Record Auction Prices for Contemporary Art Spark Nausea

At the contemporary art festival held November 8–11 in New York, auction houses Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips achieved record prices for works by artists including Louise Bourgeois ($3.04 million), Damien Hirst ($1.3 million), Richard Prince ($1.2 million), Paul McCarthy ($856,000), Hiroshi Sugimoto ($744,000), Francis Alÿs ($632,000), and Cindy Sherman ($385,000). The author critiques the obsession with records, noting that the highest contemporary art auction record is David Smith's sculpture at $23.8 million. However, the frenzy around top names creates nausea. On November 11, Phillips sold works from the collection of French design dealer Didier Krzentowsky: a Cindy Sherman film still fetched a high price, while other lots reflected a different reality—a Paul McCarthy image from 1995 sold for $36,000, a Richard Prince print from 1979 for $42,000, and a Hiroshi Sugimoto photograph from 1993 for $26,400. On November 7, Phillips sold a Richard Prince painting from 1988 for $475,200, which features a joke about a doctor's affair. The author concludes that humor is the only enduring value in contemporary art, as Duchamp understood.