Based on the prices that works of art have been going for at auctions lately, you might think that the world economy is not in trouble. At a Sotheby’s New York sale of contemporary works, a painting by German artist Gerhard Richter set the record for a work by a living artist, going for $37 million.
Richter’s Domplatz, Mailand is a 9-foot-by-9-foot canvas that Siemens Elettra had originally commissioned, notes The Associated Press. It looks as if it was a photograph taken on a rainy day and shows a shopping center in Milan.
According to The New York Times, when it first went up for auction in 1998 in London, it went for £2.2 million, which was around $3.65 million at the time. It wound up going for $37.1 million last night to a private New York collector.
A total of 53 pieces of art were sold for a total of $293 million during the sale. Barnett Newman’s 1953 work Onement VI went for $43.84 million, the highest price ever for a work by the color field artist. There were some disappointments for Sotheby’s though, including a Yves Klein sculpture titled Sculpture éponge bleue sans titre, SE 168, which went for $22 million.