They were the epitome of upper-class lifestyle and high society, clamoring for international prestige with majestic design and cutting-edge technology.  Their decks saw the likes of the Astors, the Guggenheims, and the Strausses, which made them more than mere vessels.  From the R.M.S. Titanic to the S.S. Normandie, the world's most famous ships represented the power, beauty and imagination of their countries and the companies that designed them.  Now, lucky landlubbers can bid on their bounty at Christie's Annual Ocean Liner Auction on Thursday, June 28th.

Though the Titanic's items are likely to be the most popular among history buffs -- there is a hand-written personal account of a third-class passenger watching the lights of the ship go out, and a log book from the second rescue ship to arrive on the scene -- Christie's offers a range of maritime memorabilia to suit the taste of any collector. A world tour without the jet lag, there is furniture, silverware and interior design decorative panels reflecting the various styles of the French, Italian and American-made ships. Taken from the Grand Salon of the S.S. Normandie, a pair of Jean Rothschild side chairs depict the art-deco style of design popular in 1930s France and are expected to bring as much as $30,000.  The S.S. United States offers more modern fare, particularly in the furniture of the Kenneth C. Schultz Collection.

Yet the most spectacular items are the decorative panel pieces of the Italian ships.  These large hanging murals -- such as the Emanuele Luzzati Ceramic Ensemble from the S.S. Stella Solaris -- recall the Mediterranean, and the Greek and Turkish ports they frequented. Like most of the Luzzati pieces on the ship, they represent Greek mythological scenes, mainly from The Odyssey and The Iliad, while the Brass Bacchanalia panels appear downright ancient Egyptian. All of these items are expected to sell for more than $10,000.

Alongside salt-kissed remains are the works of great artists such as Fred Pansing, Albert Sebille and Albert Brenet who depicted the ships in their prime.  Sebille's exquisite Normandie, at Midnight on the Atlantic (at right) is expected to draw between $10,000 and $15,000.

As Gregg Dietrich, Christie's Ocean Liner Expert, says, "These ships were The Concords of the past."  Though their time has passed, it is impossible to deny the allure of these great mammoths of maritime engineering.

-- WILL REITER

I saw Damien Hirst's flashy skull this week, and can attest that it is a remarkable spectacle, if not necessarily a remarkable object.  Hirst's new show spans two galleries -- the White Cube's Hoxton space in East London and its Mason's Yard space in the West End -- but the skull is not in either of theses spaces. It's kept on a separate floor in its own private room. To get there you must walk out of the Mason's Yard gallery, around to the back of the building to a ticket booth manned by sleekly dressed, young galleristas. They ask for your postal code (the gallery will brag, I'm sure, of the visitors from the UAE or San Tropez) and hand you a free ticket. From the booth you are led into a roped-off line, where you can stand for a half-hour or more.

The whole thing may strike you as a kind of upmarket carnival ride. Long lines, for brief, heavily hyped thrills. The White Cube has even rented out a small gallery space across the street to hawk t-shirts and posters and a book filled with scientific facts about the skull, like the age of the teeth (35 years).

Next to you in line is, perhaps, a physicist from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and his wife. On the other side is a family from Birmingham. None of them are really fans of Hirst, they must admit, but, you know, they'd read about the skull and were in the area and, well, they thought, why not?

Soon you reach ushers draped in black and armed with walkie talkies. They give you some instructions, search your bags, and bring you upstairs in a group (They let in about a dozen viewers at a time). There you are lined up against a wall in a narrow hallway, and told to leave your bags at your feet.

"The room is pitch black," says another chic guard, "and you will be allowed only two minutes to examine the piece."

"Two minutes?" someone vainly objects. In you go.

The skull is shiny, very shiny. It's made of millions of dollars of diamonds, and you can't help thinking about the price tag as everyone crowds around, elbowing for the best spot to marvel at the workmanship. You can't help wondering what makes it so expensive. From your perspective, craning over the shoulders of your fellow gallery-goers, it might as well be covered in cubic zirconium.

"It's got good teeth," someone pipes up in the dark. "Very good teeth," says another, "better than mine."

After closer inspection a teenage girl adds, "There are no fillings."

"You'd expect diamond fillings, wouldn't you?"

"Good bone structure," says an older man. "I bet he was very handsome."

"Is it a girl or a boy?" asks young woman.

"It's a man."

"A man?" says a middle-aged Englishman. "How clever."

Suddenly, time's up. You head out into the bright sun, dazed by the life of the city.

-- AUSTIN KELLEY

Oh, now he's going to be impossible to live with.

Damien Hirst, enfant terrible, became the most expensive living artist at auction last week (unlike with Peter Doig note the absence of a European modifier). With Larry Gagosian, Jay Jopling, and a diamond-studded $100 million skull in his corner, it almost makes one want to shout foul.

But there's no arguing with records. They are what they are. People set them. People break them -- breathtakingly quickly nowadays. Since the dawn of artistry, artists have succeeded in the market because of the patrons in their corner. In this case, patronage helped the 42-year-old figurehead of the Young British Artists dethrone American iconoclast Jasper Johns, 77, who'd held the record at auction for a living artist since 1989 when publisher S.I. Newhouse paid $17.1 million for the artist's False Start (1959). (This record was improved upon in May when Gagosian paid $17.4 million for Johns's Figure 4 (1959) at Christie's.) Newhouse subsequently sold False Start to entertainment mogul David Geffen, who sold it last year to hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin for a reported $80 million.

Modern-day patronage also helped Hirst trump the most-expensive-living-European-artist-at-auction record set by the 84-year-old School of London painter Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud and portraitist of the Queen, when his depiction of the late Bruce Bernard sold for 7.86 million pounds ($15.6 million) at Christie's the night before.

Lullaby Spring, the work that reset the contemporary art world when it fetched 9.6 million pounds ($19.2 million) at Sotheby's London on June 21, is one of four pill cabinets belonging to Hirst's take on that allegorical mainstay, the Four Seasons. The stainless steel cabinet contains 6,136 Easter-hued pharmaceuticals (unlike the 8,601 diamonds used for his high-security skull, the pills are hand-painted bronze placebos). In May, its more despondent counterpart, Lullaby Winter, summoned a record $7.4 million at Christie's.

Despite Hirst's coup, it was Freud's late buddy Francis Bacon who was the undisputed star of the recent auction sales of Impressionist & Modern and Contemporary & Postwar art in New York and London, which fetched nearly $2.5 billion altogether at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips de Pury, including day sales.

Two paintings by Bacon alone racked up nearly $100 million in May and June. Bacon's 1978 Self Portrait (at right) fetched 21.58 pounds ($43 million) last week, the second highest price for the artist. His Study from Innocent X (1962) set a $52.6 million record at Sotheby's in New York just last month. All of which makes one wonder about Venice Biennale director Robert Storr's recent observation, "'Money talks but generally, when it comes to art's substance, it doesn't have much to say."' Maybe, but it sure does move it.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

What does it mean when a Monet bought in 1990 for $3.4 million returns to the market and makes $35.5 million? Maybe it means we should stop feeling sorry for those Japanese buyers who appeared to lose their shirts in the last art market boom.

Ostensibly, the Japanese buyer who bought Waterloo Bridge, temps couvert (1904) in 1990 and consigned it to Monday's evening sale of Impressionist & Modern art at Christie's in London, made a sweet profit, albeit nearly twenty years later. This time around the painting was bought by an anonymous American collector for nearly three times its estimate and remained the second most expensive Monet at auction for 24 hours. Sotheby's barely skipped off with the title on Tuesday night when an Asian collector paid $36.7 million for Monet's Nympheas of 1904, consigned by a European collector who had purchased it from the artist's son. What goes around comes around, particularly in the art world.

What was meant to be the star of the Christie's sale, a fresh-to-market Monet, Les acreaux de roses, Giverny, sold for $17.8 million, shy of its $18 million low estimate, commission included. Still, Monet helped Christie's achieve the highest total ever for a European auction this week, selling more Impressionist & Modern art in its London evening sale ($239.9 million) than in its corresponding New York evening sale last month ($236.5 million). Sotheby's sale on Tuesday brought in $159.6 million against its New York total of $278.4 million. This, compared to 1997, when the June London sales of Impressionist & Modern art at Christie's and Sotheby's brought in $22.4 million and $58.3 million, respectively.

Further illustrating how much the world has changed in the past decade, both top-selling Monets this week exceeded the artist's record at auction in U.S. dollars, but not in pounds. (The record-holder, Bassin aux Nympheas of 1900, fetched 19.8 million pounds or $33 million at Sotheby's London in 1998.)

What does it all mean? For starters, all bets are off.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

For many collectors, provenance is the vital factor in their attraction to a given auction lot. A pair of Nikes worn by Michael Jordan while torching the Knicks in the playoffs is part of NBA history; a pair of Air Jordans worn by some guy while playing h-o-r-s-e in the high school gym are just sweaty sneakers.

For the intrepid collector who prefers history shrouded in ambiguity, however, consider the auction of abandoned safe deposit boxes at Doyle New York on June 27 (viewing from June 23-26). Calling upon their relationship with various banks, Doyle has acquired unclaimed or undesired goods that have come to light when banks have merged with another or liquidated their own inventory. Despite the fact that most of the findings at such auctions aren't overly rarified -- coins, jewelry (like the gold bangle pictured here), and other disjecta -- the overwhelming sentiment in the air is one of speculation. What could be so important in someone's life that it had to be locked in a bank -- and why was it then simply left there? Then again, the mystery of why something once considered worthy of safekeeping suddenly or gradually becomes the object of indifference, or is simply forgotten, is probably better left to psychologists or poets to unravel.

In the end, imaginatively reconstructing the lives behind some of the lots, from the grandiose to the mundane, is perhaps the real source of enjoyment at these auctions. Elaborate reflections and intricately spun familial yarns can make bidders feel as if, for a short while, they've become entangled in a Paul Auster novel.

Such musings can be a welcome respite after the excess of the summer auctions at the big houses, where it's easy to feel that one has been trapped, with no way out, on Page Six.

-- DAVID COGGINS

Monkeys are smarter than dogs. Monkeys ride bikes. Monkeys smoke cigars. Monkeys have been observed using tools. (Well, they stick twigs into termite holes in order to secure a snack -- but that's tool-use, nevertheless.) Dogs do none of these things. Dogs attack harmless mailmen while wagging their tails at, say, the serial killer next door.

But despite the monkey's evident intellectual superiority, the art world, at least, has always had an abiding fascination with dogs and has long chosen to portray them as the the noblest and most human-like dignitaries of the animal world. In order to celebrate the aesthetic allure of man's best friend, Christie's is holding "The Dog Sale," an auction of canine-related paintings from the 1600s to the 20th century.

One piece, valued as high as $1.2 million, is "Neptune" by Sir Edward Landseer, a monumental Romantic work featuring a black and white Newfoundland ostensibly gallivanting on some seaside rocks in the Scottish Highlands. But look closer. In the distance, a boat is being pulled ashore. A terrifying storm approaches. "Newfoundlands were famous for their rescues at sea," the Christie's catalog proclaims, and the painting implies that the energetic dog would, if needed, unhesitatingly save the boat's occupants from a watery death.

Another work of interest is Richard Ansdell's "Two King Charles Spaniels in a Landscape" (valued between $150,000-$200,000) in which two King Charles Spaniels pose on an elaborate red tapestry. In the background a tempest (again) appears to be brewing. The dogs, aristocrats to the core, project a certain devil-may-care attitude that even the most ardent egalitarian can admire.

Despite the fact that all of the auction's works are concerned with dogs, there is a surprising amount of variety on view. The lots contain everything from an 1880s portrait of a dog by John Singer Sargent, done for his friend Louise Burckhardt (valued at up to $80,000) to clay sculptures of pug dogs by contemporary artist Kerry Jameson ($2,000-$3,000).

The common thread between these works seems to be that all the dogs represented (and, by implication, all dogs everywhere) share a certain heroic quality. Can anyone honestly picture a chimp diving into the sea and saving a boatload of passengers from the raging waters of the North Atlantic? Landseer's masterpiece convinces us that a Newfoundland could -- and would -- do just that.

Maybe dogs have it over monkeys, after all.

-- REBECCA HARRINGTON

Sometimes it's really hard to take the art world seriously. Sometimes, in particular, it is really hard to take Damien Hirst at all.

Just in time for the art world hordes that arrive in London this week, Hirst has revealed For the Love of God, a $100 million diamond-encrusted skull at the White Cube gallery in London -- the most expensive artwork to be proffered, announced, and most likely imminently sold by a living artist. Viewing of the tricked-out tchotchke with a mega 52.4-carat pink diamond smack dab in the middle of its forehead is by ticket only, and apparently sold out. Commodity art, indeed.

A few years ago, I wrote an article for ARTnews identifying the top ten most-expensive-living artists. It was a nearly impossible task considering that (at the time, at least) privately paid prices weren't openly -- or at least not regularly -- discussed. In the article, I explained that the artists in the piece were considered based on the sum paid for a single work of art at auction or privately (private sums can and often do exceed an artist's record at auction), regardless of how many works have sold at that level, the production costs involved in creating the work, or how prices for new works measured up.

Hirst didn't make the list -- The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, his14-foot tiger shark in formaldehyde, hadn't yet sold for somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 million to hedge-fund billionaire Steven Cohen. (Having recently substituted a new shark for the badly deteriorating original perhaps the sculpture should be renamed The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Replaced Because He Was Decomposing.)

Look for Sotheby's to upend Hirst's $7.43 million auction record set for Lullaby Winter at Christie's last month when it offers Lullaby Spring, a cabinet full of candy-colored pills, in its London salesroom this Thursday (estimate: $6-8 million).

Still, it's a bit unfair to compare market prices for an oil-on-canvas number painting by Jasper Johns to a large-scale investment-grade Celebration sculpture by Jeff Koons. Part of the wow-factor involved when an artwork sells for eight or nine figures is the fact that someone out there parted with that much cash for an object that, when you break it down, is composed of rather ordinary materials. It may be perverse, but there's a sense of magic in that.

Affixing 8,601 diamonds (apparently ethically acquired ones) to a platinum cast of an 18th-century skull reeks of a rather sophomoric attempt at piracy. Hirst recently told Reuters, "I've stopped worrying about what art is."

His confusion is apparent. Memento mori or not, when you break it down, For the Love of God is jewelry.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

[Read Part 1 of this entry here.]

A once puritanical art world has become more comfortable with its capitalist side. In the present art market boom, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago have been some of the biggest sellers.

Museum provenance (owned or exhibited), like a Rockefeller provenance, undoubtedly contributes to an object's value. Christie's and Sotheby's include this information in their sales catalogues alongside exhibition pedigree. Retrospectives of artists like Richard Serra (above) at MoMA or exhibitions of younger artists like Neo Rauch at the Met irrefutably raise an artist's profile and prices. (Let's avoid for now what happens when museums possess or exhibit looted objects.)

Museum directors and curators are VIPs on the grand tour that is today's art market, which is as synchronized as the art fairs now taking place across the continent and due to come to a luxurious halt at Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips de Pury in London next week. The London evening sales of Impressionist & Modern and Contemporary & Postwar art could fetch more than $600 million, an encore to the $1 billion-plus sold at the evening sales in New York in May. As Robert Storr, former Museum of Modern Art curator and presently the dean of the Yale School of Art, who is curating this year's Venice Biennale, told the International Herald Tribune, "The art world no longer has a single center, or even two or three. It's truly international now." (In other words, it too is flat like the rest of the world.)

When museums sell artworks, they are often hoping, like any insatiable collector, to purchase something better. If they are fortunate, they acquire something headline-grabbing like Robert Rauschenberg's early combine painting Rebus (1955, at left). Two years ago the Modern paid about $30 million to acquire Rebus from French luxury goods magnate Francois Pinault, who coincidentally owns Christie's and just signed a $30-million deal (winning out against the Guggenheim Foundation) to transform the Punta della Dogana into a contemporary arts center to house his personal collection in Venice (he already owns the Palazzo Grassi). While sealing the deal for the Venice space last week, Pinault reportedly purchased the entire Sigmar Polke exhibition at the Venice Biennale, outmaneuvering several interested museums. He's planning to house them in a special Dogana room designed by Polke and Japanese architect Tadao Ando. If that doesn't work out, perhaps we'll see the works for sale at Christie's.

Who knows? Perhaps a museum will end up buying them.

--KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

The Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo has been on a selling spree as of late, disposing of more than 200 works at Sotheby's this season. On June 6, its prized bronze statue Artemis and the Stag sold for a staggering $28.5 million, five times its estimate and a record for any sculpture or antiquity at auction.

Altogether the works have fetched $76 million (including Sotheby's commission) against a presale estimate of $20 to $30 million. With the proceeds, the Albright-Knox aims to collect more modern and contemporary art. The sum could get them a decent Warhol.

Deaccessioning museum artworks was once a hot-button issue. To a lesser degree, it still is (protestors filed a lawsuit to try to halt the Albright-Knox sales) but public outrage doesn't always carry the weight you might expect. Just a decade ago selling works from your permanent collection was as likely to elicit criticism from your colleagues as was selling your name or renting your collection to keep your institution in the black (or in the green). Of course, that was before Tom Krens came to town and the Louvre ate his franchise concept for breakfast.

Next, in Part 2 of "The Grand Tour": A fiscally puritanical art world grows more comfortable with its capitalist side.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

Four photographs of Kate Moss sold for more than $360,000 at Christie's London in May, the latest demonstration that she has become an art world darling. "Sphinx," an exhibition of Moss in a series of remarkably vacant contortions (left) by Marc Quinn is currently on view at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York (through June 30). Moss was the official poster-girl for "Face of Fashion," an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Two years ago a painting of a pregnant Moss by Lucian Freud sold for more than $7 million.

Among the photos sold in May was Chuck Close's rendering of Moss sans makeup and clothes for the September 2003 issue of W magazine -- a complete set of six prints that fetched nearly $166,000, more than five times the estimate. A larger-than-life nude of Kate in Marrakech (right) taken by Albert Watson in January 1993 and published in German Vogue, fetched an artist's-record $106,542. Irving Penn's platinum print Kate Moss (Hand on Neck) from 1996 sold for $75,763, and Corinne Day's notorious 1993 depiction of a scantily-clad waifish Kate framed by candy-colored lights, first published in British Vogue, sold for more than $13,021.

Recently named one of Time's 100 most influential people and with a clothing line now in Topshop and Barneys, Moss has become an even more ubiquitous icon since the Daily Mirror caught her on camera in 2005 partaking in what appeared to be a pile of coke. Last year, two pranksters snuck a Kate Moss Floor Mat, appropriating the infamous Daily Mirror cover shot, into the Whitney Biennial. As Quinn sees it, "In a world without gods and goddesses, celebrity has replaced divinity. What is interesting to me about Kate Moss is that she is someone whose image has completely separated from her real self and this image has a life of its own."

A life that elicits a lot of cold hard cash.

-- Kelly Devine Thomas

Irving Penn, Kate Moss (Hand on Neck), 1996.

How do you rake in $4.97 million for a house that, for decades, sat in the middle of Africa, rotting away? Firstly, make sure it was designed by one of the hottest names in today's decorative art market, the late Jean Prouvé. Then, transport it to New York, place it on an empty lot under the 59th Street bridge and throw cocktail parties for prospective buyers and design buffs. Finally, surround it at sale with more than one hundred pieces designed by very hot Twentieth Century French names: Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeaneret and of course, Prouvé himself.

By the time hotelier, Andre Balazs walked away with the star attraction -- Prouvé's restored (and now very shiny) aluminum-sided Maison Tropicale -- Christie's could congratulate themselves on their strategy. The early June auction, attended by such aficionados as Jacqueline and Vito Maria Schnabel, netted $8,318,000.

Like the then futuristic house, designed in 1951 to house officers of France's colonial service in the Congo, many items had traveled far. Lot 299, a typical design from Prouvé, a one time metalworker, and Perriand -- it combined lacquered aluminum, sheet steel, plywood and exotic wood -- was a cupboard from the laundry room at the Air France quarters in Brazzaville. It was snapped up for $38,400.

Part of the allure of the Maison Tropicale, unlike many pedigreed Modern houses now arriving on the art market, was that it was designed to travel. Disassembled, it fits into 6 containers. "It was the very first Pre Fab," said an excited Balazs, the owner of the Mercer and the Chateau Marmont. "Prouvé's point of view -- combining the environmental with industrial and the Modern -- is fascinating."

When it was discovered in Brazzaville by the antiques dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, who returned it to France in 2000, it was riddled with bullet holes. One remains, inside the top of the steps to the living floor. At another time, it served as a maison for Congolese squatters.

After the sale, Balazs announced he would move his prize "somewhere tropical." An outdoor cabana or a cocktail lounge in one of his hotels perhaps? Somewhere where those who now hang out at Balazs' Raleigh Hotel in Miami Beach can experience the industrial design genius of Prouvé. At these prices they won't be squatters.

-- DAVID HAY

All images courtesy of Tien Mao.