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The Two Manhattans

Below 40th Street folks were asking questions like, "When will the lights come back on?" "How are they going to pump all that water out of the subways?" and "Where am I going to live, now?"

Hurricane Sandy: As It Happened

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Hurricane Sandy: As it Happened

Several blocks above 40th Street, it was, "Do you think that Picasso will fetch $50 million?"

Photos: The Two Manhattans

Hurricane Sandy destroyed homes and took lives, but it also forced Sotheby's BID 1.44 % to postpone its sale of Impressionist and modern art until Nov. 8 and its contemporary art auction until Nov. 13.

A runway at the Teterboro, N.J., airport was horribly flooded. It would have been miserable trying to land in a private jet.

On Halloween, I walked the eerily empty streets of lower Manhattan, strolling past one shuttered business after the next, listening to the hum of pumps and generators. I felt like Charlton Heston in the 1971 sci-fi thriller, "The Omega Man"—hoping to make it out before dark when the streets would fill with zombies.

Never take electricity for granted. Above 40th Street, light shined brightly, doors on restaurants swung freely, and the streets and sidewalks bustled. It was another world with Wi-Fi and places to charge cellphones.

At Sotheby's, near 72nd Street, it was like the hurricane never happened. The auction house is open to the public for a free preview of the art it will sell. Most pieces are priced in multiples of millions—a bit more than, say, the average casualty-loss insurance claim.

To me, the most amazing work on display is an old leather shoe stuck to a piece of plywood. Some guy named Kurt Schwitter did this in 1945. It is modestly priced between $600,000 and $800,000.

Earlier, I had found a discarded necktie on the pavement outside the New York Stock Exchange. I didn't think to hang it on some plywood from a boarded-up doorway. This is why I may never be rich enough to shop Sotheby's.

The pieces here are too exquisite to be shown in a museum: Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Salvador Dali, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Andy Warhol.

These belong on the wall of some billionaire's mansion where most of humanity will never see them.

But Sotheby's is a pawnshop for the world's elite. "We keep our supply going based on the three D's: Death, Divorce and Debt," says David Norman, vice chairman of Sotheby's North and South America.

Mr. Norman is impressive, not just because he's helped sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art, but because he has both a degree in art history and a job.

He didn't say it, but I'm going to say it: A dead billionaire is good for the humanities. When the rich die, art comes alive. Go see what's on display at Sotheby's before it's bought up again.

"Sometimes these things reappear in the market in five to seven years," Mr. Norman says. "The majority don't reappear for 10 or 20 years more."

Sotheby's set a record earlier this year when it sold a pastel version of "The Scream" by Edvard Munch for nearly $120 million. This iconic image of a wavy, zombie-like creature, shrieking with both hands clutching his face, could only be saying one thing: "A hurricane is coming!"

Good thing a hurricane does not hit everywhere. Millions of Americans are out of work, or groping in the dark, but there is always someone who can plop down millions on a Picasso.

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