After a dismal 2020, auction houses are looking to get back on track. May 10, 2021 This untitled Keith Haring lot will be on sale at Sotheby's this week. Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP. So, here we are, on the verge of another major—and relatively “normal,” whatever that means these days—auction season, as Christie’s and Sotheby’s get ready to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary art in the space of a single week. (Phillips’s sale has been pushed to June.) And despite all that has changed in the past year, some things have remained the same—or even shifted back to how they were before the pandemic. After a dismal 2020 for the auction houses, they’re now back on steadier ground, with the low end of the cumulative estimates this season reaching over $1 billion. (Does that ring a bell?)