#christies

#christies

Last night (17 November), Christie's kicked off New York's marquee November auctions with its 20th-century evening sale, plus top-notch offerings from a virtually unknown single-owner American collection. The auction house racked up $574.7m from both sales, which rises to $690m with fees. The result well surpassed last November's $485.9m total (with fees), indicating that the market is regaining confidence. It also lands squarely within its pre-sale estimate of $358m to $533m (all estimates calculated without fees).

Our dad was a passionate collector, driven not by possession, but by a profound appreciation for the beauty, history and cultural resonance of the items he curated. From iconic instruments to handwritten lyrics by legends to rare historical artifacts and documents, each piece in the collection tells a story -- and he was always so excited to share those stories with the world.

On March 11, 2021, Christie's made history as the first major auction house to sell art in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT). Digital artist Beeple managed to offload his massive mosaic, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, for a whopping $69 million, generating hundreds of astonished headlines and getting those three letters, NFT, in front of untold scads of early-adopter eyeballs. It was the sale heard 'round the world, a starter pistol kicking off the NFT gold rush.

In 2018, Christie's catapulted AI artwork into the mainstream when they sold the Paris-based collective Obvious's GANS inkprint Portrait of Le Comte de Belamy (2018) for $432,500, dwarfing the work's high estimate of $10,000. And, few could forget the March 2021 sale of Beeple's digital work Everyday: The First 5000 Days (2021), which hammered at $69.3m (the house applied no estimate) and put NFTs on the art world map.

Judging by recent auction records that have been set by numerous artists from the Arab world and conversations with curators of major collections across the globe, it seems that demand for Arab art has expanded beyond the region into Western and Eastern collections.