On a cool May evening in New York, the stage at Phillips transformed into a paradox: half battlefield, half ballet. The numbers were grim—$52 million in sales, a startling 40% dip from the prior year’s $86 million haul. Yet something quietly radical unfolded in the margins: women took the spotlight, not in slogans but in sales. The market’s ostensible slump became, unexpectedly, a platform for long-overdue recognition.
Yes, Basquiat still played the financial anchor, his Untitled (1984) fetching $6.6 million and a companion work on paper adding another $3 million to the house’s coffers. But the mood felt less like a victory lap for the usual blue-chip suspects and more like a reevaluation—an auction whose real fire came from elsewhere.
The Rise of Women in a Shifting Market
Step aside, silver-haired titans. On Tuesday night, it was Olga de Amaral, Grace Hartigan, Kiki Kogelnik, Ilana Savdie, and Danielle McKinney who cast the longer shadows. Amaral’s fiber piece Imagen perdida 27 soared to $1.2 million—quadruple its estimate—buoyed by the momentum of her ICA Miami retrospective. Hartigan’s The Fourth climbed to $1.6 million, nearly nudging out Calder’s kinetic poetry from the top ten.
Kogelnik and Savdie didn’t merely perform—they surprised. The former’s figurative piece reached $280,000 against a $150,000 projection, while the latter was propelled to $180,000, fueled by a bidding flurry that spanned Texas to Lebanon. Both sales, though modest by marquee standards, suggest that the collecting class is casting its net further afield and daring, however cautiously, to value the uncanonized.
Record Setters and Repositionings
Even the lone male record-breaker, James Turrell, barely skimmed past his previous high, with Ariel (2022) selling for $660,400. It was a whisper compared to Amaral’s roar. Meanwhile, Danielle McKinney, a relative newcomer, saw her painting vault from an estimate of $50,000 to a closing hammer of $120,650—a 2.5x leap that might herald a new generation of narrative figuration finding traction.
In contrast, the market’s more recognizable names were met with polite applause rather than a standing ovation. Jeff Koons, Frank Stella, Richard Prince, and George Condo failed to sell. David Hockney and Barbara Hepworth held their own, but without spectacle. The era of automatic escalation appears to be on pause.
Security Blankets and Trophy Hunts
It’s sluggish right now.
– Said adviser Erica Samuels, cutting through the spin.
Her comment echoed the broader sense that the art market, like a sleepwalker, is instinctively reaching for the familiar—Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and the steady glow of postwar American masters. The late Leonard Riggio’s estate at Christie’s only confirmed the shift: security over speculation, gravity over glitter.
Phillips’s sale didn’t collapse—it held, exactly hitting its pre-sale estimate. But the missed lots, the withdrawn works, and the soft landings on big-ticket items hinted at a climate of caution. Trophy hunting is becoming a spectator sport rather than a collector’s compulsion.
Why This Moment Matters
Behind the raw numbers, a more textured story reveals itself. This auction wasn’t about volume; it was about signal. The sharp ascent of women artists isn’t anecdotal—it’s systemic. In a market obsessed with metrics, it is precisely these outlier successes that illuminate change. Amaral’s woven cosmos, Hartigan’s brash 1950s stroke, McKinney’s intimate interiors—each of them chipped away at an edifice too long held in place by familiar names and safer bets.
The art world may be inching toward equity not with a bang, but with the whisper of a paddle raised on a phone line from Los Angeles. It’s a slow revolution, but a revolution nonetheless.