Moments from Christie’s Auction (2022)

In May 2022, Christie's New York sold Andy Warhol's Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, one of a series of silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe that Warhol made in 1964, for $195 million, setting a record for any American artist at auction and, at the time, the second-highest price ever paid for a work at auction overall. The painting came from the collection of Swiss dealers Thomas and Doris Ammann, and the sale drew intense attention partly because of the work's own violent backstory: it takes its name from a visitor to Warhol's studio who once fired a gun at a stack of the Marilyn canvases, and the surviving works came to be catalogued by which color background they had rather than which had literally been shot.

The sale underscored just how thoroughly Warhol's Pop images, mass-produced by design, mocking celebrity and repetition itself, had become the single most valuable currency in American art. It's worth pairing that irony with a viewing if you ever get the chance to see a Marilyn silkscreen in person at a museum: a picture built entirely around the idea of endless, cheap reproduction became, in a saleroom, one of a kind and worth nine figures.