Hope being an exotic commodity these days, I try to take it wherever I can get it. One of the few recent times I’ve felt optimistic about the future was last fall—November 18th, to be exact, at 7 p.m. EST. The setting was the Breuer building on 945 Madison Avenue, which Sotheby’s had bought for a hundred million dollars in 2023, and the occasion was (I know, I know) an art auction. Beggars can’t be choosers.
What happened was: A few hundred members of the bunker class, looking properly shiny-shoed and puffy-lipped, came to the Upper East Side to attend the auction house’s Now & Contemporary Evening Sale. Champagne was imbibed. Fussy little salmon-and-cucumber canapés were munched. In an effort to make sure I wouldn’t be turned away, I’d spent many hours on the phone with a succession of press agents, each politer and kinder and less helpful than the last. Absolutely… I’d be happy to pass that on… Certainly… Just a moment, please… I don’t know if that’s possible but let me check… Whether it was Ernesto or Bruno or Bernardo crooning in my ear, I had spent my early November sampling a single melodious Fuck off, like if hold music were a human voice. (In case it ever comes up, here is how you infiltrate the most talked-about auction season in recent memory: Walk in. Remember to dress nice, and if the weather’s cold, be sure to remove your outer layers by the time you’re through the front door. The security guard may give you the can-I-help-you treatment, but whoever’s behind the front desk will barely look up as she sends you to the elevators with her swipe finger.)
The bunker people finished their drinks and made their way to the sales room. They were here to watch hundreds of millions of dollars of artworks pass from consignor to buyer, one of these works being America, a fully functioning, eighteen-karat gold toilet by (or “by”—it’s not like he built it himself) the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. The auctioneer opened the bidding at ten million dollars, waited for someone to go higher, made a series of toilet puns and, what felt like many centuries later, sold America to the one and only buyer, a “famous American brand.” And that was it. That was the inspirational moment.
Not exactly the March on Washington, perhaps, but the more I think about it, the better I feel. Even now, as I’m typing this, it makes me smile, for the simple reason that I dislike auctions and would like few things more than to see them dismantled canapé by canapé. Whatever your feelings on capitalism or the one percent, I think you should hate them too, and (provided you like art and aren’t a billionaire) I think I can convince you the sale of America is promising news. Weeks passed before I saw this for myself, though. Moments of genuine hope, like works of art, don’t always explain themselves straightaway.
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My acquaintance with the art market had been growing like mold all autumn. I’d proposed a long piece on Sotheby’s and the auction scene, an editor had granted my wish, and immediately I’d regretted the whole thing. Like many art critics I know, I try to avoid writing about the sale of art whenever possible, not because the subject is so very complex but because beating a dead horse has never been my idea of a good time.
But before I raise my riding crop, a question: What do auction houses sell? Easy—they sell whatever people own that other people want: Chardin still lifes, oil drums, Napoleon’s teeth, the Elephant Man’s bones, landscapes, fossilized dinosaur turds, the transaxle from James Dean’s Porsche, a signed first edition of Mein Kampf, handbags, watches, William Shatner’s kidney stone, self-portraits, shoes.
Also, hippos. Metal hippos, with hinged doors and revolving bottle racks in the belly. The enormous one in the lobby of the Breuer that fall was primarily made from copper—was, in fact, the only copper hippo by this particular artist, although he made others in bronze. Auction houses love this kind of object, because it’s safely representative of an artist’s work (i.e. similar to other things that have already sold for millions of dollars) but still appealingly distinctive (e.g. nobody’s going to stop by your place in South Beach, see the copper hippo in the cigar lounge, and say they’ve got one just like it). Whichever Sotheby’s employee decided to place Lot 8 in the lobby deserves a handsome raise. A copper hippo, estimated to sell for between seven and ten million dollars, set the tone for the season. It may as well have been the company mascot.
“Exciiiting,” I heard a Sotheby’s employee in a salmon frock tell her colleague. (Perhaps you’re familiar with this word, not to be confused with its near homophone “exciting,” from episodes of Succession? A rough translation might be “stressful and complicated in ways that cannot be acknowledged directly,” or perhaps just “unexciting.”) I felt her pain, I really did. Art auctions have this strange ability to throw endless flashy oddities in your face—gold toilets! butterflies! shredders!—and still bore you catatonic. Writing about them seemed both too easy and impossible. You could always eat up five hundred words telling readers about, say, the abyss-eyed lady who tries to tell you about her latest trip to Scotland (everybody’s going to be moving there once climate change gets worse). But eventually you needed say something about What It All Means, and how much was there to say beyond the fact that selling art to furnish the houses of Trump backers and opioid pushers was obscene?
Not that this has stopped everyone. In the past twenty years, there have been so many art-world satires they deserve their own section at Barnes & Noble. Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, Stephanie LaCava’s The Superrationals—whatever you might think about the literary quality of these works, their notion of how art gets discovered and promoted and criticized and sold isn’t significantly more sophisticated than that of, say, the scene in The Other Guys where Mark Wahlberg name-drops Cindy Sherman. The last intelligent human being to claim the market was good for art was probably Dave Hickey, who died in 2021. Most other writers seem to think some version of the following: money warps what it touches; excellent art may be out there but is unlikely to prosper in a market system that rewards sniveling careerists; the people buying paintings barely know which way to hang them and only care about dodging taxes anyway. All quite possibly true. Saying it over and over, though, struck me as plangent or else just naïve, like criticizing a priest for being preachy.
And then Sotheby’s bought the Breuer, and I began to understand how people can still be mad at auction houses for ruining everything.
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The first time I went to the Breuer, I had a long conversation about socialism. I was a college freshman, if that wasn’t clear from the previous sentence, so this would have been 2011, one of the last years you could go there to see the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which had resided within since 1966. I don’t remember what I thought of the building, but I must have had some dim awareness that I was walking through a landmark of Brutalism, the architectural style that emerged in the late Forties, when the world was freshly scorched and too much aesthetic refinement seemed barbaric. A few more years would pass before I’d start to appreciate the unapologetic rough bulk of the place, the complete indifference to looking pretty that allows it to look sublime instead.
The Breuer is the only building that has regularly given me the feeling New York City is always supposed to inspire: a sense of standing at the center of everything and staring out. There are strange minerals half-buried in the walls. There are colors that blush and fade with the passing sun. If it weren’t architecture, it would be the Grand Canyon. When the Whitney’s curators understood what they were working with (spring 2013, say, the year of an irresistible exhibition of Edward Hopper’s drawings), they didn’t overstuff the galleries with light or things. Artworks appeared on the walls with a tempo of sleeping breaths; shows looked like they had been there since the dawn of time and had no plans of moving. The Breuer always has this aura of inevitability, which makes its recent history funnier, or at least more laughable.
A few months before I started college, the Met had announced its intentions to take over 945 Madison, and for much of the second half of the 2010s the Breuer’s galleries were devoted to solemnly ravishing exhibitions of Munch and Richter and Whitten. In 2021 the building changed owners again and became the temporary home of the Frick collection. If you visited during any of these years, you were an exceptionally lucky museumgoer. If not, what you need to know is that, for a long time, New Yorkers could come to the Breuer and see, free of charge if they played it right, world-class art in world-class conditions (sorry, but Fragonard’s Progress of Love will never look as good in the redundant floweriness of the Frick as it did on Madison). I don’t miss many things about my twenties, but I miss the hours I spent at 945 Madison, especially when I think about what came next. Sotheby’s bought the building, and a place where the public could go see art year-round became one where art goes to disappear.
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“Two hundred and eighty million dollars, are we all done? Maybe not. Don’t take the photograph quite yet.” These words were spoken in November 2017, in the New York headquarters of Christie’s, Sotheby’s only serious rival among auction houses. Anyone can go on YouTube and watch the Global President sell Lot 9B, a five-hundred-year-old, possibly bogus painting of Jesus. For some reason, it was included in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. In the video, no one looks confused.
You can see a few people in the center of the room making bids, but most are there just to watch. The real action comes from the extreme left and right, where columns of employees stand with their landlines raised. Years before, there was some hand-wringing about how phones would ruin the auction experience: the endless whispering and waiting would drain away all the excitement, it was widely assumed—and if anybody could call from anywhere on the planet, what was the point of holding an in-person auction to begin with? In the end, the weirdness of buying art over the phone turned out to be no match for agoraphobes’ lust for barking orders.
The savior stares out at the room with Xanaxed bonhomie, left eye sagging below his right.
“Give me two-ninety?” the Global President asks. Some diligent mumbling, and then a subordinate gives him three hundred. “I thought so,” the Global President says with a tasty sneer. Lot 9B—the same painting everyone had dismissed as a workshop mediocrity until a few years ago—ends up selling for 450 million dollars, to the sound of polite applause. At the time there were grumbles that Christie’s reclassified it as the work of an Old Master to net itself extra tens of millions in commissions. Less talked about was Christie’s decision to call 9B a work of contemporary art.
The winning bidder turned out to be the Saudi royal family; in the aftermath of the sale, rumor had it the painting was being displayed in the cozy splendor of a storage locker. That’s always a safe bet. Plenty of esteemed collectors have seen their purchases only once, and plenty of others never will. There are well over a million works of art in the Geneva Freeport, some of which have spent years moving from owner to owner without leaving the building. When Japanese billionaires unloaded their collections in the 2010s, handlers realized that many of the Impressionist masterpieces inside hadn’t seen the outside of a crate since the Reagan administration. And for every case we know about, there must be many more, smothered under a stack of NDAs.
At this point there are lots of questions we might want to ask concerning the legality or morality or obvious sleaziness of this kind of behavior. I have a simpler one, though: Why do people clap at art auctions? It seems odd to come to the Upper East Side to cheer for the winning bidder, who probably isn’t even in the room and who, for all anyone knows, manufactures tear gas for a living. Are people applauding the painting? Unlikely, unless they’re excited about never seeing it again. My hypothesis: they’re clapping for cash itself.
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The fall auctions were about to begin. Hundreds of artworks were poised to vanish into the climate-controlled cellars of the one percent, but first the public was welcome to browse. That’s right: anybody could go into the Breuer, walk upstairs without reaching for a wallet or showing a New York driver’s license or a student ID, and see the art. For thirteen whole days!
If this strikes you as a lavish gift from Sotheby’s to the world, rather than a piddling consolation prize, odds are good that you are a Sotheby’s employee yourself (or possibly the architecture critic for the Times—“The biggest change in the end,” he wrote, in what may as well have been sponcon, “is that entry to the building will now be free, unlike when this was a ticketed museum”). All the same, I knew I had to go. The auction preseason is one of the few times when anyone can see what the bunker classes are craving, which is to say what, if anything, they’re thinking about. Like hope, you take these opportunities wherever you can get them.
On November 8th, the Breuer was as full of bodies as I’d ever seen it: elevator-loads of old folks in gray puffer jackets; clenched circles of scarved ladies; kids trying to slide down the banisters in the stairwells, or maybe up. The entry line poked through the front door, past the concrete moat along the sidewalk and around the block. Most of the visitors I chatted with were Upper East Siders who lived a short walk away. Many had brought their dogs—the better to help them imagine the art hanging in their living rooms, I suppose.
Almost as soon as I arrived I noticed the lead Sotheby’s auctioneer sauntering about among the masses. TikTok, I’d heard, was crazy for his tall, lanky Englishness, and seeing him in the galleries I could understand why—he’s one of those people who look so polished you feel you’ve forgotten to read the user manual for your own body. Standing in gaggles of vast net worth, his eye contact is exquisite, excluding nobody. His expressions are legible from across the room, and probably Central Park. When he smiles, it’s because he’s instructed his mouth to smile.
In the stairwell, I noticed the tiny clay city sculpted by Charles Simonds: a dwelling for little people. It’s been there since the Eighties, and people adore it, as they adore most small, innocent, defenseless things. I find it hard to imagine the building without it, and for the time being, Sotheby’s appeared to agree with me. When I told someone I’d be visiting the Breuer, he asked if the Simonds was still there, the way one might inquire after a dear friend who’s been in a car crash.
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Here I should confess something. Even though it’s my job to evaluate aesthetic objects with some degree of detail, my first real thought, once I’d made it up the stairs and taken my first swig of the showroom, was: “Yuck.” Months later, I’m not sure if I have anything to offer beyond elaborate paraphrases of that word. The upper floors of the Breuer had been crammed with drywall; paintings butted into other paintings; plinths were chipped, stubbed; labels presumably corresponded to something. I hadn’t had a drink in months, but the lighting made me feel like I was walking through a CVS hungover at 7 a.m. on a Sunday, and it was all so bright and shrill and shameless it instilled an irritation that was almost despair, as though life itself was nothing but a series of overlit rooms of drywall and concrete. I assume this is what Brutalism haters feel when they think about Brutalism.
As I made my way through, I began to notice something. No matter how hard I tried, I could not look at art there. You’ve heard of face blindness? Somehow when I walked in, I’d contracted the disease, but for paintings and photographs and the like. My eyes worked fine. It didn’t matter whether I was trying to contemplate Lot 617, or Lot 113, or Lot 812, or Lot 105, or Lot 306—whatever I happened to be looking at, I found equal blurs staring back at me as aesthetic quality slipped away in the slurry of the setting. I spent what felt like an eon studying a corner of the floor, trying to figure out which text went with which artwork, before I realized there were five labels but only three paintings. A man with long eyelashes pointed out the error to nobody in particular, but somebody heard him anyway. Seconds later, two Sotheby’s employees were making the corrections, as though they’d been standing there, waiting for him to complain.
The easy explanation for this would be that Sotheby’s didn’t do its job very well: the organizers had no time to throw together a coherent show, the Breuer isn’t a particularly large building relative to the amount of stuff on display, and what’s the point if previews only last a few days? Maybe so, but given that much of the art I failed to look at was fated to spend the next couple decades not being looked at, I have to wonder if Sotheby’s understood its assignment perfectly. Not looking at valuable art, one could argue, is the ultimate sign of ownership. True ownership means being a little careless (“Oh, this old thing?”); true power is the power to treat your property like trash—lose track of it, let it shatter or scuff in the calm confidence that you can collect the insurance and buy something else. William Randolph Hearst loved to tell his friends how he spent months tracking down a lovely silver sculpture, only to realize he’d bought it years before. Any old fool can collect art, but only a true robber baron could forget what he’s collected.
I realize I’m being vague about what I saw at the Breuer, but let me be precise about my vagueness, at least. Nearly impossible though it was to scrutinize individual works, certain qualities appeared too often to be ignored. John Mulaney has a good bit about Trump being a poor person’s idea of a rich person, and, taken together, the Breuer’s contents suggested nothing so much as a pauper’s idea of rich-guy art—heavy, gold, lots of shiny mirrorlike surfaces so as to optimize narcissism. The gold, especially: Lot 573, a gold tapestry by O—; Lot 592, a gold sculpture by L—; Lot 249, a gold sculpture by M—; Lot 315, a gold sculpture by J—; Lot 585, another gold tapestry by O—. Some of these were actual gold, some bronze or gold-patinated bronze or gilded brass, others merely metal, but as I walked through the Breuer they seemed to melt into a single yellow smear.
To call the Now & Contemporary artworks at the Breuer ugly isn’t necessarily an insult. Art history would be nothing but flowers and fat little angels without ugliness, which comes in as many flavors as beauty. Do you take your ugliness brave? Try Goya. Honest? There’s always Arbus. Cerebral? Duchamp and the Dadaists. Rich and macabre? Bacon. Ugliness challenges, ugliness reproaches its audience for preferring beauty, over time ugliness may become a new kind of beauty. Whereas the ugliness at the Breuer didn’t challenge anything or anybody. It didn’t need to—it just gloated from a great height.
The irony of this arrangement is that there were a few objects I could see clearly at Sotheby’s Breuer, but not because they were any good—almost the opposite. In a typical exhibition, the standout artworks are the handful that persuade us to pay them attention by dint of their beauty or humor or intelligence or honesty. But good art without the right context is nothing at all—if you can’t hear “Jeux d’eau” over the roar of the subway, it’s not Ravel’s fault. At the Breuer, things stood out because they were self-aware: they seemed to understand that everything is ugly and they weren’t afraid to let you know. Lot 557, a painting called Why Pay More showing the three words in punchy letters (gold, naturally), reminded me of a commercial that makes fun of stupid commercials but is still, at the end of the day, selling you something.
In the lobby, the copper hippo gloated, or maybe moaned in agony. In the days to come, it would be filled with posh, fussy things: champagne, hors d’oeuvres, candy, Chateau Cheval Blanc 2008. The year intrigued me—you might wonder why, in a place where the ultrarich are encouraged to spend more money, anyone would want to remember the scariest time in recent economic history. But in 2025, in an auction building, the date had a smirky “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” quality: 2008, keep in mind, was the year Sotheby’s sold $201 million worth of butterflies and polka dots by one of the world’s most despised artists, the year when it seemed the world might be prone to apocalypses but the art market knew only up, up, up. Who wouldn’t be wistful?
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If Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet (another one of the rare objects that managed to stand out) were a person, it would be the guy at the club who screams “It’s so fucking loud in here!” in your defenseless ear: part of the problem, but at least you can understand what he’s saying. The original version of America was completed in 2016 and displayed in the Guggenheim, where a hundred thousand people pissed or shit in it before it was finally stolen. Fortunately Cattelan had the time to order his employees to build a replacement, and so in the days leading up to November 18th, anyone was welcome to wait in line at the Breuer and take a selfie with Lot 109.
What is it about lines that gets people going? Gold is supposed to be universally attractive to our species, and gold has nothing on lines. How else to explain the rich cross section of humanity behind the black velvet rope on the fifth floor of the Breuer—college kids, tourists from Hong Kong and Colombia, dog owners, united in the desire to stand and wait? A man stood in the queue for fifteen minutes, googled “Maurizio Cattelan” on his phone, scrolled, and walked away before his turn came. A shortish, sixty-something woman named Suzanne, who was visiting the city with her daughter, told me she’d flown from Los Angeles to see the installation of Larry Bell’s glass sculptures at Madison Square Park. Why was she waiting to see the gold toilet? I asked. “It’s the only place so far on two or three floors we visited that has a line,” she explained, as though this was a bulletproof explanation for waiting in it instead of an obvious reason to do anything but. Several minutes later, Suzanne walked in with her daughter, walked out twentyish seconds later, and said more or less what I assumed she’d say: “I’m underwhelmed.”
You can’t be underwhelmed unless you expect something to begin with—and what, exactly, did any of us think we were going to see? The wall text had already informed everyone Cattelan had created an updated version of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal that boldly collapsed the distinction between high and low culture back in 1917. (The distinction between high and low culture is one of those things that’s perpetually being boldly collapsed, only to get right back up again.) America was a reissue of a hundred-year-old product—indeed, a reissue of the reissue. A solid gold one, admittedly, but it’s not like we were allowed to touch it or weigh it or test its molecular structure in a lab. Had Cattelan’s toilet been swapped out for a hollow brass decoy, would anyone have noticed?
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The climax of the fall auction season arrived on the first night with the sale of Lot 8. Bids trudged up for twenty minutes, the head Sotheby’s auctioneer smiling as he over-enunciated number after number: “one ninety … one ninety … one hundred ninety million dollars … one hundred ninety million dollars … one ninety … one hundred ninety million dollars.” Like rappers, auctioneers are good at saying the same phrases many different ways, maestros of the weird music of finance. When, at last, Lot 8 sold, the figure was $236,400,000, the largest ever paid at auction for a work of art besides Lot 9B in 2017. Just before the gavel came down, the lead auctioneer smirked and said, “I don’t think this one comes up again.” Too true. One of the top-rated comments for the YouTube video of the sale is, “Congratulations to the storage locker that bought this painting.”
Lot 8 has one thing on 9B: a famous artist definitely painted it. Less definite is the identity of the individual or conglomerate who bought it: early rumors point to Jeff Bezos, or the powerful Hong Kong collector Rosaline Wong, or maybe Mohammed bin Salman, back for more. The most common candidate I hear is the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, ADQ. If true, this would have some amusing implications, given that ADQ has invested a billion dollars in Sotheby’s already—is Sotheby’s, to a large degree. If Abu Dhabi coughed up another quarter billion to buy, or “buy,” Lot 8, then the sale isn’t a real sale any more than an accomplice’s victory in three-card monte is a real victory. It’s a commercial for the art market, a simulation of general interest meant to gin up the real thing. The same magazines announcing the art market’s triumphant return publish, with a shrug, the rumors that this triumph is in large part bogus. Otherwise known as “bogus.”
Is it possible, despite the shelves of satires, that writers have gone too easy on auctions? Exasperation can become another form of enablement; throw your head back and laugh and you’re already halfway to a nod. The mostly subtly flattering criticism one hears is, “The art market is just a market.” When people say things like this, they usually mean that buying art is about investing, not timeless aesthetic quality, that it’s amoral yet logical, effective at achieving its aims. In 2024, Sotheby’s sold a duct-taped banana “by” Cattelan for $6.2 million; in the media, the purchase was interpreted as proof of the art market’s kooky invincibility. Few talked about what a disastrous night it had been: dozens of lots selling under their estimated value, others failing to sell at all. If the art market is just a market, no invisible hand is steadying it: like the actual market, it’s highly inefficient and poorly run and possibly doomed. “If they were a car company,” an industry insider told me, “they wouldn’t exist anymore.” I know what he means—then again, if most car companies were actual companies, as opposed to too-big-to-fail monstrosities waiting for bailouts, they wouldn’t exist either.
Capitalism is a misleading analogy for the art market, in short, but the art market is the perfect analogy for contemporary capitalism. If the goal were to invent the pithiest symbol of the modern economy, in fact, I’m not sure one could do better than a group of people lining up to see a shiny, useless, not-even-that-new product they do not like and cannot have—see it and take a video, which then gets circulated and becomes an ad for the product, which was sort of an ad to begin with. An ad for an ad.
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The rest of auction season was mostly an echo of night one. Other auctioneers brought up Lot 8 with hushed reverence, as though they were describing something that took place fifty years ago instead of last Monday. One of them, a young, buzz-cut gent with trembly eyes, affected a posh drawl modeled on the lead auctioneer’s—“Perhaps another go? … Any more?” Clearly he was American, but now and again he’d slip in little Anglicisms—“Sporting.” Superpowers come and superpowers go, but nothing can topple the awesome power of English accents. Who can say how many trillions in sales they’ve lubricated?
The hippo ended up selling for $31.4 million, making it the most expensive work of design ever sold at auction.
Someone paid $762,000 for Why Pay More. Another painting by the same artist failed to find a buyer.
In a single week, Sotheby’s sold $1.173 billion worth of objects.
In the middle of the Now & Contemporary Auction on November 19th, I went to the restroom. When I entered a stall, I noticed the toilet seat was wet. This was no ordinary careless dribble; the whole surface had been splattered, thoroughly Pollocked, drenched—it looked like it had been attacked by a barful of St. Patrick’s Day drunks, not a roomful of millionaires at eleven in the morning. An ordinary object made shimmery gold.
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A phrase that comes up a lot at auctions is, “People have been lining up to see X all week!” On the surface, it’s puzzling anyone would use these words to sell expensive objects: Since when does the one percent (really, the top one percent of the one percent) care what “people” think about anything?
Maybe it’s like this. The reason the art market has continued to grow over the past 75 years is that art, to the public, is more than mere stuff. The common man may not know anything about Leonardo da Vinci, but he knows the Mona Lisa is one of those things that justifies human existence. This makes art a safe investment for bidders to whom art is stuff and nothing more, to be bought and stored and sold like oil futures: their nihilism only pays off because everyone else behaves like a true believer. But for all this to keep working decade after decade, it’s not enough for the world to love art in general. For sales to run smoothly, people need to believe art is not just valuable but aspirational, covetable. People need to line up for hours and make big Instagrammable shows of enthusiasm. They need to pretend that art that is overlit and mislabeled and smushed into stuff is still art.
Why do they? At the risk of repeating myself, what are auction-goers clapping for? It took me a few fall sales to realize the question itself was wrong. People weren’t clapping for anything, not even cash. All week long, when a lot sold for more than its estimated price, the phone operators applauded to show support for the company that pays them, and a roomful of auction-goers followed suit. It’s reflexive, like a yawn. But nobody had to clap. Nobody has to do anything. Art auctions don’t produce many heroes, but I’d like to nominate that man who stood in line to see America, googled it and left—we could all learn from his noble example. No matter how strong the herd instinct pulsing in our heads, no matter how posh the English accents in the room, we can always just walk away.
Take hope where you can get it. At auctions, you see the smug witless bloat of power, but also the fragility. Which is why, in spite of the cynicism, in spite of the waste, in spite of myself, the sale of America delighted me. Cattelan’s golden toilet, all 223 pounds of it, sold to the “famous American brand” for twelve million dollars. This sounds like a tremendous amount of money, and it is. It was also, figuring in the requisite buyer’s fees, the price of 223 pounds of gold on November 18, 2025—the same sum 223 non-artistic pounds of gold bricks or gold dust would have fetched. If auctions are good for anything at all, surely they’re good for quantifying value. Going into that evening, the value of America’s raw stuff was already a matter of public record. As for Cattelan’s artistry, his fiery political critique, not to mention the value of Sotheby’s marketing campaign, the months of promotion, the black velvet rope, the hundreds of Instagram videos—by evening’s end, all this had been well and thoroughly quantified. It was, for once, an honest sale.
The famous American brand turned out to be Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!
Art credit: Alexi Rosenfeld, Sotheby’s Global Headquarters Grand Opening, 2026. Getty Images.
Hope being an exotic commodity these days, I try to take it wherever I can get it. One of the few recent times I’ve felt optimistic about the future was last fall—November 18th, to be exact, at 7 p.m. EST. The setting was the Breuer building on 945 Madison Avenue, which Sotheby’s had bought for a hundred million dollars in 2023, and the occasion was (I know, I know) an art auction. Beggars can’t be choosers.
What happened was: A few hundred members of the bunker class, looking properly shiny-shoed and puffy-lipped, came to the Upper East Side to attend the auction house’s Now & Contemporary Evening Sale. Champagne was imbibed. Fussy little salmon-and-cucumber canapés were munched. In an effort to make sure I wouldn’t be turned away, I’d spent many hours on the phone with a succession of press agents, each politer and kinder and less helpful than the last. Absolutely… I’d be happy to pass that on… Certainly… Just a moment, please… I don’t know if that’s possible but let me check… Whether it was Ernesto or Bruno or Bernardo crooning in my ear, I had spent my early November sampling a single melodious Fuck off, like if hold music were a human voice. (In case it ever comes up, here is how you infiltrate the most talked-about auction season in recent memory: Walk in. Remember to dress nice, and if the weather’s cold, be sure to remove your outer layers by the time you’re through the front door. The security guard may give you the can-I-help-you treatment, but whoever’s behind the front desk will barely look up as she sends you to the elevators with her swipe finger.)
The bunker people finished their drinks and made their way to the sales room. They were here to watch hundreds of millions of dollars of artworks pass from consignor to buyer, one of these works being America, a fully functioning, eighteen-karat gold toilet by (or “by”—it’s not like he built it himself) the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. The auctioneer opened the bidding at ten million dollars, waited for someone to go higher, made a series of toilet puns and, what felt like many centuries later, sold America to the one and only buyer, a “famous American brand.” And that was it. That was the inspirational moment.
Not exactly the March on Washington, perhaps, but the more I think about it, the better I feel. Even now, as I’m typing this, it makes me smile, for the simple reason that I dislike auctions and would like few things more than to see them dismantled canapé by canapé. Whatever your feelings on capitalism or the one percent, I think you should hate them too, and (provided you like art and aren’t a billionaire) I think I can convince you the sale of America is promising news. Weeks passed before I saw this for myself, though. Moments of genuine hope, like works of art, don’t always explain themselves straightaway.
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My acquaintance with the art market had been growing like mold all autumn. I’d proposed a long piece on Sotheby’s and the auction scene, an editor had granted my wish, and immediately I’d regretted the whole thing. Like many art critics I know, I try to avoid writing about the sale of art whenever possible, not because the subject is so very complex but because beating a dead horse has never been my idea of a good time.
But before I raise my riding crop, a question: What do auction houses sell? Easy—they sell whatever people own that other people want: Chardin still lifes, oil drums, Napoleon’s teeth, the Elephant Man’s bones, landscapes, fossilized dinosaur turds, the transaxle from James Dean’s Porsche, a signed first edition of Mein Kampf, handbags, watches, William Shatner’s kidney stone, self-portraits, shoes.
Also, hippos. Metal hippos, with hinged doors and revolving bottle racks in the belly. The enormous one in the lobby of the Breuer that fall was primarily made from copper—was, in fact, the only copper hippo by this particular artist, although he made others in bronze. Auction houses love this kind of object, because it’s safely representative of an artist’s work (i.e. similar to other things that have already sold for millions of dollars) but still appealingly distinctive (e.g. nobody’s going to stop by your place in South Beach, see the copper hippo in the cigar lounge, and say they’ve got one just like it). Whichever Sotheby’s employee decided to place Lot 8 in the lobby deserves a handsome raise. A copper hippo, estimated to sell for between seven and ten million dollars, set the tone for the season. It may as well have been the company mascot.
“Exciiiting,” I heard a Sotheby’s employee in a salmon frock tell her colleague. (Perhaps you’re familiar with this word, not to be confused with its near homophone “exciting,” from episodes of Succession? A rough translation might be “stressful and complicated in ways that cannot be acknowledged directly,” or perhaps just “unexciting.”) I felt her pain, I really did. Art auctions have this strange ability to throw endless flashy oddities in your face—gold toilets! butterflies! shredders!—and still bore you catatonic. Writing about them seemed both too easy and impossible. You could always eat up five hundred words telling readers about, say, the abyss-eyed lady who tries to tell you about her latest trip to Scotland (everybody’s going to be moving there once climate change gets worse). But eventually you needed say something about What It All Means, and how much was there to say beyond the fact that selling art to furnish the houses of Trump backers and opioid pushers was obscene?
Not that this has stopped everyone. In the past twenty years, there have been so many art-world satires they deserve their own section at Barnes & Noble. Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, Stephanie LaCava’s The Superrationals—whatever you might think about the literary quality of these works, their notion of how art gets discovered and promoted and criticized and sold isn’t significantly more sophisticated than that of, say, the scene in The Other Guys where Mark Wahlberg name-drops Cindy Sherman. The last intelligent human being to claim the market was good for art was probably Dave Hickey, who died in 2021. Most other writers seem to think some version of the following: money warps what it touches; excellent art may be out there but is unlikely to prosper in a market system that rewards sniveling careerists; the people buying paintings barely know which way to hang them and only care about dodging taxes anyway. All quite possibly true. Saying it over and over, though, struck me as plangent or else just naïve, like criticizing a priest for being preachy.
And then Sotheby’s bought the Breuer, and I began to understand how people can still be mad at auction houses for ruining everything.
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The first time I went to the Breuer, I had a long conversation about socialism. I was a college freshman, if that wasn’t clear from the previous sentence, so this would have been 2011, one of the last years you could go there to see the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which had resided within since 1966. I don’t remember what I thought of the building, but I must have had some dim awareness that I was walking through a landmark of Brutalism, the architectural style that emerged in the late Forties, when the world was freshly scorched and too much aesthetic refinement seemed barbaric. A few more years would pass before I’d start to appreciate the unapologetic rough bulk of the place, the complete indifference to looking pretty that allows it to look sublime instead.
The Breuer is the only building that has regularly given me the feeling New York City is always supposed to inspire: a sense of standing at the center of everything and staring out. There are strange minerals half-buried in the walls. There are colors that blush and fade with the passing sun. If it weren’t architecture, it would be the Grand Canyon. When the Whitney’s curators understood what they were working with (spring 2013, say, the year of an irresistible exhibition of Edward Hopper’s drawings), they didn’t overstuff the galleries with light or things. Artworks appeared on the walls with a tempo of sleeping breaths; shows looked like they had been there since the dawn of time and had no plans of moving. The Breuer always has this aura of inevitability, which makes its recent history funnier, or at least more laughable.
A few months before I started college, the Met had announced its intentions to take over 945 Madison, and for much of the second half of the 2010s the Breuer’s galleries were devoted to solemnly ravishing exhibitions of Munch and Richter and Whitten. In 2021 the building changed owners again and became the temporary home of the Frick collection. If you visited during any of these years, you were an exceptionally lucky museumgoer. If not, what you need to know is that, for a long time, New Yorkers could come to the Breuer and see, free of charge if they played it right, world-class art in world-class conditions (sorry, but Fragonard’s Progress of Love will never look as good in the redundant floweriness of the Frick as it did on Madison). I don’t miss many things about my twenties, but I miss the hours I spent at 945 Madison, especially when I think about what came next. Sotheby’s bought the building, and a place where the public could go see art year-round became one where art goes to disappear.
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“Two hundred and eighty million dollars, are we all done? Maybe not. Don’t take the photograph quite yet.” These words were spoken in November 2017, in the New York headquarters of Christie’s, Sotheby’s only serious rival among auction houses. Anyone can go on YouTube and watch the Global President sell Lot 9B, a five-hundred-year-old, possibly bogus painting of Jesus. For some reason, it was included in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. In the video, no one looks confused.
You can see a few people in the center of the room making bids, but most are there just to watch. The real action comes from the extreme left and right, where columns of employees stand with their landlines raised. Years before, there was some hand-wringing about how phones would ruin the auction experience: the endless whispering and waiting would drain away all the excitement, it was widely assumed—and if anybody could call from anywhere on the planet, what was the point of holding an in-person auction to begin with? In the end, the weirdness of buying art over the phone turned out to be no match for agoraphobes’ lust for barking orders.
The savior stares out at the room with Xanaxed bonhomie, left eye sagging below his right.
“Give me two-ninety?” the Global President asks. Some diligent mumbling, and then a subordinate gives him three hundred. “I thought so,” the Global President says with a tasty sneer. Lot 9B—the same painting everyone had dismissed as a workshop mediocrity until a few years ago—ends up selling for 450 million dollars, to the sound of polite applause. At the time there were grumbles that Christie’s reclassified it as the work of an Old Master to net itself extra tens of millions in commissions. Less talked about was Christie’s decision to call 9B a work of contemporary art.
The winning bidder turned out to be the Saudi royal family; in the aftermath of the sale, rumor had it the painting was being displayed in the cozy splendor of a storage locker. That’s always a safe bet. Plenty of esteemed collectors have seen their purchases only once, and plenty of others never will. There are well over a million works of art in the Geneva Freeport, some of which have spent years moving from owner to owner without leaving the building. When Japanese billionaires unloaded their collections in the 2010s, handlers realized that many of the Impressionist masterpieces inside hadn’t seen the outside of a crate since the Reagan administration. And for every case we know about, there must be many more, smothered under a stack of NDAs.
At this point there are lots of questions we might want to ask concerning the legality or morality or obvious sleaziness of this kind of behavior. I have a simpler one, though: Why do people clap at art auctions? It seems odd to come to the Upper East Side to cheer for the winning bidder, who probably isn’t even in the room and who, for all anyone knows, manufactures tear gas for a living. Are people applauding the painting? Unlikely, unless they’re excited about never seeing it again. My hypothesis: they’re clapping for cash itself.
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The fall auctions were about to begin. Hundreds of artworks were poised to vanish into the climate-controlled cellars of the one percent, but first the public was welcome to browse. That’s right: anybody could go into the Breuer, walk upstairs without reaching for a wallet or showing a New York driver’s license or a student ID, and see the art. For thirteen whole days!
If this strikes you as a lavish gift from Sotheby’s to the world, rather than a piddling consolation prize, odds are good that you are a Sotheby’s employee yourself (or possibly the architecture critic for the Times—“The biggest change in the end,” he wrote, in what may as well have been sponcon, “is that entry to the building will now be free, unlike when this was a ticketed museum”). All the same, I knew I had to go. The auction preseason is one of the few times when anyone can see what the bunker classes are craving, which is to say what, if anything, they’re thinking about. Like hope, you take these opportunities wherever you can get them.
On November 8th, the Breuer was as full of bodies as I’d ever seen it: elevator-loads of old folks in gray puffer jackets; clenched circles of scarved ladies; kids trying to slide down the banisters in the stairwells, or maybe up. The entry line poked through the front door, past the concrete moat along the sidewalk and around the block. Most of the visitors I chatted with were Upper East Siders who lived a short walk away. Many had brought their dogs—the better to help them imagine the art hanging in their living rooms, I suppose.
Almost as soon as I arrived I noticed the lead Sotheby’s auctioneer sauntering about among the masses. TikTok, I’d heard, was crazy for his tall, lanky Englishness, and seeing him in the galleries I could understand why—he’s one of those people who look so polished you feel you’ve forgotten to read the user manual for your own body. Standing in gaggles of vast net worth, his eye contact is exquisite, excluding nobody. His expressions are legible from across the room, and probably Central Park. When he smiles, it’s because he’s instructed his mouth to smile.
In the stairwell, I noticed the tiny clay city sculpted by Charles Simonds: a dwelling for little people. It’s been there since the Eighties, and people adore it, as they adore most small, innocent, defenseless things. I find it hard to imagine the building without it, and for the time being, Sotheby’s appeared to agree with me. When I told someone I’d be visiting the Breuer, he asked if the Simonds was still there, the way one might inquire after a dear friend who’s been in a car crash.
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Here I should confess something. Even though it’s my job to evaluate aesthetic objects with some degree of detail, my first real thought, once I’d made it up the stairs and taken my first swig of the showroom, was: “Yuck.” Months later, I’m not sure if I have anything to offer beyond elaborate paraphrases of that word. The upper floors of the Breuer had been crammed with drywall; paintings butted into other paintings; plinths were chipped, stubbed; labels presumably corresponded to something. I hadn’t had a drink in months, but the lighting made me feel like I was walking through a CVS hungover at 7 a.m. on a Sunday, and it was all so bright and shrill and shameless it instilled an irritation that was almost despair, as though life itself was nothing but a series of overlit rooms of drywall and concrete. I assume this is what Brutalism haters feel when they think about Brutalism.
As I made my way through, I began to notice something. No matter how hard I tried, I could not look at art there. You’ve heard of face blindness? Somehow when I walked in, I’d contracted the disease, but for paintings and photographs and the like. My eyes worked fine. It didn’t matter whether I was trying to contemplate Lot 617, or Lot 113, or Lot 812, or Lot 105, or Lot 306—whatever I happened to be looking at, I found equal blurs staring back at me as aesthetic quality slipped away in the slurry of the setting. I spent what felt like an eon studying a corner of the floor, trying to figure out which text went with which artwork, before I realized there were five labels but only three paintings. A man with long eyelashes pointed out the error to nobody in particular, but somebody heard him anyway. Seconds later, two Sotheby’s employees were making the corrections, as though they’d been standing there, waiting for him to complain.
The easy explanation for this would be that Sotheby’s didn’t do its job very well: the organizers had no time to throw together a coherent show, the Breuer isn’t a particularly large building relative to the amount of stuff on display, and what’s the point if previews only last a few days? Maybe so, but given that much of the art I failed to look at was fated to spend the next couple decades not being looked at, I have to wonder if Sotheby’s understood its assignment perfectly. Not looking at valuable art, one could argue, is the ultimate sign of ownership. True ownership means being a little careless (“Oh, this old thing?”); true power is the power to treat your property like trash—lose track of it, let it shatter or scuff in the calm confidence that you can collect the insurance and buy something else. William Randolph Hearst loved to tell his friends how he spent months tracking down a lovely silver sculpture, only to realize he’d bought it years before. Any old fool can collect art, but only a true robber baron could forget what he’s collected.
I realize I’m being vague about what I saw at the Breuer, but let me be precise about my vagueness, at least. Nearly impossible though it was to scrutinize individual works, certain qualities appeared too often to be ignored. John Mulaney has a good bit about Trump being a poor person’s idea of a rich person, and, taken together, the Breuer’s contents suggested nothing so much as a pauper’s idea of rich-guy art—heavy, gold, lots of shiny mirrorlike surfaces so as to optimize narcissism. The gold, especially: Lot 573, a gold tapestry by O—; Lot 592, a gold sculpture by L—; Lot 249, a gold sculpture by M—; Lot 315, a gold sculpture by J—; Lot 585, another gold tapestry by O—. Some of these were actual gold, some bronze or gold-patinated bronze or gilded brass, others merely metal, but as I walked through the Breuer they seemed to melt into a single yellow smear.
To call the Now & Contemporary artworks at the Breuer ugly isn’t necessarily an insult. Art history would be nothing but flowers and fat little angels without ugliness, which comes in as many flavors as beauty. Do you take your ugliness brave? Try Goya. Honest? There’s always Arbus. Cerebral? Duchamp and the Dadaists. Rich and macabre? Bacon. Ugliness challenges, ugliness reproaches its audience for preferring beauty, over time ugliness may become a new kind of beauty. Whereas the ugliness at the Breuer didn’t challenge anything or anybody. It didn’t need to—it just gloated from a great height.
The irony of this arrangement is that there were a few objects I could see clearly at Sotheby’s Breuer, but not because they were any good—almost the opposite. In a typical exhibition, the standout artworks are the handful that persuade us to pay them attention by dint of their beauty or humor or intelligence or honesty. But good art without the right context is nothing at all—if you can’t hear “Jeux d’eau” over the roar of the subway, it’s not Ravel’s fault. At the Breuer, things stood out because they were self-aware: they seemed to understand that everything is ugly and they weren’t afraid to let you know. Lot 557, a painting called Why Pay More showing the three words in punchy letters (gold, naturally), reminded me of a commercial that makes fun of stupid commercials but is still, at the end of the day, selling you something.
In the lobby, the copper hippo gloated, or maybe moaned in agony. In the days to come, it would be filled with posh, fussy things: champagne, hors d’oeuvres, candy, Chateau Cheval Blanc 2008. The year intrigued me—you might wonder why, in a place where the ultrarich are encouraged to spend more money, anyone would want to remember the scariest time in recent economic history. But in 2025, in an auction building, the date had a smirky “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” quality: 2008, keep in mind, was the year Sotheby’s sold $201 million worth of butterflies and polka dots by one of the world’s most despised artists, the year when it seemed the world might be prone to apocalypses but the art market knew only up, up, up. Who wouldn’t be wistful?
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If Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet (another one of the rare objects that managed to stand out) were a person, it would be the guy at the club who screams “It’s so fucking loud in here!” in your defenseless ear: part of the problem, but at least you can understand what he’s saying. The original version of America was completed in 2016 and displayed in the Guggenheim, where a hundred thousand people pissed or shit in it before it was finally stolen. Fortunately Cattelan had the time to order his employees to build a replacement, and so in the days leading up to November 18th, anyone was welcome to wait in line at the Breuer and take a selfie with Lot 109.
What is it about lines that gets people going? Gold is supposed to be universally attractive to our species, and gold has nothing on lines. How else to explain the rich cross section of humanity behind the black velvet rope on the fifth floor of the Breuer—college kids, tourists from Hong Kong and Colombia, dog owners, united in the desire to stand and wait? A man stood in the queue for fifteen minutes, googled “Maurizio Cattelan” on his phone, scrolled, and walked away before his turn came. A shortish, sixty-something woman named Suzanne, who was visiting the city with her daughter, told me she’d flown from Los Angeles to see the installation of Larry Bell’s glass sculptures at Madison Square Park. Why was she waiting to see the gold toilet? I asked. “It’s the only place so far on two or three floors we visited that has a line,” she explained, as though this was a bulletproof explanation for waiting in it instead of an obvious reason to do anything but. Several minutes later, Suzanne walked in with her daughter, walked out twentyish seconds later, and said more or less what I assumed she’d say: “I’m underwhelmed.”
You can’t be underwhelmed unless you expect something to begin with—and what, exactly, did any of us think we were going to see? The wall text had already informed everyone Cattelan had created an updated version of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal that boldly collapsed the distinction between high and low culture back in 1917. (The distinction between high and low culture is one of those things that’s perpetually being boldly collapsed, only to get right back up again.) America was a reissue of a hundred-year-old product—indeed, a reissue of the reissue. A solid gold one, admittedly, but it’s not like we were allowed to touch it or weigh it or test its molecular structure in a lab. Had Cattelan’s toilet been swapped out for a hollow brass decoy, would anyone have noticed?
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The climax of the fall auction season arrived on the first night with the sale of Lot 8. Bids trudged up for twenty minutes, the head Sotheby’s auctioneer smiling as he over-enunciated number after number: “one ninety … one ninety … one hundred ninety million dollars … one hundred ninety million dollars … one ninety … one hundred ninety million dollars.” Like rappers, auctioneers are good at saying the same phrases many different ways, maestros of the weird music of finance. When, at last, Lot 8 sold, the figure was $236,400,000, the largest ever paid at auction for a work of art besides Lot 9B in 2017. Just before the gavel came down, the lead auctioneer smirked and said, “I don’t think this one comes up again.” Too true. One of the top-rated comments for the YouTube video of the sale is, “Congratulations to the storage locker that bought this painting.”
Lot 8 has one thing on 9B: a famous artist definitely painted it. Less definite is the identity of the individual or conglomerate who bought it: early rumors point to Jeff Bezos, or the powerful Hong Kong collector Rosaline Wong, or maybe Mohammed bin Salman, back for more. The most common candidate I hear is the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, ADQ. If true, this would have some amusing implications, given that ADQ has invested a billion dollars in Sotheby’s already—is Sotheby’s, to a large degree. If Abu Dhabi coughed up another quarter billion to buy, or “buy,” Lot 8, then the sale isn’t a real sale any more than an accomplice’s victory in three-card monte is a real victory. It’s a commercial for the art market, a simulation of general interest meant to gin up the real thing. The same magazines announcing the art market’s triumphant return publish, with a shrug, the rumors that this triumph is in large part bogus. Otherwise known as “bogus.”
Is it possible, despite the shelves of satires, that writers have gone too easy on auctions? Exasperation can become another form of enablement; throw your head back and laugh and you’re already halfway to a nod. The mostly subtly flattering criticism one hears is, “The art market is just a market.” When people say things like this, they usually mean that buying art is about investing, not timeless aesthetic quality, that it’s amoral yet logical, effective at achieving its aims. In 2024, Sotheby’s sold a duct-taped banana “by” Cattelan for $6.2 million; in the media, the purchase was interpreted as proof of the art market’s kooky invincibility. Few talked about what a disastrous night it had been: dozens of lots selling under their estimated value, others failing to sell at all. If the art market is just a market, no invisible hand is steadying it: like the actual market, it’s highly inefficient and poorly run and possibly doomed. “If they were a car company,” an industry insider told me, “they wouldn’t exist anymore.” I know what he means—then again, if most car companies were actual companies, as opposed to too-big-to-fail monstrosities waiting for bailouts, they wouldn’t exist either.
Capitalism is a misleading analogy for the art market, in short, but the art market is the perfect analogy for contemporary capitalism. If the goal were to invent the pithiest symbol of the modern economy, in fact, I’m not sure one could do better than a group of people lining up to see a shiny, useless, not-even-that-new product they do not like and cannot have—see it and take a video, which then gets circulated and becomes an ad for the product, which was sort of an ad to begin with. An ad for an ad.
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The rest of auction season was mostly an echo of night one. Other auctioneers brought up Lot 8 with hushed reverence, as though they were describing something that took place fifty years ago instead of last Monday. One of them, a young, buzz-cut gent with trembly eyes, affected a posh drawl modeled on the lead auctioneer’s—“Perhaps another go? … Any more?” Clearly he was American, but now and again he’d slip in little Anglicisms—“Sporting.” Superpowers come and superpowers go, but nothing can topple the awesome power of English accents. Who can say how many trillions in sales they’ve lubricated?
The hippo ended up selling for $31.4 million, making it the most expensive work of design ever sold at auction.
Someone paid $762,000 for Why Pay More. Another painting by the same artist failed to find a buyer.
In a single week, Sotheby’s sold $1.173 billion worth of objects.
In the middle of the Now & Contemporary Auction on November 19th, I went to the restroom. When I entered a stall, I noticed the toilet seat was wet. This was no ordinary careless dribble; the whole surface had been splattered, thoroughly Pollocked, drenched—it looked like it had been attacked by a barful of St. Patrick’s Day drunks, not a roomful of millionaires at eleven in the morning. An ordinary object made shimmery gold.
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A phrase that comes up a lot at auctions is, “People have been lining up to see X all week!” On the surface, it’s puzzling anyone would use these words to sell expensive objects: Since when does the one percent (really, the top one percent of the one percent) care what “people” think about anything?
Maybe it’s like this. The reason the art market has continued to grow over the past 75 years is that art, to the public, is more than mere stuff. The common man may not know anything about Leonardo da Vinci, but he knows the Mona Lisa is one of those things that justifies human existence. This makes art a safe investment for bidders to whom art is stuff and nothing more, to be bought and stored and sold like oil futures: their nihilism only pays off because everyone else behaves like a true believer. But for all this to keep working decade after decade, it’s not enough for the world to love art in general. For sales to run smoothly, people need to believe art is not just valuable but aspirational, covetable. People need to line up for hours and make big Instagrammable shows of enthusiasm. They need to pretend that art that is overlit and mislabeled and smushed into stuff is still art.
Why do they? At the risk of repeating myself, what are auction-goers clapping for? It took me a few fall sales to realize the question itself was wrong. People weren’t clapping for anything, not even cash. All week long, when a lot sold for more than its estimated price, the phone operators applauded to show support for the company that pays them, and a roomful of auction-goers followed suit. It’s reflexive, like a yawn. But nobody had to clap. Nobody has to do anything. Art auctions don’t produce many heroes, but I’d like to nominate that man who stood in line to see America, googled it and left—we could all learn from his noble example. No matter how strong the herd instinct pulsing in our heads, no matter how posh the English accents in the room, we can always just walk away.
Take hope where you can get it. At auctions, you see the smug witless bloat of power, but also the fragility. Which is why, in spite of the cynicism, in spite of the waste, in spite of myself, the sale of America delighted me. Cattelan’s golden toilet, all 223 pounds of it, sold to the “famous American brand” for twelve million dollars. This sounds like a tremendous amount of money, and it is. It was also, figuring in the requisite buyer’s fees, the price of 223 pounds of gold on November 18, 2025—the same sum 223 non-artistic pounds of gold bricks or gold dust would have fetched. If auctions are good for anything at all, surely they’re good for quantifying value. Going into that evening, the value of America’s raw stuff was already a matter of public record. As for Cattelan’s artistry, his fiery political critique, not to mention the value of Sotheby’s marketing campaign, the months of promotion, the black velvet rope, the hundreds of Instagram videos—by evening’s end, all this had been well and thoroughly quantified. It was, for once, an honest sale.
The famous American brand turned out to be Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!
Art credit: Alexi Rosenfeld, Sotheby’s Global Headquarters Grand Opening, 2026. Getty Images.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.