The analysis of the November 2020 Contemporary Art Day Sales at Sotheby's is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

Earlier this month, Sotheby’s announced plans to stage two stand-alone day sales devoted to modern and contemporary art leading up to its early December evening sale. In a normal, non-pandemic, non-Presidential election year, this would be the time when we would have both Day and Evening sales in New York. But this isn't a normal year. On Friday, the house announced those two auctions achieved a collective total of $74.9 million. The contemporary segment of the day sales, which included a live and online auction, brought in $48.8 million, coming up short of the combined $57.8 million pre-sale low estimate.

The live sale saw a 76.5 percent sell-through rate with 257 lots sold; the online sale saw 225 lots find buyers, which calculates to an even lower statistic of just 64 percent of lots sold.