All eyes are on New York this week as the richest offering of contemporary art ever to hit the auction block comes up for sale. Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips will hammer down a combined total of 1,322 artworks, worth in excess of £500m. Can they sell them all? Results at recent art fairs have been less than stellar, with sales at Art Chicago and Art Cologne reportedly down. Observers detect some pre-sale jitters in the salerooms but, says Brett Gorvy, Christie’s deputy chairman: “What we are seeing is a very selective market, with buyers wanting the ‘masterpiece’, high-value works and that is the message we have been giving vendors to encourage them to sell now. And this is what we are offering this week.”

Speaking of Warhol, who is one of the very few globally recognised “brand names” in art, Christie’s is taking a giant Warhol portrait of Mao for sale in Hong Kong. The 14-foot silkscreen is priced “in the region of” £60m, an enormous price even if you think that Warhol’s 1963 “Green Car Crash” made £35.5m last year in New York. The portrait is the centrepiece in an exhibition of “Mao by Andy Warhol” being held in conjunction with the New York gallery L&M Arts in the Hong Kong Convention centre, May 22-29.