Marcia Sherrill
Sold!
At the record-breaking art auctions this spring, Marcia finds herself in the middle of the action
BY
Marcia Sherrill
PHOTOGRAPHY
Portrait by Steve Pomberg

It had been a few years since my daughter, Anabelle, now 12, had been to an auction, though she is often with friends’ parents who peruse the modern and contemporary art catalogs at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. These days, it’s something of a snobbish sport. Trolling past the Warhols and Lichtensteins with toddlers and teens in tow suggests that “Hey, I can plunk down a couple mil. These kids aren’t cheap.” And there is a ring of truth in that if your child insists on full-on Prada and Juicy Couture. In Manhattan this spring, contemporary art was sold like a luxury brand, but at Sotheby’s huge sale in May, Anabelle’s cries of “I love modern art” fell on my deaf ears and empty pocketbook.

I was bewildered to encounter a line of ticket holders spanning the block along York Avenue and 72nd Street. Since when did you need a ticket? It seems that art buying as theater has upped the ante, and while the tickets are free, the intent is to discourage the on-lookers, the gawkers and the morbidly curious who have neither the means nor intention of buying anything.

Without one of those coveted tickets, and having left my Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles business cards at the apartment, I grabbed a dog-eared copy of the magazine out of my tattered alligator bag and marched over to the press desk. That’s where, to my amazement, I was torn from my child and whisked to the very front of the auction room. Before me lay a sea of faces radically changed from the Sotheby’s I knew from my 20s and 30s. Gone were the layers of dusty academics, blue-haired matrons clad in couture and their bored, graying husbands, whose sole purpose in life was to raise the paddle when jabbed with an elbow. They were now replaced by SoHo bohemians and Upper East Side dandies jabbering on cell phones and texting on iPhones; BlackBerries chimed and buzzed to no censure, and curators fielded calls from what appeared to be dozens of anxious clients. No one even bothered to raise a paddle, as Bic pens seemed to be the favored method of closing a deal at mega-millions.

Phalanxes of young, elegant women manned over 40 phones as the Sotheby’s Jumbotron displayed prices in yen, euros, Swiss francs, pounds sterling, Hong Kong dollars and plain ol’ greenbacks. The crowd moaned in anticipation of each of the 85 lots. A giant, erotic Murakami sculpture that makes Michelangelo’s David look modest stood far back of the crowd and commanded an astounding $13.5 million. As auctioneer Tobias Meyer regaled the crowd with his soothing Teutonic accent—“Are we done at $77 million?”—the gavel came down on a Francis Bacon triptych. And the crowd swooned as he said “I shall sell it” when a pair of young gentlemen refused to continue bidding on a Robert Rauschenberg that was weirdly within its estimate on a night of soaring prices, especially for an artist just pronounced dead. These days, I guess, in this hyped up, go-go, modern art market, the spoils are for the living.