Skip to content
Pursuits
Year in Review

Basquiat, Beeple Drive The Year’s Top 10 Art Sales to $781 Million

The biggest results at auction keep getting bigger.

In This Case (1983), by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In This Case (1983), by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Photographer: Cindy Ord/Getty Images North America

If you are one of the 500 people listed in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, where the net worth begins at $5.8 billion (Margaretta Taylor) and ends at $266 billion (Elon Musk), the $781 million  spent on just 10 artworks this year might not seem like much.

For everyone else, it’s functionally inconceivable.