Charlie Chaplin's legendary Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera is expected to sell for £70,000 to £90,000 today at Christie's London. With its Mickey-Mouse ears and tripod mount, this hand-cranked 35mm was Chaplin's trademark, and the Hollywood camera before sound came into the picture. As confirmed by its February 23, 1918 receipt (two months after he set up Charlie Chaplin Studios Inc.), Chaplin bought the Bell & Howell straight from the factory for $2,000. Not a bad deal for the camera that would go on to film The Gold Rush, A Woman of Paris, and The Kid, to name a few. (Because multiple cameras were used at all times, Christie's believes that everything Chaplin filmed between 1918 and 1926 was at least partially shot with this 2709.) As Chaplin's eye on the world for decades, surely this witness to silent film's golden age has stories left to tell.

—Alannah Arguelles

Charlie Chaplin's legendary Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera.
Chaplin's February 23, 1918 receipt.

Apparently, nothing screams high-class like the 30-pound pike that legendary taxidermists J. Cooper and Sons preserved and mounted in a gilt-lined bowfront case (below). This item, which sold for just below $11,000, was only one among a smorgasbord of vintage and near-modern fishing relics—including reels, rods, books, trophy fish, and tackle boxes—featured at the Bonhams Auction House Henley Sale, held last Saturday, July 21, at Henley-on-Thames just outside London.

Another angling artifact, which fetched over $5,000, has a name more reminiscent of The Silence of the Lambs than A River Runs Through It. But the Gut Twisting Engine—made for the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the exquisite but short-lived Crystal Palace—is actually a beautiful, silver-plated brass tool used to turn horsehair into fishing line.

When it comes to rods and reels, a certain maker again asserted itself as the biggest name in the game. One of Bonham's signature fishing items, the Zane Grey big game reel and leather case (top), had a winning bid of $8,860. The high price was more than expected for the piece, which Hardy designed and manufactured in the 1930s to meet the requirements of the famous angler and author Zane Grey, who—as any self-important writer would—demanded it be the most expensive reel in the world before he would lend it his name.

An established angler looking to actually tackle the sport (rather than, say, decorate a room in the spirit of the pastime) might covet Lot 135, the limited edition House of Hardy Compleat Angler Traveller Set. And since it didn't sell last Saturday, it will be listed again on their next fishing auction on October 12 This item literally has it all—hook, line, and sinker. Inside its brushed aluminum case there's everything you'll need to snag your own 30-pound pike. After that, taxidermy is optional.

—WILL REITER

Two years ago New York hedge fund manager Rajiv Chaudhri, paid$1.6 million for Tyeb Mehta's Mahisasura (left) at Christie's, making it the first work by a contemporary Indian artist to surpass the $1 million mark. Since then, S.H. Raza and F. N. Souza have followed suit.

New Indian wealth both at home and abroad has elicited prices at auction dramatic enough to make one rethink Chinese contemporary art as the most promising Asian export. Now, with exhibitions of contemporary Indian art taking place all over the world and the art market's nascent endorsement, India has set out to build an international contemporary and modern art museum of its own, the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (KMOMA), a project said to be inspired by the Tate Modern and earmarked for a world-renowned architect (Frank Gehry and Herzog and de Mueron have been reported to be among the contenders). The museum, a joint venture between the West Bengal government and private investors, including artists, gallery owners, and collectors, is expected to cost $150 million and five years to build.

On Tuesday, Sotheby's offered 84 artworks by nearly 70 artists, many of whom had donated their works to benefit the museum, including Jorgen Chowdhury, Somnath Hore, Ram Kumar, Ganesh Pyne, and Souza. Estimated to tally as much as $3 million, the auction brought in just half of that sum—$1.5 million.

Despite some notable failures--the star of the sale, Mehta's Kali Head (Green), failed to sell against a $400/600,000 estimate—current market strength was reflected in some of the results. Rameshwar Broota's Untitled fetched a double-estimate $300,000, while Arpita Singh's Classified File went for $204,000, exceeding it's top estimate by more than $50,000. Keep Cooking II, a bright red steel sculpture by Venice Biennale exhibitor Riyas Komu sold for a mid-estimate $14,400. Subodh Gupta's bronze and chrome accoutrements, meanwhile, fetched an above-estimate $78,000. Dubbed the Damien Hirst of Delhi, Gupta preempted Hirst last year, creating Very Hungry God (above), a giant skull rendered in stainless steel pots and utensils before Hirst opted for diamonds. Owned by Christie's proprietor Francois Pinault, the work is currently on exhibit outside Pinault's Palazzo Grassi in Venice. No security guards required.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

Auction experts often describe their business as being dependent on three Ds: death, debt, and divorce. In recent years, they might add restitution.

Last week Christie's held the second of three sales of property restituted to the heirs of Amsterdam dealer Jacques Goudstikker. The heirs waged an eight-year legal battle before the Dutch government agreed last year to return 202 paintings in its national collections, including Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. So far the Goudstikker works have brought in $16 million. Part three of the collection will be auctioned at Christie's in Amsterdam in November. And that may not be the end of it. The heirs continue to search for hundreds of works that are still missing from the collection.

Restitution is big business. Many of the most valuable works of art at auction in recent years have been restituted objects previously in museum collections. Both Christie's and Sotheby's have departments dedicated to restitution and provenance research. Museums have been scouring their collections for works with unclear wartime ownership. And websites all over the world  (including one assisted by Sotheby's) now host lists of art objects that might rightfully belong to the heirs of Holocaust victims.

Last year, cosmetics heir and Neue Galerie founder Ronald lauder paid $135 million for Gustav Klimt's (top) Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), one of five Klimt paintings on display in Vienna's Belvedere Gallery that Austria returned to the heirs of Austrian sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. The remaining four Klimts were sold at Christie's last November, bringing in an astounding $192 million and resulting in the highest total —$491 million—for an auction. At the sale, Lauder bought another restituted artwork, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin Street Scene (it will be on exhibit at New York's Neue Galerie July 26-September 17), which had hung in Berlin's Brücke Museum for 30 years, for a record $38 million.

Sotheby's has also handled a number of high-profile restituted works. In 2003, the firm sold Gustav Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee, previously in Vienna's Belvedere Gallery, for $30 million, and Egon Schiele's Landscape at Krumau, a work that had been in the collection of the Neue Galerie in Linz, Austria, for $20 million.

It isn't just European museums that are giving up Nazi loot. Just last year, the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, agreed to restitute J.M.W. Turner's Glaucus and Scylla to the rightful heirs. When the painting appeared at Christie's in April, the museum reclaimed the work, paying $5.7 million for it.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

“We have to have this for the house in Fire Island!” A diminutive young woman, small even in her heels and shining silk tent dress—crammed with other bad-art lovers into the lavish Hiro Ballroom on a Tuesday night—pointed excitedly toward the stage with her paddle, indicating a small painting of a hunky merman that was being hawked by the evening’s antagonistic, heavily bearded auctioneer. The picture appeared to be painted on a piece of cheap canvas, perhaps by a teenager in a mandatory high school art class. A male companion seemed to agree with the young woman’s sentiments, and, after accidentally raising his glass to bid, he raised his paddle, kicking off an intense bidding war and eventually scoring the merman for a cool $200.

This kind of so-kitschy-how-did-I-ever-live-without-it sentiment was de rigueur at the New York by New York Bad Art auction, which benefited New York Cares, a volunteer-based charity aiding people all over New York City. The auctioneer and master of ceremonies was Zach Galifianakis, a comedian specializing in politically incorrect humor à la the queen of dirty jokes, Sarah Silverman (whose show he’s appeared in). His abrasive epithets only spurred the audience—greased by the complimentary Pom Tea cocktail with your choice of vodka or Jack Daniels—to the highest level of irreverent philanthropy.

The audience’s desire to spend big bucks on bad art became manifest toward the end of the night when a framed poster of Nascar superstar Richard Petty (at right) brought in $500. An image of a vintage Walt Disney pig also caused quite a scene; it was sold by dance-music star Moby, who, from a banquette off to the side of the room, demonstrated to the cheering crowd that the pig was actually—in addition to being one of the only foam-on-plywood paintings in the 50 states—inflatable, and a steal at $300.

The evening ended with Seattle-based indie-rock darlings Band of Horses playing a full set for the giddy crowd. A disco ball spun lights around the merman, who, being passed over the heads of his new owners, had become a Fire Island-bound crowd-surfer for a good cause.

—Maud Deitch Rohrer

R It wasn't so much a portrait as a means of introduction, kind of like posting your picture on myspace or wherever. In this case, Raphael had been commissioned to paint Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, for a portrait swap with his future bride-to-be. Lorenzo's uncle, Pope Leo X, arranged his marriage to Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, a cousin of Francois I, King of France, and an important ally of the Vatican against the Holy Roman Empire.

Wedded bliss or not, it was New York dealer Ira Spanierman who scored big when he spotted the portrait at an auction forty years ago and paid $325 for it. Three years later, Renaissance scholars identified the work as a lost de' Medici portrait by Raphael. Last Thursday, it fetched an artist's-record £18.5 million ($37.3 million) at Christie's.

It wasn't the only work to fetch eight figures at the Old Master sales in London last week. Saint Rufina (above) sold for an artist's-record 8.42 million pounds ($17 million) at Sotheby's, becoming one of the top dozen Old Masters to ever sell at auction. (Check out Sotheby's ranking below.)

Maybe I can't get erotic connotations out of my head, but I'm not sure I understand why the plume in her hand is quite so big or the purpose of the vessel she is proffering. Reminds me of Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup and makes me wonder what Freud would think.

But wait…Sotheby's provides an explanation for the seemingly gratuitous symbols: Saint Rufina was the daughter of a humble potter…during a pagan festival, she and her sister, Saint Justa, destroyed an image of Venus after refusing to make offerings to it…unwilling to renounce their faith, the sisters were tortured on a rack with iron hooks and starved and, in the case of Rufina, beheaded.

Yikes. It's a martyr's palm.

TOP OLD MASTER PAINTINGS SOLD AT AUCTION  BY DOLLAR (alternative ranking by British pound in parentheses)

1. (1) SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS
MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
$76,730,700 (£49,506,650)
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, JULY 2002

2. (5)  RAPHAEL
PORTRAIT OF LORENZO DE' MEDICI
$37,277,500 (£18,500,000)
CHRISTIE'S LONDON, JULY 2007

3. (2) JACOPO PONTORMO
PORTRAIT OF  HALBERDIER
$35,200,000 (£22,278,481)
CHRISTIE'S NEW YORK, MAY 1989

4. (4) CANALETTO
VENICE, THE GRAND CANAL LOOKING NORTH-EAST FROM PALAZZO BALBI
$32,568,600 (£18,600,000)
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, JULY 2005

5. (7) JOHANNES VERMEER
YOUNG WOMAN SEATED AT THE VIRGINALS
$30,006,650 (£16,245,600)
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, JULY 2004

6. (3) REMBRANDT
PORTRAIT OF A LADY, AGED 62
$29,167,755 (£19,803,750)
CHRISTIE'S LONDON, DECEMBER 2000

7. (6) ANDREA MANTEGNA
DESCENT INTO LIMBO
$28,568,000 (£17,666,450)
SOTHEBY'S NEW YORK, JANUARY 2003

8. (8) REMBRANDT
SAINT JAMES THE GREATER
$25,800,000 (£13,656,574)
SOTHEBY'S NEW YORK, JANUARY 2007

9. (9) CANALETTO
THE BUCINTORO AT THE MOLO, VENICE, ON ASCENSION DAY
$19,990,250 (£11,423,000)
CHRISTIE'S LONDON, JULY 2005

10. (11) CANALETTO
THE OLD HORSE GUARDS, LONDON, FROM ST. JAMES PARK
$17,799,230 (£10,100,000)
CHRISTIE'S LONDON, APRIL 1992

11. (12) VELAZQUEZ
SAINT RUFINA
$17,003,348 (£8,420,000)
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, JULY 2007

12. (10) FRANCESCO GUARDI
VEDUTA DELLA GIUDECCA ET DELLA ZATTERE A VENEZZIA
$15,866,500 (£10,112,492)
SOTHEBY'S MONACO, DECEMBER 1989

—Kelly Devine Thomas

If I could do anything tomorrow morning, something other than sitting in my office nursing a lukewarm coffee deciding which rock-skipping tasks I should tackle next, I might make my way to Christie's.

It would be a breezy, crystal blue kind of morning and before entering Christie's headquarters at Rockefeller Center between Saks Fifth Avenue and Radio City Music Hall, I would watch a bunch of beautifully or at least compellingly or perhaps just confidently dressed people going about their weekday business in the company of others without necessarily being in the company of others.

Just before 10 a.m., I would take my place at Christie's "Open House" sale of postwar and contemporary art and if the estimates were spot on it would cost me as much as a Kobold watch, these Bang & Olufsen speakers or, at the very high end, this Hermès leather desk set to acquire my heart's desire. Maybe I would bring someone along to share my bungled attempt at raising my first paddle. Maybe I would be alone. I would most certainly be in the mood to bring something home.

Among the possibilities: Brian Alfred's Untitled (Racetrack) (estimate: $4/6,000); Vik Muniz's (below) portrait of Mr. Rogers, 2000 (estimate: $8/12,000); a pair of Tony Oursler Stimorol chewing gum and Camel Filters watercolors (estimate: $2/3,000); Robert Rauschenberg's (top) All Abordello Doze 1 (estimate: $30/40,000); James Rosenquist's Drawing #10 for Heart Time Flowers (estimate: $8/12,000); Donald Sultan's August 1977 (estimate: $7/9,000); and James Turrell's Roden Crater—Fumarole Entrance, 1983 (estimate: $12/18,000).

Initially, I might only allow myself to bid on something if someone else bid on it first.  If I felt like the crowd was a bit distracted or misguided or if I was really smitten (if I could feel how it would feel to live with it and if that feeling would be happiness; if it unexpectedly drew me in and made me feel connected and elevated; or if it simply provoked or amused me to a significant degree), I would make the first move and not worry about the consequences. If someone else came along and tried to have it, I would be faced with two options: letting it go or losing my mind over it. If I could do anything tomorrow morning, I might like to lose my mind over something before heading off into the sunshine.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

Sotheby's described the sale as one of the finest collections of watercolors by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) to have come to the market in living memory, somehow suggesting that the works had been squired away in a baron's castle for at least a lifetime. In actuality the works weren't entirely fresh to the market. Baron Ullens spent the last two decades pulling the collection together, buying some of them at auction as recently as five years ago. On Wednesday, the fourteen works sold for 10.76 million pounds  ($21.74 million) altogether, short of its low estimate sans buyer's commission and just over half the record $35.8 million Steve Wynn spent to acquire a Turner oil painting of Venice last year.

The highest price paid for a watercolor on Wednesday was 3.6 million pounds ($7.26 million) for Turner's A Swiss Lake, Lungernzee, not quite approaching the 5.8 million pounds ($11.4 million), a record for any watercolor, paid for Turner's The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise (below), at Christie's last June. Earlier this year, Tate Britain launched a public appeal that successfully saved The Blue Rigi for the country, after the government temporarily refused an export permit to Christie's foreign buyer, giving the nation until March 20 to come up with a reduced purchase price of 4.95 million pounds. Over 11,000 people donated 550,000 pounds—some "buying a brushstroke" (make that a pixel) online for 5 pounds each—to keep the watercolor in a public British collection.

Britain's most expensive artist until Francis Bacon's Study from Innocent X (1962) set a $52.6 million record at Sotheby's in May, Turner left the contents of his studio, 19,000 watercolors, drawings and oils, to Britain upon his death in 1851, including risqué images that The New York Times assures us were not destroyed in a bonfire in 1858.

Tate Britain will loan 86 works that were part of the Turner bequest to the National Gallery of Art in Washington this fall (October 1, 2007 - January 6, 2008) for what the museum is calling the largest and most comprehensive Turner retrospective ever presented in the United States, ostensibly outshining the retrospective accorded to the artist at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. The U.S. Turner exhibition was postponed two years ago because of the enormity of the $1 billion-plus cost to insure it.

The retrospective, which will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, promises to offer a new look at the eccentric pioneer of Romanticism and major influence on impressionism and modern art. A lifelong bachelor who fathered two daughters, scribed long poetic titles for his compositions, and bolstered paint with spit and snuff, Turner claimed that he had himself tied to the mast of a ship for four hours in a howling storm in order to experience the drama of the sea. Perhaps fittingly, Britain's most controversial tribute to the painter of light is the Turner Prize, that great whipping post of contemporary English society.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

Yue Minjun became the most expensive Chinese contemporary artist last month when  The Pope (1997) sold for $2.15 million pounds ($4.28 million) at Sotheby's in London. In his portrayal of the Pope, a Western figure depicted by Western artists like Diego Velazquez, Francis Bacon, and Maurizio Cattelan, Minjun conveys a stereotypical Western vision of Chinese people: squinty eyes; full-frontal smile; ill-fitting clothing.

The record price fetched for Minjun's The Pope, is the latest demonstration that money (aside from Charles Saatchi's) is being drawn to Chinese art. Christie's spring auctions in Hong Kong brought in $195.4 million in May, including $1.78 million for Emperor Kangxi's (1662-1722) throne, which was bought by Macau casino mogul Stanley Ho. Last week, Ho paid $5.37 million for five works of Hong Kong "reunification" art and announced his plans to donate the works to the Chinese government. The highlight of the sale was Ma Baozhong's 19 December, 1984, commemorating the date then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher transferred ownership of Hong Kong back to China from Britain in 1984. Ho paid $2.19 million for it.

A year ago April, Ho's Macau casino mogul competitor Steve Wynn, the infamous mastermind who brought Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso to Las Vegas a decade ago, paid more than $10 million for a Ming vase at Christie's Hong Kong and donated it to a Macau museum. This Wednesday, Belgian collector Baron Guy Ullens is selling his collection of 14 watercolors by J.M.W. Turner at Sotheby's in London (combined estimate: $19.7/29.55 million) as he focuses on establishing a center for Chinese contemporary art in a vast Bauhaus structure in Beijing. Ullens's Turner sale comes a year after Wynn paid a record $35.8 million for a Turner oil painting of Venice at Christie's in New York. Reminds me of the Warholian observation that Sotheby's London used as a press release logo last month: "Big time art is big time money." It's also big time publicity.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

If you want to see something that's still somewhat erotically shocking, check out this video above, depicting naked young women smothering themselves in paint, pressing their bare torsos against a hanging canvas, and dragging each other around by outstretched arms across a canvas-covered floor. The tuxedo-clad maestro in the middle projecting this sensuously subversive bravado is French artist Yves Klein accompanied by an orchestra and an audience of prudently dressed women and men. Makes Damien Hirst seem almost modest.

Klein spent eight years (1954-1962), before dying of a heart attack at age 34, upending the artist's relationship to art and art's relationship to its audience. Before Warhol, Klein advocated the idea of the artist not as a machine but as a shaman capable of infusing space and objects with his aura. Artistic touch was not relevant; artistic conveyance was what Klein was after.

A judo black belt, Klein used female models as brushes; blanketed naked skin, sponges, and canvas with his patented International Klein Blue in the name of immaterial enlightenment; sold invisible paintings in an empty gallery; and asserted that the identical IKB monochrome paintings in his 1957 Picasso-tagging exhibition L'Epoca Blu (The Blue Period), were each priced differently. (According to Nan Rosenthal, while Klein told critics during and after the show that the prices were discordant, each painting in actuality was priced identically at 35,000 lire or about $56.)

A perpetual showman, Klein called his material oeuvre the "ashes of his art." Still, Klein likely would have been pleased with the results of last month's auctions in London. Two monochrome paintings nearly identical in size, identical in color and content, and painted a year apart, sold for different prices. IKB 94 (1959) (at right) fetched $2.9 million at Christie's, while IKB 170 (1960) garnered $2 million at Sotheby's. Turns out that even without his continued orchestration, Klein was onto something after all. There are plenty of reasons why artworks fetch the disparate prices they do, many of them (previous ownership, exposure, opinion, and salesmanship) having nothing to do with the physical work of art itself but rather the various auras that have attached themselves to it, beginning with the artist's.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

See Peter Beard's take on Klein style body painting here.