast, usually slow, and later very boring. People started leaving midway.

The buyers’ interest waxed and waned. Works by photographer Helmut Newton (a steely portrait of a woman in nothing but heels) and the painters Lisa Yuskavage (Studio, a scene in green, of two lingerie-clad girls) and Eric Fischl (The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog, which gathers male and female nude sunbathers on a boat in threatening seas) were gone in 60 seconds. Koons’s Lobster, a wall-relief sculpture, sold for just over $3 million, which was just below its estimate, while Adrian Ghenie’s curiously violent Antelope Attacked Near a Gas Pipe did a bit better. The Richter painting, Abstraktes Bild (1994), previously owned by Eric Clapton, topped the night at $36.5 million on a single bid (which was a disappointment). Others failed to meet their estimated sales prices; for these, the auctioneer desperately tried to raise the price, even by decimal points — “1.05? 1.1? 1.12?” (All figures in millions.) Maybe this is how the rich haggle for cents on the dollar.

The auction ended with some disappointment: The Banksy, heavily underbid, got just $3.6 million. The market was “figuring itself out,” the auctioneer told me — perhaps Christie’s hadn’t figured out the market. The Basquiats were withdrawn mid auction; apparently, they couldn’t find buyers to sell it at a “respectable” price. In the art world, prestige is cardinal, for reputations turn on it, and when reputations falter, prices fall.

The evening’s final sale was not even physical art but an NFT — a non-fungible token. NFTs are digital files that supposedly can’t be copied (though it was printed in my brochure rather well). To elicit buyers for this merely digital work, the sellers threw in the kitchen sink of physical add-ons, including a custom computer on which to view it, a VR headset, and a gala dinner in Spain for the buyer and ten guests. The NFT sold for a cool $1 million, about half of its estimated price. At the press conference afterward, the new owner was announced as an Asia-Pacific buyer. This was the case for many lots. There was even a special team in Hong Kong for the Chinese market. It seems the Chinese are conquering the art world, too — even without crypto.

Thus was the auction. Supposedly exclusive, mildly interesting, generally underwhelming — in short, the high life.