Artnet’s Top Sales of 2011

Artnet wants a share of the online art sales pie. They’re reminding folks of the successes they’ve had over the last year:

Andy Warhol snagged first place (not just for unique works, but for all works) with the sale of Flowers for $1.3 million, which was the second highest price for a Warhol flower painting at auction last year. The canvas has flowers in a deep, bright shade of blue and is one of four in the Flowers series dated 1978; the vast majority of these works date to 1964-65.

two pictures by Thomas Hart Benton that fetched $198,559 and $143,750. […] The bigger price was paid for the mythical Ten Pound Hammer(1965), which shows three black men working on railroad tracks with a train steaming in the background. Benton must have liked the image — he released it as a lithograph in 1967 in an edition of 300.

A conceptual video sculpture by Nam June Paik sold for $92,000, proving that mixed media works can do well online, too. Polaris (1990) is composed of four televisions arranged like petals around a globe and backlit by concentric neon florescent tubes. It was exhibited in a 2000 survey of the artist’s work at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

the checkerboard abstraction Check #9 by Sherrie Levine, sold for $115,000. Levine gained notoriety in the ‘80s when she exhibited her “photographs of photographs” by Walker Evans of desolate farmers during the Great Depression, unaltered and indistinguishable from the originals. Her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art is just closing now, and her oeuvre seems particularly resonant today with the renewed debates concerning appropriation and copyright infringement in art.