More records and names

The record is held by the sculpture Rabbit by Jeff Koons, auctioned for 91.1 million dollars. It has long been the highest-priced work by a living artist at auction. For comparison, the most expensive work by a living woman artist, the painter Marlene Dumas, reached 13.6 million dollars — which says a great deal about how unequal the market still is.

At present it is Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres, auctioned for 12.4 million dollars. Photography was long undervalued on the market, treated as “merely” a reproducible medium, yet today it is breaking records. It shows that value is decided not by the technique but by the name, the idea and the scarcity.

The breakthrough came in 2021, when Christie's auctioned a digital collage by the artist known as Beeple for 69.3 million dollars. It shook received ideas about what could be auctioned at all and set off a boom in NFTs (digital certificates of ownership), which was followed by a steep fall. Even so, it was the moment digital art entered the major auction league.

The leading name of the Czech contemporary art market is the painter Josef Bolf, whose works have sold at auction for up to 1.24 million crowns. By Czech standards that is exceptional; contemporary art rarely sells here for such sums. It shows that the younger domestic scene is beginning to have collectors' stars of its own.

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted an ordinary mass-produced urinal as a work of art, turned it on its side, signed it “R. Mutt” and called it Fountain. With that the so-called ready-made was born — an ordinary object raised to art by the artist's decision alone — and the door to conceptual art was opened. Duchamp moved art “from the retina to the mind”, and without that gesture today's banana taped to a wall would make no sense. In 2004 Fountain was voted the most influential work of modern art.