After years of strong prices for collectables across the board, the leading auction houses find themselves having to adjust many of their valuations, estimates and expectations in the face of the economic downturn – yet there still appear to be plenty of bidders with money to spend on objects of decent quality, as evinced by Christie’s much-publicised €373m ($503m) sale last month of artworks collected by Yves St Laurent.
If the successful series of sales staged by the big houses towards the end of last year were anything to go by, the watch category seems to be holding up pretty well too. On March 4, Antiquorum hammered down $8.7m worth of timepieces in New York.
