Elizabeth Taylor
Christie's 2011 figures were boosted by the five-catalog sale in New York in December of Elizabeth Taylor's collection. All 1,778 lots found buyers, raising a total of $157 million. An inaugural online auction of lower-value items that had belonged to the Oscar-winning actress, who died last year, contributed $9.5 million.
Collectors are still reluctant to buy big-ticket art via the Internet. Just two of the 719 works Christie's sold for more than $1 million in 2011 were bought using online bidding.
New York remains the company's biggest auction center, with 1.2 billion pounds of sales in 2011, 6 percent down on 2010. London, which hosts three series of contemporary-art auctions each year, was up 20 percent to 871.6 million pounds.
Growth in Hong Kong slowed to 11 percent with 519.1 million pounds of transactions. In 2010, auctions in Asia rose 114 percent. China, Hong Kong and Taiwan's share of client registrations from increased just 2 percent last year.
New clients represented 12 percent of the value of Christie's international sales, the auction house said.
Christie's is a private company owned by the French billionaire Francois Pinault. The auction house was bought by Pinault's holding company, Artemis SA, for $1.2 billion in May 1998. Christie's doesn't report revenue or profit, though it gives sale totals twice a year.
Christie's said its policy, in line with U.K. accounting standards, is to convert non-U.K. results using an average exchange rate weighted daily by sales throughout the year. This would make the 2011 total of 3.6 billion pounds come to $5.7 billion. In 2010, it had sales of 3.3 billion pounds.
Sotheby's said that it will release its consolidated total of private and auction sales for 2011 at the end of February. It raised $4.8 billion in 2010.
(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)