Prices giddy-up and up

Would you like to buy a taxidermic horse that hangs from the ceiling for $2 million?

A drugstore-style pharmaceutical display and an aluminum ladder for $1 million?

A 6-foot-tall, light-up dollar sign for $231,500?

A simulated bag of cat litter for $141,900?

The big surprise in this spring’s art auctions was not that Pablo Picasso’s “Boy With a Pipe” was sold for $104.2 million. Prices of works by leading figures in the pantheon of art history can be expected to escalate. And when inflation is factored in, Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” which fetched $82.5 million 14 years ago, is still the world’s most expensive painting sold at auction. Today’s price is $116 million.

The real shocker was that edgy, sometimes extremely unwieldy creations produced in the last decade or so by artists in their 30s, 40s and 50s -- including Maurizio Cattelan’s stuffed steed, Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinet, Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s flashy dollar sign and Robert Gober’s painted plaster cat litter -- had a much larger presence than ever before in high-end auctions.

As usual, neatly framed paintings made 40 or 50 years ago by leading Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists commanded the biggest prices in the postwar and contemporary art sales. But Jeff Koons -- a wildly successful 49-year-old whose 1986 stainless steel, bourbon-filled “Jim Beam J.B. Turner Train” was sold for $5.5 million -- emerged as an Old Master in a field of relative upstarts who work with everything from video and neon to flea-market foundlings and kitschy crafts materials.

Mona Hatoum’s “Pin Carpet,” which looks like a black fur rug but is actually made of thousands of stainless steel pins glued onto canvas, was sold for $119,500. Liza Lou’s beaded cigar box, complete with eight beaded cigars, went for $45,410. Takashi Murakami’s “DOB’s March,” a gigantic helium-filled balloon decorated with a grinning, cartoon-like face, fetched $44,400. Prices include the auction houses’ commission of 19.5% to 20% of the first $100,000 and 12% of the rest.

A market on fast-forward

The phenomenon is partly a matter of supply and demand.

“As time goes by there’s an increasing shortage of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist material,” Christie’s auctioneer Christopher Burge says. “More is available in the postwar and contemporary field.”

And the May sales merely reinforced the rise of contemporary art on the auction scene, a trend that began about 30 years ago. Impressionist and Modern art far outpaced contemporary art this spring at Sotheby’s, largely because of the Picasso and other works from the John Hay Whitney collection, but the firm’s contemporary art auction sold out and surpassed its most optimistic predictions. At Christie’s, postwar and contemporary art outsold older art for the second year in a row, racking up a record $102.1 million on the first night of a four-day marathon.

But the increasing emphasis on art that has gathered no dust, much less stood the test of time, is also an inevitable development in an art market that operates on fast-forward.

“Information about art is very accessible, and it is disseminated very fast,” says Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer. “Opinions about artists are formed in about two years through the Internet and the press; it used to take 20 years.”

The prime example in his sale was Cattelan, a controversial Italian artist whose taxidermic horse, “Ballad of Trotsky,” was made in 1996. The seller, newsprint magnate Peter Brandt, bought the sculpture at Christie’s London in 2001 for $876,839 and more than doubled his money this spring.

“The world has decided Maurizio Cattelan is a great artist,” Meyer says. “That is unassailable.”

At Phillips, de Pury & Co., which gave up on old art a couple of years ago, the noisy crowd responded to auctioneer Simon de Pury’s theatrics, even as bidders carried on private conversations in a party-like atmosphere. Amid the din, he knocked down a case of 24 basketballs and six soccer balls by Koons for $433,600, a stuffed cow with motor scooter handlebars attached to its ears by Cattelan for $254,400 and a five-channel video work by Doug Aitken for $114,000.