Art
Can You Guess How Much These Artworks Are Worth?
The spring auctions are coming up in the U.S. Time to hone your eye.
This article is for subscribers only.
Auction houses don’t simply pluck prices for their sales out of nowhere. They assign estimates based on what previous, comparable artworks have sold for. The logic is the same as with real estate: If the market can sustain a price for one work, it can probably pay the same amount (if not more) for another.
Yet oftentimes it doesn’t quite work as planned. The thrill of an auction is watching furious bidding push an artwork’s price millions of dollars above its estimate—or on the flip-side, watching a supposedly million-dollar painting fail to find a single buyer.