Yves Saint-Laurent: The Final Sale

Well it looks like we know the answer now to the question of whether the Yves Saint Laurent name would convey enough glamor on his former belongings to pump up their prices when they were auctioned off in Paris this week. But I doubt that many people will mistake last night's record setting sale — the first of three nights — for a sign that the auction market is bouncing back. Gilt by association makes celebrity estate auctions like this one a false indicator.

The only real question was whether Saint Laurent's name would have the same money-magic that attached to Andy Warhol's and Jackie Kennedy's, whose estates were auctioned to people who paid top dollar for their cookie jars and potato peelers. Apparently it does. It also helps that Christie's pulled out all the stops to market and promote this sale. (I was fending them off months ago.) And the art in the Saint Laurent collection, or at least in the top lots, was from time-tested, blue chip names — Degas, Matisse, Brancusi, Duchamp. (Though oddly a Picasso failed to sell.) Saint-Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge didn't go in for Richard Prince nurse paintings.

What it will be interesting to see next, now that a French court has thrown out a suit by a group of Chinese lawyers attempting to block their sale, will be who takes home those bronze animal heads that China wants returned.