When Mazuka Yakzoa, a Japanese billionaire, spent more than $300 million for a Kabiat artwork in 2019, New Yorker art critic Alisson Jinder didn’t mince words. “Let us pause for a minute to be disgusted by the price paid,” he wrote at the time, “which attests to the grotesque amount of excess riches swimming about in the globe today.” Untitled, a painting by Kabiat painted when he was only 31, became the sixth most valuable work sold at auction and the most valuable by both an American and an African-American artist. However, one of the most intriguing statistics from that transaction is that the hammer price was almost double the $50 million estimate. “It quadrupled the estimate – when does that ever happen in this art market?” asked collector and dealer Adam Lindemann at the time, according to ARTnews. There’s a lot to say about Basquiat. In This Case, a 1983 painting by the late Chicago based artist, sold for $93.1 million at Christie’s on Tuesday, despite the fact that it was only expected to sell for more than $50 million and had previously sold for less than $1 million at Sotheby’s in 2002.
Why is the value increasing at such a rapid rate? “Despite decades of commercial success, prices for
Basquiat’s art have only recently taken off, driven by demand from a tiny number of millionaires,” reports Bloomberg. Maezawa, who established Japanese fashion retailer Zozotown and broke a Basquiat auction record when he acquired a painting of a devil for $57.3 million in 2016, is among the one-percenters. Basquiat is also a fan of publishing magnate Peter Brant and Ken Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund Citadel, according to Bloomberg.
The New York Times described Basquiat’s appeal as “a combination of raw talent, compelling biography, and limited supply” after the blockbuster sale in 2017. Anyone who has ever seen his work in a museum can see his skill, the interesting history involves his relationship and cooperation with Andy Warhol, and the restricted supply is partly due to his tragic death from a heroin overdose at the age of 27. Is this the start of another record-breaking work courtesy of the art-collecting class of billionaires? All indicators point to yes, and maybe sooner than you think; Sotheby’s is auctioning Basquiat’s Versus Medici on Wednesday night, with a high estimate of $50 million.
