In September, Gaston & Sheehan, a tiny auctioneer in Pflugerville, Texas, sold Red Man One, a 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, for $22,002,790, after 456 rounds of bidding from 13 different bidders, all of which were in multimillion-dollar territory. The price marked a 519% increase from May 2009, when the painting was sold at Sotheby’s for $3,554,500, and a 139% increase from March 2013, when the Helly Nahmad gallery in Manhattan sold it for $9,191,040 to Jho Low, who was shopping for a present for his pal Leonardo DiCaprio. (More on him later.)
Fine art has historically been seen as a consumption good — buying it was considered an expense, not an investment. Basquiat, a high-flying neo-expressionist who died of a heroin overdose at 27 in 1988, has come to exemplify art’s transformation into objects that are increasingly bought in the expectation that they will rise in value.