It was a “white glove sale” that made the champagne corks pop on Wednesday night at Christie’s in New York: This term is used in technical jargon to describe an auction in which all lots were sold, no work left behind stains the white Gloves.
The start of the New York auction season was led by a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat: “The Guilt of Gold Teeth” was the most expensive work of the evening at US $ 40 million (the equivalent of 34.4 million euros), but it stayed that way at the lower end of the estimate. In second place was the painter Peter Doig, whose painting “Swamped” set a new world record for the artist, who had already been highly traded, with almost 40 million US dollars (including premiums exactly 39,862,500 dollars or 34,335,841 euros).
In third place is the newcomer to the Olympus of the market favorites: Beeple. Last year a collage of the US computer artist’s oeuvre when NFT (Non-Fungible Token, a kind of certificate of authenticity on the blockchain) changed hands for around 70 million dollars, the American (real name: Mike Winkelmann) is the face of the NFT hype . At Christie’s, an object has now been auctioned in which Beeple’s digital works are shown on a three-dimensional display. As can be seen on social media, the artist himself followed the auction – and the increase in his already considerable wealth – in the auction room and invested some money in art himself.
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