Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

by Tom Wright

Low didn’t scoop up only the Basquiat that evening. He also bought two works by Alexander Calder for over $8 million. It was a record-breaking night for Christie’s, with $495 million in sales, the largest haul in auction history. That year, global art market sales topped 47 billion euros, a jump of 150 percent from a decade earlier, according to the European Fine Art Foundation. The growing cost of fine art, like that of real estate on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or in London’s Knightsbridge, was partly due to the innate worth of the painting or the residence, coupled with limited supply. But it was also a reflection of the amount of dirty money in the market, and that night at Christie’s was a glaring example of the problem, even if the auction house was not aware of it.