A recent art auction of works from the S.I. Newhouse Collection was held at Christie’s in New York and ended with record-breaking numbers in the span of just a few hours. As reported by The New York Times, several works including one of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, (Number 7A (1948)) a long horizontal composed of mostly black lines reminiscent of splattered Japanese ink painting, sold for record breaking numbers. The Pollock sold for $181 million, which broke the record for the highest price a deceased American artist has sold for at auction. The previous highest sale for a Pollock at auction was $61.2 million.
Other sales from the collection included Constantin Brancusi’s art-decoish stylized head, Danaide (approx 1913), for $107.6 million. Such sales, many over the $1 million mark, combined for a total combined take for the evening of $1.1 billion.
But what does this mean? In the middle of a down art market, the staggering auction prices point to three things:
- Collectors are placing their bets on established names with stable values as a hedge against otherwise currently widely-fluctuating art markets at lower price points.
- Collectors are collecting more for investment and bragging rights than out of a need for stewardship or support of living artists.
- Portfolio value comes before anything else. The sense is that if the entire contemporary art market folded, current collectors wouldn’t blink an eye as long as they keep trading Pollocks and Rothkos.
In fact, the recent auction at Christie’s spurned the ire of Jerry Saltz, the art world’s most-reliably middlebrow malcontent. In a piece for Vulture, he called the auction a “carnival-freak show” and accused such ultra-wealthy auctions as “the opposite of art.” When Jerry Saltz—a man whose entire role over the past four decades has been basically to decry mainstream taste while incarnating it and looking like a duck—thinks you’re being risk-averse, that’s saying something.
The next test of which way the market’s winds are blowing will be an upcoming auction in Los Angeles in June hosted by Bonhams of the estate and collection of iconic ‘70s actress Diane Keaton. Keaton, who died last fall at the age of 79, was intimately involved in supporting Los Angeles arts and institutions, including trying to save the historic Ambassador Hotel in the 2000’s.
Art from her collection will hit the auction block the first half of June 2026. My guess is that the collection (including works by postmodern masters Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg and Annie Leibovitz) will be far too “quirky” to raise interest among the million-or-more club, but in times of great instability, even the art of prediction is unreliable.
Image: Reuters