O nce a month or so I write about headline art news. There’s plenty of it.

Don’t go breakin’ my heart, Elton John! Christie’s is mounting eight sales of items from his collection between now and February 28. I don’t think the pop megastar has finally decided that his future lies beyond the yellow brick road of fame and glory, and I’m sure he doesn’t need the money. At 76, he’s retiring, at least from touring. He’s moving from tony Buckland in Atlanta, which has been his U.S. base for 32 years, and consolidating his life back in the U.K.

I looked at the nearly 1,000 lots in the auction catalogue. There’s lots of Versace clothing, over-the-top costumes, his signature eyeglasses, fancy furniture, and the bulk of his very good photography collection. No electric suits or mohair boots, I’m afraid, but the sales reflect a magnetic, flamboyant, and thoughtful character.

The first sale happened on Thursday. Two Louis XVI suits made for John and his then-partner to celebrate the star’s 47th birthday were for sale. Warning — they’re so stiff, you can’t sit down. Seven Versace-designed silk shirts, Cartier watches and rings, John’s pinball machine for that special wizard, and two silver, rocket-shaped cocktail shakers sold as well.

John has good taste in photographs. He likes composition with classical order, a crisp finish, and serene lighting, as in Robert Mapplethorpe’s and Imogen Cunningham’s still lifes and work by Edward Weston and Richard Avedon. Even Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants, from 1955, which shows he has a sense of humor, is the art of balance. There are wild cards like Cindy Sherman’s Film Still # 39, from 1979, which sold for $378,000, on an estimate of $300,000–$500,000. He’s got a good eye.

John’s art went for what I consider market value. There wasn’t a provenance premium. When it came to things like his Bentley, sunglasses, or those rocket-shaped cocktail shakers, well, sky high’s the operative cliché. The Bentley went for $441,000, on a $25,000–$35,000 estimate.

Also on the auction front, Sotheby’s offered two self-portraits on the block on February 1, one right after the other, by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), painted around 1610, and by Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), once Rubens’s protégé, painted around 1638. They’re both lovely. Sotheby’s is adept in marketing and pushed the sale of the two as a face-off, not of the likes of Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston but of two long dead Flemings. Their fate’s a succinct lesson on auction prices.

The van Dyck sold for $2,430,000, on a $2 million–$3 million estimate, including the buyer’s premium, so a smidgen above the low estimate. The Rubens, on a $3 million–$5 million estimate, didn’t sell. What gives?

The Rubens stayed in the family for close to 250 years. At some point in the 1860s or ’70s, after it left the family, its owner commissioned a restorer to add to the painting’s panel surface to stabilize a problem with warping. The restorer then painted the added panel à la Rubens. This constitutes a defect that hits the value notwithstanding Rubens’s movie-star good looks.

It was last sold at auction in 2021, not as a Rubens self-portrait but as a portrait of an unknown gentleman by the circle of van Dyck. Then, the auction house in Uppsala in Sweden sold it for 5.2 million kronor (about $510,000), on a measly estimate of 4,000–6,000 kronor ($384–$575), the cost of a couple of new tires for my car. Obviously, dealers trawling auction previews sniffed a bad attribution and pounced.

Whoever bought it did a ton of research, got Rubens officialdom to agree the picture was a Rubens self-portrait, and off to Sotheby’s it went. Houses are flipped, but so is art. A too-high estimate and an extra strip or two of Baltic oak did the Rubens dirty. The Rubens might have been too informal, too. He painted it in the spirit of a family photograph. The more stately van Dyck once belonged to Charles I — Van Dyck was his much-loved court painter. A couple of million seems right.

Sotheby’s did something revolutionary earlier this month. It instituted a supply-side premium cut. Auction houses make money on the premiums they charge buyers and sellers on top of the hammer price. Auction houses normally take 10 percent from the seller and add — think tax — a far heftier amount on the hammer price that comes from the buyer’s wallet. For years this was a standard 20 percent, but some houses have pushed it to over 30 percent. Rich, frequent buyers sometimes negotiate special deals. It has become too murky. High buyer’s premiums have pushed value-conscious buyers away.

Sotheby’s will cut its buyer’s premium from 26 percent to 20 percent on objects sold at below $6 million. For higher-priced objects, it’s 10 percent on that chunk of the price over $6 million.

Sellers are now charged 10 percent on prices below $500,000 and nothing on amounts $500,000–$5 million. There’s no seller’s commission charged on consignments going for $5 million–$20 million. After $20 million and up to $50 million, sellers get 40 percent of the buyer’s premium. By lowering commissions, Sotheby’s thinks it will make more money by drawing new buyers and sellers. This makes sense. I continue to be amazed at the positive transformation of Sotheby’s in the quality of its sales, the professionalism of its experts, and the transparency of its business model.

New, dogmatic, and foolish regulations from President Biden’s National Park Services are shuttering museum displays of Native American art and artifacts and, over time, forcing museums to return these objects to Native tribes. It’s a money grab, since the tribes, once they get the objects from museums, might very well sell them after the repatriation ceremony’s tom-toms stop.

The regulations are based on a new interpretation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a 1990 law compelling museums to return art, artifacts, and human remains that might have been buried in tribal graveyards. For years, evidence to be considered in NAGPRA included ancestral studies, biology, provenance, linguistics, and oral tradition. If, by a preponderance of this evidence, an object was found to be from a Native grave, the tribe got it back.

The new rule has already compelled the Museum of Natural History in New York to close galleries. Other museums will take objects off view. Many more will be returned. The public will know less about Native American history and aesthetics. The new, extreme regulations will expose museums to expensive legal quagmires. The Museum of Natural History has faced lunatics before. It wrongly surrendered its signature bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, in front of the museum for a hundred years, because Roosevelt loomed over the black child and Native American child on either side of him.

Until now, oral tradition was simply one part of the evidentiary puzzle and, like everything else, could be challenged. Now, it’s conclusive, even if historical, biological, and anthropological evidence contradicts it. Oral tradition, of course, is sketchy. At its worst, it’s “my momma done told me” evidence. It’s also packed with creation myths and supernatural interventions. Spectral evidence, like the poppycock from spooks that teenage girls in Salem recited during the 1692 witchcraft trials, is eligible. That’s as bogus a standard as “I’m offended,” “I feel unsafe,” and “He made me cry.”

NAGPRA has always been generous, proof-wise, to Native tribes. In evaluating whether or not an object was from a grave and sacred, I’d rather follow the science, look at facts, and leave oral tradition to gossips and fake Cherokees like Elizabeth Warren. I also don’t think there’s good research on what has happened to the tens of thousands of objects repatriated to tribes since 1990. It’s likely that many have been sold to private collectors. The tribes are probably as greedy as everyone else is these days.

The Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan is the only museum in the country devoted to Himalayan art. It’s a niche, to be sure, but it immerses visitors into the looks of Buddhism and cleanses the palette from the yucky city experience. Earlier this month the board announced it would close to the public in October. This is sad news. Its permanent Mandala Lab is an experiential survey in Buddhism. Its Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room is very beautiful and shows us that the Chinese Communists hate nothing more than faith.

Donald and Shelley Rubin are the collecting couple whose art is on view. The 70,000-square-foot museum once housed a department store. On 17th Street near 7th Avenue, the Rubin isn’t in a spot known for culture, so drawing art appreciators as opposed to lovers, specialists, and adventurers is tough. All museums continue to struggle to rebuild audiences after the Covid mass hysteria shut them for months, and the Rubins seem to think the struggle is too expensive. The place closes on October 6. I’ll write about Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now, its funeral exhibition, before then.

As much as I like the Rubin, I’ve always thought the building was too big. A Manhattan location is glitzy but unnecessary and counterproductive. The museum seems best suited to a college museum, which has a built-in audience and, if it’s like the Hood at Dartmouth, Colby College’s museum, or Vassar’s museum, it would be on the summer-tourist track.

The museum is going global, it says. In a nifty — and disingenuous — announcement, the museum said it will be more inclusive than ever, lending from the collection, making grants, and keeping an online presence. It already does these things, of course. Forty percent of the staff will lose their job, but the big-dollar people won’t. Their jobs, in fact, will get easier, since they won’t have to cater to the public. There’s lots of blather on the museum website about being a 21st-century museum, letting go of old models, and reinventions. How does shutting the doors to the public make it more inclusive? Buddha says, “Beats me.”