(Reuters) Emerging market billionaires, driven by vanity, easy money from the world's central banks and a quest for safe investments, are taking the contemporary art market to new heights.
Art collectors made news for a second straight night on Wednesday as Sotheby's held the biggest auction in its history, led by the record-setting $105 million paid for a work by Andy Warhol.
The previous day, hedge fund managers, oil princes and oligarchs were bidding by telephone at Christie's when the auction house sold Francis Bacon's "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" for a record $142.4 million, in what was seen as a test of the global art market's health.
It passed. Among the reasons, art consultants and hedge fund managers say, is the rise of a class of super-wealthy collectors, many of them from Asia, the Middle East and Russia - zones bolstered by years of booming commodities prices.
"While we are seeing big numbers for many lots, there is only a small number of buyers and it is not dominated by American financiers," said Abigail Asher, a partner at art consultants Guggenheim, Asher, Associates Inc.
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