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The Billionaires Are Battling Over a Giacometti Sculpture
David Geffen, lion of the old-guard art world, is up against Justin Sun, tech provocateur.
The star lot of the $922 million sale, featured on the catalogue’s cover, was Alberto Giacometti’s 1949 sculpture Le Nez, a skeletal bronze head with a long, thin nose, hanging from a cord in a large cubic cage. Buyers of such significant artworks are typically a secretive bunch, but this one outed himself, and the price he’d paid, immediately on Twitter: It was Justin Sun, the 34-year-old billionaire, born in China, and founder of the crypto platform Tron, who would, in November 2024, become known for buying and eating artist Maurizio Cattelan’s work Comedian —the banana duct-taped to a wall. “The fact that Justin has done this,” he said, “puts that in the history of this work.” The art market at its highest levels is built on relationships and respectability: Even if this is all swiftly resolved, that any of it took place could be off-putting to future collectors — a kind of psychological stain on the work.
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