Auctions November 2023: With $1.8 Billion in Sales, Auctions Return to the Fair and Sober

Sotheby's auctioneer Oliver Barker takes bids during Sotheby's auction of Emily Fisher Landau collection, including Picasso's "Femme à la montre" in New York City on November 8, 2023. Pablo Picasso's 'Femme a la montre' from 1932 is expected to fetch at least 120 million USD. Other works up for sale include pieces by Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol. The sale consists of around 120 pieces from Landau's prestigious collection which is overall expected to realise well over 400 million USD. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP) (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images). AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Journalist Angelica Villa spoke with Megan Fox Kelly about her thoughts on the fall marquee New York auctions. Kelly shares that the “sober” environment—where prices are fair and bidding doesn’t climb to stunning heights—is good news for some.

Serious collectors often leverage such a “softer” auction environment as an opportunity to access works previously beyond their reach, said New York art adviser Megan Fox Kelly. She emphasized that a more tempered marketplace can put some buyers at a strategic advantage when they’re calculating acquisitions with mind-bending values. “It’s a buyer’s market,” she said.

At Christie’s, Monet’s Le Bassin aux nymphéas (1917-19) went for $74 million during a 20th-century evening sale. “Whoever bought that painting, the guarantor, bought it really well,” said Kelly. “It could have been a whole lot more.”

So, where is the market right now? Advisers downplayed the significance of short-term drops in overall auction sales as a metric for assessing the trade’s health. Compared to the 2008 recession, for instance, there is a far more global spread of buyers, said Kelly, meaning that the market’s recovery time from any given slowdown is now significantly shorter. The bottom line: “I think there is still a lot of discretionary money out there,” Kelly said.

Read Villa’s full coverage in ARTnews here.