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Admission Is Free. The Rothko Is $40 Million.The wonder, and danger, of the spring auction previews at Sotheby's and Christie's.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007, at 7:16 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

The Contemporary Art auctions are the fastest-growing of the bunch. The de Kooning that I admired at last year's Christie's sale, Untitled XXV, went for $24.2 million. The Clyfford Still, 1947-R-No1, sold for $19 million. Warhol's Orange Marilyn fetched $14.5 million.

The idea of mustering this kind of money is as preposterous as planning a trip to the moon. Yet these exhibitions invite the fantasy, and anyone who strolls through their corridors can't help but be drawn in to play along. Of course, many of the people roaming the display rooms—serious collectors solicitously guided by the top curators or "art consultants" describing a Calder mobile or Cubist Picasso to a client over their cell phones—aren't just playing.

Is there something vulgar about this? Maybe. Many of these paintings should be in a public museum, not in some hedge-fund king's living room. Yet there is an undeniable, perhaps a primordial thrill in seeing these creations outside the hushed temple of the museum, deep in the ruckus of the marketplace.

Don't get me wrong. I love and cherish museums. There is nothing like the pleasure of a brilliantly curated museum show. I try to visit the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum at least once a month; each holds who-knows-how-many paintings and sculptures that I could look at for a very long time, again and again.

But most art was made to be sold; most museums acquired their art from dealers or from collectors who bought it from a dealer before bequeathing it. Roaming through the auction-house display-halls has the frisson of plunging from the sacred to the profane, of looking at these creations in their natural state.

One of these upcoming auctions sets off a different, in some ways edgier sort of tingle. Beginning this weekend are the preview exhibitions for the Prints auctions. Here, it's not just the sensory overload—though there's plenty of that, with the two auction houses together displaying more than 1,400 prints. It's the fact that their obtainability is not so theoretical.

These aren't poster-prints; they're limited-edition lithographs and etchings, usually signed, by the likes of Whistler, Picasso, Diebenkorn, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Mitchell, and Frankenthaler—and, while their values are soaring, too, a fair number of them go for the price of a very used car or a short trip to Europe.

So, even those of us with relatively modest means can stroll through the aisles, discussing where we'd hang this frothy little Chagall (estimated price: $6,000 to $8,000), that playful Miró ($5,000 to $7,000), or this jaunty Sam Francis monotype ($5,000 to $8,000)—and suddenly realize: The estimated prices aren't so high; bidding on one is not entirely out of the question.

I've bid on a few prints in the past few auctions, but I've never won; I keep getting outbid by gallery owners who, three weeks later, post the print on their Web sites for nearly double what they paid. This season, I've got my eye on a Robert Motherwell screenprint-with-collage called Redness of Red ($10,000 to $15,000) … but no, it costs too much, somebody please outbid me, I've got no business spending this kind of money, save me from myself! It's fun to go look, but beware—it's also dangerous.

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Fred Kaplan, Slate's "War Stories" columnist, also writes here and there about the arts. He can be reached at .
Images of Pollock and Rothko pieces courtesy Sotheby's.
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