After Going Digital, Sotheby’s ‘Contemporary Curated’ Sale Brought in $6.4 Million—an Online Auction Record for the Company

Sotheby’s set a personal best
yesterday at its Contemporary Curated auction in London.
Transplanted online in response to the health crisis, the sale
brought in $6.4 million (£5.1 million). Cruising past its pre-sale
high estimate of $5.75 million (£4.7 million), the total marks the
auction house’s highest ever recorded total for an online
sale.

The previous record was
set last month at
Sotheby’s online design sale, which realized a little over $4
million.

Leading the results of the
seven-day event was George Condo’s 2005 canvas, Antipodal
Reunion, which
depicts three grotesque, stripe-shirted cartoon figures. Eight bids
pushed the painting well past its $986,000 (£800,000) estimate to
$1.3 million (£1 million)—the highest price ever paid for a
painting in an online sale at Sotheby’s. 

There were other notable sales:
an intricately patterned 1993 canvas by
Yayoi Kusama, which went
for $293,000 (£237,500); a 1998
acrylic-on-aluminum work by Imi Knoebel, which brought $277,000 (£225,000); and
a Monir Shahroudy
Farmanfarmaian mirrored glass painting from 1975, which went for $463,000 (£375,000)—a
new auction record for the Iranian artist’s work.

Altogether, 88 percent of the
105 lots sold, over half of which exceeded their estimates. Bidders
came from 36 countries. Over a third were participating in a
Sotheby’s auction for the first time, the house reported. All told,
the effort was Sotheby’s most successful Contemporary Curated sale
in London ever—IRL or online (though last year’s New York edition
of the sale (the previous record was $5.9 million, set in November
2019.)

Online auctions
grew 63 percent last month, pulling in a combined $20.7 million—or 20
percent—more than this time last year, according to data from
Artnet’s Price Database. Still, those sales’ totals pale in
comparison to those traditionally brought in through live sales,
throwing into sharp relief the toll the pandemic has taken on
auction houses across the sector. 

Sotheby’s itself embodies this
predicament. The company has been among the industry’s most
successful in its transition online, bringing in almost $26 million
across 14 digital sales in March—six of which were converted from
live events. It has another 43 online events on the docket for
April and May. And yet, despite those successes, the auction
house furloughed
approximately 200 people, or roughly 12 percent of its staff, in late
March.

The post After Going Digital, Sotheby’s ‘Contemporary
Curated’ Sale Brought in $6.4 Million—an Online Auction Record for
the Company appeared first on artnet News.