A $6.2 million banana and the unexpected return of the art market

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A $121.2 million René Magritte. A $68.3 million Ed Ruscha.

And don’t forget that $6.2 million banana that sold for six times its asking price. To anyone looking in, the art market appeared to come roaring back this week—but it’s anyone’s guess if the party will last. Roughly $1.2 billion in art changed hands at the world’s chief auction houses—Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips—during a weeklong series of bellwether auctions in New York that concluded Friday.

That’s a little over half of what similar sales totaled last fall, but no matter: Collectors say they are starting to feel the itch to splurge on high-end art for the first time in a couple of years. In a realm dominated by billionaires who can afford to go on art-buying sprees in good economic years and bad, it’s confounding to some that art sales have been in such a slump lately. The market’s been hampered in part by fears over inflation, multiple wars and election uncertainties.

Now, with the U.S. presidential election behind us and several rounds of interest-rate cuts, market watchers are closely tracking the spending habits of the world’s wealthy to gauge whether they feel good times are ahead, or not. As with everything in luxury, perception is key.

This week, the consensus among blue-chip art buyers clearly shifted to a cheerier mood. “People needed to see a good signal that the art market was still alive, and we gave them that," said Christie’s chief executive Guillaume Cerutti, whose house sold Magritte’s 1954 “Empire of Lights," for $121.2 million over its $95 million estimate. It also sold Ruscha’s 1964 “Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half," which surpassed its $50 million estimate by $18.3 million.