Auctioneer Adrien Meyer secures the winning bid for Jackson Pollock's Number 7A, 1948 of $157 million. Courtesy Christie's.
Megan Fox Kelly spoke with journalist George Nelson at ARTnews following Monday’s evening auction at Christie’s.
Megan Fox Kelly told Nelson there may well have been more buyers participating than was immediately apparent. Two Christie’s staffers placed an outsized number of bids on Monday: Maria Los, deputy chairman and head of client advisory Americas, and Alex Rotter, global president. They “could each have been speaking to multiple collectors throughout the night,” Fox Kelly noted.
Fox Kelly, cautioned that Christie’s blockbuster results risked masking a weaker broader market. “It’s not smoke and mirrors so much as how people interpret the data. If you’re not looking at the market from the inside, there’s a tendency to assume that when the top end rises, everything rises with it. That’s not necessarily the case,” she said. “When collectors see extraordinary works making extraordinary prices, they assume the market is up for everything. They think the value of their own collections has necessarily risen because a major Pollock or Rothko sold for an enormous number. But those sales don’t automatically lift the value of everything else.”
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