Paintings by Gustav Klimt and Pablo Picasso adorned the walls of a room in a famous Madison Avenue building a few months ago. The Klimt ended up becoming the second most expensive work of art ever auctioned.
Over the weekend, this room, in the former Whitney Museum of American Art, underwent a transformation. Now, it is a basketball court where, until March 10th, you can play.
On the walls in museum-style display cases are game-worn uniforms, sneakers and basketballs worn by former NBA player Scottie Pippen, who was once described as the Robin to Michael Jordan’s Batman during the Chicago Bulls’ glory years in the 1990s. Sotheby’s, which now occupies the building, is selling 50 items from Pippen’s career that he stored in storage.
Sotheby’s says the exhibition is “premium art giving way to premier sport” and “a temporary reinvention of a historic New York cultural space, reflecting how pieces of sports memorabilia are increasingly presented.” The basketball court will disappear almost as quickly as it appeared. It will be open during the day until March 10, and then it will be dismantled. Pippen will be on hand for a private event — Sotheby’s has not announced the date — and will play one-on-one with VIP clients.
Until March 10th, you can go there and shoot balls into the basket. I went on Monday (2). Omar Touray, the security guard, kind of encouraged me, and by his count, I made six of the 11 baskets I tried. Don’t ask me how I did it—I haven’t stepped on a basketball court since gym class in high school, and I was terrible back then. When I texted an editor that I had just made six baskets, she thought I meant that I had woven wicker baskets.
Antoine Plaskett, an art broker at Sotheby’s, entered the court after me. He said he was happy with the installation. “We didn’t grow up with Andy Warhol,” he said. “I learned that. I grew up watching this guy” —Pippen— “and Michael Jordan and LeBron James.”
Sotheby’s wants to reach sports fans who may not keep up with the art market and sales such as Vincent van Gogh’s “The Sower in a Wheatfield at Sunset” (an ink drawing that sold for US$11.2 million on the same night that Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold for US$236.4 million). R$ 1.25 billion)). “We’ve been putting a lot of effort into developing initiatives that go beyond auctions, creating moments of community connection” for fans of other types of collectibles, such as sports memorabilia and watches, said Josh Pullan, head of Sotheby’s luxury division.
By Sotheby’s estimates, the most expensive item in Pippen’s sale is a pair of sneakers from the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. They were worn not by Pippen, but by his teammate Jordan — whom Pippen praised for years, only to attack in a 2021 memoir as “selfish.” He was less willing to comment on the book’s contents during an interview with my colleague Sopan Deb, and all he said upon picking up the sneakers in a promotional video for the auction was, “I still have Jordan’s orthopedic insoles in here. It’s the secret to Michael Jordan being able to fly.”
Sotheby’s starting bid for the sneakers is US$500,000 (R$2.6 billion). The auction house expects Pippen’s US team jacket from the 1992 Olympic medal ceremony to sell for US$100,000 (R$528 million) to US$200,000 (R$1 billion). The estimate for a jersey Pippen wore in the 1996 NBA playoffs, when the Bulls were undefeated in ten home games, is US$200,000 to US$250,000 (R$1.3 billion). The starting bid for Pippen’s set of six NBA championship trophies is US$150,000 (R$793 million).
Pippen said in the video that it was “time to part with” the memorabilia he’s selling “because I really just kept them in storage. I never really showed them off much.”
Basketball and Breuer
Sotheby’s says this is the first time there has been a basketball court in the building, which was designed by architect Marcel Breuer in the 1960s and was most recently the temporary headquarters of the Frick Collection. There were basketballs at the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney in 2014, but New York Times critic Roberta Smith reported that they were floating in aquariums.
Pullan, who said the idea for building the court came about during a brainstorming session, is from Perth, Australia. He was entering his teens when the Chicago Bulls won their six NBA championships in the 1990s.
“Maybe it just reveals my age,” he said, “but to me, it’s like the essence of basketball.”
