BY ANNA LOUIE SUSSMAN
Seasoned art collectors
know it’s usually wise to go into an auction with a set budget; otherwise one
can get carried away by the adrenaline. It helps when that budget is about $100
million.
Yusaku Maezawa, the
Japanese e-commerce billionaire, hewed to what appears to be his annual $100
million high-profile spring auction season spend, with his purchase of
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) at Thursday night’s Contemporary Art
evening sale at Sotheby’s. The canvas was hammered down at $98 million after a
dramatic 10-minute bidding war, coming to $110.4 million with the buyer’s
premium. It marks the highest auction price ever for an American
artist—unseating Andy Warhol, whose $105 million auction record was set by
Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963) at Sotheby’s New York in November
2013—and the second-highest price for any contemporary work.
Maezawa purchased $98
million of art at last year’s spring auctions, in a spending binge that
included a $57.3 million Basquiat, then a record for the artist.
Bidding began at $57
million, a sum that sounded a little cheeky at first, and drew murmurs from the
crowd. The murmurs morphed into gasps as that figure, and with it Basquiat’s
record, receded into history and the bidding soared. Sotheby’s specialist Yuki
Terase, on the phone with Maezawa, used incongruously slight gestures—a
delicate wiggle of a finger—to indicate she was ramping up the price by another
million.
Sotheby’s had guaranteed
the work for $60 million to the consignor, Lise Spiegel Wilks, and had also
received an irrevocable bid on the work, meaning a buyer had placed a bid at an
undisclosed amount and will share in the upside above that price. Auctioneer
and chair of Sotheby’s Europe Oliver Barker called the estimate of $60 million
“uncharted territory,” since it exceeded the previous record.
But Sotheby’s head of
contemporary art Grégoire Billault said the team had anticipated strong demand,
due to the quality of the work and the fact it had been off the market so long.
“We felt that yes, it was
the price that it deserved,” said Billault.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-110-million-basquiat-unseats-warhol-americas-expensive-artist-sothebys-sale
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