Mica’s Magritte, a train full of laces and Cattelan’s banana: Auction week in New York

My God, if you look at all the art in New York City this fall — it’s an embarrassment of riches. Museums have just launched major shows, which means the highly anticipated “Flight to Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt” opens at The Met this weekend, and the The amazing Orphism show will take place at the Guggenheim, with boldly colored abstract gems dotting the spiral ramp up the dome. Christian MarclayThe 24-hour ticking masterpiece of clock is currently showing at MoMA and the Alvin Ailey show at the Whitney is a grand spectacle. One can spend a whole day browsing the big stores in Chelsea, or exploring Tribeca, where dozens of galleries have set up shop in the blocks between Broadway and Church in the past five years. It’s a lot.

But modestly: The best places to see art at this particular time in New York are not museums or galleries, but auction houses—open to the public (and completely free!) —displays the billions of dollars of art they expect to sell next week. And if you don’t go now, all this art will be gone forever, shipped to the docks and homes of their new owners.

I will be on the ground to do all the hammering—and to see whether the election of Donald Trump and the sharp increase in the stock market has an impact on the depth of bidding—but before that, let’s take a quick look at some of the goods in the neighborhood next week, shall we?

Christie’s is selling off the estate of Mica Ertegun, a fabulous Manhattan doyenne who counted among her close friends everything from Jackie O to Mick Jagger to Henry Kissinger to Bette Midler to the Orthodox priest based in Southampton Father Alexander Karloutsos. She passed away last year, three years later she turned 100 years old. Until Tuesday, New Yorkers can stop by Rockefeller Center and walk through the aisles to gawk at the elegant objects that have filled the lives of Mica and her husband, the influential music executive extremely large Ahmet Ertegun, who passed away in 2006 after a fall in Bill Clintonhis 60th birthday party at the Beacon Theater, while the Rolling Stones performed—one of the greatest lives anyone will ever live, it has been argued.

ED RUSCHA, Standard Station, Western Ten cents torn in halfCourtesy of CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2024.

“She died at 97, so she was one of those children of the century who saw and did everything and traveled everywhere, had homes everywhere,” said. Max Carter, Christie’s Vice President of 20th and 21st Century Art.

This is one of the few properties sold this week that brought excitement to the auctions, even if it didn’t fetch hundreds of millions of dollars like the estates of Paul Allen or David Rockefeller did. in recent years.

“Over the past few seasons, there has been no shortage of demand – it’s the supply that’s always changing and I feel very confident about this particular season because we have a lot of things that are special, a lot of things that are opportunities for generation,” Carter said. ABOVE. “There are many other things in Mica’s collection, many in the collections of many different owners, that have been hidden for decades and you won’t really get them back if you don’t act now .”

The star of the collection is the Rene Magritte that the Erteguns purchased from the Byron Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1968, when Ertegun was nearing his peak as a music and mica industry mogul is launching his interior design company, MAC II. She has designed apartments for many of her incredible friends and collaborators: Bill Blass, Alice Walton, Keith Richards, Michael Eisner, and Jimmy Buffett. She also designed her own apartment and this Magritte took pride of place in their home.

“Magritte is unparalleled—it hasn’t been on the market for a long time, so it’s not only iconic but also irreplaceable, it’s provenance and newness to the market, always driving demand.” Megan Fox Kelly, who has several customers planning to bid next week.