SOTHEBY’S MOVES ASIAN SALES TO HONG KONG; NEW YORK MUSEUM EXPANDS

Sotheby’s said it will cease holding auctions of Asian contemporary art in New York and consolidate them instead in Hong Kong, with biannual sales in the Asian city, reports Le-Min Lim for Bloomberg.The auction house will organize dedicated auctions of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian art in April and October in Hong Kong, starting next year. Its September 17 sale of such Asian works in New York will be its last in the city, said Rhonda Yung, Sotheby’s Hong Kong–based spokeswoman, in an interview. The decision doesn’t preclude sales of batches of Asian artworks at its New York, Paris, and London auctions, Yung said. The move by the US auction house tracks that of London-based rival Christie’s International, which held Asia’s first major evening sale of the region’s contemporary works in Hong Kong in May.

In other news, the Museum of the City of New York is opening a new, all-glass gallery that will include cold rooms to store the institution’s valuable photographic negatives, according to the Associated Press. The twenty-eight-million-dollar pavilion marks the first expansion since 1932 of the landmarked building. It is the first phase of a ninety-seven-million-dollar modernization project expected to be completed in 2011. The new gallery opens to the public on October 3 as the museum launches the show “Paris/New York: Design Fashion Culture 1925–1940.” The space will feature rooms kept at forty degrees Fahrenheit to preserve the museum’s collection of five hundred thousand photographs, as well as a vault for its silver collection.