Christie’s Auction Sets Record: $853 Million
During the same week in which we learned that the share of wealth owned by the top 0.1% in the U.S. is almost the same as the bottom 90%, Christie’s International in New York gave us another sign of all the money the rich are able to splash around. The house made auction history Wednesday when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in about the same time it takes to watch a movie. Christie’s total easily surpassed its own roughly $600 million expectations, as American hedge-fund managers and Asian entrepreneurs in black silk-lapel suits raised their paddles for nearly everything on offer— and attendees let out gasps on occasion as prices soared. But the sale’s biggest pop belonged to— Andy Warhol, the market mainstay whose 1963 silk-screen of a trio of overlapping, gun-toting images of Elvis Presley, “Triple Elvis [Ferus Type],†sold to an anonymous European telephone bidder for $82 million.
