“the best BIdding battle ever”
It was an extraordinary couple of weeks here in New York City for the May auctions that included what one publication called, “the best bidding battle ever.” My attempt to win the iconic painting “The Sugar Shack” by Ernie Barnes for a client captured the media and the artworld’s attention! The bidding played out at Christie’s for over 11 minutes – a typical lot takes between one to three minutes – and included multiple bidders up to the $3,000,000 mark and then just myself and another bidder. As a former auctioneer, I utilized my auction room experience to apply a number of tactics to put our competition off-balance. It was a coincidence that in a room of several hundred people, the other final bidder was sitting just a couple of rows behind me (with the press sitting just behind him). When this bidder entered the auction room late, he seemed new and slightly uncomfortable in the setting. My strategy was to grind him out with a range of tactics: quick volleying bids, split bids as a feint to slow the bidding and skipping bids at some points in the action, dragging him into deep water. After he skipped the standard $100,000 incremental bid in order to raise the bid $1,000,000 to $8,500,000, I took the unusual step of turning around and telling him directly that I was not giving up. When he shouted back that he was going to “make me pay,” the auction room erupted in applause! In the end, I made him “pay” when our final bid of $12,900,000 was bested by his winning bid at the $13,000,000 hammer. The press took hold of our back-and-forth bidding and highlighted our memorable battle in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, CNN and a host of art publications. But I was not finished in New York, as I found great success in the auction room later in the week, winning a fantastic Tracey Emin painting in the Evening Sale at Sotheby’s and an A-plus Jennifer Guidi sand painting at Phillips.
