Jeffrey Deitch at Christie’s preview with Pol Bury’s “Punctuation.”
Call the cops, there’s Yukon gridlock at Christie’s.
It is the Tuesday afternoon before the big postwar contemporary art auctions, and mirrored in the Jeff Koons sculpture “Balloon Monkey (Orange),” a half-dozen shiny sport utility vehicles can be seen ganging up at curbside, attempting to disgorge their big-dog passengers all at once.
There goes Ralph Lauren. And here comes the former Hollywood mover and shaker Michael Ovitz. Over there is a hedge fund honcho with an Eddie Munster hairdo and more than $50 billion under management.
It is the last day of previews before several auctions, the first of which (to the surprise of practically no one) will one day from now go on to set soaring records, shaking loose $852.9 million (including premiums) from the deep pockets of a select group for whom pursuing blue-chip contemporary artworks is what shooting tuskers was to Hemingway.
If it all seems so remote from the lives of ordinary people — of the sort now innocently gawping at a less exotic public spectacle, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, erected a half-block away on the spot where Mr. Koons’s “Split/Rocker” stood not long ago — it is not. Or, anyway, not altogether.
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Concealed behind the breathless hype, the eye-popping sales figures, the inevitable aura of Tulipmania attached to the ever-advancing art industrial machine is something unexpectedly democratic.
Increasingly, at these twice-yearly sales, the auction houses stage art exhibitions impressive by any standards, hanging what experts at Christie’s term once-in-a-lifetime pieces in displays organized and lighted to nearly museum standards — and all open to the curious, no barrier to entry, no admission fee.
“That, to me, is amazing,” Jeffrey Deitch was saying on Tuesday as he conducted a reporter on a tour of the pictures available. “I began when Christie’s was a stuffy place,” he added. “There were no pictures in the catalogs, no price estimates, no specialists. And the art was displayed with very little attention to aesthetics.”
That would have been in the Pictures Generation-era, the long-ago 1980s, before art fairs mushroomed around the globe and along with them a population of newly created art advisers, among whom Mr. Deitch, now 62, was one of the earliest.
That was also before multinationals added auction houses to their portfolios and started applying to the stodgy auction business merchandising techniques so effective in selling shoes and handbags.
In the decades before Jeffrey Deitch became an industry fixture and gadfly, he was first an art critic and then a corporate art adviser and also a shrewd collector. He became a pioneering dealer when Deitch Projects opened in 1996 on Grand Street and a lamented loss to fans of the wackadoodle downtown Art Parade he sponsored every year in SoHo when he closed shop in 2010 to direct the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. There he spent a lively if controversial three years before ending a contract with two years remaining, a classic example of “jumped” or “was pushed.”
And now he is back in New York and has a new book (“Live the Art”) and new catalog (“The MOCA Index 2010-2013”), new artist collaborations in the offing and a renewed relationship with all the old clients from his database.
“He’s a man who would want to be very discreet,” Mr. Deitch said in a hushed voice on Tuesday when urged to identify a young zillionaire he had been escorting through the viewing rooms at Christie’s. From behind a pair of eyeglasses resembling twin portholes, Mr. Deitch gave a look that seemed to bind a listener to the code of art-world omerta.
And then, as the art collectors Jay Johnson and Tom Cashin and the aristocratic Milanese art dealer Giangaleazzo Visconti di Modrone silently slipped past, Mr. Deitch made a beeline for what he considered some of the auction’s choicest pictures.
That they were not in every case the headline offerings made sense; Mr. Deitch made his reputation finding and championing underdogs. “The great thing about the auctions is that you see the good, the bad, the things that make you say, ‘Why is this $100,000, and why is this $5,000?' ” he said. “One of the games is to outsmart the market, to anticipate trends. There’s always something that’s neglected.”
The Ed Ruscha picture “Smash” would not be one. The navy blue 1963 canvas with the word “smash” centered on the canvas (and painted along its perimeters) was among the auction’s choicest offerings and sold Wednesday evening to Larry Gagosian, the Manhattan dealer, for $30.4 million (including premium), well above its $20 million high estimate.
What interested Mr. Deitch more were pictures scattered throughout the galleries and created by world-famous artists at what could be termed threshold moments and, equally, paintings by those artists that fashions seemed to pass by. “Look at this Pol Bury,” he said of a canvas by the Belgian kinetic sculptor from which small filaments waved like tiny white sand eels. “Look at this painting, which has the comparative simplicity of Carl Andre and is a fusion of art and design that you had in the 1960s in Italy,” he said then, of a work by the obscure International Optical artist Getulio Alviani, still hard at work in Rome at 75.
Much as a weirdly surrealist 1938 painting by Jackson Pollock illustrated, as Mr. Deitch said, “the genesis of the greatest moment in American art,” a fine small painting by Yayoi Kusama showed the troubled Japanese master — who took up residence at the Seiwa Institute for the Mentally Ill four decades ago — at a presumably less fraught moment in her early career.
“It’s not going to be expensive,” Mr. Deitch said of the Kusama, whose presale estimate was $400,000 to $600,000. He paused. “That depends on what you consider expensive,” Mr. Deitch added, as the billionaire Mr. Lauren ambled past.