The Art Market Surges, Selling $2.3 Billion in Works

The art market is sizzling. The world’s chief auction houses sold more than $2.3 billion worth of art during a two-week sale series in New York that ends Friday. Back in person en masse for the first time since early 2019, collectors chased after high-end art with a voraciousness not seen since a few years before the pandemic.

Rarely do auction houses sell every single object they have to offer, but Sotheby’s and Christie’s achieved that feat a couple of times as collectors splurged on everything from classic paintings of windswept fields by Vincent van Gogh to spray-painted images by street artists such as Banksy to a rare edition of the U.S. Constitution.