The world had its first billion-dollar art sale—and the night was barely halfway over.
. While a relatively lowball run of lots were on the block—a few of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s six- and seven-figure masterworks sandwiched between a Gustav Klimt that sold for $104 million and a Vincent van Gogh that sold for $117 million—I left thethe global CEO of Christie’s, huddled somewhat conspiratorially withthe auction house’s global president.
Immediately Pylkkänen launched into his plummy auctioneer patter, calling the four-foot-tall Giacometti sculpture “a nice thing, a wonderful object,” and looking down at phone-to-ear mega-dealerand saying, “Chris, are you coming in?” Estimated to sell for $20 million, it went for $25 million to a client on the phone with a Christie’s specialist from Switzerland, primo Giacometti territory.“One billion dollars, you got that?” the rep said. “We hit it with Giacometti.
I was trying to do the math in my head, and with the number of eight-and-nine-figure lots I realized, yes, with fees, that would add up to hit the elusive 10-figure mark. The world had its first billion-dollar art sale. The night was barely halfway over. The grand total ended up at $1.5 billion, making it the highest-grossing auction of all time. It nearly doubled the previous record, and smashed the record for most valuable private collection, soaring past the mark by more than half a billion.
The record-smashing total points to the eye-popping wealth and picture-buying tenacity of the late multibillionaire Allen, who died in 2018 at age 65. Yes, he compiled what’s now the most expensive art collection in history, but that’s just the oil-on-canvas portion of everything he bought over the years, which amounts to an unthinkable array of fancy stuff.with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and used the latter half of his life to empty his coffers stuffed to the brim with software moola.
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