In May 2007, Sotheby's New York city achieved the evening sale of a lifetime with a global sale amount of $255 million for 65 works of art.The star of the evening was the White Center picture by Mark Rothko that fetched $72.8 million with a guaranteed price of $46 million by Sotheby's autioneer Tobias Meyer and an opening bid of 28 million. Forty-one of the works offered that night sold for over $1 million.
On the White Center only Sotheby's made a staggering profit of $16 million. Commenting the fabulous price reached by the Rothko, Nicholas Mclean, an New York art dealer, only said :"Someone had just bought a Rockfeller."
But Rothko was not the only artist to fetch crazy levels on this historical night : Jim Hodges' No-One Ever Leaves, a leather jacket tossed in a corner (picture above) whose hem is joined to the wall by a spider web of thin silver chains (making the whole thing a work of contemporary art) sold for $690,000.
Jim Hodges, not to be confused with James Hovis "Jim" Hodges (1956-) who served one term as the Governor of South Carolina (1999-2003), was born in Spokane, Washington in 1957. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, in 1980, from Fort Wright College, in Spokane, and a Master of Fine Arts degree, in 1986, from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. He is a a conceptual artist and a sculptor of creative interactive environments.
