Sotheby’s mid-season ‘Contemporary Curated’ live sale, which was held in New York on 26 February, yielded $19.88 million (including fees) – a considerable amount, although less than the equivalent sale last year which brought in $25.7 million. 

The sale also had fewer lots than previous years, with 101 works of art for sale (last year’s sale had 276). Despite this, the sell-through rate was comparable, and there were more objects selling above the high estimate. ARTnews asked Sotheby’s if the decline in lots was related to current issues facing Sotheby’s, such as their recent round of redundancies or the reported difficulties sourcing material from consignors, but head of sale Haleigh Stoddard rebuked these claims, stating that the sale was small, but that had been “intentional” as “we wanted it to be a more highly edited selection.” She added that “it was really a goal for us to limit our volume this season, and I think we did that really successfully with higher quality works and higher value works, sort of above the $300,000, $400,000 range.” 

Stoddard added that “our buyers responded really well, and we’ve only heard positive things from the participants in the auction today. From our perspective, it’s something that’s positive. In fact, we will continue to focus on this low volume, high-value ratio for the rest of the year. It’s something that we are very interested in exploring further for our mid season sales.”

Despite these remarks, there have been recent suggestions that the art market is struggling, with art advisor Morgan Long commenting, after the New York Old Masters sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s earlier this year, that “all the markets are tough to sell and getting works in all areas to the auction block is harder than ever.”

Nevertheless, there were some standout highlights from Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated sale, including an untitled painting (1985) by Joan Mitchell which sold for $3.95 million against a pre-sale estimate of $3-5 million, George Condo’s Artist and Muse (2015) which sold for $1.88 million, and Jean Dubuffet’s Echec à l’être (1971), which sold for $1.54 million surpassing its pre-sale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million.