Magna Carta's worth is relative these days. Last night, Sotheby's sold Ross Perot's copy of the 13th century English charter that gave birth to habeas corpus and set the foundation for basic human rights. The buyer was Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein who paid $21 million for it, less than the record price paid for Jeff Koons's Hanging Heart last month and about half the sum required to obtain an apartment at 15 Central Park West. Michael Moore may have a seizure and finally move to Canada.

Still, the single sheet of parchment dating from 1297 scored quite a mark-up over the $1.5 million Perot paid for it in 1983 when he acquired the 2,500-word medieval Latin manuscript from the Brudenell family of Deene Park. Twenty-some years later Perot's family-run foundation decided to sell the sole copy in private hands (a total of 17 originals are known to survive before the year 1300) and the only Magna Carta outside of Britain aside from an example in Australia. The manuscript, which carries the seal of King Edward I, was estimated to make $20/30 million (with proceeds going to education, medicine, and assisting wounded soldiers and their families), a fraction of the some $60 million Perot reportedly paid in his bid to become president in 1992.

Shortly after 7 p.m., Sotheby's vice-chairman David Redden took to the podium before 150 seated guests, a single phone bank, and a salesroom thick with professional camera crews alongside burly men with digital cameras and Revolutionary War types sporting curled mustaches. "So Magna Carta . . . " Redden announced with understated relish, "What should we say? $12 million to start it . . ." Bidding was nonexistent in the room aside from a lone suitor, a fair-skinned female seated in the phone bank, bidding on behalf of Rubenstein. "On the telephone, on my left. Fair warning at 19 million dollars," Redden paused before bringing down his hammer. "$19 million to the telephone."

Magna Carta's debut at auction lasted less than five minutes. The crowd applauded the result, then milled about waiting for word about the identity of the new owner who would join the ranks of Bill Gates, the buyer of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester for $30.8 million at Christie's in 1994, and television and movie producer Norman Lear who paid $8.14 million for a copy of the Declaration of Independence seven years ago (some may recall spotting it at P. Diddy's 2004 White Party).

Rubenstein, who flew in last night to attend the auction, made a personal appearance after the sale. Holding court before a purple-clothed case displaying the 710-year-old document, he announced that he would return the manuscript to the National Archives where it had been on exhibit for the last 20 years on loan from Perot. Sotheby's heralded Rubenstein as having saved Magna Carta for America.

Redden described the sale as a high point in his 33-year career at Sotheby's and recalled that in the 1970s he and his fellow Sotheby's associates had created a board game. "We debated whether the star lot would be the Mona Lisa or the Magna Carta," said Redden after the auction. "We decided on the Magna Carta." Turns out that in today's market Magna Carta is more Marvin Gardens than Park Place.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

For all the anonymous 18th-century portraits that turn out to (maybe) be Titians, there are Gauguins that turn out to be exceptionally unattractive fakes. This week the Art Institute of Chicago announced that The Faun, in its collection for a decade, wasn't by Gauguin as it had surmised but was rather the product of a 47-year-old forger whose cohort parents had consigned it to Sotheby's in 1994.

While forger Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to serve four years and eight months in a British jail last month and his octogenarian parents await their fate, the museum reportedly is looking to Sotheby's for a refund. Perhaps its Board of Trustees will have better luck than these folks.

Sotheby's was involved in a bestial surprise of another kind last week when a limestone lioness from ancient Mesopotamia fetched a triple-estimate $57 million--the highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture. Measuring just over 3 in. tall, the palm-sized figurine with killer deltoids and washboard abs was on loan to the Brooklyn Museum of Art for nearly sixty years by Alastair Bradley Martin, an amateur tennis champion and heir of steel magnate Henry Phipps. The mighty feline in a bodybuilder pose is said to have been found at a site near Baghdad and was acquired by Martin and his wife Edith in 1948.

Two holes in the back of its 5,000-year-old head suggest that it was worn 50 Cent-style around the neck of a powerful leader perhaps to repel misfortune and ward off evil forces. Or perhaps it was designed to attract renown and vast fortune: Sotheby's sold the purported amulet as The Guennol Lioness, adopting the Welsh name for Martin that graces the couple's formidable collection and their former estate.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

Tomorrow Christie's will hold the first spirits auction in New York since prohibition. It's being billed as an historic moment, and while the long-term impact will be more evolutionary than revolutionary –expect whiskey and cognac lots in wine auctions – the first something is a bang.

Nearly 1,000 lots will be offered. The whiskeys are grabbing the headlines, but the auction is as rich in Maderias and Cognacs, including a strong showing of 18th– and early 19th–century bottlings, like the famous Haley's Comet vintage of 1811, and the Waterloo vintage of 1815.

Some highlights:

* Single bottle of Verdlheo 1748, a Solera. Estimate: $7,500-$12,000.

* Case of Terrantez 1795, a good year for Madeira. Estimate: $30,000-$48,000.

* 'Grande Armée Cognac 1811, with the letter 'N' embossed in glass at the shoulder (it was a good year for Napoleon). Estimate: $3,000-$5,000.

* Cognac, Grande Fine Réserve 1811, from the private cellar of Doris Duke. Estimate: $1,000-$1,500.

* Single bottle of the Macallan, 1856. Estimate: $16,000-$24,000.

* Single bottle of the Macallan 1926, bottled in 1986 and rebottled in 2002; possibly the finest whiskey ever created and the cult object of the auction. Estimate: $20,000-$30,000.

* Armagnac from the war years, 1940-1946, from Marquis de Montdidier, Chateau de Cahuzac. Estimate: $500 to $700 each.

* Single bottle of rye whiskey made in George Washington's still with his recipe. A limited edition of 24 bottles was produced in 2003, and bottle #1 was won at auction by Marvin Shanken for $100,000 (and donated to the distillery's museum); this is bottle #8. Estimate: $10,000-$20,000.

* Collection of 8 bottles designed by Art Deco master Erté for Courvoisier in 1988. Estimate: $8,000-$12,000.

* A superlot of 729 whiskeys from a collector in the Pacific Northwest, the star of the auction. Estimate: $70,000-$100,000.

Everyone is fixating on the spirits, but about one-third of the lots are investment-grade wine: heavy-hitting Bordeaux from the 1980s and 1990s, Domaine de la Romanée Conti. Expect savvy wine buyers to wait out the spirits and cherry-pick bottles of the softer stuff.

--Oliver Schwaner–Albright

Apparently Russians have a love of money. Eliciting comparisons to Saudi high rollers of the 1970s and Japanese consumers of the 1990s, they shop for Gulfstream G550 airplanes and diamond-encrusted car grilles at modestly named shindigs. They also have a thing for cultural heritage and Faberge eggs.

Last week, Christie's and Sotheby's sold a combined $160 million worth of Russian artworks in London--a record haul that toppled previous highs. Among the highlights was a pink Faberge egg with a peek-a-boo diamond-set cockerel that sold for $16.5 million, a good bit of change more than the asking price of this ovoidal architectural wonder.

Goncharova's Bluebells

The world has been smitten with Russian collectors ever since an anonymous fellow with a bad dye job and apparently worse shoes mysteriously showed up at Sotheby's a year ago last May and plunked down $95 million for a Picasso. Today Russia claims some 53 billionaires and more than 100,000 millionaires, according to the New York Times. The nation also claims title to the most expensive female artist: Natalia Goncharova whose Picking Apples, sold for $9.8 million in June. Last week Goncharova's Bluebells fetched $6.2 million at Sotheby's, the top lot of its inaugural Russian evening sale. 

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz

With its burgeoning scene of art-infatuated oligarchs (and their wives), art foundations, collecting clubs, art fairs, galleries, and private museums, Larry Gagosian paid a well-heeled visit to Moscow in the fall. Now Vik Muniz, who will render you and your significant other in Bosco chocolate syrup for $110,000 (thank Neiman Marcus) for the holidays, has rendered Russian icons in puzzle pieces and sand for an exhibition at Moscow's Gary Tatintsian Gallery. Must be love or something like it.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

There's a pleasing symmetry to an auction of a single object belonging to the first president.  If you're going to keep it simple, however, it helps if the object in question is unique -- say, an Order of Cincinnati Medal -- and is estimated to fetch up to $10,000,000. That will be the case at Sotheby's on December 11 when you can bid on Washington's gold medal, which has not been seen in America since the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Made in France in 1784, the medal was subsequently presented by Washington's family to the great man's respected colleague, Marquis of Lafayette, in 1824.  The Society of Cincinnati, founded by the officers of the Continental Army in 1783, was intended to maintain the ideals of the American Revolution.  It had quite an impressive membership, including 23 signers of the Constitution. For their first president they selected, not surprisingly, George Washington.

--David Coggins

Laptops seem to come in only a few different styles: black, white, and somewhere boring in between. The One Laptop Per Child Charity Auction, December 3rd to December 12th at Design Miami, aims to change that. The online auction, presented by Luminaire, features pieces inspired by laptops, each created by an up and coming contemporary artist.

Ugo Rodinone

Better still, all of the proceeds will go to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a philanthropic effort to bring computers to the children of developing nations.

Cindy Sherman

In order to provide computers to as many children as possible, OLPC had to create a laptop that was both functional and affordable. The $100 laptop has arrived, and it's a minor revolution. Created for OLPC by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, and crafted by the trailblazing designer Yves Behar the XO laptop, named for it's bold typographic logo, doesn't need to be plugged in. It runs on solar power and can be recharged by hand. It also connects automatically to the Internet, and to other XO machines, even from remote locations.

Richard Tuttle

Add all these features up, and you start to wonder why no one has tried this before. The auction is a chance to give to a great cause and win a piece of art that is equal parts technical and collectible.

-- Benjamin Popper

Cai Guo-Qiang set a new record for a Chinese contemporary work at auction this week when a set of 14 drawings for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) fetched a double-estimate $9.5 million. The drawings, which Cai created by igniting traces of gunpowder on large sheets of paper resulting in burn patterns and Cy Twombly-ish pockmarks, reference Cai's pyrotechnic performance at the 2001 APEC conference, attended by George W. Bush and then-Chinese chairman Jiang Zemin.

The work was the top lot of a quadruple-estimate $108 million sale at Christie's in Hong Kong--the kickoff of a five-day spending spree and the further rise of commerce and culture in China over communism and censorship.

Born in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, Cai first came to international attention during his years in Japan (1986-95) with his series "Projects for Extraterrestrials," with the aim of reaching distant galactic audiences but as far as we know confined to earthly attendees in locales like Berlin, Hiroshima, Johannesburg, Oxford, and Vienna. In 2002, an exhibition devoted to Cai's work at the Shanghai Art Museum crowned him the first contemporary artist to be granted a one-person show in a government-run art museum in China.

Now a resident of New York, Cai has left his imprint all over Manhattan with firework extravaganzas from Central Park to the East River. Early next year, the Guggenheim will exhibit the record-setting gunpowder drawings, which sold to an anonymous buyer, in "Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe." Museum-phobes might check out Cai's contribution to Beijing's opening and closing ceremonies at the upcoming Steven Spielberg-approved (maybe) Olympic spectacular.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

The manliest art in the world is on sale this week at Sotheby's annual Sporting Art sale. Although not connected by period, style or form, these paintings and sculptures (a.k.a. a bronze rooster, racehorse, and a tiger attacking a tortoise) are unified in displaying country sports and wildlife. Many of these artists have attempted to capture action in motion with exciting results: horses' legs blur beneath them, dogs scamper or stare creepily at the viewer, and pirates sail a sea that looks like it's alive.

Works available at this year's auction include several paintings by Alfred Munnings, the famous English painter of horses, from Andrew Lloyd Webber's collection, as well as pieces from Rosa Bonheur who is awkwardly described in the press release as "the most famous woman painter of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century."

These paintings would be a great addition to any home, be it a rustic cabin, a ski lodge getaway, or a yacht. 

The auction will take place November 29th.

JAMES WILLIAM GILES
MR. J. A. SANDILAND'S KING CHARLES SPANIELS AT REST AND AT PLAY
signed J. Giles and dated 1842 (lower right)
oil on canvas
Est: 200,000 USD - 300,000 USD

SIR ALFRED J MUNNINGS, Silks and Satins of the Turf, o/b Original Frame
Est: 800,000 - 1,200,000 USD

Montague Dawson, The Brilliant Privateer the U.S.S. Rattlesnake, oil on canvas
Est: 400,000 - 500,000 USD

-- Brian Childs

Phillips de Pury's November 15 evening sale was a fitting end to the $1.7 billion fall auction season, up from $1.4 billion six months ago and less than half that amount two years ago. The crowd was loud and restless, prompting the irrepressible Simon de Pury to shush them a half-dozen times (to no avail). Still, de Pury rode the audience like a first-rate jockey for three-plus hours, bringing in a mid-estimate $42.3 million and $8.2 million to benefit the New Museum. The top lot was Willem de Kooning's 1982 Untitled XVI, an orange, blue, and white Alzheimer's-afflicted aerial canvas, which fetched a tepid $5.8 million (estimate: $5/7 million).

de Kooning's 1982 Untitled XVI

By the end of the two-week marathon, buyers were distracted and boisterous--de Pury repeatedly used inflection and one-on-one direction to overcome the constant din of white noise that filled the Meatpacking District warehouse-cum-salesroom. "Would you like to continue?" a flushed de Pury queried one female bidder. "No? You wouldn't? That's very, very sad."

A delectable European openness and voyeurism pervade Phillips beyond the cheeky see-through partition separating the ladies from the gents in the underground restrooms. Newlyweds Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann, the widely reported seller of Jeff Koons's $23.5 million Hanging Heart at Sotheby's, canoodled in a center row, while jeweler Laurence Graff, who paid a combined $24 million for a soup-can picture and a double-image of Elvis Presley by Warhol earlier in the week, mingled and chatted as if bar-hopping with old friends.

(Over the weekend, the New York Times's Carol Vogel kind-a-sort-a reported
that Graff was the buyer of Koons's $11.8 million Diamond (Blue). She also named Damien Hirst as the buyer who paid $33 million for a 1969 Francis Bacon self-portrait; Eli Broad as the winner of Koons's Hanging Heart; and Steven Cohen as the buyer of Francis Bacon's $45.9 million picture of a bullfight.)

Larry Gagosian, who normally makes the round at Phillips, was nowhere to be seen, but Philippe Segalot carried on with his seasonal buying spree, winning a Styrofoam work with footprints by Rudolf Stingel
for an artists-record $1.9 million (estimate: $500/700,000).

Prince's 2002 Registered Nurse

Dealer Andrew Fabricant, spouse of Laura Paulson, Christie's international director for contemporary art, wanted Richard Prince's 2002 Registered Nurse, but lost it to a phone bidder for $4.2 million (estimate: $1.5/2.5 million). Another Prince work dating from 2001 and aptly titled What Can You Do? (estimate: $1.5/2 million) failed to find a buyer when art adviser Kim Heirston was unable to connect with a client on her cell phone.

Eder's 2006 Masturbating Woman Surrounded by Bad Towels

The slim and seemingly proper de Pury displayed his trademark resolve when it came to Martin Eder's 2006 Masturbating Woman Surrounded by Bad Towels. Whereas Christie's Christopher Burge might have smirked and Sotheby's Tobias Meyer might have teased, de Pury unabashedly spanked the title across the room for $157,000.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

It was bound to happen and it did thanks in large part to dealer Larry Gagosian. Jeff Koons usurped Damien Hirst as the most expensive living artist at auction on November 14 thanks to a two-ton suspended hot pink Hanging Heart for which Gagosian paid a record $23.5 million (estimate: $15/20 million). At least Gagosian had competition from two phone bidders for the work unlike the lackluster response to the artist's Diamond (Blue) at Christie's the night before. Both Koons and Hirst belong to Gagosian's stable of what might be described as most-expensive-living-artists-in-waiting. Gagosian also bid Koons's 2001 Pancakes up to $3.3 million before letting a phone bidder have it for $3.4 million hammer, a record for a painting by Koons with buyer's premium ($3.8 million).

Koons's Hanging Heart

But enough about Gagosian, who also paid $2.3 million for Warhol's 1962 Campbell's Beef Noodle (Crushed) (estimate: $1.2/1.8 million). He wasn't the only bidder with deep pockets in the room. Philippe Segalot, restless in his chair and armed with his cell phone, won the top lot of the sale and the season--Francis Bacon's 1969 Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1--for $45.9 million (estimate: $35 million-plus), Andy Warhol's 1978-79 Shadow for $7.6 million (estimate: $4.5/6.5 million), and Robert Ryman's 1981 Sector for $4 million (estimate: $2.5/3.5 million). Segalot has a charmingly insistent way of raising his paddle before the hammer comes down--as if signaling the auctioneer that he's not going to take no for an answer.

Francis Bacon's Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1

The phone banks took on the air of a tower of Babel as specialists speaking in hushed voices and multiple languages attempted to coax bids from telephone clients and kept them apprised of the action in the room. "$1 million against us; would you like $1.1 million?"

From the front row Valentino unsuccessfully tried to win Warhol's 1986 Self Portrait (Green Camouflage), which sold for a high-estimate $12.3 million, and Mark Rothko's 1968 Untitled, which fetched a double-estimate $7.8 million and whose color scheme matched the peacocked hair of Marc Jacobs, also seated in the front row, and a regular at this week's sales. Gina Gershon strode out of the salesroom in a long black leather coat and Louboutin booties towards the end of the sale.

By the end of the night, Sotheby's had sold 65 of the 71 works on offer and racked up $315.9 million, its highest sales total in its 263-year history. Tobias Meyer, sporting his signature double-breasted suit, nipped and tucked to suggest six-pack abs, stuck around for the post-sale press conference this time, pronouncing the firm's unprecedented sale results "evidence of the hunger that exists across a global community of buyers."

It appears that the sky's still the limit for the art market and particularly for Koons (literally). Next Thursday, a 53-foot tall rendition of his 1986 Rabbit will debut in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Koons has described his stainless steel cast of an inflatable bunny as "a symbol maybe of the Resurrection, of the Playboy bunny, of masturbation." Quite a heady holiday combination.

--Kelly Devine Thomas