New York’s marquee auction week at Christie’s and Sotheby’s closed with nearly $2 billion in sales. A headline number that is impressive on its face, but far more revealing when we zoom out. In 2025, art isn’t just art. It’s a proxy for power, a measurement of liquidity, and a cultural scoreboard for the ultra-high net worth, the untouchables, some might say. And this week, the scoreboard was flashing neon.
At Sotheby’s, records toppled: a Frida Kahlo (historic), a $62.7 million Van Gogh, and the week’s crown jewel… a $236.3 million Gustav Klimt, now the most expensive contemporary art work ever sold and the second highest auction get of all time. Twenty-six blocks south, in Rockefeller Center, the energy at Christies was different but equally as telling. Cindy Sherman’s photograph triggered the first applause of the night, hammering at more than double the estimate. But the fiercest battles came from the Giacometti lots, with as many as six phone bidders, all proxies for anonymous global wealth, scrambling for near-identical works like they were rare minerals, not drawings. Even the Edlis-Neeson “coffee table” Giacometti sparked a seven-minute battle of nearly 40 bids, eventually going for $4.53 million.
But the real story isn’t the numbers. It’s what the numbers reveal.
Art is still the “safest” place for money when everything else feels volatile. Tech is wobbling, real estate is messy, and geopolitics feel like an open tab left running. But art, especially blue chip art, remains a store of value that doubles as a status symbol. These buyers weren’t flinching at inflation or interest rates. They were acquiring cultural permanence.
The global elite are consolidating their power through taste. This bidding wars weren’t just about the pieces, they were about possession. Who gets to own a Sherman? Who controls that supply of Giacomettis? Who can push a Klimt into the price stratosphere simply because they want to? Collecting at this level is a form of cultural authorship; a way for private individuals to curate the canon.
Wealth today is about visibility and invisibility simultaneously. Six Christies specialists, including the Global President, President of North America and several department VP’s, battling on the phones isn’t efficiency, it’s choreography. It’s the performance of anonymity. The most powerful buyers show their power not by being seen, but by being felt: through paddle numbers, through agents, through the velocity with which they lift the price floor for entire categories.
The art market is a temperature check on the psychology of the ultra-rich. And this week, things were hot. Confidence was high. Appetite was voracious. The tone was clear: the ultra-rich are not acting cautious. They’re acting acquisitive.
What this means for the rest of us, and for the culture, is simple:
The people deciding what gets preserved, elevated, and historicized are not museums, critics, or scholars. They’re the ones wiring eight and nine-figure sums through their advisors on a Tuesday night.
Art may be timeless, but this week proved something else:
Cultural power is increasingly something you can buy. And the highest bidders are rewriting the map in real time.
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