The trouble with art-world gossip is that it is often wrong, yet it goes around and around so fast that speculation becomes fact. Here's a recent example: After the best of a group of abstract canvases by Gerhard Richter sold at Sotheby's in November for $20.8 million, some spectators at the sale decided that the anonymous telephone buyer had been...
Despite (or perhaps because of) the stock market's nearly 400-point plunge, on Wednesday night collectors raced to put their available cash -- and lots of it -- into art. Sotheby's evening sale, the last of the week's three big-money evening auctions, achieved the company's third-highest total for a contemporary art sale ever (the highest was in...
NEW YORK -- Sotheby's Tuesday evening auction of contemporary art, in which 49 of the 54 works sold for an impressive $222.4 million, brilliantly illustrated an uncomfortable maxim. With rare exceptions, ''contemporary'' artists never do better than when they are dead and buried. In Sotheby's sale the exception was Gerhard Richter, born in 1932,...