Impressive 2011 Online Art Sales on artnet Auctions

New York / Berlin / Paris (PRWEB) February 02, 2012

If you havent noticed already, now is a good time to take a look at the world of online art sales. In the last year we we’ve seen the launch of the cyberspace VIP Art Fair (whose second iteration opens next week), and Christies New York hosted its first exclusively online auction during its Elizabeth Taylor blitz in early December.

The past year saw some big prices on artnet Auctions, too. Below are highlights of the 2011 sales on artnet Auctions in the categories of unique works of art, prints and multiples, and photography.

Unique Works

As in conventional auctions, postwar material drew some of the highest prices. Never far from the top in any art sale, Andy Warhol snagged first place (not just for unique works, but for all works) with the sale of Flowers, for US$ 1.3 million, which was the second highest price for a Warhol flower painting at auction last year. The canvas has flowers in a deep, bright shade of blue and is one of four in the Flowers series dated 1978; the vast majority of these works date to 19641965.

In a different mode entirely are two pictures by Thomas Hart Benton (American, 18891975) that fetched US$ 198,559 and US$ 143,750. The Regionalist painter and one-time mentor to Jackson Pollock (American, 19121956) depicted his family enjoying a palm-tree dotted beach in Eleuthera (1955), named for an island in the Bahamas where the Bentons vacationed. The bigger price was paid for the mythical Ten Pound Hammer (1965), which shows three black men working on railroad tracks with a train steaming in the background. Benton must have liked the imagehe released it as a lithograph in 1967 in an edition of 300.

A conceptual video sculpture by Nam June Paik (American/Korean 19322006) sold for US$ 92,000, proving that mixed media works can do well online, too. Polaris (1990) is composed of four televisions arranged like petals around a globe and backlit by concentric neon florescent tubes. It was exhibited in a 2000 survey of the artists work at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Another conceptual work, the checkerboard abstraction Check #9 by Sherrie Levine (American, b.1947), sold for US$ 115,000. Levine gained notoriety in the 80s when she exhibited her “photographs of photographs” by Walker Evans (American, 19031975) of desolate farmers during the Great Depression, unaltered and indistinguishable from the originals. Her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art is just closing now, and her oeuvre seems particularly resonant today with the renewed debates concerning appropriation and copyright infringement in art.

Prints and Multiples

A portfolio of 37 prints by Charles-