By James Tarmy
During a lovely spring week in May 2019, in what now feels like the halcyon days of pre-Covid life, seven paintings and three sculptures sold for a brisk $605 million.
Flash forward to this year, when it took 12 months and a 67-million-year-old dinosaur to amass top 10 results that still only managed to total $408 million.
To be clear: The top of the auction market is never a great indicator of how the art market is doing; it’s like trying to gauge the strength of the U.S. car market by looking at Bugatti sales. This has always been true, and it’s particularly salient during the pandemic as jittery sellers turn to pre-arranged (and publicly untraceable) private sales instead of riskier public auctions.