It was supposed to be the highlight of New York’s spring auction week: Sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s masterpiece “Large Thin Head” was this year’s most hotly anticipated piece up for sale. But when the bidding opened, collectors went silent. WSJ’s Kelly Crow explains what this unexpected auction week bust reveals about today’s art market. Annie Minoff hosts. Further Listening: - The $6 Million Banana's Appeal - Is This Painting a Masterpiece? AI Is On the Case - The Basquiat Sisters on Managing One of Art's Hottest Brands Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Our colleague Kelly Crow covers the art market. And last week was a big one for her. It was auction week in New York.
Yeah, it's kind of the art world's version of the Super Bowl. The world's biggest auction houses roll out a series of sales that happen every night of the week. And for years, this has sort of served as a public reckoning moment to reassess price levels for hundreds of the world's most expensive artists.
Auction Week showcases the biggest art sales. It's a chance for art watchers like Kelly to see which artists are hot and what kind of eye-popping prices their work can command. And what was the hottest piece up for sale this auction week?
So heading into last week, all eyes were on this Alberto Giacometti sculpture, a bronze bust of the artist's younger brother, Diego. It kind of came in with the highest estimate of the week at around $70 million.
Collectors and curators consider the bust a masterpiece. And Kelly was in the room when it went up for sale at the auction house Sotheby's New York headquarters.
It's this soaring tall building built to sort of feel like a luxury shopping mall, if you will. There's escalators that run right up the middle with galleries ringing each floor. And so you kind of go up these series of escalators and... There's polite women greeting you at every floor. And everyone's in pinstripe suits and, you know, nice dresses.
And you sort of make your way finally to this huge room that has, you can see it, around 600 or 700 people. And it was pretty packed. There it is. I'm sitting there watching it, and I actually pulled out my phone and started Instagram-living. Hey, guys, I'm here outside of these. And here we go.
What happened next was unlike anything Kelly's seen at an auction for decades.
Oh, my goodness. The collective gasp that came out of these 600 mouths in the room was so audible that it was really startling.
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