Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern art on Wednesday proved to be a solid if unexciting evening. Experts there, however, pronounced it “fantastic,” as if to again reassure buyers and sellers that the art market was alive and well despite setbacks in the financial and real estate markets.
As was true at Christie’s auction of Impressionist [...]

You can’t help but wonder just how many of the smartly dressed people sitting night after night at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury over the next two weeks will be serious bidders and how many will be voyeurs hoping to witness an implosion of the multibillion dollar art market.
For years collectors and the news [...]

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the [...]

Lucian Freud’s one-time muse was paid £20 a day to sit for a painting expected to fetch more than £17m.
But Londoner Sue Tilley said she did not do it for the money and had “lovely lunches” with the artist.
Freud’s 1995 work, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, looks set to become the most expensive painting by a living [...]

“Two Wandering Tigers” by Cai Guo-Qiang
Sotheby’s sold $51.77 million worth of Chinese contemporary art in three auctions in Hong Kong on Wednesday, allaying concerns that the global economic slowdown would depress the prices. The highlight of the day was the highly anticipated afternoon sale of more than 100 works from the Estella Collection, which Sotheby’s [...]

Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction of Chinese contemporary art brought in nearly $18 million on Wednesday afternoon, with aggressive bidding countering concerns that global economic uncertainties would weaken prices.
More than 100 works from the Estella Collection, which Sotheby’s has called the largest and most important trove of Chinese contemporary art, were on the block. In the [...]

Tonight, on the evening of Valentine’s Day, over $40 million was raised to fight AIDS in Africa in an historic auction — the most significant charity auction of Contemporary Art ever — organized by Bono, Damien Hirst, Sotheby’s, Gagosian Gallery and dozens of donating artists in the (RED) Auction. The proceeds will go the United [...]