Alexandra Suich Bass

speaker

194 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Alexandra Suich Bass’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

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On first glance, the painting by an unknown seventeenth century artist seemed unlikely to start a bidding war.

It depicts two yellow skulls, one without a lower jaw, and a handwritten note.

Yet on July 1st, bidding at an auction at Christie's in London pushed the painting's price to $575,000, about four times the pre-sale estimate.

Sales of old masters, a century-spanning category that typically includes works completed before 1850, are picking up.

The value of sales of Old Masters worldwide rose 30% in 2025 from a year earlier to $1.2 billion.

But that doesn't quite capture the full story.

Many of these paintings are sold privately.

Patrick Williams of Adam Williams, a gallery in New York, told me that younger buyers are showing more interest too.

This year sixteen percent of bidders in old master sales at Sotheby's are under the age of forty, nearly triple the share from five years ago.

So what's changed in the past two years?

Contemporary markets have been showing some volatility.

Old masters are more stable, they're less expensive, and of course they're more scarce since the artists are long dead.

Buyers have more eclectic tastes too.

Paul Smeets, a gallerist, told me.

Portraits and figurative art are in vogue because they're instagrammable.

There's an allure to old fashioned fabrics and a romanticizing of simpler life.

In an AI age, older things feel more authentic.

Can you describe it since people won't be able to see it?

Of course,

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