On a cloudy day in May, in a drab gray room in Rockefeller Center, three hours ticked by at a normal pace. Within these 3 three hours, nearly $400 million worth of postwar and contemporary art was sold at the Christie’s auction house Wednesday evening. Only one day before, the post-war and contemporary art auctions at Sotheby’s closed at a grand total of $255 million, enabling the two-day total sales in Manhattan alone to surpass a cool half-billion dollars with ease. The undoubted financial star of Christie’s evening was Andy Warhol‘s silkscreen painting “Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I).” Inspired by a 1963 Newsweek photo depicting a car crash that impaled one driver on a telephone pole, the painting ignited a heated bidding war between two parties, urging bids to as high as $64 million. (more…)