Bargain-Basement Basquiats

On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 12, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich will attempt to sell his prize Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, Untitled (Boxer), at Christie’s for $12 million to $16 million, despite rampant speculation that the Big Art Sales of recent years are over, thanks to continuing tumult in the financial markets.

“It’s art-historically important, but it’s also a wham picture,” said Brett Gorvy, Mr. Ulrich’s longtime advisor at Christie’s, of the massive canvas, which leaned against a wall one recent afternoon at the auction house’s Rockefeller Center headquarters, waiting to be hung for presale viewing. “It’s got so much war power.”

The scribbled boxer with arms raised and menacing mouth guard was a self-portrait depicting “a triumphant black man in a white society, white art society as well, but he’s both victor as well as the crucified, wearing his crown of thorns,” further elaborated Mr. Gorvy, the international co-head, with Amy Cappellazzo, of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department. “He’s totally violent … his head is almost being pulled apart, and his body is this big phantom object but it’s also like a building—it’s almost like King Kong in New York.”

The moment to sell this painting, Mr. Gorvy insisted, is now. Bought by Mr. Ulrich in 1999 for just a couple million dollars, it is the the most impressive Basquiat to emerge for sale at auction for years. Christie’s sold a lesser painting by the artist in February for $13 million. “Even in tough times, the best of the best sells well,” said Mr. Gorvy with a shrug.

A slight South African-born Brit of aristocratic bearing who started in Christie’s London office in 1994 after several years as an art journalist, Mr. Gorvy talks fast and walks faster, partially hunched over, as though constantly en route to a meeting where millions of dollars are at stake (these days, he is). He was wearing an expensive-looking suit and muted purple tie, and his short hair was slicked back. At the sale on the 12th, he will stand on an elevated platform to one side of the room: working the phones incessantly, consulting with international bidders at 2 or 5 a.m. their time, placing their bids in increments of $1 million with a cool nod of his head. When Christie’s sold Warhol’s Double Marlin for $32.5 million in May, including fees, it was to Mr. Gorvy—or rather, Mr. Gorvy’s invisible clients. (One can relive the scene on YouTube).

NEEDLESS TO SAY, the net worth of international collectors has diminished significantly since then. “Even though these people are extraordinarily wealthy, and the difference is whether they’re worth $12 billion or $1 billion, psychologically, to buy art at this moment is probably not high on their list,” Mr. Gorvy admitted. October sales in London were the first signs of real trouble in the market, with Christie’s selling just over 50 percent of its lots (during the recent boom market, 95 percent was not unusual). With this in mind, Mr. Gorvy and his team have been busy trying to get sellers—most of whom consigned their art early in the summer, before the Wall Street implosion—to lower their “reserves,” or minimum prices.

Not that it’s been all bad news: a single-artist sale of Damien Hirst’s mammals in formaldehyde grossed nearly $200 million at Sotheby’s in September, roughly concurrent to the downfall of Lehman Brothers.

Still: “Every season we knew that the potential moment the music would stop was there and was just lih-terally within eyesight or on the horizon,” said Mr. Gorvy. Now, “I think in most cases there’s actually a genuine relief.” After all, there’s a certain stress in selling a record $385 million worth of postwar art in one sale, as his department did in May 2007. Where does one go from there?

“No one’s spat in my face yet,” Mr. Gorvy said. But walking around the Frieze Art Fair in London, he was besieged by “angry dealers basically saying, ‘You’re to blame for this, you guys, you got greedy during the boom period.’ And you turn around and say, ‘Well, why is that painting on the wall at that price point? Why is your Richard Prince at $5 million dollars? It’s not because you priced it at $5 million, it’s because the auctions happened and the prices went higher and higher to the point where that is now the value point. So you’ve done extraordinarily well. Your second house in wherever is because of the auctions.”

Blaming the auctioneers is an old game, Mr. Gorvy added wryly. When the art market last went bust in the late ’80s, during his stint as an art journalist, he played it, too. “I read some of the articles I wrote at the time, and I was finger-pointing at auction houses; how can they do this, this is total greed!”

But from his current vantage point, it’s the buyers who make the prices, not the auction houses. And buyers lately have just been particularly loaded.

He sighed and said colleagues call him Dr. Doom.

AS CHRISTIE'S LAURA PAULSON, a senior international director in Mr. Gorvy’s department, explained at a recent press breakfast for the Nov. 12 sale: “Because there was such a concentration of new wealth at levels we’d never seen before, there was less concern about what one paid for art.” A stylish brunette in knee-high black boots, she added that you’d probably be less likely to see collectors like hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb bidding in the front row this go-round.

No, any big buyers will probably be doing so discreetly, Mr. Gorvy added later. What denizen of the Forbes 400 wants to be seen paying $10 million for a painting while simultaneously laying off workers?