Sotheby’s CEO Tad Smith Announces Big Warhol Mao ($30-40m) for November on CNBC: After making a counter-intuitive case that an end to the estate tax might help increase art market liquidity, Smith mentioned the top lot in Sotheby’s sales would be a Warhol Mao painting from 1972 (above) estimated at $30-40m. The very quiet Warhol market suddenly has two large works testing the appetite for $30-50m pictures. …

Loic’s Hints: Loic Gouzer seems to be previewing works for the November sales in New York on his Instagram account with this picture of a group including Rothko, Miró and Brice Marden. …
Speaking of Marden: Before his most recent show of work in London, dealer Larry Gagosian kept the names of potential buyers of the few works on offer very close to his vest. Word is leaking out of the small group of collectors who were given the chance to buy one of the $7.5m green works. A number of the buyers are the obvious choices but the question remains whether Yusaku Maezawa‘s Instagram post of one of the works is an indicator that he is among the buyers. …

Esquire Tells the History of the Sackler Family, Their Drug Empire and Collecting Habit: 

• As Arthur’s fortune grew, he turned his acquisitive instincts to the art market, quickly amassing the world’s largest private collection of ancient Chinese artifacts. According to a memoir by Marietta Lutze, his second wife, collecting, exhibiting, owning, and donating art fed Arthur’s “driving necessity for prestige and recognition.” Rewarding at first, collecting soon became a mania that took over his life. “Boxes of artifacts of tremendous value piled up in numerous storage locations,” she wrote, “there was too much to open, too much to appreciate; some objects known only by a packing list.” Under an avalanche of “ritual bronzes and weapons, mirrors and ceramics, inscribed bones and archaic jades,” their lives were “often in chaos.” “Addiction is a curse,” Lutze noted, “be it drugs, women, or collecting.”