I wish that I had the time to do on-site blogging for all the sales, but you’ll be forced to deal with some real professional reporting on this one…upbeat assessments of Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary Sale held this week from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Reuters.

Pictured above is a 1967 Dan Flavin that sold in the sale for $362,500 (including buyer’s premium), just under estimate. Official results are available on the Christie’s websites.

::In my dream house, Dan Flavin art serves as my nightlights::

News sources were mostly down on the results of this week’s Impressionist and Modern Sale at Sotheby’s.  A lack of bidders for two of the featured works, a Picasso portrait and Giacometti sculpture, brought the sale total to $61.4 million– below the low estimate of $81 million and the lowest sale total in this category since 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  One bright point was the sale of Mondrian‘s Composition in Black and White, with Double Lines (pictured above) for $9.3 million, almost double its $5 million estimate.

Shouldn’t we be happy that despite an economic crisis, art maintains appeal at the high end of the market?  Maybe I’m being optimistic…

The Times Online discovered that the unsold Picasso was consigned by a victim of the Bernie Madoff scandal: click here.

No, wait, The New York Times discovered that point (but this article has a picture of Tobias Meyer!): click here.

Bloomberg’s assessment of Sotheby’s economic well-being (or lack thereof): click here.

A new article from Dow Jones Financial News Online finds that a record high 40% of contemporary works for sale at major auctions went unsold in the first quarter of 2009.  Only three pieces, including the Anish Kapoor scultpure pictured above, sold for over $1 million (the Kapoor sold for approximately $1.2 million, including the buyer’s premium, at Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Sale in London last February).  Check out the full article here.

One can assume that similar results are occurring in the non-six/seven/eight figure art market, too.

Speaking of Anish Kapoor, one of my favorite pieces of public sculpture is his “Cloud Gate” in Millennium Park, Chicago.  I found this article in the Chicago Tribune about a battle brewing over raising admission cost to the Art Institute of Chicago for city residents.

Here’s a great story from Canada about a seriously novice collector (he bought his first art book less than a month ago!) who picked up an oil painting by Tom Thomson at auction for under the original reserve price: click here.

For those who aren’t familiar with auction jargon, a reserve price is the agreed upon lowest price at which a consignor at auction will allow his or her piece to sell.  Usually, if no bids are equal to or higher than the reserve price, the piece won’t be sold.  In this case, the auctioneer was somehow able to contact the consignor of the artwork and negotiate a last-minute lowering of the reserve price; this is pretty unusual for major auction houses.

I have to admit that I wasn’t familiar with the artist Tom Thomson.  It’s worth checking out his wikipedia page, if only for the story surrounding his mysterious death in 1917.