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After two successive nights of $700 million art auctions—both strong, but hardly indications of an art market where buyers were bidding with abandon—I thought the remainder of New York’s so-called gigaweek would be relatively quiet. I envisioned a series of modest day sales and cleanup evening sales where business got done with little excitement. Was I ever wrong.

On Wednesday evening, as my last newsletter went out, the $126 million Christie’s evening sale of 21st century art—with works from the collection of Chicago couple Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson—was just getting started. Edlis and Neeson were tastemakers in their day. A huge trove of their art—including major works by Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Cindy Sherman—now forms the backbone of the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection of postwar and contemporary holdings. Had those works been included in the sale, it would have been a tentpole event in the art market. That said, the works on offer were nothing to sneeze at.

One of Sherman’s more recognizable Film Still works—No. 13, from 1978—in an unusually large format sold for a banner price of nearly $2.2 million. A smaller version of the work sold in 2008 for $900,000. A bronze statue of a toy cowboy by Richard Prince sold for $3.3 million, and a rare Double Nurse painting made a conservative $3.5 million. Warhol’s bright yellow double image of Leonardo’s Last Supper sold for a little more than $8.1 million, nearly the same price as a different version in the same color that was sold in 2018. And a Warhol oxidation diptych that once sold for $775,000 in 2011 made $1.7 million this week.

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In many ways, the Edlis-Neeson collection had a time warp feel to it, due to not only the couple’s tastes, but also its redolence of an earlier era in the art market. Nowhere was this more evident than in the sale of John Currin’s Lake Place, from 2012, which was estimated at $2.5 million. The estimate was no doubt keyed to Christie’s sale in May of an earlier Currin painting for $3 million, a sign of the stirring of interest around an artist whose work had gone out of favor. But this painting didn’t summon that enthusiasm. It was sold for a hammer price of $1 million, or $1.27 million with fees. In another measure of changing tastes, the Edlis-Neesons’ four pieces of Diego Giacometti furniture brought in a total of $12 million, well above the combined estimate of less than $6 million.

In the various-owners portion of Christie’s sale, there were some other lots that charted the changing taste in contemporary art. Takashi Murakami’s Miss Ko2, from 1997, sold for $2.75 million with fees. It’s the third time one of these editioned works has sold in the last eight years for approximately the same price—although it’s a far cry from 2010, when one of the edition sold for $6.8 million. It’s another reminder that art market prices are not so much a measure of quality as they are a reflection of demand. Low prices, as with the Currin sale, often draw our scorn, but they regenerate interest in an artist’s work and allow art to be redistributed more efficiently.

On the opposite end of the distribution spectrum, Olga de Amaral’s Pueblo H, from 2011, sold from Elaine Wynn’s collection for $3.1 million—more than twice de Amaral’s previous auction record. All of her sales above $1 million have come since the Fondation Cartier exhibition in Paris in late 2024, and de Amaral’s gallery, Lisson, has played an important role in building on this interest. There’s a show of the artist’s work up right now in Los Angeles.

Of course, we cannot leave Christie’s without mentioning the sale of Christopher Wool’s RIOT, from 1990, which made nearly $20 million. Bought by a West Coast art advisor, the painting actually achieved the artist’s fourth-highest auction price ever. A decade ago, hard on the heels of a major museum retrospective of his work, a similar version of this painting sold for nearly $30 million. But as a testament to how long Wool’s word paintings have had an enduring presence in the culture, recall Morley Safer’s infamous 60 Minutes report from 1993, lampooning the auction market for contemporary art and complaining that another Wool word painting had sold for… $30,000. How far we’ve come.

At one point on Wednesday evening, Pylkkänen turned down a chopped bid. In announcing that he would not accept bids in $100,000 increments, he slyly noted that he wasn’t Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s star auctioneer. The next night, during Sotheby’s sale of the Pritzker Collection, when Barker turned down a bid, he told the bidder with a smile, “I’m advised I take too many split bids.” Barker then turned his gaze to the first few rows, where Pylkkänen, now a top art advisor (he bought a $12.3 million Magritte, the most expensive lot in the modern evening sale), was seated. “I’ve been waiting to say that all day,” he addressed his former rival directly.

The good-natured ribbing drew laughter from the crowd, but Barker did seem to hold the line a bit more than usual. Then, when Helena Newman replaced Barker for the modern evening auction, the iron fist came out of the velvet glove. Twice Newman was forced to lay down the law to maintain the bidding increments, and both times her long experience paid off. Her bidders accepted the conditions and finally bid the next increment.

It’s rare to see variations on this delicate art form so starkly displayed. And, with fewer and fewer live auctions being conducted, there’s a sense that the next generation of auctioneers will not be able to accumulate the necessary experience—it takes a long time to get that comfortable in high-stress situations—to rise to the level of these last-of-a-dying-breed masters.

I don’t know if it was the auctioneering that provided the secret sauce at Sotheby’s on Thursday night, but something clicked in the room, and all three of the auctions Sotheby’s held were conducted without a lot passing (although two lots were withdrawn). Global guarantees may have played a role; the excitement and novelty of the new Breuer Building might have contributed, as well. But the result was another $305 million in auction sales, with the Pritzker Collection accounting for $109.5 million of that total.

The top lot was a Vincent van Gogh still life, which advisor Patti Wong bought for $62.7 million. Max Beckmann’s Der Wels, from 1947, sold for $9.2 million with fees, well above the $5 million estimate without fees. In the Exquisite Corpus sale of art collected by Nesuhi Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, Frida Kahlo’s El Sueño sold for more than $54 million, a record price for a work by a female painter.

A few works struggled against their estimates, but on the whole, the three sales were conducted with enthusiastic, sometimes aggressive bidding. There even seemed to be a collector or two in the room bidding on surrealist works for themselves. Indeed, that was the theme of the week: art being bought for the love of art, not in pursuit of returns.