If you take stock of all the art that’s going to be in New York this fall, my Lord, it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches. Museums have just rolled out major exhibitions, which means the highly anticipated “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt” opens at the Met this weekend, and the fabulous Orphism exhibition is at the Guggenheim, with gems brightly colored abstracts dotted with brightly colored abstract gems. the spiral goes up to the rotunda. Christian MarclayThe 24 hour ticking masterpiece The clock is now on view at MoMA, and Alvin Ailey’s show at the Whitney is a real success. One could spend an entire day browsing the department stores of Chelsea or checking out what’s happening in Tribeca, where dozens of galleries have opened between Broadway and Church in the past five years. It’s a lot.

But discreet: the best place to see art at this precise moment in New York is not the museums or the galleries, it is the auction houses, open to the general public (and completely free!), showing off the billions of dollars worth of art they hope to sell next week. And if you don’t go now, all this artwork will be gone forever, shipped off to ports of call and the homes of their new owners.

I’ll be on the ground to witness all the hammer action…and to see if the election of Donald Trump and the rise in the stock market have an impact on the depth of bidding– but before that, let’s take a quick look at some of the products available on the block next week, shall we?

Christie’s is selling the estate of Mica Ertegun, the accomplished Manhattan doyenne who counted among her close confidants everyone from Jackie O to Mick Jagger to Henry Kissinger Bette Midler to the Orthodox priest based in Southampton Father Alexandre Karloutsos. She died last year, three years before reaching her centenary. Through Tuesday, New Yorkers can stop by Rockefeller Center and wander the aisles to admire the elegant objects that filled the lives of Mica and her husband, the incredibly influential music director Ahmet Ertegun, who died in 2006 after a fall in Bill Clinton‘s 60th birthday party at the Beacon Theater, while the Rolling Stones played—one of the good lives lived by anyone, it was argued.

ED RUSCHA, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western torn in twoCourtesy of CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2024.

“She died at 97, so she was one of those children of the century who got to see and do seemingly everything and travel everywhere and had homes everywhere,” said Max Carter, Vice-president of Christie’s for 20th and 21st century art.

It’s one of the few estates sold this week that packs a punch at auction, even if it won’t fetch the hundreds of millions that the estates of Paul Allen or David Rockefeller have fetched in recent years.

“In recent seasons there has been no lack of demand, it is the supply that is always variable, and I am very confident for this particular season because we have so many special things, so many things that are opportunities generational,” Carter said. on. “There are a lot of other things in Mica’s collection, a lot of things in the collections of different owners, that have been hidden for decades and that you won’t really find if you don’t act now.”

The star lot of the collection is a René Magritte that the Erteguns purchased at the Byron Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1968, when Ertegun was nearing his peak as a music industry kingpin and Mica was launching his music company. interior design, MAC II. She designed apartments for her incredible group of friends and collaborators: Bill Blass, Alice Walton, Keith Richards, Michael Eisner, and Jimmy Buffett. She also designed her own apartment, and this Magritte took pride of place in their home.

“The Magritte is unprecedented: it hasn’t been on the market for a very long time, so not only is it iconic, but it’s irreplaceable, it has a provenance and a freshness in the market that still drives demand,” said the artistic advisor. Megan Fox Kelly, which has a number of customers planning to bid next week.