Contemporary Auction: Christie's Roars Back

Top Lot: Mark Rothko, "No. 15," 1952

You've probably already heard about the bravura performance of Christie's in pulling off a highly successful contemporary art auction last night:

---Second-highest contemporary art auction total ever: $348,263,600
---Record auction price for a living artist, set by Lucian Freud's "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping": $33,641,000
---Auction records set for seven more artists
---Top lot: Rothko's "No. 15," 1952 (above), $50.44 million, the second-highest auction price for that artist (behind the $72.84-million Rockefeller Rothko).

The sale was 95% sold by both dollar value and number of lots, which sounds like a boom, not a bursting bubble. That perennial bear, collector Eli Broad, was quoted at the end of Carol Vogel's NY Times report as saying:

The market is defying gravity. It was amazing.

But wait. I'm amazed too! Did I really see Vogel correctly compare presale estimates to HAMMER PRICES (as distinguished from final prices, including buyers premium), no fewer than FIVE TIMES? Could it be that my point about the need to compare apples to apples is, at last, being taken?

Now if she would just do the same for sale totals. Vogel wrote:

Only three of the auction's 57 lots failed to sell, bringing the evening's total to $348.2 million, well above its $282 million low estimate but below the $398.6 million high.

Actually, the hammer price total, which is the only one that should be compared to the presale estimates, was $309.01 million---still comfortably within the estimate range, but not, as Bloomberg has it, "closer to the top" of the range. That assessment only works if you misleadingly compare presale estimates (which DON'T include the buyers premium) to sale totals that DO include the buyers premium---the apples-to-oranges fallacy.

Lindsay Pollock and Philip Boroff, do you read me?

For Christie's complete results, go here.

On we go to Sotheby's tonight, home of the highest-estimated work in this spring's New York evening sales---Francis Bacon's "Triptych," which the auction house hopes will bring around $70 million. The entire sale is estimated at $291.05-360.65 million, making this a potentially close horse race with its archrival.