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Buoyed by $105 million sale, Christie's inaugurates pop culture division. September 24, 2026 12:19 pm Blue-chip auction house Christie's on September 23 revealed the launch of a new division focused on sales of pop culture memorabilia, Artnews reports. The announcement comes on the heels of a sale of sports, music, and historical memorabilia from the collection of Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay that brought in a whopping $105.3 million - the largest amount ever commanded by such a trove at auction, according to Christie's. The division will be helmed by Josh Benesh, a onetime Heritage Auctions exec, and per Christie's website will offer "extraordinary music memorabilia, rare film props, original screen-worn wardrobe, significant instruments and personal artefacts from some of the most influential figures in contemporary culture and entertainment history." "We've been testing this market," Christie's chief executive Bonnie Brennan said Wednesday during a conversation at the Art of Influence conference in New York, where she announced the new division. "We feel that right now is at a point of maturity that makes sense for us to really commit." Among the works that pushed the Irsay sale to its record high were Jack Kerouac's original manuscript for On the Road and the "Black Strat" owned by lead Pink Floyd axeman David Gilmour, which hammered for $14.5 million, setting just one of the auction's total twenty-eight records. Also on the block were the "Tiger" guitar belonging to Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia the Fender Mustang played by Kurt Cobain in Nirvanas music video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Christie's hopes the new division will serve as a bridge to its luxury and fine art divisions. Like auction houses around the world, it also hopes to lure a younger audience. "If we don't invite people in, if we don't make the next generation feel like Christie's is a place for them, we die," said Brennan. Artforum Inbox Register to receive its full menu of newsletters - From the Archive, Must See, Video, In Print, Dispatch, and ArtforumEDU - as well as special offers from Artforum.

After a $105 M. Memorabilia blockbuster, Christie's launches a pop culture division. September 23, 2026 5:23pm After years of testing the waters, Christie's has decided that pop culture is ready for the big leagues. The auction house confirmed Wednesday that it is launching a dedicated pop culture division, a new global operation that will hold multiple auctions each year spanning film and television, music and musical instruments, sports memorabilia, science and technology, natural history, fashion, and popular design. Josh Benesh, a former Heritage Auctions executive who joined Christie's as a consultant earlier this year, has been appointed to lead the division as its global head based in New York. The move comes after Christie's spent years assessing the appetite for the category, most recently with the blockbuster sale of the collection of Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay. Across five auctions this year, Christie's sold 404 lots from Irsay's sprawling trove of music, sports, and historical memorabilia for $105.3 million, which the auction house said was the largest total ever achieved for a memorabilia collection. "We've been testing this market," Christie's chief executive Bonnie Brennan said Wednesday during a conversation with Puck's Marion Maneker at the Art of Influence conference in New York, hosted by Puck and the Flag Art Foundation, where she announced the new division. "We feel that right now is at a point of maturity that makes sense for us to really commit." Christie's is hardly new to selling celebrity collections and memorabilia. Its past consignments have included the collections of Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Elton John, George Michael, Mark Knopfler, and David Gilmour. What is new is the decision to gather that business under a permanent global department, something several of Christie's competitors have already done. Sotheby's established a dedicated Science & Popular Culture department in 2021 under Cassandra Hatton, who had already worked on auctions devoted to space exploration, science and technology, natural history, and hip-hop after joining the company in 2016. Last year Ralph De Luca, an art adviser, joined Sotheby's as vice chairman of pop culture; however, his stay was short-lived, as he quietly parted ways with the house after a year. Bonhams has likewise run dedicated entertainment memorabilia sales for years; in 2021, when it appointed Helen Hall director of entertainment memorabilia, the house described itself as the only global auction house holding regular auctions devoted to the category. Freeman's currently operates a collectibles department that includes pop culture memorabilia, comics, video games, and toys. Then there is Heritage Auctions, which has built an enormous business around collectibles ranging from comics and sports memorabilia to movie props and music. Heritage is where Benesh spent five years as chief strategy officer and general counsel before moving to Christie's. During the panel, Brennan said Christie's isn't interested in competing for sheer volume. "We don't want to be the biggest," she said. Instead, the house intends to focus on objects with the kind of provenance and cultural significance that can benefit from the storytelling machinery it applies to fine art and major single-owner collections. To that end, the Irsay collection offered something close to an ideal test case. Irsay, who died last year, had spent decades amassing a collection that ranged from presidential documents and Jack Kerouac's original typescript for On the Road to some of the most famous guitars in rock history. The first four auctions in March brought $94.5 million and were 100 percent sold by lot, setting 28 auction records. A final sale in July pushed the total past $105 million. The collection included Pink Floyd lead guitarist David Gilmour's famed "Black Strat," which sold for $14.5 million and became the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, as well as Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia's "Tiger" and the Fender Mustang played by Nirvana's Kurt Cobain in the music video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Benesh, the new division's leader, told ARTnews by email that the Irsay sale was "a compelling proof of concept," but that discussions about creating a dedicated pop culture business had begun well before the collection was won. For Brennan, the sale's importance went beyond its total. "I sat in the Jim Irsay sale room, and that was an experience like I've never seen," she said. Buyers were "backslapping each other," she recalled, and hugging after winning lots. "There was no better example of auction creating community than that." Christie's had seen signs of that audience before. On stage at the conference, Brennan remembered the 2019 sale of Gilmour's guitar collection, when the rush of online bidders became so intense that the auction house's system went down and the sale had to be delayed. "There's real demand there, and we have to meet it," Brennan said. That demand dovetails with a larger push at Christie's to use auctions to attract collectors who might not initially think of themselves as traditional art buyers. Earlier in Tuesday's conversation, Brennan described bringing younger and new clients into the secondary market as an existential concern for the 260-year-old auction house. "If we don't invite people in, if we don't make the next generation feel like Christie's is a place for them, we die," she said. Luxury items have already proved themselves for Christie's, where watches, jewelry, handbags, and wine can provide a relatively familiar way into an institution that can otherwise appear forbidding. Brennan said 75 percent of bids in Christie's luxury auctions now arrive through its online tools. Pop culture offers another route in, with objects whose significance often requires little introduction to a prospective buyer. The larger goal is to follow collectors across categories. "Collectors rarely stick to one category," Benesh said. "We see tremendous conversion, but that works both ways. Our art clients are just as enthusiastic about these opportunities."

Christie's wins battle for Herbert Lust collection, expected to fetch more than $50 M. September 22, 2026 10:00am Christie's has won the battle for the collection of the late Herbert Lust, the eccentric banker, scholar, and prolific collector whose holdings were being pursued by both of the major auction houses earlier this summer. In August, ARTnews reported that Christie's and Sotheby's were duking it out for what remained of Lust's sprawling collection following his death in May at the age of 99. At the time, sources familiar with the negotiations said the estate was shopping roughly 300 works collectively valued at around $60 million. Christie's will offer the collection beginning during its November marquee auctions in New York, with additional sales to follow in New York, London, and Paris. The auction house expects the collection to bring more than $50 million in total. Christie's is handling the collection in collaboration with the Fine Art Group. The biggest lot of the group is, as Togg reported last month, Alberto Giacometti's Figure, demie grandeur (no. 2), which Christie's has estimated at $20 million to $30 million. The 47-inch-tall bronze was made around 1949, the same year that Lust first met Giacometti while studying in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. The two became friends, and Lust would go on to become both an obsessive collector and a scholar of the artist's work. There is a wrinkle here: Sotheby's lost the consignment despite having what appeared to be the inside track. The house had cultivated Lust for years, selling 27 Robert Indiana works from his collection in 2017 and, two years later, sending a camera crew to his Greenwich, Connecticut, home to film the collector surrounded by his Stellas, Bellmers, Calders, and Giacomettis. Christie's, however, will get to sell them. Along with the Giacometti, the collection includes Frank Stella's Les Indes Galantes (1962), estimated at $7 million to $10 million. Christie's says it is one of four related large-scale Stella works that made that year, with the other three in museum collections. It has not appeared at auction in nearly 25 years. Other highlights include Yves Tanguy's Qui répondra?, estimated at $2 million to $3 million; Hans Bellmer's Jointure de boules (La Poupée), estimated at $1.5 million to $2.5 million; Robert Indiana's LOVE Wall, estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million; Alexander Calder's Pomegranate Pods, estimated at $500,000 to $700,000; and another Giacometti, the 1946 painting Chaise jaune dans l'atelier, estimated at $400,000 to $600,000. The result for the Bellmer could be particularly interesting. Lust collected the Surrealist in extraordinary depth - he once joked that he could buy 50 great Bellmers for the price of one great Magritte - and Christie's says Jointure de boules is the artist's largest and most important construction from the 1930s remaining in private hands. The house expects it to set a new auction record for Bellmer. Lust's collection was built over the better part of a century and was deeply tied to his friendships with artists. He met Giacometti at 22 while studying comparative literature at the Sorbonne and later wrote a memoir about their friendship as well as a catalogue raisonné of the artist's graphic work. He also produced a catalogue raisonné of Enrico Baj and wrote extensively on Bellmer. By the end of his life, Lust had already given away hundreds of works. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art received substantial holdings, including some 200 Giacomettis, while the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden received more than 70 photographs in 2020. Even after those gifts, Lust still had more than 1,000 objects split between his Greenwich home and Manhattan pied-à-terre. The November sales will therefore represent only the latest chapter in the dispersal of a collection that Lust spent most of his adult life assembling. But after a summer in which the two biggest auction houses were competing for the right to sell what remained, Christie's gets the gavel.