Dance on the volcano: The most expensive works of art at international auctions in 2022

Dhe winner of the year puts it in a nutshell: “Sometimes we dance with the art market on the volcano,” says Guillaume Cerutti, head of the auction house Christie’s, which has annual sales of $8.4 billion – after $7.1 billion in the previous year – has not only set a new company record, but also a record for the auction business as a whole. Competitor Sotheby’s follows not far behind in second place with total sales of eight billion dollars, also a new record value that clearly exceeds the previous year’s record of 7.3 billion. Phillips, the smallest house of the big three, also reports a record result. Although $1.3 billion in sales is little more than $1.2 billion in 2021, the company can look forward to strong growth in private sales.

War in Ukraine, rebellion in Iran, more and more corona upheavals, especially in China, recession and inflation in the West: All of this has only strengthened the will of the wealthy to invest their abundant capital in art. When top-class private collections with top works by canonical artists were also auctioned off, there was no stopping them.

This was already evident in the spring when Andy Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” went under the hammer at Christie’s in New York along with the $318 million collection by the late art dealers Thomas and Doris Ammann. The image from a series of Warhol’s comrade-in-arms Dorothy Podber firing a pistol ball in 1964, loaded with this special story, shot up 170 million dollars. Mega-dealer Larry Gagosian won the charity auction and can now boast the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction of the 20th century and the most expensive of 2022 – good for business.

Christie’s would have liked to have achieved even more: the estimate was $200 million in advance. Then, in November, when the auction house launched – also for philanthropic causes – the modernist-focused collection of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen in New York, the top lots reliably lived up to their high expectations. 150 lots from the Allen Collection brought in an incredible $1.6 billion, including the premium, more than any other private collection before it; 20 artist records were set, five bids ended up in excess of 100 million dollars, most notably Georges Seurat’s pointillist meta-picture “Les Poseuses” from 1888. Seen from the pixelated screen world in which we pose, it seems strangely familiar. The gavel fell at $130 million – in favor of a bidder from Asia.

The auction houses see growth potential on this continent, although the sales figures in this part of the world have been weakening recently and America remains the largest market. But at Sotheby’s, Asian collectors now spend more per person on average than collectors from other continents, according to the company, and the house achieved a stable $1.1 billion in sales despite all the political and pandemic turmoil in Hong Kong. Reason enough for Sotheby’s to open a new branch there in the near future, while Tokyo and Seoul continue to catch up as art metropolises.

Overall, the proportion of younger buyers under 40 is growing at Sotheby’s; a trend that Christie’s is also observing: Millennials are gaining weight among buyers – and are changing the supply side with their tastes. May heroes of the last century and the one before last enthrone at the top, from Cezanne to Basquiat, hot – and also overheated – are traded a few levels below young stars like Anna Weyant, Christina Quarles, Ewa Juszkiewicz or Flora Yukhnovich. The shooting star of the year 2021 shows how quickly a meteoric rise can be followed by a fall: sales of NFTs have now fallen by 98 percent.