A step away from buying toothpaste

Fifty years ago it was not possible to bid at auction via the telephone — that first historic telephone bid was made for a Monet at Christie’s in 1967. Now the auction house’s Great Rooms, and indeed every other international saleroom, is lined by banks of telephones and digital screens, and absentee clients may also bid from anywhere in the world online, live through an interactive bidding portal or via iPhone and iPad apps. It seems that one moment advances in technology allowed Elizabeth Taylor to sit by her pool in Bel Air in her swimsuit and bid on the telephone for Duchess of Windsor diamonds in Geneva, the next, that part of her estate could be dispersed around the globe courtesy of Christie’s inaugural online-only auction.

That sale in December last year drew an astonishing 57,000 bids placed in 25 countries, with 54 per cent of bidders new to Christie’s. Now the auction house has announced a deal with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts that will see ‘many thousands’ and more than $100 million worth of its remaining Warhols — paintings, drawings, photographs, prints and printed graphic material — offered over the coming years through an unprecedented range of bidding and sale platforms. Artists’ estates have traditionally been the preserve of dealers. One of the reasons for giving the auction house the business, cited by the foundation’s president Joel Wachs, is that this range — not to mention the promotional reach of Christie’s website, which receives 1.5 million ‘unique’ visitors a month — will ‘provide unprecedented global access to Andy Warhol’s work, in keeping with the artist’s own democratising philosophy and working methods’. The first offering is on 12 November, with estimates ranging from $2,500 to $1.5 million.

What is striking now is how no one considers the idea of buying art online, often sight-unseen, odd.