Kimpsons Crushes Simpsons: New KAWS Record

The auction world’s exclusive eight-figure club has a new member.

On Monday night in Hong Kong, a painting by the artist KAWS (aka the New Jersey–born Brian Donnelly) sold for a staggering 115.9 million HKD, or about $14.7 million in U.S. dollars, a new auction record for the artist. It sold to an unidentified buyer for $14.8 million including fees, a record for the artist and about 15 times the estimate of 6,000,000—8,000,000 HKD ($760,000–$1 million), soaring to that lofty finish.

The record-shattering piece, which is a riff on the cover art for the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club (1967), easily eclipsed KAWS’s previous record of $2.7 million, which was set last November in New York by Untitled (Fatal Group), 2004, a work that presents the artist’s take on the classic Fat Albert cartoon.