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Beyond the Banana-rama

Look past the crypto spectacle of Cattelan’s $6.2 million duct-taped fruit, and it’s clear that the premier auctions showed a steady appetite for the superstars’ stand-out works—Magritte, Ruscha, Prince—but a less reliable hunger for everything else. Of course, the houses are declaring victory.

Ed Ruscha Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half
An influential art advisor observed that we seemed to be seeing a reemergence of “individual taste”—a polite way of saying that you really could not predict which lots would do well once you stepped down from the undeniably great ones. Photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images
Marion Maneker
November 24, 2024

Christie’s C.E.O. Guillaume Cerutti was his usual Gallic self after the auction house concluded its first evening of sales—led by a $121 million Magritte, a $68 million Ed Ruscha, a $26 million Alberto Giacometti, a $19 million David Hockney, and a $17 million Joan Mitchell. He sat stone-faced in the audience of his own post-sale press conference as chairman Alex Rotter explained that his approach to the season was to confront an uncertain market with undeniable masterpieces, top-loading the sales with bankable, evergreen art works. And that’s more or less how the first night played out: The top 10 lots of the Mica Ertegun and 20th Century sales accounted for two-thirds of the $486 million in sales.